New Denierbud video. "The CIA During World War II"

[Carto's Cutlass Supreme]

Nice research Hieldner!

I didn't know Furtherglory had mentioned Taylor. I corresponded with Furtherglory a little before her death, but not on this subject.

The deathbooks being turned over to Taylor, compromises the deathbooks.

Some OSS agents were never allowed to say they were in the OSS, but others were allowed to mention that. I wonder when it was first known that Taylor was an agent. For many individuals, membership became known with the release of the database in 2008. But others were able to say they were in the OSS as early as the 1960's. Anyone know anything about this?

Julia Child is a famous one, the cookbook writer. I'm not sure if that was known until the 2008 release.

In some ways "the CIA in World War II" is a sentence that is wrong. Because it was the OSS, but really it doesn't matter because all those names are deliberately vague. "Office of Strategic Services" is meaningless and vague and purposely so. Similarly "Central Intelligence Organization" is wrong too. It's a lot closer to say they are the covert arm of US foreign policy than to say they "gather intelligence." As I recently heard an ex CIA from the 1980's Ralph McGehee, describe it. Yes the WWII version wasn't the same as the 1950's version of US covert operations in foreign countries, but that could have also been the case if the name was the same the whole time too.

[Scott]

As I mentioned, after shaving I did not have time to put on my field jacket before being captured and was unfortunately caught in the old coat and trousers although my OD's were underneath. It was with great difficulty that I was permitted to bring along my jacket.

What's an OD?

Jack H. Taylor is considered the first Navy Seal!

Hey CCC, great video!

"OD" is Olive Drab.

Taylor probably means that he had his fatigues on underneath "the old coat and trousers."

They did let him keep his Field Jacket initially, but I'm guessing that he had some military insignia on both the nice field jacket and his OD shirt.

He is behind enemy lines so he doesn't want to stand out with something like fancy boots, and he is probably wearing minimal insignia.

My guess is that the Germans know that he has a uniform in spite of their playing mind games with him as a spy.

In WWII, OD meant a darker olive green to brownish color, but not a light tan or khaki, which is more of a Summer or desert uniform.

The U.S. Navy or Marine Corps uniform in the Pacific was a little bit of a lighter shade of green, a sort of herringbone tropical. They probably also called greenish fatigues OD.

In Korea and Vietnam, Army OD or Olive Drab changed to OG or Olive Green, although we still called it OD from what I can remember ─ or sometimes just "green fatigues." Ronald Reagan used to refer to Leftist Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega as "that guy in designer eyeglasses and green fatigues."

OSS Taylor is probably wearing either an Army 1943 Pattern Herringbone Twill Fatigue Uniform (below, Left), or a stripped-down U.S. Army M1943 combat uniform (below, Right).

But all he would really need to do is wear any generic Army or Navy fatigues with a U.S. Navy pin or patch and his Navy Lieutenant rank bars, which are the same as for an Army Captain ─ silver "railroad tracks."

I think Taylor would need to visibly wear his military rank and branch and have his ID or dogtags on him, and then he's covered under the Geneva Convention. Wearing a generic old overcoat to conceal his uniform in public may be pushing it if caught by a patrol. But he was basically caught with his pants down while sleeping in a barn from what I understand of his story.

And we don't know if they really would have executed him at some point or not. I doubt it.

[Hektor]

Nice research Hieldner!

I didn't know Furtherglory had mentioned Taylor. I corresponded with Furtherglory a little before her death, but not on this subject.

The deathbooks being turned over to Taylor, compromises the deathbooks.

Some OSS agents were never allowed to say they were in the OSS, but others were allowed to mention that. I wonder when it was first known that Taylor was an agent. For many individuals, membership became known with the release of the database in 2008. But others were able to say they were in the OSS as early as the 1960's. Anyone know anything about this?
Julia Child is a famous one, the cookbook writer. I'm not sure if that was known until the 2008 release.

I didn't know Furtherglory died, sorry to hear that. I liked that she made information available 'as is'.

I'd expect that some may have said they were in the OSS. While others, that were, didn't.
Another issue is people claiming they were, while they were not. Frequently got this here with the 'Recces'. Which is the equivalent to something like the Green Berets with reconnaissance functions. The German word was 'Fernspaeher' I learned. But I don't think they had those during WW2. They had other units of that kind though. The Fernspaeher were/are in the 'Bundeswehr'. It's for strategic services. They are dropped by air behind enemy lines to do surveillance e.g. to assist infantry or to gather information valuable against that enemy.

In some ways "the CIA in World War II" is a sentence that is wrong. Because it was the OSS, but really it doesn't matter because all those names are deliberately vague. "Office of Strategic Services" is meaningless and vague and purposely so. Similarly "Central Intelligence Organization" is wrong too. It's a lot closer to say they are the covert arm of US foreign policy than to say they "gather intelligence." As I recently heard an ex CIA from the 1980's Ralph McGehee, describe it. Yes the WWII version wasn't the same as the 1950's version of US covert operations in foreign countries, but that could have also been the case if the name was the same the whole time too.

Indeed. Naming can be an issue.
But so do function and the boundaries of those organizations.
The function can be the gathering of information. But it can also be to manipulate events in another country. Since it is 'undercover' they will also be trained to conceal information, but also to lie efficiently. On the other hand they need to be more reliable then usually, which can be a conundrum. There is more ethical issues with those, than with other arms of government.

Boundaries is another problem. Do only those count officially on the payroll of that organization. Or does it also include the networks they must have to operate. Both gathering information, but also manipulating events require networks that will probably have several tiers. The network will definitely be people not openly connected to the CIA or the US government. In other words, there will be lots of deceit involved as well.

