This is a scanned copy of the original, and fairly well
known photograph of Britain's Major Gerald
Draper intimidating
former Auschwitz commandant, and father of five
children, Rudoph Hoess. I found it on the Yad Vashem's website.
What is news (googling reveals this has never before
been posted on the world wide web, and I've only found
it partially quoted in one book), is that there was a
hand written message on reverse of this photo. It reads:
Miden, March 1946
The moment when Col. Draper asked the question "How many millions have you gassed in your camp Auschwitz Birkenau, Hoess?"
Answer: "Between 2½ and 3½ millions in my time!"
Hoess' "time" at Auschwitz (as commandant) ended on
December 1, 1943 (see 3868-PS),
when he became deputy to the chief inspector of all
concentration camps, Richard Gluecks. The Nazis
would not destroy the
last "gas chamber" at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Krema 5,
until January 20, 1945, giving the Nazis 14 months
more to gas Jews after Hoess had left.
Someone has clearly drawn Hoess' blood. The Yad
Vashem claims this photo was
taken in Poland. But Hoess is wearing the same
shirt, and has the same drastically shaven haircut,
as he does in the above photo with Draper, and also
in this photo with
two British soldiers. The Vad Yashem clearly has
these photos incorrectly marked as being from
Poland, when they're all from the British Occupied
Zone of Germany.
Professor Colonel Gerald Irving Antony Dare Draper
OBE (1914 - 1989)
"he secured the confession of Hoess, the
Commandant of Auschwitz."
Revisionists have already noted the role of Gerald Draper in Hoess' "problematic" confessions. Robert Faurisson wrote in 1986 that Colonel Draper (who was Major Draper in March 1946), "he may also have been a Jew", and that Hoess mentions in "his autobiography" an "English public prosecutor, a major" gave him further "rough treatment." David Hebden has pointed out how Colonel Draper was the British prosecutor at the Tesch trial in March 1946, where it was asserted by the prosecution (i.e. him) that 4,500,000 were gassed at Birkenau alone. Hebden also convincingly asserts that Hoess' "confessed" estimates were forced from him to corroborate what German/Brazilian Nazi turned British army interpretor Perry Broad had testified to as a witness at the Tesch trial. I've also posts here relating to Hoess' torture by British Jews, and to his numerous and widely varying estimates of the number he supposedly killed at Auschwitz.
In this article, I'm just going to attempt to
outline who Colonel Draper was, but a more extensive
biography of his career as a Professor of Law,
mainly relating to war, can be read here.
This an interview with Gerald Draper from 1988 the year before his death. He talks about his background, and of the mass slaughter of Croatian men, women and children, many just handed over to Tito by the British, in the aftermath of WWII. He was clearly a intelligent and highly educated man.
[ "WAR CRIMES of TITO and BRITS from Nuremberg Prosecutor"
archived video info ]
Gerald Draper was born on May 30, 1914 in Hove,
Sussex, on the south-coast of England. His
parents had separated sometime before he was
born, but the Births,
Marriages and Deaths Index states
his mothers maiden name was Short. His friend
and former student, Count de Salis, wrote
in his brief Biographical
Note of Gerald Draper which was
published in 1998 in a collection of Draper's
articles, that Draper spoke rarely of his
childhood and early life, but both were deeply
unhappy. He was raised in simple circumstances
by a nanny, who he believed was his mother, and
noted bitterly that he was disappointed, when
aged six, his father, whom he did not recognise
or know, came to collect him, and soon pack him
off to a Preparatory School. Within a few months
of being sent to Prep school, he caught
pneumonia after being soaked with cold water by
other boys, and almost died. After his recovery,
he never again returned to school, being given a
private education, presumably at his fathers'
home. He later attended King's College, London
University.
Draper graduated as a Bachelor of Laws from
King's College London University in 1935. On his
CV which he wrote shortly before his death as
part of the procedure for receiving a
Knighthood, it states that he became a solicitor
in 1936, and obtained a Master of Laws Degree in
1938. In the interview above, he says he began
his Master's Degree in 1937, for which he was
writing his Dissertation
when war broke out, so he had to abandon that to
go into the army.
