Why is Grandma Nisel not mentioned in Elie Wiesel’s Night?

According to Hilda Wiesel’s 1995 “Survivors of the Shoah” testimony, Grandmother Nisel (also spelled Nissel) went with the family to Auschwitz.

According to Elie Wiesel’s 1995 memoir, All Rivers Run to the Sea1, Grandmother Nisel went with the family to Auschwitz.

But Grandma Nisel is not mentioned even once in Wiesel’s 1958-60 supposedly autobiographical Night.2

Did Wiesel simply forget about his grandmother only 10 years after the event and then remember her again in the 1990’s? Did he cut her out because he wanted to condense his book and she was peripheral to the storyline? Neither of these can be believed. In the first place, Wiesel makes it clear in All Rivers how important Grandma Nisel was to him and he writes affectionately about her. Secondly, by including his grandmother when he mentioned his mother and three sisters, he would not have added more than a few words to the deportation narrative, as we will see. Thirdly, Grandma Nisel, as a member of his family group that he says he lost at Auschwitz, could not with any decency be left out when writing about this momentous event.

And, in fact, he didn’t leave her out of his memoir, nor did Hilda leave her out of her testimony. But Night is another story (pun intended).

There is no excuse or explanation that can be given for such a lapse, and none has ever been attempted. Not one of Wiesel’s numerous interviewers, biographers, commentators or adulators have ever asked about it, or, if they did, they must have accepted without complaint a “no comment” from him. (I suspect that whenever Wiesel gives an interview or allows someone to write a book about him, he obtains an agreement in advance as to what can be discussed and what is off-limits. And I imagine probing questions about his family are off-limits … probably on the grounds that it is “too painful” for him. Wiesel is always treated with the softest of kid gloves.)

Who is Grandmother Nisel and why is she important?

Nisel Bash was the daughter of Moshe and Yehudit (or Mindil) Bash (or Basch). She was born in 1881 in Chust, Ruthenian-Czechoslovakia. She married Eliezer Vizel and lived with him in Sighet, Rumania … which later became Hungary. (This information is from the victim forms filled out for Yad Vashem by her nephew and grandson; see further below.) We don’t know the date of her marriage, but her first child may have been born in 1900 when she was 19 years old. This first child of Nisel and Eliezer was probably a daughter, either Idiss or Giza. In 1903 their first son, named Shlomo, was born. After that came another son, Mendel; then two more daughters.

Below: YV forms for Shlomo Wiesel by Son Eli and cousin Yaakov Fishkovitz. (click on picture for larger image) Below that is the 1957 YV form for Mendel Wiesel by Yaakov Fishkovitz.

I have reconstructed the birth dates of Nisel’s children as best I can since no reliable family genealogy has ever been made available. Sites like Rootsweb are completely useless for information about the Wiesel family. In All Rivers (p. 7), Elie Wiesel writes about his aunts:

“I also had two aunts in Czechoslovakia: Aunt Idiss in Slotvino and Aunt Giza in Ungvaer. Grandma Nissel’s other two daughters lived in Sighet. Zlati, the youngest, was called an old maid behind her back. She married late, you see—at twenty-one.”

The older of the two daughters who lived in Sighet is never named or described, yet she could not have died as a child since Wiesel speaks of her as living in Sighet when he was a boy. Did she disgrace the family in some way and so is not to be mentioned? Wiesel writes that Grandma Nisel sat at the cash register in his father’s store, but also helped out at her son Mendel’s store:

“Maybe (Grandma Nisel) was trying not to show favoritism toward any of her children. My father was the oldest, but she was just as close to my Uncle Mendel, who had a modest grocery store on the other side of town.”

From this we can understand that Shlomo was the oldest of the two sons. Among Orthodox Hasidic Jews, males are in an entirely different category of importance and expectations than females, who are only required to find a good husband and have children. Mendel married Golda Feig, the sister of Sarah Feig, making for a tight-knit Wiesel-Feig family relationship.

Uncle Mendel Wiesel was born in 1905, according to cousin Yaakov (the only source we have) and died at the same time as Shlomo in 1943 … in Sighet. He would have been only 38 years old! Yet in Night he appears in the story at the time of the deportation to Auschwitz—Elie Wiesel’s family stays in his empty house in the small ghetto. On page 30:

“The people must have been driven out unexpectedly. I went to see the rooms where my uncle’s family had lived. On the table there was a half-finished bowl of soup. There was a pie waiting to be put in the oven. Books were littered about on the floor. Perhaps my uncle had had dreams of taking them with him?”

Nisel lived in her own house that was close to her son Shlomo’s home. Young Elie dropped in often to visit her and had quite a few stories to tell about that in All Rivers. Elie’s namesake grandfather Eliezer had been killed in the First World War in his capacity as a stretcher-bearer. Nisel related to her grandson that when she was told of his death: “I learned what catastrophe meant, and I knew my mourning would never end.” (All Rivers, p 8 )

On page 9, Wiesel relates a story that when he returned to Sighet as an adult, he first went to the cemetery to find his grandfather’s grave. He spoke to his grandfather’s spirit about the deportation to Auschwitz thus: “Did you know, Grandpa, that Grandma Nisel was the only one in the family, almost the only one in the whole community, who guessed it all? She knew she would never come home. She left this wretched town in her funeral dress. Yes, she wore her shroud under her black dress. She alone was ready.”

There are two other distinct mentions in All Rivers of his grandmother taking part in the deportation-to-Auschwitz process. On Page 70 he writes that on Tuesday, May 16, they were ordered out of their houses to be sent to the small ghetto. “There was another heat wave. My little sister was thirsty, and my grandmother too.” Page 77, arriving at Auschwitz: “I stared intently, trying desperately not to lose sight of my mother, my little sister with her hair of gold and sun, my grandmother, my older sisters.”

Yet in 20 pages in the book Night of detailed description of the pre-deportation events, the trip to Auschwitz and their arrival, there is no mention at all of a grandmother. Nowhere in the entire book is there a Grandma Nisel.

Other family members place Grandma Nisel at Auschwitz.

Her nephew Yaakov Fishkovitz in 1957 filled out a YV form (above top) stating she died at Auschwitz in 1944. Yaakov also filled out a form for his cousin Shlomo Wiesel. A grandson, Eliezer Shlomovitz of Los Angeles CA, filled out a Yad Vashem form for his grandmother Nisel Vizel too, many years later in 1994 or 1999 (hard to read), saying she died at Auschwitz in 1944 (above). But neither Elie nor his two surviving sisters acknowledged her death at Auschwitz in this way. Although Hilda said in her 1995 Shoah testimony: “… we were, myself and my sister, the one who was in Canada and is now deceased; my mother; my grandmother, that is my father’s mother; and, oh . . . my little 10-year old sister.”

Hilda also said: “And my mother – died. She was 44 years old.” She then repeated: “And my little sister – dead at age 10.” These are assumed deaths. But if she is correct about her mother’s age in 1944, then Sarah Feig was born in 1900. Could she have been 3 years older than her husband, born in 1903 according to his cousin Yaakov? Possibly, even considering what we know about Hasidic marriages, wherein the groom is usually no more than one year older, or the same age, as the bride.3 But Hilda, being the eldest, should know her mother’s age. Right: Hilda, age 16, in 1938 with her mother Sarah Feig Wiesel, who would have been 38 in the picture if she were born in 1900.

The name Shlomo appears only once in Night at the end.

On the very first page of this famous novel it is written: “My father was a cultured, rather unsentimental man.” Right here it would have been natural to write: My father, Shlomo Wiesel, was a cultured, rather unsentimental man. But no, and throughout the book this character continues to be known only as “my father,” until page 103-4 when another prisoner, Meir Katz, addresses him by his first name. In the original edition it is spelled Chlomo; in the 2006 translation, the spelling is changed to Shlomo. The name of Wiesel also occurs only once, on page 51:

We had already been eight days at Auschwitz. It was during roll call. We were not expecting anything except the sound of the bell which would announce the end of roll call. I suddenly heard someone passing between the rows asking, “Which of you is Wiesel of Sighet?

The man looking for us was a bespectacled little fellow with a wrinkled, wizened face. My father answered him.

“I’m Wiesel of Sighet.”

The little man looked at him for a long while, with his eyes narrowed.

“You don’t recognize me—you don’t recognize me. I’m a relative of yours. Stein. Have you forgotten me already? Stein! Stein of Antwerp. Reizel’s husband. Your wife was Reizel’s aunt. She often used to write to us … and such letters!”

Let’s remember there were many Wiesel’s (Vizel’s) in Sighet, a town with a large Jewish population. For example, there are three Mendel Wiesel’s from Sighet of around the same age in the Yad Vashem databank, and there are eight Shlomo Wiesel’s recorded as sucumbing in the camps. This doesn’t include all the Wiesel’s with other first names! So we can expect that the man Stein would have used the first name too, or Wiesel would have asked Stein which Wiesel he was looking for. This seems like another avoidance of using the name Shlomo, but it is strange that both the first and last name were used one time only.

On page 2, the sisters are named:

There were four of us children: Hilda, the eldest; then Bea; I was the third, and the only son; the baby of the family was Tzipora.

In the original Night (p 31), the family servant, a Christian from a nearby village, is named Martha. In All Rivers, she becomes Maria, and the name in the 2006 re-translation of Night is changed to Maria. Okay, it could have been an error.

The dust jacket on an original, hard-bound copy of Night reads: “The adolescent Elisha and his family, among hundreds of thousands of Jews […] are cruelly deported …” Elisha is not the name of the main character in the book; it is Eliezer. The first time that name is used is on page 86: “Let’s hope that we shan’t regret it, Eliezer.” On page 92: “Don’t let yourself be overcome by sleep, Eliezer.” On page 96, Eliezer is addressed by his name twice by Juliek. On page 108: ”Eliezer … my son … bring me … a drop of coffee…” Then, again, on pages 109, 110 and 112. Why is he called Elisha on the dust jacket? Elisha is the name of the main character in Wiesel’s second novel, Dawn. A little mix-up there?

In Night, Father is 50 and little sister is seven.

In spring 1944, just arriving at Auschwitz, Eliezer’s father declares that he is fifty years of age. Eliezer says he is “not quite 15.” (p 40) In the new 2006 translation (p 30), Eliezer’s age is changed to “15” but the father’s “fifty” remains the same. “Not quite 15″ doesn’t equate to Elie Wiesel, whose birthday is Sept. 30, 1928, so that was an oversight in Night. Or it can also be seen as a similar situation as with Tzipora’s age: Making the young victims even younger so they will appear more sympathetic to the reader, and making some adults older. Lying about their age is a tactic used by many “holocaust survivors” in their memoirs to explain how they escaped the “gas chamber.” Arguably, this could have been done by Sarah Wiesel for Tzipora too—claiming her to be 14 instead of 10, since in the story Night, Eliezer made himself out to be 18 (3 years older that he really was) and got away with it.

Why is the father in Night fifty? Shlomo Wiesel was certainly somewhere between 40 and 44 years of age in 1944. Actually, according to his cousin Yaakov, he wasn’t even alive, having died in 1943! Moreover, Mendel died in 1943 also. One has to assume from this that they died together somehow. Yaakov filled out a form for Mendel at the same time as for Shlomo. The forms look exactly alike except for the different name and date of birth. Shlomo is shown to be born in 1903, Mendel in 1905. Keep in mind that in 1957 the book Night was not yet published in French or English and the name of Elie Wiesel was completely unknown, so Fishkowitz had no reason to lie to protect his relatives, as he might have had later.

Contrarily, on the Yad Vashem form Elie Wiesel filled out in 2004, no birth date is given for his father, nor the age at death. Did he not know? Is it possible for a son not to know his father’s age?

This photograph (above) of Shlomo Wiesel was taken in 1942 according to Hilda Wiesel. At this time he would have been 39 years old.

Further, we have no information on these details for Wiesel’s mother Sarah Feig either, and no family member (or anyone) ever filled out a YV Holocaust victim form for her or her youngest daughter who supposedly died with her at Auschwitz. (Can the reason be that they don’t want to record an age/birth date for either one?) But, as I wrote above, Hilda Wiesel Kudler said in her Shoah testimony that her mother was 44 years old when she died, and her youngest sister was ten. Is Hilda a reliable witness?

On page 30 of Night, Eliezer says: “I looked at my little sister Tzipora, her fair hair well combed, a red coat over her arm, a little girl of seven.” This is when the family was walking to the ‘small ghetto’ after being ordered out of their home in the spring of 1944, only a week or so before they arrived in Auschwitz. But Hilda said Tzipora was then ten years old. Which is correct? Or is neither? Some of my readers will tell me, “What does it matter?” Accuracy matters, because if a source is wrong in some things that can be determined as wrong, nothing from there should be depended upon.

Nowhere in All Rivers do we find Tzipora’s age given by Wiesel, even though he mentions her many times. He only wants us to know that she was young or “a child.” A ten-year-old girl is quite a bit more mature than a seven-year old. I venture to say she was given the age of seven in Night to make her appear more vulnerable, and her death even more of a barbaric crime. Also, if she were seven, there would be more reason to “exterminate” both mother and daughter, under the extermination thesis. But in truth, a 44-year-old-woman and her 10-year-old daughter could be quite useful in the labor force, and therefore could have gone on to meet some other fate. There may even be some private knowledge of that—which may be another reason no one has filled out a Yad Vashem Holocaust Victim report for these two, while two were filled out for 64- year-old Grandma Nisel.

That Shlomo Wiesel was 50 years old in 1944 can be ruled out by the fact that his mother was 64 years old in 1944, making her only 14 years older than a 50 year old. So this Father character cannot truly be the real Shlomo. The father is depicted as somewhat confused, a poor decision maker, and as having difficulty adjusting to camp life, both physically and psychologically. He appears more like a man of sixty. Eliezer is often shown to be his father’s caretaker. “My father … was running at my side, out of breath, at the end of his strength, at his wit’s end. I had no right to let myself die. What would he do without me? I was his only support.” (Night, p 90)

A fifteen-year-old with a gold crown?

How many 15-year-olds do you know who have a crown on a tooth already? Thirty-one-year-olds may, the age Lazar Wiesel was in 1944. Or the following story could be totally fabricated. Wiesel writes in Night that when he was transferred to Monowitz (Buna), he was given a physical and a dental exam. The dentist wanted to remove his gold crown; Eliezer talked him out of it. One day his work foreman, named Franek, noticed the gold and told Eliezer he wanted it. Eliezer resisted, but eventually, after suffering a series of abuses, gave up his gold tooth to Franek. In this story, he is called out for his dental appointment by his number, “A-7713.” (p 58) The number is used again on page 64 when the Kapo decides to give him a beating.

I felt the sweat run down my back.

“A-7713!”

I came forward.

Earlier, on page 51, the author wrote:

“The three “veterans,” with needles in their hands, engraved a number on our left arms. I became A-7713.”

Yet where is the number A-7713 on Elie Wiesel’s left arm?

At Buna, he worked in an electrical warehouse alongside some Polish civilians and a few French women After his beating by the Kapo, one of the French girls came over to him, “wiped his blood-stained forehead with her cool hand,” gave him a mournful smile and a bit of bread. Finally she spoke to him “in almost perfect German.” Several years later he recognized her in the Paris Metro, and prodded her memory. They went to a terrace café and she revealed to him that she was Jewish, from a religious family, and during the occupation she obtained forged papers and passed herself off as an Aryan. She was enlisted in “forced labor groups” and deported to Germany. That’s how she escaped the concentration camps.

These kinds of stories abound in Night and other holocaust-survivor books. No witnesses, no proofs, no names, just a bit of imagination. I will remind you again that the original Night was published in 1960 categorized as Judaica/Literature … in other words, fiction. When the new translation came out in 2006, it was changed to Autobiography/Jewish Interest. It is now an autobiography of Elie Wiesel, with his picture on the back cover and a special new Preface, written by him, which condemns the Germans and attempts to explain the changes he and his wife have made in the text.

Eliezer Wiesel is not necessarily Elie Wiesel

The author of the Yiddish book is Eliezer Wiesel. The author of Night is Elie Wiesel. There is only 2 years between the publication of Un di Velt Hot Gesvign in 1956 and the French La Nuit in 1958, but in that time the author’s name had changed. When did Elie start being called ‘Elie’ rather than Eliezer or Liezer or Lazar or something else? According to some of his biographers, it was when he was still living at home with his family. As we know, there were many Eliezer Wiesel’s (Vizel’s) in Sighet, let alone in Hungary, at the time. Un di Velt Hot Gesvign, however, was written in Polish Yiddish, or at least it was published in that language. The final version of the book of 245 pages was edited by Mark Turkov who specialized in Polish Yiddish. Where the story came from, we really don’t know. That’s the bottom line. We have the preposterous story told by Elie Wiesel of writing it in a ship’s cabin on his way to Brazil at a time that he was involved in a serious love affair and embarking on an important assignment for his newspaper. Equally preposterous is his claim to have handed an 862-page manuscript over to the stranger Turkov during a chance meeting on the ship, docked at Sao Paulo, without a copy for himself or a contract or any guarantee of return – just ‘good faith.’ Being an experienced journalist at that time, he would certainly have known better. Worse than that, he says he didn’t even believe when he gave it to him that Turkov would publish it. (All Rivers, p 240-41)

We make a leap of faith to believe that Eliezer Wiesel has to be Elie Wiesel. It should also be pointed out that these survivor stories were all the rage within the Yiddish-speaking communities at the time. There were many of them in circulation, even before they were published. Elie Wiesel had cousins in Argentina whom he visited while he was there in April-May 1954; he mentioned them in All Rivers.4 It’s very likely that he was introduced to these survivor stories, and Mark Turkov’s publishing house, through these relatives and their circle. Was he attracted to a particular story by an author with his own name, Eliezer Wiesel?

More unlikely stories

Wiesel tells us another unlikely story in All Rivers (p 277) that in Dec. 1955, back in Paris, he received a copy of the published book, edited down to 245 pages, in the mail from Turkov. There are no witnesses to this. He only mentions telling one close friend, Israel Adler, who took him out for a coffee by way of celebration.(!) Shortly after that he moved to the United States. It appears from his writings that Wiesel forgot all about the manuscript he gave to Turkov until the book came to him in the mail, but he does add on that page that “they never did send back the manuscript”—to give himself a reason for not having it and not being able to say what was actually in it.

In contradiction to this story is the one wherein Francois Mauriac, whom Wiesel first meets in Spring 1955, encourages him to write about his concentration camp experiences. He doesn’t tell Mauriac he has already done so, but acts like he will think about it, later accepting the guilt-ridden, elderly Catholic’s help in getting the book published. Wiesel writes in All Rivers, p 319, that he sent a manuscript of what became La Nuit (Night) to Mauriac one year later, in 1956.

In 1957, during my convalescence, I received good news from Francois Mauriac: Jerome Lindon of Editions de Minuit was going to publish La Nuit (Night). The letter of confirmation opened a new chapter in the book of commentaries that is my life.

Lindon didn’t like the orginal title: “And the World Remained Silent.” He preferred a biblical phrase, perhaps something from the Book of Jeremiah. But after discussing various suggestions, we settled on La Nuit. Lindon also wanted me to tighten the text, given to him by Mauriac, though I had already pruned and abridged it considerably.

