Correction on the identification of prisoners in a Buchenwald photo — Updated

Update May 12, 2012:

The boy wearing a beret was incorrectly identified by the USHMM as Elie Wiesel

The photo above shows the face of the boy, who has been mistakenly identified by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum as Elie Wiesel.  The photo shows the orphan boys who marched out of the Buchenwald concentration camp on April 27, 1945. The boy, who is right in front of the boy whose face is circled, has been incorrectly identified as Elie Wiesel on the website of Ken Waltzer.  According to The Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity, neither of these boys is Elie Wiesel.

A closer look at the face of the boy wearing a beret, who is NOT Elie Wiesel

The face of the prisoner identified by The Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity as 16-year-old Elie Wiesel

I previously blogged about this whole controversy here.

Continue reading my original post:

I have made corrections on several pages of my website after being informed by The Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity that Elie Wiesel is not in the photo of orphan boys marching out of the Buchenwald concentration camp.  I had previously identified Elie Wiesel as the tall boy wearing a beret in the photo below.  I had gotten this information from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum website.  Apparently the USHMM was mistaken and Elie Wiesel in not in any of the photos of the orphan boys at Buchenwald.

Orphan boys marching out of the Buchenwald concentration camp

Another photo of the orphan boys marching out of Buchenwald

I should have known that the tall boy wearing a beret was not Elie Wiesel, but I trusted the USHMM to give accurate information.  The Communist prisoners, who ruled the camp, wore berets to identify themselves to the other prisoners.  Notice the man on the far right in the photo above wearing a beret to identify himself as a Communist. There is also an adult man, wearing a beret, in the photo below.

Child survivors of Buchenwald wearing clothes made from German military uniforms

One of the youngest survivors of the Buchenwald concentration camp, shown in the center of the photograph above, was four-year-old Josef Schleifstein. The Communist prisoners, who were in charge of the day-to-day administration of the camp, made sure that the children were well cared for. Note the adult man in the back row wearing a beret to identify himself as a Communist. The children in the photo are wearing clothes made for them by the Americans out of German uniforms. As prisoners in the camp, the orphans had worn striped uniforms just like the other prisoners.

Buchenwald orphans leaving on a train to Paris

I received the photo below, along with the caption, from The Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity.

Note that the caption on the photo above states that “The picture was taken on April 16, 1945…”  Either the date on the photo is wrong, or Elie Wiesel made a mistake when he wrote in two of his books that he was in the hospital at Buchenwald on April 16, 1945 after the Buchenwald camp had been liberated.

I am eagerly awaiting Ken Waltzer’s new book about the Buchenwald orphans, which will get all this straightened out.  On his website, Waltzer also identified one of the orphan boys, marching out of the camp, as Elie Wiesel.  According to The Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity, the only photo of Elie Wiesel in Buchenwald is the one taken on April 16, 1945 in barrack #56. The orphans barrack was #66.

What happened to Germany’s gold after World War II?

General Dwight D. Eisenhower inspects Germany’s gold, found in a salt mine

General Dwight D. Eisenhower is shown in the photo above as he inspects Germany’s gold, found in a salt mine.  The man behind him, wearing a helmet with four stars, is General Omar Bradley. The Nazis had hidden 250 million dollars worth of gold bars inside the salt mine.

The soldier on the far left, in the photo, is Benjamin B. Ferencz.  Ferencz had been transferred, in 1945, from General Patton’s army to the newly created War Crimes Branch of the U.S. Army.  A Jew from Transylvania, Ferencz had moved with his family to America when he was a baby. In 1945, his job was to gather evidence for future trials of German war criminals.

General Eisenhower inspects Germany’s art treasures, stored in the salt mine, to protect them from the Allied bombing raids

The photo above shows General Eisenhower as he inspects Germany’s art treasures in the same salt mine where the gold was stored.

On Easter weekend in April 1945, the 90th Infantry Division had overrun the little German town of Merkers, which was near the Ohrdruf sub-camp of Buchenwald, and had captured the Kaiseroda salt mine, which is sometimes called the Merkers mine.  Hidden deep inside the salt mine was virtually the entire gold and currency reserves of the German Reichsbank, together with all of the priceless art treasures which had been removed from Berlin’s museums for protection against Allied bombing raids and possible capture by the Allied armies. According to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum web site, the soldiers also found important documents that were introduced at the Nuremberg IMT as evidence of the Holocaust.

This quote is from the USHMM website:

The US Army made many significant finds of Nazi booty and records, among them gold, currency, artworks, and documentation discovered on April 7, 1945, by engineers of the US 90th Infantry Division in the Kaiseroda Salt mine in Merkers, Germany. Millions of documents were captured at various locations, including records of the German Army High Command records; files from Krupp, Henschel, and other German industrial concerns; Luftwaffe (German air force) material; and records kept by Heinrich Himmler (the Chief of the German Police and Reich Leader of the SS), the German Foreign Office, and many others.

All of America’s top military leaders in Europe, including Generals Eisenhower, Bradley and Patton, visited the mine and viewed the treasure.

General Dwight D. Eisenhower examined the Kaiseroda salt mine on April 12, 1945, along with General Omar Bradley, General George S. Patton, and other high-ranking American Army officers before making a side trip to see the Ohrdruf labor camp.

The photo below shows General Eisenhower as he inspects the Ohrdruf camp.  He is viewing the bodies found on the grounds of the camp when Ohrdruf was discovered by American troops on April 4, 1945.  The bodies were left out for more than a month, so that American soldiers could be brought to witness the atrocities committed by the Nazis.

