The Extermination of the Jews and Adolf Hitler

by F. B.

A student essay from Dr. Elliot Neaman's History 210 class (historical methods - spring 1998)

There is beginning to be a steady growth of Holocaust denial worldwide. It is promoted in the political process, in the media, and the university. Denial, or "revisionism" as the deniers call it, plays on classical anti-Semitic stereotypes: Jewish conspiracy and Jewish control of the media. It is a well organized and exploits a true historical phenomenon : history is always examined by later generations, especially histories of wars.

Deniers will tell you that there is no concrete evidence to prove that the Holocaust did in fact happen, and that gas chambers really did exists. "What proof exists that the Nazis practiced genocide or deliberately killed six million Jews?" the Institute for Historical Review asks in a leaflet about the Holocaust. "None," the sheet proclaims. "The only evidence is the testimony of individual ‘survivors.’ This testimony is contradictory and few ‘survivors’ claim to have witnessed any gassing. There is no hard evidence whatsoever: no mounds of ashes, no crematoria capable of doing the job, no piles of clothes, no human soap, no lamp shades made of human skin, no records, no credible demographic statistics." Deniers argue that all the confessions at Nuremberg were false, the result of torture; that gassing was only for delousing; that if gassing had been the policy, a gas other than Zyklon-B would have been used; that the crematoria could not have operated quickly enough to account for all the dead; that pictures of the dead were of people who had died of typhus, or as the IHR’s question-and-answer sheet proclaims, "piles of German women and children killed in Allied bombing raids who have been passed off as dead Jews."

Deniers also argue that Nazi Germany in general, and Hitler in particular weren’t so bad. Question: "What evidence is there that Hitler knew of the ongoing Jewish extermination." Answer: "None." Through lies, distortions, and half-truths, hard-core deniers repaint a world where Nazis are the victims and Jews are the villains. The worst mistake any rational person can make is to think that since Holocaust denial is so irrational, it must appear irrational to others. It doesn’t. Read any Holocaust denial article that avoids overt Jew-hatred, and the arguments appear logical, internally consistent and reasonable. French professor Robert Faurisson, for example, denies the existence of gas chambers at Auschwitz by writing about the characteristics of the gas used to kill Jews, Zyklon-B. He argues that Zyklon-B is an effective killer that sticks to surfaces. How, he asks, could such a powerful, combustible, and explosive gas have been used, when the testimony about the camp suggest that no special equipment was used to take the bodies out, that there would have been poisoned air pockets between corpses, that the people who removed the bodies smoked while doing so, and that the removal of corpses was said to be immediate when, even with the best technology, it would have required nearly a day to ventilate a gas chamber?

Fred Leuchter, a self-proclaimed and self-taught "expert" on gas chambers examined the buildings in Auschwitz-Birkenau and Maidanek, which would have contained chemical residue from the gas chambers if any Zyklon-B had been used, and found none. Others point to statistics of Jewish population before and after the war. For example, in a booklet titled Auschwitz: Truth or Lie, by Thies Christophersen, the number of Jews in 1938 is given as 15, 688,259 (source, the American Jewish Committee); and 18,700,000 in 1948 (source, a New York Times article). How could there have been a Holocaust if there were 3 million more Jews after the war than before? Regardless of their prime focus, most deniers come back to a central theme: that the indictment of Nazism as an unequivocally evil episode in human history is simplistic and in error.The deniers’ claims can be debunked, not with debate, but with expose. They have to be exposed to the disingenuousness of the deniers’ insistence on debate.

Professional deniers are not Holocaust scholars, but anti-Semitic imposters with a neo-Nazi political agenda burdened by what Gerry Gable terms a "moral albatross around their neck of enormous proportions. And that’s the Holocaust. All the other things, they can argue Hitler’s a good anti-Communist, they can argue he made the trains run on time, but when it comes to a state writing into its statute book, into its law, the Nuremberg laws, the laws based on race and eugenics and so on, and the creation of an extermination program that killed millions of people in the camps, you’ve got something they’re stuck with." In order for there to be an honest debate, both sides have to be committed to honest historical inquiry. The deniers’ agenda is to easily exposed: their literature is produced by Nazis who sell glowing biographies of Hitler, and tapes of Nazi marches. One of the major claims that the deniers use is that Hitler did not order and did not know about the extermination of the Jews. Deniers note that there is no single signed document by which Hitler ordered the Holocaust. From this they contend that if any extermination took place, Hitler did not know about it, rather than the more logical explanations: that he was not foolish enough to sign such a damning document, or if he was so foolish, one has not been found. Deniers also do not acknowledge that a not so massive as the destruction of the Jews would by necessity require the knowledge and the approval of the Nazi head of state- what historian would claim that President Johnson’s failure to sign a formal declaration of war against Vietnam meant he was unaware of that war?

