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Subject: SNET: >> The Holocaust Big Lie: Did Six Million Really Die?
Date: 4 Sep 2000 03:47:00 -0400
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Did Six Million Really Die?

by Richard E. Harwood

Introduction

Of course, atrocity propaganda is nothing new. It has accompanied every
conflict of the 20th century and doubtless will continue to do so. During the
First World War, the Germans were actually accused of eating Belgian babies,
as well as delighting to throw them in the air and transfix them on bayonets.
The British also alleged that the German forces were operating a "Corpse
Factory," in which they boiled down the bodies of their own dead in order to
obtain glycerine and other commodities, a calculated insult to the honour of
an Imperial army. After the war, however, came the retractions; indeed, a
public statement was made by the Foreign Secretary in the House of Commons
apologising for the insults to German honour, which were admitted to be
war-time propaganda.

No such statements have been made after the Second World War. In fact, rather
than diminish with the passage of years, the atrocity propaganda concerning
the German occupation, and in particular their treatment of the Jews, has done
nothing but increase its virulence, and elaborate its catalogue of horrors.
Gruesome paperback books with lurid covers continue to roll from the presses,
adding continuously to a growing mythology of the concentration camps and
especially to the story that no less than Six Million Jews were exterminated
in them. The ensuing pages will reveal this claim to be the most colossal
piece of fiction and the most successful of deceptions; but here an attempt
may be made to answer an important question: What has rendered the atrocity
stories of the Second World War so uniquely different from those of the First?
Why were the latter retracted while the former are reiterated louder than
ever? Is it possible that the story of the Six Million Jews is serving a
political purpose, even that it is a form of political blackmail?

So far as the Jewish people themselves are concerned, the deception has been
an incalculable benefit. Every conceivable race and nationality had its share
of suffering in the Second World War, but none has so successfully elaborated
it and turned it to such great advantage. The alleged extent of their
persecution quickly aroused sympathy for the Jewish national homeland they had
sought for so long; after the War the British Government did little to prevent
Jewish emigration to Palestine which they had declared illegal, and it was not
long afterwards that the Zionists wrested ftom the Government the land of
Palestine and created their haven from persecution, the State of Israel.
Indeed, it is a remarkable fact that the Jewish people emerged from the Second
World War as nothing less than a triumphant minority. Dr. Max Nussbaum, the
former chief rabbi of the Jewish community in Berlin, stated on April 11,
1953: "The position the Jewish people occupy today in the world -- despite the
enormous losses -- is ten times stronger than what it was twenty years ago."
It should be added, if one is to be honest, that this strength has been much
consolidated financially by the supposed massacre of the Six Million,
undoubtedly the most profitable atrocity allegation of all time. To date, the
staggering figure of six thousand million pounds has been paid out in
compensation by the Federal Government of West Germany, mostly to the State of
Israel (which did not even exist during the Second World War), as well as to
individual Jewish claimants.

DISCOURAGEMENT OF NATIONALISM

In terms of political blackmail, however, the allegation that Six Million Jews
died during the Second World War has much more far-reaching implications for
the people of Britain and Europe than simply the advantages it has gained for
the Jewish nation. And here one comes to the crux of the question: Why the Big
Lie? What is its purpose? In the first place, it has been used quite
unscrupulously to discourage any form of nationalism. Should the people of
Britain or any other European country attempt to assert their patriotism and
preserve their national integrity in an age when the very existence of
nation-states is threatened, they are immediately branded as "neo-Nazis".
Because, of course, Nazism was nationalism, and we all know what happened then
-- Six Million Jews were exterminated! So long as the myth is perpetuated,
peoples everywhere will remain in bondage to it; the need for international
tolerance and understanding will be hammered home by the United Nations until
nationhood itself, the very guarantee of freedom, is abolished.