The text was given to the French publisher by Mauriac. In the next lines he says that he, Elie, was the one who made the drastic cuts in the original manuscript. When?!

He proposed new cuts throughout, leading to significant differences in length among the successive versions. I had cut down the original manuscript from 862 pages to the 245 of the published Yiddish edition. Lindon edited La Nuit down to 178.

What a tissue of lies. Never before had Wiesel written about the Yiddish book, but now, in 1995, he relates that it was he who cut the 862 pages to 245. Such a prodigious task would certainly not have gone unremarked upon by him! And now it is the publisher who did the final editing to 178 pages. One wonders just what part Elie Wiesel played in this group effort?

Wiesel continues with an unconvincing “explanation” of why the book’s original ending was cut out, something that was made controversial by a certain Jewish scholar. He then says, “By the time Night was published in France, I was at work on another book.” This rendition of how such an important book came about is so sloppy and insulting to the intelligence of his readers that it speaks for itself.

Both the USHMM and Wikipedia have the dates wrong.

At the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Elie Wiesel Timeline: From 1952, it says Wiesel interviewed Mauriac in 1954 (it was 1955) and that Wiesel finished his “900-page Yiddish manuscript” in Brazil in 1955 (it was 1954). I believe it is backwards on purpose, in order to fit Wiesel’s lies. But this is typical of the scholarship carried out at this totally Jewish-run, but government funded museum. It reads:

1954
During an interview with the distinguished French writer, Francois Mauriac, Elie is persuaded to write about his experiences in the death camps.

1955
Elie Wiesel finishes a nearly 900-page manuscript in Yiddish while on assignment in Brazil. And the World Stayed Silent is published in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

1963
Elie Wiesel becomes an American citizen.

Wikipedia skips over the dates, doesn’t give any dates for the writing of the books because they don’t fit, but says that Wiesel moved to NYC in 1955.

“In 1955, Wiesel moved to New York City, having become a US citizen: due to injuries suffered in a traffic accident, he was forced to stay in New York past his visa’s expiration and was offered citizenship to resolve his status.”

Others say he moved to NYC in 1956. Since he was still in Paris in Dec.’55, one assumes he didn’t leave for the U.S. until Jan. ‘56. Wiesel nowhere gives a date, which is the reason for the confusion — his biographers have to guess. But, while he received a U.S. “green card” sometime after recovering from his accident, he did not become a citizen until 1963. Wikipedia is known to change its information on Wiesel without notice. For example, it now spells his father’s name Chlomo, whereas previously it was Shlomo.

Why did Wiesel start campaigning for the Nobel Prize the same year Mark Turkov died?

Mark Turkov, the publisher of Un di Velt Hot Gesvign (And The World Remained Silent), died in 1983, the same year Wiesel’s supporters began their campaign to get him a Nobel Prize. It is a fact that Wiesel never spoke about the Yiddish book that was the precursor to Night until after Mark Turkov’s death. As I wrote in “The Shadowy Origins of Night, Part III,” this was the time Wiesel first began to speak of being the author of the Yiddish book, which he obliquely referred to in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech in 1986, when he said “the world did know and remained silent.”

Another reason for bringing the previously ignored Yiddish book into the light is that Buchenwald survivor Myklos Grüner began, in 1987, to claim that a different Eliezer Wiesel was the author of Un di Velt Hot Gesvign, thus making it necessary for the first time for Elie to explain just how it got written … by him. That he botched the explanation so badly in his memoir is no surprise to those who have studied the man. From the article mentioned above:

Grüner writes in his book Stolen Identity (p 50), “My work of research to find Lazar Wiesel born on the 4^th of September 1913 started first in 1987, to establish contact with the Archives of Buchenwald.” He was also writing to politicians and newspapers in Sweden. This could not have failed to attract the notice of Elie Wiesel and his well-developed public relations network. Grüner tracked down Un di Velt Hot Gesvign as the original book from which Night was taken, and believed it was written by his friend Lazar Wiesel and stolen somehow by Elie. (p 43)

This could account for why Elie Wiesel suddenly began to speak and write about ‘his’ Yiddish book, published in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1956. He deals with it in his memoir All Rivers, published in 1995, after Turkov and everyone else associated with it are dead. No witnesses.

Is it too far-fetched to believe that Turkov agreed to remain silent about the real author of Un di Velt Hot Gesvign, either by being bought off, threatened, or even voluntarily? And once Turkov was safely dead, Wiesel and his supporters could breathe more easily about claiming his authorship of the book?

It is a strange fact that the title Un di Velt Hot Gesvign (or, in English, And the World Remained Silent) does not appear on the long list of “books by Elie Wiesel” at the beginning of his memoir All Rivers, nor in the original or in the new 2006 translation of Night. It also does not appear in the complete list of his books at The Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity. It is, however, at the beginning of the list of his books on Wikipedia. Clearly, there is uncertainty about this book, perhaps a desire by publishers not to put down in writing something that could bring them a lawsuit … or perhaps a wish by Wiesel not to stimulate questions about that book.

Conclusions

1. The characters in Night are only loosely based on Elie Wiesel and his family. Therefore it can’t be called an autobiography.

2. Elie Wiesel is the author of Night, written in French with the assistence of his editor and probably Francois Mauriac, but he cannot have been the author of Un di Velt Hot Gesvign.

3. Elie Wiesel made arrangement while in Brazil/Argentina for Mark Turkov to mail him the book by Eliezer Wiesel as soon as there was a hard copy, or his relatives mailed it to him. (Elie received a copy in Dec. 1955, according to himself, but the book was not available to the public until 1956.)

4. In the winter and spring of 1956, in the United States, Elie adapted the book to a shorter version in French, which he mailed to Francois Mauriac in Paris. He inserted the names of his family members and personalized it, especially in the beginning chapters.

5. The secrecy of the birth and death dates among Wiesel’s close relatives is to keep from contradicting what is written in Night, on which his fame and fortune truly rests. Without Night, Wiesel fades into just another Jewish-Zionist writer.

6. Elie Wiesel’s failure to correct and clarify details of his family history (especially birth and death dates of his parents, sisters and other close relatives), and of the writing and publication of Un di Velt and La Nuit, mirrors his refusal to show the number A-7713 that he says is tattooed on his left arm.

7. The essential purpose for securing a Nobel Prize for Wiesel, in literature or peace, was to solidify his reputation in light of the fagility of Night as the basis of that reputation. Nobel prize recipients are a protected species by the entire “global elite,” not just the Jews. Having himself falsely identified in the Buchenwald Liberation photo served the same purpose.

My challenge: I welcome any native Polish Yiddish speaker/reader who is also fluent in English to prove me wrong about what I have written above by providing an honest, accurate translation of Un di Velt Hot Gesvign into English so it can be compared with Night. Why hasn’t this already been done? It’s natural to be suspicious of what is kept hidden. Let’s put everything on the table so that the questions I have raised can be cleared up.

Endnotes:

1. Elie Wiesel, Memoirs: All Rivers Run to the Sea, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1995. 418 pp.

2. Elie Wiesel, Night, Hill and Wang, New York, 1960. 116 pp. (Original edition)

3. “One day my father saw a beautiful young girl in a carriage and was so struck by her that he ran after her, calling out, ‘Who are you?’ Of course, she did not deign to reply, but that evening the driver gave him the answer. The girl was the younger daughter of Reb Dodye Feig, of the village of Bichkev. The following year they were married, and they had four children, three girls and a boy.” (All Rivers, p 15)

4. “In Buenos Aires my cousins Voicsi and her husband Moishe-Hersh Genuth came to meet us. I gave them some articles for Yedioth Ahronoth, unaware they would be reprinted or quoted in the American Jewish press.” (All Rivers, p 241)

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.”

Proof that the man in the famous Buchenwald photograph is NOT Elie Wiesel.

With the help of the New York Times and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, Elie Wiesel and his backers did not shy away from criminal deceit by purposely misidentifying an unknown face in this famous photo as belonging to Elie Wiesel.

The above high-resolution photograph of Buchenwald survivors was first published in the New York Times on May 6, 1945 with the caption “Crowded Bunks in the Prison Camp at Buchenwald”. It was taken inside Block #56 by Private H. Miller of the Civil Affairs Branch of the U.S. Army Signal Corps on April 16, 1945, five days after the Buchenwald camp was liberated by a division of the US Third Army on April 11, 1945. None of the men in the picture were identified at that time.

The U.S. Army photographer was in block #56, not #66

The U.S. Army photographer said he was inside Block #56. The “children’s block” that housed the so-called “boys of Buchenwald” was #66. This was not a typo. Note that these men are not children or teenagers, except for the youngster on the lower left who has been correctly identified as 16 yr. old Myklos (Nikolaus) Grüner, and a couple others. These adults appear to be a mixture of sick individuals suffering from a wasting disease (Grüner learned after liberation he had TB), along with basically healthy men who were also in that block for some reason five days after they had been freed. As we have read from many Buchenwald inmates, they moved about at will from the day of liberation onward. In Elie Wiesel’s book Night, he even says that some of the boys in his block went to the city of Weimar the very next day to steal potatoes and rape girls.

The true facts of this photograph have never been told and perhaps are not known. (Grüner has written in Stolen Identity that he left a procession of youths being led to the camp entrance on the morning of April 11, scurried into the nearest barracks and jumped into an empty bunk space. It turned out to be this one.) But because of the man standing there stark naked except for a piece of clothing held in his hands to cover himself, this photograph was likely staged. In any event, it was never represented as the “children’s barracks.” Still, Elie Wiesel inexplicably once told an interviewer for the German weekly Die Zeit that this picture was taken in the Children’s Block and all these men were really teenagers even though they looked old. (Source: “1945 und Heute: Holocaust,” Die Zeit, April 21, 1995.)

Kenneth Waltzer wrote to EWCTW on Nov. 14, 2010: “Eli Wiesel was indeed the Lazar Wiesel who was admitted to Buchenwald on January 26, 1945, who was subsequently shifted to block 66…” and Waltzer repeated in another comment on June 27, 2011 that “— after his father died — Elie Wiesel was moved in early February to block 66, the kinderblock. Miklos Gruner too was in block 66. Elie Wiesel was there with other boys from Sighet, who knew him.”

But we are also to accept that on April 16 Wiesel was in block 56, even though he didn’t report any such move in his book Night.  In fact, in that fictitious story Wiesel says he became deathly ill with food poisoning three days after liberation (April 14) and spent the next two weeks in hospital (pg 115, Marion Wiesel translation). That in itself precludes his being in this photograph taken on April 16!

Whom do you believe—the New York Times or your own eyes?

 Not Wiesel at age 16 in 1945

You can see for yourself from these two high-quality photographs supplied to me by a helpful reader that the face on the left  is not Wiesel. On the right is Elie Wiesel in 1944 at the age of 15.

The inmate on the left definitely has an aquiline nose and full, even sensual, lips. In this close-up, the receding hairline is visible on the recently shaved head.  On the right, the real 15-year-old Elie Wiesel exhibits a normal youthful hairline, a differently shaped nose and thinner lips. He also has a higher forehead than the more roundish-headed inmate. The eyes of the man on the left are not as deep-set under the eyebrows. His somewhat surprised, curious expression is not typical of Wiesel, whose expression was generally reserved, and often hooded.

The close-up on the left  appears to be the real Elie Wiesel in France later in 1945. He would be 17 or almost 17 years old in this picture. Notice the non-receding, youthful hairline with a long front lock hanging to the side, and the slightly concave  curve of the nose .

This close-up image  is from the photograph below, which is found at the USHMM Survivor Resource Center with the caption given below.

Jewish boys gather for a prayer service in a chapel in an OSE children’s home. Those pictured include Elie Wiesel (seen in profile, back right) and Jakob Rybsztajn standing next to him facing the camera.

(I note that Elie Wiesel is older than the other boys in this picture, giving credence to the idea that he acted in the role of counselor and sometime teacher to the newer, younger “religious” boys.)

Notice again the slight concave curve of the nose, the high forehead, deep-set eyes, large ears, sensitive mouth and slender neck. But also look at all that hair! The date of this picture is given by USHMM as 1945 and the location as Ambloy, [Loir et Cher] France.  It says in the accompanying text “In October 1945 the children and staff of Ambloy were relocated to the Chateau de Vaucelles in Taverny (Val d’Oise).”  That means this picture was taken between June and October 1945. They could have been celebrating Rosh Hashana, Yom Kippur or Sukkot.

But could his hair have grown to such a length from a shaved head in April 1945? No way, and thus this is another proof that the liberated Buchenwald inmate with the shaved head is NOT Elie Wiesel. 

A PDF from my valued contributer examines the ages of the small group more closely. Take a look:

four men in bunk

Who first identified Elie Wiesel in the famous Buchenwald liberation photo?

In October 1983, the New York Times  published this photograph as part of an article in its high circulation Sunday NYT Magazine with the 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.”

Coincidentally, it was 1983 when Wiesel’s friend Sigmund Strochlitz began campaigning for a Nobel prize for Wiesel. Letters of nomination are due into the Nobel committee by Feb.1 of each year, so by January 1984, the committee was  receiving letters nominating Wiesel from U.S. Senators such as Daniel Moynihan and Barry Goldwater. (see “How Elie Wiesel Got the Nobel Peace Prize“)  The effort continued, with new and ever more innovative ideas, through 1985 and 1986 with the help of John Silber, President of Boston University, Wiesel’s employer. Hundreds were enlisted into the effort.

The 1983 article in the New York Times that was the opening gun of the campaign was written by Jew Samuel Freedman and titled “Bearing Witness: The Life and Work of Elie Wiesel.” It included this line: “His name has been frequently mentioned as a possible recipient of a Nobel Prize, for either peace or literature.” Well, it had just begun to be mentioned … by this team of cheerleaders.

Wiesel pretends that he had nothing to do with it. In an interview in France in 2009, he said: “If you fight or if you do scientific research to get the Nobel, you never succeed and you should not succeed.” (Elie Wiesel, “messager de la memoire”) No, he did not fight but his mercenaries fought for him, and he used this photograph as his “research.” That this photograph played a large role is shown by the fact that immediately after the Nobel award ceremony in December 1986, Wiesel went to Yad Vashem Memorial in Jerusalem and posed in front of its prominent display there.

Elie Wiesel on Dec. 18, 1986 at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem 

After the award was announced by the Nobel Committee, the New York Times  published again on Nov. 1 a severely cropped version of the Buchenwald photo (below) 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.” The picture accompanied an article by Jew Martin Susskind titled, “A Voice from Bonn: History Cannot Be Shrugged Off.”

The role played by the tax-payer funded United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

Elie Wiesel finagled his way to becoming Founding Chairman of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council in 1980 after being chosen in 1978 by President Jimmy Carter as chairman of the President’s Commission on the Holocaust. Why the United States needed to do anything at all about the “Holocaust” is something only the 2.5% Jewish population in this country can answer. It is to satisfy them. Wiesel continued to chair the Council until 1986, when he reached his goal of becoming a Nobel Laureate. The USHMM was undoubtedly an important institutional heavyweight that leveraged him to the Nobel.

The USHMM naturally accepted that Wiesel was in the famous photograph as soon as he and the New York Times said he was. If you think the museum staff does real research, is searching for truth and/or is engaged in scholarship of any kind, you are badly mistaken. The museum represents official power only and is invested in keeping it in Jewish hands.

This photograph is the only document tying Elie Wiesel to the Holocaust

The only document that connects Elie Wiesel to the Auschwitz-Birkenau and Buchenwald experience he claims to have—in other words, his claim to be an authentic “Holocaust survivor”—is the famous Buchenwald liberation photograph. There are no records with his name and birth date for either camp. His books do not support his presence there very well. That’s why the Wiesel promoters, who wanted to anchor their man’s claim to be the unchallenged spokesman for the world’s greatest victims—which winning a Nobel prize would surely do—decided that they could pawn that unknown face off as the face of Wiesel. This decision was made in 1983. It’s certain that Elie Wiesel took part in making it, though the pretense is kept up by all that he was aloof from the entire process.

What you must do

When you comprehend the immense power that this simple photo comparison and commentary gives us, you know that we have it in our hands  to break down the Wiesel legend if this knowledge is widely circulated. If you understand this, you know what you must do. You must post this article everywhere you can, you must tell everyone about it, send it to all you know … make sure that this photo comparison moves through the Internet and finds a home in as many places as possible.  And keep it up, because once is not enough. I’ve done my part, readers. Now it’s up to you.

On 30 June 2011 the following news item was published by PRNewswire:[1]

Sixty-six years after the notorious Nazi death camp at Auschwitz was liberated and the horrific crimes of Dr. Josef Mengele were first revealed, Alexander Historic Auctions of Stamford, Connecticut (an affiliate of Alexander Autographs, Inc., www.alexautographs.com) has obtained for auction all of the war criminal’s writings, including his autobiography describing his escape from Germany and life in South America, diaries, philosophical tracts, racial and political commentary, poetry, short stories, and travelogues. The archive is composed of over 3,300 pages of handwritten text, some illustrated, largely in bound journals, written while Mengele was in hiding in Paraguay and Brazil between 1960 and 1975.

The archive will be offered in Alexander’s July 21, 2011 auction of historic militaria and autographs.

[...].

The autobiographical material in this archive, about 25% of its content, is of such historical importance, it was quoted and paraphrased in the mid-1980′s by Bundt Magazine and by authors Gerald Posner and John Ware in their biography of Mengele. Bundt and Posner/Ware quoted excerpts very sparingly, leaving the vast majority of this material unpublished and but for Bundt and Posner/Ware, unviewed.

Writing in the third person, or using the pseudonym ‘Andreas,’ Mengele describes his capture by American forces, hiding on a farm while furtively meeting his wife, escape over the Brenner Pass to Italy, arrest, passage to Argentina, and life in Paraguay and Brazil. (…). He also offers his opinions on a myriad of subjects, including race-mixing, the Nuremburg war crimes trials, justification of the concentration camp system, and denial of the conditions at the camps.

[...].

Bill Panagopulos, president of Alexander Historic Auctions, has a strong opinion on the sale of the archive: ‘Scholarly institutions or historic collections should obtain these writings not as a ‘remembrance’ of a horrific period of world history, but more as a learning tool for future generations to recognize the psychopathic mentality that incited the Holocaust so that similar genocides are never repeated.’

What’s most intriguing in this newsreport is the statement that the Auschwitz doctor’s writings include “denial of the conditions at the camps”. What could this mean, exactly?

The very brief excerpts published by Gerald Posner and John Ware in their Mengele biography Mengele: The Complete Story[2] provide us with some clues in this respect.[3] Mengele did not deny that mass death occured at Auschwitz due to epidemics, malnutrition and other “natural causes” (Posner/Ware, p. 73):

“It is natural and understandable that the camps were suffering very bad hunger after all the problems and therefore I saw what was to be expected.”

According to a Munich pharmacist and his wife who met with him soon after the war, Mengele wanted to turn himself in, but was finally persuaded against it. To this couple Mengele declared his innocence (p. 67):

“I don’t have anything to hide. Terrible things happened at Auschwitz, and I did my best to help. One could not do everything. There were terrible disasters there. I could only save so many. I never killed anyone or hurt anyone. I can prove I am innocent of what they could say against me. I am building the facts for my defense. I want to turn myself in and be cleared at a trial.”

