Today, the United States Holocaust Museum is celebrating its 20th anniversary. You can read about it online here.

This quote is from the news article about the USHMM:

For 20 years, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum has reminded visitors of atrocity, grief and survival.

On Monday, nearly 4,000 supporters joined 843 Holocaust survivors and 130 veterans to celebrate its 20th anniversary and hear speeches from President Bill Clinton and museum founding chairman Elie Wiesel.  Under a large tent outside the museum, just south of the National Mall in Washington, D.C., survivors talked with American soldiers who liberated concentration camps, sharing their stories.

Ernest Gross, who survived the Dachau concentration camp, searched for years to find a camp liberator. He found one in Don Greenbaum of Philadelphia. The two traveled to Washington to attend the ceremony together.

“I was transported from Camp 7 to Dachau to be gassed and to go into the ovens,” Gross told ABC News just before the ceremony, from his seat next to Greenbaum.

“I was standing in line, and I was close enough that I was able to see the ovens, and all of a sudden I see the German soldiers are throwing their weapons down,” Gross said.  “I didn’t know why I turned around, and I saw the American Army liberating the camp, and for 67 years I looked for somebody who liberated me to thank him.”

The USHMM website has a page about Ernest Gross, which mentions that he was a prisoner in the Kaufering VII sub-camp of Dachau.  In the last days of the war, the prisoners in the eleven Kaufering camps were evacuated to the Dachau main camp, except for Kaufering IV which was the camp for sick prisoners.

Now we know why the prisoners were brought from the Kaufering sub-camps to the main camp.  It was not to allow them to be liberated by the American Army which was on its way to Dachau.  No, Ernst Gross and the rest of the Kaufering prisoners were brought to the main camp to be killed in the gas chamber.  Ernst was saved in the nick of time.

Fritz Schnaittacher, a Jew who had been living in Germany until 1933, was an intelligence officer with the U.S. Seventh Army in Germany during World War II.

Fritz Schnaittacher

You can read the full story, entitled “A German Jew in the U.S. Army Confronts Dachau” here.

In a letter to his wife in 1945, First Lieutenant Fritz Schnaittacher, an intelligence officer with the U.S. Seventh Army in Germany, wrote about how he was almost sent to Dachau 12 years ago, which would have been in 1933 when the Dachau camp was first opened.  The first prisoners, who were sent to Dachau in 1933, were taken from the Munich prison to the first German concentration camp which had just been opened.  These first prisoners had been arrested as “enemies of the state” after the Reichstag fire. What was this young German Jew doing in 1933 that he was just missed being sent to Dachau by “the skin of his teeth,” as he wrote in his letter to his wife.

This quote is from Schnaittacher’s letter to his wife:

Twelve years ago to day I came to Munich — yesterday we took it — to day we were in the heart of it — another coincidence. The past few days were some of the greatest and saddest in my life. Our regiment took Dachau or should I say liberated the human wreckage which was left there. This I consider one of the most glorious pages in the history of our regiment, not because the fighting was tough, it wasn’t, but because it finally opened the gates of one of the world’s most hellish places.

You have heard the stories over the radio — I don’t want to add much more — the most striking picture I saw was the “death train” — I say picture, no not picture, but carload and carload full of corpses, once upon a time people, who were alive, who were happy and people who had convictions or were Jews — then slowly but methodically they were killed. Death has an ugly face on these people — they were starved to death — the positions they were lying in show that they succumbed slowly — they made one move, fell, were too weak to make another move, and there are hundreds of such lifeless skeletons covered by some skin. I tried to find out the origin of this train. Some of the stories corresponded — whether this train was to leave Dachau or had just arrived is not essential — essential is that they were locked into these cattle cars without sanitation and without food. The SS had to take off in a hurry — we came too fast — it was too late to cover up their atrocities.

First prisoners arrive at Dachau concentration camp in 1933

You can read about the first prisoners who were sent to Dachau, on my website here.  A few of the first prisoners who were sent to Dachau in 1933 were Jewish, but none of the first prisoners were sent there just because they were Jews; they were transferred to the first concentration camp, from the Munich jail, because of their politically activity against the state.

In reading the letter that Fritz wrote to his wife, I was struck by the fact that he wrote about the “death train” but didn’t write about what was happening to the German people in the last days of the war. I am currently reading a book entitled Germany 1945, in which the author mentions that 500,000 German civilians were killed during the Allied bombing of German cities and that 26 million Germans (one fourth of the total population) were homeless.  This number did not include the ethnic Germans, in other European countries, who were expelled from their homes and forced to go to Germany, where there was no housing available.  On top of this, the American Army officers forced German civilians out of their homes so that they could occupy them.  Fritz had no sympathy for the German civilians who were treated very badly by the Americans.

Before you say that the Germans got what they deserved because Germany started the war, read a blog post that I wrote 3 years ago about the start of World War II.

Elly Gotz was only in the Dachau main camp for two days before the camp was liberated, but he witnessed prisoners being killed in the gas chamber.  He told an audience of students about the Dachau gas chamber in a talk that he gave in April this year.  His message is that the students shouldn’t hate, but how can these students not hate after they are told lies about prisoners being gassed at Dachau?

This quote is from the news article which you can read in full here:

Gotz talked about the atrocities he witnessed and experienced — of being forced to move to the Jewish ghetto, of going into hiding with his family — where his mother, a nurse, had the task of helping them take their own lives (with syringes of a heart attack-inducing drug) should they be discovered.

Gotz also talked of his time at the Dachau labour and concentration camps and of witnessing innocent people being shot, dying of starvation and being killed in gas chambers.

Currently, there is a 93 year-old-man who is scheduled to go on trial in Germany as a war criminal because he was a cook in a concentration camp.  If old men, like John Demjanjuk, can be brought into court on a stretcher, and prosecuted for alleged war crimes, then old men who tell lies about gas chambers should also be brought into court in Germany and charged with the crime of Lying about the Holocaust.

Elly Gotz was born in Kaunas, Lithuania in 1928.  In 1941, his family was put into a ghetto where they stayed for three years before being sent to a Dachau sub-camp in 1944.

On April 29, 1945, when the main Dachau camp was liberated, there was a total of 2,539 Jews in the camp, including 225 women, according to the US Army census. Most of the Jews had arrived only weeks or even days before, after they were evacuated from the Dachau sub-camps, mainly the eleven Kaufering camps near Landsberg am Lech, where they had been forced to work in building underground factories for the manufacture of Messerschmitt airplanes.  Elly Gotz and his father had been working in the Kaufering I camp for 10 months.

You can hear Elly Gotz tell his story on the YouTube video below.  At 1:35 on the video, Gotz tells how “the vicious Commandant” of Dachau told him the prisoners were all going to be killed: “We are keeping the last bullets for you.”

The last Commandant of the Dachau Concentration Camp was Wilhelm Eduard Weiter; he had left the Dachau main camp on April 26, 1945, leading a transport of prisoners to the Schloss Itter, a subcamp of Dachau in Austria. When Weiter realized that Elly the Liar had arrived in the main camp the following day, Weiter came back and made his threats to 17-year-old Elly so that he would have some lies to tell students years later.

This morning, I read a news article in the online Redding Eagle newspaper, which tells the story of Frank Stevenson, Jr. who was at Dachau when the camp was liberated on April 29, 1945.

Dachau guards who were captured by the American liberators; Frank Stevenson is on the right

This quote is from the news article in the Redding Eagle:

Death camp changed life of Wernersville WWII veteran
[by] Bruce Posten

As an Army soldier, Frank Stevenson Jr. helped liberate Dachau, the notorious Nazi concentration camp, and its subsidiary camps in late April 1945.

[...]

Stevenson witnessed the horror of human atrocity firsthand.

“As soon as Hitler was in business, Dachau was operating as a place for his political prisoners of many nationalities,” said Stevenson, who will celebrate his 90th birthday on June 6, the 69th anniversary of D-Day.

That’s an appropriate irony, not because he was part of the historic World War II Allied invasion, but what the success of that endeavor allowed him to witness during the final days of the war.

[...]

But it was Dachau, the model for other German camps, that left the lasting impression, with its legacy of starvations (sic), executions and prisoners worked to death.

What he saw [at Dachau], he will never forget: the famished inmates surrounded by barbed wire; a railroad track that led up to a door where victims were herded into a gas chamber; a room of I-beams with pulleys and nooses for hangings; and another with an incinerator where bodies were burned.

Stevenson came upon a bloodstained wall showing evidence of executions. And in still another room, he saw the bodies piled up to the ceiling, people killed within days of the liberation with no time for the Germans to burn them.

“We really had no idea of all this,” Stevenson said, adding that with the approach of Allied liberators some prisoners escaped and gathered weapons, seeking vengeance by killing Nazi guards.

Note that Frank Stevenson mentioned that the prisoners were killing Nazi guards, but apparently he didn’t know that some of the SS soldiers at Dachau were killed by the American liberators. Apparently, he also did not know about the typhus epidemic in the camp and that the dead bodies found in the camp were the bodies of prisoners who had died from typhus.  He assumed that the bodies of prisoners, that were piled up in the morgue, were the bodies of prisoners who had been murdered in the last days of the war.

This quote is a continuation of the news article in the Redding Eagle:

In [Stevenson's book], a letter to his mother and father on May 1, 1945, read: “Since I’ve been over here I’ve found that a lot of what we are told is either grossly exaggerated or just plain propaganda; however, the weirdest story that was ever told about this concentration camp was perfectly true.”

Nothing was perfect at Dachau, except the horrible human truth.

“I used to be quite a believer in God, taught Sunday school and attended church,” Stevenson said. “But after I saw that I just kept asking myself, ‘Where was God when all those people were killed?’ I respect anyone’s faith, because it can provide comfort, but for me that’s no more. I believe when you’re dead, you’re dead.”

In 1984, Stevenson took a trip to Europe, but Dachau wasn’t on the itinerary. Stevenson was drawn to go back.

“Our tour director didn’t want us to go and said, ‘You don’t believe all that stuff that was supposed to have happened there?’ ” Stevenson said.

Stevenson believed it; he had seen it.

Along with 15 others, he took a side trip and caught up with the tour later.

“I know what I saw,” Stevenson said.

And no distance of decades or others’ delusions can mask what he witnessed.

American reporters view bodies of typhus victims after Dachau was liberated

The photo above shows bodies laid out in rows near a barracks building on the east side of the Dachau camp; these were the bodies of prisoners who had died of typhus after the camp was liberated.

Prisoners in the typhus ward set up by American doctors after Dachau was liberated

After the Dachau camp was liberated, the former inmates had to be kept inside the prison enclosure for several weeks until all danger of spreading the typhus epidemic in the camp had passed. Just before the Americans arrived, up to 400 prisoners had been dying each day in the typhus epidemic which was out of control, according to the testimony of the Chief Doctor of the camp at the American Military Tribunal held at Dachau in November 1945.  On 2 May 1945, the 116th Evacuation Hospital arrived at Dachau and set up operations. According to a report made on 20 May 1945, there were 140 prisoners dying each day in the camp; the principle causes of death were starvation, tuberculosis, typhus and dysentery. On liberation day, April 29, 1945, there were 4,000 prisoners in the Dachau camp hospital and an unknown number of sick prisoners in the barracks who had been receiving no medical attention.

There were 18 one-story wooden SS barrack buildings in the Dachau army garrison which were converted by the American liberators into hospital wards. The American medical workers were housed in the SS administration building. A Typhus Commission arrived, within days, and began vaccinating all medical personnel and the prisoners. There was a daily dusting of DDT to kill the lice which spreads typhus.

Dachau prisoner being dusted with DDT to kill the lice that spreads typhus

On 3 May 1945, the sick prisoners were brought to the hospital wards. They were bathed, dusted with DDT powder and given clean pajamas to wear; their old prison clothes were burned.

By July 1945, the typhus epidemic in the Dachau concentration camp had been brought under control by the US Army doctors, and all the prisoners had either been released or moved to a Displaced Persons camp at Landsberg. The photograph below shows former inmates being tested for typhus before being allowed to leave.

Survivors of Dachau were given a test for typhus before being allowed to leave

So why didn’t the Nazis take care of the prisoners and prevent a typhus epidemic at Dachau?  No one ever mentions that the SS administrators at Dachau DID try to prevent epidemics, but in the last months of the war, when Germany was being bombed back to the Stone Age, everything got out of control.

Disinfection Hut at Dachau, where clothes were disinfected to prevent typhus, was torn down to make a space for a memorial to the Jews who died at Dachau

The photograph above shows the disinfection hut at Dachau, which is no longer in existence. Before it was torn down, the building was used as a restaurant, when the Dachau camp became a refugee camp for 17 years, for Germans who had been expelled from the Sudetenland in what is now the Czech Republic after the war. The restaurant was torn down in 1965 to make room for the Dachau Memorial Site. The location of the disinfection building is where the Jewish Memorial now stands.

Jewish Memorial stands in the location of the former disinfection building

On April 30, 1945, one day after the Dachau camp was liberated, a Displaced Persons team of US Army soldiers arrived to take care of the survivors. Marcus J. Smith, who was a medical doctor on this team, described the disinfection building, which he saw when the prisoners escorted him around the camp. In his book, The Harrowing of Hell, Smith wrote the following:

“Our escorts take us to the disinfection building. Here, while prisoners were bathed in antiseptic solution every two to four weeks, their clothes were put into an apparatus in which they were exposed to two to four meter radiowaves and a temperature of 182 degrees Centigrade. So I am told. This is an experimental method, and I cannot ascertain its effectiveness. My recommendation will be to use soap, water, antiseptic solutions and DDT. Nearby is a concrete building in which 300 prisoners could shower at a time. I am told that each prisoner was permitted one shower every two weeks. (The building has been closed for the last three weeks.)”

The shower building which Smith described, in his book, had been closed for three weeks because a bomb that hit the Dachau complex on April 9, 1945 had destroyed the water main, and there was no running water in the camp when the Americans arrived.

Smith went on to describe the “crematorium and the gas chamber” which were in the “large concrete and brick building with the high smokestack,” so it is clear that neither the “disinfection building” nor the shower room, which he described above, was the building where the homicidal gas chamber was allegedly located.

The prisoners who took Smith on a tour of the camp, one day after it was liberated, did NOT point out that the four disinfection chambers in the crematorium building used Zyklon-B for delousing the clothes. Regarding the clothes piled up outside the Baracke X building where four delousing chambers and the homicidal gas chamber were located, Smith wrote the following:

“There are conflicting stories as to the use of the gas chamber. [...] Many of the stories described the shedding of clothes before execution. This was purposeful. The clothing was collected and later issued to newly arriving prisoners.”

Smith assumed that the clothes, that were shed by the prisoners, prior to being gassed in Baracke X, were taken all the way across the camp to the old disinfection building to be deloused.  He did not understand that the “gas chambers” in the Baracke X building were being used for disinfecting clothing.

