- The following is rather long but highly significant.
It is the condensed transcript of the testimony of German-Jewish author,
Joseph Burg, who testified in the Second Great Holocaust Trial of Ernst
Zündel some 20 years ago.
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- Like so much else, there is a personal story "attached"
to this document. Ernst told it to me several times, but I will ask him
to recall it for a future ZGram so that I get it right. It has to do with
the fact that because of this stunning testimony by a Jew demolishing the
"Holocaust", Joseph [Ginz]burg was not allowed to be buried in
a Jewish cemetery, and nobody of the tribe wanted to do his eulogy.
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- Ernst was in Germany at the time, visiting a dissident
acquaintance, and the two volunteered to do the honors, because they respected
Burg's courage and integrity.
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- The way Ernst always told this story is that he swears
he heard a "rumbling in the coffin" because Burg, who was an
avowed atheist, was honored in a Catholic church underneath the crucifix,
with the reviled Ernst Zundel and a "Nazi" friend - it might
have been Manfred Roeder (?) - sending him off with honors to the afterlife!
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- Another piece of Zundel lore!
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- Please read this carefully. There are nuances there
I bet that most of you haven't ever been privileged to hear.
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- Ingrid Rimland
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- =====
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- The 'False News' Trial of Ernst Zündel -- 1988
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- Joseph G. Burg
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- Joseph G. Burg was the twelfth witness called by the
defense. He testified on Tuesday, March 29 and Wednesday, March 30, 1988.
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- For an eight or nine year period prior to 1981, Zündel
had been in communication by letter and in visits with Joseph G. Burg,
a Jewish author who had written several books on the Second World War.
These books included Guilt and Fate, Scapegoats, Zionist Nazi Censorship
in the Federal Republic of Germany, National Socialist Crimes of Bad Conscience
by Germans Against Germans under Zionist Direction and Major Attacks of
Zionists against Pope Pius XII and the German Governments. Burg had discussed
these books with Zündel and believed the latter had received them.
(25-6824, 6825, 6835, 26-6896, 6897)
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- In his books, Burg dealt with the subject of the alleged
Nazi extermination camps. Burg had spoken to hundreds of people who had
been in Auschwitz and had visited the camp in the fall of 1945. Burg had
wanted to see the crematoria, the hospitals, and in particular, a large
new bakery. He also wanted to find the gas chambers although at that time
gassings were not yet in fashion. He did not find any gas chambers. Burg
formed the opinion that there were no "extermination" camps at
all, that gas chambers had never existed and that there had been no plan
to exterminate the Jews of Europe. These opinions were published in his
books and in his correspondence with Zündel. (25-6825 to 6838)
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- Burg also visited Majdanek three times. He did find gas
chambers in Majdanek, but testified that they were disinfection gas chambers
for liquidating lice and fleas: bugs which caused epidemics. The chambers
were standard in each camp and had the German words "Attention! Poisonous
Gas!" under a death skull. Zyklon B was the new formula used to disinfect
the clothing. It destroyed the bugs but not the fabric. (25-6839)
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- After the war, Burg heard a lot about the allegations
that people were gassed at Auschwitz and Majdanek. He proved that it was
either out of stupidity or propaganda. Up to now, he pointed out, no document
had been found showing who gave the order for gassings, who built them
and where they were built. The German authorities especially had been called
the "super-bureaucracis." It therefore couldn't be that after
all these years not a document could be found. (25 6840)
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- Burg testified that he spoke to hundreds of people who
serviced and operated the crematoria but the people who operated gas chambers
were impossible to find. Nobody had published anything in which it was
claimed that he worked in a gassing institution for human beings. There
was literature about gassing that was completely contradictory. Why? Because
it was all made up. These opinions were published in his books. (25-6840)
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- In every camp there were crematoria. It was a practical
issue. People died. When the Germans occupied the eastern territories,
the huge camps were established and there were larger and more crematoria
as the war progressed. Epidemics broke out causing an increased number
of deaths. The question of crematoria was one of hygiene: the process was
more hygienic than burial and took less space. (26-6897, 6898)
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- Like all other activities in the camp, the inmates looked
after the crematoria. It was the most difficult work because of the heat
and the lifting of corpses into the ovens. The inmates worked very often
in three shifts around the clock. (26-6998) These workers did it voluntarily.
They were asked by the Jewish council or the Jewish police. It was important
to ask how the Jewish council or police co-operated with the German SS.
