93-year-old Hans Lipschis, a former guard at Auschwitz, will be put on trial in Germany

There is no rest for the wicked!

According  to a news article, which you can read in full here, “Hans Lipschis, a 93-year-old thought to have been a guard at Auschwitz, was arrested in Germany on Monday. The Lithuanian-born man, who was added to the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s most wanted list last month, says he was only a cook. But prosecutors believe he supported the killing in his role as a guard.”

Death’s Head emblem worn by German SS soldiers

The photo above shows the emblem worn by the Death’s Head SS soldiers. The motto on the emblem reads in English: “My Honor’s name is Loyalty.”

The most important part of the article about the arrest of Hans Lipschis is this quote:

According to information obtained by the German news agency DPA, Lipschis was a member of the SS “Death’s Head” unit that ran the [Auschwitz] camp. He later worked as a cook for the SS adminstration (sic).

Oh no! Lipschis was a member of the dreaded “Death’s Head” unit.  Why hasn’t he been put on trial, by the Germans themselves, long before this?

Under the ex-post-facto laws created by the Allies after World War II, members of the Nazi party and members of the SS are all “war criminals.”  The German people have been remiss in their duty to bring all former Nazis, and former SS men, to justice.  This man should not expect pity, just because he is 93-years old.

So why was the “Death’s Head” unit worse than other units of the SS?

The following information is from a book written by Christopher Ailsby, entitled Hell on the Eastern Front, the Waffen-SS War in Russia 1941 – 1945:

Theodor Eicke, the first Commandant of the Dachau concentration camp, viewed the SS-Totenkopfverbände (Death’s Head unit) as an elite, within the elite structure of the SS. This concept grew from the fact that the most dangerous political enemies of the state were incarcerated in the concentration camps.

Hitler had given the sole responsibility for guarding and running the concentration camps to the SS- Totenkopfverbände.

Theodor Eicke had repeatedly pressed home his principles in orders, circulars and memorandums. The training of the SS-Totenkopfverbände was based on elitism, toughness and comradeship, together with a regime of ruthless discipline.

The SS-Übungslager at Dachau was a training center where members of the SS-Totenkopfverbände were taught to be concentration camp administrators. Voluntary SS fighting units, called the Waffen-SS, were also quartered in the garrison at Dachau, along with the SS camp guards.

The Waffen-SS and the SS camp guards were two distinct organizations which grew out of the original private army which was recruited to protect Hitler and other members of the Nazi party from the Social Democrats and the Communist Red Army during political campaigns.

At the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal, SS General Ernst Kaltenbrunner testified that there were 13 Stammlager (central concentration camps). One of these camps was Matzgau, located near Danzig; it was a camp where SS guards were imprisoned for offenses such as physical mistreatment of concentration camp prisoners, embezzlement, or theft.

If Lipschis had committed any crimes, while he was a guard at Auschwitz, he would have been sent to the Matzgau camp as punishment.  He was a cook at Auschwitz, but apparently, he didn’t try  to poison any of the prisoners.  If he had, he would have been arrested.

The Dachau concentration camp had a section, in the camp prison, for the SS men who had mistreated the prisoners.  When the camp was liberated, there were 128 SS men in this prison.

Selections were made as soon as the Jews got off the trains to Auschwitz

The photo above was shown, along with the news story about Hans Lipschis. However, the  bottom half of the photo, which shows a woman and her baby being directed to the right, was cut off. I copied the photo below from the news article.

Photo taken at Auschwitz was cut in half in the news article

Why was this photo cut in half for the news article?  Because mothers and babies were directed to the left to the gas chamber.  This photo shows a mother and her baby being sent to the right.

The law under which Franz Suchomel was convicted of a “war crime” committed at Treblinka

A couple of days ago, I blogged about Franz Suchomlel at https://furtherglory.wordpress.com/2014/02/25/proof-of-the-treblinka-gas-chambers-found-in-the-trial-testimony-of-franz-suchomel-a-junior-ss-guard-at-the-camp/

Today, I am going to expand upon the ex-post-facto law under which Suchomel was convicted and sentenced to six years in prison by a German District Court in Düsseldorf in 1965.

Ex-post-facto means “after the fact.” The law, under which Suchomel and many others were convicted, was not in existence during the time that Franz Suchomel allegedly committed a war crime.

The photo below shows Friedrich Weitzel (#40), a low level SS man who was a supply clerk at Dachau.  He was convicted under the same ex-post-facto law as Franz Suchomel, whose job at Treblinka was about as important as the work done by Weitzel at Dachau.

Friedrich Weitzel is sentenced to prison after his conviction by the American Military Tribunal, under the new law of “common design.”

This quote, regarding the trial of Franz Suchomel, is from Wikipedia:

Twenty years after the end of [World War II], in the framework of first official investigations into war crimes at the Treblinka extermination camp, German authorities collected evidence of Suchomel’s participation in the Holocaust. He was arrested on 11 July 1963.[5] The Treblinka trials took place from 12 October 1964 until 3 September 1965 against ten defendants before the 3rd District Court of Düsseldorf. The charges consisted of the murder of at least 700,000 mainly Jewish people in the gas chambers, as well as deadly assault, shootings, and hangings of individual prisoners. Suchomel was convicted of accessory to murder and sentenced to six years in jail.[4] Suchomel was released from prison on 20 December 1967.[1]

The law, under which Suchomel was convicted, was called “common design” or “common plan.”

According to Robert E. Conot, who wrote a book entitled Justice at Nuremberg, the idea of a law called “common design” was originated by Lt. Col. Murray C. Bernays, a Lithuanian Jew who had emigrated with his family to America in 1900 at the age of six.

