19 - 20 are treated in this section together

19. If Auschwitz was not an extermination camp, why did the commandant, Rudolf Hoess, confess that it was?

20. Is there any evidence that it was American, British, French and Soviet policy to torture German prisoners in order to extract confessions before the trials at Nuremberg and elsewhere?

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Ernst Zündel

These two points address the question of alleged Allied torture to obtain confessions of war crimes.

Part of this content was already covered extensively in QA #1. Please re-read that material to get a good overview. Specifically, re-read "Nuremberg: The Crime That Will Not Die" to appreciate how Auschwitz Commander Rudolf Hoess was tortured.

The content below is, therefore, only meant to round out the record of Allied-inflicted torture so as to strengthen their political stance.

Probably the one question most frequently asked by people who express an interest in Revisionism is: "Do you have any proof that Germans were tortured in order to extract confessions?"

It must be clearly understood that the entire Holocaust-gassing myths stands and falls with the "confession" of Rudolf Hoess, one-time commandant of Auschwitz - an Allied prisoner who was sadistically tortured. The bulk of this rebuttal offered below will address itself to the nature of the Nuremberg Trials in general, and Hoess's "confession" in particular, since these trials were the bench mark on which the entire extortion "reparations" scheme was constructed, and in which Hoess was a key figure.

However, it behooves the reader to understand that torture - either to obtain confessions or simply for sadistic purpose - was a fact of life in post-war Germany. It went on for many years.

A number of able historians have done an admirable job in exposing the facts relating to the shocking use of torture by the Allies. Admittedly, documentation is often difficult to obtain, due to the fact that the Allied "interrogators" generally covered their tracks well, yet the persistence of historians and researchers interested in the truth has begun to pay off.

If I were to point to one particular event which signaled the allies policy in regard to treatment of the vanquished, I would designate the meeting of the so-called "Big Three" at Teheran in 1943. It was a telling episode forecasting what was yet to come and illustrating the cavalier attitude against a soon-to-be-vanquished foe.

As described by both Churchill and Elliott Roosevelt in their memoirs,

"Stalin rose and proposed a blood-curdling toast. The strength of the German army depended, he said, upon fifty thousand high officers and technicians. His toast was a salute to shooting them, ". . . as fast as we can, all of them."

Quick as a flash, Churchill sprang to his feet - his face and neck were red, says Elliott Roosevelt, who was present - and announced, quite hypocritically, as it turned out, that British conceptions of law and justice would never tolerate such butchery.

Into this breach stepped President Roosevelt. He had a compromise to suggest.

Instead of executing fifty thousand, perhaps

". . . we should settle on a smaller number. Shall we say, 49,500?"

Here is another telling vignette, as recounted by American author Marguerite Higgins visited Germany following the war and later wrote of her experiences in "News Is a Singular Thing".

Higgins described a visit to a GI "Interrogation Center":

"The GI led us to the main door of the camp . . . Behind the bars of the cell we saw 3 uniformed Germans. Two of them, beaten and covered with blood, were lying unconscious on the floor. A third German was lifted up by the hair on his head, and I shall never forget, he had red hair like a carrot. A GI turned his body over and struck him in the face. When the victim groaned, the GI roared, "Shut your mouth, damned Kraut!". . . . It turned out that for almost a quarter of an hour, the doubled rows of 20 to 30 GI's stood aligned taking turns methodically beating the six captured Germans. . . It came out later that the worked-up GI's had captured six young German boys, who had never even been members of the SS. The youngsters had only recently been inducted into a government work battalion. The boy with the red hair was 14 years old. The other 5 German boys in the cell blocks were between 14 and 17 years old."

The book "Vorsicht! Faelschung!" reproduces a photograph of 2 German youngsters taken after their "interrogation" by Allied investigators. The photo speaks for itself. The faces of the two youngsters are bruised, swollen, and bloody.

These beatings were endemic. These were not isolated occurrences. And if this was the treatment meted out to the innocent - to youngsters in particular - it is only logical to assume that "Nazis" accused of "heinous crimes" were treated far, far worse.

