The Fate of Jews in German Hands

An Historical Enquiry into the Development and Significance of Holocaust Revisionism

by Joel S. A. Hayward

Chapter II
‘The Hoax’ according to Arthur R. Butz

Butz's book is a contrived sham, dangerous only because of its possible impact on naive and confused general readers. For the specialist, or those with a general grasp of World War II conditions however, The Hoax of the Twentieth Century is a sitting duck.[1]

Bradley F. Smith wrote these words in 1978. In the same review he claimed that a recently published German study … systematically refutes the principle Holocaust Revisionist theses. This splendid survey, he claimed, is as applicable to Butz as it is to his German comrades, and should be studied by everyone able to read German.[2] Smith was in error; the article in question — Organisierter Massenmord an Juden in Nationalsozialistischen Vernichtungslagern[3] — refutes neither Butz nor the German Revisionists. The article does not even mention Butz's book (which had not yet been published) or his principle theses, which are different in many ways from the other Revisionist writers mentioned.

It has now been fifteen years since Smith briefly reviewed The Hoax of the Twentieth Century, yet despite the book allegedly being a contrived sham and a sitting duck for anti-Revisionists, not one scholar has attempted a detailed refutation. The Hoax has been the subject of a number of short review essays, and has been mentioned in hundreds of biased and unscholarly anti-Revisionist reports. However, not one significant scholarly article or book has been written to challenge or refute Butz's arguments or conclusions. The present writer offers four possible reasons for this lack of scholarly reaction. First, scholars upholding accepted opinion on the Holocaust believe that debating the issues raised by Butz would only 'legitimise' his position. Second, these scholars believe the dishonesty and speciousness of Butz's arguments are so self-evident that no reasonable person could take them seriously. Third, they feel they cannot refute Butz's prin-

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cipal theses without making a number of concessions they would rather not make. Fourth, they simply do not believe they can refute Butz's principal theses. It would appear that the lack of scholarly reaction to The Hoax was not because of the first two hypothetical reasons. Whilst scholars upholding accepted opinion on the Holocaust will not enter into any form of discourse with Revisionists, they have always been willing to attack them and their theses in books and articles. For example, Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Georges Wellers and several other leading French anti-Revisionist scholars have been attempting to expose and refute Robert Faurisson since around 1978.[4] They have published anti-Faurisson newspaper and journal articles, booklets and books. Anti-Revisionists have also published books on the writings of Richard Harwood and Paul Rassinier, whose works are far less substantial than The Hoax.[5] Therefore, the fact that no scholars have attempted to refute Butz is not because they believe doing so would 'legitimise' his Revisionist position.

Anti-Revisionists believe that Butz's arguments are specious and based on an improper consideration of evidence, yet they also believe that these facts are not obvious enough to dissuade people from taking his arguments seriously. Many people, they point out, have already been converted to Revisionism by The Hoax. Anti-Revisionists repeatedly claim that the danger of Butz's book is that its academic appearance might convince uninformed readers that it is a scholarly piece of work. Butz imitates the academic style in challenging what he calls an establishment view, wrote Gill Seidel. It is a clever pose.[6] According to Yisrael Gutman, Butz's (and Faurisson's) work has

the aura of what purports to be a kind of studious scholarship. Their writings are replete with annotations and bibliographies and appear calculated to impress the reader as being serious and balanced studies of the subject. This style of writing is clearly designed for students and the intelligentsia…[7]

Criticising authors for writing in an academic style is unreasonable, to say the least. Butz, like Faurisson and other leading Revisionists, did not write in a scholarly style to trick readers. He wrote in a dispassionate manner because he wanted readers to make up their own minds about the

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arguments he was putting forward. He did not include source references merely to impress readers. Like all scholars (Butz is a university professor, it should be remembered), he included references so that readers could check his sources and determine the accuracy and reliability of his citations and quotations. Butz was in a 'no win' situation; his detractors would certainly have condemned him if he had written in an emotional and subjective manner and provided no references, yet for writing in a dispassionate manner and identifying all his sources he was, and continues to be, derided.

The fact that no significant scholarly articles or books have been published which challenge or refute Butz's arguments and conclusions may indicate that scholars upholding received opinion believe that The Hoax would be difficult to refute. However, despite their apparent unwillingness to challenge Butz's book in a scholarly manner, anti-Revisionists have certainly not ignored it. As noted above, in 1978 the book was placed on the 'index' of the Bundesprüfstelle für jugendgefährdende Schriften. In several countries, including New Zealand[8] attempts have been made to have The Hoax banned from sale. It was banned in Canada, along with several other Revisionist works.[9] This ban is taken seriously by Canadian authorities. For example, on one occasion Butz's book was seized from library shelves at the University of Calgary by two officers of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. On another occasion the Mounted Police confiscated and pulped the twenty-five copies of The Hoax which Professor Gary Botting of Red Deer College in Alberta had made available to his students. Botting, a brilliant academic with higher qualifications in several disciplines, including a Ph.D. in English literature, is certainly not a neo-Nazi. His own father had died in Belsen. Botting made the books available to students because he believed a more stimulating intellectual environment would be produced if students were exposed to a variety of viewpoints.[10]

Several of Butz's detractors have attempted to diminish his credibility by pointing out that he is not even an historian, just a professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences. Gill Seidel, for example, noted that whilst Butz holds a doctorate, it is in a totally unrelated area.[11]

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It is quite true that Butz is not an historian. However, his detractors' one-sidedness is apparent; if they believe his lack of formal training in the discipline of history casts a shadow of doubt on his historical writings, they must acknowledge that doubt is likewise cast on the writings of many esteemed authorities on the Holocaust. Professor Raul Hilberg by way of illustration, is the author of The Destruction of the European Jews a standard text on the Holocaust. He has a Ph.D. in public law and government, and teaches international relations at the University of Vermont. The late Gerald Reitlinger, author of the widely-read and frequently-cited Final Solution, was an art dealer with no academic qualifications. Georges Wellers, a prominent French writer on the Holocaust and a bitter opponent of Faurisson, is the former director of a research laboratory at the Faculty of Medicine in Paris. These writers are just a few of the many authorities on the Holocaust with no formal training in the discipline of history. Their lack of historical training — like Butz's — is unimportant if they have employed sound methodological principles. Countless excellent historical works have been written by amateur historians whose careful and systematic piecing together of evidence has thrown new light on their objects of inquiry.

Butz anticipated that his expertise would be questioned. In the foreword to The Hoax he wrote:

There will he those who will say that I am not qualified to undertake such a work and there will even be those who will say that I have no right to publish such things.[12] He defended his decision to write a book challenging received opinion on the Holocaust by insisting that an impartial and critical examination of the Holocaust had been entirely avoided by academic historians:

[No historians have] produced an academic study arguing, and presenting the evidence for, either the thesis that the exterminations did take place or that they did not take place. If they did take place then it should be possible to produce a book showing how it started and why, by whom it was organized and the lines of authority in the killing operations, what the technical means were and that those technical means did not have some sort of more mundane interpretation (e.g. crematoria), who were the technicians involved, the numbers of victims from the various lands and the timetables of their executions, presenting the evidence on which these claims are based together with reasons why one should be willing to accept the authenticity of all documents produced at illegal trials. No historians have undertaken anything resembling such a project; only non-historians have undertaken portions.[13]

Butz claims that his book is an honest, impartial and detailed examination of the evidence both for and against received opinion on the Holocaust. The Hoax is certainly far more scholarly than the works of previous Holocaust Revisionists. Th 315-page volume comprises eight lengthy chapters, five appendices, thirty-two plates and diagrams, 444 endnotes, a bibliography listing 162 works, and a detailed index. Butz's writing style is generally dispassionate, and all his endnotes are presented unambiguously so that sources can be identified and quotations can be verified.

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Contrary to the allegations of several of his detractors, Butz cited and quoted very few other Revisionists in defence of his arguments. Of his 444 endnotes, only twenty (4.5%) refer to Revisionist works. Twelve of those twenty endnotes also refer to non-Revisionist sources. This means that out of Butz's 444 notes, only eight (1.8%) refer exclusively to Revisionist sources. Similarly, of the 162 publications listed in his bibliography, only sixteen (10%) are by Revisionists. On the other hand, publications by scholars upholding received opinion were cited extensively by Butz. He cited Reitlinger's Final Solution seventy-two times and Hilberg's The Destruction of the European Jews thirty-three times. The records of war crimes trials were also frequently cited by Butz. Thirty-three of his endnotes refer to documents and testimonies from the main Nuremberg trial (1945-1946). Fifty-one endnotes refer to similar sources from the lesser Nuremberg trials (1946-1949). Another twelve refer to the records of the Adolf Eichmann trial in 1961. The present writer checked over half of Butz's sources to determine if he had responsibly and accurately cited and quoted them. Although Butz interpreted some material in ways the present writer would not, no significant errors in quotation or citation were detected. Nor was any evidence of deliberate falsification found.

A large part of The Hoax is devoted to the principal war crimes trials and the evidence produced at them relating to the Holocaust. Butz mainly referred to the International Military Tribunal (IMT), the twelve subsequent trials held by the Americans before the Nuremberg Military Tribunal (NMT), and the trials held in the Dachau concentration camp. The Dachau trials dealt with the staffs of Dachau, Flossenbürg and Buchenwald concentration camps and with the Germans accused of the Malmédy massacre. Echoing the claims of most previous Revisionists, Butz argued that the IMT and NMT trials had no legal precedent and were based on ex post facto laws. They were, he said, based on laws providing for the punishment of actions now designated as 'crimes' which were not punishable by law at the time they were committed. Not only were the trials based on ex post facto laws, but there was no provision for politically neutral judgement. The International Military Tribunal, for example, was certainly not international. It was not established, administered or supervised by the United Nations, but by the governments of the four principal victor powers: the United States, Great Britain, the Soviet Union and France. Butz correctly pointed out that several important political commentators attacked the legal basis of the trials and the sentences imposed. Senator Robert A. Taft, for example, condemned the trials as a major violation of the basic principles of both American and international justice. Butz noted that:

A decade later … the then obvious presidential candidate John F. Kennedy published a book, Profiles in Courage (a survey of various people whom Sen. Kennedy thought courageous), in which he commended Taft for taking this stand, adding that Taft's views are shared … by a substantial number of American citizens today.[14]

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The trials were based on preconceived notions of guilt, according to Butz, who quoted a number of statements by leading figures at Nuremberg which appear to support his claim. Judge Iola Nikitchenko, for instance, was the Soviet judge who signed the Agreement and Charter for the Soviet Union. He was also one of the two Soviet members of the International Military Tribunal, and presided over the tribunal's opening session. At a joint planning conference held not long before the Tribunal convened, Nikitchenko declared that we are dealing here with the chief war criminals who have already been convicted.[15] Although Butz did not mention it, Nikitchenko, who had previously presided over the well-known Stalinist show trials of Zinoviev and Kamenev, went on to explain that:

The fact that the Nazi leaders are criminals has already been established. The task of the Tribunal is only to determine the measure of guilt of each particular person and mete out the necessary punishment — the sentences.[16]

Butz not only argued that the trials were illegal and based on preconceived notions of guilt, he insisted that improper methods were used to obtain some of the evidence put forward at the trials. He was particularly critical of the American treatment of German prisoners during the Dachau trials in 1946, which were supervised by the War Crimes Branch. He claimed that a large number of prisoners were maltreated by their American captors in order to gain the right type of evidence:

The entire repertoire of third degree methods was enacted at Dachau: beatings and brutal kicking, to the point of mining testicles in 137 cases, knocking out teeth, starvation, solitary confinement, torture with burning splinters, and impersonation of priests in order to encourage prisoners to confess… A favorite strategem, when a prisoner refused to cooperate, was to arrange a mock trial. The prisoner was led into a room in which civilian investigators, dressed in U. S. Army uniforms, were seated around a black table with a crucifix in the centre, with two candles providing the only light. This court then proceeded to hold a sham trial, at the conclusion of which a sham death sentence was passed. The condemned prisoner was later promised that, if he cooperated with the prosecutors in giving evidence, he would be reprieved. In many cases the prisoner's family was threatened with loss of ration cards or other hardships if cooperation was not obtained.[17]

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Although these claims seem fantastic and unsustainable, Butz actually based them on the findings of two American judges who investigated the Dachau trials. On July 29, 1948, Kenneth Royall, Secretary of the U.S. Army, appointed a commission to investigate the alleged torture and maltreatment of prisoners before and during the Dachau trials. The commission — headed by Gordon Simpson and Edward Van Roden, senior American judges — submitted its report to Royall in October 1948. Selected portions were made public several months later.[18] Although it decided that no organised plot existed to secure suitable evidence by coercion, the commission concluded that coercion and torture of prisoners occurred frequently. They found, as Butz mentioned, that all but two of the Germans in the 139 cases they investigated had their testicles damaged beyond repair. The other examples of torture and coercion mentioned by Butz also appear in the judges' findings. An independent review board was appointed by General Lucius D. Clay, the Governor of the U.S. Occupation Zone, and whilst the findings of this board challenged the Simpson-Van Roden commission on the frequency of the brutalities, it confirmed that torture and coercion had occurred. Moreover, when Colonel A. H. Rosenfeld, head of the Dachau War Crimes Administration Branch, resigned his post in 1948 he was asked if the allegations about mock trials and coercion were true. He replied: Yes, of course. We couldn't have made those birds talk otherwise … it was a trick, and it worked like a charm.[19]

Many of these acts of brutality were carried out by Jews working for the courts. A sizeable percentage of the interrogators, investigators and interpreters at the Dachau trials, argued Butz, were German-Jewish refugees hired principally for their language skills. They included former concentration camp inmates. It was the same at the NMT trials. Butz quoted one of the judges in Case 6, who privately complained that there were too many Jews on the prosecution.[20] He also quoted at length from Judge Charles Wennerstrum's statement in the February 23, 1948 issue of the Chicago Tribune. Wennerstrum, the presiding judge in Case 7, was so disgusted by the lack of justice he witnessed in Nuremberg that he spoke out publicly. Alluding to the Jews working for the prosecution, Wennerstrum stated that a large number of the prosecution staff were biased on racial grounds and motivated by a desire for personal revenge. If I had known what I know today, Wennerstrum also said,

I would never have come here. Obviously, the victor in any war is not the best judge of the war crime guilt… What I have said of the nationalist character of the tribunals applies to the prosecution. The high ideals announced as the motives for creating these tribunals has not been evident. The prosecution has failed to maintain objectivity aloof from vindictiveness, aloof from personal ambitions for convictions. It has failed to strive to lay down precedents which might help the world avoid

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future wars. The entire atmosphere here is unwholesome. Linguists were needed. The Americans are notably poor linguists. Lawyers, clerks, interpreters and researchers were employed who became Americans only in recent years, whose backgrounds were imbedded in Europe's hatreds and prejudices… Most of the evidence in the trials was documentary, selected from the large tonnage of captured records. The selection was made [exclusively] by the prosecution. The defense had access only to those documents which the prosecution considered material to the case. Our tribunal introduced a rule of procedure that when the prosecution introduced an excerpt from a document, the entire document should be made available to the defense for presentation as evidence. The prosecution protested vigorously. Gen. [Telford] Taylor tried out of court to call a meeting of the presiding judges to rescind this order. It was not the attitude of any conscientious officer of the court seeking full justice. Also abhorrent to the American sense of justice is the prosecution's reliance upon self-incriminating statements made by the defendants while prisoners for more than 2½ years, and repeated interrogation without presence of counsel …[21]

Butz claimed that, despite the Nuremberg trials' shocking departure from the principles of Common Law, brutality and coercion were not as extensive at those trials as they were at the less important Dachau trials. Nonetheless, the Dachau trials cannot be waved aside so easily, because the administering agency, the War Crimes Branch [of the Judge Advocate General's Department], was also deeply involved in the Nuremberg trials.[22] This is particularly significant, according to Butz, in the light of the fact that the head of the War Crimes Branch was Colonel David Marcus, a fanatical Zionist who was later killed in 1948 while seeing as commander of the Jerusalem Haganah. Butz claimed that Telford Taylor, American Chief of Counsel, was mainly involved in public relations and … was not deeply involved in the details of the running of the trials which were his formal responsibility.[23] Taylor was just a front man, whilst Marcus exercised effective control of much of the American staff at Nuremberg and also selected the judges and lawyers for the trials (with only a handful of exceptions). Marcus, said Butz, was first assigned to head the War Crimes Branch by J. H. Hilldring, a pro-Zionist General who later worked in the State Department as Assistant Secretary of State for Palestine. Butz believed that Marcus, the arch-Zionist in charge of the agency which had engaged in torture of witnesses in connection with certain trials[24], had helped turn them into Zionist 'show trials'. Butz stated, for example:

The filling of the War Crimes Branch position with a fanatical Zionist, the first soldier since Biblical times to hold the rank of General in the Army of Israel is not only significant in terms of what the Zionist might do in the position, but also significant in revealing, in a simple way, the nature of the overall political forces

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operating at the trials. This is the important point. It is simply not possible to imagine an appointment that would make these trials more suspect. Under these political conditions it is simply silly to expect anything but a frame-up at the trials.[25]

Several pages of The Hoax are also devoted to Robert M. W. Kempner, a German-born Jew who worked at the main Nuremberg trial as the prosecution/defence liaison officer and then as a member of the prosecution staff. He was apparently most active in the prosecution of Wilhelm Frick, the Nazi Minister of the Interior. Butz, convinced that Kempner was also involved in improper practices at Nuremberg, summarised his career[26]: between 1928 and 1933 Kempner was a senior counsel for the Prussian State Police, and specialised in investigating the rising Nazi party, which he despised and sought to have outlawed. After the Nazis gained power in 1933 he was dismissed from his government position. He left Germany in 1935 and finally emigrated to the United States in 1939, at which point he resumed his anti-Nazi crusade. As part of this crusade he published in 1943 a book outlining what should be done after the war to suppress Nazism permanently. During the war he worked for both the U.S. Department of Justice and the OSS. In the latter agency he was given the assignment of compiling lists of trustworthy German anti-Nazis who could be given posts in the coming occupation government of Germany. After the war Kempner continued his anti-Nazi crusade. As noted, he worked at Nuremberg as a member of the prosecution staff. In 1951 he served as Israel's representative to West Germany in negotiations relative to restitution for Jews who had suffered at Nazi hands. The same year he actively opposed the United States' reprieves and sentence reductions of several convicted war criminals. Kempner next appeared as an IMT prosecution spokesman at the 1952 House of Representatives' investigation of the Katyn Forest massacre. According to the Chicago Tribune (April 24, 1952), Kempner admitted at a secret session that the U.S. prosecution staff at the main Nuremberg trial had possessed evidence clearly showing that the Russians had committed the Katyn murders. This evidence had, of course, been suppressed at the trial. In 1961 he worked as a special consultant to the Israeli government, assembling evidence for the Eichmann trial.

Butz argued that Kempner could accurately be described as a fanatical anti-Nazi. His career over fifty years shows that Anti-Nazism is obviously Kempner's consuming vocation.[27] Additionally, insisted Butz, he was an extremely important figure in the trials that the United States held in Nuremberg. Kempner had critically important responsibilities in connection with the IMT and was also treated, in later years, as an authority on what had gone on there. At the end of the IMT trial the press described him as Jackson's expert on German matters and chief of investigation and research for … Jackson.[28] At the NMT he took over the prosecution of the most important case, the political section of the Wilhelmstrasse Case, and he may very well have been the most important individual on the Nuremberg staff.[29] There are excellent grounds … for believing that Kempner abused the power he had at the military tribunals, and produced evidence by improper methods involving threats and various forms of coercion.[30] To support this claim that Kempner obtained evidence by threats and other forms of coercion, Butz pointed out that several defendants are on record as having been informed by Kempner that if they did not provide suitable confessions they would be handed over to the Russians or French, who would sentence them to death.

