You can read the story of Holocaust survivor Helga Weiss in full here. Helga has just published the journal that she kept for four years while she was imprisoned in several Nazi concentration camps.
Helga was born in 1929 and her story parallels that of Anne Frank, who was also born in 1929, except that Helga’s family did not go into hiding. Helga was sent to Theresienstadt, now known as Terezin, where Anne Frank’s family would have been sent, had they not gone into hiding.
This quote from the news article about Helga caught my attention:
Then in April 1945 they were moved by rail to Mauthausen in Austria. It took 16 days – so long the camp was out of killer gas.
After being sent to Theresienstadt, where she stayed in the children’s barracks for several years, Helga was sent with her mother to Auschwitz, and from there to Freiberg, which was a sub-camp of the Flossenbürg concentration camp. In the last days of the war, the Flossenbürg camp was evacuated and some of the prisoners were sent to the Mauthausen camp in Austria.
Helga was lucky. She survived because the Mauthausen gas chamber was out of “killer gas” in April 1945. But is this true? Not according to the Mauthausen Memorial Site. The photo below shows a sign that was inside the gas chamber in May 2003 when I took the photo.
Sign inside the Mauthausen gas chamber
The sign, shown in the photo above, indicates that the gas chamber at Mauthausen was in operation until April 29, 1945. The sign mentions that Cyclon B gas (the killer gas) was being used until April 29, 1945.
The plaque shown in the photo above was in the gas chamber in May 2003. In April 1989, there was a different sign with slightly different wording.
The English version of the sign in 1989 was as follows:
The gas chamber was camouflaged as a bathroom by sham showers and waterpipes. Cyclone B gas was sucked in and exchanged through a shaft (situated in the corner on the right) from the operating room into the gas chamber. The gas-conduit was removed shortly before liberation on April 4th, 1945.
Note that, in 1989, the date given for the removal of the gassing apparatus was April 4, 1945. In May 2003, the sign in the gas chamber gave the date of removal as April 29, 1945. So Helga was brought to Mauthausen after April 4, 1945 and there was no gas chamber at that time. The sign had to be changed because Ludwig Haider was gassed AFTER April 4, 1945.
The photo below shows a memorial plaque for Ludwig Haider who was gassed on April 23, 1945, less than two weeks before the camp was liberated on May 5, 1945. At the time that Ludwig Haider was gassed, a Red Cross representative was in the camp and selected prisoners were being evacuated to neutral countries, but in spite of this, the gassing continued right up to the end.
Memorial for Ludwig Haider who was gassed at Mauthausen on April 23, 1945
So it seems that the Nazis had NOT run out of “killer gas” at Mauthausen. But what about Auschwitz? Helga was sent from Theresienstadt to Auschwitz; why wasn’t she gassed at Auschwitz?
This quote, from the news article about Helga Weiss, tells about an incident where children at Auschwitz, who were being taken to the gas chamber, escaped and ran into Helga’s barracks:
The teenager [Helga] could hear the guards’ hobnail boots heading towards the hut [barracks] and froze in terror.
She wrote in her diary: “They’re coming! They saw the children running to us! They’ll shoot all of us. It’s the end!”
She says: “I hugged Mum and started to pray, ‘God, if I must die, let Mum and me die together. Don’t leave me alone here.
“Although I don’t want to die – let Mum and me survive’.”
And they did. From Auschwitz they were sent to Freiberg [sub-camp of Flossenbürg] in Germany as slave labour.
So Helga was writing in her journal at the exact time that a group of children were being taken to the Auschwitz gas chamber? What did the guards say when they burst in and found Helga recording this event in her journal? “Oh, excuse us; we didn’t mean to interrupt your writing. Carry on; we will come back another day to take the children to the gas chamber.”
By this time, Helga was exempt from the Auschwitz gas chamber because she was 15 years old. Anne Frank was not gassed at Auschwitz because she was over 15 years old. Anne was sent on to Bergen-Belsen. Helga was also sent to Bergen-Belsen, where she survived the typhus epidemic, only to be sent to Mauthausen to be gassed in the last days of the war, even though she was over 15 at that point.
What? You don’t believe that there was a gas chamber at Mauthausen? Oh, ye of little faith. I have two pages of gas chamber testimony on my website, starting here. I will have to add Helga’s testimony to the list.
