Wilhelm Höttl

Wilhelm Höttl (often spelled Hoettl in English; 1915 - 1999) was an SS officer notorious for alleging during the Nuremberg trials that Adolf Eichmann had stated to him that six million Jews had died during World War II.

Notwithstanding that the notorious Soviet propagandist Ilya Ehrenburg had, without presenting any evidence to anyone, stated that six million had perished as early as 1944, Höttl's was the only evidence presented to the Nuremberg Tribunal for this familiar number. Eichmann later rejected this allegation and later released documents have been argued to establish that Höttl was a completely unreliable informant, who routinely fabricated information to please those who were willing to pay him. Another SS officer, Dieter Wisliceny, made a somewhat similar claim, but alleged a lower number of four to five million.

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.)."

The Six Million Swindle stated that "Hoettel himself claims to have been a British agent sometime during the war. The London paper Weekend (January 25, 1963) confirms this. It also reveals that when Hoettl gave his affidavit he had been threatened with delivery to the Hungarian Communists. This must be interpreted as a promise of immunity if he gave sufficient damning testimony against his superior, Eichmann, but hanging if he didn't. According to the British at Flensburg, he declared he had one time heard Eichmann say that four million Jews died in concentration camps and another two million elsewhere as reprisals and so on. He was then rushed to the Nuremburg Trials, where he dutifully repeated his hearsay. But oddly enough, though the German attorney for the Defense, one Dr. Kaufmann, repeatedly requested that he be called for cross-examination, the Nuremburg lynchers did not dare expose this key evidence to cross-examination. Again, at the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem the legal lynchers were afraid to expose him to cross-examination. And during the same trial Eichmann insisted that Hoettl had twised his casual remark and that he had in fact never named figures to Hoettel because he could not know such figures . (See: Heinrich Haertl, Freispruch fuer Deutschland, Goettingen, 1965, p. 190-01). Here in lies the truth of the matter. Neither Eichmann nor Hoettl could know the figures. And Hoettl got immunity for what was almost certainly a perjured affidavit. Yet on it rests almost the whole myth of the six million."

See also

• Holocaust demographics

External links

• Wilhelm Höttl and the Elusive ‘Six Million’
• The Victories of Revisionism (Part 2) - the section "The Imposture of the Six Million. Wilhelm Höttl and the Nuremberg Tribunal Unmasked"