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A Fiest For Lovers of Mud Fights and World Wrestling

Thursday, 12 February 2009 04:20

Editorial

zyk_dees

The Polemic of the Anti-Defamation League Against Holocaust Revisionism only proves that it has no leg to stand on.

It never seizes to amaze me with how little substance the so-called Anti-Defamation League engages in important political and historical debates. Anyone who has bothered studying its writings must have noticed that it provides very little if any arguments and rather resorts to smokescreens and under the belt personal attacks. It relies completely on shameless sycophants in politics and media to parrot its slogans. Unfortunately only very few people have the 'civil courage' to stand up to this nonsense.

The ADL's online guide against "Holocaust denial" is a typical example. The title of the introduction already contains the entire message: Denial as Anti-Semitism. Anyone hoping for a scholarly debate will be bitterly disappointed. Lovers of mud fights and 'world wrestling' can expect a treat though.

Holocaust denial, which coyly refers to itself as Holocaust revisionism, has emerged after over two decades of propagandizing as an important "cutting edge" ideological cement of the diverse hate movement in the 1990s. While appearing on the surface as a rather arcane pseudo-scholarly challenge to the well-established record of Nazi genocide during the Second World War, Holocaust denial serves as a powerful conspiracy theory uniting otherwise disparate fringe groups (e.g., Liberty Lobby, various Klan factions, neo-Nazis, the Aryan Nations and other Identity groups, racist skinheads, etc.).

It's a well established Jewish propaganda technique to use their media power to create powerful enemy images such as Hitler, David Duke, neo-Nazis, Klu-Klux Klan etc. and then associate whoever else they hate - and they hate a lot of people - with those images for the purpose of defaming them.

On the surface, Holocaust deniers portray themselves as individuals and groups engaged in a legitimate, dispassionate quest for historical knowledge and "truth."

It makes no difference whether Holocaust revisionists have an axe to grind with Jews or not. The only thing that matters is whether their arguments are coherent or not. For example, if Holocaust revisionists raise the point that they find it hard to believe that a million Jews were gassed by the non-toxic exhaust fumes of a captured Russian diesel tank engine and the victims burned and burried in trenches, without trace, in an area where the groundwater is as high as half a meter below surface, then it is completely irrelevant whether this point was raised by a Canadian Hitler aficionado of German descent or an Israeli torture specialist.

Dressing themselves in pseudo-academic garb, they have adopted the term "revisionism" in order to mask and legitimate their enterprise. After all, the ongoing challenge to and revision of previously accepted historical interpretation is one of the hallmarks of the professional historian's craft.

Dismissing the arguments of Holocaust revisionists as 'pseudo-academic garb', in spite of their solid academic credentials, is nothing short of malicious slander. Where does it say that you must have a PHD in history to have the right to question historic 'truths' promoted by our ruling crime families? You don't have to be a hen to be able to tell that an egg is rotten! This point is particularly important in a situation where any historian can kiss his academic career good-bye if he contradicts the Judeo-Bolshevik narrative of the Jewish Holocaust.

These so-called revisionists have appropriated the name of the post-World War I historical revisionists of the 1920s and 1930s who challenged successfully the previously dominant view of exclusive German guilt for causing the Great War. They assert that the accepted premise that Nazi Germany engaged in a premeditated campaign of systematic genocide against the Jews of Europe during the period of the Second World War is one that does not stand honest scholarly scrutiny.

The ADL is referring to the three holiest dogmas of the secular Holocaust religion: a plan to kill all European Jews, the unique method of homocidal gas chambers and 6 million dead Jews. 50+ years of brainwashing have trained most Westerners to be automatically enraged and disgusted by any attempt to enfringe on those taboos. This is why the ADL only needs to label someone a Holocaust denier to ensure he is treated like a convicted paedophile.

