Auschwitz survivor claims that German guard refused order to pour Zyklon-B into gas chamber

Now I’ve heard everything!  According to a news article which you can read in full here:  “At Auschwitz, one guard named Georg was a Silesian. Georg refused the order to pour Xyklon B gas into the execution chambers.”

Re-enactment of pouring Zyklon-B gas into gas chamber

Silesia is a former German province in what is now Poland. The Auschwitz camp was located in Upper Silesia, which was included in the Greater German Reich when the camp was in operation. During World War II, there were many ethnic Germans in Silesia.

Now we know that the German guards at Auschwitz had a choice: they could pour Zyklon-B gas into the homicidal gas chambers at Auschwitz, if they were so inclined, but they could also refuse and nothing would happen to them.  This quote is also from the news article:  “Georg was certain they would send him straight to the Russian front for disobeying, but he would not be a party to mass murder.”

If only more of the German guards, at Auschwitz, had refused to pour the Zyklon-B pellets into the holes in the roof of the gas chamber, there would have been no Holocaust.

Holes in roof of Auschwitz gas chamber were “reconstructed” by the Soviet liberators

This quote is also from the news article:

[Cantor David Wisnia] “had escaped from death on the march from Dachau to Austria in March 1945. Prior to that, he was in Birkenau, the sub-camp to Auschwitz, for nearly three years.”

The photos below show prisoners on a “death march” out of Dachau.

Prisoners on a “death march” out of the Dachau camp

I learned the reason for the “death marches” out of the concentration camps 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.

Burned bodies found at the Ohrdruf sub-camp of Buchenwald

The photograph above, which was taken at the Ohrdruf forced labor camp, is a copy of the one that hangs in front of the elevator door at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. It is the first thing that visitors to the Museum see as they step out of the elevator and enter the first exhibit room. This is what the American soldiers first saw when they liberated Germany from the Nazis.

The photo shows a pyre made of railroad tracks where the bodies of prisoners who had died of typhus at Ohrdruf were burned. Ohrdruf was a small sub-camp of Buchenwald and it did not have a crematorium with ovens to dispose of the bodies.  The prisoners were not burned alive, as taught by a college professor in America.

Acting on Hitler’s orders, the Commandant of Dachau, Wilhelm Eduard Weiter, had made an attempt to evacuate the Dachau main camp before the American liberators arrived. On April 26th, 1945, Weiter left Dachau with a transport of prisoners bound for Schloss Itter, a subcamp of Dachau in Austria. Was this the march that David Wisnia was on?

Strangely, Weiter committed suicide when he reached Schloss Itter.  Or could he have been killed by the Jews on the march, after they were liberated by American soldiers? This website tells about the liberation of Schloss Itter but does not mention Weiter.

Jews and Russian POWs on a “death march” out of Dachau

Concentration camp prisoners who wore a black triangle will be honored in a new Berlin memorial

Dachau triangle sculpture has no black triangle (1997 photo)

According to the current news, the mentally and physically disabled in Nazi Germany wore a black triangle in the concentration camps.

The Huffington Post has an article about the planned memorial to the victims of the Nazi euthanasia program in Germany which you can read here.  This quote is from the article:

Adolf Hitler saw no place for the mentally and physically disabled in his vision of a “racially pure” Germany, just as he saw no place for Jews, Sinti and Roma and homosexuals.

You can read about the euthanasia program at Hartheim Castle in Austria on my website here.

I took the photo above, in May 1997 at Dachau, on my very first visit to a Memorial Site in a former Nazi concentration camp.  That’s when I learned for the first time about how the prisoners were classified according to several categories.

At Dachau, in 1997, there was nothing in the Museum about handicapped people being put into a concentration camp and forced to wear a black triangle.

Close-up of triangle sculpture at the Dachau Memorial Site (1997 photo)

Non-Jewish Polish forced laborers at Dachau wore a blue triangle, as shown in the photo above. A purple triangle was worn by the Jehovah’s Witnesses.

A bar over the triangle denoted a person who had been released and then incarcerated again for a second offense. A dot below the triangle meant that the prisoner was in the punishment detail and had to perform hard labor. Note the red dots in the sculpture.

Another section of the Dachau Triangle sculpture

The vast majority of the prisoners at Dachau were political prisoners from other countries, primarily Communists and illegal combatants who continued to fight after their countries were conquered; they wore a red triangle, pointing downward. A red triangle pointing upward was for a German political prisoner, but they are not included in the Dachau sculpture.

Monument at Sachsenhausen Memorial Site shows only red triangles in honor of the Communist prisoners (1999 photo)

Inside the Museum at Dachau, in 1997, was a poster, which is shown in the photo below.

Poster shows the various badges worn by prisoners to designate their category

The top row of triangles in the photo above shows all the colors of the badges worn by the prisoners in all the Nazi concentration camps.

Red was for Communists, Social Democrats, anarchists, and other “enemies of the state.” Green was for German criminals who had committed two or more crimes. Blue was for foreign forced laborers; brown was for Gypsies; pink was for homosexuals; purple was for Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Black was for a-socials, a catch-all term for vagrants, bums, prostitutes, hobos, perverts, alcoholics who were living on the streets, or anyone who didn’t have a permanent address. The “work-shy,” or those who were arrested because they refused to work, also wore a black badge.

Before 1942, Gypsy men wore a black triangle in the concentration camps. At that time, Gypsy men were arrested and imprisoned for being a-social if they didn’t have a permanent address, or they were arrested for being “work-shy” if they were not employed.

Every male citizen in Nazi Germany, who was capable of working, was required to take a job and they were not allowed to quit their job without permission. Gypsy women were arrested under the a-social category if they were prostitutes.

When I visited the Sachsenhausen Memorial Site in 1999, I learned more about the triangles that were worn by the prisoners.

According to information presented at the Sachsenhausen Museum, Jewish prisoners always wore two triangles: one was a yellow triangle, with another triangle of a different color sewn on top of it, to form a six point star.

