THE OHLENDORF TRIAL The most revealing trial in the "Einsatzgruppen
Case" at Nuremberg was that of S.S. General Otto Ohlendorf, the chief of the
S.D. who commanded Einsatzgruppe D in the Ukraine, attached to Field Marshal von
Manstein's Eleventh Army. During the last phase of the war he was employed as a
foreign trade expert in the Ministry of Economics. Ohlendorf was one of those
subjected to the torture described earlier, and in his affidavit of November
5th, 1945 he was "persuaded" to confess that 90,000 Jews had been killed under
his command alone. Ohlendorf did not come to trial until 1948, long after the
main Nuremberg Trial, and by that time he was insisting that his earlier
statement had been extracted from him under torture. In his main speech before
the Tribunal, Ohlendorf took the opportunity to denounce Philip Auerbach, the
Jewish attorney-general of the Bavarian State Office for Restitution, who at
that time was claiming compensation for "eleven million Jews" who had suffered
in German concentration camps. Ohlendorf dismissed this ridiculous claim,
stating that "not the minutest part" of the people for whom Auerbach was
demanding compensation had even seen a concentration camp. Ohlendorf lived long
enough to see Auerbach convicted for embezzlement and fraud (forging documents
purporting to show huge payments of compensation to non-existent people) before
his own execution finally took place in 1951. Ohlendorf explained to the
Tribunal that his units often had to prevent massacres of Jews organised by
anti-Semitic Ukrainians behind the German front, and he denied that the
Einsatzgruppen as a whole had inflicted even one quarter of the casualties
claimed by the prosecution. He insisted that the illegal partisan warfare in
Russia, which he had to combat, had taken a far higher toll of lives from the
regular German army - an assertion confirmed by the Soviet Government, which
boasted of 500,000 German troops killed by partisans. In fact, Franz Stahlecker,
commander of Einsatzgruppe A in the Baltic region and White Russia, was himself
killed by partisans in 1942. The English jurist F. J. P. Veale, in dealing with
the Action Groups, explains that in the fighting on the Russian front no
distinction could be properly drawn between partisans and the civilian
population, because any Russian civilian who maintained his civilian status
instead of acting as a terrorist was liable to be executed by his countrymen as
a traitor. Veale says of the Action Groups: "There is no question that their
orders were to combat terror by terror", and he finds it strange that atrocities
committed by the partisans in the struggle were regarded as blameless simply
because they turned out to be on the winning side (ibid. p. 223). Ohlendorf took
the same view, and in a bitter appeal written before his execution, he accused
the Allies of hypocrisy in holding the Germans to account by conventional laws
of warfare while fighting a savage Soviet enemy who did not respect those
laws.
ACTION GROUP EXECUTIONS DISTORTED The Soviet
charge that the Action Groups had wantonly exterminated a million Jews during
their operations has been shown subsequently to be a massive falsification. In
fact, 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 two million of these had been killed
by the Einsatzgruppen. This absurd figure went beyond even the wildest estimates
of Soviet Prosecutor Rudenko, and it was not.given any credence by the American
Tribunal which tried and condemned Ohlendorf. The real number of casualties for
which the Action Groups were responsible has since been revealed in the
scholarly work Manstein, his Campaigns and his Trial (London, 1951), by the able
English lawyer R. T. Paget. Ohlendorf had been under Manstein's nominal command.
