Did Six Million Really Die?
a book by Richard Harwood
Did Six Million Really Die? by Richard Harwood
[Chapter 9] Before and after the “Holocaust”: Jewish population numbers in 1933 and 1948
Rassinier entitled his first book The Lies of Odysseus in commemoration of the fact that travellers always return bearing tall stories, and until his death he investigated all the stories of extermination literature and attempted to trace their authors. He made short work of the extravagant claims about gas chambers at Buchenwald in David Rousset's The Other Kingdom (New York, 1947); himself an inmate of Buchenwald, Rassinier proved that no such things ever existed there (Le Mensonge d'Ulysse, p. 209 ff) Rassinier also traced Abbé Jean-Paul Renard, and asked him how he could possibly have testified in his book Chaines et Lumières that gas chambers were in operation at Buchenwald. Renard replied that others had told him of their existence, and hence he had been willing to pose as a witness of things that he had never seen (ibid, p. 209 ff).Certainly the most bogus "memoirs" yet published are those of
Adolf Eichmann. Before his illegal kidnapping by
the Israelis in May, 1960 and the attendant blaze of international publicity,
few people had ever heard of him . He was indeed a relatively unimportant
person, the head of Office A4b in Department IV (the Gestapo) of the Reich
Security Head Office. His office supervised the transportation to detention
camps of a particular section of enemy aliens, the Jews. A positive flood of
unadulterated rubbish about Eichmann showered the world in 1960, of which we may
cite as an example Comer Clarke's Eichmann: The Savage Truth. ("The orgies often
went on until six in the morning, a few hours before consigning the next batch
of victims to death," says Clarke in his chapter "Streamlined Death and Wild Sex
Orgies," p . 124).
Strangely enough, the alleged
"memoirs" of Adolf Eichmann suddenly appeared at the time of his abduction to
Israel. They were uncritically published by the American Life magazine (November
28th, December 5th, 1960), and were supposed to have been given by Eichmann to a
journalist in the Argentine shortly before his capture -- an amazing
coincidence. Other sources, however, gave an entirely different account of their
origin, claiming that they were a record based on Eichmann's comments to an
"associate" in 1955, though no one even bothered to identify this person. By an
equally extraordinary coincidence, war crimes investigators claimed shortly
afterwards to have just "found" in the archives of the U.S. Library of Congress,
more than fifteen years after the war, the "complete file" of Eichmann's
department.
So far as the "memoirs" themselves
are concerned, they were made to be as horribly incriminating as possible
without straying too far into the realms of the purest fantasy, and depict
Eichmann speaking with enormous relish about "the physical annihilation of the
Jews." Their fraudulence is also attested to by various factual errors, such as
that Himmler was already in command of the Reserve Army by April of 1944,
instead of after the July plot against Hitler's life, a fact which Eichmann
would certainly have known.
The appearance of these "memoirs"
at precisely the right moment raises no doubt that their object was to present a
pre-trial propaganda picture of the archetypal "unregenerate Nazi" and fiend in
human shape. The circumstances of the Eichmann trial in Israel do not concern us
here; the documents of Soviet origin which were used in evidence, such as the
Wisliceny statement, have been examined already, and for an account of the
third-degree methods used on Eichmann during his captivity to render him
"co-operative" the reader is referred to the London Jewish Chronicle, September
2nd, 1960. More relevant to the literature of the extermination legend are the
contents of a letter which Eichmann is supposed to have written voluntarily and
handed over to his captors in Buenos Aries. It need hardly be added that its
Israeli authorship is transparently obvious. Nothing in it stretches human
credulity further than the phrase "I am submitting this declaration of my own
free will"; but the most hollow and revealing statement of all is his alleged
willingness to appear before a court in Israel, "so that a true picture may be
transmitted to future generations."
