Fritz Klein
Up to a point I do not flinch from martyrdom. I do flinch from scrolling thru all posts that have appeared since the day before yesterday. In Codoh, from which I was expelled, there was plenty of disorganised thought. Here we also have a disorganising format.
I doubt if anyone has given reason to doubt Moorehead’s accuracy. The Moorehead passage is strong evidence that some Belsen staff were tortured in early interrogations. I also claimed that it is fair evidence that Fritz Klein himself was tortured during early interrogations - and that that would remain true even anyone can identify some other Belsen doctor who also confessed to horrendous crimes but was mysteriously never charged with them. If the passage proved no more than that, it would be proving quite a lot. The topic is Klein. Nick Terry does quite seem dispute these claims, but he belittles them. He calls he torture “rough treatment” and elides the context of interrogation. For Nickterry the fact that Klein was in military captivity for many months, hospitalised and without a lawyer of his choice, is a default argument that the May confession was voluntary. We are forced to to admit, m’lud, that the prisoner was brutally tortured during his early interrogations when a journalist was around to see it. But, m’lud, can anyone prove this Nazi war criminal was ill-treated during long months of isolation when nobody was around to see it?
If any prisoner was tortured and hospitalised then the burden of proof is to show that his early written confessions were voluntary, not the other way round. That would be self-evident in any other legal context but the sacred one of the Holocaust. And there would have been no cause to ill-treat Klein in his long isolation, as long as he undertook to stand by his written confession in the courtroom. He obviously did make that promise, and he obviously felt less able to keep it as his cross-examination unfolded. The unpublished shorthand records of court hearings do bring us nearer to something voluntary, and probably much closer to what was actually said in interrogation rooms. The written affidavit is terse, free of detail, and categorical. “I have seen the gas chambers and the crematorium and Auschwitz and I knew that those I selected [as unfit] were to go to the gas chamber.” He claims he was ordered to do so by Dr Wirths [the same Eduard Wirths who committed suicide after a long interrogation by Gerald Draper).
In the stand he tells us that he “once” visited what would in effect have been an empty mortuary and that the gas chambers are something about which he knew because had “heard”. I have shown - as Professor Van Pelt did not show - that Klein used a bunch of qualifiers which the leading expert on coercive interrogation regards as tell-tale signs of a false confession and are certainly signs of an unreliable one. But I expect that in this forum the weight of casual opinion may have proved to be greater than the opinion of a leading expert. What Klein categorically knew in the affidavit, he knew in courtroom only because he had “heard” of it, and condemns only “if it did happen” and finally regarded ot as merely “probable.” These and other markers, if not proof of a false confession, amount to a virtual retraction of the claim categorically “to know” that unfit prisoners went to gas chambers. Mandy Rice Terry will say: he would deny that wouldn’t he, since guilty knowledge is the only thing that would condemn him. But if Klein is now making a denial then he is no longer making a confession, and his testimony should not be counted as such.
We observe that Klein is not pressed to confess to something he saw or to anything he criminally did. He is being pressed by Backhouse to confess, not to a crime but to the existence of a crime. But he cannot quite go the distance. The crime only existed “probably.” The Undeniability of the Auschwitz gas chambers was very pointedly stipulated at the beginning of the trial by the court-appointed English army officers who were charged with the defence. The earliest gas chamber confession I have found in the Belsen files, dated April 24 and has an interesting linguistic usage. It begins “I admit...” What is interesting is that interrogatee does not admit that he did something or that he saw anything. Under encouragement from Roger Latry he “admits” that something was the case. To be precise he “admits” that from 1941 transports arriving at Auschwitz were conducted directly to the gas chamber. He admits to a knowledge which he apparently he did nothing to acquire. As with Klein, the important thing was for the accused was to admit that something had happened; he was not not pressed to tell us exactly how he knew that something happened.
On can reach sometimes agreement on facts; one cannot so easily reach agreement on standards of evidence which involve judgments about the burden of proof. These standards can change. Judges and juries in the UK are now less likely to regard a retraction of pre-trial confessions as virtually a punishable offence – being a further step away from the penitence that earns lenience. For my part I will believe that confessions were voluntary only when they are internally coherent and detailed and made in the presence of a lawyer of choice whose career will not suffer for making a vigorous defence. Outside those conditions I myself, given my view of power structures, would always take a prisoner’s word against the state when he claims his confession was forced . ( Of course I do not thereby take his word for it that his confession was false. Involuntary confessions may be socially valuable of course in preventing guilty men from walking free; but such confessions have no intellectual merit as evidence, even if they are proved extrinsically to be correct.) But you, reader, being the rascal you are, probably will not have my lofty standards and until recently neither did any judiciary.
Why, one must have asked, in the recent crop of DNA- disproved false confessions did some of the victims of the accused enter a guilty plea. One reason is that they had come to believe that their confession was true - “probably.” Another reason was that that their lawyer knew that retraction would do them more harm than good. If you claimed your confession was coerced you then had to prove that it was coerced, and that is something judges and juries may simply refuse to believe. In two of the worst US miscarriages (Byron Halsey and Jeffrey Deskovic) the accused did retract their false confessions and did protest their innocence in the trial. The scientific evidence strongly supported that innocence. Yet the Prosecution was able to prevail, largely on the basis of those false confessions. Heavy sentences were handed down. The feeling of the court was that the accused were obviously wrong’uns. Nobody would ever confess to a crime they did not commit. Retraction only added insult to injury - wrong’uns would say that wouldn’t they? They got heavy sentences.
Yet a post-Miranda American citizen was a many times more likely to receive a fair trial than a big Nazi wrong’un in the hysterical atmosphere of 1945, and he could retract a confession with much more impunity. That is not hard to show, but it is laborious, and I intend to save it for eleswhere
Up to a point I do not flinch from martyrdom. I do flinch from scrolling thru all posts that have appeared since the day before yesterday. In Codoh, from which I was expelled, there was plenty of disorganised thought. Here we also have a disorganising format.
