[WW2] - Nürnberg rättegångarna

Hur gick det egentligen till under Nürnberg rättegångarna?
Kan man verkligen lita på vittnesmål från (dessa) rättegångar där vittnen utsatt för trakasserier och misshandel en masse?

"Harlan Fiske Stone, former Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, described the Nuremberg Kangaroo Trials as “a high-grade lynching party for Germans”.

Robert Taft, former US Senator, said that the Nuremberg Kangaroo Trials set a dangerous precedent that could endanger American military personnel captured in future conflicts. If victorious armies can prosecute their defeated enemy for “war crimes”, he said, the same could happen “someday” to captured American soldiers or, for that matter, to an US President, like Skull-and-Bones’ George W. Bush, conducting wars which are - like the Iraq war of 2003 - in clear violation of international law.

John F. Kennedy, former US President, wrote in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book Profiles in Courage of the political heroism of Robert Taft, whose personal code of honor required him to denounce the Nuremberg Kangaroo Trials at the risk of jeopardizing his lifelong QUEST for the presidency. (Kennedy, John Fitzgerald. 1963. Profiles in Courage. New York)

Despite relentless opposition and an unprecedented smear campaign against him by the Zionist media, Taft questioned the fairness of the Nuremberg Trials. He contended that they were not the shining example of Western jurisprudence that those media had led the gullible American people to believe.

Robert Taft conducted a Senate investigation in which many American witnesses disclosed that there had been widespread torture of German defendants. Such conduct led Senator Taft to suggest that one could hardly trust such confessions. Taft then went on to question the very foundations of the trials and the image of “justice” they were supposed to represent.

In Profiles in Courage, US President John F. Kennedy quotes Robert Taft speaking at Kenyon College in Ohio as follows:
“About this whole judgment there is the spirit of vengeance, and vengeance is seldom justice. The hanging of the eleven men convicted will be a blot on the American record we shall long regret.

In these trials we have accepted the Russian idea of the purpose of trials - government policy and not justice - with little relation to Anglo-Saxon heritage. By clothing policy in the forms of legal procedure, we may discredit the whole idea of justice in Europe for years to come.” (Kennedy, John Fitzgerald. 1963. Profiles in Courage. New York)

Other Zionist controlled media tried to give the the Nuremberg Kangaroo Trials an appearance of fairness and authenticity in a courtroom setting, but there cannot be any justice when

• the accusers have control over judges, prosecution, and defense,
• the judges are the political enemies of the accused,
• men face persecution for acts of war that the allied accusers themselves had committed (Dresden, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Gulag, etc.),
• the trials allow massive amounts of testimony without cross-examination of witnesses,
• so-called evidence consists of confessions exacted through torture,
• witnesses for the defense could face arrest for showing up at court,
• men are tried for violations of laws that did not even exist at the time of their alleged commission (“ex-post-facto criminal law”).

Judge Edward Van Roden was a member of the Simpson Army Commission that investigated the methods used. In the January 9, 1949, Washington Daily News and in the January 23, 1949, London Sunday Pictorial he told of some examples of the use of torture.

“... The investigators”, he said, “would put a black hood over the accused’s head and then punch him in the face with brass knuckles, kick him and beat him with rubber hoses. . . . All but two of the Germans, in the 139 cases we investigated, had been kicked in the testicles beyond repair.” (Washington Daily News. 1949. January 9 --- Sunday Pictorial. 1949. January 23. London.)

Much of the “Holocaust proof” offered today by “Holocaust” promoters working either for Zionist outlets or are themselves Jews, is based on the “confessions” extracted at the Nuremberg Trials. However, one can hardly rely on confessions of those whose testicles were damaged during interrogation.

In addition, Russian KGB officials, who themselves had committed extensive “war crimes” and “crimes against humanity”, sat as judges in Nuremberg.

Iowa Supreme Court justice Charles F. Wenersturm, who was president of one of the Nuremberg tribunals, had resigned his appointment in disgust at the proceedings. He charged that the prosecution prevented the defense from obtaining evidence and preparing their cases, that the trials were not trying to create a new legal principle but were motivated solely by hatred of Germans. Additionally, he said that 90 percent of the Nuremberg Kangaroo Court consisted of persons who, on political and racial grounds, were biased against the defense. He contended that Jews dominated the staff of the Nuremberg Courts and were more interested in revenge than justice.

