This is all very pretty, but isolating one case from the sum total of witness testimonies is entirely useless in the end. Your entire line of argument amounts to nothing more than a gigantic well-poisoning exercise, of the kind we have seen over and over again from deniers: take one case which seems to cast doubt on the hated gas chambers, and then commit the fallacy of hasty generalisation by extending the doubt to every single other testimony.
In my previous post I mentioned the interrogations of Eduard Wirths, Klein's boss, by Gerald Draper, and pointed to several specific issues with the testimony that render an allegation or insinuation of coercion implausible. Your reply doesn't bother to address those points, instead you offer an aside about how Wirths committed suicide after the interrogation.
What is the implication of this in your eyes? That he was bumped off after delivering the goods? But in fact, Wirths' testimonies were not used in any war crimes prosecution in the 1940s and remained virtually unknown to historians until fairly recently.
In fact, this one case turns out to be very interesting. Wirths wrote down a settlement of account of his actions at Auschwitz - something done by several other Auschwitz SS men in 1945-46, not just Broad or Hoess. Wirths' first account of Auschwitz was sent to the Hamburg Kripo, before he was interrogated by the British. The account is clearly intended as a self-exculpation and points to his efforts on behalf of the prisoners, and also cites his former secretary Hermann Langbein as a character witness.
There is a report that Draper said to Wirths when first meeting him, something along the lines of 'I am shaking the hands of the man who killed 4 million at Auschwitz' (paraphrase, forget the exact quote). And the interrogation transcript shows Draper questioning Wirths on precisely this point. But Wirths refuted this and said it was physically impossible as the crematoria did not have a sufficient capacity to achieve such a figure. He then specified that the crematoria had a capacity of 5000 bodies/day. That is sufficiently close to the '4756' document from June 1943 that it is reasonable to infer that Wirths had seen it at some point.
Wirths' written account strongly indicates that he was suffering from PTSD from what he had seen and participated in at Auschwitz. But there are also wartime letters sent to his family, from late 1944, which without breaching the security regulations confirm that he was enormously relieved that 'the whole thing' was over. His suicide was clearly the result of his guilt and his highly strung personality, triggered by fears that he would be prosecuted for war crimes. Draper mentioned for some reason that the Czechs were after him. The Poles would have also very much wanted his ass.
Wirths also admitted that he had supervised medical experimentation at Auschwitz, and IIRC admitted that he himself had carried out such experiments. It does not take much knowledge of the trials to know that doctors who carried out human experimentation received extremely short shrift from the courts (not to mention posterity). Such men often hanged for those crimes, irrespective of whether they had also ordered or taken part in selections for gas chambers.
There is no evidence that Wirths was tortured. There is no evidence that anyone other than Wirths wrote his first (voluntary) account of Auschwitz. There is no evidence that Draper knew what to make Wirths say in an interrogation, and there is strong evidence to indicate that Draper interrogated Wirths from a position of lesser knowledge of Auschwitz than Wirths possessed. The refutation of the 4 million figure is proof of that. There is no evidence that Wirths was fed the 5000/day figure from any source and no such source existed in either the public domain (the Soviet report gave a much higher number) or was in British possession at the time. There is no evidence that Wirths was assisted in any way in his suicide, and plenty of reasons why such an action would have been entirely idiotic. Wirths would, in fact, have made the perfect witness at Nuremberg, had he not committed suicide. His suicide buried his 1945 accounts for a generation and they were not used at all in the 1940s.
Wirths was one SS witness, Klein another. We need to add Entress, Kremer and Muench for the doctors who were interrogated in 1945-6, plus Hoess, Liebehenschel, Kramer, Aumeier, Hoessler, Moll, Moeckel, Broad, Clausen, Grabner and Boger, to name but 16 of the more senior SS men. There are a couple dozen more of lesser stature. They reacted in different ways, as can be documented from the interrogation transcripts and their own writings. Several distorted the facts in order to minimise their responsibility (Aumeier, Moll). Several portrayed themselves as victims (Clausen, Grabner). Most gave chapter and verse on the crime as a whole while obfuscating or omitting their own personal responsibility (Clausen, Broad, Entress). One committed suicide (Wirths) and one died in captivity (Clausen). 10 others were executed, of whom 5 were executed essentially for crimes committed at other concentration camps, not involving gas chambers. 1 jumped an extradition train after leaving a written account confirming, as usual, gassing (Boger). 1 turned state's witness and wasn't prosecuted until the 1960s (Broad). 1 was acquitted in Poland, and 1 had a death sentence commuted (Muench, Kremer).
Out of the 16 senior witnesses mentioned above, there is no evidence of torture or coercion or maltreatment for 14 of them. And by evidence I mean either an external source or the witness claiming to have been tortured.
The evidence for the 'torture' of the two that remain is equivocal at best, and is not of the kind that could have resulted in them singing a false song. In the case of Hoess, the allegation of torture is completely nonsensical when he was in the custody of three separate nation-states; there is no evidence of maltreatment for either his jailing at Nuremberg in US captivity or in Poland. When someone writes out as many pages as Hoess did in Polish captivity, torture cannot have occurred, since it would be physically impossible to produce any written materials under torture or coercion (sleep deprivation through to beatings). And Hoess was extremely detailed in what he described.
So yeah, Hoess got beaten up when first captured. I don't think that's in much dispute. But it is a long way from beating someone up to getting them to tell a story which is untrue. It is also virtually impossible - the pulp fiction description from Rupert Butler, which is almost certainly embellished, does not sound like the kind of environment conducive to producing Hoess's first statement, which is long, and follows a conventional pattern of getting the witness to tell their life story, allowing Hoess to follow the story through to his service after Auschwitz.
Besides which: what is the logic here? There are numerous external sources of various kinds, including a substantial number of documents, to confirm Hoess's testimony and also to show that Hoess misremembered things that are not in apparent dispute. Hoess misdates the introduction of the crematoria, which is otherwise well documented. Most historians have distrusted Hoess's dates for quite some time now.
And similarly, other than Pelt's brief quote, Klein's testimony is mostly disregarded. You can keep Klein if you want, he does not offer useful evidence for historians. Indeed of the 16 senior witnesses mentioned above I would place him virtually dead last. Other witnesses confirm that Auschwitz SS doctors were on a rota for selections, and Klein's own testimony is immaterial on this issue as a result.
Your tell-tales confirm this. Klein waffles around what he did or did not see, and thus his courtroom testimony is useless as historical evidence, it would be of more interest to psychologists. But the falsity of such a confession can go several ways. Suspects and accused do lie, after all, to paint themselves in a better light or to distance themselves from responsibility. Moreover, the distancing routine of 'I heard about this' is not unknown for other Auschwitz SS men, is it? They say they heard about the gassings but they never saw them personally. A figleaf of distance is thereby created, even if the suspect/accused is lying their head off.
To prove that Klein's testimony was false, as in invented, cannot be done from analysing his testimony alone. The truth or falsity of gas chambers does not rest on a solitary witness, and cannot be 'turned' starting with one witness, whether you pick Hoess or Klein or someone else does not make much of a difference. To prove falsity, you would need to prove that all the relevant testimonies (of SS and German witnesses) was false, which has not been done. Any other approach is either going to fall foul of the fallacy of hasty generalisation or resort to the falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus fallacy. End of story.
