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Part One
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Go to Part Three INTRODUCTION TO THE THIRD EDITION This booklet which now comes to you electronically is so persuasive that it has been translated into a dozen different languages, and conversely, has been banned or otherwise suppressed in almost as many countries. Did Six Million Really Die? was originally published by the Historical Review Press in England in 1974. It was an immediate success and even though no bookshop would stock it, word spread fast. A German edition was published in collaboration with former schoolteacher and author Udo Walendy. A French edition was distributed by schoolteacher Francois Duprat; however tragedy struck when Duprat was murdered by a car bomb. His wife was also severely injured. The booklet, despite some errors, had a catalytic effect. Dr Arthur Butz of Northwestern University in Chicago contracted with HRP to publish an entire scholarly book on the subject, The Hoax of the twentieth Century. Dr. Robert Faurisson of the University of Lyons-2 in France also began to publish his own findings on the 'Holocaust'. All around the world - in the U.S., in Canada, Australia, South Africa, Sweden - 'Holocaust' Revisionists were popping out of the woodwork - many of them initially influenced by this slim pamphlet. Soon, the powers that be began to sit up and take notice. In 1976 the South African Jewish Board of Deputies applied to the Publications Control Board to have D6MRD? banned From South Africa. The local distributor S.E.D. Brown put up a brave fight hut shortage of funds and his advanced age prevented him from pursuing an effective appeal. To celebrate their brazen and successful censorship, the Deputies then published their 'case' against D6MRD? in book form, Six Million Did Die. Only a couple of the Deputies' criticisms were legitimate. The rest of the book consists of submissions from Establishment historians and politicians of every stripe, denouncing D6MRD? without presenting any factual critique. Of particular interest are the 'expert' testimony of Professor Hugh Trevor-Roper, who would later completely discredit his 'expertise' by endorsing the 'Hitler Diary' fraud; and also the submission of the 'reformed' Nazi Albert Speer, whose letter actually provides more evidence for the Revisionist position than it does for the Exterminationists. His letter is reproduced at the end of this edition of D6MRD? In an attempt to get around the South African ban, HRP temporarily changed the title to Six Million Lost and Found. However, due to the immense popularity of the original title, we have now reverted to it. Surrogate or 'bootleg' copies of D6MRD? then began to appear, especially in the United States and Canada. Some of these editions were authorized by HRP; many were not. In Toronto, German publisher Ernst Zundel brought out his own edition, with four pages of new introductory material. He bravely mailed free copies to Canadian Members of Parliament, clergy, journalists and broadcasters. Anxious to create a 'story', one staffer of the Canadian Broadcasting Company showed a copy to a professional 'survivor' Mrs Sabina Citron, who runs her own maverick Holocaust Remembrance Association. Enraged at the existence of such dissident ideas, and put on the spot by the CBC reporter, Mrs Citron filed a private legal complaint against Zundel, under a very obscure and obsolete law, prohibiting the publication of 'False News'. She then insisted that the Crown take over the prosecution of the case at taxpayers' expense. Even though Mrs. Citron's group had been expelled from the Toronto Jewish Federation, and even though she herself had been in trouble with the law, the petrified Crown Attorney's office meekly agreed to her demands. Just for good measure, they also added to the charge a recent flyer Zundel had published (but again, not written). Zundel was arraigned and a preliminary hearing was held in June 1984. The Crown exhibited eleven witnesses. There were two Holocaust 'experts': John Fried and Raul Hilberg. However, Fried's testimony was so weak, and his political perspective so transparently leftist, that he was not called to the main trial. Two survivors were featured: Mrs Sabina Citron and Amold Friedman. Mrs Citron's narrative of her war-time experiences was so mundane that, much to her chagrin, she too would not be asked to testify at the main trial. Although Zundel had thoroughly prepared for the hearing, by bringing in Revisionist scholars from around the world, his lawyer at that time was totally unfamiliar with the issues. Consequently, Hilberg & Co. smugly thought the main trial would be an easy victory. At the time the main trial opened in January 1985, Zundel had located a new lawyer, a dynamic, aggressive and talented Westerner, Doug Christie. Although he had had no previous exposure to Revisionism he grasped the arguments immediately. Again, Zundel brought in teams of his own experts, both to prepare the research for Christie, and themselves to testify during the Defence portion of the case. Ironically, both the Defence and Prosecution agreed that D6MRD? was largely correct and that only small points were in error. But the Crown had set out to prove that the entire Revisionist thesis was incorrect, and thus it turned out that it was actually the 'Holocaust' which was on trial. Christie took full advantage of the situation by ruthlessly grilling the entire slate of prosecution witnesses. A stunned Hilberg retreated further and further in his testimony; so much so that he was later chastised by American Jewish groups for putting up such a feeble performance. Although the judge at the preliminary had been a disinterested 'good ol' boy' the main trial was presided over by an extremely hostile and biased judge Hugh Locke. It was later discovered that when he was a barrister his own law-firm had done legal work for Mrs Citron's Holocaust Remembrance Association! Locke allowed the Crown to introduce all kinds of hearsay evidence, particularly an emotive movie film. After seven and a half weeks the jury eventually found Zundel guilty regarding D6MRD? (but not guilty as regards the other leaflet) He was sentenced to 15 months imprisonment, with automatic deportation afterwards. Despite the severity of the sentence Canadian Jews were despondent, and many complained bitterly and openly that the trial had only given the Revisionists a platform for their 'obnoxious' views. Indeed, Zundel regarded the outcome as a victory. He had aired Revisionist arguments to the public; there had been very heavy and fairly accurate media coverage throughout the trial. And as a result he had recruited vast numbers of new supporters who had never heard his message before. In Britain, where it is not an offence to deny the Holocaust, an official of the Jewish Board of Deputies said that a prosecution would only bring undesirable publicity. However, other members of the Jewish community had different ideas. In 1980 a Jewish journalist employed by a communist publication misnamed Searchlight decided; with accomplices, to destroy the premises of a firm thought to be producing D6MRD? causing damage to the extent of 60,000 British pounds. This man, with two previous convictions, was quickly apprehended and later sentenced to an inadequate prison term of two and a half years. In May 1987 a man, quite properly, was sentenced to 4 years for arson against a Jewish Synagogue: damage; 500 pounds. He had no previous convictions. His defence was that his father had been murdered by Jews in Palestine. Since we here at Historical Review Press value accuracy, we have responded to criticisms of D6MRD? by correcting in this third edition those few errors which existed. Most of these mistakes were transposed into the earlier editions from previous works. It should be borne in mind that Rassinier, for example, was totally alone and without resources, so it is not surprising that his pioneering studies contained some errors, which would be later repeated in earlier editions of D6MRD? We hope that we have now eliminated all of these. We are extremely grateful to the Canadian government for drawing our attention to these few errors, so that we can correct them, but we do question whether it was worth them spending millions of their taxpayers' dollars in the process, when a 50c stamp on a letter to us would have sufficed.
