The floor drains in the Dachau gas chamber…

A few years ago, I was accused of being a Holocaust denier because I wrote, in a private e-mail message, that I think that the floor drains in the Dachau gas chamber are real drains. My private e-mail was published on Paolosilv’s blog without my permission, but when I objected, the blog post, which quoted my e-mail, was removed.

According to the Holocaust experts, the drains in the gas chamber at Dachau cannot be real drains, that are connected to the sewer system, because that would mean that the Dachau gas chamber is actually a shower room.

Poison gas cannot be allowed to get into the sewer system because it would poison everyone in the vicinity; for this reason, the floor drains for the disinfection chambers at Dachau are outside the chambers and the poison pellets are poured into a wire basket so they will not get on the floor.

Visitors to Dachau today are not allowed to go into the basement to see if there are drain pipes connected to the drains in the gas chamber, so my opinion about the drains in the Dachau gas chamber, which are now closed up, is pure speculation.

The floor drains in the Dachau gas chamber have been closed up

The drain outside the four disinfection chambers which were used to delouse the clothing of the Dachau prisoners

Notice that the alleged fake drain in the Dachau gas chamber was manufactured by the same company that made the real drain that is outside the disinfection chambers.

Is there a document somewhere which proves that the Nazis ordered six fake drains from the manufacturer and specified that the drain holes should be closed up? Not that I know of. Maybe someone modified six real drains and closed the  holes so that the poison gas could not go down the drain into the sewer system and poison the whole camp.

The two drains in the morgue room have to be real because it was necessary to clean up the mess made by the dead bodies stacked inside the room; this means that there is a sewer pipe underneath the Baracke X building where the gas chamber is located.

Drain outside the four disinfection chambers at Dachau

Four of the six floor drains in the Dachau gas chamber

If the drains in the Dachau gas chamber are actually fake drains, designed to fool the unsuspecting victims, why use 6 drains?  That is a total waste of money and involves a lot of unnecessary work.  Only one fake drain would be needed to fool the victims into thinking that the gas chamber is a shower room.

Northeast corner of Dachau gas chamber

The photo above shows one of the small windows for pouring Zyklon-B pellets into the Dachau gas chamber.  On the ceiling are the empty holes where showerheads used to be and a square vent.  On the wall, near the ceiling, are light fixture boxes which the American film, shown at the Nuremberg IMT, says were used to vent gas from the chamber.

As seen today, the Dachau gas chamber has two ways to input the gas: through bins on the outside wall or through the shower heads.  There are two ways to vent the gas: through the vent in the ceiling or through the empty light fixture boxes.

Two of the floor drains are about four feet from the windows on the east wall where the Zyklon-B pellets “could be poured in” according to a sign in the undressing room at Dachau. The prisoners would have had plenty of time to sweep the pellets down the drain with their hands before the poison gas fumes were released, so the drains can’t be real, according to the Holocaust experts.

Have you ever seen the “Soup Nazi” episode on the Seinfeld TV show?  The owner of a small soup restaurant in New York is called the “Soup Nazi” because he insists that customers do everything the right way.  If the customers don’t do everything just right, the “Soup Nazi” says “No soup for you!”

That’s the way the real Nazis were; everything had to be done just right.  No wasting of time, money and materials, by putting in 6 fake drains when one would have been enough.  The Seinfeld show, which is about “nothing” had many jokes about the Holocaust including a spoof about the last scene in Schindler’s List which was way over the top.  Too bad that the Seinfeld show is now over; the argument about the floor drains at Dachau would have made a good episode.

I read a blog post written by a student who has studied the Holocaust since elementary school and finally got to see Dachau.  The student wrote this in the blog post:

The adjoining room was labeled the “shower room.” The prisoners were told they were going to get a shower, but once they were locked in the room, they were all gassed.

This student became very emotional when standing in the gas chamber, according to the blog post, but in all the times that I  have visited Dachau and have stood in the gas chamber, I did not become emotional.  There must be something wrong with me.  While I was standing in the gas chamber the last time that I visited Dachau, I was too busy looking around at the shower heads and noticing that they were not evenly spaced on the ceiling and that the one remaining shower head did not hang down from the ceiling.  (All of the shower heads have now been stolen as souvenirs.)

I know that the gas that was used at Dachau was not liquid, nor invisible vapor, but rather was in the form of Zyklon-B pellets that are about the size of peas; the pellets could not have been put through the shower heads.

