Tour guide tells students about a “man-made hill” that was put into place at Dachau

On May 19, I blogged about tour guides at Dachau who tell lies about the history of the camp.

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

Jewish survivor of Dachau tells students about witnessing prisoners being killed in the gas chamber

Elly Gotz was only in the Dachau main camp for two days before the camp was liberated, but he witnessed prisoners being killed in the gas chamber.  He told an audience of students about the Dachau gas chamber in a talk that he gave in April this year.  His message is that the students shouldn’t hate, but how can these students not hate after they are told lies about prisoners being gassed at Dachau?

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

Gotz talked about the atrocities he witnessed and experienced — of being forced to move to the Jewish ghetto, of going into hiding with his family — where his mother, a nurse, had the task of helping them take their own lives (with syringes of a heart attack-inducing drug) should they be discovered.

Gotz also talked of his time at the Dachau labour and concentration camps and of witnessing innocent people being shot, dying of starvation and being killed in gas chambers.

Currently, there is a 93 year-old-man who is scheduled to go on trial in Germany as a war criminal because he was a cook in a concentration camp.  If old men, like John Demjanjuk, can be brought into court on a stretcher, and prosecuted for alleged war crimes, then old men who tell lies about gas chambers should also be brought into court in Germany and charged with the crime of Lying about the Holocaust.

Elly Gotz was born in Kaunas, Lithuania in 1928.  In 1941, his family was put into a ghetto where they stayed for three years before being sent to a Dachau sub-camp in 1944.

On April 29, 1945, when the main Dachau camp was liberated, there was a total of 2,539 Jews in the camp, including 225 women, according to the US Army census. Most of the Jews had arrived only weeks or even days before, after they were evacuated from the Dachau sub-camps, mainly the eleven Kaufering camps near Landsberg am Lech, where they had been forced to work in building underground factories for the manufacture of Messerschmitt airplanes.  Elly Gotz and his father had been working in the Kaufering I camp for 10 months.

You can hear Elly Gotz tell his story on the YouTube video below.  At 1:35 on the video, Gotz tells how “the vicious Commandant” of Dachau told him the prisoners were all going to be killed: “We are keeping the last bullets for you.”

The last Commandant of the Dachau Concentration Camp was Wilhelm Eduard Weiter; he had left the Dachau main camp on April 26, 1945, leading a transport of prisoners to the Schloss Itter, a subcamp of Dachau in Austria. When Weiter realized that Elly the Liar had arrived in the main camp the following day, Weiter came back and made his threats to 17-year-old Elly so that he would have some lies to tell students years later.

Grandson of a Nazi war criminal takes a tour of the Dachau Memorial Site

A very interesting article about Dachau, written fairly recently, by Jeaneane Payne, can be read here on the online Knoxville Daily Sun.  One surprising fact that I learned from this article is the information in this quote:

“Germans today prefer to use the term ‘death camps’ as opposed to concentration camps because the only purpose of the camps was to kill people in an industrialized way,” stated [the grandson of an SS man]. [...]

[This young man’s] grandfather was a Nazi war criminal, an SS agent stationed at Dachau. As I was planning my trip to Germany to visit my daughter and son-in-law, [he] asked if he could travel to Dachau from Southwest Germany with us. [...]

His grandfather was a volunteer in the SS. “He was proud of his involvement with the SS,” [his grandson] said. “He never showed remorse for his actions.”

After the war, the SS was declared to be a criminal organization by the Allies at the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal, so every man in the SS was a war criminal, regardless of his behavior during World War II.  You can read about it on this website.  The grandfather of this young man could have personally saved the lives of many Jews at Dachau, yet he would still have been a war criminal simply because he was in a military unit that had been declared (ex-post-facto) by the enemy to be a criminal organization.

This quote is from the article by Ms. Payne:

After touring the main facilities, we decided to go as a group to visit the crematorium knowing this would be the most difficult part for each of us, particularly for [the grandson of an SS man] who knew his grandfather had a part in the effort by the SS of placing so many innocent people in the ovens.

The crematorium had been built at the backside of the camp, out of view and out of hearing range of the screams of many thousands of people as they were being place[d] into the ovens. It was adjacent to the gas chamber which had been disguised as “showers”.

Cremation ovens at Dachau concentration camp

View of the inside of one of the Dachau ovens

Dr. Francizek Blaha was a prisoner, who worked at the Dachau crematorium, performing autopsies. The following quote is from the affidavit of Dr. Blaha, given to American interrogators on 3 May 1945, and presented at the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal in November 1945:

Sometimes prisoners were killed only because they had dysentery or vomited and gave the nurses too much trouble. Mental patients were liquidated by being led to the gas chamber and injected there or shot. Shooting was a common method of execution. Prisoners could be shot just outside the crematorium and carried in. I have seen people pushed into the ovens while they were still breathing and making sounds, although if they were too much alive they were usually hit on the head first.

Could this be the origin of the claim that prisoners were burned alive in the ovens at Dachau?  Are tour guides now telling visitors that people were burned alive at Dachau?

According to Marcus J. Smith, a U.S. Army doctor, who wrote a book called The Harrowing of Hell about the days immediately following the liberation of the camp, the ovens at Dachau were used by the American military to cremate the bodies found in the camp, including the bodies of some of the Waffen-SS soldiers who were killed when the camp was liberated.

Smith wrote that, around May 6, 1945, the disposal of the bodies in the camp began:

It is time to dispose of the bodies. Some are carried to the gravel pits. Then the furnaces of the crematorium are stoked and reignited. By increasing the work day for the operators from four to ten hours, 710 corpses are cremated in the next four days. Too slow! A top-level decision is made to bury the dead.