This is where Gerald Draper lived in 1939,
according to the London Electoral Register.
The house
is in Southwest London, although I won't
publish the address here, I found it quite
easily online.
Draper's CV states
he was a member of the Irish Guards from
1941 - 1944 in the ranks of Ensign and
Subaltern. In 1945 he was seconded to the
Judge Advocate General's Office (until 1948)
and as a Military Prosecutor at the War
Crimes Trials in Germany until 1949. Between
1950 until his retirement from the army in
1956, he was an Legal Advisor in directorate
of the Army Legal Staff. He held the rank of
Colonel on retirement.
As David
Hebden pointed out, Draper was the
prosecutor at the Tesch Trial, which was
held between March 1 and March 8, 1946 in
Hamburg. In the Law
Reports of Trials of War Criminals Volume 1,
published in 1947, page 93 (pdf
copy), in it's "Outline of the
Proceedings" for the Tesch trial or "The
Zyklon B Case" It states:
"Major G.I.D. Draper, Irish Guards, Judge Advocate General's Branch, HQ. B.A.O.R., was Prosecutor."
In the above interview with Draper, he
stated that he was also involved in the
Nuremberg Trials, and in Count
de Salis's Biographical Note, he makes
mention of Draper cross examining German
Field Marshall Erich von Manstein.
Manstein's British run trial was held in
Hamburg between August and December 1949,
and other sources also
confirm Draper was part on the prosecution
team at the Manstein trial.
In 1998 Reflections on Law and Armed Conflicts: The Selected Works on the Laws of War by the Late Professor Colonel G.I.A.D. Draper, OBE (hereafter RLAC) was published by Martinus Nijhoff Publishers. The relatively short book, is a collection of Draper's articles selected by the book's editors Hilaire McCoubrey and Michael A. Meyer. A forward was contributed by British barrister Sir Elihu Lauterpacht, and a Biographical Note of Draper, was written by his friend and former student Count de Salis (who I believe is Charles John de Salis). Clearly this phenomenally expensive book was never intended for mass-market circulation, but it does feature the photograph of Draper and Hoess on the cover, and confirms that it was Draper who secured the confession from Hoess, that he had gassed 2,500,000 people at Auschwitz. These extracts I quote below.
His Posthumously Published Book
In 1998 Reflections on Law and Armed Conflicts: The Selected Works on the Laws of War by the Late Professor Colonel G.I.A.D. Draper, OBE (hereafter RLAC) was published by Martinus Nijhoff Publishers. The relatively short book, is a collection of Draper's articles selected by the book's editors Hilaire McCoubrey and Michael A. Meyer. A forward was contributed by British barrister Sir Elihu Lauterpacht, and a Biographical Note of Draper, was written by his friend and former student Count de Salis (who I believe is Charles John de Salis). Clearly this phenomenally expensive book was never intended for mass-market circulation, but it does feature the photograph of Draper and Hoess on the cover, and confirms that it was Draper who secured the confession from Hoess, that he had gassed 2,500,000 people at Auschwitz. These extracts I quote below.
Disability
In both the Forward written by Lauterpacht, and
the Biographical Note by Count de Salis in RLAC,
is mentioned a sever physical disability Draper
suffered from. De Salis, states that sometime in
the early 1950s, Draper's "back bent forward and
rigid" and he "was left for the rest of his life
under a handicap". As you can see on Draper's
CV, this did not stop him from pursuing
a successful academic career at the Universities
of London and later Sussex.
Catholicism
Count de Salis wrote: "Gerald was profoundly
Roman Catholic" and included among his closest
friends distinguished Priests ...". Another
admirer of Draper's, described him
as "deeply Christian himself." Draper's memorial
service was held in Guard's Chapel, in
Wellington Military Barracks in London, where
during the Sunday service on June 18, 1944 over
100 worshippers had been killed by a German V1
rocket.
