The plan to gas all the Jews at Theresienstadt, or if that wasn’t enough, to drown them

Holocaust Survivor Inge Auerbacher is scheduled to give a talk to 7th and 8th students at Clarksburg, MA on Wednesday, May 22, 2013.  Auerbacher claims to be one of only 100 children to have survived the Theresienstadt concentration camp; there was a total of 15,000 children in the camp. She will be telling these American students about the atrocities in the camp, located only a few miles from Prague in the Czech Republic.

You can see photos of Theresienstadt on my website here.

The Clarksburg students have been studying the Holocaust since March and have read Auerbacher’s book, entitled I Am a Star.  (The Star refers to the Star of David which the Jews were forced to wear.)

The Nazis forced all Jews to wear a Star of David

I previously blogged here about Inge Auerbacher and her claim that the Theresienstadt gas chamber was never finished and the Jews were saved by the Russian troops who arrived to liberate the camp on May 8, 1945.  Before the Russians arrived, the Theresienstadt camp had been turned over to the Red Cross and the SS guards and administrators had left.

I looked up Auerbacher’s book on the Internet and found this condensed information, which was taken from her book, at this website:

During the last days of World War II, orders were given to build gas chambers at Terezín. The plan was to kill all the remaining Jews. At Terezín they were to kill the Jews by gassing them or by drowning in a specially prepared areas. Not one Jew in all of Europe was to stay alive. It was only a rush of events that spared Inge and some of the other prisoners their lives. The guards fearing capture by the Allies, began to burn all the camp records. The evidence of death had to be destroyed. At the beginning of May, the guards, living outside the barricades, ran away. They made last efforts to kill the remaining Jews by shooting wildly and throwing hand grenades into the camp as they fled.

The quote about “gassing them or by drowning” is on page 66 of Auerbacher’s book.

Before reading this information from Auerbacher’s book, I had never heard about the guards at Theresienstadt “throwing hand grenades into the camp as they fled,” as Auerbacher wrote on page 67 of her book.  Thank God that Auerbacher survived and can educate elementary school children in America about this atrocity.   I wonder how many Red Cross workers were hit by the wild shooting and the hand grenades thrown at them.  Auerbacher’s book should be made into a movie, so that we can see just how cruel the Nazis were.

Students who want to learn more about Theresienstadt can study this quote, from an article on this website:

The situation in Terezin [Theresienstadt] was influenced by the atmosphere connected with the intensive negotiations of Heinrich Himmler and his plenipotentiaries, particularly Kurt Becher, with the representatives of international Jewish organizations and the American Office for War Refugees.

On November 9 the Berlin Central Office of the Gestapo informed the Reich’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs that within the framework of plans approved by Hitler on how to “make use of Jews for the German war effort in a manner other than by their work for the Reich”, a transport of 1 000 prisoners would be sent to Switzerland.

On December 6 a train dispatched from the Bergen – Belsen camp with 1 368 Jewish prisoners actually crossed the Swiss border. Among them were 97 Jews from Czechoslovakia. Four days earlier – according to the recollections of Felix Kersten whom Himmler had been using for his international political contacts – the Reichsfuhrer of the SS at a meeting in Triberg promised to free two to three thousand Jewish prisoners from Terezin on condition that the world press would not interpret this release as a sign of weakness on the part of Germany. Himmler refused to set 20 000 Terezin prisoners free. (At that time, however, such a large number of Jewish prisoners were not present in Terezin anymore.)

Shortly afterwards – on December 5 – during an inspection of Terezin, an unknown functionary of the Reich’s Security Main Office visited the Jewish Elder Benjamin Murmelstein (officially appointed as late as December 13). According to Rahm, the Commander of the camp, he was satiied [satisfied] with what he had seen. This visit gave birth to the legend that on the basis of this inspection “by a special commission from Berlin” it was decided not to liquidate Terezin but to make use of it for propaganda purposes.

Various alternatives for liquidating Terezin are documented from the circles of Prague’s Gestapo and from Eichmann’s Office at the Gestapo Headquarters in Berlin. There are documents about actual preparations, particularly about the building of a “food store” in Terezin ravelin No. XVIII, which could easily become a gas chamber, and the building of a “duck pond” in ravelin No. XV, which could be easily changed into the area where all of the camp’s inmates could be shot by machine -guns, burned by flame – throwers or drowned by a gush of water from the Oh e river. However, the leadership of the Reich had different plans for Terezin.

According to Wikipedia, “A ravelin is a triangular fortification or detached outwork, located in front of the innerworks of a fortress (the curtain walls and bastions). Originally called a demi-lune, after the lunette, the ravelin is placed outside a castle and opposite a fortification curtain.”

