Did Six Million Really Die?

By Richard E. HARWOOD

This is the second revised edition, published in 1974.

Comment by Dennis Edwards: In regards to censorship of opinion, Thomas Jefferson said the following in a letter, written in 1814 to Nathaniel Dufeif: "If M. de Becourt's book be false in its facts, disprove them; if false in its reasoning, refute it. But, for God's sake, let us freely hear both sides, if we choose." Therefore, for those who wish to hear an alternative opinion to the one normally given, I have made this post. How much is "true," I don't know, "but let freely us hear both sides if we choose!"

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 glycerin 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 apologizing 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 from 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 insidious hint about "multiracial 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 hell fire 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 TOWARDS 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 encourage their emigration from the country altogether. By 1939, the great majority of German Jews had emigrated, all of them with a sizable 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 early 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 S.S.: Alibi of a Nation, London, 1956, p. 253).

ZIONIST POLICY STUDIED

The Nazi view of Jewish emigration was not limited 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.Hjalmar 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 & Frankl, S.S. 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 that 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 Jewish emigration. 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 program" 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 program, 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 Ravensbrück. 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 program. 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 Interpreter, 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 & Frankl, Dr. Goebbels, London, 1960, p. 165). In the meantime he approved of the Jews being "concentrated in the East". Later Goebbels memorandum 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 perfectly 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 authorization 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", nevertheless 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 States. 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 on wards 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 estimates 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 Romania (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 postwar 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 million 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 numbers 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 spiraled 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 euthanasia, 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 memorandum 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 emphasized 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 program 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 verbally" (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 the 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 terminology 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 program has been replaced now by the evacuation of Jews to the east as a further possible solution, in accordance with the previous authorization of the Führer." Here, he explained, their labour was to be utilized. 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 Procès 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 particularly 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 practice, 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 defense 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 defense 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 enumerated 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 defense 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 naturalization certificates were very new indeed, and who, whether in the administrative service or by their translations etc., created an atmosphere 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 percent 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 Bardèche, 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 Peiper, 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 criticize 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 extermination 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 statementof 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 plausibility, 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 "verba lorder" for exterminating Jews

that is supposed to have accompanied Hitler's genuine, written order - yet another nebulous and

unprovable assumptionon the part of Reitlinger. An earlier order from Hitler, dated March 1941

and signed by Field Marshal Keitel, makes it quite clear what the real tasks of the future

Einsatzgruppen would be. It states that in the Russian campaign, the Reichsfüher S.S.

(Himmler) is to be entrusted with "tasks for the political administration, tasks which result from

the struggle which has to be carried out between two opposing political systems" (Manvell &

Frankl, ibid., p. 115). This plainly refers to eliminating Communism, especially the political

commissars whose specific task was Communist indoctrination.

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 nonexistent

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 inflicted.

(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 th eS.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 theaccused for

many years, and was thoroughly convinced of his innocence with respect to the fraudulent

charge of planned genocide against the Jews. The Allied judgement which condemned Pohl did

not prompt Seidl to change his opinion in the slightest. He declared that the prosecution had

failed to produce a single piece of valid evidence against him. One of the most eloquent defences

of Oswald Pohl was made by S.S. Lieutenant Colonel Kurt Schmidt-Klevenow, a legal officer in

the S.S. Economy and Administration Office, in his affidavit of August 8th, 1947. This affidavit

has been deliberately omitted from the published documents known as Trials of the War

Criminals before the Nuremberg Military Tribunals 1946-1949. Schmidt-Klevenow pointed out

that Pohl had given his fullest support to Judge Konrad Morgen of the Reich Criminal Police

Office, whose job was to investigate irregularities at the concentration camps. Later on we shall

refer to a case in which Pohl was in favour of the death penalty for camp commandant Koch,

who was accused by an S.S. court of misconduct. Schmidt-Klevenow explained that Pohl was

instrumental in arranging for local police chiefs to share in the jurisdiction of concentration

camps, and took personal initiative in securing strict discipline on the part of camp personnel.

In short, the evidence given at the Pohl trial shows that the proceedings involved nothing less

than the deliberate defamation of a man's character in order to support the propaganda legend

of genocide against the Jews in the concentration camps he administered.

FALSIFIED EVIDENCE AND FRAUDULENT AFFIDAVITS

Spurious testimony at Nuremberg which included extravagant statements in support of

the myth of the Six Million was invariably given by former German officers because of pressure,

either severe torture as in the cases cited previously, or the assurance of leniency for themselves

if they supplied the required statements. An example of the latter was the testimony of S.S.

General Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski. He was threatened with execution himself because of his

suppression of the revolt by Polish partisans at Warsaw in August 1944, which he carried out

with his S.S. brigade of White Russians. He was therefore prepared to be "co-operative". The

evidence of Bach-Zelewski constituted the basis of the testimony against the Reichsführer of the

S.S. Heinrich Himmler at the main Nuremberg Trial (Trial of the Major War Criminals, Vol.IV,

pp, 29, 36). In March 1941, on the eve of the invasion of Russia, Himmler invited the Higher S.S.

Leaders to his Castle at Wewelsburg for a conference, including Bach-Zelewski who was an

expert on partisan warfare. In his Nuremberg evidence, he depicted Himmler speaking in

grandiose terms at this conference about the liquidation of peoples in Eastern Europe, but

Goering, in the courtroom, denounced Bach-Zelewski to his face for the falsity of this testimony.

An especially outrageous allegation concerned a supposed declaration by Himmler that one of

the aims of the Russian campaign was to "decimate the Slav population by thirty millions." What

Himmler really said is given by his Chief of Staff, Wolff - that war in Russia was certain to result

in millions of dead (Manvell & Frankl, ibid. p. 117). Another brazen falsehood was Bach-

Zelewski's accusation that on August 31st, 1942 Himmler personally witnessed the execution of

one hundred Jews by an Einsatz detachment at Minsk, causing him to nearly faint. It is known,

however, that on this date Himmler was in conference at his field headquarters at Zhitomir in

the Ukraine (cf K. Vowinckel, Die Wehrmacht im Kampf, vol. 4, p. 275). Much is made of Bach-

Zelewski's evidence in all the books on Himmler, especially Willi Frischauer's Himmler: Evil

Genius of the Third Reich (London, 1953, p. 148ff). 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 vanRoden.

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 theywere 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 everyday, 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 6,000 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 Thies

Christophersen (The Auschwitz Legends: An Account of his Experiences, by Thies

Christophersen, 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 Christophersen, 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 foreword,

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). Christophersen'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. Christophersen, 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 thata 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. (Christophersen'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). Christophersen 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, Christophersen 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 Christophersen never saw this public demolition.

Althoughit 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. Christophersen draws attentionto 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 Christophersen 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 & 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.

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 heyday 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 extermination literature, as well as all the information on the so-called "death camps"

such as Auschwitz. This information comes from the Jewish Historical Commission of Poland;

the Central Commission for the Investigation of War Crimes, Warsaw; and the Russian State

War Crimes Commission, Moscow. Reitlinger acknowledges that the Hoess testimony at

Nuremberg was a catalogue of wild exaggerations, such as that Auschwitz was disposing of

16,000 people a day, which would mean a total at the end of the war of over 13 million. Instead

of exposing such estimates for the Soviet-inspired frauds they obviously are, Reitlinger and

others prefer to think that such ridiculous exaggerations were due to "pride" in doing a

professional job. Ironically, this is completely irreconcilable with the supposedly authentic

Hoess memoirs, which make a clever attempt at plausibility by suggesting the opposite picture

of distaste for the job. Hoess is supposed to have "confessed" to a total of 3 million people

exterminated at Auschwitz, though at his own trial in Warsaw the prosecution reduced the

number to 1,135,000. However, we have already noted that the Soviet Government announced

an official figure of 4 million after their "investigation" of the camp in 1945. This kind of casual

juggling with millions of people does not appear to worry the writers of extermination literature.

A review of the Hoess "memoirs" in all their horrid detail would be tedious. We may confine

ourselves to those aspects of the extermination legend which are designed with the obvious

purpose of forestalling any proof of its falsity. Such, for example, is the manner in which the

alleged extermination of Jews is described. This was supposed to have been carried out by a

"special detachment" of Jewish prisoners. They took charge of the newly arrived contingents at

the camp, led them into the enormous "gas-chambers" and disposed of the bodies afterwards.