The shower heads were put in the gas chamber in order to fool the victims into thinking that the gas chamber was a shower room, so why weren’t they spaced evenly?  The spacing of the shower heads looks suspicious to me.  I think that the uneven spacing is due to the vent being put in AFTER the shower heads were installed.

The following quote is from The Harrowing of Hell, a book written by Captain Marcus J. Smith, a US Army medical doctor with DP Team 115, who arrived at Dachau on April 30, 1945:

“They stood beneath innocent-looking shower heads, evenly spaced on the ceiling; from them the invisible lethal gas (carbon monoxide and hydrogen cyanide) flowed for ten to twenty minutes. I noticed a thick glass window on the rear of the chamber: I am told that through the window a supervisor witnessed the executions so that he could decontaminate when they were over.”

Contrary to the description above, written by a medical doctor with the US Army, who saw the gas chamber the day after the camp was liberated, the holes for the fake shower heads are currently not “evenly spaced.” There are three rows of ceiling holes in the gas chamber today.  On the north side of the ceiling, there are three holes on the left side, then two ceiling vents with one hole between them on the right side. In the middle row, there are 6 holes and in the row near the south wall, there are 5 holes, making a total of 15 randomly-spaced holes for the fake shower nozzles.

Were the shower heads changed sometime after this army doctor saw the gas chamber on April 30, 1945?  Was the whole ceiling lowered so that the water pipes were hidden?  Was the peephole used to see which water pipes to open because all three water pipes did not need to flow if there were only a few prisoners taking a shower under one row of shower heads?

A group of US Congressmen visited Dachau on May 1, 1945 and in their report, they described the gas chamber as having a 10-foot ceiling with pipes on the ceiling.  The two rooms on either side of the gas chamber both have 10-foot ceilings.  On May 3, 1945, when a film of the gas chamber was made, the ceiling was 7.6 feet high and there were no pipes visible.  Were there some changes made to the gas chamber between April 30, 1945 and May 3, 1945?  The film that was made on May 3, 1945 was shown at the Nuremberg IMT as proof that prisoners were gassed at Dachau.

The one remaining shower head in the Dachau gas chamber in 2003 was made of sheet metal and it looked like the head from a large garden sprinkler can. It was approximately five inches in diameter, and was set flush with the ceiling in a hole that was about 4 or 5 inches deep into the ceiling. By looking into the empty holes on the ceiling today, one can see that these fake shower heads in the gas chamber were not connected to any pipes. The one remaining shower head had been dented, as though someone had punched it with his fist.

A real shower room at Dachau with the shower heads hanging from water pipes

The photo above shows what a real shower room looked like at Dachau.  Notice the shower heads are evenly spaced and hanging down from the pipes.  This photo was taken in the administration building which has been converted into a Museum at Dachau.  The pipes and shower heads  have been removed.  Were the  real pipes and shower heads removed so that visitors will not think for themselves,  but will just let emotion overcome them when they stand in the gas chamber which is disguised as a shower room?

My long-awaited answer to accusations on Paolosilv’s blog

I am finally feeling well enough to wade through a long blog post accusing me of being a Holocaust denier, and to answer the accusations. You can read the accusations on Paolosilv’s blog here.

The long, tedious post on Paolosilv’s Blog reminds me of the Seinfeld show, which I watch in re-runs every evening.  The Seinfeld show is famously about “nothing” and it includes many long conversations in which the members of the cast argue about something that is very insignificant.  I don’t have the time, nor the motivation, to address all the points brought up on the Holocaust denier accusation blog post, but there is one point which I believe should be cleared up: the reason for the death marches out of the Nazi camps near the end of World War II.

I wrote this in a comment on my blog on February 22, 2010:

“Towards the end of the war, trains were scarce in Europe. The Germans did not use valuable trains to bring prisoners from the Auschwitz death camp to camps in Germany, which were not death camps, in order to kill them. The prisoners were brought to Germany so that they could work in the factories in the sub-camps.”

Paolosilv’s blog wrote this in answer to my comment:

This is again, untrue. The prisoners were ordered to Germany by Hitler/Himmler so they could not testify. The orders were that they were to be killed, as I have posted the quotes from the Nazis elsewhere.

Why would prisoners be marched all the way from Auschwitz -Birkenau to camps in Germany so late in the war (early January 1945)? Just for ‘labor’? Unlikelihood.

