Since so much work in this area has already been done, this section will borrow from the existing literature. Particular use will be made of the seminal work by Dr. A. R. Butz, The Hoax of the Twentieth Century. For convenience the references given will be to page numbers of the second edition of that work; readers who wish to pursue them will find that Butz provides ample references to his original sources.

The orthodox historical view referred to here is that portrayed in a figure in Nazi Mass Murder: a Documentary History of the Use of Poison Gas by Eugen Kogon et al., published in German in 1983 and in English in 1994. The roles of the camps, according to that work, were as follows:

• Euthanasia institutes: Brandenburg (Germany), Bernburg (Germany), Grafenek (Germany), Hadamar (Germany), Hartheim (Austria) and Sonnenstein (Germany).
• Extermination camps: Belzec (Poland), Kulmhof (Poland), Sobibor (Poland) and Treblinka (Poland).
• Concentration and extermination camps: Auschwitz (Poland) and Majdanek (Poland).

This scenario is substantially in agreement with that presented by Keegan (pp. 286-288) and Messenger (p. 97). These authors are both historians at Sandhurst Military College. Specifically, the view of contemporary historians is that no gas chambers existed on German soil.

The eight Jews in hiding in Prinsengracht 263 were arrested on 4 August 1944 by an SS Oberscharführer and three Dutch Police helpers (Het Achterhuis, Bakker edition p. 299). Despite the major role of the two women, Elisabeth van Wijk-Voskuijl and Hermine Gies-Santrouschitz in supporting the group in hiding, when the eight were discovered only two men, Kleiman and Kugler, were taken into custody for harbouring them. The sick Kleiman was released on 18 September 1944 and Kugler escaped on 28 March 1945 during a march towards Germany when his convoy came under fire from British Spitfires.

The fate of this group of eight Jews provides a small, although perhaps typical, sample which may illustrate the fate of the large numbers of people (the criminals, gypsies, communists and homosexuals, of which the Jews were just a proportion) who were taken into custody by the Germans. It is often casually asserted that all of these groups were gassed. Special efforts have been made to trace this group of eight in particular and so a greater than usual opportunity for determining their fates should exist.

On their arrest the eight were moved initially to the Westerbork transit camp in the north-east of Holland and a month later they were transferred to Auschwitz. There Otto Frank, his wife and Mr. van Pels remained but the other five were disseminated to other camps. Auguste van Pels was transferred (via Bergen-Belsen and Buchenwald) to Theresienstadt (Czechoslovakia), a ‘model camp’ with relatively good conditions normally reserved for aged German Jews; her son went to Mauthausen in Austria. Pfeffer was transferred to Neuengamme via either Buchenwald or Sachsenhausen. Anne and her elder sister Margot were moved to Bergen-Belsen at the end of October 1944.

At the end of February or the beginning of March Margot Frank, followed a few days later by Anne, succumbed to an epidemic of typhus “in which thousands of the inmates died” (Het Achterhuis, Bakker p. 300). The same source states that their mother, Mrs. Edith Frank-Holländer, died in Auschwitz from hunger and exhaustion. It is tempting to accept Faurisson’s account that she died of typhus, on the grounds that he interviewed Otto Frank, who would be likely to know the fate of his wife who was in the same camp, but Faurisson’s earlier monograph appears to be so biased and unreliable that it is considered prudent to disregard it altogether – it is quite conceivable that Faurisson merely presumed that Mrs. Frank died from typhus and failed to check. One account has suggested that Peter van Pels died during the evacuation march from Auschwitz to Mauthausen, but there seems to be agreement as to the date of his death.

The only one of the group for whom any claim has been made of gassing is Mr. Hermann van Pels who, according to Netherlands Red Cross dossier 103586, was gassed immediately on his arrival at Auschwitz on 5-6 September. According to the commentary in the recent Bakker edition of Het Achterhuis however Otto Frank reported that he was still alive some weeks after this date and it is proposed that he died sometime in October or November 1944. Red Cross documents are not accessible to the public and so cannot be inspected, and in this case we may fairly conclude that the information contained within it must have been taken from another, less reliable source.

Otto Frank was the only one of the eight to survive and return to Amsterdam, at which point he began compiling his daughter’s writings into a book. When Russian forces arrived at Auschwitz on 27 January 1945 Mr. Frank was being treated for typhus in the camp hospital and he did not leave there until 5 March 1945.