General George S. Patton had also opposed the Nuremberg Kangaroo Trials. For example, in a letter to his wife he wrote:

“I am frankly opposed to this war criminal stuff. It is not cricket and is Semitic. I am also opposed to sending POWs to work as slaves in foreign lands, where many will be starved to death.” (Blumenson, M. The Patton Papers. 1972. Boston)

The armies of the Soviet Union raped almost all the German women in their occupied areas - from young children to the elderly. They murdered millions and forced millions from their homes in the winter of 1945. East Prussia, German land for centuries where the “anti-Semitic” philosopher Immanual Kant was born (Königsberg), had its entire German population expelled and/or murdered by the Soviets. In the 1990's, Jewish researcher, John Sack, documented the Jewish mass murder of tens-of-thousands of Germans in the months following the war. (Sack, J. An Eye For An Eye. 1993. New York)

It wasn’t just the Soviets and the Jews who committed “war crimes”. The Western allies had their share of them as well. One of those crimes was Operation Keel Haul, which deported hundreds of thousands of Russian and Eastern European anti-Communists to torture, slave labor and mass murder in the Soviet Union. When they learned of the forced repatriation planned by the Allies, scores of them committed suicide. Another was the Morgenthau Plan of the Jew, Zionist and ferocious German-hater Henry Morgenthau, which the Allies implemented for a while after the war. The plan called for each German civilian to receive a ration of food that was less than that alleged to have been allotted to inmates in Germany's concentration camps for Jews."

http://www.y-quest.net/nuremberg.htm

Klipper ur ditt inlägg för att få fram vad jag skall besvara. Ovanstående rör alltså Malmedy- och Dachauprocesserna 1946. Jag tar till ett tidigare inlägg i en debatt med Ezzelino samt inledningsvis något om "tortyren" av Rudolf Höss:

"Jag tror inte det hade någon större betydelse vid Nürnbergrättegången vilket miljonantal ihjälgasade i Auschwitz han (Höss) uppgav, det väsentliga var nog alla andra hemska detaljer han berättade om. Och han medger ju själv i sina memoarer (på svenska "Kommendant i Auschwitz", som författades i Polen 1946, då han väntade på avrättningen, att han vid ETT tillfälle blev misshandlad (inte torterad) i Nürnberg. Det intressanta med hans självbiografi, som f.ö. utgavs först 1958, är emellertid att nästan allt det hemska han berättar har kunnat beläggas långt senare genom vittnesmål, erkännanden och en mängd dokument.

Sedan har jag måst skära ner (även för att hålla mig inom 10000 tecken!) dina (Ezzelinos) glädjeyttringar över amerikanarnas "tortyr" av de åtalade i Dachauprocessen 1946 - och också göra dig besviken. Den sammanföll nämligen i stort sett med den s.k. Malmedyprocessen och även där påstods samma saker, bl.a att många av de åtalade fått sina testiklar krossade med men för livet! Hur man då omärkt av detta kan uppträda inför en domstol, vilket alla gjorde, kan man fråga sig....Men lyckligtvis visade det sig nästan allt vara skrönor iscensatta av en nynazistisk grupp, där av någon besynnerlig anledning även den senare ökände senatorn Joseph Mac Carty var involverad! Hoppas du kan läsa tyska, det framgår alltså av http://www.idgr.de/texte-1/legenden/folter/folter.html "

Ezzelino var inte vidare nöjd med med svaret och den källa jag angav och jag beklagade då att en annan webb-sida om saken ej var tillgänglig. Jag har emellertid nu fått fram den, men endast den "cachade" sidan, därav den "långa url:en
http://www.google.se/search?q=cache:OZ2kdP_qnpQJ:www.scrapbookpages.com /DachauScrapbook/DachauTrials/MalmedyMassacre04.html+edward+van+roden&hl=sv&lr=l ang_da|lang_en|lang_nl|lang_no|lang_sv|lang_de

Två fel gör inte ett rätt.
Jag har följt era långa och stundom intressanta debatter med stort intresse men inte brytt mig om att lägga mig i men det finns ju en början på allt.

Misshandel i samband med förhör eller vittnesmål är väl icke acceptabelt oavsett vad den anklagades brott är, i en normal rättsstat eller under civila former?
Om det är så att han blev misshandlad vid lämnandet av dessa uppgifter vid och inför en rättegång så ogillas ju rättegången som sådan, skyldig eller inte.

Vilket samhälle vill vi leva i?
Vart går gränsen mellan misshandel och tortyr?

"Massakern" i Malmedy visar lite hur dessa rättegångar kunde se ut. Än i dag så tjaffsar fortfarande historiker med varandra vad som egentligen hände där, men tyskarna blev alla dömda för brott under rättegången 1946.

"On May 16, 1946, Peiper and 70 members of his Kampfgruppe, plus his army commander, chief of staff and corps commander, were arraigned before a U.S. military court in the former concentration camp at Dachau, charged that they did "willfully, deliberately and wrongfully permit, encourage, aid, abet and participate in the killing, shooting, ill treatment, abuse and torture of members of the armed forces of the United States of America." The location chosen for the trial and the number of defendants was clearly significant, and it surprised no one when all the Germans were found guilty. The court of six American officers presided over by a brigadier general took an average of less than three minutes to consider each case. Forty-three of the defendants, including Peiper, Christ, Rumpf, Sievers and Sternebeck, were sentenced to death by hanging (Poetschke had been killed in March 1945), 22 to life imprisonment and the rest to between 10 and 20 years.
[...]
Sadly, incomplete and rushed investigations, suspicions about the methods used to obtain confessions, and inadequate or flawed evidence ensured that guilty men escaped proper punishment, and there can be little doubt that some innocent men were punished during the trial. In the final analysis, justice itself became another casualty of the incident."

