Allied prosecutors used torture to help prove their case at Nuremberg
and other postwar trials. (note 72)
Former Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss was tortured by British
officials into signing a false and self-incriminating "confession"
that has been widely cited as a key document of Holocaust
extermination. His testimony before the Nuremberg Tribunal, a high
point of the proceeding, was perhaps the most striking and memorable
evidence presented there of a German extermination program. (note 73)
Höss maintained that two and half million people had been killed in
Auschwitz gas chambers, and that another 500,000 inmates had died
there of other causes. No serious or reputable historian now accepts
either of these fantastic figures, and other key portions of Höss'
"confession" are now generally acknowledged to be untrue. (note 74)
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn has cited the case of Jupp Aschenbrenner, a
Bavarian who was tortured into signing a statement that he had worked
on mobile gas chambers ("gas vans") during the war. It wasn't until
several years later that he was finally able to prove that he had
actually spent that time in Munich studying to become an electric
welder. (note 75)
Fritz Sauckel, head of the German wartime labor mobilization program,
was sentenced to death at the main Nuremberg trial. An important piece
of evidence presented to the Tribunal by the US prosecution was an
affidavit signed by the defendant. (Nuremberg document 3057-PS.) It
turned out that Sauckel had put his signature to this self-
incriminating statement, which had been presented to him by his
captors in finished form, only after he was bluntly told that if he
hesitated, his wife and children would be turned over to the Soviets.
"I did not stop to consider, and thinking of my family, I signed the
document," Sauckel later declared. (note 76)
Hans Fritzsche, another defendant in the main Nuremberg trial, was
similarly forced to sign a self-damning confession while he was a
prisoner of the Soviet secret police in Moscow. (Nuremberg document
USSR-474.) (note 77)
Nuremberg defendant Julius Streicher, who was eventually hanged
because he published a sometimes sensational anti-Jewish weekly paper,
was brutally mistreated following his arrest. He was badly beaten,
kicked, whipped, spat at, forced to drink saliva and burned with
cigarettes. His genitals were beaten. Eyebrow and chest hair was
pulled out. He was stripped and photographed. Fellow defendant Hans
Frank was savagely beaten by two black GIs shortly after his arrest.
August Eigruber, former Gauleiter of Upper Austria, was mutilated and
castrated at the end of the war. (note 78)
Josef Kramer, former commandant of both the BergenBelsen and Auschwitz-
Birkenau camps, and other defendants in the British-run "Belsen"
trial, were reportedly also tortured, some of them so brutally that
they begged to be put to death. (note 79)
Although most of the defendants at the main Nuremberg trial were not
tortured, many other Germans were forced to sign affidavits and give
testimony against their former colleagues and superiors. A simple
threat to turn the subject over to the Soviets was often enough to
persuade him to sign an affidavit or provide testimony needed in
court. Threats against the subject's wife and children, including
withdrawal of ration cards, delivery to the Soviets or imprisonment,
often quickly produced the desired results. If all else failed, the
subject could be placed in solitary confinement, beaten, kicked,
whipped or burned until he broke down. (note 80)
The testimony of the prosecution's chief witness in the Nuremberg
"Wilhelmstrasse" trial was obtained by threat of death. The American
defense attorney, Warren Magee, had somehow obtained the transcript of
the first pretrial interrogation of Friedrich Gaus, a former senior
official in the German Foreign Office. Despite frantic protests by
prosecuting attorney Robert Kempner, the judge decided to permit Magee
to read from the document. During the pretrial interrogation session,
Kempner told Gaus that he would be turned over to the Soviets for
hanging. Tearfully pleading for mercy, Gaus begged Kempner to think of
his wife and children. Kempner replied that he could save himself only
by testifying in court against his former colleagues. A desperate
Gaus, who had already endured four weeks in solitary confinement,
agreed. When Magee finished reading from the damning transcript, Gaus
sat with both hands to his face, totally devastated. (note 81)
American soldiers repeatedly beat former SS captain Konrad Morgen in