Dachau prisoners who loaded the dead bodies into the ovens pose for a photo

The old photo above show crematory workers demonstrating how they dragged the dead bodies out of the morgue, loaded them onto a stretcher and then shoved them into the cremation ovens. Posed photographs, such as the photo shown above, were offered for sale to American soldiers who visited the museum set up in Baracke X by the US Army after the liberation of Dachau.

According to Marcus J. Smith, the chief of the Dachau crematorium crew was Ludvik “a heavy, powerfully muscled Czech who has labored in the crematorium for a long time.” Smith wrote that Ludvik sent him a letter in which he complained that his team of 10 people were not being treated as well as they had been by the SS. Ludvik wrote in this letter: “We feel that after our liberation, at least the same standard of living should be maintained. But our position is worse than then as to food, drinks and tobacco.”

Could it be that Ludvik and his fellow prisoners shoved Jews into the ovens alive?  Or did the SS men come into the crematorium at night and burn a few Jews alive, just for fun?  Is this why the SS was declared to be a criminal organization by the Allies ex post facto (after the fact)?  The grandsons of the SS men should not be tortured by being told that SS men burned people alive in the ovens at Dachau.  For shame!

Smith wrote that, because the cremation efforts were too slow, the bodies were buried by German civilians “at the American commander’s request.” The corpses were taken on carts to the burial site on a hill called Leitenberg where the bodies were transferred to a bulldozed excavation, according to Smith. He wrote that “Eventually 2,400 bodies were buried.” That would mean that there was a total of 3,110 bodies in the camp, including those of the prisoners who died between April 29th and May 6th after the liberation. There were allegedly 2,310 bodies on the death train that arrived in the camp on April 27, 1945, which would have to be included in this total. There were 2,226 prisoners who died in the month of May 1945 after the liberation of the camp; they were buried in a cemetery in the town of Dachau.

Photo of the body of Louis Schloss, who died at Dachau

Ms. Payne shows a photo of Louis Schloss, a prisoner who died after being punished at Dachau with this caption under the photo:

Nurembourg (sic) businessman Louis Schloss died on May 16, 1933 at Dachau as a result of a beating. To give the incident the appearance of a suicide, he was hung on a hook with suspenders. The above image was taken on May 17, 1933 under the direction of the State Prosecution Office.

It is true that Louis Schloss died in the Dachau camp after being beaten.  Here is what happened:  When the Dachau camp was first opened on March 22, 1933, the guards were police officers with the Munich police, but after only a few weeks, SS soldiers were assigned to guard duty in the camp.

The first Commandant of Dachau was SS Standartenführer Hilmar Wäckerle, who began using that title on April 19, 1933. Wäckerle was instructed by Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS and the acting Police Chief of Munich, to draw up a set of rules for discipline in the camp. His rules were extremely harsh and a number of prisoners died after being punished.

The deaths in the Dachau camp came to the attention of the Munich prosecutor after Sophie Handschuch made a formal complaint in 1933, demanding to know the true cause of death of her son who had been an inmate at Dachau. Other prisoners who died in the early days of the camp were Dr. Rudolf Benario, Fritz Dressel, Sepp Götz, Ernst Goldmann, Arthur Kahn, and Erwin Kahn. Karl Lehrburger and Wilhelm Aron, both Jewish, also died as a result of harsh treatment in the Dachau camp. Herbert Hunglinge committed suicide to escape the unbearable conditions in the camp.

After an investigation by the Munich police, Wäckerle was charged with murder for the deaths of Louis Schloss on May 16, Leonard Hausmann on May 17, Dr. Alfred Strauss on May 24 and Sebastian Nefzger on May 25. Dr. Strauss and Louis Schloss were both Jewish. Because of the criminal charges, Himmler was forced to relieve Wäckerle of his command, as of June 25, 1933. The charges against Wäckerle were later dropped, but he was dismissed from his job as Commandant and sent to fight on the Eastern front, where he was killed in action. Wäckerle was replaced by Theodor Eicke who became the new Commandant. Eicke was also killed in action after he was transferred to the Eastern front.

In June 1934, Eicke was given the title of Inspector General and the authority to approve all punishments in all the camps.

The following quote is from the article written by Ms. Payne:

Pole hanging was a method of torture used in interrogation as well as punishment. Victims were hung up by their wrists, swung back and forth, and beaten.

“These are the torments of hell! The whole body weight hangs from the arms that are twisted backward. And the monsters stand in front of you and laugh at your pain, ask you whether you now want to confess, slap you in the face and pull and tug at your body. When you stay silent they swing you, often they whip you at the same time.” — “The Powerful and the Helpless,” prisoner account of Edgar Kupfer-Koberwitz (1940-1945 in the Dachau concentration camp) on pole hanging, 1957 (excerpt).

Fake photo of “tree hanging” is a still shot from a documentary made by the Soviet Union

Pole hanging was also called “tree hanging.”  I previously blogged about pole hanging here.  The photo shown above was taken in the second Dachau Museum, which first opened in 1965.  When the Museum was expanded in 2003, this photo was removed.  Although it was known that this was a fake photo, it was left up in the Dachau Museum for several years.
This quote is also from the article by Ms. Payne, which shows a photo of a door into a prison cell in the Dachau bunker:

During the 5 hours we spent at Dachau, the most difficult for me was viewing the prison cells. The walk down a long corridor portrayed each cell as being more deplorable than that the last.