Door into disinfection chamber in Baracke X where clothing was disinfected

DDT was in common use in America in 1945, but was apparently not being used by the Germans. Smith wrote the following in his book The Harrowing of Hell:

“As the years passed, reports began to appear about the resistance of certain insects to DDT, and its harmful effects on certain species of birds, fish, amphibians, and mammals. But in 1945, we had no inkling of adverse effects. We used DDT by the ton; it coated our clothes, food, and air, and the results achieved by it in the control of the typhus fever epidemic were spectacular.”

The Germans were way ahead of American scientists, who had not yet discovered the harmful effects of DDT. If only the SS had used DDT at Dachau, there would not have been dead bodies at Dachau for American soldiers, like Frank Stevenson, to find, and assume that these prisoners had been deliberately killed by the Nazis.

There were 2,539 Jews at the Dachau main camp when it was liberated.  The number of Jewish deaths at Dachau is unknown.
Dachau Liberated: TheOfficial Report of the US Seventh Army, published in 1945, mentions that 14,700 deaths had occurred at Dachau in the first quarter of 1945.  This was during the time that there was a typhus epidemic at Dachau.

Paul Berben, a prisoner in the camp, wrote a book entitled Dachau, the Official History 1933 – 1945, in which he stated that 2,888 prisoners had died at Dachau in January 1945, 3,977 prisoners had died in February, 3,668 had died in March and 2,625 had died in April, for a total of 13,158 in the first four months of 1945.  Most of these deaths were due to typhus and other diseases in the camp.

In the month of May 1945, an additional 2,226 Dachau prisoners died after the camp was liberated, in spite of the excellent care given to them by American military doctors. There were 196 more deaths in June before the typhus epidemic was finally stopped by the use of DDT and the vaccination of all the prisoners.

According to a book published by the US Seventh Army immediately after the war (Dachau Liberated, The Official Report by The U.S. Seventh Army), there was a total of 29,138 Jews brought to Dachau from other camps between June 20, 1944 and November 23, 1944. The US Seventh Army report says that Jews were brought to Dachau to be executed and that they were gassed in the gas chamber disguised as a shower room in the Baracke X building, and also in the four smaller gas chambers. According Barbara Distel, the former director of the Memorial Site, the gas chamber at Dachau, which was disguised as a shower room, was never used for any purpose.

Today, tour guides tell visitors that the gas chamber at Dachau was used, but not for “mass gassing.”

Before you say that Dachau tour guides don’t tell lies, read this quote from another blog:

One thing I didn’t realize was that the [Dachau] camp wasn’t immediately emptied and shut down following the end of the war. Dachau was a refugee camp until the 1960s. This is so hard for me to wrap my head around–how people had to live in the same camp under still-horrible conditions even after the war was over. Obviously the Nazis were no longer there killing and torturing them, but these people were forced to live in the same barracks where they’d been starved and exposed to the most unhygienic, unhealthy, uncomfortable conditions…and they were still encountering a lot of the same food shortages and unsanitary living conditions. Every day they looked out into the square where the Nazis had lined them up and, guns in hand, told them that they were subhuman. They lived a stone’s throw away from mass graves containing the ashes and bodies of family members and friends, and every day they passed the places where they had been tortured and their loved ones killed.

Did a Dachau tour guide really tell a group of American tourists that the “refugees,” who lived in the Dachau barracks until they were thrown out in 1965, were former prisoners in the camp?  Or did the blogger misunderstand what the tour guide was saying?

The truth is that the “refugees” who lived in the former Dachau camp for 17 years were ethnic Germans who had been expelled from Czechoslovakia. They had been forced to walk to Germany and try to find housing in a war-torn country where every city had been bombed.  They were the lucky ones; these expellees had manged to make it to Germany without being burned alive by the Czechs who drove them out.  I previously blogged about the expellees here.

The guidebooks that were being sold at Dachau, on my many visits there, did not mention the ethnic German expellees.  The German people don’t dwell on their suffering during and after World War II.  No one wants to hear their story.  Today, Dachau is all about the Jews, even though Dachau was not primarily a camp for Jews.

This is another quote from the blog post which you can read in full here:

I can’t tell every story I heard on my tour–they were nearly all horrifying, appalling reminders of what human beings are capable of. It’s enough to say, in a fairly family-friendly blog, that thousands of people were tortured for no reason other than the amusement of their captors. That the Nazis would keep prisoners locked in tiny cells for months at a time–or even a year–only to take them outside in to the sun, blind them, and shoot them. To put it another way: the Nazis would invest the time and expense in keeping someone alive for a year knowing full well that they were going to kill them. They weren’t murdering people to spare the expense of keeping them imprisoned. They weren’t killing them in the heat of battle. They weren’t even doing it for ideology anymore. They were doing it for fun. The idea that people like that have existed at all on this planet is terrifying, but to remember that they were in positions of power–and that they held these positions a mere sixty-odd years ago–is truly chilling.   [....]

I have deduced that the blogger is referring to the bunker at Dachau, the prison within the prison, where the VIP prisoners like the Reverend Martin Niemoeller were held.  These prisoners had small private cells, with a toilet and wash basin, but they did not have to stay in their cells 24/7; they could walk around outside and even receive visitors.  They could read books and one prisoner had a musical instrument.

One wing of the bunker had prison cells for Dachau guards who had abused the prisoners in the camp.  Shortly before Dachau was liberated, there were 128 prisoners in this wing, who were released so that they could assist with the surrender of the camp.

Did this blogger misunderstand what the tour guide was saying?  The bunker was used by the American occupation after the war to imprison alleged German war criminals, with 5 men in each cell that was intended for one person.

Or did a Dachau tour guide really say that thousands of people were tortured at Dachau for the amusement of their captors and that prisoners were killed at Dachau for “fun.”

There were several SS men, imprisoned by the Allies at Dachau, who testified under oath in court that they were tortured to force them to admit to crimes that they had not committed.

The following testimony was given at the American Military Tribunal by Johann Kick, the head of the political department at Dachau. Kick was convicted, sentenced to death and executed for his alleged torture of the Dachau prisoners.

Q: … will you describe to the court the treatment that you received prior to your first interrogation anyplace?

(Prosecution objection as to whether beating received on the 6th of May could be relevant to confession signed on the 5th of November).

Q: … Kick, did the treatment you received immediately following your arrest have any influence whatever on the statements that you made on the 5th of November?

A: … The treatment at that time influenced this testimony to that extent, that I did not dare to refuse to sign, in spite of the fact that it did not contain the testimony which I gave.

Q: Now, Kick, for the court, will you describe the treatment which you received immediately following your arrest?

A: I ask to refuse to answer this question here in public.

President: The court desires to have the defendant answer the question.

A: I was here in Dachau from the 6th to the 15th of May, under arrest; during this time I was beaten all during the day and night… kicked… I had to stand to attention for hours; I had to kneel down on sharp objects or square objects; I had to stand under the lamp for hours and look into the light, at which time I was also beaten and kicked; as a result of this treatment my arm was paralyzed for about 8 to 10 weeks; only beginning with my transfer to Augsberg, this treatment stopped.

Q: What were you beaten with?

A: With all kinds of objects.

Q: Describe them, please.

A: With whips, with lashing whips, with rifle butts, pistol butts, and pistol barrels, and with hands and fists.

Q: And that continued daily over a period of what time?

A: From the morning of the 7th of May until the morning of the 15th of May.

Q: Kick, why did you hesitate to give that testimony?

A: If the court hadn’t decided I should talk about it, I wouldn’t have said anything about it today.

Q: Would you describe the people who administered these beatings to you?

A: I can only say that they were persons who were wearing the United States uniform and I can’t describe them any better.

Q: And as a result of those beatings when Lt. Guth called you in, what was your frame of mind?

A: I had to presume that if I were to refuse to sign I would be subjected to a similar treatment.

The blogger’s description of the Dachau gas chamber and its use is absolutely mind boggling.  If you don’t know anything about the Dachau gas chamber, you can read about it on my website here.

This quote is the blogger’s description of the gas chamber:

There was however, one thing that triggered a gut reaction of sheer fear and despair, and that was the gas chamber. Dachau did not use gas chambers in the same way as many other camps; it was in fact a testing facility to determine the best, most efficient way to kill the most people. (I hate that I had to type that sentence. I hate that there were–and still are– people whose horrible actions gave me a reason to type it.) The Nazis tested a number of variables in the gas chambers at Dachau–how much poison? Should it be pumped in as gas or sprinkled on the floor in another form to be converted into gas by raising the temperature once the prisoners were in the room? How could they most effectively poison loads of people from as safe a distance as possible? Those are the questions the Nazis encountered.

This is the reality that their victims met: The gas chamber at Dachau was made to look like a shower. The men were told they would get a hot shower. They were led into a room with towels hanging on the walls and told to undress. They were then sent into the chamber, which was fitted with shower heads to really sell the illusion. If they asked why it was so hot, they were told that it was the hot water coming up through the pipes. The doors were closed, and the men who had entered would never leave. Their bodies were unceremoniously burned in a crematorium located in the next room, and their ashes were dumped into unmarked mass graves.

Even as a perfectly safe and healthy tourist in 2013, standing in the gas chamber was like standing in a nightmare. The room was dark and low ceilinged and gave the impression that it would crush you if you stood there long enough. It felt claustrophobic even though the doors were open and I was practically the only person in there. And I started to tear up.

Did the blogger actually go inside the gas chamber at Dachau?  Did he see the towel rods in the undressing room?  Did he see water pipes for the showers?  Whom did the victims ask about why the gas chamber was so hot?

Why was the ceiling so low?  Was it because this room was modified by the Americans after the camp was liberated?

You can read about the history of the Dachau gas chamber on my website here.

This quote from the blog post about a trip to Dachau absolutely astounded me:

Our guide, who’s been leading Dachau tours for four years, sent us into the building by ourselves while he waited outside. “I’ve only been in that room once,” he said, “and I have no desire to ever go back.” I heard stories of other tour guides who stopped leading Dachau tours after a year or so because they could not deal with the pain and horror of visiting the camp three or four times a week.

Why wouldn’t the guide go inside the Dachau gas chamber?  Because he couldn’t lie with a straight face?

After reading this far on the blog post, I was not inclined to believe the story, told by the blogger, of the Carmelite nunnery at Dachau.  This blog post is getting quite long, so I will stop for awhile, eat breakfast, and write another blog post about the Carmelite nunnery.

Earlier today, I wrote a long comment on my blog about a blog post written by another blogger.  My new post today is a continuation of my criticism of what my fellow blogger wrote. I am writing about how the Carmelite convent, just outside of the Dachau Memorial Site, was built.

A Catholic convent was built just outside the north wall of the Dachau camp

The Carmelite Convent, called Karmel Heilig-Blut, was designed by Josef Wiedemann, the same architect who designed the Catholic Church and its bell tower. The foundation stone was laid by Dr. Johannes Neuhäusler, a former inmate in the camp, at a ceremony on April 28, 1963. The spot where the convent was built was formerly a pond that was filled with gravel when the Nazis rebuilt the camp in 1937. Construction started in August 1963 and the finished convent was dedicated on November 22, 1964.

This quote is from the blog post which you can read in full here:

To leave things on a slightly less depressing note (although I feel like a post about Dachau is allowed–nay, expected–to be a downer), in the years since the war, a convent has been built adjacent to the camp grounds.The sisters wanted the entrance gate to the convent to be through one of the old guard towers at the far end of the camp, near the various religious monuments, but the Powers That Be (the earthly ones, I mean) kept saying no. “The problem was solved,” our guide told us, “by a sixty-two-year-old nun with a sledgehammer”–thus confirming my belief in the inherent badassery of nuns everywhere. The power of Christ compels you, indeed.

No legal action was taken against the nun; a group of Roma people (gypsies) backed her up and lent their support to the convent’s unorthodox building plans. And the gate to the convent remains there (after a bit of touching up…sledgehammer holes aren’t that pretty) to this day, a symbol that Dachau is no longer an enclosed prison, but an open memorial site.

There may have been a nun wielding a sledgehammer, but I am guessing that the nun was allowed to make the first hole in a guard tower at Dachau, in a symbolic ceremony in 1963, when one of the original guard towers at Dachau was remodeled to make an entrance into the Catholic convent.

Entrance into the convent is through a guard tower

After Dachau was liberated, the “Powers That Be” were the members of the International Committee of Dachau which is still, to this day, in charge of the Dachau Memorial Site.  Just before the acting Commandant, Martin Gottfried Weiss, left the Dachau camp in April 1945, when the American liberators were on their way, he turned the camp over to this Committee, which was headed by Albert Guérisse, a British SOE agent who had been imprisoned at Dachau because he was an illegal combatant, aiding the French Resistance.

The man in charge of the construction of a convent at Dachau was Dr. Johannes Neuhäusler. As a former inmate in the Dachau camp, he headed the projects to build both the convent and the Church of the Mortal Agony of Christ, which was the very first memorial built at Dachau.

When the American liberators arrived at Dachau on April 29, 1945, the majority of the prisoners in the camp were Polish Catholics. According to the US Army census, there were 2,539 Jews in the camp, most of them having arrived in the last days and weeks of the war, after being evacuated from other camps.

A Catholic church was the first memorial built at Dachau

The name of the Catholic chapel at Dachau is Todeangst Christi. It is usually translated in English as “Mortal Agony of Christ” although the literal translation of the German title would be “Christ’s Mortal Anxiety.” The church was built in 1960 at the instigation of Dr. Johannes Neuhäusler, a former inmate of the camp who became a Bishop in Munich after the war. Neuhäusler had been arrested in 1941 for breaking one of the laws of the Nazi government by publicly reading the critical writings of Cardinal Faulhaber, who opposed the Nazi regime. He was first taken to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp for political prisoners near Berlin and then transferred to Dachau a few months later.

The guard towers at Dachau were torn down after the camp was liberated; the guard towers that you see there today are reconstructions, except for the guard tower which has a door into the Catholic convent, which is the only original tower.

When the Dachau concentration camp was in operation, there were no doors into the guard towers from inside the camp, since this would have allowed the prisoners to break into the towers and kill the guards.

Door into the Catholic Convent at Dachau is through a guard tower

The guard tower, which is now an entrance to the Catholic convent, had to be remodeled to make a door from the Dachau Memorial Site into the convent.  There may have been a ceremony when this door was created.  I can see Neuhäusler handing a sledgehammer to the oldest nun and giving her the honor of making the first blow in the construction of  a new door into the guard tower.

The Jewish Memorial at Dachau was not built until 1967.  It is very close to the Catholic convent, and the Jews have complained about the tiny cross on the convent building, but the cross is still there.

Jewish Memorial at Dachau is very close to the Catholic convent

Tiny cross on Catholic convent offends the Jews

Note the contrast between the Catholic convent and the Jewish Memorial. One is dark and ominous, and the other is light and welcoming.

The Dachau Memorial site has turned into a memorial to the Jews.  Tourists go there to pay their respects to the Jews who died in the Holocaust.  The fact that Dachau was a camp mainly for political prisoners, who were predominantly Catholic, has been completely lost.  The former shower room at Dachau is now explained away as a place where the Nazis tested gassing methods.  The gas chamber is the linchpin of the Holocaust and you can’t have a Memorial to the Jews without a gas chamber.

