Another “liar, liar, pants on fire” Holocaust survivor story exposed as a fake

I will soon be updating this page of my scrapbookpages.com website:

http://www.scrapbookpages.com/Buchenwald/JedemDasSeine.html

One of the photos that I included on that page of my website, several years ago, has been proven to be a fake.  It is not a photo of Jews who were mistreated at Buchenwald, but a photo of German Prisoners of War at Bad Nenndorf, a little known prison set up by the British in 1945 after World War II had ended.

Photo of German POWs at Bad Nenndorf Britrish prison

Mel Gibson

The soldier on the far left in the photo looks a lot like Mel Gibson.  Maybe he can redeem himself by claiming that his Jewish father was tortured at Buchenwald.

The soldier, on the far right in the photo, looks very German to me, and he looks as if he is mad as hell, and not going to take it anymore.  That’s the way I feel, now that I have realized that I was duped by the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, who passed this photo off as a photo of her Jewish father, surrounded by ethnic Germans, who were allegedly prisoners at Buchenwald.

This text, which is on my website, will soon to changed to tell the truth behind the photo above:

The photo above was taken by an American Army photographer shortly after the camp was liberated. In the center of the photo is a Jewish prisoner who had gone into hiding when the Germans started to evacuate the camp, according to his daughter. He first hid in the typhus ward and later dug a hole near the infirmary barrack. He was too weak to stand when this photo was taken.

His daughter wrote in an e-mail to me that her father told her about “the American soldier who asked him to pose for a picture, because he was particularly emaciated compared to the other – political – prisoners. The photographer asked them to assume a serious expression, because he wanted to communicate what happened in the camps during the war.”

Note that the prisoner in the center of the photo is wearing thick socks. The concentration camp prisoners were not normally issued socks. These socks had formerly belonged to an SS guard in the camp.

The following is a quote from the e-mail letter sent to me by this prisoner’s daughter:

“When my father arrived in Buchenwald, he was slated to work in the quarry, in effect a protracted death sentence, when a Nazi Jeep drove by seeking building engineers. My father was a textile engineer, but decided to take the chance. He was lucky; his co-worker (they were building barracks) taught him on the job.

Towards the end of the war he would hide near the Germans’ cabin and listen to the newscasts, which told of the approaching American army. This motivated him to find whatever means possible to hold out in the camp and avoid further deportation. I already wrote you how he hid: first by hiding in the typhus ward, then by digging a cave.”

I should have known that something was wrong when a woman [whose name I have forgotten] wrote in an e-mail to me that her father told her about “the American soldier who asked him to pose for a picture, because he was particularly emaciated compared to the other – political – prisoners. The photographer asked them to assume a serious expression, because he wanted to communicate what happened in the camps during the war.”

Famous photo taken at Buchenwald has an Army Signal Corp number on the bottom

American soldiers were not allowed to carry cameras in World War II.  The photos taken at  Buchenwald, and at all the other camps liberated by Americans, were taken by Army Signal Core photographers and each photo has a number on the bottom in white ink.

Of course, there were American soldiers who had cameras that they had “liberated” from the Germans, but their photos are candid photos, not posed like the photo of the four men, shown above.

The photo of the four men is shown on this page of USHMM website.

The same photo is shown on this website, with the following information:

Pictured at right are four German men after being interned at the notorious Bad Nenndorf  secret prison set up by  the British during their occupation of north-west Germany in 1945. They are far from the worst of the cases discovered there.

A big Thank You to Carolyn Yeager who has exposed many lies about the Holocaust, including the photo of the German prisoners, which the Jews are claiming as a photo of prisoners at Buchenwald.

Nazis allowed Jews to write letters on their way to the gas chamber, and those letters are now kept in the archives at Arolsen…

An article which you can read in full at http://augustafreepress.com/misas-fugue-to-make-its-staunton-debut/ has this remarkable quote:

While they worked on this, students in the history department worked with Goss to research additional primary source photographs and film footage from the era through USHMM in Washington, D.C.  They also completed an International Tracing Service (ITS) request to see if any documentation on the Grunwald family existed in the Holocaust-era archives in Germany.  Dozens of documents were found.

The documents are among hundreds of artifacts that appear in the film, some emerging “out of nowhere,” Gaston said, during the lengthy discovery process.  Perhaps the most touching example is a hastily written letter by Grunwald’s mother to his father – moments before trucks took her to the gas chamber.  That letter was donated this past July to USHMM and will become part of their Permanent Exhibition, a testament to its uniqueness and importance as an artifact from this tragic time.

Grunwald’s mother was apparently selected for the gas chamber because she was not able to work, but his father was spared.  I can just see Dr. Mengele saying to Grunwald’s mother:  “Sorry, but I can’t let you slide  — I have to send you to the gas chamber, but not to worry, you can write a letter to your husband, and we will keep it in our archives, so 70 years from now, your descendants can read it.”

