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only one Jewish witness, a certain Dr. Bendel, and his is the
only testimony to the occurrence (Reitlinger, ibid., p. 457).
This situation is generally typical. When it comes down to hard
evidence, it is strangely elusive; the building was
"demolished", the document was "lost", the order was "verbal".
At Auschwitz today, visitors are shown a small furnace and here
they are told that millions of people were exterminated. The
Soviet State Commission which "investigated" the camp announced
on May 12th, 1945 that "Using rectified coefficients....the
technical expert commission has ascertained that during the time
that the Auschwitz camp existed, the German butchers
exterminated in this camp not less than four million
citizens..." Reitlinger's surprisingly frank comment on this is
perfectly adequate" "The world has grown mistrustful of
'rectified coefficients' and the figure of four millions has
become ridiculous" (ibid. p. 460).
Finally, the account of Mr. Christopherson draws attention to
a very curious circumstance. The only defendant who did not
appear at the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial in 1963 was Richard
Baer, the successor of Rudolf Hoess as commandant of Auschwitz.
Though in perfect health, he died suddenly in prison before the
trial had begun, "in a highly mysterious way" according to the
newspaper Deutsche Wochenzietung (July 27th, 1973). Baer's
sudden demise before giving evidence is especially strange,
since the Paris newspaper Rivarol recorded his insistence that
"during the whole time in which he governed Auschwitz, he never
saw any gas chambers nor believed that such things existed," and
from this statement nothing would dissuade him. In short, the
Christopherson account adds to a mounting collection of evidence
demonstrating that the giant industrial complex of Auschwitz
(compromising thirty separate installations and divided by
the main Vienna-Cracow railway line) was nothing but a vast war
production center, which, while admittedly employing the
compulsory labor of detainees, was certainly not a place of
"mass extermination".
THE WARSAW GHETTO
In terms of numbers, polish Jewry is supposed to have
suffered most of all from extermination, not only at Auschwitz,
but at an endless list of newly-discovered "death camps" such as
Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, Maidanek, Chelmno and at many more
obscure places which seem suddenly to have gained prominence. At
the center of the alleged extermination of the Polish Jews is
the dramatic uprising in April 1943 of the Warsaw Ghetto. This
is often represented as a revolt against being deported to gas
ovens; presumably the alleged subject of Hitler and Himmler's
"secret discussions" had leaked out and gained wide publicity in
Warsaw. The case of the Warsaw Ghetto is an instructive insight
into the creation of the extermination legend itself. Indeed,
its evacuation by the Germans in 1943 is often referred to as
the "extermination of the Polish Jews" although it was nothing
of the kind, and layers of mythology have tended to surround it
after the publication of sensational novels like John Hersey's
The Wall and Leon Uris' Exodus.
When the Germans first occupied Poland, they confined the
Jews, not in detention camps but in ghettos for reasons of
security. The interior administration of the ghettos was in the
hands of Jewish councils elected by themselves, and they were
policed by an independent Jewish police force. Special currency
notes were introduced into the Ghettos to prevent speculation.
Whether this system was right or wrong, it was understandable in
time of war, and although the ghetto is perhaps an unpleasant
social establishment, it is by no means barbaric. And it is
certainly not an organization for the destruction of a race.
But, of course, it is frequently said that this is what the
ghettos were really for. A recent publication on the Warsaw
Ghetto made the brazen assertion that concentration camps "were
a substitute for the practice of cramming the Jews into
overcrowded ghettos and starving them to death." It seems that
whatever security system the Germans used, and to whatever
lengths they went to preserve a semblance of community for the
Jews, they can never escape the charge of "extermination".