Since we know that no gas chambers existed at Bergen-Belsen, Mauthausen, Neuengamme and Theresienstadt, we can confidently say that none of the four remaining members of this group of eight were gassed. How then did they die? According to the International Committee of the Red Cross, “in the chaotic condition of Germany after the invasion during the final months of the war, the camps received no food supplies at all and starvation claimed an increasing number of victims” (Report of the ICRC, vol. III, p. 83). The Allies, despite protestations from the ICRC, had been continually bombarding the supply lines to the camps, exacerbating the already severe conditions which were prevalent near the end of the war. The ICRC had protested as early as 15 March 1944 about “the barbarous aerial warfare” (Inter Arma Caritas p. 78). Many tens of thousands of camp internees died, especially in the winter and spring of 1945, during the unimaginable turmoil which prevailed in the closing stages of the war. Epidemics of typhus in the camps were common.

Finding a publisher for Het Achterhuis after the war was initially difficult and probably most instrumental in its publication was a Dutchwoman, Anne Romein-Verschoor, whom Otto Frank went to see. Anne Romein-Verschoor and her husband Jan Romein were involved in “the left-wing intellectual journal” De Nieuwe Stem in which the first extracts of the diary were published, and Anne Romein-Verschoor went on to provide a foreword for the first editions of the Diary. An article written by Jan Romein appeared in the national Dutch newspaper Het Parool on 3 April 1946 directly led to its publication (as Het Achterhuis: Dagboekbrieven) in 1947:

By chance a diary written during the war years has come into my possession. The Netherlands State Institute for War Documentation already holds some two hundred similar diaries, but... having arrived here at the age of four from Germany she [Anne Frank] was able within ten years to write enviably pure and simple Dutch.

This article was the first of several to remark on the fluency of the Dutch used by AMF, but these commentators were almost certainly unaware that they were viewing typescripts which had been revised several times, during which numerous German expressions had been removed (C. E. p. 67). Ignoring the revision undertaken by Anne Frank herself, there were two subsequent drafts by or under the auspices of Otto Frank, and that there was a further intermediate typescript (‘Typescript Ia’) is almost certain (C. E. p. 64). Thus by the time Typescript II was submitted to the first Dutch publisher the text had been revised at least three times. The claim made by Otto Frank that he did not intend to publish the diary is not credible. In 1950 Le Journal de Anne Frank and Das Tagebuch der Anne Frank were published and in 1951 it appeared in Britain and America as The Diary of a Young Girl.

An essential consideration in any historical analysis is that the victors have the privilege of writing history. “Who controls the past, controls the future: who controls the present, controls the past” wrote George Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four. H. E. Barnes was more specific: “Truth is the first war casualty.” The greatest of the spoils of war is the future.

There are two sides not only to every argument but also to every historical account. We might take as an example the varying perspectives of the first use of the Atom bomb and the origins of the Cold War. The official explanation for the use of the A-bomb on Japan was that it served to bring about a speedy end to the war and to save the lives of up to a million American servicemen who might otherwise have fallen had an invasion of Japan been necessary. The scenario which has developed as secret wartime documents, diaries and other material has become available is rather different. Indeed this is the essential difference between historical or scientific opinion and religious dogma: the former must be amenable to change as new evidence becomes available, while the latter is immutable.

At the Potsdam Conference, which was the culmination of several meetings of the Big Three, the territorial spoils of war were about to be shared. Stalin had his eyes on the Far East; during the Teheran Conference at the end of 1943 Stalin had secretly committed Russia to entering the war against Japan within three months of Germany’s surrender, and a number of Eastern territories had been promised to him. A show of strength was necessary to make him curtail his ambitions. As Viscount Alanbrooke, then General Sir Alan Brooke, Churchill’s Commander In Chief of General Staff, entered in his diary on 23 July 1945: “It was now no longer necessary for the Russians to come into the Japanese war; the new explosive alone was sufficient to settle the matter. Furthermore, we now had something in our hands which would redress the balance with the Russians” (Bryant p. 477). Truman, preceded by Roosevelt, probably had a long-standing intent to use the new weapon on Japan, if only to test it on a real target. This is certainly credible if one considers American public opinion at that time. Moreover, Japan had made repeated diplomatic attempts to negotiate a face-saving end to the war via the USSR, with which she had signed a peace treaty on 13 April 1941. Such diplomatic approaches could not be ignored indefinitely; the opportunity to test the new weapon in earnest were diminishing rapidly.

When at the Potsdam Conference Truman told Churchill that the new weapon had been tested, Churchill enthused to Alanbrooke about using it not on the Japanese but on the Russians, then an ally:

He [Churchill] was letting himself be carried away... He was already seeing himself capable of eliminating all the Russian centres of industry and population without taking into account any of the connected problems, such as delivery of the bomb, production of bombs, possibility of Russians also possessing such bombs, etc. He had at once painted a wonderful picture of himself as the sole possessor of these bombs and capable of dumping them where he wished, thus all-powerful and capable of dictating to Stalin! (Bryant p. 478).