Butz clearly wanted to persuade his readers that the involvement of Jews and Zionists in the principal war crimes trials was significant in scale and heinous in nature. However, most of his arguments in support of this thesis are decidedly unpersuasive, mainly because they are reliant on secondary sources of varying reliability and plausibility. Butz did provide satisfactory evidence that Kempner had threatened at least three defendants with severe punishments if they did not confess to alleged crimes or cooperate in other ways with the prosecution. He correctly reasoned on the basis of this evidence that Kempner may have treated a number of other defendants or witnesses in the same improper manner. However, Butz provided no evidence to support his claim that the War Crimes Branch, headed by the arch-Zionist David Marcus, most likely played a major role at the main Nuremberg trial in the screening and selection of prosecution and defense lawyers and staff, in the selection of other staff such as translators, and in interrogations.[31]

No substantial and reliable evidence was provided by Butz to support his allegation that Telford Taylor was merely a front man whilst Marcus exercised effective control over the NMT proceedings. This allegation was essentially based on statements about Marcus in the remarkable book by Josiah E. DuBois [the head of the I. G. Farben NMT prosecution][32], yet a careful study of the book reveals that Butz is reading far too much into DuBois's comments. Moreover, Butz provided no significant corroborating evidence of a credible and reliable nature.[33]

Despite writing that Marcus was the head of the U.S. War Crimes Branch, an agency which had engaged in torture of witnesses in connection with certain trials, Butz provided no evidence showing that Marcus ordered, sanctioned or even somehow encouraged the torture of a single defendant at any trial. In fact, there is nothing in The Hoax to demonstrate conclusively

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that Marcus acted, in his capacity as head of the War Crimes Branch, in anything other than a proper and professional manner.

Throughout The Hoax Butz condemned orthodox historians' reliance on speculation and opposition, yet his own claims regarding David Marcus are based on nothing more than speculation and supposition. The fact that Marcus was probably a Jew and certainly a committed Zionist is only significant if one believes — as Butz unfortunately appears to — that all or most Zionists involved in the war crimes trials were unscrupulously working behind the scenes to manipulate the trials to further the Zionist cause.

It is the same with General Hilldring. Quite a pair, Marcus and Hilldring, wrote Butz after clearly intimating that the allegedly pro-Zionist head of the Army Civil Affairs Division had assigned Marcus to head the War Crimes Branch because of the latter's own Zionist views. Again, Butz provided no evidence to support this claim, which was solely based on speculation and the preconceived notion that all Zionists involved in the war crimes trials must have been up to no good. Hilldring, like many others horrified at the Nazi treatment of Jews, may have seen merit in the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. But it does not necessarily follow, as Butz appears to believe, that Hilldring would therefore act in an improper manner to assist the Jewish/ Zionist cause.

It is clear that Butz also wanted to persuade readers that the Nuremberg and other war crimes trials were unprecedented and unjust events. They were, he argued, little more than carefully-staged 'show trials', leased on preconceived notions of guilt. Butz's evidence--only a fraction of which has been mentioned — tends to support his arguments to a certain degree. The trials, most based on ex post facto laws, were certainly an unprecedented departure from the principles of Common Law. Even Harlan Fiske Stone, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, saw the trials in this light. Stone, who cannot be considered a crank or Nazi sympathiser, stated in the late 1940s:

Jackson the Chief Prosecutor] is away conducting his high-grade lynching party in Nuremberg… I don't mind what he does to the Nazis, but I hate to see the pretense that he is running a court and proceeding according to common law. This is a little too sanctimonious a fraud to meet my old-fashioned ideas.[34]

Even a cursory examination of the Agreement and Charter of August 8, 1945 (the 'London Agreement') reveals that many of the actions designated as crimes in Section II, Article 6 of the Charter were also committed before and during the Second World War by the four powers which had concluded the Agreement and Charter. A few of the many possible examples will be given: The Soviet invasion of Eastern Poland on September 17, 1939 and of Finland on November 30,

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1939 were both crimes against peace as defined in Section II, Article 6a of the Charter. Even the very planning of the British and French expedition to Norway, code-named Stratford, was a crime against peace. Although planned as a pre-emptive move against the Germans, the expedition would have flagrantly violated Norway's sovereignty. The fire-bombing of civilian populations of Lübeck, Cologne, Berlin, Hamburg and other German cities by the RAF and USAAF were arguably war crimes as defined in Section II, Article 6b. The Soviet massacre of Polish Army officers at the Katyn Forest was certainly a crime against humanity as defined in Section II, Article 6c. This is not, of course, an attempt to relativise or diminish the magnitude of the Nazi regime's many substantiated crimes. It is simply an acknowledgement that defendants at Nuremberg might have been justified in employing a tu quoque (you too) argument in defence of their claims that the four main counts on the Nuremberg indictment reflect a double standard.

One must concede after reading The Hoax and investigating the relevant sources that some defendants and witnesses gave evidence or made statements only after having been subjected to coercion or torture. Butz noted that even Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, the famous Soviet dissident and recipient of the Nobel Prize for literature, mentioned such a case in his book The Gulag Archipelago. Solzhenitsyn cited the case of Jupp Aschenbrenner, a Bavarian who was tortured into signing a statement that during the war he had worked on homicidal gas vans. It was several years before Aschenbrenner was finally able to prove that during the time he was allegedly working on the gas vans he was in Munich studying to become an electric welder.[35] The findings of the three-man commission headed by Simpson and Van Roden, which have been mentioned in no major works upholding received opinion on the Holocaust, relate only to the Dachau trials. Yet the fact that at least a few defendants and witnesses at Nuremberg were coerced into giving certain evidence is clear even from the cases involving Kempner.

It may be useful to digress briefly at this point. The Hoax was essentially finished in late 1974 and first published in the spring of 1976. In the years since the book's publication fresh evidence has come to light which further supports Butz's claims that a number of defendants and witnesses were subjected to torture and coercion. In 1983, for example, a book was published in Britain containing statements by Bernard Clarke, the former British Sergeant who captured Auschwitz Commandant Rudolf Höss.[36] The book reveals that Höß was tortured repeatedly in Heide, Schleswig-Holstein, by Sergeant Clarke and five other men from the 92nd Field Security Section. At one point during a terrible beating in which the blows and screams were [seemingly] endless, the Medical Officer urged the Captain: Call them off, unless you want to take back a corpse.[37] Höß made his first 'confession' — later classified as Nuremberg document NO-1210 — on March 15, 1946, after three days and nights of continuous physical and mental torture.[38] He signed another statement the following day. He was moved shortly after this to Nuremberg. On April 5, 1946, Höß signed an affidavit — document PS-3868 — which is essentially a summary of his statement of March 15. This affidavit has been widely cited in support of accepted opinion on mass gassings in Auschwitz. Then, on April 15, 1946, Höß testified before the International Military Tribunal. His testimony, which had a profound effect on many of those present, deviated only occasionally from the account contained in his affidavit of April 15. Although his physical maltreatment had stopped when he arrived in Nuremberg, it appears that Höß was in a very bad mental state when he made these statements. He later wrote that at Nuremberg he was psychologically cut to pieces.[39]

Obtaining information by force or coercion does not necessarily result in that information being inaccurate or concocted. It is at least possible that after torture broke his resolve to keep silent Höß told the truth about his role in mass gassings at Auschwitz. However, after examining his various statements (including his Cracow 'autobiography') according to accepted principles of source criticism, it is not unreasonable to conclude that they are at least partially concocted. They contain several significant internal inconsistencies and a number of distortions and fabrications. As these will be described below in relevant sections of this thesis, we need only touch on them at this point.

Höß stated in his affidavit of April 5, 1946 that in the three-and-a-half years he was commandant of Auschwitz at least 2,500,000 victims were executed and exterminated there by gassing and burning, and that at least another 500,000 died of starvation and disease. This made a death total of around three million.[40] Scholars upholding received opinion on the Holocaust,

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however, are now in general agreement that no more than 1,500,000 persons died from all causes in Auschwitz during the Second World War.[41] This can only mean that Höß was terribly mistaken, wildly exaggerating, or lying. In the same affidavit he referred to an entirely fictional extermination camp called Wolzek, which never existed and is not mentioned in any other contemporary sources. He also stated that Jews were already being exterminated systematically at Belzec and Treblinka in June 1941, which is impossible. According to received opinion Belzec only became operational as an extermination centre in March 1942 and Treblinka four months later, in July 1942.[42] Höß even claimed that he was ordered to establish extermination facilities at Auschwitz in June 1941. In the light of the fact that the supposedly-euphemistic 'Göring Decree' was issued to Heydrich on July 31, 1941 and the Wannsee Conference, chaired by Heydrich, was held on January 20, 1942, Höß's claim that he was ordered to commence systematic exterminations in June 1941 is, to say the least, far-fetched.[43]

Butz's own treatment of Höß's various statements and writings is limited to an analysis of the affidavit of April 5, 1946, which he reproduced in full.[44] Perhaps his most significant remarks relate to Höß's claims about the use of Zyklon-B. Höß had written that he was unimpressed with the efficiency of Treblinka's CO gassings, so when he set up his own extermination programme in Auschwitz he used a better killing agent: Cyclon B [sic], which was crystallized Prussic Acid which we dropped into the death chamber from a small opening. It took 3 to 15 minutes to kill the people in the death chamber. Butz maintained that the true purpose of Zyklon-B, not

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mentioned by Höß in his affidavit, had been intentionally obscured by scholars upholding received opinion on the Holocaust. Those scholars, he said, presented the existence of Zyklon-B in the concentration camps almost as proof in itself of homicidal gassings, and failed to inform readers that Zyklon-B was, in fact, a powerful insecticide used throughout the German armed forces and the POW and concentration camp system to kill disease-carrying insects and rodents.[45]

Zyklon-B, Butz correctly pointed out, was used to disinfest rooms and barracks. The rooms were tightly sealed, a carefully calculated amount of Zyklon-B was introduced, and after a lengthy duration all insects and rodents were dead. The rooms were then aired out. The chemical, he continued, was also used in small, technologically-advanced disinfestation chambers to delouse clothing.[46] Therefore, the fact that several tons of Zyklon-B were delivered to Auschwitz during the war is not evidence of homicidal gassings, but is evidence of the SS camp authorities' desperate attempts to combat typhus epidemics.[47] These epidemics claimed the lives of large numbers of internees at almost all concentration camps, but Auschwitz was particularly prone to outbreaks of typhus and other diseases. The Auschwitz region, poorly drained and with a high water table, was dotted with stagnant ponds which poisoned the air and caused the area to be constantly muddy.[48]

Butz cited a number of sources — including the WRB report and the statistics compiled by the Netherlands Red Cross — to show that there was a terrible typhus epidemic in Auschwitz in the summer of 1942.[49] According to the WRB report, Fifteen to twenty thousand perished in Auschwitz during this time. Butz also pointed out that other labour and concentration camps, including those where mass murder is not claimed to have been conducted, also had deplorable mortality rates. He noted, for example, that on April 10, 1943, Oswald Pohl, the Chief of the WVHA, requested Himmler's approval of the draft of a letter to the Reich Minister of Justice. The letter reveals that of a total of 12,658 prisoners in preventive detention taken over by the concentration camps 5,935 had died by April 1, 1943.[50] From the time of the first significant epidemics the SS authorities responsible, for the concentration camp system sought ways to reduce the appalling death rate. In establishments that were supposed to be providing desperately needed labor, commented Butz,

these high death rates were naturally intolerable, so in late 1942 a special campaign got under way to reduce the concentration camp death rate and on 28 December 1942, Himmler ordered that the rate be reduced at all costs. On 20 January 1943 Gluecks [the Inspector of Concentration Camps], in a circular letter to all

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concentration camp commanders, ordered that every means must be used to lower the death rate.[51]

Butz's sources were Nuremberg documents PS-2172 (Annex II) and NO-1523. Although he did not comment further on these documents, their importance actually warrants a brief discussion of their contents. In the first document cited — dated December 28, 1942 — Richard Glücks, head of Branch D of the WVHA, expressed great concern at the number of deaths in the concentration camps, including Auschwitz. Of 136,000 arrivals in the camps, he pointed out, 70,000 had already died. He emphatically ordered that the camp doctors must employ all means available to ensure that the death rate in the camps drop significantly. More than they have in the past, he continued,

the camp doctors must supervise the nutrition of the inmates and incorporate proposals for improvements in agreement with the camp commandants. These proposals must not merely remain on paper but must be inspected regularly by the camp doctors. Moreover, the camp doctors must make sure that working conditions in the individual work sites are improved as much as possible. For this purpose it is necessary for the camp doctors to make inspections of conditions at the work sites.

Glücks made it clear who had ordered such measures. The Reichsführer SS [Heinrich Himmler] has ordered that the death rate absolutely must be reduced. Indeed, Himmler — the so-called architect of genocide — was so concerned at the death rate in the concentration camps that two weeks earlier, on December 15, 1942, he told Pohl that he must

try to obtain for the nourishment of the prisoners in 1943 the greatest quantity of raw vegetables and onions. In the vegetable season issue carrots, kohlrabi, white turnips and whatever such vegetables there are in large quantities and store up sufficient for the prisoners in the winter so that they have a sufficient quantity every day. I believe we will raise the state of health substantially thereby.[52]

In the second document cited by Butz, dated January 20, 1943, Clucks instructed all camp commandants to make every effort to reduce the death rate in the camps (mit allen Mitteln zu versuchen, die Sterblichkeitsziffer im Lager herunterzudrücken). Glücks clearly wanted this matter taken seriously: I hold the camp commandant and the head of the camp administration personally responsible for examining every possibility of preserving the prisoners' capacity for work.[53] This document, like the others cited, clearly indicates that the general policy of Himmler and the SS was not to exterminate internees, but was to keep as many of them alive as possible in order to utilize their labour.

Butz argued that, despite the WVHA's campaign to reduce the death rate in the concentration camps, by the middle of 1943 the death rate was still too high although it had stabilised. On September 30, 1943 Pohl sent Himmler a progress report.[54] The tabulated statistics in this report reveal that 1,442 men and 938 women (out of a total of 68,000 internees) had died in

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Auschwitz during the month of August 1943. This represents about eighty deaths per day, or a combined death rate of 3.3% for the month. Buchenwald, by comparison, had a much lower death rate of 0.67% for the month, whilst Dachau's was 0.23% and Bergen-Belsen's was 0.12%. Only Lublin (Majdanek) had a higher death rate in August 1943. Regarding the Auschwitz death rate, which grew still further in 1944, Butz wrote:

It is perfectly obvious that these deaths, however deplorable and whatever the nature and location of the responsibility, had nothing to do with extermination or with Jews as such. From the point of view of the higher SS administration, they were catastrophic and efforts were made to bring them under control. It is not at all remarkable that with such death rates, cremation and mortuary facilities anticipating worst period death rates of even hundreds per day existed at Auschwitz.[55]

It was because of the extremely high death rate that Auschwitz and other camps constructed crematory facilities, according to Butz. The hygienic disposal of diseased cadavers was essential if the camps were to have any chance of combating the epidemics. The crematory facilities were not constructed in the concentration camps as part of a programme of systematic extermination; they were constructed to destroy efficiently and hygienically the cadavers of the hundreds of camp inmates who died every day of typhus, tuberculosis, dysentery, diarrhea, malnutrition, overwork and other such 'natural causes'.

Butz's claims regarding the horrific death rate in the concentration camps caused by typhus and other diseases appear fantastic, yet they are based on reliable evidence. In times of war diseases have almost always claimed more lives than wounds received in battle. This is especially true when military or civilian populations have been malnourished, poorly clothed and forced to cope with sanitary underprivilege and low level hygiene. The American Civil War is a good example. Friedrich Paul Berg noted:

Out of a total of 359,528 Union deaths from all causes, 110,070 were from combat but 224,586 were from disease. Of the deaths from disease, 44,000 were from diarrhea and dysentery, acute and chronic and 34,883 were from typhoid, typhomalarial, and continued fevers. By contrast, the total number of deaths arising from combat at the Battle of Gettysburg for the Union army is only 3,155 and for the Confederate army is only 3,903.[56]

Typhus, said Berg, is carried by lice and spreads with great rapidity, particularly through a poorly nourished and overcrowded population. In recent centuries it has afflicted principally the countries of Eastern Europe during times of war, especially during cold weather when people have been less willing to endure the brief discomfort of properly bathing and cleaning their clothing.[57]

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One of the medical specialists quoted by Berg wrote:

Thus in Russia during the period 1919 to 1922 the estimated number of cases [of typhus]

10,000,000, with 3,000,000 deaths, in a population of 120,000,000. These are stupendous figures. Their scale can be realized to some extent by recalling that in the much described typhus epidemic in London in 1856 only 1,062 cases were recorded as treated in the London Fever Hospital out of a population of 3,000,000 whereas in Russia in the year 1921 alone there were 4,000,000 cases in a population of 120,000,000.[58]

Lucy S. Dawidowicz, in her well-received book on the Holocaust, described the conditions in the Jewish ghettos in Eastern Europe during the Second World War. She noted that in the Warsaw ghetto the death toll from typhus was estimated at 15 percent. In that one ghetto alone, Dawidowicz wrote,

epidemic typhus was believed to have affected between 100,000 and 150,000 persons, though the official figures were barely over 15,000. The spread of disease was concealed from the Germans. Hospital cases of typhus were recorded as elevated fever or pneumonia. Mainly, the stricken were treated in their homes in a massive clandestine operation, covering up the presence of the disease from German inspection teams who periodically threatened to seal off the affected areas.[59]

That typhus and other diseases were responsible for a large percentage of all deaths in Auschwitz and other labour and concentration camps is apparent not only from the many documents cited by Butz and other Revisionists, but also from documents and photographs published in Jean-Claude Pressac's Auschwitz: Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers. For example, Pressac reproduced one of the graphic posters displayed throughout Auschwitz by the SS. It features a human skull and a single louse and the warning: One Louse, Your Death![60] The poster was clearly designed to impress upon Auschwitz internees the terrible danger of typhus-bearing lice. One Louse, Your Death!, along with various other health warnings, was also painted on the walls of various buildings.[61]

Pressac's book also reveals that the SS authorities were so committed to combating typhus that they constructed at great cost a number of large disinfestation installations. The dozens of original blueprints and architectural plans published by Pressac show that these buildings contained a large number of Entwesungskammer (disinfestation chambers), including around twenty-five which utilized Zyklon-B. Almost all of these chambers were small (10m²) and technologically advanced. Additionally, most of the buildings contained an Auskleideraum (undressing room),

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a Scherraum (shearing room, where heads were shaved), a Brauseraum (shower room), Trockenraum (drying room), Untersuchungsraum (medical examination room), and an Ankleideraum (dressing room).

A typical delousing cycle was as follows: after entering the unreine Seite (dirty side) of the disinfestation facility, the internees took off their clothes in the heated undressing room.[62] Their clothes were taken away to be deloused. The internees then had their hair cut off in the shearing room. Next they were inspected by the medical team. After this they showered in the large shower and wash rooms, and after drying themselves with towels in the drying rooms they entered the dressing rooms where they put on either their old clothes or new clothes. They then left from the reine Seite (clean side) of the buildings. Their clothes, after being taken off in the undressing room, were removed by staff and placed into the unreine Seite of the disinfestation chambers. There were three types of chambers: hot air chambers, Zyklon-B chambers and autoclaves utilizing pressurized steam. After the clothes have been deloused, they were removed from the reine Seite of the chambers and given back to the internees.

Pressac's book also shows that large quantities of Zyklon-B were used routinely in Auschwitz to disinfest barracks and other buildings, as Butz and other Revisionists claim. One particular document describing such operations is worthy of particular mention. It is Commandant Höß's Special Order of August 12, 1942.[63] Höß informed select members of his staff that because of a recent case of slight poisoning by Zyklon-B it was necessary to warn all those participating in the gassings [Vergasungen] that when rooms used for gassings are opened, extreme care must be taken. If they are not wearing gas masks staff members must wait at least five hours and keep at least fifteen metres away from the chambers. They must also pay particular attention to the wind direction. Höß advised that the gas being used at the moment contains less odorous agent and is therefore especially dangerous.

