Holocaust denier David Irving will be allowed back into Germany

The Mail Online is reporting that David Irving has won a victory in a German court and will be allowed to enter Germany again.  This quote is from an article in The Mail Online:

A Munich court convicted and fined him in 1993 on a charge of insulting the memory of the dead after he disputed that the gas chambers at Auschwitz killed hundreds of thousands of Jews.

He told a group of right-wingers in 1993 that the Polish government built the chambers after the war to ‘show tourists.’

In 1993, when David Irving said that the gas chamber in the main Auschwitz camp was built after the war, to show to tourists, the Auschwitz Museum was telling visitors that the gas chamber in the main camp was original, not a reconstruction.  Now the Auschwitz Museum admits that the gas chamber in the main camp is a reconstruction, so the basis for charging David Irving with a crime for Holocaust denial is now gone.

A poster outside the Auschwitz gas chamber shows the changes made during the reconstruction

When I visited the Auschwitz gas chamber in 1998, I was told that it was original, but when I returned in 2005, I was amazed to see a poster outside, which showed the changes made during the reconstruction.

The photo above shows the poster, which is located outside the gas chamber building in the Auschwitz main camp. On the left, the poster depicts the layout of the gas chamber building as it originally looked and on the right, the way it looked after the gas chamber was reconstructed in 1947.

After he was charged with a crime, under Germany’s Holocaust denial law, and given a fine without a trial, David Irving never entered Germany again because he knew that he would be arrested for not paying his fine.  Now he will be able to go to Germany again to continue his research in the German archives.

Note that David Irving did not get his good name back.  He will always be known as Holocaust Denier David Irving.

Original blueprint of the gas chamber building in the main Auschwitz camp

The photo above shows the original blueprint for the Krema I building in the Auschwitz main camp. The morgue, shown on the bottom right of the blueprint, has a door into the oven room and another door into the washroom. The gas chamber was in the same location as the morgue, but it did not include the area of the washroom. Note the door from the vestibule into the washroom; this door no longer exists and the area of the former wash room is included in the reconstructed gas chamber.

The blueprint for the crematorium at Auschwitz I shows that there were three ovens when the crematorium was in operation. The picture below shows a trolley which is in front of where the third oven used to be, behind the first two and in front of the window on the outside wall. According to the construction plans, the windows were added when the building was converted into an air raid shelter.

The third oven in the original crematorium in the main Auschwitz camp was in this location

Entrance into the Auschwitz crematorium where the victims entered to be gassed to death

The photo above shows the original entrance door into the crematorium building at the Auschwitz main camp. This is the door that tourists now enter to see the gas chamber, and it is the same door that the victims entered. According to the detailed construction plans for the air raid shelter, the windows shown in the photo were added in 1944.   A new door, on the other side of the building, was also added when the building was converted into an air raid shelter for the SS men.

A reader of this blog has put two photos in a comment on this post.

I took the same photo when I was at Auschwitz, but I didn’t include the window behind the ovens, which “The Black Rabbit” shows in his photos.

Ovens in the Auschwitz main camp crematorium

My photo above shows the area behind the ovens where there is a light bulb, but my flash did not pick up a window behind the ovens.  I was focusing on the device in the foreground which was for carrying the bodies on the trolleys that you see in front of the ovens.  I did go behind the ovens, but it never occurred to me to photograph the wall behind me. My photo of the rear of the ovens is shown below.

Rear of cremation ovens in Auschwitz main camp

As for what David Irving now believes, I attended one of his lectures a few years ago, and he said that he now believes that Treblinka was a death camp.  He did not say anything about gassing prisoners in the “bunkers” nor anything about the four gas chambers at the Birkenau camp, which are now in ruins.

Yellow Journalism in today’s newspapers

Yesterday, I blogged about Wilhelm Brasse, a prisoner who was put to work as a photographer in the Auschwitz concentration camp in the 1940s.  A reader alerted me to a news article in The Mail Online which tells about Brasse’s work at Auschwitz. This article is an example of Yellow Journalism at it’s best.

For the benefit of readers who are not familiar with the term Yellow Journalism, I am quoting Wikipedia:

Yellow journalism, or the yellow press, is a type of journalism that presents little or no legitimate well-researched news and instead uses eye-catching headlines to sell more newspapers.[1] Techniques may include exaggerations of news events, scandal-mongering, or sensationalism.[1] By extension, the term yellow journalism is used today as a pejorative to decry any journalism that treats news in an unprofessional or unethical fashion.[2]

Here is the eye-catching headline in The Mail Online:

The photographer at Auschwitz: Man forced to take chilling images of inmates and their Nazi guards was haunted until his death at 94

The Mail Online illustrated the article with photos taken by Brasse, including the chilling image below.

