Ο μύθος των 6 εκατομυρίων Εβραίων του ολοκαυτώματος . ( The Myth of the Six Million )

 Το βιβλίο αυτο το κατέβασα απο εδώ .
Ο άνθρωπος που δημιούργησε την σελίδα είναι Γερμανός ερευνητής ,ιστορικός ... κρίθηκε "αρνητής του ολοκαυτώματος" για την μελέτη στο θέμα αυτό  και σύμφωνα με τον νόμο ως ένοχος έπρεπε να πάει φυλακή . Πήγε στην Αμερική λοιπόν και έφτιαξε αυτήν την σελίδα και σε λίγο καιρό εκδώθηκε από την Εβραιόδουλη Αμερική στην Εβραιόδουλη Γερμανία όπου εκτείει την ποινή του !! Στην ιστοσελίδα αυτή  θα βρείτε και την δική του μελέτη και άλλων "αρνητών" του ολοκαυτώματος .

The Myth of the Six Million
by David Hoggan
POSTFACE : THE CRITICAL COMMENT OF
ARTHUR R. BUTZ (1976)
(1969)
AAARGH edition on line
2001
Second edition online 2004
HOGGAN : The Myth of the Six Million

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1. The Attitude of Adolf Hitler and the National Socialists toward the Jews
Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of defeated, truncated, and starving
Germany on January 30, 1933, by President Paul von Hindenburg. Jews throughout the
world professed to be horrified by news of this event. It was also evident that a
campaign against the still unpopular Germans on the Jewish question might possibly
be exploited to advance the position of World Jewry. Twenty years later, this turned
out to be the case to an extent that few Jews could have foreseen at the time. Dr. Max
Nussbaum, the former chief rabbi of the Jewish community in Berlin, declared on April
11, 1953: "The position the Jewish people occupy today in the world is-despite the
enormous losses ten times stronger than what it was twenty years ago."

The leaders of the modern German Reich from its foundation in 1871 until Hitler's
appointment in 1933 had usually been friendly toward the Jews. Hitler, however, was
outspokenly hostile toward every manifestation of Jewish influence in Germany. The
"unchangeable" program of his National Socialist Party, which was first proclaimed at
Munich on February 24, 1920, advocated the revocation of concessions granted to the
German Jews in the various German states during the period from 1812 to 1848.
These concessions bad made German Jews in every respect fully equal to Germans.
Hitler was determined to set the clock back on Germany's treatment of the Jews. His
position toward the Jews closely resembled that of Martin Luther, Von den Juden und
ihrer Luegen (About the Jews and their Lies, Wittenberg, 1543), and Heinrich von
Treitschke, Ein Wort ueber unser Judenthum (A Word About our Jewry, Berlin, 1880).
Hitler's appointment as Chancellor in a government coalition with the conservative
German National People's Party brought him a gigantic step closer to a position where
his will might become law in all questions affecting the German Jews.
Hitler's overt struggle against the Jews had begun the moment be joined the
diminutive anti-Jewish National Socialist Party in 1919. He had been a leading
contender in the German political arena since his Party acquired 107 Reichstag seats in
the September, 1930, German national election. In 1933, this struggle entered a
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decisive phase. There were approximately 500,000 Jews in Germany when Hitler
became Chancellor in January, 1933.
2. Disabilities Imposed on the Jews by National Socialism
The first major directive against the Jews, after the one-day boycott of April 1,
1933, was the law of April 7, 1933, which required the dismissal of Jews from
government service and from positions in the universities. This law was not fully
implemented in practice until 1939 :although. many functionaries and teachers were
retired on pensions before the end of 1933. Jews were still employed in German
journalism and publishing as late as 1939, but they had been required by 1936 to sell
all of their share of financial control over German newspapers, publishing houses, and
the film industry on the basis of an emergency press enactment by President
Hindenburg under Article 48 of the Weimar constitution on March 1, 1933.
Undoubtedly the most fundamental National Socialist legislation against the Jews
was enacted by the Reichstag at its meeting in Nuremberg on September 15, 1935.
These famous Nuremberg Laws included the citizenship law and the law for the
protection of German blood and honor. Jews were carefully defined as persons with
four or three Jewish grandparents, or persons with two Jewish grandparents who
practiced the Jewish religion or were married to Jewish partners. This legislation
deprived the Jews of German citizenship and of the right to fly the German colors, it
prohibited Jews from marrying German citizens, and it provided that sexual intercourse
between Jews and German citizens was a criminal offense. Jews were not allowed to
employ female German servants of less than forty-five years of age. A supplementary
law of July 6, 1938 permitted divorce solely on racial grounds.
It should be noted that as late as 1938 the segregation of Jews was still limited
to prohibition of sexual relations, and to the exclusion of Jews from university
employment, government work, Or from the ownership of the mass media of
communication. The Jews were allowed to operate and to own businesses, to share
public facilities of recreation, culture, and transportation, to engage in professions such
as medicine and law, to accept ordinary employment, and to travel abroad. Indeed,
many thousands of Jews were still living quietly and working in the German community
when the country was occupied by Allied troops in 1945.
Although it was the National Socialist policy to encourage the Jews to leave
Germany, rather liberal arrangements were made to permit those Jews who migrated
to take with them a sizeable portion of their assets. It was easier to transfer or take
with them the sums received from the properties sold than liquid assets. Billions of
marks were transferred to Palestine; under the Havarah agreement there were no
restrictions whatever.
3. Bruno Amann's Exposition of the Basis of the Anti-Jewish Policy of National
Socialism
The official National Socialist attitude toward the German Jews from 1933 to the
outbreak of World War 11 was best summarized in Bruno Amann, Das Weltbild des
Judentunis: Grundlagen des voelkischen Antisemitismus (A Picture of World Jewry: the
Foundations of Popular Anti-Semitism, Vienna, 1939). Amann depicted the National
Socialist revolution of 1933 as the beginning of a new age for Germany based on the
democratic principle of the community of the entire people as opposed to the class
HOGGAN : The Myth of the Six Million
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barriers 4 the past. He denounced most of Jewry as an intensely disloyal, avaricious,
and decadent element in German culture after World War I.
Amann emphatically rejected Nietzsche's thesis that Christianity marks a
culmination of Jewish tradition. He argued with great force that Christianity is, instead,
a final departure from the "chosen people" concept of the Jews. He noted the
contention of numerous propagandists hostile to Germany that Hitler was seeking to
make a "chosen people" of the Germans. Amann rejected this, and he insisted on the
common unity of European culture. He suggested that the true Christian tradition
called upon all Europeans to maintain both a guarded hostility and a necessary
protective front against the Jews.
Amann believed that forces at work in other European countries would ultimately
produce in them a similar attitude toward the Jewish question. In the meantime,
Germany had broken the hold of the "alien and aggressive Jewish avarice over her
spiritual and material heritage." Amann was emphatic in insisting that the measures
taken against the German Jews by 1939 would be adequate for all time in protecting
German interests.
Jewry had been no less shaken than Germany by new doctrines and concepts.
Amann regarded the Jewish people as split between the advocates of assimilation and
the more modern Zionists, but he did not believe that it was difficult to predict the
ultimate total triumph of Zionism. There was a natural meeting of interests in the
rejection of Jewish assimilation by both National Socialism and Zionism. It was for this
reason that the German authorities were, perfectly willing to cooperate with the
Zionists in arranging concentrations of Jewish population in certain areas. Zionism was
born of the modern Eastern European nationalist movements within the context of a
special Jewish tradition; National Socialism was born of the political, economic, and
military collapse of Germany in World War I.
Amann traced the beginning of Jewish emancipation in Europe from the first
emancipation enactments of revolutionary France in 1791. He regarded these
enactments as the beginning of a grave threat to European civilization. His special
attention was reserved for a detailed study of the advocates of emancipation in
Germany, beginning with Lessing, and of the full realization of emancipation itself by
1848. Amann claimed that the Jews had secured a dominant position in Germany prior
to World War I, but be added that this powerful position would probably not have been
challenged seriously had it not been for the German defeat in 1918. The different
circumstances governing the position of Jews in various countries was viewed by
Amann as a major subject for study within the Research Department on the Jewish
Question connected to the Reich Institute of History.
Amann conceded in 1939 the existence of a vast and world-wide sympathy for
the suppressed Jews of Germany. This was because of the clear solidarity of interest
between the liberal Jews and their sympathizers in the West, and the Bolshevik Jewry
of the East. In both East and West the Soviet Union was regarded with special affection
for having destroyed the anti-Jewish Tsarist colossus of 1917 and for having replaced it
with a regime where Jewish influence was greater than in any other state of the world.
Amann saw a permanent danger to peace in the revolutionary alliance of these East-
West forces against Germany. A more enlightened attitude toward the Jewish danger
in the West would be the only means within the foreseeable future of overcoming this
threat. Amann little suspected that traditional British balance of power calculations
would exploit the existing sentiment to produce in the immediate future the very war
which he dreaded.
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Amann's book does not contain any vulgar propaganda against the Jews. Indeed,
it in no way proves the need for an anti-Jewish policy, but rather it accepts this need
as a truism based on the old, established traditions. These traditions are
understandably assigned a special importance in an age of spreading Communism.
Amann's book is far more typical of the official German attitude, toward the Jews
under Hitler than the erratic utterances of that Self-Styled individualist of Nuremberg,
Gauleiter Julius Streicher of Franconia, in his sensational newspaper, Der Stürmer. This
was the only newspaper of its kind throughout Germany, and it was suppressed by the
German Government in 1939. Der Stürmer contained much coarse humor, graphic
cartoons, and appeals to old prejudices. Nevertheless, there was not the slightest
excuse for the United States, Great Britain, and France to collaborate with the Soviet
Union at Nuremberg in 1946 in securing Streicher's execution. The Soviet Union was
the only nation in the world at that time where the utterance of anti-Jewish ideas was
a capital offense.
4. The Three Phases of National Socialist Treatment of the Jews before World
War II
The National Socialist treatment of the German Jews prior to World War II must
be considered in three main phases of which the second one was easily the most
important. These would include: (1) the sometimes turbulent days of the period from
Hitler's appointment until the National Socialist Party purge of June 30, 1934; (2) the
following period, until the additional measures enacted after the assassination of Ernst
von Rath in November, 1938; and (3) the period from November, 1938, until the
outbreak of war in 1939. The second period was dominated by the Nuremberg laws of
September, 1935, which deprived persons defined as Jews of their citizen status and
proscribed sexual and marital relations between them and the German people.
During the first period there were occasional incidents of public violence involving
Jews, although no Jews were actually killed, and a very considerable number of Jews
were arrested and placed in concentration camps for short terms because of their
Marxist affiliations. During the second period, from 1934 to 1938, the concentration
camp population, as conceded by Gerald Reitlinger, The SS: Alibi of a Nation (London,
1956, pp. 253ff.), seldom exceeded 20,000 throughout all Germany, and the number
of Jews in the camps was never more than 3,000. During the third period, in which
several new measures were enacted against the Jews, the concentration camp
population remained virtually stationary. There was an extensive exodus of Jews from
Germany during the first, and especially during the third period; during the second
period the Jewish population remained remarkably stationary, while a much larger
number of Jews departed from Poland.
Lion Feuchtwanger, et al, Der Gelbe Fleck: die Ausrottung van 500,000
deutschen Juden (The Yellow Spot: the Extermination o~ 500,000 German Jews, Paris,
1936) presented a typical effort during the second phase to mobilize the forces of
Jewish propaganda against Germany. The yellow spot on a black field was a medieval
designation for Jewish establishments; the book derives part of its title from this
source. The other part, concerning the alleged annihilation campaign, is asserted from
the earliest pages. It is important to note that from the very start the Jewish
opponents of National Socialism declared mere measures of discrimination against the
Jews to be the equivalent of annihilation or liquidation. The term genocide was not
introduced by Professor Rafael Lemkin until after the battle of Stalingrad in 1943.
HOGGAN : The Myth of the Six Million
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This alleged annihilation in The Yellow Spot is conceived of in several different
ways. On the one hand, simple emigration is regarded as the extermination of German
Jewry as such in one special sense at least. On the other hand, sinister rumors are
cited to the effect that there would be a gigantic Old Testament-styled Purim in reverse
in the event of a foreign invasion of Germany, and that Jewish corpses would be
prominently displayed in such a case. The existing concentration camps are also
interpreted as a potential instrument of extermination, and the latter part of the book
contains a list of prisoners who had allegedly died in the camps. Special note was
made of the claim that there was still 100 Jews at Dachau in 1936 and that 60 of them
had been there since 1933.
The authors explained the National Socialist campaign against the Jews as a
Machiavellian maneuver to create jobs for loyal brown-shirted followers. They stated as
a dogmatic fact that Hitler intended to start an "imperialist war" (note the Marxistterminology)
as soon as possible, and especially when he could accomplish something
in his domestic program-ostensibly at the expense of the Jews-for which the people
would sacrifice. The mass of the German people were described as friendly toward the
Jews despite Hitler, and the otherwise loyal German Jews were considered -to have
been forced into opposition by the measures directed against them.
Much was made of the Saturday, April 1, 1933, National Socialist boycott against
the Jews, which was actually in response to the Jewish boycotts directed against
Germany from New York and London during the previous months. The boycott was
depicted as the prelude to a permanent policy of strangulation. The alleged increase in
marriages between Germans and German Jews in 1934 was regarded as a major
reason for the promulgation of the Nuremberg laws as early as 1935. The Nuremberg
laws were presented as a state bulwark in support of an unpopular policy.
This story of Jewish grievances against Germany prior to World War 11 was fully
supplemented in order to cover the whole period by F. R. Brenenfeld, The Germans
and the Jews (N.Y., 1939). His emphasis was an economic and social discrimination
against the Jews and on the alleged mistreatment of concentration camp inmates, of
which the Jews were always decidedly in the minority.
A later Jewish historian, T. L. Jarman, The Rise and Fall of Nazi Germany (N.Y.,
1956) noted that at the beginning of World War 11 the Germans had only six
concentration camps: Dachau, Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald, Mauthausen, Flossenbürg,
and Ravensbrück. There were 21,300 inmates in the camps, of whom less than 3,000
were Jews. Jarman pointed out that under National Socialism, terrorism unlike in
Russia, was kept in the background. Jarman added that "Germany in the years 1933-9
was an open country in a sense in which Soviet Russia has never been" (P. 187).
Jarman believed that the Germans were "stupid" in allowing themselves to be "drawn
into war" in 1939, as in 1914, when they had everything to lose and nothing to gain. It
is interesting to note that this interpretation was rendered possible because of the fact
that the terroristic Soviet regime was far more popular in the West than the much
milder German system.
As time went on it became more and more doubtful whether President
Roosevelt's early assurance to the German leaders about the Jewish question would be
kept. President Roosevelt bad told Germany's Reichsbank president, Hjalmar Schacht,
on May 6, 1933, that he personally had no particular sympathy for the Jews, but a
problem troubling German-American relations existed because of "the old Anglo-Saxon
sense of chivalry toward the weak." Nevertheless, Roosevelt assured Schacht that "this
hurdle would be cleared" without any lasting breach in German-American relations.
HOGGAN : The Myth of the Six Million
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Schacht met with New York Jews on May 12, 1933, and warned them that continued
pressure from the outside could make matters worse for the German Jews. These
matters are revealed in Documents on German Foreign Policy, Series C. vol. 1, nos.
214, 233.
Jewish propaganda against Germany made increasing headway during the
months which followed, and on December 20, 1933, a conference at the German
Foreign Office concluded with regret that the American press as a whole seemed to be
"the strongest Jewish propaganda machine in the world" (Ibid., vol. 2, no. 139).
Richard Sallet reported from the German Embassy in Washington, D. C. on August 3,
1934, that the sustained Jewish economic boycott of Germany continued to add fuel to
the fire, and he noted, that Jewish propaganda was more strident than ever. The
United States was seen to be positively flooded with anti-Gennan literature, and Sallet
concluded that the ultimate objective of Jewry was a war of destruction against
Germany (Ibid., vol. 3, no. 569). There was considerable relief in Germany in 1936
when President Roosevelt refused to accede to Jewish pressure to boycott the Olympic
Games at Berlin. Hjalmar Schacht, 76 Jahre meines Lebens (76 Years of My Life, Bad
Wörighofen, 1953, p. 416), was confident then that the Jewish question, despite the
ever increasing spate of Jewish propaganda, would do no lasting harm to Germany's
relations abroad.
5. The Tension and Crisis of 1938
The situation became much worse again in 1938. Considerable German attention
had been given to the encouragement under equitable terms of Jewish emigration as a
means of permanently solving the Jewish question in Germany, but many more Jews
had departed from Poland than from Germany during the period 1933-1938. A
veritable competition had developed between Germany and Poland in encouraging
emigration from their respective countries. The Polish Seim had passed a number of
stringent anti-Jewish laws in March 1938.
Early in 1938 the American press was flooded with rumors about similar actions
by the National Socialists, first in Germany, and then in Austria, and it was necessary
for American diplomats on the spot to deal with these matters. A few examples will
suffice to illustrate this situation. On January 17, 1938, the American Embassy in
Berlin denied the rumor that Jewish doctors and dentists had been deprived of their
participation in the compulsory insurance program (Ortskrankenkassen). On January
26, 1938, the Embassy denied the American press rumor that there had been any
order restricting Jewish passports or travel opportunities from Germany. On March 25,
1938, John C. Wiley, from the American consulate in Vienna, denied the extravagant
rumors of general pogroms following the Anschluss, and he added that "so far as I
know there have been no Jewish deaths by violence" (Foreign Relations of the United
States, 1938, vol. 2, pp. 355-9).
Nevertheless, on June 18, 1938, there, was organized picketing of Jewish shops
in Berlin for the first time since 1933, and Hugh Wilson, who reported from the
American Embassy that 3,000 additional Jews had come to Berlin from the provinces in
recent months, warned that dissatisfaction was being expressed in the German press
with the slow rate of Jewish emigration from Germany. A long-expected blow against
the Jewish position in Germany was struck by a law of October 14, 1938 according to
which Jewish lawyers in Germany were to retire from general practice by November
30, 1938 and in Austria by December 31, 1938. Wilson reported that in early 1938 no
HOGGAN : The Myth of the Six Million
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less than 10 per cent of the practicing lawyers in Hitler's anti-Jewish Third Reich were
Jews. This was true despite the fact that the Jews constituted less than .5 per cent of
the German population (Ibid., vol. 2, pp. 380-391). In his book, Germany and World
Peace (London, 1937), the eminent Swedish scientist and explorer, Sven Hedin, who
had been a close student of German affairs, stated that under the Weimar Republic the
Jews provided 23 per cent of the practicing lawyers in Germany although the Jews
made up only .8 per cent of the total German population.
It was in this tense situation that the Polish Government decided on October 15,
1938, to implement a law passed the previous March according to which individuals
who had remained outside Poland for a period of years could be declared stateless by
the competent Polish consular authorities. This meant that an estimated 55,000 Polish
Jews living in Germany by choice could be stranded there permanently -- through the
unilateral action -- of the Warsaw Government. Similar restrictions in 1885 by the
Tsarist Government had prompted Bismarck, who was by no means unfriendly toward
the Jews, to deport foreign Jews to the Russian Empire.
The German Foreign Office made several vain attempts to persuade the Poles to
cancel their decree. Because October 29, 1938, was the deadline on the renewal of the
Polish passports, the Germans began on October 27th to organize deportation
transports of Polish Jews. Special care was taken to see that the travelers would have
ample facilities on the transport trains, including plenty of space and good food. Some
trains managed to cross the border, but the Poles soon began to resist, even before
the passport deadline, and the entire action had to be abandoned before less than onethird
of the 55,000 Polish Jews of Germany had been returned to Poland.
This strange and tragic situation produced important repercussions. Wolfgang
Diewerge, Der Fall Gustloff (The Gustloff Case, Munich, 1936, pp. 108ff.), has recorded
the threat of Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels in 1936 that further assassinations
of German officials by Jews, as in the caste of Gustloff's assassination by David
Frankfurter, would lead to reprisals against German Jewry. Now a test situation for this
threat had arrived.
The parents and sisters of Herschel Grynszpan, a syphilitic degenerate living in
Paris, had been on one of the German transports to Poland. Grynszpan received a
postcard from one, of his sisters on November 3, 1938, which described the situation
but did not contain any special complaint. Grynszpan decided to murder German
Ambassador Welezeck in Paris, but instead he fired his revolver casually at Embassy
Counsellor Ernst von Rath after he failed to encounter Welczeek. This was on the
morning of November 7, 1938, and von Rath died forty-eight hours later.
This situation was exploited by Goebbels to increase the severity of German
policy toward the German Jews. Many Jewish synagogues were set on fire by organized
S.A. groups on November 10, 1938, and much Jewish business property was
ransacked or damaged by the same demonstrators. Hitler ordered Himmler's SS to
intervene and put an end to the violence. These demonstrations against the Jews were
not pogroms like those in Tsarist Russia because no Jews lost their lives. The mass of
Germans were horrified by the destruction of Jewish property, which was contrary to
their sense of decency and feeling for law and order. Goebbels, however, welcomed
the incident as a turning-point which would lead to the elimination of Jewish influence
in Germany. Hugh Wilson, who was about to be recalled from Germany as part of an
American protest, reported on November 16th that the British diplomats in Berlin were
more complacent about the Jewish question. They noted that German public opinion
was not behind the recent anti-Jewish measures, and they wisely concluded that this
HOGGAN : The Myth of the Six Million
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type of action would not be repeated. This was the last report which Wilson sent to
Secretary of State Hull before leaving the country (FRUS, 1938, 2, pp. 398-402).
Hitler was persuaded by Goebbels after the demonstrations to levy a one billion
Mark (250 million dollar) fine on the wealthy and moderately wealthy Jews of
Germany. Goebbels argued that otherwise the Jews would be able to pocket vast
amounts of money from the German insurance companies, because the assets
damaged or destroyed on November 10, 1938 had been heavily insured. The poorer
Jews, who had less than 5,000 Marks in immediate assets, were exempted.
The German insurance companies were ordered to pay the Jews promptly for all
damages suffered to property on November 10th, and it was permissable for the Jews
to use part of this money in paying the fine over four installments between December
15, 1938 and August 15, 1939. A further German law was announced on November 9-
6, 1938, to eliminate Jewish retail stores by January 1, 1939. At the same time, it was
promised that welfare care, pensions, and other state relief measures on behalf of the
Jews would be continued. There were no new developments of consequence in German
policy toward the Jews prior to the outbreak of World War II. At the same time, it
should not be surprising that the events of November, 1938 greatly accelerated the
emigration of Jews from Germany, and, in this sense, the aims of Goebbels were
realized (Vide H. Heiber, "Der Fall Gruenspan", in Vierteliahrshefte fuer Zeitgeschichte,
April, 1957).
