The story of six million Jews exterminated during the war was given final
authority at the Nuremberg Trials by the statement of Dr. Wilhelm Hoettl. He had
been an assistant of Eichmann's, but was in fact a rather strange person in the
service of American Intelligence who had written several books under the
pseudonym of Walter Hagen. Hoettl also worked for Soviet espionage,
collaborating with two Jewish emigrants from Vienna, Perger and Verber, who
acted as U.S. officers during the preliminary inquiries of the Nuremberg Trials.
It is remarkable that the testimony of this highly dubious person Hoettl is said
to constitute the only "proof' regarding the murder of six million Jews. In his
affidavit of November 26th, 1945 he stated, not that he knew but that Eichmann
had "told him" in August 1944 in Budapest that a total of 6 million Jews had
been exterminated. Needless to say, Eichmann never corroborated this claim at
his trial. Hoettl was working as an American spy during the whole of the latter
period of the war, and it is therefore very odd indeed that he never gave the
slightest hint to the Americans of a policy to murder Jews, even though he
worked directly under Heydrich and Eichmann.
ABSENCE OF
EVIDENCE It should be emphasised straight away that there is not a
single document in existence which proves that the Germans intended to, or
carried out, the deliberate murder of Jews. In Poliakov and Wulf's Das Dritte
Reich und die Juden: Dokumente und Aufsätze (Berlin, 1955), the most that they
can assemble are statements extracted after the war from people like Hoettl,
Ohlendorf and Wisliceny, the latter under torture in a Soviet prison. In the
absence of any evidence, therefore, Poliakov is forced to write: "The three or
four people chiefly involved in drawing up the plan for total extermination are
dead, and no documents survive." This seems very convenient. Quite obviously,
both the plan and the "three or four" people are nothing but nebulous
assumptions on the part of the writer, and are entirely unprovable. The
documents which do survive, of course, make no mention at all of extermination,
so that writers like Poliakov and Reitlinger again make the convenient
assumption that such orders were generally "verbal". Though lacking any
documentary proof, they assume that a plan to murder Jews must have originated
in 1941, coinciding with the attack on Russia. Phase one of the plan is alleged
to have involved the massacre of Soviet Jews, a claim we shall disprove later.
The rest of the programme is supposed to have begun in March 1942, with the
deportation and concentration of European Jews in the eastern camps of the
Polish Government-General, such as the giant industrial complex at Auschwitz
near Cracow. The fantastic and quite groundless assumption throughout is that
transportation to the East, supervised by Eichmann's department, actually meant
immediate extermination in ovens on arrival. According to Manvell and Frankl
(Heinrich Himmler. London, 1965), the policy of genocide "seems to have been
arrived at" after "secret discussions" between Hitler and Himmler (p. 118),
though they fail to prove it. Reitlinger and Poliakov guess along similar
"verbal" lines, adding that no one else was allowed to be present at these
discussions, and no records were ever kept of them. This is the purest
invention, for there is not a shred of evidence that even suggests such
outlandish meetings took place. William Shirer, in his generally wild and
irresponsible book The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, is similarly muted on
the subject of documentary proof. He states weakly that Hitler's supposed order
for the murder of Jews "apparently was never committed to paper - at least no
copy of it has yet been unearthed. It was probably given verbally to Goering,
Himmler and Heydrich, who passed it down . . ,"(p. 1148). A typical example of
the kind of "proof' quoted in support of the extermination legend is given by
Manvell and Frankl. They cite a memorandum of 31st July, 1941 sent by Goering to
Heydrich, who headed the Reich Security Head Office and was Himmler's deputy.
Significantly, the memorandum begins: "Supplementing the task that was assigned
to you on 24th January 1939, to solve the Jewish problem by means of emigration
and evacuation in the best possible way according to present conditions . . ."
