2. GERMAN POLICY TOWARD THE JEWS AFTER THE OUTBREAK OF
WAR With the coming of the war, the situation regarding the Jews
altered drastically. It is not widely known that world Jewry declared itself to
be a belligerent party in the Second World War, and there was therefore ample
basis under international law for the Germans to intern the Jewish population as
a hostile force. On September 5, 1939 Chaim Weizmann, the principle Zionist
leader, had declared war against Germany on behalf of the world's Jews, stating
that "the Jews stand by Great Britain and will fight on the side of the
democracies . . . The Jewish Agency is ready to enter into immediate
arrangements for utilizing Jewish manpower, technical ability, resources etc . .
." (Jewish Chronicle, September 8, 1939).
DETENTION OF ENEMY
ALIENS All Jews had thus been declared agents willing to prosecute a
war against the German Reich, and as a consequence, Himmler and Heydrich were
eventually to begin the policy of internment. It is worth noting that the United
States and Canada had already interned all Japanese aliens and citizens of
Japanese descent in detention camps before the Germans applied the same security
measures against the Jews of Europe. Moreover, there had been no such evidence
or declaration of disloyalty by these Japanese Americans as had been given by
Weizmann. The British, too, during the Boer War, interned all the women and
children of the population, and thousands had died as a result, yet in no sense
could the British be charged with wanting to exterminate the Boers. The
detention of Jews in the occupied territories of Europe served two essential
purposes from the German viewpoint. The first was to prevent unrest and
subversion; Himmler had informed Mussolini on October 11th, 1942, that German
policy towards the Jews had altered during wartime entirely for reasons of
military security. He complained that thousands of Jews in the occupied regions
were conducting partisan warfare, sabotage and espionage, a view confirmed by
official Soviet information given to Raymond Arthur Davis diat no less than
35,000 European Jews were waging partisan war under Tito in Yugoslavia. As a
result, Jews were to be transported to restricted areas and detention camps,
both in Germany, and especially after March 1942, in the Government- General of
Poland. As the war proceeded, the policy developed of using Jewish detainees for
labour in the war-effort. The question of labour is fundamental when considering
the alleged plan of genocide against the Jews, for on grounds of logic alone the
latter would entail the most senseless waste of manpower, time and energy while
prosecuting a war of survival on two fronts. Certainly after the attack on
Russia, the idea of compulsory labour had taken precedence over German plans for
Jewisb emigation. The protocol of a conversation between Hitler and the
Hungarian regent Horthy on April 17th, 1943, reveals that the German leader
personally requested Horthy to release 100,000 Hungarian Jews for work in the
"pursuit-plane programme" of the Luftwaffe at a time when the aerial bombardment
of Germany was increasing (Reitlinger, Die Endlösung, Berlin, 1956, p. 478).
This took place at a time when, supposedly, the Germans were already seeking to
exterminate the Jews, but Hitler's request clearly demonstrates the priority aim
of expanding his labour force. In harmony with this programme, concentration
camps became, in fact, industrial complexes. At every camp where Jews and other
nationalities were detained, there were.large industrial plants and factories
supplying material for the German war-effort - the Buna rubber factory at
Bergen-Belsen, for example, Buna and I. G. Farben Industrie at Auschwitz and the
electrical firm of Siemens at Ravensbruck. In many cases, special concentration
camp money notes were issued as payment for labour, enabling prisoners to buy
extra rations from camp shops. The Germans were determined to obtain the maximum
economic return from the concentration camp system, an object wholly at variance
with any plan to exterminate millions of people in them. It was the function of
the S.S. Economy and Administration Office, headed by Oswald Pohl, to see that
the concentration camps became major industrial
producers.
