On Mattogno's Hallucination That von dem Bach-Zelewski's Extended Testimony on the Minsk Shooting Is a Jewish Forgery

In a handwritten post-war manuscript, the former Higher SS and Police Leader for Central Russia Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski briefly mentioned the show mass shooting carried out by Einsatzgruppe B on 15 August 1941 for the Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler in Minsk (NARA Record Group 238, M1270/1/111, p. 41, see Figure 1).

Figure 1: Page five from a declaration of von dem Bach-Zelewski on the "persecution of Jews".

The mass execution was also reported by numerous other witnesses. From a historiographic point of view, what is most significant in von dem Bach-Zelewski's account is that he described how after the shooting and visiting of a mental asylum in Minsk (which are both confirmed by Himmler's appointment diary) Himmler ordered the Einsatzgruppen B leader Arthur Nebe "to make use of a more human method of killing" on the mentally ill people, which links the incident to the subsequent mass killing trials with explosives and poison gas in asylums in Minsk and Mogilev. The connection between the events is supported by von dem Bach-Zelewski's own documented activity on the next day to get a demonstration of the mobile carbon monoxide gas chamber of Sonderkommando Lange (for obvious reasons, he kept quiet about this in his post-war testimony).

A more vivid and detailed description of the Minsk shooting by von dem Bach-Zelewski was published on 23 August 1946 in the German-Jewish newspaper Aufbau (Figure 2). The account is somewhat more general with respect to the scope of Himmler's order following the mass execution and asylum visit. He considered that "shooting is not the most human method", ordered Nebe "to think about it and submit a report based on the experiences made" and agreed to try explosives on mentally ill people in Minsk.

Figure 2: Aufbau, volume 12, issue 34, p. 2.

But if it were according to the Holocaust denier Carlo Mattogno, von dem Bach-Zelewski's account in Aufbau is a forgery based on his more brief statement from the NARA Record Group 238:

"This anecdote appeared on 23 August 1946 in the New York Jewish newspaper Der [sic!] Aufbau as part of a statement attributed to von dem Bach-Zelewski, but its contents had been massively manipulated by the editorial staff of the newspaper, as is apparent from a comparison with the original statement of this SS officer."

(Mattogno, Inside the Gas Chambers, 2nd edition, p. 58)

Unfortunately for Mattogno, this is rubbish. Upon systematically searching the Yad Vashem Archives digital collection of Yitzhak Stone, who "was a senior aid to the American prosecutor in the Nazi War Crimes Trials at Nuremberg" for interesting material for the blog (and there sure is, so stay tuned), I stumbled across the English translation of an undated, 60 pages long "declaration von dem Bach" (YVA, O.18/90, p. 20ff.). The declaration contains amongst other things also the passages reproduced in German in Aufbau (Figure 3).

Note on Involvement of OSS in Locating Gas Van Documents PS-501

The following information is taken from pages 179-182 of this work by Michael Salter and concerns the four documents constituting Nuremberg exhibit PS-501, discussed in this series by Hans. The first involvement of the OSS was to locate the documents among those held by British intelligence in London. A cable from Donovan to Jackson dated June 1, 1945, detailed the role of Colonel Amen in obtaining "documents (originals) which contain details of gas by "death van" fitted out by that purpose" [Salter p.180, citing cable 18124, 1/6/45, Jackson Papers, Box 101, Reel 7, my emphasis]. These were placed in a dossier prepared by OSS X-2 branch and eventually picked up by Whitney Harris, who discusses here (pp.198-199) how he used them in the interrogation of Ohlendorf while preparing for the case against Kaltenbrunner. The documents were also authenticated by Rauff in Ancona, as Hans shows here. Although the Becker-Rauff document became part of PS-501, it was originally filed by the OSS as Feldpostnummer S2704 / SECRET. Rauff gave a further very detailed confirmation of the document in Chile in 1972, shown here.

On the whining of Weckert and others about the origins of these documents, I refer readers to the quote by Zimmerman in Roberto's post here.

Films and photos of Nazi crimes on Youtube

Last week I came upon this trailer of a History Channel documentary called "The Unseen Holocaust", which announces "newly discovered footage" showing Nazi mass killings "on the Eastern Front", i.e. in the areas of the former Soviet Union occupied by Nazi Germany during World War II.

Judgment at Nuremberg (1961 movie)

The 1961 movie Judgment at Nuremberg, starring Spencer Tracy, Burt Lancaster, Richard Widmark and Maximilian Schell, is a fictionalized dramatization of the Nuremberg "Justice Case", officially called "United States of America vs. Josef Altstoetter, et al".

Before I state my opinion about this film, some cautionary remarks about what I consider its weakest part, the presentation of documentary footage about Nazi crimes commented by prosecuting attorney Colonel Tad Lawson (Richard Widmark) after having been sworn in as a witness (1:30:22 to 1:36.07).  

HC Reference Library

No hay mal que por bien no venga, says a Spanish proverb. There is nothing bad that doesn’t also bring some good.

What "Revisionism" is all about – A Chat with Fredrick Töben (Part 2)

As announced in Part 1 of this article, I shall now comment on Artur Butz’s "brief 12-point summary" attached to Mr. Töben’s "brief response".

Old Herrings in a New Can: Thomas Dalton’s Debating the Holocaust (1)

They say one shouldn't judge a book by its cover, and I agree with that.

Experience also tells me that one shouldn't praise a book after reading its introduction and the first one or two chapters, for what comes later may fall short of what the beginning makes you hope for.

But does one go wrong in dismissing a book as thinly disguised propaganda, written by an author with an obvious un-confessed agenda, when its introduction and first chapter strongly point in this direction already?

Soap-for-brains Hargis

Jonnie Hargis lies through his teeth again:

See the contrived documents used at Nuremberg 'proving' soap was made from Jews:
!!! Human Soap - Official Nuremberg Documents !!!
http://forum.codoh.info/viewtopic.php?t=676

Yet another example of the Nuremberg fraud.

This is just too easy.

Except none of these documents suggest that the soap was made from Jews. The only fraud is Hargis himself.

Jürgen Graf on Criminal Justice and Nazi Crimes

Somewhere in the Cesspit, a true believer quoted the following scripture:

Read more!

Auschwitz played an important role in the Nuremberg Trial. The objective of the trial was to provide “legal proof” of the crimes of the Germans, alleged to be “unique in world history”. Especially significant are articles 19 and 21 of the London Agreement of August 1945, which created the so-called legal basis for the trials (10). According to article 19, the court was “not bound by technical rules of evidence”; article 21 stated that “the court need not require proof of facts of common knowledge, but shall take judicial notice thereof”. Just what constituted “a fact of common knowledge”, was, of course, to be decided by the court itself! Since the extermination of the Jews and the other crimes of which Germany stood accused — such as the mass murder of Polish officers at Katyn, committed by the Bolshevik butchers and blamed on the Germans, hanging German soldiers for their own crime (11) — “were facts of common knowledge”, the tedious task of producing actual proof could conveniently be dispensed with.