Apparently, Ms. Payne was not told that the bunker had private cells for the privileged prisoners who were allowed to walk around around outside their cells and even to receive visitors.  There was one wing of the bunker, that has since been torn down, which housed the SS men who had broken the rules.  The night before the Dachau camp was liberated, 128 SS men were released from their prison cells in the bunker and ordered to man the guard towers, while the regular SS guards  left that night.

After Dachau was liberated, it was turned into “War Crimes Enclosure No. 1 for German war criminals”.  The cells in the bunker were used to incarcerate high ranking German prisoners. The Germans didn’t get a private cell; 5 men were placed in each cell where there was only one bed.  They had to take turns standing, sitting and sleeping.

Ms. Payne shows a photo of one of the disinfection cells with the caption “Gas chamber.”  At least, she got that right.  A disinfection cell at Dachau was called a Gaskammer or “gas chamber” in English.

Photo of disinfection cell with the caption “Gas chamber”

Why are tourists not allowed to see what is in the basement of the gas chamber building at Dachau?

The last time that I saw the Memorial Site at the former Dachau concentration camp was in May 2007.  At that time, tourists were not allowed to see the basement of the Baracke X building where the gas chamber is located.  I have been to Dachau several times (the first time was in 1997) but the door to the basement was never open.

Stairs leading down to the basement of Baracke X at Dachau

I got to thinking about this when I read a letter, written by one of the American liberators of Dachau, on this website.  This quote is an excerpt from the letter on the website:

FORMER BRUNSWICKER EDITOR DESCRIBES HORRORS OF DACHAU
Dachau, Germany
July 29, 1945

Dear Folks,
I’m going to combine this letter because I want to tell you in some detail of something I have just seen–the site of one of the world’s greatest horrors, I think. Perhaps Dachau, just the word, means something to you. Here was one of the Nazis’ most horrible concentration camps–and we are staying within its barbed-wire enclosure in the hospital building.

Across a high concrete wall, just a few yards from me now, are the buildings where many thousands of starved and diseased persons finally were put to death, by one of several devices the ingenious Germans had arranged.

The first sight one sees is the row of small concrete gas chambers. These small rooms, about six feet square–could either be used for decontaminating clothes–and bodies–or put prisoners to death. The next room, large and with a low ceiling first gives the impression of a huge shower room. There are drains in the floor and shower spigots in the ceiling–but all fakes. Prisoner were made to take off all their clothes and enter the room, believing they were to take a bath. As many as 300 persons, I suppose men and women all in one group, were crowded into this room, the door sealed, and the gas turned on. In seven or eight minutes it was all over.

[...]

In the basement of this building was a bone crusher where the remains from the furnaces were ground into small particles, either for fertilizer or to be put into small urns, resembling flower pots, on the pretense of being sent to relatives. The basement is full of these pots and bone ashes litter the floor. Even in death these poor creatures were shown no decency.

It would be interesting to see what a bone crusher looks like.  I would also like to see the the “small urns, resembling flower pots.”   Many of the America soldiers described the pots as being red colored, apparently like the red flower pots that you can buy today.  But there is something else that I would like to see in the basement of the Baracke X building:  the contraption that was used to put the gas fumes through the floor vents in the gas chamber, as described by American Army officer Col. Davids Chavez, Jr.

This quote is from the report made by Col. David Chavez, Jr. on May 7, 1945, a little more than a week after the camp was liberated on April 29, 1945:

“The new building [Baracke X] had a gas chamber for executions… the gas chamber was labeled ‘shower room’ over the entrance and was a large room with airtight doors and double glassed lights, sealed and gas proof. The ceiling was studded with dummy shower heads. A small observation peephole, double glassed and hermetically sealed was used to observe the conditions of the victims. There were grates in the floor. Hydrogen cyanide was mixed in the room below, and rose into the gas chamber and out the top vents.” Report of the Atrocities Committed at Dachau Concentration Camp, signed by Col. David Chavez, Jr., JAGD, 7 May 1945

One of the floor grates mentioned in the Chavez report

The photograph above shows one of the “grates in the floor” that were mentioned in the official US Army report, signed by Col. Chavez, which is quoted above.

There are 6 of these grates, which appear to be floor drains, but they are now closed up.  The grates are in 2 rows of three in the center of the room. The floor slopes towards the center, so that water would drain into the grates. The size of the drains is approximately 20 by 26 inches.

Top vent that was mentioned in the Chavez report

The photo above shows one of the top vents mentioned in the Chavez report.  This is actually a light fixture box, from which the fixture has been removed.  Other reports of the gas chamber, made by the American liberators, did not mention how the gas was vented out of the room. However, there are also two large vents in the ceiling of the Dachau gas chamber, which appear to have been added later.

Two large square vents on the ceiling of the Dachau gas chamber

The photo above shows two large square vents on the ceiling of the Dachau gas chamber, on the left hand side of the photo. (The two vents on the outside wall of the gas chamber, in the center of the photo, are  part of a different lie, which I won’t go into now.)

The photo below shows a close-up of one of the ceiling vents. Both vents are supposedly connected to one vent pipe on the roof.

Vent on ceiling of Dachau gas chamber

Photo taken shortly after Dachau was liberated shows a vent on the roof directly over the gas chamber

Photo of Dachau Baracke X building shows a vent pipe over the gas chamber

In the photo above, notice the two holes in the wall, behind the white object in the foreground.  This clearly indicates that there is a vent over the gas chamber, and the old black and white photo shows that the vent was there shortly after the camp was liberated.

