Elie Wiesel’s father Shlomo in 1942, according to Hilda Wiesel.

Is he 39 or 48 years old?

A report in the Yad Vashem Shoah Victims database by Yaakov Fishkovitz contradicts Elie Wiesel’s story about his father’s death.

Yaakov (Jacob) Fishkowitz filled out a death form in 1957 for his cousin Shlomo Wiesel, shortly after Yad Vashem first began its “Central Database of Shoah Victims Names.”1 He also filled out a form for Shlomo’s mother Nisel Basch Wiesel, his aunt. The cousins shared a maternal grandfather, Moshe Basch.

Yaakov was the son of Mentza Basch, daughter of Moshe, and Fishel Fishkovitz. Yaakov recorded Shlomo’s date of birth as 1903, which is much later than has been assumed, making Elie Wiesel’s father only 40 years old when he died! However, since Wiesel himself was 14 or 15 years old in 1943 this makes a lot more sense for an Orthodox Hasidic father-son. I will examine this further on in this article.

As seen in the two Yad Vashem Shoah Victim reports below—one by Fishkovitz and the other by Elie Wiesel—Yaakov spells the last name as both Wiesel (German) and Vizel (Roumanian). The German ‘W’ is pronounced as the English ‘V;’ similarly with s and z. He also gives both the formal name Salomon and its casual form Shlomo. Elie, on the other hand, spells his father’s name as Vizel and his own name as Eli Vizel, dropping the ‘e’ in his first name that he adopted for his post-war identity.

Shlomo’s children have never or seldom used the formal ‘Salomon’ for their father, but they do agree that Eleizer (or Leizer) and Nisel were his parents and that he was born in Sighet; that he was married and operated a store. Yaakov uses the word “merchant” while Elie uses “shop owner.”  Elie adds his mother’s name, Sara Feig, but leaves his father’s date of birth blank, while also giving an incorrect date for his death according to his own book, Night.

The details from the forms (the form itself is shown in upper left corner), are translated into English from the Yiddish that was used by Elie and partially by Yaakov to fill out the forms. However, the dates can be read. The first one is by cousin Fishkovitz in 1957; the second one by son Elie in 2004, almost 50 years later.

Click on forms to see the full image

(Click on forms to see a larger, full image.) Notice that each submitter fills in what he knows or believes to be important. Yaakov knew the year of his cousin’s birth; it may have been close to his own.  Elie did not know, or doesn’t want us to know. He has never written it or given that information to an interviewer. This is important, but even more important is that Yaakov says Shlomo died in 1943 in Sighet, the year before the deportation of the Jews of Sighet! This changes the entire narrative.

What evidence do we have for Shlomo’s age?

In Elie Wiesel’s Night (“a true story, every word is true”) Eliezer’s father answers “fifty” when asked his age by a friendly Jew when they first arrive at Auschwitz in May 1944. Eliezer answers that he is fifteen years old. The Jew tells them to lower and raise their ages respectively, which they do. (Even so, they’re put in a line that takes them right up to the edge of a pit of fire before they are turned away.) Because of this, Shlomo Wiesel has generally been assumed to have been born in 1894, although that has never been verified. For example, Wikipedia does not give a date.

In Hilda Wiesel’s Shoah Foundation testimony, she shows the photo of her father that is at the top of this article, and says it was taken in 1942. Does he look like he is 39 in this photo (born in 1903) or does he look to be 48 (because he was 50 in 1944)? It’s impossible to tell for sure, but he looks like a youngish man to me.

As we know, there are no records at Auschwitz-Birkenau or Buchenwald for a Shlomo Wiesel that fits his profile. Nor are there any for Elie Wiesel and his profile. The records that are used by the “Wiesel-in-Buchenwald” supporters are those for Abraham Viezel (also spelled Vizel or Wiesel), born Oct. 10, 1900 in Sighet, who died at Buchenwald on Feb 2, 1945. He died in Block 57; the death report was made out on Feb. 3, the following day. Yet Elie Wiesel claims in Night and elsewhere his father died on Jan. 28 and was carted off to the cremation ovens immediately, fully 5 days before Abraham’s death took place.

Death record for Abraham Viesel at Buchenwald, brother of Lazar Wiesel whose Auschwitz # was A7713

This Abraham Viesel is the same Abram Wiesel who was the older brother of Lazar Wiesel, according to Myklos Gruener, who says the two brothers had become his comrades at Auschwitz-Birkenau after the death of his father. (Auschwitz records exist for Myklos, his father and two brothers, as well as for Lazar and Abram Wiesel, including each of their numbers.) Abram’s Auschwitz tattoo number A7712 is written by hand on this death record, as well as his Buchenwald number, 123488.

If Shlomo died in 1943, this would explain why there is no death record for him at Buchenwald. Are there any other convincing reasons to go along with the 1943 date? Yes. In Night and in All Rivers Run to the Sea, we’re told of Shlomo’s resistance work helping Jews with legal problems and those who needed to flee from one place to another. He had been jailed for it, something mentioned by both Elie and Hilda.  Elie characterized his father’s tireless efforts as “out of a loving, helpful heart.” But was his father, and his family, more radical than we’ve been led to believe? Was Shlomo’s life a dangerous one? Were there disputes about money—money collected to buy weapons, or for passage to safe places? Or perhaps there was anger within the Jewish community over who was being helped and who wasn’t?

In All Rivers, on page 4, Wiesel writes that as a child and adolescent he “saw his father rarely […] The Sabbath was the only day I spent with him.” “Often preoccupied,” his father spent the week in his little grocery store and at the “community offices where he worked to assist prisoners and refugees threatened with expulsion.” Expulsion from where? By whom? What were the community offices? Wiesel names Sighet as a “sanctuary for Jews fleeing …since 1640.”

What knowledge can we piece together about Shlomo?

Shlomo was a preoccupied man. He ran a store. He took in deliveries. He may have been involved in smuggling – guns, people, documents. Smuggling was a way of life among the Zionists. Jews began going to Palestine long before Elie Wiesel was born. There were different factions of Jews—the Haganah was formed in 1920 to guard Jewish settlers in Palestine. In 1931 the Irgun splintered off and there was sometimes bitter enmity between the two organizations all the way up to 1948. The Irgun policy was that every Jew had a right to enter Palestine and it became the major smuggling arm for the Zionists. The Irgun worked in Poland, for example, in the 30’s to bring Jews into Palestine with the cooperation of secret agencies of the Polish government. (See “The Role of the Irgun in Central and Eastern Europe” at http://www.eliewieseltattoo.com/elie-wiesel-and-the-mossad-part-ii)

It is fully possible that as things heated up in 1943, Shlomo got caught in some crossfire — perhaps was killed by the Hungarian police. If this were the case, Elie, as only son, may have been sent to France for safety before the deportations of Spring 1944. Further, if this were the case (a story as good as any other), Elie was an Irgun-supporting Zionist from an early age, which fits everything we know about him.

On page 8 of Night, Wiesel wrote:

In those days [Spring 1944] it was still possible to buy emigration certificates to Palestine. I had asked my father to sell everything, to liquidate everthing, and to leave.  ‘I am too old, my son,’ he answered. ‘Too old to start a new life. Too old to start from scratch in some distant land …’

If he were only 40, that is not credible. Even at 50 he was not too old, unless he really didn’t believe the worst would happen and that things would right themselves. His children were certainly not too old and he would have them to look after him in his old age. Something doesn’t add up here. This “good man” doesn’t protect his family because he feels too tired at age 40-50 to go somewhere new? He allows them all to be taken prisoner because he can’t see what’s coming, even though he’s spent his adult life helping Jewish prisoners and refugees? Wiesel often fails to give convincing explanations for why events happen as they do in his writings. I have noticed it again and again, and commented on it. It seems to me to be a combination of laziness and lack of true inventiveness. He has admitted that he was rather spoiled and lazy in his childhood and youth; one doesn’t see any evidence of change.

The age of the typical Hasidic bride and groom

Back to the question of the appropriateness of Sholmo Wiesel being age 40 in 1943-44. The Hasidic sect sees the ideal age of marriage for a male as 18-21. They encourage the bride and groom to be close in age. Taken from the New York Times article on an important Hasidic wedding:

What they saw was a marital merger of two leading international Hasidic dynasties, the Bobovers of the BoroughParkneighborhood in Brooklynand the Satmars of Williamsburg. The 19-year-old groom is a grandson of the Bobover Grand Rabbi, Shlomo Halberstam. The 18-year-old bride is a granddaughter of the Satmar Grand Rabbi, Moses Teitelbaum. The two grand rabbis are the descendants of the first Hasidic leaders in Europe. They are also first cousins and close friends.2

Another Hasidic wedding is announced, this one in Israel.

Even longtime Hassidim are raising their eyebrows: A 16-year-old young man is engaged to his 15-year-old second cousin, both great grandchildren from “Hassidei Vizhnitz.” Thousands of members of the Vizhnitz Hassidic sect, one of the largest and wealthiest in the world, are expected to attend the festive wedding ceremony, which will take place in approximately another year.3

If Shlomo were born in 1903, as Yaakov Fishkowitz has it, he would have been 25 years old in September 1928 when his third child and first son Eliezer was born. His first child Hilda was born in August 1922, when he would have been 19 years old. Perfect for a Hasidic man!

On the other hand, if he were born in 1894, he was already 34 when Elie was born, and 28 when he had his first child. That is too old and is not in the tradition of his community! That may be why Wiesel avoids mentioning his father’s date of birth; it does not fit the story of Night, which he adopted as his own. Here’s a thought: Is there an Hasidic law or tradition that forbids lying about one’s parents and other ancestors? Probably, which can be the reason he says so little about his father, mother and grandparents as far as checkable data goes.

Is it not strange for the ‘High Priest of Memory’ to be so negligent in recording the history of his family? He only filled out the Yad Vashem form (with a camera aimed at him) at the behest of that institution, as an encouragement to others to do the same. That was admitted in the TV publicity given it. Plus it is the only Shoah victim form he filled out. His mother and sister are not in the Yad Vashem Shoah Victim database! He says it’s because he’s written about them in books, so the bare facts on a form are not necessary. But in his books, he doesn’t give dates or checkable details. Why has no family member recognized the death at Auschwitz of Sara Feig Wiesel and her daughter Tzipora by filling out a form?

Is Elie Wiesel’s story about his family and their fate entirely or just partially false?

We know Wiesel’s story about his family and youth to be full of falsehoods. His book Night has been lampooned as much as it has been praised because of the contradictions and inappropriate descriptions of people and events it contains. He has long been described as a fabricator, an exaggerator, a false witness. However, here at Elie Wiesel Cons the World our mission is to expose every lie, not just the most obvious of them. So we dig deeper.

Elie Wiesel has every reason to want his father with him at Buchenwald since the story in Night, which started out as fiction, is about a son and his father. The story also says his mother and younger sister perished on their first night in Birkenau. But if Shlomo died in 1943 and never went to Auschwitz, did any of his immediate family go? Remember, there are no records for any of them there.

Could Elie Wiesel have known in 1955 how huge the Holocaust Industry would become? No, no one did. Would Elie Wiesel in 1958  have anticipated the intense scrutiny of this book Night, or his own star status in which he himself would come under intense scrutiny? No, again. Elie Wiesel didn’t prepare for the kind of future he turned out to have, so he’s been “playing it by ear” ever since—and using his untouchable Jewish holocaust survivor status with which to protect himself. His sisters and other family members and friends were silenced to keep the ‘wrong’ information from slipping out. Journalists were obviously ordered to stay away from them!

But, perhaps unbeknownst to their inner circle, there lay two victim reports with vital information relating to Elie Wiesel in the Yad Vashem databank filled out in 1957 by Yaakov Fishkovitz, one of which is displayed in this article. The other is for his aunt—Shlomo’s mother—Nisel Basch Wiesel, stating she was born in 1881 and died in 1944 at Auschwitz (in her 63rd year). Another form for Nisel was filled out in 1999 by her grandson, Eliezer Shlomovitz, living in Los Angeles CA. He gives her date of birth as 1880 with a question mark. I will write about Nisel Wiesel in a separate article, but for now I want to establish that if Nisel were born in 1880-81 she would have been only 13 years old when she gave birth to her son Shlomo, if he were born in 1894. Since Shlomo was not her first child, but perhaps even her fifth or sixth (undetermined as of now), this is clearly impossible. If Shlomo were born in 1903, it is doable.

Thus, we have every reason to doubt everything about Elie Wiesel’s story of his family history and their concentration camp credentials. I will continue with this fascinating and very important examination of the Wiesel extended family in an upcoming article. Stay tuned.

 Endnotes:

1.  Yad Vashem was established in 1953 as the official “remembrance authority” (for the Jewish Shoah) by the Knesset, Israel’s parliament. At that time, Jews were told that all Jews who died at the hands of the Nazis or their accomplices during the years of Nazi power, i.e. 1933-1945 could be considered Shoah victims. This includes Jewish soldiers serving in the Soviet and Polish armies, who were taken prisoner and died in Nazi POW camps.  Jews who survived until the liberation but died within six months of liberation are also considered Shoah victims.

Another category is ‘Shoah survivor’ All those living in Nazi-occupied territories from 1933 onward could be considered victims of the Nazis, including French, Bulgarian and Romanian Jews, and even those who went deep into the Soviet Union. Also included are “Jews who forcefully left (?) Germany in the 1930s.” Even those who went to Israel, obviously  No other group has so generously allocated ‘victim-opportunities’ to its people. This is called Chutzpah in Yiddish.  (Information taken from  http://www.yadvashem.org/wps/portal/!ut/p/_s.7_0_A/7_0_S5?New_WCM_Context=http://namescm.yadvashem.org/wps/wcm/connect/Yad+Vashem/Hall+Of+Names/Left+Links/en/3HON_FAQs)

2.  http://www.nytimes.com/1998/09/04/nyregion/a-royal-wedding-a-family-affair-two-hasidic-dynasties-unite-in-brooklyn-gala.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm  Further of interest: The Satmars originated in Hungary and the Bobovers came from Poland. […] Because Hasidic families often have 10 or more children, the two groups now have tens of thousands of followers in Brooklyn and more around the world.

3.  http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/133130  “We have a tradition of marrying at a young age, but we usually mean 19-22, although there have been occasions of marriages before the age of 18,” one Vizhnitz member told the Hebrew-language daily Yisrael HaYom. “However, marrying at the age of 15 is definitely exceptional.”

After my comment on the terms Sonderlager and SS-Sonderkommando in relation to the Sobibór camp,[1] Roberto Muehlenkamp has focused his untiring yet self-defeating powers of “argumentation” on the following passage in the March 1944 Benda report on the Sobibór prisoner uprising:

“Mit Rücksicht auf die Art die Sonderlagers und dessen Häftlinge, wurde veranlasst, dass die Wehrmacht sofort die Verfolgung der Flüchtigen und die Schutzpolizei die Sicherung des Lagers ausserhalb der Lagerumzäunung aufnahm.”[2]

In English translation:

“In view of the nature of the special camp [Sonderlagers] and its prisoners, the Wehrmacht was ordered to organize an immediate posse after the fugitives, and the Police to secure the safety of the camp outside its fences.”

Muehlenkamp has offered the following interpretation:

“The best explanation (i.e. the one that takes all known evidence into account and requires the fewest additional assumptions) is that it was considered most urgent that all fugitives be recovered lest they reveal that Sobibór had been an extermination camp, and that the Wehrmacht was charged with the task because it had more personnel available for this purpose than the SD and the Security Police, including units that were trained and experienced in hunting partisans and therefore most suited for the task.”[3]

In other words: The most reasonable explanation for why “the nature of the special camp and its prisoners” required the escaped inmates to be pursued with particular fervor was that they were able to inform the world about Sobibór the Extermination Camp. The problem with this explanation, similar to most arguments advanced by Muehlenkamp and his ilk, is that it ultimately falls back on the a priori assumption that Sobibór indeed functioned as a “pure extermination camp” – for which there is not a shred of hard evidence.

The assertion that the escaped inmates were carriers of the secret of the “extermination camp” Sobibór in fact makes little sense even from an exterminationist viewpoint. Not a single inmate from the “death camp proper”, Lager III, participated in the mass escape on 14 October 1943. In Sobibór: Holocaust Propaganda and Reality I spent several passages discussing what the Jewish eyewitness have to say regarding their and other inmates’ knowledge of Lager III, which was separated from the rest of the camp by fences and a densely wooded area. The Jewish work commando(s) employed in Lager III were likewise kept separated from the rest of the prisoner population and never entered the other Lagers. Thomas Blatt, who was sent to Sobibór in April 1943, writes in his memoirs that

“The most conclusive evidence that something murderous was taking place in Lager III was the fact that no-one ever came out alive, but such evidence was purely circumstantial. The Nazis made it difficult to collect any direct evidence of what was widely known throughout the camp.”[4]

However, as I showed in the abovementioned study, based on maps an air photos, the inmates in the other parts of the camp could not have been certain that “no-one ever came out alive” .[5]
According to another witness, Eda (Ada) Lichtman, “They [the Germans] always thought that we [= the Jewish inmates] did not know what was going on there [in Lager III].”[6]

If these witness statements are correct, then how could the escaped prisoner have been viewed as carriers of the secret (Geheimnisträgern) of  Sobibór the Extermination Camp? If it was indeed true that no Jew “ever came out alive” from Lager III and that this fact constituted “the most conclusive evidence” the camp inmates had that this part of Sobibór served as a facility for mass murder, would not then all the Polish civilians in the vicinity of the camp, who were in a much better position to ascertain whether “no-one ever came out alive”, likewise have been considered Geheimnisträgern and dealt with accordingly?

The Oneg Szabat group in Warsaw identified Sobibór as an extermination camp already in early July 1942, two months after it began operating, and already on 1 July 1942 the Polish Fortnightly Review published an article according to which Jews were sent to Sobibór and murdered there en masse with gas, machine-guns and bayonets. In a report from the the Polish Government in Exile dated 23 December 1942 Sobibór is identified together with Treblinka and Belzec as an extermination center. The Polish underground press mentioned the Sobibór “death camp” repeatedly in 1942 and 1943.[7] There can be no doubt that the Germans were aware of the contents of at least some of these propaganda writings, and the way they depicted the camp ­- but why would they then worry as late as in mid-October 1943 that the escaped prisoners would “reveal” Sobibór as an “extermination camp”? This gets even more curious when one considers that the atrocity stories produced by the early Sobibór eyewitnesses are ridiculous yarns about gassings with chlorine, mysterious black substances, magical bloodstains, electric machines releasing “deadly gas”, collapsible gas chamber floors, mass killings carried out with water hoses, etc. etc.[8] – i.e. certainly not any “detailed knowledge” regarding the supposed going-ons in Lager III.

