BEST-SELLER A HOAX Of the other variety of memoirs, those which present a picture of frail Jewry caught in the vice of Nazism, the most celebrated is undoubtedly The Diary of Anne Frank, and the truth concerning this book is only one appalling insight into the fabrication of a propaganda legend . First published in 1952, The Diary of Anne Frank became an immediate best-seller; since then it has been republished in paper-back, going through 40 impressions, and was made into a successful Hollywood film. In royalties alone, Otto Frank, the girl's father, has made a fortune from the sale of the book, which purports to represent the real-life tragedy of his daughter. With its direct appeal to the emotions, the book and the film have influenced literally millions of people, certainly more throughout the world than any other story of its kind. And yet only seven years after its initial publication, a New York Supreme Court case established that the book was a hoax. The Diary of Anne Frank has been sold to the public as the actual diary of a young Jewish girl from Amsterdam, which she wrote at the age of 12 while her family and four other Jews were hiding in the back room of a house during the German occupation. Eventually, they were arrested and detained in a concentration camp, where Anne Frank supposedly died when she was 14. When Otto Frank was liberated from the camp at the end of the war, he returned to the Amsterdam house and "found" his daughter's diary concealed in the rafters. The truth about the Anne Frank Diary was first revealed in 1959 by the Swedish journal Fria Ord. It established that the Jewish novelist Meyer Levin had written the dialogue of the "diary" and was demanding payment for his work in a court action against Otto Frank. A condensation of the Swedish articles appeared in the American Economic Council Letter, April 15th, 1959, as follows: "History has many examples of myths that live a longer and richer life than truth, and may become more effective than truth. "The Western World has for some years been made aware of a Jewish girl through the medium of what purports to be her personally written story, Anne Frank's Diary. Any informed literary inspection of this book would have shown it to have been impossible as the work of a teenager. "A noteworthy decision of the New York Supreme Court confirms this point of view, in that the well known American Jewish writer, Meyer Levin, has been awarded $50,000 to be paid him by the father of Anne Frank as an honorarium for Levin's work on the Anne Frank Diary. "Mr. Frank, in Switzerland, has promised to pay to his race kin, Meyer Levin, not less than $50,0OO because he had used the dialogue of Author Levin just as it was and "implanted" it in the diary as being his daughter's intellectual work." Further inquiries brought a reply on May 7th, 1962 from a firm of New York lawyers, which stated: "I was the attorney for Meyer Levin in his action against Otto Frank, and others. It is true that a jury awarded Mr. Levin $50,000 in damages, as indicated in your letter. That award was later set aside by the trial justice, Hon. Samuel C. Coleman, on the ground that the damages had not been proved in the manner required by law. The action was subsequently settled while an appeal from Judge Coleman's decision was pending. "I am afraid that the case itself is not officially reported, so far as the trial itself, or even Judge Coleman's decision, is concerned. Certain procedural matters were reported in 141 New York Supplement, Second Series 170, and in 5 Second Series 181. The correct file number in the New York County Clerk's office is 2241 - 1956 and the file is probably a large and full one . . ." Here, then, is just one more fraud in a whole series of frauds perpetrated in support of the "Holocaust" legend and the saga of the Six Million. Of course, the court case bearing directly on the authenticity of the Anne Frank Diary was "not officially reported". A brief reference may also be made to another "diary", published not long after that of Anne Frank and entitled: Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto: the Journal of Emmanuel Ringelblum (New York, 1958). Ringelblum had been a leader in the campaign of sabotage against the Germans in Poland, as well as the revolt of the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943, before he was eventually arrested and executed in 1944. The Ringelblum journal, which speaks of the usual "rumours" allegedly circulating about the extermination of the Jews in Poland, appeared under exactly the same Communist auspices as the so-called Hoess memoirs. McGraw-Hill, the publishers of the American edition, admit that they were denied access to the uncensored original manuscript in Warsaw, and instead faithfully followed the expurgated volume published by the Communist Government in Warsaw in 1952. All the "proofs" of the Holocaust issuing from Communist sources of this kind are worthless as historical documents.

