What were the Nuremberg Trials?

They were a series of 13 trials of accused World War II German war criminals held from 1945 to 1949 in Nuremberg, Germany. The first trial, the International Military Tribunal (IMT), was prosecuted by the four Allied powers against the top leadership of the Nazi regime in 1945-1946. The other twelve trials were prosecuted by the United States in the Nuremberg Military Tribunals (NMT) from 1946 to 1949, against a variety of governmental, military, industrial, and professional leaders.

washingtonpost.com

Giving Hitler Hell

 

By Matthew Brzezinski
Sunday, July 24, 2005; W08
 

When Nazi decrees destroyed Arnold Weiss's family, leaving him abandoned, it would have been hard to imagine this powerless child one day returning to Germany to mete out a rough justice of his own. This is the story of a man who has stared evil in the eye and held the fates of mass murderers in his hands. It begins at a company picnic, where children are cavorting as their parents dine on healthful salads and low-carb entrees. This is appropriate, in a roundabout way, because alongside the theme of hard, brutal justice, this story also concerns the American dream.

The setting is the Tarara Vineyard just outside Leesburg, and the date is summer 2002. The suburban winery has been transformed into a mini-amusement park for the occasion. Portable generators hum, powering all sorts of play stations, slides and rides. Overhead, a hot-air balloon rises and falls on its tether like a giant red yo-yo. Kids run in every direction, trailed by harried parents, the occasional nanny and a professional photographer hired to memorialize the corporate outing. A group of executives huddles near the outdoor buffet. They wear baseball caps em-blazoned with the logo of their employer, EMP, or Emerging Markets Partnerships, one of Washington's largest international investment firms. Some sip merlot, but in the presence of their bosses most of the assembled MBAs have opted for the safer soft-drink selections.

	Arnold H. Weiss stands at the center of this pleasant bustle. He is a small, dapper man, slightly stooped, and he speaks so softly that those at the back of the pack must crane their necks to see and hear him. But everyone is listening intently, and not only because he is one of the firm's founders, and, at 78, its eldest statesmen. Weiss's tone is detached and measured, almost clinical, as if he were outlining exit strategies for an Indonesian telecom deal or plotting the purchase of a Brazilian railroad. But he is not talking shop. He is relating his experiences from the Holocaust. Several of the senior partners have heard parts of the story before, and they drift in and out of the circle as Weiss recounts his years in an Orthodox Jewish orphanage near Nuremberg, where the Nazis first wrote their deadly race laws. A murmur of surprise rises from the younger employees when they discover that one of their board members was Weiss's classmate in Germany: Henry Kissinger. But silence descends again, as Weiss recalls running the gantlet through Hitler Youth gangs on his way to school every day, and the foot chases, the beatings in alleys and the scar he bears to this day from being strung up on a lamppost by teenage Nazi wannabes.
Every so often one of the executives in Weiss's audience is called away to deal with an unruly offspring or to soothe a toddler meltdown, and when that person returns, the narrative has moved forward. The Second World War has begun, and everyone in Weiss's orphanage has been sent to the extermination camp in Auschwitz. Young Arnie, however, is safely in the United States, having made it out of Germany in 1938 in one of the so-called Kindertransports that rescued thousands of Jewish children from the gas chamber. He is 13 when he arrives in this country, with only a cardboard suitcase and $5 to his name. He does not speak a word of English or know a single soul.

By this juncture in the tale, the executives huddled around Weiss are riveted.But Weiss seems anxious to wrap up his reminiscing just as the war ends and the real work of his Army intelligence unit begins: tracking down fugitive Nazis. He has grown visibly tired by the retelling, as if suddenly burdened by some great weight.

His employees can't conceal their disappointment. They clamor for more details. Weiss deflects the queries, summoning his half-century of experience as a Washington lawyer to carefully craft each response. The questions, however, keep coming.

Admits killing German prisoners "You must understand," he acknowledges after some time, "that I'm not ready to talk about what happened." But why? someone asks. For a moment Weiss stares silently through his large, gold-rimmed glasses. "Because," he finally says, "there is no statute of limitations on murder."

Since Arnold Weiss's signature adorns my wife's paycheck, I thought it prudent not to push too hard during that 2002 picnic. My curiosity, however, had been aroused, and I made it clear that if he ever wanted to tell the full story of what did happen in the weeks and months after Nazi Germany's capitulation, I would be an obliging listener.

Three years passed, and I did not hear from Weiss. I'd run into him at the occasional Christmas party or EMP function requiring black tie and spousal attendance, but he never brought up the subject. Then, a few months ago, Weiss left me a message: If I was still interested in hearing his story, he was at last prepared to tell it.

Weiss is almost 81 now, officially -- and grudgingly -- retired, though you'd never know it, since he still gets up each morning, dons a tailored suit and drives his big Mercedes to EMP's offices on Pennsylvania Avenue. He's married and has two grown sons. He missed three months of work last year recovering from a triple bypass and heart valve surgery, and while he certainly looks fit and healthy, perhaps an impending sense of mortality has made the time seem right.

Ironically, an almost identical consideration recently prompted Adolf Hitler's devoted nurse, Erna Flegel, to break her 60-year silence on Hitler's deteriorating mental and physical health in his final days. "I don't want to take my secret with me into death," the 93-year-old Flegel told a German newspaper in May. There are still many missing pieces of the WWII puzzle, and every time one is found history gets rewritten a bit. Sometimes, as in the case of the unrepentant Flegel, whose existence became known only a few years ago when the CIA declassified old OSS interrogation transcripts, the added testimony merely warrants a footnote. But on other occasions, material surfaces that requires entire chapters of the official record to be scrapped. It was only after the collapse of communism, for instance, that the Kremlin grudgingly admitted that the Soviet secret police, not the German SS, murdered thousands of Polish POWs during WWII. In 2000, it was Poland's turn to reexamine its war record, and the larger issue of anti-semitism, when an American scholar uncovered evidence that the massacre of the entire Jewish population of a village called Jedwabne was the work of Polish compatriots and not the Nazis, as had been the official version.

History has a habit of sweeping the inconvenient under the carpet. Despite the passage of more than half a century (not to mention the passage of U.S. legislation in the late 1990s ordering WWII records unsealed) there are still countless documents from the era that the CIA has deemed either too sensitive or embarrassing to declassify. Like those partially opened files, parts of Weiss's account have also emerged slowly over the years, and the snippets of the past they offer contain eerie parallels to some of the things happening in the world today. But he, too, has held back crucial portions of the narrative. Now, for the first time, he's willing to tell the whole story, from its improbable beginning to the strange new relevancy of its long-buried end.

Munich in autumn of 1945 was a devastated and demoralized city. With every passing week, the arrest lists sent from American intelligence headquarters in Frankfurt only seemed to grow longer. The teletype machine next to Weiss's desk spat out names almost round-the-clock: rocket scientists, nuclear engineers, chemists and physicists; party clerks, accountants and financiers; valets, chauffeurs and cooks. Anyone closely associated with the fallen regime had to be hauled in and detained. And in a town like Munich, whose smoky beer halls had hosted the earliest Nazi rallies, that meant a great many people.

Life In Nuremberg

Jews requisition mansions Weiss and two dozen other Army Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) officers worked out of the requisitioned home of Munich's gauleiter, or local Nazi Party boss, who had seized the villa from a wealthy Jewish industrialist. The mansion had somehow survived Allied air raids and was in a quiet, upscale neighborhood that was also relatively undamaged. But perhaps its chief recommendation was a deep, dry basement that had been converted into holding cells.

From Gauleiter Haus, Weiss's beat -- Region IV of the American Occupied Zone -- stretched south through the lakelands and forests of Bavaria to the Alpine passes and mountainous redoubts along the Austrian border. Bavaria was the cradle of the Nazi movement, the birthplace and home of many of its leading figures. And because of its mountainous terrain and the fanaticism of some of its inhabitants, it was the one area in the American Sector that posed the greatest risk of insurgency, the German equivalent of the Sunni Triangle.

