Scrapbookpages Blog

September 30, 2014

How many Holocaust memorials are there in Budapest?

Filed under: Holocaust — Tags: , — furtherglory @ 11:44 am
Holocaust Memorial in Budapest, Hungary

Holocaust Memorial in Budapest, Hungary

(Click on the image above to see a much larger size)

Why are people in Hungary protesting at this Holocaust Memorial Site?

Are the protesters offended because this memorial is not big enough? It seems to be quite small, compared to the Holocaust Memorial on the banks of the Danube river, which is shown below.

Holocaust memorial on the banks of the Danube river in Hungary

Holocaust memorial on the banks of the Danube river

Compared to the 5-acre Holocaust Memorial in the heart of Berlin, the memorial in the first photo above is woefully inadequate.  I blogged about the Berlin Memorial at https://furtherglory.wordpress.com/2010/04/07/memorial-for-the-murdered-jews-of-europe-is-crumbling-after-only-five-years/

Estimates vary considerably regarding the number of Jews from Hungary, who were killed in the Holocaust.  I previously blogged about this at https://furtherglory.wordpress.com/2012/05/04/how-many-hungarian-jews-were-murdered-in-the-holocaust/

Most of the Holocaust survivors who are still alive today are Hungarian Jews, who escaped the gas chambers of Auschwitz.

September 29, 2014

Vergangenheitsbewältigung is failing in Germany and anti-Semitism is on the march

According to a news article which you can read in full here, “With anti-Semitism on the march, Germany’s politicians and opinion makers are grappling with what went wrong with the country’s seven-decade-long struggle to come to terms with its past, or as they call it, Vergangenheitsbewältigung.”

In other words, the Germans can never bow low enough to the Jews; they can never build enough monuments in honor of the Holocaust; nor can they ever pay enough restitution to the Jews.

I previously blogged about this on this blog post: https://furtherglory.wordpress.com/2014/07/05/american-pastor-jobst-bittner-thinks-todays-germans-have-original-sin-and-collective-guilt-for-the-holocaust/

I also blogged about the number of German Jews who were killed in the Holocaust: https://furtherglory.wordpress.com/2011/02/02/how-many-german-jews-were-killed-in-the-holocaust/

This quote is from the news article cited above:

Since the Holocaust, Germany has measured its progress by how the country treats Jews. For example, the government provided generous funding to rebuild Jewish communities and allowed Jews from the former Soviet Union to relocate to Germany. But with a rising tide of anti-Semitism in recent months, there are now questions about how significant the culture of Holocaust remembrance has been in preventing hatred of Jews.

The wave of modern anti-Semitic rhetoric and violence inundating Germany in recent months jolted Chancellor Angela Merkel and religious and political leaders to participate in a “Stand-Up: Jew-Hatred-Never Again!” rally organized on Sept. 14 by the Central Council of Jews in Germany in the heart of Berlin’s government district, not far from the country’s national Holocaust memorial.

Today’s Germans cannot walk three feet without literally stumbling on Stolpersteine, which are stumbling stones honoring individual Jews who lost their lives in the Holocaust, as well as some Jews who survived the Holocaust.

Stumbling stones in Heidelberg in honor of Max and Olger Mayer

Stumbling stones in Heidelberg in honor of two German Jews Max and Olga Mayer

Thanks to Hitler and the Transfer Agreement, the Jews now have their own country, but they don’t have to live in it. The Jews can live in any country in the world, where they can set up their monuments and museums.

In spite of this, the Jews still want to live in Germany.

This quote is from the news article:

The list of anti-Semitic incidents [in Germany] between July and early September is long. Protests against Israel’s Operation Protective Edge in Gaza led seamlessly to Molotov cocktails tossed at a synagogue in Wuppertal, a city in western Germany, on July 29 — the first torching of a Wuppertal synagogue was during the Hitler era in 1938. Anti-Israel protesters attacked Jews for wearing kippot on the streets of Berlin in a couple of incidents in July. And that’s just a taste.

German authorities recorded 184 anti-Semitic incidents in June and July. According to a study by German human rights NGO Amadeu Antonio Foundation, there were 25 anti-Semitic incidents in August.

To me, the two photos below illustrate why Jews and Germans should not live in the same country. The first photo shows a Jewish Museum in Berlin and the second photo shows the entrance into the Museum through a traditional German building.

Jewish museum in Berlin

Jewish museum in Berlin

Traditional German building right next to the Jewish Museum

Traditional German building right next to the Jewish Museum

 

September 28, 2014

Sachsenhausen was an “experimental” camp, says student who toured the camp

Monument at Sachsenhausen Memorial Site

Monument at Sachsenhausen Memorial Site (Click to enlarge)

The photo above was taken by me in 2001; it shows one of the Sachsenhausen cremation ovens in the background. This statue might have been moved, by now, to another spot at the Sachsenhausen Memorial Site. The gas chamber at Sachsenhausen was located to the right of this statue.

Floor of the Sachsenhausen gas chamber which has been torn down

Floor of the Sachsenhausen gas chamber which has been torn down

Old photo of the Sachsenhausen gas chamber which was equipped with shower heads

Old photo of the Sachsenhausen gas chamber which was equipped with shower heads and had a window to let in natural light

This quote is from a news article, about a tour taken by York College students, which you can read in full here:

The first stop on their [student tour] itinerary was Berlin where they visited the concentration camp of Sachsenhausen.