The S.S., therefore, did very little, so that most of the S.S. personnel at the camp could be left in

complete ignorance of the "extermination programme". Of course, no Jew would ever be found

who claimed to have been a member of this gruesome "special detachment", so that the whole

issue is left conveniently unprovable. It is worth repeating that no living, authentic eye-witness

to these events has ever been produced. Conclusive evidence that the Hoess memoirs are a

forgery lies in an incredible slip by the Communist editors. Hoess is supposed to say that the

Jehovah's Witnesses at Auschwitz approved of murdering the Jews because the Jews were the

enemies of Christ. It is well known that in Soviet Russia today and in all her satellite countries of

eastern Europe, the Communists conduct a bitter campaign of suppression against the

Jehovah's Witnesses whom they regard as the religious sect most dangerous to Communist

beliefs. That this sect is deliberately and grossly defamed in the Hoess memoirs proves the

document's Communist origins beyond any doubt.

INCRIMINATING REMINISCENCES

Certainly the most bogus "memoirs" yet published are those of Adolf Eichmann. Before

his illegal kidnapping by the Israelis in May, 1960 and the attendant blaze of international

publicity, few people had ever heard of him. He was indeed a relatively unimportant person, the

head of Office A4b in Department IV (the Gestapo) of the Reich Security Head Office. His office

supervised the transportation to detention camps of a particular section of enemy aliens, the

Jews. A positive flood of unadulterated rubbish about Eichmann showered the world in 1960, of

which we may cite as an example Comer Clarke's Eichmann: The Savage Truth. ("The orgies

often went on until six in the morning, a few hours before consigning the next batch of victims to

death," says Clarke in his chapter "Streamlined Death and Wild Sex Orgies," p. 124). Strangely

enough, the alleged "memoirs" of Adolf Eichmann suddenly appeared at the time of his

abduction to Israel. They were uncritically published by the American Life magazine (November

28th, December 5th, 1960), and were supposed to have been given by Eichmann to a journalist

in the Argentine shortly before his capture - an amazing coincidence. Other sources, however,

gave an entirely different account of their origin, claiming that they were a record based on

Eichmann's comments to an "associate" in 1955, though no one even bothered to identify this

person. By an equally extraordinary coincidence, war crimes investigators claimed shortly

afterwards to have just "found" in the archives of the U.S. Library of Congress, more than fifteen

years after the war, the "complete file" of Eichmann's department. Sofar as the "memoirs"

themselves are concerned, they were made to be as horribly incriminating as possible without

straying too far into the realms of the purest fantasy, and depict Eichmann speaking with

enormous relish about "the physical annihilation of the Jews." Their fraudulence is also attested

to by various factual errors, such as that Himmler was already in command of the Reserve Army

by April of 1944, instead of after the July plot against Hitler's life, a fact which Eichmann would

certainly have known. The appearance of these "memoirs" at precisely the right moment raises

no doubt that their object was to present a pre-trial propaganda picture of the archetypal

"unregenerate Nazi" and fiend in human shape. The circumstances of the Eichmann trial in

Israel do not concern us here; the documents of Soviet origin which were used in evidence, such

as the Wisliceny statement, have been examined already, and for an account of the third-degree

methods used on Eichmann during his captivity to render him "co-operative" the reader is

referred to the London Jewish Chronicle, September 2nd, 1960. More relevant to the literature

of the extermination legend are the contents of a letter which Eichmann is supposed to have

written voluntarily and handed over to his captors in Buenos Aires. It need hardly be added that

its Israeli authorship is transparently obvious. Nothing in it stretches human credulity further

than the phrase "I am submitting this declaration of my own free will"; but the most hollow and

revealing statement of all is his alleged willingness to appear before a court in Israel, "so that a

true picture may be transmitted to future generations."

TREBLINKA FABRICATIONS

The latest reminiscences to appear in print are those of Franz Stangl, the former

commandant of the camp at Treblinka in Poland who was sentenced to life imprisonment in

December 1970. These were published in an article by the London Daily Telegraph Magazine,

October 8th, 1971, and were supposed to derive from a series of interviews with Stangl in prison.

He died a few days after the interviews were concluded. These alleged reminiscences are

certainly the goriest and most bizarre yet published, though one is grateful for a few admissions

by the writer of the article, such as that "the evidence presented in the course of his trial did not

prove Stangl himself to have committed specific acts of murder" and that the account of Stangl's

beginnings in Poland "was in part fabrication." A typical example of this fabrication was the

description of Stangl's first visit to Treblinka. As he drew into the railway station there, he is

supposed to have seen "thousands of bodies" just strewn around next to the tracks, "hundreds,

no, thousands of bodies everywhere, putrefying, decomposing." And "in the station was a train

full of Jews, some dead, some still alive... it looked as if it had been there for days." The account

reaches the heights of absurdity when Stangl is alleged to have got out of his car and "stepped

kneedeep into money: I didn't know which way to turn, which way to go. I waded in papernotes,

currency, precious stones, jewellery and clothes. They were everywhere, strewn all over the

square." The scene is completed by "whores from Warsaw weaving drunk, dancing, singing,

playing music", who were on the other side of the barbed wire fences. To literally believe this

account of sinking "kneedeep" in Jewish bank-notes and precious stones amid thousands of

putrefying corpses and lurching, singing prostitutes would require the most phenomenal degree

of gullibility, and in any circumstances other than the Six Million legend it would be dismissed

as the most outrageous nonsense. The statement which certainly robs the Stangl memoirs of any

vestige of authenticity is his alleged reply when asked why he thought the Jews were being

exterminated: "They wanted the Jews' money," is the answer. "That racial business was just

secondary." The series of interviews are supposed to have ended on a highly dubious note

indeed. When asked whether he thought there had been "any conceivable sense in this horror,"

the former Nazi commandant supposedly replied with enthusiasm: "Yes, I am sure there was.

Perhaps the Jews were meant to have this enormous jolt to pull them together; to create a

people; to identify themselves with each other." One could scarcely imagine a more perfect

answer had it been invented.

BEST-SELLER A HOAX

Of the other variety of memoirs, those which present a picture of frail Jewry caught in the

vice of Nazism, the most celebrated is undoubtedly The Diary of Anne Frank, and the truth

concerning this book is only one appalling insight into the fabrication of a propaganda legend.

First published in 1952, The Diary of Anne Frank became an immediate best-seller; since then it

has been republished in paper-back, going through 40 impressions, and was made into a

successful Hollywood film. In royalties alone, Otto Frank, the girl's father, has made a fortune

from the sale of the book, which purports to represent the real-life tragedy of his daughter. With

its direct appeal to the emotions, the book and the film have influenced literally millions of

people, certainly more throughout the world than any other story of its kind. And yet only seven

years after its initial publication, a New York Supreme Court case established that the book was

a hoax. TheDiary of Anne Frank has been sold to the public as the actual diary of a young

Jewish girl from Amsterdam, which she wrote at the age of 12 while her family and four other

Jews were hiding in the back room of a house during the German occupation. Eventually, they

were arrested and detained in a concentration camp, where Anne Frank supposedly died when

she was 14. When Otto Frank was liberated from the camp at the end of the war, he returned to

the Amsterdam house and "found" his daughter's diary concealed in the rafters. The truth about

the Anne Frank Diary was first revealed in 1959 by the Swedish journal Fria Ord. It established

that the Jewish novelist Meyer Levin had written the dialogue of the "diary" and was demanding

payment for his work in a court action against Otto Frank. A condensation of the Swedish

articles appeared in the American Economic Council Letter, April 15th, 1959, as follows:

"History has many examples of myths that live a longer and richer life than truth, and may

become more effective than truth." The Western World has for some years been made aware of a

Jewish girl through the medium of what purports to be her personally written story, Anne

Frank's Diary.

Any informed literary inspection of this book would have shown it to have been

impossible as the work of a teenager. A noteworthy decision of the New York Supreme Court

confirms this point of view, in that the well known American Jewish writer, Meyer Levin, has

been awarded $50,000 to be paid him by the father of Anne Frank as an honorarium for Levin's

work on the Anne Frank Diary. "Mr. Frank, in Switzerland, has promised to pay to his race kin,

Meyer Levin, not less than $50,000 because he had used the dialogue of Author Levin just as it

was and "implanted" it in the diary as being his daughter's intellectual work." Further inquiries

brought a reply on May 7th, 1962 from a firm of New York lawyers, which stated: "I was the

attorney for Meyer Levin in his action against Otto Frank, and others. It is true that a jury

awarded Mr. Levin $50,000 in damages, as indicated in your letter. That award was later set

aside by the trial justice, Hon. Samuel C. Coleman, on the ground that the damages had not been

proved in the manner required by law. The action was subsequently settled while an appeal from

Judge Coleman's decision was pending. I am afraid that the case itself is not officially reported,

so far as the trial itself, or even Judge Coleman's decision, is concerned. Certain procedural

matters were reported in 141 New York Supplement, Second Series 170, and in 5 Second Series

181. The correct file number in the New York County Clerk's office is 2241 - 1956 and the file is

probably a large and full one..."