Every Holocaust survivor seems to know exactly how much he or she weighed when they were liberated. I got to thinking about this today when I read about yet another Auschwitz survivor who mentioned how much he weighed when he was liberated. (Average weight for the survivors was around 60 pounds.)
Did the liberators bring scales with them, so that each person could weigh himself? No, but they did bring cameras with them and the liberation photos show that many of the prisoners were in good health; for example, the women in the photo below, taken at Auschwitz-Birkenau. (Why wasn’t the old woman sent to the gas chamber immediately upon arrival?) Notice the nice clothes worn by the young girl in the photo.
Survivors of Auschwitz-Birkenau
Photos taken on the day of liberation, at all the camps, show that not all prisoners in the concentration camps were skin and bones, even after many years in the camp.
The photo below was taken on the day that one of the sub-camps of Dachau was liberated by soldiers in the 45th Division of the American Army.
Russian POWs in a Dachau sub-camp
Notice that the American Army officer on the left looks slimmer than the Russian POWs.
There are many photos of skinny Russian POWs who were allegedly starved at Mauthausen, as shown in the photo below.
Russian POWs at Mauthausen
When I visited the Mauthausen Memorial Site, I saw a scale model of the quarry there, which is shown in the photo below.
Scale model of Mauthausen quarry
On the right, at the top of the photo above, you can see the barracks for the sick inmates at Mauthausen, also known as the “Russian camp” because this section of the camp was first used to house Soviet POWs. This area is now a graveyard for the sick prisoners who died after the camp was liberated.
Were the men, in the old black and white photo, actually prisoners in the Mauthusen “sick camp”? Were they skin and bones because they were ill? Or were they “Russian POWs” who had been deliberately starved?
It would be natural to assume that the Russian POWs were treated the worst in the Nazi camps because the Russians were treating German POWs very badly. But the old photo taken in a Dachau sub-camp shows that at least some of the Russian POWs were treated very well.
Today I am writing in answer to a comment made on my blog, in which the following was stated:
Those in the docks at Nuremburg and subsequent trials across the world since 1947 acknowledge the gas chambers, including Speer, the architect of the gas chambers, amongst other buildings of notoriety he designed and had built. There is a reason why Speer’s children, whilst living nearby to Speer, would not live in the same house as him – they didn’t want to be associated with the man that designed the gas chambers because they understand the reasons why they were designed.
It was news to me that Albert Speer designed the Nazi gas chambers and had them built. Way back in 1997, I purchased and read the book Inside the Third Reich, Memoirs by Albert Speer in preparation for a trip to Germany during which I planned to visit Nuremberg and then the Dachau concentration camp. Today, I got out the book and decided to look through it to find out if Albert Speer really acknowledged that he had designed the Nazi gas chambers. Fortunately, his book has an extensive index, which I consulted before reading the book again. The book is 526 pages long, so Thank God, he included an index.
In checking the index of Speer’s Memoirs, I found the term “Gas warfare,” but not “gas chambers,” nor any other reference to gassing. In reading Speer’s book, back in 1997, I was struck by the fact that he was very proud of the structures that he had designed. Did he leave out any mention of the gas chambers in his Memoirs because he was not proud of designing them?
Near the end of his book, on page 523, Speer admitted his guilt as a war criminal. This quote is from Speer’s Memoirs:
I had participated in a war, which as we of the intimate circle should never have doubted, was aimed at world domination. What is more, by my abilities and my energies, I had prolonged that war by many months. I had assented to having the globe of the world crown that domed hall which was to be the symbol of the new Berlin. Nor was it only symbolically that Hitler dreamed of possessing the globe. It was part of his dream to subjugate other nations. France, I had heard him say many times, was to be reduced to the status of a small nation. Belgium, Holland, even Burgundy, were to be incorporated into his Reich. The national life of the Poles and the Soviet Russians was to be extinguished; they were to made into helot peoples. Nor, for one who wanted to listen, had Hitler concealed his intention to exterminate the Jewish people. In his speech of January 30, 1939, he openly stated as much. Although I never actually agreed with Hitler on these questions, I had nevertheless designed the buildings and produced the weapons that served his ends.
So it seems that Albert Speer admitted, in his Memoirs, that he “designed the buildings … that served [Hitler's] ends. Why didn’t Speer specify which buildings that he had designed to serve Hitler’s ends?
