“I had a uncle who was one of the, who was part of the first American troops to go into Auschwitz and liberate the concentration camps,” Obama said, slowly and methodically. “And the story in my family is that when he came home, he just went into the attic, and he didn’t leave the house for six months. Alright? Now, obviously something had affected him deeply, but at the time, there just weren’t the kinds of facilities to help somebody work through that kind of pain.”

Did whoever wrote Obama’s Remembrance Day statement get it right this time?  This is a quote from Obama’s statement on January 27, 2012:

“We commit ourselves to keeping their memories alive not only in our thoughts, but through our actions,” Obama said in a written statement.

“As we remember all those who perished in camps from Auschwitz to Treblinka, Dachau to Sobibor, we pledge to speak truth to those who deny the Holocaust.”

I would not have put Dachau in the same sentence as Auschwitz, Treblinka and Sobibor. Dachau was not a death camp, although thousands “perished” there from typhus.  The other three were death camps where Jews were gassed.

Even Auschwitz doesn’t belong in the same list as Treblinka and Sobibor. Auschwitz was a large complex consisting of three separate camps; it was a transit camp and a labor camp, as well as a death camp. Since this sentence seems to be directed at “those who deny the Holocaust,” the author should have named Belzec instead of Dachau.  Treblinka, Sobibor and Belzec were strictly extermination camps where Jews were gassed immediately upon arrival, while Dachau was mainly a camp for political prisoners.

Charles T. Payne, who allegedly helped to liberate Ohrdruf, a sub-camp of Buchenwald, was Barak Obama’s great uncle, the brother of his maternal grandmother. Charles T. Payne was a member of Company K, 355th Infantry Regiment, 89th Infantry Division. According to an Associated Press story, published on June 4, 2009, Charles T. Payne’s unit arrived at the Ohrdruf camp on April 6, 1945. Ohrdruf was discovered by American soldiers on April 4, 1945.  Obama’s great-uncle arrived too late to be considered one of the “official” liberators of Ohrdruf.

Why is all this important?  In his written statement, Obama said “we pledge to speak truth to those who deny the Holocaust.”  In speaking the truth to Holocaust deniers, one must pay attention to details.  Holocaustians regard any tiny detail that deviates from their official story as “Holocaust denial.”  When someone lumps together Dachau, Treblinka and Sobibor, this borders on “Holocaust denial.”

Official postcard that was given to prisoners to send as a "Thank You" card

The photo above is a copy of a page in the Majdanek Museum guidebook; it shows the official Thank You postcard provided by the Nazis for the prisoners to send in acknowledgment of the receipt of a package.  The text on the page reads: “Official postcard which a prisoner could send from the camp to his family or to the Polish Red Cross after receiving a parcel.”  You can read about the Majdanek camp on my website here.

I am indebted to one of the regular readers of this blog who gave me the idea for my blog post today.  In a comment on my blog yesterday, this reader gave a link to a video which shows a postcard sent from Auschwitz-Birkenau.  Young people today might be surprised to learn that, even in a death camp, the Nazis required the prisoners to have good manners.  Yes, you read that right — the prisoners at all the Nazi camps were required to send a Thank You postcard to the Red Cross or to civilians who sent packages to the camps. 

The postcards were provided by the Nazis and mailed for the prisoners.  Just because the prisoners were waiting to be gassed at Majdanek and Auschwitz-Birkenau doesn’t mean that they were exempt from the rules of society and could get by with scarfing down food sent by their friends and relatives without sending a Thank you card.

When the Nazi War Criminals were put into camps, awaiting trial for their crimes, were they required to send a Thank You postcard to the Red Cross or the families who sent food?  This is a trick question.  The German war criminals were not allowed to receive Red Cross packages or food from civilians and they were not allowed to send letters or postcards.

I have done some research on the Internet about the story of Leslie Schwartz, who is a cousin of Tony Curtis, and here are the highlights of his remarkable story:

Leslie Schwartz was born in 1930 in a small village in Hungary that had a population which was one third Jewish, mostly Hasidic or Orthodox Jews.  In 1943, when the Germans came into Hungary, the Jews were deprived of their Hungarian citizenship; at the age of 13,  Leslie was sent, along with the rest of his family, to the Ukraine.  In 1944, they were brought back and sent to a ghetto in Hungary, from which they were transported in May 1944 to Auschwitz in cattle cars.