In 1989, Fred Leuchter examined the Dachau gas chamber and was highly critical of it in his report; he wrote the following regarding the lack of proper ventilation of the room:

For the record, this alleged gas chamber would have held only forty-seven (47) persons utilizing the nine (9) square foot inclusion rule as accepted by standard engineering practice for air handling systems. Without an exhaust system or windows, it would require at least one week to vent by convection. This estimate is based on American gas chambers requiring twenty (20) minutes to vent with two complete air changes per minute, and a minimum of forty-eight (48) hours to vent a fumigated building with an abundance of windows.

It seems that Fred Leuchter, a gas chamber expert who was a consultant for the Missouri gas chamber, did not consider the pipe over the Dachau gas chamber to be an exhaust pipe, since he wrote “without an exhaust system” in his report. According to Fred Leuchter, the exhaust pipe over a gas chamber should be 40 feet high, like the one over the Missouri gas chamber, but what does he know?

You can read Leuchter’s full report on the Dachau gas chamber on my website here.

The Dachau gas chambers (plural) were mentioned in the film of Dachau, that was made by Hollywood director George Stevens on May 3, 1945. This film was shown at the Nuremberg IMT on November 29, 1945. The gas chamber footage starts at 4:02 in the video. You can see the “top vents” mentioned by Chavez at 4:14 in the YouTube video.

Alfred de Grazia, Commanding Officer of the Psychological Warfare Propaganda Team attached to headquarters of the US 7th Army

Captain Alfred de Grazia stands in front of Dachau crematorium, May 1, 1945

The photo above, borrowed from Wikipedia, shows Captain Alfred de Grazia, who was the Commanding Officer of the Psychological Warfare Propaganda team attached to the U.S. Seventh Army during World War II.  He is standing in front of a pile of bodies outside the Baracke X building at Dachau on May 1, 1945.

Did America really have an Army team, during World War II, that carried out PSYCHOLOGICAL WARFARE and PROPAGANDA?  To our everlasting shame — YES!!!

The men in America’s Psychological Warfare and Propaganda military unit were mostly Jewish immigrants from Germany, who had been trained at Camp Ritchie in Maryland; they were known as “The Ritchie Boys.”

This quote is from Wikipedia’s entry for Alfred de Grazia:

In World War II, Alfred de Grazia served in the ranks from private to captain, in artillery, intelligence, and psychological warfare.[11] He received training in this then new field at in Washington D.C. and the newly established Camp Ritchie, Maryland.[12][citation needed] He served with the 3rd, 5th and 7th US Armies and as a liaison officer with the British 8th Army.[citation needed] He took part in six campaigns, from North Africa to Italy (Battle of Monte Cassino) to France and Germany, receiving several decorations.

He co-authored a report on psychological warfare for the Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Force.[14] By the end of the war, he was Commanding Officer of the Psychological Warfare Propaganda Team attached to the headquarters of the 7th Army.

May 1, 1945, the day that Alfred de Grazia arrived at Dachau, was the same day that a group of American Congressmen arrived.  The Congressmen had to wait until May 3rd before they could be photographed in the newly built gas chamber, which is shown in the photo below.

The delegation of US Congressmen had flown to Paris on April 22, 1945, at Eisenhower’s request, and had first visited Buchenwald on April 24, 1945, two weeks after the camp was liberated on April 11th. The Congressmen arrived in Dachau on May 1, 1945, the same day that newsreels were first released in American theaters, showing the Nazi atrocities at Buchenwald and Bergen-Belsen. Dachau had been liberated on April 29, 1945, just two days before the Congressmen arrived.

U.S. Congressmen examine the gas chamber at Dachau on May 3, 1945

Same view of Dachau gas chamber, May 2001

What did the “gas chamber” at Dachau look like before the Psychological Warfare and Propaganda team arrived at Dachau? Before the shower room in Barrack X was converted into a gas chamber, it looked something like the shower room in the administration building, which is now the Dachau Museum.  The pipes and shower heads were removed before the building was turned into a Museum.

April 1945 photo of the shower room in the administration building at Dachau

In 2004, I saw a documentary film about the Ritchie Boys. Alfred de Grazia was not included among the Ritchie Boys who were featured in the film.

I wrote a review of the film on my website.  This quote is from my review, which you can read in full here:

The movie does not fully explain why one of the Ritchie boys was sent to Nordhausen. It was not to interrogate the Jewish survivors, nor to gather evidence of war crimes, but to arrange for getting everything out of the V-2 rocket factory and on its way to America before the camp had to be turned over to the Russians in July 1945 because Nordhausen had been promised to the Soviet Union, since it was in their zone of occupation according to the terms of the Yalta agreement. The British had also been promised a share of the loot, but the Americans made sure that they got there first.

The significance of Nordhausen is lost in the film because of Parloff’s story about a Jew standing on a pile of ashes. There is no mention of the rocket technology that America stole from our Russian allies after they made such a great sacrifice to win the war, or the fact that this was a violation of President Roosevelt’s agreement with Uncle Joe at Yalta. The documentary implies that Nordhausen was a “death camp” where Jews were murdered and then cremated.

During the war crimes trial of the Nordhausen staff, held at Dachau after the war, the defense pointed out that it took one to three months to train a worker for the V-2 rocket factory, and the Germans did their best to keep these prisoners alive, although it was a losing battle due to the severe conditions in the tunnels and the typhus epidemics that were out of control in all of the camps at the end of the war. The prisoners who worked in the tunnels were political prisoners from Buchenwald; they worked side by side with German civilians in the rocket factory. They were even paid a small amount of money which they could use to buy cigarettes and food in the camp canteen, or to visit one of the prostitutes in the camp brothel.

