Archie wrote: ↑Wed Oct 23, 2024 6:10 am
SanityCheck wrote: ↑Mon Oct 21, 2024 2:08 am
I think you missed the point regarding Allied interrogations. They were much wider than a focus on the extermination of the Jews, while many German officials and officers were extremely happy to talk. Speer's interrogations by the Strategic Bombing Survey is one example.
Hoettl is another excellent example, since he wrote up very extensive reports and was very forthcoming on a wide range of issues, including Kaltenbrunner's stance to peace feelers and the Austrian bid for independence in 1944-45 (planned, rather than real). Lots and lots of detail, to be taken with the usual caution and cross referenced extensively. But he absolutely knew Kaltenbrunner, Eichmann, and many other key players in the RSHA, and had a good general overview of intelligence activities across Europe from working with RSHA Amt VI. Hoettl was a gold mine for all kinds of topics, by 1945 standards, and knew he had nothing to fear since he hadn't been in a police role, and was being exceedingly cooperative.
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No one is suggesting that every statement is 100% made up. Even the most fanciful of the survivor memoirs usually have a lot of correct factual information. The major disputed points like the gas chambers are what we care about. The idea is that the statements are systematically distorted on those points.
It's a little surprising to me that you are defending Hoettl's credibility. For a reminder, this is what was in his statement (PS-2638, quick Google translate)
According to my knowledge, Eichmann was at that time the head of the department in the IV (Gestapo) of the Reich Security Main Office and had also been commissioned by Himmler to register Jews in all European countries and transport them to Germany. Eichmann was strongly influenced by Romania's withdrawal from the war at that time. That was why he had come to me to find out about the military situation, which I received daily from the Hungarian Honved (War) Ministry and the commander of the Waffen SS in Hungary. He expressed his conviction that the war was now lost for Germany and that he personally had no further chance. He knew that he was considered one of the main war criminals by the United Nations because he was responsible for the deaths of millions of Jews. I asked him how many that was, to which he replied that the number was a great secret of the Reich, but that he would tell me because I, as a historian, must also be interested in it and he would probably not return from his mission to Romania. He had just prepared a report for Himmler because he wanted to know the exact number of Jews killed. Based on his information, he came to the following conclusion:
About four million Jews were killed in the various extermination camps, while another two million died in other ways, the majority of whom were killed by shooting by the Security Police during the campaign against Russia.
Himmler was not satisfied with the report because, in his opinion, the number of Jews killed must be greater than 6 million. Himmler had declared that he would send a man from his statistical office to Eichmann so that he could write a new report based on Eichmann's material, in which the exact number would be worked out.
This is making some very specific claims. It says Eichmann prepared a report for Himmler that found that 6M had been killed, along with the 4M + 2M breakdown. Eichmann then told Hoettl about this.
Where is this report? And where is the follow-up report that Himmler ordered from his own statistical office? The only thing like this that I am aware of is the Korherr report which was prepared much earlier in the war.
The line about Himmler being disappointed because six million just wasn't enough Jews killed is a rather absurd caricature.
Regarding Hoettl's reputation, see Weber.
https://ihr.org/journal/v20n5p25_weber-html
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.”
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.”
Yeah, I'm not going to accept as a source for the six million a second-hand recollection of a report that doesn't exist coming from some spook who was known to be unreliable.
And yet one can cross-check a lot of the material Hoettl provided in his 1945 interrogations by 3rd US Army as well as at IMT against documents and other eyewitnesses. That is the general point - only relying on a single witness is not the conventional method for law, intelligence work, history or anything, so neither is attacking a single witness going to be especially productive.
The next point is that if one is alleging a conspiracy of either active or telepathic fabrication, as 'revisionists' inevitably do at some point, then it matters where and when the interrogations happened. Hoettl was talking about Eichmann as one of many topics in August 1945 while under the control of 3rd US Army. He was then transferred to IMT Nuremberg as a material witness who could help with the case against Kaltenbrunner. So the IMT interrogation leading to the affidavit cited in court and then in the judgement did not come out of nowhere.
One needs to break down the elements and see what else was being stated by other witnesses. Rudolf Mildner, also an Austrian Security Police officer, had fingered Eichmann as the organiser/coordinator of the deportations and extermination of Jews already on 23 June 1945 (this is taken over wholesale as 2376-PS, he was also interrogated at IMT). Dieter Wisliceny gave outlines of the entire process and Eichmann's role on 25 and 27 August 1945 (noted in Stangneth, Eichmann Before Jerusalem). The 27 August 1945 statement, a paraphrased summary by the interrogator, has Wisliceny noting that the published totals then in circulation, i.e. 5-6 million, were about right according to his knowledge. Wisliceny then broke down the numbers in a very detailed way in his IMT interrogations.
Wisliceny as well as Hans Aumeier had separately pointed to Blobel as supervising the exhumation and cremation of bodies, both in August 1945 before IMT. Hoettl only had hearsay about this and spoke at IMT of a Kommando 2500, a pretty clear garbling of 1005.
Hoettl was discussing the selection of personnel for the Einsatzkommandos as early as 9 July 1945 in an overview report on the RSHA. It's this document which contains other examples of insider knowledge, for example his discussion of the compilation and reception of the SD reports (which we now know as the Meldungen aus dem Reich) was well-informed and fits with everything else known, in the German wartime documentation and postwar testimonies.
Hoettl's statement about his conversation with Eichmann actually fits the known documentation a little better than might be thought at first glance. Himmler 100% did express dissatisfaction with RSHA reporting and in the 2 October 1945 interrogation that produced Hoettl's affidavit, Hoettl correctly noted that 'Himmler further ordered the man from his statistical office should go over to Eichmann and check the whole figures and then send out a new report'. That is exactly what happened: we know the results as the Korherr report, whose conclusion referred to a reduction of the Jewish population of Europe by a minimum of 4 million.
https://catalog.archives.gov/id/57323635?objectPage=47
Aside from Wisliceny reporting a similar discussion with Eichmann about a headline total of 5 million, we also have Hoess in 1946 fingering Eichmann as the source for his initial claim of 2.5 million total deported to Auschwitz, which was significantly higher than the country-level breakdown of actions he had been giving ever since his first formal interrogation by the British in March 1946. Hoess repeated this breakdown fairly consistently and eventually realised this was right and the 2.5 million figure was wrong. But the 2.5 million figure is very close to the currently accepted number for deportations to extermination camps (topping out at 2.6 million for ABCMST in almost all calculations) and would have fitted with the data Eichmann had regarding ongoing deportations in 1943-44 over and above the Korherr report and 2nd report's numbers.
Horst Grell in the Foreign Office also noted Eichmann saying similar remarks about being high on the list of war criminals and being responsible for six million enemies of the Reich, in 1944, but this was a statement from the time of Eichmann's trial.
One can regard some or all of these numbers attributed to Eichmann whether by Hoettl, Wisliceny, Hoess or Grell as exaggerated, misremembered or influenced by later estimates, but the scenario described by Hoettl of Eichmann recounting the contretemps over RSHA statistics and the commissioning of Korherr's report is entirely accurate.
While Eichmann's absence in 1945-46 meant he became something of a 'ghost' to be invoked by other SS and a scapegoat who was being attributed greater responsibility than was perhaps the case, the pattern of conversations recounted suggests that in 1944 Eichmann was indeed being relatively forthcoming. So was Wisliceny, who leaked a lot of details to Kasztner. For Eichmann to have bandied around different numbers at different times is also plausible. The 4 million figure was for sure in the Korherr report as a total, but not identical to the extermination camps (this was too high). Eichmann would have known that Korherr's figures only captured part of the killings in the occupied Soviet territories so to throw out an estimate of 2 million is not implausible.
As a well-connected RSHA official Eichmann might even have received reports on the death toll claims in the neutral and Allied press, which were edging to 3 million by late 1943 (Der Stuermer responded to one such estimate in the Swiss press by saying 'this is not a Jewish lie), and other papers were talking of 5 million Jews being eliminated from Europe in the first half of 1944 (Danziger Vorposten). The temptation for Eichmann to boast and exaggerate or round up canot be ignored, either. So throwing around mega totals makes sense, even if Eichmann then reacted like a scalded cat to how these numbers had been turned against him.
Hoettl's comment that Eichmann gave him the estimate as he thought Hoettl would be interested as a trained historian is also plausible. It's certainly ironic that six million has thus gone down in history and in most discussions as 'the' number, even if detailed breakdowns point towards five million as more certain, the Wisliceny-Hilberg total.
There are other examples in Hoettl's interrogations at IMT where known details have shifted. He refers to Eichmann chairing multi-agency conferences on the Jewish question, which was basically true for the March and October 1942 Final Solution conferences and a garbling of Wannsee, but Hoettl's hearsay/hazy memory dated the conference to 1943. No such multi-agency conference from 1943-44 is known from other sources, there were at best practical transport planning conferences (as with the Hungarian action) since the demarcation lines had been resolved as best as they could be in 1942.
Hoettl's affidavit is not however a source on its own for a total of six million Jews murdered by the Nazis. Nor was it used as such; the presentation on the 'persecution of the Jews' and the IMT judgement's summary of this theme used Hoettl as a shorthand or capstone to sum up the numbers coming through from other exhibits and witnesses about different regions, actions and camps. All of which taken together supported a high total.
The evidence in principle available by the end of 1945 across Europe, if synthesised from a God's eye perspective, i.e. combining all the sources and not just those known to any one court, investigation or person, was all pointing in the same direction. Subsequent scrutiny from a serious perspective never pushed this below 4.2 million, and that was from Reitlinger 71 years ago; the post-Reitlinger and Hilberg research just thickens up what was theoretically knowable in the 1940s. Hoettl's affidavit was certainly referenced in early literature - by Poliakov uncritically and critically by Reitlinger and Hilberg - but by the 1960s the six million figure was so universal, one might as well complain about Giden Hausner invoking 'six million accusers' at the Eichmann trial.
I still come back to Hoettl passing on his garbled recounting of Eichmann telling him about the Korherr report: Hoettl could not possibly have known about this except hearing it from Eichmann. Who introduced the extrapolations to get to 4 + 2M = 6M and why are trivial issues, unless one is a 6M obsessive, in which case congratulations, you're right, it wasn't 6M, now deal with the evidence pointing to the real number, please.