Do you know what a “retort” is?

If you don’t know by now what a “retort” is, you can look it up on google.  You will find several web sites which give the definition of retort, which means a sharp reply.  But what if you are reading something on the Internet, and you find the word “retort” used as a noun to mean an object at a former Nazi concentration camp? What is a “retort” at Dachau, for example.  Several years ago, I took it upon myself to illustrate what a “retort” looks like at Dachau.

O.K. I won’t keep you in suspense.  The photo below shows four “retorts” at Dachau.  The “retorts” are openings in the ovens to place the bodies for cremation.  The new  crematorium at Dachau has four “retorts” and the old crematorium has two “retorts.”

Four “retorts” for burning bodies in the new crematorium at Dachau

The old crematorium at Dachau has two “retorts.”

On my web site scrapbookpages.com, there is  page on which I put the text of the Leuchter Report with links to photos illustrating the words used in the report.  You can read this page here. At the top of the page, I very clearly wrote:

The Leuchter Report on the Dachau gas chamber is printed here in order to show photos which illustrate and explain the terms used. Fred Leuchter, who does not have a degree in Engineering, has been discredited as a gas chamber expert and he no longer works as a gas chamber consultant.
(Click on the links below to see photographs of the features of the gas chamber referred to in the Leuchter Report. These photographs were NOT taken by Fred Leuchter and were NOT included in his report.)

On July 20, 2010, another blogger posted this.  On July 24, the post was updated to include this paragraph in which the blogger accused me of being a Holocaust denier:

* * * * * * F u r t h e r g l o r y / s c r a p b o o k   p r o v i d e s˛ˇ   l i n k   t o   d i s c r e d i t e d     F r e d   L e u c h t e r   s i t e   ,   t h u s   c l i n c h i n g   h i s   d e n i a l   a s   a   f a c t .

D a c h a u   C o n c e n t r a t i o n   C a m p ,   g a s   c h a m b e r ,   S S   T r a i n i n g   C a m p ,   D a c h a u   & P h o t o g r a p h s   o f   D a c h a u   g a s   c h a m b e r   a n d   t h e   L e u c h t e r   R e p o r t   w i t h   i l l u s t r a t i o n s .

h t t p : / / w w w . s c r a p b o o k p a g e s . c o m / d a c h a u s c r a p b o o k /

The moral of this story is that it doesn’t take much to become a criminal in today’s world.  If I ever go to Germany again, I could be put in prison for 5 years, just for illustrating something written by a Holocaust denier.

Update, August 4, 2010

The blog referenced above has now put up a new blog post which acknowledges that the page on scrapbookpages.com which links to the Leuchter Report  clearly states that Fred Leuchter has been discredited and no longer works as a gas chamber consultant.  So I assume that it’s O.K. to illustrate the Leuchter Report, according to today’s blog which you can read here.

Is 5 years in prison too much for saying there were no gas chambers at Dachau and Mauthausen?

The sentence of Holocaust denier Gerd Honsik in a court in Austria has been recently reduced from 5 years to 4 years in prison.  Honsik had appealed his sentence of 5 years, and the prosecution had also appealed, asking that the sentence be increased to 20 years, the maximum allowed in Austria for Holocaust denial.   Honsik won his appeal and he will now spend only 4 years in prison in Austria for the crime of Holocaust denial, even though he still denies that there were gas chambers at Mauthausen and Dachau. You can read all about the case here.

I’ve been to Austria twice and each time I was really impressed by the Austrian people, who are extremely friendly and polite.  I did have some trouble understanding their German because the language is a bit different in Austria.  The Austrians made an effort to speak High German very slowly for my benefit when talking to me.

On my first  visit to Austria in 1958, I went on a tour down the Danube that went right past Mauthausen, but the tour guide didn’t even point it out.  I didn’t know anything about Mauthausen at that time; I had never even heard of the Mauthausen gas chamber.

Gas chamber at Mauthausen

On my second trip to Austria, I spent several days in the village of Mauthausen, and went to the former concentration camp where I took photos of the gas chamber which you can see here and here.

I’ve been to Dachau several times and I took lots of photos of the gas chamber which you can see here.  Both of these gas chambers look like shower rooms to me, but what do I know?

