Edward D. Royce is the father of Republican Congressman Ed R. Royce.  In the news today is an article in the Orange County Register, about Edward D. Royce, which you can read in full here.

This quote is from the news article in the online Orange County [California] Register:

Former Stanton Mayor Edward D. Royce, whose photographs of corpses at the Dachau concentration camp have long served as rebuttal to Holocaust deniers, was honored Monday with the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Distinguished Service Award for his role in helping liberate the camp when he was an Army private.

Royce, father of Republican Congressman Ed R. Royce, took the podium at the Museum of Tolerance ceremony and recalled being among the first liberating forces to arrive at the camp on April 29, 1945.

So Edward D. Royce was one of the American soldiers who arrived at Dachau on April 29, 1945, the day that the camp was surrendered to American soldiers under a white flag of truce.  That means that he was either with the 45th Division or the 42nd Division, the two outfits that are credited with liberating the Dachau camp.  I did a quick check on the internet to determine which outift he was with and found this website:  http://lcweb2.loc.gov/diglib/vhp/bib/48477

This quote, regarding the military service of Edward D. Royce is from the website, cited above:

Branch of Service:
Army
Unit of Service:
3rd Field Artillery Observation Battalion

Oops! This means that Edward D. Royce was not at Dachau on the day that the camp was liberated.  He might have been among the soldiers who were brought in trucks to see the camp, long after it was liberated.

This quote from the Orange County Register tells about what Edward D. Royce saw at Dachau:

“I saw heaps of clothes in front of the building with bad – German for bath – painted on the door, the shower heads that pumped deadly gas instead of water, the room filled halfway to the ceiling with naked bodies and the room with ovens for burning the bodies,” said Royce, 88. [...]

Royce’s black-and-white photos, taken with a camera borrowed from his brother, documented the ovens and corpses at the camp. An estimated 6 million Jews were killed during World War II, and an estimated 30,000 prisoners died at Dachau, including deaths from extermination, disease, starvation and suicide.

I did an Image search on Google and found this page for Edward D. Royce:

I found only one photo of Dachau in the search results for Edward D. Royce, and it is not a photo that was taken by any of the American soldiers.

The photo, which is shown below, was one of the pictures in a packet of photos that were available for purchase when the U.S. soldiers were brought to Dachau in trucks, long after liberation day, so that they could go home and tell their relatives that they had participated in the liberation of Dachau.

Photo from Google Image search results for Edward D. Royce

The photo, from the Image search, has been cropped so that it does not show the logo that is in the bottom left hand corner. This is supposed to be a photo, taken by Edward D. Royce at Dachau.

I have the same photo on this page of my website.  The photo below shows the full picture before it was cropped.

Photo, taken long after Dachau was liberated, was available for sale

Notice the logo in the lower left hand corner. This photo was taken long after the Dachau camp was liberated.

A small Museum was set up by the former prisoners at Dachau, shortly after the camp was liberated.  On this page of my website, you can see a photo of the original small museum that was set up by the prisoners.

So it appears that another “liar, liar, pants on fire,” has been caught lying about his role in the liberation of Dachau.

In case you are having trouble answering the question in the title of my blog post today, I will make it a multiple choice question:

1. Did the U.S. Army Evacuation Hospitals search out the Nazi concentration camps and liberate them?

Or 2. Did the Evacuation Hospitals follow the infantry and the tanks to the concentration camps, after the camps had been liberated, and set up hospitals in the barracks of the camps to treat the inmates who were sick with typhus and other diseases?

Soldiers of the 139th Evacuation Hospital take sick prisoners out of Ebensee sub-camp of Mauthausen

Date:    Saturday, May 12, 1945 – Wednesday, May 30, 1945
Locale:    Ebensee, Austria
Credit:    United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Fred Anderson
Copyright:    United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

Healthy German prisoners at Ebensee march out of the camp after it was liberated

The correct answer, to the question in the title of my blog post, is No. 2.

For example, three days after the Buchenwald camp was officially liberated by U.S. Army soldiers, the 120th Evacuation Hospital arrived in the city of Weimar with a staff of 273 service personnel to take care of 3,000 sick prisoners at Buchenwald.  Prior to that, the 120th Evacuation Hospital had been taking care of soldiers who had been wounded on the battlefield.

A hospital was set up at Buchenwald, by the 120th Evacuation Hospital, in the barracks of the German SS soldiers who had been stationed at the German Army garrison at Buchenwald. The staff members of the 120th Evacuation Hospital stayed in a beautiful castle, which had formerly been the summer home of German royalty. A path through the woods connected the castle to the Buchenwald concentration camp.

Typhus ward set up by the 116th Evacuation Hospital at Dachau

On 2 May 1945, the 116th Evacuation Hospital arrived at Dachau and set up operations. The Dachau camp had been liberated on April 29, 1945.

According to a U.S. Army report, made on 20 May 1945, there were 140 prisoners dying each day in the Dachau camp AFTER the camp had been liberated.  The principle causes of death were starvation, tuberculosis, typhus and dysentery. Before the Americans arrived, there had been 4,000 sick prisoners in the Dachau hospital and an unknown number of sick prisoners in the barracks who had been receiving no medical attention.

Warren Priest, a soldier with the 120th Evacuation Hospital, told about how he himself had contracted typhus at Buchenwald, but was saved by recently discovered medicinal drugs which the Germans did not as yet have available.

The subject of my blog post today was inspired by a comment made by a reader named “The Black Rabbit of Inlé“.  He mentioned a new book, written by Dr. Richard MacDonald, which tells the story of how the 139th Evacuation Hospital liberated the Ebensee sub-camp of Mauthausen, but has never been given credit for the liberation.

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum gives the credit for the liberation of Ebensee to the 80th Infantry Division of the U.S. Army.

You can read the list of liberators of the camps on the website of the USHMM here.  No Evacuation Hospitals are listed as liberators.  To be counted as liberators, an Army unit had to have been at a concentration camp within 48 hours of the first soldiers to arrive.

There is a great deal of confusion, about who liberated which camp, because General Eisenhower ordered that every soldier in the U.S. Army, who was anywhere near a concentration camp, should be transported to the closest camp so that they could see the dead bodies of prisoners who had died in the typhus epidemic.  As a result, virtually every U.S. soldier, who served in World War II in Europe, can claim to be a liberator of a concentration camp.

You can read about Dr. Richard MacDonald’s new book on this website.

This quote is from the website, cited above:

The Konzentrationslager (KZ) Ebensee Concentration Camp was established to house prisoners tasked to further the research and production of the V-2 missile program run by Nazi SS Officer Wernher von Braun. This camp was liberated on May 6, 1945. Most historical accounts state that the Eightieth Infantry Division liberated this camp; however, this particular division was around forty miles behind the tanks of the actual group that brought freedom to the 16,694 labor inmates in KZ Ebensee. The Third Cavalry Reconnaissance Squadron of the Third Cavalry Group came up the road to the camp at around 10AM on that fateful Sunday; at 2:45PM, the Third Platoon of F Company opened the gates.

Unfortunately for the men of these military units they, together with the U.S. Army 139th Evacuation Hospital, became phantom units in historical archives. Their contributions to the liberation of the camp were never recorded. Inside the Gates hopes to change this by detailing the 139th Evacuation Hospital’s involvement in freeing the thousands of inmates in the said Austrian Concentration Camp.

Ebensee was not in Austria, when it was liberated, because Austria was not a country at the time that the Ebensee camp was liberated. Ever hear of “der Anschluss”?  It’s a long story, but Dr. MacDonald can catch up on history by reading this page of my website.

Sick prisoners at Ebensee sub-camp of Mauthausen

According to Martin Gilbert, the author of a book entitled Holocaust, Ebensee was an “end destination” for Jewish prisoners who were evacuated from camps farther east as the Soviet Army advanced toward Germany. In the last months of the war, the Ebensee camp was seriously over-crowded with these exhausted prisoners, many of whom had just arrived in the weeks prior to the liberation.

Gilbert wrote the following regarding the evacuations and the death marches:

Jews who had already survived the “selections” in Birkenau, and work as slave laborers in factories, had now to survive the death marches. Throughout February and March [1945] columns of men, and crowded cattle trucks, converged on the long-existing concentration camps, now given a new task. These camps had been transformed into holding camps for the remnant of a destroyed people, men and women whose labor was still of some last-minute utility for a dying Reich, or whose emaciated bodies were to be left to languish in agony in one final camp.

According to Gilbert’s book, a train loaded with 2,059 Jews arrived at Ebensee on March 3, 1945. They had survived the death camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau and had first been sent to the Gross Rosen concentration camp, then on to Ebensee.

Forty-nine of the Jewish prisoners died on the train, according to Martin Gilbert, and on their first day in the Ebensee camp, 182 died during the disinfection procedure. New arrivals had to be disinfected to kill the body lice which spreads typhus. There was a typhus epidemic in Mauthausen and the sub-camps and, according to Martin Gilbert, 30,000 prisoners died in these camps in the last four months of the war.

Ebensee survivors have shaved heads to prevent the spread of lice

According to Martin Gilbert, the last death marches of the war began on May 1, 1945 as the American Army approached; prisoners from the main camp at Mauthausen and the sub-camps at Gusen and St. Valentin were marched to Gunskirchen and Ebensee. Hundreds of them died from exhaustion, or were shot because they couldn’t keep up, or as they attempted to escape.

When American troops in the 80th Infantry Division arrived on May 4, 1945, there were around 60,000 prisoners from 25 different countries at Ebensee.

Evelyn le Chene, the historian of Mauthausen, wrote that, as the American armies approached Ebensee, all thirty thousand prisoners in the camp were ordered into a tunnel packed with explosives. There were similar reports of plans to kill all the prisoners at other camps, such as Nordhausen, and even Dachau, but none of these plans was ever carried out.

Hitler did not want the prisoners in the concentration camps to be released to get revenge on German civilians. In fact, the Russian liberators at Theresienstadt did release the Jewish prisoners there, and according to Theo Richmond, the author of the book Konin, One Man’s Quest For a Vanished Jewish Community, the former inmates did get “nekomeh” or Revenge. Richmond quotes Louis Lefkowitz, a Jewish survivor of Buchenwald and Theresienstadt, who recounted the following story regarding German civilians who were trying to flee from the Russian soldiers who were also exacting vengeance on the Germans:

I saw nekomeh in Theresienstadt. For two days after the liberation, the Russians let us do whatever we want. I was too weak to join in, but I saw our boys bring in Germans who were running away on horse and wagons. They brought them in – whole families on the wagons. They put gasoline over the people and burned them up. Wagons with whole families were burning day and night for two days.

The following quote, regarding the plan to force all the Ebensee prisoners into a tunnel, is from Evelyn le Chene:

The prisoners, to a man, blankly refused. The SS guards were paralyzed with indecision. The hordes of humans swayed and murmured. For the first time since their arrest, the prisoners who were not already dying saw the possibility that they might just survive the war. Understandably, they neither wished to be blown up in the tunnel, nor mown down by SS machine guns for refusing. But they knew that in these last days, many of the SS had left and been replaced by Ethnic Germans. [...] With the war all but over, they were thinking of the future, and the punishment they would receive for the slaughter of so many human beings was something they still wished – even with their already stained hands – to avoid. And so the prisoners won the day.

Ebensee was the last chance for the Allies to spread lies and propaganda.  The photo below shows the movie cameras that were brought in to photograph the liberation of Ebensee.

Film crew is ready to film the Ebensee camp

Angela Merkel lays a wreath at the International Monument at Dachau

The news today is filled with stories of German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s visit to the grounds of the first Nazi concentration camp near the town of Dachau. Then it was on to a beer fest in the town. Chancellor Merkel is being heavily criticized for combining a trip to the Memorial Site at the former camp with a trip to the town of Dachau to drink beer.

Angela Merkel was accompanied by Max Mannheimer, a survivor of Dachau

In the photo above, Chancellor Merkel looks as though she has the weight of the world on her shoulders as she walks beside Max Mannheimer, a survivor of two Dachau sub-camps at Allach and Mühldorf.  I don’t begrudge Chancellor Merkel a glass of beer after going through this ordeal.

Not mentioned in any of the news stories is that beer drinking does not have the same connotation in Germany, as it does in America.  Literally everyone in Germany drinks beer; it is considered to be good for one’s health.

