Surviving the Auschwitz gas chamber umpteen times

This morning, I read an article here about the death of Arnost Lustig, a Czech Holocaust survivor who wrote many books about his ordeal.  This quote, about his time in Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, and Buchenwald, is from the article:

“During the three years there, I was three times sentenced to be shot dead and umpteenth times to be gassed,” Lustig said after the war.

In spite of the fact that he survived so many death sentences, the article adds that Lustig said he never pardoned the Germans.

According to the article in the online Prague Daily Monitor, Arnost was first sent to the Theresienstadt camp, then to Auschwitz and later to Buchenwald; his father was gassed at Auschwitz. His mother and sister both survived their stay at the Mauthausen camp.

I learned from other news articles that Lustig was on a train from Buchenwald to Dachau when the engine of the train was bombed by an Allied plane, and he was able to escape.

I have never read any of his books, but now I am very interested in learning about how he survived the Auschwitz gas chamber umpteen times.

Nazi myths and legends

When I was a young college student, majoring in Journalism, I took a course in Greek mythology because I knew that a good journalist should sprinkle into his stories lots of references to Hercules, Pandora, Medusa, and the Trojan War.  A journalist today, or even a writer of a TV comedy series, needs to know Nazi mythology so that he can make references to Mengele, Goebbels, and Rudolf Hoess (often confused with Rudolf Hess).  For example, two of my favorite TV shows, Two and a Half Men and Seinfeld, have frequent jokes about the Nazis.

A good knowledge of Nazi myths and legends is required for all writers today.  For example the myth of the concentration camp prisoners being forced to move rocks from one place to another and then move them back again to the original place.

This myth was featured in the movie entitled “Bent” which is about two gay men in a concentration camp.  They are shown carrying rocks from one location to another for no reason at all, then carrying snow from place to place with their bare hands in the winter.  Today, I read a blog written by a young high school student who had recently visited Dachau. This person was told by a tour guide that the prisoners at Dachau were forced to carry rocks from one place to another.  Can this really be true?   Were there no factories where the prisoners could do productive work at Dachau?

Who is Pierre-Serge Choumoff and why should we believe anything that he wrote?

Pierre-Serge Choumoff was a former prisoner at the Gusen sub-camp of Mauthausen who wrote a book that was intended to prove that there was a gas chamber at Mauthausen.  Choumoff was an engineer who had a post-graduate degree in mathematics; he was the author of numerous scientific articles. During the time that he was a prisoner at Gusen, Choumoff was assigned to work in the arms factories of Rüstung Steyr, Daimler and Puch, which were in the immediate vicinity of the Gusen camp. He also served as an interpreter and a secretary at the Gusen camp. In the last week of World War II, Choumoff was one of the Gusen prisoners who were evacuated to the Mauthausen main camp where a gas chamber is allegedly located.

Choumoff did not use his scientific knowledge to determine that there was a gas chamber at Mauthausen. Nor did he do any tests. He did no research at all.  So on what did he base his book?  His book about the Mauthausen gas chambers is based solely on the testimony of the SS officers at Mauthausen, which he obtained from the trial testimony, given at an American Military Tribunal held in 1946, which was published in Rome in 1970.

I have not read Choumoff’s book, but I have read “The 186 Steps” by Christian Bernadac which quotes extensively from Choumoff’s book.

Pierre-Serge Choumoff was a “Nacht und Nebel” prisoner which means that his family was not told where he was.  “Nacht and Nebel” prisoners were typically Resistance fighters; with his French name, we can deduce that he was sent to Gusen after he was captured while fighting as an illegal combatant in the French Resistance.  As a member of the French Resistance, he would have had a motive to make the Germans into evil monsters who gassed innocent prisoners, so I don’t consider him to be an objective witness.

In one of his books, Choumoff wrote that the gas chamber at Mauthausen was put into operation in either March or May of 1942 and that 3,455 prisoners were gassed in it. He also wrote that the SS guards had removed the gassing equipment from the chamber on April 29, 1945 the day that Commandant Franz Ziereis turned the camp over to the Vienna police. A sign in the gas chamber confirms that the gassing apparatus was removed on April 29, 1945.

So Choumoff didn’t know when the gas chamber was put into operation, but he knew the exact number of prisoners that were gassed?  He knew the exact date that the gassing apparatus was removed, although he was not at Mauthausen on that date.

Choumoff gave the following statistics for the gassings at Mauthausen and Gusen, as quoted in “The 186 Steps” by Christian Bernadac:

For the installed gas chamber at Mauthausen: 4000; for the mobile gas chamber (Sauer truck): 1,560; Hartheim: 28,000 to 30,000 of which 4,600 to 8,000 came from Gusen or Mauthausen; finally occasional gassings in Gusen: 800. Total 34,000. At least 11,000 of these 34,000 were registered at Mauthausen or Gusen.

In his book, Christian Bernadac included the statements of several former prisoners which were gathered by Pierre-Serge Choumoff.

I am writing about Choumoff because his name came up in a blog post which you can read here.  The title of the blog post is “The latest effort to combat denial, i.e. Holocaust revisionism.”

This quote is from the blog post:

Lastly, we have the actual Introduction by Messrs. Morsch and Perz. They began by informing us that in 1983, concentration camp survivors Eugen Kogon and Hermann Langbein — along with the head of Ludwigsburg Central Office for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes, Adalbert Rückerl, as well as others — published the book “Nationalsozialistische Massentötung durch Giftgas.” This was published on the initiative of two Mauthausen survivors, Pierre-Serge Choumoff and Jean Gavard. All of this resulted from a meeting with officials of the centre for political education who discussed the increase in Revisionist debates about NS mass murder in the 1970s.

In my humble opinion, the writings of Pierre-Serge Choumoff should not be used to combat Holocaust denial.  He had no way of knowing what went on at Mauthausen because he was only there for one week. The testimony of the SS men at the proceedings of the American Military Tribunal, which he included in his book, is not believable because it was obviously obtained by torture.

You can read about the trial testimony at the proceedings against the SS men at Mauthausen on my website here and here.

John Demjanjuk’s alleged crimes against the Red Spaniards (Rotspanier)

If John Demjanjuk survives his current trial in Germany, his next trial will be held in Spain where he has been charged with war crimes in connection with the deaths of 60 Red Spaniards at the Flossenbürg concentration camp, where he served as a guard after his service at Sobibor.

“Red Spaniards” was the name for the Spanish Republicans who fought in the Spanish Civil War against General Francisco Franco’s forces.  They were called the Red Spaniards (Rotspanier) because they were Communists and Red was the color of the Communists. After their defeat by General Franco’s Army, the Spanish Republicans escaped to France where they were put into internment camps by the French government. After Germany conquered France in 1940, around 30,000 of these prisoners were deported by the Nazis to concentration camps in Germany and Austria as political prisoners because of their anti-Fascist or Communist political affiliation.

On June 19, 2008, a criminal lawsuit was filed at the offices of the Audiencia Nacional (Madrid) on behalf of several survivors and family members of the Red Spaniards who were sent to concentration camps.

Will 90-year-old John Demjanjuk live long enough for a third trial?

John Demjanjuk, now 90-years-old, is currently on trial in Germany, charged with being an accessory to the murder of 27,900 Dutch Jews at the Sobibor death camp in 1943. Demjanjuk was previously tried and convicted over 20 years ago in an Israeli court after he was identified by eye witnesses as a Ukrainian guard nicknamed “Ivan the Terrible” at Treblinka. He spent 7 years in prison in Israel before he won the case on appeal.

John Demjanjuk as a young man and in a courtroom today

A verdict in the current case is expected in late March this year, but if 90-year-old Demjanjuk is still alive, he could be brought in on a stretcher to another courtroom in Spain for a third trial.   

