Eugen Kogon and his famous book entitled “Der SS-Staat”

The subject of Eugen Kogon, and his famous book entitled Der SS-Staat has come up in the comments section of my blog, so I am going to tell you what I know about him.

Eugen Kogon testified at the trial of the Buchenwald SS men in the Dachau trials

One of the most famous inmates of Buchenwald was 43-year-old Dr. Eugen Kogon, an Austrian Social Democrat and political activist, who was a prisoner in the Buchenwald camp from September 1939 to April 1945.

Kogon was the main contributor to The Buchenwald Report, a 400-page book about the Buchenwald camp which was put together in only four weeks by the US Army, after conducting interviews with over 100 former prisoners at the camp.

Kogon later wrote a book entitled The Theory and Practice of Hell, which was a rewrite of the Buchenwald Report and one of the first books about the alleged Nazi atrocities in the Buchenwald concentration camp.

Kogon testified during the proceedings in the Dachau Trials about the harsh treatment suffered by the prisoners at Buchenwald, although he was one of the privileged political prisoners who actually ran the camp.

Kogon’s testimony was contradicted by Dr. Georg Konrad Morgen, who was the main witness for the defense in the Buchenwald case. Morgen also testified at the Nuremberg IMT in August 1946, before the Buchenwald case came to trial at Dachau.

At Nuremberg, Morgen testified on 7 August 1946 regarding the conditions at Buchenwald. In response to questions from the prosecutor at Nuremberg, Morgen answered as follows:

Q. Did you gain the impression, and at what time, that the concentration camps were places for the extermination of human beings?

A. I did not gain this impression. A concentration camp is not a place for the extermination of human beings. I must say that my first visit to a concentration camp, namely Weimar-Buchenwald, was a great surprise to me. The camp was on wooded heights, with a wonderful view. The installations were clean and freshly painted. There were grass and flowers. The prisoners were healthy, normally fed, sun-tanned, working…

THE PRESIDENT of the Tribunal: When are you speaking of? When are you speaking of?

A. I am speaking of the beginning of my investigations in July, 1943.

Q. What crimes – you may continue – please, be more brief.

A. The installations of the camp were in good order, especially the hospital. The camp authorities, under the Commandant Pister, aimed at providing the prisoners with an existence worthy of human beings.

They had regular mail service. They had a large camp library, even with foreign books. They had variety shows, motion pictures, sporting events. They even had a brothel. Nearly all the other concentration camps were similar to Buchenwald.

THE PRESIDENT: What was it they even had?

A. A brothel.

You can’t always judge a book by it’s cover

Cover of book written by Eugen Kogon

The new addition of a book, written years ago by Eugen Kogon, which is shown in the photo above, has a cover with a photo of the “Arbeit Macht Frei” sign over an entrance into a building in the Little Fortress at Theresienstadt.

Kogon’s book is about the Buchenwald concentration camp. Did the Buchenwald concentration camp have this sign on any of the buildings in the camp?  No! This photo was taken at Theresienstadt. Only Class 1 camps had the Arbeit macht Frei slogan.

I took this same photo which you can see below.

My photo of the “Little Fortress” at Theresienstadt

 

Sign on Buchenwald gate says “Jedem das Siene” (Everyone gets what he deserves)

The Buchenwald gate with its famous sign “Jedem das Seine” was designed by Franz Ehrich, a prisoner who studied with Moholy-Nagy, Klee, Kandinsky and Josef Albers at the Bauhaus in Weimar.

Ehrlich was arrested as a Communist resistance fighter in 1935 and sent to Buchenwld two years later. In 1937, the Buchenwald camp was still new and had few buildings. Ehrlich, who had worked with architect Walter Gropius in his Bauhaus Berlin office, volunteered to work in the joinery workshop at Buchenwald; he was assigned to design and build the entrance gate.

The sans-serif lettering of the words “Jedem das Seine” show Ehrlich’s training under Bauhaus typographer Joost Schmidt. After he was released from Buchenwald in 1939, Ehrlich stayed on and worked as a paid architect at the SS training camp and munitions factories at Buchenwald.

Buchenwald was a Class II camp for hard-core political prisoners, mainly Communists, who were considered to be harder to “rehabilitate.” Consequently, conditions in the Buchenwald camp were more severe than at Dachau and Sachsenhausen, which were Class I camps where many prisoners were released after being induced to accept the Nazi principles of obedience and hard work.

