Institute for Historical Review

The 'False News' Trial of Ernst Zündel -- 1988

Mark Weber

• Mark Weber was the eighth witness called by the defence. He testified from Tuesday, March 22 to Monday, March 28, 1988.

Weber was born on October 9, 1951 in Portland, Oregon. He graduated in 1976 with a high honours B.A. from Portland State University and in 1977 was awarded an M.A. in Modern European History from Indiana State University. He attended two semesters at the University of Munich and was fluent in the German language. (23 5649, 5749)

From 1978 to 1980, Weber worked as Records Counsel for the Elderly and from 1981 to 1982 worked as a writer for Middle East Perspective, a publication edited and published by Dr. Alfred Lilienthal. From 1983 onward Weber had worked in historical research and translation. (23-5649)

Beginning in 1979, Weber began extensive research into the Holocaust, in the National Archives in Washington, D.C., the Library of Congress, The Institute for Contemporary History in Munich and the Leo Baeck Institute in New York City. Included in his studies were the aerial photographs of Auschwitz taken by the Allies in 1944, the original records of the German Einsatzgruppen, the German Foreign Office files on the so-called "final solution" of the Jewish question in Europe, the records of SS concentration camp administration, the Wannsee Conference protocol and memoranda of the conference, U.S. Army records of Allied atrocities committed against Germans, and all documents and testimony in the 42 volumes of the Nuremberg Tribunal relating to the Jewish question, as well as all volumes of the other official Allied records of the Nuremberg trials relating to wartime policy regarding the Jews. In addition, Weber had carefully studied the works of such writers as Raul Hilberg, Gerald Reitlinger, Leon Poliakov and Lucy Dawidowicz. (23-5650 to 5654, 5660)

Weber was the first person to publish a secret U.S. Army report on conditions in Buchenwald concentration camp written immediately after the capture of the camp by the Americans. This report differed in very, very many substantial ways from the official story about Buchenwald that was being put out by the American government at the time. (23-5654)

Weber was a member of the Editorial Advisory Committee of the Institute for Historical Review, and had published numerous articles, including "Buchenwald: Legend and Reality," "Joseph Sobran and Historical Revisionism," "Rauschning's Phony 'Conversations with Hitler'," "Stalin Prepared for Summer 1941 Attack," "Churchill Wanted To 'Drench' Germany with Poison Gas," "National Holocaust Museum to Cost $100 Million," "Lessons of the Mengele Affair," Roosevelt's 'Secret Map' Speech," "Albert Speer and the 'Holocaust'," "President Roosevelt's Campaign to Incite War in Europe: The Secret Polish Documents" and "The Civil War Concentration Camps." He was currently working on a major study of the Holocaust controversy provisionally entitled The Final Solution: Legend and Reality. (23-5655 to 5658)

Weber's writing was revisionist, in that he generally took issue with the usually accepted story of the extermination of the European Jews. He was among perhaps a dozen writers who took the same position. Weber was familiar with most of their writings. Weber had also met the author of Did Six Million Really Die?, Richard Verrall, in England and discussed the booklet with him. (56-5659, 5661)

On cross-examination by Crown Attorney Pearson on his qualifications as an expert, Weber testified that he first met Ernst Zündel two-and-a-half weeks before, although they had corresponded and been in contact by telephone for some years. (23-5662, 5663)

Weber testified that during his undergraduate studies he had done no research into the Holocaust: "I didn't have any particular interest in it because I accepted it as completely accurate and true." (23-5665)

Weber had published no books; the approximately eighteen articles listed on his curriculum vitae had all been published in the Journal of Historical Review; however, he had published other articles on history in other publications. (23-5665 to 5668)

Weber had been a member of the Editorial Advisory Committee of the Journal of Historical Review since 1984. There were sixteen other members of the Board; of these, James J. Martin was a retired Professor of History who had a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan and had contributed to recent editions of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Dr. Martin, said Weber, was a revisionist and did not accept the generally accepted view of the Holocaust. He believed that there was no German programme to exterminate the Jews in Europe during the war. Weber knew from personal conversations with him that Martin believed that hundreds of thousands of Jews, perhaps millions, had died during the war. (23-5671, 5672)

Other members of the Editorial Committee were Dr. Walter Beveraggi-Allende, a professor of economics in Buenos Aires, who had a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University; Dr. Arthur R. Butz, an Associate Professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Northwestern University; Dr. Robert Faurisson, a Professor of Modern French literature at the University of Lyon in France; Dr. Martin A. Larson who had a Ph.D. in history; Dr. Revilo P. Oliver, a retired professor of classics at the University of Illinois, Dr. Charles E. Weber, who had a Ph.D. in German and taught German for many years at the University of Tulsa in Oklahoma; Dr. Andreas R. Wesserle, who had a Ph.D. in history and taught at Marquette University in Wisconsin; Dr. Wilhelm Stäglich who had a doctorate in law and was a retired judge, and Ditlieb Felderer. (23-5672, 5673)

The founder of the Institute for Historical Review was Willis A. Carto, who was also the founder of Liberty Lobby. (23-5673, 5674)

Weber was generally not paid for his articles; he supported himself through grants of money from the Historical Review Committee, whose officers were Mr. Fritz Berg, Dr. William B. Lindsey and Mr. William Curry. Weber also did freelance writing and research for others. These were people who believed strongly, as Weber did, that the truth about the Holocaust was generally suppressed and was not given a fair hearing. It was not possible, said Weber, to get these writings published in many other journals and the Historical Review Committee was trying to encourage those who did research and writing in this subject. (23-5679 to 5681)

Weber was qualified to give opinion evidence on the question of the Holocaust and the alleged extermination policy of the German government. (23-5684)

Weber testified that he had studied the Einsatzgruppen reports carefully after reading Raul Hilberg's standard work, The Destruction of the European Jews, and realized the importance which Hilberg ascribed to these reports. Weber quickly found that Hilberg, like most of the Holocaust historians, had extracted from these reports very selectively those portions which they could use to substantiate their theses. (23-5685) In Weber's opinion, the Einsatzgruppen reports, viewed as a whole and taken into context, did not substantiate the extermination story. There were several reasons for this: firstly, the reports showed that there was no German policy to exterminate the Jews of Russia as Jews. While the reports showed large numbers of Jews were shot by German security forces, the reports also made it clear that these shootings were carried out for specific security reasons or in reprisals or for other specific reasons, not simply because these people were Jews. Secondly, the reports themselves grossly exaggerated, sometimes by as much as ten times, the number of Jews allegedly killed. These exaggerations, said Weber, were akin to the gross exaggerations during the Vietnam War by the U.S. government of the daily body count of Vietcong dead. Said Weber, "During the Vietnam War, there was repeatedly on television, night after night, wildly exaggerated stories or figures of Vietcong that were dead." (23-5686)

One of the most important witnesses regarding the Einsatzgruppen was a man named Otto Ohlendorf, the commander of Einsatzgruppe D which had operated in southern Russia. Ohlendorf testified for the prosecution at the Nuremberg trial that his unit was responsible for the killing of 90,000 Jews in southern Russia during the year that he was the commander. These figures essentially matched the figures given in the reports of the Einsatzgruppen. Ohlendorf, said Weber, tried very hard to co-operate with the Allies in the hope of trying to save his own skin. To his surprise, however, the Allies put him on trial for his activities in the Einsatzgruppen after he testified for them. During his own trial, Ohlendorf changed his testimony and stated that the figures of Jews killed were greatly exaggerated and that there was no policy to exterminate the Jews simply because they were Jews. He was executed by the Allies. (23-5687 to 5689) The contradictions between Ohlendorf's two testimonies was not widely known. Usually, only the initial Ohlendorf testimony and the figures given therein were quoted. (23-5688)

Weber had examined the latest work of Raul Hilberg, whom Weber described as the most prominent defender of the Holocaust extermination story. Hilberg himself was becoming revisionist, said Weber. In the first edition of his book, The Destruction of the European Jews, Hilberg wrote that there were two orders given by Hitler to exterminate the Jews, the first in the summer of 1941 to exterminate the Russian Jews and, a short time later, another order to exterminate all the Jews of Europe. In the 1985 second edition of the book, however, Hilberg completely rewrote this passage and eliminated any discussion whatsoever of any orders by Hitler. In a public statement made in New York a few years before, Hilberg took the position that there probably never was an order by Hitler to exterminate the Jews but that some kind of extermination programme happened spontaneously. This was a good example of the kind of changes that occurred to the Holocaust story which the public in general was not informed of. (23-5689, 5690)

Another example of the way in which the Holocaust story had changed was the soap story. During the Second World War, Rabbi Stephen Wise, the President of the World Jewish Congress, stated repeatedly that the Germans were manufacturing soap bars from the corpses of Jews. This story was used at Nuremberg and continued to be repeated in the popular press, including a booklet published and distributed by the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai Brith as late as 1987. Yet, pointed out Weber, no reputable historian now accepted the story. Raul Hilberg and other serious historians had abandoned it. (23-5690, 5691)

With respect to the Einsatzgruppen, Weber had studied the work of Reginald Paget, a member of the British House of Commons and a historian. He was the person who investigated the Einsatzgruppen reports in the context of a trial of a German general. Paget found that the Einsatzgruppen figures were enormously exaggerated. Specifically, he investigated the claim that 10,000 Jews were shot at Simferopol in the Crimea in November 1941. He found that instead of 10,000 Jews, probably about 300 persons were shot, most of whom were not Jews. In that particular case, the Einsatzgruppen report figures were exaggerated from 300 persons to 10,000 persons. Paget subsequently concluded that the Einsatzgruppen reports were exaggerated on an order of about ten to one. (23-5691)

Weber agreed that in his book concerning the trial, Paget expressed opinions supporting the 6 million. There were a number of individuals, said Weber, who investigated various aspects of the Holocaust story and concluded that certain parts were not accurate; yet these same individuals would still accept that the overall story was true. (23-5692)

At Nuremberg and in the post-war trials, said Weber, the common defence strategy was to argue that the defendant was not involved in the extermination, not to argue that the extermination itself did not happen. This was done to avoid the almost impossible task of calling into question the entire extermination story which had been held to be true with an almost religious fervour in the United States and western Europe since the end of the war. (23-3693)

Every single defendant at Nuremberg denied there was any programme to exterminate the Jews. Generally, the defendants, the most important of whom was Hermann Göring, were astounded by the kind of testimony and evidence that was presented by men like Otto Ohlendorf. They didn't know about any extermination programme themselves and some of them said, 'Well, perhaps there was one but I don't know about it'. (23-5694)

Hans Frank (the Governor General of German-occupied Poland) strenuously denied that he knew about any extermination programme against the Jews. Weber pointed out that during his testimony, when confronted with the evidence of Ohlendorf and Höss, Frank said that 'a thousand years will pass and Germany's guilt will never pass away'. This quote was repeated endlessly in Holocaust literature, said Weber. But what was forgotten was that at the end of the trial, Frank specifically repudiated this statement because he believed the treatment of the German nation by the Allies after the end of the war offset or was comparable to the treatment that the Germans gave the Jews during the war. (23-5695)

Weber repeated that the Einsatzgruppen reports did not evidence any plan to exterminate the Jews. The Jews were shot for security reasons, as alleged spies, and for reprisals. If a German soldier was shot by a sniper or killed in a village somewhere, the normal policy of the German forces was to shoot hostages or shoot people in the village as a reprisal. This was a very grim policy but a policy which had been carried out by almost all governments faced with any kind of guerrilla or partisan warfare. The United States carried out such a policy in Vietnam and the French in Algeria. (23-5696)

What was important with regard to understanding the German policy in Russia, said Weber, was the whole context of the war at the time and the problems the Germans were facing. When Germany attacked Russia in June of 1941, the Soviet government immediately called upon all citizens of the Soviet Union to carry out a partisan war against the Germans. Jews were especially hostile to the Germans and were involved in partisan warfare more than others. Germany was faced with an enemy that did not operate by the normal rules of warfare. Always in history, said Weber, guerrilla warfare (which was terrorism), was always met by counter- terrorism. An example of that today was the policy of the Israeli government towards the Palestine Liberation Organization. The PLO termed their activities a guerrilla war of freedom; the Israeli government called it terrorism.1 (23-5696)

