[The following is a revised and corrected version of a 1980 conference paper
whose publication seems useful in that it illustrates the classic and revisionist method of examination of texts, and
also because it shows how and why a man on
the vanquished side may be led to “confess” to his conquerors. – author’s
note of June 23, 2015]
Some SS men confessed that there were “gas chambers” at Auschwitz or at
Auschwitz-Birkenau. The three most important confessions are those of Rudolf
Höss, Pery Broad and, finally, Professor Doctor Johann Paul Kremer. For a long
time the exterminationists relied especially on the first of these confessions,
that of Rudolf Höss, which has appeared in English under the title Commandant of Auschwitz. I believe I have noticed, on the
occasion of a recent historical debate in France, that the exterminationists
seem less sure of the value of this strange testimony. On the other hand, the
testimony of Johann Paul Kremer has been very useful to them. Personally, I
think the argument supplied by Kremer’s text is in fact, from their point of
view, a more valuable weapon than the absurd confession of Rudolf Höss. I must
say that first the British and then the Poles made Höss speak in such a way
that it is easy to destroy his testimony by simply comparing Commandant of Auschwitz with his numerous previous
statements, among which I particularly recommend that of 14 March 1946 (IMT
Documents NO-1210 and D-749).
I shall limit myself therefore to studying what the exterminationists
themselves today seem to consider their best weapons for supporting the
allegation of the existence and use at Auschwitz of homicidal “gas chambers.”
If I add this adjective “homicidal” it is because there are, as you know,
non-homicidal gas chambers which it is impossible to use to kill people in the
way in which it is said the Germans did. All the armies of the world have
buildings, hastily equipped, for training their recruits in the use of gas
masks. In France, these buildings bear the name chambre
à gaz (“gas chamber”); in Germany, they are called Gaskammer or Gasraum (“gas
chamber” or “gas room”). There are also gas chambers for the disinfecting of
clothes, for treating fruit, and the like.
Thus I will speak to you at some length of the testimony of Johann Paul
Kremer. You will see how, at first sight, it is troubling, and then how, if you
analyze it with a little care, it constitutes a terrible fiasco for the exterminationists.
I prize the Kremer case very much. It shows how fragile the evidence that we
are offered is; to what extent people allow themselves to be easily deceived by
appearances; how much the official historians have misused the texts and how
necessary it is to work if you wish, in the study of texts, to distinguish
between the true and the false, between the real meaning and the
misinterpretation. This is what is called “text and document appraisal”. It so
happens that it is my professional speciality. I am therefore going to inflict
upon you, to my great regret, a lecture on “text and document appraisal.” I ask
you to forgive me for the strictness of the demonstration I am going to try to
carry out here.
Before entering into the heart of the matter, I would like to share two
remarks. The first comes to us from Dr. Butz. I recall that, in a letter of 18
November 1979 to a British weekly, the New
Statesman, about a long article by Gitta Sereny (2 November
1979), he made the observation that it is quite strange to claim to base a
historical thesis like that of the formidable
massacres of millions of human beings on... confessions. That claim is even
harder to defend when you know that such confessions come from persons who had
been conquered, and that the ones who obtained the confessions were the
conquerors.
My second remark is to recall that, in the cases dealing with
Ravensbrück, where it is now known that there was never any “gassing,” the
British and French courts obtained very detailed confessions on the eleven
alleged gassings. We are told of the three principal confessions of Auschwitz,
but we no longer hear anything about the three principal confessions of
Ravensbrück: that of the camp commandant, Suhren, that of his adjutant
Schwarzhuber and that of the camp physician, Dr. Treite. Do you know what the
size of that nonexistent “gas chamber” was? Answer: nine meters by four and a
half meters. Do you know where it was located? Answer: five meters away from
the two crematory ovens. Do you know how many persons were gassed there? Of
what nationality? On what precise dates? Do you wish to know on whose orders
all of that was done, from the top to the bottom of the German military and
political hierarchy? Are you interested in learning how they used a “gas
capsule” [sic]? You will find the answers to these questions and many others in
reading, for example, the historian Germaine Tillion. That Frenchwoman had been
interned at Ravensbrück. After returning to France, she became an official
specialist in the history of the deportation. She worked at the same famous
CNRS (“National Center for Scientific Research”) in Paris at which Léon
Poliakov worked. For reasons of which I am unaware, Germaine Tillion enjoys
considerable moral credit in France. Her honesty is something of an officially
established fact. Nevertheless, several years after the war, she went before
the courts to incriminate overwhelmingly the ex-chiefs of Ravensbrück with her
stories about the “gas chambers.” Even more than her book about the camp (Ravensbrück [Paris, Le Seuil, 1973], reprint, 284 p.), one must
read her “Reflections on the study of the deportation” (“Réflexions sur l’étude
de la déportation,” in the Revue d’Histoire de la
Deuxième Guerre Mondiale (July-September, 1954), p. 3-38).
Germaine Tillion begins with some remarks on false testimony about the
deportation. She says that she has “known of numerous mentally damaged persons,
half-crooks, half-fools, exploiting an imaginary deportation.” She adds that
she has known of other persons who were “authentic deportees, whose sick minds
had striven to go beyond even the monstrous things that they had seen or of
which people had spoken, saying that they had happened to them.” She writes
further: “There were even publishers for certain of these fabrications, and
more or less official compilations to present them, but there is no excuse
whatsoever for publishers and editors, since the most elementary inquiry would
have sufficed to expose the deception.”
While reading these lines, which date from twenty-six years ago, we
realize that publishers and editors of that kind have only increased in number,
and that the Martin Grays and the Filip Müllers still have a good future ahead
of them. Two of the three accused who confessed at Ravensbrück were hanged, and
Dr. Treite committed suicide. What is awful is that without this testimony
about the “gas chambers” their lives might well have been spared. In regard to
Suhren, Germaine Tillion writes, on page 16, that he began by displaying a
“stubborn bad faith” in the course of his two trials (one at Hamburg, by the
British, and one at Rastatt, by the French); she adds this terrible sentence:
“But, without that gas chamber that he created, on his own initiative, two
months before the collapse, he could perhaps have saved his life.” In note 2 on
page 17 she writes of Schwarzhuber, who confessed immediately, some even more
dreadful lines, each word of which I ask you to ponder:
According to the English
investigators, from the first moment he had coolly faced his position,
considering himself doomed and, either to have peace (and the small privileges
to which prisoners who do not deceive their examining magistrates have a
right), or else due to lassitude, indifference or for some other reason, he
took his course and held to it, without regard for himself or for his
accomplices. He was not a brute (like Binder or Pflaum); he had an intelligent
expression, the appearance and behavior of a psychologically normal man.
Let us leave Ravensbrück and the Schwarzhuber confession for Auschwitz
and the confession of Kremer, the other SS man who had “an intelligent
expression” as well as “the appearance and the behavior of a psychologically
normal man.” To begin with, let us look at some extracts from his private diary
written during his short stay at Auschwitz, and then at the explanations he
gave for those extracts, after the war, to his Polish jailers, explanations to
which he stuck later on, at his trial 1960, which took place at Münster
(Westphalia), and at the trial of the Auschwitz guards in 1964 at
Frankfurt-on-Main. The name of Professor Doctor Kremer should not be confused
with that of Josef Kramer. The latter held high positions at the camp of
Struthof-Natzweiler (Alsace), then at Auschwitz-Birkenau, and finally at
Bergen-Belsen. He, too, made various confessions. All are interesting to study.
