by Richard Harwood
March 31, 2004
from
VancouverIndyMedia Website
recovered through
WayBackMachine Website
SOME WAYS YOU ARE LIED TO - LESSON ONE
In order to perpetuate the
holocaust legend, Jews must constantly hide the truth from the
general public. The ways of doing this are many and varied.
In lesson one we will investigate the following idea:
-
Set up a false opposition front,
in this case, an "anti-Jewish" web-site that provides free books
concerning the holocaust legend (and Jews generally) for the
public to read.
-
Rewrite the books, with the
obvious proviso that the changes are not so obvious that you
blow your cover.
This involves;
-
removing all the passages that
you do not like, or find dangerous, and substituting
passages that you do like,
-
"accidently" changing
references, or leaving out page numbers, or parts of a name,
in order to make further investigation of sources that you
do not approve of, difficult,
-
adding extra references, or
information concerning sources that you do approve of,
-
correcting mistakes in the
original that are neutral or advance your cause, and calling
the original "an earlier edition",
-
removing complementary
references to your opposition, etc, etc.
In our example we will examine the
web-site at
http//www.ety.com/HRP/
To see how well our Jewish friends at http://www.ety.com/HRP/ have
preformed their given task, we downloaded the web-pages for the book
"Did Six Million Really Die?" by Richard Harwood, from
http//www.ety.com/HRP/booksonline/d6mrd/
We then compared these pages to the original from the Institute for
Historical Review http://ihr.org/books/harwood/. The results may
interest you and are presented below.
Where the text has changed from the original, both the original and
changes have been placed in parentheses with the original in
blue text and the changes in
red text, for example,
In dealing with this
comprehensive, three-volume Report, it is important to stress
that the delegates of the International Red Cross found no
evidence ( whatever at the camps in Axis
occupied Europe of a deliberate policy to exterminate the Jews.
| whatsoever of 'gas chambers'. )
In all its 1,600 pages,...........
See for yourself one way in which you
can be deceived.
Then imagine all the other small ways
in which "your" views are constantly constructed. |
Table of Contents
-
German Policy Toward The Jews Prior To The War
-
German Policy Toward The Jews After The Outbreak Of War
-
Population And
Emigration
-
The Six
Million: Documentary Evidence
-
The Nuremberg Trials
-
Auschwitz And
Polish Jewry
-
Some
Concentration Camp Memoirs
-
The Nature And Condition Of War-Time Concentration Camps
-
The Jews And The Concentration Camps: A Factual Appraisal By
The Red Cross
-
The Truth At Last: The Work Of Paul Rassinier
Introduction
Of course, atrocity propaganda is nothing
new. It has accompanied every conflict of the 20th century and doubtless
will continue to do so. During the First World War, the Germans were
actually accused of eating Belgian babies, as well as delighting to
throw them in the air and transfix them on bayonets. The British also
alleged that the German forces were operating a "Corpse Factory," in
which they boiled down the bodies of their own dead in order to obtain
glycerine and other commodities, a calculated insult to the honour of an
Imperial army. After the war, however, came the retractions; indeed, a
public statement was made by the Foreign Secretary in the House of
Commons 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 insiduous
hint about "multi-racial partnership." Thus the accusation of the Six
Million is not only used to undermine the principle of nationhood and
national pride, but it threatens the survival of the Race itself. It is
wielded over the heads of the populace, rather as the threat of hellfire
and damnation was in the Middle Ages. Many countries of the Anglo-Saxon
world, notably Britain and America, are today facing the gravest danger
in their history, the danger posed by the alien races in their midst.
Unless something is done in Britain to halt the immigration and
assimilation of Africans and Asians into our country, we are faced in
the near future, quite apart from the bloodshed of racial conflict, with
the biological alteration and destruction of the British people as they
have existed here since the coming of the Saxons. In short, we are
threatened with the irrecoverable loss of our European culture and
racial heritage. But what happens if a man dares to speak of the race
problem, of its biological and political implications? He is branded as
that most heinous of creatures, a "racialist". And what is racialism, of
course, but the very hallmark of the Nazi! They (so everyone is told,
anyway) murdered Six Million Jews because of racialism, so it must be a
very evil thing indeed. When Enoch Powell drew attention to the dangers
posed by coloured immigration into Britain in one of his early speeches,
a certain prominent Socialist raised the spectre of Dachau and Auschwitz
to silence his presumption.
Thus any rational discussion of the problems of Race and the effort to
preserve racial integrity is effectively discouraged. No one could have
anything but admiration for the way in which the Jews have sought to
preserve their race through so many centuries, and continue to do so
today. In this effort they have frankly been assisted by the story of
the Six .Million, which, almost like a religious myth, has stressed the
need for greater Jewish racial solidarity. Unfortunately, it has worked
in quite the opposite way for all other peoples, rendering them impotent
in the struggle for self-preservation.
The aim in the following pages is quite simply to tell the Truth. The
distinguished American historian Harry Elmer Barnes once wrote that "An
attempt to make a competent, objective and truthful investigation of the
extermination question ... is surely the most precarious venture that an
historian or demographer could undertake today." In attempting this
precarious task, it is hoped to make some contribution, not only to
historical truth, but towards lifting the burden of a lie from our own
shoulders, so that we may freely confront the dangers which threaten us
all.
Richard E. Harwood
Back to Contents
1. German
Policy Toward 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 |
one ) 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 Ausrotung von 500,000 deutschen Juden (The Yellow Spot: (
The Extermination of 500,000 German Jews, |
The Outlawing of half a million Human Beings, )
Paris, 1936), presents a typical example. Despite its baselessness in fact,
the annihilation of the Jews is discussed from the first pages --
straight-forward 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 |
post-War ) 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; Reitlinger 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 SS: 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 Göring, Hitler agreed to
send the President of the Reichsbank, Dr. Hjalmar 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 Göring, 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 Helmut 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 Göring
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
and Frankl, SS 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.
Back to Contents
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
| September 5, 1959 ) 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 toward 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 emigration. 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 Ravensbrück. 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 Göring. 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 meantime
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 and Frankl, Dr. Goebbels,
London, 1960, ( p. 165 |
-- ) ). In the meantime he approved of the Jews being "concentrated
in the East". Later Goebbels memoranda also stress deportation to the East
(i.e. the Government-General of Poland) and lay emphasis on the need for
compulsory labour there; once the policy of evacuation to the East had been
inaugurated, the use of Jewish labour became a fundamental part of the
operation. It is 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.
Back to Contents
3. Population And Emigration
( Statistics | Since
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. | the total number of Jews
living in Nazi Europe in 1959 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 | 560,000 ) had emigrated prior
to the outbreak of war. These figures mean that the number of Jewish
emigrants from other European countries (France, the Netherlands, Italy, the
countries of eastern Europe etc.) was approximately 120,000.
This exodus of Jews before and during hostilities, therefore, reduces the
number of Jews in Europe to approximately 5,000,000. In addition to these
emigrants, we must also include the number of Jews who fled to the Soviet
Union after 1939, and who were later evacuated beyond reach of the German
invaders. It will be shown below that the majority of these, about
1,250,000, were migrants from Poland. But apart from Poland, Reitlinger
admits that 300,000 other European Jews slipped into Soviet territory
between 1939 and 1941. This brings the total of Jewish emigrants to the
Soviet Union to about 1,550,000. In Colliers magazine, June 9th, 1945,
Freiling Foster, writing of the Jews in Russia, explained that "2,200,000
have migrated to the Soviet Union since 1939 to escape from the Nazis," but
our lower estimate is probably more accurate.
Jewish migration to the Soviet Union, therefore, reduces the number of Jews
within the sphere of German occupation to around 3-1/2 million,
approximately 3,450,000. From these should be deducted those Jews living in
neutral European countries who escaped the consequences of the war.
According to the 1942 World Almanac (p. 594) the number of Jews living in
Gibraltar, Britain, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Ireland and Turkey
was 413,128.
3 Million Jews In Europe
( A figure,
consequently, | Consequently a figure )
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 ( --
| p. 102 )). 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
| Loui ) 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 | Say
) 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 million 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
| 15,000,000 ) and a maximum of (
18,700,000. | 18,000,000.
) 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 | Reproduced on the prior 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: |
shown: ) 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?
Back to Contents
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." ( -- |
(p. 159) ) 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, |
One of ) 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. | published in New York in 1944.
) 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. | On page 89 of his book he
quotes a 1943 publication of the Institute of Jewish Affairs of the American
Jewish Congress Hitler's Ten-Year war on the Jews, that 1,702,300 Jews had
been murdered. ) ( This, by 1943, would
| To be published in 1943 this last book must have
been written in 1942 so this figure 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 antiNazi 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 |
sister-in-law ) was congenitally insane and died (
by euthanasia, which may well suggest a streak of
mental instability in Gerstein himself. | by
euthanasia. His own behaviour might well suggest a streak of mental
instability. ) 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 | Hoenl )
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 Göring, 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 Göring 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
Göring 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 |
Miller ) and Eichmann represented Gestapo Head
Office. Reitlinger and Manvell and Frankl consider tile minutes of this
conference to be their trump card in proving the existence of a genocide
plan, but the truth is that no such plan was even mentioned, and what is
more, they freely admit this. Manvell and Frankl explain it away rather
lamely by saying that "The minutes are shrouded in the form of officialdom
that cloaks the real significance of the words and 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 Göring 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 reopening of international discussions which would decide their
future. This decision was finally reached at the interministerial Berlin-Wannsee
conference ..." (Rassinier, Le Véritable Procès 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). | (Heinrich Himmler).
) 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 Höss 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 | Manvell and
Frankl's ) 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.
Back to Contents
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, | lawyer )
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.
| The victors were putting on trial the vanquished.
) (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". |
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. |
that the defendants personally 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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Ninety per cent of the Nuremberg Court
consisted of biased persons who, either on political or racial
grounds, furthered the prosecution's case.
-
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.
-
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 per cent of the staff of the Public Prosecutor's
Office were German Jews who had left Germany after the promulgation of
Hitler's Race Laws. He observed that not even ten per cent of the Americans
employed at the Nuremberg courts were actually Americans by birth. The chief
of the Public Prosecutor's Office, who worked behind General Taylor, was
Robert M. Kempner, a German-Jewish emigrant. He was assisted by Morris
Amchan. Mark Lautern, who observed the Trials, writes in his book: "They
have all arrived: the Solomons, the Schlossbergers and the Rabinovitches,
members of the Public Prosecutor's staff ..." (ibid. p. 68).
It is obvious from these facts that the fundamental legal principle: that no
man can sit in judgment on his own case, was abandoned altogether. (
Moreover, | Worse,
) the majority of witnesses ( were also Jews. |
were also Jews, when only a minority of the concentration camp inmates had
been Jewish. ) According to Prof. Maurice Bardèche, who was also an observer
at the Trials, the only concern of these witnesses was not to show their
hatred too openly, and to try and give an impression of objectivity
(Nuremberg ou la Terre Promise, Paris, 1948, p. 149).
'Confessions' Under Torture
Altogether more disturbing, however,
were the methods employed to extract statements and "confessions" at
Nuremberg, particularly those from S.S. officers which were used to support
the extermination charge. The American Senator, Joseph McCarthy, in a
statement given to the American Press on May 20th, 1949, drew attention to
the following cases of torture to secure such confessions.
In the prison of the Swabisch Hall, he stated, officers of the S.S.
Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler were flogged until they were soaked in blood,
after which their sexual organs were trampled on as they lay prostrate on
the ground. As in the notorious Malmedy Trials of private soldiers, the
prisoners were hoisted in the air and beaten until they signed the
confessions demanded of them. On the basis of such "confessions" extorted
from S.S. Generals Sepp Dietrich and Joachim Paiper, the Leibstandarte was
convicted as a "guilty organisation". ( S.S. General
Oswald Pohl, the economic administrator of the concentration camp system,
had his face smeared with faeces and was subsequently beaten until he
supplied his confession. | -- ) In
dealing with these cases, Senator McCarthy told the Press:
"I have heard evidence and read documentary proofs to the effect that the
accused persons were beaten up, maltreated and physically tortured by
methods which could only be conceived in sick brains. They were subjected to
mock trials and pretended executions, they were told their families would be
deprived of their ration cards. All these things were carried out with the
approval of the Public Prosecutor in order to secure the psychological
atmosphere necessary for the extortion of the required confessions. If the
United States lets such acts committed by a few people go unpunished, then
the whole world can rightly criticise us severely and forever doubt the
correctness of our motives and our moral integrity."
The methods of intimidation described were repeated during trials at
Frankfurt-am-Mein and at Dachau, and large numbers of Germans were convicted
for atrocities on the basis of their admissions. The American Judge Edward
L. van Roden, one of the three members of the Simpson Army Commission which
was subsequently appointed to investigate the methods of justice at the
Dachau trials, revealed the methods by which these admissions were secured
in the Washington Daily News, January 9th, 1949. His account also appeared
in the British newspaper, the Sunday Pictorial, January 23rd, 1949. The
methods he described were:
"Posturing as priests to hear confessions and give absolution; torture with
burning matches driven under the prisoners' finger-nails; knocking out of
teeth and breaking jaws; solitary confinement and near starvation rations."
Van Roden explained: "The statements which were admitted as evidence were
obtained from men who had first been kept in solitary confinement for three,
four and five months ... The investigators would put a black hood over the
accused's head and then punch him in the face with brass knuckles, kick him
and beat him with rubber hoses ... All but two of the Germans, in the 139
cases we investigated, had been kicked in the testicles beyond repair. This
was standard operating procedure with our American investigators."
The "American" investigators responsible (and who later functioned as the
prosecution in the trials) were: Lt.-Col. Burton F. Ellis (chief of the War
Crimes Committee) and his assistants, Capt. Raphael Shumacker, Lt. Robert E.
Byrne, Lt. William R. Perl, Mr. Morris Ellowitz, Mr. Harry Thon, and Mr.
Kirschbaum. The legal adviser of the court was Col. A. H. Rosenfeld. The
reader will immediately appreciate from their names that the majority of
these people were "biased on racial grounds" in the words of Justice
Wenersturm -- that is, were Jewish, and therefore should never have been
involved in any such investigation.
Despite the fact that "confessions" pertaining to the extemination of the
Jews were extracted under these conditions, Nuremberg statements are still
regarded as conclusive evidence for the Six Million by writers like
Reitlinger and others, and the illusion is maintained that the Trials were
both impartial and impeccably fair. When General Taylor, the Chief Public
Prosecutor, was asked where he had obtained the figure of the Six Million,
he replied that it was based on the confession of S.S. General Otto
Ohlendorf. He, too, was tortured and his case is examined below. But as far
as such "confessions" in general are concerned, we can do no better than
quote the British Sunday Pictorial when reviewing the report of Judge van
Roden:
"Strong men were reduced to broken wrecks ready to mumble any
admission demanded by their prosecutors."
The Wisliceny Statement
At this point, let us turn to some of the Nuremberg documents themselves.
