David Hoggan: The Myth Of Six Million - Part 2/5

8. The Weissberg Tale

An example of one of the Jewish Communist deportees from the Soviet Union who managed to escape German confinement throughout the war was Alexander Weissberg Cybulski, Hexensabbat (Frankfurt a.M., 1951; Am. ed., The Accused, N.Y., 1951). He was born in Cracow and retained Austrian citizenship after 1938. He was a prominent scientific engineer in the second Soviet Five Year Plan until his arrest during the 1937 purge. Albert Einstein vainly interceded with Stalin on his behalf in 1938.

Weissberg has written the most informative book to date on the gigantic Sovie purges. After he was deported by the Russians at the end of 1939, Weissberg went quietly to Cracow where he remained until he was forced to flee from Russian occupation forces in that city at the end of the war. Weissberg had expected the Germans to send him at once to a concentration camp, and he had made an eloquent appeal to the Soviet authorities to permit him to depart directly to Sweden from the USSR. His appeal was rejected.

Weissberg later produced a particularly amazing book, Die Geschichte von Joel Brand (Köln, 1956; Am. ed., Desperate Mission, N.Y., 1958). There had been international interest in the Joel Brand story ever since the London Times carried the news on July 20, 1934, that Brand had come from Budapest to Istanbul with an offer from the Gestapo to permit the emigration of one million Jews from Central Europe in the midst of the war. The Gestapo, admitted that this huge emigration would greatly inconvenience the German war effort because of the demand on transport facilities involved, but they were willing to undertake the plan in exchange for ten thousand trucks to, be used exclusively on the eastern front. It goes without saying that the acceptance of the, plan would have produced a major breach between the Soviet Union and the Western Allies. Nevertheless, one of the Budapest Jewish leaders, Joel Brand, was in favor of acceptance. This prompted the British to conclude that Brand was a dangerous Nazi agent. He was whisked off to Cairo and forthwith imprisoned.

One of the, contentions of Weissberg's book is that the German Nazis were always pursuing a zig-zag policy throughout the war between the emigration of the Jews from Europe and their physical extermination. Weissberg confessed at the start a complete, lack of documentary sources to prove that Hitler ever intended the physical destruction of all Jews as such, but he nevertheless uncritically accepted the widelypropagated myth of the liquidation of six million Jews. He also denied Horthy of, Hungary the role of protector of the, Jews, and he claimed that Hungary had been under a "terroristic anti-Jewish regime" ever since 1919 (Ibid., p. 9).

The Nazi personalities receiving chief emphasis in the book are Dieter Wisliceny, the, Gestapo chief in Slovakia, and Adolf Eichmann, after 1934 the chief SS official expert on the Jewish question in Europe, Wisliceny, after 1945, made a vain effort to save his own life by supporting the efforts of the prosecution at Nuremberg. Eichmann was far from being as important in the Nazi hierarchy as his position might suggest.

For instance, throughout his whole career Eichmann never once had a personal interview with Hitler. The main thesis of the Weissberg book is that Hungarian Jews took the initiative in making deals with the Germans, that many of their deals were successful, and that, by implication, it would have been possible to negotiate with the Germans for the evacuation of the entire European Jewish population during World War II, thus showing that the Hitler regime still favored emigration as the real solution of the Jewish question. One unfortunate consequence of the book was to point the finger of suspicion at Rudolph Kastner, the chief leader of the Hungarian Jews. Weissberg sometimes made him appear to be almost pro-Hitler.

Kastner was subsequently murdered in Israel by a young Jewish terrorist in the midst of the frantic furor accompanying the 1955 Israeli national elections. Excerpts from Weissberg's findings had appeared in Israeli periodicals early in 1955.

The turbulent Hungarian situation in 1944-1945, when the valiant Magyar nation was going down to final defeat before Communism, produced many bizarre situations, but none is more striking than that of Raoul Wallenberg. This Swedish Jew, who had no, special diplomatic status, was permitted by Swedish Foreign Minister Guenther to operate from the Swedish legation in Budapest in a gigantic business venture of selling Swedish passports. It was later alleged without any foundation that Wallenberg was murdered by the "fascist" followers of Hungarian Premier Ferenc Szalassi. Wallenberg as a result was virtually canonized for ten years as a selfless hero who had given his life to protect Hungarian Jews from the German Gestapo and their Hungarian cohorts.

In reality, Wallenberg had made a fortune selling passports to these same "fascists", and for this reason he had been arrested and deported by the Soviet occupation authorities. The Swedish Government was fully informed of this by Alexandra Kollontay in Stockholm, but the truth did not reach the public until publication of the article by the Jewish writer, Rudolph Philipp, in the January 14, 1955, copy of the sensational Swedish newspaper, VI.

9. The Case of Adolf Eichmann

The fate of Adolf Eichmann reached truly monumental and sensational proportions with his so-called capture in Argentina by Israeli agents on May 12, 1960. The Israeli authorities decided to hold the world in suspense for an entire year before placing the former German official before a court under conditions in which any reference to a fair trial would be merely ludicrous.

The alleged memoirs of Eichmann were uncritically published in Life, November 28, December 5, 1960, without any attention having been paid to the fact that more

than one scandal had been caused by spurious memoirs during recent years. One need only imagine how Gerhard Ritter, the president of the German Historical Society, felt in 1953 when it was proved that Hitlers Tischgespraeche (Hitler's Secret Conversations, N.Y., 1953), which he had edited for publication in 1952, was utterly fraudulent.

Nevertheless, in 1960, a record allegedly derived from Eichmann's comments in 1955 to a highly dubious associate were to be accepted as definitive memoirs. They were designed to prove, of course, that "the unregenerate Nazi" Eichmann was every inch the fiend that be has been depicted. A disarming attempt to make them seem authentic was furnished by the touch that Eichmann did not say what his cohort, Hoettl, claimed at Nuremberg that he had said about the alleged killing of millions of Jews (Time, June 6, 1960, reported Eichmann had said five million Jews; Newsweek, June 6, 1960, claimed he had said six million).

The number of unlikely touches in the Life account make the performance look about as clumsy as the typical Communist-forged memoirs. For instance, Weissberg noted that Eichmann had made his proposal on Jewish emigration to Brand, with the specific authorization of Himmler, on April 25, 1944, at the Hotel Majestic in Budapest.

The Life account has Himmler authorizing the exchange of Jewish emigrants for war material in 1944 "when Reichsführer Himmler took over as commander of the reserve army." But Himmler did not receive his active military command over the Volkssturm until August 1944, after the July 20, 1944 assassination attempt against Hitler.

The articles in Life actually appear to be little more than a condensation of three sensational and mutually contradictory books: Minister of Death, the Eichmann Story (N.Y., 1960, by Ephraim Katz, Zwy Aldouby, and Quentin Reynolds); The Case Against Adolf Eichmann (N.Y., 1960, by Henry A. Zeiger); Eichmann: the Man and His Crimes (N.Y., 1960, by Comer Clarke). It has never been alleged that Eichmann participated in the execution of Jews, but it has been claimed that be knowingly arranged for their deportation to places of execution.

In spite of all the international commotion and the vast barrage of irresponsible print which has flooded the world on Eichmann since May, 1960, there is not the slightest substantial evidence that Eichmann ever deliberately ordered even one Jew gassed in a German concentration camp, to say nothing of having ordered and supervised the extermination of six million Jews. This would be true even though he gave testimony at his trial that he bad been responsible for the extermination of more than six million or wrote a book of alleged "true confessions" giving the same or a larger figure. Any such account by Eichmann would be (1) proof of the extent and effect of the torture and brainwashing to which be had been subjected by his Jewish captors; (2) the result of his decision, since he knew he would be executed in any event, to provide a sensational yarn of his elimination of Jews whom he disliked, even if he had not actually wished to destroy them, thus caressing his ego; or (3) a product of the fact that his experience bad actually rendered him mentally unbalanced. Perhaps all three explanations would be intermingled and blended. The essence of the matter is that, if all the important evidence indicates that there was no systematic and extensive extermination of Jews by Germany during the war, then no boast of such massive achievements in extermination can be accepted as having any factual validity. They would belong in the realm of morbid fantasy rather than sober factual reality.

10. Unconditional Surrender, the Prolongation of the War, and the Effects on Jews Under German Control

Eichmann was allegedly responsible for the deportation of men like Heimler and Levi. Unlike the case of Margarete Buber, the alleged concentration camp experiences of Heimler and Levi began long after the public announcement of unconditional surrender by President Franklin D. Roosevelt at Casablanca on January 13, 1943. The effect of this pronouncement on the prolongation of the war and on the promotion of.

Communist aims in Europe has been considered by many experts. The desire in Germany for a compromise peace by the summer of 1942 was by no means confined to the German opposition to Hitler. Walter Schellenberg, The Schellenberg Memoirs (London, 1956), reveals that, as early as August, 1942, Heinrich Himmler was willing to envisage a compromise peace approximately on the basis of Germany's territorial position on September 1, 1939. Specific peace efforts of Himmler as early as 1942 were later confirmed from official Swedish sources. Schellenberg was the dominant personality in the SD (SS Security Service) after the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich by British agents in Bohemia in 1942, and he consistently exerted a moderating influence on Himmler.

The effect of unconditional surrender was certain to mean the prolongation of the war to the bitter end to the benefit of Soviet Russia. General J.F.C. Fuller, The Second World War (London, 1948, pp. 258-9), has explained that "Russia would be left the greatest military power in Europe, and, therefore, would dominate Europe." Colonel F. C. Miksche, Unconditional Surrender (London, 1952, p. 255), stated that "the unconditional surrender policy, proclaimed by President Roosevelt in Casablanca and bolstered up by a frivolous propaganda, was heedlessly put into execution."

George N. Crocker, Roosevelt's Road to Russia (Chicago, 1959, p. 182), noted that the Germans fought on with the couragre of despair, and that "Roosevelt's words hung like a putrefying albatross around the necks of America and Britain."

The unconditional surrender pronouncement was no sudden inspiration of President Roosevelt at Casablanca. Compton Mackenzie, Mr. Roosevelt (N.Y., 1944, p. 251), dated the genesis of the unconditional surrender plan from the period of President Roosevelt's 'fireside chat' of December 29, 1940, nearly one year before the formal entry of the United States into, World War II. Alfred Vagts, "Unconditional Surrender -- vor und nach 1943" (i.e. before and after 1943) (Vierteliahrshefte fuer Zeitgeschichte, 1959/3) has explained in considerable detail how World War II actually became a "crusade" along the lines of unconditional surrender from the moment the United States formally entered the war.

There was virtually no criticism of this policy before and after Casablanca from those close to the President (William C. Bullitt was a notable exception). Elliott Roosevelt, As He Saw It (N.Y., 1946, p. 117), declared that unconditional surrender was as good as if "Uncle Joe" Stalin himself had invented it.

As a matter of fact, however, the idea of unconditional surrender for Germany was not actually of American origin, despite Roosevelt's enunciation of the slogan at Casablanca in January, 1943. The British launched the policy; indeed, it had been basic in the war plans of Lord Halifax long before September, 1939. It was confirmed when Halifax and the British refused to accept the Italian plan to stop the German-Polish war early in September, 1939, a plan to which Hitler assented. The British continued it when they refused Hitler's offers of peace at the close of the German-Polish war, and again when they rejected his generous peace offers after Dunkirk. The British under both Halifax and Chamberlain, and under Churchill were determined that Germany must be utterly destroyed.

Roosevelt, after some thought, seems to have recognized at least momentarily the folly of this policy, and on May 23, 1944, sent a note to Churchill and Stalin suggesting that a return be made to the policy of Woodrow Wilson and an appeal be made to the German people over the heads of Hitler and his government, offering peace if the National Socialist government would be overthrown. Churchill rejected it instantly, and on May 24th made a speech in the House of Commons declaring that Britain would accept nothing short of unconditional surrender. Stalin also vetoed Roosevelt's suggestion on May 26th. After that, Roosevelt made no further effort to alter the crusade for unconditional surrender (Gerhard Ritter, The German Resistance, N.Y., 1958, p. 274; John L. Snell, Wartime Origins of the East-West Dilemma over Germany, New Orleans, 1959, p. 128).

Many books have been written about the efforts of the German opposition to Hitler in 1942 to arrive at a satisfactory understanding with the Western Powers in order to win sufficient support within Germany to establish, by revolutionary action, a new government, and, needless to say, not an anti-Jewish one. Hans B. Gisevius, To the Bitter End (N.Y., 1948, p.p. 448ff.), and Fabian von Schlabrendorff, Revolt against Hitler (N.Y., 1948, pp. 117ff.), have emphasized the importance of a satisfactory German agreement on peace terms with the Western Powers. Allen Dulles, Germany's Underground (N.Y., 1947, p.p. 167ff), indicated that the author, as OSS chief directing American espionage from Switzerland, favored a positive agreement with the German opposition in 1942, and he was forcefully presenting his views to the American authorities at home. Gerhard Ritter, Carl Goerdeler und die deutsche Widerstandsbewegung (Stuttgart, 1954; Am. ed., The German Resistance, N.Y., 1958), revealed that Goerdeler, as the designated head of the future opposition government, was in despair when he heard of the unconditional surrender pronouncement.

There is overwhelming evidence that American authorities had ample reason to believe that the war might be brought to a sudden close after the North African landings and the Stalingrad impasse had positive terms for peace been presented to Germany through German opposition spokesmen in Switzerland. Robert Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins (N.Y., 1948, pp. 650ff.) has revealed that the primary reason for Roosevelt's unconditional surrender announcement, when made in 1943, was to head off a German revolt and an irresistable bid for peace even without specific terms of encouragement from the Western Powers. At that time, Roosevelt did not appear to want Germany to escape from final and total defeat in the field, as she had done by means of the conditional surrender negotiations with President Wilson in 1918.

It is an incredible fact that since the war most writers critical of unconditional surrender have concentrated almost exclusively on the unfortunate effect of the policy in prolonging the slaughter by military action and in promoting ultimate Communist control in Europe. This is astonishing, because, in the total scope of writing on World War II, the subject of the impact of the war on the European Jews has received more emphasis than any other. Surely one could have expected very early a detailed study on the implications and effects of unconditional surrender on the fate of European Jews. 

It is now alleged on many sides that American Jewish leaders by the summer of 1942 were receiving reports from Europe which persuaded them that Hitler literally meant to undertake the physical liquidation of all European Jewry. It would be logical, if these stories are at all true, to expect that the American Jewish leaders would have been seeking to save the European Jews from such a horrible fate through conclusion of the war as quickly as possible.

This would be the only possible effect means of succor under the alleged circumstances, namely, ending the war. One would expect American Jewry to have been far more horrified by Roosevelt's unconditional surrender pronouncement in January, 1943, than even by Hitler's appointment as German Chancellor in January, 1933.

Henry Morgenthau, Jr., "The Refugee Run-Around" in Colliers, Nov. 1, 1947, alleged that the United States Government knew from August, 1942, that Jews were being killed wholesale. Yet Morgenthau and his Communist assistant, Harry Dexter White, were ardent supporters of unconditional surrender both before and after Casablanca, and they were the American supporters of the Russian-born plan to convert Germany into a goat pasture. This plan was adopted by Roosevelt and Churchill at the Quebec conference in 1944, and it was soon learned by Hitler and the remaining German opposition leaders alike.

There were plenty of prominent American Jewish leaders who might have prompted President Roosevelt to follow the advice of Allen Dulles and to end the war, but they failed to do so. Margaret L. Coit, Mr. Baruch (Boston, 1957, pp. 468ff.) has proved that Bernard Baruch had more influence on President Roosevelt than did William C. Bullitt, who opposed unconditional surrender, although Bullitt had worked hard for President Roosevelt in promoting the outbreak of war in Europe in 1939.

Baruch, like Morgenthan and other Jewish advisers of the President, was a fervid supporter of unconditional surrender in 1942, although this policy was calculated in any event to produce the greatest possible loss of Jewish lives.

One can only hope that an honest and well-informed Jewish writer will soon undertake a detailed explanation of this phenomenon, which would be utterly monstrous and incomprehensible if the reports of liquidations of the Jews in 1942 had been true.

Furthermore, the internment policy persued by the German Government after March, 1942, spelled enormous suffering for many Jews in the context of Roosevelt's unconditional surrender policy, quite apart from any alleged German policy of deliberately exterminating all Jews.

The enthusiastic description by Isaac Zaar, Rescue and Liberation: America's Part in the Birth of Israel (N.Y., 1954, pp. 39ff.) of the big New York City Jewish rally on March 9, 1943, is sadly ironical under these circumstances. Ben Hecht presented his tragic Jewish pageant, We Will Never Die with a Kurt Weill musical score, Billy Rose producing, and Moss Hart directing. Only a few weeks earlier, the public declaration of unconditional surrender by the American President had guaranteed prolonged and unnecessary suffering to millions of European Jews as well as to several hundred million other Europeans.

Cyrus Adler and Aaron Margalith, With Firmness in the Right: American Diplomatic Action Affecting Jews, 1840-1945 (N.Y., 1946, pp. 418ff.), have claimed that President Roosevelt took an allegedly proper step on August 21, 1942, when he warned that retribution would follow any and all deliberate excesses against Jews. The accent here was clearly on revenge rather than immediate succor for the European Jews. An unlimited American jurisdiction in Germany after the war tantamount to "unconditional surrender" was clearly implied in the assumption that the United States would be in a position to secure retribution in any and every case where excesses had taken place. One can well doubt the value of this threat, repeated on December 17, 1942, in the context of the official unconditional surrender policy adopted the following year.

The "Emergency Conference to Save the Jews of Europe" was organized in April, 1943. The only person connected with it who opposed unconditional surrender was Herbert Hoover, and he was merely an honorary chairman. The solution envisaged was along the lines later taken by Joel Brand for the emigration of the Jews from Europe while war operations continued. This was, to put it mildly, an utopian and unsatisfactory policy compared to encouraging a speedy end of the war. This is especially true when one considers the disinclination of this group actually to negotiate with the Germans. The comprehensive German offer presented by Adolf Eicibmann at Lisbon in 1940 and again from Berlin in 1941 for the emigration of the European Jews had produced no result, and any widespread emigration of European Jews virtually ceased after the outbreak of war between Germany and the USSR in June 1941.

The British prohibited the landing of the S.S. Struma in Palestine in March 1942, with its 769 passengers from Europe, and shortly afterward the ship sank with only one life saved. Even worse was the earlier case of the French liner, Patria, which was burned and sunk by British warships before Haifa on November 25, 1940, with a loss of 2,875 Jewish lives. Anthony Eden summarized British objections to the evacuation of European Jews during wartime at a conference in Washington, D.C. on March 27, 1943 (Adler and Margalith, Ibid., p. 396; Sherwood, Ibid., p. 717).

The Emergency Conference suggested in addition to emigration a policy of bombing the concentration camps. The motive was not to be the one usually followed of seeking to reduce the industrial production connected with the camps, but rather that of demolishing the camps in their entirety. This was based on the naïve assumption that the inmates would not be killed but would be enabled to escape.

It is truly inconceivable that any large numbers of inmates would have escaped permanently. Increased loss of lives through the bombings and the destruction of facilities to provide for the prisoners would be unavoidable. The bombing campaign actually conducted in 1945, with its attendant slaughter and privations, undoubtedly produced the worst conditions experienced in German concentration camps (Zaar, Ibid., p. 60).

Further efforts, within the hopeless context of unconditional surrender, except for the effective distribution of supplies to the inmates in the camps through the International Committee of the Red Cross, were equally feeble. President Roosevelt joined Secretary Morgenthau in sponsoring a special War Refugee Board on January 22, 1.944. A tiny band of some 984 European Jews had been transported under its auspices to a special refugee camp at Oswego, N.Y. by July, 1944. The occupation of Hungary by Germany in March 1944, which probably would not have taken place bad it not been for unconditional surrender, led to the formation of the New York Conference of Hungarian Jews on April 2, 1944. The group urged Stalin to accelerate his military operations against the Hungarians as the decisive means of aiding the Hungarian Jews.

This was the best help they could offer Hungarian Jewry (Zaar, Ibid., pp. 78-1141).

Their shofer, their propaganda