The story of Viktor Frankl, a famous Holocaust survivor

I was browsing through the CODOH website this morning when I came across some interesting information about Viktor Frankl, the famous Psychiatrist, who survived four Nazi camps, including the Auschwitz death camp and the infamous Dachau camp.  There is an article in the CODOH library, entitled The Human Face of Holocaust Revisionism, written by Chris Crookes, which you can read in full here.

This quote is from the article by Chris Crookes:

…. I spent a few days lying out in the sun in the garden reading the biography of Viktor Frankl Trotzdem Ja zum Leben Sagen (Man’s Search for Meaning). I realized I had never read an eye-witness account of the biggest crime of the last century and I was also interested in the subject of how we apply meaning to our experiences. So I had bought it online from Amazon.

In the first half of the book Frankl (who was a psychiatrist) wrote of his experiences in WW2 as a Jew in concentration labor camps. As I read it I noticed he kept jumping between two contradictory viewpoints, sometimes in the space of a few pages.

At some places he affirmed that all the Jews themselves knew that if they were going to Auschwitz, then they were destined for almost certain annihilation. And at other times he asserts that they didn’t know. At some places he asserts that he and other people upon arrival knew that they were getting segregated into lines either for gassing or for work, and at others he maintains that the people didn’t know what the segregation was for.

That was confusing.

At one point he states how he himself knew, as after being selected by Joseph Mengele “to the left for the gas chamber,” he relates how he “switched behind Mengele’s back” to the right.

Then there were other odd things. He says he got out of Auschwitz by volunteering as a doctor. He wrote that he left in a transportation of ill inmates taken to Bavaria in 1944. The thought occurred: “Jewish inmates were not being gassed then? They were instead being transported out for medical care elsewhere?” That was a bit surprising.

Then he wrote how in Bavaria he worked as a doctor treating ill inmates in a hospital camp in the typhus ward near Dachau. I thought: “Er… They were taking care of them? In 1944? Jews with Typhoid? Trying to cure them?”

THEN after finishing the book I discovered that despite him giving the impression that he had been at Auschwitz at the very least for many months, that he had in fact only been there for 3 or 4 days. It was then that my curiosity was piqued and my research into this started. And it was then that I was reminded of the Colonel’s wife (who had been a young girl at the time of these events) claiming that nobody knew what was going on in the camps.

So it was that I started to re-evaluate all this. How was she—and the other town residents—supposed to know about that, if a camp inmate at Auschwitz couldn’t make up his mind whether he himself knew or not?

The important point, to take from this article, is that Viktor Frankl couldn’t decide whether prisoners were gassed at Auschwitz or not, so how could the people in the nearby towns, such as Dachau, know that prisoners were being gassed.  In recent years, the German people have been demonized for not helping the Jews, claiming that they didn’t know what was going on in the camps.

I previously blogged about the people in the town of Dachau here and here.  I blogged about how the people in the town of Dachau were punished for not helping the Jews here.

But to get back to Viktor Frankl, here is the short version of his experience in the Nazi camps:  He was first sent to the Theresienstadt Ghetto, which was the camp for the prominent Jews.  From there, he was sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau.  Holocaust experts will tell you that the only reason that Jews were sent, from Theresienstadt to Auschwitz, was to kill them.  But after only three or four days at Auschwitz-Birkenau, he was sent to the Dachau main camp.  From there, he was sent to the Kaufering III sub-camp where he worked as a doctor, treating prisoners who had typhus.

Frankl was not registered at Auschwitz-Birkenau, which according to the Holocaust experts, means that he was gassed.  Then he was sent to the Dachau main camp, where he was again not registered before being sent on to the Kaufering III sub-camp.

According to Wikipedia: “In March 1945, he was offered to be moved to the so called rest-camp Türkheim, also affiliated with Dachau. He decided to go to Türkheim, where he worked as a doctor until 27 April 1945, when Frankl was liberated by the Americans.”

The estimates, made by Holocaust experts, of how many prisoners were gassed at Auschwitz-Birkenau are based on the number of prisoners that were not registered.

