jack-booted thugs

The ultimate insult is to call someone a “jack-booted thug.”  Last night, as I was watching a re-run of the Seinfeld TV show, I heard Kramer tell Jerry Seinfeld that mail carriers who had delivered unwanted Pottery Barn catalogs to his mail box were “jack-booted thugs.”  Jerry didn’t ask Kramer what he meant by that term; as everyone knows, “jack-booted thugs” is a reference to the Nazis, who were the worst!  The worst, Jerry, the worst!  But were the Nazis bad because they wore Jack boots, or are jack boots bad because the Nazis wore them?   

Why was there a Sauna at Auschwitz?

This building at Auschwitz-Birkenau is called “the Sauna”

One of the remaining brick buildings at Auschwitz II, also known as Birkenau, is called “the Sauna.”  I walked past this building on my first trip to Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1998 and I wondered why the building was closed. The Sauna had been closed to tourists during all the years since the camp was liberated by the Soviet Union on January 27, 1945.

My tour guide told me that this beautiful brick building was where the Jews, who had been selected to work, took a shower and were given uniforms.   The building seemed too big for just a shower room, and I wondered why it was called “the Sauna.” I assumed that the name was a Nazi joke, and it was coined because the water in the shower was so hot that it created steam, like in a steam room, which we call a Sauna.

The Nazis had named this building “die zentrale Sauna.” (the central Sauna)  The CENTRAL Sauna?  How many Saunas did they have?  The Nazis were always making cruel, insensitive jokes — like putting up a sign that read “Arbeit Macht Frei” over the gate into a death camp where the only way out was “through the chimney.”

The central Sauna building is now open to tourists

When I visited Auschwitz-Birkenau again in 2005, the Sauna building was open to tourists and I finally learned why the building was called “die zentrale Sauna.” This was the largest building where the clothing of the prisoners was disinfected in steam chambers; there were other smaller disinfection buildings, which also used steam and hot air chambers, as well as Zyklon-B poison gas to disinfect the clothing.

The Sauna building is shaped like the capital letter I and the two sides of it are mirror images. The center part of the Sauna building has two long hallways. Steam chambers are located against the wall that divides the hallways; on each side of the wall are doors into the chambers.  The clothing was put in on one side, and after it was steamed, it was taken out on the other side.

Steam chambers in the Sauna building had doors on both sides of a wall

The steam chambers were manufactured by the Topf company, which also provided the crematory ovens at Birkenau and other Nazi concentration camps. At the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, the Soviet Union charged the Nazi war criminals with killing Jews with steam at the Treblinka death camp.  The clothing at the Theresienstadt ghetto was de-loused with steam.

The central Sauna at Birkenau is located directly across the road from where a group of wooden warehouse buildings used to stand. The prisoners called the warehouse section “Canada” because of all the riches that could be found there. This was where the clothing of the Jews was sorted and packed for shipment to Germany. During World War II, factories in Germany concentrated on making uniforms for the soldiers and civilian clothing was in short supply.

Steam chambers for clothing in the Sauna building

Back in the old days, when people used to go to a health spa, there was no steam room or Sauna.  Instead, people sat inside a steam chamber (sauna) with their head sticking out of the top of the chamber, which resembled those in the photo above, except they were square and made out of heavy cloth.

Close-up of a steam chamber for delousing clothes at Birkenau

The shower room, shown in the photo below, is located in the part of the building that is closest to the road. The prisoners were not given towels after their shower; they had to stand in the shower room, which had floor-to-ceiling windows, until they were dry.  Notice that the shower heads have been removed from the shower room.

Shower room in the Sauna building at Birkenau

Visitors must walk on a glass floor that has been installed in the Sauna building, so as to preserve the original concrete floors. A railing, which can be seen on the right-hand side in the photo above, prevents visitors from walking on the floor of the shower room. The photo on the wall in the background shows a group of women prisoners in the shower room. The shower room is surprisingly small, considering that this is such a huge building.

After their shower, the incoming women prisoners would be given clothing that had been taken from the victims who had arrived on a previous transport. This clothing had been deloused in the steam chambers in the building and most of the dresses had suffered damage from the hot steam. As a result, the women prisoners were typically dressed in tattered clothing.  Only a few of the women prisoners were given a uniform to wear.

