Findings are the conclusions reached after a judicial inquiry. Close enough to verdict for government work. If the verdicts of Allied War Crimes trials were binding on the German courts, there wouldn't be any point in revisiting the findings making them de facto binding.
You seem to be arguing with yourself again.
You say the sentences could not be overturned but didn't many a war criminal get early release from their sentences? In which case what does it really mean that their sentences couldn't be overturned.
Yes, indeedy, many war criminals had already been released by 1955, and the rest followed in the years immediately after. The exceptions were of course the inmates of Spandau, convicted at IMT.
In any case, the role of precedent makes it very difficult to deviate from a previous court's ruling. That's why lawyers and judges make terrible historians.
West German courts did not simply have the Nuremberg judgement read out and entered into evidence. The IMT charter wasn't entered into West German law so nobody could be prosecuted for crimes against humanity, only for murder, under the old 1871 law code.
Earlier on, I already pointed to one example where the West German justice system reneged on what you guys think is a supposedly key feature of Nuremberg. West German detectives refused to bring charges against Professor Spanner for 'soap'.
How many SS men who were not in court, had not been in court, had not been arrested, not been charged, who were not giving state's evidence, had not already given state's evidence, or were not subpoenaed to give state's evidence or not on trial themselves--in short, who were living below the radar--ever go public with the extermination of the Jews in gas chambers story?
Any convict can be tried again if he commits another crime.
Since every SS man was interned automatically in the 1940s, then your point makes absolutely no sense. SS men were either prosecuted or released from internment, those who were prosecuted in the 1940s and were not sentenced to death were all out by the end of the 1950s. None of those SS men uttered so much as a peep which would contradict extermination.
There were certainly SS men who gave accounts of the Holocaust outside of any legal proceedings: Eichmann, for one (as we will see). But I suppose his brief period of internment under another identity rules him out, since it's well known that the slightest contact or possible contact with law enforcement of any kind will induce Uebermenschen to tell porky pies.
Another SS man who was not prosecuted and wrote a book was Peter Kleist, an honorary SS man who was a civil servant in the Eastern Ministry. He was actually one of the first Holocaust deniers but was a particularly inept one. It's very noticeable that although he was well placed to offer up alibi evidence - he was in charge of the Ostland desk - his book failed to provide any.
There were many, many, many more non-SS Germans who also came out with accounts and evidence relating to war crimes independently of any legal proceedings. They, too, as we will see, were well placed to contradict extermination if they could provide refutational or alibi evidence. But they did not.
Let me ask you this: Are you one of those people who says that holocaust denial isn't illegal anywhere in the world? It never has been and it never will be? Because I know people who actually say that with a straight face.
When people like Ernst Zundel are being tried in Canada for publishing revisionist material in the mid-1980s, despite no holocaust denial law specifically on the books in Canada, or where Frederick Toben is detained in England (which has no anti-holocaust denial laws) while flying from Australia to Dubai because Germany has requested his extradition, where David Irving is arrested in Austria in 2005 because something he said in 1988 (which was true, btw) was made illegal there in 1994 and where Sheppard and Whittle (British citizens of a country with no anti-holocaust denial laws) sat in jail for two years in the United States (which has the goddamn First Amendment) before they were sent back to England to serve their sentences for hurting the Jews feelings, what do you mean by it's "perfectly possible" for former SS men to deny the holocaust without fear of legal ramifications?
Holy chronological gibberish, Batman!
There was no law against "Holocaust denial" anywhere in the world in the 1950s. The West German law against incitement to racial hatred wasn't even formalised until the turn of the decade into the 1960s, after a wave of Jewish cemetery desecrations in 1958.
Rassinier was able to tour West Germany in 1960 to bring the 'good news' to the alte Kameraden. Early 'revisionist' books circulated quite freely in West Germany during the 1960s, it wasn't until the end of the 1960s that prosecutors started monitoring right-wing newspapers and considered bringing charges against the National-Zeitung. By the end of the 1960s, there were even NPD deputies in state parliaments with parliamentary immunity.
The circumstances in West Germany during the 1950s and 1960s were entirely favourable to a concerted effort to 'set the record straight' that could actually present something more than hysterical denials and repetitions of Nazi antisemitic verbiage.
