Dr. Josef Mengele: Don’t it make my brown eyes blue

Of all the SS men associated with the Holocaust, Dr. Josef Mengele is by far the most famous, or infamous, depending on your point of view.  The title of my blog post today comes from a Crystal Gayle song which you can hear on YouTube.

Allegedly, Dr. Mengele tried to make brown eyes blue.  But why would he do that?  As a medical doctor and a specialist in genetics, Dr. Mengele would have known that changing the color of a person’s eyes would not have allowed the new eye color to be passed on to future generations.  In his day, most people in Germany had blue eyes, so why waste time on trying to make brown eyes blue?

Dr. Josef Mengele is in the center of the photo

Dr. Mengele had a Ph.D. in Anthropology as well as a degree in medicine, which he received in July 1938 from the University of Frankfurt. He earned his Ph.D. in 1935 with a thesis on “Racial Morphological Research on the Lower Jaw Section of Four Racial Groups.” In January 1937, Dr. Mengele was appointed a research assistant at the Institute for Heredity, Biology and Racial Purity at the University of Frankfurt.

He worked under Professor Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer, a geneticist who was doing research on twins. The grant for Mengele’s genetic research was authorized by the German Research Council in August 1943. As the war-time director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Hereditary Teaching Genetics, located in Berlin, von Verschuer secured the funds for Mengele’s experiments at Auschwitz. The results of Mengele’s research on twins were sent to this Institute.

Allegedly, all of Dr. Mengele’s research papers from Auschwitz were destroyed by von Versheur.  That means that the survivors of the Birkenau camp can make up stories about Dr. Mengele and no one can say that the stories are false. But how did the stories of changing brown eyes to blue get started?

According to Gerald L. Posner and John Ware, the authors of Mengele, the Complete Story, Dr. Mengele had a particular interest in studying people who had eyes of two different colors.  The story of the eye color experiment on 36 children in Birkenau was told by Dr. Vexler Jancu, a Jewish prisoner at Birkenau.

As quoted in Mengele, the Complete Story, Dr. Vexler Jancu said the following:

In June 1943 I went to the Gypsy camp in Birkenau. I saw a wooden table. On it were samples of eyes. They each had a number and a letter. The eyes were very pale yellow to bright blue, green and violet.

This seems to be the origin of the eye changing story. But were these “samples” real eyes that had been removed from dead Gypsy children or were the “samples” actually glass eyes that Dr. Mengele was comparing to the eyes of still living Gypsy children?

Dr. Josef Mengele had arrived in Auschwitz in May 1943, and his first assignment had been to take care of the medical needs of the Gypsy camp. The following quote is from the book Mengele, the Complete Story:

Within days after his arrival, while Auschwitz was in the throes of one of its many typhoid epidemics, Mengele established a reputation for radical and ruthless efficiency. The nearby marshland made clean water difficult to obtain and posed a constant threat from mosquitoes. (Mengele himself contracted malaria in June 1943.) Other SS doctors had failed in their efforts to curb typhus in the close quarters of the camp barracks. Mengele’s solution to the problem was set out in one of the seventy-eight indictments drawn up in 1981 by the West German Prosecutor’s Office, when the authorities thought he was still alive. In terms of detailed evidence, this arrest warrant is the most damning and complete document that was ever compiled against him. According to the warrant, on May 25, 1943, “Mengele sent 507 Gypsies and 528 Gypsy women suspected of typhus to the gas chamber.”

Almost every Holocaust survivor claims to have had personal experience in dealing with Dr. Mengele.  There were over 30 doctors who participated in the selections at Birkenau, yet every survivor claims to have gone through the selection line while Dr. Mengele was on duty.

Dr. Mengele is the man on the far left

Ruth Elias, a survivor of both Theresienstadt and Auschwitz, wrote a book entitled Triumph of Hope, in which she described Dr. Mengele:

Mengele was an attractive man. A perennial little smile showed the gap between his front teeth. Immaculately dressed in jodhpurs, he wore a cap bearing the SS insignia and carried the obligatory riding crop, constantly slapping it against his gleaming black boots. Whenever he spoke to me, he was very polite, giving the impression that he was interested in me. It was hard to believe that his little smile and courteous behavior were just a facade behind which he devised the most horrific murderous schemes.

This description of Dr. Mengele is typical; all the survivors of Auschwitz describe him as handsome and charming.

Dr. Mengele wearing his Iron Cross medal

The photo above was taken while Dr. Mengele was home on leave, after spending 5 months at Auschwitz-Birkenau. He is wearing an Iron Cross medal on the pocket of his uniform. Dr. Mengele was very proud of his medals; he had earned the Iron Cross 2nd Class medal shortly after he was sent to the Ukraine in June 1941 at the time of the German invasion of the Soviet Union.

In January 1942, Mengele had joined the prestigious 5th SS Panzer Division, nicknamed the Viking Division. In July 1942, he was awarded the Iron Cross 1st Class after he pulled two wounded soldiers out of a burning tank under enemy fire on the battlefield, and administered medical first aid to them.

After being wounded in battle on the Eastern front in 1942, Mengele was promoted to Hauptsturmführer (Captain) and sent to the Race and Resettlement Office in Berlin, the same office where Adolf Eichmann was in charge of transporting the Jews for “resettlement in the East.”

According to the book Mengele, the Complete Story, a severe outbreak of typhus struck the women’s camp in Birkenau in late 1943, while Dr. Mengele was the chief doctor for the women’s barracks. Around 7,000 of the 20,000 women in the camp were seriously ill.

The following quote is from Dr. Ella Lingens, an Austrian doctor who was a political prisoner at Birkenau. In a personal interview given to S. Jones and K. Rattan on February 14, 1984, Dr. Lingens said the following as quoted in Mengele, the Complete Story:

He sent one entire Jewish block of 600 women to the gas chamber and cleared the block. He then had it disinfected from top to bottom. Then he put bath tubs between this block and the next, and the women from the next block came out to be disinfected and then transferred to the clean block. Here they were given a clean new nightshirt. The next block was cleaned in this way and so on until all the blocks were disinfected. End of typhus! The awful thing was that he could not put those first 600 somewhere.

