by Mark Weber
A common response to expressions of skepticism about the
Holocaust story is to say something like "What about
Nuremberg? What about the trials and all the evidence?!"
This reaction is understandable because the many postwar
"war crimes" trials have given explicit, authoritative
judicial legitimacy to the Holocaust extermination story.
By far the most important of these was the great Nuremberg trial
of 1945-1946, officially known as the International Military
Tribunal (IMT). The governments of the United States, the Soviet
Union, Britain and France put on trial the most prominent
surviving German leaders as "Major War Criminals" for
various "war crimes," "crimes against peace,"
and "crimes against humanity." In the words of the
Tribunal's Charter, these "Nazi conspirators" carried
out their crimes as part of a great "Common Plan or
Conspiracy."
In addition, twelve secondary Nuremberg trials (NMT) organized by
the US government alone were conducted between 1946 to 1949.
Similar trials were also conducted by the British at Lüneburg
and Hamburg, and by the United States at achau. Since then, many
other Holocaust-related trials have been held in West Germany,
Israel and the United States, including the highly-publicized
trials in Jerusalem of Adolf Eichmann and John Demjanjuk.
Germany's wartime treatment of the Jews figured prominently in
the Nuremberg trials. In their condemnation of the defendants,
the Allies gave special emphasis to the alleged extermination of
six million European Jews. Chief US prosecutor Robert H. Jackson,
for example, declared in his opening address to the Tribunal:
(note 1)
The most savage and numerous crimes planned and committed by the Nazis were those against the Jews ... It is my purpose to show a plan and design, to which all Nazis were fanatically committed, to annihilate all Jewish people.... The avowed purpose was the destruction of the Jewish people as a whole... The conspiracy or common plan to exterminate the Jews was ... methodically and thoroughly pursued... History does not record a crime ever perpetrated against so many victims or one ever carried out with such calculated cruelty.
Echoing these words, chief British prosecutor Sir Hartley Shawcross declared in his final address to the Tribunal: (note 2)
There is one group to which the method of annihilation was applied on a scale so immense that it is my duty to refer separately to the evidence. I mean the extermination of the Jews. If there were no other crime against these men [the defendants], this one alone, in which all of them were implicated, would suffice. History holds no parallel to these horrors.
How compelling was the evidence presented at Nuremberg to
substantiate such damning words? How did the defendants respond
to the charges?
While much of the specific testimony and documentation presented
in these trials has been dealt with in other Journal articles,
here we take a closer look at the general trustworthiness of the
evidence cited at Nuremberg and elsewhere for the Holocaust
extermination story. This chapter also focuses on the basic
character of these trials, which have played such an important
role in "legitimizing" the Holocaust story.
The Nuremberg enterprise violated ancient and fundamental
principles of justice. The victorious Allies acted as prosecutor,
judge and executioner of the German leaders. The charges were
created especially for the occasion, and were applied only to the
vanquished. (note 3) Defeated, starving, prostrate Germany was,
however, in no position to oppose whatever the Allied occupation
powers demanded.
As even some leading Allied figures privately acknowledged at the
time, the Nuremberg trials were organized not to dispense
impartial justice, but for political purposes. Sir Norman
Birkett, British alternate judge at the Nuremberg Tribunal,
explained in a private letter in April 1946 that "the trial
is only in form a judicial process and its main importance is
political." (note 4)
Robert Jackson, the chief US prosecutor and a former US Attorney
General, declared that the Nuremberg Tribunal "is a
continuation of the war effort of the Allied nations"
against Germany. He added that the Tribunal "is not bound by
the procedural and substantive refinements of our respective
judicial or constitutional system ..." (note 5)
Judge Iola T. Nikitchenko, who presided at the Tribunal's solemn
opening session, was a vice-chairman of the supreme court of the
USSR before and after his service at Nuremberg. In August 1936 he
had been a judge at the infamous Moscow show trial of Zinoviev
and Kamenev. (note 6) At a joint planning conference shortly
before the Nuremberg Tribunal convened, Nikitchenko bluntly
explained the Soviet view of the enterprise: (note 7)
We are dealing here with the chief war criminals who have already been convicted and whose conviction has been already announced by both the Moscow and Crimea [Yalta] declarations by the heads of the [Allied] governments... The whole idea is to secure quick and just punishment for the crime...
