Gerald Fleming, emeritus reader in German at the University of Surrey (England) is, if I may say so, a KGB novelist. He is more a novelist than an historian. He was appreciated by the Soviet authorities and the Soviet publications. Even recently, since the Soviet Union disappeared, he kept paying tribute to the outstanding talent of the Red Army in interrogating German prisoners and extracting from them the desired confessions that the American Army had not been able to obtain.
In 1984, in a review of his book Hitler and the Final Solution, a subservient journalist had to concede:
His sometimes flamboyant writing and the structure of his book as a kind of thriller will annoy some historians (New York Times, December 28, 1984, p. C 23).
According to a fellow Jew, “His book has been favourably reviewed in Riga and Moscow publications, and he believed that Soviet authorities would grant him permission for a visit to the Red Army archives” (Jewish Chronicle [London], October 12, 1984, p. 4).
Hitler and the Final Solution (University of California, 1984) is a translation of his Hitler und die Endlösung (Limes Verlag, Munich 1982). The book was supposed to answer David Irving’s challenge for a single document showing that Hitler knew before the end of 1943 that there was an extermination of the Jews going on. Of course, Fleming was unable to provide such a document. So he should have refrained from presenting his book as an answer to such question, and he should have avoided writing that D. Irving’s thesis (that there was no Hitler order to liquidate the European Jews) amounted to “eine Fiktion” (p. 37, note 56).
It was a nonsense to write a book about the existence of a document that could not be found and shown. But Fleming thought he could bring us another document, perhaps as sensational, a document proving that there was an extermination program of the Jews by the Nazis. This is how he dared to publish A Resettlement Action Report, now nearly forgotten but revealed at that time – 1982 – as an extraordinary discovery. It was a fraud. Even a layman, not intoxicated by the holocaustic propaganda, could have seen at first glance that this so-called Report with no date and no signature was full of preposterous details about Auschwitz.
Readers who wish to get, quickly enough, an idea of G. Fleming as an historian can examine a few photos in his book. On one and the same page appear two photos coming from the [Communist] Polish Ministry of Justice. One is supposed to show a gas van (Gaswagen) used for asphyxiating people and the other, two German prisoners holding Zyklon B cans as they were supposed to do when they asphyxiated inmates in Majdanek. In fact, the gas van is an ordinary Magirus truck with nothing suspicious about it, and the prisoners (obviously afraid) are holding Zyklon B cans that were used for disinfestation.
In 1993, the media trumpeted all over the world the news that Fleming had discovered, in the Soviet archives, proof that execution gas chambers had been built and used at Auschwitz. He wrote a long and sensational article under the title “Engineers of Death” (New York Times, July 18, 1993, p. E19; German version: “Protokolle des Todes”, Der Spiegel, 40/1993 [October 4, 1993], p. 151, 156, 158, 160, 162).
In fact, Fleming had not found any such document but only minutes of the Soviet military police interrogation of four German engineers who had, during the war, participated in the building of Auschwitz-Birkenau crematories for the firm Topf und Sohne and who, after the war, were still working in the same company in Erfurt.
The American army had interrogated these engineers and had released them. When Erfurt was handed over to the Soviet Army, the Soviets arrested the engineers, questioned them and… got the confessions they expected.
The most important of those engineers were Fritz Sander and Kurt Prüfer. The former died from a heart attack right at the beginning of his interrogation. The latter died from a cerebral haemorrhage in 1952; we have a photo of K. Prüfer when he was a free man and a photo of him when he was in the Soviets’ hands; the difference speaks volumes and I should say that K. Prüfer’s face photographed by the Soviets is terrifying.[1]
The confessions were extremely vague and in the style of: “I heard it said… I was told… I saw from the outside…“.[2] And it so happens that the very rare precise responses do not fit with the details of the story as given today, nor with what we can see today in Auschwitz. For instance, one of those who confessed said: “In the roof [of the Krema II “gas chamber”] there were square openings of 25 by 25 cm”[3]. The trouble is that even today you can see that not one opening exists in the ceiling. I shall refer here to my “No holes, no Holocaust” argument.
In 1994, G. Fleming was the author, with the collaboration of Jewish-Canadian architect Robert Jan van Pelt, of the documentary [Auschwitz:] Blueprints of Genocide (BBC, May 9, 1994). The climax in this film was reached with a document introduced by the following words:
It says very clearly: You will be able to kill and you will be able to burn simultaneously in this building [Crematorium II].
But, first, in the film the document is surreptitiously shown and in such a way that nobody can see the German words. Second, the document in fact does not say anything of that kind. It is a simple Aktenvermerk (reminder note) of January 23, 1943 about… electricity supply! It has not even the very common “Secret” stamp. In reality, it mentions Verbrennung mit gleichzeitiger Sonderbehandlung, which means cremation (or) combustion with simultaneous special treatment. It will be noted that the falsifiers translated special treatment by “to kill” and that they went so far as to change the word order, putting first “to kill”, then “to burn”. The German text, even with such a translation, could never have designated a criminal activity consisting first in gassing people and, then, in burning the bodies of those gassed. The word Sonderbehandlung could, with its place in the sentence, have all kinds of meanings but not that of “to kill”, as this special treatment simply accompanied the action of burning.
It goes without saying that, if Fleming and van Pelt had discovered any German text “saying very clearly” what the “Holocaust” historians had been trying to find for such a long time, that text would have been published, shown and commented on in every newspaper, film, book and museum dealing with the “Holocaust”. Raul Hilberg, Élie Wiesel, Simon Wiesenthal, Serge Klarsfeld would have celebrated the discovery of the century. Instead, they did not say a single word.
At the end of the film, Fleming totally misquoted what the German engineers had confessed to the Soviets.
The film itself contains nothing on the technique and operation of the Nazi gas chambers and nothing, either, about the alleged square openings in the roof of the Krema II “gas chamber”.
On January 28, 1995, Australian journalist Jan Taylor announced in the Sydney Morning Herald that van Pelt was planning to “construct a computer model of the [Auschwitz] camp”. We are still waiting for the result. I for one would be interested to see if the architect dares to show us the four special openings in the roof of that “gas chamber” through which, we are told, the Zyklon B pellets were poured.
G. Fleming is not only a KGB novelist; he is also an impostor.
Those interested in the transcript of [Auschwitz:] Blueprints of Genocide have the choice between the British and the American versions. The British version gives a text adapted from the programme broadcast on May 9, 1994; the German document appears on p. 20 with a deceitful comment in English.[4] The American transcript is more faithful, although we are told: “This transcript has not been proof-read against the videotape”.[5]
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Notes
[1] See Der Spiegel, 40/1993, p. 160.
[2] “Ja, ich sah die Gaskammer – von aussen”, Ibid.
[3] Id., p. 162.
[4] Horizon, Blueprints of Genocide, text adapted from the programme broadcast on May 9, 1994, 26 pages + 6 pages. See Mariette Jackson, Acting Publishing Manager, Broadcasting Support Service, 252 Western Avenue, London W3 6XJ.
[5] “Nova”, show no. 2204. Air Date: February 7, 1995, 8 pages (2 columns), WGBH [Boston] Educational Foundation. Journal Graphics, Box 2222, South Easton, Massachussets 02375 (USA).
