Perhaps nothing better illustrates the essentially unfair character of the Nuremberg proceedings than the treatment of Rudolf Hess, Hitler's deputy. He was sentenced to life imprisonment even though he alone of leading figures of the countries involved in the Second World War risked his life in a dangerous but fruitless effort to conclude peace between two of the warring nations. British historian A.J.P. Taylor once succinctly summed up the injustice of the Hess case and, by implication, of the entire Nuremberg enterprise: [34]

The victorious Allies thoroughly scoured Germany for every scrap of paper that might be used to incriminate the defeated regime. Never before or since have a nation's records been so completely ransacked. In addition to official government papers, including countless secret documents tracing Germany's wartime Jewish policy, the Allies confiscated the records of the National Socialist Party and its affiliated organizations, as well as those of numerous private business firms, institutions and individuals. The sheer quantity of paper seized is staggering. For example, the records of the German Foreign Office confiscated by US officials amounted to some 485 tons of paper. [35]

From this mountain of paper, US military personnel alone selected some two thousand documents considered most incriminating for use in the main Nuremberg trial. The tons of confiscated records were later shipped to the United States. It is estimated that in the US National Archives alone, more than one million pages of documents on the Third Reich's Jewish policy are on file. Many hundreds of these Nuremberg documents have since been published, most notably by the U.S. government in the 42-volume "blue series" record of the main Nuremberg trial, the 15-volume "green series" record of the "second string" Nuremberg trials, and in the 11-volume "red series." [36]

It is as if governments hostile to the United States were to seize the top secret files of the Pentagon and CIA, and then selectively publish the most embarrassing and incriminating documents from the vast collection.

In the years since the Nuremberg trials, historians of many different countries have carefully sifted through the German records, including countless documents that were not available to the Nuremberg prosecutors. Historians have been able to compare and cross-check the records of different ministries and agencies, as well as numerous private diaries and papers. [37]

And yet, out of this great mass of paper, not a single document has ever been found that confirms or even refers to an extermination program. A number of historians have commented on this remarkable "gap" in the evidence. French-Jewish historian Leon Poliakov, for example, noted in his best-known Holocaust work:

No documents of a plan for exterminating the Jews have ever been found, he added, because "perhaps none ever existed." [38]

At Nuremberg, the German documents were in the custody of the Allied prosecutors, who did not permit defense attorneys to make their own selections of the material. Historian Werner Maser has pointed out that at Nuremberg "thousands of documents which seemed likely possibly to incriminate the Allies and exonerate the defendants suddenly disappeared … There is much evidence that documents were confiscated, concealed from the defense or even stolen in 1945." Other important documents suddenly "disappeared" when specifically requested by defense attorneys. Officials at the National Archives in Washington have confirmed to this writer on several occasions that the originals of numerous Nuremberg documents remain "lost" to this day. The Tribunal refused to allow in evidence several collections of German and captured foreign documents published during the war as German Foreign Office "White Books." Most of the 1,809 affidavits prepared by the Nuremberg defense have never been made public. [39]

Among the documents that the defense was not permitted to bring to light was the secret supplement to the German-Soviet treaty of August 23, 1939, which divided eastern Europe into German and Soviet spheres of influence. [40]

After the Nuremberg Tribunal pronounced its sentence, Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop pointed out some of the obstacles put up in his particular case: [41]

The Charter of the International Military Tribunal permitted the use of normally inadmissible "evidence." Article 19 specified that "The Tribunal shall not be bound by technical rules of evidence … and shall admit any evidence which it deems to have probative value." Article 21 stipulated: [42]

On the basis of these articles, the Tribunal accepted as valid the most dubious "evidence," including hearsay and unsubstantiated reports of Soviet and American "investigative" commissions. For example, the Tribunal accepted an American congressional report that "proved" gas chamber killings at Dachau, and a Polish government report (submitted by the US) that "proved" killings by steam at Treblinka. [43] (No reputable historian now accepts either of these stories.)

In addition, the Tribunal validated Soviet reports about Auschwitz and Majdanek (documents USSR-8 and USSR-29), which explained in detail how the Germans killed four million at Auschwitz and another one-and-a-half million at Majdanek. (These days, no reputable historian accepts either of these fantastic figures.)