The document quoted most frequently in support of the legend of the Six
Million, and which figures largely in Poliakov and Wulf's Das Dritte Reich
und die Juden: Dokumente und 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 | the preparation of
the ) political administration, tasks which result from the struggle
which has to be carried out between two opposing political systems" (Manvell
and 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 |
lawyer ) 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 1000 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 Anne-Marie
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 judgment
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 Göring, 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 and 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, | known
) 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 | is
reported to have 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
| he states ) 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 Göring, 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 Göring, even after
hearing the Ohlendorf affidavit on the Einsatzgruppen and the Höss 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, Göring 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 Göring in this supposed extermination, but Charles
Bewley in his work Hermann Göring (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 Göring. 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. | and van Roden, after the American
trials at Nuremberg. )
Back to Contents
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 BergenBelsen, attention was shifted to the eastern
camps, particularly Auschwitz. Ovens definitely existed here, it was
claimed. Unfortunately, the eastem camps were in the Russian zone of
occupation, so that no one could verify whether these allegations were true
or not. The Russians ( refused to allow anyone to see
Auschwitz until about | controlled access by
foreigners to Auschwitz for 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. (
-- | Holocaust "expert"
Dr. Raul Hilberg admitted during the Toronto trial in respect of DSMRD? that
the Auschwitz "gas-chamber" was "modified for touristic and educational
reasons." ) If anyone doubts that the Russians are capable of such
deception, they should remember the monuments erected at sites where
thousands of ( people |
Poles ) 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 Eastem Europe:
"The evidence concerning the Polish death camps was mainly taken after the
war by Polish State commissions or by the Central Jewish Historical
Commission of Poland" (The Final Solution, p . 631).
However, no living, authentic eye-witness of these "gassings" has ever been
produced and validated. Benedikt Kautsky, who spent seven years in
concentration camps, including three in Auschwitz, alleged in his book (
Teufel und Verdammte (Devil and Damned, Zurich, 1946)
| Teufel und Verdammte, Zurich 1946 (Devil and the
Damned, Warsaw 1960) ) that "not less than 3,500,000 Jews" had been
killed there. This was certainly a remarkable statement, because by his own
admission he had never seen a gas chamber. He confessed: "I was in the big
German concentration camps. However, I must establish the truth that in no
camp at any time did I come across such an installation as a gas chamber"
(p. 272-3). The only execution he actually witnessed was when two Polish
inmates were executed for killing two Jewish inmates. Kautsky, who was sent
from Buchenwald in October, 1942 to work at Auschwitz-Buna, stresses in his
book that the use of prisoners in war industry was a major feature of
concentration camp policy until the end of the war. He fails to reconcile
this with an alleged policy of massacring Jews.
The exterminations at Auschwitz are alleged to have occurred between March
1942 and October 1944; the figure of half of six million, therefore, would
mean the extermination and disposal of about 94,000 people per month for
thirty two months - approximately 3,350 people every day, day and night, for
over two and a half years. This kind of thing is so ludicrous that it
scarcely needs refuting. And yet Reitlinger claims quite seriously that
Auschwitz could dispose of no less than 6,000 people a day.
Although Reitlinger's 6,000 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 |
Five Chinneys ) (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 |
that ) "In round numbers, about 24,000 corpses
were handled every day" (p. 80-1). This, of course, would mean a yearly rate
of over 8-1/2 million. Thus between March 1942 and October 1944 Auschwitz
would finally have disposed of over 21 million people, six million more than
the entire world Jewish population. Comment is superfluous.
Although several millions, were supposed to have died at Auschwitz alone,
Reitlinger has to admit that only 363,000 inmates were registered at the
camp for the whole of the period between January 1940 and February 1945 (The
S.S. Alibi of a Nation, p. 268 ff), and by no means all of them were Jews.
It is frequently claimed that many prisoners were never registered, but no
one has offered any proof of this. Even if there were as many unregistered
as there were registered, it would mean only a total of 750,000 prisoners --
hardly enough for the elimination of 3 or 4 million. Moreover, large numbers
of the camp population were released or transported elsewhere during the
war, and at the end 80,000 were evacuated westward in January 1945 before
the Russian advance.
One example will suffice of the statistical frauds relating to casualties at
Auschwitz. Shirer claims that in the summer of 1944, no less than 300,000
Hungarian Jews were done to death in a mere forty-six days (ibid. p. 1156).
This would have been almost the entire Hungarian Jewish population, which
numbered some 380,000. But according to the Central Statistical Office of
Budapest, there were 260,000 Jews in Hungary in 1945 (which roughly conforms
with the Joint Distribution Committee figure of 220,000), so that only
120,000 were classed as no longer resident. Of these, 35,000 were emigrants
from the new Communist regime, and a further 25,000 were still being held in
Russia after having worked in German labour battalions there.
This leaves only 60,000 Hungarian Jews unaccounted for, but M. E. Namenyi
estimates that 60,000 Jews 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 |
Some facts about Auschwitz appear in a work )
called Die Auschwitz-Lüge: Ein Erlebnisbericht von Thies 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-Iniative, it is an eyewitness
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 reappraisal 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, | Christopherson
) 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, I 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 Höss 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, Majdanek,
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 |
Heinrich Himmler, p. 140 ) ). In reality, of the million or so Jews
in Poland, almost half, about 400,000 were eventually concentrated in the
ghetto of Warsaw, an area of about two and a half square miles around the
old mediaeval ghetto.
The remainder had already been moved to the Polish Government-General by
September 1940. In the summer of 1942, Himmler ordered the resettlement of
all Polish Jews in detention camps in order to obtain their labour, part of
the system of general concentration for labour assignment in the
Government-General. Thus between July and October 1942, over three quarters
of the Warsaw Ghetto's inhabitants were peacefully evacuated and
transported, supervised by the Jewish police themselves.
As we have seen, transportation to camps is alleged to have ended in
"extermination", but there is absolutely no doubt from the evidence
available that it involved only the effective procurement of labour and the
prevention of unrest. In the first place, Himmler discovered on a surprise
visit to Warsaw in January 1943 that 24,000 Jews registered as armaments
workers were in fact working illegally as tailors and furriers (Manvell and
Frankl, ibid, p. 140); the Ghetto was also being used as a base for
subversive forays into the main area of Warsaw.
After six months of peaceful evacuation, when only about 60,000 Jews
remained in the residential ghetto, the Germans met with an armed rebellion
on 18th January, 1943. Manvell and Frankl admit that "The Jews involved in
planned resistance had for a long time been engaged in smuggling arms from
the outside world, and combat groups fired on and killed S.S. men and
militia in charge of a column of deportees." The terrorists in the Ghetto
uprising were also assisted by the Polish Home Army and the PPR -- Polska
Partia Robotnicza, the Communist Polish Workers Party. It was under these
circumstances of a revolt aided by partisans and communists that the
occupying forces, as any army would in a similar situation, moved in to
suppress the terrorists, if necessary by destroying the residential area
itself.
It should be remembered that the whole process of evacuation would have
continued peacefully had not extremists among the inhabitants planned an
armed rebellion which in the end was bound to fail. When S.S.
Lieutenant-General Stroop entered the Ghetto with armoured cars on 19th
April, he immediately came under fire and lost twelve men; German and Polish
casualties in the battle, which lasted four weeks, totalled 101 men killed
and wounded. Stubborn resistance by the Jewish Combat Organisation in the
face of impossible odds led to an estimated ( 12,000
| 14,000 ) Jewish casualties, the majority by
remaining in burning buildings and dug-outs. ( A
total, however, of 56,065 inhabitants were captured and peacefully resettled
in the area of the Government-General. | --
)
Many Jews within the Ghetto had resented the terror imposed on them by the
Combat Organisation, and had attempted to inform on their headquarters to
the German authorities.
Sudden Survivors
The circumstances surrounding the Warsaw Ghetto revolt, as well as the
deportations to eastern labour camps such as Auschwitz, has led to the most
colourful tales concerning the fate of Polish Jews, the largest bloc of
Jewry in Europe. The Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, in figures
prepared by them for the Nuremberg Trials, stated that in 1945 there were
only 80,000 Jews remaining in Poland. They also alleged that there were no
Polish-Jewish displaced persons left in Germany or Austria, a claim that was
at some variance with the number of Polish Jews arrested by the British and
Americans for black market activities.
However, the new Communist regime in Poland was unable to prevent a major
anti-Jewish pogrom at Kielce on July 4th, 1946 and (
more than 150,000 | consequently thousands of
) Polish Jews suddenly fled into Western Germany. Their appearance was
somewhat embarrassing, and their emigration to Palestine and the United
States was carried out in record time. Subsequently, the number of Polish
Jewish survivors underwent considerable revision; in the American-Jewish
Year Book 1948-1949 it was placed at 390,000 quite an advance on the
original 80,000. We may expect further revisions upwards in the future.
Back to Contents
7. Some Concentration Camp
Memoirs
The most influential agency in the propagation of the extermination legend
has been the paper-back book and magazine industry, and it is through their
sensational publications, produced for commercial gain, that the average
person is made acquainted with a myth of an entirely political character and
purpose. The hey-day of these hate-Germany books was in the 1950's, when
virulent Germanophobia found a ready market, but the industry continues to
flourish ( and is experiencing another boom today.
| -- ) The industry's products consist
generally of so-called "memoirs", and these fall into two basic categories:
those which are supposedly by former S.S. men, camp commandants and the
like, and those bloodcurdling reminiscences allegedly by former
concentration camp inmates.
Communist Origins
Of the first kind, the most outstanding example is Commandant of Auschwitz
by Rudolf Höss (London, 1960), which was originally published in the Polish
language as Wspomnienia by' the Communist Government. Höss, a young man who
took over at Auschwitz in 1940, was first arrested by the British and
detained at ( Flensburg, but he |
Flensburg. After his Nuremberg testimony he )
was soon handed over to the Polish Communist authorities who condemned him
to death in 1947 and executed him almost immediately. The so-called Höss
memoirs are undoubtedly a forgery produced under Communist auspices, as we
shall demonstrate, though the Communists themselves claim that Höss was
"ordered to write the story of his life" and a hand-written original
supposedly exists, ( but no one has ever seen it.
| at the Auschwitz Museum, but no one has ever
forensically examined it. )
Höss was subjected to torture and brain-washing techniques by the (
Communists | British
) during the period of his arrest, and his testimony at Nuremberg was
delivered in a mindless monotone as he stared blankly into space. Even
Reitlinger rejects this testimony as hopelessly untrustworthy.
It is indeed remarkable how much of the "evidence" regarding the Six Million
stems from Communist sources; this includes the major documents such as the
Wisliceny statement and the Höss "memoirs", which are undoubtedly the two
most quoted items in extermination literature, as well as all the
information on the so-called "death camps" such as Auschwitz. This
information comes from the Jewish Historical Commission of Poland; the
Central Commission for the Investigation of War Crimes, Warsaw; and the
Russian State War Crimes Commission, Moscow.
Reitlinger acknowledges that the Höss testimony at Nuremberg was a catalogue
of wild exaggerations, such as that Auschwitz was disposing of 16,000 people
a day, which would mean a total at the end of the war of over 13 million.
Instead of exposing such estimates for the Soviet-inspired frauds they
obviously are, Reitlinger and others prefer to think that such ridiculous
exaggerations were due to "pride" in doing a professional job. Ironically,
this is completely irreconcilable with the supposedly authentic Höss
memoirs, which make a clever attempt at plausibility by suggesting the
opposite picture of distaste for the job. Höss is supposed to have
"confessed" to a total of 3 million people exterminated at Auschwitz, though
at his own trial in Warsaw the prosecution reduced the number to 1,135,000.
However, we have already noted that the Soviet Government announced an
official figure of 4 million after their "investigation" of the camp in
1945. This kind of casual juggling with millions of people does not appear
to worry the writers of extermination literature.
A review of the Höss "memoirs" in all their horrid detail would be tedious.
We may confine ourselves to those aspects of the extermination legend which
are designed with the obvious purpose of forestalling any proof of its
falsity. Such, for example, is the manner in which the alleged extermination
of Jews is described. This was supposed to have been carried out by a
"special detachment" of Jewish prisoners. They took charge of the newly
arrived contingents at the camp, led them into the enormous "gas-chambers"
and disposed of the bodies afterwards. The S.S., therefore, did very little,
so that most of the S.S. personnel at the camp could be left in complete
ignorance of the "extermination programme". Of course, (
no Jew would ever be | no
reliable witness has ever been ) found who claimed to have been a
member of this gruesome "special detachment", so that the whole issue is
left conveniently unprovable. ( It is worth repeating
that no living, authentic eye-witness to these events has ever been produced.
| -- )
Conclusive evidence that the Höss memoirs are a forgery lies in an
incredible slip by the Communist editors. Höss is supposed to say that the
Jehovah's Witnesses at Auschwitz approved of murdering the Jews because the
Jews were the enemies of Christ. It is well known that in Soviet Russia
today and in all her satellite countries of eastern Europe, the Communists
conduct a bitter campaign of suppression against the Jehovah's Witnesses
whom they regard as the religious sect most dangerous to Communist beliefs.
That this sect is deliberately and grossly defamed in the Höss memoirs
proves the document's Communist origins beyond any doubt.
Incriminating Reminiscences
Certainly the most bogus "memoirs" yet published are those of Adolf
Eichmann. Before his illegal kidnapping by the Israelis in May, 1960 and the
attendant blaze of international publicity, few people had ever heard of him
. He was indeed a relatively unimportant person, the head of Office A4b in
Department IV (the Gestapo) of the Reich Security Head Office. His office
supervised the transportation to detention camps of a particular section of
enemy aliens, the Jews. A positive flood of unadulterated rubbish about
Eichmann showered the world in 1960, of which we may cite as an example
Comer Clarke's Eichmann: The Savage Truth. ("The orgies often went on until
six in the morning, a few hours before consigning the next batch of victims
to death," says Clarke in his chapter "Streamlined Death and Wild Sex
Orgies," p . 124).
Strangely enough, the alleged "memoirs" of Adolf Eichmann suddenly appeared
at the time of his abduction to Israel. They were uncritically published by
the American Life magazine (November 28th, December 5th, 1960), and were
supposed to have been given by Eichmann to a journalist in the Argentine
shortly before his capture -- an amazing coincidence. (
Other sources, however, gave an entirely different
account of their origin, claiming that they were a record based on
Eichmann's comments to an "associate" in 1955, though no one even bothered
to identify this person. | -- ) By an
equally extraordinary coincidence, war crimes investigators claimed shortly
afterwards to have just "found" in the archives of the U.S. Library of
Congress, more than fifteen years after the war, the "complete file" of
Eichmann's department.
So far as the "memoirs" themselves are concerned, they were made to be as
horribly incriminating as possible without straying too far into the realms
of the purest fantasy, and depict Eichmann speaking with enormous relish
about "the physical annihilation of the Jews." Their fraudulence is also
attested to by various factual errors, such as that Himmler was already in
command of the Reserve Army by April of 1944, instead of after the July plot
against Hitler's life, a fact which Eichmann would certainly have known. The
appearance of these "memoirs" at precisely the right moment raises no doubt
that their object was to present a pre-trial propaganda picture of the
archetypal "unregenerate Nazi" and fiend in human shape.
The circumstances of the Eichmann trial in Israel do not concern us here;
the documents of Soviet origin which were used in evidence, such as the
Wisliceny statement, have been examined already, and for an account of the
third-degree methods used on Eichmann during his captivity to render him
"co-operative" the reader is referred to the London Jewish Chronicle, (
September 2nd, | Semester
2, ) 1960. More relevant to the literature of the extermination
legend are the contents of a letter which Eichmann is supposed to have
written voluntarily and handed over to his captors in Buenos Aries. It need
hardly be added that its Israeli authorship is transparently obvious.
Nothing in it stretches human credulity further than the phrase "I am
submitting this declaration of my own free will"; but the most hollow and
revealing statement of all is his alleged willingness to appear before a
court in Israel, "so that a true picture may be transmitted to future
generations."
Treblinka Fabrications
(The latest reminiscences to appear in print |
Another set of reminiscences) are those of
Franz Stangl, the former commandant of the camp at Treblinka in Poland who
was sentenced to life imprisonment in December 1970. These were published in
an article by the London Daily Telegraph Magazine, October 8th, 1971, and
were supposed to derive from a series of interviews with Stangl in prison.
