18. Myths and Realities Concerning Auschwitz and other Death Camps
Höss "confessed" on various occasions that 2,500,000 to 3,000,000 people had been gassed at the single camp of Auschwitz. It has always been claimed that most of these alleged victims were Jews, and therefore this would account for nearly half of the supposed six million Jewish victims in the period from 1941 to 1945. It is important to note that the alleged end of this supposed death program in October, 1944, does not terminate the chronicle of Jewish victims who met death from hunger, bombing, -and disease at the camps or in the camp evacuations during the last hectic months of the war. Therefore, one is expected to believe that nearly two-thirds of the deaths in the total alleged deliberate extermination program took place at one camp.
The destruction or hiding of German statistics about the details of Auschwitz by the supporters of the extermination legend, and the refusal of the Russians to give out any accurate statistics in regard to the Jews in Russia just before 1941 or after 1945 makes it impossible to state with exactness just bow many Jews were ever interned at Auschwitz, but it is certain that the number of Jews who got there during ,the war was only a smallest fraction of those alleged to have been exterminated there. The Jewish statistician, Reitlinger, who is rather more careful with his figures than most Jews who have reported on the subject, states in his The SS: the Alibi of a Nation, pp. 268ff., that the total of all internees registered at Auschwitz from February, 1940, to January, 1945, was only 363,000 and by no means all of these were Jews. Moreover, during the war many of those originally sent to Auschwitz were released or transferred elsewhere, and at least 80,000 were evacuated westward in January, 1945. The wild, erratic and irresponsible nature of the statements about the number of Jews exterminated at Auschwitz can be gleaned from the fact that the figures which have been offered by the supporters of the extermination legend have run from around 200,000 to, over six millions.
Benedikt Kautsky, Teufel und Verdammte (Devil and Damned, Zürich, 1946, p. 275) claimed that "at least 3,500,000 persons were gassed at Auschwitz." This was a remarkable statement from a man, who by his own admission, never saw any gas chambers there (Ibid., pp. 272-3).
Kautsky explained that he was sent as a Jewish political prisoner from Buchenwald in October, 1942, to work at Auschwitz-Buna. The victims of liquidation were supposedly gassed more than a mile distant at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Kautsky heard rumors to this effect.
Kautsky did witness several executions at Auschwitz. He cited a case in which two Polish inmates were executed for killing two Jewish inmates. He dedicated his book to his mother who died at eighty years of age on December 8, 1944. Like all Jews of whatever age who died during this period in German-occupied territory, she is considered to be a victim of the Nazis. Kautsky returned to Buchenwald in January, 1945, when Auschwitz was abandoned by Germany. He described how the final months of Germany's collapse in 1945 produced the worst conditions of hunger and disease that Buchenwald, which is rarely claimed any longer as an extermination camp, had ever seen. Kautsky stressed the fact that the use of inmates in war industry was a major feature of German concentration camp policy to the very end. He failed to reconcile this with the alleged attempt to massacre all Jews.
Paul Rassinier, Le Mensonge d'Ulysso (The Lies of Odysseus, Paris, 1955, pp. 209ff.) demonstrated conclusively that there were no gas chambers at Buchenwald. Rassinier is a French professor who spent most of the war as an inmate atBuchenwald. He made short work of the extravagant claims about Buchenwald gas chambers in David Rousset, The Other Kingdom (N.Y., 1947; French ed., L'Univers Concentrationnaire, Paris, 1946). He also investigated Denise Dufournier, avensbrueck: the Women's Camp of Death (London, 1948), and he found that the heroine had no other evidence for gas chambers than the vague rumors described by Margarete Buber. Similar investigations were made of such books as Filip Friedman, This Was Oswiecim (Auschwitz): the Story of a Murder Camp (N.Y., 1946), and Eugen Kogon, The Theory and Practice of Hell (N.Y., 1950). Rassinier did mention Kogon's claim that a deceased former inmate, Janda Weiss, had said to Kogon alone that she had been a witness of the gas chambers in operation at Auschwitz. Rassinier noted that there were of course rumors about gas chambers at Dachau too, but fortunately they were merely rumors. Indeed, one could trace them as far back as the sensational book by the German Communist, Hans Beimler, Four Weeks in the Hands of Hitler's Hell-Hounds: the Nazi Murder Camp of Dachau (N.Y., 1933).
Rassinier entitled his book The Lies of Odysseus in commemoration of the immemorial fact that travelers return bearing tall tales. Rassinier asked Abbé Jean-Paul Renard, who had also been at Buchenwald, how he could possibly have testified that gas chambers had been in operation there. Renard replied that others had told him of their existence, and hence he had been willing to pose as a witness of things that he had never seen (Ibid., pp. 209ff.).
Rassinier has toured Europe for years, like Diogenes seeking an honest man, more specifically somebody who was an actual eyewitness, of any person, Jew or Gentile, who had ever been deliberately exterminated in a gas oven by Germans during the course of World War II, but be has never found even one such person. He found that not one of the authors of the many books charging that the Germans had exterminated millions of Jews during the war had ever seen a gas oven built for such purposes, much less seen one in operation, nor had one of these authors ever been able to produce a live, authentic eyewitness who had done so. In an extensive lecture tour in the main cities of West Germany in the spring of 1960, Professor Rassinier vigorously emphasized to his German audiences that it was high time for a new spirit of inquiry and a rebirth of truth. He suggested that it would be very fitting for the Germans to start work along this line with respect to the extermination legend, which remains a main but wholly unjustified and unnecessary blot on Germany in the eyes of the world.
Ernst Kaltenbrunner no doubt had the problem of truth in mind when be complained about the success of the Nuremberg prosecution in coercing German witnesses to make extravagant statements in support of the myth of the six million.
Many of the key witnesses who did not have since been executed, but not all of them. Willi Frischauer, Himmler: the Evil Genius of the Third Reich (London, 1953, pp. 148ff.) makes much of the incriminating testimony of SS General Erich von den Bach-Zelewski against Himmler at the main Nuremberg trial. Himmler was supposed to have spoken to Bach-Zelewski in grandiose terms about the liquidation of people in Eastern Europe, but Göring, in the Nuremberg courtroom, condemned Bach-Zelewski to his face for this testimony.
Bach-Zelewski in April, 1959, publicly repudiated his Nuremberg testimony before a West German court, and be admitted with great courage that his earlier statements, which had no foundation in fact, had been made for reasons of expediency andsurvival. This was one of two types of false German testimony at Nuremberg. The other was that of testimony by those Germans opposed to the National Socialist regime who played fast and loose with the facts. Charles Bewley, Herman Göring (Göttingen, 1956, pp. 296ff.) has done an admirable piece of work in illustrating this in the case of the Gestapo official and member of the German underground, Hans Bernd Gisevius. The testimony of Kurt Gerstein would also fall into this category.
19. The National Socialist Leaders and the Policy of Exterminating Jews
A vigorous and protracted controversy has arisen over which key figures in the German leadership were supposed to have favored the mass extermination of European Jewry in the first instance. First and foremost it is necessary to consider the case of Hitler and to analyze the contention that Hitler was an active participant in a campaign to exterminate European Jewry.
Joachin von Ribbentrop, Zwischen London und Moskau (Between London and Moscow, Leoni, 1953, pp. 274ff.) noted that Hitler was convinced World War II would not have occurred had it not been for Jewish influence. Hitler regarded Germany's struggle with Great Britain and the United States as a disaster for western civilization and a triumph for Communism. He knew that President Roosevelt had worked with every available means to promote war in Europe prior to the English declaration of war against Germany on September 3, 1939. He did not believe that Chamberlain would have accepted war had it not been for the pressure from President Roosevelt. Further, Hitler did not believe that President Roosevelt would have worked for war had be not been encouraged and supported in his efforts by the powerful American-Jewish community.
Ribbentrop's view of the situation was more penetrating, realistic, and accurate. He did not believe that President Roosevelt would have been able to persuade Great Britain to move toward war against Germany had it not been for the pursuance by Lord Halifax of the traditional British imperialistic policy based on the balance of power.
Ribbentrop reminded Hitler that Jewish influence in England was still very slight during the long struggle against Napoleon, who had adopted the traditional anti-Jewish position of Voltaire. The friendly position of Kaiser Wilhelm II toward the Jews had no influence whatever in preventing the British onslaught against Germany in 1914.
Ribbentrop engaged in repeated discussions with Hitler about the Jewish question during the war and even during their last meeting on April 22, 1945. He was convinced that Hitler never remotely contemplated the extermination of European Jewry.
The most comprehensive attempt to document the thesis that Hitler himself directed an effort to exterminate European Jewry was made by the English Jew, Gerald Reitlinger. An expanded German-language version of his major work appeared under the title Die Endlösung: Hitlers Versuch der Austrottung der Juden Europas, 1939-1945 (The Final Solution: Hitler's Attempt to Exterminate the Jews of Europe, 1939-1945, Berlin, 1956). This title was offered on the assumption that Reitlinger had succeeded in his effort. The full title of the earlier 1953 English edition of this work did not mention Hitler.
Reitlinger conceded that the term "final solution" of the Jewish question, as employed by German leaders in the period from the outbreak of war with Poland until war with the USSR, had nothing to do with a liquidation of the Jews. He then considered Hitler's order of July, 1941, for the liquidation of the captured political commissars, and he concluded that this was accompanied by a verbal order from Hitler for special Einsatzgruppen, to liquidate all Soviet Jews (Ibid., p. 91.) This assumption was based on sheer deduction and has been disproved above. Reitlinger himself cited the statement of the SS leader Karl Wolff, the chief of Himmler's personal staff, that Hitler knew nothing of any program to liquidate the Jews (Ibid., p. 126).
Reitlinger mentioned the indirect "proof" in Hitler's warning in his Reichstag speech of January 30, 1939, that a new European war would mean the end of the Jewish race in Europe. He failed to cite this statement within Hitler's context that the catastrophe of a new war would persuade other European countries to follow the anti- Jewish programs already adopted by Germany and Italy. In this sense, the end of the Jewish race in Europe meant something far different from the physical liquidation of the Jews. It meant only the elimination of their disproportionate influence as compared to their relative population. Reitlinger was guilty of another misinterpretation of this kind when he claimed that the SS newspaper, Schwarzes Korps, November 24, 1938, preached the liquidation of the Jews instead of the elimination of their influence (Ibid., p. 9).
Finally, Reitlinger claimed to have found conclusive proof of a Hitlerian liquidation policy in the protocol of a conversation between Hitler and Hungarian Regent Horthy on April 17, 1943. Hitler complained about the black market and subversive activities of Hungarian Jews and then made the following comment: "They have thoroughly put an end to these conditions in Poland. If the Jews don't wish to work there, they will be shot. If they cannot work, at least they won't thrive" (Ibid., p. 472). There never has been the slightest proof that these comments of a vexed Hitler were followed by an actual order to shoot Jews who would not work. Reitlinger conceded that Hitler was then seeking to persuade Horthy to release 100,000 Hungarian Jews for work in the "pursuit-plane program" of the German air force at a time when the aerial bombardment of Germany was rapidly increasing in intensity (Ibid., p. 478). This indicated, at most, that the idea of compulsory labor for the Jews had taken precedence in Hitler's thinking over the emigration plan. Hitler's purpose in arguing with Horthy was obviously to increase his labor force rather than to liquidate Jews.
The prestige and impact of Reitlinger's work has been very great in Jewish circles. The Jewish Year Book (London 1956, pp. 304ff.) notes that it is commonly stated that six million Jews were "done to death by Hitler", but that Reitlinger has suggested a possible lower estimate of 4,194,200 "missing Jews" of whom an estimate one third died of natural causes. This would reduce the number of Jews deliberately exterminated to 2,796,000.
Some 2,500,000 of the alleged victims in Reitlinger's lower estimate are supposed to have come from Poland and Rumania, and yet he has stated that all figures from these countries are largely conjectured. Moreover, the German defeat at Stalingrad prevented them from interfering extensively with Rumanian Jews. In point of fact one could also add that all the statistics employed by Reitlinger, even though they are more reasonable and reliable than those of any other Jewish statistician dealing with the extermination problem on a large scale, are "largely conjectural", and that he failed dismally in his attempt to prove that Hitler was personally the director of an attempt to exterminate European Jewry.
The impression of Heinrich Hoffmann, Hitler was my Friend (London, 1955, pp. 191ff.) was that Hitler was almost exclusively preoccupied with military affairs during World War II, and that his interest in the Jewish question was very distinctly subordinated to the German war effort. This situation seemed to change only in April, 1945, when Hitler confronted the nightmare of future Soviet domination of Europe. In those last days be turned his full attention again to the activities of the Jews (Ibid., p. 227).
Hoffmann was a close personal friend who enjoyed Hitler's extraordinary confidence. Hitler said in August, 1939, that both he and England were bluffing about war. The war came, and Hoffmann revealed how Hitler did everything possible to evade pressure for an invasion of Great Britain in 1940. Hoffmann was understandably plunged into gloom by the outbreak of war with the USSR on June 22, 1941, but Hitler patiently explained to him at length why he considered the preventive war in the East indispensable for German security. The key reason, of course, was the failure of Hitler to achieve a compromise peace in the West (Ibid., pp. 115ff.).
Sven Hedin, Ohne Auftrag in Berlin (In Berlin without Assignment, Buenos Aires, 1949) had frequent contacts with Hitler during the period 1933-1942. Hitler knew that the great Swedish scientist-explorer, who was partly Jewish himself, was opposed to persecution of the Jews in any form.
Hedin's Germany and World Peace (London, 1937) had been banned in Germany, although the author, on the strength of Hitler's and Göring's friendship, had hoped to make his principal future income for scientific purposes out of the German edition of the book. Hedin admitted that the Germans before 1933 had understandable grievances against their small Jewish minority. The Jews, although only .8 per cent of the population, supplied 23.07 per cent of the lawyers of Germany and enjoyed a major share of income from German trade and industry. Nevertheless, he believed that Germany would have "overlooked" the Jewish question had it not been for her defeat in 1918 and her subsequent misfortunes. It is easy to see why Hedin's adoption of the "scapegoat" theory to explain the National Socialist anti-Jewish policy did not please the National Socialists.
In Berlin without Assignment, Hedin gave expression to the fear that people and events of the Hitler era would be depicted solely in the perspective and interests of a later period for years and years to come. The facts have borne out this prediction. The attitude of the West has remained identical with that of the USSR so far as National Socialism is concerned. Despite the Cold War and sharp disagreements on other subjects, there is complete unanimity about what happened in Germany down through 1945 and in hostility to National Socialism.
According to Hedin, Hitler did not wish to go to war with the West. The war forced upon Hitler by the West ended in a grandiose victory for Communism and in a crushing political and moral defeat for everyone else. Hence, an immense propaganda was maintained in the West after 1945 to keep people convinced that German National Socialism was infinitely worse than Russian Communism, even after Russian gains in the war.
It was rightly feared that Western policy prior to 1945 would appear as nonsense without such a thesis. Hence, an effort was launched to organize Western resistance to Communism as "the much lesser evil". But the role of the USSR was crucial in the defeat of National Socialism, and people in the West wondered how this later intense and alarmed resistance to "the much lesser evil of Communism" could be either legitimate or justifiable. The West could have presented a far more formidable and convincing moral resistance to Communism by admitting past mistakes in regard to
the war and the preceding diplomacy.
Hedin's book shares the impression of Hitler's closest Austrian friend, August Kubizek, The Young Hitler I Knew (Boston, 1955, pp. 291ff.) that Hitler was sick of the war by 1940, and he wished either to retire or to concentrate on the completion of some internal reconstruction projects. He certainly did not impress either of them as a human fiend who believed that he was about to launch his truly major program of liquidating world Jewry. Hedin described Hitler as "a powerful and harmonious personality." Hedin noted Hitler's wishful thinking in 1940 about Stalin, and his vain hope that the Soviet dictator would abandon ambitious plans for an ultimate world revolution in favor of a nationalist program for Russia. Later, in a letter to Hedin on October 30, 1942, Hitler attempted to rationalize a desperate situation by finding a new purpose in destroying Communism. He reminded Hedin that he had hoped for a compromise settlement with Poland in 1939. In accepting Hedin's thesis in Amerika in Kampf der Kontinente (America in the Struggle of the Continents, Leipzig, 1942) that Roosevelt was the major factor in producing war in 1939, he added that, perhaps, the American President had done the world a favor, after all, by forcing Germany to deal with the Communist threat before it was too late (Auftrag, pp. 281ff.).
Walter Schellenberg, The Schellenberg Memoirs (London, 1956, pp. 394ff.) revealed that Hitler learned almost immediately that Roosevelt and Churchill had agreed at Teheran in 1943 to permit most of Eastern Germany to be assigned to a Communist-controlled Poland in the event of Allied victory. The spy, Moyzisch, had obtained the complete record of the Teheran conference from British diplomatic sources in Turkey. Hitler became more convinced than ever that Communism would eventually win its struggle for the world if Germany went down. Schellenberg has testified that the future of the German people was the closest thing to Hitler's heart until the end, but Hitler's final despair became very great.
Achim Besgen, Der Stille Befehl (The Unspoken Command, Munich, 1960, pp. 229ff.) claimed without the slightest proof that Hitler in his despair in April, 1945, ordered a last-minute extermination of the Jews to accompany the Draconian measures which he was seeking to enforce on his own German people. This is the latest date offered by any author for a deliberate German effort to liquidate the Jews.
Besgen and Schellenberg agreed in their favorable opinion of genial Felix Kersten, the Baltic German physician who attended Himmler. Schellenberg recognized and approved Kersten as a moderating influence on Himmler. Besgen has celebrated Kersten as the great humanitarian who per suaded Himmler not to insist on the transportation of Finnish Jews for compulsory labor in Germany. Indeed, Himmler also desisted from his earlier efforts to persuade Bulgaria to send Jewish laborers to Germany. A few Danish Jews were forced to come to Germany, but most of them went to Sweden to evade German measures.
This pressure on countries allied or associated with Germany always had the same basis: the German Reich claimed, after the war became exceedingly critical, that the Jewish population throughout German-occupied Europe was a hostile force. The United States and Canada had begun to intern both Japanese aliens and citizens of Japanese ex'traction in internment camps before this became a German policy toward many German and other European Jews. There was no tangible evidence of disloyalty, not to mention sabotage or espionage, among these people of Japanese extraction.
The Germans at least had a somewhat more plausible basis to press for the internment of Jews. Reference has been made to Chaim Weizmann's early declaration of war against Germany on behalf of World Jewry (Weizmann was the principal Zionist leader). The following version of his statement, which was first announced in the London Times on September 5, 1939, appeared in the London Jewish Chronicle, September 8, 1939: I wish to confirm in the most explicit manner, the declaration which I and my colleagues made during the last months, and especially in the last week: that the Jews "stand by Great Britain and will fight on the side of the democracies." Our urgent desire is to give effect to these declarations. We wish to do so in a way entirely consonant with the general scheme of British action, and therefore would place ourselves, in matters big and small, under the co-ordinating direction of His Majesty's Government. The Jewish Agency is ready to enter into immediate arrangements for utilizing Jewish manpower, technical ability, resources, etc.
Weizmann had effectively declared all Jews within the German sphere to be subjects of an enemy power, and to be willing agents in the prosecution of the war against Germany. He had obviously permitted his zeal for destroying Hitler and the German Reich to triumph over his solicitude for the Jews in Hitler's domain.
Felix Kersten, Memoirs, 1940-1945 (London, 1956, pp. 119ff.) joined those who charged, on the basis of the German internment policy, that there was a deliberate German program to exterminate the Jews. But he did not attempt to implicate Hitler, and he was also emphatic in stating that Heinrich Himmler did not advocate the liquidation of the Jews but favored their emigration overseas. Yet there had to be an author of the alleged extermination policy. Kersten's fantastic attempt to provide an answer to this problem shattered the credibility of his narrative.
Kersten was born in Estonia in 1898, and he fought for the Finns against the Bolsheviks in 1918. He was a typically cosmopolitan Baltic German, and in 1920 be became a Finnish citizen. Later he studied medicine in Berlin and lived in various parts of Europe. His services as a physician were chiefly valued because of his skill as a chiropractor. He was being employed by the Dutch royal household in March, 1939, when a private German businessman suggested that he examine Himmler, who was plagued by stomach and muscular ailments. Kersten was reluctant to devote himself exclusively to Himmler because of his Dutch practice, but he agreed to do so after the German occupation of the Netherlands in May, 1940. He was convinced before the end of 1942 that Germany was heading for defeat in World War II. He informed Himmler that he was establishing permanent residence in Sweden, and that his presence in Germany would be limited to periodic visits.
It is not surprising, in view of the flow of world opinion, that Kersten, a notorious opportunist, implied after 1945 that there had been this campaign to exterminate the Jews. Any "proof" he might offer would be limited to his own private recording of alleged conversations with Himmler. Kersten gave the impression that he could say whatever he wished to Himmler about German policy. Himmler on many occasionsreputedly said that he recognized Kersten as an enemy of National Socialism who desired the defeat of Germany in the war. Apparently, this did not trouble their professional relationship.
The German-Jewish historian, George Hallgarten, published his recollections of young Himmler in Germania Judaica (Cologne, April 1960). Hallgarten and Himmler were close acquaintances while both were students at Munich. Hallgarten found Himmler to be a tolerant and broad-minded person "comparatively free from anti-Semitism." This might explain why it was actually possible for Kersten to say what be pleased to Himmler about the Jews, Germany, and the war. Himmler was, apparently, willing to tolerate Kersten because he believed, and rightly so, that the Baltic German physician was not sufficiently heroic to use his position to aid the enemies of the German Reich in the prosecution of the war.
Some of the information supplied by Kersten is of passing interest. For instance, be confirmed the fact that the Belsen concentration camp achieved the unfortunate reputation of being a "death camp" solely because of the devastating typhus epidemic which erupted there in March, 1945, toward the end of an unnecessarily prolonged war. It was this same epidemic and its results which had greatly depressed Oswald Pohl.
The crucial point in Kersten's entire book is the claim that Himmler told him on November 10, 1942, that Joseph Goebbels was the driving force behind an alleged campaign of Jewish extermination. But Roger Manvell and Heinrich Fraenkel, Dr. Goebbels, His Life and Death (N.Y., 1960, pp. 187ff.) have successfully defended the thesis that Goebbels had little to do with any specific phase of German policy after the outbreak of World War II. It was not difficult for them to sustain their point. Goebbels was the enthusiastic advocate of a "Free-Russia" movement as early as the summer of 1941, but his recommendations were summarily rejected. The German Government favored a wait-and-see policy pending a military decision, and the plans of Alfred Rosenberg for self-determination to the Soviet subject nationalities were also rejected.
Goebbels had done what he could to maintain normalcy in the cultural sphere of German life until the outbreak of the Russian war. Manvell and Fraenkel note that in 1940-1941 there were 355 state theatres, 175 independent theatres, and 142 open-air theatres in operation in Germany, "an incredibly large number even for the country which supported the largest number of theatres in Europe" (Ibid., p. 182). Goebbels was opposed to World War II from the start, and he deplored the continuation of the war. Nevertheless, when war with Russia commenced, he made recommendations for greater military preparations, but his advice in a specific sphere of public policy was, as usual, rejected. Goebbels hoped to retire after the war to write a monumental multivolume biography of Hitler and a history of Germany since 1900.
The authors cite a memorandum written by Goebbels as late as March 7, 1942, in favor of the Madagascar plan as the "final solution" of the Jewish question (Ibid., p. 195). In the meantime, he approved having the Jews "concentrated in the, East" as a measure to guarantee German war-time security. He concluded that "there can be no peace in Europe until every Jew has been eliminated from the continent." Later Goebbels memoranda comment on the transportation of the Jews to the East and emphasize the importance of compulsory labor in that area. The authors, in considering these memoranda, flatly refuse to imply, even remotely, that Goebbels was a force in initiating wartime measures against the Jews. His earlier initiative in peacetime measures, such as the November, 1938, demonstrations calculated to accelerate emigration of the Jews, belonged to a by-gone era.
It must be conceded that this allegedly definitive work on Goebbels contains more than its share of colossal errors. The authors claim there "can be no doubt at all" that Göring and Goebbels were behind the 1933 Reichstag fire, although Fritz Tobias, "Stehen Sie auf, Van der Lubbe!" (Stand Up, Van der Lvbbe, Der Spiegel, Oct. 23, 1959 ff.) has proved conclusively that none of the National Socialists had any connection with the Reichstag fire. Equally wrong is the contention that Herschel Grynszpan, the Jewish assassin of Ernst von Rath, was executed during World War II
at the behest of Goebbels. Grynszpan is at present living in Paris (Ibid., pp. 115, 149).
In short, there is no proof that Hitler knew anything of a plan to exterminate the Jews. Himmler favored Jewish emigration rather than a program of extermination. Goebbels, who also favored emigration, was in any case unable to exert a determining influence on the pursuit of public policies during wartime. Martin Bormann, who succeeded Rudolf Höss as Hitler's personal deputy and chief of the NSDAP chancellery, was notoriously dependent on Hitler for all initiative in larger questions. Important private confirmation on this point from Martin Bormann himself is contained in The Bormann Letters: Private Correspondence between Martin Bormann and his Wife from January 1943 to April 1945 (London, 1954, pp. 26ff.).
Alan Bullock, Hitler, a Study in Tyranny (N.Y., 1952, pp. 558ff.) failed to uncover any important information on Hitler's wartime policy toward the Jews, and, indeed, he was unable to transcend the moral and mental attitudes of the prosecution at the Nuremberg trials. Hugh Trevor-Roper, "Hitlers Kriegsziele" (Hitler's War Arms, in Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, 1960/2) has pointed out that Bullock's work has been crippled by an underestimation of Hitler's intelligence and a lack of understanding for his ideas.
20. Hans Grimm's Fundamental Analysis of Hitler, National Socialism, and the Jewish Problem
Hans Grimm, the proudly independent and distinguished German writer who died in 1959, has written far and away the best book on Hitler's ideas and program to date: Warum -- Woher -- Aber Wohin? (Why -- From-What -- To What Purpose?, Lippoldsberg, 1954). It would seem both fair and fitting in this lengthy treatment of dreadful charges brought against Germany to present the essence of his thought on the subject of Hitler, Germany, and the Jews. Grimm delayed his work for many years after Hitler's death until he was convinced, through sustained contemplation and greater perspective, that he had arrived at a detached judgment of the deceased German leader. Above all, he came to recognize in Hitler the man who had created the miracle of the truly German national community. The vestigial class conflicts of the feudal period, and the more modern ones exploited by Karl Marx, were largely overcome.
Grimm met Hitler for the first time in 1928. He recognized that Hitler had an abiding faith in the crucial importance of a lasting Anglo-German agreement. Hitler in those days was still looking for the man to lead Germany from the platform in the movement of which be himself was the prophet.
Grimm maintained an independent attitude toward Hitler and his work at all times. He voted "No" in the 1934 election to combine the German presidential and chancellor offices on the grounds that Hitler did not deserve to have so much power concentrated in his own hands. Hitler by that time had decided that he would have to lead Germany in her hour of supreme crisis, because the more able and qualified personality for whom he had waited had failed to appear. Grimm's distrust of Hitler remained undiminished until the end of World War II. He was, nevertheless, disgusted by the vile details of Sftauffenberg's July 20, 1944, assassination attempt against Hitler in which the would-be assassin, a German officer, merely placed a bomb certain to kill other people as part of an effort to save his own life.
Grimm was opposed to Hitler's anti-Jewish policy, but he admitted that throughout the world he himself had encountered the proverbial disloyalty toward Germany of the so-called German Jews (Ibid., pp. 53-54). Hitler had told Grimm in 1929 that the permanent disintegration of Germany would be a disaster for western civilization, and that he was convinced that the salvation of Europe and America depended upon the salvation of Germany. Hitler's basic pro-American attitude was also confirmed by Ernst Hanfstaengl, Unheard Witness (Philadelphia, 1957, pp. 183ff.).
Hanfstaengl noted that Hitler had little difficulty on the on the basis of the facts in making his charges stick about the ruthless exploitation of Weimar Germany by the Jews. Indeed, the Jewish economic position in Germany was far more impressive and extensive than in either Great Britain or the United States (Ibid., pp. 35ff.).
Grimm noted that Hitler and Goebbels, whom he also saw frequently after 1931, favored a separate state for the Jews. This indicated that their thinking on the Jewish question was not limited to the merely negative factor of ridding Germany of her Jews, but that it followed a positive approach along the lines of modern Zionism.
Hitler saw in Jewry a conscious obstacle to the creation of a German national community. Grimm noted that Hitler was striving for a truly democratic German community without the conventional parliamentary basis which had served Germany so poorly in the past. The tremendous enthusiasm which Hitler aroused among the German people in 1933 lasted well into the war period, until it was recognized that Germany's foes, after all, would be able to deny and cancel the hopes and dreams of the entire German people. Grimm himself did not fully recognize the tragedy of this situation until after Hitler's death. Grimm noted that in 1945 he encountered many healthy former inmates of those German concentration camps which had been pictured by an unbridled atrocity propaganda as unexceptionable dens of hell and death.
Grimm denounced the demonstrations against the Jews which were organized by Goebbels on November 10, 1938, but be rightly noted that they were no worse than the treatment of Germans abroad during World War I, including the United States.
That this observation about the American treatment of Germans during World War I was really an understatement has been amply proved by H. C. Peterson and G. C. Fite in their Opponents of War, 1917-1918 (Madison, Wisconsin, 1957) which deals in detail with what happened in the United States. In this context, and in view of the American record of mistreating Germans in 1917-1918, it was extremely ironical when President Roosevelt told an American press conference on November 14, 1938, that he could scarcely believe such things as the November, 1938, demonstrations in Germany could happen in a civilized country. The American Zionist leader, Samuel Untermeyer, had been conducting his boycott and holy war against the Germans for more than five years by that time.
Hitler was personally shocked by the November, 1938, measures launched by Goebbels and even declared that these events could have ruined National Socialist Germany permanently. The British diplomat, Ogilvie-Forbes, reported his conviction to London from Berlin that nothing of the sort would ever be attempted again.
Grimm himself concluded after World War II that the old Jewish nation, which had been landless for 2,000 years, was exploiting the confusion and uncertainty of younger modern nations in an attempt to dominate the world. The creation of a Zionist Jewish state would be of no adequate service in averting this danger unless it was carried through on a comprehensive scale which would enable it to embrace most of the Jews of the world.
Osward Pirow, the South African Defense Minister, approached Hitler in November, 1938, with a plan for the creation of a fund to solve the problem of Jewish emigration from Europe. The entire scheme was to be carried through on an international basis with 2.5 billion dollars provided from German-Jewish and other Jewish sources. The proposals were greeted with approval by Hitler but were blocked in London. The same was true of Pirow's proposal for an agreement between ermany and the West which would give Germany a free hand in Eastern Europe.
In May, 1939, an elaborate, conspiracy to assassinate Hitler was organized and financed by the English Jew, George Russel Strauss, at a time when England and Germany were at peace. The various would-be assassins who tried to win the reward money from Strauss were unsuccessful, but their efforts continued long after England and Germany were at war. Grimm emphasized that these efforts had no influence on Hitler's policy toward the Jews, although Hitler knew that conspiracies of this kind had been organized against him from abroad.
Grimm correctly called, attention to the fact that the prosecution at the Nuremberg trials was absolutely determined to prevent any introduction of factual material which would expose the gigantic fraud to the effect that six million Jews had been exterminated by the National Socialist government during the war. The defense
attorneys were not allowed to question the allegation by means of cross-examination, although, despite this arbitrary limitation, they did make several impressive attempts to do so through flank attacks. None of the numerous Jewish acquaintances of Grimm in Germany had been liquidated; on the contrary, all had survived the war. But economic and political pressures were exerted by occupation authorities in Germany after 1945 to prevent a free investigation of these atrocity charges by reputable scholars and they have been continued by the Adenauer government at Bonn.
Hitler hoped to create an effective German dam against the inroads from the East in line with the traditions of European history. He hoped to create a comradely international league of nationalisms among the nations of Europe. Jewish spokesmen, such as Untermeyer and Weizmann, took the same adamant position as the Soviet Marxists in seeking to undermine all such ideas. The September 30, 1938, Anglo-German friendship agreement seemed to offer great hope that Europe was facing a better future, but, within a few days, the pressure from the "anti-Munichers" within the Tory Party took the initiative for friendship with Germany out of Chamberlain's hands.
Grimm believed that Hitler had fully and properly recognized the dangers of this situation in his speech criticizing the anti-Munich English group at Saarbrücken on October 9, 1938. The English succeeded in stirring up the Poles in 1939, and the Germans of Poland had suffered day and night for many months before September, 1939, what the Jews of Germany had experienced on the single date of November 10, 1938. There was little sympathy in the international press for these Gennans of Poland. They were not Jews.
Grimm recognized Hitler's interest in adequate economic access to the raw materials of Eastern Europe, and he was convinced that Hitler would have been content under normal conditions to satisfy Germany's need within the context of the German-Russian non-aggression pact of August 23, 1939. When Hitler said at the Nuremberg Party Congress, in 1936, that Germany would swim in plenty if she had the resources of the Urals, the German leader was not saying that Germany should have the Urals or intended to take them. All he meant was that the Germans could do a better job of exploiting natural resources than was true of the Soviet masters of Russia at that time. Grimm believed that the months from November, 1938, until September, 1939, were the most difficult personal period for Hitler prior to 1944. His desire for a rational reorganization of Europe was threatened by the machinations of British fanatics on the balance of power tradition.
World War II came, and with it the spread of Communism and suffering for all Europe. Grimm, after 1945, discussed the fate of Jewry during World War II with experts on statistics and population throughout Germany, and also with numerous Germans who had personal experiences with the German concentration camp system.
Grimm noted the general consensus, based on Red Cross estimates, that the number
of Jewish and all other minority victims of German policies throughout World War II
could not have exceeded 350,000, and many of these died from allied bombings and
natural causes (Ibid., p. 290). This would leave scant room for the alleged mass
operation of the gas chambers.
Grimm was quick to deplore the mistreatment of any Jews wherever they occurred, but he did not believe for one moment that Jewish misfortune surpassed German suffering during a war which ended in unprecedented disaster for Germany and unparalleled triumph for the Jews. Nevertheless, Grimm concluded that there would continue to be a Jewish question as well as a German question until a homeland could be created for most of the Jews (Ibid., p. 561). Grimm's book constituted a
courageous and conscientious attempt to defend his country from undeserved slander and defamation.
21. The Factual Appraisal of the Conditions in the German Wartime Concentration Camps by the International Committee of the Red Cross
A key role in relation to the Jewish question in Europe during World War H was played by the International Committee of the Red Cross, which consisted largely of relatively detached Swiss nationals, although, as might be expected, sentiment became more critical of Germany when the German military defeats continued to mount following Stalingrad. At the 17th International Red Cross Conference at Stockholm in 1947 final arrangements were made for a definitive report to appear the next year: Report of the International Committee of the Red Cross on its Activities during the Second World War (3 vols., Geneva, 1948). This comprehensive survey both supplemented and incorporated the findings from two previous key works: Documents sur L'activité du CICR en faveur des civils detenus dans les camps de concentration en Allemagne, 1939-1945 (Geneva, 1946), and Inter Arma Caritas: the Work of the ICRC during the Second World War (Geneva, 1947). The team of authors, headed by Frédéric Siordet, explained in the opening pages of the first of the 1948 volumes that their motto had been strict political neutrality, and service to all. The ICRC was contrasted with the national societies of the Red Cross with their primary aims of aiding their own peoples. The neutrality of the ICRC was seen to he typified by its two principal wartime leaders, Max Huber and Carl J. Burckhardt. This neutral source has been selected here to conclude the testimony on the genocide question.
The ICRC considered that its greatest single wartime triumph consisted in the successful application of the 1929 Geneva military convention to obtain access to civilian internees in the various parts of Central and Western Europe. The ICRC, however, was unable to obtain any access to the Soviet Union, which had failed to ratify the 1929 convention. The millions of civilian and military internees in the USSR were cut off from any international contact or supervision whatever. This was especially deplorable, since enough was known to assert that by far the worst
conditions for internees of both types existed in the USSR.
ICRC contacts with German internment camps in wartime began on September 23, 1939, with a visit to Germany's major PW camp for captured Polish soldiers. The ICRC, after March, 1942, and the first reports on German mass-internment policies directed toward the Jews, became concerned that previously satisfactory conditions in German civilian internment camps might be affected. The German Red Cross was requested to take action, but they candidly reported to the ICRC on April 29, 1942, that the German Government was not being sufficiently cooperative in providing necessary information. The German Government took the position that its internment policy "related to the security of the detaining state" (Report, vol. 1, p. 613). The ICRC did not accept this position as a basis for excluding supervisory authority, and finally, by the latter part of 1942, it was able to secure important concessions from Germany.
The German Government agreed to permit the ICRC to supervise the shipment of food parcels to the camps for all cases which did not involve German nationals. The ICRC soon established contact with the commandants and personnel of the camps and launched their food relief program, which functioned until the last chaotic days of the war in 1945. Letters of thanks for packages were soon pouring in from Jewish internees, and it was also possible to make unlimited anonymous food shipments to the camps.
As early as October 2, 1944, the ICRC warned the German Foreign Office of the impending collapse of the German transportation system due to the Allied bombing campaign. The ICRC considered that starvation conditions for people throughout Germany were becoming inevitable. At last, on February 1, 1945, the German Government agreed to permit Canadian PW's to drive white supply trucks to the various concentration camps. The ICRC set up one special distribution center at the Berlin Jewish Hospital and another at Basel. However, this improvised food system did not work well, and many of the white food trucks were destroyed by Allied aerial attacks. The ICRC role became so important in the last phase of the war that it was actually the ICRC representatives who hoisted the white flags of surrender at Dachau and Mauthausen during the final days of the war.
The ICRC had special praise for the liberal conditions which prevailed at Theresienstadt (Terezin) up to the time of their last visits there in April, 1945. This large Jewish community, which had been concentrated under German auspices, enjoyed complete autonomy in communal life under a Jewish administration. The Jewish Council of Elders repeatedly informed the ICRC representatives that they were enjoying surprisingly favorable conditions when one considered that Germany was going down to defeat during a war in which World Jewry had been the first to call for her destruction.
The ICRC also had special praise for the Vittel camp in German-occupied France. This camp contained thousands of Polish Jews whose only claim to special consideration was that they had received visas from American consular authorities. They were treated by the German authorities in every respect as full-fledged American citizens.
The ICRC had some guarded comments to make about the situation of Hungarian Jews, many of whom were deported. to Poland by the Germans in 1944 after the German occupation of Hungary. The ICRC believed, for instance, that the "ardent" demonstrations of Hungarian Jews against the German occupation were unwise.
The ICRC had special praise for the mild regime of Ion Antonescu of Rumania toward the Jews, and they were able to give special relief help to 183,000 Rumanian Jews until the moment of the Soviet occupation. This enabled the Rumanian Jews to enjoy far better conditions than average Rumanians during the late months of the war.
This aid ceased with the Soviet occupation, and the ICRC complained bitterly that it never succeeded "in sending anything whatsoever to Russia" (Report, vol. 2, p. 62). It should be noted that the ICRC received voluminous flow of mail from Auschwitz until the period of the Soviet occupation. By that time many of the internees had been evacuated westward by the Germans. The efforts of the ICRC to extend aid to the internees left at Auschwitz under the Soviet occupation were futile. It was possible, however, at least to a limited extent, for ICRC representatives to supervise the evacuation of Auschwitz by way of Moravia and Bohemia. It was also possible to continue sending food parcels for former Auschwitz inmates to such places as
Buchenwald and Oranienburg.
The ICRC complained bitterly that their vast relief operations for civilian Jewish internees in camps were hampered by the tight Allied blockade of Fortress Europe. Most of their purchases of relief food were made in Rumania, Hungary, and Slovakia. It was also in the interest of the interned Jews that the ICRC on March 15, 1944, protested against "the barbarous aerial warfare of the Allies" (Inter Arma Caritas, p. 78). The period of the 1899 and 1907 Hague conventions could only be considered a golden age by comparison.
It is important to note in finishing with these detailed and comprehensive ICRC reports that none of the International Red Cross representatives at the camps or else where in Axis-occupied Europe found any evidence what ever that a deliberate policy of extermination was being conducted by Germany against the Jews. The ICRC did emphasize that there was general chaos in Germany during the final months of the war at a time when most of the Jewish doctors from the camps were being used to combat typhus on the eastern front. These doctors were far from the camp areas when the dreaded typhus epidemics of 1945 struck (Report, vol. 1, pp. 204ff.).
The ICRC worked in close cooperation throughout the war with Vatican representatives, and, like the Vatican, found itself unable, after the event, to engage in the irresponsible charges of genocide which had become the order of the day. Nothing is more striking or important relative to the work of the International Red Cross in relation to the concentration camps than the statistics it presented on the loss of life in the civil population during the Second World War: These figures present the appalling estimate of 17,850,000 who lost their lives for reasons other than persecution, while only 300,000 of all persecuted groups, many of whom were not Jews, died from all causes during the war. This figure of 300,000 stands out in marked contrast with the 5,012,000 Jews estimated by the Jewish joint Distribution Committee to have lost their lives during the war, mainly through extermination by National Socialists.
One of the most bewildered Germans after the war was Legation Counsellor Eberhard von Thadden, who had been delegated the double responsibility by the German Foreign Office of working on the Jewish question with the ICRC and with Adolf Eichmann. In April, 1943, he discussed with Eichmann the rumors circulating abroad that Jews were being wantonly exterminated by the German authorities. Eichmann insisted that the very idea of extermination was absurd. Germany needed all possible labor in a struggle for her very existence.
Thadden questioned the wisdom of the internment policy. Eichmann admitted that available transportation facilities were needed to furnish both the fronts and the homeland, but he argued that it had become necessary to concentrate Jew from the occupied territories in the East and in German camps to secure Jewish labor effectively and to avert unrest and subversion in the occupied countries. Any of the occupied countries might become a front-line area within a relatively short period of time.
Eichmann insisted that the family camps for the Jews in the East, along the lines of Theresienstadt, were far more acceptable to the Jews than the separations which the splitting up of families would entail. Eichmann admitted a case to Thaden in 1944 in which a Jew was killed in Slovakia while on transport from Hungary to Poland, but he insisted that such an event was extremely exceptional. He reminded Thadden again that the Jews were solely in camps so that their working power could be utilized and espionage could be prevented. He noted that Germany had not employed these extreme measures in the early years of the war, but only when it became evident that her very existence was at stake. Eichmann also reminded Thadden that foreign Jews who were being allowed to leave Europe directly from the camps were not charging Germany with the atrocities which were irresponsibly rumored from abroad. In short, Thadden, who had personally made numerous visits to the various concentration camps, was thoroughly convinced that Eichmann was right and that the foreign rumors of genocide in circulation were incorrect.
Eberhard von Thadden's only comment from his prison cell on June 11, 1946, after having heard the full scope of the Nuremberg Trial propaganda, was that, if Eichmann had lied, he would have to have been a "very skillful" liar indeed. The world has not yet sufficiently pondered the question about who has lied and why. Yet it is a statistical fact that, for every fraudulent affidavit or statement claiming a death camp or a gas chamber, there are at least twenty which deny the very existence of such camps and gas chambers. It is only the published evidence which has presented a lopsided picture in support of the genocide myth.
22. Conclusion
The unavoidable conclusion about the wartime German treatment of European Jewry is that we have encountered a deliberate defamation and falsification conspiracy on an unprecedented scale. The internment of European Jews, like that of the Japanese in the United States and Canada, was carried out for security reasons. It was pointed out earlier that there was no such thorough internment of the Jews by Germans as took place in the case of the Japanese in America. Not over 2,000,000 Jews were ever interned by the Germans in concentration camps and it is unlikely that the figure was greater than 1,500,000. There is not the slightest intention here to argue that such internment was either necessary or desirable in any of these cases.
Our treatment here has been solely concerned with the utterly monstrous and unfounded charge that internment was used by the Germans as a veil behind which they successfully slaughtered no less than six million European Jews. There has never been even the slightest conclusive proof for such a campaign of promiscuous slaughter on the part of Germany, and, in the meantime, all reliable evidence continues to suggest with increasing volume and impact that this genocide legend is a deliberate and brazen falsification.
Long live Palestine
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