They do not deny that Hitler's government engaged in persecution of and discrimination against Jews in Germany and German controlled countries. They even admit the existence of concentration camps. They assert, however, that the anti-Semitic actions of the Nazi government were in large part a legitimate response to Jewish misdeeds and disloyalty during wartime. As such, the measures taken and the use of concentration camps was not qualitatively different from similar wartime and post-war actions of the western allies and the Soviet Union. Only Germany is singled out for special condemnation, they argue, because it lost the war. What they deny is the existence of any German plan or program to subject the Jews of Europe to genocide.

The Jewish Holocaust^TM was fabricated for three reasons. Firstly, to overcome any resistance in public opinion against the creation of a Jews-only state in Palestine. Secondly, to eclipse the horrendous war crimes committed by Great Britain, the U.S. and the Soviet Union against German civilians and prisoners of wars. And thirdly, to humiliate a beaten enemy for the purpose of extorting unprecedented reparations and ensure blind obedience to even the most outrageous political demands.

Holocaust deniers seek to plant seeds of questioning and doubt about the Holocaust in their mass audiences. While Holocaust denial has become an article of faith among the militants and followers of the contemporary hate movement, its success does not depend upon conversion to that faith among the general public. The spread of skepticism about the scope and historicity of the Holocaust among a critical mass of public opinion would be considered to be a significant ideological triumph in and of itself.

This is another popular Jewish propaganda technique rooted in their psychopathic behavioural patterns: accusing others of their own crimes. It is the supporters of the Holocaust narrative who are demanding dogmatic belief for their non-sensical accusations, whereas the Holcoaust revisionists have taken upon themselves the hard work of proving the innocence of the accuseds.

Holocaust denial has been widely embraced within the otherwise disparate contemporary hate movement because it serves as an ideological cement that meets a very contemporary political need. In particular, it provides a sanitized envelope for latter-day would-be Hitlers by seeking to show that the heinous crimes ascribed to the original never took place. As such, much of the barrier preventing politicians and movements of the ultra right from making a strategic breakthrough by appealing to a more mainstream audience would be removed. Accordingly, Holocaust denial provides contemporary legitimation through posthumous rehabilitation. It is no accident that David Duke is an avid propagator of Holocaust denial ideology and materials. William Pierce and other neo-Nazis who once embraced the reality of the Holocaust as the essence of the National Socialist mission (only bemoaning the fact that it did not fully succeed in eliminating Jews from the face of the earth) now find it politically expedient to promote Holocaust denial.

This is a classic case of attacking the man instead of the argument, a tactic popular with unscrupelous debaters who have no leg to stand on. Holocaust revisionists are coming from very diverse political backgrounds. Whether or not some of them have a sinister agenda for trying to debunk the biggest hoax in human history is completely irrelevant. A hoax is a hoax, irrespective of what motivates the debunker.

The core message of the Holocaust deniers is even more insidious. They recognize the fact that most people believe that the Holocaust actually occurred. How can it be, they ask, that the great majority have come to accept as truth an historical assertion which is in actuality a gigantic falsehood?

They answer that most people have come to accept uncritically the story of the Holocaust because they have been systematically propagandized with deliberate lies for over fifty years. These lies include materials inserted into the educational curriculum at all levels of instruction; the content of Holocaust-related dramatic and documentary theatrical film and television programming; a vast Holocaust literature; public rituals of Holocaust remembrance; and, most of all, a federally supported museum built in the shadow of the Washington Monument in the nation's capital. They picture a vast shadowy conspiracy that controls and manipulates the institutions of education, culture, the media and government in order to disseminate a pernicious mythology.

The purpose of this Holocaust mythology, they assert, is the inculcation of a sense of guilt in the white,Western Christian world. Those who can make others feel guilty have power over them and can make them do their bidding. This power is used to advance an international Jewish agenda centered in the Zionist enterprise of the State of Israel.

What's most notable about the above paragraphs is that the ADL has nothing to put up against the revisionist arguments than name calling.