Källa: http://historynet.com/wwii/blmassacr...dy/index2.html

PS Inga dödsstraff utfördes och alla var ute efter ca 10 år. Peiper höll på att skriva sin memoar när han blev mördad.

Tyvärr, Olle, den långa url-en gör även denna sida "lång", jag tror det är bäst om du splittrar upp den eller avlägsnar den så återställs trådsidan till normalskick.

Du vidhåller alltså fortfarande att det inte var någon tortyr av Höss. Svara då på frågan: om Elie Wiesel, Rudolf Vrba eller Anne Frank hade utsatts för den behandlingen, hade det också varit "tortyr" (med citationstecknen antyder du att de som kallar det tortyr ljuger eller överdriver) enligt ditt sätt att se på saken?
Och deras bekännelser om att de, låt säga, förgiftat dricksvattnet i hela Centraleuropa och partajat med Satan på Blocksberg hade inte varit något att fatta misstankar vid, "för de hade ju så många andra hemska detaljer att erkänna"?

Till frågan om de krossade testiklarna och din sjuka idé att jag skulle visa "glädjeyttringar" för att jag talar om hur saken enligt domare Van Roden och medicinska undersökningar förhöll sig, dvs. att 137 av 139 fått testiklarna söndersparkade: vad tror du själv, om du får "vila" några veckor eller månader efter att ha fått pungen krossad, nog skulle du väl kunna masa dig inför domarskranket och tiga och nicka medhåll? Det skulle nog inte kännas så där jättemysigt, men va fan...Ditt och dina meningsfränders envetna bestridande av att illdåd begicks även mot tyskar vittnar om en inrotad lögnaktighet och inhuman hållning och oförmåga att se saker från ett någorlunda neutralt perspektiv. Det är samma sorts mentalitet som hos idioterna som försöker bagatellisera och försvara tortyren och övergreppen i Abu Ghraib och på Guantanamobasen.

Visst, du får ha vilka åsikter du vill: kom bara inte med ditt selektiva brutalsentimentala moraliserande, som tydligen endast gäller när tyskar eller nazister har utfört något övergrepp.

Inte nog med att du sedan länge är drabbad av orddiarré, du blir löjligare och löjligare!

Alla de åtalade benådades ju från dödsstraffet och fick istället avtjäna 5-6 år i fängelse, varefter de förmodligen gifte sig och fick barn, trots sina "krossade testiklar"! Som f.ö. ingen av de 137 (!!!) någonsin klagat på, vare sig före eller efer frigivningen. Alltså som vanligt en revisionistskröna....

"...förmodligen gifte sig och fick barn".

Är det bekräftat av en domare och medicinsk undersökning om denna "tortyr"?

Dessa rättegångar verkar ju bara snart bli en enda stor parodi.

Det du frågar efter, medicinska undersökningar, finns på de anvisade webbsidorna. Rättegångarna en parodi? Nej, de gällde mycket allvarliga saker, det parodiska stod nynazisterna med sina beskyllningar för. Domaren van Rohden (som inte var domare i dessa rättegångar) bestred ju f.ö. de uttalanden som tillvitats honom.

Lägg ner dina provokationer och svara på den fråga jag ställde: om det Höss, Dachauvakterna och vissa andra vid Nürnbergrättegångarna utsattes för hade drabbat Elie Wiesel och Anne Frank, och de bekänt lika sinnesrubbade saker som Höss ("tre miljoner dödade i Auschwitz"), hade även det varit legitimt, trivsamt, och ett pålitligt vittnesmål? Och inte alls tortyr?

Vänligen slakta den långa url-en som fortsätter fucka upp denna sida.

Låt oss då lyssna på den amerikanske rättegångsreportern Joseph Halows beskrivning av vad som utspelades i samband med Dachaurättegången och Mauthausenrättegången:

http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v09/v09p453_Halow.html

"An unusual set of circumstances, over which I had only limited control, and timing, over which I had no control whatsoever, determined the course of my military career and led me to work as a court reporter at Dachau for the 7708 War Crimes Group in Germany after my discharge from the Army. Arriving in Germany innocent of war and politics, I found my preconceptions of right and wrong during wartime, as well as the justice of the postwar trials, challenged by what I observed and experienced during the Dachau trials. Many years later, my review of the records of those trials has only strengthened my belief that justice was not served at Dachau after the war.

As one might well imagine, the motive of the professional witnesses was also one of spite and revenge. Those of them who had been in the concentration camps hated the Germans and would have done anything to harm them. In many instances their vengeance included relating exaggerated accounts of what they had witnessed. It also included outright lying.

