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 toward 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 Göring. 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
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thaicoons
8 years ago
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.
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thaicoons
8 years ago
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 Göring, 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 Göring 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 Göring 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 Göring 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 Höss 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 judgment 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
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thaicoons
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'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.
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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.
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