General Eisenhower is in the middle of the photo, inspecting the bodies found at Ohrdruf labor camp, which was a sub-camp of Buchenwald

The discovery of the Ohrdruf labor camp started the propaganda effort to paint the Germans as war criminals.  The official story told about the photo above is that these prisoners were shot after the camp was evacuated because there weren’t enough trucks to transport the sick prisoners.  My personal opinion is that these prisoners were killed by some of the other prisoners, as soon as the Germans abandoned the camp, and marched the healthy prisoners to the Buchenwald camp.  Why waste bullets, shooting sick prisoners, when they were going to die anyway?

General Eisnenhower couldn’t have cared less about the prisoners at the Ohrdruf camp.  He didn’t even mention the camp in his autobiography.  He was only there to see the salt mine and get his greedy hands on the German gold.  Except for General Patton, who went to see the Buchenwald camp, none of the generals in the American army ever visited any of the Nazi camps, except the Ohrdruf sub-camp.

A couple of days ago, I was reading Bradley Smith’s website when I came across a pdf file in which I read that Germany’s gold was confiscated by the Allies and is still in the possession of the USA.  I was surprised to learn this, since Germany and America became allies after the war when the Cold War with the Soviet Union began.  I was astonished to learn that the German tax payers are being forced to pay for the occupation of Germany, which is still going on, 70 years after the end of the war.  Germany still has a Constitution written by the Allies.  When will Germany become a sovereign country again?

Most Americans believe that Germany was treated well by the Allies after World War II.  Just the other day, Bill O’Reilly said something about the fairness of the Nuremberg trial in which Germany’s war criminals were convicted.  O’Reilly has mentioned the Marshall Plan numerous times; he claims that the Marshall Plan was America’s generous plan to restore the country of Germany after the destruction of World War II.  (The Marshall Plan provided aid to many countries in Europe.  Germany did not receive as much aid as other countries that had not suffered war damage.)

When will Americans stop bragging about how well Germany was treated after World War II?  Enough, already!  It is time for the British and the Americans to get the hell out of Germany and let the German people have their country again.

The liberation of the Dora-Mittelbau (Nordhausen) labor camp by American troops

A reader of my blog provided a link to this news report from 2008 about two American veterans who took part in the liberation of Dora-Mittelbau, aka Nordhausen, the famous labor camp where the Germans were building rockets, using the labor of political prisoners. Mittelbau-Dora began as a sub-camp of Buchenwald, but by the end of the war, it was a separate camp with sub-camps of its own.

The article, which was written by Lia Russell, starts off with this quote:

It was a scene beyond their minds’ capacity to process – even now, 63 year later – as Portsmouth natives Jack Lorber and Robert Elliott prepare to observe another Veterans Day.

Lorber, Elliott and the other men of the 786th Tank Battalion and 243rd Engineer Combat Battalion were already seasoned combat veterans by the time they came upon Buchenwald – a notorious Nazi concentration camp near Weimar, Germany. Yet, they described the horrors they witnessed there as worse than seeing their own comrades blown to pieces by land mines and left strewn in frozen fields.

Every one of their senses was assaulted by their initial confrontation with Buchenwald on April 11, 1945 – the terrible smells of human waste and burnt flesh that caught in their throats, the 27,000 surviving inmates who grabbed and hugged and begged them for food, the sounds of moaning, wailing, crying, rejoicing at freedom.

As soon as I read this, I knew these veterans were not talking about the Buchenwald concentration camp.  There were 21,000 survivors of Buchenwald and there was no smell of burnt flesh when the liberators arrived.  The survivors of the Buchenwald main camp were not starving, except maybe the prisoners that the Communists, who ruled the camp, didn’t like.  You can read about the liberation of Buchenwald on my website here.

The 786th Tank Battalion was attached to the 3rd Armored Division which is credited with liberating the Dora-Mittelbau labor camp on April 11, 1945, the same day that the Buchenwald concentration camp was liberated by the 6th Armored Division.  The Dora-Mittelbau camp, located near the town of Nordhausen, had been abandoned by the SS and most of the prisoners had been marched to Bergen-Belsen because the Dora-Mittelbau camp was in a war zone.  Only a handful of prisoners, who were too sick to walk, had been left behind.

Here is a quote from this page of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum website:

On April 11, 1945, the 3rd (Armored Division) discovered the Dora-Mittelbau concentration camp. The division first arrived on the scene, reporting back to headquarters that it had uncovered a large concentration camp near the town of Nordhausen. Requesting help from the 104th Infantry Division, the 3rd immediately began transporting some 250 ill and starving prisoners to nearby hospital facilities.

So there were 250 prisoners still in the camp, not 27,000. Note that the USHMM calls Dora-Mittelbau a concentration camp, not a sub-camp of Buchenwald, which is correct.

American soldiers found bodies of prisoners at Dora-Mittelbau that had been killed by American bombs

The famous photo, shown above, which was published in Life magazine in 1945, shows the bodies of prisoners, killed at Dora-Mittelbau, by bombs dropped from American planes.

This website has a video which shows American soldiers carrying the sick prisoners out of the Dora-Mittelbau camp on stretchers.  They were the lucky ones, who had been too sick to march to Bergen-Belsen where they would have most likely died in the typhus epidemic that was in progress.

