What Dachau looked like in 1966…

I had a chance to see Dachau in 1957 when a group of people invited me along on a trip to see the camp.  I didn’t want to go because the camp was filled, at that time, with homeless people who had been expelled from Czechoslovakia because they were ethnic German.

I  recently read a description of Dachau, written by a man who visited the camp in 1966.  In 1965, the ethnic Germans were kicked out and the former camp was turned into a Memorial Site.

This quote is from the article about Dachau in 1966:

I saw a man wearing a Confederate flag baseball cap the other day. I didn’t hate him, but I sure felt sorry for him for the heavy load he carries. The sight reminded me of the Nazi flag and my visit to Dachau concentration camp in Germany in 1966. The visit was one of my life-changing experiences.

Dachau was one of the many Nazi concentration camps that tortured, experimented on and murdered millions of Jews, people of color, Gypsies, Catholics, disabled people, liberals (free-thinkers), homosexuals or anyone that opposed the Nazi regime of Adolph Hitler.

I can still visualize the white bones in the sun sticking out of the dirt of the farmer’s fields that surrounded Dachau.

I can still see the tall, double-barbed-wire fences and the sign in German that read: “Work Will Set You Free” at the entrance of the camp.

I can still see the 5-foot-high pile of tens of thousands of eye glasses, the lampshade made from human skin, the long, 10-foot-tall, granite wall indented from the millions of machine gun rounds that first burst through the bodies of the men, women and children that were marched along the parapet and fell into the huge trench in front.

I can still smell the crematorium ovens and see the gurneys used to wheel the corpses in by the thousands. I can visualize the light green gas chamber — supposedly never used — with the fake shower nozzles on the walls.

In other camps, these gas chambers were packed with terrified, crying people who knew their fate. When the doors were closed cyanide was dropped into the holes in the roof, or trucks were backed up to the chambers and hoses hooked up to the exhaust and forced into the rooms. Monsters did this; monsters who made the Inquisition pale in comparison.

I regret that I didn’t go to Dachau in 1966.  I could have seen “a lampshade made of human skin.”

People of color were not sent to Dachau, but there was one prisoner from the Belgian Congo: Jean (Johnny) Voste, who was at Dachau when the camp was liberated. Voste was a Belgian Resistance fighter who had been arrested in 1942 for an act of sabotage in the town of Malignes, near Antwerp.

When a Holocaust denial law is eventually passed in America, what will US citizens be required to believe?

I anticipate that America will eventually have a law against Holocaust denial and that Holocaust denial will be an exception to our 1st Amendment right of free speech.  Russia is currently contemplating such a law.  You can read more about the proposed law in Russia here.

When a Holocaust denial law is passed in the USA, what will Americans be required to believe, under the threat of 5 years in prison?

Today, I read an interesting article here, entitled “What do Creationists and Holocaust Deniers Have In Common?”

This quote is from the article cited above:

As distasteful and offensive as the Holocaust deniers analogy may seem (it’s such a morally repulsive idea that no sane historian would ever attempt to equivocate the truth of the Holocaust with radical conspiracy theories), we would be naive if we summarily discounted that denial without understanding its origins and its import. For a great many in the radicalized Middle East, Holocaust denial is a centerpiece in education policy, domestic policy, and international affairs. We are nearly seventy years removed from the Holocaust, and I suspect that, within my lifetime, I’ll one day read about the death of the last remaining survivor.

We know the Holocaust is true, because many of us lived through it. To be sure, I am far too young to remember the Holocaust, but when I was eighteen, a group of friends and I trekked through the Dachau Concentration Camp, one of the saddest but most illuminating moments of my young life: Confronting the vestiges of undeniable evil, the inhumanly cramped boarding rooms, the crematoriums, the gas chambers, the cast-iron sign emblazoned with the words “Arbeit Macht Frei.” A place that still smelled like soot and death and dust. This was not a Hollywood set. If I had possessed even a fragment of a thought about the remote possibility of a massive conspiracy, it was forever extinguished that afternoon. Dachau is a vivid, permanent, real place on our planet; Holocaust deniers are idiots.