There is nothing wrong with going to a beer fest, after visiting a Memorial Site.  If Hilary Clinton were president of the United States, and she visited an internment camp, where German-Americans were imprisoned during World War II and for two years afterwards, she might go to a beer joint afterwards and some people might legitimately complain.  Beer drinking has a low-class connotation in America, but not in Germany.

None of the stories, that I have read, about Chancellor Merkel’s visit, mentioned that Max Mannheimer is a controversial figure because of his “später Tagebuch,” which means a diary written later.

This quote from Wikipedia is about Mannheimer writing his Tagebuch or diary of his time in Nazi concentration camps at a later time.

Seine Erinnerungen wurden zum ersten Mal 1985 in den Dachauer Heften abgedruckt.[13] und erschienen 2000 vollständig unter dem Titel Spätes Tagebuch.

In other words, Max Mannheimer miracaculously remembered his time in Nazi concentrations camps, and wrote his memoir many years later.  Because Mannheimer never said a word about his time in the camps until many years later, some people are suspicious of his “später Tagebuch.” In any case, he was not a prisoner in the main Dachau camp, which Chancellor Merkel visited.

This quote about Chancellor Merkel’s visit to Dachau is from a news article which you can read in full here:

Ms Merkel’s tour of Dachau, which was the first Nazi concentration camp, included a meeting with Max Mannheimer, one of its few remaining survivors. More than 200,000 people including Jews, homosexuals, Roma and political prisoners were imprisoned, forced to work and used for medical experiments at Dachau which opened in 1933. It was liberated by US troops in April 1945

The Chancellor was shown the camp baths and a room where prisoners were stripped of their clothing and identity and henceforth referred to only by numbers. Ms Merkel said her visit was accompanied by feelings of “shame and dismay”.

She visited the camp baths (plural)?

What camp baths?  One of the exhibits at Dachau is located in a former shower room, as shown in the photo below.

Former shower room at Dachau is now used for Museum displays

The photo above shows a room in the Museum at Dachau which was formerly a shower room.  The shower fixtures have been removed; the shower heads in this room were hanging down from pipes on the ceiling, not stuck into the ceiling like the shower heads in the Dachau gas chamber. The only other shower room at Dachau was converted into a gas chamber when the American liberators lowered the ceiling and stuck shower heads into the ceiling.

Surely, Chancellor Merkel was not shown the shower room in the BarrackX building and told that this was a “camp bath”, not a gas chamber.

What about the room where Dachau prisoners were “stripped of their clothing”?  That could only be the undressing room in BarackeX.  The two photos below show the undressing room.

The wall of the empty undressing room at Dachau

Door into shower room which was converted into a gas chamber at Dachau by the American liberators

Did Max Mannheimer tell Chancellor Merkel that the room shown in the photo above was the undressing room where incoming prisoners undressed before going into the shower.  Mannheimer would have taken a shower in BarackeX before being sent to a sub-camp of Dachau.

Surely, the German people are not saying that the gas chamber at Dachau was a shower room!  That is against the law and will get you 5 years in prison.

Another criticism that I have, of the news stories about Chancellor Merkel’s visit to Dachau, is the claim that Dachau had “prisoners of war” in the camp.  This quote is from Fox News:

More than 200,000 Jews, gays, Roma, political opponents, the disabled and prisoners of war were imprisoned in Dachau during World War II.

Yes, it is true that there were “prisoners of war” incarcerated at Dachau during World War II, but they were NOT prisoners of war at the time that they were sent to the camp.  They only became “prisoners of war” after the Allies created ex-post-facto laws AFTER the war.

The so-called “prisoners of war” at Dachau were illegal combatants under the rules of the Geneva Convention of 1929.  They were resistance fighters who were fighting after their country had surrendered and promised to lay down their arms and stop fighting.  The main camps where illegal combatants were sent were Buchenwald and Natzweiler, but there were some prisoners at Natzweiler who were transferred to Dachau in the last days of the war.  These prisoners were designated at “prisoners of war” after the German camps were taken over by the Allies.

German prisoners of war, who were actual soldiers, not illegal combatants, were designated by General Eisenhower as Disarmed Enemy Forces and held in camps where they were not treated according to the rules of the Geneva Convention.

The only real POWs at Dachau were German POWs who were imprisoned, after World War II, in War Crimes Enclosure No. 1 at Dachau.  Surely, Chancellor Merkel did not honor these men on her visit.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel is being heavily criticized in the press because she combined a trip to the Dachau Memorial Site with a trip to the town of Dachau in connection with her re-election campaign.  Personally, I don’t see anything wrong with that.  If she had gone to the town, and NOT visited the former camp, she would have been criticized even more.

In one news story, which you can read in full here, a former Dachau prisoner defends Chancellor Merkel:

Jean Samuel, a French resistance fighter held at Dachau from July 1944 until the camp’s liberation in April 1945, said that regardless of Merkel’s campaign schedule the gesture was important.

“We are fighting for the duty to remember so I hope that is also why she came,” he told AFP at the ceremony.

As a “French resistance fighter,” Jean Samuel was an illegal combatant, who could have been executed because he was in violation of the Geneva Convention of 1929.  You can read about the history of the French resistance on my website here.  Jean Samuel was most likely a prisoner at the Natzweiler camp, which was the main camp for French resistance fighters, before he was transferred to Dachau.

The photo below shows some of the French Resistance fighters, who were prisoners at Dachau.

French resistance fighters at Dachau

Notice that one of the French Resistance fighters at Dachau was given a jacket that is too sizes too small.  This is just one of the many ways that prisoners at Dachau were tortured.  At least, he has a cigarette in his hand. The photo below shows another photo of the resistance fighters at Dachau, including one man with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth.  Could this be the same man?

“Political prisoners” at Dachau after the camp was liberated

The photo above shows some of the members of the International Committee of Dachau, an organization that was in charge of the Dachau camp when it was liberated. The second man from the left, who is wearing a cardigan sweater and a coat, appears to be Albert Guérisse, a British SOE agent from Belgium, who was hiding his identity by using the name Patrick O’Leary.

Guérisse was one of five British SOE agents who had survived the Nazi concentration camps at Mauthausen in Austria and Natzweiler in Alsace before being transferred to Dachau. On the day that the Dachau camp was liberated, Guérisse greeted Lt. William P. Walsh and 1st Lt. Jack Bushyhead of the 45th Infantry Division and took them on a tour of the camp, showing them the gas chambers and the ovens in the crematorium.

After Dachau was liberated on April 29, 1945, the official report of the US Seventh Army was printed as a book entitled Dachau Liberated: The Official Report by The U.S. Seventh Army, Released Within Days of the Camp’s Liberation by Elements of the 42nd and 45th Divisions. The Report was based on two days of interviewing 20 political prisoners at Dachau; the prisoners told the Americans that both the shower room and the four disinfection chambers were used as homicidal gas chambers.

The following quote is from The Official Report:

“When the American troops arrived on 29 April 1945, there were approximately 32,500 estimated internees of all nationalities, the Poles predominating. During this period, the camp was notorious for its cruelty, but within the last six or eight months, some ‘token’ improvement was noted in the treatment of the internees. However, the new crematorium was completed in May 1944, and the gas chambers, a total of five, were used for the executions and the disposals of the bodies.”

I applaud Jean Samuel for defending Chancellor Merkel.  It’s the least he could do to thank the Germans for not executing him, as they could have legally done, since he had been fighting in World War II as an illegal combatant.

In order to understand the story of the French Resistance, with regard to Dachau, you can read about the long and complicated case of General Charles Delestraint on my web site at http://www.scrapbookpages.com/DachauScrapbook/GeneralDelestraint.html

Almost every news story, or website, that you will ever read, mentions that 2/3 of the prisoners at Dachau were Jews.  This is very misleading; it implies that Dachau was a camp for Jews, instead of a camp that held mainly political prisoners.

When the Dachau concentration camp was liberated on April 29, 1945, there were 2,539 Jews among approximately 32,000 survivors in the main camp, located just outside the town of Dachau.  By what slight of hand does 2,539 figure out to be two thirds of 32,000?

Political prisoners at Dachau after the camp was liberated

According to Paul Berben, a former prisoner, who wrote a book called Dachau: 1933 – 1945: The Official History, there were 67,649 prisoners in the main Dachau camp AND IT’S 123 SUB-CAMPS when the last census was taken on April 26, 1945, three days before the US 7th Army arrived to liberate the MAIN camp.  Most of the Jews were in the sub-camps, not the main camp.

Many of the sub-camps, which Berben refers to as “Kommandos,” had already been evacuated and the prisoners had been brought to the main camp at Dachau.  Before the evacuation of the sub-camps, there were virtually no Jews in the main camp.

The largest number of prisoners in the whole Dachau system were classified as political prisoners, who numbered 43,401; the majority of the political prisoners were Catholic. The political prisoners included Communists, Social Democrats, anarchists, spies, and anti-Fascist resistance fighters from the Nazi occupied countries such as France, Belgium, Norway, the Netherlands, and Poland.

Dachau survivors pose in a barracks building after they were liberated

There was a total of 22,100 Jews in the Dachau system on April 26, 1945 and most of them were in the sub-camps. Many of the Jews in the main camp had just arrived a few days before from the sub-camps that had been evacuated.

On April 26th, approximately 3,400 Jews had been death-marched out of the main camp, headed south toward the mountains where it is believed that the Nazis intended to hold them as hostages to use in surrender negotiations with the Allies. Another 1,735 Jews had been evacuated from Dachau by train on April 26th.

The evacuation of prisoners from the sub-camps to the main Dachau camp had begun in March 1945, in preparation for surrendering the prisoners to the Allies. The evacuated prisoners had to walk for several days to the main camp because Allied bombs were destroying the railroad tracks as fast as the Germans could repair them. The few trains that did bring prisoners to Dachau, including a train load of women and children, were bombed or strafed by American planes, killing many of the prisoners.

Women prisoners who had recently arrived at Dachau

Most of the prisoners in the sub-camps of Dachau were Jews who had survived Auschwitz and had been brought on trains to Germany in January 1945 after a 50-kilometer death march out of the camp. By the time that the survivors staggered into the Dachau main camp in the last weeks of April, they were emaciated, sick and exhausted. Other Jews at Dachau in 1945 had been brought from the three Lithuanian ghettos in the Summer of 1944 to work in the Dachau sub-camps. The American liberators got most of their information about the Dachau camp from these Jews who had only recently arrived and were eager to tell their stories about abuse at the hands of the Nazis.

Since March 1945, around 15,000 new prisoners had been accommodated in the Dachau main camp, which had been originally designed for 5,000 men. By the time that the American liberators arrived, there were over 30,000 prisoners in the main camp, although the exact number was unknown.

According to Paul Berben’s account, the prisoners who arrived at Dachau were particularly numerous in 1944, as the inmates in other camps were evacuated from the war zone. He wrote that the last prisoner number at the end of 1943 was 60.869.

By the end of 1944, the last prisoner number was 137.244, which indicates that 76,375 new prisoners were brought to Dachau in 1944; most of them were sent to the sub-camps to work in the factories. The last prisoner numbers registered at Dachau were around 161.900. It was at this point that life in the Dachau concentration camp began to deteriorate.

In the final desperate days of trying to evacuate prisoners from the camps to prevent them from being released by the Allies, there were around 6,000 prisoners brought to Dachau from Flossenbürg, Buchenwald and Leipzig. These prisoners were not registered at Dachau, nor given a number, according to Paul Berben.

Throughout the 12 years that the Dachau camp was in existence, there were approximately 206,000 prisoners brought to the main camp and it’s 123 sub-camps.  There were 31,951 recorded deaths.  The Dachau Memorial Site estimates that there were at least 41,000 deaths, including the deaths, during the last days, which were not recorded.

In her speech at Dachau on August 20, 2013, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said the following:

“At the same time, this place [Dachau] is a constant warning: how did Germany reach the point of taking away the right of people to live because of their origin, their religion… or their sexual orientation?”

Dachau was primarily a place where the right of people to live was taken away because they were political enemies of the German government, or their right to live had been taken away because they had broken the law, for example, the law known as Paragraph 175 which made it a crime to have homosexual sex in public.  Most of the prisoners at Dachau were Catholic, but they were not imprisoned because of their religion.  There were numerous prisoners at Dachau who were incarcerated because they were fighting in a war as illegal combatants.