I doubt if anyone has given reason to doubt Moorehead’s accuracy. The Moorehead passage is strong evidence that some Belsen staff were tortured in early interrogations. I also claimed that it is fair evidence that Fritz Klein himself was tortured during early interrogations - and that that would remain true even anyone can identify some other Belsen doctor who also confessed to horrendous crimes but was mysteriously never charged with them. If the passage proved no more than that, it would be proving quite a lot. The topic is Klein. Nick Terry does quite seem dispute these claims, but he belittles them. He calls he torture “rough treatment” and elides the context of interrogation. For Nickterry the fact that Klein was in military captivity for many months, hospitalised and without a lawyer of his choice, is a default argument that the May confession was voluntary. We are forced to to admit, m’lud, that the prisoner was brutally tortured during his early interrogations when a journalist was around to see it. But, m’lud, can anyone prove this Nazi war criminal was ill-treated during long months of isolation when nobody was around to see it?
If any prisoner was tortured and hospitalised then the burden of proof is to show that his early written confessions were voluntary, not the other way round. That would be self-evident in any other legal context but the sacred one of the Holocaust. And there would have been no cause to ill-treat Klein in his long isolation, as long as he undertook to stand by his written confession in the courtroom. He obviously did make that promise, and he obviously felt less able to keep it as his cross-examination unfolded. The unpublished shorthand records of court hearings do bring us nearer to something voluntary, and probably much closer to what was actually said in interrogation rooms. The written affidavit is terse, free of detail, and categorical. “I have seen the gas chambers and the crematorium and Auschwitz and I knew that those I selected [as unfit] were to go to the gas chamber.” He claims he was ordered to do so by Dr Wirths [the same Eduard Wirths who committed suicide after a long interrogation by Gerald Draper).
In the stand he tells us that he “once” visited what would in effect have been an empty mortuary and that the gas chambers are something about which he knew because had “heard”. I have shown - as Professor Van Pelt did not show - that Klein used a bunch of qualifiers which the leading expert on coercive interrogation regards as tell-tale signs of a false confession and are certainly signs of an unreliable one. But I expect that in this forum the weight of casual opinion may have proved to be greater than the opinion of a leading expert. What Klein categorically knew in the affidavit, he knew in courtroom only because he had “heard” of it, and condemns only “if it did happen” and finally regarded ot as merely “probable.” These and other markers, if not proof of a false confession, amount to a virtual retraction of the claim categorically “to know” that unfit prisoners went to gas chambers. Mandy Rice Terry will say: he would deny that wouldn’t he, since guilty knowledge is the only thing that would condemn him. But if Klein is now making a denial then he is no longer making a confession, and his testimony should not be counted as such.
We observe that Klein is not pressed to confess to something he saw or to anything he criminally did. He is being pressed by Backhouse to confess, not to a crime but to the existence of a crime. But he cannot quite go the distance. The crime only existed “probably.” The Undeniability of the Auschwitz gas chambers was very pointedly stipulated at the beginning of the trial by the court-appointed English army officers who were charged with the defence. The earliest gas chamber confession I have found in the Belsen files, dated April 24 and has an interesting linguistic usage. It begins “I admit...” What is interesting is that interrogatee does not admit that he did something or that he saw anything. Under encouragement from Roger Latry he “admits” that something was the case. To be precise he “admits” that from 1941 transports arriving at Auschwitz were conducted directly to the gas chamber. He admits to a knowledge which he apparently he did nothing to acquire. As with Klein, the important thing was for the accused was to admit that something had happened; he was not not pressed to tell us exactly how he knew that something happened.
On can reach sometimes agreement on facts; one cannot so easily reach agreement on standards of evidence which involve judgments about the burden of proof. These standards can change. Judges and juries in the UK are now less likely to regard a retraction of pre-trial confessions as virtually a punishable offence – being a further step away from the penitence that earns lenience. For my part I will believe that confessions were voluntary only when they are internally coherent and detailed and made in the presence of a lawyer of choice whose career will not suffer for making a vigorous defence. Outside those conditions I myself, given my view of power structures, would always take a prisoner’s word against the state when he claims his confession was forced . ( Of course I do not thereby take his word for it that his confession was false. Involuntary confessions may be socially valuable of course in preventing guilty men from walking free; but such confessions have no intellectual merit as evidence, even if they are proved extrinsically to be correct.) But you, reader, being the rascal you are, probably will not have my lofty standards and until recently neither did any judiciary.
Why, one must have asked, in the recent crop of DNA- disproved false confessions did some of the victims of the accused enter a guilty plea. One reason is that they had come to believe that their confession was true - “probably.” Another reason was that that their lawyer knew that retraction would do them more harm than good. If you claimed your confession was coerced you then had to prove that it was coerced, and that is something judges and juries may simply refuse to believe. In two of the worst US miscarriages (Byron Halsey and Jeffrey Deskovic) the accused did retract their false confessions and did protest their innocence in the trial. The scientific evidence strongly supported that innocence. Yet the Prosecution was able to prevail, largely on the basis of those false confessions. Heavy sentences were handed down. The feeling of the court was that the accused were obviously wrong’uns. Nobody would ever confess to a crime they did not commit. Retraction only added insult to injury - wrong’uns would say that wouldn’t they? They got heavy sentences.
Yet a post-Miranda American citizen was a many times more likely to receive a fair trial than a big Nazi wrong’un in the hysterical atmosphere of 1945, and he could retract a confession with much more impunity. That is not hard to show, but it is laborious, and I intend to save it for eleswhere
