Did Six Million Really
Die?
By Richard E.
Harwood
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).
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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