The Hoax of the Twentieth Centur

My investigations of the Jewish “Holocaust” commenced in 1972, and twenty seven years have passed since the first publication of this book in 1976 in England as The Hoax of the Twentieth Century. Twenty six years have passed since the release of the slightly revised second British and first American edition of 1977. This text consists of the last, preceded by a short article I wrote for the student newspaper at Northwestern University in 1991[1] and followed by five supplements representing writings from 1979-1997. There is also an addendum to Appendix E (“The Role of the Vatican “), consisting of the obituary/tribute I wrote on Rev. Robert A. Graham. All were published in the Journal of Historical Review. Also Appendix A on Kurt Gerstein, has been revised somewhat.

I am proud that this book remains of interest to anybody a quarter century after publication. Nevertheless, the age of this text, and the great advances that have subsequently occurred in Holocaust revisionism, require some comments on the value of the book to today’s reader. How can a quarter century old text not be obsolete today? What does today’s reader gain from it? Would it not be better to revise this text to take into account more recent developments?

From the perspective of today, the book has defects, and several people, of whom I am one, could now do better. In admitting such defects, I can plead that I was one man working with little help. Except for Wilhelm Stäglich, the correspondents I had before publication in 1976 were not then, and have not subsequently become, significant in revisionist work. The literature of revisionist orientation was scanty. Some of it was rubbish that constituted a minor nuisance. On the positive side were Paul Rassinier, Thies Christophersen, and Wilhelm Stäglich. At that time the writings of Rassinier, a former political prisoner at Buchenwald, were of interest both as a primary source, relating personal experiences, and as historical exposition (today Rassinier is of interest only as a primary source). Christophersen and Stäglich, Germans who had been stationed near Auschwitz, were of value only as primary sources, although Stäglich later wrote a book of historical exposition. Even taking these three into account, the historical complex was not there, as I shall explain below.

A common complaint about this work has been that I am not a trained historian or history professor. It is, however, not unusual for people who are not academic historians to make contributions to history. The great American historian Francis Parkman was no history professor; he had only a brief academic appointment as Professor of Horticulture at Harvard. The late Arnaldo Momigliano urged wariness of academic historians and pointed out that none of the three leading nineteenth century historians of the ancient world was a history professor, e.g. Mommsen was a Professor of Law.[2]

However, such examples do not satisfactorily illustrate the fact that history has a closer relationship to popular culture than most other academic disciplines. This is easily clarified and proved. In the major book reviews (New York Times, New York Review, etc.) one can find reviews of, and advertisements for, many works on the leading edge of historical research, i.e. works not specifically written for popular readership. No such attention is given to leading edge works in electrical engineering and most other academic disciplines. Many intelligent laymen can read such historical works with comprehension. If many can read them, then some can write them. I could give reasons for this relatively popular status of serious history study, but it would carry us too far afield. In any case, there is no venality on the part of academic historians in approving of such popular promotion of their books.

Such observations show, however, that there is hypocrisy in their common implication, when denouncing Holocaust revisionism, that only people with their kinds of Ph.D. degrees are competent to deal with historical issues.

The style of my book is certainly not elegant. I believe my style has improved much since then but, like most men with a technical education, my style remains at best dry and not elegant. It was, however, good enough to do the job. I have even sometimes wondered if elegance of style might be incompatible with a subject as dreary as the present one.

It is not immodest for me to say that mine is the best book of its type, because it is the only book of its type. To compare my book to others, the approach of mine is horizontal, the others vertical. Subsequent investigators have taken specific subjects and gone more deeply into them than I did. Such vertical approaches should be contrasted with my horizontal. I attempted to cover every reasonably relevant aspect of the problem. The question of the existence of gas chambers was only one of many. I tried to show what did happen as well as what did not. I showed the relevance of the Zionist and related movements. I discussed the Allied policies and the Jewish influences in them. My use of sources (e.g. the Nuremberg trials, Red Cross reports, Vatican documents, contemporary newspaper accounts) today seems obvious but it was not then. To aid in comprehending the early war crimes trials, I gave witchcraft trials as a useful precedent.

I claim an additional contribution of this book that may seem ridiculous on its face. I treated the German concentration camps as specific institutions that existed in specific locations, with the alleged events that took place in them taking place, if at all, in real space and real time, together with other events that happened simultaneously in those same camps or in real space. By “real space” I mean a space that we all exist in so that, whatever happened at Auschwitz, it happened at the same time President Roosevelt held meetings in Washington, and I as a child went to school, etc., and in the same space.

That is so obvious that it may seem preposterous for me to present it as an original perspective, but please hear me out. My impression of the extant literature was that the events claimed there may as well be imagined as having taken place on Mars, if at all, so absent was a concern for the broader context. As I reminded readers on page 210:

Consider my presentation of Auschwitz, the principal alleged “extermination camp”. I started by describing Auschwitz as a camp that performed functions similar to those performed by typical German camps that are not claimed to have been extermination camps; I outlined those functions and I presented a map showing where the German camps were. Then I described Auschwitz in its unique respects and showed, why the Allies would have been interested in events transpiring at Auschwitz. I presented pictures of crematorium ovens at Auschwitz and other camps. I presented a map of the Auschwitz region and a plan of the “Birkenau” section of the Auschwitz camp. That plan and the various maps showed the reader exactly where, in Europe, Poland, and at Auschwitz, the great gas chambers were supposed to have been located. Then I considered one of the specific groups of Jews, the Hungarian Jews, not only from the point of view of allegations of events in German camps but from the point of view of events in Hungary. That is, for me the problem of the Hungarian Jews was as much a problem of what happened in Hungary as what happened at Auschwitz. Even in considering events at Auschwitz, I chose to place my perspective elsewhere, among the Allies who, at the time in question, were very interested in Auschwitz as an industrial bombing target and would have photographed the camp for that purpose.

The photographs were produced almost three years after publication of my book and confirmed my conclusions, but that is not the point that I am now trying to emphasize. My point is that, as unlikely as it may seem, my method of placing Auschwitz in its general historical context was essentially unique in this historical area. True, some of what I said in that respect is to be found in earlier books that purported to relate how the “exterminations” transpired, but in scattered bits and pieces that were usually incidental to those accounts. Even so, much had to be culled from diverse sources. For example, though it seems obvious that any useful discussion of the Auschwitz problem required a map of the Auschwitz region and of the Birkenau camp, the former had to be constructed by me from several sources and the latter had to be lifted, not from one of the standard “Holocaust” books such as those by Hilberg or Reitlinger, but from a book about a German trial of Auschwitz personnel that took place in 1963-5. Hilberg, Reitlinger, and similar authors were very stingy with maps and pictures, except in books specifically devoted to presenting pictures. We can say, with only minor oversimplification, that they would sell you a book of pictures or a book of text, but not one book integrating the two in any useful way.

I believe my analysis provoked investigations of specific problems, even when such influence was not acknowledged. My implied skepticism about the reality of the mysterious “German industrialist” who in 1942, according to the World Jewish Congress, passed along information that a plan to exterminate the Jews had been discussed in Hitler’s headquarters, may have provoked the later investigations attempting to determine his identity. Walter Laqueur and Richard Breitman, in Breaking the Silence, 1986, unconvincingly proposed Eduard Schulte. I also stressed the inaction of the Allies with respect to Auschwitz, which Laqueur (The Terrible Secret, 1980) and Martin Gilbert (Auschwitz and the Allies, 1981) tried without success to explain.

The existence and relevance of the 1944 aerial reconnaissance photos of Auschwitz were, to the best of my knowledge, first argued in my book.[3] I also believe that my book provoked, perhaps through some intermediary, the 1979 release of these photos by the CIA, but again such influence is not admitted.

I analyzed the specifics of the alleged extermination process at Auschwitz. I showed that all of the specific material facts required a dual interpretation of relatively mundane facts, e.g. transports, selections, showers, shaving hair, Zyklon B, crematoria, etc., all real and all relatively mundane, had been given a second interpretation. That insight scarcely merits the label today, but it did then. It has been the main paradigm for all subsequent revisionist writing on Auschwitz and other alleged “extermination camps”. It may seem very simple and obvious after one reads this book; it certainly was not when I wrote it. The reader is shown what sorts of questions he should ask if he wants to go further. Those who have studied the development of ideas understand that the right answers are not attainable until the right questions are formulated (yes, questions can be right or wrong). This book, even today, shows how to do that.

I consider my book generally “right” even today in the sense of how the historical parts fit together, and they fit perfectly without major or fundamental mysteries. Contrast the gyrations of the typical historians who have nothing but mysteries. How and when was an order to exterminate given? Was such an order given at all? Why didn’t the Allies recognize what was (allegedly) happening at Auschwitz? Why didn’t the Pope forthrightly condemn physical extermination, even after the German had been driven out of Rome? Why didn’t the Allied press give greater prominence to reports of extermination of Jews, rather than bury them in the back pages of the larger newspapers?

This horizontal analysis remains unique in the revisionist literature. The book presented a historical complex that remains valid today. The book made specialized studies easier because investigators did not have to worry about coherence of the larger picture; they could direct a curious person to my book. I did a good enough job for that, even if not a perfect job. The proof is that, among revisionists, defects of the book are certainly seen, but, unfortunately, there seems to be no great demand for an improved integrated work of comparable scope and no aspiring author in view.

An example. You want to discuss the question of gas chambers at Auschwitz. My old book won’t help if you want to be current, and there would not necessarily be any reason to cite it. There are much more recent and conclusive writings, but I could not imagine a person securely venturing into such a controversy without having a grasp of the general historical complex, as provided in my book. Thus, I cannot imagine contemporary Holocaust revisionism existing without a book such as mine, even if it is never necessary to cite it today.