Henry Morgenthau, Jr., a Jew who was the Secretary of the Treasury and one of President Franklin Roosevelt’s top advisers, had proposed that the German war criminals should be charged and then executed without a trial. But Bernays said, “Not to try these beasts would be to miss the educational and therapeutic opportunity of our generation. They must be tried not alone for their specific aims, but for the bestiality from which these crimes sprang.”

According to Robert E. Conot’s book, 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 allegedly committed in the concentration camps, beginning with Dachau in 1933. Most of the war crimes, that were prosecuted in 1945 at the Nuremberg IMT, and at the American Military Tribunal at Dachau, had not yet been committed.

The British also conducted trials, based on ex-post-facto laws.

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.

Even before the start of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg and the American Military Tribunal at Dachau, the first trial of German war criminals in the U.S. zone of Germany was held between October 8 and October 15, 1945 when staff members of Hadamar, a clinic near Limberg, Germany, were put on trial.

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

The 1945 Hadamar Trial (October 8-15, 1945) was the first mass atrocity trial in the U.S. zone of Germany following World War II.

On August 8, 1945, the Allies signed the London Charter which gave each of the four great powers (Great Britain, France, the Soviet Union and the USA) jurisdiction over the camp personnel in the concentration camps located in their respective zones of occupation. The London Charter was also the basis for the International Military Tribunal to try the major German war criminals at Nuremberg.

Even before the war was over, the first Allied war crimes trial had taken place in Poland when the camp personnel of the Majdanek concentration camp were tried by the Soviet Union.  The defendants in this trial were charged with the murder of 1.5 million prisoners at Majdanek.  Now the number of deaths at Majdanek has been reduced to 78,000, including 59,000 Jews.

The British, who had liberated Bergen-Belsen after Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler voluntarily turned the camp over to them on April 15, 1945, held the first post-war military tribunal for concentration camp personnel in September 1945 at Lüneberg, Germany.

Immediately following the liberation of Majdanek on July 23, 1944, the former concentration camp, for political prisoners and Jews, was turned into a camp for captured German soldiers and a few of the former guards and administrative personnel, who were then quickly tried and convicted as war criminals.  America followed this same plan. After the typhus epidemic in the Dachau concentration camp was brought under control in June 1945, the former camp was turned into a prison for German war criminals who were awaiting trial by the American Military Tribunal.

The war crimes office at Dachau

The German defendants at the American Military Tribunal were not allowed access to the records, which were confiscated by the Americans as evidence in the Dachau trials.

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.

The 100% conviction rate, at the American Military Tribunal, was due to the fact that it was the concentration camp system that was on trial; there was literally no defense for the accused because it could not be denied that the concentration camp system was inherently evil and that everyone in a position of authority in any of the camps was part of that system.

The man, who is standing, is a former inmate of Dachau who is pointing out Friedrich Weitzel (#40), who was the supply clerk for the Dachau concentration camp

Friedrich Weitzel, who is shown in the photo above, was convicted of participating in the “common design” at the Dachau concentration camp because he was the “supply clerk” for the camp.  There was no defense against the “common design” ex-post-facto law

In 1945, there was no German law, nor any international law, that covered any atrocities, that might have been committed in the camps, nor the genocide of the Jews. New laws had been made after these crimes had been allegedly committed.

Col. Robert Jackson, the chief prosecutor of the Nuremberg IMT, said in his opening address: “Hence I am not disturbed by the lack of precedent for the inquiry we propose to conduct.”

Under the new concept of “common design,” organizations, as well as individuals, could be charged with war crimes and membership in an organization was enough to convict an individual of a war crime, whether or not that person committed any acts himself.

At the American Military Tribunal proceedings, the “common design” theory meant that individuals were guilty of crimes committed by others on the staff of a concentration camp even if they didn’t serve at the same time. It didn’t matter whether or not the crimes allegedly committed by others in a particular concentration camp had ever been proved in a court of law or by a military tribunal; staff members of that camp were presumed to be guilty of these crimes, and they had no defense.

Crimes against Humanity was another new concept which did not exist before the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal began. This new law, which was one of the four categories of crimes described by Allied Control Council Law No. 10, was enacted after the end of World War II. It covered brutalities, cruelties, tortures, atrocities and other inhumane acts, including the murder of six million Jews in the Nazi camps. Some of the top-level war criminals at the Nuremberg IMT were charged with Crimes against Humanity, but this charge was not used in the proceedings against the concentration camp personnel who were tried by the American Military Tribunal at Dachau.

It was not until 1948 that the newly-created United Nations announced a law against genocide. With no existing laws in place, the Allies had created new international laws in order to convict and punish those who were presumed to be guilty.

During the trials conducted by the Nuremberg IMT and the American Military Tribunal, the prosecution had only to prove that the accused had participated in a common plan by virtue of his position on the staff of a concentration camp, whether or not he had personally committed any atrocities. The accused in these trials were not charged with committing any specific crime, but rather with aiding and abetting the commission of crimes in the concentration camp system which was designated by the Allies to be a criminal enterprise.

The basis for the “common plan” theory of guilt was Article II, paragraph 2 of Law Order No. 10 which stated as follows:

2. Any person without regard to nationality or the capacity in which he acted, is deemed to have committed a crime as defined in paragraph 1 of this Article, if he was (a) a principal or (b) was an accessory to the commission of any such crime or ordered or abetted the same or (c) took a consenting part therein or (d) was connected with plans or enterprises involving its commission or (e) was a member of any organization or group connected with the commission of any such crime or (f) with reference to paragraph 1 (a), if he held a high political, civil or military (including General Staff) position in Germany or in one of its Allies, co-belligerents or satellites or held high position in the financial, industrial or economic life of any such country.

Franz Suchomel’s interview for Claude Lanzman’s documentary entitled Shoah

Franz Suchomel’s interview with Claude Lanzman, for his documentary entitled Shoah, is shown in seven Youtube videos.  There is also a YouTube video entitled “The Treblinka Death Camp — Former SS member confesses” which you can view at the end of this blog post.

