Arthur R. Butz archive

Trials and Doubts

The war crimes trials, which the victors in World War II conducted, mainly of Germans but also of many Japanese, were precedent-shattering in their scope and in the explicitness of the victorious powers’ claims to some sort of legal jurisdiction in respect of laws or understandings, which did not exist at the time they were allegedly broken by the Axis powers. Thus, in disregard of European honor conventions, which had been respected for centuries, German civilian and military prisoners, many of the highest rank, met violent deaths while in Allied captivity as a supposed consequence of these extraordinary proceedings.

Nothing resembling the trials of 1945–1949, which were conducted by the wartime enemies of Germany, has ever occurred before. The case of Joan of Arc comes to mind, but that involved a solitary prisoner, not an entire state, and the English who were, in the last analysis, responsible for the trial did everything to make the issue appear to be one of heresy and witchcraft, already formally proscribed, to be decided by an impartial and universal church according to pre-existing rules of evidence and procedure.

In the United States, the real progenitor of the trials, opinion on the appropriateness of having conducted such trials has always been divided, but the balance has varied. In the immediate post-war period, opinion generally favored the trials with, however, some significant voices in opposition. In the middle of the heated election campaign of 1946, just before the major Nazis Göring, Ribbentrop et al. were to be hanged, Senator Robert A. Taft delivered a speech attacking both the legal basis for the trials and the sentences which had been imposed; his speech seems to have hurt his Republican Party in those elections.

A decade later, views had evidently changed somewhat, since at that time the then obvious presidential candidate John F. Kennedy published a book, Profiles in Courage (a survey of various people whom Senator 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.^[1]

With the Eichmann abduction in 1960 and subsequent trial and with the associated later publicity, opinion seemed to move again, however slowly, toward approval of the trials. Many reasons may be offered for this extraordinary reversal, but it seems to me that what had happened was that in a peacetime, generally non-hysterical atmosphere the world’s attention had been focused on one tale of a peculiarly macabre sort: the killing, mainly in gas chambers, of several (usual figure, six) million Jews of all ages and conditions by the Nazis during the war, as part of a program of ridding Europe of Jewry. Gerald Reitlinger’s The Final Solution, 2nd edition (1968), is generally accepted as the most detailed and useful presentation of this claim, and Raul Hilberg’s The Destruction of the European Jews (1961) tells essentially the same story. Other writings are Nora Levin’s The Holocaust (1968), several books by Léon Poliakov, and The War Against the Jews, 1933–1945, by Lucy S. Dawidowicz (1975).

Returning to the problem of the appropriateness of the war crimes trials, everybody would agree as to the (at least) shaky legal foundations of the trials, but apparently many people would go along with the claim that the trials were appropriate anyway because normal wartime excesses were not involved; the extraordinary nature of the crime, the extermination of the European Jews, called for extraordinary proceedings. Such cruelty must not only be punished but documented as well, the argument goes.

I do not propose in this book to settle the question of what degree of cruelty justifies what degree of legal irregularity. Rather, a rarely heard point, which is at least relevant to the debate, is insisted upon here: It is a fact that without the evidence generated at these trials, there would be no significant evidence that the program of killing Jews ever existed at all. One has only to examine the sources employed by Hilberg and by Reitlinger to see this. If the trials had not been held, a person claiming the existence of the extermination program could not, if challenged, produce any evidence for this, save a few books (not including Hilberg or Reitlinger) whose claims are just as unsupported as his original claim. Thus, the problem that had been involved in deciding whether or not to hold trials on the Jewish extermination aspect was not a simple question of whether or not to try mass murder; unlike the usual murder case there was legitimate and very solid doubt that the deed had been committed at all.

This may surprise the reader who regards the tale of Jewish extermination as a near certainty; such is simply not the case. There are many considerations supporting this view, and some are so simple that they may surprise the reader even further. The simplest valid reason for being skeptical about the extermination claim is also the simplest conceivable reason: at the end of the war, they were still there.

This must be qualified only slightly. Consider a West European observer, who had been familiar with the status of European Jewry prior to the war, making a survey of West European Jewry in, say, late 1946 (East European Jewry was out of bounds). He would have found Italian, French, Belgian, and Danish Jewry essentially unscratched (these points will be discussed more fully in later chapters). On the other hand, he would have found that large numbers of Jews, possibly majorities, were missing from Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and Czechoslovakia (then accessible from the West). German-Austrian Jewry was confused because, although most had emigrated before the war, it was difficult to be precise about what numbers had emigrated to where. In any case, large numbers, possibly majorities, of those who had remained were no longer resident in their former homes.

However, the absences were offset by the obvious fact that displaced persons’ camps in Germany were full of Jews (a figure of more than 250,000 has been given^[2]) and that many European Jews had emigrated to the U.S. or Palestine or elsewhere since the beginning of the war. The facts available to the West European observer in late 1946 argued very strongly against the extermination claims, which had received such wide publicity during the war and at the recent trial at Nuremberg.

The passage of a quarter of a century has, despite superficial developments, gradually strengthened this view of the extermination tale, although for many years there was only one serious writer in the field, the late French geographer Paul Rassinier. In 1948, he published a book, Passage de la Ligne, on his experiences as a left wing political prisoner at Buchenwald, 1943–1945, generally received with sympathy, provoking only muffled and inconclusive gnashings of teeth on a certain side.^[3]

In 1955, the two books were combined as Le Mensonge d’Ulysse, 2^nd edition, in which material increasingly critical of the gas chamber claim had been added. The most common (but not very common) edition today is the fifth (referenced here), published in 1961, in which year Rassinier also published a short complementary volume, Ulysse Trahi par les Siens, consisting of three essays showing that he had moved rather strongly in the direction of a negative judgment on the gas chambers; the last essay is the text of a speech given in several German and Austrian cities in the early spring of 1960 (just before the Eichmann affair). In 1962 followed Le Véritable Procès Eichmann (The Real Eichmann Trial), a study of the entire range of alleged German crimes in their historical and political contexts; by this time, he had reached a definitive conclusion on the tale of extermination of the Jews: a historic lie: the most tragic and the most macabre imposture of all time.^[5]

Rassinier employed two basic approaches to reach this conclusion: the material and the demographic.

By the material approach we mean the analysis of the evidence that mass executions of Jews by gassings or other specific means were in fact conducted by the Germans during World War II. The material approach is nearly synonymous with analysis of the war crimes trials evidence, or of the trials evidence as interpreted by Hilberg and by Reitlinger, and as supplemented by them with similar evidence. Rassinier only tentatively explored the demographic approach in Le Véritable Procès Eichmann, but in his final general work on the Jewish extermination problem, Le Drame des Juifs Européens (The Drama of the European Jews), 1964, he presented a lengthy analysis of the question from a demographic point of view. In 1965, he published L’Opération Vicaire, a critique of Rolf Hochhuth’s play The Deputy. One must comment that it is necessary to check up on Rassinier in his interpretation of sources; some do not check out, and, in addition, he employs some clearly unreliable sources at a few points. There are also some glaring but relatively irrelevant errors of fact, such as characterizing Hanson Baldwin as The New York Times’ expert in matters of Jewish population (it is doubtful that the Times ever had a staff member who could be characterized thus) and in asserting that the majority of American Jews are anti-Zionist and support the outlook of the anti-Zionist American Council for Judaism (which was never a politically significant organization). However, Rassinier was a courageous pioneer in an ignored area and, despite the various shortcomings of his work, no fair minded person could read it without becoming at least skeptical about the exterminations. Rassinier passed away in July 1967. His books had appeared in German, Spanish, and Italian translations, but no English translation was published for some years.^[6]

Rassinier’s books were followed by three books, which Josef Ginsburg published under the pseudonym J. G. Burg: Schuld und Schicksal (Guilt and Fate), 1962, Sündenböcke (Scapegoats), 1967, and NS-Verbrechen (National Socialist Crimes), 1968.^[7] Ginsburg’s books are not particularly well researched, since his views are based mainly on what he had read in the newspapers plus his personal experiences as a Jew who, together with his family, was deported during the war to occupied eastern territory by the Nazis and the Romanians. After the war, Ginsburg took his family to Israel, but he eventually became very anti-Zionist and moved back to Europe, eventually setting up a bookbindery in Munich. While he believes that many Jews perished as a result of the combined effects of Nazi policies and wartime conditions, he denies that the German government ever contemplated the extermination of the Jews of Europe, and he is particularly scornful of the six million figure. He is unsure of the existence of gas chambers, but he believes that many Jews perished on account of epidemics, pogroms, air raids, and executions of partisans and offers an estimate of about three million as the maximum possible number of victims, although he believes the correct figure is much lower. As a reward for his efforts to get at the truth, Ginsburg, a small man and not young, was beaten up by Jewish thugs while visiting his wife’s grave in the Israelite cemetery in Munich.^[8]

[Editor’s Note: In this context the seven-volume work Die Geschichte der Verfemung Deutschlands (The History of Germany’s Defamation) by the Vienna author Franz J. Scheidl ought to be mentioned, which was self-published in 1967/68. It was disseminated only in small numbers and is not widely known today even among revisionists. The work has a wide scope reaching from atrocity propaganda during World War I (vol. 1) to the injustice done to Germany and the German people after World War II (vols. 6 & 7). Especially volumes 3 to 5 tackle the orthodox Holocaust narrative head-on. A large part of Scheidl’s work consists of quotes from more or less revisionist writings which appeared earlier. It offers only little new material based on the author’s own research. Scheidl is moreover rather polemical at times and does not cite his sources properly in all cases. The value of this work lies primarily in its encyclopedic presentation of revisionist knowledge as it existed in the mid-1960s.]

