Some misconceptions related to the Nuremberg trials …

... come up again and again in discussions with "Revisionist" fanatics.

Read more!


Here, for instance, we have the claims of Mr. "Bergmann" in his post # 463 on the RODOH forum:

Mr. Mühlenkamp

Quote:
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If you could now show us where the IMT concluded on “4 million Jews in Auschwitz and steaming to death 900,000 Jews in Treblinka”, and which findings of fact in its judgment were based on “common knowledge” rather than documentary and eyewitness evidence assessed at the trial, that would be something. Otherwise, better keep your trap shut.
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The one who should keep his big trap shut is Saint Roberto, the enlightened one.

By the way, how did you achieve that enlightened status about the Holocaust myth? Did you do those koans of the Zen practice?

Both the “4 million Jews in Auschwitz" and the "steaming to death of 900,000 Jews in Treblinka” were part of the Soviet and Polish indictments of those kangaroo trials and were not objected to by anybody to my knowledge. or were they?

They therefore form part of the Crimes against humanity of the IMT and NMT. which is spelled out in en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cri...t_humanity
for your spiritual enlightenment.

Since you told us that you once read the whole trial protocols (only idiots would do such stupid things to read 100,000 pages of text) you can check out the details yourself and avoid in the furture such stupid questions.

The following were declared guilt of these crimes against humanity including “4 million Jews in Auschwitz and steaming to death 900,000 Jews in Treblinka”, and sentenced either to death or imprisoned for many years:

Hans Frank, Wilhelm Frick, Walther Funk, Hermann Göring, Alfred Jodl, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Wilhelm Keitel, Konstantin von Neurath, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Alfred Rosenberg, Fritz Sauckel, Baldur von Schirach, Albert Speer, Julius Streicher, Oswald Pohl.

Of course these crimes of “4 million Jews gassed in Auschwitz and steaming to death 900,000 Jews in Treblinka” were never investigated because of this beautiful provision:

»The Tribunal shall not be bound by technical rules of evidence.
The Tribunal shall not require proof of facts of common knowledge, but shall take judicial notice thereof.«

Mr. "Bergmann" is making the following claims here, decorated with a hallucination or lie (I never claimed to have read the entire protocols of any of the Nuremberg trials, for all I can remember) and some insults and/or senile baloney:

1. The International Military Tribunal, at the Nuremberg Trial of German Major War Criminals, declared it a fact that 4 million Jews had been killed in Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp.

2. The International Military Tribunal, at the same trial, declared it a fact that 900,000 Jews had been steamed to death at Treblinka.

3. The International Military Tribunal reached these findings of fact because it was not bound by technical rules of evidence.

4. The International Military Tribunal simply proclaimed the killing of 4 million Jews at Auschwitz and the steaming to death of 900,000 Jews at Treblinka to be facts of common knowledge and took judicial notice thereof, instead of asking for evidence supporting these allegations and examining that evidence.

Expanding on the reply I gave Mr. "Bergmann" in my RODOH post # 6996, I shall now address these claims, one by one.

1. The International Military Tribunal, at the Nuremberg Trial of the Major War Criminals, declared it a fact that 4 million Jews had been killed in Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp.

At a criminal trial, the document that shows the conclusions that the tribunal eventually arrived at after assessing the evidence presented by prosecution and defense, or procured by itself, is the judgment. In the judgment one can see which of the prosecution’s allegations the tribunal considered to have been proven beyond a reasonable doubt.

One should therefore look at the Judgment of the International Military Tribunal for the Trial of German Major War Criminals in order to establish whether, as claimed by Mr. Bergmann, the IMT declared the killing of 4 million Jews at Auschwitz-Birkenau to be a proven fact.