Jewish political prisoners wore a yellow triangle with a red triangle on top. Jews who wore a white triangle over a yellow one were called Jüdisher Rassenschänder. A black triangle designated an a-social (Asozialer). A Jewish a-social was a Jüdisher Asozialer who wore a black triangle over a yellow one. A green triangle meant a criminal who was a repeat offender; Jewish criminals wore a green triangle over a yellow one and were called Jüdisher Befristeter Vorbeugeshäftlinge or Jewish prisoners in limited preventive custody.

The Jehovah’s Witnesses (Bibelforscher) wore purple triangles, and the Sinti and Roma (Gypsies) wore a brown triangle. The work-shy (Arbeitsscheuer) wore white triangles at Sachsenhausen. Non-Jewish race defilers, or those who broke the 1935 Nürnberg laws against race mixing, wore a triangle with a black border around it.

Because Sachsenhausen was near Berlin, which was the mecca for homosexuals at that time, Sachsenhausen was the concentration camp that had the most homosexual prisoners of any of the Nazi camps. Homosexuals wore a pink triangle (Rosa Winkle).

On my visit to the Dachau Memorial Site in 1997, I learned that prisoners who were terminally ill were sent to Hartheim Castle for mercy killing.  A doctor had to sign the order, giving the cause of the illness.

Hartheim Castle in Austria was where severely handicapped people were killed.

None of the former concentration camps, that I have visited, had a display that included a black triangle worn by a handicapped person. That is why I was very surprised to read a news article about a memorial that is soon going up in Berlin, in honor of the handicapped people who wore black triangles in the concentration camps, where they were killed.  This is news to me!

Proposed “euthanasia monument” will be a blue wall

This quote is from the news article, which you can read in full here:

New Berlin memorial revives memories of doctors’ role in Nazi holocaust

By Dr. Peter Saunders

Editor’s note. Dr. Saunders is a former general surgeon and is CEO of Christian Medical Fellowship, a UK-based organization with 4,500 UK doctors and 1,000 medical students as members.

Officials gathered in Berlin [in early July] to lay the foundations for a monument to the people killed as part of the Nazi ‘euthanasia’ programs.

The symbolic site at Tiergartenstrasse 4 was chosen as it was the headquarters of the original project.

The planned exhibit will be dedicated to the victims of the ‘euthanasia’ program, codenamed ‘T4’, used by the Nazis to kill those with physical or mental illnesses.

It will be situated not far from a memorial to the six million Jewish victims of the Holocaust opened in 2005 and a memorial to the half a million Roma victims of the Nazis opened in 2012.

Between January 1940 and August 1941 about 70,000 people were killed under the T4 programme. Many were sent to gas chambers, others were killed by lethal injection.

The programme was ostensibly shut down in 1941, partly after church protests, but it continued in secret. Historians estimate that between 200,000 and 300,000 people who were either psychotherapy patients or physically disabled were killed altogether.

The planned monument will be a long, blue glass wall – designed by the architects Ursula Wilms and Heinz W. Hallman, along with the artist Nikolaus Koliusis and the federal government plans to contribute 500,000 euros ($643,200) to the costs.

The finished site is tentatively scheduled for inauguration in the second half of 2014. […]

Many still fail to appreciate the role of doctors in the Nazi holocaust but what ended in the 1940s in the gas chambers of Auschwitz, Dachau and Treblinka had much more humble beginnings in the 1930s in nursing homes, geriatric hospitals and psychiatric institutions all over Germany.

When the Nazis arrived, the medical profession was ready and waiting.

The medical and other healthcare staff from T4 and the early killing centres based in hospitals were later redeployed for the killing of Jews, Gypsies, Poles, Russians and disloyal Germans. By 1943 there were 24 main death camps (and 350 smaller ones) in operation.  […]

Britain’s Black Triangle Campaign, which was set up to combat discrimination against disabled people, uses as its symbol the ‘black triangle’ which the Nazis forced people with mental and other disabilities to wear in the extermination camps during the Holocaust.

The generic classification they used was ‘arbeitsscheu’ – literally ‘workshy’.

The lessons are clear. The holocaust had small beginnings and advanced in a series of imperceptibly small steps. The medical profession accepted its basic premises (that there is such a thing as ‘a life not worth living’ and that killing such people was ‘an act of mercy’) and failed to protest whilst a small section of its members actively acquiesced to involvement.

The Nazi euthanasia program began in August 1939 when a five-month-old baby boy, named Gerhard Kretschmar, was “put to sleep” after the boy’s father made a request to Adolf Hitler for a “mercy killing.” Hitler sent his personal physician, Karl Brandt, to conduct a medical examination before giving his permission for the infant to be given a lethal injection.

Karl Brandt was put on trial at Nuremberg in the “Doctor’s Trial.” In his testimony, Brandt said that the baby’s father, Richard Kretchmar, had written to Hitler’s office in early 1939, asking for permission to kill his blind and deformed son. The following quote is from Brandt’s testimony:

“The father of a deformed child wrote to the Fuhrer with a request to be allowed to take the life of this child or this creature. Hitler ordered me to take care of this case. The child had been born blind, seemed to be idiotic, and a leg and parts of the arm were missing.”

An estimated 8,000 deformed children were killed in the same manner, some without the consent of their parents.

The Nazi euthanasia program was code-named T4, named after the address on Tiergartensstrasse in Berlin; this was the street address of the Privatkanzlei des Führers run by Philip Bouhler.  This is approximately where the new memorial to the victims, who were killed in the euthanasia program, will be located.

By the beginning of 1940, six hospitals were involved in these “mercy killings.” Records discovered in 2003 show that the euthanasia program was eventually extended to 296 medical facilities in Germany, Austria, the Czech Republic and Poland, where mentally and physically disabled children and adults were injected, gassed or starved to death.