The first official book about Dachau, written by Americans, was entitled Dachau; it was published in May 1945. On the cover of the book were the letters SS, written with the alphabet called runes; the title is sometimes given as SS Dachau.  Another book entitled Dachau Liberated, The Official Report by the U.S. Seventh Army was published in July 2000.  It contains all the text in the original book, that was published in 1945, plus additional information about the Dachau camp.

The following quote is from the book entitled Dachau Liberated, The Official Report by the U.S. Seventh Army:

LIBERATION

The Americans came Sunday, 29th of April. The arrival of the Americans was preceded by several days of frenzy. Wednesday was the last day of work and there was no more going out of the compound.  Scattered labor details living outside of camp returned suddenly. Radios were taken away and there was no more communication with the outside.

On Thursday, orders to evacuate the entire camp were given. Transports began to be organized on large scales, but the organization was poor and uncoordinated. The prisoners having jobs in the administrative department mislaid orders, suddenly did not understand commands, and generally seemed quite indifferent to the mounting nervousness of the few camp officials that were left.  Only one transport got under way.  It consisted of about 4,000 men, and they hiked with heavy guard in the direction of the Tyrol (the transport led by Dachau Commandant Eduard Weiter).

Then began the time of tense waiting.  Rumors swept through the barracks of regiments and tanks just over the hill, of plans of mass annihilation of the prisoners by the remaining SS men, of parachutists, and of an armistice.  The prisoners organized a secret police force to keep order after the liberation they knew was coming.  They built barricades to keep their own comrades from getting in the way of the jumpy guards. And all time was at a standstill for three days while the prisoners waited and the guards paced nervously, furtively, in their towers.

Sunday, just after the noon meal, the air was unusually still.  The big field outside the compound was deserted. Suddenly someone began running toward the gate at the other side of the field. Others followed. The word was shouted through the mass of gray, tired prisoners.  Americans!  That word repeated, yelled over the shoulders in throaty Polish, in Italian, in Russian and Dutch and in the familiar ring of French.  The first internee was shot down as he rushed toward the gate by the guard. Yet they kept running and shouting through eager lips and unbelieving eyes. Americans!  And at the gate in front of the hysterical mob were not the regiments or the tanks they had expected, but one dark-complexioned, calm American soldier, an American Pole, pistol in hand, looking casually about him; up at the towers were the SS guards watched apparently frozen; behind him two or three other American boys about a hundred yards away; and into the flushed wet faces of those thousand surging about in front of him.

A few shots were fired from behind the wall, the guards in the first tower came down, hands above their heads. A white blanket was hung out from another tower (tower B), but one of them had a pistol in his hand which he had held behind his back, and the dark-complexioned soldier shot him down.  At the far side of the compound, the guards were taken care of from the outside.

Then a jeep arrived. Where were the regiments and tanks?  The first American (probably 1st Lt. William Cowling) was hoisted into the air and two others, a 19-year-old farmer from the West, and a 19-year-old university student (possibly T/5 Guido Oddi and Pfc. C. E. Tinkham), were dragged out of the jeep and carried around the grounds on the internee’s shoulders.  A blond journalist (Margaret Higgins) in uniform was also in the jeep, and she climbed the tower by the gate with a young officer.

Suddenly the prisoners produced flags and colors which had been buried under barracks or hidden in rafters. These flags and colors were improvised from sheets and scraps of colored cloth.  It was a mardi-gras.  Over the loud speaker system the blond journalist said “We are just as glad to see you as you are to see us.” And then a chaplain (probably Captain Leland L. Loy) in broken German asked them to join him in the Lord’s Prayer. And for a few minutes in powerful earnest unison with bowed reverent heads and clasped hands, they prayed. The words echoed through the compound and through the hearts of the thousands still incredulous at the dark-complexioned American Pole, the 19-year-old farm boy from the West, and the student, and at the regiments and tanks that never came.

So who were the “dark-complexioned American Pole,” the 19-year-old farm boy and the student?

The “dark-complexioned American Pole” may have been 1st Lt. William J. Cowling, who is believed to be the first American soldier to have entered the camp.  Cowling was an aide to Brig. Gen. Henning Linden, who was the deputy commander of the 42nd Division, one of the divisions which liberated Dachau.

On the day of the liberation, 1st Lt. William J. Cowling, wrote a long letter to his family in which he claimed that he was the first soldier to enter the Dachau concentration camp, along with some “newspaper people.”

The next day Marguerite Higgins, a reporter with the New York Herald Tribune, filed a news report in which she claimed that she and Sgt. Peter Furst were the first two people to go inside the Dachau concentration camp. Furst was a reporter for the US Army Newspaper called the Stars and Stripes.

According to a book entitled Surrender of the Dachau Concentration Camp 29 Apr 45, The True Account, written by John H. Linden, there were two guards who accompanied 1st Lt. Cowling when he entered the prison enclosure: T/5 Guido Oddi and Pfc. C. E. Tinkham.

But who was really the “dark-complexioned soldier” who shot one of the guards?

One of the men with the 222nd Regiment of the 42nd Rainbow Division was Ignacio Inclan Perez, a 17-year-old Mexican-American soldier from Cotulla, Texas. Gabriel Perez recalls that his father, Inclan Perez, talked about seeing the train at Dachau just before entering the camp. In an e-mail to me, Gabriel wrote, “I also remember my father telling me about a German soldier that he shot and killed as he was trying to get away. He also mentioned that he saw German guards in a mess area that had been gunned down by American soldiers. He stated that he was glad he never did that because it would have been difficult to live with later in life.”

Lt. Col. Walter J. Fellenz, an officer in the 222nd Regiment, gave the following information in his account of the liberation of Dachau:

Amid the deafening roar of cheers, several inmates warned us of danger by pointing to one of the eight towers which surrounded the electrically charged fence. The tower was still manned by SS guards! Half crazed at what we had just seen, we rushed the tower with rifles blazing. The SS tried to train their machine guns on us, but we quickly killed them each time a new man attempted to fire the guns. We killed at least 17 SS, then in mad fury our soldiers dragged the dead bodies from the towers and emptied their rifles into the dead SS chests.

Lt. Col. Felix Sparks of the 45th Thunderbird Division disputed this account; he said that his men had shot the guards in the towers with rifles from the cover of the many buildings surrounding the confinement area.

In his book entitled The Day of the Americans, Nerin E. Gun, a journalist who was a prisoner at Dachau, wrote:

Miss Higgins and a fellow journalist, Robert Fust (sic), on the highway leading to the camp, had picked up an SS man and ordered him to show them the quickest way to the Lager. The SS man had remained seated on the back seat of the jeep and, in the pandemonium that followed the arrival of the detachment, the prisoners, who had never seen an American uniform before and who at this point really had no reason to be choosy, thought the SS man was another one of their liberators. He too was showered with embraces, kisses, handshakes, and shouts of triumph. The SS man must have thought that either they had all lost their minds or else the hour of universal reconciliation had rung. It was only fifteen minutes later that O’Leary, head of the International Committee, ordered him arrested. That same evening, he faced a firing squad.

The shooting of disarmed German soldiers during the Dachau liberation was investigated by the Office of the Inspector General of the Seventh Army. Their report was finished on June 8, 1945 but was marked Secret. The report has since been made public and a copy of it was reproduced in Col. John H. Linden’s book entitled Surrender of the Dachau Concentration Camp 29 April 1945. One of the soldiers mentioned in the report was Tec 3 Henry J. Wells, a Jewish soldier who may have been the “dark-complexioned” soldier at the liberation of Dachau.

Here are four paragraphs from the IG report which pertain to the shooting of the guards at Tower B:

11. After entry into the camp, personnel of the 42nd Division discovered the presence of guards, presumed to be SS men, in a tower to the left of the main gate of the inmate stockade. This tower was attacked by Tec 3 Henry J. Wells 39271327, Headquarters Military Intelligence Service, ETO, covered and aided by a party under Lt. Col. Walter J. Fellenz, 0-23055, 222 Infantry. No fire was delivered against them by the guards in the tower. A number of Germans were taken prisoner; after they were taken, and within a few feet of the tower, from which they were taken, they were shot and killed.

12. Considerable confusion exists in the testimony as to the particulars of this shooting; however Wells, German interrogator for the 222 Infantry, states that he had lined these Germans up in double rank, preparatory to moving them out; that he saw no threatening gesture; but that he shot into them after some other American soldiers, whose identities are unknown, started shooting them.

13. Lt. Colonel Fellenz was entering the door of the tower at the time of this shooting, took no part in it and testified that he could not have stopped it.

18. It is obvious that the Americans present when the guards were shot at the tower labored under much excitement. However Wells could speak German fluently, he knew no shots had been fired at him in his attack on the tower, he had these prisoners lined up, he saw no threatening gesture or act. It is felt that his shooting into them was entirely unwarranted; the whole incident smacks of execution similar to the other incidents described in this report.

Captain Leland L. Loy, the Chaplain of the 3rd Battalion of the 157th Infantry Regiment of the 45th Thunderbird Division, may have been the American who led a prayer at the liberation of Dachau.

The original book about Dachau, written by the  American liberators and published in May 1945, described the Dachau gas chambers (plural) on page 52:

Then they entered the gas chamber. Over the entrance, in large black letters, was written “Brause Bad” (showers). There were about 15 shower heads suspended from the ceiling from which gas was then released.  There was one large gas chamber, capacity of which was 200, and five smaller gas chambers, capacity of each being 50. It took approximately 10 minutes for the execution. (There were actually only 4 “smaller gas chambers at Dachau.)

In the gas chamber with the sign “Brausebad,” as seen today, the shower heads are NOT suspended from the ceiling.  All of the shower heads have been stolen by tourists over the years and there are now 15 empty holes in the ceiling with NO PIPES.  However, tour guides at Dachau tell gullible tourists that the Dachau gas chamber was used.

In 2001, I went to the town of Dachau and stayed there for a week in a hotel.  At that time, Dachau was still a small, historic town, and I enjoyed my stay immensely. I asked the owner of the hotel which bus I should take to get to the former Dachau camp; she said she didn’t know, so I had to figure it out for myself. The town’s people seemed to be ignoring the former camp, and just living their lives in peace.

Catholic church in the town of Dachau

Today, I read in an article in The Independent, which said that young people from Munich are now moving to Dachau and the town has grown to be a city of 45,000 residents.

According to the article in The Independent, which you can read in full here, the town can never overcome its shame, due to the horror of the Dachau concentration camp, which had 800,000 visitors last year.

This quote is from the article in The Independent:

The horror of Dachau takes a little time to sink in. It hits home half way through the former camp’s permanent exhibition on Third Reich terror when visitors are confronted with a piece of slatted wooden furniture that resembles an innocuous child’s toboggan.

Closer inspection reveals that a 4ft-long “bull whip” is lying across the wooden slats. The toboggan, it turns out, is one of the concentration camp system’s notorious “whipping stools” that were used to ruthlessly inflict blood soaked punishment on hundreds of thousands of camp inmates during 12 years of Nazi rule.

Alfred Hübsch, a prisoner in Dachau from 1937 onwards, witnessed the whipping stool in action. His account is on display in the camp museum: “The prisoner’s screams could be heard everywhere,” he writes, “The delinquent had to count the strokes out loud. The numbers were blurted out in terrible pain so the tortured person would slur his words or misspeak. If that happened they would begin beating all over again,” he added.

The “whipping stools” were used for 12 years?  Who knew?

The photo below shows Rudolf Wolf, a former prisoner of the Dachau camp, demonstrating the whipping block during the American Military Tribunal proceedings, where the former SS men in the camp were put on trial.

Rudolf Wolf demonstrates the whipping table at Dachau trial

The photo below shows the whipping table on display in the Dachau Museum.

Photo of whipping table in the Dachau Museum

Notice that the “whipping block” which is on display in the Museum is a real whipping block, but the table that is being demonstrated by Rudolf Wolf during the AMT proceedings is an ordinary table.  The trial started in Noveber 1945, so why wasn’t the actual whipping block shown during the trial?

That is easily explained: All punishments at Dachau and at all the other concentration camps had to be approved by the WVHA economic office in Oranienburg, where Rudolf Hoess was a member of the staff after he was removed as the Commandant of Auschwitz in December 1943.

