This section will now deal with deniers trying to exculpate Hitler and many senior Nazis from the holocaust, saying it was dirty work undertaken by the lower ranks without knowledge of the higher ups. Additionally, it will also deal with other aspects of the holocaust not related to camps, i.e. the mass graves and medical horrors that are part of it, and includes genocide via Einsatzgruppen shootings & Gas Vans.

CONTENTS:

Addressing the "no extermination order from Hitler" nonsense

Göring's Final Solution letter to Heydrich

Did Hitler know what was going on regarding the Final Solution to the Jewish question?

The Hitler Interview in 1922 and many other recorded instances of Hitler's genocidal intent

More proofs about Hitler's intent regarding the fate of the Jewish race in Europe

Goebbels' diary entries

Hans Frank, Generalgouverneur of Nazi-occupied Poland

Heinrich Himmler as a German dictionary - the October 4th, 1943 Posen (Poznan) speech

Hoefle Telegram

"Bandenbekämpfung" and the Korherr report

The Jäger report

Letter to Himmler by Viktor Brack, the organiser of Aktion T4, talking about castration

Wetzel's letter to Lohse and "the Brack remedy", October 29, 1941

Franz Walter Stahlecker's Map, January 31 1942

Naked women being executed

Another shot of the massacre

Mass grave in Proskuriv, Podolia (Western Ukraine)

 

Mobile Gas Vans

Documentary evidence of the existence and homicidal nature of gas vans

Gas vans were also used within the Reich, such as in Mauthausen

SS-Major General Harald Turner's letter to chief of German Administration in Serbia, Karl Wolff

Saurer Gas vans in Smolensk, 23rd February 1942

"SHOW ME A PHOTO OR VIDEO OF A GASSING VICTIM!!!!"

The tale of Dr. Charles P. Larson's Dachau autopsies and other "crime doctors"

Prisoners who have committed suicide on the electrified barbed wire fence of the camp

Nazi Medical experimentation and the horrors of Ravensbrück and Natzweiler-Struthof

August Hirt and the Jewish Skeleton Collection

The Kommissarbefehl of 6th June 1941, and how it is relevant to the holocaust

Treatment of Soviet PoWs (September 8th, 1941) and why they're part of the holocaust

The Nuremberg trials

Concluding National Socialist guilt of crimes against humanity, Einsatzgruppen and Gas Vans

Addressing the "no extermination order from Hitler" nonsense

Holocaust denial is a religion with many religious principles its adherents feverishly cling on to. One such tenet, is there is no surviving extermination order from Hitler. While this is true, to therefore conclude that there never was a Hitler order, neither verbal nor in writing, is the worst kind of blunder a historian can make. Later on I will show how verbal commands were a thing in Nazi Germany's chain of command, and how written orders had limited circulation and usually only for higher ups - which also made it easy for highly incriminating documents to be destroyed. Documents being fed to paper shredders is not just a mere meme. Adolf Ehinger's paper shredder was manufactured in 1935 in Germany. Ehinger later marketed his shredders to government agencies and financial institutions from hand-crank to electric motor. Keep in mind burning paperwork was also a thing.

But let's address the document at hand. Pic related was sent from the Führerhauptquartier on the 11th of July 1943, titles "Treating (better translation: "About" or "Dealing with") the Jewish question" and states that the Führer has commanded that when it comes to dealing with the Jewish question in public, NO description is to be given regarding the future implementation of a "complete solution".

 

It goes on to state that HOWEVER, that it is *allowed* to be spoken of that Jews en masse are being drafted to a befitting work duty.

 

While holocaust deniers say this falls perfectly in line with, and is simply more proof of, the mass internment of the Jewish people in camps which they don't deny in the first place, I would like to ask them why there is a specific Führer order demanding nobody be descriptive about the meaning of the term "complete solution" to begin with. The German phrase "Es kann jedoch..." actually implies that one is allowed to give a slightly more vague explanation, instead of interpreting the missive as being ordered to say nothing at all.

 

Why all the secrecy, unless they were trying to cover up the fact that "complete solution" in reality does NOT mean sending all Jews to work in labor camps after all? The whole order basically says "here is a top secret Führer order stating you should not be descriptive about A but it is okay to explain it as B". Very suspicious indeed.

Göring's Final Solution letter to Heydrich

Furthermore, we have the above, dated July 1941, an order from Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring to Reinhard Heydrich, one of the key architects of the Holocaust, instructing him to take all organisatory and material preparations necessary to begin the operation of the TOTAL Solution (Gesamtlösung) to the Jewish Question in territories under German control in Europe by means of emigration and evacuation, and to soon let him know exactly what the logistical and material requirements for the impending FINAL solution (angestrebte Endlösung) to the Jewish Question are going to be.

 

While this is not an order from Hitler himself, it can still be accepted as a written order for the Final Solution, first beginning by emigratory means ("...in Form der Auswanderung und Evakuierung"), given by Göring, one of Hitler's closest aides. During the Nuremberg trials, Göring stressed about the words "emigration and evacuation" to point out that this particular order was not about physically exterminating Jews. He wanted to exculpate himself this way, but he did NOT deny that the physical extermination of Jews had happened. Hermann Göring also doesn't say that he had no idea about the physical extermination while he was in office.

 

To assume both Himmler (you can hear his frank discussion about the physical extermination of the Jewish race in his 1943 Posen speeches) AND Göring were acting behind Hitler's back and without his consent is a tall claim that is not supported by any evidence provided by Holocaust deniers.

Did Hitler know what was going on regarding the Final Solution to the Jewish question?

Throughout the 1920s, Hitler maintained that "the Jewish question" was the "pivotal question" for his Party and would be solved "with well-known German thoroughness to the final consequence."[1] With his assumption to power in 1933, Hitler's racial notions were implemented by measures that increasingly excluded Jews from German society.

 

On January 30, 1939, Hitler warned that if Jewish financiers and Bolsheviks initiated war, "The result will not be the Bolshevization of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe."[2]

 

On, September 21, 1939, after the Germans invaded Poland, SD chief Heydrich ordered the Einsatzgruppen (mobile killing units operating in German-occupied territory) to forcibly concentrate Polish Jews into ghettos, alluding to an unspecified "final aim."[3]

 

In the summer of 1941, with preparations underway for invading Russia, large-scale mass murder initiatives - already practiced domestically upon the mentally ill and deformed (see Aktion-T4, the euthanasia program) - were broadly enacted against Jews. Heydrich, acting on Hitler's orders, directed the Einsatzgruppen to implement the "special tasks" of annihilation in the Soviet Union of Jews and Soviet commissars.[4] On July 31, Heydrich received orders from Goering to prepare plans "for the implementation of the aspired final solution of the Jewish question" in all German-occupied areas, which is the shown document above.[5] Eichmann, while awaiting trial in Israel in 1960, related that Heydrich had told him in August 1941 that "the Führer has ordered the physical extermination of the Jews."[6] Rudolf Hoess, the Commandant of Auschwitz, wrote in 1946 that "In the summer of 1941... Himmler said to me, 'The Führer has ordered the Final Solution to the Jewish Question... I have chosen the Auschwitz camp for this purpose.' "[7]

 

On January 20, 1942, Heydrich convened the Wannsee Conference to discuss and coordinate implementation of the Final Solution. Eichmann later testified at his trial: "These gentlemen... were discussing the subject quite bluntly, quite differently from the language that I had to use later in the record. During the conversation they minced no words about it at all... they spoke about methods of killing, about liquidation, about extermination."[8]

 

Ten days after the conference, while delivering a speech at the Sports Palace in Berlin that was recorded by the Allied monitoring service, Hitler declared: "The result of this war will be the complete annihilation of the Jews. . . the hour will come when the most evil universal enemy of all time will be finished, at least or a thousand years."[9] On February 24, 1943, he stated: "This struggle will not end with the annihilation of Aryan mankind, but with the extermination of the Jewish people in Europe."[10]

 

Keep in mind that many of Hitler's orders, particularly on the extermination campaigns after the Aktion T4 fiasco, were made verbally, as the testimonies of Nazi higher ups confirm. Eichmann recorded in his diaries and memoirs, to Hitler propagandist and history distorter David Irving's chagrin (and Irving has spent his life saying Hitler had no clue about the holocaust), that Hitler gave Himmler the final verbal orders for the extermination campaign in October 1941.

 

The underlings were expected to determine the Führer's wants and do their best to achieve them. They knew what he wanted, because he outlined what he wanted often enough in his repetitious table talks, speeches, and harangues, for decades.

 

Hitler, seeing himself as a visionary and artist, was not interested in the details of how things were done, except with military operations, where he threw himself into tiny details, like the number of towed anti-tank guns in an infantry division. He was fascinated with this stuff, from his World War I experiences as a soldier. This mania for detail on minor military subjects turned Führer conferences into lengthy ordeals for all attending, as they often focused no trivialities instead of the big picture. After a few years, the OKW (Oberkommando der Wehrmacht) officers knew that the way to present Hitler with bad news was to sandwich stories of an isolated incident of heroism or a small victory, so he would be less infuriated by the defeat, and still focus on the small victory.

 

Hitler also saw warfare in terms of propaganda, and designed a lot of his military strategy in those terms. The Battle of the Bulge was not designed as much to take Antwerp and cut off the British 21st Army Group as it was to set the Western Allies squabbling amongst each other. He did not understand how well SHAEF (Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force) worked, compared to his feuding bureaucracies.

 

One of the major facets of how Hitler developed his image in Germany was that he was a leader who was above and beyond the normal political fray, an ordinary man who had given up all normal desires (family, civilian career, time, art) to achieve Germany's destiny. When things went wrong in Germany, they were not the Führer's fault. It was somebody else's. It helped enable him to take the credit, avoid the blame, and keep anyone from noticing his shortcomings and health issues.

 

It's also worth noting that in the final days in Berlin, a lot of paper in the Führerbunker was burned, some on orders of Hitler, others on orders from Martin Bormann. God knows what valuable incriminating evidence was lost. We can be certain that at least a good portion of it was sensitive information, as it wouldn't have been burned otherwise. Hitler regarded his war on the Jewish people (and Bolshevism as an extension in accord with his belief) as central to his life and career, and a subject for which he believed he would be considered a great hero decades later. Bormann likely destroyed a lot of key papers.

 

Another load of key papers went down in one of the planes flying to the Berghof, Hitler's private residence in the Obersalzberg of the Bavarian Alps near Berchtesgaden, crashing in what became East Germany. This crash became the tool by which Konrad Kujau displayed his fake "Hitler diaries" in 1983, which apparently were going to whitewash Hitler. In all likelihood, that plane contained many of the Table Talks that Bormann had transcribed.

 

But the key point...many of Hitler's orders and desires were given verbally, particularly after the Aktion-T4 mess.

 

Also, see Hitler's complicity regarding:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligenzaktion_Pommern (see death tolls below)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valley_of_Death_(Bydgoszcz) (1,200 - 5,000 civilians executed)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Tannenberg (20,000 civilian deaths in 760 mass executions)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massacres_in_Piaśnica (an estimated 12,000 - 14,000 victims)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_AB-Aktion_in_Poland (upto 7500 shot)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palmiry_massacre (around 1700 murdered)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wola_massacre (upto 50,000 liquidated)

 

Sources:

[1]: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, Volume 2, p. 489.

[2]: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, Volume 2, p. 490., speeches also available on youtube

[3]: Holocaust, Jerusalem: Keter Books, 1974, p. 104

[4]: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, Volume 2, p. 657

[5]: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, Volume 2, p. 492.

[6]: Ronnie Duggar, The Texas Observer, Austin, 1992, D. 48

[7]: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, Volume 2, pp. 641-642.

[8]: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, Volume 2, p. 657.

[9]: Ronnie Duggar, The Texas Observer, Austin, 1992, D. 48.

[10]: Holocaust, pp. 105-106.

The Hitler Interview in 1922 and many other recorded instances of Hitler's genocidal intent

Major Josef Hell was a journalist in the twenties and in the beginning of the thirties, during which time he also collaborated with Dr. Fritz Gerlich, the editor of the weekly newspaper "Der Gerade Weg", as cited in Fleming, Gerald. Hitler and the Final Solution. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. p. 17

 

In 1922, Hitler told Josef Hell the following:

 

“Once I really am in power, my first and foremost task will be the annihilation of the Jews. As soon as I have the power to do so, I will have gallows built in rows — at the Marienplatz in Munich, for example — as many as traffic allows. Then the Jews will be hanged indiscriminately, and they will remain hanging until they stink; they will hang there as long as the principles of hygiene permit. As soon as they have been untied, the next batch will be strung up, and so on down the line, until the last Jew in Munich has been exterminated. Other cities will follow suit, precisely in this fashion, until all Germany has been completely cleansed of Jews." — Adolf Hitler, 1922. (Josef Hell, "Aufzeichnung," 1922, ZS 640, p. 5, Institut fuer Zeitgeschichte.[13])

 

For more, see:

https://www.phdn.org/archives/www.ess.uwe.ac.uk/genocide/statements.htm

 

Similarly, Hitler expressed his genocidal hatred for Jews many other times as well:

 

On 21 January 1939 Hitler spoke with František Chvalkovský and said:

 

"We are going to destroy the Jews. They are not going to get away with what they did on 9 November 1918. The day of reckoning has come." (Helmuth Krausnick, 'The Persecution of the Jews', in Buchheim et al., Anatomy of the SS State (New York, 1968), p. 44, cited in Germany, 1866-1945, p. 637 Craig, Gordon Alexander)

 

In Mein Kampf, Hitler argued that in World War I, if upto 15,000 Jews had been homicidally gassed, this would have at least vindicated the sacrifices of German soldiers made at the front:

 

"If at the beginning of the war and during the war twelve or fifteen thousand of these Hebrew corrupters of the people had been held under poison gas, as happened to hundreds of thousands of our very best German workers in the field, the sacrifice of millions at the front would not have been in vain." (Kaes, Anton; Jay, Martín; Dimendberg, Edward. The Weimar Republic sourcebook. University of California Press. p. 806. ISBN 0-520-06775-4, requoting Mein Kampf page 766, Stalag Edition, Ostara Publications)

 

And then we have the time when Hitler told the Italian ambassador Vittorio Cerruti on the eve of the April 1st, 1933 SA-organized nationwide boycott of Jewish stores in Germany:

 

"I don't know whether my name will be held in honor in Germany in 200 or 300 years, but I'm absolutely certain that in 500 or 600 years the name Hitler will be universally glorified as the name of the man who once and for all eradicated the global pestilence that is Jewry." - as quoted in Max Domarus, "Hitler, Vol.1, part 1", pp. 300f.

