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Europa - MARCH OF THE TITANS Chapter Sixty Three The Third Reich
Yet despite all the intense scrutiny and historical evaluation, Hitler and the Third Reich remain one of the most difficult historical areas with which to come to grips. The reason for this is that Hitler still has a massive influence on everyday politics and life at the end of the 20th century, and it is difficult to find any source which has an objective view of the state created by the Nazis from 1933 to 1945 in Germany. In fact, a large amount of what has been written about Hitler and Nazi Germany has been particularly subject to the pressure of political correctness: a good example is the story of 1936 Olympics and the Black American athlete Jesse Owens. The 1936 Olympics The story most repeated about Hitler and the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin, which were unquestionably put on as a political showcase for Nazi Germany, is that Hitler refused to shake the hand of the American Black athlete Jesse Owens after the latter had won a race. This myth is extremely widespread: the Encarta Encyclopedia, issued by Microsoft (1998 edition) states the following in its entry under Jesse Owens: "Owens, Jesse (1913-80), one of the greatest track-and-field athletes of all time . . . A member of the U.S. track team in the 1936 Olympic Games, held in Berlin, Owens won four gold medals. He won the 100-m dash in 10.3 sec, equaling the Olympic record; set a new Olympic and world record of 20.7 sec in the 200-m dash; and won the running broad jump with a leap of 26 ft 5I in., setting a new Olympic record. He was also a member of the U.S. 400-m relay team that year, which set a new Olympic and world record of 39.8 sec. Despite Owens' outstanding athletic performance, German leader Adolf Hitler refused to acknowledge his Olympic victories because Owens was black. Owens went on to play an active role in youth athletic programs and later established his own public relations firm. His autobiography, The Jesse Owens Story, was published in 1970." "Owens, Jesse," Microsoft« Encarta« 98 Encyclopedia. (r) 1993-1997 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved." In reality what happened was that Hitler personally attended the first day of the track and field competition on 2 August 1936, and did personally congratulate the German athlete Hans Woellke, who became the first German to win a gold medal in the Olympics since 1896. Throughout the rest of the day, Hitler continued to receive Olympic champions, German and non German in his VIP box. The next day, 3 August, the chairman of the International Olympic Committee, Comte Baillet-Latour approached Hitler early in the morning and told the German leader that he had violated Olympic protocol by having winners paraded to his box. Hitler apologized and gave an undertaking that he would from then on refrain from publicly congratulating any winners, German or otherwise. During this day, did Owens win his gold medals - and in line with the Olympic Committee's ruling, Hitler did not shake his hand, or anybody else's for that matter, at the games again. It is therefore utterly false to claim that Hitler deliberately chose to ignore Owens. In fact, in the very autobiography that the Encarta Encyclopedia extract above refers to, The Jesse Owens Story, Owens himself recounted how Hitler had stood up and waved to him: "When I passed the Chancellor he arose, waved his hand at me, and I waved back at him. I think the writers showed bad taste in criticizing the man of the hour in Germany." Another common story about the 1936 Olynpic games is that Owens' victory "disproved the Nazi master race theory" - in fact the Olympic games as a whole were won by the German team with 89 medals, compared to the 56 medals won by the second placed USA team. In what was to become an act of extreme irony, the American president of the time, Franklin D. Roosevelt, then involved in an election and concerned about the reaction in the USA's southern states, refused to see Owens at the White House: Owens was later to remark that it was Roosevelt, not Hitler, who snubbed him. This is a good example of one of the more outstanding distortions which have sprung up around Nazi Germany, all as a result of a political agenda linked to Nazi Anti-Jewishness. It is also true that it is the victors' prerogative to write the historical account of events: this too has served to cloud the issue of the Third Reich and to make it into the political hot potato that it remains over fifty years after it vanished.
The 1936 Berlin Olympics. Because they were the first political Olympic games, there are a huge number of distortions about the event. One of the hidden facts was the large degree of European support for Hitler: here the French Olympic team enter the stadium in Berlin, giving the Nazi salute while marching behind their country's flag. Democracy Suppressed A trademark characteristic of Hitler and the Nazi Party - they never made any secret of it - was their abhorrence of democracy. Firmly believing in the leadership principle, where one responsible leader took the responsibility for the major decisions, as soon as the Nazis came to power they started with a program of entrenching themselves in power to the exclusion of other parties and opposition movements. This anti-democratic movement extended past the political front: freedom of the press and eventually freedom of speech was also suspended. Although these were reversals of the democratic process, Germany was not alone in this: indeed, even at the end of the 20th century, still only one country on earth - the United States of America - guarantees its citizens total freedom of speech: every single other country on earth has one or another form of restriction on free speech, most notably in the area of race relations, where all European countries have made it a criminal offense to discuss racially related topics which are openly debated in America. Hitler Elected to Office It was thus ironic that Hitler came to power by being voted into office, and not through a coup (although he tried that early in his career in 1923; he failed and served nine months in prison as a result). In the election of March 1933, the Nazi party received the single largest share of the vote, giving them 44 per cent of the seats in the German parliament. This in itself was not an outright majority, but when the smaller nationalist and right wing parties were added to the Nazi total, Hitler in effect had 52% of the popular vote behind him. These smaller parties were to later of their own free will merge with the Nazi Party. Fifty two percent of the popular vote is a total that most modern politicians would regard as an overwhelming majority: most Western European governments come to power with far less, usually around 30 to 40 per cent of the vote. Once in power, the Nazis then combined their mastery of propaganda with an extended program of political and social reform. Within three years, this had persuaded the vast majority of Germans to vote for Hitler. Upon taking office in 1933, Hitler made a public speech asking the Germans for four years in office, after which he would hold a referendum to test the popularity of his government. This referendum was duly held with the simple question " Do you approve of the National Socialist Government or not" being printed on the ballot papers. The result even surprised Hitler: a staggering 44,461,278 "yes" votes, or 98.8 per cent of the qualified voter total of 45,453,691 was recorded. "No" votes amounted to a paltry 540,211 total. (Baynes, Hitler's Speeches, 1922-1939, Vol. 2 Royal Institute of International Affairs, London). Even taking into account that some people might have been too frightened to express opposition, this still indicates a level of support which would be unobtainable by any politician in any modern democracy.