It has been established already that the 1931 Jewish
population census for Poland placed the number of Jews at
2,732,600, and that after emigration and flight to the Soviet
Union, no more than 1,100,000 were under German control. These
incontrovertible facts, however, do not prevent Manvell and
Frankl asserting that "there had been over three million Jews in
Poland when Germany began the invasion" and that in 1942 "some
two million still awaited death" (ibid, p. 140). In reality, of
the million or so Jews in Poland, almost half, about 400,000
were eventually concentrated in the ghetto of Warsaw, an area of
about two and a half square miles around the old mediaeval
ghetto. The remainder had already been moved to the Polish
Government-General by September 1940. In the summer of 1942,
Himmler ordered the resettlement of all Polish Jews in detention
camps in order to obtain their labor, part of the system of
general concentration for labor assignment in the Government-
General. Thus between July and October 1942, over three quarters
of the Warsaw Ghetto's inhabitants were peacefully evacuated and
transported, supervised to camps is alleged to have ended in
"extermination", but there is absolutely no doubt from the
evidence available that it involved only the effective
procurement of labor and the prevention of unrest. In the first
place, Himmler discovered on a suprise visit to Warsaw in
January 1943 that 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--Polish Partia Robotnicza, the Communist Polish
Workers Party. It was under these circumstances of a revolt
aided by partisans and communists that the occupying forces, as
any army would in a similar situation, moved in to suppress the
terrorists, if necessary by destroying the residential area
itself. It should be remembered that the whole process of
evacuation would have continued had not extremists among the
inhabitants planned an armed rebellion which in the end was
bound to fail. When S.S. Lieutenant-General Stroop entered the
Ghetto with armored cars on 19th April, he immediately came
under fire and lost twelve men; German and Polish casualties in
the battle, which lasted four weeks, totaled 101 men killed and
wounded. Stubborn resistance by the Jewish Combat Organization
in the face of impossible odds led to an estimated 12,000 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 Organization, and had attempted to inform on
their headquarters to the German authorities.
SUDDEN SURVIVORS
The circumstances surrounding the Warsaw Ghetto revolt, as
well as the deportations to eastern labor camps such as
Auschwitz, has led to the most colorful tales concerning the
fate of Polish Jews, the largest bloc of Jewry in Europe. The
Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, in figures prepared by them
for the Nuremberg Trials, stated that in 1945 there were only
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 Polish Jews suddenly fled
into Western Germany. Their appearance was somewhat
embarrassing, and their emigration to Palestine and the United
States was carried out in record time. Subsequently, the number
of Polish Jewish survivors underwent considerable revision; in
the American-Jewish Yearbook 1948-1949 it was placed at 390,000,
quite an advance on the original 80,000. We may expect further
revisions in the future.
7. SOME CONCENTRATION CAMP MEMOIRS
The most influential agency in the propagation of the
extermination legend has been the paper-back book and magazine
industry, and it is through their sensational publications,
produced for commercial gain, that the average person is made
acquainted with a myth of an entirely political character and
purpose. The hey-day of these hate-Germany books were in the
1950's, when virulent Germanophobia found a ready market, but
the industry continues to flourish and is experiencing another
boom today. The industry's products consist generally of so-
called "memoirs" and these fall into two basic categories; those
which are supposedly by former S.S. men, camp commandants and
the like, and those bloodcurdling reminiscences allegedly by
former concentration camp inmates.
COMMUNIST ORIGINS
Of the first kind, the most outstanding example is Commandant
of Auschwitz by Rudolf Hoess (London 1960) which was originally
published in the Polish language as Wspomnienia by the
Communist Government. Hoess, a young man who took over at
Auschwitz in 1940, was first arrested by the British and
detained at Flensburg, but he was soon handed over to
the Polish Communist authorities who condemned him to death in
1947 and executed him almost immediately. The so-called Hoess
memoirs are undoubtedly a forgery produced under Communist
auspices, as we shall demonstrate, though the Communists
themselves claim that Hoess was "ordered to write the story of
his life" and a hand-written original supposedly exists, but no
one has ever seen it. Hoess was subjected to torture and brain-
washing techniques by the Communists during the period of his
arrest, and his testimony at Nuremberg was delivered in a
mindless monotone as he stared blankly into space. Even
Reitlinger rejects this testimony as hopelessly untrustworthy.
It is indeed remarkable how so much "evidence" regarding the Six
Million stems from Communist sources; this included the major
documents such as the Wisliceny statement and the Hoess
"memoirs", which are undoubted the two most quoted items in
extermination literature, as well as all the information on the
so-called "death camps" such as Auschwitz. This information
comes from the Jewish Historical Commission of Poland; the
central Commission for the Investigation of War Crimes, Warsaw;
and the Russian State War Crimes Commission, Moscow.
Reitlinger acknowledges that the Hoess testimony at Nuremberg
was a catalogue of wild exaggerations, such as that Auschwitz
was disposing of 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 Hoess memoirs, which make a clever attempt
at plausibility by suggesting the opposite picture of distaste
for the job. Hoess is supposedly to have "confessed" to a total
of three million people exterminated at Auschwitz, though at his
own trial in Warsaw the prosecution reduced the number to
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 Hoess "memoirs" in all their horrid detail
would be tedious. We may confine ourselves to those aspects of
the extermination legend which are designed with the obvious
purpose of forestalling any proof of its falsity. Such, for
example, is the manner in which the alleged extermination of
Jews is described. This was supposed to have been carried out by
a "special detachment" of Jewish prisoners. They took charge of
the newly arrived contingents at the camp, led them into the
enormous "gas chambers" and disposed of the bodies afterwards.