He died a few days after the interviews were concluded. These alleged
reminiscences are certainly the goriest and most bizarre yet published,
though one is grateful for a few admissions by the writer of the article,
such as that "the evidence presented in the course of his trial did not
prove Stangl himself to have committed specific acts of murder" and that the
account of Stangl's beginnings in Poland "was in part fabrication."
A typical example of this fabrication was the description of Stangl's first
visit to Treblinka. As he drew into the railway station there, he is
supposed to have seen "thousands of bodies" just strewn around next to the
tracks, "hundreds, no, thousands of bodies everywhere, putrefying,
decomposing." And "in the station was a train full of Jews, some dead, some
still alive ... it looked as if it had been there for days." The account
reaches the heights of absurdity when Stangl is alleged to have got out of
his car and "stepped knee-deep into money: I didn't know which way to turn,
which way to go. I waded in paper-notes, currency, precious stones,
jewellery and clothes. They were everywhere, strewn all over the square."
The scene is completed by "whores from Warsaw weaving drunk, dancing,
singing, playing music", who were on the other side of the barbed wire
fences.
To literally believe this account of sinking "knee-deep" in Jewish
bank-notes and precious stones amid thousands of putrefying corpses and
lurching, singing prostitutes would require the most phenomenal degree of
gullibility, and in any circumstances other than the Six Million legend it
would be dismissed as the most outrageous nonsense. The statement which
certainly robs the Stangl memoirs of any vestige of authenticity is his
alleged reply when asked why he thought the Jews were being exterminated:
"They wanted the Jews' money," is the answer. "That racial business was just
secondary."
The series of interviews are supposed to have ended on a highly
dubious note indeed. When asked whether he thought there had been "any
conceivable sense in this horror," the former Nazi commandant supposedly
replied with enthusiasm:
"Yes, I am sure there was. Perhaps the Jews were
meant to have this enormous jolt to pull them together; to create a people;
to identify themselves with each other."
One could scarcely imagine a more
perfect answer had it been invented.
Best-Seller A (Hoax
| Fraud)
Of the other variety of memoirs, those
which present a picture of frail Jewry caught in the vice of Nazism, the
most celebrated is undoubtedly The Diary of Anne Frank, and the truth
concerning this book ( is only one appalling insight
into the fabrication of a propaganda legend. |
provides an additional insight into how a propaganda legend is fabricated.
) ( First published in 1952. The Diary of Anne Frank
became an immediate best-seller; since then it has been republished in
paper-back, going through 40 impressions, and was made into a successful
Hollywood film. In royalties alone, Otto Frank, the girl's father, has made
a fortune from the sale of the book, which purports to represent the
real-life tragedy of his daughter. With its direct appeal to the emotions,
the book and the film have influenced literally millions of people,
certainly more throughout the world than any other story of its kind. And
yet only seven years after its initial publication, a New York Supreme Court
case established that the book was a hoax. |
First published in 1947, as Het Achterhuis ('The Behind-house'), the Diary
became a huge success, selling over 15 million copies and being adapted into
a Hollywood film. Representing the real-life tragedy of Anne Frank, its
direct appeal to the emotions has influenced millions of people, certainly
more throughout the world than any story of its kind. The Anne Frank House
in Amsterdam now attracts more than half a million paying visitors every
year. )
( The Diary of Anne Frank has been sold to the public
as the actual diary of a young Jewish girl from Amsterdam, which she wrote
at the age of 12 | The Diary of Anne Frank
purports to be the diary a young Jewish girl kept ) while her family
and four other Jews were hiding in ( the back room of
a house | a factory ) during the German (
occupation. | occupation of Holland. ) Eventually, (
they | the eight )
were arrested and detained in ( a concentration camp,
where Anne Frank supposedly died when she was 14. |
various concentration camps. Anne Frank died in
Bergen-Belsen of typhus, by which time she was fifteen. ) (
When Otto Frank was liberated from the camp at the end
of the war, he returned to the Amsterdam house and "found" his daughter's
diary concealed in the rafters. | When
Auschwitz was liberated by the Russians Otto Frank was being treated for
typhus in the camp hospital and he died in 1980. )
( The truth about the Anne Frank Diary was first revealed in 1959 by the
Swedish journal Fria Ord. It established that the Jewish novelist Meyer
Levin had written the dialogue of the "diary" and was demanding payment for
his work in a court action against Otto Frank. A condensation of the Swedish
articles appeared in the American Economic Council Letter, April 15th, 1959,
as follows: "History has many examples of myths that live a longer and
richer life than truth, and may become more effective than truth. "The
Western World has for some years been made aware of a Jewish girl through
the medium of what purports to be her personally written story, Anne Frank's
Diary. Any informed literary inspection of this book would have shown it to
have been impossible as the work of a teenager.
"A noteworthy decision of the New York Supreme Court confirms this point of
view, in that the well known American Jewish writer, Meyer Levin, has been
awarded $50,000 to be paid him by the father of Anne Frank as an honorarium
for Levin's work on the Anne Frank Diary."
Mr. Frank, in Switzerland, has promised to pay to his race kin, Meyer Levin,
not less than $50,000 because he had used the dialogue of Author Levin just
as it was and "implanted" it in the diary as being his daughter's
intellectual work." Further inquiries brought a reply on May 7th, 1962 from
a firm of New York lawyers, which stated: "I was the attorney for Meyer
Levin in his action against Otto Frank, and others. It is true that a jury
awarded Mr. Levin $50,000 in damages, as indicated in your letter. That
award was later set aside by the trial justice, Hon. Samuel C. Coleman, on
the ground that the damages had not been proved in the manner required by
law. The action was subsequently settled while an appeal from Judge
Coleman's decision was pending.
"I am afraid that the case itself is not officially reported, so far as the
trial itself, or even Judge Coleman's decision, is concerned. Certain
procedural matters were reported in 141 New York Supplement, Second Series
170, and in 5 Second Series 181. The correct file number in the New York
County Clerk's office is 2241 -- 1956 and the file is probably a large and
full one . . ."
Only in 1986 were the complete diaries published, first in Dutch and then in
English as The Diary of Anne Frank: The Critical Edition (London, 1989). In
this heavy tome three versions of the 'diary' are reproduced: two versions
of the manuscript and the published version. Anne Frank wrote large sections
of her 'diary,' and re-wrote the remainder, up to two years after the stated
entry dates. Gerrold van der Stroom, writing in the Critical Edition,
observed that "she changed, rearranged, sometimes combined entries of
various dates, expanded and abbreviated." The revised text was then edited
at least twice under the auspices of Otto Frank. Many passages which are
pure fantasy, intensely personal or incongruous with its sentimental theme
are omitted from the published Diary. In the entry of 29 March 1944 Frank
described her book as "teen romance," a novel, but this is incorrectly
translated in the published Diary and even in the Critical Edition as "a
romance."
Earlier editions of D6MRD? claimed that the Anne Frank Diary was a hoax.
Otto Frank's reply to this charge was that the Diary contained the "essence"
of his daughter's work. In essence the charge against the Diary is true
because it is a fraud: it is not a diary but a story in which fact and
fiction are freely mixed. For how a real diary is treated see Bryant's
Triumph in the West, 1943-1946: Based on the Diaries and Autobiographical
Notes of' Field Marshall, the Viscount Alanbrooke (Alanbrooke was chief
military advisor to Churchill and attended the wartime conferences with
Stalin). His contemporaneous diary entries are in double-quotes and his
subsequent remarks (perspectives with hindsight, omissions etc.) are in
single-quotes. Such a scheme would be impossible with Anne Frank's 'diary.
The Dutch State Institute for War Documentation (Rijksinstituut voor
Oorlogsdocumentatie), who now keep the Diary manuscripts in a bank vault,
say they hold two hundred other diaries, many of which were written within
concentration camps. This further illustrates the phenomenon whereby
disproportionate attention is given to one text of dubious provenance while
hundreds of more authentic documents remain unexamined. )
( Here, then, | The Diary
of Anne Frank ) is just one more fraud in a whole series of frauds
perpetrated in support of the "Holocaust" legend and the saga of the Six
Million. ( Of course, the court case bearing directly
on the authenticity of the Anne Frank Diary was "not officially reported".
| -- )
A brief reference may also be made to another "diary", (
published not long after that of Anne Frank and
entitled: | entitled: ) Notes from the
Warsaw Ghetto: the Journal of Emmanuel Ringelblum (New York, 1958).
Ringelblum had been a leader in the campaign of sabotage against the Germans
in Poland, as well as the revolt of the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943, before he was
eventually arrested and executed in 1944. The Ringelblum journal, which
speaks of the usual "rumours" allegedly circulating about the extermination
of the Jews in Poland, appeared under exactly the same Communist auspices as
the so-called Höss memoirs.
McGraw-Hill, the publishers of the American
edition, admit that they were denied access to the uncensored original
manuscript in Warsaw, and instead faithfully followed the expurgated volume
published by the Communist Government in Warsaw in 1952. All the "proofs" of
the Holocaust issuing from Communist sources of this kind are worthless as
historical documents.
Accumulating Myths
( Since | After )
the war, ( there has been |
was ) an abundant growth of sensational
concentration camp literature, the majority of it Jewish, each book piling
horror upon horror, blending fragments of truth with the most grotesque of
fantasies and impostures, relentlessly creating an edifice of mythology in
which any relation to historical fact has long since disappeared.
We have referred to the type already - Olga Lengyel's absurd Five Chimneys
("24,000 corpses handled every day"), ( Doctor at
Auschwitz | Auschwitz, A Doctor's Eye-Witness
Account ) by Miklos Nyiszli, ( apparently a
mythical and invented person, | -- )
This was Auschwitz: The Story of a Murder Camp by Philip Friedman, and so on
ad nauseam.
( The latest | Another
) in this vein is For Those I Loved by Martin Gray (Bodley Head, 1973),
which purports to be an account of his experiences at Treblinka camp in
Poland. Gray specialized in selling fake antiques to America before turning
to concentration camp memoirs. The circumstances surrounding the publication
of his book, however, have been unique, because for the first time with
works of this kind, serious doubt was cast on the authenticity of its
contents. Even Jews, alarmed at the damage it might cause, denounced his
book as fraudulent and questioned whether he had ever been at Treblinka at
all, while B.B.C. radio pressed him as to why he had waited 28 years before
writing of his experiences.
It was interesting to observe that the "Personal Opinion" column of the
London ( Jewish | Javish
) Chronicle, March 30th, 1973, although it roundly condemned Gray's book,
nevertheless made grandiose additions to the myth of the Six Million. It
stated that: "Nearly a million people were murdered in Treblinka in the
course of a year. 18,0OO were fed into the gas chambers every day." It is a
pity indeed that so many people read and accept this kind of nonsense
without exercising their minds. If 18,000 were murdered every day, the
figure of one million would be reached in a mere 56 days, not "in the course
of a year." This gigantic achievement would leave the remaining ten months
of the year a total blank. 18,000 every day would in fact mean a total of
6,480,000 "in the course of a year." Does this mean that the Six Million
died in twelve months at Treblinka? What about the alleged three or four
million at Auschwitz?
This kind of thing simply shows that, once the
preposterous compromise figure of Six Million had scored a resounding
success and become internationally accepted, any number of impossible
permutations can be made and no one would even think to criticise them. In
its review of Gray's book, the Jewish Chronicle column also provides a
revealing insight into the fraudulent allegations concerning gas-chambers:
"Gray recalls that the floors of the gas chambers sloped, whereas another
survivor who helped to build them maintains that they were at a level ..."
Occasionally, books by former concentration camp inmates appear which
present a totally different picture of the conditions prevailing in them.
Such is Under Two Dictators (London, 1950) by Margarete Buber. She was a (
German-Jewish woman |
woman ) who had experienced several years in the brutal and primitive
conditions of a Russian prison camp before being sent to Ravensbrück, the
German camp for women detainees, in August 1940. She noted that she was the
only Jewish person in her contingent of deportees from Russia who was not
straight away released by the Gestapo. Her book presents a striking contrast
between the camps of Soviet Russia and Germany; compared to the squalor,
disorder and starvation of the Russian camp, she found Ravensbrück to be
clean, civilised and well-administered. Regular baths and clean linen seemed
a luxury after her earlier experiences, and her first meal of white bread,
sausage, sweet porridge and dried fruit prompted her to inquire of another
camp inmate whether August 3rd, 1940 was some sort of holiday or special
occasion. She observed, too, that the barracks at Ravensbrück were
remarkably spacious compared to the crowded mud hut of the Soviet camp. In
the final months of 1945, she experienced the progressive decline of camp
conditions, the causes of which we shall examine later.
Another account which is at total variance with popular propaganda is Die
Gestapo Lässt Bitten (The Gestapo Invites You) by Charlotte Bormann, a
Communist political prisoner who was also interned at Ravensbrück.
Undoubtedly its most important revelation is the author's statement that
rumours of gas executions were deliberate and malicious inventions
circulated among the prisoners by the Communists. This latter group did not
accept Margarete Buber because of her imprisonment in Soviet Russia. A
further shocking reflection on the post-war trials is the fact that
Charlotte Bormann was not permitted to testify at the Rastadt trial of
Ravensbrück camp personnel in the French occupation zone, the usual fate of
those who denied the extermination legend.
Back to Contents
8.
The Nature And Condition Of War-Time Concentration Camps
In his ( recent book |
book ) Adolf Hitler (London, 1973), Colin Cross, who (
brings | brought )
more intelligence than is usual to many problems of this period, (
observes | observed
) astutely that "The shuffling of millions of Jews around Europe and
murdering them, in a time of desperate war emergency, was useless from any
rational point of view" (p. 307). Quite so, and at this point we may well
question the likelihood of this irrationalism, and whether it was even
possible. Is it likely, that at the height of the war, when the Germans were
fighting a desperate battle for survival on two fronts, they would have
conveyed millions of Jews for miles to supposedly elaborate and costly
slaughter houses?
To have conveyed three or four million Jews to Auschwitz alone (even
supposing that such an inflated number existed in Europe, which it did not),
would have placed an insuperable burden upon German transportation
facilities which were ( strained |
already strained ) to the limit in supporting
the far-flung Russian front. To have transported the mythical six million
Jews and countless numbers of other nationalities to internment camps, and
to have housed, clothed and fed them there, would simply have paralysed
their military operations. There is no reason to suppose that the efficient
Germans would have put their military fortunes at such risk.
On the other hand, the transportation of a reasonable 363,000 prisoners to
Auschwitz in the course of the war (the number we know to have been
registered there) at least makes sense in terms of the compulsory labour
they supplied. In fact, of the 3 million Jews living in Europe, it is
certain that no more than two million were ever interned at one time, and it
is probable that the number was much closer to 1,500,000. We shall see
later, in the Report of the ( Red Cross, |
International Committee of the Red Cross, )
that whole Jewish populations such as that of Slovakia avoided detention in
camps, while others were placed in community ghettos like Theresienstadt.
Moreover, from western Europe deportations were far fewer. The estimate of
Reitlinger that only about 50,000 French Jews from a total population of
320,000 were deported and interned has been noted already.
The question must also be asked as to whether it could have been physically
possible to destroy the millions of Jews that are alleged. Had the Germans
enough time for it? Is it likely that they would have cremated people by the
million when they were so short of manpower and required all prisoners of
war for purposes of war production? Would it have been possible to destroy
and remove all trace of a million people in six months? Could such enormous
gatherings of Jews and executions on such a vast scale have been kept
secret? These are the kind of questions that the critical, thinking person
should ask. And he will soon discover that not only the statistical and
documentary evidence given here, but simple logistics combine to discredit
the legend of the six million.
Although it was impossible for millions to have been murdered in them, the
nature and conditions of Germany's concentration camps have been vastly
exaggerated to make the claim plausible. ( William
Shirer, | Shirer, ) in a typically
reckless passage, states that "All of the thirty odd principal Nazi
concentration camps were death camps" (ibid, p. 1150). This is totally
untrue, and is not even accepted now by the principal propagators of the
extermination legend. Shirer also quotes Eugen Kogon's The Theory and
Practice of Hell (N.Y. 1950, p. 227) which puts the total number of deaths
in all of them at the ridiculous figure of 7,125,000, though Shirer admits
in a footnote that this is "undoubtedly too high."
'Death Camps' Behind The Iron Curtain
It is true that in 1945, Allied
propaganda did claim that all the concentration camps, particularly those in
Germany itself, were "death camps", but not for long. On this question, the
( eminent American historian |
American historian ) Harry Elmer Barnes wrote:
"These camps were first presented as those in Germany, such as Dachau,
Belsen, Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen and Dora, but it was soon demonstrated
that there had been no systematic extermination in those camps.
Attention
was then moved to Auschwitz, Treblinka, Belzec, Chelmno, Jonowska, Tarnow,
Ravensbrück, Mauthausen, Brezeznia and Birkenau, which does not exhaust the
list that appears to have been extended as needed" (Rampart Journal, Summer
1967). What had happened was that certain honest observers among the British
and American occupation forces in Germany, while admitting that many inmates
had died of disease and starvation in the final months of the war, had found
no evidence after all of "gas chambers".
As a result, eastern camps in the Russian zone of occupation such as
Auschwitz and Treblinka gradually came to the fore as horrific centres of
extermination (though no one was permitted to see them), and this tendency
has lasted to the present day. Here in these camps it was all supposed to
have happened, but with the Iron Curtain brought down firmly over them, no
one has ever been able to verify such charges. The Communists claimed that
four million people died at Auschwitz in gigantic gas chambers accommodating
2,000 people -- and no one could argue to the contrary.
What is the truth about so-called "gas chambers"? Stephen F. Pinter, who
served as a lawyer for the United States War Department in the occupation
forces in Germany and Austria for six years after the war, made the
following statement in the widely read Catholic magazine Our Sunday Visitor,
June 14th , 1959:
"I was in Dachau for 17 months after the war, as a (
U.S. Department Attorney, | U.S. War Department
Attorney, ) and can state that there was no gas chamber at Dachau.
What was shown to visitors and sightseers there and erroneously described as
a gas chamber was a crematory. Nor was there a gas chamber in any of the
other concentration camps in Germany. We were told that there was a gas
chamber at Auschwitz, but since that was in the Russian zone of occupation,
we were not permitted to investigate since the Russians would not allow it.
From what I was able to determine during six postwar years in Germany and
Austria, there were a number of Jews killed, but the figure of a million was
certainly never reached. I interviewed thousands of Jews, former inmates of
concentration camps in Germany and Austria, and consider myself as well
qualified as any man on this subject."
This tells a very different story from the customary propaganda. Pinter, of
course, is very astute on the question of the crematory being represented as
a gas chamber. This is a frequent ploy because no such thing as a gas
chamber has ever been shown to exist in these camps, hence the deliberately
misleading term a "gas oven", aimed at confusing a gas chamber with a
crematorium. The latter, usually a single furnace and similar to the kind of
thing employed today, were used quite simply for the cremation of those
persons who had died from various natural causes within the camp,
particularly infectious diseases.
This fact was conclusively proved by the German archbishop, Cardinal
Faulhaber of Munich. He informed the Americans that during the Allied air
raids on Munich in September 1944, 30,000 people were killed. The archbishop
requested the authorities at the time to cremate the bodies of the victims
in the crematorium at Dachau. But he was told that, unfortunately, this plan
could not be carried out; the crematorium, having only one furnace, was not
able to cope with the bodies of the air raid victims.
Clearly, therefore, it
could not have coped with the 238,000 Jewish bodies which were allegedly
cremated there. In order to do so, the crematorium would have to be kept
going for 326 years without stopping and 530 tons of ashes would have been
recovered.
Casualty Figures Reduced
The figures of Dachau casualties are
typical of the kind of exaggerations that have since (
had to be | been ) drastically revised.
In 1946, a memorial plaque was unveiled at Dachau by Philip Auerbach, the
Jewish State-Secretary in the Bavarian Government who was convicted for
embezzling money which he claimed as compensation for nonexistent Jews. The
plaque read: "This area is being retained as a shrine to the 238,000
individuals who were cremated here." Since then, the official casualty
figures have had to be steadily revised downwards, and now stand at only
20,600 the majority from typhus and starvation only at the end of the war.
This deflation, to ten per cent of the original figure, will doubtless
continue, and one day will be applied to the legendary figure of six million
as a whole.
Another example of drastic revision is the present estimate of Auschwitz
casualties. The absurd allegations of three or four million deaths there are
no longer plausible even to Reitlinger. He now puts the number of casualties
at only 600,000; and although this figure is still exaggerated in the
extreme, it is a significant reduction on four million and further progress
is to be expected. ( Shirer himself |
Shirer ) quotes Reitlinger's latest estimate,
but he fails to reconcile this with his earlier statement that half of that
figure, about 300,000 Hungarian Jews were supposedly "done to death in
forty-six days" - a supreme example of the kind of irresponsible nonsense
that is written on this subject.
Humane Conditions
That several thousand camp inmates did die in the chaotic final months of
the war brings us to the question of their war-time conditions. These have
been deliberately falsified in innumerable books of an extremely lurid and
unpleasant kind. ( The Red Cross Report, |
The Red Cross Report, of the ICRC ) examined
below, demonstrates conclusively that throughout the war the camps were well
administered. The working inmates received a daily ration even throughout
1943 and 1944 of not less than 2,750 calories, which was more than double
the average civilian ration in occupied Germany in the years after 1945.
The internees were under regular medical care, and those who became
seriously ill were transferred to hospital. All internees, unlike those in
Soviet camps, could receive parcels of food, clothing and pharmaceutical
supplies from the Special Relief Division of the Red Cross.
The Office of the Public Prosecutor conducted thorough investigations into
each case of criminal arrest, and those found innocent were released; those
found guilty, as well as those deportees convicted of major crimes within
the camp, were sentenced by military courts and executed. In the Federal
Archives of Koblenz there is a directive of January 1943 from Himmler
regarding such executions, stressing that "no brutality. is to be allowed" (Manvell
and Frankl), ibid, p. 312).
Occasionally there was brutality, but such cases
were immediately scrutinised by S.S. Judge Dr. Konrad Morgen of the Reich
Criminal Police Office, whose job was to investigate irregularities at the
various camps. Morgen himself prosecuted commander Koch of Buchenwald in
1943 for excesses at his camp, a trial to which the German public were
invited. It is significant that Oswald Pohl, the administrator of the
concentration camp system who was dealt with so harshly at Nuremberg, was in
favour of the death penalty for Koch. In fact, the S.S. court did sentence
Koch to death, but he was given the option of serving on the Russian front.
Before he could do this, however, Prince Waldeck, the leader of the S.S. in
the district, carried out his execution. This case is ample proof of the
seriousness with which the S.S. regarded unnecessary brutality.
Several S.S. court actions of this kind were conducted in the camps during
the war to prevent excesses, and more than 800 cases were investigated
before 1945. Morgen testified at Nuremberg that he discussed confidentially
with hundreds of inmates the prevailing conditions in the camps. He found
few that were undernourished except in the hospitals, and noted that the
pace and achievement in compulsory labour by inmates was far lower than
among German civilian workers. The evidence of Pinter and Cardinal Faulhaber
has been shown to disprove the claims of extermination at Dachau, and we
have seen how the casualty figures of that camp have been continuously
revised downwards. The camp at Dachau near Munich, in fact, may be taken as
fairly typical of these places of internment. Compulsory labour in the
factories and plants was the order of the day, but the Communist leader
Ernst Ruff testified in his Nuremberg affidavit of April 18th, 1947 that the
treatment of prisoners on the work details and in the camp of Dachau
remained humane.
The Polish underground leader, Jan Piechowiak, who was at Dachau from May
22nd, 1940 until April 29th, 1945 also testified on March 21st, 1946 that
prisoners there received good treatment, and that the S.S. personnel at the
camp were "well disciplined". Berta Schirotschin, who worked in the food
service at Dachau throughout the war, testified that the working inmates,
until the beginning of 1945 and despite increasing privation in Germany,
received their customary second breakfast at 10 a.m. every morning.
In general, hundreds of affidavits from Nuremberg testify to the humane
conditions prevailing in concentration camps; but emphasis was invariably
laid on those which reflected badly on the German administration and could
be used for propaganda purposes. A study of the documents also reveals that
Jewish witnesses who resented their deportation and internment in prison
camps tended to greatly exaggerate the rigours of their condition, whereas
other nationals interned for political reasons, such as those cited above,
generally presented a more balanced picture.
In many cases, prisoners such
as Charlotte Bormann, whose experiences did not accord with the picture
presented at Nuremberg, were not permitted to testify.
Unavoidable Chaos
The orderly situation prevailing in the German concentration camps slowly
broke down in the last fearful months of 1945. The Red Cross Report of 1948
explains that the saturation bombing by the Allies paralyzed the transport
and communications system of the Reich, no food reached the camps and
starvation claimed an increasing number of victims, both in prison camps and
among the civilian population of Germany. This terrible situation was
compounded in the camps both by great overcrowding and the consequent
outbreak of typhus epidemics. Overcrowding occurred as a result of prisoners
from the eastern camps such as Auschwitz being evacuated westward before the
Russian advance; columns of ( such exhausted |
exhausted ) people arrived at several German
camps such as Belsen and Buchenwald which had themselves reached a state of
great hardship.
Belsen camp near Bremen was in an especially chaotic condition in these
months and Himmler's physician, Felix Kersten, an anti-Nazi, explains that
its unfortunate reputation as a "death camp" was due solely to the ferocity
of the typhus epidemic which broke out there in March 1945 (Memoirs
1940-1945, London, .1956). Undoubtedly these fearful conditions cost several
thousand lives, and it is these conditions that are (
represented | portrayed ) in the
photographs of emaciated human beings and heaps of corpses which the
propagandists delight in showing, claiming, that they are victims of
"extermination".
A surprisingly honest appraisal of the situation at Belsen in 1945 appeared
in Purnell's History of the Second World War (Vol. 7, No. 15) by Dr. Russell
Barton, ( now superintendent and |
a ) consultant psychiatrist at Severalls
Hospital, Essex, who spent one month at the camp as (
a | a British ) medical student after
the war. His account vividly illustrates the true causes of the mortality
that occurred in such camps toward the war's end, and how such extreme
conditions came to prevail there. Dr. Barton explains that Brigadier Glyn
Hughes, the British Medical Officer who took command of Belsen in 1945, "did
not think there had been any atrocities in the camp" despite discipline and
hard work "Most people," writes Dr. Barton,
"attributed the conditions of
the inmates to deliberate intention on the part of the Germans. . Inmates
were eager to cite examples of brutality and neglect, and visiting
journalists from different countries interpreted the situation according to
the needs of propaganda at home."
However, Dr. Barton makes it quite clear that the conditions of starvation
and disease were unavoidable in the circumstances and that they occurred
only during the months of 1945. "From discussions with prisoners it seemed
that conditions in the camp were not too bad until late 1944. The huts were
set among pine trees and each was provided with lavatories, wash basins,
showers and stoves for heating."
The cause of food shortage is also explained.
"German medical officers told
me that it had been increasingly difficult to transport food to the camp for
some months. Anything that moved on the autobahns was likely to be bombed
... I was surprised to find records, going back for two or three years, of
large quantities of food cooked daily for distribution. At that time I
became convinced, contrary to popular opinion, that there had never been a
policy of deliberate starvation. This was confirmed by the large numbers of
well-fed inmates. Why then were so many people suffering from mal-nutrition?
... The major reasons for the state of Belsen were disease, gross
overcrowding by central authority, lack of law and order within the huts,
and inadequate supplies of food, water and drugs."
The lack of order, which
led to riots over food distribution, was quelled by British machine-gun fire
and a display of force when British tanks and armoured cars toured the camp.
Apart from the unavoidable deaths in these circumstances, Glyn Hughes
estimated that about "1,000 were killed through the kindness of English
soldiers giving them their own rations and chocolates." As a man who was at
Belsen, Dr. Barton is obviously very much alive to the falsehoods of
concentration camp mythology, and he concludes:
"In trying to assess the
causes of the conditions found in Belsen one must be alerted to the
tremendous visual display, ripe for purposes of propaganda, that masses of
starved corpses presented."
To discuss such conditions "naively in terms of
'goodness' and 'badness' is to ignore the constituent factors..."
Fake Photographs
Not only were situations such as those at Belsen unscrupulously exploited
for propaganda purposes, but this propaganda has also made use of entirely
fake atrocity photographs and films. The extreme conditions at Belsen
applied to very few camps indeed; the great majority escaped the worst
difficulties and all their inmates survived in good health. As a result,
outright forgeries were used to exaggerate conditions of horror.
A startling case of such forgery was revealed in the British Catholic Herald
of October 29th, 1948. It reported that in Cassel, where every adult German
was compelled to see a film representing the "horrors" of Buchenwald, a
doctor from Goettingen saw himself on the screen looking after the victims.
But he had never been to Buchenwald. After an interval of bewilderment he
realised that what he had seen was part of a film taken after the terrible
air raid on Dresden by the Allies on 13th February, 1945, where the doctor
had been working. The film in question was shown in Cassel on 19th October,
1948. After the air raid on Dresden, which killed a record 135 000 people,
mostly refugee women and children, the bodies of the victims were piled and
burned in heaps of 400 and 500 for several weeks. These were the scenes,
purporting to be from Buchenwald, which the doctor had recognised.
The forgery of war-time atrocity photographs is not new. For further
information the reader is referred to ( Arthur
Ponsonby's book Falsehood in Wartime (London, 1928), |
Falsehood in Wartime (London, 1928) by Arthur Ponsonby
MP, ) which exposes the faked photographs of German atrocities in the
First World War. Ponsonby cites such fabrications as "The Corpse Factory"
and "The Belgian Baby without Hands", which are strikingly reminiscent of
the propaganda relating to Nazi "atrocities". F. J. P. Veale explains in his
book that the bogus "jar of human soap" solemnly introduced by the Soviet
prosecution at Nuremberg was a deliberate jibe at the famous British "Corpse
Factory" myth, in which the ghoulish Germans were supposed to have obtained
various commodities from processing corpses ( (Veale,
ibid, p. 192). | (Times 17 April 1917, p.5;
Veale, ibid, p. 192; The Penguin Book of Lies, Kerr, London, 1990, p. 301).
)
This accusation was one for which the British Government apologised after
1918. It received new life after 1945 in the tale of lamp shades of human
skin, which was certainly as fraudulent as the Soviet "human soap". In fact,
from Manvell and Frankl we have the grudging admission that the lamp shade
evidence at Buchenwald Trial "later appeared to be dubious" (The
Incomparable Crime, p. 84). It was given by a certain Andreas Pffffenberger
in a "written affidavit" of the kind discussed earlier, but in 1948 General
Lucius Clay admitted that the affidavits used in the trial appeared after
more thorough investigation to have been mostly "hearsay."