Gas Chamber at Dachau had a sign in 2001 which said it was never used

Austria is such a beautiful and wonderful country, so why are the Austrians acting crazy about whether or not there were gas chambers at Mauthausen and Dachau, which Gerd Honsik denies. Who  cares?

What about the famous German historian Martin Brozat, who said there were no gas chambers in the Old Reich, which would include Dachau, but not Mauthausen, because Austria was in the Greater German Reich during World War II?

Brozat wrote a letter to the Hamburg weekly newspaper “Die Zeit” with a headline that read “Keine Vergasung in Dachau.” The letter ran in the German edition on August 19, 1960, and in the US edition on August 26, 1960. Dr. Broszat was with the Institute for Contemporary History (Institut für Zeitgeschichte) at that time.  He is now dead.

This quote is from the English version of Brozat’s famous letter:

Neither in Dachau nor in Bergen-Belsen nor in Buchenwald were Jews or other prisoners gassed. The gas chamber in Dachau was never entirely finished or put “into operation.” Hundreds of thousands of prisoners who perished in Dachau and other concentration camps in the Old Reich were victims, above all, of the catastrophic hygienic and provisioning conditions: according to official SS statistics, during the twelve months from July 1942 through June 1943 alone, 110,812 persons died of disease and hunger in all of the concentration camps of the Reich. The mass extermination of the Jews by gassing began in 1941-1942 and occurred exclusively in a few facilities selected and equipped with appropriate technical installations, above all in the occupied Polish territory (but at no place in the Old Reich) in Auschwitz-Birkenau, in Sobibor on the Bug, in Treblinka, Chelmno and Belzec.

It is at those places, but not in Bergen-Belsen, Dachau or Buchenwald, where the mass extermination facilities, spoken of in your article, were built and disguised as shower baths or disinfection rooms.

What about Simon Wiesenthal, the famous Nazi hunter, who was a prisoner at Mauthausen? Wiesenthal famously wrote that there were no gas chambers on German soil, which would include both Dachau and Mauthausen, although he later denied that he ever wrote this.

Even  Sir Hartley Shawcross,  the chief British prosecutor at the Nuremberg IMT, didn’t mention Mauthausen in his closing address on July 26, 1946, when he said that murder was “conducted like some mass production industry in the gas chambers and the ovens” of Buchenwald, Dachau,  and Oranienburg (Sachsenhausen).

Strangely, no one was ever charged with the crime of killing prisoners in a gas chamber at Dachau; you can read about the reasons why on my web site here.

A recent visitor to Mauthausen wrote this on her blog which you can read here:

This is the gas chamber at Mauthausen. It had been 10 years since I stood inside a gas chamber but this time, I think it impacted me even more. I stood there thinking about holding Smith as they turned on the “shower”. Then quickly realizing that it wasn’t a shower, it was gas. Then realizing that me and my baby were going to die. I don’t even hesitate drawing such a graphic picture because it’s truth. It’s history. It happened. If we don’t study this, it can happen again. I stood in a room where thousands of people died.

Another visitor to Mauthausen took a guided tour and wrote this on a blog here:

Stop #6- Gas Chamber

This was the cheapest and most effective method for direct killing.  They chose 50-80 people every one or two weeks an (sic) could fit between 30 and 40 in one chamber.  The SS lied to the prisoners telling them they would be taking a shower.  They brought them outside the chambers where numbered hooks were mounted on the walls.   “Remember your hook number so you can retrieve your clothes after the shower.”  Many Jewish prisoners were well educated when told they would be taking a shower, realized their (sic) was no drain in the floor.  However, at thsi (sic) point it was too late.   Their destiny was in the hands of the SS.

The one and only floor drain in Mauthausen gas chamber

Do the tour guides at Mauthausen really tell visitors that the educated Jews knew the shower room was a gas chamber because there was no floor drain? Visitors can see that there is one floor drain in the middle of the room; it is shown in my photo above.

The “numbered hooks” were allegedly used at Auschwitz-Birkenau, according to Rudolf Hoess, the Commandant.  If there were “numbered hooks” at Mauthausen, they had been removed before I visited the camp.

Dachau according to John F. Floyd in the Gadsden Times

Last night I read a commentary entitled “Could the Holocaust happen again?” written by John F. Floyd in the Gadsden Times and I was very upset about it.  This morning I was still bothered about this article.