It is still the only book of this sort. A better one would be nice but there are two problems that occur to me. First such a book, if written from the point of view of our knowledge today, would not fit into a single volume. This explains why I reject the idea of trying to bring this book up to date. Such a project would quickly run away from “updating”, resulting in an entirely new work. Any attempt to respect the original content and organization of the book would be a handicap in the updating project. The best single volume for bringing the reader up to date on revisionist scholarship is a compilation of papers by many people, not an integrated work.[4]

Second, a paradox: a weakness of the book explains some of its strength. From the present point of view, there seems much in the book that is awkwardly presented. This is because I did not write this book as an expert. The book was written as works of research normally are: I was myself struggling to understand, as would an intelligent and serious reader. Thus, the book expresses a relationship of common perspective, and therefore implicit mutual empathy, between author and reader that could not exist in a new book, written today from a position of expertise and directed at a neophyte reader, which is the only relationship possible today. I believe this explains the occasional overwhelming effect the book has. From this point of view the book is still contemporary, as well as “right”, and ought not undergo major revision.

For these reasons, I have rejected any idea of “updating” this book. Rather, several later writings from 1979 on have been provided here, as specified above.

That this book is still valuable today is due to the distortions and misrepresentations that have continued to issue from the media and academe, resulting in millions of people so uninformed that a viewpoint of 1976 is a great revelation for them in 2003.

I consider this book as successful as could have been judiciously hoped under the circumstances, but it is important to view it as one of the successes in the phenomenon of Holocaust revisionism, for which no single person, or set of specific persons, can take credit. It seems to me to be just something that was timely and had to develop and that I was just a part of this development. I discussed this in my paper reproduced as Supplement 1, but to try to make my point clearer, let me emphasize that the Jews have played a very important role in this development; they must take some of the credit. It was they who chose, in 1977, to spread the news of this obscure book to the most remote corners of the universe. Who could have imagined such massive publicity for a book from an unknown publisher, written by an unknown author, and only barely available in the USA? They have used their powerful positions in the media to keep the subject of “Holocaust” uppermost in the minds of the populace; we get it for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. The present “Holocaustomania”, which younger readers may believe has been a permanent feature of our public affairs since World War II, can be fairly said to have started with the 1978 NBC-TV “docudrama” Holocaust. Only Jewish groups (either formally Jewish or having a largely Jewish membership), on the campus of Northwestern University, have maintained students’ interest in my work on the “Holocaust”. Such mutual dependency only holds for things that had to happen.

When I wrote this book, there were perhaps a half dozen serious Holocaust revisionist researchers (most not known by me). Today there are too many for me to even try to list, and readers of contemporary Holocaust revisionist literature in all languages certainly number in the hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions.

There are many back-handed compliments to our success. Perhaps the most conspicuous is the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. A February 1992 funds appeal for it, signed by “National Campaign Chairman” Miles Lerman, named “revisionists” as those whom the museum would “counter”. The Museum formally opened in April 1993 with the “Intent on refuting revisionist attempts to diminish the scope of the Holocaust”.[5] As if that weren’t enough, the 104th Congress passed, without dissent, a resolution making only two points: it “deplores” revisionism and “commends the vital, ongoing work of the [...] Museum.”[6] That silly Museum is an ironic monument to Holocaust revisionism.[7]

The Museum will not be the last such monument. In 1996, Jewish Senators Barbara Boxer and Arlen Specter handed Jewish movie director Steven Spielberg a check representing a $1 million federal grant for his “Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation” (a project of videotaping accounts of “survivors” - “Shoah” is the Hebrew word used in place of “Holocaust”). Specter motivated the grant in terms of opposing the considerable success of revisionists.[8]

A more recent example is the projected Holocaust Memorial in Berlin. A July 2001 advertisement, appealing for funds, raised the danger of revisionism.[9]

Revisionist apostasy has been rare. It has been most visible in cases where some public figure who was not actually a revisionist made public remarks supportive of revisionism. A 1996 example was Abbé Pierre, a sort of French Mother Teresa (although more active in public affairs) who, despite his quick recantation of his revisionist remarks, will never be forgiven by his former friends.[10] This episode is one of many that illustrate the handicaps that Holocaust revisionism has labored under.

A final proof, if needed, of our success is the fact of laws passed in recent years, in several European countries, criminalizing the publication of revisionist views on the Holocaust. Such literature circulated freely in Europe until the present revisionist movement started making its impact in the late 70s. In the United States we are still free of state suppression, although there is considerable whining in some quarters about “First Amendment absolutism”. Here the repression works largely by extra-legal means of intimidation and reprisal. For example, Fred Leuchter was the leading execution technologist in the USA when he published his famous 1988 report on the alleged Auschwitz gas chambers.[11] Since then, his business has been ruined and his marriage destroyed. All such developments are of course back-handed and evil tributes to the success of Holocaust revisionism. Even the most naive reader will see the point: they don’t want you to know these things! They are trying to hold back the wind.

We are successful, but we have a long way to go, as the brute strength of the dying monster is considerable.

2. A. Momigliano, “History in an Age of Ideologies,” American Scholar, Autumn 1982, pp. 495-507.

3. There is an unconfirmed and disputed claim that U.S. Army Capt. Jacob Javits (later U.S. Senator) used the photos, in 1944, to argue for bombing Auschwitz. See letters in the New York Jewish weekly Forward, 23 Feb. 2001, p. 10, and 6 April 2001, p. 16. If the claim is true, the photos were forgotten until I argued, in my 1976 book, that they had to exist. I am inclined to think the claim is not true.

4. Germar Rudolf (ed.), Dissecting the Holocaust: The Growing Critique of “Truth” and “Memory”, 2nd edition, Theses & Dissertations Press, PO Box 257768, Chicago, IL 60625, USA, 2003. Expanded version of the text originally published as Grundlagen zur Zeitgeschichte: Ein Handbuch über strittige Fragen des 20. Jahrhunderts, by Ernst Gauss (ed. = Germar Rudolf), Grabert-Verlag, Tübingen, 1994. Probably not available from Grabert now, but available from T&DP.

6. Senate resolution 193 passed 9 Nov. 1995, and House resolution 316 passed 16 April 1996.

7. Perhaps the most telling point is that the Museum, after so much promotion and millions spent, has failed to depict a homicidal gas chamber. Robert Faurisson has commented on this and related his humorous encounter with the Museum’s director, Dr. Michael Berenbaum. Journal of Historical Review, Jan./Feb. 1994, p. 23; Nov./Dec. 1994, p. 4.

8. Boston Globe, 24 July 1996, p. A6. Spielberg got into “Shoah business” (from an American expression - “there’s no business like show business”) via his Schindler’s List movie, which also failed to depict a gassing or homicidal gas chamber. On the basis of his other movies and other scenes in this one, I could not attribute the failure to squeamishness on Spielberg’s part. He is a good enough showman to have realized that a complete depiction of a gassing via Zyklon B, faithful to the legend and to physical possibility, would have been far too preposterous even for him. The Jewish worker who was shot for exceeding her assigned tasks was routine rubbish, but the gassing would have been too much.

11. S. Lehman, “A Matter of Engineering,” Atlantic Monthly, Feb. 1990, pp. 26-29. Also see the letters in the May issue; Fred A. Leuchter, An Engineering Report on the alleged Execution Gas Chambers at Auschwitz, Birkenau and Majdanek, Poland, Samisdat Publishers Ltd., Toronto 1988; for an update on this issue, see Germar Rudolf, The Rudolf Report. Expert Report on Chemical and Technical Aspects of the ‘Gas Chambers’ of Auschwitz, Theses & Dissertations Press, PO Box 257768, Chicago, IL 60625, USA, 2003.

A number of individuals contributed valuable suggestions and critiques which are reflected in the text of this book, but of course the responsibility for any errors of fact or interpretation, if such be found, is entirely my own. I also wish to reserve for myself any problems that may arise on account of the reaction to this book, and for this reason I refrain from making the applicable personal acknowledgments here.

Institutional acknowledgments are made to the U.S. National Archives, the U.S. Army Audio-visual Agency, and the Foreign Affairs Document and Reference Center of the U.S. Department of State, Washington, DC, to the Panstwowe Museum, Oświęcim, and to the Library of the University of Chicago, and the Center for Research Libraries, Chicago.

Special acknowledgment is made to the staffs of the Imperial War Museum, London, the national office of the Netherlands Red Cross, The Hague, and the Library of Northwestern University (especially the inter-library loan department), Evanston, all of whom contributed more than routine services without, of course, being aware of the exact nature of the research involved.

In common with virtually all Americans, who have had their opinions formed since the end of World War II, I had, until not very long ago, assumed that Germany had given the world a particularly murderous outburst during World War II. This view has ruled Western opinion since 1945 and earlier, and I was no exception in accepting the essentials of it.

An important qualification in the preceding is the term “essentials,” for the collection of crimes of which the Germans were supposedly guilty in World War II grows rapidly smaller as one examines the evidence and arguments assembled in readily available “revisionist” books. An elementary critical examination reveals that most of the crimes that are real even in the minds of “intellectuals” (e.g. lampshades manufactured by some Germans from the skins of human beings killed in concentration camps for the purpose) obviously had no basis in fact. Likewise with legends about mistreatment of American and British prisoners of war. Moreover, the general problem is elaborated considerably when one weighs, as the revisionists do, the appalling wartime and postwar brutalities of the Western Allies.

Such an investigation does not overturn the “Holocaust” legend, however, and the “six million” Jews murdered, mainly in “gas chambers,” can seem immovable fact. The revisionist books which overturn some of the most popular misconceptions seem to accept the gas chambers as factual. All educated opinion that the investigator consults accepts the “extermination” story. Professors of history who have specialized in Germany, if asked, seem to consider the charge as established as the Great Pyramid. Liberal and conservative publicists, though they have very different attitudes toward World War II and America’s entry into it, and though they squabble with each other on almost everything else, close ranks on the reality of the “Holocaust.” Noting the obvious ways in which this legend is exploited in contemporary politics, notably in connection with the completely illogical support that the U.S. extends to Israel, I had long had lingering doubts about it, and there was also the fact that there existed a small number of respected observers whose views had not been formed entirely after World War II and who, in the very limited channels open to them and with various degrees of explicitness, denied even the approximate truth of the legend. A good example is the distinguished American scholar John Beaty, who was called to active duty in the military Intelligence Service of the War Department General Staff just before the entry of the U.S. into the war and attained the rank of Colonel by the end of the war. Among other things, Beaty was one of the two editors of the daily secret “G-2 Report,” which was issued each noon to give persons in high places, including the White House, the world picture as it existed four hours earlier. In his book Iron Curtain Over America, published in 1951, he ridiculed the six million legend with a few remarks that were unfortunately brief and inconclusive, but, coming from a man who was one of the best informed in the world during the war, carried some amount of authority.

Elementary investigation into the question, of the sort the non-historian customarily does, led me nowhere. The meager amount of literature in the English language which denied the truth of the legend was not only unconvincing; it was so unreliable and unscrupulous in the employment of sources, when sources were employed, that it had a negative effect, so that the case for the truth of the essentials of the legend (disregarding quantitative problems, e.g., whether it was six million or four million or only three million) seemed strengthened. At the time I became aware that there existed additional literature in French and German but, being quite unaccustomed to reading texts in those languages except on rare occasions when I consulted a paper in a French or German mathematics journal, I did not undertake to acquire copies of the foreign language literature.

Moreover, I assumed that if such literature was worth more than what was being published in English, somebody would have published English translations.

Still possessing my lingering doubts I sat down, early in 1972, and started to read some of the “Holocaust” literature itself rather more systematically than I had previously, in order to see just what claims were made in this connection and on what evidence. Fortunately, one of my first choices was Raul Hilberg’s The Destruction of the European Jews. The experience was a shock and a rude awakening, for Hilberg’s book did what the opposition literature could never have done. I not only became convinced that the legend of the several million gassed Jews must be a hoax, but I derived what turned out to be a fairly reliable “feel” for the remarkable cabalistic mentality that had given the lie its specific form (those who want to experience the “rude awakening” somewhat as I did may stop here and consult pp. 567-571 of Hilberg[12]).

Although my long-lingering skepticism in regard to the legend was no longer on the defensive, my information could not, early in 1972, be considered conclusive, and my knowledge of the subject was not comprehensive, so I set out, at first in my “spare time,” to investigate the subject with the thoroughness that was required.

The reader will have surmised that my “spare time” eventually expanded considerably.

Several - for me startling - discoveries made the subject irresistible in a purely intellectual sense. I acquired the foreign language literature. Ultimately, I spent the entire summer of 1972 working on an exposé of the hoax, since by then I had penetrated and demolished the whole sorry mess. While the book you are holding differs considerably in quantity of factual content and general quality from the picture I had formed by the summer of 1972, that picture, whose essentials are transmitted here, was in such overwhelming contradiction to the lies that Western society had equipped me with, that my attention could not be drawn from the subject by any appeal to prudence or any such practical calculation. Because even early in the summer of 1972, it was evident that my research had carried the subject beyond the existing literature, I felt an inescapable obligation and an intellectual imperative to put forward for society’s evaluation what I knew about this most pernicious hoax. It quickly became clear that only a book would do; the subject could not, given the years of propaganda, be treated in a research paper or pamphlet and, a fortiori, it could not be treated in the form of a lecture.

The body of a text was written in the summer of 1972, and then the manuscript was gradually improved in the course of the next two years. A trip to Europe in the summer of 1973 was very rewarding, as was a trip to Washington later in the year. The book was essentially finished in late 1974.

There will be those who will say that I am not qualified to undertake such a work and there will even be those who will say that I have no right to publish such things. So be it.

If a scholar, regardless of his specialty, perceives that scholarship in acquiescing, from whatever motivation, in a monstrous lie, then it is his duty to expose the lie, whatever his qualifications. It does not matter that he collides with all “established” scholarship in the field, although that is not the case here, for a critical examination of the “holocaust” has been avoided by academic historians in all respects and not merely in the respect it is treated in this book. That is, while virtually all historians pay some sort of lip service to the lie, when it comes up in books and papers on other subjects, none has produced an academic study arguing, and presenting the evidence for, either the thesis that the exterminations did take place or that they did not take place. If they did take place then it should be possible to produce a book showing how it started and why, by whom it was organized and the line of authority in the killing operations, what the technical means were and that those technical means did not have some sort of more mundane interpretation (e.g. crematories), who the technicians involved were, the numbers of victims from the various lands and the timetables of their executions, presenting the evidence on which these claims are based together with reasons why one should be willing to accept the authenticity of all documents produced at illegal trials. No historians have undertaken anything resembling such a project; only non-historians have undertaken portions.

With these preliminary remarks, therefore, I invite your study of the hoax of your century.

12. Vol. 3, pp. 885-890 in the “revised and definitive edition” of 1985. Editor’s note: Cf. J. Graf, The Giant with Feet of Clay.

I see three principal reasons for the widespread but erroneous belief in the legend of millions of Jews killed by the Germans during World War II: U.S. and British troops found horrible piles of corpses in the west German camps they captured in 1945 (e.g. Dachau and Belsen), there are no longer large communities of Jews in Poland, and historians generally support the legend.

During both world wars Germany was forced to fight typhus, carried by lice in the constant traffic with the east. That is why all accounts of entry into the German concentration camps speak of shaving of hair, showering, and other delousing procedures, such as treatment of quarters with the pesticide Zyklon. That was also the main reason for a high death rate in the camps and the crematories that existed in all.

When Germany collapsed in chaos, then of course all such defenses ceased, and typhus and other diseases became rampant in the camps, which quartered mainly political prisoners, ordinary criminals, homosexuals, conscientious objectors, and Jews conscripted for labor. Hence the horrible scenes, which however had nothing to do with “extermination” or any deliberate policy. Moreover, the west German camps involved were not the alleged “extermination camps”, which were all in Poland (e.g. Auschwitz and Treblinka) and which were all evacuated or shut down before capture by the Soviets, who found no such scenes.

The “Final Solution “ spoken of in the German documents was a program of evacuation, resettlement, and deportation of Jews with the ultimate objective of expulsion from Europe. During the war, Jews of various nationalities were being moved east, as one stage in this Final Solution. The legend claims that the movements were mainly for extermination purposes.

The great majority of the millions allegedly exterminated were east European, not German or west European, Jews. For that reason study of the problem via population statistics has been difficult to impossible, but it is a fact that there are no longer large communities of Jews in Poland. However, the Germans were only one of several parties involved in moving Jews around. The Soviets deported virtually all of the Jews of eastern Poland to their interior in 1940. After the war, with Polish and other Jews pouring out of the east into occupied west Germany, the Zionists moved large numbers to Palestine, and the U.S. and other countries absorbed many Jews, in most cases under conditions making impossible a numerical accounting. Moreover, the Polish borders were changed drastically at the end of the war; the country was literally moved west.

Historians generally support the legend, but there are precedents for nearly incomprehensible blindness on the part of scholars. For example, throughout the Middle Ages even the Pope’s political enemies conceded his false claim that the 4th century Emperor Constantine had ceded rule of the west to the Pope, although all knew very well that Constantine had been succeeded by more emperors. Near unanimity among the academics is especially suspect when there exist great political pressures; in some countries Holocaust revisionists have been prosecuted.

It is easy to show that the extermination legend merits skepticism. Even the casual reader of the Holocaust literature knows that during the war virtually nobody acted as though it was happening. Thus, it is common to berate the Vatican, the Red Cross, and the Allies (especially the intelligence agencies) for their ignorance and inaction, and to explain that the Jews generally did not resist deportation because they did not know what was in store for them. If you add all this up you have the strange claim that for almost three years German trains, operating on a continental scale in densely civilized regions of Europe, were regularly and systematically moving millions of Jews to their deaths, and nobody noticed except for a few of our Jewish leaders who were making public “extermination” claims.

On closer examination, even those few Jewish leaders were not acting as though it was happening. Ordinary communications between the occupied and neutral countries were open, and they were in contact with the Jews whom the Germans were deporting, who thus could not have been in ignorance of “extermination” if those claims had any validity.

This incredible ignorance must also be attributed to Hans Oster’s department in German military intelligence, correctly labeled “the veritable general staff of the opposition to Hitler” in a recent review.

What we are offered in evidence was gathered after the war, in trials. The evidence is almost all oral testimony and “confessions.” Without the evidence of these trials there would be no significant evidence of “extermination”. One must pause and ponder this carefully. Were trials needed to determine that the Battle of Waterloo happened? The bombings of Hamburg, Dresden, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki? The slaughter in Cambodia?

Yet this three year program, of continental scope, claiming millions of victims, required trials to argue its reality. I am not arguing that the trials were illegal or unfair; I am arguing that such historical logic as the legend rests on must not be countenanced. Such events cannot happen without generating commensurate and evidence for their reality, just as a great forest fire cannot take place without producing smoke. One may as well believe that New York City was burned down, if confessions to the deed can be produced.

Detailed consideration of the specific evidence put forward in support of the legend has been a focus of the revisionist literature, but I shall mention one point here. The claim of the legend is that there were no technical means provided for the specific task of extermination, and that means originally provided for other purposes did double duty in improvised arrangements. Thus, the Jews were allegedly gassed with the pesticide Zyklon, and their corpses disappeared into the crematories along with the deaths from “ordinary” causes (the ashes or other remains of millions of victims never having been found).

The “war crimes trials,” which the victors in World War II conducted, mainly of Germans but also of many Japanese, were precedent-shattering in their scope and in the explicitness of the victorious powers’ claims to some sort of legal jurisdiction in respect of laws or understandings, which did not exist at the time they were allegedly broken by the Axis powers. Thus, in disregard of European honor conventions, which had been respected for centuries, German civilian and military prisoners, many of the highest rank, met violent deaths while in Allied captivity as a supposed consequence of these extraordinary proceedings.

