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 he 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.

The Bullenhuser Damm School in Hamburg where the Nazis hung children, until dead, from hooks in the basement

Bullenhuser Damm school in Hamburg where Jewish children were murdered

I vaguely recall reading, years ago, the story of the Jewish children who were killed by being hung from hooks in the basement of the Bullenhuser Damm school in Hamburg. The purpose of killing these children was to prevent them from giving testimony about the medical experiments that Nazi doctors were doing at the school.

One would think that the cruel Nazis would take pity on innocent children, and just give them an injection of poison to kill them… but No!  The depraved Nazis dragged the Jewish children, kicking and screaming, to the basement, where they hung them from hooks until they were dead.

Unfortunately, there is no photo, that I know of, which shows the hooks in the basement of the school.  The photo below shows the hooks in the basement of the Buchenwald crematorium, where prisoners were hung by the neck until dead…but that’s another story.

Hooks on the wall of the basement in the Buchenwald crematorium

I was reminded of the Bullenhuser Damm story today when I read about two young Jewish girls who survived the Holocaust because they had the good sense to refuse when Dr. Josef Mengele tried to entice them into going on a transport to the school in Hamburg.

When Dr. Josef Mengele came to the children’s barracks at the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp, and flashed his gapped-tooth grin, asking “Who wants to see their mother?”— Andra and Tatiana, two young girls from Italy, did not step forward.  They knew that this was a ruse.

Dr. Mengele was NOT your typical German, six foot four, blond and blue-eyed, sondern short, dark-haired, and brown-eyed.  But what he lacked in looks, he more than made up for with his charm.  Every Holocaust survivor has described Dr. Mengele as charming and polite, but Andra and Tatiana were not fooled by his charm.  They refused his invitation to go to the women’s barracks to see their mother, and Dr. Mengele was powerless to force them to go.

You can read the story of Andra and Tatiana Bucci in full here.  This quote is from the article about them in the online Washington Post:

Andra and Tatiana Bucci did not cry at Auschwitz.

Or if they did, they have forgotten. They do not recall suffering from hunger, although surely they did, or missing their mother, who arrived with them at the concentration camp and then one day disappeared. They do remember what she looked like the last time they saw her at Auschwitz. Bald and emaciated, she frightened them. Andra and Tatiana were only 4 and 6 years old.

[...]

…. The Nazis arrested everyone in the house — including Nonna Rosa, Mira, Andra and Tatiana, their 6-year-old cousin Sergio and his mother, Mira’s sister Gisella. [...]

At the Judenrampe [at Auschwitz], the “Jewish platform” where deportees were unloaded before Nazis built the now-iconic train tracks directly into the camp, Andra looked at the frozen ground as she recalled the scene in 1944 — the soldiers barking in a language she didn’t understand and herding the masses like animals. Mira and her daughters, Gisella and Sergio were ordered in one direction, Nonna Rosa in the other. Like many elderly deportees, she immediately perished.

By surviving that first selection, Andra and Tatiana had already exceeded their life expectancy at Auschwitz. “The fact that these children survived at all is extraordinary luck,” said Patricia Heberer, a historian at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and the author of “Children During the Holocaust.”

Andra and Tatiana believe they were spared because they were mistaken for twins, who were prized by the notorious Nazi doctor Josef Mengele for medical experiments. Among the copious records kept by the Germans at Auschwitz, there is a list of twins, Tatiana and Andra have been told, on which their names appear. They do not know why their cousin Sergio went with them, and not to the gas chamber.

[...]

Mira went to the women’s quarters and to work. The girls, along with Sergio, went to the children’s barracks. [...]

Andra and Tatiana have forgotten the faces of most other children in their barracks. But they remember the face of their cousin Sergio, whose story they told through tears.

One day, the girls received a visit from the blokova, a female prisoner who oversaw the children’s barracks. She favored them and had occasionally brought them extra food, once even some extra clothing. Years later, Tatiana broke down when she realized that her sweater had undoubtedly come from a murdered child.

The sisters remember that the blokova gave them a warning. A man would come to the children’s barracks and announce that whoever wanted to see his or her mother should come forward. The woman insisted: The girls must not move.

It came to pass one day exactly as the blokova had said. Andra and Tatiana, in the second great act of obedience that saved them, stood still.

“Inside, they were grown-ups, not little ones,” said Pezzetti, the Italian scholar. They knew, he said, that they could not delude themselves into thinking that their mother was waiting for them.

The girls had passed the blokova’s warning on to Sergio. But Sergio, an only child, could not resist. He went away [to Bullenhuser Damm school] with a group of 10 girls and 10 boys. Andra and Tatiana never saw him again.

Decades later, they learned that Sergio and the other children had been taken to Germany, where they were infected with tuberculosis for a Nazi medical experiment. In an effort to conceal the brutalization of 20 human guinea pigs, Nazis hanged the children in the basement of a school in Hamburg less than a month before the war ended.

[..]

…. Mira — unbeknownst to her daughters — had not died at Auschwitz. She had been transferred to another camp, survived, returned to Italy and was reunited with the girls’ father, who had been a prisoner of war in Africa. Gisella, too, had survived.

In case you don’t believe the story of the children being hung from hooks in the basement of the Bullenhuser Damm school, you can read about it on Wikipedia.  The following quote is from Wikipedia:

In October 1944,[2] a subcamp of the Neuengamme concentration camp was established in the school to house prisoners used in clearing the rubble after air raids. The Bullenhauser Damm School was evacuated on April 11, 1945. [...]

On the night of April 20, 1945, 20 Jewish children who had been used in medical experiments at Neuengamme, their four adult Jewish caretakers and six Red Army prisoners of war (POWs) were killed in the basement of the school.[3] Later that evening, 24 Soviet POWs who had also been used in the experiments were brought to the school to be murdered. The names, ages and countries of origin were recorded by Hans Meyer, one of the thousands of Scandinavian prisoners released to the custody of Sweden in the closing months of the war. Neuengamme was used as a transit camp for these prisoners.[4]

[...]

The medical experiments on tuberculosis infection were initially carried out on prisoners from the Soviet Union and other countries at the Neuengamme concentration camp. The experiments were then extended to Jews. For this he chose to use Jewish children. Twenty Jewish children (10 boys and 10 girls) from Auschwitz concentration camp were chosen by Josef Mengele and sent to Neuengamme. Mengele allegedly asked the children, “Who wants to go and see their mother?”

The children were accompanied to Neuengamme by four women prisoners. Two were Polish nurses and one was a Hungarian pharmacist, and they were killed upon arrival at Neuengamme. The fourth woman, Polish-born Jew Paula Trocki, was a doctor. She survived the war and later gave testimony in Jerusalem ….

[...]

The SS evacuated the building around April 11, 1945 leaving a skeleton crew of two SS guards: Ewald Jauch and Johann Frahm and a janitor. They were accompanied by three SS guards (Wilhelm Dreimann, Adolf Speck, and Heinrich Wiehagen), as well as the driver, Hans Friedrich Petersen, and SS physician, Alfred Trzebinski. The children as well as others were told they were being taken to Theresienstadt. Upon arriving at the school they were led into the basement. According to one of the SS men present, the children “sat down on the benches all around and were cheerful and happy that they had been for once allowed out of Neuengamme. The children were completely unsuspecting.”

They were then made to undress and were then injected with morphine by Trzebinski. They were then led into an adjacent room and hanged from hooks set into the wall. The execution was overseen by SS Obersturmführer Arnold Strippel. The first child to be hanged was so light that the noose would not tighten. Frahm grabbed him in a bearhug and used his own weight to pull down and tighten the noose. The adults were hanged from overhead pipes; they were made to stand on a box, which was pulled away from under them. That same night, about 30 additional Soviet prisoners were also brought by lorry to the school to be executed; six escaped, three were shot trying to do so, and the rest were hanged in the basement.[7]

Note that the Nazis gave the children morphine before hanging them from hooks in the basement of the school.  The children could have been given a merciful death by giving them a little more morphine, but No!  The hateful Nazis had to hang the children from hooks, even going so far as to grab a child in a bearhug and pull the child down so that the noose would tighten.  This is why the German people will be forever hated.

