Witnesses, Gas Chambers and KL Auschwitz: An Overview

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Witnesses, Gas Chambers and KL Auschwitz: An Overview

#1

Post by David Thompson » 28 Jun 2004, 07:49

Eugen Kogon, Hermann Langbein and Adalbert Rueckerl (editors), in their book Nazi Mass Murder: A Documentary History of the Use of Poison Gas, Yale University Press, New Haven (CT): 1993, pp. 139-145, give this concise overview of the testimony and statements regarding the existence of homicidal gas chambers at KL Auschwitz:
Chapter 7 Auschwitz

For about the first two years of its existence, from May 1940 to the spring of 1942, Auschwitz was a concentration camp that resembled many others. The population was almost exclusively Polish. In 1942 a new annex, called Birkenau, or Auschwitz II, was built three kilometers northwest of the original camp, which was thereafter known as Auschwitz I, or the base camp.

The base camp, Auschwitz I, was provided with a crematorium in the course of the first period, before the new camp was built. On 3 September 1941 a trial gassing was conducted in the disciplinary section of the cellar in block 11. Later, one room of the base-camp crematorium was equipped as a gas chamber. After these trials, in 1942, two abandoned thatch-roofed cottages in a wood at Birkenau were transformed into gas chambers; they were known as "the bunkers." In the spring of 1943 construction of four modern crematoria was completed on the site of Birkenau itself.

Each was divided into three parts: a section for the crematory ovens, a place for prospective victims to undress, and a gas chamber. The bunkers were no longer used, except in emergencies.

Victims of the gas chamber were chosen in two ways: by selection when the trains arrived, even before the passengers were registered, and by periodic selections from among the registered inmates of the camps who were no longer able to work.

On 7 October 1944, one of the Birkenau crematoria was put out of commission, through a bloody revolt by the prisoners who made up the special work detail in charge of cleaning and maintenance. Finally, in January 1945, when the Russian army was approaching, all four crematoria were dynamited by members of the SS.

While the Russians were advancing, the commandant of Auschwitz took various measures to destroy the camp documents and all traces of the gas chambers. A number of compromising documents escaped destruction, however. Although there are many gaps in the information they provide, what remains is

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140 Auschwitz

instructive, precise—and damning. But the most incriminating testimony is in the sworn statements made after the war by former members of the SS garrison at Auschwitz.

Testimony of Members of the SS

Rudolf Höss was the camp's first commandant. He was the organizer of the most gigantic of the Nazi concentration camp complexes. It was on his authority that a disinfestant marketed in Germany in the 1920s under the name of Zyklon B was used for the extermination of human beings in the 1940s. As camp commandant he was responsible for having the gas chambers built.

Although he left Auschwitz for a higher post in November 1943, he returned a few months later to manage the most intensive of the extermination operations carried out there—that of the Hungarian Jews.

No one had as complete or as detailed a knowledge of the Auschwitz complex as Rudolf Höss. After the war he became remarkably free with confidences, as if he had fallen prey to obsessions and felt the need to get rid of them.

He was arrested on 11 March 1946 in Schleswig-Holstein, in the British occupation zone, where he was working as a farmhand under the name of Fritz Lang. He was taken to Minden, where on 14 March he made a statement under oath. Then he was transferred to Nuremberg, where the International War Crimes Tribunal was sitting. There, on 5 April, he made a second declaration under oath.1 On 15 April, at the request of the defense, he was questioned during an open session of the tribunal.2

Finally he was transferred to Warsaw, where his trial lasted from 11 March to 2 April 1947. Condemned to death, he was executed by hanging on 16 April, on the site of Auschwitz I. During the judicial investigation that preceded his trial in Poland, he wrote a 228-page autobiography.3 His "testimony" includes not only the statements he made to the British as a suspect, to the International Tribunal at Nuremberg as a witness, and to the Polish judges as a defendant, but also this account of his life, which he wrote on his own initiative.

