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

For three and a half hours, the viewer [of Lanzmann's documentary] is taken through an exploration of Benjamin Murmelstein, the last president of the Jewish Council in the “model ghetto” of Theresienstadt in Nazi-annexed Czechoslovakia.

Set up by SS colonel Adolf Eichmann as a bogus town run by Jews themselves – a Potemkin village designed to dupe the world – Theresienstadt was one of the grimmest chapters in the long record of Nazi atrocities.

Theresienstadt was not in “Nazi-annexed Czechoslovakia” at that time; it was in the German protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.  You can read all about Theresienstadt on my website here.

According to Wikipedia, Adolf Eichmann “was a German Nazi SS-Obersturmbannführer (lieutenant colonel) and one of the major organizers of the Holocaust. Because of his organizational talents and ideological reliability, Eichmann was charged by SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich with the task of facilitating and managing the logistics of mass deportation of Jews to ghettos and extermination camps in German-occupied Eastern Europe.”

Nowhere on the Wikipedia page does it say that Eichmann SET UP the Theresienstadt ghetto.  He might have been in charge of the transports to and from Theresienstadt, but he did not have the authority to set up a ghetto or anything else.  Eichmann was “small potatoes,” not important enough to being setting up camps or ghettos.

This quote from the news article also resonated with me:

Murmelstein’s recollections, said Lanzmann, are doubly precious, as they prompt a new interpretation of Eichmann, who was kidnapped by Mossad agents in Argentina and hauled to Israel for trial, culminating in his execution in 1962. [...]

If Eichmann was “small potatoes,” why did the Mossad go to the trouble of kidnapping him and taking him to Israel?  I think it was because Eichmann was the one who wrote the minutes of the Wannsee Conference where the genocide of the Jews was allegedly planned.

The Israelis wanted Eichmann to admit that he left out the part of the Conference where the men talked about killing the Jews, not “transporting them to the East,” as Eichmann wrote in the minutes.

Now it has come to my attention that another tour guide at Dachau is telling some very dubious stories about the camp.  You can read about what a Dachau tour guide told a 20 year old British tourist here:

This quote is from this student’s blog post about her trip to Dachau:

We stopped at a map for a quick briefing before the tour, but I was pretty eager to get moving. Here he explained that Dachau was home to the first concentration camp. That being said, it’s a little different to visit. During the time of the camp, the town turned a blind eye to what was going on right under their nose – and this happened everywhere. This is how the Nazis got away with so much. So naturally, after the camp was liberated, the people were embarrassed. As a result, they tried to hide the camp. Most of the barracks were destroyed, a man made hill was put into place, and trees were planted to enclose what was the most shameful part of the small city. In later years, though, the city decided to embrace its culture rather than turning their backs on history. Thus, the memorial was built and it became a place for people to visit and to learn and understand. [...]

First of all, the people in the town of Dachau did not try to hide the camp.  The people in the town were cowering in fear of the former Jewish prisoners who were brought to the town and allowed to live in the homes of the residents, who were forced out with nothing but a fine-toothed comb.

The barracks in the Dachau concentration camp were not destroyed.  The camp was turned into a camp for alleged German war criminals.  You can read about “War Crimes Enclosure No. 1″ on my website here.

From 1965 to 2003, the Dachau Memorial Site had nothing about the 30,000 “German war criminals” who were held in the Dachau concentration camp barracks from June 1945 to August 1948. In May 2003, I visited the new museum, that had just opened at Dachau. There was one small display board about the prison camp for Germans at Dachau and also one small display board about the proceedings of the American Military Tribunal at Dachau.

German prisoners line up outside  “War Crimes Enclosure No. I” in the former Dachau concentration camp

What about the “man made hill” at Dachau?  Why was a hill constructed outside the camp?

The photo below shows what looks like two “man-made” hills on either side of the entrance to the Dachau Memorial Site.

Grass covered mounds on both sides of the entrance to Dachau Memorial Site

On the left side of the photo above, you can see clearly that there is a small grass-covered hill.  On the right side of the photo, there is another grass-covered mound in the shadows of the trees.  Are these the trees that the tour guide said were planted to “enclose the most shameful part of the small city” of Dachau?

My photo below shows the line of trees that hide the Memorial Site today.

Door into Dachau gate house with a line of trees on the left side of the photo

The fence that is shown in my 2005 photo above was not there when Dachau was a concentration camp.  The fence was added when the entrance to the Dachau Memorial Site was changed so that tourists can now enter the Memorial Site the same way that the prisoners did — through the Arbeit Macht Frei gate.