The Birkenau camp was 425 acres in size. Seven small villages had been torn down to make room for the camp; it was like a small city with a total of 300 buildings. There was a total of 140,000 prisoners in the camp in 1943, but the barracks had a capacity of 200,000 prisoners. There was plenty of space to put the first 600 women somewhere, even if he had to set up tents on the soccer field which was near one of the gas chambers at Birkenau. In his performance review, his superior officer complemented him on his work in stopping the typhus epidemic; there was no mention of the 600 women that he had allegedly murdered to accomplish this.

According to the book entitled Mengele, the Complete Story, by Gerald L. Posner and John Ware, Dr. Josef Mengele spent 21 months at the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp, and during that time, he sent 400,000 prisoners to their deaths in the gas chambers at Birkenau. Allowing for the time that Dr. Mengele could not work when he was sick with malaria and typhus, he selected 20,000 Jews and Gypsies per month to be killed, according to Posner and Ware.

There is a famous story about Dr. Mengele sewing two children together, back to back, to create Siamese twins. Vera Alexander, a survivor of Birkenau, claimed to be a witness to the Siamese twins experiment. Dr. Mengele had died in 1979 but his death had been kept a secret by his friends and family. In October 1985, while an intensive manhunt for Mengele was underway, Vera Alexander said the following in an interview for the TV production The Search for Mengele, as quoted in the book Mengele, the Complete Story:

One day Mengele brought chocolate and special clothes. The next day, SS men came and took two children away. They were two of my pets, Tito and Nino. One of them was a hunchback. Two or three days later, an SS man brought them back in a terrible state. They had been cut. The hunchback was sewn to the other child, back to back, their wrists back to back too. There was the terrible smell of gangrene. The cuts were dirty and the children cried every night.

Dr. Mengele escaped from Auschwitz before the camp was liberated by the army of the Soviet Union, and he took all of his research papers with him. These papers later fell into the hands of the Allies, but they have never been published. The results of Dr. Mengele’s experiments are currently being held in a vault in Israel. The testimony of some of the Jews, who were the subjects of his experiments or research, has been published, but not the results of Dr. Mengele’s experiments, nor his research papers on Jewish genetic conditions and diseases.

Dr. Josef Mengele died on February 7, 1979 when he suffered a stroke while swimming at Bertioga beach in Sao Paulo, Brazil. It was not until a couple of years after his death that survivors began to come forward with stories about the crimes that he had committed at Birkenau, and a massive manhunt was made to find him.

But was anyone really trying to find Dr. Mengele?  Not according to his son. As long as Dr. Mengele was not found and brought to trial, the survivors of Birkenau could make up stories without having to prove those stories.

Nov. 29, 1945 — fake evidence day at the Nuremberg IMT

Today is the 65th anniversary of the day that the American prosecution team presented a film about the fake gas chamber which the American liberators had constructed at Dachau.  I previously blogged about this here.   This would be a good time for America to come clean and admit that the shower room at Dachau was converted into a fake gas chamber between April 30, 1945 and May 3, 1945, the day that the “gas chamber” was filmed as evidence to be shown at Nuremberg.

I’m not saying that the Nuremberg IMT was all bad.  The present-day International Criminal Court in The Hague would never have been set up if it had not been for the precedent set by the Nuremberg IMT. There was no  international law before the Nuremberg IMT.   I’m not even saying that creating a fake gas chamber at Dachau was wrong.  There were no real gas chambers that could have been easily filmed by the American prosecutors.

The real gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau had all been blown up, and all the other gas chambers were in Soviet occupied territory.  So America built a  fake gas chamber.  So what?  Most people today would say that this was justified, just as convicting the Germans of crimes that were not yet crimes was justified, in the opinion of most people.

We must think of the greater good.  It’s been 65 years now and no country has done any mass gassing, except maybe in Iraq where the Kurds were allegedly gassed, giving America a good reason to start a war.

On December 20, 1945, an affidavit, allegedly given by Alfred Naujocks, was read at the Nuremberg IMT to prove that Germany started World War II on September 1, 1939. The affidavit was allegedly signed by Naujocks on November 20, 1945, the day before testimony started at the Nuremberg IMT.   You can read my previous blog post about Naujocks here.

What really happened at Dachau?

I must get back to the Dachau Memorial Site and take a guided tour so that I can learn about what REALLY happened at the Dachau concentration camp.

A recent visitor who took a tour of Dachau wrote this on a blog post here:

Dachau was the first concentration camp and some say it was not a “killing camp”, which is also not true.  Dachau was the first stage of creating the entire system of concentration camps.  All the training for all personel who worked at all the concentration camps was conducted here.  It was where torture techniques were developed and perfected.  It was where all of the psychological warfare techiques that were conducted throughout the nation of Germany and occupied territories were perfected.  They had a gas chamber and it was used, more for testing various combinations of gases to see how they killed, but it was used nonetheless.  Many many people died in Dachau, both from disease, deliberate gassing and torture.

Visitors to the Dachau Memorial site can also learn a little about German culture, such as this information on the blog cited above:

We have the impression that the Aryan race was supposed to be an entire populace of blonde haired, blue eyed ppl.  Such is in fact not true.  The Aryan race was simply people who could trace their Germany ancestry back 3 generations.

the fate of Andrée Borrel, a French woman in the British SOE

My blog post today is in answer to a comment made, by a German reader of my blog, about his search for the fate of Andrée Borrel, who was a British SOE agent during World War II.  His comment mentioned that Borrel “joined the (French) Resistance, was betrayed and fled to England via Portugal.”  He also mentioned that Borrel was “sent back to France” (by the British SOE) and was then caught by the Gestapo.

Andrée Borrel was one of the first two woman SOE agents to parachute into France. She was tall and athletic, courageous and very beautiful.

What really caught my attention in the comment was these words:  “she was working and stayed with the Bielmeier Bakery but was taken away and apparently executed, but where?”

The Bielmeier bakery was in the town of Dachau during World War II, and it was a work Kommando where prisoners from the Dachau concentration camp were sent to work.  Dachau was basically a men’s camp; women and teen-aged prisoners at Dachau lived and worked outside the camp in places like the Bielmeier bakery.

Before I began doing extensive research on the fate of the women in the British SOE, I thought that the most logical explanation for the disappearance of the women in the SOE, after they were betrayed by the British, was that they had escaped for fear that they would be killed to cover up the fact that they had been used and betrayed.   I dismissed this idea because none of the SOE women who disappeared had ever contacted their families.  The story told by the British was that 12 SOE women had been executed at these three concentration camps:  Dachau, Natzweiler and Ravensbrück.  However, there is no proof that any British SOE women were ever executed by the Germans.

