The fate of Eleanor Hodys, according to Nizkor and Wikipedia

This morning, I had to do some research on Dr. Konrad Morgen, the SS judge, who was mentioned in a comment on my blog. The person, who commented, found it strange that an SS judge would be given the task of investigating murder in the concentration camps, when the sole purpose of the camps was to murder the prisoners.

In my research, I read Wikipedia’s page on Dr. Morgan, where I found this quote:

Though [Dr. Morgen] discovered early on that the Final Solution of the Jewish problem through physical extermination was beyond his jurisdiction, and discovered no legal objections to large-scale, centrally-authorized anti-Jewish operations like Harvest Festival [the execution of Jews at Majdanek], Morgen went on to prosecute so many Nazi officers for individual violations that by April 1944, Himmler personally ordered him to restrain his cases.[4]

Nonetheless, [Dr. Morgen] went on to investigate Auschwitz camp commandant Rudolf Höss on charges of having “unlawful relations” with a beautiful Jewish woman prisoner, Eleanor Hodys; Höss was, for a time, removed from his command and these proceedings gained Hodys a brief stay of execution; sent to Berlin by Morgen, then transferred to Buchenwald, she was shot by the SS shortly before the end of the war.[5]

The source [5] for this information is this website: http://www.nizkor.org/hweb/camps/auschwitz/alphabet/judge.html

After Eleanor Hodys was “shot by the SS before the end of the war,” her ghost turned up at the Dachau camp, where she told her sad story to the American liberators of the camp.  Her testimony was included in the book, written by the liberators, entitled Dachau Liberated: The Official Report.

I blogged about the testimony of Eleanor Hodys, as given to the Americans at Dachau, on this blog post: https://furtherglory.wordpress.com/2010/12/27/more-stories-from-dachau-liberated-the-official-report/

I believe that the American liberators got the story of the standing cells from Eleanor Hodys, and that the claim that there were standing cells at Dachau is based on her story.  The alleged standing cells at Dachau are no longer in existence.

I also blogged about the sad story, told by Eleanor Hodys, at https://furtherglory.wordpress.com/2013/07/13/did-rudolf-hoess-the-commandant-of-auschwitz-rape-any-of-the-female-prisoners/

Today’s Germany — no country for old men

In a news article in The Daily Beast, which you can read in full here, Michael Moynihan wrote that “There Should Be No Statute of Limitations on Prosecuting War Crimes.”

He means German war crimes, of course.  No Allied soldier, who served in World War II, was ever put on trial for war crimes, and none ever will be put on trial.  Only the losers are war criminals. Only the winners are allowed to make up new laws, after a war is over.

At the end of World War II, the Allies made up ex-post-facto laws, under which the Germans were put on trial by the Allies in the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal and the American Military Tribunal held at Dachau, Germany.  One of these ex-post-facto laws was called “common design” or “common plan.” Under the new common design law, anyone who was anywhere near the place where a war crime, or a Crime Against Humanity, had been committed, was guilty simply because he was there.

Under the new laws made up by the Allies after the war, the Waffen-SS was declared to be a criminal organization, as was the National Socialist political party, known to Americans today as the Nazis.

If Germany had won the war, the Germans might have designated the US Marines as a criminal organization, along with the Democratic political party.  Anyone who belonged to either of these organizations would have automatically been a war criminal, under the new laws.

My photo of the ruins of Oradour-sur-Glane

Moyniham’s article includes a great photo of the ruins of Oradour-sur-Glane, a village in France, where a German soldier named Werner C. was present when the Germans did a reprisal action against the village for the kidnapping and murder of German soldiers, including Major Helmut Kämpfe, a beloved German officer, who was believed to have been killed at Oradour-sur-Glane.

This quote, regarding the Oradour-sur-Glane reprisal, is from Wikipedia:

A few days later, survivors were allowed to bury the dead. 642 inhabitants of Oradour-sur-Glane had been murdered in a matter of hours. Adolf Diekmann claimed that the episode was a just retaliation for partisan activity in nearby Tulle and the kidnapping of Helmut Kämpfe.

Under the Geneva Convention of 1929, a reprisal was legal.  Under the Geneva Convention of 1949, which is currently in effect, reprisals are no longer legal.

This quote is from the article written by Michael Moynihan:

…. German prosecutors, mining information from East German secret police files, have assembled a case against former Waffen-SS soldier Werner C. (German privacy laws protect the accused’s identity), an 88 year old from Cologne who acknowledges being present in Oradour-sur-Glane on that grim day [June 10, 1944] but claims to not have participated in the orgiastic violence.

But they are right to haul—or wheel—a geriatric SS man present at a notorious, if largely forgotten, massacre into the courtroom. Countries who don’t reckon with the past, shunting memories of political and institutional violence to the side in favor of “moving forward,” risk banalizing totalitarianism. For instance, a recent Gallup poll found that “residents in seven out of 11 countries that were part of the [Soviet Union] are more likely to believe its collapse harmed their countries than benefited them.” And Germany saw a recent wave of nostalgia for East German dictatorship (bloodlessly called “Ostalgie”), because there was no commensurate Nuremberg Trial, no nie wieder, no truth and reconciliation at the collapse of Soviet communism.

It’s unclear what role Werner C. played in the massacre, though years of rigorous academic research of Nazi crimes both inside and outside Germany have punctured the myth of soldiers merely “following orders,” lest the poor conscript too became a victim of fascism. If Werner C. pulled a trigger or pulled the pin from a grenade, or pushed children into a locked church in Oradour, he should breathe his last breath inside a prison. A small measure of justice, 70 years later, and reassurance that not all the perpetrators have “escaped the penalty of their crime.”

If Werner C. is put on trial in Germany, it will not be because he “pulled a trigger or pulled the pin from a grenade, or pushed children into a  locked church in Oradour.”  He will be put on trial and will be automatically convicted because he was there when a reprisal was conducted against the villagers in Oradour-sur-Glane. If he was there, he is guilty under the ex-post-facto law, known as “common design.”

John Demjanjuk was recently convicted, in Germany, under the “common design” law, which set a precedent for new charges to be brought against any former German soldier, who is still alive.

What really happened in Oradour-sur-Glane, that caused the German soldiers to do a reprisal?  Ever heard of “the tragic well” in Oradour-sur-glane? The photo below shows the tragic well.

The tragic well where bodies of German soldiers were found in Oradour-sur-Glane

You can read about the bakery, where burned bodies were found by the German soldiers when they entered the village of Oradour-sur-Glane, on my website at http://www.scrapbookpages.com/Oradour-sur-Glane/Tour/Ruins/Bakery.html

You can read the SS version of what happened at Oradour-sur-Glane on my website at http://www.scrapbookpages.com/Oradour-sur-Glane/Story/Synopsis02.html

My photo of an old car in the ruins of Oradour-sur-Glane

You can read the notes that I wrote, after my visit to the ruins of Oradour-sur-Glane, on my website at http://www.scrapbookpages.com/Oradour-sur-Glane/Story/TripNotes2.html

New movie The Monuments Men opening Feb. 7, 2014

I have been reading the book entitled The Rape of Europa by Ms. Lynn H. Nicholas, in order to prepare for the new movie The Monuments Men which will open in theaters on  Feb. 7, 2014.  You can see a trailer for the movie below.

The trailer for the movie tells us that “the Nazis have been stealing art” and that there are “5 million pieces of stolen art” that the Monuments Men must find and preserve because “Hitler wants to destroy everything.”  Basically, “the Nazis are on the run and they have taken everything with them” according to the movie trailer.  The Monuments Men must find the art and save the culture of the world from the Nazis.  Sounds good to me.

The evil Nazis have stolen all the art in Europe and The Monuments Men have been “tasked” to find it.

What?  The Germans didn’t have any art of their own? They had stolen the art from Warsaw and other places with the intent of destroying it, according to the trailer for the movie.

At one point in the movie, the fictional character, played by George Clooney, explains the importance of the mission of The Monuments  Men:  “If you destroy an entire generation of people’s culture, it’s as if they never existed,” he says. “That’s what Hitler wants and it’s the one thing we can’t allow.”

So the theme of the movie seems to be that a group of American art experts are going to prevent Hitler from destroying an entire generation of culture.  Hitler was an artist himself and he was planning an art museum in his home town of Linz, Austria, after the war.

According to the book entitled The Rape of Europa, the Nazis had stashed the art in a salt mine at Alt Aussee.  You can read what Wikipedia says about Altaussee at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altaussee#Nazi_Stolen_Art_Repository

Note the difference in the spelling of Altaussee.

August Eigruber was put on trial by the American Military Tribunal

This quote is from page 316 of The Rape of Europa:

The basic legend tells us that [August] Eigruber put bombs in the mines [at Altaussee] with the intention of blowing up everything, and that heroic Austrian Resistance workers removed them and thereby saved the priceless works for humanity. […]

…Hitler had ordered [Alt Aussee] and other repositories sealed and the works of art preserved at all  costs.

[The] next ploy was to try to persuade [August] Eigruber that the bombs would not destroy everything inside unless the mine entrances were sealed.  This would make the bombs inaccessible but the engineers convinced [Eigruber] that [the bombs] could be detonated by a long fuse to the exterior.  […]

Eigruber’s opponents turned to the highest [Nazi] Party authority still available [after Hitler’s suicide] — SS Intelligence Chief Ernst Kaltenbrunner, who was well known in Alt Aussee, where he kept a mistress.

Kaltenbrunner authorized the immediate removal of the bombs and promised to so inform Eigruber. […] On May 5 [1945]  the mine entrances were blasted shut.  Inside, the scattered masterpieces rested safely in the darkness.

This quote is also from the book entitled The Rape of Europa by  Ms. Lynn H. Nicholas:

By the summer of 1943 an Austrian official, Dr. Herbert Seiberl, had completed an investigation of the labyrinthine network of salt  mines in the Salzkammergut, a chic summer resort area high in the mountains of Salzberg. [..] The most suitable was at Alt Aussee where the main chambers lay more than a mile inside the mountain, reachable only by tiny special trains. Seiberl’s belief that the conditions would be ideal was supported by his discovery of a little chapel inside the mine in which oil paintings had been hanging since 1933 without ill effect. [..]