Here, then, is just one more fraud in a whole series of frauds perpetrated in support of the

"Holocaust" legend and the saga of the Six Million. Of course, the court case bearing directly on

the authenticity of the Anne Frank Diary was "not officially reported". A brief reference may also

be made to another "diary", published not long after that of Anne Frank and entitled: Notes

from the Warsaw Ghetto: the Journal of Emmanuel Ringelblum (New York, 1958). Ringelblum

had been a leader in the campaign of sabotage against the Germans in Poland, as well as the

revolt of the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943, before he was eventually arrested and executed in 1944.

The Ringelblum journal, which speaks of the usual "rumours" allegedly circulating about the

extermination of the Jews in Poland, appeared under exactly the same Communist auspices as

the so-called Hoess memoirs. McGraw-Hill, the publishers of the American edition, admit that

they were denied access to the uncensored original manuscript in Warsaw, and instead faithfully

followed the expurgated volume published by the Communist Government in Warsaw in 1952.

All the "proofs" of the Holocaust issuing from Communist sources of this kind are worthless as

historical documents.

ACCUMULATING MYTHS

Since the war, there has been an abundant growth of sensational concentration camp

literature, the majority of it Jewish, each book piling horror upon horror, blending fragments of

truth with the most grotesque of fantasies and impostures, relentessly creating an edifice of

mythology in which any relation to historical fact has long since disappeared. We have referred

to the type already - Olga Lengyel's absurd Five Chimneys ("24,000 corpses handled every

day"), Doctor at Auschwitz by Miklos Nyiszli, apparently a mythical and invented person, This

was Auschwitz: The Story of a Murder Camp by Philip Friedman, and soon ad nauseam. The

latest in this vein is For Those I Loved by Martin Gray (Bodley Head, 1973), which purports to

be an account of his experiences at Treblinka camp in Poland. Gray specialised in selling fake

antiques to America before turning to concentration camp memoirs. The circumstances

surrounding the publication of his book, however, have been unique, because for the first time

with works of this kind, serious doubt was cast on the authenticity of its contents. Even Jews,

alarmed at the damage it might cause, denounced his book as fraudulent and questioned

whether he had ever been at Treblinka at all, while B.B.C. radio pressed him as to why he had

waited 28 years before writing of his experiences. It was interesting to observe that the

"Personal Opinion" column of the London Jewish Chronicle, March 30th, 1973, although it

roundly condemned Gray's book, nevertheless made grandiose additions to the myth of the Six

Million. It stated that: "Nearly a million people were murdered in Treblinka inthe course of a

year. 18,000 were fed into the gas chambers every day." It is a pity indeed that so many people

read and accept this kind of nonsense without exercising their minds. If 18,000 were murdered

every day, the figure of one million would be reached in a mere 56 days, not "in the course of a

year." This gigantic achievement would leave the remaining ten months of the year a total blank.

18,000 every day would in fact mean a total of 6,480,000 "in the course of a year." Does this

mean that the Six Million died in twelve months at Treblinka? What about the alleged three or

four million at Auschwitz? This kind of thing simply shows that, once the preposterous

compromise figure of Six Million had scored a resounding success and become internationally

accepted, any number of impossible permutations can be made and no one would even think to

criticise them. In its review of Gray's book, the Jewish Chronicle column also provides a

revealing insight into the fraudulent allegations concerning gas-chambers: "Gray recalls that the

floors of the gas chambers sloped, whereas another survivor who helped to build them

maintains that they were at a level..." Occasionally, books by former concentration camp

inmates appear which present a totally different picture of the conditions prevailing in them.

Such is Under Two Dictators (London, 1950) by Margarete Buber. She was a German-Jewish

woman who had experienced several years in the brutal and primitive conditions of a Russian

prison camp before being sent to Ravensbrück, the German camp for women detainees, in

August 1940. She noted that she was the only Jewish person in her contingent of deportees from

Russia who was not straight away released by the Gestapo. Her book presents a striking contrast

between the camps of Soviet Russia and Germany; compared to the squalor, disorder and

starvation of the Russian camp, she found Ravensbrück to be clean, civilised and welladministered.

Regular baths and clean linen seemed a luxury after her earlier experiences, and

her first meal of white bread, sausage, sweet porridge and dried fruit prompted her to inquire of

another camp inmate whether August 3rd, 1940 was some sort of holiday or special occasion.

She observed, too, that the barracks at Ravensbrück were remarkably spacious compared to the

crowded mud hut of the Soviet camp. In the final months of 1945, she experienced the

progressive decline of camp conditions, the causes of which we shall examine later. Another

account which is at total variance with popular propaganda is Die Gestapo Lässt Bitten (The

Gestapo Invites You) by Charlotte Bormann, a Communist political prisoner who was also

interned at Ravensbrück. Undoubtedly its most important revelation is the author's statement

that rumours of gas executions were deliberate and malicious inventions circulated among the

prisoners by the Communists. This latter group did not accept Margarete Buber because of her

imprisonment in Soviet Russia. A further shocking reflection on the post-war trials is the fact

that Charlotte Bormann was not permitted to testify at the Rastadt trial of Ravensbrück camp

personnel in the French occupation zone, the usual fate of those who denied the extermination

legend.

8. THE NATURE & CONDITION OF WAR-TIME CONCENTRATION

CAMPS

In his recent book Adolf Hitler (London, 1973), Colin Cross, who brings more intelligence

than is usual to many problems of this period, observes astutely that "The shuffling of millions

of Jews around Europe and murdering them, in a time of desperate war emergency, was useless

from any rational point of view" (p. 307). Quite so, and at this point we may well question the

likelihood of this irrationalism, and whether it was even possible. Is it likely, that at the height of

the war, when the Germans were fighting a desperate battle for survival on two fronts, they

would have conveyed millions of Jews for miles to supposedly elaborate and costly slaughter

houses? To have conveyed three or four million Jews to Auschwitz alone (even supposing that

such an inflated number existed in Europe, which it did not), would have placed an insuperable

burden upon German transportation facilities which were strained to the limit in supporting the

farflung Russian front. To have transported the mythical six million Jews and countless

numbers of other nationalities to internment camps, and to have housed, clothed and fed them

there, would simply have paralysed their military operations. There is no reason to suppose that

the efficient Germans would have put their military fortunes at such risk. On the other hand, the

transportation of a reasonable 363,000 prisoners to Auschwitz in the course of the war (the

number we know to have been registered there) at least makes sense in terms of the compulsory

labour they supplied. In fact, of the 3 million Jews living in Europe, it is certain that no more

than two million were ever interned at one time, and it is probable that the number was much

closer to 1,500,000. We shall see later, in the Report of the Red Cross, that whole Jewish

populations such as that of Slovakia avoided detention in camps, while others were placed in

community ghettos like Theresienstadt. Moreover, from western Europe deportations were far

fewer. The estimate of Reitlinger that only about 50,000 French Jews from a total population of

320,000 were deported and interned has been noted already. The question must also be asked

as to whether it could have been physically possible to destroy the millions of Jews that are

alleged. Had the Germans enough time for it? Is it likely that they would have cremated people

by the million when they were so short of manpower and required all prisoners of war for

purposes of war production? Would it have been possible to destroy and remove all trace of a

million people in six months? Could such enormous gatherings of Jews and executions on such

a vast scale have been kept secret? These are the kind of questions that the critical, thinking

person should ask. And he will soon discover that not only the statistical and documentary

evidence given here, but simple logistics combine to discredit the legend of the six million.

Although it was impossible for millions to have been murdered in them, the nature and

conditions of Germany's concentration camps have been vastly exaggerated to make the claim

plausible. William Shirer, in a typically reckless passage, states that "All of the thirty odd

principal Nazi concentration camps were death camps" (ibid, p. 1150).This is totally untrue, and

is not even accepted now by the principal propagators of the extermination legend. Shirer also

quotes Eugen Kogon's The Theory and Practice of Hell (N.Y. 1950, p. 227) which puts the total

number of deaths in all of them at the ridiculous figure of 7,125,000, though Shirer admits in a

footnote that this is "undoubtedly too high."