Throughout Germany, the Allies were anxious to restore basic services and get local governments up and running again, and one of Weiss's responsibilities was to vet potential officials for past Nazi Party membership. It was an important and time-consuming duty, but he still kept a special eye out for high-value targets who had evaded capture. Many of Hitler's henchmen, particularly from the dreaded SS, were still at large, along with mountains of gold bullion, and if there was to be an uprising, they would surely lead and finance it. Already, sporadic attacks by a group of insurgents ominously known as the Werewolves had prompted standing orders for GIs to execute insurgents by firing squad. This wreaked havoc on the morale of U.S. servicemen, especially since many of the troublemakers were 16- and 17-year-old former Hitler Youth members.

More worrisome, though, were the persistent rumors that Hitler was still alive. "We were certain that he had committed suicide at his bunker," Weiss recalls. "But since Berlin was part of the Russian zone, and no witness and no body had been produced by the Soviets, many Germans refused to believe the Fuhrer was gone."

The Russians, who knew full well where the late Fuhrer was since they had his charred remains in a secret laboratory in Moscow, further stirred the pot. Izvestia, the official Communist daily, ran a front page story claiming that he and Eva Braun had installed themselves in bourgeois splendor in a castle (complete with moat) in Westphalia, in the British Zone.

Hitler sightings soon spanned the globe, from Sweden and Ireland all the way to Argentina, where Hitler, having undergone plastic surgery, was said to be developing long-range robot bombs in an underground hideout. Even Washington caught the paranoia bug, sending an urgent classified cable to its embassy in Buenos Aires to run down the lead: "Source indicates that there is a western entrance to the underground hideout, which consists of a stone wall operated by photo-electric cells, activated by code signals from ordinary flashlights." The matter was apparently taken seriously enough, according to a 1989 book on the CIC, America's Secret Army, by Ian Sayer and Douglas Botting, that FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover became involved in the investigation. By October 1945, speculation over Hitler's whereabouts had reached such a fever pitch that a decision "at the highest level," says Weiss, was made to put the mystery to rest once and for all. The British -- who were particularly incensed at the Soviet suggestion that Hitler was living untrammeled under their noses -- were charged with finding definitive proof that Hitler was dead. Messages now clattered off the CIC teletype machines to give the highest priority to the search for eyewitnesses who may have been in the bunker with Hitler during his last days.

"The highest-ranking Nazi who was still on the loose was Bormann," says Weiss. Martin Bormann, the Brown Eminence, had been the Nazi Party secretary and Hitler's gatekeeper. He had controlled access to the Fuhrer. If anyone knew what had happened to Hitler, it was Bormann. "I remembered vaguely that his adjutant was from Munich."

Weiss tortures mother and sister?

Weiss scoured the records, and discovered that Bormann's right-hand man, SS Standartenfuhrer Wilhelm Zander, indeed hailed from Munich, and was still unaccounted for. Zander not only might know where his boss was hiding, there was a good chance that he had been in his bunker just before the Red Army stormed it. Weiss picked up the Munich phone book. Sure enough, there were several Zanders listed. "I rounded up his mother and sister," Weiss recalls. He was struck by how ordinary they seemed. That was something Weiss would grow accustomed to: how monsters could come from such seemingly normal families.

Though the mother and sister were defensive and insisted that Zander had done nothing wrong, eventually one of them let slip that he had a much younger girlfriend in Munich. She was a striking 21-year-old brunette who still lived with her parents. Weiss had her arrested. Though he himself was barely old enough to legally buy beer by today's standards, Weiss could back then cordon off entire city blocks and incarcerate everyone for any period of time. Warrants were not needed, and there was no judicial oversight. "We had absolute power," he says, with a small smile. "The Germans were already calling us the American Gestapo." Weiss sent the girlfriend not to CIC headquarters at the posh Gauleiter Haus, but to a larger jail filled with common criminals on the outskirts of Munich. There, he let her sit alone in a cell for two days to contemplate her fate. "I wanted her frightened, to give her time to think" of all the terrible things that could happen to her. It was a standard interrogation technique with subjects who were considered weak. Breaking hard cases required a completely different approach, and Weiss, since he was one of the few American officers who spoke German, was rapidly gaining experience as a skilled interrogator.

When he had deemed that she had stewed long enough, Weiss had the woman brought to a barren interrogation room. He made her stand, another small but apparently effective psychological tactic. "She was ready to talk," he recalls. "She immediately admitted to being Zander's lover." Weiss asked when she had last seen him. He expected her to say that it had been years, but instead she said six weeks earlier. "My teeth just about dropped," Weiss recalls. That meant the trail might still be hot. The woman had another surprise for Weiss. Zander had foolishly told her the alias he was using and where he was hiding. Weiss immediately sent a coded communique to CIC headquarters in Frankfurt. U.S. intelligence notified British Intelligence, which dispatched its lead investigator to join Weiss in the chase.

Maj. Hugh Trevor-Roper made an unlikely secret agent. Tall, gaunt and nearsighted, he seemed more like a distracted academic, which in fact he was in civilian life, a history professor at Oxford. Weiss briefed Trevor-Roper. Zander was using the name Paustin and was posing as a farmhand for someone named Irmgard Unterholzener in a village not too far from Munich called Tegernsee. The pair made hasty arrangements to raid the place, but by the time they arrived, Zander had bolted. For the next three weeks, Weiss chased down blind leads without luck. Then, just before Christmas, Weiss got a call from the CIC field office in Munsingen, Germany. A Paustin had registered for a residence permit -- the Germans, apparently even when on the lam, were very punctilious about recordkeeping -- with the local police in a small German village near the Czech border called Vilshofen. Weiss got on the horn to Trevor-Roper. "We found him," Weiss said excitedly. It took 24 long hours for Trevor-Roper to get to Munich, during which Weiss paced impatiently.

When he finally arrived, the pair shouldered their weapons -- Weiss had a holstered .38; Trevor-Roper opted for the larger Colt .45 -- and set out in an open jeep for the chilly 90-minute drive to Vilshofen.

Hollywood, in Weiss's own words, could not have cast a more unlikely pair of Nazi hunters. In photos, Trevor-Roper, in an ill-fitting uniform and Coke-bottle glasses, towers thinly over Weiss, who though he weighed a scant 120 pounds when he enlisted, had rounded out his diminutive frame, thanks to the Gauleiter Haus' well-provisioned mess table. But looks can be deceiving. The aristocratic Oxford don (Trevor-Roper, who became one of the most preeminent WWII historians, died Lord Dacre) and the brash Jewish-American refugee made a formidable team.

At the Munsingen field office, they called for backup -- several MPs and a junior CIC officer. Weiss is fuzzy on the latter's full name; a military intelligence document of the period lists him only as Special Agent Rosener.

Weiss, Rosener and Trevor-Roper found the farmhouse shortly before 4 a.m. It was an old stone building, prosperous and well kept, and all was quiet despite the impending holiday. (At this stage, there seems to be some discrepancy as to the chronology of events. Petrova and Watson list the raid as occurring on Boxing Day, or December 26. Sayer and Botting have the date as December 28. But Weiss, whose key role is noted in both books, still has a memo he wrote at the time on CIC letterhead that puts the raid as having taken place on Christmas Eve.) As the MPs broke down the door, a shot rang out from the house. Weiss's first instinct after diving for cover was to disarm Trevor-Roper. "He was pretty much legally blind, and I was more afraid of getting shot by him than Zander," Weiss recalls. The MPs found the startled Zander naked in bed with a woman (not his girlfriend) and quickly overpowered him. Weiss grabbed Zander's Italian Beretta -- a memento he has kept to this day.