Seiberl was thinking of this place not for the Linz holdings [of Hitler], but for the Austrian collections, now for the first time within range of Allied bombers coming from Italy. […this mine] was immediately claimed for the exclusive use of the Führer. […] The arrangement met with Hitler’s approval. […]

In quite another mood, in August 1944 Hitler had ordered  all military installations, utilities, communications, archives, monuments, food stores, and transportation facilities destroyed as the German armies retreated so that only a wasteland would await the Allies. […] Albert Speer, who had proposed a more realistic program, was removed from office for a time, but eventually managed to compromise with the Führer and change the order for destruction to “disabling” all the while working under Hitler’s orders.

In addition to the scorched-earth order, on every front soldiers and Gauleiters were commanded to fight to the last or face execution, Hitler’s theory being, as Wolff had found out in Italy, that if they held out long enough, the Western Allies would join Germany to defeat Bolshevism. In this scenario Germany would remain intact, and the purloined treasures would be used. They must, therefore, be kept from the enemy as long as possible.  Indeed, in his will, written the day before his suicide, Hitler stipulated that his collections should be given to the [German] nation.  […]

Gauleiter Eigruber of Oberdonau had taken Hitler’s scorched earth decrees deeply to heart and was persuaded that the works of art at Alt Aussee should not fall into the hands of the Bolshevists [Communists] or “International Jewry.”   […]

The story of Eigruber’s fanatic desire for destruction, and the efforts to stop him, has become the legend of Alt Aussee.  […]

Strangely, Eigruber’s plot to blow up the art in the salt mine was not mentioned in his trial as a war criminal by the American Military Tribunal, which I wrote about on my website at http://www.scrapbookpages.com/DachauScrapbook/DachauTrials/Mauthausen02.html

This quote, about August Eigruber, is from Wikipedia:

Right after Germany’s unconditional surrender in May 1945, Eigruber was arrested in the Salzkammergut by the United States Army, and he was questioned as a witness at the Nuremberg Trials. In the Mauthausen-Gusen camp trials, Eigruber was sentenced in March 1946 by the Dachau International Military Tribunal to death by hanging for his responsibility for crimes at Mauthausen concentration camp. The sentence was carried out in the prison yard at Landsberg Prison, Landsberg am Lech on May 28, 1947.

 

US Holocaust Memorial Museum has a new exhibit on the Lithuanian Jews

According to a news article in the Huffington Post, which you can read in full here, the USHMM in Washington, DC, has a new exhibit entitled “Some were neighbors: Collaboration and Complicity in the Holocaust.”

Entrance into the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

This quote is from the article in the Huffington Post:

As you enter the new exhibit at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., you see an image of lovely young girls dressed up for a dance class. Some of the girls are Jews and some are not, but you can’t tell which are which. In Kaunas (Kovno), Lithuania, in 1935-1936, their lives are intertwined.

Then you hear the woman’s voice. Baffled. Wondering. Three-quarters of a century later, her bewilderment is still with her. “We were friends, I thought.” Once a friend, now an enemy — how could it have happened?

“Some Were Neighbors: Collaboration and Complicity in the Holocaust,” the museum’s newest exhibit, is open for visitors through 2016 and is also accessible online. It is a pertinent place to visit as we observe International Holocaust Remembrance Day, which commemorates the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1945, on January 27.

For 20 years, the museum has helped visitors to ask themselves important questions. This exhibit is no exception. It provides an extraordinary range of information while expertly prodding visitors to engage in moral inquiry.

The new exhibit, inside the USHMM, is about non-Jews, living side by side with their Jewish neighbors in Kovno, Lithuania during World War II.  When the Nazis came, the Lithuanians turned on their neighbors, the Jews, and began beating them to death.  What did the Jews ever do to their neighbors to cause them to beat the Jews to death while German soldiers watched?

Famous photo of Lithuanian man standing  over the Jews that he has beaten to death

I previously blogged about the Lithuanians killing Jews at https://furtherglory.wordpress.com/2011/04/18/the-killing-of-the-jews-in-lithuania/

Jews were beaten to death by their neighbors in Kovno, Lithuania as German soldiers looked on

Why didn’t the Lithuanians stand up for their neighbors, and protect them from the Nazis?  By-standers in Lithuania were nothing new.  When did the non-Jews in any country ever stand up for their Jewish neighbors, and save them?

According to the International Jewish Encyclopedia, the Jews had been expelled 77 times before the Final Solution, beginning with their expulsion from Carthage in the year 250 AD and continuing up to 1919 when foreign Jews were expelled from the state of Bavaria, even before the Nazi party was established in Germany.

Major expulsions of the Jews in Europe occurred in England in 1290, France in 1306 and again in 1394, Switzerland in 1348, Hungary in 1349, Austria in 1422, Spain in 1492, Lithuania in 1495 and again in 1656, and Portugal in 1497. The International Jewish Encyclopedia also says that the Russian Jews were confined to a reservation called the Pale of Settlement in 1772.

After many of these expulsions, the Jews fled to Poland. The Polish people welcomed them, starting in the 14th century.

After the Nazis conquered Poland in 1939, they gained control of millions of Jews, who were the enemies of Fascism.  Bad Nazis!  They would not let the Jews live in peace, and fight against Germany as Resistance fighters.

