by Theodore J. O'Keefe
Nothing has been more effective in establishing the authenticity of
the Holocaust story in the minds of Americans than the terrible scenes
US troops discovered when they entered German concentration camps at
the close of World War II.
At Dachau, Buchenwald, Dora, Mauthausen, and other work and detention
camps, horrified US infantrymen encountered heaps of dead and dying
inmates, emaciated and diseased. Survivors told them hair-raising
stories of torture and slaughter, and backed up their claims by
showing the GIs crematory ovens, alleged execution gas chambers,
supposed implements of torture, and even shrunken heads and
lampshades, gloves, and handbags purportedly made from skin flayed
from dead inmates.
US government authorities, mindful that many Americans who remembered
the atrocity stories fed them during World War I still doubted the
Allied propaganda directed against the Hitler regime, resolved to
"document" what the GIs had found in the camps. Prominent newsmen
and politicians were flown in to see the harrowing evidence, while
the US Army Signal Corps filmed and photographed the scenes for
posterity. Famous journalist Edward R. Murrow reported, in tones of
horror, but no longer of disbelief, what he had been told and shown,
and Dachau and
Buchenwald were branded on the hearts and minds of the American
populace as names of infamy unmatched in the sad and bloody history
of this planet.
For Americans, what was "discovered" at the camps -- the dead and the
diseased, the terrible stories of the inmates, all the props of
torture and terror -- became the basis not simply of a transitory
propaganda campaign but of the conviction that, yes, it was true: the
Germans did exterminate six million Jews, most of them in lethal gas
chambers.
What the GIs found was used, by way of films that were mandatory
viewing for the vanquished populace of Germany, to "re-educate" the
German people by destroying their national pride and their will to a
united, independent national state, imposing in their place
overwhelming feelings of collective guilt and political impotence.
And when the testimony, and the verdict, of the Nuremberg Tribunal
incorporated most, if not all, of the horror stories Americans were
told about
Dachau, Buchenwald, and other places captured by the US Army, the
Holocaust could pass for one of the most documented, one of the most
authenticated, one of the most proven historical episodes in the
human record.
A Different Reality
But it is known today that, very soon after the liberation of the
camps, American authorities were aware that the real story of the
camps was quite different from the one in which they were coaching
military public information officers, government spokesmen,
politicians, journalists, and other mouthpieces.
When American and British forces overran western and central Germany
in the spring of 1945, they were followed by troops charged with
discovering and securing any evidence of German war crimes.
Among them was Dr. Charles Larson, one of America's leading forensic
pathologists, who was assigned to the US Army's Judge Advocate
General's Department. As part of a US War Crimes Investigation Team,
Dr. Larson performed autopsies at Dachau and some twenty other German
camps, examining on some days more than 100 corpses. After his grim
work at Dachau, he was
questioned for three days by US Army prosecutors.
Dr. Larson's findings? In an 1980 newspaper interview he said: "What
we've heard is that six million Jews were exterminated. Part of that
is a hoax." And what part was the hoax? Dr. Larson, who told his
biographer that to his knowledge he "was the only forensic pathologist
on duty in the entire European Theater" of Allied military operations,
confirmed that "never was a case of poison gas uncovered."
Typhus, Not Poison Gas
If not by gassing, how did the unfortunate victims at Dachau,
Buchenwald and Bergen-Belsen perish? Were they tortured to death or
deliberately starved? The answers to these questions are known as
well.
As Dr. Larson and other Allied medical men discovered, the chief
cause of death at Dachau, Belsen and the other camps was disease,
above all typhus, an old and terrible scourge of mankind that until
recently flourished in places where populations were crowded together
in circumstances where public health measures were unknown or had
broken down. Such was the case in the overcrowded internment camps in
Germany at war's end, where, despite such measures as systematic
delousing, quarantine of the sick and cremation of the dead, the
virtual
collapse of Germany's food, transport, and public health systems led
to catastrophe.
