The Natzweiler gas chamber

The Gas Chamber at Natzweiler-Struthof

The Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp was located on top of a 2,500 foot-high mountain in the Vosges mountain range, which was a ski area before the camp was built, and still is today.

Natzweiler-Struthof was not a death camp, specifically built for the mass extermination of the Jews; it was a camp for the imprisonment of convicted German criminals and Anti-Fascist resistance fighters. However, one of the reasons that it is so well known in America today is because a small number of Jews were killed there in a gas chamber, according to the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

The gas chamber building, shown in the photo above, has been preserved, but it was not open during the time that I visited. However, it is not necessary to examine the gas chamber because we have the confession of Josef Kramer, in which he said that he personally gassed 80 Jews.

Kramer made his confession after he was arrested at Bergen-Belsen when that camp was voluntarily turned over to the British on April 15, 1945.

Le Struthof, as the camp is known to the French, was located 31 miles from Strasbourg where Dr. August Hirt, a Professor at the University of Strasbourg, was conducting research on racial characteristics. When he requested Jewish skeletons that were undamaged by bullet holes or body blows, Heinrich Himmler ordered that Jews should be brought from Auschwitz to Natzweiler so that they could be killed in a gas chamber there.

In August 1943, a special gas chamber was constructed by adapting an existing building, formerly owned by the Struthof hotel, which was located on a side road, about a mile from the concentration camp. This room had previously been used as a refrigerator room by the hotel.

Killing the Jews in one of the gas chambers at Auschwitz and shipping the skeletons to Strasbourg wouldn’t do – the skeletons had to be prepared with great care by Dr. Hirt himself.

According to a Tübingen Professor, Dr. Hans-Joachim Lang, two anthropologists, who were both members of the SS, Dr. Hans Fleischhacker and Bruno Beger, were sent in June 1943 to Auschwitz to select Jews to be gassed so that their skeletons could be added to the rassistische/rassenideologische collection of Dr. August Hirt. There were 57 men and 29 women in the group that was selected.

In the documents submitted to the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal, it is mentioned that the Jewish victims were put into quarantine for a time at Auschwitz because there was a typhus epidemic in the camp; then they were brought to Natzweiler-Struthof.

The Nuremberg IMT documents show that 86 corpses were brought to the Anatomie Institute of the Reichsuniversitat Strassburg and that an assistant of Prof. August Hirt saw the tattoos on the arms and secretly wrote down the 86 numbers on a piece of paper.

Dr. August Hirt in his SS uniform

In a Military Tribunal conducted by the British after the war, Magnus Wochner, an SS staff member who was among the accused, testified as follows, according to a book entitled “The Natzweiler Trial,” written by Anthony M. Webb:

I recall particularly one mass execution when about 90 prisoners (60 men and 30 women), all Jews, were killed by gassing. This took place, as far as I can remember, in spring 1944. In this case the corpses were sent to Professor Hirt of the department of Anatomy in Strasbourg.

Contrary to the statement above, the gassing actually took place in August 1943, according to the confession of Natzweiler Commandant Josef Kramer, who was not among the accused at the trial where Wochner testified.

Dr. August Hirt doing an autopsy Photo Credit: USHMM

According to Dr. Lang, the files of the Natzweiler-Struthof camp show that there were 4 Jewish inmates in the camp on August 1, 1943 and one week later there were 90 Jews, indicating that a group of 86 Jews had arrived. The 29 women were gassed soon after arrival and the following week, there were 60 Jews in the camp. A week later, after the men had been gassed, there were only 3 Jews left in the camp since one of the male Jewish inmates had died during the week that the women were gassed.

When the Bergen-Belsen camp was turned over to the British on April 15, 1945, Commandant Josef Kramer volunteered to stay behind to help the British soldiers take over the camp, which was experiencing a horrendous typhus epidemic. Obviously, Kramer had no remorse for his crimes and did not expect to be arrested, or he would have escaped along with the other guards who left the camp before the British arrived. Instead, he met the British troops at the gate and offered his help in overcoming the typhus epidemic.