The fact that the Nazi leaders are criminals has already been established. The task of the Tribunal is only to determine the measure of guilt of each particular person and mete out the necessary punishment -- the sentences.
Indicative of the largely political nature of the Nuremberg
process was the important Jewish role in organizing these trials.
Nahum Goldmann, one-time president of both the World Jewish
Congress and the World Zionist Organization, reported in his
memoir that the Nuremberg Tribunal was the brain-child of World
Jewish Congress officials. Only after persistent effort were WJC
officials able to persuade Allied leaders to accept the idea, he
added. (note 8)
The World Jewish Congress also played an important but less
obvious role in the day to day proceedings. Above all, the
powerful but secretive organization made sure that Germany's
persecution of the Jews was a primary focus of the trials, and
that the defendants were punished for their involvement in that
process. (note 9)
Two Jewish officers in the US Army -- Lieutenant Colonel Murray
Bernays and Colonel David "Mickey" Marcus -- played key
roles in the Nuremberg enterprise. In the words of historian
Robert Conot, Bernays was "the guiding spirit leading the
way to Nuremberg." Bernays, a successful New York attorney,
persuaded US War Secretary Henry Stimson and others to accept the
idea of putting the defeated German leaders on trial. (note 10)
Marcus, a fervent Zionist, became the "number three man in
making American policy" in occupied Germany. As chief of the
US government's War Crimes Branch in 1946 and 1947, he selected
almost all of the judges, prosecutors and lawyers for the
Nuremberg NMT Trials. (He later became a commander of Zionist
"Haganah" military forces in Palestine.) (note 11)
Some of the Americans who participated in the Nuremberg trials
became disillusioned with the entire business. One of the few to
make public his feelings was Charles F. Wennerstrum, an Iowa
Supreme Court justice who served as presiding judge in the
Nuremberg trial of German generals. "If I had known seven
months ago what I know today, I would never have come here,"
he declared immediately after sentences were pronounced.
"The high ideals announced as the motives for creating these
tribunals have not been evident," he added. (note 12)
Wennerstrum cautiously referred to the extensive Jewish
involvement in the Nuremberg process. "The entire atmosphere
here is unwholesome ... Lawyers, clerks, interpreters and
researchers were employed who became Americans only in recent
years, whose backgrounds were imbedded in Europe's hatreds and
prejudices." He criticized the one-sided handling of
evidence. "Most of the evidence in the trials was
documentary, selected from the large tonnage of captured records.
The selection was made by the prosecution. The defense had access
only to those documents which the prosecution considered material
to the case." He concluded that "the trials were to
have convinced the Germans of the guilt of their leaders. They
convinced the Germans merely that their leaders lost the war to
tough conquerors." Wennerstrum left Nuremberg "with a
feeling that justice has been denied."
America's leading jurist was dismayed by the Nuremberg process.
US Supreme Court Chief Justice Harlan Fiske Stone remarked with
irritation: "[Chief US prosecutor] Jackson is away
conducting his high-grade lynching party in Nuremberg. I don't
mind what he does to the Nazis, but I hate to see the pretense
that he is running a court and proceeding according to common
law. This is a little too sanctimonious a fraud to meet my
old-fashioned ideas." In a private letter he wrote:
"... I wonder how some of those who preside at the trials
would justify some of the acts of their own governments if they
were placed in the status of the accused." On another
occasion Stone specifically wondered "whether, under this
new [Nuremberg] doctrine of international law, if we had been
defeated, the victors could plausibly assert that our supplying
Britain with fifty destroyers [in 1940] was an act of aggression
..." (note 13)
In Congress, US Representative Lawrence H. Smith of Wisconsin
declared: "The Nuremberg trials are so repugnant to the
Anglo-Saxon principles of justice that we must forever be ashamed
of that page in our history ... The Nuremberg farce represents a
revenge policy at its worst." (note 14) Another Congressman,
John Rankin of Mississippi, stated: "As a representative of
the American people I desire to say that what is taking place in
Nuremberg, Germany, is a disgrace to the United States... A
racial minority, two and a half years after the war closed, are
in Nuremberg not only hanging German soldiers but trying German
businessmen in the name of the United States." (note 15)
Probably the most courageous condemnation was by US Senator
Robert A. Taft, widely regarded as the "conscience of the
Republican party." At considerable risk to his political
career, he denounced the Nuremberg enterprise in an October 1946
speech. "The trial of the vanquished by the victors cannot
be impartial no matter how it is hedged about with the forms of
justice," he said. Taft went on: (note 16)
About this whole judgment there is the spirit of vengeance, and vengeance is seldom justice. The hanging of the eleven men convicted will be a blot on the American record which we will long regret. In these trials we have accepted the Russian idea of the purpose of trials -- government policy and not justice -- with little relation to Anglo-Saxon heritage. By clothing policy in the forms of legal procedure, we many discredit the whole idea of justice in Europe for years to come.
