37 - 38 are treated together in this section

37. How did they die?
38. What is typhus?

Ernst Zündel Replies:
Rebuttal # 37-38:

This topic, too, has been covered previously and will merely be reviewed in
synopsis. A comprehensive source is given in Typhus and the Jews by Friedrich
Paul Berg, Liberty Bell Publications, 1989. We recommend that Nizkor not only
read it but post it.

Here is a very brief excerpt, starting on page
4:

"A standard feature of the Holocaust story is the reliance upon
photographs of thousands of dead bodies found in some of the German
concentration camps at the end of World War 2. For people who are unfamiliar
with the horrors of war, which includes most of us fortunately, those
photographs are more than sufficient proof of a genocidal policy on the part
of the German regime. . . The claims of the revisionists that the bodies were
the result of catastrophic epidemics of typhus, typhoid, tuberculosis,
dysentery, etc., are readily scoffed at as the foolish rantings of Nazi
apologists . . .

Perhaps the best discussion of conditions at the end
of World War 2 in Germany is by John E. Gordon, M.D., Ph.D., Professor of
Preventive Medicine and Epidemiology at the Harvard University of Public
Health. . . (T)he excepts which follow are not from someone who can be easily
branded as another pro-German revisionist. The following passages by Gordon
were published in 1948 by the American Association for the Advancement of
Science:

"The whole area seethed with foreign peoples, conscript
laborers moving this way and that and in all directions, hoping to reach their
homes, in search of food, seeking shelter. Most of the typhus was within this
group and they carried the disease with them. They moved along the highways
and in country lanes - they moved mostly on foot, halted, then gathered in
great camps of sometimes 15,000 or more, extemporized, of primitive
sanitation, crowded, and with all too little sense of order and cleanliness..
. wearied with the war, undernourished, poorly clothed and long inured to
sanitary underprivilege and low level hygiene, Add to this shifting population
the hundreds of released political prisoners, often heavily infested with
typhus . . rarely has a situation existed so conducive to the spread of
typhus.

Typhus fever in a stable population is bad enough. It has
demonstrated its potentialities in both war and peace. The Rhineland in those
days of March, 1945 could scarcely be believed by those who saw it - it is
beyond the appreciation of those who did not. It was Wild West, the hordes of
Genghis Khan, the Klondike gold rush, and Napoleon's retreat all rolled up
into one. Such was the typhus problem in the Rhineland . . ."

Revisionists have always maintained that Jews died by the same means and
causes as practically ALL civilians died during that horrible war - by
starvation, bombings, hardships due to destroyed housing and lack of fuel, and
rampant diseases caused by lack of medicine as a result of bombing and
overcrowding. An inordinate number of those who were in concentration camps died
from typhus. Typhus is spread by body lice. The Germans had no DDT. Zyklon B was
used instead to control the spread of disease. The idea was, believe it or not,
to SAVE lives.

According to Webster's Dictionary, typhus is an acute
infectious disease carried by lice. There are three types of louse that infest
humans. There is the head louse, the pubic louse (i.e. crabs), and the body
louse. Typhus is transmitted to humans through the body louse. It transmits more
easily where conditions are unsanitary and bodies are dirty.

That is the
short answer. A longer answer can be found by reading up on just how war played
out so horribly at the end of 1945.

The reason it is important to be
aware of typhus in relation to the Holocaust story is that it played a
devastating role in creating the scenes of human devastation recorded by the
Allied armies after they captured German labor-, prison-, and concentration
camps, particularly Dachau. It puts the Allied war-propaganda newsreels of the
concentration camps into their proper context. This topic can only be properly
understood and studied in depth if one studies the official US Bombing Survey,
conducted by the USA after Germany's defeat.

This massive study details
the numbers of hospitals, universities, laboratories, vitamin-producing chemical
factories, hospital and surgical supply companies destroyed in Germany, leading
to the widespread use of toilet paper as a substitute for cotton gauze or
bandages. With hygienic conditions at such a low point, typhus via lice spread
like wildfire. Typhus was nothing new; it had long been a scourge in eastern
Europe even during times of peace. During times of war, however, it became a
scourge beyond description.

Lice spread rapidly in unsanitary,
overcrowded situations and were difficult to control due to the vast movement of
troops, due to dislocation of civilians, destruction by war, streams of refugees
etc. Let's take just one example, Auschwitz.

During the Summer of 1942,
a typhus epidemic broke out at the German concentration and labor camp at
Auschwitz. Auschwitz was equipped with extensive hospital facilities, but the
extent of the epidemic quickly outstripped the resources available to combat it.
Large sections of the camp were put into quarantine. The staff of the camp
implemented a complex set of procedures to control the spread of lice and to
stop the epidemic. At its peak, the typhus epidemic at Auschwitz killed several
hundred prisoners every day and forced the SS, who operated the camp, to take
drastic action, since they themselves were in danger.