Now this reader’s information, that Andrée Borrel worked in a bakery in the town of Dachau, sheds new light on the story.

Several of the women SOE agents were sent to the civilian prison in Karlsruhe, Germany after they were captured.  On July 6, 1944, four of these women (Andrée Borrel, Vera Leigh, Diane Rowden and Sonia Olschanezky) were released and allegedly executed that evening at the Natzweiler concentration camp in Alsace, which is now in France.  These women had been sent to France by the British SOE to be caught so that the Germans could be given false information about the D-day invasion.   The official story given by the SOE is that four of the women were executed at Natzweiler exactly one month after the Normandy invasion.

The problem is that the Karlsruhe prison has no record of the name of the concentration camp where these four women were sent when they were released. The alleged execution of the women was top secret. So secret that there was no written execution order and no records kept of their deaths.

Why such secrecy?  The British SOE was an illegal organization and the women were illegal combatants who had no protection under the Geneva Convention of 1929.  If caught, they could be legally executed.  There were several male SOE agents who were executed, but there was no secrecy about their executions.

A biography of Vera Atkins, entitled A Life in Secrets, by Sarah Helm gives the following account of what happened when the SOE women were brought to the offices of Magnus Wochner and Wolfgang Zeuss in the Political Department, a branch of the Gestapo, in the Natzweiler camp.

The following is a quote from A Life in Secrets:

Then a man from the Karlsruhe Gestapo, who had accompanied the women, walked into Wochner’s office and explained that there were orders from Berlin to execute the women immediately. Wochner disputed this “unorthodox” procedure, saying that such orders usually arrived in Zeuss’s office by secret teleprint, or by letter direct from Berlin to the commandant of the camp. A carbon copy was always immediately made of such an order and sent to the commandant. But the Karlsruhe Gestapo man said the women’s names should not be entered in any records at all. Other witnesses, however, suggested he was simply lying and that the camp executioner, Peter Straub, would never have been authorized to kill a prisoner without Wochner’s order.

Two months later, four more British SOE women agents were allegedly taken to Dachau by Max Wassmer, the same man who allegedly brought the women to Natzweiler. (The Archives of the Dachau concentration camp has no record of Max Wassmer ever being checked in at the gate into Dachau, as would have been the required procedure.) For the SOE women allegedly sent to Dachau, there was no proper order from Berlin, authorizing the execution of the women, and no records of the execution were kept.

Even after the war, at the proceedings against nine staff members of the Natzweiler camp before a British Military Court from May 29, 1946 to June 1, 1946, the names of the women were kept secret from the public, allegedly to spare the feelings of the relatives. However, according to Sarah Helm’s book, the relatives didn’t mind the public knowing the names of the women and had given written permission to reveal their names.

The records of the British Military Court were sealed and the transcripts of the trial were not published until 1949. The fate of the men, who were put on trial by the British, was not publicly known until 1956 when a journalist named Anthony Terry persuaded the legal department of the British Embassy to release the information to him.

According to Rita Kramer’s book, Flames in the Field, Terry also publicly identified the fourth woman who was allegedly executed at Natzweiler after he discovered that Sonia Olschanezky had been taken to the Karlsruhe prison on the same day as Borrel, Leigh and Rowden, and that she was released on July 6, 1944, the same day as the other three. In the published trial transcripts, the fourth woman was not identified.

On September 12, 1944, four more women SOE agents were allegedly executed secretly at Dachau. There are no records of the execution of the four women at Dachau and all of their names were not even known until 1947 when the name Noor-un-nisa Inayat Khan was added to the list of the Dachau victims. Until Sonia Olschanezky was finally identified as the fourth Natzweiler victim, it had been assumed that Noor Inayat Khan was executed at Natzweiler.

According to Rita Kramer’s book, the Karlsruhe records only show that the women were taken to an unnamed concentration camp. The logical place to send the women would have been Ravensbrück, the women’s concentration camp near Berlin, where they could have been executed and their bodies disposed of in the crematorium.

The Ravensbrück camp was liberated by the Soviet Union and the records that were confiscated by the Soviets have never been released, even to this day.  The Soviets did finally release the records that were confiscated from Auschwitz and Majdanek, but curiously, the records from Ravensbrück are still being kept secret. I wonder why?

The Natzweiler camp is in a remote area in the Vosges mountains in Alsace; it would have been a great place for a secret execution, except that there were at least 6 British SOE agents there who were potential witnesses to the arrival of the women.  (Maybe that’s why Natzweiler was chosen by the British for their official story — the six SOE men at Natzweiler could corroborate their false story of  the execution.)

Natzweiler had only one crematory oven and prisoners were not normally brought there by the Gestapo for execution since the closest railroad station was 5 miles from the camp.

In spite of the strict secrecy surrounding the alleged execution of the four women at Natzweiler, the Gestapo was remarkably careless in handling this important mission. For one thing, the prisoners at the Natzweiler camp had not seen a woman in quite a while, so their arrival in the camp was bound to attract attention.

Four women arrived in the Natzweiler camp around 3 o’clock in the afternoon and were paraded through the entire camp in full view of all the prisoners who did not work outside the camp.  Who were these women?  Could they have been the wives or girl friends of the SS men who were there to attend a party that took place that evening?  Maybe prostitutes that had been hired for the party?

According to British SOE agent Albert Guérisse, the Commandant of the Natzweiler camp had gone down to the station to meet them and had brought the women back in his car; he then drove around the camp and gave the women a tour.  Is that the way the Nazis treated condemned women?

Brian Stonehouse, an SOE agent who testified that he had witnessed the arrival of the four women, was a prisoner in the “Nacht und Nebel” category. The N.N. prisoners were not allowed to work outside the camp, but by some remarkable coincidence, Stonehouse was doing manual labor that day near the gate and he was able to get a good look at the women so that he could identify them later.

Stonehouse noted that one woman had “very fair heavy hair,” but her dark roots were showing; she was wearing a black coat and carrying a fur coat over her arm, although this was in July. Another woman was wearing a tweed coat, while a third woman had a tartan plaid ribbon in her hair. He remembered that the fourth woman was wearing clothes that “looked very English.”

