A friend of the site, who also graciously volunteered to edit my articles (I’m sure you’ve noticed the difference), sent me a link to an article by Jamie McCarthy titled, The “Wolzek” Paradox.
McCarthy’s article runs cover for one problem with the testimony of Rudolf Hoess. It is by no means the biggest problem, however; the biggest problem with Hoess’ testimony is that he was coerced and tortured before he gave his confession. A detail that McCarthy minimizes as best he can. The following image is from a passage from Hanns and Rudolf : the German jew and the hunt for the Kommandant of Auschwitz, by Thomas Harding, where he unashamedly relates the torturing of Hoess.
The problem that McCarthy is addressing is from the following testimony of Hoess:
“The ‘final solution’ of the Jewish question meant the complete extermination of all Jews in Europe. I was ordered to establish extermination facilities at Auschwitz in June 1941. At that time, there were already in the General Government three other extermination camps: Belzek, Treblinka, and Wolzek.”
There are actually two problems here. The first mistake is that Hoess said the gassings began in June of 1941. According to the official Holocaust fabulists, the gassings did not start until the beginning of 1942. Fabulists try to brush this aside as mere confusion on Hoess’ part. Confusion or not, this mistake is just one of a whole host of reasons that Hoess’ testimony is unreliable.
The second problem is Hoess mentioning Wolzek as an extermination camp. There is no camp named Wolzek. McCarthy has an explanation for this which I will discuss in a bit.
First, I’d like to discuss a strawman that McCarthy erected:
“The second error is that the last camp named, ‘Wolzek,’ does not exist, and never existed. And from this apparent contradiction, deniers rush to conclusions. The conclusion they prefer is that Höß was tortured, and that his whole confession, and his testimony, indeed everything Höß ever said or wrote, is wrong.”
Yes, Hoess was tortured before giving his confession. That is a colossal issue, as extracting confessions through torture is unethical (and in many cases illegal), and it often leads to false confessions. However, no serious revisionist has ever said that every single thing that Hoess ever said or wrote is wrong. McCarthy is being childishly hyperbolic.
McCarthy is missing the point, probably deliberately. The following is a quote from an article by Robert Faurisson that McCarthy himself referenced:
“The Revisionists proved a long time ago that the various confessions of Rudolf Höss contained so many gross errors, nonsensical elements, and impossibilities of all kinds, that it is no longer possible to believe them, as did the judges at Nuremberg and Cracow, as well as certain self styled historians, without any prior analysis of their content and of the circumstances in which they were obtained.”
As Faurisson said, it is important to examine the content of the confession and the circumstance in which it was obtained. Aside from the torture, Hoess does not even remember giving his confession. This is no surprise considering the fact that he was sleep-deprived and forced to drink alcohol. Oh yeah, and the regular beatings. Knowing this alone would make any legitimate court, or historian, toss that confession altogether. Yet the confession was not thrown out. Instead it was used in the oh-so-illegitimate Nuremberg trials.
If you’d like to know all the “gross errors, nonsensical elements and impossibilities” of Hoess’ statements you can read pages 179-312 of Carlo Mattogno’s book, Commandant of Auschwitz—Rudolf Höss, His Torture and His Forced Confessions. One example of many is that Hoess claimed that on a regular basis 2000 people were forced into a room 4/5 the size of a tennis court to be gassed. The following image is a visual representation of that claim.
McCarthy goes on to proclaim:
“Not only was Höß not tortured into inventing ‘Wolzek’ and then forced to write about that torture to unvex future historians, Höß was not tortured into inventing ‘Wolzek’ in the first place. Because ‘Wolzek’ is not an invention.”
McCarthy makes much effort to explain that Wolzek is just Sobibor and Hoess just got the name wrong. Maybe this is true. If it is, I don’t care because it doesn’t matter. Just because McCarthy might have an explanation for Wolzek doesn’t fix all the other problems with Hoess’ confession. To get an idea of how many problems we are talking about, here are the chapter listings from the pages of Mattogno’s book that I mentioned earlier:
Finally, McCarthy sets up a false dichotomy in order to accuse revisionists of choosing the wrong answer:
“The deniers’ explanation is that this made-up camp ‘Wolzek’ was invented out of nothing, because Höß was simply tortured into confessing to things which did not exist.
But the paradox is resolved by reading the interrogation transcript and looking at the map. The camp was there. It was not invented, just misnamed.
The reader may judge which rival hypothesis best fits the facts:
- Höß was inventing details under torture and just happened to place a fictitious death camp in exactly the same location as the real, omitted Reinhard death camp, or
- he just got its name wrong.
The choice is obvious.
Why do Holocaust-deniers rush to embrace the wrong choice? The answer is left as an exercise for the reader.” (My emphasis added.)
In reality, there are many possible reasons for Hoess making the mistake of saying Wolzek, not just two as McCarthy asserts. The reason doesn’t really matter. On its own, Hoess mentioning Wolzek as a extermination camp would not be enough to render Hoess’ confession as unreliable. However, given that Hoess was tortured before the extraction of his testimony and given that his statements are riddled with other major problems, it becomes clear that anyone using this testimony as evidence is being criminally dishonest—whether or not they have an excuse for the so-called Wolzek problem.