However, there was also a “recuperation camp” near the town of Nordhausen where the factory workers were sent to recover when they were too sick to work in the underground factory. In the last months of the war, Jewish prisoners who had been evacuated from Auschwitz were brought to this sub-camp of Nordhausen, which was called Boelke Kaserne by the Germans. A few days before the recuperation camp was liberated, it was bombed by American planes and around 1500 prisoners were killed. There were other prisoners who had died of tuberculosis or typhus and when the liberators arrived, there were around 3,000 unburied bodies and around 700 sick and dying prisoners who had been left behind when the camp was evacuated.

During the Boelke Kaserne segment in the documentary, a shot of the crematorium at Dachau is shown with bodies piled up against the wooden structure in front of the outside wall. Then another shot of some sick prisoners in wagons, which was taken at Dachau, is shown. This footage is from the film entitled “Nazi Concentration Camps,” which was made by Lt. Col. George C. Stevens a day or two after Dachau was liberated; it was shown during the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal. Christian Bauer obtained the film clips for his documentary from the US Archives.

Bauer now lives in Munich, 18 kilometers from Dachau. Surely, he must have recognized that this footage was taken at Dachau and not at the Nordhausen sick camp. Perhaps he used the scenes from Dachau instead of Nordhausen because so many of the bodies found at the Nordhausen “recuperation camp” had been blown to pieces by American bombs.

Woman prisoner at Dachau saw people begging for their lives outside the camp’s gas chamber…

Magdalena Hamilton was a Catholic prisoner who survived six months in the Dachau concentration camp before she was liberated by American troops on April 29, 1945, at exactly 6:10 p.m.  Dachau was mostly a men’s camp for political prisoners, but there were a few women prisoners there.

This quote is from a news story which you can read in full here:

She [Ms. Hamilton] saw people begging for their lives outside the camp’s gas chamber and crematorium. She saw men digging their own graves before they were shot by German soldiers. She saw people tortured until they could no longer stand it.

The gas chamber at Dachau was outside the prison enclosure and hidden from view by a row of trees.  There is now a gate into the area where the gas chamber and the crematorium were located, but at the time that Ms. Hamilton was a prisoner there, the gate was not yet in existence.

Tourist entrance into the area where the Dachau gas chamber is located

Gas chamber location was separated from the rest of the camp by a canal

The Nazis wanted to make sure that the world would know about the atrocities committed in the Dachau concentration camp, so they made it a priority to bring witnesses to the area where the gas chamber was located. They took prisoners, such as Ms. Hamilton, outside the camp and allowed them to witness the Jews begging for their lives as they were shoved into the gas chamber.

Door into a gas chamber at Dachau

There were four gas chambers, like the one shown in the photo above, where the Jews were shoved in kicking and screaming and begging for their lives.  This was after they had first been tortured.  Ms. Hamilton was brought to the crematorium building to see it all.

This quote from the news article explains why Ms. Hamilton was allowed to survive:

Hamilton thinks the only reason she survived Dachau is because she speaks German and that she had finished four semesters of medical school before she was taken into custody. The Germans were desperate for people to treat their injured soldiers, she said.

What injured soldiers?  Is she talking about the injured soldiers who were dragged out of the SS hospital at Dachau and lined up against a wall and shot during the infamous Dachau Massacre, perpetrated by American soldiers?  Does she tell the little school children about that when she gives a talk?

Does Ms. Hamilton explain to the school children why she sent to the Dachau camp?  Was she arrested because she was fighting as an illegal combatant and a  traitor to her country?  Does she explain why she is still telling lies to demonize the German people 68 years after the liberation of the Dachau camp?

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

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

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

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

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

Gas Chamber

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

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

The Baracke X building where the Dachau gas chamber is located

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Building in town of Dachau

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

An important policy of the Nazi party in Germany was called Gleichschaltung, a term that was coined in 1933 to mean that all German culture, religious practice, politics, and daily life should conform with Nazi ideology. This policy meant total control of thought, belief, and practice and it was used to systematically eradicate all anti-Nazi elements after Hitler came to power in January 1933.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Muslim woman, who teaches in American universities, visits Dachau

A blog entry, written by a Muslim woman, which you can read in full here, starts off with this quote:

I am a Muslim intellectual woman who teaches Judaism and Islam, a Muslim who seeks dialogue with Jews, a Muslim who sympathizes with Jews and understands the need for the state of Israel.

The past year has been an intense one for me and my family. On March 30, I gave birth to a beautiful girl, Ruya, who happens to share her birth date with Moses Maimonides, the great 12th century Jewish philosopher and physician. At the end of June, I was invited to present a paper at a conference in Elmau, a small resort town 50 miles south of Munich. The conference was organized by the University of Munich’s department of history and Jewish studies and co-sponsored by University of California. It was titled, “Judaism Through Muslim Eyes and Islam Through Jewish Eyes.” I teach at a variety of Southern California universities, and I was honored by the invitation to be part of such a unique international conference, which included esteemed scholars and intellectuals whose work has had a deep resonance for me, in terms of both my political and religious thinking.