Did Hitler actually say in his January 30, 1939 speech that he was going to “exterminate the Jewish people”? What German word did he use for the English word “exterminate”? I don’t know so I had to look it up. I found a website which has published Hitler’s entire speech, not in German, but translated into English.
This quote is from Hitler’s speech on January 30, 1939:
One thing I should like to say on this day, which may be memorable for others as well as for us Germans: In the course of my life I have very often been a prophet and have usually been ridiculed for it. During the time of my struggle for power, it was in the first instance the Jewish race that only received my prophecies with laughter when I said that I would one day take over the leadership of the State and with it that of the whole nation and that I would then, among many other things, settle the Jewish problem. Their laughter was uproarious, but I think that for some time now they have been laughing on the other side of their face. Today I will once more be a prophet. If the international Jewish financiers in and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war,then the result will not be the bolshevization of the earth, and this the victory of Jewry, butthe annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe! For the time when the non-Jewish nations had no propaganda is at an end. National Socialist Germany and fascist Italy have institutions that enable them when necessary to enlighten the world about the nature of a question of which many nations are instinctively conscious, but which they have not yet clearly thought out. At the moment Jews in certain countries may be fomenting hatred under the protection of a press, of the film, of wireless propaganda, of the theater, of literature, etc., all of which they control. . . .”
The nations are no longer willing to die on the battlefield that this unstable international race may profiteer from a war or satisfy its Old Testament vengeance. The Jewish watchword, ‘Workers of the world, unite!’ will be conquered by a higher realization, namely, ‘Workers of all classes and of all nations, recognize your common enemy!’
Note that Hitler said that he was going to “annihilate the Jewish race in Europe,” not that he was going to annihilate all the Jews in the world. Did Hitler mean that he was going to get the Jews out of Europe, or did he mean that he was going to kill the Jews in Europe? If he killed only the Jews in Europe, this would not have solved his problem with International Jewry, since Jews from other continents would have quickly filled the void in Europe.
But I digress. Let’s get back to Albert Speer. At the Nuremberg IMT, a former prisoner at Mauthausen, named Francois Boix, identified Speer as one of the men who came to visit the Mauthausen camp. Now we’re getting somewhere. Speer obviously went to Mauthausen to check on the construction of the gas chamber there, which he had designed. Or did he have some other reason to visit Mauthausen? Like maybe he wanted to inspect the factories at Mauthausen, which were building armaments for the Germans in World War II.
The website of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has this quote, from the testimony at Nuremberg, about Speer’s visit to the Mauthausen camp:
When did you see him? A. [Speer] came to the Gusen camp in 1943 to arrange for some constructions, and also to the quarry at Mauthausen. I did not see him myself as I was in the identification service of the camp and could not leave, but during these visits Paul Ricker, head of the identification department, took a roll of film with his Leica which I developed. On this film I recognised (sic) Speer and with him other leaders of the SS. Speer wore a light-coloured suit.
So Speer came to visit the Gusen and Mauthausen camps in 1943? Funny, he never mentioned Mauthausen in his Memoirs. (The word Mauthausen is not in the index of his book.)
The gas chamber at Mauthausen was completed in the spring of 1942, according to testimony in the American Military Tribunal proceedings against the Mauthausen war criminals. Why did Speer wait a whole year before going to inspect the Mauthausen gas chamber which he had allegedly designed?
I found some more information on the subject of Albert Speer and the gas chambers on this website. This quote is from the website:
Ernst Nielsen developed an interest in the Holocaust in the early 1970s. He first undertook some study of the subject at a university in 1975. (Nielsen testified on behalf of Ernst Zündel at his trial in 1988.)
In 1977 [Nielsen] wrote to Albert Speer and arranged a meeting which took place for one hour in Heidelberg, West Germany. Speer had been the minister responsible for armaments and war production during the war. This meant he had been involved with Auschwitz since Auschwitz was an industrial centre. Nielsen asked Speer if there were gas chambers in Auschwitz. Speer replied that the first time he learned about gas chambers was during the Nuremberg trials. Nielsen met Zündel about a year later and told him about this meeting with Speer during one of many conversations he had with Zündel about the Holocaust story.
