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  Did Six Million Really Die?...The Truth

(Part3)
Note:  Some spelling errors remain due to scanner error.
Part One
Part Two
 

Chapter VIII

THE NATURE AND CONDITION OF WAR-TIME CONCENTRATION CAMPS

    In his book Adolf Hitler (London, 1973) Colin Cross brought more intelligence than is usual to many problems of this period, observed astutely that "The shuffling of millions of Jews around Europe and murdering them, in a time of desperate war emergency, was useless from any rational point of view" (p. 307). Quite so, and at this point we may well question the likelihood of this irrationalism and whether it was even possible. Is it likely, that, at the height of the war, when the Germans were fighting a desperate battle for survival on two fronts, they would have conveyed millions of Jews for miles to supposedly elaborate and costly slaughter houses?

    To have conveyed three or four million Jews to Auschwitz alone (even supposing that such an inflated number existed in Europe, which it did not) would have placed an insuperable burden upon German transportation facilities which were already strained to the limit 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 labour they supplied. In fact, of the 3 million Jews living in Europe, it is certain that no more than two million were ever interned at one time, and it is probable that the number was much closer to 1,500,000. We shall see later, in the Report of the International Committee of the Red Cross, that whole Jewish populations such as that of Slovakia avoided detention in camps, while others were placed in community ghettos like Theresienstadt. More-over, from western Europe deportations were far fewer. The estimate of Reitlinger that only about 50,000 French Jews from a total population of 320,000 were deported and interned has been noted already.

    The question must also be asked as to whether it could have been physically possible to destroy the millions of Jews that are alleged. Had the Germans enough time for it? Is it likely that they would have cremated people by the million when they were so short of manpower and required all prisoners of war for purposes of war production? Would it have been possible to destroy and remove all trace of a million people in six months? Could such enormous gatherings of Jews and executions on such a vast scale have been kept secret? These are the kind of questions that the critical, thinking person should ask. And he will soon discover that not only the statistical and documentary evidence given here, but simple logistics combine to discredit the legend of the six million.

    Although it was impossible for millions to have been murdered in them, the nature and conditions of Germany's concentration camps have been vastly exaggerated to make the claim plausible. Shirer, in a typically reckless passage, states that "All of the thirty-odd principal Nazi concentration camps were death camps" (ibid. p. 1150). This is totally untrue and is not even accepted now by the principal propagators of the extermination legend. Shirer also quotes Eugen Kogon's The Theory and Practice of Hell(N.Y. 1950, p. 227) which puts the total number of deaths in all of them at the ridiculous figure of 7,125,000, though Shirer admits in a footnote that this is "undoubtedly too high.

'DEATH CAMPS' BEHIND THE IRON CURTAIN

    It is true that in 1945, Allied propaganda did claim that all the concentration camps, particularly those in Germany itself, were "death camps," but not for long. On this question the American historian Prof. 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 British and American occupation forces in Germany, while admitting that many inmates had died of disease and starvation in the final months of the war, had found no evidence after all of "gas chambers".

    As a result, eastern camps in the Russian zone of occupation such as Auschwitz and Treblinka gradually came to the fore as horrific centres of extermination (though no one was permitted to see them), and this tendency has lasted almost 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 it was difficult to verify such charges. The Communists claimed that four million people died at Auschwitz in gigantic gas chambers accommodating 2,000 people - and no one could argue to the contrary.

    What is the truth about so-called "gas chambers"? Stephen F Pinter, who served as a lawyer for the United States War Department in the occupation forces in Germany and Austria far six years after the war, made the following statement in the widely read Catholic magazine Our Sunday Visitor, June 14, 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 sightseers there and erroneously described as a gas chamber was a crematory. Nor was there a gas chamber in any of the other concentration camps in Germany. We were told that there was a gas chamber at Auschwitz; but since that was in the Russian zone of occupation, we were not permitted to investigate since the Russians would not allow it. From what I was able to determine during six postwar years in Germany and Austria, there were a number of Jews killed, but the figure of a million was certainly never reached. I interviewed thousands of Jews, former inmates of concentration camps in Germany and Austria, and consider myself as well qualified as any man on this subject.

    This tells a very different story from the customary propaganda. Pinter, of course, is very astute on the question of the crematory being represented as a gas chamber. This is a frequent ploy because no such thing as a gas chamber has ever been shown to exist in these camps, hence the deliberately misleading term "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 been drastically revised. In 1946, a memorial plaque was unveiled at Dachau by Philip Auerbach, the Jewish State-Secretary in the Bavarian Government who was convicted for embezzling money which he claimed as compensation for non-existent 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 percent 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 quotes Reitlinger's latest estimate, but he fails to reconcile this with his earlier statement regarding half of that figure - 300,000 Hungarian Jews who were supposedly "done to death in forty-six days". This is 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 of the ICRC, examined below, demonstrates conclusively that throughout the war the camps were well administered. The working inmates received a daily ration even throughout 1943 and 1944 of not less than 2,750 calories, which was more than double the average civilian ration in occupied Germany in the years after 1945.

    The internees were under regular medical care and those who became seriously ill were transferred to hospital. All internees, unlike those in Soviet camps, could receive parcels of food, clothing and pharmaceutical supplies from the Special Relief Division of the Red Cross.

   The Office of the Public Prosecutor conducted thorough investigations into each case of criminal arrest and those found innocent were released; those found guilty, as well as those deportees convicted of major crimes within the camp, were sentenced by military courts and executed. In the Federal Archives of Koblenz there is a directive of January 1943 from Himmler regarding such executions, stressing that "no brutality is to be allowed" (Manvell & 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 was invited.

    It is significant that Oswald Pohl, the administrator of the concentration camp system who was dealt with so harshly at Nuremberg, was in favour of the death penalty for Koch. In fact, the S.S. court did sentence Koch to death but he was given the option of serving on the Russian front. Before he could do this, however, Prince Waldeck the leader of the S.S. in the district, carried out his execution. This case is ample proof of the seriousness with which the S.S. regarded unnecessary brutality.

    Several S.S. court actions of this kind were conducted in the camps during the war to prevent excesses and more than 800 cases were investigated before 1945. Morgen testified at Nuremberg that he discussed confidentially with hundreds of inmates the prevailing conditions in the camps. He found few that were under-nourished except in the hospitals, and noted that the pace and achievement in compulsory labour by inmates was far lower than among German civilian workers.

   The evidence of Pinter and Cardinal Faulhaber has been shown to disprove the claims of extermination at Dachau and we have seen how the casualty figures of that camp have been continuously revised downwards. The camp at Dachau near Munich, in fact, may be taken as fairly typical of these places of internment. Compulsory labour in the factories and plants was the order of the day, but the Communist leader Ernst Ruff testified in his Nuremberg affidavit of April 18, 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 22, 1940 until April 29, 1945 also testified on March 21, 1946 that prisoners there received good trearment, and that the S.S. personnel at the camp were "well disciplined". Berta Schirotschin, who worked in the food service at Dachau throughout the war, testified that the working inmates, until the beginning of 1945 and despite increasing privation in Germany, received their customary second breakfast at 10 a.m, every morning.