Dropped being Axis lines OSS folks were probably instructed to either 'blow up' stuff, gather information... or to plant information there.
It appears that the psychological warfare division was also gathering information on the one hand, while planting information as well... Quite officially through the Allied controlled media. Morris Janowitz mentioned this in a journal article of 1946 quite openly:
https://archive.org/details/MorrisJanow ... Atrocities
Edward Tenenbaum also made an internal report on Buchenwald:
https://archive.org/details/EdwardTenen ... waldReport
But that the first to appear in Buchenwald were from the "Psychological Warfare Division" is already a red flag. If you suspected 'war crimes' at the place, wouldn't you sent investigators first not linked to any unit whose semi-official function is to lie both to your enemies as well as to your own?
Eugen Kogon's book also openly mentions that he was tasked and supported by the 'psychological warfare' unit. Probably was so blinded by the moment that he didn't realize what he's actually saying there. I don't think that contemporary Germans gave the names and titles much thought. Depending on their personal histories, they probably thought something in the line of: "So you found a pile of corpses somewhere in Germany? Does that really surprise you after years of strategic bombing?". I'm of course more familiar with the German media-products of the 1980s and 1990s. "The Holocaust" and anything that has been stuffed into that brand was of course the figurehead of the subject and featured prominently. Together with National Socialism and how Germany never really dealt with the past. While not denying mass bombing of residential areas directly, they managed to make it a none issue. When people noticed the bias and discrepancies in reporting, they reacted with reporting of German bombs in Rotterdam and Warsaw. That there were important differences within those scenarios they omitted. The shear fact who could edit the information and make placements and who had an armada of journalists, historians, publishing houses at its disposal already decided on how the media narrative would look like. That was Reeducation in action 40 years after the occupation of Germany.

The South African press was another matter. The English press would place articles in line with the Allied view occasionally, but mentioning concentration camps was a bit a problem for them, because that would bring up the concentration camps the British established in South Africa for Boer families and black folk especially in the Transvaal area and the Orange Free State.
The Afrikaans press was similar. That however changed from 1990 onward more and more. I think the schools changed their curriculum as well... bending it to 'the struggle narrative'. Since a lot of the pupils had parents/grand parents that could contradict the narrative, it seems the toned that down a bit. That switched to Holocausting though. Hitler2.0. is also featuring in school history books. And I think this would also make as an interesting study on school books would kids are actually taught on this. But the story usually goes like: Hitler and the Nazis came to power in Germany 1933, formed a dictatorship, started world war two and killed six million Jews.
Why exactly he came to power, what they actually did, how ww2 came about and what the issue with the Jews actually was, won't be said directly. I can't recall that any crimes against (ethnic) Germans or what happened after WW1 was mentioned. But there are also ways to mention this briefly in one sentence and then gloss it over. You then can say that you didn't deny it, while actually you managed to have omitted noticing of it in your audience. What I noticed is that 'gas chambers' are barely mentioned in official 'educational material', but of course they are in the minds of people based on movies and gossip. So no need for that. Rather don't mention them, before somebody asks what the evidence is.

I really think we should have:
1.) Have a good look how "News" about "the Holocaust" entered public communication meaning media as well as 'educational' materials. Who are/were the actors involved in this? What do they actually say? And is it credible meaning can it be corroborated with other kinds of evidence?
2.) Investigate Matters of "The Holocaust in School Books". or "NS-Germany/WW2 in School Books" (to be broader). How do present day school books present the subject and is what they say resting on a factual base?

AJC did actually do surveys on German school books in the past, they were obviously concerned that they may deviate from what they wanted the Germans to think.

[Carto's Cutlass Supreme]

Wow "Scott"! I remember you from 20 years ago on the internet! Thank you for the post. Explaining OD and everything else you said, I would probably have never known the answer had it not been for you.

There was another question I had. "Revisionist" pointed out that I had the '1 row of German defendants' wrong. It was two rows. So where were the German defendants' lawyers? My guess is they were probably right down below them, closer to the center of the room at tables. Do you know?

[Archie]

As I mentioned, after shaving I did not have time to put on my field jacket before being captured and was unfortunately caught in the old coat and trousers although my OD's were underneath. It was with great difficulty that I was permitted to bring along my jacket.

What's an OD?

Jack H. Taylor is considered the first Navy Seal!

Hey CCC, great video!

"OD" is Olive Drab.

Taylor probably means that he had his fatigues on underneath "the old coat and trousers."

They did let him keep his Field Jacket initially, but I'm guessing that he had some military insignia on both the nice field jacket and his OD shirt.

He is behind enemy lines so he doesn't want to stand out with something like fancy boots, and he is probably wearing minimal insignia.

My guess is that the Germans know that he has a uniform in spite of their playing mind games with him as a spy.

In WWII, OD meant a darker olive green to brownish color, but not a light tan or khaki, which is more of a Summer or desert uniform.

The U.S. Navy or Marine Corps uniform in the Pacific was a little bit of a lighter shade of green, a sort of herringbone tropical. They probably also called greenish fatigues OD.

In Korea and Vietnam, Army OD or Olive Drab changed to OG or Olive Green, although we still called it OD from what I can remember ─ or sometimes just "green fatigues." Ronald Reagan used to refer to Leftist Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega as "that guy in designer eyeglasses and green fatigues."

OSS Taylor is probably wearing either an Army 1943 Pattern Herringbone Twill Fatigue Uniform (below, Left), or a stripped-down U.S. Army M1943 combat uniform (below, Right).

But all he would really need to do is wear any generic Army or Navy fatigues with a U.S. Navy pin or patch and his Navy Lieutenant rank bars, which are the same as for an Army Captain ─ silver "railroad tracks."

I think Taylor would need to visibly wear his military rank and branch and have his ID or dogtags on him, and then he's covered under the Geneva Convention. Wearing a generic old overcoat to conceal his uniform in public may be pushing it if caught by a patrol. But he was basically caught with his pants down while sleeping in a barn from what I understand of his story.

And we don't know if they really would have executed him at some point or not. I doubt it.

The Dupont operation Taylor was a part of was a covert effort to establish a resistance movement in Austria.

'Dupont' was a US special forces operation to parachute an Office of Strategic Services party into the Wiener-Neustadt area of Austria on an intelligence-gathering mission (13 October 1944/5 May 1945).

The plan was for four men (one American and three Austrian) to parachute into the area of Wiener Neustadt, about 25 miles (40 km) to the south of Vienna. It was here that there was a major chokepoint of the German transportation system supplying the Italian front and the Rax Werke, a key German aviation facility, and also, it was believed, that the Germans were building a major defence line against an Allied advance from the south.

OSS planners thought that the Allies might be able to marshal a resistance movement around Wiener Neustadt from among the many anti-Nazi Austrians believed to live in the area. The US forces also had no local source of intelligence from this region, and believed that a successful penetration of Wiener Neustadt and the surrounding country could yield an important quantity of intelligence.

I don't know about all of the legal distinctions here (what counts as a POW) but it sure sounds like he was a spy.

https://codenames.info/operation/dupont/

[Scott]

Wow "Scott"! I remember you from 20 years ago on the internet! Thank you for the post. Explaining OD and everything else you said, I would probably have never known the answer had it not been for you.

There was another question I had. "Revisionist" pointed out that I had the '1 row of German defendants' wrong. It was two rows. So where were the German defendants' lawyers? My guess is they were probably right down below them, closer to the center of the room at tables. Do you know?