If this quote from memory is correct, then it seems unlikely that Mengele was referring to the use of homicidal gas chambers, because the systematic killing of innocent people in chemical slaughterhouses would not be a “disaster”, but pre-meditated mass murder. Epidemic outbreaks, however, could justly be termed “disasters”.

The defense that Mengele was reportedly building may well be included among the papers now to be auctioned off.

Elsewhere (p. 154) Mengele noted that)

“The political lie triumphs and time and history have been warped and bowed.”

This clearly indicates that Mengele believed that victors of WWII had rewritten the history of what transpired during the war in their own favor.

Then there is the title of one of the autobiographical texts, Fiat Lux, “Let there be light”. A suggested by Robert Faurisson, this title clearly implies that Mengele wished to shed light on what had actually transpired at Auschwitz.

If it is true that Mengele’s writings contain “denial of the conditions at the camps” then it seems most likely that “conditions” refer to either claims of gross mistreatment of prisoners in the form of torture, unlawful punishments etc, or to the allegation that Auschwitz functioned as an extermination camp.

One can only hope that the Mengele documents are purchased by an institution that does not place them behind lock and key, but prefer to reveal their contents to the world. After all, we should never underestimate the Holocaust industry’s tendency to shoot itself in the foot.

[1] “Auschwitz ‘Angel of Death’ Josef Mengele’s Unknown Writings to be Auctioned”,

http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/auschwitz-angel-of-death-josef-mengeles-unknown-writings-to-be-auctioned-124801054.html

[2] Gerald Posner, John Ware, Mengele: The Complete Story, McGraw-Hill, New York 1986.

[3] For more on this biography see my online review at: http://www.codoh.com/review/revmengele.html

By Thomas Kues

1. Introduction

According to orthodox holocaust historiography, carbon monoxide from engine exhaust was used to kill nearly 2 million Jews in Poland, Serbia and on occupied Soviet territory between late 1941 and the summer of 1944. The majority of these supposed victims were allegedly killed in stationary gas chambers located in three “pure extermination camps” in the Polish General Government – Bełżec, Sobibór and Treblinka – while the remainder is said to have been killed in mobile “gas vans” that were either stationed at the Chełmno (Kulmhof) camp in the Warthegau area of occupied Poland or employed by Einsatzgruppen or SD units operating in Serbia and on occupied Soviet territory. Below is listed the victim figures for each “killing center” as currently held by the orthodox historians.

Bełżec 434,501[1]

Sobibór 170,000[2]

Treblinka 750,000-900,000[3]

Chełmno (Kulmhof) 152,000-360,000[4]

Other “gas vans” 100,000 approx.

Total: 1,606,501-1,964,501

According to most eyewitness testimony, Diesel engines from captured Soviet tanks were used as killing agents Bełżec and Treblinka, while at Sobibór, the historians claim, a petrol (gasoline) engine of unclear origin was used to produce the lethal carbon monoxide gas. As for the “gas vans” supposedly employed at Chełmno, those are commonly held to have been modified Saurer or Diamond trucks.

The danger of Diesel exhaust has long been debated by revisionist scholars. Since the early 1980s, American revisionist writer and engineer F.P. Berg has published a number of articles dealing with this issue. Their conclusion: Because Diesel engines only generate small amounts of carbon monoxide, and since Diesel exhaust contains much oxygen, the use of diesel engines as killing agents in homicidal gas chambers is preposterous. Witness testimony claiming that Diesel engines were utilized for murderous purposes are thus objectively false. To those witnesses belongs Kurt Gerstein, a certified mining engineer.

This article will not further discuss the Diesel engine issue – it will suffice to say that a number of holocaust historians cling on to the notion that Diesel engines were used for killings,[5] at least at Treblinka, while others have tried to cautiously distance themselves from the Diesel claim.[6] Instead, I will for reason of argument follow the assumption that the (hypothetical) German perpetrators used engines capable of producing lethal amounts of carbon monoxide gas. Given this, I will pose a number of questions related to the physical effects of the poison gas. How would the carbon monoxide (CO) affect the bodies of the victims? What would they look like post mortem? And, most importantly: what does the eyewitnesses to the alleged carbon monoxide gas chambers have to say about the appearance of the corpses?

2. Previous research

The main revisionist study on the issue of skin discoloration caused by carbon monoxide consists of an online article by revisionist and engineer F.P. Berg, entitled “Blue Women on the Beach – and the False Toxicity of CO2 in Diesel Exhaust”. It was written as a rebuttal to an article by Charles D. Provan, “The Blue Color of the Jewish Victims at Belzec Death Camp – and Carbon Monoxide Poisoning”, which had previously appeared in the May 2004 issue of The Revisionist. Below I will provide a summary of the relevant articles written by Berg and Provan between 1983 and 2007.

2.1. Berg’s first articles on the issue of Diesel gas chambers

The first of F.P. Berg’s writings to deal with the issue of the alleged carbon monoxide gas chambers, and especially the claim that Diesel engines were used to generate the lethal gas, was an article originally presented at the 1983 International Revisionist Conference and later, in 1984, published in The Journal for Historical Review, “The Diesel Gas Chambers: Myth Within a Myth”. In it he among other things dissected the witness account of a supposed mass gassing at Bełżec in 1942 that was left by the former SS hygiene technician Kurt Gerstein in French prison in 1945. Referring to the text of one of Kurt Gerstein’s “reports”, Berg writes:

“According to the last sentence of the text quoted, ‘the bodies were tossed out blue, wet with sweat and urine.’ Here we have a flaw as far as the death-from-carbon-monoxide theory is concerned because victims of carbon monoxide poisoning are not blue at all. On the contrary, victims of carbon monoxide poisoning are a distinctive ‘cherry red,’ or ‘pink.’ This is clearly stated in most toxicology handbooks and is probably well known to every doctor and to most, if not all, emergency medical personnel. Carbon monoxide poisoning is actually very common because of the automobile and accounts for more incidents of poison gas injury than all other gases combined.”[7]

As sources Berg gave references to two standard works on toxicology.[8] The above argument was then reiterated in a revised and expanded version of the same article which originally appeared in the revisionist anthology Grundlagen zur Zeitgeschichte (1994) under the same title and later in translation (in Germar Rudolf (ed.), Dissecting the Holocaust, Theses & Dissertations Press 2003) as “Diesel Gas Chambers: Ideal for Torture – Absurd for Murder”. In this appearance the above quoted passage was complemented with a further reference to recently published specialist literature.[9]

2.2. The 2004 article by Charles D. Provan

In his article The Blue Color of the Jewish Victims at Belzec Death Camp – and Carbon Monoxide Poisoning[10] Provan asserts that bluish color or bluish tinge attributed to the Bełżec victims by Gerstein and later Pfannenstiel can be explained as cyanosis. “Blue”, Provan writes, “is a regular (and documented) color for carbon monoxide poisoning, especially when the victims are alive, but also when the victims are dead.” In regard to fatal cases of CO poisoning, Provan quotes a number of studies indicating that “in some cases” of fatal poisoning there is “no cherry-red coloring of the skin”, that in some cases the appearance of the victim is instead “cyanotic”, and that the cherry-red discoloration might be “slight” due to low saturation (i.e. low carboxyhemoglobinal level) and in some cases obscured because of “associated cyanosis”. Provan takes the above as evidence that what Gerstein and Pfannenstiel said in regards to the color of the corpses is “possible”, and that Berg in his previous articles had reached the wrong conclusions.

2.3. The rebuttal of F.P. Berg

Berg opens his rebuttal to Provan[11] stating that the assertion of blue corpses “is totally at odds with the claims (…) that the toxic ingredient [in the exhaust gas used as the killing agent] was carbon monoxide.” The texts on cyanosis referenced by Provan, Berg notes, “fail to use the words “blue” or even “bluish” at all”. “The simple fact”, Berg further contends, “is that the blue appearance of “cyanosis” does not correspond at all to the general “blue” appearance of the “blue corpses” that Gerstein or Pfannenstiel allegedly saw (…)”. Corpses may be multi-colored, and thus “blue” cyanosis may appear on one part of the body, while the rest of it displays a cherry-red color. Cyanosis occurring in connection with carbon monoxide poisoning is “associated” with the poisoning and not in itself a product of any reaction between carbon monoxide and the victim’s blood. Reactions of carbon monoxide with blood are more or less bright red, never blue. Provan is wrong in defining cyanosis as a “medical term for blue coloring occurring in a patient or corpse” since “cyanotis” is not simply the medical term for blue coloring, but only applies to some varieties of blue discoloration. One would not be able to conclude a case of CO poisoning from the mere presence of cyanosis; the color of the victim’s blood would also be examined.

While cyanosis may appear in some fatal cases, “the appearance of a generally “blue” corpse is extremely rare if it ever occurs at all” (Berg). Below a carboxyhemoglobin level of 30% a living body or corpse may indeed display cyanosis without accompanying bright red discoloration, but as the lethal level for most individuals lies around 60%, an overwhelming majority of corpses would definitely show some nuance of red. Variations and exceptions to this occur in only around 6% of all cases. Also, the reddish color when occurring “tends to be extremely intense and dramatic whereas cyanosis is an extremely subtle coloring in which most of the skin is merely pale” (Berg). A lay observer would thus have a hard time noticing any cyanotic cases, whereas the red discolored corpses would be immediately noticeable. “There is good reason to believe”, Berg writes, “that a cyanotic description in our context does not really mean blue at all — but merely blue by contrast or in comparison to other parts of the same or other bodies.” In regards to the Pfannenstiel testimony, Berg remarks that Pfannenstiel “noticed nothing special about the corpses” except for a bluish tinge to the face of some of them, and that no mention of any red discoloration is made, two things which combined speaks against the reliability of this witness. Berg also strongly criticizes Provan’s way of mixing fatal and non-fatal cases of poisoning, as well as “immediate” fatal cases with “delayed” ones. Living victims of CO poisoning may be partially cyanotic and partially red (with a “flushed” or pink appearance) or cyanotic with only negligible or unnoticeable red discolorations. Dead CO victims on the other hand are usually red or cherry-red. In the rare cases (around 9% of all cases) when cyanosis appears associated with fatal CO poisoning, it tends to be appear restricted to parts of the body where the skin is more translucent, such as the lips or nasal openings. The alleged observations of Gerstein and Pfannenstiel are thus not reconcilable with known medical facts.

3. The difference between fatal and non-fatal cases of CO poisoning

In discussing the issue of discolorations in the skin of CO gassing victims, it is important to note the difference between fatal and non-fatal (i.e. clinical) cases of CO poisoning. In the writings of anti-revisionists, we often find quotes from medical literature such as:

“The classic findings of cherry-red lips, cyanosis, and retinal hemorrhages occur rarely.”[12]

Or:

“The classic ‘cherry-red’ skin coloration is actually rare, and patients are more likely to appear pale or cyanotic.”[13]

As F.P. Berg points out, statements such those above appears to refer mainly to clinical cases of carbon monoxide poisoning, i.e. cases where the poisoned person was found alive and received treatment before he or she either survived, or died (therefore the word “patients” in the second quote). A statement similar to the ones quoted above can be found in the standard work A guide to general toxicology (1983):

“Carbon monoxide poisoning may result in blisters or bullae over pressure areas but the classic cherry red color of the skin is rare.”[14]

When, however, the text within which this quote appears is read more closely, it becomes evident that the author(s), without stating this explicitly, is referring mainly or even exclusively to clinical cases.[15] In fact, specialist literature on toxicology and emergency medicine by its very nature normally focus on clinical cases, while cases involving untreated fatal cases are normally treated in writings related to forensic medicine.[16] An article from 2007 authored by Nicholas Bateman, a professor in clinical toxicology, indirectly confirms that deep red or “cherry pink” discoloration is rare among surviving victims, but more common in fatal cases (emphasis added):

“Skin blistering may occur if the patient lies unconscious for some hours before being discovered, and the skin is more likely to be cyanosed than to have the cherry-pink colour that is described to be a classical feature of CO poisoning, but rarely seen in living patients.”[17]

The letter by Bruno Simini to The Lancet, often cited by anti-revisionists, in which it is stated that “cherry-red discoloration in CO poisoning is quite rare” and that “most doctors overestimate the frequency of cherry-red discoloration in CO poisoning” is also clearly referring to clinical cases of poisoning, since it only refers to “surveys of patients” i.e. treated victims of CO poisoning.[18]

The case reports and medical papers which I quote and refer to in the next section clearly proves that deep red or cherry red discoloration of the skin is virtually always present among fatal cases of CO poisoning. In the section after that I will contrast the contents of the medical case reports and findings with statements made by professed eyewitnesses to the alleged homicidal gas chambers and “gas vans”.

Illustration 1: Reddish flush in a non-fatal case of CO poisoning.[19]

Illustration 2: Typical red discoloration in victim of fatal CO poisoning.[20]

Illustration 3: A fatal case of CO poisoning displaying distinctive reddish-pink discoloration.[21]

Illustration 4: Bright red lividity in a victim of CO poisoning.[22]

4. Verified cases of discoloration resulting from carbon monoxide poisoning

Below I will provide brief summaries of a number of case reports and medical papers concerned with skin discoloration as an effect of CO poisoning.

Item 1: The man with the red face

The following case from mid-60’s America involved the suicide attempt of a 21-year old white male of Italian descent:[23]

“When seen on the morning following his admission the author was struck by the appearance of the patient’s cherry-red face. Additionally, he was thick-tongued in speech, lethargic and showed impairment of orientation as regards time and place. Confusion as to what had brought about his admission was noted.

The writer’s initial impression was acute brain syndrome but one whose etiology might involve carbon monoxide poisoning. Thus, the patient was questioned closely as regards the circumstances and details of his suicide attempt. Elicited from the patient were additional facts that he had fallen asleep in his car with the engine running and the windows closed. Twelve hours later, he awoke and returned home to tell his parents what he had done. At that time his clothes were covered by vomitus. It became apparent that a most important clinical sign and area of history had been over-looked previously.”

Thus it is apparent that cherry-red skin discoloration can be highly visible even among survivors of carbon monoxide poisoning. Red discoloration of the skin is thus not limited to the lividity of fresh corpses, but appears in the still living victim’s body as the mechanical result of carbon monoxide being absorbed by the bloodstream. This is because, as F.P. Berg writes in his rebuttal to Provan, “when carbon monoxide reacts with human blood, it forms carboxyhemoglobin which above concentrations of 30% is a bright red, becoming brighter and more intense as the concentration increases”, that is, the discoloration begins immediately with the reaction of the blood with the CO, and is then increased by the inflow of CO. Following death the discoloration is then concentrated by the pooling of blood that is livor mortis (post-mortem lividity).

Item 2: A dead girl in Italy

This case involved a 21 year old white female found dead in a country house owned by her family. It was later determined that her death had been unintentionally caused by a gas water heater. We are told by the authors of the case report that “[t]he pale cherry pink colour of the victim immediately suggested a carbon monoxide poisoning.” A spectrophotometric measurement of the blood showed a carboxyhemoglobin level of 60%. The report also mentions that among survivors of CO poisoning, the mean carboxyhemoglobin level is 28.1%, while among fatalities the mean level is 62.3%. At a level of 50%, the probability of survival is more or less 50%.[24]

Item 3: A German report on six “unusual” cases of fatal CO poisoning

This article[25] states that, despite the presence of indicative death scenes and/or characteristic findings of the external (coroners’) examination, about 40% of all unintentional fatal cases of carbon monoxide poisoning remain unrecognized until the autopsy. To illustrate possible reasons for this, the authors describe six individual cases. In case 1 and 2, involving a middle-aged couple, the bodies were found in a state of extreme putrefaction, so that the cause of death could only be recognized through spectrophotometrically analyzing the carboxyhemoglobin level of the oedema fluid that had gathered in the scalps of the victims. Case 3 involved a young truck driver, found dead in the closed cab of his vehicle and not displaying any clear external signs of CO poisoning, despite a carboxyhemoglobin level of 83%. Case 4 involved a 19 year old male found dead in a flat. Despite a carboxyhemoglobin level of 65% his body lacked “the bright pink coloration of livor mortis”. Case 5 involved a 27 year old male discovered dead in his flat with a carboxyhemoglobin level of 80%. His body was found in a state of advanced decomposition. Case 6 involved a 42 year old female found dead in the garage beside her car. The body did not show any clear external signs of CO poisoning despite a carboxyhemoglobin level of 46%. As stated already by the title of this article (“Unusual carbon monoxide poisoning”) these six cases (in particular cases 3, 4 and 6) are to be viewed as anomalous.

Item 4: An American case of CO poisoning without cherry-red discoloration

According to the authors of this article, carbon monoxide poisoning “typically causes so-called cherry-red livor of the skin and viscera.” They then report of a case of CO poisoning in which this cherry-red livor did not develop. It involved a 75 year old white male found dead in his car during a cold winter. His carboxyhemoglobin level was measured as 86%. The authors inform us that “the curious absence of cherry-red livor” was studied and the decedent’s tissue and blood specimens tested at various temperatures. The tests showed that neither the blood nor the tissue of the victim had a tendency to develop cherry-red color, regardless of temperature.[26]

Item 5: An optical study of discolorations

In this South African study of 10 fatal cases of carbon monoxide poisoning, the skin color of the victims’ bodies was analyzed by the help of reflectance spectrophotometry, with the values converted to visual equivalents. It was found that several circumstances contribute to the difficulty of identifying the cherry-red color in the skin, among them low CO concentration in the blood, skin pigmentation, washing-out of previously high CO concentrations, and deep venous dilatation combined with superficial vasoconstriction (narrowing of the blood vessels), producing the impression of cyanosis. It was further found that the color of the altered blood “depends on the way the red cells are massed together, their depths below the surface, and the brightness of the background against which they are viewed.”[27]

Item 6: A study of 15 CO victims at an Indian hospital

This study, published in 2001, was carried out at a hospital in a provincial Indian city which is located on an altitude of 5000 ft above mean sea level. It involved findings in 40 cases of accidental carbon monoxide poisoning, 25 of the clinical, 15 of them post mortem. The autopsy findings revealed “deep red discoloration of skin and serous membranes” in 12 of the 15 corpses.[28] This study is important for the topic of the present article, since it shows that deep red discoloration is displayed by a majority of victims of lethal carbon monoxide poisoning even when the skin of the victims are of a darker pigmentation than the average Caucasian’s.

Item 7: An Austrian study on 182 cases of fatal CO poisoning

This study[29] consists of an analysis of autopsy reports of postmortems performed at the Viennese Institute of Forensic Medicine between 1984 and 1993. The aim of this survey was to determine whether the cherry-pink coloring of livor mortis[30] is a reliable finding for the coroner to suspect a carbon monoxide-related death immediately at the death scene. It involved 182 cases of unintentional carbon monoxide-related deaths: 92 females and 90 males. The authors found a strong association between the carboxyhemoglobin level (i.e. the level of CO concentration in the blood’s hemoglobin) and the cherry-pink coloring of livor mortis: “in 98.4% of unintentional carbon monoxide-related deaths livor mortis was clearly cherry-pink.”[31] It was determined that fresh corpses with carboxyhemoglobin levels greater than 31% show “a clear cherry-pink coloring of livor mortis.”[32] The survey further indicated that the Viennese coroners’ inability to recognize cases of unintentional carbon monoxide fatalities immediately at the death scene was correlated to the age of the victim: the older the victim, the worse the coroner’s recognition.