For York College student Trey Sokolik, it was Sachsenhausen that made the biggest impact on his experience.

“It was an experimental camp so people didn’t know how they were going to die,” Sokolik explained. “The torture methods they used there were actually what brought the Sachsenhausen commander [Rudolf Höss] to Auschwitz.”

“They would hang people from their hands,” he continued. “Just thinking about what that felt like is horrible.”

The “hanging from their hands” was the practice of “baum hanging,” which is illustrated in the photo below. This torture is officially called Strappado.

Still shot from a Soviet movie shows "baum hanging"

Still shot from a Soviet movie shows “baum hanging”

I visited the Sachsenhausen camp twice, once in 1999 and again in 2001.  I had to go back a second time because I completely missed the gas chamber the first time that I was there. The gas chamber, which is quite small, is located in the area of the cremation ovens. (The gas chamber has a floor drain, and could have been used also as a shower room.)

Sachsenhausen is actually located in the town of Oranienburg, which is close to Berlin, and only a short train ride away.

What kind of an “experimental camp” was Sachsenhausen? Maybe this student is referring to the medical experiments, which were done at Sachsenhausen.

According to a brochure, which I purchased at the Sachsenhausen Memorial Site in 2002, there was a total of five infirmary (hospital) barracks in the Nazi Sachsenhausen concentration camp. (After the camp was liberated by Soviet troops, the camp was turned into a camp for German prisoners for the next ten years.)

The brochure says that the infirmary barracks at Sachsenhausen were used for presentation to high ranking visitors, foreign delegations and journalists. At the same time, medical experiments on prisoners, murders and selection for mass executions took place in the infirmary, according to the brochure.

Two of these infirmary barracks have been preserved at the camp Memorial Site. Nearby is the small building used by the Pathology Department. This is where autopsies were done to determine the cause of death or to see the results of the medical experiments on the subjects who died. The photograph below shows the autopsy room with the tile-covered tables where the autopsies was performed.

Autopsy tables at Sachsenhausen Memorial Site

Autopsy tables at Sachsenhausen Memorial Site

Doctor at Sachsenhausen camp

Doctor  at Sachsenhausen camp

Heinz Baumkötter, whose photograph, shown above, hangs in the Pathology Lab at Sachsenhausen, was prosecuted as a war criminal by a Soviet Union Military Tribunal in October 1947; he was convicted and sentenced to life in prison. In 1956, he was released by the Soviets, but was then put on trial again in a West Germany court, and convicted of murder.

According to Rudolf Höss, who was an adjutant at Sachsenhausen before he became the first Commandant of Auschwitz, “Arbeit Macht Frei” means that works liberates one in the spiritual sense. Sachsenhausen was the first concentration camp to have the Arbeit Macht Frei sign.

Höss was himself a prisoner at one time and he complained about having to sit all alone in a prison cell without having any work to occupy his time. When Höss was transferred to Auschwitz, he had this same slogan put over the entrance gate to the Auschwitz main camp, called Auschwitz I. When the Sachsenhausen camp was turned into a Communist prison for German citizens, the Arbeit Macht Frei sign was removed and the prisoners had nothing to occupy their time.

Sachenhausen was the first camp to have the "Arbeit Macht Frei" sign

Sachenhausen was the first camp to have the “Arbeit Macht Frei” sign

Immediately in front of the Sachsenhausen gate house is the roll call area (Appellplatz), which is shown in the center of the photograph above. According to a museum pamphlet, the SS constructed a shoe testing track here in 1940 where prisoners of the penal commando had to test the soles of army boots by marching for days. The civilian director of the shoe-testing operation was Ernst Brennscheidt, who was sentenced to 15 years of forced labor after he was convicted of Crimes against Humanity by a Soviet Union Military Tribunal in October 1947.

Is this why Sachsenhausen was called “an experimental camp?”  Because of the experiments done on the shoes?

The photo below is from this website.

The location of the shoe testing track at Sachsenhausen

The location of the shoe testing track at Sachsenhausen (Click for larger size)

My photo below shows a reconstruction of the alleged shoe testing track, which is in front of a wall that shows the location of the former barracks at Sachsenhausen

Monument at Sachsenhausen represents the barracks

Monument at Sachsenhausen represents the barracks which have been torn down

September 27, 2014

New book mentions Blessed Titus Brandsma, a Catholic priest who was killed at Dachau

A new book, entitled Principalities and Powers: Spiritual Combat 1942 – 1943, mentions a Dutch Carmelite priest named Father Titus Brandsma who has the title of “Blessed” because he has been canonized as a saint in the Catholic Church.

Father Titus Brandsma was a prisoner at Dachau

Father Titus Brandsma was a prisoner at Dachau

This quote is from the news article about the book and it’s author Father George William Rutler:

Fr Rutler, a parish priest in Manhattan, New York and a well-known essayist, has taken his title from the famous quotation in St Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians. This is in part because of he wishes to show the larger forces at work during WWII and also because an old friend and fellow priest had bequeathed to him a pile of newspapers, journals and radio transcripts for this particular year. Growing up after the war, Rutler sees his book as “a feeble act of thanks from my generation” for the previous one that had endured so many sacrifices on behalf of future ones. –
According to an article which you can read in full here, the author of the book, George William Rutler, “is fascinated by the way large historical events interweave with humbler but no less significant spiritual occurrences, relating that on the day of the British defeat in the first battle of El Alamein, Fr Titus Brandsma, a Dutch Carmelite, died in Dachau after giving his Rosary to the SS functionary who gave him a lethal injection.

