Did Six Million Really Die:
Truth at Last - Exposed:
( Part 3 of 9 )
Continued from Part 2
The
story of six million Jews exterminated during the war was given finalauthority
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 strangeperson in the
service of American Intelligence who had written several booksunder 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 NurembergTrials. It is
remarkable that the testimony of this highly dubious personHoettl is said
to constitute the only "proof' regarding the murderof six million Jews.
In his affidavit of November 26th, 1945 he stated,not that he knew but that
Eichmann had "told him" in August 1944in Budapest that a total
of 6 million Jews had been exterminated. Needlessto say, Eichmann never
corroborated this claim at his trial. Hoettl wasworking as an American spy
during the whole of the latter period of thewar, and it is therefore very
odd indeed that he never gave the slightesthint to the Americans of a policy
to murder Jews, even though he workeddirectly under Heydrich and Eichmann.
ABSENCE OF EVIDENCE It should be emphasised straight awaythat
there is not a single document in existence which proves that the Germansintended
to, or carried out, the deliberate murder of Jews. In Poliakovand Wulf's
Das Dritte Reich und die Juden: Dokumente und Aufsätze (Berlin,1955),
the most that they can assemble are statements extracted after thewar from
people like Hoettl, Ohlendorf and Wisliceny, the latter under torturein
a Soviet prison. In the absence of any evidence, therefore, Poliakovis forced
to write: "The three or four people chiefly involved in drawingup the
plan for total extermination are dead, and no documents survive."This
seems very convenient. Quite obviously, both the plan and the "threeor
four" people are nothing but nebulous assumptions on the part ofthe
writer, and are entirely unprovable. The documents which do survive,of course,
make no mention at all of extermination, so that writers likePoliakov and
Reitlinger again make the convenient assumption that such orderswere generally
"verbal". Though lacking any documentary proof,they assume that
a plan to murder Jews must have originated in 1941, coincidingwith the attack
on Russia. Phase one of the plan is alleged to have involvedthe massacre
of Soviet Jews, a claim we shall disprove later. The rest ofthe programme
is supposed to have begun in March 1942, with the deportationand concentration
of European Jews in the eastern camps of the Polish Government-General,such
as the giant industrial complex at Auschwitz near Cracow. The fantasticand
quite groundless assumption throughout is that transportation to theEast,
supervised by Eichmann's department, actually meant immediate exterminationin
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 presentat these discussions,
and no records were ever kept of them. This is thepurest invention, for
there is not a shred of evidence that even suggestssuch outlandish meetings
took place. William Shirer, in his generally wildand irresponsible book
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, is similarlymuted on the subject of
documentary proof. He states weakly that Hitler'ssupposed order for the
murder of Jews "apparently was never committedto paper - at least no
copy of it has yet been unearthed. It was probablygiven verbally to Goering,
Himmler and Heydrich, who passed it down . .,"(p. 1148). A typical
example of the kind of "proof' quoted insupport of the extermination
legend is given by Manvell and Frankl. Theycite a memorandum of 31st July,
1941 sent by Goering to Heydrich, who headedthe Reich Security Head Office
and was Himmler's deputy. Significantly,the memorandum begins: "Supplementing
the task that was assigned toyou on 24th January 1939, to solve the Jewish
problem by means of emigrationand evacuation in the best possible way according
to present conditions. . ." The supplementary task assigned in the
memorandum is a "totalsolution (Gesamtlösung) of the Jewish question
within the area of Germaninfluence in Europe," which the authors admit
means concentration inthe East, and it requests preparations for the "organisational,
financialand material matters" involved. The memorandum then requests
a futureplan for the "desired final solution" (Endlösung),
whichclearly refers to the ideal and ultimate scheme of emigration and evacuationmentioned
at the beginning of the directive. No mention whatever is madeof murdering
people, but Manvell and Frankl assure us that this is whatthe memorandum
is really about. Again, of course, the "true nature"of the final
as distinct from the total solution "was made known toHeydrich by Goering
verbafly" (ibid, p. 118). The convenience of these"verbal"
directives issuing back and forth is obvious.
THE WANNSEE CONFERENCE The final details of the plan toexterminate
Jews were supposed to have been made at a conference at GrossWannsee in
Berlin on 20th January, 1942, presided over by Heydrich (Poliakov,Das Dritte
Reich und die Juden, p. 120 ff; Reitlinger, The Final Solution,p. 95 ff).