It can be stated in summary that German policy toward the Jews prior to World
War II consisted mainly of legislative pressure, and of a few public occasions of
violence in which, however, no Jews were actually killed. No doubt some Jewish lives
were lost in German concentration camps prior to World War II, but certainly there
was no deliberate policy of killing Jews as such, and the proportion of Jews affected
was far smaller than that of Germans subjected to similar treatment.
The purpose of the German campaign against the Jews was to eliminate the
powerful Jewish economic, political, cultural influence within Germany, and latterly,
with increasing emphasis, to promote the total emigration of the Jewish population
from Germany. The purpose of the organized Jewish counter-measures was to promote
a military crusade of neighboring states against Germany in the hope of securing the
total destruction of the German National Socialist state by means of war. It goes
without saying that there were many enlightened Jews who did not share this objective
just as there were moderate forces constantly at work within the German leadership to
secure a more generous policy toward the Jews than Hitler had hitherto employed.
It may be useful at this point to give a few population statistics bearing on the
period before the war and that of wartime. It is estimated that the number of Jews in
Germany when Hitler became Chancellor in January 1933, was approximately 500,000.
There were large additions toward the end of the pre-war period due to the annexation
of Austria and the Sudetenland and the establishment of a protectorate over Bohemia
and Moravia. The anti-Jewish attitude, policies and measures had encouraged
extensive migration of Jews from these areas controlled by National Socialist Germany.
It is estimated that about 320,000 left Germany between January, 1933, and
September, 1939. Some 480,000 emigrated from Austria, the Sudetenland and
Bohemia-Moravia before the war broke out. There were about 360,000 Jews in areas
under German control when war came in September, 1939, and of these some 65,000
left during the war.
HOGGAN : The Myth of the Six Million
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6. The Legend of the Depravity of Hitler and National Socialism
The National Socialist campaign against the Jews ended in total defeat and in
death for Hitler on April 30, 1945. This result was produced by Germany's involvement
in World War II. A tremendous campaign has been sustained since that date to depict
Hitler as the most evil and wicked man who has ever lived, and to brand forever with
shame the German nation which submitted to his leadership. The exploitation of the
circumstances concerning Hitler's wartime treatment of -the Jews was and remains the
decisive factor in this campaign.
The essence of the charge of unprecedented monstrosity against Hitler is that
under his orders some six million Jews were exterminated in seried gas ovens that had
been erected for this purpose in all the numerous concentration camps that existed
before the war in Germany and in those which were opened later on in territories
conquered by the advancing German armies. There has never been any valid evidence
brought forward to support this charge in general, and the six million figure was purely
conjectural from the beginning, having been set forth in the midst of the war, when
any such extent of extermination would have been impossible, if the six million figure
is to be accepted as the total number of Jews exterminated during the whole war
period. If six million Jews had been exterminated by 1943, then by May, 1945, at least
ten millions should have been done away with, provided Hitler and his cohorts could
have got their hands on that many Jews which, of course, they could not have done.
So far as can be discovered to date, the first time this charge of mass
extermination of Jews throughout Europe was advanced against Hitler and his
government took place in a book by a Polish-Jewish jurist, Rafael Lemkin, Axis Rule in
Occupied Europe, which appeared in 1943. He contended that the Nazis had gassed
millions of Jews, perhaps as many as six millions. This precise figure was first
confirmed by the New Jewish Frontier early in 1945. Tortured witnesses for the
Nuremberg Trials confirmed this figure when they did not exceed it, although the
prosecution at Nuremberg was willing to settle for around four millions as the number
that had been exterminated. Although totally ignorant of the facts, President Truman
stated that six millions was the correct number and often repeated this figure, thus
giving it official status. He cynically stated that his desire to please the Jews was due
to the fact that there were many more Jewish than Arab voters in the United States.
The six million figure has stuck, mainly due to the fact that the Jews have
recognized that it is difficult enough to sustain any such figure and that to go beyond it
would only add the ridiculous to the unsubstantiated, although the figure has often
been casually lifted to seven or eight millions in the press. The linking of the
reparations paid by West Germany to Israel and to German Jews to the six million
figure has provided a strong vested financial interest in perpetuating this estimate.
Before examining the literature of the. legend of the extermination of six million
Jews, it may be desirable to outline the general situation. There can be no decisive
solution of the problem on a statistical basis for the figures are not available in any
finality or decisive fashion. It is not known precisely bow many Jews were under
German control at any time during the war, to say nothing of what the Germans did
with them after they were able to get their hands on them. No one knows with any
certainty how many Jews were in the territory ultimately occupied by the Germans
before the attack on Russia on June 22, 1941, or what happened to them after the
attack. It is uncertain how many fled back into Russia before the German advance. Nor
does anybody know how many Jews were slaughtered by various Slavic peoples before
HOGGAN : The Myth of the Six Million
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the Germans arrived. There is plenty of evidence that Slavic peoples other than the
Russians were more prone to kill Jews after war broke out than were the Germans,
save for Jews operating among the Russian partisans. There are no accurate statistics
as to how many Jews fled to Russia, to Palestine, to other European countries, and to
the United States during the war. Nor are there any reliable figures as to how many
Jews in areas occupied by the Germans survived the war. During the war, as well as
before, the Germans were far more eager to expel Jews than to intern them, if and
when it was possible to arrange emigration. This was not so easy to do in wartime.
Jewish statisticians have done their best to magnify the number of Jews in the
future occupied areas be-fore September, 1939, and June, 1941, and to reduce almost
fantastically the number that remained alive in June, 1945. There is no probability that
the needed statistics can ever be recovered in any satisfactory manner. Both the Jews
and the Russians may be counted upon to suppress such statistics as they possess
because of the likelihood that they would, expose the extent of the fraud involved.
Unless the Russians should some time establish unity and rapport with the Germans
they are never likely to release any figures which would lessen the indictment of the
Germans relative to the extermination legend. The best that can be done is to produce
the figures and related considerations which do now prove that it would have been
entirely impossible for the Germans to have exterminated six million Jews, even if they
bad decided from the first to do so, and of any such policy there is no proof
whatsoever.
We know that there were about 360,000 Jews under German control in
September, 1939, in Germany, Austria, the Sudetenland and Bohemia-Moravia. There
were about 1,100,000 Jews in that part of Poland occupied by the Germans in 1939-
1940. There were approximately 1,150,000 Jews in eastern Poland which was taken
over by the Russians in the autumn of 1939. How many of these escaped into Russia
ahead of the German drive after June, 1941, is unknown. There is no doubt that the
Germans took over large numbers of Jews during -their invasion -of Russia, but it is
very likely that at no time during the war did the Germans have control over more
than 3,500,000 to 4,000,000 Jews, and many of these could not be withdrawn before
the Russians occupied these areas again. One thing is relatively certain, and that is
that the Germans never got their hands on as many as six million Jews during the war.
To have exterminated six millions would have made it necessary for them to have
executed every last Jew that they seized. Not even the upholders of the extermination
legend allege that this was the case, since they portray great numbers of Jews used in
labor operations at all the German concentration camps.
While it was the usual German policy during the war to intern Jews to prevent
subversion and. espionage, to suppress partisan activities, and to secure Jews for the
labor force, the German practice of interning Jews was no such sweeping process as
took place with the treatment of the Japanese by the United States and Canada. After
the war, Philip Auerbach, the Jewish attorney-general of the Bavarian State Office for
Restitution, claimed that the Germans interned no less than eleven million Jews, but in
the light of all the even partially reliable figures it is doubtful if they interned as many
as two million, and not all of these were put in concentration camps. Some were
placed in Jewish community centers like that at Theresienstadt, where they were
governed by Jews. Not only such population figures as we possess but also
considerations of logistics make it impossible to credit any such figure as eleven
millions, or even six millions. To have transported, interned, administered, fed and
clothed six million Jews would have paralyzed German military operations on the vast
HOGGAN : The Myth of the Six Million
— 12 —
eastern front. It would have been a terrific task to have gathered, interned and cared
for three million Jews.
In the early days of the launching of the extermination legend it was maintained
that there were gas chambers in all of the German concentration camps and that great
numbers of Jews were exterminated in all of them. But after the occupation of West
Germany by the Americans, British and French -there were many honest observers in
the occupation forces who visited these camps and found and reported that no gas
chambers existed there. It was then contended that most of the gas ovens were
concentrated at Auschwitz in southern. Poland, which was then under Russian control.
The Russians refused to allow any visitors there for about ten years after the war, by
which time the Russians were able to revamp Auschwitz in such a manner as to give
some plausibility to the claim that large numbers of Jews had been gassed there. It is
significant, however, that no living, authentic eye-witness of the gassing of Jews at
Auschwitz has ever been produced and validated.
It has continued to, be maintained that about half of the entire six million Jews
said to have been gassed by the Germans were gassed at Auschwitz, but even the
Jewish statistician, Gerald Reitlinger, admits that only 363,000 inmates were
registered at Auschwitz from January, 1940, to February, 1945, and not all -of these
were Jews. The supporters 4 the genocide legend con-tend that many at Auschwitz
were not registered but they have brought no proof of this. Even if one admits that
there were as many who were unregistered as were registered, that would make less
than 750,000 altogether. lit would have been very difficult to have gassed about three
millions with only 750,000 to work ,,on, although it has been frequently asserted by
dogmatic but uninformed writers that from four to five million Jews were gassed at
Auschwitz. Moreover, many who were sent to Auschwitz were -shifted elsewhere,
especially toward the end of the war when the Russians were advancing.
Here, again, logistics supplement registration and population data in undermining
the extermination myth. To have brought three million Jews, and a considerable
number of Gentiles to Auschwitz would have placed an insuperable burden upon
German transportation facilities which were strained to the limit in supporting the farflung
eastern military front, especially after the war began to turn against the
Germans. There is no probability that the Germans would have risked their military
fortunes to the extent required to convey three million persons to Auschwitz and care
for them there. Hence, both population figures and logistics combine to discredit the
legend of six million Jews being gassed in all camps under German control, as well as
of about three millions being gassed at Auschwitz.
Joined with all this are the facts which will be developed later on showing that
there is no evidence that the Germans adopted any program of mass extermination of
Jews during the war or that any German National Socialist leader ever gave any order
to do so. It has been alleged by numerous Jewish critics of Hitler, especially Gerald
Reitlinger, that early in the war the Nazi leaders decided on a "final solution" of the
Jewish problem and that this solution was the extermination of all the Jews they could
seize. There is no foundation whatever for this charge. Hitler, Himmler and Goebbels
did determine upon a "final solution" of the Jewish problem, so far as they could
control it, but this solution was to encourage or force the Jews to leave all lands that
the National Socialists controlled and to settle elsewhere. Emigration rather than
extermination was the solution proposed by all of these Nazi leaders. Not even the
Nuremberg inquisition could link Göring in any serious manner with the Jewish issue,
HOGGAN : The Myth of the Six Million
— 13 —
but there is no doubt that he shared the program of encouraging -the Jews to leave all
territory that Germany controlled or might control.
7. The Nature of some Jewish Memoirs and Reminiscences of Concentration
Camp Experiences during World War II
One may well consider today the feelings of any alert and patriotic German on
reading Eugene Heimler's Night of the Mist (N.Y., 1960). This highly praised and widely
celebrated book consists of alleged memoirs from the years 1944 and 1945. The hero
is a sensitive young Jewish poet of Hungary who awakens on March 19, 1944, to
discover that the Nazis are occupying the country because of Regent Horthy's attempt
to conclude a military armistice with the Soviet Union.
The arrival of the Nazis is considered by every Jew to be a death warrant. The
hero is persuaded to hide as a patient in a mental hospital. After some time he sneaks
out to marry his sweetheart, Eva. They are rounded up along with other Jews, and on
July 4, 1944, they are packed off to Auschwitz concentration camp in a cattle truck. A
German officer promises them excellent treatment, but one of the captives is allegedly
killed by an SS guard during the journey. The hero testifies that he was twice severely
beaten after his arrival. He has not been long at the camp when he learns that his wife
has died of dysentery. He has a passionate love affair with a gypsy girl, Cara, for
several weeks, but one day she is no longer at their hideaway in the camp to embrace
him, and he assumes that she has been killed.
The hero finds himself at Buchenwald by August, 1944, his stay at Auschwitz
apparently having lasted a very brief time. He works in a factory, and later in one of
the camp kitchens, where the SS place him in charge of a group of non-Jewish people,
working there. An elderly German Social Democrat inmate screams that he will not
work along with a Jew, but the hero pacifies him by threatening to beat him. The
sound of artillery later reveals the approach of the American forces, but the SS compel
a group of inmates to march with them to Bohemia. There they are overtaken by the
end of the war, and the hero returns to Hungary. He has managed to survive, but he is
sickened by the alleged effort of Hitler to annihilate every Jew in German occupied
Europe, although he has never actually seen anyone gassed.
Primo Levi, If This is a Man (N.Y., 1959), recounted his alleged experiences as a
frail young Italian Jew caught in the Nazi vice. Mussolini had established his Italian
Social Republic, and the hero, who has been roaming about the countryside in search
of plunder, is captured by Fascist militia on December 13, 1943. This terminates his
career as a volunteer with the Communist Italian partisans seeking to overthrow
Mussolini. He is taken in January, 1944, to the Italian detention camp at Fossoli near
Modena.
German officials arrive at Fossoli on a visit, and they complain that conditions
and facilities for the prisoners are not sufficiently healthy. There is an announcement
on February 22, 1944, that a small group of 650 Jews will be sent to Germany. The
hero reaches Auschwitz, where he is assigned to work in the Buna synthetic rubber
factory. Conditions are wretched, and the humdrum Sunday concerts and football
matches are no consolation for him. He receives a camp tattoo nunber on his arm
signifying that he has become merely another cipher. There are constantly rumors that
most of the Jews will end their lives in gas chambers.
Hungarian becomes the second language in his camp area next to Yiddish after
the spring of 1944, because the Nazis have been able to lay hands on so many
HOGGAN : The Myth of the Six Million
— 14 —
Hungarian Jews. There are excellent camp news facilities for the inmates. They learn at
once of the Allied landings in Normandy and of the attempt on Hitler's life in 1944.
Auschwitz is bombarded from the air by Allied planes; both the attitudes of the guards
and the conditions in the camp become progressively worse. At last the Russians
approach Auschwitz. The camp is evacuated on January 18, 1945, but many of the sick
prisoners are left behind. The hero is one of them, and he is freed by the Russians on
January 27, 1945. This is a joyous occasion for him which be celebrates with great
enthusiasm.
Levi and Heimler agree that the main purpose of the Nazis has been to liquidate
as many Jews as possible. Another former Auschwitz inmate, Miklos Nviszli, Auschwitz:
a Doctor's Eye-Witness Account (N.Y., 1960), has contended that adequate facilities
existed there to liquidate the Jews of all Europe. These men consider themselves
extremely fortunate to have avoided contact with gas chambers and crematoria about
which so many dreadful stories have been circulated.
The German reader might wonder what Regent Horthy of Hungary and Premier
Mussolini of Italy thought about the high-handed manner in which Hitler is said to have
prompted his loyal SS to dispose of the fate of Hungarian and Italian subjects. Nicholas
Horthy complained in his Memoirs (N.Y., 1957, pp. 174ff.) that the Jewish minority in
Hungary prior to World War II received no less than 25 per cent of the national
income, and that the Jewish problem was a serious one for Hungarians. He also
maintained that, in 1939, Hitler favored a peaceful accomodation with Poland and that
the war was forced upon Germany. Nevertheless, Horthy did everything possible to
protect Hungarian Jews from German interference as long as he was in control of his
country. The same was true of Mussolini, who became more dependent on Hitler after
Otto Skorzeny rescued the Italian leader from prison following his initial overthrow in
July, 1943.
Luigi Villari, Italian Foreign Policy under Mussolini (N.Y., 1956, pp. 197ff.), has
explained that the Duce also did everything he could until 1945 to prevent German
interference with Italian Jews and to intercede on their behalf when they were
transported to Germany. This was true despite the fact that Mussolini was sincerely,
opposed to Jewish influence in Italy. A German observer would not fail to note the
contrast between the mildly critical attitudes and policies of Horthy and Mussolini
toward the Jews and the openly anti-Jewish policy of Hitler.
The sensibilities of Mussolini in the Jewish question were well-known to Heinrich
Himmler, the top German SS leader. He told Mussolini on October 11, 1942, during a
visit to Rome, that German policy toward the Jews had gradually taken on a new
aspect during wartime solely for reasons of military security. Himmler complained that
thousands of Jews in the German-occupied territories were partisans or had conducted
sabotage and espionage. Chaim Weizmann, the Zionist leader of the Jewish agency in
London, had declared war on Germany on behalf of all Jews throughout the world as
early as September 5, 1939. It was because of the critical stage of the war that
Himmler now defended the new German policy of transporting Jews in occupied
territories to restricted regions and internment camps.
Himmler complained that there had been cases of Jewish women and children
working with the partisans in the USSR, and he admitted that many Jews actually
apprehended in partisan activities in that area had been summarily shot by German
military units. Himmler also referred to captured Soviet Jews engaged in military
construction work under conditions in which be admitted that the death-rate was
probably higher than normal. Mussolini firmly reminded Himmler that the Catholic
HOGGAN : The Myth of the Six Million
— 15 —
Church was strongly opposed to any extreme measures against the Jews, and he
intimated that a policy of German excesses might change the attitude of Pope Pius XII,
who favored an Axis victory over the USSR in World War II (Vierteliahrshefte für
Zeitgeschichte, 1956/4).
Himmler's references to the resistance of Soviet Jews was intended to justify the
tougher German policy toward the Jews which began with the outbreak of the Russo-
German war on June 22, 1941. A Canadian Jewish journalist, Raymond Arthur Davies,
Odyssey through Hell (N.Y., 1946), stated that the Soviet Red Army should receive the
principal credit for saving Jewish lives in Europe during World War II. Davies extolled
the military achievements of Soviet Jews both as partisans and regulars on both sides
of the front. Schachno Epstein, the chief of the Anti-Fascist Committee of Soviet Jews,
told Davies that the Soviet Union, by evacuating Jews and by other measures, had
saved the lives of at least 3,500,000 European Jews. Incidentally, this would have
made it rather difficult for the Nazis to get hold of 6,000,000 to exterminate.
Davies spent most of the war in the Soviet Union, and be was convinced that in
no other belligerent country bad the Jewish role attained comparable significance. He
emphasized that thousands of Soviet war plants were managed by Jews, and that a
remarkably large number of Jews held top positions in the Soviet armed forces and
administration. He noted that 250,000 Polish Jews from the German sphere of
occupation fled to the USSR in 1939, and they were to be encountered in every Soviet
province. He had received official Soviet information that no less than 35,000 European
Jews were fighting for Tito in the illegal partisan war against Germany. He surmised
that most of Rumania's Jews bad emerged from the war unscathed because of the
impact on Rumanian policy of Germany's defeat at Stalingrad. Davies enjoyed contacts
with many American Jews who had emigrated to the USSR in the 1930's and were
playing a prominent part in the Communist war effort. He also encountered many
Jewish Red Army officers who boasted of killing their regular German army prisoners in
gigantic mass executions. Davies entered Berlin with the Red Army, and he
pronounced the wanton destruction and rape of that city equitable and just. Davies
immediately established close contacts with the leaders of the Berlin Jewish community
after the Reich capital fell. One of the prominent members of the Berlin Jewish
community was Hildegard Benjamin, who later, as Communist, Minister of justice in
Soviety Central Germany, compelled the Germans to accept the Soviet, legal system
instead of keeping one of their own.
Davies rejoiced that these thousands of Berlin Jews had also been liberated by
the Soviets and not by the West. He was convinced that Zionism had become
superfluous for Jews in the Soviet environment despite the fact that anti-Jewish feeling
persisted at the grass-roots level in many parts of the USSR.
Ralph Nunberg, The Fighting Jew (N.Y., 1945), offered an equally graphic account
of the role of the Soviet Jews in World War II. Nunberg noted with pride that no less
than 313 Soviet front line generals were Jews. He saw the USSR victorious under the
aegis of Karl Marx, another "fighting Jew" (Ibid., p. 198).
Nunberg admitted -that many Jews from Central Europe, as well as from other
parts of the world, had been victims of the gigantic Soviet purges between 1936 and
1939, but this slaughter was incidental and ideological and was not part of an openly
anti-Jewish policy on the part of Stalin. The USSR and some of her later satellites were
the only countries in the world where anti-Jewish utterances were a capital offense.
But Soviet initiative did lead to the deportation. of "undesirable" Jews to Germany
during the period of the 1939-1941 Russo-German non-aggression pact.
HOGGAN : The Myth of the Six Million
— 16 —
Margarete Buber, Under Two Dictators, (London, 1950), presented the memoirs
of a German-Jewish woman who was sent to the German concentration camp at
Ravensbrück in August, 1940, after spending several years in the brutal and primitive
conditions of a Russian concentration camp. She was considered to be too dangerous
to be given her freedom in Germany, and she noted that she was the only Jewish
person in her contingent of deportees from Russia who was not released forthwith by
the Gestapo. She found that conditions in Ravensbrück presented a striking contrast to
the filth, disorder, and starvation of her Russian camp.
German concentration camps in August, 1940, were few and far between, and
the number of prisoners was small in contrast to the vast camps of the Soviets. The
number of inmates in all German camps at the outbreak of war in September 1939 has
been previously cited at 21,300. Most of these inmates were the usual types of
criminals, and there was only a small percentage of Jewish people. After one year of
war, the total concentration camp population was still less than 40,000 in contrast to
the many millions detained in the USSR camps.
The camp the heroine entered at Ravensbrück was immaculately clean with
spacious lawns and flower beds. Regular baths, and a change of linen every week
seemed sheer luxury after her earlier experiences. At a first meal consisting of white
bread, sausage, margarine and sweet porridge with dried fruit, the heroine could not
resist asking her neighbor at table if August 3, 1940, was some sort of holiday or
special occasion. Her neighbor was quite blank, and the heroine proceeded to ask if the
food was always so good. The neighbor replied in the affirmative, but she wondered
why anyone should be so pleased with it. The heroine did not attempt an explanation.
She also considered her barracks at Ravensbrück a palace compared to her crowded
mud hut in the Soviet camp. Her first Sunday meal of goulash, red cabbage, and
potatoes was a veritable feast. The heroine spent many years at Ravensbrück. The
camp was crowded by 1943. Some of the old cleanliness was lost, and many flowers
were trampled down. This was a consequence of the never-ending war. Prisoners from
Auschwitz and other camps poured in toward the end of the war. The heroine noted
that the Auschwitz inmates arrived "half-starved and exhausted" early in 1945. It
should be recalled that tens of thousands of eastern German refugees literally died of
starvation during this same period.
