7
SOME
CONCENTRATION CAMP MEMOIRS
The most influential
agency in the propagation of the extermination
legend has been the paper-back book and magazine
industry, and it is through their sensational
publications, produced for commercial gain, that
the average person is made acquainted with a
myth of an entirely political character and
purpose. The hey-day of these hate-Germany books
was in the 1950's, when virulent Germanophobia
found a ready market, but the industry continues
to flourish and is experiencing another boom
today. The industry's products consist generally
of so-called "memoirs", and these fall into two
basic categories: those which are supposedly by
former S.S. men, camp commandants and the like,
and those bloodcurdling reminiscences allegedly
by former concentration camp inmates.
COMMUNIST
ORIGINS
Of the first kind, the
most outstanding example is Commandant of
Auschwitz by Rudolf Hoess (London, 1960), which
was originally published in the Polish language
as Wspomnienia by' the Communist Government.
Hoess, a young man who took over at Auschwitz in
1940, was first arrested by the British and
detained at Flensburg, but he was soon handed
over to the Polish Communist authorities who
condemned him to death in 1947 and executed him
almost immediately. The so-called Hoess memoirs
are undoubtedly a forgery produced under
Communist auspices, as we shall demonstrate,
though the Communists themselves claim that
Hoess was "ordered to write the story of his
life" and a hand-written original supposedly
exists, but no one has ever seen it. Hoess was
subjected to torture and brain-washing
techniques by the Communists during the period
of his arrest, and his testimony at Nuremberg
was delivered in a mindless monotone as he
stared blankly into space. Even Reitlinger
rejects this testimony as hopelessly
untrustworthy. It is indeed remarkable how much
of the "evidence" regarding the Six Million
stems from Communist sources; this includes the
major documents such as the Wisliceny statement
and the Hoess "memoirs", which are undoubtedly
the two most quoted items in extermination
literature, as well as all the information on
the so-called "death camps" such as Auschwitz.
This information comes from the Jewish
Historical Commission of Poland; the Central
Commission for the Investigation of War Crimes,
Warsaw; and the Russian State War Crimes
Commission, Moscow. Reitlinger acknowledges that
the Hoess testimony at Nuremberg was a catalogue
of wild exaggerations, such as that Auschwitz
was disposing of 16,000 people a day, which
would mean a total at the end of the war of over
13 million. Instead of exposing such estimates
for the Soviet-inspired frauds they obviously
are, Reitlinger and others prefer to think that
such ridiculous exaggerations were due to
"pride" in doing a professional job. Ironically,
this is completely irreconcilable with the
supposedly authentic Hoess memoirs, which make a
clever attempt at plausibility by suggesting the
opposite picture of distaste for the job. Hoess
is supposed to have "confessed" to a total of 3
million people exterminated at Auschwitz, though
at his own trial in Warsaw the prosecution
reduced the number to 1,135,000. However, we
have already noted that the Soviet Government
announced an official figure of 4 million after
their "investigation" of the camp in 1945. This
kind of casual juggling with millions of people
does not appear to worry the writers of
extermination literature. A review of the Hoess
"memoirs" in all their horrid detail would be
tedious. We may confine ourselves to those
aspects of the extermination legend which are
designed with the obvious purpose of
forestalling any proof of its falsity. Such, for
example, is the manner in which the alleged
extermination of Jews is described. This was
supposed to have been carried out by a "special
detachment" of Jewish prisoners. They took
charge of the newly arrived contingents at the
camp, led them into the enormous "gas-chambers"
and disposed of the bodies afterwards. The S.S.,
therefore, did very little, so that most of the
S.S. personnel at the camp could be left in
complete ignorance of the "extermination
programme". Of course, no Jew would ever be
found who claimed to have been a member of this
gruesome "special detachment", so that the whole
issue is left conveniently unprovable. It is
worth repeating that no living, authentic
eye-witness to these events has ever been
produced. Conclusive evidence that the Hoess
memoirs are a forgery lies in an incredible slip
by the Communist editors. Hoess is supposed to
say that the Jehovah's Witnesses at Auschwitz
approved of murdering the Jews because the Jews
were the enemies of Christ. It is well known
that in Soviet Russia today and in all her
satellite countries of eastern Europe, the
Communists conduct a bitter campaign of
suppression against the Jehovah's Witnesses whom
they regard as the religious sect most dangerous
to Communist beliefs. That this sect is
deliberately and grossly defamed in the Hoess
memoirs proves the document's Communist origins
beyond any doubt.
