A Brief List of the Conveniently Deceased

By Thomas Kues

Source: http://codoh.com/library/document/656

Below I have compiled a list of former NS bureaucrats and camp personnel who after the war died in a fashion which could be described as “convenient” to the upholders and propagators of the officially sanctioned Holocaust narrative. They are all individuals who must have had insight into the truth regarding the “Final Solution” and the alleged gas chambers. A number of them are also known to have denied the existence of such killing facilities. Most of the listed people committed suicide, many of them under mysterious circumstances. The author of this article does not suggest that all of them were assassinated. Some of them may indeed have ended their own lives, for some reason or other. In any case, their deaths no doubt came convenient for certain people. It is my hope that this list will spur new research into some of the individual cases.

• Heinrich Himmler (b. 1900) was the head of the SS and thus the highest responsible for the “Final solution to the Jewish problem,” by orthodox historians alleged to have meant the physical extermination of the European Jewry. After wandering the Flensburg area carrying false papers, Himmler was arrested by British troops on May 22, 1945. According to the official narrative, Himmler committed suicide late on May 23 by biting into a cyanide capsule which he had somehow managed to keep hidden inside his mouth for a whole day, despite eating a sandwich and being searched by his captors in the meantime.

• Richard Baer (b. 1911) was commandant of Auschwitz I from May 11, 1944 and of Auschwitz II (Birkenau) from the end of 1944 until the evacuation of the camp in January 1945. After the war he lived near Hamburg under the assumed name Carl Neumann, working as a forester. He was arrested on December 21, 1960, and soon became the main prosecuted at the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial, then in preparation. Baer however never testified before the court, since he died in his prison cell in June 1963. The cause of death is variously given by historians as “natural causes” or “circulatory ailments,” but the autopsy did not rule out “ingestion of an odorless, non-corrosive poison” (cf. W. Stäglich, Auschwitz: A judge looks at the evidence, pp. 233-5). According to a brief article in the French right-wing newspaper Rivarol Baer had denied any knowledge of homicidal gas chambers during his pre-trial interrogations.

• Josef Kramer (b. 1906) was the commandant of Birkenau from May to December 1944. In a lengthy statement made by Kramer to his British captors on May 22, 1945, he explicitly denied the existence of gas chambers at Birkenau. Kramer was sentenced to death at a trial concerning his time as commandant of the Bergen-Belsen camp. He was hanged on December 13, 1945.

• Friedrich Hartjenstein (b. 1905) was together with Kramer in charge of Birkenau from the end of November 1943 to the beginning of May 1944. He was sentenced to death twice: first by a British tribunal on June 5, 1946, the second time by a French tribunal on July 2, 1954. None of the sentences were related to his activity at Birkenau. He allegedly died of a heart attack in his Paris prison cell on October 20, 1954.

• Odilo Globocnik (b. 1904) was the SS and Police Leader of the Lublin District of the General Government and responsible for the construction of the alleged “pure extermination camps” Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka. According to most accounts, Globocnik allegedly poisoned himself with a cyanide capsule just after being captured by British troops in Austria on May 31, 1945. Other sources claim he was killed by partisans or Jewish “avengers” in May or June 1945.

• Hermann Höfle (b. 1911) was Globocnik’s deputy and responsible for deportations of Jews to the Aktion Reinhardt camps. After the war he was interned by British forces but soon released. He allegedly committed suicide by hanging himself in a prison cell in Vienna on August 20, 1962, just before his trial was to begin.

• Irmfried Eberl (b. 1910) was the first commandant of Treblinka and a former euthanasia doctor. After the war Eberl undisturbed practiced as a physician in the Austrian town of Blaubeuren . He was arrested on January 8, 1948 by the American occupying forces. He allegedly committed suicide by hanging in his custody cell on February 16, 1948.

• Franz Paul Stangl (b. 1908) served as commandant of Sobibor from March to September 1942, and as commandant of Treblinka from September 1942 to August 1943. After the war he was briefly interned but released and fled to Syria . In 1951 he and his family migrated to Brazil , where Stangl, living under his own name, worked at a Volkswagen factory. He was arrested in 1967 and extradited to West Germany , where he was sentenced to life in prison in 1970. While awaiting appeal he met and talked to Jewish journalist Gitta Sereny, who later published alleged transcripts of the conversations in her book Into that Darkness (1974). On June 28, 1971, the day after their last conversation, Stangl suddenly died, allegedly from a heart attack.

• Gustav Franz Wagner (b. 1911) was reportedly deputy commandant at Sobibor. After the war Wagner migrated to Syria and later in the early 1950’s to Brazil , where he lived under his own name, working as a farmhand. After Simon Wiesenthal initiated a hunt for a man falsely identified as him, the real Wagner voluntarily handed himself over to the Brazil special police in São Paulo , on May 30, 1978. According to an article in the newspaper Folha de São Paulo, June 2, 1978, Wagner had stated to the police: “I never saw any gas chamber at Sobibor” ( Eu nunca vi nenhuma camara de gas em Sobibor). On June 22, 1979, the Rio Supreme Court dismissed all claims for Wagner’s extradition. On October 30, 1980, Wagner allegedly committed suicide by stabbing himself to death in the bathroom of his rural home. The circumstances of the suicide have been deemed suspicious even by some exterminationist writers. Brazil citizen and former Sobibor inmate Stanislaw Szmajzner, who “confronted” Wagner at the time of his arrest, has let out that he “believes” that Wagner was in fact killed by Jewish “avengers” (Die Zeit, October 11, 1991). The author is currently researching the Wagner case together with local Brazilian revisionists.

• Kurt Bolender (b. 1912) was another SS posted at Sobibor. When arrested in 1961, he initially denied killings at the camp. He is alleged to have committed suicide by hanging on October 21, 1966, just before his sentence was pronounced. According to the American magazine Time, Bolender left behind a suicide note stating that he was innocent.

• Kurt Gerstein (b. 1905) was an engineer and SS hygiene technician who in Allied captivity after the war claimed to have visited Belzec and to there have witnessed a gassing of Jews. He wrote a number of “reports” concerning the alleged visit, which were later presented as “undisputable proof” of homicidal gas chambers. On July 25, 1945, soon after the French started interrogating him, Gerstein was found hanged in his cell. Gerstein’s widow was not informed about her husband’s death until June 1948 (cf. Henri Roques, The “Confessions of Kurt Gerstein”).

• Alexander Laak, former commandant of the Jägala camp in Estonia where a large number of Jews were supposedly massacred, is alleged to have committed suicide by hanging in his garage in Winnipeg , Canada . A number of Laak’s subordinates had at the time been given harsh sentences at a Soviet show trial. According to an article in Der Tagespiegel September 8, 1960, Laak had declared the Soviet allegations against him to be “99% lies and Communist propaganda.” In Michael Elkin's book Forged in Fury (1971) it is claimed that a Jewish "avenger" named Arnie Berg travelled to Winnipeg to kill Laak, and that Laak hanged himself under Berg's supervision in order to not have his wife shot by Berg.

• Herbert Cukurs was a Latvian who allegedly participated in a massacre of 30,000 Jews in Riga . After the war Cukurs lived in São Paulo , where he later was “recognized” by two Jews and became a target of extreme harassment by the local Jewish community. In 1965 Cukurs was tricked to go to Uruguay , where he was brutally murdered with gun shots and hammer blows from unknown perpetrators. His dismembered remains were then sent back to his family in a box. According to the newspaper Folha de São Paulo, Cukurs had insisted to his family that he was innocent of the allegations.

The above list should by no means be considered complete.