Germany’s War by John Wear, Chapter 8: The Alleged Genocide of European Jewry

Germany’s War by John Wear: https://www.amazon.com/GERMANYS-WAR-Origins-Aftermath-Atrocities/dp/0982344899/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1CODKQLIYA3ZW&keywords=john+wear+germany%27s+war&qid=1578315223&s=books&sprefix=John+Wear%2Caps%2C169&sr=1-1 

The genocide of European Jewry by National Socialist Germany is widely considered to be the most thoroughly documented event in human history. Tens of thousands of books, magazine, and newspaper articles have been written and numerous criminal trials have been conducted to document the mass extermination of European Jewry. The crimes of Germany against Jews are considered to be so uniquely evil that the term “the Holocaust” has been invented to describe the alleged genocide of European Jewry.  

Despite the extensive attention given to the event, revisionist historians have called into question many aspects of the Holocaust story. In particular, it has been shown that: 1) there were no homicidal gas chambers in any of the German concentration camps; 2) Germany did not have a program of genocide against the Jews; and 3) the standard estimate of 6 million Jews who died during World War II is a ridiculous exaggeration.

Scientific Evidence Refuting Homicidal Gas Chambers

In every murder trial the prosecution has the burden of proof to show the cause of death. Scientific evidence is usually the most convincing evidence to show the cause of death because scientific evidence can be verified in an objective manner. Incredibly, in the biggest and most publicized murder trial of all time, the prosecution at the International Military Tribunal produced no autopsy reports or expert reports on the existence and operation of the alleged homicidal gas chambers. Even in the Auschwitz Trial in Frankfurt in the mid-1960s and the Majdanek Trial in Dusseldorf in the late 1970s, the defense never thought to request a report on the alleged murder weapons, which have partly survived today. In all of these trials the prosecution relied almost exclusively on eyewitness testimony to convict the defendants of murder.¹

It was not until 1988 that a scientific study was conducted concerning the homicidal gas chambers allegedly used in the German concentration camps. In 1988 the Canadian government prosecuted Ernst Zuendel for the criminal offense of knowingly disseminating false news about “the Holocaust.” As part of his defense in this trial, Zuendel commissioned the American gas chamber expert Fred Leuchter to make a scientific examination of the alleged homicidal gas chambers at Auschwitz, Birkenau and Majdanek. The resulting Leuchter Report is the first scientific study of the alleged German homicidal gas chambers.²

Leuchter, who before this assignment had believed in the existence of the gas chambers and the German genocide of European Jewry, was perhaps the leading expert in the United States on the construction and use of execution equipment. Leuchter had designed and manufactured execution equipment of all types prior to this assignment, including electrocution systems, lethal injection equipment, gallows, and gas chamber hardware. He had worked with most, if not all, of the states in the United States having capital punishment.³ As a result of his on-site examination of the alleged gas chambers, Fred Leuchter states:

Construction of these facilities further shows that they were never used as gas chambers. None of these facilities were sealed or gasketed. No provision was ever made to prevent condensation of gas on the walls, floor or ceiling. No provision ever existed to exhaust the air-gas mixture from these buildings. No provision ever existed to introduce or distribute the gas throughout the chamber. No explosion-proof lighting existed and no attempt was ever made to prevent gas from entering the crematories, even though the gas is highly explosive. No attempt was made to protect operating personnel from exposure to the gas or to protect other non-participating persons from exposure. Specifically, at Auschwitz, a floor drain in the alleged gas chamber was connected directly to the camp’s storm drain system. At Majdanek a depressed walkway around the alleged gas chambers would have collected gas seepage and resulted in a death trap for camp personnel. No exhaust stacks ever existed. Hydrogen cyanide gas is an extremely dangerous and lethal gas, and nowhere were there any provisions to effect any amount of safe handling. The chambers were too small to accommodate more than a simple fraction of the alleged numbers. Plain and simple, these facilities could not have operated as execution gas chambers.⁴

In addition to reporting that the alleged homicidal gas chambers at Auschwitz, Birkenau, and Majdanek were structurally unsuitable for gassing, Leuchter researched the chemical properties of the Zyklon B fumigant. Leuchter found that Zyklon B is a highly toxic compound that, when exposed to air at a temperature greater than 78.3º F (25.7º C), releases deadly hydrogen cyanide gas. The released hydrogen cyanide gas clings to surfaces and reacts chemically with materials containing iron, forming ferrocyanide compounds that have a distinctive blue color called Prussian blue. Since building materials normally contain a certain amount of rust (iron oxide, usually between one and 4%), repeated exposure to hydrogen cyanide gas would result in Prussian blue staining on the walls of the alleged gas chambers.⁵

Leuchter took forensic samples from the alleged gas chambers at the visited sites and a control sample from the delousing facility at Birkenau. The samples were analyzed by an independent laboratory in the United States. The laboratory found no significant ferrocyanide compound traces in the samples taken from the alleged homicidal gas chambers, but the samples from the walls of the disinfection chamber had heavy concentrations of the ferrocyanide compounds. Leuchter concluded that this result would be impossible if the alleged homicidal gas chambers had been repeatedly exposed to hydrogen cyanide gas.

Leuchter also observed that the delousing chambers were airtight, well made and designed for safety. By comparison the alleged homicidal gas chambers were not airtight, were poorly constructed, and dangerous for the operators. Why would gas chambers designed to kill lice be properly constructed and engineered, while gas chambers designed to kill millions of people be improperly constructed and engineered and dangerous for the operators? Leuchter concludes: “After a thorough examination of the alleged execution facilities in Poland and their associated crematories, the only conclusion that can be arrived at by a rational, responsible person is the absurdity of the notion that any of these facilities were ever capable of, or were utilized as, execution gas chambers.”⁶

Germar Rudolf, a certified chemist, expanded on Leuchter’s work by writing the Rudolf Report in the spring of 1992. The Rudolf Report, which has been updated and revised several times, focused on engineering and chemical aspects of the alleged homicidal gas chambers at Auschwitz and Birkenau. Rudolf observed in his on-site examinations that all of the delousing facilities at Auschwitz, Birkenau, and Majdanek have one thing in common: their walls are permeated with Prussian blue. Not only the inner surfaces, but also the outside walls and the mortar between the bricks of the delousing chambers have Prussian blue staining. Nothing of this sort can be observed in any of the alleged homicidal gas chambers at Auschwitz and Birkenau.

Rudolf also took samples from the alleged homicidal gas chambers and the delousing facilities at Auschwitz and Birkenau. Similar to Leuchter’s samples, the alleged homicidal gas chambers exhibit only insignificant traces of ferrocyanide residue on the same order of magnitude found in any other building. The samples from the delousing chambers, however, all showed very high ferrocyanide residues. Rudolf determined that if mass execution gassings with hydrocyanic acid had taken place in the alleged homicidal gas chambers, the rooms in the alleged homicidal gas chambers would exhibit similar ferrocyanide residue as the delousing chambers. Therefore, Rudolf concluded that mass gassings with Zyklon B could not have occurred in the alleged homicidal gas chambers at Auschwitz and Birkenau.⁷

In March 1992, a prominent Austrian engineer named Walter Lueftl made headlines when a report he had written stated that the stories of mass extermination of Jews in gas chambers at Auschwitz and Mauthausen are impossible for technical reasons and because they are incompatible with observable laws of nature. At the time of his report, Lueftl was a court-recognized expert engineer who headed a large engineering firm in Vienna.

Lueftl stated that although the hydrocyanic acid contained in the Zyklon B can kill quickly and certainly, the handling requirements for Zyklon B rule out any significant use of Zyklon B for the mass killing of people. Lueftl stated that during the ventilation process after a gassing, Zyklon B would still retain approximately 92% of its hydrocyanic acid content, and would thus continue releasing hydrocyanic acid gas. Lueftl asked: How could the gas chamber operators get rid of the remaining Zyklon B from the midst of dead corpses, without lengthy ventilation periods, and without causing mass deaths outside the gas chambers? Lueftl concluded that because of operational and time considerations, quasi-industrial killing using Zyklon B would be impossible.⁸

Lueftl also stated in his report that mass murder with diesel exhaust gasses is a sheer impossibility for reasons of time alone. Lueftl stated that this can be easily proven experimentally, even today, with a few brave men. Therefore, Lueftl concluded that the stories of gas chambers with diesel engines and gas vans at places such as Treblinka can only be disinformation. In his report, Lueftl states: “The laws of nature apply both to Nazis and anti-fascists. Nobody can be killed with diesel exhaust gas in the manner described [in the Holocaust literature].”⁹

Friedrich Paul Berg, an American engineer, agrees with Lueftl that diesel gas chambers are not an effective means of committing mass murder. Berg states that for any Diesel arrangement to have been even marginally effective for mass murder, it would have required an exception- ally well-informed team of experts to know and do all that was necessary. Berg mentions that even if someone had tried for a time to commit murder with Diesel exhaust, after a few tries it would have become apparent that something better was needed. Berg concludes that the evidence for diesel gassings in the German concentration camps fails to meet the most basic standards that credible evidence must pass to satisfy reasonable people.¹⁰

Other scientists have concluded that there were no homicidal gas chambers in the German concentration camps. For example, the late Dr. William B. Lindsey, a research chemist employed for 33 years by the DuPont Corporation, testified in the 1985 Ernst Zuendel trial that he considered mass homicidal gassings in the camps to be technically impossible. Based on his on-site examination of the alleged homicidal gas chambers at Auschwitz, Birkenau, and Majdanek, Dr. Lindsey stated: “I have come to the conclusion that no one was willfully or purposefully killed with Zyklon B in this manner. I consider it absolutely impossible.”¹¹

Several attempts have been made by defenders of the Holocaust story to refute revisionist scientific studies of the alleged homicidal gas chambers. For example, Jean-Claude Pressac, a French pharmacist, wrote a book published by the Beate Klarsfeld Foundation entitled Auschwitz: Techniques and Operation of the Gas Chambers. Pressac’s book actually strengthens the Revisionist view of the Holocaust story. Both explicitly and implicitly, Pressac discredits countless Holocaust claims and testimonies. Pressac writes: “This study already demonstrates the complete bankruptcy of the traditional [Holocaust] history . . . a history based for the most part on testimonies, assembled according to the need of the moment, truncated to fit an arbitrary truth and sprinkled with a few German documents of uneven value and without any connection to one another.”¹²

Pressac’s book, printed on 564 oversize pages, includes hundreds of good-quality reproductions of original German architectural plans and diagrams, photographs taken both during and after the war, and many documents with translations. Remarkably, in the entire book, Pressac fails to mention anything about the techniques and operation of the German gas chambers. The title of his book is totally false. Revisionists say that since no homicidal gas chambers ever existed in the German concentration camps, Pressac did not write about the techniques and operation of the gas chambers because there was nothing to write about.¹³

The Kraków Institute of Forensic Research also published results in 1994 that attempt to refute the Leuchter Report. The team from the forensic institute claims not to have understood how it was possible for Prussian blue to have formed in walls as a result of their being exposed to hydrogen cyanide gas. The researchers therefore excluded Prussian blue and similar iron cyanide compounds from their analyses, resulting in much lower cyanide traces for the delousing chambers. Their analysis made it practically impossible to distinguish between rooms massively exposed to hydrogen cyanide and those which were not: all would have a cyanide residue of close to zero. The Kraków researchers concluded from their analysis that since the gas chambers and delousing facilities all had the same amount of cyanide residues, humans were gassed in the gas chambers.

Germar Rudolf gave the Kraków researchers irrefutable proof that Prussian blue can be formed in walls exposed to hydrogen cyanide gas, citing a case document in expert literature.¹⁴ The authors of the Kraków report refused to change their report and admit they made a mistake. Rudolf states: “The only ‘scientific’ attempt to refute Frederick A. Leuchter’s most intriguing thesis turns out to be one of the biggest scientific frauds of the twentieth century. How desperate must they be—those who try to defend the established version of the Holocaust, i.e., the alleged systematic extermination of Jews in homicidal ‘gas chambers,’ that they resort to such obviously fraudulent methods?”¹⁵

Additional Evidence Refuting Homicidal Gas Chambers

In 1979 the U.S. government released wartime aerial photographs of the Auschwitz and Birkenau camps taken on several random days in 1944 during the height of the alleged extermination period. These photographs are so remarkable in their clarity that vehicles and even people can be distinguished in them. Many of these photographs were taken at mid-morning on typical workdays. None of these photos show huge pits or piles of bodies, smoking crematory chimneys, masses of Jews awaiting death outside of the alleged gas chambers, or mountains of coke used to fuel the crematoria. All of these would have been visible if Auschwitz and Birkenau had been the extermination centers they are said to have been.