The part of the IMT’s judgment dealing with the persecution of the Jews by the Nazis can be found here. Unsurprisingly for who is familiar with "Revisionist" hoaxing, there is nothing in this pertinent section of the judgment about 4 million Jewish dead at Auschwitz-Birkenau. What the IMT wrote was the following:

The massacres of Rowno and Dubno, of which the German engineer Graebe spoke, were examples of one method, the systematic extermination of Jews in concentration camps, was another Part of the " final solution " was the gathering of Jews from all German occupied Europe in concentration camps. Their physical condition was the test of life or death. All who were fit to work were used as slave labourers in the concentration camps; all who were not fit to work were destroyed in gas chambers and their bodies burnt. Certain concentration camps such as Treblinka and Auschwitz were set aside for this main purpose. With regard to Auschwitz, the Tribunal heard the evidence of Hoess, the Commandant of the camp from 1st May, 1940, to 1st December, 1943. He estimated that in the camp of Auschwitz alone in that time 2,500,000 persons were exterminated, and that a further 500,000 died from disease and starvation. [...]

Emphases in the above quote are mine.

As can be seen, the IMT made no statements of its own regarding the number of people killed at Auschwitz-Birkenau, instead limiting itself to reproducing the estimate of former camp commandant Rudolf Höss that «2,500,000 persons were exterminated, and that a further 500,000 died from disease and starvation» under his administration between May 1940 and December 1943. There was also no statement in the sense that the victims of Auschwitz-Birkenau had all or mainly been Jews, which – independently of the fact that the majority of this camp’s victims were indeed Jews – belies the "Jews" part of the "4 million Jews" claim.

The IMT did well not to declare the figures given by Höss to be proven facts, for they were well above the mark; Höss himself would in his later pre-trial interrogations in Poland reduce the 3 million death toll mentioned in his testimony before the IMT to a realistic order of magnitude around 1 million, which has been confirmed by historical research. But that’s not the point of this exercise. The point of this exercise is to show that Mr. "Bergmann" should at least have read the IMT’s judgment before stating his claim, instead of shooting bull so easy to debunk.

Incidentally, not even the Nuremberg Trial Indictment mentions 4 million Jews killed at Auschwitz-Birkenau. The related statement under Count Three – War Crimes of the Indictment reads as follows:

About 1,500,000 persons were exterminated in Maidanek and about 4,000,000 persons were exterminated in Auschwitz, among whom were citizens of Poland, the U.S.S.R., the United States of America, Great Britain, Czechoslovakia, France, and other countries.

Nothing here about the victims’ ethnic or religious background; they were just stated to be citizens of various countries including Poland, the U.S.S.R., the United States of America, Great Britain, Czechoslovakia and France, period.

2. The International Military Tribunal, at the same trial, declared it a fact that 900,000 Jews had been steamed to death at Treblinka.

Unlike Auschwitz and Majdanek, Treblinka is not even mentioned under Count Three – War Crimes of the Indictment. In the judgment it is referred to along with Auschwitz as one of the camps that "were set aside" for the “main purpose” of destroying Jews not fit to work in gas chambers. However, there is not even an indication in the judgment about the number of people killed at Treblinka. Mr. "Bergmann" may have mixed up the Nuremberg Trial of the Major War Criminals with the trial of Treblinka’s commander Franz Stangl before a West German court in Düsseldorf, Germany, the judgment of which was issued on 22 December 1970 (LG Düsseldorf vom 22.12.1970, 8 Ks 1/69 , some excerpts of which are transcribed here). At this judgment the court, based on an expert opinion provided by German historian Wolfgang Scheffler, concluded that at least 900,000 people, most of them Jews, had been killed at Treblinka.

Yet the main "Revisionist" fuss in connection with the Nuremberg IMT’s findings regarding Treblinka is the claim that the IMT proclaimed the victims of that camp to have been killed by a somewhat improbable method, "steaming to death".

This killing method was indeed mentioned in an exhibit introduced as evidence at the Nuremberg Trial, Document 3311-PS. This document, offered in evidence at the morning session on 14 December 1945, was an otherwise quite accurate report from a Polish Government Commission on the investigation of German crimes in Poland, which contained the following statements:

Late in April 1942 erection was completed of the first chambers in which these general massacres were to be performed by means of steam.
[…]
After being filled up to capacity, the chambers were hermetically closed and steam was let in.

