Among the accused Lucas had the best chance of acquittal, but the field inspection was – at first – his undoing. Former prisoners had called in after television reports about the visit of the court delegation and levelled such severe accusations at Lucas that, in a sensational confession in March 1965, he had admitted to taking part in prisoner selections, something that he had hitherto vigorously denied. Other untruths came to light, so that Lucas was finally found guilty. But the verdict was overruled in the review proceedings by the Federal Court in February 1969, on the grounds that Lucas’s defence, that he had acted under duress, could not be wholly disproved; in autumn 1970 he was finally acquitted by a Frankfurt court.
Admittedly the sentences passed in the Auschwitz trial were considerably lower than the punishments recommended by the state prosecutor’s office, and admittedly the reaction among survivors abroad was one of incomprehension and protest, but the trial assumed central importance in the West German treatment of the Nazi past: from a historical and political point of view the Auschwitz trial became the most important attempt to bring a criminal prosecution for the murders. In the Federal Republic the systematic elucidation of the Nazi crimes had begun only towards the end of the fifties. The Auschwitz trial provided the crucial stimulus to political and social engagement with the mass crimes. Historians working in the field of contemporary history within the Federal Republic, who had until then brought out no pertinent study on the subject, drew up pioneering documents, on the initiative of Fritz Bauer, which were read out during the trial and published in 1965 under the title Anatomie des SS-Staates (Anatomy of the SS State). After the trial interest in the critical examination of Nazi crimes clearly grew, especially among the younger generation.
Legal sanctions against the crimes did not end with the big Auschwitz trial. Four further, less extensive trials were held in Frankfurt am Main, finishing in 1981. In the second trial (December 1965 to September 1966), Josef Erber was sentenced to life imprisonment, Wilhelm Burger to eight years, and Gerhard Neubert, who had been declared unfit to stand in the first trial, to three and a half years’ imprisonment. In the third trial (August 1967 to June 1968), of the former ‘functionary prisoners’ Bernhard Bonitz and Josef Windeck, a second judicial inspection of Auschwitz took place, and two further visits followed. The third trial (December 1973 to February 1976) ended for lack of proof with the acquittal of both defendants, Willi Sawatzki and Alois Frey. In the last trial (1977–81) the accused, Horst Czerwinski, formerly camp leader in the neighbouring camps of Lagischa and Golleschau, was at first declared unfit to stand trial but was later imprisoned for life. His fellow defendant, Josef Schmidt, once a block leader in Lagischa and a guard in the parent camp, was sentenced by the court to eight years’ custody.
In March 1966, in East Berlin, the camp physician Horst Fischer, who had been working for decades as a doctor under his own name in Spreenhagen near Frankfurt an der Oder, was put on trial; he was sentenced to death and executed. Czech courts had previously applied death sentences to the medical orderly Adolf Theuer and the warder Sophie Hanel. In Austria, the homeland of many of the Auschwitz SS, their crimes were also brought before the courts, but after the national amnesty of 1957 this occurred only sporadically. Walter Dejaco and Fritz Ertl of the SS central building administration were acquitted in Vienna in March 1972; documents stored in Moscow, showing the two men’s signatures on blueprints for the crematoria, were not at the time accessible.
10
The ‘Auschwitz lie’
Since the late forties some extreme right-wing apologists have denied the National Socialist mass murder of the Jews and other groups of victims. Organized in networks, they appear worldwide under the self-designated term ‘revisionists’. Books, journals and institutions such as the Californian Institute for Historical Review and, most particularly the internet, serve to disseminate their propaganda far beyond their organized and supposedly academic circle. The starting point and core of their theses, which make lofty claims to scientific truth and are passed on through claques of supporters, are aggressive nationalism and racist anti-Semitism. Authentic sources are declared to be forgeries; surviving witnesses are discredited; some documents are given distorted interpretations, others are simply invented. The goal is to sow the seeds of doubt and through wild conjectures to produce contradictions, in order to distort the findings of genuine research. At the centre of revisionist denials, standing for all the mass crimes of the Third Reich, is Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp.
In their shoddy publication of 1947–8Maurice Bardèche, Paul Rassinier, Robert Faurisson and Austin J. App disputed the existence of gas chambers in Auschwitz and concluded that the high death figures were due not to systematic extermination, but to malnutrition and illness. The question of the number of victims is a central theme of the historical falsifiers. Not only do they trivialize the murders, but, ‘running amok against reality’ (Martin Broszat), they call the extermination the invention of a Jewish-controlled policy that aims to make the Federal Republic ‘vulnerable to blackmail’, both politically and financially.
