Allies could have saved 4 million Jews, says Bibi

[wm]

This statement given by Hoess to Judge Sehn during the preliminary investigation before his trial (in November 1946 if I remember correctly) is full of contradictions, and is no longer accepted by any competent historian as an accurate account of the events leading to the mass extermination of Jews at Auschwitz. It mixes up events from 1941 and 1942 in a completely illogical way.

It's not a statement, it's his own, an over 200 pages long account he wrote in the Polish prison in 1946.
A criminologist and psychologist, who spent numerous hours talking with Höss, Prof. Stanislaw Batawia wrote:

It is of course possible to call in question the truthfulness of the statements of the Auschwitz camp commandant, as they could be verified in part only. But both the investigators and all those who came into contact with Höss thought that his statements were generally true, as opposed to the statements of the majority of the interrogated war criminals. The frankness with which he discussed many matters of essential importance was often regarded, I think wrongly, as cynicism, typical of a man devoid of all moral sense.

It''s obvious that Höss made numerous small factual errors, typical for a person writing from memory, especially such a overworked and stressed eager beaver like him. Such mistakes are the norm, not exception in most ww2 accounts.

He didn't' try to avoid responsibility. He actually wrote he drew himself the first plans of the Auschwitz gas chambers well before homicidal use of Zyklon-B was proposed.
People make mistakes frequently, trying to remember past but not of this kind. It's illogical to assume he confused trail of events so badly. He writes again again: it happened, I did it before a suitable kind of gas was discovered. So it had to be in 1941.

As to the order for the killing of Soviet POWs, it's ridiculous - Himmler wouldn't waste so much time on such a trivial matter.

[michael mills]

It's not a statement, it's his own, an over 200 pages long account he wrote in the Polish prison in 1946.

wm, I am afraid your lack of detailed knowledge has let you down in this case.

The published version of Hoess's autobiography consists of two parts, the text of the autobiography and a series of appendices which were NOT written by Hoess but are the record of statements made by Hoess in answer to questions by Judge Sehn. The difference between the two parts of the published version are explained by its original editor, the German historian Martin Broszat.

After his arrival in Poland, Hoess was subjected to pre-trial interrogations by Judge Sehn in November 1946. The interrogations were made by Sehn asking a number of questions, to which Hoess gave answers; in the written record, Sehn's questions were omitted, giving the appearance of an uninterrupted narrative by Hoess. That is the reason why Hoess's narrative in the appendices seems to jump suddenly from one topic to another, and could also have led to some of the inconsistencies in the time-line he gives.

The above method of recording interrogations of Germans was not specific to Polish authorities; most records of Allied interrogations were formed in that way.

Once the pre-trial investigations were completed, Hoess was left alone until his trial in March 1947, and it was during that period that he wrote his autobiography, which forms the bulk of the published version.

The excerpts that you posted are all from the first appendix in the published version, which is given the title "The Final Solution of the Jewish Question at KL Auschwitz" (whether by Hoess, by Judge Sehn, or only by the editor is not clear). They therefore represent answers given to Judge Sehn's questions.

If you had a detailed knowledge of the course of events at Auschwitz from mid-1941, you would be able to tell straightaway that the timeline given in that appendix is simply impossible.

The claim that Hoess designed t5he gas chambers at Auschwitz is totally without foundation. He only ran the camp, and played no role in designed it or any of the buildings in it, and particularly not in Birkenau. All the buildings were designed by the staff of the SS Construction Office; their blueprints have in fact been preserved and are published in the book by Van Pelt which I referred to.

On the basis of the preserved designs of Crematoria II and III, Van Pelt, copying Pressac, is able to demonstrate that those buildings were designed initially as corpse-disposal facilities only, not a gas-chambers; the underground cellars were designed for corpse-storage only. The buildings were subsequently converted into combined killing and corpse-disposal facilities by remodelling one of the underground cellars as a gas-chamber, by installing a device for introducing the Zyklon-B.

Thus, when the initial experiments with Zyklon-B as a killing agent were performed in about September 1941, the gas-chambers were not even yet designed.