The trees in the photo above are not the original trees that were there when Dachau was a concentration camp.  The old photo below shows that a line of poplar trees originally hid the camp from view.  The reason that these trees were planted was to hide the concentration camp from the SS garrison which was right next to the camp.

Old photo of the Dachau gatehouse shows a line of poplar trees on the left

Note the Würm river canal and the barbed wire fence around the concentration camp in the photo above.  The tower in the background is Tower B, which was torn down, but has been reconstructed.

Let’s get back to the “man made hill” that the guide pointed out to the tourists; the two mounds on either side of the gatehouse are covering the ruins of the factories that were located just outside the camp. The factory, shown on the right side of the photo, was torn down when the camp was turned into a refugee camp.  Ethnic Germans who were expelled from Czechoslovakia after World War II lived in the former Dachau barracks for 17 years.

A factory that was just outside the Dachau gatehouse

In the photo above, the Dachau concentration camp is shown on the left side.  Note the lone poplar tree that is all that is left of the former line of poplar trees that hid the camp from the SS garrison, which is behind the camera.

The old photo below shows the Würm river canal and the line of poplar trees that separated the camp from the SS garrison.

Dachau concentration camp with moat and poplar trees

Getting back to what the tour guide told the tourists, this quote is from the blog of the 20-year-old British student:

The tour was the hardest towards the end when we went to the gas chamber. Dachau’s gas chamber is still standing. We learned that people who were killed in the gas chambers commonly came from other camps. They simply thought they were being shaved and showered just like any other camp. I had never considered this before, but I suppose it makes it seem less depressing than them knowing that they were going to die. The chambers were used a lot more towards the end of the camp because of disease and over-population. Thousands of people were killed in the chambers. The original ovens used to cremate the bodies were still there as well as the upgraded ones they used later on. I was standing outside the building, listening to our guide explain, and I saw the picture posted right there.

Bodies piled up outside the Dachau crematorium

The photo above shows dead bodies piled up outside Baracke X.  Near the end of the war, the Dachau camp had run out of coal to burn the bodies.  After the camp was liberated, these bodies were taken by the Dachau residents to Leitenberg and buried in mass graves.  But first, the bodies were left there for weeks, so that American soldiers could be brought to the camp and told that prisoners had been gassed in the building that is shown behind the bodies.

“The [gas] chambers were used a lot more towards the end of the camp because of disease and over-population”? (quote from the student’s blog)

Did the tour guide really say that?  It is true that there was a typhus epidemic in the camp, and the camp was over-populated because prisoners had been brought to the main camp from the sub-camps, so that they could be turned over to the Allies.  But did the Nazis try to stop disease and over-crowding by gassing the prisoners?

The blogger did not give the name of the tour guide, but this quote describes him:

The tour met outside the train station in Munich, where we caught a train and then a bus to the concentration camp. Dachau Concentration Camp was the first concentration camp. We were in for a big taste of history. Our tour guide was a self-made tour guide who started his work with Dachau and (from what I understand) studied art in college and was now a teacher of some sort. He was a born and bred Irish Catholic turned Atheist who, at times, seemed incredibly biased in his descriptions. (I found this amusing because he was hell bent on pushing the acknowledgement of equality of those affected by the camps.) He was entertaining, though. Since he was sort of cynical and dark-humored, it made the tour more lighthearted.

Note that the blogger wrote that the tour guide “seemed incredibly biased” and she “found this amusing.”

I interpret the statement “he was hell bent on pushing the acknowledgement of equality of those affected by the camps” to mean that he wanted to include the homosexual prisoners, the Gypsies, and the Catholic priests in the suffering at Dachau, and not just talk about the Jews.  In the future, maybe he could include the German “war criminals” who were imprisoned at Dachau, and the ethnic Germans who lived there for 17 years.  For example, he might mention the ethnic German refugees who were kicked out of the barracks at Dachau in 1965 so a Memorial Site could be built to replace their only home.

The photo below shows a restaurant, in a former disinfection hut, where the German refugees could gather and socialize, before it was torn down in 1965 to make room for a Memorial Site.  The location of the restaurant is where the Jewish Memorial now stands.