Maximillian Grabner, the head of the Political Department at Auschwitz

If you think the image of Maximillian Grabner is chilling, you should see what he really looked like.  I consider this to be an excellent portrait of the man. The caption on this photo, in The Mail Online, is this:

“Jailer: SS officer Maximilian Grabner was also captured on film by prisoner Brasse in the photography department at Auschwitz”

Maximillian Grabner was the director of the Political Department in Auschwitz. He was arrested by Dr. Konrad Morgen, an SS Judge, who was assigned to investigate all the Nazis camps for incidents of cruelty or abuse of the prisoners. Grabner had been accused of killing 2,000 prisoners “beyond the general guidelines.” Grabner was put on trial by an SS court in Weimar, Germany but was not convicted. In 1947, Grabner was tried and sentenced to death by the Polish Supreme War Tribunal in Krakow.

This quote from The Mail Online is an example of Yellow Journalism:

One day, a prisoner was sent to him because one of the camp doctors, the infamous Nazi Dr Josef Mengele, wanted a photograph of the man’s unusual tattoo.

He said: ‘It was quite beautiful. It was a tattoo of Adam and Eve standing before the Tree in the Garden of Eden, and it had obviously been done by a skilled artist.’

About an hour after taking the photograph, he learned that the man had been killed. He was called by another prisoner to come to one of the camp crematoria where he saw the dead man had been skinned.

Mr Brasse said: ‘The skin with the tattoo was stretched on a table waiting to be framed for this doctor. It was a horrible, horrible sight.’

Back in the days before Yellow Journalism became the norm in the mainsteam media, a good journalist would have explained that Brasse’s claim of being called by another prisoner to one of the camp crematoria would have been quite unusual since Brasse was working in the main Auschwitz camp, which had only one crematorium. Apparently Brasse was called by another prisoner to come to the Auschwitz II camp which had four crematoria.  It would have been very unusual for Brasse to leave his job in the main camp, at the request of another prisoner, to travel 3 kilometers to another camp to take a photo of a dead man who had been skinned for his tattoo.  This part of the article reads as if it were written by Holocaust liar survivor Irene Zisblatt.

This quote is also from The Mail Online:

Mr Brasse and another inmate managed to bury thousands of negatives in the camp’s grounds which were later recovered.

Too bad that Brasse didn’t bury the negative of the man with the tattoo, whom he photographed after the man had been skinned.

Here is more of the horror printed by The Mail Online:

In February 1941, he was summoned to the camp commander’s office, the notoriously brutal Rudolf Höss, who would later be hanged for his crimes.

Mr Brasse was certain that this was the end but when he arrived he discovered that the SS was looking for photographers.

There followed what must have been a bizarre and terrifying experience. The assembled men were tested on their photographic skills.

Each must have known failure would mean a return to hard labour and death.

He said: ‘We were five people. They went through everything with us – the laboratory skills and the technical ability with a camera. I had the skills as well as being able to speak German, so I was chosen.’

The Nazis wanted documentation of their prisoners. The Reich was obsessed with bureaucratic records and setup ‘Erkennungsdienst,’ the photographic identification unit.

Based in the camp, it included cameramen, darkroom technicians and designers.

I don’t want to say anything about the liberal bias of newspapers today because this would attract hateful comments by readers who disagree with this opinion, so I will just quote Wikipedia on the subject of liberal bias:

Liberal bias in the media occurs when liberal ideas have undue influence on the coverage or selection of news stories.

Conservative critics of the media say some bias exists within a wide variety of media channels including network news shows of CBS, ABC, and NBC, cable channels CNN, MSNBC and Current TV, as well as major newspapers, news-wires, and radio outlets, especially CBS News, Newsweek, and The New York Times.[21]

The Mail Online goes far beyond liberal bias, into the realm of Yellow Journalism.

Photos taken by Wilhelm Brasse at Auschwitz, and some that were not taken by him

Just when I thought that I was all blogged out, a reader of my blog made a comment that included three links to the news about the death of Wilhelm Brasse, the photographer at Auschwitz.  Two of the links (New York Times and Spiegel) showed the identification photos of a young Polish girl, which you can see below.

Here is the caption on the photo in the New York Times:

Prisoner identity photographs, taken by Wilhelm Brasse, of Czeslawa Kwoka of Poland. According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Czeslawa arrived with her family at Auschwitz on Dec. 13, 1942, and died on March 12, 1943. She was 14.

I actually remember seeing these photos of this young girl in the Museum exhibits in the Auschwitz main camp when I was there in 1998.

Why have these photos captured the attention of the world?  The photos of this young girl capture the essence of the misfortune of the Auschwitz prisoners.  This is a cute young girl, only 14 years old, but the first two photos show her as old and haggard, her hair shown, and her lips compressed in definance. In the third photo, the photographer has captured her youth and beauty with a jaunty scarf on her head and an upward adoring gaze.  The girl has been “humanized” by the photographer with the way that he posed her in the third photo.

The first photo shows that her head is pressed against a device to hold her head at the correct distance from the camera, so that the photographer did not have to re-focus the camera for each new prisoner.

The quality of the photos is excellent, indicating that a camera with a good portrait lens was being used, and that the photographer knew how to develop and print black and white photos, which is now a lost art.

The third link given by a reader of my blog was to the Wikipedia entry for Wilhelm Brasse.

Wilhelm Brasse holds a photo which he allegedly took at Auschwitz

The photo above is shown on the Wikipedia page for Wilhelm Brasse with this caption:

Brasse in 2005 with one of his Auschwitz photographs

Oops! The photo that Brasse is holding is NOT one of the photos that he took. It is a still shot from a film taken by the Soviet liberators of Auschwitz.  The Soviets filmed these prisoners because, according to the Soviets, these were Jews who had been experimented on by Dr. Josef Mengele.  Wilhelm Brasse could not have taken the film which included this still shot because he had been death marched out of the Auschwitz camp on January 18, 1945 before the Soviets arrived on January 27, 1945 to liberate the camp.

So why did Brasse pose with this still photo?  Did his memory fail him and he couldn’t remember which photos that he took?  Or was he persuaded to pose with a photo that he knew was NOT  one of the photos that he had taken?

I previous blogged about the photo that Brasse is holding here.  Don’t bother trying to change the Wikipedia entry; the lie about this photo is so firmly entrenched into Holocaust history that it is one of those famous “events that never happened, but are true.”

The photo actually shows Gypsy children who are suffering from the disease called “Noma.”  When the Gypsy camp was closed, all the Gypsies were sent to the gas chamber, except for these children who had Noma, who were left behind for some unknown reason.  I previously blogged about the gassing of the Gypsies here and here.

The news articles about the death of Wilhelm Brasse mention that he did not take photos of the prisoners who were immediately gassed upon arrival at Auschwitz.  That is correct: the prisoners who were gassed immediately were not registered in the Auschwitz camp, so no identification photos were taken of them.  That is why the names of the prisoners who were immediately gassed are completely unknown; also the number of Jews who were immediately gassed is completely unknown.  The Nazis were no fools; they had the good sense not to leave behind records of the Jews who were gassed.

This quote is from Wikipedia about Wilhelm Brasse:

Dr. Mengele had insisted that Brasse take the “identity” portraits of Auschwitz prisoners “in three poses: from the front and from each side.”[4] After taking hundreds of thousands of such photographs, Brasse and others disobeyed later Nazi orders to destroy them,[4] yet only some of his photos have survived….

Personally, I don’t believe that Dr. Mengele had anything to do with the “identity” portraits.  The taking of the identity portraits in the main camp started long before Dr. Mengele arrived at the Birkenau camp to be the doctor assigned to take care of the Gypsy family camp.

 

The ruins at Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1979, compared to today

An article in the online Telegraph, which you can read here, includes a photo that allegedly shows the ruins of one of the gas chambers at Auschwitz II, aka Birkenau.  It is an old black and white photo, taken in 1979.  I enhanced the photo, using Photoshop and reproduced it below.

Here is the caption on the photo, copied from the Telegraph:

FILE – In this undated file photo from 1979, a former inmate of the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Poland sometime in 1979, gazes down at ruins of gas chambers where hundreds of people were exterminated during World War II. The oldest known survivor of the Auschwitz concentration camp, a teacher who gave lessons in defiance of his native Poland’s Nazi occupiers has died at the age of 108, an official said Monday, Oct. 22, 2012. Antoni Dobrowolski died Sunday in the northwestern Polish town of Debno, according to Jaroslaw Mensfelt, a spokesman at the Auschwitz-Birkenau state museum.

1979 photo of an Auschwitz survivor viewing the ruins at Auschwitz-Birkenau

My 2005 photo of the ruins of the undressing room in Krema II

In the color photo above, note the steps of the International Monument on the right hand side. Note the guard tower in the background on the right.  My 2005 photo matches the 1979 black and white photo above, indicating that the man is not looking at the ruins of a gas chamber, but at the ruins of the undressing room of Krema II.

Another 2005 photo of the undressing room of Krema II

Again, note the guard tower and the steps of the International Monument on the right in the photo above. In the foreground, you can some of the ruins of the oven room, which was at ground level.  The undressing room was 5 feet underground.

The ruins of the Krema II gas chamber

My 2005 photo of the ruins of the Krema II gas chamber shows the International Monument in the background, slightly to the left.

Now look at the old black and white photo again.  It appears that some reconstruction of the ruins was done between 1979 and 2005.  Also, look at the background of the photo.  It looks like wide open countryside, with no trees hiding the view of the Jews walking into the undressing room.  Shouldn’t there have been a fence or a row of trees to hide the “mass murder” that was going on in the camp?

My 2005 photo of the ruins of the undressing room in Krema II

My 2005 photo above shows that the undressing room has been reconstructed, and a row of trees has been planted to hide the prisoners entering the undressing room from onlookers outside the camp.  The path, that the prisoners walked, up to the undressing room entrance should also have been reconstructed.

I am not convinced that there was an entrance to the undressing room in this location. A model of Krema II and the blueprint for the Krema II building are shown below.

Model of Krema II gas chamber building

In the photo above, notice that there is a door into the gas chamber building shown on the wall of the building on the left side. There was an exterior entrance with a staircase on the north side of the Krema II building, which led to the Vorraum of Krema II so that the SS men could enter Leichenkeller 1, the gas chamber, without going through Leichenkeller 2, which was the undressing room. In case of emergency, the gas chamber could be used as a bomb shelter for the SS men working in the area, since it had a gas-tight air raid shelter door.

Blueprint of the Krema II building

On the blueprint shown in the photo above, the undressing room is on the right hand side. To the left of the undressing room is the above-ground oven room with the ovens designated by 5 squares. There were 5 ovens with 3 openings in each oven. The gas chamber was perpendicular to the undressing room. On the blueprint, the gas chamber is labeled L-keller which is an abbreviation for Leichenkeller, which means corpse cellar in English. The undressing room was also called a Leichenkeller on the blueprint. Note that the length of the undressing room is two or three times as long as the length of the gas chamber.

Now that we see that there was a way to get into the undressing room without going around the building to enter from the end of the room, why didn’t the prisoners enter the undressing room through the door into the Vorraum?

Was the undressing room reconstructed to show an entrance down some steps that weren’t actually there before the reconstruction?

Update, 5:22 p.m.

A reader has alerted me to the website of The Daily Mail which shows a photo of Wilhelm Brasse standing beside the ruins of the undressing room in Krema II at Auschwitz in 1979.  In The Daily Mail photo, it looks like there are steps at the far end of the undressing room.  However, when I converted the photo to 300 dpi, from the 63 dpi in the original, it looks more like a brick wall.  I did not enhance the photo in any way.

High resolution photo of the ruins of the undressing room (Click on the photo to enlarge)

The photographer who took this photo in 1979 focused on Brasse in the foreground of the picture. The background, which shows the end of the undressing room, is not in sharp focus, so it is hard to tell if there are really steps in the photo.

Thomas Dalton writes “A Postcard from Treblinka” about what he learned on a visit to the camp

A big Thank You to the reader who wrote a comment on my blog and included a link to A Postcard from Treblinka by Thomas Dalton, the author of a book entitled Debating the Holocaust: A New Look at Both Sides. Dalton is a professor of humanities at an American university.  You can read his articles on Inconvenient History here.  If you are not familiar with Inconvenient History, stop reading this right now and go immediately to the inconvienthistory.com website.

Dalton includes a photo of the Treblinka Museum, which was not there when I visited the Treblinka Memorial Site in 1998. At the time of my visit, there was only a small tourist center, which is shown in my photo below.  The one car parked in front of the tourist center was my tour guide’s car. We were the only visitors there that day.

Tourist Center at Treblinka in 1998

In writing about his recent trip to Treblinka, Thomas Dalton mentioned that he hired a taxi to drive him to Treblinka and just before reaching the camp, they came to a bridge over the Bug river, which was not open to traffic at that time. When I visited Treblinka in 1998, my driver took me over this bridge, which is a reconstruction, according to British Holocaust historian Martin Gilbert.

Bridge over the Bug river, near Treblinka

I have written previously on my blog about the route to Treblinka here.

On my trip to Treblinka, I was immediately suspicious about this place being a “death camp.”  It’s location near the Bug river suggested to me that Treblinka was a transit camp, which I wrote about on this blog post.

In visiting Holocaust memorial sites, I try my best to be respectful and not burst out laughing.  In reading Thomas Dalton’s account of his visit to Treblinka, I couldn’t contain myself.  I laughed out loud when I read his description of the Treblinka Monument as “a toad-stool like monolith.”  My photo of the monument is shown below.

My 1998 photo of the Treblinka Monument

According to the pamphlet that I obtained from the Visitor’s Center in 1998, the Treblinka memorial site was built between 1959 and 1963. In February 1960, the Warsaw Regional Council selected the design of Polish sculptor Franciszek Duszenko and Polish architect Adam Haupt for the memorial stone and the Symbolic Cemetery.

According to the Council, the design of the symbolic cemetery would create a field of jagged stones that suggest a cemetery consisting of 17,000 stones with 700 of the stones inscribed with the names of the Jewish villages and communities in Poland that were obliterated by the Holocaust.

The photograph below shows the back side of the memorial tombstone. When the death camp was in operation, there was a narrow dirt path through a “tube” covered with tree branches which led to the gas chamber building in this spot. Notice the Menorah at the top of the tombstone.

The back side of the Monument at Treblinka

In my 1998 photo above, the back side of the Monument faces the symbolic graveyard where, according to my tour guide, the ashes of the victims are buried.

This quote is from A Postcard from Treblinka by Thomas Dalton:

Soon enough we arrived at the pathway (the symbolic “tube”) that led to the famous central monument: a toadstool-like monolith located at the very spot of the alleged gas chambers (Photo 8). Here we were, at the heart of Treblinka, the site of the most horrendous kill rate of the entire Holocaust: of the 912,000 victims, 837,000 were killed in just six months of 1942, according to the camp’s (and Burba’s) “official” tally. (The remaining 75,000 died in 1943.) This works out to nearly 140,000 per month, 35,000 per week, or 5,000 per day, every day, rain or shine, for six months. Not even Auschwitz during the alleged Hungarian massacre could match this rate.

(And where did they put all that dirt, by the way?) Upon dumping the bodies for nine months, the Germans then, allegedly, covered the whole mess up—just in time to change their minds and decide to burn them all.

So they uncovered the graves, dredged up 700,000 rotting, decaying corpses, and dragged them over to…a fire pit. To burn them all. Down to pure ash, down to nothing. In the open air. Using wood logs. I asked Edward where this miracle happened. He walked us over to the “symbolic” pit where the Germans had constructed grills of elevated railway rails, on which they could stack the corpses—see Photos 9 and 10. Wood was placed underneath, ignited, and the bodies all but vaporized. And not only did they have the 700,000 exhumed corpses, but they also had to contend with the ongoing supply of 212,000 “fresh” bodies that were still being gassed—at a rate of 5,000 per day. All 912,000 bodies, reduced to ash, in the very spot we were standing. And they did this in just 16 weeks, according to the experts—more than 8,000 per day, every day. Those Germans were brilliant indeed, and efficient.

One small detail that I noticed in Dalton’s description of Treblinka was this quote:

How deep were the graves?, [Dalton] asked. Eight meters—some 26 feet, a very impressive hole.

In the quote above, Dalton was asking the Director of the Treblinka Museum, about the depth of the graves where the gassing victims were originally buried.  I read somewhere that the grave pits were 35 feet deep.  Apparently, that was wrong.  The graves were 26 feet deep — and the height of the Treblinka Monument is exactly 26 feet high.

When the Treblinka death camp was in operation, there was a narrow dirt path through a “tube” covered with tree branches which led to the gas chamber building in the spot where the huge memorial now stands.

This quote is from A Postcard from Treblinka:

A British forensic archaeologist has unearthed fresh evidence to prove the existence of mass graves at the Nazi death camp Treblinka—scuppering the claims of Holocaust deniers who say it was merely a transit camp. … Forensic archaeologist Caroline Sturdy Colls has now undertaken the first coordinated scientific attempt to locate the graves.

I previously blogged about the scuppering of the claims of Holocaust deniers here.

George McGovern wanted to bomb the “gas ovens” at Auschwitz

George McGovern, a former U.S. Senator and candidate for President in 1972, died Sunday at the age of 90.  In one of the many news stories about him, I learned that McGovern was a bomber pilot in World War II; he  piloted a B-24 “Liberator” bomber. Among his targets: German synthetic oil factories in occupied Poland – some of them fewer than five miles from the Auschwitz gas chambers.

This quote is from an editorial in The Jewish Press which you can read in full here:

“There is no question we should have attempted…to go after Auschwitz,” McGovern said in the interview. “There was a pretty good chance we could have blasted those rail lines off the face of the earth, which would have interrupted the flow of people to those death chambers, and we had a pretty good chance of knocking out those gas ovens.”

Even if there was a danger of accidentally harming some of the prisoners, “it was certainly worth the effort, despite all the risks,” McGovern said, because the prisoners were already “doomed to death” and an Allied bombing attack might have slowed down the mass-murder process, thus saving many more lives.

Whatever gave George McGovern the idea that the Nazis were carrying on “mass murder” with the use of “gas ovens”?

Actually, McGovern was not the only person who mistakenly believed that “gas ovens” were used to kill the Jews.

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

Cremation ovens at Buchenwald camp, April 14, 1945

The photo above is on the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum website with the following caption: “The charred remains of former prisoners in two crematoria ovens in the newly liberated Buchenwald concentration camp. Buchenwald, Germany, April 14, 1945.”

Notice the date on the photo: April 14, 1945.  Buchenwald was liberated by American troops on April 11, 1945.  Three days later, a photo of an oven with bodies inside was taken. Notice that the photo does not have an identification number in the lower right hand corner, which would identify it as a photo taken by the U.S. Army Signal Core.

The quality of the photo indicates that it was not taken with an expensive camera. This is NOT a photo taken by Margaret Bourke-White, who arrived in Buchenwald to take photos on April 15, 1945. The photo looks suspiciously like a posed photo, set up by some of the former prisoners to show how the Jews had been killed in “gas ovens.”

In any case, it is not surprising that George McGovern thought that the Nazis were doing “mass murder” by using “gas ovens.” Everyone is familiar with the method of suicide that involves sticking one’s head inside a “gas oven.”  The former prisoners at Buchenwald set up an exhibit that showed shrunken heads, and human skin lampshades, so it is conceivable that they also took photos of the “gas ovens.”

Actually, there was one prisoner at Auschwitz who did stick his head into a “gas oven.”  Tadeusz Borowski committed suicide by sticking his head into a “gas oven” a short time after he was liberated from Auschwitz-Birkenau.  Borowski is famous for writing about how the SS men and the Jews were playing soccer together at Auschwitz and they observed Jews entering the gas chamber which was very close by.

Maybe George McGovern and Alan Colmes read Borowski’s short stories and got confused about how the mass murder at Auschwitz was really done.

Bombing the homicidal gas chambers at Auschwitz would not have done much good because the disinfection buildings, where the clothing was deloused, could have then been used to kill the Jews.

My 2005 photo of one of the disinfection buildings at Auschwitz-Birkenau

The photo above shows one of the buildings where the clothing of the prisoners at the Auschwitz II camp was disinfected with Zyklon-B, the same gas that was used to murder the Jews in the crematoria buildings.

Romney: “The president said he was going to create daylight between ourselves and Israel”

In last night’s debate, Mitt Romney said:

“The president said he was going to create daylight between ourselves and Israel.”

This quote is from an article in the Tampa Bay Times:

Mitt Romney frequently criticizes President Barack Obama’s stance on Israel, saying the president doesn’t hold the Jewish state in a tight enough embrace.

“The president said he was going to create daylight between ourselves and Israel,” Romney said in a foreign policy-focused debate, the final one of the presidential election.

We decided to dig into the origin of that statement and check whether Romney’s characterization is accurate.

What Obama (reportedly) said

The “daylight” comment stems from a July 15, 2012, story in the Washington Post about a meeting Obama held in 2009 with several Jewish leaders. The meeting was closed to the press, and there is no transcript of what was said. The Post story was based on interviews with people in the meeting.

Here’s the relevant excerpt:

“If you want Israel to take risks, then its leaders must know that the United States is right next to them,” Malcolm Hoenlein, the executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, told the president.

Obama politely but firmly disagreed.

“Look at the past eight years,” he said, referring to the George W. Bush administration’s relationship with Israel. “During those eight years, there was no space between us and Israel, and what did we get from that? When there is no daylight, Israel just sits on the sidelines, and that erodes our credibility with the Arab states.”

The White House does not confirm that Obama said those words. There also has been no explicit denial.

Meanwhile, a reader of my blog gave this link to an article in which Henry Kissinger reportedly said that, in 10 years, Israel will no longer exist.

Will Obama’s policies toward Israel cause that to happen?  Will Obama let Iran get a nuclear weapon that will “wipe Israel off the map”?

Mitt Romney is a personal friend of Netanyahu and he has a great love for Israel.  If he becomes president, will he start a war to protect Israel?

“Hate murdered Eva Olsson’s family” at Auschwitz-Birkenau

Eva Olsson, an 87-year-old Holocaust survivor, “has spoken to more than one million people over the past decade and has speaking engagements that stretch well beyond her 90th birthday,” according to a news article which you can read here.

I previously blogged about Eva Olsson here.  On that blog post, I mentioned that Eva Olsson was telling students that when the Nazis ran out of Zyklon-B pellets for the gas chamber at Bergen-Belsen, they burned children alive in the ovens (plural).  (This was an obvious lie because there was no gas chamber at Bergen-Belsen and only one cremation oven.)

In her latest talk at an American school, Eva Olsson told the students that “People were forced in gas chambers screaming and moaning. After 20 minutes, it was silent.”

I have always heard that the Jews were told, on their way to the gas chamber, that they were going to take a shower, after which they would get clean clothes and hot soup.  But not according to Eva Olsson, who witnessed her family members going to the gas chamber at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Her relatives were forced into the gas chamber, screaming and moaning.

In her latest talk, Olsson told the students that when she arrived at Auchwitz-Birkenau on May 19, 1944, she was separated from her family and “before she could blink, her mother, her father and most of her siblings disappeared never to be seen again.”

Auschwitz-Birkenau was 425 acres in size.  Did her relatives disappear into the barracks in this vast camp, or did they disappear into the gas chamber? According to Olsson, she witnessed her family going into the gas chamber and fortunately, she was wearing a watch, so she knew that it took 20 minutes for them to die.

This quote is from the news article:

For Olsson, it was the beginning of a nightmare that wouldn’t end until she and her younger sister were liberated by British soldiers [at Bergen-Belsen] just hours before prisoners were to be executed by Nazi soldiers on April 15, 1945.

Bergen-Belsen was voluntarily turned over to the British soldiers on April 15, 1945, after weeks of negotiations, but according to Eva Olsson, the Nazis were planning to execute all the prisoners on the very day that the British soldiers were due to arrive.

This quote is also from the news article:

When bullying happens, people need to stand up and stop it, said Olsson, adding that whether a person is a bystander or a bully, neither is innocent.

“Hitler could not have done what he did without the bystanders in Europe. That’s how he got away with it,” she said.

“Hate is what murdered my family,” said Olsson, adding “acceptance is how we achieve peace.”

The obvious bully and hater here is Eva Olsson, who is poisoning the minds of innocent children with her obvious lies.  The bystanders here are the school administrators who allow Olsson to spread her lies.

You can read about the Bergen-Belsen camp on my website here.  You can read about the history of Auschwitz-Birkenau on my website here.

The house next to the wall around the former Dachau concentration camp

One of the houses next to the wall around the Dachau camp is on the right

In the photo above, the white building on the left is part of the Dachau bunker, where some of the prisoners were housed. Between the bunker and the house is a patch of grass where the prisoners could exercise.  Behind the grass is the wall around the Dachau camp.  A row of houses has been built right next to this wall.

The first house in the row of houses in the background is next to the Würm river canal that runs through the Dachau camp concentration camp

In the photo above, the iron fence goes across the Würm river canal which runs through the former Dachau camp. The houses in the background are right next to the wall around the camp.

Dachau gatehouse is on the left and behind the camera is the location of the bunker

My photo above shows the side of the gatehouse that faces the camp.  On the other side of the gatehouse, the Würm river canal runs in front of the gatehouse.

For years, visitors to the Dachau Memorial Site have complained about people living in houses so close to the former concentration camp, which is sacred ground because so many people died there.

I have often wondered about the people who live in these houses, which are on Pater-Roth Strasse, the street that goes past the camp.  Father Roth was the priest who stayed on at Dachau to administer to the German “war criminals” who were imprisoned at Dachau, beginning in June 1945, just after the last prisoners had left the camp when Dachau was liberated on April 29, 1945.

I finally learned from this blog about a man who lives in one of the houses next to the camp wall.  This quote is from the blog:

Our guide told us about the house standing adjacent to the wall of the camp. An old grumpy man lives there now and he peers out of the windows and watches the visitors every so often. He lives there because Dachau is the only home he remembers. He was brought to the camp as a 12 year old and was 25 when he left. Homeless, having lost his parents to the camp, he lived on the streets for two years. He returned when Dachau was turned into a refugee camp. He met his wife there, fell in love there, and had his kids there. He doesn’t remember life before Dachau and so he will die there.

I had assumed that members of the Dachau Memorial staff live in these houses, but I was wrong.

The story told by the Dachau guide is a colorful account, but I have my doubts about the truth of it.

Dachau was opened on March 22, 1933 and closed in June 1945 when it became War Crimes Camp No. 1 for German prisoners.  If this grumpy old man was 12 years old when he was brought to Dachau, and 25 when he left, that means that he was a prisoner in the camp for 13 years, one year longer than Dachau was a concentration camp.

Dachau was primarily a camp for adult men, not a camp for families. Yet the grumpy old man, who lives in one of these houses now, was brought to Dachau along with his parents, who were killed in the camp, according to the story told by the tour guide.

Dachau was originally a camp for Communists, Social Democrats, trade union leaders, religious dissidents, common criminals, Gypsy men, homosexuals, asocials, spies, resistance fighters, and others whom the Nazis considered “enemies of the state.” Dachau was not a “death camp” for the genocide of the Jews, although there were some Jews in the camp from the very beginning.

The grumpy old man lived on the streets for two years, according to the tour guide.  Why didn’t he go to the Displaced Persons Camp that was set up near the town of Dachau?

According to the Dachau tour guide, the grumpy old man came back to the Dachau camp when it was turned into a refugee camp.

After the Dachau War Crimes Enclosure No. 1 was closed in 1948, the barracks were renovated and 5,000 refugees from Czechoslovakia, who were among the 12 to 18 million ethnic Germans that were expelled from their homes after the war, lived in the Dachau camp until 1964.

In 1964, an organization of Communist survivors of Dachau began demanding that the refugees be moved out so that a Memorial could be built in honor of the former concentration camp political prisoners.  The remaining 2,000 German refugees were moved in 1964 to Dachau East, a new suburb which was created for them.

The expellees from Czechoslovakia had come to Dachau because they had no place else to go, since there was a shortage of housing in Germany after the war. Some of the expellees were living on the streets of Germany for many years after the war, begging for food and cigarette butts.

Former prisoners at Dachau were able to emigrate to America or Canada or the UK after 1948.  But apparently, the grumpy old man sneaked in among the expellees and lived in poverty at Dachau until 1964.

Where did the grumpy old man live after that?  The row of houses next to the Dachau wall were not built until the 1990s, according to what I was told on my first visit to Dachau in 1997.

After being a prisoner at Dachau for 13 years, and living with the expellees for even more years, why is the name of this grumpy old man not a household word?  Especially since he was a prisoner in the War Crimes Enclosure No. 1 for German war criminals for one year, following his 12 years as a prisoner in the Dachau concentration camp.

Ernst Kroll, a Communist prisoner, who had been an inmate at Dachau since it first opened on Mar. 22, 1933, was quoted by Nerin E. Gun, a journalist who was a Dachau prisoner, in a book entitled “The Day of the Americans.”  Why didn’t Nerin E. Gunn mention the 12-year-old boy who was a prisoner at Dachau until he was 25 years old?

My photo of the unknown prisoner at Dachau

Here is another quote from the same blog:

This statue outside the gas chamber [shown in my photo above] was rife with defiance and meaning. It shows a prisoner with a casual stance. Prisoners were not allowed to be at ease at any time, they were always expected to stand at attention. It shows him hand in pocket, which was punishable with a shot to the back of the head. It shows him wearing covered shoes and a big, thick coat. Both forbidden at Dachau. The inscription on the bottom urges the viewer to remember the dead and warn the living. The patch of land the statue looks over contains one of Europe’s largest mass graves. The beautiful trees growing there now were fed off the ashes of those sent to the crematoriums.

The “patch of land the statue looks over” is located only a few feet from Baracke X, the gas chamber building. My photo below shows the grave of ashes for the Jews who died at Dachau.