The true marvel is how come Germans told other Germans in the course of thousands of 1960s investigations about the extermination of the Jews. By your account, this was an epochal act of cowardice and cringe-making whereby
thousands of Germans were hoodwinked by the nameless hoaxing entity or zeitgeist into lying to themselves and each other.
Even though there was no third degree, no Lubianka, no confess-or-your-family-gets-it threats, no nothing that could possibly induce so many false confessions.
I know, it's crazy! But if fear of prosecution was dead, buried, dug up, and already gone through the chimney by 1955, the 1960s and 1970s had to have occurred before then.
Or you assertion that SS men had nothing to fear from coming out of the closet after 1955 is mindless drivel.
Hardly. Konrad Morgen was a state's witness in the 1940s trials and testified to what he saw in extermination camps. What was going to stop him from reversing himself in the 1950s and saying, actually, I made it all up? Mossad?
August Frank, Georg Loerner and 15 other members of the WVHA were put on trial at Nuremberg in the Pohl trial, and were given prison sentences, acquitted or released. They were headquarters guys, Schreibtischtaeter, who generally had not served on concentration camp staffs, and were in no fear of prosecution for another crime. They were right there, in the WVHA, they could easily have known what policy really was if it wasn't extermination. Not a peep out of them.
12 more SS leaders were prosecuted in the RuSHA trial and survived into the late 1950s. Not a peep out of them, either. They might have had less direct professional insight into Jewish policy but they were involved in racial policy all over Eastern Europe. Not one of them said, hey, you know this story about Auschwitz is ********, I know full well we constructed 20 resettlement camps in the Ukraine and we gave them milk and cookies. Again: they were headquarters guys, people who would have been believable if they had claimed inside knowledge.
17 Einsatzgruppen officers tried at Nuremberg were released by the end of the 1950s. None were prosecuted again. None of them uttered a peep, instead they kept on providing evidence for West German war crimes prosecutions.
20 ministers and senior civil servants were prosecuted at the Ministries Trial, including several men who had participated in the Wannsee conference. They were all out by the
early 1950s. Gottlob Berger, an SS-Obergruppenfuehrer, even wrote for Nation Europa, a right-wing journal, after his release in 1951, and lived to 1975. He was the SS liaison with the Eastern Ministry. So he was apparently unafraid to collaborate with neo-Nazis but too scared to come out with the alibi evidence that he could have provided, given his position?
This would possibly be valid only if there were Germans in the territory where the Jews were sent and that they would have necessarily seen and recognized the Jews sent there. How many of these Germans were in the east and how many of them would have been in a position to know the fate of the Jews sent there? Where were these Germans after the war and who sought out their testimony?
Are you seriously claiming that deporting millions of Jews from west to east wouldn't firstly involve a very large number of Germans, or be witnessed by them - just counting the railwaymen alone - or that once they arrived 'wherever', that even though nearly a million of the deportees had passed through Auschwitz, a concentration camp, that the Germans would just let the deportees wander off into the countryside without any supervision whatsoever?
There were Germans stationed in every district (Kreis, Gebietskommissar, Feldkommandantur) of the occupied territories. There were policemen, military garrisons, civil servants, private businessmen, and railwaymen. 10s of 1000s of Germans spent their war years in Poland and other East European countries, behind the front.
All of them had the opportunity to write in to Nation Europa or the National-Zeitung with the happy news that they were serving in Dnepropetrovsk and one day saw large numbers of Jews arrive there. Or any other eyewitness statement that would serve as rebuttal evidence.
And you've read the transcript of the Eichmann interview? Then you know he confirmed nothing of an extermination policy. And you know the difference between a policy of ethnic cleansing and a policy of extermination? And you know that you can shoot people who are Jewish without pushing them into gas chambers? Just checking, I want to be sure we have the same idea of what an "extermination" is.
I'm quite certain we do not have the same idea of what extermination is, since you have shown time and again that you will apply the most restrictive definition of the term, to the point of strawmannery.
Eichmann's interviews with Sassen certainly waffled around his own personal responsibility, but he still managed to recount Heydrich summoning him to inform him that Hitler had ordered the physical extermination of the Jews.