 

Did you get the memo? Hitler is being quoted as having considered himself someone who will have "eradicated the global pestilence that is Jewry". Emphasis on the words 'eradicated' and 'global'. This doesn't leave room for interpretations of mere deportation out of Germany or Europe, as revisionists like to spin yarns around. Its meaning is pretty clear: worldwide physical extermination.

More proofs about Hitler's intent regarding the fate of the Jewish race in Europe

Oh you thought we were done? Not by a long shot. This article summarizes how many more times Hitler made clear in his many speeches exactly what awaits the Jews, should war happen in Europe once more:

 

http://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot.co.at/2014/05/three-hitler-speeches-from-1942.html

 

My particular favorite is the following speech of his, delivered to the Reichstag on January 30th, 1939: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W6mIO-kYI0I [alternative link: https://www.bitchute.com/video/WERQlXgxAswi/]

 

in case the link doesn't work, he says the following:

 

"Ich will heute wieder ein Prophet sein: Wenn es dem internationalen Finanzjudentum in und außerhalb Europas gelingen sollte, die Völker noch einmal in einen Weltkrieg zu stürzen, dann wird das Ergebnis nicht die Bolschewisierung der Erde und damit der Sieg des Judentums sein, sondern die Vernichtung der jüdischen Rasse in Europa!"

 

translation:

 

"Today I want to be a prophet again. If international finance Jewry within Europe and abroad should succeed once more in plunging the peoples into a world war, then the consequence will be not the Bolshevization of the world and therewith a victory of Jewry, but on the contrary, the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe!"

 

A man who threatens on tape that war brought upon Europe will result in the annihilation (Vernichtung) of the Jewish race (Jüdische Rasse, aka people, not "Judentum" as a political or economic power, or "jüdische Macht" (power) or "jüdischer Einfluss" (influence) but RASSE) in Europe, is about as clear as can be that he means the mass killing of Jews and nothing else, no figure of speech or any bullshit like that holocaust deniers would like to believe. He doesn't talk about evacuation, about "durchschleusen", or "evakuierung", or "deportation", about Sonderbehandlung, or even about "Ausrottung" (which some particularly obstinate deniers interpret as "to root out"), no, he says VERNICHTUNG (annihilation, destruction) very clearly.

 

Before you accuse me of only showing you a snippet, here's a longer clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QWx7nq_lnQM [video unavailable]

 

Hitler then goes on to say:

 

"Die Völker wollen nicht mehr auf den Schlachtfeldern sterben, damit diese wurzellose internationale Rasse an den Geschäften des Krieges verdient und ihre alttestamentarische Rachsucht befriedigt. Über der jüdischen Parole: Proletarier aller Länder vereinigt euch wird eine höhere Erkenntnis siegen, nämlich: Schaffende Angehörige aller Nationen erkennt euren gemeinsamen Feind."

 

translated to:

 

"The peoples no longer want to die on the battlefields, so that this rootless international race can profit from the affairs of the war and sate its old-testamentarian vengefulness. A higher realization will prevail over the Jewish slogan proletarians of the world unite!: Productive members of all nations, recognize your common enemy!"

 

Unless holocaust deniers can procure a 1940s dictionary that gives a different meaning to the German word Vernichtung, I daresay at this point they only can resort to saying:

 

1) the recording is fake (easy way out)

or

2) Hitler was only a hothead making empty threats, or poetic ("we will not die, for it is they who will...")

 

both are very moronic attempts at this point to exculpate Hitler.

Goebbels' diary entries

Holocaust deniers often like to claim there is no physical evidence written on paper that the Nazi regime was planning on physically exterminating European Jews. But they couldn't be further from the truth. From the plethora of documents left that prove this, one such example are the many diary entries and other publications of Joseph Goebbels which make the genocidal intent of the Nazi regime all too clear. =====

 

The History of the Diary itself, and how it was found

To better understand the importance of the diary, we have to first look at the history of its creation: Goebbels began to keep a diary in October 1923, shortly before his 27th birthday, while unemployed and living in his parents' home at Rheydt in the Ruhr region. He had been given a diary as a present by Else Janke, a young (part-Jewish) woman with whom he had an unsuccessful relationship, and most of his early entries were about her. His biographer Toby Thacker writes: "Writing a diary quickly became a kind of therapy for this troubled young man"[1] From 1923 onwards he wrote his diary almost daily.

 

According to biographer Peter Longerich, Goebbels' diary entries from late 1923 to early 1924 reflected the writings of a man who was isolated, preoccupied by "religious-philosophical" issues, and lacked a sense of direction.[2] Diary entries of mid-December 1923 forward show Goebbels was moving towards the völkisch nationalist movement.[3] Goebbels first took an interest in Adolf Hitler and Nazism in March 1924.[4] In February 1924, Hitler's trial for treason had begun in the wake of his failed attempt to seize power in Munich, Bavaria, during 8–9 November 1923 (this failed coup became known as the Beer Hall Putsch).[5] The trial garnered Hitler much press and gave him a platform for propaganda.[6] After Goebbels first met Hitler in July 1925, however, the Nazi leader increasingly became the central figure in the diary. By July 1926 Goebbels was so enraptured by Hitler speaking on "racial issues", that he wrote: "It is impossible to reproduce what [Hitler] said. It must be experienced. He is a genius. The natural, creative instrument of a fate determined by God. I am deeply moved.".[7]

 

By mid 1941 the diaries had grown to fill twenty thick volumes, and Goebbels realized that they were too valuable a resource to risk their destruction in an air raid. He therefore moved them from his study in his Berlin home to the underground vaults of the Reichsbank in central Berlin.[8] From this time onwards, he no longer wrote the diaries by hand. Instead he dictated them to a stenographer, who later typed up corrected versions.

 

By November 1944 it was evident to Goebbels that Germany was going to lose the war. Realizing that he was unlikely to survive the fall of the Third Reich, he gave orders that his diaries were to be copied for safekeeping, using the new technique of microfilm.[9] A special darkroom was created in Goebbels's apartment in central Berlin, and Goebbels's stenographer, Richard Otte, supervised the work of microfilming the diaries on about 1,700 glass plates in 1944 and 1945.[10] The original handwritten and typed diaries were packed and stored in the Reich Chancellery.[11] After the war, these were originally destined to be sold as 7,000 pages of scrap paper to a German scrap merchant, but rescued in the last moment. Through the hands of different intermediaries, the papers came into the possession of American reporter Frank E. Mason. Mason suspected that they were Goebbels diaries and took them to Louis P. Lochner, former chief of the Berlin bureau of the Associated Press. While some sections were damaged or missing, such as the entries detailing the annexation of Austria and the Kristallnacht in 1938, buried in the scattered manuscript were nevertheless several telling entries from the war years (as translated in Lochner, The Goebbels Diaries, 1948, pp. 86, 147-148) which will follow below.

 

The boxes of glass plates containing the microfilmed diaries however, were sent in April 1945 to Potsdam just west of Berlin, where they were buried. They were discovered by the Soviets and shipped to Moscow, where they sat unopened until they were discovered by German historian Elke Fröhlich from Munich's Institute for Contemporary History in the Moscow archives in 1992. Only then did the publication of the full diaries become possible (in German in 32 volumes).

 

The Diary Entries Proving the Holocaust

 

Now that you have understood the history of the diary, let us begin with the incriminating entries.

 

First, I will begin with a piece that Goebbels wrote for "Das Reich" on November 16th, 1941 in which he stated:

 

"The Jews are receiving a penalty that is certainly hard, but more than deserved. World Jewry erred in adding up the forces available to it for this war, and now is gradually experiencing the destruction that it planned for us, and would have carried out without a second thought if it had possessed the ability. It is perishing according its own law: "An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth."

 

source: "Die Juden sind schuld!" Das eherne Herz: Reden und Aufsätze aus den Jahren 1941/42 von Joseph Goebbels, Munich, 1943, p. 85; English translation by Randall Bytwerk at Calvin College German Propaganda Archive: http://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/goeb1.htm

 

Not related to Goebbels, but two days later, on November 18, three days after a meeting with Himmler, Alfred Rosenberg gave a briefing to the German press in which he stated that:

 

"In the east some six million Jews still live, and this question can only be solved in a biological eradication of the entire Jewry of Europe. The Jewish question is only solved for Germany when the last Jew has left German territory, and for Europe when not a single Jew lives on the European continent up to the Urals. ...for this reason it is necessary to expel them over the Urals or eradicate them in some other way."

 

source: Christopher R. Browning, "Evidence for the Implementation of the Final Solution", citing Rosenberg, 18.11.1941, in Political Archives of the Foreign Office, Pol. XIII, VAA Berichte, online at: https://www.phdn.org/archives/www.ess.uwe.ac.uk/genocide/browning3.htm

 

Now let's begin with Goebbels' diary entries. One example is Goebbels paraphrasing Hitler, spoken at a meeting of the NSDAP Reichs-and-Gauleiter on 12 December 1941 and recorded in Goebbels' diary entry on the following day:

 

«Bezüglich der Judenfrage ist der Führer entschlossen, reinen Tisch zu machen. Er hat den Juden prophezeit, dass, wenn sie noch einmal einen Weltkrieg herbeiführen würden, sie dabei ihre Vernichtung erleben würden. Das ist keine Phrase gewesen. Der Weltkrieg ist da, die Vernichtung des Judentums muss die notwendige Folge sein. Diese Frage ist ohne jede Sentimentalität zu betrachten. Wir sind nicht dazu da, Mitleid mit den Juden, sondern nur Mitleid mit unserem deutschen Volk zu haben. Wenn das deutsche Volk jetzt wieder im Ostfeldzug an die 160 000 Tote geopfert hat, so werden die Urheber dieses blutigen Konfliktes dafür mit ihrem Leben bezahlen müssen.»

(Quoted after Christian Gerlach, Krieg, Ernährung, Völkermord, page 117)

 

translation:

 

"Regarding the Jewish question, the Führer is determined to make a clean sweep. He prophesied to the Jews that, if they were again to bring about a world war, they would experience their destruction therein. That was no catch-phrase. The world war is here, the destruction of Jewry must be the necessary consequence. This question is to be regarded without any sentimentality. We are not here to have pity with the Jews, but only to have pity with our German Volk. If the German Volk has now again sacrificed about 160 000 dead in the Eastern Campaign, the authors of this bloody conflict must pay for this with their lives."

 

February 14, 1942: "The Führer once again expressed his determination to clean up the Jews in Europe pitilessly. There must be no squeamish sentimentalism about it. The Jews have deserved the catastrophe that has now overtaken them. Their destruction will go hand in hand with the destruction of our enemies. We must hasten this process with cold ruthlessness.”

 

On 27 March 1942, during the height of the war, Goebbels wrote into his diary one of the most explicit recorded references to the Nazi genocide of the Jews: «Aus dem Generalgovernement werden jetzt, bei Lublin beginnend, die Juden nach dem Osten abgeschoben. Es wird hier ein ziemlich barbarisches und nicht näher zu beschreibendes Verfahren angewandt, und von den Juden selbst bleibt nicht mehr viel übrig. Im großen kann man wohl feststellen, daß 60 % davon liquidiert werden müssen, während nur noch 40 % in die Arbeit eingesetzt werden können. Der ehemalige Gauleiter von Wien, der diese Aktion durchführt, tut das mit ziemlicher Umsicht und auch mit einem Verfahren, das nicht allzu auffällig wirkt. An den Juden wird ein Strafgericht vollzogen, das zwar barbarisch ist, das sie aber vollauf verdient haben. Die Prophezeiung, die der Führer ihnen für die Herbeiführung eines neuen Weltkriegs mit auf den Weg gegeben hat, beginnt sich in der furchtbarsten Weise zu verwirklichen. Man darf in diesen Dingen keine Sentimentalitäten obwalten lassen.»

 

translation:

 

"The Jews are now being pushed out of the General Government, beginning near Lublin, to the East. A pretty barbaric procedure is being applied here, and it is not to be described in any more detail, and not much is left of the Jews themselves. In general one may conclude that 60% of them must be liquidated, while only 40% can be put to work. The former Gauleiter of Vienna [Globocnik], who is carrying out this action, is doing it pretty prudently and with a procedure that doesn't work too conspicuously. The Jews are being punished barbarically, to be sure, but they have fully deserved it. The prophesy that the Führer issued to them on the way, for the eventuality that they started a new world war, is beginning to realise itself in the most terrible manner. One must not allow any sentimentalities to rule in these matters."

 

More examples: "...the greater the number of Jews liquidated, the more consolidated will the situation in Europe be after this war." -March 6, 1942

 

"Short shrift ["kurzer Prozess"] is being made of the Jews in all eastern occupied areas. Tens of thousands will 'have to believe in it' [German: "müssen daran glauben", idiom for 'bite the dust'], and the prophecy of the Führer is being fulfilled on them, that Judaism will have to pay for a new world war which it has ignited with the extermination of its race." -April 29, 1942 (German original for reference: "Zehntausend müssen daran glauben, und an ihnen erfüllt sich die Prophezeiung des Führers, dass das Judentum einen von ihm entfachten neuen Weltkrieg mit der Ausrottung seiner Rasse wird bezahlen müssen.") 