Deniers argue that the manufactured guilt and shame over a mythological Holocaust led to Western, specifically United States, support for the establishment and sustenance of the Israeli state — a sustenance that costs the American taxpayer over three billion dollars per year. They assert that American taxpayers have been and continue to be swindled as well as misled and imagine that by showing the American and other Western peoples how and why they have been victimized can the power of this conspiracy be broken. Once they have been shown the "truth," that there was never any legitimate basis for their feeling of guilt, deniers postulate that these good people will rise up in righteous anger and treat the Holocaust myth conspirators in an appropriate manner.

Instead of arguing the points of the revisionist, the ADL simply takes refuge to scare tactics.

Holocaust denial is a contemporary form of the classic anti-Semitic doctrine of the evil, manipulative and threatening world Jewish conspiracy. It was this doctrine that was instrumental in laying the groundwork for the Holocaust. What is on the surface a denial of the reality of genocide is, at its core, an appeal to genocidal hatred.

All the ADL is saying is that revisionsim is wrong because it is based on the assumption of an 'evil, manipulative and threatening Jewish conspiracy' for the purpose of inciting a new holocaust. That's like accusing a solicitor who defends his client of being motivated by the wish that the accused commits more of the same crime. The malicious intention is clear: destroying the credibility of the solicitor instead of proving his arguments wrong.

The roots of Holocaust denial can be found in the bureaucratic language of Nazi policy itself, which sought to camouflage the genocidal intent of what the Nazis called the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question," even as these directives were being carried out. After the war, former Nazis and Nazi sympathizers dismissed the overwhelming proof of the Holocaust established at the Nuremberg war crimes trials; similarly, an obscure group of post-War French Trotskyists and anarchists led by Paul Rassinier (since deceased), seeking to advance their own political agenda, denounced evidence of the genocide as "Stalinist atrocity propaganda."

The revisionists claim that the 'Final Solution' was exactly what it claimed to be: a forced labor and immigration programme. To demand that the Holocaust revisionists prove that it was nothing more is as absurd as demanding that a defendant proves his innocence. The Holocaust promoters claim to have proven in the Nuremberg trials that the 'Final Solution' was in fact an extermination programme. The problem with that argument is that those trials didn't have the remotest resemblance with a court of law.

There was no organisational separation between judges and prosecution. Both groups came from the same organisational body and were stacked with Communist Jews.
There was no jury. The convictions were based on decisions made by people who were partisans to the conflict between Nazi Germany on the one hand and organised Jewry/Communism on the other.
The confessions which were used as the basis for the convictions were the result of systematic coercion. The defendants were routinely tortured and threatened with the withdrawl of desperately needed food rations for their families. Another popular threat was to extradite their families to the Russians, where they had little to expect other than rape and death.
The most vital testimony of all, the confession of Auschwitz commander Hoess, was written in English, with no attached translation, which is highly suspicious given that it is a language he wasn't familiar with.

Any of the above reasons is sufficient to throw out any case for the genocide claims.

However, as an organized propaganda movement, Holocaust "revisionism" took root in 1979 when Willis Carto, founder of Liberty Lobby -- the largest anti-Jewish propaganda organization in the United States -- incorporated the Institute for Historical Review (IHR).

The IHR is a pseudo-academic enterprise in which professors with no credentials in history (for example, the late Revilo P. Oliver was a retired University of Illinois Classics teacher; Robert Faurisson earned a Ph.D. in literature from the University of Lyon; Arthur Butz is an engineer at Northwestern University), writers without formal academic certification (such as David Irving, Henri Roques and Bradley Smith) and career anti-Semites (such as Mark Weber, Ernst Zundel and the late David McCalden) convene to develop new outlets for their anti-Jewish , anti-Israel and, for some, pro-Nazi beliefs.

Since 1993, Willis Carto has broken with the IHR in a very public, litigious feud. He has devoted considerable funds and rhetorical vehemence to discrediting his former employees, and has also established a rival "revisionist" journal, The Barnes Review.