'DEATH CAMPS' BEHIND THE IRON CURTAIN

It is true that in 1945, Allied propaganda did claim that all the concentration camps,

particularly those in Germany itself, were "death camps", but not for long. On this question, the

eminent American historian Harry Elmer Barnes wrote: "These camps were first presented as

those in Germany, such as Dachau, Belsen, Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen and Dora, but it was

soon demonstrated that there had been no systematic extermination in those camps. Attention

was then moved to Auschwitz, Treblinka, Belzec, Chelmno, Jonowska, Tarnow, Ravensbrück,

Mauthausen, Brezeznia and Birkenau, which does not exhaust the list that appears to have been

extended as needed" (Rampart Journal,Summer 1967). What had happened was that certain

honest observers among the British and American occupation forces in Germany, while

admitting that many inmates had died of disease and starvation in the final months of the war,

had found no evidence after all of "gas chambers". As a result, eastern camps in the Russian

zone of occupation such as Auschwitz and Treblinka gradually came to the fore as horrific

centres of extermination (though no one was permitted to see them), and this tendency has

lasted to the present day. Here in these camps it was all supposed to have happened, but with

the Iron Curtain brought down firmly over them, no one has ever been able to verify such

charges. The Communists claimed that four million people died at Auschwitz in gigantic gas

chambers accommodating 2,000 people – and no one could argue to the contrary. What is the

truth about so-called "gas chambers"? Stephen F. Pinter, who served as a lawyer for the United

States War Department in the occupation forces in Germany and Austria for six years after the

war, made the following statement in the widely read Catholic magazine Our Sunday Visitor,

June 14th , 1959: "I was in Dachau for 17 months after the war, as a U.S. Department Attorney,

and can state that there was no gas chamber at Dachau. What was shown to visitors and

sightseers there and erroneously described as a gas chamber was a crematory. Nor was there a

gas chamber in any of the other concentration camps in Germany. We were told that there was a

gas chamber at Auschwitz, but since that was in the Russian zone of occupation, we were not

permitted to investigate since the Russians would not allow it. From what I was able to

determine during six postwar years in Germany and Austria, there were a number of Jews

killed, but the figure of a million was certainly never reached. I interviewed thousands of Jews,

former immates of concentration camps in Germany and Austria, and consider myself as well

qualified as any man on this subject." This tells a very different story from the customary

propaganda. Pinter, of course, is very astute on the question of the crematory being represented

as a gas chamber. This is a frequent ploy because no such thing as a gas chamber has ever been

shown to exist in these camps, hence the deliberately misleading term a "gas oven", aimed at

confusing a gas chamber with a crematorium. The latter, usually a single furnace and similar to

the kind of thing employed today, were used quite simply for the cremation of those persons

who had died from various natural causes within the camp, particularly infectious diseases. This

fact was conclusively proved by the German archbishop, Cardinal Faulhaber of Munich. He

informed the Americans that during the Allied air raids on Munich in September 1944, 30,000

people were killed. The archbishop requested the authorities at the time to cremate the bodies of

the victims in the crematorium at Dachau. But he was told that, unfortunately, this plan could

not be carried out; the crematorium, having only one furnace, was not able to cope with the

bodies of the air raid victims. Clearly, therefore, it could not have coped with the 238,000

Jewish bodies which were allegedly cremated there. In order to do so, the crematorium would

have to be kept going for 326 years without stopping and 530 tons of ashes would have been

recovered.

CASUALTY FIGURES REDUCED

The figures of Dachau casualties are typical of the kind of exaggerations that have since

had to be drastically revised. In 1946, a memorial plaque was unveiled at Dachau by Philip

Auerbach, the Jewish State-Secretary in the Bavarian Government who was convicted for

embezzling money which he claimed as compensation for non-existent Jews. The plaque read:

"This area is being retained as a shrine to the 238,000 individuals who were cremated here."

Since then, the official casualty figures have had to be steadily revised downwards, and now

stand at only 20,600 the majority from typhus and starvation only at the end of the war. This

deflation, to ten per cent of the original figure, will doubtless continue, and one day will be

applied to the legendary figure of six million as a whole. Another example of drastic revision is

the present estimate of Auschwitz casualties. The absurd allegations of three or four million

deaths there are no longer plausible even to Reitlinger. He now puts the number of casualties at

only 600,000; and although this figure is still exaggerated in the extreme, it is a significant

reduction on four million and further progress is to be expected. Shirer himself quotes

Reitlinger's latest estimate, but he fails to reconcile this with his earlier statement that half of

that figure, about 300,000 Hungarian Jews were supposedly "done to death in forty-six days" - a

supreme example of the kind of irresponsible nonsense that is written on this subject.

HUMANE CONDITIONS

That several thousand camp inmates did die in the chaotic final months of the war brings

us to the question of their war-time conditions. These have been deliberately falsified in

innumerable books of an extremely lurid and unpleasant kind. The Red Cross Report, examined

below, demonstrates conclusively that throughout the war the camps were well administered.

The working inmates received a daily ration even throughout 1943 and 1944 of not less than

2,750 calories, which was more than double the average civilian ration in occupied Germany in

the years after 1945.The internees were under regular medical care, and those who became

seriously ill were transferred to hospital. All internees, unlike those in Soviet camps, could

receive parcels of food, clothing and pharmaceutical supplies from the Special Relief Division of

the Red Cross. The Office of the Public Prosecutor conducted thorough investigations into each

case of criminal arrest, and those found innocent were released; those found guilty, as well as

those deportees convicted of major crimes within the camp, were sentenced by military courts

and executed. In the Federal Archives of Koblenz there is a directive of January 1943 from

Himmler regarding such executions, stressing that "no brutality. is to be allowed" (Manvell &

Frankl), ibid,p. 312). Occasionally there was brutality, but such cases were immediately

scrutinised by S.S. Judge Dr. Konrad Morgen of the Reich Criminal Police Office, whose job was

to investigate irregularities at the various camps. Morgen himself prosecuted commander Koch

of Buchenwald in 1943 for excesses at his camp, a trial to which the German public were invited.

It is significant that Oswald Pohl, the administrator of the concentration camp system who was

dealt with so harshly at Nuremberg, was in favour of the death penalty for Koch. In fact, the S.S.

court did sentence Koch to death, but he was given the option of serving on the Russian front.

Before he could do this, however, Prince Waldeck, the leader of the S.S. in the district,

carriedout his execution. This case is ample proof of the seriousness with which the S.S.

regarded unnecessary brutality. Several S.S. court actions of this kind were conducted in the

camps during the war to prevent excesses, and more than 800 cases were investigated before

1945. Morgen testified at Nuremberg that he discussed confidentially with hundreds of inmates

the prevailing conditions in the camps. He found few that were undernourished except in the

hospitals, and noted that the pace and achievement in compulsory labour by inmates was far

lower than among German civilian workers. The evidence of Pinter and Cardinal Faulhaber has

been shown to disprove the claims of extermination at Dachau, and we have seen how the

casualty figures of that camp have been continuously revised downwards. The camp at Dachau

near Munich, in fact, may be taken as fairly typical of these places of internment. Compulsory

labour in the factories and plants was the order of the day, but the Communist leader Ernst Ruff

testified in his Nuremberg affidavit of April 18th, 1947 that the treatment of prisoners on the

work details and in the camp of Dachau remained humane. The Polish underground leader, Jan

Piechowiak, who was at Dachau from May 22nd, 1940 until April 29th, 1945 also testified on

March 21st, 1946 that prisoners there received good treatment, and that the S.S. personnel at

the camp were "well disciplined". Berta Schirotschin, who worked in the food service at Dachau

throughout the war, testified tha tthe working inmates, until the beginning of 1945 and despite

increasing privation in Germany, received their customary second breakfast at 10 a.m. every

morning. In general, hundreds of affidavits from Nuremberg testify to the humane conditions

prevailing in concentration camps; but emphasis was invariably laid on those which reflected

badly on the German administration and could be used for propaganda purposes. A study of the

documents also reveals that Jewish witnesses who resented their deportation and internment in

prison camps tended to greatly exaggerate the rigours of their condition, whereas other

nationals interned for political reasons, such as those cited above, generally presented a more

balanced picture. In many cases, prisoners such as Charlotte Bormann, whose experiences did

not accord with the picture presented at Nuremberg, were not permitted to testify.

UNAVOIDABLE CHAOS

The orderly situation prevailing in the German concentration camps slowly broke down in

the last fearful months of 1945. The Red Cross Report of 1948 explains that the saturation

bombing by the Allies paralysed the transport and communications system of the Reich, no food

reached the camps and starvation claimed an increasing number of victims, both in prison

camps and among the civilian population of Germany. This terrible situation was compounded

in the camps both by great overcrowding and the consequent outbreak of typhus epidemics.