Almost everything in John F. Floyd’s article is wrong.  You can read the whole article here. At first, I assumed that Gadsden was a city in Scotland or some place where people would not be expected to know anything about Dachau or the Holocaust, but it turns out that Gadsden is actually in Alabama in the good old USA.  Mr. Floyd began his article by writing that he got his information for his article from the History Channel.

Mr. Floyd wrote, regarding what he heard on the History Channel:

“One narrative showed the Americans advancing at a fast pace in Germany, when all of a sudden the advance came to a dead stop. The reason for this sudden termination of the advancement was not German resistance, but a German village called Dachau.”

The photo below shows what a nice village Dachau was. When the Americans arrived, every house was flying a white flag of surrender.

Dachau was a beautiful village of 13,000 people in 1945

The troops had to stop in the village of Dachau because the bridge across the river had been blown up by the Germans, not because the village was some sinister place.

This was followed by this quote from Mr. Floyd’s article:

“When American officers observed the gaunt, emaciated, starving and dying members of the human race, they called an immediate halt to the advancing U.S. forces and locked the gates to the prison. They immediately went into the German town of Dachau and made all town officials assemble at the concentration camp and witness the horrible conditions American troops had found.”

French Resistance fighters at Dachau, April 29, 1945

Polish Resistance fighters at Dachau, April 29, 1945

Prisoners try to get out after Dachau gate was locked, April 29, 1945

Why did the Americans lock the gates at Dachau?  The Americans were the “liberators” and liberators usually liberate or turn the prisoners loose.  Mr. Floyd didn’t mention any reason for locking the gates, probably because the History Channel didn’t address this issue.  The reason the gates were locked at Dachau was to keep the TYPHUS epidemic at the camp from spreading throughout Germany to kill both Germans and Americans.   During World War I, there were 4 million deaths from typhus, and that was just in Poland.  There were 20 million deaths from influenza in World War I.  The American liberators immediately recognized that it would be difficult to control an epidemic in war time, so the first thing they did was to lock the prisoners inside the camp.

So why didn’t John F. Floyd mention the typhus epidemic?

When I went to Journalism School, we were taught that there are only three rules of Journalism:

1. Accuracy  2 Accuracy  3. Accuracy

Those rules are now long gone.  Journalists now choose a side (left wing liberal or right wing conservative) and write propaganda for their side.  The  concept of telling both sides of a story and reporting accurately is completely unknown in today’s news.

Here is another quote from Mr. Floyd’s article:

There had been rumors of atrocities by the Germans in concentration camps, but what faced the Americans was reality, a reality so horrible, that even today it defies description. It was the German concentration camp called Dachau.

O.K. the “reality” defied description.  This could be interpreted that the “reality” was that the atrocities at Dachau were really committed by the American liberators.  Why didn’t John F. Floyd mention the Dachau massacre in which American soldiers killed the Waffen-SS soldiers who had surrendered?

Guards in Tower B were killed after they surrendered

German soldiers were herded into a box car and killed after they surrendered the Dachau camp

Wounded Wehrmacht soldiers were dragged out of a hospital at Dachau and shot while they had their hands in the air

John F. Floyd wrote that the History Channel documentary “hit home” because he and his wife had visited Dachau in 1980 and his wife had previously seen the camp in 1956 when Dachau was a Displaced Persons camp for ethnic Germans who had been expelled from Czechoslovakia. In his defense, Mr. Floyd would not have learned about the killing of the German soldiers who had surrendered at Dachau on his visit to Dachau in 1980 because this was still a closely guarded secret and the one-sided propaganda TV show called the History Channel would not have mentioned it.

In his article, John F. Floyd wrote the following:

Connie and I walked where so many people of the Jewish faith, gypsies, Ukrainians, homosexuals and anyone else the German Third Reich decided was unfit to live had walked to certain death.

So the “German Third Reich” decided that Ukrainians were “unfit to live”?  The Ukraine was in the Soviet Union back then and millions of Ukrainians were deliberately starved to death by the Soviets.  I didn’t know the real story, as told on the History Channel, that the Ukrainians were really “walked to certain death” at Dachau.  The homosexuals were sent to Dachau for at least 6 months of rehabilitation after they had served two sentences for breaking the law against homosexuality which had been on the books since 1871 (Paragraph 175).  The homosexuals were not sent to Dachau for “certain death.”  Gypsies were sent to Dachau only if they broke the law that called for everyone to have a permanent address or if they refused to work; they were not sent to Dachau because the German Third Reich decided they were unfit to live.