Hungarian Jews arriving at Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1944

According to Schwartz’s own account, when he arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau at the age of 14, he was sent to the children’s barrack where there were “kids” under the age of 15 who were waiting to be killed in the “crematoriums.”  All of these “kids”  were killed, according to Schwartz, but he survived because, after 10 days in the children’s camp, he asked his friend Sandor Grosz to allow him to sneak into the adult barracks. This saved his life because he was able to join the adults on a transport train out of Auschwitz.  Schwartz says that Sandor is the reason that he is living today. 

The other children had been in the children’s barracks “for a few weeks” and they were laughing and playing, not knowing that they would soon be killed.  But Leslie Schwartz knew that “something was wrong,” so he got out of that barrack; he survived but all the other “kids” were killed.  According to an interview that he gave to Harold Channer, all the “kids” in the barrack were killed in the “crematorium.”  How does he know this?  Everybody knows that children under the age of 15 were gassed at Auschwitz.

Hungarian children on their way to the gas chamber

Schwartz was sent to Dachau with the adults, and then sent to various sub-camps of Dachau, including Mühldorf and Allach.

Almost one half of all the Jews that were killed at Auschwitz were Hungarian Jews who were gassed within a period of 10 weeks in 1944. Up until the Spring of 1944, it had been the three Operation Reinhard camps at Treblinka, Belzec and Sobibor, that were the main Nazi killing centers for the Jews, not Auschwitz.

At the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp, the incoming prisoners, who were allowed to live, were first held for 6 to 8 weeks in the Quarantine barracks to prevent the spread of communicable diseases. Pictured below is sector BIIa, the Quarantine camp at Birkenau, taken from the tower of the gate house in October 2005.

Quarantine barracks at Auschwitz-Birkenau

The Quarantine barracks are the first buildings on the north side of the main camp road, located next to the Gate of Death. They have been preserved and can still be seen by tourists today.

It is not clear to me whether Leslie Schwartz was ever put into the quarantine barracks or whether he was sent immediately to the children’s barracks.  Usually, incoming prisoners who were going to be transferred out of Auschwitz were not given an Auschwitz identification number.  Leslie Schwartz has an Auschwitz ID number: 71253.  Prisoners who were destined for the gas chamber were not given an ID number at Auschwitz, but Schwartz was given a number and then sent to the children’s barracks where all the children were waiting to be killed in the gas chamber.

Schwartz has written a book Living Through Hell and a documentary of his story is being made by a German film maker.  He has been on the lecture circuit in Germany, talking to students in 17 German high schools in six months.  He also does a presentation to 9-year-old children in Germany.  Leslie Schwartz suffered for a year, at the hands of the Nazis, but he’s not bitter.

In an interview with Harold Channer, which you can see on YouTube, Schwartz said that when the Jews were sent to the Ukraine in 1943, there was a river and “the purpose of that river” was that the Germans “put you on a boat and opened the bottom,” so that all the Jews drowned.

Channer, who said that he is 76 years old, could not understand the reason for anti-Semitism.  He kept asking, with regard to the Jews: “What’s not to like?” and “Where does anti-Semitism come from?”  Both Channer and Schwartz said that the Jews in Hungary were intellectuals.  Channer asked:  “Was there anti-intellectual prejudice” among the Christians?  Or jealousy?

Finally, Schwartz explained the reason that the Nazis hated the Jews:  Hitler had syphilis — and it went to his brain.

In truth, one concentration camp is no different from another.  If there were any significant differences between Dachau and Auschwitz, it had to be the numbers who never walked out of the camps.  But a death is a death; it doesn’t make it less painful for me just because the numbers are fewer in Dachau.

My first thought was to scoff at this, but then I realized that this blogger is right.  The significant difference between Dachau and Auschwitz is the numbers.  The first report, released by the American liberators, gave the number of deaths at Dachau as 238,000, while the first estimate of the number of deaths at Auschwitz, given by the Soviet liberators, was 4 million.

“But a death is a death,” as this blogger correctly noted.  There was one big typhus epidemic at Dachau which started in December 1944 and quickly got out of control.  There were two typhus epidemics at Auschwitz, but when the Soviet liberators arrived, there was no epidemic in progress.   How many of the deaths at Dachau and Auschwitz were caused by typhus?

My fellow wordpress blogger wrote:

The pathway led to entrance of Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial Site and I was really dragging my feet, dreading what was to come as I approached closer and closer to the site.  Without having any part of the site in sight, I was already feeling my heart grow heavier by the second.  It wasn’t going to be easy…

And it wasn’t.  Truth is, there isn’t much to be seen that will really evoke strong emotions in one, but I’ve already long established the fact that my fertile imagination is probably the single major bane of my existence.

