The Value of Testimony and Confessions Concerning the Holocaust

October 23rd, 2020

Awake Goy

The Value of Testimony and Confessions Concerning the Holocaust

1. Introduction

In the debate about the Holocaust one of the main arguments of popular opinion is that there are a great many statements of eyewitnesses to document the National Socialist mass extermination, and that especially the many confessions of perpetrators among the SS are irrefutable proof of the existence of a program of deliberate extermination of the jews in the Third Reich.[2] For this reason, it is claimed, the lack of documentary and material evidence is irrelevant.[3]

First of all, it is incorrect to say that there is no material evidence. The present work is a compendium of such material evidence, which, however, all goes to refute certain aspects of the Holocaust as these are related by witnesses and maintained accordingly by the courts and by academia. The justice system as well as academics of the establishment ignore this material evidence; nevertheless, the question arises as to how eyewitness testimony is to be evaluated.

It is important to note that neither objective historians nor jurists may uncritically accept everything that someone recounts as being the plain truth, but must establish the value of such reports. The first step in this process is to fit eyewitness testimony properly into the hierarchy of the various types of evidence. Then one must consider how the individual testimony came to be – for example, whether there were manipulative factors that may have impinged on the witness and influenced his testimony.

Since most of the eyewitness statements concerning the Holocaust were made in the course of preliminary legal proceedings and of trials, we shall first clarify the value accorded to eyewitness testimony in court.

2. The Value of Eyewitness Evidence in General

In academia as well as in the justice system of a state under the rule of law, there is a hierarchy of evidence reflecting the evidential value. In this hierarchy, material and documentary evidence is always superior to eyewitness testimony.[4] Thus, academia as well as the justice system regard eyewitness testimony as the least reliable form of evidence, since human memory is imperfect and easily manipulated.[5] According to Rolf Bender, a German expert on the evaluation of evidence, its unreliable nature renders eyewitness testimony merely circumstantial evidence, in other words, not direct evidence.[6]

What standards must be met for eyewitness testimony to be usable in court?[7]

1. The witness must be credible.

While making no claims to completeness, the following lists a few criteria for determining credibility:

Emotional involvement. If witnesses are emotionally too involved in the cases under investigation, this may distort the testimony in one direction or the other, without this necessarily being a conscious process.
Veracity. If it turns out that a witness is not overly concerned about truthfulness, this casts doubts upon his further credibility.
Testimony under coercion. The frankness of testimony may be limited if a witness is subjected to direct or indirect pressure that makes him deem it advisable to configure his testimony accordingly.
Third-party influence. A person’s memory is easy to manipulate. Events reported by acquaintances or in the media can easily become assimilated as ‘personal experience’. Thus, if a witness has been exposed intensively to one-sided accounts of the trial substance prior to testifying, this can very well affect his testimony to reflect these impressions.
Temporal distance from the events to be attested to. It is generally known that the reliability of eyewitness testimony diminishes greatly after only a few days, and after several months has been so severely influenced and altered by the replacement of forgotten details with subsequent impressions that it retains hardly any value as evidence.[8]

2. Testimony must be plausible.

Internal consistency. Testimony must be free of contradictions and in accordance with the rules of logic.
Correctness of historical context. Testimony must fit into the historical context established conclusively by higher forms of evidence (documents, material evidence).
Technical and scientific reality. Testimony must report such matters as can be reconciled with the laws of nature and with what was technically possible at the time in question.

While the issues listed under 2. are easily verified, the circumstances listed under 1. are often difficult or impossible to determine and thus involve the greatest effort for the least return. One must keep in mind that every witness experienced a certain event differently, from a purely subjective and personal point of view. He or she internalized it differently, depending on his/her physical and psychological state. He/she will ultimately recount the experience in a strictly subjective manner depending on his/her abilities and on the occasion at hand. So even if two witnesses are completely impartial and credible and their statements are plausible, they nevertheless may not report the same thing.[9]

The testimony of parties in dispute before the Court – i.e., the statements of the prosecution and the defense – must naturally be considered in an especially critical light since each party has a vested interest in incriminating its opponent and exonerating itself.[10] But even impartial witnesses are often very far removed from the objective truth, and the fact that (although this has been well known for centuries) eyewitness testimony is still accorded disproportionately great significance in court even today, has repeatedly drawn sharp criticism from qualified sources[11] and has frequently resulted in gross miscarriages of justice.