Where is the order from Hitler or Himmler, which said that the prisoners should be marched out of Auschwitz to Germany to be killed?  Was this order entered into evidence at the Nuremberg IMT?

What about all the survivors of the march out of Auschwitz who ended up in the sub-camps in Germany where they worked in factories?  Otto Frank, the father of Anne Frank, said that the prisoners at Auschwitz were given a choice about whether they wanted to join the march or stay behind.  Did the order from Hitler or Himmler say that the Auschwitz prisoners had a choice between being killed or staying behind?

Why did 60,000 prisoners join the march, which was led through two feet of snow, by German soldiers?  Maybe because the prisoners knew the Germans would feed them and keep them in good health because Germany needed workers during World War II.

In America, women worked in the factories, but in Germany, most of the women stayed at home to take care of their six children.

I also wrote this on my blog:

So that leaves the question: Why didn’t the Nazis just kill the 67,000 Jews that were at Auschwitz and all of its sub-camps on January 18, 1945. Even with three large gas chambers still in operation on that date, it would have taken a long time to kill them all and burn the bodies. The Germans had to leave in a hurry because they knew the Soviet soldiers were close by. If they left all the prisoners behind, there would be 60,000 healthy Jews on the loose who would potentially take revenge on the German people, plus 7,000 sick Jews and children. Besides that, the Nazis needed prisoners to work in the German munitions factories, building Messerschmitt airplanes and V-2 rockets so Germany would have at least some chance of winning the war.”

So, actually the “death march” out of Auschwitz does make historical sense.

In answer to the above statement, Paolosilv’s said this on his blog:

Here he denies that there were death marches, or puts them into quotes so as to deny their purpose.

Paolo is still insisting that the prisoners were marched out of Auschwitz in order to kill them.  In fact, he is not the only one who believes this.  Even college professors, who teach the Holocaust, believe that the “death marches” were a means of killing the prisoners so that they could not testify against the Nazis after the war.  So why leave 7,000 prisoners behind, who could potentially testify?

Another quote from Paolosilv’s blog:

Furtherglory writes that the Nazis did not want them to take revenge on the civilian population, as happened at Weimar.

It makes no sense at all. Most of these people were in rough shape, and were not able to work. You would not march people in the dead of winter hundreds of miles so that they could work. This is utter bullshit.

The prisoners, who were marched out of Auschwitz, walked 50 kilometers (around 35 miles) to Gleiwitz which was on the border between what had been Poland and Germany in 1938.  From Gleiwitz, the prisoners were put on trains to camps in Germany and then transferred to sub-camps where they were, in fact, put to work in factories, no bullshit.  The 7,500 prisoners who “were not able to work” were left behind in the three Auschwitz-Birkenau camps.

If the purpose of the death marches was to kill the prisoners, why weren’t they, in fact, killed, as planned?  The prisoners who were marched out of Auschwitz wound up working in the sub-camps of the major camps in Germany.

The most famous prisoner, who marched out of Auschwitz, was Elie Wiesel, who says that he got up out of his hospital bed and voluntarily joined the marchers.  He was taken to Buchenwald where he survived.  Primo Levi, another famous Auschwitz survivor, stayed behind and also survived.

I have already addressed the issue of whether or not the Jewish prisoners at Buchenwald were taken out of the camp to prevent them from taking revenge on the civilians in Weimar.  The original Yiddish version of the book “Night” tells about the Jewish prisoners who did, in fact, go to Weimar to get revenge, just as the Nazis had anticipated that they would.

In February 2010 I wrote this on my blog:

Dachau was a camp for political prisoners who had a good chance of being released. There was a special badge for prisoners who had been released and then re-arrested, which means that there were numerous prisoners that were given their freedom after they had been “rehabilitated.”

Paulosilv wrote this on his blog, in his answer to the above statement:

Here he overlooks the unregistered deaths at Dachau, some of whom were Jews. Others were Poles, Russians and assorted prisoners.———-

If these deaths were “unregistered,” how do we know that the deaths occurred?  Maybe the reason that some deaths were “unregistered” is because the deaths never happened.

There were, in fact, prisoners who were brought to Dachau, given a shower, and then were never seen again.  All of them turned up later, very much alive, at the eleven Kaufering sub-camps.  The Official Army Report, by the American liberators of Dachau, mentions these prisoners who disappeared. The Official Army Report says that their alleged deaths were “unregistered.”  That is the origin of this false information.