After the Conference, this teacher took her newborn baby on a visit to the Dachau Memorial Site.  This is what she wrote about the trip to Dachau:

As the conference ended, I was asked what I intended to do in Munich for the next three days, and our plan was to visit Dachau and meet with an old German friend. My feelings about the visit to the concentration camp had not been sorted out; I just knew that I wanted to visualize something I had read about in many post-Holocaust testimonies. But my eagerness to go to Dachau was deeper than I thought.

I wanted to go to Dachau because I wanted to pay my respects to the many Jews, Christians, and Gypsies who had perished and been abused there; I went as an act of simple respect for the dead.

Dachau was a Nazi German concentration camp built on the grounds of an abandoned munitions factory near the medieval town of Dachau, which is located about 10 miles northwest of Munich, in southern Germany. As one walks toward the camp, there is an iron gate nested in between bushes and tall oak trees with the slogan: “Arbeit Mach Frei” (work will set you free).

When the Nazis opened Dachau in March, 1933, Heinrich Himmler, the police president of Munich, described it as the Nazi’s first camp for political prisoners. One can still visit the barracks where the many prisoners and SS guards were housed: the long, gray buildings with low ceilings today contain exhibitions of old propaganda, art and SS paraphernalia. It is not hard to envision the harsh reality the prisoners had to face or the lives of the SS guards.

When we stepped off the train, we saw the sign for Dachau; I began to see the sadness in the words and wondered how anyone living there today could bear to give out their address. How would the effect of memory and narrative intersect here? As I carried my daughter in my arms toward the front gate, she began to howl in a chilling manner, and I am still amazed at myself for bringing my newborn to one of the most atrocious places on earth.

I am not sure whether this was something I could have predicted, but as we approached, Ruya was exceptionally unhappy — my child who rarely cries — and her shrieks made it all seem even more difficult. The camp was bare, with white pebbles in the square and an empty space that spoke of the horror that lay in the lives of the prisoners, and the terrifying howls of my baby echoed throughout time.

Dachau became a prototype for the Nazi camps that followed, and it retains a bareness and coldness that evokes its history. The exact number of how many passed through the camp is unknown, according to the Encyclopedia Judaica, which also reports that 160,000 prisoners were registered on the files and about 90,000 in the camp’s branches. But many more transported there in the last days of the camp were not registered. Some inmates stayed in the camp, some were transported further in “death transports” and others were murdered or died there: as many as 32,000 prisoners died at Dachau of starvation and disease. In early 1945, a typhus epidemic spread through the camp, which led to an evacuation and the death of a large number of already weakened prisoners. Dachau was also the site of the first medical experiments on prisoners.

As Ruya cried, I asked my husband to keep walking so I could stop to feed her, and as I did so at the bottom of the steps of the barracks, I felt the haunting cries of so many children there before us. My daughter sucked on her milk with tears streaming down her cheeks.

As I approached the camp, I found myself saying an Islamic prayer for the dead in the courtyard, and I felt a sense of responsibility to the victims. At that moment, I felt as if I were a witness giving testimony to all Muslims. As someone who has witnessed numerous Holocaust deniers and anti-Semites, I found myself standing alone in the courtyard of Dachau, watching my daughter’s eyes become blinded by the white stones of the camp and thinking to her out loud, telling her that this very act of remembering and sharing the atrocities with others is the only assurance that this will never happen again to anyone. My baby daughter squinted at me with her wet lashes as I held her in silence.

We were led toward the crematorium and she calmed a bit, and I pushed her in her stroller into the gas chamber, a dark room with showerheads looking down upon us. It was as if she and I alone were witnessing the moment before the horror. This was the moment when I saw her scrutinize the ceiling, and I knew there was something uncanny about her newness, freshness and innocence witnessing the closeness of death. I walked out vowing that she too must in some way become a witness for all future generations of Muslims.

My photos of the Dachau gas chamber are shown below.

Ceiling of Dachau gas chamber and openings on the east wall

She mentioned that the gas chamber was “a dark room.”  Did this woman actually SEE the showerheads?  Or did she just assume that there were showerheads on the ceiling?  I took a photo of the last remaining showerhead in 2001, and as far as I know, all of the showerheads, that were stuck into the ceiling, with no pipes, are all gone now, stolen by souvenir hunters.

Photo of last remaining shower head at Dachau, taken in 2001

Apparently, she did not have a tour guide to point out the two windows on the east wall, through which gas pellets were thrown into the room.  The tour guides at Dachau have given up telling visitors that gas came though the shower heads that were just stuck into the ceiling with no pipes.

Her blog entry continues with this quote:

Dachau is one of the most famous of the Nazi concentration camps and was liberated by Allied forces on April 29, 1945 — less than 10 days before the end of the war. Soon after the British and Americans arrived, images and reports of the camp gave the world the first shocking visions of what had happened there. And now here I was, experiencing it firsthand — not a journalist, not a Jew, not a Christian, not a liberator, but a Muslim sharing this public memory.

I have studied the history of Dachau extensively, and to my knowledge, there were no British soldiers among the liberators of Dachau. You can read about the liberation of Dachau on my website here.

The quote from her blog continues:

Witnessing is, as so many post-Holocaust writers have spoken of it, a form of speaking. And Dachau is a place where silence can be broken and where the atrocities can now be declared openly. I became a witness of the ghosts and survivors of Dachau. But more notably, I felt that even by witnessing just one camp — or one death — it is as if I have witnessed a million camps and a million deaths.

“the atrocities [at Dachau] can now be declared openly?”  I didn’t know that there was a time when “the atrocities” at Dachau could NOT be declared openly. I think that what she means is that the alleged atrocities at Dachau can now be DENIED OPENLY.

