Rightly or wrongly, the Germany of Adolf Hitler considered the Jews to be a disloyal and avaricious element within the national community, as well as a force of decadence in Germany's cultural life. This was held to be particularly unhealthy since, during the Weimar period, the Jews had risen to a position of remarkable strength and influence in the nation, particularly in law, finance and the mass media, even though they constituted only one percent of the population. The fact that Karl Marx was a Jew and that Jews such as Rosa Luxembourg and Karl Liebknecht were disproportionately prominent in the leadership of communist movements in Germany also tended to convince the Nazis of the powerful internationalist and Communist tendencies of the Jewish people.
    It is no part of the discussion here to argue whether the German attitude to the Jews was right or not, or to judge whether its legislative measures against them were just or unjust. Our concern is simply with the fact that, believing of the Jews as they did, the Nazis' solution to the problem was to deprive them of their influence within the nation by various legislative acts, and most important of all, to encourage their emigration from the country altogether. By 1939, the great majority of German Jews had emigrated, all of them with a sizeable proportion of their assets.  Never at any time had the Nazi leadership even contemplated a policy of genocide towards them.

JEWS CALLED
EMIGRATION 'EXTERMINATION' 

Zionist Policy Studied

GERMAN POLICY TOWARDS THE
JEWS AFTER THE OUTBREAK OF WAR

With the coming of the war the situation regarding the Jews altered drastically. It is not widely known that world Jewry declared itself to be a belligerent party in the Second World War, and there was therefore ample basis under international law for the Germans to intern the Jewish population as a hostile force. On September 5, 1959 Chaim Weizmann, the principal Zionist leader, had declared war against Germany on behalf of the world's Jews, stating that "the Jews stand by Great Bitain and will fight on the side of the democracies... The Jewish Agency is ready to enter into immediate arrangements for utilizing Jewish manpower, technical ability, resources etc..." (Javish Chronicle, September 8, 1939).

DETENTION OF ENEMY ALIENS 
All Jews had thus been declared agents willing to prosecute a war against the German Reich and, as a consequence, Himmler and Heydrich were eventually to begin the policy of internment. It is worth noting that the United States and Canada had already interned all Japanese aliens and citizens of Japanese descent in detention camps before the Germans applied the same security measures against the Jews of Europe. Moreover, there had been no such evidence or declaration of disloyalty by these Japanese Americans as hadbeen given by Weizmann. The British too, during the Beer War, interned all the women and children of the population and thousands had died as a result, yet in no sense could the British be charged with wanting to exterminate the Beers.
    The detention of Jews in the occupied territories of Europe served two essential purposes from the German viewpoint. The first was to prevent unrest and subversion; Himmler informed Mussolini on October 11, 1942 that German policy towards the Jews had altered during wartime entirely for reasons of military security. He complained that thousands of Jews in the occupied regions were conducting partisan warfare, sabotage and espionage, a view confirmed by official Soviet information given to Raymond Arthur Davis that no less than 35,000 European Jews were waging partisan war under Tito in Yugoslavia. As a result, Jews were to be transported to restricted areas and detention  camps,  both  in Germany, and especially after March 1942, in the Government-General of Poland.
    As the war proceeded, the policy developed of using Jewish detainees for labour in the war-effort. The question of labour is fundamental when considering the alleged plan of genocide against the Jews, for on grounds of logic alone the latter would entail the most senseless waste of manpower, time and energy while prosecuting a war of survival on two fronts. Certainly after the attack on Russia, the idea of compulsory labour had taken precedence over German plans for Jewish emigration. The protocol of a conversation between Hitler and the Hungarian regent Horthy on April 17, 1943, reveals that the German leader personally requested Horthy to release 100,000 Hungarian Jews for work in the "pursuit-plane programme" of the Luftwaffe at a time when the aerial bombardment of Germany was increasing (Reitlinger, Die Endliisung, Berlin, 1956, p. 478).  This took place at a time when, supposedly, the Germans were already seeking to exterminate the Jews, but Hitler's request clearly demonstrates the priority aim of expanding his labour force.
    In harmony with this programme, concentration camps became, in fact, industrial complexes. At every camp where Jews and other nationalities were detained, there were large industrial plants and factories supplying material for the German war-effort: the Buna rubber factory at Bergen-Belsen, for example, Buna and 1.IG. Farben Industrie at Auschwitz, and the electrical firm of Siemens at Ravensbriick. In many cases, special concentration camp money notes were issued as payment for labour, enabling prisoners to buy extra rations from camp shops. The Germans were determined to obtain the maximum economic return from the concentration camp system, an object wholly at variance with any plan to exterminate millions of people in them. It was the function of the S.S. Economy and Administation Office, headed by Oswald Pohl, to see that the concentration camps became major industrial producers.