This video about Dora-Mittelbau shows what the labor camp was like.  At 1.51 minutes in the video, you can see a memorial sign for the “death march” of the prisoners out of the camp before it was liberated.  At 3:45 minutes, you can see the dead bodies laid out in rows.  These prisoners were not killed by the Germans; Germany was trying to win a war so it would have been stupid to kill the workers who were building rockets.  World War II was bad enough without telling lies about it.

Two Catholic priests were crucified upside down at Buchenwald

A couple of days ago, I read an article written by Kathy Schiffer on this website.  This quote is from the article:

It was at Buchenwald that two Austrian priests, Otto Neururer and Mathias Spannlang, were crucified upside down on June 5, 1940.

I had never heard about this before I read the article, so I went to Wikipedia to find out more.  According to Wikipedia, it was that evil Nazi Martin Sommer who perpetrated this atrocity.  This quote from Wikipedia tells the story:

Walter Gerhard Martin Sommer (February 8, 1915 – June 7, 1988) was an SS Hauptscharführer (master sergeant) who served as a guard at the concentration camps of Dachau and Buchenwald. Sommer, known as the “Hangman of Buchenwald” was considered a depraved sadist who reportedly ordered two Austrian priests, Otto Neururer and Mathias Spannlang, crucified upside-down.

Note that Martin Sommer REPORTEDLY ordered this atrocity.  “Reportedly” is only slightly better than “allegedly.”

Wikipedia also says this about Martin Summer, who was put on trial by the Nazis themselves:

After the SS trial Sommer received a reduction in rank and was sentenced to a penal battalion fighting on the Eastern Front where he was wounded in a tank explosion, losing his left arm and right leg. He was taken captive by the Red Army and was detained as P.O.W. until 1950 when his prisoner status was upgraded to war criminal. He was released from Soviet captivity in 1955 as part of the negotiations conducted on behalf of Soviet held German prisoners by Konrad Adenauer.

Karl Otto Koch, the Commandant of Buchenwald, was also put on trial at the same time and he was sentenced to death for ordering the deaths of two prisoners.  How did Martin Sommer get off with such a light sentence after he had ordered the crucifixion of two priests?

I googled some more and found the website where Kathy Schiffer had apparently gotten her information.  Here is a quote from that website:

Neururer was arrested on the charge of “slander to the detriment of German marriage” and interned first in the concentration camp of Dachau and later in Buchenwald. The sadistic tortures to which he was subjected caused incredible suffering, but even so he shared his scarce food rations with prisoners who were even weaker than himself. In the Buchenwald camp he was approached by a prisoner who asked to be baptized. Perhaps he was an agent provocateur. Neururer suspected that the request could be a trap, but his sense of duty did not allow him to refuse. Two days later he was transferred to the much feared “bunker”, which in concentration camps was the place of extreme punishment. There he was hanged upside down until he died on 30 May 1940.

Being “hanged upside down until death” is not crucifixion.  Note also that Neururer was sent from Dachau to Buchenwald.  That doesn’t make any sense.  The priests were sent to Dachau from other camps so they could all be together. Note that the date is also different from the date given by Kathy Schiffer.

I previously blogged here, way back in 2010,  about the priests who were allegedly crucified at Buchenwald.

After a little more searching, I found this website which has some information about Otto Neuruer:

Otto Neururer was one of hundreds of priests who died under SS Nazi persecution.  “He was injected with Malaria by the “doctors” who conducted human lab experiments in the camps during that brutal time.

I believe that this version of the story is the truth.  This quote is from my own website:

Because of the fact that they were exempt from work, the priests were chosen as subjects for medical experiments, conducted by Dr. Klaus Schilling, on a cure for malaria. As a result of these experiments, many of the priests died.

This information is also from my own website:

In 1940, the German bishops and the Pope had persuaded Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler to concentrate all the priests imprisoned in the various concentration camps into one camp, and to house them all together in separate blocks with a chapel where they could say Mass.

In early December 1940, the priests already in Dachau were put into Barracks Block 26 near the end of the camp street. Within two weeks, they were joined by around 800 to 900 priests from Buchenwald, Mauthausen, Sachsenhausen, Auschwitz and other camps, who were put into Blocks 28 and 30. Block 30 was later converted into an infirmary barrack.

At first, the priests at Dachau were given special privileges such as a ration of wine, a loaf of bread for four men, and individual bunk beds. The priests were not required to work and they were allowed to celebrate Mass.

In October 1941, these privileges were taken away. Only the German priests were now allowed to say Mass. All non-German clergymen, including Poles, Dutchmen, Luxembourgers and Belgians, were removed from Block 26 and sent to Block 28. A wire fence was placed around Block 28 and a sentry stood guard. The non-German priests were now forced to work, just like the rest of the prisoners. Allegedly, this change happened because the Pope had made a speech on the radio in which he condemned the Nazis, and the German bishops had made a public protest about the treatment of the priests.

[...]

The Catholic priests were not sent to Dachau just because they were priests. Catholics and Protestants alike were arrested as “enemies of the state” but only if they preached against the Nazi government. An important policy of the Nazi party in Germany was called Gleichschaltung, a term that was coined in 1933 to mean that all German culture, religious practice, politics, and daily life should conform with Nazi ideology. This policy meant total control of thought, belief, and practice and it was used to systematically eradicate all anti-Nazi elements after Hitler came to power.