In 1969, a short book was published in the United States, The Myth of the Six Million, attributed to an anonymous author.^[9] While some things can be said in favor of this book, e.g. I learned of Rassinier there, it also contains so many errors of fact that it illustrates that it is not enough that a book’s thesis be correct, for quite a few people who used it as a basis for prosecuting public controversy got burned as a result.

The next development was the publication in Germany of a book by Emil Aretz, Hexen-Einmal-Eins einer Lüge (The Witches’ Multiplication Table of a Lie), of which only the third edition, Munich, 1973, seems to have attained significant circulation. Aretz carries the case against the exterminations only slightly beyond Rassinier. He depends heavily on Rassinier in this respect, although he provides some new material. A major function of his book is the presentation of a remarkably bold and forthright general defense of the German nation.

The unreasonable continuation of war crimes trials in West Germany and the absence of any statute of limitations with respect to alleged war crimes by Germans have had a seldomly remarked implication: people who were there have been afraid to come forward and report what, to their knowledge, actually happened. They would rather not call attention to the fact that they were there. However, it was inevitable that a few courageous individuals would come forward nevertheless. The most important of these, to date, has been Thies Christophersen, author of the booklet Die Auschwitz Lüge (The Auschwitz Lie). Christophersen was at Auschwitz from January to December 1944. In 1973, he published his recollections and his firm view that no exterminations ever took place there. An English translation of Christophersen’s booklet, to which some colorful announcements had been added, was published in 1974. Christophersen was followed by Dr. Wilhelm Stäglich, a retired Hamburg judge, who had been assigned to an anti-aircraft unit near Auschwitz during 1944 and had visited the camp on a few occasions. For such honest reporting of his recollections, Stäglich was punished with a five year, twenty percent reduction of his pension.^[10]

In late 1973, Austin J. App, a retired English professor in Maryland, published a short booklet, The Six Million Swindle. Early in 1974, Wolf Dieter Rothe published the first volume of his study, Die Endlösung der Judenfrage, and later in 1974, Richard Harwood published in England his book, Did Six Million Really Die? Harwood’s booklet is quite good in convincing power, although it has some weak points, and the reader is referred to Rassinier for a definitive treatment of the subject. It was favorably reviewed by Colin Wilson in the November 1974 issue of the influential British monthly Books and Bookmen, setting off a months-long controversy in the pages of that journal.^[11]

In early 1975, Harry Elmer Barnes’ translation of one of Rassinier’s books, The Drama of the European Jews, was issued by a small publisher in the United States.

How Many Jews?

In this introductory chapter, we quickly review the principal problems that arise when demographic questions are asked. We then indicate, how demographic problems are resolved in this book, but indicate that the specific task of resolution must be deferred until later in the book.

The problems inherent in a demographic study are formidable. First, all sources of post-war primary data are private Jewish or Communist sources (exclusively the latter in the all important cases of Russia and Poland). Second, it appears that one can get whatever results desired by consulting the appropriately selected pre-war and post-war sources. Consider world Jewish population. The 1939 study of Arthur Ruppin, Professor of Jewish Sociology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, gave 16,717,000 Jews in the world in 1938.^[12] Because Ruppin (who passed away in 1943) was considered the foremost expert on such matters, on account of many writings on the subject over a period of many years, the estimates of other pre-war sources tend to agree with him. Thus, the American Jewish Committee estimate for 1933, which appears in the 1940 World Almanac, was 15,315,359. The World Almanac figure for 1945 is 15,192,089 (page 367); no source is given, but the figure is apparently based on some sort of religious census. The 1946 World Almanac revised this to 15,753,638, a figure which was retained in the editions of 1947 (page 748), 1948 (page 572), and 1949 (page 289). The 1948 World Almanac (page 249) also gives the American Jewish Committee estimate for 1938 (sic), 15,688,259 while the 1949 World Almanac (page 204) reports new figures from the American Jewish Committee, which were developed in 1947–1948: 16,643,120 in 1939 and 11,266,600 in 1947.

However, The New York Times military expert Hanson Baldwin, in an article written in 1948 dealing with the then forthcoming Arab-Jewish war on the basis of information available at the UN and other places, gave a figure of 15 to 18 million world Jewish population as well as figures for such things as Jews in Palestine, Jews in the Middle East, Arabs in Palestine, total Arabs, total Moslems, etc.^[13]

Such a sketch illustrates some of the simpler uncertainties that exist in a demography study. To carry the matter further, the 11–12 million postwar world Jewish population figure, which it is necessary to claim in order to maintain the extermination thesis, is very vulnerable on two points. The first is the set of statistics offered for the U.S., and the second is the set offered for Eastern Europe. Both, especially the latter, are subject to insuperable uncertainties. Let us first consider the United States. Census figures for the total U.S. population are:^[14]

while U.S. Jewish population figures, as given by the Jewish Statistical Bureau (subsidiary of either the American Jewish Conference or the Synagogue of America), H. S. Linfield, Director, are:^[15]

It is important to note that all of the U.S. Jewish population figures are given by the same source (Linfield).

The indicated growth of U.S. Jewish population, 1917–1937, is 40.8%, while the growth of total U.S. population, 1920–1940, is 24.6%. This contrast is generally reasonable, since in the period under consideration Jewish immigration was fairly heavy. However, Jewish immigration into the U.S. raises some problems of its own. The American Jewish yearbook gave a net Jewish immigration for the years 1938–1943 and 1946–1949 (inclusive) of 232,191.^[16] Figures for 1944 and 1945 do not seem to be available. It was in those two years, incidentally, that an indeterminate number of Jews were admitted to the U.S. outside of the regular immigration procedure. It was claimed that there were only 1,000 such Jews quartered at a camp near Oswego, New York, and that they were not eligible for admission to the U.S. This was supposed to be a U.S. contribution to relieving the problems of refugees, but the whole episode seems most strange and suspicious.^[17]

Rather than attempt to settle the problem of the extent of Jewish immigration, suppose one allows the Jewish population a growth rate in 1937–1957 at least equal to that of the U.S. Jewish population of 1917–1937, as seems at least reasonable in view of various facts, e.g., the reasons which sent 1.5 million Jews to Palestine during the World War II and aftermath period appear to motivate immigration to the U.S. just as well, and no national or racial immigration quotas were applicable to Jews as such. In such a case, there should be at least 6,678,000 Jews in the U.S. in 1957, not the 5,300,000 that are indicated. There are about 1,400,000 Jews missing from the interpolated figures for 1957, and we consider this a conservative figure for the reason given. The period 1937–1957 was one of Jewish movement on an unprecedented scale.

On the other hand, we can adopt an equally conservative approach and assume that the 4,770,647 Jews of 1937 grew in 1937–1957 at the same rate as the U.S. population in 1940–1960. Under this assumption, these should have become 6,500,000 Jews in the U.S. in 1957. If one adds the reasonable figure of 300,000 more due to immigration, we have 6,800,000 in 1957. Thus, by either method of extrapolation the figures offered for post-war U.S. Jewish population are at least approximately 1.5 million short for 1957.

The specific major fault of the U.S. Jewish population figures is the inexplicably small claimed growth from 1937 to 1949 despite record Jewish movement and a very open U.S. immigration policy.

Eastern Europe, however, presents the core of the demographic problem. In order to avoid very serious confusion, one must first recognize that there have been extensive border changes in Eastern Europe in the course of the twentieth century. A map of Europe on the eve of World War I (1914) is given as Fig. 1. A map for January 1938 showing, essentially, Europe organized according to the Treaty of Versailles, before Hitler began territorial acquisitions, is given in Fig. 2, and Fig. 4 shows the post-war map of Europe. The principal border change at the end of World War II was the moving westward of the Soviet border, annexing the three Baltic countries (Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia) and parts of Romania, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and East Prussia. Poland was compensated with the remainder of East Prussia and what used to be considered eastern Germany; the effect was to move Poland bodily westward.

Pre-war (1938) Jewish population estimates for Eastern Europe were offered by H. S. Linfield and the American Jewish Committee in the 1948 (sic) World Almanac (page 249). Post-war (1948) figures are published in the 1949 World Almanac (page 204).

The claimed Jewish loss for Eastern Europe is thus 4,985,912. The figure for the USSR includes, in both cases, the three Baltic countries and the Jews of Soviet Asia. The pre-war figures are in all cases in close agreement with the figures that Ruppin published shortly before the war. To the extent that the extermination legend is based on population statistics, it is based precisely on these statistics or their equivalents.