On May 19, I blogged about tour guides at Dachau who tell lies about the history of the camp.

Now it has come to my attention that another tour guide at Dachau is telling some very dubious stories about the camp.  You can read about what a Dachau tour guide told a 20 year old British tourist here:

This quote is from this student’s blog post about her trip to Dachau:

We stopped at a map for a quick briefing before the tour, but I was pretty eager to get moving. Here he explained that Dachau was home to the first concentration camp. That being said, it’s a little different to visit. During the time of the camp, the town turned a blind eye to what was going on right under their nose – and this happened everywhere. This is how the Nazis got away with so much. So naturally, after the camp was liberated, the people were embarrassed. As a result, they tried to hide the camp. Most of the barracks were destroyed, a man made hill was put into place, and trees were planted to enclose what was the most shameful part of the small city. In later years, though, the city decided to embrace its culture rather than turning their backs on history. Thus, the memorial was built and it became a place for people to visit and to learn and understand. [...]

First of all, the people in the town of Dachau did not try to hide the camp.  The people in the town were cowering in fear of the former Jewish prisoners who were brought to the town and allowed to live in the homes of the residents, who were forced out with nothing but a fine-toothed comb.

The barracks in the Dachau concentration camp were not destroyed.  The camp was turned into a camp for alleged German war criminals.  You can read about “War Crimes Enclosure No. 1″ on my website here.

From 1965 to 2003, the Dachau Memorial Site had nothing about the 30,000 “German war criminals” who were held in the Dachau concentration camp barracks from June 1945 to August 1948. In May 2003, I visited the new museum, that had just opened at Dachau. There was one small display board about the prison camp for Germans at Dachau and also one small display board about the proceedings of the American Military Tribunal at Dachau.

German prisoners line up outside  “War Crimes Enclosure No. I” in the former Dachau concentration camp

What about the “man made hill” at Dachau?  Why was a hill constructed outside the camp?

The photo below shows what looks like two “man-made” hills on either side of the entrance to the Dachau Memorial Site.

Grass covered mounds on both sides of the entrance to Dachau Memorial Site

On the left side of the photo above, you can see clearly that there is a small grass-covered hill.  On the right side of the photo, there is another grass-covered mound in the shadows of the trees.  Are these the trees that the tour guide said were planted to “enclose the most shameful part of the small city” of Dachau?

My photo below shows the line of trees that hide the Memorial Site today.

Door into Dachau gate house with a line of trees on the left side of the photo

The fence that is shown in my 2005 photo above was not there when Dachau was a concentration camp.  The fence was added when the entrance to the Dachau Memorial Site was changed so that tourists can now enter the Memorial Site the same way that the prisoners did — through the Arbeit Macht Frei gate.

The trees in the photo above are not the original trees that were there when Dachau was a concentration camp.  The old photo below shows that a line of poplar trees originally hid the camp from view.  The reason that these trees were planted was to hide the concentration camp from the SS garrison which was right next to the camp.

Old photo of the Dachau gatehouse shows a line of poplar trees on the left

Note the Würm river canal and the barbed wire fence around the concentration camp in the photo above.  The tower in the background is Tower B, which was torn down, but has been reconstructed.

Let’s get back to the “man made hill” that the guide pointed out to the tourists; the two mounds on either side of the gatehouse are covering the ruins of the factories that were located just outside the camp. The factory, shown on the right side of the photo, was torn down when the camp was turned into a refugee camp.  Ethnic Germans who were expelled from Czechoslovakia after World War II lived in the former Dachau barracks for 17 years.

A factory that was just outside the Dachau gatehouse

In the photo above, the Dachau concentration camp is shown on the left side.  Note the lone poplar tree that is all that is left of the former line of poplar trees that hid the camp from the SS garrison, which is behind the camera.

The old photo below shows the Würm river canal and the line of poplar trees that separated the camp from the SS garrison.

Dachau concentration camp with moat and poplar trees

Getting back to what the tour guide told the tourists, this quote is from the blog of the 20-year-old British student:

The tour was the hardest towards the end when we went to the gas chamber. Dachau’s gas chamber is still standing. We learned that people who were killed in the gas chambers commonly came from other camps. They simply thought they were being shaved and showered just like any other camp. I had never considered this before, but I suppose it makes it seem less depressing than them knowing that they were going to die. The chambers were used a lot more towards the end of the camp because of disease and over-population. Thousands of people were killed in the chambers. The original ovens used to cremate the bodies were still there as well as the upgraded ones they used later on. I was standing outside the building, listening to our guide explain, and I saw the picture posted right there.

Bodies piled up outside the Dachau crematorium

The photo above shows dead bodies piled up outside Baracke X.  Near the end of the war, the Dachau camp had run out of coal to burn the bodies.  After the camp was liberated, these bodies were taken by the Dachau residents to Leitenberg and buried in mass graves.  But first, the bodies were left there for weeks, so that American soldiers could be brought to the camp and told that prisoners had been gassed in the building that is shown behind the bodies.

“The [gas] chambers were used a lot more towards the end of the camp because of disease and over-population”? (quote from the student’s blog)

Did the tour guide really say that?  It is true that there was a typhus epidemic in the camp, and the camp was over-populated because prisoners had been brought to the main camp from the sub-camps, so that they could be turned over to the Allies.  But did the Nazis try to stop disease and over-crowding by gassing the prisoners?

The blogger did not give the name of the tour guide, but this quote describes him:

The tour met outside the train station in Munich, where we caught a train and then a bus to the concentration camp. Dachau Concentration Camp was the first concentration camp. We were in for a big taste of history. Our tour guide was a self-made tour guide who started his work with Dachau and (from what I understand) studied art in college and was now a teacher of some sort. He was a born and bred Irish Catholic turned Atheist who, at times, seemed incredibly biased in his descriptions. (I found this amusing because he was hell bent on pushing the acknowledgement of equality of those affected by the camps.) He was entertaining, though. Since he was sort of cynical and dark-humored, it made the tour more lighthearted.

Note that the blogger wrote that the tour guide “seemed incredibly biased” and she “found this amusing.”

I interpret the statement “he was hell bent on pushing the acknowledgement of equality of those affected by the camps” to mean that he wanted to include the homosexual prisoners, the Gypsies, and the Catholic priests in the suffering at Dachau, and not just talk about the Jews.  In the future, maybe he could include the German “war criminals” who were imprisoned at Dachau, and the ethnic Germans who lived there for 17 years.  For example, he might mention the ethnic German refugees who were kicked out of the barracks at Dachau in 1965 so a Memorial Site could be built to replace their only home.

The photo below shows a restaurant, in a former disinfection hut, where the German refugees could gather and socialize, before it was torn down in 1965 to make room for a Memorial Site.  The location of the restaurant is where the Jewish Memorial now stands.

Former “disinfection hut” at Dachau was turned into a restaurant for ethnic German refugees

The title of my blog post today comes from a quote from a letter which a 19-year-old American soldier sent to his family after he was taken to see the Dachau concentration camp in July 1945. Dachau had been liberated by American troops on April 29, 1945.

You can read the full news article about the letter here.

Here is the exact quote from the American soldier’s letter which describes the ovens at Dachau:

“Over and in front of the ovens were iron hooks from which a person would be hung while watching his comrades burned alive,” Zohn wrote “The next room is where we found bodies stacked so high that the lights in the ceiling were broken. The blood stood four-feet high.”

Bodies stacked up in the morgue at Dachau and blood running down the floor drain

The photo above shows the bodies stacked in the morgue at Dachau, but where is the blood standing four feet high?  These bodies had been removed by July 1945, so this soldier must have seen only a photo of the bodies.

Sign above the ovens at Dachau says “Prisoners were hanged from here”

If you look closely at the photo above, you can see a small hook, to the right of the center beam.  To the left of the beam is another hook that is less visible.  The pulley above the ovens was used to raise and lower the inner doors of the ovens.  I  previously blogged about the two sets of doors in the ovens at Dachau.

This is a full quote from the news article about the letter:

Zohn’s letter described the tour the U.S. soldiers took through a carefully organized killing machine of gas chambers, torture rooms, body rooms and the incinerators.

Groups of men, women and children were first lured into the gas chamber, thinking they were showers.
“They went in a long, low-ceilinged room with shower ‘nozzles’ all in the ceiling, but a closer inspection reveals that the nozzles are fakes,” Zohn wrote. “After the 100 or so victims died, they were stacked in the next room which had large drain pipes to drain off the blood and other fluids.

Nazi guards used iron stretchers to deposit the bodies into the ovens, a 20- to 30-minute process, he wrote.

“Over and in front of the ovens were iron hooks from which a person would be hung while watching his comrades burned alive,” Zohn wrote “The next room is where we found bodies stacked so high that the lights in the ceiling were broken. The blood stood four-feet high.”

Posed photo of Dachau crematorium workers demonstrating how they put bodies into the oven

The photo above was taken after the Dachau camp was liberated.  It is one of a series of photos that were sold to the American soldiers, who were brought to Dachau on Eisenhower’s orders, so that they could see the atrocities committed at Dachau. Eisenhower wanted the American soldiers to know what they were fighting for.

America fought World War II to stop the evil Nazis from burning prisoners alive while other prisoners watched from where they were hung on a hook above the oven.

Unfortunately, I don’t think there is a photo which shows how prisoners were hung from hooks in front of the oven so that they could watch as their fellow prisoners were burned alive.

The ovens in the new crematorium at Dachau

My photo, of the Dachau ovens above, does not show the hooks, which are very small and hard to see.  I think the Nazis were taking a big chance, that the weight of a body hung from a hook above the ovens, would have pulled down the rafters.  But you know by now how stupid the Nazis were.  How many times do I have to tell you people this?

I have been to the Dachau Memorial Site several times, beginning with my first visit in May 1997, but I have never taken a guided tour.  Now I am very glad that I never took a guided tour.  I might have burst out laughing, been arrested, and thrown into prison in Germany for 5 years.

I learned from this blogger that Dachau tour guides must be certified.  She visited the Dachau Memorial Site on March 5, 2013 and wrote this about her tour guide:

Our guide was not a typical tour guide – he was very much not a people-person, though perhaps that is the sobering nature of his work as a Dachau guide. He’d been giving Dachau tours for four years, and had a certification to do so. I’m always skeptical of certifications and what they actually do for you, but it ended up being very interesting. Apparently Neo-Nazis try to give tours of these camps with revisionist history, to make it sound like these atrocities never happened, showing alleged evidence during the tour that these places are all lies. On our tour there was a strict policy of not videotaping our guide, for fear that if these videos are on the internet then Neo Nazis will re-cut them to make it sound like even the legitimate tour guides believe the revisionist history. Even beyond this, though, the material covered in such a tour is sensitive and perhaps easy to treat or deliver an improper way. The [German] government is trying to get rid of all of these Neo-Nazi revisionists and anyone who doesn’t do a sufficiently sensitive job dealing with what happened at Dachau by requiring tour guide certification. The process takes about a year and a half – you have to know your stuff to be able to discuss this place. Suffice to say, it felt like we were in good hands.

Shouldn’t the policy be extended to forbid tourists from going through the camp on their own?  What is to keep tourists from noticing things that support the revisionist version of Dachau history?  I started down the road to revisionism the minute that I stepped inside the former camp.

According to the blogger who visited Dachau, this is the kind of information that a certified tour guide gives to visitors.  Everything in the following quote is WRONG, WRONG, WRONG:

Psychological torture was perhaps the focus of our tour. There are documents of methods they used just to get under the skin of their prisoners. Little things, like putting coat hooks and shelves in the barracks to emphasize that no one had a coat, or anything to put on the shelves. Signs that said “Rauchen Verboten” – smoking is forbidden – to remind them that they had no cigarettes. Words on the door to the camp – “work will set you free.” Then other things – they would torture people in the dead of the night, between midnight and three in the morning, to keep people in the barracks awake with the screams. They’d keep the windows open just to make it all the louder. Systems were in place to ensure that the guards could not take sympathy on the prisoners without direct harm to themselves – sympathy could result in their own imprisonment in the camp. Former guards were the ones was in charge of keeping the prisoners in that barracks in line, making sure everyone did his job. The capos were usually taken from the group of criminally insane, the psychopaths, the rapists, the murderers. If they didn’t do well enough, they too were turned over to the mob. These camps were designed to almost run themselves.

There was also the interesting issue of paperwork, and registered versus unregistered prisoners. Over the course of the war, only the tiniest fraction of the prisoners were ever registered officially. We know that far more people than were registered went through these camps and died in them, but we have no idea how many simply because the Germans wouldn’t register a lot of people in order to keep the death rates in these camps artificially low. When you look at the map that shows the number of people officially registered in these camps, the numbers are low compared to what you hear in history books.

It would take hours for me to tell you why every word of this is WRONG.  Read a revisionist website to learn the truth.  No wonder the Dachau tour guides have to be certified.  (Certified insane, so they can tell these lies.)

This quote is also from the blogger who took a tour of the Dachau Memorial Site:

Dachau is one of the best preserved concentration camps in the world, and one of only three that still has one of the old gas chambers. When the Nazis realized that they were losing, they destroyed the gas chambers usually, but for some reason not the one at Dachau – there is still speculation about why this is. The man hired to run Dachau, Theodor Eicke, was a medically diagnosed psychopath.

Did the certified tour guide really say that there is “speculation” about Theodor Eicke not blowing up the gas chamber because he was a “medically diagnosed psychopath”?

Eicke was not the Commandant of Dachau at the time that the gas chamber should have been blown up to prevent the Allies from finding it.  Eicke was the second commandant at Dachau and he held this position for only one year.  In June 1934, Eicke was given the title of Inspector General and the authority to approve all punishments in all the camps.  In fact, Eicke was dead by the time that the Dachau gas chamber should have been blown up.  According to Wikipedia, “Eicke was killed on 26 February 1943, several months after being promoted to SS-Obergruppenführer (equivalent to general in the Waffen-SS).”

Isn’t that just like the Nazis?  Promoting a “medically diagnosed psychopath” to the rank of general in the Waffen-SS.  But I digress.

I previously blogged about why the Dachau gas chamber was not blown up.

This quote from my fellow blogger concerns the gas chamber at Dachau:

At the very end of the tour, Marcin our tour guide took us to the building where the gas chamber was held. He gave us the history, told us how it was used. While the Dachau gas chamber was not an instrument of death quite the same way that the gas chambers at Auschwitz were, they were used for experimenting with different kinds of poison gas, to determine what gases and what methods were most effective.

“I went into the gas chamber the first time I was here, and I have never gone back through it. I will not be going through it today. Once was enough. Meet me at the exit.”

First, through the rooms where the men were told to remove all their clothes; they were going to have a shower. Then they would be handed soap and towels.  [...]

I was the first to walk in. I can’t really describe how or why it was overwhelming, but it was. Most people were in and out as quickly as they could go – just a walk through, stepping on as little of the floor as possible. I stepped to the side, just stood, crying, while everyone else walked through as if there were some invisible barrier keeping them from stepping into any space that wasn’t directly between the two doors. A large group came shuffling through, laughing and making ghost-sounds to cover up their fear, the uncomfortable way that their skin crawled – but they spoke in whispers and didn’t look up from the ground, so I couldn’t be angry.

