Deborah Lipstadt, who defeated hard-core Holocaust denial, now worries about soft-core denial

Deborah Lipstadt gives a victory salute after defeating David Irving in his lawsuit against her

Deborah Lipstadt is a professor of modern Jewish history and Holocaust Studies at Emory University in Atlanta; she is back in the news, speaking about soft-core Holocaust denial, which is a new threat to the Shoah (Holocaust).

You can read an article about her in The JC.com here.

This quote is from the article in The JC.com:

[Deborah Lipstadt] The woman who fought one of the most high-profile Holocaust denial legal cases [against David Irving] claims it [Holocaust denial] is on the rise and taking on a new and disturbing form.

Prof Deborah Lipstadt identified the trend of equating the Shoah with modern-day events as a “soft-core” form of denegrating the Nazi genocide.

“It’s used politically, glibly, and I don’t like it. It’s a grim, cheap way of getting to your point.

“It’s much more frequent than in the past. I don’t think there’s much we can do about it,” she said

Topics as wide-ranging as abortion, animal rights and sporting defeats have been likened to the Shoah [Holocaust] over the recent months.

I am writing about this because the subject of the lawsuit, brought by David Irving, against Deborah Lipstadt, has come up recently in the comments on my blog.

This comment was made on my blog on a previous post:

You’re not forced to use the term “Holocaust denial” […] That term [Holocaust denial] was invented by Deborah Lipstadt to demonize, belittle and ridicule Holocaust revisionists and their works. The Mainstream Mass Media then turned Lipstadt’s insult into an official term by using it systematically when they talked about Holocaust revisionists.

Isn’t it very ironic that a Jewess [Deborah Lipstadt] who has never produced anything about the “Holocaust” (her only ‘research’ topic is Holocaust revisionists, not the “Holocaust” itself) could decide that Holocaust revisionists are not researchers but only deniers? Men and women who worked very hard for decades and were persecuted very harshly for that are suddenly mere deniers because Missis Zero Contribution Talmudic Hatred Lipstadt decided so…

When Lipstadt defeated David Irving in his libel lawsuit, this was acclaimed by the media as proof that the Holocaust happened, just as the Jews claim that it did, and that “Holocaust denial” has been defeated.

Irving was suing Lipstadt for libel, and he could have won the case, but he made the mistake of including Penguin Publishing in the lawsuit. He was suing for money damages because Lipstadt called him a dangerous Holocaust denier, which hurt his reputation and his income from his books, but I don’t think he sued to have her book removed from the market. Her book was published in America in 1993 but it was not published in the UK until 1996.

It has been many years since the trial. I followed the trial on the Internet at the time, and as I recall, Irving also sued Lipstadt because she went to book stores, along with some other Jews, and demanded that Irving’s books be taken off the shelves. Irving was also suing because he had a firm contract with a publisher to publish his next book, but Lipstadt went to Irving’s publisher and persuaded him to break the contract to publish the book.

It is very clear that Lipstadt was guilty of wrongdoing with regard to preventing Irving from publishing and selling his books. Irving included Penguin in the second part of his lawsuit even though the publishing firm was not involved in preventing Irving from earning his livelihood. This was the big mistake that caused him to lose the case.

Irving and Lipstadt disagreed on the details of the Holocaust, and the judge sided with Lipstadt. The Holocaust was not proved during the trial, but Irving claimed a victory when he got Robert van Pelt to admit that there were no holes found in the roof of the two underground gas chambers that are now in ruins. This was the famous “No holes, no Holocaust” slogan that Irving claimed as a victory.

The judge was not a Holocaust expert; he ruled in favor of the defense because he did not want his life and his career to be ruined. Irving made a mistake in defending himself. He should have had a lawyer present at his table, so the lawyer could stand up and say, every five minutes: “Objection! Assuming facts not in evidence.”

Lipstadt had all of the Holocaust True Believer experts on her side, but Irving made the mistake of not asking any of the Holocaust revisionists to testify for his side.

In doing some searching on the libel trial, I found nothing about Irving’s charge against Lipstadt for conspiring with others to go to book stores and persuade them to remove his books.

Nor did I find anything about Irving’s charge that Lipstadt persuaded Irving’s publisher to break his contract to publish Irving’s new book.

The judge in the case wrote a 333 page judgment. I downloaded the judgment from the Internet at the time of the trial and read it. The judge ruled in Irving’s favor on some points, although his overall judgment was against Irving. On the subject of Lipstadt going to bookstores and on Lipstadt preventing Irving’s book from being published, the judge ruled that Irving was correct in his claims, but that Penguin was not guilty of these charges, so because of that, he had to rule against Irving.

In searching the Internet about the case, that part of the judgement was not mentioned. Everything on the Internet now is against Irving and in favor of Lipstadt.

During the trial, it appeared that Irving was winning, as far as the daily transcripts were concerned. The judge even mentioned that Irving did a good job representing himself.

The burden of proof was on Lipstadt, and in following the case from day to day, it did not seem that her side was proving it’s case. In spite of that, I didn’t expect the judge to rule in Irving’s favor because if he had done that, the judge would now be reviled by the whole world, just as Irving was.