Professor Mehnaz M. Afridi teaches Judaism and Islam at various Southern California universities. She also offers public lectures and seminars. For more information, visit http://www.mehnazafridi.com.

What is incredible to me is that this Professor of Judaism and Islam did not prepare for her visit to Dachau.  When I first visited Dachau in 1997, there were no websites about Dachau on the Internet.  I put up the first website about Dachau in 1998.  Since then, I have expanded that website to include lots of information about Dachau, which you can read here.

Why tour guides at Dachau tell visitors that the gas chambers were used

I learned from a comment made on my blog yesterday that a tour guide at Dachau is telling gullible tourists that the gas chambers were used to kill prisoners.  This quote is from the comment:

However when I asked why historians now think that a gas chamber at Dachau was used, he claims that witness statements claim it was which were never given proper weight in the past (apparently Gordon Hogan, historian extrodinairre, is the first person in history to realise this), and that’s good enough for him. He also claims that traces of Zyklon B have been tested for and found(!!). This all sounded a little “make it up as you go along” so I researched some more on the internet, and realise there is no evidence that any people were gassed at Dachau.

All of the claims in the above comment are true. There is NO EVIDENCE that any people were gassed at Dachau.  However, it is also true that “witness statements claim that it was.”  Four of the Dachau gas chambers were used to disinfect the clothing of the prisoners with Zyklon-B gas, so if these four chambers were tested for Zyklon-B, there would have been traces of it found.

You can see photos of the Dachau gas chamber and read a description of the shower room, that was allegedly used as a gas chamber here.  You can see photos of openings in the interior of the shower room here.

What “witness statements” claim that the gas chambers (plural) were used?

After Dachau was liberated on April 29, 1945, the official report of the U.S. Seventh Army was printed as a book entitled Dachau Liberated: The Official Report by The U.S. Seventh Army, Released Within Days of the Camp’s Liberation by Elements of the 42nd and 45th Divisions.

The Official Report was based on two days of interviewing 20 political prisoners at Dachau; the prisoners told the Americans that both the shower room and the four disinfection chambers were used as homicidal gas chambers.  Did these POLITICAL PRISONERS have a motive to lie? Did the American liberators have a motive to lie?  Did General Dwight D. Eisenhower have a motive to show the German people as monsters?  Yes, to all three questions!

Dachau was the first Nazi concentration camp to be found by American troops, while prisoners were still incarcerated there.  Prior to this, Americans had come across the abandoned Natzweiler camp in France and the abandoned Ohrdruf sub-camp of Buchenwald. At Dachau, this was the first chance that Americans had to talk with the prisoners of a concentration camp and get their first-hand account of what happened.

Some of the political prisoners in the camp had organized the International Committee of Dachau.  Members of the Committee met the Americans at the Arbeit Macht Frei gate and escorted them to the gas chambers. There are claims that the sight of the gas chambers caused the Americans to violate the Geneva Convention by killing the German soldiers who had surrendered; this is known as the Dachau Massacre.

The International Committee of Dachau is still in existence and it still controls what is told at the Dachau Memorial Site.  That is why tourists today are told that the gas chambers were used, even though there is no evidence that it was even possible that the shower room could have been used to gas the prisoners.

The following quote is from The Official Report by The U.S. Seventh Army:

“When the American troops arrived on 29 April 1945, there were approximately 32,500 estimated internees of all nationalities, the Poles predominating. During this period, the camp was notorious for its cruelty, but within the last six or eight months, some ‘token’ improvement was noted in the treatment of the internees. However, the new crematorium was completed in May 1944, and the gas chambers, a total of five, were used for the executions and the disposals of the bodies.”

The Baracke X building and the five gas chambers were actually completed in May 1943.  At that time, most of the Jews were in camps in Poland, so who was being gassed at Dachau?

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

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

Based on the WITNESS STATEMENTS, the tour guides should tell tourists that hydrogen cyanide was put into the gas chamber through the GRATES IN THE FLOOR. Tourists are told that the grates in the floor, which are now closed up, are fake grates, but I don’t think that the tour guides tell people that the gas came up into the shower room through these grates.

Note that the Official Army Report says nothing about the two little windows on the east wall of the gas chamber.  Those windows weren’t there when the camp was liberated.  Or perhaps, they were there and no one noticed them.  I have a page on my website in which I have collected eye witness statements and none of these statements mention the little windows.  In spite of this, tour guides at Dachau tell visitors that gas pellets were thrown into the shower room through these openings.

I don’t know if all of the Dachau tour guides tell visitors that the gas chamber was used, but I have read many blog posts written by students who took a tour of Dachau.

This quote is from this blog:

Dachau was never used as a mass-extermination facility, meaning a large number of prisoners did not endure a gas chamber death.  However, there is a gas chamber at Dachau and it was used to kill only “small numbers” of prisoners.  The tour guide explained that because of Dachau’s location in Germany, it was easier to ship prisoners to concentration camps outside of the country in order to easily “dispose” of them.

The German people have no control over their history.  If someone on the staff of the Dachau Memorial Site would have the nerve to speak up, and say that the shower room was not used as a gas chamber, that person would be reported to the Thought Police and would wind up serving 5 years in a German prison.    If you live in Germany or Austria, do not mention anything that you have read here, or you could be put on trial for Holocaust denial.

Americans who still have free speech should speak up when they take a tour of Dachau and confront the tour guides with their lies.

What did the Dachau gas chamber look like the day after the camp was liberated?