Milton R. Konvitz, a Jewish specialist of law and public
administration who taught at New York University, warned at the
time that the Nuremberg Tribunal "defies many of the most
basic assumptions of the judicial process." He went on:
"Our policy with respect to the Nazis is consistent with
neither international law nor our own State Department's
policy... The Nuremberg trial constitutes a real threat to the
basic conceptions of justice which it has taken mankind thousands
of years to establish." (note 17)
In the years since, distinguished figures in both the United
States and other countries have expressed similar views. US
Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas wrote: "I thought
at the time and still think that the Nuremberg trials were
unprincipled. Law was created ex post facto to suit the passion
and clamor of the time." (note 18)
US Rear Admiral H. Lamont Pugh, former Navy Surgeon General and
Commanding Officer of the National Naval Medical Center, wrote:
"I thought the trials in general bordered upon international
lunacy. I thought it particularly unfortunate, inappropriate,
ill-conceived and dupably injudicious that the United States
should have been cast in the leading role as prosecutors and
implementators of the trials of German participants or
principals." (note 19)
Another indictment of the Nuremberg trial appeared more recently
in the pages of the liberal New Republic: (note 20)
The whole majesty of the Western heritage of the law was used to subvert that heritage in the Nuremberg Tribunal. Weighty jurists in every Western country (but not Russia) protested against this travesty of the Western legal system. So did historians. So did merely cultured and moral men and women. If the victors were to "try" the vanquished for war crimes, then they should try themselves for often committing the same crimes. Who would try [British] Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Travers "Bomber" Harris, the architect of the policy of saturation bombing of German cities? But it was not only a matter of our own "war crimes." If it was right to use the apparatus of the law to punish those responsible for exceptional crimes like the holocaust, it was wrong to use it to punish errors of judgment and statecraft such as every defeated regime seems to have committed. "We used the methods of the enemy" -- and used them in peace at Nuremberg.
While the Nuremberg trials were underway, and for some time
afterwards, there was quite a lot of talk about the universal
validity of the new legal code established there. A new age of
international justice had begun, it was claimed. Many sincerely
believed that the four Allied powers would themselves abide by
the Tribunal's standards. (note 21)
As it happened, none of the four powers that participated in the
Tribunal ever made the slightest effort to apply the principles
so solemnly and self-righteously proclaimed at Nuremberg either
to their own leaders or to those of any other country.
No Soviet leader was executed for the Soviet military
interventions in Hungary in 1956 or Czechoslovakia in 1968. No
British leader was put on trial for the British invasion of Egypt
in October 1956. President Eisenhower was not tried for his
invasion of Lebanon in 1958. President Kennedy was not hanged for
his ill-fated 1962 "Bay of Pigs" invasion of Cuba.
President Johnson was never called to judicial account for his
conduct of the war in Vietnam or his invasion of the Dominican
Republic. President Nixon was not brought before a tribunal for
his armed "incursion" into Cambodia.
When (North) Vietnamese officials threatened to put captured US
airmen on trial in 1966, US Senator Everett Dirksen was moved to
remark that the Nuremberg trials "may have been a ghastly
mistake." (note 22)
In conducting the Nuremberg trials, the Allied governments
themselves violated international law. For one thing, their
treatment of the German defendants and the military prisoners who
testified violated articles 56, 58 and others of the Geneva
convention of July 1929. (note 23)
Justice -- as opposed to vengeance -- is a standard that is
applied impartially. At Nuremberg, though, standards of
"justice" applied only to the vanquished. The four
powers that sat in judgment were themselves guilty of many of the
very crimes they accused the German leaders of committing. (note
24) Chief US prosecutor Robert Jackson privately acknowledged in
a letter to President Truman that the Allies (note 25)
have done or are doing some of the very things we are prosecuting the Germans for. The French are so violating the Geneva Convention in the treatment of [German] prisoners of war that our command is taking back prisoners sent to them [for forced labor in France]. We are prosecuting plunder and our Allies are practicing it. We say aggressive war is a crime and one of our allies asserts sovereignty over the Baltic States based on no title except conquest.
