Dieter Wisliceny

Dieter Wisliceny (1911 - 1948) was an SS officer who (like Wilhelm Höttl) during the Nuremberg trials alleged that Adolf Eichmann had stated to him that several millions of Jews had been killed during the war. Unlike Höttl, who claimed that Eichmann had stated six million Jews killed, Wisliceny claimed that Eichmann had stated four to five million Jews killed. Eichmann later rejected having made either statement.

The revisionist Germar Rudolf has written that "Both Höttl and Wisliceny were originally held in the defendants’ wing of the Nuremberg prison because of their involvement in the mass deportation of Jews to Auschwitz. Their statements, however, allowed them to be moved to the witnesses’ wing – a life-saving switch in many cases. [...] On the basis of his pliability on behalf of the victors, Höttl, who was as deeply involved in the deportation of the Jews as Wisliceny, succeeded in ending up not as a defendant at Nuremberg, but rather as a privileged witness (Irving 1996, pp. 236f.; cf. Höttl 1997, pp. 83, 360-387). Wisliceny was convinced to cooperate with the Allies by threats that he would otherwise be extradited to communist eastern Europe. This caused Wisliceny to turn against his co-prisoners and even to offer to turn in hiding comrades. As an additional reward, the Allies promised him security for his family against possible revenge attacks by betrayed comrades (Servatius 1961, p. 64). While the Allies kept their promise to free Höttl for his services, they were not so cooperative with regards to Wisliceny. Despite his cooperation he was later extradited to communist Czechoslovakia anyway, where he was eventually sentenced to death and hanged (Arendt 1990, p. 257). Also worth mentioning are the circumstances, under which Höttl and Wisliceny as well as many other witnesses made their incriminating statements about Eichmann: They all thought that Eichmann, who had gone underground, was dead, and they hoped to exonerate themselves or to buy the benevolence of the Allies at the expense of Eichmann (ibid., pp. 331, 339). Only during the later Eichmann trial in Jerusalem it turned out that all these witnesses had unjustly transmogrified the assumed dead Eichmann to the main responsible individual of the “final solution” in order to exonerate themselves (ibid., pp. 339ff.)."

See also

Holocaust demographics

External links

• Wilhelm Höttl and the Elusive ‘Six Million’
• Genocide at Nuremberg

Note that besides the external sources listed here, an alleged Holocaust confessor/witness may be extensively discussed in the external sources listed in the articles on the particular Holocaust camps and/or other Holocaust phenomena the individual is associated with.