This information is from my own scrapbookpages.com website:
On March 30, 1943, Speer made his one and only visit to a concentration camp, taking a tour of Mauthausen, which at that time was just switching over from forced labor in the granite quarry to munitions factories using prison labor. Speer was a close personal friend of Hitler and one of the most powerful men in the Nazi government, holding the position of state architect and later the title of Armaments Minister. It was his job to work with Hitler, an amateur architect, in designing new buildings for Berlin and Linz. As the war progressed, plans for the buildings were put on hold and the concentration camps became work camps for the armaments industry, which was under the control of Speer.
Gitta Sereny, author of Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth, wrote the following in regard to Speer’s visit to Mauthausen:
…he spent about forty-five minutes being given the so-called VIP tour which carefully protected visitors from seeing anything that might shock their sensibilities. It was no doubt under the utopian impression this tour provided that he wrote five days later to Himmler protesting against the “lavish building projects” he noticed in the camp. Given the extreme shortage of steel, wood and manpower for building armament factories desperately needed to supply the front lines, he felt that despite the admittedly important tasks for the war effort assigned to concentration camps, the SS really could not continue building along such generous lines:
“We must therefore carry out a new planning program for construction within the concentration camps, which, while allowing for the maximum success for present demands of the armament industry, will require a minimum of material and labor. The answer is an immediate switch to primitive construction methods.”
By “primitive construction methods,” Speer meant such things as temporary unpainted wooden barracks buildings, like the ones used at Auschwitz, which had unplastered walls and no windows because they were really intended to be used for horse barns. Mauthausen, with its granite buildings and painted wooden barracks with windows, was too nice for the slave laborers in Speer’s estimation.
You can see photos of the beautiful buildings at Mauthausen on my website here.
According to Sereny, Speer talked to a friend, Annamarie Kempf, about his trip to Mauthausen. Annamarie told the author:
Now of course, we know that what they showed him was all fake – what they called their “VIP treatment”: a couple of good barracks with, for God’s sake, vases with flowers; shiny kitchens with tasty food on the stove; immaculate shower rooms; and clean, robust-looking prisoners who declared themselves well satisfied with their imprisonment. No wonder he said it wasn’t so bad.
Conditions in all the camps in Greater Germany, which included Austria, deteriorated rapidly when the camps in what is now Poland had to be evacuated, beginning in the summer of 1944, as the Army of the Soviet Union advanced. On October 17, 1944, there were 6,969 male inmates and 399 female inmates at Mauthausen, according to the camp records. After prisoners began to arrive from Auschwitz, which was evacuated beginning in October 1944, the main camp at Mauthausen became seriously overcrowded, with 19,800 prisoners at one point, making conditions ideal for the spread of disease. From there, it was all downhill. By the time the American liberators arrived in the first week of May 1945, there was no more food, no flowers in the vases, no robust-looking prisoners and the shower room, which was actually a gas chamber, was filled with dead prisoners.
I have one whole section, on my website, about the Mauthausen gas chamber, which you can read here. In all my research about Mauthausen, I never learned that it was Albert Speer who had designed the gas chamber there. He must have designed the Mauthausen gas chamber with beauty in mind, rather than workability.
The Memorial Site at Mauthausen does not acknowledge that the gas chamber was designed by Albert Speer. Nor does any other Memorial Site acknowledge that Albert Speer designed the gas chamber in their former camp.
In doing some research on the confession of Franz Ziereis, the Commandant of the Mauthausen concentration camp, I came across a YouTube video which features Dr. Ernst Kaltenbrunner as he testified in his own defense on April 12, 1946 at the Nuremberg IMT.
At 3:25 in the YouTube video, you can hear Col. Amen, the prosecutor, say to Dr. Kaltenbrunner: Did you understand the question?
Kaltenbrunner answers “Ja” and proceeds to explain that he had given the order to surrender the Mauthausen camp “to the enemy without any ill-treatment.” I was very impressed with the testimony of Dr. Kaltenbrunner, who was very calm and spoke German so clearly that almost any German speaker can understand what he is saying.
The following is a copy of the Nuremberg testimony on April 12, 1946 from the Yale University website, beginning with the question by Col. Amen:
COL. AMEN: Did you understand the question, Defendant?