Former “disinfection hut” at Dachau was turned into a restaurant for ethnic German refugees

A Catholic convent was built just outside the north wall of the Dachau camp

The Carmelite Convent, called Karmel Heilig-Blut, was designed by Josef Wiedemann, the same architect who designed the Catholic Church and its bell tower. The foundation stone was laid by Dr. Johannes Neuhäusler, a former inmate in the camp, at a ceremony on April 28, 1963. The spot where the convent was built was formerly a pond that was filled with gravel when the Nazis rebuilt the camp in 1937. Construction started in August 1963 and the finished convent was dedicated on November 22, 1964.

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

To leave things on a slightly less depressing note (although I feel like a post about Dachau is allowed–nay, expected–to be a downer), in the years since the war, a convent has been built adjacent to the camp grounds.The sisters wanted the entrance gate to the convent to be through one of the old guard towers at the far end of the camp, near the various religious monuments, but the Powers That Be (the earthly ones, I mean) kept saying no. “The problem was solved,” our guide told us, “by a sixty-two-year-old nun with a sledgehammer”–thus confirming my belief in the inherent badassery of nuns everywhere. The power of Christ compels you, indeed.

No legal action was taken against the nun; a group of Roma people (gypsies) backed her up and lent their support to the convent’s unorthodox building plans. And the gate to the convent remains there (after a bit of touching up…sledgehammer holes aren’t that pretty) to this day, a symbol that Dachau is no longer an enclosed prison, but an open memorial site.

There may have been a nun wielding a sledgehammer, but I am guessing that the nun was allowed to make the first hole in a guard tower at Dachau, in a symbolic ceremony in 1963, when one of the original guard towers at Dachau was remodeled to make an entrance into the Catholic convent.

Entrance into the convent is through a guard tower

After Dachau was liberated, the “Powers That Be” were the members of the International Committee of Dachau which is still, to this day, in charge of the Dachau Memorial Site.  Just before the acting Commandant, Martin Gottfried Weiss, left the Dachau camp in April 1945, when the American liberators were on their way, he turned the camp over to this Committee, which was headed by Albert Guérisse, a British SOE agent who had been imprisoned at Dachau because he was an illegal combatant, aiding the French Resistance.

The man in charge of the construction of a convent at Dachau was Dr. Johannes Neuhäusler. As a former inmate in the Dachau camp, he headed the projects to build both the convent and the Church of the Mortal Agony of Christ, which was the very first memorial built at Dachau.

When the American liberators arrived at Dachau on April 29, 1945, the majority of the prisoners in the camp were Polish Catholics. According to the US Army census, there were 2,539 Jews in the camp, most of them having arrived in the last days and weeks of the war, after being evacuated from other camps.

A Catholic church was the first memorial built at Dachau

The name of the Catholic chapel at Dachau is Todeangst Christi. It is usually translated in English as “Mortal Agony of Christ” although the literal translation of the German title would be “Christ’s Mortal Anxiety.” The church was built in 1960 at the instigation of Dr. Johannes Neuhäusler, a former inmate of the camp who became a Bishop in Munich after the war. Neuhäusler had been arrested in 1941 for breaking one of the laws of the Nazi government by publicly reading the critical writings of Cardinal Faulhaber, who opposed the Nazi regime. He was first taken to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp for political prisoners near Berlin and then transferred to Dachau a few months later.

The guard towers at Dachau were torn down after the camp was liberated; the guard towers that you see there today are reconstructions, except for the guard tower which has a door into the Catholic convent, which is the only original tower.

When the Dachau concentration camp was in operation, there were no doors into the guard towers from inside the camp, since this would have allowed the prisoners to break into the towers and kill the guards.

Door into the Catholic Convent at Dachau is through a guard tower

The guard tower, which is now an entrance to the Catholic convent, had to be remodeled to make a door from the Dachau Memorial Site into the convent.  There may have been a ceremony when this door was created.  I can see Neuhäusler handing a sledgehammer to the oldest nun and giving her the honor of making the first blow in the construction of  a new door into the guard tower.

The Jewish Memorial at Dachau was not built until 1967.  It is very close to the Catholic convent, and the Jews have complained about the tiny cross on the convent building, but the cross is still there.

Jewish Memorial at Dachau is very close to the Catholic convent

Tiny cross on Catholic convent offends the Jews

Note the contrast between the Catholic convent and the Jewish Memorial. One is dark and ominous, and the other is light and welcoming.

