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= Evidence_and_documentation_for_the_Holocaust =
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Introduction
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The Holocaust--the systematic killing of about six million Jews by
Nazi Germany from 1941 to 1945--is the most-documented genocide in
history. Although there is no single document which lists the names of
all Jewish victims of Nazi persecution, there is conclusive evidence
that about six million Jews were murdered. There is also conclusive
evidence that Jews were gassed at Auschwitz-Birkenau, the Operation
Reinhard extermination camps, and in gas vans, and that there was a
systematic plan by the Nazi leadership to murder them.
Evidence for the Holocaust comes in four main varieties:
*Contemporary documents, including a wide variety of "letters, memos,
blueprints, orders, bills, speeches"; Holocaust train schedules and
statistical summaries generated by the SS; and photographs, including
official photographs, clandestine photographs by survivors, aerial
photographs, and film footage of the liberation of the camps. More
than 3,000 tons of records were collected for the Nuremberg trials.
*Later testimony from tens of thousands of eyewitnesses, including
survivors such as 'Sonderkommandos,' who directly witnessed the
extermination process; perpetrators such as Nazi leaders, SS guards,
and Nazi concentration camp commandants; and local townspeople.
Moreover, virtually none of the perpetrators put on trial denied the
reality of the systematic murder, with the most common excuse (where
one was given) being that they were just following orders.
*Material evidence in the form of concentration and extermination
camps, which still exist with various amounts of the original
structure preserved, and thousands of mass graves containing the
corpses of Holocaust victims.
*Circumstantial evidence: during World War II, the population of Jews
in German-occupied Europe was reduced by about six million. About 2.7
million Jews were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau, Kulmhof
extermination camp, and the Operation Reinhard camps never to be seen
or heard from again.
The perpetrators attempted to avoid creating explicit evidence and
they also tried to destroy the documentary and material evidence of
their crimes before the German defeat. Nevertheless, much of the
evidence was preserved and collected by Allied investigators during
and after the war, and the overwhelming evidence of the crimes
ultimately made such erasure attempts futile. Collectively, the
evidence refutes the arguments of Holocaust deniers that the Holocaust
did not occur as described in historical scholarship.
Policy
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Historians, including Ian Kershaw, Raul Hilberg, and Martin Broszat,
indicate that no document exists showing that Hitler ordered the
Holocaust. However, other evidence makes clear that Hitler knew about
and ordered the genocide. Statements from top-ranking Nazis such as
Adolf Eichmann, Joseph Goebbels, and Heinrich Himmler also indicate
that Hitler orchestrated the Holocaust and statements from Hitler
himself reveal his genocidal intentions toward Jewry.
Order and responsibility
==========================
In a draft of an internal memorandum, dated 18 September 1942,
Reichsfuhrer SS Heinrich Himmler wrote that "in principle the
Fuehrer's time is no longer to be burdened with these matters"; the
memorandum goes on to outline Himmler's vision, including "The
delivery of anti-social elements from the execution of their sentences
to the Reich Fuehrer of SS to be worked to death. Persons under
protective arrest, Jews, Gypsies, Russians and Ukrainians, Poles with
more than 3-year sentences, Czechs and Germans with more than 8-year
sentences according to the judgement of the Minister of Justice
[Thierack]. First of all, the worst anti-social elements amongst those
just mentioned are to be handed over; I shall inform the Fuhrer of
this through Reichsleiter Bormann."
Nevertheless, and in contrast to the T4 euthanasia program, no
document written or signed by Hitler ordering the Holocaust has ever
been found. Deniers have claimed that this lack of order shows
genocide was not Nazi policy.
During David Irving's unsuccessful libel action against Deborah
Lipstadt, he indicated that he considered a document signed by Hitler
ordering the 'Final Solution' would be the only convincing proof of
Hitler's responsibility. He was, however, described as content to
accuse Winston Churchill of responsibility for ordering the
assassination of General Sikorski, despite having no documentary
evidence to support his claim. Mr Justice Gray concluded that this was
a double standard.
