Elie Wiesel questioned under oath in a California courtroom in 2008:

Q. And is this book Night that you wrote a true account of your experience during World War II?

A. It is a true account. Every word in it is true.

In Part One, I established that the decision to rebrand Night into an autobiography was the reason for a new translation, in which necessary changes could be made to better ‘fit’ the story both to the real Elie Wiesel and the known facts of the Hungarian deportation.

When the 2006 translation came out, with its new classification to “autobiography,” questions arose from some circles. Responding to these questions, Edward Wyatt wrote an article  in the NewYork Times on Jan. 19, 2006, in which he quoted Jeff Seroy, senior vice president at Farrar, Straus & Giroux, parent company of Night publisher Hill & Wang, as strongly denying that changes were made to bring the book more in line with the facts. “Nonsense,” said Seroy. “Some minor mistakes crept into the original translation that were expunged in the new translation. But the book stands as a record of fact.”

Left:  Elie Wiesel manning his table at a Jewish book fair in Austin, TX in 2006. The new translation of Night by his wife Marion had come out in January of that year. It was also chosen for Oprah Winfrey’s book club at that time. Below: Publisher Jeff Seroy, center, with writer Brad Gooch to his left, Doug Stumps on his right .

Blaming the Translator

“Mistakes in the original translation” can only mean mistakes by Stella Rodway, the original translator! But we have already shown that Stella Rodway faithfully reproduced the French La Nuit, which was Wiesel’s own work. The author and publisher are casting  these changes as translation errors to divert attention away from Elie Wiesel’s own errors—part of their campaign to pass Night off from now on as “a record of fact.”

A record of fact it isn’t

When I ended Part One, Eliezer and Father were still in the train car on their way to Buchenwald. You will recall that the Yiddish, the French and thus the original English version of Night specified the trip took 10 days and 10 nights from Gleiwitz (on the former German/Polish border) to Buchenwald. Since we know from standard historical sources1 that the prisoners were evacuated from Monowitz on Jan. 18 and arrived in Gleiwitz the next day, Jan. 19; and since according to the description in Night itself, they spend three days in Gleiwitz (Jan. 20-22), this would make their day of arrival February 1, 1945. But in Night, Father’s death takes place the night of Jan. 28-29, three days before they arrived!  This is why Marion Wiesel removed the number 10 in her new translation, leaving the number of days and nights undetermined.

A strange detail that actually belongs in Part One is on page 87 of the original Night. Eliezer remarks, after his and his Father’s deliberations and final decision to go on the march: “I learned after the war the fate of those who had stayed behind in the hospital. They were quite simply liberated by the Russians two days after the evacuation.” The evacuation, as we all know, was on the 18th. We also know the Russians did not arrive on the 20th of January! The actual liberation day is January 27. What possessed Wiesel to write this? Well, because it was in Un di velt:  “Two days after we had left Buna, the Red Army occupied the camp.  All the sick had stayed alive.”

From the point in the story of Eliezer and Father’s arrival at Buchenwald there are no significant changes made by Marion Wiesel to the original French and English versions. But there is much in all the versions that differs strikingly from the “official holocaust history” as written by acknowledged official chroniclers such as Danuta Czech. So I will continue with comparisons between Night and “official history,” along with some very significant changes made from Un di velt hot geshvign to Wiesel’s edited French La Nuit.

Arrival at Buchenwald:  26 Jan. or 1 Feb.?

Danuta Czech, in her Auschwitz Chronicle1,  records that on January 26,

A transport with 3,987 prisoners from Auschwitz auxiliary camps reaches Buchenwald.  There are 52 dead prisoners in the transport.  115 prisoners die on the day of arrival.  Their corpses are delivered to the autopsy room. (P 801)

This is the transport that carried Lazar and Abraham Wiesel/Viezel, Miklos (Nikolaus) Grüner and all of the inmates of Monowitz whose names are on the transport list.2 According to Czech, the Monowitz prisoners began their march on the evening of January 18, 1945, with “divisions of nurses placed between the columns” of 1000 each (P 786), arriving at Gleiwitz Camp the following evening. On Jan. 21 “they are loaded in open freight cars with other prisoners from Auschwitz who have arrived in Gleiwitz.” (P 788) From Jan. 21 to Jan. 26 is five days of travel … not ten, as Wiesel wrote in Night.

The narrative in Night gives us a date of Jan. 22 for the boarding of the train, one day later than Czech. And while Night gives the number of days on the train (10), it does not name the date of arrival.

Hilda Wiesel says her father died on arrival

Totally contradicting what is written in Night, Hilda Wiesel Kudler, Elie’s oldest sister, in her testimony for the Shoah Foundation in 1995, said she learned from her brother that their father died as he stepped off the train.

And I said, where is father? And he replied, he’s gone back to Sighet; he[Elie] didn’t want to tell me [that he was dead]. And I repeated, but where is he? And he insisted he was at Sighet. And I said, look, I want you to tell me the truth. Because he knew the date of my father’s death. You know, they did a long march3 from Auschwitz, then they put them on the train to go to Buchenwald; he died gasping for air; when he stepped off the train, he died gasping for air; at Buchenwald. But he[Elie] knew the date.                 

Right: Hilda Wiesel Kudler, in France,  giving her videotaped testimony to the Shoah Foundation

From this, we can better understand something about Elie Wiesel—that he has never had a problem with making up stories that “sound better” than the truth. But, if Hilda is correct in her recall, and if their father really was one of the 115 inmates who Danuta Czech reports died on the day of arrival, then Wiesel’s long, melodramatic story of watching his father sicken and die over a ten-day period in Night is fiction. All of it—including his father being whacked on the head by a cruel “officer” in the barracks.

The day of arrival for this transport is Jan. 26, but according to the timeline in Night, it arrives on Feb. 1. Either way, it doesn’t correspond to the date of  Jan. 28 that Wiesel, for reasons unknown, selected as the date his fictional Father died.

You might also be interested to know that Hilda is named Deborah in Un di velt;  the name Hilda is never used. It was Wiesel who changed it to Hilda in La Nuit.

Un di Velt says Father dies a week after arrival in Buchenwald, Night says 8-10 days … yet it is January 28 … or is it the 18th Day of Shevat?

Regular readers of this blog will know this already, but it bears repeating yet again: there is no Shlomo Wiesel in the official history or in the records who fits the profile of “Father” as described by Elie Wiesel in Night. There is an Abraham (sometimes shortened to Abram) Viezel who is recorded in several places—on a medical report at Auschwitz, on the transport to Buchenwald, and on a death certificate dated  Feb. 2, 1945, seven (7) days after arrival. This Abraham was born Oct. 10, 1900, making him 44 years old when he died. Recall that Night gives Father’s age as 50 in 1944 (SR, P 40).

Wiesel’s description has the transport to Buchenwald arriving on Feb.1st.  But that’s just the beginning. After arriving, this is the timeline given in both the original Night and Marion Wiesel’s 2006 translation:

It was daytime when I awoke. I went to look for my father. (Feb. 2nd) 

[…]

On the third day after our arrival at Buchenwald, everyone had to go to the showers [his father went too-cy]. Even the sick who had to go through last. (Feb 4th)  […] Struck down by dysentery, my father lay in his bunk, five other invalids with him. I sat by his side watching him … A week went by like this. (Feb. 11th or Feb. 8th depending on how you read it)

[ . . . ]

When I got down after roll call, I could see his lips trembling as he murmured something. […] Then I had to go to bed. I climbed into my bunk, above my father, who was still alive. It was January 28, 1945. (still Feb. 8 or 11) I awoke on January 29 at dawn. In my father’s place lay another invalid. They must have taken him away before dawn and carried him to the crematory.” (Feb 12th or 9th)  [Stella  Rodway translation, pp 107-112]

The timeline in Un di velt is not in doubt:

On the seventh or eighth day of our being in Buchenwald, the bunk-elder [should be block-elder -cy) who used to deal out bread for the whole bunk [sic], came to me. . . .  

[ . . . ]

On the same day, in the evening, disaster struck. The end. During roll call.  The healthy had to go out of the block in order to be counted by the S.S. men.  The sick stayed in their bunks.  My father and I thus stayed inside.   He — because of his dysentery and I — because of my bandaged foot.  Father was lying in the lowest bunk and I — in the uppermost.

[ . . . ]

After roll call, I immediately jumped down from the uppermost bunk and ran to him.  He was still breathing.  But — he was silent.

[ . . . ]

For a couple of hours I stayed by him and looked at his face long and well […] Then they forced me to go lie down to sleep. I climbed up to the uppermost bunk and I did not know that in the morning, on awakening, I would find my father no more.

It was the eighteenth of Shevat, 5705.  

* * *

Nineteenth of Shevat.  Early in the morning.

 I got up and ran to my father.  Another sick man was lying in his place.

 I had a father no more. (pp 233-238)

Readers might be surprised to learn that the Hebrew calendar date of 18-19 Shevat, 5705 corresponds to February 1-2, 1945! How neat is that? So, in Un di velt Father dies seven days after arrival, on the very same day as Abraham Viezel died, who was officially recorded at Buchenwald with the registration number of 123488 and the Auschwitz registration number of A-7712. (However, Un di velt also says that the trip from Gleiwitz to Buchenwald took ten days, which means they could not have arrived until sometime in February. Seven days from that time would not be Feb. 2nd.)

So can we conclude from this that Abraham is Shlomo? Not necessarily. The Yiddish author  reports Father’s death as occurring during the night of 18-19 Shevat (Feb. 1-2), but Elie Wiesel, author of La Nuit, says the date is Jan. 28th! Why? Who can answer that but Elie Wiesel? He certainly knows what the month of Shevat and the year 5705 means … or he could have easily found out.

Or can we conclude that Un di velt was written by Lazar Wiesel, as Nikolaus Grüner claims … that he wrote his story as a father-son relationship … and that he was perhaps not the brother of Abraham as Grüner says he was? (It’s noted on Lazar’s Buchenwald file card that his father was also in Buchenwald; his mother in Auschwitz.) Well, again, not necessarily.  There are other possibilities. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The facts are, there are problems with all of these theories; none is a perfect fit. We can ask: If Elie Wiesel is the author of Un di velt hot geshvign, why did he change so many of the underpinning facts of the story when he rewrote it in French as La Nuit? This is a real head-scratcher. We can also ask: Why did Naomi Seidman, the Jewish professor who discussed in detail some of the differences between the Yiddish book and Night, not mention the 18th of Shevat? Is it because she couldn’t find an explanation for it? Siedman, Ruth Franklin and other Jewish reviewers have never brought up some of these Yiddish to French discrepancies. They are too embarrassing a problem for them.

What we can safely say is that no matter who the author of Un di velt was … he was totally unfamiliar with the real facts of when the Monowitz prisoners arrived at Buchenwald. Was it because he was not one of them? Was it  because he was not concerned about accuracy since his story was directed at a non-critical audience—a Yiddish-speaking Jewish audience? As we continue, we’ll find more mystifications, but also a few certainties.

 What happens to Eliezer after Father’s death?

Wiesel writes in Night (essentially the same in all translations):

I had to stay at Buchenwald until April eleventh. I have nothing to say of my life during this period. […] I was transferred to the children’s block, where there were six hundred of us. […] I spent my days in a state of total idleness. And I had one desire—to eat. I no longer thought of my father or of my mother. (SR, P 114)

He continues that on April 10, a general evacuation of the remainder of the camp—20,000 prisoners in all, including “several hundred children”—was begun but was soon interrupted. It resumed on the 11th but was again interrupted around ten a.m. when the camp inmate “resistance movement” rose up, firing guns. And then at 6 p.m. on that same day the first American tank arrived. This corresponds pretty well with the official story, but then it goes astray.