On the alleged homicidal “gas chamber” at Struthof, I would like to point out
that the French did not, as I believed until recently, wring just one
confession out of Kramer, but, as I have discovered, two totally absurd and
astonishingly contradictory confessions. People sometimes refer to one of
these, but the other has been kept carefully hidden. One day I shall deal with
it, as well as with the two reports of the French military courts on the “gas
chamber” at Struthof: the one report, really childish, concludes that there
were “gassings”; the other has disappeared from the military court archives,
and reaches the opposite conclusion. This report, dated 1 December 1945, was made
by the eminent toxicologist Professor René Fabre.
1. EXTRACTS FROM THE DIARY OF DR. JOHANN PAUL KREMER, PHYSICIAN AT
AUSCHWITZ, OF SUMMER 1942, SELECTED AND PRESENTED BY THE OFFICIAL HISTORIANS
(LEON POLIAKOV, GEORGES WELLERS, SERGE KLARSFELD)
– 2 September 1942: This
morning, at three o’clock, I was present for the first time at a Sonderaktion. Compared with that,
Dante’s Inferno appears to be a comedy. It is not without reason that Auschwitz
is called an extermination camp.
(sources?) (Georges Wellers’s version, in Le Monde,
29
December 1978, p. 8; the author explains beforehand that a Sonderaktion
is
a “selection for the gas chambers.”)
– At three o’clock in
the morning, I was present for the first time at a “special action” (thus did
they refer to the selection and murder in the gas chambers). In comparison with
the Inferno of Dante that seemed to me almost a comedy. It is not without
reason that they call Auschwitz an extermination camp (Serge Klarsfeld’s
version, in Le Mémorial de la Déportation des Juifs de France, 1978, p. 245; the
author obviously reproduced page 48 of a book (not dated) published in Poland
by the International Auschwitz Committee under the title KL
Auschwitz: Arbeit Macht Frei (Concentration Camp Auschwitz: work makes one free),
96 p.).
– This morning at three
o’clock, I was present for the first time at a “special action.” In comparison,
Dante’s inferno appeared to me a comedy. It is not for nothing that Auschwitz is
called an extermination camp
(Léon Poliakov’s version, in Auschwitz, Paris: Collection
Archives Gallimard/Julliard, 1973, p. 40).
For this first entry, 2 September, I have cited three versions. For the
following dates, I shall content myself with citing a single version: the
official version of the State Museum of Oswiecim (Auschwitz), as it appeared in
Auschwitz vu par les SS (Auschwitz seen
by the SS). I intentionally confine myself only to what the official historians
habitually cite in their works and only to what, in the eyes of the authorities
of the State Museum of Auschwitz, would tend to prove that Dr. Kremer had
participated in the “gassings” of human beings.
– 5 September 1942: This
noon was present at a special action in the women’s camp (“Moslems”) – the most
horrible of all horrors. Hscf. Thilo, military surgeon, is right when he said today
to me we were located here in “anus mundi” [anus of the world]. In the evening at about 8 p.m.
another special action from Holland. Men compete to take part in such actions
as they get additional rations then – 1/5 litre vodka, 5 cigarettes, 100 grams
of sausage and bread. Today and tomorrow (Sunday) on duty.
On the next day, Dr. Kremer said that he had had an excellent lunch. On
numerous occasions, his diary contains like remarks about food. Historians
often cite these remarks to show the cynicism of the doctor; they say that the
atrocities of the “gas chambers” did not hurt his appetite. Dr. Kremer mentions
a special action of Sunday, 6 September at 8 in the evening, then on the
evening of 9 September, then on the morning of 10 September, then in the nights
of the 23rd and the 30th. He then writes:
– 7 October 1942:
Present at the 9th special action (new arrivals and women “Moslems”)
[...]
– 12 October 1942: [ ...
] was present at night at another special action with a draft from Holland
(1600 persons).
Horrible scene in front of the last bunker! This was the 10th special
action.
– 18 October 1942: In
wet and cold weather was on this Sunday morning present at the 11th
special action (from Holland). Terrible scenes when 3 women begged to have
their poor lives spared. 8 November 1942: This night took part in 2 special
actions in rainy and murky weather (12th and 13th) [...]
Another special action in the afternoon, the 14th so far, in which I
had participated [...]
Dr. Kremer is wrong in his reckoning. He has forgotten that on 5
September there had been not one but two special actions, which made a total of
15 special actions for his stay at Auschwitz. This stay lasted 81 days, on only
76 of which was he on duty (because of a five-day leave).
The notes in the Polish edition say that the dates of these special
actions coincided with the dates of the arrival of transports of deportees.
2. EXTRACTS FROM THE SPONTANEOUS CONFESSIONS OF JOHANN PAUL KREMER IN
THE POLISH COURT IN 1947, SELECTED AND PRESENTED BY THAT COURT
Here is what one can read in KL
Auschwitz vu par the SS, p. 214, note 50:
In the official record
of his questioning of 18 August 1947 at Cracow, Kremer stated as follows: “On 2
September 1942, at 3 a.m. I was already assigned to take part in the action of
gassing people. These mass murders took place in small cottages situated
outside the Birkenau camp in a wood. These cottages were called ‘bunkers’ (Bunker)
in the SS men’s slang. All SS surgeons on duty in the camp took turns
participating in the gassings, which were called ‘Sonderaktion.’ My part
as surgeon at the gassing consisted in remaining in readiness near the bunker.
I was brought there in a car. I sat in front with the driver and an SS hospital
orderly (SDG) sat in the back of the car with an oxygen apparatus to
revive SS men employed in the gassing, in case any of them should succumb to
the poisonous fumes. When the transport with people who were destined for
gassing arrived at the railway ramp, the SS officers selected from among the
arrivals persons fit to work and the rest – old people, all children, women
with children in arms and other persons not deemed fit to work – were loaded
upon lorries and driven to the gas-chambers. I used to follow behind the
transport till we reached the bunker [Faurisson note: the word is in the
singular]. Here people were first driven to barracks where the victims
undressed and then went naked to the chambers. Very often no incidents occurred,
as the SS men kept people quiet, maintaining that they were to bathe and be
deloused. After driving all of them into the gas chamber the door was closed
and an SS man in a gas mask threw the contents of a Cyklon tin through an
opening in the side wall. The victims’ shouting and screaming could be heard
through that opening and it was clear that they fought for their lives [Lebenskampf].
These shouts were heard for a very short time. I should say for some minutes
but I am unable to give the exact span of time.”
Note 51 on page 215 of KL Auschwitz vu par
les SS gives another extract from the same interrogation
transcript. Here is how Dr. Kremer is supposed to have explained his entry of 5
September 1942 about the “Moslem” women and the anus
mundi:
Particularly unpleasant
had been the action of gassing emaciated women from the women’s camp. Such
individuals were generally called “Muselmänner” (“Moslems”). I remember
taking part in the gassing of such women in daylight. I am unable to state how
numerous that group had been. When I came to the bunker [Faurisson note:
“bunker” is in the singular] they sat clothed on the ground. As the clothes
were in fact worn out camp clothes they were not let into the barracks but
undressed in the open. I could deduce from the behavior of these women that
they realized what was awaiting them. They begged the SS men to be allowed to
live, they wept, but all of them were driven to the gas chamber and gassed.
Being an anatomist I had seen many horrors, had to deal with corpses, but what
I then saw was not to be compared with anything seen ever before. It was under
the influence of these impressions that I had noted in my diary, under the date
of 5 September 1942: “The most horrible of all horrors. Hauptsturmführer Thilo
was right when he said to me today that we were located here in ‘anus mundi.’ I
had used this expression because I could not imagine anything more sickening and
more horrible.”