EMIGRATION STILL FAVOURED 
It is a remarkable fact however, that well into the war period, the Germans continued to implement the policy of Jewish emigration. The fall of France in 1940 enabled the German Government to open serious negotiations with the French for the transfer of European Jews to Madagascar. A memorandum of August, 1942 from Luther, Secretary of State in the German Foreign Office, reveals that he had conducted these negotiations between July and December 1940, when they were terminated by the French. A circular from Luther's department dated August 15, 1940 shows that the details of the German plan had been worked out by Eichmann, for it is signed by his assistant, Dannecker. Eichmann had in fact been commissioned in August·to draw up a detailed Madagascar Plan, and Dannecker was employed in research on Madagascar at the French Colonial Office (Reitlinger, The Final Solution, p. 77).
The proposals of August 15 were that an inter-European bank was to finance the emigration of four million Jews by means of a phased programme. Luther's 1942 memorandum shows that Heydrich had obtained Himmler's approval of this plan before the end of August and had also submitted it to Goering. It certainly met with Hitler's approval, for as early as June 17 his interpreter, Schmidt, recalls Hitler observing to Mussolini that "One could found a State of Israel in Madagascar" (Schmidt, Hitler's Interpreter, London, 1951, p. 178).
    Although the French terminated the Madagascar negotiations in December 1940, Poliakov, the director of the Centre of Jewish Documentation in Paris, admits that the Germans nevertheless pursued the scheme and that Eichmann was still busy with it throughout 1941. Eventually however it was rendered impractical by the progress of the war, in particular by the situation after the invasion of Russia, and on February 10, 1942 the Foreign Office was informed that the plan had been temporarily shelved. This ruling, sent to the Foreign Office by Luther's assistant, Rademacher, is of great importance because it demonstrates conelusively that the term "Final Solution" meant only the emigration of Jews, and also that transportation to the eastern ghettos and concentration camps such as Auchwitz constituted nothing but an alternative plan of evacuation.
    The directive reads: "The war with the Soviet Union has in the meantime created the possibility of disposing of other territories for the Final Solution. In consequence the Fiihrer has decided that the Jews should be evacuated not to Madagascar but to the East. Madagascar need no longer therefore be considered in connection with the Final Solution" (Reitlinger, ibid. p. 79). The details of this evacuation had been discussed a month earlier at the Wannsee Conference in Berlin, which we shall examine below.
    Reitlinger and Poliakov both make the entirely unfounded supposition that because the Madagascar Plan had been shelved, the Germans must necessarily have been thinking of "extermination". Only a month later, however, on March 7, 1942, Goebbels wrote a memorandum in favour of the Madagascar Plan as a "Final Solution" of the Jewish question (Manvell & Frankl, Dr. Goebbels, London, 1960). In the meantime he approved of the Jews being "concentrated in the East". Later Goebbels' memoranda also stress deportation to the East (i.e.-the GovernmentGeneral of Poland) and lay emphasis on the need for compulsory labour there; once the policy of evacuation to the East had been inaugurated, the use of Jewish labour became a fundamental part of the operation. It is perfectly clear from the foregoing that the term "Final Solution" was applied both to Madagascar and to the Eastern territories and that therefore it meant only the deportation of the Jews.
   Even as late as May 1944 the Germans were prepared to allow the emigration of one million European Jews from Europe. An account of this proposal is given by Alexander Weissberg, a prominent Soviet Jewish scientist deported during the Stalin purges, in his book Die Geschichte von Joel Brand (Cologne, 1956). Weissberg, who spent the war in Cracow though he expected the Germans to intern him in a concentration camp, explains that on the personal authorisation of Himmler, Eichmann had sent the Budapest Jewish leader Joel Brand to Istanbul with an offer to the Allies to permit the transfer of one million Euiopean Jews in the midst of the war. (if the 'extermination' writers are to be believed, there were scarcely one million Jews left by May, 1944.) The Gestapo admitted that the transportation involved would greatly inconvenience the German war-effort but were prepared to allow it in exchange for 10,000 trucks to be used exclusively on the Russian front.
    Unfortunately, the plan came to nothing: the British concluded that Brand must be a dangerous Nazi agent and immediately imprisoned him in Cairo while the Press denounced the offer as a Nazi trick. Winston Churchill, though orating to the effect that the treatment of the Hungarian Jews was probably "the biggest and most horrible crime ever committed in the whole history of the world" nevertheless told Chaim Weizmann that acceptance of the Brand offer was impossible, since it would be a betrayal of his Russian Allies.
    Although the plan was fruitless it well illustrates that no one allegedly carrying out "thorough" extermination would permit the emigration of a million Jews and it demonstrates, too, the prime importance placed by the Germans on the war-effort.

POPULATION AND EMIGRATION

    Since statistics relating to Jewish populations are not everywhere known in precise detail, and approximations for various countries differ widely, it is unknown exactly how many Jews were deported and interned at any one time between the years 1939 - 1945.  In general, however, what reliable statistics there are, especially those relating to emigration, are sufficient to show that not a fraction of six million Jews could have been exterminated. 
    In the first place, this claim cannot remotely be upheld on examination of the European Jewish population figures. According the Chambers Enqclopaedia the total number of Jews living in Nazi Europe in 1959 was 6,500,000. Quite clearly, this would mean that almost the entire number was exterminated. But the Baseler Nachrichten, a neutral Swiss publication employing available Jewish statistical data, establishes that between 1933 and 1945 1,500,000 Jews emigrated to Britain, Sweden, Spain, Portugal, Australia, China, India, Palestine and the United States. This is confirmed by the Jewish journalist Bruno Blau, who cites the same figure in the New York Jewish paper Aufbau, August 13, 1948. Of these emigrants, approximately 400,000 came from Germany before September 1939. 
    This is acknowledged by the World Jewish Congress in its publication Unity in Dispersion (p. 377) which states that: "The majority of the German Jews succeeded in leaving Germany before the war broke out." In addition to the German Jews, 220,000 of the total 280,000 Austrian Jews had emigrated by September, 1939, while from March 1939 onwards the Institute for Jewish Emigration in Prague had secured the emigration of 260,000 Jews from former Czechoslovakia. 
    In all, only 360,000 Jews remained in Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia after September 1939. From Poland, an estimated 560,000 had emigrated prior to the outbreak of war. These figures mean that the number of Jewish emigrants from other European countries (France, the Netherlands, Italy, the counties of eastern Europe etc.) was approximately 120,000. 
    This exodus of Jews before and during hostilities, therefore, reduces the number of Jews in Europe to approximately 5,000,000. In addition to these emigrants, we must also include the number of Jews who fled to the Soviet Union after 1939, who were later evacuated beyond reach of the German invaders. It will be shown below that the majority of these, about 1,250,000, were migrants from Poland. But apart from Poland, Reitlinger admits that 300,000 other European Jews slipped into Soviet territory between 1939 and 1941. This brings the total of Jewish emigrants to the Soviet Union to about 1,550.000. In Colliers magazine, June 9, 1945, Feiling Foster, writing of the Jews in Russia, explained that "2,200,000 have migrated to the Soviet Union since 1939 to escape from the Nazis," but our lower estimate is probably more accurate. 
    Jewish migration td the Soviet Union, therefore, reduces the number of Jews within the sphere` of German occupation to around 3 and 1/2 million, approximately 3,450,000. From these should be deducted those Jews living in neutral European countries who escaped the consequences of the war.  According to the 1942 World Almanac (p. 594) the number of Jews living in Gibraltar, Britain, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Ireland and Turkey was 413,128. 

3 MILLION JEWS IN EUROPE 

   Consequently a figure of around 3 million Jews in German occupied Europe is as accurate as the available emigration statistics will allow. Approximately the same number however can be deduced in another way if we examine statistics for the Jewish populations remaining in countries occupied by the Reich. More than half of those Jews who migrated to the Soviet Union after 1939 came from Poland. 
   It is frequently claimed that the war with Poland added some 3 million Jews to the German sphere of influence and that almost the whole of this Polish Jewish population was "exterminated". This is a major factual error. The 1931 Jewish population census for Poland put the number of Jews at 2,732,600 (Reitlinger, Die Endlosung, p. 36).  Reitlinger states that at least 1,170,000 of these were in the Russian zone occupied in the autumn of 1939, about a million of whom were evacuated to the Urals and south 
Siberia after the German invasion of June 1941 (ibid. p. 50). As described above, an estimated 500,000 Jews had emigrated from Poland prior to the war. 
   Moreover the journalist Raymond Arthur Davies, who spent the war in the Soviet Union, observed that approximately 250,000 had already fled from German-occupied Poland to Russia behveen 1939 and 1941 and were to be encountered in every Soviet 
province (Odyssey through Hell, N.Y., 1946, p. 102). Subtracting these figures from the population of 2,732,600 therefore, and allowing for the normal population increase, no more than 1,100,000 Polish Jews could have been under German rule at the end of 1939 (Gutachen des Instituts fur Zeitgeschichte, Munich, 1956, p. 80). 
   To this number we may add the 360,000 Jews remaining in Germany, Austria and former Czechoslovakia (Bohemia-Moravia and Slovakia) after the extensive emigration from those countries prior to the war described above.  Of the 320,000 French Jews, the Public Prosecutor representing that part of the indictment relating to France at the Nuremberg Trials, stated that 120,000 Jews were deported, though Reitlinger estimates only about 50,000. 
    Thus the total number of Jews under Nazi rule remains below two million. Deportations from the Scandinavian countries were few and from Bulgaria none at all. When the Jewish populations of Holland (140,000), Belgium (40,000), Italy (50,000), Yugoslavia (55,000), Hungary (380,000) and Romania (725,000) are included, the figure does not much exceed 3 million. This excess is due to the fact that the latter figures were prewar estimates unaffected by emigration, which from these countries accounted for about 120,000 (see above). This cross-checking therefore confirms the estimate of approximately 3 million European Jews under German occupation. 

RUSSIAN JEWS EVACUATED  

   The precise figures concerning Russian Jews are unknown and have therefore been the subject of extreme exaggeration.  The Jewish statistician Jacob Leszczynski states that in 1939 there were 2,100,000 Jews living in future German occupied Russia i.e. western Russia. In addition, some 260,000 lived in the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. According to Loui Levine, President of the American Jewish Council for Russian Relief, who made a post-war tour of the Soviet Union and submitted a report on the status of Jews there, the majority of these number were evacuated east after the German armies launched their invasion. 
    In Chicago, on October 30, 1946, he declared that "At the outset of the war, Jews were amongst the first evacuated from the western regions threatened by the Hitlerite invaders - shipped to safety east of the Urals. Two million Jews were thus saved." This high number is confirmed by the Jewish journalist David Bergelson, who wrote in the Moscow Yiddish paper Ainikeit December 5, 1942, that "Thanks to the evacuation, the majority (80%) of the Jews in the Ukraine, White Russia, Lithuania and Latvia before the arrival of the Germans were rescued. 
   Reitlinger agrees with the Jewish authority Joseph Schechtmann who admits that huge numbers were evacuated, though he estimates a slightly higher number of Russian and Baltic Jews left under German occupation, between 650,000 and 850,000 (Reitlinger, The Final Solution, p. 499). In respect of these Soviet Jews remaining in German territory, it will be proved later that in the war in Russia no more than one hundred thousand persons were killed by the German Action Groups as partisans and Bolshevik commissars, not all of whom were Jews. By contrast, the partisans themselves claimed to have murdered five times that number of German troops. 
 

'SIX MILLION' UNTRUE SAY NEUTRAL SWISS 

   It is clear therefore that the Germans could not possibly have gained control over, or exterminated, anything like six million Jews. Excluding the Soviet Union, the number of Jews in Nazi occupied Europe after emigration was scarcely more than three million, by no means all of whom were interned. To approach the extermination of even half of six million would have meant the liquidation of every Jew living in Europe. And yet it is known that large numbers of Jews were alive in Europe after 1945. Philip Friedmann in Their Brother's Keepers (N.Y., 1957, p. 13) states that "at least a million Jews survived in the very crucible of the Nazi hell," while the official figure of the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee is 1,559,600. Thus, even if one accepts the latter estimate, the number of possible wartime Jewish deaths could not possibly have exceeded a limit of one and a half million. 
    Precisely this conclusion was reached by the reputable journal Baseler Nachrichten of neutral Switzerland.  In an article entitled "We hoch ist die Zahl der jiidischen Opfer?" ("How high is the number of Jewish victims?", June 13, 1946), it explained that purely on the basis of the population and emigration figures described above, a maximum of only one and a half million Jews could be numbered as casualties. Later on however it will be demonstrated that the number was actually far less, for the Baseler Nachrichten accepted the Joint Distribution Committee's figure of 1,559,600 survivors after the war, but we shall show that the number of claims for compensation by Jewish survivors is more than double that figure. This information was not available to the Swiss in 1946. 
 

IMPOSSIBLE BIRTH RATE 

   Indisputable evidence is also provided by the post-war world Jewish population statistics. The World Almanac of 1938 gives the number of Jews in the world as 16,588,259. But after the war the New York Times, Febuary 22, 1948, placed the number of Jews in the world at a minimum of 15,000,000 and a maximum of 18,000,000. Quite obviously, these figures make it impossible for the number of Jewish war-time casualties to be measured in anything but thousands. Fifteen and a half million in 1938 minus the alleged six million leaves nine million; the New York Times figures would mean, therefore, that the world's Jews produced seven million births, almost doubling their numbers, in the space of ten years. This is patently ridiculous. 
    It would appear therefore that the great majority of the missing "six million" were in fact emigrants - emigrants to European countries, to the Soviet Union and the United States before, during and after the war. And emigrants also, in vast numbers to Palestine during and especially at the end of the war. After 1945 boat-loads of Jewish survivors entered Palestine illegally from Europe, causing considerable embarrassment to the British Government of the time; indeed, so great were the numbers that H.M. Stationery Office publication No. 190 (November 5, 1946) described them as "almost.amounting to a second Exodus." It was these emigrants to all parts of the world who had swollen the world Jewish population to between 15 and 18 millions by 1948, 
and probably the greatest part of them were emigrants to the United States who entered in violation of the quota laws. 
    On August 16, 1963 David Ben Gurion, President of Israel, stated that although the official Jewish population of America was said to be 5,600,000, "the total number would not be estimated too high at 9,000,000" (Deutsche Wochenzeitung, Novemher 23, 1963). The reason for this high figure is underlined by Albert Maisal in his article "Our Newest Americans" (Readers Digest, January, 1957) for he reveals that "Soon after World War II, by Presidential decree, 90 per cent of all quota visas for central and eastern Europe were issued to the uprooted." Reproduced on the prior page is just one extract from hundreds that regularly appear in the obituary columns of Aufbau, the Jewish American weekly published in New York (June 16, 1972). It shows how Jewish emigrants to the United States subsequently changed their names; their former names when in Europe appear in brackets. For example, as shown: Arthur Kingsley (formerly Dr. Konigsberger of Frankfurt). Could it be that some or all of these people whose names are 'deceased' were included in the missing six million of Europe? 
 