In a November 2000 interview with Oprah Winfrey, Wiesel recalled:

… and we [children] were left until the end. But every day we marched to the gate anyway. I was near the gate more than five times before I was released, and each time, the gate closed just before I came to it. 

Ah, we have heard this before, haven’t we? As exaggerated as it sounds, in Un di velt the author goes even further. He writes:

I didn’t even bother to try hiding myself.  Let myself be born along with the stream.  Tens of times I stood before the iron camp gate, on the threshold of death, and always something happened which brought us back to the block.  

Un di velt continues: “If I was not killed then it is merely thanks to almighty chance.   For — because of the hunger, I even wanted to go to the gate: outside the gate, they were distributing bread and marmalade.”

Above:Elie interviewed by Oprah in 2000. Right: The front gate at Buchenwald, from the inside looking out, that Wiesel says he marched right up to “tens of times” but was always turned back!

Liberation brings Freedom and Revenge

UdV, P 244:  The first gesture of freedom: the starved men made an effort to get something to eat. They only thought about food. Not about revenge. Not about their parents. Only about bread. And even when they had satisfied their hunger—they still did not think about revenge.

SR, P 115: Our first act as free men was to throw ourselves onto the provisions. We thought only of that. Not of revenge, not of our families. Nothing but bread.

Oprah Winfrey interview:  Oprah asks, “After you were liberated, what did you do?” Wiesel answers: “The first thing many of us did was reassemble to say a prayer for the dead.”  (page 5)

*   *   *   * 

UdV, P 244:  Early the next day Jewish boys ran off to Weimar to steal clothing and potatoes. And to rape German girls [un tsu fargvaldikn daytshe shikses]. The historical commandment of revenge was not fulfilled.

LN, P 178:  Le lendemain, quelques jeunes gens coururent à Weimar ramasser des pommes de terre et des habits—et coucher avec des filles. Mais de vengeance, pas trace.

SR, P 116:  On the following day, some of the young men went to Weimar to get some potatoes and clothes—and to sleep with girls. But of revenge, not a sign.

MW, P115:  The next day a few of the young men ran into Weimar to bring back some potatoes and clothes—and to sleep with girls. But still no trace of revenge.

In this case, Wiesel made the change from ‘rape’ to ‘sleep with’ in La Nuit. The expression for “German girls” that we find in the Yiddish book was also removed. The term that was actually used is shikses, a word which originally meant “abomination” and which is used today as a term of contempt for all non-Jewish women. In other words, in saying daytshe shikses, the author was expressing, in rather vulgar terms, his contempt and hatred for German women. This apparently was not good for the eyes of the Goyim to see. It was changed by Wiesel in the French La Nuit, and thus it never reached our eyes until now.

Yet, the Yiddish author goes even further and decries the failure of the Jewish males to take a proper revenge, which is here envisioned as a much larger public act of retribution than the “too mild” raping of German women. (Public retribution, of course, did come later with the Nuremberg Military Tribunals.)

Eliezer is hospitalized for two weeks—April 14 to April 28

UdV P 244:  Three days after liberation I became very ill; food-poisoning. They took me to the hospital and the doctors said that I was gone. For two weeks I lay in the hospital between life and death. My situation grew worse from day to day.

SR P 116:  Three days after the liberation I became very ill with food poisoning. I was transferred to the hospital and spent two weeks between life and death.

MW P 115:  Three days after the liberation of Buchenwald, I became very ill: some form of poisoning. I was transferred to a hospital and spent two weeks between life and death.

Three days after liberation on April 11th is April 14th. Thus, Eliezer is in the hospital from April 14 until April 28—extremely ill, close to death. In his 1995 memoir, All Rivers Run to the Sea, Elie Wiesel claims that on that day (the 14th) he was thrown a can of lard, which he apparently ate although he doesn’t remember doing so. He lost consciousness and awoke in a hospital. But the addition of this story, which is in the original Un di velt, presents serious problems for Elie Wiesel. Perhaps the hospital story had slipped his mind when he decided to claim he was one of the survivors lying on a bunk in the “famous Buchenwald liberation photograph.” Because he was in the hospital …

He cannot be in the famous Buchenwald liberation photo taken on April 16 …

I have already demolished the false claim that Wiesel is in that photograph here. But on top of that, our translator found an interview of Leo Eitinger, a Jewish Czech-born psychiatrist, by Harry James Cargas, a friend and biographer of Elie Wiesel, which contained this gem:

 HJC:   The same thing happened with Livia Rothkirchen at Yad Vashem as happened with you. I was there doing research on atrocity photography for my book A Christian Response to the Holocaust and saw a photo that covers a large wall, of seventeen men lying in their bunks at liberation time. I think you’ve probably seen this picture. Wiesel and Dr. Rothkirchen passed it by many times, over a several-year period, before he told her he was in that photograph. I asked Elie if I could write something about it and he said, “No.” I wrote something and showed it to him and he gave me permission to publish it. 

LE: I didn’t know Elie is in the photo.4

Cargas’ book was published in 1993, ten years after it was publicly announced that Elie Wiesel was in that photograph. Apart from the revelation that Cargas has to ask permission from Wiesel before he publishes anything about him, can you imagine that after walking by that famous photo for several years, Wiesel would finally think to say, “Oh hey, that’s me laying there, back in the shadows.”

Right:  The photo at Yad Vashem in Israel with Elie Wiesel posing in front of it in 1986 after receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo.

He cannot have been present to agree to and sign the Military Questionaire on April 22 …

Much has been made by holocaust historians like Kenneth Waltzer and others I won’t name that this Fragebogen made out for Lázár Wiesel proves that Elie Wiesel was in Buchenwald. The birth date is not Elie’s; the date of arrest is not Elie’s; the signature is not Elie’s; the registration number belongs to another prisoner (Pavel Kun) who died only a month earlier; and on top of all that … Elie himself tells us in Night that he was lingering between life and death in the hospital on April 22. He was still six days away from having recovered enough to leave the hospital.

He cannot be in the photograph of the “Boys of Buchenwald” taken on April 27.

Kenneth Waltzer also claims on his Michigan State University website that Elie Wiesel is “seen to the left”  (fourth from the front in left row wearing dark suit in front of the taller boy wearing a beret) in this photograph of the youths being transferred from the barracks inside Buchenwald to the former SS barracks on the outside. Why is Waltzer not paying attention to what is written in Night – that Eliezer was put in the hospital on the 14th of April, at death’s door, and remained for two weeks? One really has to wonder at the stupidity of holocaust historians. Or more likely — how stupid they think the rest of us are! See The Many Faces of Elie Wiesel.

The book’s ending: What does the long passage in Un di velt hot geshvign tell us?

UdV P 245:  One fine day I got up—with the last of my energy—and went over to the mirror that was hanging on the wall. I wanted to see myself. I had not seen myself since the ghetto.

From the mirror a skeleton gazed out.

Skin and bones.

I saw the image of myself after my death. It was at that instant that the will to live was awakened.

Without knowing why, I raised a balled-up fist and smashed the mirror, breaking the image that lived within it.

And then—I fainted.

From that moment on my health began to improve.

I stayed in bed for a few more days, in the course of which I wrote the outline of the book you are holding in your hand, dear reader.

But—

Now, ten years after Buchenwald, I see that the world is forgetting. Germany is a sovereign state, the German army has been reborn. The bestial sadist of Buchenwald, Ilsa Koch, is happily raising her children. War criminals stroll in the streets of Hamburg and Munich. The past has been erased. Forgotten.

Germans and antisemites persuade the world that the story of the six million Jewish martyrs is a fantasy, and the naive world will probably believe them, if not today, then tomorrow or the next day.

So I thought it would be a good idea to publish a book based on the notes I wrote in Buchenwald.

I am not so naive to believe that this book will change history or shake people’s beliefs. Books no longer have the power they once had. Those who were silent yesterday will also be silent tomorrow. I often ask myself, now, ten years after Buchenwald:

Was it worth breaking that mirror? Was it worth it?

SR P 116:  One day I was able to get up, after gathering all my strength. I wanted to see myself in the mirror hanging on the opposite wall. I had not seen myself since the ghetto.

From the depths of the mirror, a corpse gazed back at me.

The look in his eyes, as they stared into mine, has never left me.

MW P 115:  One day when I was able to get up, I decided to look at myself in the mirror on the opposite wall. I had not seen myself since the ghetto.

From the depths of the mirror, a corpse was contemplating me.

The look in his eyes as he as he gazed at me has never left me.

The difference in length between the Yiddish and the English passage is the first thing that strikes us. The Yiddish writer had a lot to say in these final thoughts. He regained his “will to live” right there in the hospital. Twice he speaks of writing an outline and notes for Un di velt hot geshvign  while still in his hospital bed. But there is no record by Elie Wiesel anywhere that says he did any writing in preparation for writing his “testimony” while in the camp (in fact, just the opposite), or at any time in advance of 1954.

The tragic true story of Ilse Koch is that she gave birth to one child while a prisoner of the Americans but she certainly was not allowed to raise him. She was hounded, vilified and persecuted after the war, retried by a German court in 1951 after being acquitted at the IMT, and ultimately given a life sentence—solely, it can be argued, to satisfy Jewish vengence. She committed suicide in prison in 1967.

Left: Ilse Koch on the witness stand in 1947.  She was  seven months pregnant and the only woman brought before the American Military Tribunals held at Dachau.

The Yiddish author also mentions the “six million Jewish martyrs” … in 1954. This number emerged from the Nuremberg Tribunals, but we know that claims of “six million Jewish victims” goes all the way back to the 1890’s.

All this and more was cut out for the French La Nuit (which, remember, was written by Wiesel) and the English versions which were taken from the French. As has been noted by Jewish commentators themselves, the Yiddish writer is an angry, politically-minded religious Jew who expected, or wished, the world to have been transformed by the travail of the Jews during WWII. He is bitterly disappointed. There is more in this final chapter of the Yiddish book that doesn’t appear in the French or English versions. Here is just one passage:

 Dreams of truth, of freedom are false dreams for men. Visions of justice and equality are false visions for men. Man is: the struggle for bread, for meat; man is: the struggle to satisfy one’s own instincts.

Man is instinct to the core.  Flesh to the core.  And not heart.  And not spirit.  And not morality.

I learned that in Buchenwald. And what one learns in such conditions is without a doubt the truth, the purest truth.  For man can really know man only in extreme conditions, when he has thrown away from himself all masks, social and psychological, and appears before us naked, as he is in truth.

In Buchenwald I saw the true face of man.  The face of a human animal, which is worse than a true animal. O God, woe is you, woe is man, how trifling and puny.  Ought you to even exist, if the son of Adam was made in your image!

God . . . I had ceased to believe in his existence.  But despite that, I continued to believe in his evil. (UdV, P 240-41)

Was this written by Elie Wiesel? If it was, he is a man who has put on his own mask to play the game of Jewish vengence against the goyim persecutors of his people. In other parts of Night, Wiesel writes of losing his faith in a caring God, of no longer following his religion—but later he denied that is true, even though he wrote it! But this passage in Un di velt is too passionate to dismiss as merely a passing sense of discouragement. That is, of course, unless it is just a literary construct and doesn’t reflect any truth of the author.

