48,000 Bulgarian Jews were saved from the Holocaust

Fox News is reporting that today (March 10, 2013), Bulgaria is commemorating the rescue of the Bulgarian Jews from the Nazis during World War II.  How did that happen?  Hint: Bulgaria and Germany were allies and Bulgaria refused Hitler’s order to deport the Bulgarian Jews to the death camps.

How do we know how many Jews there were in Bulgaria during World War II?  On January 20, 1942, the Wannsee Conference took place in a mansion in a suburb of Berlin; the minutes of that meeting listed the number of Jews in all of Europe, including 48,000 Jews in Bulgaria. It was at the Wannsee Conference that “The Final Solution to the Jewish Question in Europe,” aka the “Genocide of the Jews,” was planned.

Were there any Bulgarians among the 4 million Jews that were killed at Auschwitz-Birkenau, according to the Soviet Union? After the war, the Soviets prepared the following report which includes Bulgarians among the 4 million:

DOCUMENT 008-USSR

Report by the Soviet War Crimes Commission, 6 May 1945

There were usually 200,000 inmates at one time in the extermination camp of Auschwitz. Over 4 million people from the countries occupied by Germany were killed in Auschwitz, in most cases by gas immediately after their arrival; the remainder were first used for labour or for medical experiments and later killed in various ways (injections, ill treatment etc.). Details relating to the camp and the persons responsible for the crimes.

Description

Record no. 56 of the Soviet War Crimes Commission, second edition. Russian language. Signatures ink. With German translation.  [...]

Since the Germans also burnt a great number of bodies on pyres, the capacity of the installations for the extermination of human beings in Auschwitz must be considered to be much higher in fact than this figure would suggest. But even when one considers that individual crematoria may not have worked to full capacity, or they might have been shut down for repairs part of the time, the technical commission established that the German hangmen killed not less than 4,000,000 citizens of the USSR, Poland, France, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Roumania, Hungary, Bulgaria, Holland, Belgium, and other countries during the period of the existence of Auschwitz camp.

Read more at http://www.scrapbookpages.com/AuschwitzScrapbook/History/Articles/SovietCharges.html

The 4 million figure, which included citizens of Bulgaria, has now been changed to 1.1 million by the Auschwitz Museum.

This quote is from the Fox News story which you can read in full here:

SOFIA, Bulgaria –  Bulgarians on Sunday commemorated public protests that led to the rescue of more than 48,000 Jewish countrymen from deportation to Nazi death camps.

Ceremonies across the country Sunday marked the 70th anniversary of protests by Bulgarian clergymen, intellectuals, politicians and others that ultimately stopped the Nazis from deporting any Jews from Bulgaria.

Though an ally of Germany during the war, Bulgaria was the only Eastern European country that saved its Jews from the Holocaust. This act of salvation is a unique chapter in the history of the Holocaust, but its full story remained largely unknown until the fall of communism in Bulgaria in 1989.

But Parliament admitted for the first time on Friday that Jews were deported to Nazi concentration camps from areas under Bulgarian control during World War II.

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/world/2013/03/10/bulgarians-commemorate-anniversary-rescue-country-jews-from-holocaust/#ixzz2NADT2VWf

Monument at Mauthausen in honor of Bulgarian resistance fighters

But what about the monuments to the Bulgarians at Mauthausen and Treblinka? The photo above shows a monument at the Mauthausen Memorial Site that was erected in 1976 in honor of the Bulgarian “political prisoners” at Mauthausen.  The “political prisoners” in the Mauthausen camp may or may not have been Jews; they were sent to the Mauthausen Class III concentration camp because they were captured Resistance Fighters, who were fighting as illegal combatants in World War II.

Hungary was also an ally of Germany and the Hungarian Jews were sent to Nazi camps in May 1944.  The photo below shows a monument to the Hungarian Jews that were sent to Mauthausen because they were Resistance fighters.