The sign over the iron gates at both Dachau and Sachsenhausen read “Arbeit Macht Frei” or Work Brings Freedom.

Yes, the Holocaust happened; just ask Dr. Wolf Murmelstein

“Yes, the Holocaust happened.”

The title of my blog post today is a line from the letter which I received this morning from Dr. Wolf Murmelstein, the son of Dr. Benjamin Murmelstein, the last Jewish “elder” of Theresienstadt.

Yes, the Holocaust happened, and little nine-year-old Wolf was there, right in the middle of it.

This quote is from a letter written to me by Dr. Murmelstein, who is still mentally suffering from his childhood ordeal.

Begin Quote from Dr. Wolf Murmelstein’s letter to me:

Yes, the Holocaust happened. The Gas Chambers in the Death Camps were operating, the mass shootings were taking place (mainly in Russia and Ukraine), the Ghettos (including Theresienstadt) were places of starvation and disease; they were the anti-chambers to the Death Camps.

And no one who is commenting here [on this blog] — the fault-finding commentators — can answer this question: In what direction, and how did the large East, Central and South European Jewish communities disappear in the years from 1939 to 1945?

Asking your blog readers to think better about the Shoah, the Holocaust matter, I am

Sincerely yours,

Wolf Murmelstein.

Gate into the walled ghetto formerly known as Theresienstadt

Here is the full text of the letter which I received today from Dr. Wolf Murmelstein:

Begin quote:
My parents and myself survived at Theresienstadt for the simple reason that Eichmann, after the INTERNATIONAL RED CROSS visit of April 6, 1945 had no possibility, any more, of liquidating the so-called ‘Model Ghetto.”

The conclusion, that our survival proves that the Holocaust never took place, is very offensive.

Indeed, we have relatives who survived Auschwitz and the Death Marches, and relatives that we do not even know where, when and how they were murdered. We remember friends who left and never returned. Comments, that say they emigrated and changed names, are offensive and very stupid.

Mr. Berg and Mr. Leuchter simply do not acknowledge that, in USA prisons, the Gas Chambers can murder one or two victims at a single execution, but German Holocaust Technology solved the problem of mass murder in Gas Chambers by employing Zyclon B, which is lethal for lice, as well as lethal for human beings — even in rooms not sufficiently aired after “disinfection” or “murder”.

As the Nazis had been able to keep secret the details and designs of Gas Chambers employing Zyklon B, they had been kept secret; simple. Besides, Death Camps had been located far away from important cities; Auschwitz had been an exception for logistic reasons.

I started asking about what had occurred, and how it had occurred, some time after Liberation, when I was nine years old. I learned that events had to be studied while considering general historical background.

So I went on studying the Shoah – Holocaust – and history linked with the general, economic and social history of Europe.

I was 14 when I read [Eugene] Kogon about Buchenwald and 16 when I read the memories of Schacht about the German Economic problems during and after WWI and so on.

[“Der SS-Staat,” is a book written in 1946 by Eugen Kogon, an Austrian Social Democrat who was sent, as a prisoner, to Buchenwald because he was a political activist. This book is a rewrite of the Buchenwald Report, compiled by the US Army from interviews with the survivors.]

About Theresienstadt, Jewish emigration and Eichmann, I was able to speak with my Father about this for 40 years.

So I can answer many questions [about the Holocaust] on this blog according to my best knowledge.

When I am asked for forensic proof, such as autopsies of Death Camp victims, I can only say that I am fed up with all the fault finders and trouble makers, who have had their fun torturing survivors by questioning them, using well known police techniques, which often obtain confessions from persons who then turn out to be innocent; this often happens twenty years after they have been murdered in the Gas Chamber of a place of lawful executions.

Clearly, I would like to see many careless journalists, “historians”, and writers in the deepest hell, because their careless writing and talking about a tragedy is helpful … for the [Holocaust] deniers.

Political Zionism came about as the result of racism and antisemitism “fin de siecle” of the nineteenth century when Theodore Herzl reported to the Vienna NEUE FREIE PRESSE about the Dreyfus case. For European Jews it had been hard to emigrate to Palestine/Israel. But for many survivors, Israel had been the only possible solution as they could not return to Poland, Hungary, etc.

What was it really like at Buchenwald?

In my blog post today, I am responding to a comment made by a reader of my blog, who wrote:

“What reason would have had Buchenwald inmates to lie about that Concentration Camp conditions? Do you know the work of Eugen Kogon, an austrian right wing catholic nationalist-?”

