German reactions to Allied propaganda on the Holocaust

[Apione]

Hi, I'm an Italian reader of historical revisionism.
I've always asked myself a question I never knew how to answer: How did the Germans respond to Allied Holocaust propaganda?
For example: have major Nazi mass media, such as the Völkischer Beobachter, ever replied to the Joint Declaration by Members of the United Nations, which in December 1942 attributed the mass extermination of Jews to the Nazi regime?
I thank you for any response.

[Lamprecht]

Just as a quick response, since I have posted some things related to this before in other threads. Likely there is some other place where this specific topic is dealt with more thoroughly, but I would have to search.

It wasn't just the Germans, but also the Allies themselves who didn't necessarily believe it all. "Atrocity propaganda" was a trick used extensively in WWI, which was fresh in people's minds still.

On July 1943, the chairman of the Britain’s Joint Intelligence Committee, Victor Cavendish-Bentinck, commented:
"The Poles, and to a far greater extent the Jews, tend to exaggerate German atrocities in order to stoke us up."

In a post here, which was mostly a timeline that makes use of the Goebbels diary, in which Goebbels speaks of "alleged" atrocities and "propaganda". He does not appear to believe the claims that are made:

Challenge to Believer NFrNJ : When did "Final Solution" become extermination?
viewtopic.php?t=13087

It is around this period when the Allied atrocity propaganda efforts go into full force. Goebbels complains the entire month about this

25 November 1942:
New York Times reports: "Himmler program kills Polish Jews. Slaughter of 250,000 ..."

27 November 1942: (Goebbels)
"Also, the Jews have again become completely impudent, even in the Reich area. I will therefore take care that, at least from Berlin if possible, they will be quickly pushed out (abgeschoben). Next week a transport of 5,000 Berlin Jews will leave for the Eastern zone."

4 December 1942:
The London Times reports: "Nazi War on Jews: Deliberate Plan for Extermination."

6 December 1942: (Goebbels)
"A new suggestion was made on the liquidation (Liquidierung) of Jewish marriages. After that one wants to go to compulsive separations, and otherwise, as means to obtain evacuation (Evakuierung)... The Führer has also given me an order to first take care that the unprivileged full Jews are deported (herausgeschafft) from Germany. Once they are all gone, we can then approach the problem of the remaining Jews."

9 December 1942:
"The Jews throughout the world mobilize against us. They tell of terrible atrocities against the Jewish race which we allegedly allowed to happen in Poland, and now they threaten us in London and Washington to inflict a terrible punishment on all guilty parties after the war. That still cannot prevent us from bringing about a radical solution to the Jewish Question. In any case, we will just let this threat be. The Jews will probably not have anything else special to report from Europe."

17 December 1942: (Goebbels)
"The Jews continue to raise a fuss about the alleged atrocities in Poland... Eden speaks in the House of Commons on the issue of the Polish Jews. One sees in this a whole propaganda effort, a result of the strong Jewish influence on British public opinion"
UK Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden's statements can be read here: https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hans ... eclaration

December 1942:
Belzec is claimed to have stopped gassings, resulting in 450-600 thousand victims. Until mid-1943 however the corpses in the alleged mass graves were supposedly being dug up, burned in giant pyres made of railroad tracks, and then reburied in the same alleged pits. These pits have never been actually shown to exist anywhere near the quantities alleged, despite supposedly being in known locations.


By the end of 1942, the year "Final Solution" supposedly became extermination according to NFrNJ, over 1.5 million Jews were allegedly killed in the 6 "extermination camps" with 4 million total Jewish deaths overall.
And yet on December 17 Goebbels speaks of "alleged atrocities" and he refers to these accusations as "propaganda"?

After the war:
"Why Didn't Any Nazi Deny" and the scope of the "conspiracy"
viewtopic.php?t=12287

- On July 1945, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported that: "A report from the place where major German war criminals are now confined discloses that all of them have denied that the Nazis had any plans to exterminate the Jews of Europe." https://archive.is/NJgOn


April 1945: As Soviet-Allied atrocity propaganda about Nazi gas chambers grows bigger and bigger, Radio Berlin denies that Nazi Germany ever had any homicidal gas chamber in its concentration camps, and adds that the German gas chambers are "merely delousing devices" using poison gas only for "sanitary purposes."