The innumerable trials of Nazi war criminals in the Federal German Republic were held on the same model. Ever since the 1950s, the US puppet regime in Bonn has assigned the “German” justice system the task of conjuring up the Fata Morgana of a mass murder of millions of people in gas chambers, of which not the slightest evidence remains. This was achieved in the following manner:

Before the trial began, the accused was vilified in the controlled media as a “beast in human shape”. Proof was not required, since “crime” and “criminal” were, for the most part, considered to have been established from the outset. The witnesses were allowed to lie a blue streak, since nobody was allowed to subject the former “victims of persecution” to emotional torment with sceptical questioning; the only chance for a lenient sentence for the accused lay in evading any dispute over the existence of the gas chambers and the reality of the genocide, while merely disputing one’s own participation in the killings, blaming everything on persons already dead, missing, or superiors who had already been sentenced. Anyone in a war crimes trial who disputed the basic version of events at Auschwitz (i.e., the Holocaust yarn) — a version already accepted as “proven fact” — found himself in a totally hopeless position: his stubborness only got him a tougher sentence. This is how the confessions came to be given. Anyone wishing further information should consult chapter 4 of Wilhelm Staeglich’s book Der Auschwitz-Mythos, Manfred Koehler’s article on the value of Holocaust testimonies and confessions in the Gauss anthology Grundlagen zur Zeitgeschichte, and the chapter on the trials in our book “The Holocaust Swindle”.

Many people may wonder why every post-war German government from Adenauer to Kohl has allowed these show trials to be carried on in order to incriminate their own people with fake atrocities. The reason is that the Bundesrepublik is not a sovereign state. The trials are intended to pursue definite objectives in domestic as well as foreign policy.

First, every such trial allows Bonn to prove its anti-fascistic convictions to foreign powers, thus proving the Bonn regime to be a prime ally of the USA. In addition, the trials help “re-educate” the German people. In this respect, all German governments have played a decisive role as the bootlickers and thugs of Washington. By repeatedly “proving” the unexcelled brutality of the National Socialist regime, they legitimize their own “democratic” parliamentary system, which continues to suffer from the minor defect of having being introduced solely as a result of German defeat in WW II. Dragging crowds of young people through the courtrooms to witness the trials destroys the national pride and self-respect of the young, and thus creates acceptance for Bonn policies, which provide for a complete subordination to American interests. In so doing, the trials contribute greatly to strengthening the post-war New World Order, which is based upon two dogmas: sole German guilt for WWII, and the cruelty of the National Socialist regime (unique in world history, don’t forget), a cruelty most clearly expressed in the extermination of the Jews.

The source of this "wisdom" is a chapter of some screed by Jürgen Graf, a "Revisionist" liar. Let us look at what he tells his faithful flock, item by item.

In the first paragraph, Graf babbles down the well-known mantra about articles 19 and 21 of the Charter of the International Military Tribunal (Graf places these provisions in the London Agreement of August 8th 1945, which established the constitution of the International Military Tribunal and to which the Charter was attached). This nonsense has already been dealt with in my article Some misconceptions related to the Nuremberg trials …, where it was shown that

a) Articles 19 and 21 of the Charter of the IMT were no sinister or particularly "Nurembergian" provisions, but actually similar to provisions that are commonly applied in Anglo-Saxon and/or Continental European legal practice, and

b) The International Military Tribunal did not consider the crimes for which the defendants were standing trial to be "facts of common knowledge", as Graf would have it, but reached its findings of fact about these crimes like any tribunal or jury at any common criminal trial, by assessment of evidence presented before the tribunal.

As a comparison between the Nuremberg Indictment and the Nuremberg Judgment clearly shows, there are a number of allegations in the former that no longer show up in the latter. This means that the tribunal did not consider these allegations to have been proven beyond a reasonable doubt by the evidence assessed. Had the tribunal merely proclaimed the allegations in the indictment to be "facts of common knowledge", there would have been no hearing of evidence lasting over eight months, as there actually was, and the contents of indictment and judgment would be identical.

One allegation in the Indictment that didn’t show up in the judgment was the allegation that the Germans had murdered thousands of Polish POWs at Katyn. In the Indictment it was claimed under Count Three – War Crimes that

In September 1941, 11,000 Polish officers who were prisoners of war were killed in the Katyn Forest near Smolensk.

In the section of the Judgment dedicated to War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity, however, there is not a word about Katyn. Feel free to check.

Why is that so?

Because, as mentioned in this article by Jürgen Langoswki, which is based on the writings of Nuremberg prosecutor Telford Taylor, the tribunal heard three Soviet prosecution and three German defense witnesses about these killings, and the hearing of evidence was inconclusive, meaning that it could not be established who had been responsible for this crime (an investigation conducted by the US Congress in 1951/52, also mentioned by Langowski, eventually confirmed that the Soviets had been the killers) and therefore no findings of fact regarding Katyn could be included in the judgment.

Yet Jürgen Graf would obviously have his readers believe that the Nuremberg defendants were also sentenced for the Katyn killings. This alone is enough to conclude that Jürgen Graf is full of shit, and that his ramblings are not worth further looking at. But let’s continue, not only for the fun of it but also and mainly because Graf’s nonsense is a good opportunity to provide some basic information about the handling of Nazi-era crimes by the German Federal Republic’s judicial system.

Graf claims that «Ever since the 1950s, the US puppet regime in Bonn has assigned the "German" justice system the task of conjuring up the Fata Morgana of a mass murder of millions of people in gas chambers, of which not the slightest evidence remains.». Not the slightest evidence, Jürgen? Take your head out of the sand, asshole. As to the justice system of the German Federal Republic, which is as German as you will never be:

First of all, instructions by the German government – i.e. the executive – to the German justice system are somewhat difficult because the legislative, executive and judicative powers are separate and independent of each other in the German state. Judges, according to Article 97 of the Grundgesetz, are independent (i.e. not subject to any instructions from any executive organ) and subject to law alone. And the activity of public prosecutors is also not governed by instructions received from the government, but by the principle of legality established in the section 160 of the German code of criminal procedure, the Strafprozessordnung, a law that was first issued in 1877. According to this provision, the public prosecutors office (Staatsanwaltschaft) must, as soon as it has in some way gained knowledge of the suspicion that a crime has been committed, investigate the case in order to determine whether an indictment is to brought in.