Another claim is about Auschwitz. British historian David Irving, who is perhaps one of the most famous deniers, called the Auschwitz death-camp story a "sinking ship" and states that there were "no gas chambers at Auschwitz". The Auschwitz State Museum has recently revised its half-century-old claim that 4 million humans were murdered there. The Museum now says maybe it was 1 million. But what documentary proof does the Museum provide to document the 1 million figure? None. Revisionists want to know where those 3 million souls have been the last 45 years. The Leuchter Report contains the results of the first-ever forensic examination of the alleged gas chambers at Auschwitz. The Report is the work of America’s leading execution hardware expert, Fred A. Leuchter. It concludes that no mass gassings ever did or ever could have taken place there in the so-called gas chambers. Fred Leuchter has called for an international commission of scientists, engineers and historians to investigate the Auschwitz gas chamber rumor. Deniers also say that there was a Holocaust but there were no gas chambers. The gas chambers were a product of wartime propaganda. Mass media propaganda in turn generated mass hysteria about mass murder. The Holocaust gas chamber story demonized the German people, and justified the partition of Germany, and the loss of three provinces, Pomerania, Silesia, and East Prussia, which had been populated by Germans for hundreds of years. Also the Holocaust gas chamber story justified the expansion of Soviet influence throughout Eastern Europe, supported the establishment of Communist regimes, and the implementation of communist terror and the complete disregard of the rights of the people in this region. And the Holocaust gas chamber story justified the creation the State of Israel. Behind several political struggles in the early days of Israel it played a role, and in the shocking maltreatment of native Arab populations in the brad area of Palestine it was also an important element. These are three political reasons that support the myth of the gas chambers.

Political reasons can support any myth as long as that myth is able to exert some influence. But the gas chamber myth has now outlived its political utility. The lands that Germany has lost will not be returned to them anymore. Meanwhile the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe are a thing of the past. They need no more artificial support. Finally the State of Israel is almost now 50 years old, no one anymore seriously questioning its right to exist. But if the political reasons are of no more use, the emotional reasons are still powerful. A lot of people in America fought and saw their friends die defeating Nazi Germany. They feel satisfaction that their comrades did not die in vain, and that the crimes of the Nazis, including the gas chambers, were proven at Nuremberg. To say that there were no gas chambers seems to dishonor their own hardships or the sacrifice of their friends. Also after WWII, and partly because of population transfers and mass shooting by the Nazis, the Jewish community of Eastern Europe almost ceased to exist. An analysis of history will show that the eastern European Jewish community, that is, as a separate, unassimilated, Yiddish speaking, and devoutly orthodox entity, had been out ever since the first partition of Poland in the 1770’s, but no one wants to admit that the World of Our Fathers was bound to disappear eventually through the modernization process. And so the Nazis serve as a convenient scapegoat. And last many Jews came under German control in WWII, and suffered terribly. Many were killed. Many families were separated. Almost everyone lost everything they had. This is the reality of the Holocaust. It was similar to what occurred to the class enemies of the Soviet regime, form 1917 on. The difference is that everyone in the West either knows of knows of a person who experienced the camps, and who goes on endlessly about homicidal gas chambers, even while they usually admit having never seen one. And so propaganda became rumor, and in the words of eyewitnesses, assisted by charitable impulses, becomes fact.

