American World War II Air Force pilots were prisoners at Buchenwald until rescued by the Luftwaffe

On the last train out of Paris, just before the Allies liberated the city, were 168 American fighter pilots who had been shot down over France.  They were sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp, not as POWs, but as “terrorfliegers” (terror flyers) because they had been aiding French Resistance fighters, whom the Nazis called “terrorists.”

Elie Wiesel — Holocaust survivor # A7713?

On March 25, 2010, Elie Wiesel spoke to students at the University of Dayton in Ohio as reported by the Dayton Daily News.

Here is a quote from the Dayton Daily News article:

One student wondered if Wiesel still has his concentration camp number and if it serves as a reminder of those terrible experiences.

“I don’t need that to remember, I think about my past every day,” he responded. “But I still have it on my arm – A7713. At that time, we were numbers. No names, no identity.”

At the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp where Elie Wiesel says he was a prisoner from May 1944 to January 1945, the Jews, who were chosen to work, had an identification number tattooed on their arm. The Jews who arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau in May 1944 were tattooed with a number preceded by the letter A.

Noor Inayat Khan — if you tell a lie often enough, does it become the truth?

I was searching the blogs yesterday for anything about Dachau and came across this blog, which had an article about Noor Inayat Khan with the title “A Remarkable True Story for Women’s History Month.”  Noor Inayat Khan was a British SOE  spy who was allegedly executed at Dachau.

Famous photo of Buchenwald survivors – revisited

Barrack #56 at Buchenwald concentration camp

The famous photo above was taken at the Buchenwald concentration camp, inside  Block #56, by Private H. Miller of the Civil Affairs Branch of the U. S. Army Signal Corps on April 16, 1945, five days after the camp was liberated by the Sixth Armored Division of the US Third Army on April 11, 1945. The photo was published by the New York Times on May 6, 1945 with the caption “Crowded Bunks in the Prison Camp at Buchenwald.”

Schindler’s List for sale for $2.2 million

This morning I read this on the Reuters news web site:

(Reuters) – A New York memorabilia dealer is selling what he claims is the last privately-owned copy of a World War Two manuscript of Jewish names known as “Schindler’s list” and made famous in a 1993 movie of the same name.

The list was kept by German industrialist Oskar Schindler, who saved more than a 1000 Jewish lives from the Holocaust by employing them in his factory during World War Two.

Where are the bodies of the prisoners who died at Dachau?

When the US Seventh Army arrived at Dachau on April 29, 1945 to liberate the concentration camp, many of the American soldiers reported later that the smell of the smoke from the burning of the bodies was horrific.  Some said that they had seen partially burned bodies in the ovens.  Others reported seeing smoke coming from the chimney on top of the crematorium.

There were stories told by the American liberators about the ashes that they saw flying in the air, or ashes covering the ground like snow.  Some visitors today imagine that they can still smell the burning bodies at Dachau. Others completely freak out when they see the ovens in the crematorium.

Some of the tour guides tell visitors today that the Nazis were killing the prisoners at Dachau as fast as they could before the American liberators got there.  Actually, the prisoners were dying at the rate of up to 400 per day in a typhus epidemic, and the Germans had run out of coal to burn the bodies.

Theresienstadt survivor tells British school children about Red Cross visit

Theresienstadt is a former military fort in what is now the Czech Republic; during World War II, the Nazis turned it into a concentration camp for the prominent Jews, including many artists and musicians. Theresienstadt is now known as Terezin.

Theresienstadt is famous for die Verschönerung, the beautification program in which the Nazis cleaned up the ghetto in preparation for a visit on June 23, 1944 by two Swiss delegates of the International Red Cross and two representatives of the government of Denmark.

More self-flagellation by the Germans

In the news today is an article with the headline Study: Dresden Bombing Exaggerated.

The city of Dresden after it was bombed in World War II

Here is a quote from the article:

(March 19) — On Feb. 13-15, 1945, British and U.S. bombers pounded the eastern German city of Dresden with 3,900 tons of high explosives and incendiaries. How many people lost their lives in the devastating firestorms that followed has long been a subject of contention — the Nazis claimed the dead numbered close to 500,000; modern historians have estimated up to 40,000.

Now a five-year study by a panel of German historians has concluded that about 25,000 people died in the attack, far fewer than most experts thought. Researchers pored over records from the city’s archives, cemeteries, official registries and courts. They discovered that the death toll among refugees from the Eastern Front was lower than previously reported. They also dismissed the idea that hundreds of thousands of bodies could have lain undiscovered in the smoldering ruins.

The German people love to beat themselves up and atone for their past sins; they consider it wrong to have any pride in being German or to have any loyalty to their country.  Can you imagine Americans doing a five-year study to prove that a war crime committed against America was not so bad?

The Dachau Uprising, 28 April 1945

Today I am writing about the “Dachau Uprising” in answer to a comment that was made by Taff, who says he is a Dachau tour guide.  Taff commented on my post about the “Dachau Massacre” when Waffen-SS soldiers, who had been sent from the battlefield to surrender the Dachau concentration camp, were killed by the American liberators after they had surrendered.

An excerpt from Taff’s comment is quoted below:

“The photographic evidence shows SS men wearing spotty cammo uniforms which were not worn by the camp guard staff so it is entirely likely that at least some of the executed were indeed Waffen-SS. You are going to cry over an error of this magnitude which took place only 200 metres away from the abomination that was KZ Dachau? Put things in perpspective. [...] Those jolly, innocent lads of the Waffen-SS had not listened to demands for mercy during the Dachau Uprising on the 28th of April 1945.”

Equating the killing of unarmed Prisoners of War, in violation of the Geneva Convention, with the killing of civilians in a battle between soldiers and citizens of a town, really got me riled up.  So I am going to tell you about the Dachau Uprising, in which Taff implies that the civilians demanded mercy and were nevertheless killed by Waffen-SS soldiers.

Gordon Hogan, Dachau tour guide

Today, I read an article posted on this website with the headline “Genocide, the stench of death and eating lunch in a gas chamber.”

The article is about an Irishman from Tipperary, named Gordon Hogan, who conducts tours for visitors to the Dachau Memorial Site. According to the article, Gordon “is one of the leading tour guides at the Nazi death camp of Dachau.”

The following quote is from the article:

“Gordon, 29, who lives in Munich, knows everything there is to know about the dark history of the horrific Dachau concentration camp.

“So who better to show the camp to the huge number of visitors who come to see it annually than the Templemore artist?”

Who better?  I think maybe someone who knows about the real history of the Dachau concentration camp would be better. The visitors probably already know the “dark history of the horrific Dachau concentration camp.”  What the visitors need is an unbiased tour guide with a Neutral Point of View (NPV) and a knowledge of history.