The Nuremberg Trials and the Holocaust
Do the 'war crimes' trials prove extermination?
Dubious testimony
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. (note 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." (note 56) French historian Jean-Claude Pressac likewise warned in his detailed book about Auschwitz that "extreme care is required with the testimony of survivors ..." (note 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. (note 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." (note 59)
French historian Germain Tillion, a specialist of the Second World War period, has warned that former camp inmates who lie are, in fact, (note 60)
very much more numerous than people generally suppose, and a subject like that of the concentration camp world -- well designed, alas, to stimulate sado-masochistic imaginations -- offered them an exceptional field of action. We have known numerous mentally damaged persons, half-swindlers and half fools, who exploited an imaginary deportation. We have known others of them -- authentic deportees -- whose sick minds strove to even go beyond the monstrosities that they had seen or that people said happened to them.
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." (note 61)
Shmuel Krakowki, 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. (note 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. (note 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." (note 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?" (note 65)
August Gross, a German who worked as a civilian employee for the U.S. Army at the Dachau trials, later declared: (note 66)
The American prosecutors paid professional incrimination witnesses, mostly former criminal concentration camp inmates, the amount of one dollar per day (at that time worth 280 marks on the black market) as well as food from a witness kitchen and witness lodging. During the recess periods between trial proceedings the US prosecuting attorneys told these witnesses what they were to say in giving testimony. The US prosecuting attorneys gave the witnesses photos of the defendants and were thereby able to easily incriminate them.
A young US Army court reporter at the Dachau trials in 1947, Joseph Halow, later recalled the unwholesome situation:
The witnesses in the concentration camp cases were virtually all of the sort we court reporters termed "professional witnesses," those who spent months in Dachau, testifying against one or another of the many accused... It was to their economic advantage to testify, and many of them made a good living doing so. As one might well imagine, the motive of the professional witnesses was also one of spite and revenge... In many instances their vengeance included relating exaggerated accounts of what they had witnessed. It also included outright lying.
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." (note 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. (note 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 reblinka by Ukrainian-born defendant Feodor Fedorenko had wrongly identified the accused after being misled by Israeli authorities. (note 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." (note 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." (note 71)
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