The Small Fortress (Malá Pevnost) in the Czech Republic

The subject of the “Malá pevnost” came up in a comment on my blog a couple of days ago, so I decided to write about it today.  I visited the Small Fortress in October 2000 and took some photos, which I am posting.

The main entrance into the Small Fortress

The Small Fortress is now a Memorial Site, located in the Czech Republic, on the east side of the Ohre river, which divides the two parts of the old military fortress, originally known as Theresienstadt. The former Theresienstadt ghetto, which was turned into a concentration camp in World War II, is on the west side of the Ohre river. The Main Fortress, where the Nazi concentration camp was formerly located, is now the town of Terezin.

When Theresienstadt was originally built as a military fortress in 1780, it consisted of two parts: the Main Fortress, where the Jews were later imprisoned by the Nazis in World War II, and the Small Fortress which was originally built as a prison and was used as such from the time it was completed until a few years after World War II, when the last of the German war criminals, who were incarcerated here by the victorious Allies, were executed.

The Small Fortress was turned into a Gestapo prison in June 1940, more than a year before the Main Fortress was turned into a ghetto and a transit camp for Jews in November 1941.  My tour guide said that 90% of the inmates in the Small Fortress during the war were non-Jewish Czech Communists.

The following quote is from a pamphlet that I obtained on the my tour in October 2000:

People were sent [to the Small Fortress] for taking part in the democratic and communist resistance movement, for aiding parachutists sent from the west and east to help the Czech resistance, for supporting partisans, escaped prisoners-of-war and Jews, or for individual acts against the Nazi regime. They were intellectuals, workers, farmers, clericals, artists and students, men and women. The fate of the Jewish prisoners here was particularly tragic. After arrest by the Gestapo for taking part in the resistance movement or breaking the rules established for Jews in Terezin town, they were sent here, given the hardest work and subjected to the worst terrorism by the guards. It was actually a transit prison as most of the inmates were sent after a certain time before a Nazi court and from there to other prisons and penitentiaries or to concentration camps in Germany, Poland and Austria.

Before we got to the Small Fortress, the road went through the old walled town of Theresienstadt, which is now called by the Czech name Terezin, but at that point I didn’t know yet that this was the old ghetto because, from the road, it looks much like all the other small towns that we had passed through.

The road that goes through the town of Terezin, October 2000

Suddenly I saw the zigzag brick walls of the ramparts that surround the Small Fortress. The red brick fortifications around the two fortresses are 4 kilometers long. There are double walls around the fortress with a dry moat in between them.

When the bus stopped at the Small Fortress, I was startled to see a cemetery in front of it with a large Christian cross in the middle and a much smaller Star of David behind it, placed closer to the entrance gate. I soon learned that this was not an insult to the Jews, but a representation of the truth since, contrary to what I had read in several tourist guidebooks, very few Jews had died in the Small Fortress, according to our guide.

Graves in front of Small Fortress

Star of David marks Jewish graves near wall around the Small Fortress

I learned that the Small Fortress was used by the Nazis, beginning in 1940, as a Gestapo prison for Communists, anti-Fascist resistance fighters, partisans and guerrilla fighters who were captured during in the war. There were 27,000 men and 5,000 women sent to the Small Fortress for “interrogation.” According to our guide, there were approximately 1,500 Jews sent to the Small Fortress for fighting with the resistance movement or for breaking the rules of the Theresienstadt ghetto. The guide told us that 90% of the inmates in the Small Fortress during the war were non-Jewish Czech Communists.

According to a pamphlet that our tour group was given when we entered, there were 10,000 corpses buried at the Small Fortress between 1945 and 1958 after the bodies were exhumed from mass graves at the Small Fortress, the Theresienstadt ghetto and the nearby Litomerice concentration camp. In the two photos shown above, there are 2,386 individual graves in the cemetery in front of the Small Fortress.

Gate inside the Small Fortress

The main gate into the Small Fortress, which is shown at the top of my blog post, was designated Number 1 on the tour of the Small Fortress. After going through the main gate, our tour group walked a few yards into the prison, then turned left to go through the Administration Court which was Number 2 on the tour. You can see the number 2 on the left side of the square archway in the foreground of the photograph above. The sight of the sign “Arbeit Macht Frei” on the arch over a doorway in the background of the photo was very upsetting to the Jews on the tour because  “Arbeit Macht Frei” has now become the slogan of the Holocaust.

The “Arbeit Macht Frei” sign was only put over the gates into camps where prisons had a chance of being released.  According to a booklet that I purchased at the Small Fortress Museum, there were 5,600 prisoners released from the Small Fortress, which was a Gestapo prison for political prisoners and captured partisans, not a death camp for Jews.

Prison Cells in the First Courtyard of the Small Fortress

The First Courtyard of the Small Fortress at Theresienstadt, which is shown in the photograph above, was divided into Blocks A and B. There were 17 group cells and 20 small cells for solitary confinement. Up to 1,500 prisoners used this small courtyard as their exercise yard.

According to the visitor’s pamphlet that we were given, the group cells held up to 100 prisoners at one time. Cell number 1 was reserved for prisoners from the Soviet Union. Cells number 2 and number 3 were used to imprison Jews who were “arrested for political activities and violating anti-Jewish regulations.”

Notice that the photograph above shows grass growing on the roof. The prison cells were rooms between the double walls around the fort, and the roof was covered with dirt.

Door into Prison Cell in Small Fortress

The photograph above shows the door to one of the group prison cells in the First Courtyard.  The Plaque on the right hand side, which is written in Czech, English and Hebrew, reads as follows:  “In the years 1940 to 1945 more than 1500 Jews were imprisoned in the Small Fortress. Their destiny was worst of all the groups of prisoners. About 800 from them were tortured to death here, most of others perished after the deportation to concentration camps. Dedicated to the memory of the victims by the Embassy of the State of Israel.”

There were approximately 32,000 prisoners who passed through the Small Fortress during the time that it was a Gestapo prison from June 1940 until May 8, 1945.

According to a pamphlet that tourists were given on the tour, between 2,500 and 2,600 of the prisoners died, including between 250 and 300 who were executed. However, our tour guide told us that most of the prisoners at the Small Fortress were Communist resistance fighters who were fighting against the Nazi Fascists.  (Remember that there was a war going on.)

After the arrival of the Soviet Army on May 8, 1945, the prisoners at both the Small Fortress and the Theresienstadt ghetto had to be held under quarantine until the typhus epidemic could be brought under control. In just the two months of April and May, 1945 there were approximately 1,000 deaths from typhus in the Small Fortress.

The pamphlet that we were given at the entrance of the Small Fortress has this map on which all the places of interest are numbered for easy reference. The entrance shown at the top of this page is number 1 on the map and the graveyard in front of the fortress is number 34, the last thing that visitors see as they walk toward their tour bus in the parking lot.

Entrance into the tunnel at the Small Fortress

Door Number 18, shown on the far right in the photograph above, opens into the mortuary room, which I saw only from the outside on my tour. This is where corpses were stored until they could be taken to the crematorium to be burned.

Door Number 17, shown in the middle of the photo above, is the entrance to a tunnel which goes through the old fortifications on the north side of the Small Fortress to the former military firing range which, according to a pamphlet that I was given at the Small Fortress, was used by the Nazis for executions.

The tunnel is about a quarter of a mile long, although it seemed more like a mile, as I was walking through it. The tunnel is not underground, as you can easily see by looking through a few narrow slits in the wall along the way, but it feels like it is underground. The tunnel goes through the double walls of the original fortifications, but it was not used during World War II. It is shown to tourists because it is one more scary feature in this place of horror.

Exit from the tunnel in the Small Fortress

When you first enter the tunnel, it doesn’t seem to be very long, but just as you think you are nearing the end, the tunnel makes a turn and continues on. The exit from the tunnel is shown in the photograph above, where you can readily see that the tunnel is above ground. However, if you suffer the least bit from claustrophobia, it would be wise to let the tour leader know in advance so that arrangements can be made for you to reach the execution site through the door used by the condemned prisoners. The sandy path from the tunnel leads to the execution site which is between the ramparts.

Firing range at the Small Fortress is at the end of the tunnel

The photograph above shows the place where prisoners were executed in the Small Fortress at Theresienstadt. One of the fortification walls is in the background and the spot where the condemned prisoner stood is in the center of the picture. The concrete form in the foreground was one of three places, under a free-standing roof, from which the firing squad would shoot while in a prone position.

According to a small booklet which I purchased at the Museum, between 250 and 300 of the 32,000 prisoners, who were inmates at the Small Fortress, were executed. This included 49 men and 3 women who were shot on May 2, 1945 just before the prison was liberated. Most of members of this group were in either the Predvoj resistance or the Communist party which had been banned by the Nazis.

The first recorded execution in the Small Fortress was on May 11, 1943 when a leader of the Communist resistance, Frantisek Prokop, was shot at the firing range. On September 28, 1944, Dr. Paul Eppstein, the second Elder of the Theresienstadt Ghetto was executed here because of his resistance activities.

The “Gate of Death” at the Small Fortress is No. 21 on the tour

After visiting the firing range in the Small Fortress at Theresienstadt, our tour group went through the Gate of Death which was the gate through which condemned prisoners had to walk to reach another execution site outside the fortress. If you don’t want to go through the tunnel to get to this execution site, you can reach the Gate of Death by walking straight ahead when you enter the Small Fortress, instead of turning left into the Administration Court.

You will then enter the Fourth Courtyard which is where our tour group emerged when we came through the Gate of Death. The photograph above shows the Gate of Death, taken from inside the Fourth Courtyard. In the background, you can see the high wall of the firing range.

I will continue with Part 2 and put up more photos of the Small Fortress later today.

Did Adolf Eichmann set up the Theresienstadt ghetto? I don’t think so.

Claude Lanzmann’s new documentary film, featuring Benjamin Murmelstein and the Theresienstadt ghetto, has been getting a lot of ink in the press lately.

This quote is from an article which you can read in full here:

For three and a half hours, the viewer [of Lanzmann's documentary] is taken through an exploration of Benjamin Murmelstein, the last president of the Jewish Council in the “model ghetto” of Theresienstadt in Nazi-annexed Czechoslovakia.

Set up by SS colonel Adolf Eichmann as a bogus town run by Jews themselves – a Potemkin village designed to dupe the world – Theresienstadt was one of the grimmest chapters in the long record of Nazi atrocities.

Theresienstadt was not in “Nazi-annexed Czechoslovakia” at that time; it was in the German protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.  You can read all about Theresienstadt on my website here.

According to Wikipedia, Adolf Eichmann “was a German Nazi SS-Obersturmbannführer (lieutenant colonel) and one of the major organizers of the Holocaust. Because of his organizational talents and ideological reliability, Eichmann was charged by SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich with the task of facilitating and managing the logistics of mass deportation of Jews to ghettos and extermination camps in German-occupied Eastern Europe.”

Nowhere on the Wikipedia page does it say that Eichmann SET UP the Theresienstadt ghetto.  He might have been in charge of the transports to and from Theresienstadt, but he did not have the authority to set up a ghetto or anything else.  Eichmann was “small potatoes,” not important enough to being setting up camps or ghettos.

This quote from the news article also resonated with me:

Murmelstein’s recollections, said Lanzmann, are doubly precious, as they prompt a new interpretation of Eichmann, who was kidnapped by Mossad agents in Argentina and hauled to Israel for trial, culminating in his execution in 1962. [...]

If Eichmann was “small potatoes,” why did the Mossad go to the trouble of kidnapping him and taking him to Israel?  I think it was because Eichmann was the one who wrote the minutes of the Wannsee Conference where the genocide of the Jews was allegedly planned.

The Israelis wanted Eichmann to admit that he left out the part of the Conference where the men talked about killing the Jews, not “transporting them to the East,” as Eichmann wrote in the minutes.

Eichmann at his trial in Israel

During his trial in Jerusalem, Eichmann testified as follows during session 107 on July 24, 1961:

What I know is that the gentlemen convened their session, and then in very plain terms – not in the language that I had to use in the minutes, but in absolutely blunt terms – they addressed the issue, with no mincing of words. And my memory of all this would be doubtful, were it not for the fact that I distinctly recall saying to myself at the time, Look, just look at Stuckart, the perpetual law-abiding bureaucrat, always punctilious and fussy, and now what a different tone! The language was anything but in conformity with the legal protocol of clause and paragraph. I should add that this is the only thing from the conference that still has stayed clearly in my mind.

When the Presiding Judge asked Eichmann what Stuckart had said “in general” “on this topic,” Eichmann answered, “The discussion covered killing, elimination, and annihilation.”

On the basis of Eichmann’s testimony, it is now accepted that the minutes of the Wannsee conference were written with euphemisms, instead of the actual words used at the conference.

Tour guide tells students about a “man-made hill” that was put into place at Dachau

On May 19, I blogged about tour guides at Dachau who tell lies about the history of the camp.

Now it has come to my attention that another tour guide at Dachau is telling some very dubious stories about the camp.  You can read about what a Dachau tour guide told a 20 year old British tourist here:

This quote is from this student’s blog post about her trip to Dachau:

We stopped at a map for a quick briefing before the tour, but I was pretty eager to get moving. Here he explained that Dachau was home to the first concentration camp. That being said, it’s a little different to visit. During the time of the camp, the town turned a blind eye to what was going on right under their nose – and this happened everywhere. This is how the Nazis got away with so much. So naturally, after the camp was liberated, the people were embarrassed. As a result, they tried to hide the camp. Most of the barracks were destroyed, a man made hill was put into place, and trees were planted to enclose what was the most shameful part of the small city. In later years, though, the city decided to embrace its culture rather than turning their backs on history. Thus, the memorial was built and it became a place for people to visit and to learn and understand. [...]

First of all, the people in the town of Dachau did not try to hide the camp.  The people in the town were cowering in fear of the former Jewish prisoners who were brought to the town and allowed to live in the homes of the residents, who were forced out with nothing but a fine-toothed comb.

The barracks in the Dachau concentration camp were not destroyed.  The camp was turned into a camp for alleged German war criminals.  You can read about “War Crimes Enclosure No. 1″ on my website here.

From 1965 to 2003, the Dachau Memorial Site had nothing about the 30,000 “German war criminals” who were held in the Dachau concentration camp barracks from June 1945 to August 1948. In May 2003, I visited the new museum, that had just opened at Dachau. There was one small display board about the prison camp for Germans at Dachau and also one small display board about the proceedings of the American Military Tribunal at Dachau.

German prisoners line up outside  “War Crimes Enclosure No. I” in the former Dachau concentration camp

What about the “man made hill” at Dachau?  Why was a hill constructed outside the camp?

The photo below shows what looks like two “man-made” hills on either side of the entrance to the Dachau Memorial Site.

Grass covered mounds on both sides of the entrance to Dachau Memorial Site

On the left side of the photo above, you can see clearly that there is a small grass-covered hill.  On the right side of the photo, there is another grass-covered mound in the shadows of the trees.  Are these the trees that the tour guide said were planted to “enclose the most shameful part of the small city” of Dachau?

My photo below shows the line of trees that hide the Memorial Site today.

Door into Dachau gate house with a line of trees on the left side of the photo

The fence that is shown in my 2005 photo above was not there when Dachau was a concentration camp.  The fence was added when the entrance to the Dachau Memorial Site was changed so that tourists can now enter the Memorial Site the same way that the prisoners did — through the Arbeit Macht Frei gate.

The trees in the photo above are not the original trees that were there when Dachau was a concentration camp.  The old photo below shows that a line of poplar trees originally hid the camp from view.  The reason that these trees were planted was to hide the concentration camp from the SS garrison which was right next to the camp.

Old photo of the Dachau gatehouse shows a line of poplar trees on the left

Note the Würm river canal and the barbed wire fence around the concentration camp in the photo above.  The tower in the background is Tower B, which was torn down, but has been reconstructed.

Let’s get back to the “man made hill” that the guide pointed out to the tourists; the two mounds on either side of the gatehouse are covering the ruins of the factories that were located just outside the camp. The factory, shown on the right side of the photo, was torn down when the camp was turned into a refugee camp.  Ethnic Germans who were expelled from Czechoslovakia after World War II lived in the former Dachau barracks for 17 years.

A factory that was just outside the Dachau gatehouse

In the photo above, the Dachau concentration camp is shown on the left side.  Note the lone poplar tree that is all that is left of the former line of poplar trees that hid the camp from the SS garrison, which is behind the camera.

The old photo below shows the Würm river canal and the line of poplar trees that separated the camp from the SS garrison.

Dachau concentration camp with moat and poplar trees

Getting back to what the tour guide told the tourists, this quote is from the blog of the 20-year-old British student:

The tour was the hardest towards the end when we went to the gas chamber. Dachau’s gas chamber is still standing. We learned that people who were killed in the gas chambers commonly came from other camps. They simply thought they were being shaved and showered just like any other camp. I had never considered this before, but I suppose it makes it seem less depressing than them knowing that they were going to die. The chambers were used a lot more towards the end of the camp because of disease and over-population. Thousands of people were killed in the chambers. The original ovens used to cremate the bodies were still there as well as the upgraded ones they used later on. I was standing outside the building, listening to our guide explain, and I saw the picture posted right there.

Bodies piled up outside the Dachau crematorium

The photo above shows dead bodies piled up outside Baracke X.  Near the end of the war, the Dachau camp had run out of coal to burn the bodies.  After the camp was liberated, these bodies were taken by the Dachau residents to Leitenberg and buried in mass graves.  But first, the bodies were left there for weeks, so that American soldiers could be brought to the camp and told that prisoners had been gassed in the building that is shown behind the bodies.

“The [gas] chambers were used a lot more towards the end of the camp because of disease and over-population”? (quote from the student’s blog)

Did the tour guide really say that?  It is true that there was a typhus epidemic in the camp, and the camp was over-populated because prisoners had been brought to the main camp from the sub-camps, so that they could be turned over to the Allies.  But did the Nazis try to stop disease and over-crowding by gassing the prisoners?

The blogger did not give the name of the tour guide, but this quote describes him:

The tour met outside the train station in Munich, where we caught a train and then a bus to the concentration camp. Dachau Concentration Camp was the first concentration camp. We were in for a big taste of history. Our tour guide was a self-made tour guide who started his work with Dachau and (from what I understand) studied art in college and was now a teacher of some sort. He was a born and bred Irish Catholic turned Atheist who, at times, seemed incredibly biased in his descriptions. (I found this amusing because he was hell bent on pushing the acknowledgement of equality of those affected by the camps.) He was entertaining, though. Since he was sort of cynical and dark-humored, it made the tour more lighthearted.

Note that the blogger wrote that the tour guide “seemed incredibly biased” and she “found this amusing.”

I interpret the statement “he was hell bent on pushing the acknowledgement of equality of those affected by the camps” to mean that he wanted to include the homosexual prisoners, the Gypsies, and the Catholic priests in the suffering at Dachau, and not just talk about the Jews.  In the future, maybe he could include the German “war criminals” who were imprisoned at Dachau, and the ethnic Germans who lived there for 17 years.  For example, he might mention the ethnic German refugees who were kicked out of the barracks at Dachau in 1965 so a Memorial Site could be built to replace their only home.

The photo below shows a restaurant, in a former disinfection hut, where the German refugees could gather and socialize, before it was torn down in 1965 to make room for a Memorial Site.  The location of the restaurant is where the Jewish Memorial now stands.

Former “disinfection hut” at Dachau was turned into a restaurant for ethnic German refugees

Did a 62-year-old nun with a slegdehammer really make an opening in a guard tower at Dachau for a door into a nunnery?

