Arthur R. Butz – The Hoax Of The Twentieth Century

Arthur R. Butz, The Hoax of the Twentieth Century
tion with anti-partisan measure, but make no sense at all if one is supposed to be
executing all Jews and gypsies at the same time, including women and children.
Ohlendorf’s NMT testimony is thus hopelessly contradictory, as it was bound
to be in the circumstances, in which he found himself. One should note, however,
that Ohlendorf did not testify to the reality of any executions, which his court was
not formally committed, a priori, to accepting as factual anyway. The only part of
Ohlendorf’s testimony that may be of value is his attack on the Einsatzgruppen
reports as “edited.”
Ohlendorf’s testimony contrasts with that of Haensch, an SS Lieutenant Colonel
who was in command of a Sonderkommando in group C for about seven
weeks. The fact that Haensch had not testified previously when others were on
trial and the fact that his lower rank made the a priori constraints on Case 9 of
lesser effect in his case, gave him a freedom that Ohlendorf did not enjoy. He testified
that absolutely nobody, in giving him his orders, had ever mentioned Jews
as such in connection with executive activities of the Einsatzgruppen and that his
Sonderkommando had not, as a matter of fact, had a policy of executing Jews as
such. He estimated that his Sonderkommando executed about sixty people during
his period of service. All of these claims were completely in conflict with what
are said to be the reports of the Einsatzgruppen, as the court pointed out in detail
in the judgment, concluding that in connection with Haensch: 364
“[…] one can only dismiss as fantastic the declaration of the defendant
that his predecessor who had admittedly executed thousands of Jews under the
Führer Order, and whose program Haensch was to continue, said nothing to
Haensch about that program. And when Haensch boldly uttered that the first
time he ever had any inkling of the Führer Order was when he arrived in Nuremberg
six years later, he entered into the category of incredulousness which
defies characterization.”
Ohlendorf and Haensch were both sentenced to hang. Ohlendorf’s sentence
was carried out in 1951, but Haensch’s sentence was commuted to fifteen years.
Presumably, he was out sometime during the Fifties.
Of course, the basic plea of all defendants in Case 9 as well as in almost all
other cases was that whatever they did was done in obedience to orders that could
be disobeyed only under circumstances that would have resulted in the execution
of the disobedient person. Incidentally, in my opinion this is a perfectly valid defense,
and it may have been this consideration that played a role in whatever inducements
were offered to Germans to become prosecution witnesses at the IMT
trial; it did not imply his guilt or, at least, it logically did not, if it was done in
obedience to orders. In fact, this was the case in the German military law that the
German witnesses were familiar with. Disobedience of even an illegal order was a
serious and punishable offense. People such as Höss and Ohlendorf had, no doubt,
reasoned that their testimony at the IMT had incriminated them only in the sense
of perjury, an offense that they knew the Allied tribunals would never charge
them with. Ohlendorf’s attempts to ingratiate himself with the U.S. prosecutors
364
248
NMT, vol. 4, 313-323,547-555.