    In general, hundreds of affidavits from Nuremberg testify to the humane conditions prevailing in concentration camps; but emphasis was invariably laid on those which reflected badly on the German administration and could be used for propaganda purposes. A study of the documents also reveals that Jewish witnesses who resented their deportation and internment in prison camps tended to greatly exaggerate the rigours of their condition, whereas other nationals interned for political reasons, such as those cited above, generally presented a more balanced picture. In many cases, prisoners such as Charlotte Bormann, whose experiences did not accord with the picture presented at Nuremberg, were not permitted to testify.
 

UNAVOIDABLE CHAOS

    The orderly situation prevailing in the German concentration camps slowly broke down in the last fearful months of 1945. The Red Cross Report of 1948 explains that the saturation bombing by the Allies paralysed the transport and communications system of the Reich. No food reached the camps and starvation claimed an increasing number of victims, both in prison camps and among the civilian population of Germany. This terrible situation was compounded in the camps both by great overcrowding and the consequent outbreak of typhus epidemics. Overcrowding occurred as a result of prisoners from the eastern camps such as Auschwitz being evacuated westward before the Russian advance; columns of exhausted people arrived at several German camps such as Belsen and Buchenwald which had themselves reached a state of great hardship.

    Belsen camp near Bremen was in an especially chaotic condition in these months and Himmler's physician, Felix Kersten, an anti-Nazi, explains that its unfortunate reputation as a "death camp" was due solely to the ferocity of the typhus epidemic which broke out there in March 1945 (Memoirs 1940-1945, London, 1956). Undoubtedly these fearful conditions cost several thousand lives, and it is these conditions that are portrayed in the photographs of emaciated human bengs and heaps of corpses which the propagandists delight in showing, claiming that they were victims of "extermination."

    A surprisingly honest appraisal of the situation at Belsen in 1945 appeared in Purnell's History of the Second World War (Vol. 7, No. 15) by Dr. Russell Barton, a consultant psychiatrist in upstate New York, who spent one month at the camp as a British 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 clear that the conditions of starvation and disease were unavoidable in the circumstances and that they occurred only during the months of 1945. "From discussions with prisoners it seemed that conditions in the camp were not too bad until late 1944. The huts were set among pine trees and each was provided with lavatories, wash basins, showers and stoves for heating.

    The cause of food shortage is also explained. "German medical officers told me that it had been increasingly difficult to transport food to the camp for some months. Anything that moved on the autobahns was likely to be bombed... I was surprised to find records, going back for two or three years, of large quantities of food cooked daily for distribution. At that time I became convinced, contrary to popular opinion, that there had never been a policy of deliberate starvation. This was confirmed by the large numbers of well-fed inmates. Why then were so many people suffering from 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 armoured cars toured the camp.

    Apart from the unavoidable deaths in these circumstances, Glyn Hughes estimated that about "1,000 were killed through the kindness of English soldiers giving them their own rations and chocolates." As a man who was at Belsen, Dr. Barton is obviously very much alive to the falsehoods of concentration camp mythology, and he concludes: "In trying to assess the causes of the ·conditions found in Belsen one must be alerted to the tremendous visual display, ripe for purposes of propaganda, that masses of starved corpses presented." To discuss such conditions "naively in terms of 'goodness' and 'badness' is to ignore the constituent factors..."
 

FAKE PHOTOGRAPHS 

  Not only were situations such as those at Belsen unscrupulously exploited for propaganda purposes, but this propaganda has also made use of entirely fake atrocity photographs and films. The extreme conditions at Belsen applied to very few camps indeed; the great majority escaped the worst difficulties and their inmates survived in good health. As a result, outright forgeries were used to exaggerate conditions of horror.

    A startling case of such forgery was revealed in the British Catholic Herald of October 29, 1948. It reported that in Cassel, where every adult German was compelled to see a film representing the "horrors" of Buchenwald, a doctor from Goettingen saw himself on the screen looking after the victims. But he had never been to Buchenwald. After an interval of bewilderment he realized that what he had seen was part of a film taken after the terrible air raid on Dresden by the Allies on 13 February, 1945 where the doctor had been working. The film in question was shown in Cassel on 19 October, 1948. After the air raid on Dresden, which killed a record 135,000 people, mostly refugee women and children, the bodies of the victims were piled and burned in heaps of 400 and 500 for several weeks. These were the scenes, purporting to be from Buchenwald, which the doctor had recognized.

    The forgery of war-time atrocity photographs is not new. For further information the reader is referred to Falsehood in Wartime (London, 1928) by Arthur Ponsonby MP, which exposes the faked photographs of German atrocities in the First World War. Ponsonby cites such fabrications as "The Corpse Factory" and "The Belgian Baby without Hands," which are strikingly reminiscent of the propaganda relating to Nazi 'atrocities'. F J P Veale explains in his book that the bogus "jar of human soap" solemnly introduced by the Soviet prosecution at Nuremberg was a deliberate jibe at the famous British "Corpse Factory" myth, in which the ghoulish Germans were supposed to have obtained various commodities from processing corpses (Times 17 April 1917, p.5; Veale, ibid, p. 192; The Penguin Book of Lies, Kerr, London, 1990, p. 301). This accusation was one for which the British Government apologized after 1918.

    It received new life after 1945 in the tale of lamp shades of human skin, which was certainly as fraudulent as the Soviet "human soap". In fact, from Manvell and Frankl we have the grudging admission that the lamp shade evidence at the Buchenwald Trial "later appeared to be dubious" (The Incomparable Crime,. p 84).

  It was given by a certain Andreas Pfaffenberger in a "written affidavit" of the kind discussed earlier, but in 1948 General Lucius Clay admitted that the affidavits used in the trial appeared after more thorough investigation to have been mostly 'hearsay'.

    An excellent work on the fake atrocity photographs pertaining to the Myth of the Six Million is Udo Walendy's Forged War Crimes Malign the German Nation (Vlotho/Weser, 1989; Hull 1996), and from the numerous examples given we illustrate one overleaf. The origin of the first photograph is unknown, but the second is a photomontage. Close examination reveals immediately that the standing figures have been taken from the first photograph and a heap of corpses superimposed in front of them. The fence has been removed and an entirely new horror "photograph" created. This blatant forgery appears on page 341 of R Schnabel's book on the S.S., Macht ohne Moral: Eine Dokumentation uber die SS (Frankfurt, 1957), with the caption "Mauthausen". Walendy has cited eighteen other examples of forgery in Schnabel's book. The same photograph appeared in the Proceedings of the International Military Tribunal, Vol. XXX, p. 421, likewise purporting to illustrate Mauthausen camp. It is also illustrated without caption in Eugene Aroneanu's Konzentrationlager; Document F.321 for the International Court at Nuremberg; Heinz Kiinrich's Der KZ-Staat (Berlin, 1960, p. 81); Vaclav Berdych's Mauthausen (Prague, 1959) and Robert Neumann's Hitler - Aufstieg und Untergang des Dritten Reiches (Munich, 1961).