Among the SS men who served at Auschwitz, the secondmost witness is without doubt SS-Unterscharführer Pery Broad, born in 1921. After having been a member of the Hitlerjugend, the Nazi youth organization, and then a volunteer in the SS, he was transferred to Auschwitz in 1942; he was so near-sighted that he had been exempted from serving at the front. In June he was assigned to the camp Gestapo, officially known as the political division, and there he remained until the camp was liberated in 1945. In the opinion of those who knew him, he was quite intelligent and, in spite of his subordinate rank (equivalent to that of sergeant), one of the best informed of the SS members.

He was captured on 6 May 1945 in the British occupation zone. A Brazilian

Auschwitz 141

citizen who spoke English quite well, he became an interpreter for the British authorities. In 1945 he wrote a long memoir on the Auschwitz camp; on 13 July he turned it over to representatives of the Intelligence Service. In this document he says nothing whatsoever about his own role and blames his colleagues for the atrocities. On 14 December of the same year, at Minden, he made a statement under oath that is a kind of summary of this memoir.4 These documents were not made public until the last quarter of 1947, when an American military tribunal instituted proceedings against the German manufacturers involved in the deliveries of large quantities of Zyklon B to the Auschwitz camp. Thus the 1945 statement was not translated into English until nearly two years later, on 29 September 1947.

Broad made a new deposition on 20 October 1947 at Nuremberg. 5 In all these statements he describes the killing processes used in the Auschwitz gas chambers but denies his own responsibility. Before the end of 1947 he was released by the British. But many years later he was indicted along with other former SS members from Auschwitz and had to defend himself in a trial, held in Frankfurt-am-Main, that lasted from 20 December 1963 to 20 August 1965.6 During the trial his 1945 memoir, in which he accused several of his co-defendants of atrocities, was presented to Broad; he admitted that he was the author, and was apparently surprised and embarrassed by it, since he made no mention of his own complicity in the exterminations. He is a witness very well informed about events at Auschwitz, and his testimony is entirely independent of that of Höss, as he wrote his memoir eight months before Höss was arrested. Neither this memoir nor his 1947 depositions were known to the Polish courts or to Höss.

The third competent, independent witness is Dr. Johann Paul Kremer, a professor of medicine at the University of Münster and an SS-Hauptsturmführer, who was sent as a doctor to Auschwitz and remained there from 29 August to 18 November 1942. During this time he took part in fifteen special operations inflicted on the deportees as soon as they got off the train. These operations consisted of dividing the new arrivals into two groups: those who would be brought into the camp as workers and those who would be taken directly to the gas chambers. Dr. Kremer kept a diary in which he briefly noted all sorts of events, including, among others, the special operations he witnessed. 7

He was arrested in August 1945 by the British authorities, and his diary was confiscated. Then he was put at the disposal of the Polish Supreme Court in Cracow, so that he could be judged in the country where his crimes had been committed. His case was dealt with along with those of thirty-nine other SS members from Auschwitz.8 He was condemned to death in Poland at the end of 1947 but was pardoned in 1958. In 1960 he appeared before a court in Münster as

142 Auschwitz

a defendant; he was sentenced to imprisonment but was immediately pardoned. Then from 1963 to 1965 he appeared as a witness at the Frankfurt trial of twenty SS members who had served at Auschwitz

Dr. Kremer's testimony consists of the notes in his 1942 diary, as well as his explanations to law courts in Cracow, Münster, and Frankfurt. None of his testimony was ever denied by the other Auschwitz SS men who were his co-defendants.

To these three principal witnesses, whose accounts date from before the end of the war (in the case of Dr. Kremer's diary) or from soon afterward, may be added several SS members from Auschwitz who testified during the Frankfurt trial and were defended by twenty-two attorneys. Eight former members of the SS (Richard Böck, Gerhard Hess, K. Hölblinger, Dr. Kremer, Dr. Konrad Morgen, Henry Storch, Franz-Johann Hofmann, and Dr. Gerhard Wiebeck) admitted that they had seen the gas chambers at Birkenau in operation. Of these eight, seven were appearing as witnesses and the eighth, Hofmann, as a defendant. Among the other SS men who testified during the trial, not a single one denied the existence of the gas chambers or their purpose; none expressed the least doubt on the subject.