Earlier today, I wrote a long comment on my blog about a blog post written by another blogger.  My new post today is a continuation of my criticism of what my fellow blogger wrote. I am writing about how the Carmelite convent, just outside of the Dachau Memorial Site, was built.

A Catholic convent was built just outside the north wall of the Dachau camp

The Carmelite Convent, called Karmel Heilig-Blut, was designed by Josef Wiedemann, the same architect who designed the Catholic Church and its bell tower. The foundation stone was laid by Dr. Johannes Neuhäusler, a former inmate in the camp, at a ceremony on April 28, 1963. The spot where the convent was built was formerly a pond that was filled with gravel when the Nazis rebuilt the camp in 1937. Construction started in August 1963 and the finished convent was dedicated on November 22, 1964.

This quote is from the blog post which you can read in full here:

To leave things on a slightly less depressing note (although I feel like a post about Dachau is allowed–nay, expected–to be a downer), in the years since the war, a convent has been built adjacent to the camp grounds.The sisters wanted the entrance gate to the convent to be through one of the old guard towers at the far end of the camp, near the various religious monuments, but the Powers That Be (the earthly ones, I mean) kept saying no. “The problem was solved,” our guide told us, “by a sixty-two-year-old nun with a sledgehammer”–thus confirming my belief in the inherent badassery of nuns everywhere. The power of Christ compels you, indeed.

No legal action was taken against the nun; a group of Roma people (gypsies) backed her up and lent their support to the convent’s unorthodox building plans. And the gate to the convent remains there (after a bit of touching up…sledgehammer holes aren’t that pretty) to this day, a symbol that Dachau is no longer an enclosed prison, but an open memorial site.

There may have been a nun wielding a sledgehammer, but I am guessing that the nun was allowed to make the first hole in a guard tower at Dachau, in a symbolic ceremony in 1963, when one of the original guard towers at Dachau was remodeled to make an entrance into the Catholic convent.

Entrance into the convent is through a guard tower

After Dachau was liberated, the “Powers That Be” were the members of the International Committee of Dachau which is still, to this day, in charge of the Dachau Memorial Site.  Just before the acting Commandant, Martin Gottfried Weiss, left the Dachau camp in April 1945, when the American liberators were on their way, he turned the camp over to this Committee, which was headed by Albert Guérisse, a British SOE agent who had been imprisoned at Dachau because he was an illegal combatant, aiding the French Resistance.

The man in charge of the construction of a convent at Dachau was Dr. Johannes Neuhäusler. As a former inmate in the Dachau camp, he headed the projects to build both the convent and the Church of the Mortal Agony of Christ, which was the very first memorial built at Dachau.

When the American liberators arrived at Dachau on April 29, 1945, the majority of the prisoners in the camp were Polish Catholics. According to the US Army census, there were 2,539 Jews in the camp, most of them having arrived in the last days and weeks of the war, after being evacuated from other camps.

A Catholic church was the first memorial built at Dachau

The name of the Catholic chapel at Dachau is Todeangst Christi. It is usually translated in English as “Mortal Agony of Christ” although the literal translation of the German title would be “Christ’s Mortal Anxiety.” The church was built in 1960 at the instigation of Dr. Johannes Neuhäusler, a former inmate of the camp who became a Bishop in Munich after the war. Neuhäusler had been arrested in 1941 for breaking one of the laws of the Nazi government by publicly reading the critical writings of Cardinal Faulhaber, who opposed the Nazi regime. He was first taken to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp for political prisoners near Berlin and then transferred to Dachau a few months later.

The guard towers at Dachau were torn down after the camp was liberated; the guard towers that you see there today are reconstructions, except for the guard tower which has a door into the Catholic convent, which is the only original tower.

When the Dachau concentration camp was in operation, there were no doors into the guard towers from inside the camp, since this would have allowed the prisoners to break into the towers and kill the guards.

Door into the Catholic Convent at Dachau is through a guard tower

The guard tower, which is now an entrance to the Catholic convent, had to be remodeled to make a door from the Dachau Memorial Site into the convent.  There may have been a ceremony when this door was created.  I can see Neuhäusler handing a sledgehammer to the oldest nun and giving her the honor of making the first blow in the construction of  a new door into the guard tower.

The Jewish Memorial at Dachau was not built until 1967.  It is very close to the Catholic convent, and the Jews have complained about the tiny cross on the convent building, but the cross is still there.

Jewish Memorial at Dachau is very close to the Catholic convent

Tiny cross on Catholic convent offends the Jews

Note the contrast between the Catholic convent and the Jewish Memorial. One is dark and ominous, and the other is light and welcoming.

The Dachau Memorial site has turned into a memorial to the Jews.  Tourists go there to pay their respects to the Jews who died in the Holocaust.  The fact that Dachau was a camp mainly for political prisoners, who were predominantly Catholic, has been completely lost.  The former shower room at Dachau is now explained away as a place where the Nazis tested gassing methods.  The gas chamber is the linchpin of the Holocaust and you can’t have a Memorial to the Jews without a gas chamber.

Dachau tour guides who tell lies should be thrown into prison for 5 years

Before you say that Dachau tour guides don’t tell lies, read this quote from another blog:

One thing I didn’t realize was that the [Dachau] camp wasn’t immediately emptied and shut down following the end of the war. Dachau was a refugee camp until the 1960s. This is so hard for me to wrap my head around–how people had to live in the same camp under still-horrible conditions even after the war was over. Obviously the Nazis were no longer there killing and torturing them, but these people were forced to live in the same barracks where they’d been starved and exposed to the most unhygienic, unhealthy, uncomfortable conditions…and they were still encountering a lot of the same food shortages and unsanitary living conditions. Every day they looked out into the square where the Nazis had lined them up and, guns in hand, told them that they were subhuman. They lived a stone’s throw away from mass graves containing the ashes and bodies of family members and friends, and every day they passed the places where they had been tortured and their loved ones killed.

Did a Dachau tour guide really tell a group of American tourists that the “refugees,” who lived in the Dachau barracks until they were thrown out in 1965, were former prisoners in the camp?  Or did the blogger misunderstand what the tour guide was saying?

The truth is that the “refugees” who lived in the former Dachau camp for 17 years were ethnic Germans who had been expelled from Czechoslovakia. They had been forced to walk to Germany and try to find housing in a war-torn country where every city had been bombed.  They were the lucky ones; these expellees had manged to make it to Germany without being burned alive by the Czechs who drove them out.  I previously blogged about the expellees here.

The guidebooks that were being sold at Dachau, on my many visits there, did not mention the ethnic German expellees.  The German people don’t dwell on their suffering during and after World War II.  No one wants to hear their story.  Today, Dachau is all about the Jews, even though Dachau was not primarily a camp for Jews.

This is another quote from the blog post which you can read in full here:

I can’t tell every story I heard on my tour–they were nearly all horrifying, appalling reminders of what human beings are capable of. It’s enough to say, in a fairly family-friendly blog, that thousands of people were tortured for no reason other than the amusement of their captors. That the Nazis would keep prisoners locked in tiny cells for months at a time–or even a year–only to take them outside in to the sun, blind them, and shoot them. To put it another way: the Nazis would invest the time and expense in keeping someone alive for a year knowing full well that they were going to kill them. They weren’t murdering people to spare the expense of keeping them imprisoned. They weren’t killing them in the heat of battle. They weren’t even doing it for ideology anymore. They were doing it for fun. The idea that people like that have existed at all on this planet is terrifying, but to remember that they were in positions of power–and that they held these positions a mere sixty-odd years ago–is truly chilling.   [....]

I have deduced that the blogger is referring to the bunker at Dachau, the prison within the prison, where the VIP prisoners like the Reverend Martin Niemoeller were held.  These prisoners had small private cells, with a toilet and wash basin, but they did not have to stay in their cells 24/7; they could walk around outside and even receive visitors.  They could read books and one prisoner had a musical instrument.

One wing of the bunker had prison cells for Dachau guards who had abused the prisoners in the camp.  Shortly before Dachau was liberated, there were 128 prisoners in this wing, who were released so that they could assist with the surrender of the camp.

Did this blogger misunderstand what the tour guide was saying?  The bunker was used by the American occupation after the war to imprison alleged German war criminals, with 5 men in each cell that was intended for one person.

Or did a Dachau tour guide really say that thousands of people were tortured at Dachau for the amusement of their captors and that prisoners were killed at Dachau for “fun.”

There were several SS men, imprisoned by the Allies at Dachau, who testified under oath in court that they were tortured to force them to admit to crimes that they had not committed.

The following testimony was given at the American Military Tribunal by Johann Kick, the head of the political department at Dachau. Kick was convicted, sentenced to death and executed for his alleged torture of the Dachau prisoners.

Q: … will you describe to the court the treatment that you received prior to your first interrogation anyplace?

(Prosecution objection as to whether beating received on the 6th of May could be relevant to confession signed on the 5th of November).

Q: … Kick, did the treatment you received immediately following your arrest have any influence whatever on the statements that you made on the 5th of November?

A: … The treatment at that time influenced this testimony to that extent, that I did not dare to refuse to sign, in spite of the fact that it did not contain the testimony which I gave.

Q: Now, Kick, for the court, will you describe the treatment which you received immediately following your arrest?

A: I ask to refuse to answer this question here in public.

President: The court desires to have the defendant answer the question.

A: I was here in Dachau from the 6th to the 15th of May, under arrest; during this time I was beaten all during the day and night… kicked… I had to stand to attention for hours; I had to kneel down on sharp objects or square objects; I had to stand under the lamp for hours and look into the light, at which time I was also beaten and kicked; as a result of this treatment my arm was paralyzed for about 8 to 10 weeks; only beginning with my transfer to Augsberg, this treatment stopped.

Q: What were you beaten with?

A: With all kinds of objects.

Q: Describe them, please.

A: With whips, with lashing whips, with rifle butts, pistol butts, and pistol barrels, and with hands and fists.

Q: And that continued daily over a period of what time?

A: From the morning of the 7th of May until the morning of the 15th of May.

Q: Kick, why did you hesitate to give that testimony?

A: If the court hadn’t decided I should talk about it, I wouldn’t have said anything about it today.

Q: Would you describe the people who administered these beatings to you?

A: I can only say that they were persons who were wearing the United States uniform and I can’t describe them any better.

Q: And as a result of those beatings when Lt. Guth called you in, what was your frame of mind?

A: I had to presume that if I were to refuse to sign I would be subjected to a similar treatment.

The blogger’s description of the Dachau gas chamber and its use is absolutely mind boggling.  If you don’t know anything about the Dachau gas chamber, you can read about it on my website here.

This quote is the blogger’s description of the gas chamber:

There was however, one thing that triggered a gut reaction of sheer fear and despair, and that was the gas chamber. Dachau did not use gas chambers in the same way as many other camps; it was in fact a testing facility to determine the best, most efficient way to kill the most people. (I hate that I had to type that sentence. I hate that there were–and still are– people whose horrible actions gave me a reason to type it.) The Nazis tested a number of variables in the gas chambers at Dachau–how much poison? Should it be pumped in as gas or sprinkled on the floor in another form to be converted into gas by raising the temperature once the prisoners were in the room? How could they most effectively poison loads of people from as safe a distance as possible? Those are the questions the Nazis encountered.

This is the reality that their victims met: The gas chamber at Dachau was made to look like a shower. The men were told they would get a hot shower. They were led into a room with towels hanging on the walls and told to undress. They were then sent into the chamber, which was fitted with shower heads to really sell the illusion. If they asked why it was so hot, they were told that it was the hot water coming up through the pipes. The doors were closed, and the men who had entered would never leave. Their bodies were unceremoniously burned in a crematorium located in the next room, and their ashes were dumped into unmarked mass graves.

Even as a perfectly safe and healthy tourist in 2013, standing in the gas chamber was like standing in a nightmare. The room was dark and low ceilinged and gave the impression that it would crush you if you stood there long enough. It felt claustrophobic even though the doors were open and I was practically the only person in there. And I started to tear up.

Did the blogger actually go inside the gas chamber at Dachau?  Did he see the towel rods in the undressing room?  Did he see water pipes for the showers?  Whom did the victims ask about why the gas chamber was so hot?

Why was the ceiling so low?  Was it because this room was modified by the Americans after the camp was liberated?

You can read about the history of the Dachau gas chamber on my website here.

This quote from the blog post about a trip to Dachau absolutely astounded me:

Our guide, who’s been leading Dachau tours for four years, sent us into the building by ourselves while he waited outside. “I’ve only been in that room once,” he said, “and I have no desire to ever go back.” I heard stories of other tour guides who stopped leading Dachau tours after a year or so because they could not deal with the pain and horror of visiting the camp three or four times a week.

Why wouldn’t the guide go inside the Dachau gas chamber?  Because he couldn’t lie with a straight face?

After reading this far on the blog post, I was not inclined to believe the story, told by the blogger, of the Carmelite nunnery at Dachau.  This blog post is getting quite long, so I will stop for awhile, eat breakfast, and write another blog post about the Carmelite nunnery.