What does it all mean?

The title of this two-part article is “What Changes were made to Elie Wiesel’s Night, and Why.” I didn’t promise to solve the mystery of the author of Un di velt hot geshvign, but I did hope I might do so, or at least eliminate some contenders.

I confess I expected there to be more difference between the Yiddish and the French books than it turns out to be. It is now clear that La Nuit was taken directly from Un di velt, although that doesn’t mean they were written by the same person. However, that is the greater likelihood unless it can be proven otherwise. Similarly, if Elie Wiesel is the author of Un di velt, it doesn’t mean he was in the camps. The fact that the books are filled with errors argues against it.

Night is a novel

It’s difficult to come to any certainties when the material we have to work with is so internally inconsistent and when there are several versions of it—similar in some ways to the many versions of the Anne Frank Diary. But we can conclude for certain that Night only works as a novel, not as an autobiography—no matter how much the Jewish spin doctors say that a memoir, to be a work of “great literature,” must include some fictional flights of fantasy. Nowhere does Night fit the facts. Even with wife Marion’s changes in 2006, it couldn’t be pulled together enough to make a convincing true-life testimony. And we know how many of these “survivor novels” there are around. It’s not like many other hopefuls didn’t have the same idea!

The Lazar-Lázár Riddle

In spite of all the above, I would like to propose a hypothetical scenario, one that I am not endorsing, for obvious reasons, but that does have the value of answering one of the more ignored aspects of this riddle, namely the way the 31-year-old Lazar Wiesel disappeared at the same time the 16-year-old Lázár Wiesel appeared. This cannot be denied. Thirty-one-year-old Lazar arrived at Buchenwald in January; sixteen-year-old Lázár left there in July. The easiest explanation for this is that Lazar wanted to have the papers of a 16-year-old Buchenwald orphan so he could be sent to France. In the confusion of the last months of the war and the immediate post-war period, this kind of thing became more possible.  Such an explanation may sound a little far-fetched, but is it any harder to swallow than Elie Wiesel not having the tattoo (Auschwitz ID number) that he says he has? Or Elie Wiesel not having his own Buchenwald identification number, but “borrowing” a dead man’s (Pavel Kun, 2 years older than Elie) right before, or after, liberation? These things don’t make sense. Nor does the fact that in La Nuit Elie Wiesel wrote that his father died on Jan. 28, 1945, while in the Yiddish book that he also claims to have written as his own “testimony” the date is Feb. 2nd?  Or that he wrote that the Russian Army took over the Auschwitz complex two days after its evacuation, which everyone knows is false?

Elie Wiesel even wrote in Night that his foot was operated on right before the evacuation of Auschwitz, while in his later real memoir, All Rivers Run to the Sea (pp 89-90), he flat-out recalled it as his knee, something that could not be mis-remembered. I could list many of these senseless “mistakes,” many of which I have written about in earlier articles.

There is something that doesn’t fit well into this Lazar-Lázár hypothesis, though—that is, that we have pictures of the real Elie Wiesel in France at the Jewish welfare orphanage, OSE. But how did he get through a year at Auschwitz and Buchenwald with no records of his being there … and a poor memory of what occurred and when?  Did he somehow manage to attach himself to the Buchenwald transport with the stolen identity papers? But also, there are other ways he could have come to be at the Ecouis homes in France  than in the children’s transport from Buchenwald. Just as there are other ways he could have come into possession of the Yiddish Un di velt without writing it himself.

Was Elie Wiesel in the camps?

My answer is still no. Wiesel could have been in some camps in some capacity under some auspices, but he is not telling the truth about what camp experience he did have. That means Hilda Wiesel Kudler is also not telling the truth but is standing by her brother. She says at the end of her bitter testimony to the Shoah Foundation, “I will not forget, and I will not forgive.” Have you ever wondered why Elie has not contributed a videotaped testimony to the Spielberg/USC Shoah Foundation library?

Wiesel’s other sister, who changed her name to Beatrice from Batia, never wrote or testified  a word about it. She did go to work for Jewish organizations in Germany, however, immediately after the war, helping Jews to emigrate to wherever they wanted to go, including Palestine. The whole family were committed Zionists, as were most Eastern European/Russian Jews who were able to flood into the West because of the war. ‘Bea’ finally got her own papers to emigrate to Canada.

Left: Elie Wiesel with his older sisters Bea (left) and Hilda (right) in Paris after the war, exact date unknown.

A Jewish organization, Sharit Ha-Platah, gathered names of Jews who were liberated from Dachau and it’s many sub-camps and published them in 1946. This is the only record so far found with the names of Hilda and Beatrice Wiesel, and it is a self-identified list of Jews by Jews, not an official German record of forced laborers or prisoners. So the hard evidence for the Wiesel family is not there. It doesn’t mean they weren’t, however; it’s  just that we’re left with believing what they say, because we want to or because we’re expected to.

The easiest option is to go along with Elie Wiesel’s story that he was in those camps, and question his credibility from other angles, such as the in-credible stories he tells. This is what revisionists had done before Nikolaus Grüner came along and released documents he had obtained from Buchenwald and the correspondence he had with the archivists there. These documents cannot be ignored, in spite of what other nonsense Grüner writes in his book Stolen Identity. These documents have caused a “sea change” in revisionism about Elie Wiesel, to the extent that it can be divided between pre-Grüner and post-Grüner research and writing.

Because of these documents, it is up to Elie Wiesel to come forth and answer questions about them. But being that he is completely unprepared to do so, this job has been given to his surrogates—Professor Waltzer for one. Kenneth Waltzer promised, with a lot of bombast, that he would produce proof that Elie is Lazar and that Shlomo is Abraham, but for a year now he has failed to produce it, or even say anything more about it. He has also failed to come out with his promised book, “The Rescue of Children and Youths at Buchenwald,” which was to include Elie Wiesel. In the opinion of this writer, Waltzer is as big a fraud as Wiesel, selling emotion and sentimentality instead of factual history. They are both supported with professorships at well-funded universities.

So, back to the main question: Was Elie Wiesel in Auschwitz and Buchenwald?  As I said, my answer is still no … and no one should accept that he was without some further explanation from him, during which he subjects himself to questions. If he’s genuine, he can certainly withstand questions. That, however, is not going to happen because … fill in your own answer.

Elie Wiesel has kept the details of his life before 1955 vague. He has managed to prevent unwanted questions from being asked of him. He hides behind a stated aversion to “holocaust deniers” so that anyone who is not a 100% believer is not welcome in his company. He gets away with the ‘moral outrage’ he professes toward anyone who doubts, thus no interviewer, reporter, writer, academic, student or even President dares to doubt in his presence. It works like a charm.

Endnotes

1.  Danuta Czech,  Auschwitz Chronicle: 1939-1945.  New York: Henry Holt, 1997

2.  APMO, D-Bu 3/17, pp. 18-85, 87 (transport list as cited by Czech in Auschwitz Chronicle)

3.  Hilda was obviously unaware that the march itself was only 24 hours, probably because she had heard so many false and exaggerated stories about “endless days of marching” that proliferate in survivor stories.

4.  Harry James Cargas, ed.  Voices from the Holocaust, Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1993.  pp. 116-22.

On Tuesday, January 17, 2006, Amazon.com announced that it was changing the categorization of a new translation of Elie Wiesel’s Night from novel to memoir.

Amazon would also revise the editorial description of the original edition to make clear that they consider the book a memoir, not a novel. “We hope to make these changes as quickly as possible,” said Jani Strand, a spokeswoman for the online retailer. The day before, Oprah Winfrey had announced that Night was her latest book club choice, displacing her previous selection, James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces.

The sudden switch from fiction to non-fiction caused some discussion and questions, which Strand brushed away by saying,  “Amazon.com’s data source for the Oprah Book Club edition of Night inaccurately classified the book as fiction.” She declined to offer details. The book, re-classified as “Autobiography” and blessed by Oprah, was already No.3 on Amazon.com as of that Tuesday afternoon! Wiesel, interviewed later with his literary agent Georges Borchardt, insisted they had never portrayed it as a novel.

But the publisher did.1 There has been confusion about the question for so long—even Wiesel’s defenders have to admit it. Ruth Franklin, in her 2011 book, A Thousand Darknesses, wrote: “Unfortunately, Night is an imperfect ambassador for the infallibility of the memoir, owing to the fact that it has been treated very often as a novel—by journalists, by scholars, and even by its publishers.”2  On Night’s Wikipedia page it has long been described as autobiography, memoir, novel—yes, all three. How long will that continue? As long as there are editions of Night that still sport those labels, one assumes.

 Left: Oprah Winfrey and Elie Wiesel pose together at the  Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity Award Dinner at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel on May  20, 2007.  Winfrey was honored  with  the  Humanitarian   Award for “positively impacting people all over the world, especially children.”  One year earlier, she had selected Wiesel’s “Night” for her popular book club “pick” which sent it immediately to the top of the national bestseller lists.

As for Wiesel and Borchardt, they answered questions about differences in the text of the new edition by saying they were not significant enough to justify raising questions. The next day, Wiesel’s wife Marion, the translator of the new edition of Night, said in an interview that among the changes was a reference to the age of the book’s narrator when he arrives in 1944 at Birkenau, the entry point for Auschwitz.

“At no point did this change the meaning and the fact of anything in the book,” Marion Wiesel said. She explained it this way:  The narrator tells a fellow prisoner that he is “not quite 15.” But the scene takes place in Spring 1944. Mr. Wiesel, born on Sept. 30, 1928, would have already been 15, going on 16. So in the new edition, she changed it to “15.” Whaaaa? She changed the age as it was written in the Yiddish to fit Elie Wiesel, who was fifteen and a half at that time and would not have written “not quite 15.” What is written in the Yiddish original, Un di velt hot geshvign, we also find in the original Night. I will add that if your birthday is still four months away, you don’t say you are “not quite” your next age, especially when you are young. Marion tried to joke it away, telling reporters “I kidded Elie and told him, ‘I don’t think you can add.’”

But that particular change, rather than insignificant, was one of the major reasons that a new translation was undertaken. There are other quite significant changes in the new edition that will be enumerated in this article. When you learn what they are, you can decide for yourself if you think they are insignificant.

Right: Marion Wiesel is the translator of the 2006 edition of  Night. Here, in 2010, she attends an after party at The Monkey Bar for Oliver Stone’s new “South of the Border” New York premiere at Cinema 21.

Wiesel wrote a Preface to the New Translation, something he didn’t have in the original La Nuit or Night.

In his preface, Wiesel begins: “Why did I write it? … so as not to go mad or, on the contrary, to go mad in order to understand the nature of madness …”

He continues in this vein—typical Wiesel mystical-religious style. However, in his only description of the writing process of this book—the typing of the 862 pages which he titled Un di velt hot geshvign, according to his later memoir—it is hard to believe that he was in such a state of mind. He writes in All Rivers Run to the Sea that during this time in Paris he is busy with his newspaper job and contacts; also involved in a love affair with a woman named Hanna. He embarks on a major journalistic assignment in Brazil, sent by his editor, taking along a friend to keep him company on the ship’s crossing. They both get free tickets from a “resourceful Israeli friend”—these benefactors are usually unnamed. As the voyage begins, he says his mind is dwelling on Hanna and whether he should take the marriage step that she had asked for.