Chapter IX

THE JEWS AND THE CONCENTRATION CAMPS,
A FACTUAL APPRAISAL BY THE RED CR6SS

    There is one survey of the Jewish question in Europe during World War Two and the conditions of Germany's concentration camps which is almost unique in its honesty and objectivity, the three-volume Report of the International Committee of the Red Cross on its Activities during the Second World War (Geneva, 1948).

    This comprehensive account from an entirely neutral source incorporated and expanded the findings of two previous works: Documents sur l'activite' du CICR en faveur des civils detencus dans les camps de concentration en Allemagne 1939-1945 (Geneva, 1946), and Inter Arma Caritas: The Work of the ICRC during the Second World War (Geneva, 1947). The team of authors, headed by Frederic Siordet, explained in the opening pages of the Report that their object, in the tradition of the Red Cross, had been strict political neutrality, and herein lies its great value.

   The ICRC successfully applied the 1929 Geneva Military Convention in order to gain access to civilian internees held in Central and Western Europe by the German authorities. By contrast, the ICRC was unable to gain any access to the Soviet Union, which had failed to ratify the Convention. The millions of civilian and military internees held in the USSR, whose conditions were known to be by far the worst, were completely cut off from any international contact or supervision.

    The Report of the ICRC is of value in that it first clarifies the legitimate circumstances under which Jews were detained in concentration camps, i.e. as enemy aliens. In describing the two categories of civilian internees, the Report distinguishes the second type as "Civilians deported on administrative grounds (in German, Schutzhaftlinge), who were arrested for political or racial motives because their presence was considered a danger to the State or the occupation forces" (Vol. Ill, p. 73). These persons, it continues, "were placed on the same footing as persons arrested or imprisoned under common law for security reasons" p.74).

    The Report admits that the Germans were at first reluctant to permit supervision by the Red Cross of people detained on grounds relating to security, but by the latter part of 1942, the ICRC obtained important concessions from Germany. They were permitted to distribute food parcels to major concentration camps in Germany from August 1942, and "from February 1943 onwards this concession was extended to all other camps and prisons" (Vol. III, p. 78). The ICRC soon established contact with camp commandants and launched a food relief programme which continued to function until the last months of 1945, letters of thanks for which came pouring in from Jewish internees.
 

RED CROSS RECIPIENTS WERE JEWS

  The Report states that "As many as 9,000 parcels were packed daily. From the autumn of 1943 until May 1945, about 1,112,000 parcels with a total weight of 4,500 tons were sent off to the concentration camps" (Vol. III, p. 80). In addition to food, these contained clothing and pharmaceutical supplies. "Parcels were sent to Dachau, Buchenwald, Sangerhausen, Sachsenhausen, Oranienburg, Flossenburg, Landsberg-am-Lech, Flbha, Ravensbruck, Hamburg-Neuengamme, Mauthausen, Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, to camps near Vienna and in Central and Southern Germany. The principal recipients were Belgians, Dutch, French, Greeks, Italians, Norwegians, Poles and stateless Jews" (Vol. III, p. 83).

    In the course of the war, "The Committee was in-a position to transfer and distribute in the form of relief supplies over twenty million Swiss francs collected by Jewish welfare organizations throughout the world, in particular by the American Joint Distribution Committee of New York" (Vol. 1, p. 644). This latter organization was permitted by the German Government to maintain offices in Berlin until the American entry into the war. The ICRC complained that obstruction of their vast relief operation for Jewish internees came not from the Germans but from the tight Allied blockade of Europe. Most of their purchases of relief food were made in Rumania, Hungary and Slovakia.

    The ICRC had special praise for the liberal conditions which prevailed at Theresienstadt up to the time of their last visits there in April 1945. This camp, "where there were about 40,000 Jews deported from various countries, was a relatively privileged ghetto" (Vol. III, p. 75). According to the Report, "The Committee's delegates were able to visit the camp at Theresienstadt (Terezin) which was used exclusively for Jews and was governed by special conditions ... From information gathered by the Commmee, this camp had been started as an experiment by certain leaders of the Reich ... These men wished to give the Jews the means of setting up a communal life in a town under their own administration and possessing almost complete autonomy ... two delegates were able to visit the camp on April 6, 1945. They confirmed the favourable impression gained on the first visit" (Vol. I, p. 642).

    The ICRC also had praise for the regime of Ion Antonescu of Fascist Rumania where the Committee was able to extend special relief to 183,000 Rumanian Jews until the time of the Soviet occupation. The aid then ceased and the ICRC complained bitterly that it never succeeded "in sending anything whatsoever to Russia" (Vol. II, p. 62). The same situation applied to many of the German camps after their "liberation" by the Russians. The ICRC received a voluminous flow of mail from Auschwitz until the period of the Soviet occupation, when many of the internees were evacuated westward. But the efforts of the Red Cross to send relief to internees remaining at Auschwitz under Soviet control were futile. However. food parcels continued to be sent to former Auschwitz inmates transferred west to such camps as Buchenwald and Oranienburg.
 

NO MENTION OF GAS CHAMBERS

   One of the most important aspects of the Report of the ICRC is that it clarifies the true cause of those deaths that undoubtedly occurred in the camps towards the end of the war. Says the Report: "in the chaotic condition of Germany after the invasion during the final months of the war, the camps received no food supplies at all and starvation claimed an increasing number of victims. Itself alarmed by this situation, the German Government at last informed the ICRC on February 1, 1945 ... In March 1945, discussions between the President of the ICRC and General of the S.S. Kaltenbrunner gave even more decisive results. Relief could henceforth be distributed by the ICRC and one delegate was authorised to stay in each camp .I." (Vol. III, p.83).

    Clearly, the German authorities were at pains to relieve the dire situation as far as they were able. The Red Cross are quite explicit in stating that food supplies ceased at this time due to the Allied bombing of German transportation, and in the interests of interned Jews they had protested on March 15, 1944 against "the barbarous aerial warfare of the Allies'' (Inter Armet Caritns, p. 78). By October 2, 1944, the ICRC had warned the German Foreign Office of the impending collapse of the German transportation system, declaring that starvation conditions for people throughout Germany were becoming inevitable.

    In dealing with this comprehensive, three-volume Report, it is important to stress that the delegates of the International Red Cross found no evidence whatsoever of 'gas chambers'. The original 1946 edition did not even talk of 'extermination' or 'death camps' but after the emotional impact of the Nuremberg trials the Red Cross felt compelled to introduce into the expanded 1948 Report several, very cursory references to 'death camps' (Vol. 1 p. 641) and 'extermination camps' (Vol. I p. 645).