[michael mills]

(For example of early plans, see: http://hetireland.org/app/uploads/2015/ ... yout-1.pdf)

Sid, you do not appear to have read your own source carefully enough. This is what it says:

Thee SS expected many deaths from endemic and epidemic disease in Birkenau, with its targeted population of 125,000 Soviet POWs, and in the main camp located in a suburb of Auschwitz called Zasole, where 30,000 Polish prisoners were to be interned. The existing crematorium capacity of 340 corpses per day was deemed insufficient. The SS commissioned (fall 1941) a very large crematorium that could manage by means of five triple-muffle ovens no fewer than 1,440 corpses per day. The initial design was worked out between the chief of the Auschwitz Zentralbauleitung Karl Bischoff, Topf engineer Kurt Prüfer, and architect Georg Werkmann, who was employed in SS headquarters in Berlin. The main features of their plan were a large incineration hall with five triple-muffle ovens above ground, and two large corpse cellars (Leichen Keller or L-Keller) below ground (shown in the drawing). The smaller of these morgues was to be equipped with a special ventilation system with ducts located in the walls. The main access to the morgues was by means of a corpse-slide—a feature that had become standard in concentration camp underground morgues. A corpse elevator was to provide the connection between the basement morgues and the ground-floor incineration room.

The crematorium was to be built in the main camp, right next to the existing crematorium, but to service both the main camp and Birkenau. The staggering cremation capacity of 1,440 corpses per day was considered appropriate to cope with the anticipated “normal” mortality of the 155,000 slave laborers to be worked to death. Given the rapidity with which the 9,890 Soviet prisoners of war who had been brought to Auschwitz since October had died, the dimensions of the crematorium did not seem out of place. When this crematorium, and one that was a mirror image of it, were completed, at a different location, each contained a homicidal gas chamber in the smaller of the two morgues. But nothing in the original conceptual sketch of the crematorium nor in the worked-out blueprints, which date from January 1942, suggest the intention to equip this building (or its mirror-image copy) with a gas chamber. In both cases the gas chamber was, quite literally, an afterthought.


...........................................................................................................................................

The original design of the crematorium, sketched in October 1941, shown in the exhibition, did not show gas chambers. In the fall of 1942, when the two crematoria were under construction, the design team moved to include homicidal gas chambers[/b]. Architect Walther Dejaco transformed the basement plan, adding new stairs that allowed for easy access below, and removing the corpse-slide. He changed the larger of the two underground morgues into an undressing room, and the smaller, which already was planned to have a powerful ventilation system in its wall and ceiling, into a gas chamber which could hold up to 2,000 victims at one time. He reversed the swing of the chamber door to open outwards, not inwards, to allow access to the room after a gassing. He also equipped each gas chamber with four so-called gas columns. These wire mesh columns allowed not only for the easy introduction of the cyanidesoaked calcium sulfate pellets into the crowded room, but also for the quick removal of the still degassing pellets when all the victims had died twenty minutes later. This removal was crucial for a smooth continuous operation of the killing installations: because Zyklon-B had been developed as a pest-killer, it had been designed to degas the cyanide for a 24-hour period. Lice nits were difficult to kill, and needed a long exposure to the cyanide. Human beings died quickly, and with transports arriving day after day, the SS insisted on being able to enter the gas chambers shortly after all the victims had died. The architects must have reasoned that removal of the still degassing pellets would facilitate the cleaning operation: once the pellets were removed and the ventilators turned on, the gas was cleared from the room in half an hour, allowing for corpse cremation in the fifteen large ovens to begin without delay. In this manner, one “load” of victims could be killed and cremated in a 24-hour period. This streamlined murder system facilitated a regular daily schedule of arrivals, selections, and killings.

The record shows that Crematoria II and III were designed in October 1941 as corpse-disposal facilities only, in the expectation that the POW camp planned to be constructed at Birkenau would have a high death rate from disease. Those plans for those buildings were only changed to incorporate homicidal gas chambers in autumn 1942, when they were already under construction.

[Sid Guttridge]

Hi Michael,

So, even in October 1941 the Germans were planning for a high death rate through disease. This could only occur if the Germans willed it.

Cheers,

Sid.

[wm]

The claim that Hoess designed t5he gas chambers at Auschwitz is totally without foundation. He only ran the camp, and played no role in designed it or any of the buildings in it, and particularly not in Birkenau. All the buildings were designed by the staff of the SS Construction Office; their blueprints have in fact been preserved and are published in the book by Van Pelt which I referred to.

Although he doesn't say there he designed the gas chambers, at all.
He says he drew a detailed location plan and description of the installation, the idea was a gas similar to carbon monoxide (only cheaper) would be used.
A few sketches and raw calculations certainly are not a design.
He sent them to Himmler and never received any acknowledgment or a decision based on his report. Later, he unofficially learned Himmler liked his ideas.
And adds it was in the preliminary stages and the starting date wasn't set.

