January 27th is International Holocaust Remembrance Day

In honor of International Holocaust Remembrance Day on January 27th, I am posting some of the photos that I took in 1998 and in 2005 at Auschwitz, the main extermination camp of the Holocaust. Auschwitz was liberated on January 27th, 1945 by soldiers of the Soviet Union.

Ruins of Krema II gas chamber at Auschwitz II, aka Birkenau

Early morning photo of the ruins of Krema III at Birkenau

The Germans marched 60,000 prisoners out of the three camps in the Auschwitz complex on January 18, 1945.  They came back twice, on January 20th and again on January 26th, to blow up the gas chambers in order to destroy the evidence.  

More Holocaust education needed: one in five young Germans has never heard of Auschwitz

Today, the British newspaper Mail Online is reporting this startling news:

ONE-FIFTH of young Germans have never heard of Auschwitz, survey reveals

Does this mean one-fifth of young “ethnic Germans” (Volksdeutsche) have never heard of Auschwitz, or does it mean one-fifth of all young citizens of Germany have never heard of Auschwitz?

It is hard for me to believe that anyone in Germany has never heard of Auschwitz  — unless they are recent immigrants from Africa or the Middle East.  Did the people asking the survey question pronounce the word Auschwitz correctly? If the surveyers used the British or the American pronunciation of the word, the ethnic Germans might not have known what they were talking about.

According to the article in the Mail Online, “Twenty one per cent of people aged between 18 and 30 quizzed about the most notorious Nazi extermination camp had not heard of it, the survey revealed.”   How was the question posed:  Did the survey people ask “What was the most notorious Nazi extermination camp?”

This quote is from the article:

The Nazis built six extermination camps – Auschwitz, Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka and Majdanek – all of them in occupied Poland.The murder of prisoners, most of them Jewish, began in 1941 when Nazi officials enacted Hitler’s ‘Final Solution of the Jewish Question’.

The “Final Solution of the Jewish Question” was enacted in 1941?  Does that mean “enacted into law?”  NO, NO, NO! There was no German law in which the murder of the Jews was ordered. The murder of the Jews did, in fact, begin in 1941, but the Wannsee conference where the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question” was discussed did not begin until January 20, 1942.  So the murder of the Jews was not ordered at the Wannsee conference.

Auschwitz was not in occupied Poland when the camp was in operation, as stated in the Mail Online article.  It was in the Greater German Reich.  So was Chelmno.

Chelmno was located in the Warthegau, a district in the part of Poland that had been annexed into the Greater German Reich after the joint conquest of Poland by Germany and the Soviet Union in 1939.

This quote is also from the article in the Mail Online:

The survey, published in Stern magazine, showed that of people over 30, 95 per cent had heard of Auschwitz and the crimes committed there.

But less than 70 per cent could name the country it lies in.

Auschwitz is in Silesia which was also annexed into the Greater German Reich in 1939.  Silesia was given to Poland after World War I, in the Treaty of Versailles.  After the conquest of Poland in 1939, Germany took back Silesia.  Maybe 70 per cent of the Germans who were surveyed do not believe that Silesia should belong to Poland.  Or maybe they were answering the question with the name of the country that Auschwitz was in when the camp was in operation.

I’m guessing that the reason the survey found that one out of five young Germans had never heard of Auschwitz is because one out of five Germans are afraid to speak about the Holocaust, for fear that they will get a notice in the mail that they have to pay a fine for breaking the German law against Holocaust denial.  It has been my experience, in visiting Germany many times, that Germans of all ages are afraid to speak about the Holocaust.

I think that this survey might have been flawed by the survey takers not asking the questions in the right way.

I have found that, when talking to German people, one must be very precise.  For example, if you ask for a ticket to Frankfurt, you will hear “Which one?”  Don’t go to Berlin unless you know how to pronounce the name of the city.  If you want to go to Rothenburg, you must specify Rothenburg ob der Tauber.  There are special places in Germany where Americans, who can’t pronounce Dachau correctly, can buy their tickets without being frowned upon for not knowing how to speak properly.

Deaths in gas chambers at Auschwitz recorded by Ernest Michel

On a previous post on my blog, which you can read here, I wrote in the comments section that the Jews, who were immediately gassed upon arrival at Auschwitz-Birkenau, were not registered in the camp, which makes it impossible for anyone to know how many Jews were killed at Auschwitz.  A reader wrote this in answer to my comment:

I know Auschwitz Birkenau filed false death certificates for the new arrivals sent directly to the gas chambers.

