The title of my blog post today is from the subject line of an e-mail that I got from a follower of my blog. My first thought was: Which chimneys at Auschwitz? According to the official account of the Holocaust, all the crematoria at the Auschwitz II camp at Birkenau were destroyed by the Germans just before the Soviet soldiers liberated the camp on January 27, 1945 and there were no chimneys still in existence. So how did the Soviet liberators determine that there was 18 inches of fat inside the chimneys?
Ruins of Krema II, Feb. 1945
My e-mail correspondent sent me a link to an article in the Daily Mail here which mentions a new book about the Soviet liberation of Auschwitz.
Here is a quote which I copied from the Daily Mail article:
The insanity was worse when the extermination camps of Auschwitz and Birkenau were reached. Most of the inmates had been marched away, but some remained. The sight of them was shattering.
“I had seen many innocent people killed. I had seen hanged people and burned people,” wrote one hardened company commander, “but I was still unprepared for Auschwitz.”
Another Red Army soldier recalled “emaciated, brutally tortured people wrapped in rags. Most were unable to stand, but lay on plank beds or sat propped up against the wall. It was a vision of hell”.
Horror after horror revealed itself – mounds of corpses; the children’s barracks, with just two survivors; warehouses stuffed with a million men’s suits and women’s dresses; the 18-inch layer of fat caking the inside of the chimneys.
“I could not comprehend how a human mind could conceive of this,” said a sergeant after seeing inside a “shower room”.
This devastating evidence of the massacre and torture of their people spurred on the Russian Army. Another witness told his comrades: “Show the German bastards no mercy. Smash them to pulp.” (more…)
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