In his entry for 12 October 1942, Dr. Kremer mentioned a special action
concerning 1600 persons who had come from the Netherlands: in the margin next
to that mention he wrote the name of Hössler, who at that time was one of the
SS men responsible for the camp at Birkenau. Here is how Dr. Kremer is supposed
to have explained his entry for 12 October (see p. 224, note 77):
In connection with the
gassing action described by me in my diary under the date 12 October 1942. I
have to explain that about 1600 Dutchmen were gassed then. This is an
approximate number which I had put down after hearing it mentioned by others.
This action was conducted by SS officer Hössler. I remember how he had tried to
drive the whole group into one bunker. He was successful except for one man
whom it was not possible to squeeze inside the bunker by any means. This man
was killed by Hössler with a pistol shot. I therefore wrote in my diary about
horrible scenes in front of the last bunker and I mentioned Hössler’s name in
connection with this incident.
For his entry of 18 October 1942 Dr. Kremer is supposed to have
furnished the following explanation (see p. 226, note 83):
During the special
action described by me in my diary under the date of 18 October 1942, three women
from Holland refused to enter the gas chamber and begged for their lives. They
were young and healthy women, but their begging was of no avail. The SS men
taking part in the action shot them on the spot.
3. DR. KREMER PERSISTED IN THESE CLAIMS AT HIS TRIAL IN MÜNSTER IN 1960
In 1977 the University of Amsterdam published its seventeenth volume of Justiz und NS- Verbrechen (Justice and Nazi crimes). There we
find the text of the decision rendered against Dr. Kremer on 29 November 1960.
On pages 19 and 20, the court sought to describe the operation of “gassing,” as
well as the part that the accused was supposed to have personally played in
that operation. The court speaks of a single “gas chamber.” It involved a farm
comprising several separate structures near the Birkenau camp. An SS medical
orderly went up on the roof and dumped some Zyklon through several specially
fitted shafts (“durch Einwurfschächte”). He
wore a gas mask. The doors of the “gas chamber” were all airtight. From
outside, they heard the victims cry out. The court continued:
When there was no more
sign of life, the defendant was taken back to his lodging by the Health Service
car. The gas chambers were opened a short moment afterwards. [Faurisson note:
Please note here that this opening is said to have been done a short
moment after the death of the victims]. The bodies were removed by prisoners and were
destroyed by cremation. During the events described above [Faurisson note: The
court here alludes to Kremer’s description of the arrival of the victims, their
disrobing, etc.] the accused was seated in the Health Service car, which was
standing in the immediate vicinity of the gas chambers. Whether he had left his
car and whether he had taken an active part in the murderous action could not
be proved. The accused was in the car, however, in accordance with the mission
that he had been assigned, ready for any accident involving the SS man
certified by the Health Service who was handling the Zyklon B poison; he would
help him immediately with the oxygen inhalator. He [the accused] himself
admitted that in all good faith. But in fact no accident ever happened.
4. IN 1964 AT THE FRANKFURT TRIAL DR. KREMER AGAIN PERSISTED IN HIS
CLAIMS
On June 1964, Dr. Kremer, then eighty years old, took the stand in
Frankfurt as a witness for the prosecution against the former Auschwitz guards.
In order to try to know exactly what he said on that day, we must rely on pages
72-73 of Hermann Langbein’s book Der Auschwitz
Prozess: Eine Dokumentation [The Auschwitz Trial: A
Documentation] [Vienna: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1965], 1027 p.).
Unfortunately Hermann Langbein is the secretary of the International
Concentration Camp Committee and his works all show a biased and partisan
spirit. Bernd Naumann’s book says almost nothing on the deposition of Dr.
Kremer (Auschwitz [Frankfurt:
Athenäum, 1965], 552 p.). Thus, here is Hermann Langbein’s version of how Dr.
Kremer’s deposition on the question of the “gas chambers” went; I reproduce the
text in its entirety:
Judge: Where did the
gassings take place?
Kremer: Some old farms
had been transformed into a bunker [Faurisson note: The German text indeed
gives the singular: Alte Bauernhäuser waren als Bunker ausgebaut] and provided with a
sliding door for secure closing. Upstairs was located a dormer window. The
people were brought in undressed. They entered quietly; only some of them
balked; they were taken aside and shot. The gas was released by an SS soldier.
For that he went up on a ladder.
Judge: And there were
some special rewards for those who participated in such an action?
Kremer: Yes, that was
the custom; a little schnaps and some cigarettes. They all wanted them. They
were allotted the goods. I myself also received such goods – this was quite
automatic.
Co-Plaintiff’s Counsel
Ormond: You wrote in your diary that the SS soldiers strove with each other for
service on the ramp [for the arrival of the convoys].
Kremer: That is humanly
quite understandable. This was war, was it not, and the cigarettes and schnaps
were rare. When someone was eager for cigarettes... They collected the goods
and then they went off to the canteen with their bottles.
Dr. Kremer’s testimony on the “gassings” at Auschwitz is limited to
these few questions and answers. Here, in conclusion, is Langbein’s commentary:
The man who described
the process of gassing with these bland and indifferent words is the former
university professor Dr. Johann Paul Kremer of Münster. He had already been
convicted in Poland and in Germany for his participation in mass murders. At
Frankfurt he left the witness stand smiling softly.
5. EXTRACTS FROM THE DIARY: MY EXPLANATIONS AND MY COMMENTARIES
I note first that these extracts contain neither the word “gassing” nor
the expression “gas chamber.”
Dr. Kremer’s diary was a private one. The doctor expressed himself
freely in it. He frankly expressed his horror of the camp. He does not mince
words. He compares what he sees to a vision from Dante. One can therefore think
that, had he seen the virtual human slaughterhouses that the “gas chambers”
would have been, he would have mentioned that absolute horror. Wouldn’t Dr.
Kremer, being a scientist, at least have noted some precise physical details
about these abattoirs, which, in the history of science, would have been an
amazing invention? But let us begin at the beginning. Did Dr. Kremer in fact
write what they say he wrote? The answer to that question is no, absolutely
not. His text has been gravely distorted. This is indeed the work of a forger.
As an example I am going to reproduce the text of Georges Wellers’s version,
but I am going to insert in it, in capital letters in italics, what he has
omitted, and I am going to insert in place of Sonderaktion
and of extermination, which are misinterpretations, the two words that
are appropriate; I will also put them in capital letters. Here, then, is the
text translated from the original German (see document NO-3408 in the National
Archives, Washington):
– 2 September 1942: This
morning, at 3 o’clock, I was present OUTSIDE for the first time at a SPECIAL
ACTION. Compared to that, Dante’s Inferno appears TO ME ALMOST LIKE a
comedy. It is not without reason that Auschwitz is called THE camp of THE
ANNIHILATION!
Every text must be scrupulously respected, especially a text supposed to
serve as the basis for a shocking demonstration and for a terrible accusation.
The deletion of the word OUTSIDE is
very serious. Why, after the time has been specified, has the indication of the
place been concealed? The German text says: DRAUSSEN.
Dr. Kremer was not in a closed place, as a gas chamber would have been.
He was “outside,” “on the outside.” Undoubtedly that detail is not very clear,
and perhaps it meant “outside of the camp proper,” but that possibility must
not be concealed. For Sonderaktion,
Wellers has kept the German word; in appearance, this is evidence of
scrupulousness and care; in reality, it is a clever trick. As a matter of fact,
this word, at least for a French reader, has a sound that is disturbing,
Germanic, barbaric, and can only conceal horrible things. But there is even
more: just before citing that entry by Dr. Kremer, Wellers, in his article in Le Monde, wrote: “[Kremer] had participated in the selection for
the gas chambers (Sonderaktion).” In
other words, Wellers pushes on his reader the following lie: In his diary, Dr.