The Nazis made a documentary film of some of the adult victims before they were killed; this was an attempt to justify the murder of disabled and deformed people. Many of the victims, who were crippled by a birth defect called spina bifida, are shown in the film, walking on all fours. This film is not shown at the Hartheim Memorial Site.  The film used to be available on the Internet, but is no longer shown.

World at War TV series misconstrues the Oradour-sur-Glane reprisal

Entrance into the ruined village of Oradour-sur-Glane which is now a memorial site

I wrote a previous blog post about Oradour-Glane, a French village that is shown in the British TV series entitled World at War.  At that time, I had not actually seen the World at War episode that starts with a speech by Sir Lawrence Olivier, which I quoted in my previous blog post. I also blogged about the tragedy at Oradour-sur-Glane on this blog post.

Today, I watched several World at War episodes, and I learned that the one which starts and ends with Oradour-sur-Glane is the very last episode.  The Oradour-sur-Glane reprisal, which was done by the Germans in an attempt to stop the war crimes perpetrated by the French Resistance, is purported to be the way that Germany fought World War II, attacking villages and killing civilians for no reason.  Instead of reporting the truth, that Oradour-sur-Glane was a reprisal action, the false portrayal of the destruction of this French village is used to demonize the German Army and the German people.

A series of photos of Oradour-sur-Glane is shown in the last World at War episode, as Sir Lawrence Olivier intones these words:

“Down this road, on a summer day in 1944. . . The soldiers came. Nobody lives here now. They stayed only a few hours. When they had gone, the community which had lived for a thousand years. . . was dead. This is Oradour-sur-Glane, in France. The day the soldiers came, the people were gathered together. The men were taken to garages and barns, the women and children were led down this road . . . and they were driven. . . into this church. Here, they heard the firing as their men were shot. Then. . . they were killed too….”

The photo below shows the church, which is mentioned in the World of War, as the place where women and children were killed …. by German soldiers.

The ruined church at Oradour-sur-Glane

After the opening scenes in the World at War episode, which shows Oradour-sur-Glane, there is a photo of the ruined church, much like my photo above. Then a photo of the altar in the church is shown, and a photo of the windows in the church.

The photos below show the road, down which the soldiers came, on a summer day in 1944.  What summer day was it, exactly?  June 10, 1944.  The date should have been mentioned in the World at War, because the destruction of the village took place FOUR DAYS after the Normandy invasion.

Ruins along the road into Oradour-sur-Glane

Ruins along the road into Oradour-sur-Glane

Why did German soldiers take time out to go to a remote village and kill innocent women and children in a Church, of all places?  The World at War documentary doesn’t tell us, so we are left to conclude that the Germans were intent upon killing innocent civilians, not winning the war.

What does the evidence show about the atrocity at Oradour-sur-Glane?  This issue was not addressed in the World at War episode.  I previously blogged about the evidence, as shown in the photos that I took when I visited Oradour-sur-Glane.

You can read about another reprisal action in France, which I wrote about on this blog post.  French civilians fought throughout World War II as terrorists, aka illegal combatants.  You can read about the French Resistance on my website here.

My photo below shows the entrance road, early on a foggy morning, before the arrival of the many tour groups which stop here.  The entrance road comes to a dead end where it intersects with the main street, called Rue de Emile Desourteaux, which is shown in the fog in the background.

The photos of the road into Oradour-sur-Glane were very dark on the show World at War, much like my photo taken in 2001

The entrance road, on the left, ends at the fairgrounds in the center of the village

Well on the Fairgrounds at Oradour-sur-Glane was shown in the World at War

My photo immediately above shows a well, which is at the edge of the Fairgrounds in Oradour-sur-Glane. A photo similar to this one was shown in the TV series World at War.

Why this photo?  It has nothing to do with the tragedy at Oradour-sur-Glane.  However, the photo below does have something to do with why the Germans did a reprisal at the village.

The “tragic well” is shown on the right

One of the first sights on the entrance road is the “Tragic Well,” where dead bodies that had been thrown into the well were found. The photo above was taken inside the enclosure of an old farmstead near the entrance into the town. It shows an old well with a wooden cross placed beside it.  The cross was put up by the Germans.

According to defense testimony at the Nuremberg IMT, the SS claimed to have found a number of bodies of German soldiers who had been executed in Oradour-sur-Glane.  Some of these bodies were found in the “Tragic Well.”

According to Philip Beck, who wrote a book about Oradour-sur-Glane, entitled Oradour, Village of the Dead, the names of the victims whose bodies were found in the well are unknown. Out of the 642 people allegedly murdered in the village by the SS soldiers, the bodies of only 52 were ever identified.

The entrance street into the ruined village is the former road to St. Junien, a town that is 13 kilometers southwest of Oradour-sur-Glane. The Waffen-SS soldiers who destroyed this peaceful village on 10 June 1944 were coming from St. Junien, but they didn’t use the present entrance road to enter the village. Instead, they traveled south and entered the village at the southern end, which is now closed off. Originally, tourists were allowed to enter the ruined village from three gated entrances, including the present entrance, which is currently the only entrance.

A new town has been built right next to the ruined village.  The photo below shows the church in the new town.

Church in the new town of Oradour-sur-Glane

You can see photos of the ruined Oradour-sur-Glane church on my website here.  Each side has it’s own version about what happened at Oradour-sur-Glane. You can read all the different versions of the story on my website here.

It is “disgusting that the camp guards were allowed to live at all”

The title of my blog post today is a quote from a comment on a previous post on my blog on July 25, 2013. This quote is from the comment:

“I think its disgusting that the camp guaards were allowed to live at all.  Anyone who commits such attrocities deserves to be brutally murdered (and screw the ‘human rights’ that supposedly incorporates them)

This comment might pertain to the Dachau concentration camp, or maybe it was in reference to all the concentration camps, operated by the Germans.  Surely, the comment was not meant to refer to the guards at the internment camps in America where German-Americans and Japanese-Americans were incarcerated in violation of the 4th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

The United States participated in war crimes trials in Europe under three jurisdictions: the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, the U.S. Military Tribunals at Nuremberg, and the U.S. Army courts at Dachau. The authority for the proceedings of all three jurisdictions derived from the Moscow Declaration, called the Declaration of German Atrocities, which was released on November 1, 1943. This declaration, which was made long before many of the war crimes were committed, expressed the Allied plan to arrest and bring to justice Axis war criminals.