Left to right: Richard Baer, Dr. Josef Mengele and Rudolf Hoess

Andra and Tatiana were initially spared when they were not selected for the gas chamber upon arrival at Auschwtiz-Birkenau because Dr. Mengele thought that these two children, aged 6 and 4, were twins.  Dr. Mengele is famous for not being able to tell a child’s age; hundreds of Jews survived the Holocaust because they lied about their age and said that they were older than 15, the age at which children were selected for the gas chamber.  Obviously, Dr. Mengele was able to judge that Andra and Tatiana were younger than 15, but he thought that they were twins.

Keep in mind that there is a document in the files of Auschwitz which lists them as twins. Strangely, Andra and Tatiana were not used by Dr. Mengele in his experiments on twins, or if they were, they didn’t mention it for some reason.

With Dr. Mengele in charge of selections at Auschwitz-Birkeanau, it is a miracle that the Nazis managed to kill anyone.

April 11, 2013 — the 68th anniversary of the liberation of Buchenwald

Elie Wiesel, a survivor of Buchenwald, famously said: “Some things never happened, but are true.”  The most famous events that never happened at the Nazi concentration camps, but are true, took place at Buchenwald.

The photo below shows some of the things that never happened at Buchenwald, but are true: the shrunken heads, the lampshades made of human skin, an ashtray made from a human bone.

Display table put up at Buchenwald after the camp was liberated

The Buchenwald concentration camp was liberated on April 11, 1945 by four soldiers in the Sixth Armored Division of the US Third Army, commanded by General George S. Patton. Just before the Americans arrived, the camp had already been taken over by the Communist prisoners who had killed some of the guards and forced the rest to flee into the nearby woods.

Pfc. James Hoyt was driving the M8 armoured vehicle which brought Capt. Frederic Keffer, Tech. Sgt. Herbert Gottschalk and Sgt. Harry Ward to the Buchenwald camp on April 11, 1945.

American soldiers were brought to Buchenwald to see the display table

The photo above shows American soldiers, who were brought in trucks to Buchenwald on April 15, 1945 to see the displays put up by the prisoners, including the table in the photo above.  Last year, I wrote about the liberation of Buchenwald here.  You can read a poem written about the liberation of Buchenwald here.

One of the most famous events, that never happened, but are true, is the role of African-American soldiers in the liberation of Buchenwald, which you can read about here.

There were approximately 21,000 prisoners at Buchenwald on the day it was liberated. This included approximately 4,000 Jewish prisoners who were survivors of the death camps in what is now Poland, and 904 children under the age of 17, many of whom were orphans. Elie Wiesel claims that he was one of the 904 orphans, who were housed in Block 66 at Buchenwald, but many revisionists, such as Carl Mattogno, don’t believe him.

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.

The Allies used the word “extermination camp” for all the Nazi camps, assuming that the purpose of these camps was the mass murder of the Jews. Buchenwald was a Class II camp, intended for the imprisonment of condemned criminals and captured anti-Fascist resistance fighters who were considered to be beyond “rehabilitation.”

Three days after the Americans liberated Buchenwald, the 120th Evacuation Hospital arrived in Weimar with a staff of 273 service personnel to take care of the 3,000 sick prisoners; a hospital was set up in the barracks of the SS soldiers who had been stationed at Buchenwald. The staff stayed in a beautiful castle on the Ettersberg, which had formerly been the summer home of German royalty. A path through the woods connected the castle to the concentration camp.

One of the soldiers in the Evacuation Hospital unit was Tech. Sgt. Warren E. Priest from Haverhill, MA. In October 2007, Warren Priest told his story to Mike Pride, the editor of the Concord Monitor.

The following quote from Warren Priest was included in an article published by the Concord Monitor on October 25, 2007:

We left this lovely summer home and walked up a pathway through the woods. It was spring, and the leaves were just emerging. We saw all the loveliness and color of the season.

We smelled Buchenwald long before we saw it. That whole area was overwhelmingly and intrusively affected by the odor of death in the camp. You couldn’t escape it.

Reaching near the top, I suddenly encountered human forms. We had been trained not to fraternize, so I didn’t say anything. I held my carbine. They moved to the side of the pathway and got down on their knees and put their hands together prayerfully and looked up and smiled. It was one of those moments when expression was all nonverbal.

Buchenwald was a work camp, not a death camp, although plenty had been killed there. Close by was a Karl Zeiss factory, where prisoners worked. They specialized in the assembly of optical instruments – binoculars and cameras. We got quite a few of the things we needed from a supply train that the American troops had captured. We stole, if you will, things from the factory. I had two or three pairs of binoculars and a 35-millimeter camera.

Sgt. Warren E. Priest wrote the following, in a letter to his mother, after seeing Buchenwald:

I saw what and why we were fighting. Never never permit yourself to feel any trace of pity whatsoever for the German people, Mum. They’ve jeopardized their right to call themselves standing members of our world of civilization. They are certainly no better than the Japs, and in some respects worse.

The photos below show what Sgt. Priest saw at Buchenwald, that caused him to feel no “trace of pity whatsoever for the German people.”

Bodies found outside the crematorium when Dachau was liberated

Dead bodies outside the Buchenwald crematorium

Pile of ashes found outside the Buchenwald crematorium

On April 15, 1945, German civilians were brought to Buchenwald to see the evidence of the Nazi atrocities.  General George S. Patton, who was there that day, wrote in his autobiography that the number of Weimar citizens brought to the camp was 1,500, although other accounts say it was 2,000. The German civilians had to march five miles up a steep hill, escorted by armed American soldiers. It took two days for the Weimar residents to file through the camp. No precautions were taken to protect them from the typhus epidemic in the camp.

General Patton had previously visited the Ohrdruf sub-camp of Buchenwald on April 12, 1945 along with General Omar Bradley and General Dwight D. Eisenhower.

On April 15, 1945, the day that he visited Buchenwald, General George S. Patton had written the following in a letter to General Dwight D. Eisenhower:

We have found at a place four miles north of WEIMAR a similar camp, only much worse. The normal population was 25,000, and they died at the rate of about a hundred a day. The burning arrangements, according to General Gay and Colonel Codman who visited it yesterday, were far superior to those they had at OHRDRUF. I told the press to go up there and see it, and then write as much about it as they could. I also called General Bradley last night and suggested that you send selected individuals from the upper strata of the press to look at it, so that you can build another page of the necessary evidence as to the brutality of the Germans.

The photo below shows German civilians walking past the pile of bodies in front of the Buchenwald crematorium.

German civilians were marched to Buchenwald at gunpoint to view the bodies piled up at the crematorium

This YouTube video explains how some things never happened at Buchenwald, but are true.

Holocaust Remembrance Day starts Sunday evening, April 7, 2013

While searching for some news about Holocaust Remembrance Day, which begins tonight, I came across a website which shows the photo below.  Under the photo are the words of General Eisenhower:  “Get it all on record now — get the films — get the witnesses — because somewhere down the road of history some bastard will get up and say that this never happened.”

I had never realized, until now, that it was Eisenhower who coined the phrase “[the Holocaust] NEVER HAPPENED.”

Photo of General Eisenhower at the Ohrdruf camp, April 12, 1945

Holocaust and Heroism Remembrance Day, or Yom HaShoah, will be observed this year starting Sunday evening, April 7th, the 27th of Nissan, and going through Monday night. In America, a ceremony will take place at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in the Hall of Remembrance; you can see photos of the Hall and read about it on my website here.

The world-wide, annual observance of Holocaust Remembrance Day is a celebration of the heroism of the Jews during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943.