The two photos below show original signs on the wall which can still be seen in the Sauna building. The first sign says “Desinfizierte Wäsche.” Before their shower, the prisoners had to first be submerged into a tub of disinfectant to kill any germs or lice on their bodies. The second sign says “Brausen” which means Showers in English. The yellow and black stripes alert visitors that the doorway is very low.

Sign reads Disinfection Wash in English

Sign reads “Showers” in English

The incoming prisoners entered the Sauna building through a door located at the northern end of the building, the same door that tourists now enter. Inside this door is a huge waiting room where the new prisoners were first registered and then told to undress. Then they were herded naked down the long hallway in the center of the building, where you can see the steam chambers on each side.  There are also a few hot air chambers.

Hot air chamber for de-lousing the clothing at Birkenau

At the end of the hallway was a small room where the women had all their body hair shaved off by male barbers while the SS men assigned to this building watched. This was an effort to control lice which hides in body hair. The barbers also shaved the men’s hair in this room, according to a sign in the building.

After having all their hair cut off, the prisoners proceeded into the next room, called the Untersuchungsraum. This was where they had to undergo a humiliating search of all their body cavities by an SS man. The search was for hidden diamonds or gold which some of the victims tried to smuggle into the camp, thinking that they could buy more favorable treatment. From this room, the prisoners proceeded to the disinfection tubs which were right next to the shower room.

After their shower, the victims then entered another hallway that was on the other side of the hallway where they had entered. At the end of this hallway was another large waiting room. On the north side of the waiting room was a little room where the women were given their prisoner clothing. On the south side of the waiting room was the room where the men received their new clothing. The prisoners then exited the building through two doors which were on the east side of the south wing of the building.

According to Elizabeth Mann, an Auschwitz survivor who spoke to visitors at the Museum of Tolerance in the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, when I visited, the female prisoners at Birkenau were given a shower periodically in the Sauna, but they never knew whether gas or water would come out. According to Ms. Mann, prisoners were sometimes gassed in the shower room of the Sauna.

The Sauna building now has a display of photos that were found in the suitcases of the incoming prisoners and saved by the Nazis.

Display of photos in the Sauna building

In the photo above, the photos on the display board and the windows on the right hand side, are reflected in the glass floor of the building.

All the photos in this post are copyrighted by scrapbookpages.com and are not in the public domain.

How many of the Nazi gas chambers are still in existence?

This morning I read on a blog that there are only four Nazi gas chambers still in existence in all of Europe.  It took me a minute to think of which four gas chambers, to which this blogger might be referring.

It is universally accepted by Holocaust historians that there were six extermination camps where Jews were gassed during the Holocaust: Auschwitz-Birkenau, Majdanek, Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka.

The gas chambers at Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka were destroyed more than 65 years ago and nothing remains of them. Three of the four gas chambers at Birkenau were destroyed by the Nazis in January 1945 and one was destroyed by the prisoners in October 1944.

There were also gas chambers at Mauthausen, Dachau, Sachsenhausen, Ravensbrück and Stutthof.  The  original gas chambers at Mauthausen, Dachau and Stutthof are still there, as are the gas chambers in Building No. 41 at Majdanek. There are also reconstructed gas chambers at Majdanek and the main Auschwitz camp.

One of the euthanasia gas chambers, the one at Hartheim Castle, was also used to gas concentration camp prisoners from Dachau and Mauthausen.  There is a building located about a mile from the Natzweiler camp, which is alleged to have been a gas chamber where 86 Jews from Auschwitz were brought to be killed; you can read about it on another blog post that I wrote.

I have visited and photographed five of the remaining gas chambers in Europe: Auschwitz, Majdanek, Dachau, Mauthausen and Hartheim.  I also visited the site of “the little white house” which was used at Birkenau before the four large gas chambers were built.  The location of “the little red house,” which was the first gas chamber at Birkenau, is unknown.

