Critique of the Matt Cockerill vs. Thomas Dalton Debate, Part 2

Matt Cockerill writes on page 38:

“Various colleagues of Höss who were interrogated on the matter – from Hans Aumeier, to Pery Broad, to Eduard Wirths, to Wilhelm Boger, to Wilhelm Clausen – similarly confessed to the role of Auschwitz as an extermination camp with mass gassings of Jews. Would you have our readers believe that all these men were tortured into false confessions?”

My response

Numerous Allies have confessed to torturing and intimidating German soldiers into making false confessions. For example, Benjamin Ferencz, who was a Harvard Law School graduate and enjoyed an international reputation as a world peace advocate, related a story concerning his interrogation of an SS colonel. Ferencz explained that he took out his pistol in order to intimidate him:[1]

“What do you do when he thinks he’s still in charge? I’ve got to show him that I’m in charge. All I’ve got to do is squeeze the trigger and mark it as auf der Flucht erschossen [shot while trying to escape]… I said ‘you are in a filthy uniform sir, take it off!’ I stripped him naked and threw his clothes out the window. He stood there naked for half an hour, covering his balls with his hands, not looking nearly like the SS officer he was reported to be. Then I said ‘now listen, you and I are gonna have an understanding right now. I am a Jew – I would love to kill you and mark you down as auf der Flucht erschossen, but I’m gonna do what you would never do. You are gonna sit down and write out exactly what happened – when you entered the camp, who was there, how many died, why they died, everything else about it. Or, you don’t have to do that – you are under no obligation – you can write a note of five lines to your wife, and I will try to deliver it…’ [Ferencz gets the desired statement and continues:] I then went to someone outside and said ‘Major, I got this affidavit, but I’m not gonna use it – it is a coerced confession. I want you to go in, be nice to him, and have him re-write it.’ The second one seemed to be okay – I told him to keep the second one and destroy the first one. That was it.”

The fact that Ferencz threatened and humiliated his witness and reported as much to his superior officer indicates that he operated in a culture where such illegal methods were acceptable.[2] Any Harvard law graduate knows that such evidence is not admissible in a legitimate court of law.

Ferencz further acknowledged the unfairness of the Dachau trials:[3]

“I was there for the liberation, as a sergeant in the Third Army, General Patton’s Army, and my task was to collect camp records and witness testimony, which became the basis for prosecutions… But the Dachau trials were utterly contemptible. There was nothing resembling the rule of law. More like court-martials… It was not my idea of a judicial process. I mean, I was a young, idealistic Harvard law graduate.”

The defense counsel in the Mauthausen trial at Dachau insisted that signed confessions of the accused, used by the prosecution to great effect, had been extracted from the defendants through physical abuse, coercion, and deceit.[4] Benjamin Ferencz admitted in an interview that these defense counsel’s claims were correct. Ferencz stated:[5]

“You know how I got witness statements? I’d go into a village where, say, an American pilot had parachuted and been beaten to death and line everyone up against the wall. Then I’d say, “Anyone who lies will be shot on the spot.” It never occurred to me that statements taken under duress would be invalid.”

Defense witnesses at the Mauthausen trial repeatedly testified to improper interrogation techniques used by the prosecution. For example, defendant Viktor Zoller, the former adjutant to Mauthausen commandant Franz Ziereis, testified that U.S. Lt. Paul Guth said:

“I received special permission and can have you shot immediately if I want to.”

When Zoller refused to sign a confession, Guth acted as if he was going to shoot Zoller. Zoller still refused to sign the confession and wrote:[6]

“I won’t say another word even though the court might think I am a criminal who refused to talk.”

Defendant Georg Goessl testified that Guth told him to add the words “and were injected by myself” to his statement. If Goessl did not write down what Guth dictated, Guth visually demonstrated to Goessl that he would be hanged. Goessl testified that he then signed the false statement and planned to clear up the matter in court.[7]

Defendant Willy Frey testified that a prosecution witnesses had never seen him before and wouldn’t be able to identify him if he didn’t have a number hanging around his neck. Frey testified that he had been severely beaten in Mossburg by an American officer. Frey signed his confession only because he was afraid that he would be beaten again.[8]

Defendant Johannes Grimm testified that he signed a false statement that Lt. Guth had dictated to Dr. Ernst Leiss. When asked why he signed this false statement, Grimm replied:

“I already described my mental condition on that day. I had memories of the previous interrogations. My left cheekbone was broken and four of my teeth were knocked out…”

Grimm further testified:[9]

“The only superior I had to obey was Lt. Guth telling me to write this sentence.”

