48,000 Bulgarian Jews were saved from the Holocaust

Fox News is reporting that today (March 10, 2013), Bulgaria is commemorating the rescue of the Bulgarian Jews from the Nazis during World War II.  How did that happen?  Hint: Bulgaria and Germany were allies and Bulgaria refused Hitler’s order to deport the Bulgarian Jews to the death camps.

How do we know how many Jews there were in Bulgaria during World War II?  On January 20, 1942, the Wannsee Conference took place in a mansion in a suburb of Berlin; the minutes of that meeting listed the number of Jews in all of Europe, including 48,000 Jews in Bulgaria. It was at the Wannsee Conference that “The Final Solution to the Jewish Question in Europe,” aka the “Genocide of the Jews,” was planned.

Were there any Bulgarians among the 4 million Jews that were killed at Auschwitz-Birkenau, according to the Soviet Union? After the war, the Soviets prepared the following report which includes Bulgarians among the 4 million:

DOCUMENT 008-USSR

Report by the Soviet War Crimes Commission, 6 May 1945

There were usually 200,000 inmates at one time in the extermination camp of Auschwitz. Over 4 million people from the countries occupied by Germany were killed in Auschwitz, in most cases by gas immediately after their arrival; the remainder were first used for labour or for medical experiments and later killed in various ways (injections, ill treatment etc.). Details relating to the camp and the persons responsible for the crimes.

Description

Record no. 56 of the Soviet War Crimes Commission, second edition. Russian language. Signatures ink. With German translation.  [...]

Since the Germans also burnt a great number of bodies on pyres, the capacity of the installations for the extermination of human beings in Auschwitz must be considered to be much higher in fact than this figure would suggest. But even when one considers that individual crematoria may not have worked to full capacity, or they might have been shut down for repairs part of the time, the technical commission established that the German hangmen killed not less than 4,000,000 citizens of the USSR, Poland, France, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Roumania, Hungary, Bulgaria, Holland, Belgium, and other countries during the period of the existence of Auschwitz camp.

Read more at http://www.scrapbookpages.com/AuschwitzScrapbook/History/Articles/SovietCharges.html

The 4 million figure, which included citizens of Bulgaria, has now been changed to 1.1 million by the Auschwitz Museum.

This quote is from the Fox News story which you can read in full here:

SOFIA, Bulgaria –  Bulgarians on Sunday commemorated public protests that led to the rescue of more than 48,000 Jewish countrymen from deportation to Nazi death camps.

Ceremonies across the country Sunday marked the 70th anniversary of protests by Bulgarian clergymen, intellectuals, politicians and others that ultimately stopped the Nazis from deporting any Jews from Bulgaria.

Though an ally of Germany during the war, Bulgaria was the only Eastern European country that saved its Jews from the Holocaust. This act of salvation is a unique chapter in the history of the Holocaust, but its full story remained largely unknown until the fall of communism in Bulgaria in 1989.

But Parliament admitted for the first time on Friday that Jews were deported to Nazi concentration camps from areas under Bulgarian control during World War II.

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/world/2013/03/10/bulgarians-commemorate-anniversary-rescue-country-jews-from-holocaust/#ixzz2NADT2VWf

Monument at Mauthausen in honor of Bulgarian resistance fighters

But what about the monuments to the Bulgarians at Mauthausen and Treblinka? The photo above shows a monument at the Mauthausen Memorial Site that was erected in 1976 in honor of the Bulgarian “political prisoners” at Mauthausen.  The “political prisoners” in the Mauthausen camp may or may not have been Jews; they were sent to the Mauthausen Class III concentration camp because they were captured Resistance Fighters, who were fighting as illegal combatants in World War II.

Hungary was also an ally of Germany and the Hungarian Jews were sent to Nazi camps in May 1944.  The photo below shows a monument to the Hungarian Jews that were sent to Mauthausen because they were Resistance fighters.

Monument to Hungarians that were sent to Mauthausen

At the Treblinka Memorial Site, there are 10 monuments to the countries from which Jews were sent to Treblinka.  The photo below shows the stones for Poland and Czechoslovakia.  Unfortunately, I didn’t take a picture of the stone for Bulgaria.

Two of the 10 stones at Treblinka in honor of countries

At the Treblinka Memorial Site, below where a symbolic cemetery is located, there are 10 large stones with the names of the countries from which the victims came. These countries were Poland, Czechoslovakia, Germany, Austria, the Soviet Union, Greece, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, France, and Belgium. According to Martin Gilbert in his book “Holocaust Journey,” there were 13,000 Jews deported to Treblinka from the Greek provinces of Macedonia and Thrace, which were then occupied by Bulgaria, so their stone says “Bulgaria.” Bulgaria was an ally of Germany, but no Jews from that country were deported. There is another stone at Treblinka for the 43,000 Jews from German-occupied Greece.

The following is a quote from the Judgment handed down at the Nuremberg IMT:

German missions were sent to such satellite countries as Hungary and Bulgaria, to arrange for the shipment of Jews to extermination camps and it is known that by the end of 1944, 400,000 Jews from Hungary had been murdered at Auschwitz. Evidence has also been given of the evacuation of 110,000 Jews from part of Romania for “liquidation.” Adolf Eichmann, who had been put in charge of this programme by Hitler, has estimated that the policy pursued resulted in the killing of 6,000,000 Jews, of which 4,000,000 were killed in the extermination institutions.

Note that the judgement at Nuremberg did not say that Jews were sent to extermination camps from Bulgaria.

Adolf Eichmann did not testify at the Nuremberg IMT, although he was quoted in the Judgement. The text of the Judgment at Nuremberg, with regard to the killing of 6 million Jews in the Holocaust, was mostly based on hearsay testimony given in an affidavit, dated 26 November 1945, by former SS officer Wilhelm Höttl. Höttl stated that Adolf Eichmann, the head of the Jewish section of the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA), had told him in August 1944 that four million Jews had been killed in the extermination camps, and another two million had been killed by the Einsatzgruppen on the Eastern front. After the German surrender in May 1945, Höttl had been recruited to work with American intelligence.

What about the other “death camps,” for example, Majdanek?  According to a book entitled Majdanek, by Jozef Marszalek, which I purchased in 1998 at the Visitor’s Center at the Majdanek Memorial Site, the prisoners at Majdanek were from these 28 countries: Albania, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, China, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Great Britain, Greece, Holland, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway, Poland, Romania, Spain, Sweden, Turkey, the USSR, the United States of America, and Yugoslavia.  Note that Bulgaria is mentioned, as is the United States of America.  It could be that the prisoners from Bulgaria, at the Majdanek camp, were not Jews. Or maybe they were from countries occupied by Bulgaria.

Getting  back to the Wannsee Conference, the mansion where the Conference was held is now a Museum.

Section 7 in the Wannsee Museum is about the “Deportations” which was “the sending of the Jews to concentration camps in the East, beginning in February 1942.”

Section 8 in the Wannsee Museum is devoted to the “Countries of Deportation.” According to the Museum, when I visited in 2001, Jews from the following countries were deported to the east: Albania, Belgium, Bulgaria, Denmark, Germany, France, Greece, Italy, Yugoslavia, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Austria, Poland, Romania, the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, and last of all, Hungary.

Again, it could be that Bulgaria was included in the list of countries, from which Jews were deported, because those countries were occupied by Bulgaria.

Why is there so much nit-picking about whether or not Bulgarian Jews were deported?

This quote from the Fox News story tells why:

Though an ally of Germany during the war, Bulgaria was the only Eastern European country that saved its Jews from the Holocaust. This act of salvation is a unique chapter in the history of the Holocaust, but its full story remained largely unknown until the fall of communism in Bulgaria in 1989.

But Parliament admitted for the first time on Friday that Jews were deported to Nazi concentration camps from areas under Bulgarian control during World War II.

“The objective evaluation of the historic events cannot ignore the fact that 11,343 Jews were deported from northern Greece and the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, then under German jurisdiction,” legislators said in a declaration and expressed regrets that “the local Bulgarian administration had not been in a position to stop this act.”

The Shalom Organization of Jews in Bulgaria had repeatedly demanded the state to take responsibility for the deportations.

“The Bulgarian government must assume the moral responsibility for the Nazi death camp deportation of ethnic Jews from the regions of Thrace and Macedonia regardless of the fact that Bulgaria saved its almost 50,000 Jews,” the group’s chairman, Maxim Benvenisti, told The Associated Press before the declaration.

It is all about the burden of shame, for allowing Jews to be sent to camps, and it’s about reparations that must be paid to the Jews by the countries that deported Jews during World War II.  What about German citizens who were kidnapped in South America, during World War II, and imprisoned in internment camps in America?  Do they deserve any reparations?  No, nobody cares about them.