Nothing resembling the trials of 1945-1949, which were conducted by the wartime enemies of Germany, has ever occurred before. The case of Joan of Arc comes to mind, but that involved a solitary prisoner, not an entire state, and the English who were, in the last analysis, responsible for the trial did everything to make the issue appear to be one of heresy and witchcraft, already formally proscribed, to be decided by an impartial and universal church according to pre-existing rules of evidence and procedure.

In the United States, the real progenitor of the trials, opinion on the appropriateness of having conducted such trials has always been divided, but the balance has varied. In the immediate post-war period, opinion generally favored the trials with, however, some significant voices in opposition. In the middle of the heated election campaign of 1946, just before the major Nazis Göring, Ribbentrop et al. were to be hanged, Senator Robert A. Taft delivered a speech attacking both the legal basis for the trials and the sentences which had been imposed; his speech seems to have hurt his Republican Party in those elections.

A decade later, views had evidently changed somewhat, since at that time the then obvious presidential candidate John F. Kennedy published a book, Profiles in Courage (a survey of various people whom Senator Kennedy thought courageous), in which he commended Taft for taking this stand, adding that Taft’s views “are shared [...] by a substantial number of American citizens today.”[13]

With the Eichmann abduction in 1960 and subsequent “trial” and with the associated later publicity, opinion seemed to move again, however slowly, toward approval of the trials. Many reasons may be offered for this extraordinary reversal, but it seems to me that what had happened was that in a peacetime, generally non-hysterical atmosphere the world’s attention had been focused on one tale of a peculiarly macabre sort: the killing, mainly in “gas chambers,” of several (usual figure, six) million Jews of all ages and conditions by the Nazis during the war, as part of a program of ridding Europe of Jewry. Gerald Reitlinger’s The Final Solution, 2nd edition (1968), is generally accepted as the most detailed and useful presentation of this claim, and Raul Hilberg’s The Destruction of the European Jews (1961) tells essentially the same story. Other writings are Nora Levin’s The Holocaust (1968), several books by Léon Poliakov, and The War Against the Jews, 1933-1945, by Lucy S. Dawidowicz (1975).

Returning to the problem of the appropriateness of the war crimes trials, everybody would agree as to the (at least) shaky legal foundations of the trials, but apparently many people would go along with the claim that the trials were appropriate anyway because normal wartime excesses were not involved; the extraordinary nature of the crime, the extermination of the European Jews, called for extraordinary proceedings. Such cruelty must not only be punished but documented as well, the argument goes.

I do not propose in this book to settle the question of what degree of cruelty justifies what degree of legal irregularity. Rather, a rarely heard point, which is at least relevant to the debate, is insisted upon here: It is a fact that without the evidence generated at these trials, there would be no significant evidence that the program of killing Jews ever existed at all. One has only to examine the sources employed by Hilberg and by Reitlinger to see this. If the trials had not been held, a person claiming the existence of the extermination program could not, if challenged, produce any evidence for this, save a few books (not including Hilberg or Reitlinger) whose claims are just as unsupported as his original claim. Thus, the problem that had been involved in deciding whether or not to hold trials on the Jewish extermination aspect was not a simple question of whether or not to try mass murder; unlike the usual murder case there was legitimate and very solid doubt that the deed had been committed at all.

This may surprise the reader who regards the tale of Jewish extermination as a near certainty; such is simply not the case. There are many considerations supporting this view, and some are so simple that they may surprise the reader even further. The simplest valid reason for being skeptical about the extermination claim is also the simplest conceivable reason: at the end of the war, they were still there.

This must be qualified only slightly. Consider a West European observer, who had been familiar with the status of European Jewry prior to the war, making a survey of West European Jewry in, say, late 1946 (East European Jewry was out of bounds). He would have found Italian, French, Belgian, and Danish Jewry essentially unscratched (these points will be discussed more fully in later chapters). On the other hand, he would have found that large numbers of Jews, possibly majorities, were missing from Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and Czechoslovakia (then accessible from the West). German-Austrian Jewry was confused because, although most had emigrated before the war, it was difficult to be precise about what numbers had emigrated to where. In any case, large numbers, possibly majorities, of those who had remained were no longer resident in their former homes.

However, the absences were offset by the obvious fact that displaced persons’ camps in Germany were full of Jews (a figure of more than 250,000 has been given[14]) and that many European Jews had emigrated to the U.S. or Palestine or elsewhere since the beginning of the war. The facts available to the West European observer in late 1946 argued very strongly against the extermination claims, which had received such wide publicity during the war and at the recent trial at Nuremberg.

The passage of a quarter of a century has, despite superficial developments, gradually strengthened this view of the extermination tale, although for many years there was only one serious writer in the field, the late French geographer Paul Rassinier. In 1948, he published a book, Passage de la Ligne, on his experiences as a left wing political prisoner at Buchenwald, 1943-1945, “generally received with sympathy, provoking only muffled and inconclusive gnashings of teeth on a certain side.”[15] Then in 1950, he published Le Mensonge d’Ulysse (The Lie of Ulysses), a critical study of the concentration camp literature, in which he challenged the certainty of the gas chambers: “It is yet too early to pronounce a definitive judgment on the gas chambers.”[16] This provoked a violent press campaign, which led ultimately to legal actions, in which author, preface author, and publisher were first acquitted, then found guilty with judgments involving fines, damages, and suspended prison sentence, and finally acquitted again.

In 1955, the two books were combined as Le Mensonge d’Ulysse, 2nd edition, in which material increasingly critical of the gas chamber claim had been added. The most common (but not very common) edition today is the fifth (referenced here), published in 1961, in which year Rassinier also published a short “complementary” volume, Ulysse Trahi par les Siens, consisting of three essays showing that he had moved rather strongly in the direction of a negative judgment on the gas chambers; the last essay is the text of a speech given in several German and Austrian cities in the early spring of 1960 (just before the Eichmann affair). In 1962 followed Le Véritable Procès Eichmann (The Real Eichmann Trial), a study of the entire range of alleged German crimes in their historical and political contexts; by this time, he had reached a definitive conclusion on the tale of extermination of the Jews: “a historic lie: the most tragic and the most macabre imposture of all time.”[17]

Rassinier employed two basic approaches to reach this conclusion: the material and the demographic.

By the material approach we mean the analysis of the evidence that mass executions of Jews by gassings or other specific means were in fact conducted by the Germans during World War II. The material approach is nearly synonymous with analysis of the war crimes trials evidence, or of the trials evidence as interpreted by Hilberg and by Reitlinger, and as supplemented by them with similar evidence. Rassinier only tentatively explored the demographic approach in Le Véritable Procès Eichmann, but in his final general work on the Jewish extermination problem, Le Drame des Juifs Européens (The Drama of the European Jews), 1964, he presented a lengthy analysis of the question from a demographic point of view. In 1965, he published L’Opération “Vicaire,” a critique of Rolf Hochhuth’s play The Deputy. One must comment that it is necessary to check up on Rassinierx in his interpretation of sources; some do not check out, and, in addition, he employs some clearly unreliable sources at a few points. There are also some glaring but relatively irrelevant errors of fact, such as characterizing Hanson Baldwin as the New York Times’ “expert in matters of Jewish population” (it is doubtful that the Times ever had a staff member who could be characterized thus) and in asserting that the majority of American Jews are anti-Zionist and support the outlook of the anti-Zionist American Council for Judaism (which was never a politically significant organization). However, Rassinier was a courageous pioneer in an ignored area and, despite the various shortcomings of his work, no fair minded person could read it without becoming at least skeptical about the “exterminations.” Rassinier passed away in July 1967. His books had appeared in German, Spanish, and Italian translations, but no English translation was published for some years.[18]

Rassinier’s books were followed by three books, which Josef Ginsburg published under the pseudonym J. G. Burg: Schuld und Schicksal (Guilt and Fate), 1962, Sündenböcke (Scapegoats), 1967, and NS-Verbrechen (National Socialist Crimes), 1968. Ginsburg’s books are not particularly well researched, since his views are based mainly on what he had read in the newspapers plus his personal experiences as a Jew who, together with his family, was deported during the war to occupied eastern territory by the Nazis and the Romanians. After the war, Ginsburg took his family to Israel, but he eventually became very anti-Zionist and moved back to Europe, eventually setting up a bookbindery in Munich. While he believes that many Jews perished as a result of the combined effects of Nazi policies and wartime conditions, he denies that the German government ever contemplated the extermination of the Jews of Europe, and he is particularly scornful of the six million figure. He is unsure of the existence of gas chambers, but he believes that many Jews perished on account of epidemics, pogroms, air raids, and executions of partisans and offers an estimate of about three million as the maximum possible number of victims, although he believes the correct figure is much lower. As a reward for his efforts to get at the truth, Ginsburg, a small man and not young, was beaten up by Jewish thugs while visiting his wife’s grave in the Israelite cemetery in Munich.

In 1969, a short book was published in the United States, The Myth of the Six Million, attributed to an anonymous author. While some things can be said in favor of this book, e.g. I learned of Rassinier there, it also contains so many errors of fact that it illustrates that it is not enough that a book’s thesis be correct, for quite a few people who used it as a basis for prosecuting public controversy got burned as a result.

The next development was the publication in Germany of a book by Emil Aretz, Hexen-Einmal-Eins einer Lüge (The Witches’ Multiplication Table of a Lie), of which only the third edition, Munich, 1973, seems to have attained significant circulation. Aretz carries the case against the exterminations only slightly beyond Rassinier. He depends heavily on Rassinier in this respect, although he provides some new material. A major function of his book is the presentation of a remarkably bold and forthright general defense of the German nation.

