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The Holocaust and the Neo-Nazi Mythomania
© 1978, The
Beate Klarsfeld Foundation
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that city put at the disposal of the
British Ministry of Foreign Affairs for any measures which would be judged
useful.
Sincerely yours
(Signature:
illegible)
M. Leon Poliakov, Chief of Research, Center
of Jewish Contemporary Documentation, Paris."
Memorandum. Kungl. Utrikes
Department.
Concerns: the engineer Kurt Gerstein, member of the SS sanitary
section, Siesebrechstr.
Probably born in 1907 in Brunswick (?). Address in
1943: Berlin Bülowstrasse 49.
In August 1942, Gerstein established
contact with an official of a neutral embassy in Berlin and related to him the
following story:
He had just come back from a brief mission to the
extermination camp of Belzec near Lublin, and he gave a detailed description of
its set up (gas chambers, role of the personnel, the collecting of deposits in
gold, etc.) He showed diverse papers, his identification cards and instructions
from the commandant of the camp for the supplying of prussic acid.
Gerstein
declared that he endeavoured to inform neutral observers of this state of
affairs and that he was firmly convinced that as soon as large masses of the
German population learnt the fact of this extermination and that it was
confirmed to them by unbiassed [sic] foreigners, the German people would not
tolerate the Nazis a single day longer. Gerstein declared in addition that he
had already spoken with a high-ranking religious authority, the Superintendant
[sic] General Dibelius, of this matter (That was later confirmed by Dibelius
himself, who vouched for the seriousness and the veracity of Gerstein.) (...)
Six months later, Gerstein again paid a visit to this same foreign diplomat of
a neutral country and asked if the latter had been able to undertake anything
in the meantime.
Following this, no further news of him was had. The sorrow
and the shame of Gerstein in regard to the extermination camps appeared to be
as real as they were profound; and his desire to inform the outside world of
these things, in order to put an end to the atrocities, was no doubt
sincere."
Let us add, finally, that after the end
of the war, Kurt Gerstein was classified among the criminals; that on August
17, 1950, his case was posthumously reexamined by the denazification Chamber of
Wurtemberg-Hohenzollern which classed him as a "minor Nazi," and that this
verdict was confirmed on November 16, 1950; that his "report" and his case were
evoked at length in March 1949 at the Assizes Court of Frankfurt-on-the-Main,
at the time of the trial of the directors of the I.G. Farbenindustrie, the
producer of "Zyklon B," which heard numerous witnesses. It is thus that the
ministers Niemöller and Ehlers, the bishop Dibelius, the canon Buchholz,
the priests Michaiski and Rehrig confirmed that at different periods, but still
during the war, Gerstein had told them of his visit to Belzec, as he had told
it to Otter, and that Dr. Dibelius had transmitted this information to the
Archbishop of Upsala in Sweden.
6. The Gerstein testimony and the
insincerity of its detractors
One must therefore be both terribly
insincere and possessed of he blind passion of the apologist of Nazism in its
most cruel and most cynical aspect to continue to affirm that the "Gerstein
report" is not an account of an atrocious experience lived in 1942, but rather
a text forged in 1945 under the effects of torture or fear; that it is a "story
which is
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The Holocaust and the Neo-Nazi Mythomania
© 1978, The
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