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Did Six Million Really Die?
Truth at Last - Exposed:
 
 
This
pamphlet has been republished around the world
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Foreword to the
new edition
“Zündel’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 Zündel 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 Zündel, 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 representatives” 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, Zündel 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 Zündel
did not know this at the time of publication.
The original English publishers did not permit Ernst Zündel 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 Zündel 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 Zündel 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 Zündel trial in 1988.
Ernst Zündel 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 Zündel and his revisionist viewpoint famous
across the globe.
The Zündel 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 Zündel 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 Zündel 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 Zündel,
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 Zündel, 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.
TO ALL CANADIAN LAWYERS AND MEDIA
REPRESENTATIVES:
This booklet is the type of material that the Attorney General
of British Columbia considers ‘racist.’ The Attorney General of Ontario, at
the behest of his B.C. colleague, is purportedly conducting an investigation of
Samisdat Publishers preparatory to the laying of a criminal charge of
“promoting hatred against an identifiable group.”
Samisdat intends to use this opportunity, however unwelcome, to test the
definition and hence, the validity of the so-called ‘Hate Law’ section of
the Canadian Criminal Code. What is now becoming clear to all of us, even to
those who enacted the so-called ‘Hate Law,’ is that we enacted not so much
an instrument against hate as an instrument against truth.
Canada was a civilised country before the passage of the ‘Hate Law.’ We
already had laws against the incitement to riot, to murder, to arson, to the
commission of assault and bodily harm. Our laws protected and still protect
every citizen from libel, slander and defamation. But the outlawing of
‘hate’ does not thereby abolish feelings of hate, as we all know. To
prohibit expressions of hatred may even cause such feelings to go unvented until
they become explosive and take the form of violence. Prior to the ‘Hate
Law,’ we Canadians behaved with mature composure when encountering hateful
expressions. We simply shunned the haters and left them to spew out their ire,
unsupported and alone. In most cases, a cold dose of healthy public ridicule
would quench the more volcanic vituperators and reason would be restored. But
something happened to us, for as we have grown older as a country, we have
become less mature and less secure. Our passage of the ‘Hate Law’ was a
grave reflection upon ourselves. It revealed a sudden loss of confidence in our
own wisdom and judgement and in the wisdom and judgement of the great majority
of Canadian voters and citizens. Suddenly, we had to be protected from ourselves
and just as suddenly, we became refugees from freedom. No democracy that so
distrusts the majority can long remain a democracy; it becomes a police state in
the worst tradition of police states.
Unfortunately, only a few clear-sighted and courageous individuals protested the
enactment of the ‘Hate Law’. So thick were the clouds of hysteria and
half-truths over the matter that only these few perceived the dangers inherent
in a statute which could be used at the discretion of a public official to
suppress the freedom of enquiry and discussion in regard to relevant public
issues. Among these few protesters, I proudly number myself, for I spoke out
then and I speak out now, on behalf of our basic freedom to act as thinking
human beings.
As we stumble along the road to the 1984 of George Orwell, we sometimes
receive a taste of his dismal future-fantasy well ahead of schedule. Pernicious
‘thought-crime’ legislation like the ‘Hate Law’ has brought us 1984
already. It has not outlawed hate, but it has outlawed truth on behalf of those
predatory vested interests whose arch enemy is truth!
This booklet has been sent to you free of charge as a public service. After
reading it, you are perfectly free to agree or to disagree with its content. You
may even ignore it and leave it unread. Truth has no need of coercion. Those who
choose to ignore the truth are not punished by law—they punish themselves. We
of Samisdat Publishers do not believe that you should be forced to read
something, any more than you should be forced not to read something.
Obviously, we have much more faith in your soundness of mind and good judgement
than do the enactors and enforcers of the ‘Hate Law’! Whether you agree or
disagree with the facts presented in this booklet, we invite you to assist us in
reclaiming and safeguarding the freedoms we have all so long enjoyed, until now,
in Canada.
Help us remove this shameful stain of tyranny from our otherwise bright and
shining land. Help us strike the terrible sword of censorship from the hands of
those who would slay truth in pursuit of their dubious aims. Without freedom of
enquiry and freedom of access to information, we cannot have freedom of thought
and without freedom of thought, we cannot be a free people. The matter is
urgent. Can you help us restore and protect the freedom of all Canadians?