---To complicate matters even further, those who investigated the cases and brought them to court were often untrained. Their major qualification for these jobs was that they spoke German. In most instances this was not difficult for them, since, as Jewish refugees from Germany, German was their mother tongue. Virtually all of these investigators also hated the Germans, as did a large portion of the professional staff assigned to work in the courts. Many of the investigators gave vent to their hatred by attempting to force confessions from the Germans by treating them brutally. This frequently emerged in the testimony of some of the accused in the court proceedings, and the accompanying documents in the files contain allegations of instances of severe beatings of the accused by some of these investigators. The most famous example of this brutality was in connection with the interrogation of the suspects in the "Malmedy Case," and was confirmed by the Army's review board. The military courts, set up as court martial, tended, however, generally to believe those who made the accusations, paying scant attention to testimony by and for the accused.

---In the end it was obvious the court placed not only more confidence, but immediate and almost blind belief in the prosecution's witnesses, despite the confusion in their indentification of the accused and their otherwise weak statements. As was usually the case in the Dachau courts, there is no indication that the testimony presented by the witnesses for the defense was even considered.

In my review of the file, I sadly noted a pathetic sworn statement submitted by Gustav Petrat, which appeared to me to be, so many years after he had been hanged in consequence of his duty at Mauthausen, the echo of a lonely young ghost. The statement was prepared in German but was translated for the recipient, since it was submitted to the Military Governor of the U.S. Zone of Occupation. The statement, in translation, reads as follows:

I, Gustav PETRAT, born 12 November 1924 in Wirballen/Litauen [Lithuania], presently in LandsberglLech, make the following sworn statement after I have been informed that this statement is to be submitted to the Military Governor of the U.S. Zone and that any false statement may be severely punished.

1. In May 1944, on account of my wound, I was transferred to the guard personnel of the Mauthausen concentration camp and served there as dog leader with the 16th Guard Company. My rank was Corporal (Rottenführer) in the Armed (Waffen) SS.

2. On 10 May 1945, I was taken prisoner by American soldiers in Ried near Mauthausen and taken to the Tittling camp. When I got there I was mistreated with whips, fists and feet, as was the general custom at that time for newly arrived prisoners.

3. Like many others I was quartered in a potato patch in the open air, so that we all were exposed to the weather.

4. On 26 May 1945 I had my first interrogation there, which was one of the most memorable of my entire captivity. Even before they asked me the first question, they struck me so that I collapsed. After I had managed to stagger upright again in spite of my weak condition and aided by the necessary kicks from the interrogator, the real interrogation began. They asked me questions that I could not have answered if I had had the best will in the world to do so. I was to state where the leader of the Mauthausen concentration camp was. It was impossible for me to give the information, since I really didn't know, and as a little corporal I couldn't know. My reply loosed a hail of blows.---

7. In January 1947 the so-called "line-ups" commenced in the Dachau Special Camp. I was confronted with prisoners three times, yet, no one accused me of the least thing. The man in charge of the line-up, Mr. ENTRESS, told the prisoners that I was said to have shot many prisoners and beaten them to death, whereat only a burst of laughter arose. At that time I was 22 years old. When I was 19 I came to Mauthausen as dog- leader.

A former prominent prisoner, Dr. SANNER, asserted he did not know me, but if a dog leader had beaten prisoners to death or shot them that would certainly have become known in the camp. Many other former long-term prisoners joined in this exonerating testimony.

8. At mid-July 1947 I and my seven co-accused were presented for the first time to our official defense lawyer, Major William A. OATES. To his question whether I knew what I was accused of, and by whom, I could only reply that I was not conscious of any guilt and also had never counted on being brought to trial, since I had never mistreated or killed anyone.---

It happened that defense witnesses were threatened and beaten by foreign former prisoners so that the former had no more interest in appearing for the defense. They were afraid that they too would be accused of something, which the foreign prisoners were quite capable of, as they hated everything German and were out for revenge.

13. In the courtroom were Polish, Jugoslav and Jewish prisoners as spectators who served as an information bureau, that is, during the court recesses they told their comrades, who were still waiting for their interrogation, everything that had been discussed during the course of the trial. On the basis of this information the latter were then able to reinforce the accusations and bring to naught the exoneration, which was scanty enough anyway.
For this reason it was also possible to always bring out the same points in the accusations."---

It is now late to be considering the question of Petrat's personal innocence or guilt, since he was executed in 1948. Apart from some possible exaggerations, Petrat's statement must be considered credible. His comments with regard to the witnesses conferring with one another has the ring of truth and confirms what the defense counsel had already suspected and had indicated to the court during his interrogation of the witnesses: that there was discussion among the witnesses about the testimony. The witnesses' mistaken identification of the accused Buetgen firmly and clearly indicates collusion among the Prosecution's witnesses.

