Did Six Million Really Die?
Truth at Last–Exposed:
( Part 5 of 9 )
Continued from Part 4
AUSCHWITZ:
AN EYE-WITNESS ACCOUNT Some new facts about Auschwitz are at last
beginning to make a tentative appearance. They are contained in a recent
work called Die Auschwitz-Lüge: Ein Erlebnisbericht von Theis Christopherson
(The Auschwitz Legends: An Account of his Experiences by Thies Christopherson,
Kritik Verlag/Mohrkirch, 1973). Published by the German lawyer Dr. Manfred
Roeder in the periodical Deutsche Bürger–Initiative, it is an eye-witness
account of Auschwitz by Thies Christopherson, who was sent to the Bunawerk
plant laboratories at Auschwitz to research into the production of synthetic
rubber for the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute. In May 1973, not long after the
appearance of this account, the veteran Jewish “Nazi-hunter” Simon
Wiesenthal wrote to the Frankfurt Chamber of Lawyers, demanding that the
publisher and author of the Forward, Dr. Roeder, a member of the Chamber,
should be brought before its disciplinary commission. Sure enough, proceedings
began in July, but not without harsh criticism even from the Press, who asked
“Is Simon Wiesenthal the new Gauleiter of Germany?” (Deutsche Wochenzeitung,
July 27th, 1973). Christopherson’s account is certainly one of the most important
documents for a re-appraisal of Auschwitz. He spent the whole of 1944 there,
during which time he visited all of the separate camps comprising the large
Auschwitz complex, including Auschwitz-Birkenau where it is alleged that
wholesale massacres of Jews took place. Christopherson, however, is in no
doubt that this is totally untrue. He writes: “I was in Auschwitz from
January, 1944 until December, 1944. After the war I heard about the mass murders
which were supposedly perpetrated by the S.S. against the Jewish prisoners,
and I was perfectly astonished. Despite all the evidence of witnesses, all
the newspaper reports and radio broadcasts I still do not believe today in
these horrible deeds. I have said this many times and in many places, but
to no purpose. One is never believed” (p. 16). Space forbids a detailed
summary here of the author’s experiences at Auschwitz, which include facts
about camp routine and the daily life of prisoners totally at variance with
the allegations of propaganda (pp. 22–7). More important are his revelations
about the supposed existence of an extermination camp. “During the whole
of my time at Auschwitz, l never observed the slightest evidence of mass
gassings. Moreover, the odour of burning flesh that is often said to have
hung over the camp is a downright falsehood. In the vicinity of the main
camp (Auschwitz I) was a large farrier’s works, from which the smell of molten
iron was naturally not pleasant” (p. 33–4). Reitlinger confirms that
there were five blast furnaces and five collieries at Auschwitz, which together
with the Bunawerk factories comprised Auschwitz III (ibid., p. 452). The author
agrees that a crematorium would certainly have existed at Auschwitz, “since
200,000 people lived there, and in every city with 200,000 inhabitants there
would be a crematorium. Naturally people died there—but not only prisoners. In
fact the wife of Obersturmbannführer A. (Christopherson’s superior) also
died there” (p. 33). The author explains: “There were no secrets
at Auschwitz. In September 1944 a commission of the International Red Cross
came to the camp for an inspection. They were particularly interested in
the camp at Birkenau, though we also had many inspections at Raisko” (Bunawerk
Section, p. 35). Christopherson points out that the constant visits to Auschwitz
by outsiders cannot be reconciled with allegations of mass extermination.
When describing the visit of his wife to the camp in May, he observes: “The
fact that it was possible to receive visits from our relatives at any time
demonstrates the openness of the camp administration. Had Auschwitz been
a great extermination camp, we would certainly not have been able to receive
such visits” (p. 27). After the war, Christopherson came to hear of
the alleged existence of a building with gigantic chimneys in the vicinity
of the main camp. “This was supposed to be the crematorium. However,
I must record the fact that when I left the camp at Auschwitz in December
1944, I had not seen this building there” (p. 37). Does this mysterious
building exist today? Apparently not; Reitlinger claims it was demolished
and “completely burnt out in full view of the camp” in October,
though Christopherson never saw this public demolition. Although it is said
to have taken place “in full view of the camp”, it was allegedly
seen by only one Jewish witness, a certain Dr. Bendel, and his is the only
testimony to the occurrence (Reitlinger, ibid., p. 457). This situation is
generally typical. When it comes down to hard evidence, it is strangely elusive;
the building was “demolished”, the document is “lost”,
the order was “verbal”. At Auschwitz today, visitors are shown
a small furnace and here they are told that millions of people were exterminated.