From a judicial point of view, confessions – both in and out of court – are considered to be circumstantial evidence, since past experience has shown that a large part of all confessions are false. False confessions may be made in order to

cover for a third party;
bask in the limelight of a crime;
put a stop to grueling interrogation;
gain a mitigated sentence by exhibiting remorse and repentance;
as a result of psychological disorders; etc…

In the Federal Republic of Germany as well, miscarriages of justice unfortunately occur time and again as a result of false confessions.[12] The same goes accordingly for self-incriminating testimony which need not always be true. It is all the more surprising, therefore, that the otherwise knowledgeable R. Bender would categorize a self-incriminating witness as being generally truthful.[13]

3. Forms of Evidence in Holocaust Studies

3.1. Material and Documentary Evidence

In orthodox Holocaust studies material evidence is practically nonexistent:

To date, not a single mass grave has been searched for, found, exhumed or examined relative to this subject complex.[14]
Not one of the allegedly numerous and giant burning sites has been looked for, located, dug up or examined.
In no case were the alleged murder weapons sought and found, i.e., examined forensically by international committees or by courts under the rule of law.

It is thus not surprising that Rückerl dispenses with any mention of material evidence and instead declares documentary evidence as the best and most important form of evidence even without any material evidence with respect to the authenticity and correctness of the documents themselves.[15]

Otherwise, only Revisionists have presented material evidence, as other authors will do in the following.

It is always surprising to see how aggressively the historians of the establishment respond to any objection that a document, which allegedly proves the Holocaust, might be forged or falsified, irrelevant, or might have been misinterpreted. On this point our contemporary historians exhibit the same aversion to detailed document criticism[16] as they also cherish where material evidence is concerned. After all, document criticism is nothing more nor less than the expert assessment of a document. In other words, it is the furnishing of material evidence regarding the authenticity and factual correctness of a document.

3.2. Eyewitness Evidence in the Orthodox View of the Holocaust

3.2.1. Media Statements as Evidence for Historiography?

Part of the testimony or statements regarding the Holocaust came in the form of written declarations or, more recently, as radio and television programs. In both cases it is easy to assess these statements in terms of the points listed under 2, but there is usually no opportunity to speak with the witness personally in order to learn more details and to establish his credibility and the plausibility of his testimony, for example by means of cross-examination. Critiques of the statements published in the various media are both numerous and extensive,[17] and a more comprehensive work was presented recently.[18] However, these witnesses usually evade the requests of critical contemporaries to make themselves available to cross-examination.[19] And while radio and television regularly present new witnesses, they never ask them any critical questions, and deny interested researchers and lawyers access to these witnesses by keeping their address or even their entire identity secret. But these paper- and celluloid-witnesses can only be accorded evidential value once their statements have stood up to critical examination. In the following chapter, Robert Faurisson reports about the first two of such a critical examination of this kind of witness to date. In this section, therefore, we will focus primarily on statements made in court, particularly since the supposed justness of the German justice system prompts the public to accord these a greater significance.

3.2.2. Court Testimony as Evidence for Historiography?

The very critical view, at least theoretically, taken by courts of witness and party testimony is based on the understanding of human nature gained in the course of centuries by many jurists. It should be accepted as a valid guideline by historians as well, even if the methods used to determine truth in scientific pursuits are necessarily different than those employed in court. For example, while a Court must reach an absolute decision regarding what is true and what is false, and must do so within a limited period of time, science cannot, indeed may not reach a conclusive and final verdict if it wants to remain true to its maxim of openness in every respect. Whereas in a court case the close relation of the proceedings to a human fate causes emotion to exert a strong and distorting influence on the process by which the verdict is reached, this influence usually is, or should be, minor in scientific pursuits.

