The first American soldier through the gate at Dachau was George Rose

I didn’t write about the liberation of Dachau yesterday, on the 70th anniversary of this big event, because I thought that I had already covered that story very extensively on my blog. As it turns out, I was wrong!

The reason that the subject of the liberation of Dachau is so important is because the liberation of Dachau is symbolic of the liberation of Germany from the Nazis. It is symbolic of the Allied victory over Fascism and the preservation of the freedom of Americans, which had been threatened by the mere existence of Hitler’s Third Reich.

It is symbolic of the Allied liberation of the Jews from the persecution of the Nazis, and the end of the Final Solution which claimed the lives of 6 million Jews. The liberation of Dachau was one of the most significant events of World War II and one of the most important events in world history.

All of the soldiers in the 45th and 42nd Divisions of the US Seventh Army can rightly claim to be heroes because they participated in the liberation of Dachau, no matter who was the first man to set foot inside the camp.

This newspaper article tells the story of George Rose, who claims that he was the first soldier to enter the Dachau camp on the day that the camp was liberated.  The following quote is from the article:

Begin quote

RALEIGH, N.C. – He was just 18 years old when he helped liberate the Dachau Concentration Camp at the end of World War II.

On Wednesday, 70 years later, George Rose of Wilmington met with North Carolina legislators, who honored him with a special resolution commemorating the anniversary of the U.S. Army’s liberation of the camp and his role in it.

“We went through the gate and that’s when we saw all the boxcars and bodies thrown one on top of another,” Rose said. “Also (we saw) a wall with bodies like rag dolls laying against it. I was 18 years old at this time, but it is something I will never forget.”

End quote

Wait a minute!  He went through THE GATE and he saw boxcars and bodies?  What gate? The train with the bodies of prisoners was parked OUTSIDE the gate into the Dachau concentration camp.

American soldiers examine the bodies found on the “death train” outside the Dachau camp

The train, that was parked outside the camp, had been strafed by American planes, killing prisoners that had been evacuated from the Buchenwald camp for their own safety.

In his book entitled The Rock of Anzio, Flint Whitlock quotes a statement made by Lt. William Walsh of the 45th Division in a documentary called The Liberation of KZ Dachau.

The following quote is from Lt. Walsh’s statement:

Begin quote

We finally get up to the main gate [into the Dachau concentration camp]. This is the gate that says, “Work makes you free”….And when I get to the gate, I asked if anybody spoke English, and there was an Englishman there [Albert Guérisse, also known as Patrick O’Leary]. I think he was a naval officer….and I said to him, “Are there any Americans in there?” And he says, “I don’t know…I think so, but there may be only one or two.”

And then I said, “…. I can’t open the gates, but I want you to know there’s all kinds of medical supplies and doctors and food and stuff like this coming behind us, and they’re going to take care of you.” And he said, “I want you to come in here first….I want you to see what was going on.”

And then he finally prevailed on me. I said, “Okay, I’ll go in.” and I went in with [Jack] Busheyhead and a sergant (sic). Of course, we had to squeeze through the gate because they’re all inside, screaming and hollering.

End quote

The man named “Busheyhead” was 1st Lt. Jack Bushyhead, a “full-blooded Cherokee Indian” who was the Executive Officer of I Company, 3rd Battalion, 157th Infantry Regiment, the unit which allegedly murdered 346 Waffen-SS soldiers in cold blood, on Bushyhead’s orders, on the day of the liberation.

John Degro

John Degro was a member of this unit. The massacre took place after 1st Lt. Bushyhead had seen the concentration camp and he wanted to avenge the wrongs done to the prisoners, according to Col. Buechner, who wrote a book entitled Dachau, The Hour of the Avenger. 1st Lt. Bushyhead was the Avenger in the title.

However, Col. Buechner wrote that the massacre took place before 3 p.m. and other accounts of the events that day say that the 45th Division soldiers did not arrive at the gate into the prison enclosure until after 3 p.m.

Albert Guérisse was a prominent member of the International Committee of Dachau, a Communist organization which was in charge of the camp after the Commandant and the regular guards had left. He was from Belgium and was actually a British SOE agent or a spy in layman’s terms.

On March 17, 1986, Private First Class John Degro, the lead scout of I Company, 3rd BN, 157th Infantry, 45th Division, wrote a statement regarding his claim to have been the first American soldier to set foot inside the Dachau camp.

Col. Howard Buechner, a 45th Division Medical Corps officer, included Degro’s statement in his book entitled Dachau, the Hour of the Avenger.

The following quote is Degro’s words from Buechner’s book:

Begin quote:

As lead scout, I shot the lock off the gate and entered the compound. There were 32,000 inmates, screaming, between hugging and kissing us. The stench was unbearable. We backed out the gate, let a few inmates out and gave them weapons. We cleaned out the guard towers, took knapsacks off of the dead SS and threw them over the barbed wire into the compound.

End quote

On the day of the Dachau liberation, 1st Lt. William J. Cowling, an aide to Brig. Gen. Henning Linden who was the deputy commander of the 42nd Division, wrote a long letter to his family in which he claimed that he was the first soldier to enter the Dachau concentration camp, along with some “newspaper people.”

