Does the Bruno Streckenbach Recording ‘Prove the Holocaust’?

It was recently announced in the mainstream as well as the jewish media that ‘proof that Adolf Hitler had ordered the Holocaust had been discovered’ and hence the public = could consider that the ‘Holocaust’ was now proven beyond any doubt whatsoever.

This ‘proof’ came in the form of a recording of SS-Gruppenfuhrer Bruno Streckenbach in the mid-late 1970s where he confirmed that the directive for the Einsatzgruppen’s operations had come from Hitler himself as he had been allegedly told this by his boss Reinhard Heydrich in August 1941.

The problem - as anyone relatively conversant with either (or both) the Partisan War in the East and the ‘Holocaust’ in general should be almost immediately aware – is that the ‘Holocaust’ is not the Einsatzgruppen and the Einsatzgruppen are not the ‘Holocaust’. Despite common misconceptions – that have been deliberately fostered in my view - the purpose of the Einsatzgruppen was not to ‘exterminate jews’ but rather to secure the conquered areas of the Soviet Union and the rear of the advancing Wehrmacht forces against partisans and other hostile elements. (1)

To quote Carlo Mattogno:

‘The various reports drawn up by the Einsatzgruppen show that these units had executive and informational responsibilities.

The executive responsibilities were both negative and positive in character. The negative aspect was the capture, identification and elimination of all those who were considered ideological and political enemies or who committed hostile acts against German troops or the populations of the occupied countries, starting with the partisans. However, as stated by the Danish researcher Therkel Strasde, the executive tasks did not initially contemplate mass executions, because (Strasde, p. 27):

“When the German police forces moved into Soviet territory in June 1941 they did not have a standard procedure for mass executions like this one, although the mass shooting of civilians and POWs had already been exercised during the Polish campaign in 1939. No detailed orders specifying the organizational and technical details of such massacres were handed out, and it is obvious from actual variations in the ways they were carried out that the methodology of mass killing was to a large extent left up to the commanders of the authorities and units to decide.”’ (2)

The problem then is fairly obvious in that Streckenbach’s post-war ‘confession’ is referencing something that isn’t the ‘Holocaust’ but rather mass executions – which we already know happened – by the Germans in the East and is nothing new. Indeed ‘Holocaust’ historians had long referenced an alleged ‘Fuhrer decision’ – not an actual order but rather an alleged informal decision – in December 1941 which they don’t have a copy of, nor can they prove actually existed. (3)

Indeed - as Mattogno observes – the problem with this argument is that even ‘Holocaust’ historians admit that the fate of Soviet jewry and that of the wider fate of the jews in Europe was considered quite separate by the Reich government:

‘The problem of the two-fold order (or double decision) therefore remains open: why didn’t Hitler issue a single extermination order valid for all Jews without distinction? Why were two orders required? Even orthodox Holocaust historians admit that, at least at the beginning, the fate of the European Jews was quite distinct from that of the Soviet Jews.’ (4)

Put another way: there is no actual Fuhrer order to ‘exterminate Soviet jewry’ let alone ‘exterminate the jews’ and without one it is almost impossible to contend this was the purpose of the Einsatzgruppen and thus the so-called ‘Holocaust by Bullets’ was in fact nothing of the kind, but rather an anti-communist/anti-partisan purge that frequently assumed an anti-Semitic character not because the Germans were ‘irrationally anti-Semitic’ but rather because the Germans were being led by local intelligence – (5) indeed the local population often welcomed the arrival of the Germans and informed them who the local supporters of Stalin’s Soviet regime were – and simply executed the main people involved in implementing the Soviet regime’s murderous orders and these were frequently jewish.

When we recognize the extremely close association of jews and communism – both in the political understanding of National Socialism and in historical reality – (6) then that such mass executions included so many jews (but were in no way limited to just them) (7) is more because of the close involvement of Soviet jewry with Stalin’s regime and the communist movement in general than because the ‘Germans hated the jews’ (i.e., the famous ‘Commissar Order’ of June 1941 resulted in many dead jews not because they were jews but because they were members of the NKVD and/or Commissars in the Red Army).

Now given all this how this ‘proof’ being reported by the mainstream as well as the jewish media?

Well, ‘Israel Hayom’s’ article – which was itself heavily syndicated and widely reproduced – gives a good indication when they write how:

‘Among the recordings, published on the Hoover Institution website, is one from SS officer Bruno Streckenbach (1902-1977), head of the Administration and Personnel Department of the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA), in which he admits that Adolf Hitler gave explicit instructions for implementing the Final Solution and the mass murder of Jews—a significant revelation, as until now there has been limited concrete evidence of this direct order.’ (8)

Again, this is misleading because as we’ve already noted ‘Holocaust’ historians have long claimed – based on extrapolations from Streckenbach’s fellow senior SS member and Einsatzgruppen leader Otto Ohlendorf’s testimony at the Nuremberg Trials – that were was an ‘Fuhrer order’ given and this is assumed – to save their blushes – to have been an informal one because otherwise they have no actual evidence that it even existed.

Thus, what does this Streckenbach testimony actually tell us?

We read that:

‘According to Streckenbach’s account, the first time he heard about the plan was when he received a hint from an old friend named Erwin Schulz, a volunteer officer in the Einsatzgruppen who until that point had supervised executions of up to a hundred people in western Ukraine, but apparently felt uncomfortable witnessing the mass murders of Jews.

Streckenbach said, “Schulz trembled, trembled like I’m trembling now. He said, ‘What are we doing?’ and I said, ‘We can’t do anything, we can’t leave everything. There was an order.'”

Streckenbach went directly to his immediate commander, Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the Reich Security Main Office, including the Gestapo, and one of the main architects of the Holocaust, who chaired the January 1942 Wannsee Conference that formalized plans for the “Final Solution to the Jewish question.”

“Heydrich was very quiet, very businesslike. He sat at the edge of his large conference table and said, ‘Be quiet now, Streckenbach. Now listen to me. Shut your mouth, don’t interfere. We can’t do anything about it. This is the order from the Führer. He chose the SS to carry out this order. Neither the Reichsführer [Heinrich Himmler, SS leader] nor I can do anything about it,'” Streckenbach recounted.’ (9)

So, what we have here is not – as ‘Israel Hayom’ would have it – ‘a direct order for the Holocaust from Hitler’ but actually a third hand account from Streckenbach that Heydrich told him that Hitler had ‘ordered the mass extermination of the jews’, but the account is very odd to say the least.

What clears up a lot of the weirdness is the fact that we already knew about this alleged order from SS-Brigadefuhrer Erwin Schulz - who was the reason for Streckenbach’s alleged conversation with Heydrich in August 1941 - and it isn’t referencing ‘mass extermination’ but rather the mass executions of communists and suspected communists in the East by the Einsatzgruppen.

To quote Richard Rhodes writing in 2002:

‘After about two weeks' stay in Berdichev the commando leaders were ordered to report to Zhitomir, where the staff of Dr. Rasch was quartered. Here Dr. Rasch informed us that Obergruppenführer Jeckeln had been there, and had reported that the Reichsführer-SS had ordered us to take strict measures against the Jews. It had been determined without doubt that the Russian side had ordered to have the SS members and Party members shot. As such measures were being taken on the Russian side, they would also have to be taken on our side. All suspected Jews were, therefore, to be shot. Consideration was to be given only when they were indispensable as workers. Women and children were to be shot also in order not to have any avengers remain. We were horrified, and raised objections, but they were met with a remark that an order which was given had to be obeyed.’ (10)

So put another way: Schulz was upset with the amount of people he and his troops were killing – because they included women and children (remember child soldiers were common in the Red Army as well among the Soviet partisan movement with the youngest recorded as six years old) - (11) and went to his superior Otto Rasch who told him that his (Rasch’s) superior Friedrich Jeckeln had said it was an order from Hitler as well as Streckenbach (12) who apparently went to his superior Reinhard Heydrich who told him the same thing according to this ‘new evidence’.

Now all this actually suggests is that there was a post-war claim that there was an order by Hitler to ‘liquidate jews in the East’ which while possible has its plausibility severely hampered by the fact that senior SS and Wehrmacht officers often threw as much of the blame for their actions as they could on their dead superiors – usually Hitler but sometimes Himmler and/or Heydrich too – (13) after the war and that no such ‘Fuhrer order’ has been found.

While this could be an ‘informal order’ this was not Hitler’s style, and it also assumes that Hitler was somehow precognizant and knew he was going to ‘lose the war and thus tried to keep such actions off any official documentation’ (i.e., the rationale for it is magical thinking and in essence trying to shoehorn a claim in without a valid evidentiary reason to do so) despite having put equally if not more contentious ‘Fuhrer orders’ into writing such as the infamous ‘Commando Order’ of October 1942.

More likely is that what Schulz and Streckenbach are referring to in their post-war testimony is simply the practical results of the Einsatzgruppen carrying out Hitler’s ‘Commissar Order’ of June 1941 in that they were not used the scale of the executions they were having to carry out as well as who they were having to execute. A useful comparison is provided by Himmler’s visit to Minsk in August 1941 where he witnessed a mass execution conducted by Arthur Nebe’s Einsatzgruppe B (specifically Einsatzkommando 8) and reportedly threw up in disgust.

It is important to remember that prior to this Schulz – who remember expressed his reservations to Jeckeln on 10th August 1941 five days before Himmler had a similarly bad reaction to the mass execution in Minsk on 15th August – had not had significant experience of mass executions before he arrived with his unit Einsatzkommando 5 in the Ukraine in early July 1941 and then witnessed the Lviv pogroms of jews by angry Ukrainians and Poles after thousands of dead Ukrainian and Polish prisoners – who had been massacred by the NKVD to prevent them being released by the advancing German forces - were found in three different former Soviet prisons in the city. (14)

In addition to this we know that Schulz was unusual in that he disapproved of any ‘anti-Semitic excesses’ as early as 1938 especially the mass execution of jews. (15)

Put another way Schulz in his own testimony as well as Streckenbach’s was a shrinking violet with a weak stomach and had only recently – as in circa a month before - begun commanding mass executions only for one of his first experiences to be the notoriously brutal Lviv pogroms of June to July 1941 (we actually have video of angry Ukrainian civilians beating jews to death with a crowbar during these events) in the wake of the discovery of the NKVD’s atrocities in the city.

Thus, Schulz’s appeals to Rausch and Streckenbach were not actually to do with his being upset at the mass killings of jews per se, but rather were motivated by his previous opposition to mass executions and ‘anti-Semitic excesses’ in general and Rausch’s response according to Schulz was simply to tell him that he wasn’t going to get his way (as he had previously) (16) because the activities of the Einsatzgruppen (i.e. pacification of the newly conquered areas and executing those implicated in Stalin’s atrocities [or allowing the local inhabitants the latitude to sort it themselves]) had been authorised at the highest levels of the Reich government (i.e., probably referring to Hitler’s ‘Commissar Order’ not an ‘exterminate the jews of the Soviet Union’ order which is claimed by orthodox historians to have come in December 1941 not August 1941! (17)

Indeed, Schulz in a fit of pique asked to be relieved of his command and was promptly removed from it on 24th August 1941; precisely two weeks after he lodged his protest with Rausch. (18)

The point here is that ‘Israel Hayom’s’ version of Streckenbach’s post-war confession has the timeline completely off because if the informal ‘exterminate the jews of the Soviet Union’ order from Hitler came in December 1941 and the events that Streckenbach and Schulz are referring to happened in August 1941. Then either Heydrich cannot have made the comments that Streckenbach claims he did or Streckenbach and Schulz are not actually talking about an informal ‘exterminate the jews of the Soviet Union’ order from Hitler at all, but rather just the scale of the campaign (as well as Schulz’s own quibbles and lack of stomach for it) required to deal with the sheer number of the supporters of - and local perpetrators allied to - Stalin’s regime (both as a matter of local justice but also to allow the Third Reich to better secure its newly occupied territories from the threat of local subversion and partisan movements).