Second, although the German justice system was thus obliged as from the date of its constitution to investigate the mass murders committed by German nationals during the Nazi era, which according to the criminal code, the Strafgesetzbuch (see English translation here), are subject to German criminal law, it took a damn long time to get going, as becomes apparent from the overview of the handling of NS crimes by Federal German criminal justice provided by the University of Amsterdam on its Justiz und NS-Verbrechen website. Emphases in the following quote are mine:

1945-1952

During the first seven years of the postwar era, approximately 740 defendants appeared before courts in 343 NS-trials. Thus, close to 40% of all those tried for Nazi homicidal crimes after the war in West Germany were tried during this early phase. During this time, the prosecuting authorities mainly focussed their attention on the category of the so-called 'tatnahen Täter', meaning those criminals at the very end of the command-line who had actually - physically - perpetrated the crimes. By contrast, the representatives of the policy making level, the so-called 'Schreibtischtäter' - i.e. the higher and top-ranking representatives of the ministerial bureaucracy, the industry, the Wehrmacht, the judiciary, the police and the NSDAP, who had generally escaped trial by the Allies - were almost totally absent in the West German prosecution statistics of these early years. In fact, only five trials were held during this time against twelve such 'desk perpetrators' (2).
Much the same applied with regard to the 18 so-called 'Euthanasia' trials held during this period. Their main target formed the perpetrators of the executionary level - doctors, nurses and (lower) administrative staff - and - rarely - representatives of the mid-level administrative apparatus. No one from the Berlin 'Euthanasia' head-office appeared in any of the Westgerman docks. Similarly, not one of the former employees of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt - the very operational heart of the mass murderous policies of the Nazi state - was indicted and tried during these years.

The majority of the trials (over 51%) conducted in these first seven years dealt with homicidal crimes committed by Germans on Germans during the final months and weeks of the war ('Endphaseverbrechen', or 'final phase crimes'). Even though, by far the most serious of the crimes of the Nazi State (both in quality and in quantity) had been committed outside Germany, only a mere 12% of the trials addressed such crimes. Trials involving the killing of against Jews numbered 19% of all court cases in this first seven-year period. Compared to later years, a relatively high number of trials (46) involved crimes of the Wehrmacht. However, the bulk of these 'Wehrmacht-trials' again concerned 'Endphaseverbrechen'. The same applied to the category of so-called 'Justizverbrechen'-trials (i.e. trials involving homicidal crimes committed by judges, public prosecutors or other judicial functionaries in the administration of justice).

This one-sided focus on the prosecution of crimes against German victims committed on German soil is generally explained by reference to the limited jurisdiction of German courts imposed upon them by Allied rules immediately after the war. For years to come, this limited jurisdiction did not allow German courts to try crimes committed against victims who had been citizens of the Allied states. Other arguments in this respect include the unfamiliarity of the German judiciary with Nazi crimes committed abroad, as well as the extraordinary difficulties associated with serious criminal investigations in foreign countries at the time. These prohibitive circumstances were indeed of importance during this first seven-year phase. However, as the available documentation clearly shows, they only form a partial explanation for the one-sidedness of the prosecution record. For, despite jurisdictional limitations, a considerable number of trials involving Allied victims did take place before German courts (3). And trying crimes committed abroad was obviously also not totally impossible for the German judiciary. Thus, trials were held during this time which dealt with homicidal crimes committed in such countries as France, Greece, Italy, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway, Poland, Russia and the Czech republic (4). A number of these trials concerned Jewish victims and some addressed the 'liquidation' of Jewish ghettos ('Ghettoräumungen'), such as those in Minsk, Riga, Rudki and Lemberg (5). And finally, the massacres at Treblinka (6) and Sobibor (7) formed the subject of another three trials during these years. What had happened in the East, therefore, had evidently not entirely escaped the attention of the German judiciary in the late nineteen-forties.

1953-1959 (8)

During the next seven years the first postwar prosecution wave petered out. Many of the trials conducted during this time were 'chance hits', or 'leftovers' from the preceding period. In contrast to the first seven years, the number of trials diminished by one-half and the number of defendants plummeted by two-thirds. Trials against 'Schreibtischtäter'[= 'desktop perpetrators' - RM] were completely absent, while the number of cases involving crimes committed abroad or against Jewish victims increased by 10%. Due, probably, to the effect of the 1954 Amnesty Law (9), the number of cases involving 'Endphaseverbrechen' now only covered 26% of all Nazi trial proceedings. The number of defendants who were acquitted or whose case was stayed rose by 10% to 58%.

So what we have here is:

- reluctant prosecution of NS crimes in the years 1945 – 1952, mainly focusing on crimes committed against German nationals during the final phase of the NS regime, and

- almost no prosecution at all in the years 1953 to 1959, and where trials were held they ended with the defendants’ acquittal in most cases.

The German justice system’s interest in prosecuting Nazi crimes and punishing the perpetrators doesn’t seem to have been very big, does it? In the years 1953 to 1959 it actually was almost non-existing.

Then things started changing a bit – not because of any instructions from "the US puppet regime in Bonn", which cared as little about these things as the US themselves (US authorities had by the mid-1950s released most of the Nazi war criminals convicted by US military tribunals, including Einsatzgruppen killers who had been sentenced to death – a fact that Graf conveniently forgot to tell his readers about), but because certain occurrences after the mid-1950s had made the German justice system and the German public aware of what enormous crimes had not been prosecuted so far. This is the explanation provided by the late German public prosecutor Adalbert Rückerl, in his 1971 book NS – Prozesse. Nach 25 Jahren Strafverfolgung: Möglichkeiten – Grenzen – Ergebnisse. The following passages are my translation from pages 20 and following of this book; emphases are mine.

In wide circles of the population there was the opinion that NS criminals who had survived the war and not managed to hide abroad had meanwhile been found and brought to justice by courts of the victorious powers or German judicial organs and de-nazification authorities. The conclusion of the de-nazification measures, the pardoning of numerous persons sentenced by the occupation tribunals, the reinstatement of many public servants, formerly suspended due to their "NS past", according to the so-called "131-Law", and probably also the efforts for a German rearmament were interpreted as indications that the chapter of prosecution of NS crimes, considered tiresome by many, was approaching its end. Many persons burdened with heavy crimes, who had not yet been found, already began to breathe relief.
But then things started changing in the mid-1950s. A chain of coincidences, favored by the careless manner of a former high SS-official, had in 1956 led to extensive investigations. These eventually led to the meanwhile well-known «Ulm Einsatzgruppen Trial». Ten defendants, among them several SS commanders, were sentenced in the summer of 1958 to long prison terms by the Ulm juror court for participation in the murder of several thousand Jews in the German-Lithuanian border region. All of a sudden the public was shown what heavy crimes had not been prosecuted so far.
Justice now reacted immediately. Recognizing that competence regulations binding for the local public prosecutor offices and courts hindered a comprehensive and systematic investigation of these crimes, the conference of ministers and senators of justice of the German federal states in the autumn of 1958 decided upon the constitution of the «Central Office of the Federal Judicial Administrations for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes» (Zentrale Stelle der Landesjustizverwaltung zur Aufklärung nationalsozialistischer Verbrechen).

