An article in the online Telegraph, which you can read here, includes a photo that allegedly shows the ruins of one of the gas chambers at Auschwitz II, aka Birkenau. It is an old black and white photo, taken in 1979. I enhanced the photo, using Photoshop and reproduced it below.
Here is the caption on the photo, copied from the Telegraph:
FILE – In this undated file photo from 1979, a former inmate of the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Poland sometime in 1979, gazes down at ruins of gas chambers where hundreds of people were exterminated during World War II. The oldest known survivor of the Auschwitz concentration camp, a teacher who gave lessons in defiance of his native Poland’s Nazi occupiers has died at the age of 108, an official said Monday, Oct. 22, 2012. Antoni Dobrowolski died Sunday in the northwestern Polish town of Debno, according to Jaroslaw Mensfelt, a spokesman at the Auschwitz-Birkenau state museum.
1979 photo of an Auschwitz survivor viewing the ruins at Auschwitz-Birkenau
My 2005 photo of the ruins of the undressing room in Krema II
In the color photo above, note the steps of the International Monument on the right hand side. Note the guard tower in the background on the right. My 2005 photo matches the 1979 black and white photo above, indicating that the man is not looking at the ruins of a gas chamber, but at the ruins of the undressing room of Krema II.
Another 2005 photo of the undressing room of Krema II
Again, note the guard tower and the steps of the International Monument on the right in the photo above. In the foreground, you can some of the ruins of the oven room, which was at ground level. The undressing room was 5 feet underground.
The ruins of the Krema II gas chamber
My 2005 photo of the ruins of the Krema II gas chamber shows the International Monument in the background, slightly to the left.
Now look at the old black and white photo again. It appears that some reconstruction of the ruins was done between 1979 and 2005. Also, look at the background of the photo. It looks like wide open countryside, with no trees hiding the view of the Jews walking into the undressing room. Shouldn’t there have been a fence or a row of trees to hide the “mass murder” that was going on in the camp?
My 2005 photo of the ruins of the undressing room in Krema II
My 2005 photo above shows that the undressing room has been reconstructed, and a row of trees has been planted to hide the prisoners entering the undressing room from onlookers outside the camp. The path, that the prisoners walked, up to the undressing room entrance should also have been reconstructed.
I am not convinced that there was an entrance to the undressing room in this location. A model of Krema II and the blueprint for the Krema II building are shown below.
Model of Krema II gas chamber building
In the photo above, notice that there is a door into the gas chamber building shown on the wall of the building on the left side. There was an exterior entrance with a staircase on the north side of the Krema II building, which led to the Vorraum of Krema II so that the SS men could enter Leichenkeller 1, the gas chamber, without going through Leichenkeller 2, which was the undressing room. In case of emergency, the gas chamber could be used as a bomb shelter for the SS men working in the area, since it had a gas-tight air raid shelter door.
Blueprint of the Krema II building
On the blueprint shown in the photo above, the undressing room is on the right hand side. To the left of the undressing room is the above-ground oven room with the ovens designated by 5 squares. There were 5 ovens with 3 openings in each oven. The gas chamber was perpendicular to the undressing room. On the blueprint, the gas chamber is labeled L-keller which is an abbreviation for Leichenkeller, which means corpse cellar in English. The undressing room was also called a Leichenkeller on the blueprint. Note that the length of the undressing room is two or three times as long as the length of the gas chamber.
Now that we see that there was a way to get into the undressing room without going around the building to enter from the end of the room, why didn’t the prisoners enter the undressing room through the door into the Vorraum?
Was the undressing room reconstructed to show an entrance down some steps that weren’t actually there before the reconstruction?
Update, 5:22 p.m.
A reader has alerted me to the website of The Daily Mail which shows a photo Wilhelm Brasse standing beside the ruins of the undressing room in Krema II at Auschwitz in 1979. In The Daily Mail photo, it looks like there are steps at the far end of the undressing room. However, when I converted the photo to 300 dpi, from the 63 dpi in the original, it looks more like a brick wall. I did not enhance the photo in any way.
