Oprah and Elie Wiesel on their trip to Auschwitz in 2006

In January 2006, Oprah Winfrey chose Elie Wiesel’s book Night for her Book Club selection.  Her previous selection had been James Frey’s memoir entitled A Million Little Pieces, which was later revealed to be full of lies.  So Oprah needed to find a book for her Book Club selection, which would be the absolute truth and would not turn out to be another fake.

Oprah traveled to Auschwitz with Elie Wiesel in 2006, in the dead of winter, and walked the grounds of the Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II (Birkenau) camps.  The film of their trip was not aired until May 24, 2006, a long time for Oprah’s Book Club readers to wait.

Eli Wiesel and Oprah Winfrey stand beside the ruins of Krema III gas chamber in 2006

Oprah did a good job of pronouncing all the words correctly, but she seemed to be at a loss for how to respond to Elie’s comments.  All she could do was echo Elie’s words, repeating what he had just said.

Oprah seemed to be confused about the gas chambers, which Elie didn’t mention in his book, Night.  She brought up the burning pits where Elie saw babies being burned alive, according to his book.

Elie Wiesel traveled down this road at Auschwitz and saw babies thrown into burning pits

Elie’s narration in the film includes some contradictions: Auschwitz II (Birkenau) was a “death factory” where the average life expectancy was four months, but there are acres of barracks, and the ruins of barracks, as far as the eye can see at Birkenau, where the prisoners were sleeping two and three to a bunk, according to Elie.  Why were there so many barracks in a death camp where people were gassed, or thrown into burning pits, upon arrival?  There were no factories at Birkenau, so why were there so many prisoners living in the barracks there?

Barracks in Auschwitz main camp where Elie Wiesel was put into quarantine

Elie took Oprah to see the exterior of Barrack #17 in the Auschwitz main camp, where he was put into quarantine for a few weeks before being sent to work at Auschwitz III (Monowitz), but he didn’t explain that he survived because he was put to work in a factory.

One thing that Elie told Oprah, which I found to be strange, was that any SS man had the right to kill anyone at Auschwitz at any time. The Germans are famous for their strict discipline, but apparently not at Auschwitz, where the SS men had no rules to govern their behavior.

It seems that Oprah did not do any research for the trip to Auschwitz, except for reading Night, and she didn’t ask “the hard questions,” as she usually does.

There is a new web site with the title “Elie Wiesel Cons The World” which you can read here.

Russian Orthodox Chapel at Dachau

At the Dachau Memorial Site, there is a small Russian Orthodox Chapel, called “Resurrection of our Lord,” located just to the left of the tourist entrance into the crematoria area.  The chapel was built by members of the Russian armed forces after the fall of Communism and the Soviet Union. It was dedicated on April 29, 1995, the 50ieth anniversary of the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp by American troops.

Russian Orthodox Chapel at Dachau Memorial Site

As shown in the photo above, the chapel is set upon a mound of earth that includes some dirt that was brought from Russia.

The photo below was taken inside the Russian Orthodox chapel. It shows a painting of the resurrected Jesus Christ, leading the Russian prisoners out of their barracks on liberation day, and through a gate that is being held open by angels on either side of Christ. Two guard towers and the barracks in the concentration camp at Dachau can be seen in the background.

The interior of the Russian Orthodox Chapel

There are two memorials inside the chapel which show Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane and Pilate presenting him to the people with the words “Ecce homo.”

The chapel is too small to have seats for visitors, but in spite of this, the chapel is used both for private prayer and regularly scheduled religious services.

The Chapel was built in honor of an estimated 6,000 Russian Prisoners of War who allegedly died in the Dachau camp or were executed at the SS firing range at Herbertshausen.  The alleged execution of 6,000 Russian POWs was not proved at the proceedings of the American Military Tribunal, held at Dachau after the war.

Ninety Russian POWs, who were believed to be Communist Commissars, were hanged at Dachau, on an order from Adolf Hitler who issued this directive on the eve of the German invasion of Russia on July 22, 1941.  Staff members at the Dachau concentration camp were convicted by an American Military Tribunal of a war crime, under the rules of the 1929 Geneva convention, for the execution of the 90 Russian officers, even though the Soviet Union had not signed the Geneva Convention and were not following it with regard to German POWs.

In all the Nazi concentration camps, the Russian POWs were treated much worse than the other prisoners, in retaliation for the atrocities committed by the Russians against German soldiers.  After the liberation of Dachau, the remaining Russian POWs were turned over to the Soviet Union in accordance with the Allied agreement at Yalta in 1943. The Soviet Union treated these returning prisoners as traitors and immediately sent them to the gulags, as the Communist concentration camps were called.

There were 3,900 Russian prisoners at Dachau when the camp was liberated, the second largest ethnic group in the camp. The majority of the prisoners at Dachau were Polish Catholics.

A Catholic church was built at Dachau in 1960 even before the camp was turned into a memorial site.  There is also a Protestant Church and a Jewish Memorial at Dachau.

Jewish Memorial at Dachau Memorial Site with a Catholic Carmelite convent in the background

Protestant Church at Dachau Memorial Site

(Click on the photos to enlarge)

Catholic Church at Dachau Memorial Site

In deference to the Jews, who cannot pray within site of a Christian cross, there is a crown of thorns on top of the Catholic Church, instead of a cross.