I can’t imagine an atmosphere less conducive to writing about what he describes as “the immense, terrifying madness that had erupted in history.” But he continues very matter-of-factly in All Rivers, “During the crossing I wrote my testimony …” and in one short paragraph tells us all he thought important to say about it. Moreover, he has never elaborated on it since!

In the new preface, Wiesel writes that in retrospect he doesn’t know what he wanted to achieve with his words, but then he comes up with something: “I knew that I must bear witness. I also knew that, while I had many things to say, I did not have the words to say them.” He needed to “invent a new language.” He is not speaking of an actual language, like German, French or English—but a language of survivors, or for survivors. Wiesel writes that common words like “hunger—thirst—fear—transport—selection—fire—chimney … all have intrinsic meaning, but in those times, they meant something else.” Really? He does not explain how that is so. But Wiesel has tried to create the idea of holocaust survivors as a special class, set apart, who know things others do not know, and can never understand—”Only those who experienced Auschwitz know what it was. Others will never know.”

Wiesel describes his writing as slow!  “Writing in my mother tongue (Yiddish) … I would pause at every sentence, and start over and over again. I would conjure up other verbs, other images, other silent cries. It still was not right.” This contrasts totally with his description in his memoir All Rivers Run to the Sea (p. 238-40)  that he wrote the original Yiddish manuscript fast and feverishly without re-reading!

Why a new translation of Night after 45 years of success with the old one?

Here again, Wiesel hedges in the preface and doesn’t have a convincing answer. He says his wife Marion has translated other books for him, and “knows his voice better than anyone else.” He says he didn’t pay enough attention to the original English translation by Stella Rodway—after his first reading of Night from the publisher, he never read it again. As for Mrs. Wiesel: “Fluent in French, she had never read the English version,” she said. But good news! Elie Wiesel Cons The World has found a translator and now has large portions of the Yiddish book translated into English. We can compare the real 245-page original to both the 1960 English translation from the French by Stella Rodway and the 2006 English translation done by Marion Wiesel.

In doing so, we have made two important discoveries.

First, Stella Rodway’s 1960 English translation of Night is an accurate rendition of the French text of La Nuit, as originally published in 1958.  That means that if there are any “errors” in the Night story, they weren’t put there by Stella Rodway.

Second, when we compare the three texts—the original version of Night, as translated by Rodway, the “corrected” 2006 translation by Marion Wiesel, and the 1955 Yiddish original of Un di velt hot geshvign—we find that the “errors” brought up by Marion Wiesel are for the greater part what was actually written in the original Yiddish book, though usually in more detail there.

In other words, the 1955 Yiddish version, the 1958 French version, and the 1960 English version generally agree—only the “corrected” 2006 translation is different.  So, are these really errors of translation that Marion Wiesel is fixing for us?  Or are they not simply problems for Elie Wiesel?  Under close scrutiny, the Elie Wiesel narrative has huge holes which bring up embarrassing questions, and this is what Marion Wiesel’s new translation was meant to head off.

Left: Original Night cover, 1960, features the title, while the author’s name is exceptionally small and insignificant. Francois Mauriac’s forward is featured.  In 2006, the author becomes the “title,” i.e. the main selling point, and Mauriac is no longer mentioned, although his forward remains in the book.

A Comparison of the 1960 original with the 2006 new version.

Following are the most “significant” differences I have found between the Stella Rodway 1960 translation and the Marion Wiesel 2006 translation. To make as clear a case as possible, I begin with the Yiddish [UdV] and its French translation La Nuit [LN], followed by the Stella Rodway English translation [SR]. Finally, Marion Wiesel’s revised translation [MW]. The word or phrase being compared is in boldface. Number one has already been written about in When Did Elie Wiesel Arrive at Auschwitz?

1.  The Saturday before Pentecost … or two weeks before?

UdV Page 22: Geshen iz dos Shbth far Shbw’wth. A friling-zun hot oysgegosn ir likht un varemkeyt iber der gorer velt un oykh iber geto …  /  It happened Saturday [Sabbath] before Shavuot. The springtime sun had spread its light and warmth over the whole world, and even over the ghetto. . . .

LN Page 29: Le samedi précédant la Pentecôte, sous un soleil printanier, les gens se promenaient insouciants à travers les rues grouillantes de monde / The Saturday preceding Pentecost …

SR Page 23:  On the Saturday before Pentecost, in the Spring sunshine, people strolled carefree and unheeding, through the swarming streets.

MW Page 12:  Some two weeks before Shavuot (Pentecost). A sunny spring day, people strolled seemingly carefree through the crowded streets.

The Yiddish, the French and the original English versions agree—it was the Saturday before the festival of Pentecost/Shavuot—but Marion Wiesel’s new edition sets that date back by two whole weeks. This is important because, as the story continues, it was later on the following day that the Jews of Sighet were forced to leave their homes in preparation for their eventual deportation:  “The ghetto was to be liquidated entirely. We were to leave street by street, starting the following day.”

So Mrs.Wiesel was NOT correcting errors in the English translation, but changing the text to fit the reality of when the Hungarians from Sighet arrived at Birkenau.  Pentecost was on Sunday, May 28, 1944. The “Saturday before Pentecost” is thus May 27. Some two weeks before is May 14.

Un di velt hot geshvign, La Nuit and the Rodway translation all have Eliezer’s family leaving on the final journey to Auschwitz around June 2nd, six days after Pentecost/Shavuot, which was a Friday. However, they also agree that “Saturday, the day of rest, was chosen for our expulsion.” So it’s necessary for us to add another day to the family’s stay in the small ghetto to make the chronology work.  On Saturday, then, the Jews are marched to the synagogue and spend the night there; in the morning, Sunday June 4, they board the train: “The following morning [Sunday], we marched to the station, where a convoy of cattle wagons was waiting. [… ] We were on our way.”  Four days and three nights on the train (according to the description in Night) makes their arrival date June 6, 1944, around midnight.

But this is not only long after the prisoner number A7713—which Elie Wiesel supposedly received at Auschwitz, and still (again, supposedly!) has tattooed on his left arm—had been given out, but also long after the last transport left from Sighet.  Indeed, there were no transports from the town after May, according to official records.

Marion Wiesel did not mention this one to the reporters; nor did Elie speak of it in his preface to his wife’s translation. But it was discovered by our translator. Marion Wiesel’s arbitrary “correction” allows Eliezer’s family to leave on May 21 and to arrive  by May 24 (just before midnight!) thus making it possible for Eliezer to receive the registration number A7713. This is a very significant change, probably the most significant in her entire new English translation.

An added note: This interesting passage is on page 27 of Un di velt, but is not included in the shorter French or English Night:

We had opportunities and possibilities to hide with regular goyim and with prominent personalities. Many non-Jews from the surrounding villages had begged us, that we would come to them. There were bunkers available for us in villages or in the mountains. But we had cast aside all proposals. Why? Quite simple: the calendar showed April 1944 and we, the Jews of Sighet, still knew nothing about Treblinka, Buchenwald and Auschwitz.

Now we have April as the general time of deportation!  So according to the timeline we find in Un di velt, Eliezer and his family left Sighet some time in June, while the calendar on their wall still said April . . .  and in the meantime, we know from official Auschwitz records that the deportations actually occured in the last two weeks of May.  The person who wrote this knew nothing about the real deportation dates for the Sighet Jews.

2.  Copulating on the train … or just caressing?

UdV Page 47:  Tsulib der engshaft hobn a sakh instinktn zikh dervekt in kerper.  Erotishe instinktn, un untern forhang fun der nakht hobn yungeleyt un froyen zikh gelozn bahersht durkh di oyfgereytste chwshym zeyere.

Ot der ershter rezultat fun umglik: erotishe freyheyt.  Di shpanung fun di letste teg hot itst gezukht a veg vi oystsulodn zikh un der leychtster iz geven – an erotisher.

Di erotishe stsenes hobn nisht dervekt keyn protestn mtsd di eltere Yidn.  Zey hobn farmakht oyern un oygn, zikh gemakht nisht zen un nisht hern.  In moment fun schnh faln avek di keytn fun der konventsioneler moral.  Mentshn hobn zikh getrakht: ver veys vos der morgn iz “lwl tsu brengen?  Zol yugnt oysnutsn dem heynt, oystsapn fun im dem letstn hn’h-tropn . . .

In English: Because of the crowding, a host of instincts awoke in [people’s] bodies.  Erotic instincts – and beneath the curtain of night young men and women let themselves be ruled by their aroused senses.

And so the first result of misfortune: erotic freedom.  The stress of the last days now sought a way to discharge itself, and the easiest was – an erotic one.

The erotic scenes did not arouse any protests from the older Jews.  They closed their ears and eyes, and forced themselves not to see and hear.  In the moment of danger, the chains of conventional morality fall away.  People thought to themselves: who knows what the morning is likely to bring?  Youth must seize the day, squeeze from it the last drops of pleasure . . .

LN Page 45: Libérés de toute censure sociale, les jeunes se laissaient aller ouvertement à leurs instincts et à la faveur de la nuit, s’accouplaient au milieu de nous, sans se préoccuper de qui que ce fût, seuls dans le monde.  Les autres faisaient semblant de ne rien voir.

SR Page 34:  “Free from all social constraint, the young people gave way openly to instinct, taking advantage of the darkness to copulate in our midst, without caring about anyone else, as though they were alone in the world. The rest pretended not to notice anything.”

MW Page 23:  “Freed of normal constraints, some of the young let go of their inhibitions and, under cover of darkness, caressed one another, without any thought of others, alone in the world. The others pretended not to notice.”

Elie Wiesel did not mention this change in his preface to the new English translation by his wife, but he did give quite a lengthy explanation (humorous to us) in the preface he wrote for the new French edition. This is what he said there:

Thanks to her, it was possible for me to correct an incorrect expression or impression here and there.  An example: I describe the first night-time voyage in the sealed cars, and I mention that certain persons had taken advantage of the darkness to commit sexual acts.  That’s false. In the Yiddish text, I say that “young boys and girls allowed themselves to be mastered by their excited erotic instincts.”  I have checked among many absolutely trustworthy sources.  In the train, all the families were still together.  A few weeks of the ghetto could not have degraded our behavior to the point of violating customs, mores and ancient laws.  That there may have been some clumsy touching, that is possible.  But that was all.  Nothing went any further.  But then, why did I say that in Yiddish, and allow it to be translated into French and English?  The only possible explanation: it is myself I am speaking of.  It is myself that I condemn.  I imagine that the adolescent that I was then, in the throes of puberty even if profoundly pious, could not resist such erotic imaginings, enriched by the physical proximity between men and women.

The original French : Grâce à elle, il me fut permis de corriger çà et là une expression ou une impression erronées. Exemple : j’évoque le premier voyage nocturne dans les wagons plombés et je mentionne que certaines personnes avaient profité de l’obscurité pour commettre des actes sexuels. C’est faux. Dans le texte yiddish je dis que « des jeunes garçons et filles se sont laissés maîtriser par leurs instincts érotiques excités. » J’ai vérifié auprès de plusieurs sources absolument sûres. Dans le train toutes les familles étaient encore réunies. Quelques semaines de ghetto n’ont pas pu dégrader notre comportement au point de violer coutumes, moeurs et lois anciennes. Qu’il y ait eu des attouchements maladroits, c’est possible. Ce fut tout. Nul n’est allé plus loin. Mais alors, pourquoi l’ai-je dit en yiddish et permis de le traduire en français et en anglais? La seule explication possible: c’est de moi-même que je parle. C’est moi-même que je condamne. J’imagine que l’adolescent que j’étais, en pleine puberté bien que profondément pieux, ne pouvait résister à l’imaginaire érotique enrichi par la proximité physique entre hommes et femmes.