Yes, I know all about Eugen Kogon. You can read the story of Eugen Kogon on Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugen_Kogon#Works_as_co-editor

Eugen Kogon testified for the prosecution at the Buchenwald trial on April 16, 1947

One thing that Wikipedia does not mention is that Eugen Kogon’s famous book was based on The Buchenwald Report written by the Americans who liberated the camp on April 11, 1945.

Dr. Eugen Kogon was an Austrian Social Democrat and political activist, who was a prisoner at Buchenwald from September 1939 to April 1945. You can read more about Eugen Kogon at this revisionist website:

http://www.whale.to/b/eugen_kogon.html

Kogon was the main contributor to The Buchenwald Report, a 400-page book about the Buchenwald camp which was put together in only four weeks by the US Army, after conducting interviews with over 100 former prisoners at the camp.

Kogon later wrote a book called The Theory and Practice of Hell, which was a rewrite of The Buchenwald Report and one of the first books about the Nazi atrocities in the Buchenwald concentration camp.

Kogon testified during the Dachau proceedings, at the American Military Tribunal, about the harsh treatment suffered by the prisoners at Buchenwald, although he himself was one of the privileged political prisoners, who actually ran the camp.

During the AMT proceedings, Kogon’s testimony was contradicted by Dr. Georg Konrad Morgen, who was the main witness for the defense in the Buchenwald case.

Dr. Morgen had also testified at the Nuremberg IMT in August 1946, before the Buchenwald case came to trial at the American Military Tribunal at Dachau.

At Nuremberg, Morgen testified on 7 August 1946 regarding the conditions at Buchenwald. In response to a question from the prosecutor at Nuremberg, Morgen had answered as follows:

Q. Did you gain the impression, and at what time, that the concentration camps were places for the extermination of human beings?

A. I did not gain this impression. A concentration camp is not a place for the extermination of human beings. I must say that my first visit to a concentration camp, namely Weimar-Buchenwald, was a great surprise to me. The camp was on wooded heights, with a wonderful view. The installations were clean and freshly painted. There were grass and flowers. The prisoners were healthy, normally fed, sun-tanned, working…

THE PRESIDENT of the Tribunal: When are you speaking of? When are you speaking of?

A. I am speaking of the beginning of my investigations in July, 1943.

Q. What crimes – you may continue – please, be more brief.

A. The installations of the camp were in good order, especially the hospital. The camp authorities, under the Commandant Pister, aimed at providing the prisoners with an existence worthy of human beings. They had regular mail service. They had a large camp library, even with foreign books. They had variety shows, motion pictures, sporting events. They even had a brothel. Nearly all the other concentration camps were similar to Buchenwald.

THE PRESIDENT: What was it they even had?

A. A brothel.

To get back to the question of why the inmates of the Buchenwald camp would lie about the conditions in the camp:

The first camp, that was ever seen by the American military, was Ohrdruf, which was a sub-camp of Buchenwald. On April 12, 1945, General George Patton visited the Ohrdruf camp, along with General Omar Bradley and General Dwight D. Eisenhower.

General Patton was the only one of the 3 generals, who then visited the main Buchenwald camp. On April 15, 1945, the day that General George S. Patton visited Buchenwald, he wrote the following in a letter to General Dwight D. Eisenhower:

“I told the press to go up there and see it, and then write as much about it as they could. I also called General Bradley last night and suggested that you send selected individuals from the upper strata of the press to look at it, so that you can build another page of the necessary evidence as to the brutality of the Germans.”

So to answer the reader’s question: the American military wanted to “build another page of the necessary evidence as to the brutality of the Germans.”

In other words, General Patton wanted to start a propaganda campaign to demonize the German people for time and all eternity.

Patton later changed his mind about the Germans and turned against the Jews, which some people think was the reason for his untimely death.

Truck loads of Americans soldiers were brought to the Buchenwald camp several days after it was liberated on April 11, 1945

After the Buchenwald camp was liberated, truck loads of American  soldiers were brought to the camp, as shown in the photo above.

These American soldiers were astounded when the Communist prisoners in the Buchenwald camp took them to see a display table, which showed pieces of tattooed human skin, two shrunken heads, preserved human body parts, an ash tray made from a human bone, and a table lamp with a lampshade allegedly made from human skin. The shrunken heads resembled those made by primitive tribes in South America.