Overcrowding occurred as a result of prisoners from the eastern camps such as Auschwitz being

evacuated westward before the Russian advance; columns of such exhausted people arrived at

several German camps such as Belsen and Buchenwald which had themselves reached a state of

great hardship. Belsen camp near Bremen was in an especially chaotic condition in these

months and Himmler's physician, Felix Kersten, an anti-Nazi, explains that its unfortunate

reputation as a "death camp" was due solely to the ferocity of the typhus epidemic which broke

out there in March 1945 (Memoirs 1940-1945, London, 1956). Undoubtedly these fearful

conditions cost several thousand lives, and it is these conditions that are represented in the

photographs of emaciated human beings and heaps of corpses which the propagandists delight

in showing, claiming, that they are victims of "extermination". A surprisingly honest appraisal of

the situation at Belsen in 1945 appeared in Purnell's History of the Second World War (Vol. 7,

No. 15) by Dr. Russell Barton, now superintendent and consultant psychiatrist at Severalls

Hospital, Essex, who spent one month at the camp as a medical student after the war. His

account vividly illustrates the true causes of the mortality that occurred in such camps towards

the war's end, and how such extreme conditions came to prevail there. Dr. Barton explains that

Brigadier Glyn Hughes, the British Medical Officer who took command of Belsen in 1945, "did

not think there had been any atrocities in the camp" despite discipline and hard work. "Most

people," writes Dr. Barton, "attributed the conditions of the inmates to deliberate intention on

the part of the Germans. Inmates were eager to cite examples of brutality and neglect, and

visiting journalists from different countries interpreted the situation according to the needs of

propaganda at home." However, Dr. Barton makes it quite clear that the conditions of starvation

and disease were unavoidable in the circumstances and that they occurred only during the

months of 1945. "From discussions with prisoners it seemed that conditions in the camp were

not too bad untillate 1944. The huts were set among pine trees and each was provided with

lavatories, wash basins, showers and stoves for heating." The cause of food shortage is also

explained. "German medical officers told me that it had been increasingly difficult to transport

food to the camp for some months. Anything that moved on the autobahns was likely to be

bombed... I was surprised to find records, going back for two or three years, of large quantities

of food cooked daily for distribution. At that time I became convinced, contrary to popular

opinion, that there had never been a policy of deliberate starvation. This was confirmed by the

large numbers of well-fed inmates. Why then were so many people suffering from malnutrition?...

The major reasons for the state of Belsen were disease, gross overcrowding by

central authority, lack of law and order within the huts, and inadequate supplies of food, water

and drugs." The lack of order, which led to riots over food distribution, was quelled by British

machine-gun fire and a display of force when British tanks and armoured cars toured the camp.

Apart from the unavoidable deaths in these circumstances, Glyn Hughes estimated that about

"1,000 were killed through the kindness of English soldiers giving them their own rations and

chocolates." As a man who was at Belsen, Dr. Barton is obviously very much alive to the

falsehoods of concentration camp mythology, and he concludes: "In trying to assess the causes

of the conditions found in Belsen one must be alerted to the tremendous visual display, ripe for

purposes of propaganda, that masses of starved corpses presented." To discuss such conditions

"naively in terms of 'goodness' and 'badness' is to ignore the constituent factors..."

FAKE PHOTOGRAPHS

Not only were situations such as those at Belsen unscrupulously exploited for propaganda

purposes, but this propaganda has also made use of entirely fake atrocity photographs and films.

The extreme conditions at Belsen applied to very few camps indeed; the great majority escaped

the worst difficulties and all their inmates survived in good health. As a result, outright forgeries

were used to exaggerate conditions of horror. A startling case of such forgery was revealed in the

British Catholic Herald of October 29th, 1948. It reported that in Cassel, where every adult

German was compelled to see a film representing the "horrors" of Buchenwald, a doctor from

Goettingen saw himself on the screen looking after the victims. But he had never been to

Buchenwald. After an interval of bewilderment he realised that what he had seen was part of a

film taken after the terrible air raid on Dresden by the Allies on 13th February, 1945 where the

doctor had been working. The film in question was shown in Cassel on 19th October, 1948. After

the air raid on Dresden, which killed a record 135 000 people, mostly refugee women and

children, the bodies of the victims were piled and burned in heaps of 400 and 500 for several

weeks. These were the scenes, purporting to be from Buchenwald, which the doctor had

recognised. The forgery of war-time atrocity photographs is not new. For further information

the reader is referred to Arthur Ponsonby's book Falsehood in Wartime (London,1928), which

exposes the faked photographs of German atrocities in the First World War. Ponsonby cites such

fabrications as "The Corpse Factory" and "The Belgian Baby without Hands", which are

strikingly reminiscent of the propaganda relating to Nazi "atrocities". F. J. P. Veale explains in

his book that the bogus " jar of human soap" solemnly introduced by the Soviet prosecution at

Nuremberg was a deliberate jibe at the famous British "Corpse Factory" myth, in which the

ghoulish Germans were supposed to have obtained various commodities from processing

corpses (Veale, ibid, p. 192). This accusation was one for which the British Government

apologised after 1918. It received new life after 1945 in the tale of lampshades of human skin,

which was certainly as fraudulent as the Soviet "human soap". In fact, from Manvell and Frankl

we have the grudging admission that the lamp shade evidence at Buchenwald Trial "later

appeared to be dubious" (The Incomparable Crime, p. 84). It was given by a certain Andreas

Pfeffenberger in a "written affidavit" of the kind discussed earlier, but in 1948 General Lucius

Clay admitted that the affidavits used in the trial appeared after more thorough investigation to

have been mostly 'hearsay'. An excellent work on the fake atrocity photographs pertaining to the

Myth of the Six Million is Dr. Udo Walendy's Bild 'Dokumente' für die Geschichtsschreibung?

(Vlotho/Weser, 1973), and from the numerous examples cited we illustrate one on this page.

The origin of the first photograph is unknown, but the second is a photomontage. Close

examination reveals immediately that the standing figures have been taken from the first

photograph, and a heap of corpses super-imposed in front of them. The fence has been removed,

and an entirely new horror "photograph" created. This blatant forgery appears on page 341 of R.

Schnabel's book on the S.S., Macht ohne Moral: eine Dokumentation über die SS (Frankfurt,

1957), with the caption "Mauthausen". (Walendy cites eighteen other examples of forgery in

Schnabel's book). The same photograph appeared in the Proceedings of the International

Military Tribunal, Vol. XXX, p. 421, likewise purporting to illustrate Mauthausen camp. It is

also illustrated without a caption in Eugene Aroneanu's Konzentrationlager Document F.321 for

the International Court at Nuremberg; Heinz Kühnrich's Der KZ-Staat (Berlin, 1960, p.81);

Vaclav Berdych's Mauthausen (Prague, 1959); and Robert Neumann's Hitler- Aufstieg und

Untergang des Dritten Reiches (Munich, 1961).

9. THE JEWS AND THE CONCENTRATION CAMPS: A FACTUAL

APPRAISAL BYTHE RED CROSS

There is one survey of the Jewish question in Europe during World War Two and the

conditions of Germany's concentration camps which is almost unique in its honesty and

objectivity, the three-volume Report of the International Committee of the Red Cross on its

Activities during the Second World War, Geneva, 1948. This comprehensive account from an

entirely neutral source incorporated and expanded the findings of two previous works:

Documents sur l'activité du CICR en faveur des civils détenus dans les camps de concentration

en Allemagne 1939-1945 (Geneva,1946), and Inter Arma Caritas: the Work of the ICRC during

the Second World War (Geneva, 1947). The team of authors, headed by Frédéric Siordet,

explained in the opening pages of the Report that their object, in the tradition of the Red Cross,

had been strict political neutrality, and here in lies its great value. The ICRC successfully applied

the 1929 Geneva military convention in order to gain access to civilian internees held in Central

and Western Europe by the Germany authorities. By contrast, the ICRC was unable to gain any

access to the Soviet Union, which had failed to ratify the Convention. The millions of civilian and

military internees held in the USSR, whose conditions were known to be by far the worst, were

completely cut off from any international contact or supervision. The Red Cross Report is of

value in that it first clarifies the legitimate circumstances under which Jews were detained in

concentration camps, i.e. as enemy aliens. In describing the two categories of civilian internees,

the Report distinguishes the second type as "Civilians deported on administrative grounds" (in

German, "Schutzhäftlinge"), who were arrested for political or racial motives because their

presence was considered a danger to the State or the occupation forces" (Vol. III, p. 73). These

persons, it continues, "were placed on the same footing as persons arrested or imprisoned under

common law for security reasons." (p.74). The Report admits that the Germans were at first

reluctant to permit supervision by the Red Cross of people detained on grounds relating to

security, but by the latter part of 1942, the ICRC obtained important concessions from Germany.

