Editing Conspiracy BBS Archive/Third Reich (section)

== HEINRICH HIMMLER ==

After [[Adolf Hitler|Hitler]]'s speeches, it is mainly the speeches of Himmler in
which one seeks to find circumstantial evidence for the alleged racially
motivated murder of the Jews. Speeches and excerpts of speeches of his
supposedly relating to this subject have been published with a commentary
by Agnes F. Peterson and Bradley F. Smith under the rather sensational
title [[Heinrich Himmler|HEINRICH HIMMLER]]: GEHEIMREDEN 1933 BIS 1945. Of course, it is absurd
to call a speech delivered before a relatively large audience "secret". Nor
is it known whether [[Heinrich Himmler|Himmler]] ever designated any of his speeches so.
Evidently the title was chosen in the hope of selling more copies of the
book.

According to the "Remarks on the Edition" at the end of the book
these speeches were discovered in the files of the "Personal Staff of the
Reichsfuhrer-SS", which the Americans seized as war booty. Today they are
reportedly in the Bundesarchiv in Coblenz. Before they were returned, they
were microfilmed. Whether they are entirely genuine is open to question.

[[Heinrich Himmler|Himmler]] was in the habit of formulating his speeches as he went
along, using notes that he had written down himself, which often consisted
of no more than a dozen phrases. According to Peterson and Smith, there are
only four or five completely prepared texts among the documents published
in their collection, but they do not specifiy which one. From the end of
1942, Himmler's speeches were frequently -though not always-
phonographically recorded with two machines. These devices are said to have
worked poorly, leaving big gaps in the recordings. Beginning in 1943,
SS-Untersturmfuhrer Werner Alfred Venn was solely responsible for making
and keeping the transcripts of Himmler's speeches. It is not clear just who
had this duty before. Venn is supposed to have taken down and typed out the
speeches - even making "corrections" (!) in the text, but changing the
meaning "barely or not at all".

One can well imagine the possibilities for error involved in the
preparation of these "documents". What is more, the American officials who
"evaluated" the staff files of the Reichsfuhrer-SS had ample opportunities
to manipulate the papers, and probably took advantage of them, for some of
Himmler's speeches were presented in evidence at the Nuremberg IMT trial.

Peterson and Smith claim that Venn sent his transcripts of the
speeches to [[Heinrich Himmler|Himmler]], who then revised them slightly. Nobody asks whether
this would have made any sense. If these were "secret speeches", there was
little possibility of their ever being published. Moreover, it is doubtful
whether [[Heinrich Himmler|Himmler]] had the time to go over his speeches carefully. Since they
had already been delivered, that must have seemed a useless undertaking.
How Peterson and Smith discovered these intimate details is a mystery.

There is considerable doubt as to whether the versions of the
speeches that were presented to a horrified world after the fall of the
[[Third Reich]] were identical with speeches Himmler may have actually have
delivered. Nevertheless, we are bound to discuss here those passages which
are cited in support of the extermination thesis. Although they are
constantly used to "substantiate" the charge that murders-by-gassing
ocurred at Auschwitz, they contain no mention of Auschwitz or any other
alleged "extermination camp".

Most frequently cited is an address Himmler delivered on October 4,
1943 before a gathering of SS-Gruppenfuhrer at Posen. Though basically a
survey of the situation at the beginning of the fifth year of the war, it
contains a discussion -relatively brief- of "The Clearing out of the Jews"
("Die Judenevakuierung"). At any rate, that is the heading this passage of
the transcript was given when it was presented in evidence at the Nuremberg
IMT trial (Nuremberg Document 1919-PS). According to this document, Himmler
declared:

  "I also want to talk to you, quite frankly, on a very grave
  matter. Among ourselves it should be mentioned quite frankly, and
  yet we will never speak of it publicly ... I mean the clearing
  out of the Jews, the extermination of the Jewish race. It's one
  of those things it is easy to talk about - "The Jewish race is
  being exterminated", says one party member, "that's quite clear,
  it's in our program - elimination of the Jews, and we're doing
  it, exterminating them".  And then they come, 80 million worthy
  Germans, and each one has his decent Jew. Of course the others
  are vermin, but this one is an A-1 Jew. Not one of all those who
  talk this way has witnessed it, not one of them has been through
  it. Most of you know what it means when 100 corpses are lying
  side by side, or 500 or 1000. To have stuck it out and at the
  same time - apart from exceptions caused by human weakness - to
  have remained decent fellows, that is what has made us hard. This
  is a page of glory in our history which has never been written
  and is never to be written, for we know how difficult we should
  have made it ourselves if - with the bombing raids, the burdens
  and the deprivations of war - we still had Jews today in every
  town as secret saboteurs, agitators and trouble-mongers. We would
  now probably have reached the 1916/17 stage when the Jews were
  still in the German national body.
  
  We have taken their wealth from them. I have issued a strict
  order, which SS-Obergruppfuhrer Pohl has carried out, that this
  wealth should, as a matter of course, be handed over to the Reich
  without reserve. We have taken none of it for ourselves.
  Individual men who have lapsed will be punished in accordance
  with an order I issued at the beginning, which gave this warning;
  Whoever takes so much as a mark of it, is a dead man. A number of
  SS men - there are not very many of them - have fallen short, and
  they will die, without mercy. We had the moral right, we had the
  duty to our people, to destroy this people which wanted to
  destroy us. But we have not the right to enrich ourselves with so
  much as a fur, a watch, a mark, or a cigarette or anything else.
  Because we have exterminated a bacterium we do not want, in the
  end, to be infected by the bacterium and die of it. I will not
  see so much as a small area of the sepsis appear here or gain a
  foothold. Wherever it may form, we will cauterize it. Altogether,
  however, we can say that we have fulfilled this most difficult
  duty for the love of our people. And our spirit, our soul, our
  character has not suffered injury from it. "


All of this may come as a shock to the unbiased but uninitiated
reader, who might get the impression that Himmler was actually talking
about ideologically motivated, systematic murder of Jews. But those who are
acquainted with the facts of this period in history will find it difficult
to believe that Himmler made all these remarks, some of which are utterly
nonsensical. A fair guess is that certain passages necessary to the
continuity of the document are missing, for no logical connection really
exists between the things Himmler purportedly discussed in this speech. He
seems to be talking about several different matters, viz., the evacuation
of the Jews, the efforts of the Einsatzgruppen to combat guerilla warfare,
the suppression of Jewish mutinies in Sobibor, Treblinka (autumn 1943),
and, most especially, the Warsaw Ghetto (April-May 1943). That Himmler is
not referring to large-scale, systematic murder of the Jews -even when he
is apparently discussing executions- is evident from the comparatively
small number of "corpses" he mentions: 100, 500 or 1,000. Far greater
numbers of people are usually said to have perished in the "gas chambers"
at any one time.

Let us examine some details of Himmler's alleged statements which
not only indicate that the passage quoted above is incomplete, but also add
to the suspicion that it may be forged.

Above all, it is astonishing that Himmler should have had no qualms
about defining "evacuation of the Jews" as "extermination of the Jewish
people". Of course, one may claim that he was simply employing the
"code-words" purportedly used by functionaires involved in the
"extermination program", but, as we have noted, there is no proof that such
a jargon existed. The audience for this speech was definitely not composed
of those SS leaders who might have been involved in the "secret
extermination of the Jews" -assuming for a moment there was such a plan. If
they had been, Himmler surely would have commented in greater detail on
this subject, instead of limiting himself to generalities. All things
considered, it is quite improbable that he would have suddenly confronted an
unprepared audience with the "real" meaning of the term "evacuation of the
Jews". If the "extermination of the Jews" were, as is usually claimed, so
highly secret that Hitler personally communicated to Himmler the order to
carry it out, would Himmler have discussed this matter before a large
assembly of men who had little or nothing to do with it?  Here one recalls
that it is frequently alleged, on the basis of statements made by Rudolf
Hoss, that Himmler personally transmitted Hitler's "secret order" for the
"extermination of the Jews" to Hoss, the commandant of Auschwitz,
instructing him to keep absolutely silent about it. If this were so,
Himmler would not have enlarged the circle of initiates to any great
extent, even without going into details. Hence this portion of the speech
cannot be authentic.

