The truth about the “Buchenwald war criminals”

I have a section on my website about the Buchenwald camp, which you can read at http://www.scrapbookpages.com/Buchenwald/index.html

You can read about the alleged Buchenwald atrocities in this section of my website: http://www.scrapbookpages.com/Buchenwald/Atrocities.html

After World War II ended, the Nazi concentration camps were declared to be a “criminal enterprise” by the Allies. Under the new Allied concept of “co-responsibility” which was used in all the World War II war crimes trials, anyone who had worked in any one of the German camps, in any capacity, was a war criminal.

The 31 accused persons, in the Buchenwald war crimes trial, included at least one person who represented each job title in the camp.

The relatively low number of Buchenwald war criminals might have been due to the fact that 76 of the SS staff members had been hunted down and killed by the inmates with the help of the Americans after the camp was liberatorated.

It was not a war crime for American soldiers to kill German POWs at that time because General Dwight D. Eisenhower had had the foresight in March 1945 to designate all future German POWs as Disarmed Enemy Forces in order to get around the rules of the Geneva Convention of 1929, which America had signed.

Today is the anniversary of the Sandy Hook massacre

You can read a very long news article about Sandy Hook and the victims who were killed, several years ago, by a young boy who was probably mentally ill.

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/sandy-hook-victims-5-years_us_5a2ac6cce4b073789f695659

How could this have been prevented? The boy who did the killing should have been put into a mental institution long before this happened. Instead, the father moved out of the house, taking his other normal sons with him, and leaving a mentally ill child in the care of his mother, who might have been mentally ill herself.

Everything that you need to know about the movie entitled “Schindler’s List”

A scene from Schindler’s List – the Movie

The photo above shows a scene from the movie entitled Schindler’s List, in which Oskar Schindler is dictating, from memory, the names of his factory workers whom he wants to take with him to his new factory in Brünnlitz, near his home town in Moravia, which is now in the Czech Republic.

His factory manager, Itzhak Stern, a prisoner who works for Schindler, is typing the names.

When all the names are listed, Stern asked Schindler if he was buying the names from the camp Commandant Amon Goeth.  Schindler answers that the list is costing him a fortune.

The Nazis did not want to send Jewish prisoners to Moravia, which was part of the former country of Czechoslovakia, that had become a German mandate. Schindler had to resort to bribes in order to move the munitions part of his Krakow factory to Brünnlitz.

In the movie, Schindler then shows the list to Amon Goeth, who tells him that there is a clerical error: Helen Hirsch, a prisoner who works as a servant in Goeth’s villa, is on the list. Goeth tells Schindler that he wants to take Helen Hirsch with him back to Vienna after the war.

Schindler offers to play a game of cards with Goeth to win Helen’s freedom, suggesting that they play double or nothing. If Goeth wins, Oskar will give him 7,400 Zloty ($2,312.50) but if Goeth’s winning hand is a “natural,” Schindler will pay him 14,800 Zl ($4,625). If Schindler
wins, he can put Helen Hirsch on his list of prisoners to be transferred to his Brünnlitz camp.

In his book entitled “Oskar Schindler,” David Crowe wrote that this scene was pure fiction.

According to Crowe, Oskar Schindler had no role in preparing the famous list, other than giving SS-Hauptscharführer Franz Josef Müller some general guidelines for the type of workers he wanted on the list. Amon Göth had been arrested by the SS on September 13, 1944 and was in prison in Breslau when the list was being prepared.

David Crowe wrote that the person responsible for the preparation of Schindler’s List was Marcel Goldberg, a corrupt Jewish prisoner, who was a member of the Ordnungdienst, the Jewish police force in the camp. Goldberg was the assistant of SS-Hauptscharführer Franz Josef Müller, the SS man responsible for the transport lists.

Only about one third of the Jews on the list had previously worked in Schindler’s factory in Krakow. The novel, “Schindler’s Ark” tells about how Goldberg accepted bribes from the prisoners who wanted on the list.

In his book “Oskar Schindler,” David Crowe wrote: “… watch how Steven Spielberg traces the story of Marcel Goldberg, the real author of Schindler’s List, in his film. He begins in the early part of the film with Goldberg sitting near Leopold “Poldek” Page and other Jewish black marketeers in Krakow’s Marjacki Bazylika (church) as Oskar Schindler tries to interest them in doing business with a German.