The Final Solution was unique in that it was the first time that the Jews were expelled from all of Western Europe at the same time.

During World War II, there were 4,950 cities and towns in Europe in which the Jewish communities were destroyed by the Nazis, according to the Wannsee Museum in Germany.  Wannsee is the place where the Final Solution was planned.

This quote about the Kovno ghetto is from Wikipedia:

In the autumn of 1943, the SS assumed control of the ghetto and converted it into the Kovno concentration camp. The Jewish council’s role was drastically curtailed. The Nazis dispersed more than 3,500 Jews to subcamps where strict discipline governed all aspects of daily life. On October 26, 1943, the SS deported more than 2,700 people from the main camp. The SS sent those deemed fit to work to Vaivara concentration camp in Estonia, and deported surviving children and the elderly to Auschwitz.

On July 8, 1944, the Germans evacuated the camp, deporting most of the remaining Jews to the Dachau concentration camp in Germany or to the Stutthof camp, near Danzig, on the Baltic coast. Three weeks before the Soviet army arrived in Kovno, the Germans razed the ghetto to the ground with grenades and dynamite. As many as 2,000 people burned to death or were shot while trying to escape the burning ghetto. The Red Army occupied Kovno on August 1, 1944. Of Kovno’s few Jewish survivors, 500 had survived in forests or in a single bunker which had escaped detection during the final liquidation; the Germans evacuated an additional 2,500 to concentration camps in Germany.

[…]

The Kovno ghetto had several Jewish resistance groups. The resistance acquired arms, developed secret training areas in the ghetto, and established contact with Soviet partisans in the forests around Kovno.

In 1943, the General Jewish Fighting Organization (Yidishe Algemeyne Kamfs Organizatsye) was established, uniting the major resistance groups in the ghetto. Under this organization’s direction, some 300 ghetto fighters escaped from the Kovno ghetto to join Jewish partisan groups. About 70 died in action.

The Jewish council in Kovno actively supported the ghetto underground. Moreover, a number of the ghetto’s Jewish police participated in resistance activities. The Germans executed 34 members of the Jewish police for refusing to reveal specially constructed hiding places used by Jews in the ghetto.

In the last days of World War II, Lithuanian Jews were brought to the Dachau concentration  camp.  I wrote about a Lithunian survivor of Dachau on my website here:

This quote is from my website, scrapbookpages.com:

Mendel Rosenberg was born in 1929 in Lithuania. In 1940, the Russians took over Lithuania and it became part of the Communist Soviet Union; this was part of the secret agreement signed by the Nazis and the Russians before their joint invasion of Poland in September 1939 which was the start of World War II.

On June 22, 1941, Germany invaded the Soviet Union. Most of the Lithuanians welcomed the Germans as liberators, and a few days before the Germans arrived, those who supported the Nazis started killing the Jews. Lithuanian political prisoners were released from the NKVD prisons by the German invaders and allowed to join in the killing of the Communist Commissars and the Jewish members of the NKVD, which was the equivalent of the German Gestapo.

[…]

Thousands of Lithuanian Jews, including the Rosenberg family, were confined in the Siauliai Ghetto where they worked in factories, manufacturing goods for the Germans. In 1943, Rosenberg was sent to the Stuthoff concentration camp near the city formerly known as Danzig. Rosenberg’s mother remained at Stuthoff, but Rosenberg and his brother were transferred to the Dachau concentration camp.

[…]

In anticipation of the liberation of Dachau, 1,759 Jewish prisoners were put on a train on April 26th and sent toward the mountains in the South Tyrol. Three days later, the train stopped and the prisoners learned that the German guards had abandoned them; they had been saved by American troops.

Why did the Germans send Jewish prisoners out of Dachau before the camp was liberated?  To prevent them from attacking the German people after they were liberated!

There were towns in Poland where the Polish people turned on their Jewish neighbors, but blamed it on the Nazis.  I blogged about this at https://furtherglory.wordpress.com/2012/05/25/the-lopuchowo-forest-in-poland-where-2000-jews-were-executed-by-the-nazis-during-wwii/

Were former concentration camp prisoners forced to live in the camps after they were liberated?

Today, I found a comment on the Reddit website, which you can read at http://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/18s90e/so_i_was_in_auschwitz_last_weekend/

The comment is quoted below:

[–]4ecohgie 1115 points 11 months ago

All 4 of my grandparents were sent to Auschwitz (among a number of other camps, through which they were transferred). What is particularly chilling for me is that, after the war, this is where most CC prisoners/refugees had to live for a number of years. I can’t imagine having to continue to reside in the same place that your entire family was murdered for years after liberation.

Adding to this. Not only did people live in the concentration camps after the war (until immigrating), but they also married and had children there. Both sets of grandparents married at the camps in 45 and 46, and my two uncles were born at Bergen-Belsen, if I remember correctly. So strange. Especially because each grandparent entered the camp with a different spouse (and some with young children), and left with a wholly different family.

I don’t know how they didn’t go completely insane.

It would have indeed been horrible if Jewish survivors in the Auschwitz camp had been forced to live there after Auschwitz was liberated by the Soviet Union on January 27, 1945. Most of the survivors of Auschwitz were marched out of the camp, BEFORE THE CAMP WAS LIBERATED, and taken to camps in Germany, including Bergen-Belsen.