Chapter I
GERMAN POLICY TOWARDS THE JEWS PRIOR TO THE WAR Rightly or wrongly, the Germany of Adolf Hitler considered the Jews to be
a disloyal and avaricious element within the national community, as well as a
It is no part of the discussion here to argue whether the German attitude to the Jews was right or not, or to judge whether its legislative measures against them were just or unjust. Our concern is simply with the fact that, believing of the Jews as they did, the Nazis' solution to the problem was to deprive them of their influence within the nation by various legislative acts, and most important of all, to encourage their emigration from the country altogether. By 1939, the great majority of German Jews had emigrated, all of them with a sizeable proportion of their assets. Never at any time had the Nazi leadership even contemplated a policy of genocide towards them. JEWS CALLED EMIGRATION 'EXTERMINATION' It is very significant, however, that certain Jews were quick to interpret these policies of internal discrimination as equivalent to extermination itself. A 1936 anti-German propaganda book by Leon Feuchtwanger and others entitled Der Gelbe Fleck: Die Ausrotung von 500,000 Deutchen Juden (The Yellow Spot: The Outlawing of half a million Human Beings, Paris, 1936), presents a typical example. Despite its baselessness in fact, the annihilation of the Jews is discussed from the first pages - straightforward emigration being regarded as the physical "extermination" of German Jewry. The Nazi concentration camps for political pisoners are also seen as potential instruments of genocide, and special reference is made to the 100 Jews still detained in Dachau in 1936, of whom 60 had been there since 1933. A further example was the sensational book by the German - Jewish Communist, Hans Beimler, called Four Weeks in the Hands of Hitler's Hell Hounds: The Nazi Murder Camp of Dachau, which was published in New York as early as 1933. Detained for his Marxist affiliations, he claimed that Dachau was a death camp, though by his own admission he was released after only a month there. The post-War Communist regime in East Germany used to issue a 'Hans Beimler Award' for services to Communism. The fact that anti-Nazi genocide propaganda was being disseminated at this impossibly early date therefore, by people biased on racial or -political grounds, should suggest great caution to the independent minded observer when approaching similar stories of the war period. The encouragement of Jewish emigration should not be confused with the purpose of concentration camps in pre-war Germany. These were used for the detention of political opponents and subversives - principally liberals, Social Democrats and Communists of all kinds, a proportion of whom were Jews, such as Hans Beimler. Unlike the millions enslaved in the Soviet Union, the German concentration camp population was always small; Reitlinger admits that between 1934 and 1938 it seldom exceeded 20,000 throughout the whole of Germany and the number of Jews was never more than 3,000. (The S.S.: Alibi of a Nation, London, 1956, p 253.) Zionist Policy Studied The Nazi view of Jewish emigration was not limited to a negative policy of simple expulsion but was formulated along the lines of modern Zionism. The founder of political Zionism in the 19th century, Theodore Herzl, in his work The Jewish State, had originally conceived of Madagascar as a national homeland for the Jews and this possibility was seriously studied by the Nazis. It had been a main plank of the National Socialist party platform before 1933 and was published by the party in pamphlet form. This stated that the revival of Israel as a Jewish state was much less acceptable since it would result in perpetual war and disruption in the Arab world, which has indeed been the case. The Germans were not original in proposing Jewish emigration to Madagascar; the Polish Government had already considered the scheme in respect of their own Jewish population and in 1937 they sent the Michael Lepecki expedition to Madagascar, accompanied by Jewish representatives, to investigate the problems involved.The first Nazi proposals for a Madagascar solution were made in association with the Schacht Plan of 1938. On the advice of Goering, Hitler agreed to send the President of the Reichsbank, Dr. Hjalmar Schacht, to London for discussions with Jewish representatives Lord Bearsted and Mr. Rublee of New York (cf. Reitlinger, The Final Solution, London, 1953, p. 20). The plan was that German Jewish assets would be frozen as security for an international loan to finance Jewish emigration to Palestine and Schacht reported on these negotiations to Hitler at Berchtesgaden on January 2, 1939. The plan, which failed due to British refusal to accept the financial terms, was first put forward on November 12, 1938 at a conference convened by Goering, who revealed that Hitler was already considering the emigration of Jews to a settlement in Madagascar (ibid., p. 21). Later, in December, Ribbentrop was told by M. Georges Bonnet, the French Foreign Secretary, that the French Government itself was planning the evacuation of 10,000 Jews to Madagascar. Prior to Schacht's Palestine proposals of 1938, which were essentially a protraction of discussions that had begun as early as 1935, numerous attempts had been made to secure Jewish emigration to other European nations and these efforts culminated in the Evian Conference of July 1938. However by 1939 the scheme of Jewish emigration to Madagascar had gained most favor in German circles. It is true that in London Helmuth Wohltat of the German Foreign Office discussed limited Jewish emigration to Rhodesia and British Guiana as late as April 1939, but by Jan. 24th when Goering wrote to Interior Minister Frick ordering the creation of a Central Emigration Office for Jews, and commissioned Heydrich of the Reich Security Office to solve the Jewish problem "by means of emigration and evacuation". The Madagascar plan was being studied in earnest. By 1939, the consistent efforts of the German government to secure the departure of Jews from the Reich had resulted in the emigration of 400,000 German Jews from a total population of about 600,000, and an additional 480,000 emigrants from Austria and Czechoslovakia, which constituted almost their entire Jewish populations. This was accomplished through Offices of Jewish Emigration in Berlin, Viena and Prague established by Adolf Eichmann, the head of the Jewish Investigation Office of the Gestapo . So eager were the Germans to secure this emigration that Eichmann even established a training centre in Austria, where young Jews could learn farming in anticipation of being smuggled illegally to Palestine (Manvell & Frankl, S.S. and Gestapo, p. 60). Had Hitler cherished any intention of exterminating the Jews, it is inconceivable that he would have allowed more than 800,000 to leave Reich territory with the bulk of their wealth, much less considered plans for their mass emigration to Palestine or Madagascar. What is more, we shall see that the policy of emigration from Europe was still under consideration well into the war period, notably the Madagascar Plan, which Eichmann discussed in 1940 with French Colonial Office experts after the defeat of France had made the surrender of the colony a practical proposition.
Chapter II
GERMAN POLICY TOWARDS THE JEWS AFTER THE OUTBREAK OF WAR
DETENTION OF ENEMY ALIENS All Jews had thus been declared agents willing to prosecute a war against the German Reich and, as a consequence, Himmler and Heydrich were eventually to begin the policy of internment. It is worth noting that the United States and Canada had already interned all Japanese aliens and citizens of Japanese descent in detention camps before the Germans applied the same security measures against the Jews of Europe. Moreover, there had been no such evidence or declaration of disloyalty by these Japanese Americans as had been given by Weizmann. The British too, during the Beer War, interned all the women and children of the population and thousands had died as a result, yet in no sense could the British be charged with wanting to exterminate the Beers. The detention of Jews in the occupied territories of Europe served two essential purposes from the German viewpoint. The first was to prevent unrest and subversion; Himmler informed Mussolini on October 11, 1942 that German policy towards the Jews had altered during wartime entirely for reasons of military security. He complained that thousands of Jews in the occupied regions were conducting partisan warfare, sabotage and espionage, a view confirmed by official Soviet information given to Raymond Arthur Davis that no less than 35,000 European Jews were waging partisan war under Tito in Yugoslavia. As a result, Jews were to be transported to restricted areas and detention camps, both in Germany, and especially after March 1942, in the Government-General of Poland. As the war proceeded, the policy developed of using Jewish detainees for labour in the war-effort. The question of labour is fundamental when considering the alleged plan of genocide against the Jews, for on grounds of logic alone the latter would entail the most senseless waste of manpower, time and energy while prosecuting a war of survival on two fronts. Certainly after the attack on Russia, the idea of compulsory labour had taken precedence over German plans for Jewish emigration. The protocol of a conversation between Hitler and the Hungarian regent Horthy on April 17, 1943, reveals that the German leader personally requested Horthy to release 100,000 Hungarian Jews for work in the "pursuit-plane programme" of the Luftwaffe at a time when the aerial bombardment of Germany was increasing (Reitlinger, Die Endliisung, Berlin, 1956, p. 478). This took place at a time when, supposedly, the Germans were already seeking to exterminate the Jews, but Hitler's request clearly demonstrates the priority aim of expanding his labour force. In harmony with this programme, concentration camps became, in fact, industrial complexes. At every camp where Jews and other nationalities were detained, there were large industrial plants and factories supplying material for the German war-effort: the Buna rubber factory at Bergen-Belsen, for example, Buna and 1.IG. Farben Industrie at Auschwitz, and the electrical firm of Siemens at Ravensbriick. In many cases, special concentration camp money notes were issued as payment for labour, enabling prisoners to buy extra rations from camp shops. The Germans were determined to obtain the maximum economic return from the concentration camp system, an object wholly at variance with any plan to exterminate millions of people in them. It was the function of the S.S. Economy and Administration Office, headed by Oswald Pohl, to see that the concentration camps became major industrial producers. EMIGRATION STILL FAVOURED It is a remarkable fact however, that well into the war period, the Germans continued to implement the policy of Jewish emigration. The fall of France in 1940 enabled the German Government to open serious negotiations with the French for the transfer of European Jews to Madagascar. A memorandum of August, 1942 from Luther, Secretary of State in the German Foreign Office, reveals that he had conducted these negotiations between July and December 1940, when they were terminated by the French. A circular from Luther's department dated August 15, 1940 shows that the details of the German plan had been worked out by Eichmann, for it is signed by his assistant, Dannecker. Eichmann had in fact been commissioned in August to draw up a detailed Madagascar Plan, and Dannecker was employed in research on Madagascar at the French Colonial Office (Reitlinger, The Final Solution, p. 77). The proposals of August 15 were that an inter-European bank was to finance the emigration of four million Jews by means of a phased programme. Luther's 1942 memorandum shows that Heydrich had obtained Himmler's approval of this plan before the end of August and had also submitted it to Goering. It certainly met with Hitler's approval, for as early as June 17 his interpreter, Schmidt, recalls Hitler observing to Mussolini that "One could found a State of Israel in Madagascar" (Schmidt, Hitler's Interpreter, London, 1951, p. 178). Although the French terminated the
