How the New York Times reported the liberation of Auschwitz in 1945

The New York Times news story about the liberation of Auschwitz on January 27, 1945 was reprinted this year in commemoration of the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz complex. The photo above was used to illustrate the news story.

I have visited Auschwitz twice, in 1998 and again in 2005, but I did not see this sign; the photo appears to have been taken in the main Auschwitz camp. I believe that this ominous sign has been added recently for the benefit of millions of tourists who flock to see the Auschwitz “Murder Factory.”

This quote is from the original New York Times article:

Saved from “Murder Factory”

MOSCOW, Feb. 2 [1945] (U.P.) —-The Newspaper Pravda reported today that the Red Army had saved several thousand tortured, emaciated inmates of the Germans’ greatest “murder factory” at Oswiecim [Oświęcim] in southwest Poland.
Pravda’s corespondent said fragmentary reports indicated that at least 1,500,000 persons were slaughtered at Oswiecim. During 1941, 1942 and early 1943 five trains arrived daily at Oswiecim with Russians Poles, Jews, Czechs, French and Yugoslaves jammed in sealed cars.

Oświęcim  is the Polish name for Auschwitz.  In 1945, the town was still known as Auschwitz, it’s original name. I blogged about this on a previous blog post at https://furtherglory.wordpress.com/2011/08/27/whats-in-a-name-auschwitz-and-birkenau/

I took photos of the warning signs on my two visits to Auschwitz. My photos are shown below.

Warning sign at the entrance to the Auschwitz main camp

A faded original sign at the Auschwitz main camp

To get back to the original New York Times article, note that the news story says that 1,500,000 people were murdered in the camp.

At the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal, the Soviets reported that 4 million people had been killed at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Now we know that the original report claimed that 1.5 million were killed; this number is now on the stones at the International monument, but the official claim now is that only 1.1 million people were  killed at Auschwitz, most of whom were Jews.

Note that the New York Times news report says that “During 1941, 1942 and early 1943 five trains arrived daily at [Oświęcim] with Russians Poles, Jews, Czechs, French and Yugoslaves jammed in sealed cars.”

It is now known that, after 1943, it was mostly Jews who arrived on the trains to Auschwitz.

Inside the Auschwitz main camp

The Auschwitz Visitors Center, the first stop for tourists

My 2005 photo of Artwork in the Auschwitz Museum Visitors Center

 

 

300 survivors attend 70th anniversary of Auschwitz liberation

My 2005 photo of the gate into the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp

Giant tent over the gate into Auschwitz-Birkenau

Yesterday, there was a big celebration at Auschwitz-Birkenau to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the infamous death camp.  You can read all about the ceremony here.  I previously blogged about the 2011 ceremony here.

The 2015 celebration was attended by 300 survivors of the camp, who were children when the camp was liberated.

Children who were liberated from Auschwitz-Birkenau

The headline of the news story is

Auschwitz 70th anniversary: Survivors warn of new crimes

This quote is from the BBC news article:

Auschwitz survivors have urged the world not to allow a repeat of the crimes of the Holocaust as they mark 70 years since the camp’s liberation.

“We survivors do not want our past to be our children’s future,” Roman Kent, born in 1929, told a memorial gathering at the death camp’s site in Poland.

Some 300 Auschwitz survivors returned for the ceremony under a giant tent.

Some 1.1 million people, mostly Jews, were killed there between 1940 and 1945, when Soviet troops liberated it.  […]

Ronald S Lauder, president of the World Jewish Congress, told the commemoration: “Jews are targeted in Europe once again because they are Jews…

Once again young Jewish boys are afraid to wear yarmulkes [skullcaps] on the streets of Paris, Budapest, London and even Berlin.”

What a revolting development this is!  Jews are not safe anywhere in Europe.  Why does everyone hate the Jews, who have never done anyone any harm?

 

My critical review of “Night Will Fall” documentary film

Update Oct. 8, 2015:

Today, I read a news article about the film entitled Night Will Fall. As you read the news article, see if you can find the words “Exchange Camp” used to describe Bergen-Belsen.  Why is this important?  Bergen-Belsen was set up as a camp to exchange prisoners during Word War II, but the Allies couldn’t have cared less about exchanging prisoners.

The following quote is from the news article:

Begin quote:
Footage [in “Night Will Fall”] shows how armed German soldiers stepped aside and allowed the British forces to march behind enemy lines. “The more I think about it now, I am amazed that none of us opened fire!” said George Leonard (Oxfordshire Yeomanry).

The soldiers’ footage became part of a project produced by Sidney Bernstein for the Allied Forces, titled “German concentration camps factual survey.” Later Alfred Hitchcock crossed the ocean to become part of the team as his contribution to the war effort.