Again, no substance, only personal attacks. The fact that none of the above has a formal historic training is irrelevant. You don't need to be a historian to realise that you can't burn a million people in a water filled pool.

Holocaust-denial propagandists misrepresent this fact [that there is no single Nazi document that expressly enumerates a "master plan" for the annihilation of European Jewry] as an exposure of the Holocaust "hoax"; in doing so, they reveal a fundamentally misleading approach to the history of the era. That there was no single document does not mean there was no plan. The "Final Solution" — the Nazis' comprehensive plan to murder all European Jews — was, as the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust observes, "the culmination of a long evolution of Nazi Jewish policy."[1] The destruction process was shaped gradually: it was borne of many thousands of directives.[2]

The trouble with that argument is that none of those directives contained orders to build and use homocidal gas chambers, leave alone exterminate all European Jews. There aren't even any architectural design plans for such gas chambers, leave alone existing installations that show any traces of or suitable for the alleged purpose.

The development and implementation of this process was overseen and directed by the highest tier of Nazi leadership, including Heinrich Himmler, Reinhard Heydrich, Adolf Eichmann, Hermann Goering and Adolf Hitler himself. For the previous two decades, Hitler had relentlessly pondered Jewish annihilation.³ In a September 16, 1919, letter he wrote that while "the Jewish problem" demanded an "anti-Semitism of reason" -- comprising systematic legal and political sanctions -- "the final goal, however, must steadfastly remain the removal of the Jews altogether."⁴

The Nazis worked closely with Zionist organisations on an emigration programme. The idea was to eventually transfer all Euroepean Jews to Palestine. Zionist organisation were even running training camps on German soil featuring the Zionist flag, preparing Jews for a future life in Palestine. No wonder they call Hitler the 'Founding Father of Israel'.

Throughout the 1920s, Hitler maintained that "the Jewish question" was the "pivotal question" for his Party and would be solved "with well-known German thoroughness to the final consequence."⁵ With his assumption to power in 1933, Hitler's racial notions were implemented by measures that increasingly excluded Jews from German society.

Jews-admirer Hitler was brought into power by the Jewish bankers to create the conditions for a mass emigration of all Euroepan Jews to Palestine. An essential part of his strategy was to make Jews feel unwelcome in an coordinated effort with a massive fear mongering campaign in the Jewish media.

On January 30, 1939, Hitler warned that if Jewish financiers and Bolsheviks initiated war, "The result will not be the Bolshevization of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe."⁶ On, September 21, 1939, after the Germans invaded Poland, SD chief Heydrich ordered the Einsatzgruppen (mobile killing units operating in German-occupied territory) to forcibly concentrate Polish Jews into ghettos, alluding to an unspecified "final aim."⁷

Again, there is no evidence that they were talking about anything but the forced emigration of all European Jews.

In the summer of 1941, with preparations underway for invading Russia, large-scale mass murder initiatives -- already practiced domestically upon the mentally ill and deformed -- were broadly enacted against Jews. Heydrich, acting on Hitler's orders, directed the Einsatzgruppen to implement the "special tasks" of annihilation in the Soviet Union of Jews and Soviet commissars^.8 On July 31, Heydrich received orders from Goering to prepare plans "for the implementation of the aspired final solution of the Jewish question" in all German-occupied areas.⁹ Eichmann, while awaiting trial in Israel in 1960, related that Heydrich had told him in August 1941 that "the Fuhrer has ordered the physical extermination of the Jews."¹⁰ Rudolf Hoess, the Commandant of Auschwitz, wrote in 1946 that "In the summer of 1941... Himmler said to me, 'The Fuhrer has ordered the Final Solution to the Jewish Question... I have chosen the Auschwitz camp for this purpose.' "¹¹

No word of an extermination programme directed against all European Jews. Eichmann's testimony doesn't have any credibility due to the fact that he was a Jewish Zionist and responsible for cooperating with Zionist organisations on a mass emigration programme.

