“The Last Days,” a documentary by Steven Spielberg

The Last Days is a documentary, made by Steven Spielberg and released in 1998; the film won an Academy Award in 1999. A book about the documentary was published in 1999, with the same title.  In 1998, I was just starting to study the Holocaust and I loved the documentary, which I assumed was the gospel truth.  I bought two copies of the book, one to read, and one to preserve in pristine condition in my home library.  The book is great; it has lots of good photos of the Holocaust.

As I began to study the Holocaust, I gradually learned that the documentary and the book entitled The Last Days are both fictional.  That doesn’t mean that The Last Days should be withdrawn because it is a fraud, but it should be reclassified as fiction and advertised as fiction.

The Last Days is about five Hungarian survivors of the Holocaust who travel to Auschwitz and Dachau to relive their stories.  Also included are the stories of three American soldiers who liberated Dachau: one Caucasian, one African American, and one Japanese.

Dr. Paul Parks is the African American who liberated Dachau, according to the book.  This was what caught my attention, because I knew that the U.S. Army was segregated during World War II and I knew that there were white soldiers who liberated Dachau.  So how did an African American liberate Dachau?

Dachau prisoners who were liberated by American troops

In the book The Last Days, about the Steven Spielberg documentary with the same name, Dr. Parks explained why African-American soldiers were chosen to liberate the concentration camps:

“About our role near the end of the war, though I have no proof of this, a Bostonian who was on General Eisenhower’s staff told me that the decision was taken that, wherever possible, the liberators of the camps would be black soldiers – United States soldiers. He said that they had come to the conclusion that if the people who were in the camps saw black soldiers they would feel more at ease with them. It wasn’t some sort of weird cruel trick – people who saw us come into the camps, some of them my friends now, have told me, ‘We knew when we saw you that you weren’t Germans….we knew you had to be Americans’ – so it did work.”

The U.S. Army and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum credit the 45th Thunderbird Division, the 42nd Rainbow Division and the 20th Armored Division of the US Seventh Army as the liberators of the Dachau concentration camp on April 29, 1945. There were no African-American soldiers in these three divisions because the American Army was segregated during World War II.

Lt. Col. Felix Sparks of the 45th Thunderbird Division insists that there were no black soldiers among the liberators of Dachau.

A page from the book The Last Days shows Dr. Paul Parks

The photo above shows a menorah, which is claimed to have been made out of nails by a Jew, who was liberated at Dachau by Parks.  Parks claims a man showed up at his home and didn’t give his name, but on behalf of the unnamed Jew who had made the menorah, he gave the menorah to Parks as a gift. The menorah was allegedly created by Edwin Theiberger; numerous copies of this menorah exist, including one at The White House.

According to a news article in the Boston Globe on October 12, 2000, Dr. Paul Parks was slated to receive the Raoul Wallenberg Award from B’nai B’rith, but the plan to honor Parks for his role in liberating Dachau was canceled after retired Army Col. Hugh F. Foster III informed B’nai B’rith spokesman Eric Rozenman that there is no military record of Dr. Parks being at Dachau when the camp was liberated.

Dr. Parks served with the 365th Engineer Regiment from 1943 to 1945; he has acknowledged that his regiment was not at Dachau on April 29, 1945, but he told a Boston Globe reporter that he was on a special assignment to deactivate mines throughout France and that is how he came to be at Dachau when the camp was liberated.

Dr. Parks claimed that his military records were lost in a fire in 1973, which means that his story of being with the soldiers who stormed the beach at Normandy on D-Day also cannot be confirmed. Foster claims that the 365th Engineer Regiment was in England on D-Day.

This quote is from the Boston Globe article:

“Parks has been among the most prominent black leaders in Massachusetts over the last half century. He was vice president of the Boston branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in the 1960s, education secretary under then-Gov. Michael Dukakis and founder of a program that for 34 years has bused black children from Boston to suburban schools.”

So why am I picking on an African American when the whole documentary The Last Days is full of lies? I’m not picking on anyone; I am recovering from a recent stroke and it is very difficult for me to type, so I can’t write about all the characters in the documentary.