ACCUMULATING MYTHS Since the war, there has been an abundant growth of sensational concentration camp literature, the majority of it Jewish, each book piling horror upon horror, blending fragments of truth with the most grotesque of fantasies and impostures, relentessly creating an edifice of mythology in which any relation to historical fact has long since disappeared. We have referred to the type already - Olga Lengyel's absurd Five Chimneys ("24,000 corpses handled every day"), Doctor at Auschwitz by Miklos Nyiszli, apparently a mythical and invented person, This was Auschwitz: The Story of a Murder Camp by Philip Friedman, and so on ad nauseam The latest in this vein is For Those I Loved by Martin Gray (Bodley Head, 1973), which purports to be an account of his experiences at Treblinka camp in Poland. Gray specialised in selling fake antiques to America before turning to concentration camp memoirs. The circumstances surrounding the publication of his book, however, have been unique, because for the first time with works of this kind, serious doubt was cast on the authenticity of its contents. Even Jews, alarmed at the damage it might cause, denounced his book as fraudulent and questioned whether he had ever been at Treblinka at all, while B.B.C. radio pressed him as to why he had waited 28 years before writing of his experiences. It was interesting to observe that the "Personal Opinion" column of the London Jewish Chronicle, March 30th, 1973, although it roundly condemned Gray's book, nevertheless made grandiose additions to the myth of the Six Million. It stated that: "Nearly a million people were murdered in Treblinka in the course of a year. 18,0OO were fed into the gas chambers every day." It is a pity indeed that so many people read and accept this kind of nonsense without exercising their minds. If 18,000 were murdered every day, the figure of one million would be reached in a mere 56 days, not "in the course of a year." This gigantic achievement would leave the remaining ten months of the year a total blank. 18,000 every day would in fact mean a total of 6,480,000 "in the course of a year." Does this mean that the Six Million died in twelve months at Treblinka? What about the alleged three or four million at Auschwitz? This kind of thing simply shows that, once the preposterous compromise figure of Six Million had scored a resounding success and become internationally accepted, any number of impossible permutations can be made and no one would even think to criticise them. In its review of Gray's book, the Jewish Chronicle column also provides a revealing insight into the fraudulent allegations concerning gas-chambers: "Gray recalls that the floors of the gas chambers sloped, whereas another survivor who helped to build them maintains that they were at a level . . ." Occasionally, books by former concentration camp inmates appear which present a totally different picture of the conditions prevailing in them. Such is Under Two Dictators (London, 1950) by Margarete Buber. She was. a German-Jewish woman who had experienced several years in the brutal and primitive conditions of a Russian prison camp before being sent to Ravensbrück, the German camp for women detainees, in August 1940. She noted that she was the only Jewish person in her contingent of deportees from Russia who was not straight away released by the Gestapo. Her book presents a striking contrast between the camps of Soviet Russia and Germany; compared to the squalor, disorder and starvation of the Russian camp, she found Ravensbrück to be clean, civilised and well-administered. Regular baths and clean linen seemed a luxury after her earlier experiences, and her first meal of white bread, sausage, sweet porridge and dried fruit prompted her to inquire of another camp inmate whether August 3rd, 1940 was some sort of holiday or special occasion. She observed, too, that the barracks at Ravensbrück were remarkably spacious compared to the crowded mud hut of the Soviet camp. In the final months of 1945, she experienced the progressive decline of camp conditions, the causes of which we shall examine later. Another account which is at total variance with popular propaganda is Die Gestapo Lässt Bitten (The Gestapo Invites You) by Charlotte Bormann, a Communist political prisoner who was also interned at Ravensbrück. Undoubtedly its most important revelation is the author's statement that rumours of gas executions were deliberate and malicious inventions circulated among the prisoners by the Communists. This latter group did not accept Margarete Buber because of her imprisonment in Soviet Russia. A further shocking reflection on the post-war trials is the fact that Charlotte Bormann was not permitted to testify at the Rastadt trial of Ravensbrück camp personnel in the French occupation zone, the usual fate of those who denied the extermination legend.