They were permitted to distribute food parcels to major concentration camps in Germany from

August 1942, and "from February 1943 onwards this concession was extended to all other camps

and prisons" (Vol. III, p. 78). The ICRC soon established contact with camp commandants and

launched a food relief programme which continued to function until the last months of 1945,

letters of thanks for which came pouring in from Jewish internees.

RED CROSS RECIPIENTS WERE JEWS

The Report states that "As many as 9,000 parcels were packed daily. From the autumn of

1943 until May 1945, about 1,112,000 parcels with a total weight of 4,500 tons were sent off to

the concentration camps" (Vol. III, p. 80). In addition to food, these contained clothing and

pharmaceutical supplies. "Parcels were sent to Dachau, Buchenwald, Sangerhausen,

Sachsenhausen, Oranienburg, Flossenburg, Landsberg-am-Lech, Flöha, Ravensbrück,

Hamburg-Neuengamme, Mauthausen, Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, to camps

near Vienna and in Central and Southern Germany. The principal recipients were Belgians,

Dutch, French, Greeks, Italians, Norwegians, Poles and stateless Jews" (Vol. III, p. 83). In the

course of the war, "The Committee was in a position to transfer and distribute in the form of

relief supplies over twenty million Swiss francs collected by Jewish welfare organisations

throughout the world, in particular by the American Joint Distribution Committee of New York"

(Vol. I, p. 644). This latter organisation was permitted by the German Government to maintain

offices in Berlin until the American entry into the war. The ICRC complained that obstruction of

their vast relief operation for Jewish internees came not from the Germans but from the tight

Allied blockade of Europe. Most of their purchases of relief food were made in Rumania,

Hungary and Slovakia. The ICRC had special praise for the liberal conditions which prevailed at

Theresienstadt up to the time of their last visits there in April 1945. This camp, "where there

were about 40,000 Jews deported from various countries was a relatively privileged ghetto"

(Vol. III, p. 75). According to the Report, "'The Committee's delegates were able to visit the camp

at Theresienstadt (Terezin) which was used exclusively for Jews and was governed by special

conditions. From information gatheredby the Committee, this camp had been started as an

experiment by certain leaders of the Reich... These men wished to give the Jews the means of

setting up a communal life in a town under their own administration and possessing almost

complete autonomy... two delegates were able to visit the camp on April 6th, 1945. They

confirmed the favourable impression gained on the first visit" (Vol. I, p. 642). The ICRC also had

praise for the regime of Ion Antonescu of Fascist Rumania where the Committee was able to

extend special relief to 183,000 Rumanian Jews until the time of the Soviet occupation. The aid

then ceased, and the ICRC complained bitterly that it never succeeded "in sending anything

whatsoever to Russia" (Vol. II, p. 62). The same situation applied to many of the German camps

after their "liberation" by the Russians. The ICRC received a voluminous flow of mail from

Auschwitz until the period of the Soviet occupation, when many of the internees were evacuated

westward. But the efforts of the Red Cross to send relief to internees remaining at Auschwitz

under Soviet control were futile. However, food parcels continued to be sent to former

Auschwitz inmates transferred west to such camps as Buchenwald and Oranienburg.

NO EVIDENCE OF GENOCIDE

One of the most important aspects of the Red Cross Report is that it clarifies the true

cause of those deaths that undoubtedly occurred in the camps towards the end of the war. Says

the Report: "In the chaotic condition of Germany after the invasion during the final months of

the war, the camps received no food supplies at all and starvation claimed an increasing number

of victims. Itself alarmed by this situation, the German Government at last informed the ICRC

on February 1st, 1945... In March 1945, discussions between the President of the ICRC and

General of the S.S. Kaltenbrunner gave even more decisive results. Relief could henceforth be

distributed by the ICRC, and one delegate was authorised to stay in each camp..." (Vol. III, p.

83). Clearly, the German authorities were at pains to relieve the dire situation as faras they were

able. The Red Cross are quite explicit in stating that food supplies ceased at this time due to the

Allied bombing of German transportation, and in the interests of interned Jews they had

protested on March 15th, 1944 against "the barbarous aerial warfare of the Allies" (Inter Arma

Caritas, p. 78). By October 2nd, 1944, the ICRC warned the German Foreign Office of the

impending collapse of the German transportation system, declaring that starvation conditions

for people throughout Germany were becoming inevitable. In dealing with this comprehensive,

three-volume Report, it is important to stress that the delegates of the International Red Cross

found no evidence whatever at the camps in Axis-occupied Europe of a deliberate policy to

exterminate the Jews. In all its 1,600 pages the Report does not even mention such a thing as a

gas chamber. It admits that Jews, like many other wartime nationalities, suffered rigours and

privations, but its complete silence on the subject of planned extermination is ample refutation

of the Six Million legend. Like the Vatican representatives with whom they worked, the Red

Cross found itself unable to indulge in the irresponsible charges of genocide which had become

the order of the day. So far as the genuine mortality rate is concerned, the Report points out that

most of the Jewish doctors from the camps were being used to combat typhus on the eastern

front, so that they were unavailable when the typhus epidemics of 1945 broke out in the camps

(Vol. I, p. 204 ff). Incidentally, it is frequently claimed that mass executions were carried out in

gas chambers cunningly disguised as shower facilities. Again the Report makes nonsense of this

allegation. "Not only the washing places, but installations for baths, showers and laundry were

inspected by the delegates. They had often to take action to have fixtures made less primitive,

and to get them repaired or enlarged" (Vol. III,p. 594).

NOT ALL WERE INTERNED

Volume III of the Red Cross Report, Chapter 3 (I. Jewish Civilian Population) deals with

the "aid given to the Jewish section of the free population," and this chapter makes it quite plain

that by no means all of the European Jews were placed ininternment camps, but remained,

subject to certain restrictions, as part of the free civilian population. This conflicts directly with

the "thoroughness" of the supposed "extermination programme", and with the claim in the

forged Hoess memoirs that Eichmann was obsessed with seizing "everysingle Jew he could lay

his hands on." In Slovakia, for example, where Eichmann's assistant Dieter Wisliceny was in

charge, the Report states that "A large proportion of the Jewish minority had permission to stay

in the country, and at certain periods Slovakia was looked upon as a comparative haven of

refuge for Jews, especially for those coming from Poland. Those who remained in Slovakia seem

to have been in comparative safety until the end of August 1944, when a rising against the

German forces took place. While it is true that the law of May 15th, 1942 had brought about the

internment of several thousand Jews, these people were held in camps where the conditions of

food and lodging were tolerable, and where the internees were allowed to do paid work on terms

almost equal to those of the free labour market" (Vol. I, p. 646). Not only did large numbers of

the three million or so European Jews avoid internment altogether, but the emigration of Jews

continued throughout the war, generally by way of Hungary, Rumania and Turkey. Ironically,

post-war Jewish emigration from German-occupied territories was also facilitated by the Reich,

as in the case of the Polish Jews who had escaped to France before its occupation. "The Jews

from Poland who, whilst in France, had obtained entrance permits to the United States were

held to be American citizens by the German occupying authorities, who further agreed to

recognize the validity of about three thousand passports issued to Jews by the consulates of

South American countries" (Vol. I, p. 645). As future U.S. citizens, these Jews were held at the

Vittel camp in southern France for American aliens. The emigration of European Jews from

Hungary in particular proceeded during the war unhindered by the German authorities. "Until

March 1944," says the Red Cross Report, "Jews who had the privilege of visas for Palestine were

free to leave Hungary" (Vol. I, p. 648). Even after the replacement of the Horthy Government in

1944 (following its attempted armistice with the Soviet Union) with a govenment more

dependent on German authority, the emigration of Jews continued. The Committee secured the

pledges of both Britain and the United States "to give support by every means to the emigration

of Jews from Hungary," and from the U.S. Govermnent the ICRC received a message stating that

"The Government of the United States... now specifically repeats its assurance that

arrangements will be made by it for the care of all Jews who in the present circumstances are

allowed to leave" (Vol. I, p . 649).

10. THE TRUTH AT LAST: THE WORK OF PAUL RASSINIER

Without doubt the most important contribution to a truthful study of the extermination

question has been the work of the French historian, Professor Paul Rassinier. The pre-eminent

value of this work lies firstly in the fact that Rassinier actually experienced life in the German

concentration camps, and also that, as a Socialist intellectual and anti-Nazi, nobody could be

less inclined to defend Hitler and National Socialism. Yet, for the sake of justice and historical

truth, Rassinier spent the remainder of his post-war years until his death in 1966 pursuing

research which utterly refuted the Myth of the Six Million and the legend of Nazi diabolism.