Survivors at Bergen-Belsen were NOT forced to live for 5 years (1945 to 1950) in the barracks of the Bergen-Belsen camp.  This would not have been possible, because the lice-infested barracks were burned to the ground by the British, after the camp was voluntarily turned over to them.

Barracks at Bergen-Belsen were burned to the ground by the British

According to Wikipedia, the survivors of Bergen-Belsen were moved to the SS training camp that was right next door to the Bergen-Belsen camp.

Over the next days the surviving prisoners [at Bergen-Belsen] were deloused and moved to a nearby German Panzer army camp, which became the Bergen-Belsen DP (displaced persons) camp. Over a period of four weeks, almost 29,000 of the survivors were moved there. Before the handover, the SS had managed to destroy the camp’s administrative files, thereby eradicating most written evidence.[12] The remaining SS personnel were now forced by armed Allied troops to bury the bodies in pits.[12]

A photo of the SS garrison, where the Bergen-Belsen survivors lived for 5 years, after the camp was turned over to the British on April 15, 1945, is shown below.

German Army garrison where Bergen-Belsen survivors lived for 5 years

So why were the Bergen-Belsen survivors forced to live in an Army garrison for 5 years?

The survivors were NOT FORCED to live there.  They stayed at the German Army garrison for 5 years, while they waited to go to Palestine. For years, the British refused to allow the Jews to enter Palestine because they anticipated the trouble that is still going on in the Middle East.

Here is another quote from Wikipedia:

The survivors of the [Bergen-Belsen] concentration camp became the first residents of the future DP camp, which was around 2 kilometres from the main concentration camp area, in a former German Army barracks.[1][2]:60 Initially, the British medical staff used buildings in the former Panzertruppenschule (school for Panzer troops) as an emergency hospital to treat the former inmates away from the disastrous conditions of the concentration camp.[3] On April 21 the first patients were moved to the new location, disinfected and issued with new clothing.[3] This movement of people was completed by May 18 and at that point the former barracks had around 12,000 hospital beds.[3]

There are also claims that Holocaust survivors were forced to live in the former Dachau camp for 17 years. Actually, it was the Germans who were expelled from what is now the Czech Republic, who lived in the former barracks at Dachau for 17 years.

After 4 years of blogging and 1107 blog posts, the winner is “the surgeon of Birkenau”

I started my blog on February 5, 2010 with my very first blog post, which was about Tadeusz Borowski, a non-Jewish political prisoner at Auschwitz-Birkenau, who wrote a book about the camp, in which he famously told about the soccer games played by the prisoners, as the Jews were marching to their deaths in the Krema III gas chamber.

Since then, I have written a total of 1107 blog posts, and the post that has gotten the most hits is the one about the “surgeon of Birkenau” which you can read at https://furtherglory.wordpress.com/2011/09/01/was-the-surgeon-of-birkenau-really-a-surgeon/

Why is this blog post so popular?  It must be because it is about the movie entitled The Debt, which seems to be based on the story of Dr. Josef Mengele, the Nazi that everyone loves to hate.

Left to right: Dr. Josef Mengele, Rudold Hoess, and Josef Kramer

You can read about Dr. Josef Mengele on my website at http://www.scrapbookpages.com/AuschwitzScrapbook/History/Articles/Selection.html

and on this page of my website at http://www.scrapbookpages.com/AuschwitzScrapbook/History/Articles/Selection2.html

Dr. Mengele made an unforgetable impression on the prisoners at Auchwitz-Birkenau because he was handsome and charming, and he whistled tunes from German opera, as he waved the Jews to the right or to the left, to live or to die.

There are numerous Holocaust survivors, who are still alive today, because Dr. Mengele was too distracted by his whistling to pay attention to the ages of the children that he was waving to the right to live.

Why is Sacramento, CA the only major city that does not have a Holocaust Museum?

Sacramento is the Capital city of California. The city has many famous museums, including a Railroad Museum, an Automobile Museum, the Crocker Art Museum, and the State Indian Museum.  But no Holocaust Museum.  Why is that?

Many years ago, there was a proposed Holocaust Museum for Sacramento, but the plan was canceled when the Armenians wanted to be included.  Holocaustians do not want to acknowledge that there was an Armenian genocide because this would take away from the Holocaust, which is the worst crime ever committed in the entire history of the world.

Now California wants to adopt a “Genocide Curriculum Measure,” which would mandate the teaching of the Armenian Genocide in California schools.  California is one of the 5 states in America which has mandatory Holocaust education.

The following quote is from an article in today’s news, which you can read at http://www.armenianweekly.com/2014/01/24/california-assembly-panel-adopts-genocide-curriculum-measure/:

SACRAMENTO, Calif. —Standing strong against Armenian Genocide denial, the California State Assembly Education Committee unanimously adopted AB-659 on Jan. 15 a measure introduced by Assemblymember Adrin Nazarian which would bolster the commitment of the State of California to teach of the Armenian Genocide to public school students in Grades 7-12.

