Rudolf Hess flew on a peace mission…but was convicted of Crimes against Peace at Nuremberg

Rudolf Hess, who was Hitler’s deputy, has been in the news lately because his remains have been removed from his final resting place in the small Bavarian town of Wunsiede; his bones were cremated and the ashes tossed into a lake.  You can see a photo of his gravestone, which was removed, and read all about it in the New York Times here.

This quote is from the N.Y. Times article:

In May 1941, Hess created an international sensation by secretly flying his personal Messerschmitt fighter plane to Britain and parachuting into Scotland, apparently hoping to negotiate a peace between Britain and Germany as the Axis was preparing to invade the Soviet Union. Instead, Hess was disowned by Hitler and imprisoned by the British for the duration of the war.

Hess took his life in his hands on a peace mission on May 10, 1941, flying his Messerschmitt ME110 plane under the radar, and rolling the plane over so that he could parachute out before the plane crashed in a field 8 miles from the home of the Duke of Hamilton, the man with whom he was planning to meet. Hess had only enough fuel for his 800-mile trip and no fuel for his return.  The Duke of Hamilton refused to see Hess, who was going to propose that the British join forces with Germany to defeat the Communist Soviet Union. Hess also wanted the resignation of Churchill, along with a few other requests.

Did Hitler authorize this peace mission and then disown his friend and deputy when the plan failed?  When Hitler learned of the flight, he declared that Hess was suffering from mental illness. No one knows the truth and we will probably never know what really happened.

The British, and especially Churchill, did not want peace.  Hess was arrested and thrown into the Tower of London.  Later, he was committed to a British mental institution.  Was Hess crazy? Or was Hess just pretending to be crazy?  

Before the Nuremberg IMT, there was “The Belsen Trial”

On Sept. 18, 1945, the Baltimore Sun printed a news article with the headline “4,000,000 deaths on Auschwitz List.” The sub headline was “Testimony to That Effect Promised at SS Trial.” (This was a reference to the upcoming Belsen Trial.)

Here is a summary of the Baltimore Sun news story from this web site:

Testimony that more than 4,000,000 persons died at the Auschwilz (sic) concentration camp was promised by the prosecution today at the opening of the military trial of Josef Kramer and 44 SS henchmen for conspiracy to commit mass murder.

Was testimony about the 4 million deaths at Auschwitz actually given at the Belsen Trial, which was the “military trial of Josef Kramer” held by the British in September 1945?  Not that I know of!  

YouTube video proves that Hitler did not start WWII

A regular reader of my blog (B. Zelewski), who reads and understands Polish, sent me the link to a YouTube video which shows the proof that Poland fired the first shots of World War II, not Germany.  On the video, you can hear a broadcast from Polish Radio in which the Poles are claiming that Germany has just attacked Poland — but this broadcast had been pre-recorded.

“Pełny komunikat o wybuchu II Wojny Światowej, z dnia 1 września 1939 roku. Komunikat czyta Zbigniew Świętochowski, komunikat specjalny nagrany 29 sierpnia czyta Józef Małgorzewski”

This was the full communique about the outbreak of WWII, as of the 1st of September 1939. The first speaker on the video is Zbigniew Świętochowski, and the special communique, recorded on August 29th, is read by Józef Małgorzewski.

future American military leaders visit Auschwitz Synagogue

In a recent news story which you can read in full here, I read the following quote:

Oswiecim, Poland — In an upstairs room at the only remaining synagogue in this town, 37 miles west of Krakow, 13 future American military officers wrestled with ethical questions in the actual shadow of Auschwitz.

One of the ethical questions that these cadets struggled with was mentioned in this quote from the article:

For example, German army units could have questioned orders to kill Jewish civilians. According to Frey, a few German army units in the 691st Wehrmacht battalion that fought in Russia refused orders to kill Jews and were not punished. Most of the units, however, obeyed the orders.

I was not familiar with this particular incident, but I immediately suspected that there is more to this story than what was included in the news article.  Were Wehrmacht soldiers ( in the regular German army) ordered to take time out from fighting on the Russian front in order to “kill Jewish civilians” for no reason other than that they were Jews?  

Did the Nazis use Jewish tombstones to pave roads?

Today I read this on the blog of a Derbyshire student who had recently visited the Auschwitz camp and the nearby town of Oswiecim:

“When the Nazis invaded Poland the cemetery (in Oswiecim) was destroyed and the gravestones were reportedly used as paving slabs. After the war someone rounded up as many of the gravestones as they could and rebuilt the cemetery.”

The operative word here is reportedly.  Who reported this?  The claim of gravestones being used as paving slabs is reminiscent of the scene in Schindler’s List which shows a road through the Plaszów labor camp that was allegedly built with tombstones.

