About the Wannsee text:
The Wannsee text (January 20th 1942)
"In the course of the final solution, Jews will be conveyed under appropriate guidance, towards the East to make use of their labor. They will be separated according to sex. Jews capable of working will be taken in large columns to areas of major works, to build roads, and consequently large numbers will doubtless perish through natural selection.
"Those who will finally remain, who without any doubt will make up the most robust element, must be treated consequently, for they represent a natural selection whose liberation must be considered the germ-cell of a new Jewish development as the experience of history has shown..)" (13-3133)
David Irving:
"I have read the minutes of the Wilhem Strasse trial, the second after that of Nuremberg. There were twelve others afterwards. Not one of them brought testimony according to which the liquidation of the Jews had been discussed at Wannsee." (33-9372-9373)
The Wannsee Protocol consists of the minutes of a conference which took place on January 20th 1942, attended by the Secretaries of State administratively concerned by the solution to the Jewish question, and those heads of departments in charge of its execution. In this text, no mention is made of gas chambers or extermination, but only of the transfer of Jews to Eastern Europe.
These minutes have all the characteristics of an apocryphal document if we are to credit the photocopy of them published in Robert N.W. Kempner’s “Eichmann und Komplizen”, pp. 132 and following (Europa Verlag 1961) : no seal, no date, no signature, ordinary machine type on small format paper, etc…
In any case they make no mention of gas chambers.
In the French versions of it, “die Zuruckdrangung der Juden aus dem Lebensraum des deutschen Volkes” has been translated by “the elimination of the Jews from the vital space of the German people”, as it was in English and in Russian.
The Germans, however, preferred to use other expressions to speak of their decision to drive the Jews out of what they called their “vital space”, expressions like “Auschaltung” (exclusion, eviction, elimination) and especially “Ausrottung” (extirpation,uprooting). It was this last word which was translated as extermination, which is “Vernichtung” in German.
For example : in his speech at Posen before the Obergruppenfuhrer (the Divisional commanders of the Waffen SS) on October 4th 1943, Himmler said :
"Ich meine jetzt die Judenevakuirung, die Ausrottung des judischen Volkes...Das judische Volk wird ausgerotten, etc... "
In the following sentence, he uses the word “Auschaltung…” (P.S.1919 T.XXIX p.145) to clarify his meaning. In other words :
"I am now thinking of the evacuation of the Jews, of the extirpation of the Jewish people, etc... "
But in the “Eichmann File”, M.Billig translated it as:
"I mean by that the evacuation of the Jews, the extermination of the Jewish people." (p.55) and "evacuation of the Jews, IN OTHER WORDS extermination" (p.47).
Another example : in a note dated 16th December 1941 on one of his talks with Hitler (P.S 1517 T.XXVII p.270) Rosenberg uses the expression “Ausrottung das Judentums”.
At the April 17th 1946 session, the American Attorney General Dodd translated it as “Extermination of Jews” (Tome XI,p.562). Rosenberg protested in vain.
"But in the speeches of the Nazis, the expression "Ausrottung des Christentums", which was often used, is always translated as " the extirpation of Christianity from German culture"
Cf. Revue d’Histoire de la seconde guerre mondiale, October 1st 1958, p.62.
It is when it refers to Judaism (Judentum) or the Jewish people (das judische Volk) that the word “Ausrottung” means extermination and applies to individuals, whereas it refers to entities.
The Wannsee conference of January 20th 1942, where, it was claimed for over a third of a century, the decision to “exterminate” European Jews, disappeared from 1984 on from the writings of even the most ferocious enemies of the “revisionists”. On this point, they too had to “revise” their history : it was at the Stuttgart Congress of May 1984,where that “interpretation” was dropped.
Source : Eberhard Jackerl and Jurgen Rohwer.“Der Mord an der Juden im Zweiten Weltkrieg”('The murder of Jews during the Second World War")
Source : DVA. 1985 p. 67
In 1992, Yehuda Bauer wrote in “The Canadian Jewish News” of January 30th that this interpretation of Wannsee was “silly”.
Finally, the most recent spokesman for the orthodox antirevisionist historians, the chemist Claude Pressac, confirmed this new revision of orthodoxy. He wrote on page 35 of his book :“Les crematoires d’Auschwitz” (CNRS editions, 1993):
"The Wannsee conference was held in Berlin on January 20th. If an action of "driving back" the Jews towards the East was planned, with the evocation of a "natural" elimination through work, nobody then spoke of liquidation on an industrial scale.
During the days and the weeks that followed, the Auschwitz Bauleitung received neither a call, a telegram or a letter demanding the study of an installation adapted to that end."
And even, in his “recapitulative chronology”, he indicates on January 20th 1942 :
"Wannsee Conference on the driving back of the Jews towards the East" (p.114).
The “extermination” was revised : it was a question of “driving back”.
It is equally remarkable that, in all this book setting itself the goal of “proving” the thesis of extermination, there was no question either of the document which, after that of Wannsee, was supposedly the most decisive: Goering’s letter to Heydrich of July 31st 1941, in which it was asserted that the “final solution” meant “extermination”, and not the transfer out of Europe.
At the time of the Toronto trial in 1988, there was also a controversy concerning the role of the “Eizenzattsgruppen”, a kind of free corps designated by the Hitlerian High Command to annihilate the groups of partisans which formed as soon as the Germans swooped down on Moscow in 1941 ;
These groups would surge behind the German army, trying to destroy its reserves of fuel, its supplies and its communication networks, cutting the Germans off from their rear bases.
This form of resistance proved so effective that Hitler gave the harshest of orders to the “Eizenzattsgruppen”, to kill off the leaders and the political commissars.
There were many Jews among these political commissars, who played a leading role in which they confronted death bravely.
At the Toronto trial, the problem of the participation of these heroic Jews to the resistance against Hitlerism was evoked at great length.
Christie, Zundel’s lawyer, insisted on asking the historian Hilberg, to clarify the meaning of the Nazi orders on this subject.
Christie : The order given to the Einzattsgruppen says : Annihilate the Jewish Bolshevik commissars, and you interpret this as meaning : "Annihilate the Jewish people and the Jewish commissars. Is that correct?
Hilberg : Correct.
Christie : It was therefore said, according to you, that it was not a question of killing the Jews, but the Jewish-Bolshevik political commissars.
Hilberg : The order was given to Himmler to "solve the problem".(4839)
Christie : It concerned the problem of the Jewish-Bolshevik political commissars. Which does not mean : the Jewish problem...Was there not a war on between Communism and Nazism ?
Hilberg : Yes, and the political commissars, at the core of the system, had to be shot.
Christie : This did not mean killing the Jews who were there. Did Hitler think that Bolshevism was of Jewish origin and that all the commissars were Jews?
Hilberg : That was propaganda. But it was the intention from the beginning, since June 22nd 1941.
Christie : Is this an article of faith with you?
Hilberg : No. It's not an article of faith, it's a certainty.
Christie : Can you show me Hitler's second order?
Hilberg : I say that there's a decisive directive from Hitler exposed by Goering to Heydrich on July 31st 1941...It was the text which prepared the Wannsee conference.
Christie : Was it an order or a letter from Hitler?
Hilberg : No.
Christie : You wrote in your book : "Hitler gave this second order. Is that correct?
Hilberg : That is correct.
Christie reverts to the meaning of the word "resettlement" in the East. "Does this mean an order to kill all the Jews?" (4-855)
Hilberg : Resettlement" was a synonym for "deporting the Jews to death camps.
Christie : Wasn't there a plan to deport the Jews to Madagascar ?
The English historian, David Irving, brought the following information, drawn from original sources, to the Toronto trial.
" ...The final solution to the Jewish problem consisted of deporting them to different territories. One of the hypotheses was Madagascar, especially after the fall of France, but the might of the British and later American fleets made this project impossible to carry out.
The only document I possess is a telephone conversation between Prime minister Lammers and the Feurher in the Spring of 1942, and the Feurher answered him that the final solution would be decided upon only after the end of the war.
Heinrich Himmler wrote to the gauleiters that the Feurher, Adolf Hitler, had given him the order to rid Europe of its Jews from West to East, by stages. It was obviously an order of deportation." (33-935 and 9352).