an unsuccessful effort to force him to sign a perjured affidavit
against Ilse Koch, a defendant in the US military's 1947 "Buchenwald"
case. American officials also threatened to turn Morgen over to the
Soviets if he did not sign the false statement. (note 82)
Luftwaffe General Field Marshal Erhard Milch was warned by a US Army
Major to stop testifying on behalf of Hermann Göring in the main
Nuremberg trial. The American officer told Milch that if he persisted,
he would be charged as a war criminal himself, regardless of whether
or not he was guilty. (note 83) Milch did not back down and was indeed
charged. In 1947 a US Nuremberg court sentenced him to life
imprisonment as a war criminal. Four years later, though, the US High
Commissioner commuted his sentence to fifteen years, and a short time
after that Milch was amnestied and released. (note 84)
Reports of widespread torture at the postwar American-run "war crimes"
trials at Dachau leaked out, resulting in so many protests that a
formal investigation was eventually carried out. A US Army Commission
of inquiry consisting of Pennsylvania Judge Edward van Roden and Texas
Supreme Court Judge Gordon Simpson officially confirmed the charges of
gross abuse. German defendants, they found, were routinely tortured at
Dachau with savage beatings, burning matches under fingernails,
kicking of testicles, months of solitary confinement, and threats of
family reprisals. Low ranking prisoners were assured that their
"confessions" would be used only against their former superiors in the
dock. Later, though, these hapless men found their own "confessions"
used against them when they were tried in turn. High ranking
defendants were cynically assured that by "voluntarily" accepting all
responsibility themselves they would thereby protect their former
subordinates from prosecution.85
One Dachau trial court reporter was so outraged at what was happening
there in the name of justice that he quit his job. He testified to a
US Senate subcommittee that the "most brutal" interrogators had been
three German-born Jews. Although operating procedures at the Dachau
trials were significantly worse than those used at Nuremberg, they
give some idea of the spirit of the "justice" imposed on the
vanquished Germans.
Virtually all of the US investigators who brought cases before
American military courts at Dachau were "Jewish refugees from Germany"
who "hated the Germans," recalled Joseph Halow, a US Army court
reporter at the Dachau trials in 1947. "Many of the investigators gave
vent to their hated by attempting to force confessions from the
Germans by treating them brutally," including "severe beatings."86
The case of Gustav Petrat, a German who had served as a guard at the
Mauthausen, was not unusual. After repeated brutal beatings by US
authorities, he broke down and signed a perjured statement. He was
also whipped and threatened with immediate shooting. Petrat was
prevented from securing exonerating evidence, and even potential
defense witnesses were beaten and threatened to keep them from
testifying. After a farcical trial by a US military court at Dachau,
Petrat was sentenced to death and hanged in late 1948. He was 24 years
old.87
Use of torture to produce incriminating statements has not been
limited to postwar Germany, of course. Such techniques have been
systematically used by governments around the world. During the Korean
War, American airmen held as prisoners by the Communist North Koreans
made detailed statements "confessing" to their roles in waging germ
warfare. Under physical and psychological torture, 38 US airmen
"admitted" dropping bacteriological bombs that caused disease
epidemics and claimed many Korean civilian lives. These statements
were later shown to be false, and the airmen repudiated them after
returning to the United States. Their phony confessions were the same
kind of evidence given by Rudolf Höss and others at the Nuremberg
trials. Under similar circumstances, Americans proved at least as
ready to "confess" to monstrous but baseless crimes as Germans.88
One of the most important and revealing Nuremberg cases is that of
Oswald Pohl, the wartime head of the vast SS agency (WVHA) that ran
the German concentration camps. After his capture in 1946, he was
taken to Nenndorf where British soldiers tied him to a chair and beat
him unconscious. He lost two teeth in repeated beatings.89 He was then
transferred to Nuremberg, where American military officials
intensively interrogated him for more than half a year in sessions
that lasted for hours. Altogether there were about 70 such sessions.