The investigations leading to the Ulm Einsatzgruppen Trial, according to this page, started because a former SS-Oberführer, who in 1941 had been director of police in the Memel region and after the war had under false name conducted a refugee camp near Ulm until being dismissed when his identity became known, had brought in an action claiming his reinstatement into public service. When the press reported about this lawsuit, one reader recognized him and remembered that this man had played a major part in shootings of Jews at the beginning of the attack on the Soviet Union. One wonders if the Federal German justice system would ever have got moving had it not been for this coincidence.

Anyway, the Central Office of the Federal Judicial Administrations for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes did good work in the 1960s and 1970s and managed to bring a number of former members of Einsatzgruppen killing squads and extermination camps staff to trial. The work of German criminal justice authorities was expressly praised by the late German historian Martin Broszat in a foreword to the article Organisierter Massenmord in Nationalsozialistischen Vernichtungslagern by his colleagues Ino Arndt and Wolfgang Scheffler, published in Vierteljahreshefte für Zeitgeschichte 24 (1976), pages 105 ff. and in Peter Maerthesheimer / Ivo Frenzel, Im Kreuzfeuer: Der Fernsehfilm Holocaust. Eine Nation ist betroffen, Frankfurt am Main 1979, pages 167 ff. On pages 174 of the latter publication, there is the following statement of Broszat’s (my translation):

Often reprimanded for its careful judgments, pleading for the accused or for facts not being provable in case of doubt, the judiciary of the German Federal Republic, with its voluminous investigation apparatus working over many years, has especially in the area of the extermination camps often contributed more to the clarification of this National Socialist crime complex than would have been possible to historians.

Yet even at the height of its prosecution of NS crimes, the German justice system was faced with difficulties hampering more extensive prosecution, one of which came from the German legislative. The Justiz und NS-Verbrechen site refers to this as follows (emphases are mine):

As of the early nineteen-sixties, the prosecution of Nazi crimes became mainly limited to the crimes of murder ('Mord') and complicity in murder ('Beihilfe zum Mord'). The prosecution of all other homicidal crimes had by then become barred due to the German statute of limitations. With regard to the crime of murder this limitation was first extended - in 1965 and 1969 - and then finally lifted in 1979. Still, the prosecution of a great many cases of complicity in murder failed due to an alteration of the law in October 1968. (14) Many Schreibtischtäter profited from this legal revision. This is because all cases in which prosecution procedures had only started in the nineteen-sixties - such as, e.g., with regard to members of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (15)- had to be suspended, as the indicted complicity in murder had by now come to fall under the limitation statue.(16)

In footnote 14, the legal revision that saved many desktop organizers of mass murder from prosecution is explained in more detail. Emphasis is mine:

14) Einführungsgesetz zum Ordnungswidrigkeitengesetz vom 24.Mai 1968 (BGBl. I S.503) zur Änderung des (damaligen) §50 StGB. According to this law the penalty of an accomplice who could not be shown to have acted out of base motives (niedrigen Beweggründen), such as racial hatred, himself, was to be mitigated 'in accordance with the regulations concerning the penalty for attempt'. Thus, the maximum penalty for complicity in murder in these cases is now still only 15 years, instead of a life sentence as before. This meant that the statute of limitations for crimes with a maximum penalty of a life sentence (in 1968 still 20 years) was no longer applicable to such cases of complicity in murder, but that, instead, a limitation period of still only 15 years applied.

To sum it up: the German justice system took ten years after the constitution of the German Federal Republic to get up its ass and start systematically investigating Nazi crimes and prosecuting Nazi criminals, and might never have done so had not a former SS killer brought in an action for reinstatement into public service. And after less than ten years of systematic investigation and prosecution of Nazi crimes, a great many criminals, especially the higher-ranking "desktop perpetrators", were placed under the statute of limitations by a neat legal trick.

Does this look like a German state hell-bent on prosecuting and condemning NS-criminals, which Graf would have his readers believe in? Certainly not. It looks like Graf doesn’t know what he’s talking about at best.

On to the third paragraph of Graf’s above-quoted rambling, which the fellow starts by claiming that before every one of the "innumerable" trials of Nazi war criminals in the Federal German Republic (actually, according to the Justiz und NS-Verbrechen site, there were a total of 912 trials since 1945 involving 1875 defendants accused of homicidal crimes committed during World War II in the service of National Socialism, which resulted in 14 death sentences, 150 life sentences and 842 timely sentences) was preceded by a media campaign in which the accused was vilified as a "beast in human shape".

While there may have been such reports in one or the other boulevard paper, I doubt they were a general phenomenon even during the trial that received most media coverage, the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial between 1963 and 1965. In his book Der Auschwitz – Prozess, Hermann Langbein praised major German newspapers, especially the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and the Frankfurter Neue Presse, for having had the strength to report about every one of the 183 days of that trial. Whoever knows the conservative German paper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, which is everything other than sensationalist, may be wondering as much as I do what Graf might be talking about.

It is also not as if all NS crimes trials before Federal German courts had received the media attention that was granted to the Ulm Einsatzgruppen Trial and the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial. In fact these trials seem to have been exceptions to the rule, and the public interest in the prosecution of NS crimes in West Germany, awakened by the Ulm Einsatzgruppen Trial, doesn’t seem to have lasted long. In the sequence of the controversy raised by the "Holocaust" television series in West Germany in 1979, German TV stations organized a number of discussion sessions where historians were confronted with questions raised by TV spectators who had seen the series. Some of the questions raised and answers given were printed in the above-mentioned publication my Märthesheimer and Frenzel. One of the questions, "War es wirklich so schlimm?" ("Was it really that bad?") was answered by historian Wolfgang Scheffler as follows (my translation, emphasis is mine):

For more than 20 years the details in all their cruelty have been thoroughly analyzed at many places in the Federal Republic, revealing a dimension and a degree of awfulness that is generally almost beyond imagination. Unfortunately it is a fact, and this also explains a great deficiency in knowledge, that many of these trials are not taken notice of. You can almost say that the participants in these trials, including the accused, have been left in the lurch by the public. It is a part of our history that is being dealt with there, the perpetrators are also a part of our people, so we cannot say that it is none of our business. Was is really that bad? Shall we provide accounts of details that were revealed in the court rooms? Shall we tell you, for instance, how the police battalions raged? Shall we describe how, during ghetto evacuations, the sick an the old were shot in the hospitals etc. because it would have been too cumbersome to take them along? Or shall we give you details of children massacres, how they were grabbed by their feet and shot through the head? The court trials have very often shown that many things were much worse than can generally be imagined. Whoever has doubts in this respect should consult the final verdicts of independent German courts.