[…]

British soldiers lined up all the SS men and women and made them prisoners of war, including the camp commandant, Josef Kramer. Mania Salinger described how she yelled with joy, “The Germans are gone,” when she realized that the watch tower was deserted. She was the first to be filmed behind the barbed-wire fence by the liberating British troops.
The two weeks of filming visually conveyed the feeling of despair and horror witnessed by the liberators of the camp. “These were Europeans of another faith who had been killed for no other reason.”

[…]

The ample footage documenting the horror of the Holocaust was made possible by the American-British film department partnership which decided to use the power of the moving image in war time. Initially the program was set up to make small propaganda films for the war effort and “to deal with a defeated Germany.” Sidney Bernstein was in charge of the British Psychological Warfare Department.

Dr. Toby Haggith, of the Imperial War Museums, described how the “camera was used in a very specific way, to gather evidence, to collect evidence.” To show “how a person was brutalized or murdered, how they’ve been killed, you have to get close to that person, to the wounds.” In prior wars, combat cameramen had not filmed such gut-wrenching scenes.

Sidney Bernstein said in 1984 that his instructions to allied cameramen were “to film everything that could prove one day that this actually happened. It will be a lesson to all mankind as to the Germans, who had denied that they knew anything about it.” The film would be the evidence that “we could show them.”

Soldiers corralled officials and mayors within a reasonable range, to come watch the disposal and burial of bodies in the pit and they filmed them watching. Bernstein wanted film evidence that they had seen the burials because most people would deny that it happened. SS officers were also filmed helping with the burial of the skeletal cadavers.

Five hundred Hungarian troops captured on film with the SS were manning the digging operation to bury as many bodies as quickly as possible in order to reduce the evidence. “The Master Race had been taught to be hard and they could kill in cold blood. It was proper to make them bury the nameless, hopeless creatures they had helped starve to death.” By April 24, 1945, some sound equipment was brought in to better document Bernstein’s film.
[…]
Scrolling through the horrible pictures frozen in time of some of the enslaved, tortured, starved, killed, and burned by German fascists, the movie ends with a powerful message. “Unless the world learns the lesson these pictures teach, night will fall. But by God’s grace, we who live will learn.”

End Quote

Continue reading my original post:

Last night I watched the premiere of the new documentary film Night Will Fall. 

This quote is from a description of the film:

Begin quote:

The HBO documentary “Night Will Fall” is a movie about the Holocaust, a movie about remembering the Holocaust and primarily, at least in formal terms, a movie about a movie. It may not do full justice to all these subjects in its tight 78 minutes, but it’s not a film you’re likely to forget.

The most wrenching sequences in “Night Will Fall” are the scenes it incorporates from “German Concentration Camps Factual Survey,” a movie begun under the auspices of the British government in 1945. Using film shot by Allied cameramen at camps including Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen and Dachau, and assembled by a team that included Alfred Hitchcock as a supervising director, “Factual Survey” was meant to be a historical document and a teaching tool; among the stated goals of the filmmakers was that it be shown to Germans to prove to them that the horrors of the camps were real.

End quote

Sorry to say, I did not like the film at all. It is obvious that an attempt was made to make an artistic film, but artwork is not appropriate in a DOCUMENTARY.  One thing that irritated me to death was the frequent shots of the end of a film strip.  Back in the old days, the end of a film reel used to show symbols.  This technique was very much overdone in the film.

But there was one good thing about the film, which surprised me.  The narrator does say that the Bergen-Belsen camp was voluntarily turned over to the British — it was not “liberated.” You can read about how the camp was taken over by the British on my website here.

Every story about Bergen-Belsen that you will ever read, and every story that you won’t read, will tell you that the British LIBERATED Bergen-Belsen, surprising the SS men who did not have a chance to escape.  At least the film tells the truth about this important point.

Unfortunately, the documentary does not mention that Bergen-Belsen was an EXCHANGE camp, intended for Jews to be exchanged for Germans held by the Allies. It became a concentration camp only in the last six months that it was in existence.

The film starts off with scenes of northern Germany in the Spring of 1945.  It is the 12th of April and two Germans are approaching the Allied lines.  They are bringing a message to the British that there is a large concentration camp nearby where there is a typhus epidemic in progress; the Germans want a truce because they need help to stop the epidemic.

The narrator then says that he was “amazed that none of the British soldiers fired” on the Germans who had approached them, asking for a truce.

Then we learn that, when the British approached the camp, they saw “neat and tidy orchards and well stocked farms” according to the narrator of the film. There was a war going on, but the narrator of the film implies that the German people were not suffering at all.