Officials of all German Ministries were present, and Müllerand Eichmann
represented Gestapo Head Office. Reitlinger and Manvell andFrankl consider
tile minutes of this conference to be their trump card inproving the existence
of a genocide plan, but the truth is that no suchplan was even mentioned,
and what is more, they freely admit this. Manvelland Frankl explain it away
rather lamely by saying that "The minutesare shrouded in the form of
officialdom that cloaks the real significanceof the words and terminolgoy
that are used" (The Incomparable Crime,London, 1967, p. 46), which
really means that they intend to interpret themin their own way. What Heydrich
actually said was that, as in the memorandumquoted above, he had been commissioned
by Goering to arrange a solutionto the Jewish problem. He reviewed the history
of Jewish emigration, statedthat the war had rendered the Madagascar project
impractical, and continued:"The emigration programme has been replaced
now by the evacuation ofJews to the east as a further possible solution,
in accordance with theprevious authorisation of the Führer." Here,
he explained, theirlabour was to be utilised. All this is supposed to be
deeply sinister, andpregnant with the hidden meaning that the Jews were
to be exterminated,though Prof. Paul Rassinier, a Frenchman interned at
Buchenwald who hasdone sterling work in refuting the myth of the Six Million,
explains thatit means precisely what it says, i.e. the concentration of
the Jews forlabour in the immense eastern ghetto of the Polish Government-General.
"Therethey were to wait until the end of the war, for the re-opening
of internationaldiscussions which would decide their future. This decision
was finally reachedat the interministerial Berlin-Wannsee conference . .
." (Rassinier,Le Véritable Proces Eichmann, p. 20). Manvell
and Frankl, however,remain undaunted by the complete lack of reference to
extermination. Atthe Wannsee conference, they write, "Direct references
to killing wereavoided, Heydrich favouring the term "Arbeitseinsatz
im Osten"(labour assignment in the East)" (Heinrich Himmler, p.
209). Why weshould not accept labour assignment in the East to mean labour
assignmentin the East is not explained. According to Reitlinger and others,
innumerabledirectives 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 lackof
documentary evidence to support the existence of an extermination planhas
led to the habit of re-interpreting the documents that do survive. Forexample,
it is held that a document concerning deportation is not aboutdeportation
at all, but a cunning way of talking about extermination. Manvelland Frankl
state that "various terms were used to camouflage genocide.These included
"Aussiedlung"(desettlement) and "Abbeförderung"(removal)"
(ibid, p. 265). Thus, as we have seen already, words areno 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 theirinterpretation of
Heydrich's directive for labour assignment in the East.Another example is
a reference to Himmler's order for sending deporteesto the East, "that
is, having them killed" (ibid, p. 251). Reitlinger,equally at a loss
for evidence, does exactly the same, declaring that fromthe "circumlocutionary"
words of the Wannsee conference it isobvious that "the slow murder
of an entire race was intended"(ibid, p. 98). A review of the documentary
situation is important, becauseit reveals the edifice of guesswork and baseless
assumptions upon whichthe extermination legend is built. The Germans had
an extraordinary propensityfor recording everything on paper in the most
careful detail, yet amongthe thousands of captured documents of the S.D.
and Gestapo, the recordsof the Reich Security Head Office, the files of
Himmler's headquarters andHitler's own war directives there is not a single
order for the exterminationof Jews or anyone else. It will be seen later
that this has, in fact, beenadmitted by the World Centre of Contemporary
Jewish Documentation at Tel-Aviv.Attempts to find "veiled allusions"
to genocide in speeches likethat of Himmler's to his S.S. Obergruppenführers
at Posen in 1943 arelikewise quite hopeless. Nuremberg statements extracted
after the war, invariablyunder duress, are examined in the following chapter.