Historians have documented evidence that as Germany's defeat became
imminent and the Nazi leaders realized that they would most likely be
captured and brought to trial, a great effort to destroy all of the
evidence of mass extermination was made. In the spring of 1942,
Himmler ordered all of the traces of murdered Russian Jews and all of
the traces of murdered prisoners of war to be removed from the
occupied territories of the Soviet Union.
As one of many examples, the bodies of the 25,000 mostly Latvian
Jews whom Friedrich Jeckeln and the soldiers under his command had
shot at Rumbula (near Riga) in late 1941 were dug up and burned in
1943.
In mid-1942, Reinhard Heydrich, through Heinrich Mueller, Chief of the
Gestapo, ordered Paul Blobel in 'Sonderaktion' 1005 to remove all
traces of the mass executions in the East carried out by the
'Einsatzgruppen'. After Blobel and his staff developed a special
incineration process, destruction of evidence at Belzec and Sobibor
followed in late 1942. In February 1943, Himmler personally visited
Treblinka and ordered the commandants to destroy records, crematoria,
and other signs of mass extermination.
In the Posen speeches of October 1943, Himmler explicitly referred to
the extermination of the Jews of Europe and further stated that the
genocide must be permanently kept secret. On 4 October, he said:
Historian Peter Longerich states that Hitler "avoided giving a clear
written order to exterminate Jewish civilians". Wide protest was
evoked when Hitler's authorisation of the T4 program became public
knowledge in Germany, and he was forced to put a halt to it as a
result (nonetheless it continued discreetly). This made Hitler realise
that such undertakings must be done secretly in order to avoid
criticism. Critics also point out that if Hitler did sign such an
order in the first place, it would have been one of the first
documents to be destroyed.
Evidence of a verbal order from Hitler includes a handwritten note by
Himmler on a meeting with Hitler at the Wolfsschanze on 18 December
1941, which read: "Jewish Question; to be exterminated as partisans".
Historians have argued that this indicates Hitler gave a verbal order
to Himmler at this meeting for the 'Einsatzgruppen' to target Jews
under the guise of anti-partisan warfare.
According to Felix Kersten's memoirs, Himmler told him that the
extermination of the Jews was expressly ordered by Hitler and had been
delegated to Himmler.
{{anchor|According to Nazis}}According to Nazis
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Many statements from the Nazis from 1941 onwards addressed the
imminent extermination of the Jews.
In a draft of an internal memorandum, dated 25 October 1941, Heinrich
Himmler wrote:
Joseph Goebbels had frequent discussions with Hitler about the fate of
the Jews, a subject which they discussed almost every time they met,
and frequently wrote about it in his personal diary. In his personal
diary he wrote:
*14 February 1942: "The Führer once again expressed his determination
to clean up the Jews in Europe pitilessly. There must be no squeamish
sentimentalism about it. The Jews have deserved the catastrophe that
has now overtaken them. Their destruction will go hand in hand with
the destruction of our enemies. We must hasten this process with cold
ruthlessness."
*27 March 1942: "A judgment is being visited upon the Jews that, while
barbaric, is fully deserved by them. The prophecy which the Führer
made about them for having brought on a new world war is beginning to
come true in a most terrible manner. One must not be sentimental in
these matters. If we did not fight the Jews, they would destroy us.
It's a life-and-death struggle between the Aryan race and the Jewish
bacillus."
On 16 November 1941, Goebbels published an article '"The Jews are to
blame"' which returned to Hitler's prophecy of 1939 and stated that
world Jewry was suffering a "gradual process of extermination".
Goebbels wrote: "Some six million Jews still live in the East, and
this question can only be solved by a biological extermination of the
whole of Jewry in Europe".