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 six million and those who preferred four million. But, he admitted, "the real number will never be known"(p. 159). 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 

   One of the first accusations 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 1944. Somewhat coincidentally, Lemkin 
was later to draw up the U.N. Genocide Convention, which seeks to outlaw "racialism". On page 89 of his book he quotes a 1943 publication of the Institute of Jewish Affairs of the American Jewish Congress Hitler's Ten-Year war on the Jaus, that 1,702.300 Jews had been murdered. To be published in 1943 this last book must have been written in 1942 so this figure would have been remarkable indeed, since the action was allegedly started only in the summer of 1942. At such a rate almost 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 no less than forty million concentration camp internees had been gassed. In his first signed memorandum of April 26, 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 4, 1945, he brought the figure 
closer to the six million preferred at the Nuremburg Trials. Gerstein's sister-in-law was congenitally insane and died by euthanasia. His own behaviour might well suggest a streak of mental instability. He had, in fact, been convicted in 1936 of sending eccentric mail through the post. Aiter 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 6, 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 fiir 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 schools (Dokumentation zur Massenvergarung, 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 Hoenl is said to constitute the only "proof' regarding the murder of six million Jews. In his affidavit of November 26, 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 Aufsatze (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 me 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 31 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 24 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 (Gesamtlosung) 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" (Endlosung), 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 verbally" (ibid, p. 1l8). The convenience of these "verbal" directives issuing back and forth is obvious. 

THE WANNSEE CONFERENCE T`he final details of the plan to exterminate Jews were supposed to have been made at a conference at Grosse Wannsee in Berlin on 20 January 1942, presided over by Heydrich (Poliakov, Das Dritte Reich und die Juden, p. 120$; Reitlinger, The Final Solution, p. 95~1. Officials of all German Ministries were present, and Miiller and Eichmann represented Gestapo Head Offrce. Reitlinger and Manvell and FranM consider fhe 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 terminology 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 authorisatian of the Fiihrer." 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 inter-ministerial Berlin-Wannsee conference..." (Rassinier, Le Ve'ritable Procds 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). 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 ASS~TMPTIONS 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" (resettlement) and "Abbefiirderung" (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 Manvell and Frankl's 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 TelAviv. Attempts to find "veiled allusions" to genocide in speeches like that of Himmler's to his S.S. Obergruppenfiihrers at Posen in 1943 are likewise quite hopeless. Nuremberg statements extracted after the war, invariably under duress, are examined in the following chapter.

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 vials, which as Field Marshal Montgomery said, made it a crime to lose a war, the reader is referred to the works cited below, and particularly to the out-standing book Advance to Barbarism Nelson, 1953) by the distinguished English lawyer 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 20, 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 victors were putting on trial the vanquished. (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. "Nuila Poena Sine Legi." 
   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 practice 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 the defendants personally 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 Wenerstrum, President of one of the 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 enumerated point by point his objections  to the Tiials (cf Mark Lautem, Das Letzte Wort iiber Nurnberg, 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 percent 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 atmosphere hostile to the accused persons. 
8.   The real aim of the Nuremberg Trials was to show the Germans the crimes of their Fiihrer, 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 percent 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 percent 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. Worse, the majority of witnesses were also Jews, when only a minority of the concentration camp inmates had been Jewish. According to Prof. Maurice Bardache, 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 20, 1949, drew attention to the following cases of torture to secure such confessions. 
    In the prison of 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 Peiper, the Leibstandarte was convicted as a 'guilty organisation'. 

  In dealing with these cases, Senator McCarthy told the Press: "I have heard evidence and read documenrary 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 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 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 Aufsatze, 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 plausibility, 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 shaw-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 Endlosung, 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 Reichsfuhrer S.S. (Himmler) is to be entrusted with "tasks for the preparation of the political administration, tasks which result from the struggle which has to be carried out between two opposing political systems" (Manvell & 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. 
    In his affidavit of November 5, 1945, Ohlendorf 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 hdd 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 lawyer 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. 225). 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 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 late 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 8th August, 1947. 
    Schmidt-Klevencrv 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 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 Reichsfuhrer 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 & Franki, ibid. p. 117). Another brazen falsehood was Bach Zelewski's accusation that on August 31, 1942 Himmler personally witnessed the execution of one hundred Jews by an Einsatz detachment at Minsk, causing him to nearly faint. It is known 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 is reported to have 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. 119ff ) he states that 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 the false evidence at Nuremberg. Reference has also been made to the thousands of fraudulent "written affidavits" which were accepted by the Nllremberg 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 inrroduced 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. Although a frontline 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 6, 1947, Fanslau declared in disbelief: "This cannot be possible, because I too would have had to know something about it. It should be emphasized 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 after the American trials at Nuremberg.

AUSCHWITZ AND POLISH JEWRY 

   The concentration camp at Auschwitz near Cracow in Poland has remained at the centre of the alleged extermination of millions of Jews. Later we shall see how, when it was discovered by honest observers in the British and American zones after the war that no "gas chambers" existed in the German camps such as Dachau and Bergen-Belsen, attention was shifted to the eastern camps, particularly Auschwitz. Ovens definitely existed here, it was claimed. Unfortunately, the eastern camps were in the Russian zone of occupation, so that no one could verify whether these allegations were true or not. The Russians controlled access by foreigners to Auschwitz for about ten years after the war, by which time they were able to alter its appearance and give some plausibility to the claim that millions of people had been exterminated there. Holocaust 'expert' Dr. Raul Hilberg admitted during the Toronto trial in respect of DSMRD ? that the Auschwitz "gas-chamber" was "modified for touristic and educational reasons." If anyone doubts that the Russians are capable of such deception, they should remember the monument erected for the thousands of Poles who were murdered in Russia by Stalin's secret police - but where the monument proclaims them to be victims of German troops in World War Two. 
    The truth about Auschwitz is that it was the largest and most important industrial concentration camp, producing all kinds of material for the war industry. The camp consisted of synthetic coal and rubber plants built by I. G. Farben Industrie, for whom the prisoners supplied labour. Auschwitz also comprised an agricultural research station, with laboratories, plant nurseries and facilities for stock breeding, as well as Krupps armament works. We have already remarked that this kind of activity was the prime function of the camps; all major firms had subsidiaries in them and the S.S. even opened their own factories. Accounts of visits by Himmler to the camps show that his main purpose was to inspect and assess their industrial efficiency. When he visited Auschwitz in March 1941 accompanied by high executives of I.G. Farben, he showed no interest in the problems of the camp as a facility for prisoners, but merely ordered that the camp be enlarged to take 100,000 detainees to supply labour for I.G. Farben. This hardly accords with a policy of exterminating prisoners by the million. 