But this involved no order to exterminate the Jews.
No order of this kind was ever given, nor in the archives of the world, including the Jewish archives which cooperated with me.
I must also emphasize that, in the British archives where we had deciphered the German codes of the S.S. units operating on the Eastern front, even with those English machines for deciphering codes, we did not decipher any code in which Hitler gave the order to kill the Jews. Only historians claiming to read between the lines and giving vent to their indignation have been able to decipher such a meaning. (33-93.76) "
The lawyer, Christie, quotes page 651 of Hilberg’s book in which is written :
"In November 1944, Himmler decided that for all sorts of practical reasons, the Jewish question was solved. On the 25th of the same month, he ordered the dismantling of all the death installations."
Source : Testimony of Kurt Becher. 8th March 1946. P.S. 3762.
Hilberg recognizes that it was not an order by Himmler (4-861 to 864):
"Becher probably presented it from memory in his testimony. He therefore did not need to use the exact language employed by Himmler."
One more time, Hilberg said that Becher had said that Himmler had said…(4.867)
After lengthy historical research by scholars of every background under the pressure of revisionist critics, the director of the “Institute of history of the present time” at the National Center of Scientific Research, Mr. Francois Bedarida sums up these works on the “evaluation of the Auschwitz victims” :
"The collective memory has seized hold of the figure of four million, the very one which, on the faith of a Soviet report, figured until now at Auschwitz on the monument erected to the memory of the victims of Nazism - while in Jerusalem the Yad Vashem museum indicated a total very much above the truth.
And yet, as soon as the war ended, scholarly memory got down to work. The result of these patient and minute investigations was that the figure of four million rested on no serious base and could not be retained.
The court, all the same, relied on an assertion by Eichmann claiming that the extermination policy had caused the death of six million Jews, four million of them in the camps. If now we refer to the most recent works and to the most reliable statistics - as is the case with Raoul Hilberg's work, "Destruction des juifs d'Europe" (Fayard,1988), we come up with a million dead at Auschwitz.
A total corroborated by the specialists as a whole since, today, these agree on a number of victims oscillating between 950,000 minimum and 1.2 million maximum."
Source : “Le Monde”, 23rd July 1990.
Nevertheless, people continue after the reduction of the number of victims at Auschwitz-Birkneau from 4 to 1 million, to repeat the global figure : 6 million Jews exterminated, according to the bizarre arithmetic : 6 - 3 = 6.
That the “final solution” to the Jewish problem was to be resolved only after the war is also testified to by the “Braun Mappe” (Brown File) of the Summer of 1941. The paragraph entitled : “Directives for the solution of the Jewish question” specified :
"All the measures concerning the Jewish question in the lands occupied in the East having to be taken after the war, the Jewish question will find a general solution in Europe."
Source : P.S. 702. Henri Monneray. “La persecution des juifs dans les pays de l’Est presentre " Nuremberg” CDJC 1949.
This restatement of the question does involve any attenuation of Hitler’s crimes, but simply recalls a piece of evidence which even the most determined partisans of the theory of “extermination” have not overlooked:
During the last two years of the war, after Stalingrad, Hitler was fighting a losing battle : the Allies were destroying his war production centres with their bombs and disorganizing his transport network.
He was forced to mobilize new soldiers, emptying his factories as a result. How could he have been fatally obsessed with the will to exterminate his prisoners and Jews, instead of using them, even in inhuman conditions, for working on his sites? Poliakov himself, in his “Breviaire de la haine” (p.3) emphasized this absurd contradiction :
"It would have been so much more economical to have made them carry out the hardest work, parking them in a reservation for instance."
Hannah Arendt also pointed out what was insane about such an operation :
"The Nazis turned straightforwardly useless into the harmful when, right in the middle of the war, despite the penury of building materials and of rolling stock, they erected huge and costly extermination factories and organized the transport of millions of people...
The manifest contradiction between this behavior and military imperatives gives the entire undertaking a mad, chimerical air."
Source : Hannah Arendt. “Le systrme totalitaire” Paris 1972. p.182.