Babo Batren waiting for the truck to take her to the gas chamber (Click on photo to enlarge)

Jews waiting for a truck to take them to the gas chamber

Most of the Jews had to walk to the gas chamber and there are numerous photos of them walking, carrying their bundles.  You can see a large collection of these photos on this website: http://www.nazigassings.com/StrollingtotheGasChambers.html

Theresienstadt survivor says invasion by Russian Army prevented the completion of the gas chambers there

Way back on May 24, 2012, I blogged about Claude Lanzmann’s new documentary film, entitled Last of the Unjust, which will be shown at the Cannes film festival on Saturday and is expected to win an award.  I also blogged about Lanzmann’s film and the gas chambers at Theresienstadt here.

The Last of the Unjust mentions Nisko, the first settlement where the Jews were sent by Adolf Eichmann.  Dr. Wolf Murmelstein, the son of Benjamin Murmelstein, wrote an essay about his father and the Nisko settlement, which you can read on my website here.

The subject of gas chambers at the Theresienstadt concentration camp has been in the news lately, due to the release of Claude Lanzmann’s new film featuring Benjamin Murmelstein, the last Jewish leader at Theresienstadt, who gave testimony 10 years ago about the gas chambers at Theresienstadt for Lanzmann’s film Shoah.  His testimony wound up on the cutting room floor, but has now been included in Lanzmann’s new film.  You can read about Lanzmann and the film here.

In a recent news article which you can read in full here, Inge Auerbacher, a child survivor of Theresienstadt, [Terezin], was quoted as saying this:

Only the invasion of that area by the Russian Army prevented the completion of gas chambers at Terezin, [Auerbacher] said.

Inge Auerbacher was also quoted as saying this in her recent talk to students in Montana:

Holocaust deniers are everywhere she said, noting that the president of Iran claims the crematories in the concentration camps were just bakery ovens.

I also blogged here about the claim that the cremation ovens at Auschwitz were bakery ovens.

Inge was lucky to have survived the Theresienstadt camp; you can read about the death statistics at Theresienstadt on my website here.

This quote is from the newspaper article about Inge Auerbacher’s talk:

Auerbacher was born on Dec. 31, 1934, in a little German village, that was over 1,000 years old. There were 60 Jewish families there and they happily lived next door to Christian families. Her father was a textile merchant and a disabled World War I veteran. Her grandfather, who lived in another village, was also a German war veteran. “We were very patriotic. We died for Germany,” she said. “Yes, we were Jewish, but we were good Germans.”

Her name, she pointed out, is a very common German name for a girl. She wore German clothing, she spoke German, the only difference, she said, was where she worshipped (sic).

Things began to change in 1938 with the beginning of riots against Jewish neighborhoods. On Nov. 10, 1938, riots struck her village, and mobs broke out every window in the homes and businesses of Jews and her father and grandfather were arrested and taken to the concentration camp at Dachau. The mob desecrated the synagogue in their community.

Somehow, after a few weeks, her father and grandfather were allowed to come home, and they immediately began trying to find a way to leave Germany. They sold their home and moved in with her grandparents in an even smaller village. They applied to immigrate to the United States and were put on a waiting list more than 10 years long. “We were stuck, with great hopes of leaving,” she said.

Auerbacher recalls the time they lived in this little village as her only childhood. During that time, her grandfather died of a broken heart from the way Germany betrayed its war veterans and from the physical abuse he endured at Dachau.

In 1941, deportations in her part of Germany started in the winter. The school was closed and she never finished first grade. She didn’t go back to school until she was 15 years old. Her grandmother was deported first. The family did not know for some time, but she was taken to the Black Forest and shot. She lies in a mass grave today. Eventually, Auerbacher, her mother and father, were deported to Terezin [Theresienstadt], a concentration camp built in an old military garrison in what is now the Czech Republic.

Auerbacher remembers that they could take almost nothing when they were deported. A few articles of clothing, metal dishes, a bedroll, and, for her, her special dolly, “Marlene,” named after the German-American movie star Marlene Dietrich.

Her time in Terezin is a blur of brutality, squalor, hunger, sickness and sorrow. She suffered scarlet fever there and many other illnesses. Her hair was filled with lice and her body covered with boils. “Hunger was a constant companion. You didn’t think about anything else but food, food, food,” she said. “You either lived or you died,” she said.

Terezin was a staging place, a transit area where two-thirds of those sent there were eventually shipped to killing centers, and a third died there. Of the 50,000 children under the age of 15 who came through Terezin, only a little more than 100 survived. Only the invasion of that area by the Russian Army prevented the completion of gas chambers at Terezin, she said.

Throughout this brutal time, she said, her father never lost hope. He told his wife, you wait and see, you’ll ride in a car again someday.

His faith sustained them, and on May 8, they were finally liberated. Eventually, they returned to her grandmother’s village and lived in an apartment there. “We were a miracle that our family survived,” she said.

[...]

After retiring, she became an activist for the Holocaust, traveling to Europe, revisiting Terezin and the places of her youth, writing her books and starting on speaking tours.