The next day Marguerite Higgins, a reporter with the New York Herald Tribune, filed a news report in which she claimed that she and Sgt. Peter Furst were the first two people to go inside the Dachau concentration camp. Furst was a reporter for the US Army Newspaper called the Stars and Stripes.

It was around 10 years ago that a newspaper reporter named Grant Segall, who was working at the Cleveland Plain Dealer newspaper, e-mailed me to ask for my help in a story that he was writing about the liberation of the Dachau camp.

The following quote is from the newspaper article, which he wrote:

Begin quote

Accounts differ as to which units liberated which camp when. But no one [except scrapbookpages.com] disputes that Private First Class Degro was the lead scout when GIs from the 45th Infantry Division, known as the Thunderbirds, helped to liberate Dachau in southern Germany.

When the troops saw the train’s cargo, says Degro, they spun and vomited. “Then we went out of our heads.”

Disdaining cover, the Thunderbirds stormed the camp. They dragged German soldiers from a hospital, never mind their wounds. They shot many unresisting foes [an atrocity whose documentation was reportedly shredded and burned by Gen. George Patton].

Though historians [including me] particularly question this part of the story, Degro insists that he raised his M-1 rifle and shot a padlock off a gate. The rescuers were hugged by screaming, skeletal prisoners.

“We were gesturing them back. We didn’t want to hurt their feelings after what they went through,” says Degro, but “they smelled like hell.”

End quote

Note that Segall starts off by saying: “Accounts differ.”  This was because I told him that there are several different accounts of the liberation of Dachau. After acknowledging that there are several different accounts, Segall reported on the account of John Degro, and didn’t mention the other accounts, which I had told him about.

In his book The Rock of Anzio, which is the history of the 45th Thunderbird Division, Flint Whitlock quoted extensively from what Lt. Col. Felix Sparks told him about the liberation.

According to Sparks, 45th Division soldiers arrived at the concentration camp gate shortly before the three jeeps carrying officers of the 42nd Division.

However, Whitlock quotes Pfc. William Donahue of the 42nd Division who said that he was already at the gate into the concentration camp when the men of the 45th Division arrived. Some of them had been drinking, according to Donahue.

Flint Whitlock does not mention John Degro at all in his book, although Degro was a member of the 45th Division. It is not clear when Degro would have shot the lock off the gate into the concentration camp, nor how the gate would have been secured again, once the lock was destroyed.

Sparks told Whitlock that his orders had been to liberate the camp and then to secure it and not let anyone in or out. If Sparks passed these orders down to his men, then John Degro would have been disobeying orders when he shot the lock off the gate and then let some of the prisoners out, as he claims.

In his book, John H. Linden mentioned that it took an hour to get all the prisoners safely back inside, once the gate had been opened by the men of the 42nd Division.

According to Lt. Col. Sparks, as told to Flint Whitlock, he met Brig. Gen. Henning Linden who had just arrived in a jeep at the concentration camp gate. Just prior to this, Linden had accepted the surrender of the concentration camp from SS 2nd Lt. Heinrich Wicker near the gate at the southwest corner of the camp. 1st Lt. Cowling claimed in his letter to his family that he had entered the concentration camp while the General was still talking to Lt. Wicker.

It is clear from these quotes that the lock on the “Arbeit Macht Frei” gate into the concentration camp did not need to be shot off. The gate could be opened from the outside by removing a bar which locked it. The gate was wide enough for a truck to drive through it, but there was also a pedestrian door in the gate that could be opened without opening the whole gate. The pedestrian door could only be opened by remote control from inside the gatehouse.

There were SS guards inside the gatehouse, waiting to surrender. Twelve of them surrendered to 1st Lt. Cowling, according to John H. Linden, the author of Surrender of the Dachau Concentration Camp 29 Apr 45, the True Account.

Both Cowling and Higgins disagree with Sparks’ version of the story, as they both claim that there were no prisoners in sight when they first entered the concentration camp. The similarity in their stories indicates that they entered the concentration camp at the same time, and each claimed to be the first person to set foot inside the prison enclosure.

John H. Linden confirms in his book that Cowling, Higgins and Furst entered the camp together, along with T/5 Oddi and Pfc. Tinkham, who were assigned to guard them.

On the day of the liberation, the concentration camp was under the control of the International Committee of Dachau, which consisted of a group of Communist political prisoners.

The last Commandant of Dachau, Wilhelm Eduard Weiter, had left the camp with a transport of prisoners on April 26th and had put Martin Gottfried Weiss in charge. As the acting Commandant, Weiss had turned the camp over to the Committee on April 28th and had then escaped with most of the regular guards that night.

The Committee had ordered all the prisoners to stay inside the barracks, so as not to provoke the remaining guards into killing them all.

End of story

“Between two throw-ins, right behind my back,” 3,000 Jews were gassed to death.

Today is April 29th, the anniversary of the day that the Dachau concentration camp was liberated in 1945.  I wrote about the Dachau liberation last year on this blog post:  https://furtherglory.wordpress.com/2014/04/29/emaciated-survivors-of-the-dachau-horror-camp/

On this blog post, I wrote about the “Dachau massacre” on the day that the camp was liberated:  https://furtherglory.wordpress.com/2013/02/27/new-book-about-felix-sparks-gives-a-new-perspective-on-the-liberation-of-dachau-and-the-dachau-massacre/  Wikipedia calls the “Dachau massacre” a “reprisal.