So why would anyone use a photo of General Dwight D. Eisenhower viewing dead bodies at the Ordruf sub-camp of Buchenwald on April 12, 1945, the same day that President Franklin D. Roosevelt died? Wouldn’t a photo, taken during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, be more appropriate?

What does the discovery of the Ohrdruf labor camp by American soldiers on April 4, 1945 have to do with the Holocaust?

The prisoners at Ohrdruf were not necessarily Jewish. The dead prisoners in the photo could have been political prisoners, who had been sent to Ohrdruf from the Buchenwald camp, which was the main camp for French Resistance Fighters.  The prisoners in the photo had most likely been killed by their fellow prisoners; the first American soldiers on the scene on April 4th had observed that the blood was still wet, although the SS men had left on April 2nd, along with most of the prisoners.

The dead men in the photo were probably Kapos, [Captains] who had helped the Nazis run the Ohrdruf camp.  However, the story that Eisenhower was told on his visit is that these were sick prisoners, who had been killed by the Nazis on April 2nd because there was no room on the trucks that were evacuating the prisoners who couldn’t walk.

A still shot from a film taken by the Americans during Eisenhower’s visit

The photo above shows Eisenhower viewing the bodies that had been left out for a week.  The man in the center, wearing civilian clothes was a Kapo, who was killed the next day by the other survivors of Ohrdruf.

Unfortunately, the photo that was chosen by the The Other News website to commemorate Yom HaShoa is the absolute worst photo that they could have used.  The killing of prisoners at Ohrdruf, by other prisoners, has nothing to do with the Holocaust, which is the term for the genocide of the Jews.

In America, Holocaust Remembrance Day will be celebrated at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.  The photo below shows a picture that hangs in the Museum.  A copy of the Confession of Rudolf Hoess, the Commandant of Auschwitz, is shown, along with a photo of Hungarian Jews walking to the gas chamber, carrying their bundles.

Photo that hangs in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

Photo taken at Ohrdruf which hangs in the USHMM

A photo, taken on April 13, 1945 after the liberation of Ohrdruf, is shown above.  This photo is the first thing you see when you step off the elevator at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.  Many people, including Professor Harold Marcuse, have claimed that prisoners were burned alive at Ohrdruf, which is why this photo is shown in America’s Holocaust Museum.

A photo of the 15th Street entrance into the United States Holocaust Museum is shown below.  On the right hand side, you can see the Hall of Remembrance, which has 6 sides, to represent the 6 million Jews killed in the Holocaust.

Eisenhower Plaza in front of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

When I visited the USHMM in the year 2000, four sides of the hexagon, which forms the Hall of Remembrance, had a quotation engraved on the outside wall. These quotations were from the speeches of four recent American presidents: Jimmy Carter (who was president when the museum was first conceived), Dwight D. Eisenhower, George Bush, Sr., and Ronald Reagan.  Eisenhower’s prophetic quote is in the most prominent spot, and it is also the most famous: “The things I saw beggar description…the visual evidence and the verbal testimony of starvation, cruelty and bestiality were so overpowering. I made the visit deliberately, in order to be in a position to give first hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations to propaganda. Ohrdruf April 15, 1945.”

The photo above shows the facade of the Holocaust Museum building, which faces a square, named Eisenhower Plaza. The building has several features which suggest places associated with the Holocaust. Sticking up on the left side of the building is what looks like the tower on top of the red brick gatehouse building at Birkenau, the infamous death camp where the Jews were gassed.

To the right of the tower, as shown in the photo below, is a glass enclosed walkway which looks somewhat like the open wooden walkways which were put over some of the streets of the Warsaw and Lodz ghettos in Poland so that non-Jews could pass through the ghetto on the streetcar, or walk on the street below, without having to come in contact with the Jews. There are two more glass walkways on the west side of the building on the third and second floors.

A two-part sculpture in front of the 15th St. entrance into the USHMM

A two-part modern sculpture entitled “Loss and Regeneration,” designed by Jewish artist Joel Shapiro, who was born in America in 1941, stands in the courtyard on the 15th Street side of the building. One section of the sculpture is near the sidewalk, and the other part near the door to the museum, as shown in the photo above.

The abstract black figures symbolize the destruction of European Jewry and the regeneration of the Jews; the first section is a house which has been tipped over and is now balanced precariously on the tip of one end of the peaked roof, symbolizing the loss of Jewish homes when the Nazis destroyed the shtetls, as the Jewish villages in Poland were called.

The second part of the “Loss and Regneration” sculpture is shown in the photo below.

Part of the “Loss and Regeneration” sculpture is in front of the Holocaust Museum

I don’t want to read anything in the comments about the United States Holocaust Museum being in the “shadow of the Washington monument.”  The photo of the Washington Monument below very clearly shows that its shadow does not fall on the Museum.

The USHMM is close to the Washington Monument

In the foreground of the photo above, you can see part of the “Loss and Regeneration” sculpture on Eisenhower Plaza in front of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.  The red brick building on the right is not part of the Museum.

So exactly where is the USHMM located?  In the shadow of the Washington Monument, or not?

The Capitol Mall in Washington, DC is a long narrow park, which extends two and a half miles from the Capitol building to the Lincoln Memorial at the west end. Lined up along both sides of the Mall are our national museums of American history, art and science. The midway point of the Mall is marked by the Washington monument, which stands like a beacon in a field surrounded by American flags. The street that crosses the Mall in front of the Washington Monument is 15th street, which runs north and south, and goes past the east side of the iron fence surrounding the White House grounds. The US Holocaust Memorial Museum is about a mile from the Capitol and half a mile from the White House. It was built on Federal land with funds donated by private citizens.

At the Washington monument, 15th street suddenly changes to Raoul Wallenberg Place. This section of 15th street was renamed in 1985 in honor of the diplomat who helped thousands of Hungarian Jews escape deportation to the death camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau in what is now Poland, by providing them with papers that said they intended to emigrate to Sweden after the war. Among the survivors saved by Wallenberg was Senator Tom Lantos, who emigrated to America after the liberation of Europe from the Fascists.

On the corner of Raoul Wallenberg Place and Independence Avenue (the street which forms the southern border of the park-like Mall) stands an old traditional style red brick building, now called the Ross Center, which houses the administrative offices of the museum and the museum cafe.  This is the red brick building shown in the photo above.

The Ross center is named after Eric F. Ross whose parents, Albert and Regina Rosenberg, died in Auschwitz in 1942. The back of the Ross Center building is on Independence Avenue while the entrance faces a brick-paved courtyard in front of the 15th street entrance to the USHMM, which is set back from the street. From the courtyard, there is a perfect view of the Washington Monument, as seen in the photograph above.

New documentary film shows 16 photographs from the Ohrdruf camp, liberated by American soldiers on April 4, 1945

It’s April, the 68th anniversary of the American liberation of these infamous concentration camps in Germany: Ordruf, Buchenwald and Dachau. (Mauthausen was liberated by American soldiers in May 1945.) The first camp to be liberated by American troops, on April 4, 1945, was Ohrdruf, a sub-camp of Buchenwald.

A new documentary film, entitled 16 photograhs at Ohrdruf has just been released.  The documentary has its own website, which you can see here.

On April 4, 1945, American soldiers of the 4th Armored Division of General Patton’s US Third Army were moving through the area south of the city of Gotha in search of a secret Nazi communications center when they unexpectedly came across the ghastly scene of the abandoned Ohrdruf forced labor camp.

A few soldiers in the 354th Infantry Regiment of the 89th Infantry Division of the US Third Army reached the abandoned camp that same day, after being alerted by prisoners who had escaped from the march out of the camp, which had started on April 2nd. Ohrdruf, also known as Ohrdruf-Nord, was the first Nazi prison camp to be discovered while it still had inmates living inside of it, although 9,000 prisoners had already been evacuated from Ohrdruf on April 2nd and marched 32 miles to the main camp at Buchenwald. According to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, the camp had a population of 11,700 prisoners in late March, 1945 before the evacuation began.