Did SS man Franz Suchoml actually confess to the existence of gas chambers at Treblinka?  Yes.  He said, in his interview with Lanzman, that he “heard the motors” of the gas chamber.

The gas chambers at Treblinka had motors?  Oh, how I wish that gas chamber expert Fred Leuchter would come out of hiding and explain how the motors in a gas chamber worked.

The photo below shows the inside of a real gas chamber in Jefferson City, MO.  Fred Leuchter was a consultant for this gas chamber, years ago.  Maybe there are motors underneath the seats, which somehow heated the Zyklon-B lethal gas.

Inside the gas chamber in Jefferson City, MO

Strangely, Franz Suchomel did not say anything about the bodies being removed from the gas chamber after the victims had been gassed.

According to Suchomel’s description of Treblinka in his interview, there were 500 to 600 Jews in the “Blue Squad” who helped “3 to 5 Germans” with the gassing procedure.  The Jews in the Blue Squad had been promised that they would live, if they helped to herd the Jews through “the funnel” into the gas chamber. But this was a lie, according to Suchomel.

In his interview, Suchomel said that the Jews in the Blue Squad were “not shot or gassed.”  They were starved to death, and at the end, “a typhus epidemic broke out” at Treblinka, which killed the Jews in the Blue Squad.

In his confession, Suchomel described how the Jewish men were driven into the gas chamber first, while the women had to wait, for a long time in the freezing cold, for their turn.  How the gas chamber was emptied, after each group of men had been gassed, Suchomel didn’t say.

At one point in the interview, Suchomel said (regarding how the women died in the gas chamber) “I didn’t see it.”

What Suchomel did say, in his interview, was “That’s how they were finished off.”  This implies that the Jews were gassed, although he had not actually witnessed the death of the Jews in the alleged gas chambers.

According to the latest estimate, there were 900,000 Jews gassed at Treblinka; this would have taken a long time, because it was so cold when the gassing took place. (The Zyklon-B gas had to be heated to 78.3 degrees Fahrenheit.)  Suchomel was very emphatic about the freezing weather — he mentioned that even the SS men suffered because their uniforms were not adequate.

At one point in his so-called confession, Suchomel said that “…on the roof  (of the gas chamber) were the hell hounds.”  He explained that the “hell hounds” were the Ukrainian helpers at Treblinka.  This implies that there were holes in the roof, through which the Zyklon-B pellets were poured into the gas chambers.  Maybe the “motors” that Suchomel heard were heating the Zyklon-B to the proper temperature to activate the gas.  This would have taken some time, since the weather was below zero when the gassing took place. Or maybe the “motors” were for the tanks that were used to generate carbon monoxide.

In his interview, Suchomel spoke German in a way that I could understand; he did not speak in a German dialect, as many Germans do.  He mentioned that the Treblinka camp was shaped like a rhombus. This indicates to me that he was at least somewhat educated.

The video that includes his confession starts off by showing old trains, that were like the trains that took the Jews to Treblinka. The village of Treblinka was shown.  The village was very small, as shown in my 1998 photo below.

The small village of Treblinka

Then the Malkinia Bahnhof (train station) was shown.

Suchomel said the Malkinia train station was 7 miles from the Treblinka camp

In his so-called confession, Suchomel never explained why the remote location of the Treblinka camp was selected.  I explained this in a previous blog post at https://furtherglory.wordpress.com/2011/10/07/malkinia-junction-where-the-trains-to-treblinka-stopped/

You can watch Suchomel’s confession on the video below.

Proof of the Treblinka gas chambers found in the trial testimony of Franz Suchomel, a junior SS guard at the camp

My 1998 photo of the entrance into former Treblinka camp, which was way out in the boondocks in what is now the country of Poland

Today, I am responding to a comment, about the Treblinka camp, made by a reader of my blog.  At the very end of this reader’s comment was this sentence:

“Please gentleman a little common sense here!”

O.K. I am going to attempt to provide a little common sense, so bear with me.

Franz Suchomel was a junior SS guard at Treblinka

This quote is from Wikipedia:

Franz Suchomel (3 December 1907 – 18 December 1979)^[1] was a Sudeten German Nazi and Unterscharführer (junior sergeant) in the SS. During World War II he participated in the Action T4 euthanasia program, in Operation Reinhard, and the Einsatzgruppen actions in the Adriatic operational zone. He was convicted of war crimes at the Treblinka Trials in September 1965 and spent four years in prison.

The comment, to which I am responding on my blog, was about the confession of Franz Suchomel, a low level SS guard at the Treblinka camp, who gave an interview for Claude Lanzman’s documentary entitled Shoah.

Franz Suchomel was convicted in a trial, conducted by the German government in 1965, twenty years after the end of World War II.

According to Wikipedia, “Suchomel was convicted of accessory to murder and sentenced to six years in jail.^[4] Suchomel was released from prison on 20 December 1967.^[1]”

Was there a war crime, called “accessory to murder” during World War II?  No, but there was an ex-post-facto law, called “common design” or “common plan” which was used during the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal.  According to this ex-post-facto law, if you were anywhere near a Nazi concentration camp, you were guilty of a crime.  The law of “common plan” was also used by the American Military Tribunal in the war crimes trials conducted at Dachau after World War II.

This quote is from the comment made by the reader of my blog:

[Franz Suchomel] An Officer of the SS, who was already tried and convicted for his duty at Treblinka (so to speak), who served time – would never-the-less give an interview with a private individual (e.g. non governmental/non-police) [Claude Lanzman] who was advancing a record that was totally untrue (e.g. Treblinka was a death camp); whereby this individual would then make up extremely specific details related to the operation of the [Treblinka] camp as he remembered them in the capacity as a Jr. SS Officer.

Think about it (assuming your assumption), you [Suchomel]  just spent 4 years of your life in a jail for a crime that simply did not exist, so you get out of jail, and then 8 or 9 years later as an old man you decide, heck let me speak to this French Jew [Lanzman] and tell him all the details about a death camp operation that I was convicted for, served time for being involved in the operation, but [it] really never happened. Most people who get accused of something they didn’t do, don’t go around making up stories about what they witnessed at the event that never happened.

Even if the trial (where the decisions were handed out by non-Jewish Germans- not Americans), you would think that Mr. Suchomel or one of the co-defendants would have gotten up and said, what the h** are you talking about there was no Treblinka death camp! If there was no camp you would think that some of the individuals would have used the defense, there was no such camp. No the defenses in most of the trials is that yes it happened but I was just a soldier following orders…. I wasn’t in charge… someone else who was in charge (a point Mr. Suchomel gets defensive about during his interview [with Lanzman], when he reminds the interviewer that the interview is not about him but about what he saw [at Treblinka].)

So why DID Franz Suchomel give an interview to Claude Lanzman?  Take a look at his photo at the top of my blog post.  Franz looks like a simple man, and a man who would not hurt a fly.  He was trying to be polite, when he was asked by Lanzman to give an interview.

Note that Wikipedia mentions that Suchomel was a Sudeten German. The Sudeten Germans were originally from Austria, and they migrated to the Sudetenland in the 1500s.  So he was from the same ethnic group of Germans as Hitler, Kaltenbrunner, and many other top level Nazis. This is all the more reason that he would have been loyal to the Nazi government, and not a traitor to his country.

According to the Wikipedia entry for Suchomel, “Franz Suchomel was secretly interviewed for the documentary film Shoah, directed by Claude Lanzmann and released in 1985. During the interview at a hotel in Braunau am Inn he provided details of Treblinka criminal operations.”

Notice where the SECRET interview took place: Braunau am Inn, the birthplace of Adolf Hitler.  Why was the interview secret and why did it take place at Braunau am Inn, which was not the residence of Franz Suchomel?

I am using my “common sense” here to say that this sounds suspicious to me.  The photo below shows that the Treblinka camp was located way out in the boondocks in what is now Poland.

Stone markers show the border of  the Treblinka camp, which was formerly located in what is now the country of Poland

As for the trial of Franz Suchomel, by the German government, if he had denied, during this trial, that there was a gas chamber at Treblinka, he would have been convicted of the crime of “Holocaust denial” under the laws of post-war Germany.

There was no defense against the ex-post-facto law known as “common plan.”  Suchomel could not deny that he was at Treblinka, and if he was there, he was guilty of a war crime, according to the ex-post-facto laws made up the Allies.

Memorial stones of basalt recreate pits where 900,000 bodies were burned at the Treblinka camp

This interesting quote is also from Wikipedia:

“In March 1941 [Franz Suchomel] became a photographer at the Hadamar Euthanasia Centre in the Action T4 headquarters in Berlin, where he took photographs of euthanasia victims before their killing.”

Today, the euthanasia program at Hadamar is purported to be the killing of only slightly “disabled” people.  Suchomel had the job of taking photos of the people who were killed, in order to show that they were severely disabled, and not able to function. These photos are no longer shown anywhere on the Internet. Now we are required to believe that the Holocaust started with the killing of people who were able to function as normal healthy people.

Archaeologists discover tiles from the walls of the gas chamber at Treblinka — the end of Holocaust denial (updated)

Update April 15, 2014:

A regular reader of my blog provided a link to an article which says that the Star of David tiles, recently found by Dr. Caroline Sturdy Colls at Treblinka, were “an extremely amateurish hoax.” You can read about the latest report on the tiles in this news article.

This quote is from the news article:

The Smithsonian Institutes’ TV documentary division has been severely embarrassed with the revelation that its recently-released “Treblinka: Hitler’s Killing Machine” documentary—which claimed to have “proved” the existence of “gas chambers” at Treblinka because of the discovery of “tiles with Stars of David,” is an extremely amateurish hoax.

The Smithsonian advertised the documentary on its YouTube Channel by saying that “The watershed discovery of Star of David tiles confirms the existence of Treblinka’s gas chambers and becomes the key to reconstructing the death camp’s sinister workings.”

Continue reading my original post.

Original sign that was at the Treblinka camp  Photo Credit: Yad Vashem

Update March 27, 2014:

On March 29, 2014, a documentary about Treblinka will be shown on the Smithsonian Channel. The film will show the tiles that were found by Dr. Carolyn Sturdy Colls and her team of experts at the site of the Treblinka camp, where 900,000 Jews were allegedly murdered in 10 gas chambers.

The tiles, shown in the documentary, were allegedly on the walls of the fake shower rooms at the Treblinka camp, which was completely destroyed by the Nazis in 1943.  When I first read about the discovery of the tiles, I imagined that they were ceramic tiles, that you would expect to see on the walls of a shower room.

Instead, the tiles, which are shown in the documentary, look like adobe floor tiles. I would not have assumed that these tiles were on the WALLS of a fake shower room.  Who puts adobe tile on the walls of a shower room?

The tiles in the documentary look like the tiles in this advertisement:

http://www.truehardwoods.com/catalog/item/8290345/8993978.htm?gclid=CIuk8OC8s70CFc1cfgodMLYA6Q

Fake adobe stone which is intended to be put on the wall of a modern day bathroom

If I were digging at the site of the former Treblinka camp, and found this type of stone, I would assume that this was a floor tile.

According to the documentary, the gas chambers at Treblinka were in buildings made of brick and had adobe tile on the walls.  I don’t think so.

Why would the Nazis have gone to such trouble to kill the Jews, when they could have just as easily built one large gas chamber inside a building in Warsaw?

Continue reading my original post.

Treblinka, the Nazi extermination camp, is back in the news.