Following the hearing, Nazarian said, “It was with great pride that I introduced AB 659, a bill that will call for the adoption of an oral testimony component in teaching students about the Armenian Genocide. I would like to thank the ANCA-WR for their assistance with this bill and look forward to their continued support as AB 659 makes its way to the Assembly floor. I would like to also commend my fellow colleagues on the Assembly Committee on Education in voting unanimously on the side of truth and justice”

Testifying forcefully in support of the measure was ANCA Western Region Legislative Affairs Director Haig Baghdassarian. Turkish American groups presented a diatribe of genocide denial, which compelled Committee Chairwoman Joan Buchanan and fellow Committee members Rocky Chavez and Shirley Weber to set the record straight about the importance of speaking clearly about genocide and historical injustices.

I previously blogged here about the “Fresno Indians” which is what Armenians living in California are sometimes called.  Note that the new legislation was sponsored by Adrin Nazarian, who is Armenian.

You can read more about the Armenian Genocide controversy on this blog: http://armeniangenocideblog.wordpress.com/tag/armenian-genocide-recognition/

If Hitler were still alive, would Oprah interview him?

Every morning, I check my blog stats to see where readers of my blog are (literally) coming from.  This morning, I found that some readers had been directed to my blog by a website, which features a fake interview, that Oprah might have conducted with Hitler if he were still alive; you can read it here.  I love this ingenious fake interview with Hitler, but there is one tiny mistake and one big mistake in the article.

The tiny mistake is this:  Two photos are shown with the caption “During the war, the Americans were very concerned about lice and typhus.”

A sign that was put up by the British at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp

One of the photos on the website is shown above; it is purported to be a sign in the USA, but this is actually a sign that the British put up at Bergen-Belsen, which had a huge epidemic of typhus at the end of the war.

America did not have any typhus epidemics during World War II.  America had a typhus vaccine and all of the American soldiers were vaccinated against typhus before going overseas.

DDT was first used in Italy in 1943 and during World War II, it was being sprayed every where in America.  German doctors had already discovered that DDT is harmful and they were not using it.  Instead, the Germans were killing the lice in clothing by using Zykon-B gas in a machine, such was the one pictured below.  The photo was taken at the Dachau concentration camp.

Machine used at Dachau to kill lice in clothing

German doctors were working on developing a typhus vaccine at the Buchenwald concentration camp; you can read about this on my website at http://www.scrapbookpages.com/Buchenwald/Atrocities1.html

Now for the big mistake in the fake Oprah interview with Hitler, which is contained in this quote:

Oprah: But my understanding is that the Holocaust was well documented.

Hitler: Be careful with the use of that term, “well documented”. Propagandists will often use it as a tool of persuasion, when in fact, there is no documentation. Not only is there no documentation of this fictitious genocide, but two separate forensic tests of the ruins of the Auschwitz “gas chambers” came back negative!

Oprah: Ruins? But the gas chamber is still there at the Auschwitz museum.

Hitler: No. The Auschwitz gas chamber is a post war propaganda reconstruction. The museum curator will even tell you that, but only if you ask. What they claim was the original gas chamber lies in a pile of ruins. These ruins were indeed tested. There is therefore no forensic evidence to support the big lie.

Two photos are shown at this point in the narrative of Oprah’s interview of Hitler.

One photo shows  the ruins of Krema II (crematorium #2) at Auschwitz-Birkenau, which “lies in ruins,” and the other photo shows the gas chamber at the Auschwitz I camp, which was not blown up. You can see photos of the ruins of Krema II on one of my previous blog posts at https://furtherglory.wordpress.com/2011/10/09/are-the-ruins-of-auschwitz-collapsing/

The photo of the Auschwitz I gas chamber on the fake Oprah interview website is similar to the photo below.

View of what tourists see inside the reconstructed gas chamber in the main Auschwitz camp

My 2005 photo of the ruins of the oven room in Krema II at Auschwitz-Birkenau

The photo above shows the ruins of the oven room in Krema II, not the  ruins of the alleged Krema II gas chamber.  The ruins of the alleged gas chamber in Krema II were “indeed tested” by Germar Rudolf and Fred Leuchter, both of whom  climbed down into the ruins of the alleged gas chamber and did not find enough evidence of Zyklon-B residue, which would prove that it was a gas chamber.

The ruins of the alleged Krema II gas chamber are shown below.

Ruins of alleged gas chamber in Krema II at Auschwitz-Birkenau

The alleged gas chamber in the main Auschwitz camp was converted into a bomb shelter by the Germans.  For 50 years, the tour guides at Auschwitz told visitors that the alleged gas chamber was original, although it is really a reconstruction, done by the Soviet Union.

You can see photos of the reconstructed gas chamber in the Auschwitz main camp on my website at http://www.scrapbookpages.com/AuschwitzScrapbook/Tour/Auschwitz1/Auschwitz08.html

Jewish activists want publishers of Mein Kampf to include annotations to put the book into “humanitarian context”

Update January 17, 2014:

[I previously blogged here about American President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who did nothing to save the Jews of Germany because he did not want a large number of Jews in America. Like Hitler, he did not want the Jews to control his country.]

To give you an idea of what the Jewish “annotation” of Hitler’s book Mein Kamp might look like, read this article, written by Abraham H. Foxman of the ADL (Anti-Defamation League).