EMIGRATION STILL FAVOURED It is a remarkable
fact, however, that well into the war period, the Germans continued to implement
the policy of Jewish emigration. The fall of France in 1940 enabled the German
Government to open serious negotiations with the French for the transfer of
European Jews to Madagascar. A memorandum of August, 1942 from Luther,
Secretary-of-State in the German Foreign Office, reveals that he had conducted
these negotiations between July and December 1940, when they were terminated by
the French. A circular from Luther's department dated August 15th, 1940 shows
that the details of the German plan had been worked out by Eichmann, for it is
signed by his assistant, Dannecker. Eichmann had in fact been commissioned in
August to draw up a detailed Madagascar Plan, and Dannecker was employed in
research on Madagascar at the French Colonial Office (Reitlinger, The Final
,Solution, p. 77). The proposals of August 15th were that an inter-European bank
was to finance the emigration of four million Jews throughout a phased
programme. Luther's 1942 memorandum shows that Heydrich had obtained Himmler's
approval of this plan before the end of August and had also submitted it to
Goering. It certainly met with Hitler's approval, for as early as June 17th his
interpreter, Schmidt, recalls Hitler observing to Mussolini that "One could
found a State of Israel in Madagascar" (Schmidt, Hitler's lnterpreter,
London,1951, p.178). Although the French terminated the Madagascar negotiations
in December, 1940, Poliakov, the director of the Centre of Jewish Documentation
in Paris, admits that the Germans nevertheless pursued the scheme, and that
Eichmann was still busy with it throughout 1941. Eventually, however, it was
rendered impractical by the progress of the war, in particular by the situation
after the invasion of Russia, and on February 10th, 1942, the Foreign Office was
informed that the plan had been temporarily shelved. This ruling, sent to the
Foreign Office by Luther's assistant, Rademacher, is of great importance,
because it demonstrates conclusively that the term "Final Solution" meant only
the emigration of Jews, and also that transportation to the eastern ghettos and
concentration camps such as Auschwitz constituted nothing but an alternative
plan of evacuation. The directive reads: "The war with the Soviet Union has in
the meantime created the possibility of disposing of other territories for the
Final Solution. In consequence the Führer has decided that the Jews should be
evacuated not to Madagascar but to the East. Madagascar need no longer therefore
be considered in connection with the Final Solution" (Reitlinger, ibid. p. 79).
The details of this evacuation had been discussed a month earlier at the Wannsee
Conference in Berlin, which we shall examine below. Reitlinger and Poliakov both
make the entirely unfounded supposition that because the Madagascar Plan had
been shelved, the Germans must necessarily have been thinking of
"extermination". Only a month later, however, on March 7th, 1942, Goebbels wrote
a memorandum in favour of the Madagascar Plan as a "final solution" of the
Jewish question (Manvell & Frankl, Dr. Goebbels, London, 1960, p. 165). In
the meantime he approved of the Jews being "concentrated in the East". Later
Goebbels memoranda also stress deportation to the East (i.e. the
Government-General of Poland) and lay emphasis on the need for compulsory labour
there; once the policy of evacuation to the East had been inaugurated, the use
of Jewish labour became a fundamental part of the operation. It is perfecdy
clear from the foregoing that the term "Final Solution" was applied both to
Madagascar and to the Eastern territories, and that therefore it meant only the
deportation of the Jews. Even as late as May 1944, the Germans were prepared to
allow the emigration of one million European Jews from Europe. An account of
this proposal is given by Alexander Weissberg, a prominent Soviet Jewish
scientist deported during the Stalin purges, in his book Die Geschichte von Joel
Brand (Cologne, 1956). Weissberg, who spent the war in Cracow though he expected
the Germans to intern him in a concentration camp, explains that on the personal
authorisation of Himmler, Eichmann had sent the Budapest Jewish leader Joel
Brand to Istanbul with an offer to the Allies to permit the transfer of one
million European Jews in the midst of the war. (If the 'extermination' writers
are to be believed, there were scarcely one million Jews left by May, 1944). The
Gestapo admitted that the transportation involved would greatly inconvenience
the German war-effort, but were prepared to allow it in exchange for 10,000
trucks to be used exclusively on the Russian front. Unfortunately, the plan came
to nothing; the British concluded that Brand must be a dangerous Nazi agent and
immediately imprisoned him in Cairo, while the Press denounced the offer as a
Nazi trick. Winston Churchill, though orating to the effect that the treatment
of the Hungarian Jews was probably "the biggest and most horrible crime ever
committed in the whole history of the world", never- theless told Chaim Weizmann
that acceptance of the Brand offer was impossible, since it would be a betrayal
of his Russian Allies. Although the plan was fruitless, it well illustrates that
no one allegedly carrying out "thorough" extermination would permit the
emigration of a million Jews, and it demonstrates, too, the prime importance
placed by the Germans on the war-effort.