On 13 March 1945, Goebbels wrote in his diary that the "rest of the
world" should follow Germany's example in "destroying the Jews", he
wrote also about how the Jews in Germany at that point had been almost
totally destroyed. This diary contains numerous other references to
the mass extermination of Jews, including how "tens of thousands of
them are liquidated" in eastern occupied territory, and that "the
greater the number of Jews liquidated, the more consolidated will the
situation in Europe be after this war." When speaking about this
document under oath, David Irving is quoted as saying "There is no
explicit reference...to the liquidation of Jews" and critics of
Holocaust denial consequently state that it is dishonest to say such a
thing when it is entirely contradicted by the diary of one of Hitler's
closest associates.
When questioned by interrogators if orders for the extermination of
Jews were delegated in writing by Himmler, Adolf Eichmann states:
Critics state that Eichmann gives a virtually identical account of
this in his memoirs, and state that it is also asserted that Eichmann
never even asked for a written order, on the basis that "Hitler's wish
as expressed through Himmler and Heydrich was good enough for him".
Eichmann's memoirs were recorded by Willem Sassen before he was
captured, and Eichmann's lawyer tried to prevent them from being
presented as evidence to avoid any detriment against his case.
In a speech, David Irving states that Heydrich told Eichmann, "The
Führer has given the order for the physical destruction of the Jews".
Irving admits that this contradicts his view that "Hitler wasn't
involved", but explains it by suggesting that a completely different
meaning can be construed, i.e. "the extirpation of Judaism" as opposed
to the physical destruction of Jews if one changes "just one or two
words". Critics of this view state that historians should not change
words if their documents contradict their claims, and consequently
point out five instances where Eichmann unambiguously states "physical
extermination" during his interrogation.
At a conference in 1941 discussing the Jewish Question, Alfred
Rosenberg said:
At the Einsatzgruppen Trial in 1947, SS-'Obersturmbannfuhrer' Martin
Sandberger recalled that his superior, SS-'Gruppenfuhrer' Bruno
Streckenbach, had informed him and other 'Einsatzgruppen' commanders
of an order from Hitler to eliminate all Jews in the Eastern
Territories at a meeting at the Palais Prinz Albrecht in 1941.
Rudolf Höss, commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp, wrote a
series of memoirs about his role in the Holocaust while awaiting
execution after the war. In these memoirs Höss stated that Himmler had
briefed him about the Final Solution and his role in it in summer
1941; during the meeting, Himmler told him that the order for the
Final Solution came directly from Hitler.
Awareness
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Congruent with the evidence that shows Hitler was responsible for the
order to murder Jews, there is also evidence that shows he was made
aware of the process. Gestapo Chief Heinrich Müller sent a telegram on
2 August 1941, ordering that "especially interesting illustrative"
material should be sent to Berlin because, "the Führer should be
presented with continuous reports on the work of 'Einsatzgruppen' in
the East from here". At the end of December 1942 Hitler received a
document from Himmler entitled, "Report to the Führer on Combating
Partisans", stating that 363,211 Jews had been murdered by the
'Einsatzgruppen' in August-November 1942. This document was
specifically printed in large font that Hitler could read without
glasses and was marked "Shown to the Führer".
Himmler's speeches
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Critics of Holocaust denial state that the claim by deniers of no Nazi
plan to exterminate the Jews is discredited by Himmler in a speech
made on 4 October 1943 to a gathering of SS officers in Poznań, where
he said:
!Original !Translated
| |In a speech at Sonthofen on 24 May 1944, Himmler said to a group
of German generals:
Use of gas chambers
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The German firm Topf and Sons manufactured gas chambers to be used in
concentration camps for extermination.
The search for cyanide in the bricks of buildings said to have been
gas chambers was important, because the pesticide Zyklon B would
generate such a residue. This was the gas most often cited as the
murder instrument for prisoners in the gas chambers, supported by both
testimony and evidence collected of Nazi policy.
