“each of the 6 million victims was an ordinary person like Hanna”

Hanna’s suitcase

The story of a little Jewish girl named Hanna, and her famous suitcase, is back in the news. A photo of her suitcase is shown above. WaisenKind means orphan.

http://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/AJ201608300006.html

Although Hanna was an “orphan,” she allegedly had a brother.The brother of little Hanna survived the Holocaust, perhaps because he was not burdened by a suitcase that he had to carry when he was sent to the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp, or maybe because he was old enough to work.

The following quote is from the news article:

Begin quote

When Fumiko Ishioka holds lectures for schoolchildren [in Japan] about the inhumanity of the Holocaust, she gets through to the kids by showing them an unassuming little brown suitcase.

“Hana’s Suitcase” belonged to Hana [Hanna] Brady, a 13-year-old Jewish girl from Czechoslovakia who perished in the Nazi-run gas chambers at the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland in the closing months of World War II.

[Why was little Hanna allowed to live in a death camp until the “closing months of World War II?” Children under the age of 15 were allegedly killed immediately.]

Hanna’s story has been published in 40 countries, while drama and film adaptations of her tragic life have also been created.

Ishioka has spoken about the Holocaust to more than 200,000 children in Japan and 10 foreign countries over the past 13 years.

In July, the 45-year-old hosted her 1,000th “Hana’s Suitcase” class at a senior high school in Tokyo.

End quote

Excuse me! I think that this young Japanese girl should be telling stories about how the “Japs” tortured and killed prisoners of war, not about the Jews. I was a young child during World War II and all we ever heard about was the atrocities committed by the Japanese. We knew nothing about young Jewish girls who carried suitcases into a prison camp during wartime.

American soldiers, who were ethnic German, were sent to the Pacific rim during World War II, not to Germany. I had an uncle, who was sent to the Pacific; he returned home with stories of the atrocities committed by the Japs.

The following quote is also from the news article:

Begin quote

Ishioka later learned that Hana’s older brother survived a concentration camp and was living in Canada. The two met and Hana’s brother told Ishioka the story of his little sister.

Ishioka says that children strongly feel the tragedy of the Holocaust when they see the suitcase during her lectures.

She repeatedly urges the kids to “imagine,” so they can understand that each of the 6 million victims was an ordinary person like Hana [Hanna].

End quote

You can see a large photo of the famous suitcase at the top of the news article. For some reason, I was unable to copy the photo.

 

How the ruins of Auschwitz-Birkenau have changed over the years

Recent photo of the ruins of the Krema II gas chamber at the Auschwitz-Birkenau memorial site

In the photo above, note the height of the trees in the background. The old photo below shows virtually no trees.

Photo of the ruins of Krema II at Auschwitz-Birkenau, taken in 1945

My 2005 photo of the same ruins

Krema II at Auschwitz-Birkenau, shown in the photos above, was the site of the largest mass murder in the history of mankind, according to Robert Jan Van Pelt, a noted Holocaust historian.

It was here that over 500,000 Jews were  gassed to death with Zyklon-B, an insecticide that was also used to disinfect clothing in the camp, according to Mr. Van Pelt.

The old black and white photo was taken shortly after Auschwitz was liberated by the Soviet Union on January 27, 1945.

The photo at the top of the page shows the same view of the ruins of Krema II, taken recently. The trees in the background are at the west end of the Auschwitz II camp, aka Birkenau.

These photos show the on-going effort to preserve the ruins of Krema II. Robert Jan Van Pelt calls Krema II the “Holy of Holies.” He feels that this is a place that demands great reverence and respect for the thousands of innocent victims who perished here.

My 2005 photo of the ruins of the oven room in Krema II where bodies were burned

Old photo shows Krema II building before it was blown up

The old black and white photo above shows the Krema II building in 1943, when it was still under construction; the roof of the partially-underground gas chamber, covered with about two inches of snow, is on the right.

The ceiling of the gas chamber room was around eight feet high; the exterior roof was about three feet above ground.