Survivor Ernie Michel discussed his work assignment at Auschwitz was to create these certificates because they liked his handwriting.

This sounds plausible because we know that the German people are very neat and meticulous, so the Nazis would have wanted someone with good handwriting to write the false death certificates at Auschwitz.

In writing my comment on the previous post, I didn’t take into account that the Jews, who survived the first selection but were too weak to continue working, were gassed months, or even years, after they arrived.  In the movie Schindler’s List, there is a famous scene where a number of Jews are forced to run naked as the German doctors decide whether they are still healthy enough to work.  It is well known that Dr. Josef Mengele would regularly visit the women’s barracks to select sick prisoners for the gas chamber.  

Germany will attempt to try more WWII “war criminals” under the “common design” ex-post-facto law

I’ve been reading in the news lately about the Polish government’s search for more German war criminals to put on trial. The trials will be conducted by the Germans in German courts.

After the conviction of John Demjanjuk in a German court, I predicted in this blog post on May 12, 2011 that Germany would have more trials based on the “common design” ex-post-facto law.  German courts will now “proceed according to precedent” and use this ex-post-facto law to convict more Germans who served at concentration camps during World War II.  I assume that the German government will also pay for their incarceration in nursing homes.  The World War II German criminals are at least 85 or 86 years old now.  At the time that they were working in a concentration camp, they didn’t know that someday they might be convicted as a war criminal just for BEING THERE.

Here is a quote from a news article about Poland’s new investigations, which you can read in full here:

The Institute of National Remembrance – a research body affiliated with the Polish government – stated last week that the main “purpose of the investigation is a thorough and comprehensive explanation of the circumstances of” the crimes that took place at Auschwitz.

[…]

During November 2010, there were “852 ongoing investigations of Nazi war criminals,” though there are certainly others living in secret, according to Slate. From the past decades, these people have essentially been getting away with their crimes, living quiet lives among the families of their victims. All because they aren’t criminals of the same caliber as those prosecuted at Nuremburg or Dachau. They were the lower ranking members of the Gestapo and the SS, following orders and murdering and torturing innocent people. For this reason, lower-ranking soldiers should not be left to live their lives after war: They should be prosecuted just like their superior officers have been. Lower-ranking soldiers are just as guilty as the upper command and should be treated as such.
[…]

The re-launched investigation into Auschwitz can be the way to address this problem, even without convictions by the Institute of National Remembrance. Instead, this Polish body can make inquiries, form conclusions, make indictments, and leave obtaining convictions to the German government. In the past year, Germany has been able to convict John Demjanjuk “based on the theory that if he worked there, he was part of the extermination process, even without direct proof of any specific killings,” according to the Huffington Post. This new German precedent, along with the fact that Berlin asks to be allowed to extradite Nazi war criminals, gives new hope for convictions.

The Black Wall at the Auschwitz main camp

I am blogging today about the infamous “Black Wall” at Auschwitz in answer to comments made on a blog post that I did about Block 10 on Oct. 13th.

The Black Wall is at the far end of a long, narrow courtyard between Block 10 and Block 11 at the Auschwitz main camp.  There is a brick wall which connects the two buildings and in front of this brick wall, there is a removable wall, constructed out of logs and covered with cork painted black. The ends of the wall are angled slightly toward the center. The purpose of the cork wall was to protect the beautiful brick wall behind it from bullet holes.

The Black Wall is made of cork and painted black

Many people have noticed that there are no bullet holes in the wall. That’s because this is not the original black wall. According to my tour guide in 1998, this is a reconstruction which looks like the original. The original wall was removed after Arthur Liebehenschel replaced Rudolf Hoess as the camp commander in November, 1943, and ordered the executions at the wall to stop.

Close-up of the Black Wall at Auschwitz

The total number of people executed at Auschwitz-Birkenau, according to the Nazi records, was 1,646 including 117 Jews, 1,485 Poles, 19 Russians, 5 Czechs and 20 Gypsies.  However, the Auschwitz Museum claims that there were 20,000 people “murdered” at the Black Wall.

