Correction on the identification of prisoners in a Buchenwald photo — Updated

Update May 12, 2012:

The boy wearing a beret was incorrectly identified by the USHMM as Elie Wiesel

The photo above shows the face of the boy, who has been mistakenly identified by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum as Elie Wiesel.  The photo shows the orphan boys who marched out of the Buchenwald concentration camp on April 27, 1945. The boy, who is right in front of the boy whose face is circled, has been incorrectly identified as Elie Wiesel on the website of Ken Waltzer.  According to The Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity, neither of these boys is Elie Wiesel.

A closer look at the face of the boy wearing a beret, who is NOT Elie Wiesel

The face of the prisoner identified by The Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity as 16-year-old Elie Wiesel

I previously blogged about this whole controversy here.

Continue reading my original post:

I have made corrections on several pages of my website after being informed by The Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity that Elie Wiesel is not in the photo of orphan boys marching out of the Buchenwald concentration camp.  I had previously identified Elie Wiesel as the tall boy wearing a beret in the photo below.  I had gotten this information from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum website.  Apparently the USHMM was mistaken and Elie Wiesel in not in any of the photos of the orphan boys at Buchenwald.

Orphan boys marching out of the Buchenwald concentration camp

Another photo of the orphan boys marching out of Buchenwald

I should have known that the tall boy wearing a beret was not Elie Wiesel, but I trusted the USHMM to give accurate information.  The Communist prisoners, who ruled the camp, wore berets to identify themselves to the other prisoners.  Notice the man on the far right in the photo above wearing a beret to identify himself as a Communist. There is also an adult man, wearing a beret, in the photo below.

Child survivors of Buchenwald wearing clothes made from German military uniforms

One of the youngest survivors of the Buchenwald concentration camp, shown in the center of the photograph above, was four-year-old Josef Schleifstein. The Communist prisoners, who were in charge of the day-to-day administration of the camp, made sure that the children were well cared for. Note the adult man in the back row wearing a beret to identify himself as a Communist. The children in the photo are wearing clothes made for them by the Americans out of German uniforms. As prisoners in the camp, the orphans had worn striped uniforms just like the other prisoners.

Buchenwald orphans leaving on a train to Paris

I received the photo below, along with the caption, from The Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity.

Note that the caption on the photo above states that “The picture was taken on April 16, 1945…”  Either the date on the photo is wrong, or Elie Wiesel made a mistake when he wrote in two of his books that he was in the hospital at Buchenwald on April 16, 1945 after the Buchenwald camp had been liberated.

I am eagerly awaiting Ken Waltzer’s new book about the Buchenwald orphans, which will get all this straightened out.  On his website, Waltzer also identified one of the orphan boys, marching out of the camp, as Elie Wiesel.  According to The Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity, the only photo of Elie Wiesel in Buchenwald is the one taken on April 16, 1945 in barrack #56. The orphans barrack was #66.

What happened to Germany’s gold after World War II?

General Dwight D. Eisenhower inspects Germany’s gold, found in a salt mine

Update: July 10, 2014:

According to a news story, which you can read in full here, Germany has given up trying to get all their gold back, after it was confiscated by Americans, who stole it from the Soviets. The gold should have gone to the Soviet Union because it was in their future zone of occupation.

Continue reading my original post.

General Dwight D. Eisenhower is shown in the photo above as he inspects Germany’s gold, found in a salt mine.  The man behind him, wearing a helmet with four stars, is General Omar Bradley. The Nazis had hidden 250 million dollars worth of gold bars inside the Merkers salt mine.

The soldier on the far left, in the photo, is Benjamin B. Ferencz.  Ferencz had been transferred, in 1945, from General Patton’s army to the newly created War Crimes Branch of the U.S. Army.  A Jew from Transylvania, Ferencz had moved with his family to America when he was a baby. In 1945, his job was to gather evidence for future trials of German war criminals.

General Eisenhower inspects Germany’s art treasures, stored in the Merkers salt mine, to protect them from the Allied bombing raids

The photo above shows General Eisenhower as he inspects Germany’s art treasures in the same salt mine where the gold was stored.

On Easter weekend in April 1945, the 90th Infantry Division had overrun the little German town of Merkers, which was near the Ohrdruf sub-camp of Buchenwald, and had captured the Kaiseroda salt mine, which is sometimes called the Merkers mine.  Hidden deep inside the salt mine was virtually the entire gold and currency reserves of the German Reichsbank, together with all of the priceless art treasures which had been removed from Berlin’s museums for protection against Allied bombing raids and possible capture by the Allied armies.

According to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum web site, the soldiers also found important documents that were introduced at the Nuremberg IMT as evidence of the Holocaust.

This quote is from the USHMM website:

The US Army made many significant finds of Nazi booty and records, among them gold, currency, artworks, and documentation discovered on April 7, 1945, by engineers of the US 90th Infantry Division in the Kaiseroda Salt mine in Merkers, Germany. Millions of documents were captured at various locations, including records of the German Army High Command records; files from Krupp, Henschel, and other German industrial concerns; Luftwaffe (German air force) material; and records kept by Heinrich Himmler (the Chief of the German Police and Reich Leader of the SS), the German Foreign Office, and many others.

All of America’s top military leaders in Europe, including Generals Eisenhower, Bradley and Patton, visited the mine and viewed the treasure.

General Dwight D. Eisenhower examined the Kaiseroda salt mine on April 12, 1945, along with General Omar Bradley, General George S. Patton, and other high-ranking American Army officers before making a side trip to see the Ohrdruf labor camp.

The photo below shows General Eisenhower as he inspects the Ohrdruf camp.  He is viewing the bodies found on the grounds of the camp when Ohrdruf was discovered by American troops on April 4, 1945.  The bodies were left out for more than a month, so that American soldiers could be brought to witness the atrocities committed by the Nazis.

General Eisenhower is in the middle of the photo, inspecting the bodies found at Ohrdruf labor camp, which was a sub-camp of Buchenwald

The discovery of the Ohrdruf labor camp started the propaganda effort to paint the Germans as war criminals.  The official story told about the photo above is that these prisoners were shot after the camp was evacuated because there weren’t enough trucks to transport the sick prisoners.  My personal opinion is that these prisoners were killed by some of the other prisoners, as soon as the Germans abandoned the camp, and marched the healthy prisoners to the Buchenwald camp.  Why waste bullets, shooting sick prisoners, when they were going to die anyway?

General Eisnenhower couldn’t have cared less about the prisoners at the Ohrdruf camp.  He didn’t even mention the camp in his autobiography.  He was only there to see the salt mine and get his greedy hands on the German gold.  Except for General Patton, who went to see the Buchenwald camp, none of the generals in the American army ever visited any of the Nazi camps, except the Ohrdruf sub-camp.

A couple of days ago, I was reading Bradley Smith’s website when I came across a pdf file in which I read that Germany’s gold was confiscated by the Allies and is still in the possession of the USA.  I was surprised to learn this, since Germany and America became allies after the war when the Cold War with the Soviet Union began.  I was astonished to learn that the German tax payers are being forced to pay for the occupation of Germany, which is still going on, 70 years after the end of the war.  Germany still has a Constitution written by the Allies.  When will Germany become a sovereign country again?

Most Americans believe that Germany was treated well by the Allies after World War II.  Just the other day, Bill O’Reilly said something about the fairness of the Nuremberg trial in which Germany’s war criminals were convicted.  O’Reilly has mentioned the Marshall Plan numerous times; he claims that the Marshall Plan was America’s generous plan to restore the country of Germany after the destruction of World War II.  (The Marshall Plan provided aid to many countries in Europe.  Germany did not receive as much aid as other countries that had not suffered war damage.)

When will Americans stop bragging about how well Germany was treated after World War II?  Enough, already!  It is time for the British and the Americans to get the hell out of Germany and let the German people have their country again.

How to make Chinese turtle soup for medicinal purposes

Turtle soup is highly recommended by Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) as the best possible medicine to revive failing kidneys.  The kidneys control every organ in the body, especially the heart and the pancreas.  Weak kidneys can cause high blood pressure, rapid heart rate, and Type II diabetes.   When your kidneys are completely failing, you have two choices:  turtle soup or a kidney transplant.

To make turtle soup, you will need a huge stainless steel pot, big enough to hold a ceramic pot placed inside it. You can buy these pots at a Chinese market.  In Sacramento, CA you can buy the pots, along with all the ingredients for the soup, including a live turtle, at Welco Supermarket. The clerk at the market will chop the live turtle into pieces with a huge cleaver, and then package it up so that you don’t have to look at it.

It will take a minimum of two days to prepare and cook the soup.  First, you start by making a broth from a whole chicken and some Chinese herbs. You will need a third pot for the broth.  The chicken and the herbs must cook for a minimum of 8 hours.  Then you put the turtle, shell and all, inside the ceramic pot and cover the turtle with the chicken broth.

Place the ceramic pot, filled with the turtle and the broth, inside the stainless steel pot and fill the stainless steel pot up to within one inch of the top of the ceramic pot.  The turtle soup must cook for a minimum of 12 hours, but longer cooking is better.  After a few hours of cooking, you can remove the ceramic pot and place the turtle soup inside your refrigerator, then continue cooking it the next day, if you do not want to stay up all night watching the soup.

Recipe for Turtle Soup

Make a broth from these ingredients:

1.  One ounce Dioscorea (Shen Yao)

2.  One and a half ounces Radix Astragali (Huang Qi)

3.  One and a half ounces Codonopsis Pilosula (Dang Shen)

4.  One half ounce Medlar (Qi Zhi)

5.  8 dried Chinese dates

6.  One whole (dead) chicken with the feathers and feet removed. Include the liver, heart, gizzard and neck in the broth.

When the broth is done, remove the chicken meat and the bones, but not the herbs.

Put the chopped up turtle (including the shell) into the ceramic pot and fill the pot, up to one inch from the top, with the chicken broth.

Place a towel or some chop sticks on the bottom of the stainless steel pot so that the ceramic pot does not touch the bottom of the stainless steel pot.

Pour water into the stainless steel pot, and allow the soup to simmer inside the ceramic pot for 12 hours at least. Do not allow the water in the stainless steel pot to get into the ceramic pot, which has a small hole in the lid.  Cover the stainless steel pot with a tight-fitting lid and allow the soup to simmer for up to 7 days.

To serve the soup, remove the pieces of turtle shell.  You may also remove the turtle meat.  You do not have to eat the turtle meat, as all of the medicinal properties will be in the broth. The amount of broth that you are required to drink depends on how much you boil it down.  Normally, about 12 ounces of broth will be enough to have a good effect on your kidneys.

Turtle soup can be eaten once a month until your kidneys recover.  For people who don’t have weak kidneys, the soup can be eaten once a year to maintain good health.

How will you know if your kidneys have improved, after you have eaten the soup?  A TCM doctor can tell you how well your kidneys are working.  When your kidneys are working the way they should, you will have not have to get up at night to go to the bathroom, and you will have no tell-tale symptoms of failing kidneys, like dry mouth.  You will have renewed energy and your blood pressure, and blood sugar, will be normal.

Hungarian Jews saved by Rezso Kasztner — the famous “Jews for trucks” deal

I learned from this news story that at least one of the Jews, that were saved by Rezso Kasztner during the Holocaust, is still alive.  Professor Ladislaus Löb recently spoke to students as part of a recent visit organized by the Holocaust Educational Trust (HET).  He was a prisoner at the Bergen-Belsen exchange camp who was saved by Kasztner.

This quote is from the news story:

Ann Mutluer, who is head of faculty for Humanities and Liberal Arts and subject leader for History, said: “Prof’s Löb’s talk was the culmination of our year-long focus on the survivors of the Holocaust, which has included an exhibition and visit to Auschwitz. His personal testimony of life in Belsen concentration camp and description of the daring work of Rezso Kasztner, the man who saved him, provided students with a unique insight.”

Here is the back story on how Rezso Kasztner saved some of the Hungarian Jews at Bergen-Belsen:

In his book entitled The Last Days, David Cesarani wrote that an attempt to save the Hungarian Jews was made by Otto Komoly and Dr. Rezso Kastner, two leading figures in the Jewish Relief and Rescue Committee in Hungary.

In 1942, the Jewish Council of Slovakia had tried to bribe Dieter Wisliceny, an SS man, to stop the deportation of the Slovakian Jews. When Wisliceny arrived in Budapest, Komoly and Kastner revived the proposal first made to Wisliceny in Slovakia, offering him a $2 million bribe to save the Hungarian Jews from deportation to the death camps. Wisliceny suggested a down payment of $200,000 to show good faith, but while Komoly and Kastner were trying to raise the money, Wisliceny left Budapest to organize the deportation of the Jews in eastern Hungary to Auschwitz. According to Cesarani, the Jews confronted Wisliceny with his betrayal, and “he coolly offered to save 600 Jews of their choosing. Soon afterwards Eichmann himself took up the negotiations.”

The following information is from the book Auschwitz, a New History by Laurence Rees:

On April 25, 1944, in his office at the Hotel Majestic in Budapest, Eichmann met with Joel Brand, another leading member of the Jewish Relief and Rescue Committee. Brand had already attended previous meetings with Eichmann and other SS officers in an attempt to bribe them to allow a number of Jews out of Hungary. Now Eichmann said to Brand, “I am prepared to sell one million Jews to you.”

Eichmann proposed an exchange of “Blood for Goods,” in which the British and the Americans would give the Nazis one new truck for every one hundred Jews. Eichmann promised that the trucks would only be used on the Eastern front where the Germans were fighting against the Communist Soviet Union. Brand was asked to go to Istanbul in Turkey to negotiate the deal. Eichmann hoped to obtain 10,000 trucks in exchange for one million Jews. But even before Brand reached Turkey on May 19, 1944, Eichmann had already ordered the deportation of the Hungarian Jews, which began on April 29, 1944.

On August 21, 1944, three SS officers (Kurt Becher, Max Grüson and Hermann Krumey) who were representing Himmler, and a representative of the Budapest Jews, Rudolf Kastner, met with Saly Mayer, a leading member of the Jewish Community in Switzerland.

The meeting took place in the middle of a bridge at St. Margarethen, on the border between Germany and Switzerland, because Mayer refused to enter Germany and he also did not want the SS men to enter Switzerland, according to Yehuda Bauer. Becher asked for farm machinery and 10,000 trucks, and in return, he promised to free 318 Hungarian Jews from Bergen-Belsen. In a show of good faith, the train with the 318 Jews was already waiting at the Swiss border. Mayer offered minerals and industry goods instead of the trucks.

According to Yehuda Bauer, Becher later claimed that he had persuaded Himmler not to deport the Budapest Jews, and that was why Himmler issued an order to stop the deportation three days later.

After the Hungarian Jews had entered Switzerland, there were false reports by the Swiss press that the Jews were being ransomed in exchange for asylum for 200 SS officers who were planning to defect. When Hitler heard about this, he ordered all further releases of Jews for ransom to stop. Nevertheless, Himmler continued to release Jews from the concentration camps, as he continued to negotiate with the Allies.

According to Laurence Rees, SS officer Kurt Becher, who was a Lt. Col., equal in rank to Eichmann, was trying to blackmail the Weiss family, owners of the biggest industrial conglomerate in Hungary, into giving its shares to the SS in return for safe passage out of the country.

This quote is from the book by Laurence Rees :

By the time of his meeting with Brand, Eichmann knew that his rival Becher had successfully arranged for shares of the Manfred-Weiss works to be transferred to the Nazis; in return, about fifty members of the Weiss family were allowed to leave and head for neutral countries.

Brand was accompanied to Istanbul by another man named Bandi Grosz, a former agent of the Abwehr, the German intelligence agency, whose operations in Hungary had been taken over by an SS officer, Lt. Col. Gerhard Clages. At the last meeting with Brand, SS officers Clages, Becher and several other Nazis had been present.

The following quote is from the book by Laurence Rees:

It was not until May 26, 1944 that the head of the Jewish Agency in Palestine notified a British diplomat, Sir Harold MacMichael, of the Nazis’ proposals. But it only took the British a matter of moments to reject the Brand mission, seeing it as an attempt to split the Western allies from the Soviets.  […]

In mid-June, Grosz was interrogated in Cairo by British intelligence officers and the story that he told was a surprising one. He claimed that Brand’s mission was only a camouflage for his own. Under the direct orders of Himmler, Grosz had been sent to facilitate a meeting in a neutral country between high-ranking British and American officers and two or three senior figures from the SD – Himmler’s own intelligence service. The purpose of the assignation was to discuss a separate peace treaty with the Western allies so that – together – they could fight the Soviet Union.

Himmler’s offer was immediately turned down. The British perceived Germany to be a threat to the British policy of “balance of power” and had refused all offers to become allies with Germany before the war; they had also refused several peace offers from Germany before the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. Great Britain and America needed the help of the Soviet Union in their plan to destroy Germany and in return, Churchill and Roosevelt had promised eastern Europe to the Communists as early as 1943 at the Tehran Conference.

According to Wikipedia, at the Tehran Conference, Churchill and Roosevelt agreed to the following:

Poland’s borders were declared to lie along the Oder and Neisse rivers and the Curzon line, despite protests of the Polish government-in-exile in London. Churchill and Roosevelt also gave Stalin free rein in his own country, and allowed the USSR to set up puppet communist governments in Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, the Baltic states, Romania, and other Eastern European countries.

By turning down Himmler’s offer of an alliance against the Soviet Union, the lives of a million Hungarian Jews were sacrificed; in the end, the British lost their empire and Hungary became a Communist country. Great Britain and America eventually became allies with Germany in 1948 against the Soviet Union in the Cold War, which lasted until 1989.

Between April 6 and April 11, 1945, the Hungarian Jews were evacuated from Bergen-Belsen on the orders of Himmler who was planning to use them as bargaining chips in his negotiations with the Allies. The Jews in the Star Camp and also in the Neutrals Camp were also evacuated, along with the Hungarians, in three trains which held altogether about 7,000 Jews who were considered “exchange Jews.”

One of these trains arrived with 1712 people on April 21, 1945 in the Theresienstadt ghetto in Czechoslovakia. Two weeks later the Theresienstadt Ghetto was turned over to the Red Cross, just before Russian troops arrived. The other two trains never made it to Theresienstadt because they had to keep making detours due to frequent Allied air attacks, according to Eberhard Kolb (Bergen-Belsen from 1943 to 1945).

One of the trains finally stopped on April 14, 1945 near Magdeburg in northern Germany; the guards ran away and the Jews on the train were liberated by the American troops. The third train halted on April 23, 1945 near the village of Tröbitz in the Niederlausitz region; they were liberated by Russian troops after the guards escaped.

How many Hungarian Jews were murdered in the Holocaust?

In yesterday’s news, I read about David Kahan, a Hungarian Holocaust survivor, who gives talks to students about the Holocaust.  According to the news article in The Voice:

“Within 10 months over 800,000 Hungarian Jews were murdered.”

There were 725,000 Jews living in Hungary in 1944, including many who were previously residents of Romania, according to Laurence Rees, who wrote Auschwitz, a New History.

Most of the Holocaust survivors, who are still alive today, are Hungarian Jews. Could Laurence Rees be wrong about the number of Jews in Hungary in 1944?

Hungarian Jews going through a selection process at Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1944

Women and children waiting for their turn in the gas chamber at Auschwitz-Birkenau

David Kahan’s story is similar to the stories of many other Hungarian survivors.  This quote is from the news article in The Voice:

Kahan, who was 15 at the time, was sent to a ghetto near his hometown to be shipped off to the Auschwitz extermination camp. After being herded into a train car with his parents, brother and sister they were taken off the train and lined up.

At the head of the line was the infamous Nazi Doctor Josef Mengele, the Angel of Death, who took a quick look at each person and with a flick of his thumb, told each person which way to go. One way was to be taken to the gas chambers and the other was to the barracks for work. His parents and younger brother and sister were sent to the gas chambers. He was chosen to live and to work.

Kahan worked for only a few days at Auschwitz before being shipped off to two other concentration camps over the next 10 months. Then one day Kahan and other Jews were loaded on a train that was to take them to an unknown location; before it reached that location though it was stopped and liberated by United States troops.

Hungarian men who were selected to work at Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp

Hungary was an ally of Germany but the Hungarian Jews were not deported to camps until the Spring of 1944, after the German Army took over Hungary. Laurence Rees wrote that it was not until May 1944, when the Hungarian Jews were deported, that Auschwitz-Birkenau became the site of the largest mass murder in modern history and the epicenter of the Final Solution.

According to Rees, in 1942, there were 2.7 million Jews murdered by the Nazis, including 1.6 million at the Operation Reinhard camps, but only 200,000 Jews were gassed at Auschwitz that year in two old converted farm houses. Rees wrote that almost one half of all the Jews that were killed at Auschwitz were Hungarian Jews who were gassed within a period of 10 weeks in 1944. Up until the Spring of 1944, it had been the three Operation Reinhard camps at Treblinka, Belzec and Sobibor, that were the main Nazi killing centers for the Jews, not Auschwitz.

After the formation of the Reich Central Security Office (RSHA) in 1939, Adolf Eichmann was put in charge of section IV B4, the RSHA department that handled the deportation of the Jews. One of his first assignments was to work on the Nazi plan to send the European Jews to the island of Madagascar off the coast of Africa. This plan was abandoned in 1940.

According to Rudolf Höss, the Commandant of Auschwitz, “Eichmann had concerned himself with the Jewish question since his youth and had an extensive knowledge of the literature on the subject. He lived for a long time in Palestine in order to learn more about the Zionists and the growing Jewish state.”

In 1937, Eichmann had gone to the Middle East to research the possibility of mass Jewish emigration to Palestine. He had met with Feival Polkes, an agent of the Haganah, with whom he discussed the Zionist plan to create a Jewish state. According to testimony at his trial in 1961 in Jerusalem, Eichmann was denied entry into Palestine by the British, who were opposed to a Jewish state in Palestine, so the idea of deporting all the European Jews to Palestine had to be abandoned.

After the Wannsee Conference on January 20, 1942, at which the Final Solution to the Jewish Question was planned, Eichmann was assigned to organize the “transportation to the East” which was a Nazi euphemism for sending the European Jews to be killed at Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, Majdanek and Auschwitz-Birkenau.  (The killing of the Jews at Chelmno began before the Wannsee Conference.)

According to Daniel Goldhagen, the author of the best-selling book entitled Hitler’s Willing Executioners, the Nazis were in a frenzy to complete the genocide of the Jews before the end of the war. Even though they were desperate for workers in their munitions factories, it was more important to the Nazis to carry out the Final Solution to the Jewish Question, according to Goldhagen who wrote the following:

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

On April 17, 1943, after Bulgaria, another ally of Germany, had refused to permit their Jews to be deported, Hitler met with Admiral Miklos Horthy, the Hungarian leader, in Salzburg and tried to persuade him to allow the Hungarian Jews to be “resettled” in Poland, according to Martin Gilbert in his book entitled Never Again. Admiral Horthy rejected Hitler’s plea and refused to deport the Hungarian Jews.

The deportation of the Hungarian Jews did not begin until April 29, 1944 when a train load of Jews were sent to Birkenau on the orders of Adolf Eichmann, according to the book by Laurence Rees. According to The Holocaust Chronicle, a huge book published in 2002 by Louis Weber, the CEO of Publications International, Ltd., another train filled with Hungarian Jews left for Birkeanu on April 30, 1944; the two trains with a total of 3,800 Jews reached Birkenau on May 2, 1944. There were 486 men and 616 women selected to work; the remaining 2698 Jews were gassed upon arrival.

On May 8, 1944, former Commandant Rudolf Höss (Hoess) was brought back to Auschwitz-Birkenau to supervise the further deportation of the Hungarian Jews. The next day, Höss ordered the train tracks to be extended inside the Birkenau camp so that the Hungarian Jews could be brought as close as possible to the gas chambers.

According to Laurence Rees, in his book Auschwitz, a New History, the first mass transport of Hungarian Jews left on May 15, 1944 and arrived at Birkenau on May 16, 1944. The mass transports consisted of 3,000 or more prisoners on each train.

The last mass transport of 14,491 Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz arrived on July 9, 1944, according to a book entitled Die Zahl der Opfer von Auschwitz, by Franciszek Piper, the former director of the Auschwitz Museum. After this mass transport of Jews left Hungary on July 8, 1944, Horthy ordered the deportation of the Hungarian Jews to stop.

By that time, a minimum of 435,000 Hungarian Jews, mostly those living in the villages and small towns, had been transported to Auschwitz, according to evidence given at the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961 in which transportation lists compiled by Laszlo Ferenczy, the chief of police in Hungary, were introduced.

On July 14, 1944, Adolf Eichmann attempted to deport another 1,500 Jews, but Horthy ordered the train to turn around before it could make it past the Hungarian border. On July 19th, Eichmann ordered the 1,500 Jews to be loaded onto the train again and rushed out of the country.

On August 13, 1944, a small transport of 131 Jews arrived from Hungary at Auschwitz and on August 18, 1944, the last transport of 152 Jews arrived.

In a telegram sent to the Foreign Office in Berlin on July 11, 1944 by Edmund Veesenmayer, it was reported that 55,741 Jews had been deported from Zone V, by July 9th as planned, and that the total number of Jews deported from Zones I through V in Hungary was 437,402

In a book entitled The World Must Know, which is the official book for the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, Michael Birnbaum wrote:

Between May 14 and July 8, 1944, 437,402 Jews from fifty-five Hungarian localities were deported to Auschwitz in 147 trains. Most were gassed at Birkenau soon after they arrived. The railroad system was stretched to its limits to keep up with the demand of the camp, where as many as 12,000 people a day were being gassed.

The exact number of Hungarian Jews murdered at Auschwitz is unknown, and the estimates vary widely. Robert E. Conot wrote in his book Justice at Nuremberg that 330,000 of the Hungarian Jews were sent directly to the gas chambers at Auschwitz. The Encyclopedia of the Holocaust puts the total number of Hungarian Jews who died at Auschwitz-Birkenau between May and July 1944 at approximately 550,000, the majority of whom were gassed. Raul Hilberg stated in his book entitled The Destruction of the European Jews that over 180,000 Hungarian Jews died at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

According to Francizek Piper, the majority of the Hungarian Jews, who were sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau, were gassed immediately. A booklet purchased from the Auschwitz Museum stated that 434,351 of the Hungarian Jews were gassed upon arrival. If these figures are correct, only 3,051 Hungarian Jews, out of the 437,402 who were sent to Auschwitz, were registered in the camp. However, Francizek Piper wrote that 28,000 Hungarian Jews were registered. The Jews who were gassed were not registered in the camp, so the number of Jews who were gassed is unknown.

The web site of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum confirms that over 100,000 Hungarian Jews were used for labor, as agreed upon by Hitler and Horthy on March 18, 1944, and that some of them were transferred to other camps within weeks of their arrival.

The following quote is from the USHMM web site:

Between late April and early July 1944, approximately 440,000 Hungarian Jews were deported, around 426,000 of them to Auschwitz. The SS sent approximately 320,000 of them directly to the gas chambers in Auschwitz-Birkenau and deployed approximately 110,000 at forced labor in the Auschwitz concentration camp complex. The SS authorities transferred many of these Hungarian Jewish forced laborers within weeks of their arrival in Auschwitz to other concentration camps in Germany and Austria.

If only 28,000 Hungarian Jews were registered at Auschwitz-Birkenau, as stated by Franciszek Piper, the former director of the Auschwitz Museum, this means that thousands were transferred from Auschwitz to labor camps without being registered. The prisoners who were gassed were not registered in the camp, and no records were kept on them.

According to records kept by the Germans at the Dachau concentration camp, between June 18, 1944 and March 9, 1945, a total of 28,838 Hungarian Jews were sent from Auschwitz-Birkenau to Dachau and then transferred to Landsberg am Lech to work on construction of underground factories in the eleven Kaufering subcamps of Dachau.

Some of the Jews who were selected for slave labor were sent to the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria and its sub-camps where they worked in German aircraft factories.

Others were sent to the Stutthof camp near Danzig, according to Martin Gilbert, who wrote the following in his book entitled Holocaust:

On June 17 Veesenmayer telegraphed to Berlin that 340,142 Hungarian Jews had now been deported. A few were relatively fortunate to be selected for the barracks, or even moved out altogether to factories and camps in Germany. On June 19 some 500 Jews, and on June 22 a thousand, were sent to work in factories in the Munich area. […] Ten days later, the first Jews, 2500 women, were deported from Birkenau to Stutthof concentration camp. From Stutthof, they were sent to several hundred factories in the Baltic region. But most Jews sent to Birkenau continued to be gassed.

According to the Museum at the former Theresienstadt ghetto in what is now the Czech Republic, there were 1,150 Hungarian Jews sent to Theresienstadt and 1,138 of them were still there on May 9, 1945 when the camp was liberated by Soviet troops.

Hungarian Jews were also sent to Bergen-Belsen, which was an exchange camp until December 1944.  After Hitler himself put pressure on Admiral Horthy to deport the Budapest Jews to Auschwitz, the Hungarian government decided to begin transporting the Budapest Jews on August 25, 1944. According to Yehuda Bauer, the plan was to transport the Jews on 6 trains with 20,000 Jews on each train; the first train was scheduled to leave for Auschwitz on August 27, 1944. However, the deportation plans were stopped when the Hungarian government received a telegram from Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler on August 24th; Himmler ordered the preparations for the deportation of the Budapest Jews to stop.

According to Eberhard Kolb, who wrote a book about the Bergen-Belsen camp, Reichsführer Himmler had already opened a special section at the Bergen-Belsen exchange camp on July 8, 1944, where 1683 Hungarian Jews from Budapest were brought. The Jews in the Hungarian section were treated better than all the others at Bergen-Belsen. They received better food and medical care and were not required to work. They wore their own clothes, but were required to wear a yellow Star of David patch. The Bergen-Belsen camp had different categories of prisoners, and the Hungarian Jews were in the category of Preferential Jews (Vorzugsjuden) because they were considered desirable for exchange purposes.

The first transport of 318 “exchange Jews” left the Bergen-Belsen Hungarian camp on August 18, 1944, bound for Switzerland. On August 20th, the trainload of Hungarian Jews arrived in Bregenz and then went on to St. Gallen the next day.

Holocaust survivor endured six years of torture, but he’s not bitter

This morning when I read the story of Holocaust survivor Charles Pierce, I was struck by the variety of place names that were included in his story: the city of Kielce in Poland, the Treblinka death camp, the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp, Dachau concentration camp, the Kaufering sub-camps of Dachau, and finally the place near the town of Dachau where he was rescued by soldiers in the 20th Armored Division.

Charles Pierce came to America in 1949, went back to school and married a woman that he met on a blind date.  He never spoke, at home, of his 6-year ordeal, not even after he came back from Germany where he testified in a war crimes trial in 1969.  He never spoke about his experience in the camps until his granddaughter asked him to speak to her class.

Kielce is the city in Poland where a pogrom occurred in July 1946.  I learned the word pogrom, from my Jewish tour guide, when I visited Poland in 1998.  She told me that the word means “like thunder.”  This word was coined to describe what happened when  non-Jews would come down “like thunder” on the Jews and chase them out of cities after accusing them of “blood libel.”

Here are the highlights of the story of Charles Pierce:

1.  After Poland was invaded by Germany in September 1939, soldiers came to Kielce and began taking the Jews as prisoners, including the family of Charles Pierce.

According to this website

“Armed teenagers, members of the Hitler Youth, ordered them out onto the streets, stripping them of their material possessions and handing the family business over to a Polish Nazi. The family moved into a newly established ghetto where 20,000 people lived in a few square blocks.”

“They saw us as sub-human. Soldiers used us for target practice,” Pierce explained.

2.  When the ghetto was liquidated, Charles Pierce was sent on a train to Treblinka.

“Survivors of the evacuation [of the ghetto] were ordered onto tightly packed railcars for transfer to Treblinka, in Poland, where Pierce spent 14 months, surviving largely on potato peels and bread, refusing to eat the horsemeat soup prisoners were given.”

3.  Pierce was transferred from Treblinka to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where just the day before he arrived, 20,000 Gypsies had been killed.

4.  Pierce survived Auschwitz-Birkenau and was transferred to one of the 11 Kaufering sub-camps of Dachau.

5.  As the war was nearing the end, Pierce was transferred to the Dachau main camp. This quote tells what was happening at Dachau:

The Nazis began slaughtering the remaining prisoners at Dachau as they planned to abandon the camp. Pierce was selected to help an officer haul his possessions out of the camp. The three-day march would nearly kill him, but in the end it saved his life.

6.  Somehow Pierce escaped from the German officer, whose possessions he had hauled out of the Dachau camp, and he happened upon the tanks of the 20th Armored Division and was rescued by American soldiers.

Middle school teacher in trouble for Holocaust role playing in the classroom

It’s all over the news today.  A middle school teacher has been arrested and is facing charges because of an incident in her classroom.  The parents of the boy involved are suing the teacher.

This quote is from this website:

COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — Police in South Carolina say a middle school teacher has been accused of dragging a student under a table during class, telling the boy “this is what the Nazis do to Jews.”

The 12-year-old student told police he got up to sharpen a pencil at Bluffton Middle School on Wednesday when the teacher grabbed him by his collar and said, “come here, Jew.”

The seventh-grade teacher, Patricia Mulholland, claims she was trying to teach the students a lesson about the Holocaust.

Attorney Robert Ferguson says the teacher’s attempt to teach about World War II and the Holocaust has been taken to mean an anti-Semitic rant and it was nothing like that.

Mulholland turned herself in to face charges of assault and battery and public disorderly conduct.

None of the news articles say whether the boy involved was Jewish or if he was only playing the role of a Jew in a lesson on the Holocaust.

The classroom incident was clearly meant to be symbolic of the Holocaust:  An innocent young boy was doing nothing wrong, just going about his business, sharpening a pencil, when all of a sudden, out of nowhere, an evil Nazi comes along and grabs him for no reason at all. He is thrown under a table, which represents a gas chamber.

The teacher was trying to get a point across:  the Jews had done nothing wrong in the entire history of the world, but for no reason at all, they were grabbed off the street and thrown into death camps, where they were gassed upon arrival if they were under the age of 15 or over the age of 45.

I got into trouble for criticizing Holocaust role playing in the classroom on this blog post. Students at Monroe High School in Ohio had participated in a pretend “death march” through a hallway, with a teacher accompanying them, holding a baseball bat, and screaming at them.

I disapprove of Holocaust role playing.  I don’t think this is the right way to teach young  students about the Holocaust.  I think Holocaust education should begin with teaching the students about what happened to the Jews in the year 70 AD and continue up to the present time with what is happening to the Palestinians today.  A small part of this history lesson would be about Nazi Germany and the Holocaust.

You can read the time line of the case here.

The Chinese are being introduced to the Holocaust

I read on the Fox News website that Chinese Premier Wen Jiaboa visited Poland recently and “paid homage on Friday to the victims of the Nazi Auschwitz death camp, saying lessons drawn from it should help build a safer world.”

This quote is from Fox News:

At the memorial in southern Poland, Wen walked through the former camp’s main gate with the Nazis’ cynical slogan “Arbeit Macht Frei” — German for “Work Sets You Free” — and laid yellow and red flowers at the Death Wall where the Germans executed thousands of Polish resistance members during World War II.

This is why I depend on Fox News for the news.  Note that Fox reported that the Death Wall (aka the Black Wall) was where Polish resistance fighters were executed.  Other news stories of the Chinese Premier’s visit said that he placed flowers at this wall to pay his respects to the six million Jews who died in the Holocaust.

The famous Black Wall at the Auschwitz main camp where visitors leave flowers

A picture that hangs in the Auschwitz Museum in the main camp shows how prisoners were executed at the Black Wall.

An illustration of the execution of prisoners at the Black Wall

The wall that visitors now see is a reconstruction.  The original wall was removed by Arthur Liebehenschel, who replaced Rudolf Hoess as the camp Commandant in November, 1943, and ordered the executions at the wall to stop.

The Black Wall is at the end of a long courtyard in the main Auschwitz camp. Block 11 on the right is where the Gestapo courtroom was located

The Black Wall was the location where political prisoners, mostly Polish resistance fighters, who had been convicted by the Gestapo Summary Court, were executed. These prisoners were brought to the Auschwitz I camp, but were not registered as inmates; they were housed in dormitory rooms on the first and second floors of Block 11 (shown in the photo above) while they awaited trial in a courtroom set up in the building.

After they were convicted, the prisoners were taken to a small washroom in Block 11 where they were ordered to strip naked, after which they were marched to the wall in groups of three and were executed with one shot to the neck at close range. Some of the prisoners, who were executed here, were Czech resistance fighters from the Gestapo prison at the Small Fortress in Theresienstadt.

The view from the Black Wall, looking toward the entrance to the courtyard. Block 11 is on the left, and the medial building, where experiments were done, is on the right.

The complete records, compiled by the office of Richard Glücks for all the Nazi concentration camps in the years 1935 to 1944, are now stored on microfilm and kept in the Russian Central Archives in the Central State Archives No. 187603 on Rolls 281 through 286. Richard Glücks was the head of Amt D: Konzentrationslagerwesen of the WVHA; he was the highest-ranking “Inspector of Concentration Camps” in Nazi Germany.

According to the records kept by the Nazis, there were 117 Jews who were executed at the Black Wall.  So why is this the place where world leaders are taken to visit when they make a trip to Auschwitz?

The total number of people executed at Auschwitz-Birkenau, according to the Nazi records, was 1,646 including 117 Jews, 1,485 Poles, 19 Russians, 5 Czechs and 20 Gypsies, but according to the Auschwitz Museum, there were 20,000 people murdered at the Black Wall in the Auschwitz I camp.

The executions at the Black Wall were legal because the prisoners were given a trial before execution. Most of the people, who were executed at the wall, were Resistance fighters who were fighting as illegal combatants in World War II.  Others were executed for committing acts of sabotage in the factories at Auschwitz.

Deaths in the gas chambers were not recorded as executions; in fact death by gassing was not recorded at all by the Nazis.

Student trip to Auschwitz sponsored by the Holocaust Education Trust

I like to read newspaper accounts of the student trips from the UK to Auschwitz.  I always learn something new.

In a recent article in the Westminster Chronicle, which you can read here, I learned this startling new information:

We stopped at the point [in Auschwitz-Birkenau] where the men were separated from the women and children, and where the prisoners who were deemed unfit to work were taken straight to the main gas chambers. All that remains of the [gas] chambers is a pile of rubble, as they were demolished when the camp was liberated.

