Yesterday a friend e-mailed me about something that Gordon Duff said on a radio show about the Buchenwald crematorium. Duff said that the Buchenwald crematorium was a completely new building which was built by the Russians after the old one was destroyed. I had never heard this before, so I decided to look up the photos that I took on my visit to Buchenwald and compare them with photos taken by the Americans immediately after the camp was liberated on April 11, 1945.
Buchenwald crematorium, Oct. 1999
The photograph above shows the Buchenwald crematorium and the pathology annex, which today houses several exhibits. The crematorium is located to the right of the gate house as you enter the camp. In the foreground of the photo, you can see rocks which have been arranged to show where the barracks formerly stood. Unlike Dachau and Sachsenhausen, where the crematorium was outside the camp fence and hidden from the prisoner’s view by trees or a wall, all of the Buchenwald inmates could see this building, which was at the top of a slope. The pathology lab was located in an annex built onto the crematorium; this was where autopsies were done to determine the cause of death.
My photo of the Buchenwald Crematorium, taken in 1999
Buchenwald crematorium, April 16, 1945
Notice the two small windows in the photo above. The people in the background are German civilians who have been marched to the camp at gun-point to view the one small pile of bodies. My photo, taken Oct. 1999, shows the same type of windows. Note that my photo shows a tiny bit of the fence around the courtyard and tiny bit of the zoo in the background on the left side; it does not show the wall in the old photo, but I am sure that it is the same building in both photos.
Maybe Gordon Duff got the Sachsenhausen camp and the Buchenwald camp mixed up. Both camps were in the Soviet zone after the war and the building which housed the ovens at Sachsenhausen was blown up by the Soviets. I visited both Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen in 1999. The photo below shows the ruins of the ovens at Sachsenhausen.
Ruins of the cremation ovens at Sachsenhausen
My photos of the Buchenwald crematorium show that it was the same building that was photographed by the Americans in April 1945 shortly after the camp was liberated and before the camp was turned over to the Russians.
Photo of entrance into Buchenwald crematorium in April 1945
Photo of entrance into crematorium, taken in 1999
I will leave it up to the experts to tell me if these two photos show the same building.
As for the ovens in the crematorium, they look the same now as in the old photos.
Photo of oven at Buchenwald, April 1945
Ovens at Buchenwald, taken in Oct. 1999
The photo below shows the courtyard of the crematorium building, taken in April 1945.
Corpse wagon in the courtyard of the Buchenwald crematorium
Note the fence around the crematorium building which is on the left and the Buchenwald zoo in the background. This photo was taken several days after the camp was liberated and it shows bodies of prisoners who died after the liberation. The photo below shows Margaret Bourke White taking a photo of the same wagon on April 15, 1945.
Margaret Bourke White at Buchenwald, April 15, 1945
In the photo above, famous photographer Margaret Bourke White is taking an exposure reading with a hand-held light meter before taking a photo of the wagon in the courtyard of the Buchenwald crematorium.
Bodies stacked up outside the crematorium, April 17, 1945
It was the policy of the American liberators to leave the bodies out as long as possible so that American soldiers could be brought to see them, on the orders of General Eisenhower, who wisely predicted that some day people would say that the stories told by the Allies were propaganda. Eisenhower wanted as many witnesses as possible to tell future generations about the atrocities in the camps.
Corpses piled up at the Buchenwald camp weeks after the camp was liberated
The photo above shows the fence around the courtyard at Buchenwald that is still there today. Note the windows which are the same as the windows in the building today.
The first newsreel about the camps in Germany, which was shown in American theaters, was entitled Nazi Murder Mills. You can see it on YouTube here. The part about Buchenwald starts at 4:11 and the Buchenwald ovens are shown at 4:41.
Buchenwald crematorium; east gate in the foreground
On July 3, 1945, the city of Weimar and the Buchenwald camp were turned over to the Soviet Union, according to a prior agreement. But before the American Army turned the Buchenwald and Mittlebau-Dora camps over to the Soviet Union, they removed as much as they could from the V-2 rocket factories and recruited the best of the German engineers who were sent to America. German doctors were recruited from the Buchenwald camp to do medical experiments in America.
The Soviet Union wasted no time in turning Buchenwald into an internment camp for Germans. On August 20, 1945, Buchenwald became Special Camp Number 2, a prison camp for Germans.
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Littlegrayrabbit,
It seems, that you have done in depth research on the issue. I just only have expressed my thoughts about the place and it’s resemblance. But, since both Auschwitz/Birkenau and Buchenwald were in Soviet occupation zone, the Soviets were pleased to build there whatever they want. Three Soviet military propogandists Vasily Grossman, Ilya Ehrenburg and Boris Polevoy had already wrote about the gas chambers at the time of war. (They have wrote about “electrocuting floors” and all other stuff as well).
Those writings had to be justified with something substantial. I have read the testimony of one of the German POW, who was imprisoned in camp Sachsenhausen after the war. He testified that the Soviets made them to build the “shower” installation without any plumbing connected to the building.
In Soviet captivity, Kurt Prüfer would “confess” that he killed Lincoln, Kennedy and Elvis and also masterminded 9/11 along with Sivon Kurzberg in his white van.
This is the police report from East Rutherford, NJ Police Department. Tell me, if it is has nothing to do with the “holocaust” story and not the part of the same conspiracy.