Theresienstadt, now known as Terezin, is most famous for the Red Cross visit in June 1944.  A second Red Cross visit was scheduled for April 6, 1945 and Adolf Eichmann came to Theresienstadt on March 5, 1945 to check out the camp.  According to some Holocaust experts, that is when he ordered gas chambers to be built at Theresienstadt because the gas chambers at Auschwitz had been closed in November 1944, and he wanted to continue the genocide of the Jews at Theresienstadt.

By March 1945, there was complete chaos in Europe in the final days of the war and Theresienstadt had become shabby again, after the first Red Cross visit in June 1944. Most of the able-bodied Jews in the camp had been sent on the transports to Auschwitz, where there were factories in which the Jews were being put to work for the German war effort. Most of the remaining inmates were elderly people or young children, like 10 year-old Inge Auerbacher, who were not able to work. Eichmann ordered the town to be cleaned up again, and the ghetto passed a second Red Cross inspection in 1945 with a good report.

On April 15, 1945, all the Danish Jews in the ghetto were transported back to Denmark with the help of the Red Cross.

On May 3, 1945, the Nazis turned the whole Theresienstadt camp over to Red Cross workers who now had the difficult task of trying to save the survivors from a raging typhus epidemic.

Typhus had been brought into the Theresienstadt ghetto by 13,454 survivors of the eastern concentration camps who began arriving after April 20, 1945. Some of them had been sent to Auschwitz a few months earlier and were now returning. In the final days of the war, the Theresienstadt ghetto became a hell hole, where a typhus epidemic was totally out of control, just like the epidemic in the unfortunate Bergen-Belsen camp which the Nazis had voluntarily turned over to the British on April 15, 1945.

Typhus is caused by body lice, and the Germans had tried unsuccessfully to control the lice in the death camps in Poland by using Zyklon B, the same chemical that they used to kill the Jews in the homicidal gas chambers.

Way back in 2010, I blogged about the gas chambers at Theresienstadt here.

Lanzmann should get in touch with Inge Auerbacher immediately and set her straight about her denial of the gas chambers at Theresienstadt, which were most certainly finished, according to his new film.  Holocaust denial is against the law in 17 countries and Auerbacher could wind up in prison for 5 years for saying that the gas chambers at Terezin were not finished because the Russian Army arrived in the nick of time.

Did the American liberators of Dachau know that there was a typhus epidemic in progress there?

This morning, I read a news article in the online Redding Eagle newspaper, which tells the story of Frank Stevenson, Jr. who was at Dachau when the camp was liberated on April 29, 1945.

Dachau guards who were captured by the American liberators; Frank Stevenson is on the right

This quote is from the news article in the Redding Eagle:

Death camp changed life of Wernersville WWII veteran
[by] Bruce Posten

As an Army soldier, Frank Stevenson Jr. helped liberate Dachau, the notorious Nazi concentration camp, and its subsidiary camps in late April 1945.

[...]

Stevenson witnessed the horror of human atrocity firsthand.

“As soon as Hitler was in business, Dachau was operating as a place for his political prisoners of many nationalities,” said Stevenson, who will celebrate his 90th birthday on June 6, the 69th anniversary of D-Day.

That’s an appropriate irony, not because he was part of the historic World War II Allied invasion, but what the success of that endeavor allowed him to witness during the final days of the war.

[...]

But it was Dachau, the model for other German camps, that left the lasting impression, with its legacy of starvations (sic), executions and prisoners worked to death.

What he saw [at Dachau], he will never forget: the famished inmates surrounded by barbed wire; a railroad track that led up to a door where victims were herded into a gas chamber; a room of I-beams with pulleys and nooses for hangings; and another with an incinerator where bodies were burned.

Stevenson came upon a bloodstained wall showing evidence of executions. And in still another room, he saw the bodies piled up to the ceiling, people killed within days of the liberation with no time for the Germans to burn them.

“We really had no idea of all this,” Stevenson said, adding that with the approach of Allied liberators some prisoners escaped and gathered weapons, seeking vengeance by killing Nazi guards.

Note that Frank Stevenson mentioned that the prisoners were killing Nazi guards, but apparently he didn’t know that some of the SS soldiers at Dachau were killed by the American liberators. Apparently, he also did not know about the typhus epidemic in the camp and that the dead bodies found in the camp were the bodies of prisoners who had died from typhus.  He assumed that the bodies of prisoners, that were piled up in the morgue, were the bodies of prisoners who had been murdered in the last days of the war.

This quote is a continuation of the news article in the Redding Eagle:

In [Stevenson's book], a letter to his mother and father on May 1, 1945, read: “Since I’ve been over here I’ve found that a lot of what we are told is either grossly exaggerated or just plain propaganda; however, the weirdest story that was ever told about this concentration camp was perfectly true.”

Nothing was perfect at Dachau, except the horrible human truth.

“I used to be quite a believer in God, taught Sunday school and attended church,” Stevenson said. “But after I saw that I just kept asking myself, ‘Where was God when all those people were killed?’ I respect anyone’s faith, because it can provide comfort, but for me that’s no more. I believe when you’re dead, you’re dead.”

In 1984, Stevenson took a trip to Europe, but Dachau wasn’t on the itinerary. Stevenson was drawn to go back.

“Our tour director didn’t want us to go and said, ‘You don’t believe all that stuff that was supposed to have happened there?’ ” Stevenson said.

Stevenson believed it; he had seen it.

Along with 15 others, he took a side trip and caught up with the tour later.

“I know what I saw,” Stevenson said.

And no distance of decades or others’ delusions can mask what he witnessed.

American reporters view bodies of typhus victims after Dachau was liberated

The photo above shows bodies laid out in rows near a barracks building on the east side of the Dachau camp; these were the bodies of prisoners who had died of typhus after the camp was liberated.

Prisoners in the typhus ward set up by American doctors after Dachau was liberated

After the Dachau camp was liberated, the former inmates had to be kept inside the prison enclosure for several weeks until all danger of spreading the typhus epidemic in the camp had passed. Just before the Americans arrived, up to 400 prisoners had been dying each day in the typhus epidemic which was out of control, according to the testimony of the Chief Doctor of the camp at the American Military Tribunal held at Dachau in November 1945.  On 2 May 1945, the 116th Evacuation Hospital arrived at Dachau and set up operations. According to a report made on 20 May 1945, there were 140 prisoners dying each day in the camp; the principle causes of death were starvation, tuberculosis, typhus and dysentery. On liberation day, April 29, 1945, there were 4,000 prisoners in the Dachau camp hospital and an unknown number of sick prisoners in the barracks who had been receiving no medical attention.

There were 18 one-story wooden SS barrack buildings in the Dachau army garrison which were converted by the American liberators into hospital wards. The American medical workers were housed in the SS administration building. A Typhus Commission arrived, within days, and began vaccinating all medical personnel and the prisoners. There was a daily dusting of DDT to kill the lice which spreads typhus.

Dachau prisoner being dusted with DDT to kill the lice that spreads typhus

On 3 May 1945, the sick prisoners were brought to the hospital wards. They were bathed, dusted with DDT powder and given clean pajamas to wear; their old prison clothes were burned.

By July 1945, the typhus epidemic in the Dachau concentration camp had been brought under control by the US Army doctors, and all the prisoners had either been released or moved to a Displaced Persons camp at Landsberg. The photograph below shows former inmates being tested for typhus before being allowed to leave.

Survivors of Dachau were given a test for typhus before being allowed to leave

So why didn’t the Nazis take care of the prisoners and prevent a typhus epidemic at Dachau?  No one ever mentions that the SS administrators at Dachau DID try to prevent epidemics, but in the last months of the war, when Germany was being bombed back to the Stone Age, everything got out of control.

Disinfection Hut at Dachau, where clothes were disinfected to prevent typhus, was torn down to make a space for a memorial to the Jews who died at Dachau

The photograph above shows the disinfection hut at Dachau, which is no longer in existence. Before it was torn down, the building was used as a restaurant, when the Dachau camp became a refugee camp for 17 years, for Germans who had been expelled from the Sudetenland in what is now the Czech Republic after the war. The restaurant was torn down in 1965 to make room for the Dachau Memorial Site. The location of the disinfection building is where the Jewish Memorial now stands.

Jewish Memorial stands in the location of the former disinfection building

On April 30, 1945, one day after the Dachau camp was liberated, a Displaced Persons team of US Army soldiers arrived to take care of the survivors. Marcus J. Smith, who was a medical doctor on this team, described the disinfection building, which he saw when the prisoners escorted him around the camp. In his book, The Harrowing of Hell, Smith wrote the following:

“Our escorts take us to the disinfection building. Here, while prisoners were bathed in antiseptic solution every two to four weeks, their clothes were put into an apparatus in which they were exposed to two to four meter radiowaves and a temperature of 182 degrees Centigrade. So I am told. This is an experimental method, and I cannot ascertain its effectiveness. My recommendation will be to use soap, water, antiseptic solutions and DDT. Nearby is a concrete building in which 300 prisoners could shower at a time. I am told that each prisoner was permitted one shower every two weeks. (The building has been closed for the last three weeks.)”

The shower building which Smith described, in his book, had been closed for three weeks because a bomb that hit the Dachau complex on April 9, 1945 had destroyed the water main, and there was no running water in the camp when the Americans arrived.

Smith went on to describe the “crematorium and the gas chamber” which were in the “large concrete and brick building with the high smokestack,” so it is clear that neither the “disinfection building” nor the shower room, which he described above, was the building where the homicidal gas chamber was allegedly located.

The prisoners who took Smith on a tour of the camp, one day after it was liberated, did NOT point out that the four disinfection chambers in the crematorium building used Zyklon-B for delousing the clothes. Regarding the clothes piled up outside the Baracke X building where four delousing chambers and the homicidal gas chamber were located, Smith wrote the following:

“There are conflicting stories as to the use of the gas chamber. [...] Many of the stories described the shedding of clothes before execution. This was purposeful. The clothing was collected and later issued to newly arriving prisoners.”