There were around 20 million Catholics and 20,000 priests in Nazi Germany. The vast majority of the German clergymen and the German people, including the 40 million Protestants, went along with Hitler’s ideology and were not persecuted by the Nazis.

[...]

Father William J. O’Malley, S.J. wrote the following regarding the priests who were arrested and sent to Dachau because they were actively helping the underground Resistance against the German occupation of Europe:

The 156 French, 63 Dutch, and 46 Belgians were primarily interned for their work in the Underground. If that were a crime, such men as Michel Riquet, S.J., surely had little defense; he was in contact with most of the leaders of the French Resistance and was their chaplain, writing forthright editorials for the underground press, sequestering Jews, POW’s, downed Allied airmen, feeding and clothing them, providing them with counterfeit papers and spiriting them into Spain and North Africa.

[...]

On December 7, 2009, a monument to the late Cardinal Josef Beran, who died in 1969, was unveiled by Prague Archbishop Cardinal Miloslav Vik in Prague, a city in the Czech Republic. Father Josef Beran was one of the priests who was a prisoner at Dachau; he was arrested and sent to Dachau after the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, the Deputy Reich-Protector of Bohemia and Moravia, on May 27, 1942. Beran was accused of being a member of the Czech Resistance which killed Reinhard Heydrich.

[...]

Nerin E. Gun wrote in his book “The Day of the Americans” that Cardinal Faulhaber in Munich sent food packages to Dr. Johannes Neuhäusler right up to the time that the prisoners in the “Honor Bunker” were sent to the Tyrol for their own protection before the camp was liberated. Gun pointed out in his book that Hitler was Catholic and that “he paid his religious dues to the German Catholic Church until the day he died.” Hitler was never excommunicated by the Pope, according to Gun, and he never apostasized.

Update April 18, 2012:

Here is another paragraph in the article by Kathy Schiffer which contains two mistakes:

Among the Buchenwald survivors were Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel; child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim; Austrian architect and industrial designer Henry P. Glass; and Protestant theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Clergy held inside its formidable walls included Yisrael Meir Lau, former Chief Rabbi of Israel; and Paul Schneider, German pastor, who died at the camp in 1939.

 

Photo of Paul Schneider hangs in his former cell in the bunker at Buchenwald

According to Wikipedia, Pastor Schneider was executed in his cell when he was injected with poison.  He was  a prisoner in Buchenwald for two years, during which time, he continued to preach against the Nazis from the window of his cell, which finally irritated the SS to the point where they executed him.

I previously blogged about Dietrich Bonhoeffer here.  He was not a survivor of Buchenwald.  He was moved to another camp and hanged on April 9, 1945, two days before Buchenwald was liberated on April 11, 1945.  Yisrael Meir Lau was a survivor of Buchenwald, but he was only 8 years old in 1945; it was after he survived Buchenwald that he became the Chief Rabbi of Israel.  I blogged about him here.

Liberators of WWII concentration camps will join this year’s March of the Living in Poland

In a news article here, I read that

[David] Cohen is one of 16 concentration camp liberators joining Holocaust survivors and some 10,000 high school students from 35 countries on the 25th March of the Living. It’s the first time U.S. WWII vets will be going on the march from Auschwitz to Birkenau, which takes place on Holocaust Remembrance Day, April 19.

This part of the news article got my attention:

In west-central Germany, Cohen mainly found small work camps, where enslaved peoples from the Third Reich’s former conquests labored for whatever war industries the Allies hadn’t bombed to smithereens. [...]

Today, Cohen doesn’t seem capable of holding a mean thought in his head. One wonders, though, if he despised the Germans 67 years ago.

“Inwardly you do,” Cohen shrugged. “But you have to realize, everywhere you went there were dead bodies, and since we were in Germany they were mostly German. So a certain hardness comes in, it’s like part of our training.”

Cohen fought with the 69th Infantry Division which is credited by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum with liberating a sub-camp of Buchenwald.  This quote is from the USHMM website here:

During the fierce battle for Leipzig, the 69th Infantry Division uncovered Leipzig-Thekla, a subcamp of the Buchenwald concentration camp, on April 19, 1945. The camp had been established in September 1943 to supply labor for the German war effort. At its height, Leipzig-Thekla held approximately 1,400 prisoners.

On April 18, 1945, the SS guards had set fire to the barracks housing some 300 inmates and shot those who attempted to escape the flames. Upon arriving at the camp, the 69th immediately began providing for the 90 to 100 survivors. Days later, U.S. Army Signal Corps photographers arrived at the site to document this atrocity. On April 28, 1945, a U.S. Army Protestant chaplain reported that 325 male prisoners, who were too ill or weak to continue working for the German war effort, had been forced into oil-soaked barracks, which were then set aflame. Prisoners who attempted to escape the conflagration were shot by the guards or electrocuted on the electrified fences. According to the report, the swift advance of the 69th prevented the SS guards from committing a similar atrocity at a nearby camp housing some 250 women.

I can’t believe that this atrocity committed by the Germans in the last three weeks of the war is not more well-known. In the middle of a battle for the city of Leipzig, the Germans stopped to burn to death the prisoners in a labor camp.  But they didn’t manage to kill all the prisoners.  Why not?  The German SS soldiers were shooting the prisoners who tried to escape the flames, but they couldn’t manage to kill them all and there were up to 100 survivors.

I previously blogged about Thekla here.