You can read about the history of the Treblinka camp on my web site at http://www.scrapbookpages.com/Poland/Treblinka/introduction.html

I previously blogged about the Treblinka camp at https://furtherglory.wordpress.com/2010/08/21/new-book-about-a-polish-jew-who-survived-seven-nazi-camps/?relatedposts_exclude=11223

This quote is from a recent article, written by Stoyan Zaimov, a Christian Post reporter, which you can read in full here:

“Dr. Caroline Sturdy Colls and her team […] pinpointed the location of a gas chamber and other physical structures at Treblinka 2, the main extermination camp,” a press release states. [Treblinka 1 was a labor camp.]

“The team uncovered […] pieces of tile with the Jewish star imprint which match eyewitness descriptions of a gas chamber that had been designed to look like a bathhouse.  […]

According to the news article cited above, “The findings are set to air on the Smithsonian Channel in a program called “Treblinka: Hitler’s killing machine,” on March 29, which is part of a special month-long programming block celebrating Women’s History Month.”

So now we know why 900,000 Jews (according to this article) were persuaded to enter the gas chambers at Treblinka. The gas chambers were disguised as a “bathhouse” with tiled walls.

Treblinka is not the only place where the gas chamber had tile on the walls, to make it look like a shower room. My photo below shows the gas chamber at Mauthausen, which had walls covered with tile.

The gas chamber at Mauthausen had tiled walls

Up to this point, the only Nazi gas chamber, known to have tiled walls, was at Mauthausen, where the gas chamber was also a fully functioning shower room.  Notice the shower heads on the ceiling in my photo above.

Perhaps the gas chambers at Treblinka were also dual purpose rooms where some of the prisoners could take a shower, while others were gassed to death.

I wonder if the tiles, which were found by the team led by Dr. Caroline Sturdy Colls, had any blue stains left by the Zyklon-B used in the gassing of the Jews.  Did the Nazis use tile on the walls, so that the blue stains could be wiped off?

Germar Rudolf standing inside a disinfection chamber at Auschwitz-Birkenau

The photo above shows the inside of a disinfection chamber at Auschwitz-Birkenau which has heavy blue stains, left by the use of Zyklon-B in disinfecting the clothing of the prisoners at Auschwitz-Birkenau.  I can’t tell if these walls are tiled, but I don’t think that they are.

According to the news article, the tiles which Dr. Colls found, “had a Jewish star imprint.”  Did the Nazis use this kind of tile in order to calm the Jews, so that they would not resist when they were put into the gas chamber?  After all, there were 900,000 Jews who were gassed at Treblinka, according to this latest news article.  The latest figures for Auschwitz-Birkenau is that 900,000 Jews were gassed there.

The findings are set to air on the Smithsonian Channel in a program called “Treblinka: Hitler’s killing machine,” on March 29, which is part of a special month-long programming block celebrating Women’s History Month.
Read more at http://global.christianpost.com/news/archaeologists-discover-new-evidence-of-nazi-death-camp-where-900000-disappeared-115012/#8ZEFhybvQWIqoGe6.99

The findings are set to air on the Smithsonian Channel in a program called “Treblinka: Hitler’s killing machine,” on March 29, which is part of a special month-long programming block celebrating Women’s History Month.
Read more at http://global.christianpost.com/news/archaeologists-discover-new-evidence-of-nazi-death-camp-where-900000-disappeared-115012/#8ZEFhybvQWIqoGe6.99

The findings are set to air on the Smithsonian Channel in a program called “Treblinka: Hitler’s killing machine,” on March 29, which is part of a special month-long programming block celebrating Women’s History Month.
Read more at http://global.christianpost.com/news/archaeologists-discover-new-evidence-of-nazi-death-camp-where-900000-disappeared-115012/#8ZEFhybvQWIqoGe6.99

My answer to a review of The Monuments Men, made by another blogger

This morning, a comment was made, at 4:20 in the morning, on one of my previous blog posts, by “jenski katie” who did a review of The Monuments Men movie on her own blog at at http://moviesbeep2014.wordpress.com/2014/02/19/the-monuments-men-movie-by-george-clooney/

Scene from the movie The Monuments Men

This quote is from jenski katie’s review of the movie The Monuments Men:

… As most of these artifacts were for Hitler’s own collection and in some cases they were bestowed to his best officers. The monuments men had to face a lot of difficulties from their forces as well. Whenever they tried to convince the raiding regiment to change their course of attack and hence avoid the unnecessary damage to the artifacts that might come in way they almost always refused to do so. Germans are planning to destroy these relics from history as much as 1000 years old meanwhile the monuments men do not agree with them and they must save the artifacts at all costs. The clock is ticking and the situation is getting worse. Will the monuments men be able to stand their ground?

The Ghent Altarpiece

I did my own review of the movie on Feb. 8th on my blog.  In my review, I said several times that the movie is hard to understand, unless you have read the book, on which the movie is based.  The book is The Monuments Men, Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves, And The Greatest Treasure Hunt in History by Robert M. Edsel. This quote is from pages 150 and 151 of Edsel’s book:

Hitler knew it was impossible to steal renowned masterpieces on the scale of the Ghent Altarpiece without drawing the condemnation of the world.  While he had the conqueror’s mentality — he believed he was entitled to the spoils of war, and he was determined to have them — Hitler and the Nazis had gone to great lengths to establish new laws and procedures to “legalize” the looting activities that would follow. This included forcing the conquered countries to give him certain works as a term of their surrender. […] In 1940, Hitler […] had commissioned an inventory, later known as the Kümmel Report […]. The inventory listed every work of art in the Western world […] that rightly belonged to Germany. […] …this included every work [of art] taken from Germany since 1500… […] The Ghent Altarpiece was a touchstone and defining emblem of Belgian culture, but to the Nazis it was Germanic enough to belong to them. Even more important, six of the side panels (painted on both sides, representing fourteen scenes) of the Ghent Altarpiece had been owned by the German state prior to 1919.  The Germans had been forced under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles that ended World War I, to give the panels to Belgium as war reparations.

The movie The Monuments Men begins with a picture of the Ghent Altarpiece on the screen.  At that point, it would have been very helpful to explain that part of the Ghent Altarpiece had been owned by the German people for centuries, until Germany was forced to give 6 panels of the Altarpiece to Belgium as war reparations after World War I. But it was not only art treasures that the Germans lost through the Treaty of Versailles, which was forced upon Germany after World War I.  The German people also lost more than half of their country, which was given to Poland and other countries.  The Treaty of Versailles, which was forced upon the Germans, was what led to World War II, so it would have been helpful to mention this at the start of the movie. Instead The Monuments Men movie is all about how the Nazis stole all of the art in Europe and were planning to destroy it.  This movie is not a documentary, but a fictional movie for the masses.

This article, which you can read in full here, agrees with my opinion of the movie, and tells the true story of The Monuments men:

According to Karlsgodt, the depiction of Hitler’s Nero Decree is “oversimplified.” The decree was issued on March 19, 1945 as an attempt to prevent Allied forces from using resources against the Reich during the war. In it, Hitler ordered that “all military, transportation, communications, industrial, and food supply facilities” be destroyed, but it didn’t explicitly include art. In the movie, however, when Stokes reads the decree aloud, he lists “archives and art” among the things set to be destroyed. This, Karlsgodt points out, “enables the plot to move forward,” so that our heroes are “racing against the Germans who are set now to destroy the art if Hitler can’t have it.”

In actuality, Hitler’s will specified that his art go to German museums, “strong evidence” that he didn’t want that art destroyed. Karlsgodt also finds it highly improbable that the Monuments Men even knew about the decree during their mission. “The systematic destruction [as seen in the film] being carried out as a result of the Nero Decree never happened,” she says. “Nazis destroyed art that they considered degenerate, like Cubist, Surrealist, Expressionist paintings, and we know that they burned several thousand—at least—paintings that they thought were actually toxic to the German spirit… [But] they didn’t destroy the art they valued.” (This included Germanic art, and the Ghent Altarpiece depicted in the film, which Hitler considered to be an example of “Aryan genius.”)

Note that the article above mentions that “Nazis destroyed art that they considered degenerate.”  I blogged about degenerate art at https://furtherglory.wordpress.com/2010/04/17/entartete-kunst-degenerate-art/

Why were Dutch Jews sent to Sobibor, passing up Auschwitz and Majdanek?

Map of Nazi extermination camps

The six extermination camps of the Holocaust are shown on the map above; each death camp is indicated by a small photo of a skull and crossbones. Note that the Sobibor death camp is shown on the far right hand side. Auschwitz and Majdanek, the two major death camps, are west of Sobibor, and closer to the Netherlands.

Sign alongside the railroad tracks for stop at Sobibor

Sobibor was a very small camp, which had no gas chambers that used Zyklon-B. At Sobibor, the Jews were killed with carbon monoxide from captured Soviet tanks. There is virtually nothing left of the Sobibor camp, except the Commandant’s house which is across the railroad tracks from the former camp.

The Commandant’s house at Sobibor death camp Photo Credit: ARC website

I previously blogged about Sobibor at https://furtherglory.wordpress.com/2013/03/13/jews-were-reduced-to-ashes-within-a-half-hour-of-their-arrival-at-the-sobibor-extermination-camp/

I am writing about Sobibor again because this death camp is in the news again. A news article on The Moderate Voice tells the story, which you can read in full at  http://themoderatevoice.com/191151/revisiting-the-road-to-heaven-on-holocaust-memorial-day/

This quote is from an article entitled The Dutch Auschwitz, which you can read in full at http://vorige.nrc.nl/international/article2228321.ece/Telling_the_story_of_the_Dutch

34,000 Dutch Jews sent to Sobibor

There is little in Sobibor to remind one of the former extermination camp where 34,000 Dutch Jews died. That is going to change, thanks in part to help from the Netherlands.

Anyone who didn’t know better would think they are in a typical Polish hamlet, where clean washing flutters in the wind, farmers on old tractors rumble by and lumbermen lug tree trunks. But Stara Kolonia Sobibór is not typical, nor will it ever be.

During the Second World War this was the site of the German extermination camp Sobibor, where 170,000 Jews, more than 34,000 of them Dutch, were systematically murdered. It is a difficult place to reach, deep in the forests of Poland’s eastern border area, and easy to forget. But that is going to change.

The Netherlands, Poland, Slovakia and Israel recently agreed on a major ‘renovation’ aimed at opening up the former camp to the outside world and pulling it out of the shadow of the well-known Auschwitz-Birkenau camp in southern Poland.

Does this make any sense to you?  Why Sobibor? There were 4 large gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau, which used Zyklon-B, and one large gas chamber in the Auschwitz main camp, which also used Zyklon-B.

Why take the Dutch Jews, on passenger trains, farther east and kill them with carbon-monoxide, when they could have been transported in cattle cars to Auschwitz or Majdanek?

The Nazis never did anything that made any sense.  Why did Hitler initially want to make the Me-262 plane a “lighting bomber” instead of a jet fighter plane?

Hitler later changed his mind and made the Me-262 a fighter plane. You can read about this at http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/messerschmitt_262.htm

The Nazis also changed their minds about Sobibor and this camp was quickly closed up in 1943. The Jews were then sent to the main extermination camps at Auschwitz and Majdanek to be killed in real gas chambers, using Zyklon-B.

Not all of the Dutch Jews were sent to death camps.  Some were sent to the Bergen-Belsen exchange camp, which was divided into several sections. One of these sections was the Star Camp (Sternlager).

Approximately 4,000 Jewish prisoners, mostly from the Netherlands, were sent to the Star camp at Bergen-Belsen, where conditions were somewhat better than in other parts of the camp. In the Star camp, the prisoners wore a yellow Star of David on their own clothes instead of the usual blue and gray striped prison uniform, but they did have to work, even the old people, according to the Bergen-Belsen Memorial Site.

The following quote is from Eberhard Kolb’s book entitled Bergen-Belsen from 1943 to 1945:

From the Dutch “transit camp'” at Westerbork all those inmates were transported to Bergen-Belsen who were on one of the coveted “ban lists”, above all the “Palestine list”, the “South America list”, or the “dual citizenship list”.

Holders of the so-called “Stamp 120000” were also taken to the Bergen-Belsen exchange camp:  Jews with proven connections to enemy states, Jews who had delivered up large properties, diamond workers and diamond dealers who were held back from transportation to an extermination camp but who were not allowed to go abroad, as well as so-called “Jews of merit”. A total of 3670 “exchange Jews” of these categories, always with their families, were deported from Westerbork to Bergen-Belsen in eight transports between January and September 1944.

According to Kolb, there were only 6,000 Dutch Jews who returned home after the war, out of a total of 110,000 who were deported by the Nazis. 20,000 more Dutch Jews survived by going into hiding until the war was over. More than a third of those who survived the camps were inmates of the Bergen-Belsen Star Camp.

British students stunned by tale of Holocaust survival

British students pose with Holocaust survivor Susan Pollack

The photo above is shown in a news article which you can read in full at http://www.littlehamptongazette.co.uk/news/local/holocaust-survivor-s-extraordinary-tale-stuns-angmering-teens-1-5877942

The article is about Susan Pollack who gave a talk to Angmering teens.  The British are at the forefront in educating teenagers about the Holocaust.

In the photo above, the girl in the photo on the poster is Irma Grese, a guard at Auschwitz-Birkenau who was transferred to Bergen-Belsen in the last months of the war.  I wrote about Irma Grese in a previous blog post at https://furtherglory.wordpress.com/2014/01/07/a-letter-to-irma-grese-from-batsheva-dagan-not-her-real-name/

Susan Pollack was a prisoner at Auschwitz-Birkeanau, who was also transferred to Bergen-Belsen in the last months of the war. The Bergen-Belsen camp was voluntarily turned over to the British on April 15, 1945.  Irma Grese met the British soldiers at the gate and volunteered her help, but I’m sure that Susan Pollack had nothing good to say about Irma.

The building shown on the poster on the left looks like the building in the photo below, which was taken at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Women lined up in front of a building at Auschwitz-Birkenau

Irma Grese’s job at Auschwitz-Birkenau was to line up the women for inspection by Dr. Josef Mengele who was the doctor for the women’s camp.

The photo below shows what might be this building, as it looks today.

My 2005 photo of old building at Auschwitz-Birkenau

This quote is from the news article, cited above:

From later April, 1944, Adolf Eichmann took charge of deportations from Hungary and within six weeks all of the Jews had been deported, mostly to Auschwitz-Birkenau.

In late May 1944, Susan and her family were sent by cattle truck to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Susan was separated from her mother who she later learned had been sent directly to the gas chambers.

Mrs Ward added: “She told the students that she had to lie about her age. She was only 14 at time and would have been sent straight to the gas chambers.”

Susan was selected to work and remained at the camp for around ten weeks before being sent to Gubbem in Germany to work as slave labour in an armaments factory.

Most of the Holocaust survivors, who out on the lecture circuit today, are Hungarian Jews who have similar stories.  The favorite Nazis that these survivors love to demonize are Dr. Josef Mengele and Irma Grese.

This quote is also from the news article:

With the Allies advancing, the prisoners were forced on a death march to Bergen-Belsen. On April 15, 1945, Susan was liberated by the British Army.

Holocaust denial and Dr. Mengele’s alleged experiments on Gypsy children

A website called The Moderate Voice, which you can read here, has an article which claims that Dr. Josef Mengele did experiments on Gypsy children.

The photo shown below accompanies the article, which is entitled “21st century technology makes Holocaust denial easy.”  The caption on the photo reads: “Children prisoners in Nazi camps used for medical experiments.”

Children who were allegedly used in medical experiments

This quote, regarding the photo above, is from The Moderate Voice:

The problem: if history can be dismissed as fake and facts be painted as being questionable, the it’s easier for horrific history to be repeated.

And if it’s easy for something to occur again, chances are some day — perhaps in a different form — it will.

I am one of the Holocaust deniers who has dismissed the photo above as fake. I have this same photo on my website in a section about the Gypsy Museum at the Sachsenhausen Memorial Site.  I visited the Gypsy Museum several years ago and took the photos below.

Photo which I took in the Gypsy Museum at Sachsenhausen

Dr. Mengele was the doctor who administered to the sick in the Gypsy camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau.  He claimed that many of the Gypsy children suffered from a disease called “noma.”

I checked with Wikipedia just to make sure.  The information about Dr. Mengele’s experiments is at

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josef_Mengele#Human_experimentation

Note that Wikipedia says that Dr. Mengele “established a kindergarten for the children who were the subjects of his experiments, along with all Gypsy children under the age of six.”  This implies that Gypsy children were not part of his experiments.  Dr. Mengele was doing research on twins, not experimenting on Gypsy children.

This quote is from Wikipedia:

Witness Vera Alexander described how he sewed two Gypsy twins together back to back in an attempt to create conjoined twins.[50] The children died of gangrene after several days of suffering.[56]

Sorry for being a “doubting Thomas,” but I don’t believe the story told by Vera Alexander. I think that this is one of those things that “never happened, but are true,” as Elie Wiesel famously said.