You can read all about the lies in The Last Days here. You can read about the soldiers who liberated Dachau here.

Should Holocaust lying be a crime?

As most people know, Holocaust denial is a crime, punishable by 5 years in prison, but up to 20 years in prison in Austria.  Gerd Honsik was recently  sentenced to 5 years in prison in Austria for saying that there were no gas chambers in Germany, including Mauthausen and Dachau.  You can read about him here.

What about fake Holocaust survivors who tell outrageous lies in the books they write, such as the book entitled A Memoir of the Holocaust Years by Misha Defonseca who wrote a fake story about her escape, when she was four years old, from the Warsaw ghetto. Misha claimed that she was adopted by wolves, but was outed by the New York Times in an article that you can read here.

What about Herman Rosenblat who allegedly survived by eating apples thrown over the fence by a nine-year-old girl, in a sub-camp of Buchenwald; you can read about that story here.

I’m not talking about mistakes which are made about the Holocaust, like mixing up Rudolf Hoess, the Auschwitz Commandant, and Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s deputy, who flew solo to the UK to try to make peace with the  British during WW II. The biggest mistake I’ve ever heard was when Alan Colmes said on TV that “gas ovens” were used in the concentration camps to kill the Jews.

On the old Hannity and Colmes TV show on 12/13/06, Alan Colmes showed a photo  of two cremation ovens at Buchenwald with the remains of partially burned bodies visible, as he said: “A number of people at this conference and your organization have said things like ‘The gas chambers did not exist.’ I want to put up on the screen the furnaces that were used to kill Jews.”

Cremation ovens at Buchenwald were not “gas ovens” for killing Jews

I wouldn’t put Colmes in prison for 5 years for saying that the Nazis killed Jews in gas ovens and I wouldn’t put Sean Hannity in prison for confusing Hoess and Hess in one of his books.  But what about Holocaust survivor Irene Zisblatt who told a lie about swallowing diamonds at Auschwitz?  You can read about her here.

Several years ago, the book entitled Fragments: Memories of a Childhood by Binjamin Wilkomirski was exposed as a fake account of the author’s alleged stay in the Majdanek concentration camp and other camps.  After Wilkomirski admitted writing a fake memoir, the book was not withdrawn from the list of books that students in America were assigned to read; it was merely reclassified as a novel.

Another novel that is similar to Wilkomirski’s book is The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosinski, a Polish writer whom I first learned about on my visit to Poland in 1998.  His book was published in America in 1965; it is routinely assigned to American college students to read, although the stories that he wrote were made up, according to my Polish tour guide.

If a person deliberately tells a lie for the purpose of making money off a book and public speeches, shouldn’t that be a crime?  Shouldn’t such a person be put into prison?  Maybe not for 5 years, like Holocaust deniers, but for 90 days, like Lindsay Lohan.  I would even allow a statute of limitations on Holocaust lies that would save  Elie Wiesel from 90 days in jail, although there is no statue of limitations for Nazi war crimes. You can read about Elie Wiesel here.

A recent comment on my blog

I have not been posting or responding to comments because I have suffered a mild stroke. There was a comment made which wordpress classified as spam. I had the option to approve the comment, but I didn’t and deleted it as spam. Now that I am recovering a bit, I have changed my mind, so I am putting up this comment which was originally made on my post about the soldiers who saw Dachau here.

Don’t tell the soldiers who saw Dachau that there was no Holocaust!

This morning I was searching for something else when I came across the web site of Don Rodda, an American soldier in World War II; he wrote about his trip to Dachau on May 1, 1945 which you can read here.

At the end of the article on Rodda’s web site, he wrote:

It may have been our Supreme Commander, Dwight D. Eisenhower, who was responsible for our being at Dachau that May Day. As the camps were being overrun, I read in “Yank” a quote from Ike who said, “I hope every American newspaper will print the story of German bestiality in detail.”

Now, fifty-odd years later, and despite all that has been written about the infamous camps, there are those who today deny The Holocaust.