This erroneous description of the killing method – the victims in the gas chambers were not killed "by means of steam" but poisoned/asphyxiated with engine exhaust – may have been related to the report being based on the account of an outside observer of the camp who, not knowing what the foggy substance was that came out of the gas chambers when they were opened on a cold day (it may have been the engine exhaust and/or steam produced by the differences in temperature between the cold outside and the cumulated body heat in the gas chamber), speculated that it was hot steam, which the victims had been boiled to death with.

What matters here, however, is not how this error came into being but whether it found its way into the IMT’s judgment, for this alone would introduce an inaccuracy into the results of the Nuremberg Trial of German Major War Criminals. Even an elementary knowledge of criminal trial procedures should be sufficient to understand that, just because an exhibit was introduced as evidence at a trial, this doesn’t necessarily mean that the tribunal accepted all or part of that exhibit’s contents as reliable and a basis for its findings of fact.

It we now look again at the IMT’s judgment, we see that there is nothing in this judgment about anyone being "steamed to death", at Treblinka or anywhere else. The only reference to Treblinka in the judgment, which is included in the above quote from the same, reads as follows:

All who were fit to work were used as slave labourers in the concentration camps; all who were not fit to work were destroyed in gas chambers and their bodies burnt. Certain concentration camps such as Treblinka and Auschwitz were set aside for this main purpose.

So Treblinka was accurately stated in the IMT’s judgment to have been a place were Jews not fit to work were destroyed in gas chambers, i.e. killed by gassing and not by "steaming to death". The IMT presumably arrived at this conclusion regarding the killing method, and accordingly dismissed the description of that method in the above-mentioned Polish report, based on the testimony of Samuel Rajzman. Rajzman clearly stated that the killing had been done in gas chambers.

As Mr. Bergmann also referred to the Nuremberg Military Tribunal (NMT) and its trial of Oswald Pohl, the following statement in the records of that trial should be mentioned:

In the spring of 1942 an extermination camp was established at Treblinka. It contained 10 death chambers and opened up for business in the early autumn of 1943. Death was inflicted here by gas and steam, as well as by electric current.

This statement is not part of the Opinion and Judgment of the United States Military Tribunal II against Pohl et al, however. It is contained in a Concurring Opinion by Judge Michael A. Musmanno, the pretense of which, as Musmanno stated here , was to provide «one document sufficiently comprehensive to which the legal profession and the lay public, now and in the future, can turn for an authoritative account on concentration camps» so that these future readers would not «be required to read through thousands of pages of transcript and scan tons of documents to obtain an adequate picture of this supreme crime against humanity through the ages». Said account was thus not a statement of findings of fact essential to the tribunal’s judgment against Pohl et al, but a friendly service to future readers of the trial documentation, meant to save them the work of having to go through all the files in order to make themselves familiar with “this supreme crime against humanity throughout the ages” as pictured by the evidence.

While Musmanno’s account, despite its somewhat emotional tone (he wrote, for instance, that «In comparison to Hoess, Genghis Khan was a Sunday school boy, Torquemada an entertaining Micawber, and Ivan The Terrible, an innocuous, benevolent, old man.») can indeed be considered authoritative, in the light of later research, in what concerns many aspects of the Nazi system and its crimes, the part dealing with the killing methods applied at Treblinka is clearly one of the inaccuracies – there are also others, like when Musmanno locates at Auschwitz Kurt Gerstein’s description of a gassing at Belzec – that diminish the authoritativeness of Musmanno’s record.

However, and incomprehensible though it is – given the above-mentioned evidence previously assessed by the International Military Tribunal, namely Rajzman’s testimony, and the above-quoted findings of fact stated in the IMT’s judgment – that Musmanno spoke of death by “steam, as well as by electric current” besides gassing at Treblinka, Musmanno’s opinion was a document separate from the tribunal’s judgment against Pohl et al and not part of the tribunal’s findings of facts stated in that judgment, in which the tribunal expressed its concurrence with the IMT’s findings of fact regarding the persecution of the Jews.

This means that, contrary to what Mr. “Bergmann” claims, the “steaming to death” of people at Treblinka was not part of the sentence against Pohl any more than it was a part of the sentences against those defendants at the Nuremberg Trial of German Major War Criminals whom the IMT convicted on the War Crimes and Crimes against Humanity charges.


3. The International Military Tribunal reached these findings of fact because it was not bound by technical rules of evidence.

This claim is related to the following provision of the Charter of the International Military Tribunal:

Article 19.
The Tribunal shall not be bound by technical rules of evidence. It shall adopt and apply to the greatest possible extent expeditious and nontechnical procedure, and shall admit any evidence which it deems to be of probative value.

The implication is that the absence of technical rules of evidence means there was no adequate assessment of the evidence in favor and against the defendants.

To establish whether this implication holds water, one must first understand what technical rules of evidence are and what effect they have.

The following definitions of rules of evidence can be found on the web:

Standards governing whether evidence in a civil or criminal case is admissible.


The rules that govern the method of presentation and admissibility of oral and documentary evidence at Court hearings or depositions.


Rules of law which determine which testimony, documents, etc. should be submitted for consideration by a judge or a jury, and the weight such evidence is to be given in determining a question of fact.


Rules of evidence govern whether, when, how, and for what purpose proof of a case may be placed before a trier of fact for consideration.

According to these definitions, rules of evidence are rules that tell a court of law

a) what evidence it is allowed to take into consideration as proof of any or certain facts relevant to its decision,

b) how it must handle such evidence as may be used as proof, and

c) what weight it must or may give to such evidence.

Rules of evidence like the US Federal Rules of Evidence, contain strict stipulations as to what types of evidence may or may not be used to establish facts in general or certain types of facts. Thus, for example, Rule 602 stipulates that «A witness may not testify to a matter unless evidence is introduced sufficient to support a finding that the witness has personal knowledge of the matter». According to Rule 608, «The credibility of a witness may be attacked or supported by evidence in the form of opinion or reputation», subject to certain limitations. Specific instances of the conduct of a witness, other than conviction of crime, «may not be proved by extrinsic evidence» for the purpose of attacking or supporting the witness' character for truthfulness, according to the same rule. Evidence that a witness has been convicted of a crime shall be admitted or not for the purpose «of attacking the credibility character for truthfulness of a witness», pursuant to the provisions of Rule 609. According to Rule 802, hearsay is not admissible as evidence, except if it falls under one of the numerous exceptions provided by the Federal Rules of Evidence themselves, by other rules prescribed by the Supreme Court pursuant to statutory authority or by Act of Congress. Proof of the content of a writing, recording or photograph generally requires submission of the original (Rule 1002), subject to a number of exceptions including but not limited to those established in Rules 1003 to 1007. And so on.

Submitting a tribunal to strict rules regarding types of evidence it may use as proof of a given fact and the conditions such evidence must comply with is not the practice in all legal systems, however. In Continental European countries like France and Germany, judges have more freedom in deciding what evidence they consider conclusive proof of a given fact, rather than being bound by rules regarding the types of evidence they are or not allowed to consider for this purpose. Thus, for instance, article 261 of the German rules of criminal procedure (Strafprozessordnung) stipulates the following (my translation):

About the result of the hearing of evidence the court decides according to its free conviction derived from the trial as a whole.

This means that the court is, on the one hand, obliged to take all evidence into consideration in its decision (provided of course that the evidence is relevant and has been lawfully obtained). It is free, however, in determining what facts it considers proven by what elements of evidence submitted, why it holds a certain witness to be credible or not, etc., without being bound to requirements other than the absence of reasonable doubt as to the facts it considers proven.