In conclusion, the authors of the article suggest that coroners should be recommended to examine naked corpses thoroughly, and especially the color of livor mortis. In this way, they write, a carbon monoxide-related death can be recognized immediately and the source of the gas release identified, thus protecting other people from the risk of poisoning.

Item 8: A survey of 388 car exhaust gas suicides in Denmark 1995-1999

This study[33] from 2005 consists of a survey of 388 cases of suicide by means of engine exhaust gas carried out in Denmark between 1995 and 1998. Of the suicides 343 were males and 45 females. It was found that in 11 cases (2.8%) putrefaction or burns were so extensive that livor mortis could not be found, while “the characteristic pink livor mortis” was found in 353 cases (91% of the total cases, 93.6% of those with livor mortis). Only in 9 cases (2.4% of those with livor mortis) did the victims show a normal-colored livor mortis. In 3 of those 9 cases the victim had survived more than a day after the poisoning, implying a positive correlation between the cherry-red discoloration of livor mortis and the carboxyhemoglobin level. In 15 cases the author of the autopsy report had neglected to write down the color of livor mortis.

Summary of the medical evidence

From the above summarized cases we may conclude that:

• Cherry-red discoloration sometimes appears in non-fatal cases of CO poisoning, i.e. it is visible also in ante-mortem states (Item 1). According to available medical literature, such cases are not the rule, but on the other hand not highly exceptional. Such discoloration would appear more or less directly after the blood cells had started absorbed the carbon monoxide. The visibility of the deep red discoloration is related to the concentrations of CO in the blood (i.e. the carboxyhemoglobin level), as well as other factors such as pigmentation (Item 5). In the case of the alleged gas chamber victims it is reasonable to assume that their carboxyhemoglobin level would be much higher than that of the average CO poisoning survivor (that is 28.1%, whereas in fatal cases the concentration averages 62.3%; cf. Item 2), thus greatly increasing the number of individual cases with cherry-red discoloration appearing already ante-mortem or prior to the onset of livor mortis.

• According to Item 7 fresh corpses with carboxyhemoglobin levels greater than 31% shows clear discoloration. This level is only 2.9% above that of the average survivor of CO poisoning (cf. Item 2).

• In cases of fatal CO poisoning, deep red discoloration of the livor mortis is visible in many cases even when the victim’s pigmentation is much darker than that of the average Caucasian (Item 6).

• In fatal cases of CO poisoning, absence of cherry-red lividity is regarded as “curious” or “unusual”. Individuals whose blood and tissue lacks the tendency to develop the cherry-red color are very much an exception (Item 4). In many of the fatal cases where discoloration could not be detected, this was due to the corpse having entered the stage of advanced decomposition, or from having suffered severe burns (Items 3, 8).

• Deep red/cherry-red discoloration of livor mortis is present in at least 95% of all fatal cases of carbon monoxide poisoning (Items 7 and 8).

5. Eyewitness descriptions of alleged carbon monoxide victims at Bełżec, Sobibór, Treblinka, and Chełmno

Witness 1: Kurt Gerstein

As a captive of Allied forces in France, former SS hygiene technician Kurt Gerstein wrote a number of reports in which he claimed to have witnessed a mass gassing at Bełżec in August 1942. In the two reports indisputably written by Gerstein in French on April 26, 1945, the bodies of the gassing victims are described in the following way:

“The blue bodies are thrown, damp with sweat and with urine, the legs full of excrement and menstrual blood.”[34]

In the German-language Gerstein reports which Henri Roques designate T III and T VI the word “blue” is not present. It is likewise not present in the French text T Va, dated to May 6, 1945. The German text T IV contains no corresponding passage.

Regarding the blueness of the Bełżec corpses and the issue of cyanosis, see Section 2 above.

Witness 2: Wilhelm Pfannenstiel

The professor of hygiene at the University of Marburg-Lahn Dr. Wilhelm Pfannenstiel allegedly accompanied the aforementioned Kurt Gerstein on his trip to Bełżec in August 1942. After the war Pfannenstiel was arrested but never sentenced to prison. Instead he was on a number of occasions summoned as a witness for the prosecution in trials dealing with the alleged homicidal gas chambers at the Reinhardt camps. In 1950 he testified before a court in the German city of Darmstadt:

“I noticed nothing special about the corpses, except that some of them showed a bluish puffiness about the face. But this is not surprising since they had died of asphyxiation.”[35]

Since Pfannenstiel was without question familiar with the texts of the Gerstein reports, it is fully possible that he also derived his description of the corpses from one of the two French texts. As an alternative, it cannot be excluded that Pfannenstiel, with his thorough background in medicine and hygiene studies, was familiar with asphyxiation symptoms and thus also able to fabricate a vague description with the ring of authority. As for the Pfannenstiel testimony I once again refer to Berg’s article summarized above.

Witness 3: Karl Alfred Schluch

SS-Unterscharführer Karl Alfred Schluch was posted at Bełżec from June 1942 until early summer 1943. His work at the camp up until December 1942 supposedly involved accompanying the naked Jewish victims through the camouflaged “sluice” which led to the gas chambers. Schluch was acquitted at the trial of former Bełżec camp staff held in Munich in 1963. In connection with this trial the witness made the following statement regarding the bodies of the gas chamber victims:

“The corpses were at least partially besmirched with excrement and urine, others in part with saliva. The lips and nose tips of some of the corpses had turned blue. With some the eyes were closed, with others the eyes had rolled.”[36]

Now it is possible that the lips, and possibly also the nose tips, of carbon monoxide victims would look purple-bluish as a result of cyanosis. The problem is that this is the only kind of discoloration that the witness claims to have been aware of. Are we to believe that Schluch noticed a few purple-bluish lips, but completely missed the large red discolorations?

Witness 4: Adolf Eichmann

Adolf Eichmann testified during his trial in Jerusalem that he had visited three camps were carbon monoxide was allegedly used to exterminate Jews: Chełmno (Kulmhof), Treblinka, and an unidentified camp in the Lublin area commonly assumed to have been Bełżec. Only in regard to the first camp does Eichmann claim to have witnessed the bodies of the alleged victims. This is how Eichmann described the murder of Jews in “gas vans” at Chełmno:

“I went myself to a small wood and just as I got there the omnibus also arrived, it pulled up beside a pit which had been dug up, the doors were opened and out of them poured corpses, down into the pit. One upon the other. It was a ghastly inferno. No, a super-inferno. To me they looked as if they were still alive. But now each and all of them were dead.”[37]

Thus according to Eichmann the corpses of the victims looked the same way as when they had been alive. The vagueness of the description makes the testimony weak evidence in any case, but it might be safely assumed that Eichmann would have noticed and remembered large red discolorations on the corpses from the gas vans, if he had in fact seen any.

Witness 5: “Szlamek”

This key witness to the alleged gas van mass murders in Chełmno, who has been identified as either a certain Jakov Grojanowski or Szlojme Fajner, claims the following in his testimony, reportedly dating from February 1942:

”How did the corpses appear? They were not burned, not black. The complexion of their faces was unchanged. Almost all the dead were lying in their excrement.

[...].

It seemed that they had only been put to sleep; their cheeks were pale and they kept their natural skin color.”[38]

Thus the corpses displayed no skin discoloration whatsoever.

Witness 6: Rudolf Reder

The witness Rudolf Reder, born in 1881, is supposed to have spent a significant portion of his nearly four month long stay at Bełżec dragging corpses from the camp’s alleged gas chambers to massive burial pits. On December 29, 1945, Reder was interrogated by the Polish Judge Jan Sehn. Regarding the physical appearance of the gas chamber victims, the witness stated:

“I was often on the ramp at the moment the doors were opened, but I never smelled any odor, and on entering a chamber right after the doors were opened I never felt any ill effects on my health. The bodies in the chamber did not show any unnatural discoloration. They looked like live persons, most had their eyes open.”[39]

The Bełżec key witness Reder is thus clearly of the opinion that the gassing victims displayed no cherry-red discoloration.

Witness 7: Eliahu Rosenberg

The Jewish witness Eliahu (Elias) Rosenberg supposedly spent several months working in close proximity of the alleged Treblinka gas chambers,[40] dragging thousands of corpses from the “death chambers” to mass graves. In a 12-page typewritten deposition in German which Rosenberg left in Vienna on December 24, 1947, the appearance of the gas chamber victims is described thus:

“The corpses were very bloated, their skin looked gray-white and easily peeled off, so that it hung from them like shreds. Their eyes protruded and the tongues hung out of their mouths.”[41]

Rosenberg’s description of the hue of the corpses is clearly not consistent with the red discoloration resulting from carbon monoxide poisoning.

In addition to Rosenberg, the Jewish writer Rachel Auerbach states in her essay “In the Fields of Treblinka” from 1946 that “the bodies were naked; some of them were white, others were blue and bloated.”[42] Auerbach had not herself been interned at Treblinka, but visited the remains of the camp in 1945 as part of an official inspection tour. Her essay is reportedly based on written testimony and talks she had with former Treblinka inmates. Another secondary account derives from the writings of a certain Jacob Mittelberg, who spent only a few hours in Treblinka before being transferred to Majdanek. Mittelberg visited the site of the “death camp” after the war in the company of Rachel Auerbach and a number of former Treblinka inmates, who told him that “when the doors of the gas chambers were opened, the people were blue and so pressed together as to be unrecognizable.”[43] Soviet-Jewish propagandist Vasily Grossman wrote in 1945 after his visit to the former camp site that “People who were unloading the chambers told me that the faces of dead were very yellow”.[44]

Witness 8: Theodor Friedrich Leidig

As far as I have been able to determine the only eyewitness to an alleged mass murder with exhaust gas to have spoken of corpses with red or reddish coloring was a certain Dr. Theodor Friedrich Leidig of the Kriminaltechnisches Institut (KTI) of the RSHA. Dr. Leidig claimed to have witnessed the murder of Russian POW’s detained at Sachsenhausen using a “gas van”:[45]

“We then went to another place, where we once again encountered the van. It turned out that we were now at the crematorium. I still remember that one could look through a peephole or a small window [Scheibe] into the interior of the van, which was illuminated.

One could see that the people were dead. Then the van was opened. Some corpses fell out, the rest were unloaded by prisoners. The corpses had, as was determined by us chemists, the pinkish-red [rosa-rote] appearance which is typical for people who have died from carbon monoxide poisoning.”

Regardless whether this testimony is reliable or not – and we have in fact not a single shred of documentary or technical evidence that supports it – the following observation is inevitable: Leidig clearly knew from his studies that humans who have died of CO poisoning ought to look “pinkish-red”, so in case he was forced or felt impelled to make up a false story, he would have little problem making it a plausible-sounding one. A testimony from a layman mentioning the presence of reddish-pink discoloration would clearly be of a higher evidentiary value, as the possibility that the witness had drawn from a priori knowledge to embellish his story would be much smaller.

6. Rebuttals to possible counter-arguments

Below I will discuss four possible counter-arguments which may be raised against the revisionist critique of the eye-witness testimony.

Argument 1: The studies cited by revisionists are irrelevant because they refer to livor mortis

As has been explained above, the cherry-red discoloration appears as a mechanical effect soon as the carbon monoxide has been absorbed by the blood cells and is thus visible on post-mortem bodies (especially pronounced in the livor mortis, as during this phase the blood is concentrated due to gravity-induced pooling) as well as in ante-mortem states (to a variable degree) and even in some cases where decomposition has already set in. The medical studies and case reports quoted in this article and others are therefore relevant, whether referring to livor mortis or ante-mortem appearances of red discoloration.

Argument 2: Most or all of the victims were deeply anemic, something which would have prevented visible discoloration from ocurring

Anemia is medically defined as a qualitative or quantitative deficiency of hemoglobin, the molecule found inside red blood cells which causes the blood to look red. Anemia results either from excessive blood loss (due to hemorrhage or chronic loss of smaller volumes of blood), excessive destruction of blood cells, or a deficient production of new red blood cell. The idea of the counter-argument is that severe anemia would prevent the red discoloration from appearing in the gassing victims.

In the case of the Jewish deportees, anemia might have been caused either by inadequate intake of vitamin B12 and/or folic acid (leading to macrocytic anemia), or by iron deficiency (causing microcytic anemia). While mild anemia caused by iron deficiency among women of childbearing age is not uncommon even in the western world of today, it is very rare among men and children.

How common then was anemia among the populations of the wartime Jewish ghettos of Poland, where malnutrition, starvation and epidemics indeed took a heavy toll on the inhabitants? This question is very difficult to give a definitive answer to, but a number of indications may be gleaned from the book Hunger Disease. Studies by the Jewish Physicians in the Warsaw Ghetto, edited the former Director of the Columbia University Institute of Human Nutrition, Dr. Myron Winnick.[46] In this volume, Winick presents a report on nutrition-related diseases prepared by a group of Jewish physicians in the Warsaw Ghetto between 1940 and 1942. The group, led by Dr. Israel Milejkowski, worked out the details of the study in secret meetings, had medical equipment smuggled into the ghetto, and later smuggled the finished manuscript out of it. The small team of 28 Jewish medical experts included Dr. Mieczyslaw Kocen, a specialist in blood diseases who himself was later allegedly exterminated at Treblinka. The manuscript of the report, which escaped the war tumult relatively unscathed, was published in limited Polish and French editions by the American Joint Distribution Committee. It remained most obscure however, until it surfaced in the United States in the late 1970s and was published in edited form by the abovementioned Winnick.[47]

Regarding the changes of blood characteristics in hunger disease victims the ghetto physicians noted the following:

“Red blood cells examined in 80 cases decreased from 3 million per cubic millimeter to between 1.5 and 1 million and in some cases even below. Hemoglobin decreased to 60 to 70% and in some cases ranged as low as 10%. Color index was usually 1 or less, and rarely reached 1.15. Examining a drop of fresh blood we noticed that the red blood cells do not aggregate normally into rolls but remain single or group into small clusters. Anisocytosis and even more often microcytosis are present, macrocytosis is rare, and there are no nucleated red blood cells. Often the red blood cells are colorless and irregularly shaped. These are symptoms of hypochromic anemia in the recovery phase as indicated by a high percentage of reticulocytes.”[48]

The Warsaw doctors pointed out that “hunger disease” does not result in a decrease of the blood volume of the victim:

“In cachexia and hunger edema there is no anemia in the strict sense because blood volume is not decreased in proportion to body weight. Since there is a low percentage of red blood cells in a drop of blood, this would be classified as normovolemic oligocytemia.”[49]

Rather than a decrease of the total number of red blood cells, “hunger disease” tends to cause a dilution of the blood through the increase of the water content:

“In normal specimens plasma contains 89 to 90% water and red blood cells contain 63 to 67% water. In our patients’ specimens plasma contained 93 to 94% water and red blood cells only 58%.

The changes described in the water content of the blood can produce a pseudoanemia in patients with cachexia or hunger edema. The dryness of the red blood cells explains the presence of microcytosis.”[50]

In a study of child victims of hunger disease it was observed:

“Anemia was usually mild (3 to 3.5 million red blood cells, but sometimes under 2 million, or color index about 1). Even in advanced anemia no young red blood cells were found. In evaluating the degree of anemia, we had to consider “blood dilution,” which was present in every case of severe malnutrition, even the dry form without edema. (…) Dr. Apfelbaum’s research on the volume of blood in adults suffering from hunger disease has demonstrated an increase in blood volume per kilogram of body weight. This factor must also be considered in evaluating the degree of anemia.”[51]

On the subject of child victims of malnutrition, Winnick comments:

“One might assume that since these children, especially the older ones, were reasonably well nourished before the war (unlike most children in developing countries) they had built up significant reserves of vitamin A prior to contracting hunger disease. (…). Finally, vitamin A requirements, like those for other vitamins, might decrease during semistarvation.”[52]

Winnick further notes:

“This results not only in hemodilution which, as we shall see, contributed to the anemia and leukopenia reported in the next chapter, but also in a reduction in the efficiency of the blood as a carrier of nutrients. Thus the vascular system is forced to supply more of the ‘poorly nourished’ blood to the ‘hungry’ tissues and organs. The absolute anemia (…) reduces the amount of oxygen carried by the blood and again increases the total blood requirements of the tissues even though they are consuming less oxygen.”[53]

Another study of the Warsaw physicians showed that some degree of anemia was common among patients of hunger disease but that

“of 32 cases only six had 4 to 5 million red blood cells. Thus anemia was prevalent. The largest group of people had 3 to 4 million blood cells. Therefore we consider this number as average for slightly advanced hunger disease.”[54]

However, according to the table following this paragraph 10 of the cases displayed a level of 3-4 million red blood cells per cubic millimeter, while 9 cases displayed a level of 2 million or less. Thus only a minority of the studied cases suffered from what could be defined as severe anemia. Further among the conclusions we read that

“Anemia is normochromic or hyperchromic and only very rarely hypochromic. There is anisocytosis with a predominance of macrocytes.”[55]

Winnick summarizes the post-mortem case studies performed as follows:

“They [the physicians] report on 492 autopsies performed in the 2 ½ years that preceded the deportations. These were cases of ‘pure’ hunger disease with no other complications. This represented about 15% of the total number of autopsies performed in their departments during the same period. They divided their material into four periods beginning in January 1940 and ending on July 22, 1942, and point out that the number of cases of hunger disease increased with time.”[56]

In a series of tables the Warsaw physicians list the following gross changes in the “hunger disease” victims:[57]

1. Pale cadaver-like skin in 82.5% of the cases. Dark brown-colored skin in 17.5%.

2. Edema in one third of the cases. Effusions were most frequent in the abdominal cavity when they occurred.

3. Edema was rare in cases of “brown skin,” whereas the pale skin group had either the edematous or the dry form of the disease.

4. Severe atrophy occurred in heart, liver, spleen, and kidney.

5. Brain weight remained unchanged (these were adult patients).

6. Marked skeletal muscle atrophy.

7. Edema of the small intestinal wall with swollen reddish discolored mucosa and mucus appeared in 27.2% of the cases.

8. Thin watery bile in 77.7% of the cases.

9. Reduced number of fat bodies in the adrenals in 50% of cases.

10. Jellylike consistency in bone marrow of certain cases.

11. Emphysema in 13.8% of cases.

12. Anemia in only 5.5% of cases.

13. Almost 50% of the cases had intestinal changes that could be classified as pseudodysentery. An equal number of these cases fell into the edematous and nonedematous groups.

The above can be taken as a strong indication that even among fatal cases of malnutrition, anemia was far from always present. Even if no definitive answers may found in regards to this question, it seems far-flung to assert that a majority of the Jewish deportees who arrived at Treblinka were afflicted with anemia severe enough to prevent the appearance of a visible livor mortis or other variants of skin discoloration.

