As I said on the Dead Footnote page, I want to go to the archives and find out what's really in there. But prior to that, I want to establish a baseline so I know what to expect.
They must have had the death penalty in the Third Reich for ordinary crimes (as opposed to political crimes). Did they use gas chambers to execute prisoners? If so, who built them? What did they look like? Do they still exist? I would like to see what a German gas chamber really looks like.
What about the euthanasia program? Did they use gas chambers for that? The same questions apply: Who built them, and what did they look like?
We should be able to find the engineering specifications for these gas chambers. Then we will know what kind of engineering specifications to look for in the archives.
As far as that goes, the same kind of investigation could be done in any country where gas chambers are (or were) used to execute prisoners. My understanding is that European countries no longer use the death penalty, but they all did at some time in the past. Some of them must have used gas chambers. When Austria, for example, installed a gas chamber in a prison, what kind of correspondence was there between the government and the contractor who built the gas chamber?
The same kind of correspondence should exist for the German gas chambers. When I say the paper trail is missing, that's what I'm talking about. But I don't know what to look for, specifically. I want to know what kind of paper trail exists for other gas chambers.
Other kinds of baselines also need to be established.
I would like to know the German policy about secrecy, in general. Did they habitually try to cover things up? Did they try to destroy the evidence for the euthanasia program and pretend it never happened? What about the Jews who were shot and buried in mass graves? Did they try to destroy the evidence for that?
What about the Night of the Long Knives? This event took place in a few days, not several years, and it involved hundreds of people, not millions. What kind of paper trail did it leave? Did the Nazis try to cover it up? If so, with how much success? Did they destroy any evidence?
The destruction of the Warsaw ghetto was a larger event than the Night of the Long Knives, both in terms of the time and the number of people involved, but it was still on a much smaller scale than the supposed gassing of six million Jews. Did the Nazis make any effort whatever to cover it up? What kind of paper trail is there for the destruction of the Warsaw ghetto?
Did they ever try to destroy the evidence for any atrocities?
When they decided something was going to be done secretly, how was the policy of secrecy established? In America, there is a document at the beginning of a secret project that specifies its level of classification, and then subsequent documents are all stamped "Classified" or "Top Secret." They must have had a comparable procedure in the Third Reich.
The main thing that needs to be nailed down is the origin of the gas chamber story. Until all the archives of the various intelligence agencies are unsealed, it will probably be impossible to trace the gas chamber story all the way back to its source. But even now, it should be possible to find the first reference to gas chambers.
The earliest "witnesses," in 1942, spoke of extermination by electric shocks and steam chambers. But by 1945, the gas chamber story was current. When did it first appear? Where did it come from?
As Samuel Crowell has pointed out in The Gas Chamber of Sherlock Holmes, the idea of mass extermination with gas chambers had been "in the air" for a long time, even before the Nazis came to power. So the precise question is, when did they start saying that the Germans were using poison gas in their concentration camps? Who said that, and when?
Crowell says,
The first claim of mass gassing pertaining to Jewish people that received wide circulation was contained in the so-called Bund Report that was smuggled to the Polish Government in exile, located in London, in the third week of May, 1942. The report contained two gassing rumors: first that a special automobile (a gas chamber) was being used to gas 90 persons at one time. Since the victims were supposed to have dug their graves before being gassed, it follows that this was more a gas chamber that could be moved from place to place than a gas van (normally conceived as a vehicle that would drive victims to a grave while they died from gas inhalation on the way). The second rumor pertains to actions in Warsaw: it is said that Jews were being experimented upon with poison gases.
The Bund Report, in turn, appears to be a composite of at least two documents that had come from Warsaw during the spring of 1942...
Until the archives of the intelligence agencies are unsealed, that's probably as far as we are going to get.
There is a loose end that has puzzled me for a long time. Why didn't Adolf Eichmann challenge the facts of his accusation? Why didn't he say the whole trial was absurd, because there were no gas chambers? He did not dispute the alleged facts, he merely said that he was not responsible. Here are his words to the court, his final statement after he has been found guilty and sentenced to death:
The Judge asked me if I wished to plead guilty, as had Hoess, the Auschwitz commander and the Governor General of Poland, Frank. Both had the same reason for acting as they did: Frank, responsible for the orders he had given, was afraid of being accused by his subordinates, while Hoess was the one who had actually carried out the mass executions.
My position is different.
I never had either the capability or the responsibility of someone who gave orders. I never had to deal with murder, as had Hoess. If I had received the order to perform these massacres, I would not have taken refuge behind false pretexts; I explained this during my interrogation: if I had found myself faced with an order which I could not carry out, I would have put a bullet through my head in order to resolve the conflict between my conscience and my duty.
He says "Hoess was the one who had actually carried out the mass executions." He did not dispute that there were mass executions.
At this point, Eichmann had been condemned to death. He had nothing to lose by telling the truth - unless they had made it absolutely clear to him that he would be tortured if he said or even hinted that there were no mass executions. Of course it's possible that he had already been tortured. It's possible that the Eichmann trial was like Stalin's show trials, where the victim says what he has been forced to say. This is possible, but as far as I know it has not been demonstrated.
In any case, this is a loose end that revisionists need to tie down.
My address can be found on the Jumping Together page. Comments are welcome.
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