The above-quoted observation by a German historian suggests that many if not most NS-crimes trials before West German courts received little or no attention from the media and the German public.

Graf’s next claim is that at West German NS crimes trials proof was not required, «since "crime" and "criminal" were, for the most part, considered to have been established from the outset».

So the crimes and their perpetrators were considered facts of common knowledge like you claimed was the case at the Nuremberg trials, right, Jürgen? Horseshit, my good boy. If, for instance, the mass killings at Treblinka were considered facts already established that required no further proof, then why, as shown in my article More Fun With Ugly Voice Productions (Part 1), did the court interrogate several dozen witnesses and hear expert opinions from historians, rendered under oath, in order to reach its findings of fact about the Nazi policy of exterminating the Jews and the execution of that policy at Treblinka extermination camp? Same at the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial, from the judgment of which I translated the following passages:

2. Sources and Assessment of Proof regarding the General Findings about the Handling of the so-called RSHA - transports
The general findings about the arrival and handling of RSHA transports at the old ramp and later at the new ramp of Birkenau camp, the tasks and activities of the various SS-members in charge of ramp service, the deceit of the people destined to die about their imminent fate, the details about their killing at the various gas chambers and crematoria, the build and inner outfitting of the gas chambers and crematoria, the removal of the corpses, the tasks and activities of the SS - special detachment at the four crematoria and finally the work of the Jewish special detachment, are based on the depositions of the defendants Boger, St., Dylewski, Broad, Hofmann, Kaduk, Baretzki, Dr. L., Dr. Frank, Dr. Sc., Dr. Capesius and Klehr, insofar as they could be taken at face value, and the credible testimonies of the witnesses O., Wal., Wil., N., Schl., Hu., Dr. M., To., Lei., H., Dr. Kremer, Ch. (who had all been former SS - members at Auschwitz concentration camp) as well as the credible testimonies of the witnesses Ka., Cou., Ja., van V., Vr., K. Erich, Pa., Sw., Bac., Buk., Boe., furthermore on the handwritten notes of the first camp commandant Hoess about the "final solution of the Jewish question" and the so-called Broad report.
The defendants do not dispute that countless Jewish people were brought in RSHA - transports to Auschwitz in the years 1941-1944 for extermination, that there they were subject to the described selection procedure at the ramp and, insofar as they were not selected as able to work and taken into the camp, killed in the gas chambers in the manner described. They also do not dispute that SS - members of various units participated in this. The defendants who are charged with having participated in the extermination of these RSHA - transports only dispute - as will be described in the assessment of their deeds - that they had anything to do with the killing of these Jewish people (like for instance the defendant Mulka) or took part especially in the selection of those able to work at the ramp.[...]

So, what were the sources of the Frankfurt court's general findings related to the mass extermination of the Jews arriving at Auschwitz on RSHA transports (as opposed to their specific findings regarding the individual actions and guilt of every individual defendant taking part in the extermination activities)?

The sources were:

a) The depositions of the defendants Boger(1), St.(2), Dylewski(3), Broad(4), Hofmann(5), Kaduk(6), Baretzki(7), Dr. L.(8), Dr. Frank(9), Dr. Sc.(10), Dr. Capesius(11) and Klehr(12);

b) The testimonies of the witnesses O.(13), Wal.(14), Wil.(15), N.(16), Schl.(17), Hu.(18), Dr. M.(19), To.(20), Lei.(21), H.(22), Dr. Kremer(23), Ch.(24) (who had all been former SS - members at Auschwitz concentration camp);

c) The testimonies of witnesses Ka.(25), Cou.(26), Ja.(27), van V.(28), Vr.(29), K. Erich (30), Pa.(31), Sw.(32), Bac.(33), Buk.(34), Boe.(35);

d) Furthermore on the handwritten notes of the first camp commandant Hoess about the "final solution of the Jewish question" (36) and the so-called Broad report (37).

37 elements of evidence, thereof 35 defendants or witnesses who made depositions directly before the court.

You never really read any of these judgments, did you, Jürgen?

I hope so for you. For if you didn’t, that just makes you an ignorant, incompetent bum spitting about his preconceived notions. If you did, you are lying.

Next claim: «The witnesses were allowed to lie a blue streak, since nobody was allowed to subject the former “victims of persecution” to emotional torment with sceptical questioning».

Again, Graf is either an incompetent fuck who didn’t even look at a single judgment or trial report, or then he is a filthy liar. Let’s have a look at what the Frankfurt District Court at the 1963 – 1965 Auschwitz trial wrote in the judgment about its approach to the evidence that it based its findings of fact on. Translation and emphases are mine:

IV. Assessment of Evidence
1. General Preliminary Remark about the Assessment of Evidence
When establishing the defendants' individual participation in the murders committed at Auschwitz concentration camp, be it mass murders of individual killings, the sworn court saw itself placed before extraordinarily difficult tasks. The defendants themselves only contributed very little to clarification. Insofar as they admitted to participation, they played down the same, represented it in a distorted manner or had a number of excuses at hand.

The few available documents essentially served only for clarifying general issues, but could hardly provide information about the defendants' individual guilt.

For clarifying the crimes committed by the defendants, the court therefore depended almost exclusively on witness depositions. If already according to general experience a witness is not always a safe element of proof, this applied all the more at the present trial, because the witnesses had to testify about events lying 20 years in the past. In addition there were hardly any witnesses who had experienced the events at Auschwitz concentration camps as neutral observers. The witnesses who had been former members of the Waffen-SS at Auschwitz concentration camp were almost without exception involved in the events of the time. This led them to show a noticeable reservation in their depositions, feign memory gaps and be shy to incriminate the accused, obviously in the assumption that after incriminating statements they could themselves be incriminated by the accused. But for a few exceptions, the depositions of these witnesses therefore mostly yielded little results.

With a number of these witnesses it was even obvious that they were telling untruths.

For finding out the truth the court was thus essentially dependent on the depositions of the former inmates. Although a great number of these witnesses made a serious effort to search their memory and tell the pure truth, the court had to take into consideration that many possible sources of error could put in question the value and the truthfulness of these witness testimonies. Almost all witnesses made their observations in a state of unspeakable suffering, tormented by hunger and in constant fear for their own life. The names of the SS-members were often not known to them. In the camp at that time there was much talk about the general occurrences and about the SS-members involved in individual events. Rumors spread fast among the inmates. They often roughened and falsified certain occurrences. The names of participating SS-men were confounded.