I have not seen the documentary, so I don’t know what the 16 photographs show, but I am guessing that the scenes, shown in the photos below, are included.

Corpses of prisoners found in a shed at Ohrdruf

General Eisenhower views the railroad tracks where bodies were burned at Ohrdruf

Mass grave at Ohrdruf was opened and the bodies were burned

Dead bodies found at Ohrdurf on the roll call square

In the photo above, the prisoners have been partially covered by blankets because their pants had been pulled down, an indication that these men might have been killed by their fellow prisoners after the Germans left. The first Americans on the scene said that the blood was still wet.
One of the American liberators who saw the Ohrdruf camp on April 4, 1945 was Bruce Nickols. He was on a patrol as a member of the I & R platoon attached to the Headquarters company of the 354th Infantry Regiment of the 89th Infantry Division, Third US Army. According to Nickols, there were survivors in the barracks who had hidden when the SS massacred 60 to 70 prisoners on the roll call square before they left the camp on April 2nd. The body of a dead SS soldier lay at the entrance to the camp, according to Nickols.
The American soldiers were told by the Ohrdruf survivors that these prisoners had been shot by the SS on April 2nd because they had run out of trucks for transporting sick prisoners out of the camp.  Seriously?  The SS men shot the sick prisoners on the roll call square because they had run out of trucks?  Strangely, there were sick prisoners still inside the barracks when the Americans arrived.  Why weren’t they shot?

Colonel Hayden Sears poses with Ohrdruf survivors, April 8, 1945

The photo above shows some of the prisoners who escaped from the march out of the camp on April 2, 1945 and came back to the camp.  They seem to be in remarkably good condition and well-dressed.

Survivors told Eisenhower prisoners were hung with piano wire on this gallows

The well-dressed prisoner on the far left, wearing a scarf around his neck, was killed by the survivors of Ohrdruf the day after Eisenhower’s visit.  As it turns out, he was a Kapo, a prisoner who helped the SS men in running the camp.

Four American generals view the bodies which were left out for a week

Citizens of the nearby town of Ohrdruf were forced to look at the bodies

Although the civilians in the town of Ohrdruf had nothing to do with the camp, they were forced to come to the camp and view the bodies that were laid out for their benefit.

Why did the Nazis kill the prisoners in a LABOR CAMP? Wouldn’t that have defeated the purpose of the labor camp? Did the prisoners actually die in a typhus epidemic at Ohrdruf?  The American soldiers who liberated Ohrdruf had been vaccinated for typhus, and most of them had probably never heard of typhus.

Bobrek sub-camp of Auschwitz III camp, where prisoners worked as slave laborers

This morning, I read an article about Gilbert Michlin, a French Jewish prisoner, who survived the Holocaust because he was selected to be a slave laborer at the Bobrek sub-camp of Monowitz (Auschwitz III).

Main gate into the Bobrek sub-camp of Monowitz

Prisoners working in the Bobrek factory

The photo above was taken in 1944 at the Bobrek sub-camp of Monowitz. It shows prisoners working in an airplane factory called Siemens Schuckert Werke. In the background, the man wearing a civilian suit is Herr Jungdorf, a German engineer for the Siemens company.

This quote is from the article about Gilbert Michlin, which you can read in full here:

In his memoir, Gilbert [Michlin] recalled French complicity in the deportation of Jews. He lovingly portrayed his father’s yearning to immigrate to America and his rejection at Ellis Island in 1923 [America had a quota on Jewish immigrants starting in 1921]; Gilbert’s own childhood dream to be an actor; and the shock of Nazi occupation and his arrest with his mother by French police at 2 a.m. on Feb. 3, 1944, two days before his 18th birthday.

A week later, Gilbert saw his mother for the last time as she was driven away from the Auschwitz platform in a truck.

It was at the [Auschwitz] death camp that a Siemens representative recruited Gilbert and about 100 others to a work unit. His father’s insistence that Gilbert learn a mechanical trade saved his life. Gilbert was selected for armaments production. Siemens kept its Bobrek factory prisoners together, even after the SS evacuated them in the death march from Auschwitz in January 1945. They were transferred together from Buchenwald to Berlin. A few months later, the war was over.

Note that, at the Auschwitz “death camp,” 18-year-old Gilbert Michlin was recruited by a Siemens representative for a work unit in the Bobrek sub-camp of Monowitz. This is the first time that I have ever heard of a Siemens rep recruiting workers at Auschwitz.  I thought that everyone who was transported to Auschwitz was at the mercy of  Dr. Josef Mengele who was always at the ramp when the trains arrived.  Was there a Siemen’s representative standing there as well, doing some recruiting for the Siemens company?

Prisoners arriving at Auschwitz-Birkenau had to undergo selection, for work or the gas chamber

Monowitz was originally a sub-camp of the Auschwitz II (Birkenau) camp, and it was known as Bunalager (Buna Camp) until November 1943 when it became the Auschwitz III camp with its own administrative headquarters. Auschwitz III consisted of 28 sub-camps which were built between 1942 and 1944. This area of Upper Silesia was known as the “Black Triangle” because of its coal deposits. The Buna plant attracted the attention of the Allies, and there were several bombing raids on the factories.

Auschwitz III was established at the site of the chemical factories of IG Farbenindustrie near the small village of Monowitz, which was located four kilometers from the town of Auschwitz. The IG Farben company had independently selected this location around the same time that Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler decided, in April 1940, to locate a new concentration camp in the town of Auschwitz. The most important factory at Auschwitz III, aka Monowitz, was the Buna Werke, which was owned by the IG Farben company.

Of the three Nazi concentration camps located near the town of Auschwitz, the Auschwitz III camp was the most important to the Nazis because of its factories which were essential to the German war effort. The Monowitz industrial complex was built by Auschwitz inmates, beginning in April 1941. Initially, the workers walked from the Auschwitz main camp to the building site, a distance of seven kilometers.

The decision to build chemical factories at Auschwitz transformed the village of Monowitz. On February 2, 1941, Herman Göring ordered the Jews in the village to be relocated to a ghetto, and German civilians moved into their former homes.

When the factories at Monowitz were opened, the town of Auschwitz quickly went from a primitive town of 12,000 inhabitants to a modern German town of 40,000 people which included an influx of German engineers and their families. Both the main Auschwitz camp and the Birkenau camp were expanded in order to provide workers for the factories. Before Monowitz became a separate camp with barracks buildings, the prisoners had to walk from the other camps to the factories.

According to Wikipedia, the Bobrek sub-camp of Monowitz was built by Siemens predecessor Siemens-Schuckert near the Polish village of Bobrek. The prisoners who worked there were producing electrical parts for German aircraft and U-boats.  On January 18, 1945, the prisoners from the Bobrek sub-camp were evacuated on a “death march” to the concentration camp in Gleiwitz, Poland, where they were put on a train to Buchenwald, from where they were transferred to a factory in a suburb of Berlin.  The Commandant of the Bobrek camp was SS-Scharführer Hermann Buch.

Heinrich Himmler and Max Faust inspect the Monowitz camp

The photo above shows Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler, a five-star general, (2nd from the left) who was the head of the SS and the man who was responsible for all the Nazi concentration camps. The man on the far left is Max Faust. This photo was taken when Himmler came to inspect the Monowitz factories on July 17th and 18th, 1942. Himmler is the man wearing a uniform. The two men on the right are German engineers.

The German engineers lived in the town of Auschwitz, after it was cleaned up to meet German standards of living. Slave labor was used to make improvements to the town, after Himmler volunteered the services of the concentration camp inmates.

The Jews who were sent to Auschwitz, and then assigned to work at Monowitz, had a much better chance of survival because the factory workers were considered too valuable to send to the gas chambers, at least while they were still able to work.
The figures below are from the Nazi records which were turned over to the Red Cross by the Soviet Union after the fall of Communism. They were published in a book written by Danuta Czech.

Male prisoners in Auschwitz III Monowitz (Buna-Werke) 10,223
Golleschau 1,008
Jawischowitz (Jawiszowice) 1,988
Eintrachthutte (Swietochlowice) 1,297
Neu-Dachs (Jaworzno) 3,664
Blechhammer (Blachownia) 3,958
Furstengrube (Wesola) 1,283
Gute Hoffnung (Janinagrube, Libiaz) 853
Guntergrube (Ledziny) 586
Brunn (Brno) 36
Gleiwitz I 1,336
Gleiwitz II 740
Gleiwitz III 609
Gleiwitz IV 444
Laurahutte (Siemianowice) 937
Sosnowitz 863
Bobrek 213
Trzebinia 641
Althammer (Stara Kuznia) 486
Tschechowitz-Dzieditz 561
Charlottengrube (Rydultowy) 833
Hindenburg (Zabrze) 70
Bismarckhutte (Hajduki) 192
Hubertushutte (Lagiewniki) 202
Subtotal 33,023

Female prisoners in Auschwitz III

Subtotal 2,095

Total for Auschwitz III: 35,118

Note that there were 213 survivors of the Bobrek sub-camp.

New article by Carolyn Yeager accuses Professor Ken Waltzer of being a “fraud”

I just got a pingback from wordpress because another blogger quoted a comment on my blog in a new post that went up this morning on the blog entitled Elie Wiesel Cons the World.

This quote is from the article, written by Carolyn Yeager, that you can read in full here:

I [Carolyn Yeager] wrote back to him [Ken Waltzer] asking where I could find it [his essay] because I wanted to read it. No reply – which is typical because factual information is not his forte, emotional rhetoric is. What might be in his essay on Elie Wiesel and Buchenwald? Will it be the same as he wrote in a March 6, 2010 comment at Scrapbookpages Blog, when he said:

[Begin Quote]
For the skeptics [I was using the name skeptic then -cy] and know-nothings who have written in suggesting Eli Wiesel was not in the camps, that Night is purely fiction, you are all dead wrong. The Red Cross International Tracing Service Archives documents for Lazar Wiesel and his father prove beyond any doubt that Lazar and his father arrived from Buna to Buchenwald January 26, 1945, that his father soon died a few days later, and that Lazar Wiesel was then moved to block 66, the children’s block in the little camp in Buchenwald. THese documents are backed up by military interviews with others from Sighet who were also in block 66, and by the list of Buchenwald boys sent thereafter to France. All of this is public domain.

Wishful thinking by Holocaust deniers will not make their fantasies true. While Wiesel took liberties in writing Night as a literary masterpiece, Night is rooted in the foundation of Wiesel’s experience in the camps. The Buchenwald experience, particularly, runs closely to what is related in Night.

Comment by kenwaltzer — November 14, 2010 @ 6:57 am
[End quote]

I usually don’t allow name calling in the comments on my blog, but I let “know-nothings” pass because Know Nothings refers to a political party from the dim past.

Ms. Yeager wrote in her latest blog post that the web page, in which Ken Waltzer identified Elie Wiesel in a photo of the boys of Buchenwald marching out of the camp, has been taken down and replaced by another page.   I previously blogged about the web page that was taken down; you can read my blog post here.

Carolyn Yeager is absolutely fearless.  She’s not afraid of Ken Waltzer, as he is finding out.  I would love to know what is going on behind the scenes, among the True Believers, in view of this latest accusation of fraud.

time is running out for Elie Wiesel, famous (alleged) survivor of Auschwitz and Buchenwald

I previously blogged about Elie Wiesel and his lack of an Auschwitz tattoo here.  I wrote about Elie Wiesel’s alleged stay at the Buchenwald camp here. Elie Wiesel has no Auschwitz identification number and no Buchenwald identification number, but he still maintains that he was a prisoner in both of those camps.  Wiesel doesn’t seem to care that there is a website devoted to telling the world that he has no tattoo.  I was blogging about Elie Wiesel and his famous book way back in 2010 here.

This website gives some information about the case, which I am quoting:

…. we wanted to check the most overwhelming fact [the lack of a tattoo], by contacting Auschwitz first by mail, then by phone. The head of Archive of the Auschwitz Museum, M. Plosa, confirmed that the number A-7713, which Elie Wiesel claims without ever displaying it publicly, was attributed to Lazar Wisel, born 15 years before him, and who therefore cannot get mixed up with him.

I am taking the liberty of quoting from the letter that was sent to the French investigator, whom I quoted above:

Thank you very much for your message of 4th December 2012.  I would like to inform you that basing on archival documents from our collection it is possible to settle as follows:

The prisoner number A-7713 was given on 24th May 1944 for Mr. Lazsr WISEL, born on 4th September 1913 in Marmaroasieget (Hungary). After the liquidation and evacuation of the Auschwitz camp Mr. Lazar Wisel was transferred to KL Buchenwald. His arrived to this camp is dated on 26th January 1945 [...]

Yours faithfully
Wojciech Plosa
Head of Archive
The state Museum Auschwitz Birkenau in  Oswiecim

So even the Auschwitz Museum will not confirm that Elie Wiesel was a prisoner at Auschwitz nor that Elie was given the tattoo number A-7713 which he swore under oath that he has.  It is time for Elie Wiesel to publicly admit that he is an imposter.

I previously blogged about Elie Wiesel and the world’s belief about Auschwitz here.

The young boys who were saved by the prisoners at Buchenwald

Just when I thought I was all blogged out, they pull me back in.  Today, I received an e-mail from a reader of my blog who alerted me to yet another book about the young boys, who were saved from certain death by the Communist Resistance Fighters at Buchenwald.  The book is entitled The Buchenwald Child: Truth, Fiction and Propaganda; it was written by William John Niven and published in 2009.  You can read parts of it on Amazon.com here.

Curiously, the book by William John Niven mentions that 905 boys were saved by the prisoners at Buchenwald.  Other books use the number 904.  Apparently, Niven added one more boy to the number of boys who were saved because other books do not include Stefan Zweig among the saved boys.

Ken Waltzer has been working on a book about the boys of Buchenwald since 2007; you can read about his book here.

Here is the description of Niven’s book, given by Amazon.com:

At the notorious Buchenwald concentration camp, communist prisoners organized resistance against the SS and even planned an uprising. They helped rescue a three-year-old Jewish boy, Stefan Jerzy Zweig, from certain death in the gas chambers. After the war, his story became a focus for the German Democratic Republic’s celebration of its resistance to the Nazis. Now Bill Niven tells the true story of Stefan Zweig: what actually happened to him in Buchenwald, how he was protected, and at what price. He explores the (mis)representation of Zweig’s rescue in East Germany and what this reveals about that country’s understanding of its Nazi past. Finally he looks at the telling of the Zweig rescue story since German unification: a story told in the GDR to praise communists has become a story used to condemn them. Bill Niven is Professor of Contemporary German History at the Nottingham Trent University, UK.

Gas chambers (plural) at Buchenwald?  Yes, of course; every Nazi camp had gas chambers.  Where do you think the Nazis disinfected the clothing of the prisoners?  In a Gaskammer, of course. You can read about the alleged Buchenwald homicidal gas chamber on my website here.

I previously blogged about the boys at Buchenwald here and here. I also blogged about another boy at Buchenwald here.

Why is there so much interest in the young boys at Buchenwald?  The Buchenwald camp was the first camp to be liberated by American soldiers.  When the Americans arrived on April 11, 1945, they found that the camp had been taken over by the Communist prisoners.  America immediately started a propaganda campaign about the atrocities committed in Buchenwald.  Yet, there had to be some explanation in the press regarding how and why 904 young boys had not been killed. You can read about the liberation of Buchenwald on my website here.

This quote, regarding the boys at Buchenwald, is from an article which you can read in full here:

They were mostly Jewish children and youths from Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Rumania, and Lithuania, who were brought in 1944-45 to Buchenwald, some with fathers or brothers, most as orphans. Most were teenagers but one-sixth were 12 years old and under.  The two youngest boys were four years old.  Some had been in German factory labor camps in Poland until mid- or late 1944.  Some had been in Auschwitz and its satellite camps and were taken to Buchenwald to slave in its sub-camps in 1944 or were evacuated in early 1945, arriving in bad shape in open coal cars in the frigid air. [...]

The story is little known. Veteran prisoners decided to protect the youths, drawing on the influence won by the German Communists and their allies in the internal camp self-administration.  First they did what they could to keep the youths from being sent to the outer sub-camps, where slave labor was killing. Second, they clustered the youths in children’s barracks under tight discipline and control to minimize their contact with SS guards, especially blocks 8, 23, and 66.  Third, they used their influence to provide access to occasional additional food and warm clothing. They used tough discipline to keep starving youths from scavenging food freely in the camp or stealing food from one another. They distributed Red Cross packages sent to other prisoners to the children. [...]

Among the boys was little Lulek, Israel Meir Lau, 8 years old, from Piotrkow, Poland, who was protected in block 8 along with several hundred others. He later became chief rabbi of Israel and today heads Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. Among the older boys was Eliezer Wiesel, 16 years-old from Sighet, Rumania, who was in block 66 with hundreds of boys under adult mentorship. He later became a Nobel Peace Prize winner.

Using the Search Inside feature on Amazon.com, I copied the following quotes from the book by Niven:

From Page 23:

Cracow and Biezanow

Stefan [Zweig] was born in the Cracow ghetto on 28 January 1941 to Zacharias and Helena Zweig; he had an eight-year-old sister at the time of this birth. Barely a month later, in order to avoid deportation, the Zweig family took refuse in the village of Wola Duchacka.  Here Zacharias successfully applied for the right of this family to live in the Cracow ghetto, where he worked to the Jewish Community.  In 1942, the Nazis began the construction of the Plaszow concentration and labor camp; deportation this camp would certainly have meant the separation of parents from their children, and Zacharias resolved to keep his family together by staying in the ghetto.  Even when sent to do forced labor in the Biezanow concentration camp in late 1942, Zacharias was able to maintain contact with Helena and his children.  On 13 March 1943, the Nazis began the third major “resettlement” action within the Cracow ghetto.  Fearing this would lead to the liquidation of their families in Cracow, a number of Biezanow inmates, including Zacharias, pleaded with Biezanow’s SS commandant, Mueller, for help.  Mueller, after negotiations with Amon Goeth, who was in charge of the resettlement action, secured permission to enter the ghetto and gather together the families of the inmates of Biezanow and “Julag-1.”  But before they could leave the ghetto, all these family members were subjected to an inspection.  To hide Stefan from the probing eyes of Goeth, Helena hid him in a sack.  But she was unable to conceal her daughter.  Goeth tore Sylvia away from her mother and ordered her to return to the ghetto.  But Sylvia secretly rejoined the group at the gate before it left the ghetto and was taken to “Julag-1” with the other members of her family.  From there, Zacharias and his family were sent to Biezanow.  Here, new problems arose.  Stefan was too young to be allowed to stay there.

From Page 24  The Protection of Stefan Jerzy Zweig

Zacharias first hid Stefan, then persuaded a Pole living in the area to take Stefan in.  Some Poles reported such illicit acts of concealment to the Nazis, and several times Poles who had taken Stefan in became afraid and abandoned him, leaving him lying next to the camp wire.

This psychological torture went on for some months, until the Nazis scaled down their search for hidden children and it became conceivable to bring young children into Biezanow.  When Zacharias had run out of money to pay for Stefan’s protection, he gook him back into the camp.  Still, the SS did occasionally go through the prisoners’ blocks looking for children.  Sometimes this happened without warning, and on such occasions Stefan had to be hidden.  Thus a member of the work detail responsible for removing the garbage sometimes hid Stefan among the refuse and took him out of the camp to safety; Zacharias later would retrieve him from the garbage dump.  On other occasions, Zacharias entrusted Stefan to the care of the Polish women outside the camp — to whom he once had to throw the child over the barbed-wire fence.  By Stefan was so well-trained that his father only needed to mention the word “SS” for him to remain completely silent.

Plaszow and Skarzysko Kamienna

On 15 November 1943, the Biezanow camp was dissolved, and the Zweig family was forced to move to Plaszow, where men and women were separated: Sylvia went with her mother, Stefan with Zacharias.  The SS began to take children and older prisoners out of the camp and shoot them on a nearby hill.  When a doctor in the camp by the name of Gross came to the women’s barracks to register the remaining children, Helena, who knew Gross personally and knew too that he had certain obligations toward the Zweigs, begged him to try to prevent any further separation of mothers from their children.  Gross subsequently promised Zacharias he would do what he could to help all threatened children.  He informed Zacharias of an impending transport to Skarzysko Kamienna, assuring him that Skarzysko was a labor camp, not a death camp.  Zacharias resolved to join the transport with his family.  Gross promised to ensure that nothing would happen to the children as they left the camp — thereby returning a favor to Zacharias, who had helped him in the past.  On his way out of Plaszow, Zacharias once more hid Stefan, this time wrapping him inside his raincoat, which he then carried over his shoulder; as he passed Amon Goeth and other SS men at the gates of the camp, he struck a posture of deference. Gross followed the transport at  a distance, and appeared to keep his word.  Zacharias and his family arrived safely in Skarzysko.  [...]

From Page 25

A 1956 brochure-cum-guidebook produced by the Museum for German History features a photograph of Zweig. The text stresses that while Buchenwald was the expression of murderous bestiality, its history also bore witness above all the the strength of the solidarity of the resistance fighters, who rose above fascist atrocities.  The guidebook states that an example of such fighters were the prisoners in the Storage Building, where comrades saved the three-year-old Stefan Zweig from death, hiding him between articles of clothing at risk of their own lives.  Strikingly, the story of Stefan’s rescue is positioned within the guidebook at the point where the narrative first turns away from telling the horrors of Buchenwald to consider more uplifting aspects.  Up to that point, the brochure largely features photographs and drawings of suffering and dead bodies. Suddenly, the reader is confronted with an image of a healthy-looking, relatively well-dressed boy wearing boots.  Stefan symbolizes survival, life and above all the triumph of solidarity over murder.  His rescue becomes a pivotal moment in a narrative of death and transcendence.  

A similar positioning of the Zweig rescue story was characteristic of its treatment in the museum at Buchenwald.  In the 1955 exhibition drafted by the MfDG, the same photograph of Stefan was shown as in the guidebook, together with Zacharias’s brief 1945 account of his son’s rescue as noted down by Stefan Heymann.  The reference to Zweig follows sections on mass murder and slave labor.  According to a 1958 draft for the new museum finally realized in 1964, there was to be a display board on women and children at Buchenwald, including Zacharias’s early postwar account of Stefan’s rescue.  It was to be situated between display boards on the mass murder of Soviets, Poles, and Jews, and on the murderous conditions at Buchenwald-Dora on the one hand, and murder of Thalmann and the prisoners’ uprising of April 1945 on the other.  Interestingly, the former Buchenwald prisoner Willi Seifert objected to the over-concentration on Zweig; a revised draft features more detail on other children saved by the communist resistance movement.
In the mid-1950s, a plaque commemorating Stefan’s rescue was mounted on the outside wall of the Storage Building.  It informs the visitor that “prisoners took care of the three-year-old Stefan Zweig, hiding him between sacks,” and that they risked their lives to save him from annihilation.  The Storage Building itself had only survived by demolition process described earlier because it was in used as a grain store by a supply firm.  In 1953, following attempts by Erfurt’s Regional Council to get permission to tear it down, the GDR’s Institute for the Maintenance of Monuments stepped in to insist on its preservation. Gradually, the idea took root that the Storage Building would be an ideal site for a new museum.  [...]