Thanks, CCC.

Well, I was banned for a long time but I have not heard any complaints about excessive moderation over here, and I am happy to be posting again.

Yes, I agree with you. I can possibly see them making some of the Defense attorneys or staff sit in the back with the peanut gallery, but I can't see them putting any of them in front of the judges ─ so, yeah, they must be crowded in front of the defendants to the left of Dodd speaking at the podium. It is very hard to make out, even where we know what the defendants looked like. I would have to refresh my memory on what all of the defendants looked like but I think we can account for all of them.

I just watched the video again and on the back row I can clearly make out Jodl, Seyss-Inquart and Speer.

Some of the older men are hard to make out but unless we have an anomaly, they are probably all of defendants and not any counsel.

Keitel (front row) and Jodl (back row) are the only ones wearing uniforms (Wehrmacht), plus Göring (Luftwaffe). When he is not testifying on the stand, Göring is sitting on the front row on our extreme left with Hess to his left, but the view is blocked.

[Hieldner]

Hektor wrote:

Not sure what version they showed in Nuremberg 'as evidence'... But there was a shockumentary named 'Death Mills', and this seems to be the 'public' version of what is shown in Nuremberg.

The Nuremberg film "Nazi Concentration Camps" has part of it lifted from the Psych Warfare (name changed to 'Information Control' after the war) film Death Mills. Even though those affidavits attest they they personally were involved in all the footage. Yet, it's from a different department so they weren't personally involved.
...

Not sure whether those are different versiosn:
https://archive.org/details/1945-04-26_ ... rder_Mills

Nazi Murder Mills is a 8:15 minutes compilation while Death Mills is a 22 minute cut of the same footage. What’s a bit more confusing are the other two versions of this film. While the German Wikipedia (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi-Konzentrationslager) states that the film shown at the Nuremberg trials was Nazi Concentration Camps with a length of 59 minutes, the English entry shows (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_trials) Nazi Concentration and Prison Camps with a length of under 58 minutes. I guess there’s no big difference except for the title.

There was another question I had. "Revisionist" pointed out that I had the '1 row of German defendants' wrong. It was two rows. So where were the German defendants' lawyers? My guess is they were probably right down below them, closer to the center of the room at tables. Do you know?

Correct. They sat in three rows before the defendants. You can take a look in the courtroom here https://museen.nuernberg.de/panorama/saal-600/

[Scott]

The Dupont operation Taylor was a part of was a covert effort to establish a resistance movement in Austria.

'Dupont' was a US special forces operation to parachute an Office of Strategic Services party into the Wiener-Neustadt area of Austria on an intelligence-gathering mission (13 October 1944/5 May 1945).

The plan was for four men (one American and three Austrian) to parachute into the area of Wiener Neustadt, about 25 miles (40 km) to the south of Vienna. It was here that there was a major chokepoint of the German transportation system supplying the Italian front and the Rax Werke, a key German aviation facility, and also, it was believed, that the Germans were building a major defence line against an Allied advance from the south.

OSS planners thought that the Allies might be able to marshal a resistance movement around Wiener Neustadt from among the many anti-Nazi Austrians believed to live in the area. The US forces also had no local source of intelligence from this region, and believed that a successful penetration of Wiener Neustadt and the surrounding country could yield an important quantity of intelligence.

I don't know about all of the legal distinctions here (what counts as a POW) but it sure sounds like he was a spy.

https://codenames.info/operation/dupont/

Well, Lieutenant Taylor was definitely a spy, but under the Hague and Geneva Conventions there are illegal combatants and legal ones. A legal spy would be an intelligence agent, but he must be in a recognizable uniform. As an enemy agent in wartime, he can't just run around in plain clothes in public.

There may be other grey-area nuances with respect to fomenting insurgencies and assisting terrorists, but I think it is clear that if Taylor was in a recognizable uniform and identified himself as a U.S. Navy officer upon capture, his activities meet GC guidelines.

Generally, captured officers do not have to submit to forced labor ─ enlisted men do ─ but it seems that Taylor preferred to work for the Germans at Mauthausen as the beet soup rations were better that way.

The soldier's Code of Conduct was interpreted more severely in those days upon repatriation as well. Today, American authorities at least are more careful not to play into Communist brainwashing and torture techniques as in Korea and Vietnam.

For example, in 1944 a vigilance committee of German sailors murdered a stool pigeon at the Papago Park PoW Camp in Arizona where I live. American intelligence had been electronically bugging barracks and cultivating informants against each other at a PoW camp in Texas. When German sailor and PoW Werner Max Herschel Drechsler was transferred to Papago Park PoW Camp ─ which today lies in a suburban neighborhood bordering Scottsdale and Phoenix, Arizona ─ his reputation as a collaborator preceded him and he was dead within seven hours. Fellow Kriegsmarine PoWs garroted him and left him hanging from a pipe in the prison shower in his underwear.

Death at Papago Park POW Camp: A Tragic Murder and America's Last Mass Execution

Dreschler was a German traitor but he did not get a fair trail after the war for his collaboration with American intelligence, and his fellow Kriegsmarine PoWs who executed him as a traitor on their own authority were in turn executed for the murder by the Americans at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas in 1945. I don't know if American Intelligence tortured Dreschler or not, but most likely all they had to do was mess with his mind and "turn him against the Nazis."

German PoWs usually worked on American farms and often stayed with farm families and were well fed and usually did not have to be guarded very much. The country was massive, and there was nowhere escapees could go. Even getting to Mexico from Phoenix was out of the question unless you hijacked a car at gunpoint to cross into Mexico or whatever before you could be stopped ─ and then the Mexican authorities would have been happy to send you back stateside for a modest reward.

There is not much left of the old Papago Park PoW Camp today. It is a housing subdivision now. Until a few years ago some of the old prisoner cabins were rented out by Arizona State University students. A few were preserved and hauled away to museums. Today there is a memorial plague on a Scottsdale urban bike path where the so-called Faustball Tunnel escape route was dug underneath the wire.

When I worked the Southwest Reference Librarian desk many years ago almost no one had heard of the Great German PoW Escape in Arizona. The most popular local question was where was the 1960s TV show Hogan's Heroes star Bob Crane murdered in 1978.

Just before Christmas in 1944, twenty-five Kriegsmarine sailors escaped through a tunnel into the desert night. The Great Papago Escape was the largest escape of German prisoners in the United States during the World War II, and the ranking U-boat commander, Kapitän zur See Jürgen Wattenberg was able to evade recapture for just over a month ─ the last one to get caught.