MORE AND MORE MILLIONS  

   It was nevertheless at this single camp that about half of the six million Jews were supposed to have been exterminated,. indeed, some writers claim 4 or even 5 million. Four million was the sensational figure announced by the Soviet Government after the Communists had "investigated" the camp, at the same time as they were attempting to blame the Katyn massacre on the Germans. Reitlinger admits that information regarding Auschwitz and other eastern camps comes from the post-war Communist regimes of Eastern Europe: "The evidence concerning the Polish death camps was mainly taken after the war by Polish State commissions or by the Central Jewish Historical Commission of Poland" (The Final Solution, p. 531). 
    However, no living, authentic eye-witness of these "gassings" has ever been produced and validated. Benedikt Kautsky, who spent seven years in concentration camps, including three in Auschwitz,
alleged in his book Teufel und Verdammte, Zurich 1946 (Devil and the Damned, Warsaw 1960) that "not less than 3,500,000 Jews" had been killed there. Thiu was certainly a remarkable statement because by his own admission he had never seen a gas chamber. He confessed: "I was in the big German concentration camps. However, I must establish the truth that in no camp at any time did I come across such an installation as a gas chamber" (p. 272-3). The only execution he actually witnessed was when two Polish inmates were executed for killing two Jewish inmates. Kautsky, who was sent from Buchenwald in October 1942 to work at Auschwitz-Buna, stresses in his book that the use of prisoners in war industry was a major feature of concentration camp policy until the end of the war. He fails to reconcile this with an alleged policy of massacring Jews.  

     The exterminations at Auschwitz are alleged to have occurred between March 1942 and October 1944; the figure of half of six million, therefore, would mean the extermination and disposal of about 94,000 people per month for thirty-two months - approximately 3,350 people every day, day and night, for over two and a half years. This kind of thing is so ludicrous that it scarcely needs refuting. And yet Reitlinger claims quite seriously that Auschwitz could dispose of no less than 6,000 people a day. 
   Although Reitlinger's 6,000 a day would mean a total by October 1944 of over 5 million, all such estimates pale before the wild fantasies of Olga Lengyel in her book Five Chinneys (London, 1959). Claiming to be a former inmate of Auschwitz, she asserts that the camp cremated no less than "720 per hour, or 17,280 corpses per twenty-four hour shift." She also alleges that, in addition, 8,000 people were burned every day in the "deathpits" and that "In round numbers, about 24,000 corpses were handled every day" p. 80-81). This,.of course, would mean a yearly rate of over 8 1/2 million. Thus between March 1942 and October 1944 Auschwitz would finally have disposed of over 21 million people, six million more than the entire world Jewish population. Comment is superfluous. 
    Although several millions were supposed to have died at Auschwitz alone, Reitlinger has to admit that only 363,000 inmates were registered at the camp for the whole of the period between January 1940 and February 1945 (The S.S.: Alibi of a Nation, p. 268 ff), and by no means all of them were Jews. It is frequently claimed that many prisoners were never registered, bur no one has offered any proof of this. Even if there were as many unregistered as there were registered, it would mean only a total of 750,000 prisoners - hardly enough far the elimination of 3 or 4 million. Moreover, large numbers of the camp population were released or transported elsewhere during the war, and at the end 80,000 were evacuated westward in January 1945 before the Russian advance. 
    One example will suffice of the statistical frauds relating to casualties at Auschwitz. Shirer claims that in the summer of 1944, no less than 300,000 Hungarian Jews were done to death in a mere forty-six days (ibid. p. 1156). This would have been almost the entire Hungarian Jewish population, which numbered some 380,000. But according to the Central Statistical Office of Budapest, there were 260,000 Jews in Hungary in 1945 which roughly conforms with the Joint Distribution Committee figure of 220,000), so that only 120,000 were classed as no longer resident. Of these, 35,000 were emigrants from the new Communist regime and a further 25,000 were still being held in Russia after having worked in German labour battalions there. 
    This leaves only 60,000 Hungararian Jews unaccounted for, but M. E. Namenyi estimates that 60,000 Jews returned to Hungary from deportation in Germany, though Reitlinger says this figure is too high (The Final Solution, p. 497). Possibly it is, but bearing in mind the substantial emigration of Hungarian Jews during the war (c.f. Report of the ICRC, Vol. 1, p. 649), the number of Hungarian Jewish casualties must have been very low indeed. 

