Lest We Forget… the Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial Commission

Dwight Eisenhower was a great president who is not often given the credit he deserves to receive. I am grateful for the Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial Commission.  General Eisenhower realized that someday there would be those who deny the holocaust even happened, therefore he took action. Citizens were made aware of the atrocities and pictures were taken. The following was taken from the commission’s website. Reports on the massive genocide inflic … Read More

My comments regarding this post on Jlue’s Weblog which I am re-blogging:

I used to be a great admirer of Dwight D. Eisenhower; he was the first president, for whom I ever voted.  I wore my “I Like Ike” button proudly and I had not one, but two, Eisenhower jackets.

In 1993, I got a computer with a modem and accessed the Internet for the first time.  I got an AOL account and started reading the online newsgroups.  That’s when I learned  about Dwight D. Eisenhower’s “death camps” where German POWs were deliberately denied their rights  under the Geneva Convention.

For a long time, I couldn’t believe it.  Eisenhower had the highest approval rating of any president that America has ever had.  Everybody liked Ike.  As the Toby Keith song goes, “I wish I didn’t know now what I didn’t know then.”

Why did Eisenhower famously predict that some day there would be people who denied what happened in World War II?  It was because Eisenhower knew that the propaganda campaign that he was planning was based on lies.

An American soldier, who was there when Eisenhower toured Ohrdruf, reported that Eisenhower was rubbing his hands together as he walked around the camp.  Apparently, Ike started planning his propaganda campaign the moment that he saw Ohrdruf.

Almost every word on the Eisenhower Memorial Commission web site, which is quoted on Jlue’s blog, is incorrect.

Jlue wrote:

…Ohrdruf was a holding facility for over 11,000 prisoners on their way to the gas chambers and crematoria at Buchenwald…

On the contrary, Ohrdruf was a forced labor camp, which was a sub-camp of the huge Buchenwald concentration camp. Ohrdruf was opened in November 1944 when prisoners were brought from Buchenwald to work on the construction of a vast underground bunker to house a new Führer headquarters for Adolf Hitler.

Ohrdruf was in the vicinity of a secret Nazi communications center and it was also near the Merkers salt mine where the Nazis had stored their gold and art treasures.

There were no gas chambers at Buchenwald; no Holocaust historian makes that claim today.

Jlue wrote:

…When General Eisenhower learned about the camp, he immediately arranged to meet Generals Bradley and Patton at Ohrdruf on the morning of April 12th. By that time, Buchenwald itself had been captured. Consequently, Ike decided to extend the group’s visit to include a tour of the Buchenwald extermination camp the next day. Eisenhower also ordered every American soldier in the area who was not on the front lines to visit Ohrdruf and Buchenwald. He wanted them to see for themselves what they were fighting against…

Eisenhower did NOT make the arrangement, himself, to meet the generals at Ohrdruf and he did NOT visit Buchenwald the next day.  At that point, Eisenhower could not have cared less about the Nazi concentration camps.

On the morning of April 12, 1945, General Dwight D. Eisenhower visited the Merkers salt mine near Ohrdruf, along with General Omar Bradley, General George S. Patton, and other high-ranking American Army officers. The Nazis had hidden valuable paintings and 250 million dollars worth of gold bars inside the salt mine, all of which was confiscated by America as the “spoils of war.”  The location of the mine was in the future zone of occupation of the Soviets, and the “spoils of war” in the mine was supposed to go to the Soviets, but Eisenhower made sure that the Americans got there first.

Eisenhower examines the Nazi gold found in a salt mine on April 12, 1945

The soldier on the far left in the photo above is Benjamin B. Ferencz. In the center is General Eisenhower and behind him, wearing a helmet with four stars is General Omar Bradley. In 1945, Ferencz had been transferred from General Patton’s army to the newly created War Crimes Branch of the U.S. Army, where his job was to gather evidence for future trials of German war criminals. A Jew from Transylvania, Ferencz had moved with his family to America at the age of 10 months.

The Kaiseroda salt mine, aka the Merkers mine, shown in the photo above, was found by the 90th Infantry Division near the little town of Merkers, Germany a few days before the Buchenwald camp was discovered by American troops on April 11, 1945.

Hidden deep inside the salt mine was virtually the entire gold and currency reserves of the German Reichsbank, together with all of the priceless art treasures which had been removed from Berlin’s museums for protection against Allied bombing raids and possible capture by the Allied armies.