This quote is from the article about the new book:

WWII “can rightly be understood and probably only fully appreciated as a holy war fought for multiple and mixed motives, but in its deepest meaning as a campaign against evil by defenders, consciously or obliviously, of the good.” Doubtless, secular historians such as Andrew Roberts or Sir Max Hastings, who has researched the “multiple and mixed motives” of the war in detail in his own books, would not demur from this conclusion. Certainly Churchill, not a conventional Christian believer but with a deep sense of what a Christian civilization signified, would have agreed with it.

It seems that Father Titus Brandsma was a martyr in the “holy war” now known as World War II. But why was he singled out to be killed?

Dachau was the concentration camp where 2,720 clergymen were sent, including 2,579 Catholic priests. The priests at Dachau were separated from the other prisoners and housed together in several barrack buildings in the rear of the camp. There were 1,780 Polish priests and 447 German priests at Dachau. Of the 1,034 priests who died in the camp, 868 were Polish and 94 were German. Most of them died as a result of the typhus epidemic in the camp.

Other clergymen at Dachau included 109 Protestant ministers, 22 Greek Orthodox, 2 Muslims and 8 men who were classified as “Old Catholic and Mariaists.”

One of the most famous Catholic priests, who was imprisoned at Dachau, was Blessed Father Titus Brandsma, a 61 year old Dutch priest, who was at Dachau for only five months before he was killed by an injection in the camp hospital on July 26, 1942; he was killed by injection because he was suffering from terminal kidney failure.

According to the accounts of his fellow priests, Father Brandsma was beaten and kicked daily even though he was already sick when he arrived in the camp on June 19, 1942. At first, Father Brandsma refused to enter the camp infirmary, and when he did finally consent, Father Brandsma was allegedly forced to participate in medical experiments.

Father Titus Brandsma had been arrested by the Nazis on January 19, 1942 in the Netherlands, which had been under German occupation since May 1940.

On January 15, 1942 the Nazis had sent articles to all the Catholic newspapers with orders that they be published the following day. All of the editors refused because on December 31, 1941, Father Brandsma had drawn up a letter to the 30 Catholic newspapers, urging all the Catholic editors in the Netherlands to violate the laws of the German occupation by not publishing any Nazi propaganda.

Father Brandsma had previously written a Pastoral Letter, read in all Catholic parishes in July 1941, in which the Dutch Roman Catholic bishops officially condemned the anti-Semitic laws of the Nazis and their treatment of the Jews. Dutch Catholics were informed by this letter that they would be denied the Sacraments of the Catholic church if they supported the Nazi party.

Father Brandsma had been very vocal in his opposition to the Nazi ideology ever since Hitler came to power in 1933. He was a prolific writer who had articles published in 80 different publications.

On January 21, 1942, Father Brandsma was put on trial and quickly convicted of treason because he refused to cooperate with the German occupation. Blessed Titus Brandsma died a martyr for the right of freedom of the press in an occupied country.

Pope John Paul II beatified Titus Brandsma in 1985, giving him the title of Blessed Titus Brandsma.

Father Titus Brandsma was a professor of Philosophy and Mysticism at the University of Nijmegan in the Netherlands. He belonged to The Order of the Brothers of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, a religious order that is believed to have been founded in the 12th century on Mount Carmel. The Carmelite priests were dedicated to the worship of Mary, the mother of God.

Entrance into the Carmelite Chapel at Dachau

Entrance into the Carmelite Chapel at Dachau

At the Dachau Memorial Site, there is a Carmelite convent which was built in 1963 just outside the former camp.  The entrance to the convent is through one of the former guard towers, which is shown in the photo above. The convent was built on the site of the gravel pit where prisoners had been assigned to work as punishment for breaking the rules in the camp.

Catholic priests were not sent to Dachau just because they were priests. Catholics and Protestants alike were arrested as “enemies of the state” but only if they preached against the Nazi government.

An important policy of the Nazi party in Germany was called Gleichschaltung, a term that was coined in 1933 to mean that all German culture, religious practice, politics, and daily life should conform with Nazi ideology. This policy meant total control of thought, belief, and practice and it was used to systematically eradicate all anti-Nazi elements after Hitler came to power.

There were around 20 million Catholics and 20,000 priests in Nazi Germany. The vast majority of the German clergymen and the German people, including the 40 million Protestants, went along with Hitler’s ideology and were not persecuted by the Nazis.

The first clergymen to arrive at Dachau were Polish priests who were sent there in 1939. The Polish priests had been arrested for helping the Polish Resistance after Poland had been conquered in only 28 days.

The largest number of Catholic priests at Dachau were the 1780 priests from Poland. The largest number of deaths of priests at Dachau was 868 from Poland. There were 830 Polish priests at Dachau when the camp was liberated, but 78 priests had already been released.

Bishop Franciszek Korczynski from Wloclawek, Poland published a book in 1957, entitled “Jasne promienie w Dachau” (Bright Beams in Dachau) in which he claimed that the extermination of the Polish clergy was planned by the Nazis as part of the liquidation of the Polish intelligentsia. He wrote that the priests at Dachau were starved and tortured and that the Nazis used the priests for medical experiments.

I got much of the information for my blog post today from a book entitled  “What was it like in the Concentration Camp at Dachau?” written by Dr. Johannes Neuhäusler. I purchased this book at the Dachau Memorial Site on my first visit in 1997.