 

May 30, 1942 (...and this is where Dr. Joseph Goebbels blows apart the whole transit camp and evacuation to the east theory that holocaust deniers have been touting for decades, in a single diary entry):

 

"Therefore one must liquidate the Jewish danger, cost it what it will. Given how few Jews can in reality adjust themselves to Western European life, one sees that, where they are led back into the ghetto, they quickly revert to form. West European civilization represents only an external coat of paint to them. There is also the Jewish essence, which works with a dangerous brutality and vindictiveness. Therefore the Führer does not at all wish that the Jews should be evacuated ["evakuiert"] to Siberia. There, under the harshest living conditions, they would undoubtedly develop again a strong life-element. [...] At bottom, however, I believe both the English and the Americans are happy that we are exterminating the Jewish riff-raff." -December 13, 1942

 

May 13, 1943: "The intellectual does not have the natural means of resisting the Jewish peril because his instincts have been badly blunted. Because of this fact the nations with a high standard of civilization are exposed to this peril first and foremost. In nature life always takes measures against parasites; in the life of nations that is not always the case. From this fact the Jewish peril actually stems. There is therefore no other recourse left for modern nations except to exterminate the Jew." (Joseph Goebbels' Diaries: Excerpts, 1942-43, Part 2 of 2: May 13, 1943 (pp. 376-377)

 

Revisionists like to claim that the Nazis had absolutely no interest in wasting their time with silly concepts like world domination, and that this is something pinned on them by allied propagandists. But again, Dr. Goebbels humiliates their theories by continuing to say the following in his May 13th, 1943 diary entry:

 

"Sie werden sich mit allen Mitteln gegen diesen allmählichen Vernichtungsfeldzug zur Wehr setzen. Eines dieser Mittel ist der Krieg. Wir müssen uns also darüber klar sein, daß wir in dieser Auseinandersetzung zwischen der arischen Menschheit und der jüdischen Rasse noch sehr schwere Kämpfe zu bestehen haben, weil das Judentum es verstanden hat, große Völkerschaften aus der arischen Rasse bewußt oder unbewußt in seinen Dienst zu bringen . . . Das Weltjudentum steht nach der festen Überzeugung des Führers vor einem geschichtlichen Sturz . . . Die Völker, die den Juden am ehesten erkannt haben und ihn am ehesten bekämpfen, werden an seiner Stelle die Weltherrschaft antreten."

 

translation:

 

"They will resist this campaign of gradual destruction with everything at their disposal. One of these is war. So we have to be aware that in this conflict between Aryan humanity and the Jewish race, we still have to fight very hard battles because Judaism has managed to bring large peoples of the Aryan race consciously or unconsciously into its service . . . It is the Fuhrer's strong conviction that World Jewry is about to undergo a historic fall . . . Those peoples who have recognized and are most eagerly fighting the Jew, will take over world domination in his place."

 

Speaking of world domination, here's another entry that proves claims of National Socialist world domination weren't far-fetched at all:

 

May 13, 1943: "Aus alledem aber hat der Führer die Konsequenz gezogen, daß das Kleinstaatengerümpel, das heute noch in Europa vorhanden ist, so schnell wie möglich liquidiert werden muß. Es muß das Ziel unseres Kampfes bleiben, ein einheitliches Europa zu schaffen. Europa kann aber eine klare Organisation nur durch die Deutschen erfahren. Eine andere Führungsmacht ist praktisch nicht vorhanden. (...) Wer Europa besitzt, der wird damit die Führung der Welt an sich reißen. In diesem Zusammenhang können wir natürlich Fragen von Recht und Unrecht überhaupt nicht zur Diskussion akzeptieren."

 

source: Fröhlich II, Bd. 8, S. 287ff

 

translation: "From all this, however, the Führer has drawn the conclusion that the plethora of small-states, which still exist in Europe, must be liquidated as soon as possible. It must remain the goal of our struggle to create a united Europe. But Europe can only be clearly organized by Germans. There is practically no other leadership. (...) He who owns Europe will take leadership of the world. In this context we can obviously not accept questions of right and wrong to be brought to the discussion."

 

Revisionists (aka holocaust deniers) are quick to dismiss Goebbels' diaries as a forgery, without, as usual, providing examples as to how, where and by whom it was forged.

 

Several aspects that speak against forgery claims is that first of all, Goebbels began writing his diary in the early 1920s, almost daily entries for YEARS, with most of the diary being quite mundane, and interesting only to political historians. Why would the supposed Jewish conspiracy forge tens of thousands of pages just to insert just a few incriminating lines regarding the final solution in the 1940s? How did they manage to know Goebbels' affairs intimately enough to avoid contradictions, e.g. putting him or his associates in the wrong city at the wrong date? I understand the task of faking minor documents, but I cannot comprehend how one could forge thousands of pages. That is a herculean task for anyone to accomplish, making sure there are no contradictions.

 

Secondly, Goebbels' diary was not used during the Nuremberg Trials even though it had already been in possession of the Russians and the Americans - with the latter even being fully aware about the potential author of those papers. In fact, the reluctance of the American government to (at that time) accept the diary as genuine and therefore enter it as evidence can only be interpreted as proof they did not forge it.

 

Well, how about the Russians? Did they forge it? Remember, the Russians were the ones trying to pin the Katyn forest massacre on the Germans during the Nuremberg Trials - and this is a fact EVERY revisionist will try to hammer into your brain, without telling you that the International Military Tribunal did not accept Katyn and therefore it was not part of the verdict. Still, the point is, the Russians were trying to falsely frame the Germans for Katyn at this point. And yet, they did not enter into evidence the microfilmed glass plates of the Goebbels Diaries they possessed. The only conclsion is, they didnt do this, because they had even less of an idea of what was in their possession until much later. So, maybe the Soviets forged em in the decades that followed? Even that theory is bunk because the incriminating passages were in also in the typewritten pages in the possession of the Americans, allowing Louis P Lochner to publish the war years 1942-1943 of the diary in the initial years after WW2. I hope you understand what I am getting at here.

 

And finally, the fact that several copies of the diary exist in different locations: the handwritten and typewritten papers in Germany, later transferred to America, and the microfilmed plates also found in Germany and then taken to Moscow, corroborating each other. This proves the diary is genuine, as does the plethora of evidence of the diary's existence before the war was over.

 

Sources:

[1]: Thacker, Toby (2010). Joseph Goebbels: Life and Death. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, page 2

[2]: Longerich, Peter (2015). Goebbels: A Biography. New York: Random House, pages 28, 33, 34

[3], [5]: ibid, page 33

[4], [6]: ibid, page 36

[7]: Kershaw, Ian (2008). Hitler: A Biography. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, pp. 127-131

[8]: ibid, pp. 133-135

[9]: Stroebel, Leslie; Zakia, Richard D. (1993). The Focal Encyclopedia of Photography. Focal Press, p. 482

[10]: Thacker 2010, p. 285

[11]: ibid, p. 295

Hans Frank, Generalgouverneur of Nazi-occupied Poland

While we're at it, why not hear a little bit about what Hans Frank, governor of the Generalgouvernement had to say about the Jews?

 

"The General Government is our work force reservoir for lowgrade work (brick plants, road building, etc.,etc.). (...) Unconditionally, attention should be paid to the fact that there can be no "Polish masters"; where there are Polish masters, and I do not care how hard this sound, they must be killed. (...) The Fuhrer must emphazize once again that for Poles there is only one master and he is a German, there can be no two masters beside each other and there is no consent to such, hence all representatives of the Polish inteligentsia are to be killed. (...) The General Government is a Polish reservation, a great Polish labour camp."

- note of Martin Borman from the meeting Dr. Hans Frank with Adolf Hitler, Berlin 2 October 1940

 

"This war would be only a partial success if the whole lot of Jewry survived it, while we shed our best blood to save Europe. My attitude toward the Jews will therefore be based solely on the expectation that they must disappear. They must be done away with. Gentlemen, I must ask you to rid yourself of all feeling of pity. We must annihilate the Jews wherever we find them and wherever it is possible."

- Hans Frank, speech at a meeting with soldiers, December 1941, quoted in "The Trial of the Germans" (1997) - Page 438, by Eugene Davidson

 

expanded quote featured here:

 

"Let me tell you quite frankly: in one way or another we will have to finish with the Jews. The Führer once expressed it as follows: should Jewry once again succeed in inciting a world war, the bloodletting could not be limited to the peoples they drove to war but the Jews themselves would be done for in Europe. If the Jewish tribe survives the war in Europe while we sacrifice our blood for the preservation of Europe, this war will be but a partial success. Basically, I must presume, therefore, that the Jews will disappear. To that end I have started negotiations to expel them to the east. In any case, there will be a great Jewish migration. But what is to become of the Jews? Do you think that they will be settled in villages in the conquered eastern territories? In Berlin we have been told not to complicate matters: since neither these territories, nor our own, have any use for them, we should liquidate them ourselves! Gentlemen, I must ask you to remain unmoved by pleas for pity. We must annihilate the Jews wherever we encounter them and wherever possible, in order to maintain the overall mastery of the Reich here."

- Hans Frank, to senior members of his administration, December 16, 1941, quoted in "Why Did the Heavens Not Darken?: the final solution in history" (1088), page 302, Arno J. Mayer

 

"Both Einstein and Freud were clever in leaving Germany, because both of them would doubtlessly have been caught by Himmler and murdered."

- Hans Frank, to Leon Goldensohn, July 20, 1946, from "The Nuremberg Interviews" (2004) by Leon Goldensohn, Robert Gellately

Heinrich Himmler as a German dictionary - the October 4th, 1943 Posen (Poznan) speech

Now that we've established not only the complicity of people like Höss (Auschwitz), Heydrich (Einsatzgruppen) or Globocnik (Aktion Reinhard) but also higher ups like Goering, Hitler and Goebbels in the physical extermination of the Jewish race in Europe, which other leading Nazi higher-up can we include? Oh, I know - Himmler! Chief of the SS, obsessed with occultism and secrecy, 2nd most hated and known Nazi figure after Hitler by the broad public today, do I really need to point out Himmler's complicity in the holocaust? Of course I have to. Why don't you take a listen to his 1943 Posen speech, freely available with translation on youtube?

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mRO04q_lQi4

The largely American, largely only English speaking deniers over at CODOH quotemined an old German dictionary to look up the meaning of the word "Ausrotten", and, after "extermination" (which is what every German native speaker understands it as) also found the meaning "extirpation", i.e. to root something out. Ausrotten = outroot. This is the straw deniers cling onto from drowning in an ocean of guilt. Himmler, just like Hitler apparently, was also a poet. Removing all Jews from Europe kinda sorta somehow means they have been exterminated from Europe, doesn't it? This is the denier lifeline.

 

Needless to say, if Himmler meant evacuation only, why change the word? Why not use words like "Deportation"? "Evakuierung"? "Vertreibung"? "Auswanderung?" "Aussiedlung?" There's plenty.

 

In fact, why is the matter of mass deporting all Jews from Europe such a DIFFICULT MATTER to speak about for poor Himmler? See: "I want to mention another very difficult chapter here before you in all frankness. Among ourselves, it ought to have been spoken of; yet we shall NEVER speak of it in public. Just as little as we hesitated to do our ordered duty as ordered on 30 June 1934, and place comrades who had failed, against the wall and shoot them, just as little did we ever speak of it, and we shall never speak of it. It was a matter of course, of tact, for us, thank God, never to speak of it, never to talk of it. It made everybody shudder; yet everyone was clear in his mind that he would do it again if ordered to do so, and if it was necessary: I mean the Jewish evacuation - the extermination of the Jewish people."

 

Notice that Himmler is clearly making a comparison between what is known as the Night of the Long Knives/Operation Hummingbird/Röhm-Putsch, which resulted in the purge of the SA (Sturmabteilung) and the execution of right-wing enemies in 1934, and the current "Ausrottung des jüdischen Volkes". Why make this comparison between actual executions, actual physical killings that occurred in 1934, and the "deportation" of the Jews? Himmler clearly links these actions together. He also speaks of this as something not to be spoken of. The deportations themselves were no secret, this was hardly a matter of great secrecy.

 

I will go on to destroy the extirpation argument holocaust deniers bring up, by addressing the rest of the speech as well (apparently, they lacked the patience to listen to the other few minutes, or they wouldnt have bothered with the extirpation nonsense). This will also cover a 2nd denier claim, which is that Himmler was referring to the killing of armed Jewish partisans and no one else.

 

Himmler goes on to say "Ausschaltung der Juden", which translates to "Elimination of the Jews" (literally it would translate to "turning off").

 

The speech gets even more revealing now. Himmler goes on to say "Und zugesehen, es durchgestanden hat keiner", which translates to: "And yet, nobody has witnessed it, has had to endure it". What? Endure Jews being evacuted out of Europe? That's a harrowing experience for Nazis, the party that wanted them out of Europe in the first place? To bid farewell to the Jewish people as they forever leave Europe and head for a new home in the East? Get real.

 

Because Himmler goes on and says: "Von euch werden die meisten wissen, was es heißt, wenn 100 Leichen beisammen liegen, wenn 500 daliegen, oder wenn 1000 daliegen." which translates to "Most of you will know what it means when 100 corpses are lying next to each other, wenn there are 500, or 1000"

 

and he goes on to say how this had strengthened them, and is a page of glory that shall never be mentioned. By this point we can tell he is obviously referring to the holocaust and no longer to the Night of the Long Knives, because he goes on to even explain why (the Jews had to be exterminated): because otherwise in the middle of war and daily allied air raids on German cities they would then also have to deal with Jews as secret saboteurs, agitators and instigators, "wenn diese noch im deutschen Volkskörper säßen" (he makes a comparison with them being a parasite in the body of the German people).

 

As if that's not enough, Himmler makes it clear once again, so that even the dumbest 21st century denier finally gets it into his thick skull: "We had the moral right, we had the duty towards our Volk (the German people) to KILL this Volk (the Jewish people) that wanted to KILL us."

 

"Umbringen" in German means "to kill". THERE CAN BE NO DEBATE.

 

And he makes it clear that it was referring to killing the Jewish people, not killing "these individuals" or "these bandits", "these partisans" or whatever else holocaust deniers want to interpret the bodies + killing section of the speech as. VOLK means an entire people, not individuals, not bands.