Theresienstadt was originally built as a military fort; it was surrounded by a dry moat and had five bastions which stuck out.

Theresienstadt was an old military fort

Dry moat at Theresienstadt

Maybe those stupid Nazis were planning to drown the Jews at Theresienstadt by flooding the moat with water.  They were desperate to kill all the Jews in the last days of the war, and when they were incapable of finishing the gas chamber in time, they decided on this outrageous plan.  Red Cross workers were already there, taking care of the prisoners who had typhus.

All American children should spend several months learning about the Nazi plan to drown the prisoners at Theresienstadt.  Forget American history, this is more important.

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

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

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

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

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

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

[...]

Stevenson witnessed the horror of human atrocity firsthand.

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

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

[...]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stevenson believed it; he had seen it.

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

“I know what I saw,” Stevenson said.

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

American reporters view bodies of typhus victims after Dachau was liberated

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jewish Memorial stands in the location of the former disinfection building

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Door into disinfection chamber in Baracke X where clothing was disinfected

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bill O’Reilly’s comments about Nazi Germany and religion

I have long suspected that Bill O’Reilly does not know the meaning of the German word “Angst.”  He typically uses the word Angst when it is clear that he means “anger.”

On his show last night, Bill said “Angst” and Fox news anchor Megyn Kelly answered, using the word “anger,” making it clear that Bill meant anger when he used the word “Angst.”

But that was not the only mistake that Bill made on his TV show last night.  He said something about Nazi Germany and religion.  This morning, I searched and searched to find the exact quote, but couldn’t find it.  Was that part of Bill’s commentary cut out of the transcript because someone on the Fox News staff recognized that Bill had made a mistake?

The gist of what Bill said about Hitler and Nazi Germany was that Hitler was against religion.  That is not correct.  Hitler was baptized a Catholic and he never apostatized, although he never went to church in his later years.  Catholic priests were put into concentration camps, mostly at Dachau, but not because of their religion.  Jews were “persecuted” but not because of race or religion.

This quote is from Wikipedia on the “National Socialist Program” [Nazi program]:

18.00 We demand struggle without consideration against those whose activity is injurious to the general interest. Common national criminals, usurers, profiteers and so forth are to be punished with death, without consideration of confession or race.

Here is another translation of Number 18 in the 25 points of the Nazi party:

18. We demand that ruthless war be waged against those who work to the injury of the common welfare. Traitors, usurers, profiteers, etc., are to be punished with death, regardless of creed or race.

Hitler believed that the Jews were working to the injury of the common welfare because they were working for the interests of International Jewry, not for the interests of Germany.   I explained all this in a previous post, which you can read here.  I also wrote two previous posts about Dietrich Bonhoeffer, which you can read here and here.  Bonhoeffer was arrested because he was a traitor to his country, not because of his religion.

A German Jew writes a letter to his wife and mentions the liberation of Dachau

Fritz Schnaittacher, a Jew who had been living in Germany until 1933, was an intelligence officer with the U.S. Seventh Army in Germany during World War II.

Fritz Schnaittacher

You can read the full story, entitled “A German Jew in the U.S. Army Confronts Dachau” here.

In a letter to his wife in 1945, First Lieutenant Fritz Schnaittacher, an intelligence officer with the U.S. Seventh Army in Germany, wrote about how he was almost sent to Dachau 12 years ago, which would have been in 1933 when the Dachau camp was first opened.  The first prisoners, who were sent to Dachau in 1933, were taken from the Munich prison to the first German concentration camp which had just been opened.  These first prisoners had been arrested as “enemies of the state” after the Reichstag fire. What was this young German Jew doing in 1933 that he was just missed being sent to Dachau by “the skin of his teeth,” as he wrote in his letter to his wife.

This quote is from Schnaittacher’s letter to his wife:

Twelve years ago to day I came to Munich — yesterday we took it — to day we were in the heart of it — another coincidence. The past few days were some of the greatest and saddest in my life. Our regiment took Dachau or should I say liberated the human wreckage which was left there. This I consider one of the most glorious pages in the history of our regiment, not because the fighting was tough, it wasn’t, but because it finally opened the gates of one of the world’s most hellish places.

You have heard the stories over the radio — I don’t want to add much more — the most striking picture I saw was the “death train” — I say picture, no not picture, but carload and carload full of corpses, once upon a time people, who were alive, who were happy and people who had convictions or were Jews — then slowly but methodically they were killed. Death has an ugly face on these people — they were starved to death — the positions they were lying in show that they succumbed slowly — they made one move, fell, were too weak to make another move, and there are hundreds of such lifeless skeletons covered by some skin. I tried to find out the origin of this train. Some of the stories corresponded — whether this train was to leave Dachau or had just arrived is not essential — essential is that they were locked into these cattle cars without sanitation and without food. The SS had to take off in a hurry — we came too fast — it was too late to cover up their atrocities.