The trouble is that such figures are absolutely meaningless. There is no way a Western observer can check the plausibility, let alone the accuracy, of such figures. He must either be willing to accept Jewish or Communist (mainly the latter) claims on Jewish population for Eastern Europe, or he must reject any number offered as lacking satisfactory authority.

It is possible to reinforce our objection on this all important point and simultaneously deal with a reservation that the reader may have; it would appear excessively brazen to claim the virtual disappearance of Polish Jewry, if such had not been essentially or approximately the case or if something like that had not happened. This seems a valid reservation, but one must recall that much of the territory that was considered Polish in 1939 was Soviet by 1945. It was possible for Polish Jewry to virtually disappear, if, during the 1939–1941 Russian occupation of Eastern Poland, the Soviets had dispersed large numbers of Polish Jews into the Soviet Union and if, during 1941–1944, the Germans had concentrated Polish Jews eastwards, with the Soviet Union ultimately absorbing many of these Jews into its territory, with those who did not wish to remain in the Soviet Union emigrating, mainly to Palestine and the U.S., but also to some extent to the new Poland and other lands. This, in fact, is what happened to the Jews who had resided in Poland before the war.

Whatever may be said about Soviet Jewish policy after, say, 1950, it is clear that the earlier policies had not been anti-Jewish and had encouraged the absorption of Jews into the Soviet Union. It is known that many Polish Jews were absorbed during and immediately after the war, but of course numbers are difficult to arrive at. Reitlinger considers this problem and settles on a figure of 700,000, without giving reasons why the correct figure might not be much higher. He then notes that the evidence that he employs of extermination of Jews in Russia (documents alleged to be German) indicates about the same number of Soviet Jews exterminated, from which he correctly infers that, in the period 1939–1946, the Soviet Jewish population may have actually increased.^[18] This important concession, coming from the author of The Final Solution, shows that our unwillingness to accept the Communist figures need not be regarded as motivated merely by the necessities of our thesis. The figures are inarguably untrustworthy. It is claimed by the Soviets that their Jewish population declined by 38%, despite the acquisition of territory containing many Jews. Since the USSR is one of the lands where Jew is a legally recognized nationality, the Soviets do indeed possess accurate figures on the number of Jews they have but have chosen (in Reitlinger’s opinion, if you choose not to accept this author’s) to claim an utterly mythical Jewish population loss of 38%.

Likewise with the value to be attached to the remainder of the figures offered.

The most relevant research by a demographer appears to be that of Leszek A. Kosinski of the University of Alberta (Geographical Review, Vol. 59, 1969, pp. 308–402 and Canadian Slavonic Papers, Vol. 11, 1969, pp. 357–373), who has studied the changes in the entire ethnic structure of East Central Europe (i.e. excluding Germany and Russia) over the period 1930–1960. He explains the extreme difficulties with basic statistics:

The criteria used in compilation differ from country to country and are not always precise. In principle, two types are used: objective criteria, such as language, cultural affiliation, and religious denomination, and subjective criteria, based on the declaration of the persons themselves. Each type has virtues and deficiencies. Objective criteria define nationality only indirectly and are difficult to apply in marginal cases (for example, bilingual persons).

The same criticism applies even more to subjective criteria. External pressure and opportunism can influence the results, especially where national consciousness is not fully developed or where an honest answer can bring undesirable consequences. Official data are not always reliable, then, even when they are not forged, as has also occurred. However, criticism of the official data cannot be applied in the same degree to all the countries, and reliability is very much a function of national policy.

Jews are of course one of the groups Kosinski is interested in, and he presents various figures, generally comparable to those given above, for numbers of pre-war Jews. However, his post-war data are so useless from this point of view that he does not even attempt to offer specific post-war numbers for Jews, although he offers post-war figures for other groups, e.g. gypsies, giving numbers less significant, statistically, than the numbers of Jews who, according to the extermination mythologists, survived in Eastern Europe. It is true that he accepts the extermination legend in a general way and presents a bar graph showing a catastrophic decrease in the Jewish populations of Poland, Hungary, Romania and Czechoslovakia. He also remarks that the combined war-caused population losses for Yugoslavs, Jews, Poles and east Germans was about 12.5–14 million, not breaking the total down, and referring the reader to the statistical summary Population Changes in Europe Since 1939 by Gregory (Grzegorz) Frumkin, whose figures for Jews come from the American Jewish Congress, the Zionist Organization of America, and the Centre de Documentation juive contemporaine (Center for Contemporary Jewish Documentation) in Paris.

However, the point is that Kosinski arrives at no figures for Jews, as he obviously should not, given the problems he has noted. The ethnic population figures from Communist Hungary are based on language, and the figures from Communist Poland, Communist Czechoslovakia, and Communist Romania are based on nationality, whatever that means in the various cases. Naturally, he apologizes for his use of official statistics, imperfect as these may be. We will return to demographic problems, especially those which involve the Polish Jews, in Chapter 7.

We must also remember that the problem of counting Jews in Western countries contains enormous difficulties on account of the lack of any legal, racial, or religious basis for defining a Jew. As an example, the statistics available to Reitlinger indicate to him that early in World War II there were 300,000 Jews in France, including refugee German Jews.^[19]

The Nazis, on the other hand, thought that there were 865,000, and I see no motivation for deliberate inflation of this figure; other figures used by the Nazis were not wildly inflated compared to the figures of other sources.^[20] I should add that I really have no idea how many Jews there are in the U.S. I can consult the World Almanac, which will tell me that there are about 6,000,000, but I cannot see how that figure was arrived at and have little confidence in it. As far as I know, the correct figure could as easily be 9,000,000. There must be at least 4,000,000 in the New York area alone.

To summarize what has been said with respect to Jewish population statistics: the problem of compiling such statistics is formidable even without political interference or pressure. Moreover, in the demographic argument for a five or six million drop in world Jewish population, the sources and authorities for the figures used are Communist and Jewish and thus, by the nature of the problem we are examining, must be considered essentially useless. In addition, the post-war figures for the United States are demonstrably too low by a significant amount.

One should not form the impression that it is essential to my argument that any demographic conclusions seemed to be reached above be accepted by the reader. It has only been shown what sorts of problems arise if one attempts a too direct demographic approach; it is not possible to settle anything in such a manner. In the final analysis, the difficulty is that the figures available amount to nothing more than statements, from Jewish and Communist sources, that millions of Jews were killed. Such claims are to be expected, but they must certainly not deter us from looking deeper. We will take up the demographic problem later in the book, however, because the nature of the situation is such that reasonably useful demographic conclusions are possible once it is understood what, in general, happened to the Jews.

Rassinier’s demographic study, in fact, does not really even attempt to settle the problem, strictly speaking. His basic approach is to analyze the inferences that have been drawn from two different sets of data, that of the Centre de Documentation juive contemporaine and that of Hilberg, both of whom infer from their data five to six million Jewish victims of the Nazis. Rassinier’s conclusion is that the former can only claim 1,485,292 victims form its data and the latter 896,892.^[21] Rassinier accepts the reality of about a million Jewish victims of Nazi policies, while rejecting the claims of extermination. For example, it is known that some East European peoples took advantage of general political-military conditions to persecute Jews. Also, many Jews who were deported from their homes no doubt perished as a result of generally chaotic conditions, which accompanied the latter part of the war.

Believing that the task is not possible, I will offer here no definite estimate of Jewish losses. However, I have no strong reason to quarrel with Rassinier’s estimate.^[22]

Our Method, Argument, and Conclusion

As stated, the material approach will be extended here and, in addition, a historical-political approach will be introduced. This is just a fancy way of saying that we will grasp that there are two political powers involved in the problem, not just one. That is to say, we have a tale of extermination, and we should inquire into the circumstance of its generation. Clearly, there are two states involved in the problem. Germany had an anti-Jewish policy involving, in many cases, deportations of Jews from their homes and countries of citizenship. That is certain. The wartime policy of Washington was to claim extermination, and the post-war policy was to hold trials, at which there was generated the only evidence that we have today that these wartime claims had any foundation. That is also certain. The policies of both states are necessarily of interest, and if there is any respect, in which this book may be breaking fundamentally new ground on the problem, it is in its insistence in seeing Washington as an active agent in the generation of the story. Thus, we are interested not only in what Hitler, Himmler, Göring, Goebbels, and Heydrich were doing during the war in regard to these matters, but also what Roosevelt, Hull, Morgenthau, and The New York Times and associated media were doing during the war, and what the various tribunals controlled or dominated by Washington did after the war. This is not only a fair but, more importantly, an illuminating historical approach.

The conclusion is that Washington constructed a frame-up on the Jewish extermination charge. Once this is recognized, the true nature of German Jewish policy will be seen.