U.S. defense attorney Lt. Patrick W. McMahon, in his closing argument to the Mauthausen court, said there was grave doubt that the defendants’ statements were freely given. Further, the striking similarity of the language made it obvious the statements contained only language desired by the interrogators. McMahon cited numerous examples in which defendants used similar language to say crimes committed at Mauthausen could not be ascribed to any one leader. Regarding shootings to prevent further escapes, McMahon also cited several examples where similar language was used in the defendants’ statements.[10]

McMahon said in his closing argument:[11]

“And so it goes with Drabek, Entress, Feigl, with Trauner, Niedermeyer, Haeger, Miessner, Riegler, Zoller, with Blei, with Eckert, with Striegel, with Eigruber, with Eisenhoefer, with Mack and Riegler. Let the court also note the unbelievable accusations that the affiants make against themselves. It is contrary to normal human conduct. People just don’t talk that way about themselves. Beyond any doubt, threats and duress were used to induce the signing of the untruthful statements in evidence.”

American attorney Willis N. Everett, Jr. also reported the torture and abuse of German defendants in the Malmédy trial at Dachau. Everett was assigned to defend the 74 German defendants accused of the Malmédy incident. The trial took place from May 16 to July 16, 1946, before a military tribunal of senior American officers operating under rules established by the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal.[12]

Everett and his staff of defense lawyers, interpreters and stenographers divided into several teams to interview the defendants. Everett wrote to his family of the experience:[13]

“Several defendants today said they thought they had had a trial… a Col. sat on the Court and his defense counsel rushed the proceedings through and he was to be hanged the next day so he might as well write up a confession and clear some of his other fellows seeing he would be hanged… another kind of court had black curtains… The Lt. Col. sat as judge at a black-draped table which had a white cross on it and the only light was two candles on either end. He was tried and witnesses brought in and he was sentenced to death, but he would have to write down in his own handwriting a complete confession. Then the beatings and hang-man’s rope, black hoods, eye gougers which they claimed would be used on them unless they confessed. Not a one yet wrote out his statement but each stated that the prosecution dictated their statements and they said it made no difference anyway as they would die the next day. So, on and on it goes with each one of the defendants. The story of each must have some truth because they have each been in solitary confinement.”

Many of the investigators in the Allied-run trials were Jewish refugees from Germany who hated Germans. These Jewish investigators gave vent to their hatred by treating the Germans brutally to force confessions from them. Joseph Halow, a Dachau trial court reporter, quit his job because he was outraged at what was happening there in the name of justice. He later testified to a U.S. Senate subcommittee that the most brutal interrogators had been three German-born Jews.[14]

The interrogations in the Russian Zone were also typically brutal and inhumane. A German physician reported his experience of the interrogations at a Russian camp:[15]

“The cellars of all the barracks are crammed with people, about 4,000 men and women, many of whom are interrogated every night by the NKVD officials. The purpose of these interrogations is not to worm out of the people what they knew – which would be uninteresting anyway – but to extort from them special statements. The methods resorted to are extremely primitive: people are beaten up until they confess to having been members of the Nazi Party. But the result is almost the opposite of what most of the people probably expect, that is, that those who hadn’t been party members would come off better. The authorities simply assume that, basically, everybody has belonged to the Party. Many people die during and after these interrogations, while others, who admit at once their party membership, are treated more leniently.”

Tuviah Friedman was a Polish Jew who survived the German concentration camps. Friedman said he beat up to 20 German prisoners a day to obtain confessions and weed out SS officers. Friedman stated:[16]

“It gave me satisfaction. I wanted to see if they would cry or beg for mercy.”

I will now examine the circumstances that led to the “confessions” of the German defendants listed by Matt Cockerill in his debate with Thomas Dalton.