I have spent a lot of time in the Dachau gas chamber, on several occasions, so I know that most people just walk through as fast as they can.  You can read all about the Dachau gas chamber on my website here.

The outside wall of the Dachau gas chamber

In my opinion, the tour guides should begin their spiel about the gas chamber while standing beside the outside wall of the gas chamber.  Explain to the tourists what these holes in the wall of the gas chamber were for.

But wait, there’s more.  This quote is from the blogger who took a tour of Dachau:

On the way back while we were waiting for our train, Marcin gave us a sort of conclusion. There were a couple of interesting takeaways. Memorials at Dachau are very controversial. Jews were not the only ones persecuted there – over the 12 years that Dachau was running, it was home to political prisoners, homosexuals, Jehovas Witnesses, Gypsies, criminals, the disabled, Jews, and anyone else that the state wanted to imprison. The categories of people and the reasons for imprisonment were intentionally broad so that there didn’t have to be much, if any, justification for incarceration. There are memorials for specific groups of prisoners, but others are not memorialized – for example, the memorials for the gypsies and the homosexuals held at Dachau are not public, but rather held elsewhere and difficult to see (they may not even be available for public viewing – it was unclear). There are yet other Dachau survivors who maintain that while their category of people was wrongfully incarcerated, other groups belonged there.

There is no memorial to the Gypsies because Gypsies were not sent to Dachau for being Gypsies.  They were sent to Dachau for breaking the law that said that everyone in Germany should have a job and a permanent address.  This law was directed at the Gypsies, but there were non-Gypsies who were “Luftmenschen” or people living on air with no visible means of support, who were also sent to Dachau.

There is no memorial to the homosexuals at Dachau because homosexuals were sent to Dachau for breaking the law against having homosexual sex in public, not for their sexual orientation.

As far as I know, disabled people were not sent to Dachau for being disabled.  Criminals were, in fact, sent to Dachau and other camps, so that they could be put to work instead of lolling around in a prison cell. Jehovah’s Witnesses were sent to Dachau and other camps because they refused to serve in the military.  Men who refused to serve in the military in America were also sent to prison.

Most of the prisoners at Dachau were political prisoners, who were arrested for fighting as illegal combatants, or for being enemies of the German government.  There is no memorial to them at Dachau.

To further understand the gas chamber story, told at Dachau, read this blog post, written by a man who calls himself a “twice a year Jew.”

Jimmy Gentry of Franklin, TN was a soldier with the 42nd Rainbow Division. In an interview with G. Petrone and M. Skinner on 2/25/2000, he recalled what it was like on April 29, 1945, the day that Dachau was liberated. Was he really there that day, or did he visit the camp days, or even years, after it was liberated? There is considerable disagreement about the liberation of Dachau, as I previously wrote in this blog post:

http://furtherglory.wordpress.com/2012/03/22/the-liberation-of-dachau-no-two-accounts-agree/

This is a detailed analysis of Jimmy Gentry’s story, as told in his own words.

The following quote is the words of Jimmy Gentry in his interview with Petrone and Skinner on 2/25/2000:

On that particular morning that we left for Dachau, not knowing that it was Dachau, we just, another day’s work. We left about dawn, which we always did, and on foot, and went South, Southeast towards Dachau. We arrived about 11 o’clock in the morning.

Jimmy Gentry was a soldier in the 42nd Division.  On the day that Dachau was liberated, a few 42nd Division soldiers arrived in jeeps at the gate into the Dachau complex at 3 p.m.  It was soldiers of the 45th Division that arrived at 11 a.m. on foot at the railroad gate, shown in the photo below.

A section of the tracks at the former railroad gate has been preserved

Only a few 42nd Division soldiers were at Dachau on the day of liberation

The photo above shows a group of 42nd Division soldiers who accompanied Brig. Gen. Henning Linden to the Dachau camp on April 29, 1945, the day of the liberation.  From left to right, they are T/5 G.N. Oddi, T/5 J.G. Bauerlein, Pfc. C.E. Tinkham, Pfc. Stout, and Pfc. W.P. Donahue.

This quote from Gentry’s interview with Petrone and Skinner mentions the Death Train that was parked outside the Dachau complex:

Because the boxcars that entered the northwest corner of that huge camp were open and the train was partway in the camp, and partway out of the camp. Our and some others went around the end of the box car to enter on the right side, and some others entered on the left side, and we only had about 3 feet between the train and the gate to enter, and on my side when I went around there I saw for the first time literally hundreds of bodies that had been shot and they were dead, and they were spilled out of the boxcar as if you had as if you had taken it, and just turned it over and poured the people out onto the side of the tracks. Some of the bodies were still in the train, some were hanging out over the tops of the piles of people outside, and that’s what I saw for the first time and they were not soldiers. We were used to seeing soldiers, both American and German soldiers who had been killed, but we’d never seen anything like this, they were striped, dressed in striped clothes, their head was the largest part of their body, their eyes all sunken back, they were ashen white, almost a blue color also, their ribs would protrude their arms the size of broomsticks, legs the same, and we didn’t know; I didn’t know who they were.

The railroad gate was at the southwest corner of the Dachau complex, not the northwest corner.  Photos of the train show that there were only two or three bodies lying along the track, not hundreds.  Gentry was describing the “death train,” but the 42nd Division soldiers did not see the train immediately, since they arrived in jeeps at a location near the main gate of the Dachau complex, which was about a mile from the railroad gate.

The quote from Gentry’s interview with Petrone and Skinner continues:

So we climbed over the bodies, and went on into the camp, and inside when we first got inside [the SS garrison,] the buildings were quite large, they were warehouses for the German SS troops, the elite soldiers, and they had all their equipment in these buildings. Now when we went in there were small arms fire, that means rifle fire all to our right and to the front of us, and what had happened, we found out later, some other troops had entered through the main gate, we came in through the train gate, or back gate, and they came in through the front gate so that’s why what we were hearing up ahead of us [was the 45th Division soldiers killing SS men inside the garrison] and to our right, and as we secured the buildings and moved, oh, towards the middle of the camp we found a second wall [there was no second wall in 1945], and on this wall, it was not as, not as large as the outside wall, there was a moat in front of it, a watered moat, and then another barbed wire fence. So there was a barbed wire fence, a moat, and then another wall. And we realized then, after seeing the train and after seeing this that these people were not to come out of there.

The moat and barbed wire fence that 42nd Division soldiers saw

There was no wall in front of this barbed wire fence when the 42nd Division soldiers arrived at Dachau on April 29, 1945.  The wall was built later to hide the crematorium and the SS garrison from the camp.  At the time that the camp was liberated, there was a line of poplar trees that hid the factory buildings from the camp, as shown in the old photo below.  The concentration camp enclosure is on the left, but not shown.  Note there is a the line of trees, but no wall.

German soldiers surrendered outside the Dachau concentration camp enclosure

Dachau concentration camp with moat and poplar trees, but no wall between the camp and the SS garrison

Wall in front of the moat was built after Dachau was liberated

The photo above shows a bridge over the moat, which was built AFTER the camp was liberated, along with a wall that was built to hide the crematorium area from the Dachau concentration camp. On the day that Dachau was liberated, the concentration camp was surrounded by a solid wall on three sides with the Würm river forming a moat on the fourth side. Today there is a wall that separates the former prison enclosure from the crematorium area, but this wall was not there in 1945.

Lt. Col. Sparks, the highest ranking officer in the 45th Division at Dachau the day that the camp was liberated, told Flint Whitlock, author of The Rock of Anzio, From Sicily to Dachau: A History of the U.S. 45th Infantry Division, that he ordered his men to enter the railroad gate, while he and a few soldiers climbed over the ten-foot wall around the SS garrison. Sparks said that he deliberately avoided the main gate because, if the SS was planning to defend the camp, that’s where they would do it.

The Dachau camp was surrendered to Brig. Gen. Henning Linden near the main gate into the Dachau complex, which the 45th Division was avoiding

Jimmy Gentry wrote a book entitled An American Life in which he included drawings that he made of the Dachau camp, as it looked on liberation day. He claimed that he entered the Dachau complex through the railroad gate at the “northwest corner” of the camp around 11 a.m. that day.

The railroad gate was actually at the southwest corner of the Dachau complex. Most accounts of the liberation say that it was the 45th Division which arrived at Dachau at 11 a.m. and entered through the railroad gate, and that the 42nd Division arrived around 3 p.m. at the gate near the southwest corner of the complex where SS 2nd Lt. Heinrich Wicker was waiting to surrender the camp. After accepting the surrender of the concentration camp, the 42nd Division soldiers then entered the complex through the main gate.

This quote is from the Gentry’s interview with Petrone and Skinner:

And this sea of faces [of the prisoners in the camp] seemed to be, every one of them seemed to be dead, but they were still alive. They looked like they were dead. So we released them [from the SS garrison] and entered the [concentration] camp, a separate compound where the prisoners were kept.

There were no prisoners released from Dachau on the day of the liberation, April 29, 1945.  Apparently Gentry is claiming that prisoners were released from the the SS garrison next to the camp.  There were no prisoners in the SS garrison.

The quote from Gentry’s interview continues:

There was not a lot of screaming and yelling and jubilation, not at all. [The prisoners] were blank faced, they were stunned. They did come up to ya and hug ya and someone, I don’t know who said it, someone in my squad said “don’t let ‘em kiss you on the mouth.” And that meant, thank goodness that meant that they had diseases, typhus fever for example, and they would fall down to their knees and hug ya around the legs, and kiss your legs and kiss your boots. And of course we didn’t know enough German to know what they were saying and some of them were not German, foreign languages and we didn’t know, we just knew that they were happy to be released, but they were a pitiful sight. We worked our way through the camp and the German guards that had stayed there, none of them left. They were all killed while they were there in the camp, either by the soldiers, American soldiers, or by the prisoners themselves in some cases. So none of them ever left that camp once we entered.

In the quote above, Gentry is describing the “Dachau massacre” when SS soldiers were killed in the SS garrison, not in the Dachau concentration camp.  Not all of the SS soldiers in the garrison were killed.  There were SS men who were survivors of the “Dachau massacre.”  The “German guards” in the concentration camp had left the camp the night before, and Hungarian SS soldiers had been brought in to keep order while the camp was surrendered to the Americans.  Many of the SS soldiers were killed by the prisoners and the American liberators, but some of them did survive.

Dachau farmers were forced to haul the bodies out of the Dachau camp for burial

Civilians from the town of Dachau were forced to bury the bodies of Dachau prisoners at Leitenberg

Gentry stated in his 2/25/2000 interview that his outfit stayed in the Dachau camp and buried the bodies.

The following quote is from the interview with Petrone and Skinner:

We stayed there in that camp, about three days, trying to help secure the camp and to get rid of literally thousands of dead bodies. Load them onto trucks, get them out of there, this awful smell. And we were able to do that and after about three days we left the camp and went out and had all the hair on our bodies shaved off because of the typhus fever.

Numerous other sources claim that no bodies were buried until May 7th. On May 13th, 1945, Dachau farmers were forced to haul the bodies out of the Dachau camp and take them to Leitenberg to be buried in mass graves. The 42nd Division soldiers had left immediately, bound for Munich.

Jimmy Gentry may have been among the first soldiers brought to Dachau in trucks after the liberation, on the orders of General Dwight D. Eisenhower, and he may have pieced together his story from other accounts told by 45th Division soldiers.  If he was actually there on the day of liberation, how did he make so many mistakes in his account of the liberation?

With nothing better to do on a lazy Summer day, I got out my copy of David L. Israel’s book The Day the Thunderbird Cried, Untold Stories of World War II.  I read this book, which was first published in 2005, when I was doing research, a few years ago, on the liberation of Dachau by the 45th Thunderbird Division of the U.S. Army.

The first chapter of The Day the Thunderbird Cried, tells about the liberation of Hadamar, an institution where mental patients were put to death during the Nazi era in Germany.  According to the story, as told by David L. Israel, when American soldiers approached Hadamar, they saw a little girl, about 5 years old, talking to some German soldiers.  The Germans handed something to the little girl, pointed to the Americans, and told her to take this “Gift” to them.  As it turned out, the “Gift” was a hand grenade that the Germans wanted the little girl to give to the Americans.  At the last minute, the little girl tripped and the hand grenade exploded, killing her, and the American soldiers, who had refused to fire at the little girl, were saved from certain death.

Painting of a little girl with a hand grenade

Did this really happen, or is this just a fictional story to illustrate how the German soldiers were heartless and cruel, but American soldiers would not shoot a little girl, even if she was holding a hand grenade, and their lives were in imminent danger?

The book does not specifically say that this incident happened to 45th division soldiers.  In the front of the book, it is mentioned that the information in the book came from interviews with soldiers in the 42nd, 45th, 99th and 106th divisions of the American army. Perhaps this story was told by a soldier in the 99th division or the 106th division.

According to Wikipedia, the Hadamar Euthanasia Centre (German: NS-Tötungsanstalt Hadamar) was a psychiatric hospital in the German town of Hadamar near Limburg in Hesse.

It was used by the Nazis as a site of the T-4 Euthanasia Programme, which performed mass sterilizations and mass murder of “undesirable” members of German society, specifically those with physical and mental disabilities. The programme started in 1939 and lasted until the German surrender in 1945.^[1]

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum website states that Hadamar was liberated by the 2nd Infantry Division.  This quote is from this page of the USHMM website:

As the 2nd Infantry Division marched across Germany, it uncovered several sites of Nazi crimes. In early April 1945, the unit captured the German town of Hadamar, which housed a psychiatric clinic where almost 15,000 men, women, and children were killed between 1941 and March 1945 in the Nazi “euthanasia” program.

In any case, the image of a little girl with a hand grenade seems to be a metaphor for something, but I don’t know what.

Painting on side of building in Washington, DC Photo Credit:
Photo Credit: DC Street Speaks
http://dcstreetspeaks.blogspot.com/2009/04/little-girl-why-do-you-have-grenade-in.html

Note that both photos show the same blonde girl, probably with blue eyes, who could be the little German girl who was bringing a “Gift” to American soldiers when she accidentally blew herself up.

I have searched and searched on the Internet, but I have not come up with any proof that the story of the little girl with the hand grenade is true.  I am relying on the vast knowledge of the followers of my blog to explain the story of the little girl with the hand grenade.

Photo of a German soldier who may or may not be Egon Zill

Egon Zill has gone down in history as the worst Commandant of the Dachau concentration camp, although he was never the Commandant of the camp. Perhaps if he HAD been the Commandant, he would have been investigated by Dr. Georg Konrad Morgen, who had two camp commandants executed after doing an investigation on them.