AUSCHWITZ: A CREDIBLE WITNESS ACCOUNT 

   Some facts about Auschwitz appear in a work called Die Auschwitz-Luge: Ein Erlebnisbericht von Thies Christopherson (The Auschwitz Legends: An Account of his Experiences by Thies Christopherson, Kritik Verlag/Mohrkirch, 1973). Published by the German lawyer Dr. Manfred Roeder in the periodical Deutsche Burger-lnitiative, it is an eye-witness account of Auschwitz by Christopherson, who was sent to the Bunawerk plant laboratories at Auschwitz to research into the production of synthetic rubber for the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute. In May 1973, not long after the appearance of this account, the veteran'Jewish "Nazi-hunter" Simon Wiesenthal wrote to the Frankfurt Chamber of Lawyers demanding that the publisher and author of the Foreward, Dr. Roeder, a member of the Chamber, be brought before its disciplinary commission. Sure enough, proceedings began in July, but not without harsh criticism even from the Press, who asked "Is Simon Wiesenthal the new Gauleiter of Germany?" (Deutsche Wochenzeitung, July 27, 1973). 
    Christopherson's account is certainly one of the most important documents for a reappraisal of Auschwitz.  He spent the whole of 1944 there, during which time he visited all of the separate camps comprising the large Auschwitz complex, including Auschwitz-Birkenau where it is alleged that wholesale massacres of Jews took place. Christopherson is in no doubt that this is totally untrue. He writes: "I was in Auschwitz from January 1944 until December 1944. After the war I heard about the mass murders which were supposedly perpetrated by the S.S. against the Jewish prisoners, and I was perfectly astonished. Despite all the evidence of witnesses, all the newspaper reports and radio broadcasts I still do not believe today in these horrible deeds. I have said this many times and in many places, but to no purpose. One is never believed" (p. 16). 
    Space forbids a detailed summary here of the author's experiences at Auschwitz, which include facts about camp routine and the daily life of prisoners totally at variance with the allegations of propaganda pp. 22-7). More important are his revelations about the supposed existence of an extermination camp. "During the whole of my time at Auschwitz, I never observed the slightest evidence of mass gassings. Moreover, the odour of burning flesh that is often said to have hung over the camp is a downright falsehood. In the vicinity of the main camp (Auschwitz 1) was a large farrier's works, from.which the smell of molten iron was naturally not pleasant" (p. 33-4). 
    Reitlinger confirms that there weie five blast furnaces and five collieries at Auschwitz, which together with the Bunawerk factories comprised Auschwitz III (ibid. p. 452). The author agrees that a crematorium would certainly have existed at Auschwitz, "since 200,000 people.lived there, and in every city with 200,000 inhabitants there would be a crematorium. Naturally people died there - but not only prisoners. In fact the wife of Obersturmbannfiihrer A. (Christopherson's superior) also died there" (p. 33). The author explains: "There were no secrets at Auschwitz. In September 1944 a commission of the International Red Cross came to the camp for an inspection. They were particularly interested in the camp at Birkenau, though we also had many inspections at Raisko" (Bunawerk section, p. 35). 
    Christopherson points out that the constant visits to Auschwitz by outsiders cannot be reconciled with allegations of mass extermination. When describing the visit of his wife to the camp in May, he observes: "The fact that it was possible to receive visits from our relatives at any time demonstrates the openness of the camp administration. Had Auschwitz been a great extermination camp, we would certainly not have been able to receive such visits" p. 27). 
    After the war, Christopherson came to hear of the alleged existence of a building with gigantic chimneys in the vicinity of the main camp. "This was supposed to be the cremaiorium. However, I must record the fact that; when I left the camp at Auschwitz in December 1944, 1 had not seen this building there" p. 37). Does this mysterious building exist today? Apparently not; Reitlinger claims it was demolished and "completely burnt out in full view of the camp" in October, though Christopherson never saw this public demolition. 
    Although it is said to have taken place "in full view of the camp", it was allegedly seen by only one Jewish witness, a certain Dr. Bendel, and his is the only testimony to the occurrence (Reitlinger, ibid, p. 457). This situation is generally typical. When it comes down to hard evidence, it is strangely elusive; the, building was "demolished", the document is "lost", the order was "verbal". At Auschwitz today, visitors are shown a small furnace and here they are told that millions of people were exterminated. The Soviet State Commission which "investigated" the camp announced on May 12, 1945 that "Using rectified coefficients... the technical expert commission has ascertained that during the time that the Auschwitz camp existed, the German butchers exterminated in this camp not less than four million citizens... Reitlinger's surprisingly frank comment on this is perfectly adequate: "The world has grown mistrustful of 'rectified coefficients' and the figure of four millions has become ridiculous" (ibid, p. 460).
    Finally, the account of Mr. Christopherson draws attention to a very curious circumstance. The only defendant who did not appear at the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial in 1963 was Richard Baer, the successor of Rudolf Hess as commandant of Auschwitz. Though in perfect health, he died suddenly in prison before the trial had begun, "in a highly mysterious way" according to the newspaper Deutsche Wochenzeitung (July 27, 1973). Baer's sudden demise before giving evidence is especially strange since the Paris newspaper Rivarol recorded his insistence that "during the whole time in which he governed Auschwitz, he never saw any gas chambers nor believed that such things existed" and from this statement nothing would dissuade him.
   In short, the Christopherson account adds to a mounting collection of evidence demonstrating that the giant industrial complex of Auschwitz (comprising thirty separate installations and divided by the main Vienna-Cracow railway line) was nothing but a vast war production centre which, while admittedly employing the compulsory labour of detainees, was certainly not a place of "mass extermination.

THE WARSAW GHETTO

   In terms of numbers, Polish Jewry is supposed to have suffered most of all from extermination, not only at Auschwitz, bur at an endless list of newly-discovered "death camps" such as Treblinka, Solibor, Belzec, Maidanek, Chelmno and at many more obscure places which seem suddenly to have gained prominence. At the centre of the alleged extermination of the Polish Jews is the dramatic uprising in April 1943 of the Warsaw Ghetto. This is often represented as a revolt against being deported to gas ovens; presumably the alleged subject of Hitler and Hinimler's "secret discussions" had leaked out and gained wide publicity in Warsaw. The case of the Warsaw Ghetto is an instructive insight into the creation of the extermination legend itself. Indeed, its evacuation by the Germans in 1943 is often referred to as the "extermination of the Polish Jews" although it was nothing of the kind, and layers of mythology have tended to surround it after the publication of sensational novels like John Hersey's The Wall and Leon Uris' Exodus.
   When the Germans first occupied Poland, they confined the Jews, not in detention camps but in ghettos for reasons of security. The interior administration of the ghettos was in the hands of Jewish Councils elected by themselves, and they were policed by an independent Jewish police force. Special currency notes were introduced into the ghettos to prevent speculation. Whether this system was right or wrong, it was understandable in time of war, and although the ghetto is perhaps an unpleasant social establishment, it is by no means barbaric. And it is certainly not an organisation for the destruction of a race. But, of course, it is frequently said that this is what the ghettos were really for.
    A recent publication on the Warsaw Ghetto made the brazen assertion that concentration camps "were a substitute for the practice of cramming the Jews into overcrowded ghettos and starving them to death." It seems that whatever security system the Germans used, and to whatever lengths they went to preserve a semblance of community for the Jews, they can never escape the charge of "extermination".
    It has been established already that the 1931 Jewish population census for Poland placed the number of Jews at 2,732,600, and that after emigration and flight to the Soviet Union, no more than 1,100,000 were under German control. These incontrovertible facts, however, do not prevent Manvell and Frankl asserting that "there had been over three million Jews in Poland when Germany began the invasion" and that in 1942 "some two million still awaited death" (Heinrich Himmler, p. 140). In reality, of the million or so Jews in Poland, almost half, about 400,000 were eventually concentrated in the ghetto of Warsaw, an area of about two and a half square miles around the old mediaeval ghetto.
The remainder had already been moved to the Polish Government-General by September 1940. In the summer of 1942, Himmler ordered the resettlement of all Polish Jews in detention camps in order to obtain their labour, part of the system of general concentration for labour assignment in the Government-General. Thus between July and October 1942, over three quarters of the Warsaw Ghetto's inhabitants were peacefully evacuated and transported, supervised by the Jewish police themselves.
    As we have seen, transportation to camps is alleged to have ended in "extermination" but there is absolutely no doubt from the evidence available that it involved only the effective procurement of labour and the prevention of unrest. In the first place, Himmler discovered on a surprise visit to Warsaw in January 1943 that 24,000 Jews registered as armaments workers were in fact working illegally as tailors and furriers (Manvell & Frankl, ibid, p. 140); the Ghetto was also being used as a base for subversive forays into the main area of Warsaw.
    After six months of peaceful evacuation, when only about 60,000 Jews remained in the residential ghetto, the Germans met with an armed rebellion on 18 January 1943. Manvell and Frankl admit that "The Jews involved in planned resistance had for a long time been engaged in smuggling arms from the outside world, and combat groups fired on and killed S.S. men and militia in charge of a column of deportees." The terrorists in the Ghetto uprising were also assisted by the Polish Home Army and the PPR - Polska Partia Robotnicza, the Communist Polish Workers Party. It was under these circumstances of a revolt aided by partisans and communists that the occupying forces, as any army would in a similar situation, moved in to suppress the terrorists, if necessary by destroying the residential area itself.
    It should be remembered that the whole process of evacuation would have continued peacefully had not extremists among the inhabitants planned an armed rebellion which in the end was bound to fail. When S.S. Lieutenant-General Stroop entered the Ghetto with armoured cars on 19 April, he immediately came under fire and lost twelve men; German and Polish casualties in the battle, which lasted four weeks, totalled 101 men killed and wounded. Stubborn resistance by the Jewish Combat Organisation in the face of impossible odds led to an estimated 14,000 Jewish casualties, the majority by remaining in burning buildings and dug-outs.
    Many Jews within the Ghetto had resented the terror imposed on them by the Combat Organisation and had attempted to inform on their headquarters to the German authorities.