In other words, the Allies were determined to put the Germans on trial, even before any war crimes were committed.

Apparently, the person who wrote the comment about the guards being allowed to live, is not familiar with the proceedings of the American Military Tribunal held at Dachau after the war.  The first trial, conducted by the AMT, was the trial of the acting Commandant of Dachau and 39 others who were on the Dachau staff.

The 40 men, who were put on trial by the AMT, were not selected, out of the thousands of SS men who had worked at the camp, because their crimes were the most heinous. Rather, they were selected as a representative group because, included among them, were staff members from every category of personnel in the concentration camp. The purpose was to show that anyone connected with a Nazi concentration camp was guilty of a crime, regardless of his personal behavior.

Rudolf Heinrich Suttrop was put on trial by the American Military Tribunal

Rudolf Heinrich Suttrop, shown in the photo above, was the adjutant to the acting Commandant of Dachau, Martin Gottfried Weiss. Suttrop was convicted and hanged, although there were no specific charges against him. His crime was that he was a low-level member of the staff of the Dachau Concentration camp, and as such, he had participated in the “common design” to commit crimes. This new law had not existed when Suttrop was on the staff at Dachau.

Altogether, there were 5 proceedings against groups of concentration camp staff members at the American Military Tribunal at Dachau. In the first four of those cases, 177 staff members of Dachau, Buchenwald, Mauthausen and Flossenbürg were charged, and all of the accused, without exception, were convicted by a panel of American military officers.

There were 97 death sentences handed down in the first four cases, and 54 of the guilty were sentenced to life in prison; the rest were sentenced to lengthy prison terms at hard labor. The prosecutor, who was responsible for this remarkable feat, was Lt. Col. William Denson, an aristocratic southern gentleman from Alabama. The 100% conviction rate was due to the fact that it was the concentration camp system that was on trial; there was literally no defense for the accused.

The first trial of the staff at Dachau was held in this building

The photo above shows the building where the trials conducted by the American Military Tribunal were held.  This building is located inside the former SS garrison at Dachau.

At the trial of the 40 men from the Dachau camp, the witnesses for the prosecution were former prisoners in the Dachau concentration camp who were given room and board and a payment of 1,000 Deutschmarks for their testimony, according to Joshua M. Greene, in his book Justice at Dachau. They were housed in the SS buildings on the former Avenue of the SS, which was named Tennessee Road by the Americans who were working on the trials.

John Barnett identifies U.S. Army photos taken at Dachau; Lt. Col. William Denson is standing on the right

The “Dachau trials” were not trials in the ordinary sense. The accused were considered to be guilty as charged, and the burden of proof was on them, not on the prosecution.

Lt. Paul Guth was the chief interrogator who was in charge of getting signed confessions from the accused before the proceedings began. Lt. Guth was a Jew who had emigrated to the United States from Vienna, Austria in 1941.

The charges against Martin Gottfried Weiss, et al were brought by The General Military Court, appointed by Par. 3, Special Order 304, Headquarters Third United States Army and Eastern Military District, dated 2 November 1945, to be held at Dachau, Germany, on, or about, November 15, 1945. Two charges of Violation of the Laws and Usages of War were brought against the defendants.

The first charge alleged that the Dachau accused “acting in pursuance of a common design to commit the acts hereinafter alleged, and as members of the staff of Dachau Concentration Camp and camps subsidiary thereto, did, at, or in the vicinity of DACHAU and LANDSBERG, Germany, between about 1 January 1942 and about 29 April 1945, willfully, deliberately and wrongfully encourage, aid, abet and participate in the subjection of civilian nationals of nations then at war with the then German Reich to cruelties and mistreatment, including killings, beatings, tortures, starvation, abuses and indignities, the exact names and numbers of such civilian nationals being unknown but aggregating many thousands who were then and there in the custody of the German Reich in exercise of belligerent control.”

The second charge was worded exactly the same as the first, except that it specified “members of the armed forces,” instead of civilians. Like the first charge, no names of victims or specific acts against members of the armed forces were listed.

Note that the charges included killings, beatings, tortures, starvation, abuses and indignities, but there was no specific charge of gassing, although a film of the Dachau gas chamber was shown on November 29, 1945 at the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal, two weeks after the Dachau proceedings began. It was not known whether any victims who might have been killed in the Dachau gas chamber were from Allied countries, so this charge was not included.

Crimes against German citizens, and others who were not civilians or military personnel in an Allied country, were not included; it was left up to the German courts to bring charges against the concentration camp staff members for crimes against victims from non-Allied countries. The charges included only Violations of the Laws and Usages of War and not Crimes against Humanity.

The charges against Martin Gottfried Weiss, and the 39 other members of the Dachau staff, were based on the theory that all of them had participated in a “common design” to run the concentration camp in a manner which had caused the prisoners great suffering, severe injury or death. The period of time covered by the charges was from January 1, 1942 until April 29, 1945. Although the camp had been in operation since March 22, 1933, this was roughly the period of time that the Dachau camp had been in existence while America was at war with Germany.

The basis for the prosecution of staff members of the Nazi concentration camps was that some of the inmates had been captured enemy soldiers who were Prisoners of War and consequently they should have been treated according to the rules of the Geneva Convention, including the Russian POWs, although the Soviet Union had not signed the Geneva Convention and had not followed it during the war. Other inmates in the Nazi camps were political prisoners, partisans, resistance fighters or insurgents from German-occupied countries; they were considered by the American prosecutors to be comparable to Prisoners of War although the 1929 Geneva Convention did not give insurgents the same rights as POWs. In fact, the resistance fighters in German-occupied countries had violated the rules of the 1929 Geneva Convention themselves by continuing to fight after their countries had surrendered.

