Did Six Million Really Die?
Truth at Last–Exposed:
( Part 4 of 9 )
Continued from Part 3
THE
OHLENDORF TRIAL The most revealing trial in the “Einsatzgruppen Case”
at Nuremberg was that of S.S. General Otto Ohlendorf, the chief of the S.D.
who commanded Einsatzgruppe D in the Ukraine, attached to Field Marshal von
Manstein’s Eleventh Army. During the last phase of the war he was employed
as a foreign trade expert in the Ministry of Economics. Ohlendorf was one
of those subjected to the torture described earlier, and in his affidavit
of November 5th, 1945 he was “persuaded” to confess that 90,000
Jews had been killed under his command alone. Ohlendorf did not come to trial
until 1948, long after the main Nuremberg Trial, and by that time he was
insisting that his earlier statement had been extracted from him under torture.
In his main speech before the Tribunal, Ohlendorf took the opportunity to
denounce Philip Auerbach, the Jewish attorney-general of the Bavarian State
Office for Restitution, who at that time was claiming compensation for “eleven
million Jews” who had suffered in German concentration camps. Ohlendorf
dismissed this ridiculous claim, stating that “not the minutest part”
of the people for whom Auerbach was demanding compensation had even seen
a concentration camp. Ohlendorf lived long enough to see Auerbach convicted
for embezzlement and fraud (forging documents purporting to show huge payments
of compensation to non-existent people) before his own execution finally
took place in 1951. Ohlendorf explained to the Tribunal that his units often
had to prevent massacres of Jews organised by anti-Semitic Ukrainians behind
the German front, and he denied that the Einsatzgruppen as a whole had inflicted
even one quarter of the casualties claimed by the prosecution. He insisted
that the illegal partisan warfare in Russia, which he had to combat, had
taken a far higher toll of lives from the regular German army—an assertion
confirmed by the Soviet Government, which boasted of 500,000 German troops
killed by partisans. In fact, Franz Stahlecker, commander of Einsatzgruppe A
in the Baltic region and White Russia, was himself killed by partisans
in 1942. The English jurist F. J. P. Veale, in dealing with the Action Groups,
explains that in the fighting on the Russian front no distinction could be
properly drawn between partisans and the civilian population, because any
Russian civilian who maintained his civilian status instead of acting as
a terrorist was liable to be executed by his countrymen as a traitor. Veale
says of the Action Groups: “There is no question that their orders were
to combat terror by terror”, and he finds it strange that atrocities
committed by the partisans in the struggle were regarded as blameless simply
because they turned out to be on the winning side (ibid., p. 223). Ohlendorf
took the same view, and in a bitter appeal written before his execution,
he accused the Allies of hypocrisy in holding the Germans to account by conventional
laws of warfare while fighting a savage Soviet enemy who did not respect
those laws.
ACTION GROUP EXECUTIONS DISTORTED The Soviet charge that the
Action Groups had wantonly exterminated a million Jews during their operations
has been shown subsequently to be a massive falsification. In fact, there
had never been the slightest statistical basis for the figure. In this connection,
Poliakov and Wulf cite the statement of Wilhelm Hoettl, the dubious American
spy, double agent and former assistant of Eichmann. Hoettl, it will be remembered,
claimed that Eichmann had “told him” that six million Jews had
been exterminated—and he added that two million of these had been killed
by the Einsatzgruppen. This absurd figure went beyond even the wildest estimates
of Soviet Prosecutor Rudenko, and it was not given any credence by the American
Tribunal which tried and condemned Ohlendorf. The real number of casualties
for which the Action Groups were responsible has since been revealed in the
scholarly work Manstein, his Campaigns and his Trial (London, 1951), by the
able English lawyer R. T. Paget. Ohlendorf had been under Manstein’s nominal
command. Paget’s conclusion is that the Nuremberg Court, in accepting the
figures of the Soviet prosecution, exaggerated the number of casualties by
more than 1,000 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 the S.S.
For eleven years he was the principal administrative chief of the entire S.S.
in his position as head of the S.S. Economy and Administration Office, which
after 1941 was concerned with the industrial productivity of the concentration camp
system. A peak point of hypocrisy was reached at the trial when. the prosecution
said to Pohl that “had Germany rested content with the exclusion of
Jews from her own territory, with denying them German citizenship, with excluding
them from public office, or any like domestic regulation, no other nation
could have been heard to complain.” The truth is that Germany was bombarded
with insults and economic sanctions for doing precisely these things, and
her internal measures against the Jews were certainly a major cause of the
declaration of war against Germany by the democracies. Oswald Pohl was an
extremely sensitive and intellectual individual who was reduced to a broken
man in the course of his trial. As Senator McCarthy pointed out, Pohl had
signed some incriminating statements after being subjected to severe torture,
including a bogus admission that he had seen a gas chamber at Auschwitz in
the summer of 1944. The prosecution strenuously pressed this charge, but
Pohl successfully repudiated it. The aim of the prosecution was to depict
this dejected man as a veritable fiend in human shape, an impression hopelessly
at variance with the testimony of those who knew him. Such testimony was
given by Heinrich Hoepker, an anti-Nazi friend of Pohl’s wife who came into
frequent contact with him during the period 1942–45. Hoepker noted that Pohl
was essentially a serene and mild-mannered person. During a visit to Pohl
in the spring of 1944, Hoepker was brought into contact with concentration
camp inmates who were working on a local project outside the camp area. He
noted that the prisoners worked in a leisurely manner and relaxed atmosphere
without any pressure from their guards. Hoepker declared that Pohl did not
hold an emotional attitude to the Jews, and did not object to his wife entertaining
her Jewish friend Annemarie Jacques at their home. By the beginning of 1945,
Hoepker was fully convinced that the administrator of the concentration camps
was a humane, conscientious and dedicated servant of his task, and he was
astonished when he heard later in 1945 of the accusations being made against
Pohl and his colleagues. Frau Pohl noted that her husband retained his serenity
in the face of adversity until March 1945, when he visited the camp at
Bergen-Belsen at the time of the typhus epidemic there. Hitherto the camp had been
a model of cleanliness and order, but the chaotic conditions at the close
of the war had reduced it to a state of extreme hardship. Pohl, who was unable
to alleviate conditions there because of the desperate pass which the war
had reached by that time, was deeply affected by the experience and, according
to his wife, never regained his former state of composure. Dr. Alfred Seidl,
the highly respected lawyer who acted as principal defence counsel at the
Nuremberg Trials, went to work passionately to secure the acquittal of Pohl.
Seidl had been a personal friend of the accused for many years, and was thoroughly
convinced of his innocence with respect to the fraudulent charge of planned
genocide against the Jews. The Allied judgement which condemned Pohl did
not prompt Seidl to change his opinion in the slightest. He declared that
the prosecution had failed to produce a single piece of valid evidence against
him. One of the most eloquent defences of Oswald Pohl was made by S.S. Lieutenant
Colonel Kurt Schmidt-Klevenow, a legal officer in the S.S. Economy and Administration
Office, in his affidavit of August 8th, 1947. This affidavit has been deliberately
omitted from the published documents known as Trials of the War Criminals
before the Nuremberg Military Tribunals 1946–1949. Schmidt-Klevenow pointed
out that Pohl had given his fullest support to Judge Konrad Morgen of the
Reich Criminal Police Office, whose job was to investigate irregularities
at the concentration camps. Later on we shall refer to a case in which Pohl
was in favour of the death penalty for camp commandant Koch, who was accused
by an S.S. court of misconduct. Schmidt-Klevenow explained that Pohl was
instrumental in arranging for local police chiefs to share in the jurisdiction
of concentration camps, and took personal initiative in securing strict discipline
on the part of camp personnel. In short, the evidence given at the Pohl trial
shows that the proceedings involved nothing less than the deliberate defamation of
a man’s character in order to support the propaganda legend of genocide against
the Jews in the concentration camps he administered.
FALSIFIED EVIDENCE AND FRAUDULENT AFFIDAVITS Spurious testimony at
Nuremberg which included extravagant statements in support of the myth of
the Six Million was invariably given by former German officers because of
pressure, either severe torture as in the cases cited previously, or the
assurance of leniency for themselves if they supplied the required statements. An
example of the latter was the testimony of S.S. General Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski.
He was threatened with execution himself because of his suppression of the
revolt by Polish partisans at Warsaw in August 1944, which he carried out
with his S.S. brigade of White Russians. He was therefore prepared to be
“co-operative”. The evidence of Bach-Zelewski constituted the basis
of the testimony against the Reichsführer of the S.S. Heinrich Himmler
at the main Nuremberg Trial (Trial of the Major War Criminals, Vol. IV,
pp, 29, 36). In March 1941, on the eve of the invasion of Russia, Himmler invited
the Higher S.S. Leaders to his Castle at Wewelsburg for a conference, including
Bach-Zelewski who was an expert on partisan warfare. In his Nuremberg evidence,
he depicted Himmler speaking in grandiose terms at this conference about
the liquidation of peoples in Eastern Europe, but Goering, in the courtroom,
denounced Bach-Zelewski to his face for the falsity of this testimony. An
especially outrageous allegation concerned a supposed declaration by Himmler
that one of the aims of the Russian campaign was to “decimate the Slav
population by thirty millions.” What Himmler really said is given by
his Chief of Staff, Wolff—that war in Russia was certain to result in millions
of dead (Manvell & Frankl, ibid., p. 117). Another brazen falsehood was Bach-Zelewski’s
accusation that on August 31st, 1942 Himmler personally witnessed the execution
of one hundred Jews by an Einsatz detachment at Minsk, causing him to nearly
faint. It is known, however, that on this date Himmler was in conference
at his field headquarters at Zhitomir in the Ukraine (cf. K. Vowinckel,
Die Wehrmacht im Kampf, vol. 4, p. 275). Much is made of Bach-Zelewski’s evidence
in all the books on Himmler, especially Willi Frischauer’s Himmler: Evil
Genius of the Third Reich (London, 1953, p. 148 ff). However, in April 1959,
Bach-Zelewski publicly repudiated his Nuremberg testimony before a West German
court. He admitted that his earlier statements had not the slightest foundation
in fact, and that he had made them for the sake of expediency and his own
survival. The German court, after careful deliberation, accepted his retraction.
Needless to say, what Veale calls the “Iron Curtain of Discreet Silence”
descended immediately over these events. They have had no influence whatever
on the books which propagate the myth of the Six Million, and Bach-Zelewski’s
testimony on Himmler is still taken at its face value. The truth concerning
Himmler is provided ironically by an anti-Nazi—Felix Kersten, his physician
and masseur. Because Kersten was opposed to the regime, he tends to support
the legend that the internment of Jews meant their extermination. But from
his close personal knowledge of Himmler he cannot help but tell the truth
concerning him, and in his Memoirs 1940–1945 (London, 1956, p. 119 ff) he
is emphatic in stating that Heinrich Himmler did not advocate liquidating
the Jews but favoured their emigration overseas. Neither does Kersten implicate
Hitler. However, the credibility of his anti-Nazi narrative is completely
shattered when, in search of an alternative villain, he declares that Dr.
Goebbels was the real advocate of “extermination”. This nonsensical
allegation is amply disproved by the fact that Goebbels was still concerned
with the Madagascar project even after it had been temporarily shelved by
the German Foreign Office, as we showed earlier. So much for false evidence
at Nuremberg. Reference has also been made to the thousands of fraudulent
“written affidavits” which were accepted by the Nuremberg Court
without any attempt to ascertain the authenticity of their contents or even
their authorship. These hearsay documents, often of the most bizarre kind,
were introduced as “evidence” so long as they bore the required
signature. A typical prosecution affidavit contested by the defence in the
Concentration Camp Trial of 1947 was that of Alois Hoellriegel, a member
of the camp personnel at Mauthausen in Austria. This affidavit, which the
defence proved was fabricated during Hoellriegel’s torture, had already been
used to secure the conviction of S.S. General Ernst Kaltenbrunner in 1946.
It claimed that a mass gassing operation had taken place at Mauthausen and
that Hoellriegel had witnessed Kaltenbrunner (the highest S.S. Leader in
the Reich excepting Himmler) actually taking part in it. By the time of the
Concentration Camp Trial (Pohl’s trial) a year later, it had become impossible
to sustain this piece of nonsense when it was produced in court again. The
defence not only demonstrated that the affidavit was falsified, but showed
that all deaths at Mauthausen were systematically checked by the local police
authorities. They were also entered on a camp register, and particular embarrassment
was caused to the prosecution when the Mauthausen register, one of the few
that survived, was produced in evidence. The defence also obtained numerous
affidavits from former inmates of Mauthausen (a prison camp chiefly for criminals)
testifying to humane and orderly conditions there.
ALLIED ACCUSATIONS DISBELIEVED There is no more eloquent testimony
to the tragedy and tyranny of Nuremberg than the pathetic astonishment or
outraged disbelief of the accused persons themselves at the grotesque charges
made against them. Such is reflected in the affidavit of S.S. Major-General Heinz
Fanslau, who visited most of the German concentration camps during the last
years of the war. Although a front line soldier of the Waffen S.S., Fanslau
had taken a great interest in concentration camp conditions, and he was selected
as a prime target by the Allies for the charge of conspiracy to annihilate
the Jews. It was argued, on the basis of his many contacts, that he must
have been fully involved. When it was first rumoured that he would be tried
and convicted, hundreds of affidavits were produced on his behalf by camp
inmates he had visited. When he read the full scope of the indictment against
the concentration camp personnel in supplementary Nuremberg Trial No. 4 on
May 6th, 1947, Fanslau declared in disbelief: “This cannot be possible,
because I, too, would have had to know something about it.” It should
be emphasised that throughout the Nuremberg proceedings, the German leaders
on trial never believed for a moment the allegations of the Allied prosecution.
Hermann Goering, who was exposed to the full brunt of the Nuremberg atrocity
propaganda, failed to be convinced by it. Hans Fritzsche, on trial as the
highest functionary of Goebbels’ Ministry, relates that Goering, even after
hearing the Ohlendorf affidavit on the Einsatzgruppen and the Hoess testimony
on Auschwitz, remained convinced that the extermination of Jews was entirely
propaganda fiction (The Sword in the Scales, London, 1953, p. 145). At one
point during the trial, Goering declared rather cogently that the first time
he had heard of it “was right here in Nuremberg” (Shirer, ibid.,
p. 1147). The Jewish writers Poliakov, Reitlinger and Manvell and Frankl
all attempt to implicate Goering in this supposed extermination, but Charles
Bewley in his work Hermann Goering (Goettingen, 1956) shows that not the
slightest evidence was found at Nuremberg to substantiate this charge. Hans
Fritzsche pondered on the whole question during the trials, and he concluded
that there had certainly been no thorough investigation of these monstrous
charges. Fritzsche, who was acquitted, was an associate of Goebbels and a
skilled propagandist. He recognised that the alleged massacre of the Jews
was the main point of the indictment against all defendants. Kaltenbrunner,
who succeeded Heydrich as chief of the Reich Security Head Office and was
the main defendant for the S.S. due to the death of Himmler, was no more
convinced of the genocide charges than was Goering. He confided to Fritzsche
that the prosecution was scoring apparent successes because of their technique
of coercing witnesses and suppressing evidence, which was precisely the accusation
of Judges Wenersturm and van Roden.
6. AUSCHWITZ AND POLISH JEWRY The concentration camp at Auschwitz
near Cracow in Poland has remained at the centre of the alleged extermination
of millions of Jews. Later we shall see how, when it was discovered by honest
observers in the British and American zones after the war that no “gas
chambers” existed in the German camps such as Dachau and Bergen-Belsen,
attention was shifted to the eastern camps, particularly Auschwitz. Ovens
definitely existed here, it was claimed. Unfortunately, the eastern camps
were in the Russian zone of occupation, so that no one could verify whether
these allegations were true or not. The Russians refused to allow anyone
to see Auschwitz until about ten years after the war, by which time they
were able to alter its appearance and give some plausibility to the claim
that millions of people had been exterminated there. If anyone doubts that
the Russians are capable of such deception, they should remember the monuments
erected at sites where thousands of people were murdered in Russia by Stalin’s
secret police—but where the monuments proclaim them to be victims of German
troops in World War Two. The truth about Auschwitz is that it was the largest
and most important industrial concentration camp, producing all kinds of
material for the war industry. The camp consisted of synthetic coal and rubber
plants built by I.G. Farben Industrie, for whom the prisoners supplied labour.
Auschwitz also comprised an agricultural research station, with laboratories,
plant nurseries and facilities for stock breeding, as well as Krupps armament
works. We have already remarked that this kind of activity was the prime
function of the camps; all major firms had subsidiaries in them and the S.S.
even opened their own factories. Accounts of visits by Himmler to the camps
show that his main purpose was to inspect and assess their industrial efficiency.
When he visited Auschwitz in March, 1941 accompanied by high executives of
I.G. Farben, he showed no interest in the problems of the camp as a facility
for prisoners, but merely ordered that the camp be enlarged to take 100,000
detainees to supply labour for I.G. Farben. This hardly accords with a policy
of exterminating prisoners by the million.
MORE AND MORE MILLIONS It was nevertheless at this single camp
that about half of the six million Jews were supposed to have been exterminated,
indeed, some writers claim 4 or even 5 million. Four million was the sensational
figure announced by the Soviet Government after the Communists had “investigated”
the camp, at the same time as they were attempting to blame the Katyn massacre
on the Germans. Reitlinger admits that information regarding Auschwitz and
other eastern camps comes from the post-war Communist regimes of Eastern 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. 272–273). 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. 80–81). 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 returned 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.
Continue to Part 5