Morgen, Konrad

Georg Konrad Morgen (8 June 1909 – 4 Feb. 1982), SS Sturmbannführer, was a judge of the SS-internal court system. In that function, he investigated numerous allegations of crimes committed in various concentration camps by members of the SS staff. Morgen testified during the International Military Tribunal (IMT) at Nuremberg and also during the Frankfurt Auschwitz show trial. The trustworthiness of this witness results from the various statements he made during the IMT. Right after swearing an oath to tell the truth, he claimed that he had been forced into the SS and was drafted into the Waffen SS at the beginning of the war. However, no one was ever forced to join the SS, and membership in the Waffen SS was strictly voluntary and limited to qualifying individuals until the later phase of the war. Having started his testimony with committing perjury in order to make himself look like a victim, Morgen then mixed true statement with tendentious claims and outrageous lies:

During his investigations of crimes committed by SS staff members in various concentration camps, he lived at the Buchenwald Camp starting in July of 1943, which he initially described rather favorably:

The installations were clean and freshly painted. There was much lawn and flowers. The prisoners were healthy, normally fed, sun-tanned, working. […] The installations of the camp were in good order, especially the hospital. The camp authorities, under the Commander Diester, aimed at providing the prisoners with an existence worthy of human beings. They had regular mail service. They had a large camp library, even books in foreign languages. They had variety shows, motion pictures, sporting contests, and even had a brothel. Nearly all the other concentration camps were similar to Buchenwald.

Morgen amended his statement the next day, since he did not mean to say that the concentration camps were sanatoria, or a paradise for the prisoners. He then explained:

The prisoner could not contact the public freely, and so his observations were not made known to the public. By this isolation in the concentration camp he was practically under the sway of the camp. This meant that he had to fear that at any time crimes could be committed against him. I did not have the impression from these facts that their purpose was to produce a system of crimes; but, of necessity, individual crimes were bound to result from these conditions.

After describing how he investigated illegal killings of camp inmates by some SS staff members, among other offenses, which had occurred on a scale similar to that in the armed forces, he recounted what Christian Wirth, the head of the Aktion Reinhardt Camps (Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka), allegedly had told him about the exterminations going on in his camps, presumably set in motion by a (non-existing) Führer order. Here is where Morgen’s credibility collapses, as none of it is part of any other witness account and thus not part of today’s orthodox narrative:

• In order to win the voluntary cooperation (!) of the Jews to help exterminate their fellow Jews, they were given every freedom and the right to plunder the wealth of the victims.
• Wirth even organized a huge Jewish wedding with 1,100 guests, during which gluttonous consumption of food and alcoholic drinks occurred, and even some SS members of the camp guard joined in this revelry.
• At the extermination camps’ train stations, Potemkin villages were built that made the arriving Jews think they had come to a real village or city.
• Fake cloakrooms were set up, and at various stations inside it, people had to hand in first their hats, then at the next station their coats, their shirts, etc.
• As soon as death had set in, the ventilators were started. None of the claimed homicidal gas chambers of these camps are said to have been equipped with fans. In the original German, Morgan uses the English term exhaustor instead of the German word Gebläse or the Germanized term Ventilator, which gives away the actual source of his knowledge.
• Morgen’s claim about how the bodies were destroyed, however, concurs with many witness accounts in a convergence of lies about self-immolating bodies:
  

  By means of a special procedure which Wirth had invented, they were burned in the open air without the use of fuel.

  However, self-immolating bodies simply do not exist.

• To develop this magical system, Wirth allegedly received no aid, no instructions, but had to do it all by himself. The mainstream narrative claims, however, that Paul Blobel was the magician who pulled off this trick.
• Morgen also misrepresented the killing of incurable mental patients as having happened in an institution that Wirth had set up, who is said to have deceived the mental institutions sending patients to him about their impending fate, when in fact Wirth merely had advisory functions at several of the mental institutions carrying out the euthanasia program.

Morgen next described accurately the condition leading to high mortality rates at many camps, caused by force majeure, such as the outbreak of epidemics despite the strictest and most comprehensive measures to prevent and combat them; high fluctuations of inmates, bringing in at times more prisoners than could be accommodated; air raids destroying food, water and pharmaceutical plants and logistics, so supplies could not reach the camps anymore; and evacuations from the East leading to catastrophic overcrowding.

When reporting about Auschwitz, he got off the truth track again when claiming that exterminations in that camp were not committed at the Auschwitz Concentration Camp but rather in a separate extermination camp near Auschwitz, called ‘Monowitz,’ hence the forced-labor camp near the BUNA plant of the I.G. Farbenindustrie, where no extermination activities are said to have happened at all.

Two decades later, when testifying during the Frankfurt Auschwitz Show Trial, he lied by claiming that incoming wagons disappeared into a depression in the ground when driving into the underground crematoria. (See Czech 1990, p. 819.)

Morgen also claimed that the extermination of the Jews started in Christian Wirth’s extermination camps, and that Auschwitz only followed later. Wirth supposedly taught the former commandant of the Auschwitz Camp Rudolf Höss how to do it, yet allegedly called Höss his untalented student. This echoes the anti-chronological timeline which Höss gave in his various testimonies extracted by torture. Höss claimed that he learned the extermination trade by visiting Treblinka in the summer of 1941, although that camp did not become operational until late July 1942. The first gassing test at Auschwitz, however, is said to have been carried out already in September 1941, followed by more-or-less regular mass killings. Here we clearly see a convergence of a lie. Morgen was either given Höss’s false affidavit(s), or he was otherwise convinced to repeat Höss’s lies.

(For Morgen’s Nuremberg testimony, see IMT, Vol. 20, pp. 487-503; his affidavits in Vol. 42, pp. 551-565.)

In an interview Morgen granted the British historian John Toland years after the war, he insisted that the stories about Ilse Koch using tattooed human skin for lampshades and other object were unfounded legends, since he had searched the Koch household himself without finding any such objects. In that context, Morgen also mentioned that he was threatened with physical violence and was physically mistreated by his U.S. interrogators, which confirms the systematic nature of physical violence used against any German official in Allied captivity after the war (see Toland 1976, pp. 845f.; see also the entry on torture).