Smith assumed that the clothes, that were shed by the prisoners, prior to being gassed in Baracke X, were taken all the way across the camp to the old disinfection building to be deloused.  He did not understand that the “gas chambers” in the Baracke X building were being used for disinfecting clothing.

Door into disinfection chamber in Baracke X where clothing was disinfected

DDT was in common use in America in 1945, but was apparently not being used by the Germans. Smith wrote the following in his book The Harrowing of Hell:

“As the years passed, reports began to appear about the resistance of certain insects to DDT, and its harmful effects on certain species of birds, fish, amphibians, and mammals. But in 1945, we had no inkling of adverse effects. We used DDT by the ton; it coated our clothes, food, and air, and the results achieved by it in the control of the typhus fever epidemic were spectacular.”

The Germans were way ahead of American scientists, who had not yet discovered the harmful effects of DDT. If only the SS had used DDT at Dachau, there would not have been dead bodies at Dachau for American soldiers, like Frank Stevenson, to find, and assume that these prisoners had been deliberately killed by the Nazis.

There were 2,539 Jews at the Dachau main camp when it was liberated.  The number of Jewish deaths at Dachau is unknown.
Dachau Liberated: TheOfficial Report of the US Seventh Army, published in 1945, mentions that 14,700 deaths had occurred at Dachau in the first quarter of 1945.  This was during the time that there was a typhus epidemic at Dachau.

Paul Berben, a prisoner in the camp, wrote a book entitled Dachau, the Official History 1933 – 1945, in which he stated that 2,888 prisoners had died at Dachau in January 1945, 3,977 prisoners had died in February, 3,668 had died in March and 2,625 had died in April, for a total of 13,158 in the first four months of 1945.  Most of these deaths were due to typhus and other diseases in the camp.

In the month of May 1945, an additional 2,226 Dachau prisoners died after the camp was liberated, in spite of the excellent care given to them by American military doctors. There were 196 more deaths in June before the typhus epidemic was finally stopped by the use of DDT and the vaccination of all the prisoners.

According to a book published by the US Seventh Army immediately after the war (Dachau Liberated, The Official Report by The U.S. Seventh Army), there was a total of 29,138 Jews brought to Dachau from other camps between June 20, 1944 and November 23, 1944. The US Seventh Army report says that Jews were brought to Dachau to be executed and that they were gassed in the gas chamber disguised as a shower room in the Baracke X building, and also in the four smaller gas chambers. According Barbara Distel, the former director of the Memorial Site, the gas chamber at Dachau, which was disguised as a shower room, was never used for any purpose.

Today, tour guides tell visitors that the gas chamber at Dachau was used, but not for “mass gassing.”

Holocaust survivor says the Nazis were in such a hurry to kill the Jews that they didn’t bother with tattoos in the last days of Auschwitz

In a news article in the online Wellsville Daily, which you can read in full here, Eva Abrams tells how she escaped death at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

This quote is from the news article:

Following the horrific account, students asked questions about her scars. She wasn’t tattooed.

“It was near the end of the war and they were in too much of a hurry to kill us, so they didn’t bother with the tattoos,” Eva said.

To go back to the beginning of the Eva Abrams story, this quote from the news article tells about how she survived:

[Eva and her family] arrived at Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland in the spring of 1944.

D-Day was a few weeks away and the Nazis were in retreat as Allied bombing increased, but the SS was determined to complete its “Final Solution” and eliminate as many Hungarian Jews as possible, Abrams told students at Bolivar Central School Friday as she gave her personal account of the Holocaust.

[...]

“As we got off the train, there was Mengele (Josef Mengele, an SS physician, infamous for his inhumane medical experimentation upon concentration camp prisoners at Auschwitz) and he pointed for my mother to go to the left and me to go to the right. My mother was only 50 years old and she was worried about what was going to happen to me,” Abrams said. Her mother and niece were sent to the gas chamber/crematorium. Abrams was sent to a barracks holding 1,000 women.

[...]

Abrams came very close to not surviving the concentration camp. Her mother, father, an older sister and her young niece didn’t survive. She recalled the 500-mile forced march, in the dead of winter, she and 1,000 other, starved, barefoot and nearly naked women, including her two older sisters, endured and how at the end of it only a family quirk may have saved her life when the German soldiers opened fire with a machine gun aimed at her and five other women.

“I fell down before they started firing. I don’t know why,” Abrams said.

[..]

30,000 records kept by the Nazis, but not one name of anyone who died in a gas chamber….

As everyone knows, the Nazis kept meticulous records of EVERYTHING — except the names of the Jews who were gassed in the death camps.

These Nazi records have been kept, for years, in “an inconspicuous white building” in the town of Arolsen, Germany.  The records contain the names of 17.5 million people, but not one name of a Jew who was gassed, according to a news story which you can read in full here.