Kremer said in so many words: “This morning, at three o’clock, I was present at
a selection for the gas chambers.”
We see very clearly now that it was nothing of the kind. Dr. Kremer was
content to speak of a “special action.” What is one to understand by this
expression? To some people who, like me, doubt the existence of the homicidal
“gas chambers,” it is absurd to answer, as Wellers does, by immediately
positing their existence as an accepted fact. Suppose someone does not believe
in the existence of flying saucers. To such a person one cannot rightly retort
that such things exist because, in some police report, it is stated: “A witness
declares that he saw something strange in the sky” – “Witnesses noted some
unusual phenomena in the sky.” Thus, for the time being, the only honest – if
not very clear – translation of Sonderaktion can
only be “special action.” I shall return later to the probable meaning of this
word about which, for the moment, we have no right to speculate.
Dr. Kremer did not write next: “Compared to that, Dante’s Inferno seemed
to be a comedy,” but: “Compared to that, Dante’s Inferno seemed TO ME ALMOST LIKE a comedy.” Here, Wellers’s suppression of three words
is perhaps not all that important, but it helps in its modest way to do
violence to the meaning of the text, always with a view to producing the same
effect. There is a shade of difference between “seemed like,” where one senses
a softening, and “seemed to be,” which is more affirmative. Dr. Kremer did not
transform an impression personal to him into an impression common to a whole
group of people. In other words, he did not state: “Dante’s Inferno appeared
here to everyone around me like a comedy”; if he had, one might suppose that he
had been present at an unquestionably Dantesque scene. In reality, he contented
himself with a personal confidence, writing in effect: “Dante’s Inferno here
appeared TO ME, who had just
arrived (that impression is personal to me, yet others can perhaps share it) ALMOST LIKE a comedy.” In other words, the scene is certainly
horrible for this doctor, who has just, for the first time in his life, arrived
in a concentration camp, but, all the same, not horrible to the point for him
to decree that, in comparison with this scene, those of Dante’s Inferno are
obviously a comedy to everybody.
But Georges Wellers has subjected the Kremer text to something far more
serious. Kremer did not say that Auschwitz was “called an extermination camp,”
which, in the original German, would have been: “genannt
Vernichtungslager.” In reality, we read in the original German: “genannt DAS Lager DER Vernichtung”
(“called THE camp of THE annihilation”). Had Wellers respected the presence of
the two articles and had he assigned to “Vernichtung”
the meaning of “extermination,” which is indispensable to his
exterminationist thesis, he would have obtained the following sentence: “It is
not without reason that Auschwitz is called the camp of the extermination.”
Thus constructed, the sentence sounds
bizarre both in German and in French. To us, this fact must signify that a word
in the text has without doubt been badly translated. That word, as will be seen
later on, is “Vernichtung.” The context
will reveal to us that this word is not to be translated here as
“extermination” (a meaning it can very well have in other contexts), but as
“annihilation.” There is here no extermination, murder, assassination, killing
or massacre; there are not the results of an act, an action or a will; there is
nothing here about a “camp where they exterminate,” there is no “extermination
camp” (an expression invented by the victors, some years after 1942, to
designate camps allegedly endowed with “gas chambers”). What there is here, in
reality, is an annihilation; men and women are reduced to wasting away; they
are annihilated, reduced to nothing by the epidemics and notably by that
illness the name of which, “typhus” (in Greek τῦφος)
signifies precisely: torpor, stupor, a kind of lethargy, a rapid destruction of
the faculties, sometimes to the point of death. Auschwitz is not “an
extermination camp” (an anachronistic expression, and we know that anachronism
is one of the most reliable signs of the presence of a falsehood), but the
camp, yes, indeed, the camp par excellence of general annihilation. Without
doubt, the moment he assumed his post at Auschwitz, this newcomer, Dr. Kremer,
had heard his colleagues say: “You know, this camp, they call it the camp of
annihilation. Watch out for typhus! You yourself are at risk of contracting it
and dying from it.”
And at the end of his entry for 2 September 1942, Dr. Kremer puts an
exclamation point. That punctuation indicates the doctor’s emotion. If one
conceals it, as does Wellers, the phrase takes on another tone: one might
believe that the doctor was cruel and cynical. One could perhaps believe that
Dr. Kremer thought coldly: “The Auschwitz camp is called an ‘extermination
camp.’ So it is. It is indeed. Let us take things as they are.” In reality, he
was overwhelmed.
Due to lack of time, I cannot devote myself to the criticism of the
texts given by Léon Poliakov, by Serge Klarsfeld, by the authorities of the
Auschwitz State Museum, by the official translation of document NO-3408, etc. I
would merely like to point out an especially serious fact. It concerns the
German courts. The court at Münster, which tried Dr. Kremer in 1960, quite
simply skipped over the word draussen when
it reproduced the entry of 2 September 1942. It accumulated other serious
dishonesties. Here is an example: to incriminate Dr. Kremer overwhelmingly, it
had recourse to the “Calendar of Events at Auschwitz” as compiled by the
communist authorities in Poland. It is strange enough for a court in the
Western world to show confidence in a document drawn up by Stalinists. But
there is more. The courts established that, for most of the convoys that
arrived in the camp, the Poles in their “Calendar” indicated with extraordinary
precision the number of persons “gassed.” Since we know that, according to the
standard exterminationist literature those who were “gassed” were not the
subject of any accounting, any tallying, an honest man could only read with
astonishment in the “Calendar” that, from the time when Dr. Kremer arrived at
Auschwitz, they had, on such and such a day, “gassed” 981 persons and, on
another day, 1594 other persons. Also, the court at Münster used a cynical
subterfuge. It reproduced numerous citations of the “Calendar” in its record
and, while making clear that the “Calendar” was its source, each time the
“Calendar” used the word “vergast” (“gassed”),
the court substituted for that clumsy word the word “umgebracht”
(“killed”). Thus readers of the verdict at Münster
are deceived. Someone who might find the mention of “981 gassed” or “1594 gassed”
suspicious will easily accept a of “981 dead” or “1594 dead.”
Finally, two remarks about the entries other than that of 2 September:
(1) The expression anus mundi would
not be appropriate, it seems to me, to scenes of “gassings,” but rather to a
repugnant and nauseating scene of groups of those fallen prey to disgusting
diseases, to dysentery, etc. (2) When Dr. Kremer says that he was present at a
special action in rainy, cold weather or in gray and rainy autumn weather, it
is probable that those actions took place outside in the open air, and not in a
gas chamber.
6. THE TRUTH OF THE TEXTS: AUSCHWITZ AS PREY TO EPIDEMICS DURING THE
SUMMER OF 1942
It is sufficient to read the diary with a certain minimum of good faith
in order to see the evidence. Here is, in summary, the complementary
information that the diary provides: Dr. Kremer came to Auschwitz to replace a
sick physician there. Typhus had ravaged not only the camp, but also the
German-Polish city of Auschwitz. The German troops as well as the internees
were stricken. There were typhus, malaria, dysentery, subtropical heat, swarms
of flies and dust in the air. The water was dangerous to drink. Diarrhea,
vomiting, stomach aches made the atmosphere stink. The sight of people reduced
to nearly nothing by typhus was demoralizing. In that hell, Dr. Kremer himself
contracted what he called “the Auschwitz disease.” However, he underwent
several vaccinations, at first against exanthematic typhus, then against
abdominal typhus (a name which, in itself, would suggest a rather good
explanation of the term anus mundi).