5. THE NUREMBERG TRIALS The story of the Six Million wasgiven
judicial authority at the Nuremberg Trials of German leaders between1945
and 1949, proceedings which proved to be the most disgraceful legalfarce
in history. For a far more detailed study of the iniquities of thesetrials,
which as Field Marshal Montgomery said, made it a crime to losea war, the
reader is referred to the works cited below, and particularyto the outstanding
book Advance to Barbarism (Nelson, 1953), by the distinguishedEnglish jurist,
F. J. P. Veale. From the very outset, the Nuremberg Trialsproceeded on the
basis of gross statistical errors. In his speech of indictmenton November
20th, 1945, Mr. Sidney Alderman declared that there had been9,600,000 Jews
living in German occupied Europe. Our earlier study has shownthis figure
to be wildly inaccurate. It is arrived at (a) by completelyignoring all
Jewish emigration between 1933 and 1945, and (b) by addingall the Jews of
Russia, including the two million or more who were neverin German-occupied
territory. The same inflated figure, slightly enlargedto 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 foundationfor the prosecution
at Nuremberg, and after some dalliance with ten millionor more by the Press
at the time, it eventually gained international popularityand acceptance.
It is very significant, however, that, although this outlandishfigure was
able to win credence in the reckless atmosphere of recriminationin 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 believingthat
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 anykind. The accusers
acted as prosecutors, judges and executioners; "guilt"was assumed
from the outset. (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 onthe German defendants).
At Nuremberg, ex post facto legislation was created,whereby men were tried
for "crimes" which were only declared crimesafter they had been
allegedly committed. Hitherto it had been the most basiclegal principle
that a person could only be convicted for infringing a lawthat was in force
at the time of the infringement. "Nulla Poena SineLege." The Rules
of Evidence, developed by British jurisprudence overthe centuries in order
to arrive at the truth of a charge with as much certaintyas possible, were
entirely disregarded at Nuremberg. It was decreed that"the Tribunal
should not be bound by technical rules of evidence"but could admit
"any evidence which it deemed to have probative value,"that is,
would support a conviction. In practise, this meant the admittanceof hearsay
evidence and documents, which in a normal judicial trial arealways rejected
as untrustworthy. That such evidence was allowed is of profoundsignificance,
because it was one of the principal methods by which the exterminationlegend
was fabricated through fraudulent "written affidavits".Although
only 240 witnesses were called in the course of the Trials, noless than
300,000 of these "written affidavits" were acceptedby the Court
as supporting the charges, without this evidence being heardunder oath.
Under these circumstances, any Jewish deportee or camp inmatecould make
any revengeful allegation that he pleased. Most incredible ofall, perhaps,
was the fact that defence lawyers at Nuremberg were not permittedto cross-examine
prosecution witnesses. A somewhat similar situation prevailedat the trial
of Adolf Eichmann, when it was announced that Eichmann's defencelawyer could
be cancelled at any time "if an intolerable situationshould arise,"
which presumably meant if his lawyer started to provehis innocence. The
real background of the Nuremberg Trials was exposed bythe American judge,
Justice Wenersturm, President of one of Tribunals. Hewas so disgusted by
the proceedings that he resigned his appointment andflew home to America,
leaving behind a statement to the Chicago Tribunewhich ennumerated point
by point his objections to the Trials (cf Mark Lautern,Das Letzte Wort über
Nürnberg, p. 56). Points 3 -8 are as follows:3. The members of the
department of the Public Prosecutor, instead of tryingto formulate and reach
a new guiding legal principle, were moved only bypersonal ambition and revenge.
4. The prosecution did its utmost in everyway possible to prevent the defence
preparing its case and to make it impossiblefor it to furnish evidence.
5. The prosecution, led by General Taylor, dideverything in its power to
prevent the unanimous decision of the MilitaryCourt being carried out i.e.
to ask Washington to furnish and make availableto the court further documentary
evidence in the possession of the AmericanGovernment. 6. Ninety per cent
of the Nuremberg Court consisted of biasedpersons who, either on political
or racial grounds, furthered the prosecution'scase. 7. The prosecution obviously
knew how to fill all the administrativeposts of the Military Court with
"Americans" whose naturalisationcertificates were very new indeed,
and who, whether in the administrativeservice or by their translations etc.,
created an atmposhere hostile tothe accused persons. 8. The real aim of
the Nuremberg Trials was to showthe Germans the crimes of their Führer,
and this aim was at the sametime the pretext on which the trials were ordered
. . . Had I known sevenmonths earlier what was happening at Nuremberg, I
would never have gonethere. Concerning Point 6, that ninety per cent of
the Nuremberg Court consistedof people biased on racial or political grounds,
this was a fact confirmedby others present. According to Earl Carrol, an
American lawyer, sixty percent of the staff of the Public Prosecutor's Office
were German Jews whohad left Germany after the promulgation of Hitler's
Race Laws. He observedthat not even ten per cent of the Americans employed
at the Nuremberg courtswere actually Americans by birth. The chief of the
Public Prosecutor's Office,who worked behind General Taylor, was Robert
M. Kempner, a German-Jewishemigrant. He was assisted by Morris Amchan. Mark
Lautern, who observed theTrials, writes in his book: "They have all
arrived: the Solomons, theSchlossbergers and the Rabinovitches, members
of the Public Prosecutor'sstaff . . ." (ibid. p. 68). It is obvious
from these facts that thefundamental legal principle: that no man can sit
in judgement on his owncase, was abandoned altogether. Moreover, the majority
of witnesses werealso Jews. According to Prof. Maurice Bardeche, who was
also an observerat the Trials, the only concern of these witnesses was not
to show theirhatred too openly, and to try and give an impression of objectivity
(Nurembergou la Terre Promise, Paris, 1948, p. 149).