 

In his second Posen speech (there was a similar one delivered on the 6th) he says:

 

"Es trat an uns die Frage heran: Wie ist es mit den Frauen und Kindern? Ich habe mich entschlossen, auch hier eine ganz klare Lösung zu finden. Ich hielt mich nämlich nicht für berechtigt, die Männer auszurotten- sprich also, umzubringen oder umbringen zu lassen – und die Rächer in Gestalt der Kinder für unsere Söhne und Enkel groß werden zu lassen. Es mußte der schwere Entschluß gefaßt werden, dieses Volk von der Erde verschwinden zu lassen."

 

which translates to:

 

"We came to the question: How is it with the women and children? I decided to find a clear solution here as well. I did not consider myself justified to exterminate the men – in other words, to kill them or have them killed – and allow the avengers of our sons and grandsons in the form of their children to grow up. The difficult decision had to be taken to make this people disappear from the earth."

 

TO MAKE THIS PEOPLE DISAPPEAR FROM THE EARTH.

 

At this point, holocaust deniers are only left with one option: to call the entire recording a fake. Which some of them have already done, like Germar Rudolf, who goes on rambling about how older recording tech was used for this recording than what was the latest fad in the 1940s, or how strange it is that a recording of a secret meeting exists in the first place (displaying his utter ignorance about Himmler even having his speeches typed and handed out to senior officials). A few other deniers point out that Himmler's voice in this recording is different to that of others, which is nonsense. If you listen to the many Hitler speeches you'll often realize how his tone often changes from very deep to a medium pitch.

 

Another "rebuttal" I have come across is when people point out "well if Germans wanted to physically kill all the Jews, why Haavara Agreement? Why Madagascar Plan?" and go on to quote Himmler from May 25th, 1940:

 

"Den Begriff Jude hoffe ich, durch die Möglichkeit einer großen Auswanderung sämtlicher Juden nach Afrika oder sonst in eine Kolonie völlig auslöschen zu sehen [...] die bolschewistische Methode der physischen Ausrottung eines Volkes aus innerer Überzeugung als ungermanisch und unmöglich."

 

The document, a memorandum Himmler had presented Hitler with and is published in VfZ 5 (1957), pp. 194-198, included the the above key sentence with respect to the fate of the Jews:

 

"I hope to see that by means of the possibility of a large emigration of all Jews to Africa or to some other colony - that the concept of Jew will be fully extinguished. [...] the Bolshevist methods of eradicating a people out of inner conviction, as un-German and impossible."

 

Hitler judged this memorandum to be "very good and correct", according to Himmler's note of 28 May. The document however was "to be held in the greatest secrecy"; Himmler was to show it to Hans Frank at some point "in order to tell him that the Führer finds it correct."

 

So the last straw of deniers is, that if Himmler in 1940 had said it is un-German to physically exterminate Jews, and move them to Madagascar instead, then the 1943 Himmler couldnt have possibly spoken of physically exterminating the Jews even though 3 years had passed, the Madagascar plan had failed, and Germany was fighting a war she would lose at some point while the Jewish question was still unsolved. Also, keep in mind that moving millions of people to Madagascar is genocide in and of itself, not just due to the scope of such an undertaking, but also because Madagascar had virtually no infrastructure back then, and the Jews would essentially be left to their own devices on an island whose climate isnt a tropical paradise as some naive person might think, but actually malaria ridden and hostile to life.

 

This utter lack of a coherent response among holocaust deniers to tackle and refute Himmler's 1943 Posen speeches is just more proof how fragmented the holocaust denier scene really is.

 

And finally, while we're at it, we can also dismiss the revisionism some deniers try to do concerning Nazi Germany's Lebensraum policy and its attitude toward Slavic people aka "oh they held no grudge against Slavs, they just fought to get rid of Bolshevism". WRONG. Himmler makes the following clear elsewhere during the October 4th Posen speech:

 

"What happens to a Russian, to a Czech, does not interest me in the slightest. What other nations can offer in the way of good blood of our type, we will take, if necessary, by kidnapping their children and raising them here with us. Whether nations live in prosperity or starve to death interests me only so far as we need them as slaves for our culture; otherwise, it is of no interest to me. Whether 10,000 Russian females fall down from exhaustion while digging an antitank ditch interests me only insofar as the anti-tank ditch for Germany is finished."[1][2][3]

 

This is followed by a long paragraph that only the German Volk and German blood matters compared to non-Germans, and non-Germans, especially Russians, are labeled "Menschentiere" (humanoid animals).

 

That the Nazis ALSO had the physical extermination of Catholic Poles in mind is made clear three years earlier when Himmler had this to say on the 15th of March 1940, in a speech also held at Posen to concentration camp commanders:

 

"Später werden alle Polen aus dieser Welt verschwinden [...] Es ist erforderlich, dass das großdeutsche Volk die Vernichtung sämtlicher Polen als seine Hauptaufgabe versteht."

 

translates to:

 

"Later, all Poles will disappear from this world [...] It is necessary that the Greater German people understand the annihilation of all Poles as being their main task."[4][5][6][7]

 

Sources:

[1] IMT: Volume 29 (Urkunden und anderes Beweismaterial), p. 123

[2]: http://germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/sub_document.cfm?document_id=1513

[3]: http://www.historyworld.net/wrldhis/PlainTextHistories.asp?historyid=388

[4]: Piotrowski, Tadeusz (2007). Poland's Holocaust: Ethnic Strife, Collaboration with Occupying Forces and Genocide in the Second Republic, 1918–1947. McFarland & Company, p. 23.

[5]: http://auschwitz.org/en/history/categories-of-prisoners/poles-in-auschwitz/

[6]: USSR-522 Letter from the Block office Mogilno to all confidential agents, IMT proceedings, Blue series, Vol XXIV, p 186 https://www.loc.gov/rr/frd/Military_Law/pdf/NT_Vol-XXIV.pdf

[7]: Exchange between Counsellor Smirnov and Hoeppner, IMT proceedings, Blue series, Vol XX, p 228 https://www.loc.gov/rr/frd/Military_Law/pdf/NT_Vol-XX.pdf

Hoefle Telegram

The Höfle Telegram (or Hoefle Telegram) is a cryptic one page document discovered in 2000 among the declassified World War II archives of the Public Record Office in Kew, England. The document consists of two top secret messages, one to SS Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann in Berlin, and one to SS Obersturmbannführer Franz Heim in German-occupied Krakau, sent by SS Sturmbannführer Hermann Höfle on 11 January 1943.

 

The Telegram contained the detailed statistics on the 1942 killings of Jews in the extermination camps of Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka, and in the concentration camp Lublin-Majdanek; as compiled by Höfle. Even though the Holocaust train-records were notoriously incomplete as revealed by the Main Commission for the Investigation of German Crimes against the Polish Nation, the quoted numbers shed a new light on the evidential standard of proof for the scope of the crimes committed by the SS. The telegram gave train arrivals in the prior fortnight, as well as cumulative arrivals until 31 December 1942, for the camps of Einsatz Reinhardt (later commonly called Aktion Reinhard), the most deadly phase of the "Final Solution".

 

The SS paid German Railways the equivalent of a third class ticket for every prisoner transported via Sonderzüge to extermination camps of Operation Reinhard from the Ghettos in Nazi-occupied Europe and the Jewish ghettos in German-occupied Poland. Children under four went free during the Holocaust. The payment was collected from the SS by the German Transport Authority on behalf of the Reichsbahn according to a schedule, at a cost of 4 Pfennig per each track kilometer.[6] The actual waybills did not include the number of prisoners per each Güterwagen boxcar because calculations were predetermined. The standard means of delivery was a 10 metre long cattle freight wagon, although third class passenger carriages were also used with train tickets paid by the Jews themselves, when the SS wanted to keep up the "resettlement to work in the East" myth. The DRB railway manual which was used by the SS for making payments, had a listed carrying capacity of each trainset set up at 50 boxcars, each loaded with 50 prisoners. In reality, boxcars were crammed with up to 100 persons and routinely loaded from the minimum of 150% to 200% capacity for the same price. This resulted in an average of 5,000 people per trainset; 100 persons in each freight car multiplied by 50 cars. Notably, during the mass deportation of Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto to Treblinka in 1942, trains carried up to 7,000 victims each.

 

The Höfle Telegram is a decoded message, encrypted at source by the German Enigma machine. A missing "5" is added in the table, and is considered to be the correct figure, because only the number 713,555 yields the correct total of 1,274,166, and also, the Korherr Report of 1943 substantiates that the total number of 1,274,166 Jews subjected to "special treatment" (Sonderbehandlung) in General Government is correct to the last incongruous digit.

 

The telegram reads:

 

Concerns: 14-day report Operation Reinhart

 

Recorded arrivals for the 2 weeks until December 31, 1942:

L = Lublin [Majdanek] (12,761)

B = Belzec (0)

S = Sobibor (515)

T = Treblinka (10,335)

Total: 23,611

 

Sum total as of 31 December 1942:

L = Lublin [Majdanek] (24,733)

B = Belzec (434,508)

S = Sobibor (101,370)

T = Treblinka (71,355)

Total: 1,274,166

 

It appears the British analysts who had decrypted the message missed the significance of this particular message at the time. No doubt this happened because the message itself contained only the identifying letters for the extermination camps followed by the numerical totals. The only clue would have been the reference to Operation Reinhard, the meaning of which – the plan to eliminate mostly Polish Jewry that was named after the assassinated SS General Reinhard Heydrich – also probably was unknown at the time to the codebreakers at Bletchley Park.

 

Höfle's radio telegram is one of two evidential proofs making use of the very exacting figures, suggesting their common origin; the other one is the Korherr report. Both of them detail the numbers involved in the execution of Jews during Einsatz Reinhard/t. Apart from quoting identical totals as of 1942, the Telegram also indicates that the camp at Lublin (Majdanek) was part of Odilo Globocnik's Operation Reinhard, a fact that historians previously had not fully realized.

"Bandenbekämpfung" and the Korherr report

This document is presented as evidence of the complicity and approval of Adolf Hitler ("Meldungen an den Führer" means report for the Führer), regarding the murders that took place during the Holocaust. It tallies the Nazis' death toll exacted on armed partisans, as well as their arrest of non-Jewish and execution of both non-Jewish and Jewish partisan accomplices in Eastern Europe between September 1st to December 1st, 1942 in Southern Russia, Ukraine and Bialystok.

 

The tally? 363,211 Jews executed in autumn 1942.

 

If Himmler was trying to artificially inflate numbers to impress Hitler, the first thing he would have done is raise the rather pathetic looking list tallying the number of defectors as a result of German propaganda.

 

The original is now in file NS19/291, Bundesarchiv, Koblenz. Likewise in the literature you find the following archive reference for the reports: BA, NS 19/2566

 

On a similar note, the Korherr Report is a 16-page document on the progress of the Holocaust as reflected in the dwindling numbers of Jews in Germany and German-controlled Europe. It was written by the chief inspector of the statistical bureau of the SS and professional statistician Dr Richard Korherr under the title die "Endlösung der Judenfrage", in English the Final Solution to the Jewish Question.

 

You can read the entire Korherr Report in the German original here:

http://www.statistik-des-holocaust.de/stat_ger_korherr.html

 

Korherr, commissioned by Heinrich Himmler calculated that, from 1937 to December 1942, the number of Jews in Europe had fallen by 4 million, of which 1.274 million were subject to "special treatment" (Sonderbehandlung - a code name for mass murder). Notice how this exact number is also mentioned in the Höfle-Telegram.

 

The decrease of Soviet Russian Jews from the territories overrun in Operation Barbarossa was not included due to lack of statistical data. The summaries came from the RSHA office receiving all SS reports about the so-called "already evacuated" Jews. Their "special treatment" was removed from the document on the request of Himmler who intended to share it with Hitler.

 

The main report, published in March 1943, summarized how many Jews remained in Germany, Austria and Europe; detailed the numbers of Jews detained in the Nazi concentration camps; how many Jews had died natural deaths since 1933; and how many Jews had been "transported from [Germany's] Eastern territories to the Russian east". This was further sub-divided into the summary of all Jews that had been given the special treatment from the camps in the Generalgouvernement and the Jews from the camps of the Warthegau. Himmler accepted the report, but made Korherr change the word Sonderbehandlung or "special treatment," to the word "durchgeschleust" or "processed".

 

The report also calculated that, from 1937 to December 1942, the number of Jews in Europe had fallen by 4.5 million. And the report also stated that since 1933, European Jewry had been slashed by half. If we look at the data from 1933 (imgur) which estimated 9.4 million Jews in Europe, the Nazi statement of European Jewry being slashed by half by end 1942 does make the 4.5 million figure plausible. Furthermore, the Korherr Report estimated that by now, a quarter of the total European Jewry as of 1937, had emigrated to other parts of the world.

 

Korherr ascribed this fall to "emigration, partially due to the excess mortality of the Jews in Central and Western Europe, partially due to the evacuations especially in the more strongly populated Eastern Territories, which are here counted as ongoing."

 

By way of explanation, Korherr added that "It must not be overlooked in this respect that of the deaths of Soviet Russian Jews in the occupied Eastern territories only a part was recorded, whereas deaths in the rest of European Russia and at the front are not included at all. In addition there are movements of Jews inside Russia to the Asian part which are unknown to us. The movement of Jews from the European countries outside the German influence is also of a largely unknown order of magnitude. On the whole European Jewry should since 1933, i.e. in the first decade of National Socialist German power, has lost almost half of its population."

 

You can read these documents (that is, Himmler instructing Korherr to change the terminology, the terminology changed, and the recorded Jewish population reduction) in their original here: i.imgur.com/o12pbGF

The Jäger report

The Jäger Report was written on 1 December 1941 by Karl Jäger, commander of Einsatzkommando 3, a killing unit of Einsatzgruppe A which was attached to Army Group North (Heeresgruppe Nord) during Operation Barbarossa, i.e. the invasion of the Soviet Union.

 

It is the most precise surviving chronicle of the activities of one individual Einsatzkommando.