The principal bearer of typhus is the louse. On 1 September 1942 Kremer
wrote: “In the afternoon was present at the gassing of a block with Zyklon B
against lice.” Zyklon B is stabilized hydrocyanic acid. This product is still
used throughout the entire world today. Many documents prove to us that the
disinfection procedure was a delicate one and could require the presence of a
physician for providing medical help, should the need arise, to the qualified
personnel in charge of carrying out the gassing of barracks and, when the places
had been ventilated for twenty-one hours, with testing to verify the
disappearance of the cyanide before the occupants were allowed to re-enter. On
10 October 1942, the situation was so serious that there was a general
quarantine of the camp. The wife of Obersturmführer (or Sturmbannführer) Cäsar
died of typhus. The entire city of Auschwitz was laid up, etc. It suffices to
refer to the text of the diary. For more details of that epidemic of 1942 one
can also consult the calendar of the Hefte
von Auschwitz. In the Anthology of the
International Auschwitz Committee, Volume I, part two, page
196 (in the French edition), we read that the SS Dr. Popiersch, head physician
of the garrison and of the camp, died of typhus on 24 April 1942 (four months
before Dr. Kremer’s arrival). In volume II, part one, published in 1969, we
read on pages 129 and 209 (note 14) that the Polish physician Dr. Marian
Ciepielowski, of Warsaw, also died of typhus while caring for the Soviet
prisoners of war.
Dr. Kremer’s work at Auschwitz seems to have been principally devoted to
laboratory research, to dissections, to anatomical studies. But it was
sometimes necessary for him to be present at corporal punishments and
executions. He was not present at the arrival of the
convoys but, once those fit for work had been separated from those unfit for
work, he would arrive, by car with a driver, from his hotel in town (room 26 at
the Station Hotel). What happened next? Did he lead people to “gas chambers” or
to disinfection? Below we shall see what he is purported to have said, first in
1947 to the Polish communists, second, to the court at Münster in 1960 and
third, to the court at Frankfurt in 1964.
7. THE TRUTH OF THE TEXTS: NO “GASSING”
We shall recall that, for 12 October 1942, Dr. Kremer wrote in his
diary:
[...] Was present at
night at another special action with a draft from Holland (1600 persons).
Horrible scene in front of the last bunker! This was the 10th special
action.
Likewise, for 18 October he wrote:
In wet and cold weather
was on this Sunday morning present at the 11th special action (from
Holland). Terrible scenes when 3 women begged to have their poor lives spared.
These two texts are easy to interpret. The “last bunker” could only be
the bunker of barracks number 11; it was located at the end of the Auschwitz
camp (the original camp), and not at or near Birkenau, which was 3 km away. The
executions took place in what was called the courtyard of block 11. It is there
that the “black wall” is located. Usually, persons who had been condemned to
death were transported to a concentration camp for execution. That was probably
the case with the three women who had arrived from the Netherlands. I suppose
it would be easy to find their names and the reasons for their conviction,
either in the archives at Auschwitz or in those of the Historical Institute in
Amsterdam. In either case, these three women were shot.
The Poles have been terribly embarrassed by this reference to the “last
bunker.” By a sleight of hand they have converted this bunker, which in the
diary is in the singular, into... peasant farmhouses that had allegedly been
transformed into “gas chambers” and were situated near Birkenau. Here the
absurdities pile up. What is the doctor supposed to have done? Nothing. He remained seated in his car, at a distance. And what
did he see of a “gassing” of human beings? Nothing. What
can he tell us about what took place after the alleged “gassing”? Nothing,
since he left by car with his driver (and the medical orderly?). He has nothing
to say about either the installation, or the killing procedure, or the
personnel employed in the killing, or of the precautions taken by them in
entering an incredibly dangerous place. It is not Dr. Kremer who will tell us
how people could enter this dreadful place “a short moment” after the alleged
victims had stopped crying out. Nor will Dr. Kremer be able to inform us by
what secret means some thousands of bodies, saturated with cyanide, lying
amidst vapors of hydrocyanic acid, could be dragged out, with bare hands
(although hydrocyanic acid poisons by contact with skin), without gas masks (although
the gas is overwhelmingly toxic), while eating and smoking (although the gas is
inflammable and explosive). It is Rudolf Höss, in his voluntary confessions to
the same Polish court, who recounted all those astonishing things. Let’s be
fair about this. Let’s suppose that the members of the Sonderkommando (“special detachment”)
in fact did possess gas masks, fitted with a particularly strong filter, the J
filter, against hydrocyanic acid. I’m afraid we have got no further ahead. I
have here, in front of me, the translation of a passage from a U.S. Army
technical manual dating from 1941 (The Gas Mask, Technical
Manual No. 3-205, War Department, 9 October 1941, prepared under the direction
of the chief of the Chemical Warfare Service, [Washington: U.S. Government Printing
Office, 1941], 144 p.) The following appears on page 55 (I have put the most
important words in capitals):
It should also be
remembered that a man may be overcome by the absorption of hydrocyanic gas
through the skin; a concentration of 2 percent hydrocyanic acid gas being
sufficient to thus overcome a man in about 10 minutes. Therefore, EVEN IF ONE
WEARS A GAS MASK, exposure to concentrations of hydrocyanic gas of 1 percent by
volume or greater should be made only in case of necessity and then FOR A
PERIOD NO LONGER THAN 1 MINUTE AT A TIME. In general, places containing this
gas should be well ventilated with fresh air before the wearer of the mask
enters, thus reducing the concentration of hydrocyanic gas to low fractional
percentages.
Dr. Kremer’s voluntary confessions, with the closing of the gas chambers
done “with a sliding door for secure closing” make us laugh. The requirement
that a homicidal gas chamber using hydrocyanic acid be totally airtight would
have been impossible to satisfy with a sliding door. But how could Dr. Kremer,
who never left his car, describe that door as if he had seen it? And the SS man
who released the gas – how did he do it? Did he release “the contents of a box
of Zyklon through an opening in the wall” (version of the confession of 1947)?
Or “by some shafts (Einwurfschächte)”
(version of 1960)? Or even through a “dormer window” that he reached “above”
while climbing “by a ladder” (1964 version)? Everything in these confessions is
empty and vague. One can simply deduce from them with certainty two quite
probable things:
– Dr. Kremer convoyed persons who were led into certain barracks in
order to undress (and undoubtedly they next went on to disinfection or to the
showers);
– Dr. Kremer was present at some gassings of buildings or of barracks in
order to disinfect them with Zyklon B.
In the course of defending himself by combining these two actual
experiences, he constructed for his accusers, or his accusers constructed for
him, the shabby and absurd account of the “gas chambers.” A very characteristic
point of false testimonies on the homicidal “gassings” is the following: the
accused says that he was at a certain distance from the place of the crime; the
best that can be found is that of a defendant who says that he had been forced
to release the Zyklon through a hole in the roof of the “gas chamber,” or even
one who “had helped push” the victims into the “gas chamber.”
That ought to remind us of those unfortunates who in the Middle Ages
were accused of having met the devil on such and such a day, at such and such
an hour, in such and such a place. They would have been able to deny that
fiercely. They might even have gone so far as to say: “You know very well that
I could not have met the devil for one excellent reason, namely, that the devil does not exist.” They would
have condemned themselves with such responses. There was only one way out: to
play their accusers’ game, to admit that the devil was incontestably there,
but... at the top of the hill, while they themselves, down below, heard the
horrible noise (sobs, groans, cries, din) of the devil’s victims. It is
shameful that, in the middle of the twentieth century, there are so many judges
and lawyers who will admit as evidence the bewildering confessions of so many
defendants without ever having had the least curiosity to ask them what they
had actually seen, with their own eyes; without posing them technical
questions; without going on to compare the most obviously contradictory
explanations. In the defense of the legal profession, I must unfortunately note
that even intelligent technicians and well-informed chemists as well can
imagine that almost any small place may easily be transformed into a homicidal
“gas chamber.” None of those people has had the opportunity of visiting an
American gas chamber, or they would grasp the enormity of their error. The
first Americans who thought about executing a man by gas also imagined it would
be easy. It was when they actually tried to do it that they found out they
risked gassing not only the condemned prisoner but also the governor and
employees of the penitentiary. It took many years to perfect a reliable gas
chamber.