Road made with tombstones

The photo above is from this website.  The caption reads:

Krakow – “Liban” quarry. Place, where prisoners from nazi concentration camp “Plaszow” was working…

But this is not real – this is only scenography made for movie “Schindler’s List”… Nevertheless – this is scary place…

Schindler’s List is a fictional movie, loosely based on a true story.  Here is a quote from a web site which explains the symbols and themes in Speilberg’s movie:

The road through the Plaszów labor camp, paved with headstones torn up from Jewish cemeteries, is a replica of the actual road that existed there. The road adds to the historical accuracy of the film but also symbolizes the destruction of the Jewish race. The removal of the headstones from the cemeteries represents the enormity of the Holocaust. Unsatisfied with simply wiping out existing Jews, Goeth, by planning the road, denies acknowledgement of many Jews’ final resting places. By removing the grave markers, Goeth in effect erases the existence of the dead. Moreover, Goeth forces the Jews in the camp to build the road, rubbing in their faces the fact that they, too, will soon be erased. The message is clear: the Nazis view the Jews as not worth even grave markers and want only to erase them from history.

Are there any photos of the “actual road that existed” at Plaszów?  There are plenty of old photos of the Autobahn, but I’ve never seen a photo of “an actual road” that was paved with tombstones.

Location of the former Plaszów concentration camp

In October 1998, I visited the site of the former Plaszów camp and took the photo above; it shows the spot where the barracks of the Plaszów concentration camp once stood. The camp was surrounded by houses on three sides and on the fourth side was a road, which is shown in the picture.

The camp Commandant, Amon Goeth, lived in a house that is out of camera range in the above picture; his former house is located to the right and behind a hill so that it cannot be seen from this spot. The fictional Schindler’s List movie shows Amon Goeth shooting prisoners from the balcony of his house although the camp cannot be seen from his house.

To reach the site of the former Plaszów camp, which is 10 kilometers from the city center of Krakow, my private tour guide drove up a hill on a rutted one-lane dirt road, thinly covered with small white granite rocks. Maybe that was the road that was allegedly paved with tombstones, and my tour guide neglected to mention it.

The construction of the Plaszów labor camp began in June 1942.  The photo below shows part of the fence around the camp.

Original fence posts around Plaszów camp

This quote is from a guidebook which I purchased at the Eagle Pharmacy museum in Krakow:

“According to the Heydrich plan the Plaszów camp and its sub camps were meant to constitute a stage in the concentration of the Jews deported to the East. The camp was built on the area of two cemeteries at Jerozolimska and Abrahama street. The location of the camp — near the Plaszow railroad station — made the access to communication tracks relatively easy.”

The “Heydrich plan” was a reference to the conference which SS officer Reinhard Heydrich led on January 20, 1942 at Wannsee, a suburb of Berlin. This is where plans were made for the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question.”

According to my 1998 tour guide, the granite quarries near the future location of the Plaszów camp were owned by a Jew, and the Nazis confiscated his property without compensation. There was a Jewish mortuary chapel near the cemetery, which my guide told me the Nazis converted into a stable. There are many other stories of the Nazis using a Jewish place of worship as a stable.

Although crushed granite from the quarries was readily available, the Nazis allegedly desecrated Jewish graves by ripping out the tombstones, then using slabs of the broken grave stones to pave the camp road, like stepping stones in a garden.

Gravestones used for a road, as shown in Schindler’s List fictional movie  Photo Credit: http://www.trekearth.com/gallery/Europe/Poland/East/Malopolskie/Krakow/photo990498.htm

The streets of the Auschwitz main camp are paved with crushed granite, but according to the fictional Shindler’s List movie, the Nazis couldn’t be bothered with making a crushed granite road through the Plaszów camp.   Now British teen-aged students are being told the story that the Oswiecim cemetery was reportedly raided for stones to pave roads in Auschwitz.

I also visited a Jewish cemetery in Krakow in 1998 and again in 2005. According to my 1998 tour guide, the cemetery adjacent to the Remu’h Synagogue in Krakow was desecrated by German soldiers who used the grave stones for target practice. The broken pieces of the stones were put into a memorial wall, which the guide said is called the Wailing Wall.

Wailing Wall in Krakow is made of broken tombstones

View of the Wailing Wall from outside the cemetery

December 12, 1941 — the day that Hitler ordered the Final Solution

This morning I was searching the internet when I came across a web site which mentioned that Hitler ordered the extermination of all the Jews on December 12, 1941.  The source given for this information was Christian Gerlach.  I looked him up on Wikipedia here and learned that he is a professor of Modern History at the University of Bern in Switzerland.  Professor Gerlach has written lots of books and essays and his credentials are impeccable, but is he right about the date of Hitler’s order?

Let’s consider what was happening on December 12, 1941:  Hitler had just declared war on America in a long-winded speech on December 11, 1941 which you can read in full here.  President Roosevelt immediately responded by declaring war on Germany on the same day.