There were four holes in the roof of the gas chambers in both Krema II and Krema III; the roofs were made of reinforced concrete, six inches thick. Through these four holes on the roof, an SS man, wearing a gas mask, would lower an open can of Zyklon-B gas pellets down into four wire-mesh columns inside the gas chamber.

When the gassing was finished, the pellets were retrieved and sent back to the Degesch company so that they could be filled with poison and used again.

Michael Kula, a Holocaust survivor, testified as an eye-witness to the use of wire-mesh columns for the Zyklon-B pellets, but these columns are no longer in existence.

 

 

I am re-posting an oldie but goody

I can’t think of anything new to write about, so I am re-posting an old blog post, which I consider to be one of my best posts:

CNN show “Voices of Auschwitz” hosted by Wolf Blitzer

The cremation ovens at the Majdanek camp

The front side of the cremation ovens at  the Majdanek camp

The back side of the Majdanek ovens Photo Credit:  Simon Robert

The original wooden crematorium building at Majdanek was allegedly burned to the ground by the Nazis on July 22, 1944, just before they abandoned the camp; the cremation ovens remained intact and tourists can still see these ovens today.

The reconstructed crematorium at Majdanek, which is open to tourists, is located at the top of a long slope, behind the spot where the barracks in Field V once stood. The reconstructed crematorium is a copy of the second crematorium that was built in the camp; it was not put into operation until the autumn of 1943, according to the Museum guidebook.

When the Majdanek camp first opened, the bodies were buried in mass graves, but from June 1942 on, the bodies were burned in the first crematorium, or on pyres made from the chassis of old lorries (trucks), according to information in the camp guidebook.

The first crematorium is no longer in existence, and I never learned the exact location of it when I visited the camp in 1998.  The original crematorium had two ovens which had been brought to Majdanek from the Sachsenhausen camp in Germany. The new crematorium was outfitted with five Kori ovens which were fueled with coke.

As you first walk into the crematorium at Majdanek, you see a row of five ovens. The ovens are placed so close to the entrance door that you realize that there would not have been enough room for workers to slide the bodies inside. Then you walk around to the other side and see that the bodies were allegedly put into the ovens from the back side and the ashes taken out on the front side, only a few feet from the entrance door.

According to Martin Gilbert in his book entitled “Holocaust Journey,” there is a gas chamber in the crematorium building. This gas chamber, like the building, is a reconstruction. Since this gas chamber is a reconstruction, it does not show the blue staining that is present in the other alleged gas chambers at Majdanek, which were used for the disinfection of the clothing of the prisoners.

The reconstructed gas chamber room in the crematorium is very small; it has a hole in the ceiling for pouring in the poison gas crystals, and there is a floor drain directly below the hole. The door to this gas chamber is missing, and may have been taken to another museum to be displayed.

A casting of an alleged Majdanek gas chamber door was on display at the United States Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. when I visited the museum several years ago.

Right next to the room, at Majdanek, which has the 5 ovens, there is an alcove, or room open on one side, which has a large concrete bathtub. According to my tour guide, this tub was used by the SS man in charge of the ovens, when he took a bath. In the shower room adjacent to the other gas chambers at Majdanek, there are two similar concrete bathtubs where the prisoners were dipped into disinfectant before taking a shower. The reconstructed gas chamber in the crematorium resembles a shower room.

Old photo of the Crematorium building at Majdanek before it was burned

The black and white photo below shows the ruined crematorium as it allegedly looked when Russian soldiers arrived at the camp on July 23, 1944. The wooden crematorium building had allegedly been set on fire by the Nazis in order to burn the bodies of Polish political prisoners who had been brought from the Gestapo prison at the Castle in Lublin and executed the day before liberation of the camp. [Actually, these prisoners had been killed by the Russians when they first arrived in Lublin.]

The photo above shows the bodies of the men who were brought to the camp, from a nearby prison, and burned by the Russian liberators of the camp, who then blamed the Germans for this deed.