“Peiper actually volunteered for classes in torture at Dachau”

The title of this post comes from a quote on a blog which you can read here.  Here is the full quote:

During his SS officer training, Peiper actually volunteered for classes in torture at Dachau inside the infamous Jewish concentration camp.

Joaquim Peiper in his SS dress uniform

Peiper was SS-Standartenführer Joachim Peiper, 1st SS Panzer Division, Leibstandarte-SS Adolf Hitler; he was prosecuted as a war criminal in the infamous Malmédy massacre case.  A caption under a photo on the blog cited above identifies the proceedings against Peiper as “The Nuremberg Trials 1946,” but Peiper was actually prosecuted by an American Military Tribunal  held at the Dachau garrison, next door to the the former Dachau concentration camp.

Tour guides at the Dachau memorial site routinely tell visitors that  prisoners were tortured at Dachau, but neglect to mention which prisoners were tortured. In June 1945, the former Dachau concentration camp became War Crimes Enclosure No. 1 where 30,000 accused German war criminals were held while they awaited trial by the American Military Tribunal. Most of  the Germans were never put on trial, but many of them were tortured at Dachau to obtain confessions before they were prosecuted.

The tour guides also tell visitors that  Dachau had a “School of Terror” where SS men learned how to torture prisoners, but neglect to tell visitors that it was the SS men, who were accused of being war criminals, that were tortured by the American interrogators.

Kurt Framm was accused in the Malmédy Massacre case

The photograph above shows Herbert Rosenstock, an American military interpreter, seated next to 2nd Lt. Kurt Flamm, an SS man, who is answering questions put to him by the prosecutor, Lt. Col. Burton F. Ellis, who is standing. Note the marks on the face of 2nd Lt. Flamm.  It looks like he might have cut himself shaving.  Or maybe he had just come from the torture chamber where he was worked over to prepare him for his testimony.

The Malmédy Massacre, which was the name given to the shooting of 84 American soldiers who had surrendered, took place on December 17, 1944, the second day of the Battle of the Bulge. After the war, during the summer of 1945, the US occupation authorities rounded up over 1,000 former soldiers in the 1st SS Panzer Division and interrogated them. Seventy-five of them were originally charged as war criminals in the Malmédy case.

The accused in the proceedings included General Josef “Sepp” Dietrich, commander of the Sixth Panzer Army, who was a long-time personal friend of Adolf Hitler.   Peiper was the commanding officer of “Kampfgrüppe Peiper,” the armored battle group which spearheaded the German attack in Hitler’s Ardennes Offensive, better known to Americans as the Battle of the Bulge. Peiper’s rank was the equivalent of an American Lt. Col. when he was assigned on December 16, 1944 to lead the tank attack, but after the battle, he was promoted to Colonel. Peiper preferred to be called by his nickname, Jochen, rather than his real first name, Joachim.

One of those who were charged was 18-year-old Arvid Freimuth who committed suicide in his cell before the trial started. Charges were dismissed against Marcel Boltz after it was learned that he was a French citizen; France had made a law that no French citizen could be tried as a war criminal.  That left 73 men who were ultimately prosecuted by the American Military.  America had no law against prosecuting American soldiers who committed war crimes in World War II, but no American “war criminals” were ever prosecuted.

My favorite photo of Joaquim Peiper

The proceedings in the Malmédy Massacre case started on May 12, 1946 and the verdicts were read on July 16, 1946. All of the 73 men on trial were convicted and 42 were sentenced to death by hanging.

None of the convicted SS soldiers were ever executed and by 1956, all of them had been released from prison. All of the death sentences had been commuted to life in prison. As it turned out, the Malmédy Massacre proceedings at Dachau had become a controversial case which dragged on for over ten years, and had resulted in criticism of the American Occupation, the war crimes military tribunals, the Jewish prosecutors and interrogators at Dachau and the whole American system of justice.

Before the last man, who had been convicted in the Dachau proceedings, walked out of the Landsberg am Lech prison as a free man, the aftermath of the case had involved the US Supreme Court, the International Court at the Hague, the US Congress, Dr. Johann Neuhäusler, a Bishop from Munich, who was a survivor of the Dachau concentration camp, and the government of the new Federal Republic of Germany.

The accused SS men claimed that, before the court proceedings, they had already had a trial, which was conducted in a room with black curtains, lit only by two candles. The judge was an American Lt. Col. who sat at a table draped in black with a white cross on it. After these mock trials in which witnesses testified against the accused, each SS man was told that he had been sentenced to death, but nevertheless he would have to write out his confession. When all of them refused to write a confession, the prosecution dictated statements which they were forced to sign under threats of violence.

There was no question that these mock trials had actually taken place, since the prosecution admitted it during the investigation after the Dachau proceedings ended.

According to James J. Weingartner, the author of A Peculiar Crusade: Willis M. Everett and the Malmedy Massacre, Lt. Col. Peiper had presented to the American defense attorney a summary of allegations of abuse made to him by his soldiers. The SS soldiers claimed that they had been beaten by the American interrogators and that one of the original 75 accused men, 18-year-old Arvid Freimuth, had hanged himself in his cell after being repeatedly beaten.

