How do You Explain Non-Coercive Confessions by Perpetrators?

[HistorySpeaks]

Even if we assume that Nuremberg was a conspiracy to forge evidence and coerce confessions (obviously I reject this, but let's assume it for argument's sake), deniers are still left with the perplexing problem of numerous *non-coercive* perpetrator confessions to the Holocaust.

For example, take Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jersualem and Nazi collaborator who spent the war in Berlin. He never faced any prosecution for his wartime collaboration with the Nazis, on whose behalf he sought to win over the Arab world. But he wrote in his memoirs that he was well aware of the extermination of millions of Jews, and had been briefed on this matter by Himmler.

Consider also Adolf Eichmann. In his private papers (which he wrote in Argentina, before being captured by the Israelis), he wrote that Hitler had ordered the extermination of the Jews. Why would he lie about this in a private journal? (And before you say muh forgery, note that David Irving is the one who found many of these incriminating Eichmann papers.).

Finally, consider Albert Speer, Hitler's Minister of Armaments and the so-called "Good Nazi." He denied knowing about the Holocaust at Nuremberg! But in a private letter to a Belgian resister,* he admitted that he had been present at the Posen speeches, in which, according to Speer, Himmler said "that all Jews would be killed". Why would Speer (who always denied knowledge of the Holocaust *publicly*) say he knew about the extermination of the Jews in a private letter?

How do you explain these and many other non-coercive confessions? Imagine you were falsely accused of monstrous crimes, like murdering children. Perhaps you could imagine "confessing" to these crimes under torture or other forms of coercion. But could you imagine "confessing" to them in a private journal or private letter or diary or memoir?

*https://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/mar/13/secondworldwar.kateconnolly

[Lamprecht]

Often people will claim such nonsense in order to distance themselves from groups they have been associated with.
Additionally, after the Nuremberg show trials, they might have been "swayed by the evidence" even though they personally did not see Jews being shoved into homicidal gas chambers. In other cases they will pretend as if it actually happened, and then argue that they had nothing to do with it or couldn't stop it. This is actually a legal defense, most notably summarized as "I was just following orders."

Why would he lie about this in a private journal?

Did he explicitly describe the method of alleged murder?
Others, like Goebbels, described the "Final Solution" (similarly to all the documents describing it) as a mass resettlement program. Why exactly would Goebbels lie about this?

It would be wrong to call a lot of these statements a "Confession" if the author did not claim to have been personally involved in the claimed extermination, and guilty as a result. Eichmann also wrote a handwritten note during the war, describing the "Final Solution" as a resettlement program. Please post these Eichmann papers you're referring to.

As for Albert Speer, his defense strategy was to play ball and tell the "Allies" what they wanted to hear, that there was a genocide of Jews. However, he, like Eichmann, argued that they were just a small cog in a giant machine and could not stop it. This is, again, not a true "Confession" in the legal sense. Also, for Speer, it quite clearly worked for him as he was imprisoned and then later released.

Why would Speer (who always denied knowledge of the Holocaust *publicly*) say he knew about the extermination of the Jews in a private letter?

Give me a break. A "Private letter" from the 1970s? This was long after the war and after he was released from prison. Quite obviously there was nothing "Private" about that letter and he very well knew that.

[Merlin300]

Consider also Adolf Eichmann. In his private papers (which he wrote in Argentina, before being captured by the Israelis), he wrote that Hitler had ordered the extermination of the Jews. Why would he lie about this in a private journal? (And before you say muh forgery, note that David Irving is the one who found many of these incriminating Eichmann papers.)

First about Eichmann-
Eichmann was giving interviews to people in the 1950s, specifically to Willem Sassen, Eichmann also drafted and purportedly sent a letter to West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, proposing that he (Eichmann) return to Germany to stand trial. Finally Eichmann frequently visited with his son Nicholas. All this made his residence in Argentina obvious. It also threatened to rock the Holocaust propaganda boat.

