Documents

By JUDGE EDWARD L VAN RODEN

From The Progressive, February 1949, p. 21f

AMERICAN investigators at the U. S. Court in Dachau, Germany, used the following methods to obtain confessions: Beatings and brutal kickings. Knocking out teeth and breaking jaws. Mock trials. Solitary confinement. Posturing as priests. Very limited rations. Spiritual deprivation. Promises of acquittal. Complaints concerning these third degree methods were received by Secretary of the Army Kenneth Royall last Spring [1948]. Royall appointed Justice Gordon Simpson of the Texas Supreme Court and me to go to Germany and check up on the reports. Accompanied by Lt. Col. Charles Lawrence, Jr., we went to Munich, Germany, set up offices there, and heard a stream of testimony about the way in which American atrocities were committed.

But first, a bit of the background. Last Spring the Supreme Court refused the habeas corpus petition of Col. Willis N. Everett, Jr., an American lawyer, who had served as defense counsel for the 74 Germans accused in the famous Malmedy case. Everett is a very able lawyer, a conscientious and sincere gentleman. He is not a fanatic.

In his petition, Everett charged that the Germans had not received a fair trial. Everett did not claim that all the German defendants were innocent, but since they did not have a fair trial, there was no way of telling the innocent from the guilty.

The tragedy is that so many of us Americans, having fought and won the war with so much sweat and blood, now say, “All Germans should be punished.” We won the war, but some of us want to go on killing. That seems to me wicked.

If Everett’s shocking charges were true, they would be a blot on the American conscience for eternity. The fact that there were atrocities by the Germans during the war against Americans, or by Americans against Germans, would not in the least lessen our disgrace if such peacetime atrocities were to go unchallenged.

Our specific assignment was not only to examine Col. Everett’s charges, but also to examine the cases of the 139 death sentences, which at that time remained unexecuted: 152 Germans had already been executed.

The 139 doomed men who were still alive fell into three groups. They were accused of involvement in the Dachau concentration camp crimes, in the killing of American fliers, or in the Malmedy massacres. Let me say that I believe the crimes for which these Germans were tried actually took place, and that some Germans were guilty of them.

But we should not let the indiscriminate hate of all Germans that was generated during and after the war, blind us to the necessity of punishing the guilty ones only.

After this investigation, and after talking to all sides, I do not believe that the German people knew what the German Government was doing. I am convinced the German populace had no idea what diabolical crimes that arch-fiend, [Heinrich] Himmler, was committing in the concentration camps. From the atrocities we learned about, he must have been the very prince of devils.

But as for the Germans at large, they fought the war as loyal citizens with a fatherland to support, and a fatherland to defend.

Some American fliers, shot down on bombing raids over Germany, were killed by German civilians.

These Germans felt that the American fliers were the murderers of their defenseless wives, mothers, and children who were in the bombed cities, just as the English felt that German fliers were their murderers. That’s war.

I felt deeply about these fliers. I had two sons in the Air Force. Jimmy made 35 missions over Germany and returned safe, thank God! Dick made 32 Missions and was finally shot down over Italy. He spent 12 months in a German prisoner-of-war camp and was fairly well treated. He is now in a sanitarium in Arizona recovering from TB he contracted in the camp.

II

The Malmedy massacres, in which a group of American prisoners of war were mown down after being captured during the Battle of the Bulge, actually happened. But can’t we distinguish between the assertion that these atrocities did happen, and the assertion that they were committed by these 74 Germans who had been in or near Malmedy at that time?

Because some wicked sadistic German individuals did it, are we doing the right thing by saying any and all Germans we lay our hands on are guilty and should be destroyed? I personally don’t believe that. That’s not the way of thinking I learnt in my church, or you learned in your church.

On Russian insistence, the Americans couldn’t retry these men. The Russian philosophy in these matters is that the investigators determine the guilt or innocence of the accused, and the judge merely sets the sentence. We accepted the Russian formula of no-retrial, but we won out on the presumption of innocence before trial.

The American prohibition of hear-say evidence had been suspended. Second and third-hand testimony was admitted, although the Judge Advocate General warned against the value of hearsay evidence, especially when it was obtained, as this was, two or three years after the act. Lt. Col. Ellis and Lt Perl of the Prosecution pleaded that it was difficult to obtain competent evidence. Perl told the court, “We had a tough case to crack and we had to use persuasive methods.” He admitted to the court that the persuasive methods included various “expedients, including some violence and mock trials.” He further told the court that the cases rested on statements obtained by such methods.

The statements which were admitted as evidence were obtained from men who had first been kept in solitary confinement for three, four, and, five months. They were confined between four walls, with no windows, and no opportunity of exercise. Two meals a day were shoved in to them through a slot in the door. They were not allowed to talk to anyone. They had no communication with their families or any minister or priest during that time.

This solitary confinement proved sufficient in itself in some cases to persuade the Germans to sign prepared statements. These statements not only involved the signer, but often would involve other defendants

III

Our investigators would put a black hood over the accused’s head and then punch him in the face with brass knuckles, kick him, and beat him with rubber hose. Many of the German defendants had teeth knocked out. Some had their jaws broken.

All but two of the Germans, in the 139 cases we investigated, had been kicked in the testicles beyond repair. This was Standard Operating Procedure with American investigators.

Perl admitted use of mock trials and persuasive methods including violence and said the court was free to decide the weight to be attached to evidence thus received. But it all went in.

One 18 year old defendant, after a series of beatings, was writing a statement being dictated to him. When they reached the 16th page, the boy was locked up for the night. In the early morning, Germans in nearby cells heard him muttering. “I will not utter another lie.” When the jailer came in later to get him to finish his false statement, he found the German hanging from a cell bar, dead. However the statement that the German had hanged himself to escape signing was offered and received in evidence in the trial of the others.

Sometimes a prisoner who refused to sign was led into a dimly lit room, where a group of civilian investigators, wearing U. S. Army uniforms. were seated around a black table with a crucifix in the center and two candles burning, one on each aide. “You will now have your American trial,” the defendant was told.

The sham court passed a sham sentence of death. Then the accused was told, “You will hang in a few days, as soon as the general approves this sentence: but in the meantime sign this confession and we can get you acquitted.” Some still wouldn’t sign.

We were shocked by the crucifix being used so mockingly.

In another case, a bogus Catholic priest (actually an investigator) entered the cell of one of the defendants, heard his confession, gave him absolution, and then gave him a little friendly tip: “Sign whatever the investigators ask you to sign. It will get you your freedom. Even though it’s false, I can give you absolution now in advance for the lie you’d tell.”