Another quote from John F. Floyd:

“Paths led to the gas chambers where the Jewish population was told they were going to the showers to be de-loused, but the showerheads spewed poison gas.”

Dachau gas chamber

As the photo above shows, all the showerheads at Dachau, except one, have been stolen as souvenirs and one can look into the holes and see that the showerheads were not connected to anything.

In 1980, the Dachau Memorial site was telling people that the Jews were killed at Dachau with poison gas that spewed from the showerheads?  What about the sign in the gas chamber which said that the gas chamber was never used?  I thought that the sign was there in 1980, but I could be wrong.   How did the guides explain how pellets “spewed” through the tiny holes in the showerheads?  How did the tour guides explain the bins on the east wall in 1980?

Dachau tour guides tell visitors that gas pellets were poured into the gas chamber through these bins on the east wall of the  gas chamber building

Another quote from John F. Floyd:

A footpath led to the hanging room where men, women and children took their last steps.

What “hanging room” is he talking about?  I was at Dachau in 1997 and there was no “hanging room.”  I returned in 2001 and again in 2003 and 2007, but I did not see a “hanging room.”

The prosecution did not mention that women and children were hanged at Dachau in the proceedings of the American Military Tribunal at Dachau.  Mr. Floyd does not give any sources, other than the History Channel documentary and his  visit to Dachau in 1980.

In his article, Mr. Floyd did mention that his wife, Connie,  “was at Dachau in 1956 and she said many awful reminders of the Holocaust no longer were there, such as lampshades made of human skin, walking canes made of the femurs from the dead, mountains of shoes that belonged to victims of the Germans and piles of teeth from which the gold had been extracted.”

So all these things were being shown in the first Dachau museum in 1956?  No wonder the Bavarian government demanded that the first museum be taken down.

Mr. Floyd wrote:

The television program then showed Dachau townspeople, at the American military’s insistence, loading the dead onto vehicles and stacking the bodies like cordwood. German men were dressed in coats and ties and the women looked like they were going to the theater.

This sounds like the Dachau townspeople were acting badly because they dressed up too much for the burial of the bodies.  As far as I know, the women from the town of Dachau did not participate in burying the bodies.  The Germans were ordered by the American military to dress up when they visited the camp.  Clothes were very hard to  get during World War II, even in America.  The idea was to have the German people ruin their best clothes as they buried the bodies; this was their punishment for allowing the prisoners to die in a typhus epidemic.

Men from the village of Dachau took the bodies in wagons to be buried

German civilians bury the Dachau bodies at Leitenberg

Mass graves at Leitenberg, near Dachau

Dachau prisoners were put to work loading the bodies at Dachau

Here is a final quote from John F. Floyd:

Hitler and Himmler paid special attention to the Jews, with the objective of eliminating all of them from Germany. What many people fail to realize is this is one goal Hitler achieved. Today, there are only 3,000 people of the Jewish faith living in Germany, out of a population of 80 million.

Even this part of the article is wrong.  There were 585,000 Jews in Germany when Hitler came to power; some books and web sites put the number of Jews in Germany even lower, down to 522,000.  The population of Germany is now close to 82 million. The number of Jews now in Germany is around 200,000, according to Wikipedia.

Remarkable stories about the Holocaust

This morning, I came across two remarkable stories about the Holocaust.  The first one is about a 13 year old Jewish boy who was sent to the Auschwitz death camp in 1944. The Jews under 15 years of age at Auschwitz were sent to the gas chamber, but for some reason, this boy stayed in Auschwitz  for 5 months, and then he was sent to the Kaufering IV camp, a sub-camp of Dachau near Landsberg am Lech.

Kaufering IV was a “sick camp” where prisoners from the other 10 Kaufering camps were sent to die when they were too sick to work. Most of the sick prisoners at Kaufering IV had typhus, but remarkably one of them recovered; his story is told here.

