Mainstream media claims Hitler Order is proven, citing interview which says the opposite | Bruno Streckenbach tapes

[Wetzelrad]

Historians like to claim that Adolf Hitler explicitly ordered extermination of the Jews. This is said to have happened in October 1941 or perhaps January 1942 or some other time. The order has never been located, and accounts differ, so no one really knows. Top news sites now claim a newly released interview tape with Bruno Streckenbach proves the existence of the Führerbefehl, or "Hitler Order".

The Times: Hitler gave first order for Holocaust, SS commander reveals
The Jewish Chronicle: New Nazi recordings confirm the Holocaust was ordered by Hitler

Is this true? Let's see the material for ourselves. There are two two-sided interview tapes: 1977 January 17 and 1977 July 18. They are poorly transcribed and translated, so I apologize for the many errors. I am writing only about the first tape, side A, which begins mid-conversation. Already at 56 seconds Streckenbach said of Erwin Schulz:

And one day he sent me a letter from his deployment in Russia like a courier and said, "If you can arrange it, ask me to come to you. I want to speak to you." And he came to me in Berlin and told me about Jewish ships [Judenschiffen].

That last word is clearly a mistake in the transcription, and it's a pretty critical one since it tells us what the topic of discussion here is. Someone who speaks the language will have to clarify. I suggest "Juden auswerfen" to replace it. In that case, they were talking about expulsion, not murder, which sets the stage for understanding or misunderstanding the rest of the interview. He continued from there:

Erwin Schulz, who loved being a soldier and the military, was so soft at heart after the Kurdwitz cradle, that is probably why he was pushed aside, he was simply completely thoughtful. I said, "You're crazy. That was out of the question. That's murder [Mord]. You can't, as a representative of a civilized state, send [hinschicken] people there every now and then in an organized manner in the 20th century. So that's how it should be. Like that." The trembling man, as trembling as I am now, Schulz was trembling back then, and he said, "What do we do?" I say, "I can't do anything, I can't get you out of there, you know, you know the mad order".

As garbled as this passage is, it's clear that Streckenbach was retelling how surprised he was to hear for the first time about an action against the Jews. Does it make sense for Streckenbach to only learn about this here, from a lower-ranked soldier in the Einsatzgruppen, especially when he is supposed to be the authority responsible for having communicated the Hitler Order to the Einsatzgruppen and for helping to carry out that order himself? Obviously not.

He said "That's murder." Is this a smoking gun? No. "That's murder" is something normally said in reaction to something that is not outright murder. He mentions sending people away, which may be a reference to expulsions. A likely explanation for this remark is that Schulz was involved in a march or train trip that caused many Jews to die.

From there, Streckenbach described a conversation with Reinhard Heydrich in which Heydrich told them Hitler had issued an order which had to be followed. This happened in August 1941, at least two months before the alleged Hitler Order to commit the Holocaust was given, so it can't be that. A roughly parallel description of all these events is given on the Wikipedia page for Erwin Schulz. That page claims Schulz was responsible for executions in the numbers of tens, hundreds, or thousands. Logically, the order Heydrich referred to must have pertained to those executions or possibly to other tasks given to his Einsatzgruppe, not to some theoretical total extinction order.

Following that, Schulz left the Einsatzgruppen. The story continues at 03:44:

So, and then it was over. I never heard anything again. When was the conference? Did I show the Russians for the first time? And all such stories.

Heidemann: There was nothing about liquidation at that point.

No, there was no talk of liquidation at all. No.

Heidemann: Even when Göring-Heidrich called for the solution of the Jewish question to be pushed forward, he didn't mean liquidation, but rather deportation.

Yes, yes [overlapping with above].

This is a rather explicit denial. The interview continues on like this with various denials from Streckenbach and the people he was speaking with. Streckenbach denied or pled ignorance to the supposed Hitler Order several times. Here's one more excerpt from 28:48:

Who did it? Who said it?

Heidemann: Yes, I mean, I just said that as an example for you. Not because it keeps coming up.

Yes, of course.

Heidemann: Whether the Führer knew about it or not.

The topic will not be settled.

Heidemann: It will never be settled. It will never go away, because, of course, if there's nothing in writing, Irving will be assumed. You tell him that now, if we know, then he'll say, "Yes, and?" These are people who told it because we were right, because it hasn't been in writing for so long. Will this still be discussed in 50 years or 100 years?

What a prescient comment. David Irving's name comes up here. All this is being said in 1977, two years after Irving's Hitler und seine Feldherren, which (if I'm not mistaken) was the first time he published his explosive hypothesis that Hitler was ignorant of the Holocaust. That Irving's name is used here makes it obvious that this entire conversation developed out of the greater public debate around Irving's hypothesis. It thus becomes totally illogical to claim that what was said here constitutes proof opposite that hypothesis.

