What Dachau looked like in 1966…

I had a chance to see Dachau in 1957 when a group of people invited me along on a trip to see the camp.  I didn’t want to go because the camp was filled, at that time, with homeless people who had been expelled from Czechoslovakia because they were ethnic German.

I  recently read a description of Dachau, written by a man who visited the camp in 1966.  In 1965, the ethnic Germans were kicked out and the former camp was turned into a Memorial Site.

This quote is from the article about Dachau in 1966:

I saw a man wearing a Confederate flag baseball cap the other day. I didn’t hate him, but I sure felt sorry for him for the heavy load he carries. The sight reminded me of the Nazi flag and my visit to Dachau concentration camp in Germany in 1966. The visit was one of my life-changing experiences.

Dachau was one of the many Nazi concentration camps that tortured, experimented on and murdered millions of Jews, people of color, Gypsies, Catholics, disabled people, liberals (free-thinkers), homosexuals or anyone that opposed the Nazi regime of Adolph Hitler.

I can still visualize the white bones in the sun sticking out of the dirt of the farmer’s fields that surrounded Dachau.

I can still see the tall, double-barbed-wire fences and the sign in German that read: “Work Will Set You Free” at the entrance of the camp.

I can still see the 5-foot-high pile of tens of thousands of eye glasses, the lampshade made from human skin, the long, 10-foot-tall, granite wall indented from the millions of machine gun rounds that first burst through the bodies of the men, women and children that were marched along the parapet and fell into the huge trench in front.

I can still smell the crematorium ovens and see the gurneys used to wheel the corpses in by the thousands. I can visualize the light green gas chamber — supposedly never used — with the fake shower nozzles on the walls.

In other camps, these gas chambers were packed with terrified, crying people who knew their fate. When the doors were closed cyanide was dropped into the holes in the roof, or trucks were backed up to the chambers and hoses hooked up to the exhaust and forced into the rooms. Monsters did this; monsters who made the Inquisition pale in comparison.

I regret that I didn’t go to Dachau in 1966.  I could have seen “a lampshade made of human skin.”

People of color were not sent to Dachau, but there was one prisoner from the Belgian Congo: Jean (Johnny) Voste, who was at Dachau when the camp was liberated. Voste was a Belgian Resistance fighter who had been arrested in 1942 for an act of sabotage in the town of Malignes, near Antwerp.

Changes in the gas chamber story told in 1997 at the Majdanek death camp

In 1998, I made a trip to Poland and a professional tour guide took me to see the Majdanek Memorial Site, where I purchased a small, 72-page booklet, that had been published in 1997.

Since then, I have learned from a fellow blogger, The Black Rabbit of Inlé, that the Memorial Site is telling a far different story about the homicidal gas chambers at Majdanek.

In a comment on my blog, The Black Rabbit of Inlé asked about the contents of the 1997 booklet; I am answering in a new blog post today so that everyone can learn about what tourists were being told at Majdanek in 1998.

Let me preface this by saying that, when I went to Poland in 1998, I was absolutely astounded at how primitive everything was in the country.  When I commented on this, my tour guide told me that it was because the country had not yet recovered from the years of Communism. I have never returned to Majdanek since 1998, although I did go to Poland again in 2005 and visited the Auschwitz camp for the second time.  I learned in 2005 that a lot of changes have been made in Poland.

So get ready for a trip down Memory Lane because I am going to quote from the 1997 guidebook pages about the Majdanek gas chambers.  On page 42 of the booklet, there is the start of a chapter entitled “Extermination.”

This quote is from page 43 of the Majdanek booklet, published in 1997:

From mid 1942, gas chambers became the direct extermination of prisoners.  Gassings were carried out in specially built chambers of which two adjoined to the bath-house were in most frequent use. Over the entrance door [to the building] there was a sign reading “Bath and Disinfection” to lull the vigilance of those condemned to death.

The “bath-house” that is referred to in the above quote was a building made of wood which had an undressing room and a shower room.  The “specially built chambers” were in a brick extension that was “adjoined” to the wood building.  The sign was on the front of the wood building.

Brick extension adjoined to Building #41 at Majdanek

Sign on front of Building #41

Upon entering the gas chamber building, (Barrack No. 41) you first see the bare, unfurnished undressing room which has narrow wooden boards over the concrete floor. Then you proceed into the shower room, a large room with rows of exposed water pipes and sprinkler-type shower heads on the ceiling; this room also has a wooden floor over concrete.

Shower Room in Building #41 at Majdanek

At one end of the shower room, there are two large concrete bathtubs. The tour guide explained that the prisoners were not allowed to loll in the bathtub, but had to get in and out in a few seconds. The bathtubs were probably filled with disinfectant, as was the case at other camps such as Buchenwald. The shower room was also used by incoming prisoners who were selected to work at Majdanek, which was a labor camp as well as an extermination camp for the Jews. The Jews did not have to be disinfected before they were gassed, although they might have been told to take a dip in one of the tubs, to fool them into thinking that they were not going to be gassed.

I could not find a photo of the bathtubs in Building #41; they might have been removed by now.  I wrote a previous blog post about the concrete bathtub in the reconstructed crematorium.  In 1998, when I visited Majdank, the tour guides were telling visitors that there was a gas chamber in the reconstructed crematorium.  The shower room in the reconstructed crematorium, is no longer claimed to have been a gas chamber.  It was previously claimed to be one of the four Majdanek gas chambers.  Now the number of gas chambers at Majdanek has dwindled down to 2.

Entrance into the main room used for gassing in Building #41

In the photo above, taken several years ago, you can see the metal door into the main gas chamber and a wood barricade which prevented visitors from entering the room.  When I visited in 1998, it was possible to enter the gas chamber and there was no sign inside the gas chamber.