Our final report on these trials has been turned over to Secretary of the Army Royall. In spite of the many instances like those I have described. we found no general conspiracy to obtain evidence improperly. With the exception of 29 cases, we saw no reason why the executions should not be carried out. For the 110 others, there was sufficient competent evidence from other sources to warrant the death penalty, exclusive of the evidence obtained by the third-degree.

The 29 men whose sentences we recommended for commutation certainly did not have a fair trial by American standards. Twenty-seven of them were to have their terms reduced to life, one of them was to get 10 years, and one would get two and one-half years, according to our recommendations. We also recommended a permanent program of clemency for reconsideration of the sentences of other prisoners convicted in war crimes cases.

Secretary Royall has saved our national conscience. Could we as Americans ever have held our heads up if he hadn’t looked into it? He has saved our national prestige and our international reputation.

However, in spite of Secretary Royall’s action in this matter, there is little real room for complacency on the part of Americans. Rather our report reveals, by implication, that we still have a serious situation in Germany to clear up. Moreover, five of the men for whom we recommended commutations have been hanged since we turned in our report. In all 100 of the 139 we set out to investigate are now dead.

IV

The American investigators who committed the atrocities in the name of American Justice and under the American flag are going scot-free. At this point there are two objectives which should be aimed for:

1. Those prisoners whose death sentences have not been commuted and who have not yet been hanged should be saved, pending full judicial review.
2. American investigators who abused the powers of victory and prostituted justice to vengeance, should be exposed in a public process, preferably in the U. S., and prosecuted.

Unless these crimes committed by Americans are exposed by us at home, the prestige of America and American justice will suffer permanent and irreparable damage. We can partially atone for our own misconduct if we first search It out and publicly condemn and disavow it. If we wait for our enemies to blazon our guilt abroad, we can only bow our heads in shamed admission.

EDWARD L. VAN RODEN, a Pennsylvania judge served in World War I and II, in the latter as Chief of the Military Justice Division for the European Theater where he saw service in Normandy, Belgium, the Rhineland, the Battle of the Bulge, and in the Ardennes. In 1946 he was reassigned to active duty and served on several important court martial trials in Germany. In 1948 Secretary of the Army Royall appointed him to an extraordinary commission charged with investigating the Dachau War Crimes program.

Harper’s Magazine

October, 1946

Page 329

SECRETS BY THE THOUSANDS

C. Lester Walker

Harper’s readers are familiar with Mr. Walker’s articles and the skillful mechanics of the Allied war. He now gives us a look at some of the disconcertingly effective tricks that were hidden up the enemy sleeve.

Someone wrote to Wright Field recently, saying he understood this country had got together quite a collection of enemy war secrets, that many were now on public sale, and could he, please, be sent everything on German jet engines. The Air Documents Division of the Army Air Forces answered:

“Sorry — but that would be fifty tons.”

Moreover, that fifty tons was just a small portion of what is today undoubtedly the biggest collection of captured enemy war secrets ever assembled. If you always thought of war secrets — as who hasn’t? — as coming in sixes and sevens, as a few items of information readily handed on to the properly interested authorities, it may interest you to learn that the war secrets in this collection run into the thousands, that the mass of documents is mountainous, and that there was never before been anything quite comparable to it.

The collection is today chiefly in three places: Wright Field (Ohio), the Library of Congress, and the Department of Commerce. Wright Field is working from a documents “mother lode” of fifteen hundred tons. In Washington, the Office of Technical Services (which has absorbed the Office of the Publication Board, the government agency originally set up to handle the collection) reports that tens of thousands of tons of material are involved. It is estimated that over a million separate items must be handled, and that they are, very likely, practically all the scientific, industrial and military secrets of Nazi Germany.

One Washington official has called it “the greatest single source of this type of material in the world, the first orderly exploitation of an entire country’s brain-power.”

How the collection came to be goes back, for beginnings, to one day in 1944 when the Allied Combined Chief’ of Staff set in motion a colossal search for war secrets in occupied German territory. They created a group of military-civilian teams, termed the Joint Intelligence Objectives Committee, which was to follow the invading armies into Germany and uncover all her military, scientific, and industrial secrets for early use against Japan. These teams worked against tine to get the most vital information be: ore it was. destroyed, and in getting it performed prodigies of ingenuity and tenacity.

At an optical company at Wetzlav, near Frankfurt, for example, the American colonel investigating felt positive that the high executives were holding out on him. But nothing would shake their story: they had given him everything. He returned next day with a legal document which he asked them all to sign. It declared they had turned over “all scientific and trade data; and if not, would accept the consequences.” Two days later they glumly signed the document, then led he colonel to a cache in a warehouse will. From a safe tumbled out the secret file on optical instruments, microscopy, aiming devices.

One two-man search team found itself completely stymied. Records that they had to find had completely disappeared. A rumor indicated they might have been hidden in a mountain. The two scoured the region in a jeep. Nothing. But keeping at it, they stumbled one day onto a small woods road whose entrance was posted:

Achtung! Minen!

Gingerly, slowly, they inched their jeep in. Nothing happened. But a concrete dugout sunk in the hill revealed another sign: “Opening Will Cause Explosion.”

“We tossed a coin,” one member of this search team said later, “and the loser hitched the jeep tow rope to the dugout door, held his breath! and stepped on the gas.”

There was no explosion. The door-ripped from its hinges. The sought-for secret files were inside.

The German Patent Office put some of its most secret patents down a sixteen-hundred-foot mine shaft at Heringen, then piled liquid oxygen, in cylinders, on top of them. When the American Joint Intelligence Objectives team found them, & was doubtful that they could be saved. They were legible, but in such bad shape that a trip to the surface would make them disintegrate. Photo equipment and a crew were therefore lowered into the shaft and a complete microfilm record made of the patents there.

PERHAPS one of the most exciting searches was also the grimmest. This was the hunt for hidden documents which might reveal that Nazi scientists had frozen human beings to death and then tried to bring them back to life again. Interviewing four Nazi doctors one day in June 1945, at a laboratory of the Institut für Luftfahrtmedizin, at Gut Hirschau, Bavaria, an American medical corps major, Leo Alexander, was struck with the dreadful conviction, despite repeated denials, that this had occurred.

His suspicion were aroused by three things. All the small animal laboratory equipment was carefully preached; all large-animal equipment destroyed. One of the doctors wanted to dissolve his research institute and dismiss his staff. And none of the scientists could find any data on human beings at all, not even on those rescued from North Sea waters and saved by the new revival techniques. Did this mean that everything of the sort was hidden away with other data which, the doctors didn’t want to show?