The supplementary task assigned in the memorandum is a "total solution
(Gesamtlösung) of the Jewish question within the area of German influence in
Europe," which the authors admit means concentration in the East, and it
requests preparations for the "organisational, financial and material matters"
involved. The memorandum then requests a future plan for the "desired final
solution" (Endlösung), which clearly refers to the ideal and ultimate scheme of
emigration and evacuation mentioned at the beginning of the directive. No
mention whatever is made of murdering people, but Manvell and Frankl assure us
that this is what the memorandum is really about. Again, of course, the "true
nature" of the final as distinct from the total solution "was made known to
Heydrich by Goering 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 to exterminate Jews were
supposed to have been made at a conference at Gross Wannsee 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 Müller and Eichmann represented Gestapo Head
Office. Reitlinger and Manvell and Frankl consider tile minutes of this
conference to be their trump card in proving the existence of a genocide plan,
but the truth is that no such plan was even mentioned, and what is more, they
freely admit this. Manvell and Frankl explain it away rather lamely by saying
that "The minutes are shrouded in the form of officialdom that cloaks the real
significance of the words and terminolgoy that are used" (The Incomparable
Crime, London, 1967, p. 46), which really means that they intend to interpret
them in their own way. What Heydrich actually said was that, as in the
memorandum quoted above, he had been commissioned by Goering to arrange a
solution to the Jewish problem. He reviewed the history of Jewish emigration,
stated that the war had rendered the Madagascar project impractical, and
continued: "The emigration programme has been replaced now by the evacuation of
Jews to the east as a further possible solution, in accordance with the previous
authorisation of the Führer." Here, he explained, their labour was to be
utilised. All this is supposed to be deeply sinister, and pregnant with the
hidden meaning that the Jews were to be exterminated, though Prof. Paul
Rassinier, a Frenchman interned at Buchenwald who has done sterling work in
refuting the myth of the Six Million, explains that it means precisely what it
says, i.e. the concentration of the Jews for labour in the immense eastern
ghetto of the Polish Government-General. "There they were to wait until the end
of the war, for the re-opening of international discussions which would decide
their future. This decision was finally reached at the 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. At the Wannsee conference, they write, "Direct
references to killing were avoided, Heydrich favouring the term "Arbeitseinsatz
im Osten" (labour assignment in the East)" (Heinrich Himmler, p. 209). Why we
should not accept labour assignment in the East to mean labour assignment in the
East is not explained. According to Reitlinger and others, innumerable
directives actually specifying extermination then passed between Himmler,
Heydrich, Eichmann and commandant Hoess in the subsequent months of 1942, but of
course, "none have survived".
TWISTED WORDS AND GROUNDLESS
ASSUMPTIONS The complete lack of documentary evidence to support the
existence of an extermination plan has led to the habit of re-interpreting the
documents that do survive. For example, it is held that a document concerning
deportation is not about deportation at all, but a cunning way of talking about
extermination. Manvell and Frankl state that "various terms were used to
camouflage genocide. These included "Aussiedlung"(desettlement) and
"Abbeförderung" (removal)" (ibid, p. 265). Thus, as we have seen already, words
are no longer assumed to mean what they say if they prove too inconvenient. This
kind of thing is taken to the most incredible extremes, such as their
interpretation of Heydrich's directive for labour assignment in the East.
Another example is a reference to Himmler's order for sending deportees to the
East, "that is, having them killed" (ibid, p. 251). Reitlinger, equally at a
loss for evidence, does exactly the same, declaring that from the
"circumlocutionary" words of the Wannsee conference it is obvious that "the slow
murder of an entire race was intended" (ibid, p. 98). A review of the
documentary situation is important, because it reveals the edifice of guesswork
and baseless assumptions upon which the extermination legend is built. The
Germans had an extraordinary propensity for recording everything on paper in the
most careful detail, yet among the thousands of captured documents of the S.D.
and Gestapo, the records of the Reich Security Head Office, the files of
Himmler's headquarters and Hitler's own war directives there is not a single
order for the extermination of Jews or anyone else. It will be seen later that
this has, in fact, been admitted by the World Centre of Contemporary Jewish
Documentation at Tel-Aviv. Attempts to find "veiled allusions" to genocide in
speeches like that of Himmler's to his S.S. Obergruppenführers at Posen in 1943
are likewise quite hopeless. Nuremberg statements extracted after the war,
invariably under duress, are examined in the following
chapter.