During this period he had no access to an attorney or any other help.
He was never formally charged with anything, nor even told precisely
why he was being interrogated.
In a statement written after he was sentenced to death at Nuremberg in
November 1947 by the American military court ("Concentration Camp"
Case No. 4), Pohl described his treatment.90 He reported that although
he was generally not physically mistreated in Nuremberg as he had been
at Nenndorf, he was nevertheless subjected to the less noticeable but,
as he put it, "in their own way much more brutal emotional tortures."
American interrogators (most of them Jews) accused Pohl of killing 30
million people and of condemning ten million people to death. The
interrogators themselves knew very well that such accusations were
lies and tricks meant to break down his resistance, Pohl declared.
"Because I am not emotionally thick-skinned, these diabolical
intimidations were not without effect, and the interrogators achieved
what they wanted: not the truth, but rather statements that served
their needs," he wrote.
Pohl was forced to sign false and self-incriminating affidavits
written by prosecution officials that were later used against him in
his own trial. As he recalled:
Whenever genuine documents did not correspond to what the
prosecution authorities wanted or were insufficient for the guilty
sentences they sought, "affidavits" were put together. The most
striking feature of these remarkable trial documents is that the
accused often condemned themselves in them. That is understandable
only to those who have themselves experienced the technique by which
such "affidavits" are obtained.
He and other defendants were "destroyed" with these affidavits, which
"contain provable errors of fact regarding essential points," Pohl
wrote. Among the false statements signed by Pohl was one that
incriminated former Reichsbank President Walter Funk, whom the
Nuremberg Tribunal eventually sentenced to life imprisonment.91
American officials also made use of false witnesses at Nuremberg, Pohl
wrote:
Whenever these productions [affidavits] were not enough to produce
the result sought by the prosecuting authorities, they marched out
their so-called 'star witnesses,' or rather, paid witnesses ... A
whole string of these shady, wretched characters played their
contemptible game at Nuremberg. They included high government
officials, generals and intellectuals as well as prisoners, mental
defectives and real hardened criminals ... During the WVHA trial [of
Pohl] a certain Otto appeared from a mental institution as a "star
witness." His previous lifestyle would have been considered exemplary
by any hardened criminal. The same is true of prosecution witness
Krusial who presented the most spectacular fairy tales to the court
under oath, which were naturally believed ...
Pohl also protested that defense attorneys were not allowed free
access to the German wartime documents, which the prosecution was able
to find and use without hindrance:
For almost two years the prosecution authorities could make
whatever use they wanted of the many crates of confiscated documentary
and archival material they had at their disposal. But the same access
right was refused to the German defendants despite their repeated
efforts ... This meant a tremendous or even complete paralysis and
hindrance of the defense cases for the accused, for those crates also
contained the exonerating material that the prosecution authorities
were able to keep from being presented to the court. And that is
called "proper" procedure.
Because Pohl held the rank of general in the German armed forces, his
treatment by the British and Americans was illegal according to the
international agreements on the treatment of prisoners of war.
"As result of the brutal physical mistreatment in Nenndorf and my
treatment in Nuremberg, I was emotionally a completely broken man," he
wrote. "I was 54 years old. For 33 years I had served by country
without dishonor, and I was unconscious of any crime."
Pohl summed up the character of the postwar trials of German leaders:
It was obvious during the Dachau trials, and it also came out
unmistakably and only poorly disguised during the Nuremberg trials,
that the prosecution authorities, among whom Jews predominated, were
driven by blind hatred and obvious lust for revenge. Their goal was
not the search for truth but rather the annihilation of as many
adversaries as possible.
To an old friend Pohl wrote: "As one of the senior SS leaders I had
never expected to be left unmolested. No more, however, did I expect a
death sentence. It is a sentence of retribution."92
He was hanged on June 7, 1951. In his final plea to the Nuremberg
court, Pohl expressed his faith that one day blind hysteria would give
way to just understanding:93
After distance and time have clarified all events and when passion has
ceased and when hatred and revenge have stilled their hunger, then
these many millions of decent Germans who have sacrificed their lives
for their fatherland will not be denied their share of sympathy which
today is being attributed to the victims of the concentration camps,
although a large number of them owe their fate not to political,
racial or religious characteristics, but to their criminal past.