For the witnesses it was thus extraordinarily difficult to distinguish between what they had personally experienced themselves and what had been told to them by others, be it in the camp or only later after liberation. There is no question that there was the risk of witnesses in good faith representing events as their own experience which had actually been described to them by others, or which they had read of in the numerous books and magazines about the events at Auschwitz that are available to the public. Furthermore it had to be taken into consideration that after 20 years there might appear memory gaps which the witnesses unconsciously filled in. Especially there was the risk that the witnesses in good faith projected events which they themselves had experienced at Auschwitz concentration camp onto other persons, especially the SS-members accused at this trial. The sworn court never lost sight of this risk, and in regard to all witness depositions containing concrete incriminations of a given defendant carefully examined whether there was not the possibility of a mistaken identification.

Another difficulty lay in that the witnesses - understandably so - could only rarely make exact statements about the place and time of certain events. Although it often seemed an impertinence [Zumutung] and an overburdening of the witnesses to ask them about concrete details of their experiences, about the looks of the SS-men taking part in certain occurrences and about the place and time or events, and to ask them to provide an exact description of the sites, the sworn court, in order to clarify the severe accusations leveled against the accused, nevertheless considered such procedures necessary to exclude the risk of mistaken identifications and counterfactual claims. For the court was lacking almost all the means of recognition available in a normal murder trial to make itself a true picture of the factual occurrences at the time of murder. The corpses of the victims were missing, as were autopsy protocols, expert reports about the cause and hour of death, the traces of the perpetrators, murder weapons etc. Only in rare cases was it possible to check the witnesses' depositions.

The credibility of the witnesses therefore had to be examined with especial care. Where there were the slightest doubts or the possibility of a mistaken identification could not be excluded with certainty the court did not use such witness depositions.

The defendants' attorneys again and again pointed out that the witnesses had conspired against certain defendants and agreed to unjustly incriminate them. They further claimed that the witnesses had in a non-permissible manner been influenced to make incriminating depositions against certain defendants. This the sworn court also had to keep in mind. There were no indications, however, that such conspiracies and influences had occurred. Insofar as individual witnesses made the impression that due to a certain eagerness for importance or another character feature they tended to tell fantastic tales, or that for reasons which could not be clarified they seemed to unjustly incriminate certain defendants with concrete events, the court did not use the depositions as a whole.

Does this sound as if the court had generally taken eyewitness testimonies from former camp inmates at face value? Quite the contrary, I would say: the court recognized that many, but not all witnesses made an effort to tell just the truth, and it took care not only to refrain from using such testimonies that gave the impression of storytelling, but also to spot mistakes in testimonies it considered to have been made in good faith.

Does this sound like the court had refrained from subjecting the poor witnesses to skeptical questioning, as Graf claims? Also not: the court made very clear that and why it was necessary to bore into the witnesses, hard though this might be on them, «in order to clarify the severe accusations leveled against the accused». And if the court subjected the eyewitness testimonies to close scrutiny, the defendants’ defense attorneys did this to an even greater extent. This applied especially to the defense attorney Dr. Laternser, whose interrogation tactics often enraged the spectators and were considered by incidental action representative Ormond as "a routine overburdening of the witnesses", while a radio commentator reporting on the trial thought them to have "often enough been defaming" (Langbein, as above page 849). A reporter of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung further pointed out the passivity of the prosecution’s representatives as their witnesses were being grilled by the defendants’ attorneys. Langbein quotes this reporter's comment on page 855 of this book. My translation:

The public prosecutor’s office, of which one would expect that it is not too passive in standing by the prosecution's witnesses, is sometime so completely silent that one could think its representatives are attending the wrong trial.

The Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial was not the only one at which eyewitnesses were subject to aggressive cross-examination by the defendants’ attorneys, as is shown for the case of the Sobibor trial at Hagen by the following passages of eyewitness Thomas Toivi Blatt’s record of his conversation with one of the convicted defendants at that trial, former SS-officer Karl Frenzel (emphases are mine):

But why did he want to talk to me? I asked him outright why he agreed to speak to me. He said he wanted to apologize to me in person. He couldn't do it in the courtroom. "I don't blame you or other witnesses," he said. "And I must honestly say I was sorry for you and all those witnesses... After all those years to have to think back on all those memories and be pressured... they were pressuring and squeezing you in the court...".

This was putting it mildly. The method of the defense was primarily to discredit the testimony of the witnesses by asking them idiotic questions. In my case for example, "How tall was the tree near the barrack?" or " Was the club with which Frenzel beat your father round or not? How many centimeters?" A stranger in the courtroom would immediately have thought I was the defendant and not the victim.

Regarding the Majdanek trial before the Düsseldorf District Court between 1975 and 1981, we have the following excerpt from Tom Bower’s book Blind Eye to Murder , courtesy of former RODOH poster David Hebden on the RODOH thread Majdanek on Trial. Emphases are mine.

It was only on 26 November 1975 that the trial finally started. It was originally expected to last one year. Billed as the last of the great Nazi trials, the prosecutors believed the evidence to be incontrovertible. Over one thousand survivors had been interviewed. Of those, 260 had been selected as having actually seen one of the defendants commit murder. The German courts insist that there must be an eyewitness to the act of murder. Hearsay or supposition is insufficient. Yet at the end of the first year only sixteen of the 260 witnesses had been heard. Judge Bogen was confronted by the obstructive tactics of the government-paid defence lawyers, intent on using the trial for their own purposes. He consistently refused to limit their attempts to disprove the existence of the Final Solution.

Exploiting the procedural rules which were drafted to prevent a repetition of the shotgun trials of the Third Reich, the defence lawyers embarked on a daily ritual, submitting endless challenges against the prosecution's introduction of evidence and introducing evidence designed not to clarify the issues or bolster their client's defence but to rewrite the history of the Nazi era.

Hans Mundorf, defending Braunsteiner, seized every possible opportunity during the first eighteen months to challenge the evidence that human corpses had been burnt in the crematoria. Every witness was asked whether he knew the difference between the smell of burning human and animal flesh. Veterinary doctors were called to testify that those outside the crematoria would not know the difference.
Ludwig Bock, the thirty-eight-year-old lawyer defending Lachert, went even further and called witnesses - all of them neo-Nazi historians - to disprove that there had ever been a planned Final Solution. With a conviction that goes beyond purely professional duty to a client, he insisted that no one, including animals, was gassed at Majdanek. `Even if there were gas chambers at Majdanek,' he told the author, `it doesn't mean that they were the reason for the death of a lot of people, because it is possible that the gas chambers were used to clean clothes.' Bock, who claimed that Lachert went to Majdanek as if it was just another job, `like being a cook in a kitchen,' insisted that she had no idea that anyone was being gassed or killed in the camp. That defence did not prevent him demanding, when a former inmate explained how she had been forced by a defendant to carry Zyklon B gas to the gas chambers, that the witness be charged as an accomplice to murder.

