- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_HolocaustThe most commonly cited death toll is the six million given by Adolf Eichmann to SS member Wilhelm Höttl, who signed an affidavit mentioning this figure in 1945.
Haaretz: Holocaust Facts: Where Does the Figure of 6 Million Victims Come From?:
- https://www.haaretz.com/jewish/holocaus ... -1.5319546The number seems to have first been mentioned by Dr. Wilhelm Hoettl, an Austrian-born official in the Third Reich and a trained historian who served in a number of senior positions in the SS.
The Trial of Adolf Eichmann - Session 87: https://web.archive.org/web/20200105122 ... 87-06.html
DR. SERVATIUS: "But in his testimony, Hoettl stated that you gave him various figures. You are familiar with his statement. Would you please comment."
ACCUSED [EICHMANN]: "If Hoettl is here using figures, I must comment that no one received such figures from me, because I myself had none. In this connection it is odd that everyone claims to have received figures from me - one person says it was five million, the other six million, and as far as his concentration camp was concerned, Hoess talks of two and a half million. I am supposed to have given this [2,5 million] figure to Gluecks [according to Hoess]. But I did not know of these figures - Gluecks is the person who was first and foremost aware of them, not I."
"This is all idle talk which was bandied about at Nuremberg, or wherever. I did not give any such figures, for the simple reason that I did not have them."
From Eichmann Interrogated: Transcripts from the Archives of the Israeli Police (Book by Jochen von Lang), p. 104:
LESS: You say you had nothing to do with the killing?
EICHMANN: That's right.
LESS: But you delivered the people to be killed.
EICHMANN: Yes, sir, that is true, insofar as I received orders to evacuate them. But not all the people I evacuated were killed. I had no knowledge whatever of who was killed and who was not.
Mark Weber on the issue (Wilhelm Höttl and the Elusive ‘Six Million’): http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v20/v20n5p25_Weber.html
The legendary figure was fixed in history at the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg, where it was cited by chief British prosecutor Sir Hartley Shawcross in his closing address, and by the Allied judges in their final judgment. / 7
This figure was not the result of any careful investigation, research, or calculation. The only specific evidence presented for it to the Nuremberg Tribunal was the hearsay testimony of former SS officer Wilhelm Höttl (sometimes spelled Hoettl), who said that he recalled it from a remark by Adolf Eichmann, the wartime head of the Jewish affairs section of Himmler's Reich Security Main Office (RSHA). Höttl, who also served with the RSHA during the war, stated in an affidavit dated November 26, 1945, and provided to the U.S. prosecution at Nuremberg, that Eichmann confided to him in August 1944 that some four million Jews had been killed in the “various extermination camps,” and another two million had been killed in other ways, mostly in shootings by Einsatzgruppen forces in the course of the military campaign in Russia. / 8
Eichmann himself, it should be noted, later called the Höttl story “nonsense,” vigorously denied ever having made the alleged remark, and speculated that Höttl may have picked up the figure from a radio or newspaper report. / 9
[And about Hoetll's trustworthiness:]
The recently released U.S. intelligence documents on Höttl, and the U.S. government report about his postwar career, confirm what some revisionist scholars have contended for years. In his book The Hoax of the Twentieth Century, first published in 1976, Dr. Arthur Butz cited sources that were publicly available even in the 1950s to show that, during the war, Höttl had gotten into trouble more than once with SS authorities. His involvement in a shady Polish land deal led in 1942 to an SS investigation of his activities. An internal SS report characterized him as “dishonest, scheming, fawning,... a real hoaxer,” and concluded that he was not fit even for SS membership, let alone a sensitive intelligence service position. / 11 Höttl was, accordingly, demoted. But his luck improved after his friend and fellow Austrian, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, was appointed in 1943 to head the RSHA. It seems that Kaltenbrunner protected him from a second disciplinary action, this one for misappropriation of security service funds.
[...]