A classic example of the use of the 'Six Million' as an anti-national weapon
appears in Manvell and Frankl's book, The Incomparable Crime (London, 1967),
which deals with 'Genocide in the Twentieth Century.' Anyone with a pride in
being British will be somewhat surprised by the vicious attack made on the
British Empire in this book. The authors quote Pandit Nehru, who wrote the
following while in a British prison in India: "Since Hitler emerged from
obscurity and became the Führer of Germany, we have heard a great deal about
racialism and the Nazi theory of the 'Herrenvolk'... But we in India have
known racialism in all its forms ever since the commencement of British rule.
The whole ideology of this rule was that of the 'Herrenvolk' and the master
race... India as a nation and Indians as individuals were subjected to
insult, humiliation and contemptuous treatment. The English were an imperial
race, we were told, with the God-given right to govern us and keep us in
subjection; if we protested we were reminded of the 'tiger qualities of an
imperial race'." The authors Manvell and Frankl then go on to make the point
perfectly clear for us: "The white races of Europe and America," they write,
"have become used during centuries to regarding themselves as a 'Herrenvolk.'
The twentieth century, the century of Auschwitz, has also achieved the first
stage in the recognition of multi-racial partnership." (ibid., p .14)

THE RACE PROBLEM SUPPRESSED

One could scarcely miss the object of this diatribe, with its insiduous hint
about "multi-racial partnership." Thus the accusation of the Six Million is
not only used to undermine the principle of nationhood and national pride, but
it threatens the survival of the Race itself. It is wielded over the heads of
the populace, rather as the threat of hellfire and damnation was in the Middle
Ages. Many countries of the Anglo-Saxon world, notably Britain and America,
are today facing the gravest danger in their history, the danger posed by the
alien races in their midst. Unless something is done in Britain to halt the
immigration and assimilation of Africans and Asians into our country, we are
faced in the near future, quite apart from the bloodshed of racial conflict,
with the biological alteration and destruction of the British people as they
have existed here since the coming of the Saxons. In short, we are threatened
with the irrecoverable loss of our European culture and racial heritage. But
what happens if a man dares to speak of the race problem, of its biological
and political implications? He is branded as that most heinous of creatures, a
"racialist". And what is racialism:,of course, but the very hallmark of the
Nazi! They (so everyone is told, anyway) murdered Six Million Jews because of
racialism, so it must be a very evil thing indeed. When Enoch Powell drew
attention to the dangers posed by coloured immigration into Britain in one of
his early speeches, a certain prominent Socialist raised the spectre of Dachau
and Auschwitz to silence his presumption.

Thus any rational discussion of the problems of Race and the effort to
preserve racial integrity is effectively discouraged. No one could have
anything but admiration for the way in which the Jews have sought to preserve
their race through so many centuries, and continue to do so today. In this
effort they have frankly been assisted by the story of the Six .Million,
which, almost like a religious myth, has stressed the need for greater Jewish
racial solidarity. Unfortunately, it has worked in quite the opposite way for
all other peoples, rendering them impotent in the struggle for
self-preservation.

The aim in the following pages is quite simply to tell the Truth. The
distinguished American historian Harry Elmer Barnes once wrote that "An
attempt to make a competent, objective and truthful investigation of the
extermination question... is surely the most precarious venture that an
historian or demographer could undertake today." In attempting this precarious
task, it is hoped to make some contribution, not only to historical truth, but
towards lifting the burden of a lie from our own shoulders, so that we may
freely confront the dangers which threaten us all.

Richard E. Harwood

1. GERMAN POLICY TOWARD THE JEWS PRIOR TO THE WAR

Rightly or wrongly, the Germany of Adolf Hitler considered the Jews to be a
disloyal and avaricious element within the national community, as well as a
force of decadence in Germany's cultural life. This was held to be
particularly unhealthy since, during the Weimar period, the Jews had risen to
a position of remarkable strength and influence in the nation, particularly in
law, finance and the mass media, even though they constituted only 5 per cent
of the population. The fact that Karl Marx was a Jew and that Jews such as
Rosa Luxembourg and Karl Liebknecht were disproportionately prominent in the
leadership of revolutionary movements in Germany, also tended to convince the
Nazis of the powerful internationalist and Communist tendencies of the Jewish
people themselves.

