Archie wrote: ↑Sun Oct 20, 2024 4:20 pm
I meant statement in a broad sense, not necessarily an affidavit. Documents from 1943 would probably be in the form of a memo, letter, diary, whatever.
The point is that the context of the postwar statements has to be considered. They had just lost the war and were under military occupation and denazification and were being threatened with execution for war crimes. If you're a guy like Hoettl, for example, you tell the Allies what they want to hear.
But this is where you're assuming the consequent. How do we know the Allies wanted to hear about the extermination of the Jews? They were busily interrogating thousands of captured German officials and military personnel, who were telling their interrogators about all kinds of things.
From a military intelligence perspective, reconstructing how the SS intelligence service worked and hearing about its operations was for sure a higher priority than all the stuff about war crimes. Moreover, there were many other SD and RSHA officers who impressed the Allies, especially the Americans, with insights about the oncoming new enemy, the Soviet Union, to the point where they were recruited like Hoettl to work for US intelligence. Others like Karl Wolff were negotiating with US intelligence to bring about an end to the war and being less than forthcoming about their involvement in or knowledge of the Final Solution; this was often being overlooked for utilitarian ends. There certainly were 'quid pro quos' where leading Nazis like Wolff were allowed to slither through and be unprosecuted, in exchange for favours rendered (like bringing about surrender in Italy), useful intelligence or other insights.
Hoettl like Schellenberg and others in SS intelligence need not have feared closer scrutiny if they could claim and soon enough prove they'd been SD only and not Gestapo or Security Police. One can argue that at least some of this class of SS officer may have realised it was a good idea to point the fingers at Amt IV officials like Eichmann to throw the scent off Amt VI officials like Hoettl. But this is fairly weak tea.
One could make a better case for saying that Allied interrogators may have had pro forma questions about war crimes in a general fishing expedition, but it's not really plausible to think that interrogators automatically knew who Eichmann was when Hoettl first made his statement. 'Oh, you were in Hungary?' 'Yes, doing intelligence stuff, not like that Eichmann'. For sure, they would have known about the Hungarian action and persecutions of Jews in Hungary since that was common knowledge, widely reported in the media (and also substantiated by ever increasing amounts of hard evidence, contra Butz).
If one was going to get a Nazi to confirm 6M as a figure, then someone else would have been a much better bet. Wisliceny happily confirmed 5M and was hardly marginalised. Someone like Ohlendorf or Kaltenbrunner would have been better still: more senior. Bach-Zelewsi and other SS generals could also have filled the role, if anyone wants to consider arm-twisting instead of this inane 'tell the Allies what they want to hear' telepathy.
In the end, Hoettl wasn't that much of a fount of detail, unlike Wisliceny, who was an actual 'Eichmann man' and true insider, with a genuine grasp of the numbers the SS operated with across different countries, as he had spent time in at least three of them. His interrogations distinguish very clearly between what he knew personally and what he had heard. Wisliceny was heard at IMT as well, Hoettl's affidavit thrown in as a kind of exclamation mark, and offered the number which stuck, because it was also being reported elsewhere, and the other evidence heard at IMT seemed to support it (try adding up the claims for different camps for deaths of 'people' and then realise how 6M Jews would have seemed reasonable as a fraction).
The problem with 'tell the Allies what they want to hear' is this breaks down with the more direct eyewitnesses. Did the French really want to hear about Globocnik, Operation Reinhard and Belzec from Kurt Gerstein? That was information he had basically volunteered, since his SS role did not necessarily connect him with any of that. French interrogators would not have been looking for such stories, if they would have had a preference it might be to hear more about Auschwitz since that was where French Jews were more typically deported. The French in any case knew next to nothing about camps that far into Poland, so they cannot have 'coached' Gerstein. Where he got these stories from is still 100% unclear from a 'revisionist' perspective - there isn't any reconstruction of how he could have known about the Reinhard camps, Wirth, and so on.
So as soon as one moves beyond the headlines - and it's still unclear what headlines were in circulation in occupied Germany, Stars and Stripes, etc, in mid-1945 when some of the SS start spilling their guts - 'tell them what they want to hear' ceases to be a credible explanation.
