The alleged Himmler Speech in Posen on 4th October 1943 is easily the best piece of evidence that orthodox ‘Holocaust’ scholars have put forward to support the mainstream ‘Holocaust’ narrative.
To quote Richard Widmann:
‘Why is so much time spent considered the text of this particular speech from 1943? The Posen speech has been called the “best evidence” to rebut the claims that the claims that the Holocaust is a myth. Before being moved to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, Himmler’s speech was housed at the National Archives near the main entrance to the building only a few yards from the Constitution, the Bill of Rights and Declaration of Independence. Clearly, the fundamentalist interpretation of this document provides one of the primary justifications for the power structure of our post-World-War-II society.’ (1)
I will also aver from my own experience that the (First) Posen speech and placing as a dark a meaning on it as humanly possible is central to the whole ‘Holocaust’ narrative and Himmler’s alleged words at Posen on 4th October 1943 are the main counter evidence usually offered to the mountains of counterevidence offered by revisionists and also the multitude of inconsistencies/contradictions within the evidence for the ‘Holocaust’.
The logic is simple enough: Himmler ‘clearly said it’ so therefore ‘the Holocaust happened’. The problem is – of course – that what they are quoting is actually an English translation of Himmler’s original German and most don’t understand – as professional translator Carlos Porter has helpfully explained in some detail – (2) that German to English translation (as often imagined by the general public) is not a simple one-to-one translation but rather having to determine what precise English word to use when the original German word has multiple meanings determined by the surrounding context.
As Porter explains:
‘The author of the document (whoever he is) uses at least 4 different words which can be translated as “kill or exterminate”:
- “ausrotten” and “ausmerzen”, almost exactly equivalent terms, are usually translated as “extirpate, exterminate, kill”, with a number of figurative meanings;
- “umbringen” and “totschlagen” are usually translated as “kill”, in a literal sense.
In this text, ALL FOUR TERMS are used figuratively at least once: see pp. 94, 96, 101 of original, i.e., (killing the Third Reich <totschlagen>, killing loyalty <umbringen>, extirpating disputatiousness <ausmerzen>, exterminating laziness, <ausrotten>).
“Ausrotten” is also used figuratively by Hitler in his famous Berlin Sportpalast speech of February 1933: “den Marxismus und seine Begleiterscheinungen aus Deutschland auszurotten” -- “to extirpate Marxism and its accompanying phenomena from Germany”.
“Ein Volk auszurotten” (p. 66) can be translated “exterminate or kill a people or race”, or, alternatively, “get rid of a rabble, crowd, mob”, etc..
“Umfallen” (p. 23), translated at Nuremberg as “die”, means “to fall down”, and is used figuratively on p. 50 <to give up>.
“Ausnutzen” (p. 25), translated at Nuremberg as “exploit”, can also mean “use”.
I have translated some parts more freely than others; the style is mostly very informal, larded with sarcasm and slang, but not without a certain eloquence.’ (2)
Porter’s annotated translation of the relevant section of Himmler’s 4th October 1943 is helpful in showing the issues he has highlighted above within the context of the text:
‘I want to mention another very difficult matter here before you in all frankness. Among ourselves, it ought to be spoken of quite openly for once; yet we shall never speak of it in public. Just as little as we hesitated to do our duty as ordered on 30 June 1934, and place comrades who had failed against the wall and shoot them, just as little did we ever speak of it, and we shall never speak of it. It was a matter of course, of tact, for us, thank God, never to speak of it, never to talk of it. It made everybody shudder; yet everyone was clear in his mind that he would do it again if ordered to do so, and if it was necessary.
I am thinking now of the evacuation of the Jews, the extirpation <Ausrottung> of the Jewish people. It is one of those things that’s easy to say: “The Jewish people will be extirpated” <wird ausgerottet>, says every Party comrade, “that’s quite clear, it’s in our programme: elimination <Ausschaltung> of the Jews, extirpation <Ausrottung>; that’s what we’re doing.” And then they all come along, these 80 million good Germans, and every one of them has his decent Jew. Of course, it’s quite clear that the others are pigs, but this one is one first-class Jew. Of all those who speak this way, not one has looked on; not one has lived through it. Most of you know what it means when 100 bodies lie together, when 500 lie there, or if 1,000 lie there. To have gone through this, and at the same time, apart from exceptions caused by human weaknesses, to have remained decent, that has made us hard. This is a chapter of glory in our history which has never been written, and which never shall be written; since we know how hard it would be for us if we still had the Jews, as secret saboteurs, agitators, and slander-mongers, among us now, in every city -- during the bombing raids, with the suffering and deprivations of the war. We would probably already be in the same situation as in 1916/17 if we still had the Jews in the body of the German people.