Whatever. Now I am blogging about something different.  Read on.

My photo of the ruins of the Krema III gas chamber with the prisoner’s soccer field in the background

My photo of the ruins of Gas Chamber III at Auschwitz-Birkenau. A soccer field where the prisoners played is shown in the background on  the left.

The title of my blog post today is a  quote from Tadeusz Barowski’s famous book entitled This Way to the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, which is about his time, as a prisoner at Auschwitz-Birkenau, when 400,000 Hungarian Jews were gassed in only 10 weeks.

Or was it 560,000 Jews that were killed in only 10 weeks? Sadly, no one knows the exact number because no one recorded their names, nor their prison identification numbers.  I wrote about the number of Hungarian  Jews that were killed, in 10  weeks, on this  previous blog post: https://furtherglory.wordpress.com/2012/05/04/how-many-hungarian-jews-were-murdered-in-the-holocaust/

Crematorium 3 (Krema III) was the main gas chamber where thousands of  Hungarian Jews were gassed in May 1944

The gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau were not a secret; all the prisoners were aware of what was going on. Many of the Jews saved themselves by lying about their age, or sneaking  over into the line of the prisoners that had been chosen to be workers in the 425 acre camp. The worker Jews were marched, on the same road, to the Central Sauna where they took a shower and had their hair shaved off. They were then assigned to barracks in the camp.

According to Tadeusz Borowski, a Polish political prisoner at Birkenau,  a soccer field was built at the camp in the Spring of 1944 “on the broad clearing behind the hospital barracks.”  Hospital barracks?  Surely not!  Why would a “death camp” have a hospital? Something wrong!

The team of prisoners played against a team of SS men who worked in the nearby hospital.

My early morning photo of the ruins of Gas Chamber III at Auschwitz-Birkeanu

By 1944, the railroad tracks into the camp had been extended all the way from the Gate of Death at Birkenau to the gas chambers at the western end of the camp; the men playing soccer were able to see the victims arrive on the trains and then walk to Krema III, which was “right by the fence” that separated the gas chambers from the barracks in the camp. Note the fence in the black and white photo above.

Borowski famously wrote, in his book, that he was the goalkeeper in a soccer game on a beautiful Sunday afternoon in May, and “Between two throw-ins, right behind my back, three thousand people had been put to death.”

Three thousand was the number of Jews that typically arrived on each train transport.

During the extermination of the Hungarian Jews in May 1944, an entire transport would be gassed without going through a selection process, in spite of the fact that the Nazis were desperate for workers in their munitions factories.

Most of the Holocaust survivors, who are still alive today, are Hungarian Jews and each of them has his or her unique story of how  they escaped the gas chambers.

I wrote about some of the stories of escape from the gas chambers on this blog post: https://furtherglory.wordpress.com/2011/09/25/stories-of-escape-from-the-gas-chambers-at-auschwitz-birkenau/

In other news today, you can read about a movie that is being made about Deborah Lipstadt’s victory over “Holocaust denier David Irving.” at http://www.jpost.com/Diaspora/Authors-battle-with-Holocaust-denier-to-hit-silver-screen-400609

I blogged about this trial on this blog post:  https://furtherglory.wordpress.com/2014/08/30/deborah-lipstadt-who-defeated-hard-core-holocaust-denial-now-worries-about-soft-core-denial/

January 27th is Holocaust Remembrance Day

The ruins of one of the gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau

1945 photo of the same gas chamber ruins at Auschwitz-Birkenau

Actually, every day is Holocaust Remembrance Day, but today is one of several official  Holocaust remembrance days.

This quote is from an old article, written by Mark Weber, which is quoted in today’s news about Holocaust Remembrance Day:

Begin quote:

Holocaust Remembrance:
What’s Behind the Campaign?

By Mark Weber

Since the late 1970s “Holocaust Remembrance” has become ever more important in the United States and many other countries. The campaign to remember the Holocaust — often defined as the genocidal killing of six million Jews in Europe during the Second World War – includes numerous commemorative events, education courses in many schools, and a stream of motion pictures, television specials, books and magazine articles.

[…]

Every major American city has at least one Holocaust museum or memorial [except Sacramento, CA]. Worldwide there are more than 250 Holocaust museums and memorials, most of them in the US and Europe. The largest is the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, which is run by a taxpayer-funded federal government agency, and draws some two million visitors yearly.

The public is continually reminded of Jewish suffering during World War II. Between 1989 and 2003 alone, more than 170 films with Holocaust themes were made. In many American and European schools, and in all Israeli classrooms, a focus on the wartime suffering of Europe’s Jews is obligatory.

Yehuda Bauer, a prominent Holocaust specialist and a professor at Hebrew University in Israel, observed in 1992: “Whether presented authentically or inauthentically, in accordance with the historical facts or in contradiction to them, with empathy and understanding or as monumental kitsch, the Holocaust has become a ruling symbol of our culture… Hardly a month passes without a new TV production, a new film, a number of new books of prose or poetry dealing with the subject, and the flood is increasing rather than abating.”