In violation of the first Nuremberg count of "planning,
preparation, initiating or waging a war of aggression," the
Soviet Union attacked Finland in December 1939 (and was expelled
from the League of Nations as a result). A few months later the
Red Army invaded Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, and ruthlessly
incorporated them into the Soviet Union. The postwar French
government violated international law and the Nuremberg charge of
"maltreatment of prisoners of war" by employing large
numbers of German prisoners of war as forced laborers in France.
In 1945 the United States, Britain and the Soviet Union jointly
agreed to the brutal deportation of more than ten million Germans
from their ancient homes in eastern and central Europe, a
violation of the Nuremberg count of "deportation, and other
inhumane acts committed against any civilian population."
(note 26)
While Allied prosecutors charged the defendants with a
"crime against peace" in planning the German invasion
of Norway in 1940, the British government eventually had to admit
that Britain and France were themselves guilty of the same
"crime" in preparing a military invasion of Norway,
code-named "Stratford," before the German move. And in
August 1941, Britain and the Soviet Union jointly invaded and
occupied Iran, a neutral nation. (note 27)
Given this record, it is hardly surprising that the four
governments that organized the Nuremberg trial of 1945-1946
included no definition of "aggression" in the
Tribunal's Charter. (note 28)
Mikhail Vozlenski, a Soviet historian who served as a translator
at the Nuremberg Tribunal in 1946, later recalled that he and the
other Soviet personnel felt out of place there because the
alleged crimes of the German leaders were "the norm of our
life" in the Soviet Union. (note 29) The Soviet role in the
proceedings, which the United States fully supported, moved
American diplomat and historian George F. Kennan to condemn the
entire Nuremberg enterprise as a "horror" and a
"mockery." (note 30)
Nuremberg's double standard was condemned at the time by the
British weekly The Economist. It pointed out that whereas both
Britain and France had supported the expulsion of the Soviet
Union from the League of Nations in 1939 for its unprovoked
attack against Finland, just six years later these same two
governments were cooperating with the USSR as a respected equal
at Nuremberg. "Nor should the Western world console itself
that the Russians alone stand condemned at the bar of the Allies'
own justice," the Economist editorial went on. It continued:
(note 31)
... Among crimes against humanity stands the offence of the indiscriminate bombing of civilian populations. Can the Americans who dropped the atom bomb and the British who destroyed the cities of western Germany plead "not guilty" on this count? Crimes against humanity also include the mass expulsion of populations. Can the Anglo-Saxon leaders who at Potsdam condoned the expulsion of millions of Germans from their homes hold themselves completely innocent?... The nations sitting in judgment [at Nuremberg] have so clearly proclaimed themselves exempt from the law which they have administered.
An official with the postwar US military occupation
administration in Germany commented: "What good are the
high-flown morals enunciated at Nuremberg if the Americans have
agreed to such things as deportation in documents which bear
official signatures, and which, therefore, give the Allies the
legal right to do the things which at Nuremberg they described as
immoral?" (note 32)
If the Nuremberg Tribunal's standards had been applied to the
victors of the Second World War, American General and supreme
Allied commander in Europe Dwight Eisenhower would have been
hanged. At the end of the war Eisenhower ordered that German
prisoners in American military custody were no longer to be
treated according to the Geneva Convention on the treatment of
prisoners of war. This violation of international law removed
masses of Germans from the protection of the International Red
Cross (ICRC), and condemned hundreds of thousands of them to slow
death by starvation and disease. (note 33)
Perhaps nothing better illustrates the essentially unfair
character of the Nuremberg proceedings than the treatment of
Rudolf Hess, itler's deputy. He was sentenced to life
imprisonment even though he alone of leading figures of the
countries involved in the Second World War risked his life in a
dangerous but fruitless effort to conclude peace between two of
the warring nations. British historian A.J.P. Taylor once
succinctly summed up the injustice of the Hess case and, by
implication, of the entire Nuremberg enterprise: (note 34)
Hess came to this country in 1941 as an ambassador of peace. He came with the ... intention of restoring peace between Great Britain and Germany. He acted in good faith. He fell into our hands and was quite unjustly treated as a prisoner of war. After the war, we should have released him. Instead, the British government of the time delivered him for sentencing to the International Tribunal at Nuremberg ... No crime has ever been proved against Hess ... As far as the records show, he was never at even one of the secret discussions at which Hitler explained his war plans.
The victorious Allies thoroughly scoured Germany for every
scrap of paper that might be used to incriminate the defeated
regime. Never before or since have a nation's records been so
completely ransacked. In addition to official government papers,
including countless secret documents tracing Germany's wartime
Jewish policy, the Allies confiscated the records of the National
Socialist Party and its affiliated organizations, as well as
those of numerous private business firms, institutions and
individuals. The sheer quantity of paper seized is staggering.
For example, the records of the German Foreign Office confiscated
by US officials amounted to some 485 tons of paper. (note 35)
From this mountain of paper, US military personnel alone selected
some two thousand documents considered most incriminating for use
in the main Nuremberg trial. The tons of confiscated records were
later shipped to the United States. It is estimated that in the
US National Archives alone, more than one million pages of
documents on the Third Reich's Jewish policy are on file. Many
hundreds of these Nuremberg documents have since been published,
most notably by the U.S. government in the 42-volume "blue
series" record of the main Nuremberg trial, the 15-volume
"green series" record of the "second string"
Nuremberg trials, and in the 11-volume "red series."
(note 36)
It is as if governments hostile to the United States were to
seize the top secret files of the Pentagon and CIA, and then
selectively publish the most embarrassing and incriminating
documents from the vast collection.
In the years since the Nuremberg trials, historians of many
different countries have carefully sifted through the German
records, including countless documents that were not available to
the Nuremberg prosecutors. Historians have been able to compare
and cross-check the records of different ministries and agencies,
as well as numerous private diaries and papers. (note 37)
And yet, out of this great mass of paper, not a single document
has ever been found that confirms or even refers to an
extermination program. A number of historians have commented on
this remarkable "gap" in the evidence. French-Jewish
historian Leon Poliakov, for example, noted in his best-known
olocaust work:
The archives of the Third Reich and the depositions and accounts of its leaders make possible a reconstruction, down to the last detail, of the origin and development of the plans for aggression, the military campaigns, and the whole array of procedures by which the Nazis intended to reshape the world to their liking. Only the campaign to exterminate the Jews, as regards its conception as well as many other essential aspects, remains shrouded in darkness.
No documents of a plan for exterminating the Jews have ever
been found, he added, because "perhaps none ever
existed." (note 38)
At Nuremberg, the German documents were in the custody of the
Allied prosecutors, who did not permit defense attorneys to make
their own selections of the material. Historian Werner Maser has
pointed out that at Nuremberg "thousands of documents which
seemed likely possibly to incriminate the Allies and exonerate
the defendants suddenly disappeared... There is much evidence
that documents were confiscated, concealed from the defense or
even stolen in 1945." Other important documents suddenly
"disappeared" when specifically requested by defense
attorneys. Officials at the National Archives in Washington have
confirmed to this writer on several occasions that the originals
of numerous Nuremberg documents remain "lost" to this
day. The Tribunal refused to allow in evidence several
collections of German and captured foreign documents published
during the war as German Foreign Office "White Books."
Most of the 1,809 affidavits prepared by the Nuremberg defense
have never been made public. (note 39)
Among the documents that the defense was not permitted to bring
to light was the secret supplement to the GermanSoviet treaty of
August 23, 1939, which divided eastern Europe into German and
Soviet spheres of influence. (note 40)
After the Nuremberg Tribunal pronounced its sentence, Foreign
Minister von Ribbentrop pointed out some of the obstacles put up
in his particular case: (note 41)
The defense had no fair chance to defend German foreign policy. Our prepared application for the submission of evidence was not allowed ... Without good cause being shown, half of the 300 documents which the defense prepared were not admitted. Witnesses and affidavits were only admitted after the prosecution had been heard; most of them were rejected... Correspondence between itler and Chamberlain, reports by ambassadors and diplomatic minutes, etc., were rejected. Only the prosecution, not the defense, had access to German and foreign archives. The prosecution only searched for incriminating documents and their use was biased. It knowingly concealed exonerating documents and withheld them from the defense.