In his book Auschwitz: The End of a Legend, Carlo Mattogno states in regard to Allied aerial photographs taken at Birkenau on May 31, 1944:

It is pointed out also that the aerial photographs taken by the Allied military on 31 May 1944, at the crucial time of presumed extermination, on the day of the arrival at Birkenau of about 15,000 deportees, and after 14 days of intense arrivals (184,000 deportees, averaging 13,000 per day) and with an extermination toll (according to Pressac’s hypothesis) of at least 110,000 homicidally gassed, which would have had to average 7,800 per day, every single day for 14 consecutive days; after all of that, the photographs do not show the slightest evidence of this alleged enormous extermination: No trace of smoke, no trace of pits, crematory or otherwise, burning or not, no sign of dirt extracted from pits, no trace of wood set aside for use in pits, no sign of vehicles or any other type of activity in the crucial zones of the courtyard of Crematory V nor in the earth of Bunker 2, nor in Crematories II and III. These photographs constitute irrefutable proof that the story of extermination of the Hungarian Jews is historically unfounded.¹⁶

German aerial reconnaissance photographs taken in 1944 of the Treblinka camp also cast serious doubts on the widely accepted story that Treblinka was a mass extermination center. Discovered in 1989 in the National Archives in Washington, D.C., these photographs corroborate other evidence indicating that Treblinka was actually a transit camp. The photographs indicate that Treblinka was an extremely small camp. The camp’s burial area appears too small to contain the hundreds of thousands of bodies supposedly buried there. Treblinka was not particularly well guarded or isolated. The aerial photographs show that fields where Polish farmers planted and cultivated crops were directly adjacent to the camp perimeter and were cultivated right up to the edge of the camp.¹⁷

John C. Ball, a geologist with experience interpreting aerial photographs, has reviewed the wartime aerial photos taken of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Belzec, Sobibór, Majdanek, and Babi Yar. Ball concludes: “To this day there is no air photo evidence to support the alleged mass murder of the Jews at any location in Europe occupied by the Germans during World War Two. Further, air photo analysis refutes the claim that the ‘Nazis’ had intended, at whatever time, to keep events in the alleged extermination camps secret. In many cases the air photos provide clear proof that some of the events attested to by witnesses, such as the destruction of Hungarian Jews or the mass executions at Babi Yar, did not in fact take place.”¹⁸

A detailed forensic examination at the Treblinka camp using sophisticated electronic ground radar has also found no evidence of mass graves. An Australian team headed by Richard Krege, a qualified electronics engineer, carried out an examination at the site of the Treblinka camp. Krege’s team used an $80,000 Ground Penetration Radar (GPR) device, which sends out vertical signals that are visible on a computer monitor. GPR devices are routinely used around the world by geologists, archeologists, and police. GPR detects any major disturbances in the soil to a normal effective depth of four or five meters.

For six days in October 1999 the team carefully examined the entire Treblinka site, especially the alleged “mass graves” portion, and carried out control examinations of the surrounding area. Krege’s team also carried out visual soil inspections, and used an auger to take numerous soil samples. They found no soil disturbance consistent with the burial of hundreds of thousands of bodies, or even evidence that the ground had ever been disturbed. In addition, the team found no evidence of individual graves, bone remains, human ashes, or wood ashes. Richard Krege concludes from his examination of the site that Treblinka was never an extermination camp.¹⁹

Startling evidence was also revealed in 1989 when the Soviets released some of the Auschwitz death registry volumes that fell into Soviet hands in January 1945 when the Red Army captured Auschwitz. The death certificates contained in these volumes were official German documents issued by Auschwitz camp doctors upon the death of an inmate. Each death certificate includes the deceased person’s full name, profession and religion, date and place of birth, pre-Auschwitz residence, parents’ names, time of death, cause of death, and a camp physician’s signature. The death registry volumes recorded the deaths of approximately 69,000 Auschwitz inmates, of which approximately 30,000 were Jewish. Most of the deaths were caused by disease, although some death certificates recorded executions by shooting or hanging. None of the death certificates recorded death by homicidal gassings.²⁰

The Auschwitz death registry volumes call into question the existence of homicidal gas chambers. Why would the German authorities record executions by shooting or hanging and not record any by gassings? Also, why did the Soviets suppress the release of these volumes for 44 years? The Auschwitz death registry volumes are totally inconsistent with Auschwitz being a center of mass extermination using homicidal gas chambers.²¹

Another important piece of evidence arguing against the existence of homicidal gas chambers is that the British broke the ultra-secret Enigma code used by the Germans to transmit secret communications. During 1942 and 1943 British intelligence intercepted daily coded messages from Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Dachau, and seven other camps. Every day the Germans recorded the numbers of dead and the method of death at each camp. The transmissions from Auschwitz mentioned illness as the primary cause of death, but also reported deaths attributable to shootings and hangings. There was no reference to homicidal gassings as a cause of death in any of the decoded messages.²²

The numbers of dead in the decoded messages from Auschwitz roughly correlate with the numbers of dead recorded in the Auschwitz death registry volumes. Since the Germans made their reports in top-secret transmissions using a supposedly indecipherable code, why would they report deaths from shootings and hangings but not from homicidal gassings? The Germans would have no reason to hide deaths by homicidal gassings in their secret messages if such deaths had actually taken place.

David Cole, a Jewish American, has also produced a very revealing video based on his visit to Auschwitz in September 1992. Wearing a yarmulke and pretending to be a righteous Jew wanting to answer those who question the Holocaust story, Cole paid extra for his personal English language tour guide. The video shows numerous weaknesses of the alleged homicidal gas chamber at Auschwitz: 1) Obvious marks on the walls and floors where apparently walls have been knocked down; 2) Equally obvious holes in the floor where bathroom facilities had been; 3) A flimsy wooden door with a big glass pane in it; 4) A doorway with no door and no fittings for a door leading to the crematorium ovens; 5) A big manhole right in the middle of the gas chamber; and 6) No Zyklon B staining in the walls. Any reasonable person can tell that the alleged gas chamber shown in the video could not possibly function as a homicidal gas chamber.

In response to David Cole’s questions, Cole’s tour guide repeatedly states that the gas chamber at Auschwitz was in its original state. Unable to answer all of Cole’s questions, Cole’s tour guide went to get a woman who was introduced as the Supervisor of Tour Guides for the Auschwitz State Museum. In response to Cole’s question, the Auschwitz tour supervisor states that the holes in the ceiling of the alleged gas chamber at Auschwitz were rebuilt after the war. Thus, contrary to statements made by Cole’s tour guide, the Auschwitz tour supervisor acknowledges that the alleged gas chamber at Auschwitz is not in its original state.

David Cole next interviewed Dr. Franciszek Piper, the Head of Archives and the Senior Curator of the Auschwitz State Museum. Dr. Piper explained in the interview that the gas chamber shown to tourists at Auschwitz is similar to the one that existed in 1941-1942, but not all details are the same so that, for example, there are no gas-tight doors. In other words, the gas chamber is not in its original state but is rather a postwar reconstruction. Cole’s video documents that the museum officials deceive tourists by representing that the gas chamber at Auschwitz is in its original state even though the museum officials know better. The postwar reconstruction they show tourists at Auschwitz is worthless as proof of anything. Also, there is not a single wartime document or photograph to confirm what the alleged homicidal gas chamber at Auschwitz looked like.²³

An additional defect of the alleged homicidal gas chamber at Auschwitz is that it has no mechanism to heat the room temperature to above 78.3º F (25.7° C). The Zyklon B crystals will not turn to gas until the temperature reaches at least 78.3º F. Since the temperature at Auschwitz is less than 78.3º F most of the year, a method of heating the chamber to a temperature above 78.3º F is essential for the successful operation of the gas chamber. Especially in winter but also during other times of the year, the increased heat generated from having dozens of people assembled in the gas chamber would not usually heat the temperature in the gas chamber to above 78.3º F.²⁴

Defenders of the Holocaust story have sometimes made concessions to revisionist researchers. In the book Auschwitz: 1270 to Present, by Robert Jan Van Pelt and Deborah Dwork, the two Jewish authors admit that the gas chamber shown tourists at the main Auschwitz camp is largely a postwar reconstruction built by the Polish government. The authors still allege, however, that there were gas chambers at Birkenau.²⁵

There has also been a trend to minimize the importance of the gas chambers in the Holocaust story. In his book Why Did the Heavens Not Darken?: The “Final Solution” in History, Princeton University professor Arno J. Mayer states: “From 1942 to 1945, certainly at Auschwitz, but probably overall, more Jews were killed by so-called ‘natural’ causes than by ‘unnatural’ ones.”²⁶ In the same book Dr. Mayer admits that “Sources for the study of the gas chambers are at once rare and unreliable.”²⁷

In his 2009 book Worse Than War: Genocide, Eliminationism, and the Ongoing Assault on Humanity, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen states:

The Germans’ extermination of the Jews is infamous precisely for the gas chambers and the so-called assembly-line killing. Yet whatever such death factories’ existential horror and significance, these installations were not essential for mass murder. This is so obvious it is astonishing that the gas chambers have been turned into the horror’s central aspect, to the longtime neglect and exclusion of so much else (particularly the perpetrators and the victims), as if the gas chambers and technology themselves caused the killing instead of being the incidental implements of people who wanted to kill. Modern technology was unnecessary and the Germans knew this. They killed their victims overwhelmingly without gassing. . . .²⁸

Since the existence of homicidal gas chambers in the German concentration camps has been scientifically disproven, it is understandable that Goldhagen and Mayer would want to minimize the importance of homicidal gas chambers in the alleged genocide of European Jewry.

Eyewitness Testimony of German Genocide of Jewry

Inevitably when anyone questions the genocide of European Jewry, the eyewitness testimony is raised as proof that the genocide happened.  However, most of the eyewitness accounts of the Holocaust story have proved to be extremely unreliable.

For example, John Demjanjuk, a naturalized American citizen, was accused by eyewitnesses of being a murderous guard at Treblinka named Ivan the Terrible. Demjanjuk was deported to Israel, and an Israeli court tried and convicted him primarily based on the eyewitness testimony of five Jewish survivors of Treblinka. Demjanjuk’s defense attorney eventually uncovered new evidence proving that the Soviet KGB had framed Demjanjuk, and that documents supposedly showing him to be a guard at Treblinka were Soviet forgeries. The Israeli Supreme Court ruled that the eyewitness accounts were not credible and that Demjanjuk was innocent.²⁹

Another example of false witness testimony of the Holocaust story occurred in the case of Frank Walus, who was a retired Chicago factory worker charged with killing Jews in his native Poland during the war. An accusation by Simon Wiesenthal that Walus had worked for the Gestapo prompted the U.S. government’s legal action. During Walus’s trial 11 Jews testified under oath that Walus had murdered Jews during the war. After a costly four-year legal battle, Walus was finally able to prove that he had spent the war years as a teenager working on German farms. An American Bar Association article published in 1981 concluded in regard to Walus’s trial that“. . . in an atmosphere of hatred and loathing verging on hysteria, the government persecuted an innocent man.”³⁰

It would be impossible for me to discuss every eyewitness account of the Holocaust story. To illustrate the unreliability of eyewitness accounts of the Holocaust story, I will analyze the eyewitness accounts of probably its three most famous survivors: Elie Wiesel, Simon Wiesenthal, and Viktor Frankl.

Elie Wiesel, whose autobiography Night written in 1956 helped him win the Nobel Peace Prize, never mentions homicidal gas chambers in his book. Instead, Wiesel writes that Jews were killed en masse by being thrown alive in burning pits.³¹ If there had actually been homicidal gas chambers at Birkenau, one would think that Wiesel would have mentioned the gas chambers in his autobiography. Also, if there had been burning pits at Birkenau, these would have shown in some of the Allied aerial photographs taken of Birkenau in 1944.

