$Unique_ID{bob01150}
$Pretitle{}
$Title{Liberation of the Nazi Concentration Camps 1945, The
Chapter XII: Discovering the 'Final Solution' - Part II}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Various}
$Affiliation{}
$Subject{holocaust
allied
nuremberg
concentration
fascist
oswiecim
soviet
camp
records
authenticity}
$Date{1987}
$Log{}
Title:       Liberation of the Nazi Concentration Camps 1945, The
Author:      Various
Date:        1987

Chapter XII: Discovering the "Final Solution" - Part II

Vassily Yakovlevich Petrenko

     I am here as one of the participants of the Second World War during which
the anti-Hitler coalition defeated the armies of the aggressors and saved
mankind from fascist slavery.  Hitler's troops, in the destruction of which my
country - the Soviet Union - made a decisive contribution, were the strongest,
the most atrocious and bloodthirsty of all our common enemies.

     I am addressing you as one of the soldiers whose fate it was to storm
fascist concentration camps to liberate the inmates, citizens of many
countries and many nationalities.  After all these years, 36 years, the
memories have not been erased and the horror of horrible crimes is still
there.  The bleeding wounds of millions of those who have suffered at the
hands of fascist butchers are still open.  Another evidence of it is the
present conference, which we conduct in a spirit of goodwill and which will
help the world.

     In January of 1945, the Soviet armed forces continued to liberate
enslaved European nations from Hitler's invaders.  At that time, the 60th
Army, which my division was part of, was fighting on the territory of Poland,
fulfilling missions which were part of the Vistula and Oder offensive drive of
the First Ukrainian Front.  Advancing along the banks of the Vistula River,
the 60th Army, apart from other military missions, had the task of capturing
Oswiecim [Auschwitz] to liberate the inmates of the fascist concentration camp
in that vicinity.

     Our soldiers defeated the enemy troops and on January 27 liberated the
concentration camp and the area.  The advance of Soviet troops was so rapid
and decisive that the fascists had failed to kill all the inmates and to
conceal the traces of their crimes.

     However, many of the inmates liberated by the Soviet Army in Oswiecim
were moved to other places and to other parts of Europe.  It was not very
pleasant.  From among those liberated there are some present here at this
conference.  I wish them good health and personal happiness.

     Much has been written about the captives, and the delegates have
mentioned it here at this conference.  Perhaps it would not seem necessary to
talk about the horrors of Oswiecim, but I will say my words.  I would like to
speak to the young people who are not well informed about the deeds of the
Nazis and perhaps do not quite understand what the former inmates have been
through.

     But there are those who would like to forget the past, to refute these
horrible barbaric plans to destroy nations and peoples, and the monstrous
means that were used in concentration camps - the way it was planned and the
cruelty, how to destroy people in Oswiecim.  Oswiecim is one of the first,
unparalleled.

     A long, long path had to be followed by Soviet soldiers to reach
Oswiecim.  Over 300 days and bloody battles were necessary to free their
country and the countries occupied by Hitler's troops in Europe.

     In the battle of Oswiecim, the 60th Army joined other troops, and when
they freed the camp, hundreds of Soviet soldiers and officers lost their
lives.  Therefore, those who visit that museum which exists where that
horrible camp was, shake their heads about the mass grave where Soviet
soldiers are buried who gave their lives to free the inmates of that camp.

     I would like to say to those who are present from socialist countries,
and those who came from other countries who freed other camps, that the most
horrible concentration camp, the most brutal one, was the Oswiecim
concentration camp.  Even in the historical past, occupying forces never
behaved in the way the so-called civilized fascists did - poisoning, murder,
torture, mobile extermination, incinerations in crematoria designed for it,
and medical experiments on adults and children.  Everything was done by the
fascists on men and women who were innocent.

     They not only destroyed four million people in Oswiecim, that is, 40
percent of those destroyed in all camps, but they used the dead bodies. Gold
teeth were extracted.  Human hair and skin were removed to make lamp shades,
wallets, and gloves.  Fat was used for soap.  Bones were ground and used with
ashes for fertilizer.  There are documents indicating this.

     For us, the soldiers who participated in the liberation of inmates of
fascist concentration camps, it is very painful to know that many of the
fascist war criminals have not yet been punished for their crimes and are
living quietly among honest people in many countries.  Moreover, they continue
fascist propaganda.  They praise Hitler and his former assistant murderers,
and henchmen are dreaming of revenge and dreaming of new wars.

     It is our common duty to the memory of the victims to fight jointly
against all forms of fascism and fascist groups, terrorism, and fascist
dictatorial regimes to ensure man s basic right to live in peace.  The point
of departure of the Soviet Union, the Communist Party, the government, and our
people is that there is nothing more important to any nation in the world than
to secure the right to life.