David Irving has now redeemed himself, to the point where he can now go on making a living because he now says that he believes that Treblinka was a death camp. I wrote about this on this blog post: https://furtherglory.wordpress.com/2012/10/29/holocaust-denier-david-irving-will-be-allowed-back-into-germany/

I wrote about Irving’s visit to Treblinka on this blog post: https://furtherglory.wordpress.com/2010/09/09/holocaust-denier-david-irving-will-visit-treblinka-death-camp/

Lipstadt’s side of the story is official history and Irving’s side of the story is a crime, punishable by prison time in 19 countries today. So which side is the judge going to believe? The judge could have been thrown into prison in any one of 19 counrties if he had ruled in Irving’s favor.

As I mentioned before, I followed the libel trial very closely. I put this quote from the trial testimony on my website. I have quoted from my scrapbookpages website below:

The following quote, regarding the purpose of the Treblinka camp is from the trial transcript of David Irving’s libel case against Deborah Lipstadt which is on this web site:

http://www.hdot.org/trial/transcripts/day05/pages91-95

(Richard Rampton, the lawyer for the defense, shows David Irving a map of the railroad lines to the Treblinka, Sobibor, and Belzec camps, as he questions him about the purpose of these camps.)

[Mr Rampton] Then there is that another marking, which we do not have to bother about, which is the actual, I think, German railway as opposed to the Russian one or the Polish one. A different gauge, I think. The line runs north/east or east/north/east out of Warsaw to a place called Malkinia; do you see that?
[Mr Irving] Yes.
[Mr Rampton] Just on the border with White Russia?
[Mr Irving] Yes.
[Mr Rampton] And there is a sharp right turn and the first dot down that single line is Treblinka.
[Mr Irving] Yes.
[Mr Rampton] Then if you go to Lublin and you go east/south/east towards the Russian border you come to a place Kelm or Khelm.
[Mr Irving] First of all Treblinka and then Kelm, yes.
[Mr Rampton] And you go sharp left northwards to Sobibor?
[Mr Irving] Yes.
[Mr Rampton] Which is just again next to the border. If on the other hand you turn right before you get to Kelm or Khelm and go to Savadar, again, travelling right down to the border on single line you get to Belsec?
[Mr Irving] Yes.
[Mr Rampton] Those, Mr Irving, were little villages in the middle of nowhere, and from the 22nd July 1942, if these figures you have given in your book are right, which they are not quite, but the volume, if you multiply, must be hundreds of thousands of Jews transported from Lublin and Warsaw and as I shall show you after the adjournment also from the East; what were those Jews going to do in these three villages on the Russian border?
[Mr Irving] The documents before me did not tell me.
[Mr Rampton] No, but try and construct in your own mind, as an historian, a convincing explanation.
[Mr Irving] There would be any number of convincing explanations, from the most sinister to the most innocent. What is the object of that exercise? It is irrelevant to the issues pleaded here, I shall strongly argue that, it would have been —
MR JUSTICE GRAY: If you want to take that point, can you
[Mr Irving] — it would have been irresponsible of me to have speculated in this book (Hitler’s War), which is already overweight, and start adding in my own totally amateurish speculation.
MR RAMPTON: No, you mistake me, Mr Irving, it is probably not your fault I, as his Lordship spotted what I have done, I have taken what you have wrote (sic) in the book as a stepping stone to my next exercise, which is to show the scale of the operation, and in due course, and I give you fair warning, to demonstrate that anybody who supposes that those hundreds of thousands of Jews were sent to these tiny little villages, what shall we say, in order to restore their health, is either mad or a liar.

[….]

MR RAMPTON: No. I suggest, Mr Irving, that anybody — any sane, sensible person would deduce from all the evidence, including, if you like, the shootings in the East which you have accepted, would conclude that these hundreds of thousands of Jews were not being shipped to these tiny little places on the Russian border in Eastern Poland for a benign purpose?
End of quote

Neither Rampton nor Irving seemed to know the reason why “hundreds of thousands of Jews” were shipped to “these tiny little places.”

I explained the reason that the Jews were shipped to “these tiny little places” in this blog post: https://furtherglory.wordpress.com/2011/10/07/malkinia-junction-where-the-trains-to-treblinka-stopped/

and also in this blog post: https://furtherglory.wordpress.com/2011/03/25/the-trains-that-traveled-west-to-treblinka/

The Nazis were “Green” when being Green wasn’t cool

Update: August 31, 2014:  I have checked my blog stats again and I have discovered that many of my readers have been directed to my blog by this website: http://bbs.tiexue.net/post2_8278990_1.html

I can’t read Chinese, so I don’t know what is written on the website, which I have cited above. However, the photos show me that the Chinese are now being educated in all the Holocaust lies. For example, the soap made from Jewish fat, which is pictured on the Chinese website. I have many of the same photos on my scrapbookpages website and on my blog, which is apparently what is attracting Chinese visitors.

The Chinese website has a link to this post on my blog: https://furtherglory.wordpress.com/page/30/

In that particular blog post, I told about one of the more outrageous lies told by Holocaustians. Are the Chinese now interested in the Holocaust because they believe that these outrageous lies are true?