Is this convincing, dear readers? Consider that the narrator of Un di velt says exactly the opposite of what Wiesel tries to present in his new French preface: the first result of a few weeks in the ghetto was erotic freedom, which was acted out in front of everyone in the train. And the “erotic instincts” that the youths let themselves be “ruled by” clearly must have involved sexual intercourse—why else would everyone have needed to shut their eyes and ears so tightly?

The Elie Wiesel of 2006 (and perhaps the Hasidic rebbes had something to do with this?) wants us to believe in the inviolable sanctity of the Jews’ “customs, mores and ancient laws,” and also in their innate respect for their elders and one another, but he is directly contradicted by what are, we are told, his own words of fifty years ago : “In the moment of danger, the chains of conventional morality fall away.”  Which Wiesel do we believe?

And Ruth Franklin (right), senior editor at The New Republic,  has the temerity to insist (in her 2006 review article) that “his [Elie’s] original suggestion that couples “copulated” in the cattle cars on the way to Auschwitz  . . .  was always a gross mistranslation of the original Yiddish.”  We’ve shown you here that it isn’t.

3.  Not yet fifteen … or fifteen?

UdV Page 63 : Yingl, vi alt bistu? fregt mir a heftling.  Zeyn pnym iz geven in der fintster, ober zeyn kol iz geven a mids, a varems. Nokh nisht keyn 15 yor, hob ikh geentfert. 

“Kid, how old are you?” a prisoner asked me.  His face was in darkness, but his voice was tired and warm. “Not yet 15 years,” I answered.

LN Page 54:  Hé, le gosse, quel âge as-tu?  C’était un détenu qui m’interrogeait.  Je ne voyais pas son visage, mais sa voix était lasse et chaude.  “Pas encore quinze ans.” / Not yet 15 years.

SR Page 39: “Here, kid, how old are you?” It was one of the prisoners who asked me this. I could not see his face, but his voice was tense and weary. “I’m not quite fifteen yet.”

MW Page 30:  “Hey, kid, how old are you?” The man interrogating me was an inmate. I could not see his face, but his voice  was weary and warm.  “Fifteen”

This very important passage was discussed above. I think the reader would agree that “not yet 15″ can mean even farther from the age of 15 than “not quite fifteen.” It can mean 14 ½. However, it is a minor point that I will not emphasize. What we can clearly see is that Marion Wiesel has changed the author’s original words to fit them to her husband’s age in Spring 1944.

4.   April … or May?

UdV Page 83:  A sheyner April-tog iz es geven. A frilings-rich in der luft.  In English:  It was a beautiful April day. A scent of spring in the air.

LN Page 69: C’était une belle journee d’avril.  Des parfums de printemps flottaient dans l’air.  Le soleil baissait vers l’ouest.

SR Page 49:  It was a beautiful April day. The fragrance of spring was in the air. The sun was setting in the west.

MW Page 40:  It was a beautiful day in  May. The fragrances of spring were in the air. The sun was setting.

(See again When Did Wiesel Arrive) Once more, the original Night as translated by Stella Rodway agrees with the Yiddish and the French; Marion Wiesel arbitrarily changed April to May, yet said her translation did not “change the meaning or the fact of anything in the book”  … what she calls a “significant change.” Well, this is a significant change, and for the same reason as given in number 1 above.

5.  Himmler … or “Reichsfuehrer Himmler?”

UdV Page 124-5:  “In nomen fun Himler . . . der heftling num’ . . . hot gegnbet . . . bsh”thn luft-alarm . . . loytn gezets, paragraf . . . iz der heftling num’ . . . farurteylt tsum toyt!  Zol dos zeyn a lere un a beyshpil far ale heftlingen . . .”

“In the name of Himmler . . . prisoner number . . . stole . . .  during the air raid . . . according to the law, paragraph . . . prisoner number . . . is condemned to death.  May this be a lesson and an example for all prisoners.”

LN Page 100:  “Au nom de Himmler ... Le détenu N^o… a dérobé pendant l’alerte… ”

SR Page 68:  “In the name of Himmler … prisoner Number … stole during the alert … According to the law … paragraph …prisoner Number … is condemned to death. May this be a warning and an example to all prisoners.”

MW Page 62:  “In the name of  Reichsfuehrer Himmler … prisoner number … stole during the air raid … according to the law … prisoner number … is condemned to death. Let this be a warning …..”

Again, the Yiddish and the original Night agree.  However, no trained member of the SS, or even the Wehrmacht, would ever have shown such disrespect as to use Himmler’s name in such a formal context without his full title: Reichsfuehrer SS Heinrich Himmler.  Marion Wiesel tried to fix the error by adding “Reichsfuehrer,” but she still gets it wrong: you don’t drop the “SS.”  On its own, this tells us that the speech was an imaginary one  invented by the author (whoever that is), someone who was never present at such a scene. Indeed, lack of knowledge about how the SS functioned in the camps is evident throughout the book. For example, the SS did not normally go inside the barracks; everything inside was handled by the kapos.

 Left: Reichsfuehrer SS Heinrich Himmler

6. Ten days and ten nights … or just “days and nights”

UdV Page 207:  Tsen teg un tsen nekht hot gedoyert di reyze. / Ten days and ten nights the trip lasted.

LN Page 155:   Dix jours, dix nuits de voyage.  Il nous arrivait de traverser des localités allemandes.

SR Page101:  Ten days, ten nights of traveling.  Sometimes we would pass through German townships.

MW Page 100:  There followed days and nights of traveling. Occasionally we would pass through German towns.

In January of 1945, as the advancing Red Army approached Auschwitz, a decision was made to evacuate, sending the prisoners to other camps in Germany.  Evacuation of the Monowitz (Auschwitz III) camp, to which Eliezer and Father had previously been transferred, began at 6 p.m. on January 18. The prisoners were given extra clothing and food—bread to carry with them. They also had whatever food they had saved up. After marching all night during a snowfall, they rested in the morning in an old brick factory. In late afternoon, they began again and reached Gleiwitz camp in a few hours [night, Jan. 19]; they then remained in Gleiwitz barracks for three days. On the 22nd  they went to the train stop and waited until evening. They were brought bread for the journey. The convoy set out

From there, as we see above, the Yiddish, the 1958 French and 1960 English versions agree on the trip lasting ten days and nights. But Marion Wiesel removes the number ten because it makes Eliezer’s timeline for the death of his father on Jan. 28/29 completely impossible. Another very significant change. Ten days and nights from the night of Jan. 22nd is the night of Feb 1, 1945.

This shows that the author of Un di velt knew nothing about the transport that arrived at Buchenwald on January 26 with 3000 prisoners from Auschwitz. This is the transport that, according to existing official records, brought Lazar and Abraham Wiesel to Buchenwald, who were registered at the camp there on  . . . January 26, 1945! (See Buchenwald Archivist Cannot ID Elie Wiesel, How True to Life is Wiesel’s description of Buchenwald, and Gigantic Fraud Carried Out.)

7. Fifteen … or sixteen?

UdV Page 213:  I was fifteen years old then. Do you understand—fifteen? Is it any wonder that I, along with my generation, do not believe either in God or in man; in the feelings of a son, in the love of a father. Is it any Wonder that I cannot realize that I myself experienced this thing, that my childish eyes had witnessed it?  (This passage from Moshe Spiegel’s stand-alone translation of Chapter Six of Un di velt hot geshvign, published as “The Death Train” in the 1968 volume Anthology of Holocaust Literature.)

LN Page 158:  J’avais quinze ans. / I was fifteen.

SR Page 103:  I was fifteen years old.

MW Page 102:  I was sixteen.

In the original versions, Eliezer repeats that he is fifteen years old in January 1945. Elie Wiesel’s birth date is Sept. 30, 1928 so on that day in 1944 he became sixteen years old, making him 16 years and 4 months when this particular event on the train to Buchenwald occurred in late January 1945. Once again, Marion Wiesel simply changes the age as she did before – if Elie was actually sixteen at that time, then Eliezer, the character in the book, must be too!

In Part Two, I will construct the timeline of the events in Buchenwald following the arrival of Eliezer and his father, and other details about Buchenwald. What will we find out?  Stay tuned.

Endnotes:

1. On the back cover of the original hardcover Night,  with the black & white striped jacket (as pictured here), it is printed “Literature” as the classification.  

2.  Ruth Franklin,  A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction, Oxford University Press, 2011,  pp 71-72.

Unfortunately, Night is an imperfect ambassador for the infallibility of the memoir, owing to the fact that it has been treated very often as a novel—by journalists, by scholars, and even by its publishers.  Lawrence Langer, in his landmark study The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination, notes that Night “continues to be classified and critically acclaimed as a novel, and not without reason.” . . .

Nonetheless, in 1997 Publishers Weekly columnist Paul Nathan had to issue a correction apologizing for referring to the book as an “autobiographical novel”; he had been misled, he said, by the entry on Wiesel in The International Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Biography.  In response, the correction itself was challenged by the director of Penguin Reference Books, publishers of the biography dictionary, who cited half a dozen sources to the effect that Night was in fact a novel.  Together with most critics, Gary Weissman, who recounted the above history in his book Fantasies of Witnessing: Postwar Efforts to Experience the Holocaust, seems to concur with Ernst Pawel’s remark in an early magazine survey of Holocaust fiction, that “the line between fact and fiction, tenuous at best, tends to vanish altogether in autobiographical novels such as Night.”  The hybrid terms used to describe it include “novel/autobiography,” “non-fictional novel,” “semi-fictional memoir,” “fictional-autobiographical memoir,” “fictionalized autobiographical memoir,” and “memoir-novel.

By Thomas Kues

In November 2010 I published a blog entry on an online video concerning the research activity of a young British archaeologist from the University of Birmingham, Caroline Sturdy Colls, who had set out to refute “Holocaust Deniers” by locating the mass graves at the Treblinka “extermination camp” using “the most up-to-date scientific techniques”.[1] Recently, a news report was published boldly stating that “mass graves at Nazi death camp Treblinka prove Holocaust deniers wrong”. In this we read that

“A British forensic archaeologist has unearthed fresh evidence to prove the existence of mass graves at the Nazi death camp Treblinka. Some 800,000 Jews were killed at the site, in north east Poland, during the Second World War but a lack of physical evidence at the site has been exploited by Holocaust deniers. Forensic archaeologist Caroline Sturdy Colls has now undertaken the first co-ordinated scientific attempt to locate the graves.”[2]

It is worth recalling that the same triumphatory claim that the “Holocaust deniers” finally and once and for all had been “refuted” was heard in connection with Kola’s surveys at Belzec and Sobibór, which in reality turned out to refute the official version of events relating to these two camps.

The above quoted news item was more or less a push for a radio program, “Hidden Graves of the Holocaust”, featuring Sturdy Colls as well as Yitzhak Arad and former Treblinka inmate Kalman Taigman, which was broadcast by BBC Radio 4 on 23 January 2012, 20:00 GMT.[3] In anticipation of this radio program, on the same date, a podcast interview was uploaded by the University of Birmingham “Ideas Lab”.[4] In this we can listen to the following description of the methods employed by Sturdy Colls and her team, as well as some vague descriptions of their findings:

“Interviewer: What technology have you used to investigate the site?

 Sturdy Colls: I used a number of non-invasive techniques at Treblinka and what this means is, as you quite rightly pointed out, the ground wasn’t disturbed due to Jewish burial law so the methods used didn’t involve any form of ground disturbance or excavation and this allowed us to investigate the historic and scientific potential of Treblinka but obviously it was very important that we recognised its religious and commemorative significance as well. So the techniques that were used, there was a process of archival research which involved looking at documentary records, revisiting historical data if you like, looking at known data and assessing it with an archaeological eye, so looking for information about the landscape. Then there was a process of looking for aerial photographs of the site, any ground based photography, accounts by the witnesses, plans that had been created, etc, to build up a database of information so that when I did do the survey all of that could be corroborated against my results. So in the field this involved field walking, so assessing the landscape, topographic survey which used advanced GPS and total station surveying to demarcate features on a plan of the site allowed us to record micro-topographic change which may be indicative of buried features. And also to assess the visibility of other features such as a number of artefacts that were actually identified in quite a remote part of the site. Then moving on from that to look below the ground I used a number of geophysical techniques, so quite often mentioned is ground penetrating radar and this was one of the methods used but this was also corroborated with other methods that detect other physical properties in the soil. So I also used resistance survey and an extension of that which allows 3D imaging of buried remains as well, to ensure that all of the properties of the buried remains could be characterised accurately.

 Interviewer: And what have you discovered?

 Sturdy Colls: Well the survey results when corroborated with historical information have indicated that there are a number of surviving building foundations at Treblinka just below the surface and also a considerable amount of obviously structural debris which the Nazis would have been simply unable to have removed from the site, and this supports accounts written by post-war investigators which commented upon the visibility of artefactual remains, structural remains, at the camp. We’ve also identified a number of pits at the site. Again, all these pits have been mapped and corroborated with witness plans and this is indicative of a number of probable graves at the site. It is recognised as part of the survey that the history of Treblinka didn’t end with its abandonment by the Nazis. Issues such as post-war looting and the construction of the memorial itself and a number of other forms of landscape change that have taken place at the site, you know, could confuse interpretation so it was essential that all of these were considered when the results from the geophysical survey in particular were being assessed. So then all of this data was married up with historical information so we seem to have a situation here where it’s been commonly believed that all of the victims at Treblinka were cremated, they were destroyed without trace, however, the research has revealed a much more complex picture of the disposal patterns used by the Nazis. Looking at it from an offender profiling perspective, so a slightly more forensic point of view, the Nazis worked on, as do most offenders, this principle of least effort where they would actually have a burial method that very much matched the nature of their victims or their locations within the camp and there are a number of photographs and physical evidence that we observed on the ground at Treblinka that demonstrates that these bodies were not reduced to ash, that some survive as mass graves in the truest sense and that also the ashes of the victims were redeposited into the pits that they were originally exhumed from upon Himmler’s order in 1943. Also with the topographic survey we’ve demonstrated that the camp as it’s marked currently on the ground by the modern memorial was actually much larger, that the boundaries of the camp should have been 50 metres further north and this has a knock-on effect for a number of structures within the camp itself. So we can examine it from a spatial point of view and look at all of these features in relation to each other and hopefully eventually start to build up a more detailed map of the camp as it existed during its operation.

 Interviewer: So you’ve now presented your findings to the authorities responsible for the memorial at Treblinka. Does this conclude investigations at the Treblinka site or is it sort of an ongoing project?

 Sturdy Colls: It’s absolutely an ongoing project. The survey demonstrated that the site has got huge potential in terms of what we can learn from the application of archaeological method and very much was the tip of the iceberg in terms of being the first survey of what I hope will be many more to come. I hope to return to the site later on this year and there will be subsequent seasons of fieldwork in coming years. As I mentioned, at the moment what we’ve got is a map of what survived at the camp as a result of my findings. However, in order to build up a map of the camp as it existed we need to do more work, we need to survey the site. Only a small proportion of the site has actually been surveyed so there’s huge potential to find out more about the history of this camp in the future.”

Somewhat more on the findings of Sturdy-Coll could be gleaned from the BBC 4 radio documentary “Hidden Graves of the Holocaust”. Starting at the mark 23:20 minutes we hear:

“Caroline Sturdy Colls: All the history books states that Treblinka was destroyed by the Nazis, in summary, the survey demonstrated that this simply isn’t the case. I have identified a number of buried [sic] pits using geophysical techniques. These are considerable. One in particular is 26 meters by 17 meters.

 Jonathan Charles: That’s huge.

 Sturdy Colls: It is huge. We are talking about a considerable number of bodies [which] could have been contained within pits of that size.

 Charles: That could have contained hundreds, perhaps thousands of bodies, we don’t know deep it is, or do you know how deep it is?

 Sturdy Colls: Unfortunately no. The survey technology does not allow us to go to certain depths. I know that it is over 4 meters, that was the extent of this [inaudible]. It’s a considerable pit.

 Charles: There are quite a few pits that you have discovered?

 Sturdy Colls: Absolutely, there were a number of pits, in particular to the rear of what of what is now the current memorial, five that are actually in a row, again of a considerable size, in an area where witnesses state this was the main body disposal area, this is behind the gas chambers, it was where the majority of victims who were sent there were then subsequently buried, and later where the cremative remains of the victims were also placed.

 Charles: It’s not just pits that you found, there’s also what look like buildings.

 Sturdy Colls: There are, and again, the Nazis claimed they destroyed Treblinka, they certainly levelled the site, but it’s not really possible when buildings have been on a site to actually sterilize the ground, so what I’ve identified is that solid structural remains, we’re talking building foundations, do survive, but in particular two sort of structures that I’ve identified are likely to be the old and new gas chambers at Treblinka.”

While here we learn virtually nothing about the supposed remains of the Treblinka “gas chambers” we are provided with some tantalizing information on the camp’s burial pits. Needless to say, a critical assessment of the findings made by Sturdy Colls can only be made after she has published at least a preliminary report or a detailed article on the same, but we may nonetheless with appropriate caution note down some preliminary observations on what has been revealed so far. The most interesting information, however, is not to be found in the radio interviews, but in a short article wrriten either by Sturdy Colls herself or by BBC editorial staff based on her verbal or written statements, which was published on the website of the BBC on 23 January.[5] In this we read:

“The existence of mass graves was known about from witness testimony, but the failure to provide persuasive physical evidence led some to question whether it could really be true that hundreds of thousands of Jews were killed here.

 Although they lasted only a few days, those post-war investigations [in 1945-1946] remained the most complete studies of the camp until I began my work at Treblinka in 2010.

 This revealed the existence of a number of pits across the site.

 Some may be the result of post-war looting, prompted by myths of buried Jewish gold, but several larger pits were recorded in areas suggested by witnesses as the locations of mass graves and cremation sites.

 One is 26m long, 17m wide and at least four metres deep, with a ramp at the west end and a vertical edge to the east.

 Another five pits of varying sizes and also at least this deep are located nearby. Given their size and location, there is a strong case for arguing that they represent burial areas.

 [...].

 As well as the pits, the survey has located features that appear to be structural, and two of these are likely to be the remains of the gas chambers.

According to witnesses, these were the only structures in the death camp made of brick.”

Even more importantly, this article is illustrated with two composite maps on which the outlines of the findings made by Sturdy Colls have been superimposed on a modern-day aerial photograph of the former camp site and a 1944 aerial photograph of the same area respectively. In the figure below I have placed these two composite maps side by side, moved the main legend and the scale and slightly increased the picture size in order to allow for easier comparison of scale. On the map to the left I have also arbitrarily numbered the “probable burial/cremation pits” from 1 to 10 (click on the picture to view it in full size).

The information furnished by the two interviews, the article and the maps allow us to make the following observations:

1) The pit which Sturdy Colls mentions “in particular” and which is stated to have a surface area of “26 meters by 17 meters”, that is a total of 442 square meters, is, judging by the dimensions, most likely identical with the rather irregular pit #3, located some 25 m south of the large cenotaph. This is clearly the largest in surface of the 10 pits identified.

2) As far as the surface area is concerned, 2 of the 33 mass graves identified by Andrzej Kola at Belzec (pits #1 and 27) were larger (with 480 and 540 square meters respectively), whereas 2 more (#7 and 14) were almost of the same size (364.5 and 370 square meters respectively).[6] Of the 6 burial pits identified by Kola at Sobibór 2 (pit #2 and 4) were larger or even significantly larger (with surface areas of 500 and 1,575 square meters respectively), whereas 2 other graves were nearly of the same surface size (pits #1 and 6, with 400 and 375 square meters respectively).[7] Yet whereas at Belzec some 435,000 and at Sobibór some 80,000 corpses are alleged to have been interred,[8] the number of uncremated bodies buried at Treblinka is supposed to have amounted to at least some 700,000. Would it then not make sense for the Germans to use mass graves of a larger size at Treblinka than at the other two Reinhardt camps?

3) The eyewitnesses Eliahu Rosenberg and Chil Rajchman, who to the knowledge of this author are the only witnesses to have provided detailed statements on the dimensions of the mass graves in the “death camp proper”, claim pits of sizes vastly larger than the largest pit mapped by Sturdy Colls. Eliahu Rosenberg claimed in 1947 that the mass graves measured 120 m × 15 m × 6 m, giving a surface area of 1,800 square meters and a total volume 9,900 cubic meters.[9] Chil Rajchman, whose 1944 testimony [10] is prominently featured in the “Hidden Graves of the Holocaust” radio program – including a particularly bizarre passage from it concerning burning blood – states:

“The pits were enormous, about 50 metres long, about 30 wide and several storeys deep. I estimate that the pits could contain about four storeys.”[11] 

The burial pits thus measured 1,500 square meters according to the witness Rajchman and maybe as much as (1,500 x 12 =) 18,000 cubic meters in volume! How come that the largest of the pits discovered by Sturdy Colls corresponds to less than one third of the surface size claimed by Rajchman and to one fourth of the surface area claimed by Rosenberg?

4) It is indeed unfortunate that the top modern equipment used by Study-Colls for some reason or other was not able to detect depths exceeding 4 meters. Perhaps it would have been wise of her to dispense of some of the piety with regards to “Jewish burial laws” and utilize probe drillings to measure the depth of the pits, as was done by Kola at both Belzec and Sobibór. Of the pits identified by Kola in these two camps, the deepest pit (#3 at Sobibór) measured 5.80 m, whereas the depth of the remaining pits averaged some 4 m.

Generously assuming Rosenberg’s estimate of 6 meters (Rajchman’s estimate of some 12 meters can be safely dismissed as an exaggeration), and even more generously assuming (for the sake of argument) 6 meters to be the effective depth, with the pit walls being vertical instead of sloping (an obviously unrealistic assumption, which is moreover contradicted by Sturdy Colls statement that this pit had a “ramp” at the west end and a “vertical edge to the east”, implying that three out of four side walls were oblique – but again, for the sake of argument…) pit #3 would have a volume of (26 x 17 x 6 =) 2,652 cubic meters. Assuming an average capacity of 8 corpses per cubic meters,[12] this means that the pit in question could have contained in total (2,652 x 8 =) 21,216 corpses. Since the so-called Höfle document from an exterminationist viewpoint shows that nearly 713,555 were murdered at Treblinka up until the end of 1942 – in reality this document only proves that this number of Jews was deported to the camp up until that time – and since virtually all sources maintain that non-experimental cremations on a significant scale did not commence at Treblinka until 1943, at least 700,000 corpses would have had to have been interred in the camp, necessitating no less than (700,000 / 21,216 =) 33 pits of the same size as pit #3, with a total surface area of 14,586 square meter, or nearly 1.5 hectares. Needless to say the mass graves would have had to be separated by soil walls of considerable thickness, thereby increasing the surface area required by the graves.