I finally got to see the video of Glenn Beck’s trip to Auschwitz

I signed up for Glen Beck’s GBTV and was finally able to see his “Restoring Courage” video which included footage of his trip to Israel on August 24, 2011 and his visit to Auschwitz before that.  Very early in the video, Glenn says “I couldn’t show you the video in Auschwitz.”  Nevertheless, there is some footage of Glenn and his wife on their trip to the main Auschwitz camp and then to the Birkenau camp.

Photo of Hungarian Jews at Auschwitz-Birkenau

On his visit to the Auschwitz Museum in the main camp, Glenn pointed out a huge photo hanging on the wall, which shows Hungarian women with small children walking down a road at Birkenau. This is one of the photos in the Auschwitz Album, taken by the SS men in May 1944. Glenn was overcome with emotion when he saw this photo, which he described as “grandmothers” holding the hands of the children.   

the role of the French railway in the Holocaust

Yesterday, I blogged about the Holocaust exhibit called “The Courage to Remember” which I went to see on the campus of California State University Sacramento.  The money for this exhibit came from a grant from the French Railway company known as SNCF, the Societe Nationale des Chemins de fer Francais, which Holocaust survivors hold responsible for reparations to the Jews because the French railway transported 76,000 Jews to the Nazi death camps.

Words on a poster at the start of the exhibit

Notice the line in the second paragraph which says “There was a time when SNCF sought to bid on the proposed high speed rail project in California.”  Sacramento is one of the cities that will have a station on the high speed rail system if and when the second phase of it is ever built. 

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

Scratch marks on the wall of the gas chamber in the main Auschwitz camp

The photo above, taken by Simon Robertson on January 12, 2004, shows fingernail scratches on the wall of the gas chamber in the main Auschwitz camp.  Notice the star of David on the right hand side in the middle of the photo. To the left of that star of David, there is another one in the white patch in the middle of the photo.

Scratches on the wall of the gas chamber in the main Auschwitz camp

When I visited Auschwitz in October 2005, I did not notice these scratch marks; possibly they had been painted over.  On my first visit to the Auschwitz main camp in October 1998, I did not see any scratches on the walls of the gas chamber.

Scratches on gas chamber wall when Glenn Beck visited the Auschwitz main camp in 2011

The following quote from Glenn Beck is on the website which shows the photo above:

The gas chambers. Glenn Beck: I have always assumed that it killed relatively quickly. But when I saw this wall – I knew I was wrong. To stand in this room where hundreds of thousands died was horrifying. The children were always on the top of the bodies. Heroes to the end. – the adults all assumed the air would be clearer higher and they tried to give these children a chance to live by holding them up close to the ceiling. It didn’t work. The gas killed everyone – but not instantly. It took twenty long horrific minutes. And the walls show it. Many of the children weren’t with their mom or dad, but with strangers. Oh, the special hell that awaited all those who were silent.

How does Glenn Beck know that it took “twenty long horrific minutes” to kill the victims in the Auschwitz gas chamber?  In the gas chamber in the main Auschwitz camp, where these photos were taken, there was no way to heat the Zyklon-B gas pellets. In the winter time, it would have taken much longer for the victims to die. The manufacturer of the Zyklon-B gas pellets recommended that the pellets be heated to a temperature of 78.3 degrees in order to speed up the release of the poison gas fumes, but the gas chamber in the main Auschwitz camp has no way to heat the pellets and no fan to circulate the gas fumes throughout the room.

Zyklon-B gas pellets on display in a glass case

On my trip to Auschwitz in 2005, I spent a long time in the Auschwitz gas chamber. I examined every inch of the room and I did not see any scratch marks on the walls.  All I saw were light blue patches of paint that appeared to be covering something on the wall.  These patches of paint are very obvious in the photos below.

My photo of the Auschwitz gas chamber, 2005

My photo of Auschwitz gas chamber, 2005

Update May 9, 2013:

Since I first wrote this post, I have found one of my photos, taken in 2005, which shows fingernail scratches on the wall. The photo, which is shown below, shows scratches near the ceiling of the gas chamber in the main camp.  I was taking a photo of the ceiling, and did not notice that my photo showed fingernail scratches near the ceiling on the far left side of the photo.

Fingernail scratches on the wall of the Auschwitz gas chamber, 2005

Continue reading my original post:

You can read more about the gas chamber in the main Auschwitz camp on my website here.  You can read more about the fingernail scratches on the wall of the Auschwitz gas chamber here.