Wiesel also mentions in Night that he had surgery on an infected foot in January 1945. The German authorities at Birkenau gave Wiesel and other hospital patients unfit to travel the option to remain in the camp. Wiesel and his father decided to evacuate Birkenau and travel to Buchenwald with the Germans rather than be liberated by the Russian army.³² If Birkenau had been a place of mass exterminations, why would Wiesel choose to travel with his supposed killers? Also, why would the German authorities at Birkenau leave behind thousands of witnesses to their genocide if a policy of genocide had actually taken place at Birkenau?

That Wiesel survived his internment at Buchenwald is, of course, the result of a miracle. Wiesel states: “In Buchenwald they sent 10,000 persons to their deaths each day. I was always in the last hundred near the gate. They stopped. Why?”³³ Today no credible historian believes that 10,000 Jews per day were executed at Buchenwald.

A remarkable witness himself, Wiesel assures us that he has met other remarkable witnesses. Wiesel states in one of his books that after Jews were executed at Babi Yar in the Ukraine: “Eye witnesses say that for months after the killings the ground continued to spurt geysers of blood. One was always treading on corpses.”³⁴ Wiesel repeats this claim later with some embellishment: “Later, I learn from a witness that, for month after month, the ground never stopped trembling; and that, from time to time, geysers of blood spurted from it.”³⁵ This story lacks all credibility. Wiesel does not seem to know that photos taken at Babi Yar shortly after the alleged mass executions of Jews show no indication of any mass grave site or any disturbance of the foliage or ground cover.³⁶

Famed Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal also reports a trip to a German camp hospital in his book The Murderers Among Us. Wiesenthal wrote that he tried to commit suicide by cutting his wrists while incarcerated by the Germans. Instead of letting him die, the Germans sent him to the hospital where they nursed him back to health.³⁷ If the Germans were intent on committing genocide against European Jewry, why would they make the effort to send both Wiesel and Wiesenthal to the hospital to restore their health?

Viktor Frankl’s book Man’s Search For Meaning has been ranked by the Library of Congress as one of the 20th century’s 10 most influential books in the United States. Frankl describes his experiences at Auschwitz in this book as if he had spent many months there. In reality, Frankl was in Auschwitz only for a few days in October 1944 while in transit from Theresienstadt to a sub camp of Dachau. Frankl has admitted this to the American evangelist Robert Schuller: “I was in Auschwitz only three or four days. . . . I was sent to a barrack and we were all transported to a camp in Bavaria.”³⁸ Frankl’s short time in Auschwitz is substantiated by the prisoner log from the sub camp of Dachau, Kaufering III, which listed Frankl’s arrival on Oct. 25, 1944, six days after his departure from Theresienstadt.³⁹ Thus, Frankl’s descriptions of his long stay at Auschwitz in Man’s Search For Meaning are false and inaccurate.

The unreliability of eyewitness testimony of the Holocaust story has also been commented on by some historians. Jewish historian Samuel Gringauz criticized what he called the “hyperhistorical” nature of most Jewish survivor testimony. Gringauz wrote that “most of the memoirs and reports are full of preposterous verbosity, graphomanic exaggeration, dramatic effects, overestimated self-inflation, dilettante philosophizing, would-be lyricism, unchecked rumors bias, partisan attacks and apologies.”⁴⁰

Shmuel Krakowski, archives director of Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust center, confirmed in 1986 that more than half of the testimonies of Jewish survivors on file there are unreliable. Krakowski said that many survivors, wanting to be a part of history, may have let their imaginations run away from them. He stated that many of the testimonies on file at Yad Vashem were later proved to be inaccurate when locations and dates could not pass an expert historian’s appraisal. Krakowski commented on the Jewish survivor testimony, “Many were never in the places where they claimed to have witnessed atrocities, while others relied on second-hand information given them by friends or passing strangers.”⁴¹

Although seldom mentioned in the press, numerous eyewitnesses have reported that they did not see any evidence of genocide in the German concentration camps. One of the first to dispute reports of German genocide was Paul Rassinier. Rassinier was a French professor of history who was arrested during the war for passive resistance activities, which included helping to smuggle Jews into neutral Switzerland. Rassinier stated that although he suffered greatly during the war in the Buchenwald and Dora concentration camps, he never saw any evidence of homicidal gas chambers or any program to exterminate the Jews. After reading sensationalized accounts that he knew were false, Rassinier felt it was his ethical duty to tell the truth about the camps and refute the false claims being made in the world’s press.

Rassinier wrote extensively about his own experiences and observations in the German camps. He also began to research the entire issue of German genocide against the Jews during the war. Rassinier concluded that the death toll in the camps was far lower than alleged. He also concluded that the deaths in the camps were not caused by a German program of genocide,⁴² but rather primarily by the poor conditions of the camps attributable to the economic collapse of Germany during a devastating war. Rassinier had nothing to gain personally from taking his unpopular position, and after suffering greatly in the German concentration camps, he then suffered intense persecution in postwar France for his courageous writings after the war.

Thies Christophersen was another witness who said that the alleged genocide of Jews during the war never happened. Christophersen supervised about 300 workers, many of them Jewish, at Auschwitz from January to December 1944. On a number of occasions during this period he visited Birkenau where allegedly hundreds of thousands of Jews were being gassed to death. In a memoir first published in Germany in 1973, The Auschwitz Lie, Christophersen wrote that during the time he was at Auschwitz he did not notice the slightest evidence of mass gassings. In March 1988 at the Ernst Zuendel trial in Toronto, he also successfully answered numerous pointed questions by the prosecuting attorney about his experiences at Auschwitz.

After The Auschwitz Lie was published, Christophersen received thousands of letters and calls. He wrote in regard to these letters and calls:

Many of those who contacted me can confirm my statements, but are afraid to do so publicly. Some of those are SS men who were brutally mistreated and even tortured in Allied captivity. I also immediately contacted those who claimed to know more about mass gassings. My experiences were precisely the same as those of French professor Paul Rassinier. I have not found any eyewitnesses. Instead, people would tell me that they knew someone who knew someone else, who talked about it. In most cases the alleged eyewitnesses had died. Other supposed eyewitnesses would quickly begin to stammer and stutter when I asked a few precise questions. Even Simon Wiesenthal had to finally admit before a Frankfurt district court that he was actually never in Auschwitz. All of the reports I have heard about are contradictory. Everyone seemed to tell a different story about the gas chambers. They couldn’t even agree about where they were supposed to have been located. This is also true of the so-called scholarly literature, which is full of contradictions. . . .⁴³

Another eyewitness who did not see any evidence of genocide of the Jews is Dr. Wilhelm Staeglich. Dr. Staeglich, a German judge, visited Auschwitz several times during the Second World War as a German orderly officer of an Anti-aircraft Detachment. Dr. Staeglich published the following account of his visits to Auschwitz:

On none of these visits did I see gassing installations, crematoria, instruments of torture, or similar horrors. The camp gave one the impression of being well-kept and very well-organized. The camp reminded me of the German Labor Front camp in which I served out my six-month stretch in the Labor Service, except that Auschwitz was, of course, considerably larger. . . . None of the inmates behaved as though they were in fear of mistreatment, let alone death.

On the later point, one encounter with inmates especially sticks in my memory. As some comrades and I were standing near the camp one evening, we caught sight of a big gang of inmates returning to camp from work in the industrial plants. They were escorted by a relatively small contingent of SS-men—mostly older people—and seemed to be thoroughly undisciplined.

They talked loudly among themselves, laughing all the while. Two or three inmates dropped out of line when they spotted us, opened their flies, and made water. Although this gesture could have been interpreted as a sign of contempt for German men in uniform, the SS guards ignored it completely. Later, whenever I heard that mortal terror prevailed in the concentration camps, I had to recall this incident. That is hardly the way people who are in constant fear of death behave.⁴⁴

Another credible eyewitness is the Austrian-born Canadian Maria Van Herwaarden, who was interned at Birkenau starting in 1942. Van Herwaarden testified at the 1988 Ernst Zuendel trial that she saw nothing at Birkenau that resembled mass murder. She did testify, however, that many of the inmates at Birkenau died of typhus and some inmates committed suicide.⁴⁵ No prosecution witnesses were called during this trial because the prosecution knew of no survivors who could withstand cross examination by Zuendel’s defense attorney.

The Nuremberg Trials

The genocide of European Jewry has been given legitimacy by the numerous trials conducted by the Allies after the Second World War. The first trial held in Nuremberg from 1945 to 1946, officially known as the International Military Tribunal (IMT), is by far the most important of these trials. The governments of the United States, the Soviet Union, Great Britain and France tried the most prominent surviving German leaders as war criminals in this trial. In addition, the United States government alone conducted 12 secondary Nuremberg trials from 1946 to 1949. Similar trials were also conducted in other locations by Great Britain, West Germany, the United States, and Israel, including the highly-publicized trial in Israel of Adolf Eichmann.

The Allies gave special attention to the alleged extermination of 6 million Jews at the Nuremberg trials. For example, chief U.S. prosecutor Robert H. Jackson declared in his opening address to the Tribunal: “The most savage and numerous crimes planned and committed by the Nazis were those against the Jews. . . . It is my purpose to show a plan and design to which all Nazis were fanatically committed, to annihilate all Jewish people. . . . The avowed purpose was the destruction of the Jewish people as a whole. . . . History does not record a crime ever perpetrated against so many victims or one ever carried out with such calculated cruelty.”⁴⁶

Sir Hartley Shawcross, the chief British prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials, echoed Justice Jackson’s sentiments in his final address to the Tribunal: “There is one group to which the method of annihilation was applied on a scale so immense that it is my duty to refer separately to the evidence. I mean the extermination of the Jews. If there was no other crime against these men, this one alone, in which all of them were implicated, would suffice. History holds no parallel to these horrors.”⁴⁷ Shawcross also stated in his closing address that “more than 6 million” Jews were killed by the Germans, and that “murder [was] conducted like some mass production industry in the gas chambers and the ovens of Auschwitz, Dachau, Treblinka, Buchenwald, Mauthausen, Majdanek and Oranienburg.”⁴⁸

Although the Nuremberg trials had an appearance of fairness in a courtroom setting, they were organized not to dispense impartial justice, but for political purposes. The victorious Allies had control over the judges, prosecution, defense, and execution of the surviving German leaders. Our Western concept of justice relies on the impartial administering of the law. Such justice is not possible when the judges are the political enemies of the accused, and when the accused are prosecuted for acts of war that the Allies themselves had committed.

Some leading Allied figures acknowledged that the Nuremberg trials were organized primarily for political purposes. Norman Birkett, a British alternate judge at the Nuremberg Tribunal, stated in a private letter in April 1946 that “the trial is only in form a judicial process and its main importance is political.”⁴⁹ Chief U.S. prosecutor Robert H. Jackson stated that the Nuremberg Tribunal “is a continuation of the Allied war effort against Germany.”⁵⁰ Judge Iola T. Nikitchenko explained the Soviet view of the Nuremberg Tribunal: “The fact that the Nazi leaders are criminals has already been established. The task of the Tribunal is only to determine the measure of guilt of each particular person and mete out the necessary punishment—the sentences.”⁵¹

The mostly political nature of the Nuremberg trials is also indicated by Nahum Goldmann in his book The Jewish Paradox. Goldmann, president of the World Jewish Congress (WJC), admits that the idea of the Nuremberg Tribunal and German reparations originated with WJC officials. Only after persistent efforts by WJC officials were Allied leaders persuaded to accept the idea of the Nuremberg trials.⁵² Also, the WJC made sure that Germany’s extermination of European Jewry was a primary focus of the trials, and that the defendants would be punished for their involvement in Germany’s extermination process.⁵³

Iowa Supreme Court Justice Charles F. Wennerstrum, who served as the presiding judge in the Nuremberg trial of German generals, resigned his appointment in disgust at the proceedings. He criticized the one-sided handling of evidence in the trials. Wennerstrum said that selection of the evidence in the trials was made by the prosecution from the large tonnage of captured German records. Wennerstrum stated: “If I had known seven months ago what I know today, I would never have come here. The high ideals announced as the motives for creating these tribunals have not been evident.”⁵⁴

Justice Wennerstrum also said that Jews dominated the staff of the Nuremberg Courts and were more interested in revenge than justice. He stated: “The entire atmosphere is unwholesome. . . . Lawyers, clerks, interpreters, and researchers were employed who became Americans only in recent years, whose backgrounds were embedded in Europe’s hatreds and prejudices.”⁵⁵ Wennerstrum left the Nuremberg trials “with a feeling that justice has been denied.”