3. POPULATION AND
EMIGRATION Statistics relating to Jewish populations are not everywhere
known in precise detail, approximations for various countries differing widely,
and it is also unknown exactly how many Jews were deported and interned at any
one time between the years 1939-1945. In general, however, what reliable
statistics there are, especially those relating to emigration, are sufficient to
show that not a fraction of six million Jews could have been exterminated. In
the first place, this claim cannot remotely be upheld on examination of the
European Jewish population figures. According to Chambers Encyclopaedia the
total number of Jews living in pre-war Europe was 6,500,000. Quite clearly, this
would mean that almost the entire number were exterminated. But the Baseler
Nachrichten, a neutral Swiss publication employing available Jewish statistical
data, establishes that between 1933 and 1945, 1,500,000 Jews emigrated to
Britain, Sweden, Spain, Portugal, Australia, China, India, Palestine and the
United Sutes. This is confirmed by the Jewish journalist Bruno Blau, who cites
the same figure in the New York Jewish paper Aufbau, August 13th, 1948. Of these
emigrants, approximately 400,000 came from Germany before September 1939. This
is acknowledged by the World Jewish Congress in its publication Unity in
Dispersion (p. 377), which states that: "The majority of the German Jews
succeeded in leaving Germany before the war broke out." In addition to the
German Jews, 220,000 of the total 280,000 Austrian Jews had emigrated by
September, 1939, while from March 1939 onwards the Institute for Jewish
Emigration in Prague had secured the emigration of 260,000 Jews from former
Czechoslovakia. In all, only 360,000 Jews remained in Germany, Austria and
Czechoslovakia after September 1939. From Poland, an estimated 500,000 had
emigrated prior to the outbreak of war. These figures mean that the number of
Jewish emigrants from other European countries (France, the Netherlands, Italy,
the countries of eastern Europe etc.) was approximately 120,000. This exodus of
Jews before and during hostilities, therefore, reduces the number of Jews in
Europe to approximately 5,000,000. In addition to these emigrants, we must also
include the number of Jews who fled to the Soviet Union after 1939, and who were
later evacuated beyond reach of the German invaders. It will be shown below that
the majority of these, about 1,250,000, were migrants from Poland. But apart
from Poland, Reitlinger admits that 300,000 other European Jews slipped into
Soviet territory between 1939 and 1941. This brings the total of Jewish
emigrants to the Soviet Union to about 1,550,000. In Colliers magazine, June
9th, 1945, Freiling Foster, writing of the Jews in Russia, explained that
"2,200,000 have migrated to the Soviet Union since 1939 to escape from the
Nazis," but our lower estimate is probably more accurate. Jewish migration to
the Soviet Union, therefore, reduces the number of Jews within the sphere of
German occupation to around 3-1/2 million, approximately 3,450,000. From these
should be deducted those Jews living in neutral European countries who escaped
the consequences of the war. According to the 1942 World Almanac (p. 594). the
number of Jews living in Gibraltar, Britain, Portugal, Spain, Sweden,
Switzerland, Ireland and Turkey was 413,128.
3 MILLION JEWS IN
EUROPE A figure, consequently, of around 3 million Jews in German-
occupied Europe is as accurate as the available emigration statistics will
allow. Approximately the same number, however, can be deduced in another way if
we examine statistics for the Jewish populations remaining in countries occupied
by the Reich. More than half of those Jews who migrated to the Soviet Union
after 1939 came from Poland. It is frequently claimed that the war with Poland
added some 3 million Jews to the German sphere of influence and that almost the
whole of this Polish Jewish population was "exterminated". This is a major
factual error. The 1931 Jewish population census for Poland put the number of
Jews at 2,732,600 (Reitlinger, Die Endlösung, p. 36). Reitlinger states that at
least 1,170,000 of these were in the Russian zone occupied in the autumn of
1939, about a million of whom were evacuated to the Urals and south Siberia
after the German invasion of June 1941 (ibid. p. 50). As described above, an
estimated 500,000 Jews had emigrated from Poland prior to the war. Moreover, the
journalist Raymond Arthur Davis, who spent the war in the Soviet Union, observed
that approximately 250,000 had already fled from German-occupied Poland to
Russia between 1939 and 1941 and were to be encountered in every Soviet province
(Odyssey through Hell, N.Y., 1946). Subtracting these figures from the
population of 2,732,600, therefore, and allowing for the normal population
increase, no more than 1,100,000 Polish Jews could have been under German rule
at the end of 1939. (Gutachen des Instituts für Zeitgeschichte, Munich, 1956,
p.80). To this number we may add the 360,000 Jews remaining in Germany, Austria
and former Czechoslovakia (Bohemia-Moravia and Slovakia) after the extensive
emigration from those countries prior to the war described above. Of the 320,000
French Jews, the Public Prosecutor representing that part of the indictment
relating to France at the Nuremberg Trials, stated that 120,000 Jews were
deported, though. Reitlinger estimates only about 50,000. Thus the total number
of Jews under Nazi rule remains below two million. Deportations from the
Scandinavian countries were few, and from Bulgaria none at all. When the Jewish
populations of Holland (140,000), Belgium (40,000), Italy (50,000), Yugoslavia
(55,000), Hungary (380,000) and Roumania (725,000) are included, the figure does
not much exceed 3 million. This excess is due to the fact that the latter
figures are pre-war estimates unaffected by emigration, which from these
countries accounted for about 120,000 (see above). This cross-checking,
therefore, confirms the estimate of approximately 3 million European Jews under
German occupation.
RUSSIAN JEWS EVACUATED The precise
figures concerning Russian Jews are unknown, and have therefore been the subject
of extreme exaggeration. The Jewish statistician Jacob Leszczynski states that
in 1939 there were 2,100,000 Jews living in future German-occupied Russia, i.e.
western Russia. In addition, some 260,000 lived in the Baltic states of Estonia,
Latvia and Lithuania. According to Louis Levine, President of the American
Jewish Council for Russian Relief, who made a post-war tour of the Soviet Union
and submitted a report on the status of Jews there, the majority of these
numbers were evacuated east after the German armies launched their invasion. In
Chicago, on October 30th, 1946, he declared that: "At the outset of the war,
Jews were amongst the first evacuated from the western regions threatened by the
Hitlerite invaders, and shipped to safety east of the Urals. Two million Jews
were thus saved." This high number is confirmed by the Jewish journalist David
Bergelson, who wrote in the Moscow Yiddish paper Ainikeit, December 5th, 1942,
that "Thanks to the evacuation, the majority (80%) of the Jews in the Ukraine,
White Russia, Lithuania and Latvia before the arrival of the Germans were
rescued." Reitlinger agrees with the Jewish authority Joseph Schechtmann, who
admits that huge numbers were evacuated, though he estimates a slightly higher
number of Russian and Baltic Jews left under German occupation, between 650,000
and 850,000 (Reitlinger, The Final Solution, p. 499). In respect of these Soviet
Jews remaining in German territory, it will be proved later that in the war in
Russia no more than one hundred thousand persons were killed by the German
Action Groups as partisans and Bolshevik commissars, not all of whom were Jews.
By contrast, the partisans themselves claimed to have murdered five times that
number of German troops.
