Did Six Million Really
Die?
By Richard E.
Harwood
4
THE SIX MILLION:
DOCUMENTARY EVIDENCE
From the foregoing it would seem certain
that the figure of six million murdered Jews amounts to nothing more
than a vague compromise between several quite baseless estimates;
there is not a shred of documentary evidence for it that is
trustworthy. Occasionally, writers narrow it down to give a disarming
appearance of authenticity. Lord Russell of Liverpool, for example,
in his The Scourge of the Swastika (London, 1954) claimed that "not
less than five million" Jews died in German concentration camps,
having satisfied himself that he was somewhere between those who
estimated 6 million and those who preferred 4 million. But, he
admitted, "the real number will never be known." If so, it is
difficult to know how he could have asserted "not less than five
million." The Joint Distribution Committee favours 5,012,000, but the
Jewish "expert" Reitlinger suggests a novel figure of 4,192,200
"missing Jews" of whom an estimated one third died of natural causes.
This would reduce the number deliberately "exterminated" to
2,796,000. However, Dr. M. Perlzweig, the New York delegate to a
World Jewish Congress press conference held at Geneva in 1948 stated:
"The price of the downfall of National Socialism and Fascism is the
fact that seven million Jews lost their lives thanks to cruel
Anti-Semitism." In the Press and elsewhere, the figure is often
casually lifted to eight million or sometimes even nine million. As
we have proved in the previous chapter, none of these figures are in
the remotest degree plausible, indeed, they are
ridiculous.
FANTASTIC EXAGGERATIONS
So far as is known, the first accusation
against the Germans of the mass murder of Jews in war-time Europe was
made by the Polish Jew Rafael Lemkin in his book Axis Rule in
Occupied Europe, published in New York in 1943. Somewhat
coincidentally, Lemkin was later to draw up the U.N. Genocide
Convention, which seeks to outlaw "racialism". His book claimed that
the Nazis had destroyed millions of Jews, perhaps as many as six
millions. This, by 1943, would have been remarkable indeed, since the
action was allegedly started only in the summer of 1942. At such a
rate, the entire world Jewish population would have been exterminated
by 1945. After the war, propaganda estimates spiralled to heights
even more fantastic. Kurt Gerstein, an anti-Nazi who claimed to have
infiltrated the S.S., told the French interrogator Raymond Cartier
that he knew that no less than forty million concentration camp
internees had been gassed. In his first signed memorandum of April
26th, 1945, he reduced the figure to 25 million, but even this was
too bizarre for French Intelligence and in his second memorandum,
signed at Rottweil on May 4th, 1945, he brought the figure closer to
the six million preferred at the Nuremberg Trials. Gerstein's sister
was congenitally insane and died by euthenasia, which may well
suggest a streak of mental instability in Gerstein himself. He had,
in fact, been convicted in 1936 of sending eccentric mail through the
post. After his two "confessions" he hanged himself at Cherche Midi
prison in Paris. Gerstein alleged that during the war he passed on
information concerning the murder of Jews to the Swedish Government
through a German baron but for some inexplicable reason his report
was "filed away and forgotten". He also claimed that in August 1942
he informed the Papal nuncio in Berlin about the whole "extermination
programme", but the reverend person merely told him to "Get out." The
Gerstein statements abound with claims to have witnessed the most
gigantic mass executions (twelve thousand in a single day at Belzec),
while the second memorandum describes a visit by Hitler to a
concentration camp in Poland on June 6th, 1942 which is known never
to have taken place. Gerstein's fantastic exaggerations have done
little but discredit the whole notion of mass extermination. Indeed,
Evangelical Bishop Wilhelm Dibelius of Berlin denounced his memoranda
as "Untrustworthy" (H. Rothfels, "Augenzeugenbericht zu den
Massenvergasungen" in Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte,
April 1953). It is an incredible fact, however, that in spite of this
denunciation, the German Government in 1955 issued an edition of the
second Gerstein memorandum for distribution in German chools
(Dokumentation zur Massenvergasung, Bonn, 1955). In it they stated
that Dibelius placed his special confidence in Gerstein and that the
memoranda were "valid beyond any doubt." This is a striking example
of the way in which the baseless charge of genocide by the Nazis is
perpetuated in Germany, and directed especially to the
youth.
The story of six million Jews exterminated
during the war was given final authority at the Nuremberg Trials by
the statement of Dr. Wilhelm Hoettl. He had been an assistant of
Eichmann's, but was in fact a rather strange person in the service of
American Intelligence who had written several books under the
pseudonym of Walter Hagen. Hoettl also worked for Soviet espionage,
collaborating with two Jewish emigrants from Vienna, Perger and
Verber, who acted as U.S. officers during the preliminary inquiries
of the Nuremberg Trials. It is remarkable that the testimony of this
highly dubious person Hoettl is said to constitute the only "proof'
regarding the murder of six million Jews. In his affidavit of
November 26th, 1945 he stated, not that he knew but that Eichmann had
"told him" in August 1944 in Budapest that a total of 6 million Jews
had been exterminated. Needless to say, Eichmann never corroborated
this claim at his trial. Hoettl was working as an American spy during
the whole of the latter period of the war, and it is therefore very
odd indeed that he never gave the slightest hint to the Americans of
a policy to murder Jews, even though he worked directly under
Heydrich and Eichmann.
ABSENCE OF
EVIDENCE
It should be emphasised straight away that
there is not a single document in existence which proves that the
Germans intended to, or carried out, the deliberate murder of Jews.
In Poliakov and Wulf's Das Dritte Reich und die Juden: Dokumente und
Aufsätze (Berlin, 1955), the most that they can assemble are
statements extracted after the war from people like Hoettl, Ohlendorf
and Wisliceny, the latter under torture in a Soviet prison. In the
absence of any evidence, therefore, Poliakov is forced to write: "The
three or four people chiefly involved in drawing up the plan for
total extermination are dead, and no documents survive." This seems
very convenient. Quite obviously, both the plan and the "three or
four" people are nothing but nebulous assumptions on the part of the
writer, and are entirely unprovable. The documents which do survive,
of course, make no mention at all of extermination, so that writers
like Poliakov and Reitlinger again make the convenient assumption
that such orders were generally "verbal". Though lacking any
documentary proof, they assume that a plan to murder Jews must have
originated in 1941, coinciding with the attack on Russia. Phase one
of the plan is alleged to have involved the massacre of Soviet Jews,
a claim we shall disprove later. The rest of the programme is
supposed to have begun in March 1942, with the deportation and
concentration of European Jews in the eastern camps of the Polish
Government-General, such as the giant industrial complex at Auschwitz
near Cracow. The fantastic and quite groundless assumption throughout
is that transportation to the East, supervised by Eichmann's
department, actually meant immediate extermination in ovens on
arrival. According to Manvell and Frankl (Heinrich Himmler. London,
1965), the policy of genocide "seems to have been arrived at" after
"secret discussions" between Hitler and Himmler (p. 118), though they
fail to prove it. Reitlinger and Poliakov guess along similar
"verbal" lines, adding that no one else was allowed to be present at
these discussions, and no records were ever kept of them. This is the
purest invention, for there is not a shred of evidence that even
suggests such outlandish meetings took place. William Shirer, in his
generally wild and irresponsible book The Rise and Fall of the Third
Reich, is similarly muted on the subject of documentary proof. He
states weakly that Hitler's supposed order for the murder of Jews
"apparently was never committed to paper - at least no copy of it has
yet been unearthed. It was probably given verbally to Goering,
Himmler and Heydrich, who passed it down . . ,"(p. 1148). A typical
example of the kind of "proof' quoted in support of the extermination
legend is given by Manvell and Frankl. They cite a memorandum of 31st
July, 1941 sent by Goering to Heydrich, who headed the Reich Security
Head Office and was Himmler's deputy. Significantly, the memorandum
begins: "Supplementing the task that was assigned to you on 24th
January 1939, to solve the Jewish problem by means of emigration and
evacuation in the best possible way according to present conditions .
. ." The supplementary task assigned in the memorandum is a "total
solution (Gesamtlösung) of the Jewish question within the area
of German influence in Europe," which the authors admit means
concentration in the East, and it requests preparations for the
"organisational, financial and material matters" involved. The
memorandum then requests a future plan for the "desired final
solution" (Endlösung), which clearly refers to the ideal and
ultimate scheme of emigration and evacuation mentioned at the
beginning of the directive. No mention whatever is made of murdering
people, but Manvell and Frankl assure us that this is what the
memorandum is really about. Again, of course, the "true nature" of
the final as distinct from the total solution "was made known to
Heydrich by Goering verbafly" (ibid, p. 118). The convenience of
these "verbal" directives issuing back and forth is
obvious.
THE WANNSEE CONFERENCE
The final details of the plan to exterminate
Jews were supposed to have been made at a conference at Gross Wannsee
in Berlin on 20th January, 1942, presided over by Heydrich (Poliakov,
Das Dritte Reich und die Juden, p. 120 ff; Reitlinger, The Final
Solution, p. 95 ff). Officials of all German Ministries were present,
and Müller and Eichmann represented Gestapo Head Office.
Reitlinger and Manvell and Frankl consider tile minutes of this
conference to be their trump card in proving the existence of a
genocide plan, but the truth is that no such plan was even mentioned,
and what is more, they freely admit this. Manvell and Frankl explain
it away rather lamely by saying that "The minutes are shrouded in the
form of officialdom that cloaks the real significance of the words
and terminolgoy that are used" (The Incomparable Crime, London, 1967,
p. 46), which really means that they intend to interpret them in
their own way. What Heydrich actually said was that, as in the
memorandum quoted above, he had been commissioned by Goering to
arrange a solution to the Jewish problem. He reviewed the history of
Jewish emigration, stated that the war had rendered the Madagascar
project impractical, and continued: "The emigration programme has
been replaced now by the evacuation of Jews to the east as a further
possible solution, in accordance with the previous authorisation of
the Führer." Here, he explained, their labour was to be
utilised. All this is supposed to be deeply sinister, and pregnant
with the hidden meaning that the Jews were to be exterminated, though
Prof. Paul Rassinier, a Frenchman interned at Buchenwald who has done
sterling work in refuting the myth of the Six Million, explains that
it means precisely what it says, i.e. the concentration of the Jews
for labour in the immense eastern ghetto of the Polish
Government-General. "There they were to wait until the end of the
war, for the re-opening of international discussions which would
decide their future. This decision was finally reached at the
interministerial Berlin-Wannsee conference . . ." (Rassinier, Le
Véritable Proces Eichmann, p. 20). Manvell and Frankl,
however, remain undaunted by the complete lack of reference to
extermination. At the Wannsee conference, they write, "Direct
references to killing were avoided, Heydrich favouring the term
"Arbeitseinsatz im Osten" (labour assignment in the East)" (Heinrich
Himmler, p. 209). Why we should not accept labour assignment in the
East to mean labour assignment in the East is not explained.
According to Reitlinger and others, innumerable directives actually
specifying extermination then passed between Himmler, Heydrich,
Eichmann and commandant Hoess in the subsequent months of 1942, but
of course, "none have survived".
TWISTED WORDS AND
GROUNDLESS ASSUMPTIONS
The complete lack of documentary evidence to
support the existence of an extermination plan has led to the habit
of re-interpreting the documents that do survive. For example, it is
held that a document concerning deportation is not about deportation
at all, but a cunning way of talking about extermination. Manvell and
Frankl state that "various terms were used to camouflage genocide.
These included "Aussiedlung"(desettlement) and "Abbeförderung"
(removal)" (ibid, p. 265). Thus, as we have seen already, words are
no longer assumed to mean what they say if they prove too
inconvenient. This kind of thing is taken to the most incredible
extremes, such as their interpretation of Heydrich's directive for
labour assignment in the East. Another example is a reference to
Himmler's order for sending deportees to the East, "that is, having
them killed" (ibid, p. 251). Reitlinger, equally at a loss for
evidence, does exactly the same, declaring that from the
"circumlocutionary" words of the Wannsee conference it is obvious
that "the slow murder of an entire race was intended" (ibid, p. 98).
A review of the documentary situation is important, because it
reveals the edifice of guesswork and baseless assumptions upon which
the extermination legend is built. The Germans had an extraordinary
propensity for recording everything on paper in the most careful
detail, yet among the thousands of captured documents of the S.D. and
Gestapo, the records of the Reich Security Head Office, the files of
Himmler's headquarters and Hitler's own war directives there is not a
single order for the extermination of Jews or anyone else. It will be
seen later that this has, in fact, been admitted by the World Centre
of Contemporary Jewish Documentation at Tel-Aviv. Attempts to find
"veiled allusions" to genocide in speeches like that of Himmler's to
his S.S. Obergruppenführers at Posen in 1943 are likewise quite
hopeless. Nuremberg statements extracted after the war, invariably
under duress, are examined in the following chapter.
Index
Introduction
1. German policy toward the Jews prior to the
war
2. German policy toward the Jews after the outbreak
of war
3. Population and Emigration
4. The Six Million: Documentary Evidence
5. The Nuremberg Trials
6. Auschwitz and Polish Jewry
7. Some Concentration Camps Memoires
8. The Nature & Condition of War Time
Concentration Camps
9. The Jews and The Concentrations Camps: A Factual
Appraisal by the Red Cross
10. The truth at last: The work of Paul
Rassinier
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