It was the German public prosecutor of Hesse, Fritz Bauer who called Walter Eytan at the Israeli Foreign Ministry and reported that Eichmann was alive and living in Argentina under the name Ricardo Klement. All the Mossad kidnappers had to do is follow Nicholas to his father's house or look in the telephone book.

Over 30 Mossad agents headed by Isser Harel followed Eichmann. Harel had fled the Soviet Union in the 1930, is reported to have engaged in terrorist acts against the British and wrote his own Eichmann book The House on Garibaldi Street...made into a TV movie. Eichmann was jumped as he came home from work, drugged and flown to Israel.

Anyway- Irving and Eichmann
"Eichmann papers convinced Irving Holocaust happened"
The 68-year-old Irving faces up to 10 years in jail in Austria in a case based on remarks he made in a 1989 interview and in speeches when he visited Austria, where denying the Nazi genocide on Jews is a crime.

"I'm not a holocaust denier. Obviously, I've changed my views," Irving, a historian who has published many books on the history of Nazi Germany and World War Two, told reporters on his way into the Vienna courtroom.

Asked by the presiding judge Peter Liebetreu whether he had denied in speeches in 1989 that Nazi Germany had killed millions of Jews, Irving said he had until he had seen the personal files of Adolf Eichmann, the chief organizer of the Holocaust.

"I said that then based on my knowledge at the time, but by 1991 when I came across the Eichmann papers, I wasn't saying that anymore and I wouldn't say that now," Irving said.
https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/21962

So, Irving aside, what do you claim that Eichmann actually wrote?

[Merlin300]

Often people will claim such nonsense in order to distance themselves from groups they have been associated with.

Lamprecht's point is well taken.
Confessions are a notoriously weak form of evidence. Stalin's favorite hangman was Major-General Iona Timofeevich Nikitchenko.
Voluntary confessions were his specialty. In an interesting aside; Nikitchenko was the presiding judge when the Nuremberg trial opened.

People openly confess to cavorting with the Devil, to murder, to a variety of crimes.
"But Tituba confessed, "The Devil came to me and bid me serve him." She described elaborate images of black dogs, red cats, yellow birds and a "black man" who wanted her to sign his book. She admitted that she signed the book and said there were several other witches looking to destroy the Puritans."

[fireofice]

In regards to Irving and Eichmann, here's what he has said about the Eichmann memoirs:

So why should Eichmann have written this and not that? By 1958, he is well aware that since Höss' memoirs have been published and Eichmann is mentioned on 20 or 30 pages, the hue and cry are on. They're out looking for him. He knows his days may be numbered. Although I'm sure that -- given his German, scrupulous, bureaucratic mind -- he's not doing this consciously, the mind has wonderful synthetic and analytical functions; the mind has a habit of suppressing, distorting, and embellishing in a manner which the owner of that mind would wish. And I'm sure that Adolf Eichmann's mind is already lying awake at night, feverishly looking for extenuating circumstances. What more extenuating circumstances would there be for an Adolf Eichmann than that the Führer had "ordered the physical destruction of the Jews"? Eichmann may well have adapted the sentence that Reinhard Heydrich actually uttered to him.

It's immaterial, one way or the other, because we must never overlook one basic fact: this is a postwar document, and any historian can now confirm that nowhere in all the archives of the world has yet been found one wartime document referring to a Führer's order to destroy the Jews, or for that matter, one wartime document referring to gas chambers or gassings. All the documents that refer to Führer orders and gas chambers are postwar documents; statements by people in the dock at Nuremberg, memoirs written by the commandant at Krakow in Poland, and the like. You can't overlook this basic watershed between wartime and postwar documents. If there's no wartime document that says there was a Führer order, if no wartime document talks of gas chambers, then there has to be some explanation for that. That's why I say I think I'm entitled to believe that Adolf Eichmann's mind is synthesizing here. He is looking unconsciously for extenuating circumstances which will perhaps get him off the hook, literally, when the time comes.