KALTENBRUNNER: Yes. You asked me who had given the order for the killing of the inmates at Mauthausen at the end of the war, and to that I reply that such an order is unknown to me. I gave only one order with regard to Mauthausen and that was to the effect that the entire camp and all internees were to be surrendered to the enemy without any ill-treatment. This order was dictated by me in the presence of the witness Dr. Höttl, and taken to Mauthausen by a courier-officer. I draw your attention to the statement of Dr. Höttl in which he confirms that fact. A questionnaire has been sent to a second person by my Defense Counsel. I requested a similar statement from him, but it is still unanswered.
COL. AMEN: I did not ask you about that order. I asked you about an order to kill all inmates at Mauthausen Concentration Camp shortly before the end of the war. Who was responsible for that order? Were you?
KALTENBRUNNER: No.
COL. AMEN: You are acquainted with the person who tells the story, Ziereis?
KALTENBRUNNER: Yes, I knew Ziereis.
COL. AMEN: And you had your picture taken with him and with Himmler, and this is now in evidence before this Tribunal. Do you recall that?
Left to right: Himmler, Ziereis, Kaltenbrunner
KALTENBRUNNER: I have not seen the picture. It was handed to the Tribunal while I was in the hospital.
COL. AMEN: Well, never mind the picture then.
I ask to have the defendant shown Document Number 3870-PS, which will be Exhibit Number USA-797. [This was the affidavit of Hans Marsalek, written from memory 10 months later]
Now, if the Tribunal pleases, this is a fairly long document which I do not propose to read at length, but it is one of the more important documents in the case, and so I hope that the Tribunal will read the entire statement, even though I do not bring it all out today in the interest of saving time.
THE PRESIDENT: It is a new document?
COL. AMEN: A new document, Your Lordship.
THE PRESIDENT: Is it in German?
COL. AMEN: Yes.
[The document was submitted to the defendant.]
This, you will note, Defendant, refers to a dying confession of Ziereis, as reported to the individual making the affidavit, and I call your attention first to the last two paragraphs on the first page, which we will read together:
“There was one SS man for 10 prisoners. The highest number of prisoners was about 17,000, not including the branch camps. The highest number in Mauthausen Camp, the branch camps included, was about 95,000. The total number of prisoners who died was 65,000. The complement was made up of Totenkopf units numbering 5,000 men, comprising guards and the command staff.”
And, now, at the middle of the next page, the paragraph begins:
“According to an order by Reichsfuehrer Himmler, I was to liquidate all prisoners on the instructions of SS Obergruppenfuehrer Dr. Kaltenbrunner; the prisoners were to be led into the tunnels of the Bergkristall works of Gusen and only one entrance was to be left open.”
KALTENBRUNNER: I have not yet found the passage.
COL. AMEN: It is in the middle of Page 2. Have you got it?
KALTENBRUNNER: Yes, sir.
COL. AMEN: “Then I was to blow up this entrance to the tunnels with some explosive and thus cause the death of the prisoners. I refused to carry out this order. This meant the extermination of the prisoners in the so-called ‘mother camp’ Mauthausen, and in the camps Gusen I and Gusen II. Details of this are known to Herr Wolfram and to SS Obersturmfuehrer Eckermann.
“A gas chamber camouflaged as a bathroom was built in Mauthausen Concentration Camp by order of the former garrison doctor, Dr. Krebsbach. Prisoners were gassed in this camouflaged bathroom. In addition to that, there ran, between Mauthausen and Gusen, a specially built automobile in which prisoners were gassed during the journey. The idea for the construction of this automobile was Dr. Wasiczki’s, SS Untersturmfuehrer and pharmacist. I, myself, never put any gas into this automobile; I only drove it. But I knew that prisoners were being gassed. The gassing of the prisoners was done at the request of the physician, SS Hauptsturmfuehrer Dr. Krebsbach.
“Everything that we carried out was ordered by the Reich Security Main Office, Himmler or Heydrich, also by SS Obergruppenfuehrer Muller or Dr. Kaltenbrunner, the latter being Chief of the Security Police.”
Then, passing on to Page 5, just below the center of the page, the paragraph commencing, “In the early summer of 1943 . . . ” Have you the place?
KALTENBRUNNER: Yes.