A statement, supposedly written by Freimuth, although portions of it were not signed by him, was introduced during the proceedings as evidence against the other accused. As in the Nuremberg IMT and the other Dachau proceedings, the accused were charged with conspiracy to commit war crimes, as well as with specific incidents of murder, so Freimuth’s statement was relevant to the case, even after he was no longer among the accused himself.

An important part of the defense case was based on the fact that the accused were classified as Prisoners of War when they were forced to sign statements incriminating themselves even before they were charged with a war crime.

As POWs, they were under the protection of the Geneva Convention of 1929, which prohibited the kind of coercive treatment that the accused claimed they had been subjected to in order to force them to sign statements of guilt. Article 45 of the Geneva Convention said that Prisoners of War were “subject to the laws, regulations and orders in force in the armies of the detaining powers.” That meant that they were entitled to the same Fifth Amendment rights as American soldiers.

After being held in prison for an average of five months, the SS  men had been charged as war criminals on April 11, 1946, a little over a month before their case before the American military tribunal was set to begin. By virtue of the charge, they were automatically reduced to the status of “civilian internee” and no longer had the protection of the Geneva Convention.

Lt. Col. Rosenfeld, who was the “law member” of the proceedings against the SS men, ruled against a defense motion to drop the charges; he ruled  that the men, accused in the Malmédy case, had never been Prisoners of War because they became war criminals the moment they committed their alleged acts and were thus not entitled to the protection of the Geneva Convention of 1929.

On March 10, 1945, an order signed by General Dwight D. Eisenhower had reduced the status of all German POWs to that of “disarmed enemy forces,” which meant that they were no longer protected under the rules of the Geneva Convention after the war.

Moreover, as the law member of the panel of judges, Lt. Col. Rosenfeld ruled that “to admit a confession of the accused, it need not be shown such confession was voluntarily made….” Contrary to the rules of the American justice system, the German war criminals, who were prosecuted by the American Military Tribunal, were presumed guilty and the burden of proof was on them, not on the prosecution.

The prosecution case in the Malmédy masssacre proceedings hinged on the accusation that Adolf Hitler himself had given the order that no prisoners were to be taken during the Battle of the Bulge and that General “Sepp” Dietrich had passed down this order to all the  commanding officers in his Sixth Panzer Army. This meant that, in the eyes of the Americans, there was a German conspiracy to kill American prisoners of war and thus, all of the accused were guilty because they were participants in a “common plan” to break the rules of the Geneva Convention. Yet General Dietrich’s Sixth Panzer Army had taken thousands of other prisoners who were not shot. According to US Army figures, there was a total of 23,554 Americans captured during the Battle of the Bulge.  The alleged “Hitler order” to kill all the Allied POWs was never found.

The main evidence in the prosecution case was the sworn statements signed by the accused even before they were charged with a war crime, statements which their American defense attorney claimed were obtained by means of mock trials and beatings in violation of the rules of the Geneva Convention of 1929. The war crimes with which they were charged were likewise violations of the Geneva Convention of 1929, a double standard which didn’t seem right to their defense attorney, Lt. Col. Willis M. Everett.

Another double standard that bothered Everett was that there had been many incidents in which American soldiers were not put on trial for killing German Prisoners of War, but the defense was not allowed to mention this. Any of the accused men who inadvertently said anything about American soldiers breaking the rules of the Geneva Convention were promptly silenced and these comments were stricken from the record.  The killing of SS soldiers who had surrendered when the Dachau camp was liberated was unknown at that time because the US Army had kept this a secret for more than 40 years.

Following the defeat of the German Army in World War II, the Judge Advocate Department of the Third US Army had set up a War Crimes Branch which conducted 489 court proceedings in which 1,672 German war criminals were charged. This was apart from the proceedings against the major German war criminals before an International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. Most of the secondary proceedings conducted by the American occupation forces were held at Dachau, between November 15, 1945 and 1948.  No Allied soldiers were ever prosecuted for war crimes committed during World War II.

I would like to know what kind of torture methods Peiper learned at Dachau.  Water boarding maybe?  He certainly got a lesson in torture methods when he was a prisoner at Dachau before he was prosecuted by an American Military Tribunal.

The training school at Dachau was for concentration camp administrators; Peiper probably did not take any classes at Dachau, since he had nothing whatsoever to do with the concentration camps.

The photo above shows Lt. Virgil Lary in the courtroom, as he identifies  Pvt. 1st Class Georg Fleps, a Waffen-SS soldier from Rumania, who allegedly fired the first two shots with his pistol in the Malmedy Massacre.

Some versions of the story say that Fleps fired a warning shot in the air when several prisoners tried to make a run for it. Other versions say that he deliberately took aim and shot one of the Americans. Panic ensued and the SS soldiers then began firing upon the prisoners with their machine guns.

The exact number of American soldiers who surrendered to the Germans is unknown, but according to various accounts, it was somewhere between 85 and 125. After the captured Americans were herded into a field, they were allegedly shot down by Waffen-SS men from Peiper’s Battle Group in what an American TV documentary characterized as an orgy, motivated by German “joy of killing.”