This is the difference between other bloggers and myself.  I approach everything with an analytical mind, not with emotion.  I’m like the character named Sheldon on The Big Bang Theory TV series — I have no emotions when comes to visiting historical sites.

The first time that I visited Dachau in 1997, the entrance to the camp was through a hole in the fence on the east side, as shown in the photo below.

Entrance to Dachau Memorial Site before 2003

The original Museum at Dachau, which was shown to visitors from 1965 until 2003, had very large dramatic photos, like the one below.

Large photo in original Dachau Museum

There have been a lot of changes at the Dachau Memorial Site over the years.  It seems to me that the Site now panders to tourists who want to have an emotional experience when they visit.

Regarding the death statistics at Dachau, a sign that was put up outside the crematorium in 1945 said, “This area is being retained as a shrine to the 238,000 individuals who were cremated here. Please don’t destroy.” Since there were also 5,380 dead prisoners at Dachau whose bodies were buried on Leitenberg hill before the camp was liberated, this would mean that the death toll at Dachau was over 243,000. Since the total number of registered inmates at the main Dachau camp was 206,206, according to the camp records, this means that the US military claimed that there were 37,000 more deaths than the number of prisoners who were registered. Yet, there were almost 32,000 cheering survivors who greeted the American liberators.

Later, a new sign was placed at the crematorium by Phillip Auerbach, a Jewish concentration camp survivor, who had been appointed the Bavarian Commissioner for Racial, Religious and Political Persecutees and the Commissioner for Restitution. This sign read “In the years from 1933 to 1945, 238,756 people were cremated here.” The Rev. Martin Niemöller, a former prisoner at Dachau, saw this sign in November 1945 and was very upset by the high number of alleged deaths in the camp.

There were 31,951 deaths at the main Dachau camp during the 12 years that the camp was in existence, according to a report made by the International Tracing Service at Arolson, Germany in 1977. The Tracing Service is part of the International Red Cross. This report was based on death records meticulously kept by the Nazis.

Today, visitors to Dachau are told that the total number of deaths was 41,000, adding another 10,000 deaths to the official number.

Paul Berben, a prisoner in the camp, wrote a book entitled “Dachau, the Official History 1933 – 1945,” in which he stated that 2,888 prisoners had died at Dachau in January 1945, 3,977 prisoners had died in February, 3,668 had died in March and 2,625 had died in April, for a total of 13,158 in the first four months of 1945.  (Paul Berben’s book is no longer the official history of Dachau.)

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

At the American Military Tribunal held at the Dachau camp in November 1945, the prosecution stated that 161, 939 prisoners had been processed through Dachau between 1940 and 1945 and that over 25,000 of them had died. According to the figures in Paul Berben’s book, the exact number of prisoners who died at Dachau during this period was 27,839.

The US Seventh Army report stated that an estimated 229,000 prisoners had been processed at Dachau since the camp opened on March 22, 1933 including around 7,000 who had arrived in the last three weeks of April, 1945. The camp records showed that 206,206 prisoners had been registered in the camp in the 12 years that Dachau was a concentration camp, but in the chaos of the last days before the camp was liberated, some prisoners were not registered.

The death statistics at Auschwitz have also been downgraded, from an initial estimate of 4 million down to 1.1 million, including 900,000 Jewish deaths.  Auschwitz was a transit camp, as well as an extermination camp.  The Jews who were sent to the gas chamber were not registered and neither were the prisoners who were sent to another camp, after arriving at Auschwitz.  The train records have never been found, so it is impossible to know the total number of people who arrived at Auschwitz and the total number of prisoners who were gassed.

Ruins of Krema II gas chamber at Auschwitz II, aka Birkenau

Early morning photo of the ruins of Krema III at Birkenau

The Germans marched 60,000 prisoners out of the three camps in the Auschwitz complex on January 18, 1945.  They came back twice, on January 20th and again on January 26th, to blow up the gas chambers in order to destroy the evidence.  

The photo below was taken in 1998. It shows a sculpture in the administration building in the main Auschwitz camp.

