SOBIBÓR - Holocaust Handbooks

234 J. GRAF, T. KUES, C. MATTOGNO, SOBIBÓR
velopments,” some of them possibly gradual, possibly discontinuous, or
into “public signals” and “green lights” for Hitler, or into a vague “telepathic”
intuition. This latter parapsychological conjecture was expounded
by Raul Hilberg in 1983 at the Avery Fisher Hall: 669
“But what began in 1941 was a process of destruction not
planned in advance, not organized centrally by any agency. There
was no blueprint and there was no budget for destructive measures.
They were taken step by step, one step at a time. Thus came not so
much a plan being carried out, but an incredible meeting of minds, a
consensus-mind reading by a far-flung bureaucracy.”
Höß’ declaration on the subject of the Führerbefehl, which mainstream
Holocaust historiography had tenaciously clung to for decades,
had been thrown quietly overboard by the functionalists with the result
we have just discussed. But one had to wait until 1999 for a drastic revision
of “the older research literature” by Karin Orth’s article on Rudolf
Höß. 670 In it Orth pushed back the alleged order by Himmler calling
Höß to Berlin by one year into June of 1942.
Another fundamental testimony which has disappeared from the
mainstream debate about the Holocaust is the one by SS-Hauptsturmführer
Dieter Wisliceny, who had been Eichmann’s representative in
Slovakia. His deposition in Nuremberg (3 January 1946) was widely
used by the early Holocaust historiography, especially with respect to
the alleged confidential remark ascribed to Eichmann that “he would
leap laughing into the grave because the feeling that he had 5 million
people on his conscience would be for him a source of extraordinary satisfaction.”
671 Wisliceny is today remembered only for having supplied
the fateful figure of 5-6 million Jewish victims, even though a little earlier
he had declared that at least 4 million Jews had come within the
scope of the “final solution,” but that he did not know how many had
survived. Actually, the Jews able to work were not subjected to this “final
solution,” e.g. the 25-30% of some 450,000 Hungarian Jews deported
to Auschwitz, 671 hence the number of victims is less than 4 million.
This brings us back to the Führerbefehl. During the same hearing
669 Newsday, Long Island, New York, 23 February 1983, p. II/3. Quoted by R. Faurisson,
Écrits Révisionnistes (1974-1998), Édition privée hors commerce, Vichy 1999, vol. III,
pp. 958f.
670 Her own words, K. Orth, “Rudolf Höß und die ‘Endlösung der Judenfrage.’ Drei Argumente
gegen deren Datierung auf den Sommer 1941,” in: Werkstatt Geschichte, 18. November
1999, pp. 45–57.
671 IMT, vol. IV, p. 371.