The unreasonable continuation of war crimes trials in West Germany and the absence of any statute of limitations with respect to alleged war crimes by Germans have had a seldomly remarked implication: people who “were there” have been afraid to come forward and report what, to their knowledge, actually happened. They would rather not call attention to the fact that they “were there.” However, it was inevitable that a few courageous individuals would come forward nevertheless. The most important of these, to date, has been Thies Christophersen, author of the booklet Die Auschwitz Lüge (The Auschwitz Lie). Christophersen was at Auschwitz from January to December 1944. In 1973, he published his recollections and his firm view that no exterminations ever took place there. An English translation of Christophersen’s booklet, to which some colorful announcements had been added, was published in 1974. Christophersen was followed by Dr. Wilhelm Stäglich, a retired Hamburg judge, who had been assigned to an anti-aircraft unit near Auschwitz during 1944 and had visited the camp on a few occasions. For such honest reporting of his recollections, Stäglich was punished with a five year, twenty percent reduction of his pension.[19]

In late 1973, Austin J. App, a retired English professor in Maryland, published a short booklet, The Six Million Swindle. Early in 1974, Wolf Dieter Rothe published the first volume of his study, Die Endlösung der Judenfrage, and later in 1974, Richard Harwood published in England his book, Did Six Million Really Die? Harwood’s booklet is quite good in convincing power, although it has some weak points, and the reader is referred to Rassinier for a definitive treatment of the subject. It was favorably reviewed by Colin Wilson in the November 1974 issue of the influential British monthly Books and Bookmen, setting off a months-long controversy in the pages of that journal.

In early 1975, Harry Elmer Barnes’ translation of one of Rassinier’s books, The Drama of the European Jews, was issued by a small publisher in the United States.

In this introductory chapter, we quickly review the principal problems that arise when demographic questions are asked. We then indicate, how demographic problems are resolved in this book, but indicate that the specific task of resolution must be deferred until later in the book.

The problems inherent in a demographic study are formidable. First, all sources of post-war primary data are private Jewish or Communist sources (exclusively the latter in the all important cases of Russia and Poland). Second, it appears that one can get whatever results desired by consulting the appropriately selected pre-war and post-war sources. Consider world Jewish population. The 1939 study of Arthur Ruppin, Professor of Jewish Sociology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, gave 16,717,000 Jews in the world in 1938.[20] Because Ruppin (who passed away in 1943) was considered the foremost expert on such matters, on account of many writings on the subject over a period of many years, the estimates of other pre-war sources tend to agree with him. Thus, the American Jewish Committee estimate for 1933, which appears in the 1940 World Almanac, was 15,315,359. The World Almanac figure for 1945 is 15,192,089 (page 367); no source is given, but the figure is apparently based on some sort of religious census. The 1946 World Almanac revised this to 15,753,638, a figure which was retained in the editions of 1947 (page 748), 1948 (page 572), and 1949 (page 289). The 1948 World Almanac (page 249) also gives the American Jewish Committee estimate for 1938 (sic), 15,688,259 while the 1949 World Almanac (page 204) reports new figures from the American Jewish Committee, which were developed in 1947-1948: 16,643,120 in 1939 and 11,266,600 in 1947.

However, New York Times military expert Hanson Baldwin, in an article written in 1948 dealing with the then forthcoming Arab-Jewish war on the basis of information available at the UN and other places, gave a figure of 15 to 18 million world Jewish population as well as figures for such things as Jews in Palestine, Jews in the Middle East, Arabs in Palestine, total Arabs, total Moslems, etc.[21]

Such a sketch illustrates some of the simpler uncertainties that exist in a demography study. To carry the matter further, the 11-12 million postwar world Jewish population figure, which it is necessary to claim in order to maintain the extermination thesis, is very vulnerable on two points. The first is the set of statistics offered for the U.S., and the second is the set offered for Eastern Europe. Both, especially the latter, are subject to insuperable uncertainties. Let us first consider the United States. Census figures for the total U.S. population are:[22] (left column) while U.S. Jewish population figures, as given by the Jewish Statistical Bureau (subsidiary of either the American Jewish Conference or the Synagogue of America), H. S. Linfield, Director, are:[23] (right column)

Table 1: U.S. total population

1920 105,710,620

1930 122,775,046

1940 131,669,275

1950 150,697,361

1960 179,300,000

Table 2: U.S. Jewish population

Year Jewish Population

1917 3,388,951

1927 4,228,029

1937 4,770,647

1949 5,000,000

1961 5,530,000

It is important to note that all of the U.S. Jewish population figures are given by the same source (Linfield).

The indicated growth of U.S. Jewish population, 1917-1937, is 40.8%, while the growth of total U.S. population, 1920-1940, is 24.6%. This contrast is generally reasonable, since in the period under consideration Jewish immigration was fairly heavy. However, Jewish immigration into the U.S. raises some problems of its own. The American Jewish yearbook gave a net Jewish immigration for the years 1938-1943 and 1946-1949 (inclusive) of 232,191.[24] Figures for 1944 and 1945 do not seem to be available. It was in those two years, incidentally, that an indeterminate number of Jews were admitted to the U.S. “outside of the regular immigration procedure.” It was claimed that there were only 1,000 such Jews quartered at a camp near Oswego, New York, and that they were not eligible for admission to the U.S. This was supposed to be a U.S. contribution to relieving the problems of refugees, but the whole episode seems most strange and suspicious.[25]

Rather than attempt to settle the problem of the extent of Jewish immigration, suppose one allows the Jewish population a growth rate in 1937-1957 at least equal to that of the U.S. Jewish population of 1917-1937, as seems at least reasonable in view of various facts, e.g., the reasons which sent 1.5 million Jews to Palestine during the World War II and aftermath period appear to motivate immigration to the U.S. just as well, and no national or racial immigration quotas were applicable to Jews as such. In such a case, there should be at least 6,678,000 Jews in the U.S. in 1957, not the 5,300,000 that are indicated. There are about 1,400,000 Jews missing from the interpolated figures for 1957, and we consider this a conservative figure for the reason given. The period 1937-1957 was one of Jewish movement on an unprecedented scale.

On the other hand, we can adopt an equally conservative approach and assume that the 4,770,647 Jews of 1937 grew in 1937-1957 at the same rate as the U.S. population in 1940-1960. Under this assumption, these should have become 6,500,000 Jews in the U.S. in 1957. If one adds the reasonable figure of 300,000 more due to immigration, we have 6,800,000 in 1957. Thus, by either method of extrapolation the figures offered for post-war U.S. Jewish population are at least approximately 1.5 million short for 1957.

The specific major fault of the U.S. Jewish population figures is the inexplicably small claimed growth from 1937 to 1949 despite record Jewish movement and a very open U.S. immigration policy.

Eastern Europe, however, presents the core of the demographic problem. In order to avoid very serious confusion, one must first recognize that there have been extensive border changes in Eastern Europe in the course of the twentieth century. A map of Europe on the eve of World War I (1914) is given as Fig. 1. A map for January 1938 showing, essentially, Europe organized according to the Treaty of Versailles, before Hitler began territorial acquisitions, is given in Fig. 2, and Fig. 4 shows the post-war map of Europe. The principal border change at the end of World War II was the moving westward of the Soviet border, annexing the three Baltic countries (Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia) and parts of Romania, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and East Prussia. Poland was compensated with the remainder of East Prussia and what used to be considered eastern Germany; the effect was to move Poland bodily westward.

Pre-war (1938) Jewish population estimates for Eastern Europe were offered by H. S. Linfield and the American Jewish Committee in the 1948 (sic) World Almanac (page 249). Post-war (1948) figures are published in the 1949 World Almanac (page 204).

Table 3: Eastern European Jewish population (est.)
Country	1938	1948
Bulgaria	48,398	46,500
Hungary	444,567	180,000
Poland	3,113,900	105,000
Romania	900,000	430,000
USSR	3,273,047	2,032,500
Totals	7,779,912	2,794,000

The claimed Jewish loss for Eastern Europe is thus 4,985,912. The figure for the USSR includes, in both cases, the three Baltic countries and the Jews of Soviet Asia. The pre-war figures are in all cases in close agreement with the figures that Ruppin published shortly before the war. To the extent that the extermination legend is based on population statistics, it is based precisely on these statistics or their equivalents.

The trouble is that such figures are absolutely meaningless. There is no way a Western observer can check the plausibility, let alone the accuracy, of such figures. He must either be willing to accept Jewish or Communist (mainly the latter) claims on Jewish population for Eastern Europe, or he must reject any number offered as lacking satisfactory authority.

It is possible to reinforce our objection on this all important point and simultaneously deal with a reservation that the reader may have; it would appear excessively brazen to claim the virtual disappearance of Polish Jewry, if such had not been essentially or approximately the case or if something like that had not happened. This seems a valid reservation, but one must recall that much of the territory that was considered Polish in 1939 was Soviet by 1945. It was possible for Polish Jewry to virtually disappear, if, during the 1939-1941 Russian occupation of Eastern Poland, the Soviets had dispersed large numbers of Polish Jews into the Soviet Union and if, during 1941-1944, the Germans had concentrated Polish Jews eastwards, with the Soviet Union ultimately absorbing many of these Jews into its territory, with those who did not wish to remain in the Soviet Union emigrating, mainly to Palestine and the U.S., but also to some extent to the new Poland and other lands. This, in fact, is what happened to the Jews who had resided in Poland before the war.

Whatever may be said about Soviet Jewish policy after, say, 1950, it is clear that the earlier policies had not been anti-Jewish and had encouraged the absorption of Jews into the Soviet Union. It is known that many Polish Jews were absorbed during and immediately after the war, but of course numbers are difficult to arrive at. Reitlinger considers this problem and settles on a figure of 700,000, without giving reasons why the correct figure might not be much higher. He then notes that the evidence that he employs of extermination of Jews in Russia (documents alleged to be German) indicates about the same number of Soviet Jews exterminated, from which he correctly infers that, in the period 1939-1946, the Soviet Jewish population may have actually increased.[26] This important concession, coming from the author of The Final Solution, shows that our unwillingness to accept the Communist figures need not be regarded as motivated merely by the necessities of our thesis. The figures are inarguably untrustworthy. It is claimed by the Soviets that their Jewish population declined by 38%, despite the acquisition of territory containing many Jews. Since the USSR is one of the lands where “Jew” is a legally recognized nationality, the Soviets do indeed possess accurate figures on the number of Jews they have but have chosen (in Reitlinger’s opinion, if you choose not to accept this author’s) to claim an utterly mythical Jewish population loss of 38%.