The episodes recounted below are only a small fraction among thousands and thousands of documented cases. The SS were particularly targeted.

Long before the Nuremberg Trials even began, the Allies looked upon the SS as a criminal organization. There was ample reason for that, for the SS happened to be the most determined adversaries of the Allied forces, and offered the most resistance. Allied casualties were generally much higher whenever they were thrown into combat opposite seasoned SS troops. The SS were both feared and admired for their military prowess. Consequently, the members of the SS received the most brutal treatment at the hands of the allied forces. The Allies sought to expunge the very memory of this elite Nazi formation.

Yet the truth of the matter is that the Waffen SS was no more criminal than any other fighting unit, Allied OR axis. The treatment its members received at the hands of the Allies was unjust and often criminal. Particularly since SS members were often stationed at concentration camps as guards, the Allies took advantage of this fact and used it to condemn the members of the SS as a whole. Yet it should go without saying that simply because someone was a guard at a camp does not mean he or she was a criminal.

What follows is a series of reports concerning the treatment Waffen SS soldiers received at the hands of the Allies. All documentation is taken from the book "Alliierte Kriegsverbrechen und Verbrechen gegen die Menschlichkeit." Published by Dürer Verlag, Buenos Aires, Argentina ,1953.

April 1945

• Paderborn. An SS officer is ordered by his interrogators to take off his shirt and undershirt. He is then beaten about the face and back with a whip. An MP extinguishes his lit cigarette on the man's back. He is then ordered to stand with his face against a wall, while his interrogators press the muzzle of a gun against his neck. A chain is placed around his wrist and twisted until the man collapses from the pain.
  
• Bavaria. A Police General is taken prisoner and led to a cell, where an American soldier holds a pistol to his head and then urinates all over his body.
  
• At a special camp run by the Americans for captured SS and Nazi Party members, a sadistic American Sergeant, Paul Doyle, brutally torments the men in his charge. Daily he beats men into unconsciousness, often breaking their ribs. The men are beaten so frequently and so badly that they have to be hospitalized. One night he enters a cell and beats a man for an exceptionally long period of time. When the victim becomes unconscious, water is thrown into his face to revive him. He is then beaten again. Finally, he is dragged from his cell unconscious. The man is later hospitalized for severe injuries, internal and external. Another SS officer is so badly beaten by Doyle that he later dies of his injuries. Another victim has his head pushed under water for long periods of time and his buttocks so severely whipped that the skin is torn and hanging.
  
• An SS man is beaten repeatedly on the soles of his naked feet.
  
• Two SS men are forced to smear each other's face with human vomit.
  
• Two SS men are shot to death after they surrender their arms to Americans.
  
• A deputy Ortsgruppenleiter is beaten bloody by Americans with rubber truncheons and fists about the head. He is then compelled to eat lit cigarettes. In a garden the form of a grave is measured out, then the man is bound hand and foot and is left lying on the floor all night long in a room lit by candle light. The next day the man is ordered to dig a grave and then stand in it, while an American soldier has his picture taken defecating and urinating in the pit.
  
• Two SS men are spat at by an American Sergeant and then kicked in the genitalia until they collapse.
  

May 1945

• An SS member is burned repeatedly with cigarette butts all over his body.
  
• An SS man is chained by his legs and hung up over a latrine with his head in the toilet.
  
• Altenburg. SS members are forced to completely disrobe. Americans then whip them so badly that they lose consciousness. In that condition they are left lying on the floor.
  
• Herford. A severely wounded SS officer is compelled by the Americans to carry heavy rolls of barbed wire on his naked shoulders, running at double time. The man soon collapses when the skin from his back is ripped from his body.
  

June 1945

• A group of SS leaders are laden down with heavy stones and then commanded to exercise barefoot over broken stones and gravel, until they collapse and have to be carried away.
  
• Two amputees are bound together with cords and forced to remain standing without any nourishment for 48 hours. Whereupon the "interrogator" Sergeant Wertheim quips: "Now you have two legs."
  
• Cage 22: Prisoners are forced to clean the latrines night after night - with their bare hands.
  
• Cage 23: The American camp Sergeant whiles away the hours by sticking needles into the stomachs of helpless prisoners. Note: The above occurred in camps in France.
  

July 1945

• Stuttgart. A man was dragged out of his bed in the middle of the night by American soldiers because he was accused of being a member of the Allgemeine SS. He was dragged into the street and cudgeled. One half hour later, he was again dragged out of his bed by 2 Americans and driven to an open field and ordered to get out. The man refused, fearing he would be shot in the back. Consequently he was beaten with rifle butts and fists until he was unconscious. Water was thrown on his face and he regained consciousness, whereby he was again beaten unconscious for a second time. As a result of the attack he suffered broken ribs, gaping head wounds, brain damage, and loss of teeth.
  
• In the vicinity of Munich, Waffen SS members were forced to eat their uniform insignias.
  

August 1945

• In the POW camp Wolfhagen, a severely wounded SS corporal is tortured by Americans in order to extract a confession. He is kicked in the genitals and burned over and over again with lighted cigarettes. The young man is 20 years old.
  
• Weiden. POW camp. Two SS men are handcuffed to each other while interrogators beat them. They are repeatedly struck in the kidneys.
  
• Special mention should be made of the Ziegenhain camp, where we have the identities of the American inquisitors. The methods of torture used were even worse than the above mentioned cases. The chief interrogators at this camp were Inspector Simon, Watson, and Lieutenant Goodman. One of their favorite games was to play "Autobahn', whereby a victim had the hair of his eyebrows and eyelashes cut or ripped out. Later the hair was shoved into the victims mouth or nostrils for long periods of time.
  
• A machine technician had his head banged into a wall so many times that blood spurted out of his nostrils.
  
• A man was brought in for "interrogation'. He was beaten extensively on the hands, face, neck and ears with a rubber truncheon festooned with barbed wire. Afterwards he was struck in the face repeatedly with bare fists. He was forced to stare in blinding lights for hours on end and threatened with hanging or shooting. He had swastikas painted on his neck and forehead.
  
• A victim is forced to swallow a postcard with Hitler's photo, along with a burning cigarette.
  
• A man is led into one of the torture chambers. There he is compelled to undress and lie in vomit, urine, and filth. He is then compelled to perform acts so disgusting that they shall not be recited here.
  
• "Inspector Simon" forces a man to swallow lit cigarettes and then knocks his teeth out.

So it went, day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year. The dungeons of the Spanish Inquisition could hardly have appeared more sinister than these "centers for interrogation'. It even appears that the Spanish Inquisition served as a model for the Allied Torquemadas.

One curious fact concerning these trials is that most of them were held by "Americans", as is evidenced by the following excerpt:

"The British, French, and the Russians withdrew from Nuremberg after the first and only "International Military Tribunal' . . . the other twelve trials which subsequently took place at Nuremberg and only came to an end in 1948, were all-American shows. The judges and prosecutors were all American citizens; the trials were held under the American flag; the proceedings began each morning by the Marshal of the Court asking God's blessing on the United States of America, plaintiff versus the defendants. Nevertheless the tribunals were supposed to be "international" and to derive their authority from the Allied Control Council even after the latter ceased to exist."

Needless to say, not one of the interrogators employed by these modern day inquisitors was ever charged with a crime or brought to justice. The dark deeds of their crimes might never have seen the light of day had it not been for the persistence and courage of the few who documented their offenses.

How absurd and ignorant it is for Nizkor to claims that confession were never extracted from the Germans by coercion or torture! Whoever needs further proof of the kangaroo court called "Nuremberg Trials" is referred to the Carlos Porter trial transcript summaries. They are available on the Zundelsite in 5 languages (English, German, French, Portuguese and Spanish) and can be accessed by anyone who values truth in history.

September 10, 1996

This summary was compiled with the able assistance of Roger Bartlett.