The photo below shows Josef Kramer, the Commandant of Bergen-Belsen and the former Commandant of Natzweiler, after he was arrested by the British on the first day after they took over the camp.

Josef Kramer, former Commandant of Natzweiler, under arrest at Bergen-Belsen

In the museum at Natzweiler-Struthof, Kramer’s confession is on display; he described how he personally mixed “salts” with water to produce a lethal gas. The gas was dumped through a hole which had been chiseled through the tiled wall of a room previously used for the refrigeration of perishable food. Then Kramer watched through a peephole as the Jews died from the fumes of the poison gas.

Josef Kramer was convicted by a British Military Tribunal held in 1945, and hanged for the crimes he had committed at Auschwitz II and Bergen-Belsen. The charges against Kramer at the proceedings of the British Military Tribunal did not include the crime of gassing Jews at Natzweiler-Struthof. Rather, he was charged with crimes committed at Bergen-Belsen and with gassing Jews at Auschwitz, where he was the Commandant of the Auschwitz II camp before being transferred to Bergen-Belsen in December 1944.

The corpse of a woman who was allegedly gassed at Natzweiler 

Photo Credit: USHMM

At the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal, charges were brought by the American prosecutor against the Nazis for medical experiments performed at Natzweiler, but there were no documents introduced in which it was claimed that a gas chamber had been used there to murder Jews.

The abandoned Natzweiler camp was discovered by both French and American troops, so it was the responsibility of the French and the American prosecutors to introduce the evidence of the gas chamber there.

On December 9, 1944, Colonel Paul Kirk and Lt. Colonel Edward J. Gully of the US 6th Army made an inspection of the Natzweiler camp, three months after it had been abandoned by the Nazis.

According to Robert H. Abzug, the author of “Inside the Vicious Heart,” they qualified just about every observation that had to do with instruments of death and torture. The following is a quote from Abzug’s book:

They found, among other things, “what appeared to be a disinfestation unit” and “a large pile of hair appearing and reputed to be human female.” They were shown a building with a space “allegedly used as a lethal gas chamber. ” In this building was “a cellar room with a special type elevator,” and “an incinerator room with equipment obviously intended for the burning of human bodies…a cell room and an autopsy room.” Kirk and Gully then described in detail the “so-called lethal gas chamber,” noting every pipe and outlet and its two steel doors. In the cellar they found four coffins and a sheet metal elevator “of a size which would take a human body” with “stains which appeared to be caused by blood.”

Kirk and Gully wrote a report that was sent to the War Crimes Division, in which they referred to a “so-called gas chamber” at Natzweiler. Based on their report, there were no charges, pertaining to a gas chamber at Natzweiler, brought against the Nazis on trial before the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg.

The building described in the quote from Abzug’s book is shown in my photo below. This building is the crematorium which has an elevator, an incinerator room, a cell room and an autopsy room.

Crematorium building at Natzweiler-Struthof

The photo below shows water pipes going into what appears to be a shower room which is right next to the crematory oven. You can see a bit of the crematory oven in the lower right hand corner of the photo. It appears that the water for the room might have been heated by the oven, as shown in the second photo below.

Water pipes going into shower room next to the ovens

When I visited the Natzweiler camp in October 2004, the room next to the oven was not open to visitors. I peeked through the window shown in the photo above and saw what looked like a shower room. This is probably the “so-called lethal gas chamber” which the two American officers described in their report, but there was no sign which said that this was a gas chamber. This is not the room that Josef Kramer described in his confession.

Oven for cremating bodies at Natzweiler-Struthof

The photo above shows the crematory oven described by the American Army officers who investigated the Natzweiler camp in an attempt to find evidence of war crimes. The shower room is behind the oven and to the right. To the right in the photograph is a display of the shoes worn by the prisoners in the camp.

The Natzweiler camp had only one crematory oven since it was not intended to be a factory for mass murder.

Apparently Kirk and Gully were not told by their French guides that the actual gas chamber was located on a side road, about one mile distant from the camp. Since they never saw the real gas chamber, they didn’t include it in their report, and consequently no charges were brought at the Nuremberg IMT with regard to the gassing of Jews at Natzweiler-Struthof.