Jewish Connection
Draper (right) and his wife at the Yad Vashem in
Israel (probably taken when he visited in 1972),
the man in the centre is Giddeon Hausner, the
prosecutor at the Eichmann trial. Draper wrote
an article praising the trial, Hannah Arendt
called it a "show trial". The caption to this
photo on the Yad Vashem database says: "The
occasion of submitting the photographs of Rudolf
Hess in the Polish prison." They obviously meant;
German prison in the British controlled zone.
Count de Salis wrote that Draper "was a deep
friend of Israel", and as previously mentioned,
the introduction to RLAC was written by British
barrister Sir Elihu Lauterpacht,
who once said of his own father: "He was neither
'Austrian' nor 'Polish'. His identification was
'Jewish.'" In 1972 Draper was the speaker at
the Lionel Cohen Lecture at the Hebrew
University of Jerusalem. But none of that is
compelling evidence of much. I have not been
able to find out anything about Drapers parents
who separated before he was born, aside from his
mother's maiden name being Short. And his father
must have been very wealthy to have had his son
privately educated, including by Hubert Brinton,
once a master at Eton.
Was Draper baptised a Catholic as an infant, and
raised in the faith? I don't know. His regiment,
the Irish Guards, indicates he
was a Catholic when he joined the British Army.
Indeed, Count de Salis also stated that as a
young student in London, Draper "became a close
friend of, and was much influenced by, Canon
Alfonso de Zulueta, as a member of the League of
Christ the King." The only thing that would have
made Draper a Jew, would have been his mother
being Jewish, and until more is known about her,
it's pointless speculating upon it.
Col. Gerald Draper and Mrs. Gerald Draper, 14 March
1987
In Chelsea,
London, during 1951, Gerald Draper married Hughes-Gibb
or Vogue! That's how her name reads Register
of Marriages at least. Count de
Salis states Draper's wife's name was
Julia. Sean Longden in his 2009 book T-Force:
The Race for Nazi War Secrets,
1945, states that
he had interviewed Draper's widow during his
research for the book, as she was the first
civilian member of staff on T-Force HQ,
and he calls her "Julia Draper (formerly Jean
Hughes-Gibb)". Where precisely the Drapers were
married (church, chapel, registry office etc.),
and whether they had any children, again, I
don't know.
In this close-up of the photo, you can see Colonel
Draper's Irish Guard's insignia
I believe this article conclusively answers
Robert Faurisson's question asked in 1986:
"As one remembers, Höss said in his "memoirs": "I received further rough treatment at the hands of the English public prosecutor, a major" (Commandant in Auschwitz, p. 74). Did this major become a colonel and was his name "Draper"?
The editors of
the 1998 book of Draper's selected articles, Hilaire
McCoubrey and Michael A. Meyer, wrote in their
introduction to the book:
Cover photo: Major Gerald Draper of the Judge Advocate General's Department of the British Army interrogating a man believed to be Rudolf Hoess, former Commandant of Auschwitz, soon after his arrest in the British Zone in Germany in March 1946. A handwritten note by Gerald Draper held in the Archives at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem explains the circumstance of the photograph as follows: How many millions have you gassed in your camp Auschwitz Birkenau, Hoess?" Answer: "Between 2½ and 3½ millions in my time!" (RLAC, p.i)
"He served with the Irish Guards in Europe and North Africa in the Second World War and was thereafter engaged as a military prosecutor at the trials of war criminals in Germany after the Second World War, in which capacity he secured the confession of Hoess, the Commandant of Auschwitz." (RLAC, p.xvii)
"The photograph of then Major Gerald Draper interogating a man believed to be the war criminal Rudolp Hoess, appears with permission of Andre Deutsch Ltd., having been used as an illustration in their book Blind Eye to Murder by Tom Bower (1981). The print itself was supplied by Yad Vashem in Jerusalem." (RLAC, pp.ix-x)
Clearly McCoubrey and Meyer didn't actually see
the original photograph in Jerusalem when they
wrote the above. It's not a separate note, the
message is written on the back of the
photograph. And if Draper wrote it himself, why
on earth would he write the sentence McCoubrey
and Meyer left off, or weren't told about by the
Yad Vashem: "The moment when Col. Draper asked
the question"? Surely Draper would not have
referred to himself in the third person so
ridiculously. And I don't know when Major Draper
was promoted to Colonel Draper, discovering this
would give an indication of how long after the
photograph was taken, that the this message was
written on the back of it. Also "Minden, March
1946" is written with a different pen to the
main text, and I presume the "1097-2"
handwritten in the top right and bottom left
corners, is for filing/archival purposes,
perhaps at the Yad Vashem.