Monument to Hungarians that were sent to Mauthausen

At the Treblinka Memorial Site, there are 10 monuments to the countries from which Jews were sent to Treblinka.  The photo below shows the stones for Poland and Czechoslovakia.  Unfortunately, I didn’t take a picture of the stone for Bulgaria.

Two of the 10 stones at Treblinka in honor of countries

At the Treblinka Memorial Site, below where a symbolic cemetery is located, there are 10 large stones with the names of the countries from which the victims came. These countries were Poland, Czechoslovakia, Germany, Austria, the Soviet Union, Greece, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, France, and Belgium. According to Martin Gilbert in his book “Holocaust Journey,” there were 13,000 Jews deported to Treblinka from the Greek provinces of Macedonia and Thrace, which were then occupied by Bulgaria, so their stone says “Bulgaria.” Bulgaria was an ally of Germany, but no Jews from that country were deported. There is another stone at Treblinka for the 43,000 Jews from German-occupied Greece.

The following is a quote from the Judgment handed down at the Nuremberg IMT:

German missions were sent to such satellite countries as Hungary and Bulgaria, to arrange for the shipment of Jews to extermination camps and it is known that by the end of 1944, 400,000 Jews from Hungary had been murdered at Auschwitz. Evidence has also been given of the evacuation of 110,000 Jews from part of Romania for “liquidation.” Adolf Eichmann, who had been put in charge of this programme by Hitler, has estimated that the policy pursued resulted in the killing of 6,000,000 Jews, of which 4,000,000 were killed in the extermination institutions.

Note that the judgement at Nuremberg did not say that Jews were sent to extermination camps from Bulgaria.

Adolf Eichmann did not testify at the Nuremberg IMT, although he was quoted in the Judgement. The text of the Judgment at Nuremberg, with regard to the killing of 6 million Jews in the Holocaust, was mostly based on hearsay testimony given in an affidavit, dated 26 November 1945, by former SS officer Wilhelm Höttl. Höttl stated that Adolf Eichmann, the head of the Jewish section of the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA), had told him in August 1944 that four million Jews had been killed in the extermination camps, and another two million had been killed by the Einsatzgruppen on the Eastern front. After the German surrender in May 1945, Höttl had been recruited to work with American intelligence.

What about the other “death camps,” for example, Majdanek?  According to a book entitled Majdanek, by Jozef Marszalek, which I purchased in 1998 at the Visitor’s Center at the Majdanek Memorial Site, the prisoners at Majdanek were from these 28 countries: Albania, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, China, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Great Britain, Greece, Holland, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway, Poland, Romania, Spain, Sweden, Turkey, the USSR, the United States of America, and Yugoslavia.  Note that Bulgaria is mentioned, as is the United States of America.  It could be that the prisoners from Bulgaria, at the Majdanek camp, were not Jews. Or maybe they were from countries occupied by Bulgaria.

Getting  back to the Wannsee Conference, the mansion where the Conference was held is now a Museum.

Section 7 in the Wannsee Museum is about the “Deportations” which was “the sending of the Jews to concentration camps in the East, beginning in February 1942.”

Section 8 in the Wannsee Museum is devoted to the “Countries of Deportation.” According to the Museum, when I visited in 2001, Jews from the following countries were deported to the east: Albania, Belgium, Bulgaria, Denmark, Germany, France, Greece, Italy, Yugoslavia, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Austria, Poland, Romania, the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, and last of all, Hungary.

Again, it could be that Bulgaria was included in the list of countries, from which Jews were deported, because those countries were occupied by Bulgaria.

Why is there so much nit-picking about whether or not Bulgarian Jews were deported?

This quote from the Fox News story tells why:

Though an ally of Germany during the war, Bulgaria was the only Eastern European country that saved its Jews from the Holocaust. This act of salvation is a unique chapter in the history of the Holocaust, but its full story remained largely unknown until the fall of communism in Bulgaria in 1989.