In 1989, a plaque was placed at Struthof, in memory of the “87 Jews who were gassed” there. This was accomplished through the joint efforts of the Simon Wiesenthal Center and a New Jersey lawyer, Stephen Draisin. The number 87 includes the 86 Jews who were brought from Auschwitz to be gassed and one Jewish inmate who died during the same time period.

According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, “the gas chamber was also used in pseudoscientific medical experiments involving poison gas. The victims of these experiments were primarily Roma (Gypsies) who had been transferred from Auschwitz. Prisoners were also subjected to experiments involving treatment for typhus and yellow fever.”

A book which I purchased from the Memorial Site has this to say about the gas chamber:

4. The affair of the Israelite corpses

Hirt, professor of anatomy in Strasbourg, received corpses from the camp of Russian war prisoners at Mutzig, but as he thought they were too lean, he asked for people in a good physical condition for studies on heredity.

87 Israelites (30 of whom were women) were sent from the camp at Auschwitz. They were shut up in block 13 at the Struthof where they were measured, and they had to undergo experiments on sterilization. On August 11, 13, 17, 19, 1943, under the direction of doctors from Strasburg, the S.S. gassed the 87 Israelites in the gas chamber at Struthof with cyanide. Death occurred after 30 to 60 seconds. The corpses were transported to the Institut d’Anatomie in Strasburg. 17 entire corpses (3 of which being women’s) were found at the liberation as well as many dissected pieces.

According to Dr. Lang, there were 16 of the 86 bodies (3 women and 13 men) that were found intact in November 1944, not 17, and an autopsy was performed on the bodies.

“The liberation” referred to in the above quote probably means the liberation of France in August 1944. The Natzweiler-Struthof camp was abandoned in September 1944 so it was not actually “liberated.”

Dr. Hans-Joachim Lang was able to identify the 86 Jews who were gassed at Natzweiler after locating their prisoner numbers in the Auschwitz archives. The 29 women and 57 men who were gassed had been deported to Auschwitz from Norway, Poland, Greece, France, Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands.

The bodies of the 86 victims are buried in the Jewish cemetery of Strasbourg and a grave stone with the 86 names was placed there in December 2005.

Dr. Lang has published a book with the names of the 86 Jews who were gassed at Natzweiler. His book can be purchased at this web site:

http://www.die-namen-der-nummern.de

Refusal to bake a gay wedding cake compared to the Holocaust

You can read about it in this news article: https://reason.com/volokh/2018/06/04/the-masterpiece-cakeshop-decision-leaves

The following quote is from the news article:

Begin quote

Do bakers have a First Amendment right to refuse to bake cakes for same-sex weddings, even if there’s a state law banning sexual orientation discrimination by such businesses?

Do they have a First Amendment right to refuse to bake such cakes that contain text or symbolism (e.g., rainbow striping) that the bakers disapprove of?

How about wedding photographers or videographers, who create products that (unlike most cakes) are traditionally seen as speech? How about calligraphers or graphic designers, who have an objection to personally writing or typing certain messages?

End quote

So how does not baking a cake compare to the Holocaust?

During the Holocaust, gay men were arrested and sent to concentration camps — for breaking the law, not for being gay.  It was against the law in Germany for men to engage in homosexual acts.

When you are really angry, there is nothing like swearing in German

Go to this website to learn to swear in German: http://www.ebaumsworld.com/blogs/german-slang-and-swearing-with-english-translations/922039/

When you are swearing in Germany, it is O.K. to have some spit coming out of your mouth that lands on the face of your enemy.

The story of Dachau, as told to tourists

My photo of a sculpture in the Dachau museum

You can read all about the museum at Dachau on my website at http://www.scrapbookpages.com/DachauScrapbook/KZDachau/DachauLife01B.html

It all started at Dachau, the first concentration camp in Germany .

Who remembers Johnny Cash “At Folsom Prison”?

https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/music/2018/05/24/johnny-cash-folsom-prison-50th-anniversary/633332002/

Johnny Cash never actually shot a man in Reno just to watch him die.