[…]

On the occasion of the opening of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum on the Mall in Washington, noted Jewish author Melvin Jules Bukiet called the Museum a “statement of raw power,” and added: “It’s not Jewish tragedy that’s remembered on the Mall this week; it’s Jewish power to which homage is paid.”

[…]

Norman Finkelstein, a Jewish scholar who has held teaching posts at New York University and DePaul University, writes in his bestselling book, The Holocaust Industry, that “invoking The Holocaust” is “a ploy to delegitimize all criticism of Jews.” He adds: “By conferring total blamelessness on Jews, the Holocaust dogma immunizes Israel and American Jewry from legitimate censure… Organized American Jewry has exploited the Nazi holocaust to deflect criticism of Israel’s and its own morally indefensible policies.”

[…]

This view is echoed by another Jewish scholar, Tony Judt, director of the Remarque Institute at New York University:

“The Shoah [Hebrew term for Holocaust] is frequently exploited in America and Israel to deflect and forbid any criticism of Israel. Indeed, the Holocaust of Europe’s Jews is nowadays exploited thrice over: It gives American Jews in particular a unique, retrospective ‘victim identity’; it allows Israel to trump any other nation’s sufferings (and justify its own excesses) with the claim that the Jewish catastrophe was unique and incomparable; and (in contradiction to the first two) it is adduced as an all-purpose metaphor for evil — anywhere, everywhere and always — and taught to schoolchildren all over America and Europe without any reference to context or cause. This modern instrumentalization of the Holocaust for political advantage is ethically disreputable and politically imprudent.”

In Israel, says Tom Segev, a prominent Israeli journalist and author, the Holocaust has become “an object of worship.” Moreover, he writes, “the ‘heritage of the Holocaust,’ as it is taught in [Israel’s] schools and fostered in national memorial ceremonies, often encourages insular chauvinism and a sense that the Nazi extermination of the Jews justifies any act that seems to contribute to Israel’s security, including the oppression of the population in the territories occupied by Israel in the Six-Day War.”

Amira Hass, an award-winning Israeli journalist and author, is even more blunt. Writing in a leading Israeli daily paper, she says:

“… Israel has turned the liquidation of Europe’s Jews into an asset. Our murdered relatives are being enlisted to enable Israel to continue not giving a damn about international decisions against the occupation. The suffering our parents endured in the ghettoes and concentration camps that filled Europe, the physical and mental anguish and torment that our parents were subjected to every single day since the `liberation,’ are used as weapons to thwart any international criticism of the society we are creating here. This is a society with built-in discrimination on the basis of nationality, and the discrimination is spreading on either side of the Green Line. This is a society that is systematically continuing to banish the Palestinian nation from its land and usurp its rights as a nation and its chances for a humane future.”

The great lesson of the Holocaust, says Israel prime minister Ariel Sharon, is that Jews must “always remain vigilant and trust no one but ourselves. Jews can only rely on themselves.” Young Jews, he adds, “have the duty to bequeath the lesson, memories and stories, to underscore the importance of the existence of the Jewish state.”

End Quote

New book entitled Holocaust High Priest: Elie Wiesel…is now available on Amazon

Yesterday, I tried to order the new book by Warren B. Routledge, which has just been published, but it was not yet available on Amazon.com. Today I received an e-mail from the author himself, who alerted me to the news that the book is now ready to order. I put in my order as fast as I could and now I am eagerly waiting for the book to arrive.

Here is the full title and information about the book: Holocaust High Priest: Elie Wiesel, “Night,” the Memory Cult, and the Rise of Revisionism (Holocaust Handbooks) (Volume 30) Paperback – April 17, 2015 by Warren B. Routledge (Author)

To prepare for reading this book, you might want to read this website: http://www.eliewieseltattoo.com/

I have written extensively on my blog about Elie Wiesel and his claim that he was in a famous photo, taken at Buchenwald. https://furtherglory.wordpress.com/2012/01/23/the-famous-buchenwald-photo-is-that-elie-wiesel-or-a-40-year-old-man/

Here is a quote from  the promo of the book:

Begin  quote:

Holocaust High Priest weaves together five compelling and interrelated narratives. The book’s main concern is to present the world’s first unauthorized biography of Elie Wiesel. It shines the light of truth on the mythomaniac who, in the 1970s, transformed the word “Holocaust” and made it the brand name of the world’s greatest hoax: the unfounded claim by an extremist segment of World Jewry to the effect that the German government’s wartime policy of territorial transfer of Europe’s Jews out of the Reich was in actuality an “extermination program.” In these pages, both Wiesel’s personal deceits and the whole myth of “the six million” are mercilessly exposed and laid bare for the reader’s perusal. Unfortunately, Zionist control of the U.S. Government as well as the nation’s media and academic apparatus has allowed Wiesel and his fellow extremists to force a string of U.S. presidents to genuflect before this imposter

End quote

A few oldies, but goodies, that have withstood the test of time

Every morning, as soon as I wake up, I brew myself a cup of strong coffee and then check my blog stats to see which of my numerous blog posts are getting the most hits. The blog post that is consistently at the top of the list is this one:

Dying victims scratched the walls of the Auschwitz gas chamber with their fingernails

Two other blog posts are are consistently in the top 10 are these two:

Hair that was shaved from the heads of Jews at Auschwitz was made into human hairnets, according to Auschwitz tour guide

The gas chamber disguised as a shower room in the crematorium at Dachau

This blog post about the liberation of Dachau also gets lots of hits:

91-year-old WWII veteran breaks his silence about the Dachau massacre

I am currently working on two new blog posts, which I will put up soon. These things take time.