The S.S., therefore, did very little, so that most of the S.S.
personnel at the camp could be left in complete ignorance of the
"extermination program". Of course, no Jew would ever be found
who claimed to have been a member of this gruesome "special
detachment", so that the whole issue is left conveniently
unprovable. it is worth repeating that no living, authentic eye-
witness of these events has ever been produced.
Conclusive evidence that the Hoess memoirs are a forgery lies
in an incredible slip by the Communist editors. Hoess is
supposed to say that the Jehovah's Witnesses at Auschwitz
approved of murdering the Jews because the Jews were the enemies
of Christ. It is well known that in Soviet Russia today and in
all her satellite countries of eastern Europe, the Communist
conduct a bitter campaign of suppression against the Jehovah's
Witnesses, whom they regard as the religious sect most dangerous
to Communist beliefs. That this sect is deliberately and grossly
defamed in the Hoess memoirs proves the document's Communist
origins beyond any doubt.
INCRIMINATING REMINISCENCES
Certainly the most bogus "memoirs" yet published are those of
Adolf Eichmann. Before his illegal kidnapping by the Israelis in
May, 1960, and the attendant blaze of international publicity,
few people had ever heard of him. He was indeed a relatively
unimportant person, the head of Office A4b in Department IV (the
Gestapo) of the Reich Security Head Ofice. His office supervised
the transportation to detention camps of a particular section of
enemy aliens, the Jews. A positive flood of unadulterated
rubbish about Eichmann showered the world in 1960, of which we
may cite as an example Comer Clarke's Eichmann: The Savage
Truth. ("The orgies often went on until six in the morning, a
few hours before consigning the next batch of victims to death,"
says Clarke in his chapter "Streamlined Death and Wild Sex
Orgies," p. 124).
Strangely enough, the alleged "memoirs" of Adolf Eichmann
suddenly appeared at the time of his abduction to Israel. They
were uncritically published by the American Life magazine
(November 28th, December 5th, 1060), and were supposed to have
been given by Eichmann to a journalist in the Argentine shortly
before his capture--an amazing coincidence. Other sources,
however, gave an entirely different account of their origin,
claiming that they were a record based on Eichmann's comments to
an "associate" in 1955, though no one even bothered to identify
this person. By an equally extraordinary coincidence, war crimes
investigators claimed shortly afterwards to have just "found" in
the archives of the U.S. Library of Congress, more than fifteen
years after the war, the "complete file" of Eichmann's
department. So far as the "memoirs" themselves are concerned,
they are made to be as horribly incriminating as possible
without stretching too far into the realms of purest fantasy,
and depict Eichmann speaking with enormous relish about "the
physical annihilation of the Jews". Their fraudulence is also
attested to by various factual errors, such as that Himmler was
already in command of the reserve Army by April of 1944, instead
of after the July plot against Hitler's life, a fact which
Eichmann would certainly have known. The appearance of the
"memoirs" at precisely the right moment raises no doubt that
their object was to present a pre-trial propaganda picture of
the archetypical "unregenerate Nazi" and fiend in human shape.
The circumstances of the Eichmann trial in Israel do not
concern us here; the documents of Soviet origin which were used
as evidence, such as the Wisliceny statement, have been examined
already, and for an account of the third-degree methods used on
Eichmann during his captivity to render him "co-operative" the
reader is referred to the London Jewish Chronicle, September
2nd, 1960. More relevant to the literature of the extermination
legend are the contents of a letter which Eichmann is supposed
to have written voluntarily and handed over to his captors in
Buenos Aries. It need hardly be added that its Israeli
authorship is transparently obvious. Nothing in it stretches
human credulity further than the phrase "I am submitting this
declaration of my own free will"; but the most hollow and
revealing statement of all is his alleged willingness to appear
before a court in Israel, "so that a true picture may be
transmitted to future generations."
TREBLINKA FABRICATIONS
The latest reminiscences to appear in print are those of
Franz Stangl, the former commandant of the camp at Treblinka in
Poland who was sentenced to life imprisonment in December 1970.
These were published in an article by the London Daily Telegraph
Magazine, October 8th, 1971, and were supposed to derive from a
series of interviews with Stangl in prison. He died a few days
after the interviews were concluded. These alleged reminiscences
are certainly the goriest and most bizarre yet published, though
one is grateful for a few admissions by the writer of the
article, such as that "the evidence presented in the course of
his trial did not prove Stangl himself to have committed
specific acts of murder" and that the account of Stangl's
beginnings in Poland "was in part fabrication."