It seems strange, too, that Himmler should allude to the
"elimination" ("Ausrottung") of the Jews as being contained in the party
program of the NSDAP, since it is neither mentioned nor implied there.
Himmler's supposed claim to the contrary, no level-headed Party Comrade
would never have seriously advocated such a thing. That Himmler uttered
this nonsense in front of high-ranking SS leaders, who were perfectly
familiar with the NSDAP program, is virtually impossible. Somebody who had
not the faintest inkling of the actual contents of the NSDAP program must
have slipped these remarks into the speech.

Just as incongruous is the statement in the second paragraph of the
address: "We had the moral right, we had the duty to our people, to destroy
this people which wanted to destroy us" ("Wir hatten das moralische Recht,
wir hatten die Pflicht gegenuber unserem Volk, dieses Volk, das uns
umbringen wollte, umzubringen").  Himmler allegedly said this when
discussing the confiscation of the evacuated Jews' wealth. In that context,
it stands out as a foreign body. Since the Jews still residing in Germany
and German-occupied territory were -considering that a war was going on-
undoubtedly a security risk, as Himmler pointed out, their evacuation and
internment in camps or ghettos was perhaps necessary, but not their murder,
which is what the word "umbringen" ("destroy", "kill") denotes. It may be
argued that the Jews were quarantined out of racial hatred, not for any
logical reason. But that would not explain why Himmler had no reservations
about discussing an "extermination plan" when the official line was that
Jews were simply being "evacuated" eastwards. To say that this was, after
all, a "secret speech" is to beg the question.

Quite possibly, the words "Ausrottung" (which can mean either
"extermination or "uprooting") and "umbringen" (which can mean either
"destroy" or kill") were mistranslated -deliberately or accidentally- in
the passage of the speech that appears in English under the heading "The
Clearing Out of the Jews" (see above) if indeed Himmler used these words.
Deliberate mistranslations are nothing new. When President Roosevelt, who
saw the mutual defense pact between Germany and Japan as the "back door"
through which an unwilling American people could be herded into the
European conflict, was zealously attempting to provoke a war with Japan, a
U.S. government agency deliberately mistranslated a Japanese official
document. Thanks to Professor Rassinier, we know that distorted
translations were employed in the Nurember IMT trial. For example, in a
retroversion of the English translation of the "Wannsee Protocol" the
phrase "Zuruckdrangung der Juden" ("pushing back the Jews", ie., to the
East European countries from whence they came to Germany) was rendered as
"Vernichtung" ("extermination"). To give another instance, the American
Chief Prosecutor cited a translation in which the expression "Ausrottung
des Judentums" ("eradication of Jewry" or "Judaism") was made into
"extermination of the Jews" -which, of course, is something altogether
different. For as Rassinier has pointed out, Jewry is, among other things,
an idea, or, to put it in other words, an expression of a common mentality,
just as is Christianity (or Christendom). When one speaks of eradicating an
idea, that does not necessarily mean physically exterminating the bearers
of that idea, in this case, individual Jews. At least, one should not jump
to that conclusion. Rassinier maintains that in this speech of Himmlers's
the term "Ausrottung" is used not in the sense of "extermination", but
rather "exclusion", or "elimination of the influence", of the Jews.

Be that as it may, Nuremberg Document 1919-PS must be considered
highly suspect, especially the part of it quoted above. It contains so many
muddled, incongruous, and utterly nonsensical remarks that even in the
post-war "re-education" literature it is usually cited only by the
sentence. In their collection of "secret speeches", Peterson and Smith make
only a brief mention of this address. Instead of reproducing it, they give
the full text of another of Himmler's speeches, delivered two days later,
on October 6, 1943, before a meeting of Reichsleiter and Gauleiter in
Posen. It also contains a discussion of the "Jewish Question", which
Peterson and Smith describe as the "most open and characteristic passage on
the extermination of the Jews". In point of fact, the train of thought is
much the same as in Nuremberg Document 1919-PS, though this speech is
somewhat better organized than the earlier one and lacks its crass
absurdities. According to this text, Himmler made the following remarks on
the "Jewish Question":