What is the meaning of the girl in the Red Coat in Schindler’s List?

The girl in the red coat in the movie Schindler’s List

Schindler’s List is now out on Blu-Ray and there is renewed interest in this fictional movie.  The photo above shows one of the scenes from the movie, which is loosely based on history.

In March 1941, the Jews in the area of Krakow, Poland had been put into a walled ghetto in Podgorze, a district of Krakow. This ghetto is depicted in the movie, Schindler’s List, but the actual scenes were filmed nearby in the old Jewish quarter called Kazimierz because there are modern buildings in Podgorze now, while Kazimierz was still in its original state in 1993.

Jews are being forced to move into the Podgorze ghetto

On March 13, 1943, a Saturday, the Podgorze ghetto in Krakow, Poland was officially closed and around 6,000 Jews who were able to work were sent to the Plaszow forced labor camp, while around 2,000 children and old people were sent to other camps, including Auschwitz II, also known as Birkenau, which was both a labor camp and a death camp.

The next stage of the Final Solution for the Krakow Jews was the liquidation of the Podgorze ghetto and the transportation of the remaining Jews to the forced labor camp at Plaszow on March 13 and 14, 1943. Before the liquidation of the ghetto, there were 2,000 prisoners at the Plaszow camp, all of them Jews. Afterwards, the camp population rose to 8,000. At this point, Plaszow was still not a concentration camp, but a penal labor camp under the jurisdiction of local SS men in the General Government, as the central section of occupied Poland was called by the Nazis. According to the novel Schindler’s Ark, it was because Plaszow was a labor camp, under local authority, that the random killing of prisoners by Amon Goeth did not command much attention among the top brass. The novel Schindler’s Ark explains that executions and floggings at all of the concentration camps had to be approved by the central administrative office in Berlin, but not at the labor camps.

Until the middle of 1943, all the prisoners at the Plaszow forced labor camp were Jews. In July 1943, a separate section was fenced off for Polish prisoners who were sent to the camp for breaking the laws of the German occupational government. Polish prisoners served their sentences and were then released from the prison. The Jews remained in the camp indefinitely. Many Jews were sent on to the Auschwitz concentration camp, only 60 kilometers southwest of Krakow.

The Schindler Jews at first lived in the Plaszow camp and walked 2.5 kilometers to and from Schindler’s enamelware factory each day. The factory was in an ordinary-looking, modern, but dreary building in Krakow. Then Schindler bribed Plaszow Commandant Amon Goeth to let his workers move into barracks which he built in the courtyard of the factory. Schindler himself lived in a nondescript gray apartment building close to his factory. When I visited Krakow in 1998, Schindler’s factory building was being used by an electronics factory called Toplar. It is now a Museum for tourists.

There were many small sub-camps, such as the Schindler factory, in the Nazi labor camp system, but none where the prisoners were so well treated. The Nazis provided food for the Schindler Jews, but Schindler spent the equivalent of $360,000 to provide extra food, which he bought on the black market, for his prisoners.

One day, Oskar Schindler was out riding his horse, along a bridal path on a hill overlooking the Podgorze ghetto, when he saw the girl in the red coat among the Jews being marched out of the ghetto, walking on their way to the Plaszow camp.

View of the ghetto from the hill where Oskar Schindler saw the girl in the red coat

In the photo above, you can see a red car, driving on Krakusa Street, where Oskar Schindler saw the girl in the red coat.

The photo below shows the bridal path along the edge of the hill overlooking Krakusa Street. This is where Schindler looked down from his horse and saw 7,000 Jews being marched out of the Podgorze ghetto, according to the novel, Schindler’s Ark. The bridal path was overgrown with trees when I took this photo in 1998.

The bridal path where Oskar Schindler was riding when he saw the girl in the red coat

The only non-Jewish inhabitant of the Podgorze ghetto was a master pharmacist named Tadeusz Pankiewicz. His Eagle Pharmacy was located at #18 on the cobble-stoned Plac Zgody which was the main square where selections took place and from where transports of Jews were sent to the Belzec death camp. I previously blogged here about how Amon Goeth took bribes from the Jews in exchange for not sending them to Belzec.

In 1993, the same year that the movie Schindler’s List was filmed, the Eagle Pharmacy building was turned into a National Memorial Museum. I visited the museum in 1998 and saw  displays which showed pictures of the roundup and deportation of the Jews of Krakow. There was also a photo of Amon Goeth on display.

In 1947, Tadeusz Pankiewicz published his memoirs called The Pharmacy in the Krakow Ghetto. It is an account of how his pharmacy became a meeting place for the Jews in the ghetto where they could get information from the underground press. Letters were sent from and received at the pharmacy. It was also a hiding place for Jews whom the Nazis were trying to arrest for violations of their laws. According to the novel Schindler’s Ark, the pharmacy was where messages were passed between the Jewish Combat Organization (ZOB) and the partisans of the Polish People’s Army, the two main groups which fought the Nazis in guerrilla warfare during World War II. In the movie, Schindler’s List, there is no mention of how Jewish partisans resisted the Nazis and helped to defeat the Germans in World War II.

So what does all this have to do with the girl in the red coat?  In the novel, Schindler’s Ark, Oskar Schindler sees the body of the little girl in the red coat and at that point, he realizes that he should do something to save the Jews.  Prior to this, Schindler had only been concerned with making lots of money by using the labor of Jews from the Podgorze ghetto. Using the labor of non-Jewish workers in his factory would have been at a much higher cost.

Did all this really happen?  No, the girl in the red coat is symbolic, although she is based on a real girl in the ghetto, who was not killed.

The following quote is from an article in the Huffington Post about the movie Schindler’s List, which you can read in full here:

The name Oliwia Dabrowska holds little meaning to film buffs, but the 23-year-old’s first movie role was quite significant. Dabrowska played “Red Genia” or the “girl in the red coat” in Steven Spielberg’s “Schindler’s List.” [...]

Dabrowska’s “red coat girl” has been the subject of much discussion and interpretation since “Schindler’s List” was released in 1993. The character bore surface similarities to Holocaust survivor Roma Ligocka, who was known for her red coat in the Krakow Ghetto, and wrote a memoir about her experiences. (Unlike Ligocka, Dabrowska’s “red coat girl” died in “Schindler’s List.”) Spielberg himself has said the significance of the red coat, the only splash of color in the black-and-white film, has more to do with reminding viewers of the way citizens of the world allowed the Holocaust to happen:

[ Spielberg said this] “America and Russia and England all knew about the Holocaust when it was happening, and yet we did nothing about it. We didn’t assign any of our forces to stopping the march toward death, the inexorable march toward death. It was a large bloodstain, primary red color on everyone’s radar, but no one did anything about it. And that’s why I wanted to bring the color red in.”

This quote from Wikipedia also gives the same words spoken by Steven Spielberg:

While the film is shot primarily in black-and-white, red is used to distinguish a little girl in a coat (portrayed by Oliwia Dabrowska). Later in the film, the girl appears to be one of the dead Jewish people, recognizable only by the red coat she is still wearing. Although it was unintentional, this character is coincidentally very similar to Roma Ligocka, who was known in the Kraków Ghetto for her red coat. Ligocka, unlike her fictional counterpart, survived the Holocaust. After the film was released, she wrote and published her own story, The Girl in the Red Coat: A Memoir (2002, in translation).[18] The scene, however, was constructed on the memories of Zelig Burkhut, survivor of Plaszow (and other work camps). When interviewed by Spielberg before the film was made, Burkhut told of a young girl wearing a pink coat, no older than four, who was shot by a Nazi officer right before his eyes. When being interviewed by The Courier-Mail, he said “it is something that stays with you forever.”

According to Andy Patrizio of IGN, the girl in the red coat is used to indicate that Schindler has changed: “Spielberg put a twist on her [Ligocka's] story, turning her into one more pile on the cart of corpses to be incinerated. The look on Schindler’s face is unmistakable. Minutes earlier, he saw the ash and soot of burning corpses piling up on his car as just an annoyance.”[19] Andre Caron wondered whether it was done “to symbolize innocence, hope or the red blood of the Jewish people being sacrificed in the horror of the Holocaust?”[20] Spielberg himself has explained that he only followed the novel, and his interpretation was that

“America and Russia and England all knew about the Holocaust when it was happening, and yet we did nothing about it. We didn’t assign any of our forces to stopping the march toward death, the inexorable march toward death. It was a large bloodstain, primary red color on everyone’s radar, but no one did anything about it. And that’s why I wanted to bring the color red in.”[21]

This quote, about the girl in the red coat, is also from Wikipedia:

Schindler prepares to leave Kraków with his fortune. He finds himself unable to do so, however, and prevails upon Goeth to allow him to keep his workers so he can move them to a factory in his old home of Zwittau-Brinnlitz, away from the Final Solution. Goeth charges a massive bribe for each worker. Schindler and Stern assemble a list of workers to be kept off the trains to Auschwitz.