But Parliament admitted for the first time on Friday that Jews were deported to Nazi concentration camps from areas under Bulgarian control during World War II.

“The objective evaluation of the historic events cannot ignore the fact that 11,343 Jews were deported from northern Greece and the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, then under German jurisdiction,” legislators said in a declaration and expressed regrets that “the local Bulgarian administration had not been in a position to stop this act.”

The Shalom Organization of Jews in Bulgaria had repeatedly demanded the state to take responsibility for the deportations.

“The Bulgarian government must assume the moral responsibility for the Nazi death camp deportation of ethnic Jews from the regions of Thrace and Macedonia regardless of the fact that Bulgaria saved its almost 50,000 Jews,” the group’s chairman, Maxim Benvenisti, told The Associated Press before the declaration.

It is all about the burden of shame, for allowing Jews to be sent to camps, and it’s about reparations that must be paid to the Jews by the countries that deported Jews during World War II.  What about German citizens who were kidnapped in South America, during World War II, and imprisoned in internment camps in America?  Do they deserve any reparations?  No, nobody cares about them.

How teachers are trained to present the Holocaust

How does one become qualified to teach Holocaust studies at one of the many Holocaust Museums in America?  This newspaper article describes how one man, Patrick LeBlanc, took a trip to Washington, DC, Israel and Europe to learn how to teach the Holocaust.

This quote is from the article:

Patrick LeBlanc is still processing what he saw and heard last summer when he was sent to Washington, D.C., Israel and Europe to enhance his ability to teach about the Holocaust.

The Clear Lake resident made the journey with the support of Holocaust Museum Houston’s new Lea Krell Weems Fellowship.

“It was a very intense trip,” said LeBlanc, a volunteer docent and teacher at the museum. “But it was good; it was a very enlightening trip.”

LeBlanc, 43, was among educators from around the country who participated in the Holocaust and Jewish Resistance Teachers’ Program this year. The three-week experience is primarily for U.S. secondary school teachers. It was created to deepen teachers’ knowledge and strengthen their ability to implement Holocaust studies.

[...]

The Holocaust & Jewish Resistance Teachers’ Program’s summer trip started this year at the national Holocaust museum in Washington, D.C.

LeBlanc and the other teachers in the group toured the facility and attended a workshop on how to use artifacts to better convey information.  They also heard from Holocaust survivors.  [...]

….the group went to Germany, where it visited the Bergen-Belsen, Sachsenhausen and Ravensbrueck concentration camps, along with the Jewish Museum Berlin and the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe.

For LeBlanc, one of the most affecting sites was a villa outside of Berlin, where Hitler’s cabinet members had met.

“They had already decided on the ‘Final Solution’” LeBlanc said.

“To be at this villa, which is gorgeous, gorgeous villa, and imagine these men sipping brandy and smoking cigars while they planned the murder of an entire people was kind of surreal.”

LeBlanc is right — the Wannsee villa is gorgeous.  I visited the villa several years ago and took the photo below.

The villa where the Wannsee conference was held

But is LeBlanc correct in saying that “They had already decided on The Final Solution”?  (In the official version of the Holocaust, the term Final Solution is defined as the genocide of the Jews.)  When was the genocide of the Jews decided upon and by whom?

At the Nuremberg IMT, Hermann Goering testified that the title of the Conference was “The Total Solution to the Jewish Question in Europe.”  The “Jewish Question” was whether the Jews should assimilate into the country where they lived, or whether they should have their own state-within-a-state.  Hitler wanted the Jews to have their own state.  Read more about the Wannsee Conference here.

Photo of the Wannsee dining room in 1922, twenty years before the Wannsee Conference took place in this room

The full text of the minutes of the Wannsee Conference can be read online here.

This quote is from the minutes, as published online:

Another possible solution of the problem has now taken the place of emigration, i.e. the evacuation of the Jews to the East, provided that the Führer gives the appropriate approval in advance.