Rassinier’s importance for the fascist propagandists stems from the fact that he was a socialist, a member of the social-democrat party, the SFIO, the forerunner of the present Socialist Party. He was deported to Buchenwald and Dora for resistance activities. After the war he became a socialist deputy and served for one year before retirement Give his different political pedigree, Rassinier’s denial of existence of the gas chambers offers far great mileage in terms of fascist strategy. Rassinier’s books are remarkably repetitive and bristle with anti-Semitism. He blandly argues, for example, in Les Responsables de la seconde guerre mondiale (Those Responsible for the Second World War), published in 1967, that the misfortunes of the Jews under Hitler were largely a consequence of their own doing: the Jew were foreigners, and there was simply no room for a national minority. According to Rassinier’s account, it was the Jews and the international Jewish community who declared war on Hitler's Germany, so he had to defend himself. "After some 15 years of historical research, I have come to the following conclusion: it was in 1943 that National Socialist Germany was accused for the first time of the systematic mass extermination of the Jews in the gas chambers. The author of this first horrible and infamous accusations was a Polish Jew." Implicit here is a Jewish conspiracy. Referring to the Gerstein report about use of Zyklon-B gas in the camps, he comments on the outcry provoked by this ‘immoral forgery’, evoking the satanic power of Jews.

Following the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, the Nazis decided to annihilate the Jewish people. As the Nazis implemented their policy of resettling ethnic Germans from throughout Eastern Europe, Jews were uprooted and forced into ghettos in the Generalgouvernment. Initially the ghettos wee established to serve as temporary areas of Jewish settlement until the establishment of a reservation in the east, of in Madagascar, was feasible. When these plans failed, Germany turned to more radical measures to solve the "Jewish question." From the introduction of both forced sterilization and the murderous euthanasia program to the mass killings of Polish Jews and Gentiles perpetrated by the Einsatzgruppen, under the code name Tannenberg, Germany exhibited few inhibitions in using mass murder to realize its radical objectives. Germany created a bureaucracy to carry out the murder of the Jews. The entire responsibility for the resettlement of the Jews was place under the supervision of Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Main Office for the Security of the Reich (RSHA). In September 1939, the Nazis subordinated the party intelligence apparatus, the security services of the SS (SD), the security police (Sipo), and the state security and the criminal police (Gestapo and Kripo, respectively) to the RSHA under the command of Heydrich, who in turn reported to Heinrich Himmler, Reichsfhrer (Reich leader) of the SS. Prior to this step, the SD had created a special unit of mobile killing units known as the Einsatzgruppen, who made their initial appearance during the Anschluss. They accompanied the regular German army in the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia in March 1939 and Poland in September. On the ever of the Polish invasion, six of these mobile units were formed, and five traveled with the German army into Poland. During the invasion of Poland, 16,000 Polish and Jewish civilians and prisoners of war were killed in mass executions by the Wehrmacht (the German army) and the Einsatzgruppen. Now merged under the RSHA, they took their orders from Heydrich, who in September 1939 told his Einsatzgruppen chiefs that the priority of the "final aim" was to clear the Jews out of western Poland and concentrate them in ghettos in larger cities, near railway junctions or along the railways so "that future measures may be accomplished more easily." Heydrich ordered that the mission be kept a "total secret"

The upper echelons of the German political hierarchy had considered genocidal acts against the Jews as early as 1938. In the aftermath of Kristallnacht in November 1938, the SS publication Das Schwarze Korps published remarks by Reinhard Heydrich in which he called for the Jews to be driven out of Germany because Germany would not tolerate "hundreds of thousands of criminals." He accused the Jews of being a breeding ground for bolshevism and predicted "the final end of Jewry in Germany, its absolute annihilation." In a speech given by Hitler to the commanders of the Wehrmacht on August 22,1939, he told them, "Thus for the time being I have sent to the East my "Death’s Head Units" with the orders to kill without pity or mercy all men, women, and children of Polish race or language. Only in such a way will we win the vital space that we need. Who still talks nowadays about the Armenians?" In his speech to the Reichstag on January 30, 1939, Hitler used the language of genocide when he warned the Jews that "if international finance Jewry in and outside Europe should succeed in thrusting the nations once again into a world war, then the result will not be the Bolshevization of the earth and with it the victory of Jewry, but the destruction of the Jewish race in Europe." In March 1939, Goebbels pressed for the total elimination of the Jews: "We cannot allow Jewry, as a seat of infection to exist any longer." He added that this could be accomplished humanely in peacetime but in a crueler way should there be war.

The invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 removed all restraints on Nazi Germany regarding the Jews. By the end of December 1941, with the United States allied with Great Britain and the Soviet Union in the war against Germany, Hitler was convinced that beneath the conflict was the guiding hand of the Jews. Given the conspiratorial nature of his beliefs, the war now provided Hitler with both a sense of urgency and an opportunity to deal with the Jewish question. If Jews were previously viewed as potential hostages stored away in Polish ghettos, the invasion of the Soviet Union now made every Jew a security risk. Jews were collectively accused of guiding the partisan resistance against the German invasion of the Soviet Union and were dealt with accordingly by Einsatzgruppen units. In fact, the contention that all Jews were partisans allowed both the Wehrmacht and Einsatzgruppen to justify the mass murder of Jews as antipartisan warfare. In 1942 Himmler confided to Mussolini that Jews everywhere were responsible for sabotage, espionage, and resistance and also for the formation of partisan bands.

Of the many massacres perpetrated by the Einsatzgruppen, perhaps the most infamous took place in late September 1941 at Babi Yar, located outside the city of Kiev in Ukraine. Under the command of Paul Blobel, Sonderkommando 4A, attached to Einsatzgruppe C, murdered 33,771 Jews in cold blood during a two-day period: "They (the Jews) were forced to lie face down, and the executioners, also at the base of the ravine, equipped with Schmeisser automatic rifles, tried to shoot them in the back of the head, per instructions. Because of the mass of victims, some were shot several times over, others were only wounded. Then the next batch came in and lay down on top of the first. According to one of the executioners, Blobel yelled frequently to his men below that the killings were not going fast enough. The killers worked in shifts, and they were supplied with ammunition and rum. At the end of the day lime chloride was spread on top of the layer of bodies."

Given Hitler’s disposition toward the Jews, it is not surprising hat once the war started and he confronted the reality of millions of Jews under Nazi rule, he would turn to genocide. In a January 1939 speech, for example, his rhetoric was filled with genocidal threats against the Jews, and in 1944, after millions of Jews had already been killed in extermination camps, Hitler boasted, "I have gotten rid of the Jews." There can be little doubt that the decision to implement the Final Solution was his and was conveyed down the German bureaucracy on a need-to-know basis by Hermann Goering, Hitler’s appointed successor, Heinrich Himmler, and his aide Reinhard Heydrich, who was given the operational responsibility for making Germany and then the rest of Europe Judenrein.

In the aftermath of the German conquest of Poland, the Einsatzgruppen introduced the use of gas to kill civilians. The euthanasia program in Germany had six killing centers complete with gas chambers and crematoriums. The Germans now applied these techniques to Poland. The first use of this method of mass murder was recorded in December 1939, when an SS Sonderkommando unit used carbon monoxide to kill Polish mental patients. Following the invasion of the Soviet Union, the Nazis introduce gas chambers as means of killing Jews. Under SS supervision, mobile vans equipped for the purpose of mass murder were first used in December 1941 at the Chelmno camp (also referred to as the Kulmhof station). Eventually the extermination camp was used to gas Jews from the Lodz ghetto and from the Warthegau region. The method used by the SS was to bring Jews to the vans, where they were made to strip under the pretense that they were to shower. They were then packed into a van, and after the door were hermetically sealed, concealed pipes filtered exhaust gas fumes among the victims. Normally, special detachments of Jews were then ordered to heave the bodies into waiting mass graves. Depending on the truck’s size, forty to sixty persons could be gassed at a time. The Nazis constructed twenty of these mobile gas chambers for the use in the Soviet Union and most of them were operated by the four Einsatzgruppen deployed on Soviet territory. Despite the problems with the vans, the success at Chelmno convinced Himmler that he was on the right track in using gas to solve the problem of extermination large numbers of Jews, and he proceeded to order the construction of a chain of extermination camps on Polish territory for this purpose. In retrospect, aside form the euthanasia program in Germany, neither the Nazi nor any other government had ever perpetrated mass murder through gassing on the scale Himmler and Heydrich conceived for the Final Solution. Himmler was also aware that such a massive undertaking could no longer be kept a secret and that the Final Solution would require the cooperation of other agencies of the German government.