Dachau gas chamber

Reconstructed gas chamber at Auschwitz main camp

Mauthausen gas chamber

One of the gas chambers in Building No. 41 at Majdanek

Building No. 41 at Majdanek has four gas chambers

Gas chamber at Hartheim Castle

Stutthof Gas Chamber

You can see more photos of the reconstructed gas chamber in the main Auschwitz camp here and more photos of the Hartheim gas chamber here.

The remains of “the liitle white house” used as a gas chamber at Birkenau

You can read all about “the little white house” here.

Ruins of the Sachsenhausen gas chamber

The floor of the Sachsenhausen gas chamber is shown in the photo above.  The gas chamber was disguised as a shower room with one floor drain.  In the background, you can see the ruins of the cremation ovens.  You can read about the Sachsenhausen gas chamber here.

Experiments done by Nazi doctors during World War II

There seems to be a popular belief that it was proven at the Doctors Trial at Nuremberg in 1947 that experiments were done on the gassing of human beings at Dachau.  Allegedly this information can be found in the book entitled The Nazi Doctors: medical killing and the psychology of genocide by Robert Jay Lifton.  (His name is sometimes incorrectly spelled Lipton.)

You can read all about the Doctors Trial here.  The charges against the doctors are listed, but there were no charges against any of the doctors for doing experiments involving gassing human beings with Zyklon-B poison gas.

I have read on other blogs about alleged experiments done in the gas chamber at Dachau. For example, this quote from a blog:

Although never used for mass killings, one of the chambers was used for human medical research as well as the murders of select prisoners.

Lifton did not mention any gassing experiments in his book. There was no evidence presented at the Doctors Trial that “the Nazi doctors sent people to gas chambers,” as another blogger wrote.  Nor were there any courts that “convicted Nazis after reviewing the evidence of gassing in numerous camps.”  None of the SS men at Dachau were ever prosecuted on a charge of killing prisoners in the gas chamber at Dachau.

The book The Nazi Doctors is online and anyone can search the book for the words Dachau or gas chambers and learn that this book does not say anything about prisoners being gassed at Dachau.  Nevertheless, tour guides at Dachau tell visitors that the gas chamber at Dachau was used a few times for gassing experiments.

You can watch a video about the Doctors Trial here.

What Glenn Beck didn’t tell you about slavery in America

On August 19, 2010 Glenn Beck gave a lesson on slavery in America on his TV show on Fox News.  You can hear what he said on his Fox News web site here.   It’s been almost a week since I watched this segment of his show, but I can’t get it out of my mind.  Glenn Beck has to be Politically Correct on his show if he wants to stay on TV, so I’ll have to tell you the rest of the story, the part that he left out.

Slaves were brought to America by the Dutch West India company which you can read about here on Wikipedia.  Here is the quote from Wikipedia:

The area where the company could operate consisted of West Africa (between the Tropic of Cancer and the Cape of Good Hope) and the Americas, which included the Pacific Ocean and the eastern part of New Guinea. The intended purpose of the charter was to eliminate competition, particularly Spanish or Portuguese, between the various trading posts established by the merchants.

Door of the West-Indisch Huis, headquarters of company that brought slaves to America

You can see a large photo of the whole West India House here.  The house is located in a section of Amsterdam that is called Haarlem.  Harlem in New York was named after Haarlem in Amsterdam.

What Glenn Beck didn’t tell you is that the slave traders, based in Haarlem, didn’t go to West Africa and sneak into the interior to capture the African natives and bring them to America in their ships.  No, the slave traders PURCHASED the slaves from the Africans who sold them to the slave traders.  They didn’t sell their own people, of course. They captured and sold people from the neighboring tribes.  The Africans even built prisons on the coast where they held the captured people until the slave ships arrived.

What Glenn Beck DID tell his viewers is that the first Africans, who were brought to America, were sold to the American colonists as indentured servants.  The buyer would pay the cost of bringing an African to America and that person became an indentured servant who had to work to pay off the cost of his passage.  White people also came to America as indentured servants and had to work to pay their passage.  A member of my extended family is descended from a 15-year-old boy who came from England to America and had to work as an indentured servant to pay for the trip.  While he was an indentured servant, he became an apprentice brick layer and learned a trade which he used to earn a living after he paid back the money to the man to whom he was indentured.

