Winkler, Jean-Marie
Négationnisme vs exactitude comptable. Stratégies de dissimulation dans l’administration de l’Aktion 14f13
- 2013.
15
Like many other Nazis, Dr Renno, deputy director of Hartheim gas killing centre, denied the crimes of which he was accused. During his trial, at the very end of the 1960’s, the defendant’s strategy was to refute entirely the killing of concentration camp prisoners during Aktion 14f13, while acknowledging the assassination of the handicapped and of the sick during the Aktion T4. Behind the denial of the criminals, concerned about minimizing their responsibility in order to escape sentencing, there is a constant theme : the Nazis tried to conceal the killing programs they perpetrated. Regarding the accounting procedures, German accuracy was opposed by a strategy of concealment, if not erasing, in the concentration camps or in the mass killing centres.This article exposes various strategies of concealment used in the discourse of the criminals and in official documents, for example the registration of deaths related to the Aktion 14f13 convoys coming from Mauthausen between 1941 and 1944. Paradoxically, the archives once deliberately forged by the executioners permit to those who can decipher them to track the very crimes they were meant to conceal. To the historian, this might be the only way to fight against oblivion in the absence of survivors.