What follows throughout the rest of the film is the subtle tale of Goldberg’s gradual moral degeneration. Schindler, for example, gives Itzhak Stern first a lighter, then a cigarette case, and finally a watch to bribe Goldberg to send more Jews to his factory from Plaszow.”

Commandant Amon Goeth had two Jewish housemaids who lived in the basement of his villa: Helen Hirsch and Helen Sternlicht. Helen Hirsch is now Helen Horowitz and Helen Sternlicht is now Helen Jonas, formerly Helen Rosenzweig.

According to David Crowe’s book, Goeth differentiated between the two Helens by calling Helen Hirsch by the nickname Lena and renaming Helen Sternlicht with the name Susanna. In the movie, the two Helens are a composite of the two real life Helens, although both appear together briefly in one scene.

Helen Hirsch moved to Israel after World War II ended, and became part of the close-knit circle of the “Schindler Jews” in Israel who provided the information that became the basis for Thomas Keneally’s novel Schindler’s Ark and Steven Spielberg’s movie Schindler’s List.

According to author David Crowe, Helen Hirsch was the older of the two Jewish maids who worked for Goeth. She had originally worked in the camp’s Jewish kitchen and was chosen by her superior, Leon Myer, to work for Goeth.

Myer took several weeks to acquaint her with the commandant’s personal likes and dislikes. Initially, Helen lived in a special barracks for Jewish workers, but eventually moved into the maid’s quarters in the cold, damp cellar of Goeth’s villa.

Living with Goeth, she said after the war, “was almost like living under the gallows twenty-four hours a day.”

David Crowe wrote that Helen Hirsch Horowitz told Martin Gosch and Howard Koch in 1964 that “insofar as she was concerned, he (Goeth) had made some attempts physically and sexually upon her.” Gosch and Koch decided not to put this in the film script because “she might be accused even today of having acceded to his physical demands in order to preserve her life, and this does not happen to be true.”

The story that is told in the movie about how Amon Goeth chose his housemaid is actually closer to the story of how Helen Sternlicht was selected by Goeth.

According to David Crowe’s book, the true story is as follows:

When the Germans began the construction of Plaszow in late 1942, Helen Sternlicht’s mother, Lola, and one of her older sisters, Sydel (Sydonia), were sent there to work. As the Krakow ghetto was being liquidated, Helen Sternlicht decided to try to sneak into Plaszow because she did not have the blue Kennkarte which was necessary for identification. Helen had already learned about the death trains to Belzec and was desperate to join her sister and mother at Plaszow. She hid in a milk wagon going to Plaszow but was discovered by the driver just before he arrived at the camp. She managed to escape his grasp and made it into the camp, where she was given a job cleaning barracks. One day while she was cleaning windows, Amon Goeth walked in and said, “I want this girl in my house. If she is smart enough to clean windows in the sunshine, I want her.”

When Plaszow was being closed in the fall of 1944, Oskar Schindler requested that Helen Sternlicht and her sister, Anna, be put on the female “Schindler’s List.”

In his book “Oskar Schindler,” David Crowe wrote that Helen Sternlicht never mentioned sexual advances toward her from Goeth.

The sex scenes in the movie Schindler’s List involved Helen Hirsch, as shown in this YouTube video.

The following quote is from the book “Oskar Schindler,” by David Crowe:

Mietek Pemper told me that Goeth, who had liver and kidney problems, was not attracted to women. In fact, he found the idea that Goeth was somehow sexually attracted to Helen Hirsch Horowitz pure “baloney.” She was not, he added, “Miss Krakow or Miss Poland.” Helen Rosenzweig added that Goeth was also a diabetic who drank heavily. He believed firmly in Nazi racial laws and would not have had relations with a Jew. This does not contradict Helen Hirsch’s claim that Goeth tried to sexually abuse her when he was drunk. However, the idea, as depicted in Steven Spielberg’s film, that Goeth was somehow infatuated with Helen Hirsch and even toyed with the idea of kissing her is totally fictitious.

In February 2009, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum did a series of interviews with Holocaust survivors called Voices on Antisemitism. As part of this project, Helen Sternlicht Jonas was interviewed by Aleisa Fishman.

