“a young cadet” who toured the “Dachau Death Camp” in 1957

The quote below is from a Nebraska newspaper article, entitled “My Hero,” in the McCook Daily Gazette.  The article was written by Dick Trail about an American soldier, named Merle Teel, who was taken on a trip, organized by the U.S. Army in 1957, to see the former Dachau concentration camp.  I was in Germany in 1957 and I had a chance to see the Dachau camp, possibly on this same trip.  I decided not to go, and now I regret that I didn’t get to see the camp in 1957.

Quote from newspaper article, written by Dick Trail:

Crossing the Rhine into Germany [during World War II] shortly before the end of hostilities [Merle Teel’s] troop happened to liberate a Camp named Dachau. Capture, is a little misnomer as when the American Army approached the German guards changed into civilian garb and hightailed out of Dodge. Merle’s troops were then confronted with the sickening sight of hundreds of emaciated Jews living in fetid dormitories awaiting the “final solution” their trip to the gas-chambers and still warm crematorium. When the inhumanity of the scene confronted [Merle Teel’s] troops they were horrified and angry. His guys ransacked the German guard’s quarters and “liberated” such supplies they could find and did what they could to comfort the poor inmates.

Next morning, Merle told of a young German boy, about 16 who came out from the nearby town to exclaim that “The local people in the town really didn’t know what was happening in the camp. They were innocent! They didn’t have anything to do with what was happening in the camp there!” Merle’s first sergeant wasn’t buying any of the kids spiel. A large tough man the 1st Sgt grabbed the kid and tossed him up on the large pile of dead bodies piled and awaiting the ovens. Merle told me that it wasn’t a proper thing to do but he hoped that the young German remembered the horror of climbing down off that pile of dead humanity. It was a story that Merle could share once and I think only with me as I too had visited the camp.

Dick Trail’s article does not mention which outfit Merle Teel’s troop was with, when his “troop happened to liberate a Camp named Dachau.”  We only know that there was a pile of corpses, upon which a 16-year-old boy from the town of Dachau was thrown.

Pile of bodies at the crematorium the day after Dachau was liberated

On April 30, 1945, the day after the Dachau concentration camp was liberated, the 40th Combat Engineer Regiment, which was supporting the 45th Thunderbird Division, arrived to take over. The soldier in the photo above is Eldon Patterson of E Company, 40th Combat Engineers. In the background is a pile of naked dead bodies, stacked up outside the Dachau crematorium. Behind the bodies is Baracke X, the crematorium building. The bodies had been piled up because the Nazis had run out of coal to burn the bodies.

Two German civilians are shown on the left in the photo above. According to Donald E. Jackson, who took this photo in May 1945, “We used civilian wagons to haul the bodies [to Leitenberg where the bodies were buried] and you can see them in other photos. The civilians loaded the bodies and unloaded them into the trench [mass grave].”

In the month of May 1945, an additional 2,226 Dachau prisoners died AFTER the camp was liberated, in spite of the excellent care given to them by American military doctors. There were 196 more deaths in June before the typhus epidemic was finally stopped by the use of DDT and the vaccination of all the prisoners.

The photo below shows the bodies of prisoners, who died AFTER the Dachau camp was liberated.

Bodies of prisoners who died after Dachau was liberated

Note that the bodies, in the photo above, still have clothing on them, which indicates that these prisoners had died AFTER the camp was liberated on April 29, 1945. Was the 16-year-old German boy thrown on this pile? If so, this would not have been as horrible as being thrown on the pile of naked bodies.

The photo below shows some American soldiers looking at the pile of bodies at Dachau. On the left, in the photo, is a small pile of bodies of the SS men who were killed by the Americans when the camp was surrendered.  The most appropriate place to toss a 16-year-old German boy would have been on the pile of SS bodies.

Pile of corpses of SS men killed in the Dachau massacre

How did it happen that this 16-year-old boy, from the town, went to the camp after it was liberated? Was he among the men from the town who were forced to bring bread to the camp for the prisoners? Or did he just wander over to the liberated camp to tell the American soldiers that the people in the town didn’t know anything about the camp? Of course the people in the  town knew about the camp.  Many of them worked in the factories inside the camp, and many of the prisoners went to the town to work in the factories located there.

Citizens in the town of Dachau were forced to bring bread to the camp

On April 28, 1945, the day before the Dachau camp was liberated, acting Commandant Martin Gottfried Weiss had opened up the well-stocked warehouses in the SS Training Camp, which was next door to the prison camp, and the next day, the food and other supplies were distributed to the inmates by the Americans. Starving Dachau residents had to fend for themselves, and were forced to provide food for the released prisoners as well.

This quote is from the news article by Dick Trail:

I was a young cadet in 1957 when we toured the preserved Dachau Death Camp. To the credit of the post-war German government, West German at the time, they had preserved the place as a reminder of a sordid Nazi past. The concrete chambers, “showers,” where the stripped naked inmates were herded in to be gassed to death were open for inspection. The ovens, cleaned of ashes, were on display. A [building] representative of the dormitories was preserved with many pictures to show how the poor emaciated men, women and children were held before being executed. It was a sobering sight for a young group of us American youth about to become commissioned officers. Deny the holocaust, Ha! I witnessed the horror of it with my own eyes in and through the repressed memories of my hero [Meryl Teel] who suffered the horror of experiencing the real thing.