Paget's conclusion is that the Nuremberg Court, in accepting the figures of the
Soviet prosecution, exaggerated the number of casualties by more than 1000 per
cent and that they distorted even more the situations in which these casualties
were infiicted. (These horrific distortions are the subject of six pages of
William Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, pp. 1140-46). Here, then,
is the legendary 6 million in miniature; not one million deaths, but one hundred
thousand. Of course, only a small proportion of these could have been Jewish
partisans and Communist functionaries. It is worth repeating that these
casualties were inflicted during savage partisan warfare on the Eastern front,
and that Soviet terrorists claim to have killed five times that number of German
troops. It has nevertheless remained a popular myth that the extermination of
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 ways of
Nuremberg proceedings. Principally because Action Group D was attached to
Manstein's command (though it was responsible solely to Himmler), the sixty-two
year old, invalid Field Marshal, considered by most authorities to be the most
brilliant German general of the war, was subjected to the shameful indignity of
a "war-crimes" trial. Of the 17 charges, 15 were brought by the Communist
Russian Government and two by the Communist Polish Government. Only one witness
was called to give evidence at this trial, and he proved so unsatisfactory that
the prosecution withdrew his evidence. Reliance was placed instead on 800
hearsay documents which were accepted 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.lawyer Reginald Paget K.C. demanded their appearance in the
witness-box. This was refused by the American authorities, and Paget declared
that this refusal was due to fear lest the condemned men revealed what methods
had been used to induce them to sign their affidavits. Manstein was eventually
acquitted on eight of the charges, including the two Polish ones which, as Paget
said, "were so flagrantly bogus that one was left wondering why they had been
presented at all."
THE OSWALD POHL TRIAL The case of the
Action Groups is a revealing insight into the methods of the Nuremberg Trials
and the fabrication of 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
administration of the concentration camp system. Pohl had been the chief
disbursing officer of the German Navy until 1934, when Himmler requested his
transfer to the S.S. For eleven years he was the principal administrative chief
of the entire S.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 concentration camp system. A peak point of hypocrisy was
reached at the trial when. the prosecution said to Pohl that "had Germany rested
content with the exclusion 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
that Germany was bombarded with insults and economic sanctions for doing
precisely these things, and her internal measures against the Jews were
certainly a major cause of the declaration of war against Germany by the
democracies. Oswald Pohl was an extremely sensitive and intellectual individual
who was reduced to a broken man in the course of his trial. As Senator McCarthy
pointed out, Pohl had signed some incriminating statements after being subjected
to severe torture, including a bogus admission that he had seen a gas chamber at
Auschwitz in the summer of 1944. The prosecution strenuously pressed this
charge, but Pohl successfully repudiated it. The aim of the prosecution was to
depict this dejected man as a veritable fiend in human shape, an impression
hopelessly at variance with the testimony of those who knew him . Such testimony
was given by Heinrich Hoepker, an anti- Nazi friend of Pohl'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 contact with concentration camp inmates
who were working on a local project outside the camp area. He noted that the
prisoners worked in a leisurely manner and relaxed atmosphere without any
pressure from their guards. Hoepker declared that Pohl did not hold an emotional
attitude to the Jews, and did not object to his wife entertaining her Jewish
friend Annemarie Jacques at their home. By the beginning of 1945, Hoepker was
fully convinced that the administrator of the concentration camps was a humane,
conscientious and dedicated servant of his task, and he was astonished when he
heard later in 1945 of the accusations being made against Pohl and his
colleagues. Frau Pohl noted that her husband retained his serenity in the face
of adversity until March 1945, when he visited 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 chaotic conditions at the close of the war had
reduced it to a state of extreme hardship. Pohl, who was unable to alleviate
conditions there because of the desperate pass which the war had reached by that
time, was deeply affected by the experience and, according to his wife, never
regained his former state of composure. Dr. Alfred Seidl, the highly respected
lawyer who acted as principal defence counsel at the Nuremberg Trials, went to
work passionately to secure the acquittal of Pohl. Seidl had been a personal
friend of the accused for many years, and was thoroughly convinced of his
innocence with respect to the fraudulent charge of planned genocide against the
Jews. The Allied judgement which condemned Pohl did not prompt Seidl to change
his opinion in the slightest. He declared that the prosecution had failed to
produce a single piece of valid evidence against him. One of the most eloquent
defences 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 affidavit of August 8th, 1947. This affidavit has been deliberately
omitted from the published documents known as Trials of the War Criminals before
the Nuremberg Military Tribunals 1946 -1949. Schmidt-Klevenow pointed out that
Pohl had given his fullest support to Judge Konrad Morgen of the Reich Criminal
Police Office, whose job was to investigate irregularities at the concentration
camps. Later on we shall refer to a case in which Pohl was in favour of the
death penalty for camp commandant Koch, who was accused by an S.S. court of
misconduct. Schmidt- Klevenow explained that Pohl was instrumental in arranging
for local police chiefs to share in the jurisdiction of concentration camps, and
took personal initiative in securing strict discipline on the part of camp
personnel. In short, the evidence given at the Pohl trial shows that the
proceedings involved nothing less than the deliberate defamation of a man's
character in order to support the propaganda legend of genocide against the Jews
in the concentration camps he administered.