As British spies in France, it was important for these women to pass for French women, especially because they were with the Prosper Network that was based in Paris, but curiously, three out of the four had on something that could be easily identified as British, according to Brian Stonehouse. His descriptions were used to identify the women at the proceedings of the British Military Court held in 1946 at Wuppertal, Germany.

The four women were allegedly taken to the Political Department at Natzweiler, where Walter Schultz, a prisoner who was an interpreter, was a witness to their arrival.

After the stop at the Political Department, the four women were allegedly  taken to the Zellenbau, the camp prison, which was at the far end of the camp. The windows on one side of the Zellenbau faced the infirmary where Albert Guérisse and Dr. Georges Boogaerts, two SOE agents from Belgium, were assigned to work. The infirmary, or the camp hospital, was about 10 meters from the prison cells.

According to the book A Life in Secrets, by Sarah Helm, a Kapo named Franz Berg, who worked in the crematorium, had witnessed the arrival of the women and “It was he who passed the word right down to the barracks on the lower terraces that there were British women among the group.”  British SOE agent Albert Guérisse, lived in barrack number 7, which was 25 meters from the hospital block.

On page 114 of her book entitled Flames in the Field, Rita Kramer wrote the following:

At the Natzweiler trial, Berg testified as to what had happened on the evening of 6 July 1944. His testimony neatly complemented, like an adjacent piece of a jigsaw puzzle, what Vera Atkins had heard from Dr. Guérisse, who had recognized Andrée Borrel and had managed to exchange a few words with another one of of the women before she disappeared. She had told him that she was English. That was all there had been time for.

Boogaerts and Guérisse told Vera Atkins that they had gotten the word from Berg about the British women. However, during the trial of nine Natzweiler staff members, Franz Berg referred to the women who were executed as “Jewish.” Not being a fashion expert like Brian Stonehouse, Berg had no way of knowing that these women were British.

Boogaerts got the attention of the women by whistling and whispering as loudly as he could through a window in his barrack building. Two of the women opened the window of their prison cell and Boogaerts threw them some cigarettes through the window. One of the women, who told Boogaerts that her code name was Denise, then gave Boogaerts a small tobacco pouch, which Franz Berg delivered to him. Denise was the code name for Andrée Borrel.

Guérisse’s account of what happened was quoted by Sarah Helm in her book:

Boogaerts came to see me after he had first made contact with the women, saying he had managed to get them some cigarettes and he suggested that I should come to his block (barracks) at 7 p.m. in order to talk to them and find out who they were, from the window of his block, which was within speaking distance. And I went to his block and by looking through the window and whistling I could see the head and shoulders of a woman appear in the window of the cell opposite in the prison block, and I noticed that she had dark hair but it was quite impossible to observe more.

It was only later, in another interview with Vera Atkins, that Guérisse remembered that he had recognized the woman with the dark hair as Andrée Borrel. Brian Stonehouse told Vera Atkins that he had identified Borrel as the bleach blonde with dark roots showing, who walked into the camp carrying a fur coat.

According to Rita Kramer’s book, the tobacco pouch that Andrée gave to Boogaerts contained some money. Inside the pouch was a slip of paper with her name on it; after the war he gave the pouch to Leone Borrel Arend, Andrée’s sister.

So we have proof that Andrée Borrel was executed at Nazweiler; she had the foresight to write down her name and give it to another British SOE agent who was a prisoner at Natzweiler.

By another remarkable coincidence, the British SOE men at Natzweiler were then transferred to Dachau where four more SOE women were sent and allegedly executed.  Strangely, the Gestapo always arranged for male SOE agents to be kept alive as witnesses to the execution of female SOE agents and they even moved them around from one camp to another for that purpose.

A couple of years ago, I contacted the staff at Dachau and I was told that there are no records at Dachau of any SOE women being brought there.  In light of this new information from a reader who was at Dachau after the war, I will have to do some more investigation about Andrée Borrel being a prisoner at Dachau who worked in the Bielmerier bakery.

Robert H. Jackson Center in Jamestown, NY

Yesterday, I looked up the text of the opening speech by Robert H. Jackson at the Nuremberg IMT on November 21, 1945 and one of the web sites that I found in my search was the web site of the Robert H. Jackson Center in Jamestown, NY.  I was very surprised to find this photo on the home page of the web site:

Boy standing in the ruins of the city of Nuremberg, 1945

Anton Schmidt — two minutes of silence in his honor at Eichmann’s trial

Today as I was organizing the books in my house, I came across an old book, The Borzoi College Reader.  My copy of the book is the third edition, published in 1976; the first edition was published in 1966, so this is not one of my old college books.  It must have been assigned reading for one of my children in college.

I decided to look through the book before throwing it out.  I opened the book in the middle and immediately saw the name Hannah Arendt at the top of the page.  I knew that she was the famous author who wrote about the Eichmann Trial.  The Borzoi College Reader had an excerpt from her book and the title of the excerpt was “Anton Schmidt.”   

Why didn’t Germany use DDT during World War II to stop typhus epidemics?

There are two possible answers to the question of why the Germans didn’t use DDT to stop the typhus epidemics that killed so many people at the tail end of World War II.

1.  DDT was not available in Germany.

2. Germany had already discovered that DDT has dangerous side effects.

I don’t know the answer to this question myself, but I am hoping that a knowledgeable reader can provide the answer.

After doing a little research on the Internet, I learned that DDT was first synthesized in 1874 by German chemist Othmar Zeidler, but DDT was not used as an insecticide until 1939. It was in 1939 that Swiss scientist Paul Hermann Muller discovered the insect-killing properties of DDT.

DDT was used for years in America until it was discovered that when DDT is ingested by humans, it is stored in body fats and can be passed on to nursing babies.

According to this web site:

“Low levels of DDT in humans are harmless but large concentrations can cause severe health problems such as liver cancer. When applied to an insect, DDT is easily absorbed through the body surface. After attacking the nervous system, DDT causes paralysis. Some insects have a resistance to DDT, thereby making the insecticide ineffective. These resistant insects are able to reproduce and pass this trait on to their offspring.”

If the Germans knew this in the 1940s, why didn’t they tell us?
It was not until the 1970s that Americans began to worry about the harmful effects of DDT on the environment. In June 1972, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) canceled all use of DDT on crops. Did the Germans know this 30 years before we figured it out?

The Dachau concentration camp was liberated by American troops on April 29, 1945, but the former inmates had to be kept inside the prison enclosure until all danger of spreading the typhus epidemic, that was killing the prisoners, had passed.