One very important thing, that Dick Trail left out of his article, is that the Dachau camp was, at that time in 1957, a Displaced Persons camp for the ethnic Germans, who had been expelled from Czechoslovakia after World War II. These people were forced to walk all the way, from what is now The Czech Republic, to Germany.

After the war, there was a severe shortage of housing, due to the extensive bombing of Germany by the Allies. There was no housing for these pathetic people, who were called “the expellees.” They were forced to live in the barracks of the Dachau camp for the next 17 years. They were the lucky ones; some of the expellees were forced to live as homeless beggars on the streets of Germany for years.

Piles of shoes prove that the Jews were gassed in the Nazi death camps

This morning, I read an article, entitled “Shoes bear witness to Nazi horrors,” in the Winnipeg Free Press newspaper here. The following quote is from the article:

WASHINGTON, D.C. — There are pictures, videos and reams of information and items on display at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., yet somehow nothing seems more powerful than a room full of dusty, abandoned shoes.

There are thousands of pairs — some had heels, some were sandals — but all covered the feet of Jewish men, women and children before they were sent to the Nazi gas chambers. A visitor gets chills thinking of so many people obeying the command to remove their footwear, likely not knowing what was about to happen to them.

The photo below, taken at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington,  DC, is shown in the newspaper article.

Display of shoes at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

How do we know that these shoes “covered the feet of Jewish men, women and children before they were sent to the Nazi gas chambers,” as stated in the article?

The Nazis did not keep records of the names of the Jews, who were sent to the gas chamber, but they wanted the world to know that they were gassing the Jews, so they devised a plan to save the shoes as evidence.

Even at Bergen-Belsen, an exchange camp, which did not have gas chambers, the shoes were saved in huge piles, as shown in the photo below.

Piles of shoes at the Bergen-Belsen exchange camp

The largest piles of shoes, an estimated 800,000 pairs, were found at the Majdanek death camp, where it was originally claimed by the Soviet union that 1.5 million Jews had died.  Now, it is claimed that only 59,000 Jews died at Majdanek.

Why were so many shoes found at Majdanek? It could be that each of the 59,000 Jews, who died there, brought several pairs of shoes with them. You never know when you might need a change of shoes.

The photo below was taken by Simon Robertson at the Majdanek Memorial Site.

Thousands of shoes, taken from the prisoners at Majdanek, are still stored there

Pile of shoes at Majdanek when the camp was liberated in 1944

A huge pile of shoes, which included baby shoes, was found by the American liberators of Dachau in April 1945. These shoes are shown in the photo below.

Pile of shoes found at the Dachau concentration camp

At Auschwitz-Birkenau, where 900,000 Jews were killed, according to the latest figures, there were more shoes found.

Old photo shows shoes found in a warehouse at Auschwitz

My 1998 photo of the shoes on display in the Auschwitz Museum

What were the Nazis planning to do with all these shoes? Were they saving them for future museums to display as evidence of the gassing of the Jews?  During World War II, the Germany people had plenty of shoes; they were not suffering at all during the bombing of German cities — NOT!  The German soldiers had plenty of good shoes; the Nazis didn’t need to recycle shoes for their soldiers — NOT!   Use your heads, people.  Don’t write silly news stories like the one cited above.

 

“The World Wars” — a 3 part series about “the second 30 years war”

You can read about the TV series called The World Wars at http://publichistorycommons.org/project-showcase-the-world-wars/  You can read about a very important part of the story, that was left out of the series, at http://www.realjewnews.com/?p=189

Very early in the first segment of the series, it is mentioned that Winston Churchill called World War I and World War II the “second Thirty Years War.”  I didn’t know, before I watched the TV series, that it was Winston Churchill who first said this.  I thought that I was the first person to call World War I and World War II a “thirty years war.”

I am still recovering from watching the disingenuous series called The World Wars. (Hint: the Jews did nothing to cause Germany to lose World War I.) I might write a review of the series later, and point out all the omissions and mistakes, but for now, I am going to write about the first Thirty Years War, which determined Germany’s history for many years.

Guns used in the first 30 years war and clothes worn by German soldiers

Exhibit in Museum shows clothes worn during Thirty Years War

I learned about the first Thirty Years War when I visited a Museum in Rothenburg op der Tauber several years ago.  The photos shown above were taken in the Museum.

In the second photo above, note the painting, in the upper right hand corner, which shows the former mayor of Rothenburg, Georg Nusch, holding the 3 and 1/4 liter tankard of wine which he drained in one gulp to save Rothenburg from destruction in 1631 when the Catholic forces of General Tilly conquered the town. The story is that General Tilly was greeted by Rothenburg citizens who offered him some wine in the ceremonial tankard. Legend has it that he was proposing to destroy Rothenburg, but promised to save the town if anyone could down a tankard of wine without stopping. Georg Nusch met the challenge and the town was saved.

The house where Georg Nusch lived is shown in the photo below.

House where Georg Nusch lived in Rothenburg op der Tauber

The events that led to the Thirty Years War started in 1526 when Archduke Ferdinand of the Hapsburg family in Austria became the King of Bohemia, a province that is now in the Czech Republic. This started a long period of hostility between the Catholic Hapsburg rulers and their Protestant Czech subjects. In 1617, Ferdinand of Styria, another member of the Hapsburg family, became the King of Bohemia, and two years later, he was elected as the Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire of the German nation. This upset the Bohemian Calvinists who were worried about losing their religious rights.