German guilt for the killing of thousands of Polish officers in the Katyn forest near Smolensk was similarly confirmed by Nuremberg document USSR-54. This detailed report by yet another Soviet "investigative" commission was submitted as proof for the charge made in the joint indictment of the four Allied governments. As a Soviet prosecutor explained: "We find, in the Indictment, one of the most important criminal acts for which the major war criminals are responsible was the mass execution of Polish prisoners of war shot in the Katyn forest near Smolensk by the German fascist invaders." [44] (Interestingly, two of the eight members of the Soviet Katyn Commission were also members of the Soviet Auschwitz commission: Academician N. Burdenko and Metropolitan Nikolai.) It wasn't until 1990 that the Soviet government finally acknowledged that the Katyn massacre was carried out, not by a German unit, as "proven" at Nuremberg, but by the Soviet secret police. [45]

The Nuremberg Tribunal judges (left to right): A. F. Volchkov, the Soviet alternate; I. T. Nikitchenko, the Soviet Judge; Norman Birkett, the British alternate; Lord Geoffrey Lawrence, the British judge; Francis Biddle, the American judge; John J. Parker, the American alternate; Donnedleu de Vabres, the French judge; and Robert Falco, the French alternate. Seated in front of the judges’ bench are members of the secretariat and stenographers.

It is sometimes claimed that the evidence presented by the prosecution to the Nuremberg Tribunal was so incontrovertible that none of the defense attorneys ever disputed the authenticity or accuracy of even a single prosecution document. [46] This is not true. Not only did defense lawyers protest against the prosecution use of spurious documents, but some of the most important Nuremberg documents are now generally acknowledged to be fraudulent. [47]

For example, defense attorney Dr. Boehm protested to the Tribunal that Nuremberg document 1721-PS, which purportedly confirms attacks by stormtroopers against Jewish synagogues in November 1938, is a clumsy forgery. He went on to explain his reasons at some length. [48]

Several Nuremberg documents based on the purported "death bed confession" of Mauthausen commandant Franz Ziereis, are demonstrably fraudulent. (Nuremberg documents 1515-PS, 3870-PS, and NO-1973.) These documents supposedly prove systematic killings of hundreds of thousands of people by gassing and other means at Mauthausen and Hartheim. [49]

Almost forty years after the Tribunal handed down its verdicts, Nuremberg document USSR-378 was definitively exposed as a fraud. It is a purported record of numerous private conversations with Hitler by Hermann Rauschning, a former National Socialist official in Danzig. In brutal language, the Führer supposedly revealed his most intimate thoughts and secret plans for world conquest. Rauschning's "memoir" was published in 1939 in Britain under the title Hitler Speaks, and in the United States in 1940 as The Voice of Destruction. It was this US edition that was accepted in evidence at Nuremberg as proof of the "guiding principles of the Nazi regime."

Chief British prosecutor Sir Hartley Shawcross and his Soviet colleagues cited numerous quotations from it. Defendant Baldur von Schirach contested its authenticity, but defense attorney Pelckmann (who did not know any better) accepted this "evidence" as authentic.[50] In 1983 Swiss historian Wolfgang Hänel established that the "memoir" is entirely fraudulent. Rauschning never had even a single private meeting with Hitler. [51]

Another fraudulent Nuremberg document is the so-called "Hossbach protocol" (document 386-PS), a purported record of a high-level 1937 conference at which Hitler supposedly revealed his secret plans for aggressive conquest. US Nuremberg prosecutor Sidney Alderman called it "one of the most striking and revealing of all the captured documents," and told the Tribunal that it removed any remaining doubts about the guilt of the Germans leaders for their crimes against peace. It was largely on the basis of this document that Göring was condemned to death. [52]

Similarly spurious is Nuremberg document L-3 (US-28), supposedly a record of a bellicose speech by Hitler to armed forces commanders on August 22, 1939. It contains a widelycited quotation attributed to Hitler, "Who talks nowadays of the extermination of the Armenians?" [53]

Jewish historian Lucy Dawidowicz, author of The War Against the Jews, acknowledged that "There are also Holocaust documents that are outright falsification and some that purvey myth rather than historical fact." [54]

Much of the evidence for the Holocaust story presented at Nuremberg and in subsequent trials has been "survivor testimony." As numerous historians have acknowledged, though, such testimony is often defective. [55]

Gerald Reitlinger cautioned readers of his detailed study, The Final Solution, that Holocaust evidence, including Nuremberg documents and testimony, cannot be accepted at face value: "A certain degree of reserve is necessary in handling all this material, and particularly this applies to the last section (survivor narratives) … The Eastern European Jew is a natural rhetorician, speaking in flowery similes." [56] French historian Jean-Claude Pressac likewise warned in his detailed book about Auschwitz that "extreme care is required with the testimony of survivors … " [57]

Jewish historian Hannah Arendt observed in her book Eichmann in Jerusalem that the "eyewitnesses" who testified in the 1961 trial in Jerusalem of Adolf Eichmann were only rarely able to distinguish between what actually happened to them years earlier and what they had read, heard or imagined in the meantime. [58] Holocaust historian Lucy Dawidowicz similarly noted that "the survivor's memory is often distorted by hate, sentimentality, and the passage of time. His perspective on external events is often skewed by the limits of his personal experience." [59]