Wishing to leave the four Germans in a frame of mind not to destroy their records, the American concealed his suspicions, and, for the time being, transferred his search elsewhere.

Chance suddenly played into his hands. The Allied radio one night broadcast a grim tale of the Dachau concentration camp. Researches on death, and treatment of shock, from exposure to cold had been performed on prisoners. The broadcast named the leading experimenter, one Dr. Rascher, and called him a member of the medical staff of the SS.

For Alexander this was a lead. He happened just to have learned that the American Seventh Army had recently captured a vast mass of especially secret SS records. He therefore headed for the Seventh Army Documents Center to see what was there.

There was more than he anticipated. Even to the complete and final report — Himmler’s personal copy, with his green-penciled annotations, all over it — with the names of Rascher and all others involved, and containing all the damning details of the almost unbelievable experiments.

Victims had been immersed naked in ice water until they lost consciousness. All the time elaborate testings were constantly made: rectal, skin, and interior-of-the-stomach temperatures; pulse, blood sugar, blood chlorides, blood count and sedimentation; urine tests; spinal fluid. Appendix 7, Figure 5, showed that seven subjects were chilled to death beyond revival in from fifty-three to one hundred and six minutes.

“This table,” Alexander commented in his own report, “is certainly the most laconic confession of seven murders in existence.”

It had been with the rest of the documents — in Himmler’s private cave in mountain at Hallein. Even though the aide of the mountain had been dynamited down over the cave mouth, the American searchers had found it.

The earliest Joint Intelligence Objectives search teams were followed by others, which were to dig out industrial and scientific secrets in particular. The Technical Industrial Intelligence Committee was one group of these, composed of three hundred and eighty civilians representing seventeen American industries. Later came the teams of the Office of the Publication Board itself and many mow groups direct from private industry. Of the latter — called, in Germany, Field Intelligence Agencies, Technical (FIAT) — there have been over five hundred; of one to ten members each, operating by invitation and under the aegis of the OPB.

Today the search still goes on. The Office of Technical Services has a European staff of four to five hundred J At Hoechst, it has one hundred abstractors who struggle feverishly to keep ahead of the forty OTS document-recording cameras which route to them each month over one hundred thousand feet of microfilm.

II

What did we find? You’d like some outstanding examples from the war secrets collection?

The head of the communications unit of Technical Industrial Intelligence Branch opened his desk drawer and took out the tiniest vacuum tube I had ever seen. It was about half thumb-size.

“Notice it is heavy porcelain — not glass — and thus virtually indestructible. It is a thousand watt — one-tenth the size of similar American tube. Today our manufacturers know the secret of making it … And here’s something …”

He pulled some brown, papery-looking ribbon off a spool. It was a quarter-inch wide, with a dull and a shiny side.

“That’s Magnetophone tape,” he said. “It’s plastic, metallized on one side with iron oxide. In Germany that supplanted phonograph recordings. A day’s Radio program can be magnetized on one reel. You can demagnetize it, wipe it off and put a new program on at any time. No needle; so absolutely no noise or record wear. An hour-long reel costs fifty cents.” He showed me then what had been two of the most closely-guarded technical secrets of the war: the infra-red device which the Germans invented for seeing at night, and the remarkable diminutive generator which operated it. German cars could drive at any speed in a total blackout, seeing objects clear as day two hundred meters ahead. Tanks with this device could spot targets two miles away. As a sniper scope it enabled German riflemen to pick off a man in total blackness.

There was a sighting tube, and a selenium screen out front. The screen caught the incoming infra-red light, which drove electrons .from the selenium along the tube to another screen which was electrically charged and fluorescent. A visible image appeared on this screen. Its clearness and its accuracy for aiming purposes were phenomenal. Inside the tube, distortion of the stream of electrons by the earth’s magnetism was even allowed for!

The diminutive generator — five inches across — stepped up current from an ordinary flashlight battery to 15,000 volts. It had. ‘a walnut-sized motor which spun a rotor at 10,000 rpm — so fast that originally it had destroyed all lubricants with the great amount of ozone it produced. The Germans had developed a new grease: chlorinated paraffin oil. The generator then ran 3,000 hours!

A canvas bag on the sniper’s back housed the device. His rifle had two triggers. He pressed one for a few seconds to operate the generator and the scope.. Then the other to kill his man in the dark. “That captured secret,” my guide de-dared, “we first used at Okinawa — to-the bewilderment of the Japs.”

We got, in addition, among these prize secrets, the technique and the machine for making the world’s most remarkable electric condenser. Millions of condensers are essential to the radio and radar industry. Our condensers were always made of metal foil. This one is made of .paper, coated with 1/250,000 of an inch of vaporized zinc. Forty per cent smaller, twenty per cent cheaper than our condensers, it is also self-healing. That is, if a breakdown occurs (like a fuse blowing out), the zinc film evaporates, the paper immediately insulates, and the condenser is right again. It: keeps on working through multiple breakdown — at fifty per cent higher voltage than our condensers! To most American radio experts this is magic, double-distilled.

Mica was another thing. None is mined in Germany, so during the war our Signal Corps was mystified. Where was Germany getting it?

One, day certain piece of mica was handed to one of our experts in the U.S. Bureau of Mines for analysis and opinion. “Natural mica,” he reported, “and no impurities.”

But the mica was synthetic. the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Silicate Research had discovered how to make it and — something which had always eluded scientists — in large sheets.

We know now, thanks to FIAT teams, that ingredients of natural mica were melted in crucibles of carbon capable of taking 2,350 degrees of heat, and then — this was the real secret — cooled in a special way. Complete absence of vibration was the first essential. Then two forces directly perpendicular to each other were applied. One, vertically, was a controlled gradient of temperature in the cooling. At right angles to this, horizontally, was introduced a magnetic field. This forced the formation of the crystals in large laminated sheets on that plane.

“You see this … the head of Communications Unit, TIIB, said to me. It was metal, and looked like a complicated doll’s house with the roof off. “It is the chassis or frame, for a radio. To make the same thing, Americans would machine cut, hollow, shape, fit — a dozen different processes. This is done on a press in one operation. It is called the ‘cold extrusion’ process. We do it with some soft, splattery metals. But by this process the Germans do it with cold steel! Thousands of parts now made as castings or drop forgings or from malleable iron can now be made this way. The production speed increase is a little matter of one thousand per cent.”

This one war secret alone, many American steel men believe, will revolutionize dozens of our metal fabrication industries.