It is no part of the discussion here to argue whether the German attitude to
the Jews was right or not, or to judge whether its legislative measures
against them were just or unjust. Our concern is simply with the fact that,
believing of the Jews as they did, the Nazis' solution to the problem was to
deprive them of their influence within the nation by various legislative acts,
and most important of all, to encounge their emigration from the country
altogether. By 1939, the great majority of German Jews had emigrated, all of
them with a sizeable proportion of their assets. Never at any time had the
Nazi leadership even contemplated a policy of genocide towards them.

JEWS CALLED EMIGRATION 'EXTERMINATION'

It is very significant, however, that certain Jews were quick to interpret
these policies of internal discrimination as equivalent to extermination
itself. A 1936 anti-German propaganda book by Leon Feuchtwanger and others
entitled Der Gelbe Fleck: Die Austrotung von 500,000 deutschen Juden (The
Yellow Spot: The Extermination of 500,000 German Jews, Paris, 1936), presents
a typical example. Despite its baselessness in fact, the annihilation of the
Jews is discussed from the first pages -- straightforward emigration being
regarded as the physical "extermination" of German Jewry. The Nazi
concentration camps for political prisoners are also seen as potential
instruments of genocide, and special reference is made to the 100 Jews still
detained in Dachau in 1936, of whom 60 had been there since 1933. A further
example was the sensational book by the German-Jewish Communist, Hans Beimler,
called Four Weeks in the Hands of Hitler's Hell-Hounds: The Nazi Murder Camp
of Dachau, which was published in New York as eady as 1933. Detained for his
Marxist affiliations, he claimed that Dachau was a death camp, though by his
own admission he was released after only a month there. The present regime in
East Germany now issues a Hans Beimler Award for services to Communism.

The fact that anti-Nazi genocide propaganda was being disseminated at this
impossibly early date, therefore, by people biased on racial or political
grounds, should suggest extreme caution to the independent-minded observer
when approaching similar stories of the war period.

The encouragement of Jewish emigration should not be confused with the purpose
of concentration camps in pre-war Germany. These were used for the detention
of political opponents and subversives - principally liberals, Social
Democrats and Communists of all kinds, of whom a proportion were Jews such as
Hans Beimler. Unlike the millions enslaved in the Soviet Union, the German
concentration camp population was always small; Reitinger admits that between
1934 and 1938 it seldom exceeded 20,000 throughout the whole of Germany, and
the number of Jews was never more than 3,000. (The SS: Alibi of a Nation,
London, 1956, p. 253).

ZIONIST POLICY STUDIED

The Nazi view of Jewish emigration was not Iimited to a negative policy of
simple expulsion, but was formulated along the lines of modern Zionism. The
founder of political Zionism in the 19th century, Theodore Herzl, in his work
The Jewish State, had originally conceived of Madagascar as a national
homeland for the Jews, and this possibility was seriously studied by the
Nazis. It had been a main plank of the National Socialist party platform
before 1933 and was published by the party in pamphlet form. This stated that
the revival of Israel as a Jewish state was much less acceptable since it
would result in perpetual war and disruption in the Arab world, which has
indeed been the case. The Germans were not original in proposing Jewish
emigration to Madagascar; the Polish Government had already considered the
scheme in respect of their own Jewish population, and in 1937 they sent the
Michael Lepecki expedition to Madagascar, accompanied by Jewish
representatives, to investigate the problems involved.

The first Nazi proposals for a Madagascar solution were made in association
with the Schacht Plan of 1938. On the advice of Goering, Hitler agreed to send
the President of the Reichsbank, Dr. Hjaimar Schacht, to London for
discussions with Jewish representatives Lord Bearsted and Mr. Rublee of New
York (cf. Reitlinger, The Final Solution, London, 1953, p. 20). The plan was
that German Jewish assets would be frozen as security for an international
loan to finance Jewish emigration to Palestine, and Schacht reported on these
negotiations to Hitler at Berchtesgaden on January 2, 1939. The plan, which
failed due to British refusal to accept the financial terms, was first put
forward on November 12, 1938 at a conference convened by Goering, who revealed
that Hitler was already considering the emigration of Jews to a settlement in
Madagascar (ibid., p. 21). Later, in December, Ribbentrop was told by M.
Georges Bonnet, the French Foreign Secretary, that the French Government
itself was planning the evacuation of 10,000 Jews to Madagascar.