Hans Aumeier was employed as a head of the Protective-Custody Camp at Auschwitz between mid-February 1942 and mid-August 1943. In his first interrogation by British prison guards on June 29, 1945, Aumeier spoke of the crematories at Auschwitz, without mentioning any gas chambers. Unsatisfied with this testimony, the interrogators demanded “exact data” on the gassings, with full details, including the number of victims per day, total numbers, and a “confession of his own responsibility” and that of the other perpetrators and persons responsible for giving the orders.

Aumeier was never asked if there were any gassings or whether or not he participated in them. Instead, he was essentially commanded to provide the details of the gassings and make a confession. The result of this subsequent “confession” by Aumeier was then commented upon by his British jailers in a “Report on the interrogation of prisoner no. 211, Sturmbannführer Aumeier, Hans” on August 10, 1945:[17]

“The interrogator is satisfied that the major part of the material of this report is in conformity with the truth as far as the facts are concerned, but the personal reactions of Aumeier and his way of thinking may change a bit when his fate gets worse.”

Thus, Aumeier was not interrogated to obtain information, but rather to make him confirm what the British had already decided was the truth.

Aumeier’s testimony on the gas chambers is full of untruths, and even contradicts the established version of the gassings. In order to have anything to say about the gassings, as the British demanded of him, Aumeier described the first experimental gassing as having occurred about a year later than the established historical version assumes today. Instead of the fall/winter 1941, the first experimental gassing according to Aumeier supposedly took place in the fall/winter of 1942. Aumeier had to say this, since he only arrived at Auschwitz in late February 1942. Otherwise, he could not satisfy his interrogators’ demands that he provide information on events which supposedly took place before he arrived at the camp. Aumeier’s initial reluctance to confirm this prescribed “truth” was probably broken by the fact that his fate could get worse, as his interrogators predicted, or that at least he had reason to believe that his fate would get worse.[18]

Unfortunately, Aumeier’s fate did get worse. He was hanged on January 24, 1948 in Krakow, Poland.

Pery Broad was kept in Allied custody for a long time. He was shipped from one prison to another so he could testify during several trials. As a potential co-perpetrator of the claimed mass murder at Auschwitz, his own life was hanging by a thread. He probably would not have lived very long if he had been extradited to Poland. But he managed to buy his freedom by giving his British captors what they wanted: detailed incriminating testimony with which the British managed to secure convictions for other defendants during the Belsen and Tesch trials.

There is one tell-tale document supporting this assumption. In the documentation about the Tesch trial, during which Broad testified, the following note by the British was found:[19]

“Perry [sic] Broad has recently given much useful information. He should therefore receive as good treatment as is possible within ALTONA Prison.”

Broad was lucky he was not executed by the Allies. His confessions were obviously bought, and enabled him to save his life.

Eduard Wirths, M.D. became the garrison physician of Auschwitz on September 6, 1942. Upon his arrival at Auschwitz, Wirths reported that there were more than 6,000 cases of typhoid fever and more than 30,000 cases of typhus. By upgrading the barracks, establishing new clinics, installing water pipes, erecting additional toilet facilities, and improving antiseptic measures, Wirths succeeded at least temporarily in suppressing the epidemics.[20]

At Christmas 1943, the Auschwitz inmates showed Wirths their appreciation by writing him a card that read:

“In the past year you have saved the lives of 93,000 people. We do not have the right to express our wishes to you. So, we wish to ourselves that you will remain here in the coming year. One for the prisoners of Auschwitz.”

This Christmas thank-you card cannot be reconciled with the belief that Dr. Wirths participated in the mass extermination of Jews in homicidal gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Obviously, the inmates at Auschwitz would not have given Dr. Wirths a Christmas thank-you card if Wirths had participated in the mass extermination of Jews.[21]

After the war, numerous Auschwitz inmates praised Dr. Wirths. The testimony of Irena Idkowiak is typical:[22]

“I testify hereby that Dr. Wirths always exerted himself most humanely in the interests of the prisoners and that thousands of prisoners remain alive on the score of his selfless efforts. This was acknowledged universally by us prisoners. His dedication went even so far that the wives of SS men complained that he gave prisoners priority over them.”

On September 16, 1945, Col. Draper in the British POW Camp Staumühle had prisoner Dr. Eduard Wirths brought before him. After they had shaken hands, Draper gazed at his own hands and then said in a soft but portentous voice:

“Now I have shaken hands with the man who, as the head doctor of Auschwitz, is responsible for the death of 4 million people. Tomorrow, I will interrogate you about it. Think about your responsibility tonight. And look at your hands.”

