Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time (40 page)

Different words mean different things when uttered by different people. What matters is what that word meant when uttered by Hitler. I would first draw attention to the famous memorandum on the Four-Year Plan of August 1936. In that Adolf Hitler says, "We are going to have to get our armed forces in a fighting state within four years so that we can go to war with the Soviet Union. If the Soviet Union should ever succeed in overrunning Germany it will lead to the
ausrotten
of the German people." There's that word. There is no way that Hider can mean the physical liquidation of 80 million Germans. What he means is that it will lead to the emasculation of the German people as a power factor. (1994)

I then pointed out that, at a December 1944 conference regarding the Ardennes attack against the Americans, Hitler ordered his generals "to
ausrotten
them division by division." Was Hitler giving the order to
transport
the Americans out of the Ardennes division by division? Irving countered:

Compare that with a speech he made in August 1939, in which he says, with regard to Poland, "we are going to destroy the living forces of the Polish Army." This is the job of any commander—you have to destroy the forces facing you. How you destroy them, how you "take them out" is probably a better phrase, is immaterial. If you take those pawns off the chess board they are gone. If you put the American forces in captivity they are equally neutralized whether they are in captivity or dead. And that's what the word
ausrotten
means there. (1994)

But what about Rudolf Brandt's use of the word? To SS Gruppenfuhrer Dr. Grawitz of the SS Reichsarzt in Berlin, SS Sturmbannfuhrer Brandt wrote concerning "the
Ausrottung
of tuberculosis as a disease affecting the nation." A year later, now an SS Obersturmbannfuhrer, he wrote to Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Heydrich's successor as chief of RSHA, "I am sending you the outline of a press announcement concerning the accelerated
Ausrottung
of the Jews in occupied Europe." The same man is using the same word to discuss the same process for tuberculosis and Jews (see figure 20). What else could
ausrotten
have meant in these contexts except "extermination"?

And what about Hans Frank's use of the word? In a speech to a Nazi assembly held on October 7, 1940, Frank summed up his first year of effort as head of the Generalgouvernement of occupied Poland: "I could not
ausrotten
all lice and Jews in only one year. But in the course of time, and if you help me, this end will be attained" (Nuremberg Doc. 3 3 63-PS, p. 891). On December 16, 1941, Frank addressed a government session at the office of the governor of Krakau in conjunction with the upcoming Wannsee Conference:

Currently there are in the Government Generalship approximately 2.5 million, and together with those who are kith and kin and connected in all kinds of ways, we now have 3.5 million Jews. We cannot shoot these 3.5 million Jews, nor can we poison them, yet we will have to take measures which will somehow lead to the goal of annihilation, and that will be done in connection with the great measures which are to be discussed together with the Reich. The territory of the General Government must be made free of Jews, as is the case in the Reich. Where and how this will happen is a matter of the means which must be used and created, and about whose effectiveness I will inform you in due time. (Original document and translation, National Archives, Washington, D.C., T922, PS 2233)

If the Final Solution meant deportation out of the Reich, as Irving and other deniers claim, does this mean that Frank was planning to send lice out of Poland on trains? And why would Frank be making references to the extermination of Jews through means other than shooting or poisoning?

And then there are entries from the diary of Joseph Goebbels, Gauleiter (General) of Berlin, Reich Minister of Propaganda, and Reich Plenipotentiary for total war effort, such as these:

August 8, 1941,
concerning the spread of spotted typhus in the Warsaw ghetto: "The Jews have always been the carriers of infectious diseases. They should either be concentrated in a ghetto and left to themselves or be liquidated, for otherwise they will infect the populations of the civilized nations."

August 19, 1941,
after a visit to Hitler's headquarters: "The Fuhrer is convinced his prophecy in the Reichstag is becoming a fact: that should Jewry succeed in again provoking a new war, this would end with their annihilation. It is coming true in these weeks and months with a certainty that appears almost sinister. In the East the Jews are paying the price, in Germany they have already paid in part and they will have to pay more in the future." (Broszat 1989, p. 143)

Himmler also talks about the
ausrotten
of the Jews, and again there is evidence that negates the deniers' definition of that word. For example, in a lecture on the history of Christianity given in January 1937, Himmler told his SS Gruppenfuhrers, "I have the conviction that the Roman emperors, who exterminated
[ausrotteten]
the first Christians, did precisely what we are doing with the communists. These Christians were at that time the vilest scum, which the city accommodated, the vilest Jewish people, the vilest Bolsheviks there were" (Padfield 1990, p. 188). In June 1941, Himmler informed Rudolf Hoess, the commandant of Auschwitz, that Hitler had ordered the Final Solution
(Endlosung)
of the Jewish question, and that Hoess would play a major role at Auschwitz:

It is a hard, tough task which demands the commitment of the whole person without regard to any difficulties that may arise. You will be given details by Sturmbannfuhrer Eichmann of the RSHA who will come to see you in the near future. The department taking part will be informed at the appropriate time. You have to maintain the strictest silence about this order, even to your superiors. The Jews are the eternal enemies of the German people and must be exterminated. All Jews we can reach now, during the war, are to be exterminated without exception. If we do not succeed in destroying the biological basis of Jewry, some day the Jews will annihilate the German Volk [people]. (Padfield 1990, p. 334)

Himmler made many similarly damning speeches. One of the most notorious is the October 4, 1943, speech to the SS Gruppenfuhrer in Poznan (Posen), which was recorded on a red oxide tape. Himmler was lecturing from notes, and early in the talk he stopped the tape recorder to make sure it was working. He then continued, knowing he was being recorded, and spoke for over three hours on a range of subjects, including the military and political situation, the Slavic peoples and racial blends, how the racial superiority of Germans would help them win the war, and the like. Two hours into the speech, Himmler began to talk about the bloody 1934 purges of traitors in the Nazi Party and "the extermination of the Jewish people."