I am writing today in answer to a comment made by a man whose grandfather was an American soldier at Dachau the day it was liberated on April 29, 1945.  His grandfather brought home photos of Dachau, including a photo of the gas chamber which was piled high with bodies, presumably the bodies of prisoners who had just been gassed.

The photos are no longer in this man’s possession, but he supplied a link to a web site which shows a drawing done by Brian J. Stonehouse, a British SOE agent who was a prisoner at Dachau. The drawing shows an open door and through the door, one can see another door, beyond which there are bodies piled up.  The drawings of Brian Stonehouse are copyrighted so I cannot show the drawing of the gas chamber here.  You will have to go to this website to see the drawing which looks like a drawing of the scene in the photo below.

Bodies found in the Dachau morgue when the camp was liberated on April 29, 1945

Note that the photo above shows a floor drain with blood running down into it.  A gas chamber cannot have a working floor drain because the poison gas would get into the sewer and poison the whole neighborhood.

Dachau gas chamber with a view into the morgue room on the right

My color photo directly above shows the Dachau gas chamber with a view into another room on the right, which is the room shown in the old black and white photo above. There were six floor drains in the gas chamber. Note the one floor drain in the photo, which is now closed up. On the left side in the photo is a water pipe that was used to clean the morgue room which had no water supply. Above the water pipe is an opening for a peephole into the gas chamber. Note that the tiles around the peep hole do not match the other tiles in the room.

When the American soldiers arrived on April 29, 1945, the gas chamber was empty, but the room next to it was piled high with bodies.  The photo below shows the outside of the building where these rooms were located.

Baracke-X the building where the Dachau gas chamber was located

The gas chamber is the room on the far left which has three holes in the wall.  The next room is the morgue room which has windows, and then the room where the ovens were located.

The room that was in the drawing done by Brian J. Stonehouse was the morgue room where bodies were stored until they could be burned in the ovens.  On the day that Dachau was liberated, there was no coal to burn the bodies.

This is the description given on the website for the drawing done by Brian Stonehouse:

Brian Julian Stonehouse, M.B.E. (1918-1998) Dachau gas chambers-the day after liberation signed and inscribed ‘B J Stonehouse/ Dachau 4t’, charcoal 29 x 32cm (11 7/16 x 12 5/8in). In a personal diary started in Dachau on Liberation day Brian Stonehouse described the day this sketch was made: ‘Monday Evening, April 30, 1945 – I visited and made sketches of piles of corpses at the Krematorium. Not much time to sketch, as the place had been mined by the SS before they left, and the building was expected to blow up at any minute.’ The sketches he made in Dachau were presented to the Imperial War Museum, this is believed to be the last known concentration camp picture by Brian Stonehouse still in private hands.

Note that Brian Stonehouse  said that he “made sketches of piles of corpses at the Krematorium.” He did not say that the “piles (plural) of corpses were in the gas chamber.

Stonewhouse literally took his life in his hands to sketch the “gas chambers” (plural) which he believed had been mined by the SS before they left.  He didn’t make this up. According to Sgt. Scott Corbett, a correspondent for the official 42nd Division newspaper who was at Dachau on the day it was liberated, the SS staff had set a time bomb to blow up the gas chamber after they abandoned the camp on April 28th, the day before the American liberators arrived.

The following quote is from an article written by Sgt. Scott Corbett for the Rainbow Reveille, the 42nd Division Newspaper. This excerpt from Scott Corbett’s article is included on page 42 of the book entitled Dachau 29 April 1945, the Rainbow Liberation Memoirs, Edited by Sam Dann:

The first human beings ever to enter the infamous Concentration Camp at Dachau without despair and terror, entered it today. Infantry men of the XVth Corps, 42nd Division, are now in command of Dachau and they brought a new life to over 30,000 survivors among the prisoners of the horror camp.

What they found there bears out every atrocity told about the first great concentration camp in 12 years of its existence. In the crematorium, the skeleton-like bodies of the dead still lay in a room next to the furnace, stacked like cordwood. The cement floor slanted to a drain which carried off the blood, but not the unforgettable stench of death. Unlike Auschwitz, where the Gas Chamber and the Crematorium were demolished by the retreating SS, the destruction of this horrifying evidence at Dachau by a time bomb was prevented when doughboys discovered and severed the wire which would have set off the charge. In addition, the entire building was a maze of booby-traps.

It is clear from this description of the gas chamber building by Scott Corbet that the room with the bodies “stacked like cordwood” was the “room next to the furnace.”  The room next to the furnace was the morgue room, not the gas chamber.  There was another room at the north end of the Baracke-X building which was also being used as a morgue room on the day the camp was liberated.  This room is shown in the photo below.

Room full of dead bodies at the north end of the gas chamber building

My photo below shows the door into the Dachau gas chamber with a view into the gas chamber and the morgue room next to it. I was standing in the same spot where Stonehouse was standing (or sitting) when he made his sketch.  Actually, I think that Stonehouse drew his sketch from memory after he saw the door into the gas chamber; he didn’t get the doors quite right in his sketch.

Door into the gas chamber at Dachau

I  was standing in the undressing room when I took the photo above, which shows the door from the undressing room into the gas chamber. I composed this photo so as to show the electrical wiring going into the room.  The undressing room is 10 feet high, but the gas chamber as it looks now is around 7 and a half feet high.  The location of the wiring indicates that the gas chamber was originally 10 feet high. (Hint: the “gas chamber” at Dachau may have been a shower room that was modified by the American liberators.)