The figures of Dachau casualties are typical of the kind of exaggerations
that have since had to be drastically revised. In 1946, a memorial plaque was
unveiled at Dachau by Philip Auerbach, the Jewish State-Secretary in the
Bavarian Government who was convicted for embezzling money which he claimed as
compensation for nonexistent Jews. The plaque read: "This area is being retained
as a shrine to the 238,000 individuals who were cremated here." Since then, the
official casualty figures have had to be steadily revised downwards, and now
stand at only 20,600 the majority from typhus and starvation only at the end of
the war. This deflation, to ten per cent of the original figure, will doubtless
continue, and one day will be applied to the legendary figure of six million as
a whole.
Another example of drastic revision
is the present estimate of Auschwitz casualties. The absurd allegations of three
or four million deaths there are no longer plausible even to Reitlinger. He now
puts the number of casualties at only 600,000; and although this figure is still
exaggerated in the extreme, it is a significant reduction on four million and
further progress is to be expected. Shirer himself quotes Reitlinger's latest
estimate, but he fails to reconcile this with his earlier statement that half of
that figure, about 300,000 Hungarian Jews were supposedly "done to death in
forty-six days" - a supreme example of the kind of irresponsible nonsense that
is written on this subject.
The truth about the Anne Frank Diary was first revealed in 1959 by the
Swedish journal Fria Ord. It established that the Jewish novelist Meyer Levin
had written the dialogue of the "diary" and was demanding payment for his work
in a court action against Otto Frank. A condensation of the Swedish articles
appeared in the American Economic Council Letter, April 15th, 1959, as follows:
"History has many examples of myths that live a longer and richer life than
truth, and may become more effective than truth. "The Western World has for some
years been made aware of a Jewish girl through the medium of what purports to be
her personally written story, Anne Frank's Diary. Any informed literary
inspection of this book would have shown it to have been impossible as the work
of a teenager.
"A noteworthy decision of the New
York Supreme Court confirms this point of view, in that the well known American
Jewish writer, Meyer Levin, has been awarded $50,000 to be paid him by the
father of Anne Frank as an honorarium for Levin's work on the Anne Frank Diary."
Mr. Frank, in Switzerland, has
promised to pay to his race kin, Meyer Levin, not less than $50,000 because he
had used the dialogue of Author Levin just as it was and "implanted" it in the
diary as being his daughter's intellectual work." Further inquiries brought a
reply on May 7th, 1962 from a firm of New York lawyers, which stated: "I was the
attorney for Meyer Levin in his action against Otto Frank, and others. It is
true that a jury awarded Mr. Levin $50,000 in damages, as indicated in your
letter. That award was later set aside by the trial justice, Hon. Samuel C.
Coleman, on the ground that the damages had not been proved in the manner
required by law. The action was subsequently settled while an appeal from Judge
Coleman's decision was pending.
Thies Christopherson, who was sent to the Bunawerk plant laboratories at
Auschwitz to research into the production of synthetic rubber for the Kaiser
Wilhelm Institute. In May 1973, not long after the appearance of this account,
the veteran Jewish "Nazi-hunter" Simon Wiesenthal wrote to the Frankfurt Chamber
of Lawyers, demanding that the publisher and author of the Forward, Dr. Roeder,
a member of the Chamber, should be brought before its disciplinary commission.
Sure enough, proceedings began in July, but not without harsh criticism even
from the Press, who asked "Is Simon Wiesenthal the new Gauleiter of Germany?"
(Deutsche Wochenzeitung, July 27th, 1973).
Christopherson's account is
certainly one of the most important documents for a re-appraisal of Auschwitz.
He spent the whole of 1944 there, during which time he visited all of the
separate camps comprising the large Auschwitz complex, including
Auschwitz-Birkenau where it is alleged that wholesale massacres of Jews took
place. Christopherson, however, is in no doubt that this is totally untrue. He
writes: "I was in Auschwitz from January 1944 until December 1944. After the war
I heard about the mass murders which were supposedly perpetrated by the S.S.
against the Jewish prisoners, and I was perfectly astonished. Despite all the
evidence of witnesses, all the newspaper reports and radio broadcasts I still do
not believe today in these horrible deeds. I have said this many times and in
many places, but to no purpose. One is never believed" (p. 16).
