“stuck in the door of the gas chamber” How Irene Zisblatt survived Auschwitz-Birkenau

Irene Zisblatt was 13 years old, 4 feet tall and weighed 60 pounds when she got stuck in the door of the Krema III gas chamber at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

During a routine roll call, Irene was confronted by Dr. Josef Mengele who asked her:  “Was machst du da?”  She should have been sent to the gas chamber long ago because she was only 13 and everyone under the age of 15 was gassed immediately.

A photo of the Krema III gas chamber building is shown below.  Note the 10 ft. high barbed wire fence around the building.  Right next to the fence is a convenient railroad track where a gondola railroad car was parked on the day that Irene was sent to the gas chamber by that evil monster Dr. Josef Mengele.  Irene was all alone, and the gas chamber was already full.  She tried to squeeze into the gas chamber, but she got stuck in the door.  But not to worry.  An SS man pulled her out of the doorway.  Then a young Sonderkommando came to save her; he wrapped her up in a blanket and tossed her over the 10 ft. high fence, into a gondola car that was parked outside the gas chamber building.

Krema III building surrounded by 10 ft. high fence

According to this quote from another blog which you can read here:

…the young man must have been an athletics champion, as the distance between the railroad tracks and the fence around crematorium III was over 100 ft., the fence had a height of about 10 ft., and Chana weighed about sixty pounds.[71] Fifth, if there had been a train with open cars[72] waiting with prisoners near the crematoria, it would have been guarded by SS personnel who doubtlessly would have noticed the unconventional arrival of Chana by “air lift.” And last not least, she would have been noticed at the latest at roll call on arrival, because her name would not have appeared in the transport list.

Gondola cars on the “death train” at Dachau

A gondola car is a railroad car that is open on top; it is used primarily to haul coal or similar items, not passengers.  The photo below shows a railroad car of the type that was used to transport passengers to Auschwitz.

Railroad car on display at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

Irene Zisblatt recorded her story of how she escaped from the gas chamber and you can hear her tell it on a YouTube video.  Don’t try to deny her story or you might wind up in prison for 5 years in 17 different countries.

the infamous Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp

With nothing better to do, I did some searching on the Internet today, and came across two blogs which feature photos of the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp.

I visited the Natzweiler-Struthof Memorial Site in the Fall of 2004 and took some photos, including the photo below, which shows a wooden bench, used for whipping prisoners.

Whipping block on display at Natzweiler Memorial Site

This blog shows a photo of the same bench with this caption:

Implements of torture, before waterboarding was in vogue. They just strapped you to this and removed body parts.

Not quite. The photo on the blog shows a bench used for whipping prisoners, not a bench for removing body parts.

Punishment of prisoners at Natzweiler and all the other concentration camps had to be approved by the WVHA economic office in Oranienburg, where Rudolf Hoess was a member of the staff after he was removed as the Commandant of Auschwitz in December 1943.

At the Nuremberg IMT, on April 15, 1946, Hoess testified that punishment on the whipping block was seldom used and that this punishment was discontinued in 1942 because Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler gave a new order that the SS men were forbidden to strike the prisoners.

On my trip to Natzweiler-Struthof in 2004, I took a photo of the exterior wall of a shower room, which is shown below.  The photo clearly shows water pipes entering the shower room.  In the lower right hand corner of the photo, you can see the rear of the cremation oven.

Water pipes on the outside wall of a shower room in Natzweiler

This blog shows a similar photo, which the blogger claims to be a photo of the interior of the gas chamber at Natzweiler.

This quote is from the blog, cited above:

In August 1943 a gas chamber was constructed in Natzweiler, in one of the buildings that had formed part of the hotel compound. The contractors for the project, Waffen –SS Natzweiler left behind a rare document in which, contrary to the coded terminology generally employed by the Nazis, specific mention was made of “the construction of a gas chamber at Struthof.”

This appeared in an invoice that the SS sent to the Strasbourg University Institute of Anatomy, charging it 236.08 Reichsmarks for the job. It was for the skeleton collection of the director of that institute, Professor August Hirt, that at least one hundred and thirty prisoners were transferred from Auschwitz to be killed in the Natzweiler gas chamber. Most of these prisoners were Jews.

Another member of the Strasbourg University faculty, Professor Otto Bickenbach, also availed himself of the Natzweiler gas chamber, to conduct experiments on prisoners with antidotes of phosgene, a poisonous gas.

The victims were Gypsies who had been transferred from Auschwitz, the previous year to serve as human guinea pigs for SS doctors experimenting with anti-typhus injections.

After my trip to Natzweiler-Struthof, I did a lot of research and wrote about the alleged gas chambers there on this page of my website.