First prisoners arrive at Dachau concentration camp in 1933

You can read about the first prisoners who were sent to Dachau, on my website here.  A few of the first prisoners who were sent to Dachau in 1933 were Jewish, but none of the first prisoners were sent there just because they were Jews; they were transferred to the first concentration camp, from the Munich jail, because of their politically activity against the state.

In reading the letter that Fritz wrote to his wife, I was struck by the fact that he wrote about the “death train” but didn’t write about what was happening to the German people in the last days of the war. I am currently reading a book entitled Germany 1945, in which the author mentions that 500,000 German civilians were killed during the Allied bombing of German cities and that 26 million Germans (one fourth of the total population) were homeless.  This number did not include the ethnic Germans, in other European countries, who were expelled from their homes and forced to go to Germany, where there was no housing available.  On top of this, the American Army officers forced German civilians out of their homes so that they could occupy them.  Fritz had no sympathy for the German civilians who were treated very badly by the Americans.

Before you say that the Germans got what they deserved because Germany started the war, read a blog post that I wrote 3 years ago about the start of World War II.

SS soldiers were shot by Lt. Bill Walsh on the day that Dachau was liberated

American soldiers pose beside the bodies of SS soldiers killed during the liberation of Dachau

The photo above shows the bodies of SS soldiers who were shot by American soldiers during the liberation of Dachau on April 29, 1945.

I previously blogged here about a new book about the liberation of Dachau, written by Alex Kershaw.  This morning, I read an excerpt from the book on this website.

Kershaw wrote at length about “I Company commander Lieutenant Bill Walsh”  describing him with these words: “twenty-five-year-old Walsh, a tall and imposing figure with a chowder-thick accent from Newton, Massachusetts, arrived at the junction with I Company, which had earned the presidential unit citation for its actions at Anzio.”

U.S. soldiers view the bodies of SS men who were taken to the “death train” and shot

You can read about the Dachau “death train” on my website here.

This quote is from the excerpt from Kershaw’s book which you can read in full here:

Walsh had no idea what [Lt. Col. Felix] Sparks meant by “concentration camp.” He had once seen a POW camp in upstate New York that had housed fit, well-fed, and happy German prisoners. Perhaps Dachau would be the same kind of place.

[ ...]

There were thirty-nine boxcars in all, containing some two thousand corpses. The train had left Buchenwald with around forty-eight hundred prisoners some three weeks earlier. It had first stopped so that hundreds could be shot. The SS that cruelest of springs had been over- whelmed, confused, and exasperated by the sheer numbers of their victims and, under orders not to let any prisoners fall into the hands of the Allies, had killed with clinical efficiency. On April 21, when the train halted for the second time, thirty-one hundred severely malnourished and dehydrated people on board were still alive. Six days later, when the train pulled into Dachau at night, there were just eight hundred. The dead were left to rot on the train.

I Company commander Bill Walsh arrived at the boxcars. At first, he thought the skeletal people were sleeping.

What the hell is this?

Sparks was next on the scene, having left his jeep in a nearby side street, along with his shotgun and radio. His only weapon now was his Colt .45, holstered at his hip. At first, as were many of his men, he was paralyzed by what he saw. The sights and smells robbed the mind of reason.

[...]

Sparks ordered his men to check to see if any people were alive. None were. Then he told them to keep going toward the camp, a hundred yards in the distance.

Bill Walsh still looked stunned. “Okay, move!” Sparks ordered Walsh.

Walsh and I Company began to move past more railroad cars, down the tracks that led into the Dachau complex.

Sparks followed behind, passing more open boxcars filled with bodies, boxcars like the ones he had ridden in across America ten years before. Ahead of him, some of his men were boiling with rage, eager to avenge the SS crimes. I Company scout Private John Lee had never seen his fellow Thunderbirds so unhinged.

Sparks heard men screaming and cursing. “Let’s get these Nazi dogs.”

It was all too much. His men were losing their minds. Lieutenant Walsh set the tone, ranting and raving about SS sons of bitches. He and others had been pushed past the breaking point. The army had trained them to fight. It had not prepared them for this kind of psychological shock. Nothing could. They had come across a tragedy beyond comprehension. “Every man in the outfit who saw those boxcars,” recalled one of Sparks’s men, “felt [like] meting out death as punishment to the Germans who were responsible.”

Sparks snapped commands and tried to regain control of his men. It took several minutes.

“Okay,” he finally said when I Company had calmed down enough for him to make himself clearly understood. “We’re going in the camp.” Sparks led the way over a perimeter wall with one group of men while Lieutenant Walsh advanced with another group from I Company. On the other side of the wall, Sparks found himself in the neat garden of a pleasant home, one of several used by families of the SS officers within the Dachau complex.

[...]

Meanwhile, Walsh and  his party came across four SS men who had their hands on their heads. Walsh took them into one of the box- cars and called for a machine gun. Then he changed his mind and fired his pistol at them. But he did not kill them all. Other I Company men could hear the survivors’ cries of pain. A private called Pruitt entered the boxcar and lifted his M1 rifle and fired, killing the wounded men with eight or nine clinical shots. “They were suffering and taking on and I figured there was no use letting them suffer, so I finished them off,” Pruitt later testified. “I never like to see anybody suffer.”

Walsh’s  men carried  on, moving  beyond  the rail tracks into the Dachau complex itself.

[...]

Then [Sparks] saw Lieutenant Bill Walsh emerge from between a couple of buildings. He was chasing a German.

“You sons of bitches,” Walsh was screaming repeatedly.

Walsh began to beat the German over the head with the barrel of his carbine.

“Bastards. Bastards. Bastards.”

Sparks ordered Walsh to stop, but Walsh ignored him. So Sparks pulled out his .45 and clubbed Walsh on the head with its butt, stunning him and knocking him to the ground.

Walsh lay there, crying hysterically.

“I’m taking over command of the company,” yelled Sparks.

One of Walsh’s men, Sidney C. Horn, recalled that seven men were needed to take a hysterical Walsh into a room and “get him quieted down. He really lost it there.” Walsh had gone “crazy,” as Sparks would later put it, overwhelmed like many of his men by the scenes of atrocity. Walsh later confessed: “I’ll be honest with you. I broke down. I started crying. The whole thing was getting to me. This was the culmination of something that I had never been trained for.”

The boxcar where SS men at Dachau were shot

The “Dachau massacre” was kept secret for over 40 years.  The explanation given for the bodies of the men whose legs were hanging out of the boxcar is that these were prisoners who were shot by the SS men when they tried to escape.

April 29, 1945 — the day that the Dachau concentration camp was liberated — stories of two survivors

Belief in the “death march” as a means of killing Jews is required in the Holocaustianity religion, so don’t even think of denying this, unless you want your future career to be permanently vitiated.

Death march OUT of Dachau in the last days of World War II

The photo above shows Jews being marched OUT of Dachau in order to prevent them from attacking civilians, since they would soon be liberated from Dachau.  Sorry, but I don’t have any photos that show a death march TO Dachau.

In his best-selling book, Hitler’s Willing Executioners, Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen wrote this on page 367 in Chapter 14, entitled “Marching to What End?”

Finally, the fidelity of the Germans to their genocidal enterprise was so great as seeming to defy comprehension. Their world was disintegrating around them, yet they persisted in genocidal killing until the end.

Goldhagen was referring to the death marches out of Auschwitz in the final days of the war, but this definition also applies to another death march out of Auschwitz, which began in July 1944 and ended at Dachau on August 6, 1944.

Two of the famous survivors of this death march were Max Mannheimer and Sol Teichman.

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

One of my closest friends here in Los Angeles is Mr. Sol Teichman, a prominent citizen, businessman, philanthropist, and a Holocaust survivor.

Born on September 9, 1927, in the Hungarian town of Munkacs, Sol’s family were (sic) prominent and prosperous grain, bean and walnut merchants. The family lived in a lovely home in a quiet cul-de-sac and were known in the tight-knit Jewish community for their piety, charity, and close ties to the Belzer and Munkacs Hasidic dynasties.

Of course, the Nazi death grip descended on the Jews of Hungary, and by 1943, the Teichman home and business had been confiscated. The Jews of Munkacs were cruelly herded into a ghetto and then shipped in cattle cars to Auschwitz.

Sol, 17 years old, and his brother Steve, 14, survived the death camp, only to be sent on a death march to Dachau in August 1944.

This quote is from this website:

Shortly after Sol’s Bar Mitzvah in 1940, his father was taken away to a Hungarian labor camp. On the second day of Passover,1944, all the Jews of Munkacz were given one hour to vacate their homes and were herded into ghettos.

In June, they were transported to Auschwitz. That was the last time that Sol Teichman saw his mother, sister and three of his brothers. [...]  As the end of the war approached, the Nazis forced many of their Jewish prisoners to participate in their infamous death march to Dachau. Sol and his brother Steve began the march. But Steve’s strength gave out so Sol carried him for the rest of the journey. Of the 6,000 who started the march, only about 600 survived, Sol and his brother among them.