This is a quote about the boy who was sent to Kaufering IV:

In October 1944, at the age of 13, after five months in Auschwitz, I was transferred to Dachau, where I was assigned to Camp #4, located near the Bavarian town of Lomitsberg. For some reason, perhaps because I was the only young boy in the entire camp, I found favor with the SS officer in charge of food supplies and services for both prisoners and guards in Camp #4, and so I was assigned to the kitchen. My job was to stand at the kitchen gate all day and to shout “Achtung!” when this SS officer entered for his periodic inspection of the kitchen.

[…]

Being on the kitchen staff meant that I had access to food. This was a lifesaving privilege not only for me but for others. I was constantly besieged by prisoners begging for any scraps of food I could get for them. I took what I could and was able to help keep many, many people alive. Many of these people survived only because of this kitchen job that I was lucky to get, and some still live in Williamsburg today.

American soldiers view the bodies at Kaufering IV on May 1, 1945

Civilians from the town of Hurlach were forced at gunpoint to bury the bodies of prisoners who had died of typhus at Kaufering IV

The photo above shows a real-life scene which was re-created in the TV series “Band of Brothers.”  You can read all about Kaufering IV  here. I previously blogged about the remarkable story of seven Jewish women who were sent to Kaufering IV because they were pregnant; their babies were born there and the mothers with their babies were evacuated to the main camp so that they could be surrendered to the Allies. You can read about the mothers and their babies who survived Kaufering IV here.

The second remarkable story about the Holocaust is told here.  This is the story of Jews who were hidden during the Holocaust and didn’t know that they were Jews until long after World War II.

This is a quote from the story:

After the Iron Curtain was lifted in Europe twenty years ago, a surprising thing occurred – thousands of people who had been raised as gentiles came to the startling realization that they were actually Jews. Poland is home to thousands of such stories. During the Holocaust and under Communist rule, many Jews there hid their identities and continued to conceal them even after the fall of Communism. On their deathbeds, some of them have revealed their true identities to their children or grandchildren. Other people found out from old family records or through other means.

“The Last Days,” a documentary by Steven Spielberg

The Last Days is a documentary, made by Steven Spielberg and released in 1998; the film won an Academy Award in 1999. A book about the documentary was published in 1999, with the same title.  In 1998, I was just starting to study the Holocaust and I loved the documentary, which I assumed was the gospel truth.  I bought two copies of the book, one to read, and one to preserve in pristine condition in my home library.  The book is great; it has lots of good photos of the Holocaust.

As I began to study the Holocaust, I gradually learned that the documentary and the book entitled The Last Days are both fictional.  That doesn’t mean that The Last Days should be withdrawn because it is a fraud, but it should be reclassified as fiction and advertised as fiction.

The Last Days is about five Hungarian survivors of the Holocaust who travel to Auschwitz and Dachau to relive their stories.  Also included are the stories of three American soldiers who liberated Dachau: one Caucasian, one African American, and one Japanese.

Dr. Paul Parks is the African American who liberated Dachau, according to the book.  This was what caught my attention, because I knew that the U.S. Army was segregated during World War II and I knew that there were white soldiers who liberated Dachau.  So how did an African American liberate Dachau?

Dachau prisoners who were liberated by American troops

In the book The Last Days, about the Steven Spielberg documentary with the same name, Dr. Parks explained why African-American soldiers were chosen to liberate the concentration camps:

“About our role near the end of the war, though I have no proof of this, a Bostonian who was on General Eisenhower’s staff told me that the decision was taken that, wherever possible, the liberators of the camps would be black soldiers – United States soldiers. He said that they had come to the conclusion that if the people who were in the camps saw black soldiers they would feel more at ease with them. It wasn’t some sort of weird cruel trick – people who saw us come into the camps, some of them my friends now, have told me, ‘We knew when we saw you that you weren’t Germans….we knew you had to be Americans’ – so it did work.”

The U.S. Army and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum credit the 45th Thunderbird Division, the 42nd Rainbow Division and the 20th Armored Division of the US Seventh Army as the liberators of the Dachau concentration camp on April 29, 1945. There were no African-American soldiers in these three divisions because the American Army was segregated during World War II.

Lt. Col. Felix Sparks of the 45th Thunderbird Division insists that there were no black soldiers among the liberators of Dachau.