Roberto Muehlenkamp has completely ignored the following simple explanation why there was a special urgency to the pursuit of the escaped Sobibór inmates: As already shown by me the dismantling plant for captured Soviet munitions mentioned in Himmler’s directive from 5 July 1943 (NO-482) was indeed installed in the “Lager IV” or “Nordlager” section of Sobibór and came to employ at least 110 inmates, many of them Soviet-Jewish POW:s, who, led by Alexander “Sasha” Pechersky, made up the core of the 14 October uprising. Documentary evidence further show that a significant amount of captured Soviet munitions was stored there and later, following the prisoner revolt, sent away from the camp.[9] It goes without saying that the detailed knowledge of the munition dismantling plant held by the escaped inmates would have been of potentially great value to partisan units operating in that part of eastern Poland as well as in the neighboring parts of Belarus and the Ukraine, especially considering that many of said partisans were using Soviet weapons. The knowledge of the escaped prisoners could thus have triggered a partisan attack on the camp with the purpose of stealing the munitions depot, or prompted the destruction of the railway tracks, as a means of shutting down the dismantling operation.[10] The fact that the addition of several trained and experienced Red Army soldiers to the local partisan groups hardly would have benefited the Germans also fits this picture.

The above alternative explanation is certainly better than Muehlenkamp’s “best explanation”, as it does not require belief in the factually unsupported claim that Sobibór functioned as a “pure extermination camp.”

[1] http://www.revblog.codoh.com/2011/05/on-the-terms-sonderlager-and-ss-sonderkommando/
[2] http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/ar/images/Sobibor%20%281%29.jpg
[3] http://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot.com/2011/05/thomas-kues-takes-on-sonderlager-paper.html
[4] Thomas Toivi Blatt, From the Ashes of Sobibor, Northwestern University Press, Evanston 1997, p. 232.
[5] Jürgen Graf, Thomas Kues, Carlo Mattogno, Sobibór: Holocaust Propaganda and Reality, TBR Books, Washington DC 2010, pp. 97-98.
[6] Ibid., p. 79.
[7] Ibid, pp. 63-67.
[8] Ibid, pp. 69-75, 82, 179.
[9] http://www.revblog.codoh.com/2011/05/lies-and-obfuscations-about-himmlers-sobibor-directive/

[10] For some curious reason it never occurred to the partisans that they could (at least temporarily) stop the deportation trains to Sobibór and the other “extermination centres” by dynamiting the railroad tracks leading there. No doubt some exterminationist historians would put this up to the Poles being inveterate anti-Semites…

In a reply [1] to my recent article [2] on the holocaust historians’ lies and obfuscations about the contents of Nuremberg document NO-482, wherein Sobibór is designated as a transit camp (Durchgangslager), anti-revisionist blogger Roberto Muehlenkamp focuses on the fact that in the 17 March 1944 report of SS-Untersturmführer Benda concerning the Sobibór prisoner uprising and mass escape the Sobibór camp is called a “Sonderlager” (special- or exception camp). According to the Tarnsprache exegesis, adopted by Muehlenkamp and his likes when it suits them, this means that Sobibór was a death camp, since the prefix Sonder- (special- or exception(al)-), it seems, always denoted killings in Nazi jargon! Muehlenkamp further accuses me and my co-authors of the study Sobibór. Holocaust Propaganda and Reality,[3] Jürgen Graf and Carlo Mattogno, of having hidden Benda’s use of the word Sonderlager from our readers. He writes:

“M[attogno], G[raf and ]K[ues] merely mention that «Five months after these events, on 17 March 1944, SS-Untersturmführer Benda wrote an account of the Sobibór uprising – which he wrongly dated 15 October 1943 – and of the ensuing search for the fugitives, stating that the rebels had “shot an SS officer as well as 10 SS NCOs.”» (MGK, Sobibór, p. 22). “

The quote presented by Muehlenkamp is correct. The non-mention of Benda’s wording, however, is in effect an editorial error, which unfortunately was carried over to the German edition of our book.[4] If Muehlenkamp had bothered to read the condensed (and somewhat “popularized”) German version of our book, Die Akte Sobibor, which is readily available online,[5] he would have found the following remark in the corresponding section:

“In diesem Bericht wurde Sobibor also als ‘Sonderlager’ bezeichnet. Was dieses Wort bedeutete, lässt sich dem Dokument selbst nicht entnehmen.”

In English translation:

“In this report Sobibor was thus designated as a ‘Sonderlager’ [Special camp]. The meaning of this term cannot be determined from the document itself.”

Which is indeed true. There exists not a single contemporary German document stating that Sobibór (or any other German camp for that matter) functioned as a center of extermination.

As for the term Sonderlager Muehlenkamp neglects to mention that it is used elsewhere without denoting anything homicidal/genocidal. For example, German historian Ulrich Herbert writes as follows concerning the setting up of “labor education camps” (Arbeitserziehungslager) in connection to industrial plants:

“The RSHA had suggested setting up such firm-internal penal camps a far back as late 1942:
‘In larger plants with a large foreign work force, with no labor education camp nearby, it appears to be possible under certain circumstances, and on an experimental basis, to set up educational departments. As in the labor education camps, foreign workers will be put to work under guard as punishment for non-serious loafing… The plant should provide for segregated housing and allocation of work after agreement with the State Police (Head) Office.’
On the basis of this decree, such camps were set up over the following months in many large plants. The camps had different designations, such as penal camp (Straflager), special camp (Sonderlager) or labor education camp (Arbeitserziehungslager).”[6]

Herbert refer his readers to:

“‘Lagerordnung der Gestapo für Ostarbeiter-Sonderlager’ (Gestapo Camp Regulations for Special Camps for Eastern Workers), December 13, 1943, Doc. NIK 15510; ‘Lagerordnung für das Sonderlager Dechenschule (Camp Regulations, Dechenschule Special Camp) December 16, 1943, Doc. NIK 15506″[7]

The term “Ostarbeiter-Sonderlager” of course implies that there existed Sonderlager housing inmates of other sort than “Eastern Workers”.

In Rheinland-Pfalz there existed between October 1939 and March 1945 the SS-Sonderlager Hinzert. From 7 February 1942 this camp was administrated by the SS-WVHA. The inmate population consisted mostly of political prisoners from France and Luxembourg, forced laborers from Poland and prisoners of war. During its period of operation some 13-14,000 men were kept prisoners in Sonderlager Hinzert; 321 deaths are documented for this camp.[8]

In Metz in Lothringen/Lorraine was located between October 1943 and August 1944 the “Sonderlager Feste Goeben” (also called “Sonderlager der Sicherheitspolizei in Metz” and “SS-Sonderlager Fort Queuleu”), a forced labor camp housing mostly French POW:s and political prisoners.[9]

In eastern Austria there existed in the period 1944-1945 a large number of Sonderlager for Hungarian-Jewish forced laborers. These were temporary labor camps where the prisoners mainly worked on constructing fortifications.[10] There was also an “SS-Sonderlager Innsbruck” for prominent prisoners.[11]

Between October 1941 and January 1942 Stutthof was counted as a Sonderlager belonging to the Danzig Gestapo.[12] It must be stressed that this was long before gassings of Jewish prisoners was allegedly carried out in this camp (August to December 1944).[13]

In Upper Silesia was located the “SD-Sonderlager Sandberge”, apparently a forced labor camp employing mainly “Eastern Workers” and Soviet POW:s.[14]

The labor and training camp Trawniki in the Lublin district either contained or was designated a “Sonderlager”.[15]

“Sonderlager Watenstedt” near Braunschweig served as a forced labor and penal camp for “work-shies”.[16]

There were also a number of more or less temporary internment camps for Roma and Sinti (Gypsies) that were sometimes referred to as Sonderlager. In this context historian Sybil H. Milton defines the term “SS-Sonderlager” as “special internment camps combining elements of protective custody concentration camps and embryonic ghettos”.[17]

Sonderlager was sometimes also used as a term denoting simply any subcamp or part of a camp housing a special category of prisoners (often prisoners carrying “special papers”), or separated from the normal camp infrastructure. Thus there existed a “Sonderlager für Juden aus Polen” (Special camp for Polish Jews) in the Bergen-Belsen Stammlager.[18] In Buchenwald Jews of foreign nationality were kept in a Sonderlager from late 1939 onward.[19] An isolated barracks at Buchenwald in which members of the Romanian Iron Guard movement were held was designated “Sonderlager Fichtenhain”.[20] “SS-Sonderlager Ammerwald” on the other hand was used for “honored prisoners” (Ehrenhäftlinge).[21]

In Moringen near Göttingen there existed from 1940 onward an “SS-Sonderlager” for “asocial” male adolescents.[22] “SS-Sonderlager Uckermark” imprisoned “asocials” and hardened criminals; it was later attached to KL Ravensbrück.[23]

None of the camps listed above are alleged to have served as extermination centers (with the exception of Stutthof, but as already noted its alleged use as an “auxiliary extermination camp” did not coincide with the period during which the camp was known as a Sonderlager).

Now is there evidence except for the Benda report that Sobibór was designated a Sonderlager? The only sort of indication that I have found so far is a statement, presumably based on eyewitness testimony, in an article by Dutch historian Louis De Jong, that the Vorlager (front camp) section of Sobibór was adorned with large sign reading “SS-Sonderlager Sobibor“.[24] The witness Thomas Blatt writes in his memoirs of “the Gothic letters on the top of the gate leading inside: ‘SS-Sonderkommando Sobibor.’”[25] The witness Dov Freiberg, however, testified at the Eichmann trial that he had observed on repeated occasions, when working outside of the camp, “a sign at the entrance of the camp” bearing the text “SS Sonderkommando Umsiedlungslager” (SS Special Commando Resettlement Camp); the former camp commandant Franz Stangl also testified to the use of this term.[26] The foremost exterminationist expert on the camp, Jules Schelvis, believes that Umsiedlungslager was the word used on the camp sign.[27] It does not seem impossible that “SS Sonderkommando Umsiedlungslager” was the full name written on the sign and that some witnesses remembered merely part of it. We know from documents that the camp staff members of Bełżec, Sobibór and Treblinka (possibly excluding the Trawniki-trained guards) were collectively known as SS-Sonderkommando “Einsatz Reinhard(t)”.[28] The correspondence of Dr. Irmfried Eberl, the first commandant of Treblinka, bore the return address “SS-Untersturmführer Dr. Eberl, Treblinka b/ Malkinia, SS-Sonderkommando“.[29] Thus quite likely the Sobibór camp staff was known as “SS-Sonderkommando Sobibor”. The camp staff at Chełmno was designated “SS-Sonderkommando Kulmhof”.[30]

Anti-revisionists may argue, in accordance with exterminationist exegesis, that the use of the term Sonderkommando, “Special commando”, must denote a commando specialized in the mass killing of Jews. Once again the argument falls flat, however, since we know of numerous “SS-Sonderkommandos” not connected in any way with alleged extermination actions. To list but a few:

- “SS-Sonderkommando Zossen” and “SS-Sonderkommando Jüterbog”, which came to form the Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler.[31]

- “SS-Sonderkommando Grüppe-Künsberg”, affiliated with the Einsatzstab Rosenberg, which appropriated libraries and archives in the occupied territories.[32]

- “The Sonderkommando ‘Dr. Dirlewanger’” (redesignated “SS-Sonderbatallion ‘Dirlewanger’” and “SS-Sonderregiment ‘Dirlewanger’”), which, although notorious for the criminal background of its members and the numerous atrocities it perpetrated (against Poles and Russians), was not employed in actions against Jews, but served mainly as an anti-partisan unit.[33]

- The “SS-Sonderkommando K”, a unit conducting racial “research” on Soviet prisoners of war, stationed in Mittersill near Salzburg.[34]

- The “SS-Sonderkommando Schloss Itter”, employed in an interment camp for “honored prisoners”.[35]

- “SS-Sonderkommando ‘Sachsen’” was employed in the concentration camp Sachsenburg.[36]

- “SS-Sonderkommando Künsberg”, a unit used for the appropriation of archives and cultural goods in Yugoslavia.[37]

- “SS-Sonderkommando ‘Jankuhn’” carried out the appropriation of cultural goods in occupied southern Russia.[38]

- “SS-Sonderkommando Sosnowitz”, which was in charge of an internment and transit camp for Jews in Sosnowiec, Upper Silesia.[39]

- “SS-Sonderkommando Trautenau”, in charge of seven women’s camps in the Sudetenland.[40]

- “SS-Sonderkommando Zeppelin”, stationed in Breslau (Wroclaw), in charge, inter alia, of training pro-German Soviet POW:s as spies to be deployed beyond the Russian frontlines.[41]

The equation of the term “SS-Sonderkommando” with mass killings of Jews is therefore likewise fallacious.

What could then have caused Sobibór to be designated a Sonderlager – at least by Untersturmführer Benda? There are, as far as I can see, three main possibilities:

1) Sobibór was redesignated as a Sonderlager following the installation of the munition dismantling unit in August-September 1943, in which a large portion of the camp’s inmates were employed.[42] On the other hand, if the summary provided by the ARC website is correct, a decoded message from 27 October 1943 mentions the “SS Durchgangslager Sobibor” (SS Transit Camp Sobibor),[43] something which would seem to contradict this hypothesis.

2) Sobibór was alternately designated a Durchgangslager and a Sonderlager, the latter because the Reinhardt camp staff was referred to as an SS-Sonderkommando. There are in turn at least two possible explanations why this commando was considered “special”. One is that the staff were not regular SS but had their background in the T4 euthanasia program, and that, most likely, they continued to perform “euthanasia” on mentally ill and disease-carrying Jewish deportees while posted to the Reinhardt camps.  The other possibility is that at least a part of the SS units involved in the evacuation, transiting and therewith connected systematic robbery of Jewish deportees were for some (perhaps purely military-administrative) reason consider irregular or “special”. What may point in this direction is the fact that Adolf Eichmann’s small personal staff, in charge of the administration of the deportation of Jews from, among other countries, Greece in 1943 and from Hungary in 1944, was named “SS-Sondereinsatzkommando Eichmann”[44] or simply “SS-Sonderkommando Eichmann”.[45] As seen above there was also the “SS-Sonderkommando Sosnowitz” in charge of an internment and transit camp in Upper Silesia. One may also note in this context that SS-Sonderlager Hinzert in the autumn of 1941 served as a transit camp in the deportation of Luxembourgian, Belgian and French Jews to the Łódz ghetto.[46]

3) Finally it cannot be excluded that Benda, writing his report nearly half a year after the uprising, simply made an error, especially considering that he mistakenly dated the uprising to 15 October 1943 (instead of 14 October).

What may be safely excluded is the possibility that Sobibór was called a Sonderlager because it functioned as an extermination center where hundreds of thousands of Jews were murdered in homicidal gas chambers. There exists not the slightest documentary or technical evidence supporting this notion, and in addition to the letters of NO-482 calling Sobibór a transit camp, the available hard evidence, as unearthed by archeologists, contradict the exterminationist version of events.[47]

To conclude: The appearance of the terms Sonderlager or SS-Sonderkommando in documents relating to Sobibór (or any of the other alleged death camps) cannot be used as evidence in support of the notion that said camp functioned as an extermination center for Jews.[48]