In 1618, an incident in Prague, the capital of Bohemia, brought about the Thirty Years War. This incident is jokingly referred to as the “defenestration” from the German word Fenster which means window. What happened was that some Bohemian Calvinists threw two of the Catholic councilmen out of a window that was over 50 feet above ground. The men survived only because they landed in a pile of manure. This violent act symbolized the Czech national dissatisfaction with the rule of the Catholic Austrians in Protestant Bohemia.

The Hapsburgs won the initial phase of the war in 1626, crushing Bohemia, and as a result, the Czechs did not regain independence until 1918 when the new country of Czechoslovakia was formed, following Germany’s loss of Bohemia in World War I.

After the victory by the Catholic Hapsburgs in Bohemia in 1626, there followed a war between the German states and Denmark, which ended with a Catholic victory and the Peace of Lübeck in 1639. During this conflict, the German forces were led by General Albrecht von Wallenstein, who became the tragic hero of Friedrich Schiller’s greatest play a century later. In 1630, a powerful Swedish army, led by King Gustavus Adolphus invaded the German states in support of the Protestant forces. The Swedish King was killed in battle in 1632. It was during this phase of the war that Rothenburg ob der Tauber was attacked by the Catholic forces of General Tilly. This phase of the war ended in 1635 with victory for the Catholics and the Treaty of Prague.

The worst was yet to come: Cardinal Richelieu, the Chief Minister of the French King, ignored the Treaty of Prague and put together an alliance between Catholic France and Protestant Sweden for the purpose of defeating the powerful Hapsburg Empire of Austria and their Spanish ally, the Hapsburg King of Spain, Philip IV. The fighting took place mostly in the German states; the Peace of Westphalia, that ended the Thirty Years War in 1648, determined to a great extent the outline of modern Germany.

The Thirty Years War caused so much death and destruction that it took 100 years for the German states to recover. There were so many German men killed that the remaining men had to take more than one wife. France emerged as the undisputed super power on the European continent, annexing the German states of Alsace and Lorraine after their victory. The French dominated the German states to such an extent that German royalty spoke French and adopted French customs. There was virtually no German literature for years afterwards because the educated people preferred Latin.

The first German state to recover from the effects of the Thirty Years war was Prussia under the leadership of Frederick the Great, a German King who was still speaking French in the 18th century. Prussia became a great power when it acquired Silesia (where the town of Auschwitz was located) after the Seven Years War which ended in 1763. Then the Prussians defeated the French in the Franco-Prussian war in 1870. This led to the unification of the German states in 1871 under the King of Prussia who became the first Kaiser (Emperor) of the German Reich.

The victory of the Germans in 1870 was the last war that the Germans ever won.  From there, the history of Germany has been all downhill, but the German people have finally learned their lesson, after losing two world wars, and they now bow down to the Jews.  The present country of Germany is only a fraction of the size of the former Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation.

My review of the HBO movie “The Normal Heart”

I was frankly disappointed with the movie entitled The Normal Heart, which I saw on TV last night. But my disappointment was due to my own fault.  I wish that I had read up on the plot, before seeing the movie. Then I might have understood it.

I was expecting Jim Parsons, the guy who plays Sheldon Cooper, on the TV show The Big Bang Theory, to be the main star in the movie.  Instead, the main star in the movie is Mark Ruffalo, who plays the part of a gay man named Ned Weeks.  Jim Parsons has a relatively minor part in the movie; he plays the part of a gay man very well, since he is gay in real life.

The Ned Weeks character in the movie is based on the life of Larry Kramer, a gay man who wrote a mostly autobiographical play called The Normal Heart.  The play focused on the rise of the HIV-AIDS crisis in New York City between 1981 and 1984, as seen through the eyes of writer/activist Ned Weeks, the gay Jewish-American founder of a prominent HIV advocacy group.

The movie starts out with a color photo of Liberace, dressed in all his finery, and another photo of his young lover. Liberace was one of the first gay men to die of AIDS. Then we see the date 1981, shown on a large expanse of blue water.  A boat appears on the water, and we learn that the boat is going to Fire Island in New York, where Ned Weeks (Larry Kramer) lives. We learn that Fire Island is a gay Mecca. Then we see an extremely handsome man, to whom Ned Weeks is attracted.

As the movie progresses, this handsome man’s looks are destroyed when he gets “gay cancer,” the early name for AIDS, when the disease was thought to be a new kind of cancer. To his credit, Ned Weeks stands by his man, but the movie soundtrack doesn’t play the song “Stand by your man.”  Instead we hear the Gershwin song, “The man I love.”  The implication is that love between two men is perfectly normal.

Very early in the movie, the Dachau concentration camp and the killing of Jews in Poland is mentioned. No one spoke up about the killing of the Jews, the same way that no one spoke up about gay men dying from a new disease.

I was very surprised that the subject of Dachau was brought up. If I had researched the story, before watching the movie, I would have known that Larry Kramer, upon whose life the movie is based, actually made a trip to Dachau after World War II.  In the movie, the implication is that gay men are now dying needlessly in New York, and no one is speaking up about it.

In the first part of the movie, it is mentioned that half of the cases, of this new disease, are in New York, where there are millions of gay men.  In the movie, it is claimed that the US government is INTENTIONALLY ignoring this new disease, which is affecting only gay men, because government officials would like to see gay men wiped out in America.  The first name, that was given to this new disease, was GRID, which stands for Gay Related Immune Deficiency.