Adolf Hitler, a Nordic racial type with slight Alpine ancestry. The Waffen SS Hitler was not only popular in Germany: many Europeans of other nationalities openly supported the Nazi ideology and volunteered, either as workers or as military servicemen and women, to actively assist the German war effort. The most striking example of this popularity came with the emergence of the first pan-European army, the Waffen-SS. The SS, or Schutzstaffel (defense echelons), had started as a small bodyguard unit for Hitler's personal protection: it grew into the ideological army of the Nazi Party, eventually forming a state within the state, with its own officers and infrastructure. The SS developed three distinct branches: the Gestapo, or political police; the Hitler bodyguard unit; and eventually their own army, called the Waffen-SS ("fighting SS"). The Waffen SS became, ironically enough, the best known SS division, even though it was the last to be created, and often the Waffen SS is confused with the Gestapo, who administered the concentration camps and were completely separate to the Waffen-SS. The Waffen-SS was an entirely voluntary, ideological army. Because of its voluntary nature, it developed a unique spirit amongst its members. In the ordinary German army, the Wehrmacht, soldiers were under strict orders to keep their trunks containing their personal possessions locked at all times to prevent theft. In the Waffen-SS all personal trunks were open at all times by order: no Waffen-SS man was expected to steal from another Waffen-SS man. This rule was easily enforced after one famous incident: two Waffen-SS men were caught stealing from a fellow soldiers trunk: they were both shot, buried without gravestones and the entire regiment then marched over their graves in formation. There was never again a single incident of theft in the whole Waffen-SS. The Waffen-SS was also the foremost indicator of the popularity of Nazism beyond the borders of Germany: it is a little known fact that of the one million men who served in the Waffen-SS during the course of the war, 60 per cent - 600,000 men - were volunteers from countries outside of Germany. Ethnic Germans were in fact a minority of the Waffen-SS, a fact often forgotten. Non-German volunteers came from the Netherlands, Belgium, Finland, France, Denmark, Norway, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, the Ukraine, Byelorussia, Spain and even a very small group of British volunteers, known as the Legion of St. George. The foreign Waffen-SS units were all deployed on the Eastern Front for two reasons: firstly they had specifically volunteered to fight Communism; and secondly so that they would never be asked to fight fellow countrymen in their native countries. All but a few thousand of the 20,000 French Waffen-SS volunteers, organized into a division called Legion Charlemagne, were killed in the Battle of Berlin in 1945.
French Waffen-SS volunteers of the Legion Charlemagne in Smolensk, Soviet Union, on the Eastern Front, Note their French flag arm flash. Finally thousands of Russians volunteered for service with the German army: in 1944 they were organized into a separate unit under a former Soviet Army general, Vlassov, who had been taken prisoner by the Germans very early in the war. Vlassov and his Russian army fought bitterly until the end, and when all was lost he and thousands of his soldiers fled into the West to surrender to the Americans and British rather than face capture by the Soviets. His hope was misplaced: in an operation codenamed Keelhaul, Vlassov and around 20,000 of his soldiers were then handed over to the Soviets by the Western allies: unsurprisingly, they were never heard of again. Internal Policies Hitler's personal popularity remained very high for almost the entire duration of the war, and serves as the single most important reason why Germans fought to the bitter end without large scale mutiny, as had happened in the First World War. This was astonishing in itself: but even more amazing when it is considered that the Nazi state became ever more authoritarian in nature. It was not long before the Communist Party had been outlawed: Germany quickly became a one party state and all other parties were eventually outlawed. Germans were given the right to vote every now and then in referendums on set issues only: in each and every case they returned over 98 per cent endorsements for whatever the government had done. Literature and art deemed to be undesirable was placed on a banned index: this automatically included any works by Jews, but also many Non-Jews. The famous book burning incident occurred only once: after that, books deemed undesirable were simply not printed in Germany any more. Economic Reforms On all fronts the German state was revolutionized: with one of the most significant being with the economy. When Hitler came to power in 1933, 30 per cent of the working population was unemployed: by 1938 Germany had a labor shortage. In this economic recovery Hitler hit upon something which helped to arouse the everlasting hatred of the international banking community: instead of basing Germany's recovery on enormous loans from foreign and local banks, Hitler based the German economy on a barter system, by which he could get much of what he needed by exchanging German surplus for the surplus of other countries - in common language, by swapping. The next radical change Hitler brought about was to take the right to print money away from private banking institutions - which he viewed as Jewish - and restored the sole right to print money to the German state itself (it is interesting to compare the contemporary systems in both Britain and America, where consortiums of private bankers - the Federal Reserve in America and the Bank of England - print the money and then "sell" it to the governments, incurring the massive national debts of these countries). Freed of the peculiar and complicated system of instant national debt through the issuance of their own money, the German economy took off like a rocket. Hitler also