Did Six Million Really Die:
Truth at Last - Exposed:

( Part 4 of 9 )

THE OHLENDORF TRIAL The most revealing trial in the "EinsatzgruppenCase" at Nuremberg was that of S.S. General Otto Ohlendorf, the chiefof the S.D. who commanded Einsatzgruppe D in the Ukraine, attached to FieldMarshal von Manstein's Eleventh Army. During the last phase of the war hewas employed as a foreign trade expert in the Ministry of Economics. Ohlendorfwas one of those subjected to the torture described earlier, and in hisaffidavit of November 5th, 1945 he was "persuaded" to confessthat 90,000 Jews had been killed under his command alone. Ohlendorf didnot come to trial until 1948, long after the main Nuremberg Trial, and bythat time he was insisting that his earlier statement had been extractedfrom him under torture. In his main speech before the Tribunal, Ohlendorftook the opportunity to denounce Philip Auerbach, the Jewish attorney-generalof the Bavarian State Office for Restitution, who at that time was claimingcompensation for "eleven million Jews" who had suffered in Germanconcentration camps. Ohlendorf dismissed this ridiculous claim, statingthat "not the minutest part" of the people for whom Auerbach wasdemanding compensation had even seen a concentration camp. Ohlendorf livedlong enough to see Auerbach convicted for embezzlement and fraud (forgingdocuments purporting to show huge payments of compensation to non-existentpeople) before his own execution finally took place in 1951. Ohlendorf explainedto the Tribunal that his units often had to prevent massacres of Jews organisedby anti-Semitic Ukrainians behind the German front, and he denied that theEinsatzgruppen as a whole had inflicted even one quarter of the casualtiesclaimed by the prosecution. He insisted that the illegal partisan warfarein Russia, which he had to combat, had taken a far higher toll of livesfrom the regular German army - an assertion confirmed by the Soviet Government,which boasted of 500,000 German troops killed by partisans. In fact, FranzStahlecker, commander of Einsatzgruppe A in the Baltic region and WhiteRussia, was himself killed by partisans in 1942. The English jurist F. J.P. Veale, in dealing with the Action Groups, explains that in the fightingon the Russian front no distinction could be properly drawn between partisansand the civilian population, because any Russian civilian who maintainedhis civilian status instead of acting as a terrorist was liable to be executedby his countrymen as a traitor. Veale says of the Action Groups: "Thereis no question that their orders were to combat terror by terror",and he finds it strange that atrocities committed by the partisans in thestruggle were regarded as blameless simply because they turned out to beon the winning side (ibid. p. 223). Ohlendorf took the same view, and ina bitter appeal written before his execution, he accused the Allies of hypocrisyin holding the Germans to account by conventional laws of warfare whilefighting a savage Soviet enemy who did not respect those laws.