8. THE NATURE & CONDITION OF WAR-TIME CONCENTRATION CAMPS In his recent book Adolf Hitler (London, 1973), Colin Cross, who brings more intelligence than is usual to many problems of this period, observes astutely that "The shuffling of millions of Jews around Europe and murdering them, in a time of desperate war emergency, was useless from any rational point of view" (p. 307). Quite so, and at this point we may well question the likelihood of this irrationalism, and whether it was even possible. Is it likely, that at the height of the war, when the Germans were fighting a desperate battle for survival on two fronts, they would have conveyed millions of Jews for miles to supposedly elaborate and costly slaughter houses? To have conveyed three or four million Jews to Auschwitz alone (even supposing that such an inflated number existed in Europe, which it did not), would have placed an insuperable burden upon German transportation facilities which were strained to the limit in supporting the farflung Russian front. To have transported the mythical six million Jews and countless numbers of other nationalities to internment camps, and to have housed, clothed and fed them there, would simply have paralysed their military operations. There is no reason to suppose that the efficient Germans would have put their military fortunes at such risk. On the other hand, the transportation of a reasonable 363,000 prisoners to Auschwitz in the course of the war (the number we know to have been registered there) at least makes sense in terms of the compulsory labour they supplied. In fact, of the 3 million Jews living in Europe, it is certain that no more than two million were ever interned at one time, and it is probable that the number was much closer to 1,500,000. We shall see later, in the Report of the Red Cross, that whole Jewish populations such as that of Slovakia avoided detention in camps, while others were placed in community ghettos like Theresienstadt. Moreover, from western Europe deportations were far fewer. The estimate of Reitlinger that only about 50,000 French Jews from a total population of 320,000 were deported and interned has been noted already. The question must also be asked as to whether it could have been physically possible to destroy the millions of Jews that are alleged. Had the Germans enough time for it? Is it likely that they would have cremated people by the million when they were so short of manpower and required all prisoners of war for purposes of war production? Would it have been possible to destroy and remove all trace of a million people in six months? Could such enormous gatherings of Jews and executions on such a vast scale have been kept secret? These are the kind of questions that the critical, thinking person should ask. And he will soon discover that not only the statistical and documentary evidence given here, but simple logistics combine to discredit the legend of the six million. Although it was impossible for millions to have been murdered in them, the nature and conditions of Germany's concentration camps have been vastly exaggerated to make the claim plausible. William Shirer, in a typically reckless passage, states that "All of the thirty odd principal Nazi concentration camps were death camps" (ibid, p. 115O). This is totally untrue, and is not even accepted now by the principal propagators of the extermination legend. Shirer also quotes Eugen Kogon's The Theory and Practice of Hell (N.Y. 195O, p. 227) which puts the total number of deaths in all of them at the ridiculous figure of 7,125,000, though Shirer admits in a footnote that this is "undoubtedly too high."

'DEATH CAMPS' BEHIND THE IRON CURTAIN It is true that in 1945, Allied propaganda did claim that all the concentration camps, particularly those in Germany itself, were "death camps", but not for long. On this question, the eminent American historian Harry Elmer Barnes wrote: "These camps were first presented as those in Germany, such as Dachau, Belsen, Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen and Dora, but it was soon demonstrated that there had been no systematic extermination in those camps. Attention was then moved to Auschwitz, Treblinka, Belzec, Chelmno, Jonowska, Tarnow, Ravensbrück, Mauthausen, Brezeznia and Birkenau, which does not exhaust the list that appears to have been extended as needed" (Rampart Journal, Summer 1967). What had happened was that certain honest observers among the British and American occupation forces in Germany, while admitting that many inmates had died of disease and starvation in the final months of the war, had found no evidence after all of "gas chambers". As a result, eastern camps in the Russian zone of occupation such as Auschwitz and Treblinka gradually came to the fore as horrific centres of extermination (though no one was permitted to see them), and this tendency has lasted to the present day. Here in these camps it was all supposed to have happened, but with the Iron Curtain brought down firmly over them, no one has ever been able to verify such charges. The Communists claimed that four million people died at Auschwitz in gigantic gas chambers accommodating 2,000 people - and no one could argue to the contrary. What is the truth about so-called "gas chambers"? Stephen F. Pinter, who served as a lawyer for the United States War Department in the occupation forces in Germany and Austria for six years after the war, made the following statement in the widely read Catholic magazine Our Sunday Visitor, June 14th , 1959: "I was in Dachau for 17 months after the war, as a U.S. Department Attorney, and can state that there was no gas chamber at Dachau. What was shown to visitors and sightseers there and erroneously described as a gas chamber was a crematory. Nor was there a gas chamber in any of the other concentration camps in Germany. We were told that there was a gas chamber at Auschwitz, but since that was in the Russian zone of occupation, we were not permitted to investigate since the Russians would not allow it. From what I was able to determine during six postwar years in Germany and Austria, there were a number of Jews killed, but the figure of a million was certainly never reached. I interviewed thousands of Jews, former immates of concentration camps in Germany and Austria, and consider myself as well qualified as any man on this subject." This tells a very different story from the customary propaganda. Pinter, of course, is very astute on the question of the crematory being represented as a gas chamber. This is a frequent ploy because no such thing as a gas chamber has ever been shown to exist in these camps, hence the deliberately misleading term a "gas oven", aimed at confusing a gas chamber with a crematorium. The latter, usually a single furnace and similar to the kind of thing employed today, were used quite simply for the cremation of those persons who had died from various natural causes within the camp, particularly infectious diseases. This fact was conclusively proved by the German archbishop, Cardinal Faulhaber of Munich. He informed the Americans that during the Allied air raids on Munich in September 1944, 30,000 people were killed. The archbishop requested the authorities at the time to cremate the bodies of the victims in the crematorium at Dachau. But he was told that, unfortunately, this plan could not be carried out; the crematorium, having only one furnace, was not able to cope with the bodies of the air raid victims. Clearly, therefore, it could not have coped with the 238,000 Jewish bodies which were allegedly cremated there. In order to do so, the crematorium would have to be kept going for 326 years without stopping and 530 tons of ashes would have been recovered.