All postal communication between the Ravensbrück inmates and the outside
world ceased in January, 1945, and confusion reigned. At last the end came, the
German guards fled, and the heroine was released. She had witnessed the progressive
deterioration of conditions at the camp over a long period. Corporal punishment for
major offenses had been introduced after her arrival, and since the winter of 1941-
1942, she had heard the usual malicious rumors that gas executions were being
practiced in some cases.
Another Ravensbrück Communist political prisoner, Charlotte Bormann, has
insisted in Die Gestapo läßt bitten (The Gestapo Invites You), that the rumors of gas
executions were tendentious inventions deliberately circulated among the prisoners by
the Communists. Margarete Buber was not accepted by this group because of her
imprisonment in the USSR. Charlotte Bormann's memoirs never found a publisher, and
she was not permitted by the prosecution to testify at the Rastadt trial of the
Ravensbrück camp leaders in the French occupation zone. This has been the usual and
typical fate of authors seeking to present the story from the side of those who denied
the extermination legend.
HOGGAN : The Myth of the Six Million
— 17 —
8. The Weissberg Tale
An example of one of the Jewish Communist deportees from the Soviet Union
who managed to escape German confinement throughout the war was Alexander
Weissberg Cybulski, Hexensabbat (Frankfurt a.M., 1951; Am. ed., The Accused, N.Y.,
1951). He was born in Cracow and retained Austrian citizenship after 1938. He was a
prominent scientific engineer in the second Soviet Five Year Plan until his arrest during
the 1937 purge. Albert Einstein vainly interceded with Stalin on his behalf in 1938.
Weissberg has written the most informative book to date on the gigantic Soviet
purges. After he was deported by the Russians at the end of 1939, Weissberg went
quietly to Cracow where he remained until he was forced to flee from Russian
occupation forces in that city at the end of the war. Weissberg had expected the
Germans to send him at once to a concentration camp, and he had made an eloquent
appeal to the Soviet authorities to permit him to depart directly to Sweden from the
USSR. His appeal was rejected.
Weissberg later produced a particularly amazing book, Die Geschichte von Joel
Brand (Köln, 1956; Am. ed., Desperate Mission, N.Y., 1958). There had been
international interest in the Joel Brand story ever since the London Times carried the
news on July 20, 1934, that Brand had come from Budapest to Istanbul with an offer
from the Gestapo to permit the emigration of one million Jews from Central Europe in
the midst of the war. The Gestapo, admitted that this huge emigration would greatly
inconvenience the German war effort because of the demand on transport facilities
involved, but they were willing to undertake the plan in exchange for ten thousand
trucks to, be used exclusively on the eastern front. It goes without saying that the
acceptance of the, plan would have produced a major breach between the Soviet Union
and the Western Allies. Nevertheless, one of the Budapest Jewish leaders, Joel Brand,
was in favor of acceptance. This prompted the British to conclude that Brand was a
dangerous Nazi agent. He was whisked off to Cairo and forthwith imprisoned.
One of the, contentions of Weissberg's book is that the German Nazis were
always pursuing a zig-zag policy throughout the war between the emigration of the
Jews from Europe and their physical extermination. Weissberg confessed at the start a
complete, lack of documentary sources to prove that Hitler ever intended the physical
destruction of all Jews as such, but he nevertheless uncritically accepted the widelypropagated
myth of the liquidation of six million Jews. He also denied Horthy of,
Hungary the role of protector of the, Jews, and he claimed that Hungary had been
under a "terroristic anti-Jewish regime" ever since 1919 (Ibid., p. 9).
The Nazi personalities receiving chief emphasis in the book are Dieter Wisliceny,
the, Gestapo chief in Slovakia, and Adolf Eichmann, after 1934 the chief SS official
expert on the Jewish question in Europe, Wisliceny, after 1945, made a vain effort to
save his own life by supporting the efforts of the prosecution at Nuremberg. Eichmann
was far from being as important in the Nazi hierarchy as his position might suggest.
For instance, throughout his whole career Eichmann never once had a personal
interview with Hitler.
The main thesis of the Weissberg book is that Hungarian Jews took the initiative
in making deals with the Germans, that many of their deals were successful, and that,
by implication, it would have been possible to negotiate with the Germans for the
evacuation of the entire European Jewish population during World War II, thus showing
that the Hitler regime still favored emigration as the real solution of the Jewish
question. One unfortunate consequence of the book was to point the finger of suspicion
HOGGAN : The Myth of the Six Million
— 18 —
at Rudolph Kastner, the chief leader of the Hungarian Jews. Weissberg sometimes
made him appear to be almost pro-Hitler. Kastner was subsequently murdered in
Israel by a young Jewish terrorist in the midst of the frantic furor accompanying the
1955 Israeli national elections. Excerpts from Weissberg's findings had appeared in
Israeli periodicals early in 1955.
The turbulent Hungarian situation in 1944-1945, when the valiant Magyar nation
was going down to final defeat before Communism, produced many bizarre situations,
but none is more striking than that of Raoul Wallenberg. This Swedish Jew, who had
no, special diplomatic status, was permitted by Swedish Foreign Minister Guenther to
operate from the Swedish legation in Budapest in a gigantic business venture of selling
Swedish passports. It was later alleged without any foundation that Wallenberg was
murdered by the "fascist" followers of Hungarian Premier Ferenc Szalassi. Wallenberg
as a result was virtually canonized for ten years as a selfless hero who had given his
life to protect Hungarian Jews from the German Gestapo and their Hungarian cohorts.
In reality, Wallenberg had made a fortune selling passports to these same "fascists",
and for this reason he had been arrested and deported by the Soviet occupation
authorities. The Swedish Government was fully informed of this by Alexandra Kollontay
in Stockholm, but the truth did not reach the public until publication of the article by
the Jewish writer, Rudolph Philipp, in the January 14, 1955, copy of the sensational
Swedish newspaper, VI.
9. The Case of Adolf Eichmann
The fate of Adolf Eichmann reached truly monumental and sensational
proportions with his so-called capture in Argentina by Israeli agents on May 12, 1960.
The Israeli authorities decided to hold the world in suspense for an entire year before
placing the former German official before a court under conditions in which any
reference to a fair trial would be merely ludicrous.
The alleged memoirs of Eichmann were uncritically published in Life, November
28, December 5, 1960, without any attention having been paid to the fact that more
than one scandal had been caused by spurious memoirs during recent years. One need
only imagine how Gerhard Ritter, the president of the German Historical Society, felt in
1953 when it was proved that Hitlers Tischgespraeche (Hitler's Secret Conversations,
N.Y., 1953), which he had edited for publication in 1952, was utterly fraudulent.
Nevertheless, in 1960, a record allegedly derived from Eichmann's comments in 1955
to a highly dubious associate were to be accepted as definitive memoirs. They were
designed to prove, of course, that "the unregenerate Nazi" Eichmann was every inch
the fiend that be has been depicted. A disarming attempt to make them seem
authentic was furnished by the touch that Eichmann did not say what his cohort,
Hoettl, claimed at Nuremberg that he had said about the alleged killing of millions of
Jews (Time, June 6, 1960, reported Eichmann had said five million Jews; Newsweek,
June 6, 1960, claimed he had said six million).
The number of unlikely touches in the Life account make the performance look
about as clumsy as the typical Communist-forged memoirs. For instance, Weissberg
noted that Eichmann had made his proposal on Jewish emigration to Brand, with the
specific authorization of Himmler, on April 25, 1944, at the Hotel Majestic in Budapest.
The Life account has Himmler authorizing the exchange of Jewish emigrants for war
material in 1944 "when Reichsführer Himmler took over as commander of the reserve
HOGGAN : The Myth of the Six Million
— 19 —
army." But Himmler did not receive his active military command over the Volkssturm
until August 1944, after the July 20, 1944 assassination attempt against Hitler.
The articles in Life actually appear to be little more than a condensation of three
sensational and mutually contradictory books: Minister of Death, the Eichmann Story
(N.Y., 1960, by Ephraim Katz, Zwy Aldouby, and Quentin Reynolds); The Case Against
Adolf Eichmann (N.Y., 1960, by Henry A. Zeiger); Eichmann: the Man and His Crimes
(N.Y., 1960, by Comer Clarke). It has never been alleged that Eichmann participated in
the execution of Jews, but it has been claimed that be knowingly arranged for their
deportation to places of execution.
In spite of all the international commotion and the vast barrage of irresponsible
print which has flooded the world on Eichmann since May, 1960, there is not the
slightest substantial evidence that Eichmann ever deliberately ordered even one Jew
gassed in a German concentration camp, to say nothing of having ordered and
supervised the extermination of six million Jews. This would be true even though he
gave testimony at his trial that he bad been responsible for the extermination of more
than six million or wrote a book of alleged "true confessions" giving the same or a
larger figure. Any such account by Eichmann would be (1) proof of the extent and
effect of the torture and brainwashing to which be had been subjected by his Jewish
captors; (2) the result of his decision, since he knew he would be executed in any
event, to provide a sensational yarn of his elimination of Jews whom he disliked, even
if he had not actually wished to destroy them, thus caressing his ego; or (3) a product
of the fact that his experience bad actually rendered him mentally unbalanced. Perhaps
all three explanations would be intermingled and blended. The essence of the matter is
that, if all the important evidence indicates that there was no systematic and extensive
extermination of Jews by Germany during the war, then no boast of such massive
achievements in extermination can be accepted as having any factual validity. They
would belong in the realm of morbid fantasy rather than sober factual reality.
10. Unconditional Surrender, the Prolongation of the War, and the Effects on
Jews Under German Control
Eichmann was allegedly responsible for the deportation of men like Heimler and
Levi. Unlike the case of Margarete Buber, the alleged concentration camp experiences
of Heimler and Levi began long after the public announcement of unconditional
surrender by President Franklin D. Roosevelt at Casablanca on January 13, 1943. The
effect of this pronouncement on the prolongation of the war and on the promotion of.
Communist aims in Europe has been considered by many experts. The desire in
Germany for a compromise peace by the summer of 1942 was by no means confined
to the German opposition to Hitler. Walter Schellenberg, The Schellenberg Memoirs
(London, 1956), reveals that, as early as August, 1942, Heinrich Himmler was willing
to envisage a compromise peace approximately on the basis of Germany's territorial
position on September 1, 1939. Specific peace efforts of Himmler as early as 1942
were later confirmed from official Swedish sources. Schellenberg was the dominant
personality in the SD (SS Security Service) after the assassination of Reinhard
Heydrich by British agents in Bohemia in 1942, and he consistently exerted a
moderating influence on Himmler.
The effect of unconditional surrender was certain to mean the prolongation of the
war to the bitter end to the benefit of Soviet Russia. General J.F.C. Fuller, The Second
World War (London, 1948, pp. 258-9), has explained that "Russia would be left the
HOGGAN : The Myth of the Six Million
— 20 —
greatest military power in Europe, and, therefore, would dominate Europe." Colonel F.
C. Miksche, Unconditional Surrender (London, 1952, p. 255), stated that "the
unconditional surrender policy, proclaimed by President Roosevelt in Casablanca and
bolstered up by a frivolous propaganda, was heedlessly put into execution."
George N. Crocker, Roosevelt's Road to Russia (Chicago, 1959, p. 182), noted
that the Germans fought on with the couragre of despair, and that "Roosevelt's words
hung like a putrefying albatross around the necks of America and Britain."
The unconditional surrender pronouncement was no sudden inspiration of
President Roosevelt at Casablanca. Compton Mackenzie, Mr. Roosevelt (N.Y., 1944, p.
251), dated the genesis of the unconditional surrender plan from the period of
President Roosevelt's 'fireside chat' of December 29, 1940, nearly one year before the
formal entry of the United States into, World War II.
Alfred Vagts, "Unconditional Surrender -- vor und nach 1943" (i.e. before and
after 1943) (Vierteliahrshefte fuer Zeitgeschichte, 1959/3) has explained in
considerable detail how World War II actually became a "crusade" along the lines of
unconditional surrender from the moment the United States formally entered the war.
There was virtually no criticism of this policy before and after Casablanca from those
close to the President (William C. Bullitt was a notable exception). Elliott Roosevelt, As
He Saw It (N.Y., 1946, p. 117), declared that unconditional surrender was as good as
if "Uncle Joe" Stalin himself had invented it.
As a matter of fact, however, the idea of unconditional surrender for Germany
was not actually of American origin, despite Roosevelt's enunciation of the slogan at
Casablanca in January, 1943. The British launched the policy; indeed, it had been basic
in the war plans of Lord Halifax long before September, 1939. It was confirmed when
Halifax and the British refused to accept the Italian plan to stop the German-Polish war
early in September, 1939, a plan to which Hitler assented. The British continued it
when they refused Hitler's offers of peace at the close of the German-Polish war, and
again when they rejected his generous peace offers after Dunkirk. The British under
both Halifax and Chamberlain, and under Churchill were determined that Germany
must be utterly destroyed.
Roosevelt, after some thought, seems to have recognized at least momentarily
the folly of this policy, and on May 23, 1944, sent a note to Churchill and Stalin
suggesting that a return be made to the policy of Woodrow Wilson and an appeal be
made to the German people over the heads of Hitler and his government, offering
peace if the National Socialist government would be overthrown. Churchill rejected it
instantly, and on May 24th made a speech in the House of Commons declaring that
Britain would accept nothing short of unconditional surrender. Stalin also vetoed
Roosevelt's suggestion on May 26th. After that, Roosevelt made no further effort to
alter the crusade for unconditional surrender (Gerhard Ritter, The German Resistance,
N.Y., 1958, p. 274; John L. Snell, Wartime Origins of the East-West Dilemma over
Germany, New Orleans, 1959, p. 128).
Many books have been written about the efforts of the German opposition to
Hitler in 1942 to arrive at a satisfactory understanding with the Western Powers in
order to win sufficient support within Germany to establish, by revolutionary action, a
new government, and, needless to say, not an anti-Jewish one. Hans B. Gisevius, To
the Bitter End (N.Y., 1948, p.p. 448ff.), and Fabian von Schlabrendorff, Revolt against
Hitler (N.Y., 1948, pp. 117ff.), have emphasized the importance of a satisfactory
German agreement on peace terms with the Western Powers. Allen Dulles, Germany's
Underground (N.Y., 1947, p.p. 167ff), indicated that the author, as OSS chief directing
HOGGAN : The Myth of the Six Million
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American espionage from Switzerland, favored a positive agreement with the German
opposition in 1942, and he was forcefully presenting his views to the American
authorities at home. Gerhard Ritter, Carl Goerdeler und die deutsche
Widerstandsbewegung (Stuttgart, 1954; Am. ed., The German Resistance, N.Y.,
1958), revealed that Goerdeler, as the designated head of the future opposition
government, was in despair when he heard of the unconditional surrender
pronouncement.
There is overwhelming evidence that American authorities had ample reason to
believe that the war might be brought to a sudden close after the North African
landings and the Stalingrad impasse had positive terms for peace been presented to
Germany through German opposition spokesmen in Switzerland. Robert Sherwood,
Roosevelt and Hopkins (N.Y., 1948, pp. 650ff.) has revealed that the primary reason
for Roosevelt's unconditional surrender announcement, when made in 1943, was to
head off a German revolt and an irresistable bid for peace even without specific terms
of encouragement from the Western Powers. At that time, Roosevelt did not appear to
want Germany to escape from final and total defeat in the field, as she had done by
means of the conditional surrender negotiations with President Wilson in 1918.
It is an incredible fact that since the war most writers critical of unconditional
surrender have concentrated almost exclusively on the unfortunate effect of the policy
in prolonging the slaughter by military action and in promoting ultimate Communist
control in Europe. This is astonishing, because, in the total scope of writing on World
War II, the subject of the impact of the war on the European Jews has received more
emphasis than any other. Surely one could have expected very early a detailed study
on the implications and effects of unconditional surrender on the fate of European
Jews. It is now alleged on many sides that American Jewish leaders by the summer of
1942 were receiving reports from Europe which persuaded them that Hitler literally
meant to undertake the physical liquidation of all European Jewry. It would be logical,
if these stories are at all true, to expect that the American Jewish leaders would have
been seeking to save the European Jews from such a horrible fate through conclusion
of the war as quickly as possible. This would be the only possible effect means of
succor under the alleged circumstances, namely, ending the war. One would expect
American Jewry to have been far more horrified by Roosevelt's unconditional surrender
pronouncement in January, 1943, than even by Hitler's appointment as German
Chancellor in January, 1933.
Henry Morgenthau, Jr., "The Refugee Run-Around" in Colliers, Nov. 1, 1947,
alleged that the United States Government knew from August, 1942, that Jews were
being killed wholesale. Yet Morgenthau and his Communist assistant, Harry Dexter
White, were ardent supporters of unconditional surrender both before and after
Casablanca, and they were the American supporters of the Russian-born plan to
convert Germany into a goat pasture. This plan was adopted by Roosevelt and
Churchill at the Quebec conference in 1944, and it was soon learned by Hitler and the
remaining German opposition leaders alike.
There were plenty of prominent American Jewish leaders who might have
prompted President Roosevelt to follow the advice of Allen Dulles and to end the war,
but they failed to do so. Margaret L. Coit, Mr. Baruch (Boston, 1957, pp. 468ff.) has
proved that Bernard Baruch had more influence on President Roosevelt than did
William C. Bullitt, who opposed unconditional surrender, although Bullitt had worked
hard for President Roosevelt in promoting the outbreak of war in Europe in 1939.
Baruch, like Morgenthan and other Jewish advisers of the President, was a fervid
HOGGAN : The Myth of the Six Million
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supporter of unconditional surrender in 1942, although this policy was calculated in
any event to produce the greatest possible loss of Jewish lives.
One can only hope that an honest and well-informed Jewish writer will soon
undertake a detailed explanation of this phenomenon, which would be utterly
monstrous and incomprehensible if the reports of liquidations of the Jews in 1942 had
been true. Furthermore, the internment policy persued by the German Government
after March, 1942, spelled enormous suffering for many Jews in the context of
Roosevelt's unconditional surrender policy, quite apart from any alleged German policy
of deliberately exterminating all Jews.
The enthusiastic description by Isaac Zaar, Rescue and Liberation: America's Part
in the Birth of Israel (N.Y., 1954, pp. 39ff.) of the big New York City Jewish rally on
March 9, 1943, is sadly ironical under these circumstances. Ben Hecht presented his
tragic Jewish pageant, We Will Never Die with a Kurt Weill musical score, Billy Rose
producing, and Moss Hart directing. Only a few weeks earlier, the public declaration of
unconditional surrender by the American President had guaranteed prolonged and
unnecessary suffering to millions of European Jews as well as to several hundred
million other Europeans.
Cyrus Adler and Aaron Margalith, With Firmness in the Right: American
Diplomatic Action Affecting Jews, 1840-1945 (N.Y., 1946, pp. 418ff.), have claimed
that President Roosevelt took an allegedly proper step on August 21, 1942, when he
warned that retribution would follow any and all deliberate excesses against Jews. The
accent here was clearly on revenge rather than immediate succor for the European
Jews. An unlimited American jurisdiction in Germany after the war tantamount to
"unconditional surrender" was clearly implied in the assumption that the United States
would be in a position to secure retribution in any and every case where excesses had
taken place. One can well doubt the value of this threat, repeated on December 17,
1942, in the context of the official unconditional surrender policy adopted the following
year.
The "Emergency Conference to Save the Jews of Europe" was organized in April,
1943. The only person connected with it who opposed unconditional surrender was
Herbert Hoover, and he was merely an honorary chairman. The solution envisaged was
along the lines later taken by Joel Brand for the emigration of the Jews from Europe
while war operations continued. This was, to put it mildly, an utopian and
unsatisfactory policy compared to encouraging a speedy end of the war. This is
especially true when one considers the disinclination of this group actually to negotiate
with the Germans. The comprehensive German offer presented by Adolf Eicibmann at
Lisbon in 1940 and again from Berlin in 1941 for the emigration of the European Jews
had produced no result, and any widespread emigration of European Jews virtually
ceased after the outbreak of war between Germany and the USSR in June 1941.
The British prohibited the landing of the S.S. Struma in Palestine in March 1942,
with its 769 passengers from Europe, and shortly afterward the ship sank with only
one life saved. Even worse was the earlier case of the French liner, Patria, which was
burned and sunk by British warships before Haifa on November 25, 1940, with a loss
of 2,875 Jewish lives. Anthony Eden summarized British objections to the evacuation of
European Jews during wartime at a conference in Washington, D.C. on March 27, 1943
(Adler and Margalith, Ibid., p. 396; Sherwood, Ibid., p. 717).
The Emergency Conference suggested in addition to emigration a policy of
bombing the concentration camps. The motive was not to be the one usually followed
of seeking to reduce the industrial production connected with the camps, but rather
HOGGAN : The Myth of the Six Million
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that of demolishing the camps in their entirety. This was based on the naive
assumption that the inmates would not be killed but would be enabled to escape. It is
truly inconceivable that any large numbers of inmates would have escaped
permanently. Increased loss of lives through the bombings and the destruction of
facilities to provide for the prisoners would be unavoidable. The bombing campaign
actually conducted in 1945, with its attendant slaughter and privations, undoubtedly
produced the worst conditions experienced in German concentration camps (Zaar,
Ibid., p. 60).
Further efforts, within the hopeless context of unconditional surrender, except for
the effective distribution of supplies to the inmates in the camps through the
International Committee of the Red Cross, were equally feeble. President Roosevelt
joined Secretary Morgenthau in sponsoring a special War Refugee Board on January
22, 1.944. A tiny band of some 984 European Jews had been transported under its
auspices to a special refugee camp at Oswego, N.Y. by July, 1944. The occupation of
Hungary by Germany in March 1944, which probably would not have taken place bad it
not been for unconditional surrender, led to the formation of the New York Conference
of Hungarian Jews on April 2, 1944. The group urged Stalin to accelerate his military
operations against the Hungarians as the decisive means of aiding the Hungarian Jews.
This was the best help they could offer Hungarian Jewry (Zaar, Ibid., pp. 78-1141).
11. Leon Poliakov and the Wisliceny Story
The genocide legend was propagated with increased zeal after the brutal
unconditional surrender pronouncement. Numerous statements were extracted from a
few of the German defendants in Allied custody after World War 11 to document the
charge that there was a gradual drift into a policy of exterminating the Jews of Europe
after the outbreak of war between Germany and the USSR in June. 1941. 'Many of
these so-called key statements appear in Léon Poliakov and Josef Wulf, Das Dritte
Reich und die Juden: Dokumente und Aufsätze (The Third Reich and the Reich:
Documents and Articles, Berlin, 1955). Poliakov is the director of the Centre de
Documentation Juive Contemporaine in Paris, which was launched by Isaac
Schneersobn in 1943 during the German occupation. The Centre was presented with
the files of the German Embassy in Paris by Provisional French President Charles de
Gaulle in 1944. Its collection of materials on German policy toward the Jews, 1933-
1945, is more extensive than any other, including the Haifa Document Office for Nazi
Crimes and Dr. Albert Wiener's similar Library in London.