Perhaps the most authoritative statement of the facts as to typhus and
mortality in the camps has been made by Dr. John E. Gordon, M.D.,
Ph.D., a professor of preventive medicine and epidemiology at the
Harvard University School of Public Health, who was with US forces in
Germany in 1945. Dr. Gordon reported in 1948 that "The outbreaks in
concentration camps and prisons made up the great bulk of typhus
infection encountered in Germany." Dr. Gordon summarized the causes
for the outbreaks as follows:
Germany in the spring months of April and May [1945] was an
astounding sight, a mixture of humanity travelling this way and that,
homeless, often hungry and carrying typhus with them ...Germany was in
chaos. The destruction of whole cities and the path left by advancing
armies produced a disruption of living conditions contributing to the
spread of the disease. Sanitation was low grade, public utilities were
seriously disrupted, food supply and food distribution was poor,
housing was inadequate and order and discipline were everywhere
lacking. Still more important, a shifting of populations was occurring
such as few countries and few times have experienced.
Dr. Gordon's findings are corroborated by Dr. Russell Barton, today a
psychiatrist of international repute, who entered Bergen-Belsen with
British forces as a young medical student in 1945. Barton, who
volunteered to care for the diseased survivors, testified under sworn
oath in a Toronto courtroom in 1985 that "Thousands of prisoners who
died at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp during World War II
weren't deliberately starved to death but died from a rash of
diseases."
Dr. Barton further testified that on entering the camp he had credited
stories of deliberate starvation but decided such stories were untrue
after inspecting the well equipped kitchens and the meticulously
maintained ledgers, dating back to 1942, of food cooked and dispensed
each day.
Despite noisily publicized claims and widespread popular notions to
the contrary, no researcher has been able to document a German policy
of extermination through starvation in the German camps.
No 'Human Skin' Lampshades
What of the ghoulish stories of concentration camp inmates skinned for
their tattoos, flayed to make lampshades and handbags, or other
artifacts? What of the innumerable "torture racks," "meathooks,"
whipping posts, gallows, and other tools of torment and death that are
reported to have abounded at every German camp? These allegations, and
even more grotesque ones proffered by Soviet prosecutors, found their
way into the record at Nuremberg.
The lampshade and tattooed-skin charges were made against Ilse Koch,
dubbed by journalists the "Bitch of Buchenwald," who was reported to
have furnished her house with objects manufactured from the tanned
hides of luckless inmates.
But General Lucius Clay, military governor of the US zone of occupied
Germany, who reviewed her case in 1948, told his superiors in
Washington: "There is no convincing evidence that she [Ilse Koch]
selected inmates for extermination in order to secure tattooed skins
or that she possessed any articles made of human skin." In an
interview General Clay gave years later, he stated about the material
for the infamous lampshades: "Well, it turned out actually that it was
goat flesh. But
at the trial it was still human flesh. It was almost impossible for
her to have gotten a fair trial." Ilse Koch hanged herself in a German
jail in 1967.
It would be tedious to itemize and refute the thousands of bizarre
claims as to Nazi atrocities. That there were instances of German
cruelty, however, is clear from the testimony of Dr. Konrad Morgen, a
legal investigator attached to the Reich Criminal Police, whose
statements on the witness stand at Nuremberg have never been
challenged by proponents of the Jewish Holocaust story. Dr. Morgen
informed the court that he had been given full authority by Heinrich
Himmler,
commander of Hitler's SS and the dread Gestapo, to enter any German
concentration camp and investigate instances of cruelty and corruption
on the part of camp personnel. As he explained in sworn testimony at
Nuremberg, Dr. Morgen investigated 800 such cases, resulting in more
than 200 convictions. Punishments included the death penalty for the
worst offenders, including Hermann Florstedt, commandant of Lublin
(Majdanek), and Karl Koch (Ilse's husband), commandant of Buchenwald.
While German camp commandants in certain cases did inflict physical
punishment, such acts had to be approved by authorities in Berlin, and
it was required that a camp physician first certify the good health of
the prisoner to be disciplined, and then be on hand at the actual
beating. After all, throughout most of the war the camps were
important centers of industrial activity. The good health and morale
of the prisoners was critical to the German war effort, as is
evidenced in a January 1943 order issued by SS General Richard Glücks,
chief of the office that supervised the
concentration camps. It held the camp commanders "personally
responsible for exhausting every possibility to preserve the physical
strength of the detainees." Camp Survivors: Merely Victims?