The first Africans who became indentured servants were also set free after they paid their debt to the person to whom they had been indentured.  Then one day, three indentured servants (two whites and one African) escaped from their masters, as Glenn Beck told his audience.  They were caught and put on trial; the African  was sentenced to a lifetime of servitude, but the two white indentured servants were not. That was the beginning of slavery in America.  What Glenn Beck didn’t tell you is that the reason the black indentured servant was given a harsher sentence is because he was the instigator; he had encouraged the two whites to run off from their masters along with him.  This had to be stopped because the whole system of indentured servitude was in danger if the Africans were going to persuade the whites to escape from their masters and not pay for their passage.

Another thing that Glenn Beck didn’t dare to tell his viewers was the religion of the owners of most of the ships.  You will have to look that up for yourself, if you don’t know already.

But there’s more!  Maybe Beck doesn’t know this, but there were also white slaves in America.  Have you ever heard of the battle of Culloden in Scotland? I went to see the battlefield when I visited Scotland many years ago and I learned from the museum there that the Scottish Highlanders who were the losers in the battle with the British were banished to America and some of these losers were sentenced by the British to be slaves for life.  I’m not sure of this, but I think the term “redneck” might have originated from the white slaves working in the fields alongside the black slaves; with their fair skin, they would have quickly developed red necks.

Mel Gibson’s uncle killed when he fell out of a guard tower at a concentration camp — Jay Leno joke

On Sunday, Aug 22, 2010, at the Comedy and Magic Club in Hermosa Beach, California, Leno told a tasteless joke about actor Mel Gibson. 

The floor drains in the Dachau gas chamber…

A few years ago, I was accused of being a Holocaust denier because I wrote, in a private e-mail message, that I think that the floor drains in the Dachau gas chamber are real drains. My private e-mail was published on Paolosilv’s blog without my permission, but when I objected, the blog post, which quoted my e-mail, was removed.

According to the Holocaust experts, the drains in the gas chamber at Dachau cannot be real drains, that are connected to the sewer system, because that would mean that the Dachau gas chamber is actually a shower room.

Poison gas cannot be allowed to get into the sewer system because it would poison everyone in the vicinity; for this reason, the floor drains for the disinfection chambers at Dachau are outside the chambers and the poison pellets are poured into a wire basket so they will not get on the floor.

Visitors to Dachau today are not allowed to go into the basement to see if there are drain pipes connected to the drains in the gas chamber, so my opinion about the drains in the Dachau gas chamber, which are now closed up, is pure speculation.

The floor drains in the Dachau gas chamber have been closed up

The drain outside the four disinfection chambers which were used to delouse the clothing of the Dachau prisoners

Notice that the alleged fake drain in the Dachau gas chamber was manufactured by the same company that made the real drain that is outside the disinfection chambers.

Is there a document somewhere which proves that the Nazis ordered six fake drains from the manufacturer and specified that the drain holes should be closed up? Not that I know of. Maybe someone modified six real drains and closed the  holes so that the poison gas could not go down the drain into the sewer system and poison the whole camp.

The two drains in the morgue room have to be real because it was necessary to clean up the mess made by the dead bodies stacked inside the room; this means that there is a sewer pipe underneath the Baracke X building where the gas chamber is located.

Drain outside the four disinfection chambers at Dachau

Four of the six floor drains in the Dachau gas chamber

If the drains in the Dachau gas chamber are actually fake drains, designed to fool the unsuspecting victims, why use 6 drains?  That is a total waste of money and involves a lot of unnecessary work.  Only one fake drain would be needed to fool the victims into thinking that the gas chamber is a shower room.

Northeast corner of Dachau gas chamber

The photo above shows one of the small windows for pouring Zyklon-B pellets into the Dachau gas chamber.  On the ceiling are the empty holes where showerheads used to be and a square vent.  On the wall, near the ceiling, are light fixture boxes which the American film, shown at the Nuremberg IMT, says were used to vent gas from the chamber.