Miles and miles of records, but no records of gassing

This quote is from the news article:

International Tracing Service (ITS) in Bad Arolsen contains 30 million documents on survivors of Nazi camps, Gestapo prisons, forced laborers and displaced persons. [...]

The 25 kilometers of yellowing papers include typed lists of Jews, homosexuals and other persecuted groups, files on children born in the Nazi Lebensborn program to breed a master race, and registers of arrivals and departures from concentration camps. [...]

The Nazis’ meticulous record-keeping stopped only when Jews and other victims were herded into gas chambers.

“At death camps like Sobibor or Auschwitz, only natural causes of death are recorded – heart failure or pneumonia,” said spokeswoman, Kathrin Flor. “There’s no mention of gassing. The last evidence of many lives is the transport to the camp.”

Wait a minute!  There are no records of anyone being gassed at Sobibor, a camp that was strictly a death camp?

Auschwitz was a multi-purpose camp with three separate locations, and some of the prisoners worked.  But the only purpose of the Sobibor camp was to get rid of (ausrotten) the Jews  by mass gassing in large gas chambers, using either carbon monoxide or Zyklon-B.

The Jews who were NOT gassed at Auschwitz were registered and given an identification number which was tattooed on their arm.  The Jews who got off the transport trains at Auschwitz, and were waved to the left by Dr. Mengele, were not registered and no records of their deaths in the gas chamber were kept.

It is understandable that the Nazis would not have wanted to keep a record of death by gassing, but they could have made up some other name, a euphemism for gassing.  Something like “went up the chimney” or shot while attempting to escape (Auf der Flucht erschossen).

By being remiss in recording the deaths from gassing, the Nazis caused the number of recorded deaths at Auschwitz to be embarrassingly low, although ESTIMATES of the Auschwitz deaths are now as high as 1.5 million.  The lack of records has led to Holocaust denial.  If only the Nazis had just kept records of the names of each person who was gassed.  Would it have killed them to have a guy standing at the door into the gas chamber, taking names to put into their vast records, which they kept for future generations?

You can read about the Nazi gas chambers here.

Jewish survivor of Dachau tells students about witnessing prisoners being killed in the gas chamber

Elly Gotz was only in the Dachau main camp for two days before the camp was liberated, but he witnessed prisoners being killed in the gas chamber.  He told an audience of students about the Dachau gas chamber in a talk that he gave in April this year.  His message is that the students shouldn’t hate, but how can these students not hate after they are told lies about prisoners being gassed at Dachau?

This quote is from the news article which you can read in full here:

Gotz talked about the atrocities he witnessed and experienced — of being forced to move to the Jewish ghetto, of going into hiding with his family — where his mother, a nurse, had the task of helping them take their own lives (with syringes of a heart attack-inducing drug) should they be discovered.

Gotz also talked of his time at the Dachau labour and concentration camps and of witnessing innocent people being shot, dying of starvation and being killed in gas chambers.

Currently, there is a 93 year-old-man who is scheduled to go on trial in Germany as a war criminal because he was a cook in a concentration camp.  If old men, like John Demjanjuk, can be brought into court on a stretcher, and prosecuted for alleged war crimes, then old men who tell lies about gas chambers should also be brought into court in Germany and charged with the crime of Lying about the Holocaust.

Elly Gotz was born in Kaunas, Lithuania in 1928.  In 1941, his family was put into a ghetto where they stayed for three years before being sent to a Dachau sub-camp in 1944.

On April 29, 1945, when the main Dachau camp was liberated, there was a total of 2,539 Jews in the camp, including 225 women, according to the US Army census. Most of the Jews had arrived only weeks or even days before, after they were evacuated from the Dachau sub-camps, mainly the eleven Kaufering camps near Landsberg am Lech, where they had been forced to work in building underground factories for the manufacture of Messerschmitt airplanes.  Elly Gotz and his father had been working in the Kaufering I camp for 10 months.

You can hear Elly Gotz tell his story on the YouTube video below.  At 1:35 on the video, Gotz tells how “the vicious Commandant” of Dachau told him the prisoners were all going to be killed: “We are keeping the last bullets for you.”

The last Commandant of the Dachau Concentration Camp was Wilhelm Eduard Weiter; he had left the Dachau main camp on April 26, 1945, leading a transport of prisoners to the Schloss Itter, a subcamp of Dachau in Austria. When Weiter realized that Elly the Liar had arrived in the main camp the following day, Weiter came back and made his threats to 17-year-old Elly so that he would have some lies to tell students years later.

Weird Jewish Museum in Berlin gets even weirder…

“Jew in a Box” in the Jewish Museum in Berlin

The sign under the glass box, where a Jew sits in the Jewish Museum in Berlin, says “Gibt es noch Juden in Deutschland?” (Are there still Jews in Germany?)

This quote is from a news article which you can read in full here:

An interactive ‘Jew in a Box’ display at the Jewish Museum in Berlin has attracted scathing criticism from prominent Jewish figures and anti-Semitic comments from visitors.