This is the
precise opposite of what, if there had been no extermination policy, a man like Eichmann would have said when 'setting the record straight' while at liberty in Latin America.
David Irving just posted an excerpt from an Eichmann manuscript composed in Latin America before his capture, which repeats the same story he offered only slight variations on until his final memoirs before his execution
http://www.fpp.co.uk/Auschwitz/Eichmann/Eichmann_IV.pdf
Why would a free man who was already known to historians as one of the architects of the Final Solution and being accused of organising extermination, admit that the Final Solution meant just that, extermination, if there was no such policy?
Actually, there were a flood of denials...at first. When Kramer was arrested and interrogated he denied the gas chambers. After spending some time on holiday with the British did he "remember" that there were gas chambers after all. [Cue Believer drivel about Hitler oath...and....action!]. Then there's Kremer who kept a detailed diary which included his time at Auschwitz. Oddly he didn't say anything about gas chambers at all in that diary. Only after he too had spent some time on holiday did he "remember" the gas chambers.
Other than Kramer, I'm aware of only one SS man, a lowly private, who after admitting that there were gas chambers at Majdanek, when questioned about his transfer to Auschwitz, froze up and wouldn't answer the question of whether there were gas chambers at Auschwitz.
There was no flood of denials, but this is what we would expect if there had not been. We would expect that SS officers whether in charge of organising deportations, involved in racial policy, in concentration camp policy, or in occupation policy, would respond to the questions of interrogators by saying: "this is not correct, we did not do this, we did x instead, and you are coming to me with misinformation. What is the source? Oh, the prisoners. Right, well they misunderstood what we were actually doing."
Heck, the Nazis had
two and a half years to prepare their alibi. The Nazi leadership knew from the very end of 1942 that they were being accused of exterminating the Jews by the Allies (the UN Declaration of 17 December 1942). They knew from the summer of 1944 that death camps had been liberated in central Poland.
It wasn't very long after the surrender that the Germans realized that the Allies actually believed in the gas chambers despite absolutely no evidence. Knowing that it is impossible to prove a negative, trying to convince the court there were no gas chambers would only result in angering the court. Their only recourse was to disavow any involvement with the gas chambers...which most did.
This, incidentally, is the same way witchcraft has been proven to be true as well.
This is just a variant on the well-worn waffle of Butz, Crowell et al. It may be comforting to you to utter such waffle, but you cannot seriously expect anyone to believe that 100s of Germans when asked about extermination facilities would decide what the hell, let's give them what they want.
It certainly is possible to prove a negative - you point to evidence or an explanation which refutes the claim. Your problem is that like most deniers you are so fixated on 'there were no gas chambers' that you miss the immediate and inextricably linked context. These camps received 100s of 1000s, all in all millions of people. A refutation has to explain what happened to them, otherwise we can assume that they were abducted en masse by the Nazi UFOs flying out of Neuschwabenland. That is a more serious explanation than the non-explanation offered by you so far, incidentally.
So proving a negative - contributing to the proof of a negative - has to start with, yes we received large transports of Jews and we selected out the able-bodied to send them to work at Monowitz.
Any other statement out of the mouth of an SS man OR a denier would fly in the face of overwhelming evidence.
A would-be denier has then to say, 'but no we did not gas those we did not select for labour, instead we sent them on their way to x'.
It's really not that difficult. We can repeat it for Treblinka. 'yes we received 100s of 1000s of Jews from Warsaw and elsewhere', says the SS man or would-be denier. Any other statement flies in the face of the paper trail and of the evidence of 100s of 1000s of Poles in Warsaw who knew about the deportations. The ghetto was emptied. The inhabitants were taken somewhere. Every indication points to Treblinka.
Either the Nazi UFOs were at it again, or they were exterminated, or they went somewhere else. If the latter, then this would be the starting point for an alibi.
No such alibi was ever presented.
This would be a valid argument if there was any evidence that any Nazis had actually escaped Europe and rebuilt their lives by hiding in Latin America. For a while, Bormann was spotted every once in a while in South America but we now know that wasn't him. There's Mengele but he drowned before he could recant.
But Mengele is the only one who we know was able to escape to South America and go into hiding.