A picture is worth a thousand words: Is that Stephan Ross in a photo taken at Dachau? (Updated)

Recent photo of George Scott, who was liberated from Dachau concentration camp

I have received an e-mail from George Scott who doubts that Stephan Ross is in the photo below, which was included with his e-mail message to me. Stephan Ross has identified himself as the young boy on the far left, but was he actually at Dachau on the day that the camp was liberated?

Stephan Ross claims that he is the boy on the far left

George Scott says that he is the 14-year-old boy, 2nd from the left, at the liberation of Dachau

This quote is from the e-mail message that I received from the son of George Scott:

“The young boy on the left” in this picture is NOT Stephen Ross, it is my father, George Scott. I have reached out to his family who have not ‘cleared the miscommunication”. His son Michael P. Ross sits appointed by President Obama…

The photo above is from a book about George Scott, who has identified himself in a photo taken at the Dachau liberation.

The reason that I am putting this up on my blog is that it is possible that Stephan Ross is receiving honors that should go to George Scot.

I have a whole page on my website devoted to the story of Stephan Ross because, frankly, I don’t believe his story.

The story told by George Scott is more believable: he mentions that he was a prisoner in one of the 11 Kaufering sub-camps of Dachau. In the last days, before the Dachau camp was liberated, the prisoners in the Kaufering camps were brought to the main Dachau camp.

George Scottt mentions that he was in one of the 11 Kaufering sub-camps of Dachau

This quote, regarding Stephan Ross is from my website:

Begin quote

According to the book “Dachau 29 April 1945, the Rainbow Liberation Memoirs,” edited by Sam Dann, Stephen Ross (real name Szmulek Rozental) was one of the lucky few who was rescued in the nick of time when Dachau was liberated. Ross was interviewed for the book and according to his own story, he was one of the 1,800 prisoners who were crowded into one quarantine barrack, which was designed to hold only about a hundred prisoners.

Ross said that the prisoners in the quarantine barrack had not been fed for two weeks before the Seventh Army arrived. Food was scarce, and according to Ross, the prisoners were fed only occasionally when they were given “a biscuit, hard as a rock and covered with mold.”

From the quarantine block, Ross said that 80 to 100 prisoners a day were carried out and put on the pile of dead bodies near the barbed wire fence, from where they were taken to the crematory.

According to Ross, the quarantine block was where the German SS Doctors Sigmund Rascher and Klaus Schilling selected prisoners for their ghastly experiments. The doctors “removed thirty to forty prisoners on a daily basis for experiments” according to Ross.

Ross said that he “had been isolated in quarantine for experiments since 1944.”

On the day of liberation, Ross made his way to the main gate, although he said that he “was very weak and hardly able to walk.”

With the help of his brother, who was also in the camp, Ross made it to the front of the crowd and was included in one of the most famous photographs of the liberation, shown at the top of this page.

Stephan Ross and his son

The photo above shows Stephan Ross with his son Mike Ross in June 2002.

Quoted below is the continuation of the article on my website about Stephan Ross.

Begin quote

After the liberation of Dachau, Ross had to stay in the camp until the typhus epidemic was brought under control. When he was released, he made his way to Munich where he was hospitalized for 6 months and treated for tuberculosis.

He was then sent to a Displaced Persons camp for orphans at a former forced labor camp in Landsberg am Lech, near Munich. Finally, he was brought to America where he was able to recover his health.

Stephan Ross is the founder of The New England Holocaust Memorial in Boston.

Like so many others Stephan Ross suffered terribly. His back was broken by a guard who caught him stealing a raw potato. Tuberculosis wracked his body. He once hid in an outhouse, submerged to his neck in human waste, to save himself from being shot. At one time he was hung [by his arms] for eating a raw potato. At age fourteen he was liberated from the infamous torture camp Dachau by American troops. Stephen will never forget the soldiers who found him, emaciated and nearly dead. They liberated him from a certain death.

When Stephan and his older brother, Harry, the only other surviving family member, were released from the Dachau Camp to seek medical attention, they came upon a U.S. Tank Unit. One of the soldiers jumped off his tank, gave Stephan and Harry his rations to eat and put his arms around Stephen. Stephan fell to his knees, kissed the G.I.’s boots and began to cry for the first time in five years.

The soldier took out of his pocket a piece of cloth and gave it to Stephan to wipe his tears. Stephan later found out that it was a small American Flag with 48 stars. This small flag is a treasured item and it will be kept by Stephan and his children as a symbol of freedom, life, compassion and love of the American soldiers.

At the age of 16, Stephan was brought to America in 1948 under the auspices of the U.S. Committee for Orphaned Children. He was illiterate, having had minimal education prior to the Nazi occupation of Poland in 1939. Over the years, he managed to earn three college degrees. Stephan made a new life in the Boston area and has worked for the City of Boston for over forty years.