[...]

- SS Obergruppenführer Ernst Kaltenbrunner called orders for homicidal gassings "impossible":

Code: Select all

Q: Witness after witness, by testimony and affidavit, has said that the gas chamber killings were done on general or specific orders of Kaltenbrunner.

Kaltenbrunner: Show me one of those men or any of those orders. It is utterly impossible.

Q: Practically all of the orders came through Kaltenbrunner.

Kaltenbrunner: Entirely impossible.

[...]
- SS Captain Alois Brunner:

"I first heard about gas chambers after the end of the war," says Alois Brunner, the "most wanted Nazi war criminal" still at large.
...
"When did you learn about the gassing of Jews?" [Austrian journalist Gerd] Honsik asked. Brunner's reply: "After the war, from the newspapers!"
...
Brunner is "an innocent man," and those who believe that he is a mass murderer or criminal are "victims of a great Allied propaganda lie," Honsik insists.

From: Alois Brunner Talks About His Past
https://codoh.com/library/document/2279/

A few more examples, from:
A Brief List of the Conveniently Deceased
https://codoh.com/library/document/656/

Gustav Franz Wagner (b. 1911) was reportedly deputy commandant at Sobibor. After the war Wagner migrated to Syria and later in the early 1950’s to Brazil , where he lived under his own name, working as a farmhand. After Simon Wiesenthal initiated a hunt for a man falsely identified as him, the real Wagner voluntarily handed himself over to the Brazil special police in São Paulo , on May 30, 1978. According to an article in the newspaper Folha de São Paulo, June 2, 1978, Wagner had stated to the police: “I never saw any gas chamber at Sobibor” ( Eu nunca vi nenhuma camara de gas em Sobibor). On June 22, 1979, the Rio Supreme Court dismissed all claims for Wagner’s extradition. On October 30, 1980, Wagner allegedly committed suicide by stabbing himself to death in the bathroom of his rural home. The circumstances of the suicide have been deemed suspicious even by some exterminationist writers. Brazil citizen and former Sobibor inmate Stanislaw Szmajzner, who “confronted” Wagner at the time of his arrest, has let out that he “believes” that Wagner was in fact killed by Jewish “avengers” (Die Zeit, October 11, 1991). The author is currently researching the Wagner case together with local Brazilian revisionists.

Kurt Bolender (b. 1912) was another SS posted at Sobibor. When arrested in 1961, he initially denied killings at the camp. He is alleged to have committed suicide by hanging on October 21, 1966, just before his sentence was pronounced. According to the American magazine Time, Bolender left behind a suicide note stating that he was innocent.

Alexander Laak, former commandant of the Jägala camp in Estonia where a large number of Jews were supposedly massacred, is alleged to have committed suicide by hanging in his garage in Winnipeg , Canada . A number of Laak’s subordinates had at the time been given harsh sentences at a Soviet show trial. According to an article in Der Tagespiegel September 8, 1960, Laak had declared the Soviet allegations against him to be “99% lies and Communist propaganda.” In Michael Elkin's book Forged in Fury (1971) it is claimed that a Jewish "avenger" named Arnie Berg travelled to Winnipeg to kill Laak, and that Laak hanged himself under Berg's supervision in order to not have his wife shot by Berg.

Herbert Cukurs was a Latvian who allegedly participated in a massacre of 30,000 Jews in Riga . After the war Cukurs lived in São Paulo , where he later was “recognized” by two Jews and became a target of extreme harassment by the local Jewish community. In 1965 Cukurs was tricked to go to Uruguay , where he was brutally murdered with gun shots and hammer blows from unknown perpetrators. His dismembered remains were then sent back to his family in a box. According to the newspaper Folha de São Paulo, Cukurs had insisted to his family that he was innocent of the allegations.