Forty-three of the Americans taken prisoner that day managed to escape and lived to tell about it. One of them was Kenneth Ahrens, who was shot twice in the back. Seventeen of the survivors ran across the snow-covered field, and made their way to the village of Malmedy where they joined the 291st Engineer Battalion.

The massacre occurred at approximately 1 p.m. on December 17th and the first survivors were picked up at 2:30 p.m. on the same day by a patrol of the 291st Engineer Battalion. Their story of the unprovoked massacre was immediately sent to General Eisenhower, the Supreme Allied Commander of the war in Europe, who made it a point to disseminate the story to the reporters covering the battle.

The Inspector General of the American First Army learned about the massacre three or four hours after the first survivors were rescued. By late afternoon that day, the news had reached the forward American divisions. In his book , entitled The Ardennes, The Battle of the Bulge, Hugh Cole wrote the following:

Thus Fragmentary Order 27 issued by Headquarters, 328th Infantry on 21 December for the attack scheduled for the following day says: “No SS troops or paratroopers will be taken prisoners but will be shot on sight.”

In his book called The Other Price of Hitler’s War: German Military & Civilian Losses Resulting from WW 2, author Martin Sorge wrote the following regarding the events that took place after the massacre:

“It was in the wake of the Malmedy incident at Chegnogne that on New Year’s Day 1945 some 60 German POWs were shot in cold blood by their American guards. The guilt went unpunished. It was felt that the basis for their action was orders that no prisoners were to be taken.”

“Holocaust denier” David Irving will visit Treblinka death camp

Most people are given the respect of having Mr. or Ms. as the title in front of their name.  David Irving will always be known as “Holocaust Denier David Irving,” in spite of the fact that he has gone over to the other side and is now a “Holocaust Believer.”

Last year, I attended one of Irving’s talks on his speaking tour of the United States.  In some cities, he was attacked by people who tried to prevent him from speaking, but the talk that I attended was without incident.  The speech that I witnessed was entirely about World War II and did not include any Holocaust denial.  After his talk, Irving answered questions from the audience about Treblinka, and he revealed that he now believes that Treblinka was a death camp.

You can read about the outrage over David Irving leading a tour to Poland here.

I visited Treblinka on a trip to Poland in 1998 and the most remarkable thing about Treblinka is how small the camp was.  There is nothing left of the camp now, and the only thing to see is the memorial stones.

Symbolic cemetery at Treblina has 17,000 stones

Treblinka was second only to Auschwitz in the number of Jews who were killed by the Nazis: between 700,000 and 900,000, compared to an estimated 1.1 million to 1.5 million at Auschwitz.

The Treblinka death camp was located 100 km (62 miles) northeast of Warsaw, near the railroad junction at the village of Malkinia Górna, which is 2.5 km (1.5 miles) from the train station in the tiny village of Treblinka.

Entrance to the Treblinka camp, which was located in the middle of a forest

Raul Hilberg wrote in his three-volume book, The Destruction of the European Jews, that there were six Nazi extermination centers, including Treblinka. The other extermination camps were at Belzec, Sobibor, Chelmno, Majdanek and Auschwitz-Birkenau, all of which are located in what is now Poland. The last two also functioned as forced labor camps (Zwangsarbeitslager).

The camps at Treblinka, Belzec, Sobibor and Chelmno had already been liquidated by the Germans before the Soviet soldiers entered Poland, and there was no remaining evidence of the extermination of millions of Jews at these four camps. The combined total of the deaths at Treblinka, Belzec and Sobibor was 1.5 million, according to Raul Hilberg’s book.

Tourists enter the camp by following the stone markers

Stone markers show where the trains came into the camp

Stone platform denotes the location of the former fake train station

Large stone memorial marks the location of the gas chambers

Stone memorial at the pit where the bodies were burned

Map of former Treblinka death camp

The Treblinka camp was literally in the middle of nowhere, and it was surrounded by trees.  There were barracks for the German staff members and for the Jews who did all the work.  After the Jews were gassed, their bodies were buried in mass graves, dug by a crane, which were 30 feet deep. The bodies were dug up later and the remains were burned on pyres of wood, cut from the surrounding trees.

There was a time, not too long ago, when David Irving was not allowed to enter  Poland, but after he served time in a prison in Austria for Holocaust denial, this ban was lifted and he finally got to see Auschwitz.  Now, it’s on to Treblinka, and who knows what other camps he will visit.

When I attended the talk on his speaking tour in 2009, I arrived early and noticed that there were a lot of young men loitering in front of the restaurant where he was scheduled to speak.  They were dressed casually, but didn’t look like hoodlums, so I didn’t worry about it.  I entered the restaurant and asked which room David Irving would be speaking in.  The restaurant had no one by that name scheduled to speak, so I assumed that the room had to be reserved under a different name because of his reputation as a Holocaust denier.

Finally, I followed other guests who were arriving right on time, and I saw that the young men who had been outside were now guarding the door and checking names off a list.  I had already been approved by Irving himself, who had called me at the last minute to give me the location of his speech, which was not the location that had been advertised. All this for a simple lecture about World War II.  You can’t be too careful in America, a country that is famous for allowing free speech.

After the lecture, which included a nice dinner, one of the young men asked me if I wanted an escort to my car, but I declined the offer.  Later, as I read the news of attacks in other cities, I realized why David Irving needed an army of protectors in order to give a harmless speech about World War II.  Once your reputation is ruined by accusations of Holocaust denial, it stays with you forever.

Joe Tacopina says Joran van der Sloot has “disintegrated” in last five years

Last night on the Joy Behahr TV show, Joe Tacopina said that Joran van der Sloot was a nice guy five years ago when he was accused of being responsible for the disappearance of Natalee Holloway, but after five years of accusations without any evidence, Joran slowly disintegrated and turned into a completely different person.  Joran is being held in Peru for the murder of Stephany Flores Ramirez, a crime to which he has confessed.

Joe Tacopina was formerly a defense attorney for Joran van der Sloot and he still sticks up for him, although he is much too high priced for Joran now.

I don’t care much for Joy Behahr’s jokes, but I watch her show every night because she usually has interesting guests.  I give her a lot of credit for putting on criminal defense attorney Joe Tacopina to take Joran’s side in the discussion.  Tacopina was famous long before the Natalee Holloway case; I first heard about him when he defended New York police officers in a losing battle about 15 years ago.

I learned last night that Joran’s mother tried to get Joran committed to a mental facility a year and a half ago.  The relentless accusations by Natalee’s family were driving him nuts.  Joran was 17 and had just graduated from High School when Natalee went missing and her family was sure that Joran had killed her.

Joran’s father was also accused of being involved in Natalee’s alleged murder, but Tacopina said last night that Joran’s father had no power in Aruba at that time and that he had done nothing to help Joran in the alleged murder of Natalee.

I believe that Tacopina hit the nail on the head when he said that Joran disintegrated over the last five years of his life.  Joran recently confessed that he tried to extort Natalee’s mother to get back at her for all the trouble that she has caused him. Tacopina revealed that Joran’s lies about the Natalee Holloway case were prompted by the money that he was offered over the years to publicly talk about the case.

It is very sad that an innocent 17-year-old boy was driven to madness and the murder of another girl by five years of accusations by the Holloway family.  Joran might walk on the murder case in Peru because he was not given his rights after his arrest.  He will still be prosecuted in the extortion case because the Holloway family will never give up.  I predict that they will finally drive Joran to suicide; his life is over anyway.

The liberation of Dachau, as reported by the New York Times

This New York Times article is about the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp.  It is printed here just as it was written in 1945:

Dachau captured by Americans who kill guards, liberate 32,000

DACHAU, Germany, April 30 – Dachau, Germany’s most dreaded extermination camp, has been captured and its surviving 32,000 tortured inmates have been freed by outraged American troops who killed or captured its brutal garrison in a furious battle.

Prisoners with access to records said that 9,000 captives had died of hunger and disease or been shot in the past three months, and 14,000 more had perished during the winter. Typhus was prevalent in the camp and the city’s water supply was reported to have been contaminated by drainage from 6,000 graves near the prison.

39 Cars Full of Bodies

A short time after the battle there was a train of thirty-nine coal cars on a siding. The cars were loaded with hundreds of bodies and from them was removed at least one pitiful human wreck that still clung to life. These victims were mostly Poles and most of them had starved to death as the train stood there idle for several days. Lying alongside a busy road near by were the murdered bodies of those who had tried to escape.

Bavarian peasants – who traveled this road daily – ignored both the bodies and the horrors inside the camp to turn the American seizure of their city into an orgy of looting. Even German children rode by the bodies without a glance, carrying stolen clothing.

The camp held 32,000 emaciated, unshaven men and 350 women, jammed in the wooden barracks. Prisoners said that 7,000 others had been marched away on foot during the past few days. The survivors went wild with joy as the Americans broke open their pens, smothering their liberators with embraces.

Bodies were found in many places. Here also were the gas chambers – camouflaged as “showers” into which prisoners were herded under the pretext of bathing – and the cremation ovens. Huge stacks of clothing bore mute testimony to the fate of their owners.

A French general was slain last week as he walked toward a truck, believing that he was to be evacuated, prisoners reported. They said that Elite Guards had shot him in the back.

The Americans stormed through the camp with tornadic fury. Not a stone’s throw from a trainload of corpses lay the bleeding bodies of sixteen guards shot down as they fled.

When Lieut. Col. Will Cowling of Leavenworth, Kan. slipped the lock in the main gate, there was still no sign of life inside this area. He looked around for a few seconds and then a tremendous human cry roared forth. A flood of humanity poured across the flat yard – which would hold a half dozen baseball diamonds — Colonel Cowling was all but mobbed.

Rescued by soldiers

He was hoisted to the shoulders of the seething, swaying crowd of Russians, Poles, Frenchmen, Czechs, and Austrians, cheering the Americans in their native tongues. The American colonel was rescued by soldiers, but the din kept up.

Flags appeared and waved from the barracks. There was even an American flag, although only one American was held there. He is a major from Chicago captured behind the German lines when he was on special assignment for the Office of Strategic Services.