ACTION GROUP EXECUTIONS DISTORTED The Soviet charge thatthe Action Groups had wantonly exterminated a million Jews during theiroperations has been shown subsequently to be a massive falsification. Infact, there had never been the slightest statistical basis for the figure.In this connection, Poliakov and Wulf cite the statement of Wilhelm Hoettl,the dubious American spy, double agent and former assistant of Eichmann.Hoettl, it will be remembered, claimed that Eichmann had "told him" that six million Jews had been exterminated - and he added that twomillion of these had been killed by the Einsatzgruppen. This absurd figurewent beyond even the wildest estimates of Soviet Prosecutor Rudenko, andit was not.given any credence by the American Tribunal which tried and condemnedOhlendorf. The real number of casualties for which the Action Groups wereresponsible has since been revealed in the scholarly work Manstein, hisCampaigns and his Trial (London, 1951), by the able English lawyer R. T.Paget. Ohlendorf had been under Manstein's nominal command. Paget's conclusionis that the Nuremberg Court, in accepting the figures of the Soviet prosecution,exaggerated the number of casualties by more than 1000 per cent and thatthey distorted even more the situations in which these casualties were infiicted.(These horrific distortions are the subject of six pages of William Shirer'sThe Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, pp. 1140-46). Here, then, is the legendary6 million in miniature; not one million deaths, but one hundred thousand.Of course, only a small proportion of these could have been Jewish partisansand Communist functionaries. It is worth repeating that these casualtieswere inflicted during savage partisan warfare on the Eastern front, andthat Soviet terrorists claim to have killed five times that number of Germantroops. It has nevertheless remained a popular myth that the exterminationof the Jews began with the actions of the Einsatzgruppen in Russia. In conclusion,we may briefly survey the Manstein trial itself, typical in so many waysof Nuremberg proceedings. Principally because Action Group D was attachedto Manstein's command (though it was responsible solely to Himmler), thesixty-two year old, invalid Field Marshal, considered by most authoritiesto be the most brilliant German general of the war, was subjected to theshameful indignity of a "war-crimes" trial. Of the 17 charges,15 were brought by the Communist Russian Government and two by the CommunistPolish Government. Only one witness was called to give evidence at thistrial, and he proved so unsatisfactory that the prosecution withdrew hisevidence. Reliance was placed instead on 800 hearsay documents which wereaccepted by the court without any proof of their authenticity or authorship.The prosecution introduced written affidavits by Ohlendorf and other S.S.Leaders, but since these men were still alive, Manstein's defence.lawyerReginald Paget K.C. demanded their appearance in the witness-box. This wasrefused by the American authorities, and Paget declared that this refusalwas due to fear lest the condemned men revealed what methods had been usedto induce them to sign their affidavits. Manstein was eventually acquittedon eight of the charges, including the two Polish ones which, as Paget said,"were so flagrantly bogus that one was left wondering why they hadbeen presented at all."

THE OSWALD POHL TRIAL The case of the Action Groups isa revealing insight into the methods of the Nuremberg Trials and the fabricationof the Myth of the Six Million. Another is the trial of Oswald Pohl in 1948,which is of great importance as it bears directly on the administrationof the concentration camp system. Pohl had been the chief disbursing officerof the German Navy until 1934, when Himmler requested his transfer to theS.S. For eleven years he was the principal administrative chief of the entireS.S. in his position as head of the S.S. Economy and Administration Office,which after 1941 was concerned with the industrial productivity of the concentrationcamp system. A peak point of hypocrisy was reached at the trial when. theprosecution said to Pohl that "had Germany rested content with theexclusion of Jews from her own territory, with denying them German citizenship,with excluding them from public office, or any like domestic regulation,no other nation could have been heard to complain." The truth is thatGermany was bombarded with insults and economic sanctions for doing preciselythese things, and her internal measures against the Jews were certainlya major cause of the declaration of war against Germany by the democracies.Oswald Pohl was an extremely sensitive and intellectual individual who wasreduced to a broken man in the course of his trial. As Senator McCarthypointed out, Pohl had signed some incriminating statements after being subjectedto severe torture, including a bogus admission that he had seen a gas chamberat Auschwitz in the summer of 1944. The prosecution strenuously pressedthis charge, but Pohl successfully repudiated it. The aim of the prosecutionwas to depict this dejected man as a veritable fiend in human shape, animpression hopelessly at variance with the testimony of those who knew him. Such testimony was given by Heinrich Hoepker, an anti- Nazi friend ofPohl's wife who came into frequent contact with him during the period 1942-45.Hoepker noted that Pohl was essentially a serene and mild-mannered person.During a visit to Pohl in the spring of 1944, Hoepker was brought into contactwith concentration camp inmates who were working on a local project outsidethe camp area. He noted that the prisoners worked in a leisurely mannerand relaxed atmosphere without any pressure from their guards. Hoepker declaredthat Pohl did not hold an emotional attitude to the Jews, and did not objectto his wife entertaining her Jewish friend Annemarie Jacques at their home.By the beginning of 1945, Hoepker was fully convinced that the administratorof the concentration camps was a humane, conscientious and dedicated servantof his task, and he was astonished when he heard later in 1945 of the accusationsbeing made against Pohl and his colleagues. Frau Pohl noted that her husbandretained his serenity in the face of adversity until March 1945, when hevisited the camp at Bergen- Belsen at the time of the typhus epidemic there.Hitherto the camp had been a model of cleanliness and order, but the chaoticconditions at the close of the war had reduced it to a state of extremehardship. Pohl, who was unable to alleviate conditions there because ofthe desperate pass which the war had reached by that time, was deeply affectedby the experience and, according to his wife, never regained his formerstate of composure. Dr. Alfred Seidl, the highly respected lawyer who actedas principal defence counsel at the Nuremberg Trials, went to work passionatelyto secure the acquittal of Pohl. Seidl had been a personal friend of theaccused for many years, and was thoroughly convinced of his innocence withrespect to the fraudulent charge of planned genocide against the Jews. TheAllied judgement which condemned Pohl did not prompt Seidl to change hisopinion in the slightest. He declared that the prosecution had failed toproduce a single piece of valid evidence against him. One of the most eloquentdefences of Oswald Pohl was made by S.S. Lieutenant Colonel Kurt Schmidt-Klevenow,a legal officer in the S.S. Economy and Administration Office, in his affidavitof August 8th, 1947. This affidavit has been deliberately omitted from thepublished documents known as Trials of the War Criminals before the NurembergMilitary Tribunals 1946 -1949. Schmidt-Klevenow pointed out that Pohl hadgiven his fullest support to Judge Konrad Morgen of the Reich Criminal PoliceOffice, whose job was to investigate irregularities at the concentrationcamps. Later on we shall refer to a case in which Pohl was in favour ofthe death penalty for camp commandant Koch, who was accused by an S.S. courtof misconduct. Schmidt- Klevenow explained that Pohl was instrumental inarranging for local police chiefs to share in the jurisdiction of concentrationcamps, and took personal initiative in securing strict discipline on thepart of camp personnel. In short, the evidence given at the Pohl trial showsthat the proceedings involved nothing less than the deliberate defamationof a man's character in order to support the propaganda legend of genocideagainst the Jews in the concentration camps he administered.