The U.S. “war crimes” office at Dachau

According to Robert E. Conot, author of Justice at Nuremberg, the idea of bringing the German war criminals to justice was first voiced by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on October 7, 1942, when he declared: “It is our intention that just and sure punishment shall be meted out to the ringleaders responsible for the organized murder of thousands of innocent persons in the commission of atrocities which have violated every tenet of the Christian faith.” Roosevelt was referring to atrocities committed in the concentration camps, beginning in 1933; most of the war crimes that were prosecuted by the American Military Tribunals at Dachau had not yet been committed.

The Declaration of St. James on January 13, 1942 announced British plans for war crimes trials even before the British BBC first broadcast the news of the gassing of the Jews in June 1942. On December 17, 1942, British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden told the House of Commons: “The German authorities are now carrying into effect Hitler’s oft repeated intention to exterminate the Jewish people of Europe.”

On October 26, 1943, the United Nations War Crimes Commission, composed of 15 Allied nations, met in London to discuss the trials of the German war criminals which were already being planned. That same year, Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin issued a joint statement, called the Moscow Declaration, in which they agreed to bring the German war criminals to justice.

Why was the report on the “Investigation of Alleged Mistreatment of German Guards at Dachau” kept secret until 1991?

German POWs being executed by American soldiers in a coal yard inside the SS garrison

The bodies of the dead SS soldiers, shown in the photo above, were left in the coal yard at Dachau, where they had been killed, until May 3, 1945 when the incident was investigated by Lt. Col. Joseph Whitaker, the Seventh Army’s Assistant Inspector General. A report on the “Investigation of Alleged Mistreatment of German Guards at Dachau” was filed on June 8, 1945. It was marked secret, but the contents were later revealed to the public in 1991. A copy of the report is included in Col. John H. Linden’s book The Surrender of Dachau 29 April 1945.

Why was this incident, which has since become known as “The Dachau Massacre,” kept secret for 46 years?

Why wasn’t the incident immediately made known to the public so that haters of the German people all over the world could have celebrated this news? After keeping this secret for 46 years, why reveal the truth at all?

Today, it is impossible to write anything about the “Alleged Mistreatment of German guards at Dachau” without attracting hateful comments, ranting about how these German POWs “deserved to die.”

The dead soldiers in the photo above were not German “Guards” of the Dachau concentration camp. Most of them were German SS soldiers, who had been stationed in the SS garrison that was adjacent to the camp. Others were wounded Wehrmacht soldiers, who had been dragged out of a hospital inside the SS garrison.

The photo below shows American soldiers looking at the bodies of the first four SS soldiers who surrendered to Lt. William Walsh.  Lt. Walsh marched these POWs to a train, parked outside the SS garrison, and shot them after they had surrendered in good faith.  The feet of one of the soldiers are shown, hanging out of the box car.

The first four SS who surrendered at Dachau were taken to this train and shot

At the time that the German soldiers were shot in the coal yard, with their hands in the air, the American soldiers in the 45th Division had not yet seen the Dachau concentration camp that was next door to the SS garrison, and the soldiers in the 42nd Division had not yet arrived at the Dachau compound.  This was a clear case of American soldiers shooting POWs that had surrendered, and had their hands in the air.

The bodies of the German soldiers in the coal yard were left out until the U.S. Army could do an investigation.

The paragraphs below are from the “Secret Report” done by the U.S. Army, which pertain to the “Execution of German soldiers by members of the 45th Division.”  Why did the U.S. Army call the shooting of the SS soldiers an Execution?  Were the German POWs given a trial before they were “Executed”?

4. At the entrance to the back area of the Dachau prison grounds, four German soldiers surrendered to Lt. William P. Walsh, 0-414901, in command of Company “I”, 157th Infantry. These prisoners Lt. Walsh ordered into a box car, where he personally shot them. Pvt. Albert C. Pruitt, 34573708, Company “I”157th Infantry, then climbed into the box car where these Germans were on the floor moaning and apparently still alive, and finished them off with his rifle.

5. After entry into the Dachau Camp area, Lt. Walsh segregated from surrendered prisoners of war those who were identified as SS Troops.

6. Such segregated prisoners of war were marched into a separate enclosure, lined up against the wall and shot down by American troops, who were acting under the orders of Lt. Walsh. A light machine gun, carbines, and either a pistol or a sub-machine gun were used. Seventeen of such prisoners of war were killed, and others were wounded.

7. Lt. Jack Bushyhead, 0-1284822, executive officer of Company “I”, participated with Lt. Walsh in this handling of the men and during the course of the shooting personally fired his weapon at these prisoners.

16. Lt. Walsh testified that the SS men were segregated in order to properly guard them, and were then fired upon because they started moving toward the guards. However, the dead bodies were located along the wall against which they had been lined up, they were killed along the entire line, although Lt. Walsh only claims those on one flank moved, and a number of witnesses testified that it was generally “understood” that these prisoners were to be shot when they were being segregated. These facts contradict the defensive explanation given by Lt. Walsh.

Surrender of the Dachau camp by 2nd Lt. Heinrich Wicker

In his report to Headquarters, written on 2 May 1945, Brig. Gen. Henning Linden, of the 42nd Division of the U.S. Army, wrote the following:

As we approached the Southwest corner, three people came forward with a flag of truce. They were a Swiss Red Cross representative, Victor Maurer, and two SS troopers who said they were the camp commander [SS Lieutenant Wickert] and his assistant. They had come here on the night of the 28th to take over from the regular personnel, for the purpose of surrendering the camp to the advancing Americans. The Swiss Red Cross representative said there were about one hundred SS guards in the camp who had their arms stacked, except for the people in the tower…He had given instructions that there were no shots to be fired, and that it would take 50 men to relieve the guards, as there were 42,000 “half-crazed” inmates, many of them typhus-infected….