US Army investigators, working at Buchenwald and other camps, quickly
ascertained what was common knowledge among veteran inmates: that the
worst offenders, the cruelest denizens of the camps, were not the
guards but the prisoners themselves. Common criminals of the same
stripe as those who populate US prisons today committed many
villainies, particularly when they held positions of authority, and
fanatical Communists, highly organized to combat their many
political enemies among the inmates, eliminated their foes with
Stalinist ruthlessness. Two US Army investigators at Buchenwald, Egon
W. Fleck and Edward A. Tenenbaum, carefully investigated circumstances
in the camp before its liberation. In a detailed report submitted to
their superiors, they revealed, in the words of Alfred Toombs, their
commander, who wrote a preface to the report, "how the prisoners
themselves organized a deadly terror within the Nazi terror."
Fleck and Tenenbaum described the power exercised by criminals and
Communists as follows:
The trusties, who in time became almost exclusively Communist
Germans, had the power of life and death over all other inmates. They
could sentence a man or a group to almost certain death ... The
Communist trusties were directly responsible for a large part of the
brutalities at Buchenwald.
Colonel Donald B. Robinson, chief historian of the American military
government in Germany, summarized the Fleck-Tenenbaum report in an
article published in an American magazine shortly after the war.
Colonel Robinson wrote succinctly of the American investigators'
findings: "It appeared that the prisoners who agreed with the
Communists ate; those who didn't starved to death."
Additional corroboration of inmate brutality has been provided by
Ellis E. Spackman, who, as Chief of Counter-Intelligence Arrests and
Detentions for the US Seventh Army, was involved in the liberation of
Dachau. Spackman, later a professor of history at San Bernardino
Valley College in California, wrote in 1966 that at Dachau "the
prisoners were the actual instruments that inflicted the barbarities
on their fellow prisoners."
'Gas Chambers'
In December 1944 US Army officers Colonel Paul Kirk and Lt. Colonel
Edward J. Gully inspected the German concentration camp at
Struthof-Natzweiler in Alsace. They submitted their findings to their
superiors at the headquarters of the US 6th Army Group, which
subsequently forwarded their report to the US War Crimes Division.
While, significantly, the full text of their report has never been
published, it has been revealed, by a historian supportive of
Holocaust claims, that the two investigators were careful to
characterize equipment exhibited to them by French informants as a
"so-called lethal gas chamber," and to claim it was "allegedly used as
a lethal gas chamber." (Emphasis added)
Both the careful phraseology of the Natzweiler report, and its
effective suppression, stand in stark contrast to the credulity, the
confusion, and the blaring publicity that accompanied official reports
of alleged gas chambers at Dachau. At first, a US Army photo depicting
a GI gazing at a steel door marked with a skull and crossbones and the
German words for: "Caution! Gas! Mortal danger! Don't open!," was
identified as showing the murder weapon.
Later, however, it was evidently decided that the apparatus in
question was merely a standard delousing chamber for clothing, and
another alleged gas chamber, this one cunningly disguised as a shower
room, was exhibited to American congressmen and journalists as the
site where thousands breathed their last. While there exist numerous
reports in the press as to the operation of this second "gas chamber,"
no official report by trained Army investigators has yet surfaced to
reconcile such problems as the function of the shower heads: Were they
"dummies," or did lethal cyanide gas stream through them? (Each theory
has appreciable support in journalistic and
historiographical literature.)
As with Dachau, so with Buchenwald, Bergen-Belsen, and the other camps
liberated by the Allies in western Germany. There was no end of
propaganda about "gas chambers," "gas ovens," and the like, but so far
not a single detailed description of the murder weapon and its
function, not a single report of the kind that is mandatory for the
successful prosecution of any assault or murder case in America at
that time and today, has come to light.
Furthermore, a number of Holocaust authorities have now publicly
decreed that there were no gassings, no extermination camps in Germany
after all. (We are now told that "gassing" and "extermination" camps
were located exclusively in what is now Poland, in areas captured by
the Soviet Red Army and made off-limits to western investigators.)
Dr. Martin Broszat of the Munich-based Institute for Contemporary
History, which is funded by the German government, stated
categorically in a 1960 letter to the German weekly Die Zeit: "Neither
in Dachau nor in Bergen-Belsen nor in Buchenwald were Jews or other
prisoners gassed." Professional "Nazi hunter" Simon Wiesenthal stated
in 1975 and again in 1993 that "there were no
extermination camps on German soil."