INCRIMINATING
REMINISCENCES
Certainly the most
bogus "memoirs" yet published are those of Adolf
Eichmann. Before his illegal kidnapping by the
Israelis in May, 1960 and the attendant blaze of
international publicity, few people had ever
heard of him . He was indeed a relatively
unimportant person, the head of Office A4b in
Department IV (the Gestapo) of the Reich
Security Head Office. His office supervised the
transportation to detention camps of a
particular section of enemy aliens, the Jews. A
positive flood of unadulterated rubbish about
Eichmann showered the world in 1960, of which we
may cite as an example Comer Clarke's Eichmann:
The Savage Truth. ("The orgies often went on
until six in the morning, a few hours before
consigning the next batch of victims to death,"
says Clarke in his chapter "Streamlined Death
and Wild Sex Orgies," p . 124). Strangely
enough, the alleged "memoirs" of Adolf Eichmann
suddenly appeared at the time of his abduction
to Israel. They were uncritically published by
the American Life magazine (November 28th,
December 5th, 1960), and were supposed to have
been given by Eichmann to a journalist in the
Argentine shortly before his capture - an
amazing coincidence. Other sources, however,
gave an entirely different account of their
origin, claiming that they were a record based
on Eichmann's comments to an "associate" in
1955, though no one even bothered to identify
this person. By an equally extraordinary
coincidence, war crimes investigators claimed
shortly afterwards to have just "found" in the
archives of the U.S. Library of Congress, more
than fifteen years after the war, the "complete
file" of Eichmann's department. So far as the
"memoirs" themselves are concerned, they were
made to be as horribly incriminating as possible
without straying too far into the realms of the
purest fantasy, and depict Eichmann speaking
with enormous relish about "the physical
annihilation of the Jews." Their fraudulence is
also attested to by various factual errors, such
as that Himmler was already in command of the
Reserve Army by April of 1944, instead of after
the July plot against Hitler's life, a fact
which Eichmann would certainly have known. The
appearance of these "memoirs" at precisely the
right moment raises no doubt that their object
was to present a pre-trial propaganda picture of
the archetypal "unregenerate Nazi" and fiend in
human shape. The circumstances of the Eichmann
trial in Israel do not concern us here; the
documents of Soviet origin which were used in
evidence, such as the Wisliceny statement, have
been examined already, and for an account of the
third-degree methods used on Eichmann during his
captivity to render him "co-operative" the
reader is referred to the London Jewish
Chronicle, September 2nd, 1960. More relevant to
the literature of the extermination legend are
the contents of a letter which Eichmann is
supposed to have written voluntarily and handed
over to his captors in Buenos Aries. It need
hardly be added that its Israeli authorship is
transparently obvious. Nothing in it stretches
human credulity further than the phrase "I am
submitting this declaration of my own free
will"; but the most hollow and revealing
statement of all is his alleged willingness to
appear before a court in Israel, "so that a true
picture may be transmitted to future
generations."
TREBLINKA
FABRICATIONS
The latest
reminiscences to appear in print are those of
Franz Stangl, the former commandant of the camp
at Treblinka in Poland who was sentenced to life
imprisonment in December 1970. These were
published in an article by the London Daily
Telegraph Magazine, October 8th, 1971, and were
supposed to derive from a series of interviews
with Stangl in prison. He died a few days after
the interviews were concluded. These alleged
reminiscences are certainly the goriest and most
bizarre yet published, though one is grateful
for a few admissions by the writer of the
article, such as that "the evidence presented in
the course of his trial did not prove Stangl
himself to have committed specific acts of
murder" and that the account of Stangl's
beginnings in Poland "was in part fabrication."
A typical example of this fabrication was the
description of Stangl's first visit to
Treblinka. As he drew into the railway station
there, he is supposed to have seen "thousands of
bodies" just strewn around next to the tracks,
"hundreds, no, thousands of bodies everywhere,
putrefying, decomposing." And "in the station
was a train full of Jews, some dead, some still
alive . . . it looked as if it had been there
for days." The account reaches the heights of
absurdity when Stangl is alleged to have got out
of his car and "stepped kneedeep into money: I
didn't know which way to turn, which way to go.
