The Franke-Gricksch Report

I tend to shy away from discussing fake Holocaust documents, as it is a less compelling argument compared to all the other things wrong with the Holocaust narrative, like the lack of physical evidence. However, the Franke-Gricksch Report (FGR) is so fake and ridiculous that it’s worth talking about.

To explain what the Franke-Gricksch Report is, I will cite Brian Renk from his article, The Franke-Gricksch ‘Resettlement Action Report’: Anatomy of a Fabrication:

A key document cited by Fleming in his book is a two-page report entitled “Umsiedlungs-Aktion der Juden” (“Resettlement Action of the Jews,” although Fleming calls it “Resettlement of the Jews”), which describes mass killings of Jews in gas chambers at Auschwitz and makes explicit reference to the “Führer Order.” This document, said to be part of a longer report, is alleged by Fleming to have been composed by SS Sturmbannführer (Major) Alfred Franke-Gricksch, a high-ranking official in the SS personnel main office in Berlin, shortly after an inspection tour of Auschwitz-Birkenau in May 1943.

The “Resettlement Action” document was apparently first cited by the American historian Charles W. Sydnor (in his book Soldiers of Destruction (Princeton Univ., 1977, p. 3371). More recently, it was published-both in facsimile and in English translation-by the French anti-Revisionist historian Jean-Claude Pressac in his Auschwitz: Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers (The Beate Klarsfeld Foundation, New York, 1989 [pages 236-239]).

Here we have two respected Holocaust fabulists that have referenced the FGR, Jean-Claude Pressac and Charles Sydnor. I have already written about Pressac’s unscholarly work. Despite Auschwitz: Technique and operation of the gas chambers having no references, foot/endnotes or bibliography, it has been credited with debunking many falsehoods promoted by Holocaust Deniers. Perhaps the use of dodgy documentation like the FGR is why Pressac didn’t have any of those things.

Charles Sydnor isn’t just any book author. He served as the Virginia Holocaust Museum’s Executive Director from 2013–2015. This is what the Virginia Holocaust Museum has to say about Sydnor:

Dr. Charles W. Sydnor Jr. is a highly respected historian of the Holocaust and World War II. He provided the United States Department of Justice and its Office of Special Investigations with expert testimony in twenty-one court cases involving former SS concentration camp guards and Nazi death camp collaborators. Most notably, in the case of Ukrainian guard John Demjanjuk, who was found guilty of being an accessory to the murder of 28,060 Jews at the Sobibór extermination camp. Dr. Sydnor has also served as the Virginia Holocaust Museum’s Executive Director from 2013-2015, and is still on staff as their Senior Historian.

The Virginia Holocaust Museum failed to mention that John Demjanjuk was wrongly accused of being “Ivan the Terrible” from Treblinka when he was never stationed there. Just as there is nothing about Sydnor using dubious documents in his book. This is because the official ranks of the Holocaust fabulists are hard pressed to ever own up to problems exposed in the Holocaust narrative. Instead they will just ignore them. This means that orthodox Holocaust historians can get away with poor, or even unethical, scholarly work.

Let us take a look at this document and see what all the ado is about. The following is a translation from the Holocaust fabulists at the Jewish Virtual Library:

The Auschwitz camp has a special task in the settlement of the Jewish question. The most modern methods make it possible to implement the Fuhrer Order very quickly and discreetly. The so-called “resettlement action” for the Jews proceeds as follows: The Jews arrive in special trains (goods wagons) towards evening and are taken by a special line to a special area of the camp. There they are unloaded and examined by a medical board in the presence of the Camp Commandant and several leading SS in the first place to see if they are fit for work.

Here anybody who can be integrated into the work process in any way is sent to a special camp. Those with some temporary ailment are sent immediately to the quarantine camp and are brought back to health through a special diet. The basic principle is: keep as many prisoners as possible for labour. The “resettlement action” of the old sort is completely rejected, for it is not permissible to systematically destroy substantial labour capacities.

The unfit go to a biggish house, into the basement rooms, which are accessible from the outside. They descend 5 or 6 steps and come to a long, well-built and ventilated basement, fitted with benches on the right and left. It is brightly lit, and above the benches are numbers. The prisoners are told that they are to be disinfected and washed ready for their new tasks. They therefore have to undress completely to be bathed. In order to avoid any panic or disorder, they are told to arrange their clothes neatly and leave them under a number so that they can find their things again after the bath. Everything proceeds in complete calm. They then go through a small corridor and arrive in a big basement room that resembles a shower room. In this room, there are three big pillars. Into these it is possible from above, outside the basement, to lower certain products. After 300 to 400 people have gathered in this room, the doors are closed and from above containers with the products are lowered into the pillars. When the containers reach the floor of the pillars, they produce certain substances that put the people to sleep in one minute. A few minutes later, the door on the other side is opened, leading to a lift. The hair of the corpses is cut off and the teeth are broken out (gold teeth) by qualified people (Jews). It has been observed that Jews have hidden jewels, gold, platinum, etc. in hollow teeth. After this the corpses are burned (As fresh corpses burn particularly well, the whole process requires only 1/2 to 1 Zentner [25 to 50kg] of coke). The work itself is carried out by Jewish prisoners who will never leave this camp.

