Photos of Auschwitz gas chamber show fingernail scratches on the wall

With nothing better to do, I got out some of the photos that I took on film, with a Nikon F5 camera, in October 2005, the last time I visited the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum.  Actually, the box of photos fell off a shelf because my photos are stacked up too high.  I took hundreds of photos, both digital pictures and on film, when I visited Auschwitz in 2005.

Scratches on the wall of the gas chamber in the main Auschwitz camp

The photo above shows scratches on the wall of the gas chamber in the main Auschwitz camp.  I did not notice the scratches when I took the photo.  I was trying to take a photo of one of the ceiling beams.  I have cropped most of the ceiling out, so that viewers can concentrate on the wall with the scratches.

I previously blogged about the scratches on the wall of the gas chamber here and here.

Interior of gas chamber in main Auschwitz camp

Notice the doorway into the oven room on the left side of the photo.  There is no door and no marks where a door would have been.  I have left this photo deliberately dark, so as to show what the gas chamber really looks like today.  It is totally creepy, and not for young children who might easily become upset.

The first time that I visited Auschwitz in 1998, my tour guide and I entered through the door that was cut into the gas chamber when it was converted into a bomb shelter.  In 2005, the door was closed and a chain was put across it, because visitors were not allowed to enter there.  The Auschwitz staff was admitting, in 2005, that the gas chamber is a reconstruction and that this door was not there when the room was a gas chamber.  My 2005 photo of the bomb shelter entrance is shown below.

Entrance to the bomb shelter in the former Auschwitz gas chamber

Notice that the photo above was taken in the early morning hours.  You have to get up very early in the morning to get photos of Auschwitz before the hordes of tourists arrive.  In the background of the photo, you can see the reconstructed chimney which is not attached to the building. My 2005 photo of the chimney is shown below.

Reconstructed chimney is not attached to the oven room in the Auschwitz gas chamber building

Why are tourists not allowed to see what is in the basement of the gas chamber building at Dachau?

The last time that I saw the Memorial Site at the former Dachau concentration camp was in May 2007.  At that time, tourists were not allowed to see the basement of the Baracke X building where the gas chamber is located.  I have been to Dachau several times (the first time was in 1997) but the door to the basement was never open.

Stairs leading down to the basement of Baracke X at Dachau

I got to thinking about this when I read a letter, written by one of the American liberators of Dachau, on this website.  This quote is an excerpt from the letter on the website:

FORMER BRUNSWICKER EDITOR DESCRIBES HORRORS OF DACHAU
Dachau, Germany
July 29, 1945

Dear Folks,
I’m going to combine this letter because I want to tell you in some detail of something I have just seen–the site of one of the world’s greatest horrors, I think. Perhaps Dachau, just the word, means something to you. Here was one of the Nazis’ most horrible concentration camps–and we are staying within its barbed-wire enclosure in the hospital building.

Across a high concrete wall, just a few yards from me now, are the buildings where many thousands of starved and diseased persons finally were put to death, by one of several devices the ingenious Germans had arranged.

The first sight one sees is the row of small concrete gas chambers. These small rooms, about six feet square–could either be used for decontaminating clothes–and bodies–or put prisoners to death. The next room, large and with a low ceiling first gives the impression of a huge shower room. There are drains in the floor and shower spigots in the ceiling–but all fakes. Prisoner were made to take off all their clothes and enter the room, believing they were to take a bath. As many as 300 persons, I suppose men and women all in one group, were crowded into this room, the door sealed, and the gas turned on. In seven or eight minutes it was all over.

[…]

In the basement of this building was a bone crusher where the remains from the furnaces were ground into small particles, either for fertilizer or to be put into small urns, resembling flower pots, on the pretense of being sent to relatives. The basement is full of these pots and bone ashes litter the floor. Even in death these poor creatures were shown no decency.

It would be interesting to see what a bone crusher looks like.  I would also like to see the the “small urns, resembling flower pots.”   Many of the America soldiers described the pots as being red colored, apparently like the red flower pots that you can buy today.  But there is something else that I would like to see in the basement of the Baracke X building:  the contraption that was used to put the gas fumes through the floor vents in the gas chamber, as described by American Army officer Col. Davids Chavez, Jr.

This quote is from the report made by Col. David Chavez, Jr. on May 7, 1945, a little more than a week after the camp was liberated on April 29, 1945:

“The new building [Baracke X] had a gas chamber for executions… the gas chamber was labeled ‘shower room’ over the entrance and was a large room with airtight doors and double glassed lights, sealed and gas proof. The ceiling was studded with dummy shower heads. A small observation peephole, double glassed and hermetically sealed was used to observe the conditions of the victims. There were grates in the floor. Hydrogen cyanide was mixed in the room below, and rose into the gas chamber and out the top vents.” Report of the Atrocities Committed at Dachau Concentration Camp, signed by Col. David Chavez, Jr., JAGD, 7 May 1945

One of the floor grates mentioned in the Chavez report

The photograph above shows one of the “grates in the floor” that were mentioned in the official US Army report, signed by Col. Chavez, which is quoted above.

There are 6 of these grates, which appear to be floor drains, but they are now closed up.  The grates are in 2 rows of three in the center of the room. The floor slopes towards the center, so that water would drain into the grates. The size of the drains is approximately 20 by 26 inches.

Top vent that was mentioned in the Chavez report

The photo above shows one of the top vents mentioned in the Chavez report.  This is actually a light fixture box, from which the fixture has been removed.  Other reports of the gas chamber, made by the American liberators, did not mention how the gas was vented out of the room. However, there are also two large vents in the ceiling of the Dachau gas chamber, which appear to have been added later.

Two large square vents on the ceiling of the Dachau gas chamber

The photo above shows two large square vents on the ceiling of the Dachau gas chamber, on the left hand side of the photo. (The two vents on the outside wall of the gas chamber, in the center of the photo, are  part of a different lie, which I won’t go into now.)