I waded in papernotes, currency, precious
stones, jewellery and clothes. They were
everywhere, strewn all over the square." The
scene is completed by "whores from Warsaw
weaving drunk, dancing, singing, playing music",
who were on the other side of the barbed wire
fences. To literally believe this account of
sinking "kneedeep" in Jewish bank-notes and
precious stones amid thousands of putrefying
corpses and lurching, singing prostitutes would
require the most phenomenal degree of
gullibility, and in any circumstances other than
the Six Million legend it would be dismissed as
the most outrageous nonsense. The statement
which certainly robs the Stangl memoirs of any
vestige of authenticity is his alleged reply
when asked why he thought the Jews were being
exterminated: "They wanted the Jews' money," is
the answer. "That racial business was just
secondary." The series of interviews are
supposed to have ended on a highly dubious note
indeed. When asked whether he thought there had
been "any conceivable sense in this horror," the
former Nazi commandant supposedly replied with
enthusiasm: "Yes, I am sure there was. Perhaps
the Jews were meant to have this enormous jolt
to pull them together; to create a people; to
identify themselves with each other." One could
scarcely imagine a more perfect answer had it
been invented.
BEST-SELLER A
HOAX
Of the other variety of
memoirs, those which present a picture of frail
Jewry caught in the vice of Nazism, the most
celebrated is undoubtedly The Diary of Anne
Frank, and the truth concerning this book is
only one appalling insight into the fabrication
of a propaganda legend . First published in
1952, The Diary of Anne Frank became an
immediate best-seller; since then it has been
republished in paper-back, going through 40
impressions, and was made into a successful
Hollywood film. In royalties alone, Otto Frank,
the girl's father, has made a fortune from the
sale of the book, which purports to represent
the real-life tragedy of his daughter. With its
direct appeal to the emotions, the book and the
film have influenced literally millions of
people, certainly more throughout the world than
any other story of its kind. And yet only seven
years after its initial publication, a New York
Supreme Court case established that the book was
a hoax. The Diary of Anne Frank has been sold to
the public as the actual diary of a young Jewish
girl from Amsterdam, which she wrote at the age
of 12 while her family and four other Jews were
hiding in the back room of a house during the
German occupation. Eventually, they were
arrested and detained in a concentration camp,
where Anne Frank supposedly died when she was
14. When Otto Frank was liberated from the camp
at the end of the war, he returned to the
Amsterdam house and "found" his daughter's diary
concealed in the rafters. The truth about the
Anne Frank Diary was first revealed in 1959 by
the Swedish journal Fria Ord. It established
that the Jewish novelist Meyer Levin had written
the dialogue of the "diary" and was demanding
payment for his work in a court action against
Otto Frank. A condensation of the Swedish
articles appeared in the American Economic
Council Letter, April 15th, 1959, as follows:
"History has many examples of myths that live a
longer and richer life than truth, and may
become more effective than truth. "The Western
World has for some years been made aware of a
Jewish girl through the medium of what purports
to be her personally written story, Anne Frank's
Diary. Any informed literary inspection of this
book would have shown it to have been impossible
as the work of a teenager. "A noteworthy
decision of the New York Supreme Court confirms
this point of view, in that the well known
American Jewish writer, Meyer Levin, has been
awarded $50,000 to be paid him by the father of
Anne Frank as an honorarium for Levin's work on
the Anne Frank Diary. "Mr. Frank, in
Switzerland, has promised to pay to his race
kin, Meyer Levin, not less than $50,0OO because
he had used the dialogue of Author Levin just as
it was and "implanted" it in the diary as being
his daughter's intellectual work." Further
inquiries brought a reply on May 7th, 1962 from
a firm of New York lawyers, which stated: "I was
the attorney for Meyer Levin in his action
against Otto Frank, and others. It is true that
a jury awarded Mr. Levin $50,000 in damages, as
indicated in your letter. That award was later
set aside by the trial justice, Hon. Samuel C.
Coleman, on the ground that the damages had not
been proved in the manner required by law. The
action was subsequently settled while an appeal
from Judge Coleman's decision was pending. "I am
afraid that the case itself is not officially
reported, so far as the trial itself, or even
Judge Coleman's decision, is concerned. Certain
procedural matters were reported in 141 New York
Supplement, Second Series 170, and in 5 Second
Series 181. The correct file number in the New
York County Clerk's office is 2241 - 1956 and
the file is probably a large and full one . . ."
Here, then, is just one more fraud in a whole
series of frauds perpetrated in support of the
"Holocaust" legend and the saga of the Six
Million. Of course, the court case bearing
directly on the authenticity of the Anne Frank
Diary was "not officially reported". A brief
reference may also be made to another "diary",
published not long after that of Anne Frank and
entitled: Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto: the
Journal of Emmanuel Ringelblum (New York, 1958).
Ringelblum had been a leader in the campaign of
sabotage against the Germans in Poland, as well
as the revolt of the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943,
before he was eventually arrested and executed
in 1944. The Ringelblum journal, which speaks of
the usual "rumours" allegedly circulating about
the extermination of the Jews in Poland,
appeared under exactly the same Communist
auspices as the so-called Hoess memoirs.