In April 2001 the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency made public thousands of pages of long-suppressed documents from its files of major German wartime figures, including the bulging Höttl file. Along with the release of these documents, two U.S. government employees wrote and issued a detailed report about Höttl based on those recently declassified CIA files, which sheds revealing light on his wartime and postwar career. This report, entitled “Analysis of the Name File of Wilhelm Hoettl,” was written by two “historical researchers” of the U.S. government's “Interagency Working Group” (IWG), Miriam Kleiman and Robert Skwirot. / 10
These documents establish that Höttl was a completely unreliable informant who routinely fabricated information to please those who were willing to pay him. In their report, the two U.S. government researchers write: “Hoettl's name file is approximately 600 pages, one of the largest of those released to the public so far. The size of the file owes to Hoettl's postwar career as a peddler of intelligence, good and bad, to anyone who would pay him. Reports link Hoettl to twelve different intelligence services, including the U.S., Yugoslav, Austrian, Israeli, Romanian, Vatican, Swiss, French, West German, Russian, Hungarian and British.”
Soon after his arrest by the Americans in May 1945, Höttl began working for the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the predecessor to the Central Intelligence Agency, and then for the U.S. Army's Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC). As the two U.S. government researchers put it: “Upon his arrest, Hoettl played to the interests of his captors ...” It was during this period, while he was secretly working for American intelligence, that Höttl provided his historic and damning “six million” affidavit for submission by the American prosecution at the Allied-run tribunal at Nuremberg.
Höttl benefited from his readiness to tell those who paid him what they wanted to hear, but this eventually proved his undoing. All the same, it took several years for U.S. intelligence to firmly conclude that it was being had.
In June 1949 one U.S. intelligence official cautioned against using Höttl for any reason, calling him “a man of such low character and poor political record that his use for intelligence activities, regardless of how profitable they may be, is a short-sighted policy by the U.S.” In August 1950, CIA messages referred to Höttl as a “notorious fabricator [of] intelligence.” A U.S. Army CIC report in early 1952 deemed his information useless, noting that Höttl “is involved in extensive intelligence activities for almost anyone who is willing to purchase his findings.” In April 1952 his reports were called “worthless and possibly inflated or fabricated.”
Interestingly, numerous U.S. intelligence reports identify connections between Höttl and Simon Wiesenthal, the well-known “Nazi hunter.” One U.S. Army CIC document described Wiesenthal as the “Chief Austrian Agent of the Israeli Intelligence Bureau.” A U.S. Army CIC report in January 1950 noted that for the last three or four months Wiesenthal had “recruited the services of Wilhelm Höttl,” and had hired him to gather information for reports by the “Nazi hunter.”
In July 1952, when U.S. Army intelligence finally broke completely with Höttl, a letter on U.S. Army stationery warned: “Dr. Höttl has long been known to this headquarters and other allied military organizations in Austria as a fabricator of intelligence information. His reports normally consist of a fine cobweb of fact, heavily padded with lies, deceit, conjecture and other false types of information. This organization will have absolutely nothing to do with Dr. Höttl or any members of his present entourage. He is persona non grata to the American, French and British elements in Austria.”
In their report on his postwar career, U.S. government historical researchers Kleiman and Skwirot conclude: “The voluminous materials in Wilhelm Höttl's personality file ... trace the activities of a notorious intelligence peddler and fabricator, who successfully convinced one intelligence service after another of his value, and then proceeded to lose such support.”
Indeed, and as already noted, Höttl “successfully convinced” the American and British prosecutors, and the judges, of the inter-Allied tribunal in Nuremberg, and many others around the world ever since, that German authorities killed six million Jews during the Second World War. And even though U.S. intelligence services and U.S. government researchers have, finally, as it were, discredited him, Höttl's most historically important claim remains widely, and even officially accepted.
DenierBud on Eichmann: http://www.bitchute.com/video/2I1vjfICL5zN/
