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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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