Argument 3: The lighting may not have been adequate for the eye-witnesses to see the colors of the corpses properly

This argument is easily dismissed. Rosenberg and Reder claims to have worked not only with removing the corpses from the gas chambers, but also with transporting them to the mass graves. It is generally asserted by holocaust historians that this activity was mainly carried out during the day,[58] so that in most if not all cases the Arbeitsjuden engaged in the corpse-dragging must have been able to observe their macabre burden in full daylight.

Argument 4: The inmates working with transporting the corpses might not have noticed the color of the livor mortis since it would have appeared on the half of the bodied turned towards the ground

There are two obstacles to this argument. On its way from the gas chamber to its final place in one of the mass graves the corpse would have made at least two stops, first close to the gas chambers, where the “dentists” would check its teeth and pull out any gold present, the second at the edge of the burial pit, where it had to be arranged with the other bodies in some fashion. In order to efficiently arrange the huge number of bodies in the mass graves, a portion of them would most likely have had to be turned around. In any case it seems logical to assume that a great many of the hypothetical gassing victims would have been turned over at least once on their way to the burial pits. That the inmates who worked day after day with these routines would have managed to completely miss the large, brightly discoloured portions of skin is simply out of the question – unless we assume that the clever Nazis selected only colorblind Jews for these work commandos!

7. Conclusion

In a medical article from 2004 we find the following stated regarding the appearance of cherry red skin discoloration in cases of carbon monoxide poisoning:

“The classical cherry red appearance is not seen in all cases of acute poisoning, and may not be apparent even in cases of severe toxicity.”[59]

However, in the case of the alleged mass gassings at the Aktion Reinhardt camps and Chełmno, all of the (alleged) victims can safely be regarded as victims of acute poisoning, and since the witnesses to the alleged gassings supposedly observed – often at very closely distance – not only one or two corpses, but hundreds, thousands, even tens of thousands of corpses, it natural follows that witnesses such as Reder, “Szlamek” and Rosenberg would have observed a very large number of bodies showing cherry red discoloration. That not a single one of the alleged eye-witnesses to mass gassings at the above listed camps mention the highly eye-catching type of discoloration that most often accompany lethal carbon monoxide poisoning is in itself enough to throw doubt upon the alleged truthfulness of their statements.[60] The apparently isolated case of Theodor Friedrich Leidig , not only because of his background but also due to the fact that he describes something not part of the holocaust per se, namely the (alleged) murder of a group of Russian prisoners of war at an “ordinary” concentration camp. When key witnesses from the “extermination camps”, however, reports the corpses to have been blue, white, grayish, or even without any discoloration whatsoever, then we can be certain that something is not right with their gas chamber testimonies.

The latest media/government/holo industry campaign has turned into a can of worms, but there is too much is at stake to retract it.

Does the public enjoy being fed fairy tales that serve the interests of the power elite? The answer must be yes, especially when it’s the kind that plays well with those who long for the “glory of Britain” in a time when Britain is becoming increasingly non-British. In order to soften the blow that via WWII the British not only lost their Empire but are losing their national sovereignty and also their racial distinctiveness, the alien government and media conspire to convince the people that doing so is a good and noble act … in Britain’s “best tradition.”

The Hoaxers: Denis Avey, the prize liar, is flanked by BBC producer Patrick Howse (left) and BBC World Service reporter Rob Broomby (right), at Number Ten Downing St. in London.

The two media men in the picture above admit they spent years hoping to verify the unlikely tale of Denis Avey, told by him to the BBC 60 years after the fact. They held on to it because for all mainstream government-connected media, new tales about the holocaust are worth their weight in gold.

Here was a living human being in his late 80’s with a bold story, but no proof he was telling the truth. Avey apparently did not know the name of the Jewish prisoner he “traded places with” in the early telling of his tale. If he had, the BBC would have known where to look for the man. Rob Broomby wrote in the March 16, 2010 BBC official newspaper Ariel (page 5), titled “How a BBC investigation found genuine ‘Hero of the Holocaust” that it was only when someone sent them a copy of a video interview made by a certain Ernie Lobet before his death in 2001, in which he recalled a British soldier he knew only as ‘Ginger’ who had smuggled cigarettes and chocolate from England to him inside Auschwitz, that they made the connection to Avey.

Here we have a problem because cigarettes, and maybe even chocolate at times, could be purchased in all the camps. In the Monowitz camp, working conditions were quite tolerable, and the Red Cross delivered packages to Jewish inmates right up to the point when Allied bombers began destroying all transports within Germany. If Lobethal knew where his sister lived (as he said he told Avey), he could himself have asked the Red Cross to look her up and ask her to send him packages. Although, it may have been a difficult request to fulfill since the BBC, with all its resources, could not find Lobethal’s sister Susana in the 2000’s until they went on a house-to-house search for her in person. Yet we’re to believe it was easy for Avey’s mother to contact her during the war.

Despite holes in the story, it is accepted

Avey and Susana Lobethal Timms both claim to have met “briefly” in 1945 when Denis returned from the war, according to Broomby. But Avey also says he was suffering from tuberculosis (highly contagious), exhaustion and post-traumatic stress and had to be hospitalized immediately and took two years to recover. I don’t believe that these two ever met before the BBC got them together in October 2009. It’s more likely that Howse and Broomby had met with Susana and she agreed to go along with the story, or simply agreed to the story. The explanation Avey and Timms give for not knowing each other—that “they lost touch” after 1945—is not persuasive. Susana would surely have made the effort to notify Avey that Ernst was alive, and then was moving to America, if all this were really true. If it were true, Ernst would want to thank the man who “saved his life” if his sister knew who the man was.

Avey claims he was known as ‘Ginger’ because of his red hair. He first said he traded places with a Jewish prisoner he had gotten to know in their common workplace (Lobethal), but later changed it to a “Dutch Jew named Hans” who died shortly afterward. Was it because Lobethal, in his testimony on the video, had said not a word about trading places in the barracks for a night? If he were involved in such a dramatic event, it would certainly not have slipped his mind. But Lobethal only told of being given cigarettes.

This, however, didn’t deter Howse and Broomby from connecting dots that didn’t exist. Lobethal’s actual Shoah testimony is that a British PoW he knew as Ginger gave him 10 packs of cigarettes, and he used two packs to trade for heavy socks to wear with his boots. Avey’s story is that Ernst got his shoes resoled. Broomby wrote in the Ariel promo linked to above that Lobethal said he traded cigarettes for “favours” which “enabled him to get his shoes resoled,” and that “saved his life” But when I watched the video testimony, that’s not what he said. In any case, this brings up the question that if conditions were as bad inside the Monowitz camp as Avey says, who is doing skilled labor like resoling shoes for prisoners whom Avey says were only waiting to die? In his testimony for the Shoah Foundation, Lobethal did not describe conditions in his camp and barracks the way that Avey does.

Avey was set up to be the next Schindler

Between 2003 and the time Lobethal’s testimony was discovered, Avey was saying he had “broken into Auschwitz” and spent a couple of nights in the Jewish barracks to see what it was like. I don’t know of him saying that he provided a special Jewish prisoner-friend with cigarettes. I think he said he used cigarettes to bribe his way into the Jewish barracks. I am skeptical that the Shoah Foundation video of Lobethal’s testimony came to the BBC’s attention after and not before they began their search for Susana Timms. Broomby avoids giving a clear timeline. It’s possible that once they saw the Lobethal video, the two media men linked together the red-haired PoW Avey with Lobethal’s ‘Ginger’. It explains why they persevered in their search for Susana—she was the vital link (witness) necessary to tie the two men together.

Avey had already committed himself to the “breaking into Auschwitz” story; now he and the BBC added the “cigarettes-life-saving story” to that, even though Lobethal had said nothing about the former. That part of Lobethal’s testimony can be seen in this new book-selling propaganda video between 3-3:40 minutes. One wonders what else Lobethal said in his video testimony that we do not see.

The BBC kept mentioning Oskar Schindler in connection with Denis Avey, for example here and here, hoping to build another huge holo-icon, only this time British, and also use the comparison to publicize the motion picture that is planned

The role of the Holocaust Education Trust

The strong backing of this powerful organization, with its sinister influence on British politics, is key to the whole Avey phenomenon. In his acknowledgements in the book, Avey thanks Lord Janner, Karen Pollack and the team at the Holocaust Education Trust (HET) for their ongoing help and support. “Their work is beyond value.” He then thanks Gordon and Sarah Brown. Following this, a page is given over to The Holocaust Educational Trust to advertise its achievements and aim of making the Holocaust a permanent part of Britain’s “collective memory.”

On Jan. 25, 2010, when Avey first met with Gordon Brown at 10 Downing Street, the Jewish Lord Janner was also in attendance. Janner proclaimed: “Denis Avey is a hero. He risked tremendous personal danger at Auschwitz to learn exactly what went on in that terrible place, and at the Holocaust Educational Trust we work to ensure that his efforts were not in vain - and that all young people learn about, remember and pass on to others the lessons of the horrors of the Holocaust.”

The HET was set up by Labour politicians and is aligned with them. It works to ensure their reelection. Grenville Janner is a member of Labour, was an MP for a time, and was President of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, the main representative body of British Jewry, from 1978 to 1984. He has been a key international figure in efforts to seek compensation and restitution for Holocaust victims. Along with chairing the Holocaust Educational Trust, he is vice president of the World Jewish Congress. He was instrumental in arranging the 1997 London Nazi Looted Gold conference.

Janner received (bought?) a life peerage as Lord Janner of Braunstone in 1997 and since sits on the Labour benches in the British House of Lords. The president of HET is Steven Rubin. One of the things they do to intimidate British politicians is to place a “Book of Commitment” every Holocaust Memorial Day in the Houses of Parliament and “invite” members to sign it. By doing so, they “honour the memory of those who perished in the Holocaust and pay tribute to the bravery of those who risked their lives to help the persecuted” –in other words, the signees publicly affirm their belief in the Jewish Holocaust. HET takes pictures of the more prominent MPs signing the book, such as Gordon Brown, David Cameron and Nick Clegg … each looking properly somber and obedient. (You can see these pictures on th fifth page) Do you think any MP would dare to not sign the “Book of Commitment?”

On July 2, 2010, after the General Election, the HET hosted the MP’s of all political parties, plus students and Holocaust survivors, at a special reception to mark the 10,000th participant in the ‘Lessons from Auschwitz’ government-funded trips for high school students. The event was held in the Houses of Parliament.

HET chairman Lord Janner, Education Secretary Michael Gove, Lessons from Auschwitz student ambassadors Jack Boyce and Nadia Caney

John Bercow MP, Speaker of the House of Commons and HET chief executive Karen Pollock at the July 2010 reception.

Karen Pollock, as HET’s chief executive, writes regular essays published in the Guardian. Her Sunday May 17, 2009 opinion piece was devoted to the idea that if Yad Vashem in Israel honors “Righteous Gentiles” of many nationalities, these governments should also create an honor for them in their individual nations. There can’t be too many holocaust awards—hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of them is the desire of the Jewish organizations. The world will actually revolve around the “Holocaust” as the pivotal point in history; nothing will be more important.

Pollock began her essay with: “Finally the government is honoring British heroes who risked their lives to help Jews during the Holocaust” and ended it by reminding us, “As the European and local elections approach, we are again subjected to poisonous propaganda from the far right, who seek to extend an exclusive claim over “Britishness” and who purport to represent our country’s heritage. But the hatred and division they peddle is the very antithesis of what Britain stands for.”

This kind of propaganda is meant to shame Britishers into going along with the Jewish holocaust agenda. The very powerful Jews of Britian force holocaustianity down the throats of all British politicians, who don’t seems to mind the taste of it, however.

Here is Karen Pollock again (right), under all the make-up, at an HET fundraiser in 2010 that featured Denis Avey as speaker and raised almost half a million pounds, with Hannah Loftus (left).

The all-important elections

After Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s visit to Auschwitz on April 28, 2009 and prior to the June elections, the Telegraph newspaper reported that “Ministers are working on plans for a new award to honour British people who helped the Jews of Europe during the Holocaust. The medal or other award would recognize acts of courage for those who saved Jews or other persecuted groups during the darkest days of the Second World War.” “Other persecuted groups” is added as a sop to the politicians, but in fact all those eventually chosen as ‘Heroes of the Holocaust’ aided Jews. Of course, the HET plays a major role in the selection.

Following this media publicity, the 2009 local elections and European Parliament elections were held on June 4 in England. In 2010, the ‘Heroes of the Holocaust’ awards ceremony took place at Downing Street on March 9. The publicity for the event highlighted Denis Avey’s swap story. On April 6, campaigning began for the British General Election. On May 6, the General Election was held.

Does this not make it clear that some obeisance and slavish offerings to Holocaustianity must always precede the elections in order to get on the good side of the powerful Jews? But now that Labour is out of power, will the Conservatives carry on in the same way?

Efforts to defend against the criticism are appearing

A recent article in the New York Post uses the word “hoax” to report on the growing disbelief in Avey’s bizarrely concocted story. The main objection most have is to the ‘swap’, which is necessary for the title of the book, The Man Who Broke Into Auschwitz, and is not something that can be dropped from the story.

The New York Post reports that the U.S. publisher Perseus did not return their call about whether they would conduct an investigation into the accuracy of the book’s claims. According to a reviewer of the book on Amazon UK, Hoddard & Staughton, the UK publisher, posted a rebuttal on their website on April 11 to Guy Walters’ April 9 Daily Mail critical review, but it was subsequently taken down. Now, however, an April 26, 2011 article by Reuters’ Mike Collett-White, tells of the publisher’s “point-by-point rebuttal of the Daily Mail article by Guy Walters,” but not where to find it. Hodderd & Staughton has since said it was “proud to publish” Avey’s book, and that “We have never doubted Mr. Avey’s testimony.” Well, they are not experts either, are they? This is equal to Boston University President Robert Brown writing to me on Sept. 27, 2010 that he “has no doubt Wiesel is a survivor of the Holocaust” and further that Wiesel is “a man of integrity and would not stoop to fabrication.” Naturally he must say that, but he does not really have any direct knowledge whatsoever to base it on.

Hoddard & Staughton also said it responded with a “detailed explanation” to a fax from the World Jewish Congress asking to have the book verified. That explanation has not been made public either.

Rob Broomby issued a new statement: “I am certainly not distancing myself from the book at all. I stand by everything in the book.” Good luck to him. Avey told Broomby that while the Walters’ article is “deeply unpleasant … I stand by my account. It is a fact.” A fact? Real facts are being ignored, while the issue is presented as being about taking an Englishman at his word.

On April 26 (yesterday as I write this), the BBC is carrying a Derbyshire story that Denis Avey is “searching for information about the Dutchman named Hans” with whom he exchanged clothing in the camp in Poland! The short notice says he is trying to find out what happened to “the other people involved in his story.” This is really bizarre, a transparent and desperate tactic dreamed up by his co-author Rob Broomby and his publishers, perhaps. Will some cooperative soul crop up saying, Oh yes, I remember good old Hans writing to me about this escapade before I never heard from him again? Or maybe another “survivor” will suddenly appear and recall something about it. It does point out what Avey and the BBC should have been doing much earlier. But, of course, they didn’t expect to be faced with this problem. Solutions are devised as problems arise.

The principals of the hoax are circling the wagons around them. The message is clear: they will do their utmost to survive the attacks that are coming. They have the media on their side, which is a giant advantage. And already the detractors are toning down their words. Piotr Setkiewicz, head of research at the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum, told Collet-White, “Perhaps 80 or 90 percent of what Mr. Avey says is true, but the problem is that deniers have this wonderful habit of fixing on every single thing which is obviously not true.” It’s certain that 80 percent of what Avey says is NOT true; one would have to go carefully through the book, but I’d be surprised if 40 percent is true. Additionally, Sekiewicz uses that odd language that calls someone who “fixes on what is not true” a denier! It has to follow that someone who does not pay attention to what is obviously not true is a believer.

Plenty of precedent for the Avey hoax phenomenon

The NY Post article mentions three of the well-known fictional “true stories” written by fake WWII camp survivors, but there are many books written by real camp survivors that are also mostly or partly fiction. One is The Password is Courage about Charles Coward, the first man who broke into Auschwitz, and who is the model for Avey’s copy-cat bravado. Avey’s insistence that his purpose is to “witness” is strangely similar to the sentiments of another self-appointed witness, Elie Wiesel, whose book Night is also a bizarre concoction by someone who wasn’t there. There are no records in Auschwitz-Birkenau or Buchenwald for Elie Wiesel or his father, nor does Wiesel have the famous tattoo on his arm. He, like Avey, waited to hear the stories of other people before he wrote his own, and his book also doesn’t jive with the official reality (or even physical reality) in several important places.

Holocaust literature is so full of fakes that are protected by the ‘holocaust industry’ and media that this Industry must now be vigilant against the most outrageous new fakes so as not to draw attention to the fakery in the old ones (as I just did above). This is the concern of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum and the World Jewish Congress. The Yad Vashem Memorial Museum in Jerusalem has said it will definitely not be awarding Avey the “Righteous of the Nations” title. New holocaust memoirs by men and women who decided to write them after a lifetime of silence should be discounted right off the bat. They are money-making or glory-making ventures, as cynical as it gets.

Cui Bono—Who Benefits?

The British Holocaust Education Trust should also be concerned about the fakery they have promoted, but they are too deep into it and have no one else at whom they can point the finger. Passing off the blame is always necessary, a form of ‘plausible denial.’ The same goes for the BBC and the Labour Party and government of Gordon Brown—they were too anxious to force this story into the public consciousness for their own political gain without regard for its obvious falsity. But when have those benefiting from the holocaust been concerned with truthfulness?

Rob Broomby is guilty of personally accepting and seeking to profit from this hoax, along with Patrick Howse. The book’s publishers had a great deal to gain, but now have a great deal to lose. They will do all they can to blunt the criticism. This is why the criticism must continue, and become ever more widely sourced … as well as louder and more demanding.

To show that even the guilty cannot help but speak the truth at times, it’s utterly appropriate that Broomby reports that Avey is fond of saying to Howse and himself, “It’s you two who opened this can of worms.” How very apt. A can of worms indeed is what it is.

“The Man Who Broke into Auschwitz” is the product of a conspiracy to defraud.

Last year, I wrote an article published here about Denis Avey, a man whose newly-released WWII concentration camp survivor story was getting a lot of attention in the British press. In my article, and on my Internet radio program The Heretics’ Hour, I did a pretty thorough job of debunking Avey’s poorly concocted story and explaining the intention of the Yad Vashem Institute and Memorial in Israel to name him one of their “Righteous Among the Nations,” an award they give to Gentiles whom they document as saving the life of a Jew during “the Holocaust.”

Now Avey has come out with a book, The Man Who Broke into Auschwitz, which immediately became a best-seller (so they say) in the UK, but has not been released yet in the U.S. The book is co-written with Rodger Broomby, the BBC journalist who interviewed Avey for the article that started the whole ball rolling. It ran in the BBC online edition Sunday, Nov. 29, 2009.

Because Avey’s basic story has already been thoroughly critiqued by me and others, I will now focus attention on the principals who conspired to create this hoax on the public by building up, even encouraging, the ridiculous tall tales of an old WWII vet. Unfortunately, this is nothing new in the Holocaust Industry, but this should not lead us to believe that familiarity makes it acceptable. It is not.