On the same day that the top American Generals visited the salt mine, they made a side trip to the Ohrdruf forced labor camp after lunch. Except for General Patton, who visited Buchenwald on April 15, 1945, none of the top American Army Generals ever visited another forced labor camp, nor any of the concentration camps.

Although Buchenwald was more important and had more evidence of Nazi atrocities, it was due to the efforts of Captain Alois Liethen that the generals visited Ohrdruf instead. Liethen was one of the first Americans to see Ohrdruf, a few days before the Generals arrived; he was an interpreter and an interrogator in the XX Corp, G-2 Section of the US Third Army.  There were rumors that the Nazis were building an atomic bomb in the vicinity of Ohrdruf, which may have been why Captain Liethen wanted to take the Generals there.

New book about Catholic priests at Dachau — “Time of An Ordeal: The Story of Polish Clergy imprisoned and killed at Dachau”

A new book entitled Time of An Ordeal: The Story of Polish Clergy Imprisoned and Killed at Dachau by Kazimierz Majdanski, archbishop emeritus of Warsaw, has just been published.

I haven’t read the book, but here is a quote from a blog which you can read here:

Half of the Polish priests imprisoned by the Nazi’s died at the Dachau concentration camp. The death of more than 2,000 Polish clergy, including five bishops, at the start of World War II seems to be forgotten by many history books, says a survivor of Dachau. Kazimierz Majdanski, now archbishop emeritus of Warsaw, was arrested Nov. 7, 1939, by the Nazis, when he was in the seminary of Wloclawek. He was arrested with other students and professors, and taken first to Sachsenhausen concentration camp and later to Dachau. In Dachau, he was subjected to pseudoscientific criminal experiments. Archbishop Majdanski: Half of the Polish priests died who were imprisoned in Dachau. I saw so many priests die in a heroic way. All of them were faithful to Christ who said to his disciples: “You will be my witnesses.”

The Memorial Site at Dachau sells a book entitled What was it like in the Concentration Camp at Dachau? by Dr. Johannes Neuhäusler, a Catholic priest, who wrote that there was a total of 2,720 clergymen at Dachau, including 2,579 Catholic Priests. According to Dr. Neuhäusler, there were 1,780 Polish priests and 447 German priests at Dachau. Of the 1,034 priests who died in the camp, 868 were Polish and 94 were German.

So it is true that half of the Polish priests at Dachau died, but they weren’t killed; the Polish priests volunteered to help the sick during the typhus epidemic at Dachau.  Some of the Polish priests died as a result of malaria experiments conducted at Dachau.  The results of the malaria experiments done at Dachau by Dr. Schilling were confiscated by the American liberators, even though he begged the Americans to allow him to publish his research and take credit for it.

If Kazimierz Majdanski, the author of the book, was arrested on November 7, 1939, it was because he was helping the Polish resistance, not because he was a student in a Catholic seminary. He was fighting as “an illegal combatant” under the Geneva Convention of 1929 and he could have been legally shot, but he was allowed to live.

If 2,000 Polish priests were killed at the start of World War II, it was because they were fighting in a war, either legally or illegally.  They were not killed by the Germans because they were priests.

It has been 65 years since Kazimierz Majdanski was released from Dachau.  Why has he waited so long to tell his story?  Is he jumping on the band wagon now and cashing in because the history of Dachau is changing, due to popular demand?

There is a video that goes along with the book, which you can see here.  The video contains numerous photos that were not taken at Dachau.

Press photographers — then and now

Yesterday I watched the movie “Thirteen Days” on TV.  It is about the 13 days of the Cuban missile crisis in October 1962.  There were several scenes in which Jack Kennedy and the men in his cabinet were shown as they spoke to the press.  I noticed that at least 75% of the photographers were using a Speed Graphic, which was THE press camera up until the 1970s.  Every movie that is set in the era between 1920 and 1970  will show press photographers using these cameras.

Cafe Teufelhart in Dachau has live jazz music in Cafe Bubu

Cafe Teufelhart in Dachau, May 2001

I took this photo in May 2001 when I stayed in the town of Dachau for a week.  One of my favorite places in Dachau was the Cafe Teufelhart.  You can see a recent photo of how the place looks now, with a sign on the roof that reads “Cafe Bubu,” on this web site.