As soon as the British soldiers entered the Belsen camp, they lined up the SS men and women who have stayed behind at the camp, taking their lives in their hands, to care for the sick prisoners. I previously blogged here about Herta Bothe, one of the SS women who stayed behind to help.

The SS men and women are immediately taken as Prisoners of War, including Josef Kramer, the Commandant of the camp who had met the British at the gate, offering his help.

Josef Kramer was arrested immediately and put in chains

SS men who stayed behind to help the British were forced to handle dead bodies without gloves

The German SS men, who had stayed behind at the camp, to help with the typhus epidemic in the camp, were forced to handle the dead bodies without gloves, as shown in the photo above.

The next thing that we see is a photo, which shows healthy prisoners, including a number of smiling children and a woman who is overweight.

One of the prisoners who was at Bergen-Belsen, when the camp was turned over to the British, was Anita Lasker Walfish, who was 19 years old at that time. She speaks in the film, but it is not mentioned that she was previously a prisoner at Auschwitz, where she played in the women’s orchestra.

30,000 corpses were found by the British at Bergen-Belsen

It is at this point in the film that it is mentioned that there are 30,000 dead prisoners in the Bergen-Belsen camp.  It is not mentioned in the film that the British meticulously counted the dead bodes, so who came up with this number?

I previously blogged about the number of deaths at Bergen-Belsen at https://furtherglory.wordpress.com/2011/01/22/50000-deaths-at-bergen-belsen-but-only-6851-death-certificates-issued/

The British used a bulldozer to shove the bodies toward a trench at Bergen-Belsen

Curiously, the film footage of a British soldier shoving dead prisoners with a bulldozer is not shown in the documentary.

What really happened at Bergen-Belsen?

The following information is from a previous blog post that I did about Bergen-Belsen:

Begin quote:

Before surrendering Bergen-Belsen to the British on April 15, 1945, Heinrich Himmler had ordered about 7,000 people to be evacuated from the camp. The three train loads of prisoners, which left the camp between April 6 and April 11, were made up of prominent Dutch Jews, Hungarian Jews, Jewish prisoners from neutral countries and Jewish prisoners who held foreign passports. Himmler was hoping to use these prisoners to negotiate peace terms with the Allies.

In preparation for surrendering the camp, two German officers had been sent to a British outpost to explain that there were 9,000 sick prisoners at Bergen-Belsen and that there was no water after the electric pump had been hit in an Allied bombing attack. [There is no mention of the broken water pump in the Night Will Fall documentary.]

The Germans proposed that the British Army should occupy the camp immediately to keep the epidemics in the camp from spreading to the troops on both sides. In return, the Germans offered to surrender the bridges over the river Aller.

At first, the British rejected the German proposals, saying it was necessary that the British should occupy an area of ten kilometers around the camp in order to be sure of keeping their troops away from the epidemic, but eventually a compromise was reached and the British agreed.

On April 15, 1945, Bergen-Belsen was surrendered to British Officer Derrick Sington, who wrote about it in a small book called Belsen Uncovered which was published by Duckworth, London in 1946.

Of course, Himmler had not anticipated that the British would film the dead bodies in the camp and then show the film in movie theaters around the world without explaining that the prisoners had died of typhus. And he certainly didn’t expect that the staff members, who had voluntarily stayed behind in the camp, would be arrested, or that some of the Hungarian soldiers, who were assigned to help with the surrender of the camp, would be shot by the British.

When the film of Bergen-Belsen was shown in American theaters, it was naturally assumed that the prisoners had been deliberately starved to death or killed in a gas chamber, since the film made no mention of the typhus epidemic in the camp. Nor was it mentioned that the water pump at Bergen-Belsen had been hit by Allied bombs and fresh water had to be brought in by trucks.

When British soldiers were finally allowed, as agreed upon in the negotiations, to enter Bergen-Belsen on April 15, 1945, they at first saw nothing amiss, according to some of the liberators. Smiling, healthy prisoners came out to greet them and some of the 500 children in the camp cheered and waved to them. But as they advanced further into the camp, they were stunned by the sight of thousands of unburied naked bodies.

The horror was beyond human imagination. The sickening stench of the rotting corpses was so great that British soldiers later claimed that they could smell the camp from a distance of 10 miles, although they had not smelled the bodies when they first entered, according to eye-witness reports.

In the last months of the war, as the Russian army advanced westward, prisoners in the camps in Poland had been evacuated and ultimately 60,000 prisoners had been crowded into the Bergen-Belsen camp which did not have enough space for them. Some of those who were still alive at Bergen-Belsen were walking skeletons. There were a variety of diseases that were rampant in the camp.

The Germans claimed that they had been unable to fix the broken water pump which had been destroyed by Allied bombs, and many inmates were dying of thirst, even though the camp was near a creek which the camp Commandant claimed was not fit for drinking. The camp used cisterns for its water supply, but the water could not be accessed without the electric pump that had been hit in a bombing raid. The nearby Army garrison had arranged for drinking water to be brought to the camp by truck, but it had not been nearly enough.

The British promptly fixed the broken pump and provided water from the creek for the camp which had been without water for six days. Creek water? Is this why 13,000 prisoners allegedly died after the British took over?

End Quote

This photo is included in the documentary Night Will Fall

After the Belsen camp was turned over to the British, German civilians from the nearby towns were forced to remove the bodies of the 13,000 prisoners who died afterwards, while the survivors stood by and jeered at them. The photograph above shows a group of survivors in the background on the left, watching as German citizens were forced to handle the diseased bodies with their bare hands at gunpoint.

German homes in the nearby towns were taken by the British military and assigned to the surviving prisoners after the barracks in the camp were burned down. The German people in the area were on their own, trying to find some place to live after they were thrown out of their homes.

The documentary is not entirely about Bergen-Belsen.  About mid way into the documentary, the story wanders off with a new topic — the Maidenek camp in Poland. Maidenek was the German name for Majdanek, a concentration camp in Poland, which had absolutely nothing to do with Bergen-Belsen.

The documentary Night Will Fall does not mention gas chambers, but gas chambers had to be included, so Maidenek was brought in instead.

We see photos of a warehouse full of hair, including a photo of braided hair which might have been taken at Auschwitz, not Majdanek. Then we see empty cans of Zyklon-B, the gas that was used to kill lice — and Jews.

Then we see photos of toys at Majdanek, followed by photos of sacks of human hair, along with photos of brushes and glasses. There are photos of suitcases and false teeth.  What are we supposed to take from this:  Was it wrong for the Germans to save everything that was brought to the camps by the prisoners?

Finally, we get to Auschwitz and we see Eva Moses Kor, who says that she got hot chocolate and cookies from the nice Russian soldiers who liberated Auschwitz.

Then it is on to Dachau.  The word Dachau is spelled out, not spoken. That’s O.K. — I can’t say the word Dachau either.  I thought that this was a nice touch — spelling the word instead of saying it.

At this point, we learn that 10,615 prisoners were DISPOSED OF at Dachau.  I don’t know what that means.

The worst part of the documentary Night Will Fall was the section about Dachau:  Negatives of the film were shown.  This was a way to disguise the fact that the scenes at Dachau were not nearly as bad as the scenes at Bergen-Belsen.

We hear Dr. Isaac Levy speak in the film, as he says that there were 40,000 prisoners still alive at Bergen-Belsen — and 35,000 corpses. Who counted the corpses?

Then the documentary shows a few photos of Dachau, including the clothes that were hung up outside the disinfection chambers.  We see the death train, as we are told that the prisoners “were left to die.”  We are told that there were 17 prisoners who were still alive on the train, along with 3,000 dead prisoners. We are told that “the Germans knew about Dachau, but they did not care.”

We are told that Hitchcock wanted to show the world how close the Germans lived to the camps. At this point, we are told that German civilians lived very near the Ebensee camp, which was in a resort area. The implication is that the German people were enjoying themselves at a resort in Austria while the people were suffering in the concentration camps. Ebensee was an “end destination” for the prisoners who were marched out of the Mauthausen camp for their own safety, as the war was going on around them..

At the end of the film, we learn that “thousands were murdered just before the liberation of the camps”.  We see the German people, who were marched for 5 miles at gun point, up a hill, to see the dead bodies at the Buchenwald camp. We see a close-up of the dead bodies, but there is no mention of typhus in the camp.

Throughout the film, there is no hint that the Allies committed any war crimes during World War II.

Proof given by Vincent Reynouard that the Germans blew up the crematoria at Auschwitz

This blog post was updated on Jan. 24, 2015.

I am answering a comment, made by The Black Rabbit of Inlé, with this new blog post. The Black Rabbit stated that “The Germans blew up the crematoria [at Majdanek] for a very good reason”

The Black Rabbit included a link to a video which features Vincent Reynouard telling us his opinion about why the Germans blew up the crematoria at Auschwitz-Birkenau before the Soviet liberators arrived.

In the first part of the video, Reynouard talks about the Majdanek camp, which was liberated by the Soviets in July 1944.  He does not mention that Polish prisoners were brought to Majdanek from the Gestapo prison in an old castle on a hill in Lublin and killed in front of the ovens, before the crematory building was burned.

