During 1942, British Intelligence, using the Enigma code breaker deciphered all of the messages from the German labor camps. With this ability, the British learned about German submarine positions and other vital information. In the mid-1990s, intelligence analyst F.H. Hinsley disclosed the “most authentic information” about daily camp life, concealed for fifty years. He wrote, “The return from Auschwitz, the largest of the camps with 20,000 prisoners, mentioned illness as the main cause of death, but included references to shootings and hangings. There were no references in the decrypts to gassings.” There was no evidence of any “Final Solution.” 1676 Germany did not use gas to maim or kill because of its adherence to the Geneva Convention, of June 17, 1925, to which it was a signatory.
Alternatively, Churchill was anxious to use “modern technology.” On February 19, 1920, he wrote to Sir Hugh Trenchard suggesting “some kind asphyxiating bombs” to seize control of Iraq, perhaps gas bombs that would just cause disablement against “turbulent tribes.” He failed to understand the “squeamishness about the use of gas.” He said, “I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilized tribes.” He retained his opinions, saying that the prejudices of “those who do not think clearly” should not prevent the scientific use of gas. The British used gas against the Iraqi rebels in 1920. 1677
On July 20, 1944, The New York Times reported that Peter H. Bergson, chair of the Hebrew Committee of National Liberation, spoke at a rally held by the American league of a Free Palestine. He referred to Churchill and FDR’s “repeated warnings” about using gas against Germany. Bergson said that that the Germans had killed a million Jews with gas. He said, “Since poison gas has been used against the co-belligerent Hebrew nation, we of the Hebrew Committee of National liberation publicly demand of the American and British Governments that unless this practice ceases poison gas must be used against Germany.” 1678
Churchill wanted to use gas to “drench the cities of the Ruhr and many other German cities so that most of the population would require constant medical attention.” He told his military advisers: “It is absurd to consider morality on this topic when everybody used it in the last war without a word of complaint from the moralists or the Church.” He relented and said that he would only use gas under certain conditions, life or death for us, or to “shorten the war by a year.” He sent a directive to military advisers, “I want a cold-blooded calculation made as to how it would pay us to use poison gas… . I want the matter studied in cold blood by sensible people and not by that particular set of psalm-singing uniformed defeatists which one runs across now here now there.” His military advisers argued it might initiate gas-use retaliation by Germany. Churchill told a friend, that he was “not at all convinced by this negative report,” but he grudgingly conceded. 1679
The bomb disposal unit was the first group to enter the German camps in order to determine safety. Those experts made a systematic film record of everything that they saw. They looked for traps, and then marked the doors and blew a whistle. The photographs that they took did not show any gas ovens. Kim Philby dismissed the story of the death and incineration of six million people. He knew that the archives in Moscow housed all the German documents describing the so-called “Final Solution” which was to send the Zionist Jews to Madagascar. 1680
In 2012, ex-intelligence operative, Anthony Trevor-Stokes,1681 visited Britain’s Public Record Office and was able to see the top-secret wartime documents which had the words, MOST SECRET… NEVER TO BE REMOVED FROM THE OFFICE red-inked across the top. These were the records from MI6 to Churchill regarding Auschwitz and the agency’s claims about the camp and Mengele’s selection process that allegedly began on July 17, 1942 followed by the “mass gassings.” In August, a deadly typhus epidemic, carried by lice, erupted in all of the camps. There are three possibilities of how typhus entered the camps: the Polish resistance movement might have introduced it to the German military, civilians entering the camp, or newly-deported inmates into the German camps. 1682
Ike Summons the Politicians and the Press