Unfortunately, that same night, Dr. Eduard Wirths hanged himself in his cell.[23]

Wilhelm Boger was an interrogation officer for the German State Police at Auschwitz. It was the investigative proceedings against Boger which led to the Auschwitz Trial in Frankfurt. Germar Rudolf provides an English translation of a statement made by Boger in July 1945, two weeks after he fell into Allied captivity. The language in this statement is terribly disconnected, which is remarkable since, until that time, Boger always wrote quite correct German. After only two weeks of captivity, Boger had completely “absorbed” the vocabulary and style of his interrogators, yet was unable to write even one coherent sentence. Boger’s interrogators almost certainly used extremely harsh measures to force Boger to write such a hysterical collection of disconnected exaggerations in “anti-fascist” rhetoric.[24]

I will now discuss why numerous legal experts, scholars and lawmakers have commented on the unfairness of the International Military Tribunal (IMT) and other Allied-run postwar trials. Although the IMT had an appearance of fairness in a courtroom setting, it was organized not to dispense impartial justice, but for political purposes. The victorious Allies had control over the judges, prosecution, defense, and execution of the surviving German leaders. Our Western concept of justice relies on the impartial administering of the law. Such justice is not possible when the judges are the political enemies of the accused, and when the accused are prosecuted for acts of war that the Allies themselves had committed.

Some leading Allied figures acknowledged that the IMT was organized primarily for political purposes. Norman Birkett, a British alternate judge at the IMT, stated in a private letter in April 1946 that “the trial is only in form a judicial process and its main importance is political.”[25] Chief U.S. prosecutor Robert H. Jackson stated that the IMT “is a continuation of the Allied war effort against Germany.”[26] Judge Iola T. Nikitchenko explained the Soviet view of the IMT:[27]

“The fact that the Nazi leaders are criminals has already been established. The task of the Tribunal is only to determine the measure of guilt of each particular person and mete out the necessary punishment – the sentences.”

The mostly political nature of the Nuremberg trials is also indicated by Nahum Goldmann in his book The Jewish Paradox. Goldmann, president of the World Jewish Congress (WJC), admitted that the idea of the Nuremberg Tribunal and German reparations originated with WJC officials. Only after persistent efforts by WJC officials were Allied leaders persuaded to accept the idea of the IMT.[28] Also, the WJC made sure that Germany’s extermination of European Jewry was a primary focus of the trial, and that the defendants would be punished for their involvement in Germany’s extermination process.[29]

Two Jewish U.S. Army officers played key roles in the Nuremberg trials. Lt. Col. Murray Bernays, a prominent New York attorney, persuaded U.S. War Secretary Henry Stimson and others to put the defeated German leaders on trial.[30] Col. David Marcus, a fervent Zionist, was head of the U.S. government’s War Crimes Branch from February 1946 until April 1947. Marcus was made head of the War Crimes Branch primarily in order “to take over the mammoth task of selecting hundreds of judges, prosecutors and lawyers” for the Nuremberg NMT Trials.[31]

Iowa Supreme Court Justice Charles F. Wennerstrum, who served as the presiding judge in the Nuremberg trial of German generals, resigned his appointment in disgust at the proceedings. He criticized the one-sided handling of evidence in the trials. Wennerstrum said that selection of the evidence in the trials was made by the prosecution from the large tonnage of captured German records. Wennerstrum stated:[32]

“If I had known seven months ago what I know today, I would never have come here… The high ideals announced as the motives for creating these tribunals have not been evident.”

Justice Wennerstrum also said that Jews dominated the staff of the Nuremberg Courts and were more interested in revenge than justice. He stated:[33]

“The entire atmosphere is unwholesome… Lawyers, clerks, interpreters, and researchers were employed who became Americans only in recent years, whose backgrounds were embedded in Europe’s hatreds and prejudices.”

Wennerstrum left the Nuremberg trials “with a feeling that justice has been denied.”

U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Harlan Fiske Stone said of Justice Robert Jackson, who left the U.S. Supreme Court to lead the IMT:

“Jackson is away conducting his high-grade lynching party in Nuremberg. I don’t mind what he does to the Nazis, but I hate to see the pretense that he is running a court and proceeding according to the common law. This is a little too sanctimonious a fraud to meet my old-fashioned ideas.”