The most relevant research by a demographer appears to be that of Leszek A. Kosinski of the University of Alberta (Geographical Review, Vol. 59, 1969, pp. 308-402 and Canadian Slavonic Papers, Vol. 11, 1969, pp. 357-373), who has studied the changes in the entire ethnic structure of East Central Europe (i.e. excluding Germany and Russia) over the period 1930-1960. He explains the extreme difficulties with basic statistics:

Jews are of course one of the groups Kosinski is interested in, and he presents various figures, generally comparable to those given above, for numbers of pre-war Jews. However, his post-war data are so useless from this point of view that he does not even attempt to offer specific post-war numbers for Jews, although he offers post-war figures for other groups, e.g. gypsies, giving numbers less significant, statistically, than the numbers of Jews who, according to the extermination mythologists, survived in Eastern Europe. It is true that he accepts the extermination legend in a general way and presents a bar graph showing a catastrophic decrease in the Jewish populations of Poland, Hungary, Romania and Czechoslovakia. He also remarks that the combined war-caused population losses for Yugoslavs, Jews, Poles and east Germans was about 12.5-14 million, not breaking the total down, and referring the reader to the statistical summary Population Changes in Europe Since 1939 by Gregory (Grzegorz) Frumkin, whose figures for Jews come from the American Jewish Congress, the Zionist Organization of America, and the Centre de Documentation juive contemporaine (Center for Contemporary Jewish Documentation) in Paris.

However, the point is that Kosinski arrives at no figures for Jews, as he obviously should not, given the problems he has noted. The ethnic population figures from Communist Hungary are based on language, and the figures from Communist Poland, Communist Czechoslovakia, and Communist Romania are based on “nationality,” whatever that means in the various cases. Naturally, he apologizes for his use of “official statistics, imperfect as these may be.” We will return to demographic problems, especially those which involve the Polish Jews, in Chapter 7.

We must also remember that the problem of counting Jews in Western countries contains enormous difficulties on account of the lack of any legal, racial, or religious basis for defining a “Jew.” As an example, the statistics available to Reitlinger indicate to him that early in World War II there were 300,000 Jews in France, including refugee German Jews.[27]

The Nazis, on the other hand, thought that there were 865,000, and I see no motivation for deliberate inflation of this figure; other figures used by the Nazis were not wildly inflated compared to the figures of other sources.[28] I should add that I really have no idea how many Jews there are in the U.S. I can consult the World Almanac, which will tell me that there are about 6,000,000, but I cannot see how that figure was arrived at and have little confidence in it. As far as I know, the correct figure could as easily be 9,000,000. There must be at least 4,000,000 in the New York area alone.

To summarize what has been said with respect to Jewish population statistics: the problem of compiling such statistics is formidable even without political interference or pressure. Moreover, in the demographic argument for a five or six million drop in world Jewish population, the sources and authorities for the figures used are Communist and Jewish and thus, by the nature of the problem we are examining, must be considered essentially useless. In addition, the post-war figures for the United States are demonstrably too low by a significant amount.

One should not form the impression that it is essential to my argument that any demographic conclusions seemed to be reached above be accepted by the reader. It has only been shown what sorts of problems arise if one attempts a too direct demographic approach; it is not possible to settle anything in such a manner. In the final analysis, the difficulty is that the figures available amount to nothing more than statements, from Jewish and Communist sources, that millions of Jews were killed. Such claims are to be expected, but they must certainly not deter us from looking deeper. We will take up the demographic problem later in the book, however, because the nature of the situation is such that reasonably useful demographic conclusions are possible once it is understood what, in general, happened to the Jews.

Rassinier’s demographic study, in fact, does not really even attempt to settle the problem, strictly speaking. His basic approach is to analyze the inferences that have been drawn from two different sets of data, that of the Centre de Documentation juive contemporaine and that of Hilberg, both of whom infer from their data five to six million Jewish victims of the Nazis. Rassinier’s conclusion is that the former can only claim 1,485,292 victims form its data and the latter 896,892.[29] Rassinier accepts the reality of about a million Jewish victims of Nazi policies, while rejecting the claims of extermination. For example, it is known that some East European peoples took advantage of general political-military conditions to persecute Jews. Also, many Jews who were deported from their homes no doubt perished as a result of generally chaotic conditions, which accompanied the latter part of the war.

Believing that the task is not possible, I will offer here no definite estimate of Jewish losses. However, I have no strong reason to quarrel with Rassinier’s estimate.[30]

As stated, the “material” approach will be extended here and, in addition, a “historical-political” approach will be “introduced.” This is just a fancy way of saying that we will grasp that there are two political powers involved in the problem, not just one. That is to say, we have a tale of extermination, and we should inquire into the circumstance of its generation. Clearly, there are two states involved in the problem. Germany had an anti-Jewish policy involving, in many cases, deportations of Jews from their homes and countries of citizenship. That is certain. The wartime policy of Washington was to claim extermination, and the post-war policy was to hold trials, at which there was generated the only evidence that we have today that these wartime claims had any foundation. That is also certain. The policies of both states are necessarily of interest, and if there is any respect, in which this book may be breaking fundamentally new ground on the problem, it is in its insistence in seeing Washington as an active agent in the generation of the story. Thus, we are interested not only in what Hitler, Himmler, Göring, Goebbels, and Heydrich were doing during the war in regard to these matters, but also what Roosevelt, Hull, Morgenthau, and the New York Times and associated media were doing during the war, and what the various tribunals controlled or dominated by Washington did after the war. This is not only a fair but, more importantly, an illuminating historical approach.

The conclusion is that Washington constructed a frame-up on the Jewish extermination charge. Once this is recognized, the true nature of German Jewish policy will be seen.

Before we review the details of the story, it should be pointed out that there are excellent a priori grounds for expecting a frame-up. There is of course the very general argument that political enmity of a magnitude to bring on armed conflict between two states necessarily excludes the impartiality on the part of one of them, which is a necessity for a fair trial and for which there exists no substitute. The judges had pursued political careers in the contexts of the internal politics of the Allied powers hostile to Germany and after the trials would, assuming they had not done anything highly improbable at the war crimes trials, return to these careers. They had, in addition, for several years heard only the anti-German viewpoint. In sitting on the military tribunals, they were ad hoc political appointees. Such considerations exclude approximate impartiality.

There are, however, much more specific reasons for expecting a frame-up. In order to see this, it is only necessary to consider the easily obtainable facts concerning the various tribunals involved.

First, there was the “big trial” conducted by the “International Military Tribunal” (IMT) at Nuremberg immediately after the war. This was the trial of the top Nazis Göring, Hess, Ribbentrop, et al., which ran from November 1945 to October 1946. The judges and prosecutors were American, British, French, and Russian. As with all “military” tribunals, there was no jury. There were three acquittals, seven prison sentences, and eleven death sentences. The latter were carried out almost immediately after the trial, except that Göring escaped the noose by swallowing a potassium cyanide capsule just before the hangings. It was never determined where Göring had obtained the poison or how he had managed to hide it for any length of time. A unique sequel to this episode was that the first Nuremberg prison psychiatrist, Dr. Douglas M. Kelley, a leader in the treatment of psychiatric disorders with drugs, shortly later published a book on his experiences at Nuremberg, giving Göring and Göring’s last act a laudatory treatment:[31]

A decade later, Dr. Kelley followed Göring by taking one of several potassium cyanide capsules which he possessed, said to be ‘souvenirs’ taken off Göring’s body.

The IMT trial was the only one that received very great attention. It was important in the sense that the Allied powers committed themselves to a specific version of the extermination claim, but there was little evidence presented of any substantial nature relative to Jewish extermination; it was almost entirely testimony and affidavits, not at all difficult for the victorious powers to produce under the circumstance. The only relative merit of the IMT trial, for our purposes, is that the complete transcript and a reasonably complete selection of the documents put into evidence are readily available in numerous libraries as a 42 volume set with a very complete subject and name index (see References).

From 1946 to 1949 a series of twelve superficially less important trials were held by the Americans before what is here called the Nuremberg Military Tribunal (NMT). They are referred to variously according to the “case number,” the major defendant, or a more descriptive title, see Table 4 (omitted)

Several death sentences resulted from these trials, but the great majority received prison sentences, in many cases rather lengthy ones. However, almost all were free by the early Fifties.

The only cases among these that will concern us here in any way are Case 1, a trial of medical personnel involved in euthanasia and medical experiments, Case 4, a trial of concentration camp administration, Cases 6 and 10, self explanatory, Case 8, dealing with German resettlement policies, Case 9 (the Einsatzgruppen were used for rear security in the east) and Case 11, a trial of officials of various ministries. The U.S. Government published a fifteen volume set of books, referred to here as the “NMT set,” in which may be found “summaries” of the cases, along with very limited “selections” of the documents put into evidence. The volume numbers corresponding to the various cases are listed in the above table.

On this point, the student encounters a significant difficulty because, as can be seen by consulting Hilberg and Reitlinger, almost all the evidence for the extermination claim was developed at the NMT, not the IMT. That is to say the important documents, those which, for better or for worse, constitute major source material for writing any history of Nazi Germany, are those of the NG, NI and NO series, and these documents were put into evidence at the NMT trials. Documentary evidence is, especially in view of the irregular legal and political circumstances which prevailed, immeasurably more weighty than testimony, as has been suggested. The relevant documentary evidence generated at the NMT consists of certain kinds of material allegedly supporting the extermination charges: documents dealing with concentration camp administration, with crematory construction, with deportations, with certain Farben and Krupp operations which employed prisoner labor, with general Jewish policies of the German Government, etc. There is of course no direct documentary evidence for an extermination program. As Dr. Kubovy of the Center for Jewish Documentation in Tel-Aviv admitted in 1960:[32]

The difficulty for the normally circumstanced person is that only small fractions of the NMT testimonies and documents are widely accessible in English translations (in the fifteen volume NMT set). Additionally, these translations cannot always be trusted, as will be seen. Also, the extracts which are published have been selected by unknown criteria.