At the Nuremberg IMT, on April 15, 1946, Hoess testified that punishment on the whipping block was seldom used and that this punishment was discontinued in 1942 or 1943 because Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler had given a new order that the SS men were forbidden to strike the prisoners. Dr. Johannes Neuhäusler mentioned in his book entitled What was it like in the Concentration Camp at Dachau? that this order was given by Himmler in 1942.

When the American liberators arrived in 1945, they found no whipping table because this seldom-used punishment had not been used for three years.  Are visitors to the Dachau Museum told this?  No, of course not.

This quote is from the article in The Independent:

The whipping stool is merely an introduction to Dachau’s  regime of inconceivable cruelty. Its victims were tortured by “Pole hanging” – a system whereby inmates in groups of 50 were strung up by their hands with their arms tied behind their backs for hours, causing them excruciating pain.

Groups of 50 were strung up?  Did the Nazis take a photo of the pole hanging?  Indeed, they did.  The photo below was shown in the Dachau Museum for years, until it was finally taken down because it was a fake.

Still photo from a Soviet film shows “pole-hanging” punishment

The photograph above, which I took inside the old Dachau Museum in May 2001, shows a scene at Buchenwald that was created in 1958 for an East German DEFA film. (Source: H. Obenaus, “Das Foto vom Baumhängen: Ein Bild geht um die Welt,” in Stiftung Topographie des Terrors Berlin (ed.), Gedenkstätten-Rundbrief no. 68, Berlin, October 1995, pp. 3-8)

This fake photo was not included in the new Dachau Museum which opened in 2003, but all the tour guides at Dachau still dwell at length upon the hanging punishment.  I have not been to Dachau since 2008; perhaps the fake photo has been brought back.

But it gets worse.  This quote is from the article in The Independent:

[The prisoners] were locked in “standing cells” with no room to sit down or turn around for days on end. They were savaged by camp dogs, drowned, shot, worked to death or died from mass overcrowding and the successive outbreaks of disease which plagued the camp before it was finally liberated by American troops in April 1945. The soldiers found hundreds of “ sallow skeletons with large sad eyes”.

Ah, yes, the famous “standing cells.”  Where are they now?  The standing cells were torn down, and now there is only a photo of what they looked like. The photo is shown below.

A diagram of the standing cells in the Dachau bunker

Who tore down the standing cells at Dachau and why?  Did anyone take a photo of them before they were torn down?  Not that I know of.  The American liberators of Dachau found out about the standing cells from Eleanore Hodys, a prisoner who had been at Auschwitz, where she claimed that she had been confined to a “standing cell” for NINE WEEKS.  She also claimed that she had had an affair with Rudolf Hoess at Auschwitz.  Hoess had formerly been the Commandant at Dachau, so her story took up about a third of the book about Dachau, which was entitled Dachau Liberated, the Official Report.  Her story may have inspired the claim of standing cells at Dachau.

There was at least one American prisoner at Dachau when the camp was liberated.  What did he have to say about the standing cells, the whipping block and the pole hanging?  Did he write a book about the torture that he endured at Dachau?  Did he ever explain why he was not executed after he was caught, fighting with the French Resistance, in civilian clothes?

The American prisoner at Dachau, when the camp was liberated, was Rene Guiraud.

After being given intensive specialized training, Lt. Guiraud had been parachuted into Nazi-occupied France, along with a radio operator. His mission was to collect intelligence, harass German military units and occupation forces, sabotage critical war material facilities, and carry on other resistance activities. In other words, he was an illegal combatant, according to the Geneva Convention of 1929, and he could have been legally executed.

Guiraud had organized 1,500 guerrilla fighters and developed intelligence networks. During all this, Guiraud posed as a French citizen, wearing civilian clothing. He was captured and interrogated for two months by the Gestapo, but revealed nothing about his mission. After that, he was sent to Dachau where he participated in the camp resistance movement along with the captured British SOE men in the camp.

Two weeks after the liberation of the Dachau horror camp, Guirard “escaped” from the quarantined Dachau camp and went to Paris where he arrived in time to celebrate V-E day.  He never said a word about how he was treated badly at Dachau.

What about the five British SOE agents, who were prisoners in the Dachau camp when it was liberated?  What did they have to say about the horror at Dachau?

One of the prisoners at Dachau, when the camp was liberated, was Albert Guérisse, a British SOE agent from Belgium, who was hiding his identity by using the name Patrick O’Leary. He was one of five British SOE agents who had survived the Nazi concentration camps at Mauthausen in Austria and Natzweiler in Alsace before being transferred to Dachau.

When the American liberators arrived at the gate into the Dachau camp, Guérisse greeted Lt. William P. Walsh and 1st Lt. Jack Bushyhead of the 45th Infantry Division and took them on a tour of the camp, showing them the gas chamber and the ovens in the crematorium. In his book  entitled The Day of the Americans, Nerin E. Gun wrote that Patrick O’Leary (real name Albert Guérisse) was the leader of the International Committee of Dachau, which was in charge of the camp.

What did Guérisse tell the Americans about the horror of Dachau, other than the gas chamber?  Nothing.  He escaped to Paris, along with Rene Guiard.

The information about the Dachau camp, which is told to visitors today, came from the Jewish prisoners, most of whom had only been in the Dachau camp for a few weeks.  They had been evacuated from the sub-camps and brought to the main camp, so that the prisoners could be surrendered to the Americans.  It was the Jewish prisoners who testified at the American Military Tribunal, and wrote books about the horror of Dachau.

Visitors to Dachau today don’t want to hear about what it was really like at Dachau.  They want to see a “horror camp” and a gas chamber. The Dachau Memorial Site caters to the desire of the tourists; it does not tell the true story of what Dachau was really like.

Few tourists visit the historic town of Dachau, which was in existence before America was a country.

The Gable on the town hall in the historic town of Dachau

The photograph above shows a close-up of the emblem on the top of the old town hall. In the round window in the center of the picture, you can see a silver spur. A spur has been used in the Dachau town seal since as far back as 1374.  But who cares about that?  Tourists today only want to see the gas chamber at Dachau, not the historic buildings in the town.

You can see photos of the historic places in the town of Dachau on my website at http://www.scrapbookpages.com/DachauScrapbook/DachauTown/HistoricPlaces/index.html

Donald Burdick holds a photo which he took at Dachau, with a “liberated” German camera

The photo above shows Donald Burdick with a German 35 mm. Voigtländer camera around his neck, holding a photo of the Dachau death train, which he personally took on the day that the Dachau camp was liberated.

American soldiers liberated the Dachau concentration camp on April 29, 1945, but before that, they had the good sense to liberate some German cameras, so that they could photograph the atrocities committed by the Germans at Dachau.

I have enhanced the photo that he is holding, using Photo Shop.  My enhanced version is shown below.

Photo taken by Donald Burdick at Dachau shows body hanging out of train boxcar

I previously blogged about the bodies found on the Dachau death train here, and I included the photo below which shows the body that is hanging out of the train.

American soldiers pose beside the bodies of SS soldiers who were shot by Lt. William Walsh

So why am I blogging about this for the umteenth time?  This morning I read a news article on the Leigh Valley newspaper, The Morning Call.

This quote is from The Morning Call:

As Donald Burdick of Forks Township approached the Dachau concentration camp in Germany on the morning of April 29, 1945, he caught the scent something foul in the air. It was a hint of the gruesome scene he was about to stumble upon: about 25 or so railroad stock cars filled with decaying human corpses.

Burdick’s personal photos of what he saw that day as a soldier in the U.S. Army were on display Sunday as part of “The Legacy Exhibit, The Story of the Holocaust.” Initially created for display at area school libraries, the exhibit was open to the public for the first time at the Sigal Museum in Easton.

The interior of Nazi concentration camps, including the blood-stained walls of gas chambers and ash-filled crematory ovens, is captured in the photos of Burdick and others. There are also the ghostly images of prisoners — some alive, practically standing skeletons; others dead, stacked in piles.

Burdick recalled the liberation of Dachau to an audience of about 100 at The Legacy Exhibit’s opening ceremony.

I would love to see Burdick’s photo of the “blood-stained walls of gas chambers” at Dachau.  The walls of the homicidal gas chamber at Dachau are glazed brick.  It would have been so easy to wipe down the walls of the gas chamber before the Americans arrived.

The Dachau gas chamber had walls made of glazed brick.

So why did the stupid Germans leave blood on the walls of the Dachau gas chamber?  Maybe for the same reason that they shot four of their own SS men and put their bodies on the “Death Train,” so that the American liberators could take photos with their liberated Voitlander cameras.  (The body in Burdick’s photo was the body of an SS man, shot by Lt. William Walsh, BEFORE he saw the Dachau concentration camp.)

This quote is a continuation of the article about “The Legacy Exhibit, The Story of the Holocaust”:

The Legacy Exhibit is the brainchild of Marylou Lordi of Easton. She conceived it a couple years ago as a way to bring the lesson’s of the Holocaust to students at Easton High School.

With the help of the Holocaust Resource Center of the Jewish Federation of the Lehigh Valley, she began assembling artifacts, especially those with a local connection.

She said she wanted to make the history feel real for students by showing them that some of the people who lived it were their neighbors.

“Beyond that, we are trying to teach a larger lesson, that of standing up,” said Shari Spark, coordinator for the Holocaust Resource Center. “If you are not afraid of making a little bit of noise, injustice can stop. … The Holocaust is an example in the extreme of where that didn’t happen.”

After the exhibit’s initial showing at Easton High, it traveled to a dozen other school libraries. Over time, the number of artifacts grew through donations as word of the undertaking spread throughout the community.

“We let it evolve,” Lordi explained.

Burdick and others, including Jewish survivors of World War II, also have addressed assemblies and individual classes at the schools.

Following Burdick’s account, people filed into the room displaying the Legacy collection. Some stared at the photographs; others recoiled after a quick glance.

Also featured were a chronology of the Holocaust, vintage radio broadcasts and military uniforms.

Among those in attendance was Julia Ben-Asher, a senior at Lafayette College. She said she has been to numerous Holocaust memorials.

There was a time, long, long ago, when newspapers took pride in publishing “all the news fit to print.”  It was the policy of every newspaper to print both sides of every story.  Today’s journalists take pride in publishing lies.

The Morning Call newspaper should have mentioned that there are two sides to the Dachau story, and that there is some controversy about the Dachau liberation story, as told by Donald Burdick.

There is another article in The Morning Call which you can read here.

This quote is from the article cited in the link above:

That day in late April 1945, Burdick smelled something putrid as his 16th Field Artillery Observation Battalion moved through the countryside.
[...]
Burdick can’t pinpoint the date he entered Dachau, but his unit could have been among three U.S. Army divisions that liberated the camp on April 29, 1945 — the 42nd Infantry, 45th Infantry and 20th Armored. They found 30,000 survivors, most of them political prisoners. Jews made up the second largest group.

So Donald Burdick was with the 16th Field Artillery Observation Battalion?  It was probably several days after the camp was liberated on April 29th before he took his photos with a liberated camera.

Did Donald Burdick  see any of the 4,000 prisoners who were suffering from typhus at Dachau?  Maybe, but why should he mention that?  No one cares that there was a typhus epidemic at Dachau.  Students today only want to hear about the blood-stained walls of the gas chamber.

Several days ago, I wanted to answer a comment made by Ken Kelso on this post on another person’s blog. Ken commented on something that Brigitte Hoess, the granddaughter of Rudolf Hoess, said about him: “How can there be so many survivors if so many had been killed?’.

I think that Brigitte has asked a legitimate question.  There does seem to be a lot of Holocaust survivors, many of them still alive, 70 years after they escaped the gas chambers.  I previously blogged about Brigitte here.

Brigitte Hoess worked as a model when she was young

I am quoting Ken Kelso’s comment (which has now disappeared) in which he answers Brigitte’s question:

First the Nazis kept records of all the Jews and other civilians they murdered.
The fact she makes such a lying comment shows how evil this woman is.

Then she tries to make excuses for her genocidal father by saying he had no choice.
Wrong! Hoess had Jews slaughtered in the gas chamber because he was a sadist murderer.

Its also well known, Hoess had an affair with a female prisoner in Aushwitz and was afraid his wife would find out about her, so Hoess sent her to the gas chamber and had her murdered. Why did Hoess have this innocent woman murdered? That was his choice.
This shows how evil this sadist Hoess was.