    However, no means of 'extermination' is indicated. In all its 1,600 pages the three-volume Report does not even mention such a thing as a 'gas chamber'. It acknowledges that Jews, like many other wartime nationalities, suffered rigours and privations, but' its complete silence on the subject of 'gassings' is ample refutation of the 'Holocaust' legend.
 

NOT ALL WERE INTERNED

   Volume III of the Report of the ICRC, Chapter 3 (I. Jewish Civilian Population) deals with the "aid given to the Jewish section of the free population" and this chapter makes it quite plain that by no means all of the European Jews were placed in internment camps but remained, subject to certain restrictions, as part of the free civilian population. This conflicts directly with the "thoroughness" of the supposed "extermination programme", and with the claim in the forged Hoess memoirs that Eichmann was obsessed with seizing every single Jew he could lay his hands on."

    In Slovakia, for example, where Eichmann's assistant Dieter Wisliceny was in charge, the Report states that "A large proportian of the Jewish minority had permission to stay in the country, and at certain periods Slovakia was looked upon as a comparative haven of refuge for Jews, especially for those coming from Poland. Those who remained in Slovakia seem to have been in comparative safety until the end of August 1944, when a rising against the German forces took place. While it is true that the law of May 15, 1942 had brought about the internment of several thousand Jews, these people were held in camps where the conditions of food and lodging were tolerable, and where the internees were allowed to do paid work on terms almost equal to those of the free labour market" (Vol. I, p. 646).

    Not only did large numbers of the three million or so European Jews avoid internment altogether, but the emigration of Jews continued throughout the war, generally by way of Hungary, Rumania and Turkey. Ironically, post-war Jewish emigration from German-occupied territories was also facilitated by the Reich, as in the case of the Polish Jews who had escaped to France before its occupation. "The Jews from Poland who, whilst in France, had obtained entrance permits to the United States were held to be American citizens by the German occupying authorities, who further agreed to recognize the validity of about three thousand passports issued to Jews by the consulates of South American countries" (Vol. 1, p. 645).

    As future U.S. citizens, these Jews were held at the Vittel camp in southern France for American aliens. The emigration of European Jews from Hungary in particular proceeded during the war unhindered by the German authorities. "Until March 1944," says the Red Cross Report, "Jews who had the privilege of visas for Palestine were free to leave Hungary" (Vol. 1, p. 648). Even after the replacement of the Horthy Government in 1944 (following its attempted armistice with the Soviet Union) with a government more dependent on German authority, the emigration of Jews continued.

    The Committee secured the pledges of both Britain and the United States "to give support by every means to the emigration of Jews from Hungary, " and from the U.S. Government the ICRC received a message stating that "The Government of the United States... now specifically repeats its assurance that arrangements will be made by it for the care of all Jews who in the present circumstances are allowed to leave" (Vol. 1, p. 649).

Chapter X

THE TRUTH AT LAST: THE WORK OF PAUL RASSINIER

    Without doubt the most important contribution to a truthful study of the extermination question has been the work of French academic Paul Rassinier. The pre-eminent value of this work lies firstly in the fact that Rassinier actually experienced life in the German concentration camps and also that, as a Socialist intellectual and anti-Nazi, nobody could be less inclined to defend Hitler and National Socialism. Yet, for the sake of justice and historical truth, Rassinier spent the remainder of his post war years until his death in l966 pursuing research which utterly refuted the Myth of the Six Million and the legend of Nazi diabolism.

    From 1933 until 1943, Rassinier was a teacher of history in the College d'Enseignement General at Belfort, Academie de Besancon. During the war he engaged in resistance activity until he was arrested by the Gestapo on October 30, 1943, and as a result was confined in the German concentration camps at Buchenwald and Dora until 1945. At Buchenwald, towards the end of the war, he contracted typhus, which so damaged his health that he could not resume his teaching. After the war, Rassinier was awarded the Medaille de la Resistance and the Reconnaisance Francaise, and was elected to the French Chamber of Deputies, from which he was ousted by the Communists in November 1946.

   Rassinier then embarked on his great work, a systematic analysis of alleged German war atrocities, in particular the supposed "extermination" of the Jews. Not surprisingly, his writings are little known; they have rarely been translated from the French, although some of his writings appeared in English in 1978. His most important works are: Le Mensonge d 'Ulysse (The Lies of Ulysses', Paris, 1949), an investigation of concentration camp conditions based on his own experiences of them; and Ulysse 'trahi par les Siens (1960), a sequel which further refuted the impostures of propagandists concerning German concentration camps. His monumental task was completed with two final volumes, Le Veritable Proce's Eichmann (1962) and Le Drame des Juifs Europ'een (1964), in which Rassinier exposes the dishonest and reckless distortions concerning the fate of the Jews by a careful statistical analysis. The last work also examines the political and financial significance of the extermination legend and its exploitation by Israel and the Communist powers.

    One of the many merits of Rassinier's work is exploding the myth of unique German "wickedness" and he reveals with devastating force how historical truth has been obliterated in an impenetrable fog of partisan propaganda. His researches demonstrate conclusively that the fate of the Jews during World War Two, once freed from distortion and reduced to proper propertions; loses its much vaunted "enormity" and is seen to be only one act in a greater and much wider tragedy. In an extensive lecture tour in West Germany in the spring of 1960, Rassinier emphasised to his German audiences that it was high time for a rebirth of the truth regarding the extermination legend, and that the Germans themselves should begin it since the allegation remained a wholly unjustifiable blot on Germany in the eyes of the world.
 

THE IMPOSTURE OF 'GAS CHAMBERS'

   Rassinier entitled his first book The Lies of Ulysses in commemoration of the fact that travellers always return bearing tall stories, and until his death he investigated all the stories of extermination literature and attempted to trace their authors. He made short work of the extravagant claims about gas chambers at Buchenwald in David Rousset's The Other Kingdom (New York, 1947); himself an inmate of Buchenwald, Rassinier proved that no such things ever existed there (Le Mensonge d'Ullysse, p. 209 ff). Rassinier also traced Abbe Jean-Paul Renard and asked him how he could possibly have testified in his book Chaines et Lumieres that gas chambers were in operation at Buchenwald. Renard replied that others had told him of their existence and hence he had been willing to pose as a witness of things that he had never seen (ibid, p. 209ff).

    Rassinier also investigated Denise Dufournier's Ravensbruck: The Women's Camp of Death (London, 1948) and again found tha the authoress had no other evidence for gas chambers there than the vague "rumours" which Charlotte Bormann stated were deliberately spread by communist political prisoners. Similar investigations were made of such books as Philip Friedman's This was Auschwitz: The Story of a Murder Camp (N.Y., 1946) and Eugen Kogon's The Theory and Practice of Hell (N.Y., 1950), and he found that none of these authors could produce an authentic eye witness of a gas chamber at Auschwitz, nor had they themselves actually seen one.

   Rassinier mentions Kogon's claim that a deceased former inmate, Janda Weiss, had said to Kogon alone that he had witnessed gas chambers at Auschwitz but of course, since this person was untraceable, Rassinier was unable to investigate the claim. He was able to interview Benedikt Kautsky, author of Teufel und Verdammte ('Devil and the Damned') who had alleged that millions of Jews were exterminated at Auschwitz. However, Kautsky only confirmed to Rassinier the confession in his book, namely that never at any time had he seen a gas chamber, and that he based his information on what others had "told him".

    The palm for extermination literature is awarded by Rassinier to Miklos Nyiszli's Auschwitz: A Doctor's Eye-Witness Account, in which the falsification of facts, the evident contradictions and shameless lies show that the author is speaking of places which it is obvious he has never seen (Le Drame des Juifs Europeen, p. 52).  When Rassinier attempted to discover the identity of this strange "eye-witness" he was told that "he had died some time before the publication of the book." Rassinier is convinced that he was never anything but a mythical figure.

    Until his death in 1967, Rassinier regularly toured Europe in search of somebody who was an actual eye-witness of gas chamber exterminations in German concentration camps during World War Two, but he has never found even one such person. He discovered that not one of the authors of the many books charging that the Germans had exterminated millions of Jews had even seen a gas chamber built for such purposes, much less seen one in operation, nor could any of these authors produce a living authentic witness who had done so. Invariably, former prisoners such as Renard, Kautsky and Kogon based their statements not upon what they had actually seen, but upon what they "heard", always from "reliable" sources, who by some chance are almost always dead and thus not in a position to confirm or deny their statements.

    Certainly the most important fact to emerge from Rassinier's studies, and of which there is now no doubt at all, is the utter imposture of "gas chambers". Investigations carried out in the sites themselves have revealed that, contrary to the declarations of the surviving "witnesses" examined above, no gas chambers whatever existed in the German camps at Buchenwald, BergenBelsen, Ravensbruck, Dachau and Dora, or Mauthausen in Ausuia. This fact, which we noted earlier was attested to by Stephen Pinter of the U.S. War Office, has now been recognised and admitted officially by the Institute of Contemporary History at Munich. However, Rassinier points out that in spite of this, "witnesses" again declared at the Eichmann trial that they had seen prisoners at Bergen-Belsen setting out for the gas chambers.

    So far as the eastern camps of Poland are concerned, Rassinier shows that the main evidence attesting to the existence of gas chambers at Treblinka, Chelmno, Belzec, Maidanek and Sobibor are the discredited memoranda of Kurt Gerstein referred to above. His original claim, it will be recalled, was that an absurd 40 million people had been exterminated during the war, while in his first signed memorandum he reduced the number to 25 million. Further reductions were made in his second memorandum. These documents continue to circulate in three different versions, one in German (distributed in schools) and two in French, none of which agree with each other. The German version featured as "evidence" at the Eichmann Trial in 1961. The Gerstein 'Statement' is reproduced in full as an Appendix to the most scholarly work to appear on this subject to date, The Hoax of the Twentieth Century by Dr A R Butz (Brighton, 1976).

    Finally, Rassinier draws attention to an important admission by Dr. Kubovy, director of the World Centre of Contemporary Jewish Documentation at Tel-Aviv, made in La Terre Retrouv'ee, December 15th, 1960. Dr. Kubovy acknowledged that not a single order for extermination exists from Hitler, Himmler, Heydrich or Goering (Le Drame des Juifs europ'een, p. 31, 39).
 

'SIX MILLION' FALSEHOOD REJECTED

   As for the fearful propaganda figure of the Six Million, Rassinier rejects it on the basis of a very detailed statistical analysis. He shows that the number has been falsely established, on the one hand through inflation of the pre-war Jewish population by ignoring all emigration and evacuation, and on the other by a corresponding deflation of the number of survivors after 1945. This was the method used by the World Jewish Congress. Rassinier also rejects any written or oral testimony to the Six Million given by the kind of "witnesses" cited above, since they are full of contradictions, exaggerations and falsehoods.

   He gives the example of Dachau casualties, noting that in 1946, Pastor Niemoller reiterated Auerbach's fraudulent "238,000" deaths there, while in 1962 Bishop Neuhgusseler of Munich stated in a speech at Dachau that only 30,000 people died "of the 200,000 persons from thirty-eight nations who were interned there" (Le Dramme des Juifs Europ'een, p. 12). Today, the estimate has been reduced by several more thousands, and so it goes on. Rassinier concludes, too, that testimony in support of the Six Million given by accused men such as Hoess, Hoenl, Wisliceny and Hoellriegel, who were faced with the prospect of being condemned to death or with the hope of obtaining a reprieve, and who were frequently tortured during their detention, is completely untrustworthy.

    Rassinier finds it very significant that the figure of Six Million was not mentioned in court during the Eichmann trial. "The prosecution at the Jerusalem trial was considerably weakened by its central motif, the six million European Jews alleged to have been exterminated in gas chambers. It was an argument that easily won conviction the day after the war ended, amidst the general state of spiritual and material chaos. Today, many documents have been published which were not available at the time of the Nuremberg trials, and which tend to prove that if the Jewish nationals were wronged and persecuted by the Hitler regime, there could not possibly have been six million victims" (ibid, p. 125).

    With the help of one hundred pages of cross-checked statistics, Professor Rassinier concludes in Le Drame des Juifs Europ'een that the number of Jewish casualties during the Second World War could not have exceeded 1,200,000. However, he regards such a figure as a maximum limit.
 

EMIGRATION: THE FINAL SOLUTION

   Rassinier is emphatic in stating that the German Government never had any policy other than the emigration of Jews overseas. He shows that after the promulgation of the Nuremberg Race Laws in September 1935, the Germans negotiated with the British for the transfer of German Jews to Palestine on the basis of the Balfour Declaration. When this failed, they asked other countries to take charge of them, but they refused (ibid, p. 20).

    The Palestine project was revived in 1938 but broke down because Germany could not negotiate their departure on the basis of 3,000,000 marks, as demanded by Britain, without some agreement for compensation. Despite these difficulties Germany did manage to secure the emigration of the majority of their Jews, mostly to the United States. Rassinier also refers to the French refusal of Germany's Madagascar plan at the end of 1940. "In a report of the 21st August, 1942, the Secretary of State for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Third Reich, Luther, decided that it would be possible to negotiate with France in this direction and described conversations which had taken place between July and December 1940, and which were brought to a halt following the interview with Montoire on 13th December 1940 by Pierre Etienne Flandin, Laval's successor. During the whole of 1941 the Germans hoped that they would be able to re-open these negotiations and bring them to a happy conclusion" (ibid, p. 108).