The most celebrated of all key "documents" is the statement of Dieter Wisliceny
obtained at the Communist-controlled Bratislava prison on November 18, 1946.
Wisliceny, who had been a journalist before engaging in police work, was an assistant
of Adolf Eichmann in the Jewish Division of the Chief Reich Security Office prior to
receiving his assignment in Slovakia. Wisliceny was a nervous wreck and addicted to
uncontrollable fits of sobbing for hours on end during the period of his arrest prior to
his execution.
The Wisliceny statement begins convincingly enough. It indicates that Reich SS
Leader Heinrich Himmler was an enthusiastic advocate of Jewish emigration. More than
100,000 Jews had been persuaded to leave Austria between March, 1938, and
January, 1939. This figure eventually reached 220,000 of the total 280,000 Austrian
Jews. A special Institute for Jewish emigration in Prague had produced remarkable
HOGGAN : The Myth of the Six Million
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results in the period after March, 1939, and secured an eventual emigration of
260,000.
The above points are indisputable, but the comment follows, allegedly from
Wisliceny, that more than three million Jews were added to the German sphere by the
war in Poland in 1939. This would be a major factual error for any expert on European
Jewry. There were more than 1,130,000 Jews in the section of Poland occupied by
Russia, whereas the figure of more than three million Jews could scarcely apply even
to the total territory of Poland before the war. An estimated 500,000 Jews had
emigrated from Poland prior to the war. The 1931 Polish census had established the
number of Jews in Poland at 2,732,600 (Reitlinger, Die Endlösung, Berlin, 1956, p.
36). An additional minimum of 250,000 Jews had fled from Western Poland to the
Soviet occupation sphere in 1939. If one subtracts 1,880,000 from 2,732,600 and
allows for the normal Jewish population increase, the Polish Jews under German rule at
the end of 1939 could scarcely have exceeded 1,100,000 (Gutachten des Instituts für
Zeitgeschichte, Munich, 1958, p. 80).
The Wisliceny statement emphasizes that the emigration of Jews from German
occupied territories continued after the outbreak of war. The emigration of Danzig Jews
by way of Rumania and Turkey in September, 1940, is cited as a typical instance.
Himmler and Eichmann had taken over the idea of a Madagascar haven for the Jews
from the Poles. The latter had sent the Michal Lepecki expedition -- accompanied by
Jewish spokesmen -- to Madagascar in 1937, and Theodor Herzl, the founder of
Zionism, had also considered Madagascar as a good possible basis for the future
Jewish state. Madagascar meant the "final solution" of the Jewish question to Himmler
and Eichmann. The Madagascar plan was still under discussion many months after the
outbreak of war with the USSR.
The statement of Wisliceny goes on to state that until June 1941, the conditions
of Jewish life in Germany, including Austria, and in the Bohemia-Moravia protectorate,
were no worse than before the war. The Jews in Poland had returned to their
customary and traditional ghetto life, but war plants were being located in the ghettos
to provide adequate employment.
12. The Outbreak of the War with Russia June 22, 1941, and the
Einsatzgruppen
Two important developments allegedly followed the outbreak of war with Russia.
In July, 1941, Hitler gave the order to execute the political commissars captured with
Soviet units (there had been 34,000 of these political agents with special powers
assigned to the Red Army as early as 1939). According to the so-called Wisliceny
statement, the special action units (Einsatzgruppen) assigned both to this task and to
crushing partisans were soon receiving orders to extend their activities in a "general
massacre" of Soviet Jews. In March, 1942, came the decision to concentrate all
European Jews in the Polish Government-General or in concentration camps, and this
was to be the prelude to the liquidation of European Jewry (Poliakov and Wulf, Ibid.,
pp. 87ff.)
The action of the Einsatzgruppen played a large role in the case presented by
Soviet Prosecutor Rudenko at Nuremberg in the major trial and also at the three later
trials of SS leaders. The 1947 indictment of the four Einsatzgruppen, which were
organized in May, 1941, on the eve of the German preventive war against the USSR,
was prepared with Soviet assistance by the American prosecutor, Telford Taylor. He
HOGGAN : The Myth of the Six Million
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charged that these four groups of security troops assigned to fight partisans and
commissars had killed not less than a million Jewish civilians in Western Russia and the
Ukraine merely because they were Jews. There were no reliable statistics to support
this claim, but Otto Ohlendorf, the chief of Einsatzgruppen D in the South, had been
"persuaded" on November 5, 1945 to sign a statement to the effect that 90,000 Jews
had been killed under his command.
Ohlendorf did not come on trial until 1948, long after the main Nuremberg trial,
and by that time he was insisting that his earlier statement had been extorted from
him by torture. In his principal speech before the 1948 tribunal, Ohlendorf denounced
Philip Auerbach, the Jewish attorney-general of the Bavarian State Office for
Restitution, who had recently stated that he was seeking compensation for his "eleven
million Jews" who had suffered in concentration camps. Ohlendorf scornfully stated
that "not the minutest part" of the people for whom Auerbach was seeking
compensation had even seen a concentration camp. Ohlendorf lived to see Auerbach
convicted of embezzlement and fraud before his own execution finally took place in
1951.
Ohlendorf explained to the tribunal that his formations often had to take
energetic action to prevent massacres of Jews organized by local people in Russia
behind the German front. He denied that all the Einsatzgruppen ever employed in the
war on the eastern front inflicted one quarter of the casualties claimed by the
prosecution, and he insisted that the illegal partisan warfare in the USSR had taken a
much higher toll of lives -- the Soviets boasted of 500,000 -- from the regular German
army. Ohlendorf wrote a bitter appeal shortly before his execution in 1951, and he
charged that the Western Allies were hypocritical in holding Germany to account by
conventional laws of warfare while engaged with a savage Soviet opponent which did
not respect those laws.
The later careful account by the brilliant English jurist, R. T. Paget, Manstein, his
Campaigns and his Trial (London, 1951) Ohlendorf was under Manstein's command --
concluded that the prosecution, in accepting Soviet figures, exaggerated the number of
casualties inflicted by the Einsatzgruppen by more than 1000 per cent and that they
distorted much further the situations in which these casualties were generally inflicted.
It has nevertheless become the popular legend that the physical liquidation of the Jews
in Europe began with the action of the Einsatzgruppen against their Soviet enemies in
1941.
Poliakov and Wulf also cited a statement by a former collaborator of Eichmann,
Dr. Wilhelm Hoettl, to the effect that Eichmann said in December, 1944, that no less
than two million Jews had been killed by the Einsatzgruppen in the period 1941-1942.
This statement was not given weight even by the American tribunal which tried and
condemned Ohlendorf. It should be noted that Soviet East Galicia was supposed to be
included in the area affected, but some 434,329 East Galician Jews were transported
westward by the Germans in the period shortly before July 1, 1943 (Gutachten des
Instituts fuer Zeitgeschichte, 1958, p. 231). This gives some idea of the
"thoroughness" of this alleged total massacre of Soviet Jews in 1941-1942. Hoettl had
been employed as an American spy during the latter phase of the war, and he could be
expected to say whatever his interrogators asked of him without the usual third degree
tortures and cruel pressures. The figures of Hoettl even went beyond the wildest
estimates of Soviet Prosecutor Rudenko.
There has been no recent claim by any serious writer that a policy to exterminate
European Jews was in effect prior to war with Russia on June 22, 1941. (Earlier books,
HOGGAN : The Myth of the Six Million
— 26 —
such as Gerald Abrahams, Retribution, N.Y., 1941; and J. Ben-Jacob, The fewish
Struggle, N.Y., 1942, did make such claims.) Leon Poliakov, Harvest of Hate: the Nazi
Program for the Destruction of the Jews of Europe (N.Y., 1954, pp. 108ff.) admits that
no document confirming an extermination policy before that date has been discovered.
He puts it this way: "The three or four people chiefly involved in the actual drawing up
of the plan for total extermination are dead and no documents have survived; perhaps
none ever existed." The implications of this statement are clear. The vague reference
of "three or four people" indicates that the alleged plan is actually a nebulous
assumption on the part of the writer.
In the absence of evidence Poliakov assumed that a plan to exterminate the Jews
must have originated between June, 1940, and June, 1941. He added, quite
Unnecessarily, that extermination was never part of the original National Socialist
plans for dealing with the Jews. He claimed that the decision of extermination was
made when it became evident that Germany was involved in a long war of doubtful
outcome. His assumption is that Hitler was determined to avenge the slaughter of
Germans with a massacre of Jews. The same writer claimed, however, that Hitler
abandoned the extermination program in October 1944, for fear of retribution in case
Germany lost the war.
Poliakov noted that Eichmann was busy with the Madagascar project for Jewish
settlement abroad throughout 1941, but the German Foreign Office was informed in
February 1942,that this plan had been abandoned at least temporarily. Poliakov
argued that the Germans were necessarily thinking of extermination when they
shelved their overseas emigration plan. He recognized as a corollary that he also must
show that they were not pursuing a plan for the settlement of the Jews in Eastern
Europe instead of overseas.
According to Poliakov, there were three clear stages of a general extermination
policy. Phase one, beginning in June, 1941, and directed exclusively against Soviet
Jews, has been dealt with. Phase two, beginning in March, 1942, constituted the first
actions to bring together many of the Jews of German-occupied Europe and place them
either in Poland or in concentration camps. Phase three, beginning in October 1942,
was the action to concentrate most Jews, including those of Poland, in camps. The final
phase of general internment is supposed to imply the permanent denial of a Jewish
haven either in Eastern Europe or overseas.
Poliakov represented the liquidation of Jews in concentration camps as
proceeding throughout phase two as well as three. He accepted the previously cited
statement of Dieter Wisliceny from the documentary collection to the effect that the
plan to exterminate European Jewry was abandoned by Himmler in October 1944.
Poliakov claimed that Göring was involved in the extermination program, although
Charles Bewley, Hermann Göring (Göttingen, 1956) has pointed out that no evidence
was found at Nuremberg to substantiate this charge.
13. The Mythical Conference of Jan. 20, 1942
While Soviet Jews were allegedly being shot at random wherever they could be
found-a charge which has been exposed as untrue-an important conference is
supposed to have taken place in Berlin, Am Grossen Wanssee Nr. 5658, on January 20,
1942. Reinhard Heydrich allegedly presided -at this conference and is alleged to have
said that he was commissioned by Göring to discuss plans for eliminating the Jews of
Europe (Das Dritten Reich und die Juden, pp. 120ff.). Hans Frank is given credit for
HOGGAN : The Myth of the Six Million
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having provided information about this conference for the prosecution, but he makes
no mention of this in his memoirs, Im Angesicht des Galgens (In the Shadow of the
Gallows, Munich, 1953). Furthermore, it is a painful fact that Frank was never given
the opportunity to explain or confirm each and every excerpt allegedly taken from his
forty-two volume personal file as Governor-General in Poland. No-one has ever been
found to substantiate the alleged information about this conference, although Interior
State-Secretary Wilhelm Stuckart, who has wrongly been given credit as "the principal
author of the 1935 Nuremberg laws (Adenauer's aide Hans Globke was the actual
author), and Under-State-Secretary Hans Luther of the German Foreign Office were
listed as present.
Heydrich supposedly said that emigration of Jews from Europe was futile because
not more than 537,000 had departed since 1933. This ridiculously low figure, is
Contradicted at every turn by official German statistics. The figure of 537,000 would
scarcely exceed the emigration of Jews from Poland alone, during the period. Heydrich
is also supposed to have, said that there were eleven million Jews in Europe, and that
95 per cent of those were in the German area of occupation. Actually, more than onehalf
of the European Jews are indicated in the same statement as being in the 1941
territory of the USSR and more than one million are listed for Vichy France and
England. The absurdity of those figures is obvious. Yet the alleged protocol indicates
that they were accepted without contradiction by the learned and well-informed
gentlemen at the conference.
The next step in Heydrich's supposed plan for the elimination of the Jews would
be to concentrate them in key areas, and hence this alleged conference of January
1942, is regarded as a signal for the second phase in the liquidation of the Jews.
Shortly afterward, the Germans proceeded to move some of the Warsaw Jews into the
Lublin area, and 310,322 of them had been sent out by the end of the summer of
1942. The first deportations of any Jews from Germany are specified by Poliakov for
October, 1941, and these proceeded the more general action in the occupied countries.
Sven Hedin, Ohne Auftrag in Berlin (In Berlin without Assignment, Buenos Aires,
1949, pp. 141ff.) discussed the sending of 1200 Jews from Stettin with Heinrich
Himmler as early as March, 1940. Hedin was in Germany from Sweden in connection
with a private effort to secure German mediation in the Russo-Finnish war of 1939-
1940. He was in possession of a Swedish journalist's report asserting that brutal
conditions had prevailed among the Jews from Stettin, but Himmler denied this and he
declared that only one old woman had died on the trip. This would mark an obvious
exception to Poliakov's assumption that no Jews from Germany were being transported
before October 1941.
14. The Role of Rudolf Höss in the Administration of Wartime Concentration
Camps, and the Nature of the Höss Memoirs
The concept of the death camp as a means of liquidating Jews returns us to
Auschwitz. Poliakov's Harvest of Hate placed great stress on Polish lanquage memoirs,
Wspomnienia, by Rudolf Höss, which were later published in English as Commandant of
Auschwitz (Cleveland, 1960). Höss was the commander of what is supposed to have
been the greatest death camp in world history.
The fact that these memoirs were published under Communist auspices makes it
utterly impossible to, accept their authenticity without decisive reservations.
Furthermore, the statements made by Höss both to British security officers at
HOGGAN : The Myth of the Six Million
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Flensburg under third-degree conditions and under torture at Nuremberg makes it very
difficult to believe that anything attributed to Höss after his capture in 1946 bears
much relation to actual facts. Even Gerald Reitlinger, who grasps at every straw to
document the extermination program, rejects the Nuremberg trial testimony of Höss
as hopelessly untrustworthy.
The purpose in examining the Höss material here is to decide to what extent, if
any, a plausible narrative has been presented under Communist auspices. The atrocity
photographs in the English-language edition are "supposed" to have been taken, by an
"unknown SS man" who received "special permission." They were allegedly found by a
Jewish woman in the Sudetenland and sold to the Jewish museum in Prague. There is
nothing whatever about these photographs to render plausible their authenticity. They
are undoubtedly akin to the pictures of the piles of corpses alleged to have been
civilians slain by the Germans during their eastern campaigns during the First World
War but were later proved to be Jews and others killed in pogroms carried out by the
Russians under the Tsar, years before 1914.
The introduction to the American edition of Höss's memoirs was written by the
Germanophobe Lord (Edward F.) Russell of Liverpool. He is the author of The Scourge
of the Swastika (N.Y., 1954) which contains a brief survey of the atrocity evidence
presented at Nuremberg. The survey ends with obsolete claims about Dachau as a
death camp. These claims about Dachau had been repudiated and disproved years
before, by Cardinal Faulliaber of Munich.
Russell, after mentioning the fact, in introducing Höss, that there were very few
camps and prisoners in Germany at the outbreak of World War II, claimed that not less
than five million Jews died in German concentration camps during the war. He
discussed other estimates, and, after satisfying himself that he was between those
who claim six million and those who claim four million, concluded: "The real number,
however, will never be known". One can only add that he had no right to claim "not
less than five million". One might have expected that there would be more interest
than there apparently has been in persuading, even at this late date, such countries as
the United States, Great Britain, the USSR, and the Communist satellites to count and
report their Jewish populations.
The site at Auschwitz was allegedly selected for a concentration camp in 1940, in
addition to the availability of good transportation facilities, because it was a fearfully
unhealthy place. This is totally untrue. The Neue Brockhaus for 1938 indicated a
population of 12,000 in the town of Auschwitz including 3,000 Jews. Although the place
was not a popular health resort, it did enjoy a reputation for a healthy and bracing
Upper Silesian climate.
Höss began the story of his life in convincing fashion with his account of a happy
boyhood in the German Rhineland. His first disturbing experience was a violation of
confessional by a Catholic priest who informed on him to his father for a minor
dereliction. Höss succeeded in joining the German army at an early age in 1916. He
was sent to Turkey and served at the fronts in Iraq and 1?alestine. At the age of
seventeen he was an NCO with extensive combat experience and the iron cross. He
had his first love affair with a German nurse at the Wilhelma hospital in Palestine. The
end of the war found him in Damascus. Three months of independent traveling at the
head of a group of comrades brought him home and thus enabled him to escape the
fate of internment.
Höss was unable to adjust to the post-war life at home with his relatives, and he
joined the Rossbach Freikorps for service in the East. Höss was arrested on June 28,
HOGGAN : The Myth of the Six Million
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1923, for participating in the murder of a Communist spy. He was sentenced to ten
year's in prison on March 15, 1924, and was amnestied on July 14, 1928. Although he
had a brief period of mental breakdown while in solitary confinement, Höss emerged
with the record of a model prisoner.
Höss spent ten exciting days in Berlin with friends after his release before turning
to farming. He believed that National Socialism would best serve the interests of
Germany, and he had become Party Member no. 3240 at Munich as early as
November, 1922. He joined the Artamanen farming fraternity, to which Himmler also
belonged, in 1928. He married in 1929 and was persuaded by Himmler to join the SS.
In 1934 he agreed to serve at the Dachau concentration camp.
At first, Höss was bewildered by the philosophy of hostile reserve toward the
prisoners at Dachau, which was indoctrinated into the SS guards by a local
commandant, later replaced. Höss himself had been a prisoner, and be tended to see
all questions from the inmate's viewpoint. Nevertheless, he believed that the
concentration camps were a necessary transitional phase in the consolidation of
National Socialism, and he was greatly attracted to the black SS uniform as a symbol
of quality and prestige. After a few years he was transferred to Sachsenhausen, where
the atmosphere, was more favorable.
The outbreak of war in 1939 brought a new phase of experience to the SS men
on concentration camp service. The enemies of Germany had sworn to annihilate the
National Socialist Reich. It was a question of existence, and not merely of the fate of a
few provinces. The SS were supposed to hold the ramparts of order until the return of
peace and the formulation of a new code of laws. A high-ranking SS officer, whose
laxity had made possible the escape of an important Communist prisoner, was
executed by his comrades on direct orders from Himmler. This brought home the
seriousness of the situation to all of the SS men at Sachsenhausen. Some of the
prisoners were amnestied in 1939 when they agreed to serve in the German armed
forces.
An untoward incident occurred in 1939 when some Cracow University professors
were brought to Sachsenhausen, but they were released a few weeks later through
intervention by Göring. Höss had extensive contacts at Sachsenhausen with Pastor
Martin Niemoeller, a much-respected opponent of National Socialism.
Höss went to Auschwitz with high hopes early in 1940. There was no camp there
as yet, but he hoped to organize a useful one which would make an important
contribution to the German industrial war effort. He had always been idealistic and
sensitive about prison conditions, and he hoped to establish housing and supply
conditions for the prospective inmates which would be as normal as possible for
wartime. Höss ran into all the irritating obstacles of red tape and shortage of supplies
in his early work of organizing the camp, and he bitterly criticized the inadequate
qualifications of many of his colleagues.
Polish prisoners constituted the largest single group in the camp during the first
two years, although many inmates were also brought to Auschwitz from Germany.
Russian contingents began to arrive late in 1941 in poor condition after long marches.
From mid-1942 the Jews constituted the main element in the camp. Höss recalled that
the small groups of Jews at Dachau had done very well with their canteen privileges in
the early days of the system. There had been virtually no Jews at Sachsenhausen.
It is at this very point that the hitherto highly plausible Höss narrative becomes
highly questionable. The manner in which the alleged deliberate extermination of the
Jews is described is most astonishing. A special large detachment of Jewish prisoners
HOGGAN : The Myth of the Six Million
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was allegedly formed. These men and women were to take charge of the contingents,
either newly arrived or from within the camp area, who had been selected for
destruction. The role of the SS was to be limited to the most general supervision and
to the release of the Zyklon-B gas pellets through the shower fixtures of the supposed
extermination sheds.
The actual taking of the clothes and the leading of the Jews into the preextermination
sheds was to be done by this special group of Jews. Later they were to
dispose of the bodies. If the "doomed" Jews resisted, they were beaten or forced to
comply in other ways by the "privileged" Jews. Allegedly, the latter did their work so
thoroughly that it was never necessary for the SS guards to intervene. Hence most of
the SS personnel at the camp could be left in complete ignorance of the extermination
action. Of course, no Jew would ever be found to claim to be a member of this
infamous "special detachment." Höss was released from his post at Auschwitz at the
end of 1943, and he became a chief inspector of the entire concentration camp
system. He supposedly concealed his earlier activities from his SS colleagues.
It should be pointed out that no Auschwitz inmate has ever personally claimed to
have witnessed the actual operation of these so-called "gas chambers." The
explanation has been that those who were victims did not survive, and those who were
accomplices had good motives not to admit anything.
The Communist editors of the Höss memoirs obviously did everything in their
power to make the account plausible. Much effort was made to show that the individual
in the SS counted for nothing, orders for everything. The evident timidity of Höss in
voicing his criticism of the hostile rather than friendly attitude of the SS leadership
toward the Dachau prisoners in the early years was exploited to lend credence to the
supposition that be would have been willing to accept any excesses, including the
massacre of huge numbers, even millions, of captive Jews. The same account depicts
Höss as a highly sensitive and gifted man living a normal family life with his wife and
children throughout his period at Auschwitz.
Höss is supposed to have said that the Jehovah's Witnesses at Auschwitz favored
death for all Jews because Jews were the enemies of Christ. This was a staggering slip
on the part of the Communist editors. It must be remembered that a bitter struggle
against the Jehovah's Witnesses is waged today by the Communists throughout all
Satellite countries, and especially in the Soviet zone of Germany. One cannot escape
the conclusion that this special defamation of the Jehovah's Witnesses was introduced
by the Communist editors.
It is, hence, impossible to avoid the conclusion that these so-called memoirs of
Höss have been subjected to an editorial supervision by Communists and others
sufficiently extensive to destroy their validity as an historical document. They have no
more validity than the alleged Memoirs of Eichmann. The claim that there is a handwritten
original of these supervised memoirs can scarcely be regarded as relevant. The
Communists are notoriously successful in obtaining "confessions," and they possessed
an amplitude of techniques which could be used to persuade Höss to copy whatever
was placed before him. The evidence of hand-writing in this case is no more convincing
than the famous after-the-event gas chamber film of Joseph Zigman, "The Mill of
Dealth," used at the Nuremberg Trial. The so-called Höss memoirs end with the
irrelevant statement that the Nuremberg documents had convinced the defendant that
Germany was exclusively to blame for World War II.