[Hieldner]

In his chapter about press reports on the Holocaust in the German occupied territories in Was niemand wissen wollte (1982; published in English as The Terrible Secret: Suppression of the Truth about Hitler's Final Solution, 1980), author Walter Laqueur lists various reports that mention mass deportations of Jews and the closing of ghettos. On page 271 he writes:

Als die gemeinsame Erklärung der Alliierten über die Ermordung der Juden im Dezember 1942 veröffentlicht wurde, ging die deutsche Presse den Goebbelschen Direktiven gemäß zum Gegenangriff über, ohne jedoch irgendwie den Kern der Anklage zu dementieren. Transocean vom 17. Dezember 1942 meinte, daß sich die Regierungen der Alliierten in ungewöhnlichem Umfang den politischen Wünschen des Judentums unterwürfen und daß es in Persien Demonstrationen gegen die Alliierten gegeben habe. Der diplomatische Korrespondent des Deutschen Nachrichten-Büros behauptete, daß Edens Erklärung nichts anderes sei als typisch britisch-jüdische Greuelpropaganda:

»Leute, die kein Wort des Mitgefühls und der Verdammung hatten, als im September 1939 über 60 000 Deutsche in grausamster Weise – Männer, Frauen und Kinder – in Polen abgeschlachtet wurden, haben kein Recht, über Humanität zu sprechen, die ihnen offenbar fremd ist.«

Die Bevölkerung Europas wisse, daß die Erklärung ein tendenziöses Manöver sei (18. Dezember 1942).

Translation:

When the Allied joint declaration on the murder of the Jews was published in December 1942, the German press went over to the counter-attack in accordance with Goebbels' directives, without however actually denying the core of the charge. Transocean of December 17, 1942, said that the Allied governments were submitting to the political wishes of Judaism to an unusual degree, and that there had been demonstrations against the Allies in Persia. The diplomatic correspondent of the German Nachrichten-Büro claimed that Eden's statement was nothing more than typical British Jewish atrocity propaganda:

»People who had not a word of sympathy and condemnation when in September 1939 over 60,000 Germans were cruelly slaughtered in Poland in the most horrible manner—men, women and children—have no right to speak about humanity that is apparently foreign to them.«

The people of Europe would know that the Declaration was a tendentious manoeuvre (December 18, 1942).

The preceding page mentions an interesting report on Jewish settlements in the East with population numbers in the periodical Ostland which I have been unable to find (full title is Ostland. Halbmonatsschrift für Ostpolitik. 23. Jahrgang.)

Das Bild, das sich aus diesen Pressestimmen ergibt, ist unmißverständlich: das Verschwinder der Juden. Es gab allerdings auch Falschinformationen: der von offizieller Seite veranlaßte Auschwitz-Besuch des Nazikorrespondenten Fritz Fiala wurde bereits erwähnt. Auch in quasi-wissenschaftlichen Zeitschriften gab es bewußte Irreführungen: Ostland, das zweimal im Monat erschien, brachte in den Ausgaben vom 15. November und vom 1. Dezember 1942 Artikel über den »Abschluß der Umsiedlung der Juden« mit vielen Zahlen, die allesamt falsch waren. Danach (15. November) befanden sich 480 000 Juden im Warschauer Getto, während in den vergangenen vier Monaten fast 90 Prozent getötet worden waren. Die Zahlen für die Bezirke Warschau und Lublin (800 000) waren ebenfalls falsch. Das Dezember-Heft enthielt eine Liste von 55 »Wohnorten für Juden« samt Zahlen von Einwohnern, die zumeist nicht mehr am Leben waren.

The picture that emerges from these press reports is unequivocal: the disappearance of the Jews. However, there was also false information: the official visit to Auschwitz by Nazi correspondent Fritz Fiala has already been mentioned. There have also been deliberate misleading statements in quasi-scientific journals: Ostland, which appeared twice a month, contained articles about the »completion of the resettlement of the Jews« in its issues of November 15 and December 1, 1942, with many figures that were all wrong. According to these articles (November 15) 480,000 Jews were in the Warsaw Ghetto, whereas almost 90 percent had been killed in the previous four months. The figures for the districts of Warsaw and Lublin (800,000) were also wrong. The December issue contained a list of 55 »places of residence for Jews« together with numbers of inhabitants, most of whom were no longer alive.