This quote is from an article on the IHR website:

Was Holocaust Survivor Viktor Frankl Gassed at Auschwitz.

Few men who emerged from the camps can match the late Viktor Frankl for acclaim. A psychiatrist from Vienna who died in 1997, Frankl gained international renown for the theories of mental health he expounded through his psychiatric school, logotherapy. Inextricably bound up with Frankl’s fame, teachings, and moral authority was his experience of the German concentration camps, above all Auschwitz, as described in Man’s Search for Meaning (U.S., 1959) a worldwide bestseller that has been ranked as one of the ten most influential books of the twentieth century by the Library of Congress.

In his reminiscence, Frankl recounted his stay at Auschwitz as if it had lasted an eternity. Now comes Timothy Pytell, adjunct professor of history at the Cooper Union in New York City, to inform us that, based on his research for an intellectual biography of Frankl, the celebrated survivor spent at most three days at Auschwitz, while in transit from Theresienstadt in Bohemia to a subcamp of Dachau in October 1944. As Pytell observes, a reader of Man’s Search for Meaning would “be stunned to discover that Frankl spent only a few days in Auschwitz.” In the book, Frankl devotes some thirty pages to Auschwitz. Besides recording his experiences on arrival (shaving, showering, delousing, etc.), Frankl makes observations about the lot of inmates there that strongly imply that, at the very least, he spent months, not days, at the camp. (“We had to wear the same shirts for half a year, until they had lost all appearance of being shirts.”) As Pytell writes of Frankl’s depiction of his stay at Auschwitz: “But if truth be told, Frankl’s rendition is contradictory and profoundly deceptive.”

Pytell notes that Frankl was transferred from Theresienstadt on October 19, 1944, on a train that carried 1500 persons to Auschwitz, and that the prisoner’s log of the Dachau sub-camp Kaufering III records Frankl’s arrival on October 25, 1944. Indeed, Frankl himself told the American evangelist Robert Schuller, in an interview published in Schuller’s magazine Possibilities (March-April 1991): “I was in Auschwitz only three or four days … I was sent to a barrack and we were all transported to a camp in Bavaria.” Thus the credibility of yet another star survivor has been tested and found wanting. Like the testimony of Miklos Nyiszli, Filip Müller, Rudolf Vrba, Mel Mermelstein, and a host of other eyewitness oracles, Viktor Frankl’s Auschwitz stories are now an embarrassment to the Holocaust industry, rather than an indictment of the Germans.

There’s more, however. While Pytell wasn’t up to examining the implications of Frankl’s stay at Auschwitz for the reliability of the camp’s official history, records compiled by exterminationist researcher of Theresienstadt H. G. Adler and by the Auschwitz State Museum make clear that if Frankl arrived at Auschwitz on October 20, 1944, he must have left Theresienstadt on a train with 1,500 passengers, designated “Es.” The English-language edition of the supposedly authoritative Auschwitz Chronicle, 1939-45 (editor Danuta Czech, London: I.B.Tauris, 1990), based on material from the Auschwitz State Museum, reports of that train:

    October 20

    1,500 Jewish men, women, and children are sent in an RSHA transport from the ghetto in Theresienstadt. After the selection, 169 women are admitted to the transit camp and 173 men as prisoners to the camp. The men receive Nos. B-13307-B-13479. The remaining 1,158 people are killed in the gas chamber of Crematorium III.

Now, while Viktor Frankl reports at length in his chatty memoir about his reception at Auschwitz (including the obligatory brush with Dr. Mengele), he says not a word about being registered, assigned a number, tattooed with that number, or transferred to the Auschwitz Stammlager, the permanent camp). Thus one can conclude that he was not admitted as a prisoner to the camp. And the Chronicle’s entry speaks of no surviving, non-registered persons from that shipment. Ergo, according to the Auschwitz Chronicle, and the records on which it claims to be based, Viktor Frankl must have beem gassed nearly fifty-three years before his widely announced death in September 1997. Who was it, then, who was sent out of Auschwitz a few days later, and went on to write all those books?