On January 20, 1942,in a villa in Wannsee, a suburb of Berlin, Heydrich invited the state secretaries of the most important German government ministries to attend a meeting for the purpose of coordination the Final Solution, as well as to inform them officially of Hitler’s decision to solve the so-called Jewish question. He proceeded to discuss the implementation of the new policy, " The Jews would be utilized for the labor in the east. Separated by sex, the Jews capable of work will be led into these areas in large labor columns to build roads, whereby a large part will doubtless fall away through natural diminution. The remnant, representing a natural selection, can be regarded as the germ cell of a new Jewish reconstruction if released." In stating that those Jews who survived the ordeal of slave labor would "have to be treated accordingly," Heydrich meant that the 11 million Jews living in continental Europe and in the British Isles were now targets for liquidation.

On April 27, 1940, Himmler authorized the use of the military barracks near the town of Auschwitz as a concentration camp. Unlike the Aktion Reinhard camps, Auschwitz was initially designed to serve as a forced labor camp in order to attract the I. G. Farben Company to the area. Thus, the camp served two purposes: as a source of slave labor and a camp to punish enemies of the Reich. By March 1941, the camp held approximately 11,000 prisoners, most of them were Poles. Before Auschwitz became synonymous with her gassing of the Jews, it had already acquired a reputation for cruel punishment, which included executions that took place on a regular basis. In March 1941, Himmler called for the building of a second and larger section of the camp, Auschwitz II or Birkenau, where the gas chambers and the crematoriums of the Auschwitz killing center would operate. In May 1942, with Goering’s approval, Auschwitz III at Monowitz was constructed for the purpose of providing forced labor for the I. G. Farben Buna synthetic rubber works. In Buna-Monowitz inmates of the camp, mainly Jews were shorn their hair, numbers were tattooed on their arms, and clad in striped pajamas, they were worked literally to death. Jews who could not keep up with the work where beaten or killed on the spot. Those too exhausted or too ill to work were sent to nearby Auschwitz II camp at Birkenau to be put to death by gas. By the winter of 1942, Auschwitz would become the most famous of the death camps.

It was Rudolf Hoess, commandant of Auschwitz, who concluded that Zyklon-B was better than the gas used in the Aktion Reinhard camps. He found the gas to be infinitely more hygienic, safer, and efficient, for the operator, protected by a gas mask, had only to open the tin and scatter the contents through a grill in the roof of the chamber; within minutes, the victims were dead. Wirth’s gas, contended Hoess, took much longer. In fact, Wirth’s reputation as the preeminent expert on the use of gas in the extermination process suffered after SS leaders reviewed his operation at Belzec. In August 1942, SS-Obersturmbannfuhrer Kurt Gerstein, who was in the prussic acid and was one of those who observed Wirth’s methods at work, wrote of what he saw:

The train arrives. 200 Ukraines fling open the doors and hunt out the people out of the trucks with ox-hide whips. Instructions come through the loudspeaker: strip completely…. The women and girls go off to the barber (who) cuts off all their hair and stuffs it into a potato sack…. So they move down the alleyway, all naked, men, women, and children…. They mount the steps, hesitate, and enter the death chambers…. One Jewess, aged about 40,eyes blazing, calls down upon the murders the blood, which is being shed here. She gets five or six strokes of the whip across the face and disappears into the chamber like the rest. The chambers fill up tight_ that’s Wirth’s order. People are treading on each other’s toes…. The victims are to be killed by the diesel’s exhaust gas. Gertstein noted that the engines refused to fire, and at that point he took out a stopwatch and measured the time it would take for the engines to work. To Wirth’s embarrassment, the engine would not start: My stop-watch ticks faithfully on, 50 minutes and 70 seconds and the diesel won’t start!…. The men in the gas chamber are waiting…. One can hear them sobbing…. After 2 hours and 49 minutes_ measured exactly on the stop-watch_ the diesel starts… A further 25 minutes pass… One can take a look through the peephole…. A few are still alive after 28 minutes. Finally after 32 minutes they’re all dead. Men of the labor detachment open the wooden doors…. Jammed in the chambers, the dead are still standing there like marble pillars. There’s no room for them all to fall or even bend over.