(26-6900)
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- When they were in full operation, the chimneys had an
increased amount of smoke. So, logically, depending on the weather or the
time of day, the colour of the flames was different. People invented stories
that inside devilish things were going on. They said living human beings
were being burned. They invented the story that every crematorium was a
gas chamber. It had even gotten to the point that the authors had such
large imaginations that when they saw the blue colour of the smoke, they
knew that Jews were being burned. (26-6898, 6899)
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- Others invented the story that living Jews were being
pushed in to be burned. Burg testified that he would like to see a Jew
who had given such statements during a trial. He said such a Jew should
be forced to take an oath under the rabbi rites with the skull cap, without
pictures of Christ, with the Hebrew Bible, in the presence of a rabbi or
a pious religious Jew. Then he should swear an oath that he had seen something
like that. Then these false statements, these sick statements, would go
down by 99.5 percent because the superficial oath was not morally binding
for these Jews. (26-6900)
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- At the time he was in a displaced persons camp, Burg
spoke to thirty or forty people about gas chambers and to about five to
ten people about the crematoria. He had a special permit allowing him to
visit the different areas where Jewish displaced persons were. He tried
to get interviews from various ghettos and camps because at that time he
had already checked various false statements. (26-6901)
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- In 1946 Burg attended the Nuremberg trials at times when
matters involving Jews were being raised. During one of these attendances
he met Ilya Ehrenburg and a Jewish publisher who had been in Auschwitz
for several years. Burg asked the publisher whether he had seen any gassing
institutions for human beings and he said no. Ehrenburg, who had been the
head of propaganda for the Red Army during the war, told Burg he had been
to Auschwitz but he too had not seen anything of gassings. Burg had discussed
this information with Zündel in general. (25-6857, 6858) Burg could
not understand the emphasis on gassings. (26-6904)
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- Burg himself was the son of Jewish parents and spent
the war years in Transnystria, an area set aside by the Germans for banned
people such as Jews. The Jews were banned because they had greeted the
Red Army. The people in this area lived in small villages and towns but
had to fend for themselves and were therefore worse off than those who
were in the concentration camps. In the camps the German authorities looked
after the inmates because, on average, they were used for work. There were
attacks on the Jews in this area by foreign ethnic groups, but no attacks
organized by the Germans. (25-6837, 6838, 26-6874, 6875)
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- In 1946 and 1947, Burg lived in Freising, a camp for
Jewish displaced persons near Munich in the American Zone. The director
was a Jewish-American officer. Burg served as a factotum: he organized
the police, the prison, the newspaper, cultural affairs. He organized groups
and drove them around Bavaria to show them the sights, the museums and
castles. His experiences in the camp were included in the book Guilt and
Fate. (25-6841)
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- Burg was read a passage from Did Six Million Really Die?:
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- The first Nazi proposals for a Madagascar solution were
made in association with the Schacht Plan of 1938.
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- Burg testified that the emigration of Jews from Nazi
Germany who did not go to Palestine was hindered by the Zionists. The Zionists
prevented the Jews from going to other countries because their interest
was in making the Jews go to Palestine. Furthermore, most countries blocked
entrance to Jewish emigration. (25-6842)
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- The German Reich wanted to get the Jews out: how and
where were secondary questions. The people under Göring dealing with
the Jewish question picked up a plan which came from the founder of the
Zionist movement, Theodor Herzl, which involved moving the Jews to Uganda
or Madagascar. Both of these colonies belonged to France. The plan did
not work out, but the existence of the plan alone proved logically that
a liquidation of the Jews did not exist. Their labour was needed as well.
Burg emphasized there was no liquidation of the Jews by the Germans. (25-6842,
6843, 6844)
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- The Transfer (Haavara) Agreement of 1933 was one of the
most important incidents in the Holocaust framework. Under this agreement
some 2.5 million Jews were to be traded for trucks. The agreement never
came to fruition because the Zionists could not take that number of Jews
to Palestine. (25-6853, 6854)
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- Burg had discovered that the German Zionist leaders requested
as early as 1933 that the Jews be required to wear the yellow star. The
Zionists saw it not as an insult but as a heroic gesture, just like the
SS wore the swastika. In 1938 the director of the Zionist movement in the
Third Reich brought about the wearing of the yellow star by the Jews against
the wishes of both Göring and Goebbels. (25-6850)
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- Burg wrote in his books about the co-operation which
existed between the Zionist leadership, including David Ben-Gurion, with
the Nazi regime prior to the war. (26 6877) Several days after Hitler had
been named Chancellor, Rabbi Leo Baeck, a leader of the Zionist organizations
in Germany, announced publicly that the interests of Jewry were identical
with the interests of National Socialism. Burg testified that Baeck meant
"Zionism," not "Jewry." The Zionists at that time in
Germany constituted one and a half percent of the Jewish population. A
few days later another Zionist leader made a similar declaration. The sense
of these declarations, testified Burg, was as follows: 'We nationalist
Jews, meaning Zionists, are in agreement with this regime. We are not ashamed
of our nationalist thoughts.' The Germans who had to deal with the Jewish
question co-operated immediately with this minority of Jews in order to
prove to the whole world that they were not anti-Jewish but were co-operating
with the Jews. (26-6878, 6879)
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- In the early 1930s, as result of this co-operation between
the Nazis and Zionists, some 120,000 Jews emigrated from Germany to Palestine.