It is important to note that Hermann Göring, who was exposed to the full brunt of
the Nuremberg atrocity propaganda, failed to be convinced by it. Hans Fritzsche, The
HOGGAN : The Myth of the Six Million
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Sword in the Scales (London, 1953, p. 145) related that Göring, even after hearing the
early Ohlendorf testimony on the Einsatzgruppen and the Höss testimony on
Auschwitz, remained firmly convinced that the mass extermination of Jews by firing
squad and gas chamber was entirely propaganda fiction.
Fritzsche pondered this question, and he concluded that there had certainly been
no thorough investigation of these monstrous charges. Fritzsche, who was acquitted at
the trial, was a skilled propagandist. He recognized that the alleged massacre of the
Jews was the main point in the indictment against all defendants. Ernst Kaltenbrunner,
the SID (SS Security Service) chief, was on trial as main defendant for the SS because
of the suicide of Himmler, just as Fritzsche was representing Goebbels for the same
reason. Kaltenbrunner was no more convinced of the genocide charges than was
Göring, and he confided to Fritzsche that the prosecution was scoring apparent
successes because of their effective technique in coercing the witnesses and
suppressing evidence. It was easier to seize a German and force him to make an
incriminating confession by unmentionable tortures than to investigate the
circumstances of an actual case.
15. The Actual Character of the SS and their Role in the Genocide Mirage
The Communist-edited Höss memoirs raise the basic question of the nature of
the SS and its personnel. This is of decisive importance because of the dominant role
of the SS in the administration of the concentration camps. Books denouncing the SS
since 1945 are legion, but undoubtedly the two most comprehensive attacks are the
narrative account by Gerald Reitlinger, The SS: Alibi of a Nation (London, 1956), and
the documentary collection by Reimund Schnabel, Macht ohne Moral: eine
Dokumentation über die SS (Power without Morality: a Documentation of the SS,
Frankfurt a.M., 1957). Both Schnabel and Reitlinger trace the growth of the SS
organization from its early birth within the National Socialist Party. Even in 1929, when
Himmler was placed in command, there were, only 280 members.
The SS was designed to be the most loyal and single-minded security
organization protecting the Hitler movement. Schnabel cited Himmler as saying at
Goslar in 1935 that not many in Germany would like the SS and that some would
become actually sick when they saw the SS uniform. Reitlinger placed special
emphasis on major dramatic events such as the uprising of the Warsaw ghetto in April,
1943, and its suppression the following month by the SS and Polish auxiliary units.
Both men seek to present the SS leadership as made up of dull, pedantic men without
scruples, and the mass of the SS men as over-trained robots with an infinite capacity
to rationalize deeds of horror.
There is, of course, another side to the SS story which it is necessary to consider
in order to obtain the full picture. The SS troops resented the charge that they had
been transformed and dehumanized. They were particularly indignant at the charge
directed against them after the war that they had been criminal members of a criminal
organization. Thousands of affidavits by former SS men testifying to the morality and
worth of their organization have been preserved in the unpublished records of the
Nuremberg trials.
The SS men were quick to point out that their social status and educational
background were above average. They recalled that no criminal elements or men with
criminal records were allowed in the organization. They considered themselves
HOGGAN : The Myth of the Six Million
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primarily loyal servants of the state and of peace and order rather than fanatical
ideologues.
More than 5/6th of the SS membership had not been connected with the National
Socialist Party prior to 1933. Only 20 per cent of the SS who served in all capacities
during the war had volunteered for service prior to the outbreak of war. A decided
majority of SS members participated actively in either the Catholic or Evangelical
churches.
The SS men argued that their indoctrination on the Jewish question was
customarily sophisticated and at a high level and it was most certainly not calculated
either to instill hatred or a desire to exterminate the Jews. Indeed, the SS men
considered it part of their office to protect Jews and their property as they had done in
putting an end to the anti-Jewish demonstrations in German cities in November 1938.
Some 99 per cent of the SS men declared that they had first heard rumors of the
alleged atrocities against the Jews after the war was over, and they had no idea of socalled
planned war crimes.
It was part of their teaching that brutality was considered unworthy of an SS
man. All of them knew of atrocities against the Germans in Russia and Yugoslavia
during the war, and of serious American mistreatment of the SS captives at the
gigantic Fürstenfeldbruck camp after May, 1945. It was the understanding of the SS
that foreign workers in the Reich during the war were on an equal status with German
workers, and that undue pressure was not to be exerted to increase the production of
the work detachments formed by concentration camp inmates. It was widely known in
this branch of the service that two SS men had been dishonorably discharged for
entering a Jewish domicile in Hannover in 1936 without permission. It was also known
that two SS men were expelled at Düsseldorf in 1937 for mistreating a Jew.
The former SS men objected to the charge that all those connected with
concentration camp administration were sadists. Men from such camps as Dachau,
Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen, and Auschwitz insisted that the prisoners at the camps
did not have abnormal work and appeared well-fed. The camps during most of the war
were generally clean and well-organized; it was only in the last fearful months that the
lack of food and the worst over-crowding took place. The actual camp guards were
conscripted for their work. It was easy to obtain affidavits after 1945 from thousands
of former concentration camp inmates who had received good treatment.
SS Judge Dr. Konrad Morgen, as chief investigator of the Reich Criminal Police
Office, visited numerous camps in 1943 and 1944, including Auschwitz. He discussed
confidentially with hundreds of inmates the prevailing situations. The working inmates
received a daily ration even throughout 1943 and 1944 of not less than 2750 calories,
which was more than double the average civilian ration throughout occupied Germany
during the years immediately after 1945.
The regular diet thus described was frequently supplemented both on outside
work and in the camps. Morgen saw only a few undernourished inmates in hospitals
and here disease was a factor. The pace and achievement in work by inmates was far
lower than among the German civilian workers. Premiums were used to increase
production, and as a result the inmates often had more tobacco than the outside
population or even the guards. Recreational facilities for the prisoners in the camps
included radio, library, newspapers, movies and all sorts of sports.
SS court actions were conducted in the camps during the war to prevent
excesses, and more than 800 major cases were investigated prior to 1945. Morgen
made a statement at Nuremberg on July 13, 1946, which was based on reports he had
HOGGAN : The Myth of the Six Million
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heard since the war, to the effect that a secret extermination campaign might have
been in progress without his knowledge, but later he retracted this statement.
The administration of the German concentration camps was the focal point in the
trial of Oswald Pohl at Nuremberg in 1948. Pohl was the chief disbursing officer of the
German navy until 1934, when he transferred to service in the SS at the insistence of
Himmler. During eleven years he was the principal administrative chief of the entire SS
and it was his responsibility after 1941 to see that the concentration camps became
major industrial producers. Yet all the testimony permitted Pohl at his trial is confined
to seven pages in Trials of War Criminals before the Nuremberg Military Tribunals,
1946-1949, vol. 5, pp. 555ff.
A peak point of irony 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 fact
is that Germany was bombarded with protests and economic reprisals, and especially
from the United States, for the treatment of the Jews precisely along these lines in the
years prior to 1941. The prosecution tried very hard to prove that Pohl had seen some
gas chambers at Auschwitz in the summer of 1944, but Pohl repudiated this charge, at
every opportunity. It is a fact that Pohl had earlier signed some incriminating
statements after being subjected to severe torture. Konrad Morgen presented a special
affidavit denying that he had ever intended to implicate Pohl in any possible attempt to
exterminate Jews. But it was to no avail, and Pohl was sentenced and hanged. This
dejected and broken man was falsely depicted at his trial as having been a veritable
fiend in human form during his days of power.
The impression which Pohl made on other people during the days of his influence
was decidedly different. In December, 1942, Pohl explained to Heinrich Hoepker some
of those medieval, anti-personal property concepts of the SS which had been derived
from the traditions of the German Order of Knights. Marc Augier, Goetterdaemmerung
(Twilight of the Gods, Freising, 1957) has made clear that the SS did not have the
slightest desire to extend these principles to private German society.
Hoepker was an anti-Nazi friend of Pohl's new wife. Pohl, previously a widower,
had remarried in 1942. Hoepker was a leading mason of the Grand Lodge of Royal
York, and, until 1934, he had been the vice-president of the Prussian Statistical State
Office. He came into contact with Pohl repeatedly during the period 1942-1945. Pohl's
conversation with Hoepker in December, 1942, marked Pohl's first attempt to give a
full exposition of the SS and its functions to a prominent anti-Nazi figure. Hoepker
noted that Pohl's attitude on this occasion was characterized by serenity and
imperturbable optimism.
Hoepker noted on all subsequent occasions that a cornradely and pleasant
atmosphere prevailed among Pohl and his SS colleagues. Hoepker, during a visit to
Pohl in the spring of 1944, was brought into contact with concentration camp inmates
who were working on a special local project outside their camp area. Hoepker noted
that the prisoners worked in a leisurely manner and in a relaxed atmosphere without
any pressure from their guards.
Hoepker knew that Pohl did not entertain a highly emotional attitude on the
Jewish question, and he knew that the Inspector did not object in the slightest when
the Jewess Annemarie Jaques who was a close friend of Pohl's wife, visited at the Pohl
home. Hoepker was fully convinced by the beginning of 1945, after several years of
intimate and frequent contact with Pohl, that the chief administrator of the German
HOGGAN : The Myth of the Six Million
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concentration camp system was a humane, conscientious, and dedicated servant of his
task. Hoepker was thoroughly astonished when he learned later in 1945 of the Allied
accusations against Pohl and his colleagues. Hoepker concluded that the Inspector was
either completely psychotic (schizophenic), or else knew nothing of the excesses with
which he was charged.
Mrs. Pohl noted that her husband retained his imperturbable serenity in the face
of adversity until his March, 1945, visit to the concentration camp, at Bergen-Belsen.
He encountered this camp, which had been a model of order and cleanliness, in a state
of chaos during a sudden typhus epidemic which was raging there. The situation was
frightful, and Pohl was able to do very little under the desperate circumstances which
the war had reached by that time. The visit of Pohl took place at about the time that
Anne Frank was reported to have died there. Pohl eventually returned to his wife as a
broken man, and he never recovered his former state of composure.
Dr. Alfred Seidl, who played a prominent role throughout the Nuremberg trials
and whose gifts as defense attorney were highly respected by Allied prosecutors,
defended Pohl at his trial. Seidl went to work on behalf of Pohl with the passion of a
Zola seeking to exonerate Dreyfus. This was understandable, because Seidl had been a
personal acquaintance of Pohl for many years, and he was thoroughly convinced of his
innocence with respect to the charge of planned participation in any action of genocide
directed against the Jewish people. The Allied judgment which condemned Pohl did not
prompt Seidl to change his opinion in the slightest. He realized that the Allied
prosecutors had failed to produce a solitary piece of valid evidence against Pohl.
The role of Cardinal Faulhaber of Munich in exonerating the Dachau concentration
camp, leadership from the charge of practicing genocide against the Jewish people is
well known. The Communist-edited Höss memoirs correctly suggest that conditions of
discipline were more severe at Dachau in 1933 and 1934 than at Sachsenhausen or
Flossenbürg. This was largely due to personnel factors at Dachau which were later
modified. Hundreds of affidavits testify to the fact that conditions at Dachau in wartime
were orderly and generally humane. For instance, the Polish underground leader, Jan
Piechowiak, was at Dachau from May 22, 1940 to April 29, 1945, nearly the whole war
period. He testified on March 21, 1946 that the prisoners at Dachau during his stay
received good treatment, and he added that the SS personnel at the camp were "well
disciplined."
Berta Schirotschin, who worked in the food service at Dachau throughout the
war, testified that the Dachau work details, until the beginning of 1945, and despite
the increasing privations in Germany, received their customary second breakfast at
10:00 -a.m. every morning. It would take an impossible stretch of the imagination to
contemplate any such consideration for German prisoners of war in Allied detention
camps both during and after the war.
The German camp personnel in the various camp locations remained surprisingly
complacent and lenient in the face of the notoriously poor work performance of
concentration camp inmates. A typical exposition of this situation was made on August
13, 1947, by Richard Goebel, an official of the Portland Cement Corporation. Goebel
was in contact with Auschwitz inmates and their work details throughout 1943 and
1944. He cited one instance of a project in a quarry with 300 free German workers and
900 Auschwitz inmates. All of the more difficult jobs were done by the free Germans,
and at no time were the inmates required to work more than a normal eight-hour shift.
Goebel had previously conducted the same project with 350 free workers, and he
noted that he was unable to obtain a higher rate of production with his new combined
HOGGAN : The Myth of the Six Million
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labor force of 1200. In other words, the work of 900 inmates was equivalent to that of
50 free German workers. Goebel never once encountered mistreatment of Auschwitz
prisoners, and be noted that the inmates who worked well received ample premium
certificates for supplementary food supplies and tobacco.
The laxity of the work performance of inmates, attested to by hundreds of
affidavits from Auschwitz and the other concentration camps, did not, as might have
been expected, automatically provoke harsh treatment or reprisals. This laxity was
taken for granted as a permanent factor by the administration camp personnel. The
slow down tactics on work details were especially notorious at Dachau, but the veteran
Communist leader, Ernst Ruff, testified in an affidavit of April 18, 1947, that the
treatment of prisoners in the camp and on the work details remained humane.
The pathetic astonishment of SS personnel at the accusations leveled against
their organization is reflected in the affidavit of SS Major-General Heinz Fanslau, who
had visited most of the German concentration camps during the last years of the war.
Fanslau had taken an intense interest in concentration camp conditions, quite apart
from his military duties at the front, and he was selected by the Allies as a prime
target in the allegation of a conspiracy to annihilate the Jewish people. It was argued
that Fanslau, with his many contacts, must have been fully informed. When it was first
rumored that Fanslau would be tried and convicted, there were hundreds of affidavits
produced on his behalf from Jews and Jehovah's Witnesses who had been inmates at
the camps which he had visited. When he read the full scope of the indictment against
the concentration camp personnel in supplementary Nuremberg trial no 4, Fanslau
exclaimed in despair on May 6, 1947: "This cannot be possible, because I, too, would
have had to know something about it."
Hermann Pister, the ex-Buchenwald commander, was tortured into signing a
statement at Nuremberg that concentration camp prisoners who, refused to work were
shot. But the Allied prosecution failed to reckon with the tough perseverance and
stamina of Gerhard Maurer, who had been in charge of all camp labor at Buchenwald.
Maurer never cracked, and, in a comprehensive affidavit from Nuremberg on July 11,
1947, he analyzed horoughly the situation which existed. He proved that the fictitious
order to shoot prisoners refusing to work was contrary to the practice which prevailed,
and that such an order was never actually issued.
SS Lieutenant-Colonel Kurt Schmidt-Klevenow, who was a legal officer with the
economy and administration office of the concentration camp system, was especially
eloquent on August 8, 1947, in arguing that Pohl had always been a conscientious and
responsible official. It is small wonder that neither his testimony nor the sample
affidavits cited above have ever been printed, because they present a picture quite
different from that which the Nuremberg prosecution wished to, give to the world.
Indeed, it is to be hoped that some day Nuremberg documents will be published which
have been carefully and fairly selected by objective editors. All of the, existing
published series of Nuremberg documents are positively farcial in their one-sidedness.
Schmidt-Klevenow pointed out that Pohl, beginning with the successfully
conducted Saubersweig case in 1940, had given judge Konrad Morgen full support in
his judicial investigations of irregularities at various camps. Indeed, Pohl actually took
a far more energetic role in the difficult Lakebusch case that did Morgen himself. In the
notorious Morgen trial prosecution of Commander Koch of Buchenwald, to which the
German public was invited, both Pohl and Schmidt were for the conviction and
execution of Koch, whereas Morgen was content with the indefinite adjournment of the
trial and the retirement of Koch.
HOGGAN : The Myth of the Six Million
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Schmidt explained in 1947 that Pohl was instrumental in arranging for local
district police chiefs to share with the SS in important jurisdictional functions of the
concentration camp system. Pohl on numerous occasions took personal initiative in
insisting on strict discipline over camp personnel, and it was due to his efforts in the
Ramdohr case that a Gestapo man who had beaten a woman at Ravensbrueek was
prosecuted and convicted.
A typical prosecution affidavit contested by the defense in the concentration
camp trial was that of Alois Hoellriegel, who had been instrumental in securing the
conviction and execution of SS leader Ernst Kaltenbrunner in 1946. Hoellriegel had
claimed that mass gassing operation had taken place at the Mauthausen camp in
Austria, and that he, as member of the camp personnel, had witnessed Kaltenbrunner
taking part in these operations.
It was impossible to sustain this statement signed by the tortured Hoellriegel at
the time of the Pohl trial in 1947. The defense proved that all deaths at Mauthausen
were systematically checked by the regular local police authorities. In addition,
hundreds of affidavits from former Jewish inmates at Mauthausen were collected which
testified to humane and orderly conditions at the camp and to good treatment for the
prisoners.
The effective work of the defense attorneys, which received no recognition in the
official Nuremberg documents, was, nevertheless, confirmed by many prominent
American officials who investigated the problem. A typical example of this is reflected
in the comments of Stephen F. Pinter, who served as a lawyer for the War Department
of the United States in the occupation forces in Germany and Austria for six years after
the war. He made the following statement in the most widely read American Catholic
magazine, Our Sunday Visitor, for June 14, 1959:
I was in Dachau for 17 months after the war, as a U.S. War Department
Attorney, and can state that there was no gas chamber at Dachau. What was shown to
visitors and sightseers there and erroneously described as a gas chamber was a
crematory. Nor was there a gas chamber in any of the other concentration camps in
Germany. We were told that there was a gas chamber at Auschwitz, but since that was
in the Russian zone of occupation, we were not permitted to investigate since the
Russians would not permit it. From what I was able to determine during six postwar
years in Germany and Austria, there were a number of Jews killed, but the figure of a
million was certainly never reached. I interviewed thousands of Jews, former inmates
of concentration camps in Germany and Austria, and consider myself as well qualified
as any man on this subject.
It is small wonder under such considerations that the Holy See has steadfastly
and consistently refused to join those who charge that Germany practiced a deliberate
policy of seeking to exterminate the Jewish population of Europe. It was possible after
Pinter departed from Germany for Americans to visit Auschwitz, but in the meantime
many years had elapsed and there had been ample opportunity for the Communist
authorities in Poland to set the stage for such visits.
16. Polish Jewry and the Extermination Legend
Frank Gibney, in his The Frozen Revolution: Poland, a Study in Communist Decay
(N.Y., 1959), offered a graphic description of the new Communist shrine at Auschwitz.
He described "the pond at Oswiecim (Auschwitz)" some fifteen miles south-east of the
former German industrial city of Kattowitz. Gibney rightly noted that the pond contains
HOGGAN : The Myth of the Six Million
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tons of bones and ashes, but he was uncritical when assuming, as he did, that these
were dumped there in the period "1940-1945." He dealt with Polish and Jewish
situations since the 1930's in his book, and he devoted much space to the anti-Jewish
race riot at Brest-Litovsk in 1938, in which, unlike the anti-Jewish measures in
Germany in November, 1938, some Jews were actually killed. But his book does not
contain a single word about the Russians as the actual perpetrators of the mass
massacre of the Polish intelligentsia and officers at the Katyn Forest in 1940. Some of
the bones in the Auschwitz basin might have been those of the 10,000 other Poles
massacred by the Russians who have never yet been accounted for.
Gibney claimed, on the basis of doubtful evidence, that Khrushchev in October,
1956, deplored the prominent role of the Jews in post-war Communist Poland.
Khrushchev is alleged to have said that there were "too many Abramovitches in your
Polish Party" (Ibid., p. 194). Gibney in this instance was clearly partaking of the
fantastic scheme promoted in America in recent years to make the USSR appear anti-
Jewish. The assured position of the Jews in the USSR, and the absence of any and all
anti-Jewish measures there cannot fail to render such efforts ludicrous.
John K. Galbraith, in his Journey to Poland and Yugoslavia (Harvard University
Press, 1958), is similar to Gibney in his general approach, although he is also
somewhat more enthusiastic about the Gemulka regime in Poland. Galbraith discusses
the impact of the German concentration camp system on Poland (Ibid., pp. 62ff.), but
he avoids sweeping statements about the fate of Polish Jewry. Much more detailed
information on the prominent role of Jews in present-day Poland is contained in Clifford
R. Barnett, Poland: its People, its Society, its Culture (New Haven, 1958). Barnett was
carefully vague about the alleged number of Jews in contemporary Poland because of
the suppression by the Communists of all statistics on Jews. He did emphasize the
conspicuous and omnipresent role of Jewish culture in Poland through the Jewish state
theatres, Jewish books and radio programs, and the exceedingly numerous Jewish
cultural associations.
Thad Paul Alton, Polish Postwar Economy (N.Y., 1955, p. 106) was less cautious
about Polish Jewry, and he accepted a figure from Eugene Kulischer, "Population
Changes behind the Iron Curtain" in Annals of the American Academy of Political and
Social Science, Sept. 1950, who made the preposterous statement that there were
only 80,000 Jews in Poland by 1949. The pure guess-work which has characterized the
glib generalizations of Kulischer on European populations has been recognized to be a
highly untrustworthy source for serious scholars.
The playing with figures under the cloak of Communist censorship has been
notorious in the case of Polish Jewry. The Jewish joint Distribution Committee, which
was permitted by the Germans to maintain offices in Poland until
Pearl Harbor, claimed in figures prepared for the Nuremberg Military Tribunal late
in 1945 that the total remaining Jewish population in Poland had been reduced to
80,000. Yet, even Communist masters of Poland were unable to prevent a major
pogrom against the Jews at Kielce on July 4, 1946, and within a short time more than
120,000 Polish Jews had fled from the central sector of Poland into Western Germany.
Subsequently, the estimate of the number of Jews who had been in Poland at the end
of 1945 underwent considerable revision until it was placed even by the American
Jewish Year Book, 1948-1949, at 390,000 instead of the earlier figure of 80,000.
The complete absence of reliable statistics has not hindered such writers as Jacob
Lestschinsky, The Position of the Jewish People Today (N.Y., 1952, pp. 4ff.) and
Jacques Vernant, The Refugee in the Post-War World (London, 1953, pp. 448ff.) from
HOGGAN : The Myth of the Six Million
— 38 —
playing fast and loose with the facts in estimating the numbers of Jews in such
countries as Poland, Rumania, and the USSR. H.B.M. Murphy, et al., Flight and
Resettlement (UNESCO, Lucerne, 1955, pp. 159ff.) show considerable surprise that
Jews in D.P. camps have revealed far less mental derangement and emotional
instability than other refugee groups. The authors find this astonishing because the
Jews are proverbially considered to be the chief victims of World War II. Nevertheless,
reflection should indicate that many Jewish D.P.'s had far less devastating wartime
experiences than other refugee groups, and, unlike the other refugee groups, who
were hopelessly ruined, they emerged from the war as a dominant and triumphant
minority.
The central position of Polish Jewry in the great wartime drama was underlined in
April, 1943, by the sensational uprising of the Warsaw ghetto against the German
authorities, who were planning to evacuate all Jews of that district and send them to
the Lublin area. As a matter of fact, most of the Jews had been moved there against
considerable opposition before the last-ditch stand began. Jews had fled to Warsaw
from many towns in Poland in 1939, and at one time the ghetto contained no less than
400,000 persons. Warsaw was the scene of huge black market operations and a lively
trade in currency and contraband goods, including hundreds of German army uniforms
which were sold to the Polish underground. The evacuation of the Jews to-the East
began on July 22, 1942, and by January, 1943, no less than 316,822 had been
transported.
A graphic account of the ghetto battle from April 20, 1943 to its finish on May 16,
1943 is contained in the Stroop, memorandum (Trial of the Major War Criminals, 1945-
1946, vol. 26, pp. 628ff.). The Germans accepted a fight to the finish in their effort,
with their Polish cohorts, to complete the evacuation of the ghetto by force. The
stubborn defense cost the loss of many lives in burning buildings. The German and
Polish attackers lost 101 men killed and wounded, whereas the estimated total Jewish
casualties were no less than 16,000. About 55,000 Jews were captured and sent to the
Lublin area. The details of these events up to the transportation to Lublin were
presented in fiction form by John Hersey, The Wall (N.Y., 1951).
More recently, in 1958, Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto: the Journal of Emanuel
Ringelblum, was published by McGraw-Hill in New York. Ringelblum had been an active
leader in organizing sabotage against the Germans in Poland, including the 1943
Warsaw uprising, prior to his arrest and execution in 1944. The editors of the American
edition of the Ringelblum journal admit that they were denied access to the
uncensored original journal at Warsaw or to the copy made of it and sent to Israel.
Instead, they have faithfully followed the expurgated volume published under
Communist auspices at Warsaw in 1952. This is exactly the same situation that
prevailed with the American edition of the so-called Höss memoirs.
The Ringelblum account is, nevertheless, far more bitter than that of Hersey in
denouncing the Jewish Council leaders at Warsaw and the Jewish police who did most
of the
work in arranging for the transportation of the Warsaw ghetto population to the
Lublin area. Indeed, the principal emphasis of the book is directed toward the need of
Jewish unity in contrast to the disunity which prevailed among the Polish Jews. This
has remained the dominant theme of Zionist leaders and it was clearly exemplified by
the controversial speech of Israeli Premier David Ben-Gurion on December 28, 1960,
which attacked the alleged laxity and absence of true Zionist zeal in wide circles of
HOGGAN : The Myth of the Six Million
— 39 —
American Jewry. Israeli Zionism continues to demand the absolute subordination to
Israel of all Jews in the non-Communist world.
The Ringelblum journal, like the Hersey novel, refers in general terms, and by
rumor only, to the alleged plan of exterminating the Jews of Poland. It has been widely
asserted that Polish Jewry was destroyed in World War 11. Yet, quite apart from
escape into Russia and emigration to Israel and the West, both Polish exchange
professors visiting the United States today and American Poles returning from visits to
Poland, agree with Barnett on the major Jewish role in contemporary Poland. The
unofficial estimates which they encountered among the Poles themselves were that
there are at least half a million Jews in Poland today and probably more than that
figure. This figure should be considered in connection with the action exodus of Jews
from Poland after 1945 and our earlier estimate that the Jewish population of the
German zone of occupation in 1939, which closely approximated in the East the
present eastern Polish boundary, could scarcely have exceeded 1,100,000. Certainly
enough is known to enable any impartial observer to regard the alleged extermination
of Polish Jewry as in part a myth built around the dramatic circumstances of the
uprising in the Warsaw ghetto during April and May of 1943.
17. The Exaggerations of Kurt Gerstein Discredit the Extermination Myth
One of the most curious incidents of testimony concerning the alleged deliberate
extermination of the Jews was provided by the memoranda of Kurt Gerstein. He was
employed as a disinfection expert by the SS from 1942 until his capture in April 1945.
Gerstein joined the National Socialist Party in 1933. He was expelled in 1936 for
eccentric conduct which included distributing through the mails 8,500 pamphlets
criticizing National Socialism. During his later 1941 SS training in Holland, he worked
with the Dutch underground movement. He claimed to have provided gas for execution
purposes, and to have been a witness of mass gas executions on a grandiose scale on
numerous occasions.
In his personal conversations and answers, Gerstein contended that be knew that
no less than forty million concentration camp prisoners has been gassed. In his first
signed memorandum on the subject of April 26, 1945, he reduced the number to
twenty-five million. He added that only four or five other persons had seen what he
had witnessed, and they were Nazis. Even this was rather too extreme for his
interrogators and he was induced to draw up a second memorandum at Rottweil on
May 4, 1945 which was in closer conformity to the legend of the alleged extermination
of six million Jewish victims.
It is interesting to note that Hans Rothfels, "Augenzeugenbericht zu den
Massenvergasungen (Eye-Witness Report of Mass Gassings)" in Vierteliahrshefte für
Zeitgeschichte, April, 1953, made a special point of stating that Evangelical Bishop
Wilhelm Dibelius of Berlin denounced the Gerstein memoranda as "Untrustworthy."
Two years later, however, in 1955, the Bonn Federal Center for Local Services issued
an edition of the second Gerstein memorandum for distribution in all German schools
(Dokumentation zur Massen-Vergasung, Bonn, 1955). The editors in their introduction
stated that the Gerstein memoranda were valid "beyond any doubt," and they add that
Dibelius has expressed his special confidence in Gerstein.
The second Gerstein memorandum is very emphatic in describing a visit by Hitler
to a concentration camp in Poland on June 6, 1942, which in point of fact never took
place. Unfortunately, the West German Government of Konrad Adenauer has actually
HOGGAN : The Myth of the Six Million
— 40 —
discouraged the exposure of this defamation of wartime Germany. It finds a vested
interest of its own in perpetuating wartime falsehoods. In this sense it is truly a puppet
government and no genuine German Government at all. The government of the
Weimar Republic bad taken a leading part in exposing the exaggerations and
falsifications in the chargesof German atrocities in the first World War, such as those
embodied in the famous Bryce Report and the writings of Arnold Toynbee.
Gerstein was sent to Cherche Midi prison in Paris after his two "confessions." He
is reported to have died on July 25, 1945. The manner of his death and the place of his
grave are unknown. His death is no less mysterious than the alleged suicide of Heinrich
Himmler in British military captivity. The work of the prosecution at Nuremberg would
have been far more difficult had Himmler been allowed to testify. It is quite likely that
Gerstein, who was in good health when sent to Paris, was considered to have outlived
his usefulness before the Nuremberg trials commenced.
18. Myths and Realities Concerning Auschwitz and other Death Camps
Höss "confessed" on various occasions that 2,500,000 to 3,000,000 people had
been gassed at the single camp of Auschwitz. It has always been claimed that most of
these alleged victims were Jews, and therefore this would account for nearly half of the
supposed six million Jewish victims in the period from 1941 to 1945. It is important to
note that the alleged end of this supposed death program in October, 1944, does not
terminate the chronicle of Jewish victims who met death from hunger, bombing, -and
disease at the camps or in the camp evacuations during the last hectic months of the
war. Therefore, one is expected to believe that nearly two-thirds of the deaths in the
total alleged deliberate extermination program took place at one camp.
The destruction or hiding of German statistics about the details of Auschwitz by
the supporters of the extermination legend, and the refusal of the Russians to give out
any accurate statistics in regard to the Jews in Russia just before 1941 or after 1945
makes it impossible to state with exactness just bow many Jews were ever interned at
Auschwitz, but it is certain that the number of Jews who got there during ,the war was
only a smallest fraction of those alleged to have been exterminated there. The Jewish
statistician, Reitlinger, who is rather more careful with his figures than most Jews who
have reported on the subject, states in his The SS: the Alibi of a Nation, pp. 268ff.,
that the total of all internees registered at Auschwitz from February, 1940, to January,
1945, was only 363,000 and by no means all of these were Jews. Moreover, during the
war many of those originally sent to Auschwitz were released or transferred elsewhere,
and at least 80,000 were evacuated westward in January, 1945. The wild, erratic and
irresponsible nature of the statements about the number of Jews exterminated at
Auschwitz can be gleaned from the fact that the figures which have been offered by
the supporters of the extermination legend have run from around 200,000 to, over six
millions.
Benedikt Kautsky, Teufel und Verdammte (Devil and Damned, Zürich, 1946, p.
275) claimed that "at least 3,500,000 persons were gassed at Auschwitz." This was a
remarkable statement from a man, who by his own admission, never saw any gas
chambers there (Ibid., pp. 272-3).
Kautsky explained that he was sent as a Jewish political prisoner from
Buchenwald in October, 1942, to work at Auschwitz-Buna. The victims of liquidation
were supposedly gassed more than a mile distant at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Kautsky
heard rumors to this effect.
HOGGAN : The Myth of the Six Million
— 41 —
Kautsky did witness several executions at Auschwitz. He cited a case in which
two Polish inmates were executed for killing two Jewish inmates. He dedicated his book
to his mother who died at eighty years of age on December 8, 1944. Like all Jews of
whatever age who died during this period in German-occupied territory, she is
considered to be a victim of the Nazis. Kautsky returned to Buchenwald in January,
1945, when Auschwitz was abandoned by Germany. He described how the final months
of Germany's collapse in 1945 produced the worst conditions of hunger and disease
that Buchenwald, which is rarely claimed any longer as an extermination camp, had
ever seen. Kautsky stressed the fact that the use of inmates in war industry was a
major feature of German concentration camp policy to the very end. He failed to
reconcile this with the alleged attempt to massacre all Jews.
Paul Rassinier, Le Mensonge d'Ulysso (The Lies of Odysseus, Paris, 1955, pp.
209ff.) demonstrated conclusively that there were no gas chambers at Buchenwald.
Rassinier is a French professor who spent most of the war as an inmate at
Buchenwald. He made short work of the extravagant claims about Buchenwald gas
chambers in David Rousset, The Other Kingdom (N.Y., 1947; French ed., L'Univers
Concentrationnaire, Paris, 1946). He also investigated Denise Dufournier,
Ravensbrueck: the Women's Camp of Death (London, 1948), and he found that the
heroine had no other evidence for gas chambers than the vague rumors described by
Margarete Buber. Similar investigations were made of such books as Filip Friedman,
This Was Oswiecim (Auschwitz): the Story of a Murder Camp (N.Y., 1946), and Eugen
Kogon, The Theory and Practice of Hell (N.Y., 1950). Rassinier did mention Kogon's
claim that a deceased former inmate, Janda Weiss, had said to Kogon alone that she
had been a witness of the gas chambers in operation at Auschwitz. Rassinier noted
that there were of course rumors about gas chambers at Dachau too, but fortunately
they were merely rumors. Indeed, one could trace them as far back as the sensational
book by the German Communist, Hans Beimler, Four Weeks in the Hands of Hitler's
Hell-Hounds: the Nazi Murder Camp of Dachau (N.Y., 1933).
Rassinier entitled his book The Lies of Odysseus in commemoration of the
immemorial fact that travelers return bearing tall tales. Rassinier asked Abbé Jean-Paul
Renard, who had also been at Buchenwald, how he could possibly have testified that
gas chambers had been in operation there. Renard replied that others had told him of
their existence, and hence he had been willing to pose as a witness of things that he
had never seen (Ibid., pp. 209ff.).
Rassinier has toured Europe for years, like Diogenes seeking an honest man,
more specifically somebody who was an actual eyewitness, of any person, Jew or
Gentile, who had ever been deliberately exterminated in a gas oven by Germans
during the course of World War II, but be has never found even one such person. He
found that not one of the authors of the many books charging that the Germans had
exterminated millions of Jews during the war had ever seen a gas oven built for such
purposes, much less seen one in operation, nor had one of these authors ever been
able to produce a live, authentic eyewitness who had done so. In an extensive lecture
tour in the main cities of West Germany in the spring of 1960, Professor Rassinier
vigorously emphasized to his German audiences that it was high time for a new spirit
of inquiry and a rebirth of truth. He suggested that it would be very fitting for the
Germans to start work along this line with respect to the extermination legend, which
remains a main but wholly unjustified and unnecessary blot on Germany in the eyes of
the world.
HOGGAN : The Myth of the Six Million
— 42 —
Ernst Kaltenbrunner no doubt had the problem of truth in mind when be
complained about the success of the Nuremberg prosecution in coercing German
witnesses to make extravagant statements in support of the myth of the six million.
Many of the key witnesses who did not have since been executed, but not all of them.
Willi Frischauer, Himmler: the Evil Genius of the Third Reich (London, 1953, pp. 148ff.)
makes much of the incriminating testimony of SS General Erich von den Bach-Zelewski
against Himmler at the main Nuremberg trial. Himmler was supposed to have spoken
to Bach-Zelewski in grandiose terms about the liquidation of people in Eastern Europe,
but Göring, in the Nuremberg courtroom, condemned Bach-Zelewski to his face for this
testimony.
Bach-Zelewski in April, 1959, publicly repudiated his Nuremberg testimony before
a West German court, and be admitted with great courage that his earlier statements,
which had no foundation in fact, had been made for reasons of expediency and
survival. This was one of two types of false German testimony at Nuremberg. The
other was that of testimony by those Germans opposed to the National Socialist
regime who played fast and loose with the facts. Charles Bewley, Herman Göring
(Göttingen, 1956, pp. 296ff.) has done an admirable piece of work in illustrating this in
the case of the Gestapo official and member of the German underground, Hans Bernd
Gisevius. The testimony of Kurt Gerstein would also fall into this category.
19. The National Socialist Leaders and the Policy of Exterminating Jews
A vigorous and protracted controversy has arisen over which key figures in the
German leadership were supposed to have favored the mass extermination of
European Jewry in the first instance. First and foremost it is necessary to consider the
case of Hitler and to analyze the contention that Hitler was an active participant in a
campaign to exterminate European Jewry.
Joachin von Ribbentrop, Zwischen London und Moskau (Between London and
Moscow, Leoni, 1953, pp. 274ff.) noted that Hitler was convinced World War II would
not have occurred had it not been for Jewish influence. Hitler regarded Germany's
struggle with Great Britain and the United States as a disaster for western civilization
and a triumph for Communism. He knew that President Roosevelt had worked with
every available means to promote war in Europe prior to the English declaration of war
against Germany on September 3, 1939. He did not believe that Chamberlain would
have accepted war had it not been for the pressure from President Roosevelt. Further,
Hitler did not believe that President Roosevelt would have worked for war had be not
been encouraged and supported in his efforts by the powerful American-Jewish
community.
Ribbentrop's view of the situation was more penetrating, realistic, and accurate.
He did not believe that President Roosevelt would have been able to persuade Great
Britain to move toward war against Germany had it not been for the pursuance by Lord
Halifax of the traditional British imperialistic policy based on the balance of power.
Ribbentrop reminded Hitler that Jewish influence in England was still very slight during
the long struggle against Napoleon, who had adopted the traditional anti-Jewish
position of Voltaire. The friendly position of Kaiser Wilhelm II toward the Jews had no
influence whatever in preventing the British onslaught against Germany in 1914.
Ribbentrop engaged in repeated discussions with Hitler about the Jewish question
during the war and even during their last meeting on April 22, 1945. He was convinced
that Hitler never remotely contemplated the extermination of European Jewry.
HOGGAN : The Myth of the Six Million
— 43 —
The most comprehensive attempt to document the thesis that Hitler himself
directed an effort to exterminate European Jewry was made by the English Jew, Gerald
Reitlinger. An expanded German-language version of his major work appeared under
the title Die Endlösung: Hitlers Versuch der Austrottung der Juden Europas, 1939-1945
(The Final Solution: Hitler's Attempt to Exterminate the Jews of Europe, 1939-1945,
Berlin, 1956). This title was offered on the assumption that Reitlinger had succeeded in
his effort. The full title of the earlier 1953 English edition of this work did not mention
Hitler.
Reitlinger conceded that the term "final solution" of the Jewish question, as
employed by German leaders in the period from the outbreak of war with Poland until
war with the USSR, had nothing to do with a liquidation of the Jews. He then
considered Hitler's order of July, 1941, for the liquidation of the captured political
commissars, and he concluded that this was accompanied by a verbal order from Hitler
for special Einsatzgruppen, to liquidate all Soviet Jews (Ibid., p. 91.) This assumption
was based on sheer deduction and has been disproved above. Reitlinger himself cited
the statement of the SS leader Karl Wolff, the chief of Himmler's personal staff, that
Hitler knew nothing of any program to liquidate the Jews (Ibid., p. 126).
Reitlinger mentioned the indirect "proof" in Hitler's warning in his Reichstag
speech of January 30, 1939, that a new European war would mean the end of the
Jewish race in Europe. He failed to cite this statement within Hitler's context that the
catastrophe of a new war would persuade other European countries to follow the anti-
Jewish programs already adopted by Germany and Italy. In this sense, the end of the
Jewish race in Europe meant something far different from the physical liquidation of
the Jews. It meant only the elimination of their disproportionate influence as compared
to their relative population. Reitlinger was guilty of another misinterpretation of this
kind when he claimed that the SS newspaper, Schwarzes Korps, November 24, 1938,
preached the liquidation of the Jews instead of the elimination of their influence (Ibid.,
p. 9).
Finally, Reitlinger claimed to have found conclusive proof of a Hitlerian liquidation
policy in the protocol of a conversation between Hitler and Hungarian Regent Horthy
on April 17, 1943. Hitler complained about the black market and subversive activities
of Hungarian Jews and then made the following comment: "They have thoroughly put
an end to these conditions in Poland. If the Jews don't wish to work there, they will be
shot. If they cannot work, at least they won't thrive" (Ibid., p. 472).
There never has been the slightest proof that these comments of a vexed Hitler
were followed by an actual order to shoot Jews who would not work. Reitlinger
conceded that Hitler was then seeking to persuade Horthy to release 100,000
Hungarian Jews for work in the "pursuit-plane program" of the German air force at a
time when the aerial bombardment of Germany was rapidly increasing in intensity
(Ibid., p. 478). This indicated, at most, that the idea of compulsory labor for the Jews
had taken precedence in Hitler's thinking over the emigration plan. Hitler's purpose in
arguing with Horthy was obviously to increase his labor force rather than to liquidate
Jews.
The prestige and impact of Reitlinger's work has been very great in Jewish
circles. The Jewish Year Book (London 1956, pp. 304ff.) notes that it is commonly
stated that six million Jews were "done to death by Hitler", but that Reitlinger has
suggested a possible lower estimate of 4,194,200 "missing Jews" of whom an estimate
one third died of natural causes. This would reduce the number of Jews deliberately
exterminated to 2,796,000.
HOGGAN : The Myth of the Six Million
— 44 —
Some 2,500,000 of the alleged victims in Reitlinger's lower estimate are
supposed to have come from Poland and Rumania, and yet he has stated that all
figures from these countries are largely conjectured. Moreover, the German defeat at
Stalingrad prevented them from interfering extensively with Rumanian Jews. In point
of fact one could also add that all the statistics employed by Reitlinger, even though
they are more reasonable and reliable than those of any other Jewish statistician
dealing with the extermination problem on a large scale, are "largely conjectural", and
that he failed dismally in his attempt to prove that Hitler was personally the director of
an attempt to exterminate European Jewry.
The impression of Heinrich Hoffmann, Hitler was my Friend (London, 1955, pp.
191ff.) was that Hitler was almost exclusively preoccupied with military affairs during
World War II, and that his interest in the Jewish question was very distinctly
subordinated to the German war effort. This situation seemed to change only in April,
1945, when Hitler confronted the nightmare of future Soviet domination of Europe. In
those last days be turned his full attention again to the activities of the Jews (Ibid., p.
227).
Hoffmann was a close personal friend who enjoyed Hitler's extraordinary
confidence. Hitler said in August, 1939, that both he and England were bluffing about
war. The war came, and Hoffmann revealed how Hitler did everything possible to
evade pressure for an invasion of Great Britain in 1940. Hoffmann was understandably
plunged into gloom by the outbreak of war with the USSR on June 22, 1941, but Hitler
patiently explained to him at length why he considered the preventive war in the East
indispensable for German security. The key reason, of course, was the failure of Hitler
to achieve a compromise peace in the West (Ibid., pp. 115ff.).
Sven Hedin, Ohne Auftrag in Berlin (In Berlin without Assignment, Buenos Aires,
1949) had frequent contacts with Hitler during the period 1933-1942. Hitler knew that
the great Swedish scientist-explorer, who was partly Jewish himself, was opposed to
persecution of the Jews in any form. Hedin's Germany and World Peace (London,
1937) had been banned in Germany, although the author, on the strength of Hitler's
and Göring's friendship, had hoped to make his principal future income for scientific
purposes out of the German edition of the book. Hedin admitted that the Germans
before 1933 had understandable grievances against their small Jewish minority. The
Jews, although only .8 per cent of the population, supplied 23.07 per cent of the
lawyers of Germany and enjoyed a major share of income from German trade and
industry. Nevertheless, he believed that Germany would have "overlooked" the Jewish
question had it not been for her defeat in 1918 and her subsequent misfortunes. It is
easy to see why Hedin's adoption of the "scapegoat" theory to explain the National
Socialist anti-Jewish policy did not please the National Socialists.
In Berlin without Assignment, Hedin gave expression to the fear that people and
events of the Hitler era would be depicted solely in the perspective and interests of a
later period for years and years to come. The facts have borne out this prediction. The
attitude of the West has remained identical with that of the USSR so far as National
Socialism is concerned. Despite the Cold War and sharp disagreements on other
subjects, there is complete unanimity about what happened in Germany down through
1945 and in hostility to National Socialism.
According to Hedin, Hitler did not wish to go to war with the West. The war
forced upon Hitler by the West ended in a grandiose victory for Communism and in a
crushing political and moral defeat for everyone else. Hence, an immense propaganda
was maintained in the West after 1945 to keep people convinced that German National
HOGGAN : The Myth of the Six Million
— 45 —
Socialism was infinitely worse than Russian Communism, even after Russian gains in
the war.
It was rightly feared that Western policy prior to 1945 would appear as nonsense
without such a thesis. Hence, an effort was launched to organize Western resistance to
Communism as "the much lesser evil". But the role of the USSR was crucial in the
defeat of National Socialism, and people in the West wondered how this later intense
and alarmed resistance to "the much lesser evil of Communism" could be either
legitimate or justifiable. The West could have presented a far more formidable and
convincing moral resistance to Communism by admitting past mistakes in regard to
the war and the preceding diplomacy.
Hedin's book shares the impression of Hitler's closest Austrian friend, August
Kubizek, The Young Hitler I Knew (Boston, 1955, pp. 291ff.) that Hitler was sick of the
war by 1940, and he wished either to retire or to concentrate on the completion of
some internal reconstruction projects. He certainly did not impress either of them as a
human fiend who believed that he was about to launch his truly major program of
liquidating world Jewry. Hedin described Hitler as "a powerful and harmonious
personality."