The orthodox view of the Second World War is familiar. Many will have had it recounted on their mother’s knee: Hitler was a despot who planned and executed the massacre of Jews and others in his diabolical gas chambers and who was only thwarted in his designs for world domination by the combined efforts of Churchill, Roosevelt and ‘Uncle Joe,’ who subsequently turned bad. As we have seen, this scenario was vacuous even to the major players at the time. The rival argument regarding the Atom bomb is readily available, as is the theory that Roosevelt knew of the impending attack on Pearl Harbour. In both these cases the essential views and facts are presented even in the moderate historical accounts quoted here. As Butz notes in his foreword of Hoax however, no alternate perspective on the basic premise of WWII, and the Holocaust in particular, is ever entertained. This enigma, which Butz has been unable to resolve, is one which this author is privileged to be able to answer, albeit here in a severely abridged form. Firstly however, some groundwork must be laid; the reader, especially if uninitiated in this regard, is invited to share in another perspective.

No excuses are made here for the Aüslander Hitler, who may have laid claim as a leader of Austria but never Germany, but it can certainly be argued that he would have been preferable to Stalin as an ally. In his forced collectivization, persecution of the kulaks and merciless suppression of political opposition Stalin was responsible for unspeakable atrocities and innumerable killings of his own countrymen, in peacetime, even before the war began. Keegan (p. 455) concludes that “Stalin, even more than Hitler, was committed to a view of war as a political event.”

In this alternative scenario, the unforgivable crime of the Germans was losing a war against the most grotesque of alliances. Recall, again, that war is not nice; the very notion of ‘war crimes’ is a tenuous one for, as Machiavelli astutely observed, the side which keeps the Rules of War (whatever they might be) loses. The predominant alliance in WWII was between a ruthless dictator and mass murderer, a half-American grown-up spoiled brat who bankrupted the then still mighty British Empire for his own aggrandizement and an invalid President with a puerile world view who compulsively vacillated and refused to write anything down (Loewenheim et al. pp. xv-xvi; Taylor pp. 128-156). It seems that if Roosevelt had any deliberate policy at all, it was to damage Britain:

In his private talks with Stalin he deliberately gave the latter the impression that, with its egalitarian and forward-looking outlook, America was better able to understand Russian needs than the conservative imperialist Power that had maintained the balance of world affairs in the past. The American-Russian axis he sought to create in the political sphere was to be reflected in the military (Bryant p. 93).

Taylor has stated this view more directly: “Although the Americans supplied the weapons of war, they also squeezed Great Britain dry economically, and that was Roosevelt’s deliberate policy” (Taylor p. 137).

By his single-minded objective of defeating Hitler at any cost, Churchill has been described as the man who destroyed two empires, the British and the German. Numerous opportunities for a peace agreement were available and a lasting peace treaty could have been struck between Churchill and Hitler in 1942 (Baudot et al. pp. 372-382; see also Ponting, 1940: Myth and Reality). Any such possibility probably disappeared entirely when on 24 January 1943 (at the Casablanca Conference) Roosevelt declared that the goal of the war was “unconditional surrender.”

The consistent impression which is drawn from a review of the literature is of Stalin playing Churchill, Roosevelt and Hitler off against each other for his own ends. Commenting on the 1943 Teheran Conference, which was probably formative of the subsequent relationship between Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill, Alanbrooke remarked:

During this meeting and all the subsequent ones which we had with Stalin, I rapidly grew to appreciate the fact that he had a military brain of the very highest calibre. Never once in any of his statements did he make any strategic error, nor did he ever fail to appreciate all the implications of a situation with a quick and unerring eye. In this respect he stood out compared with his two colleagues.

At the time of the Conference Alanbrooke wrote (Bryant pp. 90-91):

His [Stalin’s] political and military requirements could now be best met by the greatest squandering of British and American lives in the French Theatre. We were reaching a very dangerous point where his shrewdness, assisted by American short-sightedness, might lead us anywhere.

At Yalta “Roosevelt and Stalin appeared at times to combine against Churchill, especially over their refusal to tie down the future of post-war Europe in detail... The truth was that the USA and USSR were now super-powers, but Britain, drained by five and a half years of war, was not” (Messenger p. 215). Roosevelt has escaped a great deal of criticism because while Churchill insisted that only written orders be obeyed, Roosevelt refused to commit anything to paper. For this and other reasons “the British military leadership has been far more critical of Churchill’s conduct of the war than their American counterparts have been of Roosevelt’s” (Loewenheim et al. pp. 43-44).