This quote about Max Mannheimer is from Wikipedia:

In October 1943, Mannheimer and his younger brother, Edger were sent to the Warsaw Ghetto to clear rubble.[4] In July 1944, he was sent on a death march to Dachau, arriving on August 6, 1944. After three weeks in quarantine, he was sent to Allach, a Dachau subcamp where he worked at a BMW factory. At the beginning of 1945, he and his brother were sent to Mühldorf subcamp, which was evacuated by train on April 28, 1945. The train was liberated by American troops on April 30, 1945 in Seeshaupt. In the end, only Mannheimer and his brother Edgar survived.[1][3]

Now for Sol Teichman’s story, which is a real tear-jerker:

Quoted from this website:

Here is an excerpt from Sol’s privately printed memoir, The Long Journey Home, in which he describes hell on earth.

The Crimson Lake

It was a death march, and I was terrified at each and every step. My body was convulsed with excruciating muscle spasms. Everywhere was the sharp crack of rifle fire as the Germans picked off one Jew after another. Was I going to be murdered next?  I had no idea where we were going or for how long we were going to march. Would we be on this road for one day, two days, a week, a month, or did the Germans plan on marching us until we were all dead? Not knowing was torture, just as the Germans planned.

If a prisoner tried to step aside to relieve himself, he was shot, bayoneted or beaten to death with the heavy butt of a rifle.

On the first night of the march my brother Steve lost heart.

“I don’t want to go on. I don’t want to live,” he said.

I looked at my brother and I knew in the depths of my soul that there was no choice. And so, though Steve was bigger and heavier than me, I leaned over, draped him over my back and carried my brother.

All I could do was place one foot in front of the other, one breath and then another.

We marched for days and nights without food or water. The heat was unbearable. My bones felt crushed, pulverized. Every breath was torture, my lungs felt as if they were exploding from unbearable pressure. But I knew that if I stopped, if I collapsed, the Germans would shoot us, beat us to death, or let their attack dogs rip us from limb to limb. And so I staggered onward.

One day, in the distance, we spied a lake.  I think it was T’sha B’Av night. Many of the men on the march started running towards the water, desperate to get a drink of water. As I staggered closer to the lake I saw that the water was a strange color.

And then I realized that the lake was red.

The Germans were shooting hundreds of Jews by the shores of the lake—and the water turned to blood.

We stood and stared at the crimson lake. I could not, would not, drink the bloody water.

We lay down, tried to sleep, and then in the middle of the night a tremendous thunderstorm exploded. Rain poured from the sky.

I stood in the middle of the field, opened my mouth and savored the sharp needles of rain dripping down my throat. The thunderstorm was miraculous and provided just enough water to relieve my overwhelming thirst.

Shivering in the rain and mud, I snatched bits of fitful sleep.

In the middle of the night I awoke and watched in dismay as starved prisoners, crazed by empty bellies, shoved tufts of grass—black dirt clinging to the roots—into their mouths, chewed and swallowed.

In the inky darkness, someone whispered that nearby was a meadow filled with wild potatoes. Steve wanted to sneak into the field and eat the raw potatoes, but I wouldn’t let him. I knew that they would make us sick. Taking advantage of the night because the German guards couldn’t see what was going on, some Jews did sneak off and pick the potatoes. They devoured the raw potatoes in quick, starving bites. But soon they doubled over with agonizing cramps and diarrhea, and then, a few hours later, they died. Those who didn’t die, those who were too sick to move, were shot to death by the Germans.

Later, I discovered that, carrying Steve on my back, I had marched for four days and covered approximately seventy miles. But at the time, not knowing how long or how far I traveled, time seemed to vanish and distances seemed endless as I pushed onward, day after day under the oppressive heat, my back bent like a bow. My throat was parched from thirst; the sun beat down and my skin was burned raw. I was dizzy from exhaustion, hunger and fear. Every bone in my body was throbbing. I felt like a marching skeleton. Thousands were murdered along that road. My fellow Jewish prisoners were beaten to death with wooden clubs and iron bars. Some Jews welcomed death for life had become endless torture, unendurable.

Four uncles and several cousins died on this death march.

In a daze, I realized that we had reached a valley. There we camped for the night. The next day we continued a short distance to a railhead and were loaded on cattle cars bound for Dachau.

When we started the march we were about 6,000 Jews, arriving at Dachau there were only about 600 survivors.

You can see color photos of the survivors of Dachau on this website.