[1] http://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot.com/2011/05/thomas-kues-on-lies-and-obfuscations.html
[2] http://www.revblog.codoh.com/2011/05/lies-and-obfuscations-about-himmlers-sobibor-directive/
[3] TBR Books, Washington DC 2010.
[4] Jürgen Graf, Thomas Kues, Carlo Mattogno, Sobibór: Holocaust-Propaganda und Wirklichkeit, Castle Hill Publishers, Uckfield 2010.
[5] http://juergen-graf.vho.org/pdf/graf-kues-mattogno-die-akte-sobibor.pdf
[6] Ulrich Herbert, Hitler’s foreign workers: enforced foreign labor in Germany under the Third Reich, Cambridge University Press, 1997, p. 338
[7] Ibid., p. 468, note 116.
[8] Hedwig Brüchert, Michael Matheus, Zwangsarbeit in Rheinland-Pfalz während des Zweiten Weltkriegs, Franz Steiner Verlag, Stuttgart 2004, pp. 21-22.
[9] Wolfgang Benz, Barbara Distel, Der Ort des Terrors: Geschichte der nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslager, vol. 9, C.H. Beck, Munich 2009, pp. 534-537.
[10] Eleonore Lappin-Eppel, “Sonderlager für ungarisch-jüdische Zwangsarbeiter”, in: ibid., pp. 218ff.
[11] Hans-Günter Richardi, Caroline M. Heiss, Hans Heiss, SS-Geiseln in der Alpenfestung, Raetia 2005, p. 153, 158.
[12] Ibid., p. 613.
[13] For the alleged homicidal gas chamber of KL Stutthof cf. Jürgen Graf, Carlo Mattogno, Concentration Camp Stutthof and its Function in National Socialist Jewish Policy, Theses & Dissertations Press, Chicago 2003.
[14] Wolfgang Benz, Barbara Distel (eds.), Der Ort des Terrors: Geschichte der nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslager, vol. 3, C.H. Beck, Munich 2006, p. 175.
[15] Timm C. Richter (ed.), Krieg und Verbrechen. Situation und Intention: Fallbeispiele, Martin Meidenbauer, Munich 2006, p. 248 note 15.
[16] Gabriele Lotfi, KZ der Gestapo, Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 2000, pp. 75-77, 340
[17] Sybil H. Milton, “‘Gypsies’ as Social Outsiders in Nazi Germany”, in: Robert Gellately, Nathan Stoltzfus (eds.), Social outsiders in Nazi Germany, Princeton University Press, Princeton 2001, p. 219.
[18] Wolfgang Benz, Barbara Distel, Angelika Königseder (eds.), Der Ort des Terrors: Geschichte der nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslager, vol. 7, C.H. Beck, Munich 2008, pp. 192-193.
[19] Gedenkstätte Buchenwald, Konzentrationslager Buchenwald 1937-1945, Wallstein Verlag 2007, pp. 115-118.
[20] Wolfgang Benz, Barbara Distel (eds.), Der Ort des Terrors: Geschichte der nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslager, vol. 3, C.H. Beck, Munich 2006, p. 304.
[21]  Volker Koop, In Hitlers Hand: die Sonder- und Ehrenhäftlinge der SS, Böhlau Verlag, Cologne/Weimar 2010, p. 78.
[22] Titus Simon, Raufhändel und Randale, Juventa, Winheim/Munich 1996, p. 284.
[23] Angelika Ebbinghaus, Opfer und Täterinnen, F. Greno, 1987, p. 212.
[24] Louis De Jong, “Sobibor”, Encounter, December 1978, p. 22.
[25] Thomas (Toivi) Blatt, Sobibór. The Forgotten Revolt, HEP, Issaquah 1998, p. 38.
[26] J. Graf, T. Kues, C. Mattogno, Sobibór. Holocaust Propaganda and Reality, op.cit., p. 285.
[27] Jules Schelvis, Sobibór. A History of a Nazi Death Camp, Berg, Oxford/New York 2007, p. 36.
[28] Cf. Archives of the Holocaust, vol. 11, part 2, Document 430 on pp. 335-357.
[29] Michael Grabher, Irmfried Eberl. ‘Euthanasie’-Arzt und Kommandant von Treblinka, Peter Lang/Europäischer Verlag der Wissenschaft, Frankfurt am Main 2006, p. 70. For more on this correspondence see http://www.revblog.codoh.com/2009/07/review-michael-grabher-irmfried-eberl-euthanasie-arzt-und-kommandant-von-treblinka-peter-lang-europaischer-verlag-der-wissenschaft-frankfurt-am-main-2006/
[30] Sascha Feuchert, Erwin Leibfried, Jörg Riecke (eds.), Die Chronik des Gettos Lodz/Litzmannstadt: 1942, Wallstein, Göttingen 2007, p. 7.
[31] Christopher Ailsby, Hell on the Eastern Front. the Waffen-SS War in Russia 1941-1945, MBI Publishing, Osceola (WI) 1998, p. 12.
[32] Michael Burleigh, Germany turns eastwards. A study of Ostforschung in the Third Reich, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1988, p. 227ff.
[33] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/36th_Waffen_Grenadier_Division_of_the_SS
[34] Peter Mierau, Nationalsozialistische Expeditionspolitik: deutsche Asien-Expeditionen 1933-1945, Herbert Utz Verlag, Munich 2006, p. 500.
[35] Volker Koop, In Hitlers Hand, op.cit., p. 33.
[36] Carsten Schreiber, Elite im Verborgenen: Ideologie und regionale Herrschaftspraxis des Sicherheitsdienstes der SS und seines Netzwerks am Beispiel Sachsens, Institut für Zeitgechichte/Oldenbourg, Munich 2008, p. 274.
[37] Patrick Lehn, Deutschlandbilder: historische Schulatlanten zwischen 1871 und 1990, Böhlau, Cologne/Weimar/Vienna 2008, p. 407; Bettina Thorn, Internationaler Kulturgüterschutz nach der UNIDROIT-Konvention, De Gruyter Rechtswissenschaften Verlags, Berlin 2005, p. 32.
[38] Ludwig Jäger, Seitenwechsel: der Fall Schneider/Schwerte und die Diskretion der Germanistik, W. Fink 1998, p. 244.
[39] Wacław Długoborski, Franciszek Piper (eds.), Auschwitz, 1940-1945: Studien zur Geschichte des Konzentrations- und Vernichtungslagers Auschwitz, Volume 1, Verlag des Staatlichen Museums Auschwitz-Birkenau, Oswiecim 1999, p. 62; Belah Gutterman, A narrow bridge to life: Jewish forced labor and survival in the Gross-Rosen Camp System, 1940-1945, Berghahn Books/Yad Vashem, Jerusalem 2008, p. 43.
[40] Dachauer Hefte, vol. 8-9, Verlag Dachauer Hefte, Munich 1999, p. 7.
[41] C. F. Rüter, Dirk Welmoed de Mildt, Justiz und NS-Verbrechen: Sammlung deutscher Strafurteile wegen nationalsozialistischer Tötungsverbrechen 1945-1999. Register zu den Bänden I-XXII, APA/Holland University Press, Amsterdam 1998, p. 494.
[42] See my previous article “Lies and obfuscations about Himmler’s Sobibor directive”.
[43] PRO: HW 16/39 (ZIP/GPD 2041 DD-FF, message DD 14, as summarized online: http://www.deathcamps.org/reinhard/prodecodes.html
[44] Peter Krause, Der Eichmann-Prozeß in der deutschen Presse, Campus, Frankfurt am Main 2002, p. 29. Also http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eichmann-Kommando
[45] Gerald Fleming, Hitler and the Final Solution, University of California Press, Berkeley/Los Angeles 1984, p. 160.
[46]  Karin Orth, Das System der nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslager. Eine politische Organisationsgeschichte, Hamburger Edition, Hamburg 1999, p. 94.
[47] Cf. J. Graf, T. Kues, C. Mattogno, Sobibór. Holocaust Propaganda and Reality, op.cit., pp. 107-167.
[48] A final remark: In a report on a Jewish convoy from Vienna to Sobibór dated 20 June 1942 (reproduced online at http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/ar/sobibor/docs/transport%20wien%20-%20sobibor.jpg ) it is stated that the Jews upon arrival were handed over to the commandant of “the labor camp located adjacent to the railway station” (“das neben dem Bahnhof gelegene Arbeitslager“). This is the only documentary source in which Sobibór is called a “labor camp”. Most likely this designation was simply a mistake on behalf of a Viennese police officer who had not been briefed in detail on the resettlement of the Jews. From an exterminationist viewpoint it hardly makes any sense that the SS would have employed three different camouflage designations – Durchgangslager, Sonderlager and Arbeitslager – for the same death camp!

by Dr. Claus G. Wagner Bartach

Introduction

In the early 1960s, a determined, powerful group of Zionists and Israelis decided to broadcast to the world one of the horrific atrocities of the twentieth century, relating to their special concerns. Out of the more than 100 million deaths of civilians, ethnic minorities and political opponents committed in the 1940s by gruesome draconian totalitarian regimes during and after World War 2, the terrible fate of an alleged six million Jews was determined as a uniquely horrific picture of especially German atrocities and guilt towards Jews in Europe. As inconvenient as the truth may be, the reason for this special emphasis was apparently twofold: to establish a perpetual symbol for the alleged eternal suffering of Jews and to materially and politically benefit from a worldwide emotion of guilt resulting in sympathy towards Jews and Israelis, exempting them from inconvenient scrutiny and criticism of their own crass misbehavior. The term Holocaust was carefully chosen (or “invented”) and broadcast, having a vague abstract background in the Bible. An eager media was blindly following suit.

The Jewish author Norman G. Finkelstein differentiates between the “Nazi holocaust” – in which Jews and other victims were exterminated – and “The Holocaust” – the well-known public “persona” of the event, the image that he alleges is nothing but the product of propaganda of the Jewish establishment. Continuing the financial coercion of the past, “The Jewish establishment,” he tells an interviewer, “was now in a rush to shake down mainly the Swiss on the banks issue, and used pressure exerted by agencies of the American government – [saying] that if they didn’t pay up, they would be boycotted in the U.S. There is an extortion racket at work here, and for this alone the extortionists should have been thrown out of public life.”

The Holocaust

In Germany, true and imagined memories of the holocaust are continuously on television, in movies, on stage, in countless monuments, museums and in schools. It is remembered every year on Nov. 9, the anniversary of the night of the broken glass, Kristallnacht, the 1938 assault on German Jewish businesses and synagogues. Germany’s current small but agile, demanding and outspoken Jewish community is a living emblem of what happened in that country. About 300,000 strong before the war, it is less now, but growing, comprised of old German Jewish families (my own family had several friends and neighbors in Austria and Germany who were of Jewish extraction and were never in any special physical danger during these times), who were not persecuted, re-immigrants from Israel and thousands of Russian Jews, all of whom benefit from the over-generosity of the numbed-down German government.

Most of Germany’s Jews nowadays live peacefully and comfortably and see that country as one of the safest places in the world to raise their children. But one of the leaders of that community is anything but quiet. Michel Friedman, a self-anointed and very controversial television showman, a Jew who gets increasingly on the nerves of a lot of Germans, never letting them forget that they must be careful about what they think and say.¹ Friedman flatly states: “I am not responsible that Germany invented the Holocaust. They are responsible, and that’s a part of their life.” He has also stated that “the Holocaust is a special case among the many genocides which took place prior to and after it, and which are still taking place“.² In other words: The Holocaust is a “special case” since it involves the genocide of Jews. All other genocides just kill ordinary, normal human beings.

Most brainwashed Germans do not dare to argue this point. Especially young Germans, born decades after the war, have to bear the burden out of state-supported ignorance. One could ask: Is there an intrinsic risk in raising generation after generation with an imposed shame as the central characteristic of their society? While other countries may grapple with their dark histories from time to time, they have a cleansing mechanism (“Right or Wrong, my Country”), in Germany, certain dark parts of national history, and especially distorted recent history, is a fact of daily life. German have been reeducated, educated and brainwashed for many decades to believe that it is healthy for the central characteristic of their society to be that of feeling guilt. Guilt will give them a feeling, an idea, of themselves. What they have done and what they are responsible for. The above constitutes an absurd aberration of a sick and misinterpreted psychoanalysis, which ends in spiritual and intellectual self-flagellation. The allegorical Walk to Canossa (as done around 1077 by Emperor Henry IV in his dispute with Pope Gregory VII) has been done by the German nation a hundred times over, but no absolution or redemption has ever been in sight.

Another abuse is the way that other countries help to keep alive the image of Germany as an eternally recovering Nazi. The whole nation has been treated as a criminal on probation, and aggressive anti-German Zionist groups work diligently to keep alive the perception that Germans are not yet accepted, and that a German is not yet a normal man or Germany a normal nation. These groups are the ruthless activists and beneficiaries of the Holocaust industry.

The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering is a book published in 2000 by Norman G. Finkelstein which argues that the American Jewish establishment exploits the memory of the Nazi Holocaust for political and financial gain, as well as to further the interests of Israel. According to Finkelstein, this “Holocaust industry” has corrupted Jewish culture and the authentic memory of the Holocaust. Finkelstein’s parents were both Holocaust survivors who had been inmates of concentration camps.

Prof. Moshe Zimmerman of the Hebrew University’s German history department, who has himself been the target of some criticism for his style, argues that one of Finkelstein’s problems is not the content of his claims, but the style in which they are written: “What is irritating about him is his caustic style and choice of words. The claims themselves, both those that attack the centrality of the Holocaust in Jewish-American identity and the compensation affair, contain at least a kernel of truth.”³

Finkelstein analyzes and sharply criticizes the exploitation of the Holocaust for financial profit. He singles out the author and Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Elie Wiesel as having reaped great personal benefit. But Finkelstein also assails the general Jewish campaigns to restore property and/or to arrange compensation for assets allegedly stolen during the Third Reich period. He views the campaigns and their methods as “those of extortionist gangsters.”⁴

Increasingly, Germans feel they have done everything to face up to their past – having paid and still paying billions and billions of dollars for reparations, apologizing, seeking forgiveness. Mind you, nobody of the Victors apologized for the horrific atrocities committed on Germans and German ethnics during and after the War. Based on this background, it is for German historians a challenging task to write about the time during the totalitarian regime of the National Socialist Party.

Besides the new generation of historians having been exposed to the abovementioned manipulative background, objective research is extremely hampered in certain areas by severe restrictions and even federal laws which do not allow to critical scrutiny of state-determined historiography, i.e. distorted historiography established by lawyers and not by historians.

A peculiar way to become known or recognized in a special field of historic interest in Germany these days is to “cooperate” with Jewish and foreign “experts” – experts, who will always redirect any factual research about German history to their only concern and interest: The Holocaust. This has happened recently with the publication of a survey of the activities and functions of the German diplomatic service during the Third Reich and thereafter.

Das Amt und die Vergangenheit (The Office and the Past) chronicles how the German foreign diplomatic service was allegedly aware of the persecution of Jews and was “actively involved,” thus debunking the myth that most German diplomats of that time had managed to keep their hands clean.

Another Book of late Revenge?

A “Historical Commission”, composed of historians Eckart Conze (Germany), Norbert Frei (Germany), Peter Hayes (United States) and Moshe Zimmermann (Israel), was established in 2005 by then German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer (member of the Green Party), to investigate the role of the German Foreign Ministry during the period of Hitler’s rule, and how it was subsequently reestablished in the post-war period. At the end of October 2010, the commission published their abovementioned report Das Amt und die Vergangenheit, which immediately caused extraordinary criticism from different quarters .⁵

The Office – Das Amt

We must start by noting that the Commission has not produced any new or important true information; rather it has re-arranged, re-assessed and re-edited existing and available material and added significant personal and extremely biased ideological comments, which make the result more of a journalistic review than a factual work of historiography.

The book is quite cavalier in its approach, one example being its arbitrary definitions. For example, the Commission says that the claim that the Foreign Office under Hitler’s regime was a non-political body, a place of opposition, or even a hotbed of resistance, is a “myth.” Such a historical assessment was cultivated for decades by the post-war Foreign Office of the German Federal Republic.

The fact that the traditional diplomatic elite was slowly displaced by members of the party is also refuted by the commission. “With few exceptions, German diplomats continued their activities, also in the transition from the Weimar Republic to the Third Reich,” it says in the introduction. “From 30 January 1933, the Foreign Ministry became the Foreign Office of the Third Reich, and also functioned as such until 1945. (…) The Foreign Office represented, thought and acted on behalf of the regime”.⁶

The Commission’s report states that the Foreign Office supported the aggressive policies of the Nazi regime. The motives for this were supposedly manifold: “They ranged from a patriotic mentality of duty—‘one does not desert one’s country because it has a bad government’—to hopes for a re-emergence of Germany as a political power on the basis of authoritarianism, to agreement with the premises of Nazi policy; from hostility to democracy to anti-Semitism”.⁷

The diplomats supported Hitler not because they were all convinced party members, but because they shared some of Hitler’s most important political goals: “In part, there was a far-reaching identity with the [Nazis’] objectives, which helps explain the continued functioning of the top diplomacy”.⁸

The Historical Commission shows in cumbersome detail how the process of “self-consolidation” (“Selbstgleichschaltung”) took place in the case of the Foreign Office. It is quite appalling how they “discretely” smear Ernst von Weizsäcker, and his patriotic family.

The Weizsäcker family symbolizes the “continuity of the elites”, which extends from the Kaiser’s Empire to the Weimar Republic, into the Third Reich and from there into the post-war Federal Republic. Karl Hugo von Weizsäcker served the King of Württemberg from 1906 to 1918 as prime minister. He was a loyal supporter of the monarchy. His son, Ernst von Weizsäcker, made a career as an officer in the Imperial Navy and then in 1920, shortly after the founding of the Weimar Republic, joined the Foreign Office. From 1938 to 1943, he served as secretary of state, the number two behind Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop. As a young lawyer, Karl Hugo von Weizsäcker’s grandson Richard von Weizsäcker defended after the war his father Ernst at the so-called Nuremberg Wilhelmstrasse trial (named after the location of the Foreign Office), then made a political career in the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), and from 1984 to 1994 was President of the Federal Republic of Germany.

The Historical Commission can obviously not depict Ernst von Weizsäcker and other senior diplomats as fanatical Nazis. They served Hitler as Germans first and not because they were zealous members of the party. Weizsäcker noted already in 1933, after Hitler took power: “People like us must support the new era. For what would come afterwards if they failed!”⁹

In 1938 von Weizsäcker, like Chamberlain and Daladier, apparently held the honest illusion that Hitler could be appeased by the ethnic restructuring of the artificially created Czechoslovakia. At Nuremberg, he defended himself with the argument that he wanted to stop a potential war in 1938. The reason for this was not the opposition to Hitler’s foreign policy, but von Weizsäcker’s realistic pessimism about the German chances of victory in a war.

In 1949 in Nuremberg, Ernst von Weizsäcker was sentenced to five years in prison for “crimes against humanity” (a newly established term in war trials – created by parties themselves heavily involved in horrific atrocities), however, he was finally released a year later because of an amnesty. The US military court had found him guilty of “participating” in crimes by the German regime, and in particular in the alleged murder of European Jews. Many German historians and politicians, including his son Richard, deny the historical and moral justification of this absurd ruling.

That it came to a conviction of von Weizsäcker at all was mainly due to the deputy chief prosecutor Robert Kempner, a German Jew who had fled unharmed to the US in the 1930’s. Against him, von Weizsäcker’s defence did emphasize in vain his extremely one-sided, biased and revengeful polemics.¹⁰

The Historical Commission also tried to oppose the position that the Foreign Office did not participate in alleged crimes of the Second World War, which, as the Commission allegedly establishes, was from the beginning “a war of conquest and extermination determined by a racist ideology”. This quite distorted comment alone disqualifies any objectivity of the Historical Commission. “The Foreign Office did not stand apart from the rapid erosion of civilized standards and the development towards a murderous war of conquest and destruction”, the Commission concludes. “Regarding the mass deaths of over three million Soviet prisoners of war, regarding the methods of warfare and the criminal character of German occupation policy especially in the East, Wilhelmstrasse [headquarters of the Foreign Service in Berlin] was (…) extremely well informed. German diplomats were (…) assisting the occupation, confidantes, and—time and again—accomplices”.¹¹

This results in a a totally distorted picture, reflecting ignorance and confusion of facts and acts by the members of the Commission.

The same applied to the deportation of European Jews. At the beginning of Nazi rule, while the Foreign Office had “developed terminology that sought to limit Germany’s loss of reputation as result of its Jewish policies”, it later became involved “more and more in the planning, preparation and implementation of measures against the Jewish population of Europe”. “The more territories fell into the sphere of the Third Reich, the more radical Jewish policy became, the more the Foreign Office became involved with the planning and policy of the ‘Final Solution’.”¹² These concoctions bear no relevance to the objective truth and contradict the fact that there was never any documentation for central planning for genocide found after the War.

Hans Mommsen speaks out

Das Amt und die Vergangenheit found first – as usual in Germany for books of this type – a largely positive response in some political circles and the media when the book was presented to the public in late October 2010. Then on November 16, the senior historian Hans Mommsen spoke out in the Frankfurter Rundschau with a first critical review.¹³ (Mommsen is a leading expert on Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. He is a functionalist in regard to the origins of the Holocaust, seeing the Final Solution as a result of some “cumulative radicalization” of the German state as opposed to a long-term plan on the part of Adolf Hitler).¹⁴

In this first article, Mommsen described the book, compliant with the German official party line, as a kind of “masterpiece” and acknowledged that the authors were “quite outstanding compilers of some history” with “adequate staff.” Two weeks later, however, and after other critical voices had begun to be raised, he sounded more serious and irritated. In an interview with Deutschlandfunk radio, Mommsen characterized the authors in a rather negative manner.¹⁵ He described them as “gentlemen publishers, who moreover did not necessarily do the work themselves”, accusing them of “massive failures” and recommending that they take an introductory history seminar, that is, a beginners’ course. He criticized the fact that the assignment had been delegated to the Commission by a ministry, claiming this was the “government-directed science of history”, placing the Commission’s independence in question. One must remember here that Germany has a law forbidding research of the holocaust that would contradict the legally accepted version!

Mommsen had already formulated the core of his substantive criticisms in his first article in the Frankfurter Rundschau. In this, he complained about “the tendency of the authors, which surfaces everywhere, to identify the plans for the deportation of Jewish citizens, or the creation of ‘Jewish reservations’ with the later practice of mass destruction”. That was certainly true in the end result, he said, “but before the Wannsee Conference, it was not the specific orientation of the actions of the Nazis”. A strong apostate statement for a German historian.

Mommsen’s argument amounts to the claim that the genocidal dimension of the Nazi persecution of the Jews was not predictable because it had only assumed some vague and undocumented form at the Wannsee Conference in January 1942. Thus he does not want to consider the support provided by the Foreign Office to justify the Nuremberg racial laws, to prepare the plans for deportations to Madagascar and Poland and to implement other anti-Semitic measures as sharing responsibility for the subsequent mass deportations and extermination.