Continue reading my original blog post:

I always check my blog stats every morning, to see what posts on my blog are being read and by whom.  For the last couple of days, there have been hundreds of people in China reading my blog.  What could I possibly have written that could be of interest to the Chinese?

I go to a Traditional Chinese Medicine doctor and I have written several blog posts about Chinese medicine, including two blog posts which you can read here:

Can Traditional Chinese Medicine help people with Type I diabetes?

Your life span is determined by your kidneys … and the kidneys are the first organs to fail

But why would people in China want to read what I have written about TCM? Finally, I checked the news and found that the Chinese are getting interested in saving the environment.

The Nazis are noted for trying to save the environment in the early 30ies when this was virtually unknown.

I blogged about Heinrich Himmler growing medicinal herbs at Dachau on this blog post: https://furtherglory.wordpress.com/2014/04/24/letters-written-by-heinrich-himmler-to-his-family-are-being-published-in-a-german-newspaper/

I also blogged about Heinrich Himmler doing organic gardening at Dachua on this blog post: https://furtherglory.wordpress.com/2011/04/12/heinrich-himmer-the-chicken-farmer/

I am very happy that people in China are reading my blog posts, but Good Luck with understanding my writing. A lot of what I write is sarcastic and might be hard for people to understand unless they are native English speakers.

93-year-old survivor of Mauthausen visits the Memorial site

93-year-old survivor of Mauthausen visits the Memorial site

The photo above shows Pal Ferenczi, a 93-year-old survivor of the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria; he recently returned to visit the Memorial Site at the former camp. You can read about it here; the article includes this quote: “Mauthausen was the only category III concentration camp – which means it had the most brutal conditions, according to the memorial’s website. Nearly 200,000 people were taken to the camp, and half of them died there.”

This quote is from the news article about Ferenczi’s visit to Mauthausen:

Passing an empty room, he recalled how corpses would be stacked on top of each other there, waiting to be burned in the furnace. At the gas chamber, he told his family how 50 men would be shoved into the tiny room to die. Terrified victims left scratch marks on the door.

Pal Ferenczi enters the Mausthausen gas chamber

The photo above shows the inside of one of the two doors into the Mauthausen gas chamber, as Pal Ferenczi enters the room. The object on the right hand side, just above the peephole, is what is left of the door handle, which has had the actual handle removed. When prisoners took a shower in this room, it was possible for them to turn a handle and open the door to get out of the room.

When I visited Mauthausen a few years ago, I didn’t notice the scratch marks on the door of the gas chamber.  I took the photo below, which shows the same door into the gas chamber.  There is a peephole in the center of the door which has some white marks around it, but I don’t think that these are scratch marks.

One of the two doors into the Mauthausen gas chamber

Door latch on the inside of the Mauthausen gas chamber has no handle

Close-up of the peephole in the Mauthausen gas chamber — this peephole is called a “Judas opening”

Mauthausen was the only Class III camp in the Nazi concentration camp system. It was a punishment camp where prisoners were rarely ever released.  I have an extensive section about Mauthausen on my website, which you can read here.  You can read about the Jewish prisoners at Mauthausen on my website here — this page is a MUST read.

Mauthausen was the first Nazi concentration camp to receive foreign prisoners; it was not a camp that was particularly for Austrians, nor was it a camp that was specifically designed for killing the Jews. It was mainly a camp for resistance fighters from Nazi occupied countries, such as France, Hungary and the Netherlands, and for German “career criminals.”

Pal Ferenczi was undoubtedly sent to Mauthausen because he was fighting as an illegal combatant in the Hungarian Resistance. On his trip back to visit the camp, he was photographed as he stood near the Monument to the Hungarian Resistance fighters.

Pal Ferenczi visited the Memorial to the Hungarian Resistance fighters at Mauthausen

My photo of the monument to the Hungarian Resistance fighters at Mauthausen

On his visit to Mauthausen, Ferenczi visited the former morgue, which has been converted into a room where the names of the victims who died at Mauthausen are engraved.  The photo below shows Ferenczi on his visit to this room.

Former morgue room at Mauthausen has names of the victims

When I visited the Mauthausen camp, I took the photo below, which shows the former morgue before it was converted into a Memorial room. Note the two posts which are the same in both photos.

My photo of the Mauthausen morgue before it was turned into a room of names

I took the morgue photo below, because it shows a water pipe which goes into the gas chamber room.

Water pipe in the Mauthausen morgue goes through the wall into the gas chamber

Why would a gas chamber need water pipes?  The Mauthausen gas chamber was a multi-purpose room where prisoners could take a shower with water coming through real shower heads, or they could be gassed with Zyklon-B which came through a special device that has since been removed.

The article about the visit of Pal Ferenczi to Mauthausen includes a photo which shows the first crematory oven.  When I visited Mauthausen, I was told that the first crematory oven was the oven that is shown in my photo below.