You can help decisively by sending your contribution to the Samisdat Defense
Fund. Legal fees are costly in the extreme. We anticipate daily expenditures of
$1,000.00 in attorneys’ fees and in the reimbursement of witnesses who must be
flown in from Australia, Israel, Europe and from both American continents.
Whatever help you can provide will make 1984 a much better year for your
children and grandchildren—a year in which freedom of thought will not be a
memory, but a beautiful reality!
[Signature]
Ernst Zundel, Publisher
SAMISDAT PUBLISHERS, LTD.
INTRODUCTION
Of course, atrocity propaganda is nothing new. It has accompanied every conflict
of the 20th century and doubtless will continue to do so. During the First World
War, the Germans were actually accused of eating Belgian babies, as well as
delighting to throw them in the air and transfix them on bayonets. The British
also alleged that the German forces were operating a “Corpse Factory”, in
which they boiled down the bodies of their own dead in order to obtain glycerin
and other commodities, a calculated insult to the honour of an Imperial army.
After the war, however, came the retractions; indeed, a public statement was
made by the Foreign Secretary in the House of Commons apologizing for the
insults to German honour, which were admitted to be war-time propaganda.
No such statements have been made after the Second World War. In fact, rather
than diminish with the passage of years, the atrocity propaganda concerning the
German occupation, and in particular their treatment of the Jews, has done
nothing but increase its virulence, and elaborate its catalogue of horrors.
Gruesome paperback books with lurid covers continue to roll from the presses,
adding continuously to a growing mythology of the concentration camps and
especially to the story that no less than Six Million Jews were exterminated in
them. The ensuing pages will reveal this claim to be the most colossal piece of
fiction and the most successful of deceptions; but here an attempt may be made
to answer an important question: What has rendered the atrocity stories of the
Second World War so uniquely different from those of the First? Why were the
latter retracted while the former are reiterated louder than ever? Is it
possible that the story of the Six Million Jews is serving a political purpose,
even that it is a form of political blackmail?
So far as the Jewish people themselves are concerned, the deception has been an
incalculable benefit. Every conceivable race and nationality had its share of
suffering in the Second World War, but none has so successfully elaborated it
and turned it to such great advantage. The alleged extent of their persecution
quickly aroused sympathy for the Jewish national homeland they had sought for so
long; after the War the British Government did little to prevent Jewish
emigration to Palestine which they had declared illegal, and it was not long
afterwards that the Zionists wrested from the Government the land of Palestine
and created their haven from persecution, the State of Israel. Indeed, it is a
remarkable fact that the Jewish people emerged from the Second World War as
nothing less than a triumphant minority. Dr. Max Nussbaum, the former chief
rabbi of the Jewish community in Berlin, stated on April 11, 1953: “The
position the Jewish people occupy today in the world—despite the enormous
losses—is ten times stronger than what it was twenty years ago.” It should
be added, if one is to be honest, that this strength has been much consolidated
financially by the supposed massacre of the Six Million, undoubtedly the most
profitable atrocity allegation of all time. To date, the staggering figure of
six thousand million pounds has been paid out in compensation by the Federal
Government of West Germany, mostly to the State of Israel (which did not even
exist during the Second World War), as well as to individual Jewish claimants.
DISCOURAGEMENT OF NATIONALISM
In terms of political blackmail, however, the allegation that Six Million Jews
died during the Second World War has much more far-reaching implications for the
people of Britain and Europe than simply the advantages it has gained for the
Jewish nation. And here one comes to the crux of the question: Why the Big Lie?
What is its purpose? In the first place, it has been used quite unscrupulously
to discourage any form of nationalism. Should the people of Britain or any other
European country attempt to assert their patriotism and preserve their national
integrity in an age when the very existence of nation-states is threatened, they
are immediately branded as “neo-Nazis”. Because, of course, Nazism was
nationalism, and we all know what happened then—Six Million Jews were
exterminated! So long as the myth is perpetuated, peoples everywhere will remain
in bondage to it; the need for international tolerance and understanding will be
hammered home by the United Nations until nationhood itself, the very guarantee
of freedom, is abolished.