Even Pressac, a fervent anti-Revisionist, agrees that this document refers to Nazi gassings intended to save life, not take it. This is clear from the document itself. Höß had forty-two copies made and distributed to officials throughout the camp who were clearly not involved in homicidal activities. Copies were sent, for example, to the Reitstall (riding Stables), Landwirtschaft(agriculture) staff, telefonvermittlung (telephone exchange), SS-Kantinengemeinschaft (SS Can-teen) and Funkst[ation] (radio station). Pressac conceded that this document (there was nothingwhatsoever 'secret' about it) can no longer be passed off as damning proof of the existence ofhomicidal gas chambers.[64]

Other original German documents reproduced or cited in Pressac's book support Butz'sclaims that gassings occurred in Auschwitz and other camps to save the lives of Jews and otherinternees. A Fahrgenehmigung (travel authorisation) was issued by radio on July 22, 1942, abovethe signature of Richard Glücks. It gave permission for a five-tonne truck to travel from Auschwitz to the Zyklon-B production plant in Dessau to pick up gas for gassing [Gas für Vergasung] in the camp, to combat the epidemic that has broken out. On 29, July, 1942 another truck was sent to Dessau, this time to pick up gas urgently required for disinfection. On January 7, 1943, another truck was sent to the Zyklon-B production plant in Dessau to pick up disinfection material.[65]

As Pressac pointed out, there can be no suggestion that these deliveries of Zyklon-B werefor exterminating humans in gas chambers. They were to combat the typhus epidemics. Accordingto Pressac's own calculations these three trucks alone returned to Auschwitz with around 12,000(but possibly up to 15,000) one kilogram cans of Zyklon-B, which would have been sufficient todelouse the camp for several months. Because murdering humans takes far less Zyklon-B thankilling disease-carrying lice there is no possibility that these huge quantities were ordered for thepurpose of exterminating Jews. The very notion is ridiculous. Each monthly truckload of Zyklon-B contained around 5,000 kilograms, enough to kill 1,250.000 people, more than the total number of Jews sent to Auschwitz![66]

These three Fahrgenehmigungen — already known to Faurisson and other leading Revisionists[67] — actually throw new light on the two Fahrgenehmigungen presented at war crimes trials, and by certain historians upholding received opinion on the Holocaust, as evidence of mass murder.[68] They are the travel authorisations of August 26, 1942 and October 2, 1942. The first authorisa-

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tion is for a truck (no size specified) to travel from Auschwitz to Dessau to pick up material for special treatment (Abholung von Materialien für Sonderbeh[andlung]). The second authorisation is for a five-tonne truck to pick up material for the resettlement of the Jews [69] (Materialien für die Judenumsiedlung). These two travel authorisations certainly refer to the procurement of Zyklon-B from Dessau, but in the light of the first three travel authorisations mentioned above they need not be seem as euphemistically referring to the extermination of Jews. In any event, as Auschwitz was obtaining without any pretense massive quantities of Zyklon-B for delousing, there was no need — even if homicidal gassings were occurring — to use coded phrases. If a load of Zyklon-B was needed for the exterminations the WVHA could simply have authorised a truck to pick up more material for disinfecting.

Thus, our own analysis has shown that Butz was essentially correct about the typhus epidemics which ravaged the unfortunate populations of Auschwitz and many of the other Nazi concentration and labour camps. Even if it could be shown that there were no systematic exterminations, it would still be appropriate — as Butz himself pointed out — to call these places death camps.[70] Tens of thousands, maybe more, perished in Auschwitz alone from typhus and a range of other diseases.

Butz mentioned in passing but failed to draw attention to the fact that most of these deathswere the direct result of Nazi policies. The Nazis, determined to destroy totally Jüdischen Herrschaft in Europe, wanted the Jews driven out of Germany and the occupied territories, and they were unconcerned with any incidental deaths. They brutally deported Jews from all the countries of occupied Europe and 'concentrated' them in these camps, where they perished at a rate that even alarmed their SS captors. The Nazis, therefore, did the Jews an enormous injustice and (laying aside claims of extermination for the moment) must be blamed and condemned for these deaths.

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One must agree, however, that Butz provided sufficient evidence for one to conclude with certainty that the WVHA and the camp authorities themselves were alarmed and distressed at the death rate caused by typhus and the various other epidemics. Incidental deaths — even large numbers of them — is one thing: catastrophic epidemics are quite another. The SS authorities responsible for the concentration camp system reacted immediately to the epidemics by ordering counter-measures. One of the most important of these counter-measures — the delousing and disinfestation programme — involved Zyklon-B. Despite its infamous reputation, it is apparent that Zyklon-B was widely and routinely used in the camps to save the lives of Jews and others. At enormous expense the SS constructed disinfestation installations in the camps, including those now claimed to have had homicidal gas chambers. They also used Zyklon-B to delouse internees' barracks and most other buildings in the camps.

It is obvious that these life-preserving SS activities can not easily be reconciled with the image of the camps presented by most writers on the subject and by most former internees. It appears nonsensical to have the SS operating homicidal gas chambers utilizing Zyklon-B, for the specific purpose of murdering Jews and other internees, in the same camps as the SS were operating delousing chambers also utilizing Zyklon-B, for the specific purpose of saving the lives of those internees.

Accepted opinion, of course, is that in Auschwitz and the other extermination camps all Jews who could not work were immediately dispatched to the gas chambers. It is also said that when transports of Jews arrived in Auschwitz they underwent a selection process. Those who could work were separated from those who could not. Those unable to work — either because they were too young, too old, too sick or too weak — were taken away and gassed almost immediately. Therefore, it would be possible, according to this view, to make extensive use of Zyklon-B to preserve the lives of those whose labour was desperately needed whilst also making extensive use of Zyklon-B to murder those who could not contribute to the labour force and whose very existence would be a drain on the camp's resources.

This argument is superficially plausible, and is certainly consistent with former internees' descriptions of the brutal selections, which often separated (sadly, sometimes for good) children from their parents or siblings, or husbands from their wives. However, Butz pointed out that this argument has one major flaw: an impartial investigation of the evidence reveals that a large percentage of Jewish internees in Auschwitz were classed as unable to work but were, nonetheless, not exterminated. To support this surprising claim, Butz cited a report from Pohl to Himmler, dated April 5, 1944 and classified Secret.[71] There were, said Pohl, 46,000 male and 21,000

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female internees in the Auschwitz complex, and of these 67,000 internees some 18,000 were invalids or sick in hospital. Moreover, no less than 15,000 of these sick or disabled persons were in Auschwitz II (Birkenau), allegedly the worst of all extermination centres. Butz also quoted Gerald Reitlinger, who had written in The Final Solution that between the summer of 1942 and the summer of 1944 only a fraction of the starved and ailing Birkenau population had been employed at all.[72] Reitlinger also noted, said Butz, that two thirds of the 18,000 internees in the Birkenau male camp on May II, 1944 were classified as immobile, unemployable and un- assigned.[73] These internees were quartered in sick blocks and quarantine blocks. This, concluded Butz, makes it impossible to accept the assumption, so often expressed, that to be sick and unemployable and to be sent to Birkenau meant execution.[74] Mark Weber cites a document that appears to support this claim. It is an internal telex message of September 4, 1943 from SS-Standartenführer Gerhardt Maurer, the chief of Amt D-II (Arbeitseinsatz der Häftlinge — Prisoner Labour Allocation) of the WVHA. This document stales that only around 3,500 of the 25,000 Jews interned in Auschwitz at that time were able to work.[75]

Butz's claim that it was the intention of the Auschwitz camp authorities to treat sick internees, as opposed to exterminating them, gains further support from original German architectural plans of the camp published in Pressac's book. On page 512 of Auschwitz: Technique appears a photographic reproduction of a plan for a new Häftlings-Lazarett u. Quarantäne-Abt. (Prisoner Hospital and Quarantine Section) in the Mexiko section of Birkenau.[76] This plan, drawn in Berlin on June 6, 1943 and accepted by the Auschwitz Bauleitung on June 30, 1943, reveals that the new hospital and quarantine section would house 16,596 sick internees. This was a huge improvement on the already-substantial hospital facilities in Section B.IIf. Although Pressac did not mention it, a simple reading of the plan shows that the new section was to be a fully-equipped

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medical section. The legend Röntgen u. Behandlung shows that X-ray machinery was to be installed in two buildings. Other legends on the plan show that the section was also to have surgeries and operating rooms, a medical supply centre, quarters for thousands of seriously ill internees, an extensive quarantine area, laundry facilities, and its own delousing facilities. Another architectural plan in Pressac's book — Krankenbaracke für Häftlinge [77] — shows in detail what the barracks for sick internees were to be like in the huge hospital and quarantine section.

Pressac pointed out that this new hospital section was started but never completed. This, he lamented, brought about appalling sanitary conditions[78] Because of the massive influx of Hungarian Jews, which the camp could not handle, this new section ended up becoming a huge transit camp in May and June 1944. It was expanded in size to house some 60,000 internees. Nonetheless, Pressac conceded that the design plan of the massive hospital and quarantine section is a real godsend for the revisionists. It is difficult, he said, to reconcile this intended section with Birkenau's purported role as an extermination centre:

There is INCOMPATIBILITY in the creation of a health camp a few hundred yards from the Krematorien [sic] where, according to official history, people were exterminated on a large scale… It is obvious that KGL Birkenau cannot have had at one and the same time two opposing functions: health care and extermination. The plan for building a very large hospital section in BA III thus shows that the Krematorien were built purely for incineration, without any homicidal gassings…[79]

Pressac, who believes that mass exterminations did occur in Birkenau, offered a very weak explanation for this obvious incompatibility. Medical care could be given to Jewish internee's just outside the Krematorien which had annihilated their relatives and [which] could do the same to them at any moment because of the capacity for 'doublethink' (to use the term coined by George Orwell in '1984') of the SS hierarchy, who blindly executed orders even when they were totally contradictory.[80]

Thus, one must conclude that Butz has demonstrated that, contrary to accepted opinion, the SS expended enormous amounts of time, energy and money on saving and maintaining the lives of concentration and labour camp internees, both Jewish and non-Jewish. However, Butz — always trying to present the Germans at their best and the Jews at their worst — failed to emphasise that these SS actions were not the result of humanitarianism. Jews, like Gypsies and other Untermenschen, were in the camps in the first place only because they were utterly despised and considered to be vermin. Regardless of their age and health, Jews were brutally forced from their homes and

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crowded into trucks and trains, which carried them to the concentration camps. Sadly, many did not survive these terrible journeys. Once inside the camps the vast majority of internees became virtual slaves, both to the SS camp administrators and to the equally feared (if not more feared) elite groups of internees who supervised them on an everyday basis. Moreover, life in the camps was generally very difficult. Internees were forced to work long hours, often to the point of exhaustion. For example, on November 22, 1943 Pohl instructed the commandants of all concentration camps that

the eleven-hour working day laid down for prisoners must be maintained even during the winter months. Because of the limited daylight hours and the following onset of darkness, outside work detachments [Außenkommandos] (those in construction, for example) which must return to the camp in good time are exempt. But those prisoners working in factories or workshops must work eleven hours per day from Monday to Saturday inclusive. Prisoners may also work on Sundays when urgently needed, but only for the mornings. Because so much work essential to the war effort and to victory is now being done by [concentration camp] prisoners, under no circumstances is it permissible for the actual working day to be less than eleven hours[81]

It is clear, therefore, that the SS did not expend so much time, energy and money on keeping concentration camp internees alive for humanitarian reasons. Basically, they did so only to maintain the labour force they were using in industries essential to the war effort. Butz should have made this point, and could have done so in his discussion of the employment of internees at the extensive I. G. Farben Buna industrial complex at Auschwitz III (Monowitz). This coal hydrogenation complex, as Butz pointed out, was designed to process synthetic rubber using the Buna process and to manufacture oil, gasoline and various chemicals.

Butz, convinced that homicidal gas chambers did not exist in any camp, believed that war-time Allied propaganda (largely motivated by Jewish organisations) was responsible for the belief that mass gassings occurred. He quoted excerpts from perhaps one hundred articles published during the war in the New York Times relating to the Nazi treatment of Jews. Claims of homicidal gassings do appear in these war-time news reports, but whilst some of them relate to gassings in Auschwitz and other camps now designated as death camps, others relate to gassings

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that are now known never to have taken place. For example, Sholem Asch, a Jewish writer, reported in the February 7, 1943 issue of the New York Times that gas chambers and blood poisoning stations … are established in the outlying countryside, where steam shovels prepare community graves for the victims.[82] No reputable scholar today would believe this strange allegation. The New York Times of June 13, 1943, citing as its only evidence the Swedish Jewish Chronicle, seriously claimed that in the Brest-Litovsk district of eastern Poland thousands [of Jews] were gassed to death in hermetically sealed barns.[83] Again, no reputable scholar would accept that these barn gassings occurred. One might be justified in wondering how barns, of all buildings, could be hermetically sealed, or what gas they used for the murders. It would be almost impossible to force a lethal concentration of CO into a barn, and whilst Zyklon-B (HCN) could be used to kill people in such a building, the gas is so deadly that even tiny leaks would cause the deaths of all those conducting the gassings. Butz also pointed out that in war-time reports of Nazi atrocities against Jews gas was not the only killing agent mentioned. Electricity and steam also feature prominently. On December 20, 1942, by way of illustration, the New York Times insisted that they had irrefutable news that systematic extermination by gassing and electrocution was being organised at Chelmno and Belzec.[84] On February 12, 1944 the same newspaper, using as its source a young Polish Jew who escaped from a mass execution, reported that in Belzec Jews were forced naked onto a metal platform operated as a hydraulic elevator which lowered them into a huge vat filled with water… They were electrocuted by current through the water.[85] The New York Times of August 8, 1943 reported that the Germans have killed 2,000,000 persons with steam in Treblinka alone. The article stated that

when the cells are filled they are closed and sealed. Steam is forced through apertures and suffocation of the victims begins. At first cries can be heard but these gradually subside and after fifteen minutes all is silent. The execution is over… Often a gravedigger is too weak to carry two bodies, as ordered, so he ties arms or legs together and runs to the burial ground, dragging them behind him.[86]

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Although Butz does not seem to have mentioned it, similar bizarre claims were also made about Auschwitz. After the liberation of Auschwitz, American newspapers, citing a Soviet report, stated that the Nazis exterminated Jews in that camp using an electric conveyor bell on which hundreds of persons could be electrocuted simultaneously [and] then moved on into furnaces. They were burned almost instantly, producing fertilizer for nearby cabbage fields.[87] At the main Nuremberg trial, Robert Jackson, the American Chief Prosecutor, questioned Albert Speer about Germany's research in atomic energy. According to his information, Jackson said, an experiment was conducted during the war in a village near Auschwitz. 20,000 Jews were put into temporary structures and, by means of this newly invented weapon of destruction, these 20,000 people were eradicated almost instantaneously, and in such a way that there was no trace left of them.[88] Speer, of course, denied this fanciful claim.

Although reports of mass gassings in Auschwitz appeared in the west in early 1944 (and even once or twice in 1943[89]), said Butz, the Auschwitz legend was born in November 1944 when the U. S. Government's War Refugee Board (WRB) published its now-famous report.[90] As Butz noted, two young Slovakian Jews, Alfred Wetzler and Rudolf Vrba (formerly Walter Rosen- berg), escaped from Birkenau on April 7, 1944. They later wrote a report based on their observations in Birkenau. This report — along with a report by Czeslaw Mordowicz and Arnost Rosin, Jews who apparently escaped from Birkenau on May 27, 1944, and the report of Jerzy Wesolowski (not named by Butz[91]), a Pole who escaped from Birkenau on November 19, 1943 — was published in November 1944 by the War Refugee Board, excerpts of Vrba and Wetzler's account had already been published in the July 3 and 6, 1944 issues of the New York Times[92]. after their observations were made public in Switzerland, but a complete English translation was not published until the WRB issued its report.

For the purposes of this thesis, the most important part of the WRB report is the section

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written by Vrba and Wetzler (who remained anonymous until around 1960). At Birkenau, they claimed,

there are four crematoria in operation … two large ones, I and II [now commonly referred to as II and III], and two smaller ones, III and IV [IV and V]. Those of type I and II consist of three parts, i.e.: (A) the furnace room; (B) the large hall; and (C) the gas chamber. A huge chimney rises from the furnace room around which are grouped nine furnaces, each having four openings. Each opening can take three normal corpses at once and after an hour and a half the bodies are completely burned. This corresponds to a daily capacity of about 2,000 bodies. Next to this is a large reception hall which is arranged so as to give the impression of the antechamber of a bathing establishment. It holds 2,000 people and apparently there is a similar waiting room on the floor below. From there a door and a few steps lead down into the very long and narrow gas chamber. The walls of this chamber are also camouflaged with simulated entries to shower rooms in order to mislead the victims. The roof is fitted with three traps [that is, openings] which can be hermetically closed from the outside. A [rail]track leads from the gas chamber towards the furnace room. The gassings take place as follows: the unfortunate victims are brought into hall (B) where they are told to undress. To complete the fiction they are going to bathe, each person receives a towel and a small piece of soap issued by two men clad in white coats. Then they are crowded into the gas chamber (C) in such numbers that there is, of course, only standing room. To compress this crowd into the narrow space, shots are often fired to induce those already at the far end to huddle still closer together. When everybody is inside, the heavy doors are closed. Then there is a short pause, presumably to allow the room temperature to rise to a certain level, after which SS men with gas masks climb on the roof, open the traps, and shake down a preparation in powder form out of tin cans labelled CYKLON For use against vermin, which is manufactured by a Hamburg concern. It is presumed that this is a CYANIDE mixture of some sort which turns into gas at a certain temperature. After three minutes everyone in the chamber is dead… The chamber is then opened, aired, and the special squad carts the bodies on flat trucks to the furnace rooms where the burning takes place. Crematoria III and IV work on nearly the same principle, but their capacity is only half as large. Thus the total capacity of the four cremating and gassing plants at BIRKENAU amounts to about 6,000 daily. [93]

A rough ground plan of a crematory I and II (II and III) building — was included in the report, showing the position of the gas chamber in relationship to the large hall and furnace room. Each room leads directly on to the next. Clearly shown in the diagram is a rail track running from the gas chamber straight through the large hall to the furnace room. The nine furnaces (each having four openings) are shown to be situated around three sides of the base of the chimney.

This section of the WRB report also contains what was claimed to be a careful estimate of the number of Jews gassed in Birkenau between April 1942 and April 1944 alone. According to this estimate a total of approximately 1,765,000 Jews were gassed in just that two year period, including 900,000 from Poland, 150,000 from France, 100,000 from Holland, 60,000 from Germany and 50,000 from Belgium. [94]

Butz's analysis of the WRB report is particularly weak. He described the report's contents at length, and devoted a number of pages to the identities of the authors, who had written the report anonymously in the interests of their own safety. [95] He also briefly described I Cannot

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Forgive, the book published by Vrba (with Alan Bestic) in 1964. Yet Butz provided no significant evidence to support his assertion that in any case it is obvious that the WRB report is spurious. [96] He challenged the accuracy of neither the diagram of the gas chambers nor the description of the gassing process. Nor did he attempt to refute the report's estimates of how many persons had been gassed in Birkenau. Butz simply made a number of unsustained allegations about the report's provenance and claimed that the data given in the report is not the sort of information that escapees would carry out [of Birkenau].[97] This response arguably typifies Butz's work. When he encounters evidence he can not explain or refute (which, to be fair, is not frequently) he tends to resort to claims that the evidence must be fraudulent.

That is not to say that the WRB report is credible and reliable evidence of systematic extermination by gassing in Auschwitz-Birkenau. In the light of the evidence available today (much of it not available to Butz) it is apparent that the WRB report is decidedly inaccurate and unreliable. Those who have studied the original blueprints and architectural plans of the buildings now believed to have been gas chambers will immediately realize that the buildings in Vrba's and Wetzler's written description and drawn ground plan do not at all resemble the crematory buildings constructed by the SS in Auschwitz. According to the WRB report there were nine furnaces, each having four openings in the oven room, arranged around three sides of the chimney. As noted, the diagram in the report also shows this arrangement. However, contemporary photographs, the original German blueprints, and the extant correspondence between the crematory manufacturers and the Auschwitz Bauleitung, clearly indicate that the incineration rooms of Kremas II and III each had five three-retort ovens. That is, instead of each building having thirty-six oven openings, as the WRB report claims, they had fifteen. Moreover, all five ovens were arranged in front of the chimney (which was in another room). They were positioned one beside the other in a straight line. [98] The WRB report indicates that the gas chamber of each building was at surface-level, whereas the Leichenkeller (/) — the claimed gas chambers — in both Krema II and Krema III were at semi-basement level. That is, they were underground. The rail track purportedly leading horizontally and in a straight line from the gas chambers through the large (undressing) halls to the furnace looms did not exist and could not possibly have existed. Leichenkeller I in each of the buildings was underground, whilst the oven rooms were above them, off at right angles, at surface level. [99] Additionally, the large halls were not directly behind these Leichenkeller, so a

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small rail could not, as claimed, travel from one to the other. The original building plans clearly show that the hall (if Leichenkeller 2 is meant) of each building was also at semi-basement level, but was on a right angle to Leichenkeller I and separated by a Gang (corridor — also at a right angle), a Vorraum (vestibule) and several doors. [100] There could be no direct entry from one Leichenkeller to another, even if one was used as an undressing room and the other as a gas chamber, as the WRB report states. Lastly, recent research in crematory technology reveals, as we shall see below, that nowhere near 2,000 cadavers could have been cremated in Birkenau every twenty-four hours.