As for Dr. Kremer’s “special actions,” they are easy to understand.
These were simply what, in the vocabulary of the French army, are designated by
the pompous name “missions extraordinaires.” I
believe the American equivalent is “special assignments.” A “special
assignment” does not necessarily imply a transfer of personnel. It denotes a
sudden task that interrupts the habitual course of duties. Dr. Kremer, for
example, worked chiefly in the laboratory but, from time to time, he was needed
for other duties: reception of a transport to be led to disinfection, triage in
the hospital of the sick, of those with contagious conditions, etc. Like a good
soldier and a methodical man, he noted each of those duties in his diary;
probably he earned a supplementary allowance each time he performed them, as
did the SS volunteers who cleaned the railway cars at the arrival of each
convoy. In any case, if Auschwitz appeared like a hell to him, it was not at
all because of frightful crimes like the executions of crowds of human beings
in the enclosures allegedly turned into “gas chambers,” but due to the typhus,
malaria, dysentery, the infernal heat, the flies, the lice, the dust. One can
determine as much by even a slightly attentive reading of the text of his
diary. Which is what I, for my part, did first. And then one day I came by
chance upon the proof, the material proof, that this was indeed the correct
interpretation.
8. TEXTUAL CONFIRMATION OF THE CORRECTNESS OF THE REVISIONIST
INTERPRETATION OF DR. KREMER’S DIARY
On page 42 of Justiz und NS-Verbrechen we
learn that in the trial at Münster, in 1960, Dr. Kremer had called a witness in
his defense. That witness was a woman whose name began with Gla (German law
authorizes that, in a public document, certain names be revealed only in
abbreviated form.) The name was very probably that of Miss Glaser, the daughter
of Dr. Kremer’s housekeeper, of whom he speaks several times in the diary. The
witness brought to court several postcards and letters that the doctor had sent
her during his stay at Auschwitz. She said that the doctor “had not been in
agreement with what took place at Auschwitz” and that he had been eager to
leave the camp. Miss Gla[ser] then put into
evidence a letter that Dr. Kremer had sent her, dated 21 October 1942. Its
content is of extreme importance, which apparently eluded the tribunal. This
letter proves that, when Dr. Kremer spoke of the Auschwitz camp as a hell, it
was because of typhus and the other epidemics, just as I have said above. Here
are Dr. Kremer’s words in the letter:
I don’t really know for
certain, but I expect, however, that I’ll be able to be in Münster before 1
December, and thus finally turn my back on this hell of Auschwitz where, in
addition to the typhoid, and so on, typhus has once again broken out
strongly...
Here, therefore, is that “Dante’s Inferno” of the entry of 2 September
1942! Professor of medicine Johann Paul Kremer had seen the horrors of a
formidable epidemic wiping out internees and guards at Auschwitz; he had seen
no monstrous “gassing” operations exterminating crowds of human beings.
9. THE HUMAN CHARACTER OF DR. KREMER
In considering his life and reading his diary, we perceive that Dr.
Kremer was not at all a brute, or a fanatic, or a cynical man. He was human,
too human; he was a free spirit but perhaps with no great courage. He had early
on become something of a “confirmed bachelor,” attached above all to his
profession. His biography is sketched in the first pages of Volume 16 of Justiz und NS-Verbrechen. Johann Paul Kremer was born in
1883 near Cologne of a father who, having been a miller, became a farmer. He
did his advanced studies at the Universities of Heidelberg, Strasbourg and
Berlin. He earned a doctorate in philosophy and a doctorate in medicine. Kremer
worked in succession at the Charité Hospital in Berlin, at the hospital of
Berlin-Neukölln, at the surgical clinic of the University of Bonn, at the
anatomical institute of the same university; finally, he became associate
lecturer at the University of Münster, where he taught courses up until 1945
(when he was 62 years old). Those courses dealt with the doctrine of heredity,
sports medicine, X-rays and, above all, anatomy. In 1932, at the age of 48, he
joined the National Socialist German Workers Party. In 1936, at the age of 52,
he was made SS-Sturmmann (roughly, private first class). In 1941, at the age of
57, he was promoted to Untersturmführer (second lieutenant) in the Waffen-SS.
He served his active duty only during university vacations. In 1942 he spent
two months at Dachau as a physician attached to the SS hospital; he had no
contact with the camp internees. In 1941 he published a paper on heredity which
seems to have brought him some worries with regard to the official authorities.
In August 1942 he was serving at the SS hospital in Prague when, suddenly, he
received an assignment to Auschwitz to replace a doctor who had fallen ill.
Kremer was at Auschwitz from 30 August to 18 November 1942, after which time he
resumed his activity at the anatomical institute of the city of Münster. At the
time he was 58 years old. He served as president of the Disciplinary Commission
of North Westphalia of the Union of National Socialist Doctors. In 1943 he was
named lieutenant in the reserves of the Waffen-SS. Here is how he was
evaluated: “Calm personality, correct; sure of himself, energetic; above
average in general culture; excellent understanding of his speciality. Lengthy
education as surgeon and anatomist; since 1936, associate lecturer at the
University of Münster.”
On 12 August 1945, Kremer was arrested at his home in Münster by the
British occupying forces (the “automatic arrest” of former SS men). During the
arrest they seized his diary. He was interned at Neuengamme, then handed over
to the Poles. Kremer was imprisoned at Stettin, then in fourteen Polish prisons
in succession, and finally in Cracow prison. The preliminary investigation of
the case was carried out by the famous judge Jan Sehn, to whom we owe the
interrogations of Rudolf Höss and the latter’s (no doubt “voluntary”)
confession. In 1947, at the age of nearly 64, Kremer was freed for good conduct
and because of his advanced age and poor health. He returned to his home in
Münster, where he was arrested by order of a German court, then freed on bail.
At the time he was receiving a pension of DM 70 per week. He had married in
1920, at the age of 37, but he separated from his wife after two months, since
she suffered from schizophrenia. He was to obtain a divorce only in 1942,
twenty years later. Dr. Kremer had no children. A housekeeper looked after him.
Unless I am mistaken, he was never at the front and never fired a shot except,
doubtless, in training. From the age of fifteen and a half he kept a diary. I
have not read the part of his diary that predates the Second World War.
On 29 November 1960, Dr. Kremer, aged 76, was sentenced to ten years in
prison, but the ten years were considered as served. In consideration of his
advanced age, his civil rights were suspended for only five years. He was
ordered to pay court costs, stripped of his post as lecturer, his title of
professor and, I believe, of his two doctorates. On 4 June 1964 Kremer took the
witness stand in the “Frankfurt Trial” to testify against the “Auschwitz
guards.” I doubt that this old man of eighty testified willingly against his
compatriots in the hysterical atmosphere of that famous witch trial. His
“voluntary confessions” to the Polish communists were thus, to the end of his
life, to cling to his skin like the tunic of Nessus. So it was that, beginning
in 1945, this professor’s existence had become an ordeal. Here is a man who had
devoted his life to relieving the sufferings of his fellow men: after the
ordeal of a lost war he was officially made into a sort of monster who had, it
seemed, all of a sudden devoted two and a half months of his life to great
massacres of human beings in line with a truly satanic industrial method. Dr.