The following camp commandants were investigated by Dr. Konrad Morgen, who was an SS judge:

Karl-Otto Koch – Commandant of Buchenwald and Majdanek – executed for the murder of two hospital orderlies who had treated him for syphilis

Hermann Florstedt – Commandant of Majdanek – executed for murder

Hans Loritz – Commandant of Oranienburg (Sachsenhausen) – proceedings initiated on suspicion of arbitrary killing

Adam Grünewald – Commandant of Herzogenbusch concentration camp – found guilty of maltreatment of prisoners and posted to a penal unit

Karl Kuenstler – Commandant of Flossenbürg concentration camp – dismissed for drunkenness and debauchery

Alex Piorkowski – Commandant of the Dachau concentration camp – accused of murder but not sentenced

Amon Göth – Commandant of Plaszow camp — charged with stealing from the Plaszow warehouses, but never put on trial

Rudolf Höss — Commanant of Auschwitz-Birkenau — investigated  on charges of having “unlawful relations” with a Jewish woman prisoner, Eleanor Hodys.   Höss was removed from his command, but was later brought back to Auschwitz as the Commandant of the Birkenau camp, but not the Auschwitz main camp.

When Egon Zill was at Dachau, he had the title of Lagerführer, not Kommandant. Later, he was assigned to the job of Commandant of the Natzweiler camp; then he became the Commandant of Flossenbürg concentration camp.

Egon Zill was put on trial, as a “war criminal” by a German court in 1950 and sentenced to 15 years in prison; he returned to the town of Dachau to live after he completed his prison term and died there in 1974.

David L. Israel, author of the book The Day the Thunderbird Cried, published by emek press in 2005, wrote that Egon Zill was one of the Commandants of the Dachau camp and that he was exceptionally cruel to the defenseless prisoners.  According to David L. Israel, when Zill was the Commandant of Dachau, he was allowed to commit the most heinous crimes without interference from any higher authority.

The following quote is from The Day the Thunderbird Cried:

Egon Zill, by now a member of the Death’s Head formation, was the Commandant of Dachau Concentration Camp in 1941. Having received his Death’s Head unit training in Dachau, he was familiar with all the terrors the camp had to offer its inmates. Egon Zill became one of the most sadistic commandants in the history of concentration camps. Not only did he devise new and organized methods of torture for the unfortunate prisoners, he took joy in taking part in the punishment personally, or else watching from the sidelines as the prisoners died at the hands of equally sadistic guards. Zill thrived on watching men beaten, drowned, hung, and broken until their bodies were unrecognizable masses of bone and skin. A tag attached to their toes listed an identification number so they could be properly recorded in the record books as having died from a heart attack or some other medical ailment.

The Commandant of Dachau in 1941 was Alex Bernhard Piorkowski, as every law student in America knows.  I previously blogged about the strange case of Pirkowski here.

David L. Israel was a soldier in the U.S. Army in 1945, assigned to an intelligence group which investigated the Dachau camp for war crimes after it was liberated. As part of his duties, Israel interviewed the survivors of Dachau. About half of the survivors of Dachau had only been in the camp for two weeks or less. They had been brought to the main Dachau camp from the sub-camps and before that, they had been in other Nazi concentration camps; many of the prisoners at Dachau when it was liberated had previously been evacuated from Auschwitz when it was abandoned in January 1945. They were eager to tell the American liberators about the years of abuse that they had endured.

The following quote is from the book The Day the Thunderbird Cried:

Egon Zill had his dogs trained to react to the raising of his arm. On special amusement days, Zill would have a table of food placed in front of the starving prisoners who stood at attention. Should a person relax his body, the dogs would react automatically. As time went by and Zill became impatient, he raised his arm signaling the dogs into action. They attacked the genital areas of the prisoners until they were dead. At this point the bored commandant would leave the scene. [...]

Having the prisoners sing anti-Semitic songs as they dug pits to be filled with stones, only to have the stones dug up and used to fill other pits, was a common pastime for the guards. At other times, they would bind the prisoners’ hands and feet and have them crawl on the ground grunting like pigs. As the prisoners approached the pigsty, food was put out for their meal to be eaten by the pigs. The SS men stood watching as the bound prisoners fought with the pigs for the food. This type of torture was used with Jews, priests, Jehovah’s Witnesses and Poles.

The following description of the torture inflicted by Egon Zill, according to Israel’s book, is completely and totally wrong:

There was one bunker at Dachau reserved for the most severe tortures. Prisoners were kept in solitary confinement.  The tortures inflicted on the prisoners were so cruel, they were kept secret from the regular SS guards.

Contrary to what David L. Israel wrote in his book, it was the German SS men who were tortured by Americans at Dachau.  I wrote about the torture in the one and only bunker at Dachau on this blog post.  You can read more about the Commandants at Dachau on this page of my website.

German POWs being executed by American soldiers in a coal yard inside the SS garrison

The bodies of the dead SS soldiers, shown in the photo above, were left in the coal yard at Dachau, where they had been killed, until May 3, 1945 when the incident was investigated by Lt. Col. Joseph Whitaker, the Seventh Army’s Assistant Inspector General. A report on the “Investigation of Alleged Mistreatment of German Guards at Dachau” was filed on June 8, 1945. It was marked secret, but the contents were later revealed to the public in 1991. A copy of the report is included in Col. John H. Linden’s book The Surrender of Dachau 29 April 1945.

Why was this incident, which has since become known as “The Dachau Massacre,” kept secret for 46 years?

Why wasn’t the incident immediately made known to the public so that haters of the German people all over the world could have celebrated this news? After keeping this secret for 46 years, why reveal the truth at all?

Today, it is impossible to write anything about the “Alleged Mistreatment of German guards at Dachau” without attracting hateful comments, ranting about how these German POWs “deserved to die.”

The dead soldiers in the photo above were not German “Guards” of the Dachau concentration camp. Most of them were German SS soldiers, who had been stationed in the SS garrison that was adjacent to the camp. Others were wounded Wehrmacht soldiers, who had been dragged out of a hospital inside the SS garrison.

The photo below shows American soldiers looking at the bodies of the first four SS soldiers who surrendered to Lt. William Walsh.  Lt. Walsh marched these POWs to a train, parked outside the SS garrison, and shot them after they had surrendered in good faith.  The feet of one of the soldiers are shown, hanging out of the box car.

The first four SS who surrendered at Dachau were taken to this train and shot

At the time that the German soldiers were shot in the coal yard, with their hands in the air, the American soldiers in the 45th Division had not yet seen the Dachau concentration camp that was next door to the SS garrison, and the soldiers in the 42nd Division had not yet arrived at the Dachau compound.  This was a clear case of American soldiers shooting POWs that had surrendered, and had their hands in the air.

The bodies of the Germans soldiers in the coal yard were left out until the U.S. Army could do an investigation.

The paragraphs below are from the “Secret Report” done by the U.S. Army, which pertain to the “Execution of German soldiers by members of the 45th Division.”  Why did the U.S. Army call the shooting of the SS soldiers an Execution?  Were the German POWs given a trial before they were “Executed”?

4. At the entrance to the back area of the Dachau prison grounds, four German soldiers surrendered to Lt. William P. Walsh, 0-414901, in command of Company “I”, 157th Infantry. These prisoners Lt. Walsh ordered into a box car, where he personally shot them. Pvt. Albert C. Pruitt, 34573708, Company “I”157th Infantry, then climbed into the box car where these Germans were on the floor moaning and apparently still alive, and finished them off with his rifle.

5. After entry into the Dachau Camp area, Lt. Walsh segregated from surrendered prisoners of war those who were identified as SS Troops.

6. Such segregated prisoners of war were marched into a separate enclosure, lined up against the wall and shot down by American troops, who were acting under the orders of Lt. Walsh. A light machine gun, carbines, and either a pistol or a sub-machine gun were used. Seventeen of such prisoners of war were killed, and others were wounded.

7. Lt. Jack Bushyhead, 0-1284822, executive officer of Company “I”, participated with Lt. Walsh in this handling of the men and during the course of the shooting personally fired his weapon at these prisoners.

16. Lt. Walsh testified that the SS men were segregated in order to properly guard them, and were then fired upon because they started moving toward the guards. However, the dead bodies were located along the wall against which they had been lined up, they were killed along the entire line, although Lt. Walsh only claims those on one flank moved, and a number of witnesses testified that it was generally “understood” that these prisoners were to be shot when they were being segregated. These facts contradict the defensive explanation given by Lt. Walsh.

Surrender of the Dachau camp by 2nd Lt. Heinrich Wicker

In his report to Headquarters, written on 2 May 1945, Brig. Gen. Henning Linden, of the 42nd Division of the U.S. Army, wrote the following:

As we approached the Southwest corner, three people came forward with a flag of truce. They were a Swiss Red Cross representative, Victor Maurer, and two SS troopers who said they were the camp commander [SS Lieutenant Wickert] and his assistant. They had come here on the night of the 28th to take over from the regular personnel, for the purpose of surrendering the camp to the advancing Americans. The Swiss Red Cross representative said there were about one hundred SS guards in the camp who had their arms stacked, except for the people in the tower…He had given instructions that there were no shots to be fired, and that it would take 50 men to relieve the guards, as there were 42,000 “half-crazed” inmates, many of them typhus-infected….

Note that Brig. Gen. Linden incorrectly referred to SS 2nd Lt. Wicker as Wickert.  After surrendering the Dachau concentration camp to the Americans, 2nd Lt. Wicker was never seen again. It is not known when nor how he was killed.

Dachau was surrendered to the 42nd Div. of the U.S. Army under a flag of truce

According to 1st Lt. William Cowling, who was with Brig. Gen. Linden at the time that the camp was surrendered, the 42nd Division had been advancing down a road toward Munich when, by chance, they heard about the Dachau concentration camp.

In a letter to his family back home, written on April 30, 1945, Cowling wrote:

Enroute we learned from civilians and two newspaper people that just off the main road was a concentration camp of Dachau, oldest largest and most notorious camp in Germany. These newspaper people were going up to see the camp so we decided to go up too.

We ride in a Jeep with a guard out ahead of the boys and we were several hundred yards ahead as we approached the Camp. The first thing we came to was a railroad track leading out of the Camp with a lot of open box cars on it. As we crossed the track and looked back into the cars the most horrible sight I have ever seen (up to that time) met my eyes. The cars were loaded with dead bodies. Most of them were naked and all of them skin and bones. Honest their legs and arms were only a couple of inches around and they had no buttocks at all. Many of the bodies had bullet holes in the back of their heads. It made us sick at our stomach and so mad we could do nothing but clinch our fists. I couldn’t even talk. We then moved on towards the Camp and my Jeep was still several hundred yards ahead. As we approached the main gate a German officer and a civilian wearing an International Red Cross band and carrying a white flag came out. We immediately filed out and I was just hoping he would make a funny move so I could hit the trigger of my tommy gun. He didn’t however, and when he arrived abreast of us he asked for an American officer. I informed him he a was talking to one and he said he wished to surrender the camp to me.

The photo below shows Brig. Gen. Linden on the right, with the Red Cross representative in the center and Lt. Wicker, standing next to him.  Wicker’s aid has his hands on his head.  They had been taken to the “death train,” after surrendering the camp, but claimed to know nothing about it.

2nd Lt. Wicker was taken to see the “death train” but he claimed to know nothing about it

SS soldiers had been sent from the battlefield to keep order while the Dachau camp was being surrendered.  They were killed before the U.S. soldiers found out that these were not the guards in the camp.  The guards had left the night before.

SS soldier who had been sent from the battlefield to surrender Dachau

When you are fighting a war and winning, there is no need to ask questions.  Just shoot every man in sight and hope that one of your victims was a “war criminal,” not a POW with rights under the Geneva Convention of 1929.

My blog post today was inspired by the following comment on another website:

Re: The Dachau Massacre of Guards

SignifierOne, I think the issue that people are trying to argue is that, as Prisoners of War, under the Geneva Conventions, these men should have been detained and processed and then put to trial, tried for crimes against humanity, then executed instead of summarily executed on the spot.

Executing POWs is wrong but in the case of Dachau and with concentration camp SS guards I, personally, would make an exception because of pure outrage. As far as the foreign [Hungarian] SS volunteers that were executed, they would have simply either been repatriated to their country of origin and executed for treason or possibly escape justice by joining the French Foreign Legion.

The “outrage” that caused the American soldiers to “execute” the SS men without a trial was the sight of the “Death Train.”  The American executioners did not bother to examine the train and see that the prisoners had been killed by the strafing of the train by American planes.  The train had taken over 3 weeks to travel 220 miles from the Buchenwald camp because American soldiers had bombed the railroad tracks.

The title of my blog post today is a quote from a comment on a previous post on my blog on July 25, 2013. This quote is from the comment:

“I think its disgusting that the camp guaards were allowed to live at all.  Anyone who commits such attrocities deserves to be brutally murdered (and screw the ‘human rights’ that supposedly incorporates them)

This comment might pertain to the Dachau concentration camp, or maybe it was in reference to all the concentration camps, operated by the Germans.  Surely, the comment was not meant to refer to the guards at the internment camps in America where German-Americans and Japanese-Americans were incarcerated in violation of the 4th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

The United States participated in war crimes trials in Europe under three jurisdictions: the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, the U.S. Military Tribunals at Nuremberg, and the U.S. Army courts at Dachau. The authority for the proceedings of all three jurisdictions derived from the Moscow Declaration, called the Declaration of German Atrocities, which was released on November 1, 1943. This declaration, which was made long before many of the war crimes were committed, expressed the Allied plan to arrest and bring to justice Axis war criminals.

In other words, the Allies were determined to put the Germans on trial, even before any war crimes were committed.

Apparently, the person who wrote the comment about the guards being allowed to live, is not familiar with the proceedings of the American Military Tribunal held at Dachau after the war.  The first trial, conducted by the AMT, was the trial of the acting Commandant of Dachau and 39 others who were on the Dachau staff.

The 40 men, who were put on trial by the AMT, were not selected, out of the thousands of SS men who had worked at the camp, because their crimes were the most heinous. Rather, they were selected as a representative group because, included among them, were staff members from every category of personnel in the concentration camp. The purpose was to show that anyone connected with a Nazi concentration camp was guilty of a crime, regardless of his personal behavior.

Rudolf Heinrich Suttrop was put on trial by the American Military Tribunal

Rudolf Heinrich Suttrop, shown in the photo above, was the adjutant to the acting Commandant of Dachau, Martin Gottfried Weiss. Suttrop was convicted and hanged, although there were no specific charges against him. His crime was that he was a low-level member of the staff of the Dachau Concentration camp, and as such, he had participated in the “common design” to commit crimes. This new law had not existed when Suttrop was on the staff at Dachau.

Altogether, there were 5 proceedings against groups of concentration camp staff members at the American Military Tribunal at Dachau. In the first four of those cases, 177 staff members of Dachau, Buchenwald, Mauthausen and Flossenbürg were charged, and all of the accused, without exception, were convicted by a panel of American military officers.

There were 97 death sentences handed down in the first four cases, and 54 of the guilty were sentenced to life in prison; the rest were sentenced to lengthy prison terms at hard labor. The prosecutor, who was responsible for this remarkable feat, was Lt. Col. William Denson, an aristocratic southern gentleman from Alabama. The 100% conviction rate was due to the fact that it was the concentration camp system that was on trial; there was literally no defense for the accused.