Strangely, it was a men’s barrack that went up in flames, while the women’s barracks were not touched.  It seems to me that the evil Nazis would have targeted the women’s barracks first when they started burning prisoners alive three weeks before the war ended.  They would have made the men suffer by forcing them to listen to the screams of the women while they were being burned alive.

Cohen mentioned that the “war industries were being bombed to smithereens.”  The German “war industries” were located in the concentrations camps.  For example, the main  Buchenwald camp was bombed and prisoners were killed.  Did the Allies also bomb the Thekla sub-camp of Buchenwald and hit one of the prisoners barracks?

From the news article, I got the impression that Cohen did not remember the name of the sub-camp that his division liberated.  He just mentioned that his division liberated Buchenwald.  The burning of prisoners in a barrack at Thekla was no doubt the worst atrocity committed by the SS in World War II and a Jewish liberator of the camp doesn’t remember the name of it?  Something wrong!

Elie Wiesel was saved from the gas chamber at Buchenwald by soldiers in the 1st Infantry Division who liberated the camp

I am indebted to a reader of my blog who wrote a comment and provided a link to an article, written by Desiree Chen, in which she states that Abner S. Ganet was one of the soldiers with the 1st Infantry Division, which liberated Buchenwald on April 11, 1945.

Dead bodies found by American soldiers at Buchenwald

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum gives the credit for liberating Buchenwald to the 6th Armored Division, but what do they know.

This quote is from the article written by Desiree Chen:

But the man [Abner S. Ganet] known for his outspokenness had always been silent about one thing: his tour as an American soldier in World War II, and the day in 1945 when his 1st Infantry Division liberated the Buchenwald concentration camp. Mr. Ganet’s military service would earn him a Purple Heart and two Bronze Stars for bravery.

It wasn’t until 50 years later, in 1995, when Mr. Ganet realized he could no longer remain silent. That year, he met Nobel Peace Prize recipient, acclaimed author and death-camp survivor Elie Wiesel, who had come to Elmhurst College to speak during the College’s annual Holocaust Education Project.

“Wiesel asked if I had been in the war,” Mr. Ganet recalled in a 2004 interview for the College’s magazine, Prospect. “I said, Yes, Buchenwald.’ He said, ‘You liberated me.’”

Wiesel had been slated for the gas chamber on the day Ganet’s unit arrived and the camp’s guards fled.

The USHMM  claims that the 1st Infantry Division liberated Falkenau an der Eger, a sub-camp of Flossenbürg.  In 1995, Ganet was 70 years old.  Did his memory fail him or is the USHMM wrong about which division liberated Buchenwald?

Elie Wiesel was first sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau in May 1944, but the Nazis were not gassing people on the night that he arrived. (They were burning prisoners alive in two separate ditches — the babies in one and the adults in another.) Elie was marched out of Birkenau in January 1945 and put on a train to Buchenwald.

In an interview with Time magazine on March 18, 1945, Elie Wiesel said this:

“In Buchenwald they sent 10,000 to their deaths every day. I was always in the last hundred near the gate. They stopped. Why?”

What? You don’t believe that there was a gas chamber at Buchenwald?

Sign on the Buchenwald gate "To Each his Own" in English

On the web site of the Eisenhower Memorial Commission, there is a reference to a gas chamber at Buchenwald where prisoners in the Ohrdruf “holding facility” were sent to be gassed:

“On April 4, 1945, elements of the United States Army’s 89th Infantry Division and the 4th Armored Division captured the Ohrdruf concentration camp outside the town of Gotha in south central Germany. Although the Americans didn’t know it at the time, Ohrdruf was one of several sub-camps serving the Buchenwald extermination camp, which was close to the city of Weimar several miles north of Gotha. Ohrdruf was a holding facility for over 11,000 prisoners on their way to the gas chambers and crematoria at Buchenwald. “

In fact, Buchenwald was the place where the Nazis first tested Zyklon-B on humans according to this website:

In January or February, 1940, 250 Gypsy children from Brno in the Buchenwald concentration camp were used as guinea pigs for testing the Zyklon B gas.

At the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal in 1946, the French prosecutor submitted an official report which stated:

Everything had been provided for down to the smallest detail. In 1944, at Buchenwald, they had even lengthened a railway line so that the deportees might be led directly to the gas chamber. Certain [of the gas chambers] had a floor that tipped and immediately directed the bodies into the room with the crematory oven.

Sir Hartley Shawcross, the chief British prosecutor at the Nuremberg trial, stated in his closing speech that murder had been conducted “like some mass production industry in the gas chambers and the ovens” in Buchenwald and other Nazi concentration camps.

Jean-Paul Renard, a French priest who was an inmate at Buchenwald, wrote a book about his camp experiences in which he stated:

I saw thousands and thousands of persons going into the showers. Instead of liquid, asphyxiating gases poured out over them.

In a book published in 1947, Georges Henocque, another French priest and the former chaplain of the Saint-Cyr Military Academy, wrote a detailed description of the inside of the gas chamber in Buchenwald, which he claimed that he had visited.

Would a priest lie?  Two priests wrote that there was a gas chamber at Buchenwald, so it must be true.  Thank God the 1st Infantry Division arrived in time to save Elie Wiesel from an ignominious death in the gas chamber.

You can read an analysis, by Robert E. Reis, of Elie Wiesel’s book Night on another website here.

Update, April 16, 2012:

Elie Wiesel says that he was a prisoner in the “Small Camp” at Buchenwald.  This was the quarantine section for prisoners who had newly arrived.  They had to stay in this section until it was known that they had no diseases that might spread throughout the camp.  The Jews who were brought to Buchenwald, after the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp was abandoned, were kept in this camp for months. Elie says that he was eventually taken to the orphan barracks in the Buchenwald camp after his father died.

The “Small Camp” was separated from the main part of the camp by a barbed wire fence and a gate that was made of wood and barbed wire.  A photo of the gate is shown below.

Barbed wire fence and gate that divided the "Small Camp" from the main part of the Buchenwald camp, which is shown in the background

The “Liberation” of Buchenwald 67 years ago today

American soldiers arriving at the entrance to Buchenwald camp

I put the word “liberation” in quotes in the title of my blog post today because the Buchenwald concentration camp was not actually liberated.  Four American soldiers in the Sixth Armored Division of the US Third Army arrived at the main Buchenwald camp around 5 p.m. on April 11, 1945 AFTER the Communist prisoners, who ran the camp, had already taken over, killing some of the guards and forcing the rest of the guards to flee into the surrounding forest.  The photo above shows American soldiers arriving at Buchenwald to tour the camp a few days after the camp was taken over by the inmates.

Regarding the liberation of Buchenwald on April 11, 1945, Robert Abzug wrote the following in his book Inside the Vicious Heart:

The Americans were met by reasonably healthy looking, armed prisoners ready to help administer distribution of food, clothing, and medical care. These same prisoners, an International Committee with the Communist underground leader Hans Eiden at its head, seemed to have perfect control over their fellow inmates.

Pfc. James Hoyt was driving the M8 armored vehicle which brought Capt. Frederic Keffer, Tech. Sgt. Herbert Gottschalk and Sgt. Harry Ward to the Buchenwald camp that day.

Communist prisoners at Buchenwald had disarmed the guards and stacked the weapons outside the camp before American liberators arrived

The following quote is from a CNN news story on the occasion of the death of James Hoyt on August 14, 2008 at the age of 83:

According to military records, Keffer was the officer in command of the six-wheeled armored vehicle that day. The soldiers were part of the Army’s 6th Armored Division near the camp when about 15 SS troopers were captured. It was mid-afternoon.

“At the same time, a group of Russians just escaped from the concentration camp, burst out of the woods attempting to attack the SS men. The Russians were restrained and interrogated,” Maj. Gen. R.W. Grow, the American commander of the 6th Armored Division, wrote in a 1975 letter about the Buchenwald liberation.

Keffer was ordered to take his three comrades and two of the Russian prisoners “as guides to investigate, report and rejoin as rapidly as possible.”

“I took this side journey of about 3 km away from our main force because we kept encountering SS guards and prison inmates, and the latter told us of the large camp to the south,” Keffer wrote in a letter around the 30th anniversary of the liberation.

“We had been told by our intelligence that we might overrun a large prison camp, but we — or at least I — had no idea of either the gigantic size of the camp or of the full extent of the incredible brutality.”

Keffer and Gottschalk, who spoke German, entered the camp through a hole in an electric barbed wire fence. Hoyt and Ward initially stayed at the vehicle.

“We were tumultuously greeted by what I was told were 21,000 men, and what an incredible greeting that was,” Keffer wrote. “I was picked up by arms and legs, thrown into the air, caught, thrown again, caught, thrown, etc., until I had to stop it. I was getting dizzy.

“How the men found such a surge of strength in their emaciated condition was one of those bodily wonders in which the spirit sometimes overcomes all weaknesses of the flesh. My, but it was a great day!”

Keffer said the prisoners, through an underground system, had already taken control of the camp. The four soldiers notified division command to get medical help and food to the prisoners as soon as possible.

The 6th Armored Division newspaper “Armored Attacker” ran a headline on May 5, 1945: “Four 9th AIB Doughs Find Buchenwald.” The article described the discovery as “the worst concentration camp yet to be uncovered by west wall troops.”

Hoyt, a Bronze Star recipient and veteran of the Battle of the Bulge, was the last of the four original liberators to die.

Note that the headline in the 6th Armored Division newspaper said: Four 9th AIB Doughs (doughboys) FIND Buchenwald.  Credit for finding Buchenwald goes to the 6th Armored Division.  Credit for liberating Buchenwald goes to the Communist prisoners in the camp.

The typical American soldier in World War II was a 19-year-old youth, fresh from the farms and small towns of a country that was less than 200 years old. Most of them had never been outside their home state and the closest they had ever come to the kind of sights they were seeing in Germany was a picture in an encyclopedia. Some of the towns and villages they were marching through had been in existence for 700 years before America had even been seen by a white man. The war-time destruction of this ancient culture, which they were participating in, must have been mind-boggling. Most of these soldiers had no clear idea of why they were fighting the Germans, as General Dwight D. Eisenhower admitted.

After crossing the Rhine river, Germany’s ancient line of defense, on the night of March 22, 1945, the US Third Army, commanded by General George S. Patton, was advancing through the middle of Germany toward a pre-determined line where they would stop and wait for the Russian troops advancing from the east. In their path were four charming old towns laid out like a string of pearls in a straight line through the Horsel Valley on Highway F7: Eisenach, Gotha, Erfurt, and Weimar.

This was the heartland of German culture, the old stamping grounds of such German greats as Goethe, Schiller, Liszt, Herder, Nietzsche, Cranach, Luther, and Bach. Today these four cities draw millions of tourists who want to follow in the footsteps of the famous on “the Classics Road.” The area has long been known for its well preserved medieval villages and its gemütliche German people.

By April 1st, which was Easter Sunday, the American soldiers were approaching the first town, Eisenach, on the northwestern edge of the Thuringian Forest. Eisenach has been at the center of German culture since the Middle Ages; it is where Johann Sebastian Bach was born and the place where Martin Luther holed up in a castle to translate the Bible. A few miles down the road is the town of Erfurt, the place from which St. Boniface set out on his mission to convert the Germans to Christianity.

The Buchenwald concentration camp was located 5 miles from the town of Weimar.  It was at Weimar that Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Germany’s most famous writer, had lived from 1775 until his death in 1832. The area, where the concentration camp now stood, had been his favorite forest retreat, where he had sat under an oak tree. When a spot in the forest on the Ettersberg was cleared for the Buchenwald camp, Goethe’s oak was left standing, and when the tree was killed in an Allied bombing raid on the camp on August 24, 1944, the Nazis cut it down but carefully preserved the stump.

The stump of Goethe's oak tree inside the Buchenwald camp

The 6th Armored Division of General Patton’s US Third Army had approached Weimar from the northwest, when they discovered Buchenwald, which was on a wooded hill called the Ettersberg, 8 kilometers north of the historic town of Weimar. The prisoners had already hoisted a white flag of surrender by the time the Americans arrived. The soldiers in the Sixth Armored Division would not see the ruins of Weimar, the citadel of German culture, until the following day.

Weimar was the last residence of Friedrich von Schiller, a German writer whose patriotism and nationalism had encouraged the unification of Germany in 1871. The famous composers, Franz Liszt and Johann Sebastian Bach, had both lived for a time in Weimar, and the famous philosopher, Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, had spent his last days there. In April 1945, Germany had long been recognized as the most cultured country in the Western world, as well as the most technically advanced.  But all anyone cares about today is the Buchenwald concentration camp; you never hear about the destruction of the city of Weimar by American bombs.  There were no factories in Weimar and there was no reason to bomb the city, except to destroy German landmarks.

The devil is in the details — Carolyn Yeager’s analysis of Elie Wiesel’s book “Night”

I have given a new title to Carolyn Yeager’s newest blog post about the changes made in the latest version of Elie Wiesel’s book Night. I first read Night many years ago when I knew next to nothing about the Holocaust. I read it in the public library, all in one sitting. I recall that I was appalled by Elie’s attitude of indifferance when his father died.  It never occurred to me that this book was not a true account of survival in Buchenwald and Auschwitz. It certainly never occurred to me at that time to check the dates in the book against the known facts.

This quote is from the article on the blog Elie Wiesel Cons the World:

When I ended Part One, Eliezer and Father were still in the train car on their way to Buchenwald. You will recall that the Yiddish, the French and thus the original English version of Night specified the trip took 10 days and 10 nights from Gleiwitz (on the former German/Polish border) to Buchenwald. Since we know from standard historical sources (Danuta Czech, in her Auschwitz Chronicle) that the prisoners were evacuated from Monowitz on Jan. 18 and arrived in Gleiwitz the next day, Jan. 19; and since according to the description in Night itself, they spend three days in Gleiwitz (Jan. 20-22), this would make their day of arrival February 1, 1945. But in Night, Father’s death takes place the night of Jan. 28-29, three days before they arrived!  This is why Marion Wiesel removed the number 10 in her new translation, leaving the number of days and nights undetermined.

Ms. Yeager’s objective is to prove that Elie Wiesel lied in his famous best-selling book, which is assigned reading for every child in America. The detail that she uncovered in the above quote proves that Elie lied.

One might argue that the prisoners didn’t have calendars in the camps, so a mistake in dates is not important. However, Ms. Yeager has uncovered another detail in the dates in the original Yiddish version, that is much more important, as quoted below from her article:

A strange detail that actually belongs in Part One is on page 87 of the original Night. Eliezer remarks, after his and his Father’s deliberations and final decision to go on the march: “I learned after the war the fate of those who had stayed behind in the hospital. They were quite simply liberated by the Russians two days after the evacuation.” The evacuation, as we all know, was on the 18th. We also know the Russians did not arrive on the 20th of January! The actual liberation day is January 27. What possessed Wiesel to write this? Well, because it was in Un di velt (the original version):  “Two days after we had left Buna, the Red Army occupied the camp.  All the sick had stayed alive.”

I have always suspected that the Soviet soldiers arrived before January 27th, the official date of the liberation of Auschwitz.  The official story is that the Germans left Auschwitz on January 18th, then came back twice (on January 20th and January 26th) to blow up the gas chambers in order to destroy the evidence.  To me that seems to be very un-German.  I don’t think the Germans neglected to blow up the evidence of the Holocaust, and then came back to the camp twice while Soviet soldiers were in the area.

According to the testimony of Robert Jan van Pelt in the David Irving libel case, the Germans neglected to fill in the holes that were used for pouring in the gas before they left, so they came back to fill in the holes and then blow up the gas chambers.  If you know anything about the character of the German people, you know that the Germans always plan, plan, plan.  They leave nothing to chance.  Certainly, the SS men would not have left the destruction of evidence to the last minute and then run off before it was done, thus making it necessary to come back twice.