An excellent work on the fake atrocity photographs pertaining to the Myth of
the Six Million is ( Dr. Udo Walendy Bild 'Dokumente'
für die Geschichtsschreibung? (Vlotho/Weser, 1973), |
Udo Walendy's Forged War Crimes Malign the German
Nation (Vlotho/Weser, 1989; Hull 1996), ) and from the numerous
examples cited we illustrate one ( on this page. | overleaf. ) The origin of
the first photograph is unknown, but the second is a photomontage. Close
examination reveals immediately that the standing figures have been taken
from the first photograph, and a heap of corpses super-imposed in front of
them. The fence has been removed, and an entirely new horror "photograph"
created.
This blatant forgery appears on page 341 of R. Schnabel's book on
the S.S., Macht ohne Moral: eine Dokumentation über die SS (Frankfurt,
1957), with the caption "Mauthausen". (Walendy ( cites
| has cited ) eighteen other examples of
forgery in Schnabel's book). The same photograph appeared in the Proceedings
of the International Military Tribunal, Vol. XXX, p. 421, likewise
purporting to illustrate Mauthausen camp. It is also illustrated without a
caption in Eugene Aroneanu's Konzentrationlager Document F.321 for the
International Court at Nuremberg; Heinz Kühnrich's Der KZ-Staat (Berlin,
1960, p. 81); Vaclav Berdych's Mauthausen (Prague, 1959); and Robert
Neumann's Hitler -- Aufstieg und Untergang des Dritten Reichs (Munich,
1961).
Back to Contents
9. The Jews And The Concentration Camps: A Factual Appraisal By The Red
Cross
There is one survey of the Jewish
question in Europe during World War Two and the conditions of Germany's
concentration camps which is almost unique in its honesty and objectivity,
the three-volume Report of the International Committee of the Red Cross on
its Activities during the Second World War, Geneva, 1948.
This comprehensive account from an entirely neutral source incorporated and
expanded the findings of two previous works: Documents sur l'activité du
CICR en faveur des civils détenus dans les camps de concentration en
Allemagne 1939-1945 (Geneva, 1946), and Inter Arma Caritas: the Work of the
ICRC during the Second World War (Geneva, 1947). The team of authors, headed
by Frédéric Siordet, explained in the opening pages of the Report that their
object, in the tradition of the Red Cross, had been strict political
neutrality, and herein lies its great value.
The ICRC successfully applied the 1929 Geneva military convention in order
to gain access to civilian internees held in Central and Western Europe by
the Germany authorities. By contrast, the ICRC was unable to gain any access
to the Soviet Union, which had failed to ratify the Convention. The millions
of civilian and military internees held in the USSR, whose conditions were
known to be by far the worst, were completely cut off from any international
contact or supervision.
The ( Red Cross Report |
Report of the ICRC ) is of value in that it first clarifies the
legitimate circumstances under which Jews were detained in concentration
camps, i.e. as enemy aliens. In describing the two categories of civilian
internees, the Report distinguishes the second type as "Civilians deported
on administrative grounds (in German, "Schutzhäftlinge"), who were arrested
for political or racial motives because their presence was considered a
danger to the State or the occupation forces" (Vol. 111, p. 73). These
persons, it continues, "were placed on the same footing as persons arrested
or imprisoned under common law for security reasons." (P.74).
The Report admits that the Germans were at first reluctant to permit
supervision by the Red Cross of people detained on grounds relating to
security, but by the latter part of 1942, the ICRC obtained important
concessions from Germany. They were permitted to distribute food parcels to
major concentration camps in Germany from August 1942, and "from February
1943 onwards this concession was extended to all other camps and prisons"
(Vol. 111, p. 78).
The ICRC soon established contact with camp commandants
and launched a food relief programme which continued to function until the
last months of 1945, letters of thanks for which came pouring in from Jewish
internees.
Red Cross Recipients Were Jews
The Report states that "As many as 9,000 parcels were packed daily. From the
autumn of 1943 until May 1945, about 1,112,000 parcels with a total weight
of 4,500 tons were sent off to the concentration camps" (Vol. III, p. 80).
In addition to food, these contained clothing and pharmaceutical supplies.
"Parcels were sent to Dachau, Buchenwald, Sangerhausen, Sachsenhausen,
Oranienburg, Flossenburg, Landsberg-am-Lech, Flöha, Ravensbrück, Hamburg-Neuengamme,
Mauthausen, Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, to camps near Vienna
and in Central and Southern Germany. The principal recipients were Belgians,
Dutch, French, Greeks, Italians, Norwegians, Poles and stateless Jews" (Vol.
III, p. 83).
In the course of the war, "The Committee was in a position to transfer and
distribute in the form of relief supplies over twenty million Swiss francs
collected by Jewish welfare organisations throughout the world, in
particular by the American Joint Distribution Committee of New York" (Vol.
I, p. 644). This latter organisation was permitted by the German Government
to maintain offices in Berlin until the American entry into the war. The
ICRC complained that obstruction of their vast relief operation for Jewish
internees came not from the Germans but from the tight Allied blockade of
Europe. Most of their purchases of relief food were made in Rumania, Hungary
and Slovakia.
The ICRC had special praise for the liberal conditions which prevailed at
Theresienstadt up to the time of their last visits there in April 1945. This
camp, "where there were about 40,000 Jews deported from various countries
was a relatively privileged ghetto" (Vol. III, p. 75). According to the
Report, "'The Committee's delegates were able to visit the camp at
Theresienstadt (Terezin) which was used exclusively for Jews and was
governed by special conditions. From information gathered by the Committee,
this camp had been started as an experiment by certain leaders of the Reich
... These men wished to give the Jews the means of setting up a communal
life in a town under their own administration and possessing almost complete
autonomy. . . two delegates were able to visit the camp on April 6th, 1945.
They confirmed the favourable impression gained on the first visit" (Vol. I,
p . 642).
The ICRC also had praise for the regime of Ion Antonescu of Fascist Rumania
where the Committee was able to extend special relief to 183,000 Rumanian
Jews until the time of the Soviet occupation. The aid then ceased, and the
ICRC complained bitterly that it never succeeded "in sending anything
whatsoever to Russia" (Vol. II, p. 62). The same situation applied to many
of the German camps after their "liberation" by the Russians. The ICRC
received a voluminous flow of mail from Auschwitz until the period of the
Soviet occupation, when many of the internees were evacuated westward.
But
the efforts of the Red Cross to send relief to internees remaining at
Auschwitz under Soviet control were futile. However, food parcels continued
to be sent to former Auschwitz inmates transferred west to such camps as
Buchenwald and Oranienburg.
No (Evidence Of
Genocide | Mention Of Gas Chambers)
One of the most important aspects of the
( Red Cross Report |
Report of the ICRC ) is that it clarifies the true cause of those
deaths that undoubtedly occurred in the camps toward the end of the war.
Says the Report:
"In the chaotic condition of Germany after the invasion
during the final months of the war, the camps received no food supplies at
all and starvation claimed an increasing number of victims. Itself alarmed
by this situation, the German Government at last informed the ICRC on
February 1st, 1945 ... In March 1945, discussions between the President of
the ICRC and General of the S.S. Kaltenbrunner gave even more decisive
results. Relief could henceforth be distributed by the ICRC, and one
delegate was authorised to stay in each camp ..." (Vol. III, p. 83).
Clearly, the German authorities were at pains to relieve the dire situation
as far as they were able. The Red Cross are quite explicit in stating that
food supplies ceased at this time due to the Allied bombing of German
transportation, and in the interests of interned Jews they had protested on
March 15th, 1944 against "the barbarous aerial warfare of the Allies" (Inter
Arma Caritas, p. 78). By October 2nd, 1944, the ICRC warned the German
Foreign Office of the impending collapse of the German transportation
system, declaring that starvation conditions for people throughout Germany
were becoming inevitable.
In dealing with this comprehensive, three-volume Report, it is important to
stress that the delegates of the International Red Cross found no evidence (
whatever at the camps in Axis occupied Europe of a
deliberate policy to exterminate the Jews. |
whatsoever of 'gas chambers'. ) ( In all its
1,600 pages the Report does not even mention such a thing as a gas chamber.
| The original 1946 edition did not even talk of
'extermination' or 'death camps' but after the emotional impact of the
Nuremberg trials the Red Cross felt compelled to introduce into the expanded
1948 Report several, very cursory references to 'death camps' (Vol. 1 p.
641) and 'extermination camps' (Vol. I p. 645). )
It ( admits |
acknowledges ) that Jews, like many other wartime nationalities,
suffered rigors and privations, but its complete silence on the subject of (
planned extermination | 'gassings' ) is ample refutation of the Six Million
legend.
( Like the Vatican representatives with whom they
worked, the Red Cross found itself unable to indulge in the irresponsible
charges of genocide which had become the order of the day. So far as the
genuine mortality rate is concerned, the Report points out that most of the
Jewish doctors from the camps were being used to combat typhus on the
eastern front, so that they were unavailable when the typhus epidemics of
1945 broke out in the camps (Vol. I, p. 204 ff) - Incidentally, it is
frequently claimed that mass executions were carried out in gas chambers
cunningly disguised as shower facilities. Again the Report makes nonsense of
this allegation. "Not only the washing places, but installations for baths,
showers and laundry were inspected by the delegates. They had often to take
action to have fixtures made less primitive, and to get them repaired or
enlarged" (Vol. III, p. 594). | -- )
Not All Were Interned
Volume III of the Red Cross Report, Chapter 3 (I. Jewish Civilian
Population) deals with the "aid given to the Jewish section of the free
population," and this chapter makes it quite plain that by no means all of
the European Jews were placed in internment camps, but remained, subject to
certain restrictions, as part of the free civilian population. This
conflicts directly with the "thoroughness" of the supposed "extermination
programme", and with the claim in the forged Höss memoirs that Eichmann was
obsessed with seizing "every single Jew he could lay his hands on."
In Slovakia, for example, where Eichmann's assistant Dieter Wisliceny was in
charge, the Report states that "A large proportion of the Jewish minority
had permission to stay in the country, and at certain periods Slovakia was
looked upon as a comparative haven of refuge for Jews, especially for those
coming from Poland. Those who remained in Slovakia seem to have been in
comparative safety until the end of August 1944, when a rising against the
German forces took place. While it is true that the law of May 15th, 1942
had brought about the internment of several thousand Jews, these people were
held in camps where the conditions of food and lodging were tolerable, and
where the internees were allowed to do paid work on terms almost equal to
those of the free labour market" (Vol. I, p. 646).
Not only did large numbers of the three million or so European Jews avoid
internment altogether, but the emigration of Jews continued throughout the
war, generally by way of Hungary, Rumania and Turkey. Ironically, post-war
Jewish emigration from German-occupied territories was also facilitated by
the Reich, as in the case of the Polish Jews who had escaped to France
before its occupation. "The Jews from Poland who, whilst in France, had
obtained entrance permits to the United States were held to be American
citizens by the German occupying authorities, who further agreed to
recognize the validity of about three thousand passports issued to Jews by
the consulates of South American countries" (Vol. I, p. 645).
As future U.S. citizens, these Jews were held at the Vittel camp in southern
France for American aliens. The emigration of European Jews from Hungary in
particular proceeded during the war unhindered by the German authorities.
"Until March 1944," says the. Red Cross Report, "Jews who had the privilege
of visas for Palestine were free to leave Hungary" (Vol. I, p. 648). Even
after the replacement of the Horthy Government in 1944 (following its
attempted armistice with the Soviet Union) with a government more dependent
on German authority, the emigration of Jews continued.
The Committee secured the pledges of both Britain and the United States "to
give support by every means to the emigration of Jews from Hungary," and
from the U.S. Government the ICRC received a message stating that "The
Government of the United States ... now specifically repeats its assurance
that arrangements will be made by it for the care of all Jews who in the
present circumstances are allowed to leave" (Vol. I, p . 649).
Back to Contents
10. The Truth
At Last: The Work Of Paul Rassinier
Without doubt the most important contribution to a truthful study of the
extermination question has been the work of ( the
French historian, Professor Paul Rassinier. |
French academic Paul Rassinier. ) The preeminent value of this work
lies firstly in the fact that Rassinier actually experienced life in the
German concentration camps, and also that, as a Socialist intellectual and
anti-Nazi, nobody could be less inclined to defend Hitler and National
Socialism. Yet, for the sake of justice and historical truth, Rassinier
spent the remainder of his postwar years until his death in 1966 pursuing
research which utterly refuted the Myth of the Six Million and the legend of
Nazi diabolism.
From 1933 until 1943, Rassinier was a ( professor
| teacher ) of history in the College
d'enseignement général at Belfort, Academie de Besançon. During the war he
engaged in resistance activity until he was arrested by the Gestapo on
October 30th, 1943, and as a result was confined in the German concentration
camps at Buchenwald and Dora until 1945. At Buchenwald, toward the end of
the war, he contracted typhus, which so damaged his health that he could not
resume his teaching. After the war, Rassinier was awarded the Médaille de la
Résistance and the Reconnaisance Française, and was elected to the French
Chamber of Deputies, from which he was ousted by the Communists in November,
1946.
Rassinier then embarked on his great work, a systematic analysis of alleged
German war atrocities, in particular the supposed "extermination" of the
Jews. Not surprisingly, his writings are little known; they have rarely been
translated from the French ( and none at all have
appeared in English. | although some of his
writings appeared in English in 1978. )
His most important works
were: Le Mensonge d'Ulysse (The Lies of Odysseus, Paris, 1949), an
investigation of concentration camp conditions based on his own experiences
of them; and Ulysse trahi par les siens (1960), a sequel which further
refuted the impostures of propagandists concerning German concentration
camps. His monumental task was completed with two final volumes, Le
Véritable Procès Eichmann (1962) and Le Drame des Juifs européens (1964), in
which Rassinier exposes the dishonest and reckless distortions concerning
the fate of the Jews by a careful statistical analysis. The last work also
examines the political and financial significance of the extermination
legend and its exploitation by Israel and the Communist powers.
One of the many merits of Rassinier's work is exploding the myth of unique
German "wickedness"; and he reveals with devastating force how historical
truth has been obliterated in an impenetrable fog of partisan propaganda.
His researches demonstrate conclusively that the fate of the Jews during
World War Two, once freed from distortion and reduced to proper proportions,
loses its much vaunted "enormity" and is seen to be only one act in a
greater and much wider tragedy.
In an extensive lecture tour in West Germany
in the spring of 1960, ( Professor Rassinier |
Rassinier ) emphasized to his German audiences
that it was high time for a rebirth of the truth regarding the extermination
legend, and that the Germans themselves should begin it since the allegation
remained a wholly unjustifiable blot on Germany in the eyes of the world.
The Imposture Of 'Gas Chambers'
Rassinier entitled his first book The
Lies of Odysseus in commemoration of the fact that travellers always return
bearing tall stories, and until his death he investigated all the stories of
extermination literature and attempted to trace their authors. He made short
work of the extravagant claims about gas chambers at Buchenwald in David
Rousset's The Other Kingdom (New York, 1947); himself an inmate of
Buchenwald, Rassinier proved that no such things ever existed there (Le
Mensonge d'Ulysse, p. 209 ff) Rassinier also traced Abbé Jean-Paul Renard,
and asked him how he could possibly have testified in his book Chaines et
Lumières that gas chambers were in operation at Buchenwald. Renard replied
that others had told him of their existence, and hence he had been willing
to pose as a witness of things that he had never seen (ibid, p. 209 ff).
Rassinier also investigated Denise Dufournier's Ravensbrück.- The Women's
Camp of Death (London, 1948) and again found that the authoress had no other
evidence for gas chambers there than the vague "rumours" which Charlotte
Bormann stated were deliberately spread by communist political prisoners.