As far as any concrete achievement of the war is concerned, within six months of the final Nazi downfall the semi-official Zionist militia Haganah had engaged the British, who were administering the new ‘Jewish National Home’ under a League of Nations Mandate and attempting to keep the peace by holding Jewish immigration at its 1939 level.

In October 1945 Haganah initiated a sabotage campaign, setting off 500 explosions, and by the spring of 1946, when 80,000 British troops were deployed in Palestine, the territory trembled on the brink of open insurrection, which threatened to become a communal war should the Palestine Arabs judge that the British intended to permit large-scale Jewish immigration or abandon the Mandate (Keegan pp. 588-589).

The British, who had fought tenaciously against the Jews’ persecutors, were turned upon by the very race they had supposedly rescued, and placed into a completely impossible position.

Some of the omissions and contradictions in the conventional historical view are breathtaking in their simplicity. An evident problem with the orthodox notion of a German intent to exterminate Jews and other ‘undesirables’ en masse is that if Auschwitz was an extermination centre, it was clearly nonsensical to move internees from there to other camps and even to hospitalize prisoners who had succumbed during the epidemics of typhus, as is known to have taken place with at least one member of the group of eight which is our sample. One possible explanation for Otto Frank’s sparing could be his former status as a reserve Lieutenant in the German Army in the First World War, which would ordinarily have qualified him for some leniency, but there are Jews without such qualifications who also survived.

The Holocaust was not a significant feature of the war, but became so afterward. As several Revisionist scholars have admitted, a claim that no mass murders whatever took place throughout the Axis territories of WWII is impossible to sustain: it only needs a single maverick like Koch (the ‘Butcher of Buchenwald’ who was executed by his SS comrades for corruption and maltreatment of prisoners) to demolish that theory. The essential Revisionist claim is that no deliberate intention existed to exterminate Jews or indeed any other group. The Germans institutionalize and document everything and, as is well-known, no documentary evidence of such an intention exists. As Butz stated on page 10 of his book, if we neglect political rhetoric, wartime propaganda, and the post-war trials and their subsequent elaboration, reliable evidence of a German policy to slaughter Jews is distinctly lacking. Indeed, murdering Jews continued to be illegal throughout the period of the war (Butz p. 187). The intended purpose of the camps was as work or transit camps, for the official policy of the National Socialists towards the Jews was expulsion.

Revisionists have at least the work of Paul Rassinier to provide an accurate portrayal of the conditions, the mixed population and the power structures within the German camps. Rassinier was a communist and member of the French Resistance who was interned in several camps, notably Buchenwald. Butz reports that Rassinier’s work contains demographic errors, and his certainty of dates borders on the suspicious, but he unfailingly recounts incidents which might be considered prejudicial to his case and this is sufficient to inspire confidence in his integrity. His work is strongly recommended; the most striking revelation is that many of the atrocities which took place within the camps were committed by the inmates themselves. Rassinier makes enlightening comparisons with the French civilian prisons of the era and this might also provide a warning to those who insist on judging historical events against contemporary values.

The mayhem which ensued when the Allies took command of the camps and the atrocities which were committed by the Allied forces following their victory are topics which are little documented in mainstream literature. Some of the internees were common criminals and others were carrying typhus. Fatalities from disease and other deprivations continued for several months after the takeover of the camps by the Allies. The following account is by the American historian Harold Zink, taken from The Hoax of the Twentieth Century:

They not only consumed large quantities of food, but they exhibited many of the psychoneurotic traits which must be expected from people who have undergone the tribulations that many of the displaced persons suffered. It was commonplace for them to allege that they were not receiving the consideration that they deserved from the Allied authorities. They often objected to the camps in which they were living, claiming that it reflected on their position to be lodged in camps. Some urged that the best German houses be cleared of their occupants and placed at the disposal of the displaced persons, especially the Jews. They refused to assist in some instances in keeping their quarters reasonably habitable, taking the position that it was not their responsibility... Moreover, the displaced persons continued their underground war with the German population, despite all their promises and the efforts exerted by UNRRA and the American Army personnel. Forages into the countryside never ceased; some displaced persons took advantage of every opportunity to pick a quarrel with the Germans. With German property looted, German lives lost, and German women raped almost every day by the displaced persons, widespread resentment developed among the populace, especially when they could not defend themselves against the fire-arms which the displaced persons managed to obtain (Butz p. 227).

This, however, is almost as nothing compared to the revelations made by James Bacque in Other Losses. It transpires that a million Germans were deliberately starved to death after the war had ended.

In September 1943 Roosevelt and Churchill approved a plan to summarily execute certain captured Nazi leaders without trial, a scheme especially favoured by Churchill. A couple of months later, at the Teheran Conference, there was “a stormy private dinner given... by Stalin to the President and Prime Minister at which, horrified by his host’s announcement that he proposed to shoot the entire German General Staff after the war, Churchill temporarily left the room in indignation” (Bryant p. 97). However by Yalta “Stalin was in favour of a trial of major war criminals provided that it was not ‘too judicial’” and by the time of the Potsdam Conference agreement had been reached to hold them.

The United Nations War Crimes Commission was formed two years before the institution of the UN Charter, so it can accurately be stated that the UN was founded on these war crimes trials. The original criterion for membership of the UN was that member states had to have declared war against the Axis powers (Messenger pp. 244, 246).

The only apparent concession to Revisionist thought in the mainstream literature is to mention the doubtful legality of these trials. According to Butz (p. 23) 420 death sentences were passed during the German trials. According to Keegan (p. 590) 900 Japanese were executed following the Tokyo trials, mainly for maltreatment of prisoners of war. However only the German trials will be discussed here, and because of their extremity particular attention will be paid to the Dachau Trials.

The most appalling physical and psychological torture was employed in the prepatory stages of these particular trials to extract confessions from the staffs of the Buchenwald, Dachau and Flossenbürg camps. Some of the staff of the Dachau camp had stayed behind on the promise by an ICRC delegate of an orderly changeover. Quoting another passage directly from Hoax:

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 encouraging 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 favourite 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 US Army uniforms, were seated around a black table with a crucifix in the center, with two small 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... (Butz pp. 22-23).

At one point during the Dachau Trials a German defendant Menzel was being tried for murdering a Jew called Einstein. When the dead Einstein’s brother was called as a witness by prosecutor Kirschbaum, Menzel was able to point out that the Einstein who was allegedly murdered was actually sitting in court. Kirschbaum rounded on his witness and said: “How can we bring this pig to the gallows, if you are so stupid as to bring your brother into court?” (Butz p. 24).

By the time of the International and Nuremberg Military Tribunals the perverted legal procedures, forced and dishonest submissions and downright immorality surrounding these so-called trials had become institutionalized. The following extracts from the “Charter of the International Military Tribunal,” defining the terms under which it and the following Nuremburg Tribunals were to operate, are sufficient to demonstrate that by no stretch of the imagination can they be considered a proper legal process.

Article 19. The Tribunal shall not be bound by technical rules of evidence. It shall adopt and apply to the greatest possible extent expeditious and non-technical procedure, and shall admit any evidence which it deems to have probative value...

Article 21. The Tribunal shall not require proof of facts of common knowledge but shall take judicial notice thereof...

The Tribunals had discarded all legal precedent and virtually all inhibitions as far as proper legal procedures were concerned. Although there was sanctimonious talk of having “a fair trial,” practically anyone could take the witness stand and say almost anything they liked.

Some examples can be given which typify the attitude and procedures of the Tribunals. At the IMT one defendant, Gustav Krupp, was the elder of a family which ran Fried. Krupp A. G., a large corporation concerned with naval shipbuilding, armament supply and mining. The elder Krupp was charged, amongst other things, with using slave labour. When it became clear that Gustav Krupp was too old and sick to stand trial, an attempt was made by the prosecution to substitute his son Alfried in his place (IMT vol. I p. 84 & Butz pp. 21-22). This failed, and later at the NMT Alfried Krupp and another eleven leading company personnel were tried. Half-way through the 11-month trial, on 16 January 1948, the entire defence counsel walked out of the court in disgust, although the trial of the defendants apparently continued regardless. The members for the defence were eventually marshalled and six leading defence counsel were themselves taken into custody for contempt of court. A full account of this hilarious debacle is contained in NMT vol. XV pp. 996-1013. The immediately preceding transcript (pp. 991-995) makes the allegation that forged documents were submitted to the Tribunals entirely believable.

One aspect of the Tribunals which is sometimes neglected by Revisionists however is the activities of doctors and the advantage which was taken of the captive population in some of the camps to conduct medical and other trials. Many of the subjects were given extra rations to compensate for their additional ordeal, but there are reports of some of them rebelling, saying that they would rather be shot than continue being subjected to experiments.