My photo of the first crematory oven at Mauthausen

An American Tragedy: “Unarmed teenager gunned down by white policeman”

Photo of Michael Brown which has been shown many times on TV

The title of my blog post today is in quotes because these words were spoken a million times today as “unarmed teenager” Michael Brown was laid to rest, after being “gunned down” by a white policeman.  The date of his death was August 9th.  Michael Brown could not be laid to rest before now because three (or maybe four) autopsies had to be performed, and the rioting caused by his death had to be allowed to continue unabated.

This photo of Michael Brown was displayed in the church at his funeral

The funeral of Michael Brown took place today in the “Friendly Temple” Baptist church in Ferguson, MO as 4,500 people attended, including many famous people, such as Snoop Dog and Spike Lee. President Obama skipped this important event, but sent THREE White House aids to represent him.

The eulogy was given by Al Sharpton, who wore a white suit.  Many people in the church were wearing red, including the mother of Michael Brown.  A man sitting beside her, chewing gum, was wearing a red shirt. 485 members of Michael Brown’s family were at the funeral.

I saw one photo taken at the funeral, which showed a man wearing a T-Shirt that said “No Justice, no Peace.”

All of this could have been avoided if Michael Brown had been trained, as a child, in how to avoid being gunned down by a white policeman.  The first thing that he should have been taught, by his parents, is that after you rob a store, you should not attract the attention of a police officer by walking down the double yellow line in the middle of a major street.  If a police officer orders you to get out of the middle of the street, you should not approach his police car and try to take his gun.

Of course, this advice applies to all criminals, regardless of age or color.  In fact, the best advice that I can give to potential criminals is to pay for small items in a store.  Then the police won’t be called and you won’t be gunned down by a white policeman.

Hedy Epstein (the Jewish woman who was arrested in St. Louis) confronted Herman Goering at Nuremberg

Ninety-year-old Holocaust survivor Hedy Epstein has been in the news recently because she was arrested in St. Louis, MO as she protested against Gov. Jay Nixon’s actions in the aftermath of the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO.

A news story, which you can read here, mentioned that Hedy Epstein had “aided Allied forces” in the trials of the Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg in 1945.

This quote is from the news article:

“Epstein, who aided Allied forces in the Nuremberg trials, was placed under arrest in downtown St. Louis, Missouri, “for failing to disperse” during a protest of Gov. Jay Nixon’s decision to call the National Guard into Ferguson. Eight others were also arrested.”

I was dubious about Epstein’s involvement in the Nuremberg trials, so I did a search and found the video below. In the video, she explains about how she taunted Herman Goering, who was on trial at Nuremberg.

 

Holocaust survivor arrested in downtown St. Louis for supporting Michael Brown

Regular readers of my blog might have noticed that I have not blogged for almost a week.  Don’t worry about me — I’m O.K., but I have not been blogging because I have been glued to my TV, watching the rioting in Ferguson, MO following the shooting of black teenager Michael Brown by Darren Wilson, a white policeman.  You can read the details of the case here.

Darren Wilson the white police officer who shot Michael Brown

For those people, who have been living in a cave, and might not have heard about the case, the story involves 18-year-old Michael Brown, and another black teenager, Dorian Johnson, who was with him when Michael Brown was shot six times by a white police officer. You can read about the story, as told by Darren Wilson here.

Michael Brown had just robbed a convenience store, and he and his companion were making their get-away by walking nonchalantly down the double yellow line in the middle of a major street in Ferguson, a suburb of St. Louis, MO.  The white policeman had just heard, over the radio in his police car, about the convenience store robbery.

90-year-old Jewish woman arrested in St. Louis, MO

The rioting in Missouri is now almost over, but now there is a Holocaust survivor involved. You can read the story of her arrest here.

According to the news article, “[Hedy] Epstein was 8 and living in Freiburg, Germany when Hitler came to power. A year after Kristallnacht, she was sent to England in a children’s transport. Like many others sent on the Kindertransport, Epstein never saw her family members again.” You can read about the Kindertransport to the UK here.

Some people think that Hedy Epstein does not warrant the status of a “Holocaust survivor.”  The Holocaust hadn’t started yet and Hitler was allowing the Jews to leave, if they could find a country that would accept them.

The story of the city of St. Louis is a story of “white flight.”  Ferguson, MO was formerly a white community, which had a white police force.  When white people moved out of Ferguson, and blacks moved in, the white police force stayed. You can read about it here.

I was born in a small town in Missouri, a few miles west of St. Louis. I can vividly recall my first trip to St. Louis. We drove through miles of slum housing before getting to downtown St. Louis.  As we passed through mile after mile of run-down houses with the paint peeling off, I was horrified to see such blight. This was where the black residents were forced to live because this was in the days of segregation and blacks could not live in white neighborhoods.

When I lived in Missouri years ago, St. Louis was known as “the Mound city.” The name referred to the mounds that had been built by Native Americans, known at that time as “Indians.”  There was also a mound in the small town where I lived, and arrows could still be found there, lying on the ground.

When I saw the TV coverage of the Michael Brown case, it was like watching the news in Germany.  All of the white people in the city of Ferguson, including the police officer who shot Michael Brown, looked German to me. The last time that I visited St. Louis, I walked into the St. Louis airport and for a moment, I thought that I was in the Munich airport.