Extermination denied
Along with the millions of people around the world who avidly followed
the Nuremberg proceedings by radio and newspaper, the defendants
themselves were shocked by the evidence presented to substantiate the
extermination charge. Above all, the testimony of Auschwitz commandant
Rudolf Höss and Einsatzgruppen commander Otto Ohlendorf made a deep
impression. Contrary to what is often claimed or insinuated, however,
the Nuremberg Tribunal defendants declared that they did not know of
any extermination program during the war.94 These men were, in a
sense, the first "Holocaust revisionists."
The main Nuremberg defendant, Hermann Göring, who had been Hitler's
second-in-command and designated successor during most of the Third
Reich years, vehemently denied knowing of any extermination program
during the war. "The first time I learned of these terrible
exterminations," he exclaimed at one point, "was right here in
Nuremberg." The German policy had been to expel the Jews, not kill
them, he explained, and added that, to the best of his knowledge,
Hitler did not know of any extermination policy either.95
During a rare unguarded break between court sessions, fellow defendant
Hans Fritzsche privately asked Göring about the truth of the
extermination charge. The former Reichsmarschall solemnly assured
Fritzsche that the accusation was not true. The Allied evidence for
the charge, he insisted, was inaccurate or incomplete and totally
contradicted everything he knew about the matter. In any case, Göring
added, if there had been any mass killings, they certainly were not
ordered by Hitler.96
General Alfred Jodl, chief of the operations staff of the Armed Forces
High Command, and probably Hitler's closest military adviser, gave
similar testimony to the Tribunal. Responding to a direct question
about this matter, he said:97
I can only say, fully conscious of my responsibility, that I never
heard, either by hint or by written or spoken words, of an
extermination of Jews ... I never had any private information on the
extermination of the Jews. On my word, as sure as I am sitting here, I
heard all these things for the first time after the end of the war.
Hans Frank, the wartime governor of German-ruled Poland, testified
that during the war he had heard only rumors and foreign reports of
mass killings of Jews. He asked other officials, including Hitler,
about these stories and was repeatedly assured that they were false.98
Frank's testimony is particularly noteworthy because if millions of
Jews had actually been exterminated in Germanoccupied Poland, as
alleged, hardly anyone would have been in a better position to know
about it. During the course of the trial, Frank was overcome by a deep
sense of Christian repentance. His psychological state was such that
if he had known about an extermination program, he would have said so.
At one point during the proceedings, Frank was asked by his attorney,
"Did you ever take part in any way in the annihilation of Jews?" His
reply reflects his emotional state at the time:99
I say yes, and the reason why I say yes is because, under the
impression of these five months of the proceedings, and especially
under the impression of the testimony of the witness [former Auschwitz
commandant] Höss, I cannot answer to my conscience to shift the
responsibility for this solely on these low-level people. I never
built a Jewish extermination camp or helped to bring one into
existence. But if Adolf Hitler personally shifted this terrible
responsibility onto his people, than it also applies to me. After all,
we carried on this struggle against Jewry for years ... And therefore
I have the duty to answer your question in this sense and in this
context with yes. A thousand years will pass and this guilt of Germany
will not be erased.
These words, and especially the final sentence, have often been quoted
to give the impression that the defendants themselves admitted their
guilt and acknowledged the existence of a wartime German policy to
exterminate the Jews.100 Less well-known are Frank's words during his
final address to the Tribunal:101
In the witness stand I said that a thousand years would not be enough
to erase the guilt of our nation because of Hitler's behavior in this
war. [However,] not only the behavior of our wartime enemies against
our people and our soldiers, which has been carefully kept out of
these proceedings, but also the enormous mass crimes of the most
terrible kind against Germans, which I have only now learned about,
especially in East Prussia, Silesia, Pomerania and in the Sudetenland,
which have been and are still being carried out by Russians, Poles and
Czechs, have now already completely canceled out any possible guilt of
our people. Who will ever judge these crimes against the German
people?