A page from the book The Last Days shows Dr. Paul Parks

The photo above shows a menorah, which is claimed to have been made out of nails by a Jew, who was liberated at Dachau by Parks.  Parks claims a man showed up at his home and didn’t give his name, but on behalf of the unnamed Jew who had made the menorah, he gave the menorah to Parks as a gift. The menorah was allegedly created by Edwin Theiberger; numerous copies of this menorah exist, including one at The White House.

According to a news article in the Boston Globe on October 12, 2000, Dr. Paul Parks was slated to receive the Raoul Wallenberg Award from B’nai B’rith, but the plan to honor Parks for his role in liberating Dachau was canceled after retired Army Col. Hugh F. Foster III informed B’nai B’rith spokesman Eric Rozenman that there is no military record of Dr. Parks being at Dachau when the camp was liberated.

Dr. Parks served with the 365th Engineer Regiment from 1943 to 1945; he has acknowledged that his regiment was not at Dachau on April 29, 1945, but he told a Boston Globe reporter that he was on a special assignment to deactivate mines throughout France and that is how he came to be at Dachau when the camp was liberated.

Dr. Parks claimed that his military records were lost in a fire in 1973, which means that his story of being with the soldiers who stormed the beach at Normandy on D-Day also cannot be confirmed. Foster claims that the 365th Engineer Regiment was in England on D-Day.

This quote is from the Boston Globe article:

“Parks has been among the most prominent black leaders in Massachusetts over the last half century. He was vice president of the Boston branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in the 1960s, education secretary under then-Gov. Michael Dukakis and founder of a program that for 34 years has bused black children from Boston to suburban schools.”

So why am I picking on an African American when the whole documentary The Last Days is full of lies? I’m not picking on anyone; I am recovering from a recent stroke and it is very difficult for me to type, so I can’t write about all the characters in the documentary.

You can read all about the lies in The Last Days here. You can read about the soldiers who liberated Dachau here.

“mass murder” at Ohrdruf?

Ohrdruf was a labor camp that was a sub-camp of the Buchenwald concentration camp during World War II. Ohrdruf was mostly unknown by Americans until President Obama revealed that his great-uncle [the brother of his maternal grandmother] was one of the “liberators” of the camp.  The deserted Ohrdruf camp had been found by American soldiers on April 4, 1945. General Walker and General Middleton had ordered that as many soldiers as possible should be brought to Ohrdruf to view the camp. The bodies were left out until at least the first week of May, so that visiting soldiers could view them.

Obama had first said that his great uncle had liberated Auschwitz, an understandable mistake, that was easily caught by the press because Auschwitz was in what is now Poland and everyone knows that Auschwitz was liberated by Soviet soldiers.  Obama quickly corrected his statement and Ohrdruf became famous.

On July 22, 2010, Prof. Harold Marcuse made a comment on my blog in which he wrote:

Probably correct, that no prisoners were burned alive at Ohrdruf. The charred corpses found by liberators there had probably been dead already, and this was an attempt to destroy evidence of mass murder.

Prof. Marcuse had previously written in a comment that prisoners had been “burned alive” at Ohrdruf, which I had disputed.

If you’ve ever been to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, you have seen the photo of bodies being burned at Ohrdruf.  This is the first photo that you see at the Museum, but the Museum does not claim that the prisoners were burned alive.

A life-sized copy of this photo hangs in the US Holocaust Museum

I have written about the Ohrdruf photo on my web site here. I have written about the Ohrdruf camp on my website here.  In my articles about Ohrdruf, I mentioned Obama’s great uncle, Charles T. Payne, who arrived at Ohrdruf on April 6, 1945, too late to be honored as an official liberator of Ohrdruf.

But what about “mass murder” at Ohrdruf? How did the Germans accomplish “mass murder” at Ohrdruf and WHY?

Ohrdruf was a labor camp; it would have defeated the purpose of the camp to kill the prisoners.  The prisoners were working to build a secret underground bunker for Hitler.

There was no gas chamber at Ohrdruf for mass murder, so the Germans had to improvise something.  So naturally, they came up with the idea of burning the prisoners alive to kill them.  A total waste of gasoline!  But you know how stupid the Nazis were.

I found a web site which features  a letter from a soldier who was one of the American soldiers who visited Ohrdruf on April 11, 1945. In his letter, this soldier wrote:

All day to-day there have been convoys from our division to visit a nearby concentration camp. Other divisions located in the area have been likewise having their men visit the camp. One armored division sent every officer and non-commissioned officer to visit the place. I sent all my men to see it. It is the finest bit of education the army has afforded us into the meaning of fascism and the true nature of the German people.