In his book, Dr. Neuhäusler wrote that, out of the 2720 clergymen imprisoned at Dachau, 314 were released, 1034 died in the camp, 132 were transferred to another camp, and 1240 were still in the camp when it was liberated on April 29, 1945.

The highest number of priests that were released from Dachau was the 208 German priests. Out of the 447 German priests at Dachau, 100 were transferred to other camps and 94 died in the camp; there were only 45 German priests at Dachau when the camp was liberated.

The first German priest to enter Dachau in 1940 was Father Franz Seitz, according to Dr. Neuhäusler’s book. The first priests were put into Block 26, but it soon became over crowded because “practically all the priests interned in the camp at Sachsenhausen-Oranienburg were transferred to Dachau, especially many hundreds of Polish clergymen,” according to Dr. Neuhäusler.

Dr. Neuhäusler wrote that an emergency chapel was set up in Block 26 and on January 20, 1941 the first Mass was celebrated. “Some 200 priests stood enraptured before the altar while one of their comrades, wearing white vestments offered up the Holy Sacrifice.”

In 1940, the German bishops and the Pope had persuaded Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler to concentrate all the priests imprisoned in the various concentration camps into one camp, and to house them all together in separate blocks with a chapel where they could say Mass.

In early December 1940, the priests already in Dachau were put into Barracks Block 26 near the end of the camp street. Within two weeks, they were joined by around 800 to 900 priests from Buchenwald, Mauthausen, Sachsenhausen, Auschwitz and other camps, who were put into Blocks 28 and 30. Block 30 was later converted into an infirmary barrack.

One of the priests at Dachau, Father William J. O’Malley, wrote the following regarding the priests who were arrested and sent to Dachau because they were actively helping the underground Resistance against the German occupation of Europe:

“The 156 French, 63 Dutch, and 46 Belgians were primarily interned for their work in the Underground. If that were a crime, such men as Michel Riquet, S.J., surely had little defense; he was in contact with most of the leaders of the French Resistance and was their chaplain, writing forthright editorials for the underground press, sequestering Jews, POW’s, downed Allied airmen, feeding and clothing them, providing them with counterfeit papers and spiriting them into Spain and North Africa.”

Was Father Brandsma forced to be a subject of medical experiments at Dachau?  He was already 61 years old and he was already sick when he was admitted into the Dachau camp. It is highly unlikely that he was used as a subject of medical experiments.

Dr. Schilling was put on trial at Dachau because he conducted medical experiments on the prisoners

Dr. Schilling was put on trial at Dachau because he had conducted medical experiments

Dr. Klaus Schilling, shown in the photo above as he testified on the witness stand in the post-war trial of the Dachau staff, was put on trial and convicted by the American Military Tribunal because he had conducted medical experiments on inmates at Dachau.

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

After the war, Dr. Schilling was arrested by the American Army and charged with participating in a “common plan” to violate the Laws and Usages of War under the Geneva Convention of 1929 because he had conducted experiments on Dachau prisoners, using various drugs in an effort to find a cure for malaria. Most of his subjects were young Polish priests whom Dr. Schilling infected by means of mosquitoes from the marshes of Italy and the Crimea, according to author Peter Padfield in his book entitled “Himmler.” The priests were chosen for the experiments because they were not required to work, as were the ordinary prisoners at Dachau.

One of the prosecution witnesses at the trial of the German Major War Criminals at the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal was Dr. Franz Blaha, a Czech medical doctor who was a Communist political prisoner at Dachau. An affidavit signed by Dr. Blaha was entered into the main Nuremberg trial. It was marked Document Number 3249-PS, Exhibit USA-663.

His comments in this affidavit about Dr. Schilling are quoted below from the transcript of the Nuremberg trial for January 11, 1946

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

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

 

September 26, 2014

Forget Sobibor — a new gas chamber has been found at Dachau

Filed under: Dachau, Germany, Holocaust — Tags: , , — furtherglory @ 12:02 pm
International monument at Dachau

International monument at Dachau in honor of the prisoners who died there

It’s been seven years since I’ve been to the Dachau Memorial Site. I was shocked to learn from this website, that there is another gas chamber in a basement underneath the International Monument at Dachau.  The door into the gas chamber is on the other side of the monument. Who knew?

My 2007 photo below shows the back side of the International Monument with what looks like a basement door. According to the author of the article, cited above, this is a door into another gas chamber at Dachau.  There was no mention of whether this was a homicidal gas chamber like the one in the Dachau shower room, or whether this was a disinfection chamber for the clothing of the prisoners.

This quote is from the article:

At the base of the [International] monument a small set of stairs lead down to a small door. There seem to be no windows in this basement building, which turned out to be one of the many gas chambers on the camp site.

Back side of International monument at Dachau

Back side of International monument at Dachau

Dachau building which is now hidden by International Monument

Dachau building which is now hidden by International Monument

Shortly after the Dachau camp was liberated, the Polish prisoners, who were mostly Catholic, put up a Catholic Cross where the International Monument now stands. This means that the gas chamber, which is allegedly under the International Monument, was not there until after the camp was liberated on April 29, 1945.

After the Dachau camp was liberated, it was immediately turned into a prison camp for German POWs who were held for several years after the war. Dachau became known as War Crimes Enclosure No. 1.

This quote is also from the article about Dachau:

Before entering the gates of the camp, we passed the track where inmates loaded ammunition and army uniforms into carriages.