End quote

FBI director James Comey offends Poles with remark comparing Poland to Germany

The best thing that ever happened to the Jews in Poland was World War II, which gave them the opportunity to get out of the shtetls in Poland and come to America.

I blogged about this on this blog post: https://furtherglory.wordpress.com/2012/05/22/the-long-road-from-the-shetetls-of-eastern-europe-to-the-good-life-in-america-and-the-uk-via-auschwitz/

The photo below shows a house where Jews live in a shtetl called Tykosin in Poland.

A house in Poland where Jews lived before World War II

According to a news article in the Wall Street Journal today, Poland has “summoned the U.S. ambassador in protest of a remark [made] by the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation that purported Polish responsibility for the Holocaust”

This quote is from the news article:

Begin quote
A mention of Poland in the same sentence with Germany as Holocaust perpetrators caused public anger here over the weekend after remarks were published by the FBI chief, James Comey, made at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum on April 15.

“Good people helped murder millions,” Mr. Comey said, according to the FBI’s website. “And that’s the most frightening lesson of all— that our very humanity made us capable —even susceptible —of surrendering our individual moral authority to the group, where it can be hijacked by evil. Of being cowed by those in power of convincing ourselves of nearly anything.”

“In their minds, the murderers and accomplices of Germany, and Poland, and Hungary, and so many, many other places didn’t do something evil. They convinced themselves it was the right thing to do, the thing they had to do,” the FBI director said.

[…]

Poland, which apologized for wartime Jewish pogroms perpetrated by some of its citizens, have for years complained the country is unfairly viewed as an accomplice to Nazi Germany when [Poland] had an anti-Nazi resistance movement so elaborate it is referred to as “an underground state.”

End Quote

Polish resistance fighters celebrate their liberation at Dachau

I previously blogged about who started World War II in this blog post: https://furtherglory.wordpress.com/2010/02/24/alfred-naujocks-and-the-start-of-world-war-ii/

The first time that I went to Poland in 1998, one of my Polish tour guides pointed out to me that the term “Hitlerites” or Nazis should always be used when referring to the enemy in World War II, rather than referring to the enemy soldiers as Germans.

There were many countries that supported or collaborated with the Nazis, and many soldiers from Allied countries or neutral countries that fought in the Waffen SS, the volunteer army of Nazi Germany.

The photo below shows a memorial stone at the Plaszow concentration camp, which was featured in the movie Shindler’s List.

The front of the memorial stone at Plaszow has an inscription in Polish, which uses the name Hitlerists for the perpetrators of the Holocaust

I wrote about the town of Jedwabne on this blog post: https://furtherglory.wordpress.com/2012/05/25/the-lopuchowo-forest-in-poland-where-2000-jews-were-executed-by-the-nazis-during-wwii/

Can the Jews ever get enough revenge? NO, NO, NO, a thousand times NO!

Read the latest news about the trial of Oskar Groening at http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/auschwitz-bookkeeper-oskar-groening-goes-trial-germany

The remains of Auschwitz-Birkenau in the winter of 2005

I previously wrote on my blog about the Jews still wanting REVENGE,  REVENGE, REVENGE for the Holocaust: https://furtherglory.wordpress.com/2012/03/21/can-the-jews-ever-get-enough-revenge-the-john-demjanjuk-story/

That blog post was about the John Demjanjuk  case. He is now dead, but  there is a new whipping boy for the Jews to hate: Oskar Groening.

According to a news article,  which you can read in full here,

Oskar Groening, 93, a former Nazi known as the “bookkeeper of Auschwitz”, [who] goes on trial in Germany next Tuesday, is likely one of the last SS members after most escaped justice.

Some 50 Auschwitz survivors will attend proceedings as co-plaintiffs or witnesses in the trial in the northern city of Lueneburg near Hamburg.

 

A German newspaper man posed three questions about the trial to writer Christoph Heubner, vice president of the International Auschwitz Committee, who will be in the courtroom during the upcoming trial.

Quoted below is one of the questions and Heubner’s answer:

Q: This could be the last Nazi war crimes trial in Germany. How has the German judicial system dealt with bringing to justice the perpetrators?

 

A: Miserably, it’s an ongoing scandal of postwar history. In Germany a total of 43 SS men have faced court, nine received life sentences, 25 were sent to prison, and the rest were acquitted. This is out of about 6,500 people from the SS concentration camps who were alive at the end of the war. You can see that only a tiny percentage ever faced prosecution.

 

The perpetrators essentially returned to the society they came from. They disappeared back into their old neighbourhoods. For many years no one cared about what they had done. For the survivors it’s a bitter fact that there was so little interest and so little was done in bringing the perpetrators to justice.

Oskar Groening is a “war  criminal” because he did not  save the Jews in the death camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

German writer Christoph  Huebner explained it in this quote:

[Groening]  has taken a number of steps. He is a special case. He has shared much of what he saw at Auschwitz as an eyewitness. But he hasn’t dared to take the next step, he has rejected admitting his complicity in running this death factory. “I saw it, but I did not make myself culpable,” he says.

 

A small cog in a large machinery of murder also plays a role in the murders, and the court will confront him with this guilt. Whether Mr Groening will ever see a prison from the inside, whether his health permits incarceration, is secondary. The important thing is that the trial takes place.