The ruins at Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1979, compared to today

An article in the online Telegraph, which you can read here, includes a photo that allegedly shows the ruins of one of the gas chambers at Auschwitz II, aka Birkenau.  It is an old black and white photo, taken in 1979.  I enhanced the photo, using Photoshop and reproduced it below.

Here is the caption on the photo, copied from the Telegraph:

FILE – In this undated file photo from 1979, a former inmate of the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Poland sometime in 1979, gazes down at ruins of gas chambers where hundreds of people were exterminated during World War II. The oldest known survivor of the Auschwitz concentration camp, a teacher who gave lessons in defiance of his native Poland’s Nazi occupiers has died at the age of 108, an official said Monday, Oct. 22, 2012. Antoni Dobrowolski died Sunday in the northwestern Polish town of Debno, according to Jaroslaw Mensfelt, a spokesman at the Auschwitz-Birkenau state museum.

1979 photo of an Auschwitz survivor viewing the ruins at Auschwitz-Birkenau

My 2005 photo of the ruins of the undressing room in Krema II

In the color photo above, note the steps of the International Monument on the right hand side. Note the guard tower in the background on the right.  My 2005 photo matches the 1979 black and white photo above, indicating that the man is not looking at the ruins of a gas chamber, but at the ruins of the undressing room of Krema II.

Another 2005 photo of the undressing room of Krema II

Again, note the guard tower and the steps of the International Monument on the right in the photo above. In the foreground, you can some of the ruins of the oven room, which was at ground level.  The undressing room was 5 feet underground.

The ruins of the Krema II gas chamber

My 2005 photo of the ruins of the Krema II gas chamber shows the International Monument in the background, slightly to the left.

Now look at the old black and white photo again.  It appears that some reconstruction of the ruins was done between 1979 and 2005.  Also, look at the background of the photo.  It looks like wide open countryside, with no trees hiding the view of the Jews walking into the undressing room.  Shouldn’t there have been a fence or a row of trees to hide the “mass murder” that was going on in the camp?

My 2005 photo of the ruins of the undressing room in Krema II

My 2005 photo above shows that the undressing room has been reconstructed, and a row of trees has been planted to hide the prisoners entering the undressing room from onlookers outside the camp.  The path, that the prisoners walked, up to the undressing room entrance should also have been reconstructed.

I am not convinced that there was an entrance to the undressing room in this location. A model of Krema II and the blueprint for the Krema II building are shown below.

Model of Krema II gas chamber building

In the photo above, notice that there is a door into the gas chamber building shown on the wall of the building on the left side. There was an exterior entrance with a staircase on the north side of the Krema II building, which led to the Vorraum of Krema II so that the SS men could enter Leichenkeller 1, the gas chamber, without going through Leichenkeller 2, which was the undressing room. In case of emergency, the gas chamber could be used as a bomb shelter for the SS men working in the area, since it had a gas-tight air raid shelter door.

Blueprint of the Krema II building

On the blueprint shown in the photo above, the undressing room is on the right hand side. To the left of the undressing room is the above-ground oven room with the ovens designated by 5 squares. There were 5 ovens with 3 openings in each oven. The gas chamber was perpendicular to the undressing room. On the blueprint, the gas chamber is labeled L-keller which is an abbreviation for Leichenkeller, which means corpse cellar in English. The undressing room was also called a Leichenkeller on the blueprint. Note that the length of the undressing room is two or three times as long as the length of the gas chamber.

Now that we see that there was a way to get into the undressing room without going around the building to enter from the end of the room, why didn’t the prisoners enter the undressing room through the door into the Vorraum?

Was the undressing room reconstructed to show an entrance down some steps that weren’t actually there before the reconstruction?

Update, 5:22 p.m.

A reader has alerted me to the website of The Daily Mail which shows a photo Wilhelm Brasse standing beside the ruins of the undressing room in Krema II at Auschwitz in 1979.  In The Daily Mail photo, it looks like there are steps at the far end of the undressing room.  However, when I converted the photo to 300 dpi, from the 63 dpi in the original, it looks more like a brick wall.  I did not enhance the photo in any way.

High resolution photo of the ruins of the undressing room (Click on the photo to enlarge)

The photographer who took this photo in 1979 focused on Brasse in the foreground of the picture. The background, which shows the end of the undressing room, is not in sharp focus, so it is hard to tell if there are really steps in the photo.

“Brief Encounter With a Hero, Name Unknown” a poem about the Josef Shillinger story

I was doing some research on the Josef Shillinger story this morning when I came across a website featuring University of Utah Professor Jacqueline Osherow, who wrote a poem entitled Brief Encounter with a Hero, Name Unknown.

I am pretty sure that the Hero, Name Unknown is not Josef Schillinger, but rather the woman who shot him.

Jacqueline Osherow has written several books.  One of her books, published in 1994, is entitled Conversations with Survivors.