Next to the railway line, I stood on the spot where thousands of political prisoners, women and children, had stood before entering the camp.

Tracks near the Dachau gate are narrow gauge tracks, not train tracks

Tracks near the Dachau gate are narrow gauge tracks. Photo Credit: Windy Wilson blog

My 2007 photo of the narrow gauge tracks near the Dachau gate

My 2007 photo of the narrow gauge tracks at Dachau gate

The tracks shown in my photo above were not the train tracks, which brought prisoners from the train station to the gate into the Dachau camp. These are narrow gauge tracks used to transport items made in the factories at Dachau, which were outside the camp gates.  The incoming prisoners had to walk to the camp from the train station.

The author of the article about Dachau took the 45 minute walk to the camp on the “Path of Remembrance.”  This is the same path that the prisoners walked from the train station to the camp.

September 25, 2014

After the Rialto Holocaust assignment fiasco, students will now study “The Holocaust Chronicle,” a Jewish history of the Holocaust (updated)

Filed under: California, Dachau, Holocaust — Tags: , , — furtherglory @ 11:50 am

Scroll down to read the update.

You can read about the new assignment for the students in the Rialto school district at http://www.sbsun.com/social-affairs/20140918/rialto-unified-details-plan-to-re-teach-holocaust-were-really-trying

Previously, the students were asked to study both sides of the Holocaust and write an essay, giving their opinion. Now these same students will be trained in only the Jewish side of the story.

The Holocaust Chronicle is a 709 page book, which weighs about 20 pounds. I have a copy of this book in my home library and I have read most of it.

Jewish book tells history of the Holocaust

Jewish book tells history of the Holocaust

I found this quote, regarding the identity of the girl on the cover:

The young girl pictured on our homepage, and on the cover of The Holocaust Chronicle book, was discovered by British troops in the typhus ward of the Bergen-Belsen, Germany, concentration camp in April 1945. She was one of approximately 60,000 inmates found alive at the camp. Of that number, at least 10,000 were so ravaged by disease and the effects of overwork that they died after their liberation.

The girl’s name, background, and ultimate fate are unknown. We do know that she looked into a camera in April 1945, and that she may very well have walked out of Bergen-Belsen, ready to make her future. If you feel you can identify this girl, please contact us by clicking here, and forward your remarks.

So you can’t get past the cover of this book without reading mistaken so-called facts about the Holocaust. There were 13,000 prisoners who allegedly died after Bergen-Belsen was voluntarily turned over to the British.  Bergen-Belsen was an EXCHANGE camp, a fact which should have been mentioned.

There are numerous mistakes in The Holocaust Chronicle.

In looking for the mistakes, I started with the section on Dachau. On page 578, there is a full-page photo of a Dachau guard who has been shot in the leg, so that he can’t escape the prisoners who are preparing to beat him to death with a shovel. There is an American soldier in the background, holding a pistol. He has his back turned and is ignoring the whole thing.  Is he the one who shot this man in the leg so that the inmates could beat the man to death with a shovel?

German was shot in the leg at Dachau so that the prisoners could beat him to death with a shovel

German man was shot in the leg at Dachau so that the prisoners could beat him to death with a shovel

This is a photo that illustrates the “Dachau massacre,” but the book does not mention this war crime committed by the American liberators.  The man who is preparing to beat the man with a shovel is a Polish Resistance Fighter who was legally incarcerated at Dachau because he was an illegal combatant.  Does The Holocaust Chronicle explain this?  Of course not.

I didn’t have to look very far from the above cited page to find another serious mistake on page 585. There is a photo of some Gypsy children on page 585.  The caption on the photo says that these children “had been subjected to savage medical experiments.”

Gypsy children who are suffering from a disease called "Noma."

Gypsy children who are suffering from a disease called “Noma.”

I blogged about these children, who are suffering from a disease called “Noma,” on this blog post:

What imams learned about Gypsy children on their trip to Auschwitz

I also blogged about a famous photo, taken at Nordhausen. This photo is shown on page 598 of The Holocaust Chronicle, with a caption that says that these bodies are the bodies of inmates, which the Germans “had left to rot” at Nordhausen.

https://furtherglory.wordpress.com/tag/prisoners-killed-by-american-bombs/

Should public schools in America allow children to study the Jewish version of history, or is this a violation of the First Amendment?

What if a student points out a mistake in The Holocaust Chronicle?  Will he or she be expelled for the crime of “Holocaust denial”?

Update Sept. 26, 2014:

I started looking through my copy of The Holocaust Chronicle again this morning to get an idea of what the students in the Rialto school district will be learning about the Holocaust.

On page 451 of the book, I found the photo below, which I have on my website scrapbookpages.com.

Demonstration of how the corpses were dragged to the ovens at Dachau

Demonstration of how the corpses were dragged to the ovens at Dachau

This photo is not on a page about Dachau in The Holocaust Chronicle. It is on a page about the Warsaw ghetto. The caption on the photo identifies the men in the photo as Sonderkommandos, and says that the Sonderkommando Jews assisted the Nazis in order to spare their own lives.  There is no hint that this photo was taken after the liberation of Dachau, at the suggestion of the American liberators.

The photo above is part of a set of 3 photos.  The other two photos, which I have on my website are shown below.