The author doesn’t say how old he is now, so we don’t know what year it was when he was 18, but it must have been during the period of time when there was a sign in the Dachau shower room, saying that it was not a gas chamber, or never used as a gas chamber.

His trek through Dachau must have been after the barracks had been torn down, so that a Memorial Site could be constructed inside the former concentration camp.  The “inhumanly cramped boarding rooms” must have been the reconstructed barrack buildings. When the Dachau camp was used for 17 years to house the ethnic Germans who had been expelled from Czechoslovakia, tourists were not allowed to disturb these pathetic residents.

What did he think that the “Arbeit Macht Frei” sign proved? During the time that 30,000 German “war criminals” were crowded into the Dachau camp, designed for 5,000 prisoners, the “Arbeit Macht Frei” sign was not there, and the prisoners did not have to work.  During that time, the Dachau camp was called “War Crimes Enclosure No. 1.”

If he saw the “gas chambers” (plural), that means that he saw the disinfection chambers that were clearly labeled as such.  The disinfection chambers were used to SAVE lives.

David Irving was thrown into prison in Austria because he said that the gas chamber at the main Auschwitz camp was a “reconstruction.”  Now it is admitted that this gas chamber was reconstructed by the Soviets, and it is no longer a crime to say this.

When Holocaust denial becomes a crime in America, will we have to believe the stories told by Irene Zisblatt or face a 5 year prison sentence?

Hopefully, when America passes a Holocaust Denial law, there will be huge book (about the size of the book of rules on Obamacare) that gives details on each and every story that we are required to believe.

When a Holocaust denial law is finally passed in America, the prisons will become so overcrowded that a new punishment will have to be devised.  Maybe Holocaust deniers could be forced to stand on a street corner wearing a “neck violin” like ones that criminals were forced to wear in the old days.

Neck violin that criminals were forced to wear in the old days

Criminals were forced to wear a neck violin in the old days

Or should Holocaust deniers be thrown into a dungeon, as witches were, after a witch trial.  Holocaust denier trials have been compared to witch trials because the perpetrator is not allowed to defend himself or herself.

The photo below shows a dungeon for witches in Germany.

A dungeon for witches in Germany

Noor Inayat Khan was brought “in chains” to Dachau where she was executed in “late Summer 1944″

A bronze statue, sculpted by London-based artist Karen Newman, was unveiled by Britain’s Princess Anne on November 8, 2012.  You can see a photo of the unveiling below.  Personally, I don’t care for this sculpture.  I think that Noor should not be shown with her head bowed.  She should have her head lifted with a defiant expression on her face, as she shouts Liberté, her last dying word, before she was shot in the head at Dachau, as witnessed by a prisoner who came forward years later.  (Lies about Noor Inayat Khan have been told so often that they are now true lies.)

A reader of my blog make a comment on a previous post that I wrote about Noor Inayat Khan, the famous “Spy Princess” in the British SOE. He mentioned that there was a witness to the arrival of Noor at Dachau.  I found this hard to believe until I saw a YouTube video in which someone said that Noor had arrived at Dachau “in chains.”  That would have been quite a sight; every prisoner in the camp would have pushed forward to see this spectacale.

Many survivors of Dachau are still alive, and I am not surprised that someone has finally come forward to tell about witnessing the arrival of Noor at Dachau.  The words “in chains” are at 2:10 in the video below.

My photo below shows the gatehouse at Dachau, as it looked in 2007

Gatehouse entrance to Dachau concentration camp

As my photos of the Dachau gatehouse show, everyone inside the camp would have been able to see Noor hobbling through the gate with her feet in chains.  With so many prisoners to witness the coming and going of people into the camp, there was no need for the men in the gatehouse to keep records of arrivals and departures.  A bar over the pedestrian door on the gate could be removed to allow entry into the camp without opening the entire gate which was operated by remote control in the gatehouse.  So it would have been easy to sneak Noor Inayat Khan into Dachau with no one in the gatehouse knowing about it.  (There are no records of her entry into Dachau.)

