World War 2 Atrocities, Real and Imagined

A YOUNG GERMAN, Heinrich Roth, after gathering relevant information about the crematory in the city of Dortmund, reviewed the following data in an article in Unsere Arbeit (May 1974), the publication of a German youth group:

(1) Cremation of one body takes 2½ hours: 1,000 bodies, 2,500 hours or 104 days; 1,000,000 bodies, 104,000 days or 285 years. Assuming 100 incinerators in all concentration camps, the incineration of 1,000,000 bodies on a 10-hour working day would take more than five years. This calculation is based on gas-heated incinerators. Using coal, the operation would take much longer.

(2) Incineration of one corpse requires 20 cubic meters of gas. For 1,000,000 bodies, 20,000,000 cubic meters would be needed. If coal was used, 31,580 tons would be required.

(3) One body reduces to two kilograms of ashes. One million bodies would therefore produce 2,400 tons of ashes. Where did this mountain go?

Emil Aretz provides the following calculations in his book Hexeneinmaleins einer Luge (Witches’ Multiplication Table of a Lie). In 1933 there were 5,600,000 Jews in Europe (exclusive of Russia). Of these, 1,440,000 emigrated in the years 1933-45. As a result of the Polish partition and the occupation of Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia and Bessarabia, 1,300,000 fell into Russian hands. That left about 2,350, 000 Jews in the German sphere of influence, plus some 510,000 in neutral countries. Of these 286,000 died from natural causes or perished in consequence of bombardments or accidents, 61,000 were killed in combat and partisan warfare, 18,000 in the Warsaw uprising, 12,000 in the Lemberg uprising, 8,000 in the pogroms in the Baltic countries, Poland, Hungary and Yugoslavia, and 10,000 were sentenced and executed for espionage, partisan activities and sabotage. The Jewish war victims therefore total about 395,000.

Aretz then contends:

(1) No systematic extermination of Jews was ever planned. No order or instruction has ever been produced from the German authorities to the effect that the Jews were to be killed during transport or while they were in work or concentration camps.

(2) In no concentration camp, in or outside Germany proper, were there gas chambers, incinerators or crematories intended to destroy living people of any race.

This enormous mass of six million people, Aretz sums up, is supposed to have been gassed in a relatively short period of time by an insecticide and the bodies disposed of in complete secrecy by a few initiates, while the German high command and others responsible for the conduct of the war were completely unaware of what was happening.

According to the excellently documented study of Hans Rumpf, That Was the Bombing War (Gerhard Stalling, 1961), the attack on Lubeck on the nights of March 28 and 29, 1942, was the historical turning point of World War II. From then on it was the main objective of Allied air raids to attack German civilians and to destroy their houses with incendiary bombs, particularly in the most densely populated areas where the danger of fire was greatest. Flying in from the Baltic, 234 bombers attacked Lubeck for three hours. Besides the standard incendiary bombs, devices containing inflammable liquid were used on a large scale for the first time. The idea, according to the British study The RAF in the World War, was to discover to what extent a town could be destroyed by 234 airplanes with 304 tons of bombs of different composition. Lubeck was singled out, since its center dated from the Middle Ages and was for the most part composed of wood, which made it a good fire target. After Lubeck came the air raids on Rostock in April 1942; then the 1,000­ bomber raid on Cologne. In July and August 1943, 300 bombers of the American Air Force joined 2,500 RAF bombers in a raid on Hamburg. Thirty-seven thousand people were killed, and in some quarters more than one-third of the inhabitants perished in the flames. During the bombardment 7,000 young people died — 19% of the victims, and 10,000 children lost a father or mother. In Kassel, among 9,200 dead were 1,881 children under sixteen. Much greater human annihilation took place in Dresden. Estimates of the casualties ran into the hundreds of thousands, but exact figures could never be obtained because of the large numbers of refugees and because most of the dead bodies were mutilated beyond recognition.

Rumpf’s lowest estimate of the total death toll of all civilians killed by Allied air raids in World War II comes to 450,000. Of these 19% or 85,000 were young people, including 22,000 infants. Rumpf also charges that eighty of the most beautiful towns in the European heartland were deliberately destroyed by the bomber squadrons.

It has been claimed by the Allies that bombardments of civilians were started by the Germans in air attacks on Warsaw (Sept. 1939) and on Rotterdam (May 1940). In the case of Warsaw, which was not an open city, the population was warned twenty-four hours before the attack started. In the case of Rotterdam a German ultimatum was delivered while Dutch troops were resisting with great courage in the Battle of the Bridges in the center of the city. Rotterdam was no more of an open city than Warsaw, though the Allied media claimed it was at the time. Only recently a number of Dutch soldiers were honored for their heroic defense of Rotterdam.

The extent of the exaggeration of the Six Million myth can be compared to the exponential inflation of the number of victims after the bombardment of Rotterdam. The Rotterdam death toll was given as 30,000 by Holland’s former Secretary of State Van Kleffens in his book The Rape of the Netherlands (Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1940). In the Encyclopaedia Britannica it was given as 40,000. The real figure was about 1,000.

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Source: Instauration magazine, September 1979