David Hoggan: The Myth Of Six Million - Part 3/5

11. Leon Poliakov and the Wisliceny Story

The genocide legend was propagated with increased zeal after the brutal unconditional surrender pronouncement. Numerous statements were extracted from a few of the German defendants in Allied custody after World War 11 to document the charge that there was a gradual drift into a policy of exterminating the Jews of Europe after the outbreak of war between Germany and the USSR in June. 1941.

Many of these so-called key statements appear in Léon Poliakov and Josef Wulf, Das Dritte Reich und die Juden: Dokumente und Aufsätze (The Third Reich and the reich: Documents and Articles, Berlin, 1955).

Poliakov is the director of the Centre de Documentation Juive Contemporaine in Paris, which was launched by Isaac Schneersobn in 1943 during the German occupation. The Centre was presented with the files of the German Embassy in Paris by Provisional French President Charles de Gaulle in 1944. Its collection of materials on German policy toward the Jews, 1933-1945, is more extensive than any other, including the Haifa Document Office for Nazi Crimes and Dr. Albert Wiener's similar Library in London.

The most celebrated of all key "documents" is the statement of Dieter Wisliceny obtained at the Communist-controlled Bratislava prison on November 18, 1946. Wisliceny, who had been a journalist before engaging in police work, was an assistant of Adolf Eichmann in the Jewish Division of the Chief Reich Security Office prior to receiving his assignment in Slovakia. Wisliceny was a nervous wreck and addicted to uncontrollable fits of sobbing for hours on end during the period of his arrest prior to his execution.

The Wisliceny statement begins convincingly enough. It indicates that Reich SS Leader Heinrich Himmler was an enthusiastic advocate of Jewish emigration. More than 100,000 Jews had been persuaded to leave Austria between March, 1938, and January, 1939. This figure eventually reached 220,000 of the total 280,000 Austrian Jews. A special Institute for Jewish emigration in Prague had produced remarkable results in the period after March, 1939, and secured an eventual emigration of

260,000.

The above points are indisputable, but the comment follows, allegedly from Wisliceny, that more than three million Jews were added to the German sphere by the war in Poland in 1939. This would be a major factual error for any expert on European Jewry. There were more than 1,130,000 Jews in the section of Poland occupied by Russia, whereas the figure of more than three million Jews could scarcely apply even to the total territory of Poland before the war. An estimated 500,000 Jews had emigrated from Poland prior to the war. The 1931 Polish census had established the number of Jews in Poland at 2,732,600 (Reitlinger, Die Endlösung, Berlin, 1956, p. 36). An additional minimum of 250,000 Jews had fled from Western Poland to the Soviet occupation sphere in 1939. If one subtracts 1,880,000 from 2,732,600 and allows for the normal Jewish population increase, the Polish Jews under German rule at the end of 1939 could scarcely have exceeded 1,100,000 (Gutachten des Instituts für Zeitgeschichte, Munich, 1958, p. 80).

The Wisliceny statement emphasizes that the emigration of Jews from German occupied territories continued after the outbreak of war. The emigration of Danzig Jews by way of Rumania and Turkey in September, 1940, is cited as a typical instance.

Himmler and Eichmann had taken over the idea of a Madagascar haven for the Jews from the Poles. The latter had sent the Michal Lepecki expedition -- accompanied by Jewish spokesmen -- to Madagascar in 1937, and Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism, had also considered Madagascar as a good possible basis for the future Jewish state. Madagascar meant the "final solution" of the Jewish question to Himmler and Eichmann. The Madagascar plan was still under discussion many months after the outbreak of war with the USSR.

The statement of Wisliceny goes on to state that until June 1941, the conditions of Jewish life in Germany, including Austria, and in the Bohemia-Moravia protectorate, were no worse than before the war. The Jews in Poland had returned to their customary and traditional ghetto life, but war plants were being located in the ghettos to provide adequate employment.