  "In this connection, I may comment before this very tightly knit
  group on a matter which you, my Party Comrades, all take for
  granted, and which is the most difficult task I have ever faced
  in my life, the Jewish problem. All of you gladly take it for
  granted that there are no longer any Jews in your administrative
  districts. All Germans - with a few individual exceptions - are
  aware that we could not have endured the bombings, the hardships
  of the fourth year of the war, and could not endure fifth and
  sixth years of war that are perhaps yet to come, if we still had
  this demoralizing pest in our national body. "The Jews must be
  eradicated". This brief sentence is easily said. But for the man
  who must carry out what it calls for, it is the gravest and
  hardest thing in existence. Now, look, after all they're Jews,
  only Jews. That's plain enough. But just think about how many
  people - including Party comrades - have addressed to me and
  other officials those famous petitions of theirs in which they
  say: The Jews are all bastards, of course, but so-and-so is a
  good Jew and should be left alone. I daresay, judging by the
  number of such appeals and the number of people who express such
  opinions, the number of "good Jews" in Germany must have exceeded
  the total Jewish population!  In Germany we have millions and
  millions of people who each have their "one good Jew". I mention
  this only because you can see in the vital field of your own
  administrative districts how many respected and upright National
  Socialists have their "good Jew".
   
    I ask you assembled here pay attention to what I have to say,
  but not repeat it. The question came up: Well, what about the
  women and children?  - I came to a determinedly simple conclusion
  about that, too. I did not believe that I had the right to wipe
  out the men - rather I should say, kill them or have them killed
  - and let their children grow up to avenge themselves on our sons
  and grandsons. The hard decision to wipe this people off the face
  of the earth had to be made. For us, the organization that had to
  carry out this task, it was the most difficult one we ever had.
  But it was accomplished, and without - I believe I can say - our
  men and their leaders suffering any mental or spiritual damage.
  That was clearly a danger. To become too brutal, too heartless,
  and lose respect for human life, or to be too soft and bring
  oneself to the point of a nervous breakdown - the path between
  these two ever-present possibilities is incredibly narrow, the
  course between Scylla and Charybdis.
  
    We have turned over to the Reich Ministry of Economics all the
  wealth we confiscated from the Jews - the sums were staggering -
  right down to very last penny. I have always maintained: We have
  a duty to our people, to our race, we have a duty to a leader
  such as has been given to our people only once in 2,000 years,
  not to be pretty here, but to go the limit, as we must do in all
  things if we are to win the war. Yet we do not have the right to
  take even one penny of the wealth confiscated from the Jews. At
  the outset, I laid down the line: Any SS men who take so much as
  a mark of it are as good as dead. In the past few days, I've had
  to sign a number of death sentences - I might as well say it,
  there were about a dozen. One has to be strict here, or everyone
  will suffer. I considered in my duty to speak very openly to you
  - the highest bearers of the will, the highest dignitaries, of
  the Party, of this political order, of this political instrument
  of the Fuhrer - about this matter and to give the facts as they
  are. By the end of the year, the Jewish problem in the lands we
  have occupied will be solved. There will be left only remnants,
  individual Jews who are in hiding. The problem of Jews who are
  partners in mixed marriages and the problem of half-Jews will, in
  accordance with this policy, be rationally examined, decided
  upon, and resolved.
   
    Believe me, I've had lots of trouble with many units of the
  economic apparatus. I cleared out big Jewish ghettos in the lines
  of communication areas. In Warsaw, we had four weeks of
  street-fighting in the ghetto. Four weeks!  We had to clean out
  around 700 bunkers. The whole ghetto was making fur coats,
  dresses, and the like. Time was, if you tried to lay a hand on
  that place, you'd be told: Stop! You're interfering with the war
  effort. Stop! This is part of the armaments industry. - Of
  course, Party Comrade Speer had nothing to do with that. There is
  nothing you people can do about it. It is a part of the so-called
  armaments industry that Comrade Speer and I will be cleaning up
  in the forthcoming weeks and months. We will do this quite
  unsentimentally, as all things must be done in the fifth year of
  the war, without sentiment but with a stout heart for Germany.
   