Gatehouse and Arbeit Macht Frei gate at Dachau

Unfortunately, I have been unable to find any information on the name of the witness who saw Noor arrive in chains.  I have also not been able to find any photos of prisoners arriving at Dachau in chains.  The old photo below, which is on my own website, shows German war criminals marching out of  Dachau.

The photo above shows German “war criminals” leaving Dachau, which had been converted into War Crimes Enclosure No. 1 after the Dachau concentration camp was liberated and Germany surrendered to the Allies.  Note that they are not “in chains.”

Pregnant at Auschwitz — the story of Miriam Rosenthal

Strange as it may seem, there were pregnant women at the Auschwitz II death camp, aka Birkenau, who managed to escape the gas chambers and survive.

From the moment that the Jews arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau, they were separated into two long lines, one line for men and the other line for women and small children.  Anyone younger than 15 or older than 45 was immediately sent to one of the four gas chambers. Those who were allowed to live were put into one of several camps enclosed by barbed wire — the men in the Men’s Camp and the women in the Women’s camp.  There was a separate camp for Gypsies and a “family camp” for Czech prisoners who had been transferred to Auschwitz from the Theresienstadt camp.

Being pregnant in a “death camp” was a death sentence.  Gisella Perl, a famous Jewish prisoner who worked as a doctor at Auschwitz, performed many abortions in order to save the lives of the women who were pregnant; if the pregnancy had been discovered by the SS men, the pregnant woman would have been beaten to death or sent to the gas chamber.

Miriam Rosenthal was one of the few women who was pregnant at Auschwitz, but survived.   Miriam’s life was saved because she didn’t step forward when the SS men tried to find out which women were pregnant by offering them double rations.

There were 200 women who stepped forward to receive extra food, including some that were not pregnant.  Miriam was too smart to fall for that trick.  She survived, but the 200 other women were taken immediately to the gas chamber.

I previously blogged here and here about the seven Jewish women, including Miriam Rosenthal, who were brought to Dachau after their babies were born in a Dachau sub-camp.  Miriam is still alive at the age of 90 and her 67-year-old son, who was saved because his mother was smart enough to outwit the Nazis, is also alive and well.

Jewish mothers with their babies at Dachau

Shown from left to right in the photo above are Iboyla Kovacs with her daughter Agnes; Suri Hirsch with her son Yossi; Eva Schwartz with her daughter Maria; Magda with her daughter; Boeszi Legmann with her son Gyuri; Dora Loewy and her daughter Szuszi; and Miriam Schwarcz Rosenthal with her son Laci (Leslie). Miriam was the last of the seven mothers to give birth at Kaufering.

Miriam was one of the 14 children of Jeno and Laura Schwarcz of Komarno, Czechoslovakia. After Czechoslovakia was jointly invaded by Germany, Hungary and Poland in 1938, the section of Czechoslovakia where the Schwarcz family lived was taken over by Hungary. On April 5, 1944, Marian was married to William Rosenthal, and two weeks later, she became separated from her husband when she was sent to a ghetto. Miriam was deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau, along with her husband’s family, in the middle of May 1944.

Miriam survived the first selection for the gas chamber upon her arrival at Birkenau and was assigned to the women’s barracks where, after several weeks, she realized she was pregnant. In order to get out of Birkenau, she volunteered for a transport to the Plaszow concentration camp in Krakow. After only a few weeks of working at Plaszow, the camp that is shown in the movie Schindler’s List, she was sent back to Auschwitz-Birkeanu.

Upon her arrival at Birkenau, Miriam survived another selection for the gas chamber, although she was  obviously pregnant.

Miriam was soon transferred again, this time to a sub-camp of Dachau in Augsburg, Germany where she was assigned to work in a Messerschmitt airplane factory. One day in December 1944, while at work in the factory, two SS men saw that she was pregnant; they escorted her on a passenger train to one of the Kaufering sub-camps of Dachau near Landsberg am Lech, where she was placed in a barrack with six other pregnant women who would soon be ready to give birth. Even though they were pregnant, the women were forced to work in the camp laundry.

In February 1945, the women at Kaufering started to give birth. A Hungarian Jewish gynecologist was assigned to help them through, even though he was too weak to stand. A Jewish Kapo working in the kitchen had kept the women alive during their pregnancy by sneaking them extra rations. Miriam’s baby was born on February 28, 1945, according to her story.

You can read the story, as told by Miriam here.

I previously blogged here about how ordinary German soldiers killed Jewish babies.

Holocaust survivor endured six years of torture, but he’s not bitter

This morning when I read the story of Holocaust survivor Charles Pierce, I was struck by the variety of place names that were included in his story: the city of Kielce in Poland, the Treblinka death camp, the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp, Dachau concentration camp, the Kaufering sub-camps of Dachau, and finally the place near the town of Dachau where he was rescued by soldiers in the 20th Armored Division.

Charles Pierce came to America in 1949, went back to school and married a woman that he met on a blind date.  He never spoke, at home, of his 6-year ordeal, not even after he came back from Germany where he testified in a war crimes trial in 1969.  He never spoke about his experience in the camps until his granddaughter asked him to speak to her class.

Kielce is the city in Poland where a pogrom occurred in July 1946.  I learned the word pogrom, from my Jewish tour guide, when I visited Poland in 1998.  She told me that the word means “like thunder.”  This word was coined to describe what happened when  non-Jews would come down “like thunder” on the Jews and chase them out of cities after accusing them of “blood libel.”

Here are the highlights of the story of Charles Pierce:

1.  After Poland was invaded by Germany in September 1939, soldiers came to Kielce and began taking the Jews as prisoners, including the family of Charles Pierce.

According to this website

“Armed teenagers, members of the Hitler Youth, ordered them out onto the streets, stripping them of their material possessions and handing the family business over to a Polish Nazi. The family moved into a newly established ghetto where 20,000 people lived in a few square blocks.”

“They saw us as sub-human. Soldiers used us for target practice,” Pierce explained.

2.  When the ghetto was liquidated, Charles Pierce was sent on a train to Treblinka.

“Survivors of the evacuation [of the ghetto] were ordered onto tightly packed railcars for transfer to Treblinka, in Poland, where Pierce spent 14 months, surviving largely on potato peels and bread, refusing to eat the horsemeat soup prisoners were given.”

3.  Pierce was transferred from Treblinka to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where just the day before he arrived, 20,000 Gypsies had been killed.

4.  Pierce survived Auschwitz-Birkenau and was transferred to one of the 11 Kaufering sub-camps of Dachau.

5.  As the war was nearing the end, Pierce was transferred to the Dachau main camp. This quote tells what was happening at Dachau:

The Nazis began slaughtering the remaining prisoners at Dachau as they planned to abandon the camp. Pierce was selected to help an officer haul his possessions out of the camp. The three-day march would nearly kill him, but in the end it saved his life.

6.  Somehow Pierce escaped from the German officer, whose possessions he had hauled out of the Dachau camp, and he happened upon the tanks of the 20th Armored Division and was rescued by American soldiers.

Holocaust survivor Stephen Nasser identifies himself in famous photo taken at Dachau

An American soldier poses beside the "death train" at Dachau

I previously blogged here about the “death train” found by the American liberators of Dachau.  Now a Holocaust survivor, Stephen Nasser, who is out on the lecture circuit talking to school children, has identified himself as the unconscious prisoner whose head is closest to the door on the left side of the picture.  Nasser has written a book entitled My Brother’s Voice which is used in American schools; a Teacher’s Resource Guide is used to teach the children about the events described in Nasser’s book.