Hermann Stolting, who defended another of the accused, Hermine Bottcher, has a Nazi record of his own to explain. As a wartime prosecutor in a special court in Bromberg, Poland, he `persuaded' the court to give a series of death sentences for trivial offences like a farmer's illegal killing of six pigs. Today he unrepentantly justifies those sentences: `If both the circumstances and the law were the same today, I would do the same again." He points to his chairmanship of the German Animal Welfare Society as proof of his humanitarianism.

When the lawyers were not rewriting history, they were cruelly denigrating the survivors and their testimony. Credibility is hard to establish at the best of times, but thirty-five years after the event it is often impossible to remember the exact details which the defence lawyers always demanded. Time, date, place, the exact words, the precise movements of every person in the drama, the position of the lorry in relation to the hut - or was it a cart? - the final curse of the girl who was hanged by Lachert. `How can you be sure that the girl did not push the stool away herself?' `Did you see Lachert throw the children into the crematoria?'

So, did anyone at these trials think of sparing the witnesses the emotional torment of skeptical questioning? No, of course not. The best that can be said about Graf is that he knows and cares as much about the reality of these trials as a pig does about Sunday.

If the courts had been as uncritical of eyewitness testimonies as Graf claims, one would expect all testimonies to have been accepted as accurate and the defendants to have been convicted on all counts of the indictments against them. Yet if you look at, say, the judgment at the 1st Düsseldorf Treblinka Trial or the judgment at the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial, you will see that a considerable part of both judgments is dedicated to allegations contained in the indictments against the individual defendants that, in the court’s opinion, were not proven beyond a reasonable doubt by the respective eyewitness testimonies. You will also find there statements by the court that an eyewitness testimony was clearly false, where the court considered this to have been the case. One example hereof is the accusation against former SS-man Arthur Breitwieser of having taken part in the first gassing that took place in Block 11 at the Auschwitz main camp. The key prosecution witness incriminating Breitwieser was a former German inmate by the name of Petzold, who claimed to have observed Breitswieser’s activities from the gable window of Block 27. However, as the court established during its examination of the former camp site, it was impossible for the witness to see what he claimed to have seen from where he said he had stood on that day. The pertinent passages of the judgment at the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial read as follows (my translation):

The witness’s claim that he had watched the occurrences on the yard between Block 10 and Block 11 from the gable window of Block 27 cannot correspond to the truth. For from the gable window of Block 27 the yard between Blocks 10 and 11 could not be seen at all. The site inspection carried out by the mandated judge on the former area of Auschwitz concentration camp turned out that, due to the wall before the yard between Block 10 and Block 11, the yard cannot be looked into from any of the windows of Block 27. The cellar windows and the stairs leading to the middle entrance of Block 11 can also not be seen from Block 27. At most one can see the upper rim of the windows of the ground-level floor of Block 11 from the inside of Block 27. The site inspection furthermore turned out that Block 27 does not even have a gable window. The witness Sm., who was an inmate at the Stammlager himself, testified that there was never a gable window in Block 27. He furthermore stated that the wall before the yard between Block 10 and Block 11 never changed, it always remained equally high. The height of Block 21 is of no relevance. For, as the site inspection also turned up, one looks past Block 21 when looking from Block 27 in the direction of Block 11. Nevertheless it is not possible to look over the wall before the yard between Blocks 10 and 11. The witness Petz must therefore have invented the description of the alleged events on the yard between Blocks 10 and 11. No findings of fact could therefore be based on his deposition.

Breitwieser was acquitted, as were two other defendants.

The result of the court’s site investigation could also confirm the credibility of eyewitness testimonies, however. This was the case in the instance referred to in the following passage I also translated from the same judgment:

The defense of the accused Dr. Frank put in question that the witness could recognize the person of the accused at all from a distance of 60 meters. The court does not share these doubts. For during the site visit on the area of the former Auschwitz concentration camp by the mandated judge it was found that one can recognize a person standing on the former ramp from a distance of 60 meters. On the day of the site visit there was even dizzy weather. The court certified itself through an experiment in the yard of the Gallushaus that one can well recognize a person’s hand – and thumb movements from a distance of 60 meters.

These examples are significant in that they show the care taken by the court to cross-check eyewitness testimonies against other evidence, including its own observations on site, whenever this was possible. This care, in turn, emphasizes the falsity of Graf’s allegations.

Graf would have us believe that «the only chance for a lenient sentence for the accused lay in evading any dispute over the existence of the gas chambers and the reality of the genocide, while merely disputing one’s own participation in the killings, blaming everything on persons already dead, missing, or superiors who had already been sentenced», and that «Anyone in a war crimes trial who disputed the basic version of events at Auschwitz (i.e., the Holocaust yarn) — a version already accepted as "proven fact" — found himself in a totally hopeless position: his stubborness only got him a tougher sentence».

Well, well, Jürgen. So the criminal justice authorities of a constitutional democratic state like the German Federal Republic are supposed to have knowingly put the poor defendants in a situation where they had to falsely incriminate themselves (by admitting that there had been mass killings by gassing, without which, of course, there would have been no participation of theirs in the killing process to be examined), and they are supposed to have knowingly sentenced innocents to sometimes long prison terms or even lifetime imprisonment. Prosecutors and judges of a constitutional democratic state are supposed to have not only violated their legal duty to find out the truth in the most flagrant and outrageous manner, they are also supposed to have incurred in criminal acts punishable under the German criminal code (Perversion of the Course of Justice and Prosecution of the Innocent, sections 339 and 344 – see here). And both defendants and defense attorneys are supposed to have meekly played along, instead of making a scandal on account of such outrages and seeing to it that such criminal public prosecutors and judges, perverting the course of justice and prosecuting innocents, were kicked out of office and put on trial themselves.

Do you expect us to believe that shit, Jürgen?

What is more, do you expect us to believe it without having anything to show for such monstrous and far-ranging claims? For the only sources you mention are the distortions and misrepresentations of "Revisionist" liars like yourself, the late judge Stäglich (whose nonsense in his screed "Der Auschwitz Mythos" is discussed in John Zimmerman’s Holocaust Denial) and "Manfred Köhler", who is none other than "Revisionist" guru Germar "Many Names" Rudolf.