What is even odder is that minds as subtle as Poliakov and Hannah Arendt were so completely clouded by their a prioris that they did not question their Surrealistic assumptions and turn to the documents and the facts.
At Auschwitz-Birkenau, there were powerful implantations of the Farben-industry (chemical), of Siemens (transports) of Portland (construction). At Monovitz (one of the camp annexes to Auschwitz) there were 10,000 prisoners at work, 100,000 civilian workers and 1,000 English prisoners of war.
Source : “German crimes in Poland”, Warsaw 1946. Vol. I. p.37.
From 1942 to 1944, out of 39 camps that were satellites of Auschwitz, 31 used prisoners as laborers and 19 of them used a majority of Jews.
On January 25th 1942, Himmler addressed the following directive to the inspector-general of the concentration camps :
"Get ready to take in 100,000 Jews...Over the coming weeks, important economic tasks will be entrusted to the concentration camps."
Source : N.0. ; 020
a - In May 1944, Hitler ordered the use of 200,000 Jews as workers in the
construction program of Jager and the Todt organization.
An S S W V H A order dated November 18th 1943 awarded a bonus to prisoners- even Jews - who had distinguished themselves at work.
Source : Auschwitz Museum Center 6 - 1962 p.78.
There is therefore nothing “insane or chimerical”, but on the contrary an implacable realism, and an extra refutation of the “exterminationist” themes.
b - Eyewitness accounts
The Auschwitz trial was held in Frankfurt from December 20th 1963 to August 20th 1965, in a vast theater which was well-suited to a showy political operation; the vast legal machine could not avoid being forced to acknowledge in the account of the reasons for its verdict that the elements at its disposal for reaching its verdict were absurdly flimsy.
"The court lacked almost all the means of information which an ordinary criminal trial disposes of to compose a faithful portrayal of events such as they really occurred. The bodies of the victims lacking, the autopsy reports, the conclusions of the experts as to the cause of death; traces left by the culprits were lacking, crime weapons, etc...It was possible to check the accounts only in a very few cases."
Source : Page 109 of the account of the reasons for the verdict
According to the accusers, the crime-weapon was the “gas chambers.” Yet the judges found no “traces” of them!
It was enough for those gas-chambers to be “notorious” to exist, as in the days of the witch-trials, where no-one would have dared to question the witches’ “carnal knowledge” of the devil for fear of being burnt at the stake too.
One of the jurists sent by the United States to Dachau, which had become an American camp and a center of “war-crime trials”, Stephen S. Pinter, wrote :
"I lived at Dachau for 17 months after the war as US military judge, and can testify that there was no gas chamber at Dachau. What they show visitors is presented in an erroneous manner as a gas chamber, being a crematorium oven. Nor were there any gas chambers in the concentration camps in Germany.
We were told that there was a gas chamber at Auschwitz, but as Auchwitz was in the Russian zone, we did not have permission from the Russians to visit…they thus made use of the old propaganda myth according to which millions of Jews were killed.
I can attest, after 6 years spent in Germany and Austria after the war, that many Jews were killed, but that the figure of 1 million was certainly never reached, and I believe myself to be better-qualified than anyone else on this subject."
Source: Letter by Pinter to the Catholic weekly, “Our Sunday Visitor”, June 14th 1959, p.15.
Lacking written proofs and irrecusable documents, the Nuremberg court was forced to base itself on “eyewitness accounts”, like the fictionalized works and the films that came later.
The survivors who were called upon to bear witness and who authenticated the existence of “gas chambers” did it not from what they had seen but what they had “heard said”.
A typical and famous example is that of Doctor Benedict Kautzsky, successor to his father at the head of the Austrian Social Democratic party.
After declaring that the maximum period of survival at Auschwitz was three months (though he himself spent three years there), he wrote his book : “Teufel und Verdammt” (published in Switzerland in 1946), in which he declared about the “gas chambers” :
"I did not see them personally, but so many faithworthy people confirmed their existence."
"Il will hier noch eine kurze Shilderung der Gaskannmern einflechten, die ich zwar selbst nicht gesehen habe, die mir iber von so vielen glaubwurdig dargestellt worden sind... "
A few eyewitness accounts were regarded as fundamental, notably those of Rudolf Hoess, Saukel and Nyszli (“Doctor at Auschwitz”).