U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Harlan Fiske Stone said of Justice Robert Jackson, who left the U.S. Supreme Court to lead the IMT tribunal: “Jackson is away conducting his high-grade lynching party in Nuremberg. I don’t mind what he does to the Nazis, but I hate to see the pretense that he is running a court and proceeding according to the common law. This is a little too sanctimonious a fraud to meet my old-fashioned ideas.” Stone wondered on another occasion “whether, under this new [Nuremberg] doctrine of international law, if we had been defeated, the victors could plausibly assert that our supplying Britain with fifty destroyers was an act of aggression. . . .”⁵⁶

U.S. Sen. Robert A. Taft courageously denounced the Nuremberg trials in an October 1946 speech: “The trial of the vanquished by the victors cannot be impartial no matter how it is hedged about with the forms of justice.” Taft went on to state:

About this whole judgment there is a spirit of vengeance, and vengeance is seldom justice. The hanging of the eleven men convicted will be a blot on the American record which we will long regret. In these trials we have accepted the Russian idea of the purpose of the trials—government policy and not justice—with little relationship to Anglo-Saxon heritage. By clothing policy in forms of legal procedure, we may discredit the whole idea of justice in Europe for years to come.⁵⁷

Several U.S. Congressmen also denounced the Nuremberg trials. For example, Congressman John Rankin of Mississippi declared: “As a representative of the American people I desire to say that what is taking place in Nuremberg, Germany is a disgrace to the United States. . . . A racial minority, two and a half years after the war closed, are in Nuremberg not only hanging German soldiers but trying German businessmen in the name of the United States.”⁵⁸ Congressman Lawrence H. Smith of Wisconsin stated: “The Nuremberg trials are so repugnant to the Anglo-Saxon principles of justice that we must forever be ashamed of that page in our history. . . . The Nuremberg farce represents a revenge policy at its worst.”⁵⁹

Gen. George Patton was also opposed to the war crimes trials. In a letter to his wife he wrote: “I am frankly opposed to this war criminal stuff. It is not cricket and it is Semitic. I am also opposed to sending POWs to work as slaves in foreign lands, where many will be starved to death.”⁶⁰ Among many others expressing similar views, U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas wrote: “I thought at the time and still think that the Nuremberg trials were unprincipled. Law was created ex post facto to suit the passion and clamor of the time.”⁶¹

U.S. Rear Adm. H. Lamont Pugh, former Navy surgeon general and commanding officer of the National Naval Medical Center, wrote concerning the Nuremberg trials, “I thought the trials in general bordered upon international lunacy.” Even Robert Jackson wrote in a letter dated Oct. 12, 1945, to President Harry Truman: “[The Allies] have done or are doing some of the very things we are prosecuting the Germans for. The French are so violating the Geneva Convention in the treatment of [German] prisoners of war that our command is taking back prisoners sent to them. We are prosecuting plunder and our allies are practicing it. We say aggressive war is a crime and one of our allies asserts sovereignty over the Baltic states based on no title except conquest.”⁶²

Allied prosecutors also used torture to help convict the defendants at Nuremberg and other postwar trials. A leading example of the use of torture to obtain evidence at the Nuremberg trials is the confession of Rudolf Hoess, who was a former commandant at Auschwitz. Hoess’s testimony at the Nuremberg trial was probably the most important and striking evidence presented there of a German extermination program. Hoess said that more than two and a half million people were exterminated in the Auschwitz gas chambers, and that another 500,000 inmates had died there of other causes.⁶³ No defender of the Holocaust story today accepts these inflated figures, and other key portions of Hoess’s testimony at Nuremberg are widely acknowledged to be untrue.

In 1983 the anti-Nazi book Legions of Death by Rupert Butler showed that Sgt. Bernard Clarke and other British officers tortured Rudolf Hoess into making his confession. The torture of Hoess was exceptionally brutal. Neither Bernard Clarke nor Rupert Butler finds anything wrong or immoral in the torture of Hoess. Neither of them seems to understand the importance of their revelations. Bernard Clarke and Rupert Butler prove that Hoess’s testimony at Nuremberg was obtained by torture, and is therefore not credible evidence in proving a program of German genocide against European Jewry.⁶⁴

Widespread reports of torture at the American-run trials at Dachau resulted in a formal investigation of the alleged abuses. The Simpson Army Commission officially confirmed the charges of gross abuse against the German defendants. They found that the German defendants at Dachau were routinely tortured with savage beatings, kicking of testicles, months of solitary confinement, burning splinters under fingernails, starvation, and threats of family reprisals. Investigators pretending to be priests were used to obtain false confessions. Low ranking defendants were promised that their “confessions” would be used only against their former superiors; however, these defendants found that their “confessions” were used against them when they were later tried. High ranking defendants were also falsely assured that by accepting responsibility themselves they would protect their former subordinates from prosecution.⁶⁵

Pennsylvania judge Edward Van Roden was a member of the Simpson Army Commission that investigated the methods of torture used at the Dachau trials. In the Jan. 9, 1949, Washington Daily News and in the Jan. 23, 1949, London Sunday Pictorial he told of some examples of the use of torture at Dachau: “[T]he investigators would put a black hood over the accused’s head and then punch him in the face with brass knuckles, kick him and beat him with rubber hoses. . . . All but two of the Germans, in the 139 cases we investigated, had been kicked in the testicles beyond repair.”⁶⁶

Much of the proof offered today by historians of the genocide of European Jewry is the “confessions” extracted by torture at the war crime trials. Among the most celebrated cases, Rudolph Hoess, Hans Frank, Julius Streicher, Hans Fritsche, Oswald Pohl, Franz Ziereis, and Josef Kramer were all subject to torture. Obviously, no “confession” obtained under torture would be considered credible evidence in a court of law.

In addition to torturing defendants into making confessions, some defendants did not live to see the beginning of their trials. For example, Richard Baer, the last commandant of Auschwitz, adamantly refused to confirm the existence of homicidal gas chambers at Auschwitz. Baer died in June 1963 under mysterious circumstances while being held in pre-trial custody. An autopsy performed on Baer at the Frankfurt-am-Main University School of Medicine stated that the ingestion of an odorless, non-corrosive poison could not be ruled out as the cause of his death. The Auschwitz Trial in Frankfurt, Germany began almost immediately after Baer’s death. With Baer’s death the prosecutors at the Auschwitz Trial were able to attain their primary objective—to reinforce the gas chamber myth and establish it as an unassailable historical fact.⁶⁷

We also now know that many of the witnesses at the main IMT trial gave false testimony. One of the best examples is the three witnesses at Nuremberg who testified that Germans were responsible for the mass execution of Polish officers at Katyn. Today everybody agrees that the Soviet Union and not Germany was responsible for the Katyn Forest massacres.⁶⁸

False witnesses were also used at most of the later Allied war crime trials. Stephen F. Pinter served as a U.S. Army prosecuting attorney at the American trials of Germans at Dachau. In a 1960 affidavit Pinter said that “notoriously perjured witnesses” were used to charge Germans with false and unfounded crimes. Pinter stated, “Unfortunately, as a result of these miscarriages of justice, many innocent persons were convicted and some were executed.”⁶⁹

Joseph Halow, a young U.S. court reporter at the Dachau trials in 1947, later described some of the false witnesses at the Dachau trials:

[T]he major portion of the witnesses for the prosecution in the concentration-camp cases were what came to be known as “professional witnesses,” and everyone working at Dachau regarded them as such. “Professional,” since they were paid for each day they testified. In addition, they were provided free housing and food, at a time when these were often difficult to come by in Germany. Some of them stayed in Dachau for months, testifying in every one of the concentration-camp cases. In other words, these witnesses made their living testifying for the prosecution. Usually, they were former inmates from the camps, and their strong hatred of the Germans should, at the very least, have called their testimony into question.⁷⁰

An embarrassing example of perjured witness testimony occurred at the Dachau trials. U.S. investigator Josef Kirschbaum brought a former concentration camp inmate named Einstein into the court to testify that the defendant, Menzel, had murdered Einstein’s brother. Menzel, however, foiled this testimony—he had only to point to Einstein’s brother sitting in the court room listening to the story of his own murder. Kirschbaum thereupon turned to Einstein and exclaimed, “How can we bring this pig to the gallows, if you are so stupid as to bring your brother into the court?”⁷¹

Nevertheless, many defenders of the Holocaust story maintain that the 42-volume Trial of the Major War Criminals (The Blue Series) supplies a massive compilation of damning evidence against Germany’s National Socialist regime. In his book Made in Russia: The Holocaust, Carlos Porter confronts the evidence directly by reproducing page after page from the Blue Series. Porter shows that many of the charges made at Nuremberg are so bizarre that most defenders of the Holocaust story have long since let them lapse. In addition to killing Jews in homicidal gas chambers, the Germans at Nuremberg were accused of:

• Building special electrical appliances to zap inmates to death with mass electrical shocks;

• Killing 20,000 Jews in a village near Auschwitz with an atomic bomb;

• Forcing prisoners to climb trees and then killing the prisoners by cutting down the trees;

• Killing 840,000 Russian prisoners at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp using a pedal-driven brain-bashing machine, and then burning the bodies in four mobile crematories;

• Torturing and executing people at the Yanov camp in Russia in time to music created by a special orchestra selected from among the prisoners, and then shooting every member of the orchestra;

• Grinding the bones of 200 people at one time as described in documents and photographs that have disappeared;

• Making lampshades, handbags, driving gloves for S.S. officers, book bindings, saddles, house slippers, etc. out of human skin;

• Killing prisoners and concentration camp inmates for everything from having soiled underwear to having armpit hair; and

• Steaming people to death like lobsters in steam chambers at Treblinka.

After this incredible survey of Nuremberg atrocity evidence, Carlos Porter provides numerous examples of improper prosecution tactics at Nuremberg. The defendants at Nuremberg were rarely able to confront their accusers, since affidavits from witnesses who had been deposed months before sufficed. The prosecution made it difficult for the defense lawyers to have timely access to the documents introduced into evidence by the prosecution. Also, photocopies and transcripts were usually submitted into evidence instead of the original German documents, which in many cases seemed to have disappeared. Finally, the defense had access only to those documents which the prosecution considered material to the case. The defense had no right to review the tons of remaining documents that might help them defend their clients.⁷²

The defendants at Nuremberg were often shocked by the evidence presented to substantiate the genocide of European Jewry. For example, Hans Frank, the wartime governor of German-ruled Poland, testified that he had not known of a program of mass killings against the Jews during the war. However, when asked if he had participated in the annihilation of the Jews, Hans Frank stated: “I say yes . . . particularly after hearing the testimony of the witness Hoess, my conscience does not allow me to throw the responsibility on these minor people. . . . A thousand years will pass and still this guilt of Germany will not have been erased.”⁷³ This last sentence has been repeatedly quoted in books and articles about the National Socialist period. It does not prove that Germany had a program of genocide against the Jews. It only shows that Hans Frank believed the false testimony from Rudolf Hoess that had been criminally obtained through the use of torture.

Contrary to what is often claimed or insinuated, none of the defendants at the Nuremberg trials stated that they knew anything of an extermination plan of Jews during the war. Hermann Goering, Hans Frank, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Albert Speer, Gen. Alfred Jodl, and the other Nuremberg defendants all denied knowing anything of an extermination policy against European Jewry. While such testimony is often dismissed as lying, the categorical and consistent nature of their testimony, sometimes by men who assumed they would be hanged, suggests that they are telling the truth.⁷⁴

No Order, Plan, Budget or Organization for Genocide

Originally the Holocaust story assumed that Germany had a plan or program for exterminating the Jews. In the 1961 edition of his book The Destruction of European Jews, Raul Hilberg wrote that in 1941 Hitler issued two orders for the extermination of the Jews.⁷⁵ However, even though the Allies captured most of Germany’s government and concentration camp records intact, no order or plan has ever been found to exterminate European Jewry.