On April 18, 1945, Eisenhower met with Churchill in London where Ike assured him that he would send photos of the camps. He persuaded Churchill to quickly dispatch PMs and journalists to tour the camps. He was concerned that an American delegation would “be too late to see the full horrors,” whereas a British delegation, “being so much closer, could get there on time.” A ten-member delegation left London within twenty-four hours, arriving in Reims the evening of April 20. Early the next morning, the delegation boarded military planes and ultimately arrived at Buchenwald on Saturday morning, April 21, ten days after the camp’s liberation. The group would publish its official report in May 1945, stating, “That a policy of steady starvation and inhuman brutality was carried out at Buchenwald for a long period of time; and that such camps as this mark the lowest point of degradation to which humanity has yet descended. The memory of what we saw and heard at Buchenwald will haunt us ineffaceably for many years.” 1683
On April 19, Ike cabled General Marshall, “We continue to uncover German concentration camps for political prisoners in which conditions of indescribable horror prevail. I have visited one of these myself and I assure you that whatever has been printed on them to date has been understatement. If you would see any advantage in asking about a dozen leaders of Congress and a dozen prominent editors to make a short visit to this theater in a couple of C54s, I will arrange to have them conducted to one of these places where the evidence of bestiality and cruelty is so overpowering as to leave no doubt in their minds about the normal practices of the Germans in these camps.” 1684 Ike facilitated a massive media blitz at Buchenwald. He, Marshall, Truman and Churchill represented the horrors of Buchenwald, as typical of the other German camps. 1685
The Speaker of the House and the Senate Majority Leader received Ike’s telegram the next day. A delegation of twelve Congressmen was organized and ready to leave on Sunday, April 22. After arriving in Paris the next day, the group left for Weimar the following morning. Another unofficial delegation arrived within a short period, accompanied by many photographers. The committee toured Dachau on May 2, forty-eight hours after its capture. A committee compiled a sixteen-page report describing what they had seen and expressed their convictions that “men of all nations and tongues must resist encroachments of every theory and every ideology that debases mankind.” 1686
Eighteen American newspaper publishers and editors arrived at Buchenwald on April 25, and soon met with Eisenhower who reportedly said that he hoped “every American newspaper would print the story of German bestiality in detail.” Julius Adler of The New York Times, Malcolm W. Bingay of the Detroit Free Press and Stanley High of The Rotarian, all leading journalists, asked to have a telegram sent to Secretary of War Henry Stinson which read, “It is the unanimous judgment of the delegation of magazine and newspaper editors sent here to investigate conditions of German prison camps that the reports of atrocities committed upon war prisoners, political prisoners and civilians have not been exaggerated.” Labor leaders, clergymen and other prominent personalities came for a tour. Eisenhower invited the UN War Crimes Commission, devised by John Simon on October 7, 1942, to investigate war crimes committed by NS Germany. A thirteen-member commission chaired by Lord Robert Wright, a British judge, with representatives from twelve different nations toured Buchenwald on April 26 and 27. 1687 1688
On April 28, 1945, Victor Maurer, of the ICRC, negotiated a surrender plan to turn Dachau over to the American troops. On April 29, U.S. Army troops officially liberated Dachau. When America assumed jurisdiction, without any investigation or a formal trial, troops summarily executed as least 560 surrendering guards. 1689 While the Americans controlled Dachau, 300 inmates out of the 32,000 prisoners died of starvation each day, more than when the Germans controlled the camp. 1690
“The Holocaust Is Hollywood at Its Absolute Best”
In 1940, General Arc
hibald Wavell reportedly said in a memo to his Chiefs of Staff, “The elementary principle of all deception is to attract the enemy’s attention to what you wish him to see and to distract his attention from what you do not wish him to see.”
The American and British media converged on Buchenwald with their film crews. Reporters and well-known war correspondents inspected the barracks and spoke with inmates. Members of Congress and Parliament toured the camp, accompanied by others including Edward R. Murrow of CBS. Clerics also visited the camp. For the next three weeks, the media focused on Buchenwald. 1691 Murrow gave an onsite radio report, describing the camp and concluded by saying, “I pray you to believe what I have said about Buchenwald. I reported what I saw and heard, but only part of it. For most of it, I have no words.” 1692 On April 24, 1945, The Evening Independent of St. Petersburg, Florida reported that, just from April 1-22, 992,578 German POWs perished while under American jurisdiction. 1693 Presumably, these deaths occurred in Eisenhower’s barbed-wire enclosures in the Rhine Meadow.