This quote about the book is from the website:

[Osherow] expanded more into her traditional background in Judaism, from the Yiddish language to the Holocaust. “I was introduced far too young,” Osherow says of the Holocaust. “It was such a gigantic overwhelming presence.“Osherow recalls at age 7 admitting to her mother the reason she refused to take showers: She feared that gas would come out of the showerhead.

A grown Osherow wasn’t seeking accounts, but her then-husband’s entire family survived the Holocaust. This included his stepmother, Fany, who wanted her memories documented. The result was “Conversations With Survivors,” a poem recalling Fany’s experience during the Holocaust and in present day.

“Brief Encounter With a Hero, Name Unknown,” a poem from her third book, With a Moon in Transit (1996), is one of her most acclaimed. Osherow tells how the poem took shape: She asked her father-in-law, a Holocaust survivor in charge of delousing at Birkenau (an extermination camp annex of Auschwitz, the Nazi’s largest concentration camp), if he knew any of the SS. He told the story of Josef Schillinger, an SS officer. In the tale, a woman brought to the gas chamber grabs Schillinger’s gun, killing him and three other guards before being gunned down herself. The story haunted Osherow until she wrote the poem. Since then, “Brief Encounter” has taken on a life of its own.

Last year, Susan Gubar released Poetry After Auschwitz: Remembering What One Never Knew, in which she discusses “Brief Encounter.”

Osherow was stunned—and incredibly thrilled—to discover the story had a history beyond her father-in-law’s account. Merely searching online, Osherow found various accounts of the incident: It occurred in October 1943, and the woman was most likely a Polish dancer named Franceska Mann.

“My mind exploded,” Osherow recalls, still astonished. “I thought it was something that only existed in my father-in-law’s head and my head. Suddenly, there was external proof.” It also lends insight to the way Osherow writes poetry: It’s about conversations, stories and experiences, not historic research.

Note that Osherow’s father-in-law was in charge of delousing at Auschwitz-Birkenau.  The main place where delousing was done was at “the central Sauna” which you can read about on this page of my website.

I previously blogged about the death of Schillinger here.  This is a fascinating story, which must be true, since there are so many versions of it. I first heard the story when I visited the Memorial Site of the Bergen-Belsen camp.  Franceska Mann was an exchange prisoner at Belsen before she was sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau to be gassed.  I wrote about her on this page of my website.

One of the Sonderkommando prisoners at Birkenau was Zalmen Gradowski, who participated in the revolt of prisoners at Krema IV, the gas chamber that is close to the Central Sauna at Birkenau.  Gradowski wrote a statement which he buried at Auschwitz-Birkenau.  Included in his message was his version of the death of Josef Schillinger.

Here is what Gradowski wrote about the famous incident when Shillinger was shot:

The second incident was… that of the “Warsaw convoy”. They were from Warsaw who had taken American citizenship; some of them had been born in America. They were supposed to be transferred to an internment camp in Germany then eventually to Switzerland where they would be placed in the care of the Red Cross.

But instead of doing so, the great and “civilized” powers-that-be had them brought to the crematoria here. It was at this point that a heroic young woman, a dancer, committed an act of great bravery. Seizing the revolver of Kwakernak, the head of the camp’s political section, she used it to shoot Schillinger, a notoriously nasty character. Her act inspired the other brave women with her, who launched bottles and other missiles at those savage, rabid animals, the uniformed SS.

The Ravensbrück gas chamber …. and the Lachout document

Ravensbrück is one of the few Nazi concentration camps that I have never visited.  I am writing about it today because the subject came up in the comments on my last post, which was about Joe the Plumber, who thinks that the Holocaust was allowed to happen because Hitler instituted gun control in 1939.

One of the regular readers of my blog, The Black Rabbit of Inlé, who has just returned from a trip to Germany, wrote a comment which included a link to his photos of the Ravensbrück crematorium and the memorial stone that marks the spot where the gas chamber was located before it was destroyed by the Nazis on April 23, 1945.

Wait a minute!  The Ravensbrück gas chamber was destroyed a week before the camp was liberated by the Russians on April 30, 1945?  This sounds just like the story of Auschwitz-Birkenau, where the Russians arrived on January 27, 1945 and found that the Germans had destroyed the gas chamber on January 20, 1945. Very suspicious!

Another coincidence is that all the records from both the Auschwitz camp and the Ravensbrück camp were confiscated by the Russians.  The Ravensbrück records have never been released.

Years ago, I contemplated a visit to the Ravensbrück Memorial Site, and to prepare for the trip, I read the book Ravensbrück, Everyday Life in a Women’s Concentration Camp 1939-45 by Jack G. Morrison.  The section about the Ravensbrück gas chamber begins with this sentence:

The existence and operation of a gas chamber are not in doubt.

Seriously?  The gas chamber at Ravensbrück is not in doubt?  Everything about the Holocaust is in doubt.  Ever hear of “Holocaust deniers”?  Ever hear of the Lachout Document?  You can read the text of the Lachout Document on my website here.  Ravensbrück is one of the camps that is included in the document.

Note that, on my website, I have a link to The Nizkor Project which claims that the Lachout Document is a forgery.

I consider the deathcamps.org website to be the best of the True Believer Holocaust websites.  You can read their page about the Ravensbrück gas chamber here.

This quote is from the deathcamps.org website:

The last gassings happened when the Swedish Red Cross was in the camp to compile transports with weakened prisoners to carry them to neutral Sweden (via the still occupied Denmark).

Strangely, the same thing happened at the Mauthausen concentration camp where the Nazis were gassing prisoners while the Red Cross was taking prisoners out of the camp.

This quote is from this page of my own website:

As further evidence that prisoners at Mauthausen were gassed in the final days of war, Christian Bernadac quotes [in his book] the testimony of Maurice-Georges Savourey on May 4, 1945 at La Plaine, near Geneva, immediately after he was taken out of the camp by the Red Cross convoy. Savourey’s testimony, obtained from Choumoff’s book, is quoted below from Bernadac’s book:

“…The day on which the first Red Cross convoy left, Saturday, April 21, 1945, out of two thousand men…one hundred, exhausted by the short route to be covered, were led to the gas chamber and executed…One (sic) Sunday, the 22nd, one hundred fifty men went to the gas chamber; on Monday, the 23rd, eighty men met the same fate…; on Tuesday, the 24th, one hundred eighty, in two groups, all Slavs, were gassed. One of them broke away, ran through the “free camp” in his nightshirt, stumbling, not knowing which way to turn, made his way back to camp 3. There he was retaken by the S.S. and the inner camp police, and returned for execution in the gas chamber. In addition, some forty French were said to have been gassed.”

In his account of the liberation of Mauthausen, the Red Cross representative, Louis Haefliger, confirms that the “annihilation” of the prisoners in the gas chamber continued until Commandant Ziereis fled the camp on the night of May 2-3, 1945. Apparently the Nazis were gassing as many of the prisoners as they could, while at the same time, the Red Cross was allowed to take selected prisoners out of the camp.

The section about the gas chamber in the book by Jack G. Morrison continues with this quote:

However, there are some uncertainties surrounding this issue, caused in part by the SS’s destruction of the gas chamber in the closing days of the war, and by their virtual annihilation of those prisoners who worked in the crematorium and gas chamber.  The SS did a quite thorough job of destroying evidence that might be used against them.  Following the war, the Russians did not help matters by keeping researchers out of the camp and making sweeping changes, turning it into a military post.

In April 1945, the Ravensbrück prisoners, who were still able to walk, had been marched out of the camp toward one of the sub-camps. Eventually the marchers reached the Allied lines and were liberated in early May, 1945.

To his credit, author Jack G. Morrison includes the story of the liberation of Ravensbrück in his book on page 303.

That night (30 April) the Russian arrived.  Rather than being liberators, they put the French women [prisoners] through a more hellish ordeal than what they had experienced in the camp.  The women were raped repeatedly the the Russian troops, to the point where some of them were too weakened to continue their journey  [the march out of the camp].  When Soviet forces liberated the subcamp at Neustadt-Glewe, they raped all the women and girls: Jewish, Hungarian, German — it didn’t matter.

One of the prisoners at Ravensbrück was Odette Sansom, a British SOE agent, who was allegedly having an affair with the camp Commandant, Fritz Suhren.   When the march out of the camp started, Odette rode with Fritz Suhren in his car to the American lines where he surrendered on May 3, 1945. He was expecting Odette to put in a good word for him to save himself from being charged as a war criminal, but she refused.

After the war, there were rumors that Odette had survived Ravensbrück because she had been the mistress of Suhren, who was a handsome man. But Odette claimed that her toenails had been pulled out while she was a prisoner at Ravensbruck.  Strangely, Odette was the only one who was tortured this way even though she had told her captors that she was married to a relative of Winston Churchill.  Did Fritz pull out all of Odette’s toenails to convince her to sleep with him?  Is that why she refused to testify on his behalf?

Odette was one of the three SOE agents who survived Ravensbrück; the other two were Yvonne Baseden and Eileen Nearne.

Four of the 8 female SOE agents, who were sent to Ravensbrück, were executed there, according to eye-witness testimony. Their names are Denise Bloch, Lilian Rolfe, Violette Szabo and Cecily Lefort.   According to the testimony of Sylvia Salvensen, a former prisoner in the camp, Cecily Lefort was one of the women who died in the gas chamber on May 1, 1945.  This was after the march out of the camp began and the marchers were overtaken by Russian troops.