In the revised 1985 edition of Hilberg’s book, all references to such extermination orders from Hitler were removed. Exterminationist historian Christopher Browning, in a review of the revised edition of The Destruction of European Jews, wrote: “In the new edition, all references in the text to a Hitler decision or Hitler order for the ‘Final Solution’ have been systematically excised. Buried at the bottom of a single footnote stands the solitary reference: ‘Chronology and circumstances point to a Hitler decision before the summer ended.’ In the new edition, decisions were not made and orders were not given.”⁷⁶

When asked in 1983 how the extermination of European Jewry took place without an order, Raul Hilberg replied:

What began in 1941 was a process of destruction not planned in advance, not organized centrally by any agency. There was no blueprint and there was no budget for destructive measures. They were taken step by step, one step at a time. Thus came about not so much a plan being carried out, but an incredible meeting of minds, a consensus—mind reading by a far-flung bureaucracy.⁷⁷

On Jan. 16, 1985, under cross-examination at the first Ernst Zuendel trial in Toronto, Raul Hilberg confirmed that he said these words.⁷⁸ Thus, Hilberg states that the genocide of European Jewry was not carried out by a plan or order, but rather by an incredible mind reading among far-flung German bureaucrats.

Other historians have acknowledged that no document of a plan by Germany to exterminate European Jewry has ever been found. In his well-known book on the Holocaust, French-Jewish historian Leon Poliakov states that “the campaign to exterminate the Jews, as regards its conception as well as many other essential aspects, remains shrouded in darkness.” Poliakov adds that no documents of a plan for exterminating the Jews have ever been found because “perhaps none ever existed.”⁷⁹ British historian Ian Kershaw states that when the Soviet archives were opened in the early 1990s: “Predictably, a written order by Hitler for the ‘Final Solution’ was not found. The presumption that a single, explicit written order had ever been given had long been dismissed by most historians.”⁸⁰

The lack of an order from Hitler to exterminate European Jewry has divided Holocaust historians into “intentionalists” and “functionalists.” The intentionalists believe that there was a premeditated policy of extermination secretly ordered by Hitler, while the functionalists believe that Germany’s wartime extermination policy evolved at lower levels as the war progressed. The crucial point to remember in this controversy is that despite the fact that the Allies captured many tons of German documents, no one has found any documentary evidence of a wartime order, plan, or program by Germany to exterminate Europe’s Jews.

Evidence also exists that the German authorities responsible for the camps ordered measures to reduce deaths of inmates due to disease. On Dec. 28, 1942, SS officer Richard Gluecks, who was the head of the camp administration office, sent a directive to commandants of the concentration camps. It ordered that “camp physicians must use all means at their disposal to significantly reduce the death rate in the various camps. . . . The camp doctors are to see to it that the working conditions at the various labor sites are improved as much as possible.” The directive also stressed that “the Reichsfuehrer SS [Heinrich Himmler] has ordered that the death rate absolutely must be reduced.”⁸¹ Gluecks followed up his directive in January of 1943 by informing the concentration camp commandants, “As I have already pointed out, every means must be used to lower the death rate in the camps.”⁸²

German camp administrator Oswald Pohl, in an order dated Oct. 26, 1943, gave specific measures to ensure the health and productivity of the internees of the camps. A copy of the order was sent to Himmler. Pohl began by stating the importance of the camps in the war effort. In addition to stressing the importance of proper nutrition, clothing, and rest, Pohl specified that ill prisoners were to receive a special diet to help restore their health.⁸³ While such directives were not always implemented as ordered, such directives did help to lower the death rates in the camps. Such orders are inconsistent with a plan to commit genocide against European Jewry.

Many defenders of the Holocaust story claim that the Wannsee conference held on Jan. 20, 1942, was the start of a program to systematically exterminate Europe’s Jews. The documentary evidence of this meeting shows that no extermination program existed; instead, the German policy was to evacuate the Jews to the East. Israeli Holocaust historian Yehuda Bauer has declared, “The public still repeats, time after time, the silly story that at Wannsee the extermination of the Jews was arrived at.”⁸⁴ Likewise, Israeli Holocaust historian Leni Yahil has stated in regard to the Wannsee conference, “[I]t is often assumed that the decision to launch the Final Solution was taken on this occasion, but this is not so. . . .”⁸⁵

Defenders of the Holocaust story also inevitably quote speeches from Adolph Hitler, Joseph Goebbels, and Heinrich Himmler or writings from Hitler, Goebbels, and Hans Frank to prove that Germany had an extermination program against Jews during the war. Utterances by Hitler such as “. . . The world war is here, the annihilation of Jewry must be the necessary consequence” and “[N]ow that the German people have lost another 160,000 dead on the Eastern Front, the originators of this bloody conflict will have to pay for it with their lives” are quoted to prove that Germany had a program to exterminate European Jewry.⁸⁶

In this regard, it should be noted that blood thirsty and inflammatory statements were also made by the Allies during the war. In a war in which many millions of people were killed, emotions ran high and highly provocative and heated statements were made by supposedly responsible people on both sides of the war. Such statements do not prove that Germany had a program of extermination against the Jews. Instead, these statements reflect the German leaders belief that world Jewry had started World War II and must be defeated.

It should also be noted that defenders of the Holocaust story claim that the Germans took extreme measures to preserve the secrecy of their extermination program. This is why no one has ever found an order, plan, budget, or organization by Germany to exterminate European Jewry. It is untenable and absurd to think that German leaders would be stupid enough to make written and public statements about their genocide of European Jewry when they were taking extreme measures to hide their extermination of the Jews.

Horrific Scenes at German Concentration Camps

When U.S. and British troops entered German concentration camps at the end of World War II, they discovered huge piles of dead bodies and emaciated and diseased surviving inmates. The horrific scenes were filmed and photographed for posterity by the U.S. Army Signal Corps. Prominent newsmen and politicians were flown in to Germany to see the harrowing evidence at the camps for themselves. Films of the horrific scenes at the camps were made mandatory viewing for the vanquished populace of Germany, so that their national pride would be destroyed and replaced with feelings of collective guilt.

Nothing has been more effective in establishing the reality of the Holocaust story in the minds of Americans than these terrible scenes encountered by troops at the German concentration camps. Today many state laws make viewing films of these awful scenes of the German camps mandatory for school children. Proponents of showing these graphic films to school children say that the trauma induced from watching these films is necessary to teach our children about the dangers of racism and anti-Semitism.

What school children and the general public are not told is that most of the inmates in these camps died of natural causes. When American and British forces took control of the German concentration camps, they were followed by military personnel charged with documenting evidence of German war crimes. One of these was Dr. Charles P. Larson, a leading American forensic pathologist, who performed autopsies at Dachau and several other camps. At Dachau Dr. Larson performed about 25 autopsies a day for 10 days and superficially examined another 300 to 1,000 bodies. He autopsied only those bodies that appeared to be questionable. Dr. Larson stated in regard to these autopsies at Dachau:

Many of them died from typhus. Dachau’s crematoriums couldn’t keep up with the burning of the bodies. They did not have enough oil to keep the incinerators going. I found that a number of the victims had also died from tuberculosis. All of them were malnourished. The medical facilities were most inadequate. There was no sanitation. . . .

A rumor going around Dachau after we got there was that many of the prisoners were poisoned. I did a lot of toxicological analysis to determine the facts and removed organs from a cross-section of about 30 to 40 bodies and sent them into Paris to the Army’s First Medical laboratory for analysis, since I lacked the proper facilities in the field. The reports came back negative. I could not find where any of these people had been poisoned. The majority died of natural diseases of one kind or another. . . .⁸⁷

Dr. Larson did report that a number of inmates had been shot at some of the German camps and that the living conditions in the camps were atrocious. The average daily caloric intake of the inmates was far short of requirements, thus accounting for the extreme emaciation of many of the inmates. However, since Dr. Larson’s autopsy reports were inconsistent with a program of extermination or genocide, they were not introduced into evidence at the Nuremberg trials.

Dr. John E. Gordon, M.D., Ph.D., a professor of preventive medicine and epidemiology at the Harvard University School of Public Health, was with U.S. forces at the end of World War II. Dr. Gordon determined that disease, and especially typhus, was the number one cause of death in the German camps. Dr. Gordon explained the causes for the outbreaks of disease and typhus as follows:

Germany in the spring months of April and May [1945] was an astounding sight, a mixture of humanity travelling this way and that, homeless, often hungry and carrying typhus with them. . . .

Germany was in chaos. The destruction of whole cities and the path left by advancing armies produced a disruption of living conditions contributing to the spread of disease. Sanitation was low grade, public utilities were seriously disrupted, food supply and food distribution was poor, housing was inadequate and order and discipline were everywhere lacking. Still more important, a shifting of population was occurring such as few times have experienced.⁸⁸

Dr. Russell Barton, an English physician who later became an American psychiatrist, entered Bergen-Belsen with British forces as a young medical student on May 2, 1945. Dr. Barton’s first impression of the camp was one of horror; some inmates were dead and piled up outside the huts, others were in various stages of dying, disease and dehydration. Barton examined the camp’s well-equipped kitchens and found record books listing the food that had been cooked and distributed going back to 1942. Dr. Barton determined from his examination of the camp records that there had been no deliberate policy of starvation at Bergen-Belsen.

Dr. Barton made inquiries with inmates, including Jewish doctors, who told him that Bergen-Belsen had not been too bad until the autumn of 1944. Then, as the Russian armies were advancing, the inmates said they had been given the choice of remaining in the camps about to be overrun by the Soviets or being repatriated back to Germany. Many chose to return to Germany. As a result, from the autumn of 1944 to early 1945, some 53,000 people were moved into Bergen-Belsen, which had room for only 3,000 inmates. The overcrowding was extreme and the staff at the camp resented it. Josef Kramer, the commandant of Bergen-Belsen, and Dr. Fritz Klein, the medical doctor at the camp, didn’t know what to do with the huge influx of inmates. Dr. Barton concluded that the horrific conditions at Bergen-Belsen were attributable to overcrowding and the collapse of the German economy at the end of the war rather than to an intentional program of extermination.⁸⁹

Dr. Barton’s testimony is consistent with statements from Violette Fintz, a Jewish woman who had been deported to Auschwitz in mid-1944, then to Dachau, and finally to Bergen-Belsen in early 1945. Fintz compared conditions in the various camps:

Belsen was in the beginning bearable and we had bunks to sleep on, and a small ration of soup and bread. But as the camp got fuller, our group and many others were given a barracks to hold about seven hundred lying on the floor without blankets and without food or anything. It was a pitiful scene as the camp was attacked by lice and most of the people had typhus and cholera.
. . . Many people talk about Auschwitz—it was a horrible camp. But Belsen, no words can describe it. . . . From my experience and suffering, Belsen was the worst.⁹⁰

Bergen-Belsen is typical of the other German camps. The sharp increase in the number of deaths at the camps in 1945 was due to disease and overcrowding rather than an extermination program. The woeful scenes on liberation of the camps were not typical of camp conditions throughout their existence. By the end of the war as many as two or three inmates were sleeping on a single plank, three tiers to a bunk, in packed wooden barracks. Ill-clothed and ill-fed, exposed to virulent epidemics, camp inmates were dying in horrifying numbers throughout the last months of the war.⁹¹

The fate of Anne Frank, who is known around the world for her famous diary, is typical of many Jews who died in German camps during the war. Anne and her father were first deported from the Netherlands to Auschwitz in September 1944. Anne’s father contracted typhus at Auschwitz and was sent to the camp hospital to recover. He was one of thousands of Jews who remained at Auschwitz when the Germans abandoned the camp in January 1945. He survived the war and died in Switzerland in 1980.

In the face of the advancing Soviet army, Anne Frank was evacuated to Bergen-Belsen, where she died of typhus in March 1945. While Anne Frank’s fate was tragic, her story is not consistent with a German plan of extermination against the Jews. Along with thousands of others at Bergen-Belsen, Anne died from a typhus epidemic and not from a German plan to commit genocide against European Jewry.

The Allies were no more effective in stopping deaths in the camps than the Germans had been. For example, there were some 55,000 to 60,000 inmates in Bergen-Belsen when the British took control of the camp. Despite the best efforts of the British, almost 14,000 inmates died at Bergen-Belsen in the months following the British takeover.⁹² Likewise, at Dachau, the death rate remained high in the month after the Americans liberated the camp.⁹³ The high death rates in these camps were primarily caused by typhus and other diseases rather than an extermination program on the part of the Allies.