The key witness, who turned out to be the perfect witness to “prove” the thesis of the victors disguised as judges was Rudolf Hoess, ex commander of the Auschwitz camp.
The description he gave when he was arrested became the synopsis of his declarations at Nuremberg; it was everything the Court expected of him.
Here is his declaration, written under oath and signed by Rudolf Hoess on April 5th 1946 :
"I was commander of Auschwitz until December 1st 1943, and I estimate that at least 2,500,000 victims were executed there and exterminated by gassing and cremation, and that at least half a million others died there of hunger and disease, which makes a up a total of about 3,000,000 dead. The "final solution" of the Jewish question signified the extermination of all the Jews in Europe.
I received the order to prepare the extermination at Auschwitz in June 1941. At that time, there already existed three other extermination camps in the general government : Belzec, Treblinka, Wolzek."
One cannot imagine a more perfect confirmation of the theses which were
going to be spread by the media for half a century.
And yet this text itself already contains three statements in obvious contradiction with the truth :
1 - The number of 3 million dead at Auschwitz, needed to justify the total number of Jewish victims (6 million), official figure proclaimed from the start at Nuremberg and which has never ceased to be the leitmotif of official history and of the media since that time,
Has to be reduced by at least two thirds, as the new commemorative plaque at Auschwitz-Birkenau proves, on which the figure of four million has been replaced by: a little over a million.
2 - The camps of Belzec and Treblinka did not exist in 1941. They were not opened until 1942.
3 - As for the Wolzek camp, it never existed on any map.
How could this “capital testimony” have been recorded without prior verification ?
Höss himself explains it: the first declarations were made under the control of the Polish authorities which had arrested him.
The autobiography of Rudolf Höss indicates on page 174 of the French edition :
"At the time of my first cross-examination, the first confessions were obtained by beating me. I do not know what there is in that report although I signed it." (5.956).
(Hoess signed an 8-page typescript at 2.30 in the morning of March 14th 1946 which does not essentially differ from what he later wrote and said at Nuremberg or Cracow.)
Hoess himself describes in hand-written notes made at Cracow the circumstances of the first interrogatory to which he was subjected by the British military police.
"I was arrested on March 11th 1946 at llPM...The Field Security Police subjected me to painful treatment. I was dragged until Heide, precisely to the barracks where, eight months earlier, I had been released by the English. It was there I was interrogated for the first time, during which harsh means were used.
I do not know the contents of the report even though I signed it. So much liquor and whip-lashes got the better even of me…A few days later, I was taken to Meiden-on-the-Weser, the main interrogation center of the British zone. There, I fared even worse at the hands of a public attorney, a commander."
Source: Document NO-1210
It was only in 1983 that there was confirmation of the tortures inflicted upon Rudolf Hoess to obtain the “proof” of the “two and a half million” Jews exterminated by him at Auschwitz.
This book was written by Rupert Butler and was called : “Legions of Death” (Hamlyn Paperbacks). It publishes the testimony of Bernard Clarke, who arrested Rudolf Höss after finding out his whereabouts from his wife after threat of death to herself and her children.
Hoess was arrested at the farm where he was hiding on March 11th 1946. Butler describes how it took three days of torture to obtain a “coherent declaration”, eg. the one we have just quoted, signed March 14 th 1946 at 2 in the morning.
As soon as he was arrested, Hoess was beaten so hard that “in the end,the health officer intervened with insistence to the captain : tell him to stop or you’ll bring back a corpse.”
It must be noted that Butler and his interlocutor Clarke both seem highly satisfied with these acts of torture.
The American enquiry committee made up of judges Van Roden and Simpson, sent to Germany in 1948 to investigate irregularities committed by the American military court at Dachau (which had tried 1,500 German prisoners and sentenced 420 of them to death), established that the accused had been subjected to physical and psychological torture of every sort to force them to make the desired “confessions”.
Thus 137 out of 139 German prisoners examined had been kicked in testicles, receiving permanent injuries.
Source : Interview with Judge Edward L. Van Roden, in “The Progressive”, February 1949.