The War Crimes Trials

Before we review the details of the story, it should be pointed out that there are excellent a priori grounds for expecting a frame-up. There is of course the very general argument that political enmity of a magnitude to bring on armed conflict between two states necessarily excludes the impartiality on the part of one of them, which is a necessity for a fair trial and for which there exists no substitute. The judges had pursued political careers in the contexts of the internal politics of the Allied powers hostile to Germany and after the trials would, assuming they had not done anything highly improbable at the war crimes trials, return to these careers. They had, in addition, for several years heard only the anti-German viewpoint. In sitting on the military tribunals, they were ad hoc political appointees. Such considerations exclude approximate impartiality.

There are, however, much more specific reasons for expecting a frame-up. In order to see this, it is only necessary to consider the easily obtainable facts concerning the various tribunals involved.

First, there was the big trial conducted by the International Military Tribunal (IMT) at Nuremberg immediately after the war. This was the trial of the top Nazis Göring, Hess, Ribbentrop, et al., which ran from November 1945 to October 1946. The judges and prosecutors were American, British, French, and Russian. As with all military tribunals, there was no jury. There were three acquittals, seven prison sentences, and eleven death sentences. The latter were carried out almost immediately after the trial, except that Göring escaped the noose by swallowing a potassium cyanide capsule just before the hangings. It was never determined where Göring had obtained the poison or how he had managed to hide it for any length of time. A unique sequel to this episode was that the first Nuremberg prison psychiatrist, Dr. Douglas M. Kelley, a leader in the treatment of psychiatric disorders with drugs, shortly later published a book on his experiences at Nuremberg, giving Göring and Göring’s last act a laudatory treatment:^[23]

He stoically endured his long imprisonment that he might force down the Allied Tribunal and browbeat the prosecuting lawyers on their own terms. […] His suicide […] was a skillful, even brilliant, finishing touch, completing the edifice for Germans to admire in time to come. […] History may well show that Göring won out at the end, even though condemned by the high court of the Allied powers.

A decade later, Dr. Kelley followed Göring by taking one of several potassium cyanide capsules which he possessed, said to be souvenirs taken off Göring’s body.^[24]

The IMT trial was the only one that received very great attention. It was important in the sense that the Allied powers committed themselves to a specific version of the extermination claim, but there was little evidence presented of any substantial nature relative to Jewish extermination; it was almost entirely testimony and affidavits, not at all difficult for the victorious powers to produce under the circumstance. The only relative merit of the IMT trial, for our purposes, is that the complete transcript and a reasonably complete selection of the documents put into evidence are readily available in numerous libraries as a 42 volume set with a very complete subject and name index (see References).

From 1946 to 1949 a series of twelve superficially less important trials were held by the Americans before what is here called the Nuremberg Military Tribunal (NMT). They are referred to variously according to the case number, the major defendant, or a more descriptive title, see Table 4.

Several death sentences resulted from these trials, but the great majority received prison sentences, in many cases rather lengthy ones. However, almost all were free by the early Fifties.

The only cases among these that will concern us here in any way are Case 1, a trial of medical personnel involved in euthanasia and medical experiments, Case 4, a trial of concentration camp administration, Cases 6 and 10, self explanatory, Case 8, dealing with German resettlement policies, Case 9 (the Einsatzgruppen were used for rear security in the east) and Case 11, a trial of officials of various ministries. The U.S. Government published a fifteen volume set of books, referred to here as the NMT set, in which may be found summaries of the cases, along with very limited selections of the documents put into evidence. The volume numbers corresponding to the various cases are listed in the above table.

On this point, the student encounters a significant difficulty because, as can be seen by consulting Hilberg and Reitlinger, almost all the evidence for the extermination claim was developed at the NMT, not the IMT. That is to say the important documents, those which, for better or for worse, constitute major source material for writing any history of Nazi Germany, are those of the NG, NI and NO series, and these documents were put into evidence at the NMT trials. Documentary evidence is, especially in view of the irregular legal and political circumstances which prevailed, immeasurably more weighty than testimony, as has been suggested. The relevant documentary evidence generated at the NMT consists of certain kinds of material allegedly supporting the extermination charges: documents dealing with concentration camp administration, with crematory construction, with deportations, with certain Farben and Krupp operations which employed prisoner labor, with general Jewish policies of the German Government, etc. There is of course no direct documentary evidence for an extermination program. As Dr. Kubovy of the Center for Jewish Documentation in Tel-Aviv admitted in 1960:^[25]

there exists no document signed by Hitler, Himmler, or Heydrich speaking of exterminating the Jews and […] the word extermination does not appear in the letter from Göring to Heydrich concerning the final solution of the Jewish question.

The difficulty for the normally circumstanced person is that only small fractions of the NMT testimonies and documents are widely accessible in English translations (in the fifteen volume NMT set). Additionally, these translations cannot always be trusted, as will be seen. Also, the extracts which are published have been selected by unknown criteria.

Finally, the fifteen volume NMT set is likely to be found only in cities of moderately large size.^[26]

The situation is better if one lives in a very large city, since reasonably complete collections of documents together with the mimeographed trial transcripts (almost always in German) exist in certain library centers. However, the normally circumstanced person may encounter trouble in arranging to examine specific pieces, which he may call for, and in some cases general browsing even by university faculty is not welcome. In addition, no subject or name indexes exist for the NMT trials (indexes of testimonies of witnesses, with many errors, appear in the NMT volumes).

The IMT and NMT trials are almost the only ones of significance here. Of general significance are a series held by the British; of these, only the Belsen case and the Zyklon B case interests us to any extent. The Poles, Russians, French, Dutch, and Italians have all held trials of no significance except to the victims. The Bonn Government has held some trials of slight interest, for example the Auschwitz trial of 1963–1965, reported on by Langbein, by Laternser, and by Naumann.

The manner, in which the IMT and the NMT were constituted, can be set forth with sufficient completeness for our purposes. Since the autumn of 1943, there had been in existence a United Nations War Crimes Commission, headquartered in London. However, the Commission never really did anything except realize, at one point, that if anything was to be done, it would be done by the individual Allied governments.

The first serious moves started in the United States. In August 1944, the Joint Chiefs of Staff considered a proposed program for dealing with war crimes. The proposal had been approved by the Judge Advocate General of the U.S. Army. On October 1, 1944, the Joint Chiefs approved this proposal and, at about the same time and in accordance with directives of the Secretary of War, a War Crimes Branch was established in the Department of the Judge Advocate General. The War Crimes Branch, headed by Brigadier General John M. Weir with Colonel Melvin Purvis as his assistant, was responsible for handling all war crimes matters for the State, War, and Navy Departments.

The proposal that had been approved by the Joint Chiefs did not survive for very long, for its character had been rather traditional, in that it contemplated, basically, the trial of persons who had broken the accepted laws of war in the field. Thus, offenses committed before the war or acts by enemy authorities against their own nationals were not considered to be under Allied jurisdiction. Thus, for example, all measures against German Jews were considered outside the jurisdiction of the planned war crimes trials. The concept of war crimes was, at this point, strongly under the influence of the principle, never questioned, that a belligerent may try enemy soldiers for the same sorts of offenses for which he may try his own soldiers.

The Secretary of War, Stimson, had a conference with President Roosevelt on November 21, 1944, at which Roosevelt made it clear that he had in mind a much broader idea of war crimes and that the proposals approved by the Joint Chiefs were completely unsatisfactory.

Accordingly, in January 1945, Roosevelt designated Judge Samuel Rosenman as his personal representative in discussions on war crimes problems. A meeting of January 18, among Stimson, Rosenman, Attorney General Francis Biddle, and others resulted in general agreement on very much expanded conceptions of war crimes to be tried.^[27]

Biddle was later to sit as a judge at the IMT, although, for Roosevelt’s use at the Yalta conference, he had written in January 1945 that the chief German leaders are well known and the proof of their guilt will not offer great difficulties. The Russian IMT Justice Nikitchenko was slightly more direct in declaring before the trial that we are dealing here with the chief war criminals who have already been convicted.^[28]

In early May 1945, President Truman approved the revised proposals and appointed Robert H. Jackson, an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, to act as Chief of Counsel for the U.S. in the forthcoming trial and also to represent the U.S. in negotiations with foreign governments relative to constituting the trial. On June 6, 1945, Jackson made an interim report to the President, and later in June, Jackson and his staff set up headquarters in London, where much of the preliminary work for the IMT was done.

A key member of Jackson’s London staff was Colonel Murray C. Bernays, who was one of the first people who had been involved in war crimes problems. Graduated from Harvard in 1915, he established a law practice in New York. He was given a commission in the Army in 1942, and in October 1943, he was made chief of the Special Projects Branch, Personnel Division, Army General Staff. His major project in this position was the preparation of plans for trials of German war criminals. After each stage of negotiations with the White House and others, he made the appropriate revisions in the plans being considered, although he was the author of the plan that was eventually settled on, if one is to credit his account. In any case, shortly after the appointment of Jackson, Bernays was awarded the Legion of Merit, the citation reading in part:

Early recognizing the need for a sound basis in dealing with the problem of war criminals and war crimes, he formulated the basic concept of such a policy and initiated timely and appropriate action which assured its adoption as the foundation of national policy.

