Debunkers will note the ready transfer of 6000 Poles, and (Jewish!) clockmakers from Auschwitz to outside camps, despite the obvious dangers of allowing such Geheimnisträger to leave.

Wednesday, January 23, 2002
(London, England)

I SPEND another afternoon in the Public Record Office, and stay on until seven p.m., looking for the intercept that Peter Witte has found. The correct file, No.23, is thinner than the one I searched last week. I had reached No.22 under my own "steam" last year, and if I had carried on I would have found this item too -- and many others. I finally leave the building with seven pages of closely typed notes, and marvel that the world-famous conformist historians did not come across these signals. No wonder a Browning and an Evans bristles and slime-squirts when an "amateur" historian like Peter Witte or Stephen Tyas scoops them in this way.

The ominous intercept referred to by Witte and Tyas (it is in Report 355a) is in the folder and appears to be genuine, though it has been tampered with at some time, which is a pity.

The signal was intercepted in three fragments, 83, 234 and 250, of which the crucial middle one was garbled. It appears to be answering a request for data by Heinrich Himmler, which is also in the file though seemingly intercepted three days later, in a version forwarded between third parties (Report 358b). In my view it was a general response to a request that Hitler made of all his ministries, to supply to him data to incorporate in his planned speech for January 30, the tenth anniversary of the seizure of power. (The Hitler request is documented in reich air ministry and Reich Chancellery files).

The original German text of the ominous signal does not carry the lethal overtones with which the recently published English translation is provided (which is not to say those overtones were not justified: just that they are not in the original text).

The garbling is in the crucial phrase "Stand ... 31.12.42" followed by the enormous figures. It is reasonable to assume it may have read "Stand der Aktion bis 31.12.42", (state of the Action up to Dec 31, 1942) but we do not know what happened to the people, apart from the comparable details in the Korherr report: durchgeschleust, or sonderbehandelt.

Nowhere else, in this file at least, are the initials L, B, S and T used for the Reinhardt camps; but again there is nothing against this reasonable deduction. (Peter Witte incidentally is one of those who thinks the Reinhardt comes from Heydrich's name, which overlooks the RFSS pers. Stab documents which make quite plain in the Aktenzeichen (Letter-heading reference) that it is Fritz Reinhardt of the finance ministry after whom it was named).

Finally, I am struck by the very great value these HW.16 files will have, if and when they are fully analyzed, for generating a true image of the secret activities of Auschwitz. It is alas a horrendous labour-intensive task (and one which I shall not myself perform): one day of intense concentration is needed to digest each HW.16 file in the Public Record Office, and a considerable knowledge of German and its Third Reich abbreviations.

Debunkers will note the ready transfer of 6000 Poles, and (Jewish!) clockmakers from Auschwitz to outside camps, despite the obvious dangers of allowing such Geheimnisträger to leave. Exterminationists will however point to the fact that Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss seems to be having difficulties producing them for transfer...