As seen today, the Dachau gas chamber has two ways to input the gas: through bins on the outside wall or through the shower heads.  There are two ways to vent the gas: through the vent in the ceiling or through the empty light fixture boxes.

Two of the floor drains are about four feet from the windows on the east wall where the Zyklon-B pellets “could be poured in” according to a sign in the undressing room at Dachau. The prisoners would have had plenty of time to sweep the pellets down the drain with their hands before the poison gas fumes were released, so the drains can’t be real, according to the Holocaust experts.

Have you ever seen the “Soup Nazi” episode on the Seinfeld TV show?  The owner of a small soup restaurant in New York is called the “Soup Nazi” because he insists that customers do everything the right way.  If the customers don’t do everything just right, the “Soup Nazi” says “No soup for you!”

That’s the way the real Nazis were; everything had to be done just right.  No wasting of time, money and materials, by putting in 6 fake drains when one would have been enough.  The Seinfeld show, which is about “nothing” had many jokes about the Holocaust including a spoof about the last scene in Schindler’s List which was way over the top.  Too bad that the Seinfeld show is now over; the argument about the floor drains at Dachau would have made a good episode.

I read a blog post written by a student who has studied the Holocaust since elementary school and finally got to see Dachau.  The student wrote this in the blog post:

The adjoining room was labeled the “shower room.” The prisoners were told they were going to get a shower, but once they were locked in the room, they were all gassed.

This student became very emotional when standing in the gas chamber, according to the blog post, but in all the times that I  have visited Dachau and have stood in the gas chamber, I did not become emotional.  There must be something wrong with me.  While I was standing in the gas chamber the last time that I visited Dachau, I was too busy looking around at the shower heads and noticing that they were not evenly spaced on the ceiling and that the one remaining shower head did not hang down from the ceiling.  (All of the shower heads have now been stolen as souvenirs.)

I know that the gas that was used at Dachau was not liquid, nor invisible vapor, but rather was in the form of Zyklon-B pellets that are about the size of peas; the pellets could not have been put through the shower heads.

The shower heads were put in the gas chamber in order to fool the victims into thinking that the gas chamber was a shower room, so why weren’t they spaced evenly?  The spacing of the shower heads looks suspicious to me.  I think that the uneven spacing is due to the vent being put in AFTER the shower heads were installed.

The following quote is from The Harrowing of Hell, a book written by Captain Marcus J. Smith, a US Army medical doctor with DP Team 115, who arrived at Dachau on April 30, 1945:

“They stood beneath innocent-looking shower heads, evenly spaced on the ceiling; from them the invisible lethal gas (carbon monoxide and hydrogen cyanide) flowed for ten to twenty minutes. I noticed a thick glass window on the rear of the chamber: I am told that through the window a supervisor witnessed the executions so that he could decontaminate when they were over.”

Contrary to the description above, written by a medical doctor with the US Army, who saw the gas chamber the day after the camp was liberated, the holes for the fake shower heads are currently not “evenly spaced.” There are three rows of ceiling holes in the gas chamber today.  On the north side of the ceiling, there are three holes on the left side, then two ceiling vents with one hole between them on the right side. In the middle row, there are 6 holes and in the row near the south wall, there are 5 holes, making a total of 15 randomly-spaced holes for the fake shower nozzles.

Were the shower heads changed sometime after this army doctor saw the gas chamber on April 30, 1945?  Was the whole ceiling lowered so that the water pipes were hidden?  Was the peephole used to see which water pipes to open because all three water pipes did not need to flow if there were only a few prisoners taking a shower under one row of shower heads?

A group of US Congressmen visited Dachau on May 1, 1945 and in their report, they described the gas chamber as having a 10-foot ceiling with pipes on the ceiling.  The two rooms on either side of the gas chamber both have 10-foot ceilings.  On May 3, 1945, when a film of the gas chamber was made, the ceiling was 7.6 feet high and there were no pipes visible.  Were there some changes made to the gas chamber between April 30, 1945 and May 3, 1945?  The film that was made on May 3, 1945 was shown at the Nuremberg IMT as proof that prisoners were gassed at Dachau.