But not I… Not anyone who had seen Dachau.

Cafe Teufelhart in Dachau has live jazz music in Cafe Bubu

Cafe Teufelhart in Dachau, May 2001

I took this photo in May 2001 when I stayed in the town of Dachau for a week.  One of my favorite places in Dachau was the Cafe Teufelhart.  You can see a recent photo of how the place looks now, with a sign on the roof that reads “Cafe Bubu,” on this web site.

Photos don’t lie, but liars use photographs to decieve…

Yesterday I blogged about a Jewish American soldier, Irving Ross, who claimed to have taken a photo at Dachau, which was actually a photo taken at the Nordhausen sub-camp of Buchenwald after Nordhausen was bombed by American planes on April 3, 1945.  The photo, which is shown below, was published in Life magazine in May 1945.

Prisoners at Nordhausen were killed by American bombs

Notice the body of a naked man in the foreground which seems out of place because all the other bodies have clothes on.  It seems that this naked body was put there, with a little space between it and the next body, so that we can see how the Nazis starved the prisoners to death.

Lies told by Catholic priests who were prisoners at Dachau

Let me say right off the bat that I am a “fallen away Catholic,” so I have no love for Catholic priests.  I was a devout Catholic as a child; I went to Mass every day and took Communion. By the age of 13, I was beginning to have doubts, mainly because of the behavior of some of the priests that I knew.  So I admit that I am biased on the subject of Catholic priests.

Nerin E. Gun, a Turkish journalist who was a prisoner at Dachau, wrote a book entitled The Day of the Americans, published in 1966, in which he was critical of the priests at Dachau. This was the first book that I read when I started studying Dachau in 1997. In his book, Gun pointed out that, by 1965, almost every book ever written about Dachau was written by a Catholic priest. According to Gun, the priests lived comfortably in their block and refused to let any other prisoners take refuge there. They did not work; they were not mistreated, and therefore they were able at their leisure to observe everything that went on about them and write fine books.

There were around 20 million Catholics and 20,000 Catholic priests in Nazi Germany. Hitler himself was a Catholic, as were many of the Nazis, especially in Bavaria where Dachau is located.  A total of 2,579 Catholic priests were sent to the Dachau concentration camp during its 12 year history, including 447 German priests.  A total of 1,780 Catholic priests from Poland were sent to Dachau, and 868 of them died in the camp; there were 94 German priests who died at Dachau.

The vast majority of the German clergymen and the German people, including the 40 million Protestants, went along with Hitler’s ideology and were not persecuted by the Nazis.  The Catholic priests were not sent to Dachau because they were priests, but because they were anti-Nazis; the Polish priests were arrested for helping the Polish Resistance in German-occupied Poland.

Father William J. O’Malley, S.J. wrote the following regarding the priests who were arrested and sent to Dachau because they were actively helping the underground Resistance against the German occupation of Europe:

The 156 French, 63 Dutch, and 46 Belgians were primarily interned for their work in the Underground. If that were a crime, such men as Michel Riquet, S.J., surely had little defense; he was in contact with most of the leaders of the French Resistance and was their chaplain, writing forthright editorials for the underground press, sequestering Jews, POW’s, downed Allied airmen, feeding and clothing them, providing them with counterfeit papers and spiriting them into Spain and North Africa.

Henry Zwaans, a Jesuit secondary school teacher in The Hague, was arrested for distributing copies of Bishop Von Galen’s homilies and died in Dachau of dropsy and dysentery. Jacques Magnee punished a boy for bringing anti-British propaganda into the Jesuit secondary school at Charleroi in Belgium; Leo DeConinck went to Dachau for instructing the Belgian clergy in retreat conferences to resist the Nazis.

Parish priests were arrested for quoting Pius XI’s anti-Nazi encyclical, Mit Brennender Sorge, or for publicly condemning the anti-Semitic film, “The Jew Seuss,” or for providing Jews with false baptismal certificates. Some French priests at Dachau disguised themselves as workers to minister to young Frenchmen shanghaied into service in German heavy industry and had been caught doing what they had been ordained to do.