McGraw-Hill, the publishers of the American
edition, admit that they were denied access to
the uncensored original manuscript in Warsaw,
and instead faithfully followed the expurgated
volume published by the Communist Government in
Warsaw in 1952. All the "proofs" of the
Holocaust issuing from Communist sources of this
kind are worthless as historical
documents.
ACCUMULATING
MYTHS
Since the war, there
has been an abundant growth of sensational
concentration camp literature, the majority of
it Jewish, each book piling horror upon horror,
blending fragments of truth with the most
grotesque of fantasies and impostures,
relentessly creating an edifice of mythology in
which any relation to historical fact has long
since disappeared. We have referred to the type
already - Olga Lengyel's absurd Five Chimneys
("24,000 corpses handled every day"), Doctor at
Auschwitz by Miklos Nyiszli, apparently a
mythical and invented person, This was
Auschwitz: The Story of a Murder Camp by Philip
Friedman, and so on ad nauseam The latest in
this vein is For Those I Loved by Martin Gray
(Bodley Head, 1973), which purports to be an
account of his experiences at Treblinka camp in
Poland. Gray specialised in selling fake
antiques to America before turning to
concentration camp memoirs. The circumstances
surrounding the publication of his book,
however, have been unique, because for the first
time with works of this kind, serious doubt was
cast on the authenticity of its contents. Even
Jews, alarmed at the damage it might cause,
denounced his book as fraudulent and questioned
whether he had ever been at Treblinka at all,
while B.B.C. radio pressed him as to why he had
waited 28 years before writing of his
experiences. It was interesting to observe that
the "Personal Opinion" column of the London
Jewish Chronicle, March 30th, 1973, although it
roundly condemned Gray's book, nevertheless made
grandiose additions to the myth of the Six
Million. It stated that: "Nearly a million
people were murdered in Treblinka in the course
of a year. 18,0OO were fed into the gas chambers
every day." It is a pity indeed that so many
people read and accept this kind of nonsense
without exercising their minds. If 18,000 were
murdered every day, the figure of one million
would be reached in a mere 56 days, not "in the
course of a year." This gigantic achievement
would leave the remaining ten months of the year
a total blank. 18,000 every day would in fact
mean a total of 6,480,000 "in the course of a
year." Does this mean that the Six Million died
in twelve months at Treblinka? What about the
alleged three or four million at Auschwitz? This
kind of thing simply shows that, once the
preposterous compromise figure of Six Million
had scored a resounding success and become
internationally accepted, any number of
impossible permutations can be made and no one
would even think to criticise them. In its
review of Gray's book, the Jewish Chronicle
column also provides a revealing insight into
the fraudulent allegations concerning
gas-chambers: "Gray recalls that the floors of
the gas chambers sloped, whereas another
survivor who helped to build them maintains that
they were at a level . . ." Occasionally, books
by former concentration camp inmates appear
which present a totally different picture of the
conditions prevailing in them. Such is Under Two
Dictators (London, 1950) by Margarete Buber. She
was. a German-Jewish woman who had experienced
several years in the brutal and primitive
conditions of a Russian prison camp before being
sent to Ravensbrück, the German camp for
women detainees, in August 1940. She noted that
she was the only Jewish person in her contingent
of deportees from Russia who was not straight
away released by the Gestapo. Her book presents
a striking contrast between the camps of Soviet
Russia and Germany; compared to the squalor,
disorder and starvation of the Russian camp, she
found Ravensbrück to be clean, civilised
and well-administered. Regular baths and clean
linen seemed a luxury after her earlier
experiences, and her first meal of white bread,
sausage, sweet porridge and dried fruit prompted
her to inquire of another camp inmate whether
August 3rd, 1940 was some sort of holiday or
special occasion. She observed, too, that the
barracks at Ravensbrück were remarkably
spacious compared to the crowded mud hut of the
Soviet camp. In the final months of 1945, she
experienced the progressive decline of camp
conditions, the causes of which we shall examine
later. Another account which is at total
variance with popular propaganda is Die Gestapo
Lässt Bitten (The Gestapo Invites You) by
Charlotte Bormann, a Communist political
prisoner who was also interned at
Ravensbrück. Undoubtedly its most important
revelation is the author's statement that
rumours of gas executions were deliberate and
malicious inventions circulated among the
prisoners by the Communists. This latter group
did not accept Margarete Buber because of her
imprisonment in Soviet Russia. A further
shocking reflection on the post-war trials is
the fact that Charlotte Bormann was not
permitted to testify at the Rastadt trial of
Ravensbrück camp personnel in the French
occupation zone, the usual fate of those who
denied the extermination legend.
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