http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v13/v13n2p14_Irving.html

Christopher Browning says:

“Even more than most memoirs,” our Holocaust historian pointed out in an obscure 2003 essay, “the Eichmann testimonies, both before and after capture, are consciously calculated attempts at self-representation, self-justification, and legal defense. It must be said as emphatically as possible that, at the core of these testimonies, there are three monstrous falsehoods that are central to his whole enterprise.”

https://codoh.com/library/document/the- ... topher/en/

So it is NOT true that the Eichmann memoirs were uncoerced. Just because he wasn't captured yet doesn't mean there was no coercion. He was being hunted, and he thought there was a good chance that sooner or later it would be captured, so he was trying to come up with a narrative that acknowledged the holocaust but downplayed his responsibility.

It's known that people make false confessions for all kinds of reasons:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_confession

False memories, even of crimes, are also a known phenomenon:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_memory

The Myth of Repressed Memory: False Memories and Allegations of Sexual Abuse by Elizabeth Loftus
https://www.amazon.com/Myth-Repressed-M ... B00DA79VZ0

Memory Warp: How the Myth of Repressed Memory Arose and Refuses to Die by Mark Pendergrast
https://www.amazon.com/Memory-Warp-Repr ... 09KN3BX2X/

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017 ... dnt-commit

[Archie]

For example, take Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jersualem and Nazi collaborator who spent the war in Berlin. He never faced any prosecution for his wartime collaboration with the Nazis, on whose behalf he sought to win over the Arab world. But he wrote in his memoirs that he was well aware of the extermination of millions of Jews, and had been briefed on this matter by Himmler.

IIRC the thing you are referring to is some supposed statement written in the 70s and not published until the 90s, decades after the Mufti's death. Any and all claims involving the Mufti should be treated with extreme suspicion as Zionists have long tried to say he played this big role in the holocaust which is highly unlikely. There's an obvious Zionist angle to this curious overemphasis on the Mufti.

Don't you have Arab or Egyptian heritage or something? How are you not wise to the Zionists?

[Archie]

Gitta Sereny tried to say Stangl confessed to her on his deathbed and that that was proof of the holocaust. She published an article in the New Stateman which was an early attempted rebuttal to revisionism. Below is one of the revisionist replies that was submitted but not published.

We do not need "confessions" or "trials" to determine that the bombings of Dresden and Hiroshima, or the reprisals at Lidice following Heydrich's assassination, really took place.

Now, the extermination legend does not claim a few instances of homicide, but alleges events continental in geographical scope, of three years in temporal scope, and of several million in scope of victims. How ludicrous, then, is the position of the bearers of the legend, who in the last analysis will attempt to "prove" such events on the basis of "confessions" delivered under the fabric of hysteria, censorship, intimidation, persecution and blatant illegality that has been shrouding this subject for 35 years.

http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v01/v01p153_Butz.html

The point here is that it's quite ridiculous to prove six million murders on the basis of statements made decades after the war, and that is especially true when you consider the incentives of former Nazis within Germany after the war. At best it could only weakly corroborate other, stronger evidence.

[hermod]

When you're a former member of a group labelled as a criminal organization by the victors of a war, you're liable to be arrested and imprisoned at any time and your freedom only depends on your servile collaboration with the victors of that war. So when you're ordered to make a false confession, you just obey and do it. Any refusal would of course have you jailed or executed without delay. In short, under such circumstances, you're completely at the mercy of the victors and their local administrators. Obviously.

Even if we assume that Nuremberg was a conspiracy to forge evidence and coerce confessions (obviously I reject this, but let's assume it for argument's sake), deniers are still left with the perplexing problem of numerous *non-coercive* perpetrator confessions to the Holocaust.