From 1933 until 1943, Rassinier was a professor of history in the Collège d'enseignement

général at Belfort, Académie de Besançon. During the war he engaged in resistance activity until

he was arrested by the Gestapo on October 30th, 1943, and as a result was confined in the

German concentration camps at Buchenwald and Dora until 1945. At Buchenwald, towards the

end of the war, he contracted typhus, which so damaged his health that he could not resume his

teaching. After the war, Rassinier was awarded the Médaille de la Résistance et de la

Reconnaisance Française, and was elected to the French Chamber of Deputies, from which he

was ousted by the Communists in November, 1946.

Rassinier then embarked on his great work, a systematic analysis of alleged German war

atrocities, in particular the supposed "extermination" of the Jews. Not surprisingly, his writings

are little known; they have rarely been translated from the French and none at all have appeared

in English. His most important works were: Le Mensonge d'Ulysse (The Lies of Odysseus, Paris,

1949), an investigation of concentration camp conditions based on his own experiences of them;

and Ulysse trahi par les Siens (1960), a sequel which further refuted the impostures of

propagandists concerning German concentration camps. His monumental task was completed

with two final volumes, Le Véritable Procès Eichmann (1962) and Le Drame des juifs européens

(1964), in which Rassinier exposes the dishonest and reckless distortions concerning the fate of

the Jews by a careful statistical analysis. The last work also examines the political and financial

significance of the extermination legend and its exploitation by Israel and the Communist

powers. One of the many merits of Rassinier's work is exploding the myth of unique German

"wickedness"; and he reveals with devastating force how historical truth has been obliterated in

an impenetrable fog of partisan propaganda. His researches demonstrate conclusively that the

fate of the Jews during World War Two, once freed from distortion and reduced to proper

proportions, loses its much vaunted "enormity" and is seen to be only one act in a greater and

much wider tragedy. In an extensive lecture tour in West Germany in the spring of 1960,

Professor Rassinier emphasised to his German audiences that it was high time for a rebirth of

the truth regarding the extermination legend, and that the Germans themselves should begin it

since the allegation remained a wholly unjustifiable blot on Germany in the eyes of the world.

THE IMPOSTURE OF 'GAS CHAMBERS'

Rassinier entitled his first book The Lies of Odysseus in commemoration of the fact that

travellers always return bearing tall stories, and until his death he investigated all the stories of

extermination literature and attempted to trace their authors. He made short work of the

extravagant claims about gas chambers at Buchenwald in David Rousset's The Other Kingdom

(New York, 1947); himself an inmate of Buchenwald, Rassinier proved that no such things ever

existed there (Le Mensonge d'Ulysse, p. 209 ff) Rassinier also traced Abbé Jean-Paul Renard,

and asked him how he could possibly have testified in his book Chaînes et Lumières that gas

chambers were in operation at Buchenwald. Renard replied that others had told him of their

existence, and hence he had been willing to pose as a witness of things that he had never seen

(ibid, p. 209 ff). Rassinier also investigated Denise Dufournier's Ravensbrück.- The Women's

Camp of Death (London, 1948) and again found that the authoress had no other evidence for

gas chambers there than the vague "rumours" which Charlotte Bormann stated were

deliberately spread by communist political prisoners. Similar investigations were made of such

books as Philip Friedman's This was Auschwitz: The Story of a Murder Camp (N.Y., 1946) and

Eugen Kogon's The Theory and Practice of Hell (N.Y., 1950), and he found that none of these

authors could produce an authentic eye-witness of a gas chamber at Auschwitz, nor had they

themselves actually seen one. Rassinier mentions Kogon's claim that a deceased former inmate,

Janda Weiss, had said to Kogon alone that she had witnessed gas chambers at Auschwitz, but of

course, since this person was apparently dead, Rassinier was unable to investigate the claim. He

was able to interview Benedikt Kautsky, author of Teufel und Verdammte who had alleged that

millions of Jews were exterminated at Auschwitz. However, Kautsky only confirmed to Rassinier

the confession in his book, namely that never at any time had he seen a gas chamber, and that

he based his information on what others had "told him". The palm for extermination literature is

awarded by Rassinier to Miklos Nyizli's Doctor at Auschwitz, in which the falsification of facts,

the evident contradictions and shameless lies show that the author is speaking of places which it

is obvious he has never seen (Le Drame des juifs européens, p. 52). According to this "doctor of

Auschwitz", 25,000 victims were exterminated every day for four and a half years, which is a

grandiose advance on Olga Lengyel's 24,000 a day for two and a half years. It would mean a

total of forty-one million victims at Auschwitz by 1945, two and a half times the total pre-war

Jewish population of the world. When Rassinier attempted to discover the identity of this

strange "witness", he was told that "he had died some time before the publication of the book."

Rassinier is convinced that he was never anything but a mythical figure. Since the war, Rassinier

has, in fact, toured Europe in search of somebody who was an actual eye-witness of gas chamber

exterminations in German concentration camps during World War Two, but he has never found

even one such person. He discovered that not one of the authors of the many books charging

that the Germans had exterminated millions of Jews had even seen a gas chamber built for such

purposes, much less seen one in operation, nor could any of these authors produce a living

authentic witness who had done so. Invariably, former prisoners such as Renard, Kautsky and

Kogon based their statements not upon what they had actually seen, but upon what they

"heard", always from "reliable" sources, who by some chance are almost always dead and thus

not in a position to confirm or deny their statements.

Certainly the most important fact to emerge from Rassinier's studies, and of which there

is now no doubt at all, is the utter imposture of "gas chambers". Serious investigations carried

out in the sites themselves have revealed with irrefutable proof that, contrary to the declarations

of the surviving "witnesses" examined above, no gas chambers whatever existed in the German

camps at Buchenwald, Bergen-Belsen, Ravensbrück, Dachau and Dora, or Mauthausen in

Austria. This fact, which we noted earlier was attested to by Stephen Pinter of the U.S. War

Office, has now been recognised and admitted officially by the Institute of Contemporary

History at Munich. However, Rassinier points out that in spite of this, "witnesses" again

declared at the Eichmann trial that they had seen prisoners at Bergen-Belsen setting out for the

gas chambers. So far as the eastern camps of Poland are concerned, Rassinier shows that the

sole evidence attesting to the existence of gas chambers at Treblinka, Chelmno, Belzec,

Maidanek and Sobibor are the discredited memoranda of Kurt Gerstein referred to above. His

original claim, it will be recalled was that an absurd 40 million people had been exterminated

during the war, while in his first signed memorandum he reduced the number to 25 million.

Further reductions were made in his second memorandum. These documents were considered

of such dubious authenticity that they were not even admitted by the Nuremberg Court, though

they continue to circulate in three different versions, one in German (distributed in schools) and

two in French, none of which agree with each other. The German version featured as "evidence"

at the Eichmann Trial in 1961. Finally, Professor Rassinier draws attention to an important

admission by Dr. Kubovy, director of the World Centre of Contemporary Jewish Documentation

at Tel-Aviv, made in La Terre Retrouvée,December 15th, 1960. Dr. Kubovy recognised that not a

single order for extermination exists from Hitler, Himmler, Heydrich or Goering (Le Drame des

juifs européens, p. 31, 39).