When we discuss in the following the witness testimony and confessions that represent almost the entirety of the foundation on which the structure of the Holocaust rests, we must bear in mind that for the most part these statements were made in the course of trials or at least for the purpose of incriminating or exonerating someone before a court or the public. Practically no eyewitness accounts exist that were made outside a courtroom situation and free of emotion. The subject matter itself and the emotions with which it is charged have seen to that. The truth of testimony and confessions must therefore be carefully examined before the court by qualified experts – something that regularly does not happen in the so-called “NSG trials“.[20] And all the more we must ask to what extent such testimony can serve the cause of a science dependent for its closest possible approach to the truth on reports not tainted by emotion. It is already a very questionable procedure to try to ‘write history’ through eyewitness testimony in court and through the verdicts based thereon, even if both were the result of trials conducted strictly under the rule of law. The procedure becomes all the more suspect when those who ‘write the history’ draw on eyewitness testimony as evidence even when this testimony was rejected by the ruling court as lacking credibility.[21]

The science of historiography is thus faced with the dilemma that it has only these at least partially questionable statements to rely on, and must therefore make do with them. But then it is all the more important for this science to consider the circumstances under which these statements came about, for their value depends not least of all on how fairly the prosecution, the defense and the Court, but also the media and the general public were disposed towards the witnesses and the accused.

3.2.3. An Expert Opinion about the Value of Testimony Regarding the Holocaust

There is currently no topic of human history that is treated more emotionally and one-sidedly in public than the Holocaust. It represents the central taboo of western civilization, and to question it is the epitome of heresy, and punishable by imprisonment in many western democracies.

Given this state of affairs, the expert on the evaluation of eyewitness testimony, Professor Elisabeth Loftus, pointed out in 1991 that, for many different reasons, testimony pertaining to actual (or merely alleged) National Socialist atrocities, witnessed in a particularly high stage of emotion, is less reliable than almost any other testimony. Elaborating, she observes:

The time elapsed since the end of World War II has contributed to an inevitable fading of recollections.
In trials of alleged National Socialist criminals pre-trial publicity has meant that witnesses had generally known the identity of the defendants and the crimes they were charged with already before the trial.
Prosecutors have asked witnesses leading questions, such as whether they could recognize the accused as the perpetrator. Witnesses have rarely been called on to identify the accused from a number of unknown people.
It is fairly certain that witnesses have discussed identifications among themselves, which facilitated subsequent ‘identifications’ by other witnesses.
Photos of defendants have been exhibited repeatedly, each additional showing of the pictures making witnesses more familiar with the face of the accused, and thus increasingly certain.
The extremely emotional nature of these cases further increases the risk of a distortion of memory, since the accused to be identified by the witnesses were more than alleged tool of the National Socialists – they were devils incarnates: said to have tortured, maimed and mass-murdered prisoners. They were allegedly responsible for the murder of the witnesses’ mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, wives and children.[22]
Professor Loftus, herself jewish, uses her own experience to describe how a false sense of loyalty to her heritage and her people and “race“, as she puts it, prevented her from taking a stand against the obviously false testimony of her fellow Jews. It is safe to assume that this is a widespread, common reflex among jews.[23]

However, she omits three further factors that can contribute additionally to the massive distortion of memory where the Holocaust is concerned:

Accounts of witnesses’ personal experiences have always – and not only during criminal trials – been widely disseminated by word of mouth, print and broadcast media, and particularly among the witnesses themselves through personal correspondence and all sorts of relief organizations.
Since at least the late 1970s the topic of the Holocaust has been ever-present in the mass media, and in an extremely one-sided manner, so that memories inevitably become standardized.
Where the Holocaust is concerned, it is not only unforgivable but at times even a criminal offense not to know, not to admit, or perhaps only to doubt, certain things. There is thus a very strong social (or even legal) pressure on witnesses in particular to recall certain ‘facts’ and to repress others.

If one considers all these factors and combines them with studies on the manipulability of human memory, such as the one recently published by Prof. Loftus in a leading scientific journal,[24] then one cannot help but conclude that there is in fact no eye witness testimony less reliable than those on the Holocaust. If in normal scientific and legal proceedings one accepts as a rule that eyewitness testimony is the least reliable kind of evidence, then insofar as the Holocaust is concerned it is necessary to observe that here the eyewitness testimony may only serve to flesh out the framework of historical events as established by documentary evidence, and perhaps to give clues to events whose occurrence has yet to be proven by documents or material evidence. But anyone who relies chiefly on eyewitness testimony and assigns it a greater value as evidence than documentary or even material evidence cannot seriously claim to adhere to the scientific method in his work. Thus, the present volume pays particular attention to the critical analysis of many claims made by witnesses.

