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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 Marshall Montgomery said, made it a
crime to lose a war, the reader is referred to the works cited
below, and particularly to the outstanding book Advance to
Barbarism (Nelson, 1953), by the distinguished English jurist
F.J.P. Veale.
From the 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 has
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 immigration
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 onset. (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 the 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 practice, this meant the
admittance of hearsay evidence and documents, which in a normal
judicial trial are always rejected as untrustworthy. That such
evidence was allowed is of profound significance, because it was
one of the principal methods by which the extermination legend
was fabricated through fraudulent "written affidavits". Although
only 240 witnesses were called in the course of the Trials, no
less than 300,000 of these "written affidavits" were accepted by
the Court as supporting the charges, without this evidence being
heard under oath. Under these circumstances, any Jewish deportee
or camp inmate could make any revengeful allegation that he
pleased. Most incredible of all, perhaps, was the fact that
defense lawyers at Nuremberg were not permitted to cross-examine
prosecution witnesses. A somewhat similar situation prevailed at
the trial of Adolf Eichmann, when it was announced that
Eichmann's defense lawyer could be canceled 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
Latzte Wortunber Nurnberg, p. 56). Points 3-8 are as follows:
3) The members of the department of the Public Prosecutor,
instead of trying to formulate and reach a new guiding
legal principle, were moved only by personal ambition and
revenge.
4) The prosecution did its utmost in every way possible to
prevent the defense preparing its case and to make it
impossible for it to furnish evidence.
5) The Prosecution, led by General Taylor, did everything in
it power to prevent the unanimous decision of the Military
Court being carried out i.e. to ask Washington to furnish
and make available to the court further documentary
evidence in the possession of the American Government.
6) Ninety per cent of the Nuremberg Court consisted of biased
persons who, either on political or racial grounds,
furthered the prosecution's case.
7) The prosecution obviously knew how to fill all the
administrative posts of the Military Court with
"Americans" whose naturalization certificates were very
new indeed, and who, whether in the administrative
service, or by their translations etc., created an
atmosphere hostile to the accused persons.
8) The real aim of the Nuremberg Trials was to show the
Germans the crimes of their Fuhrer, 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 have never 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 Prosecutors 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 American by birth. The chief of the Public
Prosecutor's Office, who worked behind General Taylor, was
Robert M. Kempner, a German-Jewish emigrant. Mark Lautern, who
observed the Trials, writes in his book: "They have arrived: the
Solomons, the Schlossbergers and the Rabinovitches, members of
the Public Prosecutors staff..." (ibid, p. 68). It is obvious
from these facts that the fundamental legal principle: that no
man can sit in judgement on his own case, was abandoned
altogether. Moreover, the majority of witnesses were also Jews.
According to Prof. Maurice Bardeche, who also was 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 organization". S.S.
General Oswald Pohl, the economic administrator of the
concentration camp system, had his face smeared with feces 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 criticize us severely and forever doubt the
correctness of our motives and our moral integrity."
The methods of intimidation 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 of by which these admissions were secured
in the Washington Daily News, January 9th, 1949. His account
also appeared in the British newspaper, the Sunday Pictorial,
January 23rd, 1949. The methods he described were:
"Posturing as priests to hear confessions and give
absolution; torture with burning matches driven under the
prisoners fingernails; knocking out teeth and breaking jaws;
solitary confinement and near starvation rations." Van Roden
explained: "The statements which were admitted as evidence were
obtained from men who had first been kept in solitary
confinement for three, four and five months...The investigators
would put a black hood over the accused's head and then punch
him in the face with brass knuckles, kick him and beat him with
rubber hoses...All but two of the Germans, in the 139 cases we
investigated, had been kicked in the testicles beyond repair.
This was standard operating procedure with our American
investigators."
The "American" investigators responsible (and who later
functioned as the prosecution in the trials) were: Lt.Col.
Burton F. Ellis (chief of the War Crimes Committee) and his
assistants, Capt. Raphael Shumacker, Lt. Robert E. Byrne, Lt.
William R. Perl, Mr. Morris Ellowitz, Mr. Harry Thon, and Mr.
Kirschbaum. The legal adviser of the court was Col. A.H.
Rosenfeld. The reader will immediately appreciate from their
names that the majority of these people were "biased on racial
grounds" in the words of Justice Wenersturm -- that is, were
Jewish, and therefore should never have been involved in any
such investigation.
Despite the fact that "confessions" pertaining to the
extermination of the Jews were extracted under these conditions,
Nuremberg statements are still regarded as conclusive evidence
for the Six Million by writers like Reitlinger and others, and
the illusion is maintained that the Trials were both impartial
and impeccably fair. When General Taylor, the Chief Public
Prosecutor, was asked where he had obtained the figure of the
Six Million, he replied that it was based on the confession of
S.S. General Otto Ohlendorf. He, too, was tortured and his case
is examined below. But as far as such "confessions" in general
are concerned, we can do no better than quote the British Sunday
Pictorial when reviewing the report of Judge van Roden: "Strong
men were reduced to broken wrecks ready to mumble any admission
demanded by their prosecutors."
THE WISLICENY STATEMENT
At this point, let us turn to some of the Nuremberg documents
themselves. The document quoted most frequently in support of
the legend of the Six Million, and which figures largely in
Poliakov and Wulf's Das Dritte Reich und die Juden: Documente
und Aufsatze, is the statement of S.S. Captain Dieter Wisliceny,
as 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 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 prove 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 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 Police) 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 than 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 Endlosung, 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
Marshall Keitel, makes it quite clear what the real tasks of the
future Einsatzgruppen would be. It states that in the Russian
campaign, the Reichsfuhrer S.S. (Himmler) is to be entrusted
with "tasks for 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 Einsatzgruppen D in the Ukraine, attached
to Field Marshall 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 Barvarian State
Office for Restitution, who at the 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 ever
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 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 Einsatzgruppen A in the Baltic region
and White Russia, was himself killed by partisans in 1942. The
English jurist F.J.P. Veale, in dealing with the Action Groups,
explains that in the fighting on the Russian front no
distinction could be properly drawn between partisans and the
civilian population, because any Russian civilian who maintained
his civilian status instead of acting as a terrorist was liable
to be executed by his countrymen as a traitor. Veale says of the
Action Groups: "There is no question that their orders were to
combat terror by terror", and he finds it strange that
atrocities committed by the partisans in the struggle were
regarded as blameless simply because they turned out to be on
the winning side (ibid, p. 223). Ohlendorf took the same view,
and in a bitter appeal written before his execution, he accused
the Allies of hypocrisy in holding the Germans to account by
conventional laws of warfare while fighting a savage Soviet
enemy who did not respect those laws.
ACTION GROUP EXECUTIONS DISTORTED
The Soviet charge that the Action Groups had wantonly
exterminated a million Jews during their operations has been
shown subsequently to be a massive falsification. In fact,
there had never been the slightest statistical basis for the
figure. In this connection, Poliakov and Wulf cite the statement
of Wilhelm Hoettl, the dubious American spy, double agent and
former assistant to Eichmann. Hoettl, it will be remembered,
claimed that Eichmann "told him" that six million Jews had been
exterminated -- and he added that two million Jews 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 Marshall, 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 defense 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 reveal 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 documents after being subjected to severe torture,
including a bogus admission that he had seen a gas chamber at
Auschwitz in the summer of 1944. The prosecution strenuously
pressed this charge, but Pohl successfully repudiated it. The
aim of the prosecution was to depict this dejected man as a
veritable fiend in human shape, an impression hopelessly at
variance with the testimony of those who knew him.
Such testimony was given by Heinrich Hoepker, an anti-Nazi
friend of Pohl's wife who came into frequent contact with him
during the period 1942-45. Hoepker noted that Pohl was
essentially a serene and mild-mannered person. During a visit to
Pohl in the spring of 1944, Hoepker was brought into contact
with concentration camp inmates who were working on a local
project outside the camp area. He noted that the prisoners
worked in a leisurely manner and relaxed atmosphere without any
pressure from their guards. Hoepker declared that Pohl did not
hold an emotional attitude to the Jews and did not object to his
wife entertaining her Jewish friend Annemarie Jacques at their
home. By the beginning of 1945, Hoepker was fully convinced that
the administrator of the concentration camps was a humane,
conscientious and dedicated servant of his task, and he was
astonished when he heard later in 1945 of the accusations being
made against Pohl and his colleges. 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 defense council at the Nuremberg Trials, went to work
passionately to secure the acquittal of Pohl. Seidl had been
convinced of his innocence with respect to the fraudulent charge
of planned genocide against the Jews. The Allied judgement which
condemned Pohl did not prompt Seidl to change his opinion in the
slightest. He declared that the prosecution had failed to
produce a single piece of valid evidence against him.