In another room of the crematorium building is the concrete dissection table, on which the bodies were examined for valuables hidden in body cavities, according to the tour guide. It was here also that the gold teeth were removed from the victims after they had allegedly been gassed.

 

Were the “Holocaust ovens” too small to have been used to kill 6 million Jews?

Trump Foreign Policy Adviser: The Holocaust Ovens Were ‘Too Small To Kill 6 Million Jews’

The “Holocaust ovens” are back in the news, as shown in the newspaper headline above.  Yes, yes, I know that the Jews were [allegedly] killed in gas chambers, not in gas  ovens.

The “Holocaust ovens” were used to burn the bodies after the Jews had allegedly been gassed.

What does this have to do with Donald Trump’s campaign? Absolutely nothing!

However, a news article claims that the Jews were killed in ovens. You can read the article in full at http://uproxx.com/news/trump-foreign-policy-adviser-holocaust-ovens-too-small/

My 2005 photo of an oven in the main Auschwitz camp that was used to burn the bodies of Jews

In my photo above, notice how small the cremation oven is. The ovens at Auschwitz were deep enough to burn two bodies at a time, but that’s all. It would have taken a long time to kill 6 million Jews, two at a time, in the cremation ovens.

My photo of the rear of an Auschwitz oven

My photo above shows the rear of an oven where the ashes were removed.

My photo shows that the ovens were very close to an interior door into the Auschwitz gas chamber

My photo of a trolley car used to put bodies into an oven in Auschwitz main camp

 

Anthropoid — the movie, now showing in a few select theaters

There is a new movie, about the story of Reinhard Heinrich, which I am dying to see, but it is not showing in any of the theaters anywhere near me. The movie is based on Operation Anthropoid, a famous historical event that took place years ago.

Reinhard Heydrich is the man in the center

Reinhard Heydrich was noted for having a feminine type body with hips wider than his shoulders, as depicted in the photo above.

Heydrich is also noted for having had two girlfriends at the same time, and for getting one of them pregnant, then refusing to marry her. However, none of this is pointed out in the movie. Would it have killed the producer of this movie to have included a little bit of human interest?

You can read a review of the movie at http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/anthropoid-2016

The following quote is from the review, cited above:

Begin quote

The events [in the movie] take place in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia in the early 1940s. As students of World War II should know—well, as anyone should know, really, but let’s not get into that—Czechoslovakia was for all intents and purposes handed over to Germany in 1939, which gave Hitler access to a wealth of natural resources and manufacturing power to fuel the German war machine which then went on to conquer Poland and put the Second World War into active motion.

The SS was terribly efficient in quashing the Czechoslovakian resistance movement, but a Czech government in absentia kept up the effort, and in late 1941 it flew a plane from England and dispatched parachutists to drop outside of Prague, where they were to begin a daring and divisive mission.

The movie begins by following two parachutists, Jan (Jamie Dornan) and Josef (Cillian Murphy). Josef cuts his foot badly on the way down and needs some stitching up. Contemporary movies like to signal their integrity and/or authenticity by including graphic scenes depicting the suturing of icky wounds, and this one is no exception.

The duo’s bad luck continues, as they are sniffed out and then nearly sold out by a couple of quasi-quisling farm folk. And then, once they get to Prague and make their contacts, the remnants of the Czechoslovakian resistance with whom they have to work are in large part appalled by the mission they’ve come to carry out.

That is, the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, engineer of the Final Solution and the iron fist personally dispatched by Hitler to crush resistance, a man nicknamed “the Butcher of Prague.” 

Local resistance leader Ladislav (Marcin Dorocinski) balks, while suitably avuncular cohort “Uncle” Hajsky (Toby Jones) counsels cooperation. Jan and Josef shack up with a local family, establish covers in part by romancing a couple of local women, and start doing recon to determine the pattern of Heydrich’s comings and goings.