Just before the Americans arrived, up to 400 prisoners had been dying each day in the typhus epidemic which was out of control, according to the testimony of the Chief Doctor of the camp at the proceedings of the American Military Tribunal in November 1945.

DDT was sprayed directly on the prisoners at Dachau by the American liberators

On May 2, 1945, the American military’s 116th Evacuation Hospital arrived at Dachau and set up operations. According to a report made on May 20, 1945, there were 140 prisoners still dying each day in the camp; the principle causes of death were starvation, tuberculosis, typhus and dysentery. On the day the Americans arrived, there had been 4,000 prisoners in the prison hospital and an unknown number of sick prisoners in the barracks who had been receiving no medical attention.

Typhus ward set up by the Americans in the SS barracks

There were 18 one-story wooden SS barrack buildings in the Dachau army garrison, next door to the concentration camp, which were converted into hospital wards by the Americans. The American Army medical personnel were housed in the SS administration building. A Typhus Commission arrived and began vaccinating all medical personnel and the prisoners. There was a daily dusting of DDT to kill the lice which spreads typhus.  The photos above show a prisoner being dusted on the top of his head to kill the lice that spreads typhus and typhus patients in the typhus ward set up in the SS barracks next door to the Dachau concentration camp.

American reporters view the bodies of prisoners who had died of typhus in the Dachau concentration camp

The photo above was taken on May 3, 1945 when American reporters were brought to see the bodies of Dachau prisoners who had died of typhus.  This was the day that the sick prisoners in the Dachau barracks were taken to the hospital wards set up by the Americans. The sick prisoners were bathed, dusted with DDT powder and given clean pajamas to wear; their old prison clothes were burned.

On this same day, May 3, 1945, the American liberators were busy filming the fake gas chamber that they had just constructed in the shower room at Dachau.  The film of the fake gas chamber was shown at the Nuremberg IMT on Nov. 29, 1945.

By July 1945, the typhus epidemic in the Dachau concentration camp had been completely brought under control by the US Army doctors, and all the prisoners had either been released or moved to a Displaced Persons camp at Landsberg am Lech. Around 2500 prisoners died of typhus before the epidemic could be stopped. Before being allowed to leave, the former inmates at Dachau were tested for any signs of typhus by the American doctors, as shown in the photo below.

Dachau prisoners had to pass a typhus test before they could leave Dachau

So why couldn’t the Germans have done what the Americans did?  Just spray all the prisoners with DDT to kill the lice, and burn all the clothes that were filled with lice.  Was there no DDT available in Germany?  Why didn’t America send a couple of tons of DDT over to them?

Instead, the Germans used Zyklon-B in Gaskammeren (gas chambers) at Dachau to kill lice in the prisoners’ clothing.  The American liberators announced to the world, the day after Dachau was liberated, that the Germans were killing people in gas chambers, and that the Germans had cruelly ordered the prisoners to take off their clothes and hang them on hangars before going into the gas chamber.

Famous photo taken outside the disinfection chambers at Dachau concentration camp

Famous photo of a disinfection chamber door at Dachau concentration camp

What about typhus vaccine?  The American soldiers had been vaccinated before being sent overseas.  Why couldn’t America have sent some vaccine to Germany through the Red Cross?

Benjamin B. Ferencz on losing “the spirit of Nuremberg”

Yesterday a Memorium commemorating the Nuremberg “Trials” opened in the courthouse where the “trials” were held 65 years ago.  (Trials is in quotes because these so-called trials were actually military tribunals.)

Deutsche Welle, a German newspaper reported on it and you can read their news article here.

Deutsche Welle reported this:

Benjamin Ferencz, a former US prosecutor in the war crimes trials, and one of the few people participants still alive to have taken part in the trials, returned to Nuremberg at the age of 91 to speak at the opening of the museum on the anniversary of the world’s first war crimes trial.

[…]

Ferencz bore witness to this at the end of the war, and on Sunday used his speech as an opportunity to criticize those countries who, he says, are not giving their full support to the ICC, those whom he believes, have lost the spirit of Nuremberg.

The Ohrdruf labor camp near Gotha, Germany

General Dwight D. Eisenhower is shown in the center of the photo above. The man to the left of General Eisenhower is Benjamin B. Ferencz, who is taking notes. The photo shows the partially burned bodies of prisoners at Ohrdruf.   What is Ferencz writing down?  “Prisoners burned alive at an extermination camp”?  Or is he making a note that these bodies are being burned, instead of buried, to stop the spread of a typhus epidemic?

Ferencz is the soldier on the right with a note pad in his hand

The civilian in the dark suit is a former prisoner in the Ohrdruf camp.  The next day he was killed by a Russian prisoner because he was allegedly a Kapo who was helping the Germans.  The men in the photo are looking at a mass grave that has been opened.  The bodies of prisoners who died at Ohrdruf were buried before they started burning them instead.  Did the Germans get any credit for trying to stop the typhus epidemic?  No, that was not the “spirit of Nuremberg.”

The “spirit of Nuremberg” was to make up ex post facto laws and then present false evidence and make every innocent detail of World War II into a war crime perpetrated by the Germans.  The job assignment of Ferencz was to accompany the American liberators and take notes on the “atrocities” that the Germans would be charged with at Nuremberg.

Here is another quote from Deutsche Welle:

Speaking at the inauguration of the new museum, Ferencz said, “When I left Germany for the first time after World War II and left Nuremberg, my biggest regret was that I never heard from any German saying ‘I’m sorry.’ I would never have believed that I would come back 60 years later and would hear a completely different voice and a different plan in the same country.”

Yes, the Germans have a “different plan” (which was forced on them by the Allied occupation) but they have “taken the high road” and they have “owned” their “guilt.”  They don’t dwell on the fake gas chamber that was shown in a film at the Nuremberg IMT; they accept it.  I read somewhere (I can’t remember the source) that Hermann Goering laughed after seeing the film and said: “We made a few propaganda films ourselves.”

Thomas J. Dodd at the Nuremberg IMT

Today is the 65th anniversary of the day that testimony started in the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal.  During the proceedings, Thomas J. Dodd held up a shrunken head in the courtroom; this is a day that will long be remembered.

 It was on December 13, 1945 that Thomas Dodd introduced USA Exhibit #254: the shrunken head, which Ilse Koch, the wife of Commandant Karl Otto Koch of Buchenwald, had allegedly used as a paperweight.