Answer to that objection: A deal best summarized by the Jewish prosecutor Robert Kempner as follows :

"If I could save my own neck, I wouldn't stop at a little perjury."

https://postimg.cc/4KhkKQS1

How do you explain these and many other non-coercive confessions? Imagine you were falsely accused of monstrous crimes, like murdering children. Perhaps you could imagine "confessing" to these crimes under torture or other forms of coercion. But could you imagine "confessing" to them in a private journal or private letter or diary or memoir?

Diaries and letters are easily forged or altered. For instance, John Charteris (the chief of British intelligence during WWI) boasted in 1925
about a forged diary to be planted on the dead body of a German soldier in order to prove the existence of the notorious German corpse factories (the biggest hoax of Allied propaganda lies during the 1st World War).

[greatmystery]

A lot of good points have been brought up. The non-coercive confessions have been explained as far as I'm concerend. I'm anxious to see HistorySpeak's rebuttals.

[Hektor]

Even if we assume that Nuremberg was a conspiracy to forge evidence and coerce confessions (obviously I reject this, but let's assume it for argument's sake), deniers are still left with the perplexing problem of numerous *non-coercive* perpetrator confessions to the Holocaust.
.....

Can you give us an example were a supposed "perpetrator" did a "confessions to the Holocaust"? Then we can look whether this was "non-coercive" or not.


Well Nuremberg (IMT) was by those engaging in it an continuance of Allied war effort against Germany. Since a number of it, you can of course call it a conspiracy, just a very open one.

The accused also did not "confess to the Holocaust" nor in any extermination activity. There idea during them in office that the policy was to intern Jews during the war (put them under lockdown, if you want) and physically remove them from the German sphere of influence. The accused testified quite openly about what they did and to some degree of detail. From that evidence it becomes rather obvious that the Holocaust (extermination by gas chambers, plan to kill all Jews in Europe) malicious mythologizing. The Allied prosecutors had actually not the means to contradict that testimony in any serious way.

In the process many of the accused were however tricked into believing the scam. The means of this were the propaganda movies made by psychological warfare units (evidence from the "liberation of the camps"). Too bad that nobody conversant with history still believes that those movies in any way do prove any extermination program, gas chambers, etc. whatsoever. Snippets from the meager conditions during the last month before capitulation of the Wehrmacht were repossessed and rearranged to become "evidence for Nazi atrocities".... Meanwhile we are dealing with what happens to ill-fated prisoners, when the power that imprisoned them collapses over month. In fact the evidence points to many prisoners being still well-fed and healthy. Now why would that be the case, if the purpose of their imprisonment was "extermination"?

As for testimony/confession. There are various reasons why it is given by prisoners/accused/suspects etc. It is almost never non-coercive. It also frequently is false. It's more likely to be false, when there is lots of public/political pressure on those involved to yield results that favor their side or superiors. Physical coercion may play a role, psychological force is however decisive in this.

Just spoke to a policeman on this asking him, if they have false confessions. "Yes, and a lot of those" was the answer.

Coming back to the above, I assume that you believe that Jews were deported to camps in order to be gassed there. You insist there are confessions for this. Can you give details on this about one Jew being gassed at what place and time together with such a confession? Please refer the document for this. Because, if you haven't got such a document. Then all we are dealing is is slanderous rumors, gas libel, if you want.

[Lamprecht]

Can you give us an example were a supposed "perpetrator" did a "confessions to the Holocaust"?

Nobody can confess the Holocaust because it is not the Holocaust itself speaking. A confession is when someone admits guilt for something they themselves have done. So saying "Yes Jews were gassed, but I am not responsible" is not even a confession in the first place.

But yes, I do agree that HistorySpeaks should show us the exact text of these so-called "Confessions" he's referring to in the OP.

[Hektor]

Can you give us an example were a supposed "perpetrator" did a "confessions to the Holocaust"?

Nobody can confess the Holocaust because it is not the Holocaust itself speaking. A confession is when someone admits guilt for something they themselves have done. So saying "Yes Jews were gassed, but I am not responsible" is not even a confession in the first place.