Vrba's and Wetzler's careful estimate of the number of Jews gassed in Birkenau between April 1942 and April 1944 are now considered entirely inaccurate even by historians upholding received opinion on the Holocaust. Vrba and Wetzler claimed, for example, that 150,000 French Jews were gassed in Birkenau during that two year period alone (and mass gassings allegedly continued at a furious pace until the end of 1944). However, Serge Klarsfeld, the well-known French 'Nazi hunter' and Holocaust historian, conducted an intensive analysis of the transportation lists containing the numbers and names of all Jews deported from France during the war. He demonstrated conclusively that the Nazis deported a total of 75,721 Jews (including foreign and stateless Jews) from France to concentration camps. [101] This figure does not represent those gassed, only those deported. Many returned to France or settled in other parts of Europe. It is the same with Vrba's and Wetzler's claim that the total number of Jews gassed in Birkenau between April 1942 and April 1944 was approximately 1,765,000. Accepted opinion (ignoring Revisionist opinion for the moment) is that only around one million Jews perished of all causes in the various Auschwitz camps, not just Birkenau, during the entire war. Jean-Claude Pressac stated that less than 1,125,000 Jews ever entered Auschwitz, let alone died there. [102]

Rudolf Vrba, who had previously testified for the prosecution at the 1964 Auschwitz Trial in Frankfurt, testified for the prosecution in the 1985 trial of Ernst Zündel, a German-Canadian artist and publisher on trial for spreading false news (that is, for disseminating Revisionist material). Zündel, who has a sincere belief that the Holocaust did not occur, is committed to salvaging the reputation of the original National Socialist movement. At the Zündel trial in Toronto Vrba defended his description of Birkenau published in the WRB report and in his book I Cannot Forgive. Nonetheless, under cross-examination he made a number of concessions which

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throw considerable light on the claims he had made in the WRB report. For example, he stated that his careful estimates for the numbers of Jews gassed in Birkenau (1,765,000 in all) were based on no other evidence than his personal observations. He arrived at his figures simply by counting incoming transports and assuming that the internees were gassed. He could remember everything he saw and make accurate calculations because, he insisted, he developed a special mnemonical method. [103] When asked how he knew what countries the victims had come from, Vrba replied that he listened to the languages the internees spoke and examined the type of luggage they carried.

Vrba admitted that some of the thousands of Jews he claimed were dispatched directly to the gas chambers on arrival in Birkenau may in fact have been going to the bath and disinfestation facilities (the road to which passed between Kremas II and III). He further admitted that, whilst he frequently observed Krema II from the window of the mortuary connected to Block 27 of camp B.Ib, which was about fifty metres away, he never actually entered the buildings with the gas chambers which he described in the WRB report. [104] Information about the interior of the crematory buildings came from Philip Müller (now a well-known writer on the Holocaust) and other members of the Sonderkommando. Vrba also stated that when he came to draw his plan of the gas chambers, published in the WRB report, he based it on rough information and hearsay descriptions. [105] The Toronto Sun of January 24, 1985 described this part of Vrba's testimony at the Zündel trial in an article by Dick Chapman, entitled Survivor never saw actual gassing deaths. Part of this article states:

A concentration camp survivor yesterday admitted he never witnessed anybody being gassed to death and his book about Auschwitz-Birkenau is only an artistic picture … not a document for a court. Rudolf Vrba, now an assistant professor at the University of B.C., told the Ernst Zündel trial that his written and pictorial descriptions of the Auschwitz crematoria and gas chambers are based on what I heard it might look like. … He said some narrative passages in his book I Cannot Forgive are based on accounts of others. One Vrba passage says it took 90 minutes to burn a corpse, another said it took twenty minutes.

Vrba was rigorously questioned about I Cannot Forgive, which is presented as a factual and accurate account of his experiences in Birkenau. His testimony throws additional light on his attitude towards historical truth. He was forced to admit under cross-examination that many of the events he described never occurred and that he used licentia poetarum (poetic licence) in writing I Cannot Forgive. [106] The book was, he conceded, merely an attempt for an artistic depiction of what he believed had occurred. Actually, because of the number of inaccuracies in the book this was already known by most informed readers. I Cannot Forgive contains, for

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example, a detailed description of a visit Himmler made to Birkenau m January 1943 for the purpose of inaugurating a new crematory and gas chamber. 3,000 Polish Jews were allegedly gassed on this noteworthy occasion, much to Himmler's satisfaction. However, it is well known to scholars of the Holocaust that Himmler's last visit to Auschwitz was in July 1942, just as the typhus epidemic was beginning to ravage the camp, and that even in January 1943 the first of the new crematory buildings was still far from finished.

It thus appears that the WRB report of November 1944, like Vrba's other literary effort, I Cannot Forgive, is of little value as evidence of what transpired in Birkenau during the early 1940s. It is inaccurate and at least partly concocted. Even Pressac, who devoted several pages of Auschwitz: Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers to a defence of the WRB report, stated that Vrba's and Wetzler's accuracy is not great in the light of what we know now and that the WRB report is somewhat unreliable and even quite wrong on some points. [107]

Butz argued that both popular and scholarly opinions on the Nazi treatment uf European Jews were shaped considerably by the publication of the WRB report in November 1944. Thus, he said, was born the Auschwitz legend. Despite his poor choice of words, Butz is probably correct. As soon as Vrba's and Wetzler's account reached the Hungarian Jewish leadership in May 1944, it was treated as the definitive report of what was happening in Poland to the Jews. At about this time Rabbi Michael Weissmandel and Gisi Fleischmann, leaders of the Slovak Jewish underground, sent the escapees' account to Jewish leaders in Geneva, along with pleas to bomb Auschwitz and the main deportation routes. In June 1944 Vrba's and Wetzler's account reached Gerhart Riegner, the Swiss representative of the influential World Jewish Congress, and Roswell McClelland of the War Refugee Board. They sent summaries of the escapees' account, along with the other accounts later published in the November 1944 WRB report, to the International Red Cross (which was horrified by the details of mass gassings) and to government leaders in the United States and Britain. [108] Various European and American newspapers published excerpts. The full text reached Washington in November 1944, at which point it was published by the War Refugee Board and also released to the press. It was front page news in many newspapers through the United States. News accounts were long and graphic; many newspapers followed up with editorials. Radio also spread the information. [109] Indeed, the WRB report, containing the first

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significant and detailed (but inaccurate and partly concocted, as we now know) description of the gassing process, was widely publicized in the last months of 1944 and the first months of 1945. it was, despite the errors, regarded as authoritative for many years. [110]

The WRB report states that the SS used the term Sonderbehandlung (special treatment or special handling) as a euphemism for gassing. Butz noted that Sonderbehandlung appears in a number of other sources purported to be referring to extermination. He agreed that in some cases the authors did use the term to mean killing. Thus, he wrote:

There exists a document, apparently genuine, from the Gestapo District Headquarters, Düsseldorf, which specifies the manner in which executions of certain offending foreign workers were to be carried out, and which uses the term Sonderbehandlung as meaning execution There is; also a document, put into evidence at Eichmann's trial, which referred to the execution of three Jews as Sonderbehandlung. Thus it seems correct that, in certain contexts, the term meant execution. [111]

However, Butz disagreed with the notion that all references to Sonderbehandlung in war-time German documents indicates killings. The term was used in a variety of ways, and, depending on the context, could indicate either a harmless or destructive action. This particular term was not unique in having a range of meanings, he said. For example, I understand that, within the Central Intelligence Agency, termination can mean execution or assassination in certain contexts. However, the term obviously could also be applied to the dismissal of a typist for absenteeism. [112] Butz provided an example of Sonderbehandlung being used to indicate the favourable treatment of certain persons, not their executions:

At the IMT trial, prosecution Amen led Kaltenbrunner, under cross examination, into conceding that the term might have meant execution as ordered by Himmler. Then, in an attempt to implicate Kaltenbrunner personally in Sonderbehandlung, Amen triumphantly produced a document which presents Kaltenbrunner as ordering Sonderbehandlung for certain people. Amen wanted Kaltenbrunner to comment on the document without reading it, and there was an angry exchange in this connection, but Kaltenbrunner was finally allowed to read the document, and he then quickly pointed out that the Sonderbehandlung referred to in the document was for people at Winzerstube and at Walzertraum, that these two establishments were fashionable hotels which quartered interned notables, and that Sonderbehandlung in their cases meant such things as permission to correspond freely and to receive parcels, a bottle of champagne per day, etc. [113]

Amongst the most important documents mentioning the Sonderbehandlung of Jews is the Korherr Report. On January 8, 1943, Himmler ordered Richard Korherr, Inspekteur für Statistik, to write a statistical report on the progress of die Endlösung der europäischen Judenfrage (The Final Solution of the Jewish Question in Europe). Two months later Korherr sent his Report, dated March 23, 1943, to SS-Obersturmbannführer Dr. R. Brandt of Himmler's personal staff. Essentially, the sixteen-page report is a statistical record of the development and status of European Jewry up to December 31, 1942. [114] On April 10, 1943, Brandt sent Korherr instructions that Er wünscht, daß an keiner Stelle von Sonderbehandlung der Juden gesprochen wird. (he [Himmler] does not want the words special treatment of Jews to be used at all.). Brandt told Korherr that he must change the wording on one page, so that it refers to the Transportierung von Juden (transportation of Jews), and re-submit the report. [115] Korherr dutifully made the changes and returned the report on April 28, 1943. In the meantime, on April 1, 1943 Himmler instructed Korherr to compile a summary of his report, so that it could be shown to Hitler. In a letter dated April 9, 1943, Himmler also informed the Chef der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD in Berlin that he had received Korherr's report and that he considered it to be good material for a later date if necessary, namely for camouflage purposes (Tarnungszwecken).[116] Korherr responded to the request for a summary and produced a seven-page report, dated April 19, 1943, with statistics updated to March 31, 1943. [117]

The Korherr Report records in statistical form the forced Evacuation (Evakuierung) of Jews up to December 31, 1942. Section V (on die Evakuierung der Juden) states that the total number of Jews evacuated was 1,873,549, of whom 1,449,692 were Jews transported from the Eastern provinces to the Russian East. Despite the fact that Himmler had forbidden the use of the term Sonderbehandlung in note four of page nine of the report, Korherr stated that his total figure of 1,873,549 included Theresienstadt [ghetto for the aged] and special treatment (einschl. Theresienstadt und einschl. Sonderbehandlung). Korherr noted that in addition to this total another 633,300 Russian Jews were evacuated from Russian [and Russian-occupied] territories, including the formerly Baltic countries, since the beginning of the Eastern campaign.

Korherr concluded his report by stating that whereas there were slightly more than ten million Jews in Europe in 1937, by the end of 1942 that number had decreased by around four million. Altogether, he said, European Jewry must have decreased by almost half [bald die Hälfte seines Bestandes verloren haben] since 1933; that is to say, during the first decade of the development of power of National Socialism. This significant decrease, he explained, was the result of the forced evacuations (that is, mass deportations), of the excessive mortality of the Jews (a very low birth rate and a very high death rate), of the emigration abroad [to other continents] of Jews from European countries outside German influence, and of the masses of Jews who fled from European Russia deep into Asian Russia. In his summarised version of April 19 1943 (NO-5193), Korherr stated that a quarter of the total Jewish population of 1937 [that is, around 2,575,0001 had fled to other continents.

The Korherr Report has been cited by countless historians as proof that systematic ex-terminations occurred. Evakuierung (evacuation), they say, is the carefully-disguised euphemism for extermination that Himmler wanted Korherr to use in place of the usual euphemism, Sonderbehandlung. Thus, according to this view, Evakuierung was used as a synonym for Sonderbehandlung. [118]

Butz limited himself to just a few remarks about the Korherr Report, and these were made in the context of a general discussion of the term Sonderbehandlung. He correctly pointed out, for example, that Korherr stated that 27,347 Jews had died in German concentration camps (including Auschwitz), a death total which is high but not indicative of systematic extermination.

Butz also wrote:

After Himmler examined the report he informed Korherr, through Brandt, that the term Sonderbehandlung should not be used in the report, and that transport to the East should be specified. Nevertheless the document, as it has come down to us, used the term in the way indicated. The document gives no hint how the term should be interpreted but since it occurs in such a way that it is linked with Theresienstadt [where systematic extermination is known not to have occurred], it is obviously fair to interpret it in a favorable sense, as a reference to some sort of favored treatment..[119]

Although Butz is right in noting that the inclusion of Theresienstadt in Korherr's list of evacuated Jews tends to suggest that extermination is not being meant by the phrase, the rest of his explanation is unsatisfactory. Describing the Nazi treatment of Jews mentioned in Korherr's report as favored is absolutely inaccurate. If one accepts orthodox opinion on the Korherr report, which is that it refers to the extermination of Jews, one can hardly call this favorable. If one accepts the Revisionist interpretation, which is that the report refers non-euphemistically to forced deportation, then one can still not describe this as favored treatment. The deportation process was horrendous, and led both directly and indirectly to the deaths of enormous numbers of Jews.

The nature and scope of this thesis, coupled with the present writer's limited access to pre-war and war-time eastern European demographic data prevent a detailed discussion of Korherr's statistics, yet it may be appropriate to make one or two points which have a bearing on the phrase, Sonderbehandlung, and on the treatment of European Jews. First, Korherr, fed up with people

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(such as David Irving in the late 1970s) citing his report as evidence of mass exterminations, has himself strongly denied that Sonderbehandlung, at least in the context of his report, means killings. In a letter published in the July 25, 1977 issue of Der Spiegel (no. 31), Korrher declared that Sonderbehandlung actually denoted Ansiedlung (settlement). The relevant section of his letter reads:

unfortunately, Der Spiegel has published the claim of Irving, the English historian, that during the Spring of 1942, on Himmler's orders, I calculated the number of Jewish victims. Actually, these figures were delivered to me, along with the text, in completed form by the Reich Security Head Office (RSHA) with the order that not one word or figure may be changed. The statement that I had claimed in this regard that more than a million Jews had died because of special treatment [Sonderbehandlung] in the camps in German-occupied Poland and in the Warthegau is also totally wrong. I must protest against the word died in this context.

It was precisely the term special treatment that made me ask the RSHA by telephone what this term actually meant. The answer I received was that the term referred to the Jews who were being settled in the District of Lublin.

Dr. Richard Korherr,

Braunschweig [120]

Second, even a cursory reading of the Korrher Report reveals that the statistics compiled by Korherr are hard to reconcile with accepted opinion on the fate of European Jews during World War II. For example, the 633,300 Jews described by Korherr as having been evacuated from Soviet territories are claimed by many scholars to have been exterminated by the Einsatzgruppen. Yet this figure can neither he reconciled with the fantastic figures given in the Einsatzgruppen reports themselves [121] nor with received opinion on the activities of the Einsatzgruppen. which is that a million or more Jews had been murdered up to the time Korherr wrote his report. [122]

Finally, it is important to be circumspect in dealing with sources which are believed to contain euphemisms. As Butz pointed out, a particular phrase can have a variety of meanings, from the most benign to the most malignant. For example, Sonderaktion (special action or special operation) has long been considered a euphemism for killing. In some cases it clearly could be interpreted to mean killing or execution. For example, the often-cited diary entries of Dr. Johann Paul Kremer appear, at least at first glance, to support the view that Sonderaktion really meant extermination. Kremer, a Professor of Anatomy at the University of Münster, worked as a doctor in Auschwitz from August 30 to November 18, 1942. Whilst there he performed routine medical duties but also conducted specialist research into hunger and emaciation. In particular, he investigated the organ deterioration and alteration of muscle tissue of the 'Muslims', sick persons who had reached the last stage of consumption. 'Muslims' were the living skeletons' described in many books. Appropriately, Kremer worked and researched in Auschwitz at the height of the 1942 typhus epidemic, so he had plenty of ideal case studies. He kept a diary, and recorded his daily activities. On around a dozen occasions he wrote that he had witnessed or taken part in special actions. These actions, whatever they were, repelled him and caused him to curse Auschwitz. In his diary entry of September 2, 1942, Kremer wrote: Present for the first time at a special action, outside at three o'clock in the morning. Compared to this, Dante's inferno seem almost like a comedy. It's not for nothing that Auschwitz is called the camp of annihilation.' Three days later he wrote in his diary that he had witnessed another special action and that Auschwitz was indeed, as a comrade had said, anus mundi (the anus of the world). [123] In 1947 Kremer was tried before the Supreme People's Court in Cracow, Poland. He stated to the court that his diary statements about special actions were references to homicidal gassings in Birkenau. Numerous scholars accordingly continue to quote Kremer's diary as evidence of gassings. [124]

However, after he had been released from prison and returned to Münster in the late 1950s Kremer actually retracted the confessions he had made whilst in Polish hands. In Cracow, he said only hatred was entitled to give its opinion. In the light of his apparent retractions and what we know about the appalling health conditions in Auschwitz in 1942, one could reasonably suggest that Kremer's diary entries may not refer [to] gassings but to actions relating to the typhus epidemic. In Auschwitz, whole streets are struck down with typhus, Kremer wrote in his diary on October 3, 1942. Other diary entries clearly show that he was shocked by the degree of destruction caused by the epidemic. His diary entry of September 5, 1942, in which he described Auschwitz as the 'anus mundi' mentions that the special action involved Muslims. The horror of horrors. His diary entry of October 7, 1942 clearly states that the special action of that that day involved more terribly-ill Muslims. Because of the epidemic, more than a dozen incurable patients were killed every day by doctors with phenol injections and dozens (sometimes hundreds)

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more died with no 'assistance'. Because the Auschwitz I crematory could not cope with the numbers of people dying, open-air burnings of diseased cadavers were frequently conducted. It may have been these horrors — and not homicidal gassings — which prompted Kremer to write in his diary that Auschwitz was indeed the camp of annihilation (Vernichtung).

A number of other war-time German documents pertaining to Auschwitz indicate that Sonderaktion was not necessarily a Nazi euphemism for extermination. For example, on December 18, 1942 SS-Hauptsturmführer Bischoff, head of the Auschwitz Central Construction Office, sent a telex to SS-Brigadeführer und Generalmajor der Waffen-SS Kammler, der Amtsgruppenchef C of the WVHA. [125] This telex, sent to inform Dr. Kammler of the expected completion dates of the new crematory buildings, stated that work on the buildings had to be stopped several times already that month for anti-typhus delousing and disinfestation. Also, the telex continued, starting on December 16, for security reasons, there was a Gestapo special action among all the civilian workers. (eine Sonderaktion der Gestapo bei sämtlichen Zivilarbeitern statt). The telex also stated that because the camp had been isolated since the outbreak of the typhus epidemic almost six months earlier, the civilian workers had been unable to leave the camp during that period. [126] Therefore, a twelve-day period of leave was essential for these workers.