On January 20, 1942, Heydrich convened the Wannsee Conference to discuss and coordinate implementation of the Final Solution. Eichmann later testified at his trial:

These gentlemen... were discussing the subject quite bluntly, quite differently from the language that I had to use later in the record. During the conversation they minced no words about it at all... they spoke about methods of killing, about liquidation, about extermination.¹²

Even if Eichmann was the die hard Jew-hating Nazi, Holocaust promoters are making him out to be, Eichmann was exposed to Israeli interrogation methods, which renders his testimony historically worthless and inadmissable in a court of law.

Ten days after the conference, while delivering a speech at the Sports Palace in Berlin that was recorded by the Allied monitoring service, Hitler declared: "The result of this war will be the complete annihilation of the Jews. . . the hour will come when the most evil universal enemy of all time will be finished, at least or a thousand years."¹³ On February 24, 1943, he stated: "This struggle will not end with the annihilation of Aryan mankind, but with the extermination of the Jewish people in Europe.¹⁴

You can't base an accusation as grotesque as the Holocaust claim on one angry remark of Hitler that was more likely referring to little more than the forced removable of all Jews from Europe.

Death camp gas chambers were the primary means of execution used against the Jews during the Holocaust. The Nazis issued a directive implementing large-scale gas chambers in the fall of 1941 but, by then, procedures facilitating mass murder, including the utilization of smaller gas chambers, were already in practice. Before their use in death camps, gas chambers were central to Hitler's "eugenics" program. Between January 1940 and August 1941, 70,273 Germans -- most of them physically handicapped or mentally ill -- were gassed, 20-30 at a time, in hermetically shut chambers disguised as shower rooms.¹⁵

First the ADL admits that there were no written orders for a mass extermination programme or homicidal gas chambers and then they make claims like above in direct contradiction. The smaller gas chambers they are referring to are those used to delouse prisoner uniforms in the fight against typphus. The fact that the Nazis used gas to kill a number of mentally ill is no proof that they gassed millions of Jews.

Meanwhile, mass shooting of Jews had been extensively practiced on the heels of Germany's Eastern campaign. But these actions by murder squads had become an increasingly unwieldy process by October 1941. Three directors of the genocide, Erhard Wetzel, head of the Racial-Policy Office, Alfred Rosenberg, consultant on Jewish affairs for the Occupied Eastern Territories, and Victor Brack, deputy director of the Chancellery, met at the time with Adolf Eichmann to discuss the use of gas chambers in the genocide program.¹⁶ Thereafter, two technical advisors for the euthanasia gas chambers, Kriminalkommissar Christian Wirth and a Dr. Kallmeyer, were sent to the East to begin construction of mass gas chambers.¹⁷ Physicians who had implemented the euthanasia program were also transferred.

None of that makes up for the fact that there are no installations or designs, nor bureaucratic orders that show that such facilities have ever existed and been used.

Mobile gassing vans, using the exhaust fumes of diesel engines to kill passengers, were used to kill Jews at Chelmno and Treblinka -- as well as other sites, not all of them concentration camps -- starting in November 1941.¹⁸ At least 320,000 Chelmno prisoners, most of them Jews, were killed by this method; a total of 870,000 Jews were murdered at Treblinka using gas vans and diesel-powered gas chambers.¹⁹

The problem with that claim is that the exhaust fumes of diesel engines are not poisonous because they don't contain any carbon monoxide like the fumes of petrol based engines.

Gas chambers were installed and operated at Belzec, Lublin, Sobibor, Majdanek and Auschwitz-Birkenau from September 3, 1941, when the first experimental gassing of a group of Soviet prisoners-of-war took place at Auschwitz, until November 1944.²⁰ Working with chambers measuring an average 225 square feet, the Nazis forced to their deaths 700 to 800 men, women and children at a time.²¹ Two-thirds of this program was completed in 1943-44, and at its height it accounted for as many as 20,000 victims per day.²² Authorities have estimated that these gas chambers accounted for the deaths of approximately 2? to 3 million Jews.