The photo below shows a close-up of one of the ceiling vents. Both vents are supposedly connected to one vent pipe on the roof.

Vent on ceiling of Dachau gas chamber

Photo taken shortly after Dachau was liberated shows a vent on the roof directly over the gas chamber

Photo of Dachau Baracke X building shows a vent pipe over the gas chamber

In the photo above, notice the two holes in the wall, behind the white object in the foreground.  This clearly indicates that there is a vent over the gas chamber, and the old black and white photo shows that the vent was there shortly after the camp was liberated.

In 1989, Fred Leuchter examined the Dachau gas chamber and was highly critical of it in his report; he wrote the following regarding the lack of proper ventilation of the room:

For the record, this alleged gas chamber would have held only forty-seven (47) persons utilizing the nine (9) square foot inclusion rule as accepted by standard engineering practice for air handling systems. Without an exhaust system or windows, it would require at least one week to vent by convection. This estimate is based on American gas chambers requiring twenty (20) minutes to vent with two complete air changes per minute, and a minimum of forty-eight (48) hours to vent a fumigated building with an abundance of windows.

It seems that Fred Leuchter, a gas chamber expert who was a consultant for the Missouri gas chamber, did not consider the pipe over the Dachau gas chamber to be an exhaust pipe, since he wrote “without an exhaust system” in his report. According to Fred Leuchter, the exhaust pipe over a gas chamber should be 40 feet high, like the one over the Missouri gas chamber, but what does he know?

You can read Leuchter’s full report on the Dachau gas chamber on my website here.

The Dachau gas chambers (plural) were mentioned in the film of Dachau, that was made by Hollywood director George Stevens on May 3, 1945. This film was shown at the Nuremberg IMT on November 29, 1945. The gas chamber footage starts at 4:02 in the video. You can see the “top vents” mentioned by Chavez at 4:14 in the YouTube video.

Two videos about the Auschwitz gas chamber…which is correct?

Here are two conflicting versions of the story of the Auschwitz-Birkenau gas chambers.  The first video shows the ruins of Krema II at Auschwitz, as a tour guide speaks to a group of tourists, who are not shown.

The second video was done by the famous “denierbud.”  It also shows a depiction of Krema II, one of the four gas chamber buildings at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Whom do you believe?

An American public school has opened a Holocaust Museum

A U.S. High School in the Bronx has recently opened a Holocaust Museum.  You can read all about it in the online New York Daily News here.

One of the items on display is an empty Zyklon-B can.  Zyklon-B was the poison gas that was used in the homicidal gas chambers at the Nazi death camps. Zyklon-B was also used in the disinfection chambers in all the camps; the clothes of the prisoners were disinfected in order to kill the lice that spreads typhus.  A photo of the empty can, on display in the High School Museum, is shown below.

Empty Zyklon-B can on display in American public school

Do you notice anything about the hole in the top of the can?  This jagged hole was probably not made by a machine supplied by the Degesch company, which shipped the Zyklon-B to the camps.  This means that this can is probably not from Dachau, where the cans were opened by a machine.  It could be an empty can from Auschwitz.

Cans of Zykon-B at the Mauthausen Memorial Site

My photo above was taken at the Mauthausen Memorial Site, which shows a shower room where prisoners were allegedly gassed with Zyklon-B, although the device that was used to put the Zyklon-B into the room was mysteriously removed, and can no longer be seen.

Notice that the can, with the pellets spilling out, has an opening that might have been made by a Degesch machine.   Degesch machines were never used in the homicidal gas chambers; the Zyklon-B pellets were just dumped onto the heads of the prisoners through holes in the roof of the gas chamber.

Degesch machine used at Dachau to open a can of Zyklon-B and pour the pellets into a basket from which they could be retrieved

What are the Bronx High School students going to learn in their Holocaust Museum?  Will the teacher say:  “Gather around students and you will learn how Zykon-B was used to save lives in the Nazi concentration camps.  Zylon-B was the poison that was used to disinfect the clothing of the prisoners because typhus is spread by lice.”

This quote is from the news article in the online New York Daily News:

The museum cost $1 million to construct and was paid for by donations – many from the school’s alumni, according to principal Valerie Reidy. She said the museum would be used as part of the school’s curriculum to build students’ character and help link history to current events.

“We teach a lot of things other than content,” she said. “We want to make sure our students become leaders who stand up and say, ‘No. I’m not going to let this happen.’”

Stuart Elenko, who taught at the school from 1964 to 1993, started the collection as a way to teach students tolerance, Jill Veyler, the museum’s curator, said.

Sadly, my High School did not have a million dollar Museum with an empty Zyklon-B can on display, so I didn’t learn tolerance.

The Bullenhuser Damm School in Hamburg where the Nazis hung children, until dead, from hooks in the basement

Bullenhuser Damm school in Hamburg where Jewish children were murdered

I vaguely recall reading, years ago, the story of the Jewish children who were killed by being hung from hooks in the basement of the Bullenhuser Damm school in Hamburg. The purpose of killing these children was to prevent them from giving testimony about the medical experiments that Nazi doctors were doing at the school.

One would think that the cruel Nazis would take pity on innocent children, and just give them an injection of poison to kill them … but No!  The depraved Nazis dragged the Jewish children, kicking and screaming, to the basement, where they hung them from hooks until they were dead.

Unfortunately, there is no photo, that I know of, which shows the hooks in the basement of the school.  The photo below shows the hooks in the basement of the Buchenwald crematorium, where prisoners were hung by the neck until dead … but that’s another story.

Hooks on the wall of the basement in the Buchenwald crematorium

I was reminded of the Bullenhuser Damm story today, when I read about two young Jewish girls who survived the Holocaust because they had the good sense to refuse when Dr. Josef Mengele tried to entice them into going on a transport to the school in Hamburg.