There can also be no question about the use of duress and physical force by the interrogators. This was confirmed by the review of the Malmedy case, but was present in other American cases as well. There were certainly American legal personnel who were disturbed by the beatings administered to the prisoners in order to extract confessions of guilt, but for the most part they kept silent. One investigator who did know and was deeply distressed was, surprisingly enough, Fred Fleischmann, an American Jew who had been forced to flee Germany during World War II. Fleischmann later complained bitterly about the beatings the German prisoners were forced to endure."

Men det är ju inte misshandel, övergrepp och tortyr, Olle, det drabbade ju bara tyskar?

Mer uppbygglig läsning, särskilt för Olle, som tydligen förnekar svåra övergrepp mot tyska fångar under efterkrigsrättegångarna, och att tortyr oavsett vem det drabbar är skändligt och ogiltigförklarar de "bekännelser" som ernås genom misshandeln:

http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v12/v12p167_Weberb.html

"Allied prosecutors used torture to help prove their case at Nuremberg and other postwar trials. (note 72)

Former Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss was tortured by British officials into signing a false and self-incriminating "confession" that has been widely cited as a key document of Holocaust extermination. His testimony before the Nuremberg Tribunal, a high point of the proceeding, was perhaps the most striking and memorable evidence presented there of a German extermination program. (note 73) Höss maintained that two and half million people had been killed in Auschwitz gas chambers, and that another 500,000 inmates had died there of other causes. No serious or reputable historian now accepts either of these fantastic figures, and other key portions of Höss' "confession" are now generally acknowledged to be untrue. (note 74)

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn has cited the case of Jupp Aschenbrenner, a Bavarian who was tortured into signing a statement that he had worked on mobile gas chambers ("gas vans") during the war. It wasn't until several years later that he was finally able to prove that he had actually spent that time in Munich studying to become an electric welder. (note 75)

Fritz Sauckel, head of the German wartime labor mobilization program, was sentenced to death at the main Nuremberg trial. An important piece of evidence presented to the Tribunal by the US prosecution was an affidavit signed by the defendant. (Nuremberg document 3057-PS.) It turned out that Sauckel had put his signature to this self-incriminating statement, which had been presented to him by his captors in finished form, only after he was bluntly told that if he hesitated, his wife and children would be turned over to the Soviets. "I did not stop to consider, and thinking of my family, I signed the document," Sauckel later declared. (note 76)

Hans Fritzsche, another defendant in the main Nuremberg trial, was similarly forced to sign a self-damning confession while he was a prisoner of the Soviet secret police in Moscow. (Nuremberg document USSR-474.) (note 77)

Nuremberg defendant Julius Streicher, who was eventually hanged because he published a sometimes sensational anti-Jewish weekly paper, was brutally mistreated following his arrest. He was badly beaten, kicked, whipped, spat at, forced to drink saliva and burned with cigarettes. His genitals were beaten. Eyebrow and chest hair was pulled out. He was stripped and photographed. Fellow defendant Hans Frank was savagely beaten by two black GIs shortly after his arrest. August Eigruber, former Gauleiter of Upper Austria, was mutilated and castrated at the end of the war. (note 78)

Josef Kramer, former commandant of both the BergenBelsen and Auschwitz-Birkenau camps, and other defendants in the British-run "Belsen" trial, were reportedly also tortured, some of them so brutally that they begged to be put to death. (note 79)

Although most of the defendants at the main Nuremberg trial were not tortured, many other Germans were forced to sign affidavits and give testimony against their former colleagues and superiors. A simple threat to turn the subject over to the Soviets was often enough to persuade him to sign an affidavit or provide testimony needed in court. Threats against the subject's wife and children, including withdrawal of ration cards, delivery to the Soviets or imprisonment, often quickly produced the desired results. If all else failed, the subject could be placed in solitary confinement, beaten, kicked, whipped or burned until he broke down. (note 80)---

Reports of widespread torture at the postwar American-run "war crimes" trials at Dachau leaked out, resulting in so many protests that a formal investigation was eventually carried out. A US Army Commission of inquiry consisting of Pennsylvania Judge Edward van Roden and Texas Supreme Court Judge Gordon Simpson officially confirmed the charges of gross abuse. German defendants, they found, were routinely tortured at Dachau with savage beatings, burning matches under fingernails, kicking of testicles, months of solitary confinement, and threats of family reprisals. Low ranking prisoners were assured that their "confessions" would be used only against their former superiors in the dock. Later, though, these hapless men found their own "confessions" used against them when they were tried in turn. High ranking defendants were cynically assured that by "voluntarily" accepting all responsibility themselves they would thereby protect their former subordinates from prosecution.85

One Dachau trial court reporter was so outraged at what was happening there in the name of justice that he quit his job. He testified to a US Senate subcommittee that the "most brutal" interrogators had been three German-born Jews. Although operating procedures at the Dachau trials were significantly worse than those used at Nuremberg, they give some idea of the spirit of the "justice" imposed on the vanquished Germans.---

One of the most important and revealing Nuremberg cases is that of Oswald Pohl, the wartime head of the vast SS agency (WVHA) that ran the German concentration camps. After his capture in 1946, he was taken to Nenndorf where British soldiers tied him to a chair and beat him unconscious. He lost two teeth in repeated beatings.89 He was then transferred to Nuremberg, where American military officials intensively interrogated him for more than half a year in sessions that lasted for hours. Altogether there were about 70 such sessions. During this period he had no access to an attorney or any other help. He was never formally charged with anything, nor even told precisely why he was being interrogated.