Other priests who were sent to Dachau had been arrested for child molestation or for a violation of Paragraph 175, the German law against homosexuality. The most famous priest at Dachau was Father Leonard Roth, who had to wear a black triangle because he had been arrested as a pedophile.  The street that runs along the outside of the Dachau Memorial Site is named after him.  You can read all about Father Leonard Roth here.

In his Official History of Dachau, Paul Berben, who was a prisoner himself, wrote the following about how the priests were treated differently than the other prisoners:

On 15th March 1941 the clergy were withdrawn from work Kommandos on orders from Berlin, and their conditions improved. They were supplied with bedding of the kind issued to the S.S., and Russian and Polish prisoners were assigned to look after their quarters. They could get up an hour later than the other prisoners and rest on their beds for two hours in the morning and afternoon. Free from work, they could give themselves to study and to meditation. They were given newspapers and allowed to use the library. Their food was adequate; they sometimes received up to a third of a loaf of bread a day; there was even a period when they were given half a litre of cocoa in the morning and a third of a bottle of wine daily.

David L. Israel was a soldier in 45th Thunderbird Division of the US Seventh Army during World War II.  After the Dachau concentration camp was liberated, he was assigned to interview the surviving prisoners in order to gather evidence for the war crimes trials which had already been planned.  According to David L. Israel, the Catholic priests told him a completely different version of how they were treated at Dachau.

The following quote is from David L. Israel’s book entitled The Day the Thunderbird Cried, published in 2005:

New and special tortures were devised daily for the Catholic priests. Sometimes, if they were lucky, they would be assigned to clean the dog kennels or the horse stables. On those occasions, they could sometimes get some of the leftover food which meant another day of survival. Being assigned to the pigsty was almost sure death; many of the prisoners never returned. Their bodies remained where they had been drowned in the pig swill as the SS guards looked on.

Israel did not make this up.  The Catholic priests told him these stories. Yet, when the SS staff members at Dachau were prosecuted by an American Military Tribunal in 1945, there was no testimony about the Catholic priests being given food left over from feeding the animals or drowning in the pig swill.

Among the famous Catholic priests at Dachau was Father Jean Bernard, from Luxembourg, a country that was occupied by Germany during World War II.  Father Bernard wrote a book entitled Pfarrerblock 25487 which was translated into English in 2007 under the title Priestblock 25487. The movie The Ninth Day by Volker Schlöndorff was based on a 10 day furlough that Father Bernard was given to go home when his mother died.

Father Jean Bernard was imprisoned on May 19, 1941; he was released in August 1942.  In his Dachau diary, which he published in 1945, Father Bernard wrote:

My first day at the transport commando “Präzifix”: It is March 19, 1941, the feast of St. Joseph – As we push the wagon through the door, I pray to him.

Präzifix was the name of a screw factory just outside the “Arbeit Macht Frei” gate at Dachau. According to the diary that he kept at Dachau, Father Bernard was doing heavy work outside the camp on his first day there, although Paul Berben wrote that the priests were withdrawn from work on May 15, 1941 on orders from Berlin.

After reading some of the reviews of Father Bernard’s book, I decided not to read it myself.  I am afraid that the lies told by Father Bernard in his book would make my blood boil — literally.

For example, Ronald J. Rychlak wrote the following in his review of Father Bernard’s book:

There was so little food that Fr. Bernard tells of risking the ultimate punishment in order to steal and eat a dandelion from the yard. The prisoners would secretly raid the compost pile, one time relishing discarded bones that had been chewed by the dogs of Nazi officers. Another time the Nazi guards, knowing what the priests intended, urinated on the pile. For some priests, this was not enough to overcome their hunger.

Father Bernard “ate a dandelion from the yard?”  Dandelions are edible, but if there were any dandelions growing at Dachau, they would have been in the greenhouse which was located where the Protestant church now stands, or on the farm that was located outside the camp.  The “yard” at Dachau had grass and flowers, but you can be sure that the Germans, who are obsessively neat, did not allow weeds to grow among the grass and flowers. A dandelion is considered a weed when it is growing where it was not planted.