At the end of the movie, we learn that 36 million people have died of AIDS. This includes a large number of men and women, who died of the disease in Africa.  The disease spread around the world because Fire Island, where AIDS started, was visited by gay men from all over the world.

One thing, in the movie, that might be of great interest to the followers of my blog, is the mention of Alan Turing, a gay man who “cracked the Enigma code,” which led to the Allies winning World War II.  The implication is that gay men are no different than straight men, and if the US government allows all the gay men in America to die, there will be no more gay geniuses like Alan Turing.

This quote about Alan Turning is from Wikipedia:

Alan Turing was arrested and came to trial on 31 March 1952, after the police learned of his sexual relationship with a young Manchester man. He made no serious denial or defence, instead telling everyone that he saw no wrong with his actions. He was particularly concerned to be open about his sexuality even in the hard and unsympathetic atmosphere of Manchester engineering. Rather than go to prison he accepted, for the period of a year, injections of oestrogen intended to neutralise his libido. […]

A factor in his life unknown to most around him was that he had also continued to work for GCHQ, the post-war successor to Bletchley Park, on the basis of a personal connection with Alexander, now its director. But since 1948, the conditions of the Cold War, and the alliance with the United States, meant that known homosexuals had become ineligible for security clearance. Turing, now therefore excluded, spoke bitterly of this to his onetime wartime colleague, now MI6 engineer Donald Bayley, but to no other personal friends. State security also seems the likely cause of what he described as another intense crisis in March 1953, involving police searching for a visiting Norwegian who had come to see him. Concern over the foreign contacts of one acquainted with state secrets was understandable, and his holiday in Greece in 1953 could not have been calculated to calm the nerves of security officers.

Although unable to tell his friends about questions of official secrecy, in other ways he actively sought much greater intimacy of expression with them and with a Jungian therapist. Eccentric, solitary, gloomy, vivacious, resigned, angry, eager, dissatisfied — these had always been his ever-varying characteristics, and despite the strength that he showed the world in coping with outrageous fortune, no-one could safely have predicted his future course.

He was found by his cleaner when she came in on 8 June 1954. He had died the day before of cyanide poisoning, a half-eaten apple beside his bed. His mother believed he had accidentally ingested cyanide from his fingers after an amateur chemistry experiment, but it is more credible that he had successfully contrived his death to allow her alone to believe this. The coroner’s verdict was suicide.

 

New 9/11 museum includes a “tchotchke store”

Are Americans speaking Yiddish now?

This quote is from a news story about the opening of the 9/11 museum in New York city:

Early reactions to the Memorial Museum have ranged from sober appreciation to emotional hostility.

At the negative end of things, people have objected to the US$24 (NZ$28) admission charge, to an out-of-context Virgil quote written on the wall, to the entombed human remains, and to the gift shop merchandise (hoodies, mugs, a rescue vest for dogs).

“This tchotchke store – this building, this experience – is nothing more than the logical endpoint for our most reliably commodifiable national tragedy,” snapped Buzzfeed’s Steve Kandell, who lost his sister in the terrorist attacks.

9/11 Memorial in New York city

To put all this into context, here is a quote from the start of the article, cited above:

After more than $700 million and years of delay, the National September 11 Memorial Museum opened on Wednesday in downtown New York.

To enter this museum, you pass through a soaring glass pavillion, complete with two structural “tridents” rescued from the twin towers.

Then you descend into subterranean galleries, “a crypt beneath a crime scene,” as Justin Davidson phrased it.

Tucked in the bowels of the World Trade Centre site are multimedia displays, mangled artifacts, and a medical examiner’s office, holding the remains of more than 1000 unidentified bodies.

There is also a gift shop.

9/11 Memorial gift shop

There are numerous articles in today’s newspapers about the opening of the 9/11 memorial, and all of them object to the gift shop. There are also comparisons of the 9/11 Memorial to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC.  This quote is from the article, cited above:

It is no surprise, for example, that the woman brought on to curate the Memorial Museum, Alice Greenwald, was previously a director at the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC.

This begs the question: How many Jews died in the 9/11 attack? This subject is very controversial because allegedly there were 3,000 Jews who decided to stay home that day. Another blogger wrote about this at http://robertlindsay.wordpress.com/2010/04/12/not-one-jew-was-killed-in-the-9-11-attacks-and-the-wtc-is-full-of-jewish-workers/

“two tridents” from 9/11 wreckage

(Click on the photos on this page to see a larger size)

I previously blogged about the 9/11 attack at https://furtherglory.wordpress.com/2011/09/22/911-memorial-ceremonies/

 

 

 

Students in the USA should be studying the American Depression

This morning, I read a news article in the Northwest Herald newspaper about 8th grade students in Prairie Grove, Arkansas, who “have been building memorials to the victims of the Holocaust to be part of a Holocaust memorial museum in the school’s library.”

This quote is from the article, which you can read in full at http://www.nwherald.com/2014/05/19/prairie-grove-students-create-holocaust-memorial-museum/atixnh0/

PRAIRIE GROVE – A mattress and a bed don’t seem like big things, but 14-year-old Samantha Kelly has a whole new appreciation for them.
The Prairie Grove eighth-grader and her classmates have been building memorials to the victims of the Holocaust to be part of a Holocaust memorial museum in the school’s library. […]

Kelly’s memorial is a replica mattress of the one described in Hana’s Suitcase, a nonfiction story the class read.