Display table put up at Buchenwald for the benefit of American soldiers who were brought to see the camp several days after the camp was liberated

A movie about the Buchenwald camp, directed by famed Hollywood director Billy Wilder, was made by a film crew of the Signal Corps of the US Army, shortly after the liberation of the camp; it included some footage of the display table, shown in the photo above.

In 1947, the American Military Tribunal held proceedings against 31 people associated with the Buchenwald camp. The so-called “Buchenwald trial” began with the showing of the film that had been made by Billy Wilder. The defense objected to the showing of this film, pointing out that the film had been made three or four days after the camp came under the control of the American Army, and that it did not show anything that had occurred prior to that time.

The objection was overruled and the film was shown. The defense also objected to the display of the two shrunken heads, but this objection was also overruled.

Dr. Kurte Sitte shows a shrunken head during the Buchenwald proceedings of the AMT

At the Buchenwald trial, Dr. Kurte Sitte, a 36-year-old doctor of Physics at Manchester University, who had been a political prisoner at Buchenwald since September 1939, testified that a shrunken head, which he identified in the courtroom, was the head of a Polish prisoner who had been decapitated on the order of SS Doctor Mueller at Buchenwald. Although the prisoners in all the Nazi camps had their heads shaved, this Polish prisoner had long black hair at the time he was decapitated.

American defense attorney Capt. Emmanuel Lewis objected to the admission of the shrunken head into evidence because Dr. Mueller was not on trial, but his objection was overruled. Under the rules of the American Military Tribunal, any and all evidence was admissible, whether or not it pertained to the case, because the charges against all of the accused was participating in a “common plan” to commit war crimes. There was no defense to the “common plan” charge.

In all of the Nazi concentration camps, all punishments and executions had to be cleared with the main office in Oranienburg.  An SS officer, named Dr. Georg Konrad Morgen, was in charge of investigating cruelty and black market activities in all of the camps. Col. Karl Otto Koch, the Commandant of Buchenwald, had been engaging in both of these crimes, and he was eventually arrested in August 1943 for inciting the murder of two prisoners and for embezzlement.

According to The Buchenwald Report, the murder charge against Col. Koch was based on the accusation that he had ordered the execution of hospital orderly Walter Krämer and his assistant, both of whom had treated Koch for syphilis; Koch wanted them killed so that they could not reveal his secret. According to the charges against him, Koch had falsely claimed that these two men were executed for political reasons.

Ilse Koch, the wife of the Commandant, and Dr. Waldemar Hoven were also arrested by Morgen in August 1943 for mistreatment and murder of the prisoners.

After a six-month investigation, Karl Otto Koch was condemned to death on both counts of murder and embezzlement, but his wife, Ilse Koch, was acquitted of these charges. The charge of making lampshades from human skin was withdrawn by Morgen for lack of evidence.

According to The Buchenwald Report, one week before the American liberators arrived, Col. Koch was executed by the Nazis at the German Armament Works near the camp, thus saving the Americans the trouble of putting him on trial. However, in a footnote in the book, Death Dealer, editor Steven Paskuly wrote that Koch “was shot in Buchenwald in September 1944.”

Ilse Koch’s lover, SS officer Hermann Florstedt, was later transferred to the Majdanek camp, where he became the Commandant. Florstedt was also executed by the Nazis after he was convicted in an SS Court by Dr. Georg Konrad Morgen.

After the war, Dr. Morgen was imprisoned in War Crimes Enclosure No. 1 at the former Dachau concentration camp to await his own trial as a war criminal. As a member of the SS, Dr. Morgen was automatically a war criminal because the SS had been declared a criminal organization by the Allies after the war.

Dr. Morgen was asked to sign an affidavit that his investigation had determined that Ilse Koch ordered lamp shades made from human skin, but he refused even after several beatings by the American interrogators, according to historian John Toland in his book entitled Adolf Hitler.

The Nazi concentration camps had been declared to be a criminal enterprise by the Allies. Under the ex-post-facto law of co-responsibility which was used in all the World War II war crimes trials, anyone who had worked in one of the camps in any capacity was a war criminal. The 31 accused persons in the Buchenwald 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 American liberators.

It was not a war crime for American soldiers to kill German POWs 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.

The charges against the 31 accused war criminals in the Buchenwald trial was that they had participated in a “common design” or a “common plan” to violate the Laws and Usages of War under the Hague Convention of 1907 and the Geneva Convention of 1929. These two conventions stated the rules of warfare pertaining to Enemy Prisoners of War.

