“Hate murdered Eva Olsson’s family” at Auschwitz-Birkenau

Eva Olsson, an 87-year-old Holocaust survivor, “has spoken to more than one million people over the past decade and has speaking engagements that stretch well beyond her 90th birthday,” according to a news article which you can read here.

I previously blogged about Eva Olsson here.  On that blog post, I mentioned that Eva Olsson was telling students that when the Nazis ran out of Zyklon-B pellets for the gas chamber at Bergen-Belsen, they burned children alive in the ovens (plural).  (This was an obvious lie because there was no gas chamber at Bergen-Belsen and only one cremation oven.)

In her latest talk at an American school, Eva Olsson told the students that “People were forced in gas chambers screaming and moaning. After 20 minutes, it was silent.”

I have always heard that the Jews were told, on their way to the gas chamber, that they were going to take a shower, after which they would get clean clothes and hot soup.  But not according to Eva Olsson, who witnessed  her family members going to the gas chamber at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Her relatives were forced into the gas chamber, screaming and moaning.

In her latest talk, Olsson told the students that when she arrived at Auchwitz-Birkenau on May 19, 1944, she was separated from her family and “before she could blink, her mother, her father and most of her siblings disappeared never to be seen again.”

Auschwitz-Birkenau was 425 acres in size.  Did her relatives disappear into the barracks in this vast camp, or did they disappear into the gas chamber? According to Olsson, she witnessed her family going into the gas chamber and fortunately, she was wearing a watch, so she knew that it took 20 minutes for them to die.

This quote is from the news article:

For Olsson, it was the beginning of a nightmare that wouldn’t end until she and her younger sister were liberated by British soldiers [at Bergen-Belsen] just hours before prisoners were to be executed by Nazi soldiers on April 15, 1945.

Bergen-Belsen was voluntarily turned over to the British soldiers on April 15, 1945, after weeks of negotiations, but according to Eva Olsson, the Nazis were planning to execute all the prisoners on the very day that the British soldiers were due to arrive.

This quote is also from the news article:

When bullying happens, people need to stand up and stop it, said Olsson, adding that whether a person is a bystander or a bully, neither is innocent.

“Hitler could not have done what he did without the bystanders in Europe. That’s how he got away with it,” she said.

“Hate is what murdered my family,” said Olsson, adding “acceptance is how we achieve peace.”

The obvious bully and hater here is Eva Olsson, who is poisoning the minds of innocent children with her obvious lies.  The bystanders here are the school administrators who allow Olsson to spread her lies.

You can read about the Bergen-Belsen camp on my website here.  You can read about the history of Auschwitz-Birkenau on my website here.

The three trains that left Bergen-Belsen in April 1945….were they bound for an extermination camp?

This morning I read yet another news story here about Marion Blumenthal Lazan who gave a talk to middle school students in which she said that, in the last days of World War II, she was put on one of the three trains sent from Bergen-Belsen to an extermination camp.

I previously blogged about Marion’s story here.  In that talk to students, Marion was more explicit: she said that the train was taking the prisoners to the gas chamber.

I decided to do a little research and found this article about the Oppenheimer family members who were on “The Last Train from Belsen.”  But before getting to their story, I want to quote this sentence from the article about Marion’s latest talk to students:

[Marion's] family was among 2,500 Jews put on a train headed for an extermination camp. What should have been a 10-hour journey took two weeks as the Nazis tried to evade the allies.

This quote is from the article about the Oppenheimer family:

Every Holocaust survivor has a different story. This is certainly true for the three Oppenheimer children, Eve, Rudi and Paul, who were fortunate to survive for five years under the Nazis in Holland, and in the camps of Westerbork and Bergen-Belsen, and who finished up on ‘The Last Train from Belsen.”

All three of the trains that left Bergen-Belsen in April 1945 were on their way to the Theresienstadt camp, which was turned over to the Red Cross in the final days of the war.

This quote from the story of the Oppenheimer children tells why the prisoners were taken to Theresientstadt:

At this time, 600 people were dying in Belsen every day, including Anne Frank and her sister Margot in another section of the camp. But we realized that the Allies were winning the war. Eventually we could hear the Allied guns approaching Belsen and we looked forward to our liberation and freedom. But there was another ordeal in store for us because the Germans wanted to keep the “Exchange Jews” as hostages and the Star Camp was evacuated.

All the inmates were marched to the nearby railway loading ramp and we boarded the third of three trains. The other two trains departed; the first one was liberated by the American army within just a few days, the second one may have reached Theresienstadt, the perceived destination of all three trains.

Did Theresienstadt have a gas chamber?  Of course!  Every concentration camp had a Gaskammer.  You can read about the Theresienstadt gas chamber on this page of my website.  (Scroll down to the part about the Litomerice gate if you don’t want to read the whole page.)

Poisoned bread at Bergen-Belsen — the story told by Holocaust survivor Anita Schorr

After I read the horror story of the Stanislawow Squeezing Massacre on this blog, I was prepared to award the prize for the best Holocaust lie to Robert Geminder who survived the massacre.  (3,000 Jews were allegedly killed when the German Gestapo surrounded them and squeezed them to death in the city cemetery of a Polish town on October 12, 1941.)

That was before I saw a video of a speech given by Holocaust survivor Anita Schorr here.  In her speech, Anita Schorr said that she was first sent to the Theresienstadt ghetto, which she called Terezin. She was sent from there to Auschwitz, and was then transferred to Hamburg, Germany to work in cleaning up the damage from the Allied bombing of the city.  She was 14 years old, but had lied about her age and said that she was 18 in order to avoid being gassed at Auschwitz.

After 7 months in Hamburg, Schorr was transferred to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.  You can read about Bergen-Belsen here and about the liberation of the camp here.

At around 15:07 in the video, Schorr says that British soldiers came to liberate the Belsen camp on April 14, 1945 and the Jews “were asking for food.”  The British “looked around and found bread.”  But this was “poisoned bread,” according to Anita Schorr, who explained that “one slice of the bread had enough poison to kill a person.”  Anita said that everyone in the Belsen camp would have been killed (by the poisoned bread) if the British had arrived a day later.

Actually, the British did arrive a day later; as everyone knows, the British took over the Belsen camp on April 15, 1945 after several weeks of negotiations with the Germans.

Why am I awarding the prize for the biggest Holocaust lie to Anita Schorr instead of giving this honor to Robert Geminder? I am giving the prize to Anita Schorr because her lie is more egregious and more damaging to the German people.  Her lie promotes hatred while the amusing story told by Geminder is laughable and no intelligent person believes it.

Ignorant people might believe that the Germans poisoned the bread supply, during a typhus epidemic at Belsen, but the Jews were saved because the British arrived a day early, before the camp was voluntarily turned over to them to them by the Germans.  That’s why Anita Schorr gets the prize for the biggest Holocaust lie ever told.

What really happened at Bergen-Belsen? Can you say “typhus”?

Graph shows the number of deaths at Bergen-Belsen in the last 5 months of World War II

The photo above shows a graph that was displayed at Bergen-Belsen around fifty years ago. It shows that there were 350 deaths at Bergen-Belsen in December 1944; 800 to 1000 deaths in January 1945; 6,000 to 7,000 deaths in February 1945; 18,168 deaths in March 1945 and 18,365 deaths in April 1945.  What caused the number of deaths at Bergen-Belsen to increase so dramatically in the last months of World War II?  Daniel Jonah Goldhagen famously  wrote in his best-selling book entitled Hitler’s Willing Executioners: “Finally, the fidelity of the Germans to their genocidal enterprise was so great as seeming to defy comprehension. Their world was disintegrating around them, yet they persisted in genocidal killing until the end.”

I eagerly read Goldhagen’s boring book when it first came out in 1996.  I recall that he wrote that the so-called “death marches” out of the camps were done for the purpose of killing the Jews, but in his 468 page book, the word typhus is never mentioned. Bergen-Belsen was briefly mentioned on only one page.  (If books are ever burned in Germany again, his stupid book will be the first one to be thrown into the fire.)

Today, survivors of Bergen-Belsen, like Eva Olsson, go around telling innocent 10-year-old schoolchildren in American and Canada that there was a gas chamber at Bergen-Belsen and that children were burned alive when the Germans ran out of pellets for the gas chamber.  I previously blogged about Eva Olsson here.  Olsson herself had typhus while she was at Bergen-Belsen.  As most people in the world know, Anne Frank and her sister Margo both died of typhus in the camp.

Poster in the Bergen-Belsen museum in 2002 shows the burning of the camp

I took the photo above in the Bergen-Belsen museum in May 2002; it shows the British liberators of the camp burning down all the buildings in the camp, as this was the only way to stop the typhus epidemic in the camp.

You can read more about Bergen-Belsen here.   