'CONFESSIONS' UNDER TORTURE Altogether more disturbing,however,
were the methods employed to extract statements and "confessions"at
Nuremberg, particularly those from S.S. officers which were used to supportthe
extermination charge. The American Senator, Joseph McCarthy, in a statementgiven
to the American Press on May 20th, 1949, drew attention to the followingcases
of torture to secure such confessions. In the prison of the SwabischHall,
he stated, officers of the S.S. Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler were floggeduntil
they were soaked in blood, after which their sexual organs were trampledon
as they lay prostrate on the ground. As in the notorious Malmedy Trialsof
private soldiers, the prisoners were hoisted in the air and beaten untilthey
signed the confessions demanded of them. On the basis of such "confessions"extorted
from S.S. Generals Sepp Dietrich and Joachim Paiper, the Leibstandartewas
convicted as a "guilty organisation". S.S. General OswaldPohl,
the economic administrator of the concentration camp system, had hisface
smeared with faeces and was subsequently beaten until he supplied hisconfession.
In dealing with these cases, Senator McCarthy told the Press:"I have
heard evidence and read documentary proofs to the effect thatthe accused
persons were beaten up, maltreated and physically tortured bymethods which
could only be conceived in sick brains. They were subjectedto mock trials
and pretended executions, they were told their families wouldbe deprived
of their ration cards. All these things were carried out withthe approval
of the Public Prosecutor in order to secure the psychologicalatmosphere
necessary for the extortion of the required confessions. If theUnited States
lets such acts committed by a few people go unpunished, thenthe whole world
can rightly criticise us severely and forever doubt thecorrectness of our
motives and our moral integrity." The methods ofintimidation described
were repeated during trials at Frankfurt-am-Meinand at Dachau, and large
numbers of Germans were convicted for atrocitieson the basis of their admissions.
The American Judge Edward L. van Roden,one of the three members of the Simpson
Army Commission which was subsequentlyappointed to investigate the methods
of justice at the Dachau trials, revealedthe methods by which these admissions
were secured in the Washington DailyNews, January 9th, 1949. His account
also appeared in the British newspaper,the Sunday Pictorial, January 23rd,
1949. The methods he described were:"Posturing as priests to hear confessions
and give absolution; torturewith burning matches driven under the prisoners
finger-nails; knocking outof teeth and breaking jaws; solitary confinement
and near starvation rations."Van Roden explained: "The statements
which were admitted as evidencewere obtained from men who had first been
kept in solitary confinement forthree, four and five months . . . The investigators
would put a black hoodover 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 beyondrepair. This was standard operating procedure with
our American investigators."The "American" investigators
responsible (and who later functionedas the prosecution in the trials) were:
Lt.-Col. Burton F. Ellis (chiefof the War Crimes Committee) and his assistants,
Capt. Raphael Shumacker,Lt. Robert E. Byrne, Lt. William R. Perl, Mr. Morris
Ellowitz, Mr. HarryThon, and Mr. Kirschbaum. The legal adviser of the court
was Col. A. H.Rosenfeld. The reader will immediately appreciate from their
names thatthe majority of these people were "biased on racial grounds"
inthe words of Justice Wenersturm - that is, were Jewish, and therefore
shouldnever have been involved in any such investigation. Despite the fact
that"confessions" pertaining to the extemination of the Jews wereextracted
under these conditions, Nuremberg statements are still regardedas conclusive
evidence for the Six Million by writers like Reitlinger andothers, and the
illusion is maintained that the Trials were both impartialand impeccably
fair. When General Taylor, the Chief Public Prosecutor, wasasked where he
had obtained the figure of the Six Million, he replied thatit 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 SundayPictorial
when reviewing the report of Judge van Roden: "Strong menwere reduced
to broken wrecks ready to mumble any admission demanded bytheir prosecutors."
THE WISLICENY STATEMENT At this point, let us turnto
some of the Nuremberg documents themselves. The document quoted mostfrequently
in support of the legend of the Six Million, and which figureslargely in
Poliakov and Wulf's Das Dritte Reich und die Juden: Dokumenteund Aufsätze,
is the statement of S.S. Captain Dieter Wisliceny, anassistant in Adolf
Eichmann's office and later the Gestapo chief in Slovakia.It was obtained
under conditions even more extreme than those describedabove, for Wisliceny
fell into the hands of Czech Communists and was "interrogated"at
the Soviet-controlled Bratislava Prison in November, 1946. Subjectedto torture,
Wisliceny was reduced to a nervous wreck and became addictedto uncontrollable
fits of sobbing for hours on end prior to his execution.Although the conditions
under which his statement was obtained empty itentirely of all pIausibility,
Poliakov prefers to ignore this and merelywrites: "In prison he wrote
several memoirs that contain informationof great interest" (Harvest
of Hate, p. 3). These memoirs include somegenuine statements of fact to
provide authenticity, such as that Himmlerwas an enthusiastic advocate of
Jewish emigration and that the emigrationof Jews from Europe continued throughout
the war, but in general they aretypical of the Communist-style "confession"
produced at Sovietshow-trials. Frequent reference is made to exterminating
Jews and a flagrantattempt is made to implicate as many S.S. leaders as
possible. Factual errorsare also common, notably the statement that the
war with Poland added morethan 3 million Jews to the German-occupied territory,
which we have disprovedabove.
THE CASE OF THE EINSATZGRUPPEN The Wisliceny statementdeals
at some length with the activities of the Einsatzgruppen or ActionGroups
used in the Russian campaign. These must merit a detailed considerationin
a survey of Nuremberg because the picture presented of them at the Trialsrepresents
a kind of "Six Million" in miniature, i.e. has beenproved since
to be the most enormous exaggeration and falsification. TheEinsatzgruppen
were four special units drawn from the Gestapo and the S.D.(S.S. Security
Service) whose task was to wipe out partisans and Communistcommissars in
the wake of the advancing German armies in Russia. As earlyas 1939, there
had been 34,000 of these political commissars attached tothe Red Army. The
activities of the Einsatzgruppen were the particular concernof the Soviet
Prosecutor Rudenko at the Nuremberg Trials. The 1947 indictmentof the four
groups alleged that in the course of their operations they hadkilled not
less than one million Jews in Russia merely because they wereJews. These
allegations have since been elaborated; it is now claimed thatthe murder
of Soviet Jews by the Einsatzgruppen constituted Phase One inthe plan to
exterminate the Jews, Phase Two being the transportation ofEuropean Jews
to Poland. Reitlinger admits that the original term "finalsolution"
referred to emigration and had nothing to do with the liquidationof Jews,
but he then claims that an extermination policy began at the timeof the
invasion of Russia in 1941. He considers Hitler's order of July 1941for
the liquidation of the Communist commissars, and he concludes that thiswas
accompanied by a verbal order from Hitler for the Einsatzgruppen toliquidate
all Soviet Jews (Die Endlösung, p. 91). If this assumptionis based
on anything at all, it is probably the worthless Wisliceny statement,which
alleges that the Einsatzgruppen were soon receiving orders to extendtheir
task of crushing Communists and partisans to a "general massacre"of
Russian Jews. It is very significant that, once again, it is a "verbalorder"
for exterminating Jews that is supposed to have accompaniedHitler's genuine,
written order - yet another nebulous and unprovable assumptionon the part
of Reitlinger. An earlier order from Hitler, dated March 1941and signed
by Field Marshal Keitel, makes it quite clear what the real tasksof the
future Einsatzgruppen would be. It states that in the Russian campaign,the
Reichsfüher S.S. (Himmler) is to be entrusted with "tasksfor the
political administration, tasks which result from the struggle whichhas
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.
Continue to Part 4