Prior to the Schacht Palestine proposals of 1938, which were essentially a
protraction of discussions that had begun as early as 1935, numerous attempts
had been made to secure Jewish emigration to other European nations, and these
efforts culminated in the Evian Conference of July, 1938. However, by 1939 the
scheme of Jewish emigration to Madagascar had gained the most favour in German
circles. It is true that in London Helmuth Wohltat of the German Foreign
Office discussed limited Jewish emigration to Rhodesia and British Guiana as
late as April 1939; but by January 24th, when Goering wrote to Interior
Minister Frick ordering the creation of a Central Emigration Office for Jews,
and commissioned Heydrich of the Reich Security Head Office to solve the
Jewish problem "by means of emigration and evacuation", the Madagascar Plan
was being studied in earnest.

By 1939, the consistent efforts of the German Government to secure the
departure of Jews from the Reich had resulted in the emigration of 400,000
German Jews from a total population of about 600,000, and an additional
480,000 emigrants from Austria and Czechoslovakia, which constituted almost
their entire Jewish populations. This was accomplished through Offices of
Jewish Emigration in Berlin, Vienna and Prague established by Adolf Eichmann,
the head of the Jewish Investigation Office of the Gestapo. So eager were the
Germans to secure this emigration that Eichmann even established a training
centre in Austria, where young Jews could learn farming in anticipation of
being smuggled illegally to Palestine (Manvell and Frankl, SS and Gestapo, p.
60). Had Hitler cherished any intention of exterminating the Jews, it is
inconceivable that he would have allowed more than 800,000 to leave Reich
territory with the bulk of their wealth, much less considered plans for their
mass emigration to Palestine or Madagascar. What is more, we shall see that
the policy of emigration from Europe was still under consideration well into
the war period, notably the Madagascar Plan, which Eichmann discussed in 1940
with French Colonial Office experts after the defeat of France had made the
surrender of the colony a practical proposition.

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 and
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.

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
and Frankl, ibid., p. 115). This plainly refers to eliminating Communism,
especially the political commissars whose specific task was Communist
indoctrination.

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 and 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.