Space forbids a detailed summary
here of the author's experiences at Auschwitz, which include facts about camp
routine and the daily life of prisoners totally at variance with the allegations
of propaganda (pp. 22-7). More important are his revelations about the supposed
existence of an extermination camp. "During the whole of my time at Auschwitz, l
never observed the slightest evidence of mass gassings. Moreover, the odour of
burning flesh that is often said to have hung over the camp is a downright
falsehood. In the vicinity of the main camp (Auschwitz I) was a large farrier's
works, from which the smell of molten iron was naturally not pleasant" (p.
33-4). Reitlinger confirms that there were five blast furnaces and five
collieries at Auschwitz, which together with the Bunawerk factories comprised
Auschwitz III (ibid. p. 452). The author agrees that a crematorium would
certainly have existed at Auschwitz, "since 200,000 people lived there, and in
every city with 200,000 inhabitants there would be a crematorium. Naturally
people died there -- but not only prisoners. In fact the wife of
Obersturmbannführer A. (Christopherson's superior) also died there" (p. 33).
The author explains: "There were no
secrets at Auschwitz. In September 1944 a commission of the International Red
Cross came to the camp for an inspection. They were particularly interested in
the camp at Birkenau, though we also had many inspections at Raisko" (Bunawerk
section, p. 35). Christopherson points out that the constant visits to Auschwitz
by outsiders cannot be reconciled with allegations of mass extermination. When
describing the visit of his wife to the camp in May, he observes: "The fact that
it was possible to receive visits from our relatives at any time demonstrates
the openness of the camp administration. Had Auschwitz been a great
extermination camp, we would certainly not have been able to receive such
visits" (p. 27).
After the war, Christopherson came
to hear of the alleged existence of a building with gigantic chimneys in the
vicinity of the main camp. "This was supposed to be the crematorium. However, I
must record the fact that when I left the camp at Auschwitz in December 1944, I
had not seen this building there" (p. 37). Does this mysterious building exist
today? Apparently not; Reitlinger claims it was demolished and "completely burnt
out in full view of the camp" in October, though Christopherson never saw this
public demolition. Although it is said to have taken place "in full view of the
camp", it was allegedly seen by only one Jewish witness, a certain Dr. Bendel,
and his is the only testimony to the occurrence (Reitlinger, ibid, p. 457).
This situation is generally
typical. When it comes down to hard evidence, it is strangely elusive; the
building was "demolished", the document is "lost", the order was "verbal". At
Auschwitz today, visitors are shown a small furnace and here they are told that
millions of people were exterminated. The Soviet State Commission which
"investigated" the camp announced on May 12th, 1945, that "Using rectified
coefficients . . . the technical expert commission has ascertained that during
the time that the Auschwitz camp existed, the German butchers exterminated in
this camp not less than four million citizens ..." Reitlinger's surprisingly
frank comment on this is perfectly adequate: "The world has grown mistrustful of
'rectified coefficients' and the figure of four millions has become ridiculous"
(ibid, p. 460). Finally, the account of Mr. Christopherson draws attention to a
very curious circumstance. The only defendant who did not appear at the
Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial in 1963 was Richard Baer, the successor of Rudolf Höss
as commandant of Auschwitz. Though in perfect health, he died suddenly in prison
before the trial had begun, "in a highly mysterious way" according to the
newspaper; Deutsche Wochenzeitung (July 27th, 1973). Baer's sudden demise before
giving evidence is especially strange, since the Paris newspaper Rivarol
recorded his insistence that "during the whole time in which he governed
Auschwitz, he never saw any gas chambers nor believed that such things existed,"
and from this statement nothing would dissuade him. In short, the Christopherson
account adds to a mounting collection of evidence demonstrating that the giant
industrial complex of Auschwitz (comprising thirty separate installations and
divided by the main Vienna-Cracow railway line) was nothing but a vast war
production centre, which, while admittedly employing the compulsory labour of
detainees, was certainly not a place of "mass extermination".