Madagascar negotiations in December 1940, Poliakov, the director of the Centre
of Jewish Documentation in Paris, admits that the Germans nevertheless pursued
the scheme and that Eichmann was still busy with it throughout 1941. Eventually
however it was rendered impractical by the progress of the war, in particular by
the situation after the invasion of Russia, and on February 10, 1942 the Foreign
Office was informed that the plan had been temporarily shelved. This ruling,
sent to the Foreign Office by Luther's assistant, Rademacher, is of great
importance because it demonstrates conclusively that the term "Final Solution"
meant only the emigration of Jews, and also that transportation to the eastern
ghettos and concentration camps such as Auchwitz constituted nothing but an
alternative plan of evacuation. Reitlinger and Poliakov both make the entirely unfounded supposition that because the Madagascar Plan had been shelved, the Germans must necessarily have been thinking of "extermination". Only a month later, however, on March 7, 1942, Goebbels wrote a memorandum in favour of the Madagascar Plan as a "Final Solution" of the Jewish question (Manvell & Frankl, Dr. Goebbels, London, 1960). In the meantime he approved of the Jews being "concentrated in the East". Later Goebbels' memoranda also stress deportation to the East (i.e.-the Government General of Poland) and lay emphasis on the need for compulsory labour there; once the policy of evacuation to the East had been inaugurated, the use of Jewish labour became a fundamental part of the operation. It is perfectly clear from the foregoing that the term "Final Solution" was applied both to Madagascar and to the Eastern territories and that therefore it meant only the deportation of the Jews. Even as late as May 1944 the Germans were prepared to allow the emigration of one million European Jews from Europe. An account of this proposal is given by Alexander Weissberg, a prominent Soviet Jewish scientist deported during the Stalin purges, in his book Die Geschichte von Joel Brand (Cologne, 1956). Weissberg, who spent the war in Cracow though he expected the Germans to intern him in a concentration camp, explains that on the personal authorization of Himmler, Eichmann had sent the Budapest Jewish leader Joel Brand to Istanbul with an offer to the Allies to permit the transfer of one million European Jews in the midst of the war. (if the 'extermination' writers are to be believed, there were scarcely one million Jews left by May, 1944.) The Gestapo admitted that the transportation involved would greatly inconvenience the German war-effort but were prepared to allow it in exchange for 10,000 trucks to be used exclusively on the Russian front. Unfortunately, the plan came to nothing: the British concluded that Brand must be a dangerous Nazi agent and immediately imprisoned him in Cairo while the Press denounced the offer as a Nazi trick. Winston Churchill, though orating to the effect that the treatment of the Hungarian Jews was probably "the biggest and most horrible crime ever committed in the whole history of the world" nevertheless told Chaim Weizmann that acceptance of the Brand offer was impossible, since it would be a betrayal of his Russian Allies. Although the plan was fruitless it well illustrates that no one allegedly carrying out "thorough" extermination would permit the emigration of a million Jews and it demonstrates, too, the prime importance placed by the Germans on the war-effort.
Chapter III
POPULATION AND EMIGRATION Since statistics relating to Jewish populations are not everywhere known in precise detail, and approximations for various countries differ widely, it is unknown exactly how many Jews were deported and interned at any one time between the years 1939 - 1945. In general, however, what reliable statistics there are, especially those relating to emigration, are sufficient to show that not a fraction of six million Jews could have been exterminated. In the first place, this claim cannot remotely be upheld on examination of the European Jewish population figures. According the Chambers Encyclopedia the total number of Jews living in Nazi Europe in 1939 was 6,500,000. Quite clearly, this would mean that almost the entire number was exterminated. But the Baseler Nachrichten, a neutral Swiss publication employing available Jewish statistical data, establishes that between 1933 and 1945 1,500,000 Jews emigrated to Britain, Sweden, Spain, Portugal, Australia, China, India, Palestine and the United States. This is confirmed by the Jewish journalist Bruno Blau, who cites the same figure in the New York Jewish paper Aufbau, August 13, 1948. Of these emigrants, approximately 400,000 came from Germany before September 1939. This is acknowledged by the World Jewish Congress in its publication Unity in Dispersion (p. 377) which states that: "The majority of the German Jews succeeded in leaving Germany before the war broke out." In addition to the German Jews, 220,000 of the total 280,000 Austrian Jews had emigrated by September, 1939, while from March 1939 onwards the Institute for Jewish Emigration in Prague had secured the emigration of 260,000 Jews from former Czechoslovakia. In all, only 360,000 Jews remained in Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia after September 1939. From Poland, an estimated 560,000 had emigrated prior to the outbreak of war. These figures mean that the number of Jewish emigrants from other European countries (France, the Netherlands, Italy, the counties of eastern Europe etc.) was approximately 120,000. This exodus of Jews before and during hostilities, therefore, reduces the number of Jews in Europe to approximately 5,000,000. In addition to these emigrants, we must also include the number of Jews who fled to the Soviet Union after 1939, who were later evacuated beyond reach of the German invaders. It will be shown below that the majority of these, about 1,250,000, were migrants from Poland. But apart from Poland, Reitlinger admits that 300,000 other European Jews slipped into Soviet territory between 1939 and 1941. This brings the total of Jewish emigrants to the Soviet Union to about 1,550.000. In Colliers magazine, June 9, 1945, Feiling Foster, writing of the Jews in Russia, explained that "2,200,000 have migrated to the Soviet Union since 1939 to escape from the Nazis," but our lower estimate is probably more accurate. Jewish migration td the Soviet Union, therefore, reduces the number of Jews within the sphere` of German occupation to around 3 and 1/2 million, approximately 3,450,000. From these should be deducted those Jews living in neutral European countries who escaped the consequences of the war. According to the 1942 World Almanac (p. 594) the number of Jews living in Gibraltar, Britain, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Ireland and Turkey was 413,128. 3 MILLION JEWS IN EUROPE Consequently a figure of around 3 million Jews in German occupied Europe is as accurate as the available emigration statistics will allow. Approximately the same number however can be deduced in another way if we examine statistics for the Jewish populations remaining in countries occupied by the Reich. More than half of those Jews who migrated to the Soviet Union after 1939 came from Poland. It is frequently claimed that the war with Poland added some 3 million Jews to the German sphere of influence and that almost the whole of this Polish Jewish population was "exterminated". This is a major factual error. The 1931 Jewish population census for Poland put the number of Jews at 2,732,600 (Reitlinger, Die Endlosung, p. 36). Reitlinger states that at least 1,170,000 of these were in the Russian zone occupied in the autumn of 1939, about a million of whom were evacuated to the Urals and south Siberia after the German invasion of June 1941 (ibid. p. 50). As described above, an estimated 500,000 Jews had emigrated from Poland prior to the war. Moreover the journalist Raymond Arthur Davies, who spent the war in the Soviet Union, observed that approximately 250,000 had already fled from German-occupied Poland to Russia between 1939 and 1941 and were to be encountered in every Soviet province (Odyssey through Hell, N.Y., 1946, p. 102). Subtracting these figures from the population of 2,732,600 therefore, and allowing for the normal population increase, no more than 1,100,000 Polish Jews could have been under German rule at the end of 1939 (Gutachen des Instituts fur Zeitgeschichte, Munich, 1956, p. 80). To this number we may add the 360,000 Jews remaining in Germany, Austria and former Czechoslovakia (Bohemia-Moravia and Slovakia) after the extensive emigration from those countries prior to the war described above. Of the 320,000 French Jews, the Public Prosecutor representing that part of the indictment relating to France at the Nuremberg Trials, stated that 120,000 Jews were deported, though Reitlinger estimates only about 50,000. Thus the total number of Jews under Nazi rule remains below two million. Deportations from the Scandinavian countries were few and from Bulgaria none at all. When the Jewish populations of Holland (140,000), Belgium (40,000), Italy (50,000), Yugoslavia (55,000), Hungary (380,000) and Romania (725,000) are included, the figure does not much exceed 3 million. This excess is due to the fact that the latter figures were prewar estimates unaffected by emigration, which from these countries accounted for about 120,000 (see above). This cross-checking therefore confirms the estimate of approximately 3 million European Jews under German occupation. RUSSIAN JEWS EVACUATED The precise figures concerning Russian Jews are unknown and have therefore been the subject of extreme exaggeration. The Jewish statistician Jacob Leszczynski states that in 1939 there were 2,100,000 Jews living in future German occupied Russia i.e. western Russia. In addition, some 260,000 lived in the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. According to Loui Levine, President of the American Jewish Council for Russian Relief, who made a post-war tour of the Soviet Union and submitted a report on the status of Jews there, the majority of these number were evacuated east after the German armies launched their invasion. In Chicago, on October 30, 1946, he declared that "At the outset of the war, Jews were amongst the first evacuated from the western regions threatened by the Hitlerite invaders - shipped to safety east of the Urals. Two million Jews were thus saved." This high number is confirmed by the Jewish journalist David Bergelson, who wrote in the Moscow Yiddish paper Ainikeit December 5, 1942, that "Thanks to the evacuation, the majority (80%) of the Jews in the Ukraine, White Russia, Lithuania and Latvia before the arrival of the Germans were rescued. Reitlinger agrees with
the Jewish authority Joseph Schechtmann who admits that huge numbers were
evacuated, though he estimates a slightly higher number of Russian and Baltic
Jews left under German occupation, between 650,000 and 850,000 (Reitlinger, The
Final Solution, p. 499). In respect of these Soviet Jews remaining in German
territory, it will be proved later that in the war in Russia no more than one
hundred thousand persons were killed by the German Action Groups as partisans
and Bolshevik commissars, not all of whom were Jews. By contrast, the partisans
themselves claimed to have murdered five times that number of German troops.