In a statement written after he was sentenced to death at Nuremberg in November 1947 by the American military court ("Concentration Camp" Case No. 4), Pohl described his treatment.90 He reported that although he was generally not physically mistreated in Nuremberg as he had been at Nenndorf, he was nevertheless subjected to the less noticeable but, as he put it, "in their own way much more brutal emotional tortures."

American interrogators (most of them Jews) accused Pohl of killing 30 million people and of condemning ten million people to death. The interrogators themselves knew very well that such accusations were lies and tricks meant to break down his resistance, Pohl declared. "Because I am not emotionally thick-skinned, these diabolical intimidations were not without effect, and the interrogators achieved what they wanted: not the truth, but rather statements that served their needs," he wrote.

Pohl was forced to sign false and self-incriminating affidavits written by prosecution officials that were later used against him in his own trial. As he recalled:

Whenever genuine documents did not correspond to what the prosecution authorities wanted or were insufficient for the guilty sentences they sought, "affidavits" were put together. The most striking feature of these remarkable trial documents is that the accused often condemned themselves in them. That is understandable only to those who have themselves experienced the technique by which such "affidavits" are obtained.

He and other defendants were "destroyed" with these affidavits, which "contain provable errors of fact regarding essential points," Pohl wrote. Among the false statements signed by Pohl was one that incriminated former Reichsbank President Walter Funk, whom the Nuremberg Tribunal eventually sentenced to life imprisonment.91---"

Fortsättning av föregående inlägg, historien om Oswald Pohl till att börja med:

"American officials also made use of false witnesses at Nuremberg, Pohl wrote:

Whenever these productions [affidavits] were not enough to produce the result sought by the prosecuting authorities, they marched out their so-called 'star witnesses,' or rather, paid witnesses ... A whole string of these shady, wretched characters played their contemptible game at Nuremberg. They included high government officials, generals and intellectuals as well as prisoners, mental defectives and real hardened criminals ... During the WVHA trial [of Pohl] a certain Otto appeared from a mental institution as a "star witness." His previous lifestyle would have been considered exemplary by any hardened criminal. The same is true of prosecution witness Krusial who presented the most spectacular fairy tales to the court under oath, which were naturally believed ...

Pohl also protested that defense attorneys were not allowed free access to the German wartime documents, which the prosecution was able to find and use without hindrance:

For almost two years the prosecution authorities could make whatever use they wanted of the many crates of confiscated documentary and archival material they had at their disposal. But the same access right was refused to the German defendants despite their repeated efforts ... This meant a tremendous or even complete paralysis and hindrance of the defense cases for the accused, for those crates also contained the exonerating material that the prosecution authorities were able to keep from being presented to the court. And that is called "proper" procedure.

Because Pohl held the rank of general in the German armed forces, his treatment by the British and Americans was illegal according to the international agreements on the treatment of prisoners of war.

"As result of the brutal physical mistreatment in Nenndorf and my treatment in Nuremberg, I was emotionally a completely broken man," he wrote. "I was 54 years old. For 33 years I had served by country without dishonor, and I was unconscious of any crime."

Pohl summed up the character of the postwar trials of German leaders:

It was obvious during the Dachau trials, and it also came out unmistakably and only poorly disguised during the Nuremberg trials, that the prosecution authorities, among whom Jews predominated, were driven by blind hatred and obvious lust for revenge. Their goal was not the search for truth but rather the annihilation of as many adversaries as possible.

To an old friend Pohl wrote: "As one of the senior SS leaders I had never expected to be left unmolested. No more, however, did I expect a death sentence. It is a sentence of retribution."92

He was hanged on June 7, 1951. In his final plea to the Nuremberg court, Pohl expressed his faith that one day blind hysteria would give way to just understanding:93

After distance and time have clarified all events and when passion has ceased and when hatred and revenge have stilled their hunger, then these many millions of decent Germans who have sacrificed their lives for their fatherland will not be denied their share of sympathy which today is being attributed to the victims of the concentration camps, although a large number of them owe their fate not to political, racial or religious characteristics, but to their criminal past.---

During the decades since Nuremberg, many individuals have been tried in (West) Germany and other countries for alleged wartime participation in exterminating the Jews. Rarely, if ever, has a defendant ever substantially challenged the Holocaust story. The accused invariably adopted the defense strategy successfully used by Speer at Nuremberg: He accepted the extermination story but denied or minimized his own personal involvement. To deny an extermination program in trials that were organized on the working assumption that such a program existed would have been judicial suicide.