[...]   The train carrying the women is accidentally redirected to Auschwitz. Schindler bribes the camp commander, Rudolf Höß, with a cache of diamonds in exchange for releasing the women to Brinnlitz.

Contrary to what Wikipedia says, Schindler did NOT “prevail upon Goeth to allow him to keep his workers.”  By that point in the movie, Goeth had been arrested by the Nazis and he was awaiting trial in Dr. Georg Konrad Morgen’s court.  Goeth had disappeared from the movie and nothing more was said about him.

Schindler and Stern did NOT assemble a list of workers to be kept off the trains to Auschwitz.  Schindler’s famous list was a list of workers to be sent to the Gross Rosen concentration camp because Schindler was setting up a sub-camp of Gross Rosen near his old home town.

Rudolf Höß was NOT the “camp commander” at the time that Schindler bribed someone to release the women to Brinnlitz.

Rudolf Hoess is shown on the right in this photo from the Auschwitz Album

Dr. Josef Mengele, the man who selected Jews for the gas chamber at the Birkenau death camp, is shown in the center of the photo above. On his left is Richard Baer, the last commandant of the Auschwitz main camp and on his right is Rudolf Höß (aka Rudolf Hoess), who had been the first Commandant of the whole Auschwitz complex; he was given this assignment on May 1, 1940. Höß was relieved of his duties as the Commandant of the Auschwitz complex at the end of November 1943 and promoted to a position in the Economic Administration Head Office (WHVA) in Oranienburg.

On May 8, 1944, Höß was brought back to Auschwitz to be the Commander of the SS men at Auschwitz and to supervise the gassing of the Hungarian Jews. (According to Laurence Rees, in his book Auschwitz, a New History, Hoess was also given authority over the Commandants of the Auschwitz II and Auschwitz III camps when he came back in May 1944.)  Auschwitz II was Auschwitz-Birkenau, the death camp.

I believe that Spielberg is completely wrong in his claim that “America and Russia and England all knew about the Holocaust when it was happening, and yet we did nothing about it.”  What is today known as “the Holocaust” was mostly unknown until many years after World War II.

Update March 7, 2013:
I neglected to explain why Oskar Schindler REALLY made up a list of Jews to be saved from certain death.

Oskar Schindler’s real motive in saving a list of 1200 Jews was to save his own skin, not to save these 1200 Jews.  Schindler knew that he would be put on trial as a war criminal, after the war, because he was the commander of a sub-camp of the Plaszow camp. He knew that the Allies had already made up new crimes, under which the war criminals would be prosecuted after the war.

Schindler knew that the Allies had already made up new laws, such as the “common plan” principle, under which the war criminals would be prosecuted.  Under the “common plan” concept, anyone who had any connection to a concentration camp, in any capacity whatsoever, would be automatically guilty of a war crime.

By saving 1200 Jews in a new sub-camp of the Gross Rosen concentration camp, he would have a defense to the “common plan” principle. He would have 1200 Jews to put in a good word for him and save him.  That is exactly what happened: Schindler was not put on trial after the war, and the Jews that he had saved took care of him for the rest of his life.

New book about Felix Sparks gives a new perspective on the liberation of Dachau and the Dachau massacre

You can read a review of Alex Kershaw’s new book entitled The Liberator here. The liberator in the title is Lt. Col. Felix Sparks, commander of the 3rd Battalion, 157th Infantry Regiment, 45th Division of the US Seventh Army, the first unit to arrive at the Dachau complex, which consisted of an SS garrison and a concentration camp.

It was Sparks who fired a shot into the air to stop the killing of German soldiers with their hands in the air, an event known today as the Dachau massacre.  The Dachau massacre was kept secret for 40 years, and many people today still don’t believe it.

German soldiers being executed at Dachau by 45th Division soldiers

Felix Sparks fires a shot into the air to stop the killing of unarmed German soldiers

In the two photos above, note the German soldiers standing against a wall with their hands up; the second photo shows Lt. Col. Felix Sparks firing a shot into the air to stop the massacre.

I received a notice from Amazon today telling me that this new book is out; in the past, I have purchased many books about Dachau and the liberation of the camp.

This quote is from the review of the book which you can read in full here:

….. Kershaw’s exploration of what relentless combat can do to the mind. By Sept. 1944, he notes, more than 100,000 men had been pulled off the line due to combat fatigue.

“According to the U.S. Army surgeon general, all men in rifle battalions became psychiatric casualties after 200 days in combat. ‘There aren’t any iron men,’ declared one army psychiatrist. ‘The strongest personality, subjected to sufficient stress over a sufficient length of time, is going to disintegrate.’ ”

This happens at Dachau. Completely unprepared for what awaits them, and having fought for far too long, some of Sparks’s men crack, and begin shooting and killing unarmed SS men. Sparks manages to stop it, but is held responsible anyway. As fortune would have it, his case winds up on the desk of four-star General George S. Patton in May, 1945.

“There is no point in an explanation,” Patton tells him. “I have already had these charges investigated, and they are a bunch of crap. I’m going to tear up these goddamn papers on you and your men.”

“You have been a damn fine soldier.”

A sentiment this deeply researched and affecting book makes abundantly clear.

I have not read the book yet, so I don’t know if the author mentions that, while the 45th Division was busy killing unarmed German soldiers in the SS garrison that was right next to the camp, the 42nd Division was accepting the surrender of the camp from a German officer.

Surrender of the Dachau concentration camp to the 42nd Division under a white flag of truce

The 45th Division “liberated” the SS garrison, killing wounded Wehrmacht prisoners, along with SS men who had been sent to surrender the camp.  The concentration camp, which was within the walls of the SS garrison, was “surrendered,” not “liberated” in the sense that it was defended and soldiers had to be killed in order to take over the concentration camp by force.

You can read about the surrender of the Dachau concentration camp on my website here.

You can read about the role of the 45th Division in the “liberation” of Dachau on my website here.

The following quote is also from the review of the book:

In France, in the waning months of the war, this almost gets him [Felix Sparks] killed, as he leads a charge to rescue some cut-off forces. As he exits his tank to rescue some wounded, the Germans have an easy shot and Sparks is as good as dead. Astonishingly though, an SS machine gunner by the name of Johann Voss holds his fire. Given the ruthless reputation of the SS, this is a shocking revelation, but Kerhsaw explains: “There was no honor to be gained, said Voss, by drilling a brave officer with 7.2mm bullets as he tried to help his wounded men. Indeed, there was a silent understanding among the SS watching Sparks. Killing him would be wrong.”

So this new book is going to point out that at least one SS soldier fought honorably during World War II?  Was this what caused Lt. Col. Felix Sparks to stop the killing of unarmed German soldiers, about whom Col. Howard Buechner wrote: “Public outrage would certainly have opposed the prosecution of American heroes for eliminating a group of sadists who so richly deserved to die.”

Col. Buechner’s account of the Dachau massacre is quite controversial; you can read about it on my website here.

“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.

the elusive Lt. Heinrich Skodzensky, alleged Commandant of the SS garrison at Dachau

This popular website begins the timeline of the surrender of the Dachau concentration camp with the story of Lt. Heinrich Skodzensky, who surrendered the SS garrison at the Dachau complex on April 29, 1945.  This quote is from the website:

06:00 Waffen SS-Obersturmführer (Lt.) Heinrich Skodzensky, the new, hastily designated Camp Commandant, holds morning roll call for the garrison now guarding Dachau. His roll call tallied 560 men, many of them in hospital. A mere lieutenant had never before commanded the massive concentration camp, but the real SS Commandant, Martin Gottfried Weiss, had “run off” the day before, along with more than a thousand of the Allgemeine and Death’s Head SS guards stationed at the camp prior to the American approach. Skodzensky’s orders were to surrender. (Dachau Archive)

Was there really a man named Heinrich Skodzensky at Dachau when the camp was liberated?  Of course! Several books written by eye-witnesses mention him.  For example, the book entitled The Day of the Americans, written by Nerin E. Gun, a Turkish journalist who was a political prisoner in the camp.