Hedin noted Hitler's wishful thinking in 1940 about Stalin, and his vain hope that
the Soviet dictator would abandon ambitious plans for an ultimate world revolution in
favor of a nationalist program for Russia. Later, in a letter to Hedin on October 30,
1942, Hitler attempted to rationalize a desperate situation by finding a new purpose in
destroying Communism. He reminded Hedin that he had hoped for a compromise
settlement with Poland in 1939. In accepting Hedin's thesis in Amerika in Kampf der
Kontinente (America in the Struggle of the Continents, Leipzig, 1942) that Roosevelt
was the major factor in producing war in 1939, he added that, perhaps, the American
President had done the world a favor, after all, by forcing Germany to deal with the
Communist threat before it was too late (Auftrag, pp. 281ff.).
Walter Schellenberg, The Schellenberg Memoirs (London, 1956, pp. 394ff.)
revealed that Hitler learned almost immediately that Roosevelt and Churchill had
agreed at Teheran in 1943 to permit most of Eastern Germany to be assigned to a
Communist-controlled Poland in the event of Allied victory. The spy, Moyzisch, had
obtained the complete record of the Teheran conference from British diplomatic
sources in Turkey. Hitler became more convinced than ever that Communism would
eventually win its struggle for the world if Germany went down. Schellenberg has
testified that the future of the German people was the closest thing to Hitler's heart
until the end, but Hitler's final despair became very great.
Achim Besgen, Der Stille Befehl (The Unspoken Command, Munich, 1960, pp.
229ff.) claimed without the slightest proof that Hitler in his despair in April, 1945,
ordered a last-minute extermination of the Jews to accompany the Draconian
measures which he was seeking to enforce on his own German people. This is the
latest date offered by any author for a deliberate German effort to liquidate the Jews.
Besgen and Schellenberg agreed in their favorable opinion of genial Felix Kersten,
the Baltic German physician who attended Himmler. Schellenberg recognized and
approved Kersten as a moderating influence on Himmler. Besgen has celebrated
Kersten as the great humanitarian who per suaded Himmler not to insist on the
transportation of Finnish Jews for compulsory labor in Germany. Indeed, Himmler also
desisted from his earlier efforts to persuade Bulgaria to send Jewish laborers to
Germany. A few Danish Jews were forced to come to Germany, but most of them went
to Sweden to evade German measures.
HOGGAN : The Myth of the Six Million
— 46 —
This pressure on countries allied or associated with Germany always had the
same basis: the German Reich claimed, after the war became exceedingly critical, that
the Jewish population throughout German-occupied Europe was a hostile force. The
United States and Canada had begun to intern both Japanese aliens and citizens of
Japanese ex'traction in internment camps before this became a German policy toward
many German and other European Jews. There was no tangible evidence of disloyalty,
not to mention sabotage or espionage, among these people of Japanese extraction.
The Germans at least had a somewhat more plausible basis to press for the
internment of Jews. Reference has been made to Chaim Weizmann's early declaration
of war against Germany on behalf of World Jewry (Weizmann was the principal Zionist
leader). The following version of his statement, which was first announced in the
London Times on September 5, 1939, appeared in the London Jewish Chronicle,
September 8, 1939:
I wish to confirm in the most explicit manner, the declaration which I and my
colleagues made during the last months, and especially in the last week: that the Jews
"stand by Great Britain and will fight on the side of the democracies." Our urgent
desire is to give effect to these declarations. We wish to do so in a way entirely
consonant with the general scheme of British action, and therefore would place
ourselves, in matters big and small, under the co-ordinating direction of His Majesty's
Government. The Jewish Agency is ready to enter into immediate arrangements for
utilizing Jewish manpower, technical ability, resources, etc.
Weizmann had effectively declared all Jews within the German sphere to be
subjects of an enemy power, and to be willing agents in the prosecution of the war
against Germany. He had obviously permitted his zeal for destroying Hitler and the
German Reich to triumph over his solicitude for the Jews in Hitler's domain.
Felix Kersten, Memoirs, 1940-1945 (London, 1956, pp. 119ff.) joined those who
charged, on the basis of the German internment policy, that there was a deliberate
German program to exterminate the Jews. But he did not attempt to implicate Hitler,
and he was also emphatic in stating that Heinrich Himmler did not advocate the
liquidation of the Jews but favored their emigration overseas. Yet there had to be an
author of the alleged extermination policy. Kersten's fantastic attempt to provide an
answer to this problem shattered the credibility of his narrative.
Kersten was born in Estonia in 1898, and he fought for the Finns against the
Bolsheviks in 1918. He was a typically cosmopolitan Baltic German, and in 1920 be
became a Finnish citizen. Later he studied medicine in Berlin and lived in various parts
of Europe. His services as a physician were chiefly valued because of his skill as a
chiropractor. He was being employed by the Dutch royal household in March, 1939,
when a private German businessman suggested that he examine Himmler, who was
plagued by stomach and muscular ailments. Kersten was reluctant to devote himself
exclusively to Himmler because of his Dutch practice, but he agreed to do so after the
German occupation of the Netherlands in May, 1940. He was convinced before the end
of 1942 that Germany was heading for defeat in World War II. He informed Himmler
that he was establishing permanent residence in Sweden, and that his presence in
Germany would be limited to periodic visits.
It is not surprising, in view of the flow of world opinion, that Kersten, a notorious
opportunist, implied after 1945 that there had been this campaign to exterminate the
Jews. Any "proof" he might offer would be limited to his own private recording of
alleged conversations with Himmler. Kersten gave the impression that he could say
whatever he wished to Himmler about German policy. Himmler on many occasions
HOGGAN : The Myth of the Six Million
— 47 —
reputedly said that he recognized Kersten as an enemy of National Socialism who
desired the defeat of Germany in the war. Apparently, this did not trouble their
professional relationship.
The German-Jewish historian, George Hallgarten, published his recollections of
young Himmler in Germania Judaica (Cologne, April 1960). Hallgarten and Himmler
were close acquaintances while both were students at Munich. Hallgarten found
Himmler to be a tolerant and broad-minded person "comparatively free from anti-
Semitism." This might explain why it was actually possible for Kersten to say what be
pleased to Himmler about the Jews, Germany, and the war. Himmler was, apparently,
willing to tolerate Kersten because he believed, and rightly so, that the Baltic German
physician was not sufficiently heroic to use his position to aid the enemies of the
German Reich in the prosecution of the war.
Some of the information supplied by Kersten is of passing interest. For instance,
be confirmed the fact that the Belsen concentration camp achieved the unfortunate
reputation of being a "death camp" solely because of the devastating typhus epidemic
which erupted there in March, 1945, toward the end of an unnecessarily prolonged
war. It was this same epidemic and its results which had greatly depressed Oswald
Pohl.
The crucial point in Kersten's entire book is the claim that Himmler told him on
November 10, 1942, that Joseph Goebbels was the driving force behind an alleged
campaign of Jewish extermination. But Roger Manvell and Heinrich Fraenkel, Dr.
Goebbels, His Life and Death (N.Y., 1960, pp. 187ff.) have successfully defended the
thesis that Goebbels had little to do with any specific phase of German policy after the
outbreak of World War II. It was not difficult for them to sustain their point. Goebbels
was the enthusiastic advocate of a "Free-Russia" movement as early as the summer of
1941, but his recommendations were summarily rejected. The German Government
favored a wait-and-see policy pending a military decision, and the plans of Alfred
Rosenberg for self-determination to the Soviet subject nationalities were also rejected.
Goebbels had done what he could to maintain normalcy in the cultural sphere of
German life until the outbreak of the Russian war. Manvell and Fraenkel note that in
1940-1941 there were 355 state theatres, 175 independent theatres, and 142 open-air
theatres in operation in Germany, "an incredibly large number even for the country
which supported the largest number of theatres in Europe" (Ibid., p. 182). Goebbels
was opposed to World War II from the start, and he deplored the continuation of the
war. Nevertheless, when war with Russia commenced, he made recommendations for
greater military preparations, but his advice in a specific sphere of public policy was, as
usual, rejected. Goebbels hoped to retire after the war to write a monumental multivolume
biography of Hitler and a history of Germany since 1900.
The authors cite a memorandum written by Goebbels as late as March 7, 1942, in
favor of the Madagascar plan as the "final solution" of the Jewish question (Ibid., p.
195). In the meantime, he approved having the Jews "concentrated in the, East" as a
measure to guarantee German war-time security. He concluded that "there can be no
peace in Europe until every Jew has been eliminated from the continent." Later
Goebbels memoranda comment on the transportation of the Jews to the East and
emphasize the importance of compulsory labor in that area. The authors, in
considering these memoranda, flatly refuse to imply, even remotely, that Goebbels
was a force in initiating wartime measures against the Jews. His earlier initiative in
peacetime measures, such as the November, 1938, demonstrations calculated to
accelerate emigration of the Jews, belonged to a by-gone era.
HOGGAN : The Myth of the Six Million
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It must be conceded that this allegedly definitive work on Goebbels contains
more than its share of colossal errors. The authors claim there "can be no doubt at all"
that Göring and Goebbels were behind the 1933 Reichstag fire, although Fritz Tobias,
"Stehen Sie auf, Van der Lubbe!" (Stand Up, Van der Lvbbe, Der Spiegel, Oct. 23,
1959 ff.) has proved conclusively that none of the National Socialists had any
connection with the Reichstag fire. Equally wrong is the contention that Herschel
Grynszpan, the Jewish assassin of Ernst von Rath, was executed during World War II
at the behest of Goebbels. Grynszpan is at present living in Paris (Ibid., pp. 115, 149).
In short, there is no proof that Hitler knew anything of a plan to exterminate the
Jews. Himmler favored Jewish emigration rather than a program of extermination.
Goebbels, who also favored emigration, was in any case unable to exert a determining
influence on the pursuit of public policies during wartime. Martin Bormann, who
succeeded Rudolf Höss as Hitler's personal deputy and chief of the NSDAP chancellery,
was notoriously dependent on Hitler for all initiative in larger questions. Important
private confirmation on this point from Martin Bormann himself is contained in The
Bormann Letters: Private Correspondence between Martin Bormann and his Wife from
January 1943 to April 1945 (London, 1954, pp. 26ff.).
Alan Bullock, Hitler, a Study in Tyranny (N.Y., 1952, pp. 558ff.) failed to uncover
any important information on Hitler's wartime policy toward the Jews, and, indeed, he
was unable to transcend the moral and mental attitudes of the prosecution at the
Nuremberg trials. Hugh Trevor-Roper, "Hitlers Kriegsziele" (Hitler's War Arms, in
Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, 1960/2) has pointed out that Bullock's work has
been crippled by an underestimation of Hitler's intelligence and a lack of understanding
for his ideas.
20. Hans Grimm's Fundamental Analysis of Hitler, National Socialism, and the
Jewish Problem
Hans Grimm, the proudly independent and distinguished German writer who died
in 1959, has written far and away the best book on Hitler's ideas and program to date:
Warum -- Woher -- Aber Wohin? (Why -- From-What -- To What Purpose?,
Lippoldsberg, 1954). It would seem both fair and fitting in this lengthy treatment of
dreadful charges brought against Germany to present the essence of his thought on
the subject of Hitler, Germany, and the Jews. Grimm delayed his work for many years
after Hitler's death until he was convinced, through sustained contemplation and
greater perspective, that he had arrived at a detached judgment of the deceased
German leader. Above all, he came to recognize in Hitler the man who had created the
miracle of the truly German national community. The vestigial class conflicts of the
feudal period, and the more modern ones exploited by Karl Marx, were largely
overcome.
Grimm met Hitler for the first time in 1928. He recognized that Hitler had an
abiding faith in the crucial importance of a lasting Anglo-German agreement. Hitler in
those days was still looking for the man to lead Germany from the platform in the
movement of which be himself was the prophet.
Grimm maintained an independent attitude toward Hitler and his work at all
times. He voted "No" in the 1934 election to combine the German presidential and
chancellor offices on the grounds that Hitler did not deserve to have so much power
concentrated in his own hands. Hitler by that time had decided that he would have to
lead Germany in her hour of supreme crisis, because the more able and highlyHOGGAN
: The Myth of the Six Million
— 49 —
qualified personality for whom he had waited had failed to appear. Grimm's distrust of
Hitler remained undiminished until the end of World War II. He was, nevertheless,
disgusted by the vile details of Sftauffenberg's July 20, 1944, assassination attempt
against Hitler in which the would-be assassin, a German officer, merely placed a bomb
certain to kill other people as part of an effort to save his own life.
Grimm was opposed to Hitler's anti-Jewish policy, but he admitted that
throughout the world he himself had encountered the proverbial disloyalty toward
Germany of the so-called German Jews (Ibid., pp. 53-54). Hitler had told Grimm in
1929 that the permanent disintegration of Germany would be a disaster for western
civilization, and that he was convinced that the salvation of Europe and America
depended upon the salvation of Germany. Hitler's basic pro-American attitude was also
confirmed by Ernst Hanfstaengl, Unheard Witness (Philadelphia, 1957, pp. 183ff.).
Hanfstaengl noted that Hitler had little difficulty on the on the basis of the facts in
making his charges stick about the ruthless exploitation of Weimar Germany by the
Jews. Indeed, the Jewish economic position in Germany was far more impressive and
extensive than in either Great Britain or the United States (Ibid., pp. 35ff.).
Grimm noted that Hitler and Goebbels, whom he also saw frequently after 1931,
favored a separate state for the Jews. This indicated that their thinking on the Jewish
question was not limited to the merely negative factor of ridding Germany of her Jews,
but that it followed a positive approach along the lines of modern Zionism.
Hitler saw in Jewry a conscious obstacle to the creation of a German national
community. Grimm noted that Hitler was striving for a truly democratic German
community without the conventional parliamentary basis which had served Germany
so poorly in the past. The tremendous enthusiasm which Hitler aroused among the
German people in 1933 lasted well into the war period, until it was recognized that
Germany's foes, after all, would be able to deny and cancel the hopes and dreams of
the entire German people. Grimm himself did not fully recognize the tragedy of this
situation until after Hitler's death. Grimm noted that in 1945 he encountered many
healthy former inmates of those German concentration camps which had been pictured
by an unbridled atrocity propaganda as unexceptionable dens of hell and death.
Grimm denounced the demonstrations against the Jews which were organized by
Goebbels on November 10, 1938, but be rightly noted that they were no worse than
the treatment of Germans abroad during World War I, including the United States.
That this observation about the American treatment of Germans during World War I
was really an understatement has been amply proved by H. C. Peterson and G. C. Fite
in their Opponents of War, 1917-1918 (Madison, Wisconsin, 1957) which deals in detail
with what happened in the United States. In this context, and in view of the American
record of mistreating Germans in 1917-1918, it was extremely ironical when President
Roosevelt told an American press conference on November 14, 1938, that he could
scarcely believe such things as the November, 1938, demonstrations in Germany could
happen in a civilized country. The American Zionist leader, Samuel Untermeyer, had
been conducting his boycott and holy war against the Germans for more than five
years by that time.
Hitler was personally shocked by the November, 1938, measures launched by
Goebbels and even declared that these events could have ruined National Socialist
Germany permanently. The British diplomat, Ogilvie-Forbes, reported his conviction to
London from Berlin that nothing of the sort would ever be attempted again.
Grimm himself concluded after World War II that the old Jewish nation, which
had been landless for 2,000 years, was exploiting the confusion and uncertainty of the
HOGGAN : The Myth of the Six Million
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younger modern nations in an attempt to dominate the world. The creation of a Zionist
Jewish state would be of no adequate service in averting this danger unless it was
carried through on a comprehensive scale which would enable it to embrace most of
the Jews of the world.
Osward Pirow, the South African Defense Minister, approached Hitler in
November, 1938, with a plan for the creation of a fund to solve the problem of Jewish
emigration from Europe. The entire scheme was to be carried through on an
international basis with 2.5 billion dollars provided from German-Jewish and other
Jewish sources. The proposals were greeted with approval by Hitler but were blocked
in London. The same was true of Pirow's proposal for an agreement between Germany
and the West which would give Germany a free hand in Eastern Europe.
In May, 1939, an elaborate, conspiracy to assassinate Hitler was organized and
financed by the English Jew, George Russel Strauss, at a time when England and
Germany were at peace. The various would-be assassins who tried to win the reward
money from Strauss were unsuccessful, but their efforts continued long after England
and Germany were at war. Grimm emphasized that these efforts had no influence on
Hitler's policy toward the Jews, although Hitler knew that conspiracies of this kind had
been organized against him from abroad.
Grimm correctly called, attention to the fact that the prosecution at the
Nuremberg trials was absolutely determined to prevent any introduction of factual
material which would expose the gigantic fraud to the effect that six million Jews had
been exterminated by the National Socialist government during the war. The defense
attorneys were not allowed to question the allegation by means of cross-examination,
although, despite this arbitrary limitation, they did make several impressive attempts
to do so through flank attacks. None of the numerous Jewish acquaintances of Grimm
in Germany had been liquidated; on the contrary, all had survived the war. But
economic and political pressures were exerted by occupation authorities in Germany
after 1945 to prevent a free investigation of these atrocity charges by reputable
scholars and they have been continued by the Adenauer government at Bonn.
Hitler hoped to create an effective German dam against the inroads from the East
in line with the traditions of European history. He hoped to create a comradely
international league of nationalisms among the nations of Europe. Jewish spokesmen,
such as Untermeyer and Weizmann, took the same adamant position as the Soviet
Marxists in seeking to undermine all such ideas. The September 30, 1938, Anglo-
German friendship agreement seemed to offer great hope that Europe was facing a
better future, but, within a few days, the pressure from the "anti-Munichers" within the
Tory Party took the initiative for friendship with Germany out of Chamberlain's hands.
Grimm believed that Hitler had fully and properly recognized the dangers of this
situation in his speech criticizing the anti-Munich English group at Saarbrücken on
October 9, 1938. The English succeeded in stirring up the Poles in 1939, and the
Germans of Poland had suffered day and night for many months before September,
1939, what the Jews of Germany had experienced on the single date of November 10,
1938. There was little sympathy in the international press for these Gennans of Poland.
They were not Jews.
Grimm recognized Hitler's interest in adequate economic access to the raw
materials of Eastern Europe, and he was convinced that Hitler would have been
content under normal conditions to satisfy Germany's need within the context of the
German-Russian non-aggression pact of August 23, 1939. When Hitler said at the
Nuremberg Party Congress, in 1936, that Germany would swim in plenty if she had the
HOGGAN : The Myth of the Six Million
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resources of the Urals, the German leader was not saying that Germany should have
the Urals or intended to take them. All he meant was that the Germans could do a
better job of exploiting natural resources than was true of the Soviet masters of Russia
at that time. Grimm believed that the months from November, 1938, until September,
1939, were the most difficult personal period for Hitler prior to 1944. His desire for a
rational reorganization of Europe was threatened by the machinations of British
fanatics on the balance of power tradition.
World War II came, and with it the spread of Communism and suffering for all
Europe. Grimm, after 1945, discussed the fate of Jewry during World War II with
experts on statistics and population throughout Germany, and also with numerous
Germans who had personal experiences with the German concentration camp system.
Grimm noted the general consensus, based on Red Cross estimates, that the number
of Jewish and all other minority victims of German policies throughout World War II
could not have exceeded 350,000, and many of these died from allied bombings and
natural causes (Ibid., p. 290). This would leave scant room for the alleged mass
operation of the gas chambers.
Grimm was quick to deplore the mistreatment of any Jews wherever they
occurred, but he did not believe for one moment that Jewish misfortune surpassed
German suffering during a war which ended in unprecedented disaster for Germany
and unparalleled triumph for the Jews. Nevertheless, Grimm concluded that there
would continue to be a Jewish question as well as a German question until a homeland
could be created for most of the Jews (Ibid., p. 561). Grimm's book constituted a
courageous and conscientious attempt to defend his country from undeserved slander
and defamation.
21. The Factual Appraisal of the Conditions in the German Wartime
Concentration Camps by the International Committee of the Red Cross
A key role in relation to the Jewish question in Europe during World War H was
played by the International Committee of the Red Cross, which consisted largely of
relatively detached Swiss nationals, although, as might be expected, sentiment
became more critical of Germany when the German military defeats continued to
mount following Stalingrad. At the 17th International Red Cross Conference at
Stockholm in 1947 final arrangements were made for a definitive report to appear the
next year: Report of the International Committee of the Red Cross on its Activities
during the Second World War (3 vols., Geneva, 1948). This comprehensive survey
both supplemented and incorporated the findings from two previous key works:
Documents sur L'activité du CICR en faveur des civils detenus dans les camps de
concentration en Allemagne, 1939-1945 (Geneva, 1946), and Inter Arma Caritas: the
Work of the ICRC during the Second World War (Geneva, 1947). The team of authors,
headed by Frédéric Siordet, explained in the opening pages of the first of the 1948
volumes that their motto had been strict political neutrality, and service to all. The
ICRC was contrasted with the national societies of the Red Cross with their primary
aims of aiding their own peoples. The neutrality of the ICRC was seen to he typified by
its two principal wartime leaders, Max Huber and Carl J. Burckhardt. This neutral
source has been selected here to conclude the testimony on the genocide question.
The ICRC considered that its greatest single wartime triumph consisted in the
successful application of the 1929 Geneva military convention to obtain access to
civilian internees in the various parts of Central and Western Europe. The ICRC,
HOGGAN : The Myth of the Six Million
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however, was unable to obtain any access to the Soviet Union, which had failed to
ratify the 1929 convention. The millions of civilian and military internees in the USSR
were cut off from any international contact or supervision whatever. This was
especially deplorable, since enough was known to assert that by far the worst
conditions for internees of both types existed in the USSR.
ICRC contacts with German internment camps in wartime began on September
23, 1939, with a visit to Germany's major PW camp for captured Polish soldiers. The
ICRC, after March, 1942, and the first reports on German mass-internment policies
directed toward the Jews, became concerned that previously satisfactory conditions in
German civilian internment camps might be affected. The German Red Cross was
requested to take action, but they candidly reported to the ICRC on April 29, 1942,
that the German Government was not being sufficiently cooperative in providing
necessary information. The German Government took the position that its internment
policy "related to the security of the detaining state" (Report, vol. 1, p. 613). The ICRC
did not accept this position as a basis for excluding supervisory authority, and finally,
by the latter part of 1942, it was able to secure important concessions from Germany.
The German Government agreed to permit the ICRC to supervise the shipment of
food parcels to the camps for all cases which did not involve German nationals. The
ICRC soon established contact with the commandants and personnel of the camps and
launched their food relief program, which functioned until the last chaotic days of the
war in 1945. Letters of thanks for packages were soon pouring in from Jewish
internees, and it was also possible to make unlimited anonymous food shipments to
the camps.