Watternberg did NOT ditch his American-issued PoW uniform. But since it looked just like any ordinary work dungarees, he was actually able to evade capture. He tried camping in the desert, eating grapefruit from local orchards, and hanging out in downtown Phoenix as a hobo, speaking passable English and learning about the area and hoping to get a room somewhere. Eventually a suspicious police officer asked to see his selective service papers and the jig was up. He was cold, hungry and exhausted. In the photo below, Kriegsmarine Captain Wattenberg is in the middle with arms folded.

International Laws are based on treaty agreements and not laws in a true sense. Just because Taylor is a lawful enemy combatant, it does not mean that he can do anything he wants in somebody else's country.

Both the United States and Germany signed the 1929 Geneva Convention, while the Soviet Union (unfortunately) did not. Taylor would have been shot for sure if he had been a Soviet PoW captured behind the lines by the Germans.

Some have argued that the Germans should have unilaterally observed the Geneva Convention on the Eastern Front, but while that would have been better, I don't think that this would have been reasonable if the Soviets did not reciprocate.

[Hektor]

Hektor wrote:

The Nuremberg film "Nazi Concentration Camps" has part of it lifted from the Psych Warfare (name changed to 'Information Control' after the war) film Death Mills. Even though those affidavits attest they they personally were involved in all the footage. Yet, it's from a different department so they weren't personally involved.
...

Not sure whether those are different versiosn:
https://archive.org/details/1945-04-26_ ... rder_Mills

Nazi Murder Mills is a 8:15 minutes compilation while Death Mills is a 22 minute cut of the same footage. What’s a bit more confusing are the other two versions of this film. While the German Wikipedia (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi-Konzentrationslager) states that the film shown at the Nuremberg trials was Nazi Concentration Camps with a length of 59 minutes, the English entry shows (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_trials) Nazi Concentration and Prison Camps with a length of under 58 minutes. I guess there’s no big difference except for the title.
Nazi_Concentration_Camps.webm.480p.vp9.jpgnazi_concentration_camps.jpg

Yes there is several versions of the video. Different editing is done. Probably also for different types of audiences. The two macro-categories for audience would be people in Allied countries and people in occupied Germany. The goal with showing the films was slightly different as were the intended effects:
1.) Allied Audience: "Look what fiendih enemy we fought". Just to shut up anyone in Allied countries that had something negative to say about the conduct of the war, since there was plenty one could say there.
2.) German Audience: "Look how evil your government/ the Nazis were". The goal there is manifold tough. Goal 1 was to break German morale and discourage them from resistance. Also to dicourage them from complaining about the vicious treatment they were getting. Goal 2. Was to sow division between those that were in the NSDAP and those that were not. The ensuing debate would create cognitive dissonance as well. And that can be used to 'change culture' by changing the thinking within institutions like academia, church, schools, trade unions, parties, etc.

The later was of course the main goal with regards to Reeducation. And well. There were several players in the preparation thereof. The most important I'd consider Kurt Lewin. He was an excellent social analyst and social psychologist. Although his bias against the Germans isn't really that well hidden in the texts that deal with Germany. Essentially it is the 'diagnosis' of Germans being different from other nations in the sense that they have "Authoritarian personalities" and have an "autocratic culture". He then goes on and suggests methods on how to change the German culture into a "democratic" one. In the end this is 'brainwashing' on a massive scale. Something those pursuing and advocating would understandably object to, if it was done to them. That those methods weren't limited to Germany and also applied in countries like the US, Great Britain and elsewhere is actually something often underestimated. I think it mainly diffused via the culture in academia from the humanities to all the other departments. Especially because there wasn't really much competition for the Freudo-Marxian views and teachings at the time. There were attempts in countering it in Germany for a while. But those social conservatives engaging it were marginalized and put on positions of lesser influence. You can look at Arnold Gehlen for example. Arnold Gehlen was far more intelligent, insightful and reasonable than the epigones of the Frankfurt School. And he was also not malicious as they generally were. But he was a member of some NS-organization during the NS-administration in Germany and that could easily be held against him. It was done in a more subtle way though. And I think that was the way most old school academics were marginalized in Germany. The other method is of course via the administration of the university. Simply pressure them to put folks of your persuasion into positions of power and they will then flavor their own, while countering the other. Once you have changed hegemony it usually will self-sustain itself. In Germany the state-sponsored university have virtually a monopoly on education. That's at least as long it isn't about technical or managerial education. If you want to study sociology, philosophy, psychology, history, theology and the like, you have to do that via a state-sponsored universities. There is some seminaries for theology students for those that want to become e.g. a priest. They are not under direct state control, but Both big denominations in Germany depend on government for funding so they are watchdogs for non-compliance as well. They even made the Holocaust part of their theology, while they actually use it mostly as "Hintergrundideologie" as Arnold Gehlen / Helmut Schelsky would call it. What they don't get is that the Reeducation and propaganda campaigns weren't only against National Socialism, but against any Western Thought in general and primarily against Christianity. A hint is what "NAZI" can be short for in Hebrew. It is either 'nazir' prince/ruler (Christ) and/or Nazarene. That's a real cohencidence , isn't it.

There was another question I had. "Revisionist" pointed out that I had the '1 row of German defendants' wrong. It was two rows. So where were the German defendants' lawyers? My guess is they were probably right down below them, closer to the center of the room at tables. Do you know?

Correct. They sat in three rows before the defendants. You can take a look in the courtroom here https://museen.nuernberg.de/panorama/saal-600/

Oh, the lawyers of the defendants are another interesting subject. Whom were they actually working for? Weren't they afraid, that them defending those darn Nazis could have negative consequences? And well. Why didn't they challenge the various dubious evidences in favor of the Allied Thesis? They sometimes did it with the "aggressive war thesis", but they never seem to question the gas chamber story or 'secret mass extermination program'. I presume they would have known the reasons for the health disasters in the concentration camps. And actually Rudol Hoess 2 hour testimony hints on this. It appears that there was no real discovery before or during the trial, but that the Allied Thesis were presumed to be true. It also appears that the defense witnesses were put under pressure. E.g. Konrad Morgen was threatened with accusations during that period.