Richard Baer, the last commandant of Auschwitz I, who died in Frankfurt during the hearings that preceded the Auschwitz trial there, stated on 22 December 1960: "I commanded only Camp I at Auschwitz. I had nothing to do with the camps where the gassings took place. I had no influence over them. It was in Camp II, at Birkenau, that the gassings took place. That camp was not under my authority. " 11

Walter Dejaco worked in the construction department at Auschwitz, which supervised the building of the crematoria at Birkenau. On 3 April 1960 he told the examining magistrate of the court at Reutte that he had learned the purpose of the Birkenau gas chambers only after they began to be used; by that time their activity "had ceased to be a secret all over Upper Silesia. "12

We have the testimony of the forty SS men from Auschwitz who were tried in Poland in 1946 and 1947, and that of Höss as well; we have the testimony of nineteen SS men tried in the Federal Republic of Germany from 1963 to 1965; and we have that of Baer and Dejaco and seven other SS men, questioned as witnesses, who admitted having seen the Birkenau gas chambers functioning. This makes a total of sixty-nine witnesses who had been members of the SS.

Testimony of Former Prisoners

Among the Jews who survived internment at Auschwitz, a few did not have to undergo the first stage of the extermination process applied from the summer of 1942: the selection made when new arrivals got out of the train as soon as it

Auschwitz 143

stopped at the unloading ramp. In the beginning, this ramp was located halfway between the camps of Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II—Birkenau, about a kilometer and a half from Birkenau. Later a new ramp was installed inside the Birkenau camp, near crematoria II and III.

Among the accounts by prisoners who were kept in the camp after this first selection and thus escaped being sent immediately to be gassed, we have chosen the testimony of the rare survivors of the special work details (Sonderkommandos), who were direct witnesses of the gassing operations, and of those other prisoners who, because of the tasks to which they were assigned, were able to learn of the activity of the gas chambers. And among the accounts that fall into these two categories, we have given precedence to those furnished before the end of the war or shortly after, when memories were still fresh. The evidence provided by fifteen men fulfills these criteria:

(1) Five who escaped from Birkenau and whose accounts were published in the United States in November 1944;13

(2) four members of special work details who died at Birkenau but who left written testimony, which they buried near the crematoria where they worked; these documents were unearthed after the war, when the soil of the camp site was systematically searched;14

(3) three former members of special work details who gave evidence to the Polish authorities in 1945: Stanislaw Jankowski (whose real name was Alter Fejnsilber), Szlama Dragon, and Henryk Tauber—all of Polish origin;15 and

(4) two French physicians, Dr. André Lettich and Dr. Sigismund Paul Bendel, who, at different times, cared for members of special work details.16

The first group includes two Slovakian Jews who escaped from Birkenau on 7 April 1944, two others who escaped on 27 May of the same year, and a Polish major, not Jewish, who arrived on 25 March 1942 and escaped in November 1943.

These five escapees managed to send accounts of what they had lived through to the United States. Five months before the end of the war in Europe, they were published by an American government agency, the Executive Office of the War Refugee Board, which omitted the names of the authors "for the time being, in the interest of their own security. "17

One of those who escaped in April 1944 was Rudolf Vrba (still alive—in Canada—in 1993). In 1963 he published a book describing in detail the circumstances of his escape and telling the story of the report he had written soon afterward, which had been published anonymously by the War Refugee Board.18 The other escapee was Fred Wetzler; he described his escape under the pseudonym of Jozef Lanik. The two who escaped in May 1944 were Czeslaw Mordowicz and Arnost Rosin. The name of the Polish major remains unknown.

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Wetzler was deported on 13 April 1942 from Sered, in Slovakia, directly to Auschwitz. Vrba was deported from Novaky, also in Slovakia, to Maidanek and was then transferred on 27 June 1942 to Auschwitz. So both remained at Auschwitz-Birkenau for nearly two years, as did the Polish officer. Mordowicz arrived in Auschwitz on 17 December 1942 with a convoy of Polish Jews; Rosin, also deported from Slovakia, entered the camp on 17 April 1942.