AUSCHWITZ: AN EYE-WITNESS ACCOUNT Some new facts about Auschwitz are at last
beginning to make a tentative appearance. They are contained in a recent work
called Die Auschwitz-Lüge: Ein Erlebnisbericht von Theis Christopherson (The
Auschwitz Legends: An Account of his Experiences by Thies Christopherson,
Kritik Verlag/Mohrkirch, 1973). Published by the German lawyer Dr. Manfred
Roeder in the periodical Deutsche Bürger-Iniative, it is an eye-witness
account of Auschwitz by Thies Christopherson, who was sent to the Bunawerk
plant laboratories at Auschwitz to research into the production of synthetic
rubber for the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute. In May 1973, not long after the
appearance of this account, the veteran Jewish "Nazi-hunter" Simon Wiesenthal
wrote to the Frankfurt Chamber of Lawyers, demanding that the publisher and
author of the Forward, Dr. Roeder, a member of the Chamber, should be brought
before its disciplinary commission. Sure enough, proceedings began in July,
but not without harsh criticism even from the Press, who asked "Is Simon
Wiesenthal the new Gauleiter of Germany?" (Deutsche Wochenzeitung, July 27th,
1973). Christopherson's account is certainly one of the most important
documents for a re-appraisal of Auschwitz. He spent the whole of 1944 there,
during which time he visited all of the separate camps comprising the large
Auschwitz complex, including Auschwitz-Birkenau where it is alleged that
wholesale massacres of Jews took place. Christopherson, however, is in no
doubt that this is totally untrue. He writes: "I was in Auschwitz from January
1944 until December 1944. After the war I heard about the mass murders which
were supposedly perpetrated by the S.S. against the Jewish prisoners, and I
was perfectly astonished. Despite all the evidence of witnesses, all the
newspaper reports and radio broadcasts I still do not believe today in these
horrible deeds. I have said this many times and in many places, but to no
purpose. One is never believed" (p. 16). Space forbids a detailed summary here
of the author's experiences at Auschwitz, which include facts about camp
routine and the daily life of prisoners totally at variance with the
allegations of propaganda (pp. 22-7). More important are his revelations about
the supposed existence of an extermination camp. "During the whole of my time
at Auschwitz, l never observed the slightest evidence of mass gassings.
Moreover, the odour of burning flesh that is often said to have hung over the
camp is a downright falsehood. In the vicinity of the main camp (Auschwitz I)
was a large farrier's works, from which the smell of molten iron was naturally
not pleasant" (p. 33-4). Reitlinger confirms that there were five blast
furnaces and five collieries at Auschwitz, which together with the Bunawerk
factories comprised Auschwitz III (ibid. p. 452). The author agrees that a
crematorium would certainly have existed at Auschwitz, "since 200,000 people
lived there, and in every city with 200,000 inhabitants there would be a
crematorium. Naturally people died there - but not only prisoners. In fact the
wife of Obersturmbannführer A. (Christopherson's superior) also died there"
(p. 33). The author explains: "There were no secrets at Auschwitz. In
September 1944 a commission of the International Red Cross came to the camp
for an inspection. They were particularly interested in the camp at Birkenau,
though we also had many inspections at Raisko" (Bunawerk section, p. 35).
Christopherson points out that the constant visits to Auschwitz by outsiders
cannot be reconciled with allegations of mass extermination. When describing
the visit of his wife to the camp in May, he observes: "The fact that it was
possible to receive visits from our relatives at any time demonstrates the
openness of the camp administration. Had Auschwitz been a great extermination
camp, we would certainly not have been able to receive such visits" (p. 27).
After the war, Christopherson came to hear of the alleged existence of a
building with gigantic chimneys in the vicinity of the main camp. "This was
supposed to be the crematorium. However, I must record the fact that when I
left the camp at Auschwitz in December 1944, I had not seen this building
there" (p. 37). Does this mysterious building exist today? Apparently not;
Reitlinger claims it was demolished and "completely burnt out in full view of
the camp" in October, though Christopherson never saw this public demolition.
Although it is said to have taken place "in full view of the camp", it was
allegedly seen by only one Jewish witness, a certain Dr. Bendel, and his is
the only testimony to the occurrence (Reitlinger, ibid, p. 457). This
situation is generally typical. When it comes down to hard evidence, it is
strangely elusive; the building was "demolished", the document is "lost", the
order was "verbal". At Auschwitz today, visitors are shown a small furnace and
here they are told that millions of people were exterminated. The Soviet State
Commission which "investigated" the camp announced on May 12th, 1945, that
"Using rectified coefficients... the technical expert commission has
ascertained that during the time that the Auschwitz camp existed, the German
butchers exterminated in this camp not less than four million citizens..."
Reitlinger's surprisingly frank comment on this is perfectly adequate: "The
world has grown mistrustful of 'rectified coefficients' and the figure of four
millions has become ridiculous" (ibid, p. 460). Finally, the account of Mr.
Christopherson draws attention to a very curious circumstance. The only
defendant who did not appear at the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial in 1963 was
Richard Baer, the successor of Rudolf Hoess as commandant of Auschwitz. Though
in perfect health, he died suddenly in prison before the trial had begun, "in
a highly mysterious way" according to the newspaper; Deutsche Wochenzeitung
(July 27th, 1973). Baer's sudden demise before giving evidence is especially
strange, since the Paris newspaper Rivarol recorded his insistence that
"during the whole time in which he governed Auschwitz, he never saw any gas
chambers nor believed that such things existed," and from this statement
nothing would dissuade him. In short, the Christopherson account adds to a
mounting collection of evidence demonstrating that the giant industrial
complex of Auschwitz (comprising thirty separate installations and divided by
the main Vienna-Cracow railway line) was nothing but a vast war production
centre, which, while admittedly employing the compulsory labour of detainees,
was certainly not a place of "mass extermination".