The Charter of the International Military Tribunal permitted the use of normally inadmissible "evidence." Article 19 specified that "The Tribunal shall not be bound by technical rules of evidence... and shall admit any evidence which it deems to have probative value." Article 21 stipulated: (note 42)
The Tribunal shall not require proof of facts of common knowledge but shall take judicial notice thereof. It shall also take judicial notice of official governmental documents and reports of the United [Allied] Nations, including acts and documents of the committees set up in the various allied countries for the investigation of war crimes, and the records and findings of military and other Tribunals of any of the United [Allied] Nations.
On the basis of these articles, the Tribunal accepted as valid
the most dubious "evidence," including hearsay and
unsubstantiated reports of Soviet and American
"investigative" commissions. For example, the Tribunal
accepted an American congressional report that "proved"
gas chamber killings at achau, and a Polish government report
(submitted by the US) that "proved" killings by steam
at reblinka. (note 43) (No reputable historian now accepts either
of these stories.)
In addition, the Tribunal validated Soviet reports about uschwitz
and Majdanek (documents USSR-8 and USSR-29), which explained in
detail how the Germans killed four million at Auschwitz and
another one-and-a-half million at Majdanek. (These days, no
reputable historian accepts either of these fantastic figures.)
German guilt for the killing of thousands of Polish officers in
the Katyn forest near Smolensk was similarly confirmed by
Nuremberg document USSR-54. This detailed report by yet another
Soviet "investigative" commission was submitted as
proof for the charge made in the joint indictment of the four
Allied governments. As a Soviet prosecutor explained: "We
find, in the Indictment, one of the most important criminal acts
for which the major war criminals are responsible was the mass
execution of Polish prisoners of war shot in the Katyn forest
near Smolensk by the German fascist invaders." (note 44)
(Interestingly, two of the eight members of the Soviet Katyn
Commission were also members of the Soviet Auschwitz commission:
Academician N. Burdenko and Metropolitan Nikolai.) It wasn't
until 1990 that the Soviet government finally acknowledged that
the Katyn massacre was carried out, not by a German unit, as
"proven" at Nuremberg, but by the Soviet secret police.
(note 45)
It is sometimes claimed that the evidence presented by the
prosecution to the Nuremberg Tribunal was so incontrovertible
that none of the defense attorneys ever disputed the authenticity
or accuracy of even a single prosecution document. (note 46) This
is not true. Not only did defense lawyers protest against the
prosecution use of spurious documents, but some of the most
important Nuremberg documents are now generally acknowledged to
be fraudulent. (note 47)
For example, defense attorney Dr. Boehm protested to the Tribunal
that Nuremberg document 1721-PS, which purportedly confirms
attacks by stormtroopers against Jewish synagogues in November
1938, is a clumsy forgery. He went on to explain his reasons at
some length. (note 48)
Several Nuremberg documents based on the purported "death
bed confession" of Mauthausen commandant Franz Ziereis, are
demonstrably fraudulent. (Nuremberg documents 1515-PS, 3870-PS,
and NO-1973.) These documents supposedly prove systematic
killings of hundreds of thousands of people by gassing and other
means at Mauthausen and Hartheim. (note 49)
Almost forty years after the Tribunal handed down its verdicts,
Nuremberg document USSR-378 was definitively exposed as a fraud.
It is a purported record of numerous private conversations with
itler by Hermann Rauschning, a former National Socialist official
in Danzig. In brutal language, the Führer supposedly revealed
his most intimate thoughts and secret plans for world conquest.
Rauschning's "memoir" was published in 1939 in Britain
under the title Hitler Speaks, and in the United States in 1940
as The Voice of Destruction. It was this US edition that was
accepted in evidence at Nuremberg as proof of the "guiding
principles of the Nazi regime."