Photo taken after Dachau was liberated shows how bodies were dragged to the ovens

Photo taken after Dachau was liberated shows how bodies were dragged to the ovens

Demonstration of how bodies were put into the ovens at Dachau

Demonstration of how bodies were put into the ovens at Dachau

This quote is from the page of my website which shows the three photos above:

The three old photos [above] show crematory workers demonstrating how they dragged the dead bodies out of the morgue, loaded them onto a stretcher and then shoved them into the cremation ovens. Posed photographs, such as those shown [above], were offered for sale to American soldiers who visited the museum set up in Baracke X by the US Army after the liberation of Dachau. All three photos are courtesy of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

According to Marcus J. Smith, a U.S. Army doctor, who wrote a book called “The Harrowing of Hell,” the chief of the crematorium crew was Ludvik “a heavy, powerfully muscled Czech who has labored in the crematorium for a long time.” Smith wrote that Ludvik sent him a letter in which he complained that his team of 10 people were not being treated as well as they had been by the SS. Ludvik wrote in this letter: “We feel that after our liberation, at least the same standard of living should be maintained. But our position is worse than then as to food, drinks and tobacco.”

Smith wrote that, because the cremation efforts were too slow, the bodies were buried by German civilians “at the American commander’s request.” The corpses were taken on carts to the burial site on a hill called Leitenberg where the bodies were transferred to a bulldozed excavation, according to Smith. He wrote that “Eventually 2,400 bodies were buried.” That would mean that there was a total of 3,110 bodies in the camp, including those of the prisoners who died between April 29th and May 6th after the liberation. There were allegedly 2,310 bodies on the death train that arrived in the camp on April 27, 1945, which would have to be included in this total. There were 2,226 prisoners who died in the month of May 1945 after the liberation of the camp; they were buried in a cemetery in the town of Dachau.

Why is this photo, taken after the liberation of Dachau, on a page about the Warsaw ghetto in The Holocaust Chronicle?

The only reason, that I can think of, is that this is a horrible photo which illustrates how evil the Nazis were.  Students, who will be required to study this book, will assume that the dummy in the photo is a human being who is being dragged to an oven, probably while still alive.

 

September 23, 2014

students in an American middle school sing the national anthem of Israel

Filed under: Germany, Holocaust — Tags: , , — furtherglory @ 9:21 am

In a news story, which you can read in full here, I learned that school children in the Illing Middle School in the town of Manchester, Connecticut sang “Hatikvah,” the national anthem of Israel and read Martin Niemöller’s famous poem “First they came for…” during a ceremony in the school’s Holocaust Children’s Butterfly and Remembrance Garden.

This quote is from the news article:

Illing Middle School students have been studying Nazi genocide in all its horrible detail — desperate fingernail scratches on gas chamber walls; piles of luggage and eyeglasses seized from doomed Jewish victims; hills of human ash.

Eyeglasses on display in the museum at Auschwitz

Eyeglasses on display in the museum at Auschwitz

These American students are studying the eyeglasses taken from the prisoners at Auschwitz. What do these eyeglasses prove?  It proves that the Nazis were thrifty and they saved everything to give to the German people who had nothing after their homes were bombed.

I seriously doubt that these school children understood Niemöller’s poem.  I blogged about this on this blog post: https://furtherglory.wordpress.com/2010/08/19/rev-martin-niemoller-first-they-came-for-the-communists/

I am appalled that school children in America are singing the national anthem of another country and gathering in a garden dedicated to the Holocaust religion.

This quote is from the article, which was published in June, 2014:

Phillip Axler, a special education paraprofessional at Illing, helped students understand Jewish culture, Parker said, and in a project titled, “Memory Tile,” students wrote poems about individual children who were killed.

In my humble opinion, I don’t believe that American school children should be singing the national anthem of another country, nor studying Jewish culture.  The Holocaust didn’t happen in America and should not be taught in American schools because the Holocaust has the status of a religion, and America allegedly has “the separation of church and state.”

 

September 21, 2014

Joan Rivers [Joan Alexandra Molinsky] had a Holocaust tattoo on her arm

Filed under: TV shows — Tags: , — furtherglory @ 11:53 am

According to this website http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2014/09/04/joan-rivers-dead-81-surgery_n_5745042.html Joan Rivers had a tattoo put on her arm in 2014, which said 6M in honor of the 6 Million Jews who were killed in the Holocaust.

This quote is from the website:

Earlier in 2014, she got inked: a half-inch-tall tattoo, “6M,” on the inside of her arm representing 6 million Jews killed in the Nazi Holocaust.

I was a big fan of Joan Rivers, starting back in the 1960s when she was on TV cracking jokes.  I remember one joke about a young girl with big boobs: “She could not see her coloring box.”

I read one of her books about 20 years ago. She told about her early days, when she had a hard time establishing her career as a comedienne, but she never gave up.

September 19, 2014

new evidence of gas chambers found at the Sobibór camp in Poland

Filed under: Germany, Holocaust — Tags: , , — furtherglory @ 10:10 am

Sobibór was one of the three Aktion Reinhard [Reinhardt] camps, which were set up after the end of the Wannsee Conference, which was held, starting on January 20, 1942, to plan “The Final Solution to the Jewish Question in Europe.”

Sobibor is a remote village in Poland

Sobibor train station in Poland

One of the followers of my blog visited the site of the Sobibór camp 10 days ago. He made a comment on my blog which included a link to this news story.  The headline of the story is

Archaeologists in Poland Make Horrendous Discovery Underneath the Ground That the Nazis Never Wanted Found

This quote is from the news story:

Another archeologist involved in unearthing the gas chambers, identified as Wojciech Mazurek, offered a bone-chilling description of the concentration camp.