Finally, the fifteen volume NMT set is likely to be found only in cities of moderately large size.

The situation is better if one lives in a very large city, since reasonably complete collections of documents together with the mimeographed trial transcripts (almost always in German) exist in certain library centers. However, the normally circumstanced person may encounter trouble in arranging to examine specific pieces, which he may call for, and in some cases general browsing even by university faculty is not welcome. In addition, no subject or name indexes exist for the NMT trials (indexes of testimonies of witnesses, with many errors, appear in the NMT volumes).

The IMT and NMT trials are almost the only ones of significance here. Of general significance are a series held by the British; of these, only the Belsen case and the Zyklon B case interests us to any extent. The Poles, Russians, French, Dutch, and Italians have all held trials of no significance except to the victims. The Bonn Government has held some trials of slight interest, for example the “Auschwitz trial” of 1963-1965, reported on by Langbein, by Laternser, and by Naumann.

The manner, in which the IMT and the NMT were constituted, can be set forth with sufficient completeness for our purposes. Since the autumn of 1943, there had been in existence a United Nations War Crimes Commission, headquartered in London. However, the Commission never really did anything except realize, at one point, that if anything was to be done, it would be done by the individual Allied governments.

The first serious moves started in the United States. In August 1944, the Joint Chiefs of Staff considered a proposed program for dealing with war crimes. The proposal had been approved by the Judge Advocate General of the U.S. Army. On October 1, 1944, the Joint Chiefs approved this proposal and, at about the same time and in accordance with directives of the Secretary of War, a “War Crimes Branch” was established in the Department of the Judge Advocate General. The War Crimes Branch, headed by Brigadier General John M. Weir with Colonel Melvin Purvis as his assistant, was responsible for handling all war crimes matters for the State, War, and Navy Departments.

The proposal that had been approved by the Joint Chiefs did not survive for very long, for its character had been rather traditional, in that it contemplated, basically, the trial of persons who had broken the accepted laws of war in the field. Thus, offenses committed before the war or acts by enemy authorities against their own nationals were not considered to be under Allied jurisdiction. Thus, for example, all measures against German Jews were considered outside the jurisdiction of the planned war crimes trials. The concept of war crimes was, at this point, strongly under the influence of the principle, never questioned, that a belligerent may try enemy soldiers for the same sorts of offenses for which he may try his own soldiers.

The Secretary of War, Stimson, had a conference with President Roosevelt on November 21, 1944, at which Roosevelt made it clear that he had in mind a much broader idea of war crimes and that the proposals approved by the Joint Chiefs were completely unsatisfactory.

Accordingly, in January 1945, Roosevelt designated Judge Samuel Rosenman as his personal representative in discussions on war crimes problems. A meeting of January 18, among Stimson, Rosenman, Attorney General Francis Biddle, and others resulted in general agreement on very much expanded conceptions of war crimes to be tried.[33]

Biddle was later to sit as a judge at the IMT, although, for Roosevelt’s use at the Yalta conference, he had written in January 1945 that “the chief German leaders are well known and the proof of their guilt will not offer great difficulties.” The Russian IMT “Justice” Nikitchenko was slightly more direct in declaring before the trial that “we are dealing here with the chief war criminals who have already been convicted.”[34]

In early May 1945, President Truman approved the revised proposals and appointed Robert H. Jackson, an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, to act as Chief of Counsel for the U.S. in the forthcoming trial and also to represent the U.S. in negotiations with foreign governments relative to constituting the trial. On June 6, 1945, Jackson made an interim report to the President, and later in June, Jackson and his staff set up headquarters in London, where much of the preliminary work for the IMT was done.

A key member of Jackson’s London staff was Colonel Murray C. Bernays, who was one of the first people who had been involved in war crimes problems. Graduated from Harvard in 1915, he established a law practice in New York. He was given a commission in the Army in 1942, and in October 1943, he was made chief of the Special Projects Branch, Personnel Division, Army General Staff. His major project in this position was the preparation of plans for trials of German “war criminals.” After each stage of negotiations with the White House and others, he made the appropriate revisions in the plans being considered, although he was the author of the plan that was eventually settled on, if one is to credit his account. In any case, shortly after the appointment of Jackson, Bernays was awarded the Legion of Merit, the citation reading in part:

Bernays returned to the U.S. in November 1945 and immediately resigned from the Army. Because, as we have seen, there was considerable dialogue at higher levels relating to plans for war crimes trials, it is doubtful that one can take Bernays’s claims at full value, but he no doubt had a great deal to do with the drafting of the plans for the trials. Moreover, he had certainly been an appropriate choice for something as novel as the formulation of the “legal” structure for the war crimes trials, since his views of justice were equally novel. After his return to the U.S., he had a chat with some editors (who characterized him as “the man behind the gavel”), and in answer to their queries as to “how the small fry are going to be hooked,” he replied:[35]

In London, Jackson negotiated with the Allies on the trials, and his interim report of June 6 became the basis for the “London Agreement” of August 8, signed by the U.S., Britain, Russia, and France. An “indictment” was filed against twenty four individuals and six organizations (the SS, the General Staff, etc.) on October 18, and the trial opened at Nuremberg on November 20, 1945. Three of the listed defendants did not stand trial. Martin Bormann was never found, Robert Ley committed suicide before the trial, and Gustav Krupp was too ill and too old to stand trial. An attempt was made by the prosecution to substitute Krupp’s son as defendant, but this was too much even for that court, so the trial of Alfred Krupp had to wait until the NMT.

In passing we should note that Justice Jackson, in addition to being the American chief prosecutor at the trial, was also in a formal sense the leading personality in the London negotiations relative to the formulation of the legal system, under which he was to operate at the trial. A rare opportunity for a prosecutor, and probably an utterly unprecedented one in respect to proceedings that civilized people have seriously considered to be trials.

Equally unique features of the final charter of the IMT were that its jurisdiction was not restricted to acts taken in connection with the war but extended over the entire life of the Nazi Party, that the defense of superior orders was inapplicable, and that defendants could be compelled by the prosecution to testify.

The War Crimes Branch that had been set up in 1944 did not cease to operate, because in connection with the IMT trial Jackson had “enlisted the cooperation and participation of the War Crimes Branch of the Judge Advocate General’s Department.” Moreover, in the early months of the IMT trial (and perhaps also later), the ordinary prosecution staff, exclusive of Jackson, was “on the payroll of the Judge Advocate General.”[36]

A significant role for the Judge Advocate General’s department (JAG) was most natural under the circumstances because the JAG was the legal agency of the Army, and the basic American administrative machinery in Germany immediately after the war was that of the U.S. Army. The traditional role of the JAG had been the administration of military justice: courts-martial and related matters. However, during World War II the operations of the JAG had spread to all phases of military activity where legal matters arose; it even got involved in litigations relative to war production contracts. The Judge Advocate General, Major General Myron C. Cramer, had given a speech in May 1945, in which he declared that the pursuit and arraignment of Nazis was to tax to the utmost the capacity of the War Crimes Branch and become a major activity of the JAG, whose resources he pledged to Jackson. While it is not specified exactly what the War Crimes Branch did in connection with the IMT, it is most likely that it effectively supervised the American (hence major) role in the screening and selection of prosecution and defense lawyers and staff, in the selection of other staff such as translators, and in interrogations. Of course, Jackson formally held much of this authority, but it is reasonably sure that such responsibilities were, in fact, exercised by the War Crimes Branch.[37]

The involvement of the War Crimes Branch in trials was, however, much deeper.

While the IMT and NMT trials were being conducted, several lesser trials were taking place. Among these were the trials held at the Dachau camp (outside Munich and thus not far from Nuremberg) of the staffs of some concentration camps (Buchenwald, Flossenbürg, Dachau) that had been captured by the Americans and of those accused of killing 83 American prisoners at Malmédy during the Battle of the Bulge. These trials were supervised by the War Crimes Branch.[38] They were perhaps the most shameful episodes in U.S. history.

The entire repertoire of third degree methods was enacted at Dachau: beatings and brutal kicking, to the point of ruining testicles in 137 cases, knocking out teeth, starvation, solitary confinement, torture with burning splinters, and impersonation of priests in order to encourage prisoners to “confess.” Low rank prisoners were assured that convictions were being sought only against higher ranking officers and that they had absolutely nothing to lose by cooperating and making the desired statements. Such “evidence” was then used against them when they joined their superiors in the dock. The latter, on the other hand, had been told that by “confessing” they had taken all responsibility onto themselves, thereby shielding their men from trial. A favorite stratagem, when a prisoner refused to cooperate, was to arrange a mock trial. The prisoner was led into a room in which civilian investigators, dressed in U.S. Army uniforms, were seated around a black table with a crucifix in the center, with two candles providing the only light. This “court” then proceeded to hold a sham trial, at the conclusion of which a sham death sentence was passed. The “condemned” prisoner was later promised that, if he cooperated with the prosecutors in giving evidence, he would be reprieved. Sometimes interrogators threatened to turn prisoners over to the Russians. In many cases the prisoner’s family was threatened with loss of ration cards or other hardships if cooperation was not obtained.

As distinct from the mock trials, the official trials were also an apparently deliberate mockery of any conception of due process. The mockery started with the “indictment,” which made only general reference to very broad categories of crimes allegedly committed in the years from 1942 to 1945 (in the cases of concentration camp personnel), and then proceeded to present a long list of defendants accused of being criminal in the extremely general sense stated. Specific crimes by specific people on specific dates were not part of the indictments (e.g. document 3590-PS).

In some cases, the “defense counsel” was an American with no legal training who could not speak German. Competent interpreters were not provided at the trial. The “prosecution” also lacked legal training, as did the “court,” which consisted of ten U.S. Army officers. There was one person with legal training present, all of whose rulings on the admissibility of evidence were final. There were 1,416 convictions out of 1,672 tried, with 420 death sentences.