I am beginning to feel like Jerry Seinfeld, arguing with George about nothing, so I will end this post now.

The history of Dachau — and what American soldiers did there

This morning I read a blog post which told all about what a visitor learned on a recent tour of Dachau. The first thing that caught my attention was this comment about the Arbeit Macht Frei gate: “About the gate, the original was destroyed by the Americans getting in so a new replica was made for the memorial.”   

90-year-old Holocaust survivor was with Muslim leaders on trip to Dachau and Auschwitz

In today’s news in the Jewish Forward, there is the story of 8 imans who went on a 3-day trip to Dachau and Auschwitz which was “co-sponsored by a German think tank and the New Jersey-based Center for Interreligious Understanding, and strongly supported by the United States government.”

The trip, which you can read about here, was the brainchild of law professor Marshall Breger, an Orthodox Jew and former senior official in the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.

According to a news article,  which you can read here, Breger said:

‘There is a view that there is growing anti-Semitism in the Muslim world, reinforced by people like President [Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad, that there is growing Holocaust denial in the Muslim world.  In light of that, the idea was to offer education to those who might not have the kind of knowledge that we’ve had about World War II and the Jewish community, and to do this in a public way.”

Dr. Hans Eisele, an infamous convicted German war criminal

Dr. Hans Eisele was a German doctor who was prosecuted as a war criminal twice by an American Miulitary Tribunal after World War II.  In the proceedings of the AMT, all of the accused were charged witth participating in a “common plan” to violate the rules of the Geneva Convention of 1929 and the Hague Convention of 1907.  The accused in the American Military Tribunal proceedings were chosen in order to represent each of the positions in the concentrations camps, to show that anyone who had any association  with a concentration camp was automatically a war criminal, regardless of his personal behavior.  According to the Allies, all the Nazi concentration camps had a “common plan” to abuse and murder the prisoners so anyone who worked in a concentration camp was automatically a war criminal.  Dr. Eisele was convicted twice and sentenced to death twice. He had no defense: he had actually worked in several concentration camps.

Dachau liberation: “women in the gas chamber, still alive, were rescued when American soldiers came through”

An article on the web site of the University of San Diego, written on June 11, 2010, tells about 90-year-old Marvin Hall, a World War II veteran who served with the 42nd Rainbow Division of the US Seventh Army, which liberated the Dachau concentration camp on April 29, 1945.

The article, written by Melissa Wagoner,  starts out with this excerpt:

Holocaust museums and memorials across the globe tell the stories of survivors, of those who saw and lived a horror beyond imagination, whose lives were shattered and never again returned to normal. These recollections have largely shaped the way historians and global citizens view, and have learned from, the atrocities of the Holocaust. Few stories, however, are recorded of those who were part of the American liberation, and who helped shape the course of history through their heroism and sacrifice.

Do you know what a “retort” is?

If you don’t know by now what a “retort” is, you can look it up on google.  You will find several web sites which give the definition of retort, which means a sharp reply.  But what if you are reading something on the Internet, and you find the word “retort” used as a noun to mean an object at a former Nazi concentration camp? What is a “retort” at Dachau, for example.  Several years ago, I took it upon myself to illustrate what a “retort” looks like at Dachau.

O.K. I won’t keep you in suspense.  The photo below shows four “retorts” at Dachau.  The “retorts” are openings in the ovens to place the bodies for cremation.  The new  crematorium at Dachau has four “retorts” and the old crematorium has two “retorts.”

Four “retorts” for burning bodies in the new crematorium at Dachau

The old crematorium at Dachau has two “retorts.”

On my web site scrapbookpages.com, there is  page on which I put the text of the Leuchter Report with links to photos illustrating the words used in the report.  You can read this page here. At the top of the page, I very clearly wrote:

The Leuchter Report on the Dachau gas chamber is printed here in order to show photos which illustrate and explain the terms used. Fred Leuchter, who does not have a degree in Engineering, has been discredited as a gas chamber expert and he no longer works as a gas chamber consultant.
(Click on the links below to see photographs of the features of the gas chamber referred to in the Leuchter Report. These photographs were NOT taken by Fred Leuchter and were NOT included in his report.)