According to Christian Gerlach, Hitler gave the order to kill all the Jews the next day after his declaration of war against America. But wait a minute!  The gassing of the Jews had already started on December 8, 1941 at the Chelmno death camp.  Every student of the Holocaust knows that!

What did Buchenwald look like when Elie Wiesel was a prisoner there?

Elie Wiesel’s book “Night” has very few details about what the Buchenwald concentration camp actually looked like when he was a prisoner there for several months just before the camp was liberated on April 11, 1945.  There is an article here on the Elie Wiesel Cons The World web site about the curious lack of a detailed description of Buchenwald in Elie’s most famous book.

The Buchenwald camp was mainly a concentration camp for political prisoners; as a Jewish prisoner, Elie Wiesel would not have been allowed to walk around the whole camp, so he may not have seen everything. One thing that he would have seen is the gatehouse into the camp, which is shown in the photo below.  All incoming prisoners entered through this gatehouse.

Gatehouse at the entrance to Buchenwald

Note the clock on top which is permanently stopped at 3:15 p.m., the exact time, on April 11, 1945, when the Communist prisoners took over the camp and the SS men fled into the woods.  This view of the gatehouse is what Elie Wiesel would have seen as he marched up to the camp.

Jedem Das Seine on Buchenwald gate

Jedem das Seine is usually translated into English as “To each his own,” but the phrase has the connotation of “Everyone gets what he deserves.”  Buchenwald was a Class II concentration camp for dangerous political prisoners and hardened criminals, who had little chance of being released, so the Buchenwald camp did not have the “Arbeit Macht Frei” sign that was used on Class I camps.  Note that the photo above was taken from inside the camp, looking out; the sign faces the inside of the camp.  

Dr. Oz on how to keep your kidneys working…

Yesterday, on the Dr. Oz TV show, the subject was how to prevent or cure cancer, but more importantly, there was a segment on how to take care of your kidneys.

According to Dr. Oz, there are two things that can damage your kidneys:  high blood pressure and diabetes.  I have been going to a Traditional Chinese Medicine doctor since I had a stroke over a year ago.  According to TCM theory, it is the other way around:  weak kidneys CAUSE high blood pressure and weak kidneys are also the CAUSE of diabetes.

So how do you know if you have weak kidneys?  Your first clue is having to go to the bathroom to urinate at night.  According to my TCM doctor, this means that your kidneys are so weak that they must work overtime to eliminate the toxins in your body; normal kidneys rest at night.  Another clue is having white space showing under the pupils of your eyes, which means that you have toxins in your body that are not being removed by the kidneys.  Also, having swollen ankles, caused by retaining water, means that your kidneys are not working to eliminate the water. And when your kidneys are really weak, you will feel exhausted all the time.

Dr. Oz mentioned some natural remedies to strengthen the kidneys and lower blood sugar:  Hibiscus tea, Gumar Extract and herbs.  He didn’t identify the herbs which were in liquid form in a small brown bottle and he didn’t say whether they were Chinese herbs or not.  Dr. Oz put a few drops of the herb liquid into the mouth of a volunteer and she said the taste was acceptable, but Dr. Oz tried it himself and said that the herb liquid tasted awful.  Don’t worry, if you want to try some herbs for your kidneys, you can get them in the form of pills that are so tiny that they can easily be swallowed by anyone.  

Stauffenberg — the hero of the July 20th Plot

Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg

Today is the anniversary of the July 20th Plot to assassinate Hitler in 1944.  The hero of the plot, which failed, was Lt. Col. Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg, the man on the left in the photo above.  You can read all about it here.

Notice the resemblance to Tom Cruise who played Stauffenberg in a movie about the plot.  For some reason, the movie never caught on, and it quickly faded into oblivion. I don’t even remember the title of the movie.

Elie Wiesel’s description of Buchenwald in his book “Night.”

Carolyn Yeager has put up a new article on her web site www.eliewieseltatto.com which addresses the issue of Elie Wiesel’s description of the Buchenwald concentration camp in his book “Night.”  You can read the full article here.

Ms. Yeager does not believe that Elie Wiesel was ever an inmate at Buchenwald.  One would think that a highly acclaimed writer like Elie Wiesel would have painted vivid word pictures of the Buchenwald camp.  But that is not the case, as Ms. Yeager points out.  She has come to the conclusion that he was not at Buchenwald because he did not describe the camp at all.

This quote is from http://www.eliewieseltatto.com:

I have to say Wiesel doesn’t describe Buchenwald at all. You don’t know anything about Buchenwald from reading Night. You don’t learn much about Eliezer or anyone else. You are given an impression of suffering, without rhyme or reason, so Buchenwald becomes synonymous with suffering, that’s about it. We don’t know what it looks like.

In the few pages in which Wiesel described his suffering at Buchenwald, he tripped up twice.  The first time was when he wrote “Then I came to a block where they were distributing black coffee.”