Then she tries to blame the British for saying her Father admitted to murdering 1 million Jews, instead of the mass murderer her father was.
I hope this woman dies of cancer soon.
It will be one less evil person on this planet.

The female prisoner, with whom Rudolf Hoess had an affair, while he was the Commandant at Auschwitz, was Eleanore Hodys.  Hoess did NOT have her murdered.  On the contrary, Eleanore was transferred out of the Auschwitz camp, and Hoess lost his job as the result of having this affair.

Hoess was relieved of his duties as Commandant of Auschwitz-Birkenau complex and was sent to Oranienburg to replace Arthur Liebehenschel as the Senior Director of WVHA, the SS Economic Department.

On December 1, 1944, Liebehenschel became the new Commandant of Auschwitz, but only the Auschwitz I camp, not the whole Auschwitz-Birkenau complex.

Dr. Georg Konrad Morgen, an SS judge, who had been assigned to investigate corruption in the Auschwitz camp, allegedly learned of the affair and fired Hoess from his position as Commandant of Auschwitz-Birkenau because of this.

After Eleanor Hodys wound up at Dachau, she told her sad story to the American soldiers who liberated Dachau.  I quoted extensively from the story told by Eleanore Hodys on this blog post.

Purple triangle, worn by Jehovah’s Witnesses, shown in sculpture at Dachau

Glen Beck is shown in this YouTube video, as he explains why Jehovah’s Witnesses were put into concentration camps and forced to wear a purple triangle on their clothing to identify themselves.

Glen Beck was obviously confused because the German name for the Jehovah’s Witnesses, which was Bibelforscher, is translated as “Bible Student” in English.  The Nazis did NOT put people into concentration camps for studying the Bible.  You can read about the persecution of the Jehovah’s Witnesses on Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Jehovah%27s_Witnesses_in_Nazi_Germany

This news article, which you can read in full here,  explains how Glen Beck offended people in the audience when he talked about the triangles used to identify prisoners in the Nazi concentration camps:

This quote is from the news article:

As many people know, the Nazis used colored triangles to indicate what group a prisoner — who was likely to die — was from. Perhaps the most well-known is the pink triangle, which indicated the person whose prison uniform bore the patch was homosexual — or believed to be. An estimated 5,000–15,000 people wearing the Nazi’s pink triangle were murdered during the Holocaust.

“Does anybody know what the purple triangle was?,” Beck asked his audience. Someone yells, “Gay.”

“No, not gay — that was pink,” Beck responds.

The crowd laughs.

Did the mostly religious right Christian evangelist conservatives in Beck’s audience find the prospect of 15,000 gay people about to be murdered by Hitler’s thugs during the Holocaust to be amusing — enough so that they had to break out in laughter?

“It’s hard to know exactly what motivated each person in that room to laugh at that moment,” Sharona Coutts, Director of Investigations and Research at RH Reality Check writes in “Why Did ‘Values Voters’ Attendees Laugh About Gays Being Killed by Nazis?”

[quote from RH Reality Check] ”Was it because it seems funny that gay people were also murdered in the Nazi concentration camps? Was it because of the apparent absurdity, in their point of view, of confusing ‘legitimate’ victims of the Holocaust (Jews, Christians, people with disabilities) with those who they believe might really deserve to be killed? What part of the audience’s “values” made that reference to gay people seem so funny?”

“People with disabilities” were sent to “Nazi concentration camps”?  No, people with disabilities were sent to places like Hartheim Castle.

Beck also says, in the video, that the Nazis used a “black triangle” to designate “anarchists”.

According to information given at the Dachau Memorial Site, a black triangle was worn by the “work-shy” who were called “asocial.”

I previously blogged about the Nazis and homosexuals at http://furtherglory.wordpress.com/2013/08/08/hitler-started-with-the-gays-say-what/

Why did those evil Nazis discriminate against the innocent Jehovah’s Witnesses, who never did them any harm?

The main camp, where the Jehovah’s Witnesses were sent, was Sachsenhausen, which was near Berlin.  At the Sachsenhausen Memorial Site, there is a memorial stone in honor of a prisoner named August Dickman who was executed because he was a member of International Bible Students Association who refused to serve in the Germany army. The memorial stone says that he was a “conscientious objector.”  He was not executed because he was a Jehovah’s Witness, but rather, because he had refused to serve in the German Army.

In America, the Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Japanese internment camp prisoners, who refused to serve in the American army, were sent to federal prisons where they were forced to work at hard labor, but none were executed.

According to Rudolf Höss, who was an adjutant in the Sachsenhausen camp before he was transferred to Auschwitz, there were a large number of Jehovah’s Witnesses in the Sachsenhausen camp.

Rudolf Höss wrote in his memoir that the Jehovah’s Witnesses were sent to concentration camps, beginning in 1937, because they were “using religion to undermine the will of the people for military preparedness,” by recruiting others to their beliefs about not serving in the military.

Höss claimed that only those who were actively preaching against the state and recruiting others were imprisoned.

When World War II started, all concentration camp prisoners who were fit for military service were drafted. Höss wrote: “A large number of them (the Jehovah’s Witnesses) refused to serve in the military and were, therefore, sentenced to death by Himmler as draft dodgers.” Those who were willing to renounce their ideas against the military, or to serve in the army, were released.

The German hardened criminals (Schwehrverbrecher), who were sent to concentration camps, wore green triangles, but they are not represented in the Dachau sculpture.

Triangle sculpture at Dachau Memorial Site

In July 1936, just before the Olympics started in Berlin, 120 homeless bums were picked up off the streets and brought to Dachau. They were designated as “work-shy” and given black triangles, but, as you can see in the photo above, they are not honored in the sculpture.

Homosexuals, arrested under Paragraph 175 of the German Penal Code, wore pink triangles, but they were not honored at the Dachau Memorial Site until just recently.

In 1937, a new rule was made that criminals who had been arrested twice and had served two sentences would have to spend at least six months in a concentration camp for “rehabilitation.” The homosexuals in the concentration camps were classified as criminals and did not receive reparations from the German government after the war.

Brown badges were worn by Gypsies, although the first Gypsies brought to Dachau wore a black triangle because they were men who had been arrested for being “work-shy.”

The prisoners used the badge colors to refer to their affiliation. The Communists were the reds and their rivals, the German criminals, were the greens.

A bar over the top of the triangle meant that an inmate was a second-timer, or a prisoner who had served time in the camp, been released, and had then been arrested again; the second time they would be in the punishment block and would be treated more harshly.

The circles in the sculpture represent the circles that were worn below the triangle by prisoners who were assigned to the camp penal colony. These prisoners were assigned to the hardest work in the camps, usually to the rock quarries or the gravel pits. At Dachau, the gravel pit was where the Carmelite convent now stands.

The YouTube video below (scroll down) shows soldiers in the 45th Infantry Division of the US Army, who were the first liberators to arrive at the Dachau concentration camp on April 29, 1945.  The first man to speak is Lt. Col. Felix L. Sparks; then Lt. William P. Walsh speaks during the video at 1:43 minutes to 2:41 minutes. At 3:49 in the video, the photo below is shown, but the photo is not identified.

At 8:44 minutes in the video, Lt. Walsh describes a handsome German guy, who comes out “covered with Red Cross shields and white flags.” Lt. Walsh laughs, as he says that this German guy “looks like Howdy Doody” with all of his Red Cross shields.

At 9:32 in the video, Lt. Walsh says that the German soldier “jumped up into a box car” on the train parked outside the Dachau camp.  He doesn’t say why this German soldier jumps into the box car, nor does he say that he personally shot this man, who had surrendered while carrying a white flag.

What was the name of this German soldier, who surrendered to Lt. Walsh, carrying a white flag of surrender?  I previously blogged here about a German soldier who was killed after he surrendered.

At 14:00 in the video, Lt. Walsh begins to speak about the Germans who “died in defense of Dachau.”  He uses this phrase three or four times.  To Lt. William Walsh, when an enemy soldier surrenders, carrying a white flag, he is volunteering to “die in defense” of the military garrison where he is stationed.

The embedding of the YouTube video has been disabled but you can still watch the video on YouTube.  Apparently, someone has objected to my showing of this video on my blog.

I previously blogged about the “Dachau Massacre” at http://furtherglory.wordpress.com/2013/04/27/dachau-liberation-reprisals-another-term-for-the-dachau-massacre/

“brick path” leads to the Dachau concentration camp from the SS garrison in the background

At 7:16 minutes on the YouTube video, an American veteran says that he “walked down a brick path” [after leaving the SS garrison] and he saw a “big, red brick building” at Dachau [which was outside the concentration camp].

At 7:45 minutes, he says that he saw “big vents in the ceiling and gas jets on the wall.”  As he says this, we see a photo of the gas chamber as it looks now, not the way it looked when the American soldiers first saw it.  At this point, the veteran says “Christ, I’m in the gas chamber.”  However, he says that he “didn’t know until he had been in there five minutes.”

“red brick building” which 45th Division soldiers saw at Dachau was the gas chamber building

“gas jets” on the wall of the Dachau gas chamber

Close-up of “gas vent” on the wall of the Dachau gas chamber

The two photos above show what an American soldier in the 45th Infantry Division of the US Army allegedly saw at Dachau on the day that the camp was liberated.  This is very important testimony, as it proves that the gas chamber, as seen today, was exactly like this on April 29, 1945 and it was not remodeled by the Americans.

So why would anyone request that the embedding of the video be disabled?  This video, with the photos of the gas chamber, proves that the American soldiers did the right thing when they killed German POWs with their hands in the air after they had surrendered the camp.

Near the end of the video, at 13.26 minutes, Lt. William Walsh speaks again. Regarding the Dachau massacre, when German soldiers were killed with their hands in the air, he says “maybe it wasn’t a legitimate fight.”  He probably means that a “legitimate fight” is when enemy soldiers are killed on the battlefield, not shooting POWs, who have surrendered and have their hands in the air.

On the video, Lt. Walsh literally cannot say one God damned sentence without cursing.  At the very end, he says “everyone who died in defense of Dachau knew why [they were killed]“.  However, he does say, at one point, “When I go to hell, with the rest of the SS….”  To his credit, Lt. Walsh did imply that he was a war criminal, no better than the SS soldiers, and he admitted that he was going to Hell “with the rest of the SS…”

The first time that I visited Dachau in 1997, there was no place to eat, and bringing food inside the camp was forbidden.  At that time, there was a McDonald’s restaurant about a mile from the camp, and there was severe criticism of a sign, fairly close to the Memorial Site, advertising McDonald’s.  It was considered very disrespectful to even think of food, while visiting a place where Jews had been killed.

I visited Dachau several times after that.  On my visits, the entrance into the camp was not through the Arbeit macht Frei gate, but though a hole in the fence on the opposite side of the camp.  I have not been back to the Dachau Memorial Site since 2007.

Tourist entrance into Dachau many years ago

When I visited the camp in 2007, construction had just begun on a new visitor’s center at the new entrance on the opposite side of the camp.

Entrance path into Dachau memorial site in 2007

Construction of new Dachau visitor’s center began in 2007

The photo above shows the beginning of the construction of a visitor’s center, which includes a bookstore and a cafeteria.  The building in the background is located in the former SS garrison and training camp that is right next to the former concentration camp.

Today, visitors to the Dachau Memorial Site are told by tour guides that the SS garrison was a place where the SS soldiers were trained  in torture and abuse of the prisoners next door.

This quote is from another blogger:

Much of the [Dachau] camp (and the part we couldn’t see) was used to train the Nazis in the art of torture. Most of those Nazis worked closely with Hitler and many went on to run Auschwitz. Now the buildings are privately owned and used for the Bavarian Riot Police Academy. (Or something like that. Kind of alarming.) It really bothered me that it was a school for Nazis. Literally. And in the old shower room there are many displays and signs explaining what went on. The most disturbing sign talked about how many different languages were spoken, but said that the only language needed to communicate was that of fear.

Since 2007, visitors to Dachau have been able to see some of the buildings inside the former SS garrison, where Nazis were trained to torture the prisoners in the camp, according to the tour guides.

Looking into the former SS camp, next door to the Dachau Memorial Site

Dachau entrance sign put up in 2009

Visitor’s Center at Dachau was opened in 2009

Entrance into Dachau visitor’s center

If Hitler had a grave, he would be turning over in it, at the thought of the construction shown in the photo above.  Hitler was an artist, who had once thought of becoming an architect. The first thing that tour guides at Dachau should explain to tourists is that this building is an example of why Hitler wanted the Jews out of Germany.