The result to date of this “resettlement action”: 500,000 Jews. The present capacity of the “resettlement action” furnaces: 10,000 in 24 hours.

The FGR has everything that Holocaust fabulists could ever dream of. It is a Nazi document that corroborates, for the most part, the official Holocaust narrative. It clearly states that the “resettlement action” is an order from Hitler and confirms that “resettlement action” is code for extermination. And aside from a few problems, it outlines the alleged gassing procedure.

So why is it that when you do a Google search for “Franke-Gricksch Report” there are no results from mainstream Holocaust sites like the Holocaust Encyclopedia?

Perhaps it is because the physical impossibilities that the report so confidently states. For some of those impossibilities I turn to Jürgen Graf’s book, Auschwitz: Eyewitness Reports and Perpetrator Confessions of the Holocaust. Graf has conveniently provided a handy list of problems with the report (page 286):

1. According to Franke-Gricksch, Crematory II had ten furnaces. The actual number was five furnaces (or 15 muffles).
2. According to the document, 25 to 50 kg of coke were sufficient to incinerate 300 to 400 corpses (resulting in some 100 grams of coke per corpse), “As fresh corpses burn particularly well”!
3. The ventilation of the gas chamber only took several minutes – completely impossible.
4. Death of the victims occurred after a minute – entirely fallacious.
5. The burning capacity of the furnaces amounted to 10,000 corpses a day – practically tenfold of the theoretical maximum number.
6. The Jews were accustomed to hiding pieces of jewelry in their teeth. Who will demonstrate this feat to us?
7. By wordings such as “certain products” for Zyklon B and “certain substances” for hydrogen cyanide, the forger has apparently tried to mimic in a dilettantish manner the mythical “code language” of the Nazis. His multiple times speaking of “resettlement action” (most of the time in quotation marks) and even of “‘resettlement action’ furnaces”, can only be seen as an attempt to convince every last reader that “resettlement” was code language for “gassing.

There is another issue not mentioned by Graf which I discovered by watching this video of a podcast from The Right Stuff. I suggest viewing it to see host, Mike Peinovich, destroy Holocaust Controversies’ attack on him.

The FGR states, “The Jews arrive in special trains (goods wagons) towards evening and are taken by a special line to a special area of the camp.” The date of the report is important here, May of 1943. This is because the special line to the special area of the camp, Birkenau, wasn’t put into use until May of 1944. That’s quite the oopsie.

How do we know that the FGR is a forgery and that Franke-Gricksch wasn’t making a bunch of errors for some reason? Besides the impossibilities just mentioned, which already disqualify it from being valid evidence, there are other troubling circumstances.

First, we have orthographic errors in the German language such as “had” instead of “hat” and “gebaded”
instead off “gebadet.” This suggests that the person writing the report did not have a German version in front of them, or that the person writing the original author of the report had lived for such a long time in the English-speaking area that the endings of German verbs were mixed up with English ones.

What about Franke-Gricksch himself? Alfred Franke-Gricksch survived the war and lived until 1952, when he was executed by the Soviet Union for war crimes. So what was he up to between 1945 and 1952? According to Wikipedia:

From 1945 to 1947 Franke-Gricksch was in British internment, where, according to an English publication, he was recruited for the British secret service MI6 , with the help of which he also avoided the obligatory denazification . ^[24] Instead of using his old SS rank, he preferred to refer to himself as “Colonel a. D.” ^[8] and worked as a “business consultant” for a textile company in Gelsenkirchen . ^[2]

Interesting thing for the British to do with a supposed war criminal.

According to Pressac, a carbon copy of the FGR was discovered after the end of the Second World War “somewhere in Bavaria” by Eric M. Lipman. Lipman then supposedly made a typescript copy of the portion of the report describing Auschwitz and handed it over to the American prosecution team for the Nuremberg trials.

Was Franke-Gricksch ever asked to testify at the Nuremberg trials to question him about this incriminating report? Of course not. The prosecutors supposedly had this smoking gun of a document and Franke-Gricksch’s whereabouts were known. Why not call him to the stand? The whole thing stinks.

Now it should be easy to see why mainstream Holocaust fabulists don’t flaunt the FGR as evidence for the Holocaust. However, that fact does not excuse the historians that do cite the FGR and defend it as legitimate, and they are never punished for it, whereas revisionists have to cross every T and dot every I to avoid making minute mistakes that could cost them all their credibility. And let’s drink in the fact that the Allies were conjuring up forgeries in the first place. Holocaust fabulists assure us that the Holocaust is the best documented genocide in history—a statement that doesn’t mean squat when none of the documents actually mention systematic murder and the ones that do are fake!