Thomas J. Dodd and the shrunken head

The making of shrunken heads was an atrocity that came under War Crimes, one the four new categories of crimes that were made up by the Allies specifically for the defeated Germans.  The other three categories were Crimes against Peace, Crimes against Humanity and the designation of the National Socialists (Nazi) political party, as well as the SS, as criminal organizations.

Strangely, the Nazis only made two shrunken heads and they were found at the Buchenwald concentration camp when it was liberated by American soldiers.  After shrinking the heads of two Polish prisoners at Buchenwald, the Nazis gave up this fascinating hobby. Did some German doctors go to South America to learn the art of shrinking heads?  Probably.  I wouldn’t put anything past those evil Nazis.

Thomas J. Dodd was also the prosecutor who introduced USA Exhibit #253: pieces of human tattooed skin from concentration camp prisoners which had been preserved by tanning.

Later, Thomas J. Dodd became a U.S. Senator from Connecticut and the father of Senator Christopher Dodd.

Back when Sen. Christopher Dodd decided to run for President, he wrote a book in which he quoted extensively from the letters that his father had written to his mother while the Nuremberg IMT was in progress.  I read the book, Letters from Nuremberg shortly after it was published.

I was struck by the fact that Thomas J. Dodd seemed to believe that the Allies were being very fair to the Germans and had given them a fair trial.  The only criticism he had was that 75% of the lawyers, involved in the trial of the German war criminals were Jewish.  He didn’t seem to understand that these jobs were given to Jews because they could speak German, or at least Yiddish.

Update Nov. 24, 2010:

A reader asked in a comment if there was a forensic report on the shrunken head.  No, there were no forensic reports on anything because this was not necessary.  The Allies made the rules for the IMT and they included this rule:

V. POWERS OF THE TRIBUNAL AND CONDUCT OF THE TRIAL

[….]

Article 21. The Tribunal shall not require proof of facts of common knowledge but shall take judicial notice thereof.

The making of shrunken heads by the Germans was “common knowledge” that did not require proof, so the Allies were not required to furnish proof that the Germans had made the shrunken head that Thomas J. Dodd held up in the courtroom.

The Allies had made up new laws for the IMT and new rules for the proceedings.

The German “war criminals” were being tried on a charge of participating in a “common plan” to commit war crimes, so it didn’t matter whether any of the accused had actually made this shrunken head. Every German on trial was automatically guilty of making shrunken heads.

The same rule applied to the soap, allegedly made from human fat, which was introduced into evidence at the Nuremberg IMT by the Soviet prosecutors.  There was no forensic report done on the soap because it was common knowledge that the Germans had made soap out of the Jews.

Soap entered into evidence at the Nuremberg IMT

Proof of the Nazi gas chambers given at the Nuremberg IMT on Nov. 29, 1945

The proceedings against the German war criminals of World War II started on November 20, 1945 in the city of Nürnberg, Germany.  This year, the German people are celebrating the 65th anniversary of “the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal” and a new Museum will be open in the court building.

On the 9th day of testimony given by the Allies against the Germans, the American prosecution team presented the most incriminating evidence of all against the Germans: a film which showed the gas chamber at Dachau.

The film footage of the Dachau gas chamber was just a small part of an hour-long movie that started with the burning of concentration camp prisoners in a barn at Gardelegen and covered all the major Nazi atrocities including the lamp shades made out of human skin at Buchenwald and the emaciated bodies of typhus victims being pushed by a bulldozer into mass graves at Bergen-Belsen.

The film footage entitled Atrocities at Dachau, Story RG-60.0843, Tape 828 was made on May 3, 1945.  The film shows the two black objects between the control wheels in the center of the black and white photo below but the movie camera did not pan down to include the peep hole which can be seen in the photo. The rectangular box, located above the peephole in the black and white photo below, is clearly shown in the film and it appears to be a panel with push buttons.

The film shows the Dachau gas chamber, and the “engineer’s room” behind it, while the narrator explains how the victims were gassed. Large pipes and control wheels, located behind the west wall of the gas chamber, are shown as the narrator says:  “A man at the controls let in the poison gas.”

The photo below, which was taken in 1945 shortly after the Dachau camp was liberated, shows the pipes and control wheels behind the west wall of the gas chamber.

“Engineer’s room” with control wheels and peephole behind west wall of gas chamber Photo Credit: USHMM, courtesy of William and Dorothy McLaughlin Copyright: USHMM

In the center of the photo above is a rectangular panel with push buttons, which is approximately at shoulder level for a man six feet tall.  To the left of the push buttons is a switch box with a handle that can be thrown to let something “Ein” or “Aus” which in English means On or Off.

Just below the push button panel is a small round peephole with its cover lifted up.  Why is the peephole so low on the wall?  Those SS guys were 6 ft. 5 and would have had to bend down to check out the victims in the gas chamber.  The placement of the peep hole suggests that it was not there when the switch box and the push button box were installed, but was added later and the only space available was a spot that was too low.

On the far left and on the right in the photo above are the wheels that an operator allegedly turned, to let the gas flow into the chamber through three pipes above the ceiling. All of the shower heads have been stolen from the Dachau gas chamber, and it can now be seen that the shower heads were not connected to any pipes, either water pipes or gas pipes.

So if the shower room at Dachau could not have been used for showers, nor for gassing, what was the purpose of the room?  The room was completed in May 1943, and apparently not used for any purpose, yet the room was kept, along with an undressing room and a waiting room, so that the American liberators could find evidence that Jews were gassed in the concentration camps.

In the film, a closeup of the panel in the center of the photo above shows that it has four push buttons. The narrator of the film explains that the buttons were used to “control inflow and outtake of gas.” There are four sets of lights in the gas chamber, two sets on the south wall and two sets on the north wall.  The push buttons might actually have been used to turn the lights on and off. However, in the film shown at Nuremberg, which was made by the American Army on May 3, 1945, four of the light fixture boxes are called “top vents” through which the poison gas was vented out of the room.

A display in the undressing room in May 2007 informed visitors that the push buttons were stolen after the camp was liberated. The area behind the west wall of the gas chamber, which is shown in the photo above, is off limits to visitors now.