    After the outbreak of war the Jews, who, as Rassinier reminds us, had declared economic and financial war on Germany as early as 1933, were interned in concentration camps, "which is the way countries all over the world treat enemy aliens in time of war. it was decided to regroup them and put them to work in one immense ghetto which, after the successful invasion of Russia, was situated, towards the end of 1941, in the so-called Eastern territories near the former frontier between Russia and Poland; at Auschwitz, Chelmno, Belzec, Maidanek, Treblinka etc... There they were to wait until the end of the war for the re-opening of international discussions which would decide their future" (Le Veritable Proces Eichmann, p. 20). The order for this concentration in the eastern ghetto was given by Goering to Heydrich, as noted earlier, and it was regarded as a prelude to "the desired final solution," their emigration overseas after the war had ended.
 

ENORMOUS FRAUD

   Of great concern to Rassinier was the way in which the extermination legend was deliberately exploited for political and financial advantage, and in this he found Israel and the Soviet Union to be in concert. He noted how, after 1950, an avalanche of fabricated extermination literature appeared under the stamp of two organisations, so remarkably synchronised in their activities that one might well believe them to have been contrived in partnership. One was the 'Committee for the Investigation of War Crimes and Criminals' established under Communist auspices at Warsaw, and the other, the 'World Centre of Contemporary Jewish Documentation' at Paris and Tel-Aviv.

    Their publications seemed to appear at favourable moments in the political climate, and for the Soviet Union their purpose was simply to maintain the threat of Nazism as a maneuver to divert attention from their own activities. As for Israel, Rassinier sees the myth of the Six Million as inspired by a purely material problem. In Le Drame des Juifs Europ'een p. 31, 39) he writes: "It is simply a question of justifying by a proportionate number of corpses the enormous subsidies which Germany has been paying annually since the end of the war to the State of Israel by way of reparation for injuries which moreover she cannot be held to have caused her either morally or legally, since there was no State of Israel at the time the alleged deeds took place; thus it is a purely and contemptibly material problem.

     "Perhaps I may be allowed to recall here that the State of Israel was only founded in May 1948 and that the Jews were nationals of all states with the exception of Israel, in order to underline the dimensions of a fraud which defies description in any language; on the one hand Germany pays to Israel sums which are calculated on six million dead, and on the other, since at least four-fifths of these six million were decidedly alive at the end of the war, she is paying substantial sums by way of reparation to the victims of Hitler's Germany to those who are still alive in countries all over the world other than Israel and to the rightful claimants of those who have since deceased, which means that for the former (i.e. the six million), or in other words, for the vast majority, she is paying twice.

Conclusion

CONCLUSION

    However, it is at least an admission from the latter Organization that there were not even six million Jews in Europe and western Russia combined. Nothing better illustrates the declining plausibility of the Six Million legend than the fact that the prosecution at the Eichmann trial deliberately avoided mentioning the figure. Moreover, official estimates of the casualties are being quietly revised downwards. Our analysis of the population and emigration statistics, as well as the studies by the Swiss Baseler Nachrichten and Rassinier, demonstrate that it would have been simply impossible for the number of Jewish casualties to have exceeded a limit of one and a half million. Doubtless large numbers of Jewish persons did die in the course of the Second World War, but this must be seen in the context of a war that cost many millions of innocent victims on all sides. To put the matter in perspective for example, we may point out that 700,000 Russian civilians died during the siege of Leningrad and a total of 2,050,000 German civilians were killed in Allied air raids and forced repatriation after the war.

    The question most pertinent to the extermination legend is, of course: how many of the 3 million European Jews under German control survived after 1945? The Jewish Joint Distribution Committee estimated the number of survivors in Europe to be only one and a half million, but such a figure is now totally unacceptable. This is proved by the growing number of Jews claiming compensation from the West German Government for having allegedly suffered between 1939 and 1945. By 1965 the number of these claimants registered with the West German Government had tripled in ten years and reached 3,375,000 (Aufbau, June 30, 1965).

    Nothing could be a more devastating proof of the brazen fantasy of the Six Million. Most of these claimants are Jews, so there can be no doubt that the majority of the 3 million Jews who experienced the Nazi occupation of Europe remained, in fact, very much alive. It is a resounding confirmation of the fact that Jewish casualties during the Second World War can only be estimated at a fraction of 'Six Million'.  Surely this is enough grief for the Jewish people? Who has the right to compound it with vast imaginary slaughter, marking with eternal shame a great European nation, as well as wringing fraudulent monetary compensation from them?
 

(End)

Part One
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THE MILLIONS THAT COULD HAVE BEEN SAVED  
By I. Domb
Source: http://www.jewsnotzionists.org/holocaust.htm

        Many books have been published, read and forgotten. There is one book, however, which dare not be allowed to share this fate. This is the chronicles of Rabbi Michael Ber Weissmandl, ztl, of the war years, 1942 to 1945, so aptly named "Min Hametzar" (From the Depths). published in New York in 1961 in Hebrew. Not enough individuals have read this book. The ghastly facts uncovered in it are not sufficiently well known.

        Who can imagine the Hitlerite holocaust? Where is the language to describe it? All the known words of human speech have already been used for conventional occurrences; they have acquired everyday meanings and have been fashioned with an inability to describe the horrors of an Auschwitz or a Treblinka. What can be said to make individuals understand the wild cries of the night, when our brothers and sisters were led to the slaughterhouses? And in what way can one convey the conversion of precious Jews to the status of animals preparatory to being slaughtered?

        Skyscraping walls prevented their cries being heard, and in that horrible man-made silence, the most valuable portion of the Jewish people was compressed in the confines of the ghettos in hunger and in thirst, in epidemics and in torture, crying bitterly, only to themselves, until the end of their anguish; when they were loaded into the sealed anguish; when they were loaded in the sealed cattle-wagons for the week-long journeys, when their corpses and the still have-living reached the slaughterhouses and gas chambers. Where can existing words be found to fit this story, and who is there to coin new phrases with meaning enough to tell this tale?

        Yet all this was done through a directive from an innocent-looking office, where the S.S. murderers, with the methods of modern civilization gave the orders which, by chain reaction, set in motion all the machinery of death and destruction to which a stop could not be envisaged. One stroke of the pen to extinguish a hundred thousand lives. A few words enough for a million. And these few officers set the wheels turning in Auschwitz, in Treblinka; the Einsatzkomandos; the deep pits on the lonely plains of Europe overflowing with human blood. So much power behind it, such a military might enforcing it that only the winning of the World War could interfere with this running horror.

        But how astonished was Rabbi Weissmandl to discover that these strokes of the pen could so easily have been erased, that the Jewish tragedy could to a considerable extent, have been alleviated by some simple "old fashioned" methods. How many hundreds of thousands of Jewish lives could have been saved -- perhaps even millions.

