Deceit & Misrepresentation Höss & the Historians
Writer: Jamie McCarthy
The
IHR's
Greg Raven
provided another classic example of the sort of blatant
misrepresentation commonly employed by Holocaust deniers when he made
the following assertion in Usenet's alt.revisionism:
...Auschwitz Commandant
Rudolf Höss,
who for years has been held out as proof there were gassings (the U.S.
Holocaust Memorial Museum depends on a Höss statement to make its
point). Recently,
Deborah Lipstadt
and Christopher Browning have admitted that the Höss statements are
useless (Vanity Fair, December 1993).
[1]
Did Browning and Lipstadt say this? In a word, no.
In December 1993, a three-page article on "revisionism"
appeared in Vanity Fair. A half-page discusses "the most
sinister of the current revisionist arguments - if indeed it is an
argument at all," Holocaust-denial.
[2]
The author contacted Browning and Lipstadt to get their opinions of the
Höss statements.
Browning was quoted as saying, "Höss was always a very weak and
confused witness...the revisionists use him all the time for this
reason, in order to try and discredit the memory of Auschwitz as a
whole."
[3]
Being "weak and confused" on the witness stand is one thing.
But Höss' chief contribution to our knowledge of the Holocaust is
his memoirs, written after his conviction and sentencing. The brief
Browning quote doesn't even mention his views on the memoirs.
Lipstadt directed the article's author to her book Denying The
Holocaust, p. 188, which merely points out what
historians have known for decades:
the official Communist death total at
Auschwitz,
four million, conflicts with the historians' total (1.3 to 1.5
million). Höss isn't even in Lipstadt's index; she nowhere
mentions him! Yet
Raven
asserts that she has "admitted that the Höss statements are
useless."
Ironically, the Höss statement in question, far from destroying
his credibility, was quite accurate. In his testimony, Höss said
that 2.5 million were killed at
Auschwitz.
But in his memoirs, he makes it clear that this estimate came from his
superior officer, a Gruppenführer Glücks, who received it from
Adolf Eichmann.
Eichmann, and his deputy SS Hauptsturmführer Hans Günther, he
added, were the only ones who had access to the information needed to
calculate such a figure. Höss claimed that he never knew the
number, and had no way to make an estimate.
[4]
He later made it clear that he regarded the figure as "far too
high," noting that "Even
Auschwitz
had limits to its destructive possibilities."
[5]
So we see that Höss believed Eichmann to be mistaken, as he was.
The various guesses about the victim count, accurate or inaccurate, in
no way affected Höss' credibility when he described the gassing
process itself, and other anecdotes about the camp:
By the will of the Reichsführer SS, Auschwitz became the
greatest human extermination centre of all time...he himself gave me the
order to prepare installations at Auschwitz where mass exterminations
could take place, and personally to carry out these exterminations.
[6]
Protected by a gas mask, I watched the killing myself. In the
crowded cells death came instantaneously the moment the
Cyclon B
was thrown in. A short, almost smothered cry, and it was all over.
[7]
The killing of these Russian prisoners-of-war did not cause me much
concern at the time. The order had been given, and I had to carry it
out. I must even admit that this gassing set my mind at rest, for the
mass extermination of the Jews was to start soon and at that time
neither Eichmann nor I was certain how these mass killings were to be
carried out. It would be by gas, but we did not know which gas or how
it was to be used. Now we had the gas, and we had established a
procedure.
[8]
One woman approached me as she walked past and, pointing to her four
children who were manfully helping the smallest ones over the rough
ground, whispered: "How can you bring yourself to kill such
beautiful, darling children? Have you no heart at all?" One old
man, as he passed by me, hissed: "Germany will pay a heavy penance
for this mass murder of the Jews." His eyes glowed with hatred as
he said this.
[9]
Although
Lipstadt
doesn't mention Höss, she does include the following statement in
her book. It provides an appropriate conclusion to this discussion:
These works demonstrate how deniers misstate, misquote, falsify
statistics, and falsely attribute conclusions to reliable sources. They
rely on books that directly contradict their arguments, quoting in a
manner that completely distorts the authors' objectives. Deniers count
on the fact that the vast majority of readers will not have access to
the documentation or make the effort to determine how they have
falsified or miscontrued information.
[10]
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The Techniques of Holocaust Denial