5. THE NUREMBERG TRIALS The story of the Six
Million was given judicial authority at the Nuremberg Trials of German leaders
between 1945 and 1949, proceedings which proved to be the most disgraceful legal
farce in history. For a far more detailed study of the iniquities of these
trials, which as Field Marshal Montgomery said, made it a crime to lose a war,
the reader is referred to the works cited below, and particulary to the
outstanding book Advance to Barbarism (Nelson, 1953), by the distinguished
English jurist, F. J. P. Veale. From the very outset, the Nuremberg Trials
proceeded on the basis of gross statistical errors. In his speech of indictment
on November 20th, 1945, Mr. Sidney Alderman declared that there had been
9,600,000 Jews living in German occupied Europe. Our earlier study has shown
this figure to be wildly inaccurate. It is arrived at (a) by completely ignoring
all Jewish emigration between 1933 and 1945, and (b) by adding all the Jews of
Russia, including the two million or more who were never in German-occupied
territory. The same inflated figure, slightly enlarged to 9,800,000, was
produced again at the Eichmann Trial in Israel by Prof. Shalom Baron. The
alleged Six Million victims first appeared as the foundation for the prosecution
at Nuremberg, and after some dalliance with ten million or more by the Press at
the time, it eventually gained international popularity and acceptance. It is
very significant, however, that, although this outlandish figure was able to win
credence in the reckless atmosphere of recrimination in 1945, it had become no
longer tenable by 1961, at the Eichmann Trial. The Jerusalem court studiously
avoided mentioning the figure of Six Million, and the charge drawn up by Mr.
Gideon Haussner simply said "some" millions.
LEGAL PRINCIPLES
IGNORED Should anyone be misled into believing that the extermination
of the Jews was "proved" at Nuremberg by "evidence", he should consider the
nature of the Trials themselves, based as they were on a total disregard of
sound legal principles of any kind. The 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 on the German defendants). At Nuremberg, ex post facto
legislation was created, whereby men were tried for "crimes" which were only
declared crimes after they had been allegedly committed. Hitherto it had been
the most basic legal principle that a person could only be convicted for
infringing a law that was in force at the time of the infringement. "Nulla Poena
Sine Lege." The Rules of Evidence, developed by British jurisprudence over the
centuries in order to arrive at the truth of a charge with as much certainty as
possible, were entirely disregarded at Nuremberg. It was decreed that "the
Tribunal should not be bound by technical rules of evidence" but could admit
"any evidence which it deemed to have probative value," that is, would support a
conviction. In practise, this meant the admittance of hearsay evidence and
documents, which in a normal judicial trial are always rejected as
untrustworthy. That such evidence was allowed is of profound significance,
because it was one of the principal methods by which the extermination legend
was fabricated through fraudulent "written affidavits". Although only 240
witnesses were called in the course of the Trials, no less than 300,000 of these
"written affidavits" were accepted by the Court as supporting the charges,
without this evidence being heard under oath. Under these circumstances, any
Jewish deportee or camp inmate could make any revengeful allegation that he
pleased. Most incredible of all, perhaps, was the fact that defence lawyers at
Nuremberg were not permitted to cross-examine prosecution witnesses. A somewhat
similar situation prevailed at the trial of Adolf Eichmann, when it was
announced that Eichmann's defence lawyer could be cancelled at any time "if an
intolerable situation should arise," which presumably meant if his lawyer
started to prove his innocence. The real background of the Nuremberg Trials was
exposed by the American judge, Justice Wenersturm, President of one of
Tribunals. He was so disgusted by the proceedings that he resigned his
appointment and flew home to America, leaving behind a statement to the Chicago
Tribune which 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 trying to
formulate and reach a new guiding legal principle, were moved only by personal
ambition and revenge. 4. The prosecution did its utmost in every way possible to
prevent the defence preparing its case and to make it impossible for it to
furnish evidence. 5. The prosecution, led by General Taylor, did everything in
its power to prevent the unanimous decision of the Military Court being carried
out i.e. to ask Washington to furnish and make available to the court further
documentary evidence in the possession of the American Government. 6. Ninety per
cent of the Nuremberg Court consisted of biased persons who, either on political
or racial grounds, furthered the prosecution's case. 7. The prosecution
obviously knew how to fill all the administrative posts of the Military Court
with "Americans" whose naturalisation certificates were very new indeed, and
who, whether in the administrative service or by their translations etc.,
created an atmposhere hostile to the accused persons. 8. The real aim of the
Nuremberg Trials was to show the Germans the crimes of their Führer, and this
aim was at the same time the pretext on which the trials were ordered . . . Had
I known seven months earlier what was happening at Nuremberg, I would never have
gone there. Concerning Point 6, that ninety per cent of the Nuremberg Court
consisted of people biased on racial or political grounds, this was a fact
confirmed by others present. According to Earl Carrol, an American lawyer, sixty
per cent of the staff of the Public Prosecutor's Office were German Jews who had
left Germany after the promulgation of Hitler's Race Laws. He observed that not
even ten per cent of the Americans employed at the Nuremberg courts were
actually Americans by birth. The chief of the Public Prosecutor's Office, who
worked behind General Taylor, was Robert M. Kempner, a German-Jewish emigrant.