The example is given of Prof. Dr. Schiller who, with laudable intentions, attempted to perfect the immunization and treatment of malaria by experimentally infecting around 1,000 internees with a benign strain of malaria: “Experimental infections of human beings with malaria tertiana (mild tertian malaria) have proved to be harmless and have very frequently been carried out on voluntary experimental subjects.” Moreover, it was said to be impossible to maintain stocks of the malaria parasite without involving man. Schiller was not a hypocrite; although his trial subjects were undoubtedly involuntary he had contracted the disease himself some years previously and so was not requiring them to undergo something he had not endured himself. “Schilling only accepted this commission at Dachau because the League of Nations, of which he was a member, told him of the importance of curing the seventeen million known cases of malaria.” Schiller could not refuse patients and worked under orders from Himmler, and during his meeting with Himmler “the question of using prisoners for experiments was not discussed.” The pronouncement of the Tribunal however was that “in many respects the accused Schilling was the most reprehensible... Although his personal motives may have stemmed from his desire to aid humanity, he permitted himself to utilize Nazi methods in contrast to other eminent German artists and scientists who either fled or refused” and the 74-year old specialist in tropical diseases was hanged (NMT vol. I pp. 290-302).

In our political system it is not supposed to be the role of scientists and doctors to be activists against it, and it defies all notions of civility to expect medical scientists to perform their roles as impartial gatherers of information within the prevailing system and at the same time take personal responsibility for the system they are expected to work within. It is the view of the writer that this conflict be resolved, and not by giving scientists less responsibility but more. Since we have been, and will continue to be, betrayed by politicians, it is proposed that the optimum form of government is by a committee of scientists. Only then, it is proposed, can a serious attempt be made to correct the enormous evolutionary damage which has been done in recent years. In the future a licence will be required to have a baby.

The account involving Schilling is taken directly from the Nuremberg Tribunal documentation however and, as has been shown, scepticism is in order. The chief of the Dachau War Crimes Administration Branch, Colonel A. H. Rosenfeld, was later asked if there was any truth to the stories about the mock trials and sham death sentences employed at Dachau. He replied: “Yes, of course. We couldn’t have made those birds talk otherwise... It was a trick, and it worked like a charm” (Butz p. 24).

The following is taken from The Second Leuchter Report although its original language was German. “According to the Austrian Emil Lachout, the Allied military police and its Austrian auxiliaries regularly received copies of reports drawn up by the commissions of inquiry on the concentration camps. Those reports were used for research on ‘war crimes.’ On 1 October 1948, Commander Anton Müller and his second-in-command, Emil Lachout, sent the following memo from Vienna to all interested parties”:

Military Police Service
Circular Letter No. 31/48
Vienna, 1 Oct. 1948
10th dispatch

1. The Allied Commissions of Inquiry have so far established that no people were killed by poison gas in the following concentration camps: Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, Dachau, Flossenbürg, Gross-Rosen, Mauthausen and its satellite camps, Natzweiler, Neuengamme, Niederhagen (Wewelsburg), Ravensbrück, Sachsenhausen, Stutthof, Theresienstadt.

In those cases, it has been possible to prove that confessions had been extracted by torture, and that testimonies were false.

This must be taken into account when conducting investigations and interrogations with respect to war crimes. The result of this investigation should be brought to the cognizance of former concentration camp inmates who at the time of the hearings testified about the murder of people, especially Jews, with poison gas in those concentration camps. Should they insist on their statements, charges are to be brought against them for making false statements...

Harwood also pointed out in Did Six Million Really Die? that despite inspections by the ICRC of numerous concentration camps, throughout the 1,600 pages of their Report of the International Committee of the Red Cross on its Activities during the Second World War, published in the same year, not a single mention is made of any gas chamber. Thus, as early as 1948, the travesty of justice which had taken place at Nuremberg was becoming clear. It was too late however; the stable doors were being closed after the horse had bolted. The Holocaust legend had been born.

Humans are very capable of false perception. One example is that 80% of the witnesses of an aeroplane crash will claim that an explosion took place before the aeroplane hit the ground, when the reality is otherwise. In the mid-late 18th century there was a school of philosophers, which included Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who maintained that chimpanzees and other anthropoid apes were man. One went even further: “Nor” wrote Edward Long, “do they seem at all inferior in the intellectual faculties to many of the Negroe race” (Baker pp. 22-23). The value of science is that it provides us with objective measurement and a basis for accurate judgement.

Fourteen years after the completion of the Nuremberg Tribunals, in 1963, the principal defendant in a trial in Frankfurt was R. K. L. Mulka, an ex-SS Hauptsturmführer who had briefly been an adjutant to Höss at Auschwitz. Continuing in the tradition of Nuremberg, Mulka and several other of the 21 defendants were being tried a second time for the same offences. The opinion of the court is so cogent that the reader’s forgiveness is requested for the following lengthy extract to be reproduced verbatim:

This determination of guilt has however presented the court with extraordinarily difficult problems.