These trials are comparable in some respects to the Soviet show trials of 1936-1938. The defendants in the well-publicized Moscow trials never denied the existence of vast criminal conspiracies involving major Soviet personalities who supposedly plotted the most horrible crimes in league with hostile foreign powers. Instead, the accused pleaded that he was not personally guilty, or that his guilt was minimal and that he had truly repented. (Remarkably, even foreign observers who should have known better, such as US Ambassador in Moscow Joseph Davies, were inclined to accept the Stalinist show trials as genuine and essentially just.)105

Comparisons have also been drawn between the "Holocaust" trials and the witchcraft trials of past centuries. Those accused of witchcraft never denied the existence or diabolical power of witches. Instead they insisted that they were not personally guilty of the charges against them. Nuremberg defendant Hans Fritzsche, who had been one of Germany's most prominent and effective wartime radio news commentators, summed up the problem: "If someone accuses me of killing someone, than I can prove the contrary. But if I am accused of being the devil, there's no way to disprove that, because it can't be done."106

One of the most important of the post-Nuremberg "Holocaust" trials was the 1963-1965 Frankfurt "Auschwitz" trial of 22 former Auschwitz SS men. The lengthy case received worldwide media coverage and assumed something of the character of a show trial.107 Deciding the guilt or innocence of the defendants was "extraordinarily difficult," the judges declared in their verdict, because of the very inconclusive nature of the evidence. "We have no absolute evidence for the individual killings. We have only the witness testimonies." The judges acknowledged that "the possibilities of verifying the witness declarations were very limited." The judges further emphasized "this weakness of witness testimony" by citing the case of a Buchenwald official convicted of murdering an inmate who later turned up alive.108

This situation was embarrassingly underscored during the trial when former inmate Rudolf Kauer suddenly repudiated earlier statements about his one-time SS masters. In pre-trial interrogation he claimed to have seen defendant Wilhelm Boger brutally beat a naked Polish woman with a horse whip, ripping off one breast and flooding a room with blood. When asked to repeat his statement in court, Kauer admitted: "I lied about that. That was just a yarn going around the camp. I never saw it ..." Another claim that Boger had smashed an infant's skull against a tree trunk was also not true, he confessed. Although Boger was not liked, Kauer told the court, he was actually a just SS man.

Another defendant, Klaus Dylewski, whom Kauer had called "one of the worse killers" at Auschwitz, was actually "harmless." All of his pre-trial accusations were lies, Kauer said, calmly adding: "You can punish me if you want. I am used to that." After the presiding judge admonished him several times for repudiating his earlier statements, Kauer replied: "We don't need to lose any more words. It's not worth it. What I say now is the truth."109

Former Auschwitz camp adjutant and SS Captain Robert Mulka, the main defendant in the trial, was pronounced guilty of participation in mass murder and sentenced to 14 years at hard labor, a verdict that many outsiders considered outrageously lenient. But less than four months later Mulka was quietly released, an outcome that should astonish only those not familiar with the nature of such trials.110"

Det kan också vara av intresse att påminnas om vad de huvudåtalade vid den stora Nürnbergrättegången hade att säga om "Förintelsen" (samma essä som i föregående inlägg):

"---Along with the millions of people around the world who avidly followed the Nuremberg proceedings by radio and newspaper, the defendants themselves were shocked by the evidence presented to substantiate the extermination charge. Above all, the testimony of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss and Einsatzgruppen commander Otto Ohlendorf made a deep impression. Contrary to what is often claimed or insinuated, however, the Nuremberg Tribunal defendants declared that they did not know of any extermination program during the war.94 These men were, in a sense, the first "Holocaust revisionists."

The main Nuremberg defendant, Hermann Göring, who had been Hitler's second-in-command and designated successor during most of the Third Reich years, vehemently denied knowing of any extermination program during the war. "The first time I learned of these terrible exterminations," he exclaimed at one point, "was right here in Nuremberg." The German policy had been to expel the Jews, not kill them, he explained, and added that, to the best of his knowledge, Hitler did not know of any extermination policy either.95

During a rare unguarded break between court sessions, fellow defendant Hans Fritzsche privately asked Göring about the truth of the extermination charge. The former Reichsmarschall solemnly assured Fritzsche that the accusation was not true. The Allied evidence for the charge, he insisted, was inaccurate or incomplete and totally contradicted everything he knew about the matter. In any case, Göring added, if there had been any mass killings, they certainly were not ordered by Hitler.96
General Alfred Jodl, chief of the operations staff of the Armed Forces High Command, and probably Hitler's closest military adviser, gave similar testimony to the Tribunal. Responding to a direct question about this matter, he said:97

I can only say, fully conscious of my responsibility, that I never heard, either by hint or by written or spoken words, of an extermination of Jews ... I never had any private information on the extermination of the Jews. On my word, as sure as I am sitting here, I heard all these things for the first time after the end of the war.