A typical example of this fabrication was the description of
Stangl's first visit to Treblinka. As he drew into the railway
station there, he was supposed to have seen "thousands of
bodies" just strewn around next to the tracks, "hundreds, no,
thousands of bodies everywhere, putrefying, decomposing." And,
"in the station was a train full of Jews, some dead, some still
alive...it looked as it had been there for days." The account
reaches the heights of absurdity when Stangl is alleged to have
got out of his car and "stepped knee deep in money; I didn't
know which way to turn, which way to go. I waded in papernotes,
currency, precious stones, jewelry, and clothes. They were
everywhere, strewn all over the square." The scene is completed
by "whores from Warsaw weaving drunk, dancing, singing, playing
music," who were on the other side of the barbed wire fences. To
literally believe this account of sinking "kneedeep" in Jewish
banknotes and precious stones amid thousands of putrefying
corpses and lurching, singing prostitutes would require the most
phenomenal degree of gullibility, and in any circumstances other
than the Six Million legend it would be dismissed as the most
outrageous nonsense.
The statement which certainly robs the Stangl memoirs of any
vestige of authenticity is his alleged reply when asked why he
thought the Jews were being exterminated: "They wanted the Jews'
money," is the answer. "That racial business was just
secondary." The series of interviews are supposed to have ended
on a highly dubious note indeed. When asked whether he thought
there had been "any conceivable sense in this horror," the
former Nazi commandant supposedly replied with enthusiasm: "Yes,
I am sure there was. Perhaps the Jews were meant to have this
enormous jolt to pull together; to create a people; to identify
themselves with each other." One could scarcely imagine a more
perfect answer had it been invented.
BEST-SELLER A HOAX
Of the variety of memoirs, those which present a picture of
frail Jewry caught in the vice of Nazism, the most celebrated is
undoubtedly The Diary of Anne Frank and the truth concerning
this book is only one appalling insight into the fabrication of
a propaganda legend. First published in 1952, The Dairy of Anne
Frank became an immediate best-seller; since then it has been
republished in paper-back, going through 40 impressions, and was
made into a successful Hollywood film. In royalties alone, Otto
Frank, the girl's father, has made a fortune from the sale of
the book, which purports to represent the real-life tragedy of
his daughter. With its direct appeal to the emotions, the book
and the film have influenced literally millions of people,
certainly more through the world than any other story of its
kind. And yet only seven years after its initial publication, a
New York Supreme Court case established that the book was a
hoax.
The Diary of Anne Frank has been sold to the public as the
actual diary of a young Jewish girl from Amsterdam, which she
wrote at the age of 12 while her family and four other Jews were
hiding in the back room of a house during the German occupation.
Eventually, they were arrested and detained in a concentration
camp. where Anne Frank supposedly died when she was 14. When
Otto Frank was liberated from the camp at the end of the war, he
returned to the Amsterdam house and "found" his daughter's diary
concealed in the rafters.
The truth bout the Anne Frank Diary was first revealed in
1959 by the Swedish journal Fria Ord. It established that the
Jewish novelist Meyer Levin had written the dialogue of the
"diary" and was demanding payment for his work in a court action
against Otto Frank. A condensation of the Swedish articles
appeared in the American Economic Council Letter, April 15th,
1959, as follows:
"History has many examples of myths that live a longer
and richer life than truth, and may become more effective
than truth.
"The Western World has for some years been made aware
of a Jewish girl through the medium of what purports to
be her personally written story, Anne Frank's Diary.
Any informed literary inspection of this book would shown
it to have been impossible as a work of a teenager.
"A noteworthy decision of the New York Supreme Court
confirms this point of view, in that the well known
American Jewish writer, Meyer Levin, has been awarded
$50,000 to be paid by the father of Anne Frank as an
honorarium for Levin's work on the Anne Frank Diary.
"Mr. Frank, in Switzerland, and promised to pay to his
race kin, Meyer Levin, not less than $50,000 because he
had used the dialogue of Author Levin just as it was and
"implanted" it in the dairy as being his daughter's
intellectual work."
Further inquiries brought a reply on May 7th, 1962 from a
firm of New York Lawyers, which stated:
"I was attorney for Meyer Levin in his action against Otto
Frank, and others. It is true that a jury awarded Mr. Levin
$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 is not officially reported, so far
as the trial itself. or even Judge Coleman's decision, is
concerned. Certain procedural matters were reported in 141 New
York Supplement, Second Series 170, and in 5 Second Series 181.
The correct file number in the New York County Clerk's office is
2241-1956 and the file is probably a large and full one..."