Rudolf Hoess was captured around 2AM on
March 12, 1946, according to the British Jew and
army sergeant Bernard
Clarke who led the capturing team. Clarke of
course boasted of his team (containing several
Jews, supposedly sons of Auschwitz victims)
almost beating Hoess to death, forcing whiskey
down his throat, and probably most
significantly; threatening to hand his wife and
son over to the Russians, who would shoot his
wife.
As previously mentioned, Draper was in Hamburg
for the trial of Zyklon B inventor Dr. Bruno
Tesch, held between March 1 - March 8,
1945. I've not access to the transcripts of that
trial, but William B. Lindsey in his highly
informative 1983 article; Zyklon
B, Auschwitz, and Bruno Tesch, advises that
the prosecution insisted that 4,000,000 Jews had
gassed with Zyklon B at Auschwitz alone. Lindsey
wrote of the prosecution's star witness, Emil
Sehm, a begruntled ex-employee of Dr. Tesch, who
claimed to have seen documents in Dr. Tesch's
office which proved Dr. Tesch knew that his
Zyklon B was being used to kill Jews:
"It seems quite obvious that the incriminating parts of Sehm's testimony are monstrous fabrications. Sensing the completely irresponsible character of this testimony, Dr. Zippel, who defended Dr. Tesch, lost no time in denouncing Sehm as a liar, and after offering examples to the Tribunal in which he had certainly lied under oath, proceeded to deal with the other testimony, believing that of Sehm to have been completely discredited. In the end, however, it was Sehm's incredible accusations in the hands of the British prosecutor, Draper, which provided all the substance the Military Tribunal wanted to tie Dr. Tesch and Herr Weinbacher to the "Holocaust" juggernaut."
Major Draper put it to Dr. Tesch under cross
examination:
"Is it now clear, do you agree with me that your gas helped to exterminate four million people in one concentration camp?"
"Were you aware that the murder of the four million was partly arranged by the Reicharzt SS?"
Lindsey on Draper's performance at the trial:
"In his cross-examination, the British Military Prosecutor, Major Draper, was obviously more interested in the political implications of the trial rather than in whether Dr. Tesch actually was guilty of the charge as stated in the indictment. Draper's manner was abusive, and his questions were usually "loaded.""
Major Draper—probably not under his own
initiative—had been attempting to alchemise the
lie that 4,000,000 Jews had been murdered by gas
at Auschwitz into an established historical fact
before Rudolph Hoess was even captured. Once
such an important figure as the former
commandant of Auschwitz fell into the clutches
of the Holocaust Industry, it was inevitable
that they were going to do all it took to use
this man to shore up the myth of 4,000,000
gassed Jews. A myth which had supposedly already
been proven in trial of Dr. Bruno Tesch, and at
the also British-run trial at Bergen-Belsen of
former Auschwitz-Birkenau commandant Joseph
Kramer and 44 Others (November - December 1945).
Lindsey made a poignant comment in this regard:
The British Military Tribunal was confronted with an elementary problem of logic. If, on the basis of the obviously sullied, unclean testimony presented against Dr. Tesch, they acquitted him and Herr Weinbacher (business manger of Dr. Tesch's firm), there would have been no one else apparently at hand against whom could be made the accusation of supplying Zyklon B or initially recommending its use to kill Jews. If, indeed, there was a "Holocaust," someone had to have carried out these functions.