Kiyo’s story — life in an American internment camp

A book entitled Kiyo’s Story: A Japanese-American Family’s Quest for the American Dream: A Memoir by Kiyo Sato won the William Soroyan International prize for non-fiction in 2008.  It is the story of a young Japanese-American girl living on a strawberry farm near Sacramento, CA.  The first part of the book tells about her idyllic life in the 1920s and 1930s; just like every Holocaust survivor book I’ve ever read, Kiyo’s book  begins with a description of her wonderful childhood in a loving family.

Kiyo’s life changed completely when Pearl Harbor was bombed.  This chapter in her book is entitled “Reign of Terror.”  My childhood memory of World War II is that it was a time when people in America were very happy.  I know it sounds strange but World War II brought Americans together; the country was united for the first time as everyone wanted to do their part in winning the war.  American civilians were the people on “the Home Front,” and everyone was very patriotic.  But for the Japanese-Americans, there were signs in California towns which read “No Japs Allowed.”

For Kiyo and the other Japanese-Americans, World War II meant a time when they were the enemy, and white Americans wanted to get rid of them. In April 1942, they were rounded up and sent to internment camps under President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066.  Kiyo’s family was first sent to a camp near Fresno, CA.  In her book, Kiyo describes the primitive conditions in the camp, particularly the latrines.

Kiyo mentioned that a columnist for The Sacramento Union newspaper wrote that the Japanese-Americans should be thrown out into the desert and allowed to die so that they can become like the skulls of cattle.  That is exactly what happened to Kiyo and her family; they were sent to the Poston War Relocation Center on the Colorado River Indian Reservation in Arizona, but they survived in spite of the stifling heat and dust storms.  After the war, the Sato family returned to their strawberry farm and found that it had been taken over by a white family.

Executive Order 9066 was a violation of the Fourth Amendment of the American Constitution which guarantees the right of freedom from arrest without charges, but white Americans didn’t care.  Japanese-Americans were put into camps before they had a chance to do any acts of terror or sabotage during World War II, just like “enemies of the state” were imprisoned at Dachau.

Letter written by an American soldier who visited Dachau in September 1945

Robert “Brud” Monson was a 21-year-old pilot in the US Army Air Corps during World War II.  His niece, Cheryl, gave a copy of a letter that he wrote to his family on September 18, 1945 to Harold Marcuse, who published it on his web site, which you can read here.

Photos don’t lie, but liars use photographs to decieve…

Yesterday I blogged about a Jewish American soldier, Irving Ross, who claimed to have taken a photo at Dachau, which was actually a photo taken at the Nordhausen sub-camp of Buchenwald after Nordhausen was bombed by American planes on April 3, 1945.  The photo, which is shown below, was published in Life magazine in May 1945.

Prisoners at Nordhausen were killed by American bombs

Notice the body of a naked man in the foreground which seems out of place because all the other bodies have clothes on.  It seems that this naked body was put there, with a little space between it and the next body, so that we can see how the Nazis starved the prisoners to death.

The 72nd Gun Battalion liberated Dachau on August 29, 1944. Who knew?

Irving Ross, a Jewish soldier who was with “the 109th Anti-Aircraft Battalion in North Africa and then with the 72nd Gun Battalion, attached to the 45th Division in the 3rd US Army,” told newspaper reporter Don Moore that his unit liberated Dachau on August 29, 1944.  Don Moore’s article about Irving Ross on this blog has since been deleted.

I continued searching for information on the subject of the 72nd Gun Battalion after a reader commented that the 72nd was actually named the 72nd AAA Gun Battalion.  I found a pdf file about Myron Greene who was with the 72nd. Greene was a dentist and he made 8mm films during World War II.

Here is a quote from Myron Greene on the pdf file which you can read here.

“On April 29, at 10 a.m., the 3rd Battalion of the
157th Regiment of the 45th Division found a
concentration camp. It was Dachau. What that
battalion encountered that day was so monstrous, it
took them only 10 minutes to take complete
control of the concentration camp. No words or
pictures can tell the story of Dachau. It was
certainly hell on Earth.
Because we had had our limited training in military
government, the 45th Division turned the
administration duties of the camp over to our
battalion at noon that day.”