I have written several blog posts about the Oskar Groening  case:

https://furtherglory.wordpress.com/tag/oskar-groening/

My 2007 photo of Auschwitz-Birkenau

Hungarian Jews who were sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau to be gassed in 1944

How many prisoners were “murdered” at Dachau?

My 2001 photo of the gate into the Dachau concentration camp

The 70th anniversary of the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp, by American troops on April 29, 1945, will be coming up soon. There will be a big celebration and lots of news stories about the number of prisoners, who were murdered by the Nazis at Dachau.

This morning, I read a news article which had a photo of Newell West, with this caption:  “Newell West, WW2 veteran who served with the Army Air Corp, then with Army counterintelligence in the CIC investigating Nazi war criminals”

Newell West now lives in Tulsa, OK and he is speaking out about the number of prisoners “murdered” at Dachau. In the news article, there is no mention of how many Dachau prisoners died in the typhus epidemic in the camp. But forget that; nobody cares about the truth.

Printed below is the headline of the article:

World War II veterans remember: Newell West hunted Nazis with Counterintelligence Corps

You can read the article in full at

http://www.tulsaworld.com/newshomepage3/world-war-ii-veterans-remember-newell-west-hunted-nazis-with/article_c2c63a70-ce1d-5c2e-91c5-13f2b668daf4.html

This quote is from the news article, cited above:

“Over its 12 years in operation, more than 200,000 people from across Europe were imprisoned in Dachau and its subsidiary camps. Ultimately, some 40,500 of them would be murdered.”

How were these 40,500 Dachau prisoners “murdered”? The news article doesn’t tell us, but they might have been murdered in the Dachau gas chamber. Or they could have died in the typhus epidemic in  the camp.

Even before World War II ended on May 8, 1945, American General Dwight D. Eisenhower had ordered that as many American soldiers as possible should be brought to see the gas chamber in Baracke X at Dachau, where a sign outside read, “This area is being retained as a shrine to the 238,000 individuals who were cremated here. Please don’t destroy.”

This sign has since been taken down.

There were also 5,380 dead prisoners at Dachau, whose bodies had been buried on Leitenberg hill before the camp was liberated; this means that the death toll at Dachau was over 243,000.

Since the total number of registered inmates at the main Dachau camp was only 206,206, according to the camp records, this means that the US military claimed that there were 37,000 more deaths than the number of prisoners who were registered. Yet, there were almost 32,000 cheering survivors who greeted the American liberators.

Later, a new sign was placed at the crematorium by Phillip Auerbach, a Jewish concentration camp survivor, who had been appointed the Bavarian Commissioner for Racial, Religious and Political Persecutees and the Commissioner for Restitution.

This new sign read “In the years from 1933 to 1945, 238,756 people were cremated here.”

The Rev. Martin Niemöller, a former prisoner at Dachau, saw this sign in November 1945 and was very upset by the high number of alleged deaths in the Dachau camp.

According to a report made by the International Tracing Service at Arolson, Germany in 1977, there were 31,951 deaths at the main Dachau camp during the 12 years that the camp was in existence. The International Tracing Service is part of the International Red Cross.

The International Tracing  Service report was based on the death records meticulously kept by the Nazis. The camp records were confiscated by the American Army and are currently being kept in the National Archives in Washington, DC.

Hans Zauner, the mayor of Dachau, claimed after the war that only 20,600 prisoners had died in the entire 12-year history of the Dachau concentration camp. If his claim is correct, this means that the American military inflated the number of deaths by more than a factor of 10.

A bridge over Würm river canal leads to the Dachau gatehouse on the right

According to the Dachau camp records, there were 3,752 deaths at Dachau in the first seven years that the camp was in operation, but the death toll escalated to 13,158 deaths in the first four months of 1945.

Just in the month of February 1945, there were 3,977 deaths at Dachau, more than in all of the seven years before the war. Most of these deaths in 1945 were due to a typhus epidemic in the camp which began in the fall of 1944 when prisoners were evacuated from the camps in Poland and brought to Dachau.

Until recently, it was not generally known that the increase in the death rate at Dachau in the Spring of 1945 was due to a typhus epidemic. Without this knowledge, one might reasonably assume that the number of deaths at Dachau escalated dramatically near the end of the war because the Nazis were trying to kill as many Jews as they could before they were stopped by the Allied liberation of the camps.

Regarding the last days of the war and the number of Jewish deaths, Daniel Goldhagen wrote in his best-selling book entitled Hitler’s Willing Executioners:

“Finally, the fidelity of the Germans to their genocidal enterprise was so great as seeming to defy comprehension. Their world was disintegrating around them, yet they persisted in genocidal killing until the end.”

However, it must be remembered that two-thirds of all the Dachau prisoners, including the prisoners in the sub-camps, were non-Jewish political prisoners with Polish Catholics in the majority.

The Official Report of the US Seventh Army claimed that 29,138 Jews had been brought to Dachau and murdered in five gas chambers there between June 20, 1944 and November 23, 1944. Contrary to this claim, displays at the Dachau Memorial Site in May 2001 stated that four of these gas chambers were used only to disinfect clothing with Zyklon-B and that the fifth gas chamber at Dachau was never used nor put into operation.