Similarly he says even in November the starting date still wasn't decided, and a suitable gas wasn't discovered.

He writes a lot about the Russian POWs, so it would be hard for him to confuse the two narrations. And he says the POWs problem was solved by his industrial although mentally limited representative Fritzsch by inventing the Zyklon B method.

The first application of homicidal gassing to Jews was at Chelmno, commencing at the very end of 1941 or the beginning of 1942. That killing action was initiated by the Reichsstatthalter of Reichsgau Wartheland, who had asked Himmler and Heydrich for permission to apply Sonderbehandlung (= summary execution without a judicial process) to 100,000 of that territory; ie one-third of the Jewish population of that territory. That killing action therefore was not an extermination but rather a limited cull, designed to reduce overcrowding.

It wasn't a measure to curtail overcrowding, it was an ethnic cleansing of non-Germans. Since 1939 it was usually done by expelling them to the GG. In this regard 100,000 wasn't really any problem. It would increase the population of existing ghettos by a few percent.
More probable is Arthur Greiser, knowing about Himmler's preliminary stages, jumped the queue with "his Jews", volunteered to be the first.

[AJFFM]

Good Evening

Not to be insensitive but it seems that no one considered the reaction of the natives of the countries Bibi blames for not saving the jews.

Antisemitism was already high enough to deny refugees coming into those countries (and these were refugees in the caliber of Einstein and Oppenheimer) and for Western governments to basically bankrupt themselves to make a deal with an already detested government that murdered their sons in the field of battle to hypothetically save the 4 million jews Bibi claim can be saved (which is nonsense, the Einsatzgruppen alone murder over a million and disease and neglect probably killed another 1 million).

The only possible way that Jews (and other people who suffered or would have suffered in WWII and even beyond) is for the French to have pursued the Saar offensive with even more vigour. They didn't and we got WWII.

[wm]

It's frequently alleged it was because antisemitism but actually Western countries limited all immigration, mostly because of their own high unemployment. It wasn't like Polish peasants could emigrate to the US or Britain, but Jews couldn't.
The US, Britain belonged to their citizens, it was their own countries. As it happened they didn't want immigrants and that was all. They didn't need explain themselves then, and don't need now.
Pre-war there were tens of millions (or more likely hundreds of millions) people in need all around the world. Till 1939 at least a few million victims were claimed by the Second Sino-Japanese War (total number of dead probably well above 20 million).

[Guaporense]

Well, they could have saved ALL 6 million if they attacked Germany in 1939 when the Wehrmacht was in Poland, the French army alone was actually more powerful than the German army in September 1939, because most of the German army was still untrained. Plus the other 50 million or so who died in WW2. If the attacked Germany in 1939 the total casualties of WW2 would be perhaps less than 0.1 million.

[michael mills]

So, even in October 1941 the Germans were planning for a high death rate through disease. This could only occur if the Germans willed it.

Sid,

An acceptance and/or expectation of a high death rate through disease is not at all the same thing as a plan to kill all Jews in German-occupied Europe.

Particularly as the prisoner-labourers for whom the Birkenau POW camp was planned, who were to provide a labour force for Himmler's building projects, and who were expected to have a high death necessitating a large crematorium, were not Jews. They were actually Soviet POWs, and Birkenau was planned to hold 150,000 of them, later raised to 250,000.

But the Soviet POWs became unavailable for Himmler's projects, partly because so many died during the winter of 1941-42, and also because Goering, as supreme economic dictator, decreed that the surviving POWs fit for work should be used only in the armaments industry, not in construction projects. It was only then, in January 1942, that Himmler sought to replace the Soviet POWs with German Jews; at the end of that month he issued an order that 150,000 German Jews should be sent to concentration camps, including Auschwitz, instead of into occupied Soviet territory, and employed on important economic tasks.

Thus there was no causal connection between the decision made in October 1941 to build a large crematorium in the planned camp at Birkenau, and the decision made in January 1942 to send 150,000 Jews there for labour.

[michael mills]

A few sketches and raw calculations certainly are not a design.
He sent them to Himmler and never received any acknowledgment or a decision based on his report. Later, he unofficially learned Himmler liked his ideas.
And adds it was in the preliminary stages and the starting date wasn't set.

wm,

No competent historian in the West takes this seriously any more. Maybe some Polish historians did during the Soviet period, but I doubt that they do anymore. Hoess is just too unreliable in relation to the process of introducing gassing with Zyklon-B at Auschwitz; his version does not receive any support from other reliable sources of information about that process.

