Did Six Million Really
Die?
By Richard E.
Harwood
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.
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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