—————

Update, Sept. 8, 2010:

A reader requested in a comment that I write something about what is known now that was not known then.  So here goes:

1.  The article is dated April 30, 1945 but it does not give the date of the liberation which was April 29, 1945.

2.  Dachau was not “the most dreaded extermination camp.”  It was not an extermination camp at all.  I am amazed that this term was used so soon after Dachau was liberated.

3.  The report mentions the “tortured” inmates. This was a concentration camp, not a death camp, and torture is usually used to get information.  But why would the Dachau inmates have been “tortured”?  I wrote a blog post on the people who were tortured at Dachau, which you can read here.

4. There was no “furious battle” to capture the “brutal garrison.”  The garrison, next door to the concentration camp, was an SS garrison; the first four soldiers, who came forward and surrendered to the Americans, were marched to the train outside the camp and killed.   Then more SS soldiers were killed in cold blood after they had surrendered.

5.  “Prisoners with access to records”?  So the reporter got his information from prisoners.  The article makes it sound like 9,000 PLUS an additional 14,000 had died in the last few months.  Half of the deaths in Dachau occurred in the last 6 months that the camp was in operation, including 2,226 prisoners who died in the month of May, after the liberation. According to Paul Berben, a prisoner who wrote the history of the camp, there were 18,296 deaths in the main camp and all the sub-camps of Dachau between November 1944 and the end of May 1945. Most of these deaths were due to the typhus epidemic in the camp, according to Berben.   I am also amazed that the reporter mentioned typhus; this is usually left out of the story.

6.  The 6,000 graves were on a hill called Leitenberg, which was a couple of miles from the camp. The grave site was located far from the camp to PREVENT contamination of the water supply.  The Dachau camp had been hit by an Allied bomb on April 9, 1945 and there was no running water at the camp.  The prisoners had apparently told the reporter something about the water supply, but got the story mixed up.

7.  Not all of the 39 cars on the train were coal cars, and not all of them were filled with dead bodies.  The prisoners on the train were Jews and Soviet POWs from Buchenwald.  They had been evacuated from Buchenwald on April 7, 1945 and the train had taken 20 days to reach the camp because the tracks had been bombed by Allied planes.  Prisoners in the coal cars had been killed when the train was strafed by Allied planes, according to a Jewish prisoner who was on the train; he testified at the proceedings against the SS man who was in charge of the train.

Victor Maurer, a representative of the Red Cross, who arrived at Dachau a day or two before the liberation, said that he was told that, out of 5,000 prisoners who started the train trip to Dachau, 2,700 were dead on arrival, which would mean that there were 2,300 survivors who entered the camp. Maurer also said that there were  only 500 bodies on the train when the Americans arrived, and that some had been killed, while others had died of starvation.  The official count of the dead bodies on the train was 2,130.

8.  The “orgy of looting” which was done by the “Bavarian peasants” was caused by the warehouses at the SS garrison being turned over to the prisoners when the acting Commandant and the regular guards left the camp on April 28, 1945.  The people in the town heard that the warehouses were open and they went to the camp to get food for themselves.

9.  Half of the 32,000 prisoners had been at the camp for two weeks or less.  They had been brought to the main camp from the sub-camps.  Very few were emaciated or even “unshaven,” judging by the photos taken at the liberation.

10.  “Huge stacks of clothing bore mute testimony to the fate of their owners.”  The prisoners, who were in charge of the camp after the acting Commandant and the guards left,  told the gullible liberators that the clothes hung up outside the disinfection gas chambers were the clothes of the prisoners who had been gassed. Allegedly, the prisoners were forced to hang up their clothes outside the disinfection chambers before they went in to be gassed.

11.  The “French General” was General Charles Delestraint.  I have an article about his death on my web site which you can read here.

I find it interesting that the prisoners would tell the reporter about Delestraint’s death and specify that it was the “Elite Guards” (SS men) who had killed him.  TMI  in my opinion.  I think the prisoners killed the French General themselves and blamed it on the SS.

12.  The bodies of the “sixteen guards shot down as they fled” were the bodies of the SS men who were killed in cold blood by the liberators.  They were not fleeing; they were trying to surrender the camp to the Americans.

13.  The one American who was held there was Lt. Rene Guiraud. He had been trained in Canada before he was parachuted into Nazi-occupied France, along with a radio operator. His mission was to collect intelligence, harass German military units and occupation forces, sabotage critical war material facilities, and carry on other resistance activities. Guiraud organized 1500 guerrilla fighters and developed intelligence networks in Europe. During all this, Guiraud posed as a French citizen, wearing civilian clothing, which means that when he was caught, he was not protected under the 1929 Geneva Convention.  Guiraud was captured in France and interrogated for two months by the Gestapo, then sent to Dachau in September 1944.

Note that the reporter did not learn the name of the one American.  That’s because Guiraud kept his mouth shut; he did not come forward and tell lies to the liberators.  To his credit, Guiraud did not EVER talk about Dachau.  He knew when he volunteered for this job, that he would be put in prison if caught.  He did not write a book and whine about his treatment at Dachau.