While the prosecution could hunt all over Europe for witnesses and, if necessary, torture or otherwise coerce Germans in order to get “evidence,” the accused, cut off from the outside world and without funds, were rarely able to summon anybody to their defense.

In addition, the “Association of Persons Persecuted by the Nazis,” by a propaganda campaign, forbade former concentration camp inmates to testify for the defense.

The American lawyer George A. McDonough, who had had the rather peculiar experience of having served as both a prosecutor and defense counsel in the war crimes program and later on as a member of a reviewing board and an arbiter on clemency petitions, wrote to the New York Times in 1948 complaining about the lack of legal basis for the trials and remarking that “in nine problems out of ten the authorities and the textbooks had no answer” to the legal questions that regularly and consistently came up for anybody seriously concerned with matters of legality. For McDonough, the major problem was whether or not a defense of superior orders should be accepted in war crimes trials. He wrote:

One notable incident occurred when investigator Joseph Kirschbaum brought a certain Einstein into court to testify that the accused Menzel had murdered Einstein’s brother. When the accused was able to point out that the brother was alive and well and, in fact, sitting in court, Kirschbaum was deeply embarrassed and scolded poor Einstein:

The U.S. Army authorities in charge admitted some of these things. When the chief of the Dachau War Crimes Branch, Colonel A. H. Rosenfeld, quit his post in 1948, he was asked by newspapermen if there was any truth to the stories about the mock trials, at which sham death sentences had been passed. He replied:[39]

The Malmédy defendants had had a competent defense attorney, Lieutenant Colonel Willis M. Everett, Jr. It was Everett’s repeated appeals to, among others, the U.S. Supreme Court, plus a chorus of protests from German clergymen and others, plus such details regarding what was going on that managed to get into the press by various routes, that persuaded the American military governor, General Lucius D. Clay, to request an investigation of the trials at Dachau. On July 29, 1948, the Secretary of the Army appointed a commission consisting of two American judges, Gordon Simpson of Texas and Edward Van Roden of Pennsylvania, both JAG reserve colonels. They were assisted by JAG Lieutenant Colonel Charles Lawrence, Jr. The commission submitted its report to the Secretary of the Army in October 1948, and selected portions were made public in January 1949.

Subsequent public remarks by Van Roden and also, to some extent, by Simpson, plus an independent investigation by a review board appointed by Clay, decisively exposed the whole affair to the point where the defenders of the trials could only haggle about the numbers of German prisoners subjected to brutalities. The review board confirmed all that Van Roden claimed, taking exception only in respect to the frequencies of the brutalities.[40] Oddly, in his book, Decision in Germany, Clay denies the brutalities, but he is contradicted by his own review board.

The cases, especially the Malmédy case, attracted a good deal of attention through 1949, and a subcommittee headed by Senator Baldwin conducted an investigation. One witness, formerly a court reporter at the Dachau trials, testified that he was so repelled by what had gone on there that he quit the job. He said that the “most brutal” had been Lieutenant Perl, Frank Steiner, and Harry W. Thon. He explained that both Perl and his wife had been in Nazi concentration camps and that the Nazis had killed Steiner’s mother.

Judge Gordon Simpson (unlike Van Roden, trying to put the best interpretation, even if very strained, on the sorry facts that had come out) conceded that this was probably “a poor team,” and explained that the shortage of German-speaking American lawyers and interpreters had forced the Army to “draw on some of the German refugees.” Steiner, Kirschbaum, and Thon (later chief of the evaluation section of the civil administration division of the U.S. military government) appeared later and denied all, but they were shaken by the testimony of investigator Bruno Jacob, who admitted a few things. Speaking for the press, investigators Dwight Fanton and Morris Elowitz also denied all. Colonel Rosenfeld denied almost all. He charged that Lieutenant Colonel Harold D. McGown, commander of the American soldiers massacred at Malmédy, had fraternized with SS Colonel Joachim Peiper, the German commander, and this explained why McGown had appeared at Dachau as a defense witness for Peiper and had testified that Peiper had held talks with him and had been responsible for saving a number of Americans. As evidence for the fraternization, Rosenfeld claimed that McGown and Peiper had been “entirely too friendly during those nights they spent talking together” and that, when Peiper and his men were later able to escape a U.S. Army trap, “McGown was with them.” Of course, McGown was Peiper’s prisoner.[41]

It will, of course, be argued that these nightmarish Dachau “trials” have little to do with our subject because the standard maintained in the trials at Nuremberg were not comparable and because the bearers of the extermination legend do not cite any of the “evidence” produced at these trials. There is partial truth to these contentions; brutality and coercion were not nearly as extensive at the prominent Nuremberg trials as they were at the Dachau trials, and mass exterminations were not emphasized in the Dachau trials (although gas chambers made occasional appearances in testimony). However, the Dachau trials cannot be waved aside so easily because the administering agency, the War Crimes Branch, was also deeply involved in the Nuremberg trials, as we have noted, and as we are to reconfirm shortly in a particularly striking respect. In addition, coercion was, in fact, employed in order to get evidence at the Nuremberg trials, but that subject is discussed in Chapters 5 and 6.

None of the four powers was happy with the IMT arrangement, and after the “big trial” they split up and held the kinds of trials they were interested in. The British trials reflected a general interest, but on points of relatively minor significance here. The only major French trial was of Saar industrial magnate Hermann Röchling, whom the French had also tried, in absentia, after World War I. Planning for the American NMT trials had actually started in 1945, and in March 1946, a division of Jackson’s office, headed by Telford Taylor, had been created for this purpose.

It is worth noting that in all of these trials of Nazis, from the IMT through the Eichmann “trial” of 1961 (in which defense witnesses were not permitted) to the “Auschwitz trial” of 1963-1965 (which the Bonn Government would not allow Rassinier to attend as observer), the defense lawyers had no staff of trained research assistants to go through the documents and, in addition, almost all of the documents, which were available to them were controlled by the prosecuting powers.[42] Whatever the legalistic evaluation of such a situation, it can produce a very distorted historical picture if not approached skeptically.

Under the legalistic schema of the occupation, there was an important constraint on the NMT and other single-nation tribunals:

Two administratively distinct organizations functioned at the NMT. One was the collection of “Military Tribunals,” the judges, functioning administratively through a Secretariat, headed by a Secretary General. The judges were recruited in the U.S. “by the Department of the Army.” There were three or more judges at any one trial.

The second organization was the Office, Chief of Counsel for War Crimes (Telford Taylor), which had come into existence on October 24, 1946, immediately after Ribbentrop et al. had been killed. It filed its first indictment the next day. Although there was a trivial difference in their titles, Taylor, who had been an associate trial counsel at the IMT, was really the successor to Jackson in the trials being staged in the Nuremberg courthouse.[43]

We will have much to say of the NMT trials in this volume. However, the reader can grasp much of the spirit of these proceedings even from remarks made by some of the American judges who had been recruited by the U.S. Army to serve at Nuremberg. Understandably, these people were normally very reluctant to speak out publicly against what they observed. Thus, the remark of one of the judges in the Farben trial, that there were “too many Jews on the prosecution,” was a privately expressed hint to the prosecution, certainly not intended for publication. However, the presiding judge in Case 7 (trial of German generals for alleged wholesale murder of hostages), Charles F. Wennerstrum, spoke out publicly and forcefully immediately after sentences had been pronounced:[44]

Ironically, the validity of Wennerstrum’s attack on the low or non-existent standard of integrity maintained by the Nuremberg prosecution was confirmed even by the nature of Telford Taylor’s reaction to Wennerstrum’s statements, which were made in supposed privacy in Nuremberg for publication in the Chicago Tribune. Tribune reporter Hal Foust sent the message to Berlin for transmission to the U.S. on a wireless channel, which was supposedly secure from prying. However, the prosecution, apparently by employment of a ruse, managed to obtain a copy of the message. Ernest C. Deane, Taylor’s press officer, immediately phoned Foust in order to attempt “to talk him out of sending the story.” However, the story had already been sent, and Foust replied that “Taylor could not properly have knowledge of the article until its publication.” Taylor thereupon prepared a reply to Wennerstrum’s remarks, and the reply was actually made public before the Tribune published the Foust story containing Wennerstrum’s attack. Taylor accused the judge, among other things, of making remarks “subversive to the interests and policies of the United States.” Wennerstrum, on arrival in the U.S. shortly after the publication of Taylor’s “reply” and of the Tribune story, stood firm on his remarks and again criticized Taylor.

This incident was one of the notable “government spying” incidents of the year 1948. The Army issued an order against such spying, and there was much speculation that Taylor might be court-martialed. When reporters asked Taylor for his opinion on the legality of his action, the following exchange occurred:

Taylor steadfastly refused to express an opinion of the legality of his action but

The quote is from Hal Foust’s story about the Taylor press conference. Foust claimed that this was the second instance of Army interference with his messages to his newspaper, and that in the first instance he had been picked up by Army agents for interrogation after his story had been sent.

In our examination of the Nuremberg trials, we are naturally interested in who supervised the NMT proceedings. Pro forma, Taylor supervised almost everything except the appointments of the judges, since the Chief of Counsel’s formal responsibilities were not confined to the mere prosecution of cases. His Office was also charged with determining who should and who should not be tried (there was no separate proceeding for formulating indictments, such as a grand jury), what the former were to be charged with, and how the latter were to be disposed of. The Office also took over the functions of the Nuremberg staff and hence one may assume that the Office took over, at least formally, the (expanded) Nuremberg staff itself. Thus, the Office was responsible for interrogations, field work examination of documents, court reporting, and translating and interpreting.[45]

We have given reasons why one should expect that this Nuremberg staff had been under the effective supervision of the War Crimes Branch, and it will shortly be seen that, whatever Taylor’s formal powers, his actual functions do not suggest that he ever took over the Nuremberg staff in any effective sense. The War Crimes Branch, although quartered in far-off Washington, continues to be involved in our consideration of the Nuremberg trials.