So here’s where the spoiler question comes in: do these heroes pull it off? Well, the answer to that is part of the historical record, and yet, who knows. Some folks might want to go into this movie blind, or semi-blind, or what have you. For myself, I found the picture a frustrating experience. It is cast with largely British actors, which is fine, but it does not follow what I now consider the anachronistic convention of having them speak with their native accents; rather, Ellis makes the performers speak English in heavy Czech, or “Czech” accents—I don’t have the ear to make a pronouncement as to how accurate they are, although all the actors are dedicated and expert professionals. In any event, this strategy kind of made me yearn for the anachronistic practice, which at least had a kind of inherent consistency. I also found the movie’s style off-putting. It’s shot in widescreen format, about a 2.35 ratio, but almost all of the shots are handheld. A lot of the time the experience of the movie is like looking at a very long wobbly rectangle, and the frequently abrupt cutting doesn’t help. The tighter the aspect ratio, the more effective the hand-held, or simulated hand-held, camerawork is, I’ve found. The movie’s scenario also trucks in a variety of clichés. And, near the end, at least one mistaken, overstated metaphor.

End quote

When I visited Prague, years ago, I took a guided tour, which included a stop at the hairpin curve where Heydrich’s car was forced to slow down. He was fatally wounded on this corner, but not before he jumped out of the car and began firing his gun.

The photo above shows the hairpin turn where Heydrich’s car was forced to slow down; this is where he was fatally wounded. This is what the curve looks like today.

To some people, Heydrich is a hero, but to others, he can never be a hero because of the way that he treated women. Getting a girl pregnant, and then not marrying her, was unknown in Germany back then.

What the length of your fingers says about you

Why am I concerned about the length of anyone’s fingers, you ask. What does this have to do with the Holocaust, which is the main subject of my blog, you ask.

You can read about the various lengths of fingers, and see photos of fingers on this website: http://www.littlethings.com/finger-length-personality-quiz/

As you will note, no one has fingers that are all the same length.

Scratches on the wall of the alleged Auschwitz gas chamber

As the photo above shows, the fingernail scratches on the wall of the gas chamber were made by fingers that are are all the same length, which is unknown in real life.

Five years ago, I put up a blog post about the fingernail scratches on the walls of the gas chamber in the main Auschwitz camp. These scratches were allegedly put there by children who were held up by their dying parents so that the the children could scratch the walls made of concrete. This was allegedly done to provide proof for future generations that Jews were gassed in the morgue at Auschwitz.

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

 

Reinhard Heydrich is back in the news

The following quote is from a news article, which you can read in full here: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3751377/They-deserve-heroes-burial-Daring-Czech-assassins-Holocaust-chief-Reinhard-Heydrich-buried-unmarked-graves.html

Begin quote

A campaign is growing to give a proper burial to the two daring Czech assassins who killed [Reinhard Heydrich] a chief of the Holocaust and one of Hitler’s most fanatical henchmen.

British trained Czech paratroopers Jozef Gabcik and Jan Kubis are credited with killing Reinhard Heydrich in 1942, by ambushing his car on the streets of Prague.

They are believed to have been buried in the Czech capital in an unmarked grave in the Dablice cemetery when they were later killed in an attack on their hideout by the SS.

End quote

Reinhard Heydrich is the man on the left

Reinhard Heydrich is back in the news because the bodies of the brave men, who assassinated him, are now being moved from their unmarked graves; they are now going to have a “heroes burial” according to the news article.

Normally, when you kill someone, you are a murderer, but if you kill a Nazi, you are a hero and you deserve all the honor given to a hero.

Here is the story of what happened to Reinhard Heydrich:

On May 27, 1942, Reinhard Heydrich was wounded when a group of Czech resistance fighters, who had escaped to England, returned and made an attempt on his life in Prague. Heydrich died of his wounds on June 4, 1942.

After World War II ended on May 8, 1945, the Allied powers began a search for the Nazi documents that they would need as evidence at the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal which was set to begin in November 1945.