View of the main gas chamber from the doorway

Just outside Building #41 is a small empty square, called the Rosenfeld (Rose field) where the selections were made.  Then both groups entered Building #41 where those selected to work took a shower and those selected to die were gassed. The prisoners who were selected to die also took a shower to warm up their bodies so that the gas would work faster, according to a sign in the building in 1998.

Square in front of Building #41 where selections were made for the gas chamber at Majdanek

This quote, on page 43 of the guidebook, is a continuation of the previous quote above:

Built of brick [the gas chambers] had reinforced concrete ceilings, concrete floors and thick metal doors with a peephole hermetically sealed. In one chamber the process of killing could be watched through a small window in the wall of the adjacent room for the SS men.

My memory of the “adjacent room for the SS men” is that this was a tiny room within one of the gas chamber rooms and that this tiny room had a small window, with bars on it but no glass, where an SS man could watch the victims die.  My first thought was that an SS man, standing in this tiny room that had no door, would have been overpowered by the victims and beaten to death.  But maybe the SS man would have just shot the victims inside the gas chamber if they tried to attack him.

The quote from page 43 of the guidebook continues with this quote:

Cyclone B and carbon monoxide were most commonly used in the gas chambers. Cyclone B (lumps of silicate earth saturated with hydrocyanide) was introduced into the chamber through an opening in the ceiling and condensed carbon monoxide came from bottles.  Some 7,700 kg of Cyclone B were delivered.  To drown out the cries of the dying tractor engines were run near the chambers.  The victims were mainly Jews selected for death directly upon arrival.

According to another book, which I purchased at the Visitor’s Center, construction of the gas chambers at Majdanek started in August 1942 and was completed in October 1942.

The following quote is from a book entitled Majdanek, published in Warsaw in 1986, which I purchased from the Visitor’s Center at the Memorial Site in 1998.

This is a description of the gas chambers in “Bath and Disinfection” Building Number One (barrack #41) at Majdanek:

“The gas chambers were built of ceramic brick, covered with a ferro-concrete roof, and provided with a cement floor. The installation comprised three chambers: a large one (10 m x 5.5 m x 2 m) and two smaller ones (4.80 m x 3.60 x 2 m) as well as a cabin for the SS man who pumped doses of gas from steel cylinders into the chambers and watched through a small grated window (25 x 15 cm), the behavior of the victims. Two chambers, the large one and the southern smaller one, were equipped with devices for the use of carbon monoxide (CO). In the smaller one, there was a metal pipe, 40 mm in diameter, running along the walls above the floor. The gas got into the chamber through holes in the pipe. Cyclone B was poured into a special opening in the concrete roof.

“The large chamber also had a metal pipe, 25 mm in diameter, fastened to one of the walls above the floor. As in the smaller chamber, the carbon monoxide from a steel cylinder got in through this pipe. In addition, there were two openings in the western wall, through which hot air (120 degrees C) was blown in by a ventilator from a stove placed on the outside of the chamber, which alone killed the victims and, at the same time, intensified the action of Cyclone B, since the lethal effect of the gas increased at a temperature of over 27 degrees C. The other small chamber, on the southern side, had only an opening in the roof to pour in Cyclone B. The massive metal doors to the chambers were air-tight, fastened by two bolts and iron bars.”

When I visited Majdanek in 1998, I was the only English-speaking person there. My tour began with a movie in English, and I was the only person in the theater.

During my visit, I was carrying a camera that used film.  The camera required a lot of setting before taking a photo.  I was very nervous and my tour guide was rushing me through the gas chamber building, so I didn’t get to take any photos.  I have borrowed the photos on this blog post from other photographers.

Recent photo of the main gas chamber at Majdanek

Rear of Building #41 at Majdanek

In the photo immediately above, the door on the right is the exit from the main gas chamber at Majdanek. The door that is shown in the background of the photo of the main gas chamber is the same door that is shown on the right in the photo immediately above.

When a Holocaust denial law is eventually passed in America, what will US citizens be required to believe?

I anticipate that America will eventually have a law against Holocaust denial and that Holocaust denial will be an exception to our 1st Amendment right of free speech.  Russia is currently contemplating such a law.  You can read more about the proposed law in Russia here.

When a Holocaust denial law is passed in the USA, what will Americans be required to believe, under the threat of 5 years in prison?

Today, I read an interesting article here, entitled “What do Creationists and Holocaust Deniers Have In Common?”

This quote is from the article cited above:

As distasteful and offensive as the Holocaust deniers analogy may seem (it’s such a morally repulsive idea that no sane historian would ever attempt to equivocate the truth of the Holocaust with radical conspiracy theories), we would be naive if we summarily discounted that denial without understanding its origins and its import. For a great many in the radicalized Middle East, Holocaust denial is a centerpiece in education policy, domestic policy, and international affairs. We are nearly seventy years removed from the Holocaust, and I suspect that, within my lifetime, I’ll one day read about the death of the last remaining survivor.

We know the Holocaust is true, because many of us lived through it. To be sure, I am far too young to remember the Holocaust, but when I was eighteen, a group of friends and I trekked through the Dachau Concentration Camp, one of the saddest but most illuminating moments of my young life: Confronting the vestiges of undeniable evil, the inhumanly cramped boarding rooms, the crematoriums, the gas chambers, the cast-iron sign emblazoned with the words “Arbeit Macht Frei.” A place that still smelled like soot and death and dust. This was not a Hollywood set. If I had possessed even a fragment of a thought about the remote possibility of a massive conspiracy, it was forever extinguished that afternoon. Dachau is a vivid, permanent, real place on our planet; Holocaust deniers are idiots.

The author doesn’t say how old he is now, so we don’t know what year it was when he was 18, but it must have been during the period of time when there was a sign in the Dachau shower room, saying that it was not a gas chamber, or never used as a gas chamber.