COL. AMEN: “In the early summer of 1943, SS Obergruppenfuehrer Dr. Kaltenbrunner visited Mauthausen Concentration Camp. Camp Commandant Ziereis, Gauleiter Eigruber, Chief of the Detention Camp Bachmeyer, and several others accompanied Dr. Kaltenbrunner. I saw Dr. Kaltenbrunner and the people who accompanied him with my own eyes. According to the testimony of the ‘corpse carriers’ at that time, the former prisoners Albert Tiefenbacher”-whose affidavit has been read-”present address Salzburg; and Johann Polster, present address Pottendorf near Wiener-Neustadt, Austria, about 15 prisoners under detention were selected by the detention chief, Unterscharfuehrer Winkler, in order to show Dr. Kaltenbrunner three ways of extermination; by a shot in the neck, hanging, and gassing. Women whose hair had been shorn were among those executed and they were killed by shots in the neck. The above-mentioned ‘corpse carriers’ were present at the execution and had to carry the corpses to the crematorium. Dr. Kaltenbrunner went to the crematorium after the execution and later he went into the quarry.
“Baldur van Schirach visited the Mauthausen Concentration Camp in the autumn of 1944. He, too, went to the detention building and also to the crematorium.”
Do you still say that you had nothing to do with the order referred to or the matters set forth in the affidavit?
KALTENBRUNNER: I maintain that most emphatically, and I want to draw your attention to the fact that you, sir, have said that this statement was taken when Ziereis was on his deathbed, but you did not say that what you read from Pages 7 and 8 does not come from Ziereis, but from Hans Marsalek, who is responsible for these statements. This Hans Marsalek whom, of course, I have never seen in my life, had been an internee in Mauthausen as were the two other witnesses. I have briefly expressed my views as to the value of a statement concerning me from a former concentration camp internee and my inability to speak face to face with this witness who now confronts me, and my application will be made through my counsel. I must ask here to be confronted with Marsalek. Marsalek cannot know of any such order. In spite of that he states that he did.
COL. AMEN: Defendant, Marsalek is merely the individual who took the dying confession from Ziereis. Do you understand that?
KALTENBRUNNER: No, I do not, because thus far it is new to me that the Prosecution were using internees from concentration camps for the interrogation of Ziereis, who had been shot in the stomach three times and was dying. I thought that such interrogations would have been carried out by a man who was legally trained and who would be in a position to attach the right value to such statements.
COL. AMEN: Well, perhaps, Defendant, if you were conducting the Prosecution, you would do it differently; but, in any event, your testimony is that everything in that affidavit which was read to you is false; is that correct?
KALTENBRUNNER: It is false. I have never given an order to the Mauthausen Camp with the exception of that one order which I was entitled to do on the strength of special powers and for the contents and transmission of which I have offered sufficient evidence. Mauthausen was never under my jurisdiction in any other way, and I could not issue any such orders. The Prosecution know perfectly well, and it must have been proved to them by dozens of testimonies, that I had never had any authority over Mauthausen.
THE PRESIDENT: Defendant, you do not seem to understand what this document is. It is an affidavit of Hans Marsalek, and Paragraph 2 shows the fact that he made the interrogation of Ziereis, who was about to die, in the presence of the commander of an armored division; and he then sets out what Ziereis said, and then he goes on to declare, in addition, what is contained in Paragraph 3; and it is perfectly obvious to the Tribunal that what is said in Paragraph 3 is not what Ziereis said, but what Marsalek said-the person who was making the affidavit.
KALTENBRUNNER: My Lord, may I say in reply that Marsalek, as an internee in the camp, was of course not in a position to know that Ziereis was never under my command. For that reason alone, it appears likely that Marsalek, when he questioned Ziereis, could not possibly know the facts of the case. I have proved to the Tribunal, and proved it to the Prosecutor, that authority was not given to me until 9 April.
THE PRESIDENT: Yes, I know; that is only a matter of argument. I was only drawing your attention to the fact that it is perfectly obvious from the document itself that what Colonel Amen was reading was a statement of Marsalek and not a statement of Ziereis, which was the point you were making.
COL. AMEN: Defendant, do you recall having given an order to the commandant of the Mauthausen Concentration Camp on the 27th of April 1945, that at least 1,000 persons should be killed at Mauthausen each day? Is that true or false?
KALTENBRUNNER: I have never given such an order. You know . . .
COL. AMEN: Were you acquainted with SS Colonel Ziereis, the same person we have just been speaking of?
KALTENBRUNNER: Yes.
[From this point on, there were no more questions about Ziereis and his confession was never mentioned again]
Dr. Kaltenbrunner was the highest ranking SS man to be tried at Nuremberg; he was charged with conspiracy to commit Crimes against Peace, War Crimes, and Crimes against Humanity. Dr. Kaltenbrunner had a law degree and was able to defend himself very well, but his testimony didn’t matter.
On September 30, 1946, Dr. Kaltenbrunner was convicted of War Crimes and of Crimes against Humanity, and on October 1, 1946 he was sentenced to be hanged. At 1:39 a.m. on October 16, 1946, twelve days after his 43rd birthday, Dr. Kaltenbrunner was hanged in a gymnasium at the Nuremberg Prison.
So what does all this have to do with anything? It shows how the Nuremberg IMT was conducted and how the defendants were convicted on flimsy evidence and lies told by witnesses who were allowed to give an affidavit, and then refuse to take the witness stand to be questioned by the defense.
This morning I was reading about Dario Gabbai, one of the surviving Sonderkommando Jews at Auschwitz, who was marched out of the camp in January 1945 and eventually ended up in a sub-camp of the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria. Several years ago Gabbai gave a talk to students which you can read about here.
Gabbai was a Greek Jew who was transported on a train to Auschwitz-Birkenau in March 1944. At Birkenau, he was assigned to the Sonderkommando squad which removed the bodies from the gas chambers and carried them to the ovens to be burned. His suffering as a Sonderkommando ended in January 1945 when he was sent on a “death march” out of the Auschwitz camp to the German border and then taken by train to Austria, where he probably ended up at either the Gusen I or Gusen II sub-camp of Mauthausen.
This quote is from the article about Gabbai’s talk to the students: (I have highlighted the important points in bold faced type.)
To try and hide the horrors of what they had done, the Germans tried to destroy any evidence.
Weighing 67 pounds and in weather 23 degrees below zero, Gabbai and the others were led on a walk to Austria. He claims he stayed alive by thinking of his town. The plan was to get them all into a cave and kill them in an explosion, but the Germans abandoned them in fear of being caught by the liberation troops.
Dario Gabbai is one of the Holocaust survivors who is featured in Steven Speilberg’s documentary “The Last Days.”
This quote (the words of Gabbai) is from the book entitled “The Last Days” which tells the stories of the survivors who are featured in the documentary film with the same name:
When the Red Army was approaching, the Germans marched us to Austria; of the thousands who were on the march, only a few hundred survived, including ninety-six Sonderkommando. There was one good morning when we woke up to an unexpected silence — all the Germans had gone and the Americans came a few hours later. That was on May 6, 1945 and I weighed just sixty-seven pounds.
According to Holocaust historians, it was the custom to kill the Jews in the Sonderkommando squads periodically and replace them with new workers. But for some unknown reason, the Nazis allowed the last 100 Sonderkommando Jews to live. Their plan was to take them to a cave in Austria and blow them up.
The book entitled The 186 Steps, written by Christian Bernadac begins with a description of the Stairs of Death at the former Mauthausen concentration camp which is now a Memorial Site, visited mostly by teen-aged students.
Old photo shows prisoners carrying granite boulders up the Stairs of Death at Mauthausen
The Simon Wiesenthal Center has an online list of questions about the Holocaust; you can read the answers to the questions here.
Here is the answer to Question #12, quoted from the website:
Did the Nazis plan to murder the Jews from the beginning of their regime?
Answer: This question is one of the most difficult to answer. While Hitler made several references to killing Jews, both in his early writings (Mein Kampf) and in various speeches during the 1930s, it is fairly certain that the Nazis had no operative plan for the systematic annihilation of the Jews before 1941. The decision on the systematic murder of the Jews was apparently made in the late winter or the early spring of 1941 in conjunction with the decision to invade the Soviet Union.
The decision “was apparently made?” How do we know that the decision was made at all? Apparently, the decision was not put on paper. Note that the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s answer to this question does not explicitly say that Hitler made this decision nor that Hitler was the one who gave the order. Apparently someone read Hitler’s mind and no order was even necessary. (more…)
Thanks to a French-speaking e-mail correspondent, who wishes to remain anonymous, I have learned that French author Christian Bernadac “was able to reconstruct the life of an inmate, that he is a famous journalist investigator, on various subjects and wars…” This description of Bernadac’s book “The 186 Steps” comes from a web site that is written in French. I bought Bernadac’s book from an online used book seller in 2003. I don’t read French so it was not possible for me to read an online description of Bernadac’s book before I purchased it. I assumed that Bernadac’s book was the true story of his time in the Mauthausen concentration camp.
