Dalton writes:
Why Matt refers to a mere footnote and not the document itself is strange; but it's not hard to find. The document in reference being a diplomatic discussion between Hitler, Ribbentrop and Horthy on April 17, 1943, recorded by Paul Schmidt can be found in books going back to 1947 when the document was referred to at the Nuremberg trials.
Here are the relevant quotations:
"Der Führer beschrieb sodann Horthy die deutschen Rationierungsmaßnahmen, die in voller Ordnung durchgeführt würden. Es gäbe in Deutschland keinen schwarzen Markt,5 und die Bauern lieferten willig die für sie festgesetzten Quoten ab. Von Erzeugnissen, die sie über diese Quoten hinaus der Regierung zur Verfügung stellten, würden ihnen erheblich höhere Preise von den Regierungsstellen, zum Teil sogar das Doppelte, bezahlt, so daß auch für die Bauern eine Möglichkeit bestünde, auf diese Weise zu Geld zu kommen. – Horthy bemerkte dazu, daß diese Probleme für Ungarn sehr schwierig seien. Er habe bisher des schwarzen Marktes nicht Herr werden können. – Der Führer erwiderte, daß daran die Juden schuld seien, die auch im Weltkrieg das Hamstern und Schieben als eines ihrer Haupttätigkeitsgebiete betrachtet hätten, genau so wie jetzt in England Verurteilungen wegen Rationierungsvergehen und dergleichen hauptsächlich Juden beträfen. – Auf die Gegenfrage Horthys, was er denn mit den Juden machen solle, nachdem er ihnen so ziemlich alle Lebensmöglichkeiten entzogen habe – erschlagen könne er sie doch nicht –, erklärte der RAM, daß die Juden entweder vernichtet oder in Konzentrationslager gebracht werden müßten. Eine andere Möglichkeit gäbe es nicht. – Auf die Bemerkung Horthys, daß Deutschland es in dieser Hinsicht leichter habe, da es nicht so viele Juden besessen habe, gab der Führer Zahlen an, aus denen sich die außerordentlich starke Verjudung gewisser Berufe ergab. – Horthy erwiderte, daß er das gar nicht gewußt habe.
Im Anschluß hieran kam der Führer auf die Stadt Nürnberg zu sprechen, die 400 Jahre lang keine Juden bei sich geduldet hätte, während Fürth die Juden bei sich aufgenommen hätte. Das Ergebnis sei eine große Blüte Nürnbergs und ein völliger Niedergang Fürths gewesen. Die Juden hätten eben nicht einmal einen organisatorischen Wert. Entgegen den Befürchtungen, die er (der Führer) auch wiederholt in Deutschland zu hören bekommen habe, ginge alles auch ohne die Juden seinen Gang weiter. Wo die Juden sich selbst überlassen wären, wie z. B. in Polen, herrsche grausamstes Elend und Verkommenheit. Sie seien eben reine Parasiten. Mit diesen Zuständen habe man in Polen gründlich aufgeräumt. Wenn die Juden dort nicht arbeiten wollten, würden sie erschossen. Wenn sie nicht arbeiten könnten, müßten sie verkommen. Sie wären wie Tuberkelbazillen zu behandeln, an denen sich ein gesunder Körper anstecken könne. Das wäre nicht grausam, wenn man bedenke, daß sogar unschuldige Naturgeschöpfe wie Hasen und Rehe getötet werden müßten, damit kein Schaden entstehe. Weshalb sollte man die Bestien, die uns den Bolschewismus bringen wollten, mehr schonen? Völker, die sich der Juden nicht erwehrten, verkämen. Eins der berühmtesten Beispiele dafür sei das Absinken des einst so stolzen Volkes der Perser, die jetzt als Armenier ein klägliches Dasein führten."
Lisa Hauff (ed.), Die Verfolgung und Ermordung dereuropäischen Juden durch das nationalsozialistische Deutschland 1933–1945, Vol. 11: Deutsches Reichund Protektorat Böhmenund Mähren April 1943–1945 (Oldenbourg: De Gruyter, 2020), Doc. 10, pp. 116-117.
Of course, the full document should be read in itself, and also any surrounding documents for context. But it can be found cited, and reproduced in full in other places, it's not hard to find.
Mattogno deals with the document in Chapter 6 of '
The “Extermination Camps” of “Aktion Reinhardt”', pgs. 488-494.
Arthur Butz commented on it back in 1976:
On April 17, 1943, Hitler met Admiral Horthy at Klessheim Castle. Hitler was critical of Horthy’s lenient Jewish policy and, it is said, explained to Horthy that things were different in Poland:
“If the Jews there did not want to work, they were shot. If they could not work, they had to be treated like tuberculosis bacilli, with which a healthy body may become infected. This was not cruel if one remembers that even innocent creatures of nature, such as hares and deer, which are infected, have to be killed so that no harm is caused by them.”
The evidence that Hitler said this is the alleged minutes of the meeting and the supporting IMT testimony of Dr. Paul Otto Schmidt, Hitler’s interpreter, who normally sat in on such conferences and prepared the minutes. Schmidt testified that he was present at the meeting and that the minutes were genuine and prepared by him. However, in his later book, he wrote that he was not present, because Horthy had insisted on his leaving the room!