But this report also mentions the protection of other children (for example, in Block 8) and cites the number of children still alive at the camp on liberation.  So while “the Boy” could be Stefan, he could also be representative of all of Buchenwald’s children.  If anything, the apparent age of “The Boy,” who looks to be nine or ten despite the fact that Cremer has fitted him out with an oversized, adult head, should discourage us from seeing him as absolutely identical to the three-year-old Stefan Zweig.

So was Stefan Zweig at Buchenwald or not? He was apparently not in the barracks where the other children were taken care of by the Communist prisoners.  He was in the Storage Building which was later turned into a Museum.

The large building on the left was the Storehouse at Buchenwald; it is now a Museum

The photo above shows the Storehouse, the largest building in the Buchenwald camp, where the clothing and personal property of the inmates was kept. If a prisoner was released from the camp, his clothing was given back to him. The storehouse is now used to house the Buchenwald Museum.

In front of the storehouse was the camp laundry, which has been torn down. Goethe’s Oak was in front of the laundry building; the stump of the oak tree is shown in the photo above. The tree was killed in an Allied bombing raid on the camp on August 24, 1944 when a number of prisoners were also killed.  The surface of the stump is covered with small rocks left by visitors to the camp.

The one-story building to the right in the photo above is the disinfection building which is connected to the storehouse by an underground tunnel. Incoming prisoners were first brought to the disinfection building where their heads and entire bodies were shaved. Then they were completely submerged into a large tub of creosote to kill lice and bacteria. Then they had to go into the showers, after which they were sprayed with liquid disinfectant. All this was done in the effort to stop epidemics in the camp.

When I visited Buchenwald in 1999, I saw the Museum, which had been redone in 1995 after the fall of Communism in East Germany.  Since then, the Museum has been redone again.  I did not see anything about the boys of Buchenwald in the Museum in 1999.

“Die Hexe von Buchenwald” — a famous German fairytale

According to Wikipedia, “Buchenwald’s second commandant was Karl Otto Koch, who ran the camp from 1937 to 1941. His second wife, Ilse Koch, became notorious as Die Hexe von Buchenwald (“the witch of Buchenwald”) for her cruelty and brutality.”

(Warning to readers in Germany: if you don’t believe in fairy tales, you could go to prison for 5 years.)

Ilse Kohler had met and married Karl Otto Koch in 1936 while Koch was the Commandant at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp and Ilse was a guard there. She was dubbed “the Bitch of Buchenwald” by the American press after the camp was liberated by American troops on April 11, 1945. According to information at the camp Memorial Site and in the camp guidebook, Ilse selected prisoners with tattooed skin to be killed by her lover, Dr. Waldemar Hoven, in order to make leather lamp shades to decorate her home.

Leather lampshade, found in Ilse Koch’s home is shown on the right

The photo above shows a display table that was set up for the benefit of the German citizens of Weimar (the closest city to the Buchenwald camp) who were marched, at gunpoint, to the camp on April 15, 1945 to see the atrocities that “had been committed in their name,” only five miles from their homes.  Also shown on the display table are two shrunken heads, made by the evil Germans from two Polish prisoners in the camp.

Spread out on the table, shown in the photo above, are several pieces of tattooed skin that were found in the camp, but no lampshade with tattooed skin was ever found — until a few years ago when the lampshade shown below was found in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.  The lampshade was tested and found to have been made from human skin.

Human lampshade found in New Orleans after the hurricane

The following quote is from this website:

When the flood waters of Hurricane Katrina receded, they left behind a wrecked New Orleans and a strange looking lamp that an illicit dealer claimed was ‘made from the skin of Jews.’ This whirlwind journey takes us from Chicago to Buchenwald… from CSI-type labs to the remains of the pathology department where the SS conducted medical experiments on inmates. Before journey’s end, we go back in time to meet the most notorious Nazi villainess of all: Ilse Koch, the so-called ‘Bitch of Buchenwald.’ [...]

That this particular lampshade is human seems incontrovertible. Back in 2006 it was tested by the same DNA lab the FBI chose to identify the 11,000 body parts left after 9-11. And that lab determined that the lampshade was indeed “of human origin.” [...]

So far, our forensics tests done at some of the world’s best crime labs have pointed back to origins in Nazi Germany and WWII. The truth behind the lampshade’s important. For years it dwelled between myth and reality. Because although there’s absolutely no doubt that human skin artifacts were made at Buchenwald, a human-skin lampshade has never been found.

What?  You don’t believe in fairytales?  The fairytale of “Die Hexe von Buchenwald” is true.  It was proved, along with other facts, at the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal.

Well, not exactly proved — but it was brought up at Nuremberg.  On December 13, 1945, the US prosecution introduced Exhibit #253, which consisted of three pieces of tanned human skin that had been removed from prisoners by doctors at Buchenwald. A forensic report confirmed that it was human skin. Although this skin had not been fashioned into a lampshade, US prosecutor Thomas Dodd said that Ilse Koch had ordered tattooed human skin to be made into lampshades for her home. Exhibit #254, also introduced by Dodd, was a shrunken head, allegedly used by Ilse Koch as a paperweight, which Dodd said was the head of a Polish prisoner at Buchenwald.

Everything introduced into the Nuremberg IMT is absolutely true. But it wasn’t just at Nuremberg that the lamp shade story was proved; it was also proved at the trial of Ilse Koch conducted by the American Military Tribunal at Dachau — NOT!

Ilse Koch testifies on the witness stand at Dachau

According to Joshua M. Greene, author of Justice at Dachau, the prosecution introduced ten witnesses who testified against Ilse Koch at the American Military Tribunal. One of these witnesses, Kurt Froboess, testified that he had seen Frau Koch’s photo album, which he said had a tattoo on the cover. He said that he had seen this tattoo on a piece of preserved human skin, which he said had been removed from a fellow prisoner, in the pathology department at Buchenwald, and he later recognized this same tattoo on the cover of the photo album.

Apparently this photo album had been confiscated by the American liberators, but it was not introduced into evidence in the courtroom. In her plea for mercy from the court, Ilse Koch pointed out that Newsweek magazine had published an article in which it was stated that the US military government in Germany was in possession of her photo album. Frau Koch claimed that the album contained several photos of her home which showed lampshades made from dark leather; Frau Koch said the photos showed that the lampshades were clearly not made from human skin.

At least two witnesses at the trial of Ilse Koch testified about a lamp with a shade fashioned out of human skin and a base made from a human leg bone, which they claimed had been delivered to Frau Koch. One of these witnesses, Kurt Wilhelm Leeser, testified that he had previously seen the tattoos on this lamp shade on the arms of a fellow prisoner, Josef Collinette, before he died. This lamp was not introduced into evidence in the courtroom and there were no witnesses from the American military who testified about its existence.

The Jewish religion frowns upon tattoos and a Jew who is tattooed cannot be buried in consecrated ground, so it would have been unusual for a Jewish prisoner at Buchenwald to have had a tattoo. It was pointed out by defense counsel that Dr. Wagner was doing a study of tattoos and criminal behavior at Buchenwald. Tattooed skin had been removed from dead criminals and preserved at the pathology department where autopsies were done.

Dr. Kurt Sitte points to three pieces of tattooed skin found at Buchenwald

Three pieces of tattooed skin and a shrunken head were exhibited in the courtroom at Dachau as evidence of the ghastly crimes committed by the staff at Buchenwald. The photograph above shows Dr. Kurt Sitte, on the far right, who is identifying the three pieces of tattooed skin, found in the pathology department at Buchenwald. This same exhibit was shown at the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal on December 13, 1945 as evidence of Crimes against Humanity.  (In the trials conducted by the American military, the ex-post-facto law called “Crimes against Humanity.” was not used.)

According to the forensic report prepared for the trial of Ilse Koch, the three pieces of skin had been determined to be human. Joseph Halow, a court reporter for some of the other Dachau trials, claims that he saw a lamp shade that was part of the evidence at the proceedings against Ilse Koch, but if this lamp shade was tested, the results were not included in the forensic report. No one else, that I know of, ever mentioned seeing a lamp shade in the Dachau courtroom.