Difficulties began, however, when Britain, which administered Palestine,
refused to issue any more immigration permits because of Arab unrest. (26-6879,
6880)
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- Zionists in Germany worked at organizing schools for
children in the Jewish language, workshops for young people, etc., to help
prepare people to emigrate at some point to Palestine. The Zionists were
interested only in emigration to Palestine and did everything they could
to make sure that outside of Palestine no Jews were admitted. The Nazis
were interested in getting the Jews to emigrate wherever they could. Nevertheless,
co-operation continued between the Zionists and the Nazis, such people
as Adolf Eichmann, Golda Meir and David Ben-Gurion, until 1942 when the
Zionist leaders were of the opinion they had reached their goal. Burg stated
that even at that point Germany's defeat could be seen and the Zionists
became like "rats leaving a sinking ship." (26-6880 to 6884)
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- Burg discussed the topic of Nazi and Zionist co-operation
often with Zündel. Burg believed that the Zionists were the guilty
party and that the Germans had been trapped. To brush everything over,
the Zionists behaved like the cunning thief who runs ahead of the police
screaming "Stop the thief!" It was Zündel's duty to fight
against it and Burg stated he would help. Why? "Because otherwise
it will never come to a reconciliation of the people. The truth is slowly
coming out, and this is how, provoked by the Zionist leaders, a hatred
against the Jews is growing." (26 6885)
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- Zündel had told Burg that thanks to his book Guilt
and Fate, published in 1962, Zündel had become what he now was, a
fighter for the truth, a fighter against the false accusations made against
his people. (26-6885)
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- Burg testified that there was no liquidation in the concentration
camps. The healthier people were used for free labour. Burg pointed out
that even a golden cage was a limitation of freedom and even a crime, but
the invention of gassings came from sick minds. Burg wanted to prove that
even at Birkenau, where gassings allegedly occurred, Jewish men and women
could get special treatment. An example was Benedikt Kautsky, a Jew who
was a spiritual personality in the Socialist-Marxist world movement. Kautsky
was in Birkenau during the war doing office work. His mother, aged 79,
was also sent to Birkenau. When she became sick she got a separate room
and a special diet ordered by the doctor. This was "special treatment,"
given so the woman's life could be prolonged if not cured. She died when
she was 80 years of age. When he was liberated, Dr. Kautsky returned to
Vienna, Austria where he continued his scientific work. (26- 6893, 6894)
In 1946, immediately after the liberation, Dr. Kautsky was one of the first
to publish a book. It had the German title Teufel und Verdammte (Devil
and Damned). Burg testified that the book was the truth and had historical
value. However, the whole edition was burned. One and a half years later,
he published another edition in which he rewrote portions and made changes.
But he didn't completely rewrite it. There was no documentation about gas
chambers and Kautsky himself admitted he never saw a gas chamber himself.
(26-6902)
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- In Schuld und Schicksal (Guilt and Fate) Burg dealt with
the Warsaw and Lodz ghettos. When the German troops occupied Warsaw, they
wanted to concentrate the Jewish population. Real ghettos had been there
for centuries but the assimilated or emancipated Jews had lived far way
from the ghettos. Now the Germans wanted to have the Jews all together.
In a practical sense, the ghetto was also organized for the protection
of the Jewish population. (26-6885, 6886)
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- The Zionists were happy with this arrangement. An appointed
Jewish Council was the governing body of the ghetto. They had their own
police, jails and everything else. Naturally, there were some who were
cruel. One of these was the vice president of the police, who was later
executed. In Burg's eyes, this execution was evidence that Jews defended
themselves against the minority of Zionists who were using the majority
of Jews for their own purposes. (26-6886, 6887)
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- In the Lodz ghetto there was a Jewish police force, a
Jewish bank, Jewish money, a Jewish post office, stamps only for Jews.
There were workshops for Jews. If there was a German plan to liquidate
the Jews, why were there workshops?, asked Burg. Why those expenses? Why
train children for jobs? Thanks to Berlin, Burg testified, the Jews practiced
a small Israel. These things could not be said today, however, because
it was now said that there was a "Holocaust" and the Jews were
murdered. (26-6888, 6889)
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- The German people, not just the Nazis, had been blamed
falsely; and not just Germans living in Germany but Germans living throughout
the world. Burg had an interest in this because he believed it provoked
hatred against Jews. Zionist leaders even today had a interest in the origination
of pogroms against the Jews and Burg was testifying to prevent this. (26-6889)
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- In 1982 Zündel wrote to Burg twice asking him for
help against the Zionists in Toronto who were creating problems for him,
and for a recommendation. Zündel had been of the opinion that this
could be helpful for him. (26-6891)
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- Burg had frequently discussed the subject of German restitution
with Zündel. In Burg's opinion, if the Holocaust hadn't been invented,
the Germans wouldn't be paying restitution and, he pointed out, "they
are paying." He dealt with the subject in his book Guilt and Fate
which Zündel read in the 1960s. (25-6850, 6851) Israel was created
in 1948 and in 1951 still had no diplomatic ties with the Federal Republic
of Germany. In that year, Israel gave Dr. Nahum Goldmann, a representative
of the World Jewish Congress, authority to negotiate with Dr. Adenauer,
the Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany, concerning Germany's
guilt. Israel, under Ben Gurion, wanted money from the "damned Germans"
but didn't want to sit down at a table together with them to negotiate.
The negotiations between Goldmann and Adenauer resulted in a recognition
by Germany that it had committed a holocaust against the Jews. (26-6904,
6905)
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- Burg testified that it was important to distinguish payments
to the state of Israel. Israel did not exist during the war. It was Palestine
then and belonged to the British administration. During the whole of the
Second World War, not one single German soldier was in Palestine. What
was there to make good again, to repair?, asked Burg. (26-6905)
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- Israel submitted a document to Germany stating that of
four European Jews, three had been killed and for those dead people Israel
demanded restitution. The document did not claim that 6 million died. Neither
gassings nor murder were obvious from the document. The word used was "killed."
The initial sum of 3.5 million marks had grown and not only today's Germans
would pay but also the newborns. The sums were justified by inventions
that 40 million Jews were gassed, then 25, then about 6 million, the level
at which it had stayed. (26-6907)
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- Burg testified that the reason for the continuation of
war crimes trials in both the Federal Republic of Germany and the United
States was to prove to everybody that the Germans, even the ones born in
America and Toronto, were to be blamed for the murdering and gassing of
Jews. (26-6907)
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- Israel existed on the basis that a Holocaust happened.
The German people of the Federal Republic paid money honestly earned by
work to Israel, a barrel without a bottom. (26-6916)
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- Goldmann also negotiated for those who had been liberated
from the concentration camps. These were the ones who had suffered, said
Burg, who had their homes and apartments taken away from them, who had
left everything behind. Special offices for restitution were set up around
the world where Germany had representations. (26-6906)
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- Burg discussed with Zündel who was responsible for
the upset in the world between Germans and Jews. He told Zündel that
the First World War had brought the Zionists a homestead in Palestine but
not a nation. This was much too little and everything had to be done to
create a state of Israel. This was only possible by war activity. A world
war had to come about. The Zionists therefore co-operated with what was
known as Wall Street. Wall Street brought about the Second World War, just
as they had brought about the First World War. Burg noted that the Hitler
regime had also been supported because it was supposed to fight the Communists.
Like the National Socialists, the Communists did not want to subordinate
themselves to Wall Street. The plan of Churchill, together with the Zionists
and the Americans of Wall Street, was to ensure that the National Socialists
and Communists "knocked each other out." Chaim Weizmann had stated
that he was willing to sacrifice German Jewry in the interest of a state
of Israel. (26- 6912, 6913, 6915)
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- Burg agreed that Zündel had shown a sincere curiosity
about the Jewish question. Zündel was a German and he was defending
his country, said Burg. Zündel had told him that he saw it as his
life's work to defend his people because they were being defamed. Burg
himself believed the German people were being defamed. He had expressed
this view in his books "again and again" and suffered personally
as a result. Burg was happy that Zündel had learned a little from
him, by not talking automatically of "Jews" but instead emphasizing
"Zionists." (25-6848 to 6851)
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- If the Holocaust story went on the way it was going,
said Burg, there would never be a sincere relationship between the Jews
and the Germans. The Zionist leaders would see to that. Burg had told Zündel
that films such as Holocaust and Shoah were fortifications of a falsification
of history, made for the purpose of showing Germans why they had to pay
and that the paying would go on for another few generations. (25-6851,
6852)
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- Burg testified that if Zündel had gone along with
the current, he wouldn't have the problems he did. It would have been a
much easier life for him. It was Burg's opinion that if there were another
two or three Zündel's, it would be better for Jews as well. (26-6892,
6893)
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- The Crown chose not to cross-examine Burg.
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