 
Above: Montage of the 10 identified pits placed within a square 100 x 100 meters. Relative dimensions have been kept unchanged from the maps produced by Caroline Sturdy Colls.

5) Pits #1 and 2, which together appear to have a surface area of some 600-700 square meters, are located in the western part of the camp site, near the torn-up railroad sidespur, clearly outside of the “death camp proper”. These may be identical with the mass graves mentioned by the witness Abraham Kszepicki, in which the bodies of Jews who had died en route to the camp were buried during the first months of operation.[13]

 6) The four pits #5-8 are placed in a (not very straight) row. Sturdy Colls states in the radio documentary that there are “five” pits of “considerable size” “in a row” and in the area which witnesses state “was the main body disposal area, (…) behind the gas chambers”. Either Sturdy Colls mistakenly said five when she meant four, or it may be that one of the pits, perhaps #6, with its “neck” in the middle, is counted by her as two separate pits. Regardless of which, it is clear that the pits #5-8 cover a surface area which corresponds to roughly 175-200 % that of #3, that is, somewhere in the range of 750-900 square meters.

 7) Altogether, pits #3-10 as mapped by Sturdy Colls cover a surface hardly exceeding 1,800 square meters. If again, for the sake of argument, we assume the no doubt overly generous average effective depth of 6 meters with vertical pit walls – and once more I want to remind my readers that the pits identified at Belzec and Sobibór averaged some 4 m in depth – this would mean that the “probable burial/cremation pits” in the “death camp proper”/”upper camp”/”camp 2″ [14] had a total volume of some (1,800 x 6 =) 10,800 cubic meters. The pits at Belzec as identified by Kola have a total estimated volume of 21,310 cubic meters,[15] whereas those at Sobibór have a total estimated volume of 14,718.75 cubic meters.[16] The no doubt greatly exaggerated estimate of 10,800 cubic meters could have contained at most some (10,800 x 8 =) 86,400 corpses (assuming instead a more realistic average effective depth of 5 m this figure would change to 72,000 – and this still disregards the likely enlargement of the original grave volumes due to clandestine diggings and other causes). According to Yitzhak Arad some 312,500 Jews were murdered in Treblinka merely “during the first five weeks of the killing operation”.[17] According to the files of the Jewish Council in Warsaw, 251,545 Jews from the ghetto in that city were deported to Treblinka between 22 July 1942 and 12 September 1942.[18] And as already mentioned, the Höfle document states that 713,555 were deported to Treblinka up until the end of 1942. Judging by the information revealed, only a small fraction of this enormous number of people could have been buried in the identified “probable burial/cremation pits”, even taking into account the two pits in the reception camp, which could not have been used for any hypothetical “gas chamber” victims given the reported structure of the camp.

 8 ) Sturdy Colls’s statement that “the failure to provide persuasive physical evidence [of mass graves] led some to question whether it could really be true that hundreds of thousands of Jews were killed here” implies that the presence of mass graves itself would be enough to refute the “deniers”. However, it is clear that mass graves of considerable size must have existed at Treblinka, even if it was in fact only a transit camp. Holocaust historian Dieter Pohl estimates that up to 5 % of the deportees to the Reinhardt camps perished en route due to suffocation, dehydration, crushing caused by panicking deportees etc.[19] Considering that the reception of transports at Treblinka during the intense initial months of operation is claimed to have been grossly mismanaged by the first camp commandant, Dr. Irmfried Eberl (who, apparently because of this reason, was fired and replaced by Franz Stangl), leading to the delay of transports at way stations – and this in the summer heat of July and August – there is little reason to doubt that a certain number of Jews must haved died en route from Warsaw to Treblinka, but on the other hand the trip from Warsaw to Treblinka when following schedule lasted “only” 3 hours and 55 minutes, so that for this group of deportees (making up roughly one third of the total number of Treblinka deportees) the en route death ratio is unlikely to have reached that posited by Pohl.[20] The en route death ratio for transports originating from more distant parts of Poland and from other German-controlled countries was likely higher than that for the Warsaw deportees due to the longer travel time required. Since somewhere between 750,000 and 800,000 Jews in total were deported to Treblinka during the camp’s period of operation (July 1942 – August 1943), it seems reasonable to assume that the number of Jews who perished en route to this camp amounted to somewhere in the low tens of thousands. Moreover, there are reasons to assume that a smaller percentage of the deportees were subjected to “euthanasia” due to contageous or mental diseases, or for being too weak for further transport. To this should be added a smaller number of deaths among the camp inmates caused by epidemics etc, as well as those killed by guards in connection with attempts at escape or uprisings.

 9) The vague mention of a “more complex picture of the disposal patterns used by the Nazis” is interesting. Were uncremated corpses also detected by the survey, and if so, how many?

 10) Sturdy Colls label the pits “probable burial/cremation pits”, indicating that one or more of the pits may have been used for cremations and not for interment (at Sobibór Kola identified such a pit with an area of 10 x 3 m and a depth of up to 90 cm). In this context the smaller, more rectangular pits #4 and 5 may be the most likely candidates. The dimensions of an identified cremation pit could give important hints about the actual cremation capacity at Treblinka.

 11) It is noteworthy that none of the pits or structural remains are located under the stone/concrete covered memorial areas (cf. the map to the left, where these areas are visible as a bluish gray). Sturdy Colls’s statements does not mention whether or not she was able to map these area with her geophysics equipment.[21] This issue, like many others, will have to await further clarification. The covered area inside the “death camp proper” appears to correspond to roughly 1 hectare.

 12) It may be worth making a quick comparison of the maps of Study-Colls with the “reconstruction” of Treblinka proposed by exterminationist air-photo analyst Alex Bay.[22] Concerning the mass graves Bay writes:

“Unfortunately, the aerial photography does not contain enough information to delineate the boundaries of the graves. The May [1944] coverage is sufficient only for crudely identifying the places where deep disturbances in general are probable, but the exact boundaries cannot be established.

In Figure 42 aerial photography is presented in which nine 50 by 25 meter [164 x 82 feet] pits have been drawn to scale along the east and west sides. The positioning and size of these pits is purely speculative.”[23]

The dimensions of 50 x 25 m for the pits are taken from Bay’s number one eyewitness, Yankiel Wiernik, and his 1944 publication A Year in Treblinka. Wiernik writes indeed that “The dimensions of each ditch were 50 by 25 by 10 meters”[24] but this almost certainly refer to ditches located not in the “death camp proper”, but in the reception camp. The scene wherein Wiernik provides the abovementioned dimensions takes place on the second day after his arrival in the camp, and the following chapters imply that first visited the “death camp proper” or Camp II, as he calls it, only several days later.

In the figure below I have placed Bay’s Figure 42 side by side with the Sturdy Colls composite map based on the 1944 air photo. The scales of the two maps have been harmonized. To Bay’s map I have also added the letters A and B to indicate the solid black outlines drawn by Bay to mark out the two alleged gas chamber buildings. Even considering Bay’s admittal that the positioning and size of his mass graves “is purely speculative” it is clear that his vision of what the “death camp proper” might have looked like differ considerably from the Sturdy Colls map. As for the locations of the two alleged gas chamber buildings, which Bay goes to painstaking length to identify, based on the aerial photos and witness statements, the 4 structures marked out by Sturdy Colls (in blue) and designated “probable location of gas chambers” are located some 100 m south of the sites pinpointed by Bay. The alignment of these structures is also rather different from that asserted by Bay. Together with the considerable difference in surface size between the mass graves posited by Bay and the pits identified by Sturdy Colls, this says something of the competence of Bay as well as the reliability of his star witness Wiernik.   

 Above: Bay’s “reconstruction” of Treblinka compared with the 1944 air photo version of the Sturdy Colls map (click to enlarge)

13) As for the “probable location of gas chambers” we learn virtually nothing other than that Sturdy Colls has identified two brick structures. On the composite maps, however, four structures are marked out, of which the largest (near the eastern exit of the “Road to heaven”) is likely to be the one identified by Sturdy Colls as the “new gas chamber building”. The three other structures, two of which are relatively large, are located close to each other. One must suppose that one of the two larger structures has been identified by Sturdy Colls as the “old gas chamber building”. According to the most elaborate exterminationist effort to map Treblinka based on aerial photos and eyewitness testimony (and in this case one of the ground photos from the Kurt Franz “Schoene Zeiten” album interpreted by Bay and others as taken inside the “death camp proper”), the 2004 map of Peter Laponder,[25] the only structures located adjacent to the “old gas chamber building” were a water pump shelter, a tiny guardhouse, and a watchtower. Yet on the composite map we have two larger structures next to each other. We will have to wait and see if the geophysical survey has revealed anything about the layout of these structures. If that is not the case, we can only hope that Sturdy Colls soon returns to the camp site to excavate the detected structural remains. 

All in all, the information revealed by these interviews about the findings of the 2011 geophysical survey at Treblinka provides us with more questions than answers. We can only wait and hope that a preliminary report on the research results is not too long in coming. One thing is sure, however, namely that little indicates that the findings of Caroline Sturdy Colls have actually “proven Holocaust deniers wrong” with regard to Treblinka. On the contrary: the information revealed seems to hint that the findings of Caroline Sturdy Colls may well spell the doom of the official historiography on Treblinka.

_____________________________________________________________________

[1] Thomas Kues, “UK Forensic Archeologist Sets Out To Refute Treblinka ‘Deniers’”,  http://www.revblog.codoh.com/2010/11/uk-forensic-archeologist-sets-out-to-refute-treblinka-deniers/

[2] “Mass graves at Nazi death camp Treblinka prove Holocaust deniers wrong”, http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2012/01/16/mass-graves-at-nazi-death-camp-treblinka-holocaust_n_1208814.html

[3] This radio program is temporarily available at  http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b019rlns/The_Hidden_Graves_of_the_Holocaust/

[4] http://www.ideaslab.bham.ac.uk/MP3s/Caroline_Sturdy_Colls_Treblinka_podcast.mp3 A transcript of this podcast can be found at http://www.ideaslab.bham.ac.uk/MP3s/Transcript_Predictor_Podcast_40.doc

[5] “Treblinka: Revealing the hidden graves of the Holocaust”, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-16657363 The article carries a heading which concludes with the words “…writes forensic archaeologist Caroline Sturdy Colls” giving the clear impression that what follows is a piece written directly by Sturdy Colls herself; on the other hand the article isn’t signed. Nevertheless it is clear that the contents of the article are derived from Sturdy Colls together with the composite maps.

[6] Cf. Carlo Mattogno, Belzec in Propaganda, Testimonies, Archeological Research, and History, Theses & Dissertations Press, Chicago 2004, p. 73.

[7] Cf. Jürgen Graf, Thomas Kues, Carlo Mattogno, Sobibór: Holocaust Propaganda and Reality, TBR Books 2010, p. 120.

[8] Cf. ibid., p. 117.