More unsubstantiated claims and non-sensical accusations.

Holocaust-denial attacks on this record of mass murder intensified following the end of the Cold War when it was reported that the memorial at Auschwitz was changed in 1991 to read that 1 million had died there, instead of 4 million as previously recorded. For Holocaust deniers, this change appeared to confirm arguments that historical estimates of Holocaust deaths had been deliberately exaggerated, and that scholars were beginning to "retreat" in the face of "revisionist" assertions. Thus, for example, Willis Carto wrote in the February 6, 1995, issue of The Spotlight, the weekly tabloid of his organization, Liberty Lobby, that "All 'experts' until 1991 claimed that 4 million Jews were killed at Auschwitz. This impossible figure was reduced in 1991. . . to I.I million. . . . The facts about deaths at Auschwitz, however. . , are still wrong. The Germans kept detailed records of Auschwitz deaths. . . These show that no more than 120,000 persons of all religions and ethnicity died at Auschwitz during the war. . . ."

In fact, Western scholars have never supported the figure of 4 million deaths at Auschwitz; the basis of this Soviet estimate — an analysis of the capacity of crematoria at Auschwitz and Birkenau — has long been discredited. As early as 1952, Gerald Reitlinger, a British historian, had convincingly challenged this method of calculation. Using statistics compiled in registers for Himmler, he asserted that approximately 1 million people had died at Auschwitz; Raul Hilberg in 1961, and Yehuda Bauer In 1989, confirmed Reitlinger's estimate of Auschwitz victims. Each of these scholars, nonetheless, has recognized that nearly 6 million Jews were killed overall during the Holocaust.²³ Polish authorities were therefore responding to long-accepted Western scholarship, further confirmed subsequently by documents released in post-Soviet Russia; the cynical allegations of "Holocaust revisionism" played no part in their decision.

That's one of the miracles of the Holocult. No matter how many victims they claim for the different extermination sites, they always come to the same magic 6 million figure based on the kabbalic belief that 6 million Jews must die before the Jews can return to the 'Promised Land'.

Another frequent claim of Holocaust "revisionists" concerns what they describe as the lack of objective documentation proving the facts of the Holocaust, and the reliance by scholars on biased and poorly recollected testimonies of survivors. However, the Germans themselves left no shortage of documentation and testimony to these events, and no serious scholar has relied solely on survivor testimony as the conclusive word on Holocaust history. Lucy Dawidowicz, in the preface to her authoritative work, The War Against the Jews 1933-1945, wrote,

But none of them contain any real evidence, only assumptions, that the Holocaust accusations are correct.

"The German documents captured by the Allied armies at the war's end have provided an incomparable historical record, which, with regard to volume and accessibility, has been unique in the annals of scholarship.... The National Archives and the American Historical Association jointly have published 67 volumes of Guides to German Records Microfilmed at Alexandria, VA. For my work I have limited myself mainly to published German documents."²⁴

The author then proceeds to list 303 published sources — excluding periodicals — documenting the conclusions of her research. Among these sources are the writings of recognizable Nazi policy makers such as Adolf Hitler, Heinrich Himmler, Rudolf Hoess and Alfred Rosenberg.

More pompuous gibberish with no evidence.

Similarly, Raul Hilberg in his three-volume edition of The Destruction of the European Jews, wrote, "Between 1933 and 1945 the public offices and corporate entities of Nazi Germany generated a large volume of correspondence. Some of these documents were destroyed in Allied bombings, and many more were systematically burned in the course of retreats or in anticipation of surrender. Nevertheless, the accumulated paper work of the German bureaucracy was vast enough to survive in significant quantities, and even sensitive folders remained.²⁵

It is thus largely from these primary sources that the history of the Holocaust has been compiled. A new factor in this process is the sudden availability of countless records from the former Soviet Union, many of which had been overlooked or suppressed since their capture at war's end by the Red Army. Needless to say, the modification of specific details in this history is certain to continue for a number of years to come, considering the vastness and complexity of the events which comprise the Holocaust. However, it is equally certain that these modifications will only confirm the Holocaust's enormity, rather than -- as the "revisionists" would -- call it into question.