His trek through Dachau must have been after the barracks had been torn down, so that a Memorial Site could be constructed inside the former concentration camp.  The “inhumanly cramped boarding rooms” must have been the reconstructed barrack buildings. When the Dachau camp was used for 17 years to house the ethnic Germans who had been expelled from Czechoslovakia, tourists were not allowed to disturb these pathetic residents.

What did he think that the “Arbeit Macht Frei” sign proved? During the time that 30,000 German “war criminals” were crowded into the Dachau camp, designed for 5,000 prisoners, the “Arbeit Macht Frei” sign was not there, and the prisoners did not have to work.  During that time, the Dachau camp was called “War Crimes Enclosure No. 1.”

If he saw the “gas chambers” (plural), that means that he saw the disinfection chambers that were clearly labeled as such.  The disinfection chambers were used to SAVE lives.

David Irving was thrown into prison in Austria because he said that the gas chamber at the main Auschwitz camp was a “reconstruction.”  Now it is admitted that this gas chamber was reconstructed by the Soviets, and it is no longer a crime to say this.

When Holocaust denial becomes a crime in America, will we have to believe the stories told by Irene Zisblatt or face a 5 year prison sentence?

Hopefully, when America passes a Holocaust Denial law, there will be huge book (about the size of the book of rules on Obamacare) that gives details on each and every story that we are required to believe.

When a Holocaust denial law is finally passed in America, the prisons will become so overcrowded that a new punishment will have to be devised.  Maybe Holocaust deniers could be forced to stand on a street corner wearing a “neck violin” like ones that criminals were forced to wear in the old days.

Neck violin that criminals were forced to wear in the old days

Criminals were forced to wear a neck violin in the old days

Or should Holocaust deniers be thrown into a dungeon, as witches were, after a witch trial.  Holocaust denier trials have been compared to witch trials because the perpetrator is not allowed to defend himself or herself.

The photo below shows a dungeon for witches in Germany.

A dungeon for witches in Germany

Why did the Jews at Auschwitz march out of the camp with the Nazis instead of waiting for the Soviet liberators?

Prisoners on a death march out of Dachau on April 26, 1945

The photo above shows some of the 6,887 Jewish prisoners and Russian POWs, who were marched out of the Dachau concentration camp on April 26, 1945.  Today’s students are taught that the purpose of this “death march” was to kill the prisoners before the camp could be liberated by the Allies.  Note the two German soldiers who are marching with them.  There is no photo of the march out of Auschwitz, but the photo above will give you an idea of how the Auschwitz march might have taken place.

On a similar march out of Auschwitz-Birkenau, on January 18, 1945, the German soldiers marched at the head of the column, tramping down two feet of snow to make it easier for the Jews to march.

I am on the e-mail list of Bradley Smith, a famous Holocaust denier, and today I received an e-mail from him, which included a letter which he had recently sent to Kent State University, where Elie Wiesel was expected to give a talk to the students.

As you may know, Elie Wiesel and his father were allegedly on the death march out of Auschwitz on January 18, 1945.  Elie wrote, in his book Night, that they were given a choice of either marching or staying behind to be liberated by Soviet soldiers.  The Dachau prisoners, shown in the photo above, were not given a choice.  They were marched out of Dachau, so that they could not attack civilians in the town of Dachau, after they were liberated.

I love Bradley Smith and I am a great admirer of his writing.  I read the copy of Bradley’s letter to the University and laughed out loud.  I am quoting from the letter, so as to share it with those who may not be on Bradley’s e-mail list.

Quote from letter written by Bradley Smith to Kent State University:

=====
In his autobiographical book Night, Elie Wiesel writes that in January 1945, when he and his father were both prisoners of the murderous German Nazis at Auschwitz, they were asked by their captors if they would prefer to remain in that death camp, where countless Jews had already been murdered in gas chambers, to await the imminent arrival of their Soviet liberators, or would they rather leave with the Nazi Jew-killers who were abandoning the camp. Elie Wiesel and his dad, talking it over, agreed they would prefer to leave on the death-march retreat with German Nazis dedicated to exterminating Jews as a race rather than wait for their Soviet liberators.

Is there one professor at Kent State University who thinks it might be worthwhile that students consider the significance of this confession? Why not?
=====

I don’t think that Bradley Smith will get an answer to his letter, so I am going to explain to him and to the students, the purpose of the death march out of Auschwitz.

I learned the reason for the death marches from Professor Harold Marcuse, who teaches the history of the Holocaust at the University of California at Santa Barbara.

Professor Marcuse wrote the following in a comment on my blog several years ago:

In any case the death marches in 1945 were a largely futile attempt to keep human evidence of and witnesses to atrocities from falling into Allied hands. That rationale hinged on the illusory notion that the Germans would ultimately defend some territory and in some bizarre way “win” the war. When some responsible German officials realized beyond doubt that the war was lost, they drew the “logical” conclusion and burned the marching prisoners alive, as happened at Ohrdruf, Gardelegen and numerous other places. For them apparently, dead evidence was better than alive evidence.

I am assuming that the professors at Kent State University teach the students the same story that is taught at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Elie Wiesel and his father trusted the Nazis not to burn them alive on the march, so they didn’t stay behind at Auschwitz, when given a choice. If you have ever read Elie Wiesel’s book, you know that Elie and his father survived the burning ditches at Auschwitz on the Night that they arrived.  They expected to survive the burning of the prisoners on the march out of the camp.  They didn’t know what the Soviets might do, so they chose the Nazis instead.

Children were being burned alive at Auschwitz on the night Elie Wiesel arrived

The Jews who stayed behind at Auschwitz found out that they had made the wrong choice because the Soviets didn’t take care of them at all.

After the three Auschwitz camps were liberated, the survivors were on their own. Unlike the concentration camps in Germany, where the liberated prisoners remained in the camps as Displaced Persons and were cared for by the Americans or the British, the Auschwitz prisoners from 29 countries were released to find their own way home.

Primo Levi was an Auschwitz survivor who wrote a book, later made into a movie, about his long journey home to Italy which took him many months. He described how the Jewish prisoners were greeted with hostility in every country along the way.  (Primo Levi was forced to stay behind because he was sick at the time of the death march out of the camp.)

Binjamin Wilkomirski, who falsely claimed to be a child survivor of Auschwitz, wrote in his fake book, entitled Fragments, that there was no liberation. “We just ran away without permission,” he wrote. “No joyous celebration. I never heard the word ‘liberation’ back then, I didn’t even know there was such a word.” Binjamin Wilkomirski also describes this in his book, Fragments: “And the people outside the camp, in the countryside and the nearby town — they didn’t celebrate when they saw us.”

Wilkomirski’s fake book is still being taught in American schools, but it is now called a novel.  Elie Wiesel’s fake book was at one time classified as a novel, but is now being taught in American schools as the Gospel truth.

What color were Dr. Josef Mengele’s eyes?

With nothing better to do, I got to thinking about the color of Dr. Josef Mengele’s eyes.  Why was Dr. Mengele obsessed with changing brown eyes to blue?  Was it because he had blue eyes and he wanted everyone to have the opportunity to have blue eyes?  Or was he sad because he had brown eyes and he wanted to learn how to change the color of his own eyes?

To find out Dr. Mengele’s eye color, I started my search by re-reading the book entitled Mengele, The Complete Story by Gerald Posner and John Ware. I had to re-read the whole book because the index does not include the words “eyes” or “blue.”

I found the following quote in Mengele, the Complete Story:

The memory of this slightly built man, scarcely a hair out of place, his dark green tunic neatly pressed, his face well scrubbed, his Death’s Head SS cap tilted rakishly to one side, remains vivid for those who survived his scrutiny when they arrived at the Auschwitz railhead. Polished boots slightly apart, his thumb resting on his pistol belt, he surveyed his prey with those dead gimlet eyes, Death to the left, life to the right. Four hundred thousands souls — babies, small children, young girls, mothers, fathers, and grandparents — are said to have been casually waved to the lefthand side with a flick of the cane clasped in a gloved hand. Mengele was the chief provider for the gas chambers and their crematoria. He had a look that said ‘I am the power,’ said one survivor. At the time, Mengele was only 32 years old.

What are dead gimlet eyes?  I had to look this up on Dictionary.com which gives this meaning for the term “gimlet eye”:

“an eye that appears to give a sharp or piercing look”

It seems to me that the words “dead” and “gimlet” combined into one description does not make any sense.   Dr. Mengele had sharp, piercing eyes, yet his eyes appeared dead?

Dr. Josef Mengele had brown eyes

Ruth Elias, a survivor of Theresienstadt and Auschwitz, who wrote a book entitled Triumph of Hope, described Dr. Mengele as follows:

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

From this description, it seems that Dr. Mengele was “an attractive man” because, as the old saying goes: “Handsome is as handsome does.”  All of the survivors of Auschwitz agree that Dr. Mengele was very charming and polite.  The photo below shows that Dr. Mengele had a pleasant demeanor.

Dr. Josef Mengele is the man in the middle of the photo

As far as I am concerned, Rudolf Hoess, the man on the right was better looking than Dr. Mengele, who is shown in the middle of the photo. But to get back to the color of Dr. Mengele’s eyes, the color photo below shows that his eyes were brown.

Color photo of Dr. Josef Mengele shows that he had brown eyes

Posner and Ware did not mention in their 325 page book that Dr. Mengele had brown eyes.  Why not?  Was Dr. Mengele “pure German”?  He had dark brown hair and dark brown eyes, which indicates that he might have had a trace of Jewish blood in his bloodline.  Was this why he was obsessed with eye color?

This quote is from page 15 in the book by Posner and Ware:

In July 1939 Mengele married Irene, then almost twenty-two years old, at Obersdorf. The wedding took place after a hitch that at one stage threatened to damage his career.  In Mengele’s submission to the Rasse-und Siedlungshauptampt, the Central Office of Race and Resettlement, to satisfy the SS that there was no trace of Jewish blood in Irene’s family, doubts were raised about her grandfather, Harry Lyons Dumler, an American diplomat, could not be found.  In the absence of proof that Dumler was the father of his wife’s son, the suspicion remained that the real father might be Jewish.  Thus Irene might have inherited Jewish blood.  A search by the German consul in the United States failed to resolve the crisis.   But photographs of Irene and her ancestors and glowing testimonials from friends of her “very Nordic ways” finally won the day and the marriage was allowed. Yet since Mengele was unable to provide clinching proof that Irene had “pure Aryan blood,” much to his chagrin, he failed to qualify for the ultimate accolade of racial purity — a place in the hollowed Sippenbuch, or Kinship Book, for those who had been able to prove, chapter and verse, that their ancestors were pure Aryan at least since 1750. Thus was the arch disciple of racial “hygiene” himself deprived of a certificate that his wife and future children would be racially “clean.”

Posner and Ware do not say in their book whether or not Dr. Mengele could prove that his ancestors, back to 1750, had no Jewish blood, but it is implied in the book that Dr. Mengele himself was racially “clean.”

Why is all this important?  Dr. Mengele was doing experiments at Auschwitz, trying to find out how physical defects are inherited. He wanted to find out how hereditary diseases, such as Tay-Sach’s Disease, are passed on.  This was a terrible insult to the Jews and that is why Dr. Mengele is the number one “war criminal” as far as the Jews are concerned.  The results of his experiments at Auschwitz are kept in a vault at Yad Vashem in Israel, never to see the light of day.

But what about changing brown eyes to blue?  I don’t think that Dr. Mengele was trying to CHANGE eye color.  In my opinion, he was trying to find out how eye color is inherited, but more importantly, how physical defects are inherited. Tay-Sach’s disease is caused by recessive genes, and blue eyes are also recessive.  People with Tay-Sach’s disease don’t live long, making it hard to find subjects for experiments, so Dr. Mengele was studying eye color instead.

This quote is from the website about Tay-Sach’s disease:

How do people inherit Tay-Sachs disease?

This condition [Tay-Sach’s] is inherited in an autosomal recessive pattern, which means both copies of the gene in each cell have mutations. The parents of an individual with an autosomal recessive condition each carry one copy of the mutated gene, but they typically do not show signs and symptoms of the condition.

Dr. Mengele had a Ph.D. in Anthropology as well as a degree in medicine, which he received in July 1938 from the University of Frankfurt. He earned his Ph.D. in 1935 with a thesis on “Racial Morphological Research on the Lower Jaw Section of Four Racial Groups.” In January 1937, Dr. Mengele was appointed a research assistant at the Institute for Heredity, Biology and Racial Purity at the University of Frankfurt. He worked under Professor Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer, a geneticist who was doing research on twins. As the war-time director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Hereditary Teaching Genetics, located in Berlin, von Verschuer secured the funds for Dr. Mengele’s experiments at Auschwitz. The results of  Dr. Mengele’s research on twins was sent to this Institute. The grant for Dr. Mengele’s genetic research was authorized by the German Research Council in August 1943.

You can read here about how Dr. Mengele pulled a family of dwarves out of the gas chamber at Auschwitz, and saved their lives.

Proof that the dying victims inside the Auschwitz gas chamber scratched the walls with their fingernails

There seems to be an inordinate amount of interest in the fingernail scratches on the walls of the gas chamber in the main Auschwitz camp, judging by the number of visitors to my blog posts about the scratches.  But is there any proof that the scratches were made by the victims, and not by tourists in recent years?  Did the victims really scratch “Never Again” and a Star of David on the walls of the gas chamber in the main Auschwitz camp as they were dying?

I set out to do a search to find some proof that the scratches were made by the dying Jews.  I found the proof in a documentary entitled Auschwitz: Inside the Nazi State.  In Episode 1 of this documentary, the scratches were confirmed by the testimony of Dario Gabbai, a Jew who worked as a Sonderkommando, removing the bodies from one of the gas chambers at the Auschwitz II camp, aka Birkenau.

In the YouTube video below, you can see a scene, at 1:34 minutes into the video, that depicts the Wannsee Conference where “The Final Solution” was planned by the Nazis. It is pointed out in the video that “The Final Solution” was the name that the Nazis gave to “the extermination of the Jews.”

The following quote is from the transcript of the documentary, Auschwitz: Inside the Nazi State:

As the war developed Nazi decision makers conceived one of the most infamous policies in all history. What they called the ‘Final Solution’—the extermination of the Jews. And at Auschwitz they journeyed down the long and crooked road to mass murder to create this—the building which symbolised (sic) their crime—a factory of death.

Dario Gabbai—Jewish prisoner, Auschwitz 1944-45: “They were, the people screaming—all the people, you know—they didn’t know what to do, scratching the walls, crying until the gas took effect. If I close my eyes, the only thing I see is standing up—women with children in, in their hands, there.”

So who is Dario Gabbai?  This quote is from the Wikipedia entry for him:

David Dario Gabbai (born 1922) is a Greek Sephardi Jew and Holocaust survivor, notable for his role as a member of the Sonderkommando at Auschwitz. He was deported to the camp in March 1944 and put to work in one of the crematoria at Birkenau, where he was forced to assist in the burning of the hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews that arrived during the spring and summer of that year.

Gabbai remained at Auschwitz until its evacuation in January 1945. He was liberated from Ebensee concentration camp in Austria by the United States Army, and has publicly spoken about what he witnessed and experienced during the Holocaust.

Why was Dario Gabbai allowed to live, after he had witnessed the gassing of the Jews many times?  The policy of the Nazis was to kill the Sonderkommando Jews, who had witnessed the gassing, after 3 months on the job.  But for some strange reason, the Nazis allowed the last group of Sonderkommando Jews to live; they were marched out of the camp on January 18, 1945 and put on trains to Germany and Austria, where they lived until they were liberated by the American Army.

You can watch the first episode of the documentary on the YouTube video below.  At 1:51 minutes in the video, you can see the entrance into what is supposed to resemble the Krema II, or the Krema III, gas chamber, both of which were 5 feet underground.  At 2:00 minutes, you will hear the voice of Dario Gabbai as he describes what happened to the Jews in the gas chamber; note that he mentions, at 2:13 minutes, that they scratched the walls.  Krema II and Krema III were blown up in January 1945 and the evidence of the scratching in these two gas chambers can no longer be seen. Only the scratching on the walls of the gas chamber in the main Auschwitz camp remains.

Of course, Dario was not in the gas chamber with the Jews as they were dying, but he went into the gas chamber afterwards and carried out the dead bodies to take them up on the elevator to the cremation ovens.  How do we know that Dario, or one of the other Sonderdommando Jews, didn’t put the scratches on the walls?  We just have to trust the testimony of Dario.  Would a Jew lie?

 

Woman prisoner at Dachau saw people begging for their lives outside the camp’s gas chamber…

Magdalena Hamilton was a Catholic prisoner who survived six months in the Dachau concentration camp before she was liberated by American troops on April 29, 1945, at exactly 6:10 p.m.  Dachau was mostly a men’s camp for political prisoners, but there were a few women prisoners there.