The gas chambers were demolished WHEN the camp was liberated?  According to the official Holocaust history, after the Nazis abandoned Auschwitz on Jan. 18, 1945, they came back to the camp twice to blow up the gas chambers in order to destroy the evidence BEFORE the Soviet liberators arrived.

Did something get lost in translation?  Did a tour guide at Birkenau really tell the British students that the Soviets demolished the gas chambers WHEN THE CAMP WAS LIBERATED?  That’s Holocaust denial — punishable by 5 years in prison in 19 countries!!!

But wait!  There’s more.  This quote from the article tells how the buildings in the main Auschwitz camp were built:

We were met by a guide who walked with us through the main entrance and into some of the buildings constructed by slave labour.

Read any history book about Auschwitz and you will learn that the buildings in the main camp were originally built for migratory farm workers, who stayed there between jobs in the seasonal work on large German estates. This farm labor exchange was built in a district of the town of Auschwitz, called Zazole, in 1916. Auschwitz was then in Galicia, a province in the Austro-Hungarian sector of the former country of Poland, which had been divided between the Russians, Austrians and Prussians (Germans) in 1795.  At the time that the concentration camp was opened in Auschwitz, this area had been incorporated into the Greater German Reich; it was not part of German-occupied Poland.

Barrack building at Auschwitz was built in 1916

There were 22 buildings in the Auschwitz farm labor camp, which was originally built in 1916.  14 of the buildings were originally only one story high. The Nazis remodeled these buildigs into two story buildings with attic space. In the photo above, you can see a slight difference in the color of the bricks on the upper floors.

Did the Germans use slave labor to build these buildings in 1916?  If they did, it is news to me.

This quote from the article gives more new information about Auschwitz:

First comes a display of hair cuttings from women who had their heads shaved, their hair used on an industrial scale to weave material for guards’ uniforms.

So that’s why the hair was cut from the heads of the women.  It was used to make hair shirts for the Auschwitz guards!

Apparently the tour guides do not tell the students that the heads of the prisoners were shaved in an attempt to get rid of the lice that spreads typhus.

Prosthetic limbs and crutches on display at Auschwitz

A display case in Room 5 of Block 5, pictured above, is filled with the artificial legs and crutches which were brought to the Auschwitz camp by incoming prisoners. My tour guide in 1998 explained that the wounded Polish war veterans from World War I accounted for most of this huge collection.

This quote from the news article has a different explanation for this display:

Then there were prosthetic limbs, crutches and sticks taken from disabled prisoners who had been taken straight to the gas chambers, along with piles of glasses worn by the men and women, suitcases bearing the names of prisoners, and children’s shoes and clothes.

So disabled prisoners were brought to Auschwitz to be gassed?  I thought disabled people were sent to Hartheim Castle in Austria to be gassed.

This quote from the news article is about the gas chamber in the main Auschwitz camp:

We continued on, deep in thought, to the most sinister of all the buildings, the gas chamber.

It was a little like a factory inside – just a bare room with a hole in the ceiling. You would have no idea what happened in there without knowing the background. Or at least until you see the crematoriums and their large furnaces, built to dispose of the bodies of thousands of people.

You can read about the gas chamber in the main camp on my website here, and you can read about the four holes in the ceiling here.

One of the reconstructed holes in the ceiling of the gas chamber in the main Auschwitz camp

I don’t think the students should be taken to see the gas chamber. To see the gas chamber in the main Auschwitz camp is to become a Holocaust denier.

In the gas chamber in the main camp, there is no way to heat the Zyklon-B pellets to release the gas and no way to vent the gas from the room.  There is no container in which to put the pellets, and it would have been a problem to retrieve the pellets from the floor after the gassing.  The gas chamber is right next to the crematory room and there would have been danger of an explosion.

For years, the guides at Auschwitz told tourists that the gas chamber was original.  Now, at least, they admit that it is a reconstruction, done by the Soviets.  It is now time for the tour guides to tell student visitors that the brick buildings in the main camp were built in 1916, but not by using “slave labor.”

April 29, 1945 — the day that Dachau was liberated by American soldiers

Prisoners at the Dachau concentration camp after they were liberated

Prisoners at Dachau celebrating the liberation of the camp

You can read all about the liberation of Dachau on my website here.

The online Ventura County Star newspaper has an article about a soldier who was with the American soldiers who liberated the camp. This quote is from the newspaper:

On Sunday, Congregation Am Hayam in Ventura held its first Jewish Heritage Celebration to commemorate the 64th anniversary of Israeli independence and the 67th anniversary of the liberation of Dachau. Sandy Lebman, an Am Hayam member, was the featured speaker.

In 1945, he had just turned 20 and was serving as an Army radio gunner in the 42nd “Rainbow” Infantry Division. He was part of a seven-man reconnaissance team that came upon a walled-in area he guessed might be a POW camp. Shots rang out, and Lebman jumped back into an armored car and told the driver to rush the gate.

“I began firing from the turret with my machine gun and wiped out all the guards,” he said. “I will never forget what I saw when we broke into that crematorium where these walking skeletons were shoveling dead bodies from a stack and throwing them into the furnaces.”

Lebman looked down and saw an arm moving on a body buried in the pile. “My first thought was: Could any of these bodies or inmates be my relatives?”

When Lebman was 15 and growing up in Ohio, his father was told to stop sending money to his parents and siblings in Poland because, “They were all gone.” The boy vowed that day that as soon as he graduated from high school he would join the Army “and wipe them (the Nazis) all out.”

In Yiddish, Lebman told the Dachau crematorium workers, “Ich bin yuden!” (“I am a Jew!”) He said he will never forget the look in their eyes when they realized he was a U.S. soldier there to liberate them.

You can read about the role of the 42nd Division in the liberation of Dachau on my website here.