Still no evidence, only promises thereof. In reality, the Holocaust promoters have been fighting for decades to keep as many records as possible under wraps and only provide access to 'trustworthy' historians. You would think that those historians would scramble to publish any new evidence but so far they couldn't find anything. Guess why!

Another frequent "revisionist" assertion calls into question the generally accepted estimates of Jewish victims of the Holocaust. In attempting to portray the deaths of millions of Jews as an exaggeration or a fabrication, Holocaust deniers wildly manipulate reference works, almanac statistics, geopolitical data, bedrock historical facts and other sources of information and reportage.

For example, "revisionists" commonly cite various almanac or atlas figures -- typically compiled before comprehensive accounts on the Holocaust were available -- that appear to indicate that the worldwide Jewish population before and after World War II remained essentially stable, thereby "proving" that 6 million Jews could not have died during this period.

The widely cited "6 million" figure is derived from the initial 1945 Nuremberg trial estimate of 5.7 million deaths; subsequent censuses, statistical analyses, and other demographic studies of European Jewry have consistently demonstrated the essential accuracy of this first tally.²⁶ After nearly 50 years of study, historians agree that approximately 6 million Jews perished during the course of the Nazi genocide.²⁷

I suggest reading the chapter in Germar Rudolf's 'Lectures on the Holocaust' demonstrating that the actual Jewish losses are in line with the meticulous official death book records of the concentration camp authorities as well as the findings of the International Red Cross, according to which no more than 300,000 Jews died in Nazi prison camps, mostly due to Typphus.

Yet another centerpiece of "revisionist" propaganda attacks the objectivity and legal validity of the postwar Nuremberg Trials, where much information about the Holocaust first became public, and where the general history of the genocide was first established.

The actual process of bringing Nazi war criminals to justice was a lengthy and complicated effort involving the differing legal traditions and political agendas of the United States, England, France and the Soviet Union. As the historical record shows, the allied victors, if anything, erred on the side of leniency toward the accused Nazis.

Discussions concerning allied treatment of war criminals had begun as early as October 1943.²⁹ In the summer months following Germany's surrender in 1945, British, American and Soviet representatives met in London to create the charter for an international military tribunal to prosecute "major criminals" whose offenses extended over the entire Reich, and who therefore could be punished by joint decision of the Governments of the Allies.³⁰

By early autumn, the Allies had resolved their debates over whom to prosecute and how to define the crimes committed during the Holocaust; the first trials began thereafter in Nuremberg, before an international military tribunal. The chief defendant was Hermann Goering, but the prosecution also selected 20 other leading officials from the Nazi party, German government ministries, central bureaucracy, armament and labor specialists, the military and territorial chiefs.³¹

These trials did not result in either "rubber stamp" guilty verdicts or identical sentences. In fact, of the 21 defendants, three were set free; one received a 10-year sentence; one a 15-year sentence; two, 20-year sentences; three, life sentences, and 11 received the death penalty.³²

The defendants, moreover, had access to 206 attorneys, 136 of whom had been Nazi party members.³³ Furthermore, as Raul Hilberg stated, "The judges in Nuremberg were established American lawyers. They had not come to exonerate or convict. They were impressed with their task, and they approached it with much experience in the law and Little anticipation of the facts."³⁴

A second round of trials resulted in 25 death sentences, 20 life sentences, 97 sentences of 25 years or less, and 35 not-guilty verdicts.³⁵ By 1951, following the recommendations of an American-run clemency board, 77 the 142 convicted criminals had been released from prison.³⁶

Above smokescreen does not address the concerns with the composition and procedures of the Nuremberg trials, in particular the problem of coerced confessions.