Here, then, is just one more fraud in a whole series of fraud
perpetrated in support of the "Holocaust" [Holohoax] legend and
the saga of the Six Million. Of course, the court case bearing
directly on the authenticity of the Anne Frank Diary was "not
officially reported."
A brief reference may also be made to another "diary"
published not long after that of Anne Frank and entitled: Notes
from the Warsaw Ghetto: the Journal of Emmanuel Ringelblum (New
York, 1958). Ringelblum had been a leader in the campaign of
sabotage against the Germans in Poland, as well as the revolt of
the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943, before he was eventually arrested and
executed in 1944. The Ringelblum journal, which speaks of the
usual "rumors" allegedly circulating about the extermination of
the Jews in Poland, appeared exactly under the same Communist
auspices as the so-called Hoess memoirs. McGraw-Hill, the
publishers of the American edition, admit they were denied
access to the uncensored original manuscript in Warsaw, and
instead faithfully followed the expurgated volume published by
the Communist Government in Warsaw in 1952. All the "proofs" of
the Holocaust [Holohoax] issuing from Communist sources of this
kind are worthless as historical documents.
ACCUMULATING MYTHS
Since the war, there has been an abundant growth of
sensational concentration camp literature, the majority of it
Jewish, each book piling horror upon horror, blending fragments
of truth with the most grotesque of fantasies and impostures,
relentlessly creating an edifice of mythology in which any
relation to historical fact has long since disappeared. We have
referred to the type already--Olga Lengyel's absurd Five
Chimneys ("24,000 corpses handles every day"), Doctor at
Auschwitz by Milkos Nyiszli, apparently a mythical and invented
person, This was Auschwitz: The Story of a Murder Camp by
Phillip Friedman, and so on ad nauseam.
The latest in this vein is For Those I love by Martin Gray
(Bodley Head, 1973), which purports to be an account of his
experiences at Treblinka camp in Poland. Gray specialized in
selling fake antiques to America before turning to concentration
camp memoirs. The circumstances surrounding the publication of
his book, however, have been unique, because for the first time
with works of this kind, serious doubt was cast on the
authenticity of its contents. Even Jews, alarmed at the damage
it might cause, denounced his book as fraudulent and questioned
whether he had ever been at Treblinka at all, while the B.B.C.
radio pressed him as to why he had waited 28 years before
writing of his experiences.
It was interesting to observe that the "Personal Opinion"
column of the London Jewish Chronicle, March 30th, 1973,
although it roundly condemned Gray's book, nevertheless made
grandiose additions to the myth of the Six Million. It stated
that: "Nearly a million people were murdered at Treblinka in the
course of a year. 18,000 were fed into the gas chambers every
day." It is a pity that so many people read and accept this kind
of nonsense without exercising their minds. If 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 10 remaining 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 has scored a resounding success and become
internationally accepted, any number of impossible permutations
can be made and no one would even think to criticize them. In
its review of Gray's book, the Jewish Chronicle column also
provides a revealing insight into the fraudulent allegations
concerning gas-chambers: "Gray recalls that the floors of the
gas chambers sloped, whereas another survivor who helped build
them , maintains that they were at a level..."
Occasionally, books by former concentration camp inmates
appear which present a totally different picture of the
conditions prevailing in them. Such is Under Two Dictators
(London, 1959) by Margarete Buber. She was a German-Jewish woman
who had experienced several years in the brutal and primitive
conditions of a Russian prison camp before being sent to
Ravensbruck, the German camp for women detainees, in August
1940. She noted that she was the only Jewish person in her
contingent of deportees from Russia who was not straight away
released by the Gestapo. Her book presents a striking contrast
between the camps of Soviet Russia and Germany; compared to the
squalor, disorder and starvation of the Russian camp, she found
Ravensbruck to be clean, civilized and well-administered.
Regular baths and clean linen seemed a luxury after her earlier
experiences, and her first meal of white bread, sausage, sweet
porridge and dried fruit prompted her to inquire of another camp
inmate whether August 3rd, 1940 was some sort of holiday or
special occasion. She observed, too, that the barracks at
Ravensbruck were remarkably spacious compared to the crowded mud
hut of the Soviet camp. In the final months of 1945, she
experienced the progressive decline of camp conditions, the
causes we shall examine later.
Another account which is at total variance with popular
propaganda is Die Gestapo Lasst Bitten (The Gestapo Invites You)
by Charlotte Bormann, a Communist political prisoner who was
also interred at Ravensbruck. Undoubtedly its most important
revelation is the author's statement that rumors of gas chambers
were deliberate and malicious inventions circulated among the
prisoners by the Communists. This latter group did not accept
Margarete Buber because of her imprisonment in Soviet Russia. A
further shocking reflection on the post-war trials is the fact
that Charlotte Bormann was not permitted to testify in the
French occupation zone, the usual fate of those who denied the
extermination legend.
