Diary: May 19, 2005

Real History, Auschwitz, and the Franke-Griksch ReportDocuments on the

AS Hitler was not personally implicated in the
Franke-Griksch document, I paid little attention to it for my Hitler biography.
But bubbles of it kept coming to the surface, like marsh gas.

May
19, 2005 (Thursday)
Key
West (Florida)

A STRANGE document has surfaced, apparently in the Public Record office in London, allegedly a section of a genuine Franke-Griksch report.

In this newly found version, SS officer Alfred
Franke-Griksch describes a visit to the
Auschwitz camp, evidently in the company of Heinrich
Himmler‘s homosexual chief of SS personnel,
Maximilian von Herff, and is amazed and impressed by the scholarly work he finds being conducted there in the fields of innovative agricultural research.

It seems genuine, the date is probable, but we have not been told yet in what British file the document has been found, nor do we have a German original to examine. The translation is evidently by an English hand (see the last sentence — “the commandant’s flat, where an American would write apartment.)

This is the new document’s significance: Albert
Franke-Griksch was an SS officer,
SS-Sturmbannführer (roughly a major), who allegedly made a field trip to the
Generalgouvernement in May 1943, which included the
Auschwitz town and concentration camp or camps, and for many years a two-page extract of his field report had variously delighted the trial lawyers and conformist historians, and haunted or baffled the revisionists for the explicitness with which it describes the liquidation

procedures at Auschwitz.

But there are problems. It is not an original —
that has vanished; it is a two-page postwar typed extract, “authenticated” by a US army officer,
Eric M Lipman, who used to live in Florida and survived as recently as at 1991 in Richmond,
Virginia at 5310 Riverside Drive. In short, no
English magistrate’s court would accept a document of such uncertain provenance. Reasonable doubt.

I myself came across Lipman while writing my
Rudolf
Hess book: sent to raid the home of Rudolf
Hess‘s wife Ilse for documents in 1945, he found that the files there showed that that Hess had done so many charitable deeds during the Nazi years that it was positively an embarrassment for the prosecution, for which Lipman worked.

The documents were accordingly left securely in
Ilse’s possession, and they were all still there in the 1990s when I stayed for a week in the basement of her home, unbeknownst to the old lady upstairs, cataloguing every page and sorting them at Wolf
Rüdiger‘s request, and making too some copies for my Goebbels biography. The catalogue was unfortunately among my records seized by the British government
Trustee in May 2002, but that is another story.

AS Hitler was not personally implicated in the
Franke-Griksch document, I paid little attention to it for my Hitler biography. But bubbles of it kept coming to the surface, like marsh gas.

In the 1970s the chief archivist at the
Institut für Zeitgeschichte, Dr Anton Hoch, who was a very good friend (now long dead, alas), kept asking me in a quizzical kind of way what I thought of Franke-Griksch, and I never really knew what to reply. I had the impression that Hoch knew more than he wanted to say, the laws on free speech being as they were (and still are) in Germany.

Working in the Berlin Document Center twenty years or more ago I came across two ring-binders of selected documents on the Judenfrage, numbered 238-I and 238-II I think, and there was an unsigned, anonymous two-page account of the liquidation procedures, written on a different typwriter, \and perhaps even a postwar one to judge from the type face, and it had (from memory) the same content. Again, the copy I made is in my seized archives.

Around the same time, I came across Melitta
Wiedemann in Vlotho, a hardy old soul, an
Amazon, indeed something of a battleaxe, of the early Nazi years, and she claimed to have typed the
Franke-Griksch document. It all meant nothing to me at the time, my interview notes with her are lost (apart from the heading), and she is long gone.

Franke-Griksch was captured by the British, released years later, lured into the Soviet Zone in the 1950s, and done to death in a gulag. Years later, in the mid 1980s, I was called as an expert witness for the defence in the Westphalian trial of his son Ekkehard, who had been indicted under modern Germany’s laws for the suppression of free speech. He had been caught thinking impure thoughts about the Real History of WW2.

I was not paid for my defence work, unlike some expert witnesses in recent history, and he was bound to be convicted anyway. I seem to remember the penalty imposed on him was slight, around ten thousand dollars, plus
Berufsverbot, a ban on ever working in his profession again. I reproduce Ekkehard’s view on the two-page “Lipman-authenticated” document elsewhere.
Lipman, questioned by our friends in 1991 about the original version, could remember nothing.

Now comes this new item, also claiming to be the
Franke-Griksch report.

[Previous
Radical’s Diary]

A
page from the SS personnel file of Albert
Franke [aka Franke-Griksch]

The
Franke-Gricksch Report: The Lipman Version
originating evidently at IMT Nuremberg [page
1] [page
2] from Jean-Claude Pressac’s monumental
work

New extract of this report
allegedly surfaces 2005 in London
archives

David Irving, a Radical’s
Diary, discusses

href=”http://p093.ezboard.com/frodohforumfrm10.showmessage?topicid=750.topic&#8221>Revisionist
forum on May 2005 controversy

Another
web page examines the Franke-Griksch
report

Brian
Renk relates his investigation into the origins
of the controversial Franke-Griksch
report

co.uk”>
David Irving