Weber testified that the Wannsee Conference protocol was the record of a very important meeting held on January 20, 1942 in Berlin. This document was referred to in virtually every important work on the Holocaust. The single surviving copy was not an original but one of sixteen copies originally made. It was not signed or dated. Weber believed it was probably an unauthorized protocol but he could not be absolutely sure. The author of the document was allegedly Adolf Eichmann. Weber accepted the protocol's authenticity but the important revisionist writer, Dr. Wilhelm Stäglich, had called its authenticity into question for the reasons that the document had no date, no signature, no letterhead. There was no record of any other copies existing. (23-5706 to 5708)

The Wannsee Conference protocol itself did not indicate a plan for the extermination of the Jews. Exterminationist historians Martin Broszat and Hans Mommsen now believed that the protocol did not constitute such an order or plan. In Weber's opinion, the protocol was evidence that there was no extermination policy. From a reading of the document in context with other German documents from the time, it was clear that the German policy during the war was to deport the Jews to the east, to the occupied Soviet territories, with the intention of deporting them to some place outside of Europe after the war. (23-5708 to 5711)

Reinhard Heydrich, the chairman of the Wannsee Conference and a man who had a major role in Germany's wartime Jewish policy, gave a speech in Prague to high level German officials in which he said that the Jews of Europe would be put in camps in the occupied Soviet territories and then, after the war, would be taken out of Europe altogether. The private conversations of Hitler himself (recorded in Table Talk) to a circle of close associates in 1942 also showed this to be the German policy. Hitler said that he was absolutely determined to deport the Jews out of Europe to Madagascar or to some other Jewish national state after the war. (23-5711, 5712)

Another important document in this regard was the Luther Memorandum of August 21, 1942. The author, Martin Luther, was the head of Inland II (the domestic office of the German Foreign Office) and had a major role in co-ordinating the deportation of Jews from various countries in Europe. The Foreign Office was involved in the deportations because it had to have permission from foreign governments with which Germany was allied during the war to deport Jews from those countries to the east. So Luther was very much in a position to know what was going on. The memorandum laid out what Germany's wartime policy towards the Jews was, namely, that they were to be deported to the east and kept there until the end of the war when the Jews would be taken out of Europe altogether. This policy was cited in the memorandum and authorized by Hitler himself. (23-5713 to 5717)

Weber pointed out that exterminationist historians, when faced with documents such as this, tried to interpret the document to suit their preconceived notions. Usually the exterminationists, such as Hilberg and Dawidowicz, would allege that when the Germans talked about their policy towards the Jews, they used code words or euphemisms. The idea that the highest officials of the German government would be using code words with each other about a policy they were all aware of and that was supposed to be secret anyway was hard to believe, said Weber. He believed that interpretation was not accurate. Weber pointed out that the post- war testimony of those who were present at the Wannsee Conference was fairly unanimous in saying that the conference was not one held for an extermination programme. (23-5714 to 5718)

Another interesting piece of evidence was that of Heydrich's wife. She was shocked when her husband told her in 1942 that the Germans were going to send all the Jews to Russia. She felt it was a very cruel and harsh thing to do. Heydrich tried to reassure her that the Jews were not going to be killed and that the conditions were not as harsh as many people had been led to believe. He also stated that it was necessary that Europe rid itself of the Jews and that there would be a new beginning for them after the war. The Wannsee Conference protocol used the words bei Freilassung which meant that "upon their release" or "upon their liberation" there would be a new beginning for the Jews. (23-5718)

The German government hoped, after it won the war, to hold a pan-European conference involving even neutral countries like Switzerland, Ireland, Portugal and Spain, for an overall European policy so the Jews could not simply move into another country in Europe after being removed from others. Hitler was adamant on this point. (23-5719, 5720)

Weber first became interested in the Holocaust issue when the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) made public in 1979 the wartime aerial reconnaissance photographs of Auschwitz taken in 1944 and 1945. These photographs were unknown to the public up to that time. The purpose of the overflights was not to record what was going on in Auschwitz I or Birkenau, but what was going on at Monowitz (sometimes called Auschwitz III) which was a major industrial centre the Germans had built up for manufacturing artificial gasoline. (23-5720, 5724)

It surprised Weber that the photographs showed no evidence of an extermination in the very camp which today was considered the most important German extermination centre. Nor were the photographs consistent with the extermination story of Auschwitz as it had been presented for years by the Holocaust historians. For example, it was claimed that the Auschwitz crematories in 1944 were belching smoke constantly as masses of gassed Jews were cremated and that huge piles of corpses were being burned in open funeral pyres. However, there was no indication of this in any of the aerial photographs even though the photographs were taken at random, as far as the Germans were concerned, during precisely the period when it was alleged that the greatest extermination took place at Auschwitz. At Nuremberg, it was claimed that 4 million people were killed at the camp. While the photographs alone did not prove the revisionist viewpoint, they were inconsistent with the Holocaust story. Weber was astounded when Elie Wiesel and others nevertheless seized upon these aerial photographs to claim that the United States government knew that Jews were being exterminated at Auschwitz during the war and complacently refused to do anything about it. Elie Wiesel's words were that the United States shared a historical guilt for allowing the Jews to be exterminated. Weber asked the Director of the Modern Military Branch of the National Archives about this point and he told Weber emphatically that he also disagreed with this interpretation and felt that the photographs were being blatantly misrepresented. (23-5720 to 5724)

Weber met Richard Verrall, the author of Did Six Million Really Die?, in 1977 in England and talked with him about his writing of the booklet. Weber learned that Verrall graduated with high honours from the University of London. (23-5725)

Weber had read Did Six Million Really Die? several times. He believed that the thesis of the book, that there was no German policy or programme to exterminate the Jews of Europe during the Second World War, was accurate notwithstanding that the booklet contained statements that were not completely accurate. Harwood had relied heavily in the booklet on the writings of Paul Rassinier, a French historian who was the pioneer of Holocaust revisionism. Rassinier was a French socialist who had been arrested by the Germans and sent to Dora and Buchenwald concentration camps during the war because he helped Jews in France to escape to Switzerland. He did not have a very pleasant time in the camps, said Weber. When he returned to France at the end of the war, he was given medals by the French government and became a member of the French National Assembly. He was very shocked and distressed, however, about many of the wild and exaggerated stories that were being told in France right after the war about things he had personal knowledge of at Buchenwald and Dora. He later wrote a series of books about his experiences and the entire question of the Jews during the Second World War, including a book on the Adolf Eichmann trial. (23-5727 to 5730) Weber believed that Rassinier's work overall was credible and was especially valuable and reliable when he was talking about his own personal experiences at Buchenwald and Dora. He did not, however, have as much access to information as historians did today. As more and more information became accessible, historians were able to write about the subject with greater and greater accuracy. (23-5731)

Did Six Million Really Die? was published first in England in 1976 to the best of Weber's knowledge. Since the booklet was published, much more information had come to light about the subject that made the case for revisionism much stronger. (23-5732)

Harwood also relied heavily on the booklet The Myth of the Six Million which was published anonymously but was written by an American historian named David Hoggan. Other sources included newspaper articles and secondary sources such as Gerald Reitlinger's The Final Solution. Weber pointed out that historians very often quoted from works of others with whom they might disagree very strongly. Raul Hilberg quoted from Mein Kampf but that didn't mean Hilberg agreed with it. He would quote it to support a submission he wished to make. Often historians took material which was relevant to their particular topic from any number of sources, even those that were hostile to the general thesis of the historical work. (23-5731 to 5733)

Weber returned to the subject of the Einsatzgruppen. There were four Einsatzgruppen altogether with a total number of personnel of about 3,000. The Einsatzgruppen varied in size from about 990 in the largest to 500 in the smallest. Their official title was Task Forces of the Security Police and Security Service. Their purpose was to bring about a 'rough and ready' form of order and security to the occupied Soviet territories behind the areas where the German armies went forward and before the establishment of regular civil administration in the occupied territories. Less than half of the members of the Einsatzgruppen were SS men and a very large percentage were completely non-military personnel including interpreters, secretaries, teletype operators, truck drivers and other various support staff. Weber obtained this information from the Einsatzgruppen reports themselves, published in the official record of the International Military Tribunal. These figures were essentially accepted by all historians no matter what their views might be. (23 5745, 5746)

There were numerous estimates of the numbers of Jews supposedly killed by the Einsatzgruppen, ranging from about 3 million by a historian named Schwarz to 1 million by Gerald Reitlinger. Weber's own opinion was that from 200,000 to 800,000 Jews at the most were shot by the Einsatzgruppen although it was very difficult to say. The total pre-war Jewish population of the occupied Soviet territories was about 4.7 million Jews. The great majority of these Jews fled or were evacuated by the Soviet government in 1941 when the German army moved into the Soviet Union. Based on that, Weber believed that no more than 1 million to 1.5 million Jews came under German control in the occupied territories. Yet it was commonly alleged that 2 million or 3 million Jews were shot by the Einsatzgruppen. (23-5747, 5748)

Paul Blobel, who was the commander of one of the Einsatzkommandos (a sub-unit of the Einsatzgruppen), was put on trial after the war and testified emphatically that the figures of dead given in the Einsatzgruppen reports were grossly exaggerated. Gustav Nosske was another Einsatzkommando leader who was put on trial and testified that the Einsatzgruppen report figures were grossly exaggerated. The fact that the reports were exaggerated, said Weber, was accepted by many historians. These included Gerald Reitlinger, who wrote The Final Solution, the historians Helmut Krausnick and Hans-Heinrich Wilhelm who wrote Die Truppe des Weltanschaungskrieges, William Shirer who wrote The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, British historian Tom Bower and German historian Werner Maser. Even Raul Hilberg, in The Destruction of the European Jews, stated that an affidavit made by Otto Ohlendorf was exaggerated. Weber noted that in October of 1943, Himmler gave a speech in which he complained that 95 out of 100 official reports he received were greatly exaggerated, unreliable or false. (23-5748 to 5756)

Weber had done a comparison of the figures of alleged Jewish dead in the Einsatzgruppen reports with the Korherr report. The Korherr report was an important SS statistical report on the movement and placement of Jews in Europe prepared at the request of Himmler by Richard Korherr, the official statistician with the SS. Korherr referred to about 636,000 Jews in the Soviet areas as being "resettled." This had been interpreted to refer to Jews who were shot by the Einsatzgruppen. In Weber's opinion, that interpretation was not necessarily true at all, but even if it was, the figure of 636,000 was incompatible with the figures given in most standard books about the number of Jews supposedly shot by the Einsatzgruppen, which varied from 1 million to 3 million. (23-5751, 5752)

The best remembered case of shootings of Jews in the occupied territories, said Weber, was that of Babi Yar. Babi Yar was a ravine outside of Kiev in the Ukraine. The Einsatzgruppen reports themselves stated that on September 29 and 30, 1941, 33,000 Jews were shot and killed at Babi Yar. Weber did not believe this for several reasons. Firstly, given the general exaggerations of the Einsatzgruppen reports, it was reasonable to believe that this figure was likewise exaggerated. Secondly, Paul Blobel, who was the commandant of the unit which allegedly carried out the shootings, testified after the war that the figure could not have been more than 16,000. In his book Hitler's War, historian David Irving quoted a Soviet major who had defected to the Germans complaining to his German superiors that a year after Babi Yar Kiev was again overrun with Jews. Gerald Reitlinger, in his book The Final Solution, reported that in August of 1946, 100,000 Jews were living in Kiev. Weber pointed out that this was before the major rush of Jews from areas of the Soviet Union which had remained under Soviet control back to the areas which had been occupied by the Germans. (23-5753, 5754)

In the last several years, an important document on the Einsatzgruppen had come to light whose authenticity was accepted by Yad Vashem (and published in the book Documents on the Holocaust). The document was from Heydrich to the SS heads in the occupied Soviet territories and laid out explicitly that the task of the Einsatzgruppen was to shoot people who were dangerous to security such as snipers and saboteurs. Heydrich specifically stated that the only Jews to be shot immediately as Jews were those who were officials in the Communist Party and the Soviet government. (23-5755, 5756)

Weber testified that in the first edition of his book, Raul Hilberg claimed that there was an order to kill the Jews in Russia. He had now repudiated that claim and admitted that there might very well never have been an order by Hitler to exterminate the Jews in Russia or anywhere else. (23-5757)

Weber next turned to an examination of the accuracy of Did Six Million Really Die?. After each passage was either read to Weber or the general portion pointed out to him, Weber gave his opinion on the pamphlet's accuracy. He commenced his analysis with the first sentence of the pamphlet:

In the following chapters the author has, he believes, brought together irrefutable evidence that the allegation that 6 million Jews died during the Second World War, as a direct result of official German policy of extermination, is utterly unfounded.