Heinrich Himmler, the head of all the concentration camps, had a degree in agriculture and he was way ahead of his time in organic gardening, so of course he was using compost at the Dachau farm.  Any Nazi guard who urinated on Himmler’s compost pile would have been severely punished.

The lie told by Father Bernard that completely totaled me out was the one about the priests’ ration of  “a third of a bottle of wine daily.”  Father Bernard wrote that the priests were forced, under threats of a beating, to uncork the wine and pour a third of the bottle into a cup, then consume the wine very quickly. He mentions an occasion in which one priest, who hesitated, had the metal cup slammed into his face, cutting through his lips and cheeks to the bone.

Why don’t I believe this story? Wine comes in one liter bottles in Germany.  A third of a liter of wine would be around 11 ounces.  Did the Nazis really supply the Catholic priests with huge cups that would hold 11 ounces, just so they could torture them?

The regular prisoners at Dachau had to drink their ersatz coffee out of a small enameled cup, and they were never allowed to drink any wine at all.  This was Father Bernard’s way of turning the privileges given to the priests at Dachau into torture.  In the Catholic Church, lies are not just sins of commission; a lie can also be a sin of omission, like failing to mention the good treatment that the priests at Dachau were given.

New web site will challenge Holocaust denial

Lawrence Rees, a well known British historian, is launching a new web site (www.WW2history.com) which will tell the true story of World War II and combat Holocaust denial, according to a news article which you can read here.

According to the article, “Among the main features will be timelines for four theatres of war; the Western Front, the Eastern Front, the Pacific Front and the Holocaust.” 

Another “Holocaust survivor” exposed as a fraud

In the recent news on the Internet, there are a lot of articles about Rosemarie Pence, who allegedly survived the Dachau concentration camp and went on to become an Olympic athlete.  It has now been revealed that Rosemarie’s story is total fiction, but for years, people believed her and she earned fees for speaking to students in American schools. A book about her, entitled From Dachau to the Olympics and Beyond was written by Jean Goodwin Messinger and published in 2005.

Book about Rosemarie Pence, alias “Hannah”

Rosemarie claims that her birth name was Hannah and that she is Jewish; she told the author of the book that she was sent to Dachau when she was three years old.  Rosemarie is now 72 years old, so she was born in 1938 and she was allegedly sent to Dachau in 1941 at the age of three.

Here is a tip for future authors of Holocaust survivor stories:  If a female Holocaust survivor claims that she was sent to Dachau in 1941 at the age of three, don’t believe it.  Dachau was mainly a camp for men; there were very few children there until the very last days before the camp was liberated when children from other camps were brought to Dachau.

The Nazis did not begin rounding up all  the Jews to send them to camps until February 1942, after the Wannsee Conference which took place on January 20, 1942.  The Jews were sent to camps in the East in 1942, not to Dachau, which was a camp mainly for political prisoners.  It turns out that Rosemarie Pence is not even Jewish.

Rosemarie has a scar on her arm which she claims is from the removal of her tattoo.  Only prisoners at Auschwitz were tattooed with a number. The old black and white photo on the cover of Messinger’s book shows child survivors of Auschwitz, but  I’m not sure if Rosemarie claimed to have been in Auschwitz.  (I haven’t read the book.)

Even though it was obvious to anyone who knows anything about the Holocaust that Rosemarie’s story was fiction, it took five years or more before she was exposed as a fraud.

The moral of this story is:  Use your heads, people!  If a story sounds unbelievable, it is most likely false.  Don’t fall for every Holocaust survivor story that you hear.

Camp Sumter at Andersonville, GA — America’s Dachau

During the American Civil War, Camp Sumter was a Confederate Prisoner of War camp for Union prisoners.  The site of the prison has been preserved and is now Andersonville National Historic Site in Andersonville, GA.  Of the 45,000 Union POWs who were imprisoned at Andersonville, there were 12,913 who died of starvation and disease.