CASUALTY FIGURES REDUCED The figures of Dachau casualties are typical of the kind of exaggerations that have since had to be drastically revised. In 1946, a memorial plaque was unveiled at Dachau by Philip Auerbach, the Jewish State-Secretary in the Bavarian Government who was convicted for embezzling money which he claimed as compensation for non-existent Jews. The plaque read: "This area is being retained as a shrine to the 238,000 individuals who were cremated here." Since then, the official casualty figures have had to be steadily revised downwards, and now stand at only 20,600 the majority from typhus and starvation only at the end of the war. This deflation, to ten per cent of the original figure, will doubtless continue, and one day will be applied to the legendary figure of six million as a whole. Another example of drastic revision is the present estimate of Auschwitz casualties. The absurd allegations of three or four million deaths there are no longer plausible even to Reitlinger. He now puts the number of casualties at only 600,000; and although this figure is still exaggerated in the extreme, it is a significant reduction on four million and further progress is to be expected. Shirer himself quotes Reitlinger's latest estimate, but he fails to reconcile this with his earlier statement that half of that figure, about 300,000 Hungarian Jews were supposedly "done to death in forty-six days" - a supreme example of the kind of irresponsible nonsense that is written on this subject.

HUMANE CONDITIONS That several thousand camp inmates did die in the chaotic final months of the war brings us to the question of their war-time conditions. These have been deliberately falsified in innumerable books of an extremely lurid and unpleasant kind. The Red Cross Report, examined below, demonstrates conclusively that throughout the war the camps were well administered. The working inmates received a daily ration even throughout 1943 and 1944 of not less than 2,750 calories, which was more than double the average civilian ration in occupied Germany in the years after 1945. The internees were under regular medical care, and those who became seriously ill were transferred to hospital. All internees, unlike those in Soviet camps, could receive parcels of food, clothing and pharmaceutical supplies from the Special Relief Division of the Red Cross. The Office of the Public Prosecutor conducted thorough investigations into each case of criminal arrest, and those found innocent were released; those found guilty, as well as those deportees convicted of major crimes within the camp, were sentenced by military courts and executed. In the Federal Archives of Koblenz there is a directive of January 1943 from Himmler regarding such executions, stressing that "no brutality. is to be allowed" (Manvell & Frankl), ibid, p. 312). Occasionally there was brutality, but such cases were immediately scrutinised by S.S. Judge Dr. Konrad Morgen of the Reich Criminal Police Office, whose job was to investigate irregularities at the various camps. Morgen himself prosecuted commander Koch of Buchenwald in 1943 for excesses at his camp, a trial to which the German public were invited. It is significant that Oswald Pohl, the administrator of the concentration camp system who was dealt with so harshly at Nuremberg, was in favour of the death penalty for Koch. In fact, the S.S. court did sentence Koch to death, but he was given the option of serving on the Russian front. Before he could do this, however, Prince Waldeck, the leader of the S.S. in the district, carried out his execution. This case is ample proof of the seriousness with which the S.S. regarded unnecessary brutality. Several S.S. court actions of this kind were conducted in the camps during the war to prevent excesses, and more than 800 cases were investigated before 1945. Morgen testified at Nuremberg that he discussed confidentially with hundreds of inmates the prevailing conditions in the camps. He found few that were undernourished except in the hospitals, and noted that the pace and achievement in compulsory labour by inmates was far lower than among German civilian workers. The evidence of Pinter and Cardinal Faulhaber has been shown to disprove the claims of extermination at Dachau, and we have seen how the casualty figures of that camp have been continuously revised downwards. The camp at Dachau near Munich, in fact, may be taken as fairly typical of these places of internment. Compulsory labour in the factories and plants was the order of the day, but the Communist leader Ernst Ruff testified in his Nuremberg affidavit of April 18th, 1947 that the treatment of prisoners on the work details and in the camp of Dachau remained humane. The Polish underground leader, Jan Piechowiak, who was at Dachau from May 22nd, 1940 until April 29th, 1945 also testified on March 21st, 1946 that prisoners there received good treatment, and that the S.S. personnel at the camp were "well disciplined". Berta Schirotschin, who worked in the food service at Dachau throughout the war, testified that the working inmates, until the beginning of 1945 and despite increasing privation in Germany, received their customary second breakfast at 10 a.m. every morning. In general, hundreds of affidavits from Nuremberg testify to the humane conditions prevailing in concentration camps; but emphasis was invariably laid on those which reflected badly on the German administration and could be used for propaganda purposes. A study of the documents also reveals that Jewish witnesses who resented their deportation and internment in prison camps tended to greatly exaggerate the rigours of their condition, whereas other nationals interned for political reasons, such as those cited above, generally presented a more balanced picture. In many cases, prisoners such as Charlotte Bormann, whose experiences did not accord with the picture presented at Nuremberg, were not permitted to testify.