'SIX MILLION' UNTRUE SAY NEUTRAL SWISS It is clear therefore that the Germans could not possibly have gained control over, or exterminated, anything like six million Jews. Excluding the Soviet Union, the number of Jews in Nazi occupied Europe after emigration was scarcely more than three million, by no means all of whom were interned. To approach the extermination of even half of six million would have meant the liquidation of every Jew living in Europe. And yet it is known that large numbers of Jews were alive in Europe after 1945. Philip Friedmann in Their Brother's Keepers (N.Y., 1957, p. 13) states that "at least a million Jews survived in the very crucible of the Nazi hell," while the official figure of the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee is 1,559,600. Thus, even if one accepts the latter estimate, the number of possible wartime Jewish deaths could not possibly have exceeded a limit of one and a half million. Precisely this
conclusion was reached by the reputable journal Baseler Nachrichten of neutral
Switzerland. In an article entitled "We hoch ist die Zahl der jiidischen Opfer?"
("How high is the number of Jewish victims?", June 13, 1946), it explained that
purely on the basis of the population and emigration figures described above, a
maximum of only one and a half million Jews could be numbered as casualties.
Later on however it will be demonstrated that the number was actually far less,
for the Baseler Nachrichten accepted the Joint Distribution Committee's figure
of 1,559,600 survivors after the war, but we shall show that the number of
claims for compensation by Jewish survivors is more than double that figure.
This information was not available to the Swiss in 1946. IMPOSSIBLE BIRTH RATE Indisputable evidence is also provided by the post-war world Jewish population statistics. The World Almanac of 1938 gives the number of Jews in the world as 16,588,259. But after the war the New York Times, February 22, 1948, placed the number of Jews in the world at a minimum of 15,000,000 and a maximum of 18,000,000. Quite obviously, these figures make it impossible for the number of Jewish war-time casualties to be measured in anything but thousands. Fifteen and a half million in 1938 minus the alleged six million leaves nine million; the New York Times figures would mean, therefore, that the world's Jews produced seven million births, almost doubling their numbers, in the space of ten years. This is patently ridiculous.
On August 16, 1963 David Ben Gurion, President of Israel, stated that although the official Jewish population of America was said to be 5,600,000, "the total number would not be estimated too high at 9,000,000" (Deutsche Wochenzeitung, November 23, 1963). The reason for this high figure is underlined by Albert Maisal in his article "Our Newest Americans" (Readers Digest, January, 1957) for he reveals that "Soon after World War II, by Presidential decree, 90 per cent of all quota visas for central and eastern Europe were issued to the uprooted." Reproduced on the prior page is just one extract from hundreds that regularly appear in the obituary columns of Aufbau, the Jewish American weekly published in New York (June 16, 1972). It shows how Jewish emigrants to the United States subsequently changed their names; their former names when in Europe appear in brackets. For example, as shown: Arthur Kingsley (formerly Dr. Konigsberger of Frankfurt). Could it be that some or all of these people whose names are 'deceased' were included in the missing six million of Europe?
Chapter IV
THE SIX MILLION: DOCUMENTARY EVIDENCE From the foregoing it would seem certain that the figure of six million 'murdered' Jews amounts to nothing more than a vague compromise between several quite baseless estimates; there is not a shred of documentary evidence for it that is trustworthy. Occasionally, writers narrow it down to give a disarming appearance of authenticity. Lord Russell of Liverpool, for example, in his The Scourge of the Swastika (London, 1954) claimed that "not less than five million" Jews died in German concentration camps, having satisfied himself that he was somewhere between those who estimated six million and those who preferred four million. But, he admitted, "the real number will never be known" (p. 159). If so, it is difficult to know how he could have asserted "not less than five million." The Joint Distribution Committee favours 5,012,000 but the Jewish "expert" Reitlinger suggests a novel figure of 4,192,200 "missing Jews" of whom an estimated one third died of natural causes. This would reduce the number deliberately "exterminated" to 2,796,000. However Dr M. Perlzweig, the New York delegate to a World Jewish Congress press conference held at Geneva in 1948, stated: "The price of the downfall of National Socialism and Fascism is the fact that seven million Jews lost their lives thanks to cruel Anti-Semitism. In the Press and
elsewhere, the figure is often casually lifted to eight million or sometimes
even nine million. As we have proved in the previous chapter, none of these
figures are in the remotest degree plausible, indeed they are ridiculous. FANTASTIC EXAGGERATIONS One of the first accusations against the Germans of the mass murder of Jews in war-time Europe was made by the Polish Jew Rafael Lemkin in his book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, published in New York in 1944. Somewhat coincidentally, Lemkin was later to draw up the U.N. Genocide Convention, which seeks to outlaw "racialism". On page 89 of his book he quotes a 1943 publication of the Institute of Jewish Affairs of the American Jewish Congress Hitler's Ten-Year war on the Jaus, that 1,702.300 Jews had been murdered. To be published in 1943 this last book must have been written in 1942 so this figure would have been remarkable indeed, since the action was allegedly started only in the summer of 1942. At such a rate almost the entire world Jewish population would have been exterminated by 1945. After the war, propaganda estimates spiraled to heights even more fantastic. Kurt Gerstein, an anti-Nazi who claimed to have infiltrated the S.S., told the French interrogator Raymond Cartier that no less than forty million concentration camp internees had been gassed. In his first signed memorandum of April 26, 1945, he reduced the figure to 25 million, but even this was too bizarre for French Intelligence and in his second memorandum, signed at Rottweil on May 4, 1945, he brought the figure closer to the six million preferred at the Nuremburg Trials. Gerstein's sister-in-law was congenitally insane and died by euthanasia. His own behavior might well suggest a streak of mental instability. He had, in fact, been convicted in 1936 of sending eccentric mail through the post. After his two "confessions" he hanged himself at Cherche Midi prison in Paris. Gerstein alleged that during the war he passed on information concerning the murder of Jews to the Swedish Government through a German baron but for some inexplicable reason his report was "filed away and forgotten". He also claimed that in August 1942 he informed the Papal nuncio in Berlin about the whole "extermination programme" but the reverend person merely told him to "Get out." The Gerstein statements abound with claims to have witnessed the most gigantic mass executions (twelve thousand in a single day at Belzec) while the second memorandum describes a visit by Hitler to a concentration camp in Poland on June 6, 1942 which is known never to have taken place. Gerstein's fantastic exaggerations have done little but discredit the whole notion of mass extermination. Indeed, Evangelical Bishop Wilhelm Dibelius of Berlin denounced his memoranda as "Untrustworthy" (H. Rothfels, 'Augenzeugenbericht zu den Massenvergasungen' in Vierteljahrshefte fiir Zeitgeschichte, April 1953). It is an incredible fact however, that in spite of this denunciation, the German Government in 1955 issued an edition of the second Gerstein memorandum for distribution in German schools (Dokumentation zur Massenvergarung, Bonn, 1955). In it they stated that Dibelius placed his special confidence in Gerstein and that the memoranda were "valid beyond any doubt." This is a striking example of the way in which the baseless charge of genocide by the Nazis is perpetuated in Germany and directed especially to the youth.