The SS man who was the second in command at Ravensbrück, Johann Schwarzhuber, gave detailed testimony in the British Military Court at Hamburg, where 16 staff members of Ravensbrück were on trial from December 5, 1946 to February 3, 1947. Schwarzhuber testified that SOE agents Violette Szabo, Lilian Rolfe and Denise Bloch were executed by a shot in the neck shortly after Schwarzhuber was transferred to the camp on January 12, 1945.

Until Vera Atkins interrogated Schwarzhuber on March 13, 1946 and got him to confess to witnessing the murder of the SOE agents, nothing was known about the fate of these three women who had been at Ravensbrück since August 22, 1944. Schwarzhuber filled in all the details that Atkins wanted to hear, about how the women had died bravely and how the SS men had been impressed with their bearing.

I previously blogged about Vera Atkins here.

Schwarzhuber, who was on trial himself, said in the deposition taken from him by Vera Atkins and repeated in the courtroom, that Commandant Fritz Suhren had been annoyed that the Gestapo had not carried out these executions themselves. Suhren was not on trial since he had escaped from custody. Schwarzhuber also testified that Suhren had ordered him to organize a mass gassing of the women prisoners at the end of February 1945 at a time when sixty to seventy prisoners were dying each day during a typhus epidemic.

Prior to being sent to Ravensbrück, Schwarzhuber had worked at Dachau, Sachsenhausen and Auschwitz II, better known as Birkenau. Schwarzhuber was convicted and executed on May 3, 1947.

Schwarzhuber was the most important witness at the Ravensbrück proceedings; he had first told his story when he gave a deposition after being interrogated by Vera Atkins. How was Vera Atkins able to get Schwarzhuber to confess to crimes for which he knew that he would surely be executed? Did she threaten to turn his family over to the Russians, a threat that was usually effective?

If any of the camp records were ever found, they were not released. All of the information about the women who were executed at Ravensbrück came from the testimony of Johann Schwarzhuber and from some of their fellow prisoners.

Football players from England learn about Dr. Heinz Thilo who did selections for the gas chamber at Auschwitz

According to a news article in the online Telegraph, the England football players stood “transfixed” in front of a photo in the Auschwitz Museum which showed an SS officer, Dr. Heinz Thilo, doing a selection for the gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau.  These photos have been added to the Auschwitz Museum since I was there in 2005, so I am not sure which photo they saw, but it was probably a photo from the Auschwitz Album, like the photo below.

SS officer making selections for the gas chamber

The photo above, which is from the Auschwitz Album, shows Dr. Thilo, who is partly hidden behind another man.  The place where this photo was taken is midway along the railroad tracks into the Birkenau camp. In the background of the photo, you can see men walking down the road which is to the left of the railroad tracks as you enter the Birkenau camp.  This road goes to the two largest gas chambers, Krema II on the left side of the road and Krema III on the right side of the road.  Where else could these men be going, except to the gas chamber?

Dr. Heinz Thilo making selections at Birkenau

This quote is from the news article:

Roy Hodgson, his close friend Avram Grant and the Football Association chairman David Bernstein, whose father escaped from the Nazis, stared at the picture. Thilo’s arrogant stance, the way he was casually pointing an elderly Jew towards his death, symbolised the Final Solution.

“There was the guy who made all the decisions, whether they lived or died,” said Rooney, talking on the team bus after the seven players’ visit to this hell on earth. “He’s probably gone home after that, listened to music, and had dinner with his family as if nothing had happened. It’s crazy. It’s hard to understand.

There were over 30 doctors who made the selections at Birkenau, including the famous Dr. Josef Mengele.  Now there will be a new Nazi doctor to hate: Dr. Heinz Thilo.

Hungarian Jews arriving on a train at Auschwitz-Birkenau

In the photo above, you can see the tall chimneys of Krema II and Krema III, in the background, on opposite sides of the train.  On the left side of the photo, you can see the building that is shown in the first photo above.

Close-up of Dr. Thilo making selections for the gas chamber at Birkenau

The football players thought that the man, shown in the Museum photo, looked “arrogant.”  Maybe the photo above is the one they saw.  Note the man wearing a striped uniform in the foreground.  This man was a Kapo, a prisoner who assisted the SS men.

These gullible young men from England were taken to Auschwitz for indoctrination in Holocaust propaganda, after a visit to Oscar Shindler’s factory in Krakow where they learned that Amon Goeth had “killed 500 prisoners” by shooting them from the balcony of his house.  (They were not told that there was a hill between Goeth’s house and the camp, but Goeth had a special rifle that could shoot over a hill.)

What the football players were not told at Birkenau is that the main road through the Birkenau camp went beyond the gas chambers and intersected with another road that went to the Sauna where prisoners took a shower.  That intersection is now covered by the monstrosity called the International Monument, located between the ruins of Krema II and Krema III.