The Times article linked above actually refutes its own headline in the body. Streckenbach is quoted as asking the question "did he give the order?" As such he did not know the Hitler Order was given.

In conclusion, the headlines are totally fake and risibly so, for these reasons:

1. The story is mere hearsay 35 years removed.
2. The storyteller was 75 years old and admitted to memory troubles.
3. It's not even new info, just an alternate perspective of known events.
4. It refers to conversations had in August of 1941, prior to the supposed Hitler Order.
5. Streckenbach learned about executions from the lower-ranked Schulz instead of a higher-up.
6. Streckenbach denied and pled ignorant to the supposed Hitler Order.

[Wetzelrad]

The remainder of the tapes are uninteresting to me except one part on July tape side B, beginning at around eight minutes in. There, Streckenbach explained that at the Einsatzgruppen Trial he was blamed as the one who transmitted the Hitler Order because he was assumed dead.

Alfred Streim, who prosecuted Nazi crimes, explained things similarly:

1. Ohlendorf's testimony as witness before the International Military Tribunal and his defense in the Einsatzgruppen trial that the order for the destruction of the Jews was transmitted by Streckenbach at the assembly point prior to the invasion of the Soviet Union is false.

2. The farewell letter of one of those condemned to death in the Einsatzgruppen trial shows that Ohlendorf posited this assertion as part of his defense argument, contending that if the defendants had not been under such orders from the beginning, they would be sentenced to death as perpetrators. The letter also shows that Ohlendorf, using threats and promises, persuaded his codefendants to adopt this line of defense. All but two complied with Ohlendorf's demand. Streckenbach was designated as the person who transmitted the "Führer Order" because it was assumed he was dead; actually he was a prisoner in the Soviet Union and returned to Germany in 1955.

"The Tasks of the Einsatzgruppen" by Alfred Streim, published in Simon Wiesenthal Center Annual vol.4 (1987), p.313

Streim and Streckenbach appear to have had the same understanding of this. (Putting aside the fact that Streim believed the Hitler Order was given at some later date.) Crucially, both said the Hitler Order was confessed to falsely as part of a joint defense strategy, a scheme that Otto Ohlendorf thought would earn them lenient sentences. Ohlendorf was in fact executed, but most of his codefendants were not.

It would be useful to have a good quality translation of Streckenbach's version of these events.

[Archie]

Historians like to claim that Adolf Hitler explicitly ordered extermination of the Jews. This is said to have happened in October 1941 or perhaps January 1942 or some other time.

Nick Terry's preferred dating is Dec 1941 right after the Hitler declared war on the USA. I believe this thesis was first advanced by Christian Gerlach (see his 1998 paper "The Wannsee Conference, the Fate of German Jews, and Hitler's Decision in Principle to Exterminate All European Jews"). Most of the online anti-revisionists I have encountered seem to defer to Nick on this point. The evidence cited in support of this consists of some passages from the Hans Frank diaries and the Goebbels diaries, but these merely indicate that Hitler's remarks around this time echoed the language of his Jan 1939 "prophecy" which Hitler repeated on various occasions.

Christopher Browning favors the somewhat earlier Oct 1941 dating.

Older works often say summer 1941 or even spring 1941. The IMT judgment says summer 1941. This is what you see in the earlier "intentionalist" works.

As far as the value of this particular testimony, obviously such a major thing as when Hitler gave the extermination order cannot rest on the authority of a fairly obscure person making statements decades after the fact.

That is a good point about this coinciding with the controversy over Irving's thesis. This may well have been the motivation for this fellow to "come forward."

In the thread below, I summarized an article by Martin Broszat, "Hitler and the Genesis of the 'Final Solution': An Assessment of David Irving's Theses." Naturally, Broszat doesn't agree with Irving, but he makes some interesting concessions. It gives a sense of the reaction to Irving at that time.
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[Joe Splink]

David Cole posted a vid of Hilberg admitting there was no evidence linking Hitler to the hoax -

[Stubble]

At the einsatzgruppen trials, the lack of an order was used to hang them.

At the eichmann trial, his saying there was an order that he was following was used to hang him.

These positions conflict, and yet, they were used to dance men at the end of a rope.

The reason they can't find an order is because there never was one. The purges, the reprisals and the decimations were part of the horror of war and not part of a campaign of extermination, as an extermination campaign never existed.

Every death is a tragedy, in it's own right. Taking those deaths and putting them into one column and then calling it an extermination campaign is disingenuous at best.