“[The mattress] just stood out to us,” Kelly said. “I don’t know. … We were going to compare it to how lucky it made us seem. Some people don’t think it’s a big deal that they sleep in a bed, but prisoners had to sleep on hay. The comparison was really strong to us.”

Did the Nazis spread hay on the floor of the Jewish barracks, or did they use hay to stuff the mattresses on which the Jews slept?

Today’s students in Arkansas should be studying the history of what Americans suffered during “the Great Depression.”  I lived through the depression, and I did not have a mattress to sleep upon.  Other members of my family were living in  luxury: they slept on a substitute mattress, which was a cotton sack, filled with corn shucks.  Hay was too valuable, as food for animals, to be used to stuff a mattress during the American depression.

Famous photo, called “Migrant Mother” from the Depression days in America

The photograph, shown above, that has become known as “Migrant Mother” is one of a series of photographs that Dorothea Lange made in February or March of 1936 in Nipomo, California. Lange was concluding a month’s trip photographing migratory farm labor around the state for what was then the Resettlement Administration. In 1960, Lange gave this account of the experience:

I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother, as if drawn by a magnet. I do not remember how I explained my presence or my camera to her, but I do remember she asked me no questions. I made five exposures, working closer and closer from the same direction. I did not ask her name or her history. She told me her age, that she was thirty-two. She said that they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields, and birds that the children killed. She had just sold the tires from her car to buy food. There she sat in that lean- to tent with her children huddled around her, and seemed to know that my pictures might help her, and so she helped me. There was a sort of equality about it. (From: Popular Photography, Feb. 1960).

Migrant workers in America, living in half of a tent

(Click on the photo above to see it in a larger size.)

This is the caption on the photo above:  Dorothea Lange’s “Migrant Mother,” destitute in a pea picker’s camp, because of the failure of the early pea crop. These people had just sold their tent in order to buy food. Most of the 2,500 people in this camp were destitute. By the end of the decade there were still 4 million migrants on the road.

The state of Arkansas was one of the states that were particularly hard hit during the Great Depression.

How did America finally get out of “The Great Depression”?  World War II saved America because jobs were created and destitute men joined the Army or the Navy. Women found jobs in the factories which were set up to make war materials.

This is what 8th graders in America should be studying, not what kind of mattresses the Jews had in their barracks in the concentration camps.

For those who don’t know about Arkansas and the Great Depression, start with this article at http://www.arkansasbusiness.com/article/40159/the-depression-and-arkansas-historians-shine-light-on-dark-era?page=all

It is hard to get students in America interested in any history, except the history of the Holocaust, which they start learning in kindergarten, but I think that Arkansas students should study the history of their state.

There is a famous song entitled “Hey Oakie, did you see Arkie, out in Californy?” Arkansas students should start by learning  to sing  this song .

 

Photos of Krema II at Auschwitz-Birkenau, then and now

Old photo shows North view of the ruins of Krema II at Auschwitz

My 2005 photo of the collapsed roof of Krema II shows the same view

The two photos above show how much the ruins of Krema II at Auschwitz-Birkenau have deteriorated over the years. The photo at the top of the page was borrowed from this website. Notice that there are many more trees in my 2005 photos.

This quote is from the website which shows the old photos on my blog post today:

Crematorium II in Auschwitz-Birkenau was based on a design by Architect Georg Werkmann as modified by Walter Dejaco. The central part of the building contained furnaces with a capacity of 1440 corpses per day. The gas chambers and undressing rooms were underground; the bodies were brought up by elevator. On Saturday, March 13, 1943, 1,492 women, children and elderly people from the Cracow ghetto were gassed and burned here in its inagural run. It was blown up by the Germans as they prepared to evacuate the camp in January 1945. The 4 crematoria in Auschwitz-Birkenau are examples of the application of industrial technology to the problem of mass murder.

Note that the bodies “were brought up by elevator” and that the “gas chamber and undressing rooms were underground.”  Was there a third room underground where the bodies were stored until they could be burned?  Not that I know of.  There were two German architects or engineers,  who worked on the design.  Did they forget to include a morgue in their design?

1945 West view photo of Krema II

My 2005 photo of the West view of the ruins of Krema II

The two similar views of the Krema II gas chamber building at Auschwitz-Birkeanau, shown above, illustrate how much the ruins have changed and how more trees have been planted.

My 2005 photo shows another view of the ruins of Krema II

The photo above shows the building that is also shown on the left hand side of the old photo at the top of the page.

This quote is from the website, where I copied the old photos:

When the Germans destroyed crematorium I (sic) in Auschwitz-Birkenau, the walls blew out, leaving the roof to fall onto the foundation. The victims selected for death approached from the east, having walked from their train down a long street known at the lagerstrasse. Although the smell of burning flesh permeated the camp and flames could often be seen rising from the chimneys of the crematoria, the Nazis were usually succesful (sic) in deceiving the victims as to their immediate peril. Crematorium II stood next to Crematorium III, two brick buildings with squat, square chimneys. The victims were told to descend by stairway into the cellar which served as the undressing room. Signs in several languages said “To the Baths and Disinfecting Rooms,” “Cleanliness brings freedom” and “One louse may kill you.” Clothes were put on numbered hooks. The victims were then were sent to small vestibules where someone pointed to to the doors of a white-washed room resembling the one they had just left–in this room the showerheads were fake and several of the pillars were hollow with perforations to let out the gas.

Note that there was a “white-washed room” with “fake showerheads” on the ceiling and there were pillars in the room, “several” of which “were hollow with perforations to let out the gas.”  My 2005 photo of Krema III, which was the same design as Krema II, has what looks like a pillar in the ruins of the undressing room, although it is not “hollow with perforations to let out the gas.”  How did the gas pellets get into the hollow pillars?  There is no mention of holes in the roof, through which the gas pellets could have been poured.

My 2005 photo of the ruins of Krema III shows columns in the undressing room

The photo above shows the ruins of the undressing room in Krema III, which was a mirror image of Krema II.  The columns appear to be concrete, and not perforated.  The grass in the background is the location of the soccer field, where the prisoners played against a team of SS soldiers, while the victims were being gassed, only a few yards away.

My 2005 photo of the ruins of the Krema III gas chamber shows concrete columns

On the blueprint of Krema III, the gas chamber was called Leichenkeller 1 (Corpse Cellar # 1). In the photo above, one can see the solid concrete columns that once supported the roof of the gas chamber. When the gas chamber was in use, it had holes in the roof through which the Zyklon-B gas pellets were poured into perforated columns.  These performated columns can no longer be seen today.

The photo immediately below is a still photo from the film taken by the Soviets in February 1945. In October 2005, I took the second photo below, which shows the same view as the old photo, except for the addition of more trees.

Old photo from a film taken by the Soviets in February 1945

My 2005 photo of the ruins of Krema II

The photo below, which looks like two photos, side by side, shows the door into the alleged gas chamber in the Auschwitz main camp, on the right hand side.

Photo which shows the alleged gas chamber in main Auschwitz camp

My 2005 photo of the door, into the Auschwitz main camp gas chamber, is shown below. When I visited Auschwitz in 1998, my tour guide told me that this was the original door into the gas chamber in the main camp.  Tourists are now told that this door was constructed when the room was changed into an air raid shelter for the Germans stationed at Auschwitz.

Air raid shelter door into Auschwitz main camp gas chamber

As I was writing this blog post, these words were going through my head:

“Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive.”  Sir Walter Scott, 1808

Beware of illustrating news articles with photos that promote Holocaust denial

Update, Sept. 20, 2014:

This photo was used to illustrate a news article about the Holocaust

The photo above was taken at Bergen-Belsen after the camp was voluntarily turned over to the British.  It shows an adult woman, who is overweight, and a group of children that look healthy and well-fed.  This type of photo should not be used to illustrate the horror of the Holocaust. I copied the photo from this news article: http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/sep/18/night-will-fall-review-holocaust-documentary-hitchcock-liberation-belsen-auschwitz

Continue reading my original post:

Still shot from Soviet film made in February 1945

The photo above, which shows child survivors of Auschwitz-Birkenau, is used in an article about the Holocaust, entitled “The World is Full of Holocaust Deniers,” which you can read in full here. The child on the far right is Miriam Moses. Her twin sister is Eva Moses Kor, a survivor who is still alive today.

A word to the wise:  Don’t use photos like this when promoting the Holocaust or when railing against Holocaust deniers.

This quote is from the article, which is illustrated by the photo above:

Only 54 percent of the world’s population has heard of the Holocaust.

54 percent.

This is the most staggering statistic in a new survey by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) of more than 53,000 people in over 100 countries, conducted by First International Resources. But that figure speaks to only those who have heard of it: Only a third of the world’s population believe the genocide has been accurately described in historical accounts. Some said they thought the number of people who died has been exaggerated; others said they believe it’s a myth. Thirty percent of respondents said it’s probably true that “Jews still talk too much about what happened to them in the Holocaust.”

Seventy years after the liberation of Auschwitz, two-thirds of the world’s population don’t know the Holocaust happened—or they deny it.

I find it hard to believe that two-thirds of the people in the world today have never heard of the Holocaust — or that they deny it. Using  photos, like the one shown at the top of my blog post, will cause even more people to deny the Holocaust.  As every Holocaust True Believer knows, children under the age of 15 were immediately gassed upon arrival at Auschwitz, unless they were twins.

So what should Holocaust promoters do?  My suggestion is that they should use photos of dead bodies that do NOT illustrate the Holocaust, but claim that the bodies are dead Jews, killed in the Holocaust.

For example the photo below, which shows prisoners killed by American bombs at Nordhausen; this photo is frequently used by Holocaust promoters, who claim that these are the bodies of Jews killed by the Nazis.

Photo shows prisoners killed by American bombs at Nordhausen concentration camp

During World War II, German soldiers were allowed, and even encouraged, to carry cameras. American soldiers were not allowed to carry cameras, but many of them took  cameras from the cold dead hands of German soldiers, and used them to take photos of the concentration camps.  Soviet soldiers were lucky to have a rifle, and most of them had probably never even seen a camera.

Auschwitz was “liberated” by Soviet soldiers on January 27, 1945, but it was not until February 1945 that the Soviets finally got around to filming the Auschwitz survivors.  Because of this, the only images of the Auschwitz survivors, that can be seen today, are still shots from the Soviet film. Unfortunately, these still shots show Auschwitz inmates as being in good health.

Child survivors with chubby cheeks show their tattoos

For example, the photo above is unsuitable for a story about the horror of Auschwitz because it shows healthy children.  So what should Holocaust promoters do?

The photo below is frequently used to illustrate the alleged ill treatment of Jewish children at Auschwitz. The photo actually shows Gypsy children, who were suffering from a disease called “Noma.”