“The extermination of people took place there; murder by smoke from an engine that killed everyone within 15 minutes in these gas chambers, in torment, shouting,” he told Reuters Television. “It is said that … the Nazis even bred geese in order to drown out these shouts so that prisoners could not have heard these shouts, these torments.”

[…]

In the wake of the camp uprising that occurred on 14 October 1943, the Germans decided to dismantle the camp. Apart from certain structures that have been dismantled since the war and the few buildings in connection to the camp that are still standing, the site has remained bare lacking any real trace of the former extermination camp.

Sobibór is way out in the boondocks.  Why did the Nazis go to such trouble and expense to take the Jews to this God-forsaken place, when they could have just set up gas chambers in some more convenient place?

The site of the tiny village of Sobibor in Poland

The site of the tiny village of Sobibor in Poland  Click on the photo for a much larger size

I have written about Sobibór on my blog in the past, but it bears repeating.

The Sobibór “extermination” camp was on the eastern edge of German-occupied Poland, five kilometers west of the Bug river. The Bug river was as far as trains from western Europe could go without changing the wheels to fit the train tracks in the Soviet Union, which were a different gauge.

On the other side of the Bug river from Sobibór was Ukraine, which had belonged to the Soviet Union until it was taken by the Germans shortly after their invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941.

The unsuspecting Jews, who arrived at Sobibór, were told that they would be sent to work camps in Ukraine after they had taken a shower, but instead, the Jews were immediately killed in gas chambers that used the “lethal smoke” known as carbon monoxide.

The Jews were not registered upon arrival at the Aktion Reinhard camps and no death records were kept by the Nazis.

The Nazis claimed that the Aktion Reinhard camps were transit camps for the “evacuation of the Jews to the East,” a euphemism for the genocide of the Jews. Unlike the death camps at Auschwitz and Majdanek, the three Aktion Reinhard camps did not have ovens to cremate the bodies.  The German people are noted for being efficient, so this oversight is inconceivable.

Whatever happened to all those bodies? Were they buried, or burned on outdoor pyres?  According to the survivors, the bodies were first buried and then dug up and burned on pyres.

The head of Aktion Reinhard (Operation Reinhard) was SS-Brigadeführer Odilio Globocnik, who had previously been the Gauleiter of Vienna, Austria. Unfortunately, Globocnik and Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler both committed suicide after being captured by the British, so we will never know their version of what happened.  Thanks to the British, the  Holocaust  Holohoax story is safe.

At the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal in 1946, documents were introduced which showed an exchange of letters in 1943 between Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler, the head of all the concentration camps, and Richard Glücks, the Inspector of the Concentration Camps, in which Glücks suggested that Sobibór be converted into a concentration camp. In a letter dated 5 July 1943, Himmler rejected this idea. This indicates that Sobibór was not a concentration camp, but rather a camp that was not part of the Nazi concentration camp system.

The three Aktion Reinhard camps were all in remote locations, but “each site was on a railroad line linking it with hundreds of towns and villages whose Jewish communities were now trapped and starving” in the spring of 1942, according to Martin Gilbert’s book entitled The Holocaust. Sobibór was linked by rail with many large Jewish communities, including Lublin, Wlodawa and Chelm.

Jews were also brought from the Theresienstadt ghetto, located in what is now the Czech Republic, although Theresienstadt allegedly had a gas chamber.  Jews were also brought from the Netherlands, to be gassed at Sobibór.

The Jews from the Netherlands were brought to Sobibór on passenger trains.  This begs the question:  Why didn’t the Nazis save money by gassing these Jews in the Netherlands? Why didn’t they use these valuable trains for transporting German troops?

Deportations to Sobibór began in mid April 1942 with transports from the town of Zamosc in Poland, according to Holocaust historian Martin Gilbert.

The Jews from the Lublin ghetto were also sent to Sobibór to be gassed, although there were three or four gas chambers at Majdanek just outside the city of Lublin. Now this doesn’t make any sense at all.  The Jews could have walked to the Majdanek gas chambers, but instead they were transported on trains to Sobibór.

During the first phase of the extermination of the Jews at Sobibór, which lasted until July 1942, an estimated 100,000 Jews were gassed to death. Their bodies were buried in mass graves, then dug up later and burned on pyres.

During the next phase, the bodies were burned immediately, according to Toivi Blatt, one of the few survivors of Sobibór. At the age of 15, Blatt had been selected to work in sorting the clothing in the camp. Philip Bialowitz was also selected to work in sorting the possessions of the Jews who arrived at the camp; he also survived.

During World War II, and for years afterward, the Sobibór camp was virtually unknown. William Shirer did not even mention it in his monumental 1147-page book entitled The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.

It was not until the release of a 1987 TV movie, Escape from Sobibor, based on a book with the same name, that the public knew of this remote spot where 250,000 Jews lost their lives. The movie tells the story of the revolt during which around 300 prisoners escaped; no more than 50 of them survived to the end of the war. Philip Bialowitz and Toivi Blatt were among the prisoners who escaped and survived.

I have never visited the site of the Sobibór camp because there is not much to see there.  The photo below, taken by Allen Collins, shows two monuments in the alleged location of the gas chambers. It has now been confirmed, in this news article that this was the location of 10 gas chambers.

Monuments in the alleged location of the gas chambers at Sobibor

Monuments in the alleged location of the gas chambers at Sobibor

The photo above shows the spot in Camp III at Sobibór where 10 brick buildings with gas chambers once stood. A large block of stone represents the gas chambers in two of the buildings at Sobibór , which were torn down long ago.