As I mentioned previously. I suspect that Laternser started to work for the Americans at some stage. This appeared to be the case during the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial, when his focus was to provoke the GDR-witnesses. Their actual testimonies contradicted the Holocaust Narrative in many ways. They registered as both Jews and Communist, so - if the thesis was right - two reasons to get rid of them for good. One witness, Eisenhaendler was even transferred from Auschwitz to another camp. What they testify otherwise sounds partially like camp-rumors. Also about 'flaming chimneys' allegedly of the Krema. I suspect those could have been burning refinery exhaust in Monowitz. Also, one Jewish witness was working for the 'camp Gestapo' as a translator for Russian. Now why would you employ Jews in sensitive positions if your task was to 'exterminate them'. The homicidal gassing testimony wasn't challenged once by the defense. The credibility of some of the witnesses was, but not the thesis itself. Some of the accused did however dispute having any knowledge of this. It includes the adjutant Mulka. Him ordering Zyklon B (for delousing) was held against him. Althaus (an accountant) mentioned cremation, but also had no knowledge about homicidal gassings. And so it goes on. There was also obstruction of defense witnesses. It is noticeable that some of the accused (witnesses) had no idea why they were accused. Trial recordings are online. It's massive. Testimony over several weeks. Some deals with 'homicidal gassings', but most is about circumstantial events there. The verdict admits that they had no physical proof for anything that was said. Just the 'testimony' and that they filtered out 'unreliable testimony'. Yes, they did do that in some cases, when the lying became to obvious. In other cases they were more lenient. Especially when the 'witness' was an accused or someone that could really play harp with people's heart strings.

[Carto's Cutlass Supreme]

Thanks Scott, Hieldner, Archie, and Hektor, et al,

We've got some smart, knowledgeable people on this forum. Who knew there was a Nuremberg court panorama photo!

I wasn't sure which version of Nazi Concentration Camps played at Nuremberg, because aren't they different narrators? So luckily there was footage of inside the courtroom as the film started, and eventhough the speaker wasn't great (1945 loudspeaker technology) I listened and matched the narrator to "Nazi Concentration Camps" and not "Nazi Concentration and Prison Camps"

Speaking of narrators, William T. Murphy in his Nuremberg Films article said the narrator has never been identified. Which is weird. I'm sure another OSS agent. Watch one of you whippersnappers figure out who the narrator was!

[Hektor]

Thanks Scott, Hieldner, Archie, and Hektor, et al,

We've got some smart, knowledgeable people on this forum. Who knew there was a Nuremberg court panorama photo!

I wasn't sure which version of Nazi Concentration Camps played at Nuremberg, because aren't they different narrators? So luckily there was footage of inside the courtroom as the film started, and eventhough the speaker wasn't great (1945 loudspeaker technology) I listened and matched the narrator to "Nazi Concentration Camps" and not "Nazi Concentration and Prison Camps"

Speaking of narrators, William T. Murphy in his Nuremberg Films article said the narrator has never been identified. Which is weird. I'm sure another OSS agent. Watch one of you whippersnappers figure out who the narrator was!

Usually narrators would want to take some credit for what they did. So indeed strange when a narrator didn't do it or wasn't given that. That's unless you have a motive not to be mentioned. Now when you tell "Victors Truth" that shouldn't be a problem at all.

It's a bit different, when you tell a truth that isn't popular with the powerful of course. Then not mentioning names is reasonable.

I'm listening to the 'witness statements' of the accused in Nuremberg right now. They are very detailed. Goering spoke perhaps 10 hours over several days there. Very many details, one wouldn't pick up in history books easily... Although it follows the sequencing there.
What Hermann Goering says is of course a problem for the 'Allied narrative' in many ways, since it explains what the Germans did and why. It also does away with the myth of the "Nuremberg Excuse" that "he was only following orders". None of the accused did invoke 'higher orders' there... They all assumed responsibility for what they have done, but rejected responsibility for things they didn't do (or didn't know about).

'Higher orders' ("I was only following orders") can actually be a legal defense. That's if you are indeed getting orders from higher up to do something that is legally dubious and can be considered a crime under other circumstance. Executions of partisans, reprisals, detaining hostiles, etc. were actually considered legal at the time. And the Allies themselves did actually do that themselves and concerning genocidal city bombing went far further than that. In South Africa they detained people of German descent in concentration camps and a substantial amount of them did actually die there. But if you don't research the subject yourself, you'd never know about it. Even if you'd get a academic or media response on this. The reaction would be a rather flimsy one or one that will try to excuse the detention by suggesting that the detained were actually 'Dangerous Nazis". Well, it appears that some of them were indeed pro-National-Socialist, but it didn't apply to all of them. The Smuts-Regime did indeed also detained people that, while they had sympathies for Germany, did not support National-Socialism. Although sometimes they wrote articles were they indicated that they'd prefer it over plutocracy and Bolshevism. I have one writer in mind there, who was a Calvinist philosopher (HG-Stoker), he had some education in Germany and did his doctoral under Max Scheler.

There was quite some sympathy with Germany/Hitler mostly because the British hated Hitler and the Germans of course.
There were already Pogroms in Johannesburg against German shops during World War One.

That said the Union of South Africa provided a large contingent of troops at the benefit of the British Empire. I think it numbers 200.000 of all population groups. Several Campaigns in North Africa, Southern Europe, but also the far East.

The other Nuremberg accused I'm looking at right now is Alfred Rosenberg (Myth of the 20th century). He's more soft-spoken, but gives an apparently sincere testimony there about his Activities. I recall him being hated especially by the Churches. But while he differed with there views, he was always polite to them. And he also ensured that there would be freedom of religion in the occupied Eastern territories. The Charge was however "Conspiracy" and there were of course other problems with the 'rules of evidence' in Nuremberg.

[Hieldner]

I have rewatched both cuts, Nazi Concentration Camps and Nazi Concentration and Prison Camps, in parallel now. The prison camps “Meppene” (Meppen-Versen or Meppen-Dalum, satellite camps of Neuengamme near Hamburg) and “Munster” (there were four PoW camps near Münster) appear only in Nazi Concentration and Prison Camps, on the other hand Nazi Concentration Camps has more extensive corpse scenes, e.g. at Mauthausen. The order in which some of the camps appear is different in each version. In Nazi Concentration and Prison Camps, the footage of Buchenwald with the German citizens having to enter the camp and view the shrunken head exhibit appears as part of prison camp Arnstadt, a subcamp of Buchenwald, whereas the rest of the Buchenwald footage is shown only later, as if there was no connection between both segments. I think this is a mistake in the editing of the film.

I wasn't sure which version of Nazi Concentration Camps played at Nuremberg, because aren't they different narrators?