This document — which, as even Pressac agrees, contains nothing out of the ordinary [127] — is certainly not stating that the Auschwitz Gestapo exterminated highly-skilled civilian workers employed as experts on the crematory construction sites. Sonderaktion in this case refers to the checking and questioning of civilian workers by the camp Gestapo. This appears to have taken around three days, according to Pressac. Extant time-sheets reveal that the workers were absent from the worksite on both December 17 and 18, 1942. They then went on holiday from December 23, 1942 to January 4, 1943. [128] It is thus clear that Sonderaktion, the seemingly incriminating phrase found in a very small number of German sources, does not necessary indicate gassings

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[or] other such atrocities. We have seen that even in Auschwitz the phrase could have a harmless meaning, such as a security operation or assignment of the secret police. An impartial investigation of other sources mentioning special actions reveals that the phrase was used in a variety of ways, but perhaps most frequently to mean special military or police operations such as questionings, interrogations, arrests, deportations, medical examinations, or 'selections' of internees for work or hospitalisation. For example, the arrest of sixty-four Jews from the Orleans region of France on June 25, 1942, and their subsequent deportation, was referred to as a special action. [129] Perhaps the most famous of all German phrases relating to the Nazi maltreatment of Jews is the final solution (die Endlösung). Butz — to return to our analysis of his key theses — argued that this phrase was never used by the Nazis to denote the planned or attempted extermination of Europe's Jews. lt was used exclusively, he said, to denote the programme of expelling Jews from German-occupied Europe. To support this bold claim, which clearly contradicts received opinion, Butz reproduced in full Martin Luther's lengthy memorandum to Joachim von Ribbentrop, dated August 21, 1942. [130] Although Butz failed to mention it, Unterstaatssekretär Luther was head of the Abteilung Deutschland, a department within the Foreign Office (Auswärtiges Amt). Referat D III of the Abteilung Deutschland was the so-called Jewish Bureau. Luther, one of the Foreign Office's experts on Jewish affairs, played a significant role in co-ordinating the deportation of Jews from various countries and represented the Foreign Office at the infamous Wannsee Conference. [131] In the memorandum of August 21, 1942, designated most urgent, Luther essentially recapitulated for Ribbentrop the development of Nazi policy regarding Jews from 1939 to the time of writing. The principle of the German Jewish policy after the seizure of power, began Luther,

consisted in promoting with all means the Jewish emigration. For this purpose, in 1939 Field Marshall Goering in his capacity as Plenipotentiary for the Four Year Plan established a Reich Central Office for Jewish Emigration and the direction was given to SS Lieutenant General Heydrich in his capacity as chief of the Security Police… The present war gives Germany the opportunity and also the duty of saving the Jewish problem in Europe. ln consideration of the favorable course of the war against France, DIII … proposed in July 1940 as a solution — the removal of all Jews from Europe and the demanding of The Island of Madagascar from France as a territory for the reception of the Jews. The Reich Foreign Minister has basically agreed to the beginning of the preliminary work for the deportation of the Jews from Europe. This should be done in close cooperation with the offices of the Reichsfuehrer-SS [Himmler] … The Madagascar plan was enthusiastically accepted

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by the RSHA [Reichssicherheitshauptamt — Reich Security Head Office] which in the opinion of the Foreign Office is the agency which alone is in the position technically and by experience to carry out a Jewish evacuation on a large scale and to guarantee the supervision of the people evacuated. The competent agency of the RSHA thereupon worked out a plan going into detail for the evacuation of the Jews to Madagascar and for their settlement there. This plan was approved by the Reichsfuehrer-SS. SS Lieutenant General Heydrich submitted this plan directly to the Reich Foreign Minister in August 1940… The Madagascar plan in fact had been outdated as a result of the political development. [132] The fact that the Fuehrer intends to evacuate all Jews from Europe was communicated to me as early as August 1940 by Ambassador Abetz after an interview with the Fuehrer… Hence the basic instruction of the Reich Foreign Minister, to promote the evacuation of the Jews in closest cooperation with the agencies of the Reichsfuehrer-SS, is still in force and will therefore be observed by D II.

Germany's enormous territorial gains, in both the west and the east, brought millions more Jews under German control. Luther noted that

In his letter of 24 June 1940 … SS Lieutenant General Heydrich informed the Reich Foreign Minister that the whole problem of the approximately three and a quarter million Jews in the areas under German control can no longer be solved by emigration — a territorial solution would be necessary. In recognition of this, Reich Marshall Goering on 31 July 1941 commissioned SS Lieutenant General Heydrich to make, in conjunction with the interested German control agencies, all necessary preparations for a total solution of the Jewish problem in the German sphere of existence in Europe … On the basis of this instruction, SS Lieutenant General Heydrich arranged a conference of all the interested German agencies for 20 January 1942, at which the State Secretaries were present from the other ministries and I myself from the Foreign Office. In the [Wannsee] Conference, General Heydrich explained that Reich Marshall Goering's assignment to him had been made on the Fuehrer's instruction and that the Fuehrer instead of the emigration had now authorized the evacuation of the Jews to the East as the solution… On the basis of the Fuehrer's instruction … the evacuation of the Jews from Germany was begun … [and later] the deportations of the Jews from the occupied territories were under-taken.

Luther described at length the way the Jewish problem was being handled in various countries, and then concluded his memorandum:

The intended deportations are a further step forward on the way of the total solution and are in respect to other countries (Hungary) very important. The deportation to the Government General is a temporary measure. The Jews will be moved on further to the occupied Eastern Territories as soon as the technical conditions for it are given. I therefore request approval for the continuation of the negotiations and measures under the terms and according to the arrangement made.

Signed: LUTHER.

The provenance and authenticity of this document have been well established and Butz translated it accurately. It does appear to support his claim that the 'final solution' meant the expulsion of all Jews from the German sphere of influence in Europe. After the invasion of Russia, its specific meaning was the resettlement of these Jews in the East. [133] The Madagascar plan was certainly taken seriously by German leaders, although only in the pre-Barbarossa period. Christo-

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pher Browning, Professor of History at Pacific Lutheran University in Washington and the author of several books on the Holocaust, wrote that

Madagascar had long exercised a fascination among anti-Semites as the ideal dumping ground for the European Jews, but the idea did not take on real form as a concrete proposal among the Nazis until put forward by the Jewish expert of the Foreign Office, Franz Rademacher, in early June 1940, when Germany's power to redistribute the French empire seemed at hand. The alacrity with which the proposal was seized upon by the Nazi leadership is a measure of the frustration that had built up over the bottlenecks of demographic engineering in eastern Europe over the past nine. months. By June 18 Hitler had informed Mussolini of his intention to use Madagascar as a Jewish reservation, and he broached the subject again with Admiral Raeder on June 20. On June 24 the ever attentive Heydrich asserted his jurisdiction vis-à-vis the Foreign Office over Jewish resettlement there. The news spread quickly eastward. On July l, Adam Czerniakow, the head of the Judenrat in Warsaw, learned from an SD official, that the war would be over in a month and that we would all leave for Madagascar. [Hans] Frank knew by July 10 that he was not only reprieved from the expected deluge of Jews from the Reich but would now be rid of his own Jews as well — a colossal relief that he boisterously expounded upon to the Heiterkeit or amusement of his assembled court. On Frank's orders ghetto buildings in the General Government came to an abrupt halt as [they were] pointless in view of the plan of the Führer to send the Jews to Madagascar. [134]

The Göring Decree — mentioned by Luther in his memorandum — also tends to support the view that the intended final solution was the forced expulsion of Jews from German-occupied Europe. On July 31, 1941, Reichsmarschall Göring, in his capacity as Beauftragter für den Vierjahresplan und Vorsitzender des Ministerrats für die Reichsverteidigung, issued a directive to SS-Gruppenführer Heydrich, Chef der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD. The directive states (in full):

To complete [*] the task that was entrusted to you in the decree dated 24 January 1939, namely to solve the Jewish question by emigration and evacuation [die Judenfrage in Form der Auswanderung oder Evakuierung] in a manner which is most favourable in connection with the conditions prevailing at the time, l hereby commission you to carry out all the preparations with regard to organisational, practical, and financial viewpoints for a total solution of the Jewish question in those territories in Europe under German influence. If the competency of other central organisations is touched upon in this connection, these organisations are to participate. I further commission you to submit to me as promptly as possible a comprehensive proposal outlining the organisational, technical and material measures already taken for the intended final solution of the Jewish question [Endlösung der Judenfrage].

Göring [135]

Butz wrote that it is customary to quote this letter with deletion of the reference to 'emigration and evacuation'. [136] As an example, he cited William Shirer, who had indeed left out those words when he quoted the directive on page 964 of his best-selling book, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. The present writer has to agree that this is customary: he examined thirty-eight near-at-hand books on the Holocaust and Second World War which mention this particular

[p. 126]

directive, and found that twenty-seven leave out the words emigration and evacuation. They either quote just a fragment of the directive — usually the last line, so that it will read something like on July 31, 1941, Göring directed Heydrich to solve the final solution of the Jewish question — or they simply replace the three words, emigration and evacuation, with an ellipsis ( … ).[137] However, to be fair, it should be noted that the three most widely-cited authorities on the Holocaust — Reitlinger, Hilberg and Dawidowicz — and a number of authorities on other aspects of the Second World War, have accurately quoted the section of the directive mentioning emigration and evacuation. [138]

Particularly since the commencement of the debate between functionalists and intentionalists, there has been a difference of opinion amongst scholars as to whether the Göring Decree meant a programme of extermination or a programme of (to quote the directive itself) emigration and evacuation. Hilberg, for example, stated that the cryptic directive refers euphemistically to extermination. He wrote that the directive marks a turning point in anti-Jewish history. With the dispatch of that order, the centuries-old policy of expulsion was terminated and a new policy of annihilation was inaugurated. [139] Other scholars, including Hans Mommsen, Martin Broszat and Arno Mayer, have argued that whilst a programme of systematic extermination (as opposed to random atrocities committed by the Einsatzgruppen) evolved at a later stage of the war, in the middle of 1941 the final solution of the Jewish question still meant forced deportations to 'The East. Mayer, the Dayton-Stockton Professor of European History at Princeton University, wrote that

The invasion of the Soviet Union gave the idea of a territorial solution a new lease on life [after the Madagascar plan came to nothing]. After conquering the eastern Lebensraum along with additional Jews, the Reich would banish European Jewry to vast lands deep in Russia, east of the Urals. At the time that Göring instructed Heydrich to draft the letter signed [by Göring] on July 31, 1941, a quick and decisive defeat of Soviet Russia was still taken for granted… There is nothing in these instructions [the Göring Decree], either explicit or implicit, to indicate that by directing Heydrich to prepare an overall and definitive solution — a final solution — of the Jewish problem, Göring was asking him to prepare for the immediate or eventual mass murder of Jews. [140]

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Luther, in his memorandum of August 21, 1942, noted that seven months earlier Heydrich had chaired a high-level meeting, at which he explained that … Göring's assignment to him had been made on the Fuehrer's instruction and that the Fuehrer instead of the emigration had now authorised the evacuation of the Jews to the East as the solution. This meeting was, of course, the Wannsee Conference, so named because it was held in Berlin at 56-58 Am Grossen Wannsee. After quoting short excerpts from the only surviving copy of the Besprechungsprotokoll (thirty were originally produced and distributed), Butz stated: Here is unambiguous documentary evidence that no extermination program existed; the German policy was to evacuate the Jews to the East. Butz stated this as a fact, and offered no supporting analysis of the content of the conference protocol.

Luther's memorandum and the Göring Decree tend to support Butz's claim that the Nazis never planned a final solution more destructive than the forced deportation of all Jews from German-Occupied Europe. To determine whether this is also true of the Wannsee Conference, as Butz (and Luther himself) claimed, it is necessary to analyse carefully the text of the protocol. Accordingly, several pertinent sections — translated by the present writer — will he quoted at length.

After listing; the various officials present, the protocol begins with some clarifying remarks:

SS-Gruppenführer Heydrich, Chef der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD, opened the conference by announcing that he had been appointed by the Reichsmarschall [Göring] to serve as director of the preparation of the Final solution of the Jewish question. He also indicated that the purpose of the conference was to clarify the fundamental issues. The Reichsmarschall's request to have a draft proposal on the organisational, practical and material concerns regarding the final solution of the European Jewish question made necessary the prior agreement of all central agencies directly interested to coordinate their work.

The overall responsibility for the measures necessary for the final solution of the Jewish question rests with [Himmler,] the Reichsführer-SS und Chef der Deutschen Polizei (Chef der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD), regardless of any geographical boundaries.

The Chef der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD thereupon gave a brief review of the struggle against these opponents [Kampf gegen diesen Gegner] up to the present time. The essential phases are:

a) Forcing the Jews of the vital spheres of the German people,
b) Forcing the Jews out of the living space of the German people.

To arrive at these objectives, the only possibility of a provisional solution was to accelerate and to undertake in a methodical manner the emigration of the Jews out

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of the Reich territory.

A Reich Central Office for Jewish Emigration was established in January 1939, by decree of the Reichsmarschall, and the direction of this office was given to the Chef der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD. This office had the particular task of

a) taking all steps for the preparation of an intensified emigration of the Jews,
b) directing the course of emigration,
c) hastening emigration in individual [or particular] cases.

The objective was to clear the German living space of Jews in a legal manner.

The protocol continues by reporting that up to October 30, 1941 these special offices, despite a number of difficulties, had managed to force or assist the emigration of 537,000 Jews from the Altreich, Austria and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. Meanwhile, states the protocol a little further down,

in view of the dangers of emigration during wartime, and in view of the [new] possibilities in the east, the Reichsführer-SS und Chef der Deutschen Polizei has forbidden the emigration of Jews.

To take the place of emigration, and with the prior approval of the Führer, the evacuation of the Jews to the east has become another possible solution. Although these actions are obviously to be regarded as alternative possibilities [Ausweichmöglichkeiten], the practical experience thus gained in this field is of great importance for the final solution of the Jewish question. In the course of this final solution of the European Jewish question [Im Zuge dieser Endlösung der europäischen Judenfrage], around eleven million Jews are involved.

After listing the Jewish populations in various European countries — including England, with its 330,000 Jews, and neutral Ireland, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland, Sweden, and (European) Turkey, with their respective Jewish populations of 4,000, 3,000, 6,000, 18,000, 8,000 and 55,000 — the protocol discusses the planned treatment of Jews:

Under proper direction the Jews shall now, in the course of the final solution, be taken to the east and put to work in a suitable manner. Separated by sex, Jews capable of work will be taken to these areas and employed in large labour columns in the construction of roads, whereby a large part will undoubtedly fall away through natural decline [wobei zweifellos ein Großteil durch natürliche Verminderung ausfallen wird].

The remnant that will in any case survive this — which doubtless constitutes the toughest element — must be treated appropriately [entspechend behandelt werden] since these people, representing a natural selection, would upon their release [bei Freilassung [141]] be regarded as the germ cell of a new Jewish development (see the experience of history).

In the course of the practical implementation of the final solution, Europe is to be combed from west to east. The Reich area, including the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, will have to be taken first, if only because of the housing problem and other social and political necessities.

The evacuated Jews are to be brought group by group first to the so-called transit ghettos, so that they can then be transported further to the east…

lt is not intended to evacuate Jews over the age of sixty-five, but to transfer them to a ghetto for the aged — Theresienstadt is being constructed. As well as these old-age categories — of the 280,000 or so Jews who were in Germany and Austria on October 31, 1941, perhaps thirty percent are over sixty-five — seriously-wounded Jews [World War l veterans] and Jews with war decorations (Iron Cross, First Class) will also be taken to the ghettos for the aged. With this appropriate solution all interventions [on behalf of individuals] would be shut out with a single blow. The beginning of the individual larger evacuation actions [Evakuierungsaktionen]

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will depend to a large degree on military developments… In connection with the problematic effect of Jewish evacuation on economic life, Staatssekretär Neumann stated that Jews employed in essential war industries could not be evacuated for the time being, until replacements could be found. Heydrich pointed out that those Jews, in accordance with the directives he had approved for the implementation of current evacuations, would not be evacuated.

Although we have omitted the section of the protocol pertaining to the treatment of part-Jews — the Mischlinge — there is nothing in that section directly relevant to our discussion. In any event, no agreement was reached on the matter of the Mischlinge, so it was deferred for subsequent meetings and correspondence. Thus, there is no explicit mention of exterminations in the Wannsee Protocol. The document, purportedly written by Adolf Eichmann some time after the conference, clearly indicates that the final solution was a programme of brutal expulsion and forced labour for most Jews and 'privileged' treatment for decorated or wounded Jewish war veterans and all other Jews over the age of sixty-five.

It is, of course, argued by most scholars of the Holocaust that the protocol was written in coded language, and that evacuation was really a euphemism for extermination. Eichmann, the most junior participant in the Wannsee Conference, even testified to this effect whilst on trial in Israel. This line of argument is at least superficially plausible and should not be dismissed out of hand. However, it is based entirely on a retrospective view of the war, and appears to be contradicted by a large body of contemporary sources. A number of functionalist historians have in recent years argued that Wannsee was not in fact a conference to coordinate the systematic extermination of Jews. Exterminations, they say, did occur but in a more ad hoc manner. However, rather than merely presenting these historians' views on the Wannsee Conference — thereby approaching the material 'second-hand', as it were — we will briefly examine for ourselves some of the noteworthy documents.

On October 25, 1941, two months before the Wannsee Conference, Hitler himself stated at one of his informal table talks (in the presence of both Himmler and Heydrich):

Let nobody tell me that all the same we can't park them [the Jews] in the marshy parts of Russia! Who's worrying about our troops? It's not a bad idea, by the way, that public rumor attributes to us a plan to exterminate the Jews. Terror is a salutary thing. [142]

On January 23, 1942, only three days after the Wannsee Conference, Hitler stated during another dinner conversation that if he removed the Jews the German people would get uneasy. But did these same people, he asked, care one boot what happened to the Germans who had to emigrate? One must act radically, Hitler said. When one pulls out a tooth, one does it with a single tug, and the pain quickly goes away. The Jews must clear out of Europe. Otherwise no understanding will be possible between Europeans. He continued:

For my part, I restrict myself to telling them that they must get out … If they refuse to go voluntarily, I see no other solution but their annihilation. Why should l look at Jews with other eyes than if they were Russian prisoners of war. Many are perishing in the POW camps. It's not my fault. l wanted neither this war nor the POW camps. Why did the Jew[s] provoke this war? [143]

Four days later, on January 27, Hitler commented during another dinner conversation that the Jews must pack up, disappear from Europe. Let them go to Russia. Where the Jews are concerned, l have not pity. [144]

In the light of the fact that Heydrich clearly stated at the Wannsee Conference that his new programme was in accordance with the prior approval/authorisation (vorheriger Genehmigung) of the Führer, Hitler's own informal and unguarded comments at this time suggest that Heydrich's programme was not one of extermination, but of forced expulsion to the east. This view gains further support from a study of Goebbels's diary extracts from this period in early 1942. For example, on February 24, a month after the Wannsee Conference, Goebbels wrote in his diary:

The Führer [with whom he had just met] again voices his determination to remorselessly cleanse Europe of its Jews. There can be no sentimental feelings here. The Jews have deserved the catastrophe they are now experiencing. They will experience their own annihilation [Vernichtung] together with the annihilation of our enemies. We must accelerate this process with cold brutality. [145]

Whilst this particular entry is just one of many in Goebbels's diaries mentioning the annihilation of Jews, it is noteworthy because it appears to show Hitler linking the annihilation of Jews with the annihilation of Germany's other enemies. This tends to support the view that systematic extermination was not meant in this instance by the word Vernichtung. Hitler certainly had no plans to exterminate systematically the British, the French, or even the hated Bolshevik Russians. [146]

On March 7, 1942, a day after one of his staff members attended the conference on the Mischlinge issue and six weeks after the Wannsee Conference (at which none of his men were present), Goebbels wrote in his diary:

I read a detailed report from the SD and police [a copy of the protocol or a summary] regarding the final solution of the Jewish question. Any final solution involves a tremendous number of new viewpoints. The Jewish question must be solved within a pan-European frame. There are [as the Protocol states] 11,000,000 Jews still in Europe. They will have to be concentrated, to begin with, in the East; possibly an island, such as Madagascar, can be assigned to them after the war. [147]

Even though Heydrich had reported during the Wannsee Conference that Himmler had the overall responsibility (Federführung) for the handling of the final solution, Himmler's own actions also support the thesis that the conference was not a secret meeting designed to co-ordinate the systematic extermination of Jews. Within two weeks of the conference Himmler had formed the WVHA and transferred to it (from the SS-Führungshauptamt) the Inspectorate of Concentration Camps. This was reorganised as the Wirtschafts-Verwaltungshauptamt Amtsgruppenchef D — Konzentrationslager, the basic aim of which was to exploit the labour of concentration camp internees on a large scale. This clearly included Jews. For example, only six days after the Wannsee Conference (and slightly before the reorganisation of the relevant departments began) Himmler telegraphed a message to Glücks, the Inspector of Concentration Camps:

Because in the near future we will not be able to count on Russian prisoners of war, I am sending to the camps a large number of Jews expelled from Germany. Will you therefore prepare to receive during the next four weeks 100,000 Jews and 50,000 Jewesses who will be sent to concentration camps, which will have to deal with major economic problems and tasks. SS-Gruppenführer Pohl will inform you of particulars. [148]

Arno Mayer, noting the significance of Himmler's instructions to Glücks, wrote that they prefigure a radical change in the population as well as the purpose of the camps. [149] Indeed, this very point was made by Pohl in a letter to Himmler, dated April 30, 1942. Pohl stated:

The war makes necessary a change in the structure of the concentration camps and … their functions in regard to the employment of the detainees. The increase in the number of detainees solely for reasons of security, re-education, or prevention, is no longer a primary concern. The main emphasis is placed on the economic aspect. The mobilisation of all camp labour first for military tasks (to raise armaments production) [für Kriegsaufgaben (Rüstungssteigerung)] and later for building programmes in peacetime, must be given increasingly higher priority. This realisation demands action which will cause a gradual transformation of the concentration camps from their one-sided political form into an organisation suited to economic activities. [150]

Thus, although the Wannsee Protocol clearly indicates that the Nazis intended to uproot Jews from all over Europe and deport them to the east, where they would work as virtual slaves, the document contains no references — explicit or implicit — to an extermination programme. There is only one passage in the document which mentions Jews dying, and that describes them falling away naturally (if such deaths can be called natural) because of the hard work they would be forced to do in the east. That is, selections would be made, and Jews deemed fit for hard labour would be put to work on projects like road building, regardless of how many died from exhaustion, disease, and so forth. Heydrich coldly predicted that a large part would fall away in this manner'. Nonetheless, this passage describes a brutal policy of forced labour, but not one of extermination. It is unclear what Heydrich meant when he stated that those who survive these harsh conditions and are released must be treated appropriately. However, the document does refer to the eventual release or liberation of those who survive the harsh conditions, which appears to indicate that once the war was over the German government intended to release those Jews still working. One need not interpret Heydrich's comment to mean that those released from labour were to be exterminated. The fact that ghettos were being constructed for hundreds of thousands of old Jews and decorated and disabled Jewish war veterans — there were around 90,000 in Germany and Austria alone — indicates that the total extermination of the Jewish race was not being discussed at the conference. Moreover, although the protocol does not mention what was to happen to all those considered unfit for work, there is no mention made of them having to be treated appropriately. The document certainly does not suggest they were to be exterminated. Apparently, wrote Arno Mayer, the unfit — children, many women, the infirm, the elderly — were to be evacuated to so-called transit ghettos, for transportation further east from there. [151]

Despite the fact that the protocol refers only to the deportation and forced labour of Jews, if it is examined in isolation it might be possible to interpret it as euphemistically referring to the extermination of Jews. However, when one studies the protocol alongside other contemporary German documents pertaining to the Jewish question — only a few of which have been mentioned here — it quickly becomes obvious that such an interpretation collapses in front of the overwhelming weight of contrary evidence. It is the same with Göring's directive to Heydrich, with Luther's memorandum, and with the Korherr Report. Each of these documents, if removed from their external contexts, can have meanings imposed upon them which they were never given by their authors.