     Present-day means of warfare, as you well know, are horrible indeed.
While it took fascist murderers five years to kill four million people in the
Oswiecim concentration camp, during World War II over 40 million people lost
their lives; if there is a nuclear conflict, all mankind will die in a very
short time.  For the sake of the memory of the victims of fascism and for the
living and coming generations, it is imperative to prevent the horrible threat
of self-destruction that is facing us now.  We have to destroy nuclear weapons
before they destroy the human race on earth.

     There is only one way to resolve this situation.  That is immediate,
honest, equal, and effective negotiations.  This is precisely what our country
proposes - concrete measures to curb, reduce, and finally destroy nuclear
missiles.  Mankind must do and should be able to do it.  Participants of this
conference, inmates of concentration camps, and the liberators:  this is a
noble cause that we are pursuing.

Robert Wolfe

     Preceding speakers have described theirs as key participants in the
discovery of the Holocaust, and in the failed attempt to achieve timely public
disclosure and preventative action.  Although I served as an infantry officer
in the Second World War and in the US Military Government thereafter, I make
no claim to a significant role.  My discovery of the Holocaust has been
through the records of the Nazi perpetrators:  the Third Reich paperwork of
"the Final Solution of the Jewish question" found among the captured German
and Nuremberg trial records in the National Archives.

     For the discovery of the Holocaust, the Nuremberg trials were both a boon
and a bane.  No mere historical research could have mustered the costly
five-year effort in staff and resources that were commanded by the proclaimed
Allied policy of punishing war criminals.  Documents were thus quickly
uncovered that we might otherwise still be hunting 35 years later. But
documents were also often irretrievably torn from their context, carelessly
excerpted, poorly translated, duplicated under various unrelated designations,
and incorrectly assembled in artificial folders in a manner that muddles their
meaning and taints their authenticity.

     The Nuremberg trials are of unquestioned value to history as well as law
(in another context, I described them as "existential" justice). Nevertheless,
dislocation and distortion of key documentation was inevitable in such a
mammoth operation, given the deadline pressures of impatient victor government
paymasters.  Subsequent careless use of sources, to say nothing of that genre
of fiction which battens on the lurid attraction of jackbooted murder cum sex,
have added to Holocaust historians' difficulties by giving neo-Nazi
revisionists too many opportunities to question the authenticity of specific
documents, and therewith the actuality of the Holocaust itself.

     Just a few examples:  One of the best known Nuremberg trial documents is
the partial transcript of the day-long meeting chaired by Hermann Goring on
November 12, 1938, just three days after the Kristallnacht, which prepared the
total aryanization of the German economy, beginning with the notorious decree
fining the victims one billion Reichsmarks to compensate the Nazi perpetrators
for the property damage done.  To me, the real significance of this document
is that it reveals that during extensive discussions, the conferees not only
devised the legal measures for the aryanization of the German economy, but
unintentionally canvassed the steps and phases which eventually evolved into
the so-called Final Solution of the Jewish Question:  social, cultural, and
personal discrimination, culminating in a Jewish badge of identification and
ghettoization; a Central Office for Jewish Emigration (including a previews of
the abortive Madagascar project of 1940) which would coordinate expropriation,
de-naturalization, and expulsion; and finally what Goring referred to
cryptically as "a great settlement of accounts" with Jewry should the German
Reich "come into foreign policy conflict."  Heydrich, at least, clearly
anticipated how the insane logic of Nazi anti-Semitism must inexorably end,
but Goring and the other conferees, even the venomous Goebbels, seemed
unwilling to admit, perhaps even to themselves, that their unbridled racism
was leading to mass murder.

     This document is of such basic evidentiary value in deciding the disputed
issue of whether Nazi leaders premeditated the Holocaust, that it would be
preferable if its origin were unblurred.  Unfortunately, the paperwork context
is complicated.  Dr. Fritz Dorr, one of the Reichstag stenographers who
recorded the discussion of November 12, 1938, had then submitted his
transcript, but retained his stenographic notes.  On finding these in the
summer of 1945, he again transcribed them, and a copy quickly reached U.S.
Military Government Headquarters in Berlin-Zehlendorf.  When brought in to
identify his transcript, Dorr surrendered his shorthand notes and the ribbon
copy.