The narrators are the same in both films, except for the reading of the George C. Stevens affidavit at the beginning of the film, which is clearly by a different person, as can be told from the voice and speech intervals. After that, the same narrator who began reading the affidavit in Nazi Concentration and Prison Camps speaks in both films.

So luckily there was footage of inside the courtroom as the film started, and eventhough the speaker wasn't great (1945 loudspeaker technology) I listened and matched the narrator to "Nazi Concentration Camps" and not "Nazi Concentration and Prison Camps"

I haven’t been able to find suitable footage from inside the courtroom. In the following clip you can only hear part of the second affidavit, which is read by the same narrator in both versions of the film, and then the beginning of Nazi Concentration Camps is shown, contradicting the Definitive Survey (https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A651424349/LitRC?u=googlescholar&sid=googleScholar&xid=d6cd775c).

Speaking of narrators, William T. Murphy in his Nuremberg Films article said the narrator has never been identified.

There’s one main narrator, I think, but there’s more than one narrator for different segments of the film (I haven’t taken notes on this). All I could find is this

The film was compiled from motion pictures taken by Allied military photographers as the Allied armies in the West liberated the areas in which these camps were located. The narration was taken from the military photographer’s notes.
https://www.roberthjackson.org/nuremberg-event/concentration-camp-film-2/

This anonymity has some legal implications for the trials, as none of the creators of the stories told in the films could be questioned in court. Has a single person involved in these films ever been questioned as a witness?

I'm sure another OSS agent.

The entire Nuremberg trial was prepared by the OSS, which was tasked in particular with inventing black propaganda during the war and was described at the time as riddled with Communists and little more than an arm of British intelligence. Its head, William Donovan, came up with the idea of holding the trial at Nuremberg in the first place. See Douglas Waller, Wild Bill Donovan, chapters 30 and 31.

Though he had been largely indifferent to collecting wartime intelligence on the Holocaust, Donovan had been ahead of the rest of the U.S. government in making preparations to bring Axis leaders to justice for their crimes. As early as August 1942 he had ordered his staff to begin looking into Japanese atrocities against civilians and POWs. By October 1943, he was urging Roosevelt and others in the administration to set up the legal machinery for extraditing and prosecuting Axis war criminals. (p. 323)

He gathered up affidavits from Norwegian doctors who had treated victims of Gestapo torture in German prisons and news stories on the liberation of death camps such as Treblinka, where nearly a million Jews had been gassed. Finally on December 15, 1944, the War Department’s judge advocate general formally assigned to the OSS the job of collecting evidence against suspects and researching international law to bring them to justice. Donovan plunged into the mission as if he were launching a covert operation. He ordered his aides to put together “a top-flight staff on war crimes.” Donovan envisioned the Germans bringing the men to trial so the country could “purge itself of its blood guilt and punish its own criminals,” he said. Other officers, like Dulles, thought that was a bad idea; the Allies should control the prosecution. (p. 324)

But [Supreme Court Justice] Jackson, who took a leave of absence from the Supreme Court, quickly discovered the OSS was the only agency in the U.S. government seriously working on war crimes. He asked Donovan to join his trial staff, clearing it first with Truman, who thought having a prominent Republican on the legal team was a good idea. On May 15, Donovan huddled with Jackson in the justice’s chambers. He offered the full resources of his spy agency. Jackson was grateful; he had only a handful of loyalists to call on, including his son who was a lawyer, and none was experienced in war crimes prosecutions. Donovan also said he knew Jackson would be “the captain of the team” and he “would play wherever” the Justice could use him. Donovan didn’t really mean that. He intended to play a star role in the trials. (p. 325)

Over the next six months, 172 OSS staffers would join the justice’s team. Navy Lieutenant James Donovan, the OSS’s general counsel, became one of Jackson’s key trial tacticians. (OSS critics used James Donovan as an example of nepotism in the spy agency, which was not true in his case; the general counsel and his boss were not related.) Donovan and his investigators began piecing together the many parts of the Nazi Holocaust machine, unearthing SS documents on “death vans” used to asphyxiate Jews, collecting testimony from Auschwitz survivors on its gas chambers. (p. 325)

Donovan assembled a panel of psychiatrists to rule on Nazis who might plead insanity as a defense and briefed Jackson on the agency’s highly secret research into truth drugs, which the justice agreed might be useful in getting defendants to talk. No detail was ignored. The OSS Presentation Branch designed the courtroom for the tribunals (one innovation put the judges on the right facing the defendants in a box on the left), while John Ford’s film unit produced movies of the concentration camp horrors. (p. 325–6)

Jackson later had second thoughts about making the proceedings a media spectacle. But for now he was eager to have Donovan’s agency at his disposal. (p. 326)

Donovan soon became Jackson’s most trusted emissary, with the OSS insinuated into every aspect of the justice’s operation. He gave Jackson’s lawyers OSS office space in Paris, brought in his propagandists to write press releases, covered the prosecution team’s expenses with money from the agency’s accounts so Jackson did not have to haggle with Congress, and helped him screen American judges for the tribunal. By mid-June Donovan had presented his team captain a detailed plan for organizing the prosecution staff with the spy chief acting as his deputy and his star attorney during the trial. Jackson, who thought Donovan and his OSS had been a godsend, agreed to practically all of the suggestions. (p. 326)

The Russians wanted the war crimes trials held in Berlin, which they controlled. Donovan pressed for Nuremberg, not just because of its symbolic importance to the Nazis, but also because it was in the American zone and had the spacious Palace of Justice, damaged but still intact, with a large prison near the courthouse. Jackson agreed. (p. 331)

Inside the palace they took out tape measures to plot the dimensions of the courtrooms, checked out the badly damaged library, and inspected the jail. The trial rooms were small, but with repairs and a few walls knocked out one in the east wing would do. (p. 331)

Jackson thought the prosecution strategy should depend heavily on the thousands of documents he had accumulated to demonstrate Nazi guilt rather than on the flashy examinations and cross-examinations Donovan envisioned. Donovan argued intensely that the case needed live Germans and Holocaust victims to testify instead of Jackson spending days reading dreary records to the judges. Sensitive to image, he feared the press would grow bored and the Nazi defendants would turn public opinion against the tribunal if a dramatic case were not presented against them. Other lawyers on the team agreed with Donovan; Germans on the stand would counter the impression among their countrymen that Nuremberg was nothing more than “victor’s justice.” (p. 344)

The targets of the prosecution also divided the two men. Donovan believed that Germany's top officers should be charged with the war crimes they actually committed. He was nervous about Jackson’s intention to prosecute the entire German High Command collectively as members of a “criminal organization,” with simply proof of membership enough to convict an officer. (p. 344–5)

Because of differences with justice Jackson, Donovan was then fired as a prosecutor within the first weeks of the trial.