A classic example of the use of the ‘Six Million’ as an anti-national weapon
appears in Manvell and Frankl’s book, The Incomparable Crime (London,
1967), which deals with ‘Genocide in the Twentieth Century’. Anyone with a
pride in being British will be somewhat surprised by the vicious attack made on
the British Empire in this book. The authors quote Pandit Nehru, who wrote the
following while in a British prison in India: “Since Hitler emerged from
obscurity and became the Führer of Germany, we have heard a great deal about
racialism and the Nazi theory of the ‘Herrenvolk’... But we in India have
known racialism in all its forms ever since the commencement of British rule.
The whole ideology of this rule was that of the ‘Herrenvolk’ and the master
race... India as a nation and Indians as individuals were subjected to insult,
humiliation and contemptuous treatment. The English were an imperial race, we
were told, with the God-given right to govern us and keep us in subjection; if
we protested we were reminded of the ‘tiger qualities of an imperial
race’.” The authors Manvell and Frankl then go on to make the point
perfectly clear for us: “The white races of Europe and America,” they write,
“have become used during centuries to regarding themselves as a ‘Herrenvolk’.
The twentieth century, the century of Auschwitz, has also achieved the first
stage in the recognition of multi-racial partnership” (ibid., p. 14).
THE RACE PROBLEM SUPPRESSED
One could scarcely miss the object of this diatribe, with its insidious hint
about “multi-racial partnership”. Thus the accusation of the Six Million is
not only used to undermine the principle of nationhood and national pride, but
it threatens the survival of the Race itself. It is wielded over the heads of
the populace, rather as the threat of hellfire and damnation was in the Middle
Ages. Many countries of the Anglo-Saxon world, notably Britain and America, are
today facing the gravest danger in their history, the danger posed by the alien
races in their midst. Unless something is done in Britain to halt the
immigration and assimilation of Africans and Asians into our country, we are
faced in the near future, quite apart from the bloodshed of racial conflict,
with the biological alteration and destruction of the British people as they
have existed here since the coming of the Saxons. In short, we are threatened
with the irrecoverable loss of our European culture and racial heritage. But
what happens if a man dares to speak of the race problem, of its biological and
political implications? He is branded as that most heinous of creatures, a
“racialist”. And what is racialism, of course, but the very hallmark of the
Nazi! They (so everyone is told, anyway) murdered Six Million Jews because of
racialism, so it must be a very evil thing indeed. When Enoch Powell drew
attention to the dangers posed by coloured immigration into Britain in one of
his early speeches, a certain prominent Socialist raised the spectre of Dachau
and Auschwitz to silence his presumption.
Thus any rational discussion of the problems of Race and the effort to preserve
racial integrity is effectively discouraged. No one could have anything but
admiration for the way in which the Jews have sought to preserve their race
through so many centuries, and continue to do so today. In this effort they have
frankly been assisted by the story of the Six Million, which, almost like a
religious myth, has stressed the need for greater Jewish racial solidarity.
Unfortunately, it has worked in quite the opposite way for all other peoples,
rendering them impotent in the struggle for self-preservation.
The aim in the following pages is quite simply to tell the Truth. The
distinguished American historian Harry Elmer Barnes once wrote that “An
attempt to make a competent, objective and truthful investigation of the
extermination question... is surely the most precarious venture that an
historian or demographer could undertake today.” In attempting this precarious
task, it is hoped to make some contribution, not only to historical truth, but
towards lifting the burden of a lie from our own shoulders, so that we may
freely confront the dangers which threaten us all.
— Richard E. Harwood
1. GERMAN POLICY TOWARDS THE JEWS PRIOR TO THE WAR
Rightly or wrongly, the Germany of Adolf Hitler considered the Jews to be a
disloyal and avaricious element within the national community, as well as a
force of decadence in Germany’s cultural life. This was held to be
particularly unhealthy since, during the Weimar period, the Jews had risen to a
position of remarkable strength and influence in the nation, particularly in
law, finance and the mass media, even though they constituted only 5 per cent of
the population. The fact that Karl Marx was a Jew and that Jews such as Rosa
Luxembourg and Karl Liebknecht were disproportionately prominent in the
leadership of revolutionary movements in Germany, also tended to convince the
Nazis of the powerful internationalist and Communist tendencies of the Jewish
people themselves.
