Kurt Gerstein
[back] Eye Witnesses

Book Reviews: THE 'CONFESSIONS' OF KURT GERSTEIN, by Henri Roques

27: Confessing Germans part 1: Kurt Gerstein--SS Officer Kurt Gerstein presented himself to his French captors as a very important eyewitness--one of a handful of people who had seen Belzec. Presenting himself as valuable was a strategy for staying alive. ONE THIRD OF THE HOLOCAUST

Book
The 'Confessions' of Kurt Gerstein by Henri Roques.

Quotes
Kurt Gerstein
(b. 1905) was an engineer and SS hygiene technician who in Allied captivity after the war claimed to have visited Belzec and to there have witnessed a gassing of Jews. He wrote a number of “reports” concerning the alleged visit, which were later presented as “undisputable proof” of homicidal gas chambers. On July 25, 1945, soon after the French started interrogating him, Gerstein was found hanged in his cell. Gerstein’s widow was not informed about her husband’s death until June 1948 (cf. Henri Roques, The “Confessions of Kurt Gerstein”). A Brief List of the Conveniently Deceased by Thomas Kues

After a careful reading of Roques' work, even without Percival's valuable additions, no-one can grant any credence to Gerstein's stories about millions of Jews being exterminated at Belzec or Treblinka, nor his assertions concerning the mass burnings of corpses; the killing of millions of children at Auschwitz (which he did not see) by means of a pad soaked in prussic acid (!) held under their noses, and the like. To continue believing utterly fantastic stories like these, the "true believers" of the Holocaust faith have to follow the example of those religious fanatics who said credo quia impossibile, "I believe it because it is impossible." No wonder that the L.I.C.R.A. (Ligue Internationale Contre le Racisme et l'Anti-Sémitisme) and other Zionists pressured the French government into illegally cancelling Roques' degree! Book Reviews: THE 'CONFESSIONS' OF KURT GERSTEIN, by Henri Roques

Although the Auschwitz propaganda campaign was aggressively pursued from the very beginning, it still had a lot of catching up to do. To be sure, "extermination camps" in occupied Poland had been mentioned in the so-called Gerstein Report, a document allegedly composed by a onetime SS man named Kurt Gerstein. At first, nobody seemed to take this document seriously, and it was not even admitted in evidence at the IMT trial.15 At least three versions of it were circulated: two French versions and one German version. Numerous passages in these texts vary from one another.16 According to the French version published in 1951, the following "extermination camps" were in existence as of August 17, 1942:

  1. Belzec, on the Lublin-Lwow road. Maximum per day, 15,000 persons
  2. Sobibor, I don't know exactly where it is, 20,000 persons a day
  3. Treblinka, 120 Kilometers NNE of Warsaw
  4. Maidanek, near Lublin (in preparation)17

One notes that the supposedly well-informed Gerstein does not include Auschwitz on this list, though "mass murders" are now alleged to have begun there in the spring of 1942.(The first "gas chambers" were, it is claimed, two converted farm houses) 18 Since, according to this document, Gerstein was responsible for the procurement and distribution of Zyklon B, he certainly would have been aware of the existence of Auschwitz. As a matter of fact, Auschwitz is mentioned as an "extermination camp" at the end of the English version of the document -- along with Theresienstadt, Oranienburg, Dachau, Belsen, and Mauthausen-Gusen!19 This version of the "Gerstein Report" (the one that appears in Dr. Butz's volume) was used by the Americans in the "trials" they conducted on their own after the IMT proceedings. The Auschwitz Myth by Wilhelm Stäglich