On rewatching the “evidence films,” I noticed how utterly ridiculous they are (also see viewtopic.php?f=2&t=14391).
At Ohrdruf, we learn that the dead prisoners lying on the ground had been shot the night before American tanks arrived, contradicting the claim repeated throughout the film that the evil Nazis had tried to hide their crimes.

All denied knowledge of what had taken place at Ohrdruf.

So where did these dead bodies come from?

At Hadamar the speaker says

Meanwhile at the graveyard attached to the institution bodies are exhumed for autopsy. 20,000 are buried here. 15,000 who died in the lethal gas chamber are cremated and their ashes interred.

So, unfortunately no shred of evidence for 15,000 victims, sorry guys. They show a cemetery with about 500 graves. The shocking scenes of the excavation of five dead bodies prove that only a single body was buried in each grave.

Death books found hidden in the wine cellar of the Hadamar institution reveal part of the story of the mass killings. The bulky volumes contain thousands of death certificates. Profession unknown, nationality unknown was written after each name.

Yeah, the wine cellar. Give me a break.

Major Bulker (?) performs the autopsy. A detailed listing is made of all clinical data.

Most idiotic scene so far. The Germans had to dig up five graves and an American doctor fondles the corpses. A soldier stands next to them with a silly expression on his face and notes down “the clinical data” (= they are dead).

The investigating officers were told that the Nazis never bothered to determine whether a victim may have survived the overdosage. Instead, all were hustled off to the graveyard and buried in piles of 20 to 24.

We have already seen that only a single body lies in each grave.

The prisoners are removed to await trial. A Hadamar judge told the investigators that when the 10,000th victim died, the institution heads and Nazi officials staged a celebration.

And so on and so on.

Despite German attempts to cover up, we found these in the open fields.

Meaning corpses lying on the ground outside the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, which are loaded by German guards onto a truck that brings them into the camp. The corpses are then used for the infamous final scene with the mass grave and the bulldozer. Again, the question arises as to who these dead are, what the cause of death was, and so on.

The film makes it clear that the military photographers had the task of showing as much horror and dead bodies as possible. If there were no bodies in a place, they had to instruct Germans to dig up some of them or find them somewhere in the surrounding area so they could take gruesome pictures. Since there were extensive bombing raids, artillery fire and epidemics claiming the lives of prisoners as well as Germans in the months and weeks before each film segment was shot, it is entirely unclear who the dead bodies are and what the cause of their death was. It is striking that in all the camps where emaciated prisoners and corpses are presented, there are also perfectly healthy and well-fed prisoners standing around. The films were also used at the military tribunals, for example in Bergen-Belsen, to establish the general atmosphere right from the start of the trial.

[Carto's Cutlass Supreme]

Hi Hieldner,

That's amazing: the OSS facilitated the Nuremberg Trial. I wonder if academics just pretend that's normal.

Keep in mind that part of the film Nazi Concentration Camps comes from the film "Death Mills." The narrator in that part narrates Death Mills, made by Psych Warfare, name changed to CIC. Center? for Information Control.

Thanks for that youtube link.

[Hieldner]

The narrator in that part narrates Death Mills, made by Psych Warfare, name changed to CIC. Center? for Information Control.

I think you meant General McClure’s Information Control Division ICD (consisting of the Office of War Information OWI, the OSS and the British Political Warfare Executive headed by the loony Sefton Delmer). In Death Mills they also use Soviet footage from Auschwitz and Majdanek, which is remarkably less gory for some reason, so this was not just involving footage from McClure’s US/British agency. The film was put together by Shmuel Vildr aka Billy Wilder and Hanus Burger, a Czech Jew who also wrote the script, which mentions Jews not even once, from the material of a shelved British production entitled German Concentration Camps Factual Survey by yet another Jew.

Yet the film, austerely entitled German Concentration Camps Factual Survey, was never completed: Bernstein was stonewalled by political authorities nervous of the growing Zionist movement and in need of Germany as a postwar anti-Soviet ally. In the end, the Americans used some of the footage for a much shorter, punchier propaganda film under the forthright direction of Billy Wilder, rather different to the grieving meditation on inhumanity that Bernstein conceived.

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/sep/18/night-will-fall-review-holocaust-documentary-hitchcock-liberation-belsen-auschwitz
The German version, Todesmühlen, was screened in public cinemas in the US occupied zone, while the English version says it is not for public display.
Anyway, there are several documentary adaptations of the footage from the original long film, and what I find interesting about it is that it shows how the bodies are brought to the Belsen camp.

Starting at 8:30 you see the camp guards in a clean camp with no mass grave, then starting at 10:00 they are taken outside to a forest and load emaciated bodies that are lying around there for some reason onto a truck, and over the course of days they bring in more and more bodies from who knows where until the scene is camera ready.

The same happens in this clip of the camp at Buchenwald. Guards/local citizens are brought to a mass grave at Arnstadt, I think, dig up bodies (starting at 6:30) and bring them into Buchenwald concentration camp on a truck.

[Hektor]

Hi Hieldner,

That's amazing: the OSS facilitated the Nuremberg Trial. I wonder if academics just pretend that's normal.

Keep in mind that part of the film Nazi Concentration Camps comes from the film "Death Mills." The narrator in that part narrates Death Mills, made by Psych Warfare, name changed to CIC. Center? for Information Control.

Thanks for that youtube link.

Let's cut the crap on Germany during the first month of 1945.
If there was one thing there wasn't a shortage of, it was people starving and dying for all kinds of reasons. There were probably 100.000s, if not millions of people trying to get West away from the Red Army. Those weren't only Germans, but also Poles, Lithuanians, Hungarians, Jews, etc. They had low or no supply of food, hygiene or medical supplies, they were highly distressed, and prone to all kinds of diseases. The weather was rather cold and wet. No proper shelter. Some of those were evacuees from concentration camps further East or even of Western camps. Then there were frequent air attacks by Allied air forces shooting on anything that moves.

So you are guaranteed to get a huge amount of starving people as well as huge amount of people that have died due to malnutrition and disease. You'd get people shot by planes, dying from artillery or bombs, as well. The situation in those camps was that they were not in the capacity to absorb further prisoners. Overstocked with people they could not care for. Hence mass starvation and disease there as well. In the light of this it is rather remarkable that many of the prisoners appear to be in good health and well-fed.

So finding 'piles of bodies' is by no means astonishing. It is something anyone that gave the matter a bit of thought could have easily expected to be the case. What is astonishing is that the Allies had no shame of exploiting the situation that was of course a field day for atrocity propagandists. Audacity or Chuzpah to do so and to go on with this. My guess is however that on the Allied side they wanted to make sure that there won't be any internal quarrelling about the war effort as well as to shut up any German resistance for good. That it was a short term goal at first is probably the reason that the whole affair toned down during the 1950s until it was flared up in 1960 with the Eichmann trial again.

There was also a realignment in this. Americans now more engaged in 'cold war', Communist governments with establishing their power in the newly one countries.

The Atrocity propaganda never vanished completely of course. What changed were the groups engaging in it and their motivation. In the forties it was useful for the war effort and the aftermath. But it lost its value and urgency for the American, British, French establishment after a few years. The British and French were more concerned with their colonial empires and accusing another nation of wanting 'to be the Master Race', of 'conquering the world' and of 'exterminating subhuman races' was rather an embarrassment or even hinderance for them. They lost their colonial empires with millions of people dying in the mayhem and aftermath there. It was of course convenient to point fingers on Germany there. Blame-shifting on a scape goat. Both the US as well as the USSR tried to gain influence with the newly independent countries by offering them support, training, weapons, etc. The sales pitch was different. For the US it was mostly 'Freedom' and 'fight against the Red Danger', while for the Soviet Block it was 'liberation of the oppressed and exploited'. In Germany it was the era of the 'Wirtschaftswunder'. The Western Zone tried to align with US/NATO on this. And they tried also to be more reconciliatory internally. Many people that were dismissed for NSDAP-membership were reinstated, since their competence was needed. They also found employment in the growing industrial and commercial sectors at the time. The debate was more about NS-government 'being a dictatorship' that 'oppressed the opposition"... The Jewish question went into the background first. It only came up again, when synagogues were attacked in the late 1950s/60s. Turns out those attacks were performed by agents of Eastern Block intelligence services, that joined 'right-wing parties'. Apparently having an interest in portraying the West as 'antisemitic'. At the same time the Soviet Block had something like an 'anti-Zionist' purge going on with the Soviets now picking the side of the 'Palestinians and Arab countries'.

Holocausting flared up with the Eichmann Trial (Israel taking an enhanced interest in the narrative) and of course the large Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial, of course dished up for a German audience'. Testimony' after 20 years probably not reliable and good reason to believe that it will be coached testimony as well. But it was useful to quote snippets from in press-articles. Students and School-classes were also brought to the trial.
An interesting research topic would be 'the Holocaust' at universities in Germany. From the teachers I know they were trained in this additionally as a 'Fortbildung', 'on the job training' for a couple of days they got off work that is. So it wasn't part of university training as such. After the serial movie 'Holocaust' was shown in Germany it became easier for them to offer that in class. It seems they were shown versions of the 'Death Mills',' Nazi Murder Mills'. It also seems that they never asked how the movie was produced, why it was produced and by whom. Also no questions about the trials, the witnesses and whether there was physical evidence for the claims. The absence of evidence for people surviving WW2 was sufficient to them as evidence for those people being gassed. Seems they can't grsp that government agencies, politicians, activists would lie and make up stories, spin-doctor, when it suits them. Naivity can be deadly in this game, but with the proper atmosphere people tend not to see that. That the content and claims made in 'Death Mills' deviate substantially from what officious historiography teaches today doesn't seem to be a problem for them neither.

During the 80s the 'Historikerstreit' took place in the German media. Ernst Nolte proposed that the 'Third Reich' should be historicized meaning that it should be treated as any other period of history. He had also the thesis that National Socialism was a reaction towards Bolshevism. This didn't sit well with proponents of the 'Frankfurt School' like Juergen Habermas. Nolte did not dispute core claims of the Holocaust (conspiracy to kill all Jews, 6 million, homicidal gas chambers). He was still was marginalized, showing that compromising doesn't pay. In the same era more Revisionist books so the light. For Germany Wilhelm Stäglich's "Der Auschwitz-Mythos" was a firstling there. There were of course some other books in that line, but this one was to the point. The Zundel trial was the Highlight in the 1980s demonstrating that there is a Holocaust Lobby that can't tolerate dissent as well as that they don't have much to show in terms of evidence. The Leuchter Report, the Rudolf Report stem from this era as well. Since then "Holocaust Denial Laws" have been steeped up and persecution of Revisionists has become stronger. This all despite a pretense of liberalism, freedom of expression, speech and science. 'The Holocaust' has become a civic religion. It's used to justify policy, even war, when that otherwise would be rather difficult to do. It is of course also a mechanism of control. Politicians use it to 'show that they are friends of the Jewish people' and anyone disagreeing with them is a "NAZITHATWANTSTOGUESSSIXMILLIONJEWS". The treatment of the anti-Lockdown truckers in Canada showed that. The treatment of many more dissenters demonstrates this, too.


What amazes me is that well-trained historiographer that actually should know about the role of intelligence services and psychological warfare in war, never consider that those agencies, having motive, means and opportunity would actually use their resources and skills to distort an emerging narrative about a war and the surrounding events of it. And it isn't even a secret that psychological warfare was engaged early in the creation of the narrative. I mean Tenenbaum was from the PWD, the Buchenwald show was organized by PWD. Even Eugen Kogon makes a friendly reference to the psychological warfare division for letting him write his pamphlet.

On April 16, 1945, five days after the first American armored units had arrived, an Intelligence Team from the Psychological Warfare Division visited the Buchenwald concentration camp. Its mission was to study the situation and to prepare a comprehensive report for Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Forces (SHAEF), The report was to show how a German concentration camp was organized, what role was assigned to it in the Nazi State and what happened to those who were sent to the camps by the Gestapo and detained there by the SS.
https://archive.org/details/EugenKogonT ... 1/mode/2up

The book made Eugen Kogon quite a star afterwards. I give him credit for his honesty that he was tasked by the Psychological Warfare Division. It leaves a bad taste about 'German historians', though. Because they actually could have known that there was something fishy with the narratives presented in the book. It used to be quite an important tool in terms of "Vergangenheitsbewaeltigung'. I recall a German pupil showing this book to me. Admittedly, at this stage I didn't notice the reference to 'psychological warfare division' myself. It was before my Apostasy from the Holocaust being under shock from the story myself.