FALSIFIED EVIDENCE
AND FRAUDULENT AFFIDAVITS Spurious testimony at Nuremberg which
included extravagant statements in support of the myth of the Six Million was
invariably given by former German officers because of pressure, either severe
torture as in the cases cited previously, or the 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 dem Bach-Zelewski. He was threatened
with execution himself because of his suppression of the revolt by Polish
partisans at Warsaw in August 1944, which he carried out with his S.S. brigade
of White Russians. He was therefore prepared to be "co-operative". The evidence
of Bach-Zelewski constituted the basis of the testimony against the Reichsführer
of the S.S. Heinrich Himmler 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, Himmler invited 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 Nuremberg evidence, he depicted Himmler speaking in grandiose terms at this
conference about the liquidation of peoples in Eastern Europe, but Goering, in
the courtroom, denounced Bach-Zelewski to his face for the falsity of this
testimony. An especially outrageous allegation concerned a supposed declaration
by Himmler that one of the aims of the Russian campaign was to "decimate the
Slav population by thirty millions." What Himmler really said is given by his
Chief of Staff, Wolff - that war in Russia was certain to result in millions of
dead (Manvell & Frankl, ibid. p. 117). Another brazen falsehood was
Bach-Zelewski's accusation that on August 31st, 1942 Himmler personally
witnessed the execution of one hundred Jews by an Einsatz detachment at Minsk,
causing him to nearly faint. It is known, however, that on this date Himmler 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 made of
Bach-Zelewski's evidence in all the books on Himmler, especially Willi
Frischauer's Himmler: Evil Genius of the Third Reich (London, 1953, p. 148 ff).
However, in April 1959, Bach-Zelewski publicly repudiated his Nuremberg
testimony before a West German court. He admitted that his earlier statements
had not the slightest foundation in fact, and that he had made them for the sake
of expediency and his own survival. The German court, after careful
deliberation, accepted his retraction. Needless to say, what Veale calls the
"Iron Curtain of Discreet Silence" descended immediately over these events. They
have had no influence whatever on the books which propagate the myth of the Six
Million, and Bach-Zelewski's testimony on Himmler is still taken at its face
value. The truth concerning Himmler is provided ironically by an anti-Nazi -
Felix Kersten, his physician and masseur. Because Kersten was opposed to the
regime, he tends to support the legend that the internment of Jews meant their
extermination. But from his close personal knowledge of Himmler he cannot help
but tell the truth concerning him, and in his Memoirs 1940-1945 (London, 1956,
p. 119 ff) he is emphatic in stating that Heinrich Himmler did not advocate
liquidating the Jews but favoured their 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 the real advocate of "extermination". This nonsensical
allegation is amply disproved by the fact that Goebbels was still concerned with
the Madagascar project even after it had been temporarily shelved by the German
Foreign Office, as we showed earlier. So much for false evidence at Nuremberg.
Reference has also been made to the thousands of fraudulent "written affidavits"
which were accepted by the Nuremberg Court without any attempt to ascertain the
authenticity of their contents or even their authorship. These hearsay
documents, often of the most bizarre kind, were introduced as "evidence" so long
as they bore the required signature. A typical prosecution affidavit contested
by the defence in the Concentration Camp Trial of 1947 was that of Alois
Hoellriegel, a member of the camp personnel at Mauthausen in Austria. This
affidavit, which the defence proved was fabricated during Hoellriegel's torture,
had already been used to secure the conviction of S.S. General Ernst
Kaltenbrunner in 1946. It claimed that a mass gassing operation had taken place
at Mauthausen and that Hoellriegel had witnessed Kaltenbrunner ( 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 piece of nonsense when it was produced in court
again. The defence not only demonstrated that the affidavit was falsified, but
showed that all deaths at Mauthausen were systematically checked by the local
police authorities. They were also entered on a camp register, and particular
embarrassment was caused to the prosecution when the Mauthausen register, one of
the few that survived, was produced in evidence. The defence also obtained
numerous affidavits from former inmates of Mauthausen (a prison camp chiefly for
criminals) testifying to humane and orderly conditions
there.