The Dachau Memorial site has turned into a memorial to the Jews.  Tourists go there to pay their respects to the Jews who died in the Holocaust.  The fact that Dachau was a camp mainly for political prisoners, who were predominantly Catholic, has been completely lost.  The former shower room at Dachau is now explained away as a place where the Nazis tested gassing methods.  The gas chamber is the linchpin of the Holocaust and you can’t have a Memorial to the Jews without a gas chamber.

One thing I didn’t realize was that the [Dachau] camp wasn’t immediately emptied and shut down following the end of the war. Dachau was a refugee camp until the 1960s. This is so hard for me to wrap my head around–how people had to live in the same camp under still-horrible conditions even after the war was over. Obviously the Nazis were no longer there killing and torturing them, but these people were forced to live in the same barracks where they’d been starved and exposed to the most unhygienic, unhealthy, uncomfortable conditions…and they were still encountering a lot of the same food shortages and unsanitary living conditions. Every day they looked out into the square where the Nazis had lined them up and, guns in hand, told them that they were subhuman. They lived a stone’s throw away from mass graves containing the ashes and bodies of family members and friends, and every day they passed the places where they had been tortured and their loved ones killed.

Did a Dachau tour guide really tell a group of American tourists that the “refugees,” who lived in the Dachau barracks until they were thrown out in 1965, were former prisoners in the camp?  Or did the blogger misunderstand what the tour guide was saying?

The truth is that the “refugees” who lived in the former Dachau camp for 17 years were ethnic Germans who had been expelled from Czechoslovakia. They had been forced to walk to Germany and try to find housing in a war-torn country where every city had been bombed.  They were the lucky ones; these expellees had manged to make it to Germany without being burned alive by the Czechs who drove them out.  I previously blogged about the expellees here.

The guidebooks that were being sold at Dachau, on my many visits there, did not mention the ethnic German expellees.  The German people don’t dwell on their suffering during and after World War II.  No one wants to hear their story.  Today, Dachau is all about the Jews, even though Dachau was not primarily a camp for Jews.

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

I can’t tell every story I heard on my tour–they were nearly all horrifying, appalling reminders of what human beings are capable of. It’s enough to say, in a fairly family-friendly blog, that thousands of people were tortured for no reason other than the amusement of their captors. That the Nazis would keep prisoners locked in tiny cells for months at a time–or even a year–only to take them outside in to the sun, blind them, and shoot them. To put it another way: the Nazis would invest the time and expense in keeping someone alive for a year knowing full well that they were going to kill them. They weren’t murdering people to spare the expense of keeping them imprisoned. They weren’t killing them in the heat of battle. They weren’t even doing it for ideology anymore. They were doing it for fun. The idea that people like that have existed at all on this planet is terrifying, but to remember that they were in positions of power–and that they held these positions a mere sixty-odd years ago–is truly chilling.   [....]

I have deduced that the blogger is referring to the bunker at Dachau, the prison within the prison, where the VIP prisoners like the Reverend Martin Niemoeller were held.  These prisoners had small private cells, with a toilet and wash basin, but they did not have to stay in their cells 24/7; they could walk around outside and even receive visitors.  They could read books and one prisoner had a musical instrument.

One wing of the bunker had prison cells for Dachau guards who had abused the prisoners in the camp.  Shortly before Dachau was liberated, there were 128 prisoners in this wing, who were released so that they could assist with the surrender of the camp.

Did this blogger misunderstand what the tour guide was saying?  The bunker was used by the American occupation after the war to imprison alleged German war criminals, with 5 men in each cell that was intended for one person.

Or did a Dachau tour guide really say that thousands of people were tortured at Dachau for the amusement of their captors and that prisoners were killed at Dachau for “fun.”

There were several SS men, imprisoned by the Allies at Dachau, who testified under oath in court that they were tortured to force them to admit to crimes that they had not committed.

The following testimony was given at the American Military Tribunal by Johann Kick, the head of the political department at Dachau. Kick was convicted, sentenced to death and executed for his alleged torture of the Dachau prisoners.

Q: … will you describe to the court the treatment that you received prior to your first interrogation anyplace?

(Prosecution objection as to whether beating received on the 6th of May could be relevant to confession signed on the 5th of November).

Q: … Kick, did the treatment you received immediately following your arrest have any influence whatever on the statements that you made on the 5th of November?

A: … The treatment at that time influenced this testimony to that extent, that I did not dare to refuse to sign, in spite of the fact that it did not contain the testimony which I gave.