The regimen
implemented to fight the spread of typhus included the building of extensive
delousing facilities, particularly at the huge Auschwitz satellite camp called
Birkenau. In addition to the sauna building where incoming prisoners were
showered and had their heads shaved to remove nits (louse eggs), fumigation
chambers were built to delouse clothing and luggage with either steam or a
chemical fumigant called Zyklon-B. In addition to delousing personal items,
Zyklon-B was also used to systematically fumigate entire buildings at the camp
in a process that took several days to complete.

Even with these
procedures in place, the constant flow of thousands of prisoners and internee
laborers through Auschwitz and its sub-camps, the Germans had only limited
success in controlling the spread of typhus. Testifying to their inability to
control the disease, the SS build four crematory facilities at Birkenau during
1943 to dispose of the camp's dead, after it was discovered that dead and
conventionally buried typhus-infected cadavers poisoned the ground water and
spread the epidemic via the drinking water.

As Germany began to lose the
war, prison camps were evacuated ahead of the advancing Red Army and Allied
Armies in the West in late 1944 up to the end of the war in the spring of 1945.
(They could have left them to be "liberated" by the Reds, which would have
solved one problem! Ask Mr. Elie Wiesel why he decided to run with the
"exterminators" instead of waiting for the "liberators"!)

All of these
concentration camp inmates were crammed into the remaining German Altreich camps
such as Dachau, Bergen-Belsen etc. These concentration camps became extremely
overcrowded with yet more typhus brought by the new arrivals and causing yet
more dead. Berg has described these conditions:

". . . the clock had been turned back - in some respects, as far back as
the middle ages. By the winter and early spring of 1945, tens of millions of
people were fleeing into an area so small that, even in the best of times,
enough food could not be produced to sustain the normal population. Casualties
were in the millions. All major cities were in ruins. The fact that Germans
facing extinction in these circumstances neglected the health and nutrition of
many of their most bitter enemies in concentration camps should not be at all
surprising." (p. 10)

In addition, the German transport and production infrastructure was severely
damaged by Allied bombers and strafing fighters. The transport of supplies
became at first difficult and at the end impossible. It is worth mentioning also
that the Allies bombed the chemical factories producing Zyklon B, which was one
reason why more people died of typhus than might otherwise have been the case.
There is, in fact, correspondence from one camp commander in the archives
complaining that people died from a LACK of Zyklon B. There were also shortages
of railroad, cars, trucks, fuel, food and medicine for all of Germany, including
civilians and naturally also the concentration camps, as that country was
overrun by its enemies, who were closing in on all sides.

One
unavoidable result of Germany's desperate situation was the ever more rapid
spread of typhus and other diseases in the overcrowded and under-supplied German
prison camps. Fuel and capacity for the crematories ran out and the dead began
to accumulate in sheds, makeshift morgues, ultimately yards etc.. Even more
increased contagion was the result.

Add to that a passage from a recent
best-selling pilot book, Yeager: An Autobiography". The author described that
his fighter group was

". . . assigned an area of fifty miles by fifty miles and ordered to
strafe anything that moved . . . we weren't asked how we felt zapping people.
It was a miserable, dirty mission, but we all took off on time and did it...We
were ordered to commit an atrocity, pure and simple, but the brass who
approved this action probably felt justified because wartime Germany wasn't
easily divided between innocent civilians and its military machine. The farmer
tilling his potato field might have been feeding German
troops."

He might also have been feeding detainees at Dachau, including Anne Frank and
her family! So what was the end result? The photographs you see in every news
reel describing the horrors of the camp. They were horrors all right! Here is a
graphic description:

"The Dachau camp, located in Bavaria about 5 kilometers north of Munich,
was one of the largest and certainly one of the most notorious of the Nazi
installations housing political prisoners. It was liberated by units of the
U.S. Seventh Army on May 1, 1945.

An estimated 35,000 - 40,000
prisoners were found in the camp, living under conditions bad even for a
German camp of this kind and worse than any other that came into American
hands. Extreme filthiness, louse infestation and overcrowding prevailed
throughout the camp buildings. Several car loads of human bodies were found
packed in box cars in the railroad yards adjacent to the camp, the vestiges of
a shipment of prisoners from camps farther north who were transferred to
Dachau in the late days of the war. . .

The number of patients with
typhus fever at the time the camp was first occupied will never be known. Days
passed before a census of patients could be accomplished. Several hundreds
were found in the prison hospital, but their number was small compared with
the patients who continued to live with their comrades in the camp barracks,
bedridden and unattended, lying in bunks four tiers high with two and
sometimes three men to a narrow shelf-like bed . . . crowded beyond all
description, reeking with filth and neglect - and everywhere the smell of
death.

During the first few days little more could be done with the
limited staff that was available than make the rounds of the barracks, pulling
out the dead and the dying..."

That's where the pictures come from. As the Americans and the British
wrestled control of the concentration camps from the SS, they took films of the
chaotic and appalling conditions in these camps and circulated them around the
world as "evidence of Nazi barbarity" - in large part to deflect public
criticism of their own war crimes of genocidal bombing.

The implication
to this day is that these piles of dead were victims of gassings. Not
infrequently it is stated that Anne Frank and her family were gassed in the last
days of the war.

Nothing could be farther from the truth. She, along
with many others, died of typhus