abandoned the Gold Standard as a means of weighting the Reichsmark: money in Hitler's Germany was not based on gold but on the capacity of the German people to produce goods. Hitler said in 1937: "We were not foolish enough to try to make a currency coverage of gold of which we had none, but for every mark that was issued we required the equivalent of a mark's worth of work done or goods produced. . . .we laugh at the time our national financiers held the view that the value of a currency is regulated by the gold and securities lying in the vaults of a state bank." (CC Veith, Citadels of Chaos, Meador, 1949.) Workers' Rights Labor Unions were dissolved and reformed under the authority of the state controlled Labor Front. The right of workers to strike and of management to lock workers out were both forbidden, and the state actively intervened in labor disputes. The unemployment problem was tackled by the creation of great building projects, most notably Hitler's pet project, the Autobahns. The standard of living increased dramatically, with workers for the first time being able to travel abroad in state sponsored holidays through the "Strength through Joy" program. Children were obligated to serve in the Hitler Youth or its female equivalent as a form of national service: the meetings of these youth organizations were timed to be on Sundays at exactly the times that the main churches held their services. Soon the pews began to empty of young people who preferred to go camping or playing sport rather than sitting in church. Nazi Atomic Science Another common myth about Nazi Germany is that the country was not able to build an atomic bomb of its own because it rejected the 'Jewish science" of Albert Einstein and other Jewish scientists. This has however been proven to be untrue with the 1999 release of previously top secret files on Nazi Germany's race to build an atomic bomb. Among the materials now available to the general public in the Munich state museum, are research notes by famous German physicists who took part in the program, such as Werner Heisenberg and Otto Hahn, as well as notebooks, photos and correspondence between scientists and Nazi authorities. The documents show that German research into the atomic bomb was parallel with efforts in the United States, but that the Third Reich lacked materials to build one only because of the Allied bombing campaign. A November 1945 report by two U.S. investigators, six months after the German defeat in World War II, says ``only the lack of plutonium'' kept Adolf Hitler from building an atomic bomb. (Nazi Atom Bomb Files To Be Opened, Associated Press, January 1999). If the Allied bombing campaign had been any less severe, there can be no doubt that Nazi Germany would have been able to build an atomic bomb as well - which may well have changed the course of the war. Racial Laws In addition to the political reforms which proved to be so popular, (even the undemocratic ones), the Nazi government also implemented a number of far reaching racial laws. These laws covered a huge number of areas: from eugenics (the basis of which had been laid in America, not Germany, as outlined in an earlier chapter); prohibition of mixed marriages between Germans, Jews and Nonwhites; to anti-smoking laws. Sterilization Law On 14 July 1934 the German government passed the law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring, also known as the Sterilization Law. In terms of this law an individual could be sterilized if, in the opinion of specially established courts, that person suffered from any genetic diseases, identified as feeblemindedness, schizophrenia, insanity, genetic epilepsy, Huntington's chorea, genetic blindness or deafness, or severe alcoholism (interestingly enough, it was only in the early 1990's that American scientists "rediscovered" the genetic link to alcoholism). This law, for which Nazi Germany became infamous, was however by no means the first such law: in 1928 the Swiss canton of Waadt had passed a law in terms of which the mentally ill could be sterilized; in 1929 Denmark had passed similar sterilization legislation; Norway passed sterilization laws in 1934; followed by Sweden in 1935; Finland (1935); Estonia (1936) and Iceland (1938). Other states that passed sterilization laws included Mexico, Cuba, Latvia, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Lithuania, Latvia, and Hungary. In 1907 the American state of Indiana had passed a sterilization law; by 1930 a further 28 American states and one Canadian province had followed suit, resulting in the sterilization of some 15,000 persons before 1930. By 1939 more than 30,000 people in 29 American states had been sterilized. (Racial Hygiene, Medicine under the Nazis, Robert N. Proctor, Harvard University Press, 1988).
"We do not stand alone" - Nazi propaganda justifying the 1933 sterilization law, shows a German couple surrounded by the flags of nations which already had identical laws. Neues Volk, 1936. Nazi Eugenics The German eugenicist movement was directed primarily against Germans, not Jews. German medical research held that degenerate Whites posed a major threat to German society because of their propensity to greater reproductive levels: in this view, the Nazis were certainly not alone. In 1930, the women's supplement to the Social Democratic Party's newspaper, Vorwaarts, criticized the 1929 Danish sterilization law for not allowing the compulsory sterilization of "inferiors." In 1931 even the German Communist Party expressed itself in support of sterilization of psychiatric patients under certain conditions.(Racial Hygiene, Medicine under the Nazis, Robert N. Proctor, Harvard University Press, 1988). As a result of the German Sterilization law, by 1945 somewhere between 350,000 and 400,000 people had been sterilized in that country by the end of the war in 1945 - none of them Jews and with the only Nonwhites being 500 children born of sexual relationships between German women and Black French soldiers who had been used to occupy the Rhineland area after World War One.