Regarding the liberation of Dachau, Nerin E. Gun  wrote the following about what happened when the Americans reached the gate house into the concentration camp prison compound:

Then came the first American jeeps: a GI got out and opened the gate. Machine-gun fire burst from the center watchtower, the very one which since morning had been flying the white flag! The jeeps turned about and an armored tank came on. With a few bursts, it silenced the fire from the watchtower. The body of an SS man fell off the platform and came crashing loudly to the asphalt of the little square.

Gun wrote that the International Committee of Dachau, headed by Patrick O’Leary, had set up its headquarters at 9 a.m. on April 29th in Block 1, the barracks building that was the closest to the gate house of the prison compound. This was the building that housed the camp library. Gun wrote that Lt. Heinrich Skodzensky had arrived at Dachau on April 27th and on April 29th, the day of the liberation, he had remained in the gate house all that day.

In his book The Day of the Americans, Gun quoted Patrick O’Leary (real name Albert Guérisse) as follows:

“I ascertain that the Americans are now masters of the situation. I go toward the officer who has come down from the tank, introduce myself and he embraces me. He is a major. His uniform is dusty, his shirt, open almost to the navel, is filthy, soaked with sweat, his helmet is on crooked, he is unshaven and his cigarette dangles from the left corner of his lip.

“At this point, the young Teutonic lieutenant, Heinrich Skodzensky, emerges from the guard post and comes to attention before the American officer. The German is blond, handsome, perfumed, his boots glistening, his uniform well-tailored. He reports, as if he were on the military parade grounds near the Unter den Linden during an exercise, then very properly raising his arm he salutes with a very respectful “Heil Hitler!” and clicks his heels.

[...]

“Am I dreaming? It seems that I can see before me the striking contrast of a beast and a god. Only that the Boche is the one who looks divine.

(Boche is a French derogatory term for a German person.)

[...]

“The major gave an order, the jeep with the young German officer in it went outside the camp again. A few minutes went by, my comrades had not yet dared to come out of their barracks, for at that distance they could not tell the outcome of the negotiations between the American officer and the SS men.

“Then I hear several shots.

“The bastard is dead! the American major says to me.

“He gives some orders, transmitted to the radiomen in the jeeps, and more officers start arriving, newspapermen, little trucks. Now the prisoners have understood, they jump on the Americans, embrace them, kiss their feet, their hands; the celebration is on.”

Did anyone else write about the death of Lt. Heinrich Skodensky?  Of course!  In a book entitled The Day the War Ended, Martin Gilbert wrote the following about the liberation of Dachau, based on the account given by British SOE agent Albert Guérisse who was usng the name Patrick O’Leary in the camp:

As the first American officer, a major, descended from his tank, “the young Teutonic lieutenant, Heinrich Skodzensky,” emerged from the guard post and came to attention before the American officer. The German is blond, handsome, perfumed, his boots glistening, his uniform well-tailored. He reports as if he were on the military parade grounds near Unter den Linden during an exercise, then very properly raising his arm he salutes with a very respectful “Heil Hitler!” and clicks his heels. “I hereby turn over to you the concentration camp of Dachau, 30,000 residents, 2,340 sick, 27,000 on the outside, 560 garrison troops.”

The American major did not return the German Lieutenant’s salute. He hesitates a moment as if he were trying to make sure he is remembering the adequate words. Then he spits into the face of the German, “Du Schweinehund!” And then, “Sit down here” – pointing to the rear seat of one of the jeeps which in the meantime have driven up. The major gave an order, the jeep with the young German officer in it went outside the camp again. A few minutes went by. Then I heard several shots.

Lieutenant Skodzensky was dead. Within an hour, all five hundred of his garrison troops were to be killed, some by the inmates themselves but more than three hundred of them by the American soldiers who had been literally sickened by what they saw of rotting corpses and desperate starving inmates. In one incident, an American lieutenant (1st Lt. Jack Bushyhead) machine gunned 346 of the SS guards after they had surrendered and were lined up against a wall. The lieutenant, who had entered Dachau a few moments earlier, had just seen the corpses of the inmates piled up around the camp crematorium and at the railway station.

Jack Bushyhead had just been given a tour of the crematorium area by Albert Guérisse, aka Patrick O’Leary.

In his book entitled Deliverance Day, Michael Selzer wrote that the American liberators marched 122 SS soldiers, who had surrendered at the Dachau Concentration Camp, to a wall and with their hands up, shot them with machine guns. Included among the 122 SS soldiers was the Commander of the SS garrison, Lt. Heinrich Skodzensky, who had only moments before surrendered the camp to Colonel Jackson of the 45th Thunderbird division, saying in English, “I am the commanding officer of the guard in the camp, and I herewith surrender the camp to your forces.” Skodzensky was shot along with the others, dressed in his immaculate black SS uniform, according to Selzer’s account.

Robert H. Abzug wrote in his book entitled Inside the Vicious Heart that the American soldiers had been enraged by Skodzensky’s clean uniform and shined boots in these squalid surroundings, and that is why he was killed.

Strangely, no records of an SS officer named Skodzensky have ever been found and the story of 122 SS soldiers being shot has never been corroborated by any of the American soldiers who were there. The Dachau Memorial Site has no record of Lt. Heinrich Skodzensky in its archives and there is no record of a man named Heinrich Skodzensky in the Berlin Bundesarchiv.

So was there really a man named Heinrich Skodzensky, who was shot down because his black SS uniform was too clean and his boots were too shiny?  What does Wikipedia have to say about it?

This quote is from the German Wikipedia:  “Ein Mann mit diesem Namen [Skodzensky] konnte jedoch nie ermittelt werden, vermutlich ist er identisch mit Heinrich Wicker.”  With my limited knowledge of the German language, I think that German Wikipedia is saying that the man who surrendered the camp was named Heinrich Wicker.

I have written extensively about the surrender of the Dachau camp to Heinrich Wicker.  You can read it in full at http://www.scrapbookpages.com/DachauScrapbook/DachauLiberation/Surrender.html

You can read more about Heinrich Wicker at http://www.scrapbookpages.com/DachauScrapbook/DachauLiberation/Wicker.html

So what actually happened on April 29, 1945, the day that the Dachau camp was liberated?

Dachau was mainly a camp for Communist political prisoners and anti-Fascist resistance fighters who had been captured in the Nazi-occupied countries. On the day of the famous liberation of Dachau, the political prisoners were in control of the concentration camp. The camp Commandant, Wilhelm Eduard Weiter, had left the camp on April 26, 1945, along with a transport of prisoners who were being evacuated to Schloss Itter, a subcamp of Dachau in Austria. Former Commandant Martin Gottfried Weiss was in charge of the camp for two days until he fled, along with most of the regular guards, on the night of April 28, 1945.

Before he left, Weiss had turned the camp over to the International Committee of Dachau, an organization of prisoners inside the camp. Albert Guérisse, a British SOE agent from Belgium, who was hiding his identity by using the name Patrick O’Leary was the head of the International Committee.  Albert Guérisse was one of five British SOE agents who had survived the Nazi concentration camps at Mauthausen in Austria and Natzweiler in Alsace before being transferred to Dachau.

After the 45th Division soldiers had left the Dachau SS garrison and proceeded to the concentration camp, Guérisse greeted Lt. William P. Walsh and 1st Lt. Jack Bushyhead of the 45th Infantry Division at the “Arbeit Macht Frei” gate.  He took them on a tour of the camp, showing them the gas chamber and the ovens in the crematorium.  At this time, the Dachau massacre had already happened.  It was the “Death Train” which triggered the massacre, not the gas chamber or the bodies in the crematorium.

the controversy over the “Dachau Massacre” lives on

I previously blogged about the “Dachau Massacre” here and here and here.  I also blogged about the IG report on the killing of the SS guards at Tower B here.

Famous photo of the “Dachau Massacre”

Today, I did a google search which turned up this entry on a yahoo group. The man that wrote this entry, which I am quoting below, believes that only “around 40″ Hungarian and German soldiers were killed on the day that Dachau was liberated.  Howard Buechner wrote a book in which he said that 560 soldiers were killed by American troops that day.

Quote from a yahoo group:

Warning please…if you are related to Howard Buechner, you will not
necessarily like what I will write there. I will try and be diplomatic, as
diplomatic as one can be towards a Veteran who not only seems to have been
a pathological liar, but also had no qualms about inflicting fellow vets
with new traumas derived from the lies he spread in a self-aggrandizing
little excuse for a history book he wrote in 1986 entitled *The Hour of the
Avenger.*

I wouldn’t trust a word in that book, nor in some others I see he penned.

I have the proof, as best as can be found today. I will be posting it on
that page this week.

It includes copies of the relevant testimony of Buechner in 1945, testimony
he never thought would come to light.