One of the most eloquent defenses 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 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
favor 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 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 Reichsfuhrer
of the S.S. Heinrich Himmler at the main Nuremberg trial (Trial
of the Major War Criminals, Vol. IV, pp 29, 36). In March 1941,
on the eve of the invasion of Russia, Himmler invited the Higher
S.S. leaders to his Castle at Wewelsburg for a conference,
including Bach-Zelewski who was an expert on partisan warfare.
In his Nuremberg evidence, he depicted Himmler speaking in
grandiose terms at this conference about the liquidation of
peoples in Eastern Europe, but Goering, in the courtroom,
denounced Bach-Zelewski to his face for the falsity of this
testimony. An especially outrageous allegation concerned a
supposed declaration by Himmler that one of the aims of the
Russian campaign was to "decimate the Slav population by thirty
millions." What Himmler really said is given by his Chief of
Staff, Wolff -- that war in Russia was certain to result in
millions of dead (Manvell 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, that on this date Himmler
was in conference at his field headquarters at Zhitomir in the
Ukraine (cf, K. Vowinckel, Die Wehrmacht in Kampf, vol. 4, p.
275).
Much is made of Bach-Zelewski's evidence in all of the books
on Himmler, especially Willi Frischauers's Himmler: Evil Genius
of the Third Reich (London, 1953, p. 148 ff). However, in April
1959, Bach-Zelewski publicly repudiated his Nuremberg testimony
before a West German court. he admitted that his earlier
statements had not the slightest foundation in fact, and that he
had made them for the sake of expediency and his own survival.
The German court, after careful deliberation accepted his
retraction. Needless to say. what Veale calls the "Iron Curtain
of Discreet Silence" descended immediately over these events.
They have had no influence whatever on the books which propagate
the myth of the Six Million, and Bach-Zelewski's testimony on
Himmler is still taken at its face value.
The truth concerning Himmler is provided ironically by an
anti-Nazi -- Felix Kersten, his physician and masseur. Because
Kersten was opposed to the regime, he tends to support the
legend that the internment of Jews meant their extermination.
But from his close personal knowledge of Himmler he cannot help
but tell the truth concerning him, and in his memoirs 1940-1945
(London, 1956, p. 119 ff.) he is emphatic in stating that
Heinrich Himmler did not advocate liquidating the Jews but
favored 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 temporally
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 defense 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 defense 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 defense 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 defense 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 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 in 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 rumored 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 emphasized that throughout the Nuremberg
proceedings, the German leaders on trial never believed for a
moment the allegations of the Allied prosecution. Hermann
Goering, who was exposed to the full brunt of the Nuremberg
atrocity propaganda, failed to be convinced by it. Hans
Fritzsche, on trial as the highest functionary of Goebbel's
Ministry, relates that Goering, even after hearing the Ohlendorf
affidavit on the Einsatzgruppen and the Hoess testimony on
Auschwitz, remained convinced that the extermination of Jews was
entirely propaganda fiction (The Sword in the Scales, London,
1953, p. 1945). At one point during the trial, Goering declared
rather cogently that the first time he had heard of it "was
right here in Nuremberg" (Shirer, ibtd, p. 1147). The Jewish
writers Poliakov, Reitlinger and Manvell and Frankl all attempt
to implicate Goering in this supposed extermination, but Charles
Bewley in his work Hermann Goering (Goettingen, 1956) shows that
not the slightest evidence was found at Nuremberg to
substantiate this charge.
Hans Fritzsche pondered on the whole question during the
trials, and he concluded that there had certainly been no
thorough investigation of these monstrous charges. Fritzsche,
who was acquitted, was an associate of Goebbels and a skilled
propagandist. He recognized that the alleged massacre of the
Jews was the main point of the indictment against all
defendants. Kaltenbrunner, who succeeded Heydrich as chief of
the Reich Security head Office and was the main defendant for
the S.S., due to the death of Himmler, was no more convinced of
the genocide charges than was Goering. He confided to Fritzsche
that the prosecution was scoring apparent successes because of
their technique of coercing witnesses and suppressing evidence,
which was precisely the accusation of Judges Wenerstrum and van
Roden.