Similar investigations were made of such books as Philip Friedman's This was
Auschwitz: The Story of a Murder Camp (N.Y., 1946) and Eugen Kogon's The
Theory and Practice of Hell (N.Y., 1950), and he found that none of these
authors could produce an authentic eye-witness of a gas chamber at
Auschwitz, nor had they themselves actually seen one.
Rassinier mentions Kogon's claim that a deceased former inmate, Janda Weiss,
had said to Kogon alone that ( she |
he ) had witnessed gas chambers at Auschwitz,
but of course, since this person was ( apparently dead,
| untraceable, ) Rassinier was unable to
investigate the claim. He was able to interview Benedikt Kautsky, author of
( Teufel und Verdammte |
Teufel und Verdammte ('Devil and the Damned') ) who had alleged that
millions of Jews were exterminated at Auschwitz. However, Kautsky only
confirmed to Rassinier the confession in his book, namely that never at any
time had he seen a gas chamber, and that he based his information on what
others had "told him".
The palm for extermination literature is awarded by Rassinier to Miklos
Nyizli's ( Doctor at Auschwitz, |
Auschwitz: A Doctor's Eye-Witness Account, ) in
which the falsification of facts, the evident contradictions and shameless
lies show that the author is speaking of places which it is obvious he has
never seen (Le Drame des Juifs européens, p. 52). (
According to this "doctor of Auschwitz", 25,000 victims were exterminated
every day for four and a half years, which is a grandiose advance on Olga
Lengyel's 24,000 a day for two and a half years. It would mean a total of
forty one million victims at Auschwitz by 1945, two and a half times the
total pre-war Jewish population of the world. |
-- ) When Rassinier attempted to discover the identity of this
strange "witness", he was told that "he had died some time before the
publication of the book." Rassinier is convinced that he was never anything
but a mythical figure.
( Since the war, | Until his death in 1967, ) Rassinier (
has, in fact, | regularly
) toured Europe in search of somebody who was an actual eye-witness of gas
chamber exterminations in German concentration camps during World War Two,
but he has never found even one such person. He discovered that not one of
the authors of the many books charging that the Germans had exterminated
millions of Jews had even seen a gas chamber built for such purposes, much
less seen one in operation, nor could any of these authors produce a living
authentic witness who had done so. Invariably, former prisoners such as
Renard, Kautsky and Kogon based their statements not upon what they had
actually seen, but upon what they "heard", always from "reliable" sources,
who by some chance are almost always dead and thus not in a position to
confirm or deny their statements.
Certainly the most important fact to emerge from Rassinier's studies, and of
which there is now no doubt at all, is the utter imposture of "gas
chambers". ( Serious investigations |
Investigations ) carried out in the sites
themselves have revealed ( with irrefutable proof that,
| that, ) contrary to the declarations of the
surviving "witnesses" examined above, no gas chambers whatever existed in
the German camps at Buchenwald, Bergen-Belsen, Ravensbrück, Dachau and Dora,
or Mauthausen in Austria. This fact, which we noted earlier was attested to
by Stephen Pinter of the U.S. War Office, has now been recognised and
admitted officially by the Institute of Contemporary History at Munich.
However, Rassinier points out that in spite of this, "witnesses" again
declared at the Eichmann trial that they had seen prisoners at Bergen-Belsen
setting out for the gas chambers.
So far as the eastern camps of Poland are concerned, Rassinier shows that
the ( sole | main
) evidence attesting to the existence of gas chambers at Treblinka, Chelmno,
Belzec, Majdanek and Sobibor are the discredited memoranda of Kurt Gerstein
referred to above. His original claim, it will be recalled was that an
absurd 40 million people had been exterminated during the war, while in his
first signed memorandum he reduced the number to 25 million. Further
reductions were made in his second memorandum. These documents ( were
considered of such dubious authenticity that they were not even admitted by
the Nuremberg Court, though they continue | continue ) to circulate in three
different versions, one in German (distributed in schools) and two in
French, none of which agree with each other. The German version featured as
"evidence" at the Eichmann Trial in l961. ( --
| The Gerstein 'Statement' is reproduced in full as an
Appendix to the most scholarly work to appear on this subject to date, The
Hoax of the Twentieth Century by Dr A R Butz (Brighton, 1976). )
Finally, ( Professor Rassinier |
Rassinier ) draws attention to an important
admission by Dr. Kubovy, director of the World Centre of Contemporary Jewish
Documentation at Tel-Aviv, made in La Terre Retrouvée, December 15th, 1960.
Dr. Kubovy recognized that not a single order for extermination exists from
Hitler, Himmler, Heydrich or Göring (Le Drame des Juifs européens, p. 31,
39).
'Six Million' Falsehood Rejected
As for the fearful propaganda figure
of the Six Million, ( Professor Rassinier |
Rassinier ) rejects it on the basis of an
extremely detailed statistical analysis. He shows that the number has been
falsely established, on the one hand through inflation of the pre-war Jewish
population by ignoring all emigration and evacuation, and on the other by a
corresponding deflation of the number of survivors after 1945. This was the
method used by the World Jewish Congress. Rassinier also rejects any written
or oral testimony to the Six Million given by the kind of "witnesses" cited
above, since they are full of contradictions, exaggerations and falsehoods.
He gives the example of Dachau casualties, noting that in 1946, Pastor
Niemöller reiterated Auerbach's fraudulent "238,000" deaths there, while in
1962 Bishop Neuhäusseler of Munich stated in a speech at Dachau that only
30,000 people died "of the 200,000 persons from thirty-eight nations who
were interned there" (Le Drame des Juifs européens, p . 12). Today, the
estimate has been reduced by several more thousands, and so it goes on.
Rassinier concludes, too, that testimony in support of the Six Million given
by accused men such as Höss, Hoettl, Wisliceny and Hoellriegel, who were
faced with the prospect of being condemned to death or with the hope of
obtaining a reprieve, and who were frequently tortured during their
detention, is completely untrustworthy.
Rassinier finds it very significant that the figure of Six Million was not
mentioned in court during the Eichmann trial. "The prosecution at the
Jerusalem trial was considerably weakened by its central motif, the six
million European Jews alleged to have been exterminated in gas chambers. It
was an argument that easily won conviction the day after the war ended,
amidst the general state of spiritual and material chaos. Today, many
documents have been published which were not available at the time of the
Nuremberg trials, and which tend to prove that if the Jewish nationals were
wronged and persecuted by the Hitler regime, there could not possibly have
been six millions victims" (ibid, p. 125).
With the help of one hundred pages of cross-checked statistics, Professor
Rassinier concludes in Le Drame des Juifs européens that the number of
Jewish casualties during the Second World War could not have exceeded (
1,200,000, and he notes that this has finally been
accepted as valid by the World Centre of Contemporary Jewish Documentation
at Paris. | 1,200,000. )
However, he
regards such a figure as a maximum ( limit, and refers
to the lower estimate of 896,892 casualties in a study of the same problem
by the Jewish statistician Raul Hilberg. Rassinier points out that the State
of Israel nevertheless continues to claim compensation for six million dead,
each one representing an indemnity of 5,000 marks. |
limit. )
Emigration: The Final Solution
( Prof.
Rassinier | Rassinier ) is emphatic in
stating that the German Government never had any policy other than the
emigration of Jews overseas. He shows that after the promulgation of the
Nuremberg Race Laws in September 1935, the Germans negotiated with the
British for the transfer of German Jews to Palestine on the basis of the
Balfour Declaration. When this failed, they asked other countries to take
charge of them, but these refused (ibid, p. 20).
The Palestine project was revived in 1938, but broke down because Germany
could not negotiate their departure on the basis of 3,000,000 marks, as
demanded by Britain, without some agreement for compensation. Despite these
difficulties, Germany did manage to secure the emigration of the majority of
their Jews, mostly to the United States. Rassinier also refers to the French
refusal of Germany's Madagascar plan at the end of 1940. "In a report of the
21st August, 1942, the Secretary of State for the Ministry of Foreign
Affairs of the Third Reich, Luther, decided that it would be possible to
negotiate with France in this direction and described conversations which
had taken place between July and December 1940, and which were brought to a
halt following the interview with Montoire on 13th December 1940 by
Pierre-Etienne Flandin, Laval's successor. During the whole of 1941 the
Germans hoped that they would be able to re-open these negotiations and
bring them to a happy conclusion" (ibid, p. 108).
After the outbreak of war, the Jews, who, as Rassinier reminds us, had
declared economic and financial war on Germany as early as 1933, were
interned in concentration camps, "which is the way countries all over the
world treat enemy aliens in time of war ... It was decided to regroup them
and put them to work in one immense ghetto which, after the successful
invasion of Russia, was situated toward the end of 1941 in the so-called
Eastern territories near the former frontier between Russia and Poland: at
Auschwitz, Chelmno, Belzec, Majdanek, Treblinka etc ...
There they were to
wait until the end of the war for the re-opening of international
discussions which would decide their future" (Le Véritable Procès Eichmann,
p. 20). The order for this concentration in the eastern ghetto was given by
Göring to Heydrich, as noted earlier, and it was regarded as a prelude to
"the desired final solution," their emigration overseas after the war had
ended.
Enormous Fraud
Of great concern to (
Professor Rassinier |
Rassinier ) is the way in which the extermination legend is
deliberately exploited for political and financial advantage, and in this he
finds Israel and the Soviet Union to be in concert. He notes how, after
1950, an avalanche of fabricated extermination literature appeared under the
stamp of two organisations, so remarkably synchronised in their activities
that one might well believe them to have been contrived in partnership. One
was the "Committee for the Investigation of War Crimes and Criminals"
established under Communist auspices at Warsaw, and the other, the "World
Centre of Contemporary Jewish Documentation" at Paris and Tel-Aviv.
Their publications ( seem |
seemed ) to appear at favourable moments in the
political climate, and for the Soviet Union their purpose is simply to
maintain the threat of Nazism as a manoeuvre to divert attention from their
own activities. As for Israel, Rassinier sees the myth of the Six Million as
inspired by a purely material problem. In Le Drame des Juifs européens (P.
31, 39). he writes:
" ... It is simply a question of justifying by a
proportionate number of corpses the enormous subsidies which Germany has
been paying annually since the end of the war to the State of Israel by way
of reparation for injuries which moreover she cannot be held to have caused
her either morally or legally, since there was no State of Israel at the
time the alleged deeds took place; thus it is a purely and contemptibly
material problem. "
Perhaps I may be allowed to recall here that the State of Israel was only
founded in May 1948 and that the Jews were nationals of all states with the
exception of Israel, in order to underline the dimensions of a fraud which
defies description in any language; on the one hand Germany pays to Israel
sums which are calculated on six million dead, and on the other, since at
least four-fifths of these six million were decidedly alive at the end of
the war, she is paying substantial sums by way of reparation to the victims
of Hitler's Germany to those who are still alive in countries all over the
world other than Israel and to the rightful claimants of those who have
since deceased, which means that for the former (i.e. the six million), or
in other words, for the vast majority, she is paying twice.
Back to Contents
Conclusion
Here we may briefly summarize the data on Jewish
wartime casualties. Contrary to the figure of over 9 million Jews in
German-occupied territory put forward at the Nuremberg and Eichmann trials,
it has already been established that after extensive emigration,
approximately 3 million were living in Europe, excluding the Soviet Union.
Even when the Jews of German-occupied Russia are included (the majority of
Russian Jews were evacuated beyond German control), the overall number
probably does not exceed four million. Himmler's statistician, Dr. Richard
Korherr and the World Centre of Contemporary Jewish Documentation put the
number respectively at 5,550,000 and 5,294,000 when German-occupied
territory was at its widest, but both these figures include the two million
Jews of the Baltic and western Russia without paying any attention to the
large number of these who were evacuated.
However, it is at least an admission from the latter organization that there
were not even six million Jews in Europe and western Russia combined.
Nothing better illustrates the declining plausibility of the Six Million
legend than the fact that the prosecution at the Eichmann trial deliberately
avoided mentioning the figure. Moreover, official (
Jewish estimates | estimates ) of the
casualties are being quietly revised downwards. Our analysis of the
population and emigration statistics, as well as the studies by the Swiss
Baseler Nachrichten and ( Professor Rassinier,
| Rassinier, ) demonstrate that it would have
been simply impossible for the number of Jewish casualties to have exceeded
a limit of one and a half million. ( Professor
Rassinier | Rassinier )
( It is very significant, therefore, that the World
Centre of Contemporary Jewish Documentation in Paris now states that only
1,485,292 Jews died from all causes during the Second World War, and
although this figure is certainly too high, at least it bears no resemblance
at all to the legendary Six Million. As has been noted earlier, the Jewish
statistician Raul Hilberg estimates an even lower figure of 896,892. This is
beginning to approach a realistic figure, and the process of revision is
certain to continue. | -- )
Doubtless, ( several thousand |
large numbers of ) Jewish persons did die in
the course of the Second World War, but this must be seen in the context of
a war that cost many millions of innocent victims on all sides. To put the
matter in perspective, for example, we may point out that 700,000 Russian
civilians died during the siege of Leningrad, and a total of 2,050,000
German civilians were killed in Allied air raids and forced repatriation
after the war.
( In 1955, another neutral Swiss source, Die Tat of
Zurich (January 19th, 1955), in a survey of all Second World War casualties
based on figures of the International Red Cross, put the "Loss of victims of
persecution because of politics, race or religion who died in prisons and
concentration camps between 1939 and 1945" at 300,000, not all of whom were
Jews, and this figure seems the most accurate assessment. |
-- )
Back to Contents
Imaginary Slaughter
The question most pertinent to the
extermination legend is, of course: how many of the 3 million European Jews
under German control survived after 1945? The Jewish Joint Distribution
Committee estimated the number of survivors in Europe to be only one and a
half million, but such a figure is now totally unacceptable. This is proved
by the growing number of Jews claiming compensation from the West German
Government for having allegedly suffered between 1939 and 1945. By 1965, the
number of these claimants registered with the West German Government had
tripled in ten years and reached 3,375,000 (Aufbau, June 30th, 1965).
Nothing could be a more devastating proof of the brazen fantasy of the Six
Million.
Most of these claimants are Jews, so there can be no doubt that the
majority of the 3 million Jews who experienced the Nazi occupation of Europe
are, in fact, very much alive. It is a resounding confirmation of the fact
that Jewish casualties during the Second World War can only be estimated (
at a figure in thousands. |
at a fraction of 'Six Million'. ) Surely this
is enough grief for the Jewish people? Who has the right to compound it with
vast imaginary slaughter, marking with eternal shame a great European
nation, as well as wringing fraudulent monetary compensation from them?
RICHARD HARWOOD is a writer and specialist in political and diplomatic
aspects of the Second World War. At present he is with the University of
London. Mr. Harwood turned to the vexed subject of war crimes under the
influence of Professor Paul Rassinier, to whose monumental work this little
volume is greatly indebted. The author is now working on a sequel in this
series on the Main Nuremberg Trial, 1945 -1946.
Back to Contents
Comments About Did Six
Million Really Die?
Dr. Kuang Fann, Professor of Philosophy at York University of Canada,
formerly China:
"The whole pamphlet ... obviously should be classified as a
political opinion ..."
Ditlieb Felderer, Historical Researcher, Writer, Sweden:
"... the booklet
has proven to be more true as the years have gone by, and it is exterminationists who are coming now to start arguing like Harwood did when
the booklet was first published, so the exterminationists are moving ...
toward the booklet more and more."