He wrote his malicious book in 1986. The classified IG report only surfaced
in 1990 or 1991. In it he contradicts, without question, the lies he spread
in 1986…and, later for all I know. The army clerk misspelled his name in
the IG report as “Buchner”, but it’s him alright.

I regard the men of the 45th as “heroes” of a sort, with whatever flaws
they bore. My dad was one, both a hero and flawed. He would not have liked
the reputation of such brave men sullied by a noted physician and wanna-be
successful author. Literary critique? Buechner’s writings remind me of that
which an elementary schooler might do with certain terms. He calls himself,
in his mendacious work, “The Witness”. Yeah….right.

He wasn’t the witness to what he writes about, though he arrived later at
the scene. There were others who were. Their testimony is in the IG report.

He should have been court-martialed for dereliction of duty. That was the
recommendation of the investigative officer. Buechner may never have known
that.

Again, apologies if you are related or if you have read and believed that
book.

I have written extensively on my website about Howard Buechner’s account of the “Dachau Massacre.”   This quote is from this page of  my website:

In the first hour of the liberation, while Col. Buechner was setting up his Aid Station in the town of Dachau, 122 SS men had allegedly been “shot on the spot,” after they had surrendered to the 45th Division, according to George Stevens, Jr. who did a documentary film on the liberation; he was quoted by Col. Buechner in his book. The killing of 122 SS men in “the first hour,” was also reported by Michael Seltzer in his book entitled “Deliverance Day,” and subsequently repeated by many other writers. [...]

Stevens also told Col. Buechner that 40 SS guards had been beaten to death by the inmates, or shot with guns given to them by the American liberators, and 20 more SS guards were killed by American soldiers when they attempted to surrender after descending from the guard towers. Another 100 SS guards were murdered in unrelated killings by individual soldiers of both the 42nd and 45th Divisions, according to George Stevens, as told to Col. Buechner. These events had taken place during the 30 minute period of chaos, at the beginning of the liberation, before order could be restored. Lt. Col. Sparks said that during this time, “battle hardened veterans became extremely distraught. Some cried, while others raged. Some thirty minutes passed before I could restore order and discipline.”

When the situation was brought under control, 358 SS men were rounded up and herded into an enclosed area that had been used as a coal yard before the camp had run out of coal. Shortly thereafter, 12 SS men were machine-gunned to death in an execution in front of the coal yard wall.

The photograph below shows American military officers inspecting the bodies of the 12 Waffen-SS soldiers who were executed in the incident at the coal yard.

American soldiers inspect bodies in the coal yard

The execution of the SS men at the coal yard was stopped by Lt. Col. Felix Sparks who kicked a machine gunner away from the gun. According to Lt. Col. Sparks, the machine gunner was a soldier whose nickname was “Birdeye.” Birdeye had shouted “they are trying to get away,” and had then cut loose with his .30 caliber machine gun. This incident brought the total number of dead to 174, according to Col. Buechner. Later, when the 346 Waffen-SS men were allegedly killed on the orders of Lt. Bushyhead, the total number of soldiers executed increased to 520. In addition, Col. Buechner wrote that 30 SS men had been “killed in combat” and 10 had escaped temporarily, but were captured and killed later, bringing the grand total to 560 SS men killed during the liberation of Dachau.

Col. Buechner could have gotten his information about the 560 SS soldiers at Dachau from an article written by Andrew Mello in 1980 in After the Battle. Mello used Nerin E. Gun’s book The Day of the Americans as his source. Gun wrote that an SS officer named Lt. Heinrich Skodzensky had reported that there were 560 SS men under his command when he surrendered the Dachau Army garrison to the men of the 45th Thunderbird Division.

The man who surrendered the Dachau concentration camp was Lt. Heinrich Wicker, who was accompanied by a civilian Red Cross representative.

The total number of enemy soldiers who were killed by American soldiers at Dachau is unknown. Howard Buechner wrote his book after getting information from Private John Degro, who was there when the camp was liberated.  You can read about John Degro on this page of my website.

The following information is from this page of my website:

An investigation was conducted by the US Army between May 3 and May 8, 1945, which resulted in a report entitled “Investigation of Alleged Mistreatment of German Guards at Dachau.” Israel wrote that 23 officers and enlisted men of the 45th Infantry Division and 9 officers and enlisted men of the 42nd Infantry Division were questioned in Pullach and Munich, Germany. Lt. Col. Joseph M. Whitaker headed the investigation; the report, which was filed on June 8, 1945, is sometimes called “the I.G. Report.” In 1991 a copy of the I.G. Report was found in the National Archives in Washington, DC and was made public.

The following paragraphs from the I.G. Report pertain to the shooting of SS men at Dachau by soldiers in the 45th Division:

4. At the entrance to the back area of the Dachau prison grounds, four German soldiers surrendered to Lt. William P. Walsh, 0-414901, in command of Company “I”, 157th Infantry. These prisoners Lt. Walsh ordered into a box car, where he personally shot them. Pvt. Albert C. Pruitt, 34573708, Company “I”157th Infantry, then climbed into the box car where these Germans were on the floor moaning and apparently still alive, and finished them off with his rifle.

5. After entry into the Dachau Camp area, Lt. Walsh segregated from surrendered prisoners of war those who were identified as SS Troops.

6. Such segregated prisoners of war were marched into a separate enclosure, lined up against the wall and shot down by American troops, who were acting under the orders of Lt. Walsh. A light machine gun, carbines, and either a pistol or a sub-machine gun were used. Seventeen of such prisoners of war were killed, and others were wounded.

7. Lt. Jack Bushyhead, 0-1284822, executive officer of Company “I”, participated with Lt. Walsh in this handling of the men and during the course of the shooting personally fired his weapon at these prisoners.

16. Lt. Walsh testified that the SS men were segregated in order to properly guard them, and were then fired upon because they started moving toward the guards. However, the dead bodies were located along the wall against which they had been lined up, they were killed along the entire line, although Lt. Walsh only claims those on one flank moved, and a number of witnesses testified that it was generally “understood” that these prisoners were to be shot when they were being segregated. These facts contradict the defensive explanation given by Lt. Walsh.

There was no mention in the I.G. Report of a second incident in which 346 SS men were allegedly shot at the coal yard wall.

As a result of the investigation, the American soldiers who were involved in the execution of SS men at Dachau were threatened with court-martial, including Lt. Col. Felix Sparks and 1st Lt. Jack Bushyhead. Buechner had not been present during the execution; he was cited in the I.G. Report for dereliction of duty because he refused to give medical aid to the SS men who were still alive after the shooting which resulted in 12 to 17 deaths in the coal yard.

Was there a “gas chamber” at Natzweiler? It depends on your definition of the term “gas chamber.”

In a comment on my blog post about the alleged “gas chamber” at Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp in the French province of Alsace, this statement was written:  “… Carlo Mattogno had conceded in his November 2011 book that the Nazis gassed Jews at Natzweiler-Struthof…”  If you don’t know who Carlo Mattogno is, stop reading this right now and go to the Inconvenient History blog, where you can read his articles about the Holocaust.  Carlo Mattogno is the foremost revisionist scholar; if he says that people were “gassed” at Natzweiler, it must be true.

But…it depends on what Mattogno means by the term “gassed.”  Does he mean “gassed” as in put to death, using poison gas, in a chamber like the one that was formerly used in Jefferson City, MO to execute criminals?  I don’t think so.

The building where Jews were gassed at Natzweiler

Building where criminals were gassed to death in Jefferson City, MO

I visited the Natzweiler-Struthof Memorial Site in 2004 and wrote about the “gas chamber” on my website here.  The building shown in the old black and white photo above, which is about a mile from the former camp, was not open when I was there in 2004.

This quote is from my website page about Natzweiler:

At the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal, charges were brought by the American prosecutor against the Nazis for medical experiments performed at Natzweiler, but there were no documents introduced in which it was claimed that a gas chamber had been used there to murder Jews.

The abandoned Natzweiler camp was discovered by both French and American troops, so it was the responsibility of the French and the American prosecutors to introduce the evidence of the gas chamber there.

On December 9, 1944, Colonel Paul Kirk and Lt. Colonel Edward J. Gully of the US 6th Army made an inspection of the Natzweiler camp, three months after it had been abandoned by the Nazis. According to Robert H. Abzug, the author of Inside the Vicious Heart, they qualified just about every observation that had to do with instruments of death and torture. The following is a quote from Abzug’s book:

They found, among other things, “what appeared to be a disinfestation unit” and “a large pile of hair appearing and reputed to be human female.” They were shown a building with a space “allegedly used as a lethal gas chamber. ” In this building was “a cellar room with a special type elevator,” and “an incinerator room with equipment obviously intended for the burning of human bodies…a cell room and an autopsy room.” Kirk and Gully then described in detail the “so-called lethal gas chamber,” noting every pipe and outlet and its two steel doors. In the cellar they found four coffins and a sheet metal elevator “of a size which would take a human body” with “stains which appeared to be caused by blood.”