Count de Salis writes in his Biographical Note,
that Draper "had played scrum-half for the
Sandhurst rugby team". Sandhurst is of course
the Royal Military Academy, where all future
Officers in the British Army are trained, and
rugby is of course that immensely physical game.
Draper would have been quite familiar with a
little rough and tumble.
A friend of Draper who condones the torture of
suspect's children
Above is Bruce Anderson a prominent British
journalist who in 2010 wrote in The
Independent that security
services have a moral duty to torture the
children of potential terror suspects. Anderson
also claimed to have been a friend of Gerald
Draper, and to have listened to Draper recount
his experience of extracting information from
Hoess. In a 2008 article,
which again appeared in The
Independent, Anderson wrote:
"At the end of their sessions, Colonel Draper summed up. (I cannot remember the figures. Perhaps David Irvine could supply them.) "Herr Commandant, we have agreed that during your time at Auschwitz, 1.35 million people were killed." "Oh no, Herr Colonel, I make it 1.16million." Both men checked their calculations. "Ah, I see where the discrepancy arises," said Hoess. "You're including November'43, when I was on that course in Munich, as well as the fortnight in March '44 when I was on sick leave. Even though I was Commandant, I was not in day to day control then. I think you should mention that in your report." Gerald agreed to do so."
Clearly either Anderson or Gerald lied. The
figures Draper extracted from Hoess were well
over double, even triple what Anderson claimed
in his article. But the interesting point is, a
friend and admirer of Draper, remains
an enthusiastic supporter of torturing suspects,
their wives, and even their children to the
present day.
4,000,000 Jews Gassed at Auschwitz-Birkenau
By the time Hoess was captured, at least four former
inmates at Birkenau, had either given an
affidavit, testified in court, or both, that
4,000,000 people (sometimes specifically Jews)
had been gassed there. A former SS-Rottenführer
(Lance-corporal) Perry Broad, facing the
prospect of being handed over to the Soviets,
testified at the Tesch trial that 2½ to 3
million Jews had been gassed at Birkenau (at his
own trial, beginning in 1963, he maintained it
was "two to three million Jews"). The 4,000,000
figure for Auschwitz alone, is in the Indictment of
the main Nuremberg trial (Count III, Section
VIII, Part A), to which all defendants had
submitted their responsive pleas by December 10,
1945. And the 4,000,000 figure was also quoted
at the Nuremberg trial, by a Soviet prosecutor
on February 19, 1946, and by a British prosecutor
on March 21, 1946.
Rudolph Hoess made the first of his several signed
confessions on March 14, 1946, in which he
admitted to having gassed 2,500,000 people
whilst commandant of the Auschwitz camps (May
1940 - December 1943). When he was cross
examined as a defence witness at the main
Nuremberg trial on April 15, 1946, he agreed
that he had gassed 2,500,000.
Hoess' admittance to having gassed 2,500,000 and
killing another 500,000 by disease, by December
1943, obviously allowed room for the additional
1,500,000 or 2,000,000 to have been killed
during 1944, bringing the total up to the
Holocaust Industry's originally desired figure
of 4,000,000 plus at Auschwitz.
Auschwitz Revisionism
By early 1947 the Holocaust Industry, had
clearly worked out that it wasn't necessary for
4,000,000 Jews to have been killed at Auschwitz,
for them to maintain 6,000,000 Jews had been
killed throughout Europe. Perhaps eyebrows had
been raised following the publication of the
English edition of The
Black Book in
1946. It claimed 4,000,000 Jews were killed at
Auschwitz (p.396),
1,135,000 Jews were killed at Chelmno (p.377),
750,000 Jews were killed at Majdanek (p.379),
and 3,000,000 "mainly Jews" were killed at
Treblinka (p.407
& 400).
If we proceed with the "mainly" of 3,000,000,
being 2,500,000 (which is more than justified by
other parts of The
Black Book on
deportations to Treblinka), then at just those
four camps alone, 8,385,000 Jews were killed.