April 26th, the anniversary of the day that Dr. Sigmund Rascher was allegedly executed at Dachau in 1945

On this website, you can read an article with this headline:  1945: Sigmund Rascher, feared science

Dr. Sigmund Rascher is shown on the right, as he conducts an experiment

The article on the website cited above begins with these words:

It’s on this date in 1945 that Sigmund Rascher is supposed to have been summarily executed in Dachau.

If that’s what happened, it’s no more than Rascher (English Wikipedia page | German) deserved.

There is a link in the article to a page on my website which you can read here. (the link on the website with the article does not work)

I don’t believe that Dr. Rascher was executed at Dachau.  I wrote a blog post about the alleged execution of Dr. Rascher, which you can read here.  (the website with the article links to my blog post)

Dr. Rascher conducted some very cruel experiments for the Luftwaffe (German Air Force) at Dachau.  America also conducted experiments for the American Air Force, but stopped short of letting the subjects die during the experiments.

An experiment carried out by Dr. Sigmund Rascher at Dachau for the Luftwaffe

The photo above shows a Russian POW who was the subject of one of Dr. Rascher’s experiments.  You can read more about Dr. Rascher’s cruel experiments on my website here.  I was horrified when I saw the photo above at Dachau.  The man looks like an American, but I learned later that he is Russian.

If Dr. Sigmund Rascher had not been killed, he would probably have been brought to America, along with other German scientists and doctors, after the war.  Or he might have been put on trial in the Doctor’s Trial at Nuremberg.

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 is a day to remember the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

The historical fight between the Nazis and the Jews,  known as the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, began on April 19, 1943 and ended on May 16, 1943. A total of 56,065 Jews were taken as prisoners by the Germans during the uprising, and around 6,000 Jews were killed during the destruction of the buildings in the ghetto.

The date of Holocaust Remembrance Day changes each year, but the date of the Uprising remains the same: April 19th, the first day of Passover in 1943.

Monument on the site of Mila 18, the last bunker to surrender during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

Pictured above is the memorial stone to the Jewish heroes of the Z.O.B. (Jewish Fighting Organization) who died in an underground bunker beneath the house at ul. Mila 18 during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. The stone sits on top of a mound of rubble, where the house at this address once stood; it is turned slightly toward Mila street which is to the left. The street is still named Mila, but #18 is no longer an address there.

A building that was destroyed during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

The reason, for the Jewish Resistance in April and May 1943, was that the Jews in the Ghetto had learned that the daily trains to Treblinka were not transporting the Jews to resettlement camps in the East, but were taking them to a death camp to be killed in gas chambers. It was because the ghetto residents began refusing to get on the trains that the Nazis decided to liquidate the ghetto. Ukrainian and Latvian SS soldiers marched into the ghetto on April 19, 1943, entering at the northern border of the Ghetto on Zamenhofa street. It was not until May 16th that the SS was able to defeat the Jewish resistance fighters, who lasted longer than the whole Polish army when the Germans and the Russians jointly invaded Poland in September 1939.

The iconic photo below was included in the photos in the Stroop Report, which was the report written by the Commander of the SS forces that fought the Jews.

Jews who were forced out of a Hotel in the Warsaw Ghetto

The soldier, who is holding a gun on the little boy in the photo, was Josef Blösche; he was put on trial in East Germany after the war and was executed after being convicted of participating in the action to put down the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. There are 50 photos included in The Stroop Report, which documents the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto.

In June 1942, the Nazis had begun transporting the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto to the Treblinka death camp on the Bug river, near the eastern border of German-occupied Poland. Eventually, reports of mass murder got back to the Warsaw Ghetto and a resistance organization called the Z.O.B. (Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa) was formed to prevent any more deportations from the ghetto. The leader of the Z.O.B. was Mordecai Anielewicz.

Jews coming out of their hiding places to surrender

The interior of one of the underground bunkers where the Jews hid in the Warsaw Ghetto

In January 1943, the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto decided to resist the next round-up for deportation to Treblinka; the young Z.O.B fighters fired on German troops as they tried to get the Jews into railroad cars to be transported to the death camp. The Germans retreated after four days of fighting and the Jews began to prepare to hold out against future attempts to liquidate the ghetto.

The following quote is from the opening statement by Robert Jackson at the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal in which he spoke about the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.  One of the crimes, charged against the Germans at the IMT, was the crime of killing Jews during the Uprising.