They found tons of paperwork including secret documents hidden in salt mines and behind walls in the Nazi administration buildings. But the one most important document, the order signed by Adolf Hitler which would have given the authority for the genocide of the Jews, was never found.

Finally, in 1947, long after the first proceedings of the Nuremberg IMT had ended, the minutes of a conference held on January 20, 1942 at a villa in Wannsee, a district of Berlin, were found.

At this conference, the plans for the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question” had been discussed. Today, tourists can stand in the very room where the plans were made for the genocide of the Jews.

Fifteen top officials of the Nazi bureaucracy and the SS attended the Wannsee conference, which was led by 38-year-old Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, the chief of the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA).

In the past, I have written several blog posts about Reinhard Heydrich:

https://furtherglory.wordpress.com/tag/reinhard-heydrich/

The following quote is from one of my previous blog posts about Reinhard Heydrich:

Begin quote

On January 20, 1942 at Wannsee, a suburb of Berlin, a conference was held to plan “The Final Solution to the Jewish Question” for Europe’s 11 million Jews. SS General Reinhard Heydrich, who was the head of RSHA (Reich Security Main Office) as well as the Deputy of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia (now the Czech Republic) led the conference.

The protocols from the conference, as written by Adolf Eichmann, contained the expression “transportation to the East,” a euphemism that was used to mean the genocidal killing of all the Jews in Europe.

On May 27, 1942, Reinhard Heydrich was fatally wounded by two Czech resistance fighters who had parachuted into German-occupied Bohemia from Great Britain where they had been trained.

Even before Heydrich died 8 days later, Odilo Globocnik began preparations for Aktion Reinhard, which was the plan to send Jews to their deaths at Treblinka, Belzec and Sobibor, according to Martin Gilbert’s book entitled “The Holocaust.”

A fourth extermination camp had already been opened at Chelmno in what is now western Poland, and the first Jews had already been gassed in mobile vans on December 8, 1941, according to the Central Commission for Investigation of German Crimes in Poland.

The Jews believe that the Holocaust was planned at the Wannsee Conference, and as the leader of this conference, Reinhard Heydrich was the worst of the Nazi war criminals.

End quote from previous blog post

Telford Taylor and his role in war crimes trials

My photo of a marker at the spot where men were executed at Dachau

Today, I am writing about General Telford Taylor and his role in history.

When the Nuremberg Doctors Trial started on December 9, 1946, it was apparently not yet known, for sure, whether Dr. Sigmund Rascher had been executed.

In his opening statement for the prosecution at the Doctors Trial, General Telford Taylor said the following:

Begin quote

There were many co-conspirators who are not in the dock. Among the planners and leaders of this plot were Conti and Grawitz, and Hippke whose whereabouts is unknown. Among the actual executioners, Dr. Ding is dead and Rascher is thought to be dead. There were many others.

End quote

Taylor was referring to the Doctors who were involved as “co-conspirators” in the Nazi “plot” to do medical experiments, but were not on trial for one reason or another.

The defendants in the Doctors Trial were accused of committing crimes under the guise of scientific research. The “executioners” were the Doctors who did the actual experiments, including Dr. Rascher. They were called “executioners” because their subjects were prisoners who had been classified as “professional criminals,” but instead of having a humane execution, they had allegedly been tortured to death.

Curiously, it was not known for certain by the American prosecutors at the Doctors Trial, whether Dr. Sigmund Rascher was alive or dead, 18 months after his alleged demise, even though Dr. Leo Alexander had supposedly deduced the reason for Dr. Rascher’s execution during the course of his investigation prior to the start of the trial.

The following testimony was given, at the Doctors Trial, by a member of the German nobility, Freiherr von Eberstein, the Police President in Munich, when he was asked about Dr. Rascher by prosecution attorney, Herr Pelckmann:

Begin quote:

VON EBERSTEIN:

Yes. Rascher remained under arrest in the detention house of the SS barracks, Munich-Freimann, to all appearances until the barracks, at least the detention house, was evacuated because of the approach of the American troops.

