The Führerbefehl according to the WJC in 1945: “All Jews must die, but not before going through suffering and agony”

By Thomas Kues-

In 1945, the World Jewish Congress prepared a report on the “Criminal Conspiracy” against the Jews perpetrated by the Third Reich for the authorities in charge of bringing about the International Military Tribunal. Of this report, the chapter “Charge Eight: Mass Annihilation, part II” is of special interest. The document, which is found among the records of the World Jewish Congress at the Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives, can be read online, courtesy of the Harry S. Truman Library & Museum website:

What did the World Jewish Congress want the “international justice” to believe about the supposed Nazi extermination conspiracy? In what way did they describe the origin and the implementation of it in form of the infamous “death camps? What were the sources behind the report?

On p. 109 we read:

“In March 1942, Heinrich Himmler paid a visit to Poland. During his stay in Poland he issued an order to the effect that 50% of all Polish Jews had to be exterminated by the end of that year. In July 1942 Himmler came to Poland again. According to the Polish underground sources, he declared at a Nazi meeting in Warsaw that:

1) Hitler had personally told him that the Jews had commenced the war and should, for that reason, be punished.

2) the Jews are the scum of the earth and must be converted to dust.

3) All Jews must die, but not before going through suffering and agony.

A special “Vernichtungskommission” was organized, with Commissar Fey as Chairman and a large office in Warsaw. This commission had to supervise the work of Jewish extermination in Poland; its members continuously visited different parts of the country and directed the mass slaughter of the Jewish population. Chairman Fey was directly responsible to Himmler.”

While the first of the three statements ascribed to Hitler is clearly based on speeches made by the Führer at the outbreak of the war, the other two statements are typical Greuelpropaganda fantasies casting Hitler as the Devil incarnate. It is all to easy to picture Adolf having a tantrum in front of a sycophantic Reichsführer-SS while giving the infamous, never-proven Führerbefehl (unaware that a member of the Polish resistance, posing as a Sachertorte-carrying waiter, is taking mental notes).

Also, if the supposed mass exterminations were part of a “conspiracy”, would it make much sense to have a “Vernichtungskommission” (Extermination Committee) housed in a “large office in Warsaw”? What happened to the alleged code language? And who was “Commissar Fey”? Is this an error for Robert Ley, the head of the Deutsche Arbeitsfront (DAF)? (No “Fey” appears on the “Preliminary List of War Criminals” drawn up by the WJC the same year – Ley does, though).

The biblical undertone of the report appears most clearly on p.111:

“The fleeing Germans [after Stalingrad] surpassed even themselves and reached such depths of cruelty and destructive fury that they beggar any description and any imagination. The Jews should never be able to enjoy the defeat of their worst enemies, or, as Hitler put it, the Jews should never celebrate another Purim (Jewish festival commemorating defeat of Haman's plot) in his memory.”

As for the Hitler quote, what the Führer actually said in this speech (according to The New York Times January 31, 1944) was that, unless Germany was victorious, “Jewry could then celebrate the destruction of Europe by a second triumphant Purim”. Thus Hitler's words were not a threat of physical extermination, but a warning about the consequences of a German defeat.

The “report” gets into high gear when it reaches the description of the “death factories”. Here follows the discription of the supposed mass killings at Belzec (pp. 115-116):

“The Jews were crammed into special chambers with metal bars on the floor and walls; then the chambers were filled with water and a powerful electric current sent through these bars. Besides, there was in Belzec a special building with several gas chambers, and the German scientists zealously experienced there on Jews with all kinds of poisoning gases they invented or improved. The children, if healthy, were used as involuntary blood donors for the German Army. Mostly these children were bled white to such a degree that they died shortly afterwards. Special factories produced in Belzec soap and shoes, out of Jewish fat; yet, this business was never really profitable, probably because of the Jews being in the third year of an acute starvation period and there was not much fat left on their bodies. […]
The weak point of Belzec was the way the bodies were disposed of… They, or their remains, were loaded on railway cars and transported to a spot where a group of Jews already prepared a grave, whereupon this whole group was instantly executed. After a few months of operating in high gear, all the fields along the railway were filled with mass graves. Lumps of gored blood and decomposed remains of human bodies were spread everywhere around the graves, and the stench became so intensive, that the peasants of nearby villages deserted their farms and land, and the whole population of Belsec left this sinister town.”

