HistorySpeaks wrote:As for the Himmler stuff: it is not eyewitness testimony from Himmler so is irrelevant. And the secondhand account from Masur (which is really the only credible one - the other guys are trying to save their necks by pleading ignorance of the Holocaust) does not mention the Aktion Reinhardt camps, which had long since been razed, and is focused on Belsen and Buchenwald and Terezin, which were in the press. (Though Terezin had not been liberated yet, atrocity accounts about it were circulating.)
In the interview with Masur, Himmler didn't plead ignorance of the Holocaust. He denied its existence. Himmler told Masur that the crematories in the German camps were not criminal facilities but mere sanitary facilities constructed and used to curb epidemics and especially typhus. Given the fact that U.S. propagandists had been portraying those crematories as weapons of mass murder for several months (noisy campaign of atrocity propaganda based on the Vrba-Wetzler "report" from November 1944) when Himmler and Masur met, Himmler's words on the KL crematories amounted to denying the Holocaust itself.