The Holocaust Historiography Project

Franke-Gricksch, Alfred

Alfred Franke-Gricksch (30 Nov. 1906 – 18 Aug. 1952), SS Obersturmbannführer, was an SS bureaucrat. He was arrested by the Soviets in 1951 in East Berlin, and after a show trial in Moscow, he was sentenced to death and executed for his alleged propaganda, espionage and counter-revolutionary activities, but not for any involvement in mass-murder activities. In 1995, the Russian legal authorities, after reviewing his case, rehabilitated him (Roginskij et al., pp. 158f.).

His importance to the Holocaust derives from his participation in an inspection trip to several German wartime camps in Poland, Auschwitz among them. Franke-Gricksch wrote a report about it, which unfortunately has been lost. We know of it only due to an English translation prepared by the British and kept in the British National Archives. It contains a long description of the Auschwitz camp complex that is completely innocuous. The report also contains a brief definition of the Aktion Reinhardt, here called special enterprise REINHARD):

This branch has had the task of realising all mobile Jewish property in the Gouvernement Poland.

The British analysts of this document concurred when writing in their summary:

Sonderaktion ‘Reinhard’.

This special unit deals with the seizure of Jewish property.

We recall that the three Reinhardt camps — Belzec, Sobibór, and Treblinka — were allegedly pure extermination camps; but this report suggests that they were rather about confiscating Jewish property and then deporting the affected individuals.

An alleged supplement to the innocuous travel report also exists. It has no letterhead, date, signature, stamp or any element that links it either to Franke-Gricksch or to the claimed trip. It describes the alleged extermination procedure of Jews at Auschwitz by way of mass gassings inside one of the Auschwitz crematoria. The text contains numerous architecturally, chronologically and technically impossible claims, as well as victim numbers and cremation capacities that contradict even the orthodox narrative. It is highly likely that this document was based on false figures found in atrocity reports spread by the Polish underground during the war.

The first version of this supplement was typed — in faulty German — by Eric Lipmann, an American Jew employed by the U.S. occupational authorities to collect German documents useful for indicting German wartime leaders. His text was then retyped in an improved version, a carbon copy of which was then placed in a German archive. This document was never used in any trial, and could not have been used either, since it has no identifying hallmarks and because an original evidently does not exist. This mockery of a document has been used by mainstream historians since 1982 in support of their claim regarding mass gassing at Auschwitz.

(See Renk 1991; Mattogno 2019, pp. 97-205; Mattogno 2021a, pp. 101-119.)