On July 20, 2010, another blogger posted this.  On July 24, the post was updated to include this paragraph in which the blogger accused me of being a Holocaust denier:

* * * * * * F u r t h e r g l o r y / s c r a p b o o k   p r o v i d e s˛ˇ   l i n k   t o   d i s c r e d i t e d     F r e d   L e u c h t e r   s i t e   ,   t h u s   c l i n c h i n g   h i s   d e n i a l   a s   a   f a c t .

D a c h a u   C o n c e n t r a t i o n   C a m p ,   g a s   c h a m b e r ,   S S   T r a i n i n g   C a m p ,   D a c h a u   & P h o t o g r a p h s   o f   D a c h a u   g a s   c h a m b e r   a n d   t h e   L e u c h t e r   R e p o r t   w i t h   i l l u s t r a t i o n s .

h t t p : / / w w w . s c r a p b o o k p a g e s . c o m / d a c h a u s c r a p b o o k /

The moral of this story is that it doesn’t take much to become a criminal in today’s world.  If I ever go to Germany again, I could be put in prison for 5 years, just for illustrating something written by a Holocaust denier.

Update, August 4, 2010

The blog referenced above has now put up a new blog post which acknowledges that the page on scrapbookpages.com which links to the Leuchter Report  clearly states that Fred Leuchter has been discredited and no longer works as a gas chamber consultant.  So I assume that it’s O.K. to illustrate the Leuchter Report, according to today’s blog which you can read here.

Is 5 years in prison too much for saying there were no gas chambers at Dachau and Mauthausen?

The sentence of Holocaust denier Gerd Honsik in a court in Austria has been recently reduced from 5 years to 4 years in prison.  Honsik had appealed his sentence of 5 years, and the prosecution had also appealed, asking that the sentence be increased to 20 years, the maximum allowed in Austria for Holocaust denial.   Honsik won his appeal and he will now spend only 4 years in prison in Austria for the crime of Holocaust denial, even though he still denies that there were gas chambers at Mauthausen and Dachau. You can read all about the case here.

I’ve been to Austria twice and each time I was really impressed by the Austrian people, who are extremely friendly and polite.  I did have some trouble understanding their German because the language is a bit different in Austria.  The Austrians made an effort to speak High German very slowly for my benefit when talking to me.

On my first  visit to Austria in 1958, I went on a tour down the Danube that went right past Mauthausen, but the tour guide didn’t even point it out.  I didn’t know anything about Mauthausen at that time; I had never even heard of the Mauthausen gas chamber.

Gas chamber at Mauthausen

On my second trip to Austria, I spent several days in the village of Mauthausen, and went to the former concentration camp where I took photos of the gas chamber which you can see here and here.

I’ve been to Dachau several times and I took lots of photos of the gas chamber which you can see here.  Both of these gas chambers look like shower rooms to me, but what do I know?

Gas Chamber at Dachau had a sign in 2001 which said it was never used

Austria is such a beautiful and wonderful country, so why are the Austrians acting crazy about whether or not there were gas chambers at Mauthausen and Dachau, which Gerd Honsik denies. Who  cares?

What about the famous German historian Martin Brozat, who said there were no gas chambers in the Old Reich, which would include Dachau, but not Mauthausen, because Austria was in the Greater German Reich during World War II?

Brozat wrote a letter to the Hamburg weekly newspaper “Die Zeit” with a headline that read “Keine Vergasung in Dachau.” The letter ran in the German edition on August 19, 1960, and in the US edition on August 26, 1960. Dr. Broszat was with the Institute for Contemporary History (Institut für Zeitgeschichte) at that time.  He is now dead.

This quote is from the English version of Brozat’s famous letter:

Neither in Dachau nor in Bergen-Belsen nor in Buchenwald were Jews or other prisoners gassed. The gas chamber in Dachau was never entirely finished or put “into operation.” Hundreds of thousands of prisoners who perished in Dachau and other concentration camps in the Old Reich were victims, above all, of the catastrophic hygienic and provisioning conditions: according to official SS statistics, during the twelve months from July 1942 through June 1943 alone, 110,812 persons died of disease and hunger in all of the concentration camps of the Reich. The mass extermination of the Jews by gassing began in 1941-1942 and occurred exclusively in a few facilities selected and equipped with appropriate technical installations, above all in the occupied Polish territory (but at no place in the Old Reich) in Auschwitz-Birkenau, in Sobibor on the Bug, in Treblinka, Chelmno and Belzec.