Another “liar, liar, pants on fire” Holocaust survivor story exposed as a fake

I will soon be updating this page of my scrapbookpages.com website:

http://www.scrapbookpages.com/Buchenwald/JedemDasSeine.html

One of the photos that I included on that page of my website, several years ago, has been proven to be a fake.  It is not a photo of Jews who were mistreated at Buchenwald, but a photo of German Prisoners of War at Bad Nenndorf, a little known prison set up by the British in 1945 after World War II had ended.

Photo of German POWs at Bad Nenndorf Britrish prison

Mel Gibson

The soldier on the far left in the photo looks a lot like Mel Gibson.  Maybe Mel can redeem himself by claiming that his Jewish father was tortured at Buchenwald.

The soldier, on the far right in the photo, looks very German to me, and he looks as if he is mad as hell, and not going to take it anymore.  That’s the way I feel, now that I have realized that I was duped by the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, who passed this photo off as a photo of her Jewish father, surrounded by ethnic Germans, who were allegedly prisoners at Buchenwald.

This text, which is on my website, will soon to changed to tell the truth behind the photo above:

The photo above was taken by an American Army photographer shortly after the camp was liberated. In the center of the photo is a Jewish prisoner who had gone into hiding when the Germans started to evacuate the camp, according to his daughter. He first hid in the typhus ward and later dug a hole near the infirmary barrack. He was too weak to stand when this photo was taken.

His daughter wrote in an e-mail to me that her father told her about “the American soldier who asked him to pose for a picture, because he was particularly emaciated compared to the other – political – prisoners. The photographer asked them to assume a serious expression, because he wanted to communicate what happened in the camps during the war.”

Note that the prisoner in the center of the photo is wearing thick socks. The concentration camp prisoners were not normally issued socks. These socks had formerly belonged to an SS guard in the camp.

The following is a quote from the e-mail letter sent to me by this prisoner’s daughter:

“When my father arrived in Buchenwald, he was slated to work in the quarry, in effect a protracted death sentence, when a Nazi Jeep drove by seeking building engineers. My father was a textile engineer, but decided to take the chance. He was lucky; his co-worker (they were building barracks) taught him on the job.

Towards the end of the war he would hide near the Germans’ cabin and listen to the newscasts, which told of the approaching American army. This motivated him to find whatever means possible to hold out in the camp and avoid further deportation. I already wrote you how he hid: first by hiding in the typhus ward, then by digging a cave.”

I should have known that something was wrong when a woman [whose name I have forgotten] wrote in an e-mail to me that her father told her about “the American soldier who asked him to pose for a picture, because he was particularly emaciated compared to the other – political – prisoners. The photographer asked them to assume a serious expression, because he wanted to communicate what happened in the camps during the war.”

Famous photo taken at Buchenwald has an Army Signal Corp number on the bottom

American soldiers were not allowed to carry cameras in World War II.  The photos taken at  Buchenwald, and at all the other camps liberated by Americans, were taken by Army Signal Core photographers and each photo has a number on the bottom in white ink.

Of course, there were American soldiers who had cameras that they had “liberated” from the Germans, but their photos are candid photos, not posed like the photo of the four men, shown above.

The photo of the four men is shown on this page of USHMM website.

The same photo is shown on this website, with the following information:

Pictured at right are four German men after being interned at the notorious Bad Nenndorf  secret prison set up by  the British during their occupation of north-west Germany in 1945. They are far from the worst of the cases discovered there.

A big Thank You to Carolyn Yeager who has exposed many lies about the Holocaust, including the photo of the German prisoners, which the Jews are claiming as a photo of prisoners at Buchenwald.

Nazis allowed Jews to write letters on their way to the gas chamber, and those letters are now kept in the archives at Arolsen…

An article which you can read in full at http://augustafreepress.com/misas-fugue-to-make-its-staunton-debut/ has this remarkable quote:

While they worked on this, students in the history department worked with Goss to research additional primary source photographs and film footage from the era through USHMM in Washington, D.C.  They also completed an International Tracing Service (ITS) request to see if any documentation on the Grunwald family existed in the Holocaust-era archives in Germany.  Dozens of documents were found.

The documents are among hundreds of artifacts that appear in the film, some emerging “out of nowhere,” Gaston said, during the lengthy discovery process.  Perhaps the most touching example is a hastily written letter by Grunwald’s mother to his father – moments before trucks took her to the gas chamber.  That letter was donated this past July to USHMM and will become part of their Permanent Exhibition, a testament to its uniqueness and importance as an artifact from this tragic time.

Grunwald’s mother was apparently selected for the gas chamber because she was not able to work, but his father was spared.  I can just see Dr. Mengele saying to Grunwald’s mother:  “Sorry, but I can’t let you slide  — I have to send you to the gas chamber, but not to worry, you can write a letter to your husband, and we will keep it in our archives, so 70 years from now, your descendants can read it.”

Babo Batren waiting for the truck to take her to the gas chamber (Click on photo to enlarge)

Jews waiting for a truck to take them to the gas chamber

Most of the Jews had to walk to the gas chamber and there are numerous photos of them walking, carrying their bundles.  You can see a large collection of these photos on this website: http://www.nazigassings.com/StrollingtotheGasChambers.html

Did the American liberators of Dachau know that there was a typhus epidemic in progress there?

This morning, I read a news article in the online Redding Eagle newspaper, which tells the story of Frank Stevenson, Jr. who was at Dachau when the camp was liberated on April 29, 1945.

Dachau guards who were captured by the American liberators; Frank Stevenson is on the right

This quote is from the news article in the Redding Eagle:

Death camp changed life of Wernersville WWII veteran
[by] Bruce Posten

As an Army soldier, Frank Stevenson Jr. helped liberate Dachau, the notorious Nazi concentration camp, and its subsidiary camps in late April 1945.

[...]

Stevenson witnessed the horror of human atrocity firsthand.

“As soon as Hitler was in business, Dachau was operating as a place for his political prisoners of many nationalities,” said Stevenson, who will celebrate his 90th birthday on June 6, the 69th anniversary of D-Day.

That’s an appropriate irony, not because he was part of the historic World War II Allied invasion, but what the success of that endeavor allowed him to witness during the final days of the war.

[...]

But it was Dachau, the model for other German camps, that left the lasting impression, with its legacy of starvations (sic), executions and prisoners worked to death.

What he saw [at Dachau], he will never forget: the famished inmates surrounded by barbed wire; a railroad track that led up to a door where victims were herded into a gas chamber; a room of I-beams with pulleys and nooses for hangings; and another with an incinerator where bodies were burned.

