Made in Russia: The Holocaust

Made in Russia: The Holocaust by Carlos W. Porter. Uckfield, Sussex, England: Historical Review Press, 1988, Pb., 415 pages, $10.00, ISBN 0-939484-30-7.

A stumbling block for Revisionists, just as it was for the postwar German defendants, is the seeming wealth of documents and testimony assembled by Allied prosecutors for the Nuremberg trials. The more than sixty volumes of trial material which appeared in the wake of the “Trial of the Major War Criminals” and twelve subsequent trials before the (American) Nuremberg Military Tribunal have for many years supplied a massive compilation of apparently damning evidence against Germany's National Socialist regime. Most Exterminationists, academic and lay, believe that Germany's “aggression” in beginning the war, and the numerous atrocities and war crimes laid to the German account, above all the alleged Holocaust of European Jewry, are amply documented in the so-called “Nuremberg record.”

A critique of the Nuremberg trials, from a number of different angles, has been a staple of Revisionist writing since the trials. Revisionist authors who chose not to contest directly the Holocaust charges (e.g. F.J.P. Veale) attacked the trials for their various failings in equity, jurisdiction, etc. Holocaust Revisionists, such as Arthur Butz and Robert Faurisson, have focussed on specific abuses involved in producing testimony and evidence in support of the Holocaust, from physical and psychological pressure exerted to obtain confessions and affidavits to the authenticity of certain of the documents transcribed and reproduced in the various Nuremberg volumes.

To date no Revisionist, Holocaust or otherwise, has mounted an assault on the Nuremberg “evidence” equal in intensity to that undertaken by Carlos W. Porter in Made in Russia: The Holocaust. Porter's technique is to confront the documents directly, by reproducing page after page from the 42-volume Trial of the Maior War Criminals (the Blue Series).

Porter's tactic is audacious and provocative: he gives Allied prosecutors and their witnesses the floor and lets them strut their stuff for a good seventy-seven pages before deigning to answer their charges at any length. The catch is that most of the charges are so bizarre that Exterminationists have long since quietly let them lapse. Porter will have none of this, however: a stern Ghost of Holohoaxery Past, he puts the Nuremberg trials on trial by forcing the reader to confront the sort of tripe with which American, Soviet, British, and American prosecutors burdened the Germans and their leaders.

How many people know that at Nuremberg the Germans were accused of, along with killing about six million Jews:

• vaporizing 20,000 Jews near Auschwitz with “atomic energy”;
• killing 840,000 Russian POW's at Sachsenhausen concentration camp (in one month, with special pedal-driven brain-bashing machines, no less), then disposing of them in mobile [sic] crematoria;
• torturing and killing Jewish prisoners to the tempo of a specially composed “Tango of Death” in Lvov;
• steaming Jews to death like lobsters at Treblinka;
• electrocuting them en masse at Belzec;
• making not only lampshades and soap but also handbags, driving gloves, book bindings, saddles, riding breeches, gloves, house slippers, etc. from the remains of their victims;
• killing prisoners and concentration camp inmates for everything from having armpit hair to soiled underclothing?

Each of these grotesque claims is on display in Made in Russia, reproduced just as it appears in the Nuremberg volumes, and handily underlined and referenced for the convenience of researcher and skeptic alike.

After a sobering (or hilarious, depending on your point of view) survey of Nuremberg atrocity “evidence,” Porter reminds readers that at Nuremberg the Soviets introduced reams of so-called evidence purporting to demonstrate that it was the Germans, not Stalins’s henchmen in the secret police, who murdered over 4,000 Polish prisoners at Katyn, near Smolensk. As the author points out, an official Soviet stamp sufficed to make false affidavits, phony confessions, faked forensic reports and the like “evidence” admissible at Nuremberg under Articles 19 and 21 of the London Agreement of August 8, 1945, in which the Allied lawyers devised the rules which would bind judges and defense attorneys at the forthcoming “trial.” Americans, Britons, and Frenchmen currently gloating over Soviet discomfiture at the recent insistence of the Polish regime on finally laying the blame for Katyn where it belongs should recall that the Western Allies said not a public word at Nuremberg to challenge the Soviet “evidence” on Katyn (the judges quietly glossed over the Red charges by omitting them from their verdict).

It is the special service of Made in Russia: The Holocaust to remind readers that the same Soviet stamp which converted the fake Katyn reports into admissible evidence at Nuremberg also provided proof of the extermination of millions of Jews at Auschwitz, Majdanek, Treblinka, and elsewhere. As Porter emphasizes, physical and forensic evidence for the Holocaust was never introduced, nor is there any reason whatsoever to imagine it ever existed. All we have is a handful of “testimonies,” and “confessions,” and the reports of a number of Soviet or Soviet-controlled “investigative” commissions. If there was a Soviet Fred Leuchter, we have yet to hear from him (and probably never will). The same Red prosecutors who framed the victims of Stalin's purges at the Moscow show trials, and sent millions of innocents to their deaths in our gallant Soviet ally's Gulag archipelago, are the chief source for the vaunted Nuremberg evidence of the “Holocaust.”

Porter provides numerous examples of prosecution tactics, usually allowed by the judges, which would make hanging judge Roy Bean, or even Neal Sher, blanche. He points out that the prosecution made it difficult, if not impossible, for the defense lawyers to have timely access to the documents introduced into evidence by the prosecution; that “photocopies” and “transcripts” were almost invariably submitted in evidence by the prosecution instead of the original German documents, which in very many cases seem today to have disappeared; that the defendants rarely were able to confront their accusers, since “affidavits” from witnesses who had been deposed months or even weeks before sufficed; etc., etc., etc.

The author touches on many other aspects of the Holocaust legend, from the feasibility of homicidal gassing with Zyklon-B to the ease with which atrocity photos can be faked (just supply the right caption!) to the Allied prosecutors' propensity for introducing page after page of irrelevant evidence (Porter reproduces several cartoons from Julius Streicher's anti-Jewish Der Giftpilz [The Toadstool] which found their way into the “Nuremberg record”).

Made in Russia: The Holocaust is vulnerable to several minor criticisms. The many photographs which appear in Porter's book might have been better reproduced. Lawyers may cavil at a few of his interpretations, and doubtless other Revisionist researchers will find bones to pick here and there in some of his assertions on Zyklon, gas chambers, etc.

On balance, however, Made in Russia: The Holocaust is a book with something of value for every reader with an interest in Revisionism. Porter, a professional translator and businessman, writes with a mordant irony (the sillier Exterminationists may find a treasure trove of new atrocities to bewail here) and an admirable concision: Made in Russia can be gotten through in an hour and a half. After reading it, Revisionists will no longer be in the least awed by the Nuremberg trial volumes, and it is to be hoped that Porter's book will stimulate them to consult this dubious “record” for themselves.