Auschwitz survivor claims that German guard refused order to pour Zyklon-B into gas chamber

Now I’ve heard everything!  According to a news article which you can read in full here:  “At Auschwitz, one guard named Georg was a Silesian. Georg refused the order to pour Xyklon B gas into the execution chambers.”

Re-enactment of pouring Zyklon-B gas into gas chamber

Silesia is a former German province in what is now Poland. The Auschwitz camp was located in Upper Silesia, which was included in the Greater German Reich when the camp was in operation. During World War II, there were many ethnic Germans in Silesia.

Now we know that the German guards at Auschwitz had a choice: they could pour Zyklon-B gas into the homicidal gas chambers at Auschwitz, if they were so inclined, but they could also refuse and nothing would happen to them.  This quote is also from the news article:  “Georg was certain they would send him straight to the Russian front for disobeying, but he would not be a party to mass murder.”

If only more of the German guards, at Auschwitz, had refused to pour the Zyklon-B pellets into the holes in the roof of the gas chamber, there would have been no Holocaust.

Holes in roof of Auschwitz gas chamber were “reconstructed” by the Soviet liberators

This quote is also from the news article:

[Cantor David Wisnia] “had escaped from death on the march from Dachau to Austria in March 1945. Prior to that, he was in Birkenau, the sub-camp to Auschwitz, for nearly three years.”

The photos below show prisoners on a “death march” out of Dachau.

Prisoners on a “death march” out of the Dachau camp

I learned the reason for the “death marches” out of the concentration camps from Professor Harold Marcuse, who teaches the history of the Holocaust at the University of California at Santa Barbara.

Professor Marcuse wrote the following in a comment on my blog several years ago:

In any case the death marches in 1945 were a largely futile attempt to keep human evidence of and witnesses to atrocities from falling into Allied hands. That rationale hinged on the illusory notion that the Germans would ultimately defend some territory and in some bizarre way “win” the war. When some responsible German officials realized beyond doubt that the war was lost, they drew the “logical” conclusion and burned the marching prisoners alive, as happened at Ohrdruf, Gardelegen and numerous other places. For them apparently, dead evidence was better than alive evidence.

Burned bodies found at the Ohrdruf sub-camp of Buchenwald

The photograph above, which was taken at the Ohrdruf forced labor camp, is a copy of the one that hangs in front of the elevator door at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. It is the first thing that visitors to the Museum see as they step out of the elevator and enter the first exhibit room. This is what the American soldiers first saw when they liberated Germany from the Nazis.

The photo shows a pyre made of railroad tracks where the bodies of prisoners who had died of typhus at Ohrdruf were burned. Ohrdruf was a small sub-camp of Buchenwald and it did not have a crematorium with ovens to dispose of the bodies.  The prisoners were not burned alive, as taught by a college professor in America.

Acting on Hitler’s orders, the Commandant of Dachau, Wilhelm Eduard Weiter, had made an attempt to evacuate the Dachau main camp before the American liberators arrived. On April 26th, 1945, Weiter left Dachau with a transport of prisoners bound for Schloss Itter, a subcamp of Dachau in Austria. Was this the march that David Wisnia was on?

Strangely, Weiter committed suicide when he reached Schloss Itter.  Or could he have been killed by the Jews on the march, after they were liberated by American soldiers? This website tells about the liberation of Schloss Itter but does not mention Weiter.

Jews and Russian POWs on a “death march” out of Dachau