Dachau visitor’s center has opening in the roof

This quote is from the blogger who took a tour of Dachau after the new visitor’s center was built:

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 [of the dead bodies outside the gas chamber] posted right there.

So it seems that the tour guides at Dachau are telling students at least part of the story.  The people who were killed in the gas chambers at Dachau did in fact come from other camps.  But why?

Were prisoners brought from other camps to Dachau because the “other camps” didn’t have a gas chamber?  No, they were brought to the main Dachau camp to take a shower and have their clothes disinfected before going on to a sub-camp of Dachau. These people had originally been in Auschwitz, but were brought back to Germany when the Auschwitz camp was abandoned in January 1945.  The “gas chamber” at Dachau is the former shower room, which was changed into a gas chamber by the American liberators of the camp.

I wrote about the newly constructed gas chamber at Dachau that was shown shown in a film at the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal at http://furtherglory.wordpress.com/2010/11/19/proof-of-the-nazi-gas-chambers-given-at-the-nuremberg-imt-on-nov-29-1945/

Why do tour guides at Dachau tell visitors about the “Dachau gas chamber” at all?  It is because young students want to get their money’s worth when they pay for a tour to the camp.  They don’t want to hear that Dachau was mostly a camp for political prisoners and that there was no gas chamber.  They certainly don’t want to hear that the “gas chamber” was constructed by the American liberators.  In Germany, that would be a crime, punishable by 5 years in prison.

According to an article in the news yesterday, a former SS soldier, who is accused of being a war criminal, is being given a pass because, at the age of 94, he has signs of dementia.  This man would have trouble understanding the charges against him, even if he was sound of mind.

According to the news article, 94-year-old Hans Lipschis was set to be charged with being an accessory to thousands of murders.  Say what?  Hans was a cook. Did he personally poison thousands of Jews?  No, that was not his crime.

The news article does not explain that Hans Lipschis was scheduled to be tried on a charge of “common design” or as it is currently called, the Demjanjuk principle.

John Demjanjuk lying on a stretcher in a German courtroom

Common design was the name of an ex-post-facto law, that was dreamed up, as a charge under which the SS men who worked, in any position, in a concentration camp, could be tried as war criminals, even if they had done nothing wrong.  You can read about the “common design” charge, which was first used by the American Military Tribunal at Dachau, on my website here.  “Common Design” was also used at the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal.

This quote is from the news article:

Germany is in a last push to try to convict former guards at Nazi concentration camps after a historic change in stance by the courts. Previously it was necessary to bring witness evidence of a physical killing. Now, the fact of working at a camp proves guilt.

Prosecutors argue that whatever Lipschis did at Auschwitz, it helped to enable thousands of Holocaust murders by the guards as a group.

Last month, Germany’s war-crimes investigation unit asked regional prosecutors to arrest and try 30 other former guards on similar charges.

Lipschis was arrested May 6 and has been held since in a jail near Stuttgart.

The Ellwangen court based its ruling on Lipschis’ demeanor at court hearings and a psychiatrist’s report that said his powers of concentration and short-term memory were significantly reduced, with ups and downs day by day. Under stress, he became disoriented.

Lipschis, who was recruited during the war as an auxiliary by the SS, the security arm of the Nazi party, has not denied to reporters being at Auschwitz. He has contended he was assigned to the kitchen.

The indictment said he was part of the guard corps there between 1941 and 1943, a period when 12 trainloads of prisoners with thousands of people on board arrived as Nazi Germany killed Jewish people on a massive scale.

The SS routinely selected any of the new arrivals it considered incapable of work and killed them immediately in gas chambers.

As a displaced person after the war, Lipschis first lived in Germany, then obtained entry to the United States in 1956 and lived in Chicago. His U.S. citizenship was later revoked and he was expelled back to Germany in 1982 and settled in the small town of Aalen.

The photo below shows Friedrich Wetzel, as he is sentenced to death for the crime of being a supply officer at Dachau.

Friedrich Wetzel was sentenced to death by the American Military Tribunal, on a charge of “common design.” because he was a supply officer in the Dachau camp

Friedrich Wetzel, shown in the photo above, was a pathetic, mild-mannered man who wouldn’t hurt a fly; he was the supply officer in the camp and had not personally committed any atrocities. In the defense closing argument on December 12, 1945, Lt. Col. Douglas Bates argued against the concept of “common design.” Bates said the following, with regard to Friedrich Wetzel, as quoted from the trial transcript:

“And a new definition of murder has been introduced along with common design. This new principle of law says “I am given food and told to feed these people. The food is inadequate. I feed them with it, and they die of starvation. I am guilty of murder.” Germany was fighting a war she had lost six months before. All internal business had completely broken down. I presume people like Filleboeck and Wetzel should have reenacted the miracle of Galilee, where five loaves and fishes fed a multitude.”

When will this madness end?  Never!  The Jews can never get enough revenge for the Holocaust.  The German people are just trying to protect themselves.

Every morning, when I check my blog stats, I look to see what search terms people have used to find my blog.  This morning, I saw that someone had searched on “noor inayat khan monument Dachau.”

There is a plaque on the wall of the crematorium at Dachau, which is shown in my photo below, but I didn’t know, until now, that there is a monument to Noor Inayat Khan at Dachau.  The monument must have been put up some time after May 2007, which was the last time that I saw the Dachau Memorial Site on the grounds of the former Dachau concentation camp.

But why is there a monument ONLY to Noor Inayat Khan at Dachau?  There were FOUR British SOE agents who were executed at Dachau.  Why do the other three get no respect?  I previously blogged about the execution of Noor Inayat Khan at http://furtherglory.wordpress.com/2011/02/21/update-on-the-execution-of-noor-inayat-khan-at-dachau/

Plaque on wall of Dachau crematorium in honor of 4 British SOE agents

I did a google search on “noor inayat khan monument dachau” and found a photo of a plaque on Wikipedia commons, which is shown below.   I also found an entry on Wikipedia for the British Soe agents who were executed at Dachau, which also showed the photo below, that was taken on 12 July 2007.

Plaque in honor of Noor Inayat Khan in “Dachau Memorial Hall”

The last time that I was at the Dachau Memorial Site, it was on two separate days in May 2007.  Apparently this “monument” was put up, in the “Dachau Memorial Hall,” sometime between May and July, 2007.  I did not see the “Dachau Memorial Hall” when I visited in May.  I didn’t even know that such a thing existed.  Someone please tell me where “the Dachau Memorial Hall” is located.

The Dachau Museum is located in this building

The museum at Dachau is located in the large building, shown in the photo above, but where is the “Dachau Memorial Hall”?  I have been to Dachau on at least 10 separate days, and I never saw the “Dachau Memorial Hall.”

Wikipedia has the following information about Noor Inayat Khan:

On 11 September 1944, Noor and three other SOE agents from Karlsruhe prison, Yolande Beekman, Eliane Plewman and Madeleine Damerment, were moved to the Dachau Concentration Camp. In the early hours of the morning of 13 September 1944, the four women were executed by a shot to the head. Their bodies were immediately burned in the crematorium. An anonymous Dutch prisoner emerging in 1958 contended that Noor was cruelly beaten by a high-ranking SS officer named Wilhelm Ruppert before being shot from behind.[13]

The source for this information is this: Basu, Shrabani Spy Princess: The Life of Noor Inayat Khan” Sutton Publishing, 2006

I have written about the alleged death of four British SOE agents at Dachau on my website at http://www.scrapbookpages.com/DachauScrapbook/BritishSOEagents.html

I have written about Noor Inayat Khan on my website at http://www.scrapbookpages.com/DachauScrapbook/BritishSOEagents01.html

A reader of my blog provided a link to a page, captured by the “wayback machine,” which shows what a famous Dachau website looked like years ago.  You can see it for yourself at https://web.archive.org/web/20050311091556/http://www.holocaust-history.org/dachau-gas-chambers/

The website, shown in the link, was one of the first websites about Dachau, if not THE first.

This quote is from an “essay” written by Harry W. Mazal OBE, which was published, many years ago, on the website, cited above:

A larger room adjacent to the four disinfestation chambers is also a gas chamber but this one was designed specifically for homicidal purposes. Any doubts that this chamber is a gas chamber are rapidly dispelled upon viewing the exhaust vents on the ceiling of the room <photo 31>, the exhaust chimney on the roof <photo 32>, and the metal doors that are identical in design to those used by the disinfestation gas chambers <photo 33> <photo 34>. It would appear that the fake shower heads on the ceiling of the chamber <photo 35>, the sign over the door stating Brausebad (shower room) <photo 36> and the smooth brick finish simulating tiling (see <photo 41> below) were part of an elaborate ploy to make the victims believe they were going to take a bath after having deposited their clothes in the passageway connecting the disinfestation chambers with the homicidal chamber.

Most people have never had the opportunity to see a real homicidal gas chamber, which was used to execute condemned criminals.  I am from Missouri, one of the few places which has a real gas chamber, which I saw when I was about 12 years old.

Mazal’s photo 32, which shows “the exhaust chimney on the roof” is shown below.

Harry Mazal’s photo of the exhaust pipe on the roof of  gas chamber

40 ft. pipe on the roof of the Missouri gas chamber

This quote is also from Harry Hazal’s website:

The question arises of the difference between the method of dispensing of Zyklon-B to the disinfestation chambers and to the extermination chamber. Quite simply: the exposure time and concentration of hydrogen cyanide gas for killing insects is considerably higher than that which is needed to kill humans. According to the manufacturers of the product, it only requires 0.3 grams per cubic meter to kill human beings, whereas concentrations of up to 10 grams per cubic meter were routinely employed to destroy insects. 22 The relative ease with which it is possible to kill humans with low concentrations of hydrogen cyanide makes it simpler and less expensive to use the drawer-like bins in the homicidal chamber rather than to use the costly Degesch dispensers. Additionally, the bins would allow for other volatile poisons to be employed as suggested by Rascher in his letter to Himmler.

The photo below shows “the drawer-like bins” mentioned by Mazal on his website.

photo 39 on Harry Hazal’s website shows the “drawer-like bins” used to put the gas pellets into the Dachau gas chamber (photo taken by Daniel Karen)

The original caption on the photo above: “Close-up view of bin-like drawer designed to introduce lethal poisons into the homicidal chamber. Note hinges on bottom allowing the device to rock in or out. (Photo by Dr. Daniel Keren.)”

To his credit, Harry Mazal quotes from a small book written by Bishop Neuhäusler, which was first published in June 1960:

Bishop Neuhäusler, for example, states:

Also behind the wire fence was the camp crematorium. At first it was housed in a wooden barrack, later in a stone building built by Polish Catholic priests, to whom the building trade had been taught. This crematorium was located in a small forest on the west side quite close to the camp. The prevailing wind was from the west and consequently the smell of burning corpses filled the camp, reminding of their approaching end and adding immeasurably to their despair.

With the new crematorium a gas chamber was also connected. The whole construction of the crematorium with its gas chamber was completed in 1943. It contained an ‘undressing room’, a ‘shower bath’, and a ‘mortuary’. The showers were metal traps which had no pipelines for a supply of poisonous gas. This gas chamber was never set in action in Dachau. Only the dead were brought to the crematorium for ‘burning’, no living for ‘gassing’. 25

The quote above is from page 17 of a small 82 page booklet by Dr. Johannes Neuhäusler, which I purchased at the Dachau Memorial Site in 2001.  It was the 2000 edition of his booklet entitled “What was it like in the Concentration Camp at Dachau? An Attempt to Come Closer to the Truth”

Dr. Neuhäusler was an Auxiliary Bishop of Munich.  I wrote about him and the other Catholic priests, who were prisoners at Dachau at http://www.scrapbookpages.com/DachauScrapbook/KZDachau/DachauLife3.html

After writing that “no living” prisoners were brought to the crematorium “for gassing,” Dr. Neuhäusler went on to say, in his booklet, that prisoners at Dachau were taken to Hartheim Castle near Linz, Austria, to be gassed.  You can read about the gas chamber at Hartheim Castle on my website at http://www.scrapbookpages.com/Hartheim/gaschamber02.html

When I visited Dachau for the first time in 1997, I spent a lot of time in the Dachau Museum, which has since been changed at least twice.  In the original Museum, I recall reading that sick prisoners were sent to Hartheim Castle to be gassed to death, but first a doctor had to sign the order for the prisoner to be sent to Hartheim, giving the cause of the fatal illness that warranted a merciful death for the prisoner.