We also need to understand that these are not just harmless stories, and we can afford to humor old men and women who indulge in them. These are harmful lies, and also distortions of history that slander certain people and whole nations, even to the point of destroying once healthy societies. It is, in fact, a type of warfare—what’s called Information Warfare.

The BBC’s crucial role

The BBC first heard about Denis Avey in 2003 when he appeared on a BBC program discussing war pensions.  He began to speak about Auschwitz, where he said he had “come to witness”, calling it “like hell on earth.” As he continued, the TV hosts could hardly believe what they were hearing. Reportedly, the BBC began production on a documentary about him, but sat on this story for six years, during which time they discovered the story of the Jew Ernst Lobethall, who had testified on videotape to the Shoah Foundation in California before he died in 2001. Much has been made of the connection between the two men, but it has never been satisfactorily authenticated.

We have to assume that the BBC did its journalistic job and carefully looked at the story presented by Denis Avey. They had to see the implausibilities in it, most especially the change of uniforms between Avey and the “Jew” as their separate marching columns passed each other. This preposterous fantasy is what makes Avey’s entry into the Jewish barracks possible. They also had to know that a similar story had already been concocted by another British subject—Charles Coward—right after the war, and a motion picture had been made about it. We are thus led to the assumption that BBC fell victim to that “if it worked once, it will work again” Hollywoodish penchant to repeat past hits. This makes it clear that the BBC knew it was dealing with a fraud, but cared only whether or not it could be “sold” to the British public, who are quite willing to “buy” German atrocity stories.

Even the knowledge that the Charles Coward story has been widely discounted in recent years did not cause the BBC to exercise restraint.

The Role of British Politics

We turn now to the connection to British politics. Back in 2005, Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown (in Tony Blair’s government) made funding available to send, each year, two teenagers from every British secondary school on a visit to Auschwitz. The funding has been extended to 2011. According to the UK Telegraph, Brown’s interest in the “Holocaust” went back to his childhood, when his clergyman father worked with a church group that supported the foundation of the state of Israel.

In Feb. 2008, Tory candidate David Cameron called Brown’s school kids’ Auschwitz trips a “gimmick.” This backfired on the Tories, strengthening Brown’s belief that being pro-Auschwitz was good public relations and good politics.

Following upon his election as Prime Minister, Gordon Brown made a highly publicized “emotional” visit to Auschwitz on April 28, 2009, when he also met with the Polish premier and president to discuss deployment of Polish troops in Afghanistan. The BBC carried the news that Brown said the UK government would do all it could to assist school visits to Auschwitz, and on April 30, the Prime Minister pledged to increase the number of school pupils who visit the concentration camp memorial yearly. He also pledged support to maintain Auschwitz as a permanent memorial amid concerns the site is in a state of decay and funding for its museum is under threat.

British “Heroes of the Holocaust”

When Prime Minister Brown returned from his Auschwitz trip, he announced the creation of an award to recognize British citizens—something he named “Heroes of the Holocaust.” A campaign to gain official posthumous recognition of British Holocaust rescuers had already been initiated by the Holocaust Educational Trust (HET), a British charity founded by British Jews in 1988 to ensure that the Holocaust formed part of the National Curriculum for history. Through 2008 and 2009 the campaign attracted support from the media as well as members of parliament, both in the UK parliament and in the Scottish Parliament. This new national award was announced on 29 April 2009, just after Gordon Brown’s first visit to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in Poland. Brown had proclaimed at that time: “We will create national awards in Britain for those British citizens who helped so many people, Jewish and other citizens, during the Holocaust period.”

When Prime Minister Gordon Brown launched his “Heroes of the Holocaust” awards in 2009, it seemed a good time to bring out Denis Avey, dust him off, and present this very-much-alive “Hero” to the British public. Thus the BBC got busy arranging a meeting between Ernst Lobethall’s sister, who had been sent as a Jewish child to England in the late 1930’s, where she remained, and Denis Avey.1 The meeting was filmed and presented on BBC-TV, as well as on BBC-Online on Nov. 29, 2009, exactly seven months after the “Heroes” announcement.

Two months later, Gordon Brown received Avey at 10 Downing St. in London, sat and talked with him and later awarded him, along with 26 other recipients, the British Hero medal.

Britain’s Prime Minister Gordon Brown (right) touches the arm of Denis Avey as Avey recounts his exploits at a meeting at number 10 Downing Street in London on Holocaust Memorial Day in January 2010. (photo credit: Reuters/Luke MacGregor)

‘Great bravery’: Gordon Brown greets 91 year-old Denis Avey at the awards ceremony, while 100-year-old Sir Nicholas Winton stands nearby. These are the only two living recipients of the award.

Before the March 9, 2010 Award ceremony had taken place amid much fanfare and congratulations all round, the Daily Mail printed their own interview of Avey by Andy Dolan on Feb. 13, and the Times followed with one by Jake Wallace Simons on Feb. 25. All of these newspaper articles had differing details between them about important parts of Avey’s story. The schedule is:

BBC: Sunday, Nov. 29, 2009 [by Rob Broomby]

Daily Mail: Feb. 13, 2010 [by Andy Dolan]

The Times: Feb. 25, 2010 [by Jake Wallace Simons]

Hero of the Holocaust Award Ceremony: March 9, 2010

Others who have joined in the hoax are the Raoul Wallenberg Foundation and Felix de la Concha, As written on the Wallenberg website:

The International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation has commissioned painter Felix de la Concha to create a portrait as well as conduct an interview with Denis Avey, a man who “smuggled” himself into Auschwitz.. The interview is a part of a bigger project aimed at portraying and recording Holocaust survivors that Mr. De la Concha has been carrying on since 2008.

Another conspirator is Yad Vashem. The folks there were all set to award Avey with their “Righteous Among the Nations” title, and it is only in the past weeks they started to express second thoughts.

There is also Pulitzer Prize-winning Jewish journalist Henry Kamm, a correspondent for The New York Times, who endorsed Avey’s book with unqualified admiration for the man, and Jewish historian Sir Martin Gilbert, who wrote the forward, calling it “a most important book.”

A serious problem here is that all of these people are intelligent enough to see that Avey’s story is false on its face. They go along with the lie as a matter of course. The entire Holocaust business is rife with absurdities which no one can challenge without being heavily persecuted, if not arrested. Therefore they feel safe.

“The Holocaust” is a political asset that is used to gain, hold and justify power. It is therefore guarded with big guns. But once in awhile something is just too bizarre to pass.

The jig is up

On April 9, 2011 Guy Walters wrote in the Daily Mail that Avey’s story is not believable. But a year before that, this was pointed out by the blogger at Scrapbookpages Blog on March 4, 2010, and then on my radio program mentioned above on March 8, and my article published at Inconvenient History Revisionist Blog on March 16, 2010.

Guy Walters happens to be the author of Hunting Evil, a biography of Simon Wiesenthal that exposed the famous “Nazi Hunter” as a first-class liar who used lies to advance the idea that there were “evil Nazis” hiding everywhere that needed to be brought to justice. Wiesenthal was supported by individual Jews and Jewish organizations; he then created his own organization just for that purpose. Though an establishment figure, Walters has come out with a similar expose of Avey’s book.

In an opinion piece in the Daily Mail on April 9, 2011, Walters makes the case that “increasing numbers of people don’t believe [Avey].”  Dr Piotr Setkiewicz, the head historian at Auschwitz, said outright that he did not believe Mr Avey’s story of the swap. He added, “As there are no testimonies by other survivors, I certainly would not include this story in any book that I wrote.”

His fear was “the story could provide ammunition for Holocaust deniers.” This is always the worry of those who live off the Holocaust Industry. Note that the concern was not that it was untrue.  If the story could somehow pass muster, it would be allowed, but if the lies are so blatant and far-fetched they can be easily attacked, it’s bad for the Industry. Remember Herman Rosenblatt’s Angel at the Fence? And his fabricated story was far easier to swallow than Avey’s.

The powerful World Jewish Congress has also changed course and called on the publishers to verify the historical accuracy of the book. They released the statement “We are deeply concerned about the charge that a significant part of Mr Avey’s story — i.e, that he supposedly smuggled himself into the Auschwitz-Buna concentration camp — is exaggerated if not completely fabricated.” (my italics)

In the same week, Yad Vashem said it was now unable to honor Mr Avey with “Righteous Among The Nations,” because it could not back up his claims. The same Irena Steinfeldt, who last year effused over Avey’s “noble and extraordinary act,” this week said, “We didn’t find anyone to confirm it. We went through several testimonies of Jewish inmates, and none of them mentioned that it happened. There was nothing to substantiate it.”

She pointed the finger at the British Government when she added: “We often get recommendations that show that the applicant has won an honour from a government, but that in itself is not evidence.” She’s referring to the British “Hero of the Holocaust” Award given to Avey on March 9, 2010 by Prime Minister Gordon Brown. According to the Daily Mail, Avey’s name was “put forward to Yad Vashem” as a candidate for the ‘Righteous’ title.”

Even Former prisoners at Auschwitz and at the PoW camp where Avey allegedly had been held have strongly disputed that Avey’s exploit was possible.

Sam Pivnik, 84, a Polish Jew, was sent to Auschwitz in August 1943 and held there until January 1945. “Avey’s story seems to me highly unlikely,” he says.

A stronger rebuke is heard from Brian Bishop, 91, a survivor of Dunkirk who had been captured in Africa in 1942 and was at camp E715. “I don’t believe it. I can’t understand how he did it. To do something like that you need to have several people helping on both sides — our side and the Jewish side.” Bishop sees a further problem in Avey’s timing.  “Why does he start telling this story now? I don’t understand why all these stories are coming out now. It looks like they’re waiting for everybody to die and then no one can contradict them.” Exactly right.

Even Ernst Lobethal’s daughter, Ingrid, says she does not believe the story of the swap. “Where is the detail in what he saw there than can’t be gleaned from the vaguest Holocaust account?” She doesn’t seem to realize that the “details” of most holocaust accounts are also lies. Still, when the daughter of the man you supposedly saved from death does not believe your story, it looks pretty bad.

Avey has said he approached British military authorities in 1947 with his story, but they weren’t interested. But it has now come out that in 1947, he was approached by American prosecutors via the War Office to ask if he would like to make an affidavit of his experiences to help build a case in a war crimes trial, and he declined.

Plagiarism, too?

I mentioned previously that the story of Mr Avey’s swap is almost identical to that told by another former PoW at camp E715 named Charles Coward, who is one of the posthumus recipients of Brown’s ‘Heroes of the Holocaust’ award. This British Prisoner-of-War allegedly smuggled information about conditions at Auschwitz out and snuck food and other items in to Jewish inmates, and aided the escape of a significant number of Jewish “slave labourers.” He lived in Edmonton, Enfield.

However, Coward’s story has been discredited and his testimony at Nuremberg IMT is now widely considered untrue. A book was written about his exploits, titled The Password Is Courage; he was billed on the jacket as “The Man Who Broke Into Auschwitz” — which became the title of Avey’s book.

Avey’s co-author Rob Broomby has made excuses for the implausibilities in the story and has had to admit that he can’t confirm whether the “swap” really happened. “It’s very difficult to verify at this stage,’ he said. ‘You’re not going to find people 70 years afterwards. It’s only when you’ve spent time with Denis that you know what he’s like.”

Denis falls back on the same kind of defense. In 2001, 10 years ago, Avey gave a five-hour interview to the Imperial War Museum and did not mention the swap. When recently asked why, he said, “I don’t know why. I didn’t choose to establish it then. But what I wrote in the book is the truth. I don’t have to defend it. I don’t mind what anybody says. I know what I’ve done.”

Broomby has also said, “This is not footnoted academic history. You have to look into the man’s eyes and know what sort of man this is.’ In other words, accept the lies in order not to insult the 93-year old man who’s telling them. Oh yes, make no mistake, the argument has been made that Avey, as an elderly man, should be allowed to have his glory, and not be questioned or doubted. It’s the nice thing to do. What kind of historical record does this leave us with?

Broomby’s role in this makes him part of the conspiracy. Employed by the BBC, he first published an interview with Avey on November 29, 2009, along with the sentimental video produced by the BBC crews.

A month later, on Dec. 30, his byline appeared on another BBC article announcing that Avey is being considered for the title of “Righteous Among the Nations” by the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem. In that article, Broomby said that Avey’s story was the result of a BBC investigation. Broomby then gets the lucrative job of writing Avey’s sure-fire best-seller.

Is Britain copying Israel’s ‘Righteous Gentiles’?

This leads to my final point: Gordon Brown seems to have slavishly copied Israel in devising Britian’s own “righteous Gentile” award, which he dubbed “Hero of the Holocaust.” Though the silver medallion is inscribed with the words ‘In the Service of Humanity,’ the honor has been described as given to those who risked their lives to help Jews during the Holocaust. Is the Yad Vashem award not enough for the world? “These individuals are true British heroes and a source of national pride for all of us,” Brown said in a statement. “We pay tribute to them for the inspiration they provide now and for future generations to come.” In picking Denis Avey, and quite a few of the others, he is bringing dis-honor on Britain and arousing only a false national pride.

Considering the role of the Holocaust Educational Trust in all this, a clear picture of collaboration between the Holocaust promoters and the British government comes into view, a collaboration which results in the foisting of another fake “Holocaust Hero” onto a world already staggering under the weight of Holocaustism. The sinister purpose, as I said at the beginning, is to bolster the political power base of the World War II allied victors who have become the New World Order.

These people engage in telling lies to each other, congratulating one other on these lies, while the media does its part in carrying the lies to the public and repeating them until lies come to be fundamental to our thinking. Positive publicity for Great Britain as the “land of heroes” is part of it also.

What drives it?

Why is it so easy to get people to believe this stuff? Many repeat the popular idea that folks don’t want to admit they have been fooled by what turns out to be, upon deeper study, obvious fairy tales. Thus they prefer to continue to believe it is true. I think the reason is more profound than that. It’s not ego. People instinctively realize that if the Holocaust is a hoax, much else that they have believed, and even cherished, must also be wrong. This turns their world upside-down, and everything must be re-examined. Rather than deal with that, they refuse to think about it. They decline to look at the evidence.

This is what people like Gordon Brown and the BBC count on. This is why they feel safe. Can we hope that enough people will be outraged by the fraud committed against us, and the money, our own money, spent to uphold it, that they will be willing to re-arrange their world view? That is the hope.

Endnote:

1. Rodger Broomby wrote that Avey’s story “emerged following a recent BBC investigation” in a Dec. 30, 2009 article published by the BBC. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/8433968.stm

In 2010 a National Geographic Documentary was shown titled Sonderkommando: The living dead of Auschwitz (produced in 2009). This featured the self-styled Sonderkommando member Henryk Mandelbaum, who was interviewed by Stanislav Motl, a Czech author and journalist. We are told in this documentary by the narrator, Chris Plumley, that Motl “…spent years courting this last survivor” and that now the role played by the Sonderkommando in the extermination process can be revealed. Their role, he continues, posed a moral dilemma for them. Most of them were eventually executed by the Nazis “…as inconvenient witnesses, and those who survived the death camps were hunted down by the Russians who believed they were Nazi collaborators”. Still others were murdered by “…Zionist terror groups who roamed Europe, killing anyone seen as being a collaborator, seeking revenge…This is why Sonderkommando have rarely given interviews…”. Therefore, he concludes, the Mandelbaum testimony is an important document about events 65 years ago.

This, however, is not quite true, as several Sonderkommando members, such as Henryk Tauber and Filip Müller, gave testimonies right after the war which helped shape the holocaust story as we know it. Also later many Sonderkommando members were interviewed. For example, 8 of them were interviewed by Gideon Greif in his book We Wept Without Tears¹, and another, Shlomo Venezia, gave statements to Italian journalists before publishing his memoirs.² Yet another Sonderkommando survivor, Daniel Bennahmias, “spoke out” in the early 90s.³ The Mandelbaum interview is thus far from as unique as it is made out to be.

At the end of the documentary an impressive list of sources is presented, naming among others Museum of Gliwice, Poland; Museum of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Poland; Museum Yad Vashem, Jerusalem, Israel; Archive of Museum Beit Terezin Givat Chaim, Israel; Holocaust Museum, Washington, USA; Archive of Jewish Museum, Prague, Czech Republic; Institute of Terezin Initiative, Prague, Czech Republic; Memorial Terezin; etc. The sketches shown throughout the documentary, interspersed with a few, well known photos are by David Olère, while maps are courtesy of Martin Gilbert. Considering the sources and the recent vintage of the documentary we must surmise that this documentary is an up-to-date effort, that the most recent research has been taken into account. Let us see then what Mandelbaum, as well as the narrator, have to say. I copied what was said by the narrator word for word, as well as the English subtitles. Mandelbaum speaks in Polish.

The narrator states that Auschwitz was “…the primary headquarter the genocide of Jews”, and that on a cold morning in February 1942 at Wannsee, death sentences were imposed on 11 million Jews. Auschwitz was chosen because of the good rail connections, “…a good locality for the Final Solution”. Mandelbaum states in the interview that he arrived on April 22,1944, and was given the inmate number 181970.⁴In an earlier deposition, however, he gave the same date as February 23.⁵ As seen Mandelbaum has told his story before, contrary to what is asserted in the documentary.

The scene presented to the viewer is a snow covered ground with rubble, possibly the site of Krema II. One has to wonder why this was shot in winter, with the snow cover making it almost impossible to determine what is what. The interview is conducted in Polish with English subtitles. Mandelbaum tells Motl:

“Right now, we are standing in the worlds largest cemetery, this is crematorium II…Nobody would think that people⁶were gassed and murdered here, the young, the elderly, disabled people, simply everybody, living people”.

Mandelbaum tells us that the crematoria looked like small “chateaus”.

The narrator continues:

“In his confession having been written after his arrest in 1946, [Auschwitz commandant Rudolf] Höß stated: ‘When the powder was thrown in, there were cries of “gas”, then a great bellowing and the trapped prisoners hurled themselves against the door, but the door held and was opened several hours later so the place might be aired. It was then that I saw for the first time gassed bodies en masse, it made me feel uncomfortable and I shuddered, although I had imagined death by gas would be worse [a picture of corpses is shown here]. However I must admit that it set my mind at rest for the mass extermination of Jews was to start soon. At that time neither Eichmann nor I were certain how these mass killings were to be carried out”’.

Considering the impressive list of sources cited above, we must assume that the narrator read this from a document given to him, and that this is not his invention. Let us therefore take a look at this version of the Höß confession, leaving aside the controversies surrounding his alleged various declarations of guilt. First regarding: “…when the powder was thrown in”, referring to Cyklon B. In NO-1210, his first statement, we read, referring to the “bunkers” (there is no mention of Krema I in this): “The doors were locked and one or two tins of Cyklon B were thrown into the room through holes in the wall”. No specifics as to what was used in the new crematoria are given. Now to PS-3868, the Höß affidavit used at the IMT: „I used Cyklon B which was a crystallized prussic acid which was dropped into the death chamber from a small opening”. And last from his Memoirs which he (allegedly) wrote while in a Polish prison: “The doors were made airtight, and we knocked some holes in the ceiling through which we throw in the gas crystals” (he is referring to Krema I here), and, as for the Bunkers: “The airtight doors were screwed tight, and the contents of the gas crystal canisters emptied into the rooms through special hatches”. And for the new crematoria: “The door would be screwed shut and the waiting disinfection squads would immediately pour the gas [crystals] into the vents in the ceiling of the gas chamber down an air shaft which went to the floor. This ensured the rapid distribution of the gas”.⁷ Later in the film we are shown a well known picture of an opened can of Cyklon B with the pellets spilling out of the can. Why would those who wrote the script make Höß say “powder”?