Dr. Robert Faurisson, Expert of Ancient Texts and Documents, Lyon
University:
"The thesis of the book is that it's not true that six million
Jews died, and it is not true that there was an extermination plan, and it
is not true that there were gas chambers.
What I find right is, first, the title. The title is good. Did Six Million
Really Die? That's really the problem ... This man, Richard Harwood, brought
plenty of information for the layman in '74. He said in '74 that there were
no order(s) from Hitler to exterminate the Jews. Three years after, when
David Irving said it, it was an uproar, so it was really new and true. We
know it now in 1988 ... this ... was so important that when it was published
in France, the man who distributed (it was) murdered ... Francoise Duprat.
We don't know who exactly did that, but the interesting point is, first,
that it has been done by people very clever in those kind of bomb handling,
and what was published in the journal Le Monde after was interesting. This
murder was revindicated by a so-called "Memory of Auschwitz" organization.
It was justified by a man called Patrick Chairoff - saying that Francoise
Duprat, in distributing this kind of pamphlet, had taken a responsibility
which kills."
David Irving, British Historian, author of over 30 books on WW II and its
aftermath:
"... I read it with great interest and I must say that I was
surprised by the quality of the arguments that it represented. It has
obvious flaws. It uses sources that I personally would not use. In fact, the
entire body of sources is different. This is based entirely on secondary
literature, books by other people, including some experts, whereas I use no
books. I use just the archives. But independently, the author of this came
to conclusions and asked questions of a logical nature which I had arrived
at by an entirely different route, so to speak... And if I was to ask what
is the value of a brochure like this, I think it is that it provokes people
to ask questions, rather as my book on Hitler's War provoked the
historians... This is the kind of value which I found this brochure to have.
It was asking proper questions on the basis of an entirely different set of
sources."
Mark Weber, American Historian, Author:
"I believe that the thesis of the
booklet is accurate... that there was no German policy or program to
exterminate the Jews during the Second World War... The booklet is a
journalistic or a polemic account that is designed to convince people, and
it does not purport to be a work that can be held up to the same standards
of rigid scrutiny that a scholarly work and a detailed work by someone who
is a historian normally would be. . its main value lies in encouraging
further discussion and thought and debate on the subject it raises."
Colin
Wilson, well known British author:
". . . I received in the post a
pamphlet... entitled Did Six Million Really Die? I must admit that it has
left me thoroughly bewildered. What Harwood says, briefly, is that Hitler
had no reason to murder Jews when he needed them for forced labor... it is
worth asking the question: Did the Nazis really exterminate six million
Jews? Or is this another sign of the emotional historical distortion that
makes nearly all the books on Hitler so far almost worthless?. . . Is there,
then, any reason why we should be afraid to dig down until we get at the
truth?"
Back to Contents
The Court Cases Sparked By Did
Six Million Really Die?
In the early 1980s, Samisdat Publishers
Ltd., under the signature of its president, Ernst Zündel, published a
32-page booklet entitled Did Six Million Really Die?. The booklet was
published under a licence from Historical Review Press in England which
prohibited Samisdat from making any changes whatsoever to the publication.
Samisdat sent the booklet to hundreds of teachers, ministers, politicians
and media personalities across Canada in the hope that interest could be
aroused in discussing the subject explored in the booklet: did six million
Jews really die pursuant to a systematic policy of extermination by Nazi
Germany during World War II?
Samisdat received no complaints regarding the booklet's factual accuracy.
Nevertheless, in 1983, Samisdat's president, Ernst Zündel, was charged under
a private information laid by Sabina Citron, a founder of the Canadian
Holocaust Remembrance Association, with the criminal offence of "spreading
false news" likely to cause racial and social intolerance. The charge was
later assumed by the Crown and led to two lengthy jury trials in 1985 and
1988, both of which ended in convictions.
There is no doubt that Did Six Million Really Die? contained errors. It was
written hastily by a young University of London graduate, Richard Verrall
(who used the pseudonym "Richard Harwood") in the early 1970s. The errors,
however, were the type of minor error which one can find in the first
edition of any non-fiction book. For example, Verrall wrote that the first
allegation of mass murder of Jews was made against the Germans in 1943 by
the Polish Jew Raphael Lemkin. In fact, the first charge of mass murder was
made by the Allies in a Joint Declaration issued on December 17, 1942. The
error played no significant part in the argumentation of the author. The
significance and importance of Did Six Million Really Die? lay in its logic,
its reasoning and its opinions.
It critiqued the weaknesses of the evidence
and arguments provided in orthodox "Holocaust" literature and it gave to the
reader little- known alternate views of what happened in the camps, such as
those of Dr. Russell Barton (who was present in Bergen-Belsen immediately
after its liberation) and Thies Christophersen (who was stationed near
Auschwitz during the war). It summarized the findings of the French
revisionist historian Paul Rassinier, whose works at that time were not
known at all in the English-speaking world. In short, Did Six Million Really
Die? did what polemical works were meant to do: it provided the reader with
an alternate viewpoint on a historical event.
Two juries convicted Zündel in spite of devastating cross-examination of
Holocaust "survivors" and Holocaust historians by defence attorney Douglas
H. Christie and notwithstanding expert evidence which crushed the basis of
the Holocaust story, namely, the allegation that millions of Jews were done
to death with industrial efficiency in gigantic gas chambers and disposed of
in crematories and burning pits. It did not matter to the jury in the second
Zündel trial in 1988 that the warden of a United States penitentiary, Bill
M. Armontrout, testified to the enormous difficulties of gassing even one
person today in gas chambers. It did not matter to the jury that a forensic
investigation of Auschwitz, Birkenau and Majdanek by the only expert in gas
chamber technology in the United States, Fred A. Leuchter, Jr., resulted in
Leuchter's opinion that no gassings could have taken place in the alleged
Nazi gas chambers. It mattered not that the Canadian crematory expert, Ivan
Lagacé, testified that the thousands of persons alleged by Holocaust
historians to have been cremated in Birkenau and Auschwitz daily were
"ludicrous" and "beyond the realm of reality."
It did not matter to the jury
that the internationally-known British historian David Irving testified that
he no longer believed in the "Holocaust" as it had been defined by its
historians. It did not matter that Holocaust historian Raul Hilberg refused
to return to testify in 1988 after testifying in 1985 for fear of cross-
examination. It did not matter that the Crown could not produce one expert
witness in gas chambers or crematories to refute the defence expert
evidence. If the evidence presented at the 1988 trial of Zündel was not
enough to convince the jury to acquit him, it was enough to start an
explosive chain reaction of books and studies into the veracity of the gas
chamber claim. The evidence of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr. and his report on the
gas chambers at Auschwitz and Majdanek by far caused the most
reverberations. The Jewish Holocaust lobby at first ignored the Leuchter
Report, but as its influence mounted internationally, they scrambled to
attempt to refute it.
The Beate Klarsfeld Foundation published the books
Auschwitz: Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers and Truth Prevails:
Demolishing Holocaust Denial: the end of "The Leuchter Report." The success
of these books in "demolishing" the Leuchter Report can perhaps be measured
by the fact that almost no one has heard of them; the mass media, usually so
willing to use anything to smear Holocaust revisionism, has virtually
ignored them. Apparently unable to find competent experts to support the gas
chamber claim among engineers and crematory experts, the Jewish Holocaust
lobby turned the use of their considerable resources instead to ensuring the
destruction of Fred Leuchter's career and the passage of laws in France and
Austria making "denial of the Holocaust" a criminal offence. A full account
of the tactics used against Leuchter can be found in his article "Witch Hunt
in Boston" (Journal of Historical Review, vol. 10, pp. 453- 460).
While the
Jewish lobby has succeeded in the political arena in having repressive laws
enacted against revisionism, they have not succeeded in refuting revisionism
on its merits, most importantly its technical and forensic evidence. The
report of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr., has engendered three further studies of the
gas chambers.
Krakow Forensic Institute
In response to the Leuchter Report, the Auschwitz State Museum in 1990
commissioned the Krakow Forensic Institute to carry out an investigation of
the alleged gassing sites at the camp. The result of the testing of brick
and mortar samples fully corroborated the findings of Leuchter: the
Institute found either no traces or extremely small traces of cyanide in its
samples.
The Institute explained the test results, however, by stating that
it could not be assumed that cyanide traces would still be detected after 45
years of being subjected to the weather and the elements. The Krakow
Forensic Institute also tested samples of hair from the Auschwitz Museum for
cyanide. The tests proved negative.
(For a copy of the report and
commentary, see "An Official Polish Report on the Auschwitz 'Gas Chambers'",
Journal of Historical Review, vol. 11, pp. 207- 216).
Germar Rudolf
Germar Rudolf, a diplom chemist in Germany, investigated the sites of the
alleged gas chambers of Auschwitz and took samples for the purpose of
determining cyanide levels. Tests on the samples showed no or minimal traces
of cyanide. Rudolf's report concluded, like Leuchter's, that the alleged gas
chambers at Auschwitz could never have been used for gassings. Rudolf
disputed the Krakow Forensic Institute's conclusion that the cyanide had
been removed by environmental factors, pointing out that it was well-known
that cyanide compounds have enormous environmental resistance.
Ernst Zündel's attempts to call Rudolf as an expert witness on charges in Germany
regarding the "Holocaust" were prevented by the German judge.
Walter Lüftl
Walter Lüftl is a professional engineer with a large engineering firm in
Vienna and is president of the Austrian Chamber of Engineers. In 1992 Lüftl
wrote a report calling the alleged extermination of millions of Jews in gas
chambers "technically impossible." He pointed out that the design of the
crematories themselves showed that they were incapable of handling the
number of victims alleged. "Corpses are not flammable material," wrote Lüftl,
" to cremate them requires much time and energy."
These reports and other mounting evidence have shown the durability of the
conclusions stated in Did Six Million Really Die?. The booklet has proven to
be, in the words of Dr. Robert Faurisson, "prophetic."
Today Samisdat is proud to publish Did Six Million Really Die?: Report of
the Evidence in the Canadian "False News" Trial of Ernst Zündel, 1988. This
book is the result of four years of work and summarizes for the reader the
evidence presented at the second Zündel trial in 1988. This includes, for
the Crown, the evidence of Holocaust historians Raul Hilberg (whose evidence
from 1985 was read to the jury since he refused to reattend personally) and
Christopher Browning and the evidence of Red Cross representative Charles
Biedermann. For the defence, it includes the evidence of the premiere
revisionist historian today, Dr. Robert Faurisson, that of the
internationally renowned British historian David Irving, German historian
Udo Walendy, American historian Mark Weber, Canadian crematory expert Ivan
Lagacé and Canadian aerial photograph expert Ken Wilson. It includes the
evidence and the report of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr., concerning his forensic
investigation of the alleged gas chambers at Auschwitz, Birkenau and
Majdanek and the evidence of chemistry expert Dr. James Roth concerning the
cyanide content of samples removed from the alleged Auschwitz gas chambers
by Leuchter. It summarizes the evidence of the path- breaking Swedish
revisionist writer, Ditlieb Felderer, and reproduces the revealing
photographs of Auschwitz and Birkenau which Felderer showed the jury.
It is shocking that the persecution of Ernst Zündel has continued for ten
years and continues today with virtually no protest either in the
intellectual or media elites of Canada. These elites are apparently no
longer interested in objective truth, but interested only in maintaining the
"political correctness" which will ensure access to lucrative government and
institutional positions, the continuation of government and academic grants
and the accolades of their like-minded peers. These elites did not
simply remain silent concerning the Zündel trials but participated in a
feeding frenzy of hatred against him simply because he had published a
booklet questioning the Holocaust. Few voices were raised in defence of
intellectual freedom and its relation to the workings of a true democracy.
Instead, Zündel was attacked, vilified and ridiculed. The media willingly
censored the 1988 trial. The performance of these elites in the Zündel
affair has shown that they are unwilling to inform Canadians honestly about
controversial and vital issues which offend powerful vested interests;
indeed, it has proven their total corruption.
Ernst Zündel, in the foreword to the first Did Six Million Really Die?,
wrote the following words:
Truth has no need of coercion. Those who choose to ignore the truth are not
punished by law -- they punish themselves. We of Samisdat Publishers do not
believe that you should be forced to read something, any more than we
believe that you should be forced not to read something...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...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.
Today those words apply with even greater force as more and more individuals
face prosecution in Canada and Europe for their beliefs and opinions.
Samisdat offers this book to its readers in the hope that they will reclaim
for themselves the right to decide what is truth in history.
Back to Contents
What's Wrong With Did
Six Million Really Die?
It is worth emphasizing that the facts presented in Did Six Million Really
Die, have been tested in the crucible of Courts of Law. Not all survived the
process of weeding out error and determining the truth. Below is a list of
errors that were found. But what you can be assured of, is that the
remaining statements presented in Did Six Million Really Die can be
considered, tried and tested. What better guarantee of their correctness
could you desire?
After 10 years of wrangling, what follows is the essence of what was found
wrong with the pamphlet by the prosecution witnesses. In italics are the
primary parts of the pamphlet disputed by the prosecution followed by
evidence given by expert witnesses on both sides.
-
By 1939, the great majority of German
Jews had emigrated, all of them with a sizeable proportion of their
assets. Never at any time had the Nazi leadership even contemplated
a policy of genocide towards them... Had Hitler cherished any
intention of exterminating the Jews, it is inconceivable that he
would have allowed more than 800,000 to leave Reich territory with
the bulk of their wealth ... (p. 5,6)
Prosecution historian Christopher Browning's opinion was that
slightly over half of German Jews emigrated by 1939. Browning
testified that the figure 800,000 was an exaggeration; by 1941, the
total of Jews who had left Germany, Austria and the Protectorates
was 530,000. Because of measures taken against them, it was false to
say they left with a "sizeable proportion" of their assets. Browning
admitted under cross-examination, however, that he was not a
demographer nor a statistician and that any population statistics
concerning Jews could only be estimates. He also admitted that he
could not give a precise percentage or even proportion of their
assets Jews left with. He only knew that considerable efforts were
made to prevent property getting out.
-
The founder of political Zionism in the
19th century, Theodore Herzl, in his work The Jewish State, had
originally conceived of Madagascar as a national homeland for the
Jews, and this possibility was seriously studied by the Nazis. It
had been a main plank of the National Socialist party platform
before 1933 and was published by the party in pamphlet form. (p.5)
Browning testified it was not a plank of the Nazi Party platform
before 1933 that the Jews go to Madagascar as a national homeland.
The first time a Nazi leader mentioned Madagascar was 1938. The
first time there was a plan for Madagascar was 1940.
-
The fall of France in 1940 enabled the
German Government to open serious negotiations with the French for
the transfer of European Jews to Madagascar. A memorandum of August,
1942 from Luther, Secretary-of-State in the German Foreign Office,
reveals that he had conducted these negotiations between July and
December 1940, when they were terminated by the French. (p.7)
Browning testified that there were no such negotiations with the
French. The Madagascar Plan failed because of continuing British
control of the high seas.
-
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 and Frankl, Dr.
Goebbels, London, 1960, p. 165). In the meantime he approved of the
Jews being "concentrated in the East". Later Goebbels memoranda also
stress deportation to the East (i.e. the Government-General of
Poland) and lay emphasis on the need for compulsory labor there;
once the policy of evacuation to the East had been inaugurated, the
use of Jewish labor became a fundamental part of the operation.