-
High resolution photo of the ruins of the undressing room (Click on the photo to enlarge)
The photographer who took this photo in 1979 focused on Brasse in the foreground of the picture. The background, which shows the end of the undressing room, is not in sharp focus, so it is hard to tell if there are really steps in the photo.
I have original photographs of the ‘The Little White House’ where the first gassing took place and original photographs of those liberated from Auschwitz I walking to the town of Oswiecim where a lot of the SS guards were made to stand in the square – the litle white house is now nowhere to be seen, nor it’s counter-part the second small cottage of a similar size and demeanor – both set in a small field with trees around them both – unseen by passers by. The photographs were taken by a German photographer. Later the cottages, like the crematorias, were destroyed, just as a lot of paperwork was destroyed, by the Germans, to cover their tracks. Fortunately, they couldn’t destroy everything.
Time is a great healer, including within the landscape. On one of my visits to Auschwitz I discussed with the official photographer there, as well as the current Director of Auschwitz, the immediate vegetation surrounding the camp, as well as the one single tree that stood central in the camp, near the ‘Canada Blocks’ – opposite the ‘sauna’ – (the sorting room as people were being taken to the showers and their valuables removed from them). If you’ve ever had the chance to talk to a survivor (I have spoken to many) they will all, individually, inform you that you couldn’t eat the grass on the ground inside the camp as there was none (there were that many people daily in the camp that if it rained in the summer – it turned to swamp land and in the autumn, nearing winter, it was hard – there was no grass to eat, no vegetation to eat). A lot of the trees were destroyed due to the smoke and ash – you can still see ash remains today in the three-foot trench around the camp before you get to the barbed wire).
The camp was left virtually forgotten until 1947 whereby the local populations and outside funding sources took over the preservation of the camp and reconstructed everything that was stood in the camp. Trees have a habit of growing back as does the vegetation on any land. Proof? Look at the old footage of whole forests taken down in England due to horrendous weather storms, especially the south of England and 50 years later, they replenished themselves.
Comment by mogseyward — November 29, 2012 @ 8:22 am
Do the original photos of the Little White House show any evidence that it was used as a gas chamber? For example, was there a vent pipe to vent the gas out of the building. The state of Missouri had a gas chamber which I saw when I was a child. It had a 45 foot vent pipe that went through the roof to vent the gas. Were there any little windows in the side of the house, through which the gas pellets could have been poured? Or were there pipes on the roof, through which the gas was poured?
Regarding the SS guards who were forced to stand in the town square, how were they captured? The SS men left, along with the prisoners, before the Soviet soldiers arrived. I didn’t know that some of them were caught and brought back to the town. Did the survivors attack them and beat them up, or kill them?
Comment by furtherglory — November 29, 2012 @ 11:49 am
I’ll dig the photos out and look at them for you, but from memory, the windows were boarded quite heavily and there was only one entrace with a peephole in the door made of steel. Also from memory there is a makeshift pipe attachment in the base of the front of the cottage. I can actually scan and send them to you if I had an email address – I’d have to dig them out from my archives.
They were captured by allies, several miles from the camp and were marched into the nearest town, which was Oswiecim (in the same square, there is a market and cafes where the camp guards were made to stand) – this is also recorded by plaques around the the square). My knowledge of surviving camp guards – those that stayed in the camps I believe non survived, they were fundamentally beaten to death by the inmates and those that survived were actually sent to siberian concentration camps where many died. Those that decided to flee the camps – (there wasn’t only Auschwitz I and II – there were forty sub-camps to Auschwitz) were advanced upon and returned to the Oswiecim. There were two advances to Auschwitz – one from the East where the Russians, not the US, liberated the camps, but there was also an advance from the West where the US also advanced.