Now to the next item, the opening of the door(s). The narrator states: “…but the door held and was opened several hours later so the place might be aired”. In NO-1210 we read about the Bunkers: “After half an hour the doors were opened and the bodies were taken out by a commando of prisoners (…)”. Concerning the new crematoria we find only this: “After half an hour the electric air conditioner was started up and the bodies were taken up to the cremating stove by a lift”. In PS-3868 we read: “We usually waited about one-half hour before we opened the doors and removed the bodies”. Now from the Höß memoirs, p.30: “After half an hour the doors were opened and the bodies were pulled out”, p.42: “So far as Auschwitz is concerned, I have never known or heard of a single person being found alive when the gas chambers were opened half an hour after the gas had been poured in”, and finally from p. 43: “The door was opened a half an hour after the gas was thrown in and the ventilation system was turned on. Work was immediately started to remove the corpses”.

Nowhere does Höß mention anything about „several hours“, in fact he consistently states “half an hour” or “about half an hour” before the doors were opened. Thus again we have to ask the question: Why have the narrator quote Höß as stating “several hours”? Is this because revisionists have shown that the half an hour claim is nonsense, necessitating a rewrite of the story? Are we looking here at an “upgraded” version of the gas chamber claims?

Next we learn about the transport conditions: no water or food for 4 days (according to Mandelbaum) and at the arrival in Auschwitz the deportees were beaten by SS officers who were accompanied by barking dogs (the well-known preserved photos shows people being discharged from train wagons with some soldiers standing by, rifles slung over their shoulders, no sign of dogs). The narrator tells us:

“The whole process started with the arrival of the transports, perhaps 2,000 people at a time. All throughout the day and night, the numbers were truly staggering. For several years perhaps 9,000 people a day were gassed at Auschwitz, and it was only one of 39 death camps set up by the Nazis”.

Höß writes on p. 36 of his memoirs that „The highest total figure of people gassed and cremated in twenty-four hours was slightly more than 9,000”. While this is portrayed as a one time achievement, we now hear in the documentary that 9,000 was the normal rate, and that this went on for several years and “in 39 camps”! If this is true, the numbers would truly be staggering, in the tens of millions.

Mandelbaum continues with his narrative:

“And there it was, over there I think [he points with his cane], this small platform…they arrived at the platform and we’d escort them to an area of the camp near the crematoria, here they got undressed”.

The narrator also tells us that:

“The Sonderkommando would accompany them to the chateaux where they were to be cleaned up before going into the main camp. Many people wondered why the Sonderkommando did not warn the new arrivals”.

This is curious. As far as I am aware no-one has ever claimed that the Sonderkommando were present at the ramp. Here is what Höß stated when he took the stand at the Nuremberg Trial on 15 April 1946:

“DR. KAUFFMANN: During an interrogation I had with you the other day you told me that about 60 men were designated to receive these transports, and that these 60 persons, too, had been bound to the same secrecy described before. Do you still maintain that today?

HOESS: Yes, these 60 men were always on hand to take the internees not capable of work to these provisional installations and later on to the other ones. This group, consisting of about ten leaders and subleaders, as well as doctors and medical personnel, had repeatedly been told, both in writing and verbally, that they were bound to the strictest secrecy as to all that went on in the camps.”⁸

According to this description the 60 persons were Germans, not Jewish Sonderkommando members. In fact, when a “special Kommando” (IMT), “permanent Kommando of prisoners” (NO-1210) or “a special contingent of Jews” (Memoirs) is mentioned, it is always connected with the removal of bodies from the gas chamber, cutting of hair, pulling of gold teeth, etc., never with the escort of the victims from the railway ramp to the crematoria.

Mandelbaum continues:

“They’d just walk down, the whole thing [was] located underground [pictures are displayed of what appears to be ruins of the “undressing room” of Krema II]. In the changing room you had hangers and benches, so they didn’t see through it, they didn’t know. The first one who entered had to undress to go to the showers and they hung their clothes on the hangers and entered the shower room with their toothbrush, toothpaste [this appears to be the first and only mention of such items being brought along by the victims], towel, soap and their valuables. And there were two of those showers as you can see here underground [points at the ruins], so there were two gas chambers in fact, divided in two parts, each chamber had those two holes [draws a square into the snow]”.

This is all rather confusing, and I will point out again here that I copied Mandelbaum’s statements verbatim from the subtitles. Mandelbaum next pulls a piece of paper out of his briefcase, stating: “The gas chamber looked like this”. With this the camera focuses on a photograph of a shower room with a wooden joist ceiling, a wooden beam running down the center, a door in the back wall, a number of shower heads as well as a light in the ceiling (reproduced below). The shower heads have water pipes connected to them and look genuine. Yet we are told that the gas chamber had concrete walls and a concrete ceiling, why then show a room not even vaguely resembling one of the morgues, i.e. the alleged gas chambers? Needless to say the room displayed in the picture shows nothing resembling the alleged “Kula columns”. In reality, the picture shows the real bath of the “Bad und Desinfektion I” barrack in Majdanek.⁹

Above: The photo shown by Mandelbaum

Mandelbaum goes on:

“They’d see these showers so at first they didn’t know and thought they were real [as the ones in the picture!], but when maybe a quarter of them were inside, and others kept coming in, they’d start feeling that something wasn’t right, so they try and get out but the SS men would beat them over the head with these sticks and push them back in”.

Mandelbaum allegedly arrived in Auschwitz on April 22,1944, less than a month after that the so called Hungarian action began, yet there is not one word from him about Hungarian Jews. Also, this film was made in 2009, more than six decades after the end of the war – surely enough time for Mandelbaum to be well saturated with Holocaust stories. Still, what is startling is that he has some of the basics wrong, and not only that, the narrator’s story is also not even close to the official version.

The narrator then talks about the gassing process, a Olère drawing is shown (naked woman and children in a room, a SS guard at the door), and we are told that the condemned sometimes had to wait up to 13 minutes for the gas to be dropped in, another first. Mandelbaum describes:

“They gave a signal from above and put in 6 cans of gas through the hole [singular], people struggling for air, they’d breathe fitfully [how could he know this?] and then, still standing, they’d die in 20 or 30 minutes”.

While the motif of the still-standing corpses frequently appear in Treblinka testimonies, this is the first time I have heard it applied to the alleged gas chamber victims of Auschwitz-Birkenau. As for the time required for the victims to die, we are here told “20 or 30 minutes”, whereas Höß states 3-10 minutes, depending on the weather (NO-1210), 3-15 minutes (IMT) and “After 20 minutes at the most no movement could be detected” (Memoirs). It is hard to tell which hat Mandelbaum pulled the “20 or 30 minutes” out of. Mandelbaum continues:

“The gas worked like this: When there were a lot of people inside, humidity increased in the showers because of the breathing and the Zyklon dissolved with this humidity”.

Still no mention of the crucial Kula columns.

The narrator goes on:

“After about half an hour, what the SS called ‘the great thunder’ [another new motif], the mayhem of people dying, the chamber became silent…After opening the doors [no time given] to let the gas out…”.

What happened to the ventilators, the “electric air conditioners” mentioned in NO-1210, or as described in the memoirs: “The door was opened a half an hour after the gas was thrown in and the ventilation system was turned on”. The ventilators are an important part of the story, why forget to mention it here and tell us that the gas was let out through the doors? And they wonder why Revisionists exist…

The narration continues:

“The average lifespan of a Sonderkommando was about 60 days, sometimes more, sometimes less, after which they were executed [Mandelbaum tells us: “What saved me was the decontamination block. Over there, that was the block, a sauna”. He fails to provide details]…They were kept separate. Theirs was the only hut with barbed wire around it, as the Nazis had to maintain absolute secrecy. Hidden knowledge of the gas chambers never leaked out…”.

What is important here is the secrecy issue. We have to remember that at the IMT it was established that only 200-300 people knew about the mass gassings, because not one of the accused had ever heard of this alleged mass murder. Prof. Hilberg was the first one to dismiss this, writing that: “…the Holocaust had been the result of a huge bureaucratic machine with thousands of participants, not the fulfillment of a preconceived plan or a single order by Hitler.”¹⁰ His book The Destruction of the European Jews, published in 1961, was shunned at first, as the part about the knowledge of thousands regarding the Holocaust did not fit the story told at that time. This has changed since then, and we now learn that some 400,000 not only knew about the Holocaust but participated in the killings.¹¹ And therein lies the dilemma for the Holocaust Industry, for if that many would have known about it, all of Germany – in fact the whole world – would have known. But nothing was known, a few rumors and that is about it. Is this why this particular documentary is going back to the original story, to try and explain why practically nothing was known?

Mandelbaum states:

“Twelve thousand of them I think it was [daily], they’d gas them and burn them. In the beginning they used to burn them in crematoria I in Auschwitz, a primitive one. But then, neither Crematoria I, or IV of V could keep up with the influx of transports. They had scheduled transports from all around Europe, right? So they had to build crematoria II and III with 15 furnaces each…Each furnace had a device that sucked in the air, so the corpses burned faster”.

Here again one has to wonder why Mandelbaum is allowed to talk nonsense. When considering the impressive list of sources provided, one would think that obvious mistakes would be corrected by the narrator.¹² Crematoria II was completed first, on March 15,1943, IV on March 22, V on April 4 and III on June 25. All of them were under construction at roughly the same time. Why state that IV and V were in operation, couldn’t handle the load so II and III had to be build? Astoundingly it apparently doesn’t strike Mandelbaum that his statement makes a joke of the enumeration of the building. If he was correct then the crematories IV and V would of course have been designated crematories II and III.

The air sucking device mentioned is also of interest, Prof. van Pelt testified at the Irving trial:

“MR IRVING: ‘Well, they would self-combust? When they were raised to a certain temperature, they would self-combust?’

PROF VAN PELT: ‘That is the idea of a normal incineration.That is the idea of a normal incineration. In Auschwitz, actually, the ovens – the difference between the ovens is that one element which is used in normal ovens is with a heat kind of regenerator in Auschwitz was replaced by compressed air which was blown into the oven. Now - ‘

MR IRVING: ‘Would this account for the drop of normal coke usage from 35 kilograms in the crematorium Gusen concentration camp per body to 3.5 in Auschwitz, in your opinion?’

PROF VAN PELT: ‘Yes…’.”¹³

This description does not make much sense, and neither does Mandelbaum. Blowing air into the muffle would cool it down, blowing it into the fire box would increase coke consumption and produce more heat than the muffles could handle. In the instructions for the ovens it is stated that if the heat in the muffles rises to above 1000° Celsius, then air has to be blown in to cool it down.^xiv

Mandelbaum keeps piling it on with Motl listening and nodding, no questions asked. To list all of it would make this too long, so here will suffice with Mandelbaum’s description of the corpses and the utilization of body fat as fuel:

“Over there, there were a lot of dead men [he points in a general direction], gassed, they couldn’t burn them. But the chamber had to be emptied because the transports kept arriving. They didn’t want the people to see them, they had to keep the place tidy. So for the time being they put them behind the crema, and there they lay over night and the following day too [yet another new detail]. And I saw them in those ditches, there was smoke too and something was on fire and there they pulled those corpses [here is displayed a well known picture of a pile of bodies with multiple limbs, smoke in the background, I call it the spaghetti picture because the bodies are undistinguishable]. They’d bring poles from young trees, 80 or 70 cm cut into four [if this makes sense to anyone, congratulations], and also conifer branches from spruce trees in the woods. On top of this they would lay the dead men [he keeps mentioning only male bodies], then another layer and so forth. They burned fast, but just the legs, the heads and parts of the hips – the thighs – wouldn’t burn, because there is a lot of flesh inside so you need a high temperature. We had those hooks from the armoury made from course wire mesh, so we’d drive them into the thighs and pull them into another ditch. The other reason why the bodies wouldn’t burn is because they were piled on top of one another and there wasn’t enough air coming from the bottom. Every ditch had in the corners these holes [he draws a square in the snow], 40 by 40 or 30 by 30 and 70 or 80 centimeters deep. A normal person didn’t burn when inside those layers. And the fat of the gassed people that didn’t burn flowed into these holes…So the fat would flow into those holes and when they were about ¾ full, we’d scoop out the fat with these types of mugs and pour it over the dead men [again only male corpses are mentioned] so that the fire would flare up and the corpses would burn faster”.

Where to begin? We learn that the Nazis did not want people to see the corpses, yet we are to believe that burning them would not be noticed? As far as the incineration process is concerned, it is clear that Mandelbaum has no clue. What are we to make of the 80 cm or 70 cm poles cut into four? Then the part about the heads and thighs not burning because of too much flesh! What part of the body is flammable, the bones? In fact, there is no mention of ashes or bone fragments. Mandelbaum admits, however, that burning corpses in a ditch will not work because the lack of draught, so here we go again with the fat collection canard. He has the fat flowing into four holes in the corners, while another witness, Filip Müller, has a trench on the bottom of the burning pit with the fat flowing into a hole outside the pit.¹⁵ The concept of the fat reservoirs is nonsense in any case. For one, the fat would ignite as soon as it made contact with the flames.¹⁶ Secondly, how would the Sonderkommando workers get close enough to the raging fire to dip their mugs into the holes?

The description of the incineration ditch leads to the following dialogue:

Motl: “The smell had to be appalling”.

Mandelbaum: “Well, it was burning flesh, just imagine, we worked in those ditches. The wind would start blowing against us, so our eyes were streaming. If I drank a litre of water, I’d loose a litre and a half when my eyes were streaming. We worked without masks. We never had breaks when it rained [M looks at Motl to see if he swallows this too, which he does]”.

And here we have it, this awful smell/stink of burning bodies. The narrator told us before that “hidden knowledge of the gas chambers never leaked out”, but are we to believe that nobody ever wondered what they were burning? And according to our witness, the burning continued even on rainy days. I wonder how the water mixed with the fat in the corner holes.

The narrator gives us an extremely propagandistic version of the evacuation of the camp:

“When it became obvious that the allies were close [“allies” is strange wording, considering that the Red Army was the only force to liberate Auschwitz], the camp and it’s inmates had to be destroyed. The crematoria, the hospital and it’s inmates were all blown up in a desperate attempt to conceal the dreadful legacy. The SS went on a rampage, murdering everybody. Most witnesses were shot or forced to begin their long march west into Germany, a journey on which most were to die. Before the Nazis left Auschwitz on the death march, they executed 98,000 people, including most of the Sonderkommando. Using a combination of luck and ingenuity, Mandelbaum managed to escape from the mass shootings, blending himself into the camp population”.

We have no firm knowledge as to who blew up the crematoria, but the part about the Nazis blowing up the hospital, including the patients, is simply a lie. The same goes for the of 98,000 inmates being killed before the Germans left. The fact is that the inmates were given a choice to either stay and be liberated by the Soviets or go west with the Germans. The majority chose the latter alternative. Here is what Elie Wiesel, perhaps the most prominent Auschwitz eyewitness, has to say concerning the decision to leave with the Germans instead of waiting to be liberated by the Soviets:

“He was lost in thought. The choice was in our hands. For once. We could decide our fate for ourselves. To stay, both of us, in the infirmary, where, thanks to my doctor, he could enter as either a patient or a medic.

I had made up my mind to accompany my father wherever he went.

“Well, Father, what do we do?”

“He was silent.

“Let’s be evacuated with the others,” I said.

He didn’t answer. He was looking at my foot.

“You think you’ll be able to walk?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“Let’s hope we won’t regret it, Eliezer.”¹⁷

Why then tell those obvious lies?

In the last part of the documentary, Mandelbaum questions the existence of God, telling us that he can not “remain a religious person”, because of the millions killed “Nobody knows exactly…the exact figures aren’t known”. He tells us that he made a vow, that if he survived, no details given about his obvious survival, he would speak about “…what I saw with my own eyes”. He copies Elie Wiesel here, who is also adamant that what he states he saw “with his own eyes”. One also wonders why Mandelbaum waited that long to tell his story. There is also the revealing mistakes he mistakes. For example he mentions the women’s camp, claiming that it was called “Canada”, which is erroneous.

The final minutes of Sonderkommando plays in Mandelbaum’s house, to be exact in his garden, where he cultivates many varities of trees. Motl asks him if it is possible to forget Auschwitz, and Mandelbaum answer:

“No, you can not forget a thing like that, it is something I will never forget. As long as I live , I won’t be able to forget, you just can not”.

If his story was in fact believable, one could agree with this. As mentioned at the beginning, Mandelbaum died at the age of 86, a ripe old age I would suggest – many Germans who made it through the war died much younger because of the hardships they suffered.

The importation question, however, is this: Why make a film such as this, with so many inaccuracies and contradictions visavi the official story? Why allow Mandelbaum, as well as the narrator, to make statements contradicting what we are told to believe? Anyone with the slightest bit of subject knowledge has to wonder why this documentary was made. I personally have no clue what the purpose of this is.

Lies have many versions, the Truth but one.

Below I present a number of additions to the survey material presented in the recently published “Evidence for the Presence of ‘Gassed’ Jews in the Occupied Eastern Territories, Part 2”¹ which did not make it to the deadline. The additions are presented in order of the sections to which they belong.

Section 3.3.18. “Tsetsilia Mikhaylovna Shapiro”

The relevant passage from Shapiro’s testimony reads as follows:

“In addition to the local Jewish population, Jews from other countries – France, Germany, and elsewhere – were transported to the Minsk ghetto. The Jews of each country were settled in the ghetto separately. Barbed wire separated these different ‘associations of compatriots’ one from the other. They were forbidden to have contact with each other or with the local Jews.”²

Section 3.3.19. “Avraham Tory (Golub)”

The Unknown Black Book provides us with the names of four additional camps in Lithuania with Jewish inmates:

Gerulyay – Jewish camp with women and children (p. 303, 306).

Kocheniski (Kotsynishki) – agricultural labor camp with Jewish prisoners located not far from Kovno (pp. 313-315).

Renyay – Jewish camp (p. 303).

Vishvyany – Jewish camp (p. 303).

This brings the total number of camps to 47.

Additional witnesses

3.3.20. Nikolayev Prilezhaev

Nikolayev Prilezhaev was a 75-year-old professor and member of the Belorussian Academy of Sciences who escaped (at an unclear date) from occupied Minsk with the help of partisans. Soon after his escape his account of the suffering of the Jews of Minsk was recorded by M. Grubian, a correspondent of the Yiddish-language newspaper Eynikait. In this we read:

“Professor Prilezhaev says that not a trace remained of Minsk’s native Jews, and that a certain number of Jews from Lodz and Hamburg are still languishing in the ghetto, dying from hunger and disease.”³

Any convoys of Łódź Jews to reach Minsk must have done so via the “pure extermination camp” of Chełmno.

3.3.21. Golda Vasserman

In an account of the Tulchin Ghetto in Transnistria, written in 1944 by the Romanian Jewess Golda Vasserman, we find the following passage:

“In the autumn of 1942, there were more than three thousand Jewish families from Ukraine, Bukovina and Bessarabia in the Tulchin ghetto. [...]. Every day, new shipments of Jews would arrive in the ghetto. They were in part people who had been hiding in the forests for a long time, had made their way to the partisans and had then fallen into the hands of the fascist cutthroats, and in part Jews from various countries in Europe that had been occupied by Hitler’s forces.”⁴

According to mainstream historiography only Jews from Bessarabia, Bukovina and Romania proper were deported to Transnistria.

3.3.22. Regina Leshchinskaya

Regina Leshchinskaya (b. 1930) was interned in the Pechora camp in northern Transnistria. She states that “in 1942, many Jews from Romania, Poland and Bessarabia” were brought to this camp.⁵ Mainstream historiography is unaware of any transports of Polish Jews to Transnistria.

3.3.23. Nisim Anolik

Nisim Anolik and his brother Benjamin were deported to Estonia from Lithuania on 3 September 1943.⁶ After first arriving in the Vaivara camp they were transferred to one labor camp after another, until in early February 1944 they found thenselves in the Ereda camp:

“Most of the people in the camp came from Kaunas and Vilno. There were also people from Prague, Berlin, Hamburg, Vienna, Riga, Brussels, and Paris. They lived separately from us, but we found out about them, since we would receive clothes with their names on them after they had been exterminated. All the prisoners wore numbers on the left side of their chests and on their right leg near the knee.”⁷

At a noth further stated date in May 1944 the Anolik brothers were transferred again, this time to the Klooga camp.⁸ The first and only convoy of French Jews to reach Estonia – according to orthodox historiography – departed Paris on 15 May 1944 with Kovno and Tallinn as its destinations (cf. 2.3.3.). According to Estonian historian Meelis Maripuu the French Jews who did not disembark in Kovno on 20 May arrived in Tallinn on the following day, i.e. 21 May 1944, and that on the same day “about 60 of the weaker prisoners were sent to ‘work’ from which they never returned”; 60 more French Jews were sent “to work in the forest” on 14 July, while another group of “about 100 sick prisoners” were sent away on 14 August. All the remaining French Jews were kept in the Tallinn Central Prison; later three Jews who were suspected of attempting to escape were shot.⁹ Although Maripuu assumes that the Jews sent away from the prison on 21 May were shot, it is not out of the question that they were in fact transferred to a labor camp, and that the Paris Jews observed by Anolik in Ereda came from this transport. As for the Jews from Prague, Berlin, Hamburg and Vienna they may have arrived with the documented transports from Theresienstadt and Berlin to Raasiku in the summer of 1942 or indirectly via the Riga Ghetto. The presence in Estonia of Jews from Brussels, i.e. from Belgium, however, is anomalous from an orthodox viewpoint.

In a previous article [1] I have discussed the monthly radio broadcasts in German that the famous novelist Thomas Mann made during the war and the mentions of mass gassings of Jews made in them. Most significantly, in his speech from January 1942 the Nobel laureate in exile claimed that “Four hundred young Dutch Jews were brought to Germany to be used as guinea pigs for poison gas”. As far as I was able to determine, this was the first occurence of the allegation that the Germans were carrying out mass gassings of Jews. In his speech from June 1942 Mann again spoke of the gassed Dutch Jews, stating that the victims numbered not 400, but 800, and that the Jews in question had been “brought to Mauthausen and gassed there”. Comparison of the contents of the January speech with a diary entry written on 16 February 1942 by a Romanian-Jewish Bucarest physician named Emil Dorian strongly implies that the allegation did not originate with Mann, and that it had been spread also by other channels.

As for the background to the allegation I summarized the documented facts, as set out by Raul Hilberg, concerning two small convoys of young Dutch Jews who, as retaliation for underground activities, were deported to German concentration camps. The first convoy, consisting of 400 Jews, were sent first to Buchenwald in late February 1941, where a tenth of them perished during the following months. In the spring of 1941 the survivors were transferred to Mauthausen. In June a second convoy of 291 Amsterdam Jews were sent directly to Mauthausen. The deported Dutch Jews were set to carry out heavy work in quarries and mines, and many who did not perish from exhaustion or illness reportedly committed suicide. No “Holocaust” historian, including the foremost defender of the Mauthausen gas chamber legend, Hans Marsalek, has ever alleged that any of these Dutch Jews were “gassed” in Mauthausen. In conclusion, I wrote that Allied intelligence or Jewish organizations must have begun to disseminate the gassing allegation by January 1942 at the latest, and that the origin of the allegation no doubt required research into the clandestine publications of the Dutch resistance.

I have not yet had the opportunity to review any Dutch sources, but on the other hand I have found a number of news items from Jewish press that sheds more light on the issue. Below I will present these items and briefly discuss their implications.

On 28 November 1941 the German-Jewish exile weekly Aufbau, published in New York, carried the following item on p. 3:

“From London comes the report that up to now at least 400 of the 680 young Dutch Jews sent to the concentration camp Mauthausen in Austria earlier this year have died. They perished due to deficient nutrition, hard labor and cruel treatment. Their families were forbidden to send food parcels to them in the camp.”

As shown by a notice in the American-Jewish bimonthly Contemporary Jewish Record this information was based on a news dispatch of unstated origin (possibly the Dutch government in exile) dated 17 November 1941.[2] Thus by late November the Jewish press in the West were aware of the fact that most of the deported Dutch Jews had perished, but in line with post-war historiography their deaths were described as being due to “natural” causes, not gassing.

On 5 December 1941 Aufbau presented under the title “The Secret of Mauthausen” two letters to the editor (on p. 6) which I will give here full in translation. The first letter, signed “Carl van Hester” reads:

“In no. 48 [the 28 November issue] you carried a notice entitled ‘Dutch Jews in concentration camps’ which – as terrible as its contents are – do not by far make justice to the facts. Since we are dealing here with one of the worst crimes committed by the Nazi murderers I wish to submit to you the true facts for publication.
It is the question here of some 680 young Jews between 18 and 35 years of age, about half of them of Dutch nationality and the rest German emigrants to Holland, among them several former members of the wellknown agricultural training camp of Wieringen. One half of them were singled-out during a veritable manhunt on the streets of Amsterdam, carried out in retaliation to a demonstration calling for a general strike. This demonstration had in turn been spontaneously orchestrated by the population as an answer to the first German attempts to incite pogroms in the old Jewish quarters. This group first arrived in Buchenwald, where within a month perhaps 10 percent of them perished due to the ‘normal’ mortality. Then in summer the rest of them were sent on to Mauthausen.
In the meantime a second manhunt had taken place in Amsterdam resulting in the arrests of 300 to 350 young Jews. This time it was a reprisal for an alleged bombing attempt against an apartment building which housed German officers. These young folks were given careful medical examinations and a certain number of them with with bodily deficiencies were sent home. Initially one assumed that this was because [only] human material useful for the labor service was needed. As it now turns out, it was obviously because only perfect ‘material’ can be used for laboratory experiments.
Also this group was transported to Mauthausen, and already some ten days later death notices began to arrive by the dozens, conveyed to the unhappy parents by the Gestapo in the rudest manner: By postcards they were summoned to the office [of the German administration] where they had to receive the terrible news. One father, who had both of his sons in Mauthausen was summoned one Monday to report to the office the following Friday. Expecting the worst he asked, first on his own and then through a Christian Dutchman, if he could receive the news earlier. This was dismissed with the following words: ‘The Jew is scheduled for Friday and have to wait until then.’
When Friday came the official informed him briefly that one of his sons was dead. The father asked: I have another son there, how is he? The official leafed through his papers: ‘Oh, he died eight days ago.’
An American reader would hardly believe this story, but it is true, it is true, so help me God.
Whether any of the unlucky [deported Dutch Jews] are still alive I do not know. I would not hope for it. Of the fifteen close, personal acquaintances which I had among them, not a single one is left alive.
How then did they die? A higher foreign dignitary has personally made the effort to request from higher circles in Berlin the release of a certain young person, whose parents he was befriended with. Various authorities, who thought it was the question of an ordinary concentration camp inmate, promised him assistance and their endorsement. However, as soon as the dignitary mentioned, that he was speaking of one of the young Dutchmen in Mauthausen, he was met instead with icy rejection. Finally, a high-ranking Nazi openly told him: ‘No-one leaves Mauthausen alive, and even if the war ended tomorrow the last of them would be bumped off [umgelegt] already today. They are killed by poison gas [Die gehen an Giftgas zu Grunde].’ (Except for myself there are several other reliable witnesses here [in the Netherlands?] to whom he [the foreign dignitary] has told of this personally.)
I don’t write to you about all this because there is still a chance to save these poor. However, when the day comes for the world to judge Germany, one must recall such dreadful things and remind the world of them, so that not feeble pity clouds the eye.“

The second letter, signed “R. Pisk (New York City)” is apparently published only in part:

“…do you not find it remarkable, that out of 680 young, fresh, strong people 400 should have lost their lives due to overwork or malnutrition? Regrettably I personally have indications [Anhaltspunkte] that these poor youths have been subjected to poison gas experiments, which have killed them in droves…“

These two letters prove that the gassing allegation was invented at the very latest in November 1941, i.e. prior to the alleged first mass gassings in the Chelmno camp. As for now, the identities of the letter writers remain a mystery. The letter signed “Carl van Hester” gives the impression to have been written by a Dutchman, probably one involved in the resistance movement, but if this person was still residing in the occupied Netherlands at this time, it seems obvious that he must have used a pseudonym. One must further assume that “R. Pisk” did not spell out his evidence for the gassings, or else the newspaper would certainly have published his letter in full, instead of devoting the remaining space to seven other letters concerning everything from savings and insurances to refugees on Mauritius.

On 10 April 1942 Aufbau again wrote of Mauthausen in a brief notice titled “Death Camp Mauthausen” (p. 2):

“The Dutch government in London has announced 740 out of 1,200 Jews sent to forced labor in the salt and sulfur mines of Mauthausen have died. Without even the slightest protection they were abandoned by the Nazis to the poisonous fumes [den giftigen Dämpfen preisgegeben].”

This announcement from the Dutch government in exile in London is almost certainly the one Mann is referring to in his speech from June 1942 (“It was almost 800 people who were arrested at that time, brought to Mauthausen and gassed there. The exact figure has meanwhile been published by the Dutch government, but since I do not believe that this report has yet reached you, I do well to pass on to you this privately received information). It seems clear from the Aufbau notice, however, that the announcement in question did not attribute the deaths to any “poison gas experiments”, but to exposure to poisonous fumes in mines where the Jews reportedly had to work without protective gear. This is also the version maintained by the Institute of Jewish Affairs in an survey from August 1943:

“In the summer of 1941 Jewish youths began to disappear from Holland; within a short time their number reached some 1,200. It became known that they had been sent to the concentration camp of Manthausen [sic] in Upper Austria where they were forced to work in suplhur mines without protection against the deadly fumes. According to an official statement of the Dutch government-in-exile, 740 of these young men died during the first four months of labor. At first, obituary notices appeared in the Dutch press; soon, however, such announcements were prohibited. Parents were called to Gestapo headquarters to receive news. Appointments were deliberately made days in advance so as to keep them in suspense. Usually their children had been dead for weeks. The ashes could be obtained upon remittance of 75 guilders.“[3]

It is tempting to speculate that the people who made up the gassing story were “inspired” by real deaths or accidents involving such poisonous fumes and then combined this real element with the gas warfare paranoia carried over from World War I.[4]

In the Aufbau issue of 12 June 1942 we find the following brief article on page 5:

“The news of the poison gas experiments first brought to a horrified world by Aufbau has now been confirmed by a high American official, who previously was stationed in Czechoslovakia and in the last week arrived in New York on the [Swedish] diplomat ship ‘Drottningholm’. Also he knows of events which have taken place in this camp, located 20 miles north of Linz. What is new is not that hundreds of the Jews arrested in Holland have been killed in these gas experiments or that some 1,200 of them have died in the mines near the camp – that is an allegation which the Dutch government already have made its own – but that this newly arrived official attest to that also several hundreds of Jews from Prague, robbed of all their papers and other signs of identification, have been brought to Mauthausen. According to the statements of the authorities in the Protectorate these deportees were sent to ghettos in Poland. Now it can be confirmed, however, that in reality they were sent to Mauthausen.
As has been reported to Aufbau by a reliable source, there has since some time existed a second Mauthausen in the former nunnery Liebenau in Württemberg, to where the Nazis brought feeble-minded young men – or whoever they classified as such – for purposes similar to those of Mauthausen. The prisoners in this camp were Jewish as well as non-Jewish. Later these experiments in Liebenau were discontinued and the nunnery transformed into an internment camp for foreign women.“

According to post-war historians, mental patients housed in Liebenau were sent to be gassed at the Grafeneck euthanasia center, but there were no gassings at Liebenau itself.[5] The alleged poison gas experiments at Liebenau were reported also by the Contemporary Jewish Record, but in their report the victims had changed from mental patients to “hundreds of Jewish and Russian war prisoners”.[6] The same journal also reported on the mysterious American dignitary:

“Several hundred others [of Czech Jews] were sent to the Mauthausen concentration camp, near Linz, where they are being used as ‘guinea pigs’ in Nazi poison gas experiments, an American official returning on the ‘Drottningholm’ revealed Aug. 10 [1942].”[7]

Could this “high American official” have been the same as the “higher foreign dignitary” mentioned in the letter of “Carl van Hester”? Any help with identifying this person would be most welcome.

On 3 July 1942 Aufbau again wrote of the Mauthausen gassings (p. 10):

“According to reliable reports 700 young Jews have been killed by the Nazis through criminal poison gas experiments in the camp Mauthausen. As already announced in a previous issue we plan to draw up a list of the victims, partly in order to make contact with friends and relatives of the unlucky ones, partly out of historical-documentary reasons.
A publication of the names will not take place during the war and because of requests not in the future, either.
We have already received many notifications. Since many names still are missing we hereby renew the appeal to our readers.“

I have not yet been able to locate the referred-to first appeal.

When the Mauthausen gassing allegation appeared for the last time in Aufbau on 9 October 1942 (p. 2) the number of gassing victims had been changed to encompass all Dutch Jews sent to the camp according to the April 1942 announcement of the Dutch government in exile:

“These threats of the Nazis to send [Dutch] Jews to the concentration camp Mauthausen is all the more upsetting if one consider the atrocities which they have carried out in this camp located 20 miles north of Linz. As the first newspaper Aufbau reported earlier this year that the Nazis had conducted poison gas experiments on Dutch Jews, of whom some twelve hundred met their death.“

The story of the Dutch Jews gassed at Mauthausen did not die there, however. On 16 December 1943 the following was reported from London:

“The Germans are using prisoners from concentration camps as subjects for tests with poison gas, according to a young Dutchman, who recently escaped and now is in hospital, seriously ill, in a neutral country.
The Dutchman has given authenticated details of their sufferings to a Dutch Government representative.
The Dutchman says that he was sent to Mauthausen camp in Austria in 1942. From there he was taken in a van with 27 others to a large factory. This contained a number of laboratories and gas chambers with three windowless cement walls [and] one of thick glass, through which the chemists and physiologists watched the ‘experiments.’
The prisoners were sent into one chamber naked three times. The first time they wore gas maks, and remained inside a quarter of an hour.
The Dutchman says: ‘After two minutes an intense skin prickling set in, after which we felt a glowing sensation. When we went out our temperatures were taken and blood drawn from our earlobes. We then received a strong chlorine shower bath. We did not experience any harmful results.
In a second experiment three weeks later we again wore gas masks, and again experienced a glowing sensation, which this time was followed by a feeling of intense cold. Ten of the victims developed sores and severe itching.
They were not exposed to the third experiment, in which 14 of us were sent in without gas masks for half an hour.
Grilles in the floor were uncovered. After a few minutes all of us vomited and became dizzy.
We gradually lost our sense of balance and fell over each other. We were only faintly conscious.
When the test ended laboratory assistants, clad in anti-gas suits, rubber gloves and shoes and gas masks, carried us out. Blood spurted from our nostrils, mouths and ears.
We again reached a chlorine shower, and our lungs and stomachs were X-rayed. Vomiting and dizziness continued for four days, but we were forced to resume our heavy camp labour.
We heard later from the guards that 40 young Jews had twice been exposed to the same ordeal. All had died.“[8]

The gassings alleged here are clearly experiments with poison gas, not gassings in the “Holocaust” sense. We further note that the “gas chambers” described clearly are identical neither with the alleged Mauthausen “gas chamber” or the “gas chamber” at the Euthanasia institute at Schloss Hartheim, that the experiments are dated to the year 1942, and that the number of Jewish victims mentioned is 40, not 400, 700, 800 or 1,200.

The idea that the Germans were conducting experiments with military poison gases had appeared already in an underground report on Auschwitz dated 24 October 1941, but in this instance the alleged victims were Soviet prisoners of war:

“At Oswiecim [Auschwitz], in early October, 850 Russian officers and non-coms (prisoners of war) who had been brought there were put to death by gas in order to test a new war gas which is to be used on the eastern front.“[9]

Did the Polish underground propagandists influence the Dutch ones, or vice versa? Was the notion derived from a common source? Is it really possible that two groups came up with more or less the same notion independent of each other? What role did the mysterious “Carl van Hester”, “R. Pisk” and the (American?) “higher foreign dignitary” play in the development of the mass gassings legend? What we know is that both the Mauthausen and the Auschwitz allegations are untrue.[10] Accordingly, we are dealing with two similar pieces of black propaganda. Which came first? To answer all those questions more research is clearly needed.

[1] “Thomas Mann’s War-time Radio Speeches and the Genesis of the Mass Gassing Allegations”, http://www.revblog.codoh.com/2010/08/thomas-manns-war-time-radio-speeches-and-the-genesis-of-the-mass-gassing-allegations/
[2] Contemporary Jewish Record, vol. 5 no. 2 (February 1942), p. 87.
[3] Boris Schub (ed.), Hitler’s Ten-Year War on the Jews, American Jewish Congress/World Jewish Congress, New York 1943, pp. 238-239.
[4] Cf. Samuel Crowell, The Gas Chambers of Sherlock Holmes, online: http://www.codoh.com/incon/inconshr123.html
[5] http://www.wuerttembergisches-psychiatriemuseum.de/index.php?section=zwiefalten&page=1940
[6] Contemporary Jewish Record, vol. 5 no. 4 (August 1942), p. 426
[7] Contemporary Jewish Record, vol. 5 no. 5 (October 1942), p. 524
[8] Nazi Gas Tests On Prisoners”, The Courier-Mail (Brisbane), 17 December 1943, p. 2
[9] Oboz koncentracyjny Oswięcim w swietle akt Delegatury Rzadu R.P. na Kraj, Oswiecim 1968, p. 11
[10] For the latter see C. Mattogno, Auschwitz: The First Gassing, Theses & Dissertations Press, Chicago 2005