UNAVOIDABLE CHAOS The orderly situation prevailing in the German concentration camps slowly broke down in the last fearful months of 1945. The Red Cross Report of 1948 explains that the saturation bombing by the Allies paralysed the transport and communications system of the Reich, no food reached the camps and starvation claimed an increasing number of victims, both in prison camps and among the civilian population of Germany. This terrible situation was compounded in the camps both by great overcrowding and the consequent outbreak of typhus epidemics. Overcrowding occurred as a result of prisoners from the eastern camps such as Auschwitz being evacuated westward before the Russian advance; columns of such exhausted people arrived at several German camps such as Belsen and Buchenwald which had themselves reached a state of great hardship. Belsen camp near Bremen was in an especially chaotic condition in these months and Himmler's physician, Felix Kersten, an anti-Nazi, explains that its unfortunate reputation as a "death camp" was due solely to the ferocity of the typhus epidemic which broke out there in March 1945 (Memoirs 1940-1945, London, .1956). Undoubtedly these fearful conditions cost several thousand lives, and it is these conditions that are represented in the photographs of emaciated human beings and heaps of corpses which the propagandists delight in showing, claiming, that they are victims of "extermination". A surprisingly honest appraisal of the situation at Belsen in 1945 appeared in Purnell's History of the Second World War (Vol. 7, No. 15) by Dr. Russell Barton, now superintendent and consultant psychiatrist at Severalls Hospital, Essex, who spent one month at the camp as a medical student after the war. His account vividly illustrates the true causes of the mortality that occurred in such camps towards the war's end, and how such extreme conditions came to prevail there. Dr. Barton explains that Brigadier Glyn Hughes, the British Medical Officer who took command of Belsen in 1945, "did not think there had been any atrocities in the camp" despite discipline and hard work "Most people," writes Dr. Barton, "attributed the conditions of the inmates to deliberate intention on the part of the Germans. . Inmates were eager to cite examples of brutality and neglect, and visiting journalists from different countries interpreted the situation according to the needs of propaganda at home." However, Dr. Barton makes it quite clear that the conditions of starvation and disease were unavoidable in the circumstances and that they occurred only during the months of 1945. "From discussions with prisoners it seemed that conditions in the camp were not too bad until late 1944. The huts were set among pine trees and each was provided with lavatories, wash basins, showers and stoves for heating." The cause of food shortage is also explained. "German medical officers told me that it had been increasingly difficult to transport food to the camp for some months. Anything that moved on the autobahns was likely to be bombed . . . I was surprised to find records, going back for two or three years, of large quantities of food cooked daily for distribution. At that time I became convinced, contrary to popular opinion, that there had never been a policy of deliberate starvation. This was confirmed by the large numbers of well-fed inmates. Why then were so many people suffering from mal-nutrition? . . . The major reasons for the state of Belsen were disease, gross overcrowding by central authority, lack of law and order within the huts, and inadequate supplies of food, water and drugs." The lack of order, which led to riots over food distribution, was quelled by British machine-gun fire and a display of force when British tanks and armoured cars toured the camp. Apart from the unavoidable deaths in these circumstances, Glyn Hughes estimated that about "1,000 were killed through the kindness of English soldiers giving them their own rations and chocolates." As a man who was at Belsen, Dr. Barton is obviously very much alive to the falsehoods of concentration camp mythology, and he concludes: "In trying to assess the causes of the conditions found in Belsen one must be alerted to the tremendous visual display, ripe for purposes of propaganda, that masses of starved corpses presented." To discuss such conditions "naively in terms of 'goodness' and 'badness' is to ignore the constituent factors..."
CONTINUE TO PART 7