[Hieldner]

Laqueur writes in his aforementioned book furthermore (p. 190 f.):

Als 1942 die ersten Nachrichten über Massenmorde außerhalb Deutschlands umliefen, wurde Fritz Fiala, Schriftleiter des Grenzboten, des Organs der Volksdeutschen in der Slowakei, von Eichmann entsandt, um Juden aufzusuchen, die in den Osten ›umgesiedelt‹ worden waren. Fialas Artikel, der über ganz Europa verbreitet wurde, schilderte Eindrücke von einem jüdischen Kaffeehaus mit einem jüdischen Polizisten davor, einer Gruppe lächelnder jüdischer Krankenschwestern und gutgenährter junger Männer (Pariser Zeitung, Nr. 353, 23. Dezember 1942). Wie Fiala schrieb, waren alle Juden, mit denen er gesprochen hatte, mit ihrem Los zufrieden:
»Alle ihre Ängste waren zerstreut, kein einziges ihrer Argumente [gegen die Verschickung] war gerechtfertigt.« Einer von den Juden ging sogar so weit, Fiala zu sagen: »Ich wollte, die ganze Welt wüßte, mit wie viel Menschlichkeit Deutschland uns hier behandelt.«
Fiala nannte den Namen des Lagers nicht, es war aber, wie sich nach dem Krieg herausstellte – Auschwitz (Alfred Wetzler 1946 vor einem slowakischen Gericht in Bratislava: Rotkirchen, Slovac Jewry, S. 158).

When the first news of mass murders outside Germany circulated in 1942, Fritz Fiala, editor of the Grenzbotenbote, the organ of the ethnic Germans in Slovakia, was sent by Eichmann to visit Jews who had been »resettled« to the East. Fiala’s article, which was distributed throughout Europe, described impressions of a Jewish coffee house with a Jewish policeman in front of it, a group of smiling Jewish nurses and well-fed young men (Pariser Zeitung, No. 353, December 23, 1942). As Fiala wrote, all the Jews he had spoken to were satisfied with their lot:
»All their fears were allayed, not one of their arguments [against the deportation] was justified.« One of the Jews even went so far as to say to Fiala: »I wish the whole world knew with how much humanity Germany is treating us here.«
Fiala did not mention the name of the camp, but it was, as it turned out after the war—Auschwitz (Alfred Wetzler 1946 before a Slovakian court in Bratislava: Rotkirchen, Slovac Jewry, p. 158).

[Lamprecht]

Himmler said he didn't believe it:



And Hitler, from Irving's book "HItler's War":




David Irving in Hitler's War also writes how Hitler reacted to seeing a newspaper headline claiming 1.5 million Majdanek victims, on October 27, 1944:

"At the war conference later that day Press Chief Otto Dietrich showed Hitler an English newspaper which reported a claim by Moscow that 1,500,000 people had been liquidated in a concentration camp at Majdanek, which the Red Army had overrun, near Lublin; by way of evidence, there was a photograph of neat stacks of combs. A hush fell on the war conference. Hitler angrily laid the newspaper aside: ‘That’s the “hacked-off hands” again – pure enemy propaganda!’ (He told Sonnleitner after the conference that Allied propaganda had claimed in 1914 that German troops marching into Belgium had cut off babies’ hands and hung the children upside down in church bells as clappers."

- David Irving (2001) "Hitler's War". p. 754
https://web.archive.org/web/20190711071 ... HW_Web.pdf

Irving also writes in Hitler's War about how captured Nazis records show that both Goebbels and Himmler enquired into whether there was any truth in the reports in the Western press, that the Nazis were gassing Jews:

"Early in September 1942 the London Daily Telegraph published reports from Warsaw that seven thousand Jews a day were being deported from the ghetto and executed – a total of 700,000 by May 1942. ‘In many cases gas chambers had been used.’ In a Top Secret telegram Goebbels’s ministry asked Hans Frank for an explanation.