But The
Black Book (pages
4, 241 and 396) states
just 6,000,000 European Jews were
killed. Something obviously had to be done.
Roughly six weeks after his appearance at the
Nuremberg trial, on May 25, 1946 Hoess was
handed over to officials from the Soviet puppet
regime of Poland, who immediately flew him to
Warsaw, and placed him in a prison. Following
seven months of interrogation, Hoess supposedly
wrote an autobiography during January and
February of 1947. In his memoirs, which provide
full details of the gassings at Auschwitz and
Birkenau, Hoess lowered his estimate of the
number he gassed from 2,500,000 (which appears
in three separate affidavits he gave in April
and May 1946 (NO-1210, 3868-PS and NI-034), to a
minimum of 1,130,000, but certainly not
significantly more. This figure was purportedly
obtained by Hoess by then having remembered the
numbers of Jews Adolf Eichmann or one of his
subordinates had told him had been deported to
the Auschwitz camps.
Hoess was himself put on trial in Krakow on
March 11, 1947, and the Indictment states
that 4,000,000 mainly Jews were killed at
Auschwitz, along with another 300,000 inmates
who'd been registered at the camp. During the
trial Hoess apparently denied
the 4,000,000 figure again, maintaining it was
around 1,500,000. Converging on evidence that
Hoess' reduction was not all
his own work, is
the "Expert Opinion" of Jewish historian Nachman
Blumental of the Polish Jewish Historical
Committee, whose report dated March 25, 1947 was
submitted as evidence to Hoess' trial. It reads:
“Hence, about 3,000,000 died in the large death camps: Bełżec, Chełmno, Auschwitz, Sobibór and Treblinka. Estimating, in accordance with the findings of the judicial investigation, the number of victims at the Chełmno and Treblinka death camps to be about 1,000,000 (to be precise 731,600 at Treblinka and 340,000 at Chełmno), plus about 400,000 for Majdanek and its sub-camps, about 400,000 altogether for Sobibór and Bełżec, about 1,500,000 victims remain for Auschwitz.”
The world's leading Revisionist, Carlo Mattogno,
has pointed
out that
this report proves nothing more than the fact
Blumental was poor at mathematics. I'd believe
it also strongly suggests that Hoess' reduction
of the death toll was the result of an boardroom
decision of Holocaust Industry, who had decided
that the figures for the individual "death
camps" were unnecessary high for their overall
desired figure of 6,000,000 holocausted
Jews. Hoess was found guilty of having killed "an
undetermined number of people, at least
2,500,000, mainly Jews", sentenced to death, and
executed by hanging in the main Auschwitz camp
on April 16, 1947.
Conclusion
Just what could Draper have said in that moment
which was captured in this photograph, what was
it Draper told Hoess which produced such a look
of fear on his face? The threat of another
beating! Unlikely, Hoess had fought in the First
World War, and been recognised for his bravery
with the Iron Cross First Class. Hoess was to
appear at the Nuremberg trial, he could hardly
be placed before the film cameras with blacken
eyes.
Draper's torture-approving friend Bruce Anderson,
also wrote in
2008, of Draper's interrogation of Hoess
Thirty years later, when Gerald retold the story, the emotions which he had suppressed at the time would seize possession of his soul. It was as if there was a poison in his bloodstream, which the cleansing organs were powerless to eliminate, even after several decades.
Anderson insists that the "poison in his
bloodstream" was a result of Draper having to endure
listening to Hoess retell the horrors of Auschwitz
30 year prior. But in reality, it was undoubtedly
due to the guilt that haunted Draper for the rest of
his life, for having been complicit to the torture
of Hoess' family—blackmailing Hoess to tell the
world at the Nuremberg trial, that the Nazis had
gassed millions of Jews at Auschwitz.
such a very informative article. thank you.
ReplyGood work.
ReplyThis is AT LEAST credible history - and damning of those who concocted and disseminated the lies that even today continue to pass for fact.
ReplyExcellent - thank you and do continue your good work!
Reply