Prisoners were brought from the Castle in the city of Lublin to the Majdanek camp and allegedly killed in front of the ovens

Polish tourists were brought to the Majdanek crematorium

The battle for the liberation of the Majdanek camp took place during two days of intense fighting. During this time, prisoners held in the Castle on a hill in the city of Lublin were allegedly brought by the Germans to the Majdanek camp and killed in front of the ovens.

Sorry, but I don’t believe that the Germans killed the prisoners in front of the ovens and burned the crematoria building to cover their crime. This just doesn’t make sense; why not just shoot the prisoners at the Castle, and leave the bodies there.

I believe that the Soviet liberators killed the prisoners in the Castle because they were Polish traitors, then brought their bodies to the crematorium and set fire to the crematorium, in order to blame the Germans for their deaths.

The important point in the video, which features Vincent Reynouard, is that he believes that the Germans destroyed the three crematoria at the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp, before the Soviet liberators arrived, in order to destroy evidence.  I believe that it was the Soviets who destroyed evidence at Auschwitz-Birkenau before they officially liberated the 3 Auschwitz camps and then blamed the Germans for destroying evidence.

Vincent Reynouard also believes that Madame Rouffance did not jump out of the window of the church in Oradour-sur-Glane.  In previous testimony, he gives several reasons why he believes that she could not have made this jump and survived.  I believe that Madame Rouffance was NOT EVEN IN THE CHURCH.   I wrote about this in another blog post: https://furtherglory.wordpress.com/2013/10/18/madame-rouffanche-the-only-survivor-of-the-massacre-in-the-oradour-sur-glane-church-tells-her-story/

Sorry, but I believe that the Soviet liberators of Auschwitz came to the Birkenau camp and destroyed the three crematoria buildings, then returned a few days later and liberated the camp, claiming that the Germans had destroyed the evidence of the gas chambers.

The video of Vince Reynouard shows him climbing down into the ruins of the alleged gas chambers.  It also shows lots of photos of the ruins, as he looks for the holes used for putting the gas pellets into the gas chambers.  I had a hard time finding these holes myself, and I came to the conclusion that there were no holes in the roof to input gas pellets.

Soldiers in the First Army of the Ukrainian Front liberated Auschwitz on Jan. 27, 1945

Soldiers who participated in the liberation of Auschwitz

The young woman in the center of the photo above is a Communist political prisoner named Olga. This is a still shot from the Soviet movie, which is shown to tourists at the Auschwitz Museum in the main camp. Note the badge worn by the elderly woman, which indicates that she is a political prisoner, aka an illegal combatant.

The liberation of Auschwitz on January 27, 1945 was the most important event that ever happened in the entire history of the world, so it is important to correctly identify the liberators.

A  recent news article, which you can read in full here, claims that it was Ukrainians, not Russians, who liberated Auschwitz.  The photo above was taken in February 1945 because the liberating soldiers did not have cameras with them.  The liberation had to be re-enacted.

Here is the real story of the liberation of Auschwitz:

On January 18, 1945, the three Auschwitz camps, called Auschwitz I, II and III, and the 40 satellite camps had been abandoned by the German Nazis. The prisoners, who chose to leave with the Germans, were marched out of the camp.

The gassing of the Jews at Auschwitz II, also known as Birkenau, had stopped at the end of October 1944. The evacuation of the Birkenau survivors to other concentration camps in the West had already begun in early October.

Anne Frank and her sister Margo were on one of the first transports out of Auschwitz, which took them to Bergen-Belsen, where they both died of typhus.

Aerial photos taken by the Allies showed that the roofs of crematoria buildings Krema II and Krema III and Krema IV at Birkenau had been removed in November 1944, so that the cremation ovens could be lifted out with cranes and transported to Germany.

Unfortunately, the four gas chambers in the Birkenau camp had not been destroyed by the Germans at the same time that the cremation ovens were lifted out of these building.

 Ruins, allegedly found by the Soviets on Jan. 27, 1945, were photographed in Feb. 1945

My photo of the ruins of Krema II at Birkenau taken in 2005

Many people believe that Soviet soldiers really arrived shortly after the Germans left with some the prisoners on the “death march” out of the camp, and that the crematory buildings (Krema II, Krema III, and Krema IV) were actually destroyed by the Soviet soldiers before they officially liberated the camp.

Fortunately, Krema I in the main camp had been converted into a bomb shelter by the Germans, and it was not destroyed by the liberators.  The bomb shelter was later converted into a gas chamber, which is still shown to tourists.

For many years, it was claimed that the so-called gas chamber in the main camp was original, but now it is admitted that it is a “reconstruction.”

Re-enactment of child survivors marching out of Auschwitz-Birkeau

Another still photo from the movie taken at the re-enactment of the liberation of Auschwitz

Note the little girl on the far left in the front row in the first photo above. She is on the left in the front row of the second photo above, which is also a still shot taken from the documentary film made by the Soviet Union in February, after they had liberated the camp.

The first photo shows a few of the 611 children at Birkenau, who greeted the liberators. They are holding out their arms to show their tattoos. Notice that the boy in the front is wearing a prison uniform which looks as though it would fit an adult.

This same film clip is included in a film entitled “The Nazis: Nazi War Crimes,” produced by the Soviet Union in which it was claimed that this same film clip was shot by the Nazis just before these children were killed at Babi Yar, a ravine near Kiev in the Ukraine.

Photo of the ruins of one of the Birkenau gas chambers was taken by the Soviets in Feb. 1945

So now that we know that the Soviets were not above telling lies about Babi Yar, I am inclined to believe that it was the Soviets who blew up the gas chambers at Birkenau before their official “liberation” of the camp on January 27, 1945.

The photo above shows the ruins of one of the gas chambers. How did the Soviets know that the ruins, shown in the photo, are the ruins of a gas chamber?

Why were there so many child survivors of Auschwitz, which are shown in the Soviet film of the re-enactment of the liberation?  Apparently, the Soviet soldiers did not know that children under the age of 15 were gassed at Auschwitz.  There were 611 children still alive when the Soviet liberators arrived.

The American delegation that will attend the 70th anniversary celebration of the liberation of Auschwitz

You can read a news article here about the American delegation that will attend the ceremonies at Auschwitz during the celebration of the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the camp by Soviet troops.

One of these delegates from America will be Irene Weiss, a Hungarian Jewish girl who miraculously escaped the gas chamber during the 10 weeks time that 400,000 Hungarian Jews were gassed and burned. I blogged about Irene Weiss on another blog post at https://furtherglory.wordpress.com/2013/10/06/cbs-news-video-entitled-the-vast-reach-of-the-nazi-holocaust/

This quote is from the news article about the American delegation that is going to Auschwitz:

President Obama announced on Saturday the delegation that would represent the United States at the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau later this month.

The anniversary, on Jan. 27, celebrates the liberation of perhaps the most notorious concentration camp during the Holocaust.

The delegation will be led by Secretary of Treasury Jacob Lew and will include two individuals who survived the camp. Israel Arbeiter and Irene Weiss, who were held at the camp years ago, will travel to Poland for the event, as will David Harris, Executive Director of the American Jewish Committee.

Also making the trip will be U.S. Ambassador to Poland Stephen Mull, U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization Crystal Nix-Hines, and representatives from the Departments of State, Health and Human Services and the National Security Council.

You can read about the gassing of the Hungarian Jews on this page of my website: http://www.scrapbookpages.com/AuschwitzScrapbook/History/Articles/HungarianJews.html

Hungarian Jews who have just arrived on a train at Auschwitz

The page on my website about the gassing of the Hungarian Jews, starts out with this quote:

It was not until May 1944, when the Hungarian Jews were deported, that Auschwitz-Birkenau became the site of the largest mass murder in modern history and the epicenter of the Final Solution. In 1942, there were 2.7 million Jews murdered by the Nazis, including 1.6 million at the Operation Reinhard camps, but only 200,000 Jews were gassed at Auschwitz that year in two old converted farm houses. This information is from the book “Auschwitz, a New History” by Laurence Rees, published in 2005.

Almost one half of all the Jews that were killed at Auschwitz were Hungarian Jews who were gassed within a period of 10 weeks in 1944. Up until the Spring of 1944, it had been the three Operation Reinhard camps at Treblinka, Belzec and Sobibor, that were the main Nazi killing centers for the Jews, not Auschwitz.

Obama has made many mistakes in the past, when talking about the Holocaust. I think that he has made another mistake in sending Irene Weiss to represent America at Auschwitz.

Irene was 13 years old when she arrived at Auschwitz.  Everyone knows that children under the age of 15 were immediately sent to the gas chamber, so how did Irene manage to escape the gas chamber?

Hungarian Jews face the Sauna as they wait for their turn in the gas chamber

The “Sauna” was the building where incoming Jews took a shower at Auschwitz.  But the Jews in the photo above are waiting for their turn in one of the 4 gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

This quote is from my website:

Irene Weiss has identified the two little boys on the left [in the photo above] as her two brothers, who were gassed. She used a magnifying glass to identify the woman behind them as her mother. Irene is not in the photo; she was not selected for the gas chamber, although it was the custom for the Nazis to send everyone under the age of 15 to be gassed. I’m guessing that she got by on her looks.