By roundabout route via New York, the same report reached Himmler; writing to Gestapo chief Müller on Nov 1942 he called it a ‘very interesting [press] announcement about a memorandum written by Dr. [Stephen F.] Wise [President of the American Jewish Congress] in September 1942,’ and he commented: ‘Given the scale of the Jewish migration, I’m not surprised that such rumours crop up somewhere in the world. We both know there’s a high death rate among the Jews who are put to work. But you are to guarantee to me that at each location the cadavers of these deceased Jews are either burned or buried, and that nothing else can happen with the cadavers wherever they are. You are to investigate at once in all quarters to find out whether there have been any such abuses as the – no doubt mendacious – rumours disseminated around the world claim. All such abuses are to be reported to me on the SS oath of honour’"

[Hektor]

Himmler said he didn't believe it:



And Hitler, from Irving's book "HItler's War":



...

That's like saying it didn't happen from the best source possible.

The Americans investigated German reaction to their atrocity propaganda:
https://archive.org/details/MorrisJanow ... Atrocities

[Archie]

Mark Weber mentioned an interesting reaction of Heydrich's wife, Lina Heydrich, in his testimony at the second Zundel trial.

Another interesting piece of evidence was that of Heydrich's wife. She was shocked when her husband told her in 1942 that the Germans were going to send all the Jews to Russia. She felt it was a very cruel and harsh thing to do. Heydrich tried to reassure her that the Jews were not going to be killed and that the conditions were not as harsh as many people had been led to believe. He also stated that it was necessary that Europe rid itself of the Jews and that there would be a new beginning for them after the war.

http://ihr.org/books/kulaszka/20weber.html

I don't know what Weber's source for this is but if it was recorded during the war it would be a valuable reference.

I found an article from the late 70s in the NYT that gives Mrs. Heydrich's thoughts on the Holocaust miniseries that aired in Germany.

The telecast last month of the American television program “Holocaust” has caught West Germany up in an emotional storm. The story of the fate of a Jewish family from Berlin during the Nazi period struck an emotional chord that had previously been dulled by years of documentaries.

“To me, the film was really like novel,” she told a visitor. “The whole story hadn't any relation to my life. didn't recognize the character they called Heydrich as my husband.”

No, she said, she didn't know anything about the murder of the Jews. “Some were arrested, of course, everyone knew that. But I didn't know anything about the details and I didn't mingle with the officials.”

“The Final Solution had nothing to do with my husband,” she said. “That was something falsely attributed to him. The European Jews were all shipped to the Urals.”

"I don't think Himmler did it all by himself,” she said. “He must have asked Hitler. I can't imagine anything else. One couldn't have done it alone.”

https://www.nytimes.com/1979/02/07/archives/widow-of-heydrich-says-holocaust-ignores-facts-horrors-of-the-camps.html

Her thoughts seem pretty similar to a lot of the Nuremberg defendants. She doesn't directly deny but insists she had no idea.

[Revision]

This is quite clearly his source:

Translated from "Leben mit einem Kriegsverbrecher" ("My Life With a War Criminal") By Lina Heydrich:

Already at the end of 1941, Goering assigned him an order that would later turn out to be the greatest accusation and burden: The "final solution to the Jewish question". Due to its inevitability in Prague, a meeting of all relevant gentlemen and departments was postponed to January 1942. As Reinhard told me about this order, he presented the matter relatively factually. As he said, it was about the organization of the "emigration of all European Jews to Central Russia". "You mean," I asked him, "that all Jews are to be deported to Siberia?" His answer: "Yes, I mean that. Siberia is not the land of terror. It was only made into a specter by the Russian prison camps. Think of von Pomme's father." What did he say? I remembered. Major Pomme's father (Pomme was chief adjutant to the police for Reinhard) was a prisoner of war during the First World War in Russia and had been sent to Siberia. He kept saying to his son: “Once again I want to go to Siberia as a free man. It is a wonderful country."