Kirk and Gully wrote a report that was sent to the War Crimes Division, in which they referred to a “so-called gas chamber” at Natzweiler. Based on their report, there were no charges, pertaining to a gas chamber at Natzweiler, brought against the Nazis on trial before the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg.

The “so-called lethal gas chamber” that Kirk and Gully mentioned in their report was in the building shown in the photo below.

Crematorium building at Natzweiler-Struthof

What Kirk and Gully saw was the shower room that is located next to the one cremation oven.  The outside wall of this shower room is what is shown in Judisman’s painting.  Yishai Jusidman based his painting on the photo below, which he modified, to make it look like the inside of a gas chamber.

Outside wall of a shower room in the Natzweiler crematorium

When I visited the Natzweiler Memorial Site in October 2004, the room next to the cremation oven was not open to visitors. I peeked through the window shown in the photo above and saw what looked like a shower room. This is probably the “so-called lethal gas chamber” which the two American officers described in their report, but there was no sign on the wall which said that this was a gas chamber. The shower room is not the room that Josef Kramer, the former Commandant of Natzweiler, described in his confession to the British after he was arrested at Bergen-Belsen, where he was the last Commandant of that camp; Kramer described a room in the building that is located about a mile from the camp.

Le Struthof, as the camp is known to the French, was located 31 miles from Strasbourg where Dr. August Hirt, a Professor at the University of Strasbourg, was conducting research on racial characteristics. When he requested Jewish skeletons that were undamaged by bullet holes or body blows, Heinrich Himmler ordered that Jews should be brought from Auschwitz to Natzweiler so that they could be killed in a gas chamber there.

In August 1943, a special gas chamber was constructed by adapting an existing building, formerly owned by the Struthof hotel, which was located about a mile from the concentration camp on a side road. This room had previously been used as a refrigerator room by the hotel.

Killing the Jews in one of the gas chambers at Auschwitz and shipping the skeletons to Strasbourg wouldn’t do – the skeletons had to be prepared with great care by Dr. Hirt himself.

According to a Tübingen Professor, Dr. Hans-Joachim Lang, two anthropologists, who were both members of the SS, Dr. Hans Fleischhacker and Bruno Beger, were sent in June 1943 to Auschwitz to select Jews to be gassed so that their skeletons could be added to the rassistische/rassenideologische collection of Dr. August Hirt. There were 57 men and 29 women in the group that was selected.

In the documents submitted to the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal, it is mentioned that the Jewish victims were put into quarantine for a time at Auschwitz because there was a typhus epidemic in the camp; then they were brought to Natzweiler-Struthof. The Nuremberg IMT documents show that 86 corpses were brought to the Anatomie Institute of the Reichsuniversitat Strassburg and that an assistant of Prof. August Hirt saw the tattoos on the arms and secretly wrote down the 86 numbers on a piece of paper.

In the museum at Natzweiler-Struthof, Josef Kramer’s confession, regarding the gas chamber, is on display. In his confession, Kramer described how he personally mixed “salts” with water to produce a lethal gas. The gas was dumped through a hole which had been chiseled through the tiled wall of a room previously used for the refrigeration of perishable food. Then Kramer watched through a peephole as the Jews died from the fumes of the poison gas.

Josef Kramer was convicted by a British Military Tribunal held in 1945, and hanged for the crimes he had committed at Auschwitz II and Bergen-Belsen. The charges against Kramer at the proceedings of the British Military Tribunal did not include the crime of gassing Jews at Natzweiler-Struthof. Rather, he was charged with crimes committed at Bergen-Belsen and with gassing Jews at Auschwitz, where he was the Commandant of the Auschwitz II camp before being transferred to Bergen-Belsen in December 1944.

At the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal, charges were brought by the American prosecutor against the Nazis for medical experiments performed at Natzweiler, but there were no documents introduced in which it was claimed that a gas chamber had been used there to murder Jews. The abandoned Natzweiler camp was discovered by both French and American troops, so it was the responsibility of the French and the American prosecutors to introduce the evidence of the gas chamber there.
In 1989, a plaque was placed at Struthof, in memory of the “87 Jews who were gassed” there. This was accomplished through the joint efforts of the Simon Wiesenthal Center and a New Jersey lawyer, Stephen Draisin. The number 87 includes the 86 Jews who were brought from Auschwitz to be gassed and one Jewish inmate who died during the same time period.

According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, “the gas chamber [at Natzweiler] was also used in pseudo-scientific medical experiments involving poison gas. The victims of these experiments were primarily Roma (Gypsies) who had been transferred from Auschwitz. Prisoners were also subjected to experiments involving treatment for typhus and yellow fever.”

A book which I purchased from the Natzweiler Memorial Site has this to say about the gas chamber, shown in the black and white photo:

4. The affair of the Israelite corpses

Hirt, professor of anatomy in Strasbourg, received corpses from the camp of Russian war prisoners at Mutzig, but as he thought they were too lean, he asked for people in a good physical condition for studies on heredity.

87 Israelites (30 of whom were women) were sent from the camp at Auschwitz. They were shut up in block 13 at the Struthof where they were measured, and they had to undergo experiments on sterilization. On August 11, 13, 17, 19, 1943, under the direction of doctors from Strasburg, the S.S. gassed the 87 Israelites in the gas chamber at Struthof with cyanide. Death occurred after 30 to 60 seconds. The corpses were transported to the Institut d’Anatomie in Strasburg. 17 entire corpses (3 of which being women’s) were found at the liberation as well as many dissected pieces.

“The liberation” referred to in the above quote probably means the liberation of France in August 1944. The Natzweiler-Struthof camp was abandoned in September 1944 so it was not actually “liberated.”

According to Dr. Hans-Joachim Lang, there were 16 of the 86 bodies (3 women and 13 men) that were found intact in November 1944, not 17, and an autopsy was performed on the bodies.

Dr. Lang was able to identify the 86 Jews who were gassed at Natzweiler after locating their prisoner numbers in the Auschwitz archives. The 29 women and 57 men who were gassed had been deported to Auschwitz from Norway, Poland, Greece, France, Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands.

The bodies of the 86 victims were buried in the Jewish cemetery of Strasbourg and a grave stone with the 86 names was placed there in December 2005.

Dr. Lang has published a book with the names of the 86 Jews who were gassed at Natzweiler. His book can be purchased at this web site:

http://www.die-namen-der-nummern.de

A poem about the liberation of Buchenwald ends with the “oath of Buchenwald”

Monument stands where the Buchenwald survivors swore the “oath of Buchenwald”

This morning, I received an e-mail with a copy of a poem written by one of the French survivors of the Buchenwald concentration camp.  The poem, which was sent to me by Susan Perry Ferguson, can be read in full here. Susan is the daughter of Major Julian S. Perry, the American soldier who found the poem, written by an unknown prisoner after the liberation of Buchenwald. The poem was originally written in French; you can read the full text here.

The poem is quite long, so I am only quoting the last few lines, which are the most important:

Buchenwald is finished.
In the SS barracks, the liberated set themselves up
In a little bit of comfort.

The anxiety is over,
But we think, non-stop, about the two last processions,
Struck down by death.

There is but one survivor, hiding among the cadavers,
Who lived through the slaughter that was extermination.
The previous processions fell upon no peaceful haven.
No less than 42,000 human beings died.

So we will return to France, to our family homes.
Feelings of emptiness, which are many, spoil our return.
But there is an oath we need to assert:
We must avenge our dead,
Surround and stage an attack, in turn,
Against the race of murderers and sadists.
Men, women, and children they have killed,
Mercilessly, without pity.
Out of fanatic hatred.

Liberated Buchenwald prisoners outside the SS barracks

The poet wrote “The previous processions fell upon no peaceful haven. No less than 42,000 human beings died.”  The word “processions” is a reference to the thousands of prisoners who were marched out of the Buchenwald camp, before the camp was liberated, in an attempt to prevent them from being released by the American soldiers who were on their way.

The prisoners in the “processions” were marched five miles to the train station in Weimar, the closest city to the camp.  The prisoners were put on a train and taken to the Dachau concentration camp, where most of them were dead upon arrival. You can read about it here.  The total number of deaths at Buchenwald is unknown; you can read about the death statistics at Buchenwald here.

The unknown author of the above poem was a French Resistance fighter, who was sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp, after he was captured.  The French Resistance fighters were civilians who had continued to fight during World War II  after France had surrendered.