German immigrants came to Missouri because the state of Missouri is in the same ecological zone as Germany. You see the same plants and trees in Missouri that you see in Germany. St. Louis is at the confluence of the Missouri river and the Mississippi river.  The Germans settled in many small towns along the Missouri river, including the town where I was born.  When World War II started, 25 percent of the citizens of Missouri were German American, including me.

Entrance into the first St. Louis gated community

To understand the attitudes of white people in the St. Louis area, you should know that St. Louis was the first city ever to have a “gated community,” which was for white people only. You can read about it on Wikipedia here.

This quote is from Wikipedia:

Washington Terrace is a residential private place in St. Louis, Missouri, laid out circa 1892. The gate is south of Union and Delmar, within the bounds of the Central West End.

A private place is a self-governing enclave whose common areas like streets and common gardens are owned by the residents, with services are provided by the private sector, an experiment that foreshadowed the gated community in the U.S. by 100 years. About 50 of these enclaves once stood within the borders of the city of St. Louis. Most were designed by civil engineer Julius Pitzman between 1868 and 1905. Many of these developments, like Washington Terrace, are well-preserved and still gated, patrolled, and functioning as private enclaves.

The “reconstruction” of the gas chamber in the main Auschwitz camp…

A regular reader of my blog made a recent comment, which I am going to discuss at length in my blog post today.  In the comment, there was a quote from this revisionist website: http://codohfounder.com/robert-faurisson-on-david-cole-three-pieces/

Begin quote:
It was in 1975 that [Robert] Faurisson succeeded in having a man in charge at the Auschwitz State Museum, Jan Machalek, admit that this so-called “gas chamber” was not “genuine” (in German: echt) but “reconstructed” (in German: rekonstruiert). Consequently, Faurisson asked: “Reconstructed according to the original plan?” and Machalek replied “yes”. Therefore, coming back to Auschwitz in 1976, Faurisson asked Tadeusz Iwaszko, Director of the archives, whether Machalek had been right or not in saying that the so-called “gas chamber” was “reconstructed according to an original plan”. And Iwaszko replied “Yes”.State 1 – From 1940 to 1943, a Leichenhalle (a cold storage room for bodies, with a washroom, etc.);

State 2 – From June 1944 to January 1945, a Luftschützbunker für SS-Revier mit einem Operationsraum (an air-raid shelter for the SS-hospital with an operating room).

The Leichenhalle was a dead-end room: there was no door on the S/E side.

The Luftschützbunker was a room with an opening on the S/E side: a typical anteroom with two doors and, inside, there were typical partition walls in zig-zag as in any air-raid shelter.
End Quote

Note that the Auschwitz Museum Director told Robert Faurison that “From 1940 to 1943” the gas chamber was a “cold storage room for bodies, with a washroom” and that “there was no door on the [southeast] side.”

On my first trip to Auschwitz, in 1998, I was told by my tour guide that the door on the southeast side was the original door into the gas chamber. You can see this door in my 1998 photo below.

This door was added to the Auschwitz “gas chamber” when the morgue was converted into an air raid shelter for the SS men in 1944

The original blueprint of the Auschwitz “gas chamber” building is shown below.

Original blueprint of the Auschwitz gas chamber building

The photo above shows the original blueprint for the “gas chamber” building in the Auschwitz main camp. The morgue, shown on the bottom right of the blueprint, has a door into the oven room and another door into the washroom. The gas chamber was in the same location as the morgue and it did not include the area of the washroom [but it does now].

Note the door from the vestibule into the washroom; this door no longer exists and the area of the former wash room is included in the reconstructed gas chamber.

According to a guide book, which I purchased at the Auschwitz Museum in 1998, the gas chamber in the main camp was only used from September 1941 to March 1942 and after that, the gassing of the Jews was done in “the little red house” and “the little white house” just outside the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp.

However, Danuta Czech wrote that the last victims were members of the Sonderkommando, who were gassed in Krema I in December 1942. The ruins of “the little white house,” also known as Bunker 2, can be seen behind the Sauna building outside the Birkenau camp.

Filip Müller was among the first Jews brought to Auschwitz; he arrived in April 1942 and began working in the crematorium in the main camp in May 1942. Regarding the gassing of prisoners in the main camp, he wrote that “From the end of May 1942 one transport after another vanished in this way into the crematorium of Auschwitz.”

The following quote is from Müller’s book, “Eyewitness Auschwitz“:

At the same time, the siting of the crematorium in the immediate vicinity of the camp was fraught with danger: there was the distinct possibility that The Secret Matter of the Reich could not remain hushed up forever, notwithstanding its top-secret classification. It was for this reason that the columns of deported Jews were conducted to the ‘showers’ either at daybreak when the camp inmates were still asleep, or late at night after roll call. On these occasions a camp curfew was declared. To break it meant to risk being shot. For that same reason those of us prisoners who had been forced to participate in preparations for the extermination of Jews as well as in covering up all traces of the crimes were divided into two groups. This was to prevent us from pooling our information and obtaining detailed knowledge of the extermination methods. Prisoners of the second working party, the crematorium stokers, turned up only after we had swept and thoroughly cleaned the yard. By the time they arrived the chamber had already been aired and the gassed were lying there as if they had just fallen naked from the sky.