The next four accounts were found during the diggings on the site of Birkenau. The first to be discovered was unearthed in February 1945, shortly after the camps were liberated on 27 January. It is a letter in French, dated 6 November 1944 and addressed by a prisoner named Chaim Herman to his wife and daughter. It was found buried in a bottle near one of the crematoria at Birkenau. The writer, of Polish origin, indicates that he was deported from Drancy, near Paris, on 2 March 1943. After the letter was discovered, his name was found on the list of those deported from Drancy, a transit camp, on that date. At Auschwitz he was put into one of the special work details assigned to the crematoria; his job was to carry corpses.19

On 5 March 1945, on the site of crematorium II at Birkenau, an aluminum bottle was unearthed containing a letter dated 6 September 1944 and signed by Salmen Gradowski. Along with the bottle was a notebook whose pages are covered with the same handwriting. The text stops in the middle of a sentence. Gradowski, too, belonged to one of the special work details.20

A notebook of the kind used by schoolchildren was found on the site of the same crematorium in the summer of 1952. Twenty-one of its pages are filled. The first four are devoted to the Belzec extermination center and the remaining seventeen to Auschwitz. The whole text was written in 1943 and 1944 at Birkenau. The last date that appears in it is 26 November 1944. The author's name is unknown, but it is clear that he had been at Auschwitz for a long time and belonged to a special work detail.21

Finally, on 17 October 1962 a glass jar containing sixty-five sheets of paper covered with writing was found near the ruins of the gas chamber of the same crematorium. Some of the sheets had been so damaged that the writing was difficult to make out. The author was Salmen Lewental, of Polish origin, who arrived at Auschwitz on 10 December 1942. He was immediately assigned to one of the special work details serving bunkers 1 and 2 and the ditches where the corpses were burned.22

The first of the French physicians, Dr. André Lettich, was deported on 25 July 1942, and his job with the special work detail ended before the year was over. He had seen only the Birkenau bunkers. The second, Dr. Sigismund Paul Bendel, was deported on 7 December 1943 and remained longer; he was familiar with the new gas chambers installed earlier that year. When they returned from their deportation, they both related their experiences in accounts published in 1946.23

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One of the three members of special work details who made depositions in Poland in 1945, Stanislaw Jankowski, was deported from France on 27 March 1942. In November of that year he was assigned to the work detail of crematorium I at Auschwitz I and then, in July 1943, to the work detail of crematorium V at Birkenau. His testimony was given on 14 April 1945, three weeks before the end of the war in Europe. Szlama Dragon arrived at Auschwitz on 7 December 1942, and on 10 December he was assigned to the work detail of bunker 1 at Birkenau. He was transferred several times: first to bunker 2 then (in 1943) to crematorium V at Birkenau and later to crematorium IV. But he had also seen crematorium III. He made his statement to the Polish authorities on 10 May 1945. Henryk Tauber arrived in Birkenau on 19 January 1943, and on 4 March he was assigned to the work detail for crematorium II. In July of the same year he was transferred to crematorium IV. He made his deposition to the Polish examining magistrate, Judge Jan Sehn, on 24 May 1945. So we have here three eyewitnesses, each of whom gave testimony without knowing what the others had said, at a time when no trial of former Auschwitz personnel had begun in any country.

Finally, we have the testimony provided by Michal Kula in Cracow on 11 June 1945. Kula, a Polish mechanic, was arrested on 15 August 1940 and registered at Auschwitz the same day. He was given a job in the metal-working shop at Auschwitz I and was later transferred to the one at Auschwitz II. His duties put him in contact with the special work details, as the metal-working shop made tools and carried out repairs for the crematoria.

After the war was over, a number of survivors of the Sonderkommandos provided testimony that confirmed the statements already made by the others. They included Milton Buki, Filip and Dov Päisikovic, Filip Müller, Avram Dragon, Szyja Rosenblum, Dr. Miklos Nyizli, and two other men, named Silberberg and Mandelbaum. Several of them supplied valuable additional details.

Very few of the accounts given by Auschwitz survivors fail to mention the Birkenau gas chambers: their existence was known all over the Auschwitz camps and their annexes.