'SIX MILLION' UNTRUE ACCORDING TO
NEUTRAL SWISS It is clear, therefore, that the Germans could not
possibly have gained control over or exterminated anything like six million
Jews. Excluding the Soviet Union, the number of Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe
after emigration was scarcely more than 3 million, by no means all of whom were
interned. To approach the extermination of even half of six mfilion would have
meant the liquidation of every Jew living in Europe. And yet it is known that
large numbers of Jews were alive in Europe after 1945. Philip Friedmann in Their
Brother's Keepers (N.Y., 1957, p. 13), states that "at least a million Jews
survived in the very crucible of the Nazi hell," while the official figure of
the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee is 1,559,600. Thus, even if one accepts
the latter estimate, the number of possible wartime Jewish deaths could not have
exceeded a limit of one and a half million. Precisely this conclusion was
reached by the reputable journal Baseler Nachrichten of neutral Switzerland. In
an article entitled "Wie hoch ist die Zahl der jüdischen Opfer?" ("How high is
the number of Jewish victims?", June 13th, 1946), it explained that purely on
the basis of the population and emigration figures described above, a maximum of
only one and a half million Jews could be numbered as casualties. Later on,
however, it will be demonstrated conclusively that the number was actually far
less, for the Baseler Nachrichten accepted the Joint Distribution Committee's
figure of 1,559,600 survivors after the war, but we shall show that the number
of claims for compensation by Jewish survivors is more than double that figure.
This information was not available to the Swiss in
1946.
IMPOSSIBLE BIRTH RATE Indisputable evidence is
also provided by the post-war world Jewish population statistics. The World
Almanac of 1938 gives the number of Jews in the world as 16,588,259. But after
the war, the New York Times, February 22nd, 1948 placed the number of Jews in
the world at a minimum of 15,600,000 and a maximum of 18,700,000. Quite
obviously, these figures make it impossible for the number of Jewish war-time
casualties to be measured in anything but thousands. 15-1/2 million in 1938
minus the alleged six million leaves nine million; the New York Times figures
would mean, therefore, that the world's Jews produced seven million births,
almost doubling their numbers, in the space of ten years. This is patently
ridiculous. It would appear, therefore, that the great majority of the missing
"six million" were in fact emigrants - emigrants to European countries, to the
Soviet Union and the United States before, during and after the war. And
emigrants also, in vast nunibers to Palestine during and especially at the end
of the war. After 1945, boat-loads of these Jewish survivors entered Palestine
illegally from Europe, causing considerable embarrassment to the British
Government of the time; indeed, so great were the numbers that the H.M.
Stationery Office publication No. 190 (November 5th, 1946) described them as
"almost amounting to a second Exodus." It was these emigrants to all parts of
the world who had swollen the world Jewish population to between 15 and 18
millions by 1948, and probably the greatest part of them were emigrants to the
United States who entered in violation of the quota laws. On August 16th, 1963
David Ben Gurion, President of Israel, stated that although the official Jewish
population of America was said to be 5,600,000, "the total number would not be
estimated too high at 9,000,000" (Deutsche Wochenzeitung, November 23rd, 1963).
The reason for this high figure is underlined by Albert Maisal in his article
"Our Newest Americans" (Readers Digest, January, 1957), for he reveals that
"Soon after World War II, by Presidential decree, 90 per cent of all quota visas
for central and eastern Europe were issued to the uprooted." Reprinted on this
page is just one extract from hundreds that regularly appear in the obituary
columns of Aufbau, the Jewish American weekly published in New York (June 16th,
1972). It shows how Jewish emigrants to the United States subsequently changed
their names; their former names when in Europe appear in brackets. For example,
as below: Arthur Kingsley (formerly Dr. Königsberger of Frankfurt). Could it be
that some or all of these people whose names are 'deceased' were included in the
missing six million of Europe?
