History Talk

B. H. Cramer · Guest

The Liberation Of The
Camps - Facts To Consider
By Theodore J. O'Keefe
1-29-5

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. [1]

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."
[2] 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, [3] confirmed that "never
was a case of poison gas uncovered." [4]

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: [5]

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." [6]

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." [7] 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."
[8] 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. [9] 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. [10]
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." [11]

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." [12]

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." [13]

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." [14]

'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, who 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." [15] (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. [16]

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." [17]
Professional "Nazi hunter" Simon Wiesenthal stated in 1975 and again in 1993
that "there were no extermination camps on German soil." [18]

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." [19]

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.

Notes
1. John D. McCallum, Crime Doctor [a biography of Dr. Charles P. Larson]
(Mercer, Wash.: The Writing Works, 1978), pp. 44-46, 59, 69; See also: J.
Cobden,
"The Dachau Gas Chamber Myth," The Journal of Historical Review, March-April
1995, pp. 17-18.
2. Jane Floerchinger, "Concentration Camp Conditions Killed Most Inmates,
Doctor Says," The Wichita Eagle, April 1, 1980, p. 4C.
3. J. D. McCallum, Crime Doctor (1978), p. 46.
4. The Wichita Eagle, April 1, 1980, p. 4C.
5. John E. Gordon, "Louse-Borne Typhus Fever in the European Theater of
Operations, U.S. Army, 1945," in Forest Ray Moulton, editor, Rickettsial
Diseases
of Man (Washington, DC: American Academy for the Advancement of Science,
1948), pp. 16-27. Quoted in: Friedrich P. Berg, "Typhus and the Jews," The
Journal
of Historical Review, Winter 1988-89, pp. 444-447, and in Arthur Butz, The
Hoax of the Twentieth Century (IHR, 1993), pp. 46-47.
6. "Disease killed Nazis' prisoners, MD says," Toronto Star, Feb. 8, 1985,
p. A2. On Barton's similar testimony in a 1988 Toronto trial, see: Barbara
Kulaszka, ed., Did Six Million Really Die? (Toronto: Samisdat, 1992), pp.
175-180,
and, Robert Lenski, The Holocaust on Trial (1990), pp. 157-160, and, M.
Weber, "Bergen-Belsen Camp: The Suppressed Story," The Journal of Historical
Review
, May-June 1995, pp. 27, 30 (n. 30).
7. "Clay Explains Cut in Ilse Koch Term," The New York Times, Sept. 24,
1948, p. 3.
8. Interview with Lucius Clay, 1976, Official Proceeding of the George C.
Marshall Research Foundation. Quoted in M. Weber, "Buchenwald: Legend and
Reality," The Journal of Historical Review, Winter 1986-87 (Vol. 7, No. 4),
pp.
406-407.
9. International Military Tribunal (IMT), Trial of the Major War Criminals
Before the International Military Tribunal (Nuremberg: 1947-1949 ["blue
series"]), Vol. 20, pp. 489, 438.
10. Eugen Kogon, The Theory and Practice of Hell (New York: Berkley Books
[pb.], 1984), pp. 108-109. See also: "Punishment for Mistreating SS Camp
Prisoners," The Journal of Historical Review, Jan.-Feb. 1995, p. 33.
11. Nuremberg document NO-1523. Published in Trials of War Criminals Before
the Nuernberg Military Tribunal (NMT "green series"), Vol. 4, pp. 372-373.
12. Egon W. Fleck and Edward A. Tenenbaum, Buchenwald: A Preliminary Report,
US Army, 12th Army Group, April 24, 1945. National Archives, RG 331, SHAEF,
G-5, 17.11, Jacket 10, Box 151. Quoted in: M. Weber, "Buchenwald: Legend and
Reality," The Journal of Historical Review, Winter 1986-87, pp. 408-409.
13. Donald B. Robinson, "Communist Atrocities at Buchenwald," American
Mercury
, October 1946, pp. 397-404.
14. San Bernardino Sun-Telegram, March 13, 1966. Quoted in: James J. Martin,
The Man Who Invented 'Genocide' (IHR, 1984), pp. 110-111.
15. "Concentration Camp at Natzwiller [sic]," RG 331, Records of Allied
Operations and Occupation, SHAEF/G-5/2717, Modern Military, National
Archives
(Washington, DC). Quoted in: Robert H. Abzug, Inside the Vicious Heart (New
York:
Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 9-10, 181 (n. 5).
16. John Cobden, Dachau: Reality and Myth (IHR, 1994), pp. 25-29. See also:
The Journal of Historical Review, May-June 1993, pp. 9-11; The Journal of
Historical Review, March- April 1995, p. 16.
17. "Keine Vergasung in Dachau," Die Zeit (Hamburg), August 19, 1960.
Facsimile reprint, and English-language translation, in The Journal of
Historical
Review, May-June 1993, p. 12.
18. Letters in Books & Bookmen (London), April 1975, p. 5, and in The Stars
and Stripes (European edition), Jan. 24, 1993, p. 14. Wiesenthal's 1993
Stars
and Stripes letter is reprinted in facsimile in The Journal of Historical
Review
, May-June 1993, p. 10.
19. Memorial Site Concentration Camp Dachau. Leaflet published by the
International Dachau-Committee (Dachau, Germany), no date.
#2007

The original version of this revised and updated essay first appeared in The
Journal of Historical Review, July-August 1995 (Vol. 15, no. 4), pp. 18-23.

Theodore J. O'Keefe, educated at Harvard University, is the author of
numerous published articles, essays and reviews on historical and political
subjects. For some years he served as editor of The Journal of Historical
Review, which is published by the Institute for Historical Review.

RJ11 · Guest

In article <_LGdnewqRI7LE-DVnZ2dnUVZ_tfinZ2d@giganews.com>,
B. H. Cramer <Iyamhre@alltimes.yep> wrote:

(drivel snipped)

http://www.holocaust-history.org/~dkeren/camps/belsen/index.shtml

"That we sentence 1.2 million Jews to die of hunger should be
noted only marginally" -- Hans Frank, the Governor-General of the
"Generalgouvernement" (part of Nazi-occupied Poland), speaking about
the Jews under his jurisdiction, on 24 August 1942. Source: "Nazi
Conspiracy and Aggression", Vol. IV, page 900.

RJ.

Kurt Knoll · Guest

The Americans did also see the destruction of cities.The misery and death
bodies of civilians. But they are certainly not interested to show us the
for comparison. definitely thy do not want us to the all the facts but only
facts that can be used for manipulating others.
Kurt Knoll.

"B. H. Cramer" <Iyamhre@alltimes.yep> wrote in message
news:_LGdnewqRI7LE-DVnZ2dnUVZ_tfinZ2d@giganews.com...

TallHenry · Guest

In article <g5lsmj$31l$1@aioe.org>, ZULU <zulu@freetibet.cn> wrote:

RJ11 · Guest

In article <3c329446-b5e4-4617-a511-041043134a05@e53g2000hsa.googlegroups.com>,
Zulu <zulu@volcanomail.com> wrote: