Rosenthal, Maryla

Maryla Rosenthal was a German Jewess who was deported to Auschwitz, where she was deployed as a secretary in the typing pool of the Political Department, hence the camp’s Gestapo. She was one of the first witnesses interviewed in the course of the investigations against Wilhelm Boger, which ultimately expanded and became the infamous Frankfurt Auschwitz show trial. During her first interview, Mrs. Rosenthal was unable to confirm the accusations against her former boss or to confirm the general allegations of cruelties in Auschwitz. Among other things, Mrs. Rosenthal asserted that Boger had been a polite boss, both to her and her former colleagues at the typing pool, helping her out with food and clothes on occasion. She felt no hatred for Jews coming from him.

Mrs. Rosenthal then reported the manner in which the other women in the Political Department gossiped in the toilet and exchanged the latest camp talk, which she regarded with skepticism and kept her distance from. She heard talk about Boger committing massacres, but she insisted that she never saw him agitated or any other evidence supporting these rumors.

Needless to say, that didn’t sit well with the prosecution who was looking for incriminating evidence, not exonerating ones. Hence, she was interviewed again. This time, she was confronted with the accusations made by other former inmates, which is clearly a manipulative interviewing technique. But she didn’t budge, insisting that she had no memory of cruelties happening, either because her memory was no good, or because maybe her experience in Auschwitz was simply too much for me. I could not grasp and process what I saw and heard there. In other words, they pulled out the deus ex machina called suppressed memory, a phony theory used by Freudian psychiatric manipulators trying to talk clients into believing horror stories of their past, claiming that they subconsciously suppress recollections due to the trauma suffered. As was proven by many studies, this technique of reviving alleged suppressed memory only leads to the implantation of false memories. In fact, Mrs. Rosenthal’s attitude — her positive description of Boger, her return to Germany because she didn’t like Israel, and her use of the term colleagues in reference to her fellow-inmates — indicate that she was not traumatized by events in Auschwitz.

On the other hand, Mrs. Rosenthal recounted how witnesses met in Frankfurt, accommodated by associations of former camp inmates, such as Hermann Langbein’s International Auschwitz Committee, which allowed witnesses to exchange stories, thus exposing them to manipulative influences. Mrs. Rosenthal was stunned by what her former colleagues claimed they still remembered. She, on the contrary, resisted the implantation of false memories.

As I said before, I cannot remember that. I want to emphasize that I have not the slightest interest in protecting anybody. But on the other hand, I cannot say what I do not know.

The abnormality of Mrs. Rosenthal’s testimony — the only clearly exonerating testimony among all the testimonies of former secretaries of the political department at Auschwitz — is generally recognized in the relevant literature. It is explained away by orthodox Holocaust historians, as well as by the Frankfurt Jury Court, with the claim that Mrs. Rosenthal must have suppressed the horrible side of her experiences, wiping them out of her memory entirely, relegating it all entirely to her subconscious mind.

In the end, Mrs. Rosenthal’s testimony was not considered exonerating during the Frankfurt Auschwitz show trial, but, rather, as incriminating! According to the Frankfurt judges, the atrocities in Auschwitz were so horrible that Mrs. Rosenthal was so traumatized that she lost all recollection of these same atrocities, and that she was completely intimidated because she could no longer trust her own memory at all. By this logic, one can turn just about any exonerating testimony into an incriminating one. This turns all logic of evaluating evidence and of determining the truth on its head. With that approach, once a thesis has been postulated, it can no longer be refuted, as every exonerating testimony can be interpreted as incriminating. This is the logic of a true witch trial.

In reality, Mrs. Rosenthal was the only witness among those former typists who did not succumb to the false-memory syndrome, resisting the massive pressure to remember what no normal person would remember after 15 or even 20 years and more.

(For details, see Rudolf 2023, pp. 368-371; 2004b.)