In the testimony given at Dachau, there was no reference by any of the attorneys to a lamp being on display in the courtroom during the proceedings. Dr. Sitte identified the shrunken head that was exhibited in the courtroom, but he did not mention a lamp being in the courtroom during his testimony.

Dr. Sitte, who had a Ph.D. in physics, was one of the star witnesses against Ilse Koch. He had been a prisoner at Buchenwald from September 1939 until the liberation. He testified that tattooed skin was stripped from the bodies of dead prisoners and “was often used to create lampshades, knife cases, and similar items for the SS.” He told the court that it was “common knowledge” that tattooed prisoners were sent to the hospital after Ilse Koch had passed by them on work details. Dr. Sitte’s testimony of “common knowledge” was just another word for hearsay testimony, which was allowed by the American Military Tribunal.

According to Joshua M. Greene, author of Justice at Dachau, Dr. Sitte testified that “These prisoners were killed in the hospital and the tattooing stripped off.”

Under cross-examination, Dr. Sitte was forced to admit that he had never seen any of the lampshades allegedly made of human skin and that he had no personal knowledge of any prisoner who had been reported by Frau Koch and was then killed so that his tattooed skin could be made into a lampshade. He also admitted that the lampshade that was on the display table in the film was not the lampshade made from human skin that was allegedly delivered to Frau Koch. Apparently the most important piece of evidence, the lampshade made from human skin, was nowhere in sight during the trial of Ilse Koch.

During his cross examination of Dr. Sitte, defense attorney Captain Emanuel Lewis tried to introduce a plausible explanation for the removal of tattoos at Buchenwald when he asked:

“Is it not a fact that skin was taken from habitual criminals and was part of scientific research done by Dr. Wagner and into the connection between criminals and tattoos on their bodies?”

Dr. Sitte answered:

“In my time, skin was taken off prisoners whether they were criminal or not. I don’t think that a responsible scientist would ever call this kind of work scientific.”
In a ceremony to commemorate the 50ieth anniversary of the liberation of Buchenwald, one thousand survivors of the camp participated along with some of the American veterans who had liberated the camp. As quoted in an article about this event by Stephen Kinzer in the New York Times International, one of the former inmates shared his memories of Ilse Koch:

“She was a very beautiful woman with long red hair, but any prisoner who was caught looking at her could be shot,” recalled Kurt Glass, a former inmate who worked as a gardener at the Koch family villa. “She got the idea she would like lamp shades made of human skin, and one day on the Appellplatz we were all ordered to strip to the waist. The ones who had interesting tattoos were brought to her, and she picked out the ones she liked. Those people were killed and their skin was made into lampshades for her. She also used mummified human thumbs as light switches in her house.”

If the human thumb light switches were ever found, they were not introduced as evidence into the trial of Ilse Koch.

Just before the American liberators arrived at Buchenwald on April 11, 1945, Karl Otto Koch, the husband of Ilse Koch, had been executed by the Nazis themselves on April 5, 1945, two days before they began evacuating the Buchenwald camp. Koch had been incarcerated in the Buchenwald camp prison ever since he was arrested in August 1943 and tried in December 1943 by SS officer Dr. Georg Konrad Morgen in a special Nazi court. Koch was found guilty of extortion for taking bribes from Jewish prisoners, and he was also found guilty of two counts of murder for ordering the deaths of two Buchenwald prisoners.

Ilse had also been arrested by the SS for embezzlement and had been put on trial in Morgen’s court, along with her husband, but she had been acquitted of all charges. Dr. Georg Konrad Morgen had investigated the human lamp shade accusation, but had thrown this charge out of his court case for lack of evidence. Ilse Koch had been implicated in the crime of embezzlement at the Buchenwald camp because she shared a joint bank account with her husband, who was accused of extorting the equivalent of 100,000 dollars from the prisoners. As the wife of the Commandant, she came under the jurisdiction of the SS special court. She had been taken to the city jail in Weimar in August 1943 to await her trial, and had never returned to her former home just outside the Buchenwald camp.

According to a book entitled The Order of the Death’s Head: The Story of Hitler’s SS, by Heinz Höhne, Otto Koch had extorted money from Jewish prisoners who were sent to Buchenwald in November 1938 following the state-sponsored pogrom known as Kristallnacht. Approximately 10,000 Jewish men had been brought to Buchenwald in November 1938 but they were offered the opportunity to be released if they promised to leave Germany with their families within six months. Koch was accused of taking money from these prisoners without official authorization. Koch had also ordered the deaths of two prisoners, allegedly in an attempt to cover up his misdeeds.

Another version of the story, according to The Buchenwald Report commissioned by the US Army, is that Koch had syphilis and he had ordered the deaths of two hospital orderlies to prevent them from revealing his secret.

Before his crimes at Buchenwald were uncovered, Commandant Karl Otto Koch had been transferred to the Majdanek death camp in Poland in September 1941, but his wife stayed behind, continuing to live in the Commandant’s house. According to The Buchenwald Report, it was rumored that Ilse Koch was having simultaneous love affairs with Dr. Waldemar Hoven, a Waffen-SS Captain who was the chief medical doctor at Buchenwald, and Hermann Florstedt, the Deputy Commandant.

Waldemar Hoven, a doctor at Buchenwald

Both Florstedt and Dr. Hoven had been put on trial in the special Nazi court, which was run by Dr. Georg Konrad Morgen, who was also an officer in the Waffen-SS. Florstedt was convicted by the Nazi court and was executed. Dr. Hoven, who was a Communist sympathizer, was convicted of killing non-Communist Buchenwald prisoners by injecting them in the heart. He was sentenced to death by the SS court, but his sentence was never carried out. After serving 18 months in the Buchenwald camp prison, he was reprieved because there was a shortage of doctors in the camp and his services were needed.

After World War II ended, Dr. Hoven with again charged with killing Buchenwald political prisoners by injection. He was one of the 23 Nazi doctors who were put on trial in June 1947 in the case of USA vs. Karl Brandt and others at Nuremberg, where he was again convicted of murder and sentenced to death. Dr. Hoven was executed by hanging on June 2, 1948.

In April 1947, Ilse Koch was convicted by the American Military Tribunal in Dachau and sentenced to life in prison. She was not convicted of ordering lamp shades to be made, but rather she was found guilty on a charge of participating in a “common plan” to violate the Laws and Usages of War under the Geneva Convention. During the review process, her sentence was reduced to time served, or four years, and she was released in 1949 by General Lucius D. Clay who said that the lamp shades in her home had been made from goat skin.

Ilse Koch was then retried in a German court on charges of cruelty to the prisoners and ordering prisoners to be murdered. She was convicted again and sentenced again to life imprisonment; after 20 years in prison Ilse committed suicide in 1967. The German court had not charged her with making lamp shades, but the judges did take judicial notice that lamp shades, made from human skin, had been found in her home, although this had not been proved during the proceedings of the American Military Tribunal at Dachau.

Room at Buchenwald where lampshades were made

The photograph above shows a room in the pathology annex at Buchenwald, which is called the Gedenkraum, or Place of Thought in English. A plaque on the wall of this room says that this is the room where the skin was flayed from dead prisoners to make lamp shades. I took the photo above in 1999 when I visited the Buchenwald Memorial Site. No lamp shades, nor even a picture of them, were displayed anywhere at the Buchenwald Memorial Site when I was there.

The Jewish newspaper Forward reported on April 4, 1997 that the National Archives in College Park, Maryland has identified “a human skin lampshade, or part of one,” taken from the Buchenwald concentration camp and kept with government documents, and that the National Museum of Health and Medicine holds three pieces of tattooed human skin also taken from Buchenwald.

Of all the propaganda published by the American liberators of the Nazi camps, in order to demonize the German people, the fairytale “Die Hexe von Buchenwald” is the most egregious, in my opinion.

I previously blogged about the lampshades at Buchenwald here.