But the rowdy inmates of California’s Folsom State Prison didn’t seem to mind, loudly cheering the country icon as he sang those famous words in Folsom Prison Blues, which hit the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart 50 years ago on May 25, 1968.

The outlaw anthem is taken from Cash’s seminal live effort At Folsom Prison, which he recorded over two shows inside prison walls on Jan. 13, 1968, before releasing the album that May. He was inspired to write the song in 1953 while serving in the U.S. Air Force, after watching the 1951 movie Inside the Walls of Folsom Prison. He originally recorded and released it as a single in 1955 and it became a top-5 hit on country radio.

But it wasn’t until he recorded a live version of the track in 1968 — which he performed for an estimated 1,000 prisoners — that it managed to cross over onto the pop charts, peaking at No. 32 on the Hot 100 that summer.

Throw Mama from the train a kiss …

What is wrong with this recent newspaper headline:

Gwyneth Paltrow says Brad Pitt threatened to kill Harvey Weinstein after he allegedly sexually harassed her

Who allegedly sexually harassed whom? Did Brad Pitt allegedly sexually harass Gyneth Paltrow? After he threatened to kill Harvey Weinstein?

The title of my blog post is an old expression that was formerly used to teach students how to write and to speak properly. The title is incorrect. It should read “Throw a kiss to Mama from the train.”

“…you pronounced the final e.”

I have just finished listening to a video about the Buchenwald camp. In the video, the narrator pronounces some of the words incorrectly, particularly German words, that have an e at the end of the word.

Years ago, someone wrote a poem about me which contained the line “What further glory awaits for thee — you pronounced the final e.”

I took the name “further glory” for my name on the internet — and the rest is history.

The Auschwitz Album shows photos of the Jews who were gassed by the Nazis

You can see the Auschwitz Album photos at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kOIHRQlQqwU

You can see a video of the liberators saving the Jews below:

The story of the Gypsies in the Holocaust

You can read about the Gypsies in the Holocaust at https://www.thoughtco.com/gypsies-and-the-holocaust-1779660

Photo of a  Gypsy wagon

A Short History of the Gypsies

Approximately a thousand years ago, several groups of people migrated from northern India, dispersing throughout Europe over the next several centuries.

Though these people were part of several tribes (the largest of which are the Sinti and Roma), the settled peoples called them by a collective name, “Gypsies” — which stems from the one-time belief that they had come from Egypt.

Nomadic, dark-skinned, non-Christian, speaking a foreign language (Romani), not tied to the land – the Gypsies were very different from the settled peoples of Europe. Misunderstandings of Gypsy culture created suspicions and fears, which in turn led to rampant speculations, stereotypes, and biased stories. Unfortunately, too many of these stereotypes and stories are still readily believed today.

Throughout the following centuries, non-Gypsies (Gaje) continually tried to either assimilate the Gypsies or kill them. Attempts to assimilate the Gypsies involved stealing their children and placing them with other families; giving them cattle and feed, expecting them to become farmers; outlawing their customs, language, and clothing as well as forcing them to attend school and church.

Decrees, laws, and mandates often allowed the killing of Gypsies. For instance, in 1725 King Frederick William I of Prussia ordered all Gypsies over 18 years of age to be hanged. A practice of “Gypsy hunting” was quite common – a game hunt very similar to fox hunting. Even as late as 1835, there was a Gypsy hunt in Jutland (Denmark) that “brought in a bag of over 260 men, women, and children.”¹

Though the Gypsies had undergone centuries of such persecution, it remained relatively random and sporadic until the twentieth century when the negative stereotypes became intrinsically molded into a racial identity, and the Gypsies were systematically slaughtered.

The Gypsies Under the Third Reich

The persecution of Gypsies began in the very beginning of the Third Reich – Gypsies were arrested and interned in concentration camps as well as sterilized under the July 1933 Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring. In the beginning, Gypsies were not specifically named as a group that threatened the Aryan, German people. This was because, under Nazi racial ideology, Gypsies were Aryans.

Thus, the Nazis had a problem: how could they persecute a group enveloped in negative stereotypes but supposedly part of the Aryan, super race?

