19. If Auschwitz was not an extermination camp, why did the commandant, Rudolf Hoss, confess that it was?

The IHR says (original):

He was tortured by Jewish interrogators in British uniform, as one of them has subsequently admitted.

The IHR says (revised):

He was tortured by British military police, as one of his interrogators later admitted.

The Samisdat version says:

Time-honored methods were used to get him to tell his captors what they wanted to hear.

Nizkor replies:

Wait a minute! The story gets more and more vague with each revision.

What exactly did this torturer admit? The IHR's first claim was that the interrogaters were Jewish operatives wearing (phony) British uniforms. If one of these interrogators supposedly admitted this, why did the IHR change things around and make these phony Jewish operatives into real British military police?

The real answer is that this claim of "Jewish interrogators in British uniform" appears nowhere else in Holocaust-denier literature. This claim appears only in the "Q&A." There is no evidence whatsoever to support it.

In other words, someone just made it up. Later, someone else decided they'd better quietly drop the whole thing. How many of the other 65 Q&A are similar? We can't know, because they don't provide any evidence to back any of them up.

Regarding the Höss confession:

We must consider all information in context. There are numerous other testimonies which confirm the essential facts of Höss' confession. There are captured documents which speak very clearly of gassing and mass shooting. The list goes on and on; for just a few examples, see the answer to question 1.

Deniers depend very heavily upon Hoess supposedly being coerced and fed a story. But they only have two pieces of evidence:

• A lurid book by one Rupert Butler called Legions of Death. Butler tells of seeing Hoess beaten when he was first found. He makes no mention of the interrogators being Jewish agents in British uniform, of course.

  And most importantly, Butler's version of what happened contradicts the deniers' hypothesis that Hoess was fed a story. Butler's book nowhere mentions Hoess being given a particular story to tell, it simply says Hoess was beaten.

• A piece of hearsay that is supposedly contained in a secret document which the "revisionist" Robert Faurisson is not at liberty to reveal. (And even if it were revealed, it would be the first time the deniers ever accepted hearsay as being valid...)

(See footnote 2 of Mark Weber's essay, titled "Let's Hear Both Sides" on the IHR's web site and "Different Views on the Holocaust" on Ernst Zündel's web site.)

On this pair of flimsy excuses, the deniers dismiss and ignore Hoess' confession, his testimony, his memoirs, and everything else he said and wrote about the gassings and the extermination program. Excerpts from his testimony and memoirs are available.

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