Arthur R. Butz – The Hoax Of The Twentieth Century

Arthur R. Butz, The Hoax of the Twentieth Century
had been coerced. Baron von Strempel said that he had been arrested in Hamburg
by two British agents who, when asked for their warrant, “smiled, drew their guns
from their shoulder holsters, and said that was their warrant.” He then spent four
weeks in an American interrogation center and then seven months in a detention
camp, where he was again subject to continual questioning. During this period, his
health was “never so bad.” He was questioned by Robert M. W. Kempner, but did
not want to talk about this. Judge Laws was obliged to direct von Strempel to reply
to defense attorney Magee’s questions about this feature of his experiences.
He finally said that Kempner had told him that if he “concealed any embassy
dealings” he would be court martialed and sentenced to death. He then told the
whole story. Incessant, intensive questioning by interrogators made him feel as if
he had been “hypnotized.” O. John Rogge became one of von Strempel’s interrogators
in Germany. During Rogge’s interrogation, he said, his necktie and shoelaces
were removed, he was kept in solitary confinement, was questioned all day
without food, and was “at all times under duress.” He admitted that he had signed
a statement, but said that this was on account of fear of further solitary confinement.
He gave this testimony, so destructive to the prosecution’s case, despite the
fact that the U.S. was paying him $70 per week, plus hotel expenses, in connection
with his appearance as a witness against Stewart. There was also the possibility
of U.S. retaliation via some sort of “war crimes” charge. Thomsen was likewise
cross-examined; he admitted that von Strempel had told him of the death
threat and said that he had been “coached” by Rogge in recalling details. The jury
found Stewart innocent during the course of a lunch break. Thus had Kempner
appeared in the newspapers even before Case 11 had gotten underway. 292
In examining the sedition affair, we have, therefore, encountered the Wilhelmstrasse
Case, in the sense that Kempner enters the picture as interrogator and potential
prosecutor of incarcerated former officials of the German Foreign office.
The connection with Case 11 is even more substantial because Stewart’s attorney
in the 1947 trial, Warren E. Magee, was shortly later to become co-counsel for
Baron von Weizsäcker, the principal defendant in Case 11. We therefore have the
unusual fact that the two sides involved in Case 11 had, almost simultaneously,
clashed in a regular U.S. legal proceeding and that the testimony that had been the
result of the interrogation of the captive Germans had been successfully challenged
by the defense as coerced. This is an extraordinary and important confirmation
of the kind of activity, indicated by the evidence we have already reviewed,
which must have transpired behind the scenes at the NMT – carrot and
stick tactics of various sorts, including even third degree methods in some cases
(but not necessarily in all cases where the evidence could correctly be said to have
been “coerced”). Magee’s successes along these lines did not, moreover, cease
with the Stewart trial. In another extraordinary choice of a person to use as a
prosecution witness rather than put on trail, Kempner had used Friedrich Gaus,
who had a reputation as “Ribbentrop’s evil spirit,” as the chief prosecution witness
against von Weizsäcker. Magee, evidently by virtue of being an American
292
204
New York Times (Mar. 12, 1947), 6; (Mar. 13, 1947), 17; (Mar. 14, 1947), 12; (Mar. 15, 1947), 11;
(Mar. 18, 1947), 4; (Mar. 19, 1947), 5; (Mar. 26, 1947), 4; Chicago Tribune (Mar. 19, 1947), 20.