Arthur R. Butz, The Hoax of the Twentieth Century: The Case Against the Presumed Extermination of European Jewry (Uckfield: Caslte Hill Publishers, 2015), p. 253.And Samuel Crowell writes:
Hitler’s Remarks to Admiral Horthy (April 17, 1943)
On this date, Adolf Hitler and his foreign minister Joachim Ribbentropp continued their discussions with the Hungarian regent. At one point, Hitler, according to the minutes, launched into the following tirade:
"Where the Jews were left to themselves, as for example in Poland, gruesome poverty and degeneracy had ruled. They were just pure parasites. One had fundamentally cleared up this state of affairs in Poland. If the Jews didn’t want to work, they were shot. If they couldn’t work, they had to perish. They had to be treated like tuberculosis bacilli, from which a healthy body can be infected. That was not cruel; if one remembered that even innocent natural creatures like hares and deer had to be killed so that no harm was caused. Why should one spare the beasts who wanted to bring us bolshevism? Nations who did not rid themselves of Jews perished."
This is a relatively straightforward quote, and reveals not only Hitler’s anti-Semitism but also his ruthlessness with regards to the Jewish people. However, this is not an extermination plan either: the killing of Jews, or allowing them to die, is clearly being contrasted against forced labor. This is consistent with Goebbels’ diary from March 1942, and the Wannsee Conference of January 1941.
Samuel Crowell, The Gas Chamber of Sherlock Holmes: And Other Writings on the Holocaust, Revisionism, and Historical Understanding (Charleston: Nine-Banded Books, 2011), pp. 315-316.And in his 1993 Master's thesis, the New Zealand historian Joel Hayward writes of this meeting in connection with the feud between David Irving and Martin Broszat; Hayward does the correct thing, and objectivly evaluates the document and adjacent sources (which Cockerill doesn't do, likely because he's unaware of the sources) without resorting to speculation or unjustified conclusions in service of a dogma:
To counter Irving's assertion that Hitler was too preoccupied with the conduct of the war to concern himself with the Jewish problem, and therefore left his subordinates (in particular, Himmler and Heydrich) to attend to it, Broszat argued at length that there was:
a widely motivated and powerful link in Hitler's thinking and will between military operations, especially the war against the Soviet Union, and his ideological struggle ["Weltanschauungskampf"] against the Jews.
To support this view he presented a lengthy, stereotypical and unpersuasive analysis of Hitler's antisemitic ideology. He also, however, presented weightier evidence in the form of passages from the
Führer's April 1943 discussions with Marshal Antonescu, the Romanian head of state, and with Admiral Horthy, the Hungarian Regent. In these passages Hitler tried to persuade them to adopt a more brutal position regarding the Jews of their respective countries. Some of the language Hitler used in these discussions was particularly blunt. For example, Broszat quoted Hitler saying to Horthy on April 17, 1943, at the Klessheim conference:
They [the Jews] are just parasites. This state of affairs [alleged Jewish lawlessness] had not been tolerated in Poland; if the Jews there refused to work, they were shot. Those who could not work just wasted away. They had to be treated as tuberculosis bacilli which could infect a healthy organism
Broszat argued that this is very clear and irrefutable evidence that Hitler, even after Stalingrad, still took an active interest in the Jewish question and knew that the Jews of Poland were being subjected to a policy of extermination, Irving had himself quoted these passages in
Hitler's War but, according to Broszat, had done so only as part of a deliberately-misleading discussion of
the revolt of the Warsaw Ghetto which had been suppressed not long before (and in the conference with Horthy that had not even been discussed); he thus makes it [Hitler's statement that "if the Jews there refused to work, they were shot ..."] falsely appear as only referring to an action limited in scope and executed for a specific reason ["eine engbegrenzte und besonders begründete Aktion erscheinen"].
It appears that Broszat made some major errors because of a misreading of Irving's text. First, Irving
did not link Hitler's brutal comments at the Klessheim conference to the Warsaw Ghetto Revolt, but to the alleged problems of Jewish lawlessness in Poland and the forced settlement in camps of the "Jews left working for armaments concerns in the Generalgouvernment".
Second, the ghetto revolt had not been suppressed shortly
before the date of Hitler's explicit statements to Horthy, as Broszat mistakenly asserted. The revolt did not even commence until two days
after that date and was not "suppressed" until May 16, 1943, almost a full month later. Irving had correctly written that at the time of the Klessheim conference "the fifty thousand Jews surviving in the [Warsaw] ghetto were
on the point of staging an armed uprising"; that is, it was just about to happen.
Third, Hitler's unambiguous description to Horthy of what the Jews in Poland were suffering –
which even surprised Foreign Minister Ribbentrop, who had never previously heard him utter such things about the murderous treatment of the Jews – indicates that Hitler was aware of individual antiJewish atrocities.
Yet it also indicates that forced labour, not total extermination, was the desired treatment of the Jewish question in Poland. Only the day before, on April 16, Horthy had protested to Hitler that he had done all he could against the Jews of Hungary, but that they could "hardly be murdered or otherwise eliminated". Hitler had reassured the Regent: "There is no need for that."Broszat, who died on October 16, 1989, clearly had a deep knowledge of the period. His research in all potentially relevant primary sources enabled him to compile in his
Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte article a body of sources which demonstrates that Hitler paid far more attention in the war years to the Jewish question than Irving had intimated. His article, to which Irving was unprofessionally denied the right of reply, provides a reasonable degree of indirect evidence that tends to establish the conclusion by inference that Hitler was aware of and permitted the events in the east now described as the Holocaust. Yet it fails to demonstrate directly or conclusively that Hitler ordered, sanctioned or even knew about those events.
Joel S. A. Hayward, The Fate of Jews in German Hands (Ulaan Baator, Gengis Khan Publishing House Online, 2003), pp. 174-176.So there we have it. Neither Ribbentrop nor Hitler on April 17, 1943 could possibly be referring to the 'extermination' of Jews, as on April 16, the day prior Hitler had explicitly replied to Horthy that there was 'no need' for such measures as extermination.