A wave of far-right publications first swept West Germany in the seventies. It began in 1970 with the Hexen-Einmal-Eins einer Lüge (Witch’s Multiplication of a Lie) by Emil Aretz. Three years later came Die Auschwitzlüge. Ein Erlebnisbericht (The Auschwitz Lie. A Report from Experience) by Thies Christophersen (1973), who had been a member of the SS troops in Auschwitz. Despite being banned, more than 100,000 copies of his book were distributed. The Hoax of the Twentieth Century by Arthur R. Butz (1976) was published in German translation in 1977. The pamphlet Did Six Million Really Die? by Richard Verrall, alias Richard Harwood, was also translated into German. The Hamburg judge Wilhelm Stäglich, who had been stationed near Auschwitz as a Wehrmacht officer in the Second World War, published Der Auschwitz-Mythos – Legende oder Wirklichkeit? (The Auschwitz Myth – Legend or Reality?) with the far-right Tübingen company Grabert-Verlag in 1979. The book was impounded across the country the following year, and banned in 1982. Stäglich was removed from state employment after the revocation of his doctorate. Jean-Claude Pressac, who had long been a disciple of Faurisson, also appeared at first as an advocate of ‘revisionism’, although his investigations into the crematoria of Auschwitz eventually led him to part company with the revisionist circle. Since then Pressac has presented important research into the technology of the extermination systems in Auschwitz, although the total figure of 775,000 deaths that he presents without evidence is not tenable.
In the Federal Republic denial of the Nazi crimes was protected by the right to free speech until 1985, but since then it has been punishable as a crime, first as libel, and since 1994 as incitement to public disorder. The crime is called, pithily if not precisely, the ‘Auschwitz lie’.
The revisionists’ theses have been made more respectable by professional historians like Hellmut Diwald, Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Erlangen. In his Geschichte der Deutschen (History of the Germans), published in 1978, he incorporated certain revisionist theses, such as that of ‘natural deaths’ in Auschwitz. Not so much an apologist as a proponent of resolutely anti-communist views, which were also characteristic of the early revisionists, he appeared in the Historikerstreit (‘historians’ dispute’), as it was called, of the 1980s, when, in a process that was utterly unproductive from the historical point of view, historians questioned the uniqueness of the National Socialist crimes and drew comparisons with the Soviet gulag system.
In the late eighties and early nineties relativization and denial led to the macabre project of attempting to support the ‘Auschwitz lie’ from a scientific and technical viewpoint. In 1988 Fred R. Leuchter, an American builder of execution equipment, published a report alleging that samples of stone from the crematoria in Auschwitz– Birkenau, which he had taken without permission on a three-day excursion, had shown no traces of hydrocyanic acid. Revisionist circles hailed this as definitive proof of the non-e
xistence of the gas chambers.
The Leuchter Report was the result of concentrated activities by the revisionist network around Ernst Zündel, who made a considerable profit in Toronto by issuing racist publications, and was taken to court. To avoid being convicted, Zündel had commissioned Leuchter, the self-appointed engineer, to write the expert report, and paid him for it. The neo-Nazi publicist and publisher Udo Walendy commissioned a German translation of the report, and the foreword was written by Robert Faurisson. Germar Rudolf, in the Rudolf-Gutachten (Rudolf Documents) confirmed Leuchter’s findings.
Finally the historian Ernst Nolte joined in the discussion of the Leuchter Report. Nolte did not mention the ‘Auschwitz lie’ as such, but he did make public statements in which he spoke respectfully of Leuchter’s report, and stressed his supposedly scientific approach.
The British writer David Irving, who had written apologias for Hitler and acted as a legal expert witness for Ernst Zündel, took the same line. Since writing the foreword to the English edition of the Leuchter Report, Irving had become the figurehead of the international Holocaust deniers. Irving has been forbidden to travel to Germany since the nineties. The libel case that Irving brought before the High Court in London against the American historian Deborah Lipstadt and her publishers, Penguin Books, ended in failure. Irving was proved to have wilfully misinterpreted the evidence for the mass extermination in Auschwitz. Of crucial importance to the trial were the expert witnesses called by the defendants to throw down the gauntlet to Irving. In a 700-page document Robert Jan van Pelt, a Toronto cultural historian, assembled all available pieces of evidence concerning the extent, the duration and the technology of the murder operations in Auschwitz. The London trial, which was given similar importance in the British press to the Nuremberg trials of the ‘major war criminals’ and the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, ended in April 2000 in the first and July 2001 in the second instance, with the dismissal of the libel claim. Since the trial it has been permissible to speak in public of Auschwitz-denier Irving as a falsifier of history, an anti-Semite and a racist.