Last month American Bill Glucroft, 27, climbed into a glass box at the museum, which chronicles Jewish life in the capital and broader Germany, with the caption beneath it reading: “Are there still Jews in Germany?”

Since then, other Jewish people have taken turns to sit in the box.

“A lot of our visitors don’t know any Jews and have questions they want to ask,” said museum official Tina Luedecke.

“With this exhibition we offer an opportunity for those people to know more about Jews and Jewish life.”

But since the start of the exhibit, ‘The Whole Truth, everything you wanted to know about Jews’, it has drawn criticism within the Jewish community.

Before you criticize this weird exhibition, you have to see it in context—with the rest of the Museum, which was deliberately set up to throw people off balance.

The photo below shows the outside of the Museum building, which was designed by Jewish architect Daniel Libeskind.

Exterior of Jewish Museum in Berlin

The design of the Jewish Museum in Berlin is supposed to represent a deconstructed Star of David, as though it has been hit by lightning. The only windows in the museum are the angular slits that you see on the sides of the building. The surface of the building is covered with polished metal facing. There is no door into the exhibits; entry is through a tunnel from the Baroque building next door, which is shown in the photo below.

Entrance to the Jewish Museum in Berlin is through this Baroque building next door

Entry to the Jewish Museum is through the Baroque building, shown in the photo above, which was formerly Berlin’s Superior court. The Jewish Museum was originally an annex of the Berlin Museum in the former court building, which is called the Kolliegenhaus. The Berlin Museum was moved back to its original home, and the Jewish Museum opened here as a separate museum in October 2001.

Sign says “Jewish Museum Berlin”

The two contrasting buildings in the photo above show the difference between the German people and the Jews in Germany.  Be prepared to leave the normal world behind, as you go through a tunnel to get to the Jewish Museum next door to a traditional German building.

Aerial view shows the Jewish Museum on the left, next door to a traditional German building

The layout of the Jewish Museum in Berlin

There are no windows in the Jewish Museum building, but narrow slits in the sides of the building allow in some light, which illuminate two of the corridors, as shown in the model above. The whole building is designed to be scary, like a house of horrors. There are no guided tours and visitors may walk about freely, although when I was there in 2001, there were attendants on duty, ready to answer any questions.

The Axis of Exile and the Axis of Continuity

The photo above shows two of the corridors in the Jewish Museum.  This is where the “axis of Continuity” intersects with the “axis of Exile.” The “axis of Exile,” which represents the deportation of the German Jews by the Nazis, leads outside to a garden, which consists of 49 stone columns with trees planted on top of the columns.  (You can’t get any weirder than that.)

Garden outside Jewish Museum has stone columns planted with trees on top

Trees growing out of columns in the garden outside the Jewish Museum — can anything be weirder than that?

The “axis of Continuity” leads to the exhibition space. Together, the three corridors in the Museum represent the three important elements of the Jewish experience, according to the museum designer.

The photos below show the interior of one of the empty towers.

Memory Void Tower in the Jewish Museum in Berlin

Fallen leaves in the Memory Void Tower

Close-up of Fallen Leaves in the Memory Void Tower

New film by Claude Lanzmann, soon to be released, will feature Benjamin Murmelstein, the last head of the Jewish council at Theresienstadt

Claude Lanzmann is the 87-year-old director of the famous 9 and 1/2 hour Holocaust documentary entitled Shoah, which features testimony from Holocaust survivors and Holocaust perpetrators.  The testimony, given by Benjamin Murmelstein, for that film ended up on the cutting room floor.  I previously blogged about Lanzmann’s new film here.

So why is Lanzmann doing a new film, featuring the testimony of Murmelstein, who is now dead?  Because Murmelstein revealed, in his testimony, that there was a gas chamber at Theresienstadt where the Nazis were planning to finish off the genocide of the Jews.

This quote from the news article explains it:

…. What angers [Lanzmann] is not that anyone would be making money off of images of genocide, but rather, that anyone would dare suggest that any such images [of gas chambers] exist.

“They [gas chamber images] don’t [exist],” he says categorically. “The core of the story is the gas chambers, and there is no footage from inside the gas chambers. All other sorts of footage are side things.”

Gas chamber at Theresienstadt was near this location

According to the Ghetto Museum at Theresienstadt, a homicidal gas chamber was built by the Nazis in the Spring of 1945 in a corridor of the town’s fortifications wall near the Litomerice gate, (shown in the photo above) which is right by the Bauhof building, shown in the photograph below. Click here to see a map of the Theresienstadt ghetto. The Bauhof building is number 14 on the map.

Bauhof gas chamber building is on the left and the Litomerice gate is on the right

The alleged Theresienstadt homicidal gas chamber was directly across from the Jäger (Hunter) barracks, an identical building on the opposite side of the town, which was used as a disinfection station where the prisoners and their clothing were deloused. The prisoners were disinfected by being completely submerged in a tub containing a chemical which would kill the lice on their bodies. At the same time, their clothing was disinfected by hot steam; they would have to put their clothes back on while they were still wet and then return to their barracks.