It has occurred to me that some readers might think that the grumpy old man in the house next to the wall around Dachau might be Martin Zaidenstadt, the pan-handler who used to demand money from American visitors to the Memorial Site.  If given less than $20, he would get very grumpy.  A house next to the wall would have been a convenient place for him to live,  but for a man as rich as Zaidenstadt, that would not have been an option.

Martin Zaidenstadt stopped coming to the Dachau Memorial Site to beg for money in 2001.  I was told by someone on the Dachau staff that he was too ill to come to the camp anymore.  Martin was born in 1911, so if he is still alive, he is 101 years old.  I was told by someone in the town of Dachau that he lives in the luxurious house in the photo below, which is just off the main street in the town.

Two story house, with a courtyard, in the heart of the town of Dachau

Records found in the 1990s show that the father of Daniel Goldsmith was killed in a gas chamber

I have always thought that there are no records of the prisoners who were gassed at Auschwitz.  I have always heard that selections were made, just after the Jews arrived on trains at Auschwitz, and those who were selected for the gas chamber were not registered.  No records were made for the prisoners who were gassed, according to every Holocaust book that I’ve ever read.

But according to a recent talk, given by Holocaust survivor Daniel Goldsmith at a Catholic school, there was a record made for his father, who was “killed in a gas chamber.”  You can read the full story in a news article here.

This quote is from the news article:

Daniel Goldsmith, a Holocaust child survivor, and Bernard Lens, a World War II veteran who helped liberate the Dachau concentration camp, visited Hilltown’s St. Agnes-Sacred Heart Catholic School for a slideshow presentation on the Holocaust Thursday, Oct. 11.

[…]

In the fall of 1944, the town he were (sic) living in was liberated by American soldiers, and he was able to reunite with his mother. Goldsmith found out from his mother that his father had died in the Auschwitz concentration camp.

[…]

Years later, in the 1990s, Goldsmith found records that stated his father had been killed in a gas chamber.

This is BIG NEWS.  The records of the prisoners who were gassed at Auschwitz have apparently been found.  This means the end of Holocaust denial.

The memorial stones, at the International Monument in the former Auschwitz-Birkenau camp, now say that 1.5 million people died at Auschwitz.  This number is an estimate.  Now that the records have been found, the stones, which originally said that 4 million had died at Auschwitz, will have to be changed again and this time the exact figure for the number of Jews who were gassed can be put on the memorial stones.

Original plaque at the International Monument in Auschwitz-Birkenau

Memorial stone at the International Monument in Auschwitz-Birkenau

The old black and white photo above shows that the original plaque at the Internationl Monument claimed that 4 million people died at Auschwitz-Birkenau.  The color photo shows the new plaque which says that 1.5 million died at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

As shown in the color photo, the English inscription reads:

FOR EVER LET THIS PLACE BE A CRY OF DESPAIR AND A WARNING TO HUMANITY, WHERE THE NAZIS MURDERED ABOUT ONE AND A HALF MILLION MEN, WOMEN AND CHILDREN MAINLY JEWS FROM VARIOUS COUNTRIES OF EUROPE. AUSCHWITZ-BIRKENAU 1940-1945

From 1986 to April 3, 1990, the words on the English plaque read:

FOUR MILLION PEOPLE SUFFERED AND DIED HERE AT THE HANDS OF THE NAZI MURDERERS BETWEEN THE YEARS 1940 AND 1945.

Four million was the number of Auschwitz-Birkenau victims that the Soviet prosecutors at the Nuremberg IMT claimed in their charges against the Nazi war criminals in November 1945.

After the fall of Communism in 1989, the Soviet Union released the 46 death register books (Sterbebücher) which they had captured when they liberated the Auschwitz and Birkenau camps on Jan. 27, 1945. The books, which were turned over to the International Red Cross, contained the names of 69,000 prisoners who had died in the Auschwitz-Birkenau camps from July 27, 1941 to December 31, 1943.

The Auschwitz I camp opened on May 20, 1940 and both camps were evacuated on Jan. 18, 1945, so some of the death registers were missing. The Red Cross extrapolated these figures and estimated that there was a total of 135,000 registered deaths at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

The Jews who were gassed had allegedly not been registered in the camp and their deaths were not included in the records that were turned over to the Red Cross in 1989.

The train records for the Jews who were transported to Auschwitz have never been found, but it has been estimated that a total of 1.3 million Jews were sent to Auschwitz and around 200,000 were eventually sent to other camps after being registered. Based on these figures, the total number of deaths at Auschwitz-Birkenau is now estimated to be 1.1 million, including 900,000 Jewish deaths.

Strangely, the records, to which Daniel Goldsmith alluded, were found in the 1990s.  This was after the Russians had turned over the records from the camp to the Red Cross.

I am looking forward to reading more about the records that were found in the 1990s, since apparently these records name names.  This will finally put an end to Holocaust denier Bradley Smith asking for the name of just one person who was gassed.  (I love Bradley Smith; he is a great writer, but he is constantly making trouble. He writes on the CODOH website.)