Published sources and selected eye-witness accounts
Adler, Hans Günter, Hermann Langbein and Ella Lingens-Reiner (eds.), Auschwitz, Zeugnisse und Berichte, Hamburg, 1994(first published Cologne, 1962)
Bezwiska, Jadwiga and Danuta Czech (eds.), KL Auschwitz Seen by the SS: Höss, Broad, Kremer,Oświęcim, 1972
Dębski, Jerzy, Sibylle Goldmann, Halina Jastrzbska, Stephanie Kreuzhage and Jan Parcer (eds.), Sterbebücher von Auschwitz. Fragmente. Vol. I: Berichte. Vol. 2 and Vol. 3: Namensverzeichnis A–L, M–Z, Munich, 1995
Frei, Norbert, Thomas Grotumn, Jan Parcer, Sybille Steinbacher and Bernd C. Wagner (eds.), Standort-und Kommandanturbefehle des Konzentrationslagers Auschwitz. 1940–1945, Munich, 2000
Greif, Gideon (ed.), Wir weinten tränenlos . . . Augenzeugenberichte der jüdischen Sonderkommandos in Auschwitz, Cologne, 1995
Gutmann, Israel and Bella Guttermann (eds.), The Auschwitz Album. The Story of a Transport, Jerusalem, 2002
Hahn, Hans-Jürgen (ed.), Gesichter der Juden in Auschwitz. Lili Meiers Album, Berlin, 1995
Höss, Rudolf, Commandant of Auschwitz. The Autobiography of Rudolf Hoess, London, 1959(originally published in Polish, 1956; in German, 1958)
Höss, Rudolf and Steven Paskuly, Death Dealer: The Memoirs of the SS Kommandant at Auschwitz, London, 1992
Kielar, Wieslaw, Anus Mundi. Five Years in Auschwitz, Frankfurt am Main, 1982(originally published in Polish, 1972)
Langbein, Hermann, Menschen in Auschwitz, Munich, 1999(first published Vienna, 1972)
Levi, Primo, If This is a Man, London, 1962(originally published in Italian, 1958)
Parcer, Jan (ed.), Memorial Book: Gypsies at Auschwitz– Birkenau (2vols.), Munich, 1993(Polish and German editions, 1993)
Shelley, Lore (ed.), Secretaries of Death. Accounts by Former Prisoners Who Worked in the Gestapo of Auschwitz, New York, 1986
Świebocka, Teresa, Jonathan Webber and Connie Wilsack, Auschwitz. A History in Photographs, Bloomington, Indiana, and Warsaw, 1993(first published Oświęcim, 1990)
Further reading
Allen, Mike Thad, The Business of Genocide: The SS, Slave Labour, and the Concentration Camps, Chapel Hill, 2002
Aly, Götz, Final Solution: Nazi Population Policy and the Murder of the European Jews, London, 1999(originally published in German, 1995)
Aly, Götz and Susanne Heim, Architects of Annihilation: Auschwitz and the Logic of Destruction, Phoenix, London, 2003(originally published in German, 1991)
Arad, Yitzhak, Bełżec, Sobibór, Treblinka. The Operation Reinhard Death Camps, Bloomington, Indiana, 1987
Auschwitz. Geschichte und Wirklichkeit des Vernichtungslagers, Reinbeck, 1980
Die Auschwitz-Hefte. Texte der polnischen Zeitschrift ‘Przeglad Lekarski’ über historische, psychische und medizinische Aspekte des Lebens und Sterbens in Auschwitz (2vols.), Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung, Hamburg, 1994
Bailer-Galanda, Brigitte, Wolfgang Benz and Wolfgang Neugebauer (eds.), Die Auschwitz-Leugner. ‘Revisionistiche’ Geschichtslüge und historische Wahrheit, Berlin, 1996
Balzer, Friedrich-Martin and Werner Renz (eds.), Das Urteil im Frankfurter Auschwitz-Prozess (1963–65), Bonn, 2004
Bankier, David, The Germans and the Final Solution: Public Opinion under Nazism, Oxford, 1996
Bastian, Till, Auschwitz und die ‘Auschwitz-Lüge’. Massenmord und Geschichtsfälschung, Munich, 1997
Benz, Wolfgang (ed.), Dimension des Völkermords. Die Zahl derjüdischenOpferdesNationalsozialismus,Munich, 1996
Browning, Christopher, The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy September 1939–March 1942, London, 2004
Buchheim, Hans, Martin Broszat, Hans-Adolf Jacobsen and Helmut Krausnick, Anatomie des SS-Staates, Munich, 1999(first published 1965(2vols.))