Stevenson came upon a bloodstained wall showing evidence of executions. And in still another room, he saw the bodies piled up to the ceiling, people killed within days of the liberation with no time for the Germans to burn them.

“We really had no idea of all this,” Stevenson said, adding that with the approach of Allied liberators some prisoners escaped and gathered weapons, seeking vengeance by killing Nazi guards.

Note that Frank Stevenson mentioned that the prisoners were killing Nazi guards, but apparently he didn’t know that some of the SS soldiers at Dachau were killed by the American liberators. Apparently, he also did not know about the typhus epidemic in the camp and that the dead bodies found in the camp were the bodies of prisoners who had died from typhus.  He assumed that the bodies of prisoners, that were piled up in the morgue, were the bodies of prisoners who had been murdered in the last days of the war.

This quote is a continuation of the news article in the Redding Eagle:

In [Stevenson's book], a letter to his mother and father on May 1, 1945, read: “Since I’ve been over here I’ve found that a lot of what we are told is either grossly exaggerated or just plain propaganda; however, the weirdest story that was ever told about this concentration camp was perfectly true.”

Nothing was perfect at Dachau, except the horrible human truth.

“I used to be quite a believer in God, taught Sunday school and attended church,” Stevenson said. “But after I saw that I just kept asking myself, ‘Where was God when all those people were killed?’ I respect anyone’s faith, because it can provide comfort, but for me that’s no more. I believe when you’re dead, you’re dead.”

In 1984, Stevenson took a trip to Europe, but Dachau wasn’t on the itinerary. Stevenson was drawn to go back.

“Our tour director didn’t want us to go and said, ‘You don’t believe all that stuff that was supposed to have happened there?’ ” Stevenson said.

Stevenson believed it; he had seen it.

Along with 15 others, he took a side trip and caught up with the tour later.

“I know what I saw,” Stevenson said.

And no distance of decades or others’ delusions can mask what he witnessed.

American reporters view bodies of typhus victims after Dachau was liberated

The photo above shows bodies laid out in rows near a barracks building on the east side of the Dachau camp; these were the bodies of prisoners who had died of typhus after the camp was liberated.

Prisoners in the typhus ward set up by American doctors after Dachau was liberated

After the Dachau camp was liberated, the former inmates had to be kept inside the prison enclosure for several weeks until all danger of spreading the typhus epidemic in the camp had passed. Just before the Americans arrived, up to 400 prisoners had been dying each day in the typhus epidemic which was out of control, according to the testimony of the Chief Doctor of the camp at the American Military Tribunal held at Dachau in November 1945.  On 2 May 1945, the 116th Evacuation Hospital arrived at Dachau and set up operations. According to a report made on 20 May 1945, there were 140 prisoners dying each day in the camp; the principle causes of death were starvation, tuberculosis, typhus and dysentery. On liberation day, April 29, 1945, there were 4,000 prisoners in the Dachau camp hospital and an unknown number of sick prisoners in the barracks who had been receiving no medical attention.

There were 18 one-story wooden SS barrack buildings in the Dachau army garrison which were converted by the American liberators into hospital wards. The American medical workers were housed in the SS administration building. A Typhus Commission arrived, within days, and began vaccinating all medical personnel and the prisoners. There was a daily dusting of DDT to kill the lice which spreads typhus.

Dachau prisoner being dusted with DDT to kill the lice that spreads typhus

On 3 May 1945, the sick prisoners were brought to the hospital wards. They were bathed, dusted with DDT powder and given clean pajamas to wear; their old prison clothes were burned.

By July 1945, the typhus epidemic in the Dachau concentration camp had been brought under control by the US Army doctors, and all the prisoners had either been released or moved to a Displaced Persons camp at Landsberg. The photograph below shows former inmates being tested for typhus before being allowed to leave.

Survivors of Dachau were given a test for typhus before being allowed to leave

So why didn’t the Nazis take care of the prisoners and prevent a typhus epidemic at Dachau?  No one ever mentions that the SS administrators at Dachau DID try to prevent epidemics, but in the last months of the war, when Germany was being bombed back to the Stone Age, everything got out of control.

Disinfection Hut at Dachau, where clothes were disinfected to prevent typhus, was torn down to make a space for a memorial to the Jews who died at Dachau

The photograph above shows the disinfection hut at Dachau, which is no longer in existence. Before it was torn down, the building was used as a restaurant, when the Dachau camp became a refugee camp for 17 years, for Germans who had been expelled from the Sudetenland in what is now the Czech Republic after the war. The restaurant was torn down in 1965 to make room for the Dachau Memorial Site. The location of the disinfection building is where the Jewish Memorial now stands.

Jewish Memorial stands in the location of the former disinfection building

On April 30, 1945, one day after the Dachau camp was liberated, a Displaced Persons team of US Army soldiers arrived to take care of the survivors. Marcus J. Smith, who was a medical doctor on this team, described the disinfection building, which he saw when the prisoners escorted him around the camp. In his book, The Harrowing of Hell, Smith wrote the following:

“Our escorts take us to the disinfection building. Here, while prisoners were bathed in antiseptic solution every two to four weeks, their clothes were put into an apparatus in which they were exposed to two to four meter radiowaves and a temperature of 182 degrees Centigrade. So I am told. This is an experimental method, and I cannot ascertain its effectiveness. My recommendation will be to use soap, water, antiseptic solutions and DDT. Nearby is a concrete building in which 300 prisoners could shower at a time. I am told that each prisoner was permitted one shower every two weeks. (The building has been closed for the last three weeks.)”

The shower building which Smith described, in his book, had been closed for three weeks because a bomb that hit the Dachau complex on April 9, 1945 had destroyed the water main, and there was no running water in the camp when the Americans arrived.

Smith went on to describe the “crematorium and the gas chamber” which were in the “large concrete and brick building with the high smokestack,” so it is clear that neither the “disinfection building” nor the shower room, which he described above, was the building where the homicidal gas chamber was allegedly located.

The prisoners who took Smith on a tour of the camp, one day after it was liberated, did NOT point out that the four disinfection chambers in the crematorium building used Zyklon-B for delousing the clothes. Regarding the clothes piled up outside the Baracke X building where four delousing chambers and the homicidal gas chamber were located, Smith wrote the following:

“There are conflicting stories as to the use of the gas chamber. [...] Many of the stories described the shedding of clothes before execution. This was purposeful. The clothing was collected and later issued to newly arriving prisoners.”

Smith assumed that the clothes, that were shed by the prisoners, prior to being gassed in Baracke X, were taken all the way across the camp to the old disinfection building to be deloused.  He did not understand that the “gas chambers” in the Baracke X building were being used for disinfecting clothing.