 

The Jäger Report is a tally sheet of actions by Einsatzkommando 3, including the Rollkommando Hamann killing squad. The report keeps an almost daily running total of the liquidations of 137,346 people, the vast majority Jews, from 2 July 1941 to 25 November 1941. The report documents exact date and place of the massacres, number of victims and their breakdown into categories (Jews, communists, criminals, etc.).

 

In total, there were over 100 executions in 71 different locations listed there. On 1 February 1942, Jäger updated the totals to 136,421 Jews (46,403 men, 55,556 women and 34,464 children), 1,064 Communists, 653 mentally disabled, and 134 others in a handwritten note for Franz Walter Stahlecker.

 

The six-page report was prepared in five copies, but only one survives and is kept by the Central Lithuanian Archives in Vilnius.

 

for more, see:

http://web.archive.org/web/20070312214303/http://www.holocaust-history.org/works/jaeger-report/htm/intro000.htm

and

https://www.phdn.org/archives/einsatzgruppenarchives.com/jagerimages.html

 

Jäger escaped capture by the Allies when the war ended, assumed a false identity, and was able to assimilate back into society as a farm hand until his report was discovered in March 1959. Arrested and charged with his crimes, Jäger committed suicide by hanging himself in prison in Hohenasperg while he was awaiting trial in June 1959.

Letter to Himmler by Viktor Brack, the organiser of Aktion T4, talking about castration

This document talks about how trying to sterilize someone (persumably in Auschwitz) with x-rays is a waste of time and can be done operatively which only takes 6 to 7 minutes ("die, wie ich mich selbst überzeugt habe", i.e. as I have come to the conclusion myself).

Wetzel's letter to Lohse and "the Brack remedy", October 29, 1941

The above pictured letter is chronologically the first German document which called for an extermination of Jews deemed unfit for labor via homicidal gassing. At the same time, the existence of this document proves a link between, on one hand, Aktion T4, regarding which Adolf Hitler's personal involvement has been conclusively proven (including signature), and on the other hand the mass murder of Jews that became collectively known as the Holocaust, even referencing the Einsatzgruppen shootings.

 

Viktor Brack, a civil servant in the T4 euthanasia program, had served in 1930 and 1931 as Heinrich Himmler’s driver. In 1934, he was appointed the head of Central Office II of the Chancellery of the Führer (address Tiergartenstraße 4, hence abbreviated T4), where he oversaw the murder by gas and lethal injections of some seventy thousand mentally and physically handicapped ethnic German victims.

 

Hinrich Lohse (yes, Hinrich, not Heinrich) was the Reich Commissar for the East - for the combined Baltic States and Russia. In 1941, he moved into his offices in Kovno, and then Riga.

 

On October 4, 1941, Lohse sent a letter from Riga to court judge and Adviser on Jewish Affairs Dr. Erhard Wetzel, “re: the solution of the Jewish question.” While that letter did not survive the war, three weeks later, on October 25 1941, Wetzel replied the following to Lohse, which is the letter pictured above:

 

The Reich Ministry

for the Occupied Eastern Territories

 

Berlin, October 25, 1941

Expert AGR Dr. Wetzel

 

Secret!

 

Re: Solution of the Jewish Question

 

1. To the Reich Commissar for the East Re: Your report of October 4, 1941 in respect to the Solution of the Jewish Question

 

With reference to my letter of October 18, 1941, this is to inform you that Oberdienstleiter Brack of the Führer Chancellery has agreed to collaborate in the production of the required shelters and gassing devices. At this time, the envisaged devices are not available in sufficient quantity; they will first have to be manufactured. Since in Brack’s opinion, the manufacture of the devices in the Reich will cause much greater difficulties than doing it on the spot, Brack considers it most expedient to send his people to Riga, especially his chemist Dr. Kallmeyer, who will effect all further steps there. Oberdienstleiter Brack points out that the procedure in question is not without danger, so that special protective measures are necessary. In these circumstances, I request that you address yourself to Oberdienstleiter Brack in the Führer Chancellery through your Higher SS and Police Leader and request the dispatch of the chemist Kallmeyer and other assistants. I should inform you that Sturmbannführer Eichmann, the expert for the Jewish Question in the RSHA is entirely in agreement with this process. According to information from Sturmbannführer Eichmann, camps for Jews are to be set up in Riga and Minsk, to which Jews from the Old Reich territory may also come. At this time, Jews are being evacuated out of the Old Reich to Litzmannstadt (Lodz), and also other camps, to then later be used for labour in the east insofar as they are capable of work.

   As things now are, there are no objections if the Jews who are not capable of work, are eliminated with the Brackian remedy. In this way, events such as those that, according to a report in front of me, took place on the occasion of the shootings of the Jews in Vilna, and which, considering that the shootings were carried out in public, can hardly be excused, will no longer be possible. On the other hand, those capable of work will be transported for labour in the east. It goes without saying that the male and female Jews capable of work will be kept apart.

   I request a report on your further measures.

 

(the last paragraph is translated from the harder to read original 2nd page, so I will provide the transcript of this page below:)

 

"Nach Sachlage bestehen keine Bedenken, wenn diejenigen Juden, die nicht arbeitsfähig sind, mit den Brackschen Hilfsmitteln beseitigt werden. Auf diese Weise dürften dann auch Vorgänge, wie sie sich bei den Erschießungen der Juden in Wilna nach einem mir vorliegenden Bericht ergeben haben, und die auch im Hinblick darauf, daß die Erschießungen öffentlich vorgenommen wurden, kaum gebilligt werden können, nicht mehr möglich sein. Die Arbeitsfähigen dagegen werden zum Arbeitseinsatz nach Osten abtransportiert. Daß bei den arbeitsfähigen Juden Männer und Frauen getrennt zu halten sind, dürfte selbstverständlich sein."

 

So what we have here, is a letter that speaks plain as day of gassing devices (Vergasungsapparate), in all likelihood mobile gas vans rather than stationary gas chambers (since they theoretically could, but for practical purposes cannot be manufactured in the Reich and should rather be assembled on-location instead, as Wetzel stresses); of eliminating (beseitigen) Jews via the Brackian remedy (T4), and even references to Einsatzgruppen activity, i.e. shootings of Jews in Vila in public (Erschießungen der Juden in Wilna; öffentlich vorgenommen). No euphemisms this time.

 

Given his role in Aktion T4, we can be certain that the "Brackian remedy" is something more sinister than mere sterilization.

Franz Walter Stahlecker's Map, January 31 1942

Franz Walter Stahlecker (1900 – 1942) was Commander of the Sicherheitspolizei (Sipo) and the Sicherheitsdienst (SD) for the Reichskommissariat Ostland in 1941–42. Stahlecker commanded Einsatzgruppe A, the most murderous of the four Einsatzgruppen active in German-occupied Eastern Europe.

 

Pic related shows the annotated map from the report sent by Stahlecker, and summarizes 220,250 murders committed by Einsatzgruppe A under his command by October 1941; Estonia is marked as "Judenfrei" {free of Jews}

 

On a related note regarding the genocide committed by the Einsatzgruppen in the Baltics, here is an excerpt from a contemporary diary entry by Swiss Red Cross doctor Robert Hegglin, who wrote that around 100,000 Jews had been shot in the Riga area by Germans and Baltic collaborators:

 

http://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot.nl/2016/11/contemporary-diary-of-swiss-doctor.html

Naked women being executed

A picture from the Main Commission for the Investigation of Nazi War Crimes, courtesy of USHMM Photo Archives. It shows members of the German Gendarmerie and Ukrainian Schutzmannschaft shooting individual Jewish women who remain alive in a ravine south of Rovno (Rivne) in the Sdolbunov Gebietskommissariat, after a mass execution of Jews from the Mizocz ghetto, taken October 14, 1942.

 

On June 28, 1941 Rovno was captured by Nazi Germany and served as the administrative center of the Reichskommissariat Ukraine.

 

According to the Zentrale Stelle in Germany (Zst. II 204 AR 1218/70), these Jews were collected by the German Gendarmerie and Ukrainian Schutzmannschaft during the liquidation of the Mizocz ghetto, which held roughly 1,700 Jews. On the eve of the ghetto's liquidation (13 October 1942), some of the inhabitants rose up against the Germans and were defeated after a short battle. The remaining members of the community were transported from the ghetto to this ravine...

 

Multiple copies online and in published works are available, for example at Reitlinger, Gerald, The SS -- Alibi of a Nation, Viking (Da Capo reprint), New York 1957 ISBN 0-306-80351-8, at page 264c. Also available at the USHMM website as photo 17878.

 

Some holocaust deniers who have stumbled upon this image have tried to discredit its authenticity by various means. One of their theories is that at first glance the two executioners do not look like they're wearing stereotypical Wehrmacht or SS-uniforms, especially pointing us out to the fact that the round peaked caps (Schirmmützen) look more Soviet than German, which is obviously nonsense:

 

http://i31.photobucket.com/albums/c359/Voldy26/A_SS_092.jpg

 

Their next point of criticism to claim the event is staged is their observation that the gun the executioner is using is a Russian PPSH. I am no firearms expert but to me, it looks like an MP18. The deniers move on to make the next observation, namely that the victims in the photo look too clean - if this is supposed to be a photo of a mass execution, we're supposed to see a mass of dirtied, bloodied bodies, so the deniers. But are we? First off, the photo seems to be taken during or shorty before the execution, rather than after. You can verify this by observing how some victims appear to be crawling, or seem to have just finished lying down, and one of the executioners leveling his weapon at precisely these people. Furthermore, it would be a waste of bullets to spray a mass of people with gunfire rather than delivering individual shots to the head or neck, which also goes in line with testimony and diary entries regarding the manner in which these mass executions took place. When shot this way on an individual basis, the rest of the body will remain clean and unbloodied, which also corresponds well with the notion that the victim has stripped down only recently, e.g. at the lip of the ravine. This also explains the elevation of the person taking the photograph compared to what's going on below him. What remains then, regarding this type of execution, is the question regarding the complicity of the victims: how could they have offered no resistance, not tried to run away, or any incident of mass panic happening if the executions were happening one bullet at a time? To understand crowd compliance despite certain doom awaiting them, all you need to do to verify this aspect of human behavior for yourself is to watch one of the ISIS videos shot in 1080p quality in summer 2014 where a row of some 50 P.O.W.s are told to lie down next to each other while a single ISIS militant with an AK files past them, delivering head shots. None of them try to get up, panic and run. This same scenario repeats itself in another ISIS video, where victims line up in a row leading to a river, where they are shot and their bodies immediately dunked into it. If these videos don't convince you, I don't know what will.

Another shot of the massacre

A German policeman prepares to complete the mass execution by shooting two Jewish children, who were shot with the others in connection with the liquidation of the Mizocz ghetto, October 14, 1942.

 

What remains is how these photos were acquired. Information regarding this action, including the photos, were acquired from a man named Gustav Hille, who was the Bezirks-Oberwachtmeister of the Gendarmerie at the time. Hille gave the five photos (there were originally seven) to the company lawyer of a textile firm in Kunert, Czechoslovakia, where he worked as a doorman after the war. The Czech government confiscated the photos from the lawyer in 1946 and they subsequently became public. That the photos indeed show the shooting of Jews in connection with the liquidation of the ghetto was also confirmed by a statement of Gendarmerie-Gebietsführer Josef Paur in 1961. During the war, the images were owned by SS-Unterscharführer Schäfer until 1945 and became part of the Ludwigsburg investigation (ZSt. II 204 AR 1218/70).

 

Sources:

From photographs of the Mizocz shootings in the USHMM collection (No. 17876, 17877, 17878, 17879).

also, see Struk, Janina, Photographing the Holocaust, pages 72-73

Mass grave in Proskuriv, Podolia (Western Ukraine)

The town was occupied by the German Army from July 8, 1941 to March 25, 1944. On November 4, 1941, 5300 Jewish inhabitants of the town and surrounding villages were shot by an Einsatzgruppe.[1] A ghetto was formed on December 14, 1941, where all surviving Jewish inhabitants had to resettle and were subjected to forced labor. They were subsequently killed in the fall of 1942. More than 9500 Jews were killed in the town in total.[2]

 

How far will holocaust deniers go in their delusion to call photographic evidence of mass murder staged or fake? Do they honestly think this was some kind of Soviet propaganda event in the style of Spencer Tunick? Or will they drop their usual Typhus victim nonsense on every mass grave they are shown (only to later claim no mass graves were ever found)? This is why people label their mental condition DENIAL and not revisionism.

 

read more at:

 

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3205754/Blood-oozed-soil-grave-sites-pits-alive-secrets-Ukraine-s-shameful-Holocaust-Bullets-killing-centre-1-6million-Jews-executed.html?ito=social-facebook

 

Sources:

[1]: Husson, Edouard (11 November 2008). "L'Ukraine et le début de la " solution finale de la question juive en Europe " - Le meurtre des Juifs d'Ukraine par les nazis et leurs collaborateurs - Introduction historique". Centre Européen de Recherche et d'Enseignement sur la Shoah à l'Est.

[2]: "До 70-річчя останнього розстрілу в'язнів проскурівського гетто". http://biznes.km.ua. 30 November 2012.

Mobile Gas Vans

The Nazis used mobile gas vans to murder Jews (eventually they abandoned this system because it was not efficient enough). This is known partly because SS-Major General Dr. Harald Turner, chief of the German Administration in Serbia, wrote to Karl Wolff, chief of Heinrich Himmler's personal staff, on 11 April 1942. In the note Turner describes a 'delousing van' - the quotation marks (he used!) around the word already suggest that it is a euphemism - then makes it quite clear what this means:

 

"Already some months ago, I shot dead all the Jews I could get my hands on this area, concentrated all the Jewish women and children in a camp and with the help of the SD got my hands on a 'delousing van', that in about 14 days to 4 weeks will have brought about the definitive clearing out of the camp..."

 

Additional details about these vans are to be found in a letter from Willy Just to SS Lieutenant Colonel Walter Rauff on 5 June 1942. In the letter, Just describes how a load of '97,000 have been processed'.