I also want to refer here very frankly to a very difficult matter. We can now very openly talk about this among ourselves, and yet we will never discuss this publicly. Just as we did not hesitate on June 30, 1934, to perform our duty as ordered and put comrades who had failed up against the wall and execute them, we also never spoke about it, nor will we ever speak about it. Let us thank God that we had within us enough self-evident fortitude never to discuss it among us, and we never talked about it. Every one of us was horrified, and yet every one clearly understood that we would do it next time, when the order is given and when it becomes necessary.

I am now referring to the evacuation of the Jews, to the extermination of the Jewish people. This is something that is easily said: "The Jewish people will be exterminated," says every Party member, "this is very obvious, it is in our program—elimination of the Jews, extermination, will do." And then they turn up, the brave 80 million Germans, and each one has his decent Jew. It is of course obvious that the others are pigs, but this particular one is a splendid Jew. But of all those who talk this way, none had observed it, none had endured it. Most of you here know what it means when 100 corpses he next to each other, when 500 lie there or when 1,000 are lined up. To have endured this and at the same time to have remained a decent person—with exceptions due to human weaknesses—has made us tough. This is an honor roll in our history which has never been and never will be put in writing, because we know how difficult it would be for us if we still had Jews as secret saboteurs, agitators and rabble rousers in every city, what with the bombings, with the burden and with the hardships of the war. If the Jews were still part of the German nation, we would most likely arrive now at the state we were at in 1916/17. (Original document and translation, National Archives, Washington, D.C., PS Series 1919, pp. 64-67)

Irving's response to this quote was interesting:

Irving:
I have a later speech he made on January 26, 1944, in which he is speaking to the same audience rather more bluntly about the
ausrotten
of Germany's Jews, when he announced that they had totally solved the Jewish problem. Most of the listeners sprang to their feet and applauded. "We were all there in Poznan," recalled a Rear Admiral, "when that man [Himmler] told us how he'd killed off the Jews. I can still recall precisely how he told us. 'If people ask me,' said Himmler, 'why did you have to kill the children too, then I can only say I am not such a coward that I leave for my children something I can do myself.'" Quite interesting—this is an Admiral afterwards recording this in British captivity without realizing he was being tape recorded, which is a very good summary of what Himmler actually said.

Shermer:
That sounds to me like he means to kill Jews, not just transport them out of the Reich.

Irving:
I agree, Himmler said that. He actually said, "We're wiping out the Jews. We're murdering them. We're killing them."

Shermer:
What does that mean other than what it sounds like?

Irving:
I agree, Himmler is admitting what I said happened to the 600,000. But, and this is the important point, nowhere does Himmler say, "We are killing millions." Nowhere does he even say we are killing hundreds of thousands. He is talking about solving the Jewish problem, about having to kill off women and children too. (1994)

Irving, once again, has fallen into the fallacy of
ad hoc rationalization.
Since Himmler never exactly said millions, therefore he really meant thousands. But, please note, Himmler never said thousands either. Irving is inferring what he wants to infer. The actual numbers come from other sources, which, in conjunction with Himmler's speeches and many other pieces of evidence, converge on the conclusion that he meant millions would be killed. And millions were killed.

The Einsatzgruppen

Finally, there is telling evidence about the extermination of Jews from lower down in the ranks. The Einsatzgruppen were mobile SS and police units for special missions in occupied territories. Their mandate included rounding up and killing Jews and other unwanted persons in towns and villages prior to occupation by Germans. For the winter of 1941-1942, for example, Einsatzgruppe A reported 2,000 Jews killed in Estonia, 70,000 in Latvia, 136,421 in Lithuania, and 41,000 in Belorussia. On November 14, 1941, Einsatzgruppe B reported 45,467 shootings, and on July 31, 1942, the governor of Belorussia reported that 65,000 Jews were killed during the previous two months. Einsatzgruppe C estimated they had killed 95,000 by December 1941, and Einsatzgruppe D reported on April 8, 1942, a total of 92,000 killed. The grand total is 546,888 dead in less than one year.

Numerous eyewitness accounts from members of the Einsatzgruppen can be found in
"The Good Old Days": The Holocaust as Seen by Its Perpetrators and Bystanders
(Klee, Dressen, and Riess 1991). For example, on Sunday, September 27, 1942, SS Obersturmfuhrer Karl Kretschmer wrote to "My dear Soska," his wife. He apologizes for not writing more, is feeling ill and in "low spirits" because "what you see here makes you either brutal or sentimental." His "gloomy mood," he explains, is caused by "the sight of the dead (including women and children)." Which dead? Dead Jews, who deserve to die: "As the war is in our opinion a Jewish war, the Jews are the first to feel it. Here in Russia, wherever the German soldier is, no Jew remains. You can imagine that at first I needed some time to get to grips with this." In a subsequent letter, not dated, he explains to his wife that "there is no room for pity of any kind. You women and children back home could not expect any mercy or pity if the enemy got the upper hand. For that reason we are mopping up where necessary but otherwise the Russians are willing, simple and obedient. There are no Jews here any more." Finally, on October 19, 1942, in a letter signed "You deserve my best wishes and all my love, Your Papa," Kretschmer provides a paradigmatic example of what Hannah Arendt meant by the banality of evil: