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Ida Nasatir book review:
Final Judgment by Victor H. Bernstein
July 17, 1947—Final Judgment by Victor
H. Bernstein— Southwestern
Jewish Press, page 6: This is a small but shocking book. It contains a
portion of the mass of evidence presented at the Nuremberg trials which the
author attended, against twenty-one defendants, the creators of Nazi Germany.
The horrible crimes are literally without parallel in all the annals of mankind.
The first part of the book analyzes the carefully laid plans for
"Revenge" which the German military caste began to formulate as early
as 1918, immediately after the Armistice. Once begun, aggression followed
aggression, finally ending with the annihilation of entire groups of people. The
chief victims of this program of extermination were of course the Jews, six
million of whom were coldly murdered in the various concentration camps. The
testimony concerning the liquidation of the Jews is as fantastic as it is
hideous. A most damning chapter in the book is that entitled "Ghoul's
Gold." German business and industry not only prepared diligently for the
extermination of the Jews, with firms ACTUALLY COMPETING for bids to build
bigger and better crematoria, but they profited enormously from the massacred
Jews. The I.A. Toft an Sons submitted this "noble" offer to the
Auschwitz administration: "To the Central Construction Administration
of the SS and Police, Auschwitz. Subject: Crematoria for the second and third
prisoner camps. We again confirm receipt of your order for five three-part
cremation furnaces, including two electric elevators for the transportation of
the corpses. A practical installation for heating with coal and apparatus for
the removal have also been orders. Signed) I.A. Topf and Sons, Heil
Hitler! Rumors current among the war that the Nazis were using human
corpses for the manufacture of soap were indignantly denied even by such liberal
magazines as the Christian Century. However, evidences presented at Nuremberg
reveals that a firm in Danzig manufactured an electrically heated tank for the
manufacture of soap out of human fat: "The recipe called for 12 pounds of
human fat, ten quarts of water, and eight ounces to a pound of caustic
soda...all boiled for two or three hours and then cooled." Crushed bone was
sold to fertilizer firms for the manufacture of phosphate. Millions of garments,
carefully sorted in extermination camp warehouses, were turned back for
reprocessing for the German textile industry. And not only the garments, but
even the hair of the victims, especially female victims was saved and utilized
for the "glory" of the German people. The ineffable tragedy of
the Jew and the destiny the Nazis reserved for him, is told at length with a
mountain of DOCUMENTARY PROOF in this book. If the war had lasted a few months
longer, every Jew in Europe would have been murdered in crematoria, in mobile
gas vans, or shot at open pits. Final Judgment is an indispensable
book. If you read it, you will think about much, and you will forget
nothing. I promise this!