The one remaining shower head in the Dachau gas chamber in 2003 was made of sheet metal and it looked like the head from a large garden sprinkler can. It was approximately five inches in diameter, and was set flush with the ceiling in a hole that was about 4 or 5 inches deep into the ceiling. By looking into the empty holes on the ceiling today, one can see that these fake shower heads in the gas chamber were not connected to any pipes. The one remaining shower head had been dented, as though someone had punched it with his fist.

A real shower room at Dachau with the shower heads hanging from water pipes

The photo above shows what a real shower room looked like at Dachau.  Notice the shower heads are evenly spaced and hanging down from the pipes.  This photo was taken in the administration building which has been converted into a Museum at Dachau.  The pipes and shower heads  have been removed.  Were the  real pipes and shower heads removed so that visitors will not think for themselves,  but will just let emotion overcome them when they stand in the gas chamber which is disguised as a shower room?

Holocaust denier murdered… J.P. Bellinger is on the case

A headline in the news today reads:

American writer JP Bellinger dose (sic) not rule out the the involvement of Israeli spy agency, Mossad, in the tragic death of a Polish historian, who was researching on the Holocaust.

Dariusz Ratajczak, a former professor at the University of Opole, was found dead in a car parked near a shopping center in Opole on June 11, 2010.  You can read the rest of the news article here.

J.P. Bellinger is the guy who famously wrote a book about Heinrich Himmler being murdered by the British, who then claimed that Himmler had committed suicide.  The death of Holocaust denier Dariusz Ratajczak was also called a suicide, but the fact that his body was found in a parked car two weeks after his death aroused suspicion because he had not died in the car, according to Bellinger.

J.P. Bellinger’s book about the death of Heinrich Himmler is in German, but there is an article written by him in English, which you can read here.  WARNING:  Bellinger’s article about Himmler is on the codoh.com web site and Bellinger is a “revisionist.” Holocaust denial, aka revisionism, can get you 5 years in prison, and it can also get you killed. If you think your computer might be impounded in an investigation of you for Holocaust denial in the future, you should go to a public library to access Bellinger’s article.

My long-awaited answer to accusations on Paolosilv’s blog

I am finally feeling well enough to wade through a long blog post accusing me of being a Holocaust denier, and to answer the accusations. You can read the accusations on Paolosilv’s blog here.

The long, tedious post on Paolosilv’s Blog reminds me of the Seinfeld show, which I watch in re-runs every evening.  The Seinfeld show is famously about “nothing” and it includes many long conversations in which the members of the cast argue about something that is very insignificant.  I don’t have the time, nor the motivation, to address all the points brought up on the Holocaust denier accusation blog post, but there is one point which I believe should be cleared up: the reason for the death marches out of the Nazi camps near the end of World War II.

I wrote this in a comment on my blog on February 22, 2010:

“Towards the end of the war, trains were scarce in Europe. The Germans did not use valuable trains to bring prisoners from the Auschwitz death camp to camps in Germany, which were not death camps, in order to kill them. The prisoners were brought to Germany so that they could work in the factories in the sub-camps.”

Paolosilv’s blog wrote this in answer to my comment:

This is again, untrue. The prisoners were ordered to Germany by Hitler/Himmler so they could not testify. The orders were that they were to be killed, as I have posted the quotes from the Nazis elsewhere.

Why would prisoners be marched all the way from Auschwitz -Birkenau to camps in Germany so late in the war (early January 1945)? Just for ‘labor’? Unlikelihood.

Where is the order from Hitler or Himmler, which said that the prisoners should be marched out of Auschwitz to Germany to be killed?  Was this order entered into evidence at the Nuremberg IMT?

What about all the survivors of the march out of Auschwitz who ended up in the sub-camps in Germany where they worked in factories?  Otto Frank, the father of Anne Frank, said that the prisoners at Auschwitz were given a choice about whether they wanted to join the march or stay behind.  Did the order from Hitler or Himmler say that the Auschwitz prisoners had a choice between being killed or staying behind?

Why did 60,000 prisoners join the march, which was led through two feet of snow, by German soldiers?  Maybe because the prisoners knew the Germans would feed them and keep them in good health because Germany needed workers during World War II.