An empty light fixture box that was called a “top vent” in the film shown at the Nuremberg IMT

One of the “top vents,” which was featured in the film at Nuremberg, is shown in the photo above, taken in May 2003. This empty light fixture box is called a “gas vent” in the film that was shot by Hollywood director George Stevens on May 3, 1945 and shown at the Nuremberg IMT on November 29, 1945.

A light fixture box in the Dachau shower room

The photo above, taken in May 2007, shows one of the remaining light fixtures in the alleged gas chamber. The light fixture box is flush against the ceiling.  Notice the very sloppy construction job.  Who puts a light fixture flush against the ceiling?  Could the ceiling have been lowered from 10 ft. down to the present height after the room was originally constructed?  The two rooms on either side of the alleged gas chamber have 10 ft. ceilings.

In the film that was shown at the Nuremberg IMT on November 29, 1945, a US soldier can be seen opening the heavy steel door that separates the undressing room from the alleged gas chamber. In the film, the first thing we see, on the wall opposite the door, are two “gas vents,” one of which is shown in my color photo above. Then we see a “gas nozzle” which looks like a shower head stuck into the concrete ceiling with no visible pipes.

I took this photo of the last remaining shower head in the Dachau shower room in May 2001

Heating vent near the floor in the southwest corner of the Dachau shower room

The photo above shows a large square vent located just above the floor on the west wall of the Dachau shower room. This vent is shown in the film, as the narrator says that it is a “gas vent.”  Today, tour guides at Dachau tell visitors that this is a heating vent, used to warm up the Zykon-B, which needs to be heated in order to release the poison.

The film also shows an unopened can of Zyklon-B pellets which is called “cyanide powder” by the narrator. The Americans should have opened up that can of Zyklon-B.  They would have seen that the gas was in the form of pellets, not powder, and it could not have gone through the shower heads.  They should have done some research to learn that the Zyklon-B pellets needed to be heated.  They should have mentioned in the film that the heating vent on the west wall was used to heat the Zyklon-B pellets, which is what tourists today are told.

Now the tour guides at Dachau tell visitors that the poison pellets “could have been” put through the two small windows on the east wall of the alleged gas chamber.  Sure, the Zyklon-B  pellets “could have been” thrown into the room through the two little windows if those windows had been there between May 1943 and May 1945.

Two vents on the east wall of the Dachau shower room

The Nuremberg film shows a sign on the wall of the morgue that reads “Reinlichkeit is hier Pflight deshalb Hände waschen nicht vergessen.” In English, this means “Cleanliness is a duty here, therefore don’t forget to wash your hands.” This sign has now been painted over.

The film footage that is available on the USHMM web site is raw footage with no sound, but the transcript of the narration about the gas chamber in the finished movie is quoted below:

This is the Brausebad — the shower bath. Inside the shower bath — the gas vents. On the ceiling — the dummy shower heads. In the engineers room — the intake and outlet pipes. Push buttons to control inflow and outtake of gas. A hand-valve to regulate pressure. Cyanide powder was used to generate the lethal smoke. From the gas chamber, the bodies were removed to the crematory.

A delegation of US Congressmen flew to Paris on April 22, 1945, at General Eisenhower’s request.  Remember that Eisenhower famously said that some day people might believe that it was all propaganda.  So Eisenhower wanted to make sure that there were plenty of witnesses to the Nazi atrocities.

The Congressmen visited the Buchenwald concentration camp on April 24, 1945, two weeks after the camp was liberated on April 11th. The Congressmen arrived in Dachau on May 1, 1945, the same day that newsreels were first released in American theaters, showing the Nazi atrocities at Buchenwald and Bergen-Belsen. Dachau had been liberated on April 29, 1945, just two days before the Congressmen arrived.

So what did the Congressmen do on May 1st, their first day at Dachau?  Did they relax in a nice hotel in the town of Dachau?  Or did they go directly to the Dachau camp and look around?  Were the Congressmen anxious to see the alleged gas chamber or did they hang around for two days in the town, before checking out the gas chamber?

Zieglerbrau  Brewery and Inn in the town of Dachau

Photo of the congressmen in the Dachau gas chamber

The old black and white photo above was taken on May 3, 1945.  The photo below, which shows the same view of the Dachau gas chamber, was taken in May 2001.  Notice the sign that says, in 5 languages, that the gas chamber was never used.  That sign was removed in 2003 and visitors are now told that the gas chamber was used, although not for “mass gassing.”

Dachau “gas chamber” May 2001

In the old black and white photo, the second Congressman from the right is pointing towards the northeast corner of the gas chamber, where there is a square vent in the ceiling and one of the “gas vents” shown in the movie of the gas chamber, taken on May 3, 1945.

The Congressman seems to be pointing to the “gas vent” in a light fixture box in the northeast corner, while ignoring the large opening on the wall near the floor.  How could the Congressmen have missed seeing the small windows that are on the wall of the shower room today?  Maybe the Congressmen didn’t see the windows on the east wall because they weren’t there in May 1945!

The northeast corner of the Dachau shower room

In their report, the Congressmen wrote:

“A distinguishing feature of the Dachau Camp was the gas chamber for the execution of prisoners and the somewhat elaborate facilities for execution by shooting. The gas chamber was located in the center of a large room in the crematory building. It was built of concrete. Its dimensions were about 20 by 20 feet, and the ceiling was some 10 feet in height. In two opposite walls of the chamber were airtight doors through which condemned prisoners could be taken into the chamber for execution and removed after execution. The supply of gas into the chamber was controlled by means of two valves on one of the outer walls, and beneath the valves was a small glass-covered peephole through which the operator could watch the victims die. The gas was let into the chamber through pipes terminating in perforated brass fixtures set into the ceiling. The chamber was of a size sufficient to execute probably a hundred men at one time.”

In their report, the Congressmen described the ceiling of the Dachau gas chamber as being 10 feet high and pointed out that “The gas was let into the chamber through pipes terminating in perforated brass fixtures set into the ceiling.” The one remaining shower head, which I saw in 2001, was made of sheet metal. The ceiling of the alleged gas chamber is now much lower.  The empty holes for the shower heads show that the shower heads had not been connected to any pipes.  So where are the “pipes terminating in perforated brass fixtures” which the Congressmen reported?  Are the pipes still hanging from the 10 ft. ceiling that is now hidden by a new ceiling that was constructed by the American liberators in May 1945?

Did the Dachau shower room originally have shower heads hanging from pipes on the ceiling like the pipes shown in the photo below, before some re-construction was done by the American liberators?  The photo was taken at the Mauthausen concentration camp; it shows a real water pipe entering the room through the wall.

A shower head hanging from pipes on the ceiling

Why doesn’t the Congressional Report match the photo of the Congressmen inside the gas chamber on May 3, 1945?  Did the Congressmen go to the alleged gas chamber on May 1st and write their report immediately? The film that was shown at Nuremberg was taken two days later; was there some construction done in the two days before the film was shot?

The peephole in the alleged gas chamber presents a problem.  If the room was actually a shower room, why was a peephole necessary?  The Congressmen, who were filmed inside the alleged gas chamber on May 3, 1945, mentioned the peephole in their report.  However, if they had previously seen the alleged gas chamber on May 1st, before any modification of the shower room was done, would they have seen a peephole?  Yes. It is possible that re-construction on the shower room had started on April 30, 1945.

Peephole and water faucet on the west wall of the Dachau shower room

Notice that the frames around the two openings do not match. This is an indication that the two frames were not installed at the same time.  The tiles around the peephole do not match the rest of the tiles on the wall.

The photo below shows a closeup of the peephole.

Close-up of the peephole in the Dachau shower room

Why is the peephole so large?  On the other side of the wall, the peephole has a tiny, round metal frame.  Did the Americans have trouble making a tiny hole in the tile on the other side of the wall?

The photo below, taken after the camp was liberated, shows that the peep hole is too low on the wall.  On the right side of the photo, you can see several wooden coffins, stacked up.

The only known photo of the Dachau gas chamber in 1945

The Congressmen’s report is entitled Document No. 47 of the 79th Congress, 1st Session, Senate Report (May 15, 1945) of the Committee Requested by Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower to the Congress of the U.S. relative to Atrocities and other Conditions in Concentration Camps in Germany. This document was entered into the Nuremberg trial proceedings as IMT Document L-159.

I don’t know if the Congressmen’s report will be in the new Museum at Nuremberg, but it should be.  Another document that should be in the new Museum is the Report of the Atrocities Committed at Dachau Concentration Camp, signed by Col. David Chavez, Jr., JAGD, 7 May 1945.

The Chavez report, which was entered into the Nuremberg IMT, is quoted below:

“The new building had a gas chamber for executions… the gas chamber was labeled “shower room” over the entrance and was a large room with airtight doors and double glassed lights, sealed and gas proof. The ceiling was studded with dummy shower heads. A small observation peephole, double glassed and hermetically sealed was used to observe the conditions of the victims. There were grates in the floor. Hydrogen cyanide was mixed in the room below, and rose into the gas chamber and out the top vents.”

The “grates in the floor” are drains that are connected to the sewer line.  According to the Chavez report, the poison gas rose up through the floor drains and was then vented through the light fixture boxes.  But why was the gas vented through the light fixture boxes when there was a vent on the ceiling in the northeast corner?  (Look at the photo above which shows the northeast corner.)  The Chavez report seems to be suggesting that there was no ceiling vent for the gas.  Was the ceiling vent put there a few days AFTER the American liberators arrived?  Is that why the shower heads are randomly placed on the ceiling instead of being in three identical rows?

An affidavit, given by Dr. Franz Blaha, a prisoner at Dachau, to Col. David Chavez on 3 May 1945, was also entered into the proceedings of the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal. Except for the film of the Dachau gas chamber that was shown at Nuremberg on November 29, 1945, Dr. Blaha’s affidavit was the only evidence presented at Nuremberg which proved that prisoners had been gassed at Dachau.

The affidavit by Dr. Franciszek Blaha, a Czech Communist inmate at Dachau, which was introduced at the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal, is quoted below:

Nuremberg Trial Proceedings Vol. 5
THIRTY-SECOND DAY
Friday, 11 January 1946

“12. Many executions by gas or shooting or injections took place right in the camp. The gas chamber was completed in 1944, and I was called by Dr. Rascher to examine the first victims. Of the eight or nine persons in the chamber there were three still alive, and the remainder appeared to be dead. Their eyes were red, and their faces were swollen. Many prisoners were later killed in this way. Afterwards they were removed to the crematorium where I had to examine their teeth for gold. Teeth containing gold were extracted. Many prisoners who were sick were killed by injections while in the hospital. Some prisoners killed in the hospital came through to the autopsy room with no name or number on the tag which was usually tied to their big toe. Instead the tag said ‘Do not dissect’. I performed autopsies on some of these and found that they were perfectly healthy but had died from injections. Sometimes prisoners were killed only because they had dysentery or vomited and gave the nurses too much trouble. Mental patients were liquidated by being led to the gas chamber and injected there or shot. Shooting was a common method of execution. Prisoners could be shot just outside the crematorium and carried in. I have seen people pushed into the ovens while they were still breathing and making sounds, although if they were too much alive they were usually hit on the head first. “

Note that Dr. Blaha said that the gas chamber was completed in 1944.  The building where the alleged gas chamber is located was completed in May 1943. Was the shower room converted into a gas chamber in 1944?  Did the Nazis really allow a Communist prisoner to examine the bodies of prisoners who had been gassed, so that he could testify against them in the event that they lost the war?  Why didn’t the SS men at Dachau keep the gassing a secret and blow up the gas chamber building before they left on April 28th, the day before the camp was liberated?

Dr. Georg Konrad Morgen was a defense witness for the SS at the Nuremberg IMT. The SS had been charged with being a criminal organization.  Dr. Morgen testified that Dr. Blaha, who was a prisoner at Dachau, could not have seen what he claimed to have seen because prisoners were not allowed in all parts of the camp.

Dr. Morgen was a Nazi judge who had been appointed by Heinrich Himmler to inspect the concentration camps to determine if there was any corruption or abuse of the prisoners.  He had 5 of the concentration camp Commandants arrested and two of them were executed.  Yet, Dr. Morgen gave the Dachau camp a good report.

How come Dr. Morgen didn’t find out about the gas chamber at Dachau?  Dr. Morgen DID testify at the Nuremberg IMT that there was a gas chamber at the Auschwitz III camp but the SS was not responsible for it.  He didn’t do anything about the alleged gas chamber at Auschwitz III (Monowitz) because it had allegedly been ordered personally by Hitler.

You can read about the “human soap” evidence presented by the Soviet Union at the Nuremberg IMT here.

What about entering false evidence into the proceedings of a Tribunal?  Is that a crime?