The Soviet State Commission which “investigated” the camp announced
on May 12th, 1945 that “Using rectified coefficients... the technical
expert commission has ascertained that during the time that the Auschwitz
camp existed, the German butchers exterminated in this camp not less than
four million citizens...” Reitlinger’s surprisingly frank comment
on this is perfectly adequate: “The world has grown mistrustful of ‘rectified
coefficients’ and the figure of four millions has become ridiculous” (ibid,
p. 460). Finally, the account of Mr. Christopherson draws attention to a
very curious circumstance. The only defendant who did not appear at the Frankfurt
Auschwitz Trial in 1963 was Richard Baer, the successor of Rudolf Hoess as
commandant of Auschwitz. Though in perfect health, he died suddenly in prison
before the trial had begun, “in a highly mysterious way” according
to the newspaper; Deutsche Wochenzeitung (July 27th, 1973). Baer’s sudden
demise before giving evidence is especially strange, since the Paris newspaper
Rivarol recorded his insistence that “during the whole time in which
he governed Auschwitz, he never saw any gas chambers nor believed that such
things existed,” and from this statement nothing would dissuade him.
In short, the Christopherson account adds to a mounting collection of evidence
demonstrating that the giant industrial complex of Auschwitz (comprising
thirty separate installations and divided by the main Vienna–Cracow railway
line) was nothing but a vast war production centre, which, while admittedly
employing the compulsory labour of detainees, was certainly not a place of
“mass extermination”.
THE WARSAW GHETTO In terms of numbers, Polish Jewry is supposed
to have suffered most of all from extermination, not only at Auschwitz, but
at an endless list of newly-discovered “death camps” such as Treblinka,
Sobibor, Belzec, Maidanek, Chelmno and at many more obscure places which
seem suddenly to have gained prominence. At the centre of the alleged extermination
of the Polish Jews is the dramatic uprising in April, 1943 of the Warsaw Ghetto.
This is often represented as a revolt against being deported to gas ovens;
presumably the alleged subject of Hitler and Himmler’s “secret discussions”
had leaked out and gained wide publicity in Warsaw. The case of the Warsaw
Ghetto is an instructive insight into the creation of the extermination legend
itself. Indeed, its evacuation by the Germans in 1943 is often referred to
as the “extermination of the Polish Jews” although it was nothing
of the kind, and layers of mythology have tended to surround it after the
publication of sensational novels like John Hersey’s The Wall and Leon Uris’
Exodus. When the Germans first occupied Poland, they confined the Jews, not
in detention camps but in ghettos for reasons of security. The interior administration
of the ghettos was in the hands of Jewish Councils elected by themselves,
and they were policed by an independent Jewish police force. Special currency
notes were introduced into the ghettos to prevent speculation. Whether this
system was right or wrong, it was understandable in time of war, and although
the ghetto is perhaps an unpleasant social establishment, it is by no means barbaric.
And it is certainly not an organisation for the destruction of a race. But,
of course, it is frequently said that this is what the ghettos were really
for. A recent publication on the Warsaw Ghetto made the brazen assertion
that concentration camps “were a substitute for the practice of cramming
the Jews into overcrowded ghettos and starving them to death.” It seems
that whatever security system the Germans used, and to whatever lengths they
went to preserve a semblance of community for the Jews, they can never escape
the charge of “extermination”. It has been established already
that the 1931 Jewish population census for Poland placed the number of Jews
at 2,732,600, and that after emigration and flight to the Soviet Union, no
more than 1,100,000 were under German control. These incontrovertible facts,
however, do not prevent Manvell and Frankl asserting that “there had
been over three million Jews in Poland when Germany began the invasion” and
that in 1942 “some two million still awaited death” (ibid., p. 140).