'SIXMILLION' FALSEHOOD REJECTED

As for the fearful propaganda figure of the Six Million, Professor Rassinier rejects it on

the basis of an extremely detailed statistical analysis. He shows that the number has been falsely

established, on the one hand through inflation of the pre-war Jewish population by ignoring all

emigration and evacuation, and on the other by a corresponding deflation of the number of

survivors after 1945. This was the method used by the World Jewish Congress. Rassinier also

rejects any written or oral testimony to the Six Million given by the kind of "witnesses" cited

above, since they are full of contradictions, exaggerations and falsehoods. He gives the example

of Dachau casualties, noting that in 1946, Pastor Niemöller reiterated Auerbach's fraudulent

"238,000" deaths there, while in 1962 Bishop Neuhäusseler of Munich stated in a speech at

Dachau that only 30,000 people died "of the 200,000 persons from thirty-eight nations who

were interned there" (Le Drame des juifs européens,p . 12). Today, the estimate has been

reduced by several more thousands, and so it goes on. Rassinier concludes, too, that testimony

in support of the Six Million given by accused men such as Hoess, Hoettl, Wisliceny and

Hoellriegel, who were faced with the prospect of being condemned to death or with the hope of

obtaining a reprieve, and who were frequently tortured during their detention, is completely

untrustworthy. Rassinier finds itvery significant that the figure of Six Million was not mentioned

in court during the Eichmann trial. "The prosecution at the Jerusalem trial was considerably

weakened by its central motif, the six million European Jews alleged to have been exterminated

in gas chambers. It was an argument that easily won conviction the day after the war ended,

amidst the general state of spiritual and material chaos. Today, many documents have been

published which were not available at the time of the Nuremberg trials, and which tend to prove

that if the Jewish nationals were wronged and persecuted by the Hitler regime, there could not

possibly have been six millions victims" (ibid, p. 125). With the help of one hundred pages of

cross-checked statistics, Professor Rassinier concludes in Le Drame des juifs européens that the

number of Jewish casualties during the Second World War could not have exceeded 1,200,000,

and he notes that this has finally been accepted as valid by the World Centre of Contemporary

Jewish Documentation at Paris. However, he regards such a figure as a maximum limit, and

refers to the lower estimate of 896,892 casualties in a study of the same problem by the Jewish

statistician Raul Hilberg. Rassinier points out that the State of Israel nevertheless continues to

claim compensation for six million dead, each one representing an indemnity of 5,000 marks.

EMIGRATION: THE FINAL SOLUTION

Prof. Rassinier is emphatically stating that the German Government never had any policy

other than the emigration of Jews overseas. He shows that after the promulgation of the

Nuremberg Race Laws in September 1935, the Germans negotiated with the British for the

transfer of German Jews to Palestine on the basis of the Balfour Declaration. When this failed,

they asked other countries to take charge of them, but these refused (ibid, p. 20). The Palestine

project was revived in 1938, but broke down because Germany could not negotiate their

departure on the basis of 3,000,000 marks, as demanded by Britain, without some agreement

for compensation. Despite these difficulties, Germany did manage to secure the emigration of

the majority of their Jews, mostly to the United States. Rassinier also refers to the French

refusal of Germany's Madagascar plan at the end of 1940. "In a report of the 21st August, 1942,

the Secretary of State for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Third Reich, Luther, decided that

it would be possible to negotiate with France in this direction and described conversations

which had taken place between July and December 1940, and which were brought to a halt

following the interview at Montoire on 13th December 1940 by Pierre-Etienne Flandin, Laval's

successor. During the whole of 1941 the Germans hoped that they would be able to re-open these

negotiations and bring them to a happy conclusion" (ibid, p . 108). After the outbreak of war, the

Jews, who, as Rassinier reminds us, had declared economic and financial war on Germany as

early as 1933, were interned in concentration camps, "which is the way countries all over the

world treat enemy aliens in time of war... It was decided to regroup them and put them to work

in one immense ghetto which, after the successful invasion of Russia, was situated towards the

end of 1941 in the so-called Eastern territories near the former frontier between Russia and

Poland: at Auschwitz, Chelmno, Belzec, Maidanek, Treblinka etc... There they were to wait until

the end of the war for the re-opening of international discussions which would decide their

future" (Le véritable procès Eichmann, p.20). The order for this concentration in the eastern

ghetto was given by Goering to Heydrich, as noted earlier, and it was regarded as a prelude to

"the desired final solution," their emigration overseas after the war had ended.

ENORMOUS FRAUD

Of great concern to Professor Rassinier is the way in which the extermination legend is

deliberately exploited for political and financial advantage, and in this he finds Israel and the

Soviet Union to be in concert. He notes how, after 1950, an avalanche of fabricated

extermination literature appeared under the stamp of two organisations, so remarkably

synchronised in their activities that one might well believe them to have been contrived in

partnership. One was the "Committee for the Investigation of War Crimes and Criminals"

established under Communist auspices at Warsaw, and the other, the "World Centre of

Contemporary Jewish Documentation" at Paris and Tel-Aviv. Their publications seem to appear

at favourable moments in the political climate, and for the Soviet Union their purpose is simply

to maintain the threat of Nazism as a manoeuvre to divert attention from their own activities. As

for Israel, Rassinier sees the myth of the Six Million as inspired by a purely material problem. In

Le Drame des juifs européens (p. 31, 39). he writes: "It is simply a question of justifying by a

proportionate number of corpses the enormous subsidies which Germany has been paying

annually since the end of the war to the State of Israel by way of reparation for injuries which

moreover she cannot be held to have caused her either morally or legally, since there was no

State of Israel at the time the alleged deeds took place; thus it is a purely and contemptibly

material problem. Perhaps I maybe allowed to recall here that the State of Israel was only

founded in May 1948 and that the Jews were nationals of all states with the exception of Israel,

in order to underline the dimensions of a fraud which defies description in any language; on the

one hand Germany pays to Israel sums which are calculated on six million dead, and on the

other, since at least four-fifths of these six million were decidedly alive at the end of the war, she

is paying substantial sums by way of reparation to the victims of Hitler's Germany to those who

are still alive in countries all over the world other than Israel and to the rightful claimants of

those who have since deceased, which means that for the former (i.e. the six million), or in other

words, for the vast majority, she is paying twice."

CONCLUSION

Here we may briefly summarise the data on Jewish war-time casualties. Contrary to the

figure of over 9 million Jews in German-occupied territory put forward at the Nuremberg and

Eichmann trials, it has already been established that after extensive emigration, approximately 3

million were living in Europe, excluding the Soviet Union. Even when the Jews of German occupied

Russia are included (the majority of Russian Jews were evacuated beyond German

control), the overall number probably does not exceed four million. Himmler's statistician, Dr.

Richard Korherr and the World Centre of Contemporary Jewish Documentation put the number

respectively at 5,550,000 and 5,294,000 when German-occupied territory was at its widest, but

both these figures include the two million Jews of the Baltic and western Russia without paying

any attention to the large number of these who were evacuated. However, it is at least an

admission from the latter organisation that there were not even six million Jews in Europe and

western Russia combined. Nothing better illustrates the declining plausibility of the Six Million

legend than the fact that the prosecution at the Eichmann trial deliberately avoided mentioning

the figure. Moreover, official Jewish estimates of the casualties are being quietly revised

downwards. Our analysis of the population and emigration statistics, as well as the studies by

the Swiss Baseler Nachrichten and Professor Rassinier, demonstrate that it would have been

simply impossible for the number of Jewish casualties to have exceeded a limit of one and a half

million. It is very significant, therefore, that the World Centre of Contemporary Jewish

Documentation in Paris now states that only 1,485,292 Jews died from all causes during the

Second World War, and although this figure is certainly too high, at least it bears no

resemblance at all to the legendary Six Million. As has been noted earlier, the Jewish statistician

Raul Hilberg estimates an even lower figure of 896,892. This is beginning to approach a realistic

figure, and the process of revision is certain to continue. Doubtless, several thousand Jewish

persons did die in the course of the Second World War, but this must be seen in the context of a

war that cost many millions of innocent victims on all sides. To put the matter in perspective, for

example, we may point out that 700,000 Russian civilians died during the siege of Leningrad,

and a total of 2,050,000 German civilians were killed in Allied air raids and forced repatriation

after the war. In 1955, another neutral Swiss source, Die Tat of Zurich (January 19th, 1955), in a

survey of all Second World War casualties based on figures of the International Red Cross, put

the "Loss of victims of persecution because of politics, race or religion who died in prisons and

concentration camps between 1939 and 1945" at 300,000, not all of whom were Jews, and this

figure seems the most accurate assessment.

IMAGINARY SLAUGHTER

The question most pertinent to the extermination legend is, of course: how many of the 3

million European Jew sunder German control survived after 1945? The Jewish Joint

Distribution Committee estimated the number of survivors in Europe to be only one and a half

million, but such a figure is now totally unacceptable. This is proved by the growing number of

Jews claiming compensation from the West German Government for having allegedly suffered

between 1939 and 1945. By 1965, the number of these claimants registered with the West

German Government had tripled in ten years and reached 3,375,000 (Aufbau, June 30th, 1965).

Nothing could be a more devastating proof of the brazen fantasy of the Six Million. Most of these

claimants are Jews, so there can be no doubt that the majority of the 3 million Jews who

experienced the Nazi occupation of Europe are, in fact, very much alive. It is a resounding

confirmation of the fact that Jewish casualties during the Second World War can only be

estimated at a figure in thousands. Surely this is enough grief for the Jewish people? Who has

the right to compound it with vast imaginary slaughter, marking with eternal shame a great

European nation, as well as wringing fraudulent monetary compensation from them?