The fact that prisoners from Dachau were sent to Hartheim to be gassed indicates that there was no homicidal gas chamber at Dachau — until the shower room was converted into a gas chamber by the Americans who liberated Dachau.  I blogged about the Dachau gas chamber film that was shown at the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal at http://furtherglory.wordpress.com/2010/11/19/proof-of-the-nazi-gas-chambers-given-at-the-nuremberg-imt-on-nov-29-1945/

I have written about the Dachau gas chamber on my website at http://www.scrapbookpages.com/DachauScrapbook/GasChamber/history02.html

Harry Mazal is now deceased, but if he were still alive today, would he still claim that the shower room at Dachau was a homicidal gas chamber?  Tour guides at Dachau now tell gullible teenagers that the Dachau gas chamber was used, although not for “mass gassing.”

According to a news article in the Huffington Post, which you can read in full here, the USHMM in Washington, DC, has a new exhibit entitled “Some were neighbors: Collaboration and Complicity in the Holocaust.”

Entrance into the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

This quote is from the article in the Huffington Post:

As you enter the new exhibit at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., you see an image of lovely young girls dressed up for a dance class. Some of the girls are Jews and some are not, but you can’t tell which are which. In Kaunas (Kovno), Lithuania, in 1935-1936, their lives are intertwined.

Then you hear the woman’s voice. Baffled. Wondering. Three-quarters of a century later, her bewilderment is still with her. “We were friends, I thought.” Once a friend, now an enemy — how could it have happened?

“Some Were Neighbors: Collaboration and Complicity in the Holocaust,” the museum’s newest exhibit, is open for visitors through 2016 and is also accessible online. It is a pertinent place to visit as we observe International Holocaust Remembrance Day, which commemorates the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1945, on January 27.

For 20 years, the museum has helped visitors to ask themselves important questions. This exhibit is no exception. It provides an extraordinary range of information while expertly prodding visitors to engage in moral inquiry.

The new exhibit, inside the USHMM, is about non-Jews, living side by side with their Jewish neighbors in Kovno, Lithuania during World War II.  When the Nazis came, the Lithuanians turned on their neighbors, the Jews, and began beating them to death.  What did the Jews ever do to their neighbors to cause them to beat the Jews to death while German soldiers watched?

Famous photo of Lithuanian man standing  over the Jews that he has beaten to death

I previously blogged about the Lithuanians killing Jews at http://furtherglory.wordpress.com/2011/04/18/the-killing-of-the-jews-in-lithuania/

Jews were beaten to death by their neighbors in Kovno, Lithuania as German soldiers looked on

Why didn’t the Lithuanians stand up for their neighbors, and protect them from the Nazis?  By-standers in Lithuania were nothing new.  When did the non-Jews in any country ever stand up for their Jewish neighbors, and save them?

According to the International Jewish Encyclopedia, the Jews had been expelled 77 times before the Final Solution, beginning with their expulsion from Carthage in the year 250 AD and continuing up to 1919 when foreign Jews were expelled from the state of Bavaria, even before the Nazi party was established in Germany.

Major expulsions of the Jews in Europe occurred in England in 1290, France in 1306 and again in 1394, Switzerland in 1348, Hungary in 1349, Austria in 1422, Spain in 1492, Lithuania in 1495 and again in 1656, and Portugal in 1497. The International Jewish Encyclopedia also says that the Russian Jews were confined to a reservation called the Pale of Settlement in 1772.

After many of these expulsions, the Jews fled to Poland. The Polish people welcomed them, starting in the 14th century.

After the Nazis conquered Poland in 1939, they gained control of millions of Jews, who were the enemies of Fascism.  Bad Nazis!  They would not let the Jews live in peace, and fight against Germany as Resistance fighters.

The Final Solution was unique in that it was the first time that the Jews were expelled from all of Western Europe at the same time.

During World War II, there were 4,950 cities and towns in Europe in which the Jewish communities were destroyed by the Nazis, according to the Wannsee Museum in Germany.  Wannsee is the place where the Final Solution was planned.

This quote about the Kovno ghetto is from Wikipedia:

In the autumn of 1943, the SS assumed control of the ghetto and converted it into the Kovno concentration camp. The Jewish council’s role was drastically curtailed. The Nazis dispersed more than 3,500 Jews to subcamps where strict discipline governed all aspects of daily life. On October 26, 1943, the SS deported more than 2,700 people from the main camp. The SS sent those deemed fit to work to Vaivara concentration camp in Estonia, and deported surviving children and the elderly to Auschwitz.

On July 8, 1944, the Germans evacuated the camp, deporting most of the remaining Jews to the Dachau concentration camp in Germany or to the Stutthof camp, near Danzig, on the Baltic coast. Three weeks before the Soviet army arrived in Kovno, the Germans razed the ghetto to the ground with grenades and dynamite. As many as 2,000 people burned to death or were shot while trying to escape the burning ghetto. The Red Army occupied Kovno on August 1, 1944. Of Kovno’s few Jewish survivors, 500 had survived in forests or in a single bunker which had escaped detection during the final liquidation; the Germans evacuated an additional 2,500 to concentration camps in Germany.

[...]

The Kovno ghetto had several Jewish resistance groups. The resistance acquired arms, developed secret training areas in the ghetto, and established contact with Soviet partisans in the forests around Kovno.

In 1943, the General Jewish Fighting Organization (Yidishe Algemeyne Kamfs Organizatsye) was established, uniting the major resistance groups in the ghetto. Under this organization’s direction, some 300 ghetto fighters escaped from the Kovno ghetto to join Jewish partisan groups. About 70 died in action.

The Jewish council in Kovno actively supported the ghetto underground. Moreover, a number of the ghetto’s Jewish police participated in resistance activities. The Germans executed 34 members of the Jewish police for refusing to reveal specially constructed hiding places used by Jews in the ghetto.

In the last days of World War II, Lithuanian Jews were brought to the Dachau concentration  camp.  I wrote about a Lithunian survivor of Dachau on my website here:

This quote is from my website, scrapbookpages.com:

Mendel Rosenberg was born in 1929 in Lithuania. In 1940, the Russians took over Lithuania and it became part of the Communist Soviet Union; this was part of the secret agreement signed by the Nazis and the Russians before their joint invasion of Poland in September 1939 which was the start of World War II.

On June 22, 1941, Germany invaded the Soviet Union. Most of the Lithuanians welcomed the Germans as liberators, and a few days before the Germans arrived, those who supported the Nazis started killing the Jews. Lithuanian political prisoners were released from the NKVD prisons by the German invaders and allowed to join in the killing of the Communist Commissars and the Jewish members of the NKVD, which was the equivalent of the German Gestapo.

[...]

Thousands of Lithuanian Jews, including the Rosenberg family, were confined in the Siauliai Ghetto where they worked in factories, manufacturing goods for the Germans. In 1943, Rosenberg was sent to the Stuthoff concentration camp near the city formerly known as Danzig. Rosenberg’s mother remained at Stuthoff, but Rosenberg and his brother were transferred to the Dachau concentration camp.

[...]

In anticipation of the liberation of Dachau, 1,759 Jewish prisoners were put on a train on April 26th and sent toward the mountains in the South Tyrol. Three days later, the train stopped and the prisoners learned that the German guards had abandoned them; they had been saved by American troops.

Why did the Germans send Jewish prisoners out of Dachau before the camp was liberated?  To prevent them from attacking the German people after they were liberated!

There were towns in Poland where the Polish people turned on their Jewish neighbors, but blamed it on the Nazis.  I blogged about this at http://furtherglory.wordpress.com/2012/05/25/the-lopuchowo-forest-in-poland-where-2000-jews-were-executed-by-the-nazis-during-wwii/

This morning, I had to do some research on Dr. Konrad Morgen, the SS judge, who was mentioned in a comment on my blog. The person, who commented, found it strange that an SS judge would be given the task of investigating murder in the concentration camps, when the sole purpose of the camps was to murder the prisoners.

In my research, I read Wikipedia’s page on Dr. Morgan, where I found this quote:

Though [Dr. Morgen] discovered early on that the Final Solution of the Jewish problem through physical extermination was beyond his jurisdiction, and discovered no legal objections to large-scale, centrally-authorized anti-Jewish operations like Harvest Festival [the execution of Jews at Majdanek], Morgen went on to prosecute so many Nazi officers for individual violations that by April 1944, Himmler personally ordered him to restrain his cases.[4]

Nonetheless, [Dr. Morgen] went on to investigate Auschwitz camp commandant Rudolf Höss on charges of having “unlawful relations” with a beautiful Jewish woman prisoner, Eleanor Hodys; Höss was, for a time, removed from his command and these proceedings gained Hodys a brief stay of execution; sent to Berlin by Morgen, then transferred to Buchenwald, she was shot by the SS shortly before the end of the war.[5]

The source [5] for this information is this website: http://www.nizkor.org/hweb/camps/auschwitz/alphabet/judge.html

After Eleanor Hodys was “shot by the SS before the end of the war,” her ghost turned up at the Dachau camp, where she told her sad story to the American liberators of the camp.  Her testimony was included in the book, written by the liberators, entitled Dachau Liberated: The Official Report.

I blogged about the testimony of Eleanor Hodys, as given to the Americans at Dachau, on this blog post: http://furtherglory.wordpress.com/2010/12/27/more-stories-from-dachau-liberated-the-official-report/

I believe that the American liberators got the story of the standing cells from Eleanor Hodys, and that the claim that there were standing cells at Dachau is based on her story.  The alleged standing cells at Dachau are no longer in existence.

I also blogged about the sad story, told by Eleanor Hodys, at http://furtherglory.wordpress.com/2013/07/13/did-rudolf-hoess-the-commandant-of-auschwitz-rape-any-of-the-female-prisoners/

I have seen nothing, about Martin Zaidenstadt, the famous Dachau panhandler, in the news for many years, although I have searched and searched.  He does not have an entry on Wikipedia, which is strange, because a few years ago, he was a very famous person in the world of the Holocaustians.

My photo of Martin Zaidenstadt, May 1997

I previously blogged about him on this blog post:  http://furtherglory.wordpress.com/2010/03/12/martin-zaidenstadt-the-fake-holocaust-survivor-who-pan-handled-at-dachau/

If Zaidentadt is still alive, he is 103 years old now.  Just living to such an advanced age would make him famous, so why is there no news of him?

You can read about Martin Zaidenstadt in an article, written by Jewish revisionist Mark Weber, on this revisionist web site:  http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v19/v19n2p60_Weber.html

At one time, Martin Zaidenstadt was the most famous of all the fake Holocaust survivors, so why has there been no news of him for at least 4 years?  I could not find any photographs of him, except for the photo that I took on my first visit to Dachau.  My photo shows him reaching into his pocket for a business card, which he would give to tourists, and then ask for a donation.  If the donation was not enough money to please him, he would snatch the card out of the hand of the person who had stinted on their donation, as happened to me.

The movie entitled The Monuments Men is based on a book written by Robert M. Edsel, which was published in 2009. After the “Author’s Note” in the front of the book, there are several pages of photographs of “the Monuments Men,” arranged in alphabetical order.  The second photo shows “Private Harry Ettlinger, U.S. Seventh Army.” The text, accompanying the photo reads: “A German Jew, Ettlinger fled Nazi persecution in 1938 with his family.”

You can read a news article about Harry Ettlinger at http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/tv-movies/70-years-original-monuments-men-article-1.1597958  The photo below accompanies the article. Dimitri Leonidas, who plays Harry Ettlinger in the movie, is shown on the far left.

From left to right: Dimitri Leonidas, John Goodman, George Clooney, Matt Damon and Bob Balaban in “The Monuments Men”

Chapter 1 of Robert M. Edsel’s book is entitled “Out of Germany, Karlsruhe, Germany 1715 to 1938.”  The information in this chapter is about how “a Jewish congregation was established in [the city of ] Karlsruhe” in 1715.

In Chapter 1, we learn that, in 1800 “inhabitants of Germany became legally obligated to take a surname.” A Jew named Seligmann had emigrated to Karlsruhe from Ettlingen, a nearby town where his family had lived since 1600.  Seligmann took the surname Ettlinger; Harry Ettlinger is one of his descendents.