The family who owned the house had come running downstairs, shocked at all the commotion. There followed a good deal of yelling, not the least from Zander, who was demanding to know who his captors were and what they wanted.

"We're Americans, and we've come to arrest you," said Weiss.

"Why?" Zander demanded.

"What's your name?"

"Paustin."

"Do you have ID?"

Zander produced an identity card: It listed him as in his late thirties, a shade under 6 feet, and of medium build, which was all accurate. The photo too showed a good likeness; dark hair and cool, light eyes forming an arrogant gaze that had apparently made Zander/Paustin a ladies man.

"This is a fake," said Weiss. "You're coming with us."

The whole way back to Munich, as Weiss drove and Rosener guarded the handcuffed prisoner, Zander maintained his innocence. "He kept screaming, 'What do you want from me?'" Weiss recalls. "And we kept saying, 'We'll tell you when we get there.'"

When they arrived at Gauleiter Haus, they began the interrogation immediately. "We wanted to go after him while the shock of the arrest was still fresh." Trevor-Roper, as the senior officer, led the questioning, and Weiss acted mostly as interpreter. For 10 hours they grilled Zander, who initially continued to insist that his was a case of mistaken identity.

"We confronted him with all the facts of his life," Weiss recalls. The aim was to show Zander that Allied intelligence already knew everything about him, that there was no point in continuing the charade. Zander's answers started growing contradictory. Weiss turned up the heat.

"We have your mother and sister," he said. This wasn't true. Weiss had arrested only the girlfriend. But Zander didn't know that.

Finally, and with great formality, he said: "You are correct. I am SS Standartenfuhrer Wilhelm Zander."

It wasn't particularly dramatic, but they had broken him. The real questioning could now begin. When had he last seen Nazi leaders Goebbels? Goering? Himmler? Who was in the bunker with the Fuhrer during his last hours? What were the circumstances of Zander's last meeting with Bormann? How did he get out of the Fuhrer's bunker? What route did he take? Trevor-Roper was particularly interested in the names of lesser officials present during Hitler's last 48 hours, support staff such as Erna Flegel, cooks, drivers, guards and so on.

Once Zander had given up the ghost of Paustin, he talked nonstop for six hours. Almost as an afterthought, Weiss asked why he had left the bunker.

"I was sent on an important mission as a courier," said Zander, matter-of-factly. "I suppose you want the documents."

Absolutely, said Weiss, even though he had no idea what Zander was taking about. "Where are they?"

That same day Zander led Weiss and Trevor-Roper back to Tegernsee, where he had originally lain low. There was a dry well at the back of the Unterholzener property, and he pointed down it. Weiss retrieved a fake-leather suitcase from the bottom. At first glance it contained only Zander's discarded SS uniform. But upon closer inspection, a hidden compartment was found. In it was a plain manila envelope.

Weiss tore it open. "Oh my God," he cried, involuntarily switching to his native German. He was staring at Hitler's "Last Will and Political Testament."

"Let me show you something," says Weiss, breaking off his narrative. It takes me a second to make the leap from 1945 to the pres-ent, to readjust to the office surroundings. I take in the plush ex-ecutive decor, the crystal tombstones that investment bankers use to commemorate big deals, the framed notice from the June 6, 1994, edition of the Wall Street Journal: $1,086,460,000, it reads in bold banner-headline print, the amount of money raised for the first of six funds EMP manages. A scale model of a Boeing 757 flying the corporate colors of an Asian airline (one of the firm's investments) sits on the window sill, competing for airspace with the real planes that cruise over the Potomac on final approach to Reagan National Airport.

"Here, I brought it with me." Weiss fishes through his briefcase, which is definitely not fake leather. Everyone dresses well at EMP's posh Pennsylvania Avenue headquarters, but only the chairman -- a former prime minister of Pakistan and World Bank senior vice president -- is nattier than Weiss.

"There," says Weiss, handing me an old sheaf of papers.

They are 1946 photostats. What is startling is the simplicity of the documents. With all the pageantry that surrounded the Third Reich, these humble pages don't even contain an official seal. Printed on plain white typing paper of the sort found lying around any office, they have an almost suspect humility about them. But they are real, authenticated by the FBI in early 1946, according to America's Secret Army.

Mein privates Testament, reads the underlined heading of the first page. It is dated April 29, 1945, 4 a.m., and at the back are five signatures. The first is small and tightly wound, like a compressed thunderbolt: Adolf Hitler. The others are more expansive and boldly ambitious: witnesses Martin Bormann and Joseph Goebbels, the propaganda minister who killed himself and his family in the room next to Hitler in the bunker.

The same signatures grace a second, considerably longer document titled Mein politsches Testament, in which Hitler rails against his generals, expels Himmler and Goering from the Nazi Party, and appoints Grand Adm. Karl Doenitz as his successor and names the entire 17-member Cabinet. A third document had been in the package found by Weiss that Zander was to have delivered to Doenitz -- the death-bed marriage certificate between Hitler and his longtime mistress, Eva Braun. But Weiss did not get a copy of it. (Weiss received a photostat of Hitler's wills along with a congratulatory memo dated January 7, 1946, from an American brigadier general whose signature is illegible. The originals are stored in the National Archives.) "The wills were to be used to re-honor Hitler, when at some future date the Germans would rise again," Weiss wrote in his own sure hand in a 1946 memo that ends in a triumphant, "Case closed." (Weiss had reason to sound exultant: For finding definitive proof that Hitler was dead -- in his will, Hitler explains that he prefers ending his own life to being paraded around like a zoo exhibit -- he was awarded the Army Commendation Medal, a citation from the commanding general of the Intelligence Services and a recommendation for the Bronze Star.)

As to why Zander failed to deliver the documents to Doenitz, Weiss's memo, now yellowed with age, hints that such information was above his pay grade. Trevor-Roper, however, had access to further debriefings with the wayward SS courier. "A half-educated, stupid, but honest man," he wrote in his final report, published in 1947, "Zander only wished by a silent death to end a wasted life and expiate the illusions which it was too late to shed." Apparently, the loyal SS man had begged for permission not to carry out his last mission. An idealist, he wished to die alongside his Fuhrer. But, according to Trevor-Roper, Hitler refused his request and ordered him to carry the succession documents. Once he thought Hitler was gone, Zander no longer believed that Nazi Germany had any future and simply ditched the documents instead. Weiss never found Bormann, whose skeleton was discovered in Berlin in 1972, prompting speculation that he had killed himself not long after leaving Hitler's bunker.

Weiss still marvels at Hitler's mix of naiveté and arrogance for thinking that the Third Reich could survive defeat or that his orders would be carried out after death. "Can you imagine?" he says. "Hitler was still trying to run Germany from the grave. Talk about chutzpah!" But more mundane matters also preoccupied Hitler's last thoughts: He wanted his paintings donated to a picture gallery in his home town of Linz and some personal mementos distributed to his secretaries, particularly Frau Winter. "As executor, I appoint my most faithful Party comrade, Martin Bormann," Hitler wrote. "He is given full legal authority to hand over to my relatives . . . especially to my wife's mother . . . everything which is . . . necessary to maintain a petty-bourgeois standard of living."

Hitler's final written words, however, commanded Germany's future leaders to "mercilessly resist the universal poisoner of all nations, international Jewry." It is, thus, one of history's ironies that the first person to read those words was a young German American Jew who had survived the Holocaust as a victim of Nazi persecution and was now acting as an instrument of justice.

Weiss was born Hans Arnold Wangersheim to a middle-class family of assimilated Jews that had lived peacefully in German Franconia for nearly four centuries. Weiss's father, Stefan, covered the sports beat for the Nuremburg Acht-Uhr Abendblatt, and his flashy, opinionated columns on the rising or falling fortunes of the local soccer clubs lent him an aura of minor celebrity enjoyed by the contemporary likes of a Tony Kornheiser. Sportswriters in those days didn't have production deals with ESPN, and the Wangersheims lived modestly in a working-class neighborhood where the nascent forces of fascism and communism competed fiercely, and often violently, for the residents' affections.