Q: Now, Kick, for the court, will you describe the treatment which you received immediately following your arrest?

A: I ask to refuse to answer this question here in public.

President: The court desires to have the defendant answer the question.

A: I was here in Dachau from the 6th to the 15th of May, under arrest; during this time I was beaten all during the day and night… kicked… I had to stand to attention for hours; I had to kneel down on sharp objects or square objects; I had to stand under the lamp for hours and look into the light, at which time I was also beaten and kicked; as a result of this treatment my arm was paralyzed for about 8 to 10 weeks; only beginning with my transfer to Augsberg, this treatment stopped.

Q: What were you beaten with?

A: With all kinds of objects.

Q: Describe them, please.

A: With whips, with lashing whips, with rifle butts, pistol butts, and pistol barrels, and with hands and fists.

Q: And that continued daily over a period of what time?

A: From the morning of the 7th of May until the morning of the 15th of May.

Q: Kick, why did you hesitate to give that testimony?

A: If the court hadn’t decided I should talk about it, I wouldn’t have said anything about it today.

Q: Would you describe the people who administered these beatings to you?

A: I can only say that they were persons who were wearing the United States uniform and I can’t describe them any better.

Q: And as a result of those beatings when Lt. Guth called you in, what was your frame of mind?

A: I had to presume that if I were to refuse to sign I would be subjected to a similar treatment.

The blogger’s description of the Dachau gas chamber and its use is absolutely mind boggling.  If you don’t know anything about the Dachau gas chamber, you can read about it on my website here.

This quote is the blogger’s description of the gas chamber:

There was however, one thing that triggered a gut reaction of sheer fear and despair, and that was the gas chamber. Dachau did not use gas chambers in the same way as many other camps; it was in fact a testing facility to determine the best, most efficient way to kill the most people. (I hate that I had to type that sentence. I hate that there were–and still are– people whose horrible actions gave me a reason to type it.) The Nazis tested a number of variables in the gas chambers at Dachau–how much poison? Should it be pumped in as gas or sprinkled on the floor in another form to be converted into gas by raising the temperature once the prisoners were in the room? How could they most effectively poison loads of people from as safe a distance as possible? Those are the questions the Nazis encountered.

This is the reality that their victims met: The gas chamber at Dachau was made to look like a shower. The men were told they would get a hot shower. They were led into a room with towels hanging on the walls and told to undress. They were then sent into the chamber, which was fitted with shower heads to really sell the illusion. If they asked why it was so hot, they were told that it was the hot water coming up through the pipes. The doors were closed, and the men who had entered would never leave. Their bodies were unceremoniously burned in a crematorium located in the next room, and their ashes were dumped into unmarked mass graves.

Even as a perfectly safe and healthy tourist in 2013, standing in the gas chamber was like standing in a nightmare. The room was dark and low ceilinged and gave the impression that it would crush you if you stood there long enough. It felt claustrophobic even though the doors were open and I was practically the only person in there. And I started to tear up.

Did the blogger actually go inside the gas chamber at Dachau?  Did he see the towel rods in the undressing room?  Did he see water pipes for the showers?  Whom did the victims ask about why the gas chamber was so hot?

Why was the ceiling so low?  Was it because this room was modified by the Americans after the camp was liberated?

You can read about the history of the Dachau gas chamber on my website here.

This quote from the blog post about a trip to Dachau absolutely astounded me:

Our guide, who’s been leading Dachau tours for four years, sent us into the building by ourselves while he waited outside. “I’ve only been in that room once,” he said, “and I have no desire to ever go back.” I heard stories of other tour guides who stopped leading Dachau tours after a year or so because they could not deal with the pain and horror of visiting the camp three or four times a week.

Why wouldn’t the guide go inside the Dachau gas chamber?  Because he couldn’t lie with a straight face?

After reading this far on the blog post, I was not inclined to believe the story, told by the blogger, of the Carmelite nunnery at Dachau.  This blog post is getting quite long, so I will stop for awhile, eat breakfast, and write another blog post about the Carmelite nunnery.

You can see photos of Theresienstadt on my website here.

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

The Nazis forced all Jews to wear a Star of David

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Theresienstadt was an old military fort

Dry moat at Theresienstadt

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

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

http://www.scrapbookpages.com/Buchenwald/JedemDasSeine.html

One of the photos that I included on that page of my website, several years ago, has been proven to be a fake.  It is not a photo of Jews who were mistreated at Buchenwald, but a photo of German Prisoners of War at Bad Nenndorf, a little known prison set up by the British in 1945 after World War II had ended.

