Did Six Million Really
Die?
By Richard E.
Harwood
1
GERMAN POLICY TOWARD THE JEWS
PRIOR TO THE WAR
Rightly or wrongly, the Germany of Adolf Hitler considered the
Jews to be a disloyal and avaricious element within the national
community, as well as a force of decadence in Germany's cultural
life. This was held to be particularly unhealthy since, during the
Weimar period, the Jews had risen to a position of remarkable
strength and influence in the nation, particularly in law, finance
and the mass media, even though they constituted only 5 per cent of
the population. The fact that Karl Marx was a Jew and that Jews such
as Rosa Luxembourg and Karl Liebknecht were disproportionately
prominent in the leadership of revolutionary movements in Germany,
also tended to convince the Nazis of the powerful internationalist
and Communist tendencies of the Jewish people themselves.
It is no part of the discussion here to argue whether the German
attitude to the Jews was right or not, or to judge whether its
legislative measures against them were just or unjust. Our concern is
simply with the fact that, believing of the Jews as they did, the
Nazis' solution to the problem was to deprive them of their influence
within the nation by various legislative acts, and most important of
all, to encounge their emigration from the country altogether. By
1939, the great majority of German Jews had emigrated, all of them
with a sizeable proportion of their assets. Never at any time had the
Nazi leadership even contemplated a policy of genocide towards
them.
JEWS CALLED EMIGRATION
'EXTERMINATION'
It is very significant, however, that certain Jews were quick to
interpret these policies of internal discrimination as equivalent to
extermination itself. A 1936 anti-German propaganda book by Leon
Feuchtwanger and others entitled Der Gelbe Fleck: Die Austrotung von
500,000 deutschen Juden (The Yellow Spot: The Extermination of
500,000 German Jews, Paris, 1936), presents a typical example.
Despite its baselessness in fact, the annihilation of the Jews is
discussed from the first pages -- straightforward emigration being
regarded as the physical "extermination" of German Jewry. The Nazi
concentration camps for political prisoners are also seen as
potential instruments of genocide, and special reference is made to
the 100 Jews still detained in Dachau in 1936, of whom 60 had been
there since 1933. A further example was the sensational book by the
German-Jewish Communist, Hans Beimler, called Four Weeks in the Hands
of Hitler's Hell-Hounds: The Nazi Murder Camp of Dachau, which was
published in New York as eady as 1933. Detained for his Marxist
affiliations, he claimed that Dachau was a death camp, though by his
own admission he was released after only a month there. The present
regime in East Germany now issues a Hans Beimler Award for services
to Communism.
The fact that anti-Nazi genocide propaganda was being disseminated
at this impossibly early date, therefore, by people biased on racial
or political grounds, should suggest extreme caution to the
independent-minded observer when approaching similar stories of the
war period.
The encouragement of Jewish emigration should not be confused with
the purpose of concentration camps in pre-war Germany. These were
used for the detention of political opponents and subversives -
principally liberals, Social Democrats and Communists of all kinds,
of whom a proportion were Jews such as Hans Beimler. Unlike the
millions enslaved in the Soviet Union, the German concentration camp
population was always small; Reitinger admits that between 1934 and
1938 it seldom exceeded 20,000 throughout the whole of Germany, and
the number of Jews was never more than 3,000. (The SS: Alibi of a
Nation, London, 1956, p. 253).
ZIONIST POLICY
STUDIED
The Nazi view of Jewish emigration was not Iimited to a negative
policy of simple expulsion, but was formulated along the lines of
modern Zionism. The founder of political Zionism in the 19th century,
Theodore Herzl, in his work The Jewish State, had originally
conceived of Madagascar as a national homeland for the Jews, and this
possibility was seriously studied by the Nazis. It had been a main
plank of the National Socialist party platform before 1933 and was
published by the party in pamphlet form. This stated that the revival
of Israel as a Jewish state was much less acceptable since it would
result in perpetual war and disruption in the Arab world, which has
indeed been the case. The Germans were not original in proposing
Jewish emigration to Madagascar; the Polish Government had already
considered the scheme in respect of their own Jewish population, and
in 1937 they sent the Michael Lepecki expedition to Madagascar,
accompanied by Jewish representatives, to investigate the problems
involved.
The first Nazi proposals for a Madagascar solution were made in
association with the Schacht Plan of 1938. On the advice of Goering,
Hitler agreed to send the President of the Reichsbank, Dr. Hjaimar
Schacht, to London for discussions with Jewish representatives Lord
Bearsted and Mr. Rublee of New York (cf. Reitlinger, The Final
Solution, London, 1953, p. 20). The plan was that German Jewish
assets would be frozen as security for an international loan to
finance Jewish emigration to Palestine, and Schacht reported on these
negotiations to Hitler at Berchtesgaden on January 2, 1939. The plan,
which failed due to British refusal to accept the financial terms,
was first put forward on November 12, 1938 at a conference convened
by Goering, who revealed that Hitler was already considering the
emigration of Jews to a settlement in Madagascar (ibid., p. 21).
Later, in December, Ribbentrop was told by M. Georges Bonnet, the
French Foreign Secretary, that the French Government itself was
planning the evacuation of 10,000 Jews to Madagascar.
Prior to the Schacht Palestine proposals of 1938, which were
essentially a protraction of discussions that had begun as early as
1935, numerous attempts had been made to secure Jewish emigration to
other European nations, and these efforts culminated in the Evian
Conference of July, 1938. However, by 1939 the scheme of Jewish
emigration to Madagascar had gained the most favour in German
circles. It is true that in London Helmuth Wohltat of the German
Foreign Office discussed limited Jewish emigration to Rhodesia and
British Guiana as late as April 1939; but by January 24th, when
Goering wrote to Interior Minister Frick ordering the creation of a
Central Emigration Office for Jews, and commissioned Heydrich of the
Reich Security Head Office to solve the Jewish problem "by means of
emigration and evacuation", the Madagascar Plan was being studied in
earnest.
By 1939, the consistent efforts of the German Government to secure
the departure of Jews from the Reich had resulted in the emigration
of 400,000 German Jews from a total population of about 600,000, and
an additional 480,000 emigrants from Austria and Czechoslovakia,
which constituted almost their entire Jewish populations. This was
accomplished through Offices of Jewish Emigration in Berlin, Vienna
and Prague established by Adolf Eichmann, the head of the Jewish
Investigation Office of the Gestapo. So eager were the Germans to
secure this emigration that Eichmann even established a training
centre in Austria, where young Jews could learn farming in
anticipation of being smuggled illegally to Palestine (Manvell and
Frankl, SS and Gestapo, p. 60). Had Hitler cherished any intention of
exterminating the Jews, it is inconceivable that he would have
allowed more than 800,000 to leave Reich territory with the bulk of
their wealth, much less considered plans for their mass emigration to
Palestine or Madagascar. What is more, we shall see that the policy
of emigration from Europe was still under consideration well into the
war period, notably the Madagascar Plan, which Eichmann discussed in
1940 with French Colonial Office experts after the defeat of France
had made the surrender of the colony a practical proposition.
Index
Introduction
1. German policy toward the Jews prior to the
war
2. German policy toward the Jews after the outbreak
of war
3. Population and Emigration
4. The Six Million: Documentary Evidence
5. The Nuremberg Trials
6. Auschwitz and Polish Jewry
7. Some Concentration Camps Memoires
8. The Nature & Condition of War Time
Concentration Camps
9. The Jews and The Concentrations Camps: A Factual
Appraisal by the Red Cross
10. The truth at last: The work of Paul
Rassinier
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