This soldier also mentioned that

The prisoners were brought here in trains and trucks, and the camp had a quota of 1500 a month to execute.

He had probably learned this from one of the former prisoners who was giving a tour to the Americans.  This could be the origin of the story of “mass murder” at Ohrdruf.   The soldier didn’t mention the typhus epidemic in his letter, probably because he was never told about this.

The Ohrdruf camp is a really big deal because it was the first “horror camp” seen by the American soldiers in World War II.  There were no cremation ovens there because the Nazis didn’t anticipate that the typhus epidemic in Germany would reach Ohrdruf and that so many prisoners would die.

The Germans finally started burning the bodies at Ohrdruf to prevent the spread of typhus. They did not burn prisoners alive to prevent them from testifying about atrocities in a labor camp. Prisoners were NOT sent to Ohrdruf to be executed, but to build a communications center and a bunker for Hitler. Ohrdruf was a labor camp.

The Eisenhower Memorial Commission has a web site where you can read this quote:

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

If the Eisenhower Memorial Commission says this, it must be true, right?  If you can’t trust General Dwight D. Eisenhower, whom CAN you trust?

It makes perfect sense that the stupid Germans would build a “holding facility” many miles away from the gas chamber at Buchenwald.  Wait a minute! A gas chamber at Buchenwald?  I must have missed it when I  visited Buchenwald.

Barack Obama himself says that there was a gas chamber at Buchenwald.

On June 3, 2009, Obama said in a speech in Cairo, Egypt:

Tomorrow, I will visit Buchenwald, which was part of a network of camps where Jews were enslaved, tortured, shot and GASSED TO DEATH by the Third Reich. Six million Jews were killed, more than the entire Jewish population of Israel today.  Denying that fact is baseless, ignorant, and hateful.

Holocaust denial started when Paul Rassinier, who was  a prisoner at Buchenwald, denied that there was a gas chamber there.  I have written about the Buchenwald gas chamber here.

Should Holocaust lying be a crime?

As most people know, Holocaust denial is a crime, punishable by 5 years in prison, but up to 20 years in prison in Austria.  Gerd Honsik was recently  sentenced to 5 years in prison in Austria for saying that there were no gas chambers in Germany, including Mauthausen and Dachau.  You can read about him here.

What about fake Holocaust survivors who tell outrageous lies in the books they write, such as the book entitled A Memoir of the Holocaust Years by Misha Defonseca who wrote a fake story about her escape, when she was four years old, from the Warsaw ghetto. Misha claimed that she was adopted by wolves, but was outed by the New York Times in an article that you can read here.

What about Herman Rosenblat who allegedly survived by eating apples thrown over the fence by a nine-year-old girl, in a sub-camp of Buchenwald; you can read about that story here.

I’m not talking about mistakes which are made about the Holocaust, like mixing up Rudolf Hoess, the Auschwitz Commandant, and Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s deputy, who flew solo to the UK to try to make peace with the  British during WW II. The biggest mistake I’ve ever heard was when Alan Colmes said on TV that “gas ovens” were used in the concentration camps to kill the Jews.

On the old Hannity and Colmes TV show on 12/13/06, Alan Colmes showed a photo  of two cremation ovens at Buchenwald with the remains of partially burned bodies visible, as he said: “A number of people at this conference and your organization have said things like ‘The gas chambers did not exist.’ I want to put up on the screen the furnaces that were used to kill Jews.”

Cremation ovens at Buchenwald were not “gas ovens” for killing Jews

I wouldn’t put Colmes in prison for 5 years for saying that the Nazis killed Jews in gas ovens and I wouldn’t put Sean Hannity in prison for confusing Hoess and Hess in one of his books.  But what about Holocaust survivor Irene Zisblatt who told a lie about swallowing diamonds at Auschwitz?  You can read about her here.

Several years ago, the book entitled Fragments: Memories of a Childhood by Binjamin Wilkomirski was exposed as a fake account of the author’s alleged stay in the Majdanek concentration camp and other camps.  After Wilkomirski admitted writing a fake memoir, the book was not withdrawn from the list of books that students in America were assigned to read; it was merely reclassified as a novel.

Another novel that is similar to Wilkomirski’s book is The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosinski, a Polish writer whom I first learned about on my visit to Poland in 1998.  His book was published in America in 1965; it is routinely assigned to American college students to read, although the stories that he wrote were made up, according to my Polish tour guide.

If a person deliberately tells a lie for the purpose of making money off a book and public speeches, shouldn’t that be a crime?  Shouldn’t such a person be put into prison?  Maybe not for 5 years, like Holocaust deniers, but for 90 days, like Lindsay Lohan.  I would even allow a statute of limitations on Holocaust lies that would save  Elie Wiesel from 90 days in jail, although there is no statue of limitations for Nazi war crimes. You can read about Elie Wiesel here.

Acupuncture — a miracle cure

As my regular readers might know by now, I recently suffered a mild stroke.  The stoke happened while I was asleep, and when I suddenly awoke at 4:25 in the morning, I had some damage to the left arm and left leg, and was having some blurred vision, besides feeling some nausea.  I rushed to an emergency hospital and got there within 15 minutes, but it was already too late.  The doctors at the hospital could do nothing but give me tests which determined that my self diagnosis was correct. I was admitted to the hospital, and as soon as I could get out, after passing numerous tests, I headed straight to a Chinese doctor for acupuncture.

Origin of the belief that prisoners were burned alive on the “death marches” out of the concentration camps

The origin of the Holocaust story of the prisoners in the Nazi concentration camps being sent on “death marches” and burned alive, at places like Gardelegen, is the best-selling book, Hitler’s Willing Executioners, Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen.

Chapter 14 of Goldhagen’s book is entitled “Marching to What End?”

Goldhagen wrote that “marching the Jews to death, was an end in itself.” Goldhagen did say that Himmler, the head of all the concentration camps, had given an order not to kill any of the Jews being marched out of the camps, but he wrote that, in spite of this order, the Germans continued to kill the Jews on the marches.

I read Goldhagen’s book before I knew very much about the Holocaust, and I was amazed to read this on page 367:

Finally, the fidelity of the Germans to their genocidal enterprise was so great as seeming to defy comprehension. Their world was disintegrating around them, yet they persisted in genocidal killing until the end.

Goldhagen then quotes a survivor of the Gardelegen massacre:

One night we stopped near the town of Gardelegen.  We lay down in a field and several Germans went to consult about what they should do.  They returned with a lot of young people from the Hitler Youth and with members of the police force from the town. They chased us all into a large barn. Since we were 3,000 – 6,000 people, the wall of the barn collapsed from the pressure of the mass of people, and many of us fled. The Germans poured out petrol and set the barn on fire.  Several thousand people were burned alive. Those of us who had managed to escape, lay down in a nearby wood and heard the heart-rending screams of the victims. This was on April 13. One day later the place was conquered by Eisenhower’s army. When the Americans got there, the bodies were still  burning.

The book includes this photo of a victim of the Gardelegen massacre.

Prisoner clutched a handful of straw as he burned to death

This photo was shown all over America in a traveling exhibit which ended at Washington, DC.  Remarkably, the straw and the man’s clothing didn’t burn.  I think that this photo proves that the prisoners were not deliberately burned alive.

Goldhagen also included this photo, which I think was staged. I think a dead body was placed in the doorway and then the sliding barn door was pulled across his body.

Prisoner who tunneled under the door face-up on his back.

After reading about this terrible crime, I went to Gardelegen to see for myself.  I wrote about the Gardelegen massacre here and here. I wrote about the reason for the massacre here.

To this day, the official story of the Holocaust, as taught in American universities, is that the prisoners were marched out of the camps in order to kill them and that prisoners on the marches were deliberately burned to death. According to the official story, the Germans had no fear of the Jews and the Russian POWs killing and raping civilians; they just wanted to kill the Jews for no reason in the last days of the war.

Read the full story of Gardelegen for yourself here.

A recent comment on my blog

I have not been posting or responding to comments because I have suffered a mild stroke. There was a comment made which wordpress classified as spam. I had the option to approve the comment, but I didn’t and deleted it as spam. Now that I am recovering a bit, I have changed my mind, so I am putting up this comment which was originally made on my post about the soldiers who saw Dachau here.