12. The Outbreak of the War with Russia June 22, 1941, and the Einsatzgruppen

Two important developments allegedly followed the outbreak of war with Russia.In July, 1941, Hitler gave the order to execute the political commissars captured with Soviet units (there had been 34,000 of these political agents with special powers assigned to the Red Army as early as 1939). According to the so-called Wisliceny statement, the special action units (Einsatzgruppen) assigned both to this task and to crushing partisans were soon receiving orders to extend their activities in a "general massacre" of Soviet Jews. In March, 1942, came the decision to concentrate all European Jews in the Polish Government-General or in concentration camps, and this was to be the prelude to the liquidation of European Jewry (Poliakov and Wulf, Ibid., pp. 87ff.) The action of the Einsatzgruppen played a large role in the case presented by Soviet Prosecutor Rudenko at Nuremberg in the major trial and also at the three later trials of SS leaders. The 1947 indictment of the four Einsatzgruppen, which were organized in May, 1941, on the eve of the German preventive war against the USSR, was prepared with Soviet assistance by the American prosecutor, Telford Taylor. He charged that these four groups of security troops assigned to fight partisans and commissars had killed not less than a million Jewish civilians in Western Russia and the Ukraine merely because they were Jews. There were no reliable statistics to support this claim, but Otto Ohlendorf, the chief of Einsatzgruppen D in the South, had been "persuaded" on November 5, 1945 to sign a statement to the effect that 90,000 Jews had been killed under his command.

Ohlendorf did not come on trial until 1948, long after the main Nuremberg trial, and by that time he was insisting that his earlier statement had been extorted from him by torture. In his principal speech before the 1948 tribunal, Ohlendorf denounced Philip Auerbach, the Jewish attorney-general of the Bavarian State Office for Restitution, who had recently stated that he was seeking compensation for his "eleven million Jews" who had suffered in concentration camps. Ohlendorf scornfully stated that "not the minutest part" of the people for whom Auerbach was seeking

compensation had even seen a concentration camp. Ohlendorf lived to see Auerbach convicted of embezzlement and fraud before his own execution finally took place in 1951.

Ohlendorf explained to the tribunal that his formations often had to take energetic action to prevent massacres of Jews organized by local people in Russia behind the German front. He denied that all the Einsatzgruppen ever employed in the war on the eastern front inflicted one quarter of the casualties claimed by the prosecution, and he insisted that the illegal partisan warfare in the USSR had taken a much higher toll of lives -- the Soviets boasted of 500,000 -- from the regular German army. Ohlendorf wrote a bitter appeal shortly before his execution in 1951, and he charged that the Western Allies were hypocritical in holding Germany to account by conventional laws of warfare while engaged with a savage Soviet opponent which did not respect those laws.

The later careful account by the brilliant English jurist, R. T. Paget, Manstein, his Campaigns and his Trial (London, 1951) Ohlendorf was under Manstein's command -- concluded that the prosecution, in accepting Soviet figures, exaggerated the number of casualties inflicted by the Einsatzgruppen by more than 1000 per cent and that they distorted much further the situations in which these casualties were generally inflicted.

It has nevertheless become the popular legend that the physical liquidation of the Jews in Europe began with the action of the Einsatzgruppen against their Soviet enemies in 1941.

Poliakov and Wulf also cited a statement by a former collaborator of Eichmann, Dr. Wilhelm Hoettl, to the effect that Eichmann said in December, 1944, that no less than two million Jews had been killed by the Einsatzgruppen in the period 1941-1942.

This statement was not given weight even by the American tribunal which tried and condemned Ohlendorf. It should be noted that Soviet East Galicia was supposed to be included in the area affected, but some 434,329 East Galician Jews were transported westward by the Germans in the period shortly before July 1, 1943 (Gutachten des Instituts fuer Zeitgeschichte, 1958, p. 231). This gives some idea of the "thoroughness" of this alleged total massacre of Soviet Jews in 1941-1942.

Hoettl had been employed as an American spy during the latter phase of the war, and he could be expected to say whatever his interrogators asked of him without the usual third degree tortures and cruel pressures. The figures of Hoettl even went beyond the wildest estimates of Soviet Prosecutor Rudenko.

There has been no recent claim by any serious writer that a policy to exterminate European Jews was in effect prior to war with Russia on June 22, 1941. (Earlier books, such as Gerald Abrahams, Retribution, N.Y., 1941; and J. Ben-Jacob, The fewish Struggle, N.Y., 1942, did make such claims.) Leon Poliakov, Harvest of Hate: the Nazi Program for the Destruction of the Jews of Europe (N.Y., 1954, pp. 108ff.) admits that no document confirming an extermination policy before that date has been discovered.

He puts it this way: "The three or four people chiefly involved in the actual drawing up of the plan for total extermination are dead and no documents have survived; perhaps none ever existed." The implications of this statement are clear. The vague reference of "three or four people" indicates that the alleged plan is actually a nebulous assumption on the part of the writer.

In the absence of evidence Poliakov assumed that a plan to exterminate the Jews must have originated between June, 1940, and June, 1941. He added, quite Unnecessarily, that extermination was never part of the original National Socialist plans for dealing with the Jews. He claimed that the decision of extermination was made when it became evident that Germany was involved in a long war of doubtful outcome. His assumption is that Hitler was determined to avenge the slaughter of Germans with a massacre of Jews. The same writer claimed, however, that Hitler abandoned the extermination program in October 1944, for fear of retribution in case

Germany lost the war.

Poliakov noted that Eichmann was busy with the Madagascar project for Jewish settlement abroad throughout 1941, but the German Foreign Office was informed in February 1942,that this plan had been abandoned at least temporarily. Poliakov argued that the Germans were necessarily thinking of extermination when they shelved their overseas emigration plan. He recognized as a corollary that he also must show that they were not pursuing a plan for the settlement of the Jews in Eastern Europe instead of overseas.

According to Poliakov, there were three clear stages of a general extermination policy. Phase one, beginning in June, 1941, and directed exclusively against Soviet Jews, has been dealt with. Phase two, beginning in March, 1942, constituted the first actions to bring together many of the Jews of German-occupied Europe and place them either in Poland or in concentration camps. Phase three, beginning in October 1942, was the action to concentrate most Jews, including those of Poland, in camps. The final phase of general internment is supposed to imply the permanent denial of a Jewish haven either in Eastern Europe or overseas.

Poliakov represented the liquidation of Jews in concentration camps as proceeding throughout phase two as well as three. He accepted the previously cited statement of Dieter Wisliceny from the documentary collection to the effect that the plan to exterminate European Jewry was abandoned by Himmler in October 1944.

Poliakov claimed that Göring was involved in the extermination program, although Charles Bewley, Hermann Göring (Göttingen, 1956) has pointed out that no evidence was found at Nuremberg to substantiate this charge.

13. The Mythical Conference of Jan. 20, 1942

While Soviet Jews were allegedly being shot at random wherever they could be found-a charge which has been exposed as untrue-an important conference is supposed to have taken place in Berlin, Am Grossen Wanssee Nr. 5658, on January 20, 1942. Reinhard Heydrich allegedly presided -at this conference and is alleged to have said that he was commissioned by Göring to discuss plans for eliminating the Jews of Europe (Das Dritten Reich und die Juden, pp. 120ff.). Hans Frank is given credit for having provided information about this conference for the prosecution, but he makes no mention of this in his memoirs, Im Angesicht des Galgens (In the Shadow of the Gallows, Munich, 1953). Furthermore, it is a painful fact that Frank was never given the opportunity to explain or confirm each and every excerpt allegedly taken from his forty-two volume personal file as Governor-General in Poland. No-one has ever been found to substantiate the alleged information about this conference, although Interior State-Secretary Wilhelm Stuckart, who has wrongly been given credit as "the principal author of the 1935 Nuremberg laws (Adenauer's aide Hans Globke was the actual author), and Under-State-Secretary Hans Luther of the German Foreign Office were listed as present.

Heydrich supposedly said that emigration of Jews from Europe was futile because not more than 537,000 had departed since 1933. This ridiculously low figure, is Contradicted at every turn by official German statistics. The figure of 537,000 would scarcely exceed the emigration of Jews from Poland alone, during the period.

Heydrich is also supposed to have, said that there were eleven million Jews in Europe, and that 95 per cent of those were in the German area of occupation. Actually, more than onehalf of the European Jews are indicated in the same statement as being in the 1941 territory of the USSR and more than one million are listed for Vichy France and England. The absurdity of those figures is obvious. Yet the alleged protocol indicates that they were accepted without contradiction by the learned and well-informed gentlemen at the conference.

The next step in Heydrich's supposed plan for the elimination of the Jews would be to concentrate them in key areas, and hence this alleged conference of January 1942, is regarded as a signal for the second phase in the liquidation of the Jews. Shortly afterward, the Germans proceeded to move some of the Warsaw Jews into the Lublin area, and 310,322 of them had been sent out by the end of the summer of 1942. The first deportations of any Jews from Germany are specified by Poliakov for October, 1941, and these proceeded the more general action in the occupied countries.

Sven Hedin, Ohne Auftrag in Berlin (In Berlin without Assignment, Buenos Aires, 1949, pp. 141ff.) discussed the sending of 1200 Jews from Stettin with Heinrich Himmler as early as March, 1940. Hedin was in Germany from Sweden in connection with a private effort to secure German mediation in the Russo-Finnish war of 1939- 1940. He was in possession of a Swedish journalist's report asserting that brutal conditions had prevailed among the Jews from Stettin, but Himmler denied this and he declared that only one old woman had died on the trip. This would mark an obvious exception to Poliakov's assumption that no Jews from Germany were being transported before October 1941.

14. The Role of Rudolf Höss in the Administration of Wartime Concentration Camps, and the Nature of the Höss Memoirs

The concept of the death camp as a means of liquidating Jews returns us to Auschwitz. Poliakov's Harvest of Hate placed great stress on Polish lanquage memoirs, Wspomnienia, by Rudolf Höss, which were later published in English as Commandant of Auschwitz (Cleveland, 1960). Höss was the commander of what is supposed to have been the greatest death camp in world history.

The fact that these memoirs were published under Communist auspices makes it utterly impossible to, accept their authenticity without decisive reservations.

Furthermore, the statements made by Höss both to British security officers at Flensburg under third-degree conditions and under torture at Nuremberg makes it very difficult to believe that anything attributed to Höss after his capture in 1946 bears much relation to actual facts. Even Gerald Reitlinger, who grasps at every straw to document the extermination program, rejects the Nuremberg trial testimony of Höss as hopelessly untrustworthy.

The purpose in examining the Höss material here is to decide to what extent, if any, a plausible narrative has been presented under Communist auspices. The atrocity photographs in the English-language edition are "supposed" to have been taken, by an "unknown SS man" who received "special permission." They were allegedly found by a Jewish woman in the Sudetenland and sold to the Jewish museum in Prague. There is nothing whatever about these photographs to render plausible their authenticity. They are undoubtedly akin to the pictures of the piles of corpses alleged to have been civilians slain by the Germans during their eastern campaigns during the First World War but were later proved to be Jews and others killed in pogroms carried out by the Russians under the Tsar, years before 1914.

The introduction to the American edition of Höss's memoirs was written by the Germanophobe Lord (Edward F.) Russell of Liverpool. He is the author of The Scourge of the Swastika (N.Y., 1954) which contains a brief survey of the atrocity evidence presented at Nuremberg. The survey ends with obsolete claims about Dachau as a death camp. These claims about Dachau had been repudiated and disproved years before, by Cardinal Faulliaber of Munich.

Russell, after mentioning the fact, in introducing Höss, that there were very few camps and prisoners in Germany at the outbreak of World War II, claimed that not less than five million Jews died in German concentration camps during the war. He discussed other estimates, and, after satisfying himself that he was between those who claim six million and those who claim four million, concluded: "The real number, however, will never be known". One can only add that he had no right to claim "not less than five million". One might have expected that there would be more interest than there apparently has been in persuading, even at this late date, such countries as the United States, Great Britain, the USSR, and the Communist satellites to count and report their Jewish populations.

The site at Auschwitz was allegedly selected for a concentration camp in 1940, in addition to the availability of good transportation facilities, because it was a fearfully unhealthy place. This is totally untrue. The Neue Brockhaus for 1938 indicated a population of 12,000 in the town of Auschwitz including 3,000 Jews. Although the place was not a popular health resort, it did enjoy a reputation for a healthy and bracing Upper Silesian climate.

Höss began the story of his life in convincing fashion with his account of a happy boyhood in the German Rhineland. His first disturbing experience was a violation of confessional by a Catholic priest who informed on him to his father for a minor dereliction. Höss succeeded in joining the German army at an early age in 1916. He was sent to Turkey and served at the fronts in Iraq and 1?alestine. At the age of seventeen he was an NCO with extensive combat experience and the iron cross. He had his first love affair with a German nurse at the Wilhelma hospital in Palestine.

The end of the war found him in Damascus. Three months of independent traveling at the head of a group of comrades brought him home and thus enabled him to escape the fate of internment.

Höss was unable to adjust to the post-war life at home with his relatives, and he joined the Rossbach Freikorps for service in the East. Höss was arrested on June 28, 1923, for participating in the murder of a Communist spy. He was sentenced to ten year's in prison on March 15, 1924, and was amnestied on July 14, 1928.

Although he had a brief period of mental breakdown while in solitary confinement, Höss emerged with the record of a model prisoner.

Höss spent ten exciting days in Berlin with friends after his release before turning to farming. He believed that National Socialism would best serve the interests of Germany, and he had become Party Member no. 3240 at Munich as early as November, 1922. He joined the Artamanen farming fraternity, to which Himmler also belonged, in 1928. He married in 1929 and was persuaded by Himmler to join the SS.

In 1934 he agreed to serve at the Dachau concentration camp. At first, Höss was bewildered by the philosophy of hostile reserve toward the prisoners at Dachau, which was indoctrinated into the SS guards by a local commandant, later replaced. Höss himself had been a prisoner, and be tended to see all questions from the inmate's viewpoint. Nevertheless, he believed that the concentration camps were a necessary transitional phase in the consolidation of National Socialism, and he was greatly attracted to the black SS uniform as a symbol of quality and prestige. After a few years he was transferred to Sachsenhausen, where the atmosphere, was more favorable.

The outbreak of war in 1939 brought a new phase of experience to the SS men on concentration camp service. The enemies of Germany had sworn to annihilate the National Socialist Reich. It was a question of existence, and not merely of the fate of a few provinces. The SS were supposed to hold the ramparts of order until the return of peace and the formulation of a new code of laws. A high-ranking SS officer, whose laxity had made possible the escape of an important Communist prisoner, was executed by his comrades on direct orders from Himmler. This brought home the seriousness of the situation to all of the SS men at Sachsenhausen. Some of the prisoners were amnestied in 1939 when they agreed to serve in the German armed forces.

An untoward incident occurred in 1939 when some Cracow University professors were brought to Sachsenhausen, but they were released a few weeks later through intervention by Göring. Höss had extensive contacts at Sachsenhausen with Pastor Martin Niemoeller, a much-respected opponent of National Socialism.

Höss went to Auschwitz with high hopes early in 1940. There was no camp there as yet, but he hoped to organize a useful one which would make an important contribution to the German industrial war effort. He had always been idealistic and

sensitive about prison conditions, and he hoped to establish housing and supply conditions for the prospective inmates which would be as normal as possible for wartime. Höss ran into all the irritating obstacles of red tape and shortage of supplies in his early work of organizing the camp, and he bitterly criticized the inadequate qualifications of many of his colleagues.

Polish prisoners constituted the largest single group in the camp during the first two years, although many inmates were also brought to Auschwitz from Germany. Russian contingents began to arrive late in 1941 in poor condition after long marches.

From mid-1942 the Jews constituted the main element in the camp. Höss recalled that the small groups of Jews at Dachau had done very well with their canteen privileges in the early days of the system. There had been virtually no Jews at Sachsenhausen.

It is at this very point that the hitherto highly plausible Höss narrative becomes highly questionable. The manner in which the alleged deliberate extermination of the Jews is described is most astonishing. A special large detachment of Jewish prisoners was allegedly formed. These men and women were to take charge of the contingents, either newly arrived or from within the camp area, who had been selected for destruction. The role of the SS was to be limited to the most general supervision and to the release of the Zyklon-B gas pellets through the shower fixtures of the supposed extermination sheds.

