Preamble

My intend is to show that, because of the many spy networks established in Germany and the occupied territories-, the numerous Germans who were opposed to National Socialism-, people in all walks of life including high ranking army officers, diplomats, bureaucrats, etc., if the Holocaust would have happened, details about it would have been known very early on, and those details propagated world wide.

But before I delve into the traitor/spy issue in The Third Reich, a few generalities first.

National Socialism came to be because of the thread Communism posed. Germany was to play a major role in the world revolution envisioned by Lenin et al, in fact, Lenin stated that there could be no world revolution without Germany. Communism was alive and well in Germany, in the last election before Hitler was appointed Chancellor, that of November 1932, almost 6 million Germans voted for the KPD, the Communist party, up from 5.2 million in the July election, translating into 100 seats in the Reichstag, a gain of 11 seats. When Hitler came to power, some of those Communists changed colors but many remained true to their Communist ideology, managed to conceal it. Those “closet communists” were people who worked in government offices, including the Foreign Office (Auswärtiges Amt=AA), had access to secret files and information. Not all of the opposition were Communists, of course, some were ideologically opposed to National Socialism, many of them had open channels to London, whereas the Communists-, and Communist sympathisers communicated with Moscow via spies installed by Moscow. To add to this, many high-ranking Officers in the armed forces were traitors.

A little about the Holocaust. The camps Auschwitz I and Birkenau were not located in isolated areas, access was restricted, but people from villages/towns around worked in the camps, prisoners were released, transferred to other camps, guards went on leave, etc. etc. Also, a well run resistance had been organized inside the camp, with contacts by various means to the outside. Treblinka, another alleged death camp, was located in the open as well, farmers from around sold milk, butter, bread, etc., to the camp staff daily, right at the gate. A village, Wolka Okraglik, was located only 1 kilometer to the east. Farmers tended fields which were practically surrounding the camp, making it impossible to conceal camp activities from prying eyes, especially since the so-called Totenlager was situated on an elevated part of the camp. And, “…scores of people escaped from Treblinka”, according to Nizkor/Yad Vashem http://www.nizkor.org/hweb/orgs/israeli/yad-vashem/yvs-camps-02-00.html
Yet, we had practically no detailed information from the time of the operation of the camp, just some allegations, most of them turned out to be untrue. Also, immediately following the war, “The Holocaust”, as it later became known, was hardly talked about.

To begin with: Who would have known? and: Why was not more known? The accusers at Nuremberg no doubt had a problem with this issue. Thus, they decided to have Höß, Auschwitz camp commandant from May 1940 to November 1943, state that only a few were in the know. The following is taken from day 174 of the IMT proceedings, Tuesday, 9 July 1946, p.65, extract from the deliberation by Dr, Kauffmann, counsel for the defendant Kaltenbrunner http://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/07-09-46.asp :

“This witness (Wanneck. Wilf) then finally confirmed the fact that this operation (The Final Solution. Wilf) was conducted independently through a direct channel of command from Himmler to Eichmann and said that the position of Eichmann, which already had been a dominating one when Heydrich was still alive, had increased steadily, so that eventually he had acted completely independently in the entire Jewish sphere. And here I add that, according to the statement of Hoess, the only man left alive who is familiar with this question, it is established that only about 200 or 300 people knew of that dreadful order of Himmler's which was given during a conference which lasted for 10 or 15 minutes, on the basis of which more than four million people were exterminated. And I add that a large nation of 80 million had learned little or probably nothing about these things which happened in the Southeast of the Reich during the war[…]”

Eichmann himself never acted independently. Also, Himmler was not the one giving those kind of orders, Hitler was, but that as an aside. According to this statement, 200 or 300 people knew of the order, but of the action itself, mass murder, “…80 million had learned little or probably nothing”. Impossible when considering the enormity of the undertaking.

We are talking of the assembling, transporting, murdering and body disposal of 5.1 (Hilberg) to 6 million Jews. Secrecy could not have been maintained long, many more must have been in the know. As the subject of traitors in all levels of government in the Third Reich, as well as that of the spy-rings operating in Germany proper and in the occupied territories, is being addressed it becomes more and more apparent that details would have been known. This the accusers at Nuremberg were aware of, undoubtedly, and care was taken to conceal it, to make believe that only a few would have known about the alleged Holocaust, or else the impossibility of keeping this a secret would have become apparent and the charges levelled exposed as untenable right then.

Prof. Raul Hilberg, may he RIP, in his “The Destruction of the European Jews”, was perhaps the first to acknowledge that a task of that extent, the alleged murder of up to 6 million Jews, must have involved thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people in all sorts of departments. His book was shunned at first, I have to suspect because it violated the secrecy issue and thus would have opened Pandora’s box. We are given different reasons for rejecting Hilberg’s book. Prof. Finkelstein writes:
http://www.normanfinkelstein.com/article.php?pg=3&ar=102

“It is hard now to remember that the Nazi holocaust was once a taboo subject. During the early years of the Cold War, mention of the Nazi holocaust was seen as undermining the critical U.S.-West German alliance. It was airing the dirty laundry of the barely de-Nazified West German elites and thereby playing into the hands of the Soviet Union, which didn't tire of remembering the crimes of the West German “revanchists.” The major American Jewish organizations rushed to make their peace with Konrad Adenauer's government (the Anti-Defamation League took the lead) while those holding commemorations for the Jewish dead were tagged communists, which as a rule they were.
In Eichmann in Jerusalem, published in the mid-1960s, Hannah Arendt could draw on only one other scholarly study apart from Hilberg's on the Nazi holocaust in the English language[…]”