Nazi eugenics was primarily concerned with German Whites, not other races. The word "Untermensch" (or sub-man) was originally used to refer to degenerate Whites, not other races. In this illustration from the 1937 publication Volk in Gefahr (A People in Danger), the problem of criminal Whites is addressed so: "The Threat of the Underman. It looks like this: Male criminals had an average of 4.9 children, criminal marriage, 4.4 children, parents of slow learners, 3.5 children, a German family 2.2 children, and a marriage from the educated circles, 1.9 children." Mother's Cross Imitating ancient Greek and Roman attempts to encourage population growth, the German government rewarded those families with large numbers of children: a special Mother's Cross was struck, given in bronze to German women who had four children, silver for six children and gold for eight. Hundreds of thousands of these medals were given out before the war ended. Financial payments and tax concessions were also offered for large numbers of children. A combination of these incentives, the abolition of abortions (except in cases of the mentally ill) and the expansion of the borders of Germany eventually caused an increase (over and above what would have been the case had Hitler not come to power) in the number of children born in Germany during the Third Reich era of just over three million. The Nuremberg Laws In September 1935 the German government passed the Reich Citizenship Law which effectively limited citizenship of Germany to only those of "German and related blood who through their behavior make it evident that they are willing and able faithfully to serve the German people and nation." Jews and other non Germans were reclassified as aliens and denied German citizenship. The Blood Protection Law, proclaimed on the same day, forbade all sexual relations between Germans and non Germans, based on citizenship. This effectively forbade marriages between Germans, Jews and Nonwhites alike. To address the issue of already existing marriages and children, the law defined a Jew as a person who had two (out of the four) Jewish grandparents - less than that and the person was classed as a German, and allowed to marry other Germans - a Nazi concession to the fact that many European Jews were to all practical purposes European in racial make-up. In fact, the Blood Protection Law specifically forbade such "one quarter Jews" from marrying other "one quarter Jews" - this was done to promote the further dissolution of Jewish genes, conversely to prevent the strengthening of any Jewish gene pool in Germany which might result from such unions. Contrary to propaganda surrounding the Third Reich, many of these one quarter Jews served the new German government faithfully, serving in all areas of the Reich's administration, including in the armed forces, without persecution of any sort.
The Nuremberg laws had strict genetic rules as to who was a Jew and who was not: a person was only classified as Jewish if they had more than two Jewish grandparents. This chart, issued by the Reich Health Office in 1936, is an overview or "admissibility of marriage between Aryans and non-Aryans." The white circles represent "pure Germans", the circles with black indicate the proportion of Jewish blood. Allowable (zulassig) was a marriage between full Aryan and a one-quarter Jew; not allowed (verboten) was a marriage between a one quarter Jew and a three quarters Jew - an interesting example of how the laws actually sought to dissipate the Jews into Germany. The third and last racial law passed by the German government was the Law for the Protection of the Genetic Health of the German People, passed in October 1935. This law required couples wishing to marry to submit themselves to a medical examination before marrying to see if any genetically undesirable traits might be passed on to children born of such a union: the law forbade marriage between individuals suffering from venereal disease, feeble mindedness, epilepsy, or any of the diseases encompassed in the Sterilization Law. Those who were classed as bearing such genetically undesirable traits, were only allowed to marry if they agreed to be sterilized, so that no children would be born of the marriage. Euthanasia In 1938 a German father by the name of Knauer wrote to Hitler asking that his child, born blind, retarded and with one arm and one leg, be granted a mercy death, or euthanasia. The case so moved Hitler that he ordered his personal physician to establish if the claims were true, and if so, that the child be granted euthanasia. This Knauer case was to the be the start of a legal euthanasia program, the first in Western civilization since the times of the Spartans and early Romans, who had also engaged in mercy killings of retarded and deformed children. In all, some 5,000 retarded and deformed children were granted euthanasia by the German government before the end of the war - with each case being individually reviewed by a specially appointed committee. The policy of administering euthanasia to retarded and deformed children was then also extended to incurably insane adults. Thanks to the German habit of keeping meticulous records, the exact number of incurably insane adults granted euthanasia is known: 70,273. Although the adult euthanasia project was conducted in secret, it was impossible to conceal such things from the German public, and by 1941 news of the mercy killings had been leaked. Growing public pressure on the Nazi government forced the abandonment of the program in that year. Medical Advances An overview of Nazi medical advances makes interesting reading for the modern health conscious person: Nazi scientists were amongst the first in the world to warn of the dangers of radiation; asbestos, lead, cadmium and mercury (all of which have only re-emerged in the health field many years after the end of the Second World War, when much German medical research was dismissed as Nazi hallucinations). In addition to this, German medical journals of the 1930s and 1940s were the first in the world to warn against the ill effects of artificial food colorants and preservatives in food and drinks, and stressed the need for a return to "organic" or natural ingredients in pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, fertilizers and foods. Vivisection Outlawed The very first law passed by the Nazi controlled parliament of the territory of East Prussia in 1933, under the premiership of Herman Goering, was the abolition of vivisection, or experimentation on animals. This law also included a ban on the Jewish ritual whereby meat is made kosher: the ritual includes the slitting of an animal's throat and letting it bleed to death while a rabbi prays over the dying animal: this was rejected by the Nazis as a barbaric way of slaughtering animals which inflicted unnecessary pain. Eventually the anti-vivisection law was extended throughout Germany. Nazi Germany also forbid the use of the pesticide DDT on the grounds that it was a health hazard (it would be decades before this policy was adopted by other countries) and instead used a German produced version known as Cyclone-B. Hitler Backed Anti-Smoking Drive Nazi Germany was also the first country in the world to actively launch anti-smoking campaigns: in July 1939 the Bureau against the Dangers of Alcohol and Tobacco was founded, with the Reich Health Office sponsoring cash prizes for research into the effects of nicotine upon human chromosomes. In June 1942 the Institute For The Struggle Against Tobacco was founded at the University of Jena in Saxony, funded personally by Hitler who gave 100,000 Reichmarks of his own personal money to the project. By 1944, Germany had also become the first country in the world to ban smoking on public transport. Alcohol In 1937 the Nazis enacted laws prohibiting the sale of alcohol to minors and enacted stiff penalties for drunken-driving, introducing the first blood tests for automobile drivers suspected of being under the influence while behind the steering wheel. As part of the state's efforts to control drinking, the SS undertook the promotion of mineral water. The SS's business interests in mineral water extended to the point where by 1945 it controlled 75 per cent of all Germany's mineral water production. 1933: Jewish Declaration of War on Germany The very first declaration of war which led up the Second World War was in fact made on 23 March 1933, when a meeting of Jewish leaders from around the world formally and publicly declared war on the Hitler government, which at that stage was only two months old and had passed none of its racial laws, which would only come two years later. The Jewish declaration of war was carried publicly by a large number of newspapers, including the Daily Express in London, which ran a bold full page headline "Judea Declares War on Germany" on its edition of 24 March 1933. Calling on all "Jews of the world to unite" the meeting of Jewish leaders resolved to launch a series of mass demonstrations and also to institute a worldwide boycott of German goods, presumably through their international business connections.