The photo above shows the Jews looking toward the Sauna, where there was a shower room. The closest gas chambers were behind them. I previously blogged about the Jews walking, on the same road, to the gas chambers and to the Sauna.

There are very few survivors of Auschwitz that are still living.  Most of them were children, under the age of 15, when they were prisoners in the camp.  Each of them has a story to tell about why they weren’t gassed.

big celebration to mark the liberation of Auschwitz 70 years ago on January 27th

Prisoners marching out of Auschwitz after the camp was liberated

Today, I read a blog post that showed the photo above, which I also have on my website on this page:

http://www.scrapbookpages.com/AuschwitzScrapbook/History/Articles/Liberation2.html

This quote is from my website page which shows the photo above:

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

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

Excuse me, but I don’t think that this photo is suitable to illustrate the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp.  Surely, there are better photos which could illustrate how the prisoners at Auschwitz were humiliated, beaten, starved, and gassed to death.

Holocaust denial is an International Thought Crime

Be careful what you say about the Holocaust, lest you be renditioned to Israel for trial as a Holocaust denier.

I was not aware that Israel’s laws apply to everyone in the world.  I learned about this just today when I read the article on this page on the Inconvenient History website:

http://inconvenienthistory.com/archive/2014/volume_6/number_4/quo_vadis_revisionism.php

This quote is from the article, written by the late Joseph P. Bellinger:

Begin quote:

International Thought Crime

Israel may have assumed the lead in enacting Holocaust denial legislation when the nation enacted a “Global Holocaust Deniers” bill in the Knesset on July 20, 2004. This unprecedented law outlawed “Holocaust denial” even if committed overseas or outside of Israeli territory and was passed by unanimous vote. In theory, the law would enable the state of Israel to demand the extradition of any individual overseas for “Holocaust denial.”

The bill was drafted by Knesset member Aryeh Eldad of the National Union party as a counterthrust against former Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas for a doctoral dissertation he had authored twenty years prior in which he estimated that less than one million Jews had perished at the hands of the Nazis.10

In effect, the bill provides for any Holocaust denier to be prosecuted in Israel. Eldad has reasoned, “What I want is that if a Holocaust denier publishes a book in England, he will be considered a criminal in Israel.” Apparently there will be no amnesty for such deniers even if they should change their opinions. “Once a denier, always a denier.”11

Justice Minister Tommy Lapid seconded that denying the Holocaust “is a neo-Nazi crime.  Anyone involved in this belongs to the group of criminals whom our arm must reach anywhere in the world…We will not hunt them, but they should know that they are on our list of criminals. I am very satisfied and happy that this will be entering our law books.”12

End quote

Is there some International law, that I don’t know about, which gives the country of Israel the right to decide what is truth and what is fiction?

Is there anything else in the entire history of the world, except the Holocaust, that citizens in any country in the world are forbidden, by Israel, to dispute?

You can read about Auschwitz and the Holocaust on my website at

http://www.scrapbookpages.com/AuschwitzScrapbook/History/Articles/Birkenau01.html

Holocaust survivor gives a new version of the story of Franceska Mann

Franceska Mann, the woman who shot an SS man at Auschwitz-Birkenau

When I first started blogging in Feburary 2005, one of my very first blog posts was about Francska Mann, the beautiful woman who shot an SS man inside the undressing room for Krema II (crematorium number 2)  at Auschwitz-Birkenau:

Josef Schillinger – the SS man who was shot in the undressing room of Gas Chamber # 2 at Auschwitz

Today, I read another account of the Franceska Mann story, given by Holocaust survivor David Wisnia, which you can read in full in a news article here.

This quote is from the news article:

[David] Wisnia was sorting clothes on Oct. 23, 1943, when he witnessed the unthinkable – the deadly revolt at Crematorium 4.

[Krema IV was actually blown up by some of the Auschwitz inmates on Oct. 7, 1944.]

A group of prisoners, including the Polish Jewish dancer Franceska Mann, were taken into a room [the undressing room] next to a gas chamber and ordered to strip.

Mann apparently grabbed the roll-call officer’s pistol, fatally wounding him in the stomach, according to some accounts. She also reportedly fired a shot that wounded an SS sergeant. A revolt by the other prisoners was broken up when guards mowed them down with machine guns.