The riches they had, we’ve taken away from them. I have given a strict order, which SS Group Leader Pohl has carried out, that these riches shall, of course, be diverted to the Reich without exception. We have taken none of it. Individuals who failed were punished according to an order given by me at the beginning, which threatened: he who takes even one mark of it, that’s his death. A number of SS men -- not very many -- have violated that order, and that will be their death, without mercy. We had the moral right, we had the duty to our own people, to kill this people which wanted to kill us <dieses Volk, dass uns umbringen wollte, umzubringen: translator’s note: it is unclear whether the writer is referring to the Jews as a race, or to the Jews as saboteurs, agitators, and slander-mongerers; see above>. But we don’t have the right to enrich ourselves even with one fur, one watch, one mark, one cigarette, or anything else. Just because we eradicated <ausgerottet> a bacillus, after all, doesn’t mean we want to be infected by the bacillus and die. I will never permit even one little spot of corruption to arise or become established here. Wherever it may form, we shall burn it out together. In general, however, we can say that we have carried out this most difficult task out of love for our own people. And we have suffered no harm to our inner self, our soul, our character in so doing.’ (3)
What Porter’s translation of the original German makes clear is that the orthodox ‘Holocaust’ narrative relies very heavily on taking Himmler’s comments out of context and making figurative points into literal ones.
The principal problem with the orthodox ‘Holocaust’ narrative around Posen is the first (and often only) sentence that is usually quoted, which is:
‘I am thinking now of the evacuation of the Jews, the extermination of the Jewish people.’
Doesn’t make any sense whatsoever when you read it without presupposing any meaning before hand (aka how we are supposed to read documentation); why are jews being ‘evacuated’ and thus ‘exterminated’?
This is conventionally replied to by supporters of the mainstream ‘Holocaust’ narrative by claiming that this is a ‘code word’ (4) that is then linked back to the Wannsee Conference of 20th January 1942 which discussed the ‘evacuation of the jews’ (which as reading the Wannsee Protocol makes clear refers to the deportation of the jews to work camps in the East and contains no references whatsoever to the mass murder of the jews).
Thus, we have a circular bit of logic here where Himmler’s First Posen Speech of 4th October 1943 is taken to prove that the term ‘evacuation’ was in fact a ‘code word’ used at the Wannsee Conference by Reinhard Heydrich and Adolf Eichmann – which has come down to use via the Wannsee Protocol - to refer to the ‘extermination of the jews’.
Then the Wannsee Protocol’s discussion of the ‘evacuation of the jews’ is held to prove that Himmler’s Posen Speech of 4th October 1943’s reference to the ‘evacuation of the jews’ justifies the belief that ‘Ausrottung’ in this context ‘can only’ be interpreted as ‘extermination’.
The problem – as Porter points out – is that Himmler repeatedly uses ‘Ausrottung’ as well other similar terms figuratively within the First Posen Speech – and that these are translated figuratively without issue by supporters of ‘Holocaust’ orthodoxy – which are as follows:
‘In this text, ALL FOUR TERMS are used figuratively at least once: see pp. 94, 96, 101 of original, i.e., (killing the Third Reich <totschlagen>, killing loyalty <umbringen>, extirpating disputatiousness <ausmerzen>, exterminating laziness, <ausrotten>).’
Further as Porter explains Hitler himself used the similar term ‘Ausrotten’ - which Himmler also uses the First Posen Speech - figuratively not literally as early as 1933:
‘”Ausrotten” is also used figuratively by Hitler in his famous Berlin Sportpalast speech of February 1933: “den Marxismus und seine Begleiterscheinungen aus Deutschland auszurotten” -- “to extirpate Marxism and its accompanying phenomena from Germany”.’
The point here is simple: in that ‘Ausrottung’ cannot simply be translated as ‘exterminate’ but rather ‘exterminate’ is one of several possible meanings dependent on the context.
The easiest way to explain this to English speaking readers is to use the figurative English phrase ‘I am going to kill you’ in so far as if you read that in a speech, you’d know to look at the context to see if someone is using it in a joking way, but if in sometime in the future that same speech was produced as ‘evidence’ that you wanted to literally kill the person (or people) you are referring to: then you’d likely be horrified because that isn’t what you meant at all.
Essentially what someone has done to you in this scenario is take your figurative point literally deliberately in order to modify your meaning to be the worst possible and then use that modified meaning to suggest you are responsible for (mass) murder.
This is what the orthodox ‘Holocaust’ crowd has done with Himmler’s speech.
But what about the concordance between the Wannsee Protocol and Himmler’s First Posen Speech of 4th October 1943?
The problem for the orthodox ‘Holocaust’ crowd is that reading the Wannsee Protocol there is no mention of mass murder, but only of the deportation and movement of the jews to work camps in the East ‘to build roads’ no less. Unless someone can show that the Wannsee Protocol explicitly references the mass murder of jews then you cannot claim that the Wannsee Protocol ‘confirms’ the ‘extermination’ interpretation of Himmler’s Posen Speech of 4th October 1943 because the Wannsee Protocol makes no reference to jews being ‘exterminated’ only ‘evacuated’.
The point being that if the Wannsee Protocol only refers to deportation – which it does – then we have to read the sentence not as:
‘I am thinking now of the evacuation of the Jews, the extermination of the Jewish people.’
But rather as:
‘I am thinking now of the evacuation of the Jews, the extirpation of the Jewish people.’
In other words what is actually being said by Himmler here is that ‘because jews are being evacuated [from the Reich to the East per the Wannsee Protocol] therefore they are being extirpated [from the Reich’s territories/Western Europe]’ not they are ‘being exterminated’.
That is the myth of the Posen Speech which isn’t helped by desperate orthodox ‘Holocaust’ writers trying to bizarrely claim that the only possible interpretation of ‘Ausrottung’ (and its cognates) is ‘extermination’ in English using sources that disprove just such claims (5) as well as trying to argue with a professional translator (Porter) that he ‘is contemptuous of context’ when Porter provides plenty of notes about the context of statements and provides the original German of contentious passages (this is standard translation protocol which mainstream ‘Holocaust’ scholars/writers rarely adhere to)! (6)
The problem for the orthodox ‘Holocaust’ crowd is what on earth to do with Himmler’s phrase ‘I am thinking now of the evacuation of the Jews’ and given it doesn’t reference ‘extermination’ in the slightest, but fits nicely into ‘extirpation’ (in the sense of ‘getting rid of’/‘forcibly removing from’) which in turns fits with mass deportation which in turn is what the Wannsee Protocol explicitly states).
They don’t have a logical answer and even attempts to reference the Second Posen Speech that Himmler made on 6th October 1943 to ‘prove’ such an interpretation are ludicrous at best; given that Himmler explicitly says he does not want ‘exterminate’ people <‘Ich hielt mich nämlich nicht für berechtigt, die Männer auszurotten — sprich also, umzubringen oder umbringen zu lassen - und die Rächer in Gestalt der Kinder für unsere Söhne und Enkel groß werden zu lassen.’> (7) but has had to ‘wipe them out’ (8) directly referring to the context of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 19th April to 16th May 1943 in the next two paragraphs (which the orthodox ‘Holocaust’ crowd usually omit to mention). (9) Hence Himmler’s comments about how SS personnel have been forced to kill jewish women and children – (10) that we know happened in the Warsaw Ghetto – which risks turning his SS personnel into monsters inured to killing and committing atrocities which is most decidedly not what Himmler wants. (11)
It should be remembered that Himmler is making these comments as the SS are still dealing with the results of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and processing jewish prisoners which would continue into November 1943, which is why he brings up the issue at Posen. (12)
Thus, we can see that the Second Posen Speech of 6th October 1943 doesn’t provide evidence for the orthodox translation of ‘extermination’ in regard to the First Posen Speech of 4th October 1943 and nor does the Wannsee Conference/Protocol.
Further both the Second Posen Speech of 6th October 1943 and the Wannsee Conference/Protocol suggest the opposite: that Himmler was referring to what the text of speech would otherwise be read to say. That the jews are being deported en masse to the East and that the brutal German response to/reprisals resulting from the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of spring 1943 was the exception not the rule and that this caused Himmler great concern about how it was dehumanizing his SS personnel, which would be rather odd if the same SS personnel were gassing tens of thousands of jews every day throughout the Third Reich’s camp system!
Put another way: only an idiot, someone with an axe to grind and/or a paid propagandist sincerely believes the First Posen Speech that Himmler gave on 4th October 1943 references ‘extermination’.
It is like most things in regard to ‘Holocaust’ history: a ridiculous myth!
References
(1) http://www.codoh.com/incon/inconhh.html
(2) Idem.
(3) Idem.
(4) https://www.nizkor.org/himmlers-october-4-1943-posen-speech/
(5) https://web.archive.org/web/20090702075036/http://www.holocaust-history.org/himmler-poznan/ausrotten.shtml
(6) https://www.nizkor.org/himmler-heinrich-porter-posen-mistranslation/
(7) Bradley Smith, Agnes Peterson, 1974, ‘Heinrich Himmler: Geheimreden, 1933 bis 1945, und andere Ansprachen’, 1st Edition, Propylaen Verlag: Berlin, p. 169
(8) Idem.
(9) Ibid., p. 170
(10) Ibid., p. 169
(11) Ibid., pp. 169-170
(12) https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/warsaw-ghetto-uprising