As early as October 2, 1944, the ICRC warned the German Foreign Office of the
impending collapse of the German transportation system due to the Allied bombing
campaign. The ICRC considered that starvation conditions for people throughout
Germany were becoming inevitable. At last, on February 1, 1945, the German
Government agreed to permit Canadian PW's to drive white supply trucks to the
various concentration camps. The ICRC set up one special distribution center at the
Berlin Jewish Hospital and another at Basel. However, this improvised food system did
not work well, and many of the white food trucks were destroyed by Allied aerial
attacks. The ICRC role became so important in the last phase of the war that it was
actually the ICRC representatives who hoisted the white flags of surrender at Dachau
and Mauthausen during the final days of the war.
The ICRC had special praise for the liberal conditions which prevailed at
Theresienstadt (Terezin) up to the time of their last visits there in April, 1945. This
large Jewish community, which had been concentrated under German auspices,
enjoyed complete autonomy in communal life under a Jewish administration. The
Jewish Council of Elders repeatedly informed the ICRC representatives that they were
enjoying surprisingly favorable conditions when one considered that Germany was
going down to defeat during a war in which World Jewry had been the first to call for
her destruction.
The ICRC also had special praise for the Vittel camp in German-occupied France.
This camp contained thousands of Polish Jews whose only claim to special
consideration was that they had received visas from American consular authorities.
They were treated by the German authorities in every respect as full-fledged American
citizens.
The ICRC had some guarded comments to make about the situation of Hungarian
Jews, many of whom were deported. to Poland by the Germans in 1944 after the
HOGGAN : The Myth of the Six Million
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German occupation of Hungary. The ICRC believed, for instance, that the "ardent"
demonstrations of Hungarian Jews against the German occupation were unwise.
The ICRC had special praise for the mild regime of Ion Antonescu of Rumania
toward the Jews, and they were able to give special relief help to 183,000 Rumanian
Jews until the moment of the Soviet occupation. This enabled the Rumanian Jews to
enjoy far better conditions than average Rumanians during the late months of the war.
This aid ceased with the Soviet occupation, and the ICRC complained bitterly that it
never succeeded "in sending anything whatsoever to Russia" (Report, vol. 2, p. 62).
It should be noted that the ICRC received voluminous flow of mail from Auschwitz
until the period of the Soviet occupation. By that time many of the internees had been
evacuated westward by the Germans. The efforts of the ICRC to extend aid to the
internees left at Auschwitz under the Soviet occupation were futile. It was possible,
however, at least to a limited extent, for ICRC representatives to supervise the
evacuation of Auschwitz by way of Moravia and Bohemia. It was also possible to
continue sending food parcels for former Auschwitz inmates to such places as
Buchenwald and Oranienburg.
The ICRC complained bitterly that their vast relief operations for civilian Jewish
internees in camps were hampered by the tight Allied blockade of Fortress Europe.
Most of their purchases of relief food were made in Rumania, Hungary, and Slovakia. It
was also in the interest of the interned Jews that the ICRC on March 15, 1944,
protested against "the barbarous aerial warfare of the Allies" (Inter Arma Caritas, p.
78). The period of the 1899 and 1907 Hague conventions could only be considered a
golden age by comparison.
It is important to note in finishing with these detailed and comprehensive ICRC
reports that none of the International Red Cross representatives at the camps or else
where in Axis-occupied Europe found any evidence what ever that a deliberate policy
of extermination was being conducted by Germany against the Jews. The ICRC did
emphasize that there was general chaos in Germany during the final months of the war
at a time when most of the Jewish doctors from the camps were being used to combat
typhus on the eastern front. These doctors were far from the camp areas when the
dreaded typhus epidemics of 1945 struck (Report, vol. 1, pp. 204ff.).
The ICRC worked in close cooperation throughout the war with Vatican
representatives, and, like the Vatican, found itself unable, after the event, to engage in
the irresponsible charges of genocide which had become the order of the day.
Nothing is more striking or important relative to the work of the International Red
Cross in relation to the concentration camps than the statistics it presented on the loss
of life in the civil population during the Second World War:
These figures present the appalling estimate of 17,850,000 who lost their lives
for reasons other than persecution, while only 300,000 of all persecuted groups, many
of whom were not Jews, died from all causes during the war. This figure of 300,000
stands out in marked contrast with the 5,012,000 Jews estimated by the Jewish joint
Distribution Committee to have lost their lives during the war, mainly through
extermination by National Socialists.
One of the most bewildered Germans after the war was Legation Counsellor
Eberhard von Thadden, who had been delegated the double responsibility by the
German Foreign Office of working on the Jewish question with the ICRC and with Adolf
Eichmann. In April, 1943, he discussed with Eichmann the rumors circulating abroad
that Jews were being wantonly exterminated by the German authorities. Eichmann
HOGGAN : The Myth of the Six Million
— 54 —
insisted that the very idea of extermination was absurd. Germany needed all possible
labor in a struggle for her very existence.
Thadden questioned the wisdom of the internment policy. Eichmann admitted
that available transportation facilities were needed to furnish both the fronts and the
homeland, but he argued that it had become necessary to concentrate Jew from the
occupied territories in the East and in German camps to secure Jewish labor effectively
and to avert unrest and subversion in the occupied countries. Any of the occupied
countries might become a front-line area within a relatively short period of time.
Eichmann insisted that the family camps for the Jews in the East, along the lines
of Theresienstadt, were far more acceptable to the Jews than the separations which
the splitting up of families would entail. Eichmann admitted a case to Thaden in 1944
in which a Jew was killed in Slovakia while on transport from Hungary to Poland, but
he insisted that such an event was extremely exceptional. He reminded Thadden again
that the Jews were solely in camps so that their working power could be utilized and
espionage could be prevented. He noted that Germany had not employed these
extreme measures in the early years of the war, but only when it became evident that
her very existence was at stake. Eichmann also reminded Thadden that foreign Jews
who were being allowed to leave Europe directly from the camps were not charging
Germany with the atrocities which were irresponsibly rumored from abroad. In short,
Thadden, who had personally made numerous visits to the various concentration
camps, was thoroughly convinced that Eichmann was right and that the foreign rumors
of genocide in circulation were incorrect.
Eberhard von Thadden's only comment from his prison cell on June 11, 1946,
after having heard the full scope of the Nuremberg Trial propaganda, was that, if
Eichmann had lied, he would have to have been a "very skillful" liar indeed. The world
has not yet sufficiently pondered the question about who has lied and why. Yet it is a
statistical fact that, for every fraudulent affidavit or statement claiming a death camp
or a gas chamber, there are at least twenty which deny the very existence of such
camps and gas chambers. It is only the published evidence which has presented a lopsided
picture in support of the genocide myth.
22. Conclusion
The unavoidable conclusion about the wartime German treatment of European
Jewry is that we have encountered a deliberate defamation and falsification conspiracy
on an unprecedented scale. The internment of European Jews, like that of the
Japanese in the United States and Canada, was carried out for security reasons. It was
pointed out earlier that there was no such thorough internment of the Jews by
Germans as took place in the case of the Japanese in America. Not over 2,000,000
Jews were ever interned by the Germans in concentration camps and it is unlikely that
the figure was greater than 1,500,000. There is not the slightest intention here to
argue that such internment was either necessary or desirable in any of these cases.
Our treatment here has been solely concerned with the utterly monstrous and
unfounded charge that internment was used by the Germans as a veil behind which
they successfully slaughtered no less than six million European Jews. There has never
been even the slightest conclusive proof for such a campaign of promiscuous slaughter
on the part of Germany, and, in the meantime, all reliable evidence continues to
suggest with increasing volume and impact that this genocide legend is a deliberate
and brazen falsification.
HOGGAN : The Myth of the Six Million
— 55 —
The Myth of the Six Million was published anonymously in 1969, by
THE NOONTIDE PRESS, Newport Beach, California. The book is for
the moment out of print. It has been digitalized and displayed on the
website of the Institute for Historical Review,
and reproduced on AAARGH in May 2001. It is now a common
knowledge that the author of this pioneering little book (105 p.) was
David Hoggan (1923-1988), a scholar in his own right. In this second
edition (October 2004) we add the most useful comment on the book
by Arthur R. Butz, author of The Hoax of the Twentieth Century, first
published in 1976, and available in English, German, French and
Spanish on the AAARGH website:

HOGGAN : The Myth of the Six Million
— 56 —
POSTFACE : THE CRITICAL COMMENT OF
ARTHUR R. BUTZ (1976)
BUTZ REPLIES TO NOONTIDE
In November 1976 Prof. Arthur R. Butz received a letter from Noontide Press,
publishers of The Myth of the Six Million" Noontide had read on p. 12 of the first
British edition of The Hoax of the Twentieth Century that Butz considers "Myth" a
"terrible" book, and asked for an explanation. The problems involved faults in
Harwood's Did Six Miìlion Really Die?, in connection with which negative comments
were also made on p. 12 of "Hoax" (note that the page has been altered slightly in
subsequent editions). Here we republish Butz's reply to Noontide, complete except
for four unimportant deletions.
28 November 1976
Mr. Lewis Brandon
The Noontide Press
P.O. Box 76062
Los Angeles. California90005
Dear Mr. Brandon:
(paragraph deleted at request of A. R. Butz )
Some of your comments are difficult to understand. It is true that in my book
The Hoax of the twentieth century I do not specifically point out that Myth was the
first book in English, but that fact is clearty implicit in my discussion of the prior
literature. Moreover I do not make the preposterous assumption "that American and
English readers on a large scale read the books of Rassinier at a time when they
existed only in French and German. I don't know what you are thinking about.
HOGGAN : The Myth of the Six Million
— 57 —
Perhaps you are thinking of my remark that Myth was "a clear retrogression in
relation to the prior work of Rassinier." I think that, when I first read the book, I
noted the material in the appendices concerning Rassinier. and naturally assumed
that author and publisher. being aware of these works. had taken them into account
in some sense, so that the implication was that Myth was supposed to represent some
sort of advance over Rassinier. That a "college professor" would be familiar with
significant works in his own field in French seemed axiomatic to me. Thus. when I
made my negative evaluation of Myth, I must also bave implicitly made a negative
evaluation of Rassinier. because I didnt take the trouble to get Rassinier's books until
much later. after my own research, it turned out, had gone beyond Rassinier.
Therefore, although it is true that I first read of Rassinier's books in Myth, it is
difficult for me to acknowledge an intellectual debt in even that sense.
I used the word "terrible" in the sense of Myth's intellectual content. The
judgment was not made in relation to any other work, such as Rassinier's or mine.
The book can be shown to be unforgivably deficient in terms of the least demanding
standards of scholarship that a sane man could admit.
At the time Myth was written, the principal expression of the extermination
claims had become Reitlinger's book, as minted out in kliith.[??] Hilberg's book only
appeared in 1961. The evidence for Reitlinger's claims is and was mainly the
Nuremberg Trial's materials. One would therefore think it perfectly obvious that a
book such as Myth would closely consider the specific claims that the leading bearers
of the legend had made and also the specific Nuremberg evidence. This is where
Myth fails, The sad fact is that it does not merely treat the problem inadequately. It
never really addresses itself to the right problems, and that is the main reason why it
is terrible. The author wrote on only a hazy conception of the specific claims, and he
seems to not know a damn thing about the Nuremberg testimonies and documents.
Consider the last point. There are a very large number of wartime German
documents available to researchers, both those that were put into evidence at
Nuremberg and some others. Many of these are cited by Reitlinger and others as
support for their claims, so it is obvious that the author of Myth had at least some
responsibility to say something about what is in the wartime German documents.
What does Myth have to say? As far as I could see on my recent rereading of the
book, there are only three points where reference is made to a document. First. on p.
52 there is a reference to the protocol of the Wannsee Conferenee (which did take
piace). However the author of Myth does not take the elementary step of telling us
that there is nothing about extermination in the protocol, only deportation to the
East. Second, on pp. 82ff there is a reference to Reitlinger's mention of the alleged
protocol of a meeting between Hitler and Horthy. Since Reitlinger himself pointed
out (p. 416n of the 1953 edition and p. 450n of the 1968 edition) that the Dr. Schmidt
whose Nuremberg testimony constitutes the evidence for the authenticity of the
alleged protocol changed his story in his later book, you would think that Myth would
HOGGAN : The Myth of the Six Million
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at least pass this fact on to us. Alas it does not even rise to this and, indeed, we do in
fact get more valuable treatments of the documents from the other camp. Third, on p.
90 there is a reference to a "memorandum" by Goebbels (actually the "Goebbels
Diaries") and again Myth does not raise the obvious questions of authenticity (see pp.
195 & 197 of Hoax) and also suppresses the fact that there is indeed material in the
"Diaries" that supports the extermination legend. This is all we get from Myth on the
subject of wartime German documents. Stop and reflect on this. This "college
professor" in producing a work on the true nature of German policies in a certain area
has not bothered to refer to German documents of the time as being relevant to his
subject in some sense. except for the flimsy and ineptly exceuted exceptions noted.
That transcends mere weak scholarship.
lf we now proceed to consider what Myth reports was said at Nuremberg, we are
again appalled. On p. 63 we are told that Morgen and Pohl testified that they had
known nothing about an extermination program during the war, In fact. both men
testified that an extermination program had existed and that they had learned about
it during the war. This testimony was given for the self-serving reasons that I gave in
Hoax in Ch. 6. In the case of Pohl indeed, his testimony, that he knew of the existence
of the program and had even seen gas chambers at Auschwitz is printed on p. 664ff of
the very same volume that Myth cites in connection with Pohl. However, that is not
all to note in this connection. We also read on p. 63 that "all the testimony permitted
Pohl at his trial is confined to seven pages in Trials of War Criminals, vol. 5. pp.
555ff". Here the author has revealed his own complete incompetence to handle the
subject, because he shows that he does not understand the difference between the
complete trials transcripts (in which the Pohl testimony runs to over 800 pages) on
the one hand and on the other hand the selected documents and excerpts from
testimony that were published in the 15 volume set that I refer to in Hoax as the
"NMT volumes" which historians refer to as the "green series" and which is voefully
inadequate in itself, for studying the12 trials covered.
Indeed the situation seems even more horrid, because there are not "seven"
pages of Pohl testimony reproduced in the volume cited in Myth, but about seventy.
and I don't think a misprint is involved there, because there is indeed Pohl testimony
on pp. 555-563. and the rest that is reproduced is in bits that are scattered around in
8 other sections in the volume. Moreover, in a footnote that appears at the beginning
of each of these sections, the page numbers of the Pohl testimony in the complete
transcript are given. What is strongly suggested, therefore, is that the author of Myth
actually relied on some intermediate source for bis remarks about Pohl's testimony,
and did not even attain the "green series" point in his "study" of the Nuremberg
Trials! Mind now that the point involved here isn't just the number of pages of Pohl
testimony: that, would be nitpicking. The point is that the author doesn't know the
first thing about using the Nuremberg Trials records.
HOGGAN : The Myth of the Six Million
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Now let us raise the second major question suggested above. Has the author
attempted to consider and reply to the specific extermination claims that are made?
To put essentially the same question in a more practicaI way, can I read a book such
as Reitlinger's, after I have made myself familiar with the contents of Myth. and feels
that Myth confronts Reitlinger to a respectable extent? Alas, no. Myth either fails to
make the simplest confrontations. or makes losing confrontations. An example of the
former is Myth's failure to bring out the fact that the hoaxers have had the colossal
audacity to claim that the well known and widely used insecticide. Zyklon B was the
source of the gas used for mass exterminations at Auschivitz. The very oblique
reference to that fact in connection with the remark about Gerstein in the first
paragraph on p. 75 is no satisfactory substitute for the point that should have been
made. An example of the second form of a failure to confront arises if we read in
Reitlinger (pp. 130ff of 1968 edition) that Morgen testified that he had known during
the war that the extermination camps had existed. Since we read the opposite in
Myth our hopes are raised: at last we have a specific confrontation, and we can dig up
the Morgen testimony for confirmation but, alas, we find that Reitlinger is right, and
Myth dead wrong. Myth is a total failure in the sense of confrontation with the
bearers of the legend.
The preceding represents an expert evaluation but I think a non-expert
evaluation is also of considerable interest. So let me tell you my reactions to Myth
when I first read it in, I think. 1970, when I was a propagandized American but
nevertheless willing to be convinced on the subject of the six million. I thought the
book sort of rambled inconclusively. There were a couple of points, which I don't
remember now, that I tried without success to confirm, but there was another that I
remember most clearly. I thought that the book's strongest point was the claimed
International Red Cross estimate (p. 102) of a 300.000 figure for "loss of victims of
persecution because of politics, race or religion who died in prisons and
concentration camps between 1939 and 1945 (not incl. USSR)". By implication, that
figure supposedly appeared in the Red Cross publications mentioned on p. 99. I
assumed that nobody would be so brazen as to invent such a thing, so shortly
thereafter I happened to mention the point to a casual acquaintance. However, I also
took the steps to confirm this point, which took a little while because not all of the
publications cited were in Northwestern's library. To my dismay and genuine
surprise, I could find neither the 300.000 or any other figure for the category of
people in question. And in the six years that have since elapsed, I have heard of no
confirmation of this "Red Cross" figure from any source.
Myth had the effect of driving me in the direction opposite to that intended. and
it was specifically Myth that I had in mind in my remark in my Foreword near the top
of p. 7 of Hoax. What got me going in the right direction was the literature on the
other side, especially Hilberg.
HOGGAN : The Myth of the Six Million
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About a year later I ran into my acquaintance and it turned out that he bad been
quoting Professor Butz on the 300,000 "Red Cross" figure. Imagine my
embarrassment as I tried to explain myself.
In summary, the author of Myth knows very little about the Nuremberg Trials,
he does not know the most elementary facts about how they may be studied. He is
essentially unconscious of relevant wartime German documents, he fails to confront
the specific claims of the bearers of the legend, he is totally unreliable in reporting his
sources, he serves up major and inexcusable errors of fact, and the book can have the
effect of driving the open-minded and discerning reader in the direction opposite to
that intended. That is "terrible".
It is not the case that, just because something is true, it must be said in a book.
So I am sure you are interested in my motivation for writing what I wrote. One is
obvious. I wish to win the confidence of the reader who has seen that the prior
literature is defective in some sense. There must be many such people. This is
particularly called for in view of the fact that my publisher is also the publisher of the
Harwood booklet which. as I point out on p. 12 of Hoax "has some weak points."
Indeed most of the glaring errors in Harwood are almost certainly things that he
carried over. naively. from Myth. The most disastrous was the 300,000 "Red Cross"
figure, which Jewish critics in Britain had themselves a jolly time with (see Patterns
of Prejudice, July-August 1974, p. 14; Books and Bookmen, April 1975. p. 8). It is true
that Harwood gave as his source the Swiss newspaper Die Tat which was, however,
said to be reporting an official Red Cross figure, but one is still entitled to assume
that Harwood was led into this blunder because he naively put too much confidence
in Myth (and as I also had, as, described above).
Another error Harwood carried over from the appendices of Myth was the claim
that Mayer Levin authored the Diary of Anne Frank, another point that was raised
against Harwood with damaging effect in the controversy in Britain over his booklet.
Levin was involved with the English language adaptation for the stage. The Diary,
while almost certainly a forgery or at least an edited and interpolated version of a real
diary, was first published. some years earlier. in Dutch.
Other errors that Harwood carried over from Myth are (1) the claim that the six
million figure has its origin in a book published by Lemkin in 1943 (it was published
in 1944, the only figure I could see, in looking at pages suggested by the Index, is on
p. 89 where the American Jewish Congress is quoted as saying in 1943 that 1,702.500
had been exterminated, and anyway the six million figure is indicated in the
propaganda of late 1942 and early 1943) and (2) the way the "Gerstein statement"
was treated (as if there were evidence that Gerstein actually made the statement
attributed to him) and (3) the claim that Hoettl was an Allied agent during the war
(although it is possible Harwood had other sources for this) and (4) the claim that
HOGGAN : The Myth of the Six Million
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Pohl denied having seen a gas chamber at Auschwitz when he gave his Nuremberg
testimony. Closer readings would probably reveal more such examples.
This is not to imply that Harwood merely parroted Myth in his booklet.
Harwood treats correctly the major German documents that deal with the German
policy, he treats the Wannsee Conference correctly and does not follow Myth in
denying it took place, and he says quite a bit that isn't in Myth. All I am saying is that
some glaring errors in Harwood seem to have their origin, for the most part, in the
excessive trust Harwood put in Myth.
The second and more important reason for my "terrible" remark is that I really
wanted to strike a blow against Myth, at least with readers who are alert enough to
register my remark. The book is propagating and perpetuating disastrous errors. If
there is anything more pernicious than a lie, it must be the unsound argument in
favor of a thesis which is nevertheless true. This is no idle academic observation.
When Colin Wilson opened up the issue in the November 1974 Book and Bookmen, it
was a profoundly important event. However, on account of the weaknesses of the
Harwood booklet, many of which had their source in Myth, Wilson carried significant
handicaps into the controversy that then erupted in the "Letters" section of that
Journal. That is sad but it is not all that one can cite in this connection. When about
two years ago a controversy over the six million broke out at 'the University of
Colorado, the truth was ill served by some of the errors that both had spread and a
reliable source tells me that "Red Cross" figure was again made the basis for an
embarrassing phase of the controversy. There have probably been and there will
probably be more such episodes like these for, as you write in your letter, Myth has
been favorably received by "thousands of scholars, intellectuals and thought-leaders."
That fact may have caused you to fail to realize what sort of "information" they have
been getting from the book, and with what results when the readers of the book used
it as a basis for prosecuting public controversy on the subject.
I appreciate your courage in publishing Myth and I have at least a general idea
of the handicaps under which you labor. I am sure that, when you published the
book, you believed it to be good work. I can also appreciate your feelings when, after
all this, I bang out "terrible" on my typewriter, especially if this is the first time
anybody has sat down to explain to you just how bad the book is. Therefore you
should try to understand my feelings, when I observe some of our most intelligent
and indepenedent minded people getting messed up in important public
controversies partly because you, quite innocent of the fact, published disastrously
defective work on a subject where there is scant allowance even for the most minor
slips. Will you contend that I should nevertheless have kept silent about Myth?
Writing this long letter, indeed, has made me realize that perhaps I should have made
a longer and more specific attack on Myth in my book, and I should also have written
you earlier on this subject.
HOGGAN : The Myth of the Six Million
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( paragraph deleted at request of A.R. Butz) ..........
With best wishes,
Sincerely.
Arthur R. Butz
(Addition of 7 feb 2002: However I think my critique really is obsolete and of no
interest. In 1976 that little piece of shit had attained some significant circulation and
had to be cut down, but it has long been irrelevant. I still wonder if Hoggan really
wrote it. I would think that anybody who could read and write could do better.
Hoggan was a Harvard history Ph.D.)