1998 photo of sculpture in main Auschwitz camp

International Monument at Birkenau is between Krem II and Krema III gas chambers

Women's camp at Birkenau, built by Russian POWs

Steam cabinets for disinfecting clothes at Auschwitz-Birkenau

Ruins of a brick stove in a barracks at Birkenau

Sign warns of danger from fences at main Auschwitz camp

Place where roll call was held at main Auschwitz camp; sentry box and camp kitchen in background

1998 photo of door through which victims entered the gas chamber in the main camp

Ruins of Krema II at Auschwitz-Birkenau

Building which housed the theater at the main Auschwitz camp

Inside a barracks building at Birkenau

Gate into Birkenau camp, known as The Gate of Death

Kitchen at Auschwitz main camp, 2005 photo

The back side of Block 11 at the Auschwitz main camp

View of gas chamber in main Auschwitz camp, looking toward the entrance door for the victims

Ruins of Krema III at Birkenau shows entrance for SS men in center of photo

British archaeologist destroys Holocaust deniers’ argument with mass grave find at Treblinka

The lead of the story is this quote:  “A British forensic archaeologist has unearthed fresh evidence to prove the existence of mass graves at the Nazi death camp Treblinka – scuppering the claims of Holocaust deniers who say it was merely a transit camp.”

I had a third-grade teacher who taught me to look up every word, that I didn’t know the meaning of, in the dictionary.  So I went directly to an online dictionary and learned that “scuppering” can be used to mean destroy or ruin.  I think a better word might be “demolish.”  But have the arguments of the Holocaust deniers been “scuppered?”  I don’t think so.

The spot where Jews disembarked from the trains to Treblinka

A lot of good comments about this subject have been posted on my previous blog about the “fresh evidence” at Treblinka here.

This article in the Mail Online states that “a lack of physical evidence in the area has been exploited by Holocaust deniers.”  The whole article seems to me to be gloating over the scuppering of Holocaust deniers, instead of just giving the facts, as a newspaper article should. 

Kalman Taigman is mentioned in the Mail Online article as “Survivor Kalman Taigman”  I googled Kalman Taigman and learned that there is a documentary about him and another survivor.

This quote is from a website that gives a synopsis of  the documentary:

The journey of 88 year old Samuel Wilinberg and Kalman Taigman two complete opposite personalities who happen to be the last two survivors of the Treblinka death camp. The film follows the two men as they walk back on the grounds from which they fled 68 years ago. For the first time they go back together possibly for their last visit there. Together they re-live, reminisce, laugh, cry, and even sing the Treblinka anthem. Kalman lost his mother in Treblinka, Samuel lost his two sisters. “God wasn’t present in Treblinka” they both agree on while they are there.

The Mail Online article ends with this quote:

Beginning in March 1942, the SS implemented Sonderaktion 1005 to cover up the murder of millions of people during Aktion Reinhard.

There (sic) actions were so comprehensive that ever since the end of the Second World War, Holocaust deniers have used the site as evidence of misinformation about Nazi genocide.

They claim the site was merely a transit camp – a myth now debunked by the latest discoveries of mass graves.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2087735/British-archaeologist-discovers-fresh-evidence-mass-graves-World-War-Two-death-camp-Treblinka.html#ixzz1kagOqr69

Memorial stones for the Jews who were sent to Treblinka from Poland and Czechoslovakia

The photo below shows the stone for the city of Sandomierz which is in the section that is farthest from the memorial tombstone. Note the many small stones that have no names. They represent the many villages in Poland where all Jewish life was extinguished in the Holocaust.

Memorial stones for the Jews who were sent to Treblinka

ONE-FIFTH of young Germans have never heard of Auschwitz, survey reveals

Does this mean one-fifth of young “ethnic Germans” (Volksdeutsche) have never heard of Auschwitz, or does it mean one-fifth of all young citizens of Germany have never heard of Auschwitz?

It is hard for me to believe that anyone in Germany has never heard of Auschwitz  — unless they are recent immigrants from Africa or the Middle East.  Did the people asking the survey question pronounce the word Auschwitz correctly? If the surveyers used the British or the American pronunciation of the word, the ethnic Germans might not have known what they were talking about.

According to the article in the Mail Online, “Twenty one per cent of people aged between 18 and 30 quizzed about the most notorious Nazi extermination camp had not heard of it, the survey revealed.”   How was the question posed:  Did the survey people ask “What was the most notorious Nazi extermination camp?”  

Any doubts about the existence of mass graves at the Treblinka death camp in Poland are being laid to rest by the first survey of the site using tools that see below the ground, writes forensic archaeologist Caroline Sturdy Colls.

The most important part of the article is this quote:

A 1946 report by investigators into German crimes in Poland found “a cellar passage with the protruding remains of burnt posts, the foundations of the administration building and the old well” and here and there “the remains of burnt fence posts, pieces of barbed wire, and short sections of paved road”.

Bone fragments can still be seen on the surface of the ground, especially after rain”

They also discovered human remains as they dug into the ground, and on the surface “large quantities of ashes mixed with sand, among which are numerous human bones”.

Despite this, in a later statement they said they had discovered no mass graves.

The section on Treblinka in the German Crimes in Poland. Volume I. Published by the Central Commission for Investigation of German Crimes in Poland. Warsaw, 1946 can be read in full here.

At the very end of the Treblinka section of the report of the Central Commission is this quote:

The eradication of all traces of the crime by wholesale burning of corpses began after Himmler’s visit in the early spring of 1943 and lasted till the Warsaw Rising, or even later. The camp was finally closed in November, 1943.

During the investigation when the ground was levelled, no collective graves were found, and this together with the evidence given by the witnesses leads to the conclusion that almost all the remains were burnt; the German authorities having had plenty of time to do it since the camp was closed. The site of the camp was ploughed over and sown, and on it Ukrainians were settled. They fled, however, on the approach of the Red Army.

Now the mass graves, that the Polish Central Commission for Investigation of German Crimes in Poland was unable to find in 1945, have been found.  And it was the BBC that reported it.  The very first report of the gas chambers where Jews were being gassed was made by the BBC in 1942.

For another opinion, watch this video:

On page 19, Levi wrote this about his arrival at Auschwitz on a transport train:  “A vast platform appeared before us, lit up by reflectors.”  This is a reference to the Judenrampe, which was a large train platform, near the Birkenau camp, which was used from 1942 to May 1944. The Judenrampe was torn down when the train tracks were extended inside the Birkenau death camp, so that the prisoners could be brought to a spot within a few feet of the gas chambers in Krema II and Krema III.  (God forbid that the Jews should have to walk to the gas chambers.)

Levi’s description of his arrival at Monowitz begins on page 22:

The journey [to Monowitz from the Judenrampe] did not last more than twenty minutes.  Then the lorry [truck] stopped and we saw a large door, and above it a sign, brightly illuminated (its memory still strikes me in my dreams): Arbeit Macht Frei, work gives freedom.

We climb down, they make us enter an enormous empty room that is poorly heated.

So the sign was on a DOOR, not a gate.  It was the door to an enormous empty ROOM, not the door into a camp.  Note that he not only saw the sign on the door, he also saw it in his dreams.

Denis Avey also mentioned an Arbeit Macht Frei sign at Monowitz in his book The Man Who Broke into Auschwitz. On page 140, Avey describes the scene when he entered the Monowitz prison camp:

It was still light when we passed through the gate and I saw the sign bearing the cruel promise ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ — work sets you free.

I didn’t know that the irony of those words would scream across the decades. This was Auschwitz III–Monowitz.

Note that the sign that Denis Avey saw was on a GATE, not a door.

Rob Broomby co-wrote Denis Avey’s book.  On page 235, we learn that Rob questioned whether this sign was actually on the Monowitz gate.

This quote, written by Denis Avey, is from page 235 of the American edition of his book:

As Rob’s research continued it threw up some interesting questions about the nature of memory. He kept asking me if I was certain I had seen that Arbeit Macht Frei sign at the gates to Auschwitz III–Monowitz.  I was, but he said some experts had questioned it and nothing survives at the site today to testify one way or the other. The sign everyone knows these days is at the gates of the main camp, Auschwitz I. After more than sixty years it is that one which is emblazoned on the collective memory although many camps had them. Rob said the most influential account of life in the camp — that of survivor and writer Primo Levi — mentioned the sign at Auschwitz III more than once but the head of Research at Auschwitz wasn’t convinced.

So was there an Arbeit macht Frei sign at Monowitz or not?  I would say NOT.  Primo Levi saw the sign in his dreams, and Denis Avey read about it in Primo Levi’s book.  The Arbeit Macht Frei sign was used on the gates of the Nazi camps that were classified as Class I camps. Auschwitz I was a Class I camp and it had the sign.  Monowitz was a labor camp which probably did not have the sign.  I explained all this on a previous post which you can read here.

Famous photo taken in Buchenwald Barracks #56

Elie Wiesel claims to be the man in the circle

Is this the face of 16-year-old Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel? Or is this the face of a 40-year-old man?

Elie Wiesel wrote in Night that he got out of his hospital bed at the Monowitz camp in Auschwitz and joined the death march out of the camp on January 18, 1945.  He also wrote that he became sick three days after the liberation of Buchenwald on April 11, 1945 and was confined to a hospital bed for 2 weeks.  Did he also get out of his hospital bed and go over to barracks #56 to get into this famous picture?  Elie Wiesel was an orphan after his father died at Buchenwald, and he was allegedly in barracks #66, the orphan’s barracks, when the camp was liberated.