6. Examples of Absurd Claims Regarding the Alleged National Socialist Genocide[355]

child surviving six gassings in a gas chamber that never existed;[356]
woman survived three gassings because “Nazis” kept running out of gas;[357]
fairy tale of a bear and an eagle in a cage, eating one jew per day;[358]
mass graves expelling geysers of blood;[359]
erupting and exploding mass graves;[360]
soap production from human fat with imprint “RIF ” – ‘Reine Juden Seife’ (pure jewish soap), solemn burial of soap;[361]
the SS made sausage in the crematoria out of human flesh (‘RIW’– ‘Reine Juden Wurst’?);[362]
lampshades, book covers, driving gloves for SS officers, saddles, riding breeches, house slippers, and ladies handbags of human skin;[363]
pornographic pictures on canvasses made of human skin;[364]
mummified human thumbs were used as light switches in the house of Ilse Koch, wife of KL commander Koch (Buchenwald);[365]
production of shrunken heads from bodies of inmates;[366]
acid or boiling-water baths to produce human skeletons;[367]
muscles cut from the legs of executed inmates contracted so strongly that they made the buckets jump about;[368]
an SS-father potshooting babies thrown into the air while 9-year old SS-daughter applauds and shrieks: “Papa, do it again; do it again, Papa!“[369]
jewish children used by Hitler-Youth for target practice;[370]
wagons disappearing on an incline into the underground crematoria in Auschwitz (such facilities never existed);[371]
forcing prisoners to lick stairs clean, and collect garbage with their lips;[372]
injections into the eyes of inmates to change their eye color;[373]
first artificially fertilize women at Auschwitz, then gas them;[374]
torturing people in specially mass-produced “torture boxes” made by Krupp;[375]
torturing people by shooting at them with wooden bullets to make them talk;[376]
smacking people with special spanking machines;[377]
killing by drinking a glass of liquid hydrogen cyanide (which, scientifically considered, evaporates quickly and would endanger those who pouring it into said glass);[378]
killing people with poisoned soft drinks;[379]
underground mass extermination in enormous rooms, by means of high voltage electricity;[380]
blast 20,000 jews into the twilight zone with atomic bombs;[381]
killing in vacuum chamber, hot steam or chlorine gas;[382]
mass murder in hot steam chamber;[383]
mass murder by tree cutting: forcing people to climb trees, then cutting the trees down;[384]
killing a boy by forcing him to eat sand;[385]
gassing Soviet POWs in a quarry;[386]
gas chambers on wheels in Treblinka, which dumped their victims directly into burning pits; delayed-action poison gas that allowed the victims to leave the gas chambers and walk to the mass graves by themselves;[387]
rapid-construction portable gas chamber sheds;[388]
beating people to death, then carrying out autopsies to see why they died;[389]
introduction of Zyklon gas into the gas chambers of Auschwitz through shower heads or from steel bottles;[390]
electrical conveyor-belt executions;[391]
bashing people’s brains in with a pedal-driven brain-bashing machine while listening to the radio;[392]
cremation of bodies in blast furnaces;[393]
cremation of human bodies using no fuel at all;[394]
skimming off boiling human fat from open-air cremation fires;[395]
mass graves containing hundreds of thousands of bodies, removed without a trace within a few weeks; a true miracle of improvisation on the part of the Germans;[396]
killing 840,000 Russian POWs at Sachsenhausen, and burning the bodies in 4 portable ovens;[397]
removal of corpses by means of blasting, i.e., blowing them up;[398]
SS bicycle races in the gas chamber of Birkenau;[399]
out of pity for complete strangers – a jewish mother and her child – an SS-man leaps into the gas chamber voluntarily at the last second in order to die with them;[400]
blue haze after gassing with hydrogen cyanide (which is colorless);[401]
singing of national anthems and the Communist International by the victims in the gas chamber; evidence of atrocity propaganda of Communist origin;[402]
a twelve-year old boy giving an impressive and heroic speech in front of the other camp children before being ‘gassed’;[403]
filling the mouths of victims with cement to prevent them from singing patriotic or communist songs.[404]