[...]

Under proper guidance, in the course of the final solution the Jews are to be allocated for appropriate labor in the East. Able-bodied Jews, separated according to sex, will be taken in large work columns to these areas for work on roads, in the course of which action doubtless a large portion will be eliminated by natural causes.

The possible final remnant will, since it will undoubtedly consist of the most resistant portion, have to be treated accordingly, because it is the product of natural selection and would, if released, act as a the seed of a new Jewish revival (see the experience of history.)

In the course of the practical execution of the final solution, Europe will be combed through from west to east. Germany proper, including the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, will have to be handled first due to the housing problem and additional social and political necessities.

The evacuated Jews will first be sent, group by group, to so-called transit ghettos, from which they will be transported to the East.

SS-Obergruppenführer Heydrich went on to say that an important prerequisite for the evacuation as such is the exact definition of the persons involved.

It is not intended to evacuate Jews over 65 years old, but to send them to an old-age ghetto – Theresienstadt is being considered for this purpose.

In addition to these age groups – of the approximately 280,000 Jews in Germany proper and Austria on 31 October 1941, approximately 30% are over 65 years old – severely wounded veterans and Jews with war decorations (Iron Cross I) will be accepted in the old-age ghettos. With this expedient solution, in one fell swoop many interventions will be prevented.

So what the men at the Wannsee Conference discussed was ghettos and transit camps and ultimately, evacuation to the East.  That is exactly what actually happened: Jews were put into Ghettos, then sent to Transit camps, from which they were evacuated to the East.

Note that there was no discussion, during the Conference, about “gas chambers” or “death camps.”  So it seems that there was no discussion of the genocide of the Jews at the Wannsee Conference.

You can read about the Museum in the Wannsee villa on my website here.

50th anniversary of the execution of Adolf Eichmann, the “Architect of the Holocaust”

May 31st will mark the 50th anniversary of the hanging of Adolf Eichmann, who was charged with 15 crimes in an Israeli court, and convicted in 1962 of crimes against humanity, war crimes, crimes against the Jewish people, and membership in an outlawed organization (the SS).

Eichmann’s crime was that he was the man in charge of the trains that transported the Jews to the concentration camps.  Who was the man in charge of the trains that took the Japanese-Americans, German-Americans and Italian-Americans to internment camps in America?  I don’t know, but I doubt that there was anyone in charge of scheduling the trains in America.  Americans are not as organized as the Germans are. Up until recently, you could set your watch by the arrival and departure of the trains in Germany. In America, not so much.

The three judges in the trial of Adolf Eichmann were Moshe Landau, Benjamin Halevy and Yitzhak Raveh, all three of whom were German Jews who had left Germany in 1933 and escaped to the British Mandate of Palestine, soon after Hitler came to power.

This raises the question: Why didn’t all the German Jews just go to Palestine in 1933? The Holocaust could have been avoided altogether if the Jews had all emigrated to Palestine.  The answer is that the British would not allow it — they were trying to avoid the conflict that is still going on today.

As an officer in the SS, Eichmann had been assigned in 1938 to help organize SS Security Forces in Vienna after the Anschluss of Austria with Germany. After that, Eichmann was selected by the SS leadership to form the Central Office for Jewish Emigration at the end of 1938.

According to Wikipedia: Eichmann was an “expert on Jewish matters” for the Third Reich, overseeing the concentration camps, the expropriation of Jewish property, and the deportation of Jews to ghettos and death camps. He played a major role in implementing the Final Solution.

In his capacity as the head of the Central Office for Jewish Emigration, Eichmann had tried to work with Zionist organizations to get Jews into Palestine.  In December 1939, Eichmann was assigned to head the RSHA Sub-Department IV-B4, which was the office of the German government that dealt with Jewish affairs and emigration. In 1940, Eichmann was in charge of the Madagascar Project, a plan to deport Jews to the island of Madagascar, but this plan was never put into effect. (Again, the British were against this plan.)

In short, Adolf Eichmann was in charge of getting the Jews out of Germany, but was he eventually put in charge of killing all the Jews in Europe?  Yes! According to Wikipedia: “Reinhard Heydrich disclosed to Eichmann in autumn 1941 that all the Jews in German-controlled Europe were to be murdered. (Source: Browning, Christopher R. (2004), The Origins of the Final Solution, p. 362)”

Several years ago, I was staying in a hotel in Berlin, and I wanted to go to the newly-opened Museum in the house in Wannsee, a suburb of Berlin, where the Final Solution was planned.  I asked the two young people working at the front desk in the hotel how to get to the house in Wannsee where the Final Solution was planned.  I spoke to them in English because all young people in Germany speak English better than most Americans.  But the phrase “Final Solution” drew a complete blank: these young people had no idea what I was talking about.  So I said it in German:  “die Endlösung.”  Again, I drew a complete blank.

Finally, I asked the young woman at the front desk in the hotel to call me a taxi.  Surely, a taxi driver would know how to get there.  As it turned out, the cab driver did know, but he said it was 50 miles, each way.  “Das macht aber nicht,” I said, and away we went.

The point of this long digression from my subject is that a man was hanged for his role as the Architect of the Final Solution 50 years ago, but today’s young people in Germany don’t know what you are talking about when you say “die Endlösung der Judenfrage.”

Adolf Eichmann was a low-level bureaucrat in Nazi Germany. He never personally killed anyone and never ordered the death of anyone. He had no authority in Nazi Germany and was not a decision maker. So unimportant was Eichmann that he did not even leave Germany until 1950. When he finally emigrated to Argentina, he did so with the help of the International Red Cross.  His wife and children did not change their names when they left Germany, and that’s how Eichmann was tracked down by the Israeli Mossad in 1960.

Eichmann’s good friend, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, who was 6 levels above Eichmann in the Reich Security Main Office, was put on trial by the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal and specifically charged with gassing the Jews. Eichmann was not important enough to be hunted down and put on trial at Nuremberg. Eichmann and Kaltenbrunner had been friends from their school days in Linz, Austria, the city that was also the boyhood home of Adolf Hitler.  It was because of this boyhood friendship that Eichmann, who was a High School dropout, had gotten his job with RSHA.

So if Eichmann was such “small potatoes,” why was he kidnapped by the Mossad and put on trial in Israel?  There were hundreds of bureaucrats and technicians who were at the same level in the Nazi hierarchy as Eichmann.

In my humble opinion, the reason that Eichmann was put on trial was because he was the man who had typed up the minutes of the Wannseee Conference, the meeting where the Final Solution was planned on January 20, 1942. In the minutes of this meeting, a copy of which was discovered in 1947, the participants had used euphemisms such as “transportation to the East”  instead of talking about “the extermination of the Jews in gas chambers.” The Jews in Israel, who were survivors of the Holocaust, wanted to hunt down Eichmann, put him on trial, and establish that he had falsified the minutes of the Wannsee conference.

After 11 months in custody in Israel, during which time he was given Thorazine, a drug that is used to treat mental illness, Eichmann was finally put on trial. His facial tics (tartive dyskinesia) showed the effects of long term use of Thorazine.

With a little help from heavy doses of Thorazine, Eichmann confessed the truth, which was that the Wannsee Conference was held for the purpose of planning the genocide of the Jews. Up to that time, there had been no documentation found which showed that Hitler had ordered the killing of all the Jews. The Eichmann trial finally provided the proof of the systematic plan to exterminate the Jews; that is why Eichmann is regarded today as the second most important Nazi, next to Adolf Hitler.

A Holocaust survivor of a Sophie’s Choice type selection..