Dachau "gas chamber" No. 2, which was once presented to a stunned and
grieving world as a weapon that claimed hundreds of thousands of
lives, is now described in the brochure issued to tourists at the
modern Dachau "memorial site" in these words: "This gas chamber,
camouflaged as a shower room, was not used."
The Propaganda Intensifies
More than 50 years after American troops entered Dachau, Buchenwald
and other German camps, and trained American investigators established
the facts as to what had gone on in them, the government in
Washington, the entertainment media in Hollywood, and the print media
in New York continue to churn out millions of words and images
annually on the horrors of the camps and the infamy of the Holocaust.
Despite the fact that, with the exception of the defeated Confederacy,
no enemy of America has ever so suffered so complete and devastating
defeat as did Germany in 1945, the mass media and the politicians and
bureaucrats behave as if Hitler, his troops, and his concentration
camps continue to exist in an eternal present, and our opinion makers
continue to distort, through ignorance or malice, the facts about the
camps.
Time for the Truth
It is time that the government and the professional historians reveal
the facts about Dachau, Buchenwald and the other camps. It is time
they let the American public know how the inmates died, and how they
didn't die. It is time that the claims of mass murder by gassing are
clarified and investigated in the same manner as any other claims of
murder. It is time that the free ride certain groups have enjoyed as
the result of unchallenged Holocaust claims be terminated, just as it
is time to end the scapegoating of other groups, including Germans,
eastern Europeans, the
Roman Catholic hierarchy, and the wartime leadership of America and
Britain, either for their alleged role in the Holocaust or their
supposed failure to stop it.
Above all, it is time that the citizens of this great Republic have
the facts about the camps, facts they have a right to know, a right
that is fundamental to the exercise of their authority and their will
in the governance of their country. As citizens and as taxpayers,
Americans of all ethnic backgrounds, of all faiths, have a basic right
and an overriding interest in determining the facts of incidents that
are deemed by those in positions of power to be significant in
determining America's foreign and educational policy, as well as its
selection of past events to be memorialized in our
civic life.
Today the alleged facts of the Holocaust are at issue all over the
civilized world. The truth will be decided only by recourse to the
facts, in the public forum: not by concealing the facts, denying the
truth, stonewalling reality. The truth will out, and it is time the
government of this country, and governments and international bodies
throughout the world, make public the evidence of what actually
transpired in the German concentration camps in the years 1933-1945,
so that we may put paid to the lies, without fear or favor, and carry
out the work of reconciliation and renewal that is and must be the
granite foundation of mutual tolerance between peoples and of a peace
based on justice.
Summary
The conclusions of the early US Army investigations as to the truth
about the wartime German concentration camps have since been
corroborated by all subsequent investigators and can be summarized:
1.The harrowing scenes of dead and dying inmates were not the result
of a German policy of "extermination," but rather the result of
epidemics of typhus and other disease brought about largely by the
effects of Allied aerial attacks.
2.Stories of Nazi supercriminals and sadists who turned Jews and
others into handbags and lampshades for their private profit or
amusement were sick lies or diseased fantasies; indeed, the German
authorities punished corruption and cruelty on the part of camp
commanders and guards.
3.On the other hand, portrayals of the newly liberated inmates as
saints and martyrs of Hitlerism were quite often very far from the
truth; indeed, most of the brutalities inflicted on camp detainees
were the work of their fellow prisoners, in contravention of German
policy and German orders.
4.The alleged homicidal showers and gas chambers were used either for
bathing camp inmates or delousing their clothes; the claim that they
were used to murder Jews or other human beings is a contemptible
fabrication. Orthodox historians and professional "Nazi-hunters" have
quietly dropped claims that inmates were gassed at Dachau, Buchenwald
and other camps in Germany. They continue, however, to keep silent
regarding the lies about Dachau and Buchenwald, as well as to evade an
open discussion of the evidence for homicidal gassing at Auschwitz and
the
other camps captured by the Soviets.
Institute For Historical Review
Post Office Box 2739
Newport Beach, California 92659
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