Absence of evidence to Graf’s nonsensical allegations aside, let us shortly test them against the sentences issued at the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial and the first Düsseldorf Treblinka trial. If we follow Graf’s logic, then the defendants' willingness to admit to the mass killings by gassing at this camp should have brought the defendants some advantages; at least it should have saved them from suffering the most severe penalty provided for in the German criminal code, which is lifetime imprisonment.

Now, as can be read in one of the above-quoted excerpts from the judgment at the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial, none of the defendants denied that mass gassing of Jews at Auschwitz were a fact. What is more, some even provided details about how the incoming transports were processed from the selection at the ramp to the gas chambers. And yet, six of the defendants (Stefan Baretzki, Emil Bednarek, Friedrich Wilhelm Boger, Franz Josef Hofmann, Oswald Kaduk and Josef Klehr) were sentenced to lifetime imprisonment. How do you explain this, Jürgen?

Same at the first Düsseldorf Treblinka trial: as mentioned in my blog article More Fun With Ugly Voice Productions (Part 1), the defendants at this trial and at other trials related to the Aktion Reinhard(t) camps testified to the existence and the operation of the gas chambers installed there for the purpose of killing people, and gave detailed descriptions of the purpose of the camps and of the murderous procedures which had been practiced there. If they were rewarded for this with leniency on the part of the court, then why were Kurt Hubert Franz, Heinrich Arthur Matthes, Willi Mentz and August Wilhelm Miete sentenced to lifetime imprisonment? How do you explain this, Jürgen?

Of course Graf cannot explain this, for there is no explanation compatible with his articles of faith. The defendants were all sentenced on the basis of nothing other than the applicable law and the evidence against them that the court found to be sufficiently conclusive to consider their deeds proven beyond a reasonable doubt.

Now to the last paragraph of Graf’s ramblings, wherein the fellow indulges in speculations as to why Federal German criminal justice supposedly committed the outrageous, massive and criminal falsity of sentencing hundreds of innocent men for crimes they had not committed. Graf thinks that the German state, by doggedly prosecuting Nazi criminals, wanted to ingratiate itself with its supposed US masters and "re-educate" the German people into playing along with said ingratiation and the corresponding "subordination to American interests".

Of course Graf has nothing to show in support of these fantastic accusations, which alone is enough to dismiss them as a fanatic’s irrelevant public opinion.

But let us again test Graf’s hypothesis against the facts of German criminal justice’s handling of Nazi crimes: if the Federal German state intended to ingratiate itself with its US "masters" by bringing Nazi criminals to justice, then how come that

a) German criminal justice took ten years after the constitution of the German Federal Republic to start a systematic investigation and prosecution of Nazi crimes;

b) The German legislative hampered the prosecution of high-ranking NS criminals by a legislation change that placed them under the statute of limitations;

c) There were so many acquittals in such trials as, despite the factors mentioned in the previous items, did actually take place (according to the University of Amsterdam’s Justiz und NS-Verbrechen website, 912 trials since 1945 involving 1875 defendants accused of homicidal crimes committed during World War II in the service of National Socialism, resulted in 14 death sentences, 150 life sentences and 842 timely sentences, which means that 869 defendants, or 46.35 % of the total, were acquitted);

d) German justice was criticized for its "careful judgments, pleading for the accused or for facts not being provable in case of doubt", according to German historian Martin Broszat (see above quote);

and, last but not least,

e) Sentences issued against defendants found guilty of having participated in Nazi-era mass murders were often outrageously lenient?

The last of the above aspects has not been addressed in detail yet, so this will be done now.

The following I translated from pages 257/258 of the book Furchtbare Juristen, by German legal scholar Ingo Mueller. Emphases are mine:

Against the actually convicted NS-criminals the courts often issued sentences which, according to the former Hessian General Public Prosecutor Fritz Bauer, came "rather close to mocking the victims". In the early 1960s, the German coordination council of the Christian-Jewish Society observed "since some time and with increasing concern, that the sworn courts [Schwurgerichte] of the German Federal Republic are treating mass murders and violent crimes from the National Socialist era (concentration camps, ghettoes, Einsatzgruppen etc. ... differently from other murders", that the Nazi criminals were given "minimum sentences for >complicity in murder< which, in the eyes of the general public, reduced the participation in mass murder to a crime in the order of magnitude of, say, heavy theft or professional receiving of stolen goods". One or two days imprisonment for every proven murder were not a rarity at these trials, and this was by no means only due to the astronomically high numbers of victims.

Would the German state – assuming the nonsensical notion that it could dictate the judgments of its courts of justice, and that it intended to ingratiate itself with its "masters" by showing zealous prosecution of NS crimes – have permitted such outrageously lenient sentences against criminals who had been involved in Nazi mass murder, thus bringing about harsh criticism not only from German legal scholars, but also and especially from foreign states, including but not limited to the US "masters" of what Graf calls the "puppet regime in Bonn"?

Certainly not, I would say.

At the Düsseldorf Majdanek Trial, according to the above mentioned excerpt from Tom Bower’s Blind Eye to Murder, the presiding judge foresaw the outrage that the court’s extremely careful and lenient sentences against mass murderers would unleash:

When he came to read the final verdicts, Judge Bogen's hands were visibly trembling. Perhaps he was rightly anticipating the reaction of the court-room, which was filled with camp survivors, relations of those who had perished, and young Jews. The court, Bogen announced, had decided that only Braunsteiner was guilty of murder. There was, said Bogen, `insufficiently convincing evidence' against seven of the others to convict them of being more than accomplices. A ninth defendant was acquitted. To screams of `outrage' and `scandal', Bogen sentenced Braunsteiner to the mandatory life imprisonment; Lachert, alias `Bloody Brigitta,' to twelve years; Hackmann, the camp's deputy commandant, to ten years; and Laurich, the `Angel of Death', to eight years. To the disappointed prosecution lawyers Bogen justified the court's findings by insisting that the cases would have been stronger if the trial had been held `fifteen or twenty years earlier.' They did not disagree, although they were convinced that, despite the witnesses' contradictions, the evidence against Lachert and Hackmann as murderers was overwhelming. Bitterly they confide that Bogen, prematurely aged by the strain, was convinced of their guilt as murderers but was outvoted by his four fellow judges. Not surprisingly, the outcome of the eight-million-dollar trial convinced most Germans of the futility of the prosecutions.

Did the judges of the Düsseldorf District Court fail to heed instructions from the German government about how to sentence the defendants so that the world and especially Germany’s "masters" would be satisfied?

Or could it be that there were never such instructions, that the judges, whatever criticism their leniency deserves, decided on the basis of nothing other than the law and the evidence, as judges are supposed to do, and that Jürgen Graf is as full of shit as can be?

I leave it to our readers to answer these questions themselves.

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:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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.