The story of six million Jews exterminated
during the war was given final authority at the Nuremberg Trials by the
statement of Dr. Wilhelm Hoettl. He had been an assistant of Eichmann's but was
in fact a rather strange person in the service of American Intelligence who had
written several books under the pseudonym of Walter Hagen. Hoettl also worked
for Soviet espionage, collaborating with two Jewish emigrants from Vienna,
Perger and Verber, who acted as U.S. officers during the preliminary inquiries
of the Nuremberg Trials. It is remarkable that the testimony of this highly
dubious person Hoenl is said to constitute the only "proof' regarding the murder
of six million Jews. In his affidavit of November 26, 1945 he stated, not that
he knew but that Eichmann had "told him" in August 1944 in Budapest that a total
of 6 million Jews had been exterminated.· Needless to say, Eichmann never
corroborated this claim at his trial. Hoettl was working as an American spy
during the whole of the latter period of the war and it is therefore very odd
indeed that he never gave the slightest hint to the Americans of a policy to
murder Jews, even though he worked directly under Heydrich and Eichmann. ABSENCE OF EVIDENCE It should be emphasized straight away that there is not a single document in existence which proves that the Germans intended to, or carried out, the deliberate murder of Jews. In Poliakov and Wulf's Das Dritte Reich und die Juden: Dokumente und Aufsatze (Berlin, 1955), the most that they can assemble are statements extracted after the war from people like Hoettl, Ohlendorf and Wisliceny, the latter under torture in a Soviet prison. In the absence of any evidence therefore, Poliakov is forced to write: "The three or four people chiefly involved in drawing up the plan for total extermination are dead, and no documents survive." This seems very convenient. Quite obviously, both the plan and the "three or four" people are nothing but nebulous assumptions on the part of the writer, and are entirely unprovable. The documents which do survive, of course, make no mention at all of extermination, so that writers like Poliakov and Reitlinger again make the convenient assumption that such orders were generally "verbal". Though lacking any documentary proof they assume that a plan to murder Jews must have originated in 1941, coinciding with the attack on Russia. Phase one of me Plan is alleged to have involved the massacre of Soviet Jews, a claim we shall disprove later. The rest of the programme is supposed to have begun in March 1942, with the deportation and concentration of European Jews in the eastern camps of the Polish Government-General, such as the giant industrial complex at Auschwitz near Cracow. The fantastic and quite groundless assumption throughout is that transportation to the East, supervised by Eichmann's department, actually meant immediate extermination in ovens on arrival. According to Manvell and Frankl (Heinrich Himmler, London, 1965), the policy of genocide "seems to have been arrived at"after "secret discussions" between Hitler and Himmler (p. 118), though they fail to prove it. Reitlinger and Poliakov guess along similar "verbal" lines, adding that no one else was allowed to be present at these discussions, and no records were ever kept of them. This is the purest invention, for there is not a shred of evidence that even suggests such outlandish meetings took place. William Shirer, in his generally wild and irresponsible book The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, is similarly muted on the subject of documentary proof. He states weakly that Hitler's supposed order for the murder of Jews "apparently was never committed to paper - at least no copy of it has yet been unearthed. It was probably given verbally to Goering, Himmler and Heydrich, who passed it down..." (p. 1148).
A typical example of the kind of "proof'
quoted in support of the extermination legend is given by Manvell and Frankl.
They cite a memorandum of 31 July 1941 sent by Goering to Heydrich (who headed
the Reich Security Head Office and was Himmler's deputy). Significantly the
memorandum begins: "Supplementing the task that was assigned to you on 24
January 1939, to solve the Jewish problem by means of emigration and evacuation
in the best possible way according to present conditions... The supplementary
task assigned in the memorandum is a '"total solution (Gesamtlosung) of the
Jewish question within the area of German influence in Europe," which the
authors admit means concentration in the East, and it requests preparations for
the "organisational, financial and material matters" involved. The memorandum
then requests a future plan for the "desired final solution" (Endlosung), which
clearly refers to the ideal and ultimate scheme of emigration and evacuation
mentioned at the beginning of the directive. No mention whatever is made of
murdering people but Manvell and Frankl assure us that this is what .the
memorandum is really about. Again, of course, the "true nature" of the final as
distinct from the total· solution "was made known to Heydrich by Goering
verbally" (ibid, p. 1l8). The convenience of these "verbal" directives issuing
back and forth is obvious. THE WANNSEE CONFERENCE The final details of the plan to exterminate Jews were supposed to have been made at a conference at Grosse Wannsee in Berlin on 20 January 1942, presided over by Heydrich (Poliakov, Das Dritte Reich und die Juden, p. 120$; Reitlinger, The Final Solution, p. 95~1. Officials of all German Ministries were present, and Miiller and Eichmann represented Gestapo Head Office. Reitlinger and Manvell and FranM consider fhe minutes of this conference to be their trump card in proving the existence of a genocide plan, but the truth is that no such plan was even mentioned, and what is more, they freely admit this. Manvell and Frankl explain it away rather lamely by saying that "The minutes are shrouded in the form of officialdom that cloaks the real significance of the words and terminology that are used" (The Incomparable Crime, London, 1967, p. 46), which really means that they intend to interpret them in their own way. What Heydrich actually said was that, as in the memorandum quoted above, he had been commissioned by Goering to arrange a solution to the Jewish problem. He reviewed the history of Jewish emigration, stated that the war had rendered the Madagascar project impractical, and continued: "The emigration programme has been replaced now by the evacuation of Jews to the east as a further possible solution, in accordance with the previous authorization of the Fiihrer." Here, he explained, their labour was to be utilized. All this is supposed to be deeply sinister, and pregnant with the hidden meaning that the Jews were to be exterminated, though Prof. Paul Rassinier, a Frenchman interned at Buchenwald who has done sterling work in refuting the myth of the Six Million, explains that it means precisely what it says, i.e. the concentration of the Jews for labour in the immense eastern ghetto of the Polish Government-General. "There they were to wait until the end of the war, for the re-opening of international discussions which would decide their future. This decision was finally reached at the inter-ministerial Berlin-Wannsee conference..." (Rassinier, Le Ve'ritable Procds Eichmann, p. 20).
Manvell and Frankl however remain undaunted
by the complete lack of reference to extermination. At the Wannsee conference,
they write, "Direct references to killing were avoided, Heydrich favouring the
term "Arbeitseinsatz im Osten" (Labour assignment in the East) (Heinrich Himmler).
Why we should not accept 'labour assignment in the East' to mean 'labour
assignment in the East' is not explained. According to Reitlinger and others,
innumerable directives actually specifying extermination then passed between
Himmler, Heydrich, Eichmann and commandant Hoess in the subsequent months of
1942, but of course "none have survived." TWISTED WORDS AND GROUNDLESS ASSUMPTIONS The complete lack of documentary evidence to support the existence of an extermination plan has led to the habit of re-interpreting the documents that do survive. For example, it is held that a document concerning deportation is not about deportation at all, but a cunning way of talking about extermination. Manvell and Frankl state that "various terms were used to camouflage genocide. These included "Aussiedlung" (resettlement) and "Abbefiirderung" (removal, ibid. p. 265). Thus, as we have seen already, words are no longer assumed to mean what they say if they prove too inconvenient.This kind of thing is taken to the most incredible extremes, such as Manvell and Frankl's interpretation of Heydrich's directive for labour assignment in the East. Another example is a reference to Himmler's order for sending deportees to the East, "that is, having them killed" (ibid. p. 251). Reitlinger, equally at a loss for evidence, does exactly the same, declaring that from the "circumlocutionary'' words of the Wannsee conference it is obvious that "the slow murder of an entire race was intended" (ibid. p. 98). A review of the documentary situation is important because it reveals the edifice of guesswork and baseless assumptions upon which the extermination legend is built. The Germans had an extraordinary propensity for recording everything on paper in the most careful detail, yet among the thousands of captured documents of the S.D. and Gestapo, the records of the Reich Security Head Office, the files of Himmler's headquarters and Hitler's own war directives there is not a single order for the extermination of Jews or anyone else. It will be seen later that this has, in fact, been admitted by the World Centre of Contemporary Jewish Documentation at TelAviv. Attempts to find "veiled allusions" to genocide in speeches like that of Himmler's to his S.S. Obergruppenfiihrers at Posen in 1943 are likewise quite hopeless. Nuremberg statements extracted after the war, invariably under duress, are examined in the following chapter.