There were a number of British POW’s in a sub-camp to the main Auschwitz I and II. When they were demobbed they were told by the British authorities not to discuss auschwitz and they didn’t, until about 15 years ago. About 10 POW’s who were still alive were tracked down and gave their accounts to “The Independent” newspaper and each account was published over a period of time; each British POW confirmed the plight of the Jews and the brutality of which they were met, trying to help them by providing some of their meagre rations to those Jews who worked near them to keep them alive. They also confirmed the presence of the German guards being made to stand in the square for several days. I don’t know what the eventual fate of the guards was; I would imagine if it was Russian capture, most would have been shipped to siberia as that was the general fate of a German if captured by the Russians. If it was Western Allies they probably would have been more humane and interned them until safe to send home – an assumption on my part simply because of the psychology of the two different fronts.
Comment by mogseyward — December 5, 2012 @ 4:26 am
The e-mail address for my blog and my website is mail@scrapbookpages.com
I would very much like to see the photos of the house. Thank you for describing it.
Comment by furtherglory — December 5, 2012 @ 5:52 am
Wilhelm Brasse, a photographer of Auschwitz inmates, has just died.
NYT
Wikipedia
Spiegel
Comment by Eager For Answers — October 27, 2012 @ 9:09 am
So Willhelm landed a rather cushy job as photographer at Auschwitz during the period 1941 to 1945. Shame he didnt have the foresight to take some photos of the ” Gas chambers” which “everyone ” knew existed .
He would have made his fortune.
Comment by Pete — October 27, 2012 @ 9:19 am
Comment by Eager For Answers — October 27, 2012 @ 9:56 am
I am not sure, but I think that Brasse was a photographer working mainly in the Auschwitz I camp. I don’t think he took photos at the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp. He was a portrait photographer who had lights set up for his identification photos. Maybe he didn’t have a flash gun for his camera, that would have allowed him to take photos of the rooms in the crematoria buildings. Also flash bulbs for rooms that size were expensive. The Nazis would not have allowed him to take photos of underground rooms, using expensive flash bulbs. He probably took the identification photos on sheets of film, so that there was a separate negative of each photo. In other words, he had a heavy portrait camera that was not suitable for carrying into a gas chamber to take photos.
Comment by furtherglory — October 27, 2012 @ 12:19 pm
but if he was working in Auschwitz 1 then the gas chamber shown to the tourists and said to have operated between 1941 and 1943 was conveniently just near to the swimming pool and opposite the hospital. Just one snap of the building with the four introduction ports for the Zyclon B and worldwide sensation ! Missed opportunity.
Comment by Pete — October 27, 2012 @ 3:07 pm
The four introduction ports would not have shown in a photo taken at ground level. He would have had to get up on the roof to take a photo of the ports. He could have taken a photo from a window of the hospital, but maybe he was never sent to the hospital to take photos. I am guessing that he didn’t know about the gas chambers at Auschwitz until several years after World War II.
Comment by furtherglory — October 27, 2012 @ 5:41 pm
According to the trials after the war it was ” common knowledge ” among all the inmates and was being broadcast daily by the BBC from end of 1942 as propaganda material. As a workman there he would have heard the rumours surely? . in the wikipedia article it also states that he had a small pre war Kodak camera .
I suspect he didn’t know about the gas chambers until after the war as well. Until his death he was also i am sure wary of being “brought to justice ” under the ” common purpose ” law which was used against Demjanjuk.
Comment by Pete — October 28, 2012 @ 6:09 am
One interesting fact is that a man called Antoni Dobrowolski who is or was unknown to 99.999999% of the western world is given headline news when he dies at the venerable age of 108. All the major media organs and newspapers of the western world had long articles on this gentleman. Newspapers such as the Daily Mail in the UK carefully vet all comments to prevent any which question any aspect of the cult. Are they paid by organisations such as the HET to print these daily articles ?
Comment by Pete — October 27, 2012 @ 4:20 am
It is news when anyone lives to the age of 108. There is also an old lady who is a Holocaust survivor at the age of around 103; she still plays the piano, as she did in the Theresienstadt camp. It is news that so many of the survivors of Auschwitz live to their 80s and 90s. Some doctors claim that a restricted diet will help a person to live longer. As we all know, the prisoners in the camps had a minimal diet, that was mostly vegetarian. One of the vegetables that the prisoners ate was turnips, which allegedly promote longevity.
Comment by furtherglory — October 27, 2012 @ 8:02 am