When Dr. Josef Mengele came to the children’s barracks at the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp, and flashed his gapped-tooth grin, asking “Who wants to see their mother?” — Andra and Tatiana, two young girls from Italy, did not step forward.  They knew that this was a ruse.

Dr. Mengele was NOT your typical German, six foot four, blond and blue-eyed, sondern short, dark-haired, and brown-eyed.  But what he lacked in looks, he more than made up for with his charm.  Every Holocaust survivor has described Dr. Mengele as charming and polite, but Andra and Tatiana were not fooled by his charm.  They refused his invitation to go to the women’s barracks to see their mother, and Dr. Mengele was powerless to force them to go.

You can read the story of Andra and Tatiana Bucci in full here.  This quote is from the article about them in the online Washington Post:

Andra and Tatiana Bucci did not cry at Auschwitz.

Or if they did, they have forgotten. They do not recall suffering from hunger, although surely they did, or missing their mother, who arrived with them at the concentration camp and then one day disappeared. They do remember what she looked like the last time they saw her at Auschwitz. Bald and emaciated, she frightened them. Andra and Tatiana were only 4 and 6 years old.

[…]

…. The Nazis arrested everyone in the house — including Nonna Rosa, Mira, Andra and Tatiana, their 6-year-old cousin Sergio and his mother, Mira’s sister Gisella. […]

At the Judenrampe [at Auschwitz], the “Jewish platform” where deportees were unloaded before Nazis built the now-iconic train tracks directly into the camp, Andra looked at the frozen ground as she recalled the scene in 1944 — the soldiers barking in a language she didn’t understand and herding the masses like animals. Mira and her daughters, Gisella and Sergio were ordered in one direction, Nonna Rosa in the other. Like many elderly deportees, she immediately perished.

By surviving that first selection, Andra and Tatiana had already exceeded their life expectancy at Auschwitz. “The fact that these children survived at all is extraordinary luck,” said Patricia Heberer, a historian at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and the author of “Children During the Holocaust.”

Andra and Tatiana believe they were spared because they were mistaken for twins, who were prized by the notorious Nazi doctor Josef Mengele for medical experiments. Among the copious records kept by the Germans at Auschwitz, there is a list of twins, Tatiana and Andra have been told, on which their names appear. They do not know why their cousin Sergio went with them, and not to the gas chamber.

[…]

Mira went to the women’s quarters and to work. The girls, along with Sergio, went to the children’s barracks. […]

Andra and Tatiana have forgotten the faces of most other children in their barracks. But they remember the face of their cousin Sergio, whose story they told through tears.

One day, the girls received a visit from the blokova, a female prisoner who oversaw the children’s barracks. She favored them and had occasionally brought them extra food, once even some extra clothing. Years later, Tatiana broke down when she realized that her sweater had undoubtedly come from a murdered child.

The sisters remember that the blokova gave them a warning. A man would come to the children’s barracks and announce that whoever wanted to see his or her mother should come forward. The woman insisted: The girls must not move.

It came to pass one day exactly as the blokova had said. Andra and Tatiana, in the second great act of obedience that saved them, stood still.

“Inside, they were grown-ups, not little ones,” said Pezzetti, the Italian scholar. They knew, he said, that they could not delude themselves into thinking that their mother was waiting for them.

The girls had passed the blokova’s warning on to Sergio. But Sergio, an only child, could not resist. He went away [to Bullenhuser Damm school] with a group of 10 girls and 10 boys. Andra and Tatiana never saw him again.

Decades later, they learned that Sergio and the other children had been taken to Germany, where they were infected with tuberculosis for a Nazi medical experiment. In an effort to conceal the brutalization of 20 human guinea pigs, Nazis hanged the children in the basement of a school in Hamburg less than a month before the war ended.

[..]

…. Mira — unbeknownst to her daughters — had not died at Auschwitz. She had been transferred to another camp, survived, returned to Italy and was reunited with the girls’ father, who had been a prisoner of war in Africa. Gisella, too, had survived.

In case you don’t believe the story of the children, being hung from hooks in the basement of the Bullenhuser Damm school, you can read about it on Wikipedia.  The following quote is from Wikipedia:

In October 1944,[2] a subcamp of the Neuengamme concentration camp was established in the school to house prisoners used in clearing the rubble after air raids. The Bullenhauser Damm School was evacuated on April 11, 1945. […]

On the night of April 20, 1945, 20 Jewish children who had been used in medical experiments at Neuengamme, their four adult Jewish caretakers and six Red Army prisoners of war (POWs) were killed in the basement of the school.[3] Later that evening, 24 Soviet POWs who had also been used in the experiments were brought to the school to be murdered. The names, ages and countries of origin were recorded by Hans Meyer, one of the thousands of Scandinavian prisoners released to the custody of Sweden in the closing months of the war. Neuengamme was used as a transit camp for these prisoners.[4]

[…]

The medical experiments on tuberculosis infection were initially carried out on prisoners from the Soviet Union and other countries at the Neuengamme concentration camp. The experiments were then extended to Jews. For this he chose to use Jewish children. Twenty Jewish children (10 boys and 10 girls) from Auschwitz concentration camp were chosen by Josef Mengele and sent to Neuengamme. Mengele allegedly asked the children, “Who wants to go and see their mother?”

The children were accompanied to Neuengamme by four women prisoners. Two were Polish nurses and one was a Hungarian pharmacist, and they were killed upon arrival at Neuengamme. The fourth woman, Polish-born Jew Paula Trocki, was a doctor. She survived the war and later gave testimony in Jerusalem ….

[…]

The SS evacuated the building around April 11, 1945 leaving a skeleton crew of two SS guards: Ewald Jauch and Johann Frahm and a janitor. They were accompanied by three SS guards (Wilhelm Dreimann, Adolf Speck, and Heinrich Wiehagen), as well as the driver, Hans Friedrich Petersen, and SS physician, Alfred Trzebinski. The children as well as others were told they were being taken to Theresienstadt. Upon arriving at the school they were led into the basement. According to one of the SS men present, the children “sat down on the benches all around and were cheerful and happy that they had been for once allowed out of Neuengamme. The children were completely unsuspecting.”

They were then made to undress and were then injected with morphine by Trzebinski. They were then led into an adjacent room and hanged from hooks set into the wall. The execution was overseen by SS Obersturmführer Arnold Strippel. The first child to be hanged was so light that the noose would not tighten. Frahm grabbed him in a bearhug and used his own weight to pull down and tighten the noose. The adults were hanged from overhead pipes; they were made to stand on a box, which was pulled away from under them. That same night, about 30 additional Soviet prisoners were also brought by lorry to the school to be executed; six escaped, three were shot trying to do so, and the rest were hanged in the basement.[7]

Note that the Nazis gave the children morphine before hanging them from hooks in the basement of the school.  The children could have been given a merciful death by giving them a little more morphine, but No!  The hateful Nazis had to hang the children from hooks, even going so far as to grab a child in a bearhug and pull the child down so that the noose would tighten.  This is why the German people will be forever hated.

Left to right: Richard Baer, Dr. Josef Mengele and Rudolf Hoess

Andra and Tatiana were initially spared, when they were not selected for the gas chamber upon arrival at Auschwtiz-Birkenau, because Dr. Mengele thought that these two children, aged 6 and 4, were twins.  Dr. Mengele is famous for not being able to tell a child’s age; hundreds of Jews survived the Holocaust because they lied about their age and said that they were older than 15, the age at which children were selected for the gas chamber.  Obviously, Dr. Mengele was able to judge that Andra and Tatiana were younger than 15, but he thought that they were twins.

Keep in mind that there is a document in the files of Auschwitz, which lists them as twins. Strangely, Andra and Tatiana were not used by Dr. Mengele in his experiments on twins, or if they were, they didn’t mention it for some reason.

With Dr. Mengele in charge of selections at Auschwitz-Birkeanau, it is a miracle that the Nazis managed to kill anyone.

Vents in the ceiling of the gas chamber at the Auschwitz main camp

I haven’t blogged, nor even touched my computer, for several days because I have been following the news about the Boston Marathon bombing.  When I checked my blog this morning, I saw that an old blog post about Block 10 at the Auschwitz main camp has been getting hundreds of hits. I suspected that Block 10 is in the news for some reason, so I began searching for any stories about Block 10.  I found nothing.

In the course of my searching, I did find an old news story about British students from Newcastle taking a HET tour of Auschwitz.  “Block 10” was mentioned in the story, but only because this building was not open to the students.

Vent hole in the ceiling of the gas chamber in the main Auschwitz camp

This quote is from the news story about the student trip to Auschwitz:

STANDING on the same spot where so many perished, teenager Callum Easton peered up at a vent in the ceiling above his head.

This, he’s told by a guide, is where Nazi officers would pour pellets of Zyklon B, on to hundreds of naked, shivering and unsuspecting prisoners waiting to “take a shower”.

“It was a very direct link between us and them because it was the last thing that they would have ever seen,” said Callum, a history student at Newcastle College.

The 17-year-old added: “Standing in the same place where so many people died, and peering up the large vent, was very poignant.”

One of the four vent holes in the ceiling of the Auschwitz gas chamber

Were these students told that the gas chamber in the main Auschwitz camp is a RECONSTRUCTION?  The vent holes in the ceiling of the gas chamber are an example of Soviet engineering, but for 50 years, tourists were told that the gas chamber was original.

Holocaust deniers were put in prison for denying that the gas chamber was original.  Which brings me to an article about Holocaust denial on the online Washington Examiner, which you can read in full here.

This quote is from the article, which is entitled “Credo: Diane Saltzman, director of survivor affairs at the [US] Holocaust museum”:

It’s amazing to think that some doubt the Holocaust happened.

There are people that deny it because they are completely ignorant. And then for others, I don’t think most deny because they really don’t believe. I think they deny because they hate. Holocaust denial is a form of anti-Semitism. The Holocaust is the most well-documented crime in human history. There are millions and millions of pages of documents, of photographs, much of it created by the perpetrators themselves. There is no absence of true, reliable, authentic documentation of what happened, so there must be some other reason of why people choose to deny the Holocaust, and its roots are in anti-Semitism. You deny someone’s history, you deny their right to exist.

The point that I am trying to make, in my blog post today, is this:  Don’t deny that the Nazis poured Zyklon-B pellets, through vents on the ceiling, onto the heads of the Jews, who were expecting a shower in a room where there were no shower heads, or you will be called anti-Semitic, or worse.

Why do terrorists attack America, and why are they called “terrorists”?

I don’t expect the American media to reveal anything about WHY innocent civilians were attacked at the Boston Marathon.  Except maybe, to say that the “terrorists” hate our freedom, our democracy and our “ideals.”  So, this morning I went looking for some answers.  I put a question into Google and got an answer, written on Yahoo Answers three years ago.

This quote is from Yahoo Answers:

Why do Al Qaeda terrorists keep attacking the USA (US-Americans)?
To simply say “they hate Americans” is not enough. My question is the WHY? And don’t say “they are jealous,” like so many ignorant Americans do. They didn’t crash two aircrafts into the WTC towers simply because they are jealous. They hate us. But why?

They must have some sort of grievance with the USA/American policies. Is it the US foreign policy, and the US military presence in the Middle East? Is it because the USA is seen to be responsible for the continied political instability in that region? Even though the USA claims it’s all for democracy, the CIA MUST have some ulterior motives that are not so pure and well-intentioned.

3 years ago

The best answer to the above question is given in this quote from Yahoo Answers:

Best Answer – Chosen by Asker
‘Citizens from Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Egypt, all of whom have been implicated in one or another terrorist act or attempted act since September 11, 2001, have been systematically denied basic freedoms by police-state dictatorships backed by Washington.

They have watched as the US military, acting in the name of a “war on terrorism” and “liberating” the people of Afghanistan and Iraq, have killed over one million people and turned millions more into homeless refugees. In Pakistan, millions have grown to hate Washington for the unceasing murder of civilians by pilotless Predator drones.

And Muslims all over the world have seen successive administrations, Republican and Democratic alike, lend unconditional support to the Israeli regime as it deprives Palestinians in the occupied territories of the most basic human liberties, including the right to life itself.

None of this justifies terrorism, which does nothing to change these conditions and only strengthens the hands of US imperialism. However, it is these acts of aggression and repression—not some inexplicable hatred for “freedoms”—that have produced a seething anger that can give rise to retrograde acts of individual terror.’

3 years ago

Note that this was written THREE YEARS AGO and nothing has changed.  It is my personal opinion that the main reason for terrorism against America is America’s “unconditional support of the Israeli regime….”  If not for America, Israel would cease to exist.  If not for America, Israel would not have become a country; all of the Jews would have come to America and most of them would have settled in New York state.

I also found a good article, which you can read in full here.  This quote is from the article:

Why do terrorists hate America enough to give up their lives in order to deal the country such mortal blows? Of course it’s not America the terrorists hate; it’s American foreign policy. It’s what the United States has done to the world in the past half century — all the violence, the bombings, the depleted uranium, the cluster bombs, the assassinations, the promotion of torture, the overthrow of governments, and more. The terrorists — whatever else they might be — are also rational human beings; which is to say that in their own minds they have a rational justification for their actions. Most terrorists are people deeply concerned by what they see as social, political or religious injustice and hypocrisy, and the immediate grounds for their terrorism is often retaliation for an action of the United States.
Most Americans find it difficult in the extreme to accept the proposition that terrorist acts against the United States can be viewed as revenge for Washington,s policies abroad. They believe that the US is targeted because of its freedom, its democracy, its modernity, its wealth, or just being part of the West.

[….]

If I were the president, I could stop terrorist attacks against the United States in a few days. Permanently. I would first apologize to all the widows and orphans, the tortured and impoverished, and all the many millions of other victims of American imperialism. Then I would announce, in all sincerity, to every corner of the world, that America’s global interventions have come to an end, and inform Israel that it is no longer the 51st state of the USA but now — oddly enough — a foreign country. I would then reduce the military budget by at least 90% and use the savings to pay reparations to the victims. There would be more than enough money. One year’s military budget of 330 billion dollars is equal to more than $18,000 an hour for every hour since Jesus Christ was born. That’s what I’d do on my first three days in the White House. On the fourth day, I’d be assassinated.

I previously blogged about “the War on Terror” here.

As for why these acts of terror are called “terror” attacks, this could go back to the days of World War II when the Germans called a pilot of a plane dropping bombs on civilians a “Terrorflieger.” (terror flyer) You can read about it here.

The Germans also used the word “terror” to characterize the acts of the French resistance.  The terrorists who are attacking America could be called “the Middle East resistance.”

OMG…Professor David Patterson is about to jibber jabber about jibber jabber…like Sheldon Cooper in The Big Bang Theory

This quote is from a news article in The Student Newspaper of UTD, which you can read in full here:

David Patterson’s exploration into the horror of the Holocaust began over 30 years ago when as a Ph.D. student at the University of Oregon, a student of his pressed a copy of Elie Wiesel’s memoir “Night” into his hands and said, “You need to read this.”

Patterson spent the next 10 years researching the Holocaust before teaching others about the events that resulted in the deaths of over six million Jews and other persecuted groups across Europe.

Today, Patterson is a professor in the School of Arts and Humanities and has held the Hillel A. Feinberg Chair in Holocaust Studies in the Ackerman Center for Holocaust Studies at UTD since 2010. […]

Patterson’s latest book, “Genocide in Jewish Thought” was published last May and explores the theological and philosophical warrants for genocide, the relation between body and soul and the phenomenon of torture.

“My argument (in the book) is that the more abstract the thinking, the more likely it is to lead to genocide,” Patterson said. “Opposite abstract thinking, I present a model of concrete Jewish thought that may inform our understanding of the abstractions that can lead to mass murder.”

Patterson will host a lecture titled “The Why of Holocaust Denial” at 2 p.m. on April 21 in JO 4.614 as part of the Ackerman Center’s Sunday Lecture Series.

According to Patterson, denial is a phenomenon unique to the Holocaust compared to other genocides and is one of the defining features of the Holocaust.

The title of my blog post today comes from an episode of the TV show entitled The Big Bang Theory.

Years ago, when I first read Elie Wiesel’s book Night, no one pressed the book into my hands and told me to read it.  I grabbed it off a library shelf and sat down at a library table to read it; I finished the book in a couple of hours and completely dismissed it as a work of fiction, not a true story, mainly because of his description of how he and his father escaped death at the Auschwitz-Birkenau “death camp.”

Elie Wiesel and his father walked down this road on the night that they arrived at Birkeanu

Elie Wiesel wrote in his famous book Night that, after arriving around midnight at Birkenau, he and his father were assigned to a barrack in the Gypsy camp, behind the Men’s camp, which was to the left on the interior camp road, shown in the photo above.

The interior road, shown in the photo, runs north and south through the Birkeanau camp, connecting the Women’s camp to the new section, called “Mexico” by the prisoners. At that time, part of the Gypsy camp had been converted into a transit camp for the Durchgangsjuden who were held there temporarily until they could be transferred to another location.  Elie wrote that he and his father were later transferred to the main Auschwitz camp and then to the Auschwitz III camp, aka Monowitz.