Except for a few not very valuable documents, almost exclusively only witness testimonies were available to the court for the reconstruction of the deeds of the defendants. It is an experience of criminology that witness testimony is not among the best of evidence. This is even more the case if the testimony of the witness refers to an incident which had been observed twenty years or more ago under conditions of unspeakable grief and anguish. Even the ideal witness, who only wishes to tell the truth and takes pains to explore his memory, is prone to have many memory gaps after twenty years. He risks the danger of projecting onto other persons things which he actually has experienced himself and of assuming as his own experiences things which were related to him by others in this terrible milieu. In this way he risks the danger of confusing the times and places of his experiences.

It has certainly been for the witnesses an unreasonable demand for us to question them today concerning all details of their experiences. It is asking too much of the witnesses if we today, after twenty years, still wish to know when, where and how, in detail, who did what. On this basis astonishment was repeatedly expressed by the witnesses, that we asked them for such a precise reconstruction of the past occurrences. It was obviously the duty of the defence that it wished to make these witnesses appear ridiculous. On the contrary, we must call to mind only once what endless detailed work is performed in a murder trial in our days – how out of small mosaic-like pieces the picture of the true occurrences at the moment of the murder is put together. There is available for the court’s deliberations above all the corpse, the record of the post-mortem examination, the expert opinions of specialists on the causes of death and the day on which the deed must have occurred, and the manner in which the death occurred. There is available the murder weapon and fingerprints to identify the perpetrator; there are footprints he left behind as he entered the house of the slain, and many more details at hand which provide absolute proof to the court that this person was done to death by a definite perpetrator of the deed.

All this was missing in this trial. We have no absolute evidence for the individual killings; we have only the witness testimonies. However sometimes these testimonies were not as exact and precise as is necessary in a murder trial. If therefore the witnesses were asked, in which year or month an event happened, it was entirely necessary for the determination of the truth. And these dates sometimes presented to the court the only evidence for the purpose of determining whether the event related by the witness did in fact happen as the witness related it, or whether the witness had committed an error or confused victims. The court was naturally aware that it was an extraordinary burden for the witnesses, in view of the camp conditions, where no calendars, clocks or even primitive means of keeping records were available, to be asked to relate in all details what they experienced at the time. Nevertheless the court had to be able to determine whether an individual defendant did in fact commit a real murder, and when and where. That is required by the penal code.

This was an ordinary criminal trial, whatever its background. The court could only judge according to the laws it is sworn to uphold, and these laws require the precise determination of the concrete guilt of an accused on both the objective and subjective sides. The overburdening of the witnesses shows how endlessly difficult it is to ascertain and portray concrete events after twenty years. We have heard witnesses who at first appeared so reliable to the court that we even issued arrest warrants on their declarations. However in exhaustive examination of the witness declarations in hours-long deliberations it was found that these declarations were not absolutely sound and did not absolutely correspond to objective truth. For this purpose certain times had to be ascertained and documents re-examined – whether the accused, who was charged by a witness, was at the camp Auschwitz at all at the time in question, whether he could have committed the deed there, or whether the witness perhaps projected the deed onto the wrong person.

In view of this weakness of witness testimony – and I speak now only of the sworn witnesses whose desire for the truth, the subjective and objective truth, the court was thoroughly confident of – the court especially had to examine the witness testimonies. Only a few weeks ago we read in the newspapers that a member of the Buchenwald concentration camp staff had been convicted of murdering an inmate who, it is clear today, is alive and was certainly not murdered. Such examples should make us think. These cases of miscarriages of justice do not serve to strengthen the respect for the law. On these grounds also the court has avoided whatever could even in the most remote sense suggest a summary verdict. The court had examined every single declaration of each of the witnesses with great care and all earnestness and consequently is unable to arrive at verdicts of guilty on a whole list of charges, since secure grounds could not be found for such verdicts. The possibilities of verifying the witness declarations were very limited. All traces of the deeds were destroyed. Documents which could have given the court important assistance had been burned... (Butz pp. 187-188).

The conclusion of the Frankfurt court reproduced here is useful because it presents us with a fair picture of the distortions which can occur when relying on witness testimonies. However it appears to be erroneous in at least one significant respect: it speaks of “the camp conditions, where no calendars, clocks or even primitive means of keeping records were available.” Clearly not only Rassinier had adequate means of recording dates; many of the 200 diaries which are held in RIOD’s archives were written within concentration camps. Hence it seems that facilities for precisely documenting incidents within the camps were not entirely lacking, and we might then be doubly sceptical of witnesses who make unsubstantiated claims to have seen events for which no separate and independent corroborative evidence exists.