On 24 March 1933, newspapers across the world carried the news that the leaders of the world's Jews had declared war on Germany: the first declaration of the Second World War, and an event which goes a long way to explaining why Britain and France declared war on Germany in 1939 for invading Poland, but not on the Soviet Union for doing exactly the same thing. The Second World War broke against Germany, not the Soviet Union, primarily because of Jewish pressure to destroy the anti-Jewish Germany; rather than a genuine concern for the Poles. Unwittingly, this public declaration of war on Germany only served to inflame anti-Jewish feeling in Germany: the German government barred Jews from holding public office or "positions of influence" which were defined as university lecturing posts, journalists or newspaper editors, amongst others. This declaration of war also provided the legal basis upon which Germany would later justify its internment of large numbers of Jews inside Germany: America had after all, interned its' Japanese, as had Canada, and Britain had interned all its Italians. If Jews had declared themselves at war with Germany, the Nazis argued, then it would not be unreasonable to treat them as a hostile group and intern them as well. Despite this, not all Jews were interned, even right through the war. So it was that when the Soviet Army occupied Berlin in 1945, a fully functioning Jewish community a few thousand strong, complete with synagogue, was still in existence in the German capital. The Concentration Camps Nazi Germany is however most known for its concentration camps, and particularly those in which large numbers of emaciated and dead prisoners were discovered at the end of the war, and which have become synonymous with any image of that era. The first concentration camps were set up soon after the Nazis came to power, with the best known being Dachau, which is situated to the north of Munich. These camps were in fact large prisons, and the prisoners were sentenced by civil courts to fixed terms of imprisonment which depended upon the crime committed. These crimes could be overtly political - membership or activism in the banned Communist Party was common - but was also extended to all other crimes, including conventional criminal activities such as theft or robbery. Eventually homosexuals were also interned: although this would only occur quite a while later. It was in fact a former Communist, who had been sentenced to imprisonment in the Dachau concentration camp for several months, and then released, who planted a bomb at the Munich beer cellar in November 1939. The bomb very nearly killed Hitler (he left early: if he had kept to the program for the speech that night, he would most certainly have been killed). The fact that the perpetrator was a former camp inmate, released after the war had started, is however the point: it showed that sentencing to the concentration camps was not necessarily a permanent condition and that it was not Jews alone who were sent to the camps. That imprisonment at the camps was not necessarily permanent, has been proven beyond question by the uncovering in the Moscow State archives by the British Historian David Irving of a release note for a prisoner from Auschwitz itself in 1944 - supposedly at the height of that camp's gas chamber operations!
A copy of a prisoner's release note from the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp, dated 1944. The release note, discovered in the Moscow State Archives, gives the prisoner's name and date of release - 8 June 1944. The belief that imprisonment at Auschwitz meant gassing is belied by the release of prisoners from this camp and by the fact that many thousands of inmates did in fact survive. It was however so that a large number of Communists who were interned were Jews: however, by the time that the Second World War broke out in September 1939, the majority of Germany's Jews - some 319,900 out of a total population of 500,000 - had emigrated from Germany for good, leaving only some 180,000 Jews in Germany itself. (Racial Hygiene, Medicine Under the Nazis, Robert N. Proctor, Harvard University press, 1988). As the existence of the Jewish community in Berlin in 1945 showed, not even all of these had been interned during the war.
Conditions in the Nazi camps worsened during the war, particularly when the large scale bombing of Germany started destroying supply lines in late 1944 and early 1945. Nightmarish scenes such as these awaited Allied troops when they seized the camp of Bergen Belsen in northern Germany. These corpses were not killed by gas chambers: they all show the unmistakable signs of having died of typhus, with the characteristic thinness being caused by the dehydration which accompanies that sickness. Although it was initially claimed that there were gas chambers in all the camps, it is now claimed that the only gas chamber victims were in the camps in German occupied Poland. Nazi-Zionist Alliance The outbreak of the Second World War did not initially see an increase in the number of concentration camps, although their number had been steadily growing since 1933. However, the closing of the borders following the declaration of war meant that the steady flow of Jews out of German territory was cut off. Soon the German victories in Poland and in the West had added significantly to the total number of Jews under German territorial control. Initially the Nazi plan with its Jews was open ended: vague projects had been started, all varying from proposing the resettlement of Jews in Rhodesia, Madagascar or Palestine. In this way one of the more remarkable alliances of the war was struck up between Rheinard Heydrich, the SS general who would later be assassinated in Prague, and German Jewish Zionists. Heydrich, in co-operation with the Zionists, actually set up farms in Czechoslovakia for Jews wishing to emigrate to Palestine, to learn basic agricultural skills: several hundred of these Nazi trained Jewish farmers were then settled in Palestine during the war, entering that land through Turkey. However, all these plans were impractical while the war continued to rage: eventually a conference of top Nazi leaders was called in January 1942 at a villa in the suburb of Wannsee outside Berlin. Here the leadership of the Reich would decide what to do with the Jews under German control. The Wannsee Conference Although much has been made of the Wannsee conference and its detailed minutes, a reading of the proceedings does not make particularly gripping reading: nowhere is it said that Jews were to be put to death, and only talks about interning Jews and resettling them in the protectorate of Poland to be used as laborers until the war was over, when another plan could be worked out. Contemporary historians have taken the word "resettlement" as used in the Wannsee minutes to be a codeword for extermination - there is however no evidence to support this interpretation. The Einsatzgruppen In the interim, Germany had invaded the Soviet Union and had conquered huge areas of that country. The SS, entrusted with the political mission of the Nazi Party, formed what were called Einsatzgruppen - "Special Action Groups" to go in behind the German front-line with the specific instructions to execute, by shooting, all Communist functionaries, partisans or other "politically unreliable" elements behind the front-line. The Einsatzgruppen carried out their task with Germanic efficiency, sending back regular reports to Berlin (which survived the war) detailing in specific detail how many people they had killed in each time period between reports. Due to the fact that a large number of Communist functionaries were Jews, this group made up a large number, but not always a majority, of the people eliminated by the Einsatzgruppen, who were always careful to specify exactly how many of who they had killed in each particular operation. The battle with Communist partisans was sometimes particularly fierce: more than one Einsatzgruppen commander was killed in combat. Eventually at least 200,000 people were killed by the Einsatzgruppen before their efforts were abandoned in the wake of the German retreat from the occupied areas. The Concentration Camps in Poland In the part of Poland set up as German protectorate, called the Government General, six new concentration camps were built, with the first starting to function in late 1942, and the last being closed by August 1944. The six camps became known by the towns to which they were nearest situated: Chelmno (also known as Kulmhof), Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdanek (also known as Lublin), and Auschwitz. The Wannsee conference had specifically stated that the camps were to be used as forced labor units - and indeed Auschwitz was one of the biggest industrial sites in all of Poland. Situated next to the concentration camp was a number of huge industrial complexes, all relying on concentration camp forced labor: these included Agfa, Bayer Pharmaceuticals and Siemens factories, as well as the famous Buna rubber plant, which produced much of Germany's supplies of rubber, and also which innovated the oil from coal process. The new camps in Poland also differed substantially from the old camps in Germany itself in another way: the vast majority of prisoners were Jews who had been interned and deported from Germany and occupied Europe with trial. In this way the Polish Jewish doctor, Ludwik Flek was deported to Auschwitz where the SS put him to work in a laboratory manufacturing vaccines: Flek survived the war despite his incarceration in Auschwitz (Racial Hygiene, Medicine Under the Nazis, Robert N. Proctor, Harvard University Press. p. 283). The Six Million Despite the presence of massive industrial operations and the short time that the camps were in existence (less than two years all told) it is traditionally claimed that some six million Jews were killed in gas chambers at these six camps in Poland. (The other concentration camps in Germany itself, such as Dachau or Bergen Belsen, did not, it is claimed, have gas chambers). The figure of six million was arrived at on the basis of two sources: first on the evidence of a former SS officer, Wilhelm Hottl, who before the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials stated that Adolf Eichman, head of the Jewish Division of the Gestapo, had told him that 4 million Jews had died in concentration camps and 2 million "elsewhere". (Trial of the Major War Criminals before the International Military Tribunal, Nuremberg, Germany, Vol. XXI, Doc, 2738-PS, p. 85). The other source for this is a statement taken from the former commandant of the Auschwitz camp, Rudolf Hoess, who in a written statement declared that four million Jews had been killed at Auschwitz alone. Hoess was hanged at Auschwitz by the Soviets immediately after making this statement. This figure is however universally acknowledged as being too high, especially as Hoess was relieved of his command of Auschwitz in 1943, long before the camp was closed down, and as such would not have been able to tell with any certainty how many Jews passed through its gates by August 1944. There is therefore considerable confusion over the exact number of Jewish deaths in the six camps. The complete lack of German documentation on the issue has not helped: unlike the Einsatzgruppen, where meticulous record was kept of all killings carried out, the Germans kept no records of any mass murders in any of the camps. Although documentation for every other aspect of Auschwitz survived, including such petty details as how much dog food was purchased for the guard dog detachment, no documents have been found relating to gas chambers or numbers of prisoners killed. Even the original German architectural building plans for Auschwitz have survived, and are on display at the camp to this day. There are no gas chambers on these original plans - and given the specialist construction which would be required to build chambers capable of killing thousands of people at a time (as is claimed) it seems extremely unlikely that the plans in question would not have shown these structures. It is claimed that the rooms marked as mortuaries (in German, "leichenkellars") on the building plans were used as gas chambers - a claim which is highly dubious, given the technical demands which an airtight chamber being used for mass gassings, would require.
The original German architectural building plans for a crematorium at Auschwitz, on public display at the camp today. According to this original plan, there is no gas chamber. It is claimed that the underground structures, marked very clearly as mortuaries ("leichenkellers") were used as gas chambers - something which would technically be almost impossible. A detail of the plan above appears below, showing the mortuary in question.
It is therefore worth noting that there is absolutely no technical physical evidence to support the claim that gas chambers, designed for the killing of people, existed at any German concentration camp. This is particularly so with regard to the oft claimed story of gas chambers disguised as showers. What did exist were small delousing chambers - tiny air tight rooms - no larger than large cupboards - in which clothes were regularly deloused with the Zyklon-B chemical. These delousing chambers were used in all the Nazi camps - including those in Germany itself, with the result that Zyklon-B was distributed to all camps, in Poland and in Germany alike. There is however no evidence to show that these tiny delousing chambers were used to kill anybody, never mind six million Jews. Surviving bills of lading for Zyklon-B, which are available for public inspection at the National Archives in the United States, show very clearly that Zyklon-B was shipped to all camps, and not just to the alleged gas chamber camps. The bills of lading in the US National Archives run from 16 February to 31 May 1944 and reveal that the cases of cyanide crystals (Zyklon) are numbered in sequence (Nos. 50,053 to 50,210), each shipment consisted of thirteen cases, totaling 195 kg; and identical shipments -- six each -- went to Auschwitz and Oranienburg concentration camps. It has never been claimed that there was a homicidal gas chamber at Oranienburg camp, which is situated in Germany itself. It is clear that Zyklon-B was being used a delousing agent at Oranienburg, and no-one has ever claimed the contrary. It should be borne in mind that although there is no direct physical evidence to support the charge that six million Jews were gassed in the camps, this does not mean that the camps themselves did not exist, nor that Jews were rounded up and deported, nor that many died through illness, starvation or conventional judicial executions. Jewish Scholars Make Lower Estimates At the end of the war it was claimed that the Dachau and Bergen-Belsen camps in Germany (from where the horrific pictures of scores of dead bodies emanated) had operating gas chambers; and that in camps in Poland, Jews had been killed in "steam chambers" or had been skinned to make lamp shades, gloves and their body fat made into soap. All of these horror stories have in the subsequent years been refuted by all serious scholars, including the leading Jewish scholar on the issue, Raul Hilberg (who in 1998 was a Professor of Political Science at the University of Vermont, and author of the world famous book "The Destruction of the European Jews"). According to Hilberg, as quoted in an article written by himself in the 1998 Microsoft Encarta Encyclopedia under the heading Holocaust, the six camps, their means of killing and their total number of victims was as follows: "Chelmno had gas vans, and its death toll was 150,000; Belzec had carbon monoxide gas chambers in which 600,000 Jews were killed; Sobibor's gas chambers accounted for 250,000 dead; Treblinka's for 700,000 to 800,000; At Majdanek, some 50,000 were gassed or shot; and in Auschwitz, the Jewish dead totaled more than 1 million." ("Holocaust," Microsoft "Encarta" 98 Encyclopedia. 1993-1997 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.)" This only accounts for 2.8 million dead: (as the other camps did not have gas chambers); if Hilberg's figures are correct, then the number of six million dead drops, by Jewish estimates, by half to just over 3 million, if the verified Einsatzgruppen victims are included. Hilberg offers no explanation for the fact that the Nuremberg trials (both Hottl and Hoess) claimed figures twice as large (or in Auschwitz's case, four times as large); more disturbingly, no attempt is ever made to correct the still quoted figure of six million which is so popular with the media to this day, and which has been repeated so often that it is an article of faith for many. Hilberg, who has spent 36 years studying the Holocaust and the subsequent Nuremberg trials, has himself often changed his estimates: in 1985 he told a Canadian court that that five million Jews were killed during the war - substantially up on his 1998 estimate of 2.8 million. (Scientific evidence of Holocaust missing, The Sault Star Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, January 18, 1985). Revisionist Historians and Forensic Investigation It is this casual juggling with millions of numbers (the figures vary as widely as the sources consulted) and the total lack of any direct physical evidence to support the allegations of mass gassings, which has encouraged the rise of what is known as revisionist holocaust studies. Increasingly large numbers of historians around the world are researching the whole issue of the Nazi concentration camps, some going to great lengths such as taking forensic samples from the remains of the Auschwitz camp and elsewhere - and which have shown that the remains of the mortuaries which are on show as the "gas chambers" at that camp in particular, do not show any traces of Zyklon-B, as would have been the case if they had been used for mass gassings (The Leuchter Report, by Fred Leuchter, Focal Point Publications, London, 1989). Fred Leuchter is an acknowledged American expert who designed and built many of the American judicial gas chambers and execution methods, and whose work is widely available on the Internet). In February 1988 Leuchter traveled to Auschwitz, Poland, and assessed the likelihood that the building-remains there could have functioned as homicidal gas chambers. He took forty samples of the fabric of those structures, for forensic and chemical analysis by reputable American laboratories. These laboratories found no significant residues of hydrogen-cyanide compounds except in one structure, which was commonly agreed to have been the building in which the slave laborers' clothing was fumigated with Zyklon-B. Here there were massive quantities of the poison residue still impregnating the brickwork. (ibid). Independent Forensic Research Confirms Leuchter Report The British historian David Irving is the world's best selling writer and researcher on World War Two: in March 1991 he announced that he had "improperly obtained" a copy of a Polish forensic laboratory report commissioned secretly in February 1990 by Franciszek Piper, the new non-Communist director of the Auschwitz museum and archives. This independent Polish government Polish investigation, which the Auschwitz museum authorities have yet to release, although it is dated 24 September 1990, shows that while there are substantial concentrations (between 9 and 147 micrograms per 100g) of cyanide residues in ten samples taken from the walls of the rooms and chambers where cyanide gas was used for disinfecting the slave-laborers' clothing, there are none whatever in ten samples taken from rooms identified in countless war crimes trials as the lethal gas chambers also using this Zyklon B (hydrogen cyanide) gas, apart from