The ghetto inmates became aware of the alleged Theresienstadt homicidal gas chamber in the Bauhof building and were planning to blow it up, but the war ended just in time to save the Theresienstadt Jews from being gassed with Zyklon-B.

You can read about Lanzmann’s new film in this quote from a news article which you can read in full here:

The very first interview Claude Lanzmann recorded for his groundbreaking nine-and-a-half hour documentary “Shoah” ended up on the cutting-room floor. It was an interview he conducted almost 40 years ago in Rome with Benjamin Murmelstein, a Viennese rabbi and intellectual who served as the last head of the Jewish Council in Theresienstadt. Although the question-and-answer session went on for an entire week, generating hours upon hours of tape, Lanzmann never found an appropriate place for it.

Until now.

These outtakes from “Shoah” form the basis of Lanzmann’s soon-to-be-released film, “The Last of the Unjust” (a play on the title of Andre Schwarz-Bart’s classic French novel), a three-and-a-half hour documentary that reveals, in his words, “the height of Nazi cruelty and perversity.” Lanzmann promises that the testimony featured in his latest cinematic work is the ultimate rebuttal to the “so-called banality of evil” theory popularized by Hannah Arendt – whom he disparagingly refers to as “Frau Arendt” – by demonstrating just how corrupt and conniving a man was Holocaust mastermind Adolf Eichmann.

Several years ago, Dr. Wolf Murmelstein, the son of Benjamin Murmelstein, sent me 6 essays that he had written in defense of his father.   You can access all of the essays written by Dr. Wolf Murmelstein on my website  here.  I also blogged about Benjamin Mermelstein and Adolf Eichmann’s plan to continue the gassing of the Jews at Theresienstadt here.

This quote from the news article about the new Lanzmann film explains why a new film, featuring the testimony of Benjamin Murmelstein is needed:

When “Shoah” was broadcast in weekly TV segments in Iran two years ago, Lanzmann took the opportunity to write an open letter to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the world’s most notorious Holocaust denier, reassuring the national leader he had nothing to fear.

“I said ‘If you want to find proof in ‘Shoah’ that the Shoah really happened, you will not find this proof. Why? Because there is not one single corpse in ‘Shoah’. And that’s because there were no corpses. People who arrived in Auschwitz were gassed within the first two hours. Their bodies were turned to ashes, and these ashes were dumped in sacks in the river or allowed to blow away in the wind.”

Benjamin Murmelstein probably mentioned the gas chamber at Theresienstadt in his testimony for the Shoah documentary, which was not used in the film.

Was there really a gas chamber at Theresienstadt?  There was a typhus epidemic at Theresienstadt in the last days of the camp and thousands of prisoners were dying.  I have no doubt that a Gaskammer was set up, to stop the epidemic, and Zyklon-B was used to disinfect the clothing of the prisoners.  It must have alarmed the prisoners when they learned that a Gaskammer was being used in the Bauhof building near the Litomerice gate into the camp.

Theresienstadt was one of the last camps to be liberated.  Prisoners from other camps were sent there to prevent them from being released for fear that they would attack the civilian German population during the last days of World War II.  Some of the survivors of the trains, that were sent to Theresienstadt in the last days of the war, believed that they were being sent there to be killed.

In a recent talk which she gave to college students, Ela Weissberger mentioned a gas chamber at Theresienstadt.  This quote is from the news story about her talk:

Weissberger, now in her eighties, spoke about her three and a half years at Terezin and in spite of its emphasis on art, Terezin was still a site of despair and death. Weissberger told of a shooting gallery that still bears the blood of innocent victims and a brewery converted into a gas chamber under the guise of showers. All the while Terezin was hailed as a model concentration camp, covered by an elaborate veneer of propaganda as the world averted their eyes.

The photo below shows the old brewery building at Theresienstadt.

Old brewery at Theresienstadt was converted into a Gaskammer for disinfecting prisoner clothing

I have a section about Theresienstadt on my website, which you can read here.

What’s worse than a Holocaust denier? A Republican!!! (Holocaust denier David Cole has outed himself and he’s a Republican)

It has been all over the news recently that David Cole, who went into hiding years ago after his life was threatened, has surfaced as David Stein and it has become known that he is a Republican.  You can read the news about David Stein here.

Back in 1992, a young David Cole went to the Auschwitz main camp and hired a guide to show him the famous Auschwitz gas chamber.  He videotaped his visit and recorded the tour guide saying that the gas chamber was original.

I had a similar experience when I visited the Auschwitz main camp in 1998 with a Polish guide who spoke perfect English.  She also told me that the gas chamber was original.  I didn’t dare ask too many questions because it was obvious to me that she was suspicious that I was a non-believer because I wasn’t showing enough emotion to suit her.

The two YouTube videos below show David Cole on his trip to Auschwitz in 1992.

This video includes David Cole’s interview with Dr. Piper at Auschwitz