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COMMANDANT OF AUSCHWITZ, Rudolf Hoess (London, 1960)
This book purports to be the testimony of Rudolf Hoess, the Commandant of Auschwitz from 1940
until his arrest by the British Army in 1945. Subjected to torture and brain-washing, 'his testimony at
Nuremberg was delivered in a mindless monotone as he stared blankly into space.' Even Reitlinger
regarded his testimony as hopelessly untrustworthy; a catalogue of wild exaggerations. These
included his declaration that 16,000 Jew a day were disposed of - which would have meant 13 million
in total!
Tortured, his statement appears in American-English idiom yet there is no evidence that Rudolf Hoess
could speak any English at all. Tried at Nuremberg and handed over to the Polish Communists in
1947, he was ordered to write the story of his life, which was published as Wspomniena in the Polish
language. It is said that the hand-written original exists, but no one has ever seen it.
ADOLF EICHMANN
Kidnapped by the Israelis in May, 1960, this impudent illegality again had a happy coincidence in that
the incident happened just as 'war crimes investigators found in the archives of the U.S. Library of
Congress', more than fifteen years after the war's end, the 'complete file' of Eichmann's department.
Needless to say these files were riddled with inconsistencies and errors.
FRANZ STENGEL
This former commandant of Treblinka is equally interesting and for this we have to be grateful for his
reminisces 'written' - a few days before his death in prison.
THE DIARY OF ANNE FRANK
First published in 1952, The Diary of Anne Frank, a classical weepy about a Jewish adolescent's
tribulations at the hands of Nazis became an immediate best-seller, succeeded by television and film
events.
Less well known is the fact that the 'actual diary' consisted of just 150 notes. This somewhere along
the way transformed itself into a 293 page published tome of a high literary standard dealing with
historical events that make it highly unlikely to have been written by any twelve-year old girl. Nor
was this the only miracle, for it emerged that many of the notes, corrections and suchlike were written
in a ball-point pen; a writing implement that was not invented until 1951, a number of years after the
girl is supposed to have died.
Hardly surprising therefore that between 1956 and 1958, Meyer Levin, a well known author and
journalist successfully sued Otto Frank, Anne's father, for $50,000 as indemnity for 'fraud, default and
unauthorized employment of ideas'. It appeared that it wasn't so much a case of The Diary of Anne
Frank, as the case of The Diary of Meyer Levin.
Furthermore, the handwriting attributed to Anne Frank and the handwriting in the 'diary' bear no
similarity. When in April, a Swedish investigator wrote to Anne Frank's father, Otto Frank, requesting
permission to come to Switzerland, bringing with him a party of experts to examine the original
documents, which had never before been examined, his request was refused by Otto Frank... "who
wished no further contact." Further comment would be superfluous.
AUSCHWITZ
It is at Auschwitz that the most fanciful statistics appear, and it seems a great shame that the
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