More misuse of old World War II photos

Photo taken at Ohrdruf, a sub-camp of Buchenwald, shows German civilians being forced to look at dead bodies of Jews

The photo above is included on this website:  http://listovative.com/top-10-major-reasons-why-people-hate-jews/

The title of the website is

Top 10 Major Reasons why People hate Jews

The headline above the photo, shown above, says Top 10. Racial Cleansing.

I have this same photo on my website page about the true story of what happened at Ohrdruf:

http://www.scrapbookpages.com/Ohrdruf/Ohrdruf01.html

The photo does not show “Racial Cleansing.” It shows civilians, that lived in the town of Ohrdruf, who were forced, by the U.S. Army to come to the Ohrdruf subcamp of Buchenwald to view the dead bodies found there.

General Patton wrote in his book that he had suggested that the inhabitants of Ohrdruf  should be brought to the Ohrdruf camp the next day. He wrote that the army had previously “used the same system in having the inhabitants of Weimar go through the even larger slave camp (Buchenwald) north of that town.”

On Patton’s orders, German civilians were brought from the town of Ohrdruf to exhume the bodies in the mass grave there and bury them again in individual graves.

Survivors of Ohrdruf talk to General Hayden Sears on April 8, 1945

In the photo above, notice how the poor mistreated survivors of Ohrdruf are nicely dressed and appear to be in good health.  Why weren’t these prisoners killed by the Germans?  Because that is not what happened.  Read the whole story on my website at http://www.scrapbookpages.com/Ohrdruf/index.html

 

Comparing Planned Parenthood to Nazis killing Jews

German citizens were forced by the American liberators to look at the bodies of typhus victims at the Buchenwald concentration camp, which had no gas chambers

The following quote is from a news article which you can read in full here.

Christians With Their Heads In The Sand
Friday, July 31, 2015

I recall how history tells us of the German people living next to the gas chambers, ignoring the smell and horror of over six million Jews being slaughtered, and then acting as though they didn’t know it had happened. I can also recall that Eisenhower was so disgusted with these callused and unconcerned people that he made them face their denial by marching them all past the dead and decaying piles of corpses of the slaughtered Jews within these electrified wire compounds.

[…]

Remember, Christian means “Christ like”, so I ask you, after the revelations of this week that exposed Planned Parenthood and their barbaric killing and cutting up of innocent life from the womb and then selling those parts like so much meat at the local butcher shop, do you think God is proud of you hypocrites? Are you really living “Christ like”? Why you’re no better than the Germans living near the gas chambers.

So it was Eisenhower who ordered the Germans to look at the bodies of the Jews who had been gassed at Buchenwald? Careful, this is a trick question. The Holocaust industry no longer requires us to believe that there were gas chambers at Buchenwald.

General Eisenhower did not go anywhere near Buchenwald himself; it was General George S. Patton who forced German civilians to view the bodies at Buchenwald. These German civilians were guilty of a war crime because they had not stopped the Nazis from killing Jews in the non-existent gas chamber at Buchenwald.

German civilians were forced to look at dead bodies of prisoners who had died of typhus at Buchenwald concentration camp

General Patton wrote in his autobiography that the number of Weimar citizens brought to the Buchenwald camp was 1,500, although other accounts say it was 2,000 people.

The German civilians had to march five miles up a steep hill, escorted by armed American soldiers. It took two days for the Weimar residents to file through the Buchenwald camp. No precautions were taken to protect them from the typhus epidemic in the camp.

Weimar residents were required to wear their best clothes when they were forced to look at the dead bodies of Jews at Buchenwald

Citizens of Weimar forced to look at bodies of prisoners who died at Buchenwald

[The photo above was fogged in the darkroom, which accounts for the lack of contrast. I could have photoshopped it, but I have left the photo as it was originally published.]

General Patton had visited the Ohrdruf sub-camp of Buchenwald on April 12, 1945 along with General Omar Bradley and General Dwight D. Eisenhower. On April 15, 1945, the day that he visited Buchenwald, General George S. Patton wrote the following in a letter to General Dwight D. Eisenhower:

We have found at a place four miles north of WEIMAR a similar camp, only much worse. The normal population was 25,000, and they died at the rate of about a hundred a day. The burning arrangements, according to General Gay and Colonel Codman who visited it yesterday, were far superior to those they had at OHRDRUF.