Weber testified that this statement was true; in his opinion, 6 million Jews did not die as a result of a German policy of extermination during the war. (23-5758)

A great deal of careful research into this question, however, has now convinced me beyond any doubt that the allegation is not merely an exaggeration but an invention of post-war propaganda.

Weber testified that this was not quite accurate as the essential extermination story began during the war in the fall of 1942. The first organization to make the charge seriously was the World Jewish Congress through its President, Rabbi Stephen Wise. In December of 1942, the Allied governments (the United States, Great Britain, the Soviet Union and France), issued a Joint Declaration claiming that the Germans were exterminating the Jews. Privately, however, the American and British officials responsible for what was going on with the Jews in Europe urged their superiors not to issue the declaration on the grounds that there was no evidence that such an extermination programme was being carried out. This was set out in David Wyman's book The Abandonment of the Jews.

Weber pointed out that it was clear from the official history of the World Jewish Congress, Unity in Dispersion, published in 1948, that the World Jewish Congress was very instrumental in pressuring the Allied governments to issue the declaration in December of 1942. It was now known that some of the statements made by Rabbi Stephen Wise about the alleged extermination were utterly baseless and false. Wise claimed that in 1942 the Germans were turning the Jews into soap bars. No serious historian believed that anymore. Wise also claimed in November, 1942 at a press conference in Washington, D.C. that the Germans had stopped gassing the Jews and were adopting the more economical method of having teams of doctors line up Jews and inject them with poison in syringes. No serious historian believed that anymore either. But the World Jewish Congress, throughout the war, was a major vehicle for putting out these kinds of stories. (23-5758, 5759)

What was also clear from books such as Wyman's The Abandonment of the Jews and Walter Laqueur's The Terrible Secret, was that the Allies themselves did not believe their own propaganda about the extermination story. Some historians now claimed this showed the Allied governments were terribly callous and insensitive to the fate of the Jews. But what was absolutely clear, said Weber, was that the Allied officials, including President Roosevelt and top officials in the British government, did not take the extermination story seriously. (23-5760, 5761) While Monowitz (Auschwitz III) was bombed repeatedly by the Allies during the war because it was a major German industrial centre for the production of synthetic gasoline from coal, the alleged extermination camps of Auschwitz I and Birkenau were only bombed by accident. (23-5761)

Weber continued his analysis on page 4 of the booklet:

Of course, atrocity propaganda is nothing new. It has accompanied every conflict of the 20th century and doubtless will continue to do so.

Weber testified that in virtually every modern war, charges were made by each side against the other about the alleged commission of terrible atrocities. Afterwards, such charges were often shown to be false. An example was the charge made during the American Civil War by the Union that the South was carrying out a policy in the prisoner of war camps of killing Union prisoners. During the First World War, terrible lies were told by the British and American governments about the conduct of the Germans. After the war, these were shown fairly quickly to have been false. In Weber's opinion, this passage from the pamphlet was absolutely correct. (23- 5762)

No such statements have been made after the Second World War. In fact, rather than diminish with the passage of years, the atrocity propaganda concerning the German occupation, and in particular their treatment of the Jews, has done nothing but increase its virulence and elaborate its catalogue of horrors ...The ensuing pages will reveal this claim to be the most colossal piece of fiction and the most successful of deceptions;..

The extermination story was already clearly defined during the war, said Weber; what had increased since the war was the volume of emphasis given to it. At the Nuremberg trial, the fate of the Jews was by no means the dominant issue. The essential issue was German guilt for starting World War II. Today, however, there was far more in the mass media about the so-called "Holocaust" than about the question of German guilt for starting World War II. (23-5763)

Weber believed the last sentence in the quoted passage to be hyperbole and exaggeration on the part of Harwood. In Weber's opinion, the Jews had a very hard fate during the war and many of them died and suffered in the same way that many other people in Europe suffered during the war. There was a basis for the Holocaust story; it was not just something made out of whole cloth. In 1938, there were millions of Jews living in Poland, Hungary, Romania and in 1948 those Jews were gone. It was nevertheless not accurate to say that 6 million Jews died during the war. That was fiction. (23-5764, 5765)

What has rendered the atrocity stories of the Second World War so uniquely different from those of the First? Why were the latter retracted while the former are reiterated louder than ever? Is it possible that the story of the Six Million Jews is serving a political purpose, even that it is a form of political blackmail?

Weber pointed out that the Crown Attorney had previously tried to suggest that people who were Holocaust revisionists believed that the Holocaust story was a gigantic hoax perpetrated by the Jews to get money for the state of Israel. In Weber's opinion this was not accurate. It was essentially in the interests of the Allied governments that won the war and in the interests of the post-war West and East German governments which were set up by the Allies, to portray the Hitler regime in the worst possible light. The more terrible the Hitler regime could be portrayed, the more glorious became the Allied cause and the more legitimate became the post- war governments of East and West Germany. (23-5766) The state of Israel and Jews around the world benefited from the Holocaust story directly and indirectly. It was used to encourage a sense of solidarity among Jews based on fear through the argument that if a people as cultured and civilized as the Germans could commit this great crime, then anyone could. (23-5767)

To date, the staggering figure of six thousand million pounds has been paid out in compensation by the Federal Government of West Germany, mostly to the State of Israel...

The West German government had paid out massive reparations to the state of Israel and to Jews around the world since 1953, said Weber. The amount paid out so far was 80 billion marks and the West German government estimated that this figure would climb to 100 billion marks by the year 2000 or 2020. In recent exchange rates, that would be about 40 to 50 billion U.S. dollars. (23-5767, 5768)

Weber pointed out that Crown Attorney Pearson had tried to make a distinction between blaming the Nazis and blaming the Germans. But the former Prime Minister of Israel, Menachem Begin, once made it very clear that because of what the Germans did during the Hitler era, the German people would be guilty until the end of time. The reparations being paid out by the West German government today, said Weber, were paid out by people who were either not born or were just small children during the Hitler era. Yet they were being held responsible for what happened during that time. Thus, the German people were held as a people to be guilty for what happened during the war. Elie Wiesel, who was chairman of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council, stated explicitly that the German people deserved to be hated for what they had done to the Jews during the war. (23-5768, 5769)

In Weber's opinion, it was necessary after every war to put the hatreds and passions of the war behind in order for peoples to live in harmony. Keeping alive such hatreds on a permanent scale served only to create discord. (23-5769)

One could scarcely miss the object of this diatribe, with its insidious hint about "multi-racial partnership". Thus the accusation of the Six Million is not only used to undermine the principle of nationhood and national pride, but it threatens the survival of the Race itself. It is wielded over the heads of the populace, rather as the threat of hellfire and damnation was in the Middle Ages. Many countries of the Anglo-Saxon world, notably Britain and America, are today facing the gravest danger in their history, the danger posed by the alien races in their midst. Unless something is done in Britain to halt the immigration and assimilation of Africans and Asians into our country, we are faced in the near future, quite apart from the bloodshed of racial conflict, with the biological alteration and destruction of the British people as they have existed here since the coming of the Saxons. In short, we are threatened with the irrecoverable loss of our European culture and racial heritage. But what happens if a man dares to speak of the race problem, of its biological and political implications? He is branded as that most heinous of creatures, a "racialist". And what is racialism, of course, but the very hallmark of the Nazi! They (so everyone is told, anyway) murdered Six Million Jews because of racialism, so it must be a very evil thing indeed. When Enoch Powell drew attention to the dangers posed by coloured immigration into Britain in one of his early speeches, a certain prominent Socialist raised the spectre of Dachau and Auschwitz to silence his presumption.

Thus any rational discussion of the problems of Race and the effort to preserve racial integrity is effectively discouraged. No one could have anything but admiration for the way in which the Jews have sought to preserve their race through so many centuries, and continue to do so today. In this effort they have frankly been assisted by the story of the Six .Million, which, almost like a religious myth, has stressed the need for greater Jewish racial solidarity. Unfortunately, it has worked in quite the opposite way for all other peoples, rendering them impotent in the struggle for self preservation. The aim in the following pages is quite simply to tell the Truth. The distinguished American historian Harry Elmer Barnes once wrote that "An attempt to make a competent, objective and truthful investigation of the extermination question ... is surely the most precarious venture that an historian or demographer could undertake today." In attempting this precarious task, it is hoped to make some contribution, not only to historical truth, but towards lifting the burden of a lie from our own shoulders, so that we may freely confront the dangers which threaten us all.

Weber did not believe Harwood's paragraphs concerning the race problem were all that relevant. There were many Holocaust revisionists who were quite anti-racist but who also did not accept the Holocaust story. (27-5770)

Harry Elmer Barnes was one of the most highly regarded American historians during the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s. Barnes was virtually blacklisted in the later years of his life, however, because of his view that the Germans were not primarily responsible for the outbreak of war in Europe in 1939. For that he suffered a great deal, said Weber. Barnes was also strongly influenced in his later years by the writings of Paul Rassinier and came to believe that the Holocaust story was not true. In an article written for the Rampart Journal in the summer of 1967, Barnes cast doubt on the extermination story and called for a sober and unbiased investigation of the entire question. (23-5771 to 5773)

Weber turned next to passages on page 5 of the booklet:

Rightly or wrongly, the Germany of Adolf Hitler considered the Jews to be a disloyal and avaricious element within the national community, as well as a force of decadence in Germany's cultural life...The fact that Karl Marx was a Jew and that Jews such as Rosa Luxembourg and Karl Liebknecht were disproportionately prominent in the leadership of revolutionary movements in Germany, also tended to convince the Nazis of the powerful internationalist and Communist tendencies of the Jewish people themselves.

Weber agreed with the first statement in this passage and pointed out that it was a view that was not unique to Nazi Germany. The Jews had been forced out of many countries throughout their history. During the 1930s, other countries such as Hungary and Romania also had anti-Jewish laws. (23-5774)

Karl Marx was Jewish by ancestry with rabbis on both sides of his family. His father, however, had converted to Lutheranism. Rosa Luxemburg was also Jewish by ancestry. It was true, said Weber, that Jews were very disproportionately involved in the Communist movement both in Germany and in other countries. This convinced not only the Nazis but many other people, including Winston Churchill, that the Jews were dangerously tied to the international Communist movement. Winston Churchill wrote a long article voicing these opinions in the Illustrated Sunday Herald in London in 1919. Churchill wrote that the Jews should guard against being involved any more than they were in either the Zionist or Communist movements and that it was a dangerous portent of things to come if they persisted. (23-5775)

Our concern is simply with the fact that, believing of the Jews as they did, the Nazis' solution to the problem was to deprive them of their influence within the nation by various legislative acts, and most important of all, to encourage their emigration from the country altogether. By 1939, the great majority of German Jews had emigrated, all of them with a sizeable proportion of their assets. Never at any time had the Nazi leadership even contemplated a policy of genocide towards them.

Weber testified that the German policy up to 1940 or 1941 was to encourage the Jews to emigrate from Germany, especially to Palestine. This policy was welcomed by Zionist leaders at the time because they also took the view that the Jews of Germany were first and foremost Jews and not Germans. Raul Hilberg made clear in his book that in fact Jews did leave with a very substantial part of their assets. The last statement of the quoted passage was accurate, said Weber. In the context of the pre war Jewish policy, not even those who believed in the Holocaust story claimed there was any extermination programme before the war. (23-5776, 5777)

It is very significant, however, that certain Jews were quick to interpret these policies of internal discrimination as equivalent to extermination itself. A 1936 anti German propaganda book by Leon Feuchtwanger and others entitled Der Gelbe Fleck: Die Ausrotung von 500,000 deutschen Juden (The Yellow Spot: The Extermination of 500,000 German Jews, Paris 1936), presents a typical example. Despite its baselessness in fact, the annihilation of the Jews is discussed from the first pages -- straightforward emigration being regarded as the physical "extermination" of German Jewry. The Nazi concentration camps for political prisoners are also seen as potential instruments of genocide, and special reference is made to the 100 Jews still detained in Dachau in 1936, of whom 60 had been there since 1933. A further example was the sensational book by the German-Jewish Communist, Hans Beimler, called Four Weeks in the Hands of Hitler's Hell Hounds: The Nazi Murder Camp of Dachau...The encouragement of Jewish emigration should not be confused with the purpose of concentration camps in pre war Germany. These were used for the detention of political opponents and subversives -- principally liberals, Social Democrats and Communists of all kinds, of whom a proportion were Jews such as Hans Beimler. Unlike the millions enslaved in the Soviet Union, the German concentration camp population was always small; Reitlinger admits that between 1934 and 1938 it seldom exceeded 20,000 throughout the whole of Germany, and the number of Jews was never more than 3,000. (The SS: Alibi of a Nation, London, 1956, page 253).

Weber testified that the first sentence of this passage was true; Feuchtwanger, who was a Communist and a Jew, charged that the policy the Hitler government was carrying out in 1936 was "extermination." This was propaganda and hyperbole, said Weber, and a number of other Jewish leaders at the time used similarly exaggerated language to describe the pre-war German policy. Until November 1939 the only Jews in concentration camps in Germany were Jews who were put there for some political or criminal reason. They were not there simply because they were Jews. The number of people in the camps at that time was very small and most were involved in the leadership of the Communist and Social Democratic movements. (23-5778, 5779)

Hans Beimler was a Communist and the book written by him was published by a Communist publishing house. It was typical of the kind of propaganda that the Communists put out during that period of time. Weber believed that Beimler's early writing had significance in the development of the Holocaust story. Even before the war, there were wide and extensive reports of grossly exaggerated claims about Hitler's Germany by those who were his enemies, namely, Communists and Jews. It was hardly surprising therefore, when war broke out and it was much harder to know what was going on in Europe, that the stories were even more intense in their volume and character. (23-5780)

Weber had checked the reference to Reitlinger in the last sentence of the passage. Reitlinger stated that 20,000 was approximately the number of total concentration camp inmates in all of Germany; this in a country of about 60 million people. (23 5781)

The Nazi view of Jewish emigration was not limited to a negative policy of simple expulsion, but was formulated along the lines of modern Zionism.

In Weber's opinion, this was misleading. Zionism put forward the view that the Jews were not merely a religious group but also a nationality, that they should have a country of their own, and that Jews were first and foremost Jews and not citizens of whatever country they lived in. That also happened to be Hitler's views and the Nazis' views. Because their views coincided, the Nazis and the Zionists co-operated. This co-operation was laid out in great detail in a book by a Jewish author, Edwin Black, entitled The Transfer Agreement. The Transfer Agreement of Haavara was signed in 1933 by the German government and the Jewish Agency for Palestine. It arranged for Jews emigrating from Germany to Palestine to take their property with them as a way to encourage Jewish emigration to Palestine. The agreement remained in effect until after the outbreak of World War II. (23-5782)

The founder of political Zionism in the 19th century, Theodore Herzl, in his work The Jewish State, had originally conceived of Madagascar as a national homeland for the Jews, and this possibility was seriously studied by the Nazis...The Germans were not original in proposing Jewish emigration to Madagascar; the Polish Government had already considered the scheme in respect of their own Jewish population, and in 1937 they sent the Michael Lepecki expedition to Madagascar, accompanied by Jewish representatives, to investigate the problems involved.

Weber testified that the booklet's statement that Herzl had originally conceived of Madagascar as a homeland for the Jews was an error. From the very beginning, Herzl wanted to have Palestine as the national homeland. Although there was a brief period when Guinea and Uganda were considered, they were quickly rejected by the Zionists. (23-5783)

The booklet's statement concerning the Polish government was true. The Polish government was the first government to take up this idea and it sent an expedition to Madagascar to look into it. At that time, there was much speculation by leaders in Romania, Hungary, Poland and even France that there should be some place for the Jews to go to or be sent to. Madagascar was considered for that purpose because it was believed that the Arabs felt so strongly about Palestine that emigration there would only result in conflict. The island of Madagascar was a much larger and more beautiful place and it was felt that it would cause far fewer problems if the Jews went there. (23-5784)

In 1938 the Evian Conference was called. It was initiated largely by Franklin Roosevelt to deal with the question of Jewish refugees from Germany and the whole question of what should be done with the Jews. Jewish leaders were extremely disappointed with the conference because virtually none of the governments of the world, as much as they gave lip service to sympathy for the Jews, were willing to allow them to come to their own countries. The U.S. government often protested Hitler's policy towards the Jews but they were not willing to allow Jews to come to the United States. The German government made a big deal about this and said it only confirmed that Germany was right in trying to get rid of them. (23-5785)

Weber turned to page 6 of the booklet:

However, by 1939 the scheme of Jewish emigration to Madagascar had gained the most favour in German circles.

In Weber's opinion, the correct date was 1940, not 1939. The Madagascar plan was only seriously considered by German officials in 1940 after the fall of France because Madagascar was a French colony. (23-5787)

By 1939, the consistent efforts of the German Government to secure the departure of Jews from the Reich had resulted in the emigration of 400,000 German Jews from a total population of about 600,000, and an additional 480,000 emigrants from Austria and Czechoslovakia, which constituted almost their entire Jewish populations.

This passage was essentially accurate, said Weber. There were approximately 600,000 Jews in the German Reich territory before Hitler took power and about 400,000 emigrated by 1939 or 1940. A very substantial portion of the Jews from Germany proper, Austria, Sudetenland and Czechoslovakia emigrated before the outbreak of the war. (23-5789)

So eager were the Germans to secure this emigration that Eichmann even established a training centre in Austria, where young Jews could learn farming in anticipation of being smuggled illegally to Palestine (Manvell and Frankl, SS and Gestapo, p. 60).

In Weber's opinion, this was true. These training centres were set up not only in Austria but also in Germany proper. They were carried out in co-operation with the Zionist movement because the Zionists wanted very much to encourage Jews living in Germany to be productive on the soil, to be involved in new forms of trade and so forth. (23-5789)

Had Hitler cherished any intention of exterminating the Jews, it is inconceivable that he would have allowed more than 800,000 to leave Reich territory with the bulk of their wealth, much less considered plans for their mass emigration to Palestine or Madagascar.

Weber thought this was a fair statement although 800,000 might be a bit too high for the number of Jews who left. Obviously, said Weber, if Hitler had intended right from the beginning to exterminate the Jews, he wouldn't have encouraged them for years to move to Palestine and wouldn't have considered deporting them to Madagascar. (23-5790)

With the coming of the war, the situation regarding the Jews altered drastically. It is not widely known that world Jewry declared itself to be a belligerent party in the Second World War, and there was therefore ample basis under international law for the Germans to intern the Jewish population as a hostile force...All Jews had thus been declared agents willing to prosecute a war against the German Reich, and as a consequence, Himmler and Heydrich were eventually to begin the policy of internment.

It was not until 1941 that there was really a drastic change in German policy, said Weber. In fact, after the outbreak of war, the German government still encouraged Jewish emigration illegally to Palestine despite British objections and blockade. Chaim Weizmann, who at the time was the principal Zionist leader, issued a statement immediately after the outbreak of war in 1939 declaring in the name of the world's Jews that they considered themselves on the side of Britain. Whether this gave the Germans the right to intern the Jews as a hostile force was questionable. The question of how much legitimacy under international law Chaim Weizmann had to speak in the name of World Jewry was a debatable point. (23-5792)

Weber testified that the last sentence of the passage was essentially inaccurate. The German policy of deporting Jews to the east, which began in 1941, was not in response to the declaration of war by Chaim Weizmann. It was done because they wanted the Jews out of Europe. Once the war really got going, it was impossible to send the Jews to Palestine or to Madagascar because the seas were controlled by the British. So the Germans decided to deport the Jews to the east, first to Poland and then to the occupied Soviet territories. (23-5793)

It is worth noting that the United States and Canada had already interned all Japanese aliens and citizens of Japanese descent in detention camps before the Germans applied the same security measures against the Jews of Europe. Moreover, there had been no such evidence or declaration of disloyalty by these Japanese Americans as had been given by Weizmann. The British, too, during the Boer War, interned all the women and children of the population, and thousands had died as a result, yet in no sense could the British be charged with wanting to exterminate the Boers.

In Weber's opinion, the first sentence of this passage was accurate. It was not hard to understand that the United States government, right after Pearl Harbour, considered the Japanese dangerous and it was not hard to understand that the German government considered the Jews a hostile population. Weber believed the second sentence was a debatable point since no German Jews made any declaration of disloyalty although Weizmann claimed to speak on behalf of the Jews of the world.

Weber had done a great deal of research into the internment camps set up by the British during the Boer War. The British carried out a very ruthless war against the Boers to seize control of the gold and diamonds in the areas of Transvaal and the Orange Free State. The British rounded up all the women and children of the Boers and put them in concentration camps where about 27,000 of them died under appalling conditions. This was the policy, however, which broke the back of the guerrilla war carried out by the Boers against the British. (23-5794, 5795)

The detention of Jews in the occupied territories of Europe served two essential purposes from the German viewpoint. The first was to prevent unrest and subversion; Himmler had informed Mussolini on October 11th, 1942, that German policy towards the Jews had altered during wartime entirely for reasons of military security. He complained that thousands of Jews in the occupied regions were conducting partisan warfare, sabotage and espionage, a view confirmed by official Soviet information given to Raymond Arthur Davis that no less than 35,000 European Jews were waging partisan war under Tito in Yugoslavia. As a result, Jews were to be transported to restricted areas and detention camps, both in Germany, and especially after March 1942, in the Government-General of Poland.

Weber repeated that the German policy to deport the Jews to the east was not primarily motivated by security considerations, although it was a consideration that became more important as the war went on. The conversation between Himmler and Mussolini on October 11, 1942, which dealt with Jewish partisan warfare, was confined essentially to Jews in the occupied Soviet territories and not Jews in general. (23-5796)

Weber thought the dates in the last sentence of the passage were a bit off. The Germans began putting Jews in ghettos in Poland fairly soon after they took control in 1939 and the deportations of the Jews to the east began in October 1941. (23-5797)

As the war proceeded, the policy developed of using Jewish detainees for labour in the war- effort. The question of labour is fundamental when considering the alleged plan of genocide against the Jews, for on grounds of logic alone the latter would entail the most senseless waste of manpower, time and energy while prosecuting a war of survival on two fronts.

In Weber's opinion, this was a very good and valid point. In 1942, it was decided that the Jews were to be used extensively in war production activities. The Jews were a valuable source of labour for the Germans. As late as 1944, Hitler himself was concerned about using Jewish labour for the German war effort. (23-5798, 5799)

Weber had seen photographs of Monowitz (Auschwitz III) taken in 1942, 1943 and 1944 located in the Dürrfeld file. This file contained documents and photographs filed in Dürrfeld's defence in his war crimes trial after the war for alleged mistreatment of prisoners in Monowitz. The photographs showed prisoners from Birkenau and Auschwitz I in their striped uniforms working in Monowitz. This was relevant to the extermination allegation because it was very hard to reconcile the fact that prisoners from Birkenau, the alleged major extermination centre, were allowed to move around freely in Monowitz where there were many civilian workers who came in from the outside. It would have been virtually impossible, said Weber, to keep an extermination programme at Birkenau secret in such circumstances. Weber noted that exterminationist Walter Laqueur made the same point in his book The Terrible Secret and was quite baffled by it. (23-5799 to 5801)

Certainly after the attack on Russia, the idea of compulsory labour had taken precedence over German plans for Jewish emigration.

This statement, said Weber, was partly true and partly untrue. The idea was for the Jews to be deported to the east and also used for labour, so it was an effort to reconcile these two policies. (23-5801)

The protocol of a conversation between Hitler and the Hungarian regent Horthy on April 17th, 1943, reveals that the German leader personally requested Horthy to release 100,000 Hungarian Jews for work in the "pursuit-plane programme" of the Luftwaffe at a time when the aerial bombardment of Germany was increasing (Reitlinger, Die Endlösung, Berlin, 1956, p. 478). This took place at a time when, supposedly, the Germans were already seeking to exterminate the Jews, but Hitler's request clearly demonstrates the priority aim of expanding his labour force.

In harmony with this programme, concentration camps became, in fact, industrial complexes. At every camp where Jews and other nationalities were detained, there were large industrial plants and factories supplying material for the German war effort -- the Buna rubber factory at Bergen-Belsen, for example, Buna and I.G. Farben Industrie at Auschwitz, and the electrical firm of Siemens at Ravensbrück.

This passage was correct in Weber's opinion. Himmler ordered that concentration camp inmates were to be used as extensively as possible in war production. Buna was the name for artificial rubber derived from coal. The Germans had to produce artificial rubber because they did not have access to sources of natural rubber from Southeast Asia or Latin America and had a programme at Monowitz for this purpose. It never got very far, however, and instead Monowitz was devoted almost exclusively to producing synthetic gasoline. As far as Weber knew, there was no Buna rubber factory at Bergen-Belsen, so that statement in the booklet was not correct. (23-5801 to 5803)

Weber turned to page 7 of the booklet:

In many cases, special concentration camp money notes were issued as payment for labour, enabling prisoners to buy extra rations from camp shops. The Germans were determined to obtain the maximum economic return from the concentration camp system, an object wholly at variance with any plan to exterminate millions of people in them. It was the function of the SS Economy and Administration Office, headed by Oswald Pohl, to see that the concentration camps became major industrial producers.