The first trial of the staff at Dachau was held in this building

The photo above shows the building where the trials conducted by the American Military Tribunal were held.  This building is located inside the former SS garrison at Dachau.

At the trial of the 40 men from the Dachau camp, the witnesses for the prosecution were former prisoners in the Dachau concentration camp who were given room and board and a payment of 1,000 Deutschmarks for their testimony, according to Joshua M. Greene, in his book Justice at Dachau. They were housed in the SS buildings on the former Avenue of the SS, which was named Tennessee Road by the Americans who were working on the trials.

John Barnett identifies U.S. Army photos taken at Dachau; Lt. Col. William Denson is standing on the right

The “Dachau trials” were not trials in the ordinary sense. The accused were considered to be guilty as charged, and the burden of proof was on them, not on the prosecution.

Lt. Paul Guth was the chief interrogator who was in charge of getting signed confessions from the accused before the proceedings began. Lt. Guth was a Jew who had emigrated to the United States from Vienna, Austria in 1941.

The charges against Martin Gottfried Weiss, et al were brought by The General Military Court, appointed by Par. 3, Special Order 304, Headquarters Third United States Army and Eastern Military District, dated 2 November 1945, to be held at Dachau, Germany, on, or about, November 15, 1945. Two charges of Violation of the Laws and Usages of War were brought against the defendants.

The first charge alleged that the Dachau accused “acting in pursuance of a common design to commit the acts hereinafter alleged, and as members of the staff of Dachau Concentration Camp and camps subsidiary thereto, did, at, or in the vicinity of DACHAU and LANDSBERG, Germany, between about 1 January 1942 and about 29 April 1945, willfully, deliberately and wrongfully encourage, aid, abet and participate in the subjection of civilian nationals of nations then at war with the then German Reich to cruelties and mistreatment, including killings, beatings, tortures, starvation, abuses and indignities, the exact names and numbers of such civilian nationals being unknown but aggregating many thousands who were then and there in the custody of the German Reich in exercise of belligerent control.”

The second charge was worded exactly the same as the first, except that it specified “members of the armed forces,” instead of civilians. Like the first charge, no names of victims or specific acts against members of the armed forces were listed.

Note that the charges included killings, beatings, tortures, starvation, abuses and indignities, but there was no specific charge of gassing, although a film of the Dachau gas chamber was shown on November 29, 1945 at the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal, two weeks after the Dachau proceedings began. It was not known whether any victims who might have been killed in the Dachau gas chamber were from Allied countries, so this charge was not included.

Crimes against German citizens, and others who were not civilians or military personnel in an Allied country, were not included; it was left up to the German courts to bring charges against the concentration camp staff members for crimes against victims from non-Allied countries. The charges included only Violations of the Laws and Usages of War and not Crimes against Humanity.

The charges against Martin Gottfried Weiss, and the 39 other members of the Dachau staff, were based on the theory that all of them had participated in a “common design” to run the concentration camp in a manner which had caused the prisoners great suffering, severe injury or death. The period of time covered by the charges was from January 1, 1942 until April 29, 1945. Although the camp had been in operation since March 22, 1933, this was roughly the period of time that the Dachau camp had been in existence while America was at war with Germany.

The basis for the prosecution of staff members of the Nazi concentration camps was that some of the inmates had been captured enemy soldiers who were Prisoners of War and consequently they should have been treated according to the rules of the Geneva Convention, including the Russian POWs, although the Soviet Union had not signed the Geneva Convention and had not followed it during the war. Other inmates in the Nazi camps were political prisoners, partisans, resistance fighters or insurgents from German-occupied countries; they were considered by the American prosecutors to be comparable to Prisoners of War although the 1929 Geneva Convention did not give insurgents the same rights as POWs. In fact, the resistance fighters in German-occupied countries had violated the rules of the 1929 Geneva Convention themselves by continuing to fight after their countries had surrendered.

The U.S. “war crimes” office at Dachau

According to Robert E. Conot, author of Justice at Nuremberg, the idea of bringing the German war criminals to justice was first voiced by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on October 7, 1942, when he declared: “It is our intention that just and sure punishment shall be meted out to the ringleaders responsible for the organized murder of thousands of innocent persons in the commission of atrocities which have violated every tenet of the Christian faith.” Roosevelt was referring to atrocities committed in the concentration camps, beginning in 1933; most of the war crimes that were prosecuted by the American Military Tribunals at Dachau had not yet been committed.

The Declaration of St. James on January 13, 1942 announced British plans for war crimes trials even before the British BBC first broadcast the news of the gassing of the Jews in June 1942. On December 17, 1942, British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden told the House of Commons: “The German authorities are now carrying into effect Hitler’s oft repeated intention to exterminate the Jewish people of Europe.”

On October 26, 1943, the United Nations War Crimes Commission, composed of 15 Allied nations, met in London to discuss the trials of the German war criminals which were already being planned. That same year, Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin issued a joint statement, called the Moscow Declaration, in which they agreed to bring the German war criminals to justice.

Dachau triangle sculpture has no black triangle (1997 photo)

According to the current news, the mentally and physically disabled in Nazi Germany wore a black triangle in the concentration camps.

The Huffington Post has an article about the planned memorial to the victims of the Nazi euthanasia program in Germany which you can read here.  This quote is from the article: “Adolf Hitler saw no place for the mentally and physically disabled in his vision of a “racially pure” Germany, just as he saw no place for Jews, Sinti and Roma and homosexuals.”

You can read about the euthanasia program at Hartheim Castle in Austria on my website here.

I took the photo above, in May 1997 at Dachau, on my very first visit to a Memorial Site in a former Nazi concentration camp.  That’s when I learned for the first time about how the prisoners were classified according to several categories.

At Dachau, in 1997, there was nothing in the Museum about handicapped people being put into a concentration camp and forced to wear a black triangle.

Close-up of triangle sculpture at the Dachau Memorial Site (1997 photo)

Non-Jewish Polish forced laborers at Dachau wore a blue triangle, as shown in the photo above. A purple triangle was worn by the Jehovah’s Witnesses.

A bar over the triangle denoted a person who had been released and then incarcerated again for a second offense. A dot below the triangle meant that the prisoner was in the punishment detail and had to perform hard labor. Note the red dots in the sculpture.

Another section of the Dachau Triangle sculpture

The vast majority of the prisoners at Dachau were political prisoners from other countries, primarily Communists and illegal combatants who continued to fight after their countries were conquered; they wore a red triangle, pointing downward. A red triangle pointing upward was for a German political prisoner, but they are not included in Dachau sculpture.

Monument at Sachsenhausen Memorial Site shows only red triangles in honor of the Communist prisoners (1999 photo)

Inside the Museum at Dachau, in 1997, was a poster, which is shown in the photo below.

Poster shows the various badges worn by prisoners to designate their category

The top row of triangles in the photo above shows all the colors of the badges worn by the prisoners in all the Nazi concentration camps.

Red was for Communists, Social Democrats, anarchists, and other “enemies of the state.” Green was for German criminals who had committed two or more crimes. Blue was for foreign forced laborers; brown was for Gypsies; pink was for homosexuals; purple was for Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Black was for a-socials, a catch-all term for vagrants, bums, prostitutes, hobos, perverts, alcoholics who were living on the streets, or anyone who didn’t have a permanent address. The “work-shy,” or those who were arrested because they refused to work, also wore a black badge.

Before 1942, Gypsy men wore a black triangle in the concentration camps. At that time, Gypsy men were arrested and imprisoned for being a-social if they didn’t have a permanent address, or they were arrested for being “work-shy” if they were not employed.

Every male citizen in Nazi Germany, who was capable of working, was required to take a job and they were not allowed to quit their job without permission. Gypsy women were arrested under the a-social category if they were prostitutes.

When I visited the Sachsenhausen Memorial Site in 1999, I learned more about the triangles that were worn by the prisoners.

According to information presented at the Sachsenhausen Museum, Jewish prisoners always wore two triangles: one was a yellow triangle, with another triangle of a different color sewn on top of it, to form a six point star.

Jewish political prisoners wore a yellow triangle with a red triangle on top. Jews who wore a white triangle over a yellow one were called Jüdisher Rassenschänder. A black triangle designated an a-social (Asozialer). A Jewish a-social was a Jüdisher Asozialer who wore a black triangle over a yellow one. A green triangle meant a criminal who was a repeat offender; Jewish criminals wore a green triangle over a yellow one and were called Jüdisher Befristeter Vorbeugeshäftlinge or Jewish prisoners in limited preventive custody.

The Jehovah’s Witnesses (Bibelforscher) wore purple triangles, and the Sinti and Roma (Gypsies) wore a brown triangle. The work-shy (Arbeitsscheuer) wore white triangles at Sachsenhausen. Non-Jewish race defilers, or those who broke the 1935 Nürnberg laws against race mixing, wore a triangle with a black border around it.

Because Sachsenhausen was near Berlin, which was the mecca for homosexuals at that time, Sachsenhausen was the concentration camp that had the most homosexual prisoners of any of the Nazi camps. Homosexuals wore a pink triangle (Rosa Winkle).

On my visit to the Dachau Memorial Site in 1997, I learned that prisoners who were terminally ill were sent to Hartheim Castle for mercy killing.  A doctor had to sign the order, giving the cause of the illness.

Hartheim Castle in Austria was where severely handicapped people were killed.

None of the former camps that I visited had a display that included a black triangle worn by a handicapped person. That is why I was very surprised to read a news article about a memorial that is soon going up in Berlin, in honor of the handicapped people who wore black triangles in the concentration camps, where they were killed.  This is news to me!

Proposed “euthanasia monument” will be a blue wall

This quote is from the news article, which you can read in full here:

New Berlin memorial revives memories of doctors’ role in Nazi holocaust

By Dr. Peter Saunders

Editor’s note. Dr. Saunders is a former general surgeon and is CEO of Christian Medical Fellowship, a UK-based organization with 4,500 UK doctors and 1,000 medical students as members.

Officials gathered in Berlin [in early July] to lay the foundations for a monument to the people killed as part of the Nazi ‘euthanasia’ programs.

The symbolic site at Tiergartenstrasse 4 was chosen as it was the headquarters of the original project.

The planned exhibit will be dedicated to the victims of the ‘euthanasia’ program, codenamed ‘T4’, used by the Nazis to kill those with physical or mental illnesses.

It will be situated not far from a memorial to the six million Jewish victims of the Holocaust opened in 2005 and a memorial to the half a million Roma victims of the Nazis opened in 2012.

Between January 1940 and August 1941 about 70,000 people were killed under the T4 programme. Many were sent to gas chambers, others were killed by lethal injection.

The programme was ostensibly shut down in 1941, partly after church protests, but it continued in secret. Historians estimate that between 200,000 and 300,000 people who were either psychotherapy patients or physically disabled were killed altogether.

The planned monument will be a long, blue glass wall – designed by the architects Ursula Wilms and Heinz W. Hallman, along with the artist Nikolaus Koliusis and the federal government plans to contribute 500,000 euros ($643,200) to the costs.

The finished site is tentatively scheduled for inauguration in the second half of 2014. [...]

Many still fail to appreciate the role of doctors in the Nazi holocaust but what ended in the 1940s in the gas chambers of Auschwitz, Dachau and Treblinka had much more humble beginnings in the 1930s in nursing homes, geriatric hospitals and psychiatric institutions all over Germany.

When the Nazis arrived, the medical profession was ready and waiting.

The medical and other healthcare staff from T4 and the early killing centres based in hospitals were later redeployed for the killing of Jews, Gypsies, Poles, Russians and disloyal Germans. By 1943 there were 24 main death camps (and 350 smaller ones) in operation.  [...]

Britain’s Black Triangle Campaign, which was set up to combat discrimination against disabled people, uses as its symbol the ‘black triangle’ which the Nazis forced people with mental and other disabilities to wear in the extermination camps during the Holocaust.

The generic classification they used was ‘arbeitsscheu’ – literally ‘workshy’.

The lessons are clear. The holocaust had small beginnings and advanced in a series of imperceptibly small steps. The medical profession accepted its basic premises (that there is such a thing as ‘a life not worth living’ and that killing such people was ‘an act of mercy’) and failed to protest whilst a small section of its members actively acquiesced to involvement.

The Nazi euthanasia program began in August 1939 when a five-month-old baby boy, named Gerhard Kretschmar, was “put to sleep” after the boy’s father made a request to Adolf Hitler for a “mercy killing.” Hitler sent his personal physician, Karl Brandt, to conduct a medical examination before giving his permission for the infant to be given a lethal injection.

Karl Brandt was put on trial at Nuremberg in the “Doctor’s Trial.” In his testimony, Brandt said that the baby’s father, Richard Kretchmar, had written to Hitler’s office in early 1939, asking for permission to kill his blind and deformed son. The following quote is from Brandt’s testimony:

“The father of a deformed child wrote to the Fuhrer with a request to be allowed to take the life of this child or this creature. Hitler ordered me to take care of this case. The child had been born blind, seemed to be idiotic, and a leg and parts of the arm were missing.”

An estimated 8,000 deformed children were killed in the same manner, some without the consent of their parents.

The Nazi euthanasia program was code-named T4, named after the address on Tiergartensstrasse in Berlin; this was the street address of the Privatkanzlei des Führers run by Philip Bouhler.  This is approximately where the new memorial to the victims, who were killed in the euthanasia program, will be located.

By the beginning of 1940, six hospitals were involved in these “mercy killings.” Records discovered in 2003 show that the euthanasia program was eventually extended to 296 medical facilities in Germany, Austria, the Czech Republic and Poland where mentally and physically disabled children and adults were injected, gassed or starved to death.

The Nazis made a documentary film of some of the adult victims before they were killed; this was an attempt to justify the murder of disabled and deformed people. Many of the victims, who were crippled by a birth defect called spina bifida, are shown in the film, walking on all fours. This film is not shown at the Hartheim Memorial Site.  The film used to be available on the Internet, but is no longer shown.

On her news show “Outfront,” news commentator Erin Burnett talked about President Obama’s appearance on the Jay Leno show.  On the Leno show, the subject of Russia came up, since Obama is planning to go there soon. Segway into the subject of homosexuality, which is frowned upon in Russia.

Erin Burnett

You can see the video of the Jay Leno Show at http://outfront.blogs.cnn.com/2013/08/07/leno-is-russia-now-like-nazi-germany/  where you will read this quote:

More comparisons are being made about Russia’s new crackdown on gays and lesbians and the Nazi’s persecution of Jewish citizen, homosexuals and others Hitler wanted to eliminate.

It was mentioned on Burnett’s show that 84% of Russians are against gays, and that 76% of Russians agree with the laws against homosexuality in Russia.  You can see the video of Burnett’s segment about the Nazis and the gays here.

But prior to the discussion about Russians discriminating against gays, Erin Burnett dropped this bombshell:  “Hitler started with gays…and Gypsies.”