4. THE SIX MILLION: DOCUMENTARY
EVIDENCE From the foregoing it would seem certain that the figure of
six million murdered Jews amounts to nothing more than a vague compromise
between several quite baseless estimates; there is not a shred of documentary
evidence for it that is trustworthy. Occasionally, writers narrow it down to
give a disarming appearance of authenticity. Lord Russell of Liverpool, for
example, in his The Scourge of the Swastika (London, 1954) claimed that "not
less than five million" Jews died in German concentration camps, having
satisfied himself that he was somewhere between those who estimated 6 million
and those who preferred 4 million. But, he admitted, "the real number will never
be known." If so, it is difficult to know how he could have asserted "not less
than five million." The Joint Distribution Committee favours 5,012,000, but the
Jewish "expert" Reitlinger suggests a novel figure of 4,192,200 "missing Jews"
of whom an estimated one third died of natural causes. This would reduce the
number deliberately "exterminated" to 2,796,000. However, Dr. M. Perlzweig, the
New York delegate to a World Jewish Congress press conference held at Geneva in
1948 stated: "The price of the downfall of National Socialism and Fascism is the
fact that seven million Jews lost their lives thanks to cruel Anti-Semitism." In
the Press and elsewhere, the figure is often casually lifted to eight million or
sometimes even nine million. As we have proved in the previous chapter, none of
these figures are in the remotest degree plausible, indeed, they are
ridiculous.
FANTASTIC EXAGGERATIONS So far as is known,
the first accusation against the Germans of the mass murder of Jews in war-time
Europe was made by the Polish Jew Rafael Lemkin in his book Axis Rule in
Occupied Europe, published in New York in 1943. Somewhat coincidentally, Lemkin
was later to draw up the U.N. Genocide Convention, which seeks to outlaw
"racialism". His book claimed that the Nazis had destroyed millions of Jews,
perhaps as many as six millions. This, by 1943, would have been remarkable
indeed, since the action was allegedly started only in the summer of 1942. At
such a rate, the entire world Jewish population would have been exterminated by
1945. After the war, propaganda estimates spiralled to heights even more
fantastic. Kurt Gerstein, an anti-Nazi who claimed to have infiltrated the S.S.,
told the French interrogator Raymond Cartier that he knew that no less than
forty million concentration camp internees had been gassed. In his first signed
memorandum of April 26th, 1945, he reduced the figure to 25 million, but even
this was too bizarre for French Intelligence and in his second memorandum,
signed at Rottweil on May 4th, 1945, he brought the figure closer to the six
million preferred at the Nuremberg Trials. Gerstein's sister was congenitally
insane and died by euthenasia, which may well suggest a streak of mental
instability in Gerstein himself. He had, in fact, been convicted in 1936 of
sending eccentric mail through the post. After his two "confessions" he hanged
himself at Cherche Midi prison in Paris. Gerstein alleged that during the war he
passed on information concerning the murder of Jews to the Swedish Government
through a German baron but for some inexplicable reason his report was "filed
away and forgotten". He also claimed that in August 1942 he informed the Papal
nuncio in Berlin about the whole "extermination programme", but the reverend
person merely told him to "Get out." The Gerstein statements abound with claims
to have witnessed the most gigantic mass executions (twelve thousand in a single
day at Belzec), while the second memorandum describes a visit by Hitler to a
concentration camp in Poland on June 6th, 1942 which is known never to have
taken place. Gerstein's fantastic exaggerations have done little but discredit
the whole notion of mass extermination. Indeed, Evangelical Bishop Wilhelm
Dibelius of Berlin denounced his memoranda as "Untrustworthy" (H. Rothfels,
"Augenzeugenbericht zu den Massenvergasungen" in Vierteljahrshefte für
Zeitgeschichte, April 1953). It is an incredible fact, however, that in spite of
this denunciation, the German Government in 1955 issued an edition of the second
Gerstein memorandum for distribution in German chools (Dokumentation zur
Massenvergasung, Bonn, 1955). In it they stated that Dibelius placed his special
confidence in Gerstein and that the memoranda were "valid beyond any doubt."
This is a striking example of the way in which the baseless charge of genocide
by the Nazis is perpetuated in Germany, and directed especially to the
youth.