FALSIFIED EVIDENCE AND FRAUDULENT AFFIDAVITS Spurious testimonyat Nuremberg which included extravagant statements in support of the mythof the Six Million was invariably given by former German officers becauseof pressure, either severe torture as in the cases cited previously, orthe assurance of leniency for themselves if they supplied the required statements.An example of the latter was the testimony of S.S. General Erich von demBach-Zelewski. He was threatened with execution himself because of his suppressionof the revolt by Polish partisans at Warsaw in August 1944, which he carriedout with his S.S. brigade of White Russians. He was therefore prepared tobe "co-operative". The evidence of Bach-Zelewski constituted thebasis of the testimony against the Reichsführer of the S.S. HeinrichHimmler at the main Nuremberg Trial (Trial of the Major War Criminals, Vol.IV, pp, 29, 36). In March 1941, on the eve of the invasion of Russia, Himmlerinvited the Higher S.S. Leaders to his Castle at Wewelsburg for a conference,including Bach-Zelewski who was an expert on partisan warfare. In his Nurembergevidence, he depicted Himmler speaking in grandiose terms at this conferenceabout the liquidation of peoples in Eastern Europe, but Goering, in thecourtroom, denounced Bach-Zelewski to his face for the falsity of this testimony.An especially outrageous allegation concerned a supposed declaration byHimmler that one of the aims of the Russian campaign was to "decimatethe Slav population by thirty millions." What Himmler really said isgiven by his Chief of Staff, Wolff - that war in Russia was certain to resultin millions of dead (Manvell & Frankl, ibid. p. 117). Another brazen falsehoodwas Bach-Zelewski's accusation that on August 31st, 1942 Himmler personallywitnessed the execution of one hundred Jews by an Einsatz detachment atMinsk, causing him to nearly faint. It is known, however, that on this dateHimmler was in conference at his field headquarters at Zhitomir in the Ukraine(cf K. Vowinckel, Die Wehrmacht im Kampf, vol. 4, p. 275). Much is madeof Bach-Zelewski's evidence in all the books on Himmler, especially WilliFrischauer's Himmler: Evil Genius of the Third Reich (London, 1953, p. 148ff). However, in April 1959, Bach-Zelewski publicly repudiated his Nurembergtestimony before a West German court. He admitted that his earlier statementshad not the slightest foundation in fact, and that he had made them forthe sake of expediency and his own survival. The German court, after carefuldeliberation, accepted his retraction. Needless to say, what Veale callsthe "Iron Curtain of Discreet Silence" descended immediately overthese events. They have had no influence whatever on the books which propagatethe myth of the Six Million, and Bach-Zelewski's testimony on Himmler isstill taken at its face value. The truth concerning Himmler is providedironically by an anti-Nazi - Felix Kersten, his physician and masseur. BecauseKersten was opposed to the regime, he tends to support the legend that theinternment of Jews meant their extermination. But from his close personalknowledge of Himmler he cannot help but tell the truth concerning him, andin his Memoirs 1940-1945 (London, 1956, p. 119 ff) he is emphatic in statingthat Heinrich Himmler did not advocate liquidating the Jews but favouredtheir emigration overseas. Neither does Kersten implicate Hitler. However,the credibility of his anti-Nazi narrative is completely shattered when,in search of an alternative villain, he declares that Dr. Goebbels was thereal advocate of "extermination". This nonsensical allegationis amply disproved by the fact that Goebbels was still concerned with theMadagascar project even after it had been temporarily shelved by the GermanForeign Office, as we showed earlier. So much for false evidence at Nuremberg.Reference has also been made to the thousands of fraudulent "writtenaffidavits" which were accepted by the Nuremberg Court without anyattempt to ascertain the authenticity of their contents or even their authorship.These hearsay documents, often of the most bizarre kind, were introducedas "evidence" so long as they bore the required signature. A typicalprosecution affidavit contested by the defence in the Concentration CampTrial of 1947 was that of Alois Hoellriegel, a member of the camp personnelat Mauthausen in Austria. This affidavit, which the defence proved was fabricatedduring Hoellriegel's torture, had already been used to secure the convictionof S.S. General Ernst Kaltenbrunner in 1946. It claimed that a mass gassingoperation had taken place at Mauthausen and that Hoellriegel had witnessedKaltenbrunner ( the highest S.S. Leader in the Reich excepting Himmler)actually taking part in it. By the time of the Concentration Camp Trial(Pohl's trial) a year later, it had become impossible to sustain this pieceof nonsense when it was produced in court again. The defence not only demonstratedthat the affidavit was falsified, but showed that all deaths at Mauthausenwere systematically checked by the local police authorities. They were alsoentered on a camp register, and particular embarrassment was caused to theprosecution when the Mauthausen register, one of the few that survived,was produced in evidence. The defence also obtained numerous affidavitsfrom former inmates of Mauthausen (a prison camp chiefly for criminals)testifying to humane and orderly conditions there.

