Facts vs. Lies
Nothing has been more effective in establishing the authenticity
of the Holocaust in the minds of Americans than the terrible
scenes U.S. GIs discovered when they entered the German
concentration camps at the close of World War II.
At Dachau, Buchenwald, Dora, Mauthausen, and other work and
detention camps, horrified American 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 GI's crematory ovens, alleged gas
chambers, supposed implements of torture, even shrunken heads and
lampshades, gloves, and handbags purportedly made from skin
flayed from dead inmates.
U.S. government authorities, mindful that most 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 GI's had found
in the camps. Prominent newsmen and politicians were flown in to
see the harrowing evidence, while the U.S. Army Signal Corps
filmed and photographed the scenes for posterity. The 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 GI's found
was used, by way of films which 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, at Nuremberg
incorporated most, if not all, of the horror stories Americans
were told about Dachau, Buchenwald, and other places captured by
the U.S. 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.
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 Judge
Advocate General's Department. 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 U.S. Army prosecutors. (note 1)
Dr. Larson's findings? According to an interview he gave to an
American journalist in 1980, "What we've heard is that six
million Jews were exterminated. Part of that is a hoax."
(note 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," (note
3) informed Wichita Eagle reporter Jan Floerchinger
that "never was a case of poison gas uncovered." (note
4) Neither Dr. Larson nor any other forensic specialist has ever
been cited by any Holocaust historian to substantiate a single
case of death by poison gas, whether Zyklon-B or any other
variety.
If not by gassing, how did the unfortunate victims at Dachau,
Buchenwald, and Bergen-Belsen perish? Were they tortured to
death? 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 which 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 U.S. 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 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. (note 5)
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." (note 6) Dr. Barton further testified that on entering the camp he had credited stories of deliberate starvations but had 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.
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 profferred 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 U.S. 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." (note 7) In an interview General Clay gave
years later, he stated about the material for the infamous
lampshades: "Well, it turned out actually that is was goat
flesh. But at the trial it was still human flesh. It was almost
impossible for her to have gotten a fair trial." (note 8)
Ilse Koch hanged herself in a West 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 believers in the Jewish
Holocaust. 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
the camp staffs. According to Dr. Morgen's sworn testimony at
Nuremberg, he investigated 800 such cases, in which over 200
convictions resulted. (note 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.
In reality, while 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. (note 10) After all, the
camps were throughout most of the war important centers of
industrial activity. The good health and morale of the prisoners
was critical to the German war effort, as is evidenced by a 1942
order issued by SS-Brigadefuehrer Richard Gluecks, chief of the
office which controlled the concentration camps, which held camp
commanders "personally responsible for exhausting every
possibility to preserve the physical strength of the
detainees." (note 11)
U.S. 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 U.S.
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 U.S. 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." (note 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 which appeared in The American Mercury
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." (note 13)
Additional corroboration of inmate brutality has been provided by
Ellis E. Spackman, who, as Chief of Counter-Intelligence Arrests
and Detentions for the Seventh U.S. 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." (note
14)
On December 9, 1944 Col. Paul Kirk and Lt. Col. Edward J.
Gully inspected the German concentration camp at Natzweiler in
Alsace. They reported their findings to their superiors at the
headquarters of the U.S. 6th Army Group, which subsequently
forwarded Kirk and Gully's report to the War Crimes Division.
While, significantly, the full text of their report has never
been published, it has been revealed, by an author 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 claim it was
"allegedly used as a lethal gas chamber". (note 15)
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 which accompanied
official reports of alleged gas chambers at Dachau. At first, a
U.S. Army photo depicting a GI gazing mournfully 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 captured by the Allies. 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! All these things, we are told, were located in
what is now Poland, in areas captured by the Soviet Red Army and
off-limits to Western investigators. In 1960 Dr. Martin Broszat,
who is now director of the Munich-based Institute for
Contemporary History, which is funded by the West German
government to support the Holocaust story, wrote a letter to the
German weekly Die Zeit in which he stated categorically:
"Neither in Dachau nor in Bergen-Belsen nor in Buchenwald
were Jews or other prisoners gassed." (note 16) Professional
Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal wrote in 1975 that "there were
no extermination camps on German soil." (note 17) And Dachau
"gas chamber" No. 2, which was once presented to a
stunned and grieving world as a weapon which 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." (note 18)
More than forty years after American troops entered Dachau, Buchenwald, and the 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.
It is time that the government and the professional historians
revealed the facts about Dachau, Buchenwald, and the other camps.
It is time that they let the American public know how the inmates
died, and how they didn't die. It is time that the claims as to
mass murder by gassing were clarified and investigated in the
same manner as any other claims of murder are dealt with. 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 that other groups, including Germans, eastern Europeans, the
Roman Catholic hierarchy, and the wartime leadership of America
and Britain stop being scapegoated, 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 democratic
Republic have the facts about the camps, facts which they possess
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 which are deemed
by those in positions of power to be determinative in America's
foreign policy, in its educational policy, in its selection of
past events to be memorialized in our civic life. The alleged
facts of the Holocaust are today at issue all over the civilized
world: in Germany, in France, in Italy, in Britain, in the Low
Countries and Scandinavia, in Japan, across our border in Canada
and in the United States of America itself. 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, made public and patent 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, rather than on guns,
barbed wire, prisons, and lies.
The conclusions of the early U.S. Army investigations as to the truth about the wartime German concentration camps have since been corroborated by all subsequent investigators and can be summarized:
About the Author:
Theodore J. O'Keefe has published numerous articles on historical
and political subjects. He is a previous editor at the Institute
for Historical Review.
We acknowledge that the above article was made available
courtesy of the Institute for Historical Review
Post Office Box 2739
Newport Beach, California 92659 USA