Note that Brig. Gen. Linden incorrectly referred to SS 2nd Lt. Wicker as Wickert.  After surrendering the Dachau concentration camp to the Americans, 2nd Lt. Wicker was never seen again. It is not known when nor how he was killed.

Dachau was surrendered to the 42nd Div. of the U.S. Army under a flag of truce

According to 1st Lt. William Cowling, who was with Brig. Gen. Linden at the time that the camp was surrendered, the 42nd Division had been advancing down a road toward Munich when, by chance, they heard about the Dachau concentration camp.

In a letter to his family back home, written on April 30, 1945, Cowling wrote:

Enroute we learned from civilians and two newspaper people that just off the main road was a concentration camp of Dachau, oldest largest and most notorious camp in Germany. These newspaper people were going up to see the camp so we decided to go up too.

We ride in a Jeep with a guard out ahead of the boys and we were several hundred yards ahead as we approached the Camp. The first thing we came to was a railroad track leading out of the Camp with a lot of open box cars on it. As we crossed the track and looked back into the cars the most horrible sight I have ever seen (up to that time) met my eyes. The cars were loaded with dead bodies. Most of them were naked and all of them skin and bones. Honest their legs and arms were only a couple of inches around and they had no buttocks at all. Many of the bodies had bullet holes in the back of their heads. It made us sick at our stomach and so mad we could do nothing but clinch our fists. I couldn’t even talk. We then moved on towards the Camp and my Jeep was still several hundred yards ahead. As we approached the main gate a German officer and a civilian wearing an International Red Cross band and carrying a white flag came out. We immediately filed out and I was just hoping he would make a funny move so I could hit the trigger of my tommy gun. He didn’t however, and when he arrived abreast of us he asked for an American officer. I informed him he a was talking to one and he said he wished to surrender the camp to me.

The photo below shows Brig. Gen. Linden on the far left, with the Red Cross representative in the center and Lt. Wicker, standing next to him.  Wicker’s aid has his hands on his head.  They had been taken to the “death train,” after surrendering the camp, but claimed to know nothing about it.

2nd Lt. Wicker was taken to see the “death train” but he claimed to know nothing about it

SS soldiers had been sent from the battlefield to keep order while the Dachau camp was being surrendered.  They were killed before the U.S. soldiers found out that these were not the guards in the camp.  The guards had left the night before.

SS soldier who had been sent from the battlefield to surrender Dachau

When you are fighting a war and winning, there is no need to ask questions.  Just shoot every man in sight and hope that one of your victims was a “war criminal,” not a POW with rights under the Geneva Convention of 1929.

My blog post today was inspired by the following comment on another website:

Re: The Dachau Massacre of Guards

SignifierOne, I think the issue that people are trying to argue is that, as Prisoners of War, under the Geneva Conventions, these men should have been detained and processed and then put to trial, tried for crimes against humanity, then executed instead of summarily executed on the spot.

Executing POWs is wrong but in the case of Dachau and with concentration camp SS guards I, personally, would make an exception because of pure outrage. As far as the foreign [Hungarian] SS volunteers that were executed, they would have simply either been repatriated to their country of origin and executed for treason or possibly escape justice by joining the French Foreign Legion.

The “outrage” that caused the American soldiers to “execute” the SS men without a trial was the sight of the “Death Train.”  The American executioners did not bother to examine the train and see that the prisoners had been killed by the strafing of the train by American planes.  The train had taken over 3 weeks to travel 220 miles from the Buchenwald camp because American soldiers had bombed the railroad tracks.

Germany is making a big mistake in trying to ban David Irving from all hotels in Berlin

David Irving is planning to give a talk in “the heart of Berlin” in September this year.  It has been reported in the news, for months on end, that the hotels in Berlin will not allow him to stay there, nor hold a meeting where he can give a talk about history.  Yes, history!  David Irving is the foremost historian of World War II.  He is NOT the foremost Holocaust expert.

Correct me if I am wrong but it is my impression that David Irving now believes some of the Holocaust claims, specifically that the Treblinka camp was a “death camp.”  I previously blogged about Treblinka and David Irving’s proposed visit to the camp here.

Irving was originally charged with being a Holocaust denier when he famously said that “more people died in the back seat of Ted Kennedy’s car than died in the gas chamber at Auschwitz.”  At the time that he said this, the Auschwitz Museum was telling visitors that the gas chamber in the main camp was original.  The so-called gas chamber in the Auschwitz main camp is actually a “reconstruction” done by the Soviet Union after the war. So Irving was correct, and the Holocaustians were wrong.  It is now admitted by the staff at the Auschwitz Museum that the so-called gas chamber in the main Auschwitz camp is a “reconstruction.”

I have a first edition of Irving’s book Hitler’s War, which was originally published as a very small book with no index.  This means that you have to read the whole book to find the page where Irving says that Hitler knew nothing about the gassing of the Jews.  It was this statement that originally got David Irving into trouble as a “Holocaust Denier.”

I think that it is time for the German people to apologize to David Irving for accusing him of Denial when it was actually Irving who was right, and it was the Holocaustians who were lying about the so-called gas chamber in the main camp at Auschwitz.

The three sisters of Franz Kafka perished in the Nazi gas chambers

The title of my blog post comes from a sentence in an article which you can read in full here.  Franz Kafka died in 1924.  He died a very painful death, but at least he was not gassed.

Franz Kafka Photo Credit: Wikipedia

This quote is from the article cited above:

Born in Prague in 1883 into a German-speaking Jewish family, Kafka lived a life of quite exemplary tedium as an insurance clerk, rarely travelling (sic) beyond his home or that of his parents. [Primo] Levi saw similar constrictions in his own life as an assimilated Jew in bourgeois Turin. Moreover, Kafka’s three sisters had all perished in the Nazi gas chambers – victims of the grotesque bureaucracy foretold by their brother two decades earlier in The Trial. Kafka must have had a seer-like sensibility, Levi thought, to have looked so accurately into the future.

House where Franz Kafka lived in Prague

I have been unable to find any more information about exactly where the sisters of Franz Kafka “perished in the Nazi gas chambers.”  Jews from Prague were initially sent to the nearby Theresienstadt camp (now the town of Terezin) from where they were transferred to Auschwitz and placed in a “family camp.”  I wrote about the Czech Family Camp on my blog here.

I previously blogged about Primo Levi, who was a prisoner in the Auschwitz III camp, aka Monowitz.

Franz Kafka was born in this building in Prague Photo Credit: Wikipedia

Statue of Franz Kafka in Prague

This quote is from the Wikipedia page on Franz Kafka:

Kafka was born near the Old Town Square in Prague, then located in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His family were middle-class Ashkenazi Jews. His father, Hermann Kafka (1852–1931), was the fourth child of Jakob Kafka,[5][6] a shochet or ritual slaughterer in Osek, a Czech village with a large Jewish population located near Strakonice in southern Bohemia.[7] Hermann brought the Kafka family to Prague.

[…]

Hermann and Julie [Kafka] had six children, of whom Franz was he eldest.  Franz’s two brothers, Georg and Heinrich, died in infancy before Franz was seven; his three sisters were Gabriele (“Ellie”) (1889-1944), Valerie (“Valli”) (1892- 1943) and Ottilie (“Ottila”) 1892 – 1943.  They all died during the Holocaust of World War II. Valli was deported to the Lodz ghetto in Poland in 1942, but that is the last documentation of her.

Note that “Ellie” died in 1944, at the time that the Czech Family Camp Jews were sent to the gas chamber.   Valli was sent to the Lodz ghetto where many of the Jews remained until the last days of World War II.  However, Valli died in 1943, which means she was sent to the Chelmno death camp, according to the statistics on the JewishGen website.

House where Einstein played the violin for Franz Kafka

In the photo above, the house on the right is called the House of the Stone Ram.  The House of the Stone Ram is where Albert Einstein played his violin for Franz Kafka when Einstein was a professor at Prague German University from 1911 to 1912. On the left, in the photo, is the House at the Stone Madonna, also called the Storch house; it has a painting of St. Wenceslas on horseback.

This quote about Franz Kafka is from Wikipedia:

Kafka grew up in Prague as a German-speaking Jew.[106] He was deeply fascinated by the Jews of Eastern Europe, who (sic) he thought possessed an intensity of spiritual life that was absent from Jews in the West. His diary is full of references to Yiddish writers.[107] Yet he was at times alienated from Judaism and Jewish life: “What have I in common with Jews? I have hardly anything in common with myself and should stand very quietly in a corner, content that I can breathe”.[108] In his adolescent years, Kafka had declared himself an atheist.[109]

Hawes suggests that Kafka, though very aware of his own Jewishness, did not incorporate it into his work, which, according to Hawes, lacks Jewish characters, scenes or themes.[110][111][112] In the opinion of literary critic Harold Bloom, although Kafka was uneasy with his Jewish heritage, he was the quintessential Jewish writer.[113]

Franz Kafka attended the Old-New Synagogue in Prague

The photo above shows the Old-New synagogue which Franz Kafka attended when he lived in Prague; His bar mitzvah was held in the Old-New Synagogue.

On the west wall of the main hall in the Synagogue, there is a glass case shaped like the two stone tablets on which Moses chiseled the ten commandants. The case is filled with tiny light bulbs which light up on the anniversary of someone’s death if the relatives have paid for this feature. One of the lights is for Franz Kafka.

This synagogue got its strange name, Altneuschul, which is German for old-new-school because at the time that it was completed in 1275, it was the Neuschul or New Synagogue, but by the 16th century when other new synagogues were built in Prague, it became the Altneuschul or Old-New Synagogue.

Tourists flock to Hrbitova street in Prague

On the right in the photo above, tourists are shown crowding around the street vendors’ stalls on Hrbitova Street, looking for souvenirs of their visit. This picture is the view looking east toward the intersection of Maiselova and Hrbitova, taken from the entrance to the Klausen Synagogue which is at the other end of this street, behind the camera. On the left side of the picture, you see tourists looking at the windows of the souvenir shops. In the the center of the photo, a tour group is shown, listening as their guide tells them about the Old Town Hall, the pink building in front of them.

Holocaust survivor Eva Mozes Kor has made a lucrative career out of her Auschwitz experience

This quote is from an article that is on the comment section of the YouTube video of Eva Mozes Kor speaking at Clarkson University on October 8, 2012:

Sheila Faith Weiss, professor of history in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at Clarkson, arranged for Kor to share her story [with the students at Clarkson].

“I received a $277,000 National Science Foundation grant to write a biography of Dr. Mengele’s mentor, the German human geneticist Baron Otmar von Verschuer, and I had been in contact with Eva Mozes Kor,” Weiss says. “Because I am teaching a seminar on the Holocaust this semester, I asked Eva whether she might be willing to give a lecture at Clarkson. Normally, she would have charged more for her talk, but generously agreed to accept significantly less so we could bring her here. Her message is especially important for our students to hear.”

Did you get that?  Eva Mozes Kor “generously agreed to accept significantly less” to give a talk to the students at Clarkson on October 8, 2012.  Eva has made a career out of being a survivor of Auschwitz.  I previously blogged about her on this blog post.

Child survivors of Auschwitz-Birkenau.

How much money has Eva made off her stay in the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp, where she was one of the twins experimented on by Dr. Josef Mengele?

Eva Mozes Kor points to a photo of herself, marching out of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp in 1945 after the camp was “liberated”

I previously blogged here about Eva Kor, who was one of the 611 children who did not join the “death march” out of Auschwitz. The photo above shows her marching out of the camp after Soviet soldiers arrived on January 27, 1945 to “liberate” the camp.  Notice her chubby cheeks.  Dr. Mengele allegedly plied the children with chocolate, and gave the little girls hair ribbons.  That monster! How could he do something like that to innocent children!!!