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.

General Eisenhower did not visit Buchenwald himself, but he did follow General Patton’s advice to “build another page” about the “brutality of the Germans.” A group of “upper strata” reporters were flown to Germany, arriving at Buchenwald on April 24, 1945, and given the grand tour of the Buchenwald atrocities.

The news article continues with this quote:

Remember, Christian means “Christ like”, so I ask you, after the revelations of this week that exposed Planned Parenthood and their barbaric killing and cutting up of innocent life from the womb and then selling those parts like so much meat at the local butcher shop, do you think God is proud of you hypocrites?  Are you really living “Christ like”?  Why you’re no better than the Germans living near the gas chambers.  

General Patton and his attitude toward the Jews

Today, I did a google search on “Why do so many people hate the Jews?” and I found this article in the search results: http://listovative.com/top-10-major-reasons-why-people-hate-jews/

The title of the article is Top Ten Reasons Why People Hate Jews?

Number 10 in the list of Top Ten Reasons, which is shown first, is Racial Cleansing. It is not clear to me whether Jews are hated because the Jews cleanse other races, or whether the Jews are cleansed because other people hate the Jews.

Underneath the headline “Racial Cleansing” is the photo below. (Click on the photo to see it in a larger size)

Men from the town of Ohrdruf were forced to view the bodies of prisoners who had died from typhus

I recognized the photo above because I have the same photo on this page of my website scrapbookpages.com:   http://www.scrapbookpages.com/Ohrdruf/Ohrdruf01.html

The photo shows German civilians being forced to view the dead bodies of prisoners, who had died at the Ohrdruf sub-camp of Buchenwald during the last days of World War II.  The photo does NOT show the bodies of Jews who were “racially cleansed” because of hatred of the Jews.

These are the bodies of prisoners who had died of typhus and other natural causes, not the bodies of Jews who had been “racially cleansed.”  To me, this is a new low in the misuse of photos.

German civilians in the town of Ohrdruf were forced to view dead bodies in the barracks at Ohrdruf

Regarding the Ohrdruf-Nord labor camp, which was a sub-camp of Buchenwald, General Patton wrote the following in his diary:

“It was the most appalling sight imaginable. In a shed . . . was a pile of about 40 completely naked human bodies in the last stages of emaciation. These bodies were lightly sprinkled with lime, not for the purposes of destroying them, but for the purpose of removing the stench.

When the shed was full–I presume its capacity to be about 200, the bodies were taken to a pit a mile from the camp where they were buried. The inmates claimed that 3,000 men, who had been either shot in the head or who had died of starvation, had been so buried since the 1st of January.”

Dead bodies in a shed at Ohrdruf labor camp

A typhus epidemic had started in Germany in December 1944 and had quickly spread to all the camps as prisoners were transferred from one camp to another. Half of all the prisoners, who died in the German camps, died between December 1944 and the end of June 1945. Yet the survivors of Ohrdruf claimed that all the bodies found at the camp were those of prisoners who had been deliberately killed or starved to death.

General Eisenhower and General Patton view bodies at Ohrdruf, which were deliberately left out for weeks

It would be hard to find a German town, however small or obscure, that is completely lacking in historic or cultural importance. After describing the crimes of the Germans in his autobiography, General Patton went on to tell about how the Americans wantonly destroyed every village and hamlet in their path.

On the same page of his book, in which he describes the atrocities of the Germans, Patton wrote the following:

“We developed later a system known as the ‘Third Army War Memorial Project’ by which we always fired a few salvos into every town we approached, before even asking for surrender. The object of this was to let the inhabitants have something to show to future generations of Germans by way of proof that the Third Army had passed that way.”

The photo below shows General Eisenhower and General Patton viewing the gallows at Ohrdruf after the camp had been abandoned by the Germans.