Ms. Burnett is correct, but she should have explained it for viewers who might have assumed that Hitler made a new law against homosexuals and Gypsies, under which he sent both groups to gas chambers to be killed.  That’s not what happened, and Ms. Burnett should have made that clear.

The law, which made homosexuality a crime, had been on the books in Germany since 1871 when the German states were united into a country by the King of Prussia, following the victory over France in the Franco-Prussian war.

After the Nazis came to power, a new law was made, which said that men who had been arrested twice, for any crime, would be sent to a concentration camp, after they had completed their second prison sentence, where they would be held for at least six months in order to be rehabilitated.  This was the law under which homosexuals and Gypsies would up at Dachau, and later, at other camps.  The law that was broken by the Gypsies was the new law which said that every man in Germany should have a permanent residence and a visible means of support.

This explanation would have taken up a lot of time on Erin Burnett’s news show, so I am not surprised that the subject was glossed over.  If my readers are not bored to death with this subject by now, you can read more about it in this quote from my own website:

Another category of prisoners in the Nazi concentration camps were the so-called “career criminals.” On June 17, 1936, Adolf Hitler had signed a decree which made Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler the new Chief of the German Police within the Reich Ministry of Interior. According to Peter Padfield, author of the book Himmler, the new Police Chief “saw his task as preventing crime before it happened by shutting away habitual criminals, preserving the Volk from contamination by shutting away subversives who might corrupt them, picking up vagrants, the ‘work shy’ and ‘anti-socials’ and putting them to work in his camps, and in addition supervising public morals.”

Padfield wrote that Himmler’s first large-scale action as Police Chief was the “nationwide round-up of professional criminals.” On March 9, 1937, Himmler gave the order to arrest around 2,000 “professional criminals” who had committed two or more crimes, but were now free after having served their sentences. They were arrested without charges and sent to a concentration camp for an indeterminate time.

In 1937, there were only 7,500 prisoners in the four main Nazi concentration camps: Dachau, Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald and Lichtenberg. By that time, Lichtenberg was being used exclusively for women prisoners. According to Padfield, Himmler’s biographer, the new Chief of Police wanted to increase the number of inmates in the concentration camps because he desired a large labor force for the factories owned by SS. For this reason, he broadened the category of asocials to include “tramps and vagabonds, beggars – even those with a fixed address – gypsies and people who traveled from place to place like gypsies if they showed no will to work regularly, pimps who had been involved in legal proceedings even if not convicted and who still associated with procurers and prostitutes, or people under strong suspicion of procuring and finally people who had demonstrated by numerous previous convictions for resistance, causing bodily injury, brawling, trespass and similar that they do not want to adapt themselves to the orderly Volk community.”

Another category of German citizens, who were persecuted by Himmler, in his capacity as Chief of the German Police, was homosexuals. Paragraph 175 of the German criminal code, which had been in effect since 1871, made it a crime for men to publicly engage in gay sex or for male prostitutes to solicit men for sex. Himmler began enforcing this law and a total of about 10,000 homosexuals were eventually sent to concentration camps such as Dachau, Sachsenhausen and Mauthausen for at least 6 months of “rehabilitation.” According to Christian Bernadac, who wrote a book about Mauthausen, the homosexuals “received regular visits from the medical commissions” who attempted to change their sexual orientation because the Nazis believed that these prisoners were gay by choice.

Note that Padfield says that the number of homosexuals who were sent to concentration camps was 10,000.  Current stories about gays in Germany are giving the number of homosexuals, who were persecuted, as 100,000.

Note also that the law, under Paragraph 175, made it a crime to PUBLICLY engage in homosexual acts.  It was also a crime for male prostitutes to solicit men for sex.  Some of the men, who were sent to a concentration camp for soliciting men for sex, were later released after it was determined that they were not homosexual themselves.

It has come to my attention, from reading comments made on my blog, that there is a belief that homosexual men were arrested, in Nazi Germany, simply because of their sexual orientation, and that hundreds of thousands of them were murdered in concentrations camps, sometimes in the gas chamber.

How many homosexual men were actually “murdered” by the Nazis?  None.  A total of around 10,000 homosexual men were sent to Dachau and other camps, but no one knows how many died of disease or other causes while they were in a camp.

When I visited the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in the year 2000, there was a small section of exhibits entitled “Enemies of the State.” This section was devoted to the non-Jewish people who were persecuted by the Nazis; there were separate displays about the homosexuals and the Gypsies.  I vaguely recall that there were pictures of homosexual men, who had been sent to concentration camps, but I didn’t photograph this display.

“Communists, Social Democrats, trade unionists, liberals, pacifists, dissenting clergy, and Jehovah’s Witnesses” were listed in the reading material, in the exhibit, as “Enemies of the State,” but no details were given and there were no pictures of them.

There was a significant number of Communists incarcerated as political prisoners in the major German concentration camps at Dachau, Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen, but you would never know it from seeing the USHMM exhibits.

Not mentioned in the USHMM exhibits were the asocials, the work-shy or the criminals (including homosexual men) who had been sent to a concentration camp after they finished their prison time for their second offense. In the year 2000 when I was there, the USHMM did not mention that homosexuals were sent to a concentration camp, ONLY if and when they had served two terms in prison from breaking the law known as Paragraph 175.

This quote is from a recent comment on my blog:  “There are several ‘homo ‘ monuments in Holland to the Gay men murdered by the Nazis . However when the event was actually academically investigated it was found to be the reverse.”

The photos below show one of the “homo” monuments in Amsterdam.

A pink triangle monument in front of a church in Amsterdam

A pink triangle at ground level in front of the same church in Amsterdam

I didn’t take a photo of the third triangle which completes this huge sculpture in front of a church, which is within shouting distance of the Anne Frank house in Amsterdam.  Not to worry, churches are not used any more for religious services in Amsterdam, so it’s O.K. to have propaganda in front of a church.

A link to this website was provided by the reader who made the comment:  http://balder.org/judea/Nazi-Extermination-Of-Homosexuals-A-Myth.php

This quote is from the website cited above:

On December 2, 1979, the Broadway Play Bent opened at the New Apollo Theater in New York City. The starring role was played by Richard Gere.

Bent is the tale of a German homosexual named Max who is arrested and sent to Dachau. To avoid the stigma of wearing the pink triangle, Max denies his homosexuality and opts instead to claim he is Jewish. (According to the logic of Bent, the status of homosexuals in the concentration camps was even worse than that of Jews.) Max falls in love with another homosexual inmate and the play depicts their trials and tribulations. At the end, Max reclaims his inverted status as a homosexual and commits suicide by falling on an electrified fence.

“…a German homosexual…is arrested and sent to Dachau”?

That could not have happened.  Homosexuals were not sent to Dachau, nor anywhere else, solely because they were homosexual.  Germany had a law, called Paragraph 175, which made it a crime to have homosexual sex in public or for male prostitutes to solicit men for gay sex.  Men who had been arrested twice, for breaking a law that had been on the books in Germany since 1871, and had been sent to prison twice, were then sent to Dachau for a minimum of 6 months for rehabilitation, after they were released from prison.

In the 1930s and 40s, every country in the world had a law against homosexual acts.  Germany was not enforcing its law (Paragraph 175) and, as a result, Berlin became a mecca for homosexual men.  At that time, the word “gay” did not mean homosexual.

This quote is also from the website, cited above:

In 1981, the myth was given another major boost in Frank Rector’s widely distributed book The Nazi Extermination of Homosexuals (3). Rector wrote:

“It seems reasonable to conclude that at least 500,000 gays died in the Holocaust because of anti-homosexual prejudice…” Actually 500,000 may be too conservative a figure.”
It is significant that Rector included homosexuals as official victims in that amorphous event known as the “Holocaust”. He even claimed that homosexuals were sent to the gas chambers. Among the illustrations in The Nazi Extermination of Homosexuals is a frequently reproduced photo of a US soldier in front of a ten cubic meter disinfestations chamber at Dachau (claimed to be a homicidal gas chamber). Rector’s caption reads:

“The final solution to the homosexual problem lay behind that door for homosexuals not exterminated in many other ways. This chamber at Dachau. The screaming, the weeping, the futile gasping for breath, the agony that room held in a air-tight horror, was, in its hideous way, a blessing for many gays. It reduced their suffering to about fifteen minutes.”

Also in 1981, an article entitled “Some Jews and the Gays” by the homosexual novelist Gore Vidal appeared in The Nation (4). Vidal was responding to an essay in Commentary by the “neo-conservative “ Jewish author Midge Decter (5). Decter had been ruthlessly critical of the homosexual lifestyle, so Vidal told her that “like it or not, Jews and homosexuals are in the same fragile boat”. He then proceeded to lecture her that in some future “holocaust”, neo-conservative Jews were “going to be in the same gas chambers as the blacks and the faggots”.

Vidal backed up his account of homosexual victimization with a claim that fellow homosexual writer Christopher Isherwood once told him “Hitler killed 600,000 homosexuals”.

Disinfection chamber at Dachau which was believed to be a homicidal gas chamber

The photo above show the famous “gas chamber” at Dachau, which was believed, as late as 1981, to have been the gas chamber where homosexual men were murdered.

As the closest concentration camp to Berlin, the Sachsenhausen concentration camp had more homosexual prisoners than any of the other camps. According to a pamphlet, which I purchased at the Sachsenhausen Memorial Site in 2001, “a total of approximately 10,000 homosexuals were sent to all the Nazi concentration camps combined during the 12 years of the Third Reich.”

In an era when homosexuals were still in the closet in all the countries of the world, Berlin was a mecca for gays. The movie Cabaret depicts the gay scene in Berlin in 1931, just before the Nazis came to power. The movie was based on a book entitled Goodbye to Berlin by Christopher Isherwood, who lived an openly gay lifestyle in Berlin, the capital city of Germany.

Only male homosexuals who broke the German law (Paragraph 175) by flaunting their lifestyle in public were arrested. After their second arrest and prison term, these men were sent to one of the concentration camps in Germany. No lesbians were ever sent to a concentration camp, solely for being lesbians.

According to the pamphlet that I obtained at Sachsenhausen, some of the young men, who were sent to Sachsenhausen after they had been imprisoned twice for public homosexual activity, were actually Strichjunge, or male prostitutes, from Berlin.

According to the memoirs of Rudolf Höss:

The strict camp life and the hard work quickly reeducated this type. Most of them worked very hard and took great care not to get into trouble so that they could be released as soon as possible. They also avoided associating with those afflicted with this depravity and wanted to make it known that they had nothing to do with homosexuals. In this way countless rehabilitated young men could be released without having a relapse.

I saw the movie entitled Bent, soon after I started studying the Holocaust, and specifically the Dachau concentration camp.  I had a hard time understanding the movie.  It was Greek to me.

Here is the plot of Bent, from an entry in Wikipedia:

Max (Clive Owen) is a promiscuous gay man living in 1930s Berlin. He is at odds with his wealthy family because of his homosexuality. One evening, much to the resentment of his boyfriend, Rudy (Brian Webber II), Max brings home a handsome SA man (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau). Unfortunately, he does so on the Night of the Long Knives, when Hitler ordered the assassination of upper echelon SA corps. The Sturmabteilung man is discovered and killed by SS men in Max and Rudy’s apartment, and the two have to flee Berlin.

Max’s Uncle Freddie (Ian McKellen) has organised new papers for Max, but Max refuses to leave his boyfriend behind. As a result, Max and Rudy are found and arrested by the Gestapo and put on a train headed for Dachau. On the train, Rudy is brutally beaten to death by the guards. As Rudy calls out to Max when he is taken away, Max lies to the guards, denying he is gay. In the camp, Max falls in love with Horst (Lothaire Bluteau), who shows him the dignity that lies in acknowledging one’s beliefs.

This movie is pure fiction, but it has influenced many people to have unreasonable beliefs about the treatment of Homosexuals in Nazi Germany.

Steve Ross is the young boy on the far left, standing at the barbed wire fence around Dachau

According to a news article, which you can read in full here, Holocaust survivor Steve Ross, shown in the photo above, is recovering from a debilitating stroke that he suffered late last November.  I can relate because I suffered a stroke a little over three years ago.  There are a lot of things that happened in 1945, which I can’t remember, due to brain damage caused by the stroke.

Steve Ross (real name Szmulek Rozental) is famous for being a Jewish boy who survived 10 different concentration camps in 5 years.

According to the news article:

In places like Budzyn, Krasnik, Czechna in Radon, Bietigheim, Vaihingen, Unterriexingen, Grossachsenheim, Neckarsulm, Auschwitz, and lastly, Dachau. Nazi concentration camps where he was imprisoned, tortured, starved, and beaten for five years, from the age of nine to 14. Yet try as they did, the Nazis couldn’t break him. And in the end, Steve survived.

Note that Steve Ross survived Auschwitz, although he was under the age of 15.  Why wasn’t he sent to one of the Auschwitz gas chambers?  This is easily explained.  Dr. Mengele could not estimate age to within 5 years, so many children got through the selection process by lying about their age.

This quote is also from the news article:

As a boy, [Steve Ross] watched as those big green tanks with white stars crashed through the gates of Dachau that spring morning in 1945, followed by lots of tall men in uniforms he’d never seen, shouting a language he’d never heard. They fanned out around the fence perimeter, then like some rapid parade in motion, poured into the camp. There were so many, so fast. Yet he and dozens of his fellow prisoners could only watch from their barracks, for they were too weak from starvation, overwork, disease, and injuries to move.

It is understandable that, after having a stroke, Steve Ross can’t remember everything about the day that he was liberated from Dachau.  I can relate.  So I am going to help him to remember what actually happened.

There were no big green tanks with white stars that crashed through the gates of Dachau.  The photo below shows the scene just after General Linden had accepted the surrender of the camp by a tall  SS soldier, Lt. Wicker, accompanied by a Red Cross man, wearing an arm band.

General Linden standing at the gate into the Dachau camp after the camp was surrendered

American tanks had not been able to get to Dachau, to crash through the “Arbeit macht Frei” gate, which is shown intact in the photo above.

This quote, about the time line on the day of the liberation of Dachau, is from this website:

09:30 Tanks of the 101st Tank Battalion enter the city of Dachau after an alternate river crossing is found.

10:30 I Company and elements of M Company (3rd Battalion) are dispatched in the direction of the concentration camp. Tanks are held up by a bridge over the Amper River which is blown when armor is within 20 yards, killing a large number of German soldiers who are unable to cross in time.

10:45 1st Lt. L.R. Stewart and 1st Sgt. Robert Wilson of L Company find a footbridge defended by a lone German machine gunner. After firing one belt of ammunition the German retreats and I Company then crosses. Tanks and L Company remain behind to clear Dachau and continue the attack toward Munich.

The news article continues with this quote:

He saw the guards put up their hands, as if to surrender. But wait, was he seeing things? Was his chronic malnutrition causing him to be delusional? No, this time it was real. But who were these strange big men whom his all-powerful Nazi overlords were cowering before? As if to answer his thoughts, one of his fellow prisoners shouted one word.

Americans!