Editor’s Note: The following is an introduction to Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf written by Abraham H. Foxman, the National Director of the Anti-Defamation League and a Holocaust survivor. Mr. Foxman was asked to write the introduction for the 1999 English translation published by the Mariner Books division of Houghton Mifflin Co. It is reprinted here in its entirety with permission from the publisher.

Before the Holocaust, the Western world had had few lessons on these subjects. So we missed the portents of disaster: the denial of civil liberties in Germany as early as 1933, the establishment of Dachau (a concentration camp for political opponents) that same year, the passing of the Nuremberg Laws of 1935. These measures should have alerted us to the danger Hitler represented. He had made his ultimate goals clear in Mein Kampf as early as 1926: rearmament, the abolition of democracy, territorial expansion, eugenics, the “elimination” of the “Jewish threat.” Mein Kampf may have been dismissed by the West when it was first published — it is largely a theoretical text, lacking an identifiable program for accomplishing the goals it describes — but here Hitler was taking concrete steps to realize his vision. Yet nothing was done. Even in the 1940s when the reports of death camps became available, we continued to deal with Hitler in conventional military terms; we understood war, but genocide we could hardly imagine, even with evidence before us. Even today it is tempting to close our eyes to the genocidal aspects of World War II, to view the Holocaust as the byproduct of an ordinary, though catastrophic, military conflict. The systematic effort to destroy a religious or ethnic group is a concept so horrifying that our instinct is to look away.

The lesson, however, has begun to sink in. The term genocide was coined in 1944; four years later the United Nations General Assembly made the action illegal under international law. The Nuremberg trials of 1946 were an improvised affair, but since then the principle of “crimes against humanity” has been refined and war crimes tribunals have become an accepted aspect of global statecraft. Jewish refugees in the 1940s encountered closed borders and international indifference, but today the West has begun to learn compassion for refugees. In a tragic, ironic way, the Holocaust has helped lead to these advances in world civilization.

[…]

[Hitler] is at his most concrete when writing about trade unions, control of the media, and foreign alliances, less so in describing the educational system of the ideal German state or his plans for eliminating syphilis, for example. On some of the most explosive issues he can be maddeningly opaque. Thus [Hitler] writes often about the “danger” that Jews pose to Germany and the rest of the world and suggests that one day there will be a reckoning between Jews and Germans, that he will “eliminate” the “Jewish threat.” But he presents no details on how this will be accomplished.

[…]

The glue that Hitler used to hold these disparate themes together was an extreme form of race-oriented social Darwinism, but even this idea was not limited to the German fringes. The modern “science” of race had evolved with the Enlightenment, when the Aristotelian distinctions between the “cultured” and the “barbaric” races were revived, this time using terms like “civilized” and “primitive.” By positing that certain races were inherently “primitive,” white men of the Enlightenment were able to justify both their continued toleration of black slavery and their imperialist designs on places such as Africa. Differences between races were scientifically “proven” with techniques such as anthropometry (the collection and study of precise measurements of the human body); the races were then ranked on some arbitrary scale, with modern European man always holding the highest spot.

Hitler’s racial theories cemented together all of the disparate aspects of his philosophy. Pan-Germanism, ultra-nationalism, rabid anti-Semitism and anti-Marxism, and theories of racial conflict led to his Manichean philosophy of Aryan versus Jew. Each aspect of Hitler’s ideology existed elsewhere; Hitler’s achievement lay in weaving them together and presenting them as a heady brew that the demoralized and economically struggling German people could not refuse. Though others may have formulated the National Socialist program in a more sophisticated fashion, Hitler’s essentialist formulations, presented in Mein Kampf and in his speeches, were able to galvanize the German people in ways that no others could

Continue reading my original post:

Sales of Hitler’s “manifesto,” entitled Mein Kampf, (My Struggle) are increasing dramatically, as people all over the world are purchasing e-books online.

In a news article, which you can read in full here,  you will find this quote:

As Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” enjoys a disturbing second act as a wildly popular e-book, Jewish activists are appealing to publishers to mute Adolf Hitler’s manifesto with annotations that put its hateful message into historical and humanitarian context.

[..]

But Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, thinks online sellers large and small should only sell annotated versions of the book since there’s “no way for those who apply democratic rules and values to the Internet” to ban it outright.

[…]

Cooper stopped short of asking for the book to be banned, but said annotating it is a thoughtful compromise that would help new generations of readers properly understand a book he says continues to propel “very disturbing, very corrosive” views of Jews worldwide.

Memorial in Tel Aviv honors gays and lesbians

A news article in The Times of Israel tells about a new memorial in Tel Aviv, which is shown in the photo below:

Pink Triangle Monument to gays and lesbians in Tel Aviv

Tel Aviv unveils memorial to gay Holocaust victims
Landmark is the first in Israel to deal universally with Jewish and non-Jewish individuals persecuted by the Nazis

TEL AVIV — Israel’s cultural and financial capital has unveiled a memorial honoring gays and lesbians persecuted by the Nazis during World War II.

Authorities in Tel Aviv unveiled the memorial Friday. It shows a pink triangle — the symbol gays were forced to wear in concentration camps. Writing on it in English, Hebrew and German reads: “In memory of those persecuted by the Nazi regime for their sexual orientation and gender identity.”