SUDDEN SURVIVORS 

   The circumstances surrounding the Warsaw Ghetto revolt, as well as the deportations to eastern labour camps such as Auschwitz, has led to the most colourful tales concerning the fate of Polish Jews, the largest bloc of Jewry in Europe. The Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, in figures prepared by them for the Nuremberg Trials, stated that in 1945 there were only 80,000 Jews remaining in Poland. They also alleged that there were no Polish-Jewish displaced persons left in Germany or Austria, a claim that was at some variance with the number of Polish Jews arrested by the British and Americans for black market activities.
   However, the new Communist regime in Poland was unable to prevent a major anti-Jewish pogrom at Kielce on July 4, 1946 and consequently thousands of Polish Jews suddenly fled into Western Germany. Their appearance was somewhat embarrassing and their emigration to Palestine and the United States was carried out in record time. Subsequently, the number of Polish Jewish survivors underwent considerable revision; in the American-Jewish Year Book 1948-1949 it was placed at 390,000, quite an advance on the original 80,000. We may expect further revisions upward in the future.

SOME CONCENTRATION CAMP MEMOIRS

The most influential agency in the propagation of the extermination legend has been the paperback book and magazine industry, and it is through their sensational publications, produced for commercial gain that the average person is made acquainted with a myth of an entirely political character and purpose. The heyday of these hate-Germany books was in the 1950's, when virulent Germanophobia found a ready market, but the industry continues to flourish. The industry's products consist generally of so called "memoirs" and these fall into two basic categories: those which are supposedly by former S.S. men, camp commandants and the like, and those bloodcurdling reminiscences allegedly by former concentration camp inmates.

COMMUNIST ORIGINS

Of the first kind, the most outstanding example is Commandant of Auschwitz hy Rudolf Hoess (London, 1959), which was originally published in the Polish language as Wspomnienia by the Communist Government. Hoess, a young man who took over at Auschwitz in 1940, was first arrested by the British and detained at Flensburg. After his Nuremberg testimony he was handed over to the Polish Communist authorities who condemned him to death in 1947 and executed him almost immediately. The so-called Hoess memoirs are undoubtedly a forgery produced under Communist auspices, as we shall demonstrate, though the Communists themselves claim that Hoess was "ordered to write the story of his life" and a hand-written original supposedly exists at the Auschwitz Museum, but no one has ever forensically examined it.
    Hoess was subjected to torture and brain-washing techniques by the British during the period of his arrest and his testimony at Nuremberg was delivered in a mindless monotone as he stared blankly into space. Even Reitlinger regards this testimony as hopelessly untrustworthy.
    It is indeed remarkable how much of the "evidence" regarding the Six Million stems from Communist sources; this includes the major documents such as the Wisliceny statement and the Hoess "memoirs" which are undoubtedly the two most quoted items in extermination literature, as well as all the information on the so-called "death camps"'such as Auschwitz. This infermation comes from the Jewish Historical Commission of Poland; the Central Commission for the Investigation of War Crimes, Warsaw and the Russian State War Crimes Commission, Moscow.
   Reitlinger acknowledges that the Hoess testimony at Nuremberg was a catalogue of wild exaggerations, such as that Auschwitz was disposing of 16,000 people a day, which would mean a total at the end of the war of over 13 million. Instead of exposing such estimates for the Soviet inspired frauds they obviously are, Reitlinger and others prefer to think that such ridiculous exaggerations were due to "pride" in doing a professional job. Ironically, this is completely irreconcilable with the supposedly authentic Hoess memoirs, which make a clever attempt at plausibility by suggesting the opposite picture of distaste for the job. Hoess is supposed to have "confessed" to a total of 3 million people exterminated at Auschwitz, though at his own trial in Warsaw the prosecution reduced the number to 1,135,000. However, we have already noted that the Soviet Government announced an official figtire of 4 million after their "investigation" of the camp in 1945. This kind of casual juggling with millions of people does not appear to worry the writers of extermination literature.
    A review of the Hoess "memoirs" in all their horrid detail would be tedious. We may confine ourselves to those aspects of the extermination legend which are designed with the obvious purpose of forestalling any proof of its falsity. Such, for example, is the manner in which the alleged extermination of Jews is described.  This was supposed to have been carried out by a "special detachment" of Jewish prisoners. They took charge of the newly arrived contingents at the camp, led them into the enormous "gas chambers" and disposed of the bodies afterwards. The S.S. therefore did very little, so that most of the S.S. personnel at the camp could be left in complete ignorance of the "extermination programme". Of course, no reliable witness has ever been found who claimed to have been a member of this gruesome "special detachment" so that the whole issue is left conveniently unproved.
    Conclusive evidence that the Hoess memoirs are a forgery lies in an incredible slip by the Communist editors. Hoess is supposed to say that the Jehovah's Witnesses at Auschwitz approved of murdering the jews because the Jews were the enemies of Christ. It is well known that in Soviet Russia today and in all her satellite countries of eastern Europe, the Communists conduct a bitter campaign of suppression against the Jehovah's Witnesses, whom they regard as the religious sect most dangerous to Communist beliefs. That this sect is deliberately and grossly defamed in the Hoess memoirs proves the document's Communist origins beyond any doubt.