        Wisliceny was the German henchman for the Jews of Slovakia, Eichmann's representative in that area for establishing the ghettos, destroying their livelihood and finally dispatching to slaughter the hundreds of thousands of Jews in Slovakia and the neighboring countries. He carried out this mission as directed by Eichman and as his own cravings commanded. His was the first country in Europe to be designated for the supply of Jews to the slaughter houses, as it was Slovakia that was first occupied by Hitler--even earlier than Poland. The puppet government of Cardinal Tissu had asked Hitler to "cleanse" its country of Jews. Officially it even paid Germany for transportation, and Wisliceny was the ultimate ruler and organizer. He was nearly always drunk; drunk from spirits and intoxicated with blood -- and seemingly unassailable.

        Rabbi Michael Ber Weissmandl, at the end of 1943, when two thirds of the Jews of Slovakia had already been transported for "work" to that far destination, got to know through a certain Hochberg -- an S.S. intriguer, and second in command to Wisliceny, that his chief was also lustful for money and that already on more than one occasion, money had bought relief for some individuals, postponing their deportation.

        Overwhelmed with joy at this discovery, he consulted his father-in-law, the great and renowned rabbi of Nitra, ztl, who agreed that if this old-fashioned method was effective, there was no reason why it would not be attempted on behalf of the great masses to be saved.

        Rabbi Weissmandl writes of this same Hochberg, "I was first there on Friday in the summer of 1942 -- Tammuz, 5702. I was standing in the corridor near to the office of Hochberg and all of the waiting rooms around were crowded with those who had come to Hochberg to beg a postponement of that ultimate journey for "work in the east," as many still believed. I heard the voice of Hochberg speaking on the phone to his chief, Wisliceny saying, 'Her Hauptstumbandfuehrer, ich melde ghorehsamst, the train has left: Man 727, Women 637, Children 1667: altogether 3,028 Jawohl!' Never will this total leave my memory; 1600 children! No outcry and no tears. No one cares. The whole world is silent. Jawohl, Herr Hauptsturmbanfuehrer.

        One of the famous men of Pressberg, Reb Aharon Gruenhut, finally succeeded in gaining confidence by Hochberg in Rabbi Weissmandl, for whom a secret appointment was arranged. On this occasion, the rabbi presented himself as one who had connections with rabbinical circles throughout the world. He showed Hochberg his passport that contained a British visa issued just before the outbreak of war, and told him of his visit to London and of conferences there to impress him with his high standing. He then made it clear that he had come on a secret mission of the highest importance as a representative of Jewry abroad, who had contacted him through the American "Joint" in Switzerland. Their message was that they were prepared to pay in cash for the stopping of all further transports of Jews from Slovakia to the east. The "Joint" was ready to pay the price that his chief, Wisliceny, would name. Rabbi Weissmandl emphasized that neither Hochberg nor Wisliceny should believe that his mission was directed by local Jews.

        During this conversation with Hochberg in 1943, when the scales of war were already a little out of balance for Hitler's Germany after the heavy defeats in the east and the support of the allies by American might, Rabbi Weissmandl was able, with American might, Rabbi Weissmandl was able , with careful tact, to introduce doubts into Hochberg's mind about German world conquest, and more specifically about Hochberg's own position after the war. He conveyed to him that it would be very much to his and his chief's advantage to make some provisions for their own safety. In this respect, he was now authorized to offer the promise of World Jewry that if they would stop all further transports, he and Wisliceny would be save.

        Hochberg became enraged at such suggestions, but as the conversation progressed, he became much softer and began to listen carefully to what was proposed. He listened and replied, "I must go to see Wisliceny."

        He left immediately and Rabbi Weissmandl waited. Every minute seemed like an hour; every hour seemed endless. He sat there exhausted, awaiting the reply fateful for the remaining Jews of Slovakia, with so many hanging in the balance.
He had set there for many hours, when suddenly the door burst open and Hochberg hurried into the room. Speaking rapidly and with great excitement, he said, "the deal is done. My chief asked for $50,000 and no further transports will be sent; but he lays down the following terms: Wisliceny will show his goodwill: three transports -- next Tuesday, next Friday, the following Tuesday -- each of about 3000 souls, will be held up, but on Friday after that, the first Installment of $25,000 must be handed over. After that, there will be no further transports for seven weeks, to enable the second installment of $25,000 to be obtained and paid, after which there will be a final stopping of all transports. There is one further condition. You must be able to show that the money comes from abroad and not from Slovakian Jews themselves."

        The latter was an important point to this S.S. henchman, as a guarantee that it was world Jewry who was behind the deal, and who would finally keep its promise for his safety. In any case, Rabbi Weissmandl did not then think that Slovakian Jews could possibly find such a sum, as by that time they had been stripped of all their possessions. On that other hand, he did not imagine for one moment that the wealthy "Joint" would not provide such a relatively small sum to save literally tens of thousands of lives from total annihilation in the German slaughterhouses.

        Rabbi Weissmandl left Hochberg's office with hope and joy. He hurried home to Nitra to inform his father-in-law and to set about getting the deal consummated. The Rabbi of Nitra, in spite of his happiness at the possibility of saving so many lives, expressed some reservation. He felt that from a distance the "Joint" would not see their tragedy, and that the Zionist leaders working together with the "Joint" had a different calculation. But he suggested, representatives from beyond the "Kanzelel" -- the Council of Orthodox Jewish Communities -- should be drawn into this, and even the Zionists and non-Orthodox groups taken into partnership.

        The name of Mrs. Gisi Fleischman came to the forefront, as she was of Zionist circles and also the pre-war representative of the "Joint" in Slovakia. Besides her prominence, she was a good-hearted and courageous women and her word would carry weight with the "Joint". It was also decidedly to call on Mr. Fuerst -- known for both his integrity and financial ability.

        Among the weapons with which the Zionists have equipped themselves to pierce the walls of resistance to their influence, there is one most predominant. This is "ahavas Yisroel" -- love of the fellow Jew. This slogan and catch-phrase carries extra weight with the religious Jew to whom this concept has a special attraction. The Zionists have explained that their aim is achieving statehood is to provide a refuge and shelter for much tormented Jewry.

        The long, bloody paths of our, till now, 2000 year long exile, with its inquisitions, persecutions, pogroms, slaughter and torture, has always been at the front of every Jews mind. Seldom was there a place on this earth inhabited by Jews, or a stretch of time, without blood and tears at the hands of our many persecutors of all nations. It was these pogroms that provided, for the short-sighted, the initial conditioning to seek a solution in the outward idea of Zionist achievements.

        Possibly the Zionists, themselves, at the first steps of inception, were honestly taken by the idea of that solution; and it was this kernel of compassion that gave to them the power to influence others with this superficial consideration. Zionism has built on the basis that the solution of nationhood applicable to any other nation is in the same way also applicable to Jewry, as they could see no difference between the nations of the world and the Jewish people.