Buchenwald was not a prisoner of war camp, but in the proceedings of the American Military Tribunal at Dachau, the prisoners in the Nazi concentration camps were designated as detainees, who were entitled to the same treatment as POWs under the Geneva Convention of 1929. It was not until 1949, after all the Military Tribunals, conducted by the Allies, had been concluded, that a new Geneva Convention gave all detainees the same rights as POWs.

Who is Pierre-Serge Choumoff and why should we believe anything that he wrote?

Pierre-Serge Choumoff was a former prisoner at the Gusen sub-camp of Mauthausen who wrote a book that was intended to prove that there was a gas chamber at Mauthausen.  Choumoff was an engineer who had a post-graduate degree in mathematics; he was the author of numerous scientific articles. During the time that he was a prisoner at Gusen, Choumoff was assigned to work in the arms factories of Rüstung Steyr, Daimler and Puch, which were in the immediate vicinity of the Gusen camp. He also served as an interpreter and a secretary at the Gusen camp. In the last week of World War II, Choumoff was one of the Gusen prisoners who were evacuated to the Mauthausen main camp where a gas chamber was allegedly located.

Choumoff did not use his scientific knowledge to determine that there was a gas chamber at Mauthausen. Nor did he do any tests. He did no research at all.  So on what did he base his book?  His book about the Mauthausen gas chambers is based solely on the testimony of the SS officers at Mauthausen, which he obtained from the trial testimony, given at an American Military Tribunal held in 1946. This testimony was published in Rome in 1970.

I have not read Choumoff’s book, but I have read The 186 Steps by Christian Bernadac which quotes extensively from Choumoff’s book.

Pierre-Serge Choumoff was a “Nacht und Nebel” prisoner which means that his family was not told where he was.  “Nacht and Nebel” prisoners were typically Resistance fighters; with his French name, we can deduce that he was sent to Gusen after he was captured while fighting as an illegal combatant in the French Resistance.  As a member of the French Resistance, he would have had a motive to make the Germans into evil monsters who gassed innocent prisoners, so I don’t consider him to be an objective witness.

In one of his books, Choumoff wrote that the gas chamber at Mauthausen was put into operation in either March or May of 1942 and that 3,455 prisoners were gassed in it. He also wrote that the SS guards had removed the gassing equipment from the chamber on April 29, 1945 the day that Commandant Franz Ziereis turned the camp over to the Vienna police. A sign in the gas chamber confirms that the gassing apparatus was removed on April 29, 1945.

So Choumoff didn’t know when the gas chamber was put into operation, but he knew the exact number of prisoners that were gassed?  He knew the exact date that the gassing apparatus was removed, although he was not at Mauthausen on that date.

Choumoff gave the following statistics for the gassings at Mauthausen and Gusen, as quoted in The 186 Steps by Christian Bernadac:

For the installed gas chamber at Mauthausen: 4000; for the mobile gas chamber (Sauer truck): 1,560; Hartheim: 28,000 to 30,000 of which 4,600 to 8,000 came from Gusen or Mauthausen; finally occasional gassings in Gusen: 800. Total 34,000. At least 11,000 of these 34,000 were registered at Mauthausen or Gusen.

In his book, Christian Bernadac included the statements of several former prisoners which were gathered by Pierre-Serge Choumoff.

I am writing about Choumoff because his name came up in a blog post which you can read here.  The title of the blog post is “The latest effort to combat denial, i.e. Holocaust revisionism.”

This quote is from the blog post:

Lastly, we have the actual Introduction by Messrs. Morsch and Perz. They began by informing us that in 1983, concentration camp survivors Eugen Kogon and Hermann Langbein — along with the head of Ludwigsburg Central Office for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes, Adalbert Rückerl, as well as others — published the book Nationalsozialistische Massentötung durch Giftgas. This was published on the initiative of two Mauthausen survivors, Pierre-Serge Choumoff and Jean Gavard. All of this resulted from a meeting with officials of the centre for political education who discussed the increase in Revisionist debates about NS mass murder in the 1970s.

In my humble opinion, the writings of Pierre-Serge Choumoff should not be used to combat Holocaust denial.  He had no way of knowing what went on at Mauthausen because he was only there for one week. The testimony of the SS men at the proceedings of the American Military Tribunal, which he included in his book, is not believable because it was obviously obtained by torture.

You can read about the trial testimony at the proceedings against the SS men at Mauthausen on my website here and here.