The American Army had arrived. His long nightmare was finally over. He would live. The American soldiers had saved him from certain death. And as 14-year-old Steve Ross walked out of Dachau that day in 1945, a tall American soldier on a big American tank called him over. The soldier gave him some cans of food, smiled, and warmly touched his head. Steve cried. For the first time in five years, he cried. His emotions, bottled up through a half decade of hell, had finally poured out. The soldier told him something he couldn’t understand, then handed him a colorful cloth with stars and stripes.

The regular guards at Dachau had fled the night before the Americans arrived.  The “guards” who put up their hands, “as if to surrender” were SS men who were inside the SS garrison next to the camp.  Steve Ross was in the concentration camp, where he could not have seen the SS men with their hands in the air.  He might have seen the guards, who were in Tower B, come down with their hands in the air.  These guards, who had surrendered in good faith, were shot by the Americans and their bodies thrown into the moat, where the Americans continued to shoot at their dead bodies.

Steve Ross could not have walked out of the Dachau camp on the day that it was liberated.  The prisoners had to be kept inside until the typhus epidemic, that was going on, could be brought under control.

Fortunately, I wrote about Steve Ross on my website before I had a stroke that wiped out some of my memory.  The following information is from my scrapbookpages.com website:

The young boy at the far left in the photograph [at the top of my blog post] is Stephen Ross, a 14-year-old Jewish orphan from Poland, who said that he had survived 10 different concentration camps in 5 years before he was liberated at Dachau. Standing next to him is Juda Kukieda, the son of Mordcha Mendel and Ruchla Sta.

According to the book “Dachau 29 April 1945, the Rainbow Liberation Memoirs,” edited by Sam Dann, Stephen Ross (real name Szmulek Rozental) was one of the lucky few who was rescued in the nick of time when Dachau was liberated. Ross was interviewed for the book and according to his own story, he was one of the 1,800 prisoners who were crowded into one quarantine barrack, which was designed to hold only about a hundred prisoners.

Ross said that the prisoners in the quarantine barrack had not been fed for two weeks before the Seventh Army arrived. Food was scarce, and according to Ross, the prisoners were fed only occasionally when they were given “a biscuit, hard as a rock and covered with mold.”

From the quarantine block, Ross said that 80 to 100 prisoners a day were carried out and put on the pile of dead bodies near the barbed wire fence, from where they were taken to the crematory. According to Ross, the quarantine block was where the German SS Doctors Sigmund Rascher and Klaus Schilling selected prisoners for their ghastly experiments. The doctors “removed thirty to forty prisoners on a daily basis for experiments” according to Ross.

Ross said that he “had been isolated in quarantine for experiments since 1944.” On the day of liberation, Ross made his way to the main gate, although he “was very weak and hardly able to walk.” With the help of his brother, who was also in the camp, Ross made it to the front of the crowd and was included in one of the most famous photographs of the liberation, shown at the top of this page.

After the liberation of Dachau, Ross had to stay in the camp until the typhus epidemic was brought under control. When he was released, he made his way to Munich where he was hospitalized for 6 months and treated for tuberculosis. He was then sent to a Displaced Persons camp for orphans at a former forced labor camp in Landsberg am Lech, near Munich. Finally, he was brought to America where he was able to recover his health.

Here’s my advice to young people:  Write down everything that you want to remember, because when you get old, you might have a stroke, and make a fool of yourself by telling stories about events that never happened.

The following quote is also from my website:

The following information about Stephen Ross is from The New England Holocaust Memorial:

The effort to build the New England Holocaust Memorial began with a Holocaust survivor, Stephen Ross (Szmulek Rozental), who was imprisoned at the age of 9 and whose parents, one brother and 5 sisters were murdered by the Nazi’s. Between 1940 and 1945, he survived 10 different concentration camps.

Like so many others Stephen Ross suffered terribly. His back was broken by a guard who caught him stealing a raw potato. Tuberculosis wracked his body. He once hid in an outhouse, submerged to his neck in human waste, to save himself from being shot. At one time he was hung [by his arms] for eating a raw potato. At age fourteen he was liberated from the infamous torture camp Dachau by American troops. Stephen will never forget the soldiers who found him, emaciated and nearly dead. They liberated him from a certain death.

When Stephen and his older brother, Harry, the only other surviving family member, were released from the Dachau Camp to seek medical attention, they came upon a U.S. Tank Unit. One of the soldiers jumped off his tank, gave Stephen and Harry his rations to eat and put his arms around Stephen. Stephen fell to his knees, kissed the G.I.’s boots and began to cry for the first time in five years.

The soldier took out of his pocket a piece of cloth and gave it to Stephen to wipe his tears. Stephen later found out that it was a small American Flag with 48 stars. This small flag is a treasured item and it will be kept by Stephen and his children as a symbol of freedom, life, compassion and love of the American soldiers.

At the age of 16, Stephen was brought to America in 1948 under the auspices of the U.S. Committee for Orphaned Children. He was illiterate, having had minimal education prior to the Nazi occupation of Poland in 1939. Over the years, he managed to earn three college degrees. Steve made a new life in the Boston area and has worked for the City of Boston for over forty years.

He provides guidance and clinical services to inner-city underprivileged youth and families. He eventually achieved the level of Senior Staff Psychologist.

Note that Steve Ross came upon a U.S. Tank unit AFTER he was released from Dachau.

Note that Steve mentioned that he had been hung by his arms at Dachau.  The “tree hanging” punishment was used at Buchenwald, not Dachau.  I blogged here about Martin Sommer, the guard who originated this atrocity.  Martin Sommer was put on trial by the Germans in the court of Dr. Konrad Morgen. After being convicted, Sommer was sent to the Eastern front, where he was wounded, losing an arm and a leg.

Note also that Steve was submerged up to his neck in human waste in an outhouse.  Where did this happen?  Dachau had flush toilets, but no outhouses.  Steve was obviously remembering what he saw in a Spielberg movie, not what he suffered at Dachau.

However, he could have sunk down into a flush toilet at Dachau because the toilets had no seat. The photo below shows a toilet in one of the cells in the bunker, a prison within the Dachau camp.

The toilets at Dachau had no seat

I read the story of Norman Coulson in an article in The Evening Sun, which you can read in full here.

Norman Coulson was at Dachau for a year after the camp was liberated

This quote is from The Evening Sun:

Hanover WWII veteran reflects on time at Dachau
Norman Coulson, 93, tries to find balance between forgetting and remembering the horrors of the German concentration camp.
By SARAH FLEISCHMAN

The Evening Sun
Posted:   07/28/2013 08:00:07 AM EDT

After the German concentration camp of Dachau was liberated in April 1945, Norman Coulson stayed there. There was still work to be done.

“It was my job to clean up the whole camp, the bodies and so on,” Coulson said. “The thought of the place was terrible, just the stench.”

Coulson served as chief architect of the post-liberation effort with the Army Corps of Engineers. He was the only one in the Corps sent to Dachau, and he stayed there for a year before coming home to Hanover, Pa.

“It’s the kind of place you can’t forget, but you try to anyway,” Coulson said.

There were so many dead that the crematorium couldn’t handle all of them. Coulson recalls using a bulldozer to push bodies into a mass grave.

“We assumed all these people were dead,” Coulson said. “If their eyes didn’t move, they were dead.”

Coulson arrived at Dachau three days after the American takeover of the camp.

“We (Americans) took over the camp so fast no one knew what was happening,” he said.

Inmates were simply told to go home, but many of them did not have the strength or the means to make it home, if home was still there.

“They were on their own. They just walked out on the street,” he said. “Some of them didn’t know who they were.”

Coulson employed several former inmates to help him. A Polish man named Alfons was his right-hand man. He could speak English and told Coulson about the horrors of living in Dachau.

Alfons told Coulson of the food – a potato broth with no meat. He described how guards would make all of the people in a block stand outside until an escaped prisoner was found. He spoke of the gas chambers and how the guards had prisoners kill other prisoners.

“The Germans didn’t do anything on their own,” Coulson said.

And Coulson still has an album of pictures from his time at Dachau. Alfons is in several photos with Coulson, standing over a desk looking at the building plans for the camp. When they weren’t working, sometimes the two men went on picnics.

The photo album itself is a miracle. Coulson couldn’t just walk to a corner store to buy film. When Alfons and Coulson did get film, he said, it was all different sizes and of questionable quality. Then, as Coulson was waiting for a ship back home, all of his belongings were stolen – except for the photos.

In all of my research on the Dachau concentration camp, I have never before read anything about the Army Corp of Engineers staying at Dachau for a year to remove the bodies and re-build the camp.

I have, in fact, read about the 40th Combat Engineer Regiment, which was attached to the 45th Thunderbird Division; the 40th Combat Engineers arrived at Dachau on April 30, 1945 to take over, one day after the camp was liberated.

The photo below shows the prisoners helping to remove the bodies that were piled up outside the Baracke X building.

Dachau prisoners pile bodies on wagons to be taken to Leitenberg hill for burial

A bulldozer was used to dig mass graves at Leitenberg

German civilians brought bodies to Leitenberg hill for burial in mass graves

So what did the Army Corp of Engineers, headed by chief architect Norman Coulson, do at Dachau for a year?  They didn’t use a bulldozer to shove the bodies, found at Dachau, all the way up to the Lietenberg hill, into mass graves.  The shoving of bodies into graves with a bulldozer was done by the British at Bergen-Belsen because they didn’t want to handle the bodies of prisoners who had died of typhus.

British soldier driving a bulldozer at Bergen-Belsen

This quote is from the news article in The Evening Sun:

Norman Coulson, 93, a veteran of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers during World War II, talks about his time in the post-liberated Dachau concentration camp in South Germany on Monday at his home on Northland Drive in Hanover. Coulson was responsible for cleaning and rebuilding the camp, which at the time was used to hold German prisoners of war who were awaiting trial. (THE EVENING SUN — SHANE DUNLAP)

The way I heard it, it was the “German prisoners of war” who cleaned up the Dachau camp when they were put into the barracks to await trial.  The camp was not “rebuilt,” but some new barracks were built, by the Americans, that were not as good as original barracks.  You can read about “War Crimes Enclosure No. 1″ on my website here.

The trials of the “German war criminals” took place in a building inside the SS garrison that was right next to the Dachau concentration camp.  A photo of the building is shown below.

Building where the war crimes trials were held at Dachau

The news article in The Evening Sun continues with this quote:

Coulson said he spent the majority of his time in the Army traveling to seven different countries with the Army Corps of Engineers. He was in Germany, about 50 miles from Dachau, when he saw a notice asking for people with architectural experience to work at the camp. He had worked for a local Hanover, Pa. architect, I.M. Myers, since he was 16, so he had the experience.

After the war ended, the camp was to be the site of war crimes trials, so after the bodies were taken care of, Coulson had to make sure the buildings were in working order.

When convicted German soldiers were hanged, the press would come to see, so Coulson was told to design a new kind of gallows so the executions would be less public.
“I essentially just barricaded [the gallows],” Coulson said. “But I wasn’t too happy doing that project.”

The “convicted German soldiers” were hanged at Landsberg am Lech.  The photo below shows the gallows.  The man who is about to be hanged is Martin Gottfried Weiss, the acting Commandant of Dacahau when the camp was liberated.

Martin Gottfried Weiss is about to be hanged on a gallows at Landsberg

Martin Gottfried Weiss was convicted by the American Military Tribunal of participating in a “common plan” to commit war crimes.  The “common plan” was a new war crime that was made up by the Allies AFTER the war.  Under this new law, anyone who was associated with a concentration camp in any way was a “war criminal,” whose crime was so heinous that the death penalty was justified.

Alvin Law is a 90-year-old veteran of World War II, now living in a retirement home in Plainview, TX.  He recently gave an interview, to an online Plainview newspaper, which you can read in full here.

This quote is from the Plainview newspaper article:

Alvin was near Munich when he remembers coming up to the Dachau Concentration Camp. The camp was the first concentration camp established by the Nazis, and was responsible for the deaths of 31,951 Jews, ordinary Germans, Austrian criminals and foreign nationalists.

By that time, Nazis were in the process of evacuating prisoners to other camps as Americans advanced into Germany. The Nazis were also trying to hide or destroy evidence of gas chambers, in a vain attempt to hide the horrific crimes.

In April 1945, U.S. Army troops were able to liberate the camp.

“They were overjoyed,” said Alvin, as he described seeing freed prisoners.

But the experience was bittersweet, as Alvin described seeing the mountains of dead bodies in the camp.

“It was horrible,” said Alvin.

Alvin also remembers the starving German children, who were now homeless orphans.

It’s a miracle!  A newspaper article, which actually mentions that Germans were suffering during World War II. You can read here about how the Allies starved German people to death AFTER World War II ended.

The starving German children, who were homeless orphans, might have been in the DP camp that was set up near the town of Dachau.

The article mentions that “The Nazis were also trying to hide or destroy evidence of gas chambers…”

Actually, there was not much effort to destroy the evidence of gas chambers at Dachau.  The Nazis left behind a large shower room, at Dachau, that was perfect for turning into a gas chamber, AFTER the camp was liberated.  But you can’t expect an American newspaper to point this out.

I wrote about how the American liberators of Dachau made a film on May 3, 1945, which showed the gas chamber which they had just constructed. This film was shown during the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal as proof that there was a gas chamber at Dachau.  You can read about it on one of my previous blog posts here.  You can read here about what tour guides tell visitors now about Dachau.

Photo of the mountain of dead bodies at Dachau was taken in May 1945

There was only one “mountain” of dead bodies at Dachau, when the Americans arrived.  This mountain of bodies was at the crematorium, awaiting cremation, but the Nazis had run out of coal to burn the bodies.

Pile of bodies at Dachau on the day after American liberators arrived

The photo above shows American soldiers looking at a pile of bodies, which includes a small pile of bodies of German soldiers, that the Americans had killed when the camp was surrendered to them.  I previously blogged here about Alfred de Grazia, Commanding Officer of the Psychological Warfare Propaganda Team attached to headquarters of the US 7th Army, who arrived at Dachau on May 1, 1945 to supervise the construction of a gas chamber at Dachau.

The faded color photo below shows that on May 1, 1945, the pile of dead bodies had been removed and, in it’s place was a pile of sand, ready to be used for construction of some kind.  By May 3, 1945, the Dachau gas chamber was ready for inspection by a group of American congressmen.

The photo below is on the website of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, along with this caption:

Photo of Dachau crematorium building, taken on May 1, 1945 shows no pile of bodies

In the month of May 1945, an additional 2,226 Dachau prisoners died, of typhus and other diseases, after the camp was liberated. There were 196 more deaths in June before the typhus epidemic was finally stopped by the use of DDT and the vaccination of all the prisoners.

Alvin Law was probably among the American soldiers, stationed near Munich, who were brought in trucks to see the Dachau atrocities, weeks after the camp had been surrendered.

Still, I give the reporter on the Plainview newspaper a lot of credit for looking up the exact number of deaths at Dachau and including this in his article.  I think that most American reporters would have written that 100,000 died at Dachau, or maybe 500,000.  The reporter did mention the Jews first in the list of prisoners who died at Dachau.