In the months following the collapse of the Third Reich, the Allies seized many tonnes of German documents. A number of documents pertaining to the Jewish question contained the phrase final solution (die Endlösung). In the documents this phrase explicitly referred to the removal of the Jewish people from Europe, first by emigration and later by deportation (evacuation) to Poland and the occupied Soviet territories. However, in the immediate post-war months these captured German documents were given new meanings by Allied investigators who already knew that the Nazi regime killed around six million Jews. Jews were exterminated, they reasoned, and German documents describe a final solution of the Jewish question. Therefore, the term final solution must be a euphemism for extermination. This line of argument, dependent on preconceptions and a retrospective view of the war (that is, id post hoc ergo propter loc), is not sustainable in the light of the evidence available today.

Thus, it appears that Butz was correct: Luther's memorandum, which accurately outlines the development of Nazi policy regarding European Jews from early 1939 to the middle of 1942 (seven months after the Wannsee Conference), contains no murderous euphemisms. The Korherr Report, written in March 1943, indicates that even at that late stage there was no official Nazi programme to exterminate the Jews of Europe. Regardless of the anti-Jewish atrocities being committed by the Einsatzgruppen and native eastern European populations, the Nazi final solution of the Jewish question throughout this period was a programme of deportation to Poland and occupied Soviet territories. After the war Jews were to be expelled to Madagascar or some other location well outside Europe. The final solution, terrible as it was for those Jews uprooted from their homes and deported to the east, was not a programme of extermination.

This particular conclusion, although at odds with accepted opinion and in agreement with Butz and other Revisionists, has been reached only after a careful consideration of the evidence and after much reflection. It does not represent a desire to rehabilitate the reputation of the Third Reich. In any event, as we shall see below when we touch upon the Einsatzsgruppen, the lack of a systematic extermination programme or policy does not mean that Jews were not murdered en masse by Nazis and other anti-Semites. Large numbers of Jews died during horrific anti-Jewish atrocities carried out by the Einsatzgruppen and local pogromists in occupied Russian territories. Nazi leaders were, of course, well aware of these atrocities. Goebbels, for example, wrote in his diary on March 27, 1942, that beginning with Lublin, the Jews are being pushed out eastward from the Generalgouvernement. The process is rather barbaric and need not be described here. Not much will remain of the Jews (und von den Juden selbst bleibt nicht mehr viel übrig). [152]

Whilst Butz was correct about the nature of the final solution, he was wrong in many ways about the activities of the Einsatzgruppen. He commenced his discussion of the Ein-

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satzgruppen with a passage that is essentially correct:

At the time of the German invasion of Russia in June 1941, there was a Fuehrer order declaring, in anticipation of an identical Soviet policy, that the war with Russia was not to be fought on the basis of the traditional rules of warfare. Necessary measures were to be taken to counter partisan activity, and Himmler was given the power to act independently upon his own responsibility. Everyone [in the upper levels of government and the military, presumably] knew that that meant executions of partisans and persons collaborating with partisans. The dirty task was assigned to four Einsatzgruppen of the SD [Sicherheitsdienst — the Security Service of the SS], which had a total strength of about 3,000 men (i.e. of the order of 500 to 1,000 men per group). [153]

Indeed, Hitler did give Himmler authority to perform certain tasks within the operations zone of the army. On March 13, 1941, Field Marshal Keitel, Chief of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (OKW — the High Command of the Armed Forces), issued a directive, Richtlinien auf Sondergebieten auf Weisung Nr. 21 (Fall Barbarossa). [154] These were the OKW's guidelines establishing the procedures and conditions of military justice for the combat theatres and occupation zones arising from the coming invasion of the Soviet Union. The only section of these guidelines relating to the activities of the Einsatzgruppen (which are not even mentioned) is Paragraph 2b, part of which states:

In order to prepare the political and administrative organization [in newly-occupied territories] the Führer has delegated to the Reichsführer-SS certain special tasks [Sonderaufgaben] within the operations zone of the army. These originate from the necessity to settle once and for all the struggle between two opposing political systems. Within the framework of these tasks the Reichsführer-SS will act independently and on his own responsibility… The Reichsführer-SS is responsible for ensuring that military operations are not affected by the measures he finds necessary to carry out these tasks. [155]

After negotiations between Heydrich and Robert Heinrich Wagner, the Generalquartiermeister of the Oberkommando des Heeres (OKH — Army High Command), an order on the duties of the Einsatzgruppen was issued on April 28, 1941 by Field Marshal von Brauchitsch, C-in-C Army. [156] According to this order, the Einsatzgruppen were authorised to carry out their operations on their own responsibility (in eigener 'Verantwortlichkeit) and to take executive measures [p. Exekutivmaßnahmen] against the civilian population. [157] The operations zone was divided into three sub-zones: the Gefechtsgebiet (combat zone) behind this, the rückwärtiges Armeegebiet, and behind this, the rückwärtiges Heeresgebiet. The Einsatzgruppen could move freely in both areas behind the combat zone, and were subordinate to the army in regard to movement, rations and billets, but directly to Heydrich for discipline, jurisdiction and technical matters. [158] That is, they

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were subordinate to Heydrich in regard to the actual functions they were to perform. The order indicates that the Einsatzgruppen were intended to implement a rudimentary form of security and order in the zones behind the advancing front line before regular occupation administration could be established. One of their tasks was the discovery and eradication of anti-German or anti-Government movements. The order, it may be worth noting, clearly mentions leading émigrés, saboteurs, terrorists, etc [159], but does not mention Jews.

Butz was also correct about the total number of personnel involved in the Einsatzgruppen operations. The four groups had a total strength of around 3,000 people. However, although Butz does not appear to have mentioned it, less than half were SS members and a large number (around twenty-five percent) were completely non-military personnel including teletype and radio opera-tors, secretaries, interpreters, truck drivers and various other support staff. A number of the support personnel were women. [160]

Some Jews, Butz stated, posed a security menace to the German rear in the war. The task of the Einsatzgruppen, he continued,

was to deal with such dangers by all necessary means, so we need not be told much more to surmise that the Einsatzgruppen must have shot many Jews, although we do not know whether many means 5,000, 25,000, or 100,000. Naturally, many non-Jews were also executed… However, the [orthodox historical] claim goes beyond this, and asserts a dual role for the Einsatzgruppen; they were charged not only with keeping the partisan problem under control but also with exterminating all Jews (and Gypsies). Common sense alone should reject the notion that the Einsatzgruppen, which had a total strength of about 3,000 men, as a matter of general policy, spent their time and effort pursuing objectives unrelated to military considerations. The most frequently cited evidence [of the Einsatzgruppen atrocities] is a collection of documents purporting to be the daily and other reports of the Einsatzgruppen to Himmler and Heydrich for the period June 1941 to May 1942… Besides telling of regular anti-partisan activities, the reports tell of individual actions of mass executions of Jews, with numbers of victims usually running in the thousands. It is indicated, in most cases, that many copies [of the progress reports], sometimes as many as a hundred, were distributed. [161]

Butz, clearly bothered by the anti-Jewish atrocities described in the Einsatzgruppen reports and unable to explain them, resorted to claiming that the reports must be fraudulent. The reports represent, he insisted, a lie … manufactured by Moscow. Without such reports the authors of the [Holocaust] lie would have no evidence for their claims except testimony … and this consideration was no doubt the motivation for manufacturing these documents on such a large scale. [162]

These are preposterous claims. The Einsatzgruppen reports are certainly genuine and, in fact, are reliable evidence that many hundreds of thousands of Jews were murdered during the Second World War by the Nazis and their collaborators. Because these deaths, in the present writer's considered opinion, represent the greatest injustice done to the Jewish people by the Nazi

[p. 136]

regime it is necessary briefly to describe and explain the actions of the Einsatzgruppen.

It should first be pointed out that, despite the claims of most scholars of the Holocaust and the fact that staggering numbers of Jews were in fact killed, there is apparently no reliable evidence that the Einsatzgruppen were given orders to exterminate all the Jews of the occupied Soviet territories. As Butz himself noted, and on this matter he seems to be correct, the belief that the Einsatzgruppen received an order to exterminate these Jews is based largely on the affidavits and testimony before the International Military Tribunal of Otto Ohlendorf, who had been the commander of Einsatzgruppe D from the summer of 1941 to the summer of 1942. [163] Ohlendorf, a prosecution witness, stated that the Einsatzgruppen had received a Führer order to kill all Jews in the occupied Russian territories, that exterminations were carried out by shootings or in diesel gas vans, and that his own unit had shot 90,000 Jews. Ohlendorf's testimony before the International Military Tribunal and his various affidavits are widely cited by historians as concrete evidence that the Einsatzgruppen conducted genocidal activities in the occupied Soviet territories, and that they did it on the Führer's orders. However, two years or so after testifying for the prosecution at the main Nuremberg trial Ohlendorf was himself tried at Nuremberg before the American NMT. Historians tend to ignore his testimony at this trial (Case 9 — The Einsatzgruppen Case), mainly because Ohlendorf repudiated much of his earlier testimony. Whilst he admitted killing Jews and Gypsies as a matter of course, he maintained that this was done as a security measure in the context of a brutal total war on the eastern front and not as part of a genocidal programme as such. He also insisted that his Einsatzgruppe was not responsible for 90,000 Jewish deaths, as he had previously stated, but for only around 40,000. He could not, he said, vouch for the accuracy of the statistics given in some of the Einsatzgruppen reports. [164]

Despite Ohlendorf's assertion that there existed a Führer order to exterminate all the Jews in the occupied Soviet territories, no reliable evidence has come to light to corroborate this claim. Moreover, as we shall see below, many scholars, including Raul Hilberg, no longer believe such an order existed. The OKW and OKH orders and directives mentioned above contain no references to a policy or programme of exterminating the Jewish populations of these territories, and neither do any of the other OKW, OKH, or RSHA orders from the period. Even the well-known Kommissarbefehl (commissar order) of June 6, 1941, which explicitly orders the murder of all political commissars attached to the units of the Red Army, makes no mention of Jews being killed. [165]

[p. 137]

Jews were mentioned in an Armeeoberkommando directive of June 4, 1941, entitled Richtlinien für das Verhalten der Truppe in Rußland (Guidelines for the Conduct of the Troops in Russia). Bolshevism, states this document, is the mortal enemy of the National Socialist German people. Germany's struggle is directed against this destructive ideology and its carriers. The document then lists several of these carriers: Bolshevik agitators, guerrillas, saboteurs, Jews (bolschewistische, Hetzer, Freischärler, Saboteure, Juden). It states that ruthless and energetic action is needed against them. [166] This document — issued to the Wehrmacht, not even to the Einsatzgruppen — mentions that Jewish bolsheviks, along with other Bolshevik activists and terrorists, were to be executed. Yet it does not necessarily follow that all Jews in these territories, several million in all, were to be executed as Bolsheviks by the Wehrmacht. This conclusion is strengthened by the contents of an order dated July 2, 1941, issued by Heydrich himself to the Höhere SS und Polizeiführer in the occupied Soviet territories. Heydrich repeated to them in summary form the instructions he had already issued directly to the Einsatzgruppen. The relevant passage of this document, which only surfaced in the 1960s although its authenticity has since been verified by specialists in the field, states:

EXECUTIONS.

The following will be executed:

Functionaries of the Comintern (most of who are simply professional Communist politicians).

Functionaries of higher and medium rank and radicals in the Party, the Central Committee, and the regional and district committees.

Commissars of the People. Jews in the Service of the Party and the State. Other radical elements (saboteurs, propagandists, snipers, assassins, agitators, etc.)…

No actions should be taken to interfere with any activities that may be started by anti-Communist or anti-Jewish elements in the newly occupied territories. Rather, these are to be secretly encouraged. Nonetheless, all care must be taken to ensure that those who get involved in these local self defence activities are not able to claim later that they were merely following instructions or had been promised political protection. [167]

This document certainly lends itself to the argument that the Einsatzgruppen were not ordered to exterminate all the Jews of occupied Soviet territories. Heydrich's order, which we now have a copy of, is irreconcilable with the Führer order Ohlendorf claimed to have received but for

[p. 138]

which we have no real evidence. Heydrich did not instruct the Einsatzgruppen to kill all Jews. He only instructed them to kill, along with various categories of non-Jews, Jews in the service of the Party and the State (Juden in Partei- und Staatsstellungen). Clearly Jews accused of being saboteurs, propagandists, snipers, assassins, agitators, etc. would also be executed, and probably on no other evidence than mere suspicion. As this document and Keitel's directive of March 13, 1941 reveal, the Einsatzgruppen were principally used for the purposes of destroying Bolshevism, countering espionage and partisan activity, and establishing rudimentary law and order in one of the bloodiest war zones in history. In the furious struggle between the two competing ideologies, National Socialism and Bolshevism, all persons considered politically dangerous or troublesome were to be annihilated. Preemptive guerrilla warfare is one phrase that has been used to describe these actions. Of course, because Nazis tended to believe that Bolshevism sprung from the Jewish race anyway, Jewish communities, towns and ghettos would have been the main 'hunting grounds' of the Einsatzgruppen.

This argument that Jews were killed by the Einsatzgruppen during security operations and political purges gains further support from a 'secret' speech Himmler delivered in Weimar on December 16, 1943. To the assembled naval commanders he described in very frank terms the racial struggle and the events in the east:

Whenever I was forced to take steps against the partisans and Jewish commissars in some village — I'll say it for the information of this group only — I made it a point to give the order to kill the women and children of these partisans and commissars. I would have been a weakling and I would be committing a crime against our descendants if l allowed the hate-filled sons of the subhumans we have liquidated in this struggle of humanity against subhumanity to grow up. [168]

There can be no doubt that Himmler saw these actions in the east as being necessary security measures. In October 1942 he travelled to Rome to discuss with Mussolini the overall military situation. On October 11 he briefed the Duce on Germany's Jewish policy. [169] Jews, he said, were being deported from Germany and all occupied countries. Old Jews had been sent to Theresienstadt, the ghetto for the aged. Other Jews were sent to concentration camps and used for hard labour in the east. Accordingly, he said, the mortality level was very high. A not insignificant number of Jews — men, women and children — had been shot in Russia, mostly because they were involved in or actively supported partisan and resistance activities. The Germans had tried

[p. 139]

to drive Jews eastward into Russian hands, but even the Russians rejected them and killed many.

It is important to see these acts of barbarity within the context of the war being waged between the Germans and the Soviets, a war fought to a large degree outside the established 'rules of warfare'. A similar campaign of terror was conducted by each side, and we now know that the Soviets committed terrible atrocities against Poles, Baltics peoples and others. It is also true that many of the Einsatzgruppen massacres of Jews were committed as reprisals, and that local inhabitants, particularly in the Baltic states, murdered tens of thousands of Jews in pogroms. Nonetheless, three glaring facts remain: first, the Einsatzgruppen committed atrocities that were amongst the worst of the Second World War; second, the vast majority of their victims were Jews; and third, these Jewish victims numbered unquestionably in the hundreds of thousands. The daily Einsatzgruppen reports themselves describe mass shootings of hundreds, occasionally thousands, of Jews at a time.

It is very difficult to determine — even approximately — how many Jews were murdered by the Einsatzgruppen. A total figure of two million was accepted by the IMT and the American NMT. [170] Helmut Krausnick and Hans-Heinrich Wilhelm, the authors of the most detailed study of the Einsatzgruppen, have calculated that if all the figures in the reports were added up, the total number of Jewish deaths would be around 2,200,000. [171] However, most historians of the Holocaust present totals of between 900,000 and l,300,000, with others going slightly lower or higher than these figures. Thus, all these scholars — including Reitlinger, Hilberg and Dawidowicz — are implicitly stating that the figures given in the Einsatzgruppen reports are far too high, either because of error or exaggeration. There are good grounds for arguing that the reports are exaggerated, and not mistaken. Reginald Paget, a British historian and Member of Parliament, had been the lawyer for Field Marshal Erich von Manstein, accused by the Allies of war crimes. Manstein, who had been in nominal command of the Einsatzgruppen, was alleged to have directed the German Army to cooperate with them in their activities. Paget conducted research into the accuracy of the Einsatzgruppen reports, and concluded that on the whole they were wildly exaggerated, sometimes as much as by ten times. For example, according to the report of February 18, 1942, Einsatzgruppen D, under Ohlendorf, had killed 10,000 Jews in Simferopol in the Crimea. Paget discovered that the true number was around three hundred, and that these 300 were probably not exclusively Jews but a miscellaneous collection of people who were being held on the suspicion of resistance activity. [172] During the second trial of Ernst Zündel, in 1988, David Irving

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questioned about the accuracy of the Einsatzgruppen reports. Irving did not deny that the Einsatzgruppen killed large numbers of Jews (Thousands of civilians lined up on the sides of pits being machine gunned into the pits after being robbed of their personal possessions), but he denied that this was the result of a policy to kill all the Jews of the occupied Soviet territories. He also challenged the accuracy of the figures given in the Einsatzgruppen reports, and said that they were probably inflated by local commanders in order to impress their superior officers:

the question a historian should ask is, 'Why does this document exist?'. A man is out in the field behind the Russian front doing his job for the SS and he is being asked how well he is doing and he's going to show he's doing a jolly good job and that's the kind of category … I put these Einsatzgruppen reports into. I don't trust the statistics they contain… Statistics like this are meaningless. [173]

The present writer agrees that the figures given in the Einsatzgruppen reports are unrealistic, and, accordingly, cannot conclude with certainty how many Jews were actually killed in the Soviet territories. The total would be well over 300,000, but could even be two or three times higher than that. This was clearly an enormous war crime, and a terrible injustice to the Jewish people. Butz's claim that we do not know whether the figure was in the range of 5,000, 25,000 or 100,000 is unrealistic. We know that the total was at least three times higher than Butz's highest figure and more than sixty times higher than his lowest figure. Many of the individual atrocities claimed the lives of more than Butz's lowest figure. For example, on September 29 and 30, 1941, around 15,000 Jews were slaughtered at Babi Yar, a ravine outside Kiev in the Ukraine, as a reprisal for the explosion and fire in Kiev. [174] This massacre, therefore, is similar (if not larger) in scale to the Soviet mass murder of around 14,000 Polish army officers in the Katyn Forest and other sites. Babi Yar, although one of the largest, was just one of scores of mass killings of Jews by the Einsatzgruppen.