Comment by Gasan — January 18, 2011 @ 9:02 pm
Gasan,
I don’t know where the bakery was during the Nazizeit (unless it was at you know where). I do know that when Buchenwald became a Soviet camp the bakery was the building immediately behind the Krematorium.
I have said it before and I say it again. I am not aware of Topf making baking ovens, I am aware of them making crematorium ovens (and many other products also)
Baking bread does not need particular high temperatures and these ovens seem of poor ergonomic design for high throughput bread manufacture – and thats just beginning the list of objections.
Pruefer in one of his interrogations with the Soviets said when he tested the ovens in 1943 he watched six corpses cremate. No ovens at Birkenau or originating from Birkenau have ever been found.
I am sure I don’t need to join these dots for you
Comment by littlegreyrabbit — January 18, 2011 @ 1:35 am
I am still trying to compare the picture of the crematoria ovens with the picture of brick bakery in Northfield, MN. These two have striking similarities in size and design.
http://brickovenbakery.com/photo.html
I have never visited the camps, but my question is: are there any bakeries left, the visitors could look at?
I have watched some of wartime German newsreels (Die Deutsche Wochenschau) and have seen the soldiers using the same type of carriages for their bakeries. I have no doubts that Germans must have stationary commercial bakeries right at the camp.
These are my calculations: Let’s assume that Buchenwald always had for at least 30,000 people there, including the guards, personnel, etc. The bread ration for inmates was 300 grams per person per day and probably more for the guards and others. The daily supply of bread for this number of people should be no less than 10,000 loafs per day. The bread of wartime did not have preservatives and should be eaten not later than the next day. All of the bread could not be brought from Weimar or other nearest towns as it would require 200-300 truckloads (depends on the bread-truck model) delivered daily. What a waste of fuel in the wartime!
The bakeries MUST be right there at Buchenwald (and other large camps too).
As far as the pictures of the crematorium: It is very hard to imaging that these six ovens, each heated up to a minimum of 1300 F, would not destroy the wooden doors, glass windows and other materials very sensitive to heat exposure. The ovens appear to be built from the same type of bricks as the bakery in Northfield.
(I have built once my own fireplace from scratch and I know what I am talking about).
Here is a Russian website which have a slide show on the right side.
http://www.battlefield.ru/ru/articles/356-about-holocost.html
Those are professionally made holocaust pictures and one of them shows a human arm sticking out from the crematorium oven, a clearly staged picture. The webmaster, Valeriy Potapov is by no means a revisionist, but rather a believer in an orthodox story of WWII. However, he does not believe in “holocaust” anymore, because of the pictures like that.
The picture with an arm sticking out from the “crematorium oven” and the picture of burned human skeleton, made me to think that The Allied forces and the Soviets burned a couple of the dead bodies in the bakery ovens and made them look like crematorium.
Of course, there were dead bodies around the building when the Allied forces, maybe “to be cremated”.
And how about, if they brought the corpses to the bakery to make it look like a crematoria? The building appears to be afar from the barracks where they supposed to die from emaciation. All of dead bodies show the signs of emaciation, which would be caused by starvation within four to eight weeks.
Should I pronounce the greatest blasphemy in the world? That is: the crematoria shown to the tourists at the concentration camps are actually the brick bakeries?
Comment by Gasan — January 17, 2011 @ 8:16 pm
Correction: “…and WAS never really there at all.”
Comment by Skeptic — January 17, 2011 @ 5:17 pm
Great blog! This is the kind of close scrutiny that should be practiced. I listened to that program too, and was appalled at all the errors made by Gordon Duff. He is trying to present himself as some new kind of revisionist — he said he has his own motives — one that wants to “revise” without exonnerating “the Nazis” at all. That’s how it seems to me.
The problem is he just says anything that comes to mind. That, or he has some method to his madness. But he said that Buchenwald was liberated by the Russians. Of course, it was liberated by the Americans. When was it turned over to the Russians, FG? And was it sudden … or a slower process?
Duff also claimed the Buchenwald crematorium was “huge” and at least two movies used it for some type of chase scenes, with people running in and out of rooms, etc. At least that’s how I remember what he said. I was at Buchenwald too, and the room with the ovens is basically all there is. It is not as large as it looks in the picture you took either. Of course, there is a basement, with the “hooks” on the wall. Maybe Duff saw it in a movie and is describing what he remembers he saw in the film, and what never really there at all.
So, lots of wierd stuff people say and straightening it out and correcting them is a full time job!
Comment by Skeptic — January 17, 2011 @ 5:15 pm
I have added one more photo of the crematorium which shows the fence from another angle. I have put the answer to your question, about when the Russians took over the camp, into the post itself. Duff must be wrong about movies being made inside the crematorium.
America stole a lot of stuff from the Mittelbau-Dora camp that had been promised to the Russians because this was supposed to be their zone.
Comment by furtherglory — January 17, 2011 @ 7:15 pm
JC Pressac recorded an oral tradition that said, IIRC, the ovens were installed after the war.
I have a photo of when the building was just finished in 1942 on my site here
The fence is a tricky issue. It wasn’t there in 1942 and in at least some of the liberation film footage it wasn’t present (see blog post).
It is possible that the Americans may have removed the fence immediately on liberation and the fence we see today is a reconstruction of how the building originally was. Or else there was no fence until April 1945
Comment by littlegreyrabbit — January 17, 2011 @ 2:10 pm