 

Just also offers Rauff a series of suggestions on how the vans might be improved. Since there was a problem of 'off-road manoeuvrability', he suggests that the cargo area be reduced. This would make the operation more efficient, because '... were the cargo area smaller, but fully occupied, the operation would take considerably less time, because there would be no empty space.'

 

The above pic shows a purported gas van. Holocaust deniers have pointed out that this vehicle is of the company Magirus-Deutz, as the logo indicates. They then go on to claim "that real gas vans were, so the holocaust narrative goes, only converted from vans of the companies Diamond, Renault, Sauer and Opel". However, I have this to say about the source of the above image:

 

The Chelmno extermination camp was examined by a commission dealing with Nazi war crimes on Poles in May 1945. The commission was informed, that in the former Ostrowski factory of Kolo (approx. 12km from Chelmno) the remains of a gas van had been located, which according to witnesses was used by the Chelmno camp. The van was found, photographed, and these photos can be found in the Warsaw archives (47398, 47396, 47397, 47399). These photos are titled to this day as: "a van for the killing of humans by exhaust gas, in Chelmno". You'll also find one of these photos in Fleming's book "Hitler And the Final Solution".

 

Thanks to Sergey who provided me with more information regarding the photo above:

http://pages.ucsd.edu/~lzamosc/chelm00.htm

 

For a more detailed dismissal of futile attempts deniers have made to discredit gas vans, see:

http://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot.co.at/2016/08/rebuttal-of-alvarez-on-gas-vans-schafer.html

Documentary evidence of the existence and homicidal nature of gas vans

These are just some of the documents that not only prove the existence of vans having been jury rigged to be mobile gas chambers, but also what their purpose was: not fumigation or any other nonsense, but the murder of human beings using Carbon Monoxide (CO). I have marked the incriminating passages and boy are there many.

 

Open the image in a new tab for a zoom.

 

You will find a far more detailed analysis here:

 

http://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot.co.at/2015/10/contemporary-german-documents-on.html

 

So, what do some of the marked passages say? Here is just some translation of mine:

 

(author's note: grammatically, "einzige Ausfertigung" is right, as "einzigste" would translate to "onliest")

 

"Since December 1941, 97,000 have been processed by 3 employed vans."

 

CO gas (not necessarily pure, but e . g. a component of exhaust) is repeatedly mentioned as the agent. Not Zyklon or anything else.

 

Cleanup of the vans' interior is mentioned

 

Observation windows are no longer necessary...

 

There's a discussion whether interior lighting should be bothered with or not...

 

...but closing the back door and ensuing darkness causes the "load" inside to push around, making it tough to lock the door.

 

...such a commotion also causes noise...

 

...therefore lighting should be used at least for the first couple of minutes...

 

...and the lighting is also useful during cleanup after nightfall.

 

Signed, SS-Obersturmführer Rauff, June 5, 1942

 

The document below the first talks about the vans being employed during executions in remote areas, and how badly maneuverable off-road terrain is.

 

How windows had to be installed on the van's exterior as windowless vans were perceived as death-vans by the local populace already, and doubts expressed whether this new guise will work for long or not.

 

The gassing procedure is also mentioned, and how after such a gassing the people unloading the van's contents complained that the task not only took a toll on their health, but also incredibly affected their psyche. And finally, how the drivers commit the malpractice of driving too fast during the gassing, resulting in the inmates dying from asphyxiation rather than gradually losing consciousness and dying, leaving behind excrement and faces twisted in agony.

 

Signed, SS-Untersturmführer Becker, Kiev, May 16, 1942

 

The fact that it says inmates (Häftlinge) also rules out a possible denier explanation of this being a van killing animals.

Gas vans were also used within the Reich, such as in Mauthausen

I have marked the incriminating passages. This document, dated March 26, 1942 is about a delay in the manufacture and delivery of "special vans" that require a modification time of 8 - 14 days each before they can be used, and how one such van can be arranged for Mauthausen concentration camp (which by the way also had and still has a gas chamber one can visit today; at least 3,000 people are said to have been gassed while the camp and Gusen subcamps' total death toll approaches 100,000).

 

SS-Standartenführer Walter Rauff also asks for a delivery of bottled CO or other "aids" to "perform" the duty.

 

Hmm, gee, now what purpose do modified vans and bottled CO serve? Fumigation? Get outta here.

SS-Major General Harald Turner's letter to chief of German Administration in Serbia, Karl Wolff

This is the letter I mentioned in my introduction to gas vans earlier.

 

Source: Friedlander, Henry, and Sybil Milton, Eds., Archives of the Holocaust, Vol. 11, Part 2, 1992, pp. 284-286.

 

The translation is by Gord McFee, who notes that Turner's German leaves something to be desired. Thanks to John Zimmerman for research.

 

Translation (I have highlighted the incriminating passages in the document and used exclamation points to quickly get you there in the translation):

 

Privy Councillor Dr. Turner

SS-Major General

F.P.Number 18.739

 

O.U., April 11, 1942

Dear Comrade Wolff!

 

Now that the decision has been taken in my favor, I would be remiss - since I am convinced that this is singularly and only thanks to your influence and your tireless activity - if I did not transmit to you my most comradely and heartfelt thanks.

   I can also again today, the more so since you know me well enough, only again repeat, that the matter did not have to do with my person - the person concerned could have just as easily had another name - but rather with a necessary battle that had to be fought against one-sided Wehrmacht interests, by which in the final unspoken result the SS Leaders, and therewith also the SS and further also the civil servants would have been affected.

   The best proof for this is, on the one hand, a remark woven into an official document from WB Southeast "the appointment of the Higher SS and Police Leader, which did not take place according to the proposal here" or words to that effect, and on the other hand, the comment of the Chief of the General Staff WB Southeast after receipt of the decision in my favor "herewith the Wehrmacht has lost a battle".

   In any event, there reigns here in all circles, even the Wehrmacht who have in any way followed this struggle, only joy over this victory and this joy you have alone, as I see it, afforded these people. My thanks for that.

   May I use this occasion to send you as an attachment a copy of a letter from me to the Reichsführer of January 15, 1942 to which I have yet to receive an answer. I am not complaining because as I know, such things take time and I don't feel it is right for me to press the Reichsführer for the settlement of an affair. I know that for such matters you have an interest and the reason I now draw your attention to it is only because this question is now more than critical.

   !!!

   Already some months ago, I shot dead all the Jews I could get my hands on in this area, concentrated all the Jewish women and children in a camp and with the help of the SD got my hands on a "delousing van," that in about 14 days to 4 weeks will have brought about the definitive clearing out of the camp, which in any event since the arrival of Meyssner and the turning over of this camp to him, was continued by him. Then the time is come in which the Jewish officers to be found in prisoner of war camps under the Geneva Convention find out against our will about their no longer existing kinfolk and that could easily lead to complications.

   Were the affected persons now to be freed, they would in the minute of the arrival have their ultimate freedom, but like their racial comrades not for very long, and then this entire question should be resolved once and for all. Any consideration could have counter-effects on our prisoners in Canada, if it comes out that the freed persons do not move around freely here... I personally do not agree with this consideration.

   !!!

With best wishes for your personal well being, heartiest greetings and Heil Hitler!

I am as always

your loyal

Turner

Saurer Gas vans in Smolensk, 23rd February 1942

They arrived in a defect condition and were attached to the Einsatzkommandos after repair.

"SHOW ME A PHOTO OR VIDEO OF A GASSING VICTIM!!!!"

Holocaust deniers, in their usual habit of committing logical fallacies, try to disprove the homicidal gassing aspect of the holocaust by (boldly assuming) the notion that not a single photo of any gassing victim exists (having rudimentary knowledge of Nazi secrecy and the fact that gassing victims are said to have been exhumed and cremated), and therefore go on to challenge holocaust defenders by saying "show me one photo of victims of Nazi gassings - if millions died by gassing, surely a single photo exists?"

 

They are then prepared for the defenders to commit the fallacy of showing them photos of the heaps and heaps of emaciated corpses found and photographed in Western and Central Europe's concentration camps when they were liberated by the Western Allies and shown in many documentaries, like the top image in the above photo. Sneering gleefully that the bait has been taken, the holocaust deniers then go on to lecture that these are not gassing victims, but victims of typhus or malnutrition, all caused by allied aerial bombing that destroyed Germany's infrastructure in 1945 and therefore the Allies are actually responsible (the gall!) for this atrocity (the only real atrocity, according to the deniers) of the holocaust.

 

Of course, the deniers won't accept the e.g. in Auschwitz piles and piles of shoes, clothes, spectacles, personal belongings such as suitcases or even prostheses (what the hell are prostheses doing in a pile in a room in the camp unless of course their owners are all DEAD?) as proof, claiming the Soviets could have just dumped these things into the camp from somewhere else when trying to create a museum (again, makes your stomach churn listening to these people, doesn't it?).

 

I would start by showing them the 2 Sonderkommando photos instead that show a heap of corpses burning outside Krematorium V. If it isn't for their pathetic "Ohio train wreck" attempt to discredit the image, the holocaust deniers otherwise usually resort to saying things like "well clearly there was a typhus epidemic some time in the camp's history, and during that time the crematory ovens were overstressed, and therefore outdoor cremation became necessary, and the photo could just be showing typhus victims being burned".

 

At this point you already begin to realize you're becoming a victim of the game deniers play well (they are called holocaust DENIERS for a reason): they'll always weasel away from accepting historiography and try to find an alternate explanation for every bit of attention thrown their way, which is why historians don't waste their time trying to engage in a "debate" with these clowns in the first place. It's not because they're afraid, or incapable of debating (we've already had the pleasure of witnessing Van Pelt, Evans et al. tear apart the former revisionism world "expert" David Irving in court) but because deniers won't accept any evidence as evidence: A jewish eye-witness is a paid liar. A Nazi eye-witness is a tortured soul. A document is a forgery. A photo actually is showing something else or a forgery too. An audio recording is a forgery too. A corpse is a typhus victim. A poison gas canister is a delousing agent meant to save lives. A German word always has an innocuous meaning. A threat to kill Jews is just a hollow threat made out of frustration. A census is unreliable. ...these are the tools of the trade for holocaust deniers.

 

In any case, a further image of gassing victims is the bottom image shown above, taken near Krasnodar.

you can find out more here:

http://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot.co.at/2012/09/friedrich-paul-berg-yelled-for-photos.html

 

Once again, the tried and tested method of holocaust deniers is to say "we can't trust anything Soviet", citing examples like the 4 million Auschwitz death toll, or the Katyn massacre they tried to attribute to the Nazis as proof that it is fine to dismiss anything and everything else Soviet investigators ever brought up.

 

More Nazi crimes in the east:

http://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot.co.at/2011/06/22-june-1941.html

http://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot.co.at/2009/03/photographic-documentation-of-nazi.html

 

And while we're at it, how about the fact that we also have video footage of people being led into a homicidal gas chamber after all? That's right. Watch here:

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gx4pUKF7I1E

The experimental gas chamber at Mogilev has been jury rigged to dispose of people in a fashion similar to mass killing in the AR camps: using engine exhaust.

 

Read more about this at:

http://www.deathcamps.org/gas_chambers/gas_chambers_mogilev.html

The tale of Dr. Charles P. Larson's Dachau autopsies and other "crime doctors"

Another tale uncle holocaust denier would like to tell his listeners in relation to the corpses of Dachau, is that of Dr. Charles P. Larson, how he did "countless autopsies" in "20 different camps" (oh really? which other ones apart from Dachau?) and didn't find a single case of a victim having been killed by poison gas.

 

Source for the tale: http://rense.com/general62/camps.htm

 

Let's look at the facts, shall we? Larson was a US Army pathologist. Larson only visited camps in Germany, and never went to the major killing centres in Poland. His experiences, therefore, do not refer to the places where the bulk of the murders by poison gas took place. However, on page 61 of McCallum's book "Crime Doctor", Larson clearly states that he DID autopsy GASSING victims at Dachau (see excerpt below).

 

So where did the revisionist claim about Larson having said "Not one case of poison gas was found", come from? The author of that IHR article, Theodore J. O'Keefe from the Institute for Historical Review, mentions as source, a newspaper, "The Wichita Eagle, April 1st, 1980, p. 4C".

 

Now unfortunately, I could not find any properly digitized scan of that newspaper from April 1st, 1980, except for one grainy image of the article which you can see here:

 

https://qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-f48f514b789c131d6b66490ad7b1d296

 

The headline of that newspaper article reads: "Concentration Camp Conditions killed most inmates, Doctor says".

 

Interesting how it says "most", rather than "all", with the latter being the denier argument. So perhaps some of the dead were by gassing? Because Larson destroys the revisionist narrative about him, by mentioning the following in the article:

 

"Dachau did employ gas chambers, but their existence was among the closely guarded secrets in Germany."

 

Another quote from that newspaper article: "Larson said that in southern Germany, where he served, death by gassing and shooting were rare. Never was a case of poisoning uncovered."

 

It is clear here that Larson differentiates between gassing and poisoning, admitting that the former may have occurred. One can therefore draw the conclusion that he refers to the common understanding of poisoning, i.e. being forced to ingest a poison in the classic sense, for which he found no cases. This, deniers misrepresent as Larson having found no cases of gassing.

 

So while Larson may have had the (false) impression, based on his activity ONLY in southern Germany, that most Jews during the holocaust were just worked to death rather than exterminated by gassing, Charles P. Larson did believe in cases of gassing, as the following excerpts from his book "Crime Doctor" will tell:

 

On page 68 of "Crime Doctor", Charles P. Larson described Nazi physician Josef Mengele as a man "who sent millions to the gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau". Although not speaking from direct experience in this case, it is obvious that Larson himself firmly believed the homicidal gassing aspect of the holocaust.