The International Monument, on the left, is between the ruins of  Krema II and the ruins of Krema III, shown on the right in the background

You can see a collection of photos here taken when the England players toured Auschwitz-Birkenau, including a photo of one of the players coming out of the reconstructed gas chamber in the main camp. The news article with these photos includes these statements:

The most harrowing moment came when the players were led into the only surviving gas chamber at Auschwitz.  [...]

David Bernstein, the FA chairman and grandson of a Hungarian Jew, shook his head in disgust and despair when he was told prisoners were made to think they were going for a shower when they were asked to take their clothes off and enter the gas chamber.

But the prisoners were not asked to take their clothes off before entering the gas chamber in the main camp because there was no place to put the clothes.  Filip Mueller, a prisoner who worked in the gas chamber, removing the bodies for burning, wrote that the victims wore their clothes and even carried their suitcases into the gas chamber.

Richard Baer is the latest Auschwitz SS man to be demonized —- in a fictional play “The Beekeeper”

Everyone knows the names Dr. Josef Mengele and Rudolf Hoess, the evil monsters of Auschwitz.  Their names are household words.  Not so well known is the name Richard Baer.

Richard Baer, Dr. Josef Mengele, Rudolf Hoess

Now Richard Baer is the subject of a play about the Holocaust called The Beekeeper.  The play is about Richard Baer, the Commandant of Monowitz (Auschwitz III) and a prisoner named Stressler who is a beekeeper.  This is a play based on a true story, meaning that the play is NOT a true story.  Richard Baer never worked at Monowitz. The play is about one of those events that didn’t happen, but are true, as Elie Wiesel famously said.

This quote is from an article about the play, which you can read in full here:

Whilst the horrific events of the mid-20th century’s Holocaust are incredibly well-documented, I am sure I am not alone in being saddened and disgusted whenever I am served a reminder of the sheer humiliation and cruelty one set of human beings became capable of bestowing on another. This is, of course, what The Beekeeper is all about and the play does not fail to hit hard; it’s an intense and thought-provoking 90 minutes.

However, the slant is somewhat different to what we are accustomed to seeing and reading. In the writer’s own words there are no “bodies being fed into furnaces and whips cracking”. Instead, the spotlight is firmly on a single corner of the camp where the prisoner Stressler resides in isolation. Believed to be a conspirator by the other prisoners, he tenderly nurtures a hive of bees which serves not only as a distraction from his miserable, pain-filled existence but as a supply of honey for Nazi officers, in particular one Richard Baer.

On May 5, 1944, Richard Baer became the last Commandant of the Auschwitz main camp. He was only in charge of the Auschwitz main camp, not the whole Auschwitz complex. Richard Baer never worked at the Auschwitz III camp, aka Monowitz, in any capacity. In January 1945, Baer replaced Otto Förschner as the Commandant of Mittelbau-Dora, the concentration camp in Germany where the V-2 rockets were built.

After the war, Richard Baer went into hiding under an assumed name while he worked as a lumberjack in a remote area in Germany. He was finally tracked down and arrested in 1960, soon after Adolf Eichmann was captured in Argentina. Baer was asked to give a deposition which was entered into the trial of Eichmann in Israel. Baer was awaiting his own trial in the Auschwitz case in Frankfurt when he mysteriously died in prison just before the trial began in June 1963. Under interrogation, Baer had stubbornly refused to admit to the gassing of prisoners at Auschwitz.

This quote is from Wikipedia:

Richard Baer (September 9, 1911 – June 17, 1963) was a German Nazi official with the rank of SS-Sturmbannführer (major) and commander of the Auschwitz I concentration camp from May 1944 to February 1945. He was a member of N.S.D.A.P. (no. 454991) and the SS (no. 44225).

From November 1943 until the end of 1944 Fritz Hartjenstein and Josef Kramer were responsible for the extermination camp Auschwitz II, Birkenau, so that Baer was only Commandant of this part of the camp from the end of 1944 until January 1945. Near the end of the war Richard Baer, having replaced Otto Förschner as commandant of the Dora-Mittelbau camp in Thuringia Nordhausen, was responsible for the execution of Russian prisoners at mass gallows. His final rank was SS-Sturmbannführer (Major).

At the end of the war, Baer fled and lived near Hamburg as Karl Egon Neumann, a forestry worker. In the course of investigation in the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trials a warrant for his arrest was issued in October 1960 and his photograph was printed in newspapers. He was recognized by a co-worker and arrested in December 1960 after Adolf Eichmann’s arrest. On the advice of his lawyer he refused to testify and died of a heart attack in pre-trial detention in 1963.