There is no support whatever for his claim that there was a plan to introduce gassing with carbon monoxide at Auschwitz. Prior to the experiments with the homicidal use of Zyklon-B, the only method used for executing Soviet POWs was shooting, and after the experiments only Zyklon-B was used.

It wasn't a measure to curtail overcrowding, it was an ethnic cleansing of non-Germans. Since 1939 it was usually done by expelling them to the GG. In this regard 100,000 wasn't really any problem. It would increase the population of existing ghettos by a few percent.
More probable is Arthur Greiser, knowing about Himmler's preliminary stages, jumped the queue with "his Jews", volunteered to be the first.

wm, you really need to study the background to Chelmno a bit more. It has been analysed in detail by historians such as Kershaw, and they have concluded that the timeline and the environment show that it was a local initiative by Greiser, not part of a larger extermination plan.

This is the timeline:

August 1941: Hitler decides that the expulsion of the German Jews into conquered Soviet territory should not begin until 1942, after the expected defeat of the Soviet Union.

September 1941: Hitler changes his mind after Rosenberg informs him of the deportation of the Volga Germans. He orders that Jews can be deported to three intermediate destinations, Lodz, Minsk and Riga, pending their final deportation deep into Siberia or central Asia in Spring 1942.

Greiser is informed that he will have to take 20,000 Jews into the Lodz Ghetto. He objects on the grounds that the ghetto is overcrowded and there is no room for them, but his objections are overridden. There is no longer any possibility of sending Jews from Reichsgau Wartheland into the GG, since Goering had banned such deportations in 1940, after protests by Frank, who did not want any more Jews.

October 1941: 20,000 German Jews arrive at Lodz and are housed in the Ghetto, resulting in massive overcrowding.

It is most probably at this time that Greiser asked Himmler and Heydrich for permission yo give Sonderbehandlung to 100,000 Jews of the Warthegau, about one-third of the total. This would apply only to Polish Jews, not the German Jews who had been sent to Lodz.

Greiser applied to Himmler because the latter, as Reichskommissar fuer did Festigung deutschen Volkstums, had been given the power by Hitler to determine whether a particular group of people posed a danger to the German people. He also applied to heydrich because he was the only person who had the authority to permit the Sonderbehandlung of a defined group of people. Himmler had to agree that the 100,000 Jews of the Wartheland did pose a threat to the German people, and Heydrich had to authorise the application of Sonderbehandlung to that group.

Himmler told Greiser to get in touch with the HSSPF Wartheland, Koppe, who would organise the Sonderbehandlung. Koppe gave the job to the Sonderkommando Lange, a group that had been carrying euthanasia of Polish mental patients using gas vans.

November 1941: Lange tours the countryside, looking for a suitable location for a killing centre using his three gas-vans. He eventual;ly decides of Chelmno nad Nerem.

December 1941: Gassing operations begin at Chelmno, with the victims drawn from the smaller ghettos in the wartheland. Some Gypsies are all sent there.

January 1942: Non-working Jews from the Lodz Ghetto begin to be sent to Chelmno. The working Jews are retained, together with Jews selected for labour from the smaller ghettos, who are now concentrated in Lodz Ghetto.

May 1942: For the first time, German Jews held in the Lodz Ghetto are also sent to Chelmno, signalling a change in German Government policy toward them, and probably also a decision to be sort all the Jewish population of German-occupied Europe into those usable for labour and those hot usable, and to kill off the latter so as to avoid having to feed them.

[Sid Guttridge]

Hi Michael,

Yes, "An acceptance and/or expectation of a high death rate through disease is not at all the same thing as a plan to kill all Jews in German-occupied Europe."

However, it is an indication that the Germans had already factored in artificially high death rates created by their policies for those in their custody, of whatever origin. Indeed, there were already artificially high death rates in the Jewish ghettos for this reason.

I think you are being a little too benign towards the Germans in writing, "But the Soviet POWs became unavailable for Himmler's projects, partly because so many died during the winter of 1941-42,....". It would be more accurate to say that "during the winter of 1941-42 the Germans had contrived the deaths of millions of Soviet POWs through a policy of malign neglect." These men didn't just "die" and "become unavailable", they were done to death as a matter of policy by reducing their conditions of existence to the point where starvation and consequent disease mortality killed them by the million. People around them weren't dying for these reasons, so there was no reason why they should either. Be it an act of commission or omission, it remained a willful act on the part of the Germans.