In my defense, I would like to point out that nowhere in Bernadac’s book does it state that the book is a reconstruction of the life of an inmate. The entire book is written in the first person. Chapter One is entitled “The Scene is Set.” The Scene in the title refers to the author’s detailed description of how the prisoners were forced to carry heavy granite boulders up the 186 steps from the Mauthausen quarry.
This quote is from the second page in the first chapter of “The 186 Steps”:
For two months and six days I performed the acrobatics required to keep from plunging into either of these pitfalls. I was lucky to be young.
How was I supposed to know that this first person account of the life of a Mauthausen prisoner was a “reconstruction of the life of an inmate”? How was I supposed to know that he was only 7 years old when Mauthausen was liberated in May 1945? In his book, Bernadac wrote that he was 30 years old when he was sent to Mauthausen after he was captured as a French Resistance fighter. (more…)
Christian Bernadac is the author of “The 186 Steps,” a book about the Mauthausen concentration camp, which was published in 1974. According to a French Wikipedia page about Bernadac, he was born in August 1937 and died in 2003. He was only 7 years old in the last year that Mauthausen was open, which means that he was probably not a prisoner at Mauthausen, which was mainly a camp for adult men. So how did he gain first-hand knowledge about the camp? Is this book a fake, like so many other books about the Holocaust?
Before I visited the Mauthausen memorial site several years ago, I bought Bernadac’s book “The 186 Steps” and read it very thoroughly. I had to buy a used copy through Amazon.com and pay a high price for it because the book was no longer in print at that time. Based on what I read in his book, and my personal observations at the memorial site, I did a section on my web site about Mauthausen, which you can read here. I mentioned several times that Bernadac had been a prisoner at Mauthausen.
Jack Hedrick Taylor was a Navy SEAL in World War II, before there was any such thing as a Navy SEAL. After the war, Lt. Cmdr. Taylor received a Citation for the Navy Cross which described him as “chief of the Maritime Unit, Office of Strategic Services Detachment, United States Armed Forces, in the Middle East, from September 1943 to March 1944.
Lt. Jack Taylor, the first Navy SEAL
The following quote from his Citation for the Navy Cross describes his heroic exploits during World War II:
Lieutenant Jack Taylor, USNR, personally commanded fourteen separate sorties to the Greek and Balkan enemy-occupied coasts. This activity was carried out despite intense enemy efforts to prevent any kind of coastal traffic whatsoever. Lieutenant Taylor, through clandestine operations, deserving of the highest commendation and careful planning and skillful navigation effected numerous evacuations of intelligence agents, doctors, nurses, and downed airmen. Tons of arms, ammunition, explosives, and other military supplies were delivered to Marshal Tito and other resistance forces through the efforts of Lieutenant Taylor. For three months, at all times surrounded by enemy forces, and on three occasions forced to flee from enemy searching parties, Lieutenant Taylor and his intelligence team operated in Central Albania and transmitted by clandestine radio important information regarding enemy troop movements, supply dumps, coastal fortifications, anti-aircraft installations and other military intelligence of great value to the Allied forces. Parachuting into enemy territory on the night of 13 October 1944, with a team of three Austrian deserter-volunteers, he had personally trained and briefed, he began a secret intelligence mission to Austria. Handicapped from the very start by failure of their plane to drop radio equipment, living in constant danger of capture, and the physical and mental strain on his men, the courage and energy of Lieutenant Taylor prevailed and throughout the remainder of October and November, the mission collected target intelligence of the highest value to the Allies. On 30 November, the eve of their departure for Italy, the party was captured by the Gestapo. Through four months of imprisonment in Vienna and one month in Mauthausen prison camp, he was subjected to the customary interrogation methods of the Gestapo. During his capture, Lieutenant Taylor injured his left arm seriously. With this handicap and also being forced to exist on starvation rations and work at hard labor, he resisted all attempts to force him to divulge security …. the brilliant results of his operations have been an essential aid to the victory of Allied Arms.