This then one of the reasons offered, by Prof. Finkelstein, as to why the “Nazi holocaust was once a taboo subject” following WWII, but it is hardly convincing. Fritz Bauer, Hessian Attorney General from 1956 to 1968 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Bauer), in a conversation regarding the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem with Wayland B. Watters, American consul in Germany, on January 30,1960 gave another reason (the document I am quoting from was declassified in 2000 or 2002, hard for me to tell, I have no link to it but will copy it if necessary). Watters states in his report of February 7, 1961:

“Bauer did not think that Israel would be in any sort of a hurry with the Eichmann trial, on the contrary; nor did he think the trial would be particularly sensational. He seemed to feel all parties involved would “behave wisely” and that Ben Gurion’s main aim would be to secure “historical light” for internal educational purposes within Israel. (“Ben Gurion thinks the new generation in Israel is as unbelieving of Jewish passivity in the face of mass murder as the new generation in Germany is unbelieving of mass German guilt”, Bauer said)[…]”

Quotation marks in the original. Watters added at the end of the report, concerning Bauer:

“The reporting officer suspects, though he can in no way document his supposition, that Bauer may well be connected in some high-ranking capacity with the Israeli Intelligence Service in West Germany”.

This to demonstrate that even as late as 1961, “The Holocaust” was being downplayed, because, as Ben Gurion realized, the story presented was unbelievable. No investigations, by experts in the field of criminal investigations, have been undertaken since then; still by now all of it is presented as fact.

Back to the question: Who would have known? On February 25, 2008, an article appeared in “Die Welt”, a German daily, titled “Hitlers willige Vollstrecker im Auswärtigen Amt”(Hitler’s willing executioners in the foreign office), by Sven Felix Kellerhoff. The author tells us that a commission of historians concluded that the foreign office (AA) had been: “…tief in die Verbrechen der Nationalsozialisten verstrickt” (deeply involved in National Socialist crimes), this according to Eckhard Conze, chairman of the commission. However, after the war no issue was made of this, because: “Man schüttet kein dreckiges Wasser aus wenn man kein reines hat”(one does not pour out dirty water if no clean water is available). This is also not convincing because it is a simplification, an attempt to rationalize. Kellerhoff followed this up, the next day, with another article on the same subject, titled: “Zentrale Behörde des Nazi-Regimes”(central governing body of the Nazi regime), referring to the AA. I will comment on this later.

Then, on March 10, 2008, an article appeared in “Der Spiegel”, Germany’s best known political magazine, bearing the title: “Ich zielte ruhig auf die Säuglinge”(I steadily aimed at infants), by Georg Bönisch and Klaus Wiegrefe. In the first paragraph we are told that dentists, opera singers, teachers and school dropouts were actively involved in the destruction of European Jewry, 200 000 of them, Germans and Austrians, with an additional 200 000 Estonians, Ukrainians, Lithuanians and other foreigners as helpers, willingly or forced. Thus, we have 400 000 directly involved in the, alleged, mass murder of 5.1 to 6 million Jews, these people going home on leave, celebrate perhaps consuming alcoholic beverages which would have loosened their tongue, etc., still, nothing of substance was known about the alleged mass killings during the operation or immediately following the war. How can that be if what is alleged had happened? All 400 000 committed “Nazis” who told no-one? Totally unbelievable. And why now the attempt to change the story “established” at the IMT? But then, “The Holocaust” is an ever changing story which does not bode well for its veracity.

Now back to the “willing helpers” in the AA. Annelies von Ribbentrop in her “Die Kriegsschuld des Widerstandes”(War guilt of the Resistance) demonstrates, her sources include declassified files from the British Foreign Office (DBFP=Documents of British Foreign Policy) that the AA housed many traitors who had excellent contacts to Britain and elsewhere. Robert M. W. Kempner, chief prosecutor in the so-called Wilhelmstraße-Trial, the trail of AA officials, wrote a book about it, titled: “Ankläger einer Epoche” (Accuser/plaintiff of an Epoch). In it he states that he was told by his investigators while preparing the trial, that all documents of the AA had been secured and are available (the Russians also found AA documents [A. Dulles “Germany’s Underground”, p.147]). Kempner then remembered that someone from Eichmann’s staff had told him that the AA had been made aware of all deportations of Jews (Wir haben bei Deportationen ja immer im Auswärtigen Amt nachgefragt). Therefore, if those deported would have been murdered, word would have leaked out and reported back. And since some of the AA officials were looking for an excuse to discredit Hitler, telling their English contacts about “The Holocaust” would have worked well. They would have investigated, some did, but found nothing.

The lines of communication were not just open to England, the Soviet Union had also built up very effective spy networks in Germany, as mentioned at the start, one of them dubbed “Die Rote Kapelle”(The Red Orchestra). People who relayed the messages to Russia via short wave were called “Pianists”, thus the name Orchestra and Red is obvious. Many of the spies were committed communists, intend on getting rid of Hitler and help set up a Communist Government in Germany (“Deadly Illusions’, J. Costello and O. Tsarev, p.84). Yet, with all that information transmitted to Moscow and London, no details about “The Holocaust” were published by the Soviets or British. In fact, Soviet prosecutors spoke of Russian citizens at the IMT, Jews were hardly mentioned. But, and this is my point, if mass murder would have happened details about it would have been known and publicized.

To be continued.
Wilfried Heink