In textiles the war secrets collection has produced so many revelations, that American textile men are a little dizzy. There is a German rayon-weaving machine, discovered a year ago by the American ‘Knitting Machine’ Team, which increases production in relation to floor space by one hundred and fifty percent. Their “Links-Links” loom produces a ladderless, run-proof hosiery. New German needle-making machinery, it is thought will revolutionize that business in both the United Kingdom and the United States. There is a German method for pulling the wool from sheepskins without injury to hide or fiber, by use of an enzyme. Formerly the “puller” — a trade secret — was made from animal pancreas from American packing houses. During the war the Nazis made it from a mold called aspergil paraciticus, which they seeded in bran. It results not only in better wool, but in ten per cent greater yield.

Another discovery was a way to put a crimp in viscose rayon fibers which gives them the appearance, warmth, wear resistance, and reaction-to-dyes of wool. The secret here, our investigators found, was the addition to the cellulose of twenty-five per cent fish protein.

But of all the industrial secrets, perhaps, the biggest windfall came from the laboratories and plants of the great German cartel, I. G. Farbenindustrie. Never before, it is claimed, was there such a store-house of secret information. It covers liquid and solid fuels, metallurgy, synthetic rubber, textiles, chemicals, plastics. drugs, dyes. One American dye authority declares:

“It. includes the production know-how and the secret formulas for over fifty thousand dyes. Many of them are faster and better than ours. Many are colors we were never able to make. The American dye industry will be advanced at least ten years.”

III

IN MATTERS of food, medicine, and branches of the military art the finds of the search teams were no less impressive. And in aeronautics and guided missiles they proved to be downright alarming. One of the food secrets the Nazis had discovered was a way to sterilize fruitjuices without heat. The” juice was filtered, then cooled, then carbonated and stored under eight atmospheres of carbon-dioxide pressure. Later the carbon-dioxide was removed; the-juice passed through another filter — which, this time, germ-proofed it — and then was bottled. Some thing, perhaps, for American canners to think about.

Milk pasteurization by ultra-violet light has always failed .in other countries, but the Germans had found how to do it by using light tubes of great length, and simultaneously how to enrich the milk with vitamin D.

At a plant in Kiel, British searchers of the Joint Intelligence Objectives Committee found that cheese was being made — “good quality Hollander and Tilitser” — by a new method at unheard-of speed. “Eighty minutes from the renneting to the hooping of the curd,” report the investigators. The cheese industry around the world had never been able to equal that.

Butter (in a creamery near Hamburg) was being produced by something long wished for by American butter makers: a continuous butter making machine. An invention of dairy equipment manufacturers in Stuttgart, it took up less space than American churns and turned out fifteen hundred pounds an hour. The machine was promptly shipped to this country to be tested by the American Butter Institute.

Among other food innovations was a German way of making yeast in almost limitless quantities. The waste sulfite liquor from the beechwood used to manufacture cellulose was treated with an organism known to bacteriologists as candida arborea at temperatures higher than ever used in yeast manufacture before. The finished product served as both animal and human food. Its caloric value is four times that of lean meat, and it contains twice as much protein.

The Germans also had developed new methods of preserving food by plastics and new, advanced refrigeration techniques. Refrigeration and air-conditioning on German U-boats had become so efficient that the submarines could travel from Germany to the Pacific, operate there for two months, and then return to Germany without having to take on fresh water for the crew. A secret plastics mixture (among its ingredients were polyvinyl acetate, chalk, and talc) was used to coat bread and cheese A loaf fresh from the oven was dipped, dried, redipped, then heated half an hour at 285 degrees. It would be unspoiled and good to eat eight months later.

As for medical secrets in this collection,” one Army-surgeon has remarked, “some of them will save American medicine years of research; some of them are revolutionary — like, for instance, the German technique for treatment after prolonged and usually fatal exposure to cold.” This discovery — revealed to us by Major Alexander’s search already mentioned — reversed everything medical science .thought about the subject. In every one of the dread experiments the subjects were most successfully revived, both temporarily and permanently, by immediate immersion in hot water. In two cases of complete standstill of heart and cessation of respiration, a hot bath at 122 degrees brought both subjects back to life. Before our war with Japan ended, this method was adopted as the treatment for use by all American Air-Sea Rescue Services, and it is generally accepted by medicine. today.

German medical researchers had discovered a way to produce synthetic blood plasma. Called capain, it was made on a commercial scale and equaled natural plasma, in results. Another discovery was periston, a substitute for the blood liquid. An oxidation production of adrenalin (adrenichrome) was produced in quantity successfully only by the Nazis and was used with good results in combating high blood pressure (of which 750,000 persons die annually in the United States). Today we have the secret of manufacture and considerable of the supply.

Likewise of great importance medically were certain researches by Dr. Boris Rojewsky of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Biophysics at Frankfurt. These were on the ionization of air as related to health. Positively ionized air was discovered to have deleterious effects upon human well-being, and to account for the discomfort and depression felt at times when the barometer is falling. In many persons, it was found, its presence brought on asthma, hay fever, and nervous tension. It raised high blood pressure, sometimes to the danger point. It would bring on the symptoms common in mountain sickness-labored and rapid breathing, dizziness, fatigue, sleepiness.

Negatively ionized air, however, did all the opposite. It was exhilarating, creating a feeling of high spirits and well-being. Mental depression was wiped out by it. In pathological cases it steadied breathing, reduced high blood pressure, was a check on allergies and asthma. The importance of its presence wherever human beings live, work, or recuperate from illness may some day make its production one of the major functions of air conditioning.

IV

But of highest significance for the future were the Nazi secrets in aviation and in various types of missiles.

“The V.2 rocket, which bombed London,” an Army Air Force publication reports, “was just a toy compared to what the Germans had up their sleeve.”

When the war ended, we now know, they had 138 types of guided missiles in various stages of production or development, using every known kind of remote control and fuse: radio, radar, wire, continuous wave, acoustics, infra-red, light beams, and magnetics, to name some; and for power, all methods of jet propulsion for either subsonic or supersonic speeds. Jet propulsion had even been applied to helicopter flight. The fuel was piped to combustion chambers at the rotor blade tips, where it exploded, whirling: the blades around like a lawn sprinkler or pinwheel. As for rocket propulsion, their A-4 rocket, which was just getting into large scale production when the war ended, was forty-six feet long, weighed over 24,000 pounds, and traveled 230 miles. It rose sixty miles above the earth and had a maximum speed of 3,735 miles an hour — three times that of the earth’s rotation at the equator. The secret of its supersonic speed, we know today, lay in its rocket motor which used liquid oxygen and alcohol for fuel. It was either radio controlled or self-guided to its target by gyroscopic means. Since its speed was supersonic, it could not be heard before it struck.