Albert Guérisse and Noor Inayat Khan

Today the Ahmadiyya Times, a newspaper in India, has an article about the execution of Noor Inayat Khan, a British SOE agent, on September 13, 1944 at Dachau. The article includes this quote:

On 11 September 1944 Noor Inayat Khan and three other SOE agents from Karlsruhe prison, Yolande Beekman, Eliane Plewman and Madeleine Damerment, were moved to the Dachau Concentration Camp. In the early hours of the morning, 13 September 1944, the four women were executed by a shot to the head. Their bodies were immediately burned in the crematorium. An anonymous Dutch prisoner emerging in 1958 contended that Noor Inayat Khan was cruelly beaten by a high-ranking SS officer named Wilhelm Ruppert before being shot from behind. Her last word was “Liberté”. She was 30 years old.

As a British SOE agent, Noor Inayat Khan was working with the French Resistance, which was operating in violation of the Geneva Convention of 1929, so the execution of Noor Inayat Khan was legal under the terms of the Geneva Convention of 1929 which did not protect illegal combatants.

The SOE was the Special Operations Executive, a British spy organization, which carried on espionage and sabotage operations in France and elsewhere during World War II.

Albert Guérisse, a medical doctor and a resistance fighter from Belgium, was also a British SOE agent; he was a prisoner at Dachau in September 1944.  So why wasn’t Guérisse executed at Dachau?

Guérisse is the second person from the left

During World War II, Guérisse was in charge of an escape route for downed Allied pilots, called the PAT line. He used the code name Patrick O’Leary, the name of a Canadian friend. In March 1943, Guérisse was arrested in Toulouse after the escape line was infiltrated and betrayed by French collaborator Roger Le Neveu.

Guérisse was first sent to the Neue Bremm prison camp in the German city of Saarbrücken, then to the infamous Class III camp at Mauthausen in Austria; in the summer of 1944 he was an inmate at the Natzweiler labor camp, along with SOE agents Brian Stonehouse, Robert Sheppard and Ian Kenneth Hopper, who went by the name Johnny Hopper. Along with one other SOE agent, they formed a group called the “English Officers.”

When the Natzweiler camp was evacuated on September 6, 1944, Guérisse, Stonehouse, Sheppard and Hopper were sent on a train to Dachau, along with the other Natzweiler inmates. At Dachau, Guérisse became the leader of a group of Communist prisoners who formed the International Committee of Dachau inside the camp.

When the American liberators arrived at Dachau on April 29, 1945, they found that the acting Commandant, Martin Weiss, and most of the regular guards had left the night before, after turning the camp over to Guérisse’s Committee.

Guérisse and the other “English Officers” had managed to survive Mauthausen, Natzweiler and Dachau, three of the worst camps in the Nazi concentration camp system. All three of these camps had gas chambers.  In fact, it was Guérisse who greeted Lt. William P. Walsh and 1st Lt. Jack Bushyhead of the 45th Infantry Division, on the day that Dachau was liberated, and took them to see the gas chamber and the ovens in the crematorium.

The work done for the French Resistance, by Albert Guérisse, and the other English officers, was far more important than anything that the women SOE agents ever did. Yet, Madeleine Damerment was executed, after being captured on the day that she landed in France, while Guérisse and his fellow English officers were allowed to live, and Martin Weiss, the acting Commandant of Dachau, even turned the camp over to Guérisse and his Committee before it was surrendered to the Americans.

There were no male British SOE agents executed at Dachau; on the contrary, the male SOE prisoners were treated exceptionally well in the camps. The male agents did not have to work in the factories, nor on the farm at Dachau, nor in the quarry at Mauthausen. Instead, the male agents were given easy jobs inside the camps.

Albert Guérisse worked in the infirmary at Dachau, just as he had at Natzweiler. This gave him the opportunity to conspire with other Communist prisoners, who worked in the infirmary, in organizing the International Committee of Dachau, which still exists to this day.

Brian Stonehouse was also a British SOE agent at Dachau.  After World War II, he became an illustrator for Vogue magazine.  Stonehouse attributed his survival to the fact that the Nazis had kept him alive for four and a half years in order to make use of his ability as an artist.  But what about Noor Inayat Khan?  She wrote children’s books — why wasn’t she saved?

By some remarkable coincidence, Guérisse and Stonehouse had been sent to the Natzweiler camp shortly before four other female SOE agents were executed there.  Guérisse and Stonehouse were then transferred to Dachau a week before four more female SOE agents were brought to Dachau to be executed.

Arthur Haulot, a former Belgian prisoner at Dachau, and one of the prominent members of the International Committee of Dachau, told Sarah Helm, the author of a biography of SOE officer Vera Atkins, entitled A Life in Secrets, that he had never heard any mention of these women while he was at Dachau. Haulot was having an affair with a German nurse in the camp, according to his Diary, and he was in a unique position to know what was going on.

According to Sarah Helm’s book, “No witnesses had been interrogated who had seen anything at all of these women inside Dachau concentration camp.”

Belgian prisoners at Dachau pose for a photo after they were liberated

Political prisoners at Dachau after they were liberated

Notice that the Belgians and the political prisoners at Dachau appear to be in good health.  The male prisoners at Dachau were treated well, but for some reason, four female British SOE agents were executed at Dachau, including one woman who was captured on the day she landed in France, before she had a chance to do anything to help the French resistance.