The following quote is the words of Helen Sternlicht Jonas in her interview with Aleisa Fishman:

When I arrived in Camp Plaszow, I was assigned to clean barracks. At the third day, a tall SS walked in the room, and he was Amon Goeth. At the time, I didn’t know who he was. But he looked around and he said to the woman that was in charge of us to send me to his house. And I really didn’t know what a brutal man he is, but he was a madman. He was a madman. He always, from the balcony he watched the camp, and he’s standing with the little machine gun through the window. He said, “You see those dumb heads? They’re standing, doing nothing.” He says, “I’m going to shoot.” And you could hear shooting like hell. And I could hear him whistling a happy tune, like he did so well. And this face with such satisfaction! I can’t forget that. The dreams after so many years he’s chasing me, I’m hiding. Because I lived in constant fear, constant fear, just looking at him. He was barbaric.

Amon Goeth with his rifle on the balcony of his villa

The most famous scenes in Schindler’s List show Commandant Amon Goeth shooting prisoners in the camp from the balcony of his villa. The photo above shows the real life Amon Goeth.

The photo below is a still photo from the movie entitled Schindler’s List. In the movie, the balcony of Goeth’s house is only a few yards from the camp. Visitors to Goeth’s villa today can see that the house was behind a hill and the camp was not visible from the balcony.

Amon Goeth shooting from his balcony in the movie Schindler’s List

In 1943, SS Judge Georg Konrad Morgen of the Haupt Amt Gericht (SS-HAG) was given an assignment to investigate and prosecute corruption and unauthorized murder at the Buchenwald concentration camp. His next assignment was to investigate the Plaszow camp.

As a result of his investigation, which involved interviewing the prisoners, Amon Goeth was arrested by the Central Office of the SS Judiciary and imprisoned.

Goeth was charged with stealing from the warehouses and factories at Plaszow, but not with shooting prisoners from the balcony of his home.

Amon Goeth at the Plaszow camp

In the photo above, taken at the Plaszow camp, Commandant Amon Goeth is shown on his white horse. The groom for Goeth’s horse was 14-year-old Irwin Gotfried, who managed to survive the Holocaust.

After the war, Gotfried emigrated to the San Francisco bay area where he lived in a community that included 2,000 other Holocaust survivors.

In an article in the San Francisco Chronicle on May 16, 2005, staff writer Charles Burress wrote the following:

“That was me in the movie,” Gotfried said, referring to a scene from “Schindler’s List,” where the young groom is shot and killed by the commander. In real life, Gotfried was not shot and lived to become president of AGI Shower Door and Mirror Co. in Redwood City.

In the movie scene, where Gotfried is shot by Amon Goeth, Spielberg deviated from the real life story in order to make a point that is essential to the theme of the movie: Oskar Schindler was an exception. For the most part, the Nazis were depraved degenerates who were incapable of changing their ways.

In a key scene in Schindler’s List, Oskar Schindler attempts to teach Goeth that he would have “real power” if he would choose to pardon prisoners for minor infractions instead of summarily executing them. Goeth tries this suggestion, and even practices his pardon demeanor in a mirror, but he cannot overcome his intrinsic evilness. He pardons his 14-year-old groom when his work performance does not meet his standards, but then shoots him in the back with his high-powered rifle.

In the movie Schindler’s List, the Germans are always portrayed as not only brutal, but stupid and inept. There is a famous scene where three German SS officers attempt to execute a Jew, but their pistols won’t fire.

The German Luger pistol was highly prized by Allied soldiers in both World War I and World War II; thousands of them were taken from dead or captured German soldiers because the Luger was considered the best pistol in the world. This scene attempts to show that even the best that the Germans could do wasn’t good enough.

Remember that Schindler’s List is a fictional story, based on a fictional novel entitled Schindler’s Ark; it is neither objective nor true history.

 

The victims of President Pussy Grabber are now speaking out

Do you remember when “Pussy Grabber” began his campaign to become President of the United States? When it was  revealed that Donald Trump was a “pussy grabber”, he was quoted as saying: “When you are a star, they let you do it.”

Now his victims are coming forward. The following quote is from a recent news article which you can read in full at:

https://www.aol.com/article/news/2017/12/11/three-women-who-accused-trump-of-sexual-misconduct-speak-out/23303722/

Begin quote
Three women who have previously accused President Donald Trump of sexual misconduct before he took office spoke out Monday as America’s watershed #MeToo moment continues to unfold.

Jessica Leeds, Samantha Holvey and Rachel Crooks, speaking together on “Megyn Kelly Today,” described separate interactions with the president in years past, with one of the allegations dating back several decades.