He was assisted by Morris Amchan. Mark Lautern, who observed the Trials, writes
in his book: "They have all arrived: the Solomons, the Schlossbergers and the
Rabinovitches, members of the Public Prosecutor's staff . . ." (ibid. p. 68). It
is obvious from these facts that the fundamental legal principle: that no man
can sit in judgement on his own case, was abandoned altogether. Moreover, the
majority of witnesses were also Jews. According to Prof. Maurice Bardeche, who
was also an observer at the Trials, the only concern of these witnesses was not
to show their hatred too openly, and to try and give an impression of
objectivity (Nuremberg ou la Terre Promise, Paris, 1948, p.
149).
'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 support the extermination charge. The American Senator, Joseph McCarthy,
in a statement given to the American Press on May 20th, 1949, drew attention to
the following cases of torture to secure such confessions. In the prison of the
Swabisch Hall, he stated, officers of the S.S. Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler were
flogged until they were soaked in blood, after which their sexual organs were
trampled on as they lay prostrate on the ground. As in the notorious Malmedy
Trials of private soldiers, the prisoners were hoisted in the air and beaten
until they signed the confessions demanded of them. On the basis of such
"confessions" extorted from S.S. Generals Sepp Dietrich and Joachim Paiper, the
Leibstandarte was convicted as a "guilty organisation". S.S. General Oswald
Pohl, the economic administrator of the concentration camp system, had his face
smeared with faeces and was subsequently beaten until he supplied his
confession. In dealing with these cases, Senator McCarthy told the Press: "I
have heard evidence and read documentary proofs to the effect that the accused
persons were beaten up, maltreated and physically tortured by methods which
could only be conceived in sick brains. They were subjected to mock trials and
pretended executions, they were told their families would be deprived of their
ration cards. All these things were carried out with the approval of the Public
Prosecutor in order to secure the psychological atmosphere necessary for the
extortion of the required confessions. If the United States lets such acts
committed by a few people go unpunished, then the whole world can rightly
criticise us severely and forever doubt the correctness of our motives and our
moral integrity." The methods of intimidation described were repeated during
trials at Frankfurt-am-Mein and at Dachau, and large numbers of Germans were
convicted for atrocities on the basis of their admissions. The American Judge
Edward L. van Roden, one of the three members of the Simpson Army Commission
which was subsequently appointed to investigate the methods of justice at the
Dachau trials, revealed the methods by which these admissions were secured in
the Washington Daily News, 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;
torture with burning matches driven under the prisoners finger-nails; knocking
out of teeth and breaking jaws; solitary confinement and near starvation
rations." Van Roden explained: "The statements which were admitted as evidence
were obtained from men who had first been kept in solitary confinement for
three, four and five months . . . The investigators would put a black hood over
the accused's head and then punch him in the face with brass knuckles, kick him
and beat him with rubber hoses . . . All but two of the Germans, in the 139
cases we investigated, had been kicked in the testicles beyond repair. This was
standard operating procedure with our American investigators." The "American"
investigators responsible (and who later functioned as the prosecution in the
trials) were: Lt.-Col. Burton F. Ellis (chief of the War Crimes Committee) and
his assistants, Capt. Raphael Shumacker, Lt. Robert E. Byrne, Lt. William R.
Perl, Mr. Morris Ellowitz, Mr. Harry Thon, and Mr. Kirschbaum. The legal adviser
of the court was Col. A. H. Rosenfeld. The reader will immediately appreciate
from their names that the majority of these people were "biased on racial
grounds" in the words of Justice Wenersturm - that is, were Jewish, and
therefore should never have been involved in any such investigation. Despite the
fact that "confessions" pertaining to the extemination of the Jews were
extracted under these conditions, Nuremberg statements are still regarded as
conclusive evidence for the Six Million by writers like Reitlinger and others,
and the illusion is maintained that the Trials were both impartial and
impeccably fair. When General Taylor, the Chief Public Prosecutor, was asked
where he had obtained the figure of the Six Million, he replied that it was
based on the confession of S.S. General Otto Ohlendorf. He, too, was tortured
and his case is examined below. But as far as such "confessions" in general are
concerned, we can do no better than quote the British Sunday Pictorial when
reviewing the report of Judge van Roden: "Strong men were reduced to broken
wrecks ready to mumble any admission demanded by their
prosecutors."