6. AUSCHWITZ AND POLISH JEWRY
The concentration camp at Auschwitz near Cracow in Poland has
remained at the center of the alleged extermination of millions
of Jews. Later we shall see how, when it was discovered by
honest observers in the British and American zones after the war
that no "gas chambers" existed in the German camps such as
Dachau and Bergen-Belsen, attention was shifted to the eastern
camps, particularly Auschwitz. Ovens definitely existed here, it
was claimed. Unfortunately, the eastern camps were in the
Russian zone of occupation, so that no one could verify whether
these allegations were true or not. The Russians refused to
allow anyone to see Auschwitz until about ten years after the
war, by which time they were able to alter its appearance and
give some plausibility to the claim that millions of people had
been exterminated there. if anyone doubts that the Russians are
capable of such deception, they should remember the monuments
erected at sites where thousands of people were murdered in
Russia by Stalin's secret police -- but where the monuments
proclaim them to be victims of German troops in World War II.
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 Industry, for whom
the prisoners supplied labor. 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 his
main purpose was to inspect and assess their industrial
efficiency. When he had 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 labor 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 were supposed to have been exterminated, indeed,
some written claim 4 or even 5 million. Four million was the
sensational figure announced by the Soviet Government after the
Communist had "investigated" the camp, at the same time as they
were attempting to blame the Kaytn massacre on the Germans.
Reitlinger admits that information regarding Auschwitz and other
eastern camps comes from the post-war Communist regimes of
Eastern Europe: "The evidence concerning the Polish death camps
was mainly taken after the war by Polish State commissions or by
the Central Jewish Historical Commission of Poland" (The Final
Solution, p. 631).
However, no living, authentic eye-witness of these "gassings"
has ever been produced and validated. Benedikt Kautsky, who
spent seven years in concentration camps, including three in
Auschwitz, alleged in his book Tuefel and Verdammte (Devil and
Damned, Zurich, 1946) that no 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 failed 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 that 6000
people a day.
Although Reitlinger's 6000 a day would mean a total by
October of over 5 million, all such estimates pale before the
wild fantasies of Olga Lengyel in her book Five Chimneys
(London, 1959). Claiming to be a former inmate of Auschwitz, she
asserts that the camp cremated no less that "720 per hour, or
17,280 corpses per twenty-four hour shift." She also alleges
that, in addition, 8,000 people were burned every day in the
"death-pits", and that therefore "In round numbers, about 24,000
corpses were handled every day" (p. 80-1). This, of course,
would mean a yearly rate of over eight and one half million.
Thus between March 1942 and October 1944 Auschwitz would have
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 estimation
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 fourty-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 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 labor battalions there.
This leaves only 60,000 Hungarian 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 thee ICRC, Vol. 1, p. 649), the
number of Hungarian Jewish casualties must have been very low
indeed.
AUSCHWITZ: AN EYE-WITNESS ACCOUNT
Some new facts about Auschwitz are at last beginning to make
a tentative appearance. They are contained in a recent work
called Die Auschwitz-Luge: Ein Erlebnisbericht von Theis
Christopherson (The Auschwitz Legends: An Account of his
Experiences by Theis Christopherson, Kritik Verlag/Mohrkirch,
1973). Published by the German lawyer Dr. Manfred Roeder in the
periodical Deutsche Burger-Iniative, it is an eye-witness
account of Auschwitz by Theis 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 Weisenthal 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 Weisenthal
the new Gauleiter of Germany?" (Deutsche Wochenzeiung, July
27th, 1973).
Christopherson's account is certainly one of the most
important documents for a re-appraisal of Auschwitz. He spent
the whole of 1944 there, during which time he visited all of the
separate camps comprising the large Auschwitz complex, including
Auschwitz-Birkenau where it is alleged that wholesale massacres
of Jews took place. Christopherson, however, is in no doubt that
this is totally untrue. He writes: "I was in Auschwitz from
January 1944 until December 1944. After the war I heard about
the mass murders which were supposedly perpetrated by the S.S.
against the Jewish prisoners, and I was perfectly astonished.
Despite all the evidence of witnesses, all the newspaper reports
and radio broadcasts I still do not believe today in these
horrible deeds. I have said 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
odor 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 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 Oberstrumbannfuhrer A.
(Christopherson's superior) also died there" (p. 33) The author
explains: "There was no secrets at Auschwitz. In September 1944
a commission of the International Red Cross came to the camp for
in 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