"I've just learned that there was some quite striking announcement put out as to the atrocities yesterday by the Committee on Refugees..."
Henry Stimson
November 27th, 1944
"There is established in the Executive Office of the President a War Refugee Board (hereinafter referred to as the Board). The Board shall consist of the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Treasury and the Secretary of War.
FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT
THE WHITE HOUSE,
January 22, 1944.
"At present there are four crematoria in operation at BIRKENAU, two large ones, I and II, and two smaller ones, III and IV.
Those of type I and II consist of 3 parts, i.e.,:
(A) the furnace room;
(B) the large halls;
and (C) the gas chamber.
A huge chimney rises from the furnace room around which are grouped nine furnaces, each having four openings.
Each opening can take three normal corpses at once and after an hour and a half the bodies are completely burned. This corresponds to a daily capacity of about 2,000 bodies. Next to this is a large "reception hall" which is arranged so as to give the impression of the antechamber of a bathing establishment. It holds 2,000 people and apparently there is a similar waiting room of the floor below.
From there a door and a few steps lead down into the very long and narrow gas chamber. The walls of this chamber are also camouflaged with simulated entries to shower rooms in order to mislead the victims.
This roof is fitted with three traps which can be hermitically closed from the outside. A track leads from the gas chamber to the furnace room. The gassing takes place as follows:
The unfortunate victims are brought into hall where they are told to undress. To complete the fiction that they are going to bathe, each person receives a towel and a small piece of soap issued by two men clad in whites coats. They are then crowded into the gas chamber in such numbers there is, of course, only standing room.
To compress this crowd into the narrow space, shots are often fired to induce those already at the far end to huddle still closer together. When everybody is inside, the heavy doors are closed. Then there is a short pause, presumably to allow the room temperature to rise to a certain level, after which 55 men with gas masks climb on the roof, open the traps, and shake down a preparation in powder form out of tin cans labeled "CYCLONE" "For use against vermin," which is manufactured by a Hamburg concern.
It is presumed that this is a "CYANIDE" mixture of some sort which turns into gas at a certain temperature. After three minutes everyone in the chamber is dead. No one is known to have survived this ordeal, although it was not uncommon to discover signs of life after the primitive measures employed in the Birch Wood.
The chamber is then opened, aired, and the "special squad" carts the bodies on flat trucks to the furnace rooms where the burning takes place. Crematoria III and IV work on nearly the same principle, but their capacity is only half as large. Thus the total capacity of the four cremating and gassing plants at BIRKENAU amount's to about 6,000 daily.
On principle only Jews are gassed; Aryans very seldom, as they are usually given "special treatment" by shooting. Before the crematoria were put into service, the shooting took place in the Birch Wood and the bodies were burned in the long trench; later, however, executions took place in the large hall of one of the crematoria which has been provided with a special installation for this purpose."
"So this is the first thing we find that when that report was issued on November 26th, 1944, responsible journalists who knew their job challenged it straight away. They had a gut feeling that something wasn't quite right.
The second thing we notice about it is that one of the people who was ostensibly a member of the War Refugee Board, Henry Stimson -- he knew nothing about the report being issued over his name.
The first he knew about it was when his Assistant Secretary of War, John McCloy, telephoned him and said, "Henry, what the hell is going on?" And Henry telephoned the other Henry, Henry Morgenthau, who'd actually issued the report. Morgenthau had the War Refugee Board housed in his building.
And we've got the Henry Morgenthau diary and let me just read out what Henry Morgenthau's diary says on that day -- November 27th, 1944. The Henry Morgenthau diary, on the morning of the report being splashed in the newspapers.
Stimson phoned him. Morgenthau says, "How are you?" Stimson says, "I've just learned that there was some quite striking announcement put out as to the atrocities yesterday by the Committee on Refugees", meaning the War Refugee Board. "Well, it must have been done without anybody showing it to me, so I was rather mortified by not knowing anything about it."
Huh! Mortifying, isn't it? To find out that your pal, Morgenthau, down the road has issued a report over your name.
This sensational report about the Germans killing 1.75 million people in one camp by gas with all these bestial atrocities and you find your name has been appended as one of the signatories.
Morgenthau says, "Well, I..." He's interrupted by Stimson, who is obviously very angry. You see, Morgenthau kept a verbatim record of all his telephone conversations, which in this case is rather foolish.
Stimson says, "I don't think they ought to do that."
Morgenthau says, "Well, I was under the impression. I know he showed it to me."
Stimson says, "I know, I'm thoroughly, I'll probably be in thorough sympathy with any such announcement, but I think it's important to get it out, but as long as I'm one of the committee, I think I ought to know about it, particularly when you and I are the only two members of the committee in the sickness of health." Aha!
[laughter]
Aha! It turns out that the third member of the committee, Cordell Hale, was off sick. Aha! So now we understand how the report gets delayed from July, 1944, until November. He waits until Cordell Hale is off sick, the Secretary of State, and then he issues it without telling the other member, Henry Stimson.
So we're learning a little bit about how this magnificent report on Auschwitz came into being.
And then yesterday, as I was going through the private papers of Justice Biddle in Syracuse, the judge at Nuremberg, a little thought lit up in my head. And it's the kind of thought that lights up in my head, but not in the head of the average historian. Because it's the thought you're only entitled to light up when you've done the work.
Something is missing. You're missing something.
What we're missing on this occasion, of course, is as follows. At Nuremberg, a year after this Auschwitz report hit the headlines. At Nuremberg they produced a French woman, and a Dutch woman, and a Polish man, and a Czech person -- any number of different people who have been in Auschwitz to give evidence.
These ridiculous scenes about children screaming, "Mummy, how am I going to walk with only one leg? This nasty man has torn off my leg." These extraordinary things that were actually in the testimony at Nuremberg.
And yet the Slovak document was not introduced as evidence. Nor were the two Slovak Jews produced as witnesses, either. Although they had the most extraordinary report giving chapter and verse, and dates, and details, and statistics.
Of course, one of these two so-called Slovak Jews, a man called Vrba, is now peregrinating around the world attending various conferences and claiming to have been one of those particular two signatories.
So where was he at the time of the Nuremberg trials? The whole thing stinks.
In my mind, it is proof that the Nuremberg authorities, the prosecuting authorities, if they ever considered tabling that one cardinal document which has now become one of the cardinal pieces of evidence -- looked at it, shook their heads, possibly even investigated it and found out that its source was something completely different.
And there are two possible sources. One of the possible sources was, of course, our own Secret Service, and I'll come to that in a minute -- the British Secret Service.
And the other possible source was the German Secret Service. And this is an interesting thought. Did the German propaganda operation in 1944 decide to feed to the Allies, evidence about Auschwitz? Atrocious evidence about Auschwitz.
And you may think, well if so, of course, it was a big own goal. But this isn't just me saying this. This was the suggestion put forward to the War Refugee Board, by one very learned correspondent a few days after the publication. He wrote a letter to Stimson and to Henry Morgenthau saying, "Isn't it possible that we've fallen for Nazi propaganda?"
Because if you read the report from one side to the other, from the beginning to the end, the one fact that sticks in your craw at the end of it all, is the fact that the people who were doing the killing and the organising, and the listing, and documenting, were Jews themselves. And this is what the Nazis want us to swallow. The fact that the really cruel people in World War II, the ones who were absolutely ruthless even towards their own people were Jews.
And if you think, of course, that they are scoring an own goal by putting out atrocity stories about Auschwitz, the Nazi Propaganda Ministry will have said... they will have said, [paraphrasing] "Who cares? We're being blamed with these atrocities anyway, so let's put that in as the meat and deepen the meat is the barb that we bury saying that the real people who were doing the killing were the Jews."
A vicious piece of anti-Semitic propaganda put out by the Nazi Propaganda Ministry.
Now, I'm only offering this to you as one possible origin of the Slovak Jews' alleged report. Not my own theory. It's a theory which is in the files of the War Refugee Board. "
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