In addition to this we have further reason to suspect Streckenbach wasn’t being entirely honest and trying to transfer blame to others who were long dead – in this instance both Hitler and Heydrich – because his testimony positions Streckenbach as something of a concerned citizen and shrinking violet about mass executions when in fact he is well-known to have been an ideological radical even within the SS and to have been responsible for the mass arrest and the execution of Polish opponents of National Socialism/advocates of a strongly anti-German Polish nationalism in Poland between 1939 to 1940. (19)

Thus, we can very quickly see that Streckenbach’s comments are self-serving and downplay his involvement in the Einsatzgruppen as well as his commitment to National Socialism at the time, which Thomas Weber – quoted in the ‘Israel Hayom’ article – also implies. (20)

So, what does Streckenbach’s ‘testimony’ actually prove?

Well, the honest answer is that it is proves nothing we didn’t already know and had known for decades, and that Streckenbach is not referring in any way, shape or form to the ‘Holocaust’ but rather to the beginning of German anti-partisan operations in the East and the poor choice of Erwin Schulz to lead Einsatzkommando 5 (part of Einsatzgruppe C) who couldn’t handle the reality of punishing those who had supported Stalin and committed atrocities in his name.

It does not refer to a ‘Hitler order for the Holocaust’ despite the loud protestations by jews and their apologists that it does.

References

(1) On this see Philip Blood, 2006, ‘Hitler’s Bandit Hunters: The SS and the Nazi Occupation of Europe’, 1st Edition, Potomac: Washington D.C., esp. pp. 51-79

(2) Carlo Mattogno, 2018, ‘The Einsatzgruppen in the Eastern Territories: Genesis, Missions and Actions’, 1st Edition, Castle Hill: Uckfield, p. 40

(3) Ibid., pp. 119-120

(4) Ibid., p. 120

(5) For example, Ibid., p. 111

(6) See for example Yuri Slezine, 2004, ‘The Jewish Century’, 1st Edition, Princeton University Press: Princeton, pp. 195-201; Timothy Synder, 2010, ‘Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin’, 1st Edition, Basic Books: New York, p. 93; Bernard Wasserstein, 2012, ‘On the Eve: The Jews of Europe Before the Second World War’, 1st Edition, Profile: London, pp. 19; 64-65; 80-81

(7) For example: ‘Trial of the Major War Criminals before the International Military Tribunal’, 1947, Vol. 39, pp. 269–27

(8) https://www.israelhayom.com/2025/05/04/fuhrers-order-historic-nazi-recording-confirms-hitler-ordered-holocaust/

(9) Ibid.

(10) Richard Rhodes, 2002, ‘Masters of Death: The SS-Einsatzgruppen and the Invention of the Holocaust’, 1st Edition, Alfred A. Knopf: New York, pp. 124-125

(11) See: https://europeanstudiesreview.com/2023/11/27/the-overlooked-role-of-soviet-child-soldiers-in-defeating-adolf-hitler/

(12) Rhodes, Op. Cit., p. 124

(13) As Thomas Weber points out in: https://www.israelhayom.com/2025/05/04/fuhrers-order-historic-nazi-recording-confirms-hitler-ordered-holocaust/

(14) On this see: Ksenya Kiebuzinski, Alexander Motyl (Eds.), 2017, ‘The Great West Ukrainian Prison Massacre of 1941: A Sourcebook’, 1st Edition, Amsterdam University Press: Amsterdam, esp. 56-65

(15) George Browder, 1996, ‘Hitler's Enforcers: The Gestapo and the SS Security Service in the Nazi Revolution’, 1st Edition, Oxford University Press: New York, pp. 46–47

(16) Ibid.

(17) Mattogno, Op. Cit., pp. 119-120

(18) Peter Longerich, 2010, ‘Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews’, 1st Edition, Oxford University Press: New York, p. 225

(19) Michael Wildt, 2009, ‘An Uncompromising Generation: The Nazi Leadership of the Reich Security Main Office’, 1st Edition, University of Wisconsin Press: Madison, pp. 240–245

(20) https://www.israelhayom.com/2025/05/04/fuhrers-order-historic-nazi-recording-confirms-hitler-ordered-holocaust/