Joy Behar: “Do you consider yourself Anti-Semitic?” Helen Thomas: “Hell no! I’m a Semite.”

On a recent TV show, Joy Behar gave former White House correspondent Helen Thomas a chance to apologize for her Anit-Semitism and re-join the human race.  But Helen refused to admit that she is Anti-Semitic, claiming that she is a Semite herself.  What in the hell was she talking about?  It was quite clear that Joy Behar obviously didn’t understand what Helen meant when she said she was a Semite.

Update on the execution of Noor Inayat Khan at Dachau

It has come to my attention that there is a misconception that Germans were put on trial for the alleged execution at Dachau of British SOE agent Noor Inayat Khan and that one of the defendants said during the trial that Noor had not given them any information when she was tortured.  This morning, I learned that this information comes from the book written about Noor by Shrabani Basu.  You can read the story here.  At the top of the page, you will read this:

“In the war crimes trial, they [the Germans] said that they had not been able to get anything out of Noor Inayat Khan.” Author Shrabani Basu

At which war crimes trial did the Germans say that?  There were two secret war crimes trials, involving the alleged executions of British SOE women, which were conducted by the British, but nothing was said by the defendants at these trials about whether or not they “got anything out” of Noor.  That remark was allegedly made to SOE staff member Vera Atkins by Hans Kieffer, the man who had ordered Noor to be sent to Pforzheim prison in Germany after she had made two escape attempts in Paris.  He said this in an interview in which he was told by Vera Atkins that Noor had been executed. Kieffer cried when he learned that Noor had been executed; he claimed that he knew nothing about her execution.  

Porrajmos — the persecution of the Roma and Sinti by the Nazis

The Roma and Sinti have their own term for their genocide at the hands of the Nazis.  They call it the Baro Porrajmos which means the “Great Devouring.”  The total number of Roma and Sinti (Gypsies) who were murdered in the Nazi death camps is still unknown. The US Holocaust Memorial Museum estimates that 220,000 were killed, but other sources put the total deaths at 500,000 or more than half the total number of Gypsies in all the countries of Europe.

After World War II ended, Germany gave compensation to the Jewish survivors, but compensation claims by the Gypsies were denied by the Germans in the 1950s on the grounds that the Gypsies had been persecuted under the Nazi regime because they were “asocial” or had broken the laws of the country, not because of racism.  After a few years of protest by the Gypsies, compensation was finally given to the survivors.  

The history of the liberation of Majdanek, as taught by an American teacher

If you want to learn about the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps, as taught by an American History teacher, you can go online and read about it here.

This quote tells about the liberation of Majdanek:

Soviet forces were the first to approach a major Nazi camp, reaching Majdanek near Lublin, Poland, in July 1944. Surprised by the rapid Soviet advance, the Germans attempted to hide the evidence of mass murder by demolishing the camp. Camp staff set fire to the large crematorium used to burn bodies of murdered prisoners, but in the hasty evacuation the gas chambers were left standing.

Note that the date for the liberation of Majdanek is given as July 1944, but not the precise day of the liberation.  Why is the day of the month important?  It is important because the “Soviet advance” had reached Lublin, the city where the Majdanek camp is located, on July 22nd and the camp was liberated on July 23, 1944 after a two-day battle for the city of Lublin.   The crematorium was burned on July 22, 1944, allegedly by the Germans, but the Soviets were also in Lublin that day.

An American soldier with the 81st Field Hospital describes a visit to Dachau in 1945

A document that belonged to an American soldier who was with the 81st Field Hospital in Germany after the end of World War II has been recently put on line by his daughter.  Page 9 of the document can be read here.  I found page 9 of the document to be very revealing because it describes a visit by some members of the hospital unit to the Dachau concentration camp.  No date was given for this visit, but the “death train” was still there and the bodies of SS soldiers who had been killed after the surrender of the camp were still there, so it must have been a few days after the camp was liberated on April 29, 1945.