Buchenwald was primarily a camp for political prisoners, who were opponents of Hitler’s Third Reich. The prisoners included prominent Communists and Social Democrats, as well as French, Polish and Dutch resistance fighters, and also pastors of the Confessional Church and Catholic priests who preached against the Nazis. A Monument to the Resistance Fighters stands on the highest point of the hill called the Ettersberg, about one kilometer from the former camp. A photo of the monument is shown below.

Monument to the French Resistance fighters at Buchenwald

On April 11, 1945, the day that American troops arrived to liberate the Buchenwald camp, the Communist resistance fighters had already taken control of the camp and forced the SS guards to flee for their lives. When the American liberators arrived, they observed that some of the resistance fighters had left the camp and were hunting down the SS men in the surrounding forest. The SS soldiers were brought back to the camp and shot, hanged or beaten to death by the inmates while the American soldiers looked on and sometimes joined in.

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.

After World War II ended, the Germans were prosecuted as “war criminals”  because the Resistance fighters had been put into concentration camps, rather than POW camps. The resistance fighters from German-occupied countries who had continued to fight as partisans, killing German soldiers and blowing up trains, were called innocent victims by the American prosecutors in the American Military Tribunal trials at Dachau because they had been imprisoned in concentration camps after they were captured. Although the Geneva Convention of 1929 did not give the same rights to insurgents as to Prisoners of War, it was the prosecution’s opinion that the partisans and resistance fighters in German-occupied countries were the equivalent of POWs and entitled to the same Geneva Convention protection.

The monument shown in the photo at the top of my blog post is the memorial that was erected by the Communist prisoners at Buchenwald on 19 April 1945 in honor of the political prisoners in the camp. The Jewish survivors were not allowed to attend the ceremonies when the monument was dedicated.

The stone monument was moved in 1961 to a spot called Frederic-Manhes-Platz, which is the place where the road to the camp branches off from the main road up the hill called the Ettersberg. The place where it now stands was named after a French Resistance fighter named Col. Henri Frederic Manhes.

Buchenwald was just one of the camps to which captured partisans in the French Resistance were deported. The main camp for French Resistance fighters was Natzweiler-Struthof, which now has a Memorial Site with a Museum devoted to the French Resistance.

According to Wikipedia, “the Buchenwald oath” was as follows:

The core of the Buchenwald Oath is: We will take up the fight until the last culprit stands before the judges of the people. Our watchword is the destruction of Nazism from its roots. Our goal is to build a new world of peace and freedom. This is our responsibility to our murdered friends and their relatives.

After the Buchwald Oath was read aloud, the prisoners raised their hands and said, “We swear”.[12]

In keeping with their promise to build a new world of peace and freedom, the Buchenwald camp was turned into a camp for German prisoners after World War II.  You can read about it here. In 1997, a Museum was opened at the Buchenwald Memorial Site which tells about the German prisoners at Buchenwald after World War II.

As the poet wished, the dead were avenged.  The oath that the poet said needed to be asserted was that every last culprit should stand before the judges of the people.  This actually happened when 31 people were put on trial by the American liberators.  You can read about the trial here.

Eisenhower’s death camps — a stain on American history

The term “death camp” is used by Holocaustians to mean a Nazi concentration camp where prisoners were taken to be deliberately killed in gas chambers or worked to death.  The term Vernichtungslager (extermination camp) was coined by the Allies to refer to the six Nazi “death camps”:  Chelmno, Belzec, Treblinka, Sobibor, Majdanek and Auschwitz-Birkenau.

The open air POW enclosure at Remagen

The POW camps set up by General Dwight D. Eisenhower, after World War II ended, are also called death camps, because 1.7 million German POWs allegedly died in these camps. To read more about Eisenhower’s camps, go to this website or this website.

The subject of Eisenhower’s death camps came up in a recent comment on my blog, made by a reader who was actually a prisoner in one of Eisenhower’s camps.  The following quote is from his comment:

… all I can say to you and your readers that I reached that stage of the of starvation as a POW under Eisenhower within 10 days after receiving no food or water, according to his orders to all Allied Forces (Montgomery did not follow these instructions after consultation with Churchill). All I received was one pint of watery soup with dried onions in them. My weight was down to 50 kg(112lbs) and I could no longer walk, thus became a Muselmann, but was slowly nourished back to reasonable health at (German) Army Field Hospital. My average weight at the height of 1,82 m has always been steady at 80 kg (182lbs). You very rarely ever see pictures or comments of what was going on at the end of 1945,that he, Eisenhower, maintained Death Camps, Where allegedly 1.7 Million Germans died of hunger. Yet I doubt this figure

You can read about an American soldier’s experience as a guard in one of Eisenhower’s camps here.

I previously blogged about Eisenhower’s death camps here, but it bears repeating.

The German city of Gotha was the first headquarters of the victorious American Army in Germany, set up by General Dwight D. Eisenhower in April 1945. Gotha was also the site of one of the Prisoner of War camps set up by Eisenhower.

General Eisenhower mentioned Gotha in his book Crusade in Europe, as the nearest city to the “horror camp” at Ohrdruf-Nord, the only concentration camp that he ever visited.  He failed to mention his own notorious POW camp located near Gotha.

On March 10, 1945, as World War II was coming to an end, General Eisenhower signed an order creating the status of Disarmed Enemy Forces for the German Prisoners of War who would soon be surrendering to the Americans. This order was a violation of the Geneva Convention because it allowed Eisenhower to disregard the rules for the treatment of Prisoners of War. It allowed him to starve the German POWs, deny them the right to send and receive letters, and to receive Red Cross packages and packages from German civilians. All of these rights were enjoyed by the prisoners in the Nazi POW camps and even in the notorious concentration camps. Eisenhower signed this order before he had even seen the horrors of the Ohrdruf camp.

In his book entitled Other Losses, James Bacque wrote the following:

There were no tents in the Gotha DEF camp, only the usual barbed wire fences round a field soon churned to mud. On the first day, they received a small ration of food, which was then cut in half. In order to get it, they were forced to run a gauntlet. Hunched over, they ran between lines of guards who hit them with sticks as they scurried towards their food. On April 27, they were transferred to the U.S. camp at Heidesheim further west where there was no food at all for days, then very little.

On May 7, 1945, the German army had surrendered to General Eisenhower, who refused to shake hands with the German General, as is customary. The neutral country of Switzerland was removed as the Protecting Power for German prisoners, which was another violation of the Geneva Convention. General George S. Patton quickly released the prisoners who had surrendered to his Third Army, but General Eisenhower held his POWs until the end of 1946, forcing them to live on starvation rations. German civilians were forbidden to bring food to the POWs. Red Cross packages sent to the German POW camps were returned. The POW camps had no barracks or tents.

German POWs were forced to dig holes for shelter

The German prisoners were forced to dig holes in the ground for shelter, as the picture above shows. Even though the American army had plenty of tents, the prisoners lived for months in their holes. When it rained, the holes collapsed and the prisoners died.

After 1947, most of the records of the POW camps were destroyed by the U.S. government, according to James Bacque, as written in his book Other Losses. Bacque wrote that the Germans claimed that 1,700,000 soldiers, who were alive at the end of the war and had surrendered to the Allies, never returned home. All of the Allied countries denied responsibility, and the families were never told what had happened to their loved ones.

The following quote by Lieutenant Ernest Fisher, of the 101st Airborne Division and former Senior Historian of the United States Army is from the book Other Losses:

Starting in April 1945, the United States Army and the French Army casually annihilated about one million men, most of them in American camps.

Eisenhower’s hatred, passed through the lens of a compliant military bureaucracy, produced the horror of death camps unequaled by anything in American military history…

Stephen Ambrose, a noted World War II historian, disputes the claims made by James Bacque. His review of Bacque’s book can be read at this web site:

This quote is from the words of James Bacque, who wrote a book entitled Other Losses:

Under the Geneva Convention, three important rights are guaranteed prisoners of war: that they will be fed and sheltered to the same standard as base or depot troops of the Capturing Power; that they can send and receive mail; and that they will be visited by delegates of the International Red Cross (ICRC) who will report in secret on their treatment to a Protecting Power.  (In the cas eof Germany, as the government disintegrated in the closing stages of the war, Switzerland had been designated the protecting power.)

In fact, German prisoners taken by the U.S. Army at the end of the Second World War were denied these and most other rights by a series of specific decisions and directives stemming mainly from SHAEF–Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force.  General Dwight Eisenhower was both supreme commander of SHAEF–all the Allied armies in northwest Europe–and the commanding general of the U.S. forces in the European theatre.  He was subject to the Combined Chiefs of Staff (CCS) of Britain and the U.S., to the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS), and to the policy of the U.S. government, but in the absence of explicit directives–to the contrary or otherwise–ultimate responsibility for the treatment of the German prisoners in American hands lies with him.