THE WISLICENY STATEMENT At this
point, let us turn to some of the Nuremberg documents themselves. The document
quoted most frequently in support of the legend of the Six Million, and which
figures largely in Poliakov and Wulf's Das Dritte Reich und die Juden: Dokumente
und Aufsätze, is the statement of S.S. Captain Dieter Wisliceny, an assistant in
Adolf Eichmann's office and later the Gestapo chief in Slovakia. It was obtained
under conditions even more extreme than those described above, for Wisliceny
fell into the hands of Czech Communists and was "interrogated" at the
Soviet-controlled Bratislava Prison in November, 1946. Subjected to torture,
Wisliceny was reduced to a nervous wreck and became addicted to uncontrollable
fits of sobbing for hours on end prior to his execution. Although the conditions
under which his statement was obtained empty it entirely of all pIausibility,
Poliakov prefers to ignore this and merely writes: "In prison he wrote several
memoirs that contain information of great interest" (Harvest of Hate, p. 3).
These memoirs include some genuine statements of fact to provide authenticity,
such as that Himmler was an enthusiastic advocate of Jewish emigration and that
the emigration of Jews from Europe continued throughout the war, but in general
they are typical of the Communist-style "confession" produced at Soviet
show-trials. Frequent reference is made to exterminating Jews and a flagrant
attempt is made to implicate as many S.S. leaders as possible. Factual errors
are also common, notably the statement that the war with Poland added more than
3 million Jews to the German-occupied territory, which we have disproved
above.
THE CASE OF THE EINSATZGRUPPEN The Wisliceny
statement deals at some length with the activities of the Einsatzgruppen or
Action Groups used in the Russian campaign. These must merit a detailed
consideration in a survey of Nuremberg because the picture presented of them at
the Trials represents a kind of "Six Million" in miniature, i.e. has been proved
since to be the most enormous exaggeration and falsification. The Einsatzgruppen
were four special units drawn from the Gestapo and the S.D. (S.S. Security
Service) whose task was to wipe out partisans and Communist commissars in the
wake of the advancing German armies in Russia. As early as 1939, there had been
34,000 of these political commissars attached to the Red Army. The activities of
the Einsatzgruppen were the particular concern of the Soviet Prosecutor Rudenko
at the Nuremberg Trials. The 1947 indictment of the four groups alleged that in
the course of their operations they had killed not less than one million Jews in
Russia merely because they were Jews. These allegations have since been
elaborated; it is now claimed that the murder of Soviet Jews by the
Einsatzgruppen constituted Phase One in the plan to exterminate the Jews, Phase
Two being the transportation of European Jews to Poland. Reitlinger admits that
the original term "final solution" referred to emigration and had nothing to do
with the liquidation of Jews, but he then claims that an extermination policy
began at the time of the invasion of Russia in 1941. He considers Hitler's order
of July 1941 for the liquidation of the Communist commissars, and he concludes
that this was accompanied by a verbal order from Hitler for the Einsatzgruppen
to liquidate all Soviet Jews (Die Endlösung, p. 91). If this assumption is based
on anything at all, it is probably the worthless Wisliceny statement, which
alleges that the Einsatzgruppen were soon receiving orders to extend their task
of crushing Communists and partisans to a "general massacre" of Russian Jews. It
is very significant that, once again, it is a "verbal order" for exterminating
Jews that is supposed to have accompanied Hitler's genuine, written order - yet
another nebulous and unprovable assumption on the part of Reitlinger. An earlier
order from Hitler, dated March 1941 and signed by Field Marshal Keitel, makes it
quite clear what the real tasks of the future Einsatzgruppen would be. It states
that in the Russian campaign, the Reichsfüher S.S. (Himmler) is to be entrusted
with "tasks for the political administration, tasks which result from the
struggle which has to be carried out between two opposing political systems"
(ManvelL & Frankl, ibid., p. 115). This plainly refers to eliminating
Communism, especially the political commissars whose specific task was Communist
indoctrination.