It is no part of the discussion here to argue whether the German attitude to the
Jews was right or not, or to judge whether its legislative measures against them
were just or unjust. Our concern is simply with the fact that, believing of the
Jews as they did, the Nazis’ solution to the problem was to deprive them of
their influence within the nation by various legislative acts, and most
important of all, to encourage their emigration from the country altogether. By
1939, the great majority of German Jews had emigrated, all of them with a
sizeable proportion of their assets. Never at any time had the Nazi leadership
even contemplated a policy of genocide towards them.
JEWS CALLED EMIGRATION ‘EXTERMINATION’
It is very significant, however, that certain Jews were quick to interpret these
policies of internal discrimination as equivalent to extermination itself. A
1936 anti-German propaganda book by Leon Feuchtwanger and others entitled Der
Gelbe Fleck: Die Austrotung von 500,000 deutschen Juden (The Yellow Spot:
The Extermination of 500,000 German Jews, Paris, 1936), presents a typical
example. Despite its baselessness in fact, the annihilation of the Jews is
discussed from the first pages—straightforward emigration being regarded as
the physical “extermination” of German Jewry. The Nazi concentration camps
for political prisoners are also seen as potential instruments of genocide, and
special reference is made to the 100 Jews still detained in Dachau in 1936, of
whom 60 had been there since 1933. A further example was the sensational book by
the German-Jewish Communist, Hans Beimler, called Four Weeks in the Hands of
Hitler’s Hell-Hounds: The Nazi Murder Camp of Dachau, which was published
in New York as early as 1933. Detained for his Marxist affiliations, he claimed
that Dachau was a death camp, though by his own admission he was released after
only a month there. The present regime in East Germany now issues a Hans Beimler
Award for services to Communism.
The fact that anti-Nazi genocide propaganda was being disseminated at this
impossibly early date, therefore, by people biased on racial or political
grounds, should suggest extreme caution to the independent-minded observer when
approaching similar stories of the war period.
The encouragement of Jewish emigration should not be confused with the purpose
of concentration camps in pre-war Germany. These were used for the detention of
political opponents and subversives—principally liberals, Social Democrats and
Communists of all kinds, of whom a proportion were Jews such as Hans Beimler.
Unlike the millions enslaved in the Soviet Union, the German concentration camp
population was always small; Reitinger admits that between 1934 and 1938 it
seldom exceeded 20,000 throughout the whole of Germany, and the number of Jews
was never more than 3,000. (The S.S.: Alibi of a Nation, London, 1956, p. 253).
ZIONIST POLICY STUDIED
The Nazi view of Jewish emigration was not limited to a negative policy of
simple expulsion, but was formulated along the lines of modern Zionism. The
founder of political Zionism in the 19th century, Theodore Herzl, in his work The
Jewish State, had originally conceived of Madagascar as a national homeland
for the Jews, and this possibility was seriously studied by the Nazis. It had
been a main plank of the National Socialist party platform before 1933 and was
published by the party in pamphlet form. This stated that the revival of Israel
as a Jewish state was much less acceptable since it would result in perpetual
war and disruption in the Arab world, which has indeed been the case. The
Germans were not original in proposing Jewish emigration to Madagascar; the
Polish Government had already considered the scheme in respect of their own
Jewish population, and in 1937 they sent the Michael Lepecki expedition to
Madagascar, accompanied by Jewish representatives, to investigate the problems
involved.
The first Nazi proposals for a Madagascar solution were made in association with
the Schacht Plan of 1938. On the advice of Goering, Hitler agreed to send the
President of the Reichsbank, Dr. Hjaimar Schacht, to London for discussions
with Jewish representatives Lord Bearsted and Mr. Rublee of New York (cf.