It is the original report of the SS Brigadier General Stroop in charge of the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto, and its title page carries the inscription “The Jewish ghetto in Warsaw no longer exists.” It is characteristic that one of the captions explains that the photograph (the photo which shows a little boy with his hands up) concerned shows the driving out of Jewish “bandits”; those whom the photograph shows being driven out are almost entirely women and little children. It contains a day-by-day account of the killings mainly carried out by the SS organization, too long to relate, but let me quote General Stroop’s summary:

“The resistance put up by the Jews and bandits could only be suppressed by energetic actions of our troops day and night. The Reichsfuehrer SS [Heinrich Himmler] ordered, therefore, on 4/23/1943, the cleaning out of the ghetto with utter ruthlessness and merciless tenacity. I, therefore, decided to destroy and burn down the entire ghetto without regard to the armament factories. These factories were systematically dismantled and then burned. Jews usually left their hideouts, but frequently remained in the burning buildings and jumped out of the windows only when the heat became unbearable. They then tried to crawl with broken bones across the street into buildings which were not afire. Sometimes they changed their hideouts during the night into the ruins of burned buildings. Life in the sewers was not pleasant after the first week. Many times we could hear loud voices in the sewers. SS men or policemen climbed bravely through the manholes to capture these Jews. Sometimes they stumbled over Jewish corpses: sometimes they were shot at. Tear gas bombs were thrown into the manholes and the Jews driven out of the sewers and captured. Countless numbers of Jews were liquidated in sewers and bunkers through blasting. The longer the resistance continued the tougher became the members of the Waffen SS, Police and Wehrmacht who always discharged their duties in an exemplary manner. Frequently Jews who tied to replenish their food supplies during the night or to communicate with neighboring groups were exterminated.”

“This action eliminated,” says the SS commander, “a proved total of 56,065 [sent to Treblinka]. To that, we have to add the number killed through blasting, fire, etc., which cannot be counted.” (1061- PS)

Although the Jews lost the fight, the point is that they RESISTED the Nazis and that is cause for celebration.  The Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto were eventually taken to Treblinka and killed in gas chambers, but at least they tried.

I previously blogged about Treblinka here and here and here.

Why did the Nazis build a gas chamber at Dachau if they weren’t going to use it?

Most of the tour guides at Dachau tell visitors that the gas chamber at Dachau was never used.  A few of the tour guides tell tourists that the Dachau gas chamber was used “a few times for individual gassing, but not for mass gassing.”   Sometimes, the tourists are told that the gas chamber at Dachau was used, but only for testing the amount of gas needed to kill people. Another explanation given for the Dachau gas chamber, that was never used, is that it was built to train the SS men in how to operate a gas chamber.

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

Although Dachau was equipped with this gas chamber, the chamber was never used. Historians are not sure why.

The last time that I visited the Dachau Memorial Site in May 2007, there was a sign on the wall of the undressing room with these words:

Gas Chamber

This is the center of potential mass murder. The room was disguised as “showers” and equipped with fake shower spouts to mislead the victims and prevent them from refusing to enter the room. During a period of 15 to 20 minutes up to 150 at a time could be suffocated to death through prussic acid poison gas (Zyklon B).

Note the very clever wording: “potential mass murder” and “could be suffocated to death.”  Up to 150 people at a time could have potentially been suffocated to death with Zyklon-B gas, but strangely, this never happened.

The Baracke X building where the Dachau gas chamber is located

Beginning in February 1942, Jews in Germany and the German-occupied countries were rounded up by the Nazis and deported to the East, according to plans made for “The Final Solution to the Jewish Question in Europe” at the Wannsee Conference on January 20, 1942.  It was at this point, in April 1942, that the Nazis decided to build a homicidal gas chamber in a new building at Dachau called Baracke X, which is shown in the photo above. This was like locking the barn door after the horse had been stolen.  With all the Jews being sent to the east, whom were the Nazis planning to gas at Dachau?

On the blueprints for Baracke X, the homicidal gas chamber was called a shower room, but each of the four disinfection chambers in the same buillding was called a Gaskammer, the German word for gas chamber. The photo below shows the door into one of the disinfection chambers.  A few of the tour guides at Dachau tell visitors that these rooms were homicidal gas chambers.

Door into one of the four disinfection chambers in Baracke X at Dachau

An order was issued from Berlin on July 23, 1942 to begin construction of Baracke X at a cost of 150,000 Reichsmark.

By the time that Baracke X was finished in 1943, millions of European Jews had already been killed in the gas chambers at Treblinka, Belzec and Sobibor after being transported to the East, and millions more were destined to be sent to the death camps at Auschwitz and Majdanek. Dachau was mainly a camp for Communist political prisoners, anti-Fascist resistance fighters (most of whom were Catholic) and Soviet POWs.  Dachau was not an “extermination camp” for the genocide of the Jews.