Reinhard told me that there was everything in Siberia: fertile land, ores, minerals and coal. When I asked him skeptically whether the Jews would be able to cope with the new conditions, he only said: “Sure. They are intelligent and they need a new start. As it is now, it cannot go on. We want to remove this problem once and for all. Now, in the war, there is a unique opportunity!" And then he outlined his detailed plan, which included road construction himself. Of course, a large percentage, he emphasized, would not survive this resettlement, especially not the old Jews. Natural shrinkage has to be expected. "The Jews we bring to there," he continued, "will settle in." And when I asked him where this state was supposed to come from, he said: "In the north, in the south, in front of or behind the Urals. Behind the Urals and in the middle." And then he showed me the area on the map. There was only one mistake. The area had to be conquered first. How, I asked myself, should such a shift be possible. Reinhard's men would do it. That's how the infamous "Wannsee Conference" started for me.

See also:

Revision: Reinhard Heydrich on the Meaning of the "Final Solution": https://www.bitchute.com/video/HKwbJo77s7SA/

Thread: Lina Heydrich's Book: viewtopic.php?f=2&t=13411

Revision: Lina Heydrich Speaks Out: https://www.bitchute.com/video/ihtHiALj5L3Q/

[Archie]

Thanks, Revision. Somehow your recent thread on Lina Heydrich had escaped my notice. According to Wikipedia, her book was published in 1976 which is unfortunately well after the war. I was hoping it was a diary or something in which case it would be a bombshell document. Since it's post-war non-revisionists will say she's just protecting her husband's name, whitewashing, etc.

Interestingly, there seems to be some contradiction in her description of the "final solution" between the book and the NYT quotes.

Already at the end of 1941, Goering assigned him an order that would later turn out to be the greatest accusation and burden: The "final solution to the Jewish question". Due to its inevitability in Prague, a meeting of all relevant gentlemen and departments was postponed to January 1942. As Reinhard told me about this order, he presented the matter relatively factually. As he said, it was about the organization of the "emigration of all European Jews to Central Russia".

“The Final Solution had nothing to do with my husband,” she said. “That was something falsely attributed to him. The European Jews were all shipped to the Urals.”

On the one hand, she says Heydrich was in charge of the final solution and that it meant evacuation and resettlement. However in the second quote she says he had nothing to do with the final solution. The second quote seemingly allows for the possibility of some sort of extermination to have occurred without Heydrich's involvement or knowledge. Although she then immediately refers to Jews being shipped to the Urals which would seem to be incompatible with the extermination program. I think the most plausible interpretation is that she had revisionist views but for sake of political considerations at times she would leave open the door for some sort of super-secret holocaust that nobody knew about (the classic compromise position that defies all common sense).

[Revision]

Lina is not any Holocaust expert, and the only thing she has some knowledge to deny in this case is her hushand's role.

I think she uses somewhat bad wording in the second quote, but she means to deny the final solution in the sense most people think it, that is, by extermination. Maybe she was asked about "Final solution" and that was her answer.

[Hektor]

Lina is not any Holocaust expert, and the only thing she has some knowledge to deny in this case is her hushand's role.

I think she uses somewhat bad wording in the second quote, but she means to deny the final solution in the sense most people think it, that is, by extermination. Maybe she was asked about "Final solution" and that was her answer.

Of course she isn't. All she got to offer is some memories from her own experience and perhaps from hearsay. It's a fallacy to believe that contemporary witnesses would have "known everything that was happening at the time". They simply couldn't. Sure Mrs Heydrich did probably know more than most folks, but that doesn't make her an expert and experts hardly "know everything" neither. A good expert realises his shortcomings and wouldn't insist that the "science is settled" in his field. That's especially knowledge that has to rely on vast information gathering and secondary sources.

When old Germans say;"Davon haben wir nichts gewusst" = (We knew nothing about it), then they are brutally honest in terms of them not knowing of any extermination activities. Deportations would have been known to some, few would know what was happening in concentration camps or even have witnessed executions, which they may or may not have linked to reprisals against partisan activity - on it's own a customary act in war, performed by any party in a war, if they were confronted with that kind of problem. Not nice, but war is about to be or to be nice. If you don't realise this you are intellectually incapable of dealing with the issue.

The whole resettlement thesis is also supported by the vast majority of any other available sources and an honest survey would reveal exactly that. If it were different, we'd be confronted with hard facts and thorough evidence for the whole thing. But we aren't. We are not, despite very resourceful people having an obvious interest in proving exactly that.