Glenn Beck made a documentary film about his trip to Auschwitz with his wife Tania which can be seen on his new Glenn Beck TV (GBTV) online channel.

This quote is from the promotion for the documentary:

There is perhaps no single location representing all of history that better depicts pure evil, man’s greatest inhumanity to his fellow man, than the stark, cold set of buildings in southern Poland called Auschwitz-Birkenau. During WWII more than one million people, mostly Jews were executed there. Murdered in cold blood. The Nazis called it “the final solution of the Jewish question in Europe.”

From 1942 through 1944 Jews were delivered to the camp’s gas chambers from all over Europe.

But in the face of unthinkable horror there were people who displayed courage beyond imagination. Regular men, women, and children who put their very lives on the line in defense of righteousness. It was a small but important triumph of the human spirit then and equally important lesson for us today.

Note that Glenn Beck’s emphasis is on the righteous Gentiles who displayed courage and stood up to save the Jews.  There is a “special hell” for those who remained silent and did not intervene to stop the gassing of the Jews, even as they scratched the walls of the gas chamber in a last desperate attempt to escape, lifting their babies up so that they could gasp their last breath of air.  Oh, the Humanity!

The composite photo below was prepared by one of the readers of my blog.  It shows an old photo at the top with one of my 2005 photos and then a blueprint of the Auschwitz I gas chamber building.  Note that the blue paint that is now on the walls was not there in the old photo.

Click on the photo to see a larger size

Read more about Glenn Beck’s visit to Auschwitz here.

What’s in a name? Auschwitz and Birkenau

What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.

    —William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

Today, I read this in a travel blog:

Auschwitz and Birkenau had lovey Polish names originally as they were rural villages, when the Germans came they sent most of the Polish inhabitants to work camps away from here or they interred them as they didn’t want word to leak out about what they were doing. They changed the village names to the similar sounding but German language place names of Auschwitz and Birkenau.

The town of Auschwitz, which was more than just a “rural village,” was originally founded by Germans in 1270, according to historian Robert Jan van Pelt; it is now known by its Polish name, Oswiecim. The original name of the town was Auschwitz and it was known by this name when the three Auschwitz camps were in operation; the Germans did not change the name of the town and they did not keep it a secret that they were turning the brick barracks, in a suburb of the town, into a concentration camp for political prisoners.  More than half of the inhabitants of the town of Auschwitz were Jews and the second most prevalent population in the town was the Gypsies.  The Polish inhabitants were not sent away by the Germans and they were not interred, a word which means to bury in a grave.

The town of Auschwitz in 1940

In the photo above, you can see the Duke’s castle on the left and the 17th century Catholic church on the right.  The bridge in the foreground goes over the Sola river. The town was separated from the main Auschwitz camp by this river.

When I visited the Birkenau camp in 2005, a display sign outside the gatehouse said that the villages of Brzezinka, Babice, Broszkowice, Rajsk, Plawy, Harmeze, and Brzeszcze-Budy were torn down to provide space for the Birkenau camp.  Google Translate gives the German translation of Brzezinka as Birkenau but I am not sure if these two words have the same meaning in German and English.

The Germans came up with the name Birkenau, as the name for the camp that they built on the grounds of the seven Polish villages, because of the birch trees at the western end of the camp.

Birch trees at the western end of Birkenau camp

In June 2007, the United Nations officially changed the collective name of the three Auschwitz camps to Auschwitz-Birkenau, German Nazi Concentration and Extermination Camp (1940-1945). This change was made at the request of the government of Poland so that people will know that Poland had nothing to do with setting up the camps or running them.  Now the town, formerly known as Auschwitz, is making a big push to have the town known only by its Polish name.

The Birkenau camp was opened on October 7, 1941 when the first transport of Soviet Prisoners of War, captured during the German invasion of the Soviet Union, arrived. Between October 1941 to February 1942, there were 13,775 POWs brought to Birkenau.

Beginning in February 1942, the Birkenau camp became a death camp for Jews. The camp covers 425 acres and it had 300 buildings before it was abandoned in January 1945. Today there are 45 brick buildings and 22 wooden buildings still standing at Birkenau.

A view of the vast 425-acre site of the former Birkenau camp

One might ask: ” Why so many barracks at Birkenau when it was a death camp where Jews were gassed immediately upon arrival?”  Good question!  I don’t know the answer.