8. THE NATURE AND CONDITION OF WAR-TIME CONCENTRATION CAMPS
In his recent book Adolf Hitler (London, 1973), Colin Cross,
who brings more intelligence than is usual to many problems of
this period, observes astutely that "The shuffling of millions
of Jews around Europe and murdering them in a time of desperate
war emergency, was useless from any rational point of view" (p.
307). Quite so, and at this point we may well question the
likelihood of this irrationalism, and whether it was even
possible. It is likely, that at the height of the war, when the
Germans were fighting a desperate battle for survival on two
fronts, they would have conveyed millions of Jews for miles to
supposedly elaborate and costly slaughter houses? To have
conveyed three or four million Jews to Auschwitz alone (even
supposing that such an inflated number existed in Europe, which
it did not), would have placed an insuperable burden upon German
transportation facilities which were strained to the limit in
supporting the far flung Russian front. To have transported the
mythical six million Jews and countless numbers of other
nationalities to internment camps, and to have housed, clothed
and fed them there, would simply have paralyzed their military
operations. There is no reason to suppose that the efficient
Germans would have put their military fortunes at such risk.
On the other hand, the transportation of a reasonable 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 labor they supplied. In fact, of the 3
million Jews living in Europe, it is certain that no more than
two million were ever interned at one time, and it is probable
that the number was much closer to 1,500,000. We shall see
later, in the Report of the Red Cross, that whole Jewish
populations such as that of Slovakia avoided detention camps,
while others were placed in community ghettos like
Theresienstadt. Moreover, from western Europe deportations were
far fewer. The estimate of Reitlinger that only 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? It is likely
that they would have cremated people by the million when they
were so short of manpower and required all prisoners of war for
purposes of war production? Would it have been possible to
destroy and remove all trace of a million people in six months?
Could such enormous gatherings of Jews and executions on such a
vast scale have been kept secret? These are the kind of
questions that the critical, thinking person should ask. And he
will soon discover that not only the statistical and documentary
evidence given here, but simple logistics combine to discredit
the legend of the six million.
Although it was impossible for millions to have been murdered
in them, the nature and conditions of Germany's concentration
camps have been vastly exaggerated to make the claim plausible.
William Shirer, in a typically reckless passage, states that:
"All of the thirty odd principal Nazi concentration camps were
death camps" (ibid, p. 1150). This is totally untrue, and is not
even accepted now by the principal propagators of the
extermination legend. Shirer also quotes Eugen Kogon's The
Theory and Practice of Hell (New York, 1950, p. 227) which puts
the total number of deaths in all of them at the ridiculous
figure of 7,125,000, though Shirer admits in a footnote that
this "undoubtedly too high."
"DEATH CAMPS" BEHIND THE IRON CURTAIN
It is true that in 1945, Allied propaganda did claim that all
the concentration camps, particularly those in Germany itself,
were "death camps", but not for long. On this question, the
eminent American historian Harry Elmer Barnes wrote: "These
camps were first presented as those in Germany, such as Dachau,
Belsen, Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen and Dora, but it was soon
demonstrated that there had been no systematic extermination in
those camps. Attention was then moved to Auschwitz, Treblinka,
Belzec, Chelmno, Jonowska, Tarnow, Ravensbruck, Mauthausen,
Brezeznia and Birkenau, which does not exhaust the list that
appears to have been extended as needed" (Rampart Journal,
Summer 1967). What had happened was that certain honest
observers among the American and British occupation forces in
Germany, while admitting that many inmates had died of disease
and starvation in the final months of the war, had found no
evidence after all of "gas chambers." As a result, eastern camps
in the Russian zone of occupation such as Auschwitz and
Treblinka gradually came to the fore as horrific centers of
extermination (though no one was permitted to see them), and
this tendency has lasted to the present day. Here in these camps
it was all supposed to have happened, but with the Iron Curtain
brought down firmly over them, no one has ever been able to
verify such charges. The Communists claimed that four million
people died at Auschwitz in gigantic gas chambers accommodating
2,000 people--and no one could argue to the contrary.
What is the truth about the so-called "gas chambers"? Stephen
F. Pinter, who served as a lawyer for the United States War
Department in the occupation force in Germany and Austria for
six years after the war made the following statement in the
widely read Catholic Magazine Our Sunday Visitor, June 14th,
1959: "I was in Dachau for 17 months after the war, as a U.S.