It was at Auschwitz that the bulk or the deported Jews were killed, and this extermination camp has since become synonymous with the Holocaust. Jews who arrived at Auschwitz were subjected to a selection, whereby those who appeared strong and healthy were waved to one side and designated for hard labor. The others were sent to the gas chambers. The process of selection who would live and who would die was placed in the hands of SS doctors such as the infamous Dr. Josef Mengele, whose name has become synonymous with perverse medical experiments at Auschwitz. Mengele and other Nazi doctors were part of the selection process at Birkenau that met the new arrivals. Told to disembark ("Raus!"), the Jews were hurried from the boxcars and ordered to leave their personal belongings behind. They were then forced to stand in one of two lines, the men in one and the women in the other. It was at this point that the selection process took place, with the SS doctors directing the arrivals to one side, for the gas chambers, or to the other, for forced labor. Thoughout the process, the deportees did not appear to comprehend the significance of the two lines. Survivors have testified to the emotion of being separated from their families, with mothers and young children going to one side and older children deemed fit for labor going to the other. Those designated for the gas chambers were ordered to undress and place their clothes on hooks, and to tie their shoes together. To make the deception even more authentic, each person was given a piece of soap and brought to the gas chamber, which was equipped with showerheads. Once inside, the door was sealed, and pellets of Zyklon-B were poured into the room form a vent in the roof. As soon as the pellets of Zyklon-B came into contact with air, they were converted to gas. Since the gas worked in an upward direction, the first to die were the children, and the last were those strong enough to climb atop piles of bodies. The SS men responsible for releasing the Zyklon-B wore mask to protect themselves from the fumes. An advantage of using this gas, from Nazi perspective, was that it left no odor inside or outside the chamber.

The gassing occurred on the day of the deportees’ arrival at Auschwitz, and their corpses were then collected by Sondekommandos, or Jewish prisoners, assigned to the crematoriums, who were responsible for collecting the bodies and bringing them to one of the ovens. Personal belongings of the murdered prisoners were collected and stored in specially built warehouse (nicknamed "Canada," because the camp inmates associated Canada with wealth) and from there shipped to Germany. Special attention was directed toward salvaging whatever valuables the victims had on their person, including their hair, eyeglasses and gold teeth, which were routinely extracted from the corpses.

The victims chosen for hard labor were sent to an area of the camp called "the quarantine," where their clothes were taken from them and exchanged for prison-striped garb. The humiliation continued, with both men and women inmates having their hair shorn, (the hair was sent to Germany and used as mattress stuffing). Once moved from the quarantined area, the prisoners were sent to different sections of the Auschwitz camp for hard labor. The most dreaded part of the day was roll call (Appell), which occurred both morning and the late afternoon, when the prisoners returned from their work. Historian Jozef Buszko describes the terror of the Appell as one in which the prisoners "were made to stand at attention, motionless, usually sparsely clad, for many hours in the clod, in the rain and snow, and whoever stumbled or fell was sent to be gassed." Upon leaving the quarantine, prisoners were registered, and numbers were tattooed on their left arm. Those who were immediately gassed upon arrival at Auschwitz went unregistered. The number of Jews murdered at Auschwitz-Birkenau is estimated at between 1.1 and 1.3 million. Almost one-quarter of the Jews killed during the World War II were murdered there. Of the 405,000 registered prisoners who received numbered tattoos, only 65,000 survived.

As we can see there is quite a big group of deniers that claim that gas chambers did not exist, and some who say that Hitler did not know about the atrocities that were happening to the Jews in the "work camps." I believed that they need solid proof that gas chambers existed and that Hitler did know what was going on, but these are the kind of people that "seeing is believing" and they will not take the word of another person as good solid evidence.

There are many proofs that can be used to prove that gas chambers existed and that Hitler knew what was happening, and ordered for it to continue. There are many books written on what happen in concentration and death camps during World War II. Also the fact that the number of Jews was less after World War II, how can they explain that fact? And using the explanation that they all died of typhus and other diseases that goes around war time is not good enough because not six million Jews died of diseases and starvation over a period of 7 seven years. Many of the Holocaust deniers are using intergroup hatred to make their claims more plausible, but we have to take a stand against these people who are killing the memory of all those millions that died. Memory, or logic, or the knowledge, or the goodwill, by themselves, cannot conquer societal hate.

Holocaust deniers count on that.

Bibliography

• The Holocaust Denial: anti-Semitism, Racism and the New Right, by Gill Seidel, Pale Collective, 1986.

• Holocaust Denial, by Kenneth S. Stern, The American Jewish Committee, 1993.