Holvey said when she competed in Trump’s Miss USA pageant in 2006, Trump came backstage unexpectedly when she and other contestants were wearing nothing but robes and he personally inspected the contestants.

“I just felt so gross,” she said. “Just looking me over like I was a piece of meat.”

End quote

 

How the Holocaust began….

As far as Americans are concerned, the Holocaust began with the movie Schindler’s List.

I took the photo below in Kazimierz where Schindler’s List was filmed.

My photo above shows the courtyard in Kazimierz which was used for  the movie location.

In 1993, when Stephen Spielberg made a movie out of a novel called “Schindler’s Ark,” written by Australian author Thomas Keneally, he needed an authentic Jewish quarter for the scenes depicting the Jewish ghetto of Podgorze in Krakow. He chose the Kazimierz district of Krakow because this area had not changed since the 1940s, while Podgorze had been partially rebuilt with modern buildings.

Schindler’s List tells the story of how Oskar Schindler, an ethnic German industrialist from the Sudetenland in what is now the Czech Republic, saved 1098 Jews from the misery of having to work at the Nazi forced labor camp at Plaszow, by employing them in his factory in the Zablocie district of Krakow.

Schindler’s factory became a sub-camp in the Nazi concentration camp system; the Jewish prisoners lived in barracks which Schindler built for them on the grounds of his factory. Instead of paying wages to the Jews, Schindler paid less than normal wages to the WVHA (SS Economic Office in Oranienburg) for their labor. Although Schindler didn’t mistreat his Jewish workers, he did profit from their slave labor. Initially, he was motivated by the desire for money, not by a desire to save the Jews.

The photo above shows the balconies in the courtyard from where the suitcases were thrown down in the scene in Spielberg’s movie in which the Podgorze Ghetto is liquidated. According to my tour guide, a courtyard such as this is typical of the way living space was traditionally arranged in the old Jewish quarters of Polish cities.

Since the fall of Communism in Poland in 1989, Kazimierz has been revived as a Jewish community, and it has also become a popular tourist attraction with special tours of the places where the movie was filmed. In October 1998, I took a guided tour of Kazimierz and shot some photographs of the places where Schindler’s List was filmed.

One of the most memorable passages in the novel Schindler’s List is the one where Mrs. Dresner hides under a stairwell when the Nazis come to round up the Jews in the Ghetto in June 1942 to take them to the Belzec extermination camp. According to the book, after this roundup in which many of the Jews escaped, the Jewish Combat Organization (ZOB), a group of resistance fighters, bombed the Cyganeria Restaurant and killed 7 German SS soldiers. Next the SS-only Bagatella Cinema was bombed in Krakow. In the next few months the ZOB sank German patrol boats on the Vistula, fire-bombed German military garages in Krakow and derailed a German army train, besides forging papers and passports for Jews to pass as Aryans. In the movie, the date of the scene where Mrs. Dresner hides has been changed to the day of the liquidation of the ghetto on March 13, 1943.

The photograph below shows the stairway used in the scene in which Mrs. Dresner hides from the Jewish police who were helping the Germans to round up the Jews for “transportation to the East,” a euphemism for taking them to the gas chambers.

Stairs where Mrs. Dresner hid in Schindler’s List

The guided tour that I took in 1998 was called Schindler’s Steps. From Krakow, the tour entered Kazimierz on Jozefa street and the first thing we saw was the courtyard, which links Jozefa street with Meiselsa street, and the stairwell where the hiding scene in Schindler’s List was filmed. Mrs. Dresner hid under the stairwell, pictured above, after a neighbor allowed her daughter, but not her, to hide behind a false wall in an apartment. Mrs. Dresner was the aunt of Genia, the little girl in red, in the movie.

In the movie, the Nazis went through the Podgorze ghetto, room by room, and tore down walls as they looked for Jews who were hiding. While they are searching for Jews, a German soldier stops to play the piano. The Nazis loved classical music and this is a reference to the Jewish saying that the Nazis literally put down their violins in order to kill the Jews.

Germany was the most civilized and advanced country in the world in the 1930s, which makes it all the harder to understand how the Nazis could have planned the deliberate genocide of the Jews.

According to the novel, entitled “Schindler’s Ark,” around 4,000 Jews were found hiding in Podgorze during the liquidation of the ghetto and they were executed on the spot.

However, during the post war trial of Amon Goeth, the Commandant of the Plazow camp, the charges against him mentioned that 2,000 Jews were killed during the liquidation of the Podgorze ghetto. Those who managed to escape from the ghetto joined the partisans of the Polish People’s Army, who were hiding in the forests of Niepolomice.

Unlike the novel, the movie “Schindler’s List” does not mention the heroic Jewish resistance fighters, who managed to escape from the Nazis, and lived to fight as partisans throughout the war.

The Schindler’s Steps guided tour, which I took in October 1998, started in Krakow with Schindler’s modern apartment building at #7 Straszewskiego Street, from where Schindler could look out his third floor windows and see the Planty, a narrow park all the way around Old Town Krakow which marks the area where the town walls once stood. This apartment, in a very ordinary, ugly gray building, was given to Schindler by the Nazis after it was taken, without compensation, from the Jewish Nussbaum family.

Straszewskiego Street ends at Wawel, the limestone hill where the ancient royal palaces still stand; during the German occupation of Poland, Hans Frank, the governor of occupied Poland, which was called “the General Government,” lived on Wawel hill in the Castle originally built by King Kazimierz the Great, founder of the separate city of Kazimierz. Schindler’s apartment in Krakow was north of the Kazimierz district and north of Wawel hill.

Street in Kazimierz before the German occupation

The next stop on the tour was Schindler’s Enameled Pots and Pans Factory, on the south side of the river Vistula, at #4 Lipowa Street.

Lipowa Street goes through Podgorze, and the factory is just east of the former ghetto and across the railroad tracks.

Enamelware was apparently widely used in Poland instead of pottery or china, judging by the large amounts of enameled dishes, that were brought to the concentration camps by the prisoners, which are now on display in the museums at Auschwitz and Majdanek.

Enamelware is the type of dishes that Americans associate with the Old West when cowboys ate the beans they cooked over the campfire on metal plates coated with mottled gray enamel.

The most popular color of enameled bowls, displayed in the museums in Poland, is a dull brick red. Enameled pots and pans, such as Schindler produced in his factory, were also popular in American kitchens up until the 1960s.

Oskar Schindler

Schindler obtained a contract with the Germans to supply mess kits and field kitchen pots to the German army. Schindler’s Krakow factory produced armaments as well as enamelware.

The Enamelware part of the factory remained open until 1945 with 300 Polish non-Jewish workers.
When the Plaszow camp closed, Schindler moved the munitions part of his factory to Brünnlitz in what is now the Czech Republic.

The factory produced 45 mm anti-tank shells, but none of his shells were ever used because Schindler deliberately set his machines so that the calibration was incorrect, according to the movie “Schindler’s List.”

Other sources claim that Schindler spent all the money that he made on his enamelware business to purchase shells on the black market which he then sold to the Nazis.

By that time, his purpose was not to make money, but to save his Jewish workers, and thereby save himself from being indicted as a war criminal.

Thomas Keneally, the author of the novel “Schindler’s Ark,” who is a native of Australia, mentioned in the book that in 1944, an Australian plane was shot down by the Germans over Schindler’s factory; the plane was not trying to bomb his munitions factory, but was dropping supplies to the Jewish and Polish partisans in the forest east of Krakow, according to the author.

Schindler’s factory building was still being used for an electronics factory when I visited Krakow in 1998 and I only saw it from the street.

The factory is an ordinary gray stucco three-story building with lots of windows, built right next to the sidewalk. The architectural style of the building is what Americans would call Art Deco; in Poland in the 1940s, this style was called Modern.

There is an iron gate at the entrance to the factory courtyard where Schindler built barracks for his workers. The factory was named Deutsche Emailwaren Fabrick (German Enamelware Factory) and was called DEF for short.

Jewish workers at Schindler’s factory

Oscar Schindler’s factory was later taken over by the Jewish Council in Krakow and the building now has a sign outside, just like the original sign, which says “Deutsche Emalia Fabrika – Oscar Schindler.”

The factory was later included on the Schindler’s Steps tour; visitors could see the stairs that were used in the filming of the movie.

Schindler’s original office is at the top of the stairs and visitors could sit at his desk. The rest of the factory was off limits, but visitors could look around the grounds. The factory interior was not used in the film, except for the stairs.

The photos below were contributed by Richard Stephenson, who took the Schindler’s Steps tour in December 2005.

The grounds of Oskar Schindler’s Factory in Krakow

Stairs in the factory that were shown in Schindler’s List

Oskar Schindler’s real office that was not shown in Schindler’s List

On my visit to Poland in 1998, I stayed at the Hotel Cracovia in Krakow which was owned by Orbis Travel Agency, the tour company that I used.

Built in 1965, it is now a first class, but inexpensive, hotel where tour groups from all over Europe stay before visiting such places as Auschwitz, which is due west of Krakow. Tours of Kazimierz and the site of the Plaszow labor camp can be arranged from the hotel, as well as private tours of the Auschwitz concentration camp.

My 1998 Photos of Kazimierz

Schindler’s List – the Movie

Podgorze ghetto in Krakow

Truth of World War II (Unfortunately we may never know the truth in America, this video is blocked in the USA)

You may find it interesting to attempt to watch this video, but it has been blocked in the United States.  Can any of my readers in other countries see this video.

If you can, let me know what it says in the video.  I always wanted to know the truth about WWII.

Does Setting Your Twitter Location to Germany Block Nazi Content?

https://www.snopes.com/twitter-germany-nazis/

I was reading an interesting article today about how twitter accounts are blocked in Germany.  You can read the article in full and also watch an interesting video by clicking on the link above.

The line of thinking in the article is that you might want to set your location as Germany to block these annoying tweets.

Begin quote from Snopes

CLAIM

Changing your Twitter profile’s country setting to Germany will cause Nazi-related accounts to be blocked from view.

RATING

MOSTLY TRUE

WHAT’S TRUE

Certain national socialist, white nationalist and Nazi Twitter profiles are “withheld” from view when viewed by a Twitter user whose country is set to Germany.

WHAT’S FALSE

The change in settings is not entirely effective, and some Nazi-related accounts and content will persist.

End quote from Snopes.

A sample screen shot from twitter which appears in the article.

The interesting article concludes with the following,

Begin quote from Snopes

Against this background, Germany implemented a new law in October 2017 which specifically targets hate speech and incitement to hatred published on social media platforms, and allows the state to fine technology companies up to €50 million ($59 million) if they fail to quickly remove violating content.

Twitter describes its policy on “country withheld content” in this way:

Many countries, including the United States, have laws that may apply to Tweets and/or Twitter account content. In our continuing effort to make our services available to users everywhere, if we receive a valid and properly scoped request from an authorized entity, it may be necessary to reactively withhold access to certain content in a particular country from time to time.

It’s not clear whether an “authorized entity” means a state entity (i.e. law enforcement or prosecutors), or a private group or individual could also prompt Twitter to withhold content in a given country.

It’s also unclear whether accounts are withheld on the basis of certain keywords in a profile description or handle, or only on the basis of tweets, and whether an official entity must alert Twitter to content that might constitute a criminal offense, or the company itself proactively withholds accounts and tweets.

End quote from Snopes.

 

Holocaust survivor Alice Lok Cohana has died at 88 years old

Alice Lok Cahana recalls celebrating the Sabbath with her sister while hiding in Bergen-Belsen’s latrines.

You can read about the death of Alice Lok Cohana at http://www.chron.com/news/houston-deaths/article/Alice-Lok-Cahana-artist-and-Holocaust-survivor-12417040.php#photo-14674373

Several years ago, I wrote the following about Alice Lok Cohana on my website:

Begin quote from my website:

One of the Hungarian Jews who survived Auschwitz was Alice Lok Cahana, whose story was recounted by Laurence Rees in his book entitled “Auschwitz, a New History.”

Alice was 15 when she was registered in the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp, but months later she was sent to the gas chamber in Krema V and told that she would be given new clothes after taking a shower. The purpose of the red brick Krema V building was deceptively disguised by red geraniums in window boxes, according to Alice.

She was inside the gas chamber in Krema V when the revolt by the Sonderkommando unit in Krema IV began on October 7, 1944. This was the occasion when the Sonderkommando blew up the Krema IV gas chamber building with dynamite that had been sneaked into Auschwitz-Birkenau by some of the women prisoners who worked in factories outside the camp.

Alice Lok Cahana The recent news article left out here survival story.

Laurence Rees wrote:

But the revolt did save some lives. It must have been because of the chaos caused by the Sonderkommando in crematorium 4 that the SS guards emptied the gas chamber of crematorium 5 next door without killing Alice Lok Cahana and her group.