Robert H. Jackson, as of April 26, 1945, facilitated the organization of the first Nuremberg Trial. To prepare for a successful prosecution against NS Germany, he decided to find and use film and photo evidence. He also needed to find someone to creatively edit that film footage. The OSS had already created a special team, the OSS Field Photographic Branch/War Crimes. This team included the brothers, Budd and Stuart Schulberg, sons of the former Paramount studio chief B.P. Schulberg. The U.S. military commissioned the brothers—Budd was a Navy Lieutenant, and Stuart, was a Marine Corps Sergeant. In June, the U.S. military sent Stuart Schulberg and Daniel Fuchs, another officer with the OSS team to Europe. In September, Budd Schulberg, and OSS film editors Robert Parrish and Joseph Zigman met up with the others in Europe. 1694
The OSS team was under a huge time constraint in that they had to find “incriminating film” in time for the beginning of the trial. Budd Schulberg arrested Leni Riefenstahl, an Austrian filmmaker and actress, and forced her to help the OSS team in the Nuremberg editing room. 1695 Riefenstahl had read Mein Kampf, and heard Adolf Hitler’s speeches in 1932, which absolutely mesmerized her. She was prominent in the Third Reich as Hitler asked her to make the famous film, Triumph of the Will, a documentary of the 1934 congress in Nuremberg of the NS Party where over a million Germans participated. She also worked on Olympia and filmed Jesse Owens. In 1937, she told a reporter for the Detroit News, “To me, Hitler is the greatest man who ever lived.” 1696 Although the Allies arrested her, they later released her, possibly in exchange for her silence regarding the creative editing, as if anyone would believe her after their pervasive propaganda efforts.
Riefenstahl identified various NS leaders in her films and in other German films that the OSS unit had seized. Stuart Schulberg confiscated Heinrich Hoffmann’s photo archive. Hoffmann, Hitler’s personal photographer, became the film unit’s authority on photo evidence. The team, in “close collaboration with Jackson’s staff of lawyers,” successfully discovered and edited enough film into a four-hour film, entitled The Nazi Plan to present in the courtroom on December 13, 1945. They preceded the showing of the film with an affidavit of authenticity signed by Commander Ray Kellogg, one of Budd’s superiors. Because the entire film footage was in German, Budd Schulberg wrote English-language subtitles. 1697
The allies used Hollywood film directors to stage most of the “documentary” films that we have all seen, especially those with the mounds of dead bodies. Austrian-born Billy Wilder, a Jew, was one of the most notable and willing. He had worked for the biggest tabloid in Berlin and then began working as a screenwriter in 1929. He wrote scripts for many German films until Hitler came to power in 1933. He then relocated to Hollywood where he became a naturalized citizen in 1934. 1698
If you were to look closely at the pictures of the people in those films, you might notice that many of the faces look familiar. The directors used the same individuals in numerous scenes in more than one location. The film crews also shot the majority of the footage at least four or five days after the military liberated a camp. The crews sometimes used prisoners and at other times, they used actors. The film crews typically did not use real footage of the camps. Wilder directed and edited the film Death Mills, a 1945 film that the U.S. War Department produced in order to “educate” German audiences about the atrocities committed by the NS regime.
Death Mills was a 22-minute film they would use in the PWD de-Nazification program. Colonel William S. Paley, the son of a Ukrainian Jewish immigrant, was an innovative broadcaster and head of CBS. He was also an operative for the PWD, and wrote the following in a memo, “The atrocity film we now have in mind is much larger in scope than the one originally intended.” The PWD placed an article on the front page of The New York Times, dated April 18, and would use six minutes from the Buchenwald filming within an hour-long documentary entitled Nazi Concentration Camps, which they would use at Nuremberg. 1699 Death Mills, with a classical music score, claims that the Germans killed twenty million people, conducted medical experiments and killed Jews in gas chambers. The film shows mounds of emaciated corpses, rag-clad survivors, and images of mass graves. The Soviets provided some of the footage from Majdanek, a camp they liberated on July 22, 1944. The propaganda piece also included images of the crematoria at numerous camps, and the most incriminating images, allegedly from Auschwitz, were piles of personal belongings, clothes, shoes, and jewelry, presumably stolen from the prisoners. There were also images of the American liberation of Buchenwald.