Elie wrote in Night that on his first night in the camp, a night that he would never forget, he saw two burning pits, one for children and one for adults, where Jews were being burned alive.

Painting shows how children were burned alive at Birkenau

Elie and his father were miraculously spared at the last moment when, only two steps from the burning ditch, they were ordered to turn left and enter the Gypsy barracks.

The following quote is from one of the many editions of Night. The book has been changed through the years, so this quote might not match what is in the latest edition.

Not far from us, flames were leaping up from a ditch, gigantic flames. They were burning something. A lorry drew up at the pit and delivered its load-little children. Babies! Around us, everyone was weeping. Someone began to recite the Kaddish. I do not know if it has ever happened before, in the long history of the Jews, that people have ever recited the prayer for the dead for themselves …. Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp …. Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the little faces of the children, whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent sky.

According to his famous book, Elie and his father were transferred from the former Gypsy camp to the main Auschwitz camp, where they were housed in Barrack 17 for a short time. Normally, incoming prisoners were sent to the Quarantine barracks at Auschwitz-Birkenau, but not Elie and his father.

Elie Wiesel wrote that he was tattooed with the number A-7713 at the main Auschwitz camp.  Now it has been revealed, by Holocaust deniers, that Elie Wiesel was never registered at Auschwitz, and the number A-7713 was given to another prisoner.

You can read all about Elie Wiesel’s tattoo at this website:  http://www.eliewieseltattoo.com/

This quote is from the article on the online newspaper The Mercury:

According to Patterson, denial is a phenomenon unique to the Holocaust compared to other genocides and is one of the defining features of the Holocaust.

“(Holocaust denial) comes in many forms, ranging from a seemingly innocent avoidance of the topic to a calculated effort to incite Jew hatred,” Patterson said. “I’ll explain some features of Holocaust denial to show that it is not about historical facts at all; rather, it is driven by an anti-Semitic agenda to erase the Jews from history and to delegitimize the Jewish state.”

One of the most striking reasons for Holocaust denial is an avoidance of the ethical implications of not only the Holocaust, but also humanity itself, Patterson said.

Denial is a way of delegitimizing the voice and presence of the Jewish people, he said.

“If (the Holocaust) didn’t happen, then I don’t have to confront the fundamental questions about who I am, what I stand for and the nature of my ethical responsibility to do it for my fellow human being,” Patterson said. “Holocaust denial … has implications for all human beings.”

I don’t get it.  It’s all jibber jabber to me.  Am I unethical because I don’t believe that Elie Wiesel was ever a prisoner at Auschwitz-Birkenau, and I don’t believe that babies were thrown into burning ditches?

Am I deligitimizing the Jewish state (Israel) if I don’t believe in the Holocaust?  Don’t answer.  It was a rhetorical question.

You can read about how Holocaust denial is spreading around the world on this website.

Do photos of piles of shoes prove that prisoners were murdered at Dachau?

The photo below was used by a blogger in a blog post about a “Holocaust denier.”  It was implied that this photo proves that prisoners were murdered at Dachau.

Pile of shoes found at Dachau when the camp was liberated

This quote is the text under the photo above:

Argentinean blogger, Marcelo Gonzalez? He’s a Holocaust denier. Is there any better way to flush one’s credibility down the toilet? I can’t think of one.

I interpreted the blogger’s words to mean that the photo above proves the Holocaust, and if you deny the meaning of this photo, your credibility is going down the toilet.

This quote is a continuation of the blog post:

Dawn writes,

Being that I am a Jewish convert to Catholicism who attends Mass in the Extraordinary Form (the traditional Latin Mass), and am all too familiar with the antisemitism that Father Angelo Mary Geiger calls the “soft white underbelly of the Rad Trad movement,” I had a bad feeling about Gonzalez. Given that Pope Francis was known in Buenos Aires as a friend to the Jewish community, even co-writing a book with a leading rabbi of the city, I looked to see what, if anything, the traditionalist writer had to say about Jews and the Holocaust.

It wasn’t hard to find.

Five months ago, Marcelo Gonzalez announced that he had reached the “fixed position” that the “so-called ‘holocaust’” is a media exaggeration. If Google’s translation is correct, he wrote that he prefers to call it “the so-called ‘holocaust’” or, alternatively, the “hollowcaust.”  You can read for yourself his blog entry “Holocaust and Hollowcaust” via Google Translate (or read it here in the original Spanish). It’s disgusting, and as a fellow member of the Mystical Body, I am ashamed.

I have a similar photo of the shoes found at Dachau on my website; the photo is shown below.

Pile of shoes found at Dachau

Notice that the building in the background is the same in both photos.  The photo above was taken by one of the soldiers who liberated Dachau.

After the liberation of Dachau, Pastor Heinrich Grüber, one of the privileged prisoners at Dachau, described how upsetting the sight of the children’s shoes was to the Dachau prisoners who had to sort them:

We were shaken to the depths of our soul when the first transports of children’s shoes arrived – we men who were inured to suffering and to shock had to fight back tears. […] this was the most terrible thing for us, the most bitter thing, perhaps the worst thing that befell us.

The sight of the children’s shoes also affected Bob Grigsby, a World War II veteran who spoke to an audience of 100 people at the First Lutheran Church in Longmont, CO on November 11, 2007 about what he saw when he was a 19-year-old soldier at the liberation of Dachau: “One of my memories is of a stack of baby shoes, about as big as this room,” Grigsby said. “They weren’t just picking on grownups.”

But that wasn’t the worst horror that Grigsby discovered at Dachau.

The following quote, regarding the prisoners at Dachau, is from an article in the Longmont Times-Call on November 12, 2007:

“They were making soap out of their rendered bodies,” he said, his voice growing thick and beginning to stumble. “These were human beings. And I guess I had never seen anything like that before. I had dreams about it for years and years.”

Pile of shoes found at Majdanek

The photo above shows some of the 800,000 shoes that were found at the Majdanek death camp.  From this evidence, the Soviet liberators of Majdanek deduced that 1.5 million people had been murdered at Majdanek.  Now the number of deaths at Majdanek has been lowered to 78,000.

On this website, you can see a photo of shoes found at Auschwitz; the caption on the photo says “Piles of shoes of murdered prisoners.”

Pile of shoes found at Auschwitz

Shoes were also found at the Bergen-Belsen camp, as shown in the photo below.

Pile of shoes found at the Bergen-Belsen camp

Do these piles of shoes at Dachau, Majdanek, Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen prove that the Nazis murdered the owners of the shoes?  At the risk of my credibility going down the toilet, I don’t think so.

What about the piles of clothing that were found at Dachau, as shown in the photo below?

Piles of clothing found at Dachau

There were piles of clothing waiting to be deloused in the four disinfection chambers at the south end of the crematorium building. The photo above, which is stored in the National Archives in Washington, DC, was printed in newspapers in 1945 with the caption:

“Tattered clothes from prisoners who were forced to strip before they were killed, lay in huge piles in the infamous Dachau concentration camp.”

There was a typhus epidemic raging in the Dachau camp and 900 prisoners at Dachau were dying of the disease when the liberators arrived, according to the account of Marcus J. Smith. Smith was an Army doctor, who along with 9 others, formed Displaced Persons Team 115, which was sent to Dachau after the liberation.

In his book entitled Dachau: The Harrowing of Hell, Smith wrote that eleven of the barracks buildings at the Dachau camp had been converted into a hospital to house the 4,205 sick prisoners. Another 3,866 prisoners were bed ridden.

Smith put the total number of survivors of the Dachau camp at around 32,600, but said that between 100 and 200 a day were still dying after the camp was liberated. He mentioned that the American Army tried to keep the freed prisoners in the camp, in order to prevent the typhus epidemic from spreading throughout the country. Typhus is spread by lice, and the clothing was being deloused in an attempt to stop the epidemic.

Why didn’t the Nazis get rid of the evidence (shoes and clothing) when they knew that the liberators were on their way?  Bergen-Belsen was voluntarily turned over to the British.  The Nazis knew when the British would arrive. Why  didn’t the Nazis get rid of the pile of shoes there?

What is the real story of the shoes? The Nazis were taking apart worn-out shoes and using the pieces of shoe leather to make new shoes for their soldiers. Some of the shoes were sent to the citizens of Germany who had lost everything in the bombing raids on German cities.  Some of these shoes had been taken from the prisoners who had been brought to the camps, and some were the worn-out shoes of German soldiers.

The latest flap in the national news: the Nazi essay controversy in Albany, NY

This morning, when I checked Google News, the first story was about a professor who blogged that there was nothing wrong with the assignment, given by a teacher in an Albany High School, to write an essay on Nazi propaganda against the Jews.  The headline of the blog post was “My Take: Nothing wrong with Nazi assignment”.  You can read the full article here.

Nazi poster says “the eternal Jew”

Nazi propaganda poster calls Jews “warmongers” and “war extenders”

The two propaganda posters, shown above, make it clear that the Nazis thought of the Jews as Warmongers.  Did Jews actually start wars or promote wars?

Let’s put this into perspective:  just how many German Jews were there in January 1933, when Hitler came to power?

The following quote is from the website of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum:

According to the census of June 16, 1933, the Jewish population of Germany, including the Saar region (which at that time was still under the administration of the League of Nations), was approximately 505,000 people out of a total population of 67 million, or somewhat less than 0.75 percent. That number represented a reduction from the estimated 523,000 Jews living in Germany in January 1933; the decrease was due in part to emigration following the Nazi takeover in January. (An estimated 37,000 Jews emigrated from Germany during 1933.)

Some 80 percent (about 400,000) of the Jews in Germany held German citizenship. The remainder were mostly Jews of Polish citizenship. Many of the Polish Jews had been born in Germany and had permanent resident status.

About 70 percent of the Jews in Germany lived in urban areas, with 50 percent of all Jews living in the 10 largest German cities. The largest Jewish population center was in Berlin (about 160,000 in 1925), representing less than 4 percent of the city’s entire population. Other large Jewish population centers included Frankfurt am Main (about 26,000), Breslau (about 20,000), Hamburg (about 17,000), Cologne (about 15,000), Hannover (about 13,000), and Leipzig (about 12,000). Nevertheless, in 1933 one in five German Jews still lived in small towns.

So when Hitler became the Chancellor of Germany in January 1933, there were 400,000 Jewish citizens of Germany, and they were concentrated in only 10 cities. This was out of a total population of 67 million people in Germany.  Why would Hitler be so concerned with such a small number of German Jewish citizens?

When Hitler made speeches, railing against the Jews, he always spoke of the INTERNATIONAL JEWS.  He had first learned about the International Jews from a book published by Henry Ford, an American citizen.

Look up “International Jew” on Wikipedia and you will read this:

The International Jew is a four volume set of booklets or pamphlets originally published and distributed in the early 1920s by Henry Ford, an American industrialist and automobile manufacturer.

In Spring 1920, Henry Ford made his personal newspaper The Dearborn Independent chronicle what he considered the “Jewish Menace”. Every week for 91 issues, the paper exposed in a headline, some sort of Jewish-insprired evil major story. The most popular and aggressive stories were then chosen to be reprinted by Ford into four volumes called the “International Jew”.

Exactly what kind of propaganda did the Nazis use against the Jews in Germany?  Here are some quotes from the speeches made by Hitler and the words written by Hitler:

On January 30, 1939, Hitler said this in a speech before the Reichstag:

Wenn es dem internationalen Finanzjudentum in und außerhalb Europas gelingen sollte, die Völker noch einmal in einen Weltkrieg zu stürzen, dann wird das Ergebnis nicht der Sieg des Judentums sein, sondern die Vernichtung der jüdischen Rasse in Europa!

English translation:

If international finance Jewry in and outside Europe should succeed in once again plunging the nations into a world war, then the result will not be the victory of Jewry, but rather the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe!

In a speech on January 30, 1942 (monitored by the Allied monitoring service) Hiter said this:

Wir sind uns im klaren, daß dieser Krieg ja nur damit enden könnte, daß entweder die germanischen Völker ausgerottet werden, oder das Judentum aus Europa verschwindet. Ich habe am 1. September 1939 [sic] im Deutschen Reichstag es schon ausgesprochen. . . daß dieser Krieg nicht so ausgehen wird, wie die Juden sich es vorstellen, nämlich daß die europäischen arischen Völker ausgerottet werden, sondern daß das Ergebnis dieses Krieges die Vernichtung des Judentums ist. Zum erstenmal werden nicht andere allein verbluten, sondern zum erstenmal wird diesesmal das echt altjüdische Gesetz angewendet: Aug’ um Aug’, Zahn um Zahn!

English translation:

We see clearly that this war could only end with the extermination of the Germanic peoples, or that Jewry must disappear from Europe. I already said it on September 1, 1939 [sic] in the German Reichstag…that this war will not end the way the Jews have foreseen it, namely that the European Aryan peoples will be exterminated; rather the result of this war will be the annihilation of Jewry. For once all the others will not bleed to death alone; for once the ancient Jewish law will come into play: an eye for an eye; a tooth for a tooth.

Hitler also said this in a speech:

Das bolschewistische Ungeheuer, dem sie die europäischen Nationen ausliefern wollen, wird sie und ihre Völker dereinst selbst zerfetzen. Der Jude aber wird nicht die europäischen Völker ausrotten, sondern er wird das Opfer seines eigenen Anschlages sein.

English translation:

The Bolshevist monster, to which they want to deliver the European nations, will someday tear them and their people to pieces. The Jew will not however exterminate the European peoples, rather he will be the victim of his own plot.

In Der Führer über die Juden (1943) Adof Hitler wrote:

Ich habe aber auch keinen Zweifel darüber gelassen, daß, wenn die Völker Europas wieder nur als Aktienpakete dieser internationalen Geld- und Finanzverschwörer angesehen werden, dann auch jenes Volk mit zur Verantwortung gezogen werden wird, das der eigentliche Schuldige an dieses mörderischen Ringen ist: Das Judentum! Ich habe weiter keinen darüber im Unklaren gelassen, daß dieses Mal nicht nur Millionen Kinder von Europäern der arischen Völker verhungern werden, nicht nur Millionen erwachsener Männer den Tod erleiden und nicht nur Hunderttausende an Frauen und Kindern in den Städten verbrannt und zu Tode bombardiert werden dürfen, ohne daß der eigentliche Schuldige, wenn auch durch humanere Mittel, seine Schuld zu büssen hat.

English translation:

I have also left no doubt that, if the nations of Europe are again to be regarded as mere shares to be bought and sold by those international money and finance conspirators, then that race, Jewry, which is the real guilty party in this murderous struggle, will be saddled with the responsibility. I also made it clear that this time, not only would millions of children of European Aryan races starve, not only would millions of grown men meet their death, and not only would millions of women and children be burned or bombed to death in the cities, but that the real culprit would atone for his guilt, even if by more humane means.

Adolf Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf, 1925, Volume 1, p. 358.

Das furchtbarste Beispiel dieser Art bildet Rußland, wo er an dreißig Millionen Menschen in wahrhaft fanatischer Wildheit teilweise unter unmenschlichen Qualen tötete oder verhungern ließ, um einem Haufen jüdischer Literaten und Börsenbanditen die Herrschaft aber ein großes Volk zu sichern.

Das Ende aber ist nicht nur das Ende der Freiheit der vom Juden unterdrückten Völker, sondern auch das Ende dieses Völkerparasiten selber. Nach dem Tode des Opfers stirbt auch früher oder später der Vampir.

English translation:

The most fearsome example of this kind is Russia where he (Jewry) allowed 39 million humans in truly fanatical wildness to die or starve in inhuman agony, in order to secure the mastery of a great people for a gang of Jewish literati and stock exchange bandits.

The result is not only the end of freedom for the people oppressed by the Jews, but rather also the end of these parasites of the peoples themselves. After the death of the victim, the vampire dies sooner or later.

Adolf Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf, 1925, Volume 1, p. 61.:

Gab es denn da einen Unrat, eine Schamlosigkeit in irgendeiner Form, vor allem des kulturellen Lebens, an der nicht wenigstens ein Jude beteiligt gewesen wäre? Sowie man nur vorsichtig in eine solche Geschwulst hineinschnitt, fand man, wie die Made im faulenden Leibe, oft ganz geblendet vom plötzlichen Lichte, ein Jüdlein.

English translation:

Was there any excrement, any shamelessness in any form, above all in cultural life, in which at least one Jew would not have been involved? As soon as one even carefully cut into such an abscess, one found, like maggots in a decaying body, often blinded by the sudden light, a kike.

Hitler wrote, regarding “The Big Lie,” in Mein Kampf 1925 (English translation):

All this was inspired by the principle–which is quite true in itself–that in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily, and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they are more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in that art of lying. These people know only too well how to use falsehood for the basest purposes.

From time immemorial, however, the Jews have known better than any others how falsehood and calumny can be exploited. Is not their very existence founded on one great lie, namely, that they are a religious community, whereas in reality they are a race? And what a race! One of the greatest thinkers that mankind has produced has branded the Jews for all time with a statement which is profoundly and exactly true. He (Schopenhauer) called the Jew “The Great Master of Lies.” Those who do not realize the truth of that statement, or do not wish to believe it, will never be able to lend a hand in helping Truth to prevail.