It is true that the 3rd Battalion of the 157th Regiment of the 45th Division was the first to enter Dachau, but the Americans did not “take complete control of the concentration camp” until much later.  The 45th Division entered the SS garrison that was next door to the concentration camp on the morning of April 29, 1945 and began shooting the SS men, but they did not reach the concentration camp itself until the afternoon of that day.

The 45th Division could not have turned the administration of the Dachau concentration camp over to the 72nd AAA Gun Battalion at noon on April 29th because the Dachau camp was not surrendered to the Americans until mid afternoon on April 29, 1945.  The glaring errors in Dr. Myron Greene’s story makes me think that the administration of the Dachau camp was not turned over to the 72nd AAA Gun Battalion at all.

Apparently Don Moore did not do any research to confirm this story.  I googled 72nd Gun Battalion and found nothing except Don Moore’s blog.

The 45th Division was with the Seventh Army when Dachau was liberated on April 29, 1945.  The 72nd Gun Battalion, if it actually existed, is not recognized by the US Army and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum as being liberators of Dachau.

Don Moore included the photo below, allegedly taken by Irving Ross at Dachau, after the camp was liberated by the 72nd Gun Battalion.  This photo was obviously not taken at Dachau. Notice that the fence posts are not curved at the top, which was a characteristic of fences in the Nazi concentration camps.

The photo was actually taken at Nordhausen, a camp in Germany which had factories where concentration camp prisoners worked; these prisoners had been killed by an Allied bomb that hit the factory.

Photo claimed by Irving Ross to show Dachau was actually taken at Nordhausen

The following quote is from Don Moore’s blog, “War Tales.”

What came next would stay with Ross, a Jewish sergeant from Rockaway Beach, Long Island, for the rest of his life.

Irving Ross, of Punta Gorda, Fla. was a member of the 109th Anti-aircraft Battalion in the North African Invasion in ’42. From there he fought on through Italy, France and into Germany as a member of the 72nd Gun Battalion.

“We knew nothing about German concentration camps. It was April 29, 1944, a Sunday, when the 72nd Battalion, along with the 45th Infantry Division, went through the city of Dachau and found the camp on the outskirts of the city,” he said.

“The first thing we did was turn off the power in the camp. Then we killed every one of the guards in the guard towers with our rifle butts. They were mostly Russian prisoners in those towers who worked for the Germans.”

They rounded up what was left of the German soldiers who were running Dachau. Three days later they were all dead—without the benefit of a war crimes tribunal.

[…]

As one of Colonel Doud’s primary functionaries by this time, he helped take over the administration of the facility. When he wasn’t burning or burying bodies he was shuffling papers trying to get things sorted out at Dachau.

[…]

“Then I’d take them and show them the shower heads in a room where thousands of people were gassed. Most people think the poison gas came out of the fake shower heads, but it didn’t. It came out of jets in the side of the walls. And there were little windows where the Germans could watch people dying.”

The towers at Dachau were not manned by Russian prisoners who were working for the Germans.

The photo below is shown on Don Moore’s “War Tales” with this caption:

Retribution: The Russian concentration camp guard in the foreground was killed by American soldiers who liberated the camp. They cracked-open his skull with their rifle butts, Irving Ross said. Other guards suffered the same fate at the hands of the invading U.S. troops.

Photo of Waffen-SS soldier, wearing battle camouflage uniform, killed by a bullet to the head

The photo above actually shows a Waffen-SS soldier, who had been sent to Dachau to help with the surrender of the camp; he was shot by American soldiers, in the 45th Division or the 42nd Division, who were the liberators of Dachau.

The story told by Irving Ross takes the prize for the biggest lie ever told about the liberation of Dachau.

People in the town of Dachau didn’t know what was going on in the concentration camp

Nothing makes me more angry than reading a blog post that criticizes the German civilians who lived in the town of Dachau during the time that the concentration camp was in operation.  It seems that every recent visitor to the Dachau Memorial site, who writes about his or her trip, mentions that the people in the town must have known what was going on, but they chose to ignore it.  How come no one ever thinks that maybe the reason that the townspeople didn’t know about the atrocities in the camp is because these things never happened.

Dachau ovens had two sets of doors

I’ve seen the crematorium at Dachau many times, but I didn’t realize until just yesterday that there are actually two sets of doors on the cremation ovens.  An engineer e-mailed me and told me that the pulleys above the ovens were used to raise and lower the inner doors.

Pulley and counterweight was used to raise and lower inner door of oven at Dachau concentration camp