* * * * *

Notes to Chapter 7: Auschwitz

1 Nuremb. Doc. 3868-PS.

2 Der Prozess gegen die Hauptkriegsverbrecher vor dem Internationalen Gerichtshof Nürnberg (The trial of the principal war criminals before the International Court of Justice at Nuremberg), publication of the secretariate of the Court of Justice (so-called blue volumes), vol. 11, p. 403.

3 Rudolf Höss, Kommandant in Auschwitz (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, 1958). Original manuscript in the state museum at Auschwitz (Oswiecim) State Museum. English translation: Commandant of Auschwitz: The Autobiography of Rudolf Hoess (Cleveland: World, 1959).

4 Nuremb. Doc. 11397-NI.

5 Nuremb. Doc. 11984-NI.

6 GStA Frankfurt a/Main AZ: 4 Ks 2/63; Hermann Langbein, Der Auschwitz Prozess: Eine Dokumentation (Frankfurt a/Main: Europa, 1965), pp. 509ff.

7 J. P. Kremer's diary, original in the Auschwitz State Museum, published in KL Auschwitz in den Augen der SS (Auschwitz in the eyes of the SS) (Auschwitz State Museum, 1973).

8 Supreme Court of the People, Cracow AZ: NTN 5/47, verdict of 22 Dec. 194-

9 StA Munster AZ: 6 Ks 2/60 (ZSL: AZ: 402 AR-Z 37/58); see also n. 6.

10 See n. 6.

11 StA Frankfurt a/Main AZ: 4 Js 444/59, vol. 42, p. 7409 (ZSL: AZ: 402 AR 37/58).

12 Depositions before the investigating judge of the Reute Court. AZ: HZ 58/62 1257/85, in the criminal proceedings against the SS physician Dr. Georg Me: before the Vienna court, AZ:27c Vr. 5193/60.

13 Report of the president of the American Executive Office of the War Refug Board, 1944.

14 Original in the Auschwitz State Museum; published in the special edit

266 Notes to Pages 143–156

Handschriften der Mitglieder des Sonderkommandos (Manuscripts of Sonderkommando members), in the series Hefte von Auschwitz (Auschwitz State Museum), pp. 79f., 118ff., 138ff., 193ff.

15 See n. 14. Case files of Rudolf Höss in Auschwitz State Museum, vol. 1 chaps. 4–28.

16 Paul Bendel, Temoignages sur Auschwitz (Paris: Amicale d'Auschwitz, 1946).

André Lettich, Trente-quatre mois dans les camps de concentration (Thirty-four months in the concentration camps) (Tours: L'Union Coopérative, 1946).

17 See n. 13 and Auschwitz et Birkenau (Paris: Office Francais d'Edition, 1945).

18 R. Vrba and A. Bestic, I Cannot Forgive (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1963).

19 Seen. 14 (pp. 193f.). The letter is written in French. The other notes, written by Sonderkommando members and buried, were in Yiddish.

20 See n. 14 (pp. 79ff.).

21 See n. 14 (pp. 118ff.).

22 See n. 14 (pp. 138ff.).

23 See n. 16.

24 See n. 3 (p. 122).

Dan
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#2

Post by Dan » 28 Jun 2004, 09:51

The most discouraging thing about these sorts of essays is that they seems always to mix fact with fiction. You spend your valuable time reading them then come across mistakes like claiming Tesch and Weinbacher were hung by an American MT while anyone even remotely interested in the subject knows that it was a British MT. I notice they also left out the part about torturing Hoess, which should have been at least mentioned for this essay to be anything other than the typical partisan bullshit than it the stable fare.


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#3

Post by David Thompson » 28 Jun 2004, 10:32

Dan -- You remarked:
The most discouraging thing about these sorts of essays is that they seems always to mix fact with fiction. You spend your valuable time reading them then come across mistakes like claiming Tesch and Weinbacher were hung by an American MT while anyone even remotely interested in the subject knows that it was a British MT.
If you're talking about this sentence:
These documents were not made public until the last quarter of 1947, when an American military tribunal instituted proceedings against the German manufacturers involved in the deliveries of large quantities of Zyklon B to the Auschwitz camp.
I don't think the statement refers to the British Zyklon-B trial, although Pery Broad did testify at the British trial. The sentence in Nazi Mass Murder dates the American military tribunal case to the last quarter of 1947. Tesch and Weinbacher were convicted on 8 Mar 1946, and hanged 16 May 1946 at Hameln, so the dates don't track for that interpretation.