Weber testified that camp money was used in such camps as Buchenwald and was called Lagergeld. Numerous former inmates testified to the use of such camp money and a similar kind of currency was also issued in the Lodz and Theresienstadt ghettos by the Jewish administration. (23-5804)

Weber noted that the German guards at Mauthausen and Buchenwald were summarily shot by the Americans when those camps were captured by the Americans. It was recorded in the book Inside the Vicious Heart by Robert H. Abzug. It was also recorded by Marguerite Higgins who was a very prominent American journalist at that time and who was an eyewitness to the shootings at Buchenwald. (23-5805)

Oswald Pohl, said Weber, was the head of the SS Economy and Administration Office, and the concentration camps were under his control. He was subordinate to Himmler. Pohl was very concerned with getting maximum labour out of the camps during the war; this was confirmed in numerous documents which were published in the Nuremberg series and in correspondence between Himmler and Pohl. (23 5806)

Defence attorney Christie asked Weber whether he was familiar with the historian Helmut Diwald. Weber testified that Diwald was a professor of history at the University of Erlangen in West Germany who had written, in 1978 or 1979, a massive 760 page book entitled Geschichte der Deutschen (History of the Germans). The book was a comprehensive overview of German history and contained two pages devoted to the 'final solution'. In those two pages, he called into question many of the commonly-held assumptions about the Holocaust extermination story. Diwald wrote that the Holocaust media campaign consisted in large part of distortions, misrepresentations and lies designed to morally degradate and disqualify the German nations and the German people as a whole. He said that many of the stories said about what happened with the Jews during the war were not true. He pointed out that it was once claimed that extermination camps operated in Germany proper and that later this claim was dropped even though for a time visitors were shown a room at Dachau which was supposed to be a gas chamber and in fact wasn't. He wrote that the 'final solution' policy of the Germans was one of deportation to the east for use as labour, and he concluded by stating that despite all of the literature that had been written on the subject, the most important questions of what happened to the Jews during the war were still not clear. The two pages caused a big sensation in Germany when they came out. Weber was the first to translate and publish them in English. (23-5807, 5808)

As a result of raising these questions, Diwald's book was immediately withdrawn from circulation even though it had been selling very well. The unsold portion of the 100,000 copies which had been printed were destroyed and, without his approval, the two offending pages were hastily rewritten and substituted in a new edition. These rewritten pages were more or less acceptable to the powers-that-be. (23-5809)

In historical writing this was a very uncommon phenomenon, but in West Germany and in some other countries it was common with regard to this one issue, said Weber. Notably in West Germany and in Communist countries, the calling into question of the commonly-accepted view of the Holocaust was met with official and semi-official suppression and persecution. The case of Helmut Diwald, a reputable and prominent professor of history, was a prime example of this process. (23-5809)

It is a remarkable fact, however, that well into the war period, the Germans continued to implement the policy of Jewish emigration. The fall of France in 1940 enabled the German Government to open serious negotiations with the French for the transfer of European Jews to Madagascar. A memorandum of August, 1942 from Luther, Secretary-of-State in the German Foreign Office, reveals that he had conducted these negotiations between July and December 1940, when they were terminated by the French. A circular from Luther's department dated August 15th, 1940 shows that the details of the German plan had been worked out by Eichmann, for it is signed by his assistant, Dannecker. Eichmann had in fact been commissioned in August to draw up a detailed Madagascar Plan, and Dannecker was employed in research on Madagascar at the French Colonial Office (Reitlinger, The Final Solution, p. 77). The proposals of August 15th were that an inter European bank was to finance the emigration of four million Jews throughout a phased programme. Luther's 1942 memorandum shows that Heydrich had obtained Himmler's approval of this plan before the end of August and had also submitted it to Göring. It certainly met with Hitler's approval, for as early as June 17th his interpreter, Schmidt, recalls Hitler observing to Mussolini that "One could found a State of Israel in Madagascar" (Schmidt, Hitler's Interpreter, London, 1951, p. 178).

Weber testified that this entire passage was essentially accurate except for two statements about the Madagascar plan. It was misleading to say that there were "serious negotiations" between the Germans and French concerning the Madagascar plan. The German government considered the feasibility of the Madagascar plan and would simply have presented it to the French at a later date. In addition, the Luther Memorandum, which did discuss the Madagascar plan, did not include any discussion about negotiations with the French. Hitler's exact words to Mussolini were that 'One could found a Jewish state on Madagascar', not 'state of Israel'. (23 5810 to 5813)

Although the French terminated the Madagascar negotiations in December, 1940, Poliakov, the director of the Centre of Jewish Documentation in Paris, admits that the Germans nevertheless pursued the scheme, and that Eichmann was still busy with it throughout 1941. Eventually, however, it was rendered impractical by the progress of the war, in particular by the situation after the invasion of Russia, and on February 10th, 1942, the Foreign Office was informed that the plan had been temporarily shelved. This ruling, sent to the Foreign Office by Luther's assistant, Rademacher, is of great importance, because it demonstrates conclusively that the term "Final Solution" meant only the emigration of Jews, and also that transportation to the eastern ghettos and concentration camps such as Auschwitz constituted nothing but an alternative plan of evacuation. The directive reads: "The war with the Soviet Union has in the meantime created the possibility of disposing of other territories for the Final Solution. In consequence the Führer has decided that the Jews should be evacuated not to Madagascar but to the East. Madagascar need no longer therefore be considered in connection with the Final Solution" (Reitlinger, ibid., p. 79). The details of this evacuation had been discussed a month earlier at the Wannsee Conference in Berlin, which we shall examine below.

It was not true to say that the French terminated the Madagascar negotiations, said Weber. It was true that the Germans pursued the scheme till late in 1941, although Weber did not know if it was Eichmann who was involved. It was true that the Madagascar plan was rendered impractical by the progress of the war, but not for the reason given by Harwood. It was rendered impractical because it was clear the war was going to continue for quite a while and the British controlled all of the sea lanes to Madagascar. In Weber's opinion, "final solution" was the term that the Germans used to describe their policy of ridding Europe of the Jews first by emigration and later by deportation to the east. The Rademacher memorandum of February 10, 1942 was confirmation that the so-called "final solution" was not one of extermination but deportation. The Wannsee Conference protocol was another German document which confirmed this. (23-5814 to 5817)

Weber pointed out that when the Allies took control of Germany in 1945, they confiscated an enormous quantity of German documents relating to the German wartime policy towards the Jews and of these thousands and thousands of documents, there was not one which referred to an extermination programme or policy. This was mind-boggling, said Weber, when one considered that this programme was alleged to have happened over a three-year period over an entire continent and allegedly involved millions of people. (23-5818)

Reitlinger and Poliakov both make the entirely unfounded supposition that because the Madagascar Plan had been shelved, the Germans must necessarily have been thinking of "extermination". Only a month later, however, on March 7th, 1942, Goebbels wrote a memorandum in favour of the Madagascar Plan as a "final solution" of the Jewish question (Manvell and Frankl, Dr. Goebbels, London, 1960, p. 165).

Weber testified that this passage was accurate and agreed with Harwood's opinion in the first sentence. In July of 1942 Hitler himself stated that the Jews would be taken to Madagascar after the war was over. It was during this period of time that the policy of sending the Jews to Madagascar was replaced with a policy of deporting the Jews to the east where they would be kept until the war was over.(23 5819)

Weber was familiar with a later entry (on March 27) in the Goebbels diary which was contradictory to the one quoted by Harwood. This later entry was widely quoted to support the extermination thesis. Weber noted, however, that it was not consistent with entries in the diary like the one of March 7th, nor was it consistent with entries at a later date from the Goebbels diary or with German documents of the time. In Weber's opinion, there was great doubt about the authenticity of the entire Goebbels diaries because they were written on a typewriter. There was therefore no way of verifying if they were accurate. The U.S. government itself indicated that it could take no responsibility for the accuracy of the diaries as a whole. (23-5820, 5821)

In the meantime he approved of the Jews being "concentrated in the East". Later Goebbels memoranda also stress deportation to the East (i.e., the Government General of Poland) and lay emphasis on the need for compulsory labour there; once the policy of evacuation to the East had been inaugurated, the use of Jewish labour became a fundamental part of the operation. It is perfectly clear from the foregoing that the term "Final Solution" was applied both to Madagascar and to the Eastern territories, and that therefore it meant only the deportation of the Jews.

Even as late as May 1944, the Germans were prepared to allow the emigration of one million European Jews from Europe. An account of this proposal is given by Alexander Weissberg, a prominent Soviet Jewish scientist deported during the Stalin purges, in his book Die Geschichte von Joel Brand (Cologne, 1956).

Weber knew of no Goebbels memorandum stressing deportation. There were other German documents and memorandum which did but Goebbels had no responsibility for Jewish policy. Weber would have agreed completely with the sentence if it said "German memoranda" or "official memoranda" instead of "Goebbels."

The rest of the passage was correct, said Weber. The last portion referred to what was called the Europa Plan about which there was very little information. Late in the war, there was a programme to exchange large numbers of Jews for trucks or money. Some Jews were sent from Hungary to Switzerland to show that the Germans were willing to carry it out, but the plan fell through. (23-5822 to 5824)

Defence counsel Christie turned Weber's attention to the subject of Jewish population statistics. Weber testified that statistics about the Jewish population in Europe were almost completely unverifiable. What Harwood had written was speculative because it was a kind of opinion of the author based on his reading of the figures. It was difficult to draw conclusions because the figures themselves were suspect.

The largest Jewish populations in Europe were in Poland and the Soviet Union before the war. When the Germans took over the western half of Poland in 1939, large numbers of Jews escaped into Soviet-occupied Poland, but the exact figure was unknown. It was not known how many Jews came under German control when the Germans later took over the rest of Poland and the Soviet territories. It was known that a very high percentage, 80 percent, of the Jews in the occupied Soviet territories were deported by the Soviets or fled in 1941. In Weber's opinion, any specific figure like 6 million or 1 million was speculative. The only thing which could be done was to make an educated guess based upon a careful reading of the figures. (23-5825)

With respect to the chapter on "Population and Emigration" in Did Six Million Really Die?, Weber testified that he agreed with Harwood's statement that the majority of German Jews succeeded in leaving Germany before the war broke out. But he believed that Harwood's conclusion that the total number of Jews under German influence was 3.5 million was speculation, just as the figures in Hilberg's and Reitlinger's books were nothing more than educated guesses. (23-5827)

Weber turned to page 9 of the booklet:

So far as is known, the first accusation against the Germans of the mass murder of Jews in war- time Europe was made by the Polish Jew Rafael Lemkin in his book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, published in New York in 1943...His book claimed that the Nazis had destroyed millions of Jews, perhaps as many as six millions. This, by 1943, would have been remarkable indeed, since the action was allegedly started only in the summer of 1942. At such a rate, the entire world Jewish population would have been exterminated by 1945.

Weber testified that the first accusation of mass murder was not made by Lemkin. The first major accusation that the Germans were carrying out the mass murder of Jews was made in the fall of 1942 by the World Jewish Congress and was particularly promoted by its president, Stephen Wise. Lemkin's book picked up on the theme but his book actually wasn't relevant to the extermination story. Nor did the Lemkin book make the statement claimed by Harwood. The last part of the passage was the opinion of the author, said Weber, but since the first part of the passage was not true, the conclusion wasn't true. Weber subsequently found, however, that Paul Rassinier had made this claim in one of his books and Harwood had obviously relied upon it. (23- 5828, 5829, 6158)

After the war, propaganda estimates spiralled to heights even more fantastic. Kurt Gerstein, an anti-Nazi who claimed to have infiltrated the SS, told the French interrogator Raymond Cartier that he knew that no less than forty million concentration camp internees had been gassed. In his first signed memorandum of April 26th, 1945, he reduced the figure to 25 million, but even this was too bizarre for French Intelligence and in his second memorandum, signed at Rottweil on May 4th, 1945, he brought the figure closer to the six million preferred at the Nuremberg Trials. Gerstein's sister was congenitally insane and died by euthanasia, which may well suggest a streak of mental instability in Gerstein himself. He had, in fact, been convicted in 1936 of sending eccentric mail through the post. After his two "confessions" he hanged himself at Cherche Midi prison in Paris.