Kremer’s diary is dull in style (at least the part of it that I have read), but
when one considers the destiny of that diary and its author, one cannot help but
think of it as a work which, far more than certain other highly valued
historical or literary testimonies, is profoundly disquieting. I think often of
that old man. I think sometimes also of his tormentors. I do not know what
became of Dr. Kremer. If he were still alive today he would be ninety-seven
years old. I hope that one day a scholar will write a biography of this man,
and that to do so he will visit the city of Münster (Westphalia) where there
are certainly still a few people who knew – allow me to restore him his titles
– Professor Doctor Johann Paul Kremer.
Dr. Kremer certainly did not have National Socialist convictions. On 13
January 1943 he wrote in his diary: “There is no Aryan, Negroid, Mongoloid or
Jewish science, only a true or a false one.” On the same date, he wrote this as
well:
[...] I had never even
dreamed there existed anything like “a gagged science.” By such maneuvers,
science has received a mortal blow and has been banished from the country! The
situation in Germany today is no better than in the days when Galileo was forced to recant and
when science was menaced by tortures and the stake. Where, for Heaven’s sake,
is this situation going to lead us to in the twentieth century!!! I could
almost feel ashamed to be a German. And so I shall have to end my days as a
victim of science and a fanatic for truth.
In reality, he was to end his days as a victim of the political lie and
as a poor man forced to lie.
For 1 March 1943, we read in his diary:
Went today to shoemaker
Grevsmühl to be registered and saw there a leaflet sent to him from Kattowitz
by the Socialist Party of Germany. The leaflet said that we had already
liquidated 2 million Jews, by shooting or gassing.
The exterminationist historians do not use the argument that this entry
seems to offer them. On reflection, that is understandable. Everyone knows
quite well that a thousand rumors of German atrocities circulated during the
war. The socialist opposition made use of them, as did all of Hitler’s
opponents. In this kind of leaflet one says anything and everything. That is
the rule for this type of literature. Dr. Kremer made no comment on the
leaflet. Perhaps he believed what its author stated. That is even probable,
since he took the trouble to note it. That is precisely what is interesting
about this incident. Dr. Kremer must certainly not have been a very good Nazi,
or otherwise his shoemaker would not have run the risk of letting him read a
secret leaflet, especially one “sent to him from Kattowitz”. This last detail
proves that Dr. Kremer was not afraid of confiding very delicate information to
his diary.
On 26 July 1945, or about two and a half months after the German
surrender, Dr. Kremer witnessed the distress of his countrymen. Their distress
wrung from him nearly the same words as had the horrors of Auschwitz. I present
in italics those words in the quotation that follows:
The weather is still very hot
and dry.
The corn ripens before its time, gnats are pestering us more
and more,
the foreigners* are still greatly worrying the starving, needy and
homeless inhabitants. People are crowded into goods trains like cattle pushed hither and
thither, while at night they try to find shelter in the stench of
dirty and verminous bunkers. Quite indescribable is the fate of these
poor refugees, driven into uncertainty by death, hunger and despair.
* (The Polish
authorities here have altered the original German text, which spoke not of
“foreigners” but of “Russians, Poles and Italians.”)
The fact that immediately after this passage Dr. Kremer spoke of the
gathering of berries does not mean that he was insensitive to the suffering of
his countrymen. Anyone who keeps a diary passes in this way, without
transition, from the serious to the trifling. After the death of a person dear
to him Goethe noted something to the effect: “Death of Christiane!! I slept
well. I feel better.” And this “better” referred to health – his own health –
which up until then had caused him some concern. As for Kafka, I believe I recall
that on the very day of a similarly trying event he had gone to the swimming pool. I am not quite sure of these details
and I propose to verify them some day.
10. FORCED CONFESSIONS
We all know that forced confessions are common coin, especially in time
of war. GI’s in Korea, as in Vietnam, did not fail to confess “voluntarily” to
the worst absurdities. People often believe that “voluntary confessions” are a
speciality of the Communist world. This ignores the fact that the French,
British and Americans made great use of torture towards, for example, the
vanquished of the last war. As regards what the French did, I have carried out
an investigation of an almost surgical precision on the summary executions in a
whole small region of France at the time of the Liberation in 1944. It is
absolutely impossible to have my manuscript published, given the scandal that
it would cause, which would have repercussions, I can assure you, right up to
the Presidency of the Republic, which is opposed (imagine it!) to the
exhumation of persons who were executed by units of the Maquis. Those people were sometimes tortured. But experience
has also taught me that it is necessary to distrust some tales of physical
torture. There are perverted people who take real pleasure in inventing all
sorts of such stories.
In The Hoax of the Twentieth Century, on
pages 233-236 [2003 edition], Dr. Butz presents a profound and evocative analysis of forced
confessions and torture. His brilliant intelligence, not to say his genius,
dictates to him sometimes, as you well know, observations of such great
pertinence that one is astonished and ashamed not to have made them oneself.
Here is an example, dealing with physical torture; it is not lacking in humor:
Finally we should
observe that almost none of us, certainly not this author, has ever experienced
torture at the hands of professionals bent on a specific goal, and thus we
might suspect, to put it quite directly, that we simply do not know what we are
talking about when we discuss the possibilities of torture. (page 236)
It is, I think, easy to obtain forced confessions from a man whom one
holds at one’s mercy. Physical torture is not absolutely necessary. I mean to
say that it is not absolutely necessary to strike the victim. It is sufficient
sometimes to shout and to threaten. Seclusion and prolonged isolation, as was
the case with Aldo Moro, can create a feeling of panic and lead to a sort of
madness. One will be ready to sign any kind of declaration in order to get out
of the isolation. If an officer refuses to confess, he can be threatened with
the loss of his men, and vice versa. He will be threatened with the loss of his
wife and children. I am sure that all physical or mental resistance can be
wiped out by very simple means. For example, captors will offer their prisoner
conditions of lodging worthy of a decent hotel and give him as much as he
wishes to eat, but nothing to drink. Or the prisoner will get enough to eat and
to drink, but they will light his cell day and night so brightly (see the
example of Nuremberg) that he will no longer be able to sleep. Very quickly he
will become a human rag, prepared to mutter any kind of confession.
One fearful effect of torture is to bring the victim closer to his
torturer. The panting victim detaches himself mentally from those whom he ought
to love in order to attach himself to the one whom he ought to fear and hate.
He no longer wishes to have anything in common with those whose ideas he
shares: he comes to hate those ideas and those people because those ideas,
finally, have caused him too much suffering and those people – his friends –
appear to him as a living reproach. In contrast, there is everything to expect
from the torturer. He possesses power, which always, in spite of everything, confers
a certain prestige. The gods are on his side. It is he who has the solution to
all your sufferings. The torturer is going to propose this solution to you,
although, if he wished, he could kill you on the spot or torture you without
respite.
This torturer, who proposes that you sign a simple sheet of paper on
which some words are written: he is good. How can you resist him when you feel
yourself so weak and so alone? This torturer becomes irresistible when, instead
of demanding from you a confession that is precise and totally contrary to the
truth, he proposes to you a sort of compromise: a vague confession based on a
partial truth. From 1963 to 1965, at the Frankfurt trial, the judge had as his
first concern not the truth, since he thought that the truth had already been
revealed completely, but the measurement of the
degree of repentance of each defendant! On page 512 of Hermann Langbein’s
book, cited above, we see the judge show his preoccupation with discerning to
what degree defendant Pery Broad was conscious of having done evil: the judge
declared in all candor: “You see, an awareness of one’s wrongdoing plays a
large part in these proceedings.” How many times must the German defendants
have heard that remark from the mouths of their jailers, their investigating
magistrates, and especially from their lawyers! After that, how could an
intelligent and sensible man like Pery Broad refuse to tell the stupid story
about an anonymous SS man whom he is supposed to have noticed one day, from a
distance, in the process of releasing a mysterious liquid through the opening
in the roof of... the “gas chamber” of Auschwitz (the original camp)? Pery
Broad probably knew that no one would come and ask him, among other questions:
But how could you know
that that was the roof of a “gas chamber” and not of a morgue? Did you enter
the place? If you did, can you tell us how it was arranged? Was it not mad of
the Germans to have placed a “gas chamber” just beneath the windows of the SS hospital
and beneath the windows of the administrative building where you found yourself
that day? With the ventilation, the flow of hydrocyanic vapor would therefore
have been in the direction of the SS men in the hospital, or of those in your
building. Isn’t that so?
