XPost: alt.politics.liberalism, alt.society.liberalism, alt.poli   
   ics.democrats.d   
   XPost: alt.fan.rush-limbaugh, alt.politics   
   From: mars1933@hotmail.com   
      
   People who write confessions are often told exactly what to write,   
   word for word, by their interrogators. I know this because it happened   
   to me.   
   Some Germans did "confess":   
   "In the introduction to Death Dealer [Buffalo: Prometheus, 1992], the   
   historian Steven Paskuly wrote: "Just after his capture in 1946, the   
   British Security Police were able to extract a statement from Hoess by   
   beating him and filling him with liquor." Paskuly was reiterating what   
   Rupert Butler and Bernard Clarke had already described.   
   In 1983, Rupert Butler published an unabashed memoir (Legions of   
   Death, Hamlyn: London) describing in graphic detail how, over three   
   days, he and Clarke and other British policemen managed to torture   
   Hoess into making a "coherent statement." According to Butler [Legions   
   of Death, p. 237], he and the other interrogators put the boots to   
   Hoess the moment he was captured. For starters, Clarke struck his face   
   four times to get Höess to reveal his true identity.   
      
   The admission suddenly unleashed the loathing of Jewish sergeants in   
   the arresting party whose parents had died in Auschwitz following an   
   order signed by Höss.   
   The prisoner was torn from the top bunk, the pyjamas ripped from his   
   body.  He was then dragged naked to one of the slaughter tables, where   
   it seemed to Clarke the blows and screams were endless.   
   Eventually, the Medical Officer urged the Captain: "Call them off,   
   unless you want to take back a corpse."   
   A blanket was thrown over Höss and he was dragged to Clarke's car,   
   where the sergeant poured a substantial slug of whisky down his   
   throat. Höss tried to sleep.   
   Clarke thrust his service stick under the man's eyelids and ordered in   
   Geffnan: "Keep your pig eyes open, you swine."   
   For the first time Höss trotted out his oft-repeated justification: "I   
   took my orders frorn Himmler.  I was a soldier in the same way as you   
   are a soldier and we had to obey orders."   
   The party arrived back at Heide around three in the morning.  The snow   
   was swirling still, but the blanket was torn from Höss and he was made   
   to walk completely nude through the prison yard to his cell.   
      
   An article in the Britsh newspaper Wrexham Leader [Mike Mason, "In a   
   cell with a Nazi war criminal-We kept him awake until he confessed,"   
   October 17, 1986] following the airing of a TV documentary on the case   
   of Rudolf Hoess included eyewitness recollections by Ken Jones:   
      
   Mr. Ken Jones was then a private with the Fifth Royal Horse Artillery   
   stationed at Heid[e] in Schleswig-Holstein.  "They brought him to us   
   when he refused to cooperate over questioning about his activities   
   during the war.  He came in the winter of 1945/6 and was put in a   
   small jail cell in the barracks," recalls Mr. Jones.  Two other   
   soldiers were detailed with Mr. Jones to join Höss in his cell to help   
   break him down for interrogation.  "We sat in the cell with him, night   
   and day, armed with axe handles.  Our job was to prod him every time   
   he fell asleep to help break down his resistance," said Mr. Jones.   
   When Höss was taken out for exercise he was made to wear only jeans   
   and a cotton shirt in the bitter cold.  After three days and nights   
   without sleep, Höss finally broke down and made a full confession to   
   the authorities.   
      
   The confession Hoess signed was numbered document NO-1210; later   
   revamped, as  document PS-3868, which became the basis for an oral   
   deposition Hoess made for the  IMT on April 15, 1946, a month after it   
   had been extracted from him by torture.   
   In his memoirs Hoess recounts the circumstances of his arrest and what   
   followed.  The treatment that he underwent was particularly brutal.   
   At   
   first blush it's surprising the Poles allowed Hoess to make the   
   revelations he did concerning the British military police. Perhaps   
   they   
   did so to lend the Hoess confession a veneer of veracity; or to move   
   the   
   reader to make a comparison, flattering for the Polish Communists,   
   betweenthe British and Polish methods.   
   In fact, Hoess later said that during the first part of his detention   
   at Cracow, his jailers came very close to breaking him physically and   
   psychologically, but that later they treated him with "such decent and   
   considerate treatment" that he consented to write his memoirs; to   
   provide an explanation for certain absurdities contained in the text   
   (NO-1210) that the British police had made Hoess sign, one of these   
   absurdities being the invention of an extermination camp in a place   
   which never existed on any Polish map: "Wolzek near Lublin." Hoess had   
   talked of 3 camps-Belzek [sic], Tublinka [sic] and Wolzek near Lublin,   
   although the Belzec and Treblinka camps did not yet exist when (June   
   1941) Himmler, according to Hoess, told him they were already   
   functioning as "extermination camps."   
   Here is how, one after the other, Rudolf Hoess described his arrest by   
   the British, his signing of the document classified as NO-1210, his   
   transfer to Minden-on-the-Weser, where the treatment that he underwent   
   was worse yet, his stay at the IMT prison, and, finally, his   
   extradition to Poland [Commandant in Auschwitz, Introduction by Lord   
   Russell of Liverpool, English translation Weidenfeld and Nicolson,   
   1959, P. 173-175]:   
      
   I was arrested on 11 March 1946 [at 11 pm].   
      
   My phial of poison had been broken two days before.   
   When I was aroused from sleep, I thought at first I was being attacked   
   by robbers, for many robberies were taking place at that time. That   
   was how they managed to arrest me.  I was maltreated by Field Security   
   Police.   
   I was taken to Heide where I was put m those very barracks from which   
   I had been released by the British eight months earlier.   
   At my first interrogation evidence was obtained by beating me.  I do   
   not know what is in the record, although I signed it. Alcohol and the   
   whip were too much for me.  The whip was my own, which by chance had   
   got into my wife's luggage.  It had hardly ever touched my horse, far   
   less the prisoners.  Nevertheless, one of my Investigators was   
   convinced I had perpetually used it for flogging the prisoners.   
   After some days I was taken to Minden-on-the-Weser, the main   
   interrogation centre in the British Zone.  There I received further   
   rough treatment at hands of the English public prosecutor, a major.   
   The conditions in the prison accorded with this behaviour.   
   After three weeks, to my surprise, I was shaved and had my hair cut   
   and I was allowed to wash.  My handcuffs had not previously been   
   removed since my arrest.   
   On the next day I was taken by lorry to Nuremberg, together with a   
   prisoner of war who had been brought over from London as a witness in   
   Fritzsche's defence.  My imprisonment by the International Military   
   Tribunal was a rest-cure compared to what I had been through before.   
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)