Photo of German POWs at Bad Nenndorf Britrish prison

Mel Gibson

The soldier on the far left in the photo looks a lot like Mel Gibson.  Maybe he can redeem himself by claiming that his Jewish father was tortured at Buchenwald.

The soldier, on the far right in the photo, looks very German to me, and he looks as if he is mad as hell, and not going to take it anymore.  That’s the way I feel, now that I have realized that I was duped by the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, who passed this photo off as a photo of her Jewish father, surrounded by ethnic Germans, who were allegedly prisoners at Buchenwald.

This text, which is on my website, will soon to changed to tell the truth behind the photo above:

The photo above was taken by an American Army photographer shortly after the camp was liberated. In the center of the photo is a Jewish prisoner who had gone into hiding when the Germans started to evacuate the camp, according to his daughter. He first hid in the typhus ward and later dug a hole near the infirmary barrack. He was too weak to stand when this photo was taken.

His daughter wrote in an e-mail to me that her father told her about “the American soldier who asked him to pose for a picture, because he was particularly emaciated compared to the other – political – prisoners. The photographer asked them to assume a serious expression, because he wanted to communicate what happened in the camps during the war.”

Note that the prisoner in the center of the photo is wearing thick socks. The concentration camp prisoners were not normally issued socks. These socks had formerly belonged to an SS guard in the camp.

The following is a quote from the e-mail letter sent to me by this prisoner’s daughter:

“When my father arrived in Buchenwald, he was slated to work in the quarry, in effect a protracted death sentence, when a Nazi Jeep drove by seeking building engineers. My father was a textile engineer, but decided to take the chance. He was lucky; his co-worker (they were building barracks) taught him on the job.

Towards the end of the war he would hide near the Germans’ cabin and listen to the newscasts, which told of the approaching American army. This motivated him to find whatever means possible to hold out in the camp and avoid further deportation. I already wrote you how he hid: first by hiding in the typhus ward, then by digging a cave.”

I should have known that something was wrong when a woman [whose name I have forgotten] wrote in an e-mail to me that her father told her about “the American soldier who asked him to pose for a picture, because he was particularly emaciated compared to the other – political – prisoners. The photographer asked them to assume a serious expression, because he wanted to communicate what happened in the camps during the war.”

Famous photo taken at Buchenwald has an Army Signal Corp number on the bottom

American soldiers were not allowed to carry cameras in World War II.  The photos taken at  Buchenwald, and at all the other camps liberated by Americans, were taken by Army Signal Core photographers and each photo has a number on the bottom in white ink.

Of course, there were American soldiers who had cameras that they had “liberated” from the Germans, but their photos are candid photos, not posed like the photo of the four men, shown above.

The photo of the four men is shown on this page of USHMM website.

The same photo is shown on this website, with the following information:

Pictured at right are four German men after being interned at the notorious Bad Nenndorf  secret prison set up by  the British during their occupation of north-west Germany in 1945. They are far from the worst of the cases discovered there.

A big Thank You to Carolyn Yeager who has exposed many lies about the Holocaust, including the photo of the German prisoners, which the Jews are claiming as a photo of prisoners at Buchenwald.

While they worked on this, students in the history department worked with Goss to research additional primary source photographs and film footage from the era through USHMM in Washington, D.C.  They also completed an International Tracing Service (ITS) request to see if any documentation on the Grunwald family existed in the Holocaust-era archives in Germany.  Dozens of documents were found.

The documents are among hundreds of artifacts that appear in the film, some emerging “out of nowhere,” Gaston said, during the lengthy discovery process.  Perhaps the most touching example is a hastily written letter by Grunwald’s mother to his father – moments before trucks took her to the gas chamber.  That letter was donated this past July to USHMM and will become part of their Permanent Exhibition, a testament to its uniqueness and importance as an artifact from this tragic time.

Grunwald’s mother was apparently selected for the gas chamber because she was not able to work, but his father was spared.  I can just see Dr. Mengele saying to Grunwald’s mother:  “Sorry, but I can’t let you slide  — I have to send you to the gas chamber, but not to worry, you can write a letter to your husband, and we will keep it in our archives, so 70 years from now, your descendants can read it.”

Babo Batren waiting for the truck to take her to the gas chamber (Click on photo to enlarge)

Jews waiting for a truck to take them to the gas chamber

Most of the Jews had to walk to the gas chamber and there are numerous photos of them walking, carrying their bundles.  You can see a large collection of these photos on this website: http://www.nazigassings.com/StrollingtotheGasChambers.html

The Last of the Unjust mentions Nisko, the first settlement where the Jews were sent by Adolf Eichmann.  Dr. Wolf Murmelstein, the son of Benjamin Murmelstein, wrote an essay about his father and the Nisko settlement, which you can read on my website here.

The subject of gas chambers at the Theresienstadt concentration camp has been in the news lately, due to the release of Claude Lanzmann’s new film featuring Benjamin Murmelstein, the last Jewish leader at Theresienstadt, who gave testimony 10 years ago about the gas chambers at Theresienstadt for Lanzmann’s film Shoah.  His testimony wound up on the cutting room floor, but has now been included in Lanzmann’s new film.  You can read about Lanzmann and the film here.

In a recent news article which you can read in full here, Inge Auerbacher, a child survivor of Theresienstadt, [Terezin], was quoted as saying this:

Only the invasion of that area by the Russian Army prevented the completion of gas chambers at Terezin, [Auerbacher] said.

Inge Auerbacher was also quoted as saying this in her recent talk to students in Montana:

Holocaust deniers are everywhere she said, noting that the president of Iran claims the crematories in the concentration camps were just bakery ovens.

I also blogged here about the claim that the cremation ovens at Auschwitz were bakery ovens.

Inge was lucky to have survived the Theresienstadt camp; you can read about the death statistics at Theresienstadt on my website here.

This quote is from the newspaper article about Inge Auerbacher’s talk:

Auerbacher was born on Dec. 31, 1934, in a little German village, that was over 1,000 years old. There were 60 Jewish families there and they happily lived next door to Christian families. Her father was a textile merchant and a disabled World War I veteran. Her grandfather, who lived in another village, was also a German war veteran. “We were very patriotic. We died for Germany,” she said. “Yes, we were Jewish, but we were good Germans.”

Her name, she pointed out, is a very common German name for a girl. She wore German clothing, she spoke German, the only difference, she said, was where she worshipped (sic).

Things began to change in 1938 with the beginning of riots against Jewish neighborhoods. On Nov. 10, 1938, riots struck her village, and mobs broke out every window in the homes and businesses of Jews and her father and grandfather were arrested and taken to the concentration camp at Dachau. The mob desecrated the synagogue in their community.

Somehow, after a few weeks, her father and grandfather were allowed to come home, and they immediately began trying to find a way to leave Germany. They sold their home and moved in with her grandparents in an even smaller village. They applied to immigrate to the United States and were put on a waiting list more than 10 years long. “We were stuck, with great hopes of leaving,” she said.

Auerbacher recalls the time they lived in this little village as her only childhood. During that time, her grandfather died of a broken heart from the way Germany betrayed its war veterans and from the physical abuse he endured at Dachau.

In 1941, deportations in her part of Germany started in the winter. The school was closed and she never finished first grade. She didn’t go back to school until she was 15 years old. Her grandmother was deported first. The family did not know for some time, but she was taken to the Black Forest and shot. She lies in a mass grave today. Eventually, Auerbacher, her mother and father, were deported to Terezin [Theresienstadt], a concentration camp built in an old military garrison in what is now the Czech Republic.

Auerbacher remembers that they could take almost nothing when they were deported. A few articles of clothing, metal dishes, a bedroll, and, for her, her special dolly, “Marlene,” named after the German-American movie star Marlene Dietrich.

Her time in Terezin is a blur of brutality, squalor, hunger, sickness and sorrow. She suffered scarlet fever there and many other illnesses. Her hair was filled with lice and her body covered with boils. “Hunger was a constant companion. You didn’t think about anything else but food, food, food,” she said. “You either lived or you died,” she said.

Terezin was a staging place, a transit area where two-thirds of those sent there were eventually shipped to killing centers, and a third died there. Of the 50,000 children under the age of 15 who came through Terezin, only a little more than 100 survived. Only the invasion of that area by the Russian Army prevented the completion of gas chambers at Terezin, she said.

Throughout this brutal time, she said, her father never lost hope. He told his wife, you wait and see, you’ll ride in a car again someday.

His faith sustained them, and on May 8, they were finally liberated. Eventually, they returned to her grandmother’s village and lived in an apartment there. “We were a miracle that our family survived,” she said.