Bernays returned to the U.S. in November 1945 and immediately resigned from the Army. Because, as we have seen, there was considerable dialogue at higher levels relating to plans for war crimes trials, it is doubtful that one can take Bernays’s claims at full value, but he no doubt had a great deal to do with the drafting of the plans for the trials. Moreover, he had certainly been an appropriate choice for something as novel as the formulation of the legal structure for the war crimes trials, since his views of justice were equally novel. After his return to the U.S., he had a chat with some editors (who characterized him as the man behind the gavel), and in answer to their queries as to how the small fry are going to be hooked, he replied:^[29]

There are a good many Nazi criminals who will get off if the roundups aren’t conducted efficiently. But if we establish that the SS, for example, was a criminal organization, and that membership in it is evidence per se of criminality, the Allies are going to get hold of a great many more criminals in one swoop. You know, a lot of people here at home don’t realize that we are now the government of Germany in our zone and that no judicial system can exist other than one we approve. We are the law. If we wanted to, for instance, we could try Germans for crimes twenty, thirty, forty years old.

We’ll be too busy with the current crop of war criminals, though, to have much time to look into ancient wrongdoings.

In London, Jackson negotiated with the Allies on the trials, and his interim report of June 6 became the basis for the London Agreement of August 8, signed by the U.S., Britain, Russia, and France. An indictment was filed against twenty four individuals and six organizations (the SS, the General Staff, etc.) on October 18, and the trial opened at Nuremberg on November 20, 1945. Three of the listed defendants did not stand trial. Martin Bormann was never found, Robert Ley committed suicide before the trial, and Gustav Krupp was too ill and too old to stand trial. An attempt was made by the prosecution to substitute Krupp’s son as defendant, but this was too much even for that court, so the trial of Alfred Krupp had to wait until the NMT.

In passing we should note that Justice Jackson, in addition to being the American chief prosecutor at the trial, was also in a formal sense the leading personality in the London negotiations relative to the formulation of the legal system, under which he was to operate at the trial. A rare opportunity for a prosecutor, and probably an utterly unprecedented one in respect to proceedings that civilized people have seriously considered to be trials.

Equally unique features of the final charter of the IMT were that its jurisdiction was not restricted to acts taken in connection with the war but extended over the entire life of the Nazi Party, that the defense of superior orders was inapplicable, and that defendants could be compelled by the prosecution to testify.

The War Crimes Branch that had been set up in 1944 did not cease to operate, because in connection with the IMT trial Jackson had enlisted the cooperation and participation of the War Crimes Branch of the Judge Advocate General’s Department. Moreover, in the early months of the IMT trial (and perhaps also later), the ordinary prosecution staff, exclusive of Jackson, was on the payroll of the Judge Advocate General.^[30]

A significant role for the Judge Advocate General’s department (JAG) was most natural under the circumstances because the JAG was the legal agency of the Army, and the basic American administrative machinery in Germany immediately after the war was that of the U.S. Army. The traditional role of the JAG had been the administration of military justice: courts-martial and related matters. However, during World War II the operations of the JAG had spread to all phases of military activity where legal matters arose; it even got involved in litigations relative to war production contracts. The Judge Advocate General, Major General Myron C. Cramer, had given a speech in May 1945, in which he declared that the pursuit and arraignment of Nazis was to tax to the utmost the capacity of the War Crimes Branch and become a major activity of the JAG, whose resources he pledged to Jackson. While it is not specified exactly what the War Crimes Branch did in connection with the IMT, it is most likely that it effectively supervised the American (hence major) role in the screening and selection of prosecution and defense lawyers and staff, in the selection of other staff such as translators, and in interrogations. Of course, Jackson formally held much of this authority, but it is reasonably sure that such responsibilities were, in fact, exercised by the War Crimes Branch.^[31]

The involvement of the War Crimes Branch in trials was, however, much deeper.

While the IMT and NMT trials were being conducted, several lesser trials were taking place. Among these were the trials held at the Dachau camp (outside Munich and thus not far from Nuremberg) of the staffs of some concentration camps (Buchenwald, Flossenbürg, Dachau) that had been captured by the Americans and of those accused of killing 83 American prisoners at Malmédy during the Battle of the Bulge. These trials were supervised by the War Crimes Branch.^[32] They were perhaps the most shameful episodes in U.S. history.

The entire repertoire of third degree methods was enacted at Dachau: beatings and brutal kicking, to the point of ruining 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. Low rank prisoners were assured that convictions were being sought only against higher ranking officers and that they had absolutely nothing to lose by cooperating and making the desired statements. Such evidence was then used against them when they joined their superiors in the dock. The latter, on the other hand, had been told that by confessing they had taken all responsibility onto themselves, thereby shielding their men from trial. A favorite stratagem, 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 center, 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. Sometimes interrogators threatened to turn prisoners over to the Russians. In many cases the prisoner’s family was threatened with loss of ration cards or other hardships if cooperation was not obtained.

As distinct from the mock trials, the official trials were also an apparently deliberate mockery of any conception of due process. The mockery started with the indictment, which made only general reference to very broad categories of crimes allegedly committed in the years from 1942 to 1945 (in the cases of concentration camp personnel), and then proceeded to present a long list of defendants accused of being criminal in the extremely general sense stated. Specific crimes by specific people on specific dates were not part of the indictments (e.g. document 3590-PS).

In some cases, the defense counsel was an American with no legal training who could not speak German. Competent interpreters were not provided at the trial. The prosecution also lacked legal training, as did the court, which consisted of ten U.S. Army officers. There was one person with legal training present, all of whose rulings on the admissibility of evidence were final. There were 1,416 convictions out of 1,672 tried, with 420 death sentences.

While the prosecution could hunt all over Europe for witnesses and, if necessary, torture or otherwise coerce Germans in order to get evidence, the accused, cut off from the outside world and without funds, were rarely able to summon anybody to their defense.

In addition, the Association of Persons Persecuted by the Nazis, by a propaganda campaign, forbade former concentration camp inmates to testify for the defense.

The American lawyer George A. McDonough, who had had the rather peculiar experience of having served as both a prosecutor and defense counsel in the war crimes program and later on as a member of a reviewing board and an arbiter on clemency petitions, wrote to The New York Times in 1948 complaining about the lack of legal basis for the trials and remarking that in nine problems out of ten the authorities and the textbooks had no answer to the legal questions that regularly and consistently came up for anybody seriously concerned with matters of legality. For McDonough, the major problem was whether or not a defense of superior orders should be accepted in war crimes trials. He wrote:

At the Dachau trials, the claim of the accused that he would have been shot himself if he had not obeyed his superior’s order to commit an act which he, in ignorance, may have believed to be a legal order, or knew to be illegal, seemed to be handled by the courts as an issue of fact. The availability of this defense seemed to depend upon the age and the rank of the accused, and the state of battle existing at the time of the offense. Again it would seem high-handed procedure to hold an enlisted man to the knowledge of the illegality of a particular act when the international authorities themselves are in disagreement as to its illegality or have never defined the act at all.

[…] Hearsay evidence was admitted indiscriminately and sworn statements of the witnesses were admissible regardless of whether anybody knew the person who made the statement or the individual who took the statement. If a prosecutor considered a statement of a witness to be more damaging than the witness’ oral testimony in court he would advise the witness to go back to his home, submit the statement as evidence, and any objection by defense counsel would be promptly overruled.

One notable incident occurred when investigator Joseph Kirschbaum brought a certain Einstein into court to testify that the accused Menzel had murdered Einstein’s brother. When the accused was able to point out that the brother was alive and well and, in fact, sitting in court, Kirschbaum was deeply embarrassed and scolded poor Einstein:

How can we bring this pig to the gallows, if you are so stupid to bring your brother into court?

The U.S. Army authorities in charge admitted some of these things. When the chief of the Dachau War Crimes Branch, Colonel A. H. Rosenfeld, quit his post in 1948, he was asked by newspapermen if there was any truth to the stories about the mock trials, at which sham death sentences had been passed. He replied:^[33]

Yes, of course. We couldn’t have made those birds talk otherwise. […] It was a trick, and it worked like a charm.

The Malmédy defendants had had a competent defense attorney, Lieutenant Colonel Willis M. Everett, Jr. It was Everett’s repeated appeals to, among others, the U.S. Supreme Court, plus a chorus of protests from German clergymen and others, plus such details regarding what was going on that managed to get into the press by various routes, that persuaded the American military governor, General Lucius D. Clay, to request an investigation of the trials at Dachau. On July 29, 1948, the Secretary of the Army appointed a commission consisting of two American judges, Gordon Simpson of Texas and Edward Van Roden of Pennsylvania, both JAG reserve colonels. They were assisted by JAG Lieutenant Colonel Charles Lawrence, Jr. The commission submitted its report to the Secretary of the Army in October 1948, and selected portions were made public in January 1949.