Did those hateful Nazis actually persecute innocent men and women for their “sexual orientation and gender identify”?  NO!  They persecuted criminals who broke the German law, known as Paragraph 175, which had been on the books since 1871 when the German states were first united into a country.  Many other countries, including the United States of America, had similar laws which made homosexual acts a crime.

Did the evil Nazis go around peeking through bedroom windows to find men who were breaking the law known as Paragraph 175?  NO!  They arrested men who were having gay sex in public, in bathhouses and on stage in night clubs.  As far as I know, women were not arrested in Germany, nor in any other country, for being lesbians.

The main concentration camp, where homosexual men were sent, was Sachsenhausen, the camp in Oranienburg, near Berlin.  When I visited the Sachsenhausen Memorial Site in 1999, I picked up an Information Leaflet, which told about  the Klinkerwerk [brick works], which was a satellite camp of Sachsenhausen.

According to the leaflet, the Klinkerwerk satellite camp was used for “… the deliberate annihilation of certain prisoners groups.”

“From July to September 1942, the systematically planned murders of some 180 to 200 homosexual prisoners were carried out in the Klinkerwerk satellite camp.” according to the Information Leaflet.

As the closest concentration camp to Berlin, Sachsenhausen had more homosexual prisoners than any of the other camps. A total of approximately 10,000 homosexuals were sent to all the Nazi concentration camps combined during the 12 years of the Third Reich, according to a display which I saw in the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC. in the year 2000.

In an era when homosexuals were still in the closet in all the countries of the world, Berlin was a mecca for gays. The movie Cabaret depicts the gay scene in Berlin before the Nazis came to power. It was based on a book entitled Goodbye to Berlin by Christopher Isherwood, who lived an openly gay lifestyle in Berlin, the capital city of Germany.

After the Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933, male homosexuals who broke the German law, by flaunting their lifestyle in public, were arrested. After their second arrest and the completion of their second prison term, homosexual men were sent to a concentration camp for six months.  As far as I know, no lesbians were ever sent to a concentration camp, solely for being a lesbian.

Some of the young men, who were sent to Sachsenhausen after they had been imprisoned for public homosexual activity, were actually Strichjunge, or male prostitutes, from Berlin.

This quote is from the memoirs of Rudolf Höss:

The strict camp life and the hard work quickly reeducated this type [ male prostitutes]. Most of them worked very hard and took great care not to get into trouble so that they could be released as soon as possible. They also avoided associating with those afflicted with this depravity and wanted to make it known that they had nothing to do with homosexuals. In this way countless rehabilitated young men could be released without having a relapse.

In 1943 the brick factory [Klinkerwerk] was partly converted into an armament factory where hand grenades were produced. On April 10, 1945, an Allied bombing raid destroyed the armament factory and the brick factory. About 200 prisoners of the concentration camp lost their lives in the raid.

Homosexuals were also sent to Dachau, but when the Dachau camp was converted into a Memorial Site, they were not honored.

Pink triangle memorial in the Dachau Museum

Notice the pick triangle on the right in the photograph above, taken at Dachau in 2003.  At the bottom of the plaque, the words read “To the homosexual victims of National Socialism, the homosexual initiatives of Munich, 1985.” The inscription at the top reads “Beaten to death, killed again by silence.”

The inscription on the triangle refers to the fact that homosexuals in all the Nazi concentration camps received very harsh treatment from their fellow prisoners, and after the war, the homosexuals were not included in the commemoration of the victims. The pink triangle at Dachau was first placed, in a small room, inside the Museum on June 18, 1995.

In the early days of the Dachau camp, the Kapos, who supervised the other prisoners, were German criminals, who typically treated the homosexuals very badly. Later the internal administration of the Dachau camp was taken over by the Communist inmates, who did not honor the homosexuals.

After the war, it was the Communists who designed and supervised the Dachau Memorial Site, which was set up in 1965. There is no pink triangle on the bas relief sculpture at the International Monument at Dachau, and also no green triangle in honor of the German criminals. The new 2003 Dachau museum included  both the homosexuals and the German criminals as victims of the Nazis.

This quote from the news article in The Times of Israel explains why the city of Tel Aviv was chosen for a memorial to the gays and lesbians, who were persecuted by the Nazis:

The landmark joins similar memorials in Amsterdam, Berlin, San Francisco and Sydney dedicated to gay victims of the Holocaust. While Israel has scores of Holocaust monuments, the Tel Aviv memorial is the first that deals universally with Jewish and non-Jewish victims alike.

“This will be the first and only memorial site in Israel to mention the victims of the Nazis who were persecuted for anything other than being Jewish,” Lev told Haaretz. “As a cosmopolitan city and an international gay center, Tel Aviv will offer a memorial site that is universal in its essence. As far as I’m concerned, it’s not a monument, but a place — a place of quiet that will invite visitors to sit, contemplate, reflect and be in solitude.”

Tel Aviv has a vibrant gay scene and is a top international destination for gay tourists.

Many Germans referred to Hitler’s Germany as a paradise.  Hitler tried to clean up the country.  The YouTube video below is from the movie Cabaret.