Weiss's earliest memories of his father are of a muscular man in a crisp, white gymnastics uniform, swinging gracefully from the parallel bars. "He cut a dashing figure, or so it seemed to someone who was very young."

Weiss was 6 when his parents divorced in 1930.

His father apparently preferred the sweaty company of fellow sports lovers, and long, languid evenings in beer halls, to ministering to his three children. There might have been another woman in the picture, but the subject was too painful, and Weiss never raised it with his mother. By all accounts, the divorce proceedings were messy and bitter. Weiss's mother, Thekla Rosenberg, an avid athlete and tennis player herself, got custody of young Arnie and his two sisters, Beate and Evelyn, but no financial support from Stefan, who walked away from all parental responsibility.

At the time, the Great Depression raged on both sides of the Atlantic. In Weimar Germany, the added burden of war reparations demanded by the Treaty of Versailles at the end of WWI made the situation particularly dire. Weiss's mother had a difficult decision to make. On her bookkeeper's salary, she could not afford to raise three children. "There was just not enough money to feed all of us," Weiss recalls. "The girls needed to be more protected, so I was the candidate to be placed in an orphanage."

The Orthodox Jewish orphanage to which Weiss was sent in 1930 (or 1931 -- he no longer remembers) was in a suburb of Nuremberg known as Furth. The routine was harsh: up before dawn for morning prayers at the synagogue next door, then off to school and three hours of Hebrew lessons, followed by two more hours of Talmudic studies before evening prayers. The food was lousy; privacy was nonexistent; and between the hazing from the older kids and the harsh discipline meted out by orphanage administrators, beatings were a regular feature of life.

Weiss described the details in an oral testimony he gave in 1996 to the U.S Holocaust Memorial Museum. "It was pretty grim," he said in the taped testimony, "even before the Nazis came to power."

Asked by the curator if he felt a sense of abandonment, Weiss responded, "Yes," after a long pause. "I would say that's a fair comment."

The separation from his 2-year-old sister, Evelyn, was the hardest to bear. "I simply adored her. She was like a toy." Weiss still got to see his mother and sisters for a few hours every few months, but it wasn't the same. They inevitably grew apart. But the orphanage was within walking distance of his maternal grandmother's apartment, which afforded him at least one decent meal a week and generous helpings of affection.

Still, he says, orphanage life wasn't all bad. You always had someone to play with, so you were never lonely. Those hidings thickened the skin, and you learned quickly to fend for yourself. "Community living, once you got used to it, had all kinds of pluses, which came in handy at later stages in life." Weiss credits his upbringing in the orphanage for his ease in institutional settings, whether the military, in which he enlisted in 1942 as a gunner on B-17 bombers before being recruited into intelligence, or the Treasury Department, which he joined in 1952 after getting his law degree on the GI bill, or at the helm of the big international development banks and law firms where he spent the bulk of his Washington career.

"One of the things it taught you," he says of orphanage life, "was to internalize your feelings, to surround yourself with walls and, above all, never to show emotion or weakness."

That mental toughness was a critical survival tool in Furth, as Weiss had the added disadvantage of being small for his age. "I was a shrimp," he explains in the Holocaust Museum tapes. "I don't think I ever reached more than 5-foot-4 or 5 inches. The Aryan race seemed a little better set up in our neighborhood."

With his yarmulke and distinctive side-curls, Weiss was a natural target for local bullies, particularly the young toughs from the Hitler Youth, who were all too eager to practice on Jewish orphans what their adult leaders preached. "Did you try to fight back?" the Holocaust Museum interviewer asks. "I ran most of the time," Weiss replies. "But they'd still catch me sometimes and beat the tar out of me."

It was from this unhappy vantage point that Weiss watched the Nazi ascendancy. By the mid-1930s, the ranks of the orphanage had doubled, as Jewish parents began disappearing into the growing network of Nazi prison camps. Weiss vividly remembers the last time he saw his own father in 1935. "He came to the orphanage, which was odd since I had not heard from him in over two years. We went for a walk along the canal, and I remember he did something very strange. He put his hands on my head and said a prayer. This was very unusual because my father was not a religious man. 'We will probably never see each other again,' he said, 'I'm going to try to leave Germany.' That was the last I ever saw of him." Stefan Wangersheim was arrested soon after visiting his son.

There were other ill omens that not even an 11-year-old could miss. By 1937, food at the orphanage had become scarce. The orphanage was financed by Nuremberg's shrinking Jewish community, and as more and more Jews fled, were arrested or had their businesses seized, there was less money available for the orphans. "To earn a few extra marks, we were rented out at funerals to say the mourner's prayer," Weiss recalls. "None of us particularly looked forward to that."

At the same time, there was a massive influx of new students at Furth's sole Jewish school, as Jews were expelled from all other academic institutions. The transfers included Henry Kissinger and his younger brother, who was in Weiss's class. (Kissinger many years later at a dinner party told Weiss that, alas, he had no recollection of him.) By 1938, the orphanage's ranks had almost tripled, and the children's diet was reduced mostly to potatoes. Some of the kids' teeth started falling out from malnutrition, and Weiss's gums and molars were badly weakened from vitamin deficiency.

Then one day in February 1938, salvation. Weiss was handed a cardboard suitcase and told to pack. "You are going to America," he was informed. How and why he, out of all the children at the orphanage, had been selected for evacuation he does not know. Luck of the draw perhaps, or maybe the good will of some distant family relation. How it was that Weiss was chosen for the small American allotment was even more of a mystery, since compared with Britain, Russia and other havens, the United States placed tight restrictions on Jewish refugees.

Weiss didn't care about the whys and hows of his rescue. He just wanted out. "Since I didn't have any real attachment to my mother or sisters anymore because we had been apart for eight years, I saw this as a big adventure, and was delighted to go."

The street smarts he had developed in Furth served him well in the United States, where he landed to a decidedly frosty reception. He couldn't find a place to live in New York when he got off the boat, and he was put on a train to Chicago, where there were fewer refugees competing for homes. "We got into Chicago at 3 a.m., and I noticed a train departing for Milwaukee," he remembers. "I'd heard they spoke German there, so I got on it and locked myself in the bathroom." In Milwaukee, he lived with the homeless at the train station and ate in soup kitchens until the police picked him up. He was sent to an orphanage, but kept running away. "I shined shoes and picked up a paper route." Eventually a shop-owning family in the small town of Janesville, Wis., took him in. He went to high school and then watchmaker's college because his foster father believed that everyone should have a trade. "That period was among the happiest of my life," Weiss recalls. "I had a loving home and a completely normal teenage existence, which I never took for granted."

The soldier who returned to Nuremberg in 1945 with the 45th division was a different person from the refugee who had left seven years before. He had a new name, for one, borrowed from the back of the jersey of a fleet-footed University of Wisconsin football star; a new family back in Janesville; and a new nationality and mother tongue, which he spoke with a flat Midwestern accent. Nor was he a boy any longer, forced to run away from Nazi bullies. He was a man, part of the most powerful army the world had ever seen, and it was his turn to do the chasing.

Advancing through sniper-filled Nuremberg, Weiss barely recognized the city he grew up in. Its narrow streets were too littered with rubble for U.S. tanks to pass. The block where his parents had lived was a smoldering hulk; his old orphanage stood silent and empty. Virtually everyone he had been close to was dead: the stern but kind-hearted orphanage director, the kids he had bunked with, the friends he had gone to school with. His uncles had shot themselves rather than face deportation to the death camps. And his grandmother, the person he was probably closest to in the whole world, the warm, loving woman he would sneak out of the orphanage to visit, had been sent to the ghetto at Theresienstadt in the Czech Republic, and then to Auschwitz in Poland to become one of the 6 million.