He accuses the Historical Commission of not understanding the practical implementation of the Holocaust as the “result of a gradual process.” Therefore, it lost “sight of a self-evolution of the ‘ultimate goal’ in the shadows of official secrecy”. “Time and again”, it was “assumed that the ‘Final Aim’ and its attainment existed a priori in people’s minds”.

Here, Mommsen accuses the Historical Commission of adopting implicitly a position that they do not explicitly take themselves. Nowhere does the Commission say that the “ultimate goal”— mass shootings, gas chambers, Auschwitz—“existed a priori in people’s minds”. Such a presentation would be unhistorical, indeed.

The consequences of Hitler’s coming to power could be seen long in advance. Nazism was an expression of reactionary tendencies of German imperialism. Already in the spring of 1932, Leon Trotsky, a political communist observer and an equally radical fanatic of his time, published an article entitled “Hitler’s victory means war against the USSR”.¹⁶

The Nazis’ anti-Semitism was never a secret, at the latest it became clear since the Kristallnacht pogrom of November 9. 1938. In 1938, Ernst von Weizsäcker allegedly told the Swiss ambassador in Paris that the Jews had to leave Germany, “or they would meet their destruction in the short or long term.” And on January 30, 1939 in the Reichstag (parliament), Hitler threatened openly that if “international finance Jewry” once again plunged the peoples into a world war, the result would be “the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe”. Both are quoted by the Historical Commission.¹⁷

Mommsen counter-poses the “plans for the deportation of Jewish citizens” and “the later practice of mass destruction”. The deportation plans, in which the Foreign Office was active, were the immediate precursor of mass resettlements. They were part of a general scheme for massive resettlement and depopulation, an “ethnic land clearance project”, as Hitler called it. It was not an extermination plan. No-one had forced Weizsäcker and the other officials at the Foreign Office to endorse, approve and accept this “ethnic land clearance project”. They could have come out of what Mommsen calls the “shadows of official secrecy”, however, they did not openly do this.

Mommsen repeatedly comes back to the same point. In his interview with Deutschlandfunk he expressed “dismay” and concern that the Historical Commission had not been more “nuanced” in its treatment of the “totalitarian conditions” under which the Foreign Office was involved in the enforcement of the Holocaust.

In a further contribution to the Süddeutsche Zeitung, he said that the commission had exposed the role of the Foreign Office, “in the form of a ‘strategy of exposure’ without regard to the particular chronological context”. He refers to the hysteria that is meted out to those who call for a “more nuanced assessment of the role of the Foreign Office”.¹⁸

Mommsen is particularly irritated that Commissioner Eckart Conze describes the Foreign Office as a “criminal organization”—as if a body serving an alleged criminal regime could somehow be otherwise.

Mommsen further objected to the attempted rewriting of history by the Commission, claiming on Deutschlandfunk that: “The overall impression is created that the Foreign Office was the decisive or major driving force in the enforcement of the Holocaust.” This was “just not right.” The key movers were to be found in the apparatus of Himmler (SS) and Heydrich (SD), he claims.

Gregor Schöllgen and Daniel Koerfer comments

Following Mommsen, other historians have contributed with additional critical comments. Gregor Schöllgen, an acknowledged specialist in German foreign policy, published an indignant article in the cultural section of the Süddeutsche Zeitung. He accuses the commission of not adequately addressing the extensive, publicly available edition of the Akten zur Deutschen Auswärtigen Politik 1918-1945 (“Documents on German Foreign Policy 1918-1945”, ADAP) and the Akten zur Auswärtigen Politik der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (“Documents on the foreign policy of the Federal Republic of Germany” (AAPD), edited by himself. The Commission report creates the false impression that the “Foreign Office had consistently denied its history for decades, or worse still, had consciously misled the public”, he claims.¹⁹

The historian Daniel Koerfer attacked also the objectivity and truth of the report of the Commission. A long conversation which he held with Frank Schirrmacher, an editor of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, culminated in the accusation that it is a fanatic “book of revenge”.²⁰

Koerfer is an honorary professor at the Free University in Berlin, teaching contemporary history. His grandfather, Gerhart Feine, worked under von Weizsäcker at the Foreign Office. In his posting in Budapest, he opposed the deportation of Hungarian Jews. Koerfer’s godfather, Helmut Becker, defended Ernst von Weizsäcker at Nuremberg. At that time, as Koerfer stated it himself, “he mobilized the entire network of the two families in Germany to defend von Weizsäcker” against wrongful accusations.

Political Background

The fierce controversy that has erupted 65 years after the fall of the Third Reich around Das Amt und die Vergangenheit has not only historical but also current foundations. Ever since the German reunification 20 years ago, German foreign policy has again become increasingly self-assured and sovereign. Since the 1990s several major German companies and banks, which in the 1980s still fiercely resisted opening up their archives, commissioned historical research on the roles of their companies during the time of the Third Reich. They have now been joined by the Foreign Ministry and, more recently, the Federal Ministry of Finance. These late initiatives have been motivated by aggressive threats by ruthless Zionist groups who are specialized in blackmailing industry and banks with worldwide dire consequences if these vulnerable but lucrative targets would not kick back funds to them. An important defense against these tactics has been to utilize an open debate on such historical matters to guard against those seeking legal redress or sanctions.

The effective goal of the Historical Commission was also seen in this way by the German Foreign Ministry, as made clear by Frank-Walter Steinmeier (SPD), Foreign Minister from 2005 to 2009, when presenting the report in Berlin. “Hardly anyone knows better than those in the Foreign Ministry that some shadows of the past are catching up with us all over the world,” he said. “But also, no one knows better what we can win if we face up to this past, without taboos, without myths, confident, courageous, humbly and without pride.”

Steinmeier and Fischer seem to believe that German foreign policy can gain more clout if there is a more open approach to dealing with the past, which, however, as usual is based on self-flagellation. In doing so, they encounter complaints from the “old boys’ network” that their “honor” is being impugned. The extent of the criticism that has been leveled against the report of the Historical Commission shows, however, that there are a growing number of Germans who do not believe in the efficacy of such an approach, especially if and when the objectivity and facts are in question.

Conclusion

For anyone who is interested in the factual history of those tumultuous times, the “review” of the Commission has collected and rehashed a lot of normally widely distributed information. It is thus a practical collection, but there is nothing new or specially revealing contained in it. The problem an objective observer would have with this book is the many comments or commentaries or innuendos by the diverse “commentators” or historians (who may have a special personal agenda), reflecting biased and one-sided thinking, invidious assessments, and even the distortion of facts.

However, overall, it is a good example of a government’s tentacles slowly penetrating traditional or orthodox channels. Ideology is always at the forefront of any diplomatic service of any country, yet practical implementation is normally restricted to “home-based” departments and authorities. This was so with the German Foreign Office, too. This fact cannot be rewritten into the history of the “Office”, as much as some people would like to do.

In Mommsen’s view, the only determinant of German foreign policy was the need to maintain prestige with the German public. In an argument consistent with the school of “Primat der Innenpolitik” (“primacy of domestic politics”) Mommsen wrote that the foreign policy of the Third Reich “was in its form domestic policy projected outwards, which was able to conceal the increasing loss of reality only by maintaining political dynamism through incessant action. As such it became ever more distant from the chance of political stabilization”.²¹

When will the national self-flagellation in Germany as evidenced by the reviewed report, based as it is on biased or distorted opinions, finally come to an end?

Prof. Dr. Claus G. Wagner Bartach is a multilingual polymath and research historian of culture and politics relating to the German people. He lives in the USA.

Peter Black is a Senior Historian at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum who received his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1981. He is also the former chief historian for the “Nazi hunting” Office of Special Investigations of the United States Department of Justice.

In a long article entitled “Foot Soldiers of the Final Solution: The Trawniki Training Camp and Operation Reinhard”, published in the prestigious exterminationist journal Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Black has the following to tell us about the Sobibór “extermination camp”[1]:

“Himmler had intended to convert it [Sobibór] to a concentration camp, but servicing a plant that recycled captured ammunition; Pohl and Globocnik convinced him instead to make Sobibor into a ‘transit camp’ (Durchgangslager)”

As a source Black offers [2]:

“On plans for an ammunition recycling plant, see circular order of the Reichsführer-SS [initialed R. Brandt], July 5, 1943; Chief of WVHA [signed Pohl] to Reichsführer-SS, July 10, 1943; and Reichsführer-SS/Personal Staff [initialed Brandt] to Pohl, July 24, 1943, NARA, RG 238, NO-482.”

However, if we look at the Nuremberg document NO-482 referred to by the venerable Senior Historian of the USHMM we find that the crucial part of Himmler’s 5 July 1943 directive reads as follows:

“Das Durchgangslager Sobibor im Distrikt Lublin ist in ein Konzentrationslager umzuwandeln. In dem Konzentrationslager ist eine Entlaborierungsanstalt für Beutemunition einzurichten.”

In English translation:

“The Sobibór transit camp, located in the Lublin district, is to be converted into a concentration camp. A dismantling unit for captured enemy munitions is to be set up in the concentration camp.”

And in Pohl’s reply from 15 July 1943 (not 10 July as stated by Black) we read:

“Gemäß Ihrer obigen Anordnung soll das Durchgangslager Sobibór im Distrikt Lublin in ein Konzentrationslager umgewandelt zu werden.
Ich habe mich mit SS-Gruppenführer Globocnik darüber unterhalten. Wir beide schlagen Ihnen vor, die Umwandlung in ein Konzentrationslager aufzugeben, weil der von Ihnen erstrebte Zweck, nämlich: in Sobibór eine Entlaborierungsanstalt für Beutemunition einzurichten, auch ohne diese Umwandlung erreicht wird.”

In English translation:

“According to your above instructions, the Sobibór transit camp in the Lublin district is to be converted into a concentration camp. I have discussed this with SS-Gruppenführer Globocnik. Both of us propose to abandon this conversion, as the purpose intended, viz. to set up at Sobibór an installation for the defusing of enemy munitions, can be realized without such a conversion.”

Then on 24 July 1943 Himmler’s personal assistant, Rudolf Brandt, replied back [3]:

“Der Reichsführer-SS ist mit dem Vorschlag, den Sie und SS-Gruppenführer Globocnik hinsichtlich der Belassung des Durchgangslager Sobibór im Distrikt Lublin in dem augenblicklichen Zustand gemacht haben, einverstanden, nachdem der vom ihm gewünschte Zweck auf diese Weise erreicht wird.”

In English translation:

“The Reichsführer SS agrees to the proposal [made] by you and SS-Gruppenführer Globocnik concerning the maintenance of the Sobibor transit camp in the Lublin district in its present state, as the desired objective can be attained in this manner.”

To summarize: On 5 July 1943 Himmler ordered that the “Sobibór transit camp” was to be converted into a concentration camp equipped with a dismantling unit for captured enemy munitions. On 15 July Pohl on behalf of himself and Globocnik wrote to Himmler, recommending that said conversion be abandoned, as the installation of the dismantling unit could be achieved without it. Finally on 24 July Brandt wrote and confirmed that Himmler agreed with the proposal.

It is clear as day from even a cursory glance at these letters that Pohl and Globocnik did not “convince” Himmler “to make Sobibor into a ‘transit camp’”. In fact it was the other way around: the camp was designated a transit camp (Durchgangslager) at the time Himmler wrote his directive. This leaves only two possibilities: either Black has not read the source he cites, which seems utterly unlikely considering that it’s one of only a handful surviving documents pertaining to a field which he is well-acquainted with, i.e. Aktion Reinhardt, or he is consciously distorting the actual contents of the document. In that he would not be alone, as several exterminationist historians have published false or misleading statements about NO-482. To give just two examples: In his article on Sobibór for the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust Yitzhak Arad writes that “On 5 July 1943, Himmler ordered Sobibór to be closed as an extermination camp and transformed into a concentration camp”.[4]

Raul Hilberg writes in his standard work The Destruction of the European Jews that [5]:

“Sobibór was appropriately called a Durchgangslager (transit camp). Since it was located near the Bug, on the border of the occupied eastern territories, the designation fitted the myth of the ‘eastern migration.’ When Himmler proposed one day that the camp be designated a Konzentrationslager, Pohl opposed the change.”

But, as already shown, Himmler did not propose “to designate this camp a concentration camp” but ordered the camp to be “converted into a concentration camp” – the difference is certainly not irrelevant!

Anti-revisionist blogger Roberto Muehlenkamp has resorted to the following contrived argument in order to prove Himmler’s, Pohl’s and Brandt’s designation of Sobibór as a transit camp to be what exterminationists call Tarnsprache (camouflage langauge)[6]:

“Contrary to what Kues would like to believe and insists in maintaining, said directive and the related correspondence are everything other than evidence that Sobibór was the ‘transit camp’ that Himmler claimed it to be (…). Following the suggestions of Globocnik and Pohl, Himmler eventually became convinced that the ‘transit camp’ didn’t have to be converted into a concentration camp to install there a station for processing booty ammunition, obviously because it already had a large labor force being managed and controlled in a manner akin to what was practiced in concentration camps. As a mere transit camp would not have required such a large labor force, Himmler’s correspondence with his subordinates shows that Sobibór was not what it was claimed to be, i.e. not a transit camp.”

Elsewhere Muehlenkamp presents his argument in its full glory [7]:

“Actually the document that T[homas] K[ues] offers in support of his ‘perfect harmony’ claim in his footnote 2 (‘In a letter sent to eight high-ranking members of the SS administration, among them the head of SS-WVHA, Oswald Pohl, on 5 July 1943, Heinrich Himmler ordered “The Sobibor transit camp [Durchgangslager], located in the Lublin district, (…) to be converted into a concentration camp” (a transformation which eventually did not take place); Nuremberg Document NO-482′) belies rather than supports his claim, if one looks at it more closely. [Next follows an English translation of the relevant letters of NO-482].

Why, one wonders, did Himmler propose that the Sobibor camp be converted into a concentration camp in order to install there a station for processing booty ammunition? Obviously because he reasoned that such station required a fairly large labor force and collecting and controlling such fairly large labor force required the kind of organization that characterized the concentration camps run by the SS-Economics and Administration Main Office.

Why, on the other hand, did Globocnik and Pohl not consider it necessary to implement such organization? Obviously because Sobibor already had a fairly large labor force, which could be put to the task of processing booty ammunition, and this labor force was being managed and controlled in a manner akin to what was practiced in concentration camps.

In fact the camp held about 700 inmates at the time of the revolt on 14 October 1943. There’s no reason why a mere transit camp, a place where people were deloused and bathed and then put back on the train to their final destinations, should have required such a large labor force, which was not much smaller than that of Treblinka Labour Camp. What were all these people, directed in a concentration-camp-like manner by a dozen-or-so SS-men and a hundred-or-so Ukrainian guards, doing in a mere transit camp?

To cut a long story short, the fact that Globocnik, Pohl and eventually also Himmler considered Sobibor suitable for installing an ammunition-processing station without any transformation, obviously due to the size of its inmate population, shows that Sobibor was not what it was being called in the above-quoted documents, i.e. not a transit camp.”

To summarize: Because the Sobibór camp held some 700 inmates at the time of the prisoner uprising on 14 October 1943, it could not reasonably have been “a mere transit camp”, because such a camp would not possibly have required a labor force that large. Ergo Sobibór could not have been a transit camp. This supposed argument does not hold water, for several reasons.

To begin with, Muehlenkamp has ignored that the dismantling unit requested by Himmler was indeed installed in Sobibór, with a consequent demand for labor involved in both construction and sorting/dismantling of captured ammunition. Jewish Sobibór witness Dov Freiberg writes in his memoirs about events taking place in August-September 1943 [8]:

“There was another wave of construction at Sobibor camp and again, trains full of construction supplies arrived. Unlike the last frenzy of construction, however, which was intended to increase the capacity of the death machine, now weapons and ammunition warehouses were being built, most of them underground. At this stage Lager 4 was set up, which the Germans called Nordlager – northern camp – in the north-east corner of the existing camp, in the open area between the railway platform and the forest, and it continued into the forest, close to the Lazarett. High-ranking officers landed in light planes and ran around the area with maps and plans, while our SS officers were dragged along behind them. The establishment of ammunition warehouses in a death camp didn’t seem logical – was it possible that a foreign party would set up in a camp run secretly by the SS? It seemed likely that the Germans were going to destroy the death camp and turn it into a munitions base. The work was performed at a swift pace. Before the first bunkers were completed, transports of ammunition had already arrived and were temporarily stored outside, next to the bunkers.”

Freiberg further informs us that around the same time “about a hundred strong young men were selected from the Minsk transport [in mid-September 1943]“.[9] Jules Schelvis on the other estimates the number of workers selected from this transport at 80.[10] These men worked chiefly with carpentry and construction projects connected with the new “Lager IV”. [11]

Another Jewish Sobibór witness, Thomas Blatt, mentions “the girls who sorted the captured Soviet ammunition in Lager IV”.[12] According to Jules Schelvis the sorting of the ammunition was carried out by “a new commando consisting of fifty women and sixty men”.[13]

Intercepted radio messages confirm that unused ammunition from occupied Russia was delivered for recycling to the “SS Durchgangslager Sobibor” at the end of October 1943 (i.e. after the prisoner revolt).[14]

Thus we know that more than a hundred inmates were employed in “Lager IV” with construction work and the sorting and dismantling of captured enemy munition. That Soviet-Jewish POW:s were sent to Sobibór in September 1943 makes perfect sense in this context, as they would naturally have been familiar with the types of munition used by the Red Army.

As for the total number of Sobibór inmates we have only three documents providing indications:

1) A telex from the commmander of the security police in the Lublin district to the duty officer at Krakow on 15 October 1943, in which we read: “On 14.10.1943, around 17:00 hours, uprising of the Jews in the Sobibór SS-camp, 40 km north of Cholm. [...]. Some 300 Jews have escaped, the remainder were either shot or are now in the camp.”[15]

2) On the same day SS-Gruppenführer and HSSPF Lublin Jakob Sporrenberg notified his fellow HSSPF in Luzk (Belarus) that “about 700 Jews” had escaped from “Lager Sobibor” and were thought to be headed across the Bug river.[16]

3) In a report from SS-Untersturmführer Benda of the Security Police and SD in Cholm dated 17 March 1944 the number of escaped inmates is given as 300.[17]

Since all testimonies describing the revolt agree that the number of escapees was nowhere near 700 the logical conclusion is that 300 is the most reliable estimate of how many inmates escaped on 14 October 1943. It then seems reasonable to assume that the figure of 700 mentioned in Sporrenberg’s message might have corresponded to the total number of Jews in the camp, but nonetheless this is mere speculation. However, since most testimonies further agree that about half of the inmate population did not participate in the escape, I will consider it fully possible that Sobibór indeed had some 6-700 inmates at the time of the uprising. The Jewish witness Leon Felhendler stated that the inmate population initially amounted to about 100 and gradually increased to “around 600″.[18] The higher figure mentioned by Felhendler might then possibly have increased to some 700 in September 1943 in connection with the construction of Lager IV.

What then did these inmates work with?

As seen above, at least 110 (possibly up to 190) prisoners worked in the munition dismantling unit in Lager IV.

According to Yitzhak Arad each of the Reinhardt camps had the following inmate work commandos in the parts of the camp outside the “death camp proper” (called “Lager III” in Sobibór) [19]:

- Platform workers (Bahnhofkommando); 40-50 prisoners working at the train platform with the disembarkation and unloading of train transports.
- Transport Square Workers (Transportkommando); about 40 prisoners engaged in activities carried out on the fenced-in square where the Jewish arrivals undressed.
- “Gold Jews” (Goldjuden); nearly 20 people whose task it was to receive and sort the money, gold, valuables, foreign currency, and bonds taken from the arriving Jews.
- Hair Cutter (Friseurs); 10-20 men who cut the hair of the female arrivals before these entered the “death camp proper”.
- Sorting Team for Clothing and Belongings (Lumpenkommando); 80-120 who worked with the collection, examination, sorting, bundling, storing, preparation for shipment and loading of clothing and belongings confiscated from the arrivals.
- Forest Team (Waldkommando), a few dozen prisoners working with the cutting of wood for heating and cooking in the camp. This team was enlarged once cremations began and the demand for firewood increased.

Except for the above work commandos, Arad writes,

“part of the prisoners were employed at other activities. Groups of prisoners were engaged in construction of barracks, in stringing barbed-wire fences, and in paving roads inside the camps. In the autumn and winter a special ‘potato team’ was established. Potatoes were the camp’s principal food, and as winter approached, large quantities were brought to the camp. [...]. Some prisoners worked in the vegetable garden, pigsy, chicken coop, and cowshed, and in the SS personnel’s baths. A few prisoners were employed in cleaning and disinfecting the huts and toilets.
There were also prisoners who supplied direct personal services to the SS and Ukrainians. They included doctors, a dentist, and several barbers. A small group of boys was employed to polish and clean the shoes and uniforms of SS personnel. These boys worked in and around the SS barracks. In addition, there were groups of skilled workers, like tailors, shoemakers, smiths, mechanics, carpenters, and others, known as the ‘court Jews,’ who continued to extend services to the German and Ukrainian staff, as they had since the first stages of the camps’ activity.”[20]

In Sobibór there also existed a group of 15 young female prisoners who worked with knitting socks and sweaters using wool taken from the baggage of arrivals.[21] There were also at least one Sanitäter (medic) tending sick inmates (Kurt Thomas aka Kurt Ticho) [22] and two Jews working in the inmate kitchen (Hershel and Josef Cuckierman).[23] Jewish historian Reuben Ainsztain states that two groups of Sobibór inmates also worked at a nearby quarry.[24]

No-one disputes that the Germans confiscated belongings and valuables from the Jews who arrived in the Reinhardt camps, and it is most likely that arrivals had their hair cut off, as part of the delousing process. Moreover a large number of Jews were no doubt cremated at Sobibór; deportees who had died en route to the camp or who were subjected to “euthanasia” because of mental or physical illness, as well as inmates who fell victims to disease or were executed – and thus there was need for a Waldkommando. It is also far from unbelievable that the SS personnel and guards employed a number of Jewish artisans for their own convenience. All of the above described work commandos are therefore fully compatible with Sobibór the transit camp.

Remains then the inmates housed in the separate “death camp proper”, Lager III.

The sources diverge widely on the number of this group of inmates. In his Eichmann trial testimony Ya’acov Biskovitz gave their number as 80. Thomas Blatt estimates their number to a mere 30 man. Another witness, Chaim Engel, states that “about fifty, sixty Jews” worked in camp III. Arad on the other hand estimates their number at 200-300.[25] Schelvis, referring to a 1985 court verdict, states that the total number of inmates in Lager III as of mid-April 1943 (when a large number of convoys from the Netherlands were arriving at Sobibór) numbered around 150 prisoners.[26] As at this time all inmates in Lager III were reportedly executed because of a failed attempt at a mass escape, and since there are no known survivors from the Lager III inmates, the estimate presumably derives from testimony left by camp personnel.

Following the transit camp hypothesis the Jewish inmates of Lager III could have been employed with a number of tasks: handing out towels and soaps, helping out with the delousing process, cleaning and repairing showers and delousing facilities, guiding deportees from one station in the delousing area to another, assisting in the embarkment on departing trains etc. etc. The archeological evidence shows that the deportees, contrary to the established picture, entered Lager III at least partially dressed, since a large number of remains of clothing and toilet articles were found inside the discovered building remains in that part of the camp,[27] not least in the enormous barracks designated “Object E” by Andrzej Kola, which likely housed the main delousing facility. Further archeological findings from Belzec and Chelmno together with statements from Sobibór eyewitnesses strongly suggest that number tags were used to register the Aktion Reinhardt (and Chelmno) deportees and/or their clothes/belongings that were to go through delousing.[28] Accordingly, the Jewish inmates in Lager III could have also worked with handing out or attaching such tags, as well as with the handling of toilet articles and other items carried by the deportees. According to Reuben Ainsztain a kitchen was installed at a later stage in Lager III.[29] This may have been done in order to better to provide the deportees awaiting further transport with nourishment. Inmates could have worked with preparing and distributing food and water to the deportees.

Then there is the indisputable fact that a large number of Jews died at Sobibór. These Jews perished en route due to various causes, died from illness in the camp, were executed as reprisal for escape attempts, or were subjected to “euthanasia” (likely utilizing lethal injections, possibly also through shooting) as mentally ill or carriers of epidemic diseases (categories of Jews that the German authorities certainly did not want to have resettled in the east). The total number of deaths at Sobibór might have amounted to some 10,000.[30] The part of Lager III where these victims were buried and later cremated was most likely separated by some means from the “clean side” with the delousing facilities. No doubt a number of inmates were involved in the gruesome business of handling and disposing corpses.

To conclude: The presence of 600-700 Jewish inmates in Sobibór fits perfectly well with the transit camp hypothesis, as there was certainly enough work for them all of them to carry out. Roberto Muehlenkamp’s “argument” regarding the letters of NO-482 is therefore devoid of any value: the number of inmates at Sobibór throws no doubt on Himmler’s, Pohl’s and Brandt’s designation of Sobibór as a “transit camp” (Durchgangslager). Their use of that designation is fully congruent with the state of evidence, which allows for only one conclusion: that Sobibór indeed was a transit camp. There is a good reason why Black, Arad, Hilberg and Muehlenkamp have felt compelled to meet the contents of NO-482 with lies and obfuscations.

Before he bothered to write this helplessly flawed criticism Mr. Muehlenkamp should moreover have recalled a truism well-known to all those knowledgable about the socio-economics and technologies of Ancient Rome and Egypt: When slave labor is available in (virtually) unlimited amounts, efficient utilization of said manpower is not a pressing issue.

[1] Peter Black, “Foot Soldiers of the Final Solution: The Trawniki Training Camp and Operation Reinhard”, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, vol. 25, no. 1 (Spring 2011), p. 41.
[2] Ibid., p. 96, note 305.
[3] Quoted from Jules Schelvis, Vernichtungslager Sobibór, Metropol Verlag, Berlin 1998, p. 174.
[4] Israel Gutman (ed.), Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, vol. 3-4, MacMillan, New York 1990, pp. 1376.
[5] Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 3rd ed., Yale University Press, New Haven/London 2003, p. 1028.
[6] http://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot.com/2011/05/on-12052011-demjanjuk-was-sentenced-to.html
[7] http://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot.com/2010/06/evidence-for-presence-of-gassed-jews-in.html
[8] Dov Freiberg, To Survive Sobibor, Gefen Publishing House, Jerusalem 2007, p. 283.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Jules Schelvis, Sobibór. A History of a Nazi Death Camp, Berg, Oxford/New York 2007, p. 238.
[11] Ibid., p. 241.
[12] Thomas Toivi Blatt, From the Ashes of Sobibor. A Story of Survival, Northwestern University Press, Evanston (IL) 1997, p. 141.
[13] J. Schelvis, Sobibór. A History of a Nazi Death Camp, op.cit., p. 147.
[14] PRO: HW 16/39 (ZIP/GPD 2041 DD-FF, message DD 14, transmitted 27 October 1943. I here quote the summary of the message found online at http://www.deathcamps.org/reinhard/prodecodes.html According to J. Schelvis (Sobibór. A History of a Nazi Death Camp, op.cit., p. 188, 196 n. 44), however, the message relates the sending away of munitions from the camp, something which indeed sounds more logical.
[15] Contained in NO-482, also reproduced in several books, for example Thomas (Toivi) Blatt, Sobibór. The Forgotten Revolt, HEP, Issaquah 1998 (unnumbered page in attachment).
[16] PRO: HW 16/38 (ZIP/GPD 1956 CC-HH, message DD 12, transmitted 15 October 1943 at 1115h. Reproduced online: http://www.deathcamps.org/sobibor/pic/prodoc1.jpg
[17] NO-482 Reproduced in the appendices to Miriam Novitch, Sobibor. Martyrdom and Revolt. Documents and Testimonies, Holocaust Library, New York 1980. Also online: http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/ar/images/Sobibor%20%281%29.jpg
[18] J. Schelvis, Sobibór. A History of a Nazi Death Camp, op.cit., p. 69.
[19] Yitzhak Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka. The Operation Reinhard Death Camps, Indiana University Press, Bloomington/Indianapolis 1987, pp. 108-110.
[20] Ibid., p. 110.
[21] Ibid., p. 114.
[22] J. Schelvis, Sobibór. A History of a Nazi Death Camp, op.cit., pp. 86-87.
[23] Ibid., pp. 232-233
[24] Reuben Ainsztein, Jewish Resistance in Nazi-Occupied Eastern Europe, Paul Elek, London 1974, p. 746.
[25] Jürgen Graf, Thomas Kues, Carlo Mattogno, Sobibór. Holocaust Propaganda and Reality, TBR Books, Washington DC 2010, p. 81, note 179.
[26] J. Schelvis, Sobibór. A History of a Nazi Death Camp, op.cit., p. 142.
[27] J. Graf, T. Kues, C. Mattogno, Sobibór. Holocaust Propaganda and Reality, op.cit., pp. 154-159.
[28] Ibid, pp. 100-101, 331-333.
[29] R. Ainsztein, Jewish Resistance in Nazi-Occupied Eastern Europe, op.cit., p. 746.
[30] J. Graf, T. Kues, C. Mattogno, Sobibór. Holocaust Propaganda and Reality, op.cit., pp. 168-170.

On 25 November 2010 the AFP news bureau reported the following:

“A Lithuanian historian quit his civil service job Thursday after seven ambassadors from fellow European nations accused him of denying the Holocaust. Lithuania’s interior ministry said that Petras Stankeras, an independent historian who also held a middle-ranking post in its planning department, had left at his own request. Interior Minister Raimundas Palaitis said Stankeras’s views were personal.

‘Such interpretations have nothing in common with the position of the interior ministry with regard to the Jewish genocide,’ Palaitis said in a statement.

The announcement came a day after the ambassadors of Britain, Estonia, Finland, France, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden slammed an article by Stankeras in the mainstream weekly Veidas on the Nuremberg trials, where the victorious Allies tried top Nazi German officials after World War II. Stankeras wrote that the trials ‘provided a legal basis to the legend about the six million purportedly murdered Jews’.

The ambassadors blasted Stankeras in a letter to the interior ministry dated November 24 and obtained by the Baltic News Service on Thursday.

‘This amounts to denial of the Holocaust and merits the strongest condemnation,’ they said.

They also chastised Lithuanian authorities for failing to react rapidly, and questioned Veidas’s publication of the article. But Gintaras Sarafinas, the magazine’s editor-in-chief, said neither Veidas nor Stankeras denied the Holocaust, and blamed a style error. ‘Our weekly does not deny the Holocaust, never did and never will. The author, who is a professional historian, only wanted to discuss the number of victims,’ Sarafinas told AFP.

‘We admit that the sentence is wrong stylistically, as the word ‘purportedly’ should have been elsewhere,’ he added.

In a statement, Efraim Zuroff of the Jerusalem-based Simon Wiesenthal Center said Stankeras should be prosecuted under Lithuania’s Holocaust-denial law .”[1]

The original article in Lithuanian, “Niurnbergo karo nusikaltimų tribunolas – didžiausias juridinis farsas istorijoje” (The Nuremberg Military Court Tribunal: The Biggest Legal Farce in History), can be read in the online edition of the Veidas magazine.[2] It was printed in Veidas no. 45 from 8 November 2011. There is also an English translation available from a “Holocaust” website.[3] According to this translation, the passage “denying the Holocaust” reads as follows:

“It is also important that the Nuremberg process provided a legal basis to the legend about the six million supposedly murdered Jews [įgavo legenda apie 6 mln. neva nužudytų žydų], although the court didn’t have even a single document signed by Hitler on the extermination of Jews (no one has found this document to this day, if it even exists, although a million dollar prize has been promised).“

That there exists no documentary proof for Hitler ordering the alleged extermination of the Jews has been admitted repeatedly by orthodox holocaust historians. Christopher Browning for example stated in 1985:

“There was no written order for the final solution, and we have no reference to an oral order except what Himmler told Heydrich when he said that he acted with the Führer’s approval.“[4]

Dr. Petras Stankeras is the author of the study Lietuviu policija 1941-1944 metais (“The Lithuanian Police 1941-1944″, Lietuvos gyventojų genocido ir rezistencijos tyrimo centras, Vilnius 1998), published by the state-sponsored Lithuanian Genocide Research Center.

I Con the World

Is Elie Wiesel an icon or an “I con?”

Venerated and billed as “the world’s most famous Holocaust survivor” and a Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, earning hundreds of thousands of dollars every year in speaking fees (at $25,000 a pop it might be closer to say a million), and holding a prestigious, but undemanding six-figure professorship in Humanities at Boston University, Elie Wiesel has never been asked to show any proof that he is what he says he is.

Everything written about Elie Wiesel that this writer can find skims over the details and dwells on the emotionality of holocaust, humanity and hate. Among the many unnerving quotations from Elie concerning the last h-word is this one, found preceding an essay in the Jewish Daily Forward of June 9th by Anita Epstein, titled “Why I Cannot Forgive Germany:” [1]

“I cannot and I do not want to forgive the killers of children; I ask God not to forgive.”

     - Elie Wiesel

Ms. Epstein is influenced (or inspired?) by Wiesel to hold onto hate by holding on to the holocaust legends, such as the one about “Germans” throwing babies off of balconies. Another famous statement made by Elie is:

“Every Jew, somewhere in his being, should set apart a zone of hate – healthy virile hate – for what the German personifies and for what persists in the German. To do otherwise would be a betrayal of the dead. ”

Elie Wiesel actually plays God. The world has been conned into seeing him as the next best thing to God, as someone who has risen above it all, as someone who is capable or has earned the right to pass judgment on the rest of humanity. What has earned him this right is clearly his suffering during the one year he was held in concentration camps and his “powerful prose” in describing it.

However, Elie’s actual presence in the Auschwitz “death camp” and the Buchenwald concentration camp during 1944-45 rests solely on the claims of the New York Times and his well-promoted books, the most famous being his first one, Night, published in 1955 in Buenos Aires. That’s an interesting story in itself, but here I will limit myself to a chronology of NYT features on Elie that coincide with his advancing fortunes.

On 6 May 1945, the New York Times published the now famous photograph of the “Crowded Bunks in the Prison Camp at Buchenwald” without identifying anyone in the picture. Further use of the picture follows.

* October 1983, it was published again in the high circulation Sunday NYT Magazine with this caption: “On April 11, 1945, American troops liberated the concentration camp’s survivors, including Elie, who later identified himself as the man circled in the photo.”[2] (Wiesel says he is the last one on top row in this cropped version of the picture).

Wiesel had never claimed to be in this picture before, and this face is not the face of a 16-year-old boy, nor does it resemble an existing portrait of Elie before he was deported. But, the article included the statement: “His name has been frequently mentioned as a possible recipient of a Nobel Prize, for either peace or literature.” So we suspect it was part of the campaign being waged to win him a Nobel Prize.

As David O’Connell has written in “Elie Wiesel and the Catholics,”[3] the NYT had manufactured history by declaring erroneously that Wiesel is seen in the picture, even though Wiesel had stated over the years that he was in the sick bay at Buchenwald on April 16, the day the photograph was taken.

* 14 October 1986. The Nobel award was announced.

* 2 November 1986. The NYT again republished a severely cropped version of the Buchenwald photo with the caption: “Elie Wiesel, the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize (at far right in the top bunk) in the Buchenwald concentration camp in April 1945, when the camp was liberated by American troops.” [4]

* 4 January 1987. The NYT erroneously claimed that Wiesel had been “freed from Auschwitz” during the war. [5]

* 18 January 1988. The NYT wrote on the occasion of his trip to Auschwitz: “Mr. Wiesel was a prisoner at Auschwitz and witnessed the killing there of his father and one of his sisters.” [6] But, according to Wiesel’s account (no records), his father died in Buchenwald [from illness - editor's remark]. However, the NYT knew that Auschwitz was a familiar Holocaust “keyword” to its readers, while Buchenwald was not.

More confusion:

* 3 June 1987, the Chicago Tribune published a photo of Wiesel, accompanied by two other men, standing in front of a blown-up version of the picture and pointing to himself in it. The caption read: “Nobel Prize winner Elie Wiesel points to a picture of himself, taken by a German at the Auschwitz death camp in 1945. The photograph is part of the Holocaust Memorial in Lyon, France.”[7]

* 21 April 1995, Wiesel told the German weekly Die Zeit that the picture had actually been taken the day after the liberation, that is, on April 12, 1945, not on April 11, as he had always implied. (It was actually taken on April 16). He also said: “On the day after the liberation the picture was taken in the Children’s Block at Buchenwald by an American soldier. It shows old men. But these old faces are the faces of men who, in truth, were 15 or 16 years of age like I was.” [8]

There is much more to the story of this photograph, but that must be sufficient for now.

Counter Claims

In March 2009, fellow Hungarian Jew Myklos (Nikolaus) Grüner’s accusation that Elie Wiesel is an imposter broke onto the Internet, mainly via an article [9] on Henry Makow’s website that he picked up from a Hungarian website.[10] Naturally, it didn’t get much coverage in the media, even though Grüner had documents from both Auschwitz and Buchenwald to back him up, including undisputed records that show him registered as a prisoner in both camps. Back in January 2003, Grüner had issued an “international press release to the world” from his home in Sweden:

“Elie Wiesel A-7713 has never existed, and the man claiming himself to be “Elie Wiesel” with the concentration camp number A-7713, knowing full well that this number belonged to someone else, is an imposter of the worst kind. For this statement, I, Nikolaus Grüner A-11104, have certified and written knowledge of.” [11]

In a press release of 2006, Grüner states: “I […] take full responsibility in revealing that the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize winner ‘ELIE WIESEL’ has been impersonating Lazar Wiesel A-7713 who was born 1913 in Marmaros, Hungary. Further more I also state that the archives in Auschwitz and Buchenwald are missing evidence to prove that ‘ELIE,’ known as A-7713, was ever registered as a prisoner in any German concentration camp at all.” [12]

The evidence Grüner presents is compelling, and can be found in an organized fashion in two articles written by Carlo Mattogno and posted at Inconvenient History Revisionist Blog [13] on 24 Feb and 26 March of this year. One small piece of this evidence is that Elie Wiesel was born on 30 September 1928, and another is that the ID number A-7713 was given out on 24 May, but Elie Wiesel says in his book Night that he wasn’t deported from Sighet (Marmaros) until after 28 May and possibly not until 3 June 1944.

But the most persuasive evidence to me is registration cards and other official documents from the Auschwitz Museum archives that show Lazar Wiesel, born 4 September 1913 received number (and tattoo) A-7713 and his brother, Abraham, born 10 October 1900 was given A-7712.

A-7712 is the number Elie claims belonged to his father Shlomo, who was with him. There are no such records for Elie and his father. Nor for his two sisters who supposedly survived Auschwitz too.

The situation at Buchenwald is similar and the evidence against Elie Wiesel being a survivor of Auschwitz and Buchenwald at all continues to build to a veritable mountain, all of which will be graphically presented and archived at a website that is now under construction and soon to open.

Where’s the tattoo?

Our new website will carry the theme “Where’s the tattoo?” – an idea originally suggested by a poster on the CODOH forum. We present this to viewers as a world-wide challenge and to encourage investigation and demand for answers. We will ask for independent efforts by diverse groups to work with film, Youtube videos, petitions and letter-writing campaigns to Universities, especially Elie’s employer, Boston University.

We will challenge those in the “mighty mainstream media” to force attention on this issue. Everyone—you—can act as an individual entrepreneur, make use of the information we will provide, contribute information to I Con The World, coordinate with us. Our spotlight on Elie Wiesel and the issue of who he really is will be intense and unrelenting. We are not talking about speaking in riddles here, but of evidence that is in- your-face… or in-his-face. We urge your participation, we urge you to recruit others by bringing I Con The World to their attention, by encouraging others to contribute in whatever way they can.

Watch for us. Get ready to help.

[The Elie Wiesel Cons The World website is now up online at http://www.eliewieseltattoo.com - Editor's note]

[1] Jewish Daily Forward, 9 June 2010. http://forward.com/articles/128652/
[2] Samuel G. Freedman, “Bearing Witness: The Life and Work of Elie Wiesel,” NYT, 23 October 1983.
[3] “Elie Wiesel and the Catholics,” Culture Wars, November 2004.
[4] Martin Suskind, “A Voice from Bonn: History Cannot be Shrugged Off,” NYT, 2 November 1986.
[5] “A Survivor’s Prize,” NYT, 4 January 1987.
[6] “Wiesel and Walesa Visit Auschwitz,” NYT, 18 January 1988.
[7] “Elie Wiesel and the Catholics,” ibid.
[8] “1945 und Heute: Holocaust,” Die Zeit, 21 April 1995.
[9] http://www.henrymakow.com/translated_from_the_hungarian.html
[10] http://kuruc.info/r/6/36390/
[11] Nikolaus Grüner, Stolen Identity, Stockholm, 2005-2006.
[12] Grüner, ibid.
[13] Carlo Mattogno, ”Elie Wiesel: ‘The Most Authoritative Living Witness’ of The Shoah?” http://www.revblog.codoh.com/2010/02/elie-wiesel-the-most-authoritative-living-witness-of-the-shoah/; ”Elie Wiesel: New Documents” http://www.revblog.codoh.com/2010/03/elie-wiesel-new-documents/

In my study Special Treatment in Auschwitz. Origin and Meaning of a Term[1] I have written as follows:

«“Special Units” of the Crematoria
Danuta Czech explains the origin and meaning of the term “Sonderkommando” (special unit) as follows:
“The extermination camp created also one other group of people, those who were forced to work in the crematoria and gas chambers – the unfortunate people were assigned to the work of the special unit. The SS used code words if they spoke about the mass extermination of those ‘unworthy of life.’ It called the mass extermination as well as the transports leading
to selection ‘special treatment’ (often abbreviated as SB). Thus, also, the expression ‘special unit.’”
In other words, since criminal activity described by the code word ‘special treatment’ was allegedly being conducted in the crematoria, the staff employed there had of necessity to be a ‘special unit.’ Naturally it was the only work unit at Auschwitz that merited the prefix ‘special’ [sonder] – otherwise the word would have lost the criminal significance that it possessed according to official historiography.
Based on the documents, the reality is entirely different. First of all, the expression ‘special unit’ does not appear in a single document referring to the crematoria. In its ‘magnum opus’ the Auschwitz museum attempted to prove, on the basis of two documents, that this term was used for the crematoria personnel. The first document is a duty roster for July 18, 1944 [”Dienstplan für Dienstag”, dated 17 July], the second order no. 8/43 of April 20, 1943 from the Commandant’s Headquarters. But the first document merely mentions the term ‘special unit’ in connection with a gate control [Torkontrolle]»

Here a correction is necessary. The mention of the ”Sonderkommando” is not related to the ”Torkontrolle” written on the left (the document is written in two columns) but to four names listed on the right: ”Buch, Kelm, Schultz, Bickel”. Franciszek Piper considers them all to be “members of the SS directly employed in the gas chambers and crematoria”, but this assertion is based solely on the document in question.[2] He also states that Buch, Kelm and Schulz are mentioned as the members of the SS-Sonderkommando of the crematoria by the witnesses Alter Feinsilber (alias Jankowski) and Henryk Tauber,[3] but the first one speaks only of a ”Scharführer Buch” and a ”Kell”,[4] while the other mentions a ”Schultz” and a ”Köln”.[5] One Scharführer Buch, an Unterscharführer Kelm and an Unterscharführer appears (with their proper names) in an undated list of SS-men containing a column of written signatures under the heading ”receipt”, likely related to the payment of salaries. Their tasks are not specified.[6] The Heinz Schulz who according to Piper (whose source refers to a “Schultz”) was a Kommandoführer (commando leader) of the crematoria was identified at the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial as SS-Unterscharführer Arthur Heinz Schulz, who was the “ Kommandoführer im Arbeitskommando Zerlegbetriebe” (commando leader of the disassembly work commando).[7] Hermann Buch, who according to Piper also served as a Kommandoführer in the crematoria, served, according to the same book in which the Auschwitz historian makes this claim, as Lagerführer of BIIe (head of camp BIIe, the “Gypsy family camp), at the beginning of April 1944. In the eight lines of his biographical note there is no hint that he occupied the – in the context of the ”Holocaust” claims most important – position of a crematoria Kommandoführer.[8]

There exists a similar docuent, the ”Dienstplan für Donnerstag, den 10.05.1944” (Service schedule for Tuesday, 5 October 1944), dated 4 October, in which the term Sonderkommando appears but with only one name written next to it: ”Buch”. In the second column on the same line is written “Sola, Hütte” (Sola [river], works) and close to this ”Kelm”.[9]

Because, as explained below, the staff of the crematoria at the time was divided into 8 Kommandos, 2 for each crematorium (one day and one night shift), a total of 8 Kommandoführer were required daily. The first document mentions only 4 SS non-commissioned officers, while the second mentions only a single name, which means that the ”Sonderkommando” mentioned in them had nothing to do with the crematoria staff.

«The second [document] speaks simply of the pursuit of two Jews “who were on the run from the special unit.” [von 2 Juden, die vom Sonderkommando flüchtig waren] Therefore, the assumption, based on the above two occurrences of the term, is that there was in Auschwitz a single ‘special unit,’ which consisted of the crematoria staff!
However, in the documents, which explicitly mention the crematorium staff, its designation is simply “staff of crematorium” [Krematoriumspersonal][10] or it is identified by numbers – “206-B boiler, Crematorium I and II, 207-B boiler, Crematorium II and IV”[”206-B Heizer Krematorium I. u.II. 207-B Heizer Krematorium III. U. IV”].[11]
In the second place, there were numerous ‘special units’ in Auschwitz, of which not a single one had anything whatsoever to do with the crematoria. I list those below, for which I have found documentary evidence:

• Installation by special unit Birkenau BW 20 POW camp [“Installation des Sonderkommando-Birkenau BW 20 KGL”]: unit of electricians serving in the power plant of Birkenau (BW 20).
• pest control special unit [“Sonderkommando-Schädlingsbekämpfung”] (made up of women).
• special unit Reinhardt [“Sonderkommando-Reinhardt”]: women’s unit assigned to the sorting of clothing.
• special unit Zeppelin [“Sonderkommando Zeppelin”]: outside unit based in Breslau.
• special unit I [“Sonderkommando 1”]: unit for the warehousing of the personal effects of the Jews deported to Auschwitz.
• special unit II [“Sonderkommando II”]: no information with regard to its function.
• construction depot special unit (S.K.) [“Bauhof-Sonderkommando (S.K.) ”]: unit employed in the store of the construction depot.
• Dwory special unit (S.K.) [“Dwory-Sonderkommando (S.K.)”]: unit working in Dwory – a village about 10 km east of the town of Auschwitz.
• Buna special unit (S.K.) [“Buna-Sonderkommando (S.K.)”]: unit working in Monowitz.
• clothing workshops special unit [“Bekleidungs-Werkstätte-Sonderkommando (Bekl.Werkst.S.K.)”]: unit in the workshops producing clothing.
• DAW special unit [“D.A.W.Sonderkommando (S.K.)”]: unit employed in the German Equipment Works [Deutsche Ausrüstungswerke].
• Sonderkommando, occupied at the “Sola-Hütte.”

One may comb the orthodox historical publications, beginning with those of the Auschwitz Museum, for even a scant reference to the above ‘special units’ – but, alas, in vain!»

Recently the Auschwitz Museum website (www.auschwitz.org.pl) published two documents which mentions the term ”Sonderkommando”, one of them with explicit reference to a ”Krematorium” (crematorium). Below I present the documents with transcriptions and translations.

DOCUMENT:

TRANSCRIPTION:

«[Column 1]
a) Geheime Staatspolizei Auschwitz
b) Stadtrevier Auschwitz
Pezola, Wachtm[eister] d[er] S[chutzpolizei] d.A. [?]
c) 7.9.44. 1915 Uhr Wilczek
[Column 2]
Fluchtmeldung.
Gegen 1400 Uhr ist heute aus dem K.L. Auschwitz II vom Sonderkommando (Krematorium) eine größere Anzahl Häftlinge ausgebrochen meist Juden. Die Flüchtigen wurden bereits zum Teil bei der sofort aufgenommenen Verfolgung erschossen. Die Suchaktion wird fortgesetzt.
Kennzeichen: geschoren, auf dem l[inken]. Unterarm eintätowierte No. Kleidung teils Civil mit roten Streifen. Weitere Fahndungsmaßnahmen u[nd]. Verständigung der untergeordneten Stellen bitte ich sofort durchzuführen.
Es sind nur noch 4 Häftlinge flüchtig.
[Column 3]
Verstärkte Streife zum [vom?] Bahnhofsgelände entsandt».

TRANSLATION:

«[Column 1]
a) Secret State Police [i.e. Gestapo] Auschwitz
b) Auschwitz city hospital
Pezola, marshal of the security police d.A.[?]
c) 7.9.44. 19.15 hours Wilczek
[Column 2]
Escape report.
Towards 14.00 hours today a larger number of detainees belonging to the Sonderkommando (crematory), mostly Jews, escaped from K.L. Auschwitz. Part of the escapees were shot during the pursuit, which was commenced immediately. The search operation continues.
Dinstinguishing marks: cropped hair, number tattooed on the l[eft]. lower arm. Clothes partly civilian with red stripes. I request that you urgently notify subordinate agencies and carry out further search measures.
4 prisoners are still on free foot.
[Column 3]
Send a reinforced patrol to the station area».

It is rather curious that such an important document was discovered (?) only after 65 years and then published without any supplementary information. I will return to this issue at the end of the article.

The second document is an officer’s service report (Führer v. Dienst) from 9-10 December 1942.[14]

I will translate here only its most important parts:

«At 12.25 hours it was reported that 6 detainees had escaped from Sonderkommando I. [...]. At 20.30 hours there was a call from Harmensee that 2 detainees had been captured there. [...]. It was the two Jewish detainees no. 36816 and 38313 who had escaped from Sonderkommando II early on 7.12.42.»
[«12.25 wurde gemeldet das [sic] beim Sonderkommande [sic] I 6 Häftlinge geflüchtet sind. [...]. 20.30 wurde v. Harmenze [sic] angerufen, das [sic] dort 2 Häfltinge aufgegriffen worden sind. [...]. Es waren die beiden Juden häflinge [sic] N 36816 + 38313 welche am 7.12.42 früh v. Sonderkom. II geflüchtet sind»].

Danuta Czech, in her Auschwitz ”Kalendarium” summarizes the document in question as follows under the entry for 9 December 1942:

«At 12.25 the officer on duty received a notification that six detainees had escaped from the Sonderkommando».[15]

She then informs us that «the two prisoners, with the numbers 36816 and 38313», had escaped «from Sonderkommando II». In the entry for 10 December she adds:

«The two Jewish prisoners Ladislaus Knopp (No. 36816) and Samuel Culea (No. 38313) who had escaped from Sonderkommando II on 7 December are confined in the Bunker of Block 11 and released the same day into the camp.
Two Jewish inmates, who fled the day before from the Sonderkommando, are captured and imprisoned in the Bunker of Block 11. These are Bar Borenstein (No 74858), born 10 February 1920, and Nojech Borenstein (No 74859), born 25 March 1925 in Szreńsk. [...]. Both are probably executed in the presence of the Sonderkommando in order to terrorize the other prisoners».

In a footnote Czech explains with regards to Bar Borenstein and Nojech Borenstein:

«Next to the names of the both detainees, near the annotation “released” is written the letter “Ü”».[16]

It is not clear from what the author of the ”Kalendarium” draws her conclusion that these two prisoners were executed, as “Ü” is doubtlessly an abbreviation of “überstellt”, transferred. In fact, the numbers of these two inmates are not listed as dead among the entries of the Leichenhallenbuch (the registry of deaths from the morgue in Block 28 of the main camp) from 9 December 1942 or the following days.[17] But the most important aspect of the above summaries by Czech is the fact that she has omitted the number of the Sonderkommando from which the six prisoners had escaped: ”I”. The reason for this is easy to understand. Under the date of 3 December 1942 Czech writes:

«The approximately 300 prisoners of the Sonderkommando used for the exhumation and cremation of 107,000 corpses buried in mass graves are driven by the SS from Birkenau to the Auschwitz main camp. There they are taken to the crematorium and killed with gas. Thus the witnesses to the cremation of the corpses are eliminated».[18]

In the entry for 6 December 1942 she notes:

«A new Sonderkommando is formed, which includes several dozen detainees selected from camp BIb. It probably bears the name Sonderkommando II. Among its members are Meilech (Milton) Buki (Nr. 80312) and Szlama Dragon (Nr. 80359) [...]. At the trial of Rudolf Hoess he [Szlama Dragon] deposed as a witness for the prosecution, stating that the group of Jewish prisoners were assigned to the Sonderkommando on 9 December and the following day were employed in the cremation of corpses. From the camp documents it appears that the Sonderkommando [II] aready existed, because on 7 and 9 December prisoners employed in it attempted escape».[19]

The mention of «camp documents» clearly refer to the officer’s service report from 9 December 1942.

To recapitulate, the Sonderkommando allegedly massacred on 3 December 1942 was replaced by a “Sonderkommando II” on 6 December, which means that the former unit was the ”Sonderkommando I”. D. Czech claims that the detainees who escaped on 7 and 9 December were all from ” Sonderkommando II”, but the officer’s service report explicitly states that the six detainees in question were employed in Sonderkommando I”. By omitting the number “I” from her entry for 9 December and falsely asserting in the entry for 6 December that all the prisoners who had escaped belonged to “Sonderkommando II , Czech sought to to hide the fact that on December 9, 1942 there existed a “Sonderkommando I” as well as a “Sonderkommando II”, something which upsets her flawed reconstruction of events. It is all too obvious that, if the two Sonderkommandos existed at the same time, the first one could not have been exterminated on 3 December, and the second one could not have taken its place days later.

Elsewhere I have explained that the Sonderkommando I and II had nothing to do with the crematoria, but were working at sorting the booty of ”Aktion Reinhard” in Auschwitz.[20]

The imposture of Czech sought to confirm the thesis that at Auschwitz there existed one single, unique Sonderkommando employed in the crematoria. It had to be the only one because, as explained above, its name was to recall its supposed involvement in the alleged Sonderbehandlung. It is evident that the author of the ”Kalendarium” had to resort to this imposture because at that time there existed no documents which could establish a relationship between the Sonderkommando and the crematoria.

Now, the “escape report” mentioned above tells us of a Sonderkommando belonging to the “crematory”, but this was just one of many Sonderkommandos that existed in Auschwitz. This is confirmed by the document itself, since it specifies within brackets that the Sonderkommando was that of the “crematory”, thus implying precisely that there were other Sonderkommandos. Furthermore, the fact that the escapees from this Sonderkommando were “mostly Jews” contradicts the exterminationist axiom that all, or virtually all, of the members of the crematoria Sonderkommando were Jews.

This document is important also in another aspect, which perhaps explains the fact that it was “forgotten” for so many years. The only mass escape of Auschwitz crematoria staff mentioned by Holocaust historiography is supposed to have taken place in connection with the alleged “revolt of the Sonderkommando” of 7 October 1944. The only date to appear in the document in question is, however, 7 September 1944. The document, moreover, speaks of an escape, not of a revolt, which, among other things, is claimed to have led to deaths among the SS personnel – but in our ”escape report” there is no mention of any such deaths.

The one single document that is cited in confirmation of the alleged revolt, Standortbefehl (garrison order) No. 26/44 of 12 October 1944, states:

True to their oath to the Führer, there fell before the enemy in their line of duty, on Saturday 7.10.44 [«In Ausübung ihres Dienstes fielen vor dem Feind getreu ihrem Eid auf den Führer am Sonnabend, dem [sic] 7.10.44»]

This is followed by the names of three SS-Unterscharführer: Rudolf Erler, Willi Freese and Josef Purke.[21] It does not mention, however, under which circumstances these three non-commissioned officers died.