THE WARSAW GHETTO In terms of numbers, Polish Jewry is supposed to have
suffered most of all from extermination, not only at Auschwitz, but at an
endless list of newly-discovered "death camps" such as Treblinka, Sobibor,
Belzec, Maidanek, Chelmno and at many more obscure places which seem suddenly
to have gained prominence. At the centre of the alleged extermination of the
Polish Jews is the dramatic uprising in April 1943 of the Warsaw Ghetto. This
is often represented as a revolt against being deported to gas ovens;
presumably the alleged subject of Hitler and Himmler's "secret discussions"
had leaked out and gained wide publicity in Warsaw. The case of the Warsaw
Ghetto is an instructive insight into the creation of the extermination legend
itself. Indeed, its evacuation by the Germans in 1943 is often referred to as
the "extermination of the Polish Jews" although it was nothing of the kind,
and layers of mythology have tended to surround it after the publication of
sensational novels like John Hersey's The Wall and Leon Uris' Exodus. When the
Germans first occupied Poland, they confined the Jews, not in detention camps
but in ghettos for reasons of security. The interior administration of the
ghettos was in the hands of Jewish Councils elected by themselves, and they
were policed by an independent Jewish police force. Special currency notes
were introduced into the ghettos to prevent speculation. Whether this system
was right or wrong, it was understandable in time of war, and although the
ghetto is perhaps an unpleasant social establishment, it is by no means
barbaric. And it is certainly not an organisation for the destruction of a
race. But, of course, it is frequently said that this is what the ghettos were
really for. A recent publication on the Warsaw Ghetto made the brazen
assertion that concentration camps "were a substitute for the practice of
cramming the Jews into overcrowded ghettos and starving them to death." It
seems that whatever security system the Germans used, and to whatever lengths
they went to preserve a semblance of community for the Jews, they can never
escape the charge of "extermination". It has been established already that the
1931 Jewish population census for Poland placed the number of Jews at
2,732,600, and that after emigration and flight to the Soviet Union, no more
than 1,100,000 were under German control. These incontrovertible facts,
however, do not prevent Manvell and Frankl asserting that "there had been over
three million Jews in Poland when Germany began the invasion" and that in 1942
"some two million still awaited death" (ibid, p. 140). In reality, of the
million or so Jews in Poland, almost half, about 400,000 were eventually
concentrated in the ghetto of Warsaw, an area of about two and a half square
miles around the old mediaeval ghetto. The remainder had already been moved to
the Polish Government-General by September 1940. In the summer of 1942,
Himmler ordered the resettlement of all Polish Jews in detention camps in
order to obtain their labour, part of the system of general concentration for
labour assignment in the Government-General. Thus between July and October
1942, over three quarters of the Warsaw Ghetto's inhabitants were peacefully
evacuated and transported, supervised by the Jewish police themselves. As we
have seen, transportation to camps is alleged to have ended in
"extermination", but there is absolutely no doubt from the evidence available
that it involved only the effective procurement of labour and the prevention
of unrest. In the first place, Himmler discovered on a surprise visit to
Warsaw in January 1943 that 24,000 Jews registered as armaments workers were
in fact working illegally as tailors and furriers (Manvell and Frankl, ibid,
p. 140); the Ghetto was also being used as a base for subversive forays into
the main area of Warsaw. After six months of peaceful evacuation, when only
about 60,000 Jews remained in the residential ghetto, the Germans met with an
armed rebellion on 18th January, 1943. Manvell and Frankl admit that "The Jews
involved in planned resistance had for a long time been engaged in smuggling
arms from the outside world, and combat groups fired on and killed S.S. men
and militia in charge of a column of deportees." The terrorists in the Ghetto
uprising were also assisted by the Polish Home Army and the PPR - Polska
Partia Robotnicza, the Communist Polish Workers Party. It was under these
circumstances of a revolt aided by partisans and communists that the occupying
forces, as any army would in a similar situation, moved in to suppress the
terrorists, if necessary by destroying the residential area itself. It should
be remembered that the whole process of evacuation would have continued
peacefully had not extremists among the inhabitants planned an armed rebellion
which in the end was bound to fail. When S.S. Lieutenant-General Stroop
entered the Ghetto with armoured cars on 19th April, he immediately came under
fire and lost twelve men; German and Polish casualties in the battle, which
lasted four weeks, totalled 101 men killed and wounded. Stubborn resistance by
the Jewish Combat Organisation in the face of impossible odds led to an
estimated 12,000 Jewish casualties, the majority by remaining in burning
buildings and dug-outs. A total, however, of 56,065 inhabitants were captured
and peacefully resettled in the area of the Government-General. Many Jews
within the Ghetto had resented the terror imposed on them by the Combat
Organisation, and had attempted to inform on their headquarters to the German
authorities.