Kurt Gerstein made a statement that he thought the Germans had killed 20 or 40 million people, said Weber, but he did not specify Jews and he did not say that they were gassed. Harwood's statement was therefore only partly true. No serious historian today accepted everything that Gerstein said because he made such fantastic and ludicrous statements. This applied particularly to the figures he cited. Established historians nevertheless used portions of Gerstein's statements which they thought supported their thesis. Gerstein was quoted in virtually every important book on the Holocaust, including Hilberg. Revisionists usually called Gerstein's statements into question. In the standard biography of Gerstein, there was speculation that Gerstein was probably insane. Some people had speculated that Gerstein was murdered, but Weber thought the evidence suggested that he really did commit suicide. (23-5831, 5832)

Gerstein alleged that during the war he passed on information concerning the murder of Jews to the Swedish Government through a German baron, but for some inexplicable reason his report was "filed away and forgotten". He also claimed that in August 1942 he informed the Papal nuncio in Berlin about the whole "extermination programme", but the reverend person merely told him to "Get out". The Gerstein statements abound with claims to have witnessed the most gigantic mass executions (twelve thousand in a single day at Belzec), while the second memorandum describes a visit by Hitler to a concentration camp in Poland on June 6th, 1942 which is known never to have taken place.

In Weber's opinion, the first part of this passage was misleading. The baron was a Swedish baron whom Gerstein met on the night train from Warsaw to Berlin. Gerstein buttonholed him, according to one of his affidavits, and told him the Germans were killing all the Jews. The Swedish government didn't take any notice of what Gerstein said until after the war when quite a bit was made of it. Gerstein tried to go to the Papal nuncio but was turned away.

Gerstein made the claims concerning Belzec, as stated by Harwood, and in fact, Gerstein's statement remained one of the most important pieces of evidence supporting the claim that there were large numbers of Jews gassed there. The statement which Gerstein made concerning the trip by Hitler to a concentration camp in Poland was typical of the kind of false statements made in the Gerstein statements. Weber believed it was illegitimate to present the Gerstein statements as valid historical documents as had been done by Holocaust historians. (23-5833 to 5837)

Weber turned to page 10 of the booklet:

The story of six million Jews exterminated during the war was given final authority at the Nuremberg Trials by the statement of Dr. Wilhelm Hoettl. He had been an assistant of Eichmann's, but was in fact a rather strange person in the service of American Intelligence who had written several books under the pseudonym of Walter Hagen. Hoettl also worked for Soviet espionage, collaborating with two Jewish emigrants from Vienna, Perger and Verber, who acted as US officers during the preliminary inquiries of the Nuremberg Trials. It is remarkable that the testimony of this highly dubious person Hoettl is said to constitute the only "proof" regarding the murder of six million Jews.

The Hoettl statement was important but Weber did not agree with Harwood that it was the final authority. Hoettl made an affidavit saying that Eichmann told him that 6 million Jews had been killed. Eichmann later disputed that he had ever said this; he claimed he did not specify "Jews" but said only that millions of enemies of the Reich had been killed. The 6 million figure, however, gained much of its credibility from the Hoettl statement. Weber nevertheless thought it was misleading to say that Hoettl's statement was the only proof regarding the murder of 6 million Jews. To be fair, said Weber, the exterminationists didn't say they believed the figure just because Hoettl said it; they relied on quite a number of other things to support the figure. (23- 5837 to 5842)

It should be emphasised straight away that there is not a single document in existence which proves that the Germans intended to, or carried out, the deliberate murder of Jews.

Weber agreed with this statement if Harwood was referring to German documents. If Harwood meant documents of any kind, including affidavits made by people after the war, then in Weber's opinion the statement was not true. Weber reiterated that in all of the captured German documents, there was not a single one that referred to any German extermination programme or policy. Weber thought that the use of the word "proves" by Harwood was misleading because no one document proved anything. It could only substantiate or give credence to a given idea. (23-5842 to 5844)

March 23, 1988

Weber testified that in his book The Destruction of the European Jews, Raul Hilberg estimated that the Jewish losses during World War II were 5.1 million. In his first edition, Hilberg made no effort to justify that figure; in the second edition he did make an effort to justify the figure in a complicated manner which Weber thought was highly speculative. It was the same kind of speculation that Harwood was guilty of in Did Six Million Really Die?. (23-5856)

Hilberg included Jews who died for any reason during the war in the term "Jewish losses." A Jew who was deported from Germany to Lodz and who died of a heart attack would be counted as a victim of the Holocaust. No clear distinction was made between those who were allegedly the victims of some German programme and those who simply died in the course of the war. (23-5856)

In Weber's opinion, Hilberg's figure of 5.1 million Jewish dead was completely inconsistent with the very important Korherr report. Hilberg himself made no effort to reconcile his figures with the report. (23-5857)

In the major book on the Einsatzgruppen entitled Die Truppe des Weltanschaungskrieges, the two authors calculated that if all the figures in the German reports were added up, there would be a total of 2.2 million Jewish dead. The authors admitted frankly that this was impossible and conceded that the Einsatzgruppen report figures were exaggerated. In his book, The Destruction of the European Jews, Hilberg came up with a figure of 1.3 million Jewish dead in the occupied Soviet territories, which by implication meant that he too believed the Einsatzgruppen reports were exaggerated. Hilberg didn't say so outright, however, which was typical of how he operated. Even the figure of 1.3 million was not believable in Weber's opinion, because it was known that the great majority of Jews fled or were evacuated by the Soviet government before the Germans invaded in 1941. (23-5857)

As recorded in his Table-Talk, the authenticity of which was not questioned, Hitler said on July 27, 1942 that the Jews would have to be cleared out of Europe and he speculated they should be sent to Russia. In late 1942 or 1943, Hitler stated that the Jews should be grateful to him for wanting nothing more than a bit of hard work from them. When the Soviets captured Majdanek in 1944 and immediately put out reports that it had been an enormous extermination centre for Jews, an angry Hitler said it was crazy propaganda of the same type put out about Germany during World War I. These statements, said Weber, were consistent with views Hitler expressed on other occasions and were inconsistent with an extermination plan. (23 5858 to 5860)

In 1942, there was a large outbreak of typhus in Birkenau which resulted in the deaths of many inmates. Himmler was very concerned and issued an emphatic order that the camp commandants were to take strenuous measures to reduce the death rate and to improve the nutrition of the prisoners. At all costs, Himmler directed, the death rate of the prisoners had to be reduced. This document was published in the official Nuremberg document series, the Red series, and was accepted as a reliable document by historians. Correspondence between Himmler and Oswald Pohl, the head of the concentration camps, was very emphatic about the need to keep the prisoner death rate down. Richard Glücks, who was a very high SS official and inspector of the concentration camps, ordered on January 20, 1943 that every means be used to lower the death rate in the camps. This was Nuremberg document NO-1523 and was published in the NMT "Green Series." (23-5863) In Weber's opinion, these documents were inconsistent with the extermination story. (23-5860, 5861)

Weber pointed out that numerous historians who believed the extermination story simply ignored these documents. They never mentioned them and never talked about them. Other exterminationists who were more responsible, such as Hilberg, would mention the documents but would say that at the same time Himmler was trying to reduce the death rates in the camps, the German government was also trying to kill as many Jews as they could. This type of illogic, said Weber, was typical of the entire Holocaust story. (23-5862)

Another example of this illogic was the fact that German soldiers and SS were punished for mistreating prisoners at the same time there was supposed to be widespread brutality and even a mass programme to exterminate Jews. These inconsistencies were explained by Hilberg and others as simply being part of the irrationality of the Nazi regime. To Weber, this was an illogical conclusion and was characteristic of trying to make the evidence fit a preconceived thesis rather than deriving conclusions from the evidence. (23-5862)

Weber next showed photographs to the jury from the Walter Dürrfeld file (in the U.S. National Archives), which he had mentioned the previous day. The photographs were originally submitted in Dürrfeld's trial before an American military court in occupied West Germany in 1947 and 1948, and in Weber's opinion were not consistent with the Holocaust story. The photographs showed various aspects of life at Monowitz, including a panoramic view of the synthetic gasoline production works at Monowitz (which gave an idea of the tremendous extent of the industrial works); camp inmates in striped clothing from either Auschwitz or Birkenau working along side civilian workers; housing for the workers; the dining hall for workers, the medical centre at Monowitz showing a nurse and babies and another showing an inmate in striped clothing being X-rayed; a dental office; barracks for workers at Monowitz with two beds as well as more primitive barracks with bunk beds (which were probably used for forced labourers from the Ukraine or from Soviet areas); a Ukrainian choir during an entertainment evening at Monowitz; a greenhouse garden; and a Ukrainian forced labourer at a machining tool. (23-5864 to 5878; photographs filed as Exhibit 99 at 23-5878)

Monowitz was a very large industrial works which even today was run by the Polish government. It required an enormous amount of labour and used prisoners from nearby Auschwitz and Birkenau, including Jews. Inmates also lived at Monowitz. These people included forced labourers from the Soviet Union, especially Ukrainian workers. They did not wear the striped uniforms. In addition, there were German civilian workers and other civilian workers from throughout Europe who worked along side the concentration camp inmates. (23-5868 to 5870)

To Weber, the fact that camp inmates worked along side civilian workers was not consistent with the Holocaust claim that mass exterminations were being carried out in the utmost secrecy at Auschwitz and Birkenau. It would have been virtually impossible to have kept such an enormous extermination programme secret when inmates from both camps worked and mixed with civilian and other workers who moved freely in and out of Monowitz. (23-5872, 5873)

In Weber's opinion, the photographs of the medical centre showed that quite a lot of care was taken at Monowitz to ensure the health and happiness of the workers, including the inmates. (23-5874, 5875)

Weber turned to page 10 of the booklet to continue his analysis:

It should be emphasised straight away that there is not a single document in existence which proves that the Germans intended to, or carried out, the deliberate murder of Jews...The documents which do survive, of course, make no mention at all of extermination, so that writers like Poliakov and Reitlinger again make the convenient assumption that such orders were generally "verbal."

Weber testified that at the time Did Six Million Really Die? was written the view of those historians who believed the Holocaust story was that there was an extermination and it was ordered by Hitler verbally. Reitlinger, Poliakov and Hilberg had all speculated that the orders were verbal because there were no written orders. This view had now changed. Martin Broszat and Hans Mommsen, two prominent West German historians, as well as Raul Hilberg, now took the position that there might very well have been no order of any kind, written or verbal, and that the extermination programme came about spontaneously. (23-5882)

In this controversy, one of the most important pieces of evidence was Nuremberg document 3836-PS, the affidavit of April 1946 of former Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss. In this affidavit, Höss said that he was informed that there was an order to exterminate the Jews in the summer of 1941 and that he was told by Himmler to prepare Auschwitz as a major centre for extermination. He also said there were already exterminations being carried out in Treblinka, Belzec and a camp called Wolzek. This document, said Weber, was inconsistent with the Holocaust story as it was now presented. Firstly, there was no camp called Wolzek. Secondly, the leading exterminationists, Hilberg, Broszat and Mommsen, now claimed there was probably no order by Hitler to exterminate the Jews but even if there was, it wasn't given until 1942. Höss claimed the date was in early 1941. Finally, Höss's statement that Jews were already being exterminated in the summer of 1941 in Treblinka was not supported by any exterminationist historian.

The exterminationist historians, however, did not point out the implications of the changes in the Holocaust story when such changes occurred. In Weber's opinion, they didn't do so because it showed that documents previously relied upon as evidence, such as the Höss affidavit, were invalid. (23-5883, 5884)

The Höss affidavit was also invalid for the important reason that it had now been shown that Höss was tortured. One of the men who was involved in the torture of Höss, a British military officer, described the torture in a book called Legions of Death. (23-5885)

Weber returned to page 10 of the booklet:

The rest of the programme is supposed to have begun in March 1942, with the deportation and concentration of European Jews in the eastern camps of the Polish Government-General, such as the giant industrial complex at Auschwitz near Cracow. The fantastic and quite groundless assumption throughout is that transportation to the East, supervised by Eichmann's department, actually meant immediate extermination in ovens on arrival.

According to Manvell and Frankl (Heinrich Himmler, London, 1965), the policy of genocide "seems to have been arrived at" after "secret discussions" between Hitler and Himmler (p. 118), though they fail to prove it. Reitlinger and Poliakov guess along similar "verbal" lines, adding that no one else was allowed to be present at these discussions, and no records were ever kept of them. This is the purest invention, for there is not a shred of evidence that even suggests such outlandish meetings took place. William Shirer, in his generally wild and irresponsible book The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, is similarly muted on the subject of documentary proof. He states weakly that Hitler's supposed order for the murder of Jews "apparently was never committed to paper -- at least no copy of it has yet been unearthed. It was probably given verbally to Göring, Himmler and Heydrich, who passed it down..." (p. 1148).