ALLIED ACCUSATIONS DISBELIEVED There is no more
eloquent testimony to the tragedy and tyranny of Nuremberg than the pathetic
astonishment or outraged disbelief of the accused persons themselves at the
grotesque charges made against them. Such is reflected in the affidavit of S.S.
Major-General Heinz Fanslau, who visited most of the German concentration camps
during the 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, and
he was selected as a prime target by the Allies for the charge of conspiracy to
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 he would be tried
and convicted, hundreds of affidavits were produced on his behalf by camp
inmates he had visited. When he read the full scope of the indictment against
the concentration camp personnel in supplementary Nuremberg Trial No. 4 on May
6th, 1947, Fanslau declared in disbelief: "This cannot be possible, because I,
too, would have had to know something about it." It should be emphasised that
throughout the Nuremberg proceedings, the German leaders on trial never believed
for a moment the allegations of the Allied prosecution. Hermann Goering, who was
exposed to the full brunt 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 the Einsatzgruppen and the Hoess testimony on Auschwitz, remained
convinced that the extermination of Jews was entirely propaganda fiction (The
Sword in the Scales, London, 1953, p. 145). At one point during the trial,
Goering declared rather cogently that the first time he had heard of it "was
right here in Nuremberg" (Shirer, ibid. p. 1147). The Jewish writers Poliakov,
Reitlinger and Manvell and Frankl all attempt to implicate Goering in this
supposed extermination, but Charles Bewley in his work Hermann Goering
(Goettingen, 1956) shows that not the slightest evidence was found at Nuremberg
to substantiate this charge. Hans Fritzsche pondered on the whole question
during the trials, and he concluded that there had certainly been no thorough
investigation of these monstrous charges. Fritzsche, who was acquitted, was an
associate of Goebbels and a skilled propagandist. He recognised that the alleged
massacre of the Jews was the main point of the indictment against all
defendants. Kaltenbrunner, who succeeded Heydrich as chief of the Reich Security
Head Office and was the main defendant for the S.S. due to the death of Himmler,
was no more convinced of the genocide charges than was Goering. He confided to
Fritzsche that the prosecution was scoring apparent successes because of their
technique of coercing witnesses and suppressing evidence, which was precisely
the accusation of Judges Wenersturm and van Roden.
6. AUSCHWITZ
AND POLISH JEWRY The concentration camp at Auschwitz near Cracow in
Poland has remained at the centre of the alleged extermination of millions of
Jews. Later we shall see how, when it was discovered by honest observers in the
British and American zones after the war that no "gas chambers" existed in the
German camps such as Dachau and Bergen-Belsen, attention was shifted to the
eastern camps, particularly Auschwitz. Ovens definitely existed here, it was
claimed. Unfortunately, the eastem camps were in the Russian zone of occupation,
so that no one could verify whether these allegations were true or not. The
Russians refused to allow anyone to see Auschwitz until about ten years after
the war, by which time they were able to alter its appearance and give some
plausibility to the claim that millions of people had been exterminated there.
If anyone doubts that the Russians are capable of such deception, they should
remember the monuments erected at sites where thousands of people were murdered
in Russia by Stalin's secret police -- but where the monuments proclaim them to
be victims of German troops in World War Two. The truth about Auschwitz is that
it was the largest and most important industrial concentration camp, producing
all kinds of material for the war industry. The camp consisted of synthetic coal
and rubber plants built by I. G. Farben Industrie, for whom the prisoners
supplied labour. Auschwitz also comprised an agricultural research station, with
laboratories, plant nurseries and facilities for stock breeding, as well as
Krupps armament works. We have already remarked that this kind of activity was
the prime function of the camps; all major firms 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 was to inspect and assess their industrial
efficiency. When he visited Auschwitz in March 1941 accompanied by high
executives of I.G. Farben, he showed no interest in the problems of the camp as
a facility for prisoners, but merely ordered that the camp be enlarged to take
100,000 detainees to supply labour for I.G. Farben. This hardly accords with a
policy of exterminating prisoners by the million.
MORE AND MORE
MILLIONS It was nevertheless at this single camp that about half of the
six million Jews were supposed to have been exterminated, indeed, some writers
claim 4 or even 5 million. Four million was the sensational figure announced by
the Soviet Government after the Communists had "investigated" the camp, at the
same time as they were attempting to blame the Katyn massacre on the Germans.
Reitlinger admits that information regarding Auschwitz and other eastern camps
comes from the post-war Communist regimes of Eastem Europe: "The evidence
concerning the Polish death camps was mainly taken after the war by Polish State
commissions or by the Central Jewish Historical Commission of Poland" (The Final
Solution, p . 631). However, no living, authentic eye-witness of these
"gassings" has ever been produced and validated. Benedikt Kautsky, who spent
seven years in concentration camps, including three in Auschwitz, alleged in his
book Teufel und Verdammte (Devil and Damned, Zurich, 1946) that "not less than
3,500,000 Jews" had been killed there. This was certainly a remarkable
statement, because by his own admission he had never seen a gas 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 come across such an
installation as a gas chamber" (p. 272- 3). The only execution he actually
witnessed was when two Polish inmates were executed for killing two Jewish
inmates. Kautsky, who was sent from Buchenwald in October, 1942 to work at
Auschwitz-Buna, stresses in his book that the use of prisoners in war industry
was a major feature of concentration camp policy until the end of the war. He
fails to reconcile this with an alleged policy of massacring Jews. The
exterminations at Auschwitz are alleged to have occurred between March 1942 and
October 1944; the figure of half of six million, therefore, would mean the
extermination and disposal of about 94,000 people per month for thirty two
months - approximately 3,350 people every day, day and night, for over two and a
half years. This kind of thing is so ludicrous that it scarcely needs refuting.
And yet Reitlinger claims quite seriously that Auschwitz could dispose of no
less than 6,000 people a day. Although Reitlinger's 6,O00 a day would mean a
total by October 1944 of over 5 million, all such estimates pale before the wild
fantasies of Olga Lengyel in her book Five Chimneys (London, 1959). Claiming to
be a former 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 in the "death-pits", and
that therefore "In round numbers, about 24,000 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 1942 and October 1944 Auschwitz would finally have disposed of
over 21 million people, six million more than the entire world Jewish
population. Comment is superfluous. Although several millions, were supposed to
have died at Auschwitz alone, Reitlinger has to admit that only 363,000 inmates
were registered at the camp for the whole of the period between January 1940 and
February 1945 (The S.S. Alibi of a Nation, p. 268 ff), and by no means all of
them were Jews. It is frequently claimed that many prisoners were never
registered, but no one has offered any proof of this. Even if there were as many
unregistered as there were registered, it would mean only a total of 750,000
prisoners -- hardly enough for the elimination of 3 or 4 million. Moreover,
large numbers of the camp population were released or transported elsewhere
during the war, and at the end 80,000 were evacuated westward in January 1945
before the Russian advance. One example will suffice of the statistical frauds
relating to casualties at Auschwitz. Shirer claims that in the summer of 1944,
no less than 300,000 Hungarian Jews were done to death in a mere forty-six days
(ibid. p. 1156). This would have been almost the entire Hungarian Jewish
population, which numbered some 380,000. But according to the Central
Statistical Office of Budapest, there were 260,000 Jews in Hungary in 1945
(which roughly conforms with the Joint Distribution Committee figure of
220,000), so that only 120,000 were classed as no longer resident. Of these,
35,000 were emigrants from the new Communist regime, and a further 25,000 were
still being held in Russia after having worked in German labour battalions
there. This leaves only 60,000 Hungarian Jews unaccounted for, but M. E. Namenyi
estimates that 60,000 Jews retumed to Hungary from deportation in Germany,
though Reitlinger says this figure is too high (The Final Solution, p. 497).
Possibly it is, but bearing in mind the substantial emigration of Hungarian Jews
during the war (cf Report of the ICRC, Vol. I, p. 649), the number of Hungarian
Jewish casualties must have been very low indeed.