[...]

After retiring, she became an activist for the Holocaust, traveling to Europe, revisiting Terezin and the places of her youth, writing her books and starting on speaking tours.

Theresienstadt, now known as Terezin, is most famous for the Red Cross visit in June 1944.  A second Red Cross visit was scheduled for April 6, 1945 and Adolf Eichmann came to Theresienstadt on March 5, 1945 to check out the camp.  According to some Holocaust experts, that is when he ordered gas chambers to be built at Theresienstadt because the gas chambers at Auschwitz had been closed in November 1944, and he wanted to continue the genocide of the Jews at Theresienstadt.

By March 1945, there was complete chaos in Europe in the final days of the war and Theresienstadt had become shabby again, after the first Red Cross visit in June 1944. Most of the able-bodied Jews in the camp had been sent on the transports to Auschwitz, where there were factories in which the Jews were being put to work for the German war effort. Most of the remaining inmates were elderly people or young children, like 10 year-old Inge Auerbacher, who were not able to work. Eichmann ordered the town to be cleaned up again, and the ghetto passed a second Red Cross inspection in 1945 with a good report.

On April 15, 1945, all the Danish Jews in the ghetto were transported back to Denmark with the help of the Red Cross.

On May 3, 1945, the Nazis turned the whole Theresienstadt camp over to Red Cross workers who now had the difficult task of trying to save the survivors from a raging typhus epidemic.

Typhus had been brought into the Theresienstadt ghetto by 13,454 survivors of the eastern concentration camps who began arriving after April 20, 1945. Some of them had been sent to Auschwitz a few months earlier and were now returning. In the final days of the war, the Theresienstadt ghetto became a hell hole, where a typhus epidemic was totally out of control, just like the epidemic in the unfortunate Bergen-Belsen camp which the Nazis had voluntarily turned over to the British on April 15, 1945.

Typhus is caused by body lice, and the Germans had tried unsuccessfully to control the lice in the death camps in Poland by using Zyklon B, the same chemical that they used to kill the Jews in the homicidal gas chambers.

Way back in 2010, I blogged about the gas chambers at Theresienstadt here.

Lanzmann should get in touch with Inge Auerbacher immediately and set her straight about her denial of the gas chambers at Theresienstadt, which were most certainly finished, according to his new film.  Holocaust denial is against the law in 17 countries and Auerbacher could wind up in prison for 5 years for saying that the gas chambers at Terezin were not finished because the Russian Army arrived in the nick of time.

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

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

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

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

[...]

Stevenson witnessed the horror of human atrocity firsthand.

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

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

[...]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stevenson believed it; he had seen it.

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

“I know what I saw,” Stevenson said.

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

American reporters view bodies of typhus victims after Dachau was liberated

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jewish Memorial stands in the location of the former disinfection building

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Door into disinfection chamber in Baracke X where clothing was disinfected

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This quote is from the news article:

Following the horrific account, students asked questions about her scars. She wasn’t tattooed.

“It was near the end of the war and they were in too much of a hurry to kill us, so they didn’t bother with the tattoos,” Eva said.

To go back to the beginning of the Eva Abrams story, this quote from the news article tells about how she survived:

[Eva and her family] arrived at Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland in the spring of 1944.

D-Day was a few weeks away and the Nazis were in retreat as Allied bombing increased, but the SS was determined to complete its “Final Solution” and eliminate as many Hungarian Jews as possible, Abrams told students at Bolivar Central School Friday as she gave her personal account of the Holocaust.

[...]

“As we got off the train, there was Mengele (Josef Mengele, an SS physician, infamous for his inhumane medical experimentation upon concentration camp prisoners at Auschwitz) and he pointed for my mother to go to the left and me to go to the right. My mother was only 50 years old and she was worried about what was going to happen to me,” Abrams said. Her mother and niece were sent to the gas chamber/crematorium. Abrams was sent to a barracks holding 1,000 women.

[...]

Abrams came very close to not surviving the concentration camp. Her mother, father, an older sister and her young niece didn’t survive. She recalled the 500-mile forced march, in the dead of winter, she and 1,000 other, starved, barefoot and nearly naked women, including her two older sisters, endured and how at the end of it only a family quirk may have saved her life when the German soldiers opened fire with a machine gun aimed at her and five other women.

“I fell down before they started firing. I don’t know why,” Abrams said.

[..]