 

Let me show you just how holocaust denier websites twist and outright lie when it comes to "citing" sources (caps are my emphasis in the quote that follows), as I fully cite the source in question: "The majority died of natural diseases of one kind or the another. However, we did probe into such questions as, 'What happened to those prisoners who became psychotic at Dachau? What did the Gestapo do with them?' Well, they took those people to the crematorium. First, however, they were taken to a big windowless building next to the crematorium where the ceiling was covered with false shower heads. The victims were then ordered to strip and take a 'shower.' Outside the building, guards dropped in cyanide pellets. Then they'd blow the cyanide gas out and remove the bodies next door to the crematorium ovens. I think this is what happened to most of the truly psychotic prisoners and those they considered unruly and unmanageable and who, in the Gestapo's opinion, were incorrigibles. But, in my opinion, ONLY RELATIVELY FEW of the inmates I PERSONALLY EXAMINED at Dachau WERE murdered in THIS manner. Still, medical facilities were totally inadequate. When people fell hopelessly ill and death was imminent, and when they grew so weak they could no longer work or function, they were taken to the cyanide room for disposal. The Nazi called them 'mercy killings' because there was no hope of them getting well. Actually, the Germans considered them a liability, and extermination was the answer." ('Crime Doctor,' McCallum & Larson, p. 61. ISBN 0-916076-20-2; Library of Congress Catalog Number: 78-16403)

 

So Larson not only says people were gassed at Dachau, but that he examined at least one of them and found the cause of death to be cyanide gassing. Either this, or he lied. In any case, once again holocaust denial has been exposed at creating false narratives (something they otherwise fondly like to accuse historians of doing), which in this case, is the fairy tale that Charles P. Larson found no evidence of homicidal gassing when he did his autopsies.

 

As to whether homicidal gassings really took place at Dachau or not, that question has also been answered (in fact, you can find the Dachau gas chamber debate in any modern encyclopedia, no secrets):

 

http://www.nizkor.org/features/qar/qar04.html

 

On a similar note, holocaust deniers also dubiously cite another "expert source":

 

"Most deaths in Concentration Camps were caused, not by starvation nor maltreatment but by Typhus!“

 

attributed to a Dr. John E. Gordon, M.D., Ph.D., a professor of preventive medicine and epidemiology at the Harvard University School of Public Health, who apparently was with US forces in Germany in 1945.

 

Except the quote is a deliberately misworded hoax, because Dr. Gordon rather reported in 1948 that:

 

"The outbreaks in concentration camps and prisons made up the great bulk of typhus infection encountered in Germany."

 

IHR source: http://www.ihr.org/leaflets/libcamps.shtml

 

The meaning of this quote is something completely different, and only underscores historiography, i.e. that this "Typhus" holocaust deniers like to convince us was everywhere in Europe due to Allied bombardment, was in fact mostly only found in the concentration camps, and therefore NOT the result of Allied bombing. In fact, I am still waiting for a holocaust denier to give a SINGLE proof of ONE concentration camp's supply route that was bombed by Allies (or even sabotaged by partisans, see, they're spoiled for choices here!) so that one can deduce that the camp inmate population suffered a shortage of supplies as a direct result of this. Hint: they are unable to, so don't bother waiting. The allies did drop bombs near camps like Auschwitz (due to their proximity to industrial areas like the IG Farben plant near Auschwitz III Monowitz), but never was a lack of supplies to the camp a result of this bombing.

 

Dr. Gordon's views found corroboration by one Dr. Russell Barton, (a psychiatrist "of international repute", according to deniers but I've never heard of him), who entered Bergen-Belsen with British forces as a young medical student in 1945. Barton, who volunteered to care for the diseased survivors, testified under sworn oath in a Toronto courtroom in 1985 (hmm, I wonder what that could have been...hint: Zundel trial) that:

 

"Thousands of prisoners who died at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp during World War II weren't deliberately starved to death but died from a rash of diseases."

 

Even this single statement, made by a man who came to the defense of Ernst Zundel, does not rule out deliberate starvation in Bergen Belsen, but that is a different topic.

Prisoners who have committed suicide on the electrified barbed wire fence of the camp

Historic photograph from the archives at Natzweiler. Photographer unknown. 11"x14" Silver Gelatin Print.

Many prisoners tried to commit suicide on the electrified fences surrounding the camps.

 

I wonder what the deniers have to say about this photo? Typhus victims exhumed and tangled into a nearby fence for a photo shoot? There is no limits to the depravity of holocaust denial.

Nazi Medical experimentation and the horrors of Ravensbrück and Natzweiler-Struthof

Historic photograph from the archives at Natzweiler. Photographer unknown. 11"x14" Silver Gelatin Print

Camp prisoners were selected for death and their bodies were pickled and sent to the University Medical School in Strasbourg.

 

At Ravensbrück, so-called "rabbits" (female prisoners mainly from Poland) underwent a variety of experimental procedures, including bone splintering, bone grafts, and bone breaks (an example would be chiseling pieces of bone from legs; Polish prisoner-doctors documented the crimes).

 

One series of procedures tested the effectiveness of drugs on infections, another bone regeneration under various conditions. Tens of the subjects died or were executed (phenol injections, shooting), and many survived, suffering permanent damage to their health. You can find well-sourced photos of the lasting impact of the experiments on women who survived the procedures at Ravensbrück.

 

The above image is from the Struthof album. At the Natzweiler-Struthof camp, one of the projects involved 87 Jews, including 30 women, who were killed for the purpose of constituting a collection of skulls and skeletons to be kept at the Institute of Anatomy of the Reichsuniversität Straßburg. Because they were Jewish, these men and women were selected, asphyxiated, dismembered and carved up by men of racial science. If you've got the STOMACH to go take a look at photographic evidence of Nazi horrors, by all means:

 

http://www.phdn.org/archives/holocaust-history.org/klarsfeld/Struthof/T001.shtml

 

The corpses were dismembered on the order of German Professor August Hirt, Director of the Institute of Anatomy from 1941 to 1944, probably at the end of 1944, as this was the time the Natzweiler camp in Alsace, France, was liberated by Western Allies. The identification number of each corpse, tattooed on the left forearm, was removed.

August Hirt and the Jewish Skeleton Collection

Pic related is from an exhibition, organized by Austrian anthropologists most likely at the Natural History Museum (Naturhistorisches Museum) in Vienna in 1939 titling: "The physical and mental appearance of the Jews." The skulls and skeletons for this exhibit came from excavations in the Jewish cemetery. The caption says: The Jewish Question is only through clear segregation of "Non-Jews from Jews" solvable.

 

August Hirt (April 28, 1898 – June 2, 1945) was an Swiss-German anatomist who served at the Reich University in Strasbourg during World War II. He performed experiments with mustard gas on inmates at Natzweiler-Struthof and played a lead role in the murders of 86 people at Auschwitz for the Jewish skeleton collection. The skeletons of his victims were meant to become specimens at the Institute of anatomy in Strasbourg, but completion of the project was stopped by the progress of the war.

 

Hirt studied medicine after the end of WW1 at the University of Heidelberg. In 1922, he obtained his doctorate. He then worked at the Anatomical Institute in Heidelberg and in 1925, was authorized to teach thanks to a thesis on nerve cells. An illustrious career followed:

 

1930: professor at the Heidelberg University

1 April 1933: joined the SS (SS-Nr. 100 414)

1 April 1936: associate director of the Institute of anatomy at University of Greifswald

1 July 1937: promoted in the SS to Hauptsturmführer (captain)

1 October 1938: associate director of the Institute of anatomy at Goethe University

August 1939: SS medical chief

April 1941: director of the new Institute of anatomy at the Reichsuniversität Straßburg.

1 March 1942: member of the RuSHA, the organisation in charge of "racial and ideological purity" of SS

1944: Sturmbannführer (major)

 

The Ahnenerbe under the Third Reich was a society that organised medical experiments on prisoners. August Hirt conceived and directed one called the Jewish skeleton collection, which was begun but not completed as intended. He also performed experiments on cadavers and collected human skulls. Hirt wanted to create a collection with skulls of "Judeo-Bolsheviks", as part of his research on race. According to him, the Jewish race was on the point of extinction and he wished to gather a collection of them while there was still time. Hirt sent his project to Himmler. Hirt wrote of this project: "There are important collections of skulls of nearly all the races and peoples. Except for the Jews, of which science has so few skulls, so it is not possible to draw any meaningful inferences. The war in the East gives us the opportunity to fill the gap. We have the opportunity to acquire a tangible scientific document by procuring the skulls of Jewish-Bolsheviks who embody the disgusting but characteristic subhuman."[1]

 

Hirt conceived the project to go beyond a collection of skulls, to a collection of Jewish skeletons and so presented his research plan to Himmler. Working with the Ahnenerbe division, Wolfram Sievers, Bruno Beger, Hans Fleischhacker and Hirt together collected people from among the Auschwitz inmates in order to create an anatomical specimen collection specifically of Jews. Hirt proposed to use the small-scale gas chamber at Natzweiler-Struthof to murder the people selected, keeping their corpses intact, and then have their corpses shipped immediately to the Anatomical Institute in Strasbourg for the casts and skeletons he wanted for this collection.[2][3]

 

Hirt directed that 115 persons be selected for measurements: 79 Jewish men, 30 Jewish women, 2 Poles, and 4 "Asians". They were selected among the inmates in August 1943 at Auschwitz by his assistants, the anthropologists Bruno Beger and Hans Fleischhacker. Of those initially selected, it is believed that 89 persons (60 men and 29 women) were sent to Natzweiler-Struthof. Three men died en route, leaving 86.

 

These people were sent to Natzweiler-Struthof on July 30, 1943. They were fed reasonably well to improve their appearance for the body casts. The 86 people were divided into four groups, they were successively gassed by Josef Kramer, on August 11, 13, 17 and 19, 1943. Their bodies were returned to Hirt at the anatomical laboratory of the Reich University in Strasbourg for preparation as an anthropological display, taking body casts and preparing the skeletons.[4]

 

In September 1944, the rapid approach of the Allies led to the project being abandoned and Himmler ordered the destruction of all traces of this compromising collection. That order was not completed, nor had the casts been taken or the skeletons been prepared. The Allies found corpses and partial remains preserved in formalin for eighty-six bodies upon the liberation of Strasbourg.[2] The corpses were buried 23 October 1945 in the municipal cemetery of Strasbourg-Robertsau before being transferred in 1951 in the Jewish cemetery of Strasbourg-Cronenbourg.

 

August Hirt fled Strasbourg in September 1944, hiding in Tübingen in southern Germany across the river from Alsace. Hirt committed suicide on June 2, 1945 at Schluchsee, Baden-Württemberg, in the Black Forest.[6] His suicide was not known when he was tried in absentia at the Military War Crimes Trial at Metz on 23 December 1953 for his war crimes.[5]

 

For many years only a single victim, Menachem Taffel (prisoner no. 107969), a Polish born Jew who had been living in Berlin, was positively identified through the efforts of Serge and Beate Klarsfeld. In the book, Die Namen der Nummern (2004, ISBN 978-3455094640.The Names of the Numbers), Dr. Hans-Joachim Lang describes this mass murder. He also recounts in detail the story of how he was able to determine the identities of 86 victims, 60 years after they were murdered.

 

Sources:

[1]: Shirer, William L. (1960). The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. United States: Simon & Schuster. ISBN 0-671-72868-7.

[2]: Reamey, Anne S. "August Hirt". Archived from the original on December 26, 2013.

[3]: Henry, Diana Mara. "Photographs at Natzweiler-Struthof". Natzweiler-Struthof.org. Archived from the original on February 21, 2015.

[4]: Lang, Hans-Joachim. "The Names of the Numbers: Scientific Murders". Retrieved April 7, 2016.

[5]: Lang, Hans-Joachim (19 August 2004). "Skelette für Straßburg Eines der grausigsten Wissenschaftsverbrechen des "Dritten Reiches" ist endlich aufgeklärt" [Skeletons for Strasbourg: One of the most gruesome crimes of science in the "Third Reich" is finally cleared]. Die Zeit (in German). Retrieved 23 March 2016.

The Kommissarbefehl of 6th June 1941, and how it is relevant to the holocaust

The Commissar Order (Kommissarbefehl) was an order issued by the German High Command (OKW) on 6 June 1941, that is to say, BEFORE Operation Barbarossa had even started. Its official name was 'Guidelines for the Treatment of Political Commissars' (Richtlinien für die Behandlung politischer Kommissare).

 

It instructed the Wehrmacht that any Soviet political commissar identified among captured troops be summarily executed as an enforcer of the Judeo-Bolshevism ideology among military forces. According to the order, all those prisoners who could be identified as "thoroughly bolshevized or as active representatives of the Bolshevist ideology" should also be killed.

 

The order, translated, was as follows:

 

"Guidelines for the Treatment of Political Commissars

 

In the battle against Bolshevism, the adherence of the enemy to the principles of humanity or international law is not to be counted upon. In particular it can be expected that those of us who are taken prisoner will be treated with hatred, cruelty and inhumanity by political commissars of every kind.

 

The troops must be aware that:

 

1. In this battle mercy or considerations of international law is false. They are a danger to our own safety and to the rapid pacification of the conquered territories.

 

2. The originators of barbaric, Asiatic methods of warfare are the political commissars. So immediate and unhesitatingly severe measures must be undertaken against them. They are therefore, when captured in battle, as a matter of routine to be dispatched by firearms. The following provisions also apply:

 

3. ...Political commissars as agents of the enemy troops are recognizable from their special badge—a red star with a golden woven hammer and sickle on the sleeves.... They are to be separated from the prisoners of war immediately, i.e. already on the battlefield. This is necessary, in order to remove from them any possibility of influencing the captured soldiers. These commissars are not to be recognized as soldiers; the protection due to prisoners of war under international law does not apply to them. When they have been separated, they are to be finished off.

 

4. Political commissars who have not made themselves guilty of any enemy action nor are suspected of such should be left unmolested for the time being. It will only be possible after further penetration of the country to decide whether remaining functionaries may be left in place or are to be handed over to the Sonderkommandos. The aim should be for the latter to carry out the assessment.