Weber testified that this passage described the general position taken by exterminationists at the time the booklet was written in 1974 or 1976. The exterminationists started with the assumption that the Jews were exterminated and since it could not have happened without orders, the orders must have been given. But since there was no evidence of orders being given, it had to be assumed that it somehow happened. These historians therefore concluded that secret meetings must have taken place. This debate had now splintered the Holocaust historians into the functionalists and the intentionalists. Weber believed William Shirer's book was not a responsible book and that it was indeed replete with errors, representing a very primitive level of historical understanding of the period. It was based entirely upon a selective reading of the Nuremberg evidence and Shirer made no effort to incorporate evidence outside of the parameters of those trials. As stated by Harwood, Shirer provided no documentary proof there was a meeting or an order given by Hitler. (23-5885 to 5890)

A typical example of the kind of "proof" quoted in support of the extermination legend is given by Manvell and Frankl. They cite a memorandum of 31st July, 1941 sent by Göring to Heydrich, who headed the Reich Security Head Office and was Himmler's deputy. Significantly, the memorandum begins: "Supplementing the task that was assigned to you on 24th January 1939, to solve the Jewish problem by means of emigration and evacuation in the best possible way according to present conditions..." The supplementary task assigned in the memorandum is a "total solution (Gesamtlösung) of the Jewish question within the area of German influence in Europe," which the authors admit means concentration in the East, and it requests preparations for the "organisational, financial and material matters" involved. The memorandum then requests a future plan for the "desired final solution" (Endlösung), which clearly refers to the ideal and ultimate scheme of emigration and evacuation mentioned at the beginning of the directive. No mention whatever is made of murdering people, but Manvell and Frankl assure us that this is what the memorandum is really about.

Weber testified that the Göring memorandum was once widely quoted as evidence for the extermination programme. Manvell and Fraenkel, like other exterminationists, made the assumption that the document meant murder. This was no longer the case and today no serious historian believed it was evidence of an extermination programme. In fact, it tended to be evidence of the exact opposite. The reference to "final solution" of the Jewish question was specifically said to be emigration and evacuation or deportation. There was no mention in the document of killing. Weber believed it showed what the actual German policy was: emigration and deportation. It meant getting the Jews out of Europe. (23-5892)

In the CIA report The Holocaust Revisited the authors assumed there was an extermination programme based upon secondary literature. These assumptions were not consistent with the aerial photographs of Auschwitz themselves. This process of assumption was characteristic of the exterminationists, said Weber. They started out with the assumption that there was a vast extermination programme and then tried to make the evidence fit this notion. This led to a whole range of confusion, and as the Holocaust story changed, more and more contradictions arose. (23- 5893, 5894)

Weber turned to page 11 of the booklet:

The final details of the plan to exterminate Jews were supposed to have been made at a conference at Gross Wannsee in Berlin on 20th January, 1942, presided over by Heydrich (Poliakov, Das Dritte Reich und die Juden, p. 120 ff; Reitlinger, The Final Solution, p. 95 ff). Officials of all German Ministries were present, and Müller and Eichmann represented Gestapo Head Office. Reitlinger and Manvell and Frankl consider the minutes of this conference to be their trump card in proving the existence of a genocide plan, but the truth is that no such plan was even mentioned, and what is more, they freely admit this. Manvell and Frankl explain it away rather lamely by saying that "The minutes are shrouded in the form of officialdom that cloaks the real significance of the words and terminology that are used" (The Incomparable Crime, London, 1967, p. 46), which really means that they intend to interpret them in their own way. What Heydrich actually said was that, as in the memorandum quoted above, he had been commissioned by Göring to arrange a solution to the Jewish problem. He reviewed the history of Jewish emigration, stated that the war had rendered the Madagascar project impractical, and continued: "The emigration programme has been replaced now by the evacuation of Jews to the east as a further possible solution, in accordance with the previous authorisation of the Führer." Here, he explained, their labour was to be utilised. All this is supposed to be deeply sinister, and pregnant with the hidden meaning that the Jews were to be exterminated, though Prof. Paul Rassinier, a Frenchman interned at Buchenwald who has done sterling work in refuting the myth of the Six Million, explains that it means precisely what it says, i.e. the concentration of the Jews for labour in the immense eastern ghetto of the Polish Government-General. "There they were to wait until the end of the war, for the re-opening of international discussions which would decide their future. This decision was finally reached at the interministerial Berlin-Wannsee conference..." (Rassinier, Le Véritable Proces Eichmann, p. 20). Manvell and Frankl, however, remain undaunted by the complete lack of reference to extermination. At the Wannsee conference, they write, "Direct references to killing were avoided, Heydrich favouring the term "Arbeitseinsatz im Osten" (labour assignment in the East)" (Heinrich Himmler, p. 209). Why we should not accept labour assignment in the East to mean labour assignment in the East is not explained.

According to Reitlinger and others, innumerable directives actually specifying extermination then passed between Himmler, Heydrich, Eichmann and commandant Höss in the subsequent months of 1942, but of course, "none have survived".

Weber testified that what Harwood wrote about the Wannsee Conference protocol was essentially correct. The Wannsee Conference was called to co-ordinate among a range of German agencies the policy of deportation of the Jews. The protocol of the conference made no reference to any extermination programme, but stated that the Jews were to be sent to the east for labour. It also made reference to their later liberation and new beginnings. Exterminationists claimed that this conference was really about extermination. Increasingly, however, historians such as Hilberg, Mommsen and Broszat now said that the conference was not about extermination. (23-5895, 5896)

The complete lack of documentary evidence to support the existence of an extermination plan has led to the habit of re-interpreting the documents that do survive. For example, it is held that a document concerning deportation is not about deportation at all, but a cunning way of talking about extermination. Manvell and Frankl state that 'various terms were used to camouflage genocide. These included "Aussiedlung" (desettlement) and "Abbeförderung" (removal) (ibid., p. 265).Thus, as we have seen already, words are no longer assumed to mean what they say if they prove too inconvenient. This kind of thing is taken to the most incredible extremes, such as their interpretation of Heydrich's directive for labour assignment in the East. Another example is a reference to Himmler's order for sending deportees to the East, "that is, having them killed" (ibid., p. 251). Reitlinger, equally at a loss for evidence, does exactly the same, declaring that from the "circumlocutionary" words of the Wannsee conference it is obvious that "the slow murder of an entire race was intended" (ibid., p. 98).

Weber agreed that what was said in this passage was correct. Historians like Christopher Browning were wrong in assuming that whenever there was a reference to such words as "deportation" those words meant something else. In Weber's opinion, any historical document had to be evaluated not only in terms of itself but also in terms of many other pieces of evidence and within an overall context. To assume that the Wannsee Conference protocol was about extermination was an example of ripping a document out of its context and falsely interpreting it. Historians like Manvell and Fraenkel and Lucy Dawidowicz simply told their readers what such words as "removal" were supposed to mean. It was an arbitrary definition because there was no code book available which established these meanings. Again, pointed out Weber, these historians argued backwards. They argued from an assumption and tried to make the evidence fit the assumption, the opposite of the way historians should operate. (23-5897, 5898) Raul Hilberg had in fact stated that it was the critique of the revisionists that forced the exterminationists to straighten out their story and that the exterminationists should be thankful. (23 5900)

A review of the documentary situation is important, because it reveals the edifice of guesswork and baseless assumptions upon which the extermination legend is built. The Germans had an extraordinary propensity for recording everything on paper in the most careful detail, yet among the thousands of captured documents of the S.D. and Gestapo, the records of the Reich Security Head Office, the files of Himmler's headquarters and Hitler's own war directives there is not a single order for the extermination of Jews or anyone else.

Weber testified that although the first sentence was a bit exaggerated, he agreed in essence with this passage. Weber agreed with Harwood's statement regarding the propensity of the Germans to keep records, pointing out that the volume of German records was staggering. To this day, not all of the German records had been released by the Allies. Many were still kept secret, particularly in Communist countries such as Poland, the Soviet Union and East Germany. An example was the large quantity of German documents kept by the East German government in archives in Potsdam which were not freely available to researchers. (23-5901)

It will be seen later that this has, in fact, been admitted by the World Centre of Contemporary Jewish Documentation at Tel-Aviv. Attempts to find "veiled allusions" to genocide in speeches like that of Himmler's to his SS Obergruppenführers at Posen in 1943 are likewise quite hopeless. Nuremberg statements extracted after the war, invariably under duress, are examined in the following chapter.

Weber testified that there was such a centre at Tel Aviv, but that the statement regarding it was not quite accurate. The head of the World Centre of Contemporary Jewish Documentation said there was no written order by Hitler for the extermination of the Jews; he did not made a statement as sweeping as Harwood had indicated in the booklet. (23-5902)

Weber had read Himmler's Posen speech and listened to parts of it on recording. The speech was considered by historians such as Browning and Dawidowicz to be one of the most important pieces of evidence for a German extermination programme. Himmler gave several very similar speeches within the same time period. In Weber's opinion, Himmler made clear in one of these speeches, given to Naval officers in Weimar on December 16, 1943, what he really meant by the so called incriminating passage in the Posen speech. Himmler said that he had a policy that when Jews were shot in the Soviet East for partisan or other illegal activities or Soviet commissars, that he also, as a rule, had the wives and children of those Jews shot as well. In Weber's opinion, this was what Himmler was referring to in the Posen speech. He was not referring to an overall extermination programme. Weber believed the speech, given in exaggerated language, was not evidence of an alleged extermination programme. (23-5902, 5903)

It was important to understand, when talking about what happened to the Jews in the occupied Soviet territory that the most savage war in modern history was being conducted there. It was a war for the life and death of both Germany and the Soviet Union; a ruthless war with no pity on either side. It was misleading, said Weber, to talk about the fate of the Jews out of this context. While the Jews suffered a bad fate in the occupied Soviet territory, so did the Russians and the Ukrainians. German prisoners taken by the Soviets were very harshly treated, in part because the Soviet Union was not a member of the International Red Cross and did not abide by any of the International Red Cross agreements. Only a small percentage of Germans taken prisoner by the Soviets were returned to Germany; of about 130,000 taken prisoner only 5,000 to 10,000 came back alive. About 2 million German and Allied soldiers died on the Eastern Front. The Soviets claimed that 20 million of their own citizens died during the war, although Weber believed this figure might be exaggerated. This gave an idea of the immensity of the losses suffered by everyone in the struggle in the east. (23-5904, 5905)

The story of the Six Million was given judicial authority at the Nuremberg Trials of German leaders between 1945 and 1949, proceedings which proved to be the most disgraceful legal farce in history. For a far more detailed study of the iniquities of these trials, which as Field Marshal Montgomery said, made it a crime to lose a war, the reader is referred to the works cited below, and particularly to the outstanding book Advance to Barbarism (Nelson, 1953), by the distinguished English jurist, F.J.P. Veale.

It was Weber's opinion that this passage from the booklet contained a very important point. Article 21 of the Nuremberg Charter specified that every official document of the Allied (prosecution) governments had to be accepted as valid evidence. At Nuremberg, this meant that the so-called official reports by the Soviet Union about Auschwitz and Majdanek and even Katyn had to be accepted as valid evidence. Today, it was known these reports were not legitimate. No serious Holocaust historian, for example, believed that 4 million people were put to death at Auschwitz as claimed by the Soviets at Nuremberg. Many of the lurid stories put out by the Soviets at the trial were no longer accepted. The Soviet accusation that the Germans killed thousands of Polish officers at Katyn was no longer believed today. Even the American government now conceded that the Polish officers were killed by the Soviet secret police. (23- 5905, 5906)

F. J. P. Veale's book Advance to Barbarism cited by Harwood, was an indictment of the character of the Nuremberg trials. Many distinguished Americans and Europeans, such as Senator Robert Taft, condemned the trials as victors' justice in which the people who won the war were the prosecutors, the judges and the alleged victims, all at the same time. The Nuremberg trials invented charges for the occasion. Taft condemned the trails as a violation of the most basic principles of American justice and internationally accepted standards of justice. (23-5907)

From the very outset, the Nuremberg Trials proceeded on the basis of gross statistical errors. In his speech of indictment on November 20th, 1945, Mr. Sidney Alderman declared that there had been 9,600,000 Jews living in German occupied Europe. Our earlier study has shown this figure to be wildly inaccurate ... Should anyone be misled into believing that the extermination of the Jews was "proved" at Nuremberg by "evidence", he should consider the nature of the Trials themselves, based as they were on a total disregard of sound legal principles of any kind. The accusers acted as prosecutors, judges and executioners; "guilt" was assumed from the outset. (Among the judges, of course, were the Russians, whose numberless crimes included the massacre of 15,000 Polish officers, a proportion of whose bodies were discovered by the Germans at Katyn Forest, near Smolensk. The Soviet Prosecutor attempted to blame this slaughter on the German defendants). At Nuremberg, ex post facto legislation was created, whereby men were tried for "crimes" which were only declared crimes after they had been allegedly committed. Hitherto it had been the most basic legal principle that a person could only be convicted for infringing a law that was in force at the time of the infringement. "Nulla Poena Sine Lege."