After the war, it was claimed that Dachau and other camps liberated by the Allies in western Germany had homicidal gas chambers. In fact, the U.S. Army produced a propaganda film supporting the notion that Dachau had a gas chamber. The Army film narrator states in this film: “Hanging in orderly rows were the clothes of prisoners who had been suffocated in a lethal gas chamber. They had been persuaded to remove their clothing under the pretext of taking a shower for which towels and soap were provided.”⁹⁴ Today it is no longer claimed that anyone ever died in a gas chamber at Dachau.⁹⁵

Defenders of the Holocaust story have conceded that there were no gas chambers or extermination camps in Germany. We are now told that homicidal gassings and extermination camps were located solely in Poland, in areas captured by the Soviet Union and made off-limits to western investigators. As Dr. Martin Broszat of the Institute for Contemporary History stated in a 1960 letter to the German weekly Die Zeit: “Neither in Dachau nor in Bergen-Belsen nor in Buchenwald were Jews or other prisoners gassed.”⁹⁶ Simon Wiesenthal has also stated in 1975 and again in 1993 that “there were no extermination camps on German soil.”⁹⁷

Historical Context and Perspective of Alleged Genocide

Jewish leaders have directed anger toward the ICRC, the Vatican, and Allied governments and their officials for not doing anything to stop the alleged genocide of European Jewry. A review of the historical record shows that these organizations did nothing because they were not aware of a program of mass extermination against European Jewry.

The ICRC visited and inspected all of the major German concentration camps right up to the end of the war. The Germans even asked for Red Cross assistance in controlling the epidemics at the camps, and let the ICRC deliver approximately 1,112,000 packages with a total weight of 4,500 tons to individual inmates. In response to a U.S. State Department request, the ICRC responded in a formal letter to the State Department dated Nov. 22, 1944, that the ICRC found no evidence of mass murder of concentration camp inmates.⁹⁸

The ICRC also made two highly publicized visits to Theresienstadt in Czechoslovakia. The ICRC reports were relatively favorable in both cases. The ICRC reported that this Jewish concentration camp had stores, cultural centers, an orchestra, Jazz music ensembles, a bank for the people, and even cafes the inmates could frequent. The ICRC delegate who visited Theresienstadt the second time in the spring of 1945 was George Dunant, who was in close contact with Jewish representatives. Dunant would have been eager to report an extermination policy of Jews if such a program had existed in the camp.⁹⁹

The Vatican and Pope Pius XII have also been criticized for not speaking up forthrightly against the extermination of the Jews. The far-flung nature of the Catholic Church’s operations would have guaranteed that the Vatican would have known about the genocide of the Jews if it had occurred. Despite strong pressure put on the Vatican by the Allies, the Vatican never made an unequivocal condemnation of the extermination of the Jews even after the Germans had been driven out of Rome and even after Germany’s defeat.¹⁰⁰ The Vatican made no such unequivocal condemnation because it did not believe that Germany had a program of mass extermination of European Jewry.

Numerous books have also been written criticizing the Allies for not attempting to stop the mass extermination of Jews in the German concentration camps. The Allies made no effort in this regard because their intelligence sources uncovered no evidence of an extermination program against European Jewry. As previously discussed, during 1942 and 1943 British intelligence intercepted daily coded messages from Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Dachau, and seven other German camps. None of these messages made reference to an extermination program against Jews. Also, the surveillance photographs of Auschwitz-Birkenau taken in 1944 during the alleged extermination of Hungarian Jews showed no visual evidence of an extermination program in progress. Thus, the Allies did not believe the mass extermination claims, and consequently made no effort to interfere in the operations of the German concentration camps.

Jewish organizations in the U.S. and other Allied nations also never undertook a sustained, unified effort to rescue European Jewry during the war.¹⁰¹ There was also little resistance on the part of Jews in Europe during the war to their deportations to the German concentration camps. Thus, like the ICRC, the Vatican, and the Allied governments, Jewish organizations and the Jews of Europe did not act as if they knew of a German program of genocide against European Jewry. Obviously, the mass murder of millions of Jews occurring over a period of several years could not have happened without these organizations having knowledge of the extermination program. These organizations did nothing to stop the alleged genocide of European Jewry because no German program of genocide occurred during the war.

The Holocaust story also claims that virtually all Jews who were too sick to work were immediately killed. The documentary evidence, however, indicates that a high percentage of the inmates at Birkenau were disabled. Oswald Pohl, in a secret report to Heinrich Himmler dated April 5, 1944, stated that there were 67,000 inmates in the entire Auschwitz-Birkenau camp complex, of which 18,000 were unable to work. In Birkenau there were a total of 36,000 inmates, of whom “approximately 15,000 are unable to work.”¹⁰² Such high percentages of disabled inmates at Auschwitz-Birkenau are not consistent with a program of mass extermination.

Many of the most outlandish claims have also been quietly dropped by defenders of the Holocaust story. For example, it was claimed at the Nuremberg trials that the Germans made soap from the bodies of Jews. The judges at Nuremberg stated in their verdict that “in some instances attempts were made to utilize the fat from the bodies of the victims in the commercial manufacture of soap.”¹⁰³ In April 1990, officials at Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust Center admitted that the human soap stories were not true. Yad Vashem archives director Shmuel Krakowski stated: “Historians have concluded that soap was not made from human fat. When so many people deny that the Holocaust ever happened, why give them something to use against the truth?”¹⁰⁴

The stories of human lampshades being made from human skin have also been quietly dropped by defenders of the Holocaust story. Gen. Lucius Clay, military governor of the U.S. zone of occupied Germany, stated in regard to the case of Ilse Koch, “There is no convincing evidence that she selected inmates for extermination in order to secure tattooed skins or that she possessed any articles made of human skin.”¹⁰⁵ Years later in an interview Gen. Clay stated about the material used in the lampshades: “Well, it turned out actually that it was goat flesh. But at the trial it was human flesh. It was almost impossible for her to have gotten a fair trial.”¹⁰⁶

Did 6 Million Jews Die In World War II?

The allegation that 6 million Jews died in World War II is today widely considered to be an established historical fact. For example, the Encyclopedia Judaica states, “There can be no doubt as to the estimated figure of some 6 million victims.”¹⁰⁷ The U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., is described in its information sheet as a “living memorial to the 6 million Jews and millions of other victims of Nazi fanaticism who perished in the Holocaust.” However, an analysis of the 6 million Jewish wartime deaths shows that this figure is not the result of any careful investigation, research, or calculation.

The figure of 6 million Jewish wartime deaths was apparently first used by Martin H. Glynn, the Governor of New York. Glynn made a speech entitled “The Crucifixion of Jews Must Stop!” that was printed in The American Hebrew magazine published by the American Jewish Committee. In this speech Glynn reported on the holocaust of 6 million Jewish men and women who were dying due to the awful tyranny of war and a bigoted lust for Jewish blood. Glynn’s speech was printed on Oct. 31, 1919. The allegation was that 6 million Jews had died in the Great War.¹⁰⁸

The number of 6 million appeared again on Jan. 4, 1945, when the Jewish chief of Soviet atrocity propaganda, Ilya Ehrenburg, stated that this is the number of Jews that had died in World War II.¹⁰⁹ How Ehrenburg came up with this number fully four months before the end of the war is anyone’s guess. Immediately after the end of the war in June 1945, some Zionist leaders were also able to state that 6 million Jews had died during the war. These Zionist leaders made this statement even though the chaos in Europe at the time made any definitive demographic studies impossible.¹¹⁰

The figure of 6 million Jews who died in World War II reappeared at the IMT in Nuremberg. The number of 6 million used at the IMT is based primarily on the hearsay evidence given by the written deposition of German SS-bureaucrat Wilhelm Höttl.¹¹¹ The verbal but never cross-examined testimony of Dieter Wisliceny, who said that 5 million Jews died, is also used to substantiate the figure of 6 million.¹¹² These two men claimed that they heard these statements from Adolf Eichmann, but Eichmann later disputed that he ever made these statements.¹¹³ Thus, the prosecution’s claim at the IMT that 6 million Jews died in World War II is based solely on hearsay evidence from two German SS-bureaucrats seeking exemption from punishment whose only source later said that he never made the statement.

Stephen F. Pinter, who was a U.S. War department attorney stationed in Germany after the war, disputed the claim that millions of Jews were murdered by Germany. In a statement made in 1959, he wrote: “From what I was able to determine during six postwar years in Germany and Austria, there were a number of Jews killed, but the figure of a million was certainly never reached. I interviewed thousands of Jews, former inmates of concentration camps in Germany and Austria, and consider myself as well qualified as any man on this subject.”¹¹⁴

The eyewitness testimony of Jewish survivors of the German concentration camps is often cited to establish the genocide of 6 million European Jews by Germany. However, the New York Jewish publication Aufbau documents that on June 30, 1965, 3,375,000 inmates, the vast majority of whom were Jewish, had survived the German camps and were receiving reparations from Germany.¹¹⁵ How could there be 3,375,000 survivors of the German concentration camps receiving reparations from Germany 20 years after the war was over if Germany had mass murdered 6 million Jews? Norman Finkelstein, the author of The Holocaust Industry, quotes his mother as asking, “If everyone who claims to be a Holocaust survivor actually is one, who did Hitler kill?”¹¹⁶

As of January 1984, there were 4.39 million successful individual restitution claims under the terms of the German Federal Compensation Law (BEG) of 1953 and 1956. This law provides monetary compensation to individuals who were “persecuted for political, racial, religious or ideological reasons” by the wartime German government. The great majority of these successful restitution claims were from Jews. Raul Hilberg estimates that about two thirds of the allowed claims had been from Jews.¹¹⁷ Using Hilberg’s conservative estimate would mean that over 2.9 million Jews had received BEG restitution claims by January 1984.

The number of 2.9 million Jewish claimants understates the number of Jews who survived World War II because as of 1985 Jews in Poland, the Soviet Union, Hungary, Romania, and Czechoslovakia were not eligible for BEG restitution. Also, some European Jews who survived World War II died before the German BEG restitution law was enacted in 1953. The Atlanta Journal and Constitution newspaper estimates that only half of the Jewish “Holocaust survivors” around the world in 1985 had received restitution under the BEG.¹¹⁸ If this 50% estimate is accurate, it would mean that approximately 5.8 million European Jews survived German persecution during World War II. Such a large number of surviving Jews is not consistent with a German program of genocide against European Jewry.

The Holocaust story also originally claimed that about 4 million Jews died at Auschwitz-Birkenau. As late as 1988, on page 19 of the official Auschwitz State Museum Guidebook, the official figure of 4 million Jews killed at Auschwitz-Birkenau is affirmed. The 4 million Jews who perished at Auschwitz-Birkenau had also been used by the Soviet State Extraordinary Commission for the Investigation of Nazi Crimes, the Supreme National Tribunal in Poland, and the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg. The estimate of 4 million Jews who died at Auschwitz-Birkenau was based on the evidence of hundreds of surviving prisoners and the opinion of experts.

Scholars such as Israeli Holocaust expert Yehuda Bauer and Dr. Franciszek Piper decided around 1989 to lower the Auschwitz-Birkenau death count. Dr. Piper states in his book Auschwitz: How Many Perished, “Altogether, a total of about 1,100,000 Jews ended up in Auschwitz-Birkenau in the years 1940-1945.”¹¹⁹ The number of approximately 1 million Jews who died at Auschwitz-Birkenau is most often used as the official figure today, although some researchers such as Jean-Claude Pressac use much lower estimates. By dramatically lowering the figures, the camp curators were in effect admitting that the Communists and other officials had fabricated numbers that were too inflated to be believable. The 4 million Jewish deaths at Auschwitz-Birkenau had to be lowered to approximately 1 million in order to maintain the credibility of the Holocaust story.

Since the figure of 6 million Jews who died in German camps is based on the 4 million Jews who died at Auschwitz-Birkenau, one would think that the 6 million Jewish deaths in the German camps should be lowered to about 3 million. However, the official number of Jews dying in German concentration camps remains at 6 million even though this is now obviously an overstated number.¹²⁰

Another factor making impossible the official number of 6 million Jews dying in German camps is the fact that thousands of corpses could not possibly have been cremated every day at Auschwitz-Birkenau as is commonly claimed. Ivan Lagacé, manager of a large crematory in Calgary, Canada, testified at the 1988 Ernst Zuendel trial that based on his experience it would have only been possible to cremate a maximum of 184 bodies a day at Birkenau. Lagacé stated that the claim that the 46 retorts at Birkenau could cremate over 4,400 bodies in a day was “ludicrous,” “preposterous” and “beyond the realm of reality.”¹²¹

The book The Dissolution of Eastern European Jewry by Walter Sanning is probably the most scholarly study ever written of 20th century Jewish demography, especially in its analysis of World War II related Jewish population changes. Sanning bases his study almost exclusively on Allied, Zionist, and pro-Zionist West German sources. His analysis includes evidence given by the wartime U.S. Assistant Secretary of State, the Institute of Jewish Affairs, the American Jewish Year Book, official census publications, and the pro-Zionist Institute for Contemporary History in Munich. Sanning keeps his book as free of emotion as possible in order to contribute to a genuine discussion underlying the charge of German genocide.