It is at those places, but not in Bergen-Belsen, Dachau or Buchenwald, where the mass extermination facilities, spoken of in your article, were built and disguised as shower baths or disinfection rooms.

What about Simon Wiesenthal, the famous Nazi hunter, who was a prisoner at Mauthausen? Wiesenthal famously wrote that there were no gas chambers on German soil, which would include both Dachau and Mauthausen, although he later denied that he ever wrote this.

Even  Sir Hartley Shawcross,  the chief British prosecutor at the Nuremberg IMT, didn’t mention Mauthausen in his closing address on July 26, 1946, when he said that murder was “conducted like some mass production industry in the gas chambers and the ovens” of Buchenwald, Dachau,  and Oranienburg (Sachsenhausen).

Strangely, no one was ever charged with the crime of killing prisoners in a gas chamber at Dachau; you can read about the reasons why on my web site here.

A recent visitor to Mauthausen wrote this on her blog which you can read here:

This is the gas chamber at Mauthausen. It had been 10 years since I stood inside a gas chamber but this time, I think it impacted me even more. I stood there thinking about holding Smith as they turned on the “shower”. Then quickly realizing that it wasn’t a shower, it was gas. Then realizing that me and my baby were going to die. I don’t even hesitate drawing such a graphic picture because it’s truth. It’s history. It happened. If we don’t study this, it can happen again. I stood in a room where thousands of people died.

Another visitor to Mauthausen took a guided tour and wrote this on a blog here:

Stop #6- Gas Chamber

This was the cheapest and most effective method for direct killing.  They chose 50-80 people every one or two weeks an (sic) could fit between 30 and 40 in one chamber.  The SS lied to the prisoners telling them they would be taking a shower.  They brought them outside the chambers where numbered hooks were mounted on the walls.   “Remember your hook number so you can retrieve your clothes after the shower.”  Many Jewish prisoners were well educated when told they would be taking a shower, realized their (sic) was no drain in the floor.  However, at thsi (sic) point it was too late.   Their destiny was in the hands of the SS.

The one and only floor drain in Mauthausen gas chamber

Do the tour guides at Mauthausen really tell visitors that the educated Jews knew the shower room was a gas chamber because there was no floor drain? Visitors can see that there is one floor drain in the middle of the room; it is shown in my photo above.

The “numbered hooks” were allegedly used at Auschwitz-Birkenau, according to Rudolf Hoess, the Commandant.  If there were “numbered hooks” at Mauthausen, they had been removed before I visited the camp.

Dachau according to John F. Floyd in the Gadsden Times

Last night I read a commentary entitled “Could the Holocaust happen again?” written by John F. Floyd in the Gadsden Times and I was very upset about it.  This morning I was still bothered about this article.

Almost everything in John F. Floyd’s article is wrong.  You can read the whole article here. At first, I assumed that Gadsden was a city in Scotland or some place where people would not be expected to know anything about Dachau or the Holocaust, but it turns out that Gadsden is actually in Alabama in the good old USA.  Mr. Floyd began his article by writing that he got his information for his article from the History Channel.

Mr. Floyd wrote, regarding what he heard on the History Channel:

“One narrative showed the Americans advancing at a fast pace in Germany, when all of a sudden the advance came to a dead stop. The reason for this sudden termination of the advancement was not German resistance, but a German village called Dachau.”

The photo below shows what a nice village Dachau was. When the Americans arrived, every house was flying a white flag of surrender.

Dachau was a beautiful village of 13,000 people in 1945

The troops had to stop in the village of Dachau because the bridge across the river had been blown up by the Germans, not because the village was some sinister place.

This was followed by this quote from Mr. Floyd’s article:

“When American officers observed the gaunt, emaciated, starving and dying members of the human race, they called an immediate halt to the advancing U.S. forces and locked the gates to the prison. They immediately went into the German town of Dachau and made all town officials assemble at the concentration camp and witness the horrible conditions American troops had found.”

French Resistance fighters at Dachau, April 29, 1945

Polish Resistance fighters at Dachau, April 29, 1945

Prisoners try to get out after Dachau gate was locked, April 29, 1945

Why did the Americans lock the gates at Dachau?  The Americans were the “liberators” and liberators usually liberate or turn the prisoners loose.  Mr. Floyd didn’t mention any reason for locking the gates, probably because the History Channel didn’t address this issue.  The reason the gates were locked at Dachau was to keep the TYPHUS epidemic at the camp from spreading throughout Germany to kill both Germans and Americans.   During World War I, there were 4 million deaths from typhus, and that was just in Poland.  There were 20 million deaths from influenza in World War I.  The American liberators immediately recognized that it would be difficult to control an epidemic in war time, so the first thing they did was to lock the prisoners inside the camp.