“God , I hate the Germans,” Eisenhower wrote to his wife, Mamie, in September, 1944.  Earlier, in front of the British ambassador to Washington, he had said that all the 3,500 or so officers of the German General Staff should be “exterminated.”

In March, 1945, a message to the Combined Chiefs of Staff signed and initialled by Eisenhower recommended creating a new class of prisoners–Disarmed Enemy Forces, or DEFs–who, unlike Geneva-defined prisoners of war, would not be fed by the army after the surrender of Germany.  This would be a direct breach of the Geneva Convention.  The message, dated March 10, argues in part: “The additional maintenance commitment entailed by declaring the German Armed Forces prisoners [sic] of war which would necessitate the prevision of rations on a scale equal to that of base troops would prove far beyond the capacity of the Allies even if all German sources were tapped.”  It ends: “Your approval is requested.  Existing plans have been prepared upon this basis.”

On April 26, 1945, the Combined Chiefs approved the DEF status for prisoners of war in American hands only: the British members had refused to adopt the American plan for their own prisoners.  The Combined Chiefs stipulated that the status of disarmed troops be kept secret.

By that time, Eisenhower’s quartermaster general at SHAEF, General Robert Littlejohn, had already twice reduced rations for prisoners, and a SHAEF message signed “Eisenhower” had reported to General George Marshall, the U.S. Army Chief of staff, that the prisoner pens would provide “no shelter or other comforts….”

The problem was not supplies.  There was more than enough material stockpiled in Europe to construct prison camp facilities.  Eisenhower’s special assistant, general Everett Hughes, had visited the huge supply dumps at Naples and Marseille and reported:  “More stocks than we can ever use.  Stretch as far as eye can see.”  Food should not have been a problem, either.  In the U.S., wheat and corn surpluses were higher than they had ever been, and there was a record crop of potatoes.  The army itself had so much food in reserve that when a whole warehouse was dropped from the supply list by accident in England it was not noticed for three months.  In addition, the International Red Cross had over 100,000 tons of food in storage in Switzerland.  When it tried to send two trainloads of this to the American sector of Germany, U.S. Army Officers turned the trains back, saying their warehouses were already overflowing with ICRC food which they had never distributed.

Nonetheless it was through the supply side that the policy of deprivation was carried out.  Water, food, tents, space, medicine–everything necessary for the prisoners was kept fatally scarce.  Camp Rheinberg, where Corporal Liebich would fetch up in in mid-May, shivering with dysentery and typhus, had no food at all when it was opened on April 17.  As in the other big “Rhine meadow” camps, opened by the Americans in mid-April, there were no guard towers, tents, buildings, cooking facilities, water, latrines, or food.

The conditions in the American camps along the Rhine in late April were observed by two colonels in the U.S. Army Medical Corps, James Mason and Charles Beasley, who described them in a paper published in 1950:  “Huddled close together for warmth, behind the barbed wire was a most awesome sight–nearly 100,000 haggard, apathetic, dirty, gaunt, blank-staring med clad in dirty field grey uniforms, and standing ankle-deep in mud….The German Divisions Commander reported that the men had not eaten for at least two days, and the provisions of water was a major problem–yet only 200 yards away was the River Rhine running bankfull.”

[...]

On May 4, 1945, the first German prisoners of war in U.S. hands were transferred to DEF status.  The same day, the U.S. war Department banned mail to or from the prisoners.  (when the International Committee of the Red Cross suggested a plan for restoring mail in June, it was rejected.)

On May 8, V-E Day, the German government was abolished and, simultaneously, the U.S. State Department dismissed Switzerland as the protecting power for the German prisoners.  (Prime Minister Mackenzie King of Canada protested to the foreign Office in London the parallel removal of the Swiss as protecting power in British-Canadian camps, but was squelched for his pains.)  With this done, the State Department informed the International Red Cross that, since there was no protecting power to report to, there was no longer and point in visiting the camps.

Georg Scherer was appointed mayor of Dachau after World War II ended

I am writing a new post in response to some information supplied by The Black Rabbit of Inlé in a comment.

This quote is from a comment by The Black Rabbit of Inlé:

Harold Marcuse writes:

“Lochridge, who used pseudonyms in the article, wrote that the tour group was selected by the “newly liberated” and “newly appointed” mayor of Dachau. The person who most closely fits the bill is Georg Scherer, a participant in the 28 April uprising. Scherer, however, was released well before liberation, and was not “imprisoned for helping a French boy escape slave labor,” as Lochridge wrote.”

I was pleased to learn that Pat Lochridge used pseudonyms in her article about the tour of Dachau, taken by residents of the town of Dachau.  She mentioned, in her article about the tour of Dachau, that the mayor of the town was the “newly liberated” and “newly appointed” mayor of Dachau.  The name that she gave was the name of a man that I had never heard of.

I didn’t realize that Lochridge was using pseudonyms.  Who does that?  Lochridge was a graduate of the Columbia School of Journalism.  You can be sure that a graduate of the University of Missouri School of Journalism would not have done that.

Grave of Georg Scherer in the Old Cemetery in the town of Dachau

The photograph above shows the grave of Georg Scherer, a Dachau resident who was a prisoner in the Nazi concentration camp for five years. After the camp was liberated, Scherer was appointed Deputy Mayor of Dachau by the American Military.

Scherer had been sent to the Dachau concentration camp on December 22, 1935 because of his anti-Nazi Communist activity, but was released on January 17, 1941. As a prisoner, Georg was living at the same place where he had served an apprenticeship as a lathe operator in 1921 at the German Industrial Works which was located on the site of the former gunpowder factory.  The Dachau camp was established on the site of the former factory in 1933.

After he was released from the Dachau concentration camp, Scherer continued to work in a factory, located in the SS garrison, which was right next to the concentration camp.

On April 28, 1945, the day before American Soldiers arrived to liberate Dachau, Scherer led the Dachau Uprising in which residents of the town joined escaped prisoners in fighting against the SS soldiers. Another prisoner, Walter Neff, also remained at the camp after his release, working as an assistant to Dr. Rascher in his medical experiments. Neff also participated in helping the Dachau prisoners to escape and in planning the uprising.

Chapel in the old Dachau cemetery where Georg Scherer is buried

Dachau’s oldest existing burial plot is the Altfriedhof, which means Old Cemetery in German. It is located on Gottesackerstrasse, which is just off Augsbergerstrasse, one of the two main streets in the town. Gottersacker means “God’s own acre.” This cemetery was started in 1571 after the original cemetery in the churchyard of St. Jakob’s Church was filled up.

A beautiful Baroque chapel, called the Chapel of the Holy Cross, was built here between 1627-1628. This Chapel was dedicated in 1961 to Dachau’s war dead. The photograph above shows the Chapel with graves in front of it.

Memorial stone for 4 soldiers who fought the Communists in Dachau

The photo above shows the Görlitz Memorial for 4 soldiers who fought the Communists in the town of Dachau. This is the final resting place of four men of the Freikorps Görlitz, a militia group which fought the Red Army of the Communists.

The names on the grave stone shown above are 2nd Lieutenant Bertram, Muskateer Labuke, Private Hauk, and Gunner Hilbig. They were killed near the village of Pellheim, just outside the town of Dachau, on April 30, 1919. They were engaged in a battle against the Communists who had set up a Soviet government in the state of Bavaria, after overthrowing the imperial government, under their Jewish leader Kurt Eisner, on November 7, 1918.

The memorial stone for the men who died while liberating the town of Dachau from the Communists was set in place on April 29, 1934. Ironically, on this same date eleven years later, the American Seventh Army liberated their Communist allies from the Nazi concentration camp in Dachau.

Many of the men who later became top Nazi leaders fought with other divisions of the Freikorp, including Heinrich Himmler, the man who set up the first concentration camp at Dachau. The first 200 prisoners brought to the Dachau camp on March 22, 1933 were Communists who had been taken into “protective custody” because they were considered to be “enemies of the state.”

In the early days of the Dachau concentration camp, the bodies were not burned, as there was as yet no threat of epidemics, and cremation was not customary back then. The first prisoners who died in the concentration camp were brought to the Old Cemetery to be buried. One of the first to be buried here was a Communist member of the Reichstag, 32-year-old Franz Stenzer, who was “shot while attempting to escape” from the Dachau concentration camp on August 22, 1933. In those days, a death in the camp was a big event and the SS men even attended the funerals.