Chief British prosecutor Sir Hartley Shawcross and his Soviet
colleagues cited numerous quotations from it. Defendant Baldur
von Schirach contested its authenticity, but defense attorney
Pelckmann (who did not know any better) accepted this
"evidence" as authentic. (note 50) In 1983 Swiss
historian Wolfgang Hänel established that the "memoir"
is entirely fraudulent. Rauschning never had even a single
private meeting with Hitler. (note 51)
Another fraudulent Nuremberg document is the so-called
"Hossbach protocol" (document 386-PS), a purported
record of a high-level 1937 conference at which Hitler supposedly
revealed his secret plans for aggressive conquest. US Nuremberg
prosecutor Sidney Alderman called it "one of the most
striking and revealing of all the captured documents," and
told the Tribunal that it removed any remaining doubts about the
guilt of the Germans leaders for their crimes against peace. It
was largely on the basis of this document that Göring was
condemned to death. (note 52)
Similarly spurious is Nuremberg document L-3 (US-28), supposedly
a record of a bellicose speech by Hitler to armed forces
commanders on August 22, 1939. It contains a widelycited
quotation attributed to Hitler, "Who talks nowadays of the
extermination of the Armenians?" (note 53)
Jewish historian Lucy Dawidowicz, author of The War Against the
Jews, acknowledged that "There are also olocaust documents
that are outright falsification and some that purvey myth rather
than historical fact." (note 54)
Much of the evidence for the Holocaust story presented at
Nuremberg and in subsequent trials has been "survivor
testimony." As numerous historians have acknowledged,
though, such testimony is often defective. (note 55)
Gerald Reitlinger cautioned readers of his detailed study, The
Final Solution, that Holocaust evidence, including Nuremberg
documents and testimony, cannot be accepted at face value:
"A certain degree of reserve is necessary in handling all
this material, and particularly this applies to the last section
(survivor narratives) ... The Eastern European Jew is a natural
rhetorician, speaking in flowery similes." (note 56) French
historian Jean-Claude Pressac likewise warned in his detailed
book about Auschwitz that "extreme
care is required with the testimony of survivors ..." (note
57)
Jewish historian Hannah Arendt observed in her book Eichmann in
Jerusalem that the "eyewitnesses" who testified in the
1961 trial in Jerusalem of Adolf Eichmann were only rarely able
to distinguish between what actually happened to them years
earlier and what they had read, heard or imagined in the
meantime. (note 58) Holocaust historian Lucy Dawidowicz similarly
noted that "the survivor's memory is often distorted by
hate, sentimentality, and the passage of time. His perspective on
external events is often skewed by the limits of his personal
experience." (note 59)
French historian Germain Tillion, a specialist of the Second
World War period, has warned that former camp inmates who lie
are, in fact, (note 60)
very much more numerous than people generally suppose, and a subject like that of the concentration camp world -- well designed, alas, to stimulate sado-masochistic imaginations -- offered them an exceptional field of action. We have known numerous mentally damaged persons, half-swindlers and half fools, who exploited an imaginary deportation. We have known others of them -- authentic deportees -- whose sick minds strove to even go beyond the monstrosities that they had seen or that people said happened to them.
Jewish historian Samuel Gringauz, who was himself interned in
the ghetto of Kaunas (Lithuania) during the war, criticized what
he called the "hyperhistorical" nature of most Jewish
"survivor testimony." He wrote that "most of the
memoirs and reports are full of preposterous verbosity,
graphomanic exaggeration, dramatic effects, overestimated
self-inflation, dilettante philosophizing, would-be lyricism,
unchecked rumors, bias, partisan attacks and apologies."
(note 61)
Shmuel Krakowki, archives director of the Israeli government's
Holocaust center, Yad Vashem, confirmed in 1986 that more than
10,000 of the 20,000 "testimonies" of Jewish
"survivors" on file there are "unreliable."
Many survivors, wanting "to be part of history" may
have let their imaginations run away with them, Krakowski said.