   In judging the question "guilty or not guilty", the personal impression of the attitude and bearing of the commissar should as a matter of principle count for more than the facts of the case which it may not be possible to prove."

 

What's particularly interesting to me is the content of the first page, which says that the orders and detailed instructions are only to be distributed among the higher echelons of command, and then transmitted only orally to the lower levels of command. So here we have a document proving in writing how important orders only reached the lower ranks by word of mouth. It is therefore easy to conclude that incriminating orders in writing only resided in the personal possession of a select few higher-ranking officers, if at all, and could therefore be disposed of easily.

 

About half a million Soviet POWs held by the Germans were executed when the POW camps, which were otherwise death traps, were combed through by German units for political commissars (under the Commissar Order of 6 June 1941), "politically intolerable and suspicious elements," and Jews. Those selected in the camps were to be shot at once (recall that the Commissar Order stated about the political commissars that, "if taken while fighting or offering resistance they must, on principle, be shot immediately" and that otherwise, the commissars "are to be separated from the prisoners of war immediately, i.e. already on the battlefield. . . . These commissars are not to be recognized as soldiers; the protection due to prisoners of war under international law does not apply to them. When they have been separated, they are to be finished off."

 

Now, the classical revisionist approach to this is to maintain that this might have been an order given, but that it was never implemented by the honorable Prussian soldiery, i.e, "German commanders refused to follow Hitlers' Commissar Order of 1941, as they considered cold-blooded killing dishonorable and a violation of international law....and ya better believe it!" Do you know how ridiculous the concept of disobeying orders sounds, especially in the Third Reich? These were lies Erich von Manstein propagated after the war. But fact is that Manstein passed the order on to his subordinates. And all German army commanders enforced the order:

 

Source: Förster, Jürgen "The Wehrmacht and the War of Extermination Against the Soviet Union" pages 494-520

 

By fall 1941 the SD were regularly shooting prisoners combed out from the mass of those held. Often, trucks would come to the camps and haul selected prisoners to execution sites. By contrast, camp 4 of Dulag 131 (Bobruisk) is an example of mass killing by the German authorities in charge of a POW installation; in November 1941, because "the camps are overcrowded," and based on orders from the OKW (Oberkommando der Wehrmacht) in Berlin, the commandant of camp 4 ordered a special detachment of his men to force several 1000 prisoners into a barrack and set it on fire, incinerating the prisoners. A squad surrounded the barrack with machine guns to shoot anyone trying to flee the inferno. Also, in forced marches many prisoners were "shot while trying to escape."

 

By early 1942, about 2 million Soviet prisoners were dead, from both privation and execution.

 

These combing actions have to be taken into account in evaluating what happened to Soviet POWs in German custody and what the Germans' intentions were. There is nothing remotely similar to the German policy of shooting some POWs on the spot and having execution squads comb through those imprisoned that can be compared to the Eisenhower camps, or even Soviet Gulags for that matter. A popular revisionist canard after all, is that Eisenhower allegedly ran “death camps” in liberated Western Europe and starved 1.7 million or so German POWs to death, the brain-child of Canadian fiction author James Bacque in his novel “Other Losses”, which I have debunked here: https://imgur.com/yao6lgo.

 

There appears to be, judging by what's been presented here, no evidence like what we have for German camps for the Eisenhower camps; instead, there's exaggeration, hyperbole, and rhetoric by James Bacque. Of course, we can and should be critical of aspects of US policy - but without demonizing Eisenhower and without making false charges of genocide (and engendering such nonsense as this, "HE HATED THE GERMAN PEOPLE AS A RACE. It was his personal intent to destroy as many of them as he could, and one way was to wipe out as many prisoners of war as possible." From Bacque we get worse-than-dubious maths on casualties among German POWs, cherrypicking of quotations as well as policy and implementation details, falsification of the postwar food situation, and games with documents - to falsify a charge of mass murder. The reason exaggerated numbers do matter, is that some people use them to create false equivalences and tart up phony charges about intention and scope.

 

The German war in the east was a war of conquest and annihilation - the Germans' "treatment" of Soviet POWs was part and parcel of the Reich's war aims and war conduct. Anyone trying to make a similar case for Allied aims and practices in Europe is going to have to do a lot better than James Bacque.

 

On a related note, we also have the Commando Order (Kommandobefehl), issued by Adolf Hitler on 18 October 1942 stating that all Allied commandos encountered by German forces in Europe and Africa should be killed immediately without trial, even in proper uniforms or if they attempted to surrender.

 

Similarly, the "Kugel-Erlass" (bullet decree) also known as "Aktion Kugel" was a secret decree (Geheimbefehl), issued by Nazi Germany on March 2, 1944. The decree stated that escaped Allied prisoners of war, especially officers and senior non-commissioned officers, should be handed over to the Sicherheitsdienst who should execute them, "im Rahmen der Aktion Kugel", in concentration camp Mauthausen. This order was in direct contravention of the provisions of the Third Geneva Convention.

 

The number of escaped POW's executed by the Kugel-erlass is not precisely known. Estimates vary between 1,300 and 5,040 executed POW's. The vast majority of these POWs came from the USSR.

Treatment of Soviet PoWs (September 8th, 1941) and why they're part of the holocaust

Some excerpts translated:

 

"Bolshevism is the arch-enemy of national-socialist Germany. [...] Each German soldier has to keep distance from Soviet POWs. Any form of lenience expressed is to be strictly prosecuted. The feeling of pride and superiority of the German soldier tasked with guarding a Soviet POW is to be displayed at all times even to the public. Any active or even passive resistance encountered is to be immediately dealt with by the weapon. And those who do not do this, or not energetically enough, incriminate themselves. Fleeing Soviet POWs are to be shot immediately without prior yelling for them to stop. Warning shots are not to be given."

 

Under orders like these surviving the war in writing, it is perfectly acceptable to see why the death toll of Soviet prisoners of war is part of the holocaust's 11 million figure. Killing someone in battle in one thing. Deliberately seeing to his demise when he is a prisoner of war, is a crime against humanity.

 

By February 1942, 2,000,000 of the 3,300,000 Soviet soldiers in German custody up to that point had died from starvation, exposure, disease, gassing or shooting. Read more at:

 

https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007183

 

The plight of Soviet prisoners of war is, unlike the holocaust on European Jews, not given as much attention, in a sense rightly so because these unfortunates were at one point, armed soldiers, unlike the other victims of the holocaust. Nevertheless, they deserve attention as their treatment was far worse than anything Germans encountered in the Rheinwiesenlager, or even in the gulags.

The Nuremberg trials

This is another favorite of holocaust deniers: citing a handful of disparaging remarks made by a few judges about the objectivity of the International Military Tribunal proceedings and using these critics to brand arguably the most important trial ever conducted in human history, and one that has inspired many young people to become lawyers and dedicate their career to serving their country's judiciary system in the decades that followed, as one giant kangaroo court.

 

What are their principal allegations? One is to selectively quote the following two lines from the Charter of the International Military Tribunal (which can be found here: http://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/imtconst.asp):

 

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 nontechnical procedure, and shall admit any evidence which it deems to be of probative value."

 

and Article 21:

 

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

 

...except the deniers don't even cite article 21 fully, as it goes on to say: "It shall also take judicial notice of official governmental documents and reports of the United [Allied] Nations, including acts and documents of the committees set up in the various allied countries for the investigation of war crimes, and the records and findings of military and other Tribunals of any of the United [Allied] Nations."

 

The deniers then go on to say that this way, homicidal gassings at Dachau and reports of steam chambers at Treblinka were accepted by the IMT. What they don't tell you, is that the allegation of mass gassings having taken place at the Dachau camp have been the subject of dispute and investigation by mainstream historians for a while now, and it certainly was not the work of any holocaust denier that led to this claim being dropped by holocaust historians. Furthermore, calling gas chambers at Treblinka where people were gassed by engine exhaust "steam chambers" isn't far fetched, as engine exhaust can indeed appear to the eyes of the witness as "steam", depending on the color and consistency.

 

Lastly, holocaust deniers go on to cite other claims that appear here and there in the full IMT transcript that is 42 volumes big (e.g. Volume IX itself is 715 pages long) - that's how transcripts work: everything that is said in court is put on paper. Everyone person called up to testify gets to speak (obviously) and whatever he or she says, gets recorded. That there are some incredulous claims that turned up among the hundreds of people involved is, in fact, to be expected in a trial of this scope. However, they make up a minority, a drop in the ocean. But when confronted with this assessment, deniers once again just point us to Article 19 and 21 as if thats proof that innocent National Socialists were hung because of electric floors, peddle-powered brain bashing machines and acid pits. Falso in Uno, Falso in Omnibus - that is the holocaust deniers' modus operandi.

 

Isn't it remarkable that not a single one of these "elites" ever said this whole thing was a lie in court? The defences usually were "I was just following orders" or "I didn't know" or "I didn't participate." It never was "impossible! That is a complete fabrication! How dare you! The only thing we did at Auschwitz was push paper and delouse clothing", and so on. Men who were well aware that they were going to be sentenced to death anyhow could have seized the opportunity and tried to set the record straight about any false accusations about mass murder alleged by the victors onto their beloved Reich, but they didn't. Even after they were sentenced to death there were no tirades, nothing.

 

It is amazing to think that all these high ranking Nazi officials were, as deniers like to lecture us, tortured by the allies to extract confessions, without deniers providing any proofs except those two odd books that consist of one questionable memoir written by Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Scotland about the "London Cage", an MI19 prisoner of war facility that was subject to frequent allegations of torture (though it turned out this wasn't conventional torture in the brutal physical sense after all. For more, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Cage), the CSDIC (Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Centre) at Bad Nenndorf whose perpetrators were brought to justice (and interestingly Bad Nenndorf attracts demonstrations held by neo nazis from far right movements to this day) and Rupert Butler's 1983 novel "Legions of Death", according to which Rudolf Höss, longest serving Auschwitz camp commandant, was supposedly tortured.

 

Except Rupert Butler is neither a witness, nor a historian, but a journalist, and his book, written as a novel, does not contain adequate citations for independent verification of his claims. He tells the story and we have to accept it, a bit like children gathered around a camp fire. Holocaust deniers of course, have absolutely no problems accepting the tales of Scotland and Butler, but always start dancing around, demanding for proofs when eye-witnesses to Nazi atrocities speak of their experiences. And of course, the fact is that Höss' autobiography and the depositions during his pre-trial interrogations in Poland contained a number of statements that his interrogators would rather not have heard or read. The most striking example is his insistence in that “only” about 1.1 million people had been killed at Auschwitz-Birkenau and that the higher figures upheld by the Poles were figments of imagination lacking any foundation whatsoever.

 

But even if we take Rupert Butler's book "Legions of Death" at face value, the book does not state that Hoess' confession, a "made-up story", was extracted under torture. Rather, it says after some initial rough handling to get the man talking, once Hoess started, there was no stopping him. (see: R. Butler, Legions of Death, page 237)

 

What's also funny is that if holocaust deniers present Rupert Butler's "Legions of Death" book as legitimate, they are then also presenting the book's claim that the Sobibor extermination camp claimed 600,000 lives as legitimate (see R. Butler, Legions of Death, page 170).

 

In any case, my point still stands: Not ONE of those directly involved in the holocaust spoke up! Or maybe their families who supposedly knew that it was a lie and were enraged by the "unfair" execution of their fathers/husbands/brothers could speak up in the weeks, months, years, or decades that followed.

 

Or the descendants, eager to clear grandpa's good name and war service, would come forward. And there's no shortage of audiences for these guys to take it to: Holocaust denier central, The Institute for Historical Review, is always holding "conferences" and publishing stuff on the web, so you'd think these guys would write or appear at one of these events.

 

And neither did the SS guys who got jailed and released after serving their terms (often shortened). They could have filed suit against the US and British governments for the torture, for the physical injuries that must have been created from eating so much bully beef. You'd think these families would be waving X-Rays and doctors' reports. You'd think they'd be lining up in US District Court to file a civil class-action suit...and the US is a very litigious country, where people sue and win over hot coffee at McDonalds. There are plenty of ambulance-chasing personal injury lawyers who would take up such cases. But they don't.

 

Because the confessions weren't extracted by torture. They were extracted by reasonably trained American and British prosecutors like John Harlan Amen, who knew how to get people to talk without smacking them in the head.

 

Of course, the deniers, most of whom have no physical connection to the events in Europe that transpired 7 decades ago, are the only ones contesting the Holocaust, and not the perpetrators themselves, or the families they left behind, or even their children like Edda Göring or Kathrin Himmler. Think about it: All those Nazis that managed to flee to Argentina and remained there in safety for decades, would have had plenty of freedom to publish the odd memoir to take apart the IMT and question the holocaust. But even they, did not.

Concluding National Socialist guilt of crimes against humanity, Einsatzgruppen and Gas Vans

I have shown the written order regarding the secrecy of the Final Solution

I have shown the written order to implement and begin the Final Solution, and Göring's complicity

I have repeatedly demonstrated Hitler's intent and complicity in the Final Solution

I have shown Goebbels' complicity in the Final Solution I have shown Himmler's complicity in the Final Solution

I have shown the Höfle Telegram as documentary evidence of Aktion Reinhard in progress

I have shown further documents detailing the murder of Jews in six figures and higher

I have shown documents proving the existence of Einsatzgruppen and the atrocities they committed

I have shown documents proving forced castration was part of Nazi racial policy

I have shown documentary evidence of the Euthanasia program and how its members were later implicated in genocide in the East

I have repeatedly shown documentary evidence concerning the homicidal use of mobile gas vans

I have shown both a photo and video of gassing victims

I have exposed holocaust deniers of falsely quoting Charles P. Larson

I have shown evidence of Nazi horrors in Ravensbrück, Natzweiler-Struthof and August Hirt's Jewish Skeleton Collection

I have provided photographic evidence of both in-progress mass shooting and mass graves of unarmed, naked civilians in the East

I have shown written orders explaining the genocidal treatment Soviet Prisoners of War received at the hands of the Nazis

I have debunked allegations of a "kangaroo court" placed on the Nuremberg trials