End quote

naked game of tag in Nazi gas chamber

Stutthof gas chamber tag

You can read about the naked games of tag in a Nazi gas chamber in this November 29th, 2017 news article in the Times of Israel:  https://www.timesofisrael.com/jewish-groups-demand-poland-explain-naked-game-of-tag-in-nazi-gas-chamber/

I wrote about the naked games of tag on this previous blog post about an article on the same subject in the New York Post:

https://furtherglory.wordpress.com/2017/11/30/naked-tag-game-inside-nazi-gas-chamber/

The following quote is from a page on my web site:

http://www.scrapbookpages.com/AuschwitzScrapbook/History/Articles/HungarianJews1.html

Begin quote

Nerin E. Gun was a Turkish journalist who was imprisoned at Dachau in 1944; his job was to take down the names and vital information from Hungarian Jewish women who were on their way to be gassed in the fake shower room in the Dachau crematorium.

In his book entitled “The Day of the Americans,” published in 1966, Gun wrote the following regarding his work at Dachau:

I belonged to the team of prisoners in charge of sorting the pitiful herds of Hungarian Jewesses who were being directed to the gas chambers. My role was an insignificant one: I asked questions in Hungarian and entered the answers in German in a huge ledger. The administration of the camp was meticulous. It wanted a record of the name, address, weight, age, profession, school certificates, and so on, of all these women who in a few minutes were to be turned into corpses. I was not allowed in the crematorium, but I knew from the others what went on in there.

Some of the Jews who were selected for slave labor were sent to the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria and its subcamps where they worked in German aircraft factories.

Others were sent to the Stutthof camp near Danzig, according to Martin Gilbert, who wrote the following in his book entitled “Holocaust”:

On June 17 Veesenmayer telegraphed to Berlin that 340,142 Hungarian Jews had now been deported. A few were relatively fortunate to be selected for the barracks, or even moved out altogether to factories and camps in Germany.

On June 19 some 500 Jews, and on June 22 a thousand, were sent to work in factories in the Munich area. […] Ten days later, the first Jews, 2500 women, were deported from Birkenau to Stutthof concentration camp. From Stutthof, they were sent to several hundred factories in the Baltic region. But most Jews sent to Birkenau continued to be gassed.

According to the Museum at the former Theresienstadt ghetto in what is now the Czech Republic, there were 1,150 Hungarian Jews sent to Theresienstadt and 1,138 of them were still there on May 9, 1945.

Other prominent Jews that were sent to Theresienstadt were transferred to Auschwitz in October 1944, including the famous psychiatrist Victor Frankl from Austria, who was not registered in Auschwitz, but was transferred again, after three days in the Birkenau camp, to Dachau and then sent to the Kaufering III sub-camp.

The Jews who were neither gassed nor registered at Auschwitz upon arrival, but instead were transferred to a labor camp, were called Durchgangsjuden because they were held in a transit camp in the Mexico section of the Birkenau camp for a short time.

End quote

 

 

Happy Chelmno Day! December 7th 1941

Chelmno was not in the news today.  I know because I did a search.  Funny because there is a connection between the camp and December 7th 1941.

Tombstones stacked against the wall of Museum at the former Chelmno camp

According to Holocaust historian Martin Gilbert, the “Final Solution” began when 700 Jews from the Polish village of Kolo arrived at Chelmno on the evening of December 7, 1941 and on the following day, all of them were killed with carbon monoxide in gas vans. The victims were taken on 8 or 9 separate journeys in the gas vans to a clearing in the Rzuchowski woods near the town of Chelmno.

In his book entitled “Holocaust,” Martin Gilbert wrote the following:

Begin quote

On 7 December 1941, as the first seven hundred Jews were being deported to the death camp at Chelmno, Japanese aircraft attacked the United States Fleet at Pearl Harbor. Unknown at that time either to the Allies or the Jews of Europe, Roosevelt’s day that would “live in infamy” was also the first day of the “final solution.”

End quote

You can read all about Chelmno on my web site at

http://www.scrapbookpages.com/Poland/Chelmno/index.html

You can follow the link below to read more about this day in history.  I have not tagged all my posts on Pearl Harbor yet, but there are a good number you can read. Follow the link bellow:

https://furtherglory.wordpress.com/tag/pearl-harbor/

Chelmno is one of the few camps that I have never visited. I did some research on the camp, and I was told that the former camp is now a hangout for thieves. I was told that if I went there, I would be robbed and raped and left to die beside the road.