The Journal of History     Spring 2005    TABLE OF CONTENTS

Voices of the Censored and Ignored:
Quotes from David Irving


Page 858 "p. 392 Hitler still referred to the 'Madagascar plan' in Table talk, July 24, 1942. SS General Karl Wolff estimated--in a confidential postwar manuscript--that altogether probably only some seventy men, from Himmler down to Höss, were involved in the liquidation program. The only evidence of a 'Führer Order' behind the program came from postwar testimony of SS Major Dieter Wisliceny, Eichmann's thirty-one-year-old adviser on Jewish problems attached to the Slovak government (e.g. in pretrial interrogations at Nuremberg on November 11 and 24, 1945, and written narrative dated Bratislava, November 18, 1946). He claimed the Slovaks had sent him to Berlin in July or August 1942 to check up on the fate of 33,000 next of kin of the 17,000 able-bodied Jews supplied for the German arms industry. Eichmann admitted to him that the 33,000 had been liquidated, and--said Wisliceny--pulled from his safe a red-bordered Immediate Letter, stamped 'Top State Secret,' with Himmler's signature and addressed to Heydrich and Pohl. It read (from memory): 'The Führer has decided that the Final Solution of the Jewish Question is to begin at once. I herewith designate [Heydrich and Pohl] responsible for the execution of this order.' However, there is a marked difference between Wisliceny's 1945 and 1946 recollections of this text; and when years later Eichmann was cross-examined about this in his trial on April 10, 1961, he testified that he had neither received any such written order nor shown one to Wisliceny (who had long since been executed himself). He had only told Wisliceny verbally, 'Heydrich sent for me and informed me that the Führer has ordered the physical annihilation of the Jews.'

This kind of evidence, of course, would not suffice in an English magistrate's court to convict a vagabond of bicycle stealing, let alone assign the responsibility for the mass murder of six million Jews, given the powerful written evidence that Hitler again and again ordered the 'Jewish Problem' set aside until the war was won.

Page 858 "p. 392 On the 'resettlement' of the Jews from Poland, see Himmler's letter of July 19, 1942, to SS General Friedrich Krüger, the SS and police chief at Cracow (T175/122/7914); and the report by the Reich transport ministry's state secretary, Theodor Ganzenmüller, nine days later to Himmler's adjutant Karl Wolff that since July 22 one train per day with five thousand Jews was leaving Warsaw for Treblinka, and that twice a week a train was leaving Przemysl with five thousand Jews for Belzek. Wolff replied on August 13 that it gave him 'special pleasure' to learn this--that 'daily trainloads of five thousand members of the Chosen People are going to Treblinka and that we are thus being enabled to accelerate this migration.' He assured Ganzenmüller he would do all he could to smooth their way. Wolff--as ignorant as Ganzenmüller of the true functions of Treblinka extermination camp--was tried in 1964 by a Munich court and sentenced to fifteen years in prison. In the Wolff trial, the notorious SS General von dem Bach-Zelewski testified on July 24, 1964, that in his view 'Hitler knew nothing of the mass destruction of the Jews' and that 'the entire thing began with Himmler'."

Page 863 "The laconic report by Himmler to Hitler that 363,211 Russian Jews had been executed as 'partisan accomplices and suspects' from August to November 1942 will be found on film T175/124."

Page 871 "p. 503 Himmler had ordered Korherr to make a statistical analysis of the Final Solution, by letter of January 18, 1943 (T175/18/1557) explaining that Kaltenbrunner's office 'lacked the necessary expert precision.' The draft and shortened final reports, and Himmler's related correspondence, are on microfilm R175/103/5017 et seq.). As the ribbon copy of the shorter version is still in Himmler's files, it may not even have gone to Hitler. Nor did several letters which at about this time reached Dr. Hans Lammers alleging that Jews were being methodically exterminated in Poland (ND, NG-1903). At the Nuremberg war crimes trials, Lammers stated that he followed up these reports by asking Himmler. 'Himmler denied that there was any authorized killing going on and told me--making reference to the Führer's orders--'I have to evacuate the Jews and in such evacuations there are...obviously fatalities. Apart from those, the people are being housed in camps in the East.' And he fetched a mass of pictures and albums and showed me how the Jews were being put to work in the camps on war production, in shoe factories, tailors' shops, and the like. Then he told me: 'This job comes from the Führer. If you think you must put a stop to it, then go and tell the Führer' " (IMT, Vol. XI, page 62)."

Page 872 "p. 509 On the deportation of Hungary's Jews, see the AA's letter to Bormann, March 9, 1943 (Serial 5231 pages E310707 et seq.), and the Abwehr's security objections--in a letter to the AA--against allowing large units of Hungarian Jews to come near German military movements (ibid., K206893). According to Schmidt's notes, Ribbentrop went even further than Hitler in one outburst to Horthy, exclaiming  'that the Jews must either be destroyed or put in concentration camps--there is no other way' (a wording which caused Ribbentrop some discomfiture in the witness box at Nuremberg). Horthy copied the wording into his 1953 memoirs (page 254) but put them in Hitler's mouth! Secret Hungarian records do not echo the wording in such bluntness. In a draft letter to Hitler on May 7, Horthy included a sentence--later deleted--'Your Excellency further reproached me that my government does not proceed with stamping out Jewry with the same radicalism as is practiced in Germany.' And in his discussion with the Hungarian envoy Sztójay a few days later Ribbentrop went no further than to remind him that Hitler had (in the summer of 1942) decreed that 'by the summer of 1943 all Jews of Germany and the German occupied countries are to be moved to eastern, i.e. Russian, territories.' Ribbentrop added that for security reasons Germany required her allies to conform--Mussolini had, for instance, just undertaken to intern the Jews in Italy (documents in National Archives, Budapest)."

Page 900 "I [Ribbentrop] thereupon spoke to Fräulein Eva Braun and asked her to influence the Führer to go to southern Germany, because if he was cut off in Berlin he could no longer lead and then the front lines might easily just cave in. Fräuline Braun told me she couldn't understand either--the previous day the Führer had been talking of probably flying down south; apparently somebody had talked him around to the opposite view."

Page 902 "My principal witness is Otto Günsche himself, who tape-recorded many hours of his recollections in 1967 and again in 1971 for me. Furthermore, I used interrogations of Kempka--who helped in burning the bodies--the secretaries Girda Christian, Traudl Junge and Ilse Krüger, and Goebbels adjutant Günther Schwägermann. Contrary to the otherwise reliable account of Les Bezymenski, Der Tod des Adolf Hitler (Hamberg, 1968)-based on Soviet documents--there is not the least doubt that Hitler shot himself as well as took poison, as in fact Artur Axmann privately told Milch in prison on March 1, 1948 (diary). Fragments of the cyanide phial were found in Hitler's jaw. And Life magazine published in July 1945 William Vandivert's excellent photogrphs of the bunker room and couch, on which the blood stains are clearly visible. Both Kempka and SS Brigadier Hans Rattenhuber (manuscript dated May 20, 1945, Moscow) noticed the bloodstains on the carpet too. the Walther pistol with which Hitler killed himself is now in private hands.

According to Goebbel's telegram to "Admiral Dönitz May 1, 1945, Hitler died at 3:30 P.M., April 30, 1945."




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