The actual taking of the clothes and the leading of the Jews into the reextermination sheds was to be done by this special group of Jews. Later they were to dispose of the bodies. If the "doomed" Jews resisted, they were beaten or forced to comply in other ways by the "privileged" Jews. Allegedly, the latter did their work so thoroughly that it was never necessary for the SS guards to intervene. Hence most of the SS personnel at the camp could be left in complete ignorance of the extermination action. Of course, no Jew would ever be found to claim to be a member of this infamous "special detachment." Höss was released from his post at Auschwitz at the end of 1943, and he became a chief inspector of the entire concentration camp system. He supposedly concealed his earlier activities from his SS colleagues.

It should be pointed out that no Auschwitz inmate has ever personally claimed to have witnessed the actual operation of these so-called "gas chambers." The explanation has been that those who were victims did not survive, and those who were accomplices had good motives not to admit anything.

The Communist editors of the Höss memoirs obviously did everything in their power to make the account plausible. Much effort was made to show that the individual in the SS counted for nothing, orders for everything. The evident timidity of Höss in voicing his criticism of the hostile rather than friendly attitude of the SS leadership toward the Dachau prisoners in the early years was exploited to lend credence to the supposition that be would have been willing to accept any excesses, including the massacre of huge numbers, even millions, of captive Jews. The same account depicts Höss as a highly sensitive and gifted man living a normal family life with his wife and children throughout his period at Auschwitz.

Höss is supposed to have said that the Jehovah's Witnesses at Auschwitz favored death for all Jews because Jews were the enemies of Christ. This was a staggering slip on the part of the Communist editors. It must be remembered that a bitter struggle against the Jehovah's Witnesses is waged today by the Communists throughout all Satellite countries, and especially in the Soviet zone of Germany. One cannot escape the conclusion that this special defamation of the Jehovah's Witnesses was introduced by the Communist editors.

It is, hence, impossible to avoid the conclusion that these so-called memoirs of Höss have been subjected to an editorial supervision by Communists and others sufficiently extensive to destroy their validity as an historical document. They have no more validity than the alleged Memoirs of Eichmann. The claim that there is a handwritten original of these supervised memoirs can scarcely be regarded as relevant. The Communists are notoriously successful in obtaining "confessions," and they possessed an amplitude of techniques which could be used to persuade Höss to copy whatever was placed before him. The evidence of hand-writing in this case is no more convincing than the famous after-the-event gas chamber film of Joseph Zigman, "The Mill of Dealth," used at the Nuremberg Trial. The so-called Höss memoirs end with the irrelevant statement that the Nuremberg documents had convinced the defendant that Germany was exclusively to blame for World War II. It is important to note that Hermann Göring, who was exposed to the full brunt of the Nuremberg atrocity propaganda, failed to be convinced by it. Hans Fritzsche, The Sword in the Scales (London, 1953, p. 145) related that Göring, even after hearing the early Ohlendorf testimony on the Einsatzgruppen and the Höss testimony on Auschwitz, remained firmly convinced that the mass extermination of Jews by firing squad and gas chamber was entirely propaganda fiction.

Fritzsche pondered this question, and he concluded that there had certainly been no thorough investigation of these monstrous charges. Fritzsche, who was acquitted at the trial, was a skilled propagandist. He recognized that the alleged massacre of the Jews was the main point in the indictment against all defendants. Ernst Kaltenbrunner, the SID (SS Security Service) chief, was on trial as main defendant for the SS because of the suicide of Himmler, just as Fritzsche was representing Goebbels for the same reason. Kaltenbrunner was no more convinced of the genocide charges than was Göring, and he confided to Fritzsche that the prosecution was scoring apparent successes because of their effective technique in coercing the witnesses and suppressing evidence. It was easier to seize a German and force him to make an incriminating confession by unmentionable tortures than to investigate the circumstances of an actual case.

Their shofer, their propaganda