General Eisenhower and General Patton at Ohrdruf

In the photo above, the man on the far left, wearing a jacket and a scarf, is one of the survivors who served as a guide for General Eisenhower and his entourage. The next day the guide was “killed by some of the inmates,” General Patton wrote in his memoirs, explaining that the guide “was not a prisoner at all, but one of the executioners.”

A. C. Boyd, a soldier in the 89th Infantry Division was at Ohrdruf on the day that this man was killed. In a news article in The Gadsden Times, Jimmy Smothers wrote the following:

Boyd said he saw a Nazi guard, who had not fled with the others, trying to exit the camp. One of the prisoners, who still had a little strength, ran to a truck, got a tire iron and killed him.

“I witnessed that and saw that no one tried to stop him,” Boyd said.

In a letter dated April 15, 1945, addressed to Ike (General Dwight D. Eisenhower), Patton wrote the following regarding the man who had served as their guide at Ohrdruf:

“It may interest you to know that the very talkative, alleged former member of the murder camp was recognized by a Russian prisoner as a former guard. The prisoner beat his brains out with a rock.”

This prisoner was probably one of the Kapos in the camp whose job it had been to assist the German guards; it is doubtful that an SS soldier would have remained behind when the camp was evacuated, knowing that the prisoners would exact revenge as soon as the Americans arrived.

Note that General Patton referred to Ohrdruf as a “murder camp” in his letter. It is clear from Patton’s letters and his memoir that he did not have a clear understanding of the purpose of the concentration camps and labor camps because he believed everything that the prisoners had told him.

I wrote about General Patton’s visit to the Buchenwald main camp on this blog post: https://furtherglory.wordpress.com/2011/11/30/the-myth-that-general-eisenhower-ordered-german-civilians-to-visit-buchenwald/

After reading a bad review of “Killing Patton,” I ordered the book

Bill O’Reilly’s new book has been out for several weeks, but I have delayed ordering it because I thought I would probably not like it.

This morning I read a bad review of the book here.  In reading this bad review, I learned that the book is rich in detail and “meanders” off the track a lot.  That’s what I like when I read books.

I want to know that the tablecloth at the Potsdam Conference was red. I already know about Hitler’s diet, but I might learn more details about his diet from O’Reilly’s book.  Call me crazy, but I want to know the details.  Readers of my blog and my website know that I dote on the details.

General Patton pees into the river as he crosses the Rhine into Germany in March 1943

This quote is from Patton’s book:

“I drove to the Rhine River and went across on the pontoon bridge. I stopped in the middle to take a piss and then picked up some dirt on the far side in emulation of William the Conqueror.” General George S. Patton, March 1945

I wrote about Patton on my website section on Buchenwald at

http://www.scrapbookpages.com/Buchenwald/Liberation8.html

Everyone is entitled to his or her opinion. This quote is from the review of “Killing Patton”:

Soon, though, Patton would become the commanding officer in Southern Germany and, with the end of the war, be responsible for the so-called Displaced Persons camps in Bavaria and elsewhere. Many of these displaced persons were Holocaust survivors. Patton had contempt for them. He called them “animals” and, in letters to his wife and in diary entries, made his anti-Semitism as plain as could be. Here, in reference to a critical report on the condition of the DPs by an official named Earl G. Harrison, is a sample diary entry: “Harrison and his ilk believe that the Displaced Person is a human being, which he is not, and this applies particularly to Jews who are lower than animals.”

[…]

But how is it possible to write over 300 pages on Patton and not once mention his rancid Jew-hatred? How is it possible to mention the flower beds at the Potsdam Conference and not pause to cite Patton’s mistreatment of people who, just a short time before, had been in Auschwitz? How is it possible not to mention that Patton ran his camps in such a manner that President Harry Truman, in a letter to Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, said, “As matters now stand, we appear to be treating the Jews as the Nazis treated them except that we do not exterminate them.” Golly, gee, Bill, isn’t that colorful enough for you?

O’Reilly, like Patton, forgets why World War II was fought in the first place – to combat the evils of Nazism. Foremost among the evils was anti-Semitism, which provided the rationale for the Holocaust. O’Reilly could easily have mentioned Patton’s repellent anti-Semitism, but it clearly was not all that important to him. He didn’t have a tight narrative. He has a narrow mind.