The Holocaust isn't even a good conspiracy theory, it's a conspiracy fantasy meddled together of some factual pieces, a lot of rumours, propaganda, psychological warfare materials and the crafting of a number of parties interested in peddling that narrative to a gullible audience.

Reinhard Heydrich was in charge of the RSHA, which is kind of an equivalent to the American OSS/CIA. They did among various other things deal with the Jewish issue, but also with any other suspicious groups or open enemies of Germany at the time. Imagine that: A country confronted with an alliance of enemies more resourceful than itself having a secret police force.

Interestingly a lot of the literature on Heydrich doesn't even try to conceal that it's merely propaganda:
http://libgen.rs/search.php?req=Heydric ... column=def

[Lamprecht]

Moritz Augustus Konstantin von Schirmeister was a high ranking employee of Joseph Goebbels and interacted with him extensviely; as Goebbels' personal press officer (press adjutant), he was one of the closest people to Goebbels. At the IMT, he stated that he had daily contact with Joseph Goebbels and described his job thusly:

"During the war I had to look through all the news and propaganda material coming in from enemy broadcasting stations and regularly submit extracts from it to Goebbels. These extracts formed the basis for Dr. Goebbels' propaganda instructions which he himself issued every morning. In the afternoon and evening I had to telephone them to the press section and radio section. So that during the war, except when my deputies took my place, I was with Dr. Goebbels in his apartment, I took my meals with him, slept in his house, accompanied him on journeys, and so on."

- Moritz von Schirmeister, IMT vol. 17, 28 June 1946.
https://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/06-28-46.asp or https://archive.is/vO6KK

When asked about where the Jews were evacuated, he stated:

"Up to the first year of the Russian campaign, Dr. Goebbels in the conferences over which he presided, repeatedly mentioned the Madagascar plan. Later he changed this and said that a new Jewish state was to be formed in the East, to which the Jews were to be taken."

- Moritz von Schirmeister, IMT vol. 17, 29 June 1946.
https://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/06-29-46.asp or https://archive.fo/XqgW

When asked about allegations of atrocities, such as those he read in the enemy press, von Schirmeister stated that when he inquired about these reports:

"There were not always denials, not at all; very frequently we had quite precise answers. For example, if it was asserted that there had been a strike in Bohemia-Moravia, then the answer was: Yes, in such and such a factory a strike took place. But always and without exception, there was a very definite denial of concentration camp atrocities and so forth. That is precisely why these denials were so widely believed. I must emphasize that this was our only possibility of getting information. These pieces of information were not intended for the public, but for the minister, and again and again the answer came: 'No, there is no word of truth in this.' Even today I do not know by what other means we could have obtained information."

- ibid.

It should be noted that von Schirmeister (an on-off soldier as well) was arrested and interned by the British in 1945, and given the personal task of "re-educating" other captured German soldiers. He was taken by car with Rudolf Hoess to the prison at Nuremberg, and is precisely the POW that Hoess spoke of in his memiors, brought to Germany as a witness in the trial of Hans Fritzsche. Von Schirmeister is the claimed source of the [unconfirmed] quote where it is claimed that Hoess said:
"Certainly, I signed a statement that I killed two and a half million Jews. But I could just as well have said that it was five million Jews. There are certain methods by which any confession can be obtained, whether it is true or not."


Goebbels' secretary also claimed to have known nothing about the "Holocaust":

[Archie]

Arthur Butz discusses this in chapter 3 of Hoax.
https://www.unz.com/book/arthur_r_butz__the-hoax-of-the-twentieth-century/#p_18_1

Apparently the general policy was not to comment publicly on the atrocity stories. That's why we'll have to look to diaries, private correspondence, private meetings to see what they were saying about it.