Thus, although the Einsatzgruppen were never ordered to kill all the Jews of the occupied Soviet territories, they nevertheless murdered hundreds of thousands of Jewish men, women and children. Whereas Butz claimed that there is a scantiness of reliable evidence for these mass murders, [175] the evidence is actually plentiful, authentic, and reliable, even if the statistics them-selves are exaggerated. It should also be pointed out that we have focused our investigation only on evidence pertaining to non-personal issues such as organisation, orders and statistics. We have not drawn on the hundreds of available testimonies describing the horrors of Einsatzgruppen

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murders. They tell of routine brutality, and terrifying journeys in crowded trucks to the killing sites. They speak of rows of naked humans standing on the edges of pits waiting to receive the bullets that will send them down onto still-warm bodies below. These are crimes that cannot be brushed aside as easily as Butz attempts to.

We have touched upon several of the most important of Butz's arguments, and have seen that his work is flawed and out of date in places. First, in response to any piece of evidence apparently contradicting his theses, Butz, if unable to explain or refute it, tends to accuse it of being fabricated. By doing so he leaves himself wide open to criticism from anti-Revisionists, who allege that he ignores whole bodies of evidence. Moreover, in stating that particular sources have been manufactured, Butz naturally has to say who he believes did this and why. This occasionally leads him to write about Jewish or Communist hoaxes and lies, phrases that make him appear extreme and anti-Semitic. These terms, and some of his arguments in defence of their usage, also diminish his claim that he has produced a dispassionate analysis. His treatment of Jews and Zionists at the Nuremberg and other war crimes trials shows that he is not as unbiased as he claims. These sections contain little more than speculation and unsustained allegations based on his own preconceptions. Second, in the years since The Hoax was written, a lot of important source material has come to light. Having this material would have made several of Butz's arguments a lot stronger. His section on the affidavits and trial testimony of Rudolf Höß, for example, was generally accurate although unpersuasive. It would have appeared a lot stronger if he could demonstrate, as we are now able to, that Höß was beaten and tortured by British interrogators before making his statements. Similarly, whilst it is now possible to compare the descriptions of the gas chambers given in the WRB report and other such sources with the original German architectural drawings and building plans of the facilities in Auschwitz, these sources were not readily available when Butz wrote The Hoax. It is the same with the numerous aerial photographs of Auschwitz taken over a period of months in 1944. Butz wrote in The Hoax that such photographs must have been taken during the war, but he had no idea where they were. The CIA finally released them in 1979, three years after Butz's book was published.

Despite these particular flaws and weaknesses, and others we have identified during our analysis of The Hoax, it is apparent that Butz has also put forward some well-researched and weighty arguments. His section on the treatment of German witnesses and defendants at the Nuremberg and other war crimes trial makes for grim reading. There can be no doubt that many were coerced or tortured into making statements suitable to the prosecution's case, and not just

[p. 142]

regarding the maltreatment of Jews. This significantly damages the argument of orthodox historians of the Holocaust that even the perpetrators admit they did it. Several of these confessions, including the various affidavits and memoirs of Rudolf Höß, reflect the treatment their authors received whilst in Allied custody. They contain numerous major inaccuracies, distortions, and fabrications. The honest and responsible historian must take into consideration why and how these statements were produced before attempting to use them as sources of historical evidence.

Butz's description and analysis of the terrible epidemics raging throughout the labour and concentration camps, especially those in the damp and swampy Auschwitz region, was balanced and well-constructed. Staggering numbers of internees, both Jews and non-Jews, perished from typhus and a range of other diseases. By drawing attention to the fact that the SS expended an enormous amount of time, energy and money on saving and maintaining the lives of internees (who, in the eastern camps, were mostly Jews), Butz has demonstrated the incompatibility of these actions with the received opinion that the Nazi regime was fanatically intent on exterminating all Jews.

The way Butz dealt with the Einsatzgruppen reports and the massacres they describe is entirely unsatisfactory, and diminishes the overall impact of his book. Nonetheless, he has demonstrated that historians have been reading far too much into the phrase, final solution. This phrase, one must concede did not refer to a policy of extermination but to a policy of expulsion and deportation. Reliable and credible evidence for the alleged extermination policy is almost non-existent. On the other hand, reliable and credible evidence for the deportation policy, referred to as the final solution, is plentiful. Historians could well challenge this conclusion by arguing that the phrase is a euphemism. The murder of Jews was such a closely-guarded secret, they might argue, that absolutely no mention of such killings was ever made in documents. Euphemisms were always used instead. This ignores the obvious fact that the daily Einsatzgruppen reports — of which between fifty and a hundred copies were usually made and circulated to the relevant SS officials, including Heydrich and Himmler — explicitly refer to the mass killings of Jews. If the killing of Jews was a carefully-guarded secret requiring the use of code-words, then the Einsatzgruppen commanders, and Himmler and Heydrich themselves, were letting the cat out of the bag' on a daily basis. This is clearly nonsensical. The killing of Jews cannot have been a well-disguised state secret necessitating euphemisms on some days only, but not on others.

Notes:

[1] Bradley F. Smith, Two Alibis for the Inhumanities: A. R. Butz, The Hoax of the Twentieth Century and David Irving, Hitler's War, German Studies Review, Volume I, October 1978, p. 331. Note: this author, a professor of history at Cabrillo College, United States, and an author of many books on World War II, is not to be confused with Bradley R. Smith, the journalist, playwright and Revisionist.

[2] Ibid., p.329

[3] I. Arndt and W. Scheffler, Organisierter Massenmord an Juden in Nationalsozialistischen Vernichtungslagern: Ein Beitrag zur Richtigstellung apologetischer Literatur, Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, Volume 24, no.2, April 1976, pp. 105-135 Organisierter Massenmord was intended to expose the errors and deliberate falsification of evidence by several writers, including Emil Aretz, Thies Christophersen, Heinz Roth and Paul Rassinier (described inaccurately as der französische Journalist). However, the article, really just a summary of accepted opinion on the Holocaust, itself contains a number of significant errors of fact and judgement. These errors appear to have been based on the author's partial and uncritical reading of several documents and 'eyewitness' accounts, such as the memoirs of Rudolf Höß.

[4] Cf. N. Fresco, Les redresseurs de morts, Les Temps Modernes, June 1980, pp. 2150-2211; P. Vidal-Naquet, Un Eichmann de papier, Esprit. September 1980, pp. 8-52; Vidal-Naquet, Les Juifs, la mémoire et le présent; G. Wellers, Les Chambres à gaz ont existé (Paris: Gallimard, 1981); et al. Anti-Revisionists have written considerably more on Faurisson than on any other Revisionist.

[5] Suzman and Diamond, Six Million Did Die (on Harwood); S. Klarsfeld (ed.). The Holocaust and the Neo-Nazi Mythomania (New York: The Beate Klarsfeld Foundation, 1978) (mainly on Rassinier).

[6] Seidel, The Holocaust Denial, p. 74. Seidel also wrote: Butz writes in the controlled style of academic debate; and The Hoax consists of 8 chapters, with some 450 footnotes and 5 appendices, including 32 plates and diagrams, amounting to a 315-page volume. In other words, the neo-Nazi myth is presented in the form of a serious investigation. (p. 74)

[7] Denying the Holocaust, p. 23; cf. Suzman and Diamond, Six Million Did Die, p. 22; Smith, Two Alibis, p. 329; et al.

[8] See J. S. A. Hayward, Holocaust Revisionism in New Zealand: The Thinking-Man's Anti-Semitism?, Without Prejudice (Journal of the Australian Institute of Jewish Affairs), Number 4, December 1991, pp. 42, 43

[9] Cf. IHR Newsletter # 42, October 1986, p. 6

[10] Cf. R. Lenski, The Holocaust on Trial: The Case of Ernst Zündel (Decatur: Reporter Press, 1990), p. 18; M. Hoffman II, The Great Holocaust Trial (Torrance: Institute for Historical Review, 1985), pp. 44, 71. Botting was later fired from Red Deer College for testifying for the defence at the 1985 Zündel trial (cf. IHR Newsletter # 37, February 1986).

[11] Seidel, The Holocaust Denial, p. 74. Seidel, who attempts to demonstrate the accuracy of received opinion on the Holocaust, ignores the fact that she is not an historian herself. She teaches French and Discourse Studies, which are equally unrelated.

[12] Butz, The Hoax, p.8

[13] Ibid., p. 8

[14] Butz, The Hoax, p. 9 Taft had stated on October 6, 1946 that the trials violate the fundamental principle of American law that a man cannot be tried under an ex post facto statute. He called the death sentences of the German leaders- a blot on the American record which we shall long regret. (J. Kennedy, Profiles in Courage (New York: Harper, 1955), pp. 218-219).

[15] Quoted in Butz, The Hoax, p. 21

[16] Report of Robert H. Jackson, United States Representative to the International Conference on Military Trials, London 1945 (Washington, D.C.: US State Department, 1949), pp. 104-106, 303; W. R. Harris, Tyranny on Trial: The Evidence at Nuremberg (Dallas: S. M. U. Press, 1954), pp. 16-17; L. Kahn, Nuremberg Trials (New York: Ballantine, 1972), p. 26. Cited in M. Weber, The Nuremberg Trials and the Holocaust, The Journal of Historical Review, Volume Twelve, Number Two, Summer 1992, pp. 170, 202. Robert Harris in his review of Telford Taylor's The Anatomy of the Nuremberg Trials, stated: these were not trials in the sense that the verdicts of the major defendants might have gone either way: Goering, Ribbentrop, Sauckel, Kaltenbrunner, Frank, Seyss-Inquart — these men were always going to die. It was unthinkable, in the climate of 1946, that there could be any other outcome. (Guardian, January 3, 1993)

[17] Butz, The Hoax, p. 22

[18] Ibid., p. 24. Cf. New York Times. October 7, 1948; January 7, 1949; March 2, 1949; March 5, 1949; May 5, 1949. Although not mentioned in The Hoax. Van Roden published a summary of his findings in The Progressive, February 1949. It appears below as Appendix 1.

[19] Butz, The Hoax, p. 24

[20] Ibid., p. 26

[21] Ibid., p. 26. Wennerstrum's observations are supported by those of Joseph Halow, a civilian court reporter for the (American) 7708 War Crimes Group, which administered the 'Dachau trials'. Halow later wrote that many of the court investigators were Jewish refugees from Germany, who were employed because German was their mother tongue. Virtually all of these investigators also hated the Germans … [and] many of the investigators gave vent to their hatred by attempting to force confessions from the Germans by treating them brutally. Halow described several specific cases in which evidence was obtained by physical maltreatment. (J. Halow, Innocent in Dachau: The Trial and Punishment of Franz Kofler et al., The Journal of Historical Review, Volume Nine, Number Four, Winter 1989-1990, p. 459 ff.)

[22] Butz, The Hoax, p. 25

[23] Ibid., p. 29

[24] Ibid., p. 100

[25] Ibid., p. 30

[26] Ibid., pp. 160, 161,166, 168

[27] Ibid., p. 168

[28] Ibid., p. 168

[29] Ibid., p. 168

[30] Ibid., p. 169

[31] Ibid., p. 22

[32] Ibid., p. 28

[33] Mark Weber, who is usually far more circumspect, uncritically accepted the accuracy of Butz's claims about Marcus and wrote in a recent article: Marcus, a fervent Zionist, became the number three man in making American policy in occupied Germany. As chief of the US government's War Crimes Branch in 1946 and 1947 he selected almost all of the judges, prosecutors and lawyers for the Nuremberg NMT Trials. (Weber, The Nuremberg Trials and the Holocaust, p. 171) Weber, a leading Revisionist historian, cited Butz and his sources, but provided no other evidence to support these claims.

[34] Quoted in A. T. Mason, Harlan Fiske Stone: Pillar of the Law (New York: Viking Press, 1956), p. 716 (see also 715).

[35] A. I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago (New York: Harper and Row, 1973), p. 112. Cited in Butz, The Hoax, p. 198

[36] R. Butler, Legions of Death (London: Hamlyn, 1983), esp. pp. 235-239

[37] Ibid., p. 237

[38] Ibid., p. 237. This is corroborated by evidence contained in M. Mason's In a Cell with a Nazi War Criminal, Wrexham Leader, October 17, 1986. This article, dealing with a documentary entitled Secret Hunters, describes the minor role in the Höß interrogations played by Private Ken Jones of the Fifth Royal Horse Artillery stationed in Heide. Höß himself stated in his 'autobiography', purportedly written before his execution by the Poles in April 1947, that: At my first interrogation session evidence was gained by beating me. [Unter schlagenden Beweisen kam meine erste Vernehmung Zustande] I do not know what is in the record, although I signed it. Later he was taken to Minden a. d. Weser, the main interrogation centre in the British Zone. There I received further rough treatment at the hands of the English public prosecutor, a major. After being taken to Nuremberg, Höß underwent interrogations which were not physically violent but which had a strong psychological effect. Kommandant in Auschwitz: Autobiographische Aufzeichnungen von Rudolf Höß, Quellen und Darstellungen zur Zeitgeschichte, Band 5 (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1958), pp. 145, 146

[39] Psychologisch wurde ich beinahe seziert. (Kommandant in Auschwitz, p. 146)

[40] However, Höß apparently wrote in pencil a short letter to Dr. G. M. Gilbert, the Nuremberg Court psychiatrist, in which he said that the death total for Auschwitz was in the order of 1,135,000 (Letter dated April 24, 1946, copy in Rijksinstituut fur Oorlogsdokumentatie, Amsterdam. Cited in Reitlinger, Final Solution, p. 113). He repeated this figure during his Polish trial, and, contradicting his previous statements, declared in his report Die Endlösung der Judenfrage im KL Auschwitz that: Ich halte die Zahl 2½ Millionen für viel zu hoch. (cf. Kommandant in Auschwitz, p. 163) Another document may shed fresh light on this matter: a letter from Moritz von Schirmeister to Höß's wife. Von Schirmeister, the personal press attaché to Joseph Goebbels, had been arrested by the British. On March 31-April 1, 1946, von Schirmeister was taken in a car from Minden a. d. Weser to Nuremberg. Höß was in the same car (cf. Kommandant in Auschwitz, p. 145), and according to a letter from von Schirmeister to Höß's wife, he apparently confided to von Schirmeister: Gewiss, ich habe unterschrieben, dass ich 2½ Millionen Juden umgebracht habe. Aber ich hätte genausogut unterschrieben, dass es 5 Millionen Juden gewesen sind. Es gibt eben Methoden, mit denen man jedes Geständnis erreichen kann — ob es nun wahr ist oder nicht. (Certainly, I signed a statement that I killed two and a half million Jews. But I could just as well have said that it was five million Jews. There are certain methods by which any confession can be obtained, whether it is true or not.) (cf. R. Faurisson, How the British Obtained the Confessions of Rudolf Höss, The Journal of Historical Review, Volume Seven, No. 4, Winter 1986-87, p. 399; Faurisson testimony, SZTR, 30- 8449, 8450). The present writer believes the provenance and authenticity of Höß's letter to Gilbert have been established to no greater degree than those of Schirmeister's letter to Mrs Höß.

[41] See below, pp. 310-312

[42] Cf. A. Rückerl, NS-Vernichtungslager im Spiegel deutscher Strafprozesse: Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Chelmno (Munich: Deutsche Taschenbuch Verlag, 1979. First published 1977), pp. 133, 200. See Reitlinger's unpersuasive treatment of this problem (Final Solution, p 104)

[43] For Göring's decree, see below, p. 125

[44] Butz, The Hoax, pp. 101-102

[45] Ibid., pp. 104-105

[46] Ibid., pp. 105

[47] Ibid., pp. 52, 58, 92, 128, 131, 280

[48] Ibid., p. 52

[49] Ibid., pp. 124-127

[50] Ibid., p. 126

[51] Ibid., p.126.

[52] This document, not mentioned by Butz, is in the Imperial War Museum, London (H/13/70). Quoted in P. Padfield, Himmler: Reichsführer SS (London: Macmillan, 1990), p. 441

[53] Ich mache den Lagerkommandanten und der Leiter der Verwaltung des Konzentrationslagers für die Erschöpfung jeder Möglichkeit zur Erhaltung der Arbeitskraft der Häftlinge persönlich verantwortlich.

[54] Butz, The Hoax, pp. 126, 127. The document is 1469-PS in NMT, Volume V, pp. 379-382

[55] Butz, The Hoax, p. 127

[56] F. P. Berg, Typhus and the Jews (Reedy, WV.: Liberty Bell Publications, 1989), p. 6. Berg's sources are reputable works of medical history: S. Brooks, Civil War Medicine (Springfield, Ill.: Charles C. Thomas, 1966), p. 126; P. Steiner, Disease in the Civil War (Springfield, Ill.: Charles C. Thomas, 1968), pp. 10, 132

[57] Berg, Typhus, p. 18

[58] M. D. Mackenzie, Some Practical Considerations in the Control of Louse borne Typhus Fever in Great Britain in the Light of Experience in Russia, Poland, Rumania and China, Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine, Volume 35 (London: 1942), pp. 144-5. Quoted in Berg, Typhus, p. 19

[59] Dawidowicz, War, pp. 214-215

[60] Eine Laus Dein Tod! Wesz to smierc! (Pressac, Auschwitz: Technique, p. 54) This bilingual (German/Polish) poster is reproduced below as Appendix II.

[61] Cf. Ibid., p. 62. One of the other health messages painted on the walls was Sauber sein ist deine Pflicht.

[62] Pressac provided a photograph of the undressing room in the Desinfektions u. Entwesungsanlage im K.G.L. Auschwitz (disinfection and disinfestation installation in the Auschwitz [Birkenau] POW camp), which clearly shows, as Pressac himself pointed out, tubular radiators around the walls. These heaters existed in all rooms in the installation, said Pressac. The heaters were removed after the war, as one of his photographs shows. Pressac was clearly bothered by the existence of these heaters, and by their removal. He explained why he thought they had been removed: It is difficult to leave coexisting in a 'history' to be shown to tourists, a building where the prisoners were generously warmed whilst also showing them crematories where more than a million of them were purportedly exterminated in gas chambers. (Ibid., p. 78)

[63] Sonderbefehl, dated August 12, 1942, in ibid., p. 201. The German original of this illuminating document is reproduced below as Appendix III.

[64] Ibid., p. 188

[65] Ibid., pp. 188, 556

[66] Ibid., p. 188

[67] Cf. R. Faurisson, Réponse à Pierre Vidal-Naquet (La Vielle Taupe, 1987), p. 40.

[68] Cf. Gerald Fleming's letter to the IHR, published in The Journal of Historical Review, Volume Eleven, Number Three, Fall 1991, pp. 375-6. Fleming cited two Fahrgenehmigungen — those of August 26, 1942 and October 2, 1942 — as tangible and damning documentary evidence relating to mass gassings of human beings at Auschwitz- Birkenau. Cf. the discussion of these documents on the 88th day of the 'Auschwitz Trial' in Frankfurt, September 11, 1964 (also cited by Fleming). Even Pressac believes these two travel authorisations are evidence of mass murder (Auschwitz: Technique, pp. 188, 556, 557). See also Hilberg, Destruction, p. 570; Reitlinger. Final Solution, p. 147 et al.