Here the WJC authors tries to include every ludicrous atrocity story spread about Belzec during the war: electrocution chambers, gas chambers (utlizing various unnamed poison gases), children emptied of their blood, human soap, trains of death (the story of Jan Karski sans quicklime killings)… The idea that shoes were also produced out of the victims seems to be a new addition. No wonder, by the way, that the Belzec soap & shoes business “was never really profitable” – how good would shoes made out of human fat be? Needless to say, there are no indications whatsoever that the town of Belzec was emptied of its population – but apparently the spies of the underground resistance did not bother to verify this claim, although the town was and is easily accessible by train or car.

Next Sobibór is briefly described (p. 116):

“In the death camp of Sobibur the process of killing was still more perfected. A special brick building was constructed there, and as soon as about 800 people passed into this building, the heavy doors were locked and an electric engine in an adjoining ving pumped poison gas into it. As a rule, in fifteen minutes all the people were dead; then the floor in the building slid apart automatically and the bodies fell into the basement, from where they were taken in special carts to woods and buried there.”

This description is almost certainly a summary of a testimony left on August 10, 1944 by the former Sobibór inmate Ber (Dov) Freiberg, which was later included in Vassili Grossman and Ilya Ehrenburg's Black Book (Holocaust Library, New York 1981, p. 439). The bizarre claim of the collapsible gas chamber floor appears in a number of early Sobibór testimonies.

Regarding the third Aktion Reinhardt “death camp” the report concludes that

“Tremblinka [sic] had a much greater “productive capacity” than Belsec or Sobibur. It had first three gas chambers, then two were added, and it was able to cope with as many as 20,000 people a day.” (p. 117)

Here we run into a paradox apparent also in the Höss “confession”, namely that Auschwitz had a smaller “killing capacity” than Treblinka, despite the former being constructed as more “efficient” than the latter. On pp. 118-119 we read:

“In July 1942 Heinrich Himmler paid a visit to the camp and laid down plans how to make Oswiecim the largest death factory the Germans ever established. Four new large crematoriums, each connected with a gas-chamber, were built, able to cremate 500 people in an hour, 12,000 in a continuous work of 24 hours. And still, despite this amazing productivity, so many people were killed on some days in Oswiecim, that huge pyres of corpses had to be kindled there. Not less than 4,000,000 people perished in Oswiecim, not less than 1,800,000 of them were Jews.”

It is worth noting that the only victim figure of an “extermination camp” presented is that of Auschwitz.

Finally we note the following statement regarding Majdanek, found on p. 118:

“On November 3rd, 1943, Majdanek had a great day: 18,400 people were killed in this single day. In the official report sent on this day to Berlin, the camp authorities wrote: “The difference between the number of prisoners confined in the camp in the morning and in the evening, is the result of a special annihilation of 18,000 persons.”

This refers to the alleged so-called “Operation Harvest Festival” (Aktion Erntefest). As far as I have been able to determine, the quote from an “official report” concerning the “special annihilation” (no Tarnsprache used there!) is a complete fabrication either on part of the WJC or (perhaps more likely) Soviet propagandists.

The WJC report on the “Mass Annihilation” lack any reference to sources, but it is apparent that its authors have simply lifted their “information” from various Polish and Soviet “reports” on alleged German war crimes. Its primary value consists in the insight it provides into the dissemination of the “Holocaust” propaganda. It begs disbelief that a major international organization such as the WJC produced – at the end of the war – an unsourced “report” teeming with blatant absudities and internal contradictions, if in fact the alleged mass extermination really had taken place. It is even more astounding that WJC officials deemed this report worthy of being submitted to international judicial authorities. This in turn shows that the men behind the “Holocaust” propaganda often did not make the effort to produce authentic-sounding or even realistic descriptions of the alleged crime – such effort was not generally necessary, since the claims were not actually tried by the “International Military Tribunal”, but rather regarded as their own evidence, as far as they were found in some report submitted by the Soviet prosecution.