INCRIMINATING REMINISCENCES

 Certainly the most bogus "memoirs" yet published are those of Adolf Eichmann. Before his illegal kidnapping by the Israelis in May, 1960 and the attendant blaze of international publicity, few people had ever heard of him. He was indeed a relatively unimportant person, the head of Office A4b in Department IV (the Gestapo) of the Reich Security Head Office. His office supervised the transportation to detention camps of a particular section of enemy aliens, the Jews. A positive flood of unadulterated rubbish about Eichmann showered the world in 1960, of which we may cite as an example Comer Clarke's Eichmann: The Savage Truth.
    "The orgies often went on until six in the morning, a few hours before consigning the next batch of victims to death, says Clarke in his chapter 'Streamlined Death and Wild Sex Orgies' p. 124.
    Strangely enough, the alleged "memoirs" of Adolf Eichmann suddenly appeared at the time of his abduction to Israel. They were uncritically published by the American Life magazine (November 28, December 5, 1960) and were supposed to have been given by Eichmann to a journalist in the Argentine shortly before his capture - an amazing coincidence. By an equally extraordinary coincidence, war crimes investigators claimed shortly afterwards to have just "found" in the archives of the U.S. Library of Congress, more than frfteen years after the war, the "complete file" of Eichmann's department.
   So far as the "memoirs" themselves are concerned, they were made to be as horribly incriminating as possible without straying too far into the realms of the purest fantasy, and depict Eichmann speaking with enormous relish about "the physical annihilation of the Jews." Their fraudulence is also attested to by various factual errors, such as that Himmler was already in command of the Reserve Army by April of 1944, instead of after the July plot against Hitler's life, a. fact which Eichmann would certainly have known. The appearance of these "memoirs" at precisely the right moment raises no doubt that their object was to present a pre-trial propaganda picture of the archetypal "unregenerate Nazi" and fiend in human shape.
    The circumstances of the Eichmann trial in Israel do not concern us here; the documents of Soviet origin which were used in evidence, such as the Wisliceny statement, have been examined already, and for an account of the third-degree methods used on Eichmann during his captivity to render him "coopprativpn the reader is referred to the London Jewish Chronic~c, Se~semt~er 2, 3960,  More relevant to the literature of the extermination legend are the contents of a letter which Eichmann is supposed to have written voluntarily and handed over to his captors in Buenos Aries. It need hardly be added that its Israeli authorship is transparently obvious. Nothing in it stretches human credulity further than the phrase "I am submitting this declaration of my own free will"; but the most hollow and revealing statement of all is his alleged willingness to appear before a court in Israel, "so that a true picture may be transmitted to future generations."

TREBLINKA FABRICATIONS

 Another set of reminiscences are those of Franz Stangl; the former commandant of the camp at Treblinka in Poland who was sentenced to life imprisonment in December 1970. These were published in an article by the London Daily Telegraph Magazine, October 8, 1971 and were supposed to derive from a series of interviews with Stangl in prison. He died a few days after the interviews were concluded. These alleged reminiscences are certainly the goriest and most bizarre yet published, though one is grateful for a few admissions by the writer of the article, such as that "the evidence presented in the course of his trial did not prove Stangl himself to have committed specific acts of murder" and that the account of Stangl's beginnings in Poland "was in part fabrication."
    A typical example of this fabrication was the description of Stangl's first visit to Treblinka. As he drew into the railway station there he is supposed to have seen "thousands of bodies" just strewn around next to the tracks, "hundreds, no, thousands of bodies everywhere, putrefying, decomposing." And "in the station was a train full of Jews, some dead, some still alive.., it looked as if it had been there for days." The account reaches the heights of absurdity when Stangl is alleged to have got out of his car and "stepped kneedeep into money: I didn't know which way to turn, which way to go. I waded in papernotes, currency, precious stones, jewellery and clothes. They were everywhere, strewn all over the square." The scene is completed by "whores from Warsaw weaving drunk, dancing, singing, playing music," who were on the other side of the barbed wire fences.
    To literally believe this account of sinking "kneedeep" in Jewish bank-notes and precious stones amid thousands of putrefying corpses and lurching, singing prostitutes would require the most phenomenal degree of gullibility, and in any circumstances other than the Six Million legend it would be dismissed as the most outrageous nonsense. The statement which certainly robs the Stangl memoirs of any vestige of authenticity is his alleged reply when asked why he thought the Jews were being exterminated: "They wanted the Jews' money" is the answer. "That racial business was just secondary." The series of interviews are supposed to have ended on a highly dubious note indeed. When asked whether he thought there had been "any Conceivable sense in this horror" the former Nazi commandant supposedly replied with enthusiasm: "Yes, I am sure there was. Perhaps the Jews were meant to have this enormous jolt to pull them together; to create a people; to identify themselves with each other." One could scarcely imagine a more perfect answer had it been invented.

BEST-SELLER A FRAUD 

Of the other variety of memoirs, those which present a picture of frail Jewry caught in the vice of Nazism, the most celebrated is undoubtedly the Anne Frank Diary and the truth concerning this book provides an additional insight into how a propaganda legend is fabricated. First published in 1947 as Het Achterhuis ('The Behind-house'), the Diary became a huge success, selling over 15 million copies and being adapted into a Hollywood film. Representing the real-life tragedy of Anne Frank, its direct appeal to the emotions has influenced millions of people, certainly more throughout the world than any story of its kind. The Anne Frank House in Amsterdam now attracts more than half a million paying visitors every year.
    The Diary of Anne Frank purports to be the diary a young Jewish girl kept while her family and four other Jews were