Gypsy children, suffering from a disease called “Noma” were left behind at Auschwitz

Notice the girl, on the far left in the front row, who has a beautiful face. Holocaust promoters use this photo to show how cruel the Nazis were, claiming that this girl was tortured because she was so pretty.

The photo below, which is a still shot from the Soviet film, shows a child survivor of Auschwitz, who is being carried out of a brick building at Auschwitz because he is too weak to walk.

Suitable photo for a news article about Holocaust denial

Miriam Moses, the twin sister of Eva Moses Kor is shown on the far right in the photo at the top of my blog post. Her twin sister, Eva Moses Kor, is shown on the far right in the photo below, which is also a still shot from  the Soviet film.

Eva Moses Kor is shown in the second row on the far right

Dr. Josef Mengele, known as “Doctor Death” by Holocaustians, was famous for giving chocolate and hair ribbons to the little girls at Auschwitz. In the film, taken by the Soviets, it appears that Eva Moses is seriously overweight, possibly from eating too much chocolate.  This is an example of a photo which should NOT be used by Holocaust promoters.

The photo below, which shows Auschwitz survivors who are not in the best of health, would be a suitable photo for Holocaust promotion.

Still photo from Soviet film shows Auschwitz survivors

Still shot from the Soviet film which depicts the liberation of Auschwitz

I have the photo, shown above, on my website, along with the following text:

The photograph above shows some of the 5,800 Birkenau survivors, most of whom look like well-fed Polish peasants, walking out of the camp shortly after Auschwitz-Birkenau was liberated by Soviet troops on January 27, 1945. In the background you can see the wooden barracks buildings, with windows under the roof, and the posts of the barbed wire fence. These survivors are walking along the interior camp road that bisects the Birkenau camp from north to south, connecting the women’s camp with the new section of Birkenau, known as “Mexico.” This is a still picture taken from the Soviet movie which is shown at the beginning of the tour at the Auschwitz Museum.

The tall, skinny guy wearing an arm band is Dr. Otto Wolken, a medical doctor in the Birkenau Quarantine camp, who stayed behind to help his fellow prisoners when the Birkenau camp was evacuated. He was the first witness to testify at the Auschwitz Trial, held by the German government in Frankfurt between 1963 and 1965.

You can see part of the Soviet film in this YouTube video:

Why Auschwitz was chosen, by the Germans, as the location of their largest camp

One of the regular readers of my blog wrote a comment on a previous post, in which he said that “Auschwitz-Birkenau had been at first only a hard forced labour camp and then, for logistic and railway connection reasons, also an Extermination Camp.”

It is true that Auschwitz was chosen because of the “railway connection.”  You can read about the trains going into the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp on this page of my website: http://www.scrapbookpages.com/AuschwitzScrapbook/Tour/Birkenau/Gatehouse.html

The photo below was taken INSIDE the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp, but it is supposed to show what the tracks going into the camp looked like.

Train tracks inside the Birkenau camp

My photo below shows what the tracks going into the camp really look like.

Tracks outside the Birkenau gatehouse.

This quote is from this page of my website:

The plan to establish a concentration camp at Auschwitz was first announced by Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler on April 27, 1940.

Konzentrationslager Auschwitz, the main camp, was originally opened on June 14, 1940, as just another concentration camp, in the former Polish military garrison in Zazole, a district of the town of Auschwitz. Thirty German criminals, who were prisoners in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, were brought to Auschwitz in May 1940 to convert the garrison into a prison camp. Throughout its existence, the Nazis called Auschwitz a concentration camp, not an extermination camp or Vernichtungslager. The term “extermination camp” was coined by the Allies and initially, it applied to all the Nazi camps.

At first, the Auschwitz main camp, known as the Stammlager, was only a camp for Polish political prisoners, including some Jews, and also German common criminals, who assisted the Nazis in supervising the other prisoners. The first transport to the main Auschwitz camp consisted of 728 Polish inmates of the Gestapo prison at Tarnow, Poland. They were mostly university students, including a few Jews, who had joined the Polish Resistance. The Polish Army had never surrendered to the Germans and no Armistice had ever been signed. The Poles continued to fight during World War II, but as insurgents or illegal combatants, not as soldiers on the battlefield. When captured, the Polish resistance fighters were sent to Auschwitz or other concentration camps such as Buchenwald and Dachau.

During World War II, America had “internment” camps for German-Americans and Japanese-Americans.  The prisoners, who were kept in these camps, were not sent to other locations to work. If there had been a network of work camps in America, prisoners would have been first sent to North Platte, Nebraska, which had the world’s largest railroad yard for train connections. The size of the Bailey train yard at North Platte was 2,850 acres.  Compared to North Platte, the Auschwitz train yard was tiny, but it was still the largest train yard in Europe.

This quote from the same page on my website explains the part about the railroad connections at Auschwitz:

When railroad lines were built in the 19th century, the little town of Auschwitz, at the junction of three empires, became the crossroads of Europe. There were 44 train lines coming into Auschwitz, making it at one time a larger railroad hub than Penn Station in New York City.

It was because Auschwitz was such an important railroad junction that a camp for migrant workers was built in a suburb of the town in 1916; seasonal farm workers from all over Europe were sent from Auschwitz to the large German estates. The migrant worker camp, with its beautiful brick barracks buildings, was the place that eventually became the Auschwitz I concentration camp.

In 1919, Poland became an independent country again and Auschwitz became a Polish town called Oswiecim. The former migrant worker camp was used as a garrison by the Polish Army.