What would cause a man to die of a heart attack at the age of 52?  Was the heart attack caused by torture during his interrogation? Or by poison?  You can read all about Richard Baer and his untimely death on the website of Carlos Whitlock Porter here.

The deposition of Rudolf Hoess regarding “the Belsen incident”

I previously blogged here about the Auschwitz legend that became known as “the Belsen incident.”

Rudolf Hoess, who was the Commandant of Auschwitz-Birkenau when the Belsen incident took place, gave a deposition concerning the incident, which was entered into the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal.

Here is the text of the Rudolf Hoess deposition regarding the Belsen incident:

Sometimes it happened that prisoners knew what was going to be done. Especially the transports from Belsen knew, as they originated from the East, when the trains reached Upper Silesia, that they were most likely (being) taken to the place of extermination.

When transports from Belsen arrived, safety measures were strengthened and the transports were split up into smaller groups which we sent to different crematoriums to prevent riots. SS men formed a strong cordon and forced resisting prisoners into the gas chamber. That happened very rarely as prisoners were set at ease by the measures we undertook.

I remember one incident especially well.

One transport from Belsen arrived, approximately two-thirds, mostly men, were in the gas chamber; the remaining third was in the dressing room. When three or four armed SS Unterführers entered the dressing room to hasten the undressing, mutiny broke out.

The light cables were torn down, the SS men were overpowered, one of them stabbed and all of them were robbed of their weapons. As this room was in complete darkness, wild shooting started between the guard near the exit door and the prisoners inside.

When I arrived I ordered the doors to be shut and I had the process of gassing the first party  finished and then went into the room together with the guard carrying small searchlights, pushing the prisoners into a corner from where they were taken out singly into another room of the crematorium and shot, by my order, with small caliber weapons.

The Belsen incident happened on October 23, 1943 when a transport of around 1700 “Jews from the East” were brought on passenger trains from the Bergen-Belsen exchange camp to Auschwitz-Birkenau.  They had supposedly been told that they were being taken to a transfer camp called Bergau near Dresden, from which they would continue on to Switzerland where they would be exchanged for German POWs.

Strangely, Hoess did not mention, in his deposition, that one of the victims was Franceska Mann, a beautiful dancer who was a performer at the Melody Palace nightclub in Warsaw. In July 1943, she was among the 600 Jewish residents of the Hotel Polski on the Aryan side of the Warsaw ghetto, who were arrested. Some of them were sent to the Bergen-Belsen exchange camp since they had passports which would have allowed them to enter another country.

According to Jerzy Tabau, a prisoner who later escaped from Birkenau and wrote a report on the incident, the new arrivals were not registered at Birkenau. Instead, they were told that they had to be disinfected before crossing the border into Switzerland. They were taken into an undressing room next to one of the gas chambers and ordered to undress. The beautiful Franceska caught the attention of SS Sergeant Major Josef Schillinger, who stared at her and ordered her to undress completely. Suddenly Franceska threw her shoe into Schillinger’s face, and as he opened his gun holster, Franceska grabbed his pistol and fired two shots, wounding him in the stomach. Then she fired a third shot which wounded another SS Sergeant named Emmerich. Schillinger died on the way to the hospital.

According to Tabau, whose report, called “The Polish Major’s Report,” was entered into the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal as Document L-022, the shots served as a signal for the other women to attack the SS men; one SS man had his nose torn off, and another was scalped, according to Tabau’s report which was quoted by Martin Gilbert in his book entitled The Holocaust. According to Tabau, reinforcements were summoned and the camp commander, Rudolf Hoess, came with other SS men carrying machine guns and grenades.

According to a report entitled “Jewish Resistance in Nazi-occupied Europe” written by  Reuben Ainsztein and quoted by Martin Gilbert, the women were then removed one by one, taken outside and shot to death. However, Eberhard Kolb wrote in his book about the history of Bergen-Belsen that the women were all murdered in the gas chamber.

Before the Nuremberg IMT started in November 1945, Hoess had already made numerous confessions about the gas chambers and the millions of Jews who had been gassed to death.  His deposition about the Belsen incident assumes that gas chambers existed at Auschwitz-Birkenau.  How would someone who denies the gas chambers at Birkenau interpret the Hoess deposition?

First of all, Hoes claims that armed SS men entered the undressing room.  Didn’t they have Kapos (Jewish helpers) who assisted the SS in the crematoria?  Would armed SS men have entered a room full of Jews who were undressing before being gassed?  That would have been a job for the Kapos.

Hoess said in his deposition that two-thirds of the Jews on this transport were already inside the gas chamber, and while there was wild shooting going on in the undressing room, he ordered that the men already inside the gas chamber be gassed as planned. Then the women were taken out of the undressing room and shot. This reveals the flaw in the gassing procedure: after a number of Jews were gassed, there was no place to put the bodies so that another group could be gassed. However, note that Hoess said that the women were taken into “another room” in the crematorium where they were shot.  He doesn’t specify which crematorium was involved in this incident, but there were only two underground rooms in Krema II and Krema III.