This quote is from a news story which you can read in full here:

She [Ms. Hamilton] saw people begging for their lives outside the camp’s gas chamber and crematorium. She saw men digging their own graves before they were shot by German soldiers. She saw people tortured until they could no longer stand it.

The gas chamber at Dachau was outside the prison enclosure and hidden from view by a row of trees.  There is now a gate into the area where the gas chamber and the crematorium were located, but at the time that Ms. Hamilton was a prisoner there, the gate was not yet in existence.

Tourist entrance into the area where the Dachau gas chamber is located

Gas chamber location was separated from the rest of the camp by a canal

The Nazis wanted to make sure that the world would know about the atrocities committed in the Dachau concentration camp, so they made it a priority to bring witnesses to the area where the gas chamber was located. They took prisoners, such as Ms. Hamilton, outside the camp and allowed them to witness the Jews begging for their lives as they were shoved into the gas chamber.

Door into a gas chamber at Dachau

There were four gas chambers, like the one shown in the photo above, into which the Jews were shoved, kicking and screaming and begging for their lives.  This was after they had first been tortured.  Ms. Hamilton was brought to the crematorium building to see it all.

This quote from the news article explains why Ms. Hamilton was allowed to survive:

Hamilton thinks the only reason she survived Dachau is because she speaks German and that she had finished four semesters of medical school before she was taken into custody. The Germans were desperate for people to treat their injured soldiers, she said.

What injured soldiers?  Is she talking about the injured soldiers who were dragged out of the SS hospital at Dachau and lined up against a wall and shot during the infamous Dachau Massacre, perpetrated by American soldiers?  Does she tell the little school children about that when she gives a talk?

Does Ms. Hamilton explain to the school children why she was sent to the Dachau camp?  Was she arrested because she was fighting as an illegal combatant and a  traitor to her country?  Does she explain why she is still telling lies to demonize the German people 68 years after the liberation of the Dachau camp?

Mietek Grocher, the man who walked backwards out of a gas chamber and survived

Mietek Grocher has an entry in Wikipedia, which you can read in full here.  This quote is from Wikipedia:

Mietek Grocher is a Polish Jewish author and speaker who survived The Holocaust. Grocher recounts the events in his 1996 book Jag överlevde (English translation: I survived).

Grocher was born in 1926 in Warsaw, Poland and lived with his family in the Warsaw Ghetto. As a teenager during World War II, Grocher survived the gas chamber and nine concentration camps including Buchenwald and Majdanek. He was the only member of his family to survive. […] He also survived the Majdanek gas chambers. He realized he was actually in a gas chamber and began walking backwards. The guard guarding the gas chambers was in a conversation with another guard so Grocher escaped and found his father.

When I visited the Majdanek death camp in 1998, the Majdanek Memorial Site was telling visitors that there were 5 gas chambers at Majdanek, including 4 that were in Building 41 near the entrance into the camp.  Now the number of gas chambers at Majdanek has been reduced to only 2, which are both in Building 41.

Building #41 is on the right. Photo Credit: The Black Rabbit of Inlé

Could it be that Mietek Grocher walked backwards out of one of the gas chambers that is no longer claimed to have been a gas chamber?  The photo above shows Building #41 which was claimed to have four gas chambers in 1998, but that has changed now, so that there were only 2 gas chambers in Building #41.  Note the buildings in the background.  The Majdanek gas chambers were very near a major road; the Majdanek Memorial Site is now within the city limits of Lublin, Poland.

You can read a newspaper article about Mietek Grocher here.  This quote is from the article:

Mietek Grocher managed to escape from a gas chamber in Maidanek in 1943, when he was sixteen years old.

Wait a minute!  He was sent to the gas chamber at the age of 16?  Was he small for his age, and the Nazis didn’t know that he was over the age of 15?  Only Jews under the age of 15 or over the age of 35 were gassed.  What about his parents?  Were they under the age of 35 and exempt from the gas chamber?  The quote from the article continues:

– When I was in there I knew what awaited me and the rest of the space. Instinctively, I started to back off a little backwards, without any real thought that I could get away. […]

– But by chance, I managed to do it. An officer started talking to another officer and took a few steps away. In that moment, I managed to slip away to eventually join my parents in the camp.

Mietek says that the officer obviously had the opportunity to catch up with him – but he dared not do so, for then he would have been accused of misconduct in office and had suffered really bad.

So his parents were obviously under the age of 35, or they would have been in the gas chamber with him.

My theory is that Mietek was not in a gas chamber at all, but in one of the rooms that is no longer claimed to be a gas chamber.  Mietek was INSIDE an alleged gas chamber and there were allegedly two SS officers inside the gas chamber with him.  The SS men did not go inside the gas chamber with the victims.  This would have been too dangerous.  What if someone had dropped the Zyklon-B pellets into the gas chamber while the SS men were inside?  This would have been a disaster.  Surely, the Nazis were not that careless when they gassed the Jews at Majdanek.

The photo below shows the main gas chamber in Building 41.  This gas chamber was the one that was used most often, as evidenced by the blue stains caused by the use of Zyklon-B gas.  Is this the gas chamber that Mietek walked backwards out of?

The main gas chamber in Building 41 Photo Credit: The Black Rabbit of Inlé

The photo above shows the gas chamber in Building 41 at Majdanek which is most often photographed because it has the heaviest blue stains, indicating the frequent use of Zyklon-B gas.  The door in the photo is the exit to the outside of the building.  Did Mitek walk backwards out the back door?

The back door into the gas chamber in Building 41 is on the right Photo Credit: The Black Rabbit of Inlé

The photo above show the rear of Building 41.  The gas chamber with the heavy blue stains was in the brick annex to the building, shown in the foreground.  The door on the right is the back door into the gas chamber.  On the left, you can see the part of the building that is made of wood; in this part of the building was an undressing room and a shower room.  Does this remind you of Dachau, which also had an undressing room and a shower room in the same building with four disinfection chambers for clothing?  I predict that, soon, the whole gas chamber story at Majdanek will drop by the wayside.

The gas chamber with the heavy blue stains, in the photo above, is right next to the gas chamber with a glass window, which is no longer claimed to be a gas chamber, but a disinfection chamber. Zyklon-B was obviously used in the gas chamber with the window because it also shows blue stains.  However, so many people, including me, have made fun of the gas chamber with a window that it has now been downgraded to a clothing disinfection chamber.

The photo below shows the roof of the gas chamber that has heavy blue stains.

Roof of the gas chamber at Majdanek has no holes. Photo Credit: The Black Rabbit of Inlé

Note that there are no holes in the roof for pouring in the Zyklon-B pellets.  What?  No holes?  Did the SS men just throw the Zyklon-B pellets onto the floor of a homicidal gas chamber?  That would have been stupid because it would have been hard to retrieve the pellets, to be used again, when they were mixed with the bodily fluids from the victims who died in this chamber.  This is a clue that the main gas chamber at Majdanek may have been a disinfection chamber for clothing.

When I visited Majdanek in 1998, there was a sign that said that the victims had to take a shower before entering the gas chamber in order to warm up their bodies so that the gas would work faster.  I suspect that this stupid sign is now gone because it caused so much laughter among the tourists. Did Mietek somehow wander out of the shower room and take a wrong turn into a clothing disinfection chamber where he backed out just in time before the Zyklon-B pellets could release the poison gas?

The photo below shows the door into the gas chamber with the heavy blue stains.  Note that there is a glass door.  This door was not there when I visited in 1998, but my tour guide would not let me enter the gas chamber; she hustled me out as fast as she could.  Note the wooden boards over the concrete floor.  The door to the gas chamber is in a room next to the shower room.

Glass door into the gas chamber with the heavy blue stains. Photo Credit: The Black Rabbit of Inlé

The photo below shows the peephole in the door shown in the photo above.  Note that the glass in the peephole is on the inside of the door, where it could easily have been broken by the victims inside.  Why would the Nazis have put the glass on the inside?  Was it because they thought that an SS man might become trapped inside and would have had to break the glass to save his life?

Peephole into the gas chamber with the heavy blue stains. Photo Credit: The Black Rabbit of Inlé

The fact that the glass is on the inside of the door has been used by Holocaust deniers to claim that this could not have been a homicidal gas chamber.  That is not a valid claim.  The victims were unclothed when they were shoved inside this gas chamber after first taking a shower.  They would not have had anything that would break glass on their person.  However, an SS man who had been trapped inside the gas chamber, by accident, would have had something that could break glass.  I am sure that the SS men were smart enough to have been prepared before entering a gas chamber.

So why has the number of gas chambers at Majdanek been downgraded?  I think it is because the number of Jews who died at Majdanek has recently been lowered to just 59,000.  Assuming that some of the deaths were caused by typhus or other diseases, that leaves around 50,000 Jews who could have been gassed at Majdanek.  Five gas chambers would have been too many if only 50,000 Jews were gassed.

With respect to the gas chambers of the Holocaust, if Majdanek goes, can Auschwitz be far behind?

time is running out for Elie Wiesel, famous (alleged) survivor of Auschwitz and Buchenwald

I previously blogged about Elie Wiesel and his lack of an Auschwitz tattoo here.  I wrote about Elie Wiesel’s alleged stay at the Buchenwald camp here. Elie Wiesel has no Auschwitz identification number and no Buchenwald identification number, but he still maintains that he was a prisoner in both of those camps.  Wiesel doesn’t seem to care that there is a website devoted to telling the world that he has no tattoo.  I was blogging about Elie Wiesel and his famous book way back in 2010 here.

This website gives some information about the case, which I am quoting:

…. we wanted to check the most overwhelming fact [the lack of a tattoo], by contacting Auschwitz first by mail, then by phone. The head of Archive of the Auschwitz Museum, M. Plosa, confirmed that the number A-7713, which Elie Wiesel claims without ever displaying it publicly, was attributed to Lazar Wisel, born 15 years before him, and who therefore cannot get mixed up with him.

I am taking the liberty of quoting from the letter that was sent to the French investigator, whom I quoted above:

Thank you very much for your message of 4th December 2012.  I would like to inform you that basing on archival documents from our collection it is possible to settle as follows:

The prisoner number A-7713 was given on 24th May 1944 for Mr. Lazsr WISEL, born on 4th September 1913 in Marmaroasieget (Hungary). After the liquidation and evacuation of the Auschwitz camp Mr. Lazar Wisel was transferred to KL Buchenwald. His arrived to this camp is dated on 26th January 1945 […]

Yours faithfully
Wojciech Plosa
Head of Archive
The state Museum Auschwitz Birkenau in  Oswiecim

So even the Auschwitz Museum will not confirm that Elie Wiesel was a prisoner at Auschwitz nor that Elie was given the tattoo number A-7713 which he swore under oath that he has.  It is time for Elie Wiesel to publicly admit that he is an imposter.

I previously blogged about Elie Wiesel and the world’s belief about Auschwitz here.

Is there any proof that gas chambers existed in the Nazi camps?

Today I was doing some searching on the Internet when I came across this website.  The webmaster has apparently been searching for years for proof that gas chambers existed in Europe during Word War II and that they were used by the Nazis.  Here is a quote from this page of the website:

Therefore, it is of no use to talk about “eyewitnesses,” chemical properties of the insecticide supposedly used in the mass exterminations, or anything else. First, we must locate and/or define a Nazi gas chamber. Everything else comes second.

The above quote was written about six years ago, and I don’t know whether anyone ever came forward and revealed the location of a Nazi gas chamber, so I am going to do so now.

The photo below shows a real Gaskammer (German word for gas chamber) in the Dachau concentration camp.  Note the word “Gaszeit” (German for Gas time) on the door into the Gaskammer.  What more proof do you want that this was a gas chamber?

American soldier poses in front of a Gaskammer door at Dachau

The photograph above was taken by T/4 Sidney Blau on April 30, 1945; it shows a US soldier standing in front of one of the Gaskammern (plural) doors at Dachau.  Yes, there were multiple gas chambers at Dachau which the American soldiers saw when they liberated the camp. The political prisoners in the camp led the Americans to the gas chambers minutes after they had arrived.

The caption which the US Army put on the photo above was as follows:

Gas chambers, conveniently located to the crematory, are examined by a soldier of the U.S. Seventh Army. These chambers were used by Nazi guards for killing prisoners of the infamous Dachau concentration camp.

The photo below, which I took in May 2003, shows the same door which is now bolted to another door so that it remains open at all times.  Note that the words on the door have been painted over.

Door into gas chamber has been bolted so that it stays open

Sign above gas chamber door at Dachau, May 2003

The photo above shows a black sign with white letters near the ceiling which says “Fumigation cubicles” in English. Although the sign says in five languages that these were disinfection chambers, some of the Dachau tour guides tell visitors that these cubicles were used for homicidal gassing. Just after I finished taking this photograph in May 2003, a tour group entered the corridor and an English-speaking guide told the students: “When a transport of Jews was brought to Dachau, they had to remove their clothes, and then they entered these chambers where they were gassed.”

Maybe I misunderstood the tour guide.  Maybe he said that when a transport of prisoners arrived at Dachau, they had to remove their clothes and then the clothes were put into the gas chamber to be fumigated.  It doesn’t matter:  This was a Gaskammer which used Zyklon-B gas for killing.  Whether it was lice or Jews that were killed, this cubicle was a Gaskammer, and it was the Nazis themselves that called it a Gaskammer.  So there is your proof that there were Nazi gas chambers, and don’t you deny it.

But what about Auschwitz-Birkenau where mass gassing took place? Yes, there were gas chambers at Birkenau.  The term used on the blueprints for the gas chamber buildings at Birkenau was Gaskammer.  The photo below shows one of the Gaskammer buildings at Birkenau.

Building at Auschwitz-Birkeanau where a Gaskammer was located

Door into Gaskammer building at Birkenau has blue stains caused by the use of Zyklon-B

Fortunately, the stains caused by Zyklon-B have not been painted over, so anyone can see that the building at Auschwitz-Birkenau, shown in the photos above, used Zyklon-B.

There are two buildings at Birkenau, where Zyklon-B was used; they are located on the south side of the main road through the Birkenau camp.  Tour guides do not take visitors to these buildings.  The two gas chamber buildings are shaped like the letter T and are mirror images of each other. The photos above shows building BW5b which is located in the B1b section of Birkenau on the left side of the camp as you are standing at the entrance gate into the camp. The east wing of the building above was used for delousing.

The second delousing building is BW5a in the B1a section, which is on the other side of the fence on the right in the photo above. The west wing of the BW5a building was used for delousing. Both of these brick buildings also had shower rooms for the prisoners.

But were gas chambers, designed for disinfecting the clothing of the prisoners,  ever used for gassing the Jews?  Yes, according to Rudolf Hoess, the first Commandant of Auschwitz.

In December 1942, there were 19 fumigation chambers, which were designed to use Zyklon-B, installed in the Administration building in the main Auschwitz camp, which is now the Visitor’s Center. According to Rudolf Hoess, the disinfection chambers at the Auschwitz main camp were also used for gassing the Jews on one occasion in 1944. In his autobiography entitled Death Dealer, Hoes wrote the following on page 364:

After the destruction of the Hungarian Jews and the Jews from the Lodz ghetto, it was decided that the sonderkommando who had worked burning the bodies in the ovens of the crematory and during the open-pit cremations should themselves be killed in order to destroy the only witnesses who were in a position to tell what happened. About two hundred of the Sonderkommando were transferred to the main camp at Auschwitz, where they were gassed in the chamber used to disinfect clothing.

Why would the Sonderkommando prisoners have been gassed in disinfection gas chambers?  The Sonderkommando men at Auschwitz were the Jewish prisoners who had to carry the bodies out of the homicidal gas chambers, so they knew a gas chamber when they saw one.  They had to be fooled into entering a gas chamber, so that is why they were put into disinfection chambers.

Why not just shoot the the Sonderkommano men?  That would have been a foolish thing to do because it would have destroyed the whole gas chamber story.  The Holocaust is based on the belief that Jews were gassed in gas chambers. Those mean ole Nazis were gassing lice as fast as they could, trying to prevent the spread of typhus, but in spite of that, thousands of prisoners died of typhus in the Nazi camps.

The photo below shows a Degesh machine that was used to input the Zyklon-B gas into the disinfection chambers.  The Degesh machine was used at Dachau and these machines were also used at the main Auschwitz camp to disinfect the clothing.

Degesh machine used to input Zyklon-B gas into a disinfection chamber

A unopened can of Zyklon-B pellets was inserted into the Degesh machine, which automatically opened the can and poured the pellets into a basket, from which they could be retrieved.  The machine then blew hot air over the pellets so that the gas could be released.

There is ample proof that killing was done, using Zyklon-B in a room called a Gaskammer (gas chamber).  Killing lice counts, so don’t go denying that the Nazis used gas chambers.