Jackson Falsifies
from Freispruch für Deutschland by Heinrich Haertle, 1965
translated by Hadding Scott, 2008
translated by Hadding Scott, 2008
Even where harsher words were used, for example “annihilation,” this did not necessarily have to mean physical extermination, rather the annihilation of Jewish power.1 Similarly, Churchill demanded in an official speech before the House of Commons in September 1943 “that Prussian militarism and National-Socialism be exterminated root and branch.” He could not have meant physical extermination with that.
Chief Prosecutor Jackson2 demonstrated the lack of evidence for this “plan of annihilation” when he tried to trace it back to Hitler’s Mein Kampf. He asserts that Hitler already at that time regretted that the Jews had not been exterminated with poison gas in the last war. That is simply a falsification.
Since this falsification is also still repeated today (1965) in the re-education literature, let’s review briefly the actual text and its context.
Were it possible to prove a plan of extermination against the Jews already from Hitlers’ Mein Kampf, then the collective guilt for anti-Jewish crimes would fall upon every German citizen and soldier. An exact analysis of the actual wording, however, proves the opposite.
Hitler does not turn against Jewry as such and demand its total extermination; rather he attacks Marxism and its destructive effect in the First World War. Propagandistically generalizing, he turns above all against Jewish Marxists and asserts that had the German working class of 1914 in its inner orientation consisted of Marxists, the war would have been ended in three weeks and Germany would have been crushed. That the German People still fought proves that the Marxist false doctrine had not eaten its way in deeply enough. But to the extent that the German soldier again falls into the hands of Marxist leaders, he is lost to the Fatherland.
Only after this qualification does that passage follow which ostensibly demands the extermination of the Jews:
If at the outbreak and during the war, twelve or fifteen thousand of these Hebrew nation-corruptors had been held under poison gas once, as hundreds of thousands of our best German workers from all classes and callings had to endure on the battlefield, then the sacrifice of millions on the front would not have been in vain. On the contrary: twelve thousand scoundrels eliminated at the right time would perhaps have saved the lives of a million Germans who are more orderly and more valuable for the future.
Hitler then reproaches bourgeois statecraft for thoughtlessly sending millions of soldiers to a bloody death while declaring ten or twelve thousand traitors, black-marketeers, usurers, and swindlers as sacrosanct.
With this out-of-context passage, which was written in 1925 and relates to the war situation of 1914, Jackson can prove no plan of extermination for 1942. Nevertheless this citation wanders like a ghost through the whole literature of re-education, and even Dr. Hans Buchheim of the Institut für Zeitgeschichte still repeats this nonsense with his book published in 1958.3
As the Jewish writer Tenenbaum confirms in his book Race and Reich, despite the difficulty of exchanging foreign currency, 1500 Jews per month were able to emigrate legally from Germany. The Jewish historians Poliakoff and Wulf confirm in their book, The Third Reich and the Jews, that prior to 31 December 1942, altogether 557,357 Jews were able to emigrate from the Old Reich, Austria, and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.
If not all were able to emigrate, it was due not to restrictive measures on the German side but to the barriers which the rest of the world had erected against Jewish immigration.4
Even Madam Professor Arendt confirms that in the pre-war years a modus vivendi was able to be found which made possible a cooperation of Germans and Jews regarding emigration. The National-Socialists, she says, had essentially adopted a pro-Zionist attitude. Thus in this period an actual collaboration between Jews and Germans had come about. In those first years an apparently reciprocal and highly satisfying agreement between “Nazi officials” and the Jewish Agency for Palestine was struck, which made it possible for the emigrants to transfer their money in the form of German goods.5 What they had paid in Germany was refunded to them in pounds on arrival in Palestine. This led to the result that in the thirties, as American Jewry organized the famous boycott of German goods, Palestine was flooded with all possible products “Made in Germany.” (The author can confirm this for 1937 from his own observation in all cities of Palestine .) This led in the Eichmann Trial to the paradoxical situation that the accused could assert that back in the day he had saved hundreds of thousands of Jews. Back then a functionary from Palestine visited him in Berlin to invite him to Palestine for a sight-seeing tour of their land.
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1. The word Vernichtung, which etymologically seems as if it should be translated with the word annihilation, is used by Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf to describe the Habsburg Monarchy’s policy of trying to turn Austria’s German population into Czechs. Therefore one should not automatically assume that the word connotes killing. Furthermore, hyperbolic language seems to be a common German vice; at least it was one of Hitler’s vices when addressing the general public; perhaps the dramatic language was helpful for motivating people. It is a common practice among Holocaust promoters to zoom in on the shocking word or phrase while ignoring context that clarifies the meaning. A particularly glaring example of this is Heinrich Himmler’s speech of 4 October 1943 wherein he refers to Ausrottung (usually translated “extermination”) of the Jews, but juxtaposes it with the word Evakuierung, evacuation. Since these words both refer to the same action, the question becomes, is Himmler being euphemistic with Evakuierung — as the Holocaust promoters take for granted — or is he being hyperbolic with Ausrotting?
2. Robert H. Jackson, the Chief Prosecutor in the International Military Tribunal, was simultaneously an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court. He had been a political protégé of Franklin Roosevelt.
3. Haertle is probably referring to Hans Buchheim’s The Third Reich: Its Beginning, Its Development, Its End, (1958).
4. Britain restricted Jewish immigration to Palestine beginning in 1937.
5. What is described here is an arrangement that allowed Jews leaving Germany to take their money with them. It was necessary to convert the Jews’ German currency into goods which then could be exported and sold for foreign currency, because the Reichsmark was not accepted by foreign banks. This fact also made it difficult for Germany to import foreign goods: with what could they pay? The solution was that instead of paying for foreign goods with currency, Germany would trade goods for goods. For example, in one instance Standard Oil was paid with Hohner harmonicas.