Another blogger wrote about Eva Kor here.

Family photos displayed at Auschwitz-Birkenau in the Sauna building

Family photos on display in the Sauna building at Auschwitz-Birkenau

The photo above shows a display of photos that had been brought to the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp in the luggage carried by the Jews. Behind this photo board are more photos on display.  Somehow the photos survived.

I took the photo above, in the Sauna building, on my second visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau in 2005. The floor in the room has been covered in glass to preserve it; the photo board is reflected in the glass.

On my first visit to Auschwitz, in 1998, the Sauna building was not open. Visitors to Auschwitz were prevented from seeing the inside of this building for 60 years, before it was finally opened in 2005.  The Sauna building contains a real shower room, which is not something that visitors to a “death camp” should see.

This quote is from an article, written by Menachem Z. Rosensaft, whose father was shown in one of the photos that were saved:

All we know is that the photographs were rescued by inmates and hidden in the camp, lest the Germans burn them.  For decades after the war, they lay in a storage room in one of the buildings at Auschwitz.  In 1986, Ann Weiss, the daughter of two Holocaust survivors, came upon them almost by accident. She returned to Poland two years later and painstakingly copied the photographs.  In 2001 many of them were published in Ann Weiss’ book, “The Last Album: Eyes from the Ashes of Auschwitz-Birkenau.”

This quote from the article in the Jewish Chronicle describes the photo of Menachem Rosensaft’s father, Josef Rosensaft, which was found at Auschwitz-Birkenau:

The black and white photograph is of a young man, not yet 30 years old.  He is standing near the tower of a 14th century castle in the southern town of Będzin, wearing a long sleeved white shirt and tie, but no jacket.  He holds a hat in his hand as he looks into the camera.  The picture was taken before the Germans arrived, before the Jews of Będzin were forced to live in a ghetto, before the young man’s sisters and brother were taken to their death at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

The young man did not know that day that he would eventually be deported from Będzin with his wife and her daughter, or that he would escape from the Auschwitz-bound train by diving out of a window into the Vistula River, or that he would return to the ghetto even though he had been hit by three German bullets, or that he would learn that all the Jews on his transport had been taken directly to the gas chambers.  He did not know when his picture was taken beside the Będzin castle that he would survive the as-yet unbegun war, would survive Auschwitz-Birkenau (including many months in the notorious Block 11, known as the death block) as well as the Lagisha labor camp and the Langensalza, Dora-Mittelbau and Bergen-Belsen concentration camps. All that was still to come.

The photograph itself also survived Auschwitz. It was one of approximately 2,400 photographs that Jews had brought with them as they arrived there, unaware of their fate, and that they were forced to surrender together with their other meager belongings — their suitcases, their clothes. We will never know whether the picture had belonged to the young man’s wife, or to one of his sisters, or to a friend.

Read more: The Jewish Chronicle – Photo inspires thoughts on remembrance

Wait a minute!  Josef Rosensaft was in Block 11?  This was the famous prison block where prisoners, who had been accused of a crime, were held until they could be put on trial, and if convicted, executed at the Black Wall.

So Josef Rosensaft had been accused of a crime, possibly fighting as an illegal combatant with the Jewish Resistance, but he was not convicted.  Then he was sent to two labor camps before being sent to Dora-Mittelbau, the famous camp where V-2 rockets were being built.  Then he was evacuated to Bergen-Belsen, an exchange camp which had been turned into a concentration camp, in the last days of the war.  Josef Rosensaft’s whole story disputes the claim that Hitler wanted to genocide the Jews.  His story amounts to “Holocaust denial.”

Whatever happened to Ken Waltzer’s proposed book about the Buchenwald orphans?

Child survivors of Buchenwald; not all of them were orphans

I have a whole library of books about World War II and the Holocaust, but none that I have purchased recently.  Today, I decided that it is time for me to read some new books because the Holocaust story is changing daily. That’s why I did a search to find out if Ken Waltzer’s proposed book about the Buchenwald orphans has been released yet.

Buchenwald orphans, not including Elie Wiesel, leave on a train bound for France

The first website that came up in my search was Carolyn Yeager’s www.eliewieseltatto.com where I found this quote:

This writer [Carolyn Yeager] suspects that Ken Waltzer is having difficulty convincingly incorporating Elie Wiesel into the story of the “boys of Buchenwald” and their rescue. He has been a friend and devotee of Wiesel for many years, they are both strongly associated with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, and Wiesel has been a part of his Buchenwald story from the beginning. But the real evidence for Elie Wiesel ever being an inmate at Buchenwald doesn’t exist. There are no photographs of Elie Wiesel at Buchenwald. There are no photos of Wiesel during his supposed concentration camp period at all.

I think Waltzer believed this slipshod approach he employs would pass without comment, but he didn’t count on the appearance of Elie Wiesel Cons the World website. We are a real problem  for Ken Waltzer!

Yeager is the English spelling of the German word Jäger which means Hunter.  You can read the definition of the word Waltzer here:  [German Walzer, from walzen, to turn about, from Middle High German, to roll, from Old High German walzan; see wel-2 in Indo-European roots.]

What’s in a name?  Carolyn is the hunter and Ken is the walzer.  How appropriate!  He has been dancing around for 6 years now, while she has been relentlessly hunting him down.

Teenagers who were liberated from Buchenwald, not including Elie Wiesel

Buchenwald orphans march out of the camp; where is Elie Wiesel?

I think that Ken Waltzer has now tacitly admitted that Elie Wiesel was never in Buchenwald, nor in any other concentration camp.  Waltzer has been saved from total embarrassment by Carolyn Yeager. She has prevented him from writing a book that would have been full of lies.  He would have been disgraced as the new Rosenblat, if Carolyn had not saved him.