Evidence and documentation for the Holocaust
[1] There is also conclusive evidence that Jews were gassed at Auschwitz-Birkenau,[2][3] the Operation Reinhard extermination camps,[4][5] and in gas vans, and that there was a systematic plan by the Nazi leadership to murder them.
[8] Historians, including Ian Kershaw, Raul Hilberg, and Martin Broszat, indicate that no document exists showing that Hitler ordered the Holocaust.
[16] In a draft of an internal memorandum, dated 18 September 1942, Reichsfuhrer SS Heinrich Himmler wrote that "in principle the Fuehrer's time is no longer to be burdened with these matters"; the memorandum goes on to outline Himmler's vision, including "The delivery of anti-social elements from the execution of their sentences to the Reich Fuehrer of SS to be worked to death.
[19] As one of many examples, the bodies of the 25,000 mostly Latvian Jews whom Friedrich Jeckeln and the soldiers under his command had shot at Rumbula (near Riga) in late 1941 were dug up and burned in 1943.
[20] In mid-1942, Reinhard Heydrich, through Heinrich Mueller, Chief of the Gestapo, ordered Paul Blobel in Sonderaktion 1005 to remove all traces of the mass executions in the East carried out by the Einsatzgruppen.
[19] In the Posen speeches of October 1943, Himmler explicitly referred to the extermination of the Jews of Europe and further stated that the genocide must be permanently kept secret.
[16] Wide protest was evoked when Hitler's authorisation of the T4 program became public knowledge in Germany, and he was forced to put a halt to it as a result (nonetheless it continued discreetly).
Historians have argued that this indicates Hitler gave a verbal order to Himmler at this meeting for the Einsatzgruppen to target Jews under the guise of anti-partisan warfare.
[26] In a draft of an internal memorandum, dated 25 October 1941, Heinrich Himmler wrote: As the affairs now stand, there are no objections against doing away with those Jews who are not able to work, with the Brack remedy.
[28] In his personal diary he wrote: In November 1941, Goebbels published an article "The Jews are to blame" which returned to Hitler's prophecy of 1939 and stated that world Jewry was suffering a "gradual process of extermination".
"[32] When speaking about this document under oath, David Irving is quoted as saying "There is no explicit reference...to the liquidation of Jews" and critics of Holocaust denial consequently state that it is dishonest to say such a thing when it is entirely contradicted by the diary of one of Hitler's closest associates.
[34] Irving admits that this contradicts his view that "Hitler wasn't involved", but explains it by suggesting that a completely different meaning can be construed, i.e. "the extirpation of Judaism" as opposed to the physical destruction of Jews if one changes "just one or two words".
[24] Rudolf Höss, commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp, wrote a series of memoirs about his role in the Holocaust while awaiting execution after the war.
[39] At the end of December 1942 Hitler received a document from Himmler entitled, "Report to the Führer on Combating Partisans", stating that 363,211 Jews had been murdered by the Einsatzgruppen in August–November 1942.
[16][4] Critics of Holocaust denial state that the claim by deniers of no Nazi plan to exterminate the Jews is completely discredited by Himmler in a speech made on 4 October 1943 to a gathering of SS officers in Poznań,[original research?]
– ‚Das jüdische Volk wird ausgerottet’, sagt ein jeder Parteigenosse‚ 'ganz klar, steht in unserem Programm, Ausschaltung der Juden, Ausrottung, machen wir.
'Despite the difficulty of finding traces of this material, in February 1990, Professor Jan Markiewicz, Director of the Institute of Forensic Research in Kraków, redid the analysis.
[45] The BBC offers a response showing that this requires disregard of much documentation: Deniers have said for years that physical evidence is lacking because they have seen no holes in the roof of the Birkenau gas chamber where the Zyklon was poured in.
The roof was dynamited at war's end, and today lies broken in pieces, but three of the four original holes were positively identified in a recent paper.
"[51] The Institute for Historical Review publicly offered a reward of $50,000 for verifiable "proof that gas chambers for the purpose of killing human beings existed at or in Auschwitz."
[58] With approximately 4.5 million Jewish victims' names collected by Yad Vashem,[59] numerous documents and archives discovered after the war gave meticulous accounts of the exterminations that took place at the death camps (such as Auschwitz and Treblinka).
The figures reveal that the total Jewish population of the world has decreased by one-third from about 16,600,000 in 1939 to about 11,000,000 in 1946 as the result of the annihilation by the Nazis of more than five and a half million European Jews.
In fact, the Nazis methodically recorded the ongoing reduction of the Jewish population, as in the Korherr Report, which gave the status of the Final Solution through December 1942.
The Korherr Report, compiled by an SS statistician, gave a conservative total of 2,454,000 Jews deported to extermination camps or murdered by the Einsatzgruppen.
Further, surviving Nazi documentation spells out their plans to murder the Jews of Europe (see the Wannsee Conference), recorded the trains arriving at various death camps, and included photographs and films of many atrocities.
[73]Hans Münch, a former SS physician, signed a document certifying what he witnessed at Auschwitz: "thousands of people gassed", and the usage of Zyklon B in gas chambers.
[4] In the 1983 Holocaust documentary Shoah, Unterscharführer Franz Suchomel, tricked into an interview with false promises of anonymity, described his time at the Treblinka extermination camp.