So why didn’t John F. Floyd mention the typhus epidemic?

When I went to Journalism School, we were taught that there are only three rules of Journalism:

1. Accuracy  2 Accuracy  3. Accuracy

Those rules are now long gone.  Journalists now choose a side (left wing liberal or right wing conservative) and write propaganda for their side.  The  concept of telling both sides of a story and reporting accurately is completely unknown in today’s news.

Here is another quote from Mr. Floyd’s article:

There had been rumors of atrocities by the Germans in concentration camps, but what faced the Americans was reality, a reality so horrible, that even today it defies description. It was the German concentration camp called Dachau.

O.K. the “reality” defied description.  This could be interpreted that the “reality” was that the atrocities at Dachau were really committed by the American liberators.  Why didn’t John F. Floyd mention the Dachau massacre in which American soldiers killed the Waffen-SS soldiers who had surrendered?

Guards in Tower B were killed after they surrendered

German soldiers were herded into a box car and killed after they surrendered the Dachau camp

Wounded Wehrmacht soldiers were dragged out of a hospital at Dachau and shot while they had their hands in the air

John F. Floyd wrote that the History Channel documentary “hit home” because he and his wife had visited Dachau in 1980 and his wife had previously seen the camp in 1956 when Dachau was a Displaced Persons camp for ethnic Germans who had been expelled from Czechoslovakia. In his defense, Mr. Floyd would not have learned about the killing of the German soldiers who had surrendered at Dachau on his visit to Dachau in 1980 because this was still a closely guarded secret and the one-sided propaganda TV show called the History Channel would not have mentioned it.

In his article, John F. Floyd wrote the following:

Connie and I walked where so many people of the Jewish faith, gypsies, Ukrainians, homosexuals and anyone else the German Third Reich decided was unfit to live had walked to certain death.

So the “German Third Reich” decided that Ukrainians were “unfit to live”?  The Ukraine was in the Soviet Union back then and millions of Ukrainians were deliberately starved to death by the Soviets.  I didn’t know the real story, as told on the History Channel, that the Ukrainians were really “walked to certain death” at Dachau.  The homosexuals were sent to Dachau for at least 6 months of rehabilitation after they had served two sentences for breaking the law against homosexuality which had been on the books since 1871 (Paragraph 175).  The homosexuals were not sent to Dachau for “certain death.”  Gypsies were sent to Dachau only if they broke the law that called for everyone to have a permanent address or if they refused to work; they were not sent to Dachau because the German Third Reich decided they were unfit to live.

Another quote from John F. Floyd:

“Paths led to the gas chambers where the Jewish population was told they were going to the showers to be de-loused, but the showerheads spewed poison gas.”

Dachau gas chamber

As the photo above shows, all the showerheads at Dachau, except one, have been stolen as souvenirs and one can look into the holes and see that the showerheads were not connected to anything.

In 1980, the Dachau Memorial site was telling people that the Jews were killed at Dachau with poison gas that spewed from the showerheads?  What about the sign in the gas chamber which said that the gas chamber was never used?  I thought that the sign was there in 1980, but I could be wrong.   How did the guides explain how pellets “spewed” through the tiny holes in the showerheads?  How did the tour guides explain the bins on the east wall in 1980?

Dachau tour guides tell visitors that gas pellets were poured into the gas chamber through these bins on the east wall of the  gas chamber building

Another quote from John F. Floyd:

A footpath led to the hanging room where men, women and children took their last steps.

What “hanging room” is he talking about?  I was at Dachau in 1997 and there was no “hanging room.”  I returned in 2001 and again in 2003 and 2007, but I did not see a “hanging room.”

The prosecution did not mention that women and children were hanged at Dachau in the proceedings of the American Military Tribunal at Dachau.  Mr. Floyd does not give any sources, other than the History Channel documentary and his  visit to Dachau in 1980.

In his article, Mr. Floyd did mention that his wife, Connie,  “was at Dachau in 1956 and she said many awful reminders of the Holocaust no longer were there, such as lampshades made of human skin, walking canes made of the femurs from the dead, mountains of shoes that belonged to victims of the Germans and piles of teeth from which the gold had been extracted.”