Why are the dates of the liberation of the camp important?  The original Yiddish book, on which Night is based, mentions that the Soviets arrived on January 20th, the day that two of the gas chambers were blown up.  I think that this date is correct and that it was the Soviets who blew up the evidence so that they could then claim at the Nuremberg IMT that 4 million people had been killed at Auschwitz-Birkenau.  The Soviets also confiscated the death records and the train records.  With no records and no evidence to the contrary, no one could dispute the Soviet testimony at the Nuremberg IMT that 4 million people had been killed in this one extermination camp alone.

According to the Auschwitz Museum, after the fall of Communism in 1989, the Soviet Union turned over to the International Committee of the Red Cross 46 volumes of Death Books (Sterbebücher) which they had confiscated from the Auschwitz camp. (It was at the request of the famous Holocaust denier Ernst Zündel that the records were released.) These records, which had been kept by the political department (Gestapo) at Auschwitz, show that there were around 69,000 registered prisoners who died between July 29, 1941 and December 31, 1943. The Death books from June 14, 1940 to July 28, 1941 are missing, as are the death books from all of 1944 and January 1945. Based on these records, the International Red Cross has estimated that a total of around 135,000 registered prisoners died in the three Auschwitz camps. These figures are for Jews and non-Jews.  (Don’t repeat any of this in Germany, where it is against the law to quote the Red Cross records or to say that the Soviets arrived on January 20, 1945.)

Obama grovels before the Jews at AIPAC conference, but it wasn’t enough

This morning, I listened to President’s Obama’s speech at the annual AIPAC conference.  He started off by mentioning that Dan Shapiro, our ambassador to Israel, is learning Hebrew, and lauding Shimon Peres, who was born in a shetetl in Poland.  Then he rattled off a list of things that “destroy freedom” including gas chambers.  Obama said “we share human values with Israel.”  He got a round of applause after he said that “our support for Israel is bi-partisan and that is the way it should stay.”

Then he spent about half of his speech defending his record of support for Israel.  He specifically said “I have kept my commitment to Israel.”  and “Israel’s security is sacrosanct.”  And finally, his best line:  “There should be no doubt that I have Israel’s back.”

Towards the end of his speech, Obama mentioned his “great uncle who liberated Buchenwald.”  That is not quite correct:  On my scrapbookpages website, I wrote here about Obama’s great uncle, Charles T. Payne, who was a member of Company K, 355th Infantry Regiment, 89th Infantry Division.  He was taken to see Ohrdruf, a sub-camp of Buchenwald, on June 6, 1945, two days after the first American soldiers arrived at the abandoned camp, so technically he cannot claim the honor of being a “liberator” of Ohrdruf, and certainly not a liberator of Buchenwald.  As anyone, who knows anything about the Holocaust knows, Buchenwald was “liberated” by the prisoners themselves at 3 p.m. on April 11, 1945, a couple of hours before any American soldiers arrived.   But I digress.

Shortly after Obama finished his speech, Naftali Bennet was interviewed on Fox News.  Bennet was not happy with Obama’s speech.  He wants Obama to take “decisive action” against Iran.  He wants “immediate paralyzing sanctions against Iran, not in June — now!”  Bennet pointed out that Israel bombed the nuclear facility in Syria several years ago and it has not been re-built.  Bennet wants a “plausible threat to Iran.”  He wants “sanctions on Iran’s Central Bank now!”

Obama said, in his speech: “I firmly believe in the opportunity for diplomacy.”  What the Jews want is military action against Iran, not diplomacy, as Naftali Bennet pointed out. This speech could cost Obama his re-election.  All of the Republican candidates for the nomination are “sabre rattling” except for Ron Paul, who has no chance of being the Republican candidate.

Buchenwald war criminal Max Schobert is back in the news …. his name is in the UN archives which researchers want opened

Today I read in the news here that leading British and American researchers are pushing to open the United Nations archive which holds documents from 10,000 cases against accused World War II criminals.  Half way through the article I read this quote:

Duplicates of commission documents obtained by AP from the National Archives in Maryland include staff lists for the Nazi concentration camps at Auschwitz-Birkenau and Buchenwald with the names, ranks and accusations against them.

Buchenwald camp leader Max Schobert, described as taking part in all mass and individual executions, was quoted as giving orders to bring him at least 600 Jewish death reports every day, and to take all university graduates and rabbis to the camp gate and bury them alive. He was found guilty of war crimes in 1947 and was hanged the following year.

I rushed to my hoard of books, gathering dust on the shelves in my home, and looked for the book entitled Justice at Dachau, written by Joshua M. Greene.  I found Schobert’s name in the index; he is mentioned on page 249 as one of several SS men whose job it was to escort prisoners to the execution room in a stable at Buchenwald.  Strangely, Greene did not mention anything about Schobert burying university graduates and rabbis alive at the Buchenwald camp gate.

American liberators enter the gate at Buchenwald April 1945

On which side of the Buchenwald gate did Max Schobert bury the university graduates and rabbis alive?  When I visited Buchenwald, I did not see any monument or memorial at the spot where the rabbis were buried?  What were their names?  Maybe Elie Wiesel, the most famous prisoner at Buchenwald, would know.  Did anyone ever think to ask him?

My photo of the Buchenwald gate, taken from the inside of the camp, October 1999

If I had known that there were rabbis buried alive at the Buchenwald, I would not have walked over this sacred ground when I visited Buchenwald.  The ground near the gate is covered with gravel.  Surely Schobert could have found an easier spot to dig holes to bury people alive!