In the news today is the story of Dr. William Samelson, who was the only one of his extended family, of over 50 people, to survive the Holocaust.  He will be speaking at a Holocaust Remembrance ceremony today.  The first part of the news article is quoted below:

In the movie “Sophie’s Choice,” the title character has to choose at Auschwitz which one of her two children would be in a labor camp and which one would go to a gas chamber.

A similar choice faced William Samelson’s mother as Nazis gave her the option of staying with her two sons or going with her 6-year-old daughter. She went with her daughter, and though they were told they’d be resettled, they were sent to their deaths.

Samelson was 11 years old when he began enduring six years of labor and concentration camps at the hands of the Nazis, but he survived.

The photo below was taken on May 26, 1945 when a transport of Hungarian Jews arrived at Auschwitz.  The newly arrived prisoners had to form two lines, men and boys in one line and women and children in another line.  Strangely, Samelson’s mother was given a choice between joining the men’s line with her two sons, or going to her death with her 6-year-old daughter.

Men and women with children form two lines for selection at Auschwitz-Birkenau

I googled “William Samelson” to find out more about this strange exception which the Nazis made for his family and found that he has written an article which you can read in full here.  The title of the article is World Class Assassins, referring to the Nazis who killed 6 million Jews.

Wannsee house where the Final Solution was planned

This is a quote from Dr. Samelson’s article:

All of that (the genocide of the Jews) was brought about as a result of a planned meeting of the finest criminal Nazi minds in a charming Wannsee chalet on the outskirts of Berlin. They met there to implement their leader’s mandate to come up with a practical “solution to the Jewish Question.” (In view of the plans laid out during that meeting, I am inclined to take the liberty of misspelling the first “n” into an “h”, thus resulting in the name Wahnsee—Lake of Insanity—which more accurately describes the memorable site. Dutifully, the assemblage of thugs quickly submitted to their Fuehrer (Hitler) their full-proof (sic) program; the methodical implementation of the murder of all accessible Jews in occupied territories. And they called it “The Final Solution.” (The Holocaust Chronicle, Publications International, Ltd., Lincolnwood, Ill., 2000, pp. 92, 129, ff.).

You can read more about the Wannsee Conference on my website here.

The fatal flaw in “The Final Solution” was that the Nazis allowed at least one young person in each family to live and give testimony about the genocide of the Jews. Many of these young children, who were spared by the Nazis, are telling the world today about what happened at Auschwitz.

Dr. Samelson was allowed to live, even though he was only 11 years old and hardly qualified to do any kind of work; the rule at the Auschwitz “death camp” was death for anyone under 15 or over 45.  Sometimes, the rule was changed so selections were made by measuring the height of the young boys.  In Dr. Samelson’s case, his mother was allowed to choose which of her children would live.  His mother made the supreme sacrifice and went to her death with her daughter, allowing her two sons to live.

Women and children, including some young boys, walking to the gas chamber at Auschwitz-Birkenau

Men selected for labor are walking down the same road

The two photos above show that, after the selections were made, the men who were selected to work walked down the same road as the women and children, who were selected for the gas chamber.  This road led to the Sauna where the men took a shower. The same road also led to Crematorium IV and Crematoriaum V which were two buildings that had gas chambers disguised as shower rooms. The victims did not know until the last minute whether water or gas would come out of the shower faucets, as was shown in the movie Shindler’s List.

Women who were selected for labor went to the Sauna where they took a shower and had their heads shaved (to prevent lice which spreads typhus).  Women and children, like Samelson’s mother and sister, went to the fake shower rooms where they were gassed.

70 years after the Wannsee Conference, “Holocaust Obfuscation” threatens to replace Holocaust denial

A group of political leaders in Europe have signed a Seventy Years Declaration in an attempt to defend the official history of World War II and to combat a new form of Holocaust denial, known as Holocaust Obfuscation.