[69] We shall analyse the phrase special treatment in another section of this thesis. The phrase resettlement of the Jews looks like a euphemism, yet in this context it almost certainly refers to the moving around of Jews within the camps and sub-camps of the massive Auschwitz complex. Such shifts necessitated the delousing of vacated barracks before they were filled with new internees. For example, Danuta Czech, head of the Department of Scientific Research at the PMO, noted in her detailed chronological study of Auschwitz that from August 6-10, 1942 all the female internees were moved from the main camp (Auschwitz I) to Birkenau (Auschwitz II). After this resettlement, their empty barracks were deloused. After moving the female prisoners to Camp B-Ia in Birkenau, wrote Czech, the disinfection of the empty Blocks 1-10 in the main camp is begun. Zyklon B gas is used for this purpose. (D. Czech, Auschwitz Chronicle: 1939-1945 (London/New York: l. B. Taurus, 1990), pp. 212-215). Czech's book, incidentally, reveals the magnitude of the 1942 typhus epidemic. For example, Czech claims that throughout July 1942 a hundred or more internees — and some SS personnel — died most days in Auschwitz-Birkenau (p. 191 ff.) Her book also shows that the rigorous measures taken by the SS camp authorities to fight typhus included routine inspections and delousing of barracks, routine delousing of clothing and bedding, hospitilisation and medical treatment for sick internees, and camp quarantines.

[70] Butz, The Hoax, p. 128

[71] Nuremberg document NO 021, in NMT, Volume V, pp. 384-385 (Butz, The Hoax, p. 124). See Czech, Auschwitz Chronicle, p. 606; Hilberg, Destruction, p. 561

[72] Reitlinger, Final Solution, p. 119 (p. 125 in the 1962 edition cited by Butz), in The Hoax, p.124

[73] Ibid., p. 119 (p. 125 in the 1962 edition), in The Hoax, p. 124. Butz did not mention, however, that Reitlinger also claimed that 7,527 of the 11,311 'unemployed' internees in the men's camp were gassed within the next three months. Butz used only those sections of Reitlinger's analysis that were suitable for his own purposes and ignored unsuitable sections. Yet, to be fair, the only evidence cited by Reitlinger (pp. 170, 188) was the WRB report of November 1944, which Butz discussed at length later in The Hoax.

[74] Butz, The Hoax, p. 125

[75] German Document No. 128, Archives of the Jewish Historical Institute of Warsaw (H. Eschwege (ed.), Kennzeichen J (East Berlin: 1966), p. 264). Cited in M. Weber, Auschwitz: Myths and Facts, p. 3. Maurer, as head of Amt D-II, was superbly informed about the labour situation in Auschwitz. Of all the WVHA leaders, he would have known best who was and who was not working in that camp. Cf. Broszat, et al., Anatomie des SS-Staates, Band II, pp. 134-137; Höß, Kommandant in Auschwitz, p. 132, 138ff, 143ff, 158-164, 170, 181

[76] Bauleitung Drawing 2521: Häftlings-Lazarett u. Quarantäne-Abt. (see below, Appendix IV)

[77] Krankenbaracke für Häftlinge (Barracks for sick prisoners), Bauleitung Drawing 2471, in Pressac, Auschwitz: Technique, p. 513

[78] Ibid., p. 512

[79] Ibid., p. 512. Emphasis in original,

[80] Ibid., p.512

[81] NO-1290, in NMT, Vol. VIII, p. 371. Translated by present writer from text in Broszat, et al., Anatomie des SS-Staates, Band II, p. 142 (see Butz, p. 50). Emphasis in original. However, in their efforts to increase productivity the SS actually rewarded concentration camp internees who worked hard. On May 15, 1943 Pohl had issued a special Prämien-Ordnung (system of rewards) for internees. Accordingly: Prisoners who distinguish themselves by hard work, vigilance, good behaviour and notable achievements at work will from now on receive privileges. These consist of: 1) loosening of confinement conditions, 2) extra food rations, 3) Financial rewards, 4) tobacco, 5) permission to visit [camp] brothels [Bordellbesuch] (Doc. NO-400 in ibid., p. 127). On February 14, 1944 Pohl issued supplementary regulations. These weitere Vergünstigung included further financial rewards and visits to the camp cinema shows. Contrary to popular opinion, there were brothels and cinemas in most, if not all, concentration camps — including Auschwitz.

[82] Quoted in Butz, The Hoax, p. 78

[83] Quoted in ibid., p. 82

[84] Quoted in ibid., p. 77

[85] Quoted in ibid., p. 146

[86] Quoted in ibid., p. 84. These absurd stories have unfortunately been repeated to the present day. For example, in 1978 the Anti-Defamation League of the B'nai B'rith published a 16-page publication in newspaper format, entitled The Record: The Holocaust in History, 1933-1945. On its first printing, The Record was distributed free to some twenty million people in the United States as an advertising supplement in Sunday newspapers. It was reprinted in 1985, and was again distributed in enormous quantities. It is still being circulated by the ADL, from whom the present writer received a free copy. This publication, supposedly a thoughtful introduction to the Holocaust, includes several of the fantastic war-time reports described above. For example, it includes a reprint of the August 8, 1943 New York Times report which claimed that two million persons were systematically exterminated in Treblinka alone by steaming them to death. After the steaming, the report said, a trap door is opened and the bodies fall in a compact mass, stuck together by the heat and steam. Sadly, many other historical errors or long-discredited claims were included in The Record, such as the above mentioned claim that in Belzec Jews were electrocuted in huge mechanically-operated vats of water.

[87] Cf. Washington Daily News, February 2, 1945, pp. 2, 35. Cited in Weber, Auschwitz: Myths and Facts, p. 2

[88] IMT, Volume XVI, pp. 529-530. The above-mentioned claims of systematic exterminations in electrifying water vats and in steam chambers were also made at the main Nuremberg trial. (cf. Document 3311-PS, IMT, Volume XXXII, pp. 155-158; Proceedings of February 19, 1946: IMT, Volume VII, pp. 576-577; Proceedings of February 29, 1946: IMT, Volume XII, p. 369; et al. It is worth noting that these exterminations, which certainly never occurred were described in great detail in the Nuremberg evidence, as were the very buildings in which they were allegedly committed.

[89] Butz, The Hoax, p. 84

[90] The German Extermination Camps of Auschwitz and Birkenau: Two Eye-Witness Reports (Washington, D.C.: War Refugee Board, Executive Office of the President, November 1944)

[91] Danuta Czech names the Polish major described in the WRB report as Jerzy Tabeau, who was registered in Auschwitz as Jerzy Wesolowski (Auschwitz Chronicle, p. 529)

[92] Butz. The Hoax, p. 147

[93] WRB, I, pp. 14,15. Emphasis in original.

[94] Ibid., I, p. 33

[95] Ibid., I, p. 34

[96] Butz, The Hoax, p. 99

[97] Butz, The Hoax, p. 99

[98] Cf. Bauleitung drawing 932 (p), PMO Archives, BW30/01, neg. no. 17079 and 208/8/3. Reproduced in Pressac, Auschwitz: Technique, pp. 284-285 (see below, Appendix V)

[99] Cf. Bauleitung drawing 933[-934](p), PMO Archives, first drawing of BW 30/02, neg. no. 20957. Reproduced in ibid., p. 278

[100] Bauleitung drawing 1311(p), PMO Archives, BW 30/11, neg. no. 20922/5; Bauleitung drawing 2003, PMO Archives, BW 30/12, neg. no. 20922/4. Reproduced in ibid., pp. 295, 302

[101] S. Klarsfeld, Le mémorial de la déportation des Juifs de France (Paris: The Klarsfeld Foundation, 1978)

[102] Pressac, Auschwitz: Technique, p. 188

[103] In the District Court of Ontario Between Her Majesty the Queen and Ernst Zündel. Before the Honourable Judge H. R. Locke and a Jury (1985), p. 1639 (also see 1563)

[104] Ibid., p. 1322

[105] Ibid., p. 1540

[106] cf. Ibid., 1390-1393, 1446-1448

[107] Pressac, Auschwitz: Technique, pp. 459, 464 For Pressac's analysis of the WRB report, see pages 459-467. For a Revisionist critique of this analysis, see Carlo Mattogno's Jean-Claude Pressac and the War Refugee Board Report, The Journal of Historical Revisionism, Volume Ten, No. 4, Winter 1990-91, pp. 461-485. Mattogno is a leading Italian Revisionist. He is the author of Il rapporto Gerstein: anatomia di un falso and Auschwitz: due false testimonianze.

[108] D. Wyman, The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust, 1941-1945 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), pp. 238,288-290, 295, 297, 301-2

[109] Ibid., p. 324

[110] Pressac, Auschwitz: Technique, p. 459

[111] Butz, The Hoax, p. 112. Butz was referring to Document NO-4634 in NMT, Volume 4, p. 1166; Eichmann session 79, W1-Y1

[112] Ibid., p. 115

[113] Ibid., p. 112 The exchange between Amen and Kaltenbrunner, accurately described by Butz, is recorded in IMT, Volume XI, pp. 336-339

[114] Nuremberg Document NO-5195

[115] Document NO-5196

[116] Document NO-5197

[117] Document NO-5193

[118] Cf. G. Wellers, The Number of Victims and the Korherr Report, in S. Klarsfeld (ed.), The Holocaust and the Neo-Nazi Mythomania (New York: The Beate Klarsfeld Foundation, 1978), p. 139-161 (esp. p. 146) and appendices A to E (pp. 163-211); et al.

[119] Butz, The Hoax, p. 113

[120] Georges Wellers, in his detailed but unpersuasive discussion of Korherr's writings, cited this letter but unprofessionally quoted a few lines out of context to make it appear as though Korherr was supporting orthodox opinion on his report. The passage quoted above, in which Korherr emphatically denied that Sonderbehandlung meant killing or exterminating, was not mentioned by Wellers. (Wellers, The Number of Victims and the Korherr Report: Appendix E, in Klarsfeld (ed.), Neo-Nazi Mythomania, p. 211

[121] See the statistics in H. Krausnick and H. H. Wilhelm, Die Truppe des Weltanschauungskrieges: Die Einsatzgruppen der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD, 1938-1942 (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1981)

[122] One Yad Vashem publication, using the figures presented before the IMT, states that the Einsatzgruppen murdered about a million Jews from the beginning of the Russian campaign until the end of 1941. Korherr's report was written more than a year after this, in early 1943. (The Holocaust (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, n.d.), p. 48. Hilberg, vague about the dales involved, gives a figure of 1,400,000 for the total period (Destruction, p. 256).

[123] The Kremer diary entries are quoted in K. Smolen (ed.), KL Auschwitz in den Augen der SS: Höss, Broad, Kremer (Oswiecim: State Museum. 1973)

[124] Cf. Gilbert, The Holocaust, pp. 437, 438, 439, 478: Czech. Auschwitz Chronicle, pp. 240-268; Reitlinger, Final Solution 117-118; et al.

[125] Photographic reproduction of document in Pressac, Auschwitz: Technique, p. 210

[126] Bischoff was referring to Commandant Höß's Garrison Order 1942 of July 23, in which the latter ordered a total camp curfew to protect Auschwitz staff from the typhus epidemic then raging in the camp. (Czech, Auschwitz Chronicle, p. 202). The conditions of this curfew were very strict. An immediate travel ban was imposed on all SS officers and non-commissioned officers, SS dependents, civilian officials and workers. Moreover, SS personnel and their families living outside the outer sentry line could not enter the camp, and those living inside the outer sentry line could not leave the camp. SS personnel needed special passports to travel from their homes to their posts and could travel only by the most direct routes. Civilian workers had to use designated roads, and only under the supervision of the SS. Linen had to he changed and cleaned at least once per week. Every Monday and Friday medical examinations of SS families were conducted. SS members travelling on official business had first to report to the SS clinic for bathing and an official release. This total curfew caused the temporary postponement of all internee releases and transfers to other camps, and led to the closure of the massive I. G. Farben 'Buna' factory for around two months.

[127] Pressac, Auschwitz: Technique, p. 210

[128] Ibid., p .213

[129] Klarsfeld, Le mémorial de la déportation des Juifs de France, p. 62

[130] The Luther Memorandum is classified as Document NG-2586-J, and published in NMT, Volume XIII, pp. 243-249. Quoted in full by Butz, The Hoax, pp. 205-210. Because of its importance, the complete memorandum will be reproduced below as Appendix VI.

[131] For the wartime activities of Luther and the Foreign Office, cf. H-J. Döscher, Das Auswärtige Amt im Dritten Reich: Diplomatie im Schatten [der] Endlösung (Siedler Verlag, 1987). This book contains an excellent photographic reproduction of the so-called Wannsee Protocol (pp. 227-236).

[132] The Madagascar plan was officially cancelled by the Foreign Office in February 1942, although it was effectively abandoned well before then when it became clear that England was not about to be defeated or lose its control of the oceans. Cf. C. Browning, Nazi Resettlement Policy and the Search for a Solution to the Jewish Question, 1939-1941, German Studies Review, Volume 9, 1986, pp. 497-519

[133] Butz, The Hoax, p. 210

[134] Browning, Nazi Resettlement Policy, pp. 511-512

[*] In Ergänzung — perhaps Supplementary to

[135] For full citation, see below, p. 229 n. 39

[136] Butz, The Hoax, p. 211

[137] To name just a few: M. Gilbert, The Holocaust, pp. 176, 177; M. Gilbert, Second World War (Terrey Hills, NSW: Peribo, 1989), p. 219; Toland, Adolf Hitler, p. 958; H. Höhne, The Order of the Death's Head: the Story of Hitler's SS Translated from the German by R. Barry (London/Sydney: Pan Books, 1972), p. 325; M. Marrus, The Holocaust in History, p. 32

[138] Reitlinger, Final Solution, p. 21; Hilberg, Destruction, p. 262; Dawidowicz, War, p. 130: cf. also D. Irving, Göring: A Biography (London: Macmillan, 1989), p. 344; R. Breitman, The Architect of Genocide: Himmler and the Final Solution (London: The Bodley Head, 1991), pp. 192-193; Mayer, Why Did the Heavens Not Darken?, p. 291; et al.

[139] Hilberg, Destruction, p. 262

[140] Mayer, Why Did the Heavens Not Darken?, pp. 291, 292. Although Jewish himself, Mayer, a recipient of the American Historical Association's prestigious Herbert Baxter Adams Prize, provoked the furor of certain elements of the Jewish community in the United States by writing Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? Whilst Mayer made clear his belief that mass gassings occurred, these Jews were horrified by his concessions to several Revisionist arguments. Mayer conceded, for example, that Sources for the study of the gas chambers are at once rare and unreliable… Most of what is known is based on the depositions of Nazi Officials and executioners at postwar trials and on the memory of survivors and bystanders. This testimony must be screened carefully, since it can be influenced by subjective factors of great complexity. Diaries are rare, and so are authentic documents about the making, transmission, and implementation of the extermination policy. (pp. 362-363) Earlier in the book Mayer had written that No written document containing or reporting an explicit command to exterminate the Jews has come to light. (p. 235). What angered Mayer's detractors most was his statement, which he defended at length, that from 1942 to 1945, certainly at Auschwitz, but probably overall, more Jews were killed by 'natural' causes than by 'unnatural' causes. (p. 365).

[141] As Butz himself noted, this phrase upon their release was left out of the official Nuremberg translation of the protocol, published by the Americans in NMT, Volume XIII (see p. 213)

[142] Quoted in M. Broszat, Hitler und die Genesis der Endlösung: Aus Anlaß der Thesen von David Irving, p. 757. For the full citation and a discussion of this important article see below, p. 269 n. 29

[143] Quoted in ibid., p. 758

[144] Quoted in ibid., p. 758. Similarly, Rademacher, the Auswärtiges Amt expert on Jewish matters, reported on February 10, 1942 that since the invasion of Russia had resulted in the availability of other regions suitable for a solution to the Jewish question, the Führer has decided that the Jews are to be deported not to Madagascar but to the east. (Document NG-5770)

[145] Goebbels's diary entries are from Louis P. Lochner (ed.), Goebbels — Tagebücher aus den Jahren 1942-43 (Zürich: Atlantis Verlag, 1948). An English edition, although with slight differences in the selection of excerpts, is Lochner's The Goebbels Diaries, 1942-43 (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1948)

[146] See also page 270 ff.

[147] This corresponds with an informal comment Hitler made on July 24, 1942. He said that after the war he would demolish town after town if the filthy Jews [DrecksJuden] did not get out and leave for Madagascar or some other Jewish national state. H. Picker, Hitlers Tischgespräche im Führerhauptquartier 1941-42 (Munich: W. Goldmann Verlag, 1981. First published 1951?), p. 456. Additionally, Reich Minister Lammers told State Secretary Schlegelberg[er] of the Reich Justice Ministry in March 1942 that Hitler has repeatedly pronounced that he wants the solution of the Jewish problem postponed until after the war is over. See below, p. 265

[148] Document NI-500. Quoted in Broszat, et al., Anatomie des SS-Staates, Band II, p. 130

[149] Mayer, Why Did the Heavens Not Darken?, p. 310

[150] Quoted in Broszat, et al., Anatomie des SS-Staates, Band II, p. 150

[151] Mayer, Why Did the Heavens Not Darken?, p. 310

[152] Goebbels — Tagebücher aus den Jahren 1942-43, p. 142. In the same entry Goebbels also speculated that Im großen kann man wohl feststellen, daß 60% liquidiert werden müssen, während nur noch 40% in die Arbeit eingesetzt werden können. This operation, he said, was to be carried out by General Odilo Globocnik.

[153] Butz, The Hoax, p. 187

[154] Document No. 1 in Broszat, et al., Anatomie des SS Staates, Band II, pp. 198-201

[155] Ibid., p. 199

[156] Document No. 3 in ibid., pp. 204-205

[157] Ibid., p. 205

[158] Ibid., p. 204

[159] Ibid., p. 204

[160] Cf. Report of Einsatzgruppen A, dated October 15, 1941 (Doc. 180-L)

[161] Butz, The Hoax, p. 197

[162] Ibid., p. 200

[163] IMT, Volume IV. Cf. Butz, The Hoax, p. 202

[164] NMT, Volume IV. The limitations of this thesis prevent a detailed discussion of Ohlendorf's testimony before the IMT and the NMT. Readers are advised to study the volumes of trial records indicated and to contrast the testimony given at the two trials.

[165] Richtlinien für die Behandlung politischer Kommissare, signed by General Walter Warlimont for the OKW. Document No. 12 in Anatomie des SS-Staates, Band II, p. 225-226. This document is actually just one of a series of similar directives issued before and during the invasion of the Soviet Union. The other key documents are also published in this work.

[166] Document No. 11 in Anatomie des SS-Staates, Band II, p. 223. In this anti-Revisionist publication, The Holocaust and the Neo-Nazi Mythomania, the word Jews in this document has been changed so that it now reads the Jews (p. 48). This makes the document appear to be a directive against all Jews, as opposed to just Jewish Bolsheviks. Cf. Keitel's similarly-worded directive of September 12, 1941: Juden in den besetzten Ostgebieten; Document No. 27, in Anatomie des SS-Staates, Band II, p. 250. Again, the context is the ideological struggle against Bolshevism and not the racial struggle against the Jews.

[167] Quoted in ibid., pp. 364

[168] A.G. Peterson and B. F. Smith, Heinrich Himmler: Geheimreden 1933 bis 1945 (Berlin: Propyläen, 1974), p. 201. Quoted in Stäglich, p. 72-73. Himmler's comments in Weimar may help to explain what he meant in his often-cited Posen speech of October 4, 1943 (Document 1919-PS)

[169] The records of this conference are in the National Archives (Washington), RG 242, T-175, R69. For an orthodox interpretation of Himmler's comments to Mussolini, cf. H. Krausnick, Himmler über seinen Besuch bei Mussolini vom 11-14 Okt. 1942, Vierteljahreshefte für Zeitgeschichte 4 (1956), esp. pp. 425-426

[170] Cf. NMT, Volume IV, pp. 427-430

[171] See above, page 120, n. 120

[172] R. Paget, Manstein: His Campaigns and His Trial (London: Collins, 1951), pp. 168-173

[173] SZTR, 33-9355, 9356; 34-9472

[174] The relevant Einsatzgruppen reports give an improbable but certainly not impossible death figure of 33,771. The exaggerated nature of many of these reports prevents us accepting this figure at face value, especially as there is no reliable corroborating evidence of a statistical nature. After the war Paul Blobel, the commander of Einsatzkommando 4a, which committed the atrocity, testified that the figure could not have been more than 16,000.

[175] Butz, The Hoax, […]