By remarkable coincidence, some 25 years earlier the American Jewish community had been warning of a “holocaust” of six million Jews in Europe.
In an address published in 1919 in a leading Jewish American paper, the American Hebrew of New York City, under the headline “The Crucifixion of Jews Must Stop!,” the former governor of New York state,
Martin Glynn, spoke repeatedly of “six million” European Jews who were “dying” and “being whirled toward the grave” in a “threatened holocaust of human life.” / 6
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Given all this, it is hardly surprising that someone was found to provide “proof” for the Six Million figure at the most extravagant judicial undertaking in history, the 1945-46 trial in Nuremberg of Hermann Göring, Rudolf Hess, and other high-ranking Third Reich personalities. The legendary figure was fixed in history at the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg, where it was cited by chief British prosecutor Sir Hartley Shawcross in his closing address, and by the Allied judges in their final judgment. / 7
This figure was not the result of any careful investigation, research, or calculation.
The only specific evidence presented for it to the Nuremberg Tribunal was the hearsay testimony of former SS officer Wilhelm Höttl (sometimes spelled Hoettl), who said that he recalled it from a remark by Adolf Eichmann, the wartime head of the Jewish affairs section of Himmler's Reich Security Main Office (RSHA). Höttl, who also served with the RSHA during the war, stated in an affidavit dated November 26, 1945, and provided to the U.S. prosecution at Nuremberg, that Eichmann confided to him in August 1944 that some four million Jews had been killed in the “various extermination camps,” and another two million had been killed in other ways, mostly in shootings by Einsatzgruppen forces in the course of the military campaign in Russia. / 8
Eichmann himself, it should be noted, later called the Höttl story “nonsense,” vigorously denied ever having made the alleged remark, and speculated that Höttl may have picked up the figure from a radio or newspaper report. / 9
If it were not for Wilhelm Höttl's role in branding into the world's consciousness the trademark Six Million figure, his place in history would likely be little more than a footnote.
Who was this man, and how reliable is his historic affidavit? He was born in Vienna in March 1915. In 1938, at the remarkably young age of twenty-three, he received a doctorate in history from the University of Vienna. While still a student there, he joined the National Socialist party and the SS. From 1939 until the end of the war in Europe, Höttl was employed almost without interruption by Germany's central intelligence agency, the RSHA. He was first stationed in Vienna with the “foreign bureau” (Amt Ausland, later Amt VI), and then, from early 1943, in Berlin in the “Southeastern Europe” branch E of Amt VI, with the SS rank of major (
Sturmbannführer).
In March 1944 Höttl was assigned to Budapest, where he served as second in command to Himmler's SS representative in Hungary, and as political advisor to Hitler's ambassador there, Edmund Veesenmayer, who reported to Berlin, for example, on the large-scale deportations in 1944 of Jews from Hungary. On May 8, 1945, as German forces were unconditionally surrendering to the Allies, American troops arrested Höttl in Austria, and for several years after that he worked as an intelligence agent for the United States. He died in 1999, not long after the publication of his self-serving memoirs.
In April 2001 the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency made public thousands of pages of long-suppressed documents from its files of major German wartime figures, including the bulging Höttl file. Along with the release of these documents, two U.S. government employees wrote and issued a detailed report about Höttl based on those recently declassified CIA files, which sheds revealing light on his wartime and postwar career. This report, entitled “Analysis of the Name File of Wilhelm Hoettl,” was written by two “historical researchers” of the U.S. government's “Interagency Working Group” (IWG), Miriam Kleiman and Robert Skwirot. / 10
These documents establish that Höttl was a completely unreliable informant who routinely fabricated information to please those who were willing to pay him. In their report, the two U.S. government researchers write: “Hoettl's name file is approximately 600 pages, one of the largest of those released to the public so far. The size of the file owes to Hoettl's postwar career as a peddler of intelligence, good and bad, to anyone who would pay him. Reports link Hoettl to twelve different intelligence services, including the U.S., Yugoslav, Austrian, Israeli, Romanian, Vatican, Swiss, French, West German, Russian, Hungarian and British.”
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