"Many were never in the places where they claimed to have
witnessed atrocities, while others relied on second-hand
information given them by friends or passing strangers." He
confirmed that many of the testimonies on file at Yad Vashem were
later proved to be inaccurate when locations and dates could not
pass an expert historian's appraisal. (note 62)
We now know that witnesses at the main uremberg trial gave false
testimony. Perhaps the most obvious were the three witnesses who
ostensibly confirmed German guilt for the Katyn massacre of
Polish officers. (note 63)
Stephen F. Pinter of St. Louis, Missouri, served as a US Army
prosecuting attorney from January 1946 to July 1947 at the
American trials of Germans at achau. Altogether, some 420 Germans
were sentenced to death in these Dachau trials. In a 1960
affidavit Pinter stated that "notoriously perjured
witnesses" were used to charge Germans with "false and
unfounded" crimes. "Unfortunately, as a result of these
miscarriages of justice, many innocent persons were convicted and
some were executed." (note 64)
A tragi-comic incident during the Dachau proceedings suggests the
general atmosphere. US investigator Joseph Kirschbaum brought a
Jewish witness named Einstein into court to testify that the
defendant, Menzel, had murdered Einstein's brother. But when the
accused pointed out that the brother was, in fact, sitting in the
courtroom, an embarrassed Kirschbaum scolded the witness:
"How can we bring this pig to the gallows if you are so
stupid as to bring your brother into court?" (note 65)
August Gross, a German who worked as a civilian employee for the
U.S. Army at the Dachau trials, later declared: (note 66)
The American prosecutors paid professional incrimination witnesses, mostly former criminal concentration camp inmates, the amount of one dollar per day (at that time worth 280 marks on the black market) as well as food from a witness kitchen and witness lodging. During the recess periods between trial proceedings the US prosecuting attorneys told these witnesses what they were to say in giving testimony. The US prosecuting attorneys gave the witnesses photos of the defendants and were thereby able to easily incriminate them.
A young US Army court reporter at the Dachau trials in 1947, Joseph Halow, later recalled the unwholesome situation:
The witnesses in the concentration camp cases were virtually all of the sort we court reporters termed "professional witnesses," those who spent months in Dachau, testifying against one or another of the many accused... It was to their economic advantage to testify, and many of them made a good living doing so. As one might well imagine, the motive of the professional witnesses was also one of spite and revenge... In many instances their vengeance included relating exaggerated accounts of what they had witnessed. It also included outright lying.
In one case, testimony provided by the prosecution witnesses
"appeared to raise more questions then provide answers. Some
of it was obviously fabricated, or so grossly exaggerated as to
render it unbelievable. There were repeated instances of mistaken
identity of the same accused, and vague, uncertain statements
about some of the others." Moreover, Halow reported, the US
courts paid "scant attention to testimony by and for the
accused." (note 67)
In the 1947 "Nordhausen-Dora" case, American defense
attorney Major Leon B. Poullada protested against the general
unreliability -- and frequent outright lying -- of prosecution
witnesses in this US military trial of former concentration camp
officials. (note 68)
Use of such unreliable testimony continued in
"olocaust" trials in later years. Federal district
judge Norman C. Roettger, Jr., ruled in 1978 in a Florida case
that all six Jewish "eyewitnesses" who had testified to
direct atrocities and shootings at reblinka by Ukrainian-born
defendant Feodor Fedorenko had wrongly identified the accused
after being misled by Israeli authorities. (note 69)
New York "Nazi hunter" Charles Kremer visited Israel in
1981 looking for Jews who could confirm atrocities allegedly
committed by a former Ukrainian SS man living in New Jersey. But
Kremer cut short his visit, bitterly disappointed by the numerous
Jews who offered to provide spurious "testimony" in
return for money. As the Brooklyn Jewish Press reported,
"Kremer was stricken with gastronomic pains -- a malady he
attributes to his difficulties in dealing with hucksters who
tried to use his search for their personal gain." (note 70)
One of the most blatant examples of perjury by Jewish Holocaust
witnesses in recent years was in the case of a retired Chicago
factory worker named Frank Walus who was charged with killing
Jews in his native Poland during the war. A December 1974 letter
from "Nazi hunter" Simon Wiesenthal that accused Walus
of working for the Gestapo prompted the US government's legal
campaign. During his trial, eleven Jews testified under oath that
they personally saw Walus murder Jews, including several
children. After a costly and bitterly contested four-year legal
battle, Walus was finally able to prove that he had actually
spent the war years as a teenager quietly working on German
farms. A lengthy article copyrighted by the American Bar
Association and published in 1981 in the Washington Post
concluded that "... in an atmosphere of hatred and loathing
verging on hysteria, the government persecuted an innocent
man." (note 71)
(continued in part 2)
This article is taken from The Journal for Historical Review, PO Box 2739, Newport Beach, CA 92659, USA. Subscriptions to the Journal are $40 per year (6 issues). Reproduction of this material is authorized as long as credit is given to the Institute for Historical Review.