Such are the questions that the court did not put to Pery Broad. It
would be inhuman to blame Pery Broad, Dr. Kremer, Rudolf Höss and other SS men
for their absurd forced confessions. One must be astonished at the laughable
number of those confessions when one thinks of the hundreds of SS men from the
concentration camps who were imprisoned by the Allies. Of all those who were
hanged or shot or who committed suicide, how many left confessions? A handful
on the subject of the alleged “gas chambers.” In regard to other subjects,
perhaps there are more numerous confessions. I am inclined to believe that the
Poles and the Soviets must have obtained a multitude of confessions; the SS men
had to accuse each other, as all the men of the same lost cause were more or
less obliged to do. If there were very few confessions from the SS men
concerning the “gas chambers,” it was not due to the courage of the SS men –
since, once again, it seems to me that no one can truly resist a torturer who
is something of a psychologist – but quite simply because, on this subject,
their torturers did not know very well what precisely to make them state.
Without any material reality on which to construct their lies about the “gas
chambers” – those slaughterhouses which in fact never existed – the torturers
were reduced to inventing some poorly defined things and some stereotypes that
they attributed to such men as Rudolf Höss, Pery Broad and Johann Paul Kremer.
11. A PRACTICAL CONCLUSION
In conclusion, if in your presence an exterminationist should base his
argument for the reality of the “gas chambers” of Auschwitz (or of any other
camp) on the claim of confessions, here, in my opinion, is the conduct to
follow:
Ask if he will first enumerate those confessions one by one;
Ask him to point out the confession that, in his opinion, is the most
convincing;
Agree to read that one confession in the language (accessible to you)
and in the form that, again, is chosen by him;
Compare the allegedly original text of that confession with the text
that the exterminationist has provided;
Decipher the text line by line and word by word, without making it say
either more or less than it actually says; note carefully what the author of
the confession alleges that he personally saw, heard or did; a traditional
trick of the German courts has consisted, as was the case in the Kremer trial
at Münster in 1960, in slipping a weak confession that the defendant made into
a very long presentation about “gassing” in such a way that the reader will
believe that the whole report comes from the defendant; the reader imagines
that the defendant made a detailed report of the events. Nothing of the kind;
the text need only be “scoured” of all the additions that the judge made to it:
then one can conclude that the testimony is nearly as inconsistent as it is
brief and vague.
See if the confession stands up, if it is coherent, if it breaks no law
of physics or chemistry; be very materialistic, as if you were studying a
miracle from Lourdes; try to see the places where the action is said to have
occurred; see what remains of them; some ruins can be very instructive; seek
out the plans of the places or the buildings.
Determine, if possible, whether the text of the confession is in the
handwriting of the man who confessed; find out whether that text is in his
mother tongue or another language; the Allies usually made the Germans sign
texts drawn up in French (Josef Kramer) or in English (Rudolf Höss), and they
would add, with full peace of mind, that they guaranteed that the text had been
very faithfully translated for the accused into his own language (and they
proceeded thus in the absence of any lawyer);
Seek to know who obtained the confession, when and how; ask yourself:
upon whom did the man who confessed depend for his food and drink, and his sleeping
quarters?
I don’t think I have to add any other recommendations (for example, as
to the material or documentary authenticity of the text to be studied). You
understand that I am setting out a method of investigation that is elementary
and not at all original. It is a routine method that one would apply
automatically in ordinary criminal matters, but, unfortunately, when it comes
to crimes that are exceptional by their supposed nature, the historians as well
as the judges, very far from redoubling prudence and holding to a tried and
tested method, display an incredible rashness. Good
method – whether it is a question of an investigation, an analysis, etc. – always consists in “beginning with the
beginning.” In fact, experience has taught me that often nothing is more
difficult and less spontaneous than “to begin with the beginning.” It was only
after years of research on the “gas chambers,” and after having pronounced the
words “gas chambers” perhaps several thousand times, that one fine day I woke
up with the question: “What do these words really mean? What material reality
do they really relate to?” To ask those questions was to find in them, very
quickly, an answer. That answer you know: it is that the homicidal “gas
chambers” of the Germans existed only in sick minds. It is high time that the
entire world woke up and realized this. Germany, in particular, ought to wake
up from this dreadful nightmare. It is high time a truthful history of the
Second World War were written.
NOTES
I reproduce here the text of the entry of 2 September
1942 (Diary of Johann Paul Kremer) after the photocopy of the original as found
in the National Archives in Washington (Doc. #NO-3408). Some exterminationist
works reproduce the photograph of this entry among other entries from the
diary. But the reader has little chance of deciphering each word of Dr.
Kremer’s German handwriting. He will be inclined to trust the printed
reproduction offered to him, for example, in the margin; this is the case with KL Auschwitz, Arbeit Macht Frei, published by the International Auschwitz Committee, 96 p. (not dated).
On page 48 there appears a photograph of a manuscript page of the diary on
which are found three entries relating to five dates (1 through 5 September
1942). In the margin, one discovers the alleged printed reproduction of the
single entry of 2 September. That reproduction appears in French, English and
German. In French and English the text is outrageously distorted. In German, it
was very difficult to distort the text in a similar way, since the photocopy of
the manuscript was available to the reader. But we must have unlimited trust in
the exterminationists’ ability to falsify texts that embarrass them. The
International Auschwitz Committee found a solution thanks to a typographical
trick. After the word Sonderaktion
the editors printed, in the same typeface, the
following parenthesis, as if it were from Dr. Kremer: “So wurde die Selektion und das Vergasen genannt” (“Thus did they refer to selection and gassing”). Either the reader,
as is highly probable, will not notice the difference between the manuscript
text and the printed text and will thus believe the sentence to be a confidence
imparted by Dr. Kremer (something that will appear all the more normal since,
according to an exterminationist myth, the Nazis spent their time inventing and
using a coded language in order to cover up their crimes); or else the reader
will see the difference between the texts and the authors will then plead a
simple, and innocent, typographical error. Serge Klarsfeld, as I’ve said above,
has used this fallacious page in his “Memorial of the deportation of the Jews
of France”. Thus are historical tricks spread and perpetuated. Here is the
original manuscript text in its authentic form:
Zum 1. Male draussen um 3
Uhr früh bei einer Sonderaktion zugegen. Im Vergleich hierzu erscheint mir das
Dante’sche Inferno fast wie eine Komödie.
Umsonst wird Auschwitz nicht das Lager der Vernichtung genannt!
Finally, here is the text of the passage from the
letter of 21 October 1942 addressed to Miss Gla[ser], which I reproduce with
its errors in punctuation and spelling.
[...] Definitiven Bescheid
habe ich allerdings noch nicht erwarte jedoch, dass ich vor dem 1. Dezember
wieder in Münster sein kann and so endgultig dieser Hölle Auschwitz den Rükken
gekehrt habe, wo ausser Fleck usw. sich nunmehr auch der Typhus mächtig
bemerkbar macht...
August 1, 1980