I fully accept that the Nazis' policy of extermination of Europe's Jews came at the end of a continuum of rising persecution, increasing differential death rates and mass execution even before the death camps and their gas chambers came into operation in early 1942 and that there are no clearly defined phase lines. However, the wish must necessarily precede the deed. The deed was prepared for by the creation of Einsatzgruppen before the invasion of the USSR began in June 1941 and mass executions were underway months before the first German defeats began at Rostov and Moscow in December 1941. Therefore the mass killing of Jews began before Germany faced the prospect of defeat. Maybe they were initially "just" killing Jews en masse by conventional means with no end goal in sight, but it evolved seamlessly into a genocidal project early in 1942.

Therefore, I would contend, the mass killing of Jews on a truly genocidal scale was not contingent on Germany failing to win the war and having, in its own mind, no other alternative if it were to be "Jew Free".

Cheers,

Sid.

[michael mills]

Maybe they were initially "just" killing Jews en masse by conventional means with no end goal in sight, but it evolved seamlessly into a genocidal project early in 1942.

Yes, but why did it evolve in that way?

The Einsatzgruppen and other German police troops were killing Jews in occupied Soviet territory but nowhere else. They were not killing the Jews in occupied Poland, or in Western Europe, even though they had already been in control of Poland for close to two years and of Western Europe for one.

That is because the Jews of the Soviet Union were seen differently from the Jews of other German-occupied countries, namely as the "bearers of Bolshevism".

The question is why the killings that were initially limited to a specific group of Jews, the allegedly "Bolshevik Jews", in 1942 began to spread to the rest of the Jewish population of Europe, those who were not connected in any way to the Communist system in the Soviet Union.

Some historians see the prime cause of that the development in the failure of Germany to defeat the Soviet Union in a Blitzkrieg, which was the start of its beginning to lose the war. That interpretation seems to me to be essentially correct, given that the preserved fragments of German planning throughout 1941 point to a policy of mass deportation of Jews into conquered Soviet territory, rather than to one of active mass killing.

[Sid Guttridge]

Hi Michael,

You write "That is because the Jews of the Soviet Union were seen differently from the Jews of other German-occupied countries, namely as the "bearers of Bolshevism".

What about Karl Marx, or Rosa Luxemburg, etc.?

They were German Jews. Surely that community should have been at the top of the Nazis' hit list if their aim was to attack "the bearers of Bolshevism"?

I would suggest that the opening of the Eastern Front just provided the opportunity for the Nazis to begin to allow their worst instincts to have free rein. They were winning, they were against an opponent who they considered was not covered by international conventions covering their other conquests, and they initially had little to fear from international oversight, or retribution. They therefore created the Einsatzgruppen before the invasion, indicating premeditation.

Furthermore, looking at the report on the clearance of Lithuania, I could find no reference to a Bolshevik connection at all. It looks as though the mass killing of Jews was, from the start of Barbarossa, a discrete operation in its own right.

Cheers,

Sid.

[michael mills]

Sid, I suggest you have a look at the Situation Report from EG C of 17 September 1941.

It quite clearly states that the main task was the destruction of the "Communist apparatus", and complains that that task would not be achieved by concentrating on the easier task of killing Jews, since it had discovered that the Jews were not the only "bearers of Bolshevism".

Clearly the Einsatzgruppen commanders had started killing Jews in the belief by doing so they were destroying Bolshevism, but at least one of them (Rasch, the commander of EG C) had realised that that belief was mistaken, since the supporters of the Bolshevik system were drawn from all Soviet nationalities.

By the way, the German National Socialists were not the only people who believed that the Bolshevik regime in the Soviet Union was a Jewish creation. That was a wide-spread belief among European conservatives, including Churchill, who wrote a newspaper article in 1920 about "Jewish Bolshevism".

[Sid Guttridge]

Hi Michael,

If, as you say, "Clearly the Einsatzgruppen commanders had started killing Jews in the belief by doing so they were destroying Bolshevism", why did the report on the clearance of Lithuania seem make no reference to Bolshevism at all? It was all about the disposal of the Jews.

We seem to be looking at two overlapping but distinct operations conducted by the same organizations.

Just because Churchill may once have written something doesn't make it true, or even relevant here. It is undoubtedly true that Jewish intellectuals had a disproportional share in the development of Communist ideology and sometimes in its application, but this doesn't make the ideology "Jewish".

If I opine that the grass is green, this doesn't make the proposition "Siddish", not least because far more people who are not Sid are very likely to hold the same opinion!

Cheers,

Sid.