[9] Cf. Jürgen Graf, Carlo Mattogno, Treblinka. Extermination Camp or Transit Camp?, Theses & Dissertations Press, Chicago 2004, p. 138.

[10] Discussed in detail in my article Chil Rajchman’s Treblinka Memoirs, Inconvenient History, vol. 2, nr. 1, online: http://www.inconvenienthistory.com/archive/2010/volume_2/number_1/chil_rajchmans_treblinka_memoirs.php

[11] Chil Rajchman, Treblinka. A Survivor’s Memory 1942–1943, MacLehose Press, London 2011, p. 60.

[12] Cf. Carlo Mattogno, Belzec or the Holocaust Controversy of Roberto Muehlenkamp, section 4.1. http://www.codoh.com/gcgv/gcgvhcrm.html

[13] Yitzhak Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka. The Operation Reinhard Death Camps, Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis 1987, p. 85.

[14] Judging by some of the early maps of the camp, pit #3 would have been located outside of this part of the camp, whereas some later exterminationist efforts to reconstruct the topography of the camp places it within the “death camp proper”, cf. Mapping Treblinka, http://www.deathcamps.org/treblinka/maps.html

[15] C. Mattogno, Belzec…, op.cit., p. 73.

[16] J. Graf, T. Kues, C. Mattogno, Sobibór…, op.cit., p. 120.

[17] Y. Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, op.cit., p. 87.

[18] Ibid., pp. 275-276.

[19] Dieter Pohl, “Massentötungen durch Giftgas im Rahmen der ‘Aktion Reinhardt’: Aufgaben der Forschung” in: Günter Morsch, Betrand Perz (eds.), Neue Studien zu nationalsozialistischen Massentötungen durch Giftgas. Historische Bedeutung, technische Entwicklung, revisionistische Leugnung, Metropol, Berlin 2011, p. 194.

[20] Cf. Y. Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, op.cit., pp. 87-88; J. Graf, C. Mattogno, Treblinka. Extermination Camp or Transit Camp?, op.cit., p. 107.

[21] According to the English-language Wikipedia article on Ground Penetrating Radar (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground-penetrating_radar) “Good penetration is also achieved in dry sandy soils or massive dry materials such as granite, limestone, and concrete where the depth of penetration could be up to 15 m”, implying that the concrete slabs of the memorial in themselves should pose little problem for a GPR survey. There may of course be other, unrevealed hindering factors. 

[22] The Reconstruction of Treblinka, http://www.holocaust-history.org/Treblinka/

[23] http://www.holocaust-history.org/Treblinka/deathcampinternet/deathcampp7.shtml

[24] Y. Wiernik, A Year in Treblinka, chapter 3, online: http://www.zchor.org/treblink/wiernik.htm

[25] http://www.deathcamps.org/treblinka/pic/bmap9.jpg

This morning I found several emails asking and discussing whether a recently posted YouTube video of Ronald Reagan was real. Following the links, I found a short 9 second video of Reagan supposedly questioning the six million Holocaust story.  In the short excerpt Reagan says, “I challenge your history again. There is absolutely no record that six million people were put in concentration camps. They only have 16 million to begin with.”  But something is clearly wrong with this video.

First, the excerpt is taken out of context.  What was Reagan really speaking about?  The excerpt appears like those vintage World War II photos with incorrect captions asserting that something is there in the photo when it is not. A quick examination reveals that the footage is indeed real and was taken in 1967.  But wouldn’t such footage have been used against Reagan in his various political campaigns including two for the presidency?  And, even if buried at the time, surely such footage would have come out during his controversial visit to the Waffen SS cemetery at Bitburg.  But, I have no recollection of such comments.

Today, however thanks to the power of the Internet, one is able to answer such questions in minutes.  The short clip was indeed Reagan and it was taken in 1967.  However, the topic was not the Holocaust.  In fact, during a CBS Television and Radio broadcast on May 15th hosted by Charles Collingwood, then Governor Ronald Reagan was debating aspects of the Vietnam war with then Senator Robert F. Kennedy.

Jeff Jordan asked Reagan whether he approved that the Diem regime put six million in forced prison camps and that American advisors did nothing “but help them in this.”  To which Reagan responded,

“I challenge your history again. There is absolutely no record that six million people were put in concentration camps. They only have 16 million to begin with. Now, I’d also like to challenge something else about the supposed evils of the Diem regime. I do approve of Diem’s land reform in which he took from the great mandarin holdings, and began to make land available to the peasants and to the people of Vietnam, who had never owned land before. But also, I would like to call to your attention that a team from the U.N. was sent to Saigon, Vietnam, to investigate the charges against Diem’s regime They did investigate those, but as they returned to this country, Diem was assassinated, which I think was one of the great tragedies of this whole conflict; and the United Nations report, which they declined to make official because they thought why bring anything up now that he’s been killed, has on the other hand, been published, there has been public access to it, and the United Nations report completely cleared the Diem regime of any of the charges that had been brought against him.”

And thus in minutes our 9 second clip is exposed as a complete hoax.  I certainly hope that this hoax disappears quickly from the internet and is not passed around by those who think they have found an ally in Ronald Reagan. This video post, with it’s false caption, asserting a Holocaust connection does a disservice to all interested in historical truth.  It, along with its originator, should be denounced from all quarters.

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.

4 September 2011.

Samuel Crowell; The Gas Chamber of Sherlock Holmes, and Other Writings on the Holocaust, Revisionism, and Historical Understanding; Nine-Banded Books, PO Box 1862, Charleston, WV 25327 (www.ninebandedbooks.com); 2011, 401 pp.

Carlo Mattogno; Auschwitz: The Case for Sanity, two vols.; The Barnes Review, PO Box 15877, Washington, DC 20003 (www.BarnesReview.org), 1-877-773-9077 toll free; 2010, 756 pp. total

These two very recent books evidence the maturity of the field of Holocaust revisionism.

Carlo Mattogno, together with his long-time colleague Jürgen Graf and, more recently, Thomas Kues (familiar to readers of this newsletter) are among the most energetic and productive revisionists working today. They have accumulated a wealth of documentary material with long, presumably self-financed, trips to the various archives, especially in eastern Europe.

Mattogno has published a number of books and articles on Auschwitz, the core of the “Holocaust” legend, and this two-volume work is the most recent. Past readers of IHR’s Journal of Historical Review and Germar Rudolf’s The Revisionist may recall that I have occasionally clashed with Mattogno. I do have a problem with Mattogno’s writings and, partly because I have already read many of them, and partly for reasons I shall presently elucidate, I did not read these recent two volumes in their entirety.

A major reason I did not read all of Mattogno’s books is simply that I have great trouble following his arguments and, even after taking all that time and trouble, I can feel I have been left in the lurch.

Our most recent clash was on the subject of a document showing the Auschwitz construction department attempting to get cyanide gas detectors from the oven manufacturer Topf for use in a crematorium then under construction. Pressac and others had held this document up as proving the existence of gas chambers in the crematoria. Those wishing to revisit that exchange can see my original article[i], Mattogno’s original article[ii], and the Butz-Mattogno exchange.[iii] It suffices to say that Mattogno’s theory was that the document “was falsified by an ignorant forger”, while I speculated that the wish for cyanide gas detectors arose from a waste incinerator that shared ducts with the crematorium ovens. We agreed that Zyklon was not involved, as there was a special department at Auschwitz for that, which had all the cyanide detectors needed for that application.

It was therefore with great interest that I read his new discussion of the alleged gas detectors, which is admirable for its copious documentation. It takes 22 pages but, mainly because Mattogno’s trains of thought contrast so much with mine, I found the going rough. It seemed that Mattogno was coming around to my theory, with the change that a cyanide danger was seen in the cremations (I had never encountered an association of cyanide with cremation). I say it “seemed” because throughout the considerable labor of reading this section it was not clear where he was headed, but that’s okay if the matter is clarified in the end. Twice (pp 94, 107) he promised to “furnish an alternative explanation” to the interpretation of Pressac et.al.. He did not consider the possible involvement of the waste incinerator.

I was to be disappointed as he suddenly, and without warning, concluded his analysis with this single paragraph (p. 114):

For all these reason [sic] the Topf letter of March 2, 1943, is at least suspicious. Although it seems formally authentic, its content is utterly untenable.

What does that mean? I don’t know. If anything, Mattogno appears to want to come back to his original claim of falsification, but perhaps understands that the evidence gives no support to such a conclusion, so he has left the matter in confusion. He did not “furnish an alternative explanation”.

Thus I warn that the fruits of the reader’s considerable labor may be more in learning the relevant documents than in formulating reliable conclusions. In knowledge of the documents, Mattogno seems to have no peer. You will come away from the section I have discussed knowing more about the application of Zyklon at Auschwitz than you ever needed to know.

Much of Samuel Crowell’s book is about Auschwitz, though his aim is to consider all the major features of Holocaust legend; in that respect his work is comparable to my 1976 The Hoax of the Twentieth Century. His book is copiously documented. I read the whole volume, and am much happier with both Crowell’s conclusions and his means of reaching them than I am with Mattogno’s, on those matters common to both works. I believe Crowell’s work is of basic and abiding importance in untangling what I have called the “Hoax”.

Crowell has an additional objective missing in Mattogno. He presents a genesis of the legend, even examining the early 20^th century for cultural developments that could have given rise to fears of gas chambers. His main thrust appears to be (p. 151) “The gassing claim as a mass delusion . . . . as a cultural construct . . . . created by, and reinforced by, delusional pressures of social and cultural change as well as by censorship.” That is, the claim was created by society and history, or a natural evolution of society, rather than by intent of specific persons.

Here I shall, before coming to my main objection, criticize a major point in Crowell’s presentation, namely, his disdain for the “hoax” and “conspiracy” interpretations of the legend, though he gives limited approval to the hoax thesis (p 155):

It would probably be better to say that, if the claim is a hoax, then surely a hoax of limited participation, and we should emphasize the number of those deceived, rather than the small number of those deceiving.

Why? Everybody knows the number of those deceived, namely almost everybody, and the number of those deceiving is therefore necessarily small, and there remains only the questions who, how, and why, questions that this reviewer will further examine.

Earlier in the book Crowell advanced his theory with another concession (p. 42): “while we continue to maintain that most of the elements in the gassing story arose more or less spontaneously and were just as spontaneously believed, at Majdanek we are confronted with grim evidence of a deliberate Soviet hoax.” As for the claim of gas chambers at Auschwitz, he remarks (p. 133) “there is a strong likelihood of a Polish and Soviet communist hoax in developing this particular evidence.” The concession is most interesting in terms of who is missing as a perpetrator, whom I shall presently identify.

Later in the book he denigrates “conspiracy theory” much as our major media do (pp. 357ff):

. . . . the human mind will seek to create causal nexuses for events that seem arbitrary and capricious, especially when they are destructive on a grand scale. To this extent the human mind is always potentially schizophrenic: perceiving a world full of confusing and unpredictable action, yet understood by a mind that refuses to accept a lack of pattern or structure. When Einstein wrote to Max Born and declared that God “does not throw dice,” he was speaking not as a scientist but as Everyman.

I beg to differ: Einstein was speaking as a scientist to another scientist. His resistance as a scientist to much of modern physics, which his remark related to, is well known. Indeed finding “pattern or structure” in creating “causal nexuses for events that seem arbitrary and capricious”, though perceiving only “a world full of confusing and unpredictable action”, is called “science”.

As for definitions, that which is “confidential cooperation” to you may be “conspiracy