It is of passing interest to comment on what the Germans were saying about the Allied propaganda stories. We have seen that von Stumm of the press section of the German Foreign Office ridiculed the extermination claim when it was first made by the Allied governments, but that was a rare reference on the part of the German government to any specific Allied propaganda concoction. The weekly newspaper Das Reich, published by the Goebbels Ministry, and the Völkischer Beobachter, the daily newspaper of the Nazi Party, had much comment of a general sort on the “Greuelpropaganda,” but there were few references to specific propaganda claims. The usual situation was one of no commentary on the Jewish extermination claim as well as on other specific propaganda claims, e.g. starvation and torturing of American and British POWs and the various gruesome inventions of Hollywood, such as the draining of the blood of children in occupied countries for the use of the Wehrmacht.

The reason for this relative silence on specific propaganda claims was no doubt that there was no need, from the German point of view, to review its content. They had seen it all before, during World War I. Thus, the German press treatment of the “Greuelpropaganda” was on a higher level, and rather than concern itself with the specific contents of the stories, it concerned itself with such questions as the nature of the political interests that were served by the propaganda and the extent and means of Jewish influence in the Allied press (e.g. Das Reich for December 20, 1942).

There reference to von Stumm is from earlier in the chapter.

The December 17 statement marked the start of U.S. and British government complicity in the extermination legend. The German government did not see the event as laden with import, and von Stumm of the Foreign Office’s press section flippantly explained to the neutral press that the Allied declaration was for the purpose of helping the Christmas sales of the Jewish department stores of New York and London.

https://www.unz.com/book/arthur_r_butz__the-hoax-of-the-twentieth-century/#p_17_99

[Archie]

I came across an interesting one in Staeglich's book. On page 209 he quotes an interesting passage from a Pery Broad affidavit (NMT document NI-11984). Broad's confessions are of generally used to support the extermination legends, but this one has this interesting bit:

Sometime around 1944, a comprehensive booklet from a Polish resistance movement, in which exact claims were made about gassings and all kinds of other such operations and actions in Auschwitz, was sent to Auschwitz by the RSHA to obtain the views of the Auschwitz authorities on this matter.

This reminds me of the incident with Himmler when he asked someone to look into the soap stories to just make extra sure it wasn't true.

Obviously if Auschwitz was a major extermination camp, the RSHA presumably would have known and they would not have bothered inquiring about these claims from the Polish resistance.

Broad's statements are not generally credible although the most unreliable parts of these confessions are parts that were likely worked in by the interrogators or which the witness has offered to ingratiate himself with the prosecutors. This particular statement is not that. (Unless Broad had some incentive to shift blame away from the RSHA?)

It would be good to get some corroboration for this.

Below may be the Polish resistance booklet that's referred to. Hard to say. I'm not aware of any other ones but there might be. There were other underground reports as well but I don't know if any of them were published as a booklet during the war.
https://forum.codoh.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=13435

[Hektor]

I came across an interesting one in Staeglich's book. On page 209 he quotes an interesting passage from a Pery Broad affidavit (NMT document NI-11984). Broad's confessions are of generally used to support the extermination legends, but this one has this interesting bit:

Sometime around 1944, a comprehensive booklet from a Polish resistance movement, in which exact claims were made about gassings and all kinds of other such operations and actions in Auschwitz, was sent to Auschwitz by the RSHA to obtain the views of the Auschwitz authorities on this matter.

This reminds me of the incident with Himmler when he asked someone to look into the soap stories to just make extra sure it wasn't true.

Obviously if Auschwitz was a major extermination camp, the RSHA presumably would have known and they would not have bothered inquiring about these claims from the Polish resistance.

Broad's statements are not generally credible although the most unreliable parts of these confessions are parts that were likely worked in by the interrogators or which the witness has offered to ingratiate himself with the prosecutors. This particular statement is not that. (Unless Broad had some incentive to shift blame away from the RSHA?)
...

With accused statements, one would have to know the exact background of those accused. Also what about relatives they may have? Can they be intimidated in some way? Are there perhaps other accusation that they can be blackmailed with?

And indeed. If "the Holocaust" was real, why bother with 'denials'. Simply say nothing and justify it with the reasons you'd have undertaken it.
And well, Norbert Masur says that Himmler disputed the allegations (one month before his death). And that is actually telling, even if one considers the Masur statement as hearsay. Masur had no motive to lie in this direction.