Ernst Kaltenbrunner, wartime head of the powerful Reich Security Main
Office (RSHA), was certain that he would soon be put to death
regardless of the evidence presented to the Tribunal: "The colonel in
charge of the London prison that I was in has told me that I would be
hanged in any case, no matter what the outcome would be. Since I am
fully aware of that, all I want to do is to clear up on the
fundamental things that are wrong here." In a question-and-answer
exchange, Kaltenbrunner rejected the charge that he had ordered
gassings:102
Q. Witness after witness, by testimony and affidavit, has said
that the gas chamber killings were done on general or specific orders
of Kaltenbrunner.
A. Show me one of those men or any of those orders. It is utterly
impossible.
Q. Practically all of the orders came through Kaltenbrunner.
A. Entirely impossible.
The case of Albert Speer, one-time Hitler confidant and wartime
Armaments Minister, deserves special mention. His Nuremberg defense
strategy was unique and also rather successful because he did not
hang. While maintaining that he personally knew nothing of an
extermination program during the war, he nevertheless declared himself
morally culpable for having worked so diligently for a regime he
belatedly came to regard as evil. After serving a twenty-year sentence
in Spandau prison, the "repentant Nazi" was "rehabilitated" by the
mass media for his somewhat subtle but fervent condemnation of the
Hitler regime. His contrite memoir, published in the US as Inside the
Third Reich, was highly acclaimed and sold very profitably in Europe
and America.
Until his death in 1981, Speer steadfastly insisted that he did not
know of any extermination program or gassings during the war. His
position was remarkable because, if a wartime policy to exterminate
the Jews had actually existed, almost no one would have been in a
better position to have known about it. As Reich Armaments Minister,
Speer was responsible for the continental mobilization of all
available resources, including critically needed Jewish workers. That
millions of Jews could have been transported across Europe and killed
at a wartime industrial center as important as Auschwitz, and
elsewhere, without Speer's knowledge simply defies belief.103
During the Nuremberg "Wilhelmstrasse" trial, the chief of the Reich
Chancellery from 1933 to 1945, Hans Lammers, was asked if he "was
still of the opinion that no program for exterminating the Jews was
ever set up." He answered: "Yes, I am of that opinion. At least the
program never came to my attention. The program cannot have been set
up." Lammers, who was Hitler's closest legal adviser, went on the
explain: "I did not know of any mass killings and, of the cases I
heard about, the reports were allegations, rumors ... The fact that
individual cases occurred here and there, the shooting of Jews in
wartime in some towns or other, that I read something about that and
heard something about that, that is very easily possible."104
Such testimony by the men who were most familiar with Germany's
overall Jewish policy is routinely dismissed as brazen lying. But the
categorical and self-consistent nature of this testimony, sometimes by
men who knew that death soon awaited them, suggests a core of truth.
On the other hand, to accept the Holocaust extermination story means
giving greater credibility to the most fantastic and often
demonstrably false testimonies by very questionable witnesses.
Other Postwar Trials
During the decades since Nuremberg, many individuals have been tried
in (West) Germany and other countries for alleged wartime
participation in exterminating the Jews. Rarely, if ever, has a
defendant ever substantially challenged the Holocaust story. The
accused invariably adopted the defense strategy successfully used by
Speer at Nuremberg: He accepted the extermination story but denied or
minimized his own personal involvement. To deny an extermination
program in trials that were organized on the working assumption that
such a program existed would have been judicial suicide.
These trials are comparable in some respects to the Soviet show trials
of 1936-1938. The defendants in the well-publicized Moscow trials
never denied the existence of vast criminal conspiracies involving
major Soviet personalities who supposedly plotted the most horrible
crimes in league with hostile foreign powers. Instead, the accused
pleaded that he was not personally guilty, or that his guilt was
minimal and that he had truly repented. (Remarkably, even foreign
observers who should have known better, such as US Ambassador in
Moscow Joseph Davies, were inclined to accept the Stalinist show
trials as genuine and essentially just.)105
Comparisons have also been drawn between the "Holocaust" trials and
the witchcraft trials of past centuries. Those accused of witchcraft
never denied the existence or diabolical power of witches. Instead
they insisted that they were not personally guilty of the charges
against them. Nuremberg defendant Hans Fritzsche, who had been one of
Germany's most prominent and effective wartime radio news
commentators, summed up the problem: "If someone accuses me of killing
someone, than I can prove the contrary. But if I am accused of being
the devil, there's no way to disprove that, because it can't be
done."106
One of the most important of the post-Nuremberg "Holocaust" trials was
the 1963-1965 Frankfurt "Auschwitz" trial of 22 former Auschwitz SS
men. The lengthy case received worldwide media coverage and assumed
something of the character of a show trial.107 Deciding the guilt or
innocence of the defendants was "extraordinarily difficult," the
judges declared in their verdict, because of the very inconclusive
nature of the evidence. "We have no absolute evidence for the
individual killings. We have only the witness testimonies." The judges
acknowledged that "the possibilities of verifying the witness
declarations were very limited." The judges further emphasized "this
weakness of witness testimony" by citing the case of a Buchenwald
official convicted of murdering an inmate who later turned up alive.
108
This situation was embarrassingly underscored during the trial when
former inmate Rudolf Kauer suddenly repudiated earlier statements
about his one-time SS masters. In pre-trial interrogation he claimed
to have seen defendant Wilhelm Boger brutally beat a naked Polish
woman with a horse whip, ripping off one breast and flooding a room
with blood. When asked to repeat his statement in court, Kauer
admitted: "I lied about that. That was just a yarn going around the
camp. I never saw it ..." Another claim that Boger had smashed an
infant's skull against a tree trunk was also not true, he confessed.
Although Boger was not liked, Kauer told the court, he was actually a
just SS man.
Another defendant, Klaus Dylewski, whom Kauer had called "one of the
worse killers" at Auschwitz, was actually "harmless." All of his pre-
trial accusations were lies, Kauer said, calmly adding: "You can
punish me if you want. I am used to that." After the presiding judge
admonished him several times for repudiating his earlier statements,
Kauer replied: "We don't need to lose any more words. It's not worth
it. What I say now is the truth."109
Former Auschwitz camp adjutant and SS Captain Robert Mulka, the main
defendant in the trial, was pronounced guilty of participation in mass
murder and sentenced to 14 years at hard labor, a verdict that many
outsiders considered outrageously lenient. But less than four months
later Mulka was quietly released, an outcome that should astonish only
those not familiar with the nature of such trials.110
Conclusion
Very few of those who glibly refer to "all the Nuremberg evidence" as
proof for the Holocaust extermination story are familiar with either
the real nature of this "evidence" or the character of these trials.
On closer examination, solid documentary or forensic evidence of a
wartime German policy to exterminate Europe's Jews proves to be
elusive. As we have seen, the evidence that has been presented
consists largely of extorted confessions, spurious testimonies, and
fraudulent documents. The postwar Nuremberg trials were politically
motivated proceedings meant more to discredit the leaders of a
defeated regime than to establish truth.
We do not need trials or "confessions" to prove that the Katyn
massacre or the postwar deportation of Germans from eastern and
central Europe actually took place. By comparison, the Holocaust story
does not claim just a few isolated massacres, but a vast extermination
program taking place across the European continent over a three-year
period involving several governments and millions of people. The fact
that the Holocaust story must rely so heavily on highly dubious
testimony evidence and trials staged in a historically unparalleled
atmosphere of hysteria, intimidation and propaganda demonstrates its
inherent weakness.
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