The horror of Bergen-Belsen, as told by a British officer who witnessed the liberation of the camp

Yesterday, I received an e-mail from a man who sent me a copy of a letter, written by a British army officer, which gives an eye-witness account of the liberation of the Belsen concentration camp by British soldiers in April 1945. I thought I knew the story of Bergen-Belsen, but I was wrong!  It was much worse than I ever imagined.  You can read what I wrote about Belsen on my website, starting here.

This quote from the letter describes how the Belsen prisoners were deliberately starved to death:

The conditions at Belsen camp were ghastly.  Obviously it was used as a place where the prisoners could be exterminated slowly, and with least  trouble to the Reich.  This extermination took place in the form of slow starvation; the rations were a bowl of swede or turnip soup per person every day, and a loaf of rye bread between twelve persons every week. Thus the bare minimum was given; a minimum which would not allow anyone to die quickly of starvation, but which would make him or her gradually waste away into a living skeleton.  When this had happened, death either followed by typhus or mere collapse.  It was reckoned that at least four hundred persons died every day.

This particular part of the letter, written by the British officer, resonated with me:

Twenty of the SS guards who helped to run the camp were caught when the camp was overrun. Three have since committed suicide (and one has been shot).  The other sixteen are working as they have never worked before.  They have a heavy German lorry in which they carry away the bodies which they are made to collect.  But they are not allowed to run the engine.  Instead they all push behind, aided in their efforts by some very willing British Tommies who use all the means of persuasion to work that they can think of, from sticks to bayonets.

British soldiers force German guards to load bodies at gunpoint

In the photo above, notice the Belsen survivors, on the left side, watching the German guards being forced to load the bodies onto trucks.

The letter from the British officer started off with this description of the Belsen camp:

Belsen is a small village 11 miles from CELLE, which is in the province HANNOVER.  About a mile south of BELSEN, there is a concentraton camp, in which the Germans herded political prisoners of all nations.  They were put in this camp for crimes which ranged from listening to the British radio to treason against the Reich. Altogether, when the camp was overrun, there were about sixty thousand men and women in it, the majority being women.

What the British officer, who wrote this letter, probably didn’t know is that Bergen-Belsen did not become a concentration camp until December 1944.  Before that, it had been an exchange camp for Jews who wanted to go to Palestine. The Jews were held in the Belsen camp so that they could be exchanged for German prisoners being held in America and Great Britain. I have just recently learned that there were 900 German civilians in an American internment camp that were exchanged for Jews at Belsen.

When Belsen was “overrun” by the British, there were 60,000 prisoners in the camp, but 30,000 of them had just arrived a few days before. 

How Rabbi P. N. Gross “tricked the Nazis” and saved his wife and daughter at Bergen-Belsen

A big Thank You to Black Rabbit, another blogger who provided a link, in a recent comment, to an article published on May 8, 1945 in The Pittsburgh Press.  The headline of the newspaper article is

Rabbi’s wife and Child Freed from Horror Prison

Nazis Hold Kin of Pittsburgher 5 years

Rabbi Gross had emigrated to America and had been living in Pittsburgh since September 1940, but he had left his wife and daughter behind; they were held by the Nazis for 5 years, according to the newspaper article.  Why didn’t Rabbi Gross bring his family with him to America?  Probably because America had a law, passed in 1920, which limited the number of Jews that could obtain a visa to enter America.  This law remained on the books until Israel became a country in 1948.  After Kristallnacht, a pogrom in Germany on November 9, 1938, there were many Jews who wanted to escape from Europe, but the American laws allowed only a few to come to America.

This quote is from the article in The Pittsburgh Press:

Tuesday, May 8, 1945  The Pittsburgh Press

From the horrors of the Belsen Concentration camp has come good news for Rabbi P. N. Cross (sic) of the Hebrew Institute of Pittsburgh.

His wife, Blanka, and seven-year-old daughter, Ruthi, who were interned there 20 months before the British Second Army liberated the camp, are safe and well.

U.S. Army Chaplain S. Bunder of Philadelphia wrote Rabbi Wise yesterday that he had seen and talked with them there.

His Trick Works

For the Polish-born rabbi, who has made his home in Pittsburgh since Sept. 1940 the letter brought an end to his long fight to save the  lives of his wife and child.

His chief weapon was his wife’s citizenship paper for a Latin-American country, which Rabbi Gross obtained for her in Feb. 1942.  Although neither he nor his wife had ever seen the country, which Rabbi Gross calls “Rescuania,” and although he confesses that the transaction was a little outside the law, the trick worked.