He was then sent to Dachau and I learned from the press that he must have been shot during the last few days. I cannot give any further information about this, since I was relieved of my post on 20 April 1945.”

End quote from testimony

So he was “sent to Dachau?” He was sent to Dachau “Because of the approach of the American troops?”

What about Dr. Rascher’s time in Buchenwald when he supposedly had incriminating conversations with Captain Payne Best?

Did Captain Payne Best actually meet Dr. Rascher for the first time on the march from Dachau to the South Tyrol, as reported by Gerald Reitlinger, a highly respected historian?

Shortly after he arrived at Dachau, Captain Payne Best was transferred from the Dachau bunker to the barrack building that had been formerly used as a brothel; it is possible that he didn’t meet Dr. Rascher until the bunker was evacuated on April 26, 1945.

It is possible that Dr. Rascher was never a prisoner at Buchenwald, and Captain Payne Best just assumed that he had been a prisoner there, since Dr. Rascher was brought to Dachau around the same time that other VIP prisoners at Buchenwald were transferred to Dachau.

In his 1143-page book entitled “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich,” William L. Shirer wrote this about Dr. and Frau Rascher:

Begin quote from Shirer’s book:

“Neither survived, and it is believed that Himmler himself, in one of the last acts of his life, ordered their execution.”

In other words, no one knows for certain who ordered the murder of Dr. Sigmund Rascher.

Dr. Rascher’s execution had allegedly been ordered by Himmler, according to the Dachau Museum, and carried out by Theodor Bongartz, the man in charge of the crematorium where the bodies were disposed of. The execution had taken place, not at the usual place at the execution wall in the woods, but in the bunker in the presence of witnesses who would have heard the shot fired in Cell #73 and seen the brains spattered on the wall of the cell.

A prisoner, who had been sent to Dachau because he was a Jehovah’s Witness, was in charge of cleaning the bunker and he would have been a witness to the aftermath of the shooting.

If Himmler had given an execution order, it would normally have been given to the Gestapo chief in Berlin and the order would then have been sent by telegram to Johann Kick, the Gestapo department head at Dachau, who would have given the order to Wilhelm Ruppert, the officer in charge of executions at Dachau who would have then ordered Theodor Bongartz to shoot Dr. Rascher at the execution wall. Apparently none of this happened and there is no record of an execution order.

What exactly did Hitler write in Mein Kampf about killing the Jews?

Adolf Hitler

There has been a lively discussion, about Hitler, going on recently in the comment section of my blog.  The discussion centers on Hitler’s use of gas to kill Jews during World War II.

I have had to look up Hitler’s exact words, written in his long boring book, entitled “Mein Kampf”, in order to refresh my memory.

In doing a search, I found this website which gives quotes, from Hitler, in an organized manner:

https://whistlinginthewind.org/2014/02/22/reading-mein-kampf/

The following quote is from the website, cited above:

https://whistlinginthewind.org/2014/02/22/reading-mein-kampf/

[…] However, the most disturbing and horrifying quote comes right at the end of the book when Hitler gives a hint of the great evil he would soon commit.

[Begin quote]

“At the beginning of the War, or even during the War, if twelve or fifteen thousand of these Jews who were corrupting the nation had been forced to submit to poison gas, just as hundreds of thousands of our best German workers from every social stratum and from every trade and calling had to face it in the field, then the millions of sacrifices made at the front would not have been in vain. On the contrary if twelve thousand of these [Jewish] malefactors had been eliminated in proper time probably the lives of a million decent men, who would be of value to Germany in the future, might have been saved.”

End quote

Correct me if I am wrong, but I think that Hitler was referring to the use of poison gas, by the Allies, on the battlefield during World War One.

I could not find any quote in which Hitler advocated killing thousands of Jews, using Zyklon-B gas, in huge underground gas chambers, which looked like crematoria, nor in rooms that looked like shower rooms.

Ask yourself this: If Hitler was so terrible, why did a beautiful young woman stay with him to the bitter end, and then kill herself, beside him.