But yes, I do agree that HistorySpeaks should show us the exact text of these so-called "Confessions" he's referring to in the OP.

Indeed, that's why asking for a confession would have to be specific to begin with. But then they'd sit with the problem that there is no corpses, no murder weapon no conclusive evidence whatsoever. You get something like during witchcraft trials... That just btw. worked with apparently non-coercive confessions as well. Testimony was all they could convincingly come up with. Sometimes they at least had corpses or dead cows. But that's about it.

[Archie]

Where is the source for this supposed Mufti quote? Let's see it. Presumably it's in Arabic.

[Hektor]

Where is the source for this supposed Mufti quote? Let's see it. Presumably it's in Arabic.

The story was in the news a few years ago:
https://time.com/4084301/hitler-grand-mufi-1941/
https://www.hoover.org/research/mufti-and-holocaust
https://www.yadvashem.org/blog/adhering ... caust.html

But it seems to be more about Netanyahu blaming the Mufti for the Holocaust, deflecting from 'Hitler's guilt'... And that can not be. It's blasphemy to say Hitler isn't the most evil person in history, since this would deprive the Hitler2.0. figure from it's magical powers.

[Hieldner]

For example, take Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jersualem and Nazi collaborator who spent the war in Berlin.

He was a major political figure. Politicians will say all kinds of things (as some observers point out, these are mostly lies) to influence people and gain power. Since the propaganda apparatus of the major world powers promoted the Holocaust myth, he would have had good reason to go along with the programme. See my post below viewtopic.php?f=2&t=14564&start=15#p110379.

Yet Stalin did not mention the alleged Holocaust of the Jews in a single word in his voluminous works. In 1941 he said something along the lines that there were pogroms by the National Socialists comparable to the Tsarist period, and then absolutely nothing, just as some of his contemporary military leaders or heads of state did in their memoirs. Why?

Consider also Adolf Eichmann. In his private papers (which he wrote in Argentina, before being captured by the Israelis), he wrote that Hitler had ordered the extermination of the Jews. Why would he lie about this in a private journal? (And before you say muh forgery, note that David Irving is the one who found many of these incriminating Eichmann papers.).

This does not necessarily mean that they are genuine, and if Eichmann wrote them himself, it does not mean that he wrote them before his capture and without being forced to do so.

Finally, consider Albert Speer, Hitler's Minister of Armaments and the so-called "Good Nazi." He denied knowing about the Holocaust at Nuremberg! But in a private letter to a Belgian resister,* he admitted that he had been present at the Posen speeches, in which, according to Speer, Himmler said "that all Jews would be killed". Why would Speer (who always denied knowledge of the Holocaust *publicly*) say he knew about the extermination of the Jews in a private letter?

A newly discovered letter by Adolf Hitler's architect and armaments minister Albert Speer offers proof that he knew about the plans to exterminate the Jews, despite his repeated claims to the contrary.

Writing in 1971 to Hélène Jeanty, the widow of a Belgian resistance leader, Speer admitted that he had been at a conference where Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS and Gestapo, had unveiled plans to exterminate the Jews in what is known as the Posen speech.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/mar/13/secondworldwar.kateconnolly

So this document actually comes from leading Belgian resistance circles and was “discovered” only 36 years later. It has been discussed here viewtopic.php?t=14655 and here viewtopic.php?t=4286. Since there was regular contact by letter, Speer’s style of writing and language was known to those involved, including the “discoverers,” and could therefore be imitated. How do you know Speer wrote this?

It is on the same level as this joke from a “letter recently discovered” in 2017.

Adolf Hitler ate a meal of pasta and tomato sauce hours before he killed himself.

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/hitlers-last-ever-meal-revealed-11573513

It strikes me as rather odd that both Holocaust promoters and revisionists simply accept as genuine documents whose authenticity cannot be independently confirmed. The completely fraudulent Hitler diaries are a testament to the fact that the Allied forgers and their employees go to extreme lengths to try to shape history to their liking.