On 1-16-2006 2:41 AM, Ben Cramer
If you read the interviews with Hoess in prison with two psychologists, as well as his testimony and his memoirs, he never once tried to deny what he had done. I will at least give him honesty. He tried to mitigate it, and he tried to explain parts of it away, but he never tried to deny it. That's what I find so interesting about this. Long before there was Holocaust "revisionism", the chief Nazis virtually all acknowledged that the extermination of the Jews took place. Their usual explanations were:
- It happened but I had nothing to do with it - It happened, but I didn't know about it - It happened, but I was only following orders - It happened, but it was no worse than what Stalin did - It happened, but it was all the fault and doing of radical antisemites like Hitler, Himmler, Bormann, Goebbels, Heydrich and Ley (all conveniently dead)
and so on. Interesting. No denial from the people best placed to know and who, one would suspect, would want to deny it ever took place, since they were on trial for their lives. But they knew it had happened, so they didn't even make the effort.
I read today of a man named Hans Friedrich, a member of the SS 1st Infantry Brigade which entered the Ukraine on July 23, 1941. He freely admits he and his comrades shot thousands of Jewish men, women and children as part of the Einsatzgruppen actions. On one occasion, on August 4, 1941, they shot more than 10,000 Jews who had been forced into a town named Ostrog. Far from being sorry for having participated in the extermination of the Jews, Hans Friedrich has no regrets of any kind. He was never sent to prison and was still alive in the late 1990s. He thinks he did the right thing, that the Jews deserved to die. But he doesn't deny it happened.
-- Gord McFee I'll write no line before its time
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