In reality, of the million or so Jews in Poland, almost half, about 400,000
were eventually concentrated in the ghetto of Warsaw, an area of about two
and a half square miles around the old mediaeval ghetto. The remainder had
already been moved to the Polish Government-General by September 1940. In
the summer of 1942, Himmler ordered the resettlement of all Polish Jews in
detention camps in order to obtain their labour, part of the system of general
concentration for labour assignment in the Government-General. Thus between
July and October 1942, over three quarters of the Warsaw Ghetto’s inhabitants
were peacefully evacuated and transported, supervised by the Jewish police
themselves. As we have seen, transportation to camps is alleged to have ended
in “extermination”, but there is absolutely no doubt from the evidence
available that it involved only the effective procurement of labour and the
prevention of unrest. In the first place, Himmler discovered on a surprise
visit to Warsaw in January 1943 that 24,000 Jews registered as armaments
workers were in fact working illegally as tailors and furriers (Manvell & 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 Auschwitz,
has led to the most colourful tales concerning the fate of Polish Jews, the
largest bloc of Jewry in Europe. The Jewish Joint Distribution Committee,
in figures prepared by them for the Nuremberg Trials, stated that in 1945
there were only 80,000 Jews remaining in Poland. They also alleged that there
were no Polish-Jewish displaced persons left in Germany or Austria, a claim
that was at some variance with the number of Polish Jews arrested by the
British and Americans for black market activities. However, the new Communist
regime in Poland was unable to prevent a major anti-Jewish pogrom at Kielce
on July 4th, 1946 and more than 150,000 Polish Jews suddenly fled into Western
Germany. Their appearance was somewhat embarrassing, and their emigration
to Palestine and the United States was carried out in record time. Subsequently,
the number of Polish Jewish survivors underwent considerable revision; in
the American-Jewish Year Book 1948–1949 it was placed at 390,000 quite an
advance on the original 80,000. We may expect further revisions upwards in
the future.
7. SOME CONCENTRATION CAMP MEMOIRS The most influential agency in the
propagation of the extermination legend has been the paper-back book and
magazine industry, and it is through their sensational publications, produced
for commercial gain, that the average person is made acquainted with a myth
of an entirely political character and purpose. The hey-day of these hate-Germany
books was in the 1950’s, when virulent Germanophobia found a ready market,
but the industry continues to flourish and is experiencing another boom today.
The industry’s products consist generally of so-called “memoirs”,
and these fall into two basic categories: those which are supposedly by former
S.S. men, camp commandants and the like, and those bloodcurdling reminiscences
allegedly by former concentration camp inmates.
COMMUNIST ORIGINS Of the first kind, the most outstanding example
is Commandant of Auschwitz by Rudolf Hoess (London, 1960), which was originally
published in the Polish language as Wspomnienia by the Communist Government.
Hoess, a young man who took over at Auschwitz in 1940, was first arrested
by the British and detained at Flensburg, but he was soon handed over to
the Polish Communist authorities who condemned him to death in 1947 and executed
him almost immediately. The so-called Hoess memoirs are undoubtedly a forgery
produced under Communist auspices, as we shall demonstrate, though the Communists
themselves claim that Hoess was “ordered to write the story of his life”
and a hand-written original supposedly exists, but no one has ever seen it.
Hoess was subjected to torture and brain-washing techniques by the Communists
during the period of his arrest, and his testimony at Nuremberg was delivered
in a mindless monotone as he stared blankly into space. Even Reitlinger rejects
this testimony as hopelessly untrustworthy. It is indeed remarkable how much
of the “evidence” regarding the Six Million stems from Communist
sources; this includes the major documents such as the Wisliceny statement
and the Hoess “memoirs”, which are undoubtedly the two most quoted
items in 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. So far 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 Aries. 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 knee deep into money: I didn’t know which way to
turn, which way to go. I waded in paper notes, currency, precious stones,
jewelry 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 “knee deep”
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 Jew’s 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.
Continue to Part 6