Stone wondered on another occasion “whether, under this new [Nuremberg] doctrine of international law, if we had been defeated, the victors could plausibly assert that our supplying Britain with 50 destroyers was an act of aggression…”[34]

U.S. Sen. Robert A. Taft courageously denounced the Nuremberg trials in an October 1946 speech:

“The trial of the vanquished by the victors cannot be impartial no matter how it is hedged about with the forms of justice.”

Taft went on to state:[35]

“About this whole judgment there is a spirit of vengeance, and vengeance is seldom justice. The hanging of the eleven men convicted will be a blot on the American record which we will long regret. In these trials we have accepted the Russian idea of the purpose of the trials – government policy and not justice – with little relationship to Anglo-Saxon heritage. By clothing policy in forms of legal procedure, we may discredit the whole idea of justice in Europe for years to come.”

Several U.S. Congressmen also denounced the Nuremberg trials. For example, Congressman John Rankin of Mississippi declared:[36]

“As a representative of the American people I desire to say that what is taking place in Nuremberg, Germany is a disgrace to the United States… A racial minority, two and a half years after the war closed, are in Nuremberg not only hanging German soldiers but trying German businessmen in the name of the United States.”

Congressman Lawrence H. Smith of Wisconsin stated:[37]

“The Nuremberg trials are so repugnant to the Anglo-Saxon principles of justice that we must forever be ashamed of that page in our history… The Nuremberg farce represents a revenge policy at its worst.”

Gen. George Patton was also opposed to the war crimes trials. In a letter to his wife, he wrote:[38]

“I am frankly opposed to this war criminal stuff. It is not cricket and it is Semitic. I am also opposed to sending POWs to work as slaves in foreign lands, where many will be starved to death.”

Among many others expressing similar views, U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas wrote:[39]

“I thought at the time and still think that the Nuremberg trials were unprincipled. Law was created ex post facto to suit the passion and clamor of the time.”

U.S. Rear Adm. H. Lamont Pugh, former Navy surgeon general and commanding officer of the National Naval Medical Center, wrote concerning the Nuremberg trials:

“I thought the trials in general bordered upon international lunacy.”

Even Robert Jackson wrote in a letter dated October 12, 1945, to President Harry Truman:[40]

“[The Allies] have done or are doing some of the very things we are prosecuting the Germans for. The French are so violating the Geneva Convention in the treatment of [German] prisoners of war that our command is taking back prisoners sent to them. We are prosecuting plunder and our allies are practicing it. We say aggressive war is a crime and one of our allies asserts sovereignty over the Baltic states based on no title except conquest.”

As unfair as the IMT and later Nuremberg trials were, the trials held at Dachau were a total disgrace to our American justice system. For example, the Mauthausen trial began on March 29, 1946 and ended on May 13, 1946. It was among the biggest and most important of the Dachau trials, proceeding against 61 defendants, including camp personnel, prisoner functionaries and civilian workers. The Mauthausen trial is noteworthy in that it produced more death sentences than any other trial in American history.[41]

Chief U.S. prosecutor Lt. Col. William D. Denson argued that simple service at Mauthausen or any of its sub-camps constituted a war crime. Denson contended that Mauthausen was a “Class III extermination camp” with a common design to kill and torture its prisoners. Denson said that, since there was a common design to kill inmates at Mauthausen, defendants who had served at Mauthausen were guilty unless proven innocent.[42]

It took only 90 minutes for the seven judges to decide the fate of the 61 defendants in the Mauthausen trial. Fifty-eight of the 61 German defendants in the Mauthausen trial were convicted by the American military tribunal to be hanged. The other three defendants were sentenced to life imprisonment. Two of the defendants collapsed and had to be helped from the courtroom when they learned they were going to die.[43]

U.S. defense attorney Lt. Col. Douglas T. Bates, in his closing statement at the first Dachau trial, challenged the court’s use of the legal concept of common design. Bates said in his closing argument:[44]

“The most talked-of phrase has been ‘common design.’ Let us be honest and admit that common design found its way into the judgment for the simple expedient of trying 40 defendants in one mass trial instead of having to try one each in 40 trials. Where is the common design? Conspicuous by its absence, established for the purpose of trapping some defendants against whom there was a shortage of proof – by arguing, for example, that if Schoep was a guard in the camp, then he was equally responsible for everything that went on. There are guards at each gate of this American post today. Is it not far-fetched to say they are responsible for crimes that may be committed within the confines of this large area? If every one of the defendants is guilty of participating in that large common design, then it becomes necessary to hold responsible every member of the Nazi Party and every citizen of Germany who contributed to the waging of total war – and I submit that can’t be done.