The remains of 8 more gas chamber buildings were found near the monument

The remains of 8 more gas chamber buildings were found near the monument (click on photo for larger size)

In the photo immediately above, notice that the monument made of red stone has been temporarily removed from the block on which it stood.

Survivors of Sobibór do not agree on the number, nor the size of the gas chambers. The victims were allegedly killed with carbon monoxide from the exhaust of engines taken from captured Soviet tanks, which were stored in Camp IV. There is also disagreement on whether these were diesel engines or gasoline engines.

In the wake of the camp uprising that occurred on 14 October 1943, the Germans decided to dismantle the camp. Apart from certain structures that have been dismantled since the war and the few buildings in connection to the camp that are still standing, the site has remained bare lacking any real trace of the former extermination camp.

According to another news story, which you can read here, the exact location of the gas chambers has now been found.  The photo below shows the exact spot where the gas chamber building was located.

Exact location of Sobibor gas chamber has been found

Exact location of Sobibor gas chamber has been found

 

September 17, 2014

Oskar Groening was “grease in the machine of mass extermination” at Auschwitz

Filed under: Germany, Holocaust — Tags: , — furtherglory @ 10:12 am
The inside of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp

The inside of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp  Photo credit: Scott Barbour/Getty Images

Whenever you see the photo above at the top of a news article, you know that whatever follows is sure to be lies and half-truths.  This is a photo of the INSIDE of the Auschwitz-Birkenau “death camp,” but it is always used as a photo which purports to show the tracks outside the camp, leading into the camp.

My photo below, taken in 2005, shows the tracks outside the camp, leading into the camp.

Tracks outside the Birkenau gate, leading into the camp

Tracks outside the Birkenau gate, leading into the camp with a cornfield on the right

The Getty Images photo at the top of this page was copied from this news article. The caption on the photo is this: “This railway tracks leading to the main gate at Auschwitz II – Birkenau”  No, this is not the tracks LEADING TO THE MAIN GATE; these are the tracks inside the camp, where the transport trains stopped.

My point is that the Holocaust was not what it is now purported to be by the Holocaustian religion. Oskar Groening was not even a cog in the wheel of what happened at Auschwitz; he was only the grease in a cog of the wheel.

The “grease in the wheel” quote is from this very long document about an interview that Oskar Groening gave recently.

The photo below, in a smaller size, is at the top of the long article about Oskar Groening.

AUSCHWITZ FILE PHOTO

What do you see in the photo above — Jewish helpers (Kapos) helping the new arrivals, or SS men grabbing the luggage of the Jews?

What about the Jews in the photo below, who are carrying their bundles, as they walk to the gas chamber, with no SS man in sight.  I previously blogged about Tadeusz Borowski who famously wrote about the Jews “carrying their bundles” as shown in the photo below.

Jews carrying  their bundles as they walk to the gas chamber

Jews carrying their bundles as they walk to the gas chamber

If the idea was to steal the possessions of the Jews, why didn’t the Nazis order the Jews to bring two pieces of luggage with them on the transport trains? Why did some of the Jews bring only one small sack?

This quote is from the long documentary about an interview which Oskar Groening gave to a Jewish writer:

The documentary portrayed Gröning as the person he was, grease in the machine of mass extermination. The BBC also offered no exoneration.

[…]

Are you guilty?

Oskar Gröning looks at the videotape lying on the table in front of him. He ponders the question for a long time. It’s important to him to find the right words. Then he says: “Guilt really has to do with actions, and because I believe that I was not an active perpetrator, I don’t believe that I am guilty.”

If you weren’t a perpetrator, what were you? An accomplice?

“I don’t know. I avoid the question; it gets me in trouble. Accomplice would almost be too much for me. I would describe my role as a ‘small cog in the gears.’ If you can describe that as guilt, then I am guilty, but not voluntarily. Legally speaking, I am innocent.”

http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/an-ss-officer-remembers-the-bookkeeper-from-auschwitz-a-355188-2.html
He believes in Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels. He believes that it is the Germans’ duty to destroy global Judaism. He believes that Germany lost World War I because of the Jews. And he wants Germany to win this war.

He eats well, works diligently and sleeps well. The men in the SS sleep in comfortable beds covered with soft, checkered quilts. They once belonged to the Jews.

He believes in Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels. He believes that it is the Germans’ duty to destroy global Judaism. He believes that Germany lost World War I because of the Jews. And he wants Germany to win this war.

He eats well, works diligently and sleeps well. The men in the SS sleep in comfortable beds covered with soft, checkered quilts. They once belonged to the Jews.

[…]

He submits another transfer request, and then another. In September 1944, he is discharged to a field unit and fights against the Allies during the Ardennes offensive.

[…]

What did you think when you found out that Jews were being gassed in Auschwitz?

“That it was a tool of waging war. A war with advanced methods.”

But you weren’t in the war. You were in a factory where systematic murder was being committed.

Note this claim in the quote above: “The men in the SS sleep in comfortable beds covered with soft, checkered quilts. They once belonged to the Jews.”

Jews at Dachau slept in beds with checkered covers

Jews at Dachau slept in beds with checkered covers

Did the SS men sneak into the Jewish barracks and steal the covers from the Jews, or did the Jews bring checkered blankets with them to Auschwitz, where they were stolen by the SS men?

 

 

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