Another German rocket which was coming along was the A-9. This was bigger still — 29,000 pounds — and had wings which gave it a flying range of 3,000 miles. It was manufactured at the famous Peenemünde army experiment station and achieved the unbelievable speed of 5,870 miles an hour.

A long range rocket-motored bomber which, the war documents indicate, was never completed merely because of the war’s quick ending, would have been capable of flight from Germany to New York in forty minutes. Pilot-guided from a pressurized cabin, it would have flown at an altitude of 154 miles. Launching was to be by catapult at 500 miles an hour, and the ship would rise to its maximum altitude in as short a time as four minutes. There, fuel exhausted, it would glide through the outer atmosphere, bearing down on its target. With one hundred bombers of this type the Germans hoped to destroy any city on earth in a few days’ operations.

Little wonder, then, that today Army Air Force experts declare publicly that in rocket power and guided missiles the Nazis were ahead of us by at least ten years.

The Germans even had devices ready which would take care of pilots forced to leave supersonic planes in flight. Normally a pilot who stuck his head out at such speeds would have it shorn off. His parachute on opening would burst in space. To prevent these calamitous happenings an ejector seat had been invented which flung the pilot clear instantaneously. His chute was already burst, that is, made of latticed ribbons which checked his fall only alter the down-drag of his weight began to close its holes.

A Nazi variation of the guided air missile was a torpedo for underwater work which went unerringly to its mark, drawn by the propeller sound of the victim ship from as far away as ten miles. This missile swam thirty feet below the water, at forty miles an hour, and left no wake. When directly under its target, it exploded.

All such revelations naturally raise the question: was Germany so far advanced in air, rocket, and missile research that, given a little more time, she might have won the war? Her war secrets, as now disclosed, would seem to indicate that possibility. And the Deputy Commanding General of Army Air Forces Intelligence, Air Technical Service Command, has told the Society of Aeronautical Engineers within the past few months:

“The Germans were preparing rocket surprises for the whole world in general and England in particular which would have, it is believed, changed the course of the war if the invasion had been postponed for so short a time as half a year.”

V

For the release and dissemination of all these ‘one-time secrets the Office of the Publication Board was established by an order of President Truman within ten days after Japan surrendered. ‘The order directed that not only enemy war secrets should be published, but also (with some exceptions) all American secrets, scientific and technical, of all government war boards. (The Office of Scientific Research and Development, the National Research Council, and other such.) And thereby was created what is being termed now the biggest publishing problem a government agency ever had to handle.

For the war secrets, which conventionally used to be counted in scores, will run to three-quarters of a million separate documentary items (two-thirds of them on aeronautics) and will require several years and several hundreds of people to screen and prepare them for wide public use.

Today translators and abstracters of the Office of Technical Services, successor to the OPB, arc processing them at the rate of about a thousand a week. Indexing and cataloguing the part of the collection which will be permanently kept may require more than two millions cards; and at Wright Field the task is so complicated that electric punch-card machine; are to be installed. A whole new glossary of German-English terms has had to be compiled — something like forty thousand words on new technical and scientific items.

With so many documents, it has, of course, been impossible because of time and money limitations to reprint or reproduce more than a very few. To tell the public what is available, therefore, the OTS issues a bibliography weekly. This contains the newest war secrets information as released — with titles, prices of copies currently available or to be made up, and an abstract of contents.

The original document, or the microfilm copy, is then generally sent to the Library of Congress, which is now the greatest depository. To make them more easily accessible to the public, the Library sends copies, when enough are available, to about 125 so-called “depository” libraries throughout the United States.

And is the public doing anything with these one-time war secrets? It is — it is eating them up. As many as twenty thousand orders have been filled in a month, and the order rate is now a thousand items a day. Scientists and engineers declare that the information is “cutting years from the time we would devote to problems already scientifically investigated.” And American business men …! A run through the Publication Board’s letters file shows the following;

The Bendix Company in South Bend, Indiana, writes for a German patent on the record player changer “with records stacked above the turntable.” Pillsbury Mills wants to have what is available on German flour and bread production methods. Kendall Manufacturing Company (“Soapine”) wants insect repellent compounds. Pioneer Hi-Bred Corn Company, Iowa, asks about “interrogation of research workers at the agricultural high school at Hohenheim.” Pacific Mills requests I. G. Farbenindustrie’s water-repellent, crease-resistant finish for spun rayon. The Polaroid Company would like something on “the status of exploitation of photography and optics in Germany.” (There are, incidentally, ten to twenty thousand German patents yet to be screened.)

The most insatiable customer is Amtorg, the Soviet Union’s foreign trade organization. One of its representatives walked into the Publication Board office with the bibliography-in hand and said, “I want copies of everything.” The Russians sent one order in May for $5,594.00 worth — two thousand separate war secrets reports. In general, they buy every report issued. Americans, too, think there is extraordinarily good prospecting in the war secrets lode. Company executives practically park on the OTS’s front doorstep, wanting to be first to get hold of a particular report on publication. Some information is so valuable that to get it a single day ahead of a competitor, may be worth thousands of dollars. But the OTS takes elaborate precautions to be sure that no report is ever available to anyone before general public release.

After a certain American aircraft company had ordered a particular captured war document, it was queried as to whether the information therein had made it or saved it any money. The cost of the report had been a few dollars. The company answered: “Yea — at least a hundred thousand dollars.”

A research head of another business firm took notes for three hours in the OTS offices one day. “Thanks very much,” he said, as he stood to go, “the notes from these documents are worth at least half a million dollars to my company.”

And after seeing the complete report the German synthetic fiber industry, one American manufacturer remarked:

“This report would be worth twenty million dollars to my company if it could have it exclusively.”

Of course you, and anybody else, can now have it, and lots of other once secret information, for a few dollars. All the war secrets, as released, are completely in the public domain.

One of the accusations most often hurled at Holocaust revisionists is that even the Nazi leaders acknowledged the mass murder of Jews, claiming that they were just following orders.

Here is what was actually said by those Nuremberg defendants who addressed the charges of genocide. (Not all the defendants addressed this issue, but here is what was said by those who did.) Note that virtually all of the defendants accepted the fact that mass exterminations of Jews had occurred.

Two Hundred and Sixteenth Day, Saturday, 31 August 1946

[Trial of the Major War Criminals Before the International Military Tribunal. Volume XXII. Proceedings: August 31, 1946. pp. 366-394.]

THE PRESIDENT: Article 24 D (j) provides that each defendant may make a statement to the Tribunal. I therefore now call upon the defendants who wish — whether they wish — to make statements. Defendant Hermann Wilhelm Göring.