Holocaust Obfuscation was defined by Dovid Katz in this quote from an article which he wrote:

… the term Holocaust Obfuscation is proposed as a cover term for a newly energized European movement to confuse, recombine or equalize phenomena that are empirically and conceptually unequal, in service of the effort to obscure, relativize, minimize or delete “the Holocaust as such” from European history and consciousness.

As defined in an article about the Seventy Years Declaration, Holocaust Obfuscation means to

Deflate Nazi crimes; inflate Soviet crimes; make their “equality” into a new sacrosanct principle for naive Westerners who like the sound of  “equality”;  redefine “genocide” by law to include just about any Soviet crime….

In other words, Holocaust Obfuscation is a new form of Holocaust denial: equating the Holocaust with crimes committed by the Soviet Union during World War II.  I previously blogged about the killing of the Jews in Lithuania here.  The photo below shows a Lithuanian man standing over the bodies of Jews that have just been killed.

Lithuanian man stands over the bodies of Jews who have been killed

As everyone knows, the Holocaust was planned at the Wannsee Conference, which was held on January 20, 1942.  The problem is that the photo above was taken in Lithuania 6 months before the Holocaust was planned.  Under Holocaust Obfuscation, this man is now considered a war criminal, on par with the Nazi criminals.

This quote is from the article on Holocaust Obfuscation, which you can read here:

Seventy is the biblical lifespan for latterday humans. And the number of years since Hitler’s Wannsee Conference made the Final Solution for European Jewry in January of 1942.  During the preceding six months, starting with the June 22nd 1941 Nazi attack on the Soviet Union, the Nazis saw how easy it was to find enthusiastic local killers in the Baltic and Ukraine regions among others.  Around a million Jews perished by bullets in that half-year in Eastern Europe, many voluntarily discharged by patriots from the local populations against their own neighbors of many centuries.

So the problem with the claim that the Holocaust was planned at the Wannsee Conference is that around a million Jews had already been shot on the Eastern front by the locals.  Now some Europeans want to obfuscate by pointing out that the Nazis weren’t the only ones who killed Jews during World War II.

After the Wannsee Conference, the Nazis set up three camps that were called the Aktion Reinhard camps: Treblinka, Belzec, and Sobibor.  Holocaust Believers say that these camps were pure extermination camps where Jews were gassed upon arrival; Holocaust deniers say that these camps were transit camps where the Jews took a shower before being sent into the territory that had been taken by the Germans from the Soviet Union in the previous six months.

Now we have to deal with Holocaust Obfuscation in which a new breed of Holocaust deniers say that the crimes, committed before the Aktion Reinhard camps were set up, are equal to the crimes committed by the Nazis.

December 12, 1941 — the day that Hitler ordered the Final Solution

This morning I was searching the internet when I came across a web site which mentioned that Hitler ordered the extermination of all the Jews on December 12, 1941.  The source given for this information was Christian Gerlach.  I looked him up on Wikipedia here and learned that he is a professor of Modern History at the University of Bern in Switzerland.  Professor Gerlach has written lots of books and essays and his credentials are impeccable, but is he right about the date of Hitler’s order?

Let’s consider what was happening on December 12, 1941:  Hitler had just declared war on America in a long-winded speech on December 11, 1941 which you can read in full here.  President Roosevelt immediately responded by declaring war on Germany on the same day.

According to Christian Gerlach, Hitler gave the order to kill all the Jews the next day after his declaration of war against America. But wait a minute!  The gassing of the Jews had already started on December 8, 1941 at the Chelmno death camp.  Every student of the Holocaust knows that!

Let Himmler speak….stop cutting him off in mid-sentence!

Ten years ago, I visited the mansion where the Wannsee Conference took place on January 20, 1942.  At this famous conference, the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question” was planned.  The mansion is now a Museum with displays in the rooms on the ground floor.  I spent a lot of time there and read everything in the displays, using a guidebook with English translations.

Heinrich Himmler giving a speech