I'll acknowledge that any Nazis who successfully went underground and lived the rest of their lives undetected wouldn't be known to us. So it could've happened.
If there were any Nazis who escaped to South America but were discovered and brought to trial, it would confirm your Nazi war criminals escaping to South America theory but it would destroy your argument that South America provided safety for them.
But I don't know about any of those, do you?
As Meadmaker said above, you missed my point. Eichmann was captured in 1960 - but had admitted extermination before then. There were others in Latin America at the time, not just Mengele but Franz Stangl of Treblinka, Gustav Wagner of Sobibor, and Walter Rauff, who had overseen the development of gas vans.
There were other former Nazis in Latin America, too, who badly wanted there to be no Holocaust. The journal Der Weg tried on some of the first, feeble gambits, but could not produce any evidence of its own to refute the charge.
All these Nazis were entirely undisturbed until 1960s - the extradition of Stangl took until the end of the 1960s to go through. Plenty of time for any of these men to have gone on the record in a suitably protected way - publishing the account w/o any reference to their whereabouts, and preferably in a different continent to where they were, would seem to cover the bases - and refuted the charges.
They didn't: quite the opposite, as Eichmann's example shows.
It's really quite simple to explain why SS men testified to extermination in substantial numbers. They didn't.
You haven't cited a single SS man or woman who has publicly admitted to a Nazi extermination program for the Jews or the gas chambers outside of the courtroom.
How heavy are those goalposts you're moving?
When exactly did these SS men start telling interrogators in "substantial" numbers about the plan to physically exterminate the Jews and/or the gas chambers? Who were the Germans who spilled the beans, who did they tell this information to, and what was the circumstance of their interrogations?
So having realised that your comments on later opportunities to speak out and tell the truth have failed, you revert to classic denier suspicion mode and start constructing your conspiracy theory.
Remember the time line here. Around 1943, Allies began receiving reports of mass extermination in gas chambers. But the Allies thought these reports were false. In 1945, when large numbers of Germans began to fall into the hand of the Allies, the Allied interrogators would have no reason to believe the rumors about gas chambers. They might not even know about these rumours.
Your timeline, and your facts, are incorrect. The first reports of extermination of Jews in gas chambers appeared in 1942, alongside contradictory reports of extermnination of Jews by other means like steam and electricity. These were enough, together with the manifold reports of deportations of Jews from many different European countries, for the Allies to accuse the Germans of extermination, which they did in December 1942. They were hearsay reports, mainly, although the Chelmno account was from a direct eyewitness. But hearsay is all that is needed for probable cause. At this stage, the Allies had enough reports which converged to the conclusion that this was apparently going on.
No refutation was provided by the Nazis. I am not speaking of simple denials - there were a few - but actual proof-of-life for the whereabouts of the deportees.
That was the question being asked at the time by governments-in-exile, by the Allies, and by the Red Cross. The Nazis refused to answer, leading to the conclusion on the part of disinterested observers in the Red Cross and neutral countries, that the deported Jews were in fact being killed, even though details were still sketchy. In politics, and diplomacy, there is no right to silence and we all draw perfectly valid conclusions from someone's refusal to answer a question.
In the next two and a half years, more reports came in to various locations, confirming previous reports and correcting the wilder hearsay rumours. In the last two years of the war, there were more and more reports from liberated territories, starting in the Soviet Union, regarding Nazi war crimes as a whole, and regarding the use of gas vans, the existence of extermination camps, and eventually reports from liberated extermination camps (Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdanek). Allied military intelligence started compiling reports from the interrogations of increasing numbers of captured German soldiers and SS men who confirmed various details.
However, it's fairly certain that Allied interrogators in the summer of 1945 did not have access to all of this prior information and could not know what was in foreign office or state department files, much less what the Swiss or Swedes knew, and couldn't exactly get easy access to Polish underground resistance reports. The first interrogators knew only two things, one, that they had just liberated a series of charnel houses called concentration camps, and two, the survivors of these charnel houses started babbling about a place called Auschwitz which was even worse.