HERMANN WILHELM GÖRING (Defendant): … Repeatedly we have heard here how the worst crimes were veiled with the most secrecy. I wish to state expressly that I condemn these terrible mass murders to the utmost, and cannot understand them in the least. But I should like to state clearly once more before the High Tribunal, that I have never decreed the murder of a single individual at any time, and neither did I decree any other atrocities or tolerate them, while I had the power and the knowledge to prevent them.

The new allegation presented by Mr. Dodd in his final speech, that I had ordered Heydrich to kill the Jews, lacks every proof and is not true either. There is not a single order signed by me or signed in my behalf that enemy fliers should be shot or turned over to the SD. And not a single case has been established where units of my Luftwaffe carried out things like that…

THE PRESIDENT: I call on the Defendant Rudolf Hess.

RUDOLF HESS (Defendant): … it is of the utmost importance that what I am saying be said under oath. Therefore I now declare once more: I swear by God the Almighty and Omniscient, that I will speak the pure truth, that I shall leave out nothing and add nothing. I ask the High Tribunal, therefore to consider everything which I shall say from now on as under oath. Concerning my oath, I should also like to say that I am not a churchgoer; I have no spiritual relationship with the Church, but I am deeply religious person. I am convinced that my belief in God is stronger than that of most other people. I ask the High Tribunal to give all the more weight to everything which I declare under oath, expressly calling God as my witness…

I was permitted to work for many years of my life under the greatest son whom my people has brought forth in its thousand year history. Even if I could, I would not want to erase this period of time from my existence. I am happy to know that I have done my duty to my people, my duty as a German, as a National Socialist, as a loyal follower of my Führer. I do not regret anything.

If I were to begin all over again, I would act just as I have acted, even if I knew that in the end I should meet a fiery death at the stake. No matter what human beings may do, I shall some day stand before the judgment seat of the Eternal. I shall answer to Him, and I know He will judge me innocent…

THE PRESIDENT: I call upon the Defendant Ernst Kaltenbrunner.

ERNST KALTENBRUNNER (Defendant): The Prosecution holds me responsible for the concentration camps, for the destruction of Jewish life, for Einsatzgruppen and other things. All of this is neither in accord with the evidence nor with the truth. The accusers as well as the accused are exposed to the dangers of a summary proceeding…

In the Jewish question I was just as much deceived as other high officials. I never approved or tolerated the biological extermination of Jewry. The anti-Semitism found in Party and State laws was still to be considered in time of war as an emergency defense measure. The anti-Semitism of Hitler, as we understand it today, was barbarism. I did not participate in either of these forms and maintain, as I shall show, that the discontinuance of the extermination of the Jews is to be traced to my influence on Hitler.

After the presentation of evidence several photographs were submitted which allegedly show my knowledge of crimes in concentration camps, the camp at Mauthausen, and my knowledge of the criminal tools which were used there. I never set foot in Camp Mauthausen, only that part of the labor camps where the stone quarry was located, where hardened criminals were employed according to law, but no Jews or political prisoners. The pictures show an administration building and nothing else. Affidavit USA-909, pictures 894 to 897-F, are therefore factually impossible and wrong. The picture with Hitler shows the visit to a building site in Linz, 35 kilometers away from Camp Mauthausen…

Does not the Prosecution even now see any discrepancy in the fact that Amt V of the RSHA exposed the crimes of Amt IV of the RSHA and the secret criminal clique? In this I see the proof of the fact that I never knew what was really going on, and at the moment when I realized what was taking place, I protested in my own office…

… The speed and excitement of the cross-examination did not permit me to recall that at the time when the commission of Amt V had long been active in the camps, I could no longer believe that there was any danger to Jewish life. My credibility has been doubted ever since then, but it would have been restored immediately if an enquiry had been made by the Prosecution with the International Red Cross at Geneva in proceedings which were not so summary…

THE PRESIDENT: I call on the Defendant Alfred Rosenberg.

ALFRED ROSENBERG (Defendant): … The thought of a physical annihilation of Slavs and Jews, that is to say, the actual murder of entire peoples, has never entered my mind and I most certainly did not advocate it in any way. I was of the opinion that the existing Jewish question would have to be solved by the creation of a minority right, by emigration, or by settling the Jews in a national territory over a ten-year period of time. The White Paper of the British Government of 24 July 1946 shows how historical developments can bring about measures which were never previously planned…

I frankly welcome the idea that a crime of genocide is to be outlawed by international agreement and placed under the severest penalties, with the natural provision that neither now nor in the future shall genocide be permitted in any way against the German people either…

THE PRESIDENT: I call upon the Defendant Hans Frank.

HANS FRANK (Defendant): Your Honors:…

There is still one statement of mine which I must rectify. On the witness stand I said that a thousand years would not suffice to erase the guilt brought upon our people because of Hitler’s conduct in this war. Every possible guilt incurred by our nation has already been completely wiped out today, not only by the conduct of our war-time enemies toward our nation and its soldiers, which has been carefully kept out of this Trial, but also by the tremendous mass crimes of the most frightful sort which — as I have now learned — have been and still are being committed against Germans by Russians, Poles, and Czechs, especially in East Prussia, Silesia, Pomerania, and Sudetenland. Who shall ever judge these crimes against the German people?…

THE PRESIDENT: I call upon the Defendant Wilhelm Frick.

WILHELM FRICK (Defendant): I have a clear conscience with respect to the Indictment. My entire life was spent in the service of my people and my fatherland. To them I have devoted the best of my strength in the loyal fulfillment of my duty…

THE PRESIDENT: I call upon the Defendant Julius Streicher.

JULIUS STREICHER (Defendant): Your Honors:

At the beginning of this Trial I was asked by the President whether I pleaded guilty in the sense of the Indictment. I answered that question in the negative.

The completed proceedings and the evidence presented have confirmed the correctness of the statement I gave at that time.

It has been established that:

(1) Mass killings were carried out exclusively upon orders by the Head of the State. Adolf Hitler, without other influence.

(2) The mass killings were carried out without the knowledge of the German people and in complete secrecy by the Reichsführer SS, Heinrich Himmler.

The Prosecution had asserted that mass killings would not have been possible without Streicher and his Stuermer. The Prosecution neither offered nor submitted any proof of this assertion.

It is clearly established that on the occasion of the Anti-Jewish Boycott Day in 1933, which I was ordered to lead, and on the occasion of the demonstration of 1938 ordered by Reich Minister Dr. Goebbels, I, in my capacity as Gauleiter, neither ordered, demanded, nor participated in any acts of violence against Jews.