Reitlinger, The Final Solution, London, 1953, p. 20). The plan was that
German Jewish assets would be frozen as security for an international loan to
finance Jewish emigration to Palestine, and Schacht reported on these
negotiations to Hitler at Berchtesgaden on January 2, 1939. The plan, which
failed due to British refusal to accept the financial terms, was first put
forward on November 12, 1938 at a conference convened by Goering, who
revealed that Hitler was already considering the emigration of Jews to a
settlement in Madagascar (ibid., p. 21). Later, in December, Ribbentrop
was told by M. Georges Bonnet, the French Foreign Secretary, that the
French Government itself was planning the evacuation of 10,000 Jews to
Madagascar.
Prior to the Schacht Palestine proposals of 1938, which were essentially a
protraction of discussions that had begun as early as 1935, numerous attempts
had been made to secure Jewish emigration to other European nations, and these
efforts culminated in the Evian Conference of July, 1938. However, by 1939 the
scheme of Jewish emigration to Madagascar had gained the most favour in German
circles. It is true that in London Helmuth Wohltat of the German Foreign Office
discussed limited Jewish emigration to Rhodesia and British Guiana as late as
April, 1939; but by January 24th, when Goering wrote to Interior Minister
Frick ordering the creation of a Central Emigration Office for Jews, and
commissioned Heydrich of the Reich Security Head Office to solve the Jewish
problem “by means of emigration and evacuation”, the Madagascar Plan was
being studied in earnest.
By 1939, the consistent efforts of the German Government to secure the departure
of Jews from the Reich had resulted in the emigration of 400,000 German Jews
from a total population of about 600,000, and an additional 480,000 emigrants
from Austria and Czechoslovakia, which constituted almost their entire Jewish
populations. This was accomplished through Offices of Jewish Emigration in
Berlin, Vienna and Prague established by Adolf Eichmann, the head of the Jewish
Investigation Office of the Gestapo. So eager were the Germans to secure this
emigration, that Eichmann even established a training centre in Austria, where
young Jews could learn farming in anticipation of being smuggled illegally to
Palestine (Manvell & Frankl, S.S. and Gestapo, p. 60). Had Hitler
cherished any intention of exterminating the Jews, it is inconceivable that he
would have allowed more than 800,000 to leave Reich territory with the bulk of
their wealth, much less considered plans for their mass emigration to Palestine
or Madagascar. What is more, we shall see that the policy of emigration from
Europe was still under consideration well into the war period, notably the
Madagascar Plan, which Eichmann discussed in 1940 with French Colonial Office
experts after the defeat of France had made the surrender of the colony a
practical proposition.
2. GERMAN POLICY TOWARD 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 that 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
Jewish 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 Endlösung,
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
Interpreter, 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 mean time created the possibility of
disposing of other territories for the Final Solution. In consequence the Führer
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 mean time he approved of the Jews being “concentrated in
the East”. Later Goebbels memoranda also stressed 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 perfectly 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”, nevertheless 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
States. 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.
THREE 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 Endlösung, 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 für 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 milion 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 jüdischen 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 numbers 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. Königsberger 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 euthanasia, 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 für 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 schools (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 Aufsätze (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 (Gesamtlösung) 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” (Endlösung),
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
verbally” (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 Müller and Eichmann represented Gestapo
Head Office. Reitlinger and Manvell and Frankl consider the minutes of this
conference to be their trump card improving 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 terminology 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 Führer.” 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 Véritable 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 Abbeförderung
(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. Obergruppenführers 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
particularly 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 enumerated point by point his
objections to the Trials (cf. Mark Lautern, Das Letzte Wort über
Nürnberg, 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 atmosphere hostile to the accused persons. 8. The
real aim of the Nuremberg Trials was to show the Germans the crimes of their Führer,
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 percent 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
fingernails; 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 extermination 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 Aufsätze, 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 plausibility, 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
Endlösung, 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 Reichsfüher 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 by the 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 1,000 per cent and that they distorted
even more the situations in which these casualties were inflicted. (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 Reichsführer 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. Although 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
eastern 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 was the 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 Eastern 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. 272–273). 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 everyday, 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 6,000 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. 80–81). 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 returned 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-Lüge: 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 Bürger–Initiative, 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 Obersturmbannführer 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 transpor |