Hans Frank, the wartime governor of German-ruled Poland, testified that during the war he had heard only rumors and foreign reports of mass killings of Jews. He asked other officials, including Hitler, about these stories and was repeatedly assured that they were false.98

Frank's testimony is particularly noteworthy because if millions of Jews had actually been exterminated in Germanoccupied Poland, as alleged, hardly anyone would have been in a better position to know about it. During the course of the trial, Frank was overcome by a deep sense of Christian repentance. His psychological state was such that if he had known about an extermination program, he would have said so.

At one point during the proceedings, Frank was asked by his attorney, "Did you ever take part in any way in the annihilation of Jews?" His reply reflects his emotional state at the time:99

I say yes, and the reason why I say yes is because, under the impression of these five months of the proceedings, and especially under the impression of the testimony of the witness [former Auschwitz commandant] Höss, I cannot answer to my conscience to shift the responsibility for this solely on these low-level people. I never built a Jewish extermination camp or helped to bring one into existence. But if Adolf Hitler personally shifted this terrible responsibility onto his people, than it also applies to me. After all, we carried on this struggle against Jewry for years ... And therefore I have the duty to answer your question in this sense and in this context with yes. A thousand years will pass and this guilt of Germany will not be erased.

These words, and especially the final sentence, have often been quoted to give the impression that the defendants themselves admitted their guilt and acknowledged the existence of a wartime German policy to exterminate the Jews.100 Less well-known are Frank's words during his final address to the Tribunal:101

In the witness stand I said that a thousand years would not be enough to erase the guilt of our nation because of Hitler's behavior in this war. [However,] not only the behavior of our wartime enemies against our people and our soldiers, which has been carefully kept out of these proceedings, but also the enormous mass crimes of the most terrible kind against Germans, which I have only now learned about, especially in East Prussia, Silesia, Pomerania and in the Sudetenland, which have been and are still being carried out by Russians, Poles and Czechs, have now already completely canceled out any possible guilt of our people. Who will ever judge these crimes against the German people?

Ernst Kaltenbrunner, wartime head of the powerful Reich Security Main Office (RSHA), was certain that he would soon be put to death regardless of the evidence presented to the Tribunal: "The colonel in charge of the London prison that I was in has told me that I would be hanged in any case, no matter what the outcome would be. Since I am fully aware of that, all I want to do is to clear up on the fundamental things that are wrong here." In a question-and-answer exchange, Kaltenbrunner rejected the charge that he had ordered gassings:102

Q. Witness after witness, by testimony and affidavit, has said that the gas chamber killings were done on general or specific orders of Kaltenbrunner.

A. Show me one of those men or any of those orders. It is utterly impossible.

Q. Practically all of the orders came through Kaltenbrunner.

A. Entirely impossible.

The case of Albert Speer, one-time Hitler confidant and wartime Armaments Minister, deserves special mention. His Nuremberg defense strategy was unique and also rather successful because he did not hang. While maintaining that he personally knew nothing of an extermination program during the war, he nevertheless declared himself morally culpable for having worked so diligently for a regime he belatedly came to regard as evil. After serving a twenty-year sentence in Spandau prison, the "repentant Nazi" was "rehabilitated" by the mass media for his somewhat subtle but fervent condemnation of the Hitler regime. His contrite memoir, published in the US as Inside the Third Reich, was highly acclaimed and sold very profitably in Europe and America.

Until his death in 1981, Speer steadfastly insisted that he did not know of any extermination program or gassings during the war. His position was remarkable because, if a wartime policy to exterminate the Jews had actually existed, almost no one would have been in a better position to have known about it. As Reich Armaments Minister, Speer was responsible for the continental mobilization of all available resources, including critically needed Jewish workers. That millions of Jews could have been transported across Europe and killed at a wartime industrial center as important as Auschwitz, and elsewhere, without Speer's knowledge simply defies belief.103
During the Nuremberg "Wilhelmstrasse" trial, the chief of the Reich Chancellery from 1933 to 1945, Hans Lammers, was asked if he "was still of the opinion that no program for exterminating the Jews was ever set up." He answered: "Yes, I am of that opinion. At least the program never came to my attention. The program cannot have been set up." Lammers, who was Hitler's closest legal adviser, went on the explain: "I did not know of any mass killings and, of the cases I heard about, the reports were allegations, rumors ... The fact that individual cases occurred here and there, the shooting of Jews in wartime in some towns or other, that I read something about that and heard something about that, that is very easily possible."104

Such testimony by the men who were most familiar with Germany's overall Jewish policy is routinely dismissed as brazen lying. But the categorical and self-consistent nature of this testimony, sometimes by men who knew that death soon awaited them, suggests a core of truth. On the other hand, to accept the Holocaust extermination story means giving greater credibility to the most fantastic and often demonstrably false testimonies by very questionable witnesses.---"