As no one will reasonably dispute that France and Germany are constitutional countries requiring their criminal justice authorities to give suspects and defendants a fair hearing, this means that technical rules of evidence such as those cited above are not an indispensable requirement of a fair trial, and that their absence in the Charter of the International Military Tribunal was not the outrage that "Revisionists" try to make believe it was. According to a retired US attorney with knowledge of the German and French legal systems, technical rules of evidence tend to be done without even in the US where the trier of fact is not a jury, consisting of amateurs with no juridical training or experience, but a professional judge. This gentleman, writing as Walter Kaschner, stated the following in a post on what is not the Axis History Forum, which is transcribed in this thread of the HC forum [Broken link replaced on 03.03.2012 - R.M.]:

As to your notion that the Tribunal’s procedures were flawed because it was not bound by formal rules of evidence and could take judicial notice of governmental documents, I can only say that however highly we in the US regard our own rules of evidence that regard is not generally shared on the Continent (at least in France, which I know quite a bit about, and in Germany, which I think I know something of) and they seem to get along pretty well without them. Don’t forget that half the members of the Court were continental lawyers, and as far as I know none of the defense lawyers were familiar with our highly technical evidentiary rules. Moreover, even in the US, in cases where a judge, rather than a jury is the trier of fact, our evidentiary rules are often ignored and the judge allowed to give the evidence whatever weight he deems it’s worthy of. And in our own practice judicial notice is customarily taken of governmental documents if prepared in the ordinary course of business, or if purporting to reflect official acts or decisions.

Emphases in the above quote are mine.

Confirming Mr. Kaschner’s assessment, here are a few references to judicial or administrative decisions or hearings in the US or Canada, where technical rules of evidence are done without:

The hearing need not be conducted according to the technical rules of evidence relating to evidence and witnesses.


The Immigration Appeal Division, in any proceeding before it,
(b) is not bound by any legal or technical rules of evidence; and

(c) may receive and base a decision on evidence adduced in the proceedings that it considers credible or trustworthy in the circumstances.


In any investigation or hearing, the commissioner shall not be bound by the technical rules of evidence.


The technical rules of evidence do not apply. Any evidence may be received, except that an Administrative Law Judge may exclude any evidence or offer of proof which is immaterial, irrelevant, unduly repetitious, or customarily privileged. Every party shall have a right to present his case by oral and documentary evidence and to submit rebuttal evidence.


It having thus been shown that there is nothing sinister about the absence of technical rules of evidence at a judicial proceeding, the question that remains to be examined is, why were technical rules of evidence excluded when putting together the Charter of the International Military Tribunal?

The answer to this question goes in the direction of Mr. Kaschner’s above-quoted statement that «half the members of the Court were continental lawyers, and as far as I know none of the defense lawyers were familiar with our highly technical evidentiary rules». In his report Nuremberg in Retrospect, the erstwhile Nuremberg prosecutor Robert H. Jackson wrote the following:

The rules of evidence that should govern the tribunal might have caused serious disagreement if we had insisted on our own. Continental lawyers regard or common-law rules of evidence with abhorrence. Since they were involved in response to the peculiarities of trial by jury, we saw no reason to urge their use in an international trial before professional judges. They have not generally been followed by international tribunals.[my emphasis – RM] We settled, therefore, upon one simple rule: that the tribunal "shall admit any evidence which it deems to have probative value." While this vested considerable discretion in the tribunal, it had the merit of making admission of evidence turn on the value of what was proffered rather than upon compliance with some formal rule of evidence.

So the reason for the absence of technical rules of evidence at the Nuremberg Trial of German Major War Criminals was clearly not anyone’s intention to screw the defendants, as their "Revisionist" apologists would like to believe. The American jurists wanted to apply technical rules of evidence such as were applied in the US, but this approach was disliked by the jurists from Continental Europe involved in the making of the Charter, presumably for the simple reason that they and/or the Continental European judges nominated as members of the International Military Tribunal didn’t know a thing about US-type rules of evidence and accordingly would have been unable to handle them at the trial. The Americans decided to compromise, as said rules «were involved in response to the peculiarities of trial by jury» and they thus saw no reason to urge the use of these rules «in an international trial before professional judges». This compromise, as Mr. Kaschner pointed out, arguably benefited the defense insofar as none of the German lawyers acting as defense attorneys was familiar with technical rules of evidence as applied in the US.

At the later trials before the Nuremberg Military Tribunal, which were a purely American affair, this compromise was no longer necessary, however. This was probably the reason why, for instance, the Einsatzgruppen Trial was conducted in accordance with US rules of evidence, as mentioned by Yale F. Edeiken in his recommendable article An Introduction to the Einsatzgruppen.