Chapter V
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 vials, which as Field Marshal Montgomery said, made it a crime to lose a war, the reader is referred to the works cited below, and particularly to the out-standing book Advance to Barbarism Nelson, 1953) by the distinguished English lawyer F.J.P. Veale. From the very outset the Nuremberg Trials proceeded on the basis of gross statistical errors. In his speech of indictment on November 20, 1945, Mr. Sidney Alderman declared that there had been 9,600,000 Jews living in German occupied Europe. Our earlier study has shown this figure to be wildly inaccurate. It is arrived at (a) by completely ignoring all Jewish emigration between 1933 and 1945 and (b) by adding all the Jews of Russia, including the two million or more who were never in German occupied territory. The same inflated figure, slightly enlarged to 9,800,000, was produced again at the Eichmann Trial in Israel by Prof. Shalom Baron. The alleged Six
Million victims first appeared as the foundation for the prosecution at
Nuremberg and after some dalliance with ten million or more by the Press at the
time, it eventually gained international popularity and acceptance. It is very
significant however that, although this outlandish figure was able to win
credence in the reckless atmosphere of recrimination in 1945, it had become no
longer tenable by 1961, at the Eichmann Trial. The Jerusalem court studiously
avoided mentioning the figure of Six Million and the charge drawn up by Mr.
Gideon Haussner simply said "some" millions. LEGAL PRINCIPLES IGNORED Should anyone be misled into believing that the extermination of the Jews was "proved" at Nuremberg by "evidence" he should consider the nature of the Trials themselves, based as they were on a total disregard of sound legal principles of any kind. The victors were putting on trial the vanquished. (Among the judges of course were the Russians, whose numberless crimes included the massacre of 15,000 Polish officers, a proportion of whose bodies were discovered by the Germans at Katyn Forest, near Smolensk. The Soviet Prosecutor attempted to blame this slaughter on the German defendants). At Nuremberg, ex post facto legislation was created, whereby men were tried for 'crimes' which were only declared crimes after they had been (allegedly) committed. Hitherto it had been the most basic legal principle that a person could only be convicted for infringing a law that was in force at the time of the infringement. "Nuila Poena Sine Legi." The Rules of Evidence, developed by British jurisprudence over the centuries in order to arrive at the truth of a charge with as much certainty as possible, were entirely disregarded at Nuremberg. It was decreed that "the Tribunal should not be bound by technical rules of evidence" but could admit "any evidence which it deemed to have probative value," that is, would support a conviction. In 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 the defendants personally were not permitted to cross examine prosecution witnesses. A somewhat similar situation prevailed at the trial of Adolf Eichmann, when it was announced that Eichmann's defence lawyer could be cancelled at any time "if an intolerable situation should arise" which presumably meant if his lawyer started to prove his innocence. The real background of the Nuremberg Trials was exposed by the American Judge, Justice Wenerstrum, President of one of the 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 Tiials (cf Mark Lautem, Das Letzte Wort iiber Nurnberg, p. 56). Points 3 - 8 are as follows.
Concerning Point 6, that ninety percent of the Nuremberg Court consisted of people biased on racial or political grounds, this was a fact confirmed by others present. According to Earl Carrol, an American lawyer, sixty per cent of the staff of the Public Prosecutor's Office were German Jews who had left Germany after the promulgation of Hitler's Race Laws. He observed that not even ten percent of the Americans employed at the Nuremberg courts were actually Americans by birth. The chief of the Public Prosecutor's Office, who worked behind General Taylor, was Robert M. Kempner, a German-Jewish emigrant. He was assisted by Morris Amchan. Mark Lautern, who observed the Trials, writes in his book: "They have all arrived: the Solomons, the Schlossbergers and the Rabinovitches, members of the Public Prosecutor's staff..." (ibid. p. 68). It is obvious from these
facts that the fundamental legal principle: that no man can sit in judgement on
his own case, was abandoned altogether. Worse, the majority of witnesses were
also Jews, when only a minority of the concentration camp inmates had been
Jewish. According to Prof. Maurice Bardache, who was also an observer at the
Trials, the only concern of these witnesses was not to show their hatred too
openly, and to try and give an impression of objectivity (Nuremberg ou la Terre
Promise, Paris, 1948, p. 149). 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 20, 1949, drew attention to the following cases of torture to secure such confessions. In the prison of 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 Peiper, the Leibstandarte was convicted as a 'guilty organization'. In dealing with these cases, Senator McCarthy told the Press: "I have heard evidence and read documenrary proofs to the effect that the accused persons were beaten up, maltreated and physically tortured by methods which could only be conceived in sick brains. They were subjected to mock trials and pretended executions, they were told their families would be deprived of their ration cards. All these things were carried out with the approval of the Public Prosecutor in order to secure the psychological atmosphere necessary for the extortion of the required confessions. If the United States lets such acts committed by a few people go unpunished, then the whole world can rightly criticise us severely and forever doubt the correctness of our motives and our moral integrity. " The methods of intimidation described were repeated during trials at Frankfurt-am-Main and at Dachau, and large numbers of Germans were convicted for atrocities on the basis of their admissions. The American Judge Edward L. van Roden, one of the three members of the Simpson Army Commission which was subsequently appointed to investigate the methods of justice at the Dachau trials, revealed the methods by which these admissions were secured in the Washington Daily Navs, January 9, 1949. His account also appeared in the British newspaper, the Sunday Pictorial, January 23, 1949. The methods he described were: "Posturing as priests to hear confessions and give absolution; torture with burning matches driven under the prisoners finger-nails; knocking out of teeth and breaking jaws; solitary confinement and near starvation rations." Van Roden explained: "The statements which were admitted as evidence were obtained from men who had first been kept in solitary confinement for three, four and five months... "The investigators would put a black hood over the accused's head and then punch him in the face with brass knuckles, kick him and beat him with rubber hoses ... All but two of the Germans, in the 139 cases we investigated, had been kicked in the testicles beyond repair. This was standard operating procedure with our American investigators." The "American" investigators responsible (and who later functioned as the prosecution in the trials) were: Lt.-Col. Burton E Ellis (chief of the War Crimes Committee) and his assistants, Capt. Raphael Shumacker, Lt. Roberf E. Byme, Lt. William R. Perl, Mr. Morris Ellswitz, Mr. Harry Thon and Mr. Kirschbaum. The legal adviser of the court was Col. A. H. Rosenfeld. The reader will immediately appreciate from their names that the majority of these people were "biased on racial grounds'' in the words of Justice Wenersturm - that is, were Jewish, and therefore should never have been involved in any such investigation. Despite the fact that
"confessions" pertaining to the extermination of the Jews were extracted under
these conditions, Nuremberg statements are still regarded as conclusive evidence
for the Six Million by writers like Reitlinger and others, and the illusion is
maintained that the Trials were both impartial and impeccably fair. When General
Taylor, the Chief Public Prosecutor, was asked where he had obtained the figure
of the Six Million, he replied that it was based on the confession of S.S.
General Otto Ohlendorf. He, too, was tortured and his case is examined below.