As the months passed and artillery began to sound in the distance, the Nazis began moving the prisoners in what Wisnia called the “death march.” In December 1944, they walked to Gleiwitz, Poland, to board a train to the Dachau concentration camp in Germany.

Gleiwitz was in Germany at that time and there was a sub-camp of Auschwitz there in 1945.

Krema IV was the building that was blown up by Auschwitz inmates, including some of the women. You can read about Krema IV on my website at http://www.scrapbookpages.com/AuschwitzScrapbook/Tour/Birkenau/RuinsIV.html

Former location of the Canada warehouse

Davis Wisnia was working in the clothing warehouse, at Auschwitz-Birkenau, which was called Canada because of all the riches to be found there.

According to his story, Wisnia was going through the pockets in the clothing, collecting money for the Nazis.  The Canada warehouse was not close to Krema II where Franceska Mann shot an SS man, nor was the Canada warehouse close to Krema IV.

Wisnia’s memory seems to be failing, but that’s O.K.  I can’t remember everything either; I have to look up dates and other details.

 

tourists are spending half a day at Auschwitz, and then it’s on to see the salt mines

When I visited Auschwitz for the first time, in September 1998, my professional tour guide took me on a half day tour of the main camp, and then suggested that I go to see the famous salt mines that afternoon.

The last thing that I wanted to see, famous or not, was the salt mines.  So I hired a private guide to take me to see the Auschwitz II camp, aka Auschwitz-Birkenau. We were the only people there, besides the lone woman who greeted us at the gate.

This morning I read a news article here, which describes how tour companies still advertise a day trip to Auschwitz, along with a trip to the famous salt mines in the afternoon.

This quote is from the news article:

As the Holocaust slips out of living memory into the history books, time is apparently blunting the realities of the gas chambers so much that it is possible for some visitors to contemplate passing straight from shedding a few tears at the camp to marvelling at dwarves carved from rock salt.

It is clear that the visitors are going straight from the reconstructed gas chamber in the main Auschwitz camp to the salt mine.  They are electing not to see the ruins of the four homicidal gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

But the main message in this news article is that the Auschwitz memorial site is now concentrating on the evil Nazi perpetrators, and not so much on displays of toothbrushes and other items that the victims brought with them to the camp.

My 1998 photo of the suitcases displayed at Auschwitz

My 1998 photo of the shoes displayed at Auschwitz

This quote is from the news article:

Better protected relics will be part of the new exhibition, along with an exploration of the only aspect of Auschwitz’s gruesome history the museum has ignored until now. “The current exhibition has one great fault: it almost entirely leaves out the perpetrators,” said [Piotr] Cywinski, bemoaning the absence of details about the men who built and ran the camp.

He has been told by some survivors that the exhibition’s creators did not want to be reminded of their tormentors and by others that they only want to remember the victims. But for visitors today trying to grasp how the horrors of Auschwitz unfolded, it is a gaping hole. “How was it possible that normal people, fathers of families, started murdering people on an industrial scale? This question cannot be put aside,” said [Piotr] Cywinski.

Rudolf Hoess the Commandant of Auschwitz

It is hard to understand how a nice looking man like Rudolf Hoess, shown in the photo above, could murder Jews on an industrial scale, but today’s tourists must be told that he did.

Three evil SS men who were responsible for murdering 1.1 million people at Auschwitz

This final quote is from the news article:

With an office looking out on a gas chamber, [Piotr] Cywinski is constantly reminded of why he has chosen such a difficult job. “We throw accusations against people who were bystanders, who did nothing at that time, and then how do we look in the light of that period?” he asks. “When we look at genocide or tragedy or famine or totalitarian regimes, our silence today is indefensible. And we know how it ends, what is the outcome for the victims, because Europe went through that history 70 years ago.

Brick building behind the gas chamber in the main Auschwitz camp

The office of Piotr Cywinksi is probably located in the brick building behind the gas chamber in the main camp, which is shown on the far left in the photo. The gas chamber was on level ground, but had dirt piled over it to keep the bodies cool until they could be burned.

Wait a minute! What am I saying?  Of course this building, with the dirt piled up over it, was not a morgue where bodies had to be kept cool.  No, this is the original GAS CHAMBER in the Auschwitz main camp, which is now admitted to have been a reconstruction, done by the Soviet liberators of Auschwitz.

Photo, now owned by Getty Images, shows Red Army troops liberating the prisoners in the main Auschwitz camp

The photo above shows prisoners in the main Auschwitz camp being liberated by Soviet soldiers on January 27, 1945. At this time, the gas chamber in the main camp had been converted into a bomb shelter. The Soviets lost no time in converting the building into a gas chamber for tourists to see, and the rest is history.