As soon as I receive my copy of O’Reilly’s book in the mail, I will search for any mention of the famous slapping incident when Patton slapped a Jewish soldier. In my humble opinion, this incident angered the Jews to the point that his death was inevitable.

This quote from this source is about the slapping incident:

Patton also created controversy when he visited the 15th Evacuation Hospital on 3rd August 1943. In the hospital he encountered Private Charles H. Kuhl, who had been admitted suffering from shellshock. When Patton asked him why he had been admitted, Kuhl told him “I guess I can’t take it.” According to one eyewitness Patton “slapped his face with a glove, raised him to his feet by the collar of his shirt and pushed him out of the tent with a kick in the rear.” Kuhl was later to claim that he thought Patton, as well as himself, was suffering from combat fatigue.

As for Bill O’Reilly’s failure to call General Patton an anti-Semite, this is excusable because everyone, who is not Jewish, is now an anti-Semite.  The word has lost all meaning.  Originally, it meant a person who wanted the Jews to have their own country, rather than living in ghettos in every country in Europe, where the Jews had everything that a person would normally have in a separate country.

This quote, regarding anti-Semitism, is from Wikipedia:

In the aftermath of the Kristallnacht pogrom in 1938, German propaganda minister Goebbels announced: “The German people is anti-Semitic. It has no desire to have its rights restricted or to be provoked in the future by parasites of the Jewish race.”^[31]

After the 1945 victory of the Allies over Nazi Germany, and particularly after the extent of the Nazi genocide of Jews became known, the term “anti-Semitism” acquired pejorative connotations. This marked a full circle shift in usage, from an era just decades earlier when “Jew” was used as a pejorative term.^[32][33] Yehuda Bauer wrote in 1984: “There are no anti-Semites in the world… Nobody says, ‘I am anti-Semitic.'” You cannot, after Hitler. The word has gone out of fashion.”^[34]

General Patton’s policy regarding the treatment of German POWs

A reader of my blog recently made a comment in which he stated that General Patton told his men: “Any man who brings me an SS prisoner will be court Marshalled!”?

I interpret this to mean that General Patton wanted his men to take no prisoners when fighting in battle against Waffen-SS soldiers. Even more explicit, General Patton ordered his men to kill all Waffen-SS soldiers who surrendered.

I have been searching for some verification of this order, but have found nothing.  What I did find in my searching was an article about General Eisenhower and his treatment of German POWs at http://www.rense.com/general46/germ.htm

This quote is from the website cited above:

One month before the end of World War 11, General Eisenhower issued special orders concerning the treatment of German Prisoners and specific in the language of those orders was this statement,

“Prison enclosures are to provide no shelter or other comforts.”

Eisenhower biographer Stephen Ambrose, who was given access to the Eisenhower personal letters, states that he proposed to exterminate the entire German General Staff, thousands of people, after the war.

Eisenhower, in his personal letters, did not merely hate the Nazi Regime, and the few who imposed its will down from the top, but that HE HATED THE GERMAN PEOPLE AS A RACE. It was his personal intent to destroy as many of them as he could, and one way was to wipe out as many prisoners of war as possible.

Of course, that was illegal under International law, so he issued an order on March 10, 1945 and verified by his initials on a cable of that date, that German Prisoners of War be predesignated as “Disarmed Enemy Forces” called in these reports as DEF. He ordered that these Germans did not fall under the Geneva Rules, and were not to be fed or given any water or medical attention. The Swiss Red Cross was not to inspect the camps, for under the DEF classification, they had no such authority or jurisdiction.

This quote from the website cited above is the most important:

Months after the war was officially over, Eisenhower’s special German DEF camps were still in operation forcing the men into confinement, but denying that they were prisoners. As soon as the war was over, General George Patton simply turned his prisoners loose to fend for themselves and find their way home as best they could. Eisenhower was furious, and issued a specific order to Patton, to turn these men over to the DEF camps. Knowing Patton as we do from history, we know that these orders were largely ignored, and it may well be that Patton’s untimely and curious death may have been a result of what he knew about these wretched Eisenhower DEF camps.  […]

General Patton’s Third Army was the only command in the European Theater to release significant numbers of Germans.

Others, such as Omar Bradley and General J.C.H. Lee, Commander of Com Z, tried, and ordered the release of prisoners within a week of the war’s end. However, a SHAEF Order, signed by Eisenhower, countermanded them on May 15th.

I wrote about Eisenhower’s DEF camps on my website at http://www.scrapbookpages.com/EasternGermany/Gotha/

The myth that General Eisenhower ordered German civilians to visit Buchenwald

The famous story of how General Dwight D. Eisenhower ordered German civilians to march five miles up the hill from Weimar to see the Buchenwald concentration camp has been told many times.  But is this story really true?  Not according to General George S. Patton, who was there that day.

German civilians were ordered to see dead bodies at Buchenwald concentration camp

The famous photo above and the photo below were taken by Life magazine photographer Margaret Bourke-White on April 15, 1945 as a procession of German civilians from the city of Weimar were forced to visit the Buchenwald concentration camp. According to The Buchenwald Report, written by the prisoners at Buchenwald, Bourke-White had just arrived that day, along with General Patton.

Weimar residents were forced to look at bodies of  dead prisoners at Buchenwald concentration camp

General George S. Patton wrote in his autobiography that he visited the Buchenwald concentration camp for the first time on April 15, 1945.  He wrote that he did not make a special trip to see the camp.  Patton had visited the Ohrdruf sub-camp of Buchenwald on April 12, 1945, along with General Omar Bradley and General Dwight D. Eisenhower. Patton threw up when he smelled the 40 dead bodies in a shed at Ohrdruf. He refused to go inside the shed, but General Eisenhower famously said (regarding his visit to Ohrdruf):

I visited every nook and cranny of the camp because I felt it my duty to be in a position from then on to testify at first hand about these things in case there ever grew up at home the belief or assumption that “the stories of Nazi brutality were just propaganda”

General Eisenhower wrote in his autobiography that he only visited one camp and that was the camp near Gotha, which would be Ohrdruf.

After General Patton’s visit to Ohrdruf, he flew to Weimar to visit what he thought was going to be his next Command Post. Patton wrote in his autobiography that his visit to the main Buchenwald camp was only a side jaunt, suggested by General Walton Walker, the man who ordered the Weimar residents to march 5 miles to the Buchenwald camp.

Was General Patton lying when he wrote that it was General Walton Walker who ordered German civilians to visit Ohrdruf and then ordered civilians in Weimar to visit the main Buchenwald camp?  Why does everyone give Eisenhower credit for ordering German civilians to visit Buchenwald?  Is it because Eisenhower made no secret of his hatred for the German people?

There are photos of Eisenhower at Ohrdruf, but no photos of him at Buchenwald because he was never there and he did not give the order for civilians to visit Buchenwald.

On April 15, 1945, the day that he visited Buchenwald, General George S. Patton wrote the following in a letter to General Dwight D. Eisenhower:

We have found at a place four miles north of WEIMAR a similar camp, only much worse. The normal population was 25,000, and they died at the rate of about a hundred a day. The burning arrangements, according to General Gay and Colonel Codman who visited it yesterday, were far superior to those they had at OHRDRUF.

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.

This letter to General Eisenhower was written by General Patton on the day that he saw Buchenwald at the suggestion of General Walker.  It was General Walton Walker who ordered the civilians of the town of Ohrdruf and the city of Weimar to see the Buchenwald camps, not Eisenhower; he had better things to do.  Yet every day you can read somewhere on the Internet that it was Eisenhower who ordered the local Germans to see the camps.

For example, this quote which you can read in full here:

He (Ben-Gurion) would on many occasions recall (as Barack Obama did in his speech at Buchenwald in 2009) how Eisenhower had forced the local Germans to visit the liberated camps and see for themselves the piles of corpses and the skeletal survivors. In his speech Obama quoted Eisenhower as saying at the time that he was concerned that humanity would forget what had been done in these places, and he was determined to never let that happen. Ben-Gurion was hugely impressed and moved by this act of Eisenhower’s, both for its humanitarian quality and for its historic significance.