I read this in Life magazine today: ‘Justice cannot be measured quantitatively. If the whole of Germany is guilty of murder, no doubt it would be just to exterminate the German people. The real problem is to know who is guilty of what.’ Perhaps the prosecution has arrived at a solution as to how an entire people can be indicted as an acting part of a mythical common design.

And a new definition of murder has been introduced along with common design. This new principle of law says, ‘I am given food and told to feed these people. The food is inadequate. I feed them with it, and they die of starvation. I am guilty of murder.’ Germany was fighting a war she had lost six months before. All internal business had completely broken down. I presume people like Filleboeck and Wetzel should have reenacted the miracle at Galilee, where five loaves and fishes fed a multitude.

There has been a lot of impressive law read by the chief counsel, and it is good law – Miller, Wharton. The sad thing is that little of it is applicable to the facts in this case. Perhaps we have not been diligent enough in seeking applicable law. Some think the prosecution has found applicable law in the Rules of Land Warfare on the doctrine of superior orders. We have no intention of arguing that executions by the German Reich were due process. Nevertheless, we contend that executions were the result of law of the then recognized regime in Germany and that members of the firing squad were simple soldiers acting in the same capacity as in any military organization in the world…

If law cloaks a bloodbath in Germany, the idea of law will be the real victim. Lynch law, of which we have known a good deal in America, often gets the right man. But its aftermath is a contempt for the law, a contempt that breeds more criminals. It is far, far better that some guilty men escape than that the idea of law be endangered. In the long run, the idea of law is our best defense against Nazism in all its forms

In closing, I ask permission to paraphrase a great statesman. Never in the history of judicial procedure has so much punishment been asked against so many on so little proof.”

Despite its unfairness, William Denson refused to acknowledge that the legal concept of common design should not apply in this case. Denson stated:[45]

“I do not want the court to feel that it is necessary to establish individual acts of misconduct to show guilt or innocence. If he participated in this common design, as evidence has shown, it is sufficient to establish his guilt.”

Unfortunately, William Denson’s argument that simple service at a German camp constitutes a crime has become the standard burden of proof in Holocaust cases. The defendants in these trials are all assumed to be guilty unless proven innocent.

Defenders of the Holocaust story have also taken extreme measures to prosecute perpetrators of the alleged crimes. John Demjanjuk, for example, was found not guilty by the Israeli Supreme Court in 1993 of being Ivan the Terrible at Treblinka. Demjanjuk returned to his home in Cleveland, Ohio and looked forward to a peaceful retirement after spending many years on death row in Israel. Unfortunately, in 2001 Demjanjuk was charged again on the grounds that he had instead allegedly been a guard named Ivan Demjanjuk at the Sobibór camp in Poland.

On May 11, 2009, Demjanjuk was deported from Cleveland to be tried in Germany. On May 12, 2011, Demjanjuk was convicted by a German criminal court as an accessory to the murder of 27,900 people at Sobibór and sentenced to five years in prison. No evidence was presented at Demjanjuk’s trial linking him to specific crimes. Instead, Demjanjuk was convicted under the new line of German legal thinking that a person who served at an alleged death camp can be charged as an accessory to murder because the camp’s sole function was to kill people. No proof of participation in a specific crime is required. Demjanjuk died in Germany before his appeal could be heard by a German Appellate Court.[46]

This new line of German legal thinking is breathtaking in its unfairness. It incorrectly assumes that some German concentration camps were used for the sole purpose of exterminating people when, in fact, none of them was. Moreover, this proposed German law finds a person guilty merely for being at a certain camp. People can be found guilty of a crime even when no evidence is presented that they committed a crime. Unfortunately, Jewish organizations have successfully been prosecuting and convicting many elderly German camp personnel under this new line of German legal thinking.[47]

Endnotes