It is further established that in many articles in my weekly paper, the Stuermer, I advocated the Zionist demand for the creation of a Jewish state as the natural solution of the Jewish problem.

These facts prove that I did not want the Jewish problem to be solved by violence.

If I or other authors mentioned a destruction or extermination of Jewry in some article of my weekly paper, the Stuermer, then these were strong statements in reply to provoking expressions of opinion by Jewish authors in which the extermination of the German people was demanded. According to his last testament the mass killings ordered by the leader of the State, Adolf Hitler, were supposed to be a reprisal which was only brought about by the course of the war, then recognized as becoming unfavorable.

These actions of the leader of the State against the Jews can be explained by his attitude toward the Jewish question, which was thoroughly different from mine. Hitler wanted to punish the Jews because he held them responsible for unleashing the war and for the bombing of the German civilian population.

It is deeply regrettable that the mass killings, which can be traced back to the personal decision of the leader of the State, Adolf Hitler, have led to a treatment of the German people which must also be considered as not humane. I repudiate the mass killings which were carried out, in the same way as they are repudiated by every decent German.

Your Honors! Neither in my capacity as Gauleiter nor as political author have I committed a crime, and I therefore look forward to your judgment with a good conscience…

THE PRESIDENT: I call upon the Defendant Walter Funk.

WALTER FUNK (Defendant): … Now, horrible crimes have become known here, in which the offices under my direction were partly involved.

I learned this here in court for the first time. I did not know of these crimes, and I could not have known them.

These criminal deeds fill me, like every German, with deep shame. I have examined my conscience and memory with the utmost care, and I have told the Court frankly and honestly everything that I knew and have concealed nothing. As far as the deposits of the SS in the Reichsbank are concerned, I only acted in performance of the official duties incumbent on me as President of the Reichsbank. According to law, the acceptance of gold and foreign currency was one of the business tasks of the Reichsbank. The fact that the confiscation of these assets was taking place through the SS agencies subordinate to Himmler could not arouse any suspicion in me. The entire police system, the border control, and especially the search for foreign currency in the Reich and in all occupied areas were under Himmler, but I was equally deceived and imposed upon by Himmler.

Until the time of this Trial, I did not know and did not suspect that among the assets delivered to the Reichsbank there were enormous quantities of pearls, precious stones, jewelry, gold objects, and even spectacle frames, and — horrible to say — gold teeth. That was never reported to me, and I never noticed it either. I never saw these things. But until this Trial I also knew nothing of the fact that millions of Jews were murdered in concentration camps or by the Einsatzkommandos in the East. Never did a single person say even one word to me about these things.

The existence of extermination camps of this kind was totally unknown to me. I did not know a single one of these names. I have never set foot in a concentration camp either.

I, too, assumed that some of the gold and foreign currency which was deposited in the Reichsbank came from concentration camps and I frankly stated this fact from the beginning in all of my interrogations. But according to German law everyone was obliged to deliver these assets.

Apart from that, the kind and quantity of these shipments from the SS were never made known to me. But how was I even to suspect that the SS had acquired these assets by desecrating corpses?

If I had known of these horrible circumstances, my Reichsbank would never have accepted these assets for storage and conversion into money. I would have refused, even risking the danger that it might have cost me my head. If I had known of these crimes, Your Honors, I would not be sitting in the defendant’s dock today, you may be convinced of that. In that case the grave would have been better for me than this tormented life, this life full of suspicions, slanders, and vulgar accusations.

Not a single human being has ever lost his life because of any measures decreed by me. I have always respected the property of others. I have always tried to help people in need and, as far as it lay within my power, to bring happiness and joy into their lives And for that, many will be grateful to me and remain grateful…

I, too, have made many mistakes; I, too, have let myself be deceived in many things and frankly acknowledge, I admit, that I have let myself be deceived all too easily, and in many ways have been too unconcerned and too gullible. Therein I see my guilt. but I consider myself free from any criminal guilt which I am supposed to have incurred in discharging my official duties. In that respect. my conscience is just as clear today as on the day when I entered this courtroom 10 months ago for the first time.

THE PRESIDENT: I call upon the Defendant Hjalmar Schacht.

HJALMAR SCHACHT (Defendant): … Justice Jackson has raised a new accusation against me in his final speech, which has not been discussed at all in the Trial until now. I am said to have planned to release Jews from Germany in exchange for a ransom in foreign currency. This, too, is untrue. Disgusted by the Jewish pogrom of November 1938, I managed to obtain Hitler’s approval to a plan which was to facilitate emigration for the Jews. I intended to place 1.5 billion Reichsmarks taken from confiscated Jewish property under the administration of an international committee, and Germany was to undertake the obligation to repay this amount to the committee in 20 yearly installments and in foreign currency, which is the exact opposite of what Justice Jackson asserted here.

I discussed this plan in December 1938 in London with Lord Bearsted of Samuel and Samuel, with Lord Winterton, and with the American representative, Mr. Rublee. They were all sympathetically disposed towards the plan. But since I was removed from the Reichsbank shortly afterwards by Hitler, the matter was dropped. Had it been carried through, not a single German Jew would have lost his life…

THE PRESIDENT: I call upon the Defendant Erich Raeder.

ERICH RAEDER (Defendant): This Trial, now that the evidence has been concluded, has had a beneficial result for the German nation; but an unexpected one for the Prosecution. Unimpeachable testimony has cleared the German people and with them all the persons in the same situation as myself of the most serious charge, the charge that they had known of the killing of millions of Jews and other people, if they had not actually participated in it. The attempt of the Prosecution, who through earlier interrogations had known the truth for a long time, and who nevertheless continued and repeated their accusations — with the raised finger of the preacher of morals — in the trial briefs and during cross-examinations, this attempt to defame the entire people has collapsed upon itself…

Trial of the Major War Criminals before the International Military Tribunal. Volume XVI. Proceedings June 21, 1946. pp. 524-528.

Note that the gases Speer refers to here are extremely fast-acting and deadly. Compare these descriptions to the known physical properties of Zyklon-B, the insecticide said to have been used by the Third Reich to murder millions of Jews and others. Then ask yourself, why would the Germans have used a slow-acting insecticide rather than a fast-acting poison gas, of which they had huge stockpiles?

[…]

MR. JUSTICE JACKSON: Leaving the question of your personal participation in these matters and coming to the questions dealt with in the second part of your examination, I want to ask you about your testimony concerning the proposal to denounce the Geneva Convention.

You testified yesterday that it was proposed to withdraw from the Geneva Convention. Will you tell us who made those proposals?