While it would be impossible for anyone to give an exact number of Jews who died in the German camps during World War II, The Dissolution of Eastern European Jewry proves that not anywhere close to 6 million Jews died during the war. Sanning calculates that the worldwide losses suffered by Jews during the Second World War are in the neighborhood of 1.25 million.¹²² He estimates that 15,967,000 Jews were alive in 1941 before the German invasion of the Soviet Union, and that the Jewish population was reduced to approximately 14,730,000 after the war.¹²³

Importantly, Sanning shows that many of these Jewish losses were caused not by the direct impact of the war or by a program of German genocide, but by Soviet barbarism. Sanning states that hundreds of thousands of Jews lost their lives during the Soviet deportation to the east or in the Siberian labor and concentration camps. Sanning concludes that the food supply, shelter, and clothing provided to the Jewish inmates of the Soviet camps was woefully inadequate, and that medical attention was almost completely lacking.¹²⁴ Sanning’s conclusion is supported by Jewish historian Gerald Reitlinger, who states: “In Southern Siberia the death-rate was very high for . . . Jews.”¹²⁵ According to Sanning’s analysis, more Jews died in Soviet camps than died in German camps during the Second World War.

Closing Thoughts on Alleged Genocide of European Jewry

Revisionist historians agree that Germany persecuted Jews during World War II. National Socialist Germany saw Jews as being an influential force behind international communism, and therefore considered Jews to be a potential danger to the war effort. Consequently, Jews were sent to concentration camps, forced to live in ghettos, conscripted for labor, stripped of their rights, and suffered extreme hardships. Unfortunately, many Jews died in the German concentration camps during World War II.

However, Germany did not conduct a program of genocide against European Jewry during the war. As we have seen, the existence of homicidal gas chambers in the German concentration camps has been disproven with scientific evidence. Tons of German wartime documents were captured by the Allies, and not a single one of them refers to a policy or program of extermination. Likewise, the British broke the ultra-secret Enigma code used by the Germans to transmit secret communi- cations. During 1942 and 1943 British intelligence intercepted daily coded messages from Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Dachau, and seven other camps. None of these secret transmissions refer to homicidal gas chambers or a German program of genocide.

The horrific scenes encountered by U.S. and British troops when they entered German concentration camps at the end of World War II have been used to prove a German policy of extermination of the Jews. As gruesome as these scenes were, it was soon discovered that most of the deaths in the German camps were caused by disease and other natural causes. None of the autopsy reports show that anyone died of poison gas. Also, contrary to publicized claims, no researcher has been able to document a German policy of extermination through starvation in the German camps. The virtual collapse of Germany’s food, transport, and public health systems and the extreme overcrowding in the German camps at the end of the war led to the catastrophe the Allied troops encountered when they entered the camps.

Although the Nuremberg and later trials attempted to prove a German policy of genocide against European Jewry, the trials were organized not to dispense impartial justice, but for political purposes. Crucial witnesses such as Rudolf Hoess were tortured into making confessions, and witnesses were hired to give false testimony. The evidence produced at the Nuremberg trial to prove the number of 6 million Jews who died during World War II is based solely on hearsay evidence from two German SS-bureaucrats. As we have seen, the number of Jewish survivors of the German camps makes impossible either the number of 6 million Jews who died during the war or a German policy of genocide against European Jewry.

Some Jewish scholars have had the courage to criticize the blatant fabrications of the defenders of the Holocaust story. Dr. Norman Finkelstein, whose parents suffered in German concentration camps, states that “much of the literature on Hitler’s Final Solution is worthless as scholarship. Indeed, the field of Holocaust studies is replete with nonsense, if not sheer fraud.”¹²⁶ Finkelstein also states, “Given the nonsense churned out daily by the Holocaust industry, the wonder is why there are so few skeptics.”¹²⁷

While I know that Germany did not have a program of genocide against European Jewry, I am equally certain that the inmates in the camps suffered tremendous hardships. This point was driven home to me in 1999 when I met a Jewish lady who had spent her early childhood years in four different German camps during the war. She barely survived Bergen-Belsen, where she contracted typhoid and was very close to death when the British army took control of the camp. Her experiences in the camps had been so traumatic that she still had major psychological damage from her internment 54 years after the war was over. However, if Germany had conducted a program of genocide against European Jewry, she would have been executed since as a little Jewish girl she was too young to contribute to the German work effort. She was living proof both that Germany did not have a program of genocide against European Jewry, and that living conditions in the German concentration camps were extraordinarily harsh.

CHAPTER NOTES:

1 Rudolf, Germar, “Some Technical and Chemical Considerations about the ‘Gas Chambers’ of Auschwitz and Birkenau,” in Gauss, Ernst (ed.), Dissecting the Holocaust: The Growing Critique of Truth and Memory, Capshaw, AL: Thesis and Dissertations Press, 2000, p. 337.

2 Ibid.

3 Leuchter, Fred A., “The Leuchter Report: The How and the Why,” The Journal of Historical Review, Vol. 9, No. 2, Summer 1989, p. 133.

4 Ibid., p. 139.

5 Rudolf, Germar, “A Brief History of Forensic Examinations of Auschwitz,” The Journal of Historical Review, Vol. 20, No. 2, March/April 2001, p. 7.

6 Leuchter, Fred A., “The Leuchter Report: The How and the Why,” The Journal of Historical Review, Vol. 9, No. 2, Summer 1989, p. 139.

7 Rudolf, Germar, “Some Technical and Chemical Considerations about the ‘Gas Chambers’ of Auschwitz and Birkenau,” in Gauss, Ernst (ed.), Dissecting the Holocaust: The Growing Critique of Truth and Memory, Capshaw, AL: Thesis and Dissertations Press, 2000, pp. 363-371.

8 Lueftl, Walter, “The Lüftl Report,” The Journal of Historical Review, Vol. 12, No. 4, Winter 1992-1993, pp. 395-401.

9 Ibid., pp. 403-406, 419.

10 Berg, Friedrich Paul, “The Diesel Gas Chamber: Ideal for Torture—Absurd For Murder,” in Gauss, Ernst (ed.), Dissecting the Holocaust: The Growing Critique of Truth and Memory, Capshaw, AL: Thesis and Dissertations Press, 2000, pp. 454-456.

11 The Globe and Mail, Toronto, Feb. 12, 1986, p. M3.

12 Pressac, Jean-Claude, Auschwitz: Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers, New York: Beate Klarsfeld Foundation, 1989, p. 264.

13 Faurisson, Robert, “Auschwitz: Technique & Operation of the Gas Chambers—Part I,” The Journal of Historical Review, Vol. 11, No. 1, Spring 1991, p. 29.

14 Rudolf, Germar, “A Brief History of Forensic Examinations of Auschwitz,” The Journal of Historical Review, Vol. 20, No. 2, March/April 2001, p. 9.

15 Rudolf, Germar, “Some Technical and Chemical Considerations about the ‘Gas Chambers’ of Auschwitz and Birkenau,” in Gauss, Ernst (ed.), Dissecting the Holocaust: The Growing Critique of Truth and Memory, Capshaw, AL: Thesis and Dissertations Press, 2000, p. 369.

16 Mattogno, Carlo, Auschwitz: The End of a Legend, Newport Beach, CA: The Institute for Historical Review, 1994, p. 32.

17 “Treblinka,” The Journal of Historical Review, Vol. 12, No. 2, Summer 1992, p. 134.

18 Ball, John Clive, “Air Photo Evidence,” in Gauss, Ernst (ed.), Dissecting the Holocaust: The Growing Critique of Truth and Memory, Capshaw, AL: Thesis and Dissertations Press, 2000, p. 284.

19 The Journal of Historical Review, Vol. 19, No. 3, May/June 2000, p. 20.

20 “Pages From the Auschwitz Death Registry Volumes,” The Journal of Historical Review, Vol. 12, No. 3, Fall 1992, pp. 265-267.

21 Duke, David, Jewish Supremacism: My Awakening to the Jewish Question, 2nd edition, Mandeville, LA: Free Speech Press, 2007, p. 288.

22 Hinsley, Frank H., British Intelligence in the Second World War: Its Influence on Strategy and Operations, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984, Vol. 2, Appendix 5, “The German Police Cyphers,” p. 673.

23 David Cole Interviews Dr. Franciszek Piper, Director, Auschwitz State Museum. Newport Beach, CA: Institute for Historical Review, 1992.

24 Kulaszka, Barbara, (ed.), Did Six Million Really Die: Report of Evidence in the Canadian “False News” Trial of Ernst Zuendel, Toronto: Samisdat Publishers Ltd., 1992, pp. 355, 473.

25 Van Pelt, Robert Jan and Dwork, Deborah, Auschwitz: 1270 to Present, New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1996, pp. 363-364.

26 Mayer, Arno J., Why Did the Heavens Not Darken?: The “Final Solution” in History, New York: Pantheon Books, 1988, p. 365.

27 Ibid., p. 362.

28 Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah, Worse Than War: Genocide, Eliminationism, and the Ongoing Assault on Humanity, New York: Public Affairs, 2009, p. 123.

29 An excellent account of John Demjanjuk’s trial is provided in Sheftel, Yoram, Defending “Ivan the Terrible”: The Conspiracy to Convict John Demjanjuk, Washington, D.C., Regnery Publishing, Inc., 1996.

30 “The Nazi Who Never Was,” The Washington Post, May 10, 1981, pp. B5, B8.

31 Wiesel, Elie, Night Trilogy, New York: Hill and Wang, 2008, pp. 51-52.

32 Ibid., pp. 98-100.

33 “Author, Teacher, Witness,” Time Magazine, March 18, 1985, p. 79.

34 Wiesel, Elie, The Jews of Silence, London: Vallentine Mitchell, 1968, p. 37.

35 Wiesel, Elie, Paroles d’étranger, Editions du Seuil, Paris, 1982, p. 86.

36 Ball, John C., Air Photo Evidence, Delta, British Columbia: Ball Resources Services Limited, 1992, p. 108.

37 Wiesenthal, Simon, The Murderers Among Us, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967, pp. 37-38.

38 Frankl, Viktor, “Dr. Robert Schuller Interviews Viktor Frankl: How to Find Meaning In Life,” Possibilities: The Magazine of Hope, March/April 1991, p. 10.

39 Pytell, Timothy, “Extreme Experience, Psychological Insight, and Holocaust Perception; Reflections of Bettelheim and Frankl,” Psychoanalytic Psychology, Vol. 24, No. 4, Oct. 2007, p. 646.

40 Jewish Social Studies, New York: Conference on Jewish Relations, Jan. 1950, Vol. 12, pp. 65-66.

41 Amouyal, Barbara, “Doubts over Evidence of Camp Survivors,” Jerusalem Post, Israel, Aug. 17, 1986, p. 1.

42 Rassinier, Paul, The Holocaust Story and the Lies of Ulysses, Costa Mesa, CA: The Institute for Historical Review, 1978.

43 Christophersen, Thies, “Reflections on Auschwitz and West German Justice,” The Journal of Historical Review, Vol. 6, No. 1, Spring 1985, p. 118.

44 Staeglich, Wilhelm, Auschwitz: A Judge Looks at the Evidence, Institute for Historical Review, 1990, p. 293.

45 Kulaszka, Barbara, (ed.), Did Six Million Really Die: Report of Evidence in the Canadian “False News” Trial of Ernst Zuendel, Toronto: Samisdat Publishers Ltd., 1992, pp. 253-255.

46 Office of the United States Chief of Counsel for the Prosecution of Axis Criminality, Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression (11 vols.), Washington, D.C.: U.S. Govt., 1946-1948. (The “red series”) / NC&A, Vol. 1, pp. 134-135.

47 International Military Tribunal, Trial of the Major War Criminals Before the International Military Tribunal, 42 Vols. Nuremberg: 1947-1949. (The “blue series”) / IMT, Vol. 19, p. 501.