French historian Germain Tillion, a specialist of the Second World War period, has warned that former camp inmates who lie are, in fact, [60]

Jewish historian Samuel Gringauz, who was himself interned in the ghetto of Kaunas (Lithuania) during the war, criticized what he called the "hyperhistorical" nature of most Jewish "survivor testimony." He wrote that "most of the memoirs and reports are full of preposterous verbosity, graphomanic exaggeration, dramatic effects, overestimated self-inflation, dilettante philosophizing, would-be lyricism, unchecked rumors, bias, partisan attacks and apologies." [61]

Shmuel Krakowski, archives director of the Israeli government's Holocaust center, Yad Vashem, confirmed in 1986 that more than 10,000 of the 20,000 "testimonies" of Jewish "survivors" on file there are "unreliable." Many survivors, wanting "to be part of history" may have let their imaginations run away with them, Krakowski said. "Many were never in the places where they claimed to have witnessed atrocities, while others relied on second-hand information given them by friends or passing strangers." He confirmed that many of the testimonies on file at Yad Vashem were later proved to be inaccurate when locations and dates could not pass an expert historian's appraisal. [62]

We now know that witnesses at the main Nuremberg trial gave false testimony. Perhaps the most obvious were the three witnesses who ostensibly confirmed German guilt for the Katyn massacre of Polish officers. [63]

Stephen F. Pinter of St. Louis, Missouri, served as a US Army prosecuting attorney from January 1946 to July 1947 at the American trials of Germans at Dachau. Altogether, some 420 Germans were sentenced to death in these Dachau trials. In a 1960 affidavit Pinter stated that "notoriously perjured witnesses" were used to charge Germans with "false and unfounded" crimes. "Unfortunately, as a result of these miscarriages of justice, many innocent persons were convicted and some were executed." [64]

A tragi-comic incident during the Dachau proceedings suggests the general atmosphere. US investigator Joseph Kirschbaum brought a Jewish witness named Einstein into court to testify that the defendant, Menzel, had murdered Einstein's brother. But when the accused pointed out that the brother was, in fact, sitting in the courtroom, an embarrassed Kirschbaum scolded the witness: "How can we bring this pig to the gallows if you are so stupid as to bring your brother into court?" [65]

August Gross, a German who worked as a civilian employee for the U.S. Army at the Dachau trials, later declared: [66]

A young US Army court reporter at the Dachau trials in 1947, Joseph Halow, later recalled the unwholesome situation:

In one case, testimony provided by the prosecution witnesses "appeared to raise more questions then provide answers. Some of it was obviously fabricated, or so grossly exaggerated as to render it unbelievable. There were repeated instances of mistaken identity of the same accused, and vague, uncertain statements about some of the others." Moreover, Halow reported, the US courts paid "scant attention to testimony by and for the accused." [67]

In the 1947 "Nordhausen-Dora" case, American defense attorney Major Leon B. Poullada protested against the general unreliability - and frequent outright lying - of prosecution witnesses in this US military trial of former concentration camp officials. [68]

Use of such unreliable testimony continued in "Holocaust" trials in later years. Federal district judge Norman C. Roettger, Jr., ruled in 1978 in a Florida case that all six Jewish "eyewitnesses" who had testified to direct atrocities and shootings at Treblinka by Ukrainian-born defendant Feodor Fedorenko had wrongly identified the accused after being misled by Israeli authorities. [69]

New York "Nazi hunter" Charles Kremer visited Israel in 1981 looking for Jews who could confirm atrocities allegedly committed by a former Ukrainian SS man living in New Jersey. But Kremer cut short his visit, bitterly disappointed by the numerous Jews who offered to provide spurious "testimony" in return for money. As the Brooklyn Jewish Press reported, "Kremer was stricken with gastronomic pains - a malady he attributes to his difficulties in dealing with hucksters who tried to use his search for their personal gain." [70]

One of the most blatant examples of perjury by Jewish Holocaust witnesses in recent years was in the case of a retired Chicago factory worker named Frank Walus who was charged with killing Jews in his native Poland during the war. A December 1974 letter from "Nazi hunter" Simon Wiesenthal that accused Walus of working for the Gestapo prompted the US government's legal campaign. During his trial, eleven Jews testified under oath that they personally saw Walus murder Jews, including several children. After a costly and bitterly contested four-year legal battle, Walus was finally able to prove that he had actually spent the war years as a teenager quietly working on German farms. A lengthy article copyrighted by the American Bar Association and published in 1981 in the Washington Post concluded that "… in an atmosphere of hatred and loathing verging on hysteria, the government persecuted an innocent man." [71]

The Nuremberg Trials and the Holocaust - 2 - 3 - 4

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