The reaction of Allied JAGs, who got tasked with sorting through war crimes statements as would be expected, was disbelief until they heard several such accounts. Before May 1945, the JAG of a US Army, forget which one, may have been 9th Army, passed on reports up the chain of command from liberated prisoners and said, these are beyond belief but we have had several such reports, therefore you should read them. Which seems an entirely reasonable approach.
There are no grounds to presume that Allied interrogators would even have had much access to the press reports appearing in 1945 after liberation. Did newspapers published in New York or London make it out to Wiesbaden at that time? I doubt it.
It is in this milieu in which, according to you, substantial numbers of Germans began opening up to their interrogators about the gas chambers. So what was the reaction to the initial disclosure by the Germans? How did it happen? Did different interrogation teams from all over Europe begin receiving reports of gas chambers all at once?
Yes, the Allies received reports of gas chambers from all over Europe from May to September 1945. Given prevailing communications channels there is no reason to suppose that one unit in Austria could communicate with another unit of a different nationality in Norway. Chain of command meant that any report from a lower level corps or army JAG had to go up to army group and then to SHAEF before it could be transmitted back down the chain of command to another army or corps, even one that was neighbouring. There were no lateral communication channels because that isn't how the military works. There is moreover no proof of any such communication at this stage.
What did the Allies do to try to confirm these gas chambers? There had to have been some resistance to the idea at first because believing the gas chambers were real required accepting the fact that there had been an intelligence failure of monumental proportions.
There was no state-level intelligence failure, because reports about gas chambers had been arriving since 1942. Individual field armies of Allied forces were more concerned with military intelligence.
The field armies gathering the first reports were not yet involved in prosecuting cases or knowing what to do. They acted just as Allied forces had acted before the end of the war, interrogating German prisoners and eliciting information from them. Then they passed on the reports to higher authorities and to war crimes units, who then and only then acted on them. You're imposing an unreasonable burden on the corps and armies who interrogated the first SS men from Auschwitz if you expect them to have done the entire investigation all by themselves.
What proof did the Germans offer of these fantastical gas chambers?
The same proof that any prisoner being interrogated offers of any statement they make; their own statements and demeanour, which would allow an interrogator to draw conclusions as to their overall credibility and reliability.
Moreover, the same investigators were interrogating prisoner witnesses who were starting to paint a comprehensive picture of the inner workings of these camps. A typical early witness statement from an Auschwitz survivor will name all the SS men they knew about who served in the camp and many will identify the job roles of the SS men in question.
Conversely, many SS men decided to name individual prisoners as character witnesses, irrespective of whether they were anywhere in the vicinity. Wirths, the camp doctor, employed Hermann Langbein, as his prisoner secretary, and they had a good relationship dating back to time in Dachau before both ended up at Auschwitz. Langbein discussed Wirths at length in his initial statements written down in Vienna in 1945, while Wirths named Langbein in his initial statement in Hamburg.
No, your fantasy of Germans en mass telling their disbelieving captors about the "gas chambers" is simply a convoluted fantasy. The only way the Allies would believe in the magic gas chambers is if they had a preconceived notion that there were gas chambers. The record shows that Germans did deny the gas chambers initially. Germans continued to deny any knowledge of the gas chambers from Nuremberg to Frankfurt and beyond.
Since you've imported your desired conclusion (magic gas chambers are unbelievable) as a premise, then it's unsurprising that the above is complete gibberish. The Allies had received reports already during the war and these had been given limited publicity in the press. On a state level, there was already evidence, not a preconceived notion. Even the inaccurate hearsay reports added up to sufficient grounds to ask some hard questions, and there was also a great deal of other data which supported the conclusion. Like the fact that the Soviets had not reported at all about liberating masses of Jews in the east, and were reporting similar horror stories from places like Majdanek and Treblinka.
The interrogators working in Germany in 1945 had very little clue about the inner workings of the Nazi regime, the SS, the concentration camps or the Final Solution because they were not able to access all of the data available even to their own home country's government branches, never mind the other allies' data. They were confronted by multiple prisoner witnesses saying, Auschwitz is a death camp and it was run by Hoess and there was this guy called Moll.
The same prisoners could often point out individual SS men in internment camps and say, he was at Auschwitz, interrogate him.