4. The International Military Tribunal simply proclaimed the killing of 4 million Jews at Auschwitz and the steaming to death of 900,000 Jews at Treblinka to be facts of common knowledge and took judicial notice thereof, instead of asking for evidence supporting these allegations and examining that evidence.

This claim is related to the following provision of the Charter of the International Military Tribunal which, like Article 19, is also presented as having a sinister, particularly "Nurembergian" content:

Article 21.
The Tribunal shall not require proof of facts of common knowledge but shall take judicial notice thereof. It shall also take judicial notice of official governmental documents and reports of the United Nations, including the acts and documents of the committees set up in the various allied countries for the investigation of war crimes, and of records and findings of military or other Tribunals of any of the United Nations.

Regarding the second sentence of this provision, Mr. Kaschner (see above quote) pointed out that, also in US juridical practice, «judicial notice is customarily taken of governmental documents if prepared in the ordinary course of business, or if purporting to reflect official acts or decisions».

As to the first sentence – the bone of Mr. "Bergmann"’s contention – it takes but a look at the US Federal Rules of Evidence to realize that taking judicial notice of facts deemed to be of "common" or "general" knowledge is provided for in these rules as well. Rule 201 has the following wording:

Rule 201. Judicial Notice of Adjudicative Facts

(a) Scope of rule.
This rule governs only judicial notice of adjudicative facts.

(b) Kinds of facts.
A judicially noticed fact must be one not subject to reasonable dispute in that it is either (1) generally known within the territorial jurisdiction of the trial court or (2) capable of accurate and ready determination by resort to sources whose accuracy cannot reasonably be questioned.

(c) When discretionary.
A court may take judicial notice, whether requested or not.

(d) When mandatory.
A court shall take judicial notice if requested by a party and supplied with the necessary information.

(e) Opportunity to be heard.
A party is entitled upon timely request to an opportunity to be heard as to the propriety of taking judicial notice and the tenor of the matter noticed. In the absence of prior notification, the request may be made after judicial notice has been taken.

(f) Time of taking notice.
Judicial notice may be taken at any stage of the proceeding.

(g) Instructing jury.
In a civil action or proceeding, the court shall instruct the jury to accept as conclusive any fact judicially noticed. In a criminal case, the court shall instruct the jury that it may, but is not required to, accept as conclusive any fact judicially noticed.

The definition of a "judicially noticed fact" in subdivision (b) of Rule 201 describes what is generally held to characterize a fact of "common" or "generalized" knowledge, according to the Notes to Rule 201: it is a fact that is (1) generally known within the territorial jurisdiction of the trial court or (2) capable of accurate and ready determination by resort to sources whose accuracy cannot reasonably be questioned. According to a California judge’s ruling at a lawsuit between Mr. Mel Mermelstein and the "Institute of Historical Review", the fact that Jews were gassed to death at the Auschwitz Concentration Camp in Poland during the summer of 1944 was to be considered a fact subject to the taking of judicial notice because it was «not reasonably subject to dispute» and «capable of immediate and accurate determination by resort to sources of reasonably indisputable accuracy».

While the above shows that there is nothing sinister about a provision allowing the IMT to take judicial notice of facts of common knowledge rather than require proof of such facts, this doesn't mean that the mass murder at Nazi extermination camps could be considered a fact of common knowledge already at the time of the Nuremberg Trial of German Major War Criminals in 1945/46, when criminal justice authorities were only beginning to investigate these crimes. Accordingly, and contrary to what Mr. "Bergmann" claims, the IMT did not pronounce these crimes to be facts of common knowledge and simply take judicial notice thereof, but looked at evidence regarding the occurrence and scale of these crimes.