Original entrance into the gas chamber building in the main Auschwitz camp

The entrance into the gas chamber in the main Auschwitz camp is through an outside door, shown in the photo above, which opens into a vestibule that is about 6 feet by 8 feet in size. Inside the vestibule, there is a door straight ahead, which opens into the oven room, and another door on the right, but out of camera range, that opens into a small room which was a “laying out” room when this building was used as a mortuary.  The door into the “laying out” room is shown below.

Door into the “laying out” room

When the “gas chamber” building was converted into an air raid shelter, the “laying out” room became the “surgery” room; it has a floor drain and was previously furnished with wash basins.

According to the Auschwitz Museum, the “laying out” room “was used to store spare gratings” when the morgue was converted into a gas chamber in September 1941.

Door into the washroom, which is now included in the gas chamber

The “gas chamber” in the main Auschwitz camp, which is now shown to tourists, includes the former washroom. In the photo above, the washroom is in the foreground.

British students on HET trip learn how to emote at Auschwitz

According to a news story which you can read here, “The Holocaust Educational Trust sends about 2,000 post-16 [British] students to Auschwitz-Birkenau a year.”

The “educator for the day,” for the students, was Tom Jackson, according to the article.

This quote from the article is about what Tom Jackson told the students:

The reconstructed gas chamber at Auschwitz 1 has a cold feel to it, a cold that seeps into your bones, as if your body knows the evil took place there.

It sits just a few hundred yards from the electric fence and beyond that a house.

Camp Commander Rudolf Höss lived there with his wife and children – he was the man who oversaw the extension of Auschwitz to Birkeneau and to develop an extermination camp, following orders.

But, as Tom told us these facts and told us that he would have received no punishment if he had not built the gas chamber, I cannot help but feel sick and the faces of the pupils around me reflect that sentiment.

[Jackson] added: “He was a family man, he had a heart, I’m not excusing what he did, but think about these things, too.”

Tom Jackson was referring to the house in the main Auschwitz camp, where the Commandant lived with his wife and children; his house was very close to the gas chamber.  Yet, Jackson told the students that Hoess would “have received no punishment if he had not built a gas chamber.”

The gas chamber in the main camp was inside the crematorium building, in what was obviously a morgue; Hoess did not order the construction, nor the reconstruction, of this building. In the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp, there were four gas chambers which were built while Hoess was the Commandant.

House where Rudolf Hoess and his family lived at the main Auschwitz camp is very close to the gas chamber

This quote is also from the news article, cited above:

Even after death, [the Jews] were stripped further of their identity.

Once killed in the gas chamber, their heads were shaved before their bodies were incinerated to hide the evidence.

For many women, their hair is their pride, and for it to be shaved after death seemed almost as barbaric as the gassing itself.

Surely, the hair was not shaved from the heads of the victims AFTER they were dead. According to Holocaust lore, there were 900 people crowed into the gas chamber at a time.  After the gassing, their bodies were piled up to the ceiling, and covered with bodily fluids that were eliminated as the victims died.   Jewish helpers, called Kapos, had to go inside the gas chamber and drag the bodies to the cremation ovens, which were next door to the gas chamber.

This quote is also from the news article:

While we stood in a place where so much death and destruction took place, a man rode by on his bike.

Tom told us this was normal, that people often walked through the camp on their way home or to work – it seemed cold and cruel but they did not ask the Germans to move in and build a concentration camp, he reminded us.

The gas chambers have gone, destroyed by the Nazis to try and hide what they did, just weeks before the Red Army arrived, but the steps remain, a small reminder of the horrors that took place right by the giant memorial where Rabbi Andrew Shaw gave a moving memorial.

Rabbi Shaw’s grandfather was a victim of the Holocaust and his grandmother a survivor.

His grandfather never knew his child or his grandchildren, he did not even know his wife was pregnant.

In the above quote, it is not clear to me whether Tom was talking about the main Auschwitz camp, or the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp. I doubt that “people often walked through the [main] camp on their way to work.” The main camp was in a suburb of the town of Auschwitz, and there was a wall around it.

However, local people could have walked through the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp, which was a mile wide and a mile and a half long.  Seven villages had been torn down to build the camp.  The displaced villagers might have walked through the camp.

One thing that most tourists don’t realize is that the International Monument at Auschwitz-Birkenau is built on top of a road that used to continue on to the outside of the camp. There were people, coming from outside the camp, and people going outside the camp, while the “death camp” was in operation.

The article about the HET trip starts off by mentioning the Great Synagogue, which was burned down on the night of Novemeber 9, 1939.  What is not mentioned is that this was the night of Kristallnacht, when Synagogues were burned all over Germany.

The HET tours seem to impress upon the students that the Polish town of Oswiecim was a Jewish town, which the Germans took away from the Jews and turned into a German town named Auschwitz.  It was the other way around.

 

The Jews were forced to sing as they marched to the gas chamber in the Auschwitz main camp

Rabbi Rafi Ostroff  being arrested for singing at the memorial site in the main Auschwitz camp

When I saw the photo above, at the top of a news article, which you can read here, I thought it was an old photo, which showed Jews being arrested by the Nazis during World War II.  Then I noticed that the man on the right has a cell phone in his hand.  This is actually a photo of Rabbi Rafi Ostroff, who was arrested and forced to pay a fine for singing Jewish songs while walking to the gas chamber in the main Auschwitz camp, which is now a Memorial Site.

What is the world coming to, if a Jew can’t sing on a visit to the gas chamber at Auschwitz?

The main camp (Auschwitz I) was not a “death camp” for Jews.  It was mainly a camp for political prisoners and illegal combatants in World War II.  You can read the history of the main camp on my website here.

Entrance road into the main Auschwitz camp leads to the gas chamber on the right

The photo above shows the gravel road that runs along the outside of the Auschwitz 1 camp. Organized tours start here, then turn right at the first intersection, which is shown in the photo. The road to the right goes through the Arbeit Macht Frei gate, which is out of camera range in this shot. The gravel road goes straight ahead to the gas chamber building, and the red brick political building, which is out of camera range. The SS hospital, which is directly across from the gas chamber, can be seen on the right; it is the light-colored, two-story building.

The photos of the Jews, who were arrested at Auschwitz, show them walking past the brick buildings in the main camp, not on the road to the gas chamber.  They were not singing on the road to the gas chamber, but on the streets of the camp, where the barracks are located.

According to an old news article, which you can read here, the Nazis DID force the Jews to sing on their way to the gas chamber in the main Auschwitz camp.  This was mentioned in a trial of some of the Nazi war criminals, who carried out the gassing of the Jews.

The following quote is from the news article:

A description of how Jewish victims at Auschwitz were forced by an SS officer called “a killer” to sing songs while on their way to the gas chambers was given to the court here today as the trial of 22 former Auschwitz-Birkenau administrators and medical corpsmen continued.

The day’s principal witness, Hermann H. Biermanski, who spent five years at Auschwitz, named Wilhelm Boger, one of the defendants, as the man who made the Jews sing on their way to their death. Boger, according to Biermanski, had “a reputation as a killer” even before he had been assigned to Auschwitz.

Read more: http://www.jta.org/1964/03/20/archive/nazi-forced-jews-to-sing-on-way-to-gas-chambers-witness-testifies#ixzz3AOWJTiep

I wrote about Wilhelm Boger in another blog post, which you can read here.

Wilhelm Boger was an SS administrator who worked in the brick building that was right next to the gas chamber in the main camp

The photo above shows the gallows, on which the Commandant of the Auschwitz camp was hanged after the war. The gas chamber, which is not shown, is on the left, under a mound of dirt covered with grass.  The entrance to the gas chamber was to the left of what is shown in the photo above.

Entrance into the main gas chamber at the Auschwitz main camp was through the oven room

As the victims entered the gas chamber in the main camp, their first view was the ovens which were located straight ahead.

When the Jews entered the Auschwitz gas chamber, they saw the ovens straight ahead of them

There was no undressing room for the gas chamber in the main camp; the victims entered with their clothes on, carrying their luggage.  They were told that they were going to take a shower, but there were no shower heads on the ceiling, as you can see in the photo below.

Tourists today enter the gas chamber in the main camp by going through the room where the cremation ovens are located, as shown on the left in the photo above.  On the left side of the photo above, you can see a bit of one of the cremation ovens.

Auschwitz gas chamber is now roped off so that tourists cannot walk around in the room

The photo below shows the exit from the gas chamber building, but the victims did not go through this door. Their bodies were carried by the Kapos (Jewish helpers) to the ovens next door to the gas chamber room.

Exit door from the gas chamber in the main Auschwitz camp

This quote is from another news article which you can read here:

On Friday, August 1st, local police arrested Rabbi Rafi Ostroff, the leader of a group of visiting Australian and South African students, for singing the same songs Jews sang as they marched to their deaths. Security officials at Auschwitz I twice requested that the group cease their singing. Auschwitz-Birkenau officials again requested they cease singing and subsequently summoned police.

Auschwitz-Birkenau marks the height of World War II anti-Semitism. The final resting place of over one million victims, Auschwitz today is a common pilgrimage site for Jews from around the world. Jews and non-Jews alike come to pay tribute to the dead and to assert that never again will the world stand idly by in the face of genocide. It seems that the new wave of Auschwitz security guards, little better than their 1940’s predecessors, have a different agenda. For the first time since January 1945, it seems that proud Jews are no longer safe at Auschwitz.

Another news article, which you can read here, has this quote:

Guards at the Auschwitz Birkenau concentration camp memorial site shouted at Jews who sang “Ani Maamin” – a song based on lines from Rambam (Maimonides) which was known as the Hymn of the Camps – during a visit to the camp and fined their guide 1,000 zloty, or about $350.

So says the guide, Rabbi Rafi Ostroff, who is also the head of the Etzion Bloc Religious Council.