But as far as such 'confessions' in general are concerned, we can do no better
than quote the British Sunday Pictorial when reviewing the report of Judge van
Roden: "Strong men were reduced to broken wrecks ready to mumble any admission
demanded by their prosecutors. THE WISLICENY STATEMENT At this point, let us turn to some of'the Nuremberg documents themselves. The document quoted most frequently in support of the legend of the Six Million, and which figures largely in Poliakov and Wulf's Das Dritte Reich und die Juden: Dokumente und Aufsatze, is the statement of S.S. Captain Dieter Wisliceny, an assistant in Adolf Eichmann's office and later the Gestapo chief in Slovakia. It was obtained under conditions even more extreme than those described above, for Wisliceny fell into the hands of Czech Communists and was "interrogated" at the Soviet controlled Bratislava Prison in November, 1946. Subjected to torture, Wisliceny was reduced to a nervous wreck and became addicted to uncontrollable fits of sobbing for hours on end prior to his execution. Although the conditions under which his statement was obtained empty it entirely of all plausibility, Poliakov prefers to ignore this and merely writes: "In prison he wrote several memoirs that contain information of great interest" (Harvest of Hate, p. 3). These memoirs include
some genuine statements of fact to provide authenticity, such as that Himmler
was an enthusiastic advocate of Jewish emigration and that the emigration of
Jews from Europe continued throughout the war, but in general they are typical
of the Communist-style 'confession' produced at Soviet show-trials. Frequent
reference is made to exterminating Jews and a flagrant attempt is made to
implicate as many S.S. leaders as possible. Factual errors are also common,
notably the statement that the war with Poland added more than 3 million Jews to
the German-occupied territory, which we have disproved above. THE CASE OF THE EINSATZGRUPPEN The Wisliceny statement deals at some length with the activities of the Einsatzgruppen or Action Groups used in the Russian campaign. These must merit a detailed consideration in a survey of Nuremberg because the picture presented of them at the Trials represents a kind of "Six Million'' in miniature, i.e. has been proved since to be the most enormous exaggeration and falsification. The Einsatzgruppen were four special units drawn from the Gestapo and the S.D. (S.S. Security Service) whose task was to wipe out partisans and Communist commissars in the wake of the advancing German armies in Russia. As early as 1939, there had been 34,000 of these political commissars attached to the Red Army. The activities of the Einsatzgruppen were the particular concern of the Soviet Prosecutor Rudenko at the Nuremberg Trials. The 1947 indictment of the four groups alleged that in the course of their operations they had killed not less than one million Jews in Russia merely because they were Jews. These allegations have since been elaborated; it is now claimed that the murder of Soviet Jews by the Einsatzgruppen constituted Phase One in the plan to exterminate the Jews, Phase Two being the transportation of European Jews to Poland. Reitlinger admits that the original term "final solution" referred to emigration and had nothing to do with the liquidation of Jews, but he then claims that an extermination policy began at the time of the invasion of Russia in 1941. He considers Hitler's order of July 1941 for the liquidation of the Communist commissars, and he concludes that this was accompanied by a verbal order from Hitler for the Einsatzgruppen to liquidate all Soviet Jews (Die 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 Marshal 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
& Frankl, ibid. p.115). This. plainly refers to eliminating Communism,
especially the political commissars whose specific task was Communist
indoctrination. THE OHLENDORF TRIAL
In his affidavit of November 5, 1945, Ohlendorf 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 hdd been extracted from him under torture. In his main speech before the Tribunal, Ohlendorf took the opportunity to denounce Philip Auerbach, the Jewish attorney-general of the Bavarian State Office for Restitution, who at that time was claiming compensation for "eleven million Jews" who had suffered in German concentration camps. Ohlendorf dismissed this ridiculous claim, stating that "not the minutest part" of the people for whom Auerbach was demanding compensation had even seen a concentration camp. Ohlendorf lived long enough to see Auerbach convicted for embezzlement and fraud (forging documents purporting to show huge payments of compensation to non-existent people) before his own execution finally took place in 1951. Ohlendorf explained to the Tribunal that his units often had to prevent massacres of Jews organised by anti-Semitic Ukrainians behind the German front and he denied that the Einsatzgruppen as a whole had inflicted even one quarter of the casualties claimed by the prosecution. He insisted that the illegal partisan warfare in Russia, which he had to combat, had taken a far higher toll of lives from the regular German Army - an assertion confirmed by the Soviet Government, which boasted of 500,000 German troops killed by partisans. In fact, Franz Stahlecker, commander of Einsatzgruppe A in the Baltic region and White Russia, was himself killed by partisans in 1942. The English lawyer F J
P Veale, in dealing with the Action Groups, explains that in the fighting on the
Russian front no distinction could be properly drawn between partisans and the
civilian population, because any Russian civilian who maintained his civilian
status instead of acting as a terrorist was liable to be executed by his
countrymen as a traitor. Veale says of the Action Groups: "There is no question
that their orders were to combat terror by terror" and he finds it strange that
atrocities committed by the partisans in the struggle were regarded as blameless
simply because they turned out to be on the winning side (ibid. p. 225).
Ohlendorf took the same view, and in a bitter appeal written before his
execution, he accused the Allies of hypocrisy in holding the Germans to account
by conventional laws of warfare while fighting a savage Soviet enemy who did not
respect those laws. ACTION GROUP EXECUTIONS DISTORTED The Soviet charge that the Action Groups had wantonly exterminated a million Jews during their operations has been shown subsequently to be a massive falsification. ·In fact, there had never been the slightest statistical basis for the figure. In this connection, Poliakov and Wulf cite the statement of Wilhelm Hoettl, the dubious American spy, double agent and former assistant of Eichmann. Hoettl, it will be remembered, claimed that Eichmann had "told him" that six million Jews had been exterminated - and he added that two million of these had been killed by the Einsatzgruppen. This absurd figure went beyond even the wildest estimates of Soviet Prosecutor Rudenko, and it was not given any credence by the American Tribunal which tried and condemned Ohlendorf. The real number of casualties - for which the Action Groups were responsible has since been revealed in the scholarly work Manstein his Campaigns and his Trial (London, 1951) by the able English lawyer R. T. Paget. Ohlendorf had been under Manstein's nominal command. Paget's conclusion is that the Nuremberg Court, in accepting the figures of the Soviet prosecution, exaggerated the number of casualties by more than 1000 per cent and that they distorted even more the situations in which these casualties were inflicted. (These horrific distortions are the subject of six pages of Shirer's 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 tiial itself, typical in so many ways of
Nuremberg proceedings. Principally because Action Group D was attached to
Manstein's command (though it was responsible solely to Himmler), the sixty-two
year old, invalid Field Marshal, considered by most authorities to be the most
brilliant German general of the war, was subjected to the shameful indignity of
a "war-crimes" trial. Of the 17 charges, 15 were brought by the Communist
Russian Government and two by the Communist Polish Government. Only one witness
was called to give evidence at this trial and he proved so unsatisfactory that
the prosecution withdrew his evidence. Reliance was placed instead on 800
hearsay documents which were accepted by the court without any proof of their
authenticity or authorship. The prosecution introduced written affidavits by
Ohlendorf and other S.S. leaders, but since these men were still alive,
Manstein's defence lawyer, Reginald Pager K.C. demanded their appearance in the
witness-box. This was refused by the American authorities and Paget declared
that this refusal was due to fear lest the condemned men revealed what methods
had been used to induce them to sign their affidavits. Manstein was eventually
acquitted on eight of the charges, including the two Polish ones which, as Pager
said, "were so flagrantly bogus that one was left wondering why they had been
presented at all." THE OSWALD POHL TRIAL The case of the Action Groups is a revealing insight into the methods of the Nuremberg Trials and the fabrication of the Myth of the Six Million. Another is the trial of Oswald Pohl in 1948, which is of great importance as it bears directly on the administration of the concentration camp system. Pohl had been the chief disbursing officer of the German Navy until 1934, when Himmler requested his transfer to the S.S. For eleven years he was the principal administrative chief of the entire S.S, in his position as head of the S.S. Economy and Administration Office, which after 1941 was concerned with the industrial productivity of the concentration camp system. A peak point of hypocrisy was reached at the trial when the prosecution said to Pohl that "had Germany rested content with the exclusion of Jews from her own territory, with denying them German citizenship, with excluding them from public office, or any like domestic regulation, no other nation could have been heard to complain." The truth is that Germany was bombarded with insults and economic sanctions for doing precisely these things, and her internal measures against the Jews were certainly a major cause of the declaration of war against Germany by the democracies. Oswald Pohl was an extremely sensitive and intellectual individual who was reduced to a broken man in the course of his trial. As Senator McCarthy pointed out, Pohl had signed some incriminating statements after being subjected to severe torture, including a bogus admission that he had seen a gas chamber at Auschwitz in the summer of 1944. The prosecution strenuously pressed this charge, but Pohl successfully repudiated it. The aim of the prosecution was to depict this dejected man as a veritable fiend in human shape, an impression hopelessly at variance with the testimony of those who knew him. Such testimony was given by Heinrich Hoepker, an anti-Nazi friend of Pohl's wife who came into frequent contact with him during the period 1942-45. Hoepker noted that Pohl was essentially a serene and mild-mannered person. During a visit to Pohl in the spring of 1944, Hoepker was brought into contact with concentration camp inmates who were working on a local project outside the camp area. He noted that the prisoners worked in a leisurely manner and relaxed atmosphere without any pressure from their guards. Hoepker declared that Pohl did not hold an emotional attitude to the Jews, and did not object to his wife entertaining her Jewish friend Annemarie Jacques at their home. By the beginning of 1945, Hoepker was fully convinced that the administrator of the concentration camps was a humane, conscientious and dedicated servant of his 'task, and he was astonished when he heard late in 1945 of the accusations being made against Pohl and his colleagues. Frau Pohl noted that her husband retained his serenity in the face of adversity until March 1945, when he visited the camp at Bergen-Belsen at the time of the typhus epidemic there. Hitherto the camp had been a model of cleanliness and order, but the chaotic conditions at the close of the war had reduced it to a state of extreme hardship. Pohl, who was unable to alleviate conditions there because of the desperate pass which the war had reached by that time, was deeply affected by the experience and, according to his wife, never regained his former state of composure. Dr. Alfred Seidl, the highly respected lawyer who acted as principal defence counsel at the Nuremberg Trials, went to work passionately to secure the acquittal of Pohl. Seidl had been a personal friend of the accused for many years, and was thoroughly convinced of his innocence with respect to the fraudulent charge of planned genocide against the Jews. The Allied judgement which condemned Pohl did not prompt Seidl to change his opinion in the slightest. He declared that the prosecution had failed to produce, a single piece of valid evidence against him. One of the most eloquent defences of Oswald Pohl was made by S.S. Lieutenant Colonel Kurt Schmidt-Klevenow, a legal officer in the S.S.Economy and Administration Office, in his affidavit of 8th August, 1947. Schmidt-Klevencrv
pointed out that Pohl had given his fullest support to Judge Konrad Morgen of
the Reich Criminal Police Office, whose job was to investigate irregularities at
the concentration camps. Later on we shall refer to a case in which Pohl was in
favour of the death penalty for camp commandant Koch, who was accused by an S.S.