SUDDEN SURVIVORS The circumstances surrounding the Warsaw Ghetto revolt, as
well as the deportations to eastern labour camps such as Auschwtiz, has led to
the most colourful tales concerning the fate of Polish Jews, the largest bloc
of Jewry in Europe. The Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, in figures
prepared by them for the Nuremberg Trials, stated that in 1945 there were only
80,000 Jews remaining in Poland. They also alleged that there were no
Polish-Jewish displaced persons left in Germany or Austria, a claim that was
at some variance with the number of Polish Jews arrested by the British and
Americans for black market activities. However, the new Communist regime in
Poland was unable to prevent a major anti-Jewish pogrom at Kielce on July 4th,
1946 and more than 150,000 Polish Jews suddenly fled into Western Germany.
Their appearance was somewhat embarrassing, and their emigration to Palestine
and the United States was carried out in record time. Subsequently, the number
of Polish Jewish survivors underwent considerable revision; in the
American-Jewish Year Book 1948-1949 it was placed at 390,000 quite an advance
on the original 80,000. We may expect further revisions upwards in the future.
7.

SOME CONCENTRATION CAMP MEMOIRS The most influential agency in the propagation
of the extermination legend has been the paper-back book and magazine
industry, and it is through their sensational publications, produced for
commercial gain, that the average person is made acquainted with a myth of an
entirely political character and purpose. The hey-day of these hate-Germany
books was in the 1950's, when virulent Germanophobia found a ready market, but
the industry continues to flourish and is experiencing another boom today. The
industry's products consist generally of so-called "memoirs", and these fall
into two basic categories: those which are supposedly by former S.S. men, camp
commandants and the like, and those bloodcurdling reminiscences allegedly by
former concentration camp inmates.

COMMUNIST ORIGINS Of the first kind, the most outstanding example is
Commandant of Auschwitz by Rudolf Hoess (London, 1960), which was originally
published in the Polish language as Wspomnienia by' the Communist Government.
Hoess, a young man who took over at Auschwitz in 1940, was first arrested by
the British and detained at Flensburg, but he was soon handed over to the
Polish Communist authorities who condemned him to death in 1947 and executed
him almost immediately. The so-called Hoess memoirs are undoubtedly a forgery
produced under Communist auspices, as we shall demonstrate, though the
Communists themselves claim that Hoess was "ordered to write the story of his
life" and a hand-written original supposedly exists, but no one has ever seen
it. Hoess was subjected to torture and brain-washing techniques by the
Communists during the period of his arrest, and his testimony at Nuremberg was
delivered in a mindless monotone as he stared blankly into space. Even
Reitlinger rejects this testimony as hopelessly untrustworthy. It is indeed
remarkable how much of the "evidence" regarding the Six Million stems from
Communist sources; this includes the major documents such as the Wisliceny
statement and the Hoess "memoirs", which are undoubtedly the two most quoted
items in ext