War Department Attorney, and can state that there was no gas
chamber at Dachau. What was shown to visitors and sightseer
there and erroneously describes as a gas chamber was a
crematory. Nor was there a gas chamber in any of the other
concentration camps in Germany. We were told that there was a
gas chamber at Auschwitz, but since that was in the Russian zone
of occupation, we were not permitted to investigate since the
Russians would not allow it. From what I was able to determine
during this six postwar years in Germany and Austria, there were
a number of Jews killed, but the figure of a million was
certainly never reached. I interviewed thousands of Jews, former
inmates of concentration camps in Germany and Austria, and
consider myself as well qualified as any man on this subject."
This tells a very different story from the customary
propaganda. Pinter, of course, is very astute on the question of
the crematory being represented as a gas chamber. This is a
frequent ploy because no such thing as a gas chamber has ever
been shown to exist in these camps, hence the deliberately
misleading term a "gas oven", aimed at confusing a gas chamber
with a crematorium. The latter, usually a single furnace and
similar to the kind of thing employed today, were used quite
simply for the cremation of those persons who had died from
various natural causes within the camp, particularly infectious
diseases. This fact was conclusively proved by the German
archbishop, Cardinal Faulhaber of Munich. He informed the
Americans that during the Allied air raids on Munich in
September 1944, 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 drastically revised. In
1946, a memorial plaque was unveiled at Dachau by Philip
Auerbach, the Jewish State-Secretary in the Barvarian Government
who was convicted for embezzling money which he claimed as
compensation for nonexistent Jews. The plaque read; "This area
is being retained as a shrine to the 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 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 fourty-six days"--a supreme
example of the kind of irresponsible nonsense that is written on
this subject.
HUMANE CONDITIONS
That several thousand camp inmates did die in the chaotic
final months of the war brings us to the question of their war-
time conditions. These have been deliberately falsified in
innumerable books of an extremely lurid and unpleasant kind. The
Red Cross Report, examined below, demonstrates conclusively
that throughout the war the camps were well administered. The
working inmates received a daily ration even throughout 1943 and
1944 of not less than 2,750 calories, which was more than double
the average citizen ration in occupied Germany in the years
after 1945. The internees were under regular medical care, and
those who became seriously ill were transferred to the hospital.
All internees, unlike those in the Soviet camps, could receive
parcels of food, clothing and pharmaceutical supplies from the
Special Relief Division of the Red Cross. The Office of the
Public Prosecutor conducted thorough investigations into each
case of criminal arrest, and those found innocent were released;
those found guilty, as well as those deportees convicted of
major crimes, were sentenced by military courts and executed. In
the Federal Archives of Koblenz there is a directive of January
1943 from Himmler regarding such executions, stressing that "no
brutality is to be allowed" (Manvell and Frankl, ibid, p. 312).
Occasionally there was brutality, but such cases were
immediately scrutinized by S.S. Judge Dr. Konrad Morgen of the
Reich Criminal Police Office, whose job was to investigate
irregularities at the various camps. Morgen himself prosecuted
commander Koch of Buchenwald in 1943 for excesses at his camp, a
trial to which the German public were invited. It is significant
that Oswald Pohl, the administrator of the concentration camp
system who was dealt with so harshly at Nuremberg, was in favor
of the death penalty for Koch. In fact, the S.S. court did
sentence Koch to death, but he was given the option of serving
on the Russian front. Before he could do this, however, Prince
Waldeck, the leader of the S.S. in the district, carried out his
execution. This case is ample proof of the seriousness with
which the S.S. regarded unnecessary brutality. Several S.S.
court actions of this kind were conducted in the camps during
the war to prevent excesses, and more than 800 cases were
investigated before 1945. Morgen testified at Nuremberg that he
discussed confidentially with hundreds of inmates the prevailing
conditions in the camps. he found that few that were
undernourished except in the hospitals, and noted that the pace
and achievement in compulsory labor by inmates was far lower
than among German civilian workers.
The evidence of Pinter and Cardinal Faulhaber has been shown
to disprove the claims of extermination at Dachau, and we have
seen how the casualty figures of that camp have been
continuously revised downwards. The camp at Dachau near Munich,
in fact, may be taken as fairly typical of these places of
internment. Compulsory labor in the factories and plants was the
order of the day, but the Communist leader Ernst Ruff testified
in his Nuremberg affidavit of April 18th, 1947 that the
treatment of prisoners on the work details and in the camp of
Dachau remained humane. The Polish underground leader, Jan
Piechowiak, who was at Dachau from May 22nd, 1940 until April
29th, 1945 also testified on March 21st, 1946 that prisoners
there received good treatment, and that the S.S. personnel at
the camp were "well disciplined". Berta Schirotschin, who worked
in the food service at Dachau throughout the war, testified that
the working inmates, until the beginning of 1945 and despite
increasing privation in Germany, received their customary second
breakfast at 10 a.m. every morning.