Subsequent public remarks by Van Roden and also, to some extent, by Simpson, plus an independent investigation by a review board appointed by Clay, decisively exposed the whole affair to the point where the defenders of the trials could only haggle about the numbers of German prisoners subjected to brutalities. The review board confirmed all that Van Roden claimed, taking exception only in respect to the frequencies of the brutalities.^[34] Oddly, in his book, Decision in Germany, Clay denies the brutalities, but he is contradicted by his own review board.

The cases, especially the Malmédy case, attracted a good deal of attention through 1949, and a subcommittee headed by Senator Baldwin conducted an investigation. One witness, formerly a court reporter at the Dachau trials, testified that he was so repelled by what had gone on there that he quit the job. He said that the most brutal had been Lieutenant Perl, Frank Steiner, and Harry W. Thon. He explained that both Perl and his wife had been in Nazi concentration camps and that the Nazis had killed Steiner’s mother.

Judge Gordon Simpson (unlike Van Roden, trying to put the best interpretation, even if very strained, on the sorry facts that had come out) conceded that this was probably a poor team, and explained that the shortage of German-speaking American lawyers and interpreters had forced the Army to draw on some of the German refugees. Steiner, Kirschbaum, and Thon (later chief of the evaluation section of the civil administration division of the U.S. military government) appeared later and denied all, but they were shaken by the testimony of investigator Bruno Jacob, who admitted a few things. Speaking for the press, investigators Dwight Fanton and Morris Elowitz also denied all. Colonel Rosenfeld denied almost all. He charged that Lieutenant Colonel Harold D. McGown, commander of the American soldiers massacred at Malmédy, had fraternized with SS Colonel Joachim Peiper, the German commander, and this explained why McGown had appeared at Dachau as a defense witness for Peiper and had testified that Peiper had held talks with him and had been responsible for saving a number of Americans. As evidence for the fraternization, Rosenfeld claimed that McGown and Peiper had been entirely too friendly during those nights they spent talking together and that, when Peiper and his men were later able to escape a U.S. Army trap, McGown was with them. Of course, McGown was Peiper’s prisoner.^[35]

It will, of course, be argued that these nightmarish Dachau trials have little to do with our subject because the standard maintained in the trials at Nuremberg were not comparable and because the bearers of the extermination legend do not cite any of the evidence produced at these trials. There is partial truth to these contentions; brutality and coercion were not nearly as extensive at the prominent Nuremberg trials as they were at the Dachau trials, and mass exterminations were not emphasized in the Dachau trials (although gas chambers made occasional appearances in testimony). However, the Dachau trials cannot be waved aside so easily because the administering agency, the War Crimes Branch, was also deeply involved in the Nuremberg trials, as we have noted, and as we are to reconfirm shortly in a particularly striking respect. In addition, coercion was, in fact, employed in order to get evidence at the Nuremberg trials, but that subject is discussed in Chapters 5 and 6.

None of the four powers was happy with the IMT arrangement, and after the big trial they split up and held the kinds of trials they were interested in. The British trials reflected a general interest, but on points of relatively minor significance here. The only major French trial was of Saar industrial magnate Hermann Röchling, whom the French had also tried, in absentia, after World War I. Planning for the American NMT trials had actually started in 1945, and in March 1946, a division of Jackson’s office, headed by Telford Taylor, had been created for this purpose.

It is worth noting that in all of these trials of Nazis, from the IMT through the Eichmann trial of 1961 (in which defense witnesses were not permitted) to the Auschwitz trial of 1963–1965 (which the Bonn Government would not allow Rassinier to attend as observer), the defense lawyers had no staff of trained research assistants to go through the documents and, in addition, almost all of the documents, which were available to them were controlled by the prosecuting powers.^[36] Whatever the legalistic evaluation of such a situation, it can produce a very distorted historical picture if not approached skeptically.

Under the legalistic schema of the occupation, there was an important constraint on the NMT and other single-nation tribunals:

The determination of the International Military Tribunal in the judgments […] that invasions, aggressive acts, aggressive wars, crimes, atrocities or inhumane acts were planned or occurred, shall be binding on the tribunals established hereunder and shall not be questioned except insofar as the participation therein or knowledge thereof by any particular person may be concerned. Statements of the International Military Tribunal in the judgment […] constitute proof of the facts stated, in the absence of substantial new evidence to the contrary.

Two administratively distinct organizations functioned at the NMT. One was the collection of Military Tribunals, the judges, functioning administratively through a Secretariat, headed by a Secretary General. The judges were recruited in the U.S. by the Department of the Army. There were three or more judges at any one trial.

The second organization was the Office, Chief of Counsel for War Crimes (Telford Taylor), which had come into existence on October 24, 1946, immediately after Ribbentrop et al. had been killed. It filed its first indictment the next day. Although there was a trivial difference in their titles, Taylor, who had been an associate trial counsel at the IMT, was really the successor to Jackson in the trials being staged in the Nuremberg courthouse.^[37]

We will have much to say of the NMT trials in this volume. However, the reader can grasp much of the spirit of these proceedings even from remarks made by some of the American judges who had been recruited by the U.S. Army to serve at Nuremberg. Understandably, these people were normally very reluctant to speak out publicly against what they observed. Thus, the remark of one of the judges in the Farben trial, that there were too many Jews on the prosecution, was a privately expressed hint to the prosecution, certainly not intended for publication. However, the presiding judge in Case 7 (trial of German generals for alleged wholesale murder of hostages), Charles F. Wennerstrum, spoke out publicly and forcefully immediately after sentences had been pronounced:^[38]

If I had known seven months ago what I know today, I would never have come here.

Obviously, the victor in any war is not the best judge of the war crime guilt. Try as you will, it is impossible to convey to the defense, their counsel, and their people that the court is trying to represent all mankind rather than the country which appointed its members.

What I have said of the nationalist character of the tribunals applies to the prosecution. The high ideal 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 to avoid 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.

The trials were to have convinced the Germans of the guilt of their leaders.

They convinced the Germans merely that their leaders lost the war to tough conquerors.

Most of the evidence in the trials was documentary, selected from the large tonnage of captured records. The selection was made 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. General 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 two and a half years, and repeated interrogation without presence of counsel. Two and one-half years of confinement is a form of duress in itself.

The lack of appeal leaves me with a feeling that justice has been denied.

[…] You should go to Nuremberg. You would see there a palace of justice where 90 per cent of the people are interested in prosecution.

[…] The German people should receive more information about the trials and the German defendants should receive the right to appeal to the United Nations.

Ironically, the validity of Wennerstrum’s attack on the low or non-existent standard of integrity maintained by the Nuremberg prosecution was confirmed even by the nature of Telford Taylor’s reaction to Wennerstrum’s statements, which were made in supposed privacy in Nuremberg for publication in the Chicago Tribune. Tribune reporter Hal Foust sent the message to Berlin for transmission to the U.S. on a wireless channel, which was supposedly secure from prying. However, the prosecution, apparently by employment of a ruse, managed to obtain a copy of the message. Ernest C. Deane, Taylor’s press officer, immediately phoned Foust in order to attempt to talk him out of sending the story. However, the story had already been sent, and Foust replied that Taylor could not properly have knowledge of the article until its publication. Taylor thereupon prepared a reply to Wennerstrum’s remarks, and the reply was actually made public before the Tribune published the Foust story containing Wennerstrum’s attack. Taylor accused the judge, among other things, of making remarks subversive to the interests and policies of the United States. Wennerstrum, on arrival in the U.S. shortly after the publication of Taylor’s reply and of the Tribune story, stood firm on his remarks and again criticized Taylor.

This incident was one of the notable government spying incidents of the year 1948. The Army issued an order against such spying, and there was much speculation that Taylor might be court-martialed. When reporters asked Taylor for his opinion on the legality of his action, the following exchange occurred:

I don’t know whether it was legal or not, he replied.

Weren’t you general counsel of the Federal Communications Commission for two years before being commissioned in the army?

Yes, but what does that have to do with it?

Taylor steadfastly refused to express an opinion of the legality of his action but

off the record indicated he was as pleased with himself as a field officer […] which he never was […] who had just scored against the enemy by a trick outside the rules of warfare as prescribed by the 1907 Geneva convention.

The quote is from Hal Foust’s story about the Taylor press conference. Foust claimed that this was the second instance of Army interference with his messages to his newspaper, and that in the first instance he had been picked up by Army agents for interrogation after his story had been sent.

Who was in Charge?

In our examination of the Nuremberg trials, we are naturally interested in who supervised the NMT proceedings. Pro forma, Taylor supervised almost everything except the appointments of the judges, since the Chief of Counsel’s formal responsibilities were not confined to the mere prosecution of cases. His Office was also charged with determining who should and who should not be tried (there was no separate proceeding for formulating indictments, such as a grand jury), what the former were to be charged with, and how the latter were to be disposed of. The Office also took over the functions of the Nuremberg staff and hence one may assume that the Office took over, at least formally, the (expanded) Nuremberg staff itself. Thus, the Office was responsible for interrogations, field work examination of documents, court reporting, and translating and interpreting.^[39]

We have given reasons why one should expect that this Nuremberg staff had been under the effective supervision of the War Crimes Branch, and it will shortly be seen that, whatever Taylor’s formal powers, his actual functions do not suggest that he ever took over the Nuremberg staff in any effective sense. The War Crimes Branch, although quartered in far-off Washington, continues to be involved in our consideration of the Nuremberg trials.

