8
THE
NATURE & CONDITION OF WAR-TIME CONCENTRATION
CAMPS
In his recent book
Adolf Hitler (London, 1973), Colin Cross, who
brings more intelligence than is usual to many
problems of this period, observes astutely that
"The shuffling of millions of Jews around Europe
and murdering them, in a time of desperate war
emergency, was useless from any rational point
of view" (p. 307). Quite so, and at this point
we may well question the likelihood of this
irrationalism, and whether it was even possible.
Is it likely, that at the height of the war,
when the Germans were fighting a desperate
battle for survival on two fronts, they would
have conveyed millions of Jews for miles to
supposedly elaborate and costly slaughter
houses? To have conveyed three or four million
Jews to Auschwitz alone (even supposing that
such an inflated number existed in Europe, which
it did not), would have placed an insuperable
burden upon German transportation facilities
which were strained to the limit in supporting
the farflung Russian front. To have transported
the mythical six million Jews and countless
numbers of other nationalities to internment
camps, and to have housed, clothed and fed them
there, would simply have paralysed their
military operations. There is no reason to
suppose that the efficient Germans would have
put their military fortunes at such risk. On the
other hand, the transportation of a reasonable
363,000 prisoners to Auschwitz in the course of
the war (the number we know to have been
registered there) at least makes sense in terms
of the compulsory labour they supplied. In fact,
of the 3 million Jews living in Europe, it is
certain that no more than two million were ever
interned at one time, and it is probable that
the number was much closer to 1,500,000. We
shall see later, in the Report of the Red Cross,
that whole Jewish populations such as that of
Slovakia avoided detention in camps, while
others were placed in community ghettos like
Theresienstadt. Moreover, from western Europe
deportations were far fewer. The estimate of
Reitlinger that only about 50,000 French Jews
from a total population of 320,000 were deported
and interned has been noted already. The
question must also be asked as to whether it
could have been physically possible to destroy
the millions of Jews that are alleged. Had the
Germans enough time for it? Is it likely that
they would have cremated people by the million
when they were so short of manpower and required
all prisoners of war for purposes of war
production? Would it have been possible to
destroy and remove all trace of a million people
in six months? Could such enormous gatherings of
Jews and executions on such a vast scale have
been kept secret? These are the kind of
questions that the critical, thinking person
should ask. And he will soon discover that not
only the statistical and documentary evidence
given here, but simple logistics combine to
discredit the legend of the six million.
Although it was impossible for millions to have
been murdered in them, the nature and conditions
of Germany's concentration camps have been
vastly exaggerated to make the claim plausible.
William Shirer, in a typically reckless passage,
states that "All of the thirty odd principal
Nazi concentration camps were death camps"
(ibid, p. 115O). This is totally untrue, and is
not even accepted now by the principal
propagators of the extermination legend. Shirer
also quotes Eugen Kogon's The Theory and
Practice of Hell (N.Y. 195O, p. 227) which puts
the total number of deaths in all of them at the
ridiculous figure of 7,125,000, though Shirer
admits in a footnote that this is "undoubtedly
too high."
'DEATH CAMPS'
BEHIND THE IRON CURTAIN
It is true that in
1945, Allied propaganda did claim that all the
concentration camps, particularly those in
Germany itself, were "death camps", but not for
long. On this question, the eminent American
historian Harry Elmer Barnes wrote: "These camps
were first presented as those in Germany, such
as Dachau, Belsen, Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen and
Dora, but it was soon demonstrated that there
had been no systematic extermination in those
camps. Attention was then moved to Auschwitz,
Treblinka, Belzec, Chelmno, Jonowska, Tarnow,
Ravensbrück, Mauthausen, Brezeznia and
Birkenau, which does not exhaust the list that
appears to have been extended as needed"
(Rampart Journal, Summer 1967). What had
happened was that certain honest observers among
the British and American occupation forces in
Germany, while admitting that many inmates had
died of disease and starvation in the final
months of the war, had found no evidence after
all of "gas chambers". As a result, eastern
camps in the Russian zone of occupation such as
Auschwitz and Treblinka gradually came to the
fore as horrific centres of extermination
(though no one was permitted to see them), and
this tendency has lasted to the present day.
Here in these camps it was all supposed to have
happened, but with the Iron Curtain brought down
firmly over them, no one has ever been able to
verify such charges. The Communists claimed that
four million people died at Auschwitz in
gigantic gas chambers accommodating 2,000 people
- and no one could argue to the contrary. What
is the truth about so-called "gas chambers"?
Stephen F. Pinter, who served as a lawyer for
the United States War Department in the
occupation forces in Germany and Austria for six
years after the war, made the following
statement in the widely read Catholic magazine
Our Sunday Visitor, June 14th , 1959: "I was in
Dachau for 17 months after the war, as a U.S.
Department Attorney, and can state that there
was no gas chamber at Dachau. What was shown to
visitors and sightseers there and erroneously
described as a gas chamber was a crematory. Nor
was there a gas chamber in any of the other
concentration camps in Germany. We were told
that there was a gas chamber at Auschwitz, but
since that was in the Russian zone of
occupation, we were not permitted to investigate
since the Russians would not allow it. From what
I was able to determine during six postwar years
in Germany and Austria, there were a number of
Jews killed, but the figure of a million was
certainly never reached. I interviewed thousands
of Jews, former immates of concentration camps
in Germany and Austria, and consider myself as
well qualified as any man on this subject." This
tells a very different story from the customary
propaganda. Pinter, of course, is very astute on
the question of the crematory being represented
as a gas chamber. This is a frequent ploy
because no such thing as a gas chamber has ever
been shown to exist in these camps, hence the
deliberately misleading term a "gas oven", aimed
at confusing a gas chamber with a crematorium.
The latter, usually a single furnace and similar
to the kind of thing employed today, were used
quite simply for the cremation of those persons
who had died from various natural causes within
the camp, particularly infectious diseases. This
fact was conclusively proved by the German
archbishop, Cardinal Faulhaber of Munich. He
informed the Americans that during the Allied
air raids on Munich in September 1944, 30,000
people were killed. The archbishop requested the
authorities at the time to cremate the bodies of
the victims in the crematorium at Dachau. But he
was told that, unfortunately, this plan could
not be carried out; the crematorium, having only
one furnace, was not able to cope with the
bodies of the air raid victims. Clearly,
therefore, it could not have coped with the
238,000 Jewish bodies which were allegedly
cremated there. In order to do so, the
crematorium would have to be kept going for 326
years without stopping and 530 tons of ashes
would have been recovered.
CASUALTY
FIGURES REDUCED
The figures of Dachau
casualties are typical of the kind of
exaggerations that have since had to be
drastically revised. In 1946, a memorial plaque
was unveiled at Dachau by Philip Auerbach, the
Jewish State-Secretary in the Bavarian
Government who was convicted for embezzling
money which he claimed as compensation for
non-existent Jews. The plaque read: "This area
is being retained as a shrine to the 238,000
individuals who were cremated here." Since then,
the official casualty figures have had to be
steadily revised downwards, and now stand at
only 20,600 the majority from typhus and
starvation only at the end of the war. This
deflation, to ten per cent of the original
figure, will doubtless continue, and one day
will be applied to the legendary figure of six
million as a whole. Another example of drastic
revision is the present estimate of Auschwitz
casualties. The absurd allegations of three or
four million deaths there are no longer
plausible even to Reitlinger. He now puts the
number of casualties at only 600,000; and
although this figure is still exaggerated in the
extreme, it is a significant reduction on four
million and further progress is to be expected.
Shirer himself quotes Reitlinger's latest
estimate, but he fails to reconcile this with
his earlier statement that half of that figure,
about 300,000 Hungarian Jews were supposedly
"done to death in forty-six days" - a supreme
example of the kind of irresponsible nonsense
that is written on this subject.
HUMANE
CONDITIONS
That several thousand
camp inmates did die in the chaotic final months
of the war brings us to the question of their
war-time conditions. These have been
deliberately falsified in innumerable books of
an extremely lurid and unpleasant kind. The Red
Cross Report, examined below, demonstrates
conclusively that throughout the war the camps
were well administered. The working inmates
received a daily ration even throughout 1943 and
1944 of not less than 2,750 calories, which was
more than double the average civilian ration in
occupied Germany in the years after 1945. The
internees were under regular medical care, and
those who became seriously ill were transferred
to hospital. All internees, unlike those in
Soviet camps, could receive parcels of food,
clothing and pharmaceutical supplies from the
Special Relief Division of the Red Cross. The
Office of the Public Prosecutor conducted
thorough investigations into each case of
criminal arrest, and those found innocent were
released; those found guilty, as well as those
deportees convicted of major crimes within the
camp, were sentenced by military courts and
executed. In the Federal Archives of Koblenz
there is a directive of January 1943 from
Himmler regarding such executions, stressing
that "no brutality. is to be allowed" (Manvell
& Frankl), ibid, p. 312). Occasionally there
was brutality, but such cases were immediately
scrutinised by S.S. Judge Dr. Konrad Morgen of
the Reich Criminal Police Office, whose job was
to investigate irregularities at the various
camps. Morgen himself prosecuted commander Koch
of Buchenwald in 1943 for excesses at his camp,
a trial to which the German public were invited.
It is significant that Oswald Pohl, the
administrator of the concentration camp system
who was dealt with so harshly at Nuremberg, was
in favour of the death penalty for Koch. In
fact, the S.S. court did sentence Koch to death,
but he was given the option of serving on the
Russian front. Before he could do this, however,
Prince Waldeck, the leader of the S.S. in the
district, carried out his execution. This case
is ample proof of the seriousness with which the
S.S. regarded unnecessary brutality. Several
S.S. court actions of this kind were conducted
in the camps during the war to prevent excesses,
and more than 800 cases were investigated before
1945. Morgen testified at Nuremberg that he
discussed confidentially with hundreds of
inmates the prevailing conditions in the camps.
He found few that were undernourished except in
the hospitals, and noted that the pace and
achievement in compulsory labour by inmates was
far lower than among German civilian workers.
The evidence of Pinter and Cardinal Faulhaber
has been shown to disprove the claims of
extermination at Dachau, and we have seen how
the casualty figures of that camp have been
continuously revised downwards. The camp at
Dachau near Munich, in fact, may be taken as
fairly typical of these places of internment.
Compulsory labour in the factories and plants
was the order of the day, but the Communist
leader Ernst Ruff testified in his Nuremberg
affidavit of April 18th, 1947 that the treatment
of prisoners on the work details and in the camp
of Dachau remained humane. The Polish
underground leader, Jan Piechowiak, who was at
Dachau from May 22nd, 1940 until April 29th,
1945 also testified on March 21st, 1946 that
prisoners there received good treatment, and
that the S.S. personnel at the camp were "well
disciplined". Berta Schirotschin, who worked in
the food service at Dachau throughout the war,
testified that the working inmates, until the
beginning of 1945 and despite increasing
privation in Germany, received their customary
second breakfast at 10 a.m. every morning. In
general, hundreds of affidavits from Nuremberg
testify to the humane conditions prevailing in
concentration camps; but emphasis was invariably
laid on those which reflected badly on the
German administration and could be used for
propaganda purposes. A study of the documents
also reveals that Jewish witnesses who resented
their deportation and internment in prison camps
tended to greatly exaggerate the rigours of
their condition, whereas other nationals
interned for political reasons, such as those
cited above, generally presented a more balanced
picture. In many cases, prisoners such as
Charlotte Bormann, whose experiences did not
accord with the picture presented at Nuremberg,
were not permitted to testify.
UNAVOIDABLE
CHAOS
The orderly situation
prevailing in the German concentration camps
slowly broke down in the last fearful months of
1945. The Red Cross Report of 1948 explains that
the saturation bombing by the Allies paralysed
the transport and communications system of the
Reich, no food reached the camps and starvation
claimed an increasing number of victims, both in
prison camps and among the civilian population
of Germany. This terrible situation was
compounded in the camps both by great
overcrowding and the consequent outbreak of
typhus epidemics. Overcrowding occurred as a
result of prisoners from the eastern camps such
as Auschwitz being evacuated westward before the
Russian advance; columns of such exhausted
people arrived at several German camps such as
Belsen and Buchenwald which had themselves
reached a state of great hardship. Belsen camp
near Bremen was in an especially chaotic
condition in these months and Himmler's
physician, Felix Kersten, an anti-Nazi, explains
that its unfortunate reputation as a "death
camp" was due solely to the ferocity of the
typhus epidemic which broke out there in March
1945 (Memoirs 1940-1945, London, .1956).
Undoubtedly these fearful conditions cost
several thousand lives, and it is these
conditions that are represented in the
photographs of emaciated human beings and heaps
of corpses which the propagandists delight in
showing, claiming, that they are victims of
"extermination". A surprisingly honest appraisal
of the situation at Belsen in 1945 appeared in
Purnell's History of the Second World War (Vol.
7, No. 15) by Dr. Russell Barton, now
superintendent and consultant psychiatrist at
Severalls Hospital, Essex, who spent one month
at the camp as a medical student after the war.
His account vividly illustrates the true causes
of the mortality that occurred in such camps
towards the war's end, and how such extreme
conditions came to prevail there. Dr. Barton
explains that Brigadier Glyn Hughes, the British
Medical Officer who took command of Belsen in
1945, "did not think there had been any
atrocities in the camp" despite discipline and
hard work "Most people," writes Dr. Barton,
"attributed the conditions of the inmates to
deliberate intention on the part of the Germans.
. Inmates were eager to cite examples of
brutality and neglect, and visiting journalists
from different countries interpreted the
situation according to the needs of propaganda
at home." However, Dr. Barton makes it quite
clear that the conditions of starvation and
disease were unavoidable in the circumstances
and that they occurred only during the months of
1945. "From discussions with prisoners it seemed
that conditions in the camp were not too bad
until late 1944. The huts were set among pine
trees and each was provided with lavatories,
wash basins, showers and stoves for heating."
The cause of food shortage is also explained.
"German medical officers told me that it had
been increasingly difficult to transport food to
the camp for some months. Anything that moved on
the autobahns was likely to be bombed . . . I
was surprised to find records, going back for
two or three years, of large quantities of food
cooked daily for distribution. At that time I
became convinced, contrary to popular opinion,
that there had never been a policy of deliberate
starvation. This was confirmed by the large
numbers of well-fed inmates. Why then were so
many people suffering from mal-nutrition? . . .
The major reasons for the state of Belsen were
disease, gross overcrowding by central
authority, lack of law and order within the
huts, and inadequate supplies of food, water and
drugs." The lack of order, which led to riots
over food distribution, was quelled by British
machine-gun fire and a display of force when
British tanks and armoured cars toured the camp.
Apart from the unavoidable deaths in these
circumstances, Glyn Hughes estimated that about
"1,000 were killed through the kindness of
English soldiers giving them their own rations
and chocolates." As a man who was at Belsen, Dr.
Barton is obviously very much alive to the
falsehoods of concentration camp mythology, and
he concludes: "In trying to assess the causes of
the conditions found in Belsen one must be
alerted to the tremendous visual display, ripe
for purposes of propaganda, that masses of
starved corpses presented." To discuss such
conditions "naively in terms of 'goodness' and
'badness' is to ignore the constituent
factors..."
FAKE
PHOTOGRAPHS
Not only were
situations such as those at Belsen
unscrupulously exploited for propaganda
purposes, but this propaganda has also made use
of entirely fake atrocity photographs and films.
The extreme conditions at Belsen applied to very
few camps indeed; the great majority escaped the
worst difficulties and all their inmates
survived in good health. As a result, outright
forgeries were used to exaggerate conditions of
horror. A startling case of such forgery was
revealed in the British Catholic Herald of
October 29th, 1948. It reported that in Cassel,
where every adult German was compelled to see a
film representing the "horrors" of Buchenwald, a
doctor from Goettingen saw himself on the screen
looking after the victims. But he had never been
to Buchenwald. After an interval of bewilderment
he realised that what he had seen was part of a
film taken after the terrible air raid on
Dresden by the Allies on 13th February, 1945,
where the doctor had been working. The film in
question was shown in Cassel on 19th October,
1948. After the air raid on Dresden, which
killed a record 135 000 people, mostly refugee
women and children, the bodies of the victims
were piled and burned in heaps of 400 and 500
for several weeks. These were the scenes,
purporting to be from Buchenwald, which the
doctor had recognised.
The forgery of war-time
atrocity photographs is not new. For further
information the reader is referred to Arthur
Ponsonby's book Falsehood in Wartime (London,
1928), which exposes the faked photographs of
German atrocities in the First World War.
Ponsonby cites such fabrications as "The Corpse
Factory" and "The Belgian Baby without Hands",
which are strikingly reminiscent of the
propaganda relating to Nazi "atrocities". F. J.
P. Veale explains in his book that the bogus
'jar of human soap" solemnly introduced by the
Soviet prosecution at Nuremberg was a deliberate
jibe at the famous British "Corpse Factory"
myth, in which the ghoulish Germans were
supposed to have obtained various commodities
from processing corpses (Veale, ibid, p. 192).
This accusation was one for which the British
Government apologised after 1918. It received
new Iife after 1945 in the tale of lamp shades
of human skin, which was certainly as fraudulent
as the Soviet "human soap". In fact, from
Manvell and Frankl we have the grudging
admission that the lamp shade evidence at
Buchenwald Trial "later appeared to be dubious"
(The Incomparable Crime, p. 84). It was given by
a certain Andreas Pffffenberger in a "written
affidavit" of the kind discussed earlier, but in
1948 General Lucius Clay admitted that the
affidavits used in the trial appeared after more
thorough investigation to have been mosdy
"hearsay."
An excellent work on
the fake atrocity photographs pertaining to the
Myth of the Six Million is Dr. Udo Walendy's
Bild 'Dokumente' für die
Geschichtsschreibung? (Vlotho/Weser, 1973), and
from the numerous examples cited we illustrate
one on this page. The origin of the first
photograph is unknown, but the second is a
photomontage. Close examination reveals
immediately that the standing figures have been
taken from the first photograph, and a heap of
corpses super-imposed in front of them. The
fence has been removed, and an entirely new
horror "photograph" created. This blatant
forgery appears on page 341 of R. Schnabel's
book on the S.S., Macht ohne Moral: eine
Dokumentation über die SS (Frankfurt,
1957), with the caption "Mauthausen". (Walendy
cites eighteen other examples of forgery in
Schnabel's book). The same photograph appeared
in the Proceedings of the International Military
Tribunal, Vol. XXX, p. 421, likewise purporting
to illustrate Mauthausen camp. It is also
illustrated without a caption in Eugene
Aroneanu's Konzentrationlager Document F.321 for
the International Court at Nuremberg; Heinz
Kühnrich's Der KZ-Staat (Berlin, 1960, p.
81); Vaclav Berdych's Mauthausen (Prague, 1959);
and Robert Neumann's Hitler - Aufstieg und
Untergang des Dritten Reiches (Munich,
1961).
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