A light on a fence post at the former Birkenau camp

Interior fence around the men’s camp at Birkenau

When the Birkenau camp was liberated by Soviet troops in January 1945, the camp was being expanded with a new section called “Mexico.”  The photo below shows where a building was being built in the Mexico section.

The Mexico section of Birkenau which was never completed

Strangely, the Germans were building additional barracks at Birkenau.  Shouldn’t they have been building more gas chambers?  Birkenau was a death camp, which had no factories in which the prisoners could have worked. Was there such a long wait for the gas chambers that they needed more barracks at Birkenau?

bashing the heads of babies and desecrating cemeteries, the two most frequent crimes of the Nazis (Updated)

Update April 21, 2015

Oskar Groening as a young man, and as he looks now.  (Click on the photo to enlarge)

This quote is from a news article which you can read in full at http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/oskar-groning-trial-93yearold-auschwitz-guard-admits-he-was-morally-complicit-in-holocaust-crimes-10193173.html

Begin quote

A frail, white-haired former Nazi SS guard has described in harrowing detail how he watched one of his comrades batter to death the baby of a Jewish prisoner at the Auschwitz extermination camp and admitted that was “morally complicit” in the crimes against humanity committed during the Holocaust.

93-year-old Oskar Gröning, who served in the SS at Auschwitz from 1942 until 1944, shook visibly as he told a court in the German city of Lüneburg how, shortly after he arrived at the Nazi death camp, he was dispatched to the so-called “ramp” where prisoners were selected either for work or immediate death in the gas chambers.

“There was a little baby left lying behind on the ramp, after the main group was marched away, and it was crying,” Gröning told the court, “I turned round and saw one of my comrades pick up the child. He grabbed it by the legs and smashed it again and again against the iron side of a truck until it was silent – when I saw that my world broke down,” he added.

End quote

Oskar Gröning will soon be put on trial under the “common plan” ex-post-facto law, which dictates that if any German person was anywhere near a Nazi camp, during the Holocaust, they are guilty of every crime ever committed at the camp, whether the crime has ever been proven or not.

Continue reading my original post:

If you’ve ever read anything about the Holocaust, or seen a movie based on the Holocaust, you know that every Holocaust survivor claims to have witnessed a German soldier kill a baby by bashing its head against a tree or the side of a train.  If you believe the stories of the survivors, this was the most universal atrocity committed by the Germans against the Jews, except for desecrating every Jewish cemetery in Poland.

In a recent news article, I read about a group of students, who will be the future military leaders of America. They visited the last remaining synagogue in the town of Auschwitz, then toured the main Auschwitz concentration camp, after which they did some work in a Jewish cemetery.

These quotes are from the news article which you can read here:

On their last day in Oswiecim [Auschwitz], the group worked in a Jewish cemetery. Although, no Holocaust victims are buried there, the Germans desecrated the cemetery that dates from the 18th century.

[…]

[a student] recalled the Auschwitz guide’s story about a German bashing an infant’s head against a concrete wall. “How can someone do that to a human being?” he asked.

Note that this story was told by an Auschwitz guide.  In the story, it was a concrete wall, not a tree or a train.  Could this be the story of Wilhelm Boger, who bashed the head of a young boy and then ate the apple that the boy was carrying?  I previously blogged about this story here.  Did the guide give the name of the basher so that the students could do some research and make up their own minds about the truth of the story?

There was a time when I believed the head bashing stories, but then I heard one too many account of a German soldier bashing the head of a baby. There was even a story of a head bashing at Treblinka where there was a fake train station built to calm the fears of the Jews.  Did it make any sense to kill a baby right in front of the Jews who were being told that they would be taking a shower before being transported to the East to work?  The German army was noted for having strict disciple — except for bashing babies, which was apparently allowed.

Now I am beginning to doubt the desecrating of Jewish cemeteries stories.  Especially when I read these two atrocities told in the same newspaper article.  Are the Jews over-playing their hand in telling these stories?  I say Enough Already!

I previously blogged about the stories of desecrating cemeteries here. Read all the way to the end of the blog post cited above and you will learn about the cemetery in Krakow which was allegedly desecrated by the Germans.

My question is: Why do American students have to go to Poland to learn about alleged German atrocities during World War II? Shouldn’t they be learning about American atrocities so that these crimes will not be repeated by Americans in the future?