Wilder directed some of the scenes at Buchenwald, along with cameraman Ellis W. Carter, who like Wilder, worked for Paramount Studios. Wilder moved into camera range to pose a purported wretched inmate then realized that Carter was still filming. He recognized his mistake and then quickly backed out. One can still see Wilder’s hands gesturing and he is talking to the “inmate” evidently directing him. The date on the clapboard is April 15, 1945, the day before they filmed the official tour. After this filming, Carter filmed the shrunken heads, the lampshades and other ridiculous, devised props to try to incriminate Germany. 1700
British newspapers mention Wilder being in Europe on April 18 although the war had not formally ended. He claimed that he did not leave America until May 9, perhaps trying to conceal the fact that he was at Buchenwald directing an atrocity film for the PWD. That agency did not have any personnel skilled in filmmaking. Therefore, the PWD had recruited Wilder and other Hollywood personalities who were uniquely qualified to do a huge distraction campaign for the victorious Allies and the war planners behind the curtain—create atrocity images to justify a war in which over 60 million people perished, over 2.5% of the world population. Half of the PWD staff, hundreds of people, worked in propaganda radio. Others wrote leaflets, to disseminate from planes into enemy territory, or newspaper articles. 1701
It would be a bit suspicious if they used Wilder, now a subjective and biased Hollywood scriptwriter, to explain the Holocaust to Germans. Because he could speak German, the PWD kept him in Germany to analyze the German’s response to the propaganda films, to see if they would believe the appalling message that this deceptive organization was attempting to portray through gruesome images. Six weeks after the war ended in Europe, Wilder and Davidson Taylor, who Paley quickly promoted to a CBS Vice President, traveled throughout Bavaria to observe German reaction to an Allied film called KZ, the German term for concentration camp. Taylor reported their observations to the Head of Information Control. 1702
He wrote, “When the title KZ came on the screen there was a gasp throughout the audience. There were expressions of shock and horror audible throughout the picture. When the title ‘Buchenwald’ came on the screen, the audience spoke the word almost as one man. The atmosphere was electric throughout the exhibition of the film… there was a palpable feeling of incredulity (that) ran through the audience when the narrator said that the wife of the commandant of Belsen had made lampshades from tattooe
d human skin.” 1703 The Allies used the PWD to publicize the German atrocities among the German population. The British Office of War Information published 50,000 copies of an illustrated booklet to distribute among the citizens and among the German soldiers in Allied POW camps. 1704 Richard H. S. Crossman, editor of The God that Failed (1950) and the editor of the New Statesman, was the Assistant PWD Chief, for which officials later awarded him an Order of the British Empire. 1705 He produced anti-Nazi propaganda broadcasts for a network, Radio of the European Revolution, set up by the Special Operations Executive.
There was plenty of propaganda against Germany. The British Ministry of Information (MOI) and the American OWI also worked with the creative talents of Alfred Hitchcock, a Hollywood director and producer, to create a Holocaust documentary under the direction of British producer Sidney Bernstein. Hitchcock requested the footage that the cinematographers who accompanied the Allies filmed at Dachau, Buchenwald, Belsen and other camps. Sefton Delmer, a propagandist with the PWE, the British clandestine body created to produce and disseminate both white and black propaganda, also staged and filmed many of the camp scenes. 1706
The Hitchcock film was not released but sequestered in a vault at the London Imperial War Museum. In 1985, PBS Frontline would find the 53-minute film of the liberation of Belsen and distribute it as the Memory of the Camps. Hitchcock said, “At the end of the war, I made a film to show the reality of the concentration camps, you know. Horrible. It was more horrible than any fantasy horror. Then, nobody wanted to see it. It was too unbearable. But it has stayed in my mind all of these years.” Trevor Howard, the film’s narrator said, “We tour a number of the camps, including Buchenwald and Dachau, just as those in charge there scramble to hide away the mass human slaughter they had accomplished (eleven million people, including six million Jews). Mounds of corpses, limbs twisted every which way, were bulldozed into mass graves. These camp officials and their subordinates weren’t quick enough; we see, or imagine we see, everything.” 1707
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