The Auschwitz main camp originally had 20 brick barracks buildings; 14 of them were single story buildings and 6 were two stories high. When this camp was converted into the Auschwitz concentration camp, a second story was added to the 14 single story buildings and 8 new two-story buildings were added, making a total of 28 barracks buildings.

Between 13,000 and 16,000 concentration camp prisoners were crowded into these 28 buildings where they slept in three-tiered bunks. At one point, in 1942, there were 20,000 prisoners at the Auschwitz main camp.

Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939 and the town of Oswiecim was captured on September 6th. Following the conquest of Poland, the name of the town reverted back to Auschwitz.

The city of Krakow, located 37 miles from Auschwitz, became the capital of German-occupied Poland, known as the General Government. It is important to note that, during the time that Auschwitz was a killing center, it was in the Greater German Reich, not in occupied Poland. The Polish people are incensed when Auschwitz is described as a concentration camp in Poland. Auschwitz was located literally at the junction of the Greater German Reich and occupied Poland; it was also in the heart of “The Black Triangle,” an industrial area with large coal deposits, which is why it was such an important location for the Nazis.

 

At Auschwitz-Birkenau, the “execution chambers” are now “roped off and in ruins”

I have visited the ruins of the Krema II and Krema III gas chambers at the Auschwitz-Birkenau memorial site on 3 separate occasions: in September 1998 and again in October 2005 and 2007.

I have not been back to Auschwitz since 2007, but I have long suspected that the ruins of the Krema II gas chamber have now been roped off, to prevent anyone from climbing down into the ruins. My suspicion was confirmed when I read an article about tourist travel to Auschwitz-Birkenau here.

Seeing the inside of Krema II causes people, who try this stunt, to be instantly turned into “Holocaust deniers.”  Don’t let this happen to you.

My 2005 photo of the ruins of Krema II is shown below.

The ruins of Krema II has a hole in the roof

Three people, that I know of, have descended into a hole in the roof of Krema II, shown in my photo above, and have emerged as Holocaust deniers.

Thankfully, the ruins of Krema II have now been roped off to prevent any more people from climbing down into the ruins of the gas chamber.  Two of the three people, who descended into the gas chamber, before it was roped off, were put into prison for Holocaust denial, which is now a crime in 19 countries.  The third person, Fred Leuchter, barely escaped prison. He is an American citizen, which is the only thing that saved him; he has since gone into hiding.

Ruins of the oven room in Krema II at Auschwitz-Birkenau

This quote is from the website, cited above:

Leaving the row of prison blocks [in the main Auschwitz camp], visitors exit past watchtowers and barbed wire, arriving at the former ammunition bunker that was repurposed as the camp’s first gas chamber and crematorium. Jews from the Silesian region and Soviet POW’s were put to death here. Two of the three furnaces used to cremate the bodies of murdered Silesian Jews and Soviet POW’s are displayed. Candles flicker by flowers placed in remembrance in front of the open oven doors.

In the above quote, the “first gas chamber and crematorium” is a reference to the gas chamber in the main Auschwitz camp.

Krema I gas chamber in the main Auschwitz camp

The quote below is from this page of my website: http://www.scrapbookpages.com/AuschwitzScrapbook/History/Articles/Birkenau01.html

The first gas chamber, that was used at the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex, was in a room that was being used as a morgue in Krema I, the crematorium in the main camp. The gas chamber in Krema I was only used between September 1941 and March 1942, according to the Auschwitz Museum, although the ovens were used for cremation until 1943.

Jews were gassed in Krema I only during a six-week period in 1942; the rest of the time, it was used for gassing Soviet Prisoners of War. According to Jean-Claude Pressac, who wrote a book entitled “Auschwitz: Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers,” there was a total of approximately 10,000 people gassed in Krema I, which had a capacity of 600 to 800 persons for each gassing. By the end of March 1942, the gassing operation was moved to the Auschwitz II camp, also known as Birkenau. Two old farm houses at the western end of the Birkenau camp were used for gassing while four new gas chambers were under construction.

I wrote about the Sachsenhausen gas chamber on this page of my website: http://www.scrapbookpages.com/Sachsenhausen/ConcentrationCamp/GasChamber.html

Don’t start denying that there was a gas chamber at Sachsenhausen; it was proved in “the Berlin trial.”

According to the Auschwitz Museum, the first prisoners to be gassed at Auschwitz were 600 Soviet Prisoners of War and 250 sick prisoners who were killed with Zyklon-B gas on September 3, 1941 in Cell No. 27 in Block 11, the prison block in the main Auschwitz camp.

Keep in mind that Auschwitz was liberated by Soviet soldiers, so the Soviets had the opportunity to tell their story first.  The Soviets arrived on January 27th, after the Germans had abandoned the camp on January 18th.

The Soviet story is that the Germans sneaked back into the Auschwitz camp TWICE and blew up the Krema II and Krema III gas chambers, in order to destroy the evidence of gassing. (Or did some Soviet soldiers visit the camp on January 20th, and blow up the gas chambers?)

Thankfully, the Germans did not destroy the Krema I gas chamber in the main camp.  Tourists can see the Krema I gas chamber, although the room is now roped off, so that no one can walk around in the room, as I was able to do in 2005.

This section of the gas chamber in the main Auschwitz camp is now roped off

Ruins of Krema III gas chamber

Ruins of Krema III gas chamber

Ruins of Krema III undressing room