(p.7)
Browning said that Goebbels did not write a "memorandum", he wrote a
"diary entry." Goebbels did not lay emphasis on the need for
compulsory labor but said exactly the opposite; for example, on
March 27, 1942, he wrote that 60% of the Jews will have to be
liquidated and 40% used for forced labor. Browning admitted he had
never checked the authenticity of the original Goebbels diaries but
had accepted the commercial printed version. Historian Weber
testified there was great doubt about the authenticity of the entire
Goebbels diaries because they were typewritten. There was therefore
no way to verify their authenticity. The U.S. Government itself
indicated that it would take no responsibility for the accuracy of
the diaries: the original clothbound edition contained a U.S.
Government statement that it "neither warrants nor disclaims the
authenticity of the manuscript". Browning relied on other documents
such as the Seraphim report to show that the Germans did not put
priority on using Jews for labor. Historian Weber disagreed with
this opinion. In his view, the Jews were a valuable source of labor
for the Germans; Himmler himself ordered that concentration camp
inmates be used as extensively as possible in war production.
-
Statistics relating to Jewish
populations are not everywhere known in precise detail,
approximations for various countries differing widely, and it is
also unknown exactly how many Jews were deported and interned at any
one time between the years 1939-1945. In general, however, what
reliable statistics there are, especially those relating to
emigration, are sufficient to show that not a fraction of six
million Jews could have been exterminated. (p.7)
Browning testified that contemporary German statistical studies
showed that there were enough Jews in Europe to exterminate 6
million of them. These studies were: (a) the Burgdörfer Study
(estimated that there were about 10.72 million Jews in Europe); (b)
Madagascar Plan (4 million Jews under German control in 1940); (c)
Wannsee conference protocol (11 million Jews). In Browning's
opinion, even the German studies done at the time showed in the area
of 10 million Jews under German control in Europe. Therefore, 6
million could have been exterminated. He admitted, again, that he
was not a demographer or a statistician and that the problem of
changing borders and the various definitions of "Jew" made any
conclusions in this area difficult to the point that they could only
be estimates.
-
According to Chambers Encyclopaedia the
total number of Jews living in pre-war Europe was 6,500,000. (p.7)
Chambers Encyclopedia dealt only with the total number of Jews
living on the continent of Europe apart from Russia, not the total
number living in pre-war Europe as stated by the pamphlet.
-
In addition to the German Jews, 220,000
of the total 280,000 Austrian Jews had emigrated by September, 1939,
while from March 1939 onwards the Institute for Jewish Emigration in
Prague had secured the emigration of 260,000 Jews from former
Czechoslovakia. In all, only 360,000 Jews remained in Germany,
Austria and Czechoslovakia after September 1939. (p.7,8)
These numbers did not accord with the German studies done at the
time, Browning testified. A comparison with the Wannsee Conference
protocol statistics showed that 360,000 Jews had emigrated from
Germany; 147,000 had emigrated from Austria; 30,000 had emigrated
from the Protectorate. These figures were all much lower than
Harwood's figures.
-
In addition to these emigrants, we must
also include the number of Jews who fled to the Soviet Union after
1939, and who were later evacuated beyond reach of the German
invaders. It will be shown below that the majority of these, about
1,250,000, were migrants from Poland. But apart from Poland,
Reitlinger admits that 300,000 other European Jews slipped into
Soviet territory between 1939 and 1941. This brings the total of
Jewish emigrants to the Soviet Union to about 1,550,000. (p.8)
Browning testified that the reference to Reitlinger was a mis-cite;
Reitlinger said that 300,000 Polish Jews in total fled to the Soviet
Union, not "other European Jews" as stated by Harwood. The figure of
1,250,000 given by Harwood was therefore 5 times too high.
-
The 1931 Jewish population census for
Poland put the number of Jews at 2,732,600 (Reitlinger, Die
Endlösung, p. 36). (p.8)
Hilberg testified that this was wrong; in fact, the figure of
2,732,600 came from a census taken in the 1920s.
-
When the Jewish populations of Holland
(140,000), Belgium (40,000), Italy (50,000), Yugoslavia (55,000),
Hungary (380,000) and Roumania (725,000) are included, the figure
does not much exceed 3 million. (p.8)
These statistics were not in accord with the Nazis' own statistics,
said Browning. For example, the German statistics for 1942 listed
the Jewish population of Hungary at 743,800. German records of the
deportations from Hungary showed more Jews were deported than the
number given by Harwood as the Jewish population of Hungary.
-
So far as is known, the first accusation
against the Germans of the mass murder of Jews in war-time Europe
was made by the Polish Jew Rafael Lemkin in his book Axis Rule in
Occupied Europe, published in New York in 1943. (p.9)
The first accusation of mass murder of the Jews was made on December
17, 1942 by the Allies in a Joint Declaration. Lemkin, as far as
Browning knew, never used the 6 million figure in his book. Weber
pointed out this mistake made no difference to the substance of the
thesis of the pamphlet.
-
Gerstein's sister was congenitally
insane and died by euthanasia, which may well suggest a streak of
mental instability in Gerstein himself... Gerstein's fantastic
exaggerations have done little but discredit the whole notion of
mass extermination. Indeed, Evangelical Bishop Wilhelm Dibelius of
Berlin denounced his memoranda as "Untrustworthy" (p.9)
It was not Gerstein's sister, but his sister-in-law, who was killed
in the euthanasia program. Dibelius in fact stated that he was
convinced of the trustworthiness of Gerstein, the opposite of what
Harwood had written. However, Hilberg admitted that he would not
characterize Gerstein as being totally rational and that there was
no question that he was capable of adding imagination to fact.
Browning acknowledged there were "problems" with Gerstein's
testimony; his obvious exaggerations resulted because he was
"traumatized" by his experiences, said Browning.
-
It should be emphasised straight away
that there is not a single document in existence which proves that
the Germans intended to, or carried out, the deliberate murder of
Jews. (p.10)
In Browning's opinion, there were such documents, including the Hans
Frank diary, the Wannsee Conference protocol, and the 1943 Posen
speech of Himmler. Historian Robert Faurisson pointed out that if
these documents "proved" the existence of a deliberate plan to
murder the Jews, there would be no debate between the
"functionalists" and "intentionalists" in the Holocaust academic
circles. This debate in and of itself showed that no proof of a
deliberate plan existed. Hilberg had testified in the 1985 Zündel
trial that there were two oral orders from Hitler for the
extermination of the Jews. He denied that he had changed this view
in his then forthcoming second edition of his book The Destruction
of the European Jews, which was to be published shortly thereafter.
In 1988, Hilberg refused to testify at the second Zündel trial,
citing in a confidential letter to the prosecutor that he had "grave
doubts" about testifying again; "the defence," he wrote, "... would
... make every attempt to entrap me by pointing to any seeming
contradiction, however trivial the subject might be, between my
earlier testimony and an answer that I might give in 1988." Browning
admitted in his testimony that Hilberg had made a "significant"
change regarding the role of Hitler in the decision-making process
between his first edition and the second edition, published in 1985.
In an article entitled "The Revised Hilberg", Browning wrote that in
his second edition, Hilberg had "systematically excised" all
references in the text to a Hitler decision or a Hitler order for
the "Final Solution". In the new edition, wrote Browning, "decisions
were not made and orders were not given".
-
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.
(p.11)
Browning testified that the Posen speech contained explicit
references to exterminating the Jews. Historian David Irving
testified, however, that those portions of the original manuscript
of the Posen speech which dealt with "extermination" had been
tampered with; they were written in a different typescript using
different carbon paper and were numbered in pencil. Irving also
pointed out that the Israelis had Himmler's private diary but
refused to allow any historians to have access to it. If Himmler's
diary supported the "Holocaust", Irving said, the Israelis would be
the first to release it.
-
Most incredible of all, perhaps, was the
fact that defence lawyers at Nuremberg were not permitted to
cross-examine prosecution witnesses. (p.12)
Hilberg testified that defense lawyers were allowed to cross-examine
witnesses at Nuremberg. Weber testified that many affidavits were
entered into evidence, however, upon which no cross-examination was
possible.
-
The Soviet charge that the Action Groups
had wantonly exterminated a million Jews during their operations has
been shown subsequently to be a massive falsification. In fact,
there had never been the slightest statistical basis for the figure.
(p.14)
Browning testified that on the basis of the Einsatzgruppen reports
and the works of other historians that at least 1 million Jews were
killed by the Einsatztruppen. Historian Weber testified, however,
that in the major work on the Einsatztruppen, Die Truppe des
Weltanschauungskrieges, the two authors calculated that if all the
figures in the Einsatztruppen reports were added up, there would be
a total of 2.2 million Jewish dead. The authors admitted this was
impossible and conceded that the Einsatztruppen report figures were
exaggerated. In Weber's opinion, the figure of about 1 million was
not believable because it was known that the great majority of Jews
fled or were evacuated from the eastern territories before the
German invasion in 1941.
-
Thus between July and October 1942, over
three quarters of the Warsaw Ghetto's inhabitants were peacefully
evacuated and transported, supervised by the Jewish police
themselves... A total, however, of 56,065 inhabitants were captured
and peacefully resettled in the area of the Government-General. (p.
19)
Browning stated that reports of the Warsaw Ghetto clearing indicated
it was done brutally and not "peacefully" as alleged by Harwood. In
Browning's opinion, they were not resettled but taken to Treblinka
and Majdanek and either gassed or shot. Historian Mark Weber
testified that the record as to what happened to these Jews was
still unclear. In Weber's opinion, Treblinka and Majdanek were
simply concentration and/or transit camps.
-
Of course, no Jew would ever be found
who claimed to have been a member of this gruesome "special
detachment", so that the whole issue is left conveniently unprovable.
It is worth repeating that no living, authentic eye-witness to these
events has ever been produced. (p.20)
One of Browning's main differences with the pamphlet was that it
denied the existence of the homicidal gas chambers for the purpose
of killing Jews. He testified Jews had come forward claiming to be
members of the Sonderkommando, such as Filip Mueller, whose accounts
he found to be "moving". Browning admitted under cross-examination,
however, that he had never seen a technical plan that purported to
be either a gas chamber or gas van. He had never enquired about
cremation processes or how much heat or how long it took to cremate
a human body. Browning had not looked at the aerial photographs
taken by the Allies of Auschwitz during the war except for one on
the wall of Yad Vashem. Neither Browning nor Hilberg knew of any
autopsy report showing that any camp inmate was killed by Zyklon B.
Hilberg and Browning visited the concentration camps only for the
purpose of looking at memorials or as members of Holocaust
Commissions. Witnesses Leuchter and Roth gave evidence which showed
that samples taken from the walls and floor of the alleged "gas
chambers" at Auschwitz and Birkenau showed either no traces or only
minute traces of cyanide, while the walls of a known fumigation
chamber at Birkenau which had used Zyklon B had over 1000 times as
much traceable cyanide. In Leuchter's opinion, as an expert in gas
chamber technology, the alleged homicidal gas chambers at Auschwitz,
Birkenau and Majdanek were incapable of being used as gas chambers
for the killing of human beings because of their structure,
including such factors as lack of exhaust systems, stacking and
sealants. Ivan Lagacé, a cremation expert, testified that in modern
crematories it took a minimum of 1 1/2 hours to cremate a human body
in one retort; he termed "ludicrous" the extermination claim that
over 4,400 bodies were cremated in 46 retorts at Birkenau per day.
With respect to the veracity of "eyewitness" testimony, Weber
testified that Yad Vashem had admitted that over half of the
"survivor" accounts on record there were unreliable as many had "let
their imagination run away with them." Historian Faurisson quoted
from the Jewish writer Michel de Boüard, who admitted in 1986 that
"the record is rotten to the core" with obstinately repeated
"fantasies" and inaccuracies.
-
Of course, no Jew would ever be found
who claimed to have been a member of this gruesome "special
detachment", so that the whole issue is left conveniently unprovable.
It is worth repeating that no living, authentic eye-witness to these
events has ever been produced. (p.20)
Browning believed Eichmann to be the highest central figure in the
plan to exterminate the Jews who survived the war and testified.
Eichmann testified that Heydrich told him that Hitler had ordered
the extermination of the Jews of Europe. Browning admitted, however,
that Eichmann had "more than a little trouble" in sorting out events
in his mind. In historian Irving's opinion Eichmann was on trial and
under considerable physical and mental coercion; such testimony did
not advance historical knowledge but polluted it.
-
...only seven years after its initial
publication, a New York Supreme Court case established that the book
was a hoax. . . It established that the Jewish novelist Meyer Levin
had written the dialogue of the "diary" and was demanding payment
for his work in a court action against Otto Frank. (p.21)
This was not true; in fact Levin had sued for payment for writing a
play based on the diary itself. Faurisson and Irving testified that
other proof existed, however, that the diary's authenticity was
suspect. Expert examinations of the original diary by graphologists
and West German criminal laboratories showed that one person had
written the diary and part of it was written in ballpoint pen ink,
which only came into use in the 1950s. Faurisson believed the diary
was written by Otto Frank, the father of Anne Frank.
-
As a result, eastern camps in the
Russian zone of occupation such as Auschwitz and Treblinka gradually
came to the fore as horrific centres of extermination (though no one
was permitted to see them), and this tendency has lasted to the
present day. (p. 23)
Browning testified that it was false to say no one was permitted to
see the camps in the Soviet zone. He cited a New York Times article
by journalist W. Lawrence of a tour of Majdanek given to journalists
by the Soviets in 1944. Browning admitted that the article had
significant errors regarding the numbers of people who allegedly
died there and how Zyklon B worked. Historian Weber testified that
Western Allied investigators were not allowed to investigate
concentration camps in the Soviet zone of occupation after the war.
The visit to Majdanek by newspaper reporters was a guided tour by
the Soviets for propaganda purposes; it was not an investigation by
any specialized person.
-
Finally, Professor Rassinier draws
attention to an important admission by Dr. Kubovy, director of the
World Centre of Contemporary Jewish Documentation at Tel Aviv, made
in La Terre Retrouvée, December 15th, 1960. Dr. Kubovy recognised
that not a single order for extermination exists from Hitler,
Himmler, Heydrich or Göring (Le Drame des Juifs européens, p. 31,
39).(p.29)
Browning had never heard of Kubovy or the World Centre of
Contemporary Jewish Documentation. But both Faurisson and Irving
knew of Kubovy and Irving had cited Kubovy's quote from La Terre
Retrouvée in his book, Hitler's War.
-
However, {Rassinier} regards such a
figure as a maximum limit, and refers to the lower estimate of
896,892 casualties in a study of the same problem by the Jewish
statistician Raul Hilberg. (p.29)
Hilberg testified that he was not a statistician and had never given
an estimate of 896,892. His own calculation in fact was over 5
million. Weber testified that Harwood had taken this information
from Paul Rassinier's books; the original mistake was therefore
Rassinier's and not Harwood's.
-
... Professor Rassinier concludes ...
that the number of Jewish casualties during the Second World War
could not have exceeded 1,200,000, and he notes that this has
finally been accepted as valid by the World Centre of Contemporary
Jewish Documentation at Paris. (p.29)
Hilberg testified he had never heard of this Centre or the figure
cited by Harwood.
-
RICHARD HARWOOD is a writer and
specialist in political and diplomatic aspects of the Second World
War. At present he is with the University of London. (p.30)
Historian Weber testified that the author of the pamphlet was a man
named Richard Verrall, who had used the pseudonym "Richard Harwood".
Verrall was a graduate of the University of London with High Honours;
he was a writer and had a specialized interest in political and
diplomatic aspects of the Second World War. Verrall relied upon
secondary sources published in the 1950s and 1960s in writing the
pamphlet, which was published in 1974. Most errors made by the
author were errors originally made by Paul Rassinier, the pioneer
revisionist historian, whose works Verrall had relied upon heavily.
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