Evidence regarding Auschwitz-Birkenau and/or Treblinka brought before and assessed by the IMT included the following:

• a communication to Himmler dated 16 December 1942 by Mueller, for the Chief of the Security Police and SD (document R-91)

• an affidavit made in London by Dr. Rudolph Kastner, a former official of the Hungarian Zionist Organization, regarding the deportation of the Hungarian Jews in 1944 (document 2605-PS)

• an official Polish report on Auschwitz Concentration Camp (document l-161)

• an official United States government report issued by the Executive Office of the president of the United States, War Refugee Board, on the German camps at Auschwitz and Birkenau (document L-22)

• the affidavit of Rudolf Franz Ferdinand Hoess dated 5 April 1946 (document 3868-PS)

• the testimony of Marie Claude Vaillant-Couturier

• the testimony of Severina Shmaglevskaya

• the testimony of Rudolf Franz Ferdinand Hoess

• the Stroop-Report (document 1061-PS)

• the above-mentioned Polish Government report about Treblinka (document 3311-PS)

• the above-mentioned testimony of Samuel Rajzman

None of this evidence would have been required it the IMT had simply taken judicial notice of the mass killings at Auschwitz-Birkenau and Treblinka as facts of common knowledge. This means that the "Revisionist" claim under examination is false, just like the others before.

Claims of this nature are not uttered only by hard-core "Revisionists" like Mr. "Bergmann", by the way. On the Scrapbookpages site about Buchenwald concentration camp, more precisely in this section, one reads the following nonsense:

At the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg in 1945, the Soviet Union charged that the Nazis had made soap from human fat in the concentration camps. Soap that was allegedly made from human fat was displayed in the court room, but no forensic report on the soap was presented. No forsensic proof was required because it was common knowledge that the Nazis had made soap out of the Jews.

Article 23 of the Constitution of the International Military Tribunal stated that "The Tribunal shall not require proof of facts of common knowledge but shall take judicial notice thereof."

Apart from the fact that what the author of these lines calls "Article 23 of the Constitution of the International Military Tribunal" was actually Article 21 of the Charter of the International Military Tribunal, the author apparently forgot to read his own quote, which would have told him that, if the IMT had considered it a fact of common knowledge "that the Nazis had made soap out of the Jews", no proof whatsoever of that "fact" would have been required. Yet the Soviet prosecutor who introduced the issue of human soap into the Nuremberg Trial before the IMT substantiated his allegation that «In the Danzig Anatomic Institute semi-industrial experiments in the production of soap from human bodies and the tanning of human skin for industrial purposes were carried out» (he didn’t make a general claim that "the Nazis had made soap out of the Jews") with evidence which, besides the Exhibit USSR-393 that the Scrapbookpages author is referring to, included the following:

• the testimony of Sigmund Mazur (Exhibit USSR-197)
• a copy of "the recipe for soap produced from the corpses of the executed" (Exhibit USSR-196)
• the sworn statement of British POW John Henry Witton (Exhibit USSR-264)
• the sworn statement of British POW William Anderson Neely (Exhibit USSR-272).

Whatever one may say against the evidentiary quality of these exhibits and their conclusiveness as proof of an intention to manufacture soap from human bodies, rather than the mere use of maceration fat for cleaning purposes, the fact is that the Soviet prosecutor presented a fair amount of evidence for an allegation which, had it been deemed a fact of common knowledge, would have required no evidence at all.

If the IMT has considered it a fact of common knowledge that "the Nazis had made soap out of the Jews", as the Scrapbookpages author claims, there should also be a statement in this sense in the section of the IMT’s judgment dealing with the Persecution of the Jews. Yet what you read there shows that the IMT, while it went further in its conclusions than was warranted by the evidence presented by the Soviet prosecutor (which referred only to a single case of a possible attempt to make soap out of human fat, the experiments at the Danzig Anatomical Institute, and contained nothing warranting the conclusion that the corpses used at the Danzig Anatomical Institute were necessarily of Jews), made no statement in the sense that "the Nazis had made soap out of the Jews" but merely spoke of occasional ("in some instances") attempts to make soap from the fat of the (Jewish) victims of Nazi persecution:

After cremation the ashes were used for fertilizer, and in some instances attempts were made to utilise the fat from the bodies of the victims in the commercial manufacture of soap.

Let’s hope that the Scrapbookpages don’t contain too many ignorant claims like the one under discussion. Otherwise their author should consider scrapping the first "S" in the name of his production.


Thanks to Sergey for his valuable input to this article.