Czech, Danuta, The Auschwitz Chronicle, London, 1990
Długoborski, Waclaw and Franciszek Piper (eds.), Auschwitz 1940–45: Central Issues in the History of the Camp (5vols.), Oświęcim, 2000(originally published in Polish, 1995)
1. Aleksander Lasik, Franciszek Piper, Piotr Setkiewicz and Irena Strzelecka: The Establishment and Organization of the Camp
2. Tadeusz Iwaszko, Helena Kübica, Franciszek Piper, Irena Strzelecka and Andrzej Strzelecki: The Prisoners: Their Life and Work
3. Franciszek Piper: Mass Murder
4. Henryk Swiebocki: The Resistance Movement
5. Danuta Czech, Aleksander Lasik, Stanislaw Klodzinski and Andrzej Strzelecki: Epilogue
Dwork, Deborah and Robert Jan van Pelt, Auschwitz: 1270 to the Present, New York, 1996
Evans, Richard, Telling Lies about Hitler: The Holocaust, History and the David Irving Trial, London, 2002
Frei, Norbert (ed.), Karrieren im Zwielicht: Hitlers Eliten nach 1945, Frankfurt am Main, 2002(first published 2001)
Frei, Norbert, Sybille Steinbacher and Bernd C. Wagner (eds.), Ausbeutung, Vernichtung, Öffentlichkeit. Neue Studien zur nationalsozialistischen Lagerpolitik, Munich, 2000
Friedler, Eric, Barbara Siebert and Andreas Kilian, Zeugen aus der Todeszone. Das jüdische Sonderkommando Auschwitz,Lüneburg, 2002
Gilbert, Martin, Auschwitz and the Allies, London, 2001(first published 1981)
Gutman, Yisrael (ed.), Enzyklopädie des Holocaust. Die Verfolgung und Ermordung der europäischen Juden. German edition edited by Eberhard Jäckel, Peter Longerich and Julius Schoeps, Munich, 1995(English and Hebrew edition, 1990)
Gutman, Yisrael and Michael Berenbaum (eds.), Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp, Bloomington, Indiana, 1994
Gutschow, Niels, Ordnungswahn. Architekten planen im ‘eingedeutschten Osten’ 1939–1945, Berlin, 2001
Guttenplan, D. D., The Holocaust on Trial, New York, 2001(published in German, 2001)
Hefte von Auschwitz, published by the Staatliche Museum Auschwitz–Birkenau, nos. 1–22and special editions since 1959
Herber
t, Ulrich (ed.), National Socialist Extermination Policies: Contemporary German Perspectives and Controversies, New York, 2000(originally published in German, 1998)
Herbert, Ulrich, Karin Orth and Christoph Dieckmann (eds.), Die nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslager. Entwicklung und Struktur (2vols.), Göttingen, 1998
Hilberg, Raul, Destruction of the European Jews (3vols.), New Haven, 2003(expanded new edn originally published in German, 1994
Hilberg, Raul, Sonderzüge nach Auschwitz, Mainz, 1981
Huener, Jonathan, Auschwitz, Poland, and the Politics of Commemoration, 1945–1979, Athens, 2003
Keller, Sven, Günzburg und der Fall Josef Mengele. Die Heimatstadt und die Jagd nach dem NS-Verbrecher, Munich, 2003
Klee, Ernst, Auschwitz, die NS-Medizin und ihre Opfer, Frankfurt am Main, 1997
Langbein, Hermann, Der Auschwitz-Prozeß. Eine Dokumentation (2vols.), Frankfurt am Main, 1995(first published 1965)
Lipstadt, Deborah, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, Harmondsworth, 1995
Longerich, Peter, Politik der Vernichtung. Eine Gesamtdarstellung der nationalsozialistischen Judenverfolgung, Munich, 1998
Mommsen, Hans, Auschwitz, 17. Juli 1942. Der Weg zur europäischen ‘Endlösung der Judenfrage’, Munich, 2002
Naumann, Bernd, Auschwitz. Bericht über die Strafsache gegen Mulka u.a. vor dem Schwurgericht Frankfurt,Frankfurt am Main, 1968
Orth, Karin, Das System der nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslager. Eine politische Organisationgeschichte, Hamburg, 1999
Auschwitz: A History Page 12