I think the author may be talking about the American trial against the I.G. Farben industrial combine, which owned Degesch. That trial began in August 1947, and lasted until 30 Jul 1948. The defendants were charged with being in the Zyklon-B business, but were acquitted. This quotation is from the judgment in the case, found in vol. 8 of the Nuernberg Military Tribunal proceedings ("the Green set"), pp. 1168-69:
Poison Gas The indictment charges in paragraph 131 that “Poison gases * * * manufactured by Farben and supplied by Farben to officials of the SS, were used in * * * the extermination of enslaved persons in concentration camps throughout Europe.” In substantiation of this charge the prosecution established that Cyclon-B gas [Zyklon B gas] was supplied to concentration camps in large quantities for extermination purposes by Deutsche Gesellschaft fuer Schaedlingsbekaempfung, commonly called Degesch, in which Farben had a 42.5 percent interest, and that said firm had an administrative committee or supervisory board consisting of 11 members, including the defendants Mann, Hoerlein, and Wurster. The connection of the defendants with these transactions will, therefore, bear more careful scrutiny.

Cyclon-B, which had wide use as an insecticide long before the war, was invented by Dr. Walter Heerdt, who appeared before the Tribunal as a witness. The proprietary rights to Cyclon-B belonged to the firm of Deutsche Gold- und-Silberscheideanstalt, commonly called Degussa, but actual manufacture was performed for it by two independent concerns. Degussa was a competitor of Farben's and of the Th. Goldschmidt A. G. in the production and sale of insecticides. Degussa had, for a long time, sold Cyclon-B through the instrumentality of Degesch, which it dominated and controlled. Degussa, Goldschmidt and Farben, therefore, entered into an arrangement with Degesch whereby it became the sales outlet for insecticides and related products for all three concerns. As already pointed out, Farben took a 42.5 percent interest in Degesch. The remaining shares in the concern were divided, 42.5 percent to Degussa and 15 percent to Goldschmidt. The management of Degesch was the direct responsibility of Dr. Gerhard Peters, but the firm had an executive board of 11 members — 5 from the Farben Vorstand (the defendants Mann, Hoerlein, and Wurster, together with Brueggemann, who was severed from this trial, and Weber-Andreae, deceased), 4 from Degussa, 1 from Goldschmidt, and Dr. Heerdt, who was connected with a Degesch subsidiary. The defendant Mann was the chairman of the board. Degesch had originally been organized as an outlet for Degussa prod-

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ucts exclusively. Even after Farben and Goldschmidt acquired participating interests in the firm it continued to maintain its headquarters in the Degussa building. Its office staff was recruited from and compensated on the same basis as Degussa personnel.

The evidence does not warrant the conclusion that the executive board or the defendants Mann, Hoerlein, or Wurster, as members thereof, had any persuasive influence on the management policies of Degesch or any significant knowledge as to the uses to which its production was being put. Meetings of the board were infrequent and the reports submitted to the members thereof were not very enlightening. It seems fair to conclude that the board's principal function was to recognize the financial investments of the participating stockholders and that operational policies were largely left to Dr. Peters, subject only to the general supervision of Degussa’s executives with whom he was in close contact.

The proof is quite convincing that large quantities of Cyclon-B were supplied to the SS by Degesch and that it was used in the mass extermination of inmates of concentration camps, including Auschwitz. But neither the volume of production nor the fact that large shipments were destined to concentration camps would alone be sufficient to lead us to conclude that those who knew of such facts must also have had knowledge of the criminal purposes to which this substance was being put. Any such conclusion is refuted by the well-known need for insecticides wherever large numbers of displaced persons, brought in from widely scattered regions, are confined in congested quarters lacking adequate sanitary facilities.