court of misconduct. Schmidt Klevenow explained that Pohl was instrumental in
arranging for local police chiefs to share in the jurisdiction of concentration
camps, and took personal initiative in securing strict discipline on the part of
camp personnel. In short, the evidence given at the Pohl trial shows that the
proceedings involved nothing less than the deliberate defamation of a man's
character in order to support the propaganda legend of genocide against the Jews
in the concentration camps he administered. FALSIFIED EVIDENCE AND FRAUDULENT AFFIDAVITS Spurious testimony at Nuremberg which included extravagant statements in support of the myth of the Six Million was invariably given by former German officers because of pressure, either severe torture as in the cases cited previously, or the assurance of leniency for themselves if they supplied the required statements. An example of the latter was the testimony of S.S. General Erich 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 & Franki, ibid. p. 117). Another brazen falsehood was Bach Zelewski's accusation that on August 31, 1942 Himmler personally witnessed the execution of one hundred Jews by an Einsatz detachment at Minsk, causing him to nearly faint. It is known that on this date Himmler was in conference at his field headquarters at Zhitomir in the Ukraine (cf. K Vowinckel, Die Wehrmacht im Kampf, vol. 4, p. 275). Much is made of Bach-Zelewski's evidence in all the books on Himmler, especially Willi Frischauer's Himmler: Evil Genius of the Third Reich (London, 1953, p. 148 ff). However, in April 1959, Bach-Zelewski is reported to have repudiated his Nuremberg testimony before a West German court. He admitted that his earlier statements had not the slightest foundation in fact, and that he had made them for the sake of expediency and his own survival. The German court, after careful deliberation, accepted his retraction. Needless to say, what Veale calls the "Iron Curtain of Discreet Silence" descended immediately over these events. They have had no influence whatever on the books which propagate the myth of the Six Million, and Bach Zelewski's testimony on Himmler is still taken at its face value. The truth concerning Himmler is provided ironically by an anti-Nazi - Felix Kersten, his physician and masseur. Because Kersten was opposed to the regime, he tends to support the legend that the internment of Jews meant their extermination. But from his close personal knowledge of Himmler he cannot help but tell the truth concerning him, and in his Memoirs 1940 - 1945 ( London, 1956, p. 119ff ) he states that Himmler did not advocate liquidating the Jews but favoured their emigration overseas. Neither does Kersten implicate Hitler. However, the credibility of his anti-Nazi narrative is completely shattered when, in search of an alternative villain, he declares that Dr. Goebbels was the real advocate of "extermination". This nonsensical allegation is amply disproved by the fact that Goebbels was still concerned with the Madagascar project even after it had been temporarily shelved by the German Foreign Office, as we showed earlier, So much for the false evidence at Nuremberg. Reference has also been made to the thousands of fraudulent "written affidavits" which were accepted by the Nllremberg 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 inrroduced as "evidence"so long as they bore the required signature. A typical prosecution
affidavit contested by the defence in the Concentration Camp Trial of 1947 was
that of Alois Hoellriegel, a member of the camp personnel at Mauthausen in
Austria. This affidavit, which the defence proved was fabricated during
Hoellriegel's torture, had already been used to secure the conviction of S.S.
General Ernst Kaltenbrunner in 1946. It claimed that a mass gassing operation
had taken place at Mauthausen and that Hoellriegel had witnessed Kaltenbrunner
(the highest S.S. Leader in the Reich excepting Himmler) actually taking part in
it. By the time of the Concentration Camp Trial (Pohl's trial) a year later, it
had become impossible to sustain this piece of nonsense when it was produced in
court again. The defence not only demonstrated that the affidavit was falsified
but showed that all deaths at Mauthausen were systematically checked by the
local police authorities. They were also entered on a camp register and
particular embarrassment was caused to the prosecution when the Mauthausen
register, one of the few that survived, was produced in evidence. The defence
also obtained numerous affidavits from former inmates of Mauthausen (a prison
camp chiefly for criminals) testifying to humane and orderly conditions there. ALLIED ACCUSATIONS DISBELIEVED There is no more eloquent testimony to the tragedy and tyranny of Nuremberg than the pathetic astonishment or outraged disbelief of the accused persons themselves at the grotesque charges made against them. Such is reflected in the affidavit of S.S. Major General Heinz Fanslau, who visited most of the German concentration camps during the last years of the war. Although a frontline soldier of the Waffen S.S., Fanslau had taken a great interest in concentration camp conditions, and he was selected as a prime target by the Allies for the charge of conspiracy to annihilate the Jews.It was argued, on the basis of his many contacts, that he must have been fully involved. When it was first rumoured that he would be tried and convicted, hundreds of affidavits were produced on his behalf by camp inmates he had visited. When he read the full scope of the indictment against the concentration camp personnel in supplementary Nuremberg Trial No. 4 on May 6, 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 At one point during the trial, Goering declared rather cogently that the first time he had heard of it "was right here in Nuremberg" (Shirer, ibid. p. 1147). The Jewish writers Poliakov, Reitlinger and Manvell and Frankl all attempt to implicate Goering in this supposed extermination, but Charles Bewley in his work Hermann Goering (Goettingen, 1956) shows that not the slightest evidence was found at Nuremberg to substantiate this charge. Hans Fritzsche pondered on the whole question during the trials and he concluded that there had certainly been no thorough investigation of these monstrous charges. Fritzsche, who was acquitted, was an associate of Goebbels and a skilled propagandist. He recognised that the alleged massacre of the Jews was the main point of the indictment against all defendants. Kaltenbrunner, who succeeded Heydrich as chief of the Reich Security Head Office and was the main defendant for the S.S. due to the death of Himmler, was no more convinced of the genocide charges than was Goering. He confided to Fritzsche that the prosecution was scoring apparent successes because of their technique of coercing witnesses and suppressing evidence, which was precisely the accusation of Judges Wenersturm and van Roden after the American trials at Nuremberg. This is the end of Part One.
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force
of decadence in Germany's cultural life. This was held to be particularly
unhealthy since, during the Weimar period, the Jews had risen to a position of
remarkable strength and influence in the nation, particularly in law, finance
and the mass media, even though they constituted only one percent of the
population. The fact that Karl Marx was a Jew and that Jews such as Rosa
Luxembourg and Karl Liebknecht were disproportionately prominent in the
leadership of communist movements in Germany also tended to convince the Nazis
of the powerful internationalist and Communist tendencies of the Jewish people.
With the coming of the war the situation regarding the Jews altered drastically.
It is not widely known that world Jewry declared itself to be a belligerent
party in the Second World War, and there was therefore ample basis under
international law for the Germans to intern the Jewish population as a hostile
force. On September 5, 1959 Chaim Weizmann, the principal Zionist leader, had
declared war against Germany on behalf of the world's Jews, stating that "the
Jews stand by Great Bitain and will fight on the side of the democracies... The
Jewish Agency is ready to enter into immediate arrangements for utilizing Jewish
manpower, technical ability, resources etc..." (Javish Chronicle, September 8,
1939). 
The
most revealing trial in the "Einsatzgruppen Case" at Nuremberg was that of S.S.
General Otto Ohlendorf, the chief of the S.D. who commanded Einsatzgruppe D in
the Ukraine, attached to Field Marshal von Manstein's Eleventh Army. During the
last phase of the war he was employed as a foreign trade expert in the Ministry
of Economics. 
atrocity propaganda, failed to be convinced by it. Hans Fritzsche, on trial as
the highest functionary of Goebbels' Ministry, relates that Goering, even after
hearing the Ohlendorf affidavit on the Einsatzgruppen and the Hoess testimony on
Auschwitz, remained convinced that the extermination of Jews was entirely
propaganda fiction (The Sword in the Scales, London, 1953, p. 145). 