In general, hundreds of affidavit from Nuremberg testify to
the humane conditions prevailing in concentration camps; but
emphasis was invariably laid on those which reflected badly on
the German administration and could be used for propaganda
purposes. A study of the documents also reveals that Jewish
witnesses tended to greatly exaggerate the rigors of their
condition, whereas other national interned for political
reasons, such as those cited above, generally presented a more
balanced picture. In many cases, prisoners such as Charlotte
Bormann, whose experiences did not accord with the picture
presented at Nuremberg, were not permitted to testify.
UNAVOIDABLE CHAOS
The orderly situation in the German concentration camps
slowly broke down in the last fearful months of 1945. The Red
Cross Report of 1948 explains that the saturation bombing by the
Allies paralyzed the transport and communications system of the
Reich, no food reached the camps and starvation claimed an
increasing number of victims, both in the prison camps and among
the civilian population of Germany. This terrible situation was
compounded in the camps both by the great overcrowding and the
consequent outbreak of typhus epidemics. Overcrowding occurred
as a result of prisoners from the eastern camps such as
Auschwitz being evacuated westward before the Russian advance;
columns of such exhausted people arrived at several German camps
such as Belsen and Buchenwald which had themselves reached a
state of great hardship. Belsen camp near Bremen was in an
especially chaotic condition in these months and Himmler's
physician, Felix Kersten, an anti-Nazi, explains that its
unfortunate reputation as a "death camp" was due solely to the
ferocity of the typhus epidemic which broke out there in March
1945 (Memoirs 1940-1945, London, 1956). Undoubtedly these
fearful conditions cost several thousand lives, and it is these
conditions that re represented in the photographs of emaciated
human beings and heaps of corpses which the propagandists
delight in showing, claiming they are victims of
"extermination".
A surprisingly honest appraisal of the situation at Belsen in
1945 appeared in Purnell's History of the Second World War (Vol.
7, No. 15) by Russell Barton, now superintendent and consultant
psychiatrist at Severalls Hospital, Essex, who spent one month
at the camp as a medical student after the war. His account
vividly illustrates the true causes of the mortality that
occurred in such camps towards the war's end, and how such
extreme conditions came to prevail there. Dr. Barton explains
that Brigadier Glyn Hughes, the British Medical Officer who took
command of Belsen in 1945, "did not think there had been any
atrocities in the camp" despite discipline and hard work. "Most
people," writes Dr. Barton, "attributed the conditions of the
inmates to deliberate intention on the part of the
Germans...Inmates were eager to cite examples of brutality and
neglect, and visiting journalists from different countries
interpreted the situation according to the needs of propaganda
at home."
However. Dr. Barton makes it quite clear that the conditions
of starvation and disease were unavoidable in the circumstances,
and that they occurred only in the months of 1945. "From
discussions with prisoners it seemed that conditions in the camp
were not too bad until late 1944. The huts were set among pine
trees and each was provided with lavatories, wash basins,
showers and stoves for heating." The cause of food shortage is
also explained. "German medical officers told me that it had
been increasingly difficult to transport food to the camp for
some months. Anything that moved on the autobahns was likely to
be bombed...I was surprised to find records, going back daily
for two or three years, of large quantities of food cooked daily
for distribution. At that time I became convinced, contrary to
popular opinion that there had never been a policy of deliberate
starvation. This was confirmed by the large numbers of well-fed
inmates. Why then were so many people suffering from
malnutrition?....The major reasons for the state of Belsen were
disease, gross overcrowding by central authority, lack of law
and order within the huts, and inadequate supplies of food,
water and drugs." The lack of order, which led to riots over
food distribution, was quelled by British machine-gun fire and a
display of force when British tanks and armored cars toured the
camp.
Apart from the unavoidable deaths in these circumstances,
Glyn Hughes estimated that about "1000 were killed through the
kindness of English soldiers giving them their own rations and
chocolates." As a man who was at Belsen, Dr. Barton is obviously
very much alive to the falsehoods of concentration camp
mythology, and he concludes: "In trying to assess the causes of
the conditions found at Belsen one must be alerted to the
tremendous visual display, ripe for the purposes of propaganda,
that masses of starved corpses presented." To discuss such