This famous photo shows a Gypsy girl on a train to Auschwitz

How many times have you seen the photo above?  It shows a Gypsy girl on a train to Auschwitz, from the Westerbork camp in Holland.   The girl in this iconic photo is usually identified as a Jewish girl.  The girl in the picture is not Jewish, but rather a Gypsy girl named Settela Steinbach, who was on a transport to Auschwitz.

If you are going to write about Holocaust denial, you should check and double check the photos that you use, lest you become a Holocaust exaggerator.

Echo chambers are a dangerous thing, and the Internet allows quintessential “narrowcasting,” where people of one opinion can have their beliefs reaffirmed.

The problem: if history can be dismissed as fake and facts be painted as being questionable, the it’s easier for horrific history to be repeated.

And if it’s easy for something to occur again, chances are some day — perhaps in a different form — it will.
Read more at http://themoderatevoice.com/191720/21st-century-technology-makes-holocaust-denial-easy/#jVpOBRMSX35EY1dK.99

Did the Nazis plan to use mosquitoes as a weapon of war?

One of the regular readers of my blog wrote a comment in which he included this link:  http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-26193808

(The BBC specializes in demonizing the German people.)

Did the Nazis really conduct experiments at Dachau, using mosquitoes?  Yes, but I will get to that later.

First, you must read this quote from the news article, cited above:

German scientists at Dachau concentration camp researched the possible use of malaria-infected mosquitoes as weapons during World War Two, a researcher has claimed.

Dr Klaus Reinhardt of Tuebingen University examined the archives of the Entomological Institute at Dachau.

He found that biologists had looked at which mosquitoes might best be able to survive outside their natural habitat.

He speculates that such insects could have been dropped over enemy territory.

Heinrich Himmler, the leader of the SS, set up the institute at Dachau in 1942.  […]

Dr Reinhardt, writing in the journal Endeavour, has found evidence that the unit’s researchers investigated a particular type of mosquito which could live without food and water for four days.

That means it could be infected with malaria and then dropped from the air – and survive long enough to infect large numbers of people, he says.

He speculates that the scientists were investigating the possible use of malaria – transmitted via mosquitoes – as a biological weapon.

It is not known whether there is a connection between the work of the Entomological Institute at Dachau and the experiments carried out by Dr Claus Schilling at the camp.

Schilling used prisoners as experimental subjects in his research on malaria – deliberately infecting them – and was sentenced to death by hanging at the Dachau trials held after the war.

Sounds bad, doesn’t it?

Here is the real story:

It is true that Dr. Klaus Schilling did experiments on prisoners at Dachau while doing research on malaria.

Dr. Klaus Schilling on the witness stand at his trial

This quote is from Dr. Johannes Neuhäusler’s book entitled  What Was It Like in the Concentration Camp at Dachau?  Dr. Neuhäusler was a prisoner at Dachau.  I purchased his book at the Dachau Memorial Site in 1997.

“A physician, Dr. Klaus Schilling (sentenced to death by the Allied court), wanted to test a remedy for malaria. Malaria, a tropical disease, did not prevail in Dachau. He could have gone to the tropics to make his tests there. But why go to such trouble? One could make everything more convenient in the concentration camp.”

Dr. Klaus Schilling

Dr. Klaus Schilling was one of the world’s foremost experts on tropical diseases when he was ordered by Heinrich Himmler, the head of all the Nazi concentration camps, to come out of retirement to work on a cure for malaria after German soldiers began dying of the disease in North Africa. Before his retirement, Dr. Schilling had worked at the prestigious Robert Koch Institute in Berlin. He had begun specializing in tropical diseases after he himself had contracted malaria.

After the war, Dr. Schilling was arrested by the American Army and charged with participating in a “common plan” to violate the Laws and Usages of War because he had conducted experiments on Dachau prisoners, using various drugs in an effort to find a cure for malaria. Most of his subjects were young Polish priests whom Dr. Schilling infected by means of mosquitoes from the marshes of Italy and the Crimea, according to author Peter Padfield in his book entitled Himmler. The priests were chosen for the experiments because they were not required to work, as were the ordinary prisoners at Dachau.

One of the prosecution witnesses at the trial of the German Major War Criminals at Nuremberg was Dr. Franz Blaha, a Czech medical doctor who was a Communist political prisoner at Dachau. An affidavit signed by Dr. Blaha had been entered into the main Nuremberg trial. It was marked Document Number 3249-PS, Exhibit USA-663. His comments in this affidavit about Dr. Schilling are quoted below from the transcript of the Nuremberg trial for January 11, 1946

“3. During my time at Dachau I was familiar with many kinds of medical experiments carried on there on human victims. These persons were never volunteers but were forced to submit to such acts. Malaria experiments on about 1,200 people were conducted by Dr. Klaus Schilling between 1941 and 1945. Schilling was personally ordered by Himmler to conduct these experiments. The victims were either bitten by mosquitoes or given injections of malaria sporozoites taken from mosquitoes. Different kinds of treatment were applied including quinine, pyrifer, neosalvarsan, antipyrin, pyramidon, and a drug called 2516 Behring. I performed autopsies on the bodies of people who died from these malaria experiments. Thirty to 40 died from the malaria itself. Three hundred to four hundred died later from diseases which were fatal because of the physical condition resulting from the malaria attacks. In addition there were deaths resulting from poisoning due to overdoses of neosalvarsan and pyramidon. Dr. Schilling was present at my autopsies on the bodies of his patients.”

The 74-year-old Dr. Schilling was convicted at Dachau and hanged. In his final statement to the court, Dr. Schilling pleaded to have the results of his experiments returned to him so they could be published. During his trial, he tried to justify his crime by saying that his experiments were for the good of mankind.

I don’t know what happened to the results of his experiments, but they were probably confiscated by the Americans who conducted his trial at Dachau, and used for medical purposes in the USA.  Since he was tried under the ex-post facto law called “common design,” he had no defense.  He was guilty because he had conducted his experiments in a concentration camp.