The purpose of Chapter 1, in Edsel’s book, is to establish that the Jews were Germans, who had a right to live in Germany.  The Nazis were wrong to persecute the Jews, who belonged in Germany. The Nazis were wrong to take the possessions of the Jews, especially the art that belonged to the Jews.

On page 10 of Edsel’s book, we learn that Harry Ettlinger’s maternal grandfather, Opa Oppenheimer, had an “art collection [which] contained almost two thousand prints, private ex libris bookplates and works by minor German Impressionists working in the late 1890s and early 1900s. One of the best was a print, made by a local artist, of the self-portrait by Rembrandt that hung in the Karlsruhe museum. [...] In 1933, [after Hitler came to power] the museum had barred entry to Jews.”

According to Edsel’s book, the Ettlinger family left Germany in 1938, arriving in New York on October 9, 1938.  Exactly one month later, the event known as the “night of broken glass” [Kristallnacht] occurred.

This quote is from Edsel’s book:

The Jewish men of Karlsruhe were rounded up and put in the nearby Dachau internment camp. [...] The magnificent hundred-year-old Konenstrasse Synagogue, where only weeks before Heinz Ludwig Chaim [Harry] Ettlinger had celebrated his bar mitzvah, was burned to the ground.  Harry Ettlinger was the last boy ever to have his bar mitzvah ceremony in the old synagogue of Karlsruhe.

But this story isn’t about the Kronenstrasse Synagogue, the internment camp at Dachau, or even the Holocaust against the Jews. It is about a different act of negation and aggression Hitler perpetrated on the people and nations of Europe: his war on culture. For when Private Harry Ettlinger, U.S. Army, finally returned to Karlsruhe, it wasn’t to search for his lost relatives or the remains of his community; it was to determine the fate of another aspect of his heritage stripped away by the Nazi regime: his grandfather’s beloved art collection. In the process he would discover, buried six hundred feet underground, something he had always known but never expected to see: the Rembrandt of Karlsruhe.

Harry Ettlinger looks at the picture that his grandfather owned

This quote is from pages 533 and 534, the last two pages in Edsel’s book:

… Harry learned another story about the mines in Heilbronn and Kochendorf.

In the Kochendorf mine, one or more chambers had been designed as secret manufacturing centers for the mass production of a crucial Nazi invention: the jet engine. [...] The physical work at the mine, such as the expansion of the underground chambers, had been performed by fifteen hundred Hungarian Jewish slave laborers sent from Auschwitz to Germany. In September 1944, the British bombed Heilbronn to smithereens… [...] As the roar of the planes retreated, a chant rose mysteriously from the black belly of the mine. [...] It was Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, and the Hungarian Jews were chanting the prayer of Kol Nidre.  [...] In March 1945, less than a month before the arrival of the Americans, the slave laborers were shipped to Dachau.  Most of them froze to death during the five-day journey. The others were sent directly to the gas chamber.

The Monuments Men movie should have stuck to the story in the book by the same name, and featured Harry Ettlinger, because the book was about the Jews who were persecuted by the Nazis and stripped of their possessions, then sent to the gas chamber at Dachau.

As for the statement, in Edsel’s book, that the Hungarian Jews were sent directly to the gas chamber at Dachau, here is what really happened: According to a book published by the US Seventh Army immediately after the war, entitled 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 Official Report says that these Jews were brought to Dachau to be executed and that they were gassed in the gas chamber disguised as a shower room and also in the four smaller gas chambers, which the staff at the Dachau Memorial Site now claims were delousing chambers.

By November 1945, it was known that the 29,138 Jews brought to Dachau from other camps between June 20, 1944 and November 23, 1944 had been transferred to the eleven Kaufering sub-camps of Dachau to work in munitions factories and had not been gassed in the five gas chambers at Dachau, as stated in the Official Army Report that was written within days after the camp was liberated.

Contrary to what is stated in Edsel’s book, the Hungarian Jews who were working in the mines in Germany were not sent to the gas chamber at Dachau.

A news article on Slate.com, headlined “How do German children learn about the Holocaust?” which you can read in full here describes how children in Germany today are taught about the Holocaust.

This quote is from the Slate article:

Learning about World War II and the Holocaust at school: Overall, I think we learned about this time period at least three times. The first time the Holocaust came up in detail was in grade three or four, at the age of 9 or 10. The whole topic had a weird fascination for me because it made sense of a lot of small things in German culture, and finally we learned all about it. At the same time, I was horrified. I couldn’t imagine how people could believe these screwed-up ideas and do such horrible things in the name of these ideas. But it was a horror like I have for the witch trials and stuff like that. I didn’t make the connection between the war my grandfather fought and World War II. Later, we went to the Dachau Concentration Camp (as most schools around Munich do), and it was interesting and informative but not really disturbing. In Germany, the whole idea of “your own people” is not encouraged, and there is not a big feeling of unity (except if it’s about football/soccer). This anonymous answer tells you more about that.

Note the mention of “witch trials.”  You can read about the witch trials in Germany on my website at http://www.scrapbookpages.com/Geseke/Witches.html

My two grandfathers did not fight in World War II; they were too old. My father fought in World War I. All four of my great-grandfathers fought in the Civil War, aka The War between the North and the South — on the side of the North.  When I was in school, we studied the Civil War, but not World War I or World War II.  In my humble opinion, German children should not be forced to study the Holocaust in elementary school.

I have been to the Dachau Memorial Site several times. This is the grounds of the former Dachau concentration camp. I have seen the German children walking around the former concentration camp, looking dazed and bewildered.

I took the photo below on my first trip to Dachau in 1997.  These German students have just seen the old crematorium at Dachau.

German teenagers visit Dachau crematorium

On another trip to Dachau in May 2007, I took the photo below which shows students walking past the location where the Dachau barracks once stood.

Students on a tour of the former Dachau concentration camp

The former Dachau concentration camp was not turned into a Memorial Site until 1965.

A visitor who had seen the former Dachau concentration camp in 1964 wrote this on his blog:

One evening I asked what I shouldn’t miss when in Munich. More than one fellow traveler told me to make sure I visited Dachau, which was not far to the north. The next morning I made my way to the Autobahn and hitchhiked north towards the infamous destination. Drivers who picked me up would ask where I was going. When I replied “Dachau”, the response was uniform; the conversation quieted to silence. In retrospect, the response shifted from awkward embarrassment to naked shame.

I had to walk the last 2 or 3 kilometers to the entrance, as it was far away from any settlement. There was no commerce or residence in the area. The day was very gray, and it was as if the whole countryside was sterile. As I approached, there was a very long border of high wire fence. Walking through the entrance I found no one in attendance. I moved in turn through all the buildings and the displays. I never found a soul the entire day, at least none that were living. The dead were extremely prominent. I recollect photos of bones covered by skin, of “scientific” experimentation by hypothermia, of long, unheated wooden buildings (still standing at the time) where the inmates slept and became infected with lice and typhus.

Few visitors bother to tour the town of Dachau. Those who do visit the town are still angry with the townspeople: One tourist wrote this about the town of Dachau on her blog:

I felt so many emotions today as I rode into town. I kept looking around at all the shops and beauty parlors and got angry. Why didn’t they burn this place to the ground and salt the earth?? Didn’t people know what went on here? I found out inside that when Dachau was liberated, the Americans marched the citizens of Dachau through to look at the piles of dead bodies and the living arrangements to see just what they had either been ignoring or were honestly unaware of.

The tour guides like to tell visitors about the day that German citizens from the town of Dachau were brought to the camp to see what they had “allowed to happen in their town.”  The citizens of the town were shown the gas chambers and told all about the death factory at Dachau, which they claimed they knew nothing about, even though people in the town worked in the factories at Dachau and prisoners from the camp were sent to work in the town at 12 different locations including a large meat processing plant.

American visitors are particularly impressed when they are told that the American soldiers forced the Germans to look at the dead bodies of the prisoners that had allegedly been gassed.

The following quote is from a blogger’s account of a visit to Dachau:

The only lighthearted moment of the whole day came when we found out what the U.S. forces did when they liberated Dachau. They forced the people who lived in Dachau to come to the camp, and view what was happening in the Dachau people’s back yard. There were still dead bodies piled up that had not been burned. The camp had run out of coal. That is such an American thing to do. Look, you f***ed up. This is what it looks like. You see it. See it? Don’t ever do this again. The worst thing about Dachau is that it shows how much worse the genocide was there. This is not to say that I don’t think that the situations in Serbia or Darfur are good, but they aren’t systematic. With the Nazis, it was not blind hatred and rage fueling rash slaughters of towns of people. It was a systematic destruction of a race. Propaganda and camps were involved. It was organized, and that makes it so much colder to think of.

Young German students, who are required to take a tour of a concentration camp, also arrive in groups, escorted by their teachers. They look very subdued as they listen to their teacher’s shameful account of the crimes committed by their great-grandparents.

Most students are apprehensive about visiting Dachau. They have studied the Holocaust in elementary school, and they arrive with preconceived notions. They are not disappointed; they learn that the Dachau concentration camp was even worse than they thought it was. Visiting the former camp gives them a feeling of satisfaction, knowing that they have seen the place where the world’s worst crimes were committed.

One visitor wrote the following on a blog:

Although it was a sad place it felt like something that had to be done and I am very glad I went. Like I said, it makes you really think about things like that and think how lucky you really are, it raises the hair on my arms just thinking that I set foot in a place where approximately 206,200 people were murdered without a second thought. It was definitely a good place to see.

Actually, there were 206,206 prisoners registered at Dachau during its 12 year history, and there were a few more than 6 people who were not murdered.

Most visitors to Dachau arrive in groups and are escorted by a tour guide, who instructs them in the horrors suffered by the Dachau prisoners.

The following quote is from a blog written by a visitor, whose tour guide, Steven, had researched Dachau for 15 years:

This was the prototype camp. It was here that the men who invented the idea of concentration camp and death camp turned their ideas to reality. They had a lust for cruelty. Even long after Hitler demanded an end to killing – the prisoners being needed for labor – the killing continued. And not in gas chambers. Dachau had them, but did not use them. The killing was done for sport. Guards could use any excuse they could invent to shoot someone. The most sickening thing was when a guard would take a prisoner to the camp boundary and throw their hat over the border. Should the prisoner fetch, they would be shot dead. Should they not fetch, they would be beaten either until dead, or until they would crawl battered and bloodied over the border hoping to be shot dead.

After a trip to Europe, which included a visit to Dachau, Naomi Spencer wrote this in an article for the Spring Arbor University newspaper:

On a rainy day, we go to Dachau concentration camp. While there, we run our hands across wooden bunk beds where emaciated bodies were stacked like cards. We walk through execution chambers where poison gasses streaming from showerheads ended the lives of human beings crowded like animals in cages; we see the nail marks on the walls. We see grass matted down from rivers of blood flowing out from human ovens.

The walls of the gas chamber are made of glazed brick and there were no fingernail scratches, as of May 2007 when I last visited, but they might have been added since then. The grass and flowers that formerly surrounded the building with the “human ovens” has been replaced with a field of coarse gravel but visitors see what they want to see, not what is there.

The Nazis kept meticulous records at the concentration camps, but not meticulous enough. According to a report made by the International Tracing Service of the Red Cross at Arolsen, Germany in 1977, there were 31,951 recorded deaths at the main Dachau camp during the 12 years that the camp was in existence. Today the staff at the Memorial Site tells visitors that 41,566 is a conservative estimate of the number of deaths at Dachau.

A visitor wrote, on her blog in July 2009, about what a tour guide named Alan told a student group regarding the number of deaths:

Upon arrival, our guide, Alan, gave us the background history of the camp. He told us that the numbers of people who died there were inaccurate, because Jews, Gypsies and old or weak prisoners were not counted in the death toll because they were not considered people. Also, the majority of bodies in the mass graves were not identifiable.

The “mass graves” are on a hill called Leitenberg, a few miles from the Dachau camp. Unidentified bodies found in the camp by the American liberators are buried there.

I could go and on about what visitors to Dachau are told,  but you get the idea.  Today, there is a sign at the Dachau Memorial Site which tells visitors that the gas chamber was used, although only to “murder individual prisoners and small groups here using poison gas.”

Sign at Dachau Memorial Site