His mother and sisters, at least, had managed to bribe their way out of Germany, then to England and Portugal, and eventually, with Weiss's help, to the United States. But Weiss had little time for reflection or sorrow. Orders had come from 7th Army head-quarters for advance elements of the 45th to rush to Dachau, to liberate the camp before a group of highly valued political prisoners held there was moved or killed. (As Weiss recalls, the VIPs included Leon Blum, the French prime minister; Austria's former chancellor; the deposed head of state of Hungary; some bishops and cardinals; and a German relative of the British royal family.) What he remembers most about Dachau, though, was the smell. "I still have dreams about it," he says. A revolt had broken out in the camp before the 45th's arrival, and while the SS retained control of parts of the peri-meter, the crematoriums had not worked for some days. Bodies just piled up, or lay decomposing between the long rows of low, wooden barracks. Where SS guards still manned the watchtowers, near the main rail embankment, an entire trainload of corpses rotted. "The SS had prevented anyone from unloading it. The people locked inside the cattle cars slowly suffocated or died of thirst," Weiss says.

Even though the camp was technically liberated, the prisoners were so weak and skeletal that they perished at a rate of several hundred per day. Some would crawl on their hands and knees to get outside through holes cut in the barbed wire, so that they could die free. Others were "hell bent" on finding and killing kapos, the club-wielding prisoner turnkeys who, in exchange for extra rations, were as brutal as the SS guards they worked for. "Mobs would descend on them and rip them limb from limb."

Weiss never found the prisoners his unit was sent to rescue. They had been moved by the retreating German regular army, so that the SS would not senselessly butcher potentially valuable bargaining chips. But sifting through an unofficial record of Dachau's victims that had been secretly compiled by prisoners since the mid-'30s and hidden in hollowed-out rafters, Weiss came across a name he immediately recognized: Stefan Wangersheim, his father. (Weiss would learn many years later that his father had survived and immigrated to Brazil with a new wife. He died before Weiss had the chance to reconnect with him.)

When the war ended, Weiss's real work began. The vast death machine Hitler assembled had untold parts and myriad accomplices, and most of them did not simply vanish with Hitler's suicide. The job of identifying and accounting for those with the blood of millions on their hands would be neither quick nor easy. Weiss had a daunting list of thousands of wanted Nazis to find. He remembers one in particular, a man who had not even bothered to move from his pre-war address or take on an assumed name. Weiss had simply looked him up in the Munich phone book and knocked on his door early one morning in 1946.

Why the man had not bothered to conceal his tracks was a puzzle. Perhaps he thought that after all these months no one would come looking for him. Or maybe he believed he could hide beneath his low rank. He was an enlisted man; there were plenty of bigger fish for the Americans to fry. But he had belonged to the SS Death's Head, the notorious battalions tasked with liquidating Europe's Jews, and Weiss, if he could help it, wasn't going to let the even lowliest private from any of those killing squads go free.

"This guy was walking around Munich without a care while most of the people I knew were dead," he says. "And at the time we still didn't even comprehend the enormity of what they had done."

Of all branches of the SS, it was the Death's Head, and specifically its Einsatzgruppen and sonderkomandos units, who ran the death camps and herded entire villages into synagogues to be burned alive. They were the ones who dug the mass burial pits on the outskirts of towns and dumped truckloads of earth on women and children gasping for air. It was the Death's Head that was responsible for devising ever more efficient ways of killing. At Auschwitz, the pinnacle of their industriousness, they "processed" 60,000 people a day.

The man had been a guard at Auschwitz and Theresienstadt. It said so in his military service ID record, which, astonishingly, he was still carrying when Weiss nabbed him, as if these posts were somehow marks of distinction. Nor did he make an effort to deny who he was or where he had worked, once Weiss had him in a concrete cell flanked by two MPs.

"I had interrogated some very bad people," Weiss recalls, "but there was something about this guy, an utter lack of remorse. He was oblivious, like he'd done nothing wrong."

The man was in his mid-forties, unshaven and pale. He'd been drunk when Weiss picked him up, but two days in the cell had sobered him up sufficiently for the realization to start dawning that he was in trouble. It was clear to Weiss that the man had probably never gotten beyond elementary school, and his German was of the guttural Bavarian dialect spoken throughout the lowest ranks of the blue-collar class.

Weiss says he spent less than an hour in the cell, getting the information he needed: names of superiors, other guards and so on. "I just wanted to get out of there and take a shower.

"I guess what got me was the complete absence of humanity. To him, Auschwitz had just been a job. The fact that more than a million people were killed there didn't seem to faze him in the least bit. He didn't see Jews as people."

Weiss thought of his father, his friends at the orphanage, his grandmother. The SS man had worked at the same two camps where she had been sent. He was only a lowly cog in the killing machine, and that meant he was of little value to intelligence headquarters in Frankfurt. Unlike Zander, he didn't have to be kicked up the intelligence food chain. In that sense, the man had been right about not needing to go into hiding. No one at Allied Command was particularly interested in someone of his status. But if he believed that his low rank would somehow spare him from justice, he was dead wrong.

Weiss used Jewish killers

"How did you do it?" I ask Weiss. "The kapos," he explains, "that's where we got the idea. We had seen what the DPs did to the kapos, and we realized they could do us a favor." DPs, or displaced persons, were the survivors of death and POW camps -- Jews, Poles, Russians, Hungarians, refugees of virtually every nationality who either could not return home or no longer had any homes to return to. They numbered in the hundreds of thousands in Europe, and they were housed in huge temporary DP camps. Several such refugee camps, converted German Army barracks, were near Munich. "We studied up a little on military law, and there was nothing on the books preventing us from delivering suspects for additional debriefing to the DPs," Weiss recalls. He says he's not sure where the idea originated, who first put it into motion, or how widespread it was. "Whoever first came up with this, I honestly don't know. I don't think they'd own up to it anyway.

"

Ferencz -- who went on to a distinguished legal career, became a founder of the International Criminal Court and is today probably the leading authority on military jurisprudence of the era -- cannot specifically address Weiss's actions. But he says it's important to recall that military legal norms at the time permitted a host of flexibilities that wouldn't fly today. "You know how I got witness statements?" he says. "I'd go into a village where, say, an American pilot had parachuted and been beaten to death and line everyone one up against the wall. Then I'd say, 'Anyone who lies will be shot on the spot.' It never occurred to me that statements taken under duress would be invalid."

Weiss says that his unit had its own system of ethics when it came to handing former death camp guards over to the DPs. "You couldn't do that by yourself," he says. "You consulted with the other CIC agents, and usually there was a duty officer. We would have never done this," he adds, "without at least some nod from a superior."

The key was to make certain that there were no cases of mistaken identity. The SS men would have to own up to their participation in mass murders of their own volition, never as a result of torture, since people tend to admit to anything under such circumstances, says Weiss. As a backup, "I'd make them write out a detailed history of their war record, including who they served with, when and under who." This was double-checked against captured Nazi records to make sure that the person was indeed who they claimed to be. Only then was the decision taken, Weiss says.

Took prisoners to DP camps for execution

Weiss remembers the panic in the SS men's eyes when they finally realized where they were being taken. "We never told them where they were going," he says. At the sight of the old German Army barracks, they grasped their fate. Some would try to cling to the jeep, but the reception committee would forcibly remove them. Weiss says he never looked back in the rearview mirror to see what happened next. Nor did he need to. In all, Weiss recalls being involved in about a dozen such cases. There were similar instances in other CIC units, Weiss says, but he does not know the circumstances of those cases or how many there were. Weiss says he no longer remembers most of the names of those handed over to the DPs, and that even if he did, he would not divulge them because their descendants might seek recourse.

He says he has never, however, had any moral qualms about his actions. "I never gave it much thought after the war," he says. "The point is: What do you do with these guys? The war crimes courts were already backlogged with more senior Nazis. The jails were full. They were going to slip through the cracks."