The testimony of Dr. Peters is highly important on the issue of the defendants’ guilty knowledge. He related the details of a conference that he had in the summer of 1943 with one Gerstein, introduced by Professor Mrugowsky, director of the health institute of the notorious Waffen SS. After swearing Dr. Peters to absolute secrecy under penalty of death, Gerstein revealed the Nazi extermination program which he said emanated from Hitler through Himmler. There followed a long conference concerning the efficacy of different methods of extermination, including the use of Cyclon-B for that purpose. Dr. Peters stated emphatically that he was thereafter extremely careful to observe the admonition to treat this conference as Top Secret, and he negatived the assumption that any of the defendants had any knowledge whatever that an improper use was being made of Cyclon-B. We are of the opinion that the evidence falls short of establishing the guilt of any of the defendants on this aspect of count three.

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#4

Post by Dan » 28 Jun 2004, 11:39

You are right, I'd forgotten about the second case. One wonders why the British case wasn't mentioned in the essay.

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#5

Post by Konrad » 28 Jun 2004, 17:50

The book by Kogon/Rückerl/Langbein et al: Nationalsozialistische Massentötungen duch Giftgas (I have only a copy of the German edition) is well known and sections from it are often quoted by anti-revisionists.

This book cannot be considered un-biased. According to the introduction in the book it was written in response to a dangerous and growing spread of the Holocaust revisionism.

I love the Section II "Enttarnung der verschlüsselten Begriffe" (deciphering of the coded terms) which enlightens the reader to the effect that he can only understand the documents correctly if he interprets them as saying something other than what they actually say.

Once more:

. . .he can only understand the documents correctly if he interprets them as saying something other than what they actually say.

BRUHAHAHA

The section on Auschwitz which is partially quoted by David Thompson was written by George Wellers.

I love this one:
(2) four members of special work details who died at Birkenau but who left written testimony, which they buried near the crematoria where they worked; these documents were unearthed after the war, when the soil of the camp site was systematically searched;14
Right! And at the end of the rainbow is a pot of gold.

BRUHAHAHA

Here is an interesting one:
"I [Baer] commanded only Camp I at Auschwitz. I had nothing to do with the camps where the gassings took place. I had no influence over them. It was in Camp II, at Birkenau, that the gassings took place. That camp was not under my authority. "
Sta Frankfurt/M : 4 Js 444/59, Bd. XXXXII, S. 7409 (ZSL AZ: 402; AR-Z 37/58 )
I wonder how old Wellers got hold of this one. Baer's statements during the pre-trial interrogations were never read during the trial, and the man died before the trial. Access to the files is blocked by the authorities. How do we know that Wellers is telling the truth?
We have the testimony of the forty SS men from Auschwitz who were tried in Poland in 1946 and 1947, and that of Höss as well;
Mr. Wellers seems to be in a privileged position. Can others also look at the files of these trials?
Broad, Kremer, Broad, Kremer, Richard Böck, Gerhard Hess, K. Hölblinger, Dr. Kremer, Dr. Konrad Morgen, Henry Storch, Franz-Johann Hofmann, and Dr. Gerhard Wiebeck
I strongly recommend to read Langbein "Der Auschwitz-Prozeß" about the testimonies of these witnesses. I wonder what these fellows really saw!


Konrad

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#6

Post by David Thompson » 28 Jun 2004, 18:30

Konrad -- You wrote:
I love the Section II "Enttarnung der verschlüsselten Begriffe" (deciphering of the coded terms) which enlightens the reader to the effect that he can only understand the documents correctly if he interprets them as saying something other than what they actually say.

Once more:

. . .he can only understand the documents correctly if he interprets them as saying something other than what they actually say.

BRUHAHAHA
and
I love this one:
(2) four members of special work details who died at Birkenau but who left written testimony, which they buried near the crematoria where they worked; these documents were unearthed after the war, when the soil of the camp site was systematically searched;14

Right! And at the end of the rainbow is a pot of gold.

BRUHAHAHA

This is a research section of the forum, where posters exchange information and conduct fact-based discussions. Your post offers nothing more than a series of derisive opinions or beliefs. Such opinions are classed as "rubbish posts," and are subject to deletion after a warning. This is yours. In addition, your attempt to extract some jeering and tasteless humor out of the subject is misplaced here. Save your "efforts" for a more appreciative audience.

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