Another claim made by Holocaust deniers is that there were no
specially-constructed vents in the gas chambers through which Zyklon B
could be released. The BBC offers a response showing that this
requires disregard of much documentation:
Deniers have said for years that physical evidence is lacking because
they have seen no holes in the roof of the Birkenau gas chamber where
the Zyklon was poured in. (In some of the gas chambers the Zyklon B
was poured in through the roof, while in others it was thrown in
through the windows.) The roof was dynamited at war's end, and today
lies broken in pieces, but three of the four original holes were
positively identified in a recent paper. Their location in the
concrete matches with eyewitness testimony, aerial photos from 1944,
and a ground photo from 1943. The physical evidence shows unmistakably
that the Zyklon holes were cast into the concrete when the building
was constructed.
There is well-documented evidence that other ash was used as
fertilizer in nearby fields. Photographs of Treblinka taken by the
camp commandant show what looks to be ash piles being distributed by
steam shovels.
The Nizkor Project and other sources have stated that the minimal
concentration of Zyklon B to be explosive is 56,000 parts per million,
while 300 parts per million is fatal to humans, as is evidenced in
'The Merck Index' and the 'CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics'. In
fact, the Nazis' own documentation stated "Danger of explosion: 75
grams of HCN in 1 cubic meter of air. Normal application approx. 8-10
grams per cubic meter, therefore not explosive."
The Institute for Historical Review publicly offered a reward of
$50,000 for verifiable "proof that gas chambers for the purpose of
killing human beings existed at or in Auschwitz." Mel Mermelstein, a
survivor of Auschwitz, submitted his own testimony as proof but it was
ignored. He then sued IHR in the United States and the case was
subsequently settled for $50,000, plus $40,000 in damages for personal
suffering. The court declared the statement that "Jews were gassed to
death at the Auschwitz Concentration Camp in Poland during the summer
of 1944" was a fact.
Six million
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The vast majority of scholars, institutions, and one Nazi official
estimate between five and six million Jews perished during the
Holocaust.
p. 403 With approximately 4.5 million Jewish victims' names collected
by Yad Vashem, numerous documents and archives discovered after the
war gave meticulous accounts of the exterminations that took place at
the death camps (such as Auschwitz and Treblinka).
Jewish population
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The 1932 'American Jewish Yearbook' estimates the total number of Jews
in the world at 15,192,218, of whom 9,418,248 resided in Europe.
However, the 1947 yearbook states: "Estimates of the world Jewish
population have been assembled by the American Jewish Joint
Distribution Committee (except for the United States and Canada) and
are probably the most authentic available at the present time. The
figures reveal that the total Jewish population of the world has
decreased by one-third from about 16,600,000 in 1939 to about
11,000,000 in 1946 as the result of the annihilation by the Nazis of
more than five and a half million European Jews. In Europe only an
estimated 3,642,000 remain of the total Jewish pre-war population of
approximately 9,740,000." These numbers are also consistent with the
findings of the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry,
[
https://web.archive.org/web/20070104080919/http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/anglo/angap03.htm
Appendix III], in 1946.
Nazi documentation
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The Nazis used figures of between 9 and 11 million for the Jewish
population of Europe, as evidenced in the notes of the Wannsee
Conference. In fact, the Nazis methodically recorded the ongoing
reduction of the Jewish population, as in the Korherr Report, which
gave the status of the Final Solution through December 1942. The Höfle
Telegram was sent by Hermann Höfle on 11 January 1943 to Adolf
Eichmann in Berlin and detailed the number of Jews murdered in the
concentration camps. In the year 1942 alone, the telegram lists
1,274,166 Jews were exterminated in the four camps of Aktion Reinhard.