Ani Ma’amin has several tunes, one of which was composed by a Hassidic rabbi in the cattle cars en route to the Nazi concentration camps. The song was then adopted by other Jewish prisoners and became known as the Hymn of the Camps

“Dear friends,” wrote Rabbi Ostroff on Facebook. “Friday-yesterday. I am leading a group of Bnei Akiva from Australia and South Africa. As usual the group sings holy songs of prayer during the visit. This time the guards of the camp hounded us all the time, shouting at us not to sing. Even in the gas chamber of Aushwitz 1, the guard came up to me and shouted at me: ‘tell them immediately to shut up’.

“We then went to Birkenau. In a secluded part of the camp the boys spontaneously started singing ‘Ani Maamin’. This was the song that prisoners sang on the way to be murdered there. A guard drove after us with his car and demanded that they be silent. I told him that I don’t have control over this as they are singing from their hearts. He then threatened to arrest me and called the police.

“In my group were a few boys [whose] grandparents were prisoners or were murdered in Auschwitz. We cried a lot on that day when they shared their stories with us. I was threatened with 24 hours imprisonment or paying a 1000 zloty fine (about $350). I opted to pay as it was 2 hours before Shabbat.

The road on which prisoners were taken to the Dachau gas chamber

The YouTube video below shows tourists supposedly walking in the footsteps of the prisoners who were taken to the gas chamber at Dachau.  This alleged route is erroneous, as my photos below will show.

The YouTube video starts out by showing tourists who are walking OUT of the section of the former Dachau camp, where the gas chamber is located.  My photo below shows the scene in the first minutes of the video.

Present day entrance into the gas chamber area of Dachau

My photo above shows a bridge over the Würm river canal, which divided the Dachau camp. This bridge was not built until long after the Dachau camp was liberated in April 1945, so the prisoners did not enter through the gate shown in the photo, which was not there when Dachau was a camp.

Würm river canal separated the gas chamber location from the prisoner’s camp

Würm river canal had only one bridge over it

When the Dachau camp was in operation and prisoners were taken to the gas chamber, there was no bridge across the Würm river canal, except the bridge in front of the gatehouse.

At first, the video shows extensive footage of tourists walking OUT of the gas chamber area.  Finally, we get to the point where the camera dwells on a white table in front of the gas chamber building, and then shows the door into the waiting room for the gas chamber.

My photo below shows the entrance into the waiting room for the gas chamber.

Door into the waiting room for the gas chamber

To the left of the door, shown above, is an open-air space where the disinfection chambers are located.  When the American liberators of Dachau arrived on April 29, 1945, they thought that the disinfection gas chambers were used as homicidal gas chambers.  Some tour guides at Dachau still tell tourists that the disinfection chambers were used to gas the Jews.

U.S. Army photo shows door into a disinfection chamber at Dachau

The American liberators thought that the door, shown in the photo above, was the door into a homicidal gas chamber. They assumed that the prisoners were persuaded to take off their clothes, hang up the clothes neatly on hangers placed on a clothes line, and then enter the rooms that had the word “Gaszeit” on the doors.

My photo below shows the open corridor and the wide doors into the chambers where the prisoner’s clothing was disinfected with the same Zyklon-B gas that was used to gas the Jews.

Doors into disinfection chambers at Dachau

Note that the doors into the disinfection chambers, where the clothing of the prisoners was deloused, have been painted over, so that tourists cannot see the word Gaszeit, which was originally on the door.

White table in front of the gas chamber building at Dachau

The photograph above shows the exterior of Baracke X, the new crematorium building, which housed four crematory ovens, a homicidal gas chamber disguised as a shower room, and four disinfection gas chambers used for delousing clothing. The outside wall of the gas chamber is in the section of the building directly behind the recently added round white table, which has a commemorative plaque on the top of it.

The gas chamber is the only room in the Baracke X building which has no windows. To the right of the gas chamber is a mortuary room where bodies were customarily stored, awaiting cremation.

The single door to the left of the mortuary room leads to a small vestibule between the mortuary and the crematorium. The wheel chair ramp in front of this door was added recently.

The double doors open into the crematory room where there are four ovens for burning corpses. The windows on either side of the double doors are the windows of the crematory room. When prisoners were gassed at Dachau, which you are required to believe in 19 countries now, they entered the camp through the gatehouse and went through an admission process, in which they were given a shower, their heads were shaved, and they were given a prison uniform to wear.

After being admitted into the Dachau camp, prisoners were taken, at some time later, to the gas chamber which was outside the camp in the section where there was a garrison for SS soldiers.

Gatehouse at Dachau with fence between the gate and the gas chamber location

The German people are noted for being efficient, but strangely, it never occurred to them to build a bridge over the canal at the other end of the camp where the gas chambers were located.   The prisoners had to walk through the gate house, and traverse the length of the camp to get to the gas chamber.

A much better location for the gas chamber would have been in the spot just inside the camp, where the prisoners were processed when they were admitted.  There was a large shower room in the building near the gatehouse, which is shown in the photo below.

Dachau administration building was just inside the gate

Large shower room in Dachau administration building

The photo above shows a large room which used to be the shower room for the Dachau prisoners. This room is in the administration building, which is now a Museum.