After much thinking, Nazi racial researchers found a “scientific” reason to persecute at least most of the Gypsies. They found their answer in Professor Hans F. K. Günther’s book Rassenkunde Europas (“Anthropology of Europe”) where he wrote:

The Gypsies have indeed retained some elements from their Nordic home, but they are descended from the lowest classes of the population in that region. In the course of their migrations, they have absorbed the blood of the surrounding peoples, and have thus become an Oriental, western-Asiatic racial mixture, with an addition of Indian, mid-Asiatic, and European strains. Their nomadic mode of living is a result of this mixture. The Gypsies will generally affect Europe as aliens. ²

With this belief, the Nazis needed to determine who was “pure” Gypsy and who was “mixed.” Thus, in 1936, the Nazis established the Racial Hygiene and Population Biology Research Unit, with Dr. Robert Ritter at its head, to study the Gypsy problem and to make recommendations for Nazi policy.

As with the Jews, the Nazis needed to determine who was to be considered a “Gypsy.” Dr. Ritter decided that someone could be considered a Gypsy if they had “one or two Gypsies among his grandparents” or if “two or more of his grandparents are part-Gypsies.”3 Kenrick and Puxon personally blame Dr. Ritter for the additional 18,000 German Gypsies that were killed because of this more inclusive designation, rather than if the same rules had been followed as were applied to Jews.4

To study Gypsies, Dr. Ritter, his assistant Eva Justin, and his research team visited the Gypsy concentration camps (Zigeunerlagers) and examined thousands of Gypsies – documenting, registering, interviewing, photographing, and finally categorizing them.

It was from this research that Dr. Ritter formulated that 90% of Gypsies were of mixed blood, thus dangerous.

Having established a “scientific” reason to persecute 90% of the Gypsies, the Nazis needed to decide what to do with the other 10% – the ones that were nomadic and appeared to have the least number of “Aryan” qualities. At times Himmler discussed letting the “pure” Gypsies roam relatively freely and also suggested a special reservation for them. Assumably as part of one of these possibilities, nine Gypsy representatives were selected in October 1942 and told to create lists of Sinti and Lalleri to be saved.

There must have been confusion within the Nazi leadership, for it seems that many wanted all Gypsies killed, with no exceptions, even if they were categorized as Aryan. On December 3, 1942, Martin Bormann wrote in a letter to Himmler:

. . . special treatment would mean a fundamental deviation from the simultaneous measures for fighting the Gypsy menace and would not be understood at all by the population and lower leaders of the party. Also the Führer would not agree to giving one section of the Gypsies their old freedom.5

Though the Nazis did not discover a “scientific” reason to kill the ten percent of Gypsies categorized as “pure,” there were no distinctions made when Gypsies were ordered to Auschwitz or deported to the other death camps.

By the end of the war, it is estimated that 250,000 to 500,000 Gypsies were murdered in the Porajmos – killing approximately three-fourths of the German Gypsies and half of the Austrian Gypsies.

So much happened to the Gypsies during the Third Reich, I created a timeline to help outline the process from “Aryan” to annihilation.

End of article.

Gypsies are shown in the photo below.

• 

British royalty and an African American woman

Is it O.K. for British royalty to marry an African American?

Sorry — I am against it.

You can read about it in this news article:

The following quote is from the news article:

Begin quote

LONDON — It was an electrifying and unexpected moment in the midst of what had been a (mostly) by-the-book British wedding service. And as it went on, you could practically feel centuries of tradition begin to peel away.

Here was a relaxed, charismatic African-American bishop — Michael Bruce Curry, the head of the Episcopal Church — speaking to British aristocrats and members of the royal family in the cadence of the black American church.

But what was striking was not just his message, of love and inclusion; or his tone, which was soaring and magisterial; or his obvious delight in the matter at hand. It was the sheer fact of his prominence in a service that featured a fair number of ecclesiastical heavyweights, including the archbishop of Canterbury (who tweeted his admiration of the bishop).

The service, carefully put together by Meghan Markle and Prince Harry, included all the usual traditional elements, like a reading from the Bible by Harry’s aunt, the sister of Diana, the Princess of Wales.

End quote