48 Ibid., p. 434.

49 Maser, Werner, Nuremberg: A Nation on Trial, New York: Scribner’s, 1979, pp. 281-282.

50 International Military Tribunal, Trial of the Major War Criminals Before the International Military Tribunal, 42 Vols. Nuremberg: 1947-1949. (The “blue series”)/ IMT, Vol. 19, p. 398.

51 Harris, Whitney R., Tyranny on Trial: The Evidence at Nuremberg, Dallas: S.M.U. Press, 1954, pp. 16-17; Kahn, Leo, Nuremberg Trials, New York: Ballantine, 1972, p. 26; Taylor, Telford, The Anatomy of the Nuremberg Trials: A Personal Memoir, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992, p. 59.

52 Goldmann, Nahum, The Jewish Paradox, New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1978, pp. 122-123.

53 World Jewish Congress, Unity in Dispersion, New York: WJC, 1948, pp. 141, 264, 266, 267.

54 Foust, Hal, “Nazi Trial Judge Rips Injustice,” Chicago Tribune, Feb. 23, 1948, pp. 1-2.

55 Ibid.

56 Mason, Alpheus T., Harlan Fiske Stone: Pillar of the Law, New York: Viking, 1956, p. 716.

57 Delivered at Kenyon College, Ohio, Oct. 5, 1946. Vital Speeches of the Day, Nov. 1, 1946, p. 47.

58 Congressional Record-House, Vol. 93, Sec. 9, Nov. 28, 1947, p. 10938.

59 Congressional Record-Appendix, Vol. 95, Sec. 14, June 15, 1949, p. A 3741.

60 Blumenson, Martin, (ed.), The Patton Papers, 1940-1945, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974, p. 750.

61 Thompson, H. K. and Strutz, H. (eds.), Doenitz at Nuremberg: A Reappraisal, Institute for Historical Review, 1983, p. 196. See also Martin, James J., Revisionist Viewpoints: Essays in a Dissident Historical Tradition, Colorado Springs, CO: Ralph Myles Publishers, 1977, p. 140.

62 Hoggan, David L., “The Unvarnished Truth About the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials,” The Barnes Review, Special Updated “All-Holocaust” Issue, 2009, p. 52.

63 Taylor, Telford, The Anatomy of the Nuremberg Trials: A Personal Memoir, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992, p. 363.

64 Faurisson, Robert, “How the British Obtained the Confessions of Rudolf Hoess,” The Journal of Historical Review, Vol. 7, No. 4, Winter 1986-87, pp. 392-399.

65 Utley, Freda, The High Cost of Vengeance, Chicago: Regnery, 1949, pp. 185-200.

66 Washington Daily News, Washington, D.C., Jan. 9, 1949 and Sunday Pictorial, London, Jan. 23, 1949.

67 Staeglich, Wilhelm, Auschwitz: A Judge Looks at the Evidence, Institute for Historical Review, 1990, pp. 238-239.

68 Conot, Robert E., Justice at Nuremberg, New York: Harper & Row, 1983, p. 454; de Zayas, Alfred-Maurice, The Wehrmacht War Crimes Bureau, Lincoln: 1990, pp. 230-235.

69 Sworn and notarized statement by Stephen F. Pinter, Feb. 9, 1960. Facsimile in Erich Kern, ed., Verheimlichte Dokumente, Munich: 1988, p. 429.

70 Halow, Joseph, Innocent at Dachau, Newport Beach, CA: Institute for Historical Review, 1992, p. 61.

71 Ibid., pp. 312-313; see also Utley, Freda, The High Cost of Vengeance, Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1949, p. 195.

72 Porter, Carlos Whitlock, Made in Russia: The Holocaust, Historical Review Press, 1988.

73 Taylor, Telford, The Anatomy of the Nuremberg Trials: A Personal Memoir, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992, p. 368.

74 “The Nuremburg Trials and the Holocaust,” The Journal of Historical Review, Vol. 12, No. 2, Summer 1992, pp. 197-199.

75 Hilberg, Raul, The Destruction of European Jews, New York: Harper & Row, 1986.

76 The Revised Hilberg, Simon Wiesenthal Annual, Vol. 3, 1986, p. 294.

77 De Wan, George, “The Holocaust in Perspective,” Newsday: Long Island, NY, Feb. 23, 1983, Part II, p. 3.

78 See trial transcript, pp. 846-848. Also Kulaszka, Barbara, (ed.), Did Six Million Really Die: Report of Evidence in the Canadian “False News” Trial of Ernst Zuendel, Toronto: Samisdat Publishers Ltd., 1992, p. 24.

79 Poliakov, Leon, Harvest of Hate, New York: Holocaust Library, 1979, p. 108.

80 Kershaw, Ian, Hitler, the Germans, and the Final Solution, New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2008, p. 96.

81 Nuremberg document PS-2171, Annex 2, NC&A (The “red series”), Vol. 4, pp. 833-834.

82 Document NO-1523, NMT ( The “green series”), Vol. 5, pp. 372-373.

83 Pohl order to camp commandants, Oct. 26, 1943. Bundesarchiv (Koblenz), Bestand SS-Wirtschafts-Verwaltungshauptamt. Signatur NS 3/386. Sammlung von Verwaltungsanordnungen, insbes. KL.

84 Canadian Jewish News, Toronto, Jan. 30, 1992, p. 8.

85 Yahil, Leny, The Holocaust: The Fate of European Jewry, 1932-1945, Oxford University Press, 1990, p. 312.

86 Evans, Richard J., The Third Reich at War, 1939-1945, London: Penguin Books, 2008, p. 261.

87 McCallum, John Dennis, Crime Doctor, Mercer Island, WA: The Writing Works, Inc., 1978, pp. 60-61.

88 Gordon, John E., “Louse-Borne Typhus Fever in the European Theater of Operations, U.S. Army, 1945,” in Moulton, Forest Ray, (ed.), Rickettsial Diseases of Man, Washington, D.C.: American Academy for the Advancement of Science, 1948, pp. 16-27. Quoted in Berg, Friedrich P., “Typhus and the Jews,” The Journal of Historical Review, Winter 1988-89, pp. 444-447, and in Butz, Robert, The Hoax of the Twentieth Century, Newport Beach, CA: Institute for Historical Review, 1993, pp. 46-47.

89 Kulaszka, Barbara, (ed.), Did Six Million Really Die: Report of Evidence in the Canadian “False News” Trial of Ernst Zuendel, Toronto: Samisdat Publishers Ltd., 1992, pp. 175-176.

90 Gilbert, Martin, The Holocaust, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1986, pp. 722, 785f.

91 Halow, Joseph, Innocent at Dachau, Newport Beach, CA: Institute for Historical Review, 1992, p. 146.

92 “Holocaust,” Encyclopedia Judaica, New York and Jerusalem: Macmillan and Keter, 1971, Vol. 8, p. 859. See also Shephard, Ben, After Daybreak: The Liberation of Bergen-Belsen, 1945, New York: Schocken Books, 2005, pp. 4, 202.

93 Berben, Paul, Dachau: 1933-1945, The Official History, Comité International de Dachau, 1975, p. 281.

94 David Cole Interviews Dr. Franciszek Piper, Director, Auschwitz State Museum, Newport Beach, CA: Institute for Historical Review, 1992.

95 Berben, Paul, Dachau: 1933-1945, The Official History, Comité International de Dachau, 1975, p. 8.

96 “Keine Vergasung in Dachau,” Die Zeit (Hamburg), Aug. 19, 1960. Facsimile reprint, and English-language translation, in The Journal of Historical Review, Vol. 13, No. 3, May-June 1993, p. 12.

97 Letters in Books & Bookmen (London), April 1975, p. 5, and in The Stars and Stripes (European edition), Jan. 24, 1993, p. 14. Wiesenthal’s 1993 Stars and Stripes letter is reprinted in facsimile in The Journal of Historical Review, Vol. 13, No. 3, May-June 1993, p. 10.

98 Kelley, J., Eisler, P., Kelly, K., Silent Witness, USA Today, May 2, 1997, p. 13A.

99 Bauer, Yehuda, American Jewry and the Holocaust, Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1981, pp. 430, 448-450.

100 Laqueur, Walter, The Terrible Secret, Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1980, pp. 55-58.

101 Gilbert, Martin, Auschwitz and the Allies, New York: Holt, Reinhart and Winston, 1981, p. 5.

102 Nuremberg document NO-021, NMT (The “green series”), Vol. 5, pp. 384-385.

103 IMT (The “blue series”), Vol. 22, p. 496.

104 “A Holocaust Belief Cleared Up,” Chicago Tribune, April 25, 1990. Also Globe and Mail, Toronto, April 25, 1990. Also Hutman, Bill, “Nazis never made human-fat soap,” The Jerusalem Post – International Edition, week ending May 5, 1990.

105 “Clay Explains Cut in Ilse Koch Term,” The New York Times, Sept. 24, 1948, p. 3.

106  Interview with Lucius Clay, 1976, Official Proceeding of the George C. Marshall Research Foundation. Quoted in “Buchenwald: Legend and Reality,” The Journal of Historical Review, Winter 1986-87, Vol. 7, No. 4, pp. 406-407. See also Smith, Arthur Lee, Lucius D. Clay, An American Life, New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1990, p. 301.

107 Encyclopedia Judaica, 1971 edition, s.v. “Holocaust.”

108 “The Crucifixion of the Jews Must Stop,” The American Hebrew, Vol. 105, No. 22, New York, Oct. 31, 1919, p. 582.

109 Hoffmann, Joachim, Stalins Vernichtungskrieg 1941-1945, Munich: Herbig, 1999, pp. 390-393, and in Hoffman, Joachim, Stalin’s War of Extermination 1941-1945, Capshaw, AL: Thesis and Dissertations Press, 2001, pp. 189-190, 402-405.

110 Irving, David, Nuremberg: The Last Battle, London: Focal Point, 1996, pp. 61-62.

111 Rudolf, Germar, “Holocaust Victims: A Statistical Analysis W. Benz and W. N. Sanning—A Comparison,” in Gauss, Ernst (ed.), Dissecting the Holocaust: The Growing Critique of Truth and Memory, Capshaw, AL: Thesis and Dissertations Press, 2000, p. 183.

112 Turly, Mark, Inconvenient History, Vol. 1, No. 3, Winter 2009; see also Taylor, Telford, The Anatomy of the Nuremberg Trials: A Personal Memoir, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992, p. 248.

113 Aschenauer, Rudolf (ed.), Ich, Adolf Eichmann, Leoni, Bavaria: Druffel, 1980, pp. 460-461, 473-474, 494.

114 Pinter letter in the national Catholic weekly, Our Sunday Visitor, June 14, 1959, p. 15.

115 Staeglich, Wilhelm, Auschwitz: A Judge Looks at the Evidence, Institute for Historical Review, 1990, p. 31.

116 Interview with Norman Finkelstein, by Viktor Frölke, in Salon.com, “Shoah business,” Aug. 30, 2000. See also Finkelstein, Norman, The Holocaust Industry, New York: Verso, 2000, p. 81.

117 Hilberg testimony in Zuendel case, Toronto District Court, Jan. 18, 1985. Transcript p. 1229.

118 Atlanta Journal and Constitution, Sunday, March 31, 1985, p. 15A. See also “Wilhelm Höttl and the Elusive ‘Six Million’,” The Journal of Historical Review, Vol. 20, No. 5/6, Sept./Dec. 2001, pp. 29-30.

119 Piper, Franciszek, Auschwitz: How Many Perished, Krakow, 1994, p. 37.

120 Duke, David, Jewish Supremacism: My Awakening to the Jewish Question, 2nd edition, Mandeville, LA: Free Speech Press, 2007, p. 287.

121 Canadian Jewish News, Toronto, Feb. 12, 1985, p. M3. See also Kulaszka, Barbara, (ed.), Did Six Million Really Die: Report of Evidence in the Canadian “False News” Trial of Ernst Zuendel, Toronto: Samisdat Publishers Ltd., 1992, p. 270.

122 Sanning, Walter N., The Dissolution of Eastern European Jewry, Costa Mesa, CA: Institute for Historical Review, 1990, p. 198.

123 Ibid., p. 199.

124 Ibid., pp. 106-109.

125 Reitlinger, Gerald, The Final Solution, New York: A. S. Barnes & Company, Inc., 1961, p. 499.

126 Finkelstein, Norman, The Holocaust Industry, New York: Verso, 2000, p. 55.

127 Ibid., p. 68.

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