The opinion of the Frankfurt Court quoted here might be contrasted with a piece in (probably a letter to) the New York Times which appeared in 1948. George A. McDonough had the dubious privilege of serving in the roles of both prosecutor and defence counsel at the Dachau Trials, and wrote:

Hearsay evidence was admitted indiscriminately and sworn statements of 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 was promptly overruled (Butz pp. 23-24).

Given that no homicidal gas chambers were in operation in the German camps mentioned in the Müller document, attention shifted to the camps situated in Poland. Under communist rule these camps could not be inspected but a major development occurred in 1988 when the American engineer Fred Leuchter visited the Auschwitz, Birkenau and Majdanek camps to perform forensic tests, specifically to take samples of the residues of cyanide which would inevitably remain if the supposed gas chambers had actually been used as such.

Zyklon B (hydrocyanic acid) is an insecticide which was used to de-louse buildings and inmates’ clothing in attempts to prevent the spread of typhus in the camps, and this is the substance which is claimed to have been used for the gassings. Leuchter is a consultant who has been hired by the American Prison Service to advise on the construction of real gas chambers. Residues of cyanide in Delousing Facility No. 1 at Birkenau, which was the control sample, were 1,000 times higher than those in the communal shower areas which are supposed to have served as gas chambers. Residues of cyanide in the latter were approximately equivalent to what would be expected from a single disinfection cycle. The Leuchter Report concludes:

After reviewing all of the material and inspecting all of the sites at Auschwitz, Birkenau and Majdanek, your author finds the evidence is overwhelming. There were no execution gas chambers at any of these locations. It is the best engineering opinion of this author that the alleged gas chambers at the inspected sites could not then have been, or now, be utilized or seriously considered to function as execution gas chambers.

Subsequent reports by the chemist Germar Rudolf and the President of the Austrian Chamber of Engineers Walter Lüftl have agreed with Leuchter’s conclusions.

It is assumed that the Müller Document is not a forgery, for one must always be careful. Errors can be introduced and then carried forward by repeated quoting, gathering in this manner a momentum which is difficult to arrest. An example might again be provided by the Anne Frank Diary – most allegations that it is a fraud stem from an inaccurate 1967 article in the American Mercury attributed to Teressa Hendry. The same article reappeared 11 years later in the Washington weekly The Spotlight (C. E. pp. 78-83, 91-92).

We need have few worries about the Müller document however since it is now accepted among scholars that, despite what was concluded at Nuremburg, no gas chambers existed on German soil. ‘Joe Public’ may still be under the impression that every German camp had a gas chamber cunningly disguised as a shower, but this is not historians’ current view: the showers were just that. There are a number of accounts of showers, and a building at Auschwitz, being ‘converted’ immediately after the war for demonstration purposes, which thousands of visitors now see.

The cynic might remark from the scenario presented by Kogon et al. that, having failed to make the charge of mass murder by gassing in the German camps stick, an attempt is being made to supplant it with new charges of events which supposedly took place at German sites which practically no-one has ever heard of. This is reminiscent of the political practice of ‘mud slinging,’ used most overtly for character assassinations and by deranged conspiracy theorists (UFO’s, abductions by aliens, men on Mars and the like). The general principle is ‘If we throw enough mud, anything we can concoct, sooner or later some of it will stick.’ By repeated attempts and sheer force of effort a scenario is ultimately arrived upon which cannot be disproved. Claims of the existence of gas chambers in the Polish camps have been compromised, to say the least.

The remaining facts of the matter are these. Hitler introduced euthanasia by decree on 1 September 1939, authorizing the mercy killing of mortally ill patients:

Reichsleiter Bouhler and Dr. Brandt, M. D., are charged with the responsibility of enlarging the authority of certain physicians to be designated by name in such a manner that persons who, according to human judgement, are incurable can, upon a most careful diagnosis of their condition of sickness, be accorded a mercy death.

The law was later extended to include the severely insane. These measures caused considerable disquiet among the German civilian population, including rumours of gassings (Butz p. 174 and NMT vol. I pp. 794-802). These rumours may even have been the original inspiration for the claims by the British Psychological Warfare Executive and Jews of the existence of gas chambers.

At the present day, euthanasia is allowed in Holland and it is well-known that not all cases are voluntary. Such is the lack of respect for the law and the consensus in favour of euthanasia (or the absence of protest against it) that probably the majority of cases do not follow the official procedure. There are presently 1400 official cases per year and at least as many again unofficial ones. A visiting delegation from the British House of Lords uncovered a case of an elderly, mentally ill woman taking up a needed bed whose family were having difficulties paying for her treatment. Such was the combination of circumstances that the temptation was apparently overwhelming, and a lethal injection was administered – she was killed.