Blanka Gross and little Ruthi Gross survived for 20 months in the Belsen “horror camp”  because they were saved by the Rabbi’s trick.  But how?  30,000 Jews died at Bergen-Belsen, according to the Memorial stone at the site of the former camp.  I previous blogged about the memorial stones at Bergen-Belsen here.   

New book by Michael Hirsh about the American Liberators of the Nazi concentration camps

One of the regular readers of this blog recommended a new book, written by Michael Hirsh, which you can download here.  The cover of the book has a photo of the Allach sub-camp of Dachau which was liberated by American troops on April 30, 1945, the next day after the main Dachau camp was liberated.

The liberation of Allach, a sub-camp of the Dachau concentration camp

Allach was near the city of Munich; it was located approximately 10 miles from the main Dachau camp. According to Marcus J. Smith, who wrote “Dachau: The Harrowing of Hell,” the Allach camp was divided into two enclosures, one for 3,000 Jewish inmates and the other for 6,000 non-Jewish prisoners. Smith was a doctor in the US military, assigned to take over the care of the prisoners after the liberation. He wrote that the typhus epidemic had not reached Allach until April 22, 1945, about a week before the camp was liberated.

At the main Dachau camp, prisoners were dying at the rate of 400 a day during the typhus epidemic which started there way back in December 1944.  The prisoners at Allach were still relatively healthy, as the photo below shows.

Survivors of the Allach sub-camp of Dachau (Click on the Photo to enlarge)

Why did the author of the book entitled “The Liberators — America’s Witnesses to the Holocaust” choose a photo of Allach for the cover?  There were virtually no atrocities committed there and the survivors were in relatively good condition.  There were no “bodies stacked like cordwood.”  The only reason that I can think of is that the photo shows an American flag flying and a person of color in the foreground.  

Franz Hoessler, the Commander of the women’s camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau

Franz Hoessler is shown in a British documentary film

The photo above is a still shot of Franz Hoessler (Hössler) who was transferred to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp after the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp was abandoned on January 18, 1945.  From December 1943 to January 1945, Hoessler had been the Commander of the women’s camp at Birkenau, where he worked with Dr. Josef Mengele, who was the women’s doctor at Birkenau.

In the photo above, Franz Hoessler is standing in front of a truck loaded with corpses of prisoners who died from typhus at Bergen-Belsen after the camp was voluntarily turned over to the British on April 15, 1945 by Heinrich Himmler.  Hoessler was one of the 80 SS men and women on the staff at Belsen who volunteered to stay behind and assist the British.  Twenty of these SS staff members died after they were deliberately exposed to typhus.

Hoessler was one of twelve SS men and women, who were put on trial by the British in The Belsen Trial in 1945, and charged with crimes committed at both Belsen and Auschwitz. He was convicted of war crimes committed at Birkenau, including his alleged participation in the selection of prisoners to be gassed.

During the trial, Hoessler testified that he had been in charge of staffing the brothel, in the main Auschwitz camp, with volunteers from the women’s camp at Birkenau.  He testified that Dr. Mengele had examined the volunteers and selected those who were free from disease.  Franz Hoessler was hanged on December 13, 1945 for crimes committed at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Before the Nuremberg IMT, there was “The Belsen Trial”

On Sept. 18, 1945, the Baltimore Sun printed a news article with the headline “4,000,000 deaths on Auschwitz List.” The sub headline was “Testimony to That Effect Promised at SS Trial.” (This was a reference to the upcoming Belsen Trial.)

Here is a summary of the Baltimore Sun news story from this web site:

Testimony that more than 4,000,000 persons died at the Auschwilz (sic) concentration camp was promised by the prosecution today at the opening of the military trial of Josef Kramer and 44 SS henchmen for conspiracy to commit mass murder.

Was testimony about the 4 million deaths at Auschwitz actually given at the Belsen Trial, which was the “military trial of Josef Kramer” held by the British in September 1945?  Not that I know of!  

What would Anne Frank have written if she had continued writing in a diary after her hiding place was found?

American high school students, who are studying the Holocaust, are sometimes assigned by their teachers to write a few entries in an imaginary diary, writing as Anne Frank might have done, if she had continued her diary after her hiding place was raided by the Gestapo.  I believe that Anne Frank did continue to write in a new diary after she was sent from Auschwitz to Bergen-Belsen in October 1944.  I am basing this on the fact that many inmates of the Bergen-Belsen camp did, in fact, keep a diary in which they described what it was like in the camp.