ALLIED ACCUSATIONS DISBELIEVED There is no more eloquenttestimony to the tragedy and tyranny of Nuremberg than the pathetic astonishmentor outraged disbelief of the accused persons themselves at the grotesquecharges made against them. Such is reflected in the affidavit of S.S. Major-GeneralHeinz Fanslau, who visited most of the German concentration camps duringthe last years of the war. AIthough a front line soldier of the Waffen S.S.,Fanslau had taken a great interest in concentration camp conditions, andhe was selected as a prime target by the Allies for the charge of conspiracyto annihilate the Jews. It was argued, on the basis of his many contacts,that he must have been fully involved. When it was first rumoured that hewould be tried and convicted, hundreds of affidavits were produced on hisbehalf by camp inmates he had visited. When he read the full scope of theindictment against the concentration camp personnel in supplementary NurembergTrial No. 4 on May 6th, 1947, Fanslau declared in disbelief: "Thiscannot be possible, because I, too, would have had to know something aboutit." It should be emphasised that throughout the Nuremberg proceedings,the German leaders on trial never believed for a moment the allegationsof the Allied prosecution. Hermann Goering, who was exposed to the fullbrunt of the Nuremberg atrocity propaganda, failed to be convinced by it.Hans Fritzsche, on trial as the highest functionary of Goebbels' Ministry,relates that Goering, even after hearing the Ohlendorf affidavit on theEinsatzgruppen and the Hoess testimony on Auschwitz, remained convincedthat the extermination of Jews was entirely propaganda fiction (The Swordin the Scales, London, 1953, p. 145). At one point during the trial, Goeringdeclared rather cogently that the first time he had heard of it "wasright here in Nuremberg" (Shirer, ibid. p. 1147). The Jewish writersPoliakov, Reitlinger and Manvell and Frankl all attempt to implicate Goeringin this supposed extermination, but Charles Bewley in his work Hermann Goering(Goettingen, 1956) shows that not the slightest evidence was found at Nurembergto substantiate this charge. Hans Fritzsche pondered on the whole questionduring the trials, and he concluded that there had certainly been no thoroughinvestigation of these monstrous charges. Fritzsche, who was acquitted,was an associate of Goebbels and a skilled propagandist. He recognised thatthe alleged massacre of the Jews was the main point of the indictment againstall defendants. Kaltenbrunner, who succeeded Heydrich as chief of the ReichSecurity Head Office and was the main defendant for the S.S. due to thedeath of Himmler, was no more convinced of the genocide charges than wasGoering. He confided to Fritzsche that the prosecution was scoring apparentsuccesses because of their technique of coercing witnesses and suppressingevidence, which was precisely the accusation of Judges Wenersturm and vanRoden.

