5
THE
NUREMBERG TRIALS
The story of the Six
Million was given judicial authority at the
Nuremberg Trials of German leaders between 1945
and 1949, proceedings which proved to be the
most disgraceful legal farce in history. For a
far more detailed study of the iniquities of
these trials, which as Field Marshal Montgomery
said, made it a crime to lose a war, the reader
is referred to the works cited below, and
particulary to the outstanding book Advance to
Barbarism (Nelson, 1953), by the distinguished
English jurist, F. J. P. Veale. From the very
outset, the Nuremberg Trials proceeded on the
basis of gross statistical errors. In his speech
of indictment on November 20th, 1945, Mr. Sidney
Alderman declared that there had been 9,600,000
Jews living in German occupied Europe. Our
earlier study has shown this figure to be wildly
inaccurate. It is arrived at (a) by completely
ignoring all Jewish emigration between 1933 and
1945, and (b) by adding all the Jews of Russia,
including the two million or more who were never
in German-occupied territory. The same inflated
figure, slightly enlarged to 9,800,000, was
produced again at the Eichmann Trial in Israel
by Prof. Shalom Baron. The alleged Six Million
victims first appeared as the foundation for the
prosecution at Nuremberg, and after some
dalliance with ten million or more by the Press
at the time, it eventually gained international
popularity and acceptance. It is very
significant, however, that, although this
outlandish figure was able to win credence in
the reckless atmosphere of recrimination in
1945, it had become no longer tenable by 1961,
at the Eichmann Trial. The Jerusalem court
studiously avoided mentioning the figure of Six
Million, and the charge drawn up by Mr. Gideon
Haussner simply said "some" millions.
LEGAL
PRINCIPLES IGNORED
Should anyone be misled
into believing that the extermination of the
Jews was "proved" at Nuremberg by "evidence", he
should consider the nature of the Trials
themselves, based as they were on a total
disregard of sound legal principles of any kind.
The accusers acted as prosecutors, judges and
executioners; "guilt" was assumed from the
outset. (Among the judges, of course, were the
Russians, whose numberless crimes included the
massacre of 15,000 Polish officers, a proportion
of whose bodies were discovered by the Germans
at Katyn Forest, near Smolensk. The Soviet
Prosecutor attempted to blame this slaughter on
the German defendants). At Nuremberg, ex post
facto legislation was created, whereby men were
tried for "crimes" which were only declared
crimes after they had been allegedly committed.
Hitherto it had been the most basic legal
principle that a person could only be convicted
for infringing a law that was in force at the
time of the infringement. "Nulla Poena Sine
Lege." The Rules of Evidence, developed by
British jurisprudence over the centuries in
order to arrive at the truth of a charge with as
much certainty as possible, were entirely
disregarded at Nuremberg. It was decreed that
"the Tribunal should not be bound by technical
rules of evidence" but could admit "any evidence
which it deemed to have probative value," that
is, would support a conviction. In practise,
this meant the admittance of hearsay evidence
and documents, which in a normal judicial trial
are always rejected as untrustworthy. That such
evidence was allowed is of profound
significance, because it was one of the
principal methods by which the extermination
legend was fabricated through fraudulent
"written affidavits". Although only 240
witnesses were called in the course of the
Trials, no less than 300,000 of these "written
affidavits" were accepted by the Court as
supporting the charges, without this evidence
being heard under oath. Under these
circumstances, any Jewish deportee or camp
inmate could make any revengeful allegation that
he pleased. Most incredible of all, perhaps, was
the fact that defence lawyers at Nuremberg were
not permitted to cross-examine prosecution
witnesses. A somewhat similar situation
prevailed at the trial of Adolf Eichmann, when
it was announced that Eichmann's defence lawyer
could be cancelled at any time "if an
intolerable situation should arise," which
presumably meant if his lawyer started to prove
his innocence. The real background of the
Nuremberg Trials was exposed by the American
judge, Justice Wenersturm, President of one of
Tribunals. He was so disgusted by the
proceedings that he resigned his appointment and
flew home to America, leaving behind a statement
to the Chicago Tribune which ennumerated point
by point his objections to the Trials (cf Mark
Lautern, Das Letzte Wort über
Nürnberg, p. 56). Points 3 -8 are as
follows: 3. The members of the department of the
Public Prosecutor, instead of trying to
formulate and reach a new guiding legal
principle, were moved only by personal ambition
and revenge. 4. The prosecution did its utmost
in every way possible to prevent the defence
preparing its case and to make it impossible for
it to furnish evidence. 5. The prosecution, led
by General Taylor, did everything in its power
to prevent the unanimous decision of the
Military Court being carried out i.e. to ask
Washington to furnish and make available to the
court further documentary evidence in the
possession of the American Government. 6. Ninety
per cent of the Nuremberg Court consisted of
biased persons who, either on political or
racial grounds, furthered the prosecution's
case. 7. The prosecution obviously knew how to
fill all the administrative posts of the
Military Court with "Americans" whose
naturalisation certificates were very new
indeed, and who, whether in the administrative
service or by their translations etc., created
an atmposhere hostile to the accused persons. 8.
The real aim of the Nuremberg Trials was to show
the Germans the crimes of their Führer, and
this aim was at the same time the pretext on
which the trials were ordered . . . Had I known
seven months earlier what was happening at
Nuremberg, I would never have gone there.
Concerning Point 6, that ninety per cent of the
Nuremberg Court consisted of people biased on
racial or political grounds, this was a fact
confirmed by others present. According to Earl
Carrol, an American lawyer, sixty per cent of
the staff of the Public Prosecutor's Office were
German Jews who had left Germany after the
promulgation of Hitler's Race Laws. He observed
that not even ten per cent of the Americans
employed at the Nuremberg courts were actually
Americans by birth. The chief of the Public
Prosecutor's Office, who worked behind General
Taylor, was Robert M. Kempner, a German-Jewish
emigrant. He was assisted by Morris Amchan. Mark
Lautern, who observed the Trials, writes in his
book: "They have all arrived: the Solomons, the
Schlossbergers and the Rabinovitches, members of
the Public Prosecutor's staff . . ." (ibid. p.
68). It is obvious from these facts that the
fundamental legal principle: that no man can sit
in judgement on his own case, was abandoned
altogether. Moreover, the majority of witnesses
were also Jews. According to Prof. Maurice
Bardeche, who was also an observer at the
Trials, the only concern of these witnesses was
not to show their hatred too openly, and to try
and give an impression of objectivity (Nuremberg
ou la Terre Promise, Paris, 1948, p.
149).
'CONFESSIONS'
UNDER TORTURE
Altogether more
disturbing, however, were the methods employed
to extract statements and "confessions" at
Nuremberg, particularly those from S.S. officers
which were used to support the extermination
charge. The American Senator, Joseph McCarthy,
in a statement given to the American Press on
May 20th, 1949, drew attention to the following
cases of torture to secure such confessions. In
the prison of the Swabisch Hall, he stated,
officers of the S.S. Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler
were flogged until they were soaked in blood,
after which their sexual organs were trampled on
as they lay prostrate on the ground. As in the
notorious Malmedy Trials of private soldiers,
the prisoners were hoisted in the air and beaten
until they signed the confessions demanded of
them. On the basis of such "confessions"
extorted from S.S. Generals Sepp Dietrich and
Joachim Paiper, the Leibstandarte was convicted
as a "guilty organisation". S.S. General Oswald
Pohl, the economic administrator of the
concentration camp system, had his face smeared
with faeces and was subsequently beaten until he
supplied his confession. In dealing with these
cases, Senator McCarthy told the Press: "I have
heard evidence and read documentary proofs to
the effect that the accused persons were beaten
up, maltreated and physically tortured by
methods which could only be conceived in sick
brains. They were subjected to mock trials and
pretended executions, they were told their
families would be deprived of their ration
cards. All these things were carried out with
the approval of the Public Prosecutor in order
to secure the psychological atmosphere necessary
for the extortion of the required confessions.
If the United States lets such acts committed by
a few people go unpunished, then the whole world
can rightly criticise us severely and forever
doubt the correctness of our motives and our
moral integrity." The methods of intimidation
described were repeated during trials at
Frankfurt-am-Mein and at Dachau, and large
numbers of Germans were convicted for atrocities
on the basis of their admissions. The American
Judge Edward L. van Roden, one of the three
members of the Simpson Army Commission which was
subsequently appointed to investigate the
methods of justice at the Dachau trials,
revealed the methods by which these admissions
were secured in the Washington Daily News,
January 9th, 1949. His account also appeared in
the British newspaper, the Sunday Pictorial,
January 23rd, 1949. The methods he described
were: "Posturing as priests to hear confessions
and give absolution; torture with burning
matches driven under the prisoners finger-nails;
knocking out of teeth and breaking jaws;
solitary confinement and near starvation
rations." Van Roden explained: "The statements
which were admitted as evidence were obtained
from men who had first been kept in solitary
confinement for three, four and five months . .
. The investigators would put a black hood over
the accused's head and then punch him in the
face with brass knuckles, kick him and beat him
with rubber hoses . . . All but two of the
Germans, in the 139 cases we investigated, had
been kicked in the testicles beyond repair. This
was standard operating procedure with our
American investigators." The "American"
investigators responsible (and who later
functioned as the prosecution in the trials)
were: Lt.-Col. Burton F. Ellis (chief of the War
Crimes Committee) and his assistants, Capt.
Raphael Shumacker, Lt. Robert E. Byrne, Lt.
William R. Perl, Mr. Morris Ellowitz, Mr. Harry
Thon, and Mr. Kirschbaum. The legal adviser of
the court was Col. A. H. Rosenfeld. The reader
will immediately appreciate from their names
that the majority of these people were "biased
on racial grounds" in the words of Justice
Wenersturm - that is, were Jewish, and therefore
should never have been involved in any such
investigation. Despite the fact that
"confessions" pertaining to the extemination of
the Jews were extracted under these conditions,
Nuremberg statements are still regarded as
conclusive evidence for the Six Million by
writers like Reitlinger and others, and the
illusion is maintained that the Trials were both
impartial and impeccably fair. When General
Taylor, the Chief Public Prosecutor, was asked
where he had obtained the figure of the Six
Million, he replied that it was based on the
confession of S.S. General Otto Ohlendorf. He,
too, was tortured and his case is examined
below. But as far as such "confessions" in
general are concerned, we can do no better than
quote the British Sunday Pictorial when
reviewing the report of Judge van Roden: "Strong
men were reduced to broken wrecks ready to
mumble any admission demanded by their
prosecutors."
THE WISLICENY
STATEMENT
At this point, let us
turn to some of the Nuremberg documents
themselves. The document quoted most frequently
in support of the legend of the Six Million, and
which figures largely in Poliakov and Wulf's Das
Dritte Reich und die Juden: Dokumente und
Aufsätze, is the statement of S.S. Captain
Dieter Wisliceny, an assistant in Adolf
Eichmann's office and later the Gestapo chief in
Slovakia. It was obtained under conditions even
more extreme than those described above, for
Wisliceny fell into the hands of Czech
Communists and was "interrogated" at the
Soviet-controlled Bratislava Prison in November,
1946. Subjected to torture, Wisliceny was
reduced to a nervous wreck and became addicted
to uncontrollable fits of sobbing for hours on
end prior to his execution. Although the
conditions under which his statement was
obtained empty it entirely of all pIausibility,
Poliakov prefers to ignore this and merely
writes: "In prison he wrote several memoirs that
contain information of great interest" (Harvest
of Hate, p. 3). These memoirs include some
genuine statements of fact to provide
authenticity, such as that Himmler was an
enthusiastic advocate of Jewish emigration and
that the emigration of Jews from Europe
continued throughout the war, but in general
they are typical of the Communist-style
"confession" produced at Soviet show-trials.
Frequent reference is made to exterminating Jews
and a flagrant attempt is made to implicate as
many S.S. leaders as possible. Factual errors
are also common, notably the statement that the
war with Poland added more than 3 million Jews
to the German-occupied territory, which we have
disproved above.
THE CASE OF THE
EINSATZGRUPPEN
The Wisliceny statement
deals at some length with the activities of the
Einsatzgruppen or Action Groups used in the
Russian campaign. These must merit a detailed
consideration in a survey of Nuremberg because
the picture presented of them at the Trials
represents a kind of "Six Million" in miniature,
i.e. has been proved since to be the most
enormous exaggeration and falsification. The
Einsatzgruppen were four special units drawn
from the Gestapo and the S.D. (S.S. Security
Service) whose task was to wipe out partisans
and Communist commissars in the wake of the
advancing German armies in Russia. As early as
1939, there had been 34,000 of these political
commissars attached to the Red Army. The
activities of the Einsatzgruppen were the
particular concern of the Soviet Prosecutor
Rudenko at the Nuremberg Trials. The 1947
indictment of the four groups alleged that in
the course of their operations they had killed
not less than one million Jews in Russia merely
because they were Jews. These allegations have
since been elaborated; it is now claimed that
the murder of Soviet Jews by the Einsatzgruppen
constituted Phase One in the plan to exterminate
the Jews, Phase Two being the transportation of
European Jews to Poland. Reitlinger admits that
the original term "final solution" referred to
emigration and had nothing to do with the
liquidation of Jews, but he then claims that an
extermination policy began at the time of the
invasion of Russia in 1941. He considers
Hitler's order of July 1941 for the liquidation
of the Communist commissars, and he concludes
that this was accompanied by a verbal order from
Hitler for the Einsatzgruppen to liquidate all
Soviet Jews (Die Endlösung, p. 91). If this
assumption is based on anything at all, it is
probably the worthless Wisliceny statement,
which alleges that the Einsatzgruppen were soon
receiving orders to extend their task of
crushing Communists and partisans to a "general
massacre" of Russian Jews. It is very
significant that, once again, it is a "verbal
order" for exterminating Jews that is supposed
to have accompanied Hitler's genuine, written
order - yet another nebulous and unprovable
assumption on the part of Reitlinger. An earlier
order from Hitler, dated March 1941 and signed
by Field Marshal Keitel, makes it quite clear
what the real tasks of the future Einsatzgruppen
would be. It states that in the Russian
campaign, the Reichsfüher S.S. (Himmler) is
to be entrusted with "tasks for the political
administration, tasks which result from the
struggle which has to be carried out between two
opposing political systems" (Manvell and Frankl,
ibid., p. 115). This plainly refers to
eliminating Communism, especially the political
commissars whose specific task was Communist
indoctrination.
THE OHLENDORF
TRIAL
The most revealing
trial in the "Einsatzgruppen Case" at Nuremberg
was that of S.S. General Otto Ohlendorf, the
chief of the S.D. who commanded Einsatzgruppe D
in the Ukraine, attached to Field Marshal von
Manstein's Eleventh Army. During the last phase
of the war he was employed as a foreign trade
expert in the Ministry of Economics. Ohlendorf
was one of those subjected to the torture
described earlier, and in his affidavit of
November 5th, 1945 he was "persuaded" to confess
that 90,000 Jews had been killed under his
command alone. Ohlendorf did not come to trial
until 1948, long after the main Nuremberg Trial,
and by that time he was insisting that his
earlier statement had been extracted from him
under torture. In his main speech before the
Tribunal, Ohlendorf took the opportunity to
denounce Philip Auerbach, the Jewish
attorney-general of the Bavarian State Office
for Restitution, who at that time was claiming
compensation for "eleven million Jews" who had
suffered in German concentration camps.
Ohlendorf dismissed this ridiculous claim,
stating that "not the minutest part" of the
people for whom Auerbach was demanding
compensation had even seen a concentration camp.
Ohlendorf lived long enough to see Auerbach
convicted for embezzlement and fraud (forging
documents purporting to show huge payments of
compensation to non-existent people) before his
own execution finally took place in 1951.
Ohlendorf explained to the Tribunal that his
units often had to prevent massacres of Jews
organised by anti-Semitic Ukrainians behind the
German front, and he denied that the
Einsatzgruppen as a whole had inflicted even one
quarter of the casualties claimed by the
prosecution. He insisted that the illegal
partisan warfare in Russia, which he had to
combat, had taken a far higher toll of lives
from the regular German army - an assertion
confirmed by the Soviet Government, which
boasted of 500,000 German troops killed by
partisans. In fact, Franz Stahlecker, commander
of Einsatzgruppe A in the Baltic region and
White Russia, was himself killed by partisans in
1942. The English jurist F. J. P. Veale, in
dealing with the Action Groups, explains that in
the fighting on the Russian front no distinction
could be properly drawn between partisans and
the civilian population, because any Russian
civilian who maintained his civilian status
instead of acting as a terrorist was liable to
be executed by his countrymen as a traitor.
Veale says of the Action Groups: "There is no
question that their orders were to combat terror
by terror", and he finds it strange that
atrocities committed by the partisans in the
struggle were regarded as blameless simply
because they turned out to be on the winning
side (ibid. p. 223). Ohlendorf took the same
view, and in a bitter appeal written before his
execution, he accused the Allies of hypocrisy in
holding the Germans to account by conventional
laws of warfare while fighting a savage Soviet
enemy who did not respect those laws.
ACTION GROUP
EXECUTIONS DISTORTED
The Soviet charge that
the Action Groups had wantonly exterminated a
million Jews during their operations has been
shown subsequently to be a massive
falsification. In fact, there had never been the
slightest statistical basis for the figure. In
this connection, Poliakov and Wulf cite the
statement of Wilhelm Hoettl, the dubious
American spy, double agent and former assistant
of Eichmann. Hoettl, it will be remembered,
claimed that Eichmann had "told him " that six
million Jews had been exterminated - and he
added that two million of these had been killed
by the Einsatzgruppen. This absurd figure went
beyond even the wildest estimates of Soviet
Prosecutor Rudenko, and it was not.given any
credence by the American Tribunal which tried
and condemned Ohlendorf. The real number of
casualties for which the Action Groups were
responsible has since been revealed in the
scholarly work Manstein, his Campaigns and his
Trial (London, 1951), by the able English lawyer
R. T. Paget. Ohlendorf had been under Manstein's
nominal command. Paget's conclusion is that the
Nuremberg Court, in accepting the figures of the
Soviet prosecution, exaggerated the number of
casualties by more than 1000 per cent and that
they distorted even more the situations in which
these casualties were infiicted. (These horrific
distortions are the subject of six pages of
William Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third
Reich, pp. 1140-46). Here, then, is the
legendary 6 million in miniature; not one
million deaths, but one hundred thousand. Of
course, only a small proportion of these could
have been Jewish partisans and Communist
functionaries. It is worth repeating that these
casualties were inflicted during savage partisan
warfare on the Eastern front, and that Soviet
terrorists claim to have killed five times that
number of German troops. It has nevertheless
remained a popular myth that the extermination
of the Jews began with the actions of the
Einsatzgruppen in Russia. In conclusion, we may
briefly survey the Manstein trial itself,
typical in so many ways of Nuremberg
proceedings. Principally because Action Group D
was attached to Manstein's command (though it
was responsible solely to Himmler), the
sixty-two year old, invalid Field Marshal,
considered by most authorities to be the most
brilliant German general of the war, was
subjected to the shameful indignity of a
"war-crimes" trial. Of the 17 charges, 15 were
brought by the Communist Russian Government and
two by the Communist Polish Government. Only one
witness was called to give evidence at this
trial, and he proved so unsatisfactory that the
prosecution withdrew his evidence. Reliance was
placed instead on 800 hearsay documents which
were accepted by the court without any proof of
their authenticity or authorship. The
prosecution introduced written affidavits by
Ohlendorf and other S.S. Leaders, but since
these men were still alive, Manstein's
defence.lawyer Reginald Paget K.C. demanded
their appearance in the witness-box. This was
refused by the American authorities, and Paget
declared that this refusal was due to fear lest
the condemned men revealed what methods had been
used to induce them to sign their affidavits.
Manstein was eventually acquitted on eight of
the charges, including the two Polish ones
which, as Paget said, "were so flagrantly bogus
that one was left wondering why they had been
presented at all."
THE OSWALD POHL
TRIAL
The case of the Action
Groups is a revealing insight into the methods
of the Nuremberg Trials and the fabrication of
the Myth of the Six Million. Another is the
trial of Oswald Pohl in 1948, which is of great
importance as it bears directly on the
administration of the concentration camp system.
Pohl had been the chief disbursing officer of
the German Navy until 1934, when Himmler
requested his transfer to the S.S. For eleven
years he was the principal administrative chief
of the entire S.S. in his position as head of
the S.S. Economy and Administration Office,
which after 1941 was concerned with the
industrial productivity of the concentration
camp system. A peak point of hypocrisy was
reached at the trial when. the prosecution said
to Pohl that "had Germany rested content with
the exclusion of Jews from her own territory,
with denying them German citizenship, with
excluding them from public office, or any like
domestic regulation, no other nation could have
been heard to complain." The truth is that
Germany was bombarded with insults and economic
sanctions for doing precisely these things, and
her internal measures against the Jews were
certainly a major cause of the declaration of
war against Germany by the democracies. Oswald
Pohl was an extremely sensitive and intellectual
individual who was reduced to a broken man in
the course of his trial. As Senator McCarthy
pointed out, Pohl had signed some incriminating
statements after being subjected to severe
torture, including a bogus admission that he had
seen a gas chamber at Auschwitz in the summer of
1944. The prosecution strenuously pressed this
charge, but Pohl successfully repudiated it. The
aim of the prosecution was to depict this
dejected man as a veritable fiend in human
shape, an impression hopelessly at variance with
the testimony of those who knew him . Such
testimony was given by Heinrich Hoepker, an
anti- Nazi friend of Pohl's wife who came into
frequent contact with him during the period
1942-45. Hoepker noted that Pohl was essentially
a serene and mild-mannered person. During a
visit to Pohl in the spring of 1944, Hoepker was
brought into contact with concentration camp
inmates who were working on a local project
outside the camp area. He noted that the
prisoners worked in a leisurely manner and
relaxed atmosphere without any pressure from
their guards. Hoepker declared that Pohl did not
hold an emotional attitude to the Jews, and did
not object to his wife entertaining her Jewish
friend Annemarie Jacques at their home. By the
beginning of 1945, Hoepker was fully convinced
that the administrator of the concentration
camps was a humane, conscientious and dedicated
servant of his task, and he was astonished when
he heard later in 1945 of the accusations being
made against Pohl and his colleagues. Frau Pohl
noted that her husband retained his serenity in
the face of adversity until March 1945, when he
visited the camp at Bergen- Belsen at the time
of the typhus epidemic there. Hitherto the camp
had been a model of cleanliness and order, but
the chaotic conditions at the close of the war
had reduced it to a state of extreme hardship.
Pohl, who was unable to alleviate conditions
there because of the desperate pass which the
war had reached by that time, was deeply
affected by the experience and, according to his
wife, never regained his former state of
composure. Dr. Alfred Seidl, the highly
respected lawyer who acted as principal defence
counsel at the Nuremberg Trials, went to work
passionately to secure the acquittal of Pohl.
Seidl had been a personal friend of the accused
for many years, and was thoroughly convinced of
his innocence with respect to the fraudulent
charge of planned genocide against the Jews. The
Allied judgement which condemned Pohl did not
prompt Seidl to change his opinion in the
slightest. He declared that the prosecution had
failed to produce a single piece of valid
evidence against him. One of the most eloquent
defences of Oswald Pohl was made by S.S.
Lieutenant Colonel Kurt Schmidt-Klevenow, a
legal officer in the S.S. Economy and
Administration Office, in his affidavit of
August 8th, 1947. This affidavit has been
deliberately omitted from the published
documents known as Trials of the War Criminals
before the Nuremberg Military Tribunals 1946
-1949. Schmidt-Klevenow pointed out that Pohl
had given his fullest support to Judge Konrad
Morgen of the Reich Criminal Police Office,
whose job was to investigate irregularities at
the concentration camps. Later on we shall refer
to a case in which Pohl was in favour of the
death penalty for camp commandant Koch, who was
accused by an S.S. court of misconduct. Schmidt-
Klevenow explained that Pohl was instrumental in
arranging for local police chiefs to share in
the jurisdiction of concentration camps, and
took personal initiative in securing strict
discipline on the part of camp personnel. In
short, the evidence given at the Pohl trial
shows that the proceedings involved nothing less
than the deliberate defamation of a man's
character in order to support the propaganda
legend of genocide against the Jews in the
concentration camps he administered.
FALSIFIED
EVIDENCE AND FRAUDULENT AFFIDAVITS
Spurious testimony at
Nuremberg which included extravagant statements
in support of the myth of the Six Million was
invariably given by former German officers
because of pressure, either severe torture as in
the cases cited previously, or the assurance of
leniency for themselves if they supplied the
required statements. An example of the latter
was the testimony of S.S. General Erich von dem
Bach-Zelewski. He was threatened with execution
himself because of his suppression of the revolt
by Polish partisans at Warsaw in August 1944,
which he carried out with his S.S. brigade of
White Russians. He was therefore prepared to be
"co-operative". The evidence of Bach-Zelewski
constituted the basis of the testimony against
the Reichsführer of the S.S. Heinrich
Himmler at the main Nuremberg Trial (Trial of
the Major War Criminals, Vol. IV, pp, 29, 36).
In March 1941, on the eve of the invasion of
Russia, Himmler invited the Higher S.S. Leaders
to his Castle at Wewelsburg for a conference,
including Bach-Zelewski who was an expert on
partisan warfare. In his Nuremberg evidence, he
depicted Himmler speaking in grandiose terms at
this conference about the liquidation of peoples
in Eastern Europe, but Goering, in the
courtroom, denounced Bach-Zelewski to his face
for the falsity of this testimony. An especially
outrageous allegation concerned a supposed
declaration by Himmler that one of the aims of
the Russian campaign was to "decimate the Slav
population by thirty millions." What Himmler
really said is given by his Chief of Staff,
Wolff - that war in Russia was certain to result
in millions of dead (Manvell and Frankl, ibid.
p. 117). Another brazen falsehood was
Bach-Zelewski's accusation that on August 31st,
1942 Himmler personally witnessed the execution
of one hundred Jews by an Einsatz detachment at
Minsk, causing him to nearly faint. It is known,
however, that on this date Himmler was in
conference at his field headquarters at Zhitomir
in the Ukraine (cf K. Vowinckel, Die Wehrmacht
im Kampf, vol. 4, p. 275). Much is made of
Bach-Zelewski's evidence in all the books on
Himmler, especially Willi Frischauer's Himmler:
Evil Genius of the Third Reich (London, 1953, p.
148 ff). However, in April 1959, Bach-Zelewski
publicly repudiated his Nuremberg testimony
before a West German court. He admitted that his
earlier statements had not the slightest
foundation in fact, and that he had made them
for the sake of expediency and his own survival.
The German court, after careful deliberation,
accepted his retraction. Needless to say, what
Veale calls the "Iron Curtain of Discreet
Silence" descended immediately over these
events. They have had no influence whatever on
the books which propagate the myth of the Six
Million, and Bach-Zelewski's testimony on
Himmler is still taken at its face value. The
truth concerning Himmler is provided ironically
by an anti-Nazi - Felix Kersten, his physician
and masseur. Because Kersten was opposed to the
regime, he tends to support the legend that the
internment of Jews meant their extermination.
But from his close personal knowledge of Himmler
he cannot help but tell the truth concerning
him, and in his Memoirs 1940-1945 (London, 1956,
p. 119 ff) he is emphatic in stating that
Heinrich Himmler did not advocate liquidating
the Jews but favoured their emigration overseas.
Neither does Kersten implicate Hitler. However,
the credibility of his anti-Nazi narrative is
completely shattered when, in search of an
alternative villain, he declares that Dr.
Goebbels was the real advocate of
"extermination". This nonsensical allegation is
amply disproved by the fact that Goebbels was
still concerned with the Madagascar project even
after it had been temporarily shelved by the
German Foreign Office, as we showed earlier. So
much for false evidence at Nuremberg. Reference
has also been made to the thousands of
fraudulent "written affidavits" which were
accepted by the Nuremberg Court without any
attempt to ascertain the authenticity of their
contents or even their authorship. These hearsay
documents, often of the most bizarre kind, were
introduced as "evidence" so long as they bore
the required signature. A typical prosecution
affidavit contested by the defence in the
Concentration Camp Trial of 1947 was that of
Alois Hoellriegel, a member of the camp
personnel at Mauthausen in Austria. This
affidavit, which the defence proved was
fabricated during Hoellriegel's torture, had
already been used to secure the conviction of
S.S. General Ernst Kaltenbrunner in 1946. It
claimed that a mass gassing operation had taken
place at Mauthausen and that Hoellriegel had
witnessed Kaltenbrunner ( the highest S.S.
Leader in the Reich excepting Himmler) actually
taking part in it. By the time of the
Concentration Camp Trial (Pohl's trial) a year
later, it had become impossible to sustain this
piece of nonsense when it was produced in court
again. The defence not only demonstrated that
the affidavit was falsified, but showed that all
deaths at Mauthausen were systematically checked
by the local police authorities. They were also
entered on a camp register, and particular
embarrassment was caused to the prosecution when
the Mauthausen register, one of the few that
survived, was produced in evidence. The defence
also obtained numerous affidavits from former
inmates of Mauthausen (a prison camp chiefly for
criminals) testifying to humane and orderly
conditions there.
ALLIED
ACCUSATIONS DISBELIEVED
There is no more
eloquent testimony to the tragedy and tyranny of
Nuremberg than the pathetic astonishment or
outraged disbelief of the accused persons
themselves at the grotesque charges made against
them. Such is reflected in the affidavit of S.S.
Major-General Heinz Fanslau, who visited most of
the German concentration camps during the last
years of the war. AIthough a front line soldier
of the Waffen S.S., Fanslau had taken a great
interest in concentration camp conditions, and
he was selected as a prime target by the Allies
for the charge of conspiracy to annihilate the
Jews. It was argued, on the basis of his many
contacts, that he must have been fully involved.
When it was first rumoured that he would be
tried and convicted, hundreds of affidavits were
produced on his behalf by camp inmates he had
visited. When he read the full scope of the
indictment against the concentration camp
personnel in supplementary Nuremberg Trial No. 4
on May 6th, 1947, Fanslau declared in disbelief:
"This cannot be possible, because I, too, would
have had to know something about it." It should
be emphasised that throughout the Nuremberg
proceedings, the German leaders on trial never
believed for a moment the allegations of the
Allied prosecution. Hermann Goering, who was
exposed to the full brunt of the Nuremberg
atrocity propaganda, failed to be convinced by
it. Hans Fritzsche, on trial as the highest
functionary of Goebbels' Ministry, relates that
Goering, even after hearing the Ohlendorf
affidavit on the Einsatzgruppen and the Hoess
testimony on Auschwitz, remained convinced that
the extermination of Jews was entirely
propaganda fiction (The Sword in the Scales,
London, 1953, p. 145). At one point during the
trial, Goering declared rather cogently that the
first time he had heard of it "was right here in
Nuremberg" (Shirer, ibid. p. 1147). The Jewish
writers Poliakov, Reitlinger and Manvell and
Frankl all attempt to implicate Goering in this
supposed extermination, but Charles Bewley in
his work Hermann Goering (Goettingen, 1956)
shows that not the slightest evidence was found
at Nuremberg to substantiate this charge. Hans
Fritzsche pondered on the whole question during
the trials, and he concluded that there had
certainly been no thorough investigation of
these monstrous charges. Fritzsche, who was
acquitted, was an associate of Goebbels and a
skilled propagandist. He recognised that the
alleged massacre of the Jews was the main point
of the indictment against all defendants.
Kaltenbrunner, who succeeded Heydrich as chief
of the Reich Security Head Office and was the
main defendant for the S.S. due to the death of
Himmler, was no more convinced of the genocide
charges than was Goering. He confided to
Fritzsche that the prosecution was scoring
apparent successes because of their technique of
coercing witnesses and suppressing evidence,
which was precisely the accusation of Judges
Wenersturm and van Roden.
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