To this document is added the fact that, according to the series of reports on the Arbeitseinsatz (work deployment) of the men’s camp in Birkenau, the crematoria staff – called ”Heizer Krematorium I-IV” (firemen crematoria I-IV) and divided into one Kommando per crematorium, with each of those in turn broken down into two shifts, day an night: 57B, 58B, 59B, 60B – consisted of 663 prisoners on 8 October 1944, while on the following day it counted only 212.[22] But the decrease of 451 inmates does not necessarily indicate that they were killed during a revolt. On the other hand, if this alleged revolt had actually occurred on October 7, the decrease in the strength of the Sonderkommando would have been recorded on the following day, not on the 9th. Moreover, according to the sources referred to in footnote 22, from 10 October on, the staff of crematorium IV vanishes from the Arbeitseinsatz reports. The staff of crematorium I, II and V continues to be divided into two shifts, day and night, 33 prisoners each, practically until October 31.[23] The decrease could thus also have been caused by a reduction of the crematoria staff for administrative reasons. With regard to crematorium IV, no known document clarifies its fate.

On 7 September 1944 the crematoria staff consisted of 870 detainees,[24] while on 2 October it was down to 661.[25] If this decrease of 209 prisoners was not the result of the escape of September 7 (with which it is compatible, considering that the Arbeitseinsatz report for this day relates to changes in the work force which had taken place the day before, while the subsequent reports have not been preserved) it could also have been due to administrative reasons.

In conclusion: The fact that such an enormously important event as the alleged ”revolt of the Sonderkommando” is not explicitly mentioned in any German document, starting with those of the Litzmannstadt Gestapo, which in connection with any escape from Auschwitz as a rule always sent out a telegram to all affected offices,[26] is the most disturbing aspect of this story for Holocaust historiography.

Carlo Mattogno
8 March 2010

[1] Theses & Dissertations Press, Chicago 2004, p. 101.
[2] F. Piper, «Vernichtung», in: W. Długoborski, F. Piper (eds.), Auschwitz 1940-1945. Studien zur Geschichte des Konzentrations- und Vernichtungslagers Auschwitz, Verlag des Staatliches Museums Auschwitz-Birkenau, Oświęcim 1999, vol. III, p. 261.
[3] Idem, pp. 261-263.
[4] Inmitten des grauenvollen Verbrechens. Handschriften von Mitgliedern des Sonderkommandos, Verlag des Staatlichen Auschwitz-Birkenau Museums, 1996, p. 45.
[5] The Höss Trial, vol. 11, p. 142.
[6] GARF, 7021-108-54, pp. 97 and 98.
[7] Der Auschwitz Prozeß, edited by the Fritz Bauer Institut (Frankfurt am Main) and the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, Digitale Bibliothek, Verlag der Directmedia Publishing GmbH, Berlin 2005, p. 33519, 46036 and 46043.
[8] Aleksander Lasik, «Die Organisationsstruktur des KL Auschwitz», in: W. Długoborski, F. Piper (eds.), Auschwitz 1940-1945. Studien zur Geschichte des Konzentrations- und Vernichtungslagers Auschwitz, op. cit., vol. I, p. 239.
[9] GARF, 7021-108-59, p. 3.
[10] APMO, Übersicht über Anzahl und Einsatz der Häftlinge des Konzentrationslager, 31 January 1944. APMO, D-f/402, n. inv. 167217, p. 34.
[11] E.g. in Arbeitseinsatz für den 15. Mai 1943, APMO, D-AuII-3a/1a, p. 333a.
[12] In the list compiled by Otto Wolken. AGK, NTN, 149, pp. 139-140.
[13] Idem, p. 149.
[14] This document is dated ”9/10.42”. This should not be read as 9 October, but instead as 9-10 December (the month omitted here is indicated later in the report), the two days being when the officer in question performed his service (in all likelihood, judging from the times mentioned, which range from the 9th of December to the 10th).
[15] D. Czech, Kalendarium der Ereignisse im Konzentrationslager Auschwitz-Birkenau 1939-1945, Rowohlt Verlag, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1989, p. 355.
[16] Idem.
[17] AGK, Leichenhallenbuch, Collection “OB”, 385, pp. 42-43 and following pages.
[18] D. Czech, Kalendarium der Ereignisse im Konzentrationslager Auschwitz-Birkenau 1939-1945, op. cit., p. 349.
[19] Idem, pp. 352-353.
[20] “Azione Reinhard” e “Azione 1005”, Effepi, Genoa 2008, pp. 24-31.
[21] Standort- und Kommandanturbefehle des Konzentrationslager Auschwitz 1940-1945, K.G. Saur, Munich 2000, p. 499.
[22] GARF, 7021-108-99, p. 164 and 168.
[23] Idem, pp. 166-167.
[24] APMO, D AuII/3a/49, p. 88.
[25] Idem, p. 93. The intermediate reports have not been preserved.
[26] E.g. the telegram concerning the escape on 7 April 1944 of Walter Rosenberg (alias Rudolf Vrba) and Alfred Wetzler, who later became known as the authors of the ”Auschwitz Protocols”, APMO, JZ-8 / 6 Łódź / 4, p. 65.

Abbreviations:

AGK: Archiwum Głównej Komisji Badania Zbrodni Przeciwko Narodowi Polskiemu – Instytutu Pamieci Narodowej (Archive of the Chief Commission for the Investigation of Crimes against the Polish People – National Memorial Institute), Warsaw
APMO: Archiwum Państwowego Muzeum w Oświęcimiu (Archive of the State Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum)
GARF: Gosudarstvenni Archiv Rossiskoi Federatsii (State Archive of the Russian Federation), Moscow
RGVA: Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennii Vojennii Archiv (State Russian War Archive), Moscow.

In a discussion of my study Special Treatment in Auschwitz. Origin and Meaning of a Term (Theses & Dissertations Press, Chicago 2004), Holocaust blogger Sergey Romanov puts forth the following critique:

«Mattogno discusses lots of Auschwitz documents which contain the code words, and an unsuspecting reader might be duped into believing that Mattogno really did discuss (and rip to shreds) all the Auschwitz-related documentary evidence containing the code words. However, Mattogno deceptively omits the most crucial source on the use of the code word»

He concludes:

«Therefore, by omitting any mention of these prominent documents Carlo Mattogno has engaged in a gross and unforgivable deception. We hope to treat Mattogno’s other arguments from this and other books in the future, but it has already been established that one cannot rely on him to present the evidence fairly».[1]

If there is anyone who is “deceptive” here it is Sergey Romanov. In the abovementioned book I not only have never claimed to have considered «all the Auschwitz-related documentary evidence containing the code words», but I explicitly stated otherwise. In footnote 18 on pp. 11-12 I alert the reader:

«Likewise, a systematic treatment of all registered prisoners who were subjected to a “special treatment” would amount to an extensive analysis of the current claims of gassing as well as of the fates of various groups of prisoners, which would exceed the bounds of this investigation. [...]. In addition, a comprehensive study on this subject in preparation».

Therefore, by omitting any mention of this notification, Sergey Romanov has engaged in a gross and unforgivable deception, thus confirming once again his true nature, which has already been abundantly demonstrated in my book Olocausto: dilettanti nel web (Effepi, Genoa 2005).

The announced study, one of the most difficult I have undertaken, has now finally been published. Its title is Auschwitz: assistenza sanitaria, “selezione” e “Sonderbehandlung” dei detenuti immatricolati (Auschwitz: sanitary service, “selections” and “special treatment” of registered inmates) and it consists of 333 pages (sized 17 x 24) with 60 documents, many virtually unknown to specialists.

The table of contents below clearly shows the structure of study, so I will limit myself to presenting the conclusion. Here should only be noted that Chapter 4 contains detailed statistics on the number of prisoners unfit for work and unemployable, the stationary ill and invalids (!) who were constantly present in the hospitals of Auschwitz-Birkenau, which were established in accordance with the directive of the SS-WVHA of June 24, 1942. In Chapter 7 I have further devoted 28 pages to analyzing the documents which, according to Sergey Romanov, I ”omitted” from my previous book.

Here follows the conclusion:

«The thesis that at the hospitals of the Auschwitz camp complex registered inmates who due to illness had become unfit for work were selected to be sent to the alleged gas chambers has no documentary basis. On the contrary, documents show that at Auschwitz the SS always tried to improve, wherever possible, the living conditions and health of the inmates by establishing hospitals for the sick in which, inter alia, thousands of surgeries were performed. Some sick detainees were even transferred to other camps in order to receive a more appropriate care.

The plans – fully documented but implemented only in part due to undetermined reasons – for a huge camp hospital in Birkenau Bauabschnitt III, originally revealed by Pressac, blatantly contradicts the claims of mass extermination and demonstrates that the SS policy toward inmates unfit for work was not one of killing, but of medical treatment.

An analysis of the alleged selections of registered inmates for the gas chambers as listed by Danuta Czech shows that none of them has any historical documentary basis; rather they are often flatly contradicted by the documents. In fact, they are all based on not only the mere speculation of witnesses, but above all on unheard-of manipulations which reveal the true nature of the Auschwitz “Kalendarium” as not an historical and historiographical instrument enabling us to understand the events, but a propaganda tool for their systematic distortion».

Table of Contents:

PART ONE – THE INMATES

CHAPTER 1 – THE LIVING CONDITIONS OF THE INMATES
1.1 Provisions related to the improvement of the inmate living conditions
1.2. The selection of prisoners upon arrival
1.3. Treatment of inmates according to concentration camp regulations
1.4. Punishments
1.5. Premiums for productivity
1.6. The postal service
1.7. Food
1.8. Releases and the “Arbeitserziehungslager Birkenau”

CHAPTER 2 – THE INMATE HOSPITAL (HÄFTLINGSKRANKENBAU)
2.1. Measures taken by the SS-Standortarzt and the SS-Lagerärzte for safeguarding the health of the inmates
2.2. Reports on the medical treatment of inmates
2.3. The medical registry of the Häftlingskrankenbau
2.4. The inmate hospital in the camp Auschwitz III-Monowitz
2.5. The projected circulating air delousing facilities (Umluft-Entwesungsanlagen) for the sick inmates of Birkenau Bauabschnitt II

CHAPTER 3 – THE HÄFTLINGSLAZARETT IN BIRKENAU BAUABSCHNITT III
3.1. The discovery of Jean-Claude Pressac
3.2. Origin and implementation of the project for a camp hospital in Birkenau Bauabschnitt III

CHAPTER 4 – THE FATE OF THE REGISTERED INMATES UNFIT FOR WORK
4.1. The treatment of registered inmates unfit for work
4.2. Statistics on the sick in the Quarantänelager
4.3. Registration and transfer of sick inmates

PART TWO – THE “SELECTIONS” OF SICK INMATES FOR THE “GAS CHAMBERS”: A HISTORICAL DOCUMENTARY ANALYSIS

CHAPTER 5 – THE “SELECTION” OF SICK INMATES FOR THE “GAS CHAMBERS” ACCORDING TO THE AUSCHWITZ “KALENDARIUM”: THE MINOR “SELECTIONS”
5.1. “Sonderbehandlung 14 f 13” and the origin of the “selections” at Auschwitz
5.2. The death certificates of the “selected”
5.3. “Sonderbehandlung 14 f 13” and the “phenol injections” at Auschwitz
5.4. THE “SELECTIONS” IN THE “KALENDARIUM” OF DANUTA CZECH
5.5. THE “SELECTIONS” IN 1941: THE “FIRST GASSING”
5.6. THE “SELECTIONS” IN 1942
5.6.1. The “selection” of 11 June 1942
5.6.2. The “selection” of 3 August 1942
5.6.3. The “selection” of 29 August 1942 in Auschwitz Block 20, Room 3
5.6.4. The “selection” of 5 September 1942
5.6.5. The “selection” of October 1942
5.6.6. The “selection” of 14 November 1942
5.6.7. The “selection” of 3 December 1942
5.6.8. The “selection” of 5 December 1942
5.6.9. The “selection” of 8 December 1942
5.7. THE “SELECTIONS” IN 1943
5.7.1. The “selection” of 17 January 1943
5.7.2. The “selection” of 28 February 1943
5.7.3. The “selection” of 21 August 1943
5.7.4. The “selection” of 29 August 1943
5.7.5. The “selection” of 8 October 1943
5.7.6. The “selection” of 22 October 1943
5.7.7. The “selection” of 19 November 1943
5.7.8. The “selection” of 10 December 1943
5.7.9. The “selection” of 12 December 1943
5.7.10. The “selection” of 19 December 1943
5.8. THE “SELECTIONS” IN 1944
5.8.1. General considerations
5.8.2. The “selection” of 23 January 1944
5.8.3. The “selection” of 3 February 1944
5.8.4. The “selection” of 3 April 1944
5.8.5. The “selections” of inmates in the women’s camp BIIc in October 1944: the deceptions of L. Langfus and D. Czech
5.9. THE “SELECTIONS” LISTED BY THE FORMER INMATE OTTO WOLKEN
5.9.1. The documentation of Otto Wolken
5.9.2. The “selection” of 29 August 1943
5.9.3. The “selection” of 2 October 1943
5.9.4. The “selection” of 10 October 1943
5.9.5. The “selection” of 14 November 1943
5.9.6. The “selection” of 1 January 1944
5.9.7. The “selection” of 14 January 1944
5.9.8. The “selection” of 22 January 1944
5.9.9. The “selection” of 14 April 1944
5.9.10. The “selection” of 18 April 1944

CHAPTER 6 – THE MAJOR “SELECTIONS” ACCORDING TO THE AUSCHWITZ “KALENDARIUM”: THE THERESIENSTADT FAMILY CAMP AND THE GIPSY FAMILY CAMP
6.1.1. The establishment of the “Family camp” BIIb and the alleged homicidal gassings
6.1.2. The sources
6.1.3. The inmate strength of camp BIIb
6.1.4. The transports in September and December 1943
6.1.5. The “gassing” of the Jews of the “Family camp”: a historically sound thesis?
6.1.6. The cremation of the corpses from the “gassing” on 8 March 1944
6.1.7. The transport to Heydebreck
6.1.8. The “liquidation” of the “Family camp” (July 1944)
6.1.9. Deaths and survivors
6.1.10. The transport of 7 October 1943
6.2.THE SELECTION AND GASSING OF THE GYPSIES AT AUSCHWITZ ON 2 AUGUST 1944
6.2.1. The historical reconstruction of Danuta Czech
6.2.2. The documents
6.2.3. Interpretation of the documents

CHAPTER 7 – DOCUMENTS ON “SONDERBEHANDLUNG”
7.1. Documents concerning the “Frauenlager”
7.2. The “Sonderkommando Zeppelin”
7.3. “S.B.” in the main registry of the Gypsy camp (Hauptbuch des Zigeunerlagers)
7.4. “S.B.” in the reports on inmate strength and employment in the Frauenlager (women’s camp)
7.5. “S.B.” in the Stärkemeldung of the Frauenlager
7.5.1. The Jewish inmates of the “Durchgangslager”
7.5.2. Changes in the inmate strength of the Frauenlager in October 1944
7.5.3. “S.B.” and the “Durchgangs-Juden”
7.5.4. The “S.B.” of 3 October 1944
7.5.5. The “S.B.” of 7 October 1944
7.5.6. Conclusions
7.6. The “selections” at the HKB of the camp Auschwitz III-Monowitz
7.7. The report of SS-Untersturmführer Kinna from 16 December 1942
7.8. The “selections” of Polish boys from Zamość and other locations in Poland
7.9. The letter from the head of SS-WVHA Amt DII dated 26 April 1944

CONCLUSION

[1] Mattogno’s special treatment of evidence, http://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot.com/2006/03/mattognos-special-treatment-of.html. Bolds in original.

Two important document sources to which I have had access recently prompt me to write a sequel, with some revisions, to the two articles I have published earlier on the present subject [1], in order to bring the matter up to date.

1) The accusations of Miklos Grüner

In his book Stolen Identity. Auschwitz Number A-7713 [2], Miklos Grüner, a Hungarian Jew and former deportee to Auschwitz (ID number A-11104) and to Buchenwald (120762), accuses Elie Wiesel, Nobel Peace Prize laureate of 1986, to have appropriated the identity of another Hungarian Jewish inmate of Auschwitz and Buchenwald, Lazar Wiesel, as well as the Yiddish publication Un di velt hot geschwign (And the world remained silent) which Lazar Wiesel published in Buenos Aires in 1956. Grüner’s account contains a sizable documentation, parts of which are new, although it must be said that the author’s interpretation of some of these documents appears somewhat questionable.

Grüner’s credentials as a former deportee are beyond reproach. A letter from the Auschwitz Museum dated 7 July 2003 and addressed to him (cf. below) states that the detainee Grüner Miklos, a Hungarian Jew born on 6 April 1928 at Nyiregyhaza, was attributed the Auschwitz ID number A-11104. As far as Buchenwald is concerened, Grüner is mentioned in a “Concentration Camp Inmates Questionnaire” of the Military Government of Germany which I have published in my first article, and in the register of Block 66 to which he had been assigned: ID number (120762), last name and and first name (Grüner Miklos) and the note “U. Jun. A2” which probably means “Ungarischer Junge” (Hungarian boy).[3]

According to his book Night,[4] Elie Wiesel was deported to Auschwitz on 3 June 1944.[5] He spent one night at Birkenau and was moved to Auschwitz the following day here he was tattooed with the ID number A-7713.[6] Yet, according to Wiesel, “it was a beautiful day in April”.[7]

In my first article, I stated that the time sequence is pure invention. If Wiesel did leave his hometown of Sighet on 3 June 1944, he could not have arrived at Auschwitz in April. Moreover, the ID number A-7713 was issued on 24 May when 2,000 Hungarian Jews were assigned the numbers A-5729 through A-7728.[8] In his book, Elie Wiesel writes that he was tattooed as A-7713,[9] a statement he repeated under oath at the trial of the State of California vs. Eric Hunt on 8 July 2008,[10] adding that his father’s number was A-7712.

Grüner disputes, above all, that Elie Wiesel was assigned the Auschwitz ID number A-7713 and his father A-7712. Actually, these numbers were assigned to two Hungarian Jewish inmates who Grüner claims to have befriended – the brothers Lazar and Abraham Wiesel.

The existing documents do not allow any doubt in this matter:

  -  A letter from the Auschwitz Museum to Miklos Grüner, dated 7 July 2003, stating that the detainee with this ID number appears in a list established by the SS Hygiene Institute, dated 7 December 1944 – Monowitz, which provides the following data:

A-11104 Grüner Miklos, Hungarian Jew, born 6.04.28 at Nyiregyhaza
A-7712 Viesel Abram, born 10.10.1900 at Marmarossiget†
A-7713 Wiesel Lazar, born 4.9.1913 at Marmarossiget, locksmith [11]

This list, published by Grüner,[12] is not very helpful, however, as the title is illegible and the significance unclear. It is not even clear what the stamped date of 7 December 1944 refers to, possibly a transfer of these detainees to Monowitz or something else.