The Korherr Report, compiled by an SS statistician, gave a
conservative total of 2,454,000 Jews deported to extermination camps
or murdered by the 'Einsatzgruppen'. The complete status reports of
the 'Einsatzgruppen' death squads were found in the archives of the
Gestapo when it was searched by the U.S. Army, and the accuracy
attested to by the former 'Einsatzgruppen' members who testified
during war crime trials and at other times. These reports alone list
an additional 1,500,000 or so murders during mass shootings, the vast
majority of these victims were Jews. Further, surviving Nazi
documentation spells out their plans to murder the Jews of Europe (see
the Wannsee Conference), recorded the trains arriving at various death
camps, and included photographs and films of many atrocities.
Testimonies
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There are voluminous amounts of testimony from tens of thousands of
survivors of the Holocaust, as well as the testimony of captured Nazi
officers at the Nuremberg Trials and other times. Höss's testimony did
not consist of merely a signed confession; while in jail he also wrote
two volumes of memoirs and gave extensive testimony outside of the
Nuremberg proceedings. Further, his testimony agrees with that of
other contemporary written accounts by Auschwitz officials, such as
Pery Broad, an SS man stationed at Auschwitz while Höss was the
commandant, and the diary kept by SS physician at Auschwitz Johann
Kremer, as well as the testimony of hundreds of camp guards and
victims. Auschwitz guard Reinhold Hanning even testified that it was
common knowledge among camp personnel that "the majority of people who
arrived in the trains were killed". In addition, former SS personnel
have criticised Holocaust denial. SS-'Oberscharführer' Josef Klehr
said that anyone who maintains that nobody was gassed at Auschwitz
must be "crazy or on the wrong". 'SS-Unterscharführer' Oswald Kaduk
stated that he did not consider those who maintain such a thing as
normal people. Karl Frenzel, a senior officer at the Sobibor
extermination camp, stated in a 1983 interview that "It is wrong to
say that it never happened" in reference to Jews being gassed at the
camp. Hearing about Holocaust denial compelled former
SS-'Rottenführer' Oskar Gröning to publicly speak about what he
witnessed at Auschwitz, and denounce Holocaust deniers, stating:
Hans Münch, a former SS physician, signed a document certifying what
he witnessed at Auschwitz: "thousands of people gassed", and the usage
of Zyklon B in gas chambers. According to Münch's estimation,
prisoners died within three to five minutes of exposure to Zyklon B.
In an interview on Swedish television in 1981 Münch described the
extermination process in detail and confirmed that "special treatment"
in the context of Auschwitz referred to physical extermination.
During 'Fedorenko v. United States', a deportation case involving
former Treblinka guard Feodor Fedorenko, he testified that he had been
stationed in a guard tower overlooking the camp and admitted that the
gas chambers were visible from this vantage point and that he had
witnessed dead bodies being removed from the gas chambers on multiple
occasions.
In the 1983 Holocaust documentary 'Shoah', 'Unterscharführer' Franz
Suchomel, tricked into an interview with false promises of anonymity,
described his time at the Treblinka extermination camp. Suchomel
related to the interviewer, Claude Lanzmann, how he saw dead bodies
being removed from the gas chambers during a tour of the camp before
explaining in depth the extermination of Jews at the camp through both
gassing and shooting.
'Sonderkommandos' provide another key piece of testimony. These were
Jewish prisoners who helped march Jews to the gas chambers, and later
dragged the bodies to the crematoria. Since they witnessed the entire
process, their testimony is vital in confirming that the gas chambers
were used for murderous purposes and the scale to which they were
used.
Other key testimony comes from non-Jewish survivors of the camps such
as Catholic French Resistance member André Rogerie who was held in
seven different camps, and who as a member of the Resistance was not
targeted for extermination but for hard labor and survived. After the
war Rogerie wrote and testified extensively about his experiences in
the camps including Auschwitz-Birkenau, where he viewed and produced
the oldest contemporary sketch of a camp crematorium.
Sources
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* (Frankfurt a. M., Berlin, Wien 1974)
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* Actual text of the judgment in the Irving case.
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Original Article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evidence_and_documentation_for_the_Holocaust