On June 12, 1948, the American press carried a story which reported that an officer of the U.S. Army, Colonel David Mickey Marcus, a West Point graduate operating under the alias Mickey Stone, had been killed in action while serving as supreme commander of the Jewish forces in the Jerusalem sector in the Arab-Jewish war for the control of Palestine (actually, Marcus had been erroneously shot by one of his own sentries). The New York Times summarized his career. He had been Commissioner of Corrections in New York before the war and, as an Army officer, had helped draft the German and Italian surrender terms. He was a legal aid at the Potsdam conference (summer of 1945), after which point, if one judges for the adulatory The New York Times article only, his career ended, since we are told of no other activity of Marcus’ until he turns up with the Haganah in Palestine in January 1948, visits the U.S. in April, receiving a medal at a ceremony in the British Embassy in Washington (probably a cover for negotiations on the details of the final British capitulation), and then returns to Palestine after three weeks to take over in Jerusalem. The only hint we get of any activity in the period August 1945 to January 1948 is a story on June 24, p. 15, reporting that the London Daily Telegraph of the same date said that:

He was at the time of his death a full colonel in the Judge Advocate General’s office of the organized reserve of officers. […] Although not subject to military discipline, he had agreed to remain subject to recall.

Marcus had, in fact, been Weir’s successor as head of the War Crimes Branch. Immediately after the war, he had been number three man in making American policy in occupied Germany, but was taken out of this position early in 1946 in order to take the war crimes job. His appointment was effective as of February 18, 1946, but he spent a few months in Japan after leaving Germany and then moved into the Washington office of the War Crimes Branch until April 1947, when he retired from the Army and went into private law practice.^[40]

Our previous observations obviously suggest that it was in reality the War Crimes Branch that exercised the crucial functions in respect to the NMT. This is the case, as is made clear by a careful reading of Taylor’s official final report on the NMT trials, although the fact is not emphasized there.^[41] The fact is confirmed by the remarkable book by Josiah E. DuBois, who headed the I. G. Farben NMT prosecution, and Berkman’s book about Marcus provides some sketchy information on this aspect of Marcus’ career.^[42]

Marcus was made head of the War Crimes Branch primarily in order to take over the mammoth task of selecting hundreds of judges, prosecutors and lawyers for the NMT and Far East (Tokyo) trials. In December 1946, DuBois had been summoned to Marcus’ office in Washington to discuss the possibility of DuBois’ taking over the prosecution of leading officials of the great German chemicals firm, I. G. Farben. DuBois had been undecided, so he conferred at length with Marcus on the problems involved; one of the problems being whether or not there was sufficient evidence to charge Farben with an aggressive war plot and, if so charged, the possible political repercussions that might ensue. They discussed the general advantages of bringing the Farben men to trial. One point Marcus made was that a trial might show how Farben managed to develop certain weapons in total secrecy. Then too, if they went free, they might start working for the Russians. Marcus displayed great knowledge of Farben. He pointed out that there was a warehouse full of Farben records in nearby Alexandria, Virginia, a fact that DuBois forgot, until later events forced him to recall and act on it during the pre-trial investigation.

They got around to the required length of the pre-trial investigation. Marcus said: As far as I’m concerned, you could go over there for as long or as short a time as you liked. DuBois suggested that he would need about four months, and Marcus replied: I have no objection to that. Within a few days after you get home, you should get a wire from Telford Taylor agreeing to it.

Taylor, of course, was in Europe in his capacity of Chief of Counsel. DuBois records Taylor’s activities relative to the Farben trial. He responded favorably to a staff member’s suggestion that DuBois (under whom the staff member had worked in the Treasury Department during the war) be appointed to prosecute Farben. He passed the recommendation on to Washington. After DuBois had taken the job, he had plans to see Taylor to get his okay for adding another man, specified by DuBois, to the prosecution staff. The okay was granted. Taylor went to Paris to plead before the French cabinet for the extradition of a key Farben man. Taylor gave the opening speech at the Farben trial and then disappeared from the proceedings. Taylor was not involved in the pre-trial investigation or in the formulation of the specific charges made by the prosecution.

All of this suggests rather strongly that Taylor’s role was in public relations and that he was not deeply involved in the details of the running of the trials, which were his formal responsibility. Such situations are not unusual in large scale operations.

The facts show that the real organizers of the NMT trials were not as much in the public eye as Taylor was; in effect and possibly in intention Taylor was a front man. Marcus, as head of the War Crimes Branch, no doubt exercised effective control of much of the Nuremberg staff, and he selected the judges and lawyers for the trials (with only a handful of exceptions). The book by DuBois shows that Taylor was not involved with the trials on the working level, so the inescapable conclusion is that the substantial powers of Taylor’s office were actually exercised either by the War Crimes Branch or by persons subordinate to Taylor. In examining the prominent persons in the latter group, one encounters Robert M. W. Kempner, who is discussed in Chapter 5.

Marcus seems to have had a real importance quite incommensurate with his relatively common rank of colonel, because we are told that during the war he had made a favorable impression on FDR […] he was one of the anonymous handful who charted American policy behind the scenes. A man whose career was remarkably intertwined with that of Marcus was General J. H. Hilldring, who headed the Army Civil Affairs Division, to which Marcus was assigned in 1943. The CAD had been created in 1943 within the Army General Staff in anticipation of a need for a group to concern itself with policies to be followed in occupied territories. It had been thought that Fiorello LaGuardia was to head the CAD, but the job went to Hilldring. Marcus became a member and later the chief of the Planning Branch of the CAD. It was as a consequence of Marcus’ activities in the CAD that he made his mark; his assignment to the military government of Germany was a direct result of his CAD responsibilities. It was Hilldring who, several months later, pulled him out of his military government position and assigned him to head the War Crimes Branch (which was transferred from the JAG to the CAD on March 4, 1946). Then Hilldring immediately moved over to the State Department as an Assistant Secretary of State in charge of occupied areas problems; in this capacity he headed a secretariat, which coordinated Army, Navy, and State Department policies in Germany. In September 1947, he left the State Department and became an Adviser to the U.S. delegation at the United Nations, where the diplomatic battle between the Zionists and the Arabs was being waged. Hilldring was a tower of strength from the outset […] as information link with the Jewish representatives, he frequently conversed with Zionist strategists. Then, at about the time Marcus was made supreme commander of the Jewish forces in Jerusalem, Hilldring was appointed back to the State Department as Assistant Secretary of State for Palestine. Zionist sources have subsequently boasted that both the UN and second State Department appointments were direct result of Zionist lobbying.^[43] Quite a pair, Marcus and Hilldring.

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 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. The associated extermination hoax will be exposed with complete clarity in these pages.

The Nazis

This book is written for people who are already informed on the European side of World War II and the immediately preceding years. We have no intention of reviewing the nature of the Nazi state, the roles of Göring, Himmler, Goebbels, etc., or the anti-Jewish measures that were taken prior to the war, except that these matters will be touched upon here and there as a matter of course. The major events and approximate dates associated with the war are assumed known by the reader.

When Europe was dominated by the Germans, it was not organized according to the plan of the Treaty of Versailles; Figure 3 presents a map of Europe as it was organized in the autumn of 1942, at the apex of Hitler’s power. Germany had annexed Austria, Alsace-Lorraine, part of Czechoslovakia, and a great deal of Poland (more than just the part that had been taken from Germany after World War I). The part of Poland that remained was called the General Government and had the status of a subject province governed by the Germans, as did the three Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. In the same subject status were White Russia, the Ukraine, Bohemia-Moravia (formerly western Czechoslovakia), and Banat (long a part of Hungary dominated by ethnic Germans). The eastern part of Czechoslovakia had become the independent state of Slovakia, and Yugoslavia had been reorganized as Croatia and Serbia, corresponding to the two dominant of the five nationalities that had constituted Yugoslavia. Italy also had an interest in this area of Europe, controlled Albania, and shared influence in adjoining countries with her German ally. Finland, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria were also allied with Germany, and the Waffen-SS (regular military units within the SS) recruited troops all over Europe, particularly in the Baltic states, in the Ukraine, in Scandinavia, and in the Netherlands and Belgium.

Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, and much (later all) of France were occupied by the Germans. Sweden, Switzerland, Spain, and Portugal remained neutral throughout the war.

It is convenient to review, at this point, some matters pertaining to the SS, a strange bureaucracy, which had responsibility for certain improbable combinations of functions.

Only three of these functions — security, concentration camp administration, and resettlement policies — are of interest in our study.

The best known agency of the SS was the RSHA, Reich Security Main Office, which embraced the Gestapo (Secret State Police, headed by SS Lieutenant General Heinrich Müller), the SD (Security Service, headed by SS Lieutenant General Schellenberg), the Kripo (Criminal Police, headed by SS Lieutenant Generals Nebe and, later, Panzinger) and related functions. The first head of the RSHA had been SS General Reinhardt Heydrich, an ambitious and ruthless young man whose methods generated many enemies for him.