    With this I'll wind up my discussion of the Jewish problem. You
  now have the necessary information, and you will keep it to
  yourselves. At some much later date, one may consider the
  possibility of telling the German people a little more. I believe
  that it is better that we all bear this together for our people,
  as we have done, and take the responsibility on ourselves (the
  responsibility for a deed, not just for an idea) and take this
  secret with us to our graves. "


The "re-education" scribblers are fond on quoting this speech. In
contrast to them, I have reproduced this passage in its entirety, so that
Himmler's remarks can be seen in context. Even if it seems more polished
than the Posen address, and, above all, does not contain as many glaring
absurdities, this speech cannot be judged in any different terms. It is
quite improbable that Himmler would have used such remarks to inform
Reichsleiter and Gauleiter of the genocide supposedly carried out by the SS
on his orders.

No doubt the first and third paragraphs of this excerpt concern the
evacuation of the Jews from Germany and the occupied Western European
countries. This is especially true of the last part of the third paragraph
(after the dashes), which, incidentally, contains an echo of the "Wannsee
Protocol" in its approach to the problem of mixed marriages and persons of
mixed parentage. Since Himmler mentions "remnants" who are "in hiding", he
can only be referring here to the evacuation of the Jews from Germany and
the occupied European countries. He could not be referring to the
subsequent fate of Jews evacuated to the eastern ghettos and concentration
camps, for there they would find no place to "hide". The sentence "The Jews
must be eradicated" ("Die Juden mussen ausgerottet werden"), in the first
paragraph, is an absurdity, and was probably forged into the text. Inasmuch
as nobody in Germany had at that time heard anything about the "eradication
of the Jews", Himmler would have had to provide these high-ranking national
and regional administrators with some explanation of the term. Otherwise,
these men, who were acknowledged leaders of the Party, would have been
puzzled by it. In fact, if Himmler had discussed such a thing as killing
off the Jews, he would most likely have chosen a word like "elimination"
rather than "eradication".

When I asked two former Gauleiter, [[Karl Wahl]] and [[Rudolf Jordan]],
whether they had ever heard something from Himmler, directly or indirectly,
about "this type of solution to the Jewish Question" (as I put it to Wahl)
or something about the "mass murder of the Jewish people" (as I put it to
Jordan), neither of them could recall anything. And neither of them could
remember specific details of the meeting at Posen on October 6, 1943.
Gauleiter Wahl believes it is possible that he missed the conference
because of illness. He told me: "In 17 long years" - that is how long Wahl
served as Gauleiter - "I never heard him say anything that was not humane
or moral ... I cannot conceive of Himmler's being so stupid as to make any
such remarks, or, if he did, which I do not believe, to preserve them so
that these literary shysters could publish them 30 years later".  This last
point is remarkably well taken. It casts doubt on the authenticity of
Himmler's alleged discourse on the "Jewish Question", especially the final
paragraph of it. For how can any rational person believe that Himmler would
have had his remarks written down for posterity if he wanted to take the
"secret" of the "Final Solution" with him to the grave, and advised his
listeners to do the same?  The real author of these lines must have
believed - and it seems with good reason - that the human race is awfully
gullible.

[[Gauleiter Jordan]] told me that during the war he heard "some
executions took place in connection with tactical problems of combating
guerilla warfare", but these had nothing to do with the so-called Final
Solution; they were "necessary wartime measures". I brought up this
interpretation when discussing Himmler's address of October 4, 1943 to the
SS-Gruppenfuhrer, and I think the second paragraph indisputably confirms
it. As I have pointed out, the second paragraph of the excerpt has no
discernible relation to the first paragraph. Some of Himmler's later
speeches clarify and corroborate the fact thatthis reference must be to
executions carried out against partisans.

Even if Wahl and Jordan did not attend the meeting at which Himmler
delivered this talk, they no doubt would have heard, in some way or other,
of his remarks on the "Jewish problem" had he actually made them. Their
statements on this subject are therefore very pertinent. In my estimation,
they are satisfactory proof that Himmler did not express the notions
attributed to him in the present version of the speech of October 6, 1943.
It would be a cheap shot to impugn the veracity of these two contemporary
witnesses because of their former rank in the NSDAP - particularly since
Himmler, as I already pointed out, would have had no reason to discuss the
"Final Solution" with outsiders like Wahl and Jordan.