The exterminationists claimed there were 9 million Jews in Europe under German control during the war, said Weber, of whom 6 million were killed and 3 million survived. Weber believed that it was very hard to determine specific figures and that the exercise could only be speculative. In his book The Final Solution, Gerald Reitlinger conceded that it was very difficult to determine with much accuracy not only how many Jews died during the war but even how many Jews were in given areas during the war. In this regard, Reitlinger was much more frank than Hilberg. Reitlinger placed Jewish losses during the war at about 4.2 million. (23-5910)

With respect to Katyn, Weber pointed out that the Soviet prosecutor had gone so far as to call Katyn one of the worst crimes of the Second World War. (23-5911)

The Rules of Evidence, developed by British jurisprudence over the centuries in order to arrive at the truth of a charge with as much certainty as possible, were entirely disregarded at Nuremberg. It was decreed that "the Tribunal should not be bound by technical rules of evidence" but could admit "any evidence which it deemed to have probative value", that is, would support a conviction. In practise, this meant the admittance of hearsay evidence and documents, which in a normal judicial trial are always rejected as untrustworthy ... Most incredible of all, perhaps, was the fact that defence lawyers at Nuremberg were not permitted to cross examine prosecution witnesses ... The real background of the Nuremberg Trials was exposed by the American judge, Justice Wenersturm, President of one of Tribunals. He was so disgusted by the proceedings that he resigned his appointment and flew home to America, leaving behind a statement to the Chicago Tribune which enumerated point by point his objections to the Trials (cf. Mark Lautern, Das Letzte Wort über Nürnberg, p. 56). Points 3 -8 are as follows: 3. The members of the department of the Public Prosecutor, instead of trying to formulate and reach a new guiding legal principle, were moved only by personal ambition and revenge. 4. The prosecution did its utmost in every way possible to prevent the defence preparing its case and to make it impossible for it to furnish evidence. 5. The prosecution, led by General Taylor, did everything in its power to prevent the unanimous decision of the Military Court being carried out i.e. to ask Washington to furnish and make available to the court further documentary evidence in the possession of the American Government. 6. Ninety per cent of the Nuremberg Court consisted of biased persons who, either on political or racial grounds, furthered the prosecution's case. 7. The prosecution obviously knew how to fill all the administrative posts of the Military Court with "Americans" whose naturalisation certificates were very new indeed, and who, whether in the administrative service or by their translations etc., created an atmosphere hostile to the accused persons. 8. The real aim of the Nuremberg Trials was to show the Germans the crimes of their Führer, and this aim was at the same time the pretext on which the trials were ordered ... Had I known seven months earlier what was happening at Nuremberg, I would never have gone there.

Concerning Point 6, that ninety per cent of the Nuremberg Court consisted of people biased on racial or political grounds, this was a fact confirmed by others present. According to Earl Carrol, an American lawyer, sixty per cent of the staff of the Public Prosecutor's Office were German Jews who had left Germany after the promulgation of Hitler's Race Laws. He observed that not even ten per cent of the Americans employed at the Nuremberg courts were actually Americans by birth. The chief of the Public Prosecutor's Office, who worked behind General Taylor, was Robert M. Kempner, a German-Jewish emigrant.

Rules of evidence were not entirely disregarded at Nuremberg, said Weber, but important rules of evidence were. Evidence was admitted that would not often be normally admissible in American or British courts. There was a right of appeal at Nuremberg to the Tribunal itself, but not to any body above the Tribunal. Weber did not know of any case where defence counsel could not cross-examine; however, there were affidavits filed at Nuremberg without the calling of the witness to support it. (23-5912, 5913)

What Harwood wrote about Judge Wennerstrum was essentially accurate, said Weber. Wennerstrum, who was a member of the State Supreme Court from Iowa, was an American judge at one of the secondary Nuremberg trials conducted by the Americans. He was disgusted by what he saw there according to his own statement which was published in the Chicago Tribune. Weber had consulted the Chicago Tribune and confirmed that the statements quoted by Harwood were in fact correct. Wennerstrum felt that the people at Nuremberg were biased on racial or political grounds and Weber shared that belief. Interrogators and interpreters were very often Jewish refugees from Germany and from Central Europe who had taken refuge in the United States before and during the war. Judge Wennerstrum was alarmed and unhappy by the fact that these people, who he felt were biased, were used so extensively by the Americans in prosecuting the Germans at Nuremberg. Weber believed that the figure of 60 percent of the staff being Jewish as stated by Harwood was approximately correct. (23-5915, 5916)

It was known that some of the evidence produced at Nuremberg was invalid evidence. Rudolf Höss, who was a primary witness at Nuremberg, was tortured; the defendant Streicher had been severely beaten and Oswald Pohl had also been tortured. (23-5919)

Weber returned to page 12 of the booklet:

The methods of intimidation described were repeated during trials at Frankfurt am-Mein and at Dachau, and large numbers of Germans were convicted for atrocities on the basis of their admissions. The American Judge Edward L. van Roden, one of the three members of the Simpson Army Commission which was subsequently appointed to investigate the methods of justice at the Dachau trials, revealed the methods by which these admissions were secured in the Washington Daily News, January 9th, 1949. His account also appeared in the British newspaper, the Sunday Pictorial, January 23rd, 1949. The methods he described were: "Posturing as priests to hear confessions and give absolution; torture with burning matches driven under the prisoners finger-nails; knocking out of teeth and breaking jaws; solitary confinement and near starvation rations." Van Roden explained: "The statements which were admitted as evidence were obtained from men who had first been kept in solitary confinement for three, four and five months ...The investigators would put a black hood over the accused's head and then punch him in the face with brass knuckles, kick him and beat him with rubber hoses ... All but two of the Germans, in the 139 cases we investigated, had been kicked in the testicles beyond repair. This was standard operating procedure with our American investigators."

The "American" investigators responsible (and who later functioned as the prosecution in the trials) were: Lt.-Col. Burton F. Ellis (chief of the War Crimes Committee) and his assistants, Capt. Raphael Shumacker, Lt. Robert E. Byrne, Lt. William R. Perl, Mr. Morris Ellowitz, Mr. Harry Thon, and Mr. Kirschbaum. The legal adviser of the court was Col. A. H. Rosenfeld. The reader will immediately appreciate from their names that the majority of these people were "biased on racial grounds" in the words of Justice Wenersturm -- that is, were Jewish, and therefore should never have been involved in any such investigation.

Despite the fact that "confessions" pertaining to the extermination of the Jews were extracted under these conditions, Nuremberg statements are still regarded as conclusive evidence for the Six Million by writers like Reitlinger and others, and the illusion is maintained that the Trials were both impartial and impeccably fair.

Weber was familiar with the Simpson Army Commission and indicated that ultimately its findings were confirmed. The statements of van Roden quoted by Harwood had been reported in the American press at the time. Van Roden had also written a lengthy article in The Progressive magazine on his own initiative. (23-5921, 5922)

In Weber's opinion, it was obvious that some of the assistants and legal advisors in these investigations were Jewish. It lent substance to the statement by Justice Wennerstrum that the staffs were biased on racial grounds, that is, they were Jewish.

Weber believed that very few historians today would call the Nuremberg trials impeccably fair. Harwood was drawing a conclusion on Nuremberg based on the Malmédy trials; nevertheless, Weber felt it was not incorrect to say that what happened at Malmédy might be an indication of how Allied justice was imposed in Germany after the war. The United States conducted the Malmédy trials and most of the Nuremberg trials. (23-5924, 5925)

Weber turned to page 13 of the booklet:

These allegations have since been elaborated; it is now claimed that the murder of Soviet Jews by the Einsatzgruppen constituted Phase One in the plan to exterminate the Jews, Phase Two being the transportation of European Jews to Poland. Reitlinger admits that the original term "final solution" referred to emigration and had nothing to do with the liquidation of Jews, but he then claims that an extermination policy began at the time of the invasion of Russia in 1941. He considers Hitler's order of July 1941 for the liquidation of the Communist commissars, and he concludes that this was accompanied by a verbal order from Hitler for the Einsatzgruppen to liquidate all Soviet Jews (Die Endlösung, p. 91). If this assumption is based on anything at all, it is probably the worthless Wisliceny statement, which alleges that the Einsatzgruppen were soon receiving orders to extend their task of crushing Communists and partisans to a "general massacre" of Russian Jews.

It is very significant that, once again, it is a "verbal order" for exterminating Jews that is supposed to have accompanied Hitler's genuine, written order -- yet another nebulous and unprovable assumption on the part of Reitlinger. An earlier order from Hitler, dated March 1941 and signed by Field Marshal Keitel, makes it quite clear what the real tasks of the future Einsatzgruppen would be. It states that in the Russian campaign, the Reichsführer S.S. (Himmler) is to be entrusted with "tasks for the preparation of the political administration, tasks which result from the struggle which has to be carried out between two opposing political systems" (Manvell and Frankl, ibid., p. 115). This plainly refers to eliminating Communism, especially the political commissars whose specific task was Communist indoctrination.

In Weber's opinion, Harwood was correct in saying that it was claimed that the murder of Soviet Jews by the Einsatzgruppen constituted phase one in a plan to exterminate the Jews, phase two being the transportation of Jews to Poland. This was the view of Hilberg in The Destruction of the European Jews. (23-5934)

Harwood also correctly put forward Reitlinger's position. Weber himself did not agree that Reitlinger's conclusions were based on the Wisliceny statement, but indicated that this was the opinion of Harwood. Dieter Wisliceny, who had been an assistant to Eichmann, stated in the affidavit that 5 or 6 million Jews were killed according to Eichmann. The affidavit was very similar to Hoettl's affidavit and was introduced at Nuremberg as a prosecution exhibit. (23-5929, 5930 to 5935)

The Einsatzgruppen trial, said Weber, was one of the subsidiary Nuremberg trials conducted solely by the Americans. The personnel of the Einsatzgruppen were drawn from the Waffen SS, from the Reich Security Main Office (which was called the Gestapo) and the SD, which was also under the Reich Security Main Office. Their task was to ensure immediate security and order in territory captured by the Germans from the Soviets and before the establishment of German civil administration. In addition, they gathered extensive intelligence and made reports about conditions in the occupied Soviet areas. They were involved with Soviet commissars and anti-partisan activity although this was not their main activity. Weber explained that any Soviet military unit of any size had a political commissar. They were committed, fanatical Communists and had the power to give orders along with regular army units. (23-5931 to 5933)

The March 1941 order from Hitler to Keitel, said Weber, did not really deal with the Einsatzgruppen. While it did talk about the Einsatzgruppen, it was a very vague order that dealt with political administration and security. There were other orders which were much more explicit about the specific tasks of the Einsatzgruppen that the booklet did not refer to. From the revisionist point of view, Weber thought Did Six Million Really Die? was outdated and that a great deal more evidence was now available which made the case for revisionism much stronger. (23- 5936 to 5938)

The most revealing trial in the "Einsatzgruppen Case" at Nuremberg was that of S.S. General Otto Ohlendorf, the chief of the S.D. who commanded Einsatzgruppe D in the Ukraine, attached to Field Marshal von Manstein's Eleventh Army. During the last phase of the war he was employed as a foreign trade expert in the Ministry of Economics. Ohlendorf was one of those subjected to the torture described earlier, and in his affidavit of November 5th, 1945 he was "persuaded" to confess that 90,000 Jews had been killed under his command alone. Ohlendorf did not come to trial until 1948, long after the main Nuremberg Trial, and by that time he was insisting that his earlier statement had been extracted from him under torture. In his main speech before the Tribunal, Ohlendorf took the opportunity to denounce