The Auschwitz SS had all been transferred to serve in other concentration camps, which were hell-holes in 1945. They were captured and interned and unsurprisingly interrogated. Basic interrogation requires that you outline your career and postings in the war, it is exactly what you see time and again in the protocols. The British captured SS Captain Hans Aumeier in Norway where he was sent in 1945 to set up some crackpot fallback concentration camp. OK, they ask, where were you in the war? I was in Estonia, he replies, and before that at Auschwitz. Oh, we have heard that Auschwitz was especially nasty. Tell us more about it. OK, goes Aumeier, and starts waffling on in order to minimise his role and what might have happened there, inadvertently revealing many true details amidst the obfuscation and denial of personal responsibility.
The one thing Aumeier does not do, is point to an alibi explanation.
You wonder how the Germans knew what to say to Allies about the gas chambers? They didn't. They gave descriptions of fantastical WMDs that were all over the board.
But this is simply incorrect. There are hundreds of details regarding the extermination process at Auschwitz which are conveyed by the witnesses. The SS witnesses could not simply pull these details out of their ass and make them up from absolutely nothing. Every agreement is a nail in the coffin of your nonsense.
The Allies picked pieces of testimony that vaguely fit the narrative they wanted to develop. Your side has defended this practice vis-a-vis the Gerstein statement. You've done this with the Hoess statements as well. Use what you like and ignore all the other crazy stuff. This practice is why you had patently false garbage about steam chambers, electric floors, and the Belsen gas chamber ending up in the record.
Your obsession with disagreements and contradictions leads you to utter nonsense such as the above. We have already established that steam chambers and electric floors were not reported by a single direct eyeball witness, and are therefore irrelevant.
'Belsen gas chamber' is nowhere on the record. Because the Belsen trial also prosecuted crimes committed by Belsen staff at Auschwitz, a number of inaccurate press reports emerged which confused the two. The trial itself did not claim a gas chamber existed at Belsen. No witness interrogated before the trial, or at the trial, claimed a gas chamber there. The only case of someone claiming a gas chamber existed at Belsen came in 1992 from a by then elderly survivor who had been about 11 years old in 1945, who claimed this in a memoir. We are back to the issue of how many nutters one would expect to find in a sample of 1000 witnesses. If you expect a thousand witnesses to be nutter-free then you are living in cloud-cuckoo land.
What you have to explain is not simply the disagreements, but the agreements between testimonies. These cannot have been plucked out of thin air.
You don't need a conspiracy to explain what happened but if you want to call it a conspiracy, then there's a conspiracy. There's no need to explain how it is possible that a conspiracy of this magnitude developed. We know it is possible because it happened.
So you've gone from denying that a conspiracy was needed to calling it a conspiracy. There is unfortunately a great need to explain how it was possible because the answers offered so far, by you on this forum and by revisionists in general, do not add up to a convincing argument or explanation.
Despite your evident addiction to revisionist anomaly hunting, you seem blithely unconcerned about the anomalies in your own 'theory' (it can hardly be called that, but we'll dignifiy your drivel with the term anyhow). Why did Eichman, a free man, speak about extermination to Sassen? Why didn't he come up with a clinching alibi argument against extermination? Why did Aumeier and Dragon name the gas chambers in Birkenau the Bunkers? Why did Hoess and Grabner and others describe gassing Soviet POWs in Block 11? Why didn't anyone tell the real story if there was no extermination?
This is all without beginning to discuss the documents. I shudder to think what nonsense you will come up with to handwave away those. You're evidently not capable of correlating basic, simple evidence.
If Himmler gives a speech in Posen and speaks of Ausrottung and describes dead bodies, if his speech is greeted by Goebbels as meaning extermination, if Himmler gives another speech discussing the problem of what to do with the women and children, and this is commented on too, and if Hitler gives a private speech also admitting extermination, then why should we dispute that there was a policy of extermination in the Third Reich?
If the Grand Mufti's memoirs are published in Syria, a noted anti-Zionist state, recounting a meeting with Himmler in 1943 where the deaths of millions of Jews are discussed, then on what grounds is this evidence to be doubted? The absolute last person you'd expect to endorse the Holocaust in any way, shape or form is the spiritual leader of the Palestinian nation!
