When revisionists ascribe so much of the Holocaust story to the Soviet Russians the obvious question arises, how could they have been so wrong? When revisionists point out the false to fact parts of the witness accounts, they have to explain how this could happen.

      Let me be so bold as to try to do so. To set the stage let me point out that General Rudenko who presented the Russian evidence at Nuremberg was twenty six years old at the time. A twenty six year old general handling the prosecution of the century.

      The reason a twenty six year old could rise to the rank of general was very simple, WW II was the war for the Rodina, for the Motherland. Everyone older had died in combat or had been shot by their political masters for losing battles. Due to attrition it quickly became a war where the senior ranks were populated by people in their 20s and 30s.

      In addition to this, the education system in the Soviet Union was not quite up to world standards to say the least. Of course academia, our university equivalent was there before the war, but its ranks had been thinned of those who failed to pass political muster. Below that, political indoctrination was primary for those who received it as there was not universal education despite propaganda claims.

      Into this situation came WW II. Not only poorly educated people drawn into the ranks but poorly educated people put into positions of authority as the senior people had died fighting the war. And these were the people creating the falsified "testimony" introduced at the Nuremberg trials.

      The "testimony" was created by rather poorly educated people. But let us not be so harsh on them until we realize that US college seniors, by actual survey, would probably have done worse in creating the really true "testimony" where it regards physical facts such as geography and science. And if they were pressed into the service of creating testimony the myriad bits of nonsense and impossibilities we find in them would be equally obvious to the educated. And they would be equally convincing to the poorly educated as in the US today.

      This is your explanation in the proverbial nutshell. The poorly educated were creating the testimony. Just enough right to ring true to the uncritical and more than enough wrong to ring alarm bells to the critical.

      But why were they creating stories? It is unclear just how far back the tradition of creating damning testimony goes but it was common with the Tzars. The Tzar could not lose a prosecution in which he took a personal interest.

      All of the NKVD and KGB and other letter organizations are follow-ons to formal Tzarist organizations. It was little covered in the West but Lenin, Stalin and the rest continued the Tzarist tradition of accepting requests put into a basket and granting some of them even though it was on the feast day of a saint. The traditions of a people do not die easily, only the name changes.