When American soldiers liberated Dachau on April 29, 1945, they saw the disinfection chambers at Dachau and assumed that they were being used to gas the Jews at Dachau.

The Report of the Atrocities Committed at Dachau Concentration Camp, signed by Col. David Chavez, Jr., JAGD, 7 May 1945 is quoted below:

The new building had a gas chamber for executions… the gas chamber was labeled “shower room” over the entrance and was a large room with airtight doors and double glassed lights, sealed and gas proof. The ceiling was studded with dummy shower heads. A small observation peephole, double glassed and hermetically sealed was used to observe the conditions of the victims. There were grates in the floor. Hydrogen cyanide was mixed in the room below, and rose into the gas chamber and out the top vents.

The tour guides at Dachau no longer claim that the poison gas was mixed in the basement of Baracke X, from which it rose through the floor drains and was then vented out of empty light fixture boxes, as was explained in the U.S. Army Report. The first time that I visited Dachau in 1998, there was a sign in one corner of the gas chamber which said, in 5 languages, that the gas chamber was never used, or never put into operation.  So why did the Nazis build a gas chamber if they weren’t going to use it?  Did they anticipate that some day there would be a huge Holocaust industry and they didn’t want to disappoint the thousands of tourists who would want the thrill of seeing a dark, creepy gas chamber with a 7.6 ft. ceiling?

As far as I know, no explanation has ever been given for why the Nazis would have built a gas chamber at Dachau, but then never used it.

As the old saying goes: “You had to be there.”  If you have stayed with me this long, dear reader, you deserve an explanation of what happened at Dachau and why, which I am now going to give you.

Building in town of Dachau

By March 1933, the Nazis has taken over every town in Germany, including Dachau.  The building on the left in the photo above is where the Nazis raised their flag on March 9, 1933 after they took over the town of Dachau.

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 in January 1933.

Under the Gleichschaltung policy, every member of the Nazi party was given a second job in addition to his regular job.  Heinrich Himmler was given a second job as the supervisor of the German prisons.  On his first visit to the Munich prison, Himmler noted that the prison was overcrowded because Communists had been rounded up after the fire in the German Reichstag on February 27, 1933 and sent to “wild camps” or to regular prisons, including the Munich prison.

On March 22, 1933, Heinrich Himmler opened the first Nazi concentration camp in Germany at an old factory just outside of the town of Dachau. The first prisoners were 200 Communists who had been taken into “protective custody” after the burning of the Reichstag on the night of February 27, 1933; the justification for the imprisonment of the Communists was that they were “enemies of the state.”

Here is a little history of Germany to put everything into context:

Following World War I, Germany became a democratic Republic with a Constitution based on the American Constitution. After Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany on January 30, 1933, a new congressional election was required to confirm his appointment. In the election which took place on March 5, 1933, the Nazis gained enough seats in the Reichstag (German Congress) so that, with the help of other conservative parties, they were able to pass legislation on March 7th which ended state’s rights in Germany. This legislation allowed Hitler to unite Germany for the first time into “ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer” (one people, one empire, one leader).

After this legislation was put into effect on March 9, 1933, all the German states were now controlled by the federal government, under the rule of the Nazis; the governors of each state and all the government positions of any importance were now appointed by the Nazis, and of course, the appointees were loyal members of the Nazi party. The Nazi term for this new unity among the German people was Gleichschaltung; it meant that everyone was on the same page with all the people pulling together, united in their beliefs and objectives.

After March 9, 1933, the former German states, such as Prussia and Bavaria, no longer had state’s rights and the German people were now ruled by one government and one leader for the first time ever in the history of the world. One reason that the Nazis wanted to bring all the German states under their central control was to make sure that Bavaria would never again be taken over by the Communists which was what happened on November 7, 1918 when Jewish leader Kurt Eisner led a revolution, forced the King of Bavaria to resign, and then set up a Communist Republic in Bavaria.

Building in town of Dachau where prisoners were kept for one day before the concentration camp was opened

The building shown in the photo above is located down the street from the Brückenwirt Inn at Brunngartenstrasse 5 in the town of Dachau. This building was being used as a gymnasium when it figured prominently in Dachau history. It was here that the Communists, who had been arrested by the Nazis on March 21, 1933, were first brought when they were taken into “protective custody.” The concentration camp at Dachau did not open until the next day.

The basic plan of the Nazis, who were Fascist, was to save the country of Germany from the Communists.  The purpose of the Dachau camp was to lock up the Communists and other “enemies of the state,” not to gas the Jews.  The Jews were “transported to the East” to be gassed.  So a gas chamber at Dachau was totally unnecessary.  No gas chamber existed at Dachau until the American liberators of the camp created one for the benefit of tourists.