        As they see it, Jews regulate their fate by the same ways and means as all other peoples. The belief in exile by Heavenly Decree as a punishment for our sins, and the belief in Heavenly Redemption by the Will of the Creator was, to Zionism, non-existent. People's thoughts were not directed to the fundamental, all-embracing heresy upon which Zionism was established, but grasped only the attractive promises that were offered because unfortunately, Zionism arrived in the most feeble and small of all generation, coupled with distressing happenings, which contributed to the closing of people's minds to the truth and to their being led astray by the Zionist Idea.

        How much were Rabbi Weissmandl and his colleagues overcome with joy when they succeeded in getting the right people together! How great was their hope! But how much were they overwhelmed by sorrow when they tried to get things in motion, and how great was their frustration when they learned that the Zionists, together with the "Joint", stopped every outside help from reaching them. This was not only when it was a question of saving the remnants of the Jews of Slovakia -- about 40,000 souls -- but also when the possibility of saving what was still left of the Jews of Poland and Hungary was in question; a matter then of millions of souls. Then, too, the Zionists deliberately prevented any help from being extended under various excuses that even a child could see through. This was their policy -- stupid and merciless -- but they perused it relentlessly. In the end, they admitted openly that their policy was not to help fellow Jews, but to let them perish in the tens of thousands and in their millions.

        This is forever unforgettable and unforgivable. Zionist "ahavas Yisroel" must be displayed conspicuously and beyond any doubt.

        The Friday when the first installment of $25,000 had to be paid was fast approaching and there was not yet a way how this money could be found for Wisliceny. Mrs. Flesichman was also the representative of the World Jewish Congress and well known to the Jewish Agency. She was, therefore, considered to be the most suitable person to make contact with these organizations. Her words would be listed to....

        The pressure became even greater when it was seen the S.S. oligarchy was in earnest. The first transport has been stopped. But how can contact be made with Zurich, with New York and with Jerusalem, the seat of the Jewish Agency, which influenced and coordinated the work of these other two bodies? Slovakia was then a small country sealed off by the German occupation of the surrounding territory. There was no common border with any free country, so how could any message be conveyed to the outside world?

        Shloime Stern was instrumental in finding a temporary solution. He obtained a diplomatic courier, who was prepared to take all the important messages to the "Joint" in Zurich. He was also able to borrow money, temporarily, from various sources in Slovakia, putting together the equivalent of the enormous sounding sum of $25,000. The money obtained was changed on the back market for dollars and handed over to Hochberg for Wisliceny. Hochberg accepted it and came back with the message that there would be no further transports for seven weeks, which time was set for the completion of the deal.

        They were all convinced that once the diplomatic courier would get their message to the "Joint" and the Jewish Agency, not $50,000 but ten times $50,000 wold at once be put at their disposal for this and similar "deals." Surely Jews the world over would dance for joy upon hearing that at last the door was open in the inner circles of the S.S. and a way found to rescue their fellow Jews.

        Mrs. Fleischman sat down to write the memorandum to Salli Mayer, the "Joint" representative in Switzerland. She was careful in her every word, explaining the situation of hope that had been ignited. The "Joint" should hasten its help at this last moment and miss the life-saving opportunity that had been so dramatically forced. The memorandum was sent to the "Joint", to the Jewish Agency and to a personal friend of hers, Mr. N. Schwalbe in Zurich. And then they sat down to wait.

        Days went by, swallowed by weeks, and of the seven not many were left. The time for the final settlement was fast approaching and a great sum of money was needed. Many people had managed to escape from the hell of Poland to Slovakia on their way to Hungary and Romania, which were not yet being so intensely processed by the Hitler hordes. They were not a thousandth of a percent of those who were so brutally done to death, but still a number to be supported and a problem of Slovakian Jewry. Money was needed to bribe the Slovakian genarmerie and police to stop their pressure for the deportations to continue. Money was needed for the labor camps in Sered, Novaki and Wiener in Slovakia.

        The Slovakian anti-Semitic government had built these camps for a slave labor before deportation began, and it was put to those Jews still left there that if they, themselves, would build up and increase the capacity of those labor camps, they would absorb more and so relieve the pressure for "deportations." and above all, the money was needed to refund the temporary loans from so many sources that had gone towards the first payment to Wisliceny and to provide the second $25,000 that would finally seal this blood transaction.

        All this money was a matter of life or death for the tens of thousands of Jews in Slovakia and, in the end, for millions still alive throughout Europe. Who could provide and who should provide, if not the "Joint" and the Jewish Agency, who held possession of the vast sums of money given by Jews the world over for the help of their brethren in need? Was there anywhere at all any need that was greater?

        The diplomatic courier left for Zurich, holding in his hands the lamentations of the strangling remnants of Jewry; in his hands, their appeal from death.

        This courier had to spend some days in Zurich before his return. He was awaited with mounting anxiety, for with his advent were tied up all the hopes of the masses under sentence.

        And he returned. But not even a letter was sent with him by those "help organizations" only a verbal message that they had no time to write, and of help there was no mention at all.

        Rabbi Weissmandl writes that on hearing this message, they 'felt as though the house had collapsed on them'. It was only Mrs. Fleischman who started to explain matters after this great shock. She said that "uncle" Salli Mayer was a very cautious man and it was necessary to write again. It was also necessary to write to Mr. Silbersten, the Jewish Congress representative. "And who knows, maybe they are doing something great," she added. Maybe for such a big undertaking they had to refer to New York and Jerusalem -- who knows?

        Rabbi Weissmandl, himself, followed up with letters to the Agency and the "Joint" in the name of the Rabbis left in Slovakia -- letters of tears and of pleading -- but still there was no reply. Meanwhile, the seven weeks had passed and they had to send to Hochberg, asking him to explain to Wisliceny that the messenger that was to bring the money from Switzerland had met with an accident and was delayed in a hospital there. He would be bringing the money in three or four weeks time. Wisliceny agreed to wait.

        In the end, a letter did come from the "Joint"; a letter written by Salli Mayer, which said that $50,000 was a lot of money for such a small country, and that in the previous year's budget of the "joint", only a few thousand dollars had been allocated for them. The "Joint" had to be run according to their system. The explanation given in the memorandum why they now need all this money and the documentary evidence as to what was happening in Poland, to which country the "deportations" took place, were exaggerated stories. This was the way of Eastern European Jewry, who were always asking for money. In general, he added, it was impossible to send anything at all just then, as the money was coming from America, which had prohibited the sending of funds to enemy countries. What was possible to do was to render some small help, monthly, if the "Joint" in Hungary would agree to do this out of the blocked account that been held since the outbreak of the war.

        Rabbi Weissmandl and his colleagues read the letter, but they could not believe it had been written by fellow Jews. Their hearts stopped beating when its contents became clear to them. But this was not the end. There was a further letter. It fully explained the first. But it was more deadly and more devastating. It disclosed the bottomless abyss to which born- Jews can sink -- the responsibility of Zionism.

In His Service:
            Nick Goggin  
Editor; www.biblestudysite.com
WATCHMEN BIBLE STUDY Group

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