In May 2003, a new display in the Dachau Museum claimed that one of the five gas chambers, the one that is disguised as a shower room, was used to kill a few prisoners.

Door into the Dachau gas chamber

The sign  over the Dachau gas chamber door reads “Brausebad.”    Brausebad is the German word for “shower bath,” but don’t  let this fool you. This is really a gas chamber, and don’t you deny it unless you want to go to prison, for 5 years, in 19 different countries.

Some of the prisoners, who died at Dachau, are buried on Leitenberg Hill.  My photo below shows a Christian cross at Leitenberg.

Cross at Leitenberg  hill  in honor of the Christian prisoners who died at Dachau

In the middle of the Leitenberg cemetery is a Christian cross, made of wood, which was designed by Klaus Backmund from Munich. It is shown in my photo above.

On all four sides of the cross are panels which are engraved with likenesses of Christian martyrs. Leitenberg was consecrated as a Christian cemetery on December 16, 1949. Most of the prisoners in the Dachau concentration camp in the later years were Catholic.

What did the Dachau gas chamber look like when American soldiers first saw it?

Gate into Dachau concentration camp, 1945

In reading the comments on my blog about the gas chamber in the Dachau concentration camp, I have noticed that there seems to  be a lot of confusion about what the gas chamber shower room looked like when it was first seen by the American soldiers  who accepted the surrender of the camp.

American soldier stands beside some wooden coffins stacked inside the Dachau shower room, which is claimed to have been a gas chamber

In the photo shown above, which was taken shortly after American troops accepted the surrender of the Dachau concentration camp, notice the shower heads on the ceiling.

A real shower room at  Dachau had shower heads hanging from pipes on the ceiling

On my website, I have a page which gives several descriptions of the gas chamber, given by the soldiers who first saw it:

http://www.scrapbookpages.com/DachauScrapbook/GasChamber/descriptions.html

Here are a few of the descriptions:

“A distinguishing feature of the Dachau Camp was the gas chamber for the execution of prisoners and the somewhat elaborate facilities for execution by shooting. The gas chamber was located in the center of a large room in the crematory building. It was built of concrete. Its dimensions were about 20 by 20 feet, and the ceiling was some 10 feet in height. In two opposite walls of the chamber were airtight doors through which condemned prisoners could be taken into the chamber for execution and removed after execution. The supply of gas into the chamber was controlled by means of two valves on one of the outer walls, and beneath the valves was a small glass-covered peephole through which the operator could watch the victims die. The gas was let into the chamber through pipes terminating in perforated brass fixtures set into the ceiling. The chamber was of size sufficient to execute probably a hundred men at one time.” From Document No. 47 of the 79th Congress, 1st Session, Senate Report (May 15, 1945) of the Committee Requested by Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower to the Congress of the U.S. relative to Atrocities and other Conditions in Concentration Camps in Germany. This document was entered into the Nuremberg trial proceedings as IMT Document L-159

In 1965, twenty years after he was liberated from Dachau in 1945, Nerin E. Gun wrote a book entitled The Day of the Americans which was published in 1966. Gun was a Turkish journalist working in Berlin; he had been arrested by the Gestapo in 1940 after he was the first reporter to write about the Warsaw ghetto and the Jews being sent to extermination camps.

Turkey was an ally of Germany in World War I, but was neutral in World War II until 1945.  Gun claimed that Hitler himself ordered that Gun be removed from his job as a reporter in Berlin.

As a prisoner at Dachau, Gun’s job in 1944 was to record the names and vital information about the Hungarian Jewish women just before they were gassed at Dachau. On page 69 of his book, Gun wrote a description of how the Hungarian women were gassed along with their babies, “as the fumes of the gas issued from the floor…”

On page 70, Gun wrote that the gas was put into the chamber by “pressing the button that opened the trap door through which the gas was released…”

On page 220, Gun wrote that women prisoners were shoved into the gas chamber naked, after their head, armpits and pubic hair had been shaved clean; they had a towel and a bar of soap in their hands. Gun wrote that the gas was in the form of a “Zyklon bomb” and that the whistling of the gas could be heard as it escaped from slits in the ceiling.

Gun wrote that he was not allowed into the crematorium where the dead bodies were burned, but he knew what was going on there because he heard about it from the workers there.

At the time that Gun wrote his book, he had visited the Dachau gas chamber as recently as 1959, but he did not mention that the gas pellets were put into the chamber through the two bins on the outside wall, as was later claimed.

Gun did mention in his book that a “Zyklon bomb was thrown on the floor” of the fake shower room to gas the prisoners.

Sidney Glucksman was a prisoner at Dachau working in a factory, which made German uniforms. When he was liberated from Dachau by American troops, Glucksman told Jewish American soldier Jerome Klein that he had not had a shower for six years.

How could he take a shower when the shower room was really a gas chamber? Klein gave him a bar of soap and a clean American uniform to wear.

Contrary to Nerin E. Gun’s discription of babies being gassed along with their mothers at Dachau, Glucksman told Kim Martineau, a reporter for The Hartford, CT Courant, that he remembers mothers being separated from the babies. As the women walked naked to the “showers” to be gassed, their babies were thrown into sacks and beaten or tossed in the air for target practice.