Did Six Million Really Die?
Truth at Last–Exposed:
( Part 6 of 9 )
Continued from Part 5
BEST-SELLER
A HOAX Of the other variety of memoirs, those which present a picture
of frail Jewry caught in the vice of Nazism, the most celebrated is undoubtedly
The Diary of Anne Frank, and the truth concerning this book is only one appalling
insight into the fabrication of a propaganda legend . First published in
1952, The Diary of Anne Frank became an immediate best-seller; since then
it has been republished in paper-back, going through 40 impressions, and
was made into a successful Hollywood film. In royalties alone, Otto Frank,
the girl’s father, has made a fortune from the sale of the book, which purports
to represent the real-life tragedy of his daughter. With its direct appeal
to the emotions, the book and the film have influenced literally millions
of people, certainly more throughout the world than any other story of its
kind. And yet only seven years after its initial publication, a New York
Supreme Court case established that the book was a hoax. The Diary of Anne
Frank has been sold to the public as the actual diary of a young Jewish girl
from Amsterdam, which she wrote at the age of 12 while her family and four
other Jews were hiding in the back room of a house during the German occupation.
Eventually, they were arrested and detained in a concentration camp, where
Anne Frank supposedly died when she was 14. When Otto Frank was liberated
from the camp at the end of the war, he returned to the Amsterdam house and
“found” his daughter’s diary concealed in the rafters. The truth
about the Anne Frank Diary was first revealed in 1959 by the Swedish journal
Fria Ord. It established that the Jewish novelist Meyer Levin had written
the dialogue of the “diary” and was demanding payment for his work
in a court action against Otto Frank. A condensation of the Swedish articles
appeared in the American Economic Council Letter, April 15th, 1959, as follows:
“History has many examples of myths that live a longer and richer life
than truth, and may become more effective than truth. The Western World
has for some years been made aware of a Jewish girl through the medium of
what purports to be her personally written story, Anne Frank’s Diary. Any
informed literary inspection of this book would have shown it to have been
impossible as the work of a teenager.” A noteworthy decision of the
New York Supreme Court confirms this point of view, in that the well known
American Jewish writer, Meyer Levin, has been awarded $50,000 to be paid
him by the father of Anne Frank as an honorarium for Levin’s work on The
Anne Frank Diary. “Mr. Frank, in Switzerland, has promised to pay to
his race kin, Meyer Levin, not less than $50,0OO because he had used the
dialogue of Author Levin just as it was and ‘implanted’ it in the
diary as being his daughter’s intellectual work.” Further inquiries
brought a reply on May 7th, 1962 from a firm of New York lawyers, which stated:
“I was the attorney for Meyer Levin in his action against Otto Frank,
and others. It is true that a jury awarded Mr. Levin $50,000 in damages,
as indicated in your letter. That award was later set aside by the trial
justice, Hon. Samuel C. Coleman, on the ground that the damages had not been
proved in the manner required by law. The action was subsequently settled
while an appeal from Judge Coleman’s decision was pending. I am afraid
that the case itself is not officially reported, so far as the trial itself,
or even Judge Coleman’s decision, is concerned. Certain procedural matters
were reported in 141 New York Supplement, Second Series 170, and in 5 Second
Series 181. The correct file number in the New York County Clerk’s office
is 2241–1956 and the file is probably a large and full one...”
Here, then, is just one more fraud in a whole series of frauds perpetrated
in support of the “Holocaust” legend and the saga of the Six Million.
Of course, the court case bearing directly on the authenticity of The Anne
Frank Diary was “not officially reported”. A brief reference may
also be made to another “diary”, published not long after that
of Anne Frank and entitled: Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto: the Journal of
Emmanuel Ringelblum (New York, 1958). Ringelblum had been a leader in the
campaign of sabotage against the Germans in Poland, as well as the revolt
of the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943, before he was eventually arrested and executed
in 1944. The Ringelblum journal, which speaks of the usual “rumours”
allegedly circulating about the extermination of the Jews in Poland, appeared
under exactly the same Communist auspices as the so-called Hoess memoirs.
McGraw-Hill, the publishers of the American edition, admit that they were
denied access to the uncensored original manuscript in Warsaw, and instead
faithfully followed the expurgated volume published by the Communist Government
in Warsaw in 1952. All the “proofs” of the Holocaust issuing from
Communist sources of this kind are worthless as historical documents.