What’s going on here?  Did the Nazis just like to execute women?  Before you say that Hitler had no respect for women, what about Leni Riefenstahl who directed the famous documentary Triumph of the Will?

Hitler’s proposed “Museum of an Extinct Race”

Hitler’s proposed “Museum of an Extinct Race” was mentioned in an article here about British school teachers visiting Auschwitz to learn how to teach the Holocaust.

This quote from the article caught my attention:

This was extermination on an industrial scale and it involved huge numbers of people. Neighbours and employers reported Jews to the Gestapo. Bureaucrats processed notices of deportation. Postmen served them. Railway staff marshalled their departure. Others drove the trains and manned the signals. It was all logically and legally planned in an inversion of all the values on which human civilisation had been built.

So perverse was it that Hitler ordered the collection of 200,000 Jewish artefacts (sic), which were photographed and catalogued  to be displayed at the end of the war as a trophy case of archaeological remains. It was to be called The Museum of an Extinct Race.  

What imams learned about Gypsy children on their trip to Auschwitz

This morning I read this in an article about the recent trip of the Muslim imams to Auschwitz and Dachau:

A meeting held at Auschwitz with Wilhelm Brasse, a non-Jewish survivor who was forced by the Nazis to take pictures of Jewish prisoners inside the camp, exposed to Magid just how sinister Hitler’s regime truly was.  Brasse recalled to the group how he was forced to take photographs of naked Jewish children.

“I was devastated” while listening to the stories, Magid recounted. “I cannot imagine a human being in their right mind would take a child and hurt them. … When I came back [home], I had to hug my children.”

You can read the full article about the visit of the imams here.

Poster inside the Auschwitz Museum shows Gypsy children

The photo above shows Gypsy children. The caption (in English) claims that these children were subjects of medical experiments done by Dr. Josef Mengele, who was the doctor assigned to the Gypsy camp at Auschwitz.

When the Auschwitz I (main camp) was opened in 1940, the first prisoners were political prisoners who were transferred from a Gestapo prison, and mug shots of the victims were taken.  These photos are now displayed at the Auschwitz Museum which is in several buildings.  The photos of the naked Jewish children are not displayed at Auschwitz, and I have never seen a copy of these photos.

Rudolf Hoess wrote in his autobiography, entitled Death Dealer, that many of the Gypsy children at Auschwitz suffered from an illness called “Noma,” which reminded him of leprosy. A famous photo of some Gypsy children, suffering from Noma, is shown below.

Gypsy children, at Auschwitz, who had a disease called Noma

The photo of the Gypsy children suffering from Noma, which is shown above, is a still photo from a film made by the Soviets who liberated Auschwitz-Birkenau on January 27, 1945.  This photo is frequently shown with a caption identifying it as a photo of Jewish children who had been tortured.

A “Gypsy family camp” was set up in wooden barracks in Section BIIe in the Birkenau camp (Auschwitz II)  in February 1943.  According to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Gypsy camp was in existence for only seventeen months and most of the Gypsies perished.

The following quote is from the web site of the USHMM:

In a decree dated December 16, 1942, Himmler ordered the deportation of Gypsies and part-Gypsies to Auschwitz-Birkenau. At least 23,000 Gypsies were brought there, the first group arriving from Germany in February 1943. Most of the Gypsies at Auschwitz-Birkenau came from Germany or territories annexed to the Reich including Bohemia and Moravia. Police also deported small numbers of Gypsies from Poland, Hungary, Yugoslavia, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Norway.

(The two states of Bohemia and Moravia, which are now in the Czech Republic, were part of a German Protectorate from 1938 to 1945; they were not annexed into the Greater German Reich.)

The following quote about the gassing of the Gypsies at Auschwitz-Birkenau is from the web site of the USHMM:

They (the Gypsies) were killed by gassing or died from starvation, exhaustion from hard labor, and disease (including typhus, smallpox, and the rare, leprosy-like condition called Noma.) Others, including many children, died as the result of cruel medical experiments performed by Dr. Josef Mengele and other SS physicians. The Gypsy camp was liquidated on the night of August 2-3, 1944, when 2,897 Sinti and Roma men, women, and children were killed in the gas chamber. Some 1,400 surviving men and women were transferred to Buchenwald and Ravensbrück concentration camps for forced labor.

According to a guidebook which I purchased in 2005 from the Auschwitz Museum, there were 20,943 Roma (Gypsies) who were gassed in the Krema V gas chamber at Birkenau; their bodies were burned in the pits adjacent to Krema V.

For some strange reason, the Gypsy children who had Noma were not gassed and they were left behind for the Soviet liberators to take care of.

Photo of Gypsy children used in medical experiments at Auschwitz

The photo above was taken in the Gypsy Museum at the Sachsenhausen Memorial site.  The children in this photo are sometimes mistakenly identified as Jews.

The Nuremberg laws of 1935…

I’ve been reading about the death of Martin Dannenberg, the man who found the original 1935 document of the Nuremberg laws passed in Nazi Germany, and signed by Adolf Hitler.  Other people have written about this including an excellent article which you can read here.