Ever since the Röhm purge of 1934, the substantial ambitions of the SS in respect to military matters had resulted in growing conflict between the SS and the regular military establishment, the Wehrmacht, and Heydrich was not in the least bit delicate in the methods he employed to prosecute the conflict. In 1938, he had forced the resignation of the Minister of War, General Blomberg, by showing that Blomberg’s new wife had been a prostitute. Blomberg’s obvious successor was General von Fritsch, so Heydrich constructed a frame-up of von Fritsch, based on perjured allegations of homosexuality. Although von Fritsch was eventually exonerated, his career had been ruined, and the bitterness toward Heydrich swelled.

The SS had a second basis for rivalry with the military establishment. The German intelligence services were the Abwehr, German military intelligence, responsible to the military high command and headed, since 1935, by Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, and the SD, the political intelligence arm, responsible to Heydrich and Himmler. Since the two types of intelligence activity cannot be strictly separated, Canaris and Himmler inevitably became rivals. Heydrich appears to have attempted to be cooperative with Canaris, at least at first; this may have been due to Heydrich’s own background as a naval intelligence officer who, during the twenties, had served and trained under Canaris and had even been a frequent visitor to his home.

More significantly, the Admiral was a traitor; he is one of the awesome mysteries of World War II. During and even before the war (he was in contact with Churchill in 1938), Canaris betrayed Germany at every opportunity. A British official has expressed the role of Canaris most succinctly: We had Admiral Canaris. The man’s motivations remain as mysterious as his personality and his antecedents. Ian Colvin, one of the authorities on World War II intelligence operations, wrote a whole book about Canaris and, yet, never deciphered him:

The readers will have to judge for themselves whether Admiral Wilhelm Canaris was a German patriot or a British spy, a European statesman or a cosmopolitan intriguer, a double agent, an opportunist, or a seer. It will not be easy for them to make up their minds.

It may be of some relevance that the man whom Colvin, in his 1951 book, characterized as one of Canaris’ close personal friends, Otto John, the Abwehr man in the all important neutral capital of Lisbon during World War II, later became Chief of State Security for the Bonn Government and was subsequently exposed (in 1956) as a Soviet agent.^[44]

The Canaris case is sometimes confused by grouping Canaris with the men behind the abortive coup d’état of July 20, 1944. This is utterly erroneous since Canaris used all his powers to betray Germany, whereas the men of July 20, merely betrayed Hitler and would never have betrayed Germany. No Englishman, after the war, could have truthfully said: we had Erwin Rommel. The most one can say about Canaris’ involvement is that he was no doubt aware of the conspiracy in its early states and naturally gave its members the impression that he was with them. Canaris was a grand master at giving such impressions.

To return to Heydrich, great ambition had gotten the young SS General appointed Deputy Protector of Bohemia-Moravia in late 1941; he was thus starting to look bigger than his superior, Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler. It might also be interesting to speculate that, at about this time, Heydrich may have started to grasp Canaris’ game; as chief of the RSHA and as a former associate of Canaris, no man was better situated and motivated to penetrate Canaris’ secret than Heydrich was. When one considers the long burning antagonism of the Army, it appears that Heydrich, by early 1942, had accumulated a very long list of powerful enemies in Germany. It was thus remarkable that at this point in Heydrich’s career the English, it is said, fortuitously removed him in May 1942 by dropping two assassins from the sky. In accord with the all-too-common scenario for political assassinations (e.g. the Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy assassinations), the alleged assassins were said to have been killed before they got an opportunity to talk.

In an appointment that caused general astonishment, Heydrich was succeeded in early 1943 by the relatively obscure and much less ambitious Dr. Ernst Kaltenbrunner. Evidently desirous of avoiding repetition of the situation that had developed with Heydrich, Himmler retained a rather more direct control of the Gestapo and the SD than he had held previously. However, both agencies continued to be formally responsible to the head of the RSHA, now Kaltenbrunner. Himmler also charged Kaltenbrunner with a special task: to build up the intelligence service of the SD. This was a particularly timely decision on the part of Himmler, since Canaris fell from power (without being fully exposed) in February 1944 and, by a special Hitler decree, all military and political intelligence functions were taken over by the RSHA, thus uniting all intelligence activity under SD chief Schellenberg.

Canaris was arrested after the July 20 coup and he was executed shortly before the end of the war.

Concentration camp administration was under the WVHA, Economic-Administrative Main Office, headed by SS General Oswald Pohl. As its name suggests, the WVHA was concerned with the economic role of the SS which had arisen, for the most part, on account of the availability of the labor of concentration camp inmates. The commandants of the concentration camps reported to the Inspectorate of Concentration Camps, headed by SS Brigadier General Glücks, who reported to Pohl. Pohl reported to Himmler, and was formally equal in rank to Kaltenbrunner and Heydrich.

It is convenient to state at this point, in very general terms, what was going on with respect to the Jews of Europe during the life of the Nazi regime. Before the war, the German Government had used all means to encourage the emigration of Jews from Germany, and most German Jews had left Germany before the outbreak of the war. The persistent problems in connection with this emigration program were, first, the dislocations of the economy which were entailed in moving the Jews out and, second, the difficulty in arranging for other countries to take the Jews. By the summer of 1941, Germany was at war with Russia, and huge numbers of Jews, i.e., the greater part of all the Jews of Europe, were in the German sphere of influence. However, the war had also opened up, temporarily, vast new territories for the Germans, and consequently, a program of Jewish resettlement got under way in the autumn of 1941. Through the course of the war, as long as Germany controlled any significant amount of eastern territory, European Jews were being resettled in the East. There were also a certain number of young, adult Jews conscripted for labor.

On account of certain political problems and the priority of war requirements, the resettlement program was only partially carried out and, of course, nowhere near six million Jews were involved. Excluding Polish and Romanian Jews, perhaps 750,000 Jews were resettled, primarily in the Ukraine, White Russia, and Latvia. Not all Polish Jews fell under German domination. Apart from those who managed to flee before or after the German occupation, several hundred thousand or perhaps a million Jews had been deported from Poland by the Russians in 1940 and had been dispersed in the Soviet Union. For the most part, the Polish Jews who came into German hands were crowded into ghettoes in eastern Poland (1939 boundaries).

What happened to all of these people can be established only in a very general way, because all of the territory that the Jews had been resettled onto became Soviet territory after the war, and because the victorious powers engaged in considerable suppression of the data. However, there is sufficient evidence to permit us to see approximately what happened. Although it is very likely that a fair number perished in the disorderly and chaotic conditions that accompanied the German retreats, it is established that a large number of Jews, predominantly of pre-war Polish nationality, were absorbed into the Soviet Union, and the remainder of the Jews who had been uprooted ultimately resettled in Palestine, the U.S., Europe, and elsewhere.

These general remarks are supplied here to serve as a background to assist the reader in interpreting the analysis of the extermination claims, which is the task of the next few chapters. However, the major evidence for these remarks concerning what actually happened to the Jews will not be presented until Chapter 7.

The RSHA was responsible for carrying out most aspects of this Jewish policy. Within the Gestapo there was an office, B4, which designated the religions and cults division — Jewish religion subdivision, headed by one Karl Adolf Eichmann, whose highest attained rank had been lieutenant colonel or colonel.^[45] Eichmann did the routine chores associated with the Jewish emigration and resettlement policies of the German Government; most of his time was spent arranging with the various Jewish Councils to draw up transport lists of Jews, and arranging for transportation for the deportees. There is no evidence that Eichmann ever participated in formulating policy, and since he was not involved in concentration camp administration, he could not have been directly involved in whatever it was that happened in those camps.

It is, therefore, quite ridiculous that it was possible to get so many people excited about the case of a person such as Eichmann, who had performed completely routine functions in Nazi Germany. Those functions were carried out in accordance with specific orders transmitted by his superiors. His Jerusalem testimony was given after consulting Reitlinger and Poliakov, (producing) seventeen multicolored charts, which contributed little to a better understanding of the bureaucratic machinery of the Third Reich.^[46] I see no point in viewing the Eichmann affair as anything but a publicity stunt on the part of a state accustomed to disregarding the constraints that other states feel bound to respect. A short discussion of the Eichmann case and of Eichmann’s Jerusalem testimony, is provided in Chapter 6 (pages 243ff.).

Other departments of the SS, which were involved in resettlement activities were the RKFDV (Reich Commission for the Strengthening of Germandom, headed by SS General Ulrich Greifelt), the RuSHA (Race and Settlement Main Office, headed by SS Generals Otto Hofmann and, later, Richard Hildebrandt) and the VoMi (Liaison Office for Ethnic Germans, headed by SS General Werner Lorenz). The most important responsibility of these departments was the resettlement of ethnic Germans on conquered territories, and Greifelt was the main personality in this program. However, they inevitably got involved in the program of Jewish resettlement to some degree.