ACCUMULATING MYTHS Since the war, there has been an abundant growth
of sensational concentration camp literature, the majority of it Jewish,
each book piling horror upon horror, blending fragments of truth with the
most grotesque of fantasies and impostures, relentlessly 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
in the 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
well-administered. Regular baths and clean linen seemed a luxury after her
earlier experiences, and her first meal of white bread, sausage, sweet porridge
and dried fruit prompted her to inquire of another camp inmate whether August
3rd, 1940 was some sort of holiday or special occasion. She observed, too,
that the barracks at Ravensbrück were remarkably spacious compared to
the crowded mud hut of the Soviet camp. In the final months of 1945, she
experienced the progressive decline of camp conditions, the causes of which
we shall examine later. Another account which is at total variance with popular
propaganda is Die Gestapo Lässt Bitten (The Gestapo Invites You) by
Charlotte Bormann, a Communist political prisoner who was also interned at
Ravensbrück. Undoubtedly its most important revelation is the author’s
statement that rumours of gas executions were deliberate and malicious inventions
circulated among the prisoners by the Communists. This latter group did not
accept Margarete Buber because of her imprisonment in Soviet Russia. A further
shocking reflection on the post-war trials is the fact that Charlotte Bormann
was not permitted to testify at the Rastadt trial of Ravensbrück camp
personnel in the French occupation zone, the usual fate of those who denied
the extermination legend.
8. THE NATURE & CONDITION OF WAR-TIME CONCENTRATION CAMPS In
his recent book Adolf Hitler (London, 1973), Colin Cross, who brings more
intelligence than is usual to many problems of this period, observes astutely
that “The shuffling of millions of Jews around Europe and murdering
them, in a time of desperate war emergency, was useless from any rational
point of view” (p. 307). Quite so, and at this point we may well question
the likelihood of this irrationalism, and whether it was even possible. Is
it likely, that at the height of the war, when the Germans were fighting
a desperate battle for survival on two fronts, they would have conveyed millions
of Jews for miles to supposedly elaborate and costly slaughter houses? To
have conveyed three or four million Jews to Auschwitz alone (even supposing
that such an inflated number existed in Europe, which it did not), would
have placed an insuperable burden upon German transportation facilities which
were strained to the limit in supporting the far flung Russian front. To have
transported the mythical six million Jews and countless numbers of other
nationalities to internment camps, and to have housed, clothed and fed them
there, would simply have paralysed their military operations. There is no
reason to suppose that the efficient Germans would have put their military
fortunes at such risk. On the other hand, the transportation of a reasonable
363,000 prisoners to Auschwitz in the course of the war (the number we know
to have been registered there) at least makes sense in terms of the compulsory
labour they supplied. In fact, of the 3 million Jews living in Europe, it
is certain that no more than two million were ever interned at one time,
and it is probable that the number was much closer to 1,500,000. We shall
see later, in the Report of the Red Cross, that whole Jewish populations
such as that of Slovakia avoided detention in camps, while others were placed
in community ghettos like Theresienstadt. Moreover, from western Europe deportations
were far fewer. The estimate of Reitlinger that only about 50,000 French
Jews from a total population of 320,000 were deported and interned has been
noted already. The question must also be asked as to whether it could have
been physically possible to destroy the millions of Jews that are alleged.
Had the Germans enough time for it? Is it likely that they would have cremated
people by the million when they were so short of manpower and required all
prisoners of war for purposes of war production? Would it have been possible
to destroy and remove all trace of a million people in six months? Could
such enormous gatherings of Jews and executions on such a vast scale have
been kept secret? These are the kind of questions that the critical, thinking
person should ask. And he will soon discover that not only the statistical
and documentary evidence given here, but simple logistics combine to discredit
the legend of the six million. Although it was impossible for millions to
have been murdered in them, the nature and conditions of Germany’s concentration
camps have been vastly exaggerated to make the claim plausible. William Shirer, in
a typically reckless passage, states that “All of the thirty odd principal
Nazi concentration camps were death camps” (ibid., p. 115O). This is
totally untrue, and is not even accepted now by the principal propagators of
the extermination legend. Shirer also quotes Eugen Kogon’s The Theory and
Practice of Hell (N.Y. 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, carried out his execution. This case is ample proof
of the seriousness with which the S.S. regarded unnecessary brutality. Several
S.S. court actions of this kind were conducted in the camps during the war
to prevent excesses, and more than 800 cases were investigated before 1945.
Morgen testified at Nuremberg that he discussed confidentially with hundreds
of inmates the prevailing conditions in the camps. He found few that were
undernourished except in the hospitals, and noted that the pace and achievement
in compulsory labour by inmates was far lower than among German civilian
workers. The evidence of Pinter and Cardinal Faulhaber has been shown to
disprove the claims of extermination at Dachau, and we have seen how the
casualty figures of that camp have been continuously revised downwards. The
camp at Dachau near Munich, in fact, may be taken as fairly typical of these
places of internment. Compulsory labour in the factories and plants was the
order of the day, but the Communist leader Ernst Ruff testified in his Nuremberg
affidavit of April 18th, 1947 that the treatment of prisoners on the work
details and in the camp of Dachau remained humane. The Polish underground
leader, Jan Piechowiak, who was at Dachau from May 22nd, 1940 until April 29th,
1945 also testified on March 21st, 1946 that prisoners there received
good treatment, and that the S.S. personnel at the camp were “well disciplined”.
Berta Schirotschin, who worked in the food service at Dachau throughout the
war, testified that the working inmates, until the beginning of 1945 and
despite increasing privation in Germany, received their customary second
breakfast at 10 a.m. every morning. In general, hundreds of affidavits from
Nuremberg testify to the humane conditions prevailing in concentration camps;
but emphasis was invariably laid on those which reflected badly on the German
administration and could be used for propaganda purposes. A study of the
documents also reveals that Jewish witnesses who resented their deportation
and internment in prison camps tended to greatly exaggerate the rigours of
their condition, whereas other nationals interned for political reasons,
such as those cited above, generally presented a more balanced picture. In
many cases, prisoners such as Charlotte Bormann, whose experiences did not
accord with the picture presented at Nuremberg, were not permitted to testify.
UNAVOIDABLE CHAOS The orderly situation prevailing in the German
concentration camps slowly broke down in the last fearful months of 1945.
The Red Cross Report of 1948 explains that the saturation bombing by the
Allies paralysed the transport and communications system of the Reich, no
food reached the camps and starvation claimed an increasing number of victims,
both in prison camps and among the civilian population of Germany. This terrible
situation was compounded in the camps both by great overcrowding and the
consequent outbreak of typhus epidemics. Overcrowding occurred as a result
of prisoners from the eastern camps such as Auschwitz being evacuated westward
before the Russian advance; columns of such exhausted people arrived at several
German camps such as Belsen and Buchenwald which had themselves reached a
state of great hardship. Belsen camp near Bremen was in an especially chaotic
condition in these months and Himmler’s physician, Felix Kersten, an anti-Nazi,
explains that its unfortunate reputation as a “death camp” was
due solely to the ferocity of the typhus epidemic which broke out there in
March, 1945 (Memoirs 1940–1945, London, 1956). Undoubtedly these fearful
conditions cost several thousand lives, and it is these conditions that are
represented in the photographs of emaciated human beings and heaps of corpses
which the propagandists delight in showing, claiming, that they are victims
of “extermination”. A surprisingly honest appraisal of the situation
at Belsen in 1945 appeared in Purnell’s History of the Second World War (Vol.
7, No. 15) by Dr. Russell Barton, now superintendent and consultant psychiatrist
at Severalls Hospital, Essex, who spent one month at the camp as a medical
student after the war. His account vividly illustrates the true causes of
the mortality that occurred in such camps towards the war’s end, and how
such extreme conditions came to prevail there. Dr. Barton explains that Brigadier
Glyn Hughes, the British Medical Officer who took command of Belsen in 1945,
“did not think there had been any atrocities in the camp” despite
discipline and hard work. “Most people,” writes Dr. Barton, “attributed
the conditions of the inmates to deliberate intention on the part of the
Germans... Inmates were eager to cite examples of brutality and neglect,
and visiting journalists from different countries interpreted the situation
according to the needs of propaganda at home.” However, Dr. Barton makes
it quite clear that the conditions of starvation and disease were unavoidable
in the circumstances and that they occurred only during the months of 1945.
“From discussions with prisoners it seemed that conditions in the camp
were not too bad until late 1944. The huts were set among pine trees and
each was provided with lavatories, wash basins, showers and stoves for heating.”
The cause of food shortage is also explained. “German medical officers
told me that it had been increasingly difficult to transport food to the
camp for some months. Anything that moved on the autobahns was likely to
be bombed... I was surprised to find records, going back for two or three
years, of large quantities of food cooked daily for distribution. At that
time I became convinced, contrary to popular opinion, that there had never
been a policy of deliberate starvation. This was confirmed by the large numbers of
well-fed inmates. Why then were so many people suffering from 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...”
Continue to Part 7