4. If Dachau was in Germany and even Simon Wiesenthal says that it was not
an extermination camp, why do thousands of veterans in America say that it was
an extermination camp?

Ernst
Zündel Replies:

Rebuttal # 4

What Dachau was and wasn't is very adequately summarized in one of the IHR
pamphlets written by Theodore O'Keefe entitled "The
Liberation of the Camps - Facts versus Lies." No need to re-invent the
wheel.

This essay was written more than ten years ago, but the research and arguments
are still as relevant today as they were then. Full
documentation for footnotes is available by clicking here:

"Nothing has been more effective in establishing the authenticity of
the Holocaust in the minds of Americans than the terrible scenes US. 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.

US. 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 US. 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 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.

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 US.
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.

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? 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 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 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.

No lampshades, no handbags, etc.

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." (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 dreaded 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 caning. (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)

Concentration 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."(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 US. 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)

'Gas chambers'

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 US. 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 "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 US. 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 later became 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" in these words: "This gas chamber, camouflaged as a
shower room, was not used."(note 18)

The propaganda intensifies

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.

Time for the truth

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 (win) 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.

Conclusions

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:

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.

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 consistently punished
corruption and cruelty on the part of camp commanders and guards.

On the other hand, the representations of the newly liberated inmates to have
been 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.

The alleged homicidal showers and gas chambers had been used either for bathing
camp inmates or delousing their clothes; the claim that they had been used to
murder Jews or other human beings is a contemptible fabrication. Orthodox,
Establishment historians and professional "Nazi-hunters" have quietly
dropped claims that inmates were gassed at Dachau, Buchenwald, and other camps
in Germany (Ed: Germany Proper called the Alt-Reich). 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."

So far O'Keefe's summary. Since then we have had Leuchter
Report # 2. We have obtained documentation that the Red Cross, which had a
delegate living right in the camp, could not verify any "gas
chambers." We have had David Cole's "lowered ceiling argument."
Finally, at the Second
Great Holocaust Trial in Toronto, during the Christopher
Browning testimony, the Stephen Pinter Letter to the Editor came up. It was
affirmed as accurate by Browning, a prosecution witness:

"I was in Dachau for 17 months after the war, as a US. War Department
Attorney, and can state that there was no gas chamber at Dachau. What was shown
to visitors and sightseers there and erroneously described as a gas chamber was
a crematory. Nor was there a gas chamber in any of the other concentration
camps in Germany. We were told that there was a gas chamber at Auschwitz, but
since that was in the Russian zone of occupation, we were not permitted to
investigate since the Russians would not allow it . . . I interviewed thousands
of Jews, former inmates of concentration camps in Germany and Austria, and
consider myself as well qualified as any man on this subject." (Source:
Our Sunday Visitor, June 14, 1959)

If the Institute for Zeitgeschichte in Munich changed its
tune and now claims that ". . . a gas chamber was established {at Dachau}
etc.", it could have something to do with the nature of funding and with
the current political climate in Germany.

For detailed clarification, read John Cobden's "The Dachau Gas Chamber
Myth" and/or the March/April 1995 Journal for Historical Review (v15,
n2p14). Among other things, you fill find what really made Dachau
a "death camp" in the days when the Allies moved in:

520 Dachau guards were lined up and mowed down in cold blood by the Allies.
These victims were not SS soldiers. They were not even regular guards -- most
of whom had fled and abandoned the camp.

Here is the American war crime in progress.

The men still standing are German medics from the
medical barracks pictured behind. The butcher kneeling down on the machine gun
is 1st Lt. Jack Bushyhead, an American Indian.

..

This is the murderer, 1st Lt. Jack
Bushyhead!

Obviously, the murder of 560 Germans
didn't bother him

These people who were shot like dogs were simple German troopers who had
lost their units in the scramble of the last desperate days of the war or
simply civilians, too young or too old to have been drafted. These men and boys
were rounded up and ordered to put on the uniform of guards so as to watch the
inmates. Most of them had not been at Dachau for more than a few days.

We have at least one Zündelsite reader who told us he was there. No
questions asked. No time for explanations. Just execution-on-the- spot!

Also see the testimony of
Bernard Kneuper who was a member of a prisoner of war interrogation team
attached to the United States Army 42nd Rainbow Division

"When the Americans captured Dachau, the
guards all surrendered. They were taken into a large group and lined up against
a wall. Suddenly, shooting with machine guns started. The two prisoners were in
a rear rank. When dead men behind them fell on them, they lay among the bodies
and in that way survived. They later wandered off and were picked up by some
unit of the American division and brought to the collection point. (23-5636,
5637)"

April 22, 1996

Notes

Crime
Doctor, a biography of Larson by John D. McCallum, Mercer, Washington
&Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, 1979, p. 69.

Wichita
Eagle, April 1, 1980, p. 4C.

Crime
Doctor, p. 46.

Wichita
Eagle, April 1, 1980, 4G.

John E. Gordon,
"Louse-Borne Typhus Fever in the European Theater of Operations, U.S.
Army, 1945," in Forest Ray Moulton, Ed., Rickettsial Diseases of
Man, Am. Acad. for the Advancement of Science, Washington D.C. 1948.

Toronto
Star, February 8, 1985, p. A2.

New York
Times, 24 September 1948, p. 3.

Interview with
Lucius Clay, Official Proceeding of the George C. Marshall Research
Foundation, cited in "Buchenwald: Legend and Reality," Mark
Weber, The Journal of Historical Review, Vol. 7, no. 4.

International
Military Tribunal, Vol. XVII, p. 556; IMT, Vol. XX, pp. 489, 438.

Cited in The
Theory and Practice of Hell, Eugen Kogon, Berkley Books, New York, pp.
108-109.

Nuremberg
document NO-1523.

Buchenwald:
A Preliminary Report, Egon W. Fleck and Edward A. Tenenbaum, U.S.
Army, 12th Army Group, 24 April 1945. National Archives, Record Group 331,
SHAEF, G-5, 17.11, Jacket 10, Box 151 (8929/163-8929/180).

"Communist
Atrocities at Buchenwald," Donald B. Robinson, in American
Mercury, October 1946.

San Bernardino
Sun-Telegram, March 13, 1966 (cited in The Man Who Invented
'Genocide,' James J. Martin, Institute for Historical Review, IHR,
1984, pp. 110-111.

"Concentration
Camp at Natzwiller [sic]," RG 331, Records of Allied Operations
and Occupation, Army Headquarters WW2, SHAEF/G-5/2717, Modern
Military, National Archives, Washington, D.C., cited in Robert H. Abzug, Inside
the Vicious Heart, Oxford University Press, New York, 1985, p. 10, p.
181.

Die Zeit,
Hamburg, Germany, August 26, 1960.

Books
&Bookmen, April 1975, Vol. 7, p. 5.

Leaflet, Memorial
Site Concentration Camp Dachau, The International Dachau-Committee,
Dachau, Germany, n.d.