     Now, the vulnerability of this documentary source stems from the fact
that the transcripts, ribbon, and carbon, are of early postwar occupation-era
vintage, while the 1938 transcripts have disappeared and may well have been
destroyed.  The best contemporary source, of course, would be Dorr's
stenographic notebooks, which came into American Military Government hands,
but are not in the Nuremberg file with the postwar transcript.  I have been
vainly hunting those notes for many years, but am encouraged by a cryptic
notation in the Nuremberg file to hope that they may turn up among Office of
Strategic Services records scheduled for eventual accession by the National
Archives.

     The fact that this is only a partial transcript, which some revisionists
find suspicious, I find reassuring.  What "disinformation" expert would
manufacture a partial postwar document when he might just as well manufacture
a complete contemporary document?  But, as is customary whenever stenographers
record extensive discussion, they work in short stints or shifts.  This is
borne out by Dorr's designation of his odd-numbered stints as "turns 1, 3, 5,
and 7 [Turnus is his German word]."  Apparently neither notes nor transcripts
of his colleague's "turns" survived.

     Another example:  the Wannsee Protocols, the minutes of the January 20,
1942 Third Reich interagency meeting to coordinate the so-called Final
Solution of the Jewish question, are recognized by anyone familiar with the
Holocaust, due perhaps to the dramatically licensed presentation in the Gerald
Green TV docudrama.  But because the Protocols were offered in evidence as an
isolated document in subsequent Nuremberg trials - it had not yet been
discovered when the International Military Tribunal pronounced its verdict on
Goring and other Nazi leaders few are aware that it was part and parcel of a
series of interrelated documents that render its authenticity
incontrovertable.

     The only known extant copy of the Wannsee minutes, the 16th of 30
numbered copies, was and is deposited in a two-folder German Foreign Office
file bearing the title, "Final Solution of the Jewish Question," which
contains documentation pertaining to that subject filed in reverse,
approximate chronological sequence from January 25, 1939, through November 30,
1943.  This file includes not only the minutes of the Wannsee meeting, but of
two other such interagency meetings held in Eichmann's office at
Kurfurstenstrasse 116 on March 6 and October 27, 1942.  In fact, copy 16 of
the minutes of the January meeting was forwarded to the Foreign Office with a
covering note announcing the March meeting.  Not only do repeated subsequent
references document and detail the fact of the Wannsee meeting, but this
Foreign Office file contains an initial Heydrich invitation to Undersecretary
Luther to a "conference followed by a luncheon on Dec. 9, 1941." On January 8,
Heydrich reissued the invitation for January 20, 1942, because of a last
minute postponement when "sudden . . . events . . . required the attention of
part of the invitees", an obvious reference to Pearl Harbor.  At least two
signed copies of both invitations exist; the other sequence addressed to SS
Gruppenfuhrer Otto Hofmann was extracted from files of the Race and
Resettlement Head Office for Nuremberg use.  The fact that copies were found
in two entirely separate Nazi agency files, of course, would be hard to
manufacture.

     If further corroboration of the authenticity of the Wannsee Protocols
were required, it may be found in the official diaries of Hans Frank as head
of the so-called General Government, that remainder of Poland not formally
annexed by Germany. (I was privileged during a 1979 visit to my esteemed
colleague, Dr. Pilichowski, in Warsaw, to hold volumes of the Frank diary in
my hand, if you want to attest to its authenticity.) In a pre-Christmas 1941
speech to a cabinet session in his headquarters in the Wawel castle in Cracow,
Hans Frank said: "I will therefore think of the Jews only in the basic
expectation that they disappear in January a great discussion of this question
is to take place in the Reich Security Main Office of SS Obergruppenfuhrer
Heydrich."

     Had we been more careful, at Nuremberg and since, to stress the records,
context as well as the content of the Wannsee Protocols, no neo-Nazi
revisionist could venture to dispute either.

     Yet another example: during a visit to Auschwitz in 1979, I asked one of
the archivists whether many used cans of Zyklon-B had been found after the SS
evacuation and the Soviet liberation, and whether there were still any on
hand. (I did not state my reason for inquiring, which was that I had hitherto
seen but one can, a Nuremberg trial exhibit taken from manufacturers' stock,
which bore the printed label: "Attention, without warning odor." Kurt Gerstein
reported, and Rudolf Hoess, at both the Nuremberg and Auschwitz trials
testified, that the trace chemical incorporated into the Zyklon-B pesticide
formula to protect its human users, much as is done with natural gas, had to
be omitted when it was converted for use on human beings - on Jews to be
specific - because it prematurely warned the victims and because it caused
violent retching rather than the quiet sleep of carbon monoxide.) The
archivist took me to a backroom workshop, where an exhibit specialist showed
us several empty Zyklon-B cans of various sizes.  I gingerly picked one up;
its printed label bore no indication that the warning odor had been deleted,
but rubberstamped thereon was the statement: "Attention, without warning
odor."

     It is a universal practice of all bureaucracies to use up supplies of
outmoded printed labels, by amending them with a hand stamp, before new labels
are printed.

     A last example:  the public interest roused by the 1978 television
Holocaust docudrama prompted U.S. government analysts to search still-
classified Allied World War II aerial photography for photographic evidence of
the Auschwitz-Birkenau gas chambers in operation.  When their technically
masterful classified study was ready, I was generously given a private
presentation by its two authors.  I suggested on two counts that publication
be withheld pending revision:  1) that the original photographs used by Allied
photo analysts in 1944-5 as they still were in 1978 and still are in the
cartographic holdings of the National Archives, be published side-by-side
with the enlarged, cropped, and captioned versions the authors had derived
from them in 1978; 2) that pertinent Allied air force textual records be
searched to determine what priorities the hard-worked wartime analysts were
given, what their immediate reports disclosed, and what the detailed
subsequent reports by the Strategic Bombing Survey elaborated. The 1978
analysis was based exclusively on postwar eyewitness testimony, trial evidence
such as that of Rudolf Hoess, and other ground corroboration not available to
Allied analysts in 1944.  Nor had any use been made of the best contemporary
ground corroboration, records of the SS Concentration Camp Administration,
which to be sure were also not available until after the war.

     I also expressed two paramount concerns if my caveats were not heeded:
first, that the media would seize on the most spectacular 1978 enlargements
and captions, and that the general public would assume that labels such as
"GROUP ON WAY TO GAS CHAMBER," had been put there in 1944, rather than in
1978.  In fairness to the two authors, they agreed to my proposal, but it was
too late.  Public relations was in the saddle, and a series of high-level
lateral passes broke the story.  In the event, my fears were justified, and we
shall never be able to reverse that first mistaken impression.  From this
emerged the unsophisticated conclusion that the Allied governments had the
photographs, knew the facts, but would not act; a conclusion as damaging as it
is simplistic.

     My other concern was for a long-range insidious danger.  After the
initial furor subsided, neo-Nazi revisionists would take advantage of the
inevitable reaction of American and other Allied citizens to the implication
of indifference or worse on the part of Allied governments and citizenry, and
raise doubts about the authenticity of the Allied aerial photography of
Auschwitz-Birkenau itself.  Soon, the revisionists may be suggesting that it
was a convenient coincidence that only after the Holocaust had become a
popular media subject, did CIA photo analysts, of all people, surface aerial
photographs of Auschwitz gas chambers.

     We can, of course, counter with the irrefutable argument that it would
have been more convenient to American policy to publish these photographs at
the Nuremberg trials, during the early punitive phase of the occupation of
Germany, and not when the Federal Republic of Germany had meanwhile become one
of our closer allies.  If anything, the inopportune political timing speaks
for authenticity as does the concatenation of Allied aerial photography and
related textual records with seized German records; not only the SS textual
records I have already noted, but a sequence of two seized German aerial
photographs - 1 of Auschwitz-Birkenau taken on December 27, 1944, perhaps to
determine what the frantic dismantling and evacuation looked like to Allied
air observers, and three frames taken on February 19, 1945, probably to
discover what damaging evidence the Soviet liberators were unearthing on the
ground.  There could be no better corroboration of the authenticity of the
Allied photographs than the near-identicality of photographs of
Auschwitz-Birkenau taken, analyzed, and filed within a few days of each other
by opposing air forces, with nearly a half-year of bitter total warfare ahead
before the victor powers would unknowingly hold all the evidence in one hand.
That it lay unknown and unused for one-third of a century after war's end may
yet be of advantage to history.

     If the problem before and during the Holocaust was that no one could and
would believe what would happen, and was happening, in the middle of the
"civilized" 20th century, as Messers Karski and Pehle have borne witness from
this platform today, the problem now and in the future is that most of us
cannot grasp that there are many people who claim or believe that the
Holocaust never happened.  One day, when all the eyewitnesses - survivors,
liberators, bystanders, and even perpetrators - are gone, each succeeding
generation will have to discover anew the truth of the Holocaust.  Their only
unassailable source will be the contemporary record. The duty of our
generation is to avoid any further muddling of that record, lest we provide
the means for future revisionists to mislead the innocent, and seduce the
depraved into genocidal disaster.

     To that paramount purpose, I take the liberty to suggest that the U.S.
Holocaust Memorial Council inscribe the following on its cornerstone: "To
overstate the horror of the Holocaust is impossible.  To embellish the truth
of the Holocaust is unnecessary.  To exploit the agony of its martyrs is
unworthy."