Door into disinfection chamber in Baracke X where clothing was disinfected

DDT was in common use in America in 1945, but was apparently not being used by the Germans. Smith wrote the following in his book The Harrowing of Hell:

“As the years passed, reports began to appear about the resistance of certain insects to DDT, and its harmful effects on certain species of birds, fish, amphibians, and mammals. But in 1945, we had no inkling of adverse effects. We used DDT by the ton; it coated our clothes, food, and air, and the results achieved by it in the control of the typhus fever epidemic were spectacular.”

The Germans were way ahead of American scientists, who had not yet discovered the harmful effects of DDT. If only the SS had used DDT at Dachau, there would not have been dead bodies at Dachau for American soldiers, like Frank Stevenson, to find, and assume that these prisoners had been deliberately killed by the Nazis.

There were 2,539 Jews at the Dachau main camp when it was liberated.  The number of Jewish deaths at Dachau is unknown.
Dachau Liberated: TheOfficial Report of the US Seventh Army, published in 1945, mentions that 14,700 deaths had occurred at Dachau in the first quarter of 1945.  This was during the time that there was a typhus epidemic at Dachau.

Paul Berben, a prisoner in the camp, wrote a book entitled Dachau, the Official History 1933 – 1945, in which he stated that 2,888 prisoners had died at Dachau in January 1945, 3,977 prisoners had died in February, 3,668 had died in March and 2,625 had died in April, for a total of 13,158 in the first four months of 1945.  Most of these deaths were due to typhus and other diseases in the camp.

In the month of May 1945, an additional 2,226 Dachau prisoners died after the camp was liberated, in spite of the excellent care given to them by American military doctors. There were 196 more deaths in June before the typhus epidemic was finally stopped by the use of DDT and the vaccination of all the prisoners.

According to a book published by the US Seventh Army immediately after the war (Dachau Liberated, The Official Report by The U.S. Seventh Army), there was a total of 29,138 Jews brought to Dachau from other camps between June 20, 1944 and November 23, 1944. The US Seventh Army report says that Jews were brought to Dachau to be executed and that they were gassed in the gas chamber disguised as a shower room in the Baracke X building, and also in the four smaller gas chambers. According Barbara Distel, the former director of the Memorial Site, the gas chamber at Dachau, which was disguised as a shower room, was never used for any purpose.

Today, tour guides tell visitors that the gas chamber at Dachau was used, but not for “mass gassing.”

Holocaust survivor says the Nazis were in such a hurry to kill the Jews that they didn’t bother with tattoos in the last days of Auschwitz

In a news article in the online Wellsville Daily, which you can read in full here, Eva Abrams tells how she escaped death at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

This quote is from the news article:

Following the horrific account, students asked questions about her scars. She wasn’t tattooed.

“It was near the end of the war and they were in too much of a hurry to kill us, so they didn’t bother with the tattoos,” Eva said.

To go back to the beginning of the Eva Abrams story, this quote from the news article tells about how she survived:

[Eva and her family] arrived at Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland in the spring of 1944.

D-Day was a few weeks away and the Nazis were in retreat as Allied bombing increased, but the SS was determined to complete its “Final Solution” and eliminate as many Hungarian Jews as possible, Abrams told students at Bolivar Central School Friday as she gave her personal account of the Holocaust.

[...]

“As we got off the train, there was Mengele (Josef Mengele, an SS physician, infamous for his inhumane medical experimentation upon concentration camp prisoners at Auschwitz) and he pointed for my mother to go to the left and me to go to the right. My mother was only 50 years old and she was worried about what was going to happen to me,” Abrams said. Her mother and niece were sent to the gas chamber/crematorium. Abrams was sent to a barracks holding 1,000 women.

[...]

Abrams came very close to not surviving the concentration camp. Her mother, father, an older sister and her young niece didn’t survive. She recalled the 500-mile forced march, in the dead of winter, she and 1,000 other, starved, barefoot and nearly naked women, including her two older sisters, endured and how at the end of it only a family quirk may have saved her life when the German soldiers opened fire with a machine gun aimed at her and five other women.

“I fell down before they started firing. I don’t know why,” Abrams said.

[..]

30,000 records kept by the Nazis, but not one name of anyone who died in a gas chamber….

As everyone knows, the Nazis kept meticulous records of EVERYTHING — except the names of the Jews who were gassed in the death camps.

These Nazi records have been kept, for years, in “an inconspicuous white building” in the town of Arolsen, Germany.  The records contain the names of 17.5 million people, but not one name of a Jew who was gassed, according to a news story which you can read in full here.

Miles and miles of records, but no records of gassing

This quote is from the news article:

International Tracing Service (ITS) in Bad Arolsen contains 30 million documents on survivors of Nazi camps, Gestapo prisons, forced laborers and displaced persons. [...]

The 25 kilometers of yellowing papers include typed lists of Jews, homosexuals and other persecuted groups, files on children born in the Nazi Lebensborn program to breed a master race, and registers of arrivals and departures from concentration camps. [...]

The Nazis’ meticulous record-keeping stopped only when Jews and other victims were herded into gas chambers.

“At death camps like Sobibor or Auschwitz, only natural causes of death are recorded – heart failure or pneumonia,” said spokeswoman, Kathrin Flor. “There’s no mention of gassing. The last evidence of many lives is the transport to the camp.”

Wait a minute!  There are no records of anyone being gassed at Sobibor, a camp that was strictly a death camp?

Auschwitz was a multi-purpose camp with three separate locations, and some of the prisoners worked.  But the only purpose of the Sobibor camp was to get rid of (ausrotten) the Jews  by mass gassing in large gas chambers, using either carbon monoxide or Zyklon-B.

The Jews who were NOT gassed at Auschwitz were registered and given an identification number which was tattooed on their arm.  The Jews who got off the transport trains at Auschwitz, and were waved to the left by Dr. Mengele, were not registered and no records of their deaths in the gas chamber were kept.

It is understandable that the Nazis would not have wanted to keep a record of death by gassing, but they could have made up some other name, a euphemism for gassing.  Something like “went up the chimney” or shot while attempting to escape (Auf der Flucht erschossen).

By being remiss in recording the deaths from gassing, the Nazis caused the number of recorded deaths at Auschwitz to be embarrassingly low, although ESTIMATES of the Auschwitz deaths are now as high as 1.5 million.  The lack of records has led to Holocaust denial.  If only the Nazis had just kept records of the names of each person who was gassed.  Would it have killed them to have a guy standing at the door into the gas chamber, taking names to put into their vast records, which they kept for future generations?

You can read about the Nazi gas chambers here.