a " vanishingly small" trace in one column in Birkenau, compatible with routine disinfectant operations. Forensic tests on human hair samples were also negative. (David Irving, Focal Point Publications, http://www.fpp.co.uk/docs/ReadersLetters/Times210391.html) Raul Hilberg has also testified in a Canadian court that "no scientific reports prove Jews were exterminated in Nazi gas chambers" (Scientific evidence of Holocaust missing, The Sault Star Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, January 18, 1985). Testifying in the trial of a holocaust revisionist activist, Hilberg added that " . . . German war documents contain no mention of killing Jews . . ." and "there are no autopsy reports indicating a single person died from exposure to poisonous gas in chambers. " (ibid). Gas Chamber on Show at Auschwitz is a Reconstruction, say Modern Camp Administrators The work of revisionist historians has also forced the present day administrators of the Auschwitz camp in Poland to confess that the gas chamber which is shown to visitors is a "reconstruction" built after the war and is not the original building. This stunning confession is however not widely broadcast, and in 1998, visitors to the camp were still not being told of the deception. The fact that the Auschwitz "gas chamber" on show today is a reconstruction has been confirmed by the mainstream French magazine, L'Express, when its writer Eric Conan visited Auschwitz in January 1995. According to L'Express, the gas chamber shown to tourists was built in 1948, three years after the end of the war, by the Polish communists. The Auschwitz staff now admits this. As Conan wrote in L'Express "Tout y est faux"--Everything in it is fake. " (Eric Conan: AUSCHWITZ: La mémoire du mal, L'Express, Paris, Paris, 19 janvier 1995) Eye Witness Accounts Collapse Under Judicial Scrutiny Due to the lack of physical scientific evidence, much of the stories about gas chambers have been built up on eye witness accounts. Under inspection, these eye witness accounts also proven to be unreliable. One of the most famous such eye witnesses is one Rudolf Vrba, who in 1985 was an assistant professor at the Canadian University of British Columbia. Vrba's testimony has formed the basis of most, if not all, descriptions of the gas chambers of Auschwitz, as he was interned at that camp during the war. However, in 1985, during a trial of a holocaust revisionist in Toronto, Vrba testified that his book, I Cannot Forgive, which contained all his eyewitness accounts was "an artistic picture" and the he himself had in fact never witnessed any gassings. (Book 'An Artistic Picture' : Survivor never saw actual gassing deaths, Toronto Star, January 24, 1985 ) Pushed to the point, Vrba admitted that he never witnessed anybody being gassed to death and his book about Auschwitz-Birkenau is only "an artistic picture...not a document for a court." (ibid). Vrba told the trial that his written and pictorial descriptions of the Auschwitz crematoria and gas chambers are based on "what I heard it might look like." He said his 1944 drawings of the "Auschwitz camp layout were inexact." Vrba, who escaped the camp in Poland in 1944 insisted however he had made an accurate ("within 10%") estimates of 1,765,000 mass-murder victims up to that point. While there is not here the space to analyze every single eye witness account, the point has been made. If the chief eye witness himself admits that his own eyewitness accounts are untrue, then, this, combined with the lack of physical evidence, makes a very strong case for completely revising the Nazi death camp story in its totality. In many countries the revisionists and their work has been banned and the authors subjected to imprisonment or fines: in scenes reminiscent of the Nazi, Communist or early Christian suppression of free speech, it has become illegal to even investigate the issue in most Western European countries. This is an indication of the sensitivity of the matter even more than fifty years after the event. Jewish Persecution All the debate aside, no-one would question that the Jews, like everyone else in the Second World War, suffered great misfortune and were in particular subjected to unprecedented persecution and harassment on racial grounds. International Jewry had however publicly and openly declared war on Nazi Germany, and the Nazis therefore regarded Jews as a hostile combatant group of special significance. Jews were prohibited in many German towns completely and barred from many professions, including operating mail order businesses; from offering services at public markets; from taking orders from goods; or from holding "leadership" positions in German factories. In 1938 they were forbidden from changing their names to "German sounding" ones: and later in that same year they were all compelled to add Sarah or Israel as a middle name to their original names (depending upon their sex) so as to distinguish them further. German Jews were prevented from attending public theaters and film shows in 1939: places were denied to them at universities and other places of learning; special taxes were imposed upon them and crude anti-Jewish propaganda was taught and encouraged at lower school level amongst school children. Finally in November 1938 Jews were barred from attending German schools. Then there was always the constant possibility of physical attack: the most serious widespread example of this came in 1938 after a Jew in Paris assassinated a German diplomat in that city: the following night Nazi storm troopers attacked Jews, synagogues and Jewish owned shops all over Germany, killing dozens of Jews and leaving so much broken glass in the streets that the event became known as the Kristalnacht - the Night of Crystals. The German government was however reactive to public opinion. This was vividly illustrated when in 1943 a public demonstration by around 1,000 German Jewish women in central Berlin when their Jewish husbands and teenage sons had been arrested and were about to be deported to labor camps. Bowing to the display of public pressure, the German government released all 1,200 interned Jews and half-Jews: they were never subjected to any form of harassment again (Reuters, 09/09/98 Berlin honors 1943 protest against Holocaust). In September 1998 a plaque was erected in Berlin on the square where the protest took place. All things said, to have been a Jew in Nazi Germany could not have been a pleasant experience: but, as the over seven million individual claims against the post war German state from Jews who suffered as a result of this persecution, (by 1998 the German state had paid out over $50 billion in reparations), certainly far fewer of them died than what is most often claimed. Increasingly however, all the evidence urges a complete revision of this aspect of the history of World War Two. White
History copyright notice: Roy Greenhill's review of 'A HISTORY OF THE WHITE RACE'
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