In America, women worked in the factories, but in Germany, most of the women stayed at home to take care of their six children.

I also wrote this on my blog:

So that leaves the question: Why didn’t the Nazis just kill the 67,000 Jews that were at Auschwitz and all of its sub-camps on January 18, 1945. Even with three large gas chambers still in operation on that date, it would have taken a long time to kill them all and burn the bodies. The Germans had to leave in a hurry because they knew the Soviet soldiers were close by. If they left all the prisoners behind, there would be 60,000 healthy Jews on the loose who would potentially take revenge on the German people, plus 7,000 sick Jews and children. Besides that, the Nazis needed prisoners to work in the German munitions factories, building Messerschmitt airplanes and V-2 rockets so Germany would have at least some chance of winning the war.”

So, actually the “death march” out of Auschwitz does make historical sense.

In answer to the above statement, Paolosilv’s said this on his blog:

Here he denies that there were death marches, or puts them into quotes so as to deny their purpose.

Paolo is still insisting that the prisoners were marched out of Auschwitz in order to kill them.  In fact, he is not the only one who believes this.  Even college professors, who teach the Holocaust, believe that the “death marches” were a means of killing the prisoners so that they could not testify against the Nazis after the war.  So why leave 7,000 prisoners behind, who could potentially testify?

Another quote from Paolosilv’s blog:

Furtherglory writes that the Nazis did not want them to take revenge on the civilian population, as happened at Weimar.

It makes no sense at all. Most of these people were in rough shape, and were not able to work. You would not march people in the dead of winter hundreds of miles so that they could work. This is utter bullshit.

The prisoners, who were marched out of Auschwitz, walked 50 kilometers (around 35 miles) to Gleiwitz which was on the border between what had been Poland and Germany in 1938.  From Gleiwitz, the prisoners were put on trains to camps in Germany and then transferred to sub-camps where they were, in fact, put to work in factories, no bullshit.  The 7,500 prisoners who “were not able to work” were left behind in the three Auschwitz-Birkenau camps.

If the purpose of the death marches was to kill the prisoners, why weren’t they, in fact, killed, as planned?  The prisoners who were marched out of Auschwitz wound up working in the sub-camps of the major camps in Germany.

The most famous prisoner, who marched out of Auschwitz, was Elie Wiesel, who says that he got up out of his hospital bed and voluntarily joined the marchers.  He was taken to Buchenwald where he survived.  Primo Levi, another famous Auschwitz survivor, stayed behind and also survived.

I have already addressed the issue of whether or not the Jewish prisoners at Buchenwald were taken out of the camp to prevent them from taking revenge on the civilians in Weimar.  The original Yiddish version of the book “Night” tells about the Jewish prisoners who did, in fact, go to Weimar to get revenge, just as the Nazis had anticipated that they would.

In February 2010 I wrote this on my blog:

Dachau was a camp for political prisoners who had a good chance of being released. There was a special badge for prisoners who had been released and then re-arrested, which means that there were numerous prisoners that were given their freedom after they had been “rehabilitated.”

Paulosilv wrote this on his blog, in his answer to the above statement:

Here he overlooks the unregistered deaths at Dachau, some of whom were Jews. Others were Poles, Russians and assorted prisoners.———-

If these deaths were “unregistered,” how do we know that the deaths occurred?  Maybe the reason that some deaths were “unregistered” is because the deaths never happened.

There were, in fact, prisoners who were brought to Dachau, given a shower, and then were never seen again.  All of them turned up later, very much alive, at the eleven Kaufering sub-camps.  The Official Army Report, by the American liberators of Dachau, mentions these prisoners who disappeared. The Official Army Report says that their alleged deaths were “unregistered.”  That is the origin of this false information.

I am beginning to feel like Jerry Seinfeld, arguing with George about nothing, so I will end this post now.

The history of Dachau — and what American soldiers did there

This morning I read a blog post which told all about what a visitor learned on a recent tour of Dachau. The first thing that caught my attention was this comment about the Arbeit Macht Frei gate: “About the gate, the original was destroyed by the Americans getting in so a new replica was made for the memorial.”