  -  A letter dated 15 May 2002 addressed to Grüner by the Buchenwald Memorial (Gedenkstätte) gives the following details:

Lazar Wiesel, born on 4 September 1913 at Maromarossziget, arrived at Buchenwald with a transport from Auschwitz (Buchenwald archives, microfilm Auschwitz, p. 41). On this page, 41, under entry number 2438, you will find the data on Lazar Wiesel: Buchenwald number 123565, born on 4 September 1913, Auschwitz number A-7713. These data are confirmed by the numerical file card at the camp office [Schreibstube].[13] Lazar Wiesel appears on the American questionnaire (NARA Washington, RG 242, microfilm 60) with the number 123165 and a different date of birth (4 October 1928); he went to Paris on 16 July 1945 with a convoy of surviving children (Buchenwald archives, 56-6-12, p. 9). Here, however, there is a disgreement with respect to the numerical file card. The Schreibstube file card numbered 123165 was made out for a Slovenian Jewish detainee, Pavel Kun, who died at Buchenwald on 8 March 1945.”[14]

The list of new arrivals drawn up at Buchenwald on 26 January 1945 (Zugänge vom 26. Januar 1945) for the date in question has, in fact:

2438 123565 Wiesel Lazar 4.9.13
Marmarossziget Schlol.[15] A 7713 [16]”:

Also:

“2372 123488 Viezel Abram 10.10.00
Marmaros Schl. A 7712″[17]:

  -  The personal file card for Lazar Wiesel, which I have published in my first article.

In this document,[18] we have, in the upper left hand corner, the handwritten note “Ung. Jude” (Hungarian Jew), at center: Ausch. A 7713 (Auschwitz A-7713) the former Auschwitz ID number, on the right “Gef.-Nr. 123565” (prisoner number 123565) the new ID number for Buchenwald. The date of birth is given as 4 September 1913.

A registration card for detainees, probably stemming from the Buchenwald archives, has the following data:

“123565
Wiesel Lazar
Political.

Born 4.9.13 at Maromarossiget
Hungarian Jew
26 Januar 1945
apprentice locksmith“:

  -  “Variations account” of Buchenwald from the set of documents entitled “Veränderungsmeldungen Buchenwald”:

“
Datensatz: 9315
Häftlingnr.: 123488 [A 7712]
Name: Viezel, Abraham
geboren: 10.10.00
Nationalität:
Kategorie: polit. Jude
Einlieferung:
gestorben: 02.02.45 in:
Block 57
Meldung vom: 03.02.45“[20]

This means that Abraham Viezel, born 10 October 1900, a political detainee registered as A-7712 at Auschwitz and as 123488 at Buchenwald, died on 2 February 1945 in Block 57 , as reported on 3 February.

For this detainee, there exists a further document concerning his death, giving his ID number, which I have published in my second article.

It is thus an established fact that Lazar Wiesel was deported to Auschwitz and registered there as A-7713, then to Buchenwald where he became 123565, and that his brother Abraham had the Auschwitz number A-7712, the Buchenwald number 123488 and died there on 2 February 1945.

Therefore, these numbers were not assigned to Elie Wiesel and/or his father Shlomo.

Problems arise when we want to trace Lazar Wiesel’s fate at Buchenwald and after this departure from the camp. Actually, this Lazar Wiesel, born at Máramarossziget on 4 September 1913, registered at Buchenwald as 123565, disappears and instead we have a Lázár Wiesel who takes his place, but with a different date of birth and a different ID number.[21]

The “Concentration Camp Inmates Questionnaire” of the Military Government of Germany for the Buchenwald camp does, in fact, mention a Lázár Wiesel, ID number 123165, born on 4 October 1928 at Mármarossziget, in Romania who was interned at Auschwitz for four weeks, at Monowitz for eight months and at Buchenwald where he stayed for a further three months [22] (cf. my second article). On the subject of this Lázár Wiesel, Grüner supplies us with two significant documents. The registry for Block 66 mentioned above, provides the following information:

“[123]565 Wiesel Lazar U. Jun. A 4”[23]:

Furthermore, an excerpt of the list of children moved from Buchenwald to Paris on 16 July 1945 has, under number 405, the entry:

“Wiesel, Lazar, 4/10/28 Marmorossziget, Romanian”[24]:

Grüner explains several times what he believes happened. Lazar Wiesel was assigned to Block 66:

“About a week later, I couldn’t believe my own eyes to see Lazar in our Block 66. He told me that Abraham had passed away four days after our arrival at Buchenwald. He made it clear that he had received special permission to join us children in Block 66, since he was so much older than us.”[25]

A few pages on, he affirms Lazar Wiesel’s presence in Block 66.[26] Nothing strange about that, so far. But then he states in a somewhat confused and enigmatic way:

“From the Archive’s of Buchenwald: Sabine Stein; 08.12.00 and 15.05.02. Stating that: Lazar Wiesel’s identity Number; 123565 according to the Military Government of Germany’s Inmates Questionnaire (NARA Washington, RG 242, film 60) were changed to Number 123165 and the date of birth to 04.10.1928. With this new identity he (Lazar Wiesel) left Buchenwald with a HIAS [Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society] convoy of 675 survived children (S-414) on the 16th of July 1945 to Paris. However there is a noticeable difference of contents between Lazar Wiesel’s original registration card 123563 (???) and the new Number 123165; this latter number originally belonged to a Jewish inmate from Slovakia; Pavel Kun, who died on the 8th of March 1945 in Buchenwald.”[27]

Further along, commenting on the questionnaire mentioned above, Grüner adds:

“Concerning Number: 123165 the inmate “Wiesel Lazar” Male; Born, October 4.-1928 Dated Buchenwald: April 22- 1945 to follow.

This Affidavit [28] was drawn up in good faith to benefit Wiesel Lazar who was originally Born 04.09.1913 in Maramorossziget, and his registered Number in Buchenwald is 123565 was changed to 123165 for reason to suit Wiesel Lazar’s future and the purpose to benefit his coming future.”[29]

Elsewhere, he speaks of a “falsified Buchenwald number 123165”.[30]

Hence, according to Grüner, someone (he does not say who) gave “in good faith (?)” false indications in the questionnaire mentioned. But the reasons he proposes are absolutely ludicrous: In what way would the true date of birth (4 September 1913) and the true Buchenwald ID number (123565) not have suited “Wiesel Lazar’s future” and not benefitted “his coming future”? And how could anyone seriously hope to slip a man of 32 into a convoy of youths bound for Paris by making him 17?

Grüner supplies us with two documents (one page from the list of new arrivals at Buchenwald on 26 January 1945, and a personal file card) from which we can see that the Buchenwald number 123165 was assigned to the detainee Pavel Kun, born on 6.7.1926 at Velka Bytca, registered at Auschwitz as B-14131 who died on 8 March 1945.[31] But why would the number of this detainee have been assigned to Lazar Wiesel by “falsifying” the latter’s real number 123565?

One could also think that this ID number, precisely because it had already been assigned to Pavel Kun, was caused by a mistake – 123165 instead of 123565, but then how are we to explain the date of birth of 4 October 1928?

The questionnaire was surely established by one of the three British officers who are listed at the end of the document and it is not unlikely that they made such a mistake: but then, the detainee in question signed the document personally, using the surname “Wiesel”, thereby accepting the alleged mistake and/or the alleged falsification; hence, in any case, he would be responsible for the deception.

Furthermore, we must take into account the fact that Lázár Wiesel named as a reference a certain Sámuel Jakobovits (or Jakubowits). This young man was born on 2 October 1926, deported to Auschwitz where he was assigned the ID number A-5763 on 24 May 1944 (together with 2,000 other Hungarian Jews who where given the numbers A-5729 through 7728, among them both Abram Wiesel [A-7712] and Lazar Wiesel [A-7713], born on 4.9.1913, but – according to the questionnaire dated 22 April 1945 – also Lázár Wiesel born on 4 October 1928) and then moved to Buchenwald where he was registered as 121761 on 26 January 1945 and also assigned to Block 66.

That Lázár should have named Sámuel as one of three trustworthy persons, is perhaps in better agreement with the hypothesis of a 17-year-old boy giving as a reference a youth of 19 than with the idea that a man, 32 years of age, would name a boy 15 years his junior as a reference.

It is thus difficult to give credence to the falsification of Lazar Wiesel’s personal data, even though this might explain the Lazar Wiesel’s exit and the appearance of Lázár Wiesel. On the other hand, if we are dealing with two different persons, why is the Lázár born on 4 October 1928 not mentioned on the list of the detainees who arrived at Buchenwald from Auschwitz on 26 January 1945? And why is there no trace of his ever having been deported to Auschwitz in the first place?

It is here that we face the riddle of Elie Wiesel. Grüner does not explain in what way he may partly have taken over Lazar Wiesel’s personal data. Maybe on the basis of documents? As we have seen, Lazar Wiesel appears in in a number of documents, but the names of his parents are given only in his personal file for Buchenwald, where his date of birth is still 4 September 1913, however. If he had wanted to turn himself into Lazar Wiesel, Elie would also have had to know the documentation regarding Lázár Wiesel (especially with respect to his story about Block 66, where the youngsters were housed, but then why did he not assume the date of birth of 4 October 1928 as well, to be more convincing? And why did he never speak of either of the two Buchenwald ID numbers (123165 or 123565)?

The alternative to the use of documents is a personal contact. Elie Wiesel may have known Lazar Wiesel and built his own story on the latter’s account, embellished where needed. Here, however, we are moving into the region of conjecture, even though it is likely that the truth will have to be looked for in this direction.

The other possibility – that Elie Wiesel is himself Lazar Wiesel – must be excluded for obvious reasons of chronology: he would now be 97 years of age! On the other hand, why “change” the date of his birth once again, to 30 September 1928, after having “falsified” it to 4 October 1928?

The birth certificate issued by the Romanian authorities on 27 November 1996 for Lazar Vizel, born at Sighet to Solomon Vizel and Sura Feig, does give the date of birth as 30 September 1928 (and not 6 October 1928 as is handwritten at the top of the document, but also typed in the lower part, and as I gave it in my second article: this is the date the document was issued),[32] but does not prove anything because we don’t know to whom it refers, who requested it and why. In particular, even if it were to refer to Elie Wiesel, it could still be based on a self-declaration, as is the case for Elie Wiesel’s father whose name was added to the Central Database of Shoah Victims’ Names [33] at Yad Vashem on 8 October 2004 at Elie Wiesel’s request.

The relationships between these four persons, which I have set out in my second article, have not yet found a satisfactory explanation:

For Grüner, the whole matter hinges upon the book Un di velt hot geschwign. He asserts that Lazar Wiesel, with the new name of Lázár, wrote a manuscript of 862 pages in Yiddish which the publisher Mark Turkov cut down to 253 pages.[34] The book, according to him was “published in Paris in 1955”[35] and “is a Copyright by the then 43 year old Eliezer Wiesel, Paris. Published 1955, Buenos Aires. The copyright shall prove that he was tattooed in Birkenau with the number A-7713”.[36] Elsewhere, Grüner writes that the book is a “Copyright by Eliezer (in Yiddish the name means the same as Lazar) Wiesel, Paris 1954”.[37] Elie Wiesel, appropriating Lazar Wiesel’s copyright, is said to have published a summary of Un di velt hot geschwign entitled La Nuit in 1958.[38]

However, there is no proof that the author of the Yiddish book really is Lazar Wiesel. Grüner believes this, because on p. 87 of the book the author states that he was assigned the Auschwitz ID number A-7713 [39] and on p. 239 that he was housed at Buchenwald in Block 66,[40] but this is not sufficient to accept beyond doubt that Lazar Wiesel was the author of the book.

On the other hand, why would he have used the name “Eliezer” instead of “Lazar”? It is not correct, as Grüner will have it, that the two names, in Yiddish, “meant the same”: they certainly are not interchangeable. As I have stressed in my second article, while Lazar is indeed a diminuitive of Eliezer, its Yiddish pronunciation sounds more like Leizer or Lozer. Why would Lazar Wiesel, who appears as “Lazar” in all known documents, have chosen to call himself “Eliezer”? This is all the more mysterious, as Wiesel’s naturalization certificate, dated 21 January 1963, is made out for “Lazare” and not for Eliezer.[41]

The question of “copyright” to which Grüner seems to attach so much weight, says nothing about the author of the book. In this connection, it is not at all clear why the “copyright” was issued in Paris if the book actually appeared in Buenos Aires. If Lazar Wiesel was indeed the author, he would have cried out against the blatant plagiarism committed by Elie Wiesel less than two years later, and the publisher Mark Turkov would have sued him (unless, of course, both had somehow entitled Elie Wiesel to do so). But nothing like that happened.

Grüner apparently believes that Elie Wiesel’s alleged plagiarism altered Lazar Wiesel’s original text to a certain degree by inventing false stories and thereby exposing the true survivors to criticism by the revisionists. In this respect, he writes:

“The book “Night” is a masterpiece designed to defame us and our Jewish God, while spreading lies about the Holocaust without any kind of reasonable explanation. To mention the horribly twisted story making account for the huge flames coming from the ditches holding incinerated bodies of men, women and children, without mentioning of course, that they were dead, or that they were under the circumstances, already suffucated to death on arrival at the flaming ditches.”[42]

Elsewhere he notes:

“I had never seen or even come close to ditches burning with open fire, where people or children could be seen burning on my way to the washroom in Birkenau, as written in ‘Night’ by Elie Wiesel.”[43]

Hence, Grüner accuses Elie Wiesel to have invented at least the story of the babies being burned “alive” in the cremation trenches, which I have analyzed in my first article.

Actually, though, the same description is given in the Yiddish text, as we can see from a comparison of the two corresponding excerpts (On the left, the excerpt taken from Night [44], on the right, the text as per Un di velt hot geschwign [45]).

The Yiddish text contains another passage, also found in Night (p.41), which raises further doubts on Lazar Wiesel’s authorship. An Auschwitz detainee asks the protagonist about his age:

“‘I’m not quite fifteen yet.’
‘No. Eighteen.’ [...]
Then he questioned my father, who replied:
‘Fifty.’
The other grew more furious than ever.
‘No, not fifty. Forty. Do you understand? Eighteen and forty.’

Why would Lazar Wiesel – who was 31 years old when he arrived at Auschwitz – have stated that he was not yet fifteen? This would mean that he was born in 1929, something that is in disagreement with both Lazar Wiesel (allegedly turned into Lázár Wiesel later) who was born on 4 October 1928 and with Elie Wiesel whose date of birth was 30 September 1928.

In this puzzle, the only thing which is certain is that Elie Wiesel lied about the ID numbers assigned to himself and to his father at Auschwitz – but why would he do that if he and his father actually were deported to Auschwitz? In that case, they would necessarily have been assigned ID numbers different from A-7713 and A-7712, but for what reason would Elie Wiesel have had to hide their real numbers?

As far as Stolen Identity is concerned, Grüner, as we have seen, accuses Elie Wiesel to have discredited the true witnesses by his fantasies, but he himself follows that very same line. We will not go into this aspect of the book and will only present one quotation to back this up:

“They had saved my skin from being turned into lampshades or from being made into a burning torch. Most of all, I was spared from being turned into a cake of soap bearing the initials R.J.F. (reine jüdische fett [46] [sic]) on it.”[47]

 
Carlo Mattogno

10 April 2010

[1] Elie Wiesel: “The Most Authoritative Living Witness” of The Shoah?: http://www.revblog.codoh.com/2010/02/elie-wiesel-the-most-authoritative-living-witness-of-the-shoah/; Elie Wiesel: New Documents: http://www.revblog.codoh.com/2010/03/elie-wiesel-new-documents/
[2] Printed in Stockholm, Sweden, 2007 (private printing by the author).
[3] Idem, section entitled The Evidence, figure 2 (no page number). It is not clear whether the letter “A” stands for “Auschwitz”, but one may exclude that “A2” indicated “Auschwitz 2(II)”, because on the same list we have the entry “U. Jun. A8”.
[4] Elie Wiesel, Night, Penguin Books, New York 1981.
[5] Elie Wiesel: “The Most Authoritative Living Witness” of The Shoah?, art.cit.
[6] E. Wiesel, Night, op. cit., pp. 53-54.
[7] Idem, p. 45.
[8] Liste der Judentransporte, Museum of Auschwitz-Birkenau, microfilm no. 727/27.
[9] E. Wiesel, Night, op. cit., pp. 53-54.
[10] Elie Wiesel: “The Most Authoritative Living Witness” of The Shoah?
[11] Text in Stolen Identity. Auschwitz Number A-7713, op. cit., figure 18.1; http://kuruc.info/r/6/51815/, figure 17 (in English) and 19 (in Polish).
[12] Idem, figure 19.1-3.
[13] Document 2 published in the first article.
[14] Stolen Identity. Auschwitz Number A-7713, op. cit., figure 11.1; http://kuruc.info/r/6/51815/, figure 5.
[15] Abbreviation of Schlosserlehrling, apprentice locksmith.
[16] Stolen Identity. Auschwitz Number A-7713, op. cit., figure 11.3.
[17] Idem, figure 11.5.
[18] NARA, A 3355, RG 242.
[19] Idem, figure 7.1; http://kuruc.info/r/6/51815/, figure 6.
[20] Text in: http://kuruc.info/r/6/51815/, figure 7.
[21] I am writing “Lazar” for the person Wiesel born on 4 September 1913, and “Lázár” for the person Wiesel born on 4 October 1928.
[22] NARA, A 3355, RG 242.
[23] Stolen Identity. Auschwitz Number A-7713, op. cit., figure 2.
[24] Idem, figure 12.4.
[25] Idem, p. 28.
[26] Idem, p. 49.
[27] Idem, p. 51.
[28] Obviously, the questionnaire cannot be considered to be an “affidavit”, i.e. a declaration under oath.
[29] Stolen Identity. Auschwitz Number A-7713, op. cit., p. 59.
[30] Idem, p. 34.
[31] Idem, figure 7, 12.1 and 12.3.
[32] Text in: http://kuruc.info/r/6/51815/, figure 8.
[33] http://www.yadvashem.org/wps/portal/IY_HON_Welcome
[34] Idem, p. 43. Actually, the story ends on p. 245, with an explicit “Sof” (The End, in Yiddish). The remaining pages contain publicity (a list of the works published in the series Der poilische jidntum, Polish Judaism).
[35] Idem, p. 44.
[36] Idem, p. 55.
[37] Idem, p. 46. Printing of the book ended on 10 November 1955 and it was published in 1956, it contains the printed indication “Copyright by: Eliezer Wiesel, Paris”, undated.
[38] Idem, p. 44, 46 and figure 17.
[39] Idem, pp. 55-56.
[40] Idem, p. 57.
[41] http://www.codoh.com/forum/download/file.php?id=203&sid=4fe256698b50783e96cf239458dea8d6&mode=view
[42] Idem, p. 45.
[43] Idem, pp. 34-35.
[44] E. Wiesel, Night, op.cit., pp. 43-45.
[45] Eliezer Wiesel, Un di velt hot geschwign, op. cit., pp. 67-70.
[46] R.I.F. (and not R.J.F.) actually stands for Reichsstelle für industrielle Fettversorgung, Reich agency for industrial fat supply.
[47] Stolen Identity. Auschwitz Number A-7713, op. cit., unnumbered page entitled “In Gratitude”.