6. AUSCHWITZ AND POLISH JEWRY The concentration camp atAuschwitz near Cracow in Poland has remained at the centre of the allegedextermination of millions of Jews. Later we shall see how, when it was discoveredby honest observers in the British and American zones after the war thatno "gas chambers" existed in the German camps such as Dachau andBergen-Belsen, attention was shifted to the eastern camps, particularlyAuschwitz. Ovens definitely existed here, it was claimed. Unfortunately,the eastem camps were in the Russian zone of occupation, so that no onecould verify whether these allegations were true or not. The Russians refusedto allow anyone to see Auschwitz until about ten years after the war, bywhich time they were able to alter its appearance and give some plausibilityto the claim that millions of people had been exterminated there. If anyonedoubts that the Russians are capable of such deception, they should rememberthe monuments erected at sites where thousands of people were murdered inRussia by Stalin's secret police -- but where the monuments proclaim themto be victims of German troops in World War Two. The truth about Auschwitzis that it was the largest and most important industrial concentration camp,producing all kinds of material for the war industry. The camp consistedof synthetic coal and rubber plants built by I. G. Farben Industrie, forwhom the prisoners supplied labour. Auschwitz also comprised an agriculturalresearch station, with laboratories, plant nurseries and facilities forstock breeding, as well as Krupps armament works. We have already remarkedthat this kind of activity was the prime function of the camps; all majorfirms had subsidiaries in them and the S.S. even opened their own factories.Accounts of visits by Himmler to the camps show that his main purpose wasto inspect and assess their industrial efficiency. When he visited Auschwitzin March 1941 accompanied by high executives of I.G. Farben, he showed nointerest in the problems of the camp as a facility for prisoners, but merelyordered that the camp be enlarged to take 100,000 detainees to supply labourfor I.G. Farben. This hardly accords with a policy of exterminating prisonersby the million.

MORE AND MORE MILLIONS It was nevertheless at this singlecamp that about half of the six million Jews were supposed to have beenexterminated, indeed, some writers claim 4 or even 5 million. Four millionwas the sensational figure announced by the Soviet Government after theCommunists had "investigated" the camp, at the same time as theywere attempting to blame the Katyn massacre on the Germans. Reitlinger admitsthat information regarding Auschwitz and other eastern camps comes fromthe post-war Communist regimes of Eastem Europe: "The evidence concerningthe Polish death camps was mainly taken after the war by Polish State commissionsor by the Central Jewish Historical Commission of Poland" (The FinalSolution, p . 631). However, no living, authentic eye-witness of these "gassings"has ever been produced and validated. Benedikt Kautsky, who spent sevenyears in concentration camps, including three in Auschwitz, alleged in hisbook Teufel und Verdammte (Devil and Damned, Zurich, 1946) that "notless than 3,500,000 Jews" had been killed there. This was certainlya remarkable statement, because by his own admission he had never seen agas chamber. He confessed: "I was in the big German concentration camps.However, I must establish the truth that in no camp at any time did I comeacross such an installation as a gas chamber" (p. 272- 3). The onlyexecution he actually witnessed was when two Polish inmates were executedfor killing two Jewish inmates. Kautsky, who was sent from Buchenwald inOctober, 1942 to work at Auschwitz-Buna, stresses in his book that the useof prisoners in war industry was a major feature of concentration camp policyuntil the end of the war. He fails to reconcile this with an alleged policyof massacring Jews. The exterminations at Auschwitz are alleged to haveoccurred between March 1942 and October 1944; the figure of half of sixmillion, therefore, would mean the extermination and disposal of about 94,000people per month for thirty two months - approximately 3,350 people everyday, day and night, for over two and a half years. This kind of thing isso ludicrous that it scarcely needs refuting. And yet Reitlinger claimsquite seriously that Auschwitz could dispose of no less than 6,000 peoplea day. Although Reitlinger's 6,O00 a day would mean a total by October 1944of over 5 million, all such estimates pale before the wild fantasies ofOlga Lengyel in her book Five Chimneys (London, 1959). Claiming to be aformer inmate of Auschwitz, she asserts that the camp cremated no less than"720 per hour, or 17,280 corpses per twenty-four hour shift."She also alleges that, in addition, 8,000 people were burned every day inthe "death-pits", and that therefore "In round numbers, about24,000 corpses were handled every day" (p. 80-1). This, of course,would mean a yearly rate of over 8-1/2 million. Thus between March 1942and October 1944 Auschwitz would finally have disposed of over 21 millionpeople, six million more than the entire world Jewish population. Commentis superfluous. Although several millions, were supposed to have died atAuschwitz alone, Reitlinger has to admit that only 363,000 inmates wereregistered at the camp for the whole of the period between January 1940and February 1945 (The S.S. Alibi of a Nation, p. 268 ff), and by no meansall of them were Jews. It is frequently claimed that many prisoners werenever registered, but no one has offered any proof of this. Even if therewere as many unregistered as there were registered, it would mean only atotal of 750,000 prisoners -- hardly enough for the elimination of 3 or4 million. Moreover, large numbers of the camp population were releasedor transported elsewhere during the war, and at the end 80,000 were evacuatedwestward in January 1945 before the Russian advance. One example will sufficeof the statistical frauds relating to casualties at Auschwitz. Shirer claimsthat in the summer of 1944, no less than 300,000 Hungarian Jews were doneto death in a mere forty-six days (ibid. p. 1156). This would have beenalmost the entire Hungarian Jewish population, which numbered some 380,000.But according to the Central Statistical Office of Budapest, there were260,000 Jews in Hungary in 1945 (which roughly conforms with the Joint DistributionCommittee figure of 220,000), so that only 120,000 were classed as no longerresident. Of these, 35,000 were emigrants from the new Communist regime,and a further 25,000 were still being held in Russia after having workedin German labour battalions there. This leaves only 60,000 Hungarian Jewsunaccounted for, but M. E. Namenyi estimates that 60,000 Jews retumed toHungary from deportation in Germany, though Reitlinger says this figureis too high (The Final Solution, p. 497). Possibly it is, but bearing inmind the substantial emigration of Hungarian Jews during the war (cf Reportof the ICRC, Vol. I, p. 649), the number of Hungarian Jewish casualtiesmust have been very low indeed.

Continue to Part 5

Did Six Million Really Die: Truth at Last - Exposed:

Did Six Million Really Die:
Truth at Last - Exposed: