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.
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