The overwhelming majority of the lower-level SS guards did in fact escape justice.

Ferencz prosecuted members of the Einsatzgruppen. "There were 3,000 members of these killing squads who did nothing but kill women and children for three straight years," he says. "These 3,000 men alone were responsible for almost 1 million murders. Do you know how many I brought indictments against? Twenty-two. The rest were never tried.

"I remember talking to Soviet officers," he adds. "And they were baffled. 'You know they're guilty,' they'd say. 'Why don't you just shoot them?' There was a lot of that kind of feeling in postwar Germany."

Weiss, for his part, says he never went to Germany bent on revenge. "Whatever anger I might have had was dissipated by the devastation and destruction I witnessed of German society. The German people paid dearly for their infatuation with Hitler. But there were times when justice just had to be done."

Matthew Brzezinski last wrote for the Magazine about a Chechen rebel leader. He will be fielding questions and comments about this article Monday at 1 p.m. at washingtonpost.com/liveonline.

This is yet another example of the irrationality of David Irving. He simply cannot grasp that Peter Stahl and Gregory Douglas are two different persons. Also, the author of this article does not know Konrad Kujau, has not helped the Swiss authorities against anyone, and does not live in Freeport, Illinois. Also, I did not assassinate Abraham Lincoln, assist in the sinking of the Titanic nor was I a lead pilot in the Pearl Harbor attack. Where Irving comes up with these fictions quite escapes me.

The only reason that I can determine that could possibly explain his prolonged hysteria concerning myself is that some years ago, I bought a collection of the correspondence between Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun. These letters were in the Schloss Fischhorn collection and came from a Eugene Frankenfeld of Philadelphia. Frankenfeld was a CIC operator that was part of a team that discovered the papers of Hermann Fegelein that were buried at the SS Riding School run by his brother, Waldemar. Instead of turning these letters, and other important historical papers, in to the U.S. Army authorities, Frankenfeld kept many of them and sold them off to various collectors

New Missions
CIC's overseas mission did not end with the conclusion of hostilities. It served as the Army's chief agency in occupied Austria, Germany, and Italy, rounding up individuals subject to "automatic arrest" because of their Nazi affiliations or activities. At the same time, CIC was on the lookout for a resurgent underground Nazi movement as well as efforts to circumvent Allied occupation directives. CIC spent a considerable amount of time handling problems associated with thousands of displaced persons in Western Europe as well as ensuing black market activities. By 1946, the 970^th CIC Detachment (later designated as the 7970^th CIC Detachment in 1948 and then as the 66^th CIC Detachment in 1949) in Germany and the 430^th CIC Detachment in Austria handled the bulk of the early post-war CIC operations.

When Mahl was interrogated by Michel Thomas, a Jewish agent with the US Counter Intelligence Corps, in early May 1945, he made a handwritten statement in which he confessed that, as the executioner of the camp, he had hanged 800 to 1,000 people including a pregnant woman.

http://www.humanitas-international.org/archive/dachau-liberation/

"WANNSEE CONFERENCE: conference of chief representatives of the highest Reich and Party bodies, held on January 1, 1940 in Berlin at 'Am Großen Wannsee 56/58' under the chairmanship of R. Heydrich. On the order of A. Hitler, the participants decided on measures for the annihilation of the Jews in those parts of Europe under German control ('Final Solution of the Jewish Question'): the establishment of extermination camps (concentration camps) in Eastern Europe, where Jews were to be killed." (1)

1. On Document Criticism

Documents are objects containing encoded information about a process or condition. For example, one differentiates between photographic and written documents as well as, recently, between all kinds of data storage (sound carriers, electronic data carriers, and many more). The present discussion will focus on the criticism of written documents, which represent the main of the documents relating to the Holocaust.

If a document is to prove anything, it is first necessary to establish that the document is genuine and the information it contains is factually correct. The authenticity of a document requires, for one thing, that the materials and techniques of information encoding and storage involved already existed at the alleged time of document creation. Today, technical, chemical and physical methods frequently permit the verification of whether the paper, the ink, the writing tools etc. that make up the document or went into its production even existed at the alleged time of creation. If this is not the case, the document has been proven to be fake. For example, a document allegedly dating from the 1800s but typed on a typewriter from our own century would definitely be a fake. Unfortunately this kind of analysis is not generally possible where the items to be analyzed are Holocaust documents, since in those few cases where original documents are known to exist, these originals are jealously guarded in archives and any attempt at scientific and technical analysis is nipped in the bud.

Another element in the verification of authenticity is the determination of whether the form of the document at issue corresponds with that of similar documents of the same presumptive origin. For handwritten documents this means a similarity of handwriting and style of expression to other documents by the same author, while for official documents it requires the congruence of official markings identifying the issuing body, such as letterheads, rubber stamps, signatures and initials, reference numbers, titles and official names, notices of receipt, distributors, correctness of the administrative channels and authority etc., as well as, again, similarity to the regional and bureaucratic style of expression. The greater the discrepancies, the more likely it is that the document is a fabrication.

And finally, it must also be determined whether the contents of the document are factually correct. One aspect of this is that the conditions and events described in the document must agree with the information we already have from other reliable sources. But the fundamental question is whether what is described in the document is physically possible, and consistent with what was technically feasible at the time and whether the contents are internally logical and consistent. If this is not the case, the document may still be genuine, but its contents are of no probative value, except perhaps where the incompetence of its author is concerned.

Concerning document criticism in the context of the Holocaust, we encounter the remarkable phenomenon that any such practice is dispensed with almost entirely by the mainstream historians around the world. Even a call for impartial document criticism is considered reprehensible, since this would admit the possibility that such a document might be false, in other words, that certain events which are backed up by such documents may not have taken place at all, or not in the manner described to date. But nothing is considered more reprehensible today than to question the solidly established historical view of the Holocaust. However, where doubts about scientific results are deemed censurable, where the questioning of one's own view of history or perhaps even of the world is forbidden, where the results of an investigation must be predetermined from the start, i.e. where research may produce only the 'desired' results--where such conditions prevail, the allowed or allowable lines of inquiry have long since forsaken any foundation in science and have instead embraced religious dogma. Doubt and criticism are two of the most important pillars of science.

The present volume contains many instances of criticism of a wide range of documents, frequently proving them to be fabrications. No one will deny that particularly after the end of World War Two a great many forgeries were produced in order to incriminate Germany.(2 ) That opportunities for such forgeries were practically limitless is a fact also undisputed in view of all the captured archives, typewriters, rubber stamps, stationery, state printing presses etc. etc. And considering these circumstances, no one can rule out beforehand that the subject of the Holocaust may also have been the object of falsifications. Unconditionally honest document criticism is thus vitally important here. In the following, the Wannsee Conference Protocol --the central piece of incriminating evidence pertaining to the Holocaust--is subjected to an in-depth critical analysis such as all historians worldwide ought to have done for decades but failed to do. At the same time, this analysis may serve as challenge to all conscientious historians to finally subject all Holocaust documents --be they incriminating or exonerating-- to professionally correct and unbiased document criticism.

2. The Material About the Wannsee Conference

2.1 Primary Sources - the Material to be Analyzed

In any analysis of the Wannsee Conference Protocol, the other documents directly related to this Protocol must of course be considered as well. These documents are:

1) Göring's letter of July ?, 1941 to Heydrich, instructing Heydrich to draw up an outline for a total solution of the Jewish question in German-occupied Europe.

2) Heydrich's first letter of invitation to the Wannsee Conference, dated November 29, 1941.

3) Heydrich's second invitation to the Wannsee Conference, dated January 8, 1942.

4) The Wannsee Conference Protocol itself, undated.

5) The letter accompanying the Wannsee Conference Protocol, dated January 26, 1942.

2.1.1 Proof of Origin

According to his own statements,(3 ) Robert M. W. Kempner, the prosecutor in the Wilhelmstraßen Trial of Ernst Weizsäcker, had been expecting a shipment of documents from Berlin in early March 1947. Among these papers, he and his colleagues discovered a transcript of the Wannsee Conference. The author of the protocol, it was claimed, was Eichmann. In 1983 the WDR (West German Radio) broadcast Kempner's original taped statement, according to which he had discovered the protocol in autumn of 1947.(4) Beyond Kempner's verbal statements quoted here, no other documentation verifying the place and circumstances of the discovery were found. Kempner: "Of course no one doubted the authenticity [of the protocol]." The Court, he said, introduced the protocol as Number 2568. In the court records it appears as G-2568.

2.1.2 Different Versions

The Wannsee Conference Protocol which Kempner submitted to the Court always writes 'SS' in this way, i.e. in Latin letters, not as the runic '[..]' which was customary in the Third Reich. It would appear to be the oldest copy in circulation.(5)

Hans Wahls has mentioned numerous other versions which are also in circulation. The Political Archives at the Foreign Office in Bonn maintains that the version held there is the definitive one. This version uses the runic '[..]'. When and how this version came to be in the archives of today's Foreign Office remains unknown. Since the other versions can also not be traced back to their origins, we will dispense with any further details here. The present compilation is thus based only on the copy held by the Foreign Office.(6)

Where the letter accompanying the protocol is concerned, two versions have surfaced to date, one using 'SS', the other with the runic '[..]' as well as other differences.

2.2 Secondary Sources - Literature About the Wannsee Conference Protocol

The literature pertaining to the Wannsee Conference Protocol fills many volumes. The following summarizes the most important analyses and critiques, all of which prove conclusively that all the various versions of the protocol as well as all the versions of the letters accompanying the protocol are fabrications. As yet, no proof of the authenticity of the protocol, nor any attempt at refuting the aforementioned analyses and critiques, has been advanced by any source.

This discussion draws on:

Hans Wahls, Zur Authentizität des 'Wannsee-Protokolls';(7)

Udo Walendy, "Die Wannsee-Konferenz vom 20.1.1942";(8)

Ingrid Weckert, "Anmerkungen zum Wannseeprotokoll";(9)

Johannes Peter Ney, "Das Wannsee-Protokoll";(10)

Herbert Tiedemann, "Offener Brief an Rita Süßmuth".(11)

Other important studies shall just be mentioned briefly.(12)

3. Document Criticism

3.1 Analysis of the Prefatory Correspondence

3.1.1 Göring's Letter (13)

Form: We only have a copy of this document, as no original has ever been found. This copy is missing the letterhead, the typed-in sender's address is incorrect, and the date is incomplete, missing the day.(14) The letter has no reference number, no distributor is given, and there is no line with an identifying 're.:' (cf. Ney(10)).

Linguistic content: The repetition in "all necessary preparations as regards organizational, factual, and material matters" and "general plan showing the organizational, factual, and material measures" is not Göring's style, and is beneath his linguistic niveau.(15) The same goes for the expression "möglichst günstigsten Lösung" [grammatically incorrect, intended to mean "best possible way"].(16)

3.1.2 The First Invitation (17)

Form: The classification notice "top secret" is missing (cf. Ney10 and Tiedemann11). It is also strange that the letter took 24 days, from November 29, 1941 to December 23, 1941, for a postal route within Berlin (Ney(10)).

Linguistic content: "Fotokopie" was spelled with a 'ph' in those days; the spelling that is used is strictly modern German. "Auffassung an den [...] Arbeiten" (@"opinion on the [...] tasks") is not proper German; it ought to read "Auffassung über die [...] Arbeiten". "Persönlich" ["personal"] was scorned as classification; the entire style of the letter is un-German (Ney, ibid.).

3.1.3 The Second Invitation (18 )

Form: This document exists only in copy form, no original has ever been found. The letter bears the issuing office's running number "3076/41", while the letter accompanying the protocol, dated later, bears an earlier number, "1456/41" (Tiedemann(11)). The letterhead is different from that of the first invitation (Tiedemann, ibid.). The letter is marked only as "secret" (Ney(10)).

Linguistic content: On one occasion the letter "ß" is used correctly ("anschließenden"), but then "ss" is used incorrectly ("Grossen"). (Ney, ibid.)

Stylistic howlers: "Questions pertaining to the Jewish question"; "Because the questions admit no delay, I therefore invite you...." (Ney, ibid.)

3.2 Analysis of the Wannsee Conference Protocol

3.2.1 Form

While it is claimed that the copy of the Wannsee minutes held by the Foreign Office is the original, this cannot in fact be the case, since it is identified as the 16th copy of a total of 30. Regardless whether it is genuine or fake, however, its errors and shortcomings as to form render it invalid under German law, and thus devoid of documentary value:

The paper lacks a letterhead; the issuing office is not specified, and the date, distributor, reference number, place of issue, signature, and identification initials are missing (Wahls(7) and Walendy(8)). The stamp with the date of receipt by the Foreign Office, which is (today!) named as the receiver, is missing (Tiedemann(11)). The paper lacks all the necessary properties of a protocol, i.e. the minutes of a meeting: the opening and closing times of the conference, identification of the persons invited but not attending (Tiedemann, ibid.), the names of each of the respective speakers, and the countersignature of the chairman of the meeting (Tiedemann, ibid., and Ney(10)). The paper does, however, bear the reference number of the receiving(!) office, namely the Foreign Office - typed on the same typewriter as the body of the text (Tiedemann(11)). The most important participant, Reinhard Heydrich, is missing from the list of participants (Wahls(7) and Walendy(8)).

3.2.2 Linguistic Content

The Wannsee Conference Protocol is a treasure-trove of stylistic howlers which indicate that the authors of this paper were strongly influenced by the Anglo-Saxon i.e. British English language. In the following we will identify only the most glaring of these blunders; many of them have been pointed out by all the authors consulted, so that a specific reference frequently does not apply.

The expressions "im Hinblick" ("considering",* 8 times), "im Zuge" ("in the course of", 5 times), "Lösung" ("solution", 23 times), "Fragen" ("questions", 17 times), "Problem" (6 times), "Bereinigen" ("to clarify", 4 times), frequently even more than once in the same sentence, bear witness to such a poor German vocabulary that one may assume the author to have been a foreigner.

Further, the expressions "Lösung der Frage" ("solution of the problem"), "der Lösung zugeführt" ("brought near to a solution"), "Lösungsarbeiten" ("tasks involved" [in a solution; -trans.]), "Regelung der Frage" ("to settle the question"), "Regelung des Problems" ("to settle the problem"), "restlose Bereinigung des Problems" ("absolutely final clarification of the question" [i.e. the "problem"; - trans.]), "Mischlingsproblem endgültig bereinigen" ("securing a final solution of the problem presented by the persons of mixed blood"), "praktische Durchführung" ("practical execution"; is there such a thing as a theoretical execution?), and especially the frequent repetition of these expressions, are not at all the German style (Walendy(8)).

The phrase;

"der allfällig endlich verbliebene Restbestand [...]" ("the possible final remnant")

may perhaps appear in a prose text, but certainly not in the minutes of a conference. The text is interspersed with empty phrases such as;

"Im Hinblick auf die Parallelisierung der Linienführung" ("in order to bring general activities into line") (Tiedemann(11))

and nonsensical claims such as;

"Die evakuierten Juden werden Zug um Zug in [...] Durchgangsghettos gebracht [...]" ("The evacuated Jews will first be sent, group by group, into [...] transit-ghettos [...]").

Since the evacuation of the Jews was not then ongoing, but rather was planned for the future, this would have to have read:

"Die zu evakuierenden Juden [...]" ("The Jews to be evacuated [...]").

Further:

"Bezüglich der Behandlung der Endlösung" ("Regarding the handling of the final solution")

How does one handle a solution? (Walendy(8))

"Wurden die jüdischen Finanzinstitutionen des Auslands [...] verhalten [...]"

Does the author mean "angehalten"?*

"Italien einschließlich Sardinien" ("Italy incl. Sardinia")

Why the need to specify? In Europe people knew very well what all was part of Italy.

"Die berufsständische Aufgliederung der [...] Juden: [...] städtische Arbeiter 14,8%" ("The breakdown of Jews [...] according to trades [...]: [...] communal workers 14.8%" [i.e. "municipal" workers; -trans.]

Were all of these people common laborers? (Ney(10)) "Salaried employees" is probably what the author meant here. "[...] als Staatsarbeiter angestellt" (the Nuremberg Translation renders this as "employed by the state", which glosses over the difference between "Arbeiter", i.e. blue-collar workers, and "angestellt", i.e. the condition of employment enjoyed by salaried and public employees; -trans.): so what were they, laborers or government employees? Did the author mean civil servants? (Ney, ibid.)

"In den privaten Berufen - Heilkunde, Presse, Theater, usw." ("in private occupations such as medical profession, newspapers, theater, etc.").

In German these are called "freie Berufe", not "private Berufe". Such persons are known as doctors, journalists, and artists. "usw." is never preceded by a comma in German, whereas the English "etc." almost always is.

"Die sich im Altreich befindlichen [...]"

Well, German is a difficult language. (Ney, ibid.)

3.2.3 Contradictory Content

"[...] werden die [...] Juden straßenbauend in diese Gebiete geführt": literally, "the Jews will be taken to these districts, constructing roads as they go".

Migratory road crews?! Not a single road was constructed in this fashion! (Wahls(7) and Walendy(8))*

"Im Zuge dieser Endlösung [...] kommen rund 11 Millionen Juden in Betracht." ("Approx. 11,000,000 Jews will be involved in this final solution [...]."

Even the orthodox prevailing opinion holds that there were never more than 7 million Jews in Hitler's sphere of influence. In actual fact there were only about 2.5 million. (Wahls(7) and Walendy(8))(19)

"[...] teilte [Heydrich] eingangs seine Bestellung zum Beauftragten für die Vorbereitung der Endlösung [...] durch den Reichsmarschall mit" ("Heydrich gave information that the Reich Marshal had appointed him delegate for the preparations for the final solution [...])

Göring did have the authority to appoint Heydrich to the position of his choice, but he would have done so via the proper channels. Heydrich's superior was Himmler, and it would have taken Himmler's orders to appoint ("ernennen", not "bestellen", which means "to summon") Heydrich to anything. (Ney(10))

"Mit der Endlösung im Generalgouvernement zu beginnen, weil hier das Transportproblem keine übergeordnete Rolle spielt [...] Juden müßten so schnell wie möglich aus dem Gebiet des Generalgouvernements entfernt werden" ("[...] the implementation of the final solution [...] could start in the Government General, because the transportation problem there was of no predominant importance. [...] The Jews had to be removed as quickly as possible from the territory of the Government General [...]"

"To be removed as quickly as possible" and "constructing roads as they go" is quite a contradiction. But none of those attending the conference spoke up. Clearly Germany could muster only mental defectives as her Under Secretaries of State! (Walendy(8))

"Von den in Frage kommenden 2

"[...] Dr. Bühler stellte weiterhin fest, daß die Lösung der Judenfrage im Generalgouvernement federführend beim Chef der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD liegt [...]" ("[...] Bühler further stated that the solution of the Jewish question in the Government General as far as issuing of orders was concerned was dependent upon the chief of the Security Police and the SD [...]".

On the date of the conference at Wannsee Bühler could not have known this, for according to the 'Protocol' Heydrich had only just "announced his appointment as delegate" and his overall authority for the preparations involved. Dr. Bühler certainly did not have the authority to simply declare his superior, Dr. Hans Frank, the Governor General of Poland, removed from office! (Walendy, ibid.)

"Der Beginn der einzelnen Evakuierungsaktionen wird weitgehend von der militärischen Entwicklung abhängig sein" ("The carrying out of each single evacuation project of a larger extent will start at a time to be determined chiefly by the military development").

This statement is false, for the eastward evacuation transports of Jews from the Reich territory, including the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, had already been ongoing since October 1941 - as Heydrich's first invitation to the Wannsee conference had explicitly stated, by the way. (Walendy, ibid.)

"Die berufsständische Aufgliederung der im europäischen Gebiet der UdSSR ansässigen Juden war etwa folgende [...]" ("The breakdown of Jews residing in the European part of the USSR, according to trades, was approximately as follows [...]"

This clearly gives away the forger, at work years after the conference; at the time of the Wannsee Conference one would not have written "was", but "is". (Tiedemann(11))

3.2.4 Internal Consistency

Why were only the "seconds-in-command" invited to this conference if it was really so crucial, and why did not even these seconds-in-command bother to attend? Why, for example, would Dr. Hans Frank send, as his stand-in, Dr. Bühler, who lacked the authority to make any decisions since he was obliged to report anything of significance to his superior? (Tiedemann, ibid.)

Is it conceivable that subordinates decided on the genocide? (Tiedemann, ibid.)

Why was no one invited from offices whose cooperation would have been indispensable to the implementation of such an enormous murder scheme, such as the top management of the German Railway? (Tiedemann, ibid.)

3.3 The Accompanying Letter

3.3.1 Form

Like the Wannsee Conference Protocol, the accompanying letter reveals at first glance that it cannot be genuine: the letter is dated January 26, 1942, but the letterhead shows reference number 1456/41. Thus the letter was registered at the office of the Chief of the Security Police and the SD in 1941, before the protocol that it was to accompany (Weckert,(9) Ney,(10) Tiedemann(11)). There are 35 days between the date of the letter and the date of its arrival at the Foreign Office, given a delivery route within Berlin and a subject matter Heydrich has called urgent! (Weckert,(9) Ney,(10) Tiedemann(11)) Luther, however, added a handwritten comment (to be examined later) to this letter even before it was received by the correspondence department of the Foreign Office; this handwritten comment is dated with the month "II", i.e. February (the day is illegible). (Weckert,(9) Ney(10)) Like the conference protocol itself, the letter bears a rubber stamp recording its receipt at the Foreign Office, with the reference number D.III29g.Rs, which, however the Foreign Office had already assigned to a different document it had received, namely to a report dated January 6, 1942, sent by the German envoy in Copenhagen. (Ney, ibid.)

The letter is missing the sender's address, which is normally printed on the stationery. The new meeting place in the Kurfürstenstraße is incorrectly spelled with an "ss" rather than an "ß". The typed-in sender's reference number, "IV B 4", indicates Eichmann's office, but Eichmann used stationery which had this identifier already printed on it. The letterhead is different from that of the two letters of invitation. The letter lacks a "re.:"-line and a distributor. This "accompanying letter" makes no mention of 30 copies of the protocol whose 16th copy it allegedly accompanies. The space to indicate enclosures - though provided for in the stamp of receipt - is empty, even though this letter was supposed to accompany an enclosure of momentous importance. (Ney, ibid.) Ripske has criticized that there were no "Undersecretaries of State" ("Unterstaatssekretär") at the German Foreign Office; this rank had been done away with during the Weimar Republic, and was never reintroduced.(20)

3.3.2 Linguistic Content

The accompanying letter as well shows a pathetically un-German style: "practical execution of the final solution" - is there any such thing as a theoretical execution? (Tiedemann(11)) And again we encounter this redundant sentence with its long-winded description of the tasks involved: "[...] the organizational, factual, and material prerequisites for the practical commencement of the tasks involved." What this calls for, then, is: the detailed discussion of the preparation of the submission of the prerequisites for the practical commencement of the tasks involved. (Ney(10)) No comment necessary.

3.3.3 C