According to his book, Nasser was a Hungarian Jew who was transported to Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1944 at the age of 13.  Although it was the policy of the Nazis to gas everyone under the age of 15 at Birkenau, Stephen survived the selection process and later wound up in Mühldorf, a sub-camp of Dachau.

The following quote is from the Teacher’s Resource Guide (a pdf file) which shows a slightly different photo of the scene above:

When he was liberated by U.S. troops on April 30, 1945, he (Stephan Nasser) was discovered — unconscious — under a pile of bodies in a boxcar.

Caption: In this published news photo of American liberation of a Holocaust death train in 1945 at Seeshaupt, the caption said that in this boxcar alone sixty-four were dead.  But Nasser believes one was alive.  From the position he was lying when he passed out, and other evidence, he is 99 percent certain that he was the person lying with his head closet (sic) to the door.

The problem is that the photo, which is included in the Teacher’s Guide to Nasser’s book, shows the train that had brought prisoners to Dachau from the Buchenwald camp, not from the five Mühldorf sub-camps of Dachau.  The train was discovered by American soldiers when they liberated Dachau on April 29, 1945, not on April 30th, as stated in the Teacher’s Resource Guide.  Another “death train” went from one the Mühldorf sub-camps to Seeshaupt, which was  liberated by General Patton’s third army on April 30, 1945. This is not the train that is shown in the photo above.

According to the official Dachau report, compiled by the US Army after the camp was liberated, there were 31,432 survivors in the main Dachau camp, including 2,539 Jews who had been brought to the camp from the sub-camps just a few weeks before the liberators arrived. Most of the Jewish prisoners from the five sub-camps of Mühldorf had been evacuated to the main Dachau camp a few days earlier, accompanied by Mühldorf Commandant Martin Gottfried Weiss, who then became the acting Commandant of Dachau since the actual Commandant had left the camp.

You can read all about the “death train” from Buchenwald to Dachau on my website here.

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.   

Holocaust survivor admits to “killing Nazis” at Dachau

I was planning to take a day off from posting on my blog today, maybe going to the movies, taking a drive into the foothills, or going to the railroad museum.  But then I read in the news that Albert Rosa, a Greek Holocaust Survivor, will be speaking on Thursday to college students at Cal Poly, telling them about how he was the only one of his 70 family members to survive Auschwitz and a “death march” to Dachau where he was liberated by American troops in the last days of World War II.

This quote from the online San Luis Obispo Tribune made me very angry:

The Soviet Army moved into Poland. The retreating Germans forced the survivors at Auschwitz on a “death march” to Dachau in Bavaria. When Dachau was liberated by the Americans, Rosa joined them in “killing Nazis.” By then, he weighed only 80 pounds.

According to the article in the Tribune, Rosa kept silent for 55 years before he started to speak on the lecture circuit and brag about killing the German soldiers who were sent to Dachau to keep order while the camp was surrendered to the Americans.  

the remarkable story of Leslie Schwartz who survived Auschwitz and Dachau

I have blogged twice in the past about the remarkable story of Holocaust survivor Leslie Schwartz here and here. A reader of my blog, Marc Bonagura, who has his own blog Talking Weeds made a comment on my blog and provided a link to his blog. This blog post on Talking Weeds is also about Leslie Schwartz.

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

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

Hungarian Jews arriving at Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1944

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

other people’s blogs….or how I learned about Dachau and Auschwitz

This morning, having nothing better to do, I decided to check out other people’s blogs.  I use wordpress to do my blog and I used their software to find other blogs.  WordPress directed me to blogs that I might find interesting, based on my own history of blog posting.  That’s how I found this blog post entitled Dachau and My Heavy Heart with this statement:

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

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

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