So all these things were being shown in the first Dachau museum in 1956?  No wonder the Bavarian government demanded that the first museum be taken down.

Mr. Floyd wrote:

The television program then showed Dachau townspeople, at the American military’s insistence, loading the dead onto vehicles and stacking the bodies like cordwood. German men were dressed in coats and ties and the women looked like they were going to the theater.

This sounds like the Dachau townspeople were acting badly because they dressed up too much for the burial of the bodies.  As far as I know, the women from the town of Dachau did not participate in burying the bodies.  The Germans were ordered by the American military to dress up when they visited the camp.  Clothes were very hard to  get during World War II, even in America.  The idea was to have the German people ruin their best clothes as they buried the bodies; this was their punishment for allowing the prisoners to die in a typhus epidemic.

Men from the village of Dachau took the bodies in wagons to be buried

German civilians bury the Dachau bodies at Leitenberg

Mass graves at Leitenberg, near Dachau

Dachau prisoners were put to work loading the bodies at Dachau

Here is a final quote from John F. Floyd:

Hitler and Himmler paid special attention to the Jews, with the objective of eliminating all of them from Germany. What many people fail to realize is this is one goal Hitler achieved. Today, there are only 3,000 people of the Jewish faith living in Germany, out of a population of 80 million.

Even this part of the article is wrong.  There were 585,000 Jews in Germany when Hitler came to power; some books and web sites put the number of Jews in Germany even lower, down to 522,000.  The population of Germany is now close to 82 million. The number of Jews now in Germany is around 200,000, according to Wikipedia.

Remarkable stories about the Holocaust

This morning, I came across two remarkable stories about the Holocaust.  The first one is about a 13 year old Jewish boy who was sent to the Auschwitz death camp in 1944. The Jews under 15 years of age at Auschwitz were sent to the gas chamber, but for some reason, this boy stayed in Auschwitz  for 5 months, and then he was sent to the Kaufering IV camp, a sub-camp of Dachau near Landsberg am Lech.

Kaufering IV was a “sick camp” where prisoners from the other 10 Kaufering camps were sent to die when they were too sick to work. Most of the sick prisoners at Kaufering IV had typhus, but remarkably one of them recovered; his story is told here.

This is a quote about the boy who was sent to Kaufering IV:

In October 1944, at the age of 13, after five months in Auschwitz, I was transferred to Dachau, where I was assigned to Camp #4, located near the Bavarian town of Lomitsberg. For some reason, perhaps because I was the only young boy in the entire camp, I found favor with the SS officer in charge of food supplies and services for both prisoners and guards in Camp #4, and so I was assigned to the kitchen. My job was to stand at the kitchen gate all day and to shout “Achtung!” when this SS officer entered for his periodic inspection of the kitchen.

[…]

Being on the kitchen staff meant that I had access to food. This was a lifesaving privilege not only for me but for others. I was constantly besieged by prisoners begging for any scraps of food I could get for them. I took what I could and was able to help keep many, many people alive. Many of these people survived only because of this kitchen job that I was lucky to get, and some still live in Williamsburg today.

American soldiers view the bodies at Kaufering IV on May 1, 1945

Civilians from the town of Hurlach were forced at gunpoint to bury the bodies of prisoners who had died of typhus at Kaufering IV

The photo above shows a real-life scene which was re-created in the TV series “Band of Brothers.”  You can read all about Kaufering IV  here. I previously blogged about the remarkable story of seven Jewish women who were sent to Kaufering IV because they were pregnant; their babies were born there and the mothers with their babies were evacuated to the main camp so that they could be surrendered to the Allies. You can read about the mothers and their babies who survived Kaufering IV here.

The second remarkable story about the Holocaust is told here.  This is the story of Jews who were hidden during the Holocaust and didn’t know that they were Jews until long after World War II.

This is a quote from the story:

After the Iron Curtain was lifted in Europe twenty years ago, a surprising thing occurred – thousands of people who had been raised as gentiles came to the startling realization that they were actually Jews. Poland is home to thousands of such stories. During the Holocaust and under Communist rule, many Jews there hid their identities and continued to conceal them even after the fall of Communism. On their deathbeds, some of them have revealed their true identities to their children or grandchildren. Other people found out from old family records or through other means.