SPEER: This proposal, as I already testified yesterday, came from Dr. Goebbels. It was made after the air attack on Dresden, but before this, from the autumn of 1944 on, Goebbels and Ley had often talked about intensifying the war effort in every possible way, so that I had the impression that Goebbels was using the attack on Dresden and the excitement it created merely as an excuse to renounce the Geneva Convention.

MR. JUSTICE JACKSON: Now, was the proposal made at that time to resort to poison gas warfare?

SPEER: I was not able to make out from my own direct observations whether gas warfare was to be started, but I knew from various associates of Ley’s and Goebbels’ that they were discussing the question of using our two new combat gases, Tabun and Sarin. They believed that these gases would be of particular efficacy, and they did in fact produce the most frightful results. We made these observations as early as the autumn of 1944, when the situation had become critical and many people were seriously worried about it.

MR. JUSTICE JACKSON: Now, will you tell us about these two gases and about their production and their effects, their qualities, and the preparations that were made for gas warfare?

SPEER: I cannot tell you that in detail. I am not enough of an expert. All I know is that these two gases both had a quite extraordinary effect, and that there was no respirator, and no protection against them that we knew of. So the soldiers would have been unable to protect themselves against this gas in any way. For the manufacture of this gas we had about three factories, all of which were undamaged and which until November 1944 were working at full speed. When rumors reached us that gas might be used, I stopped its production in November 1944. I stopped it by the following means. I blocked the so-called preliminary production, that is, the chemical supplies for the making of gas, so that the gas production, as the Allied authorities themselves ascertained, after the end of December or the beginning of January, actually slowed down and finally came to a standstill. Beginning with a letter which is still in existence and which I wrote to Hitler in October 1944, I tried through legal methods to obtain his permission to have these gas factories stop their production. The reason I gave him was that on account of air raids the preliminary products, primarily cyanide, were needed urgently for other purposes. Hitler informed me that the gas production would have to continue whatever happened, but I gave instructions for the preliminary products not to be supplied any more.

MR. JUSTICE JACKSON: Can you identify others of the group that were advocating gas warfare?

SPEER: In military circles there was certainly no one in favor of gas warfare. All sensible Army people turned gas warfare down as being utterly insane since, in view of your superiority in the air, it would not be long before it would bring the most terrible catastrophe upon German cities, which were completely unprotected.

MR. JUSTICE JACKSON: The group that did advocate it, however, consisted of the political group around Hitler, didn’t it?

SPEER: A certain circle of political people, certainly very limited. It was mostly Ley, Goebbels and Bormann, always the same three, who by every possible means wanted to increase the war effort; and a man like Fegelein certainly belonged to a group like that too. Of Himmler I would not be too sure, for at that time Himmler was a little out of favor with Hitler because he allowed himself the luxury of directing an army group without being qualified.

MR. JUSTICE JACKSON: Now, one of these gases was the gas which you proposed to use on those who were proposing to use it on others, and I suppose your motive was …

SPEER: I must say quite frankly that my reason for these plans was the fear that under certain circumstances gas might be used, and the association of ideas in using it myself led me to make the whole plan.

MR. JUSTICE JACKSON: And your reasons, I take it, were the same as the military’s, that is to say, it was certain Germany would get the worst of it if Germany started that kind of warfare: That is what was worrying the military, wasn’t it?

SPEER: No, not only that. It was because at that stage of the war it was perfectly clear that under no circumstances should any international crimes be committed which could be held against the German people after they had lost the war. That was what decided the issue.

Document 3311-PS

• CHARGE NUMBER 6 OF THE POLISH GOVERNMENT AGAINST HANS FRANK: MASS MURDERS OF JEWS SYSTEMATICALLY CARRIED OUT AT THE EXTERMINATION CAMP OF TREBLINKA ESTABLISHED 1942; DESCRIPTION OF ATROCITIES THERE PERPETRATED; FRANK’S RESPONSIBILITY FOR THESE CRIMES (EXHIBIT USA-293)

Continue reading →

According to a U.S. Army report dated May 25, 1945, there were a total of 238,980 prisoners sent to Buchenwald during its 8-year history from July 1937 to April 11, 1945, and 34,375 of them died in the camp. This report was based on records confiscated from the camp after it was liberated by the Army.

According to an information booklet, obtained from the Buchenwald Memorial Site, records kept by the camp secretary show the number of deaths each year in Buchenwald, as follows:

“The horrendous death toll during the first three months of 1945 was due to a typhus epidemic in the camp. During the same time period, there were also severe epidemics in all the other major concentration camps in Germany. Typhus is spread by lice and prisoners coming into Germany from the death camps in Poland were the carriers of the lice. The worst epidemic of all was at Bergen-Belsen where 35,000 prisoners died in March and the first two weeks of April 1945. The death statistics from Buchenwald indicate that the typhus epidemic was being brought under control there.”

Webmaster note: The history of Buchenwald exemplifies the real history of German internment camps. Holocaust propagandists have taken the horrible tragedy of the last months of the War and falsly protrayed it as standard German policy toward inmates. The figures from Buchenwald show the real story. No gas chambers, no policy of extermination.

Source: usgovinfo.about.com/library/weekly/aa071101a.htm

[…]

[…] According to a July 2, 2001 National Archives press release, by March 20, 1942, a surreptitiously obtained document appears in the files of the United States Coordinator of Information (COI), a predecessor to the Central Intelligence Agency, clearly discussing the Nazi intent to eradicate European Jewry. The document is a translated copy of a dispatch filed by a Chilean diplomat on November 24, 1941. […]

[…]

The diplomat wrote to the Chilean government, translating part of the decree and making the following observations about Nazi policy in general:

The Jewish problem is being partially solved in the Protectorate [Reich Protectorate of Bohemia-Moravia], as it has been decided to eradicate all the Jews and send some to Poland and others to the town of Terezin, whilst looking for a more remote place.

The German triumph [in the war] will leave Europe freed of Semites. Those [Jews] who escape with their lives from this trial will certainly be deported to Siberia, where they will not have much opportunity to make use of their financial capabilities.

In proportion to the U.S.A. increasing its attacks on the Reich, Germany will expedite the destruction of Semitism, as she accuses international Judaism of all the calamities which have befallen the world.

The exodus of the Jews from the Reich has not had the results prophesied by the enemies of Germany: on the contrary: they have been replaced by Aryans with obvious advantage to everything and in everything, except in the usury line in which they are past masters.

[…]

Webmaster note: This is yet more confirmation that the German policy toward Jews was emigration if possible, expulsion if necessary.