What if a riot in the undressing room had not happened?  How would the gas chamber have been emptied so that another gassing could take place?  Would the bodies have been taken outside to await cremation so that the next group, waiting in the undressing room, could enter the gas chamber?  According to the official Holocaust story, the two rooms that should have been morgues were instead an undressing room and a gas chamber.

What about the elevator that took the bodies from the gas chamber up to the ovens?  The elevator was a bottleneck that was a major flaw in the gassing procedure.

The deposition given by Hoess assumes that he did not know that Bergen-Belsen was an exchange camp in October 1943.  In the deposition, it is assumed that the staff at Birkenau took precautions when processing prisoners from Bergen-Belsen because the prisoners there allegedly knew about the extermination camp at Birkenau.  The gas chambers first became known in June 1942 when the British broadcast it over the BBC, but were the prisoners from “the East” (Poland) aware of the gas chambers?

The Hoess deposition sounds very suspicious to me  — like maybe it was written by some British chap and Hoess was forced to sign it after he was tortured half to death.

the remarkable story of Martin Hecht, a Holocaust survivor

Martin Hecht was among the Hungarian Jews who were sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau to be gassed in the Spring of 1944.  He was born in the town of Ruskova in Transylvania on March 2, 1931, so he was 13 years old when he arrived at Birkenau.  According to the book Auschwitz, a New History by Laurence Rees, published in 2005, almost one half of all the Jews that were killed at Auschwitz-Birkenau were Hungarian Jews who were gassed within a period of 10 weeks in 1944. Up until the Spring of 1944, it had been the three Operation Reinhard camps at Treblinka, Belzec and Sobibor, that were the main Nazi killing centers for the Jews, not Auschwitz.

Hungarian children under the age of 15, walking to the gas chamber at Auschwitz-Birkenau

A booklet which I purchased from the Auschwitz Museum stated that 434,351 of the Hungarian Jews were gassed upon arrival. If these figures are correct, only 3,051 Hungarian Jews, out of the 437,402 who were sent to Auschwitz, were registered in the camp. However, the former Auschwitz Museum director, Francizek Piper, wrote that 28,000 Hungarian Jews were registered at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Men selected to work were registered at Auschwitz-Birkenau and given a uniform with no prison number

Martin Hecht was only 13 years old, too young to work, when he was sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau, so how did he manage to survive?  Children under 15 and adults over 45 were automatically sent to the gas chamber on the day that they arrived. Those who were selected to work were given a prison number but the photo above shows that the number was not put on the uniform, as Martin Hecht told a Ynetnews reporter.  Martin said that he did not get a tattoo on his arm.

According to an article which you can read in full on Ynetnews.com here, there were many times that Martin could have died while in captivity, but by some miracle, he survived.  

Jews were sent from concentration camps to Euthanasia Centers to be gassed

In an article about the Buchenwald concentration camp in the Michigan Times, which you can read in full here, I noticed this statement:

But during World War II, mainly in late 1941, many Jews were sent (from Buchenwald) to Bernberg for gassing and subjected to death.

I looked up Bernberg and found this information on this website:

Under Sonderbehandlung 14f13 (Special Treatment 14f13), about 5,000 persons were killed in Bernburg between 1941 and April 1943. In the main these were Jews from the concentration camps Buchenwald, Flossenbürg, Groß-Rosen, Neuengamme, Ravensbrück and Sachsenhausen.

[...]

The victims were then photographed and led to the gas chamber.

A few years ago, I visited the Euthanasia Center at Hartheim Castle and learned that the victims were also photographed there before gassing.  What was the purpose of photographing the victims before they were gassed?  Where are those photographs now?

Years ago, in the early days of the Internet, I saw some of the photographs that were taken at the Euthanasia Centers.  The subjects in the photos were easily identifiable as being mentally and/or physically defective.  These photos are no longer shown on the Internet, as far as I know.  The Nazis also filmed the victims as they were walking into the Euthanasia Centers.  These films, which used to be shown on the History Channel, revealed that some of the victims were walking on all fours; other victims were obviously mentally defective.  The films are no longer shown, as far as I know.

The gassing of Jews at the Euthanasia Centers took place before gas chambers were built at the concentration camps.  For example, at Dachau, the gas chamber was not built until 1942.  There were gas chambers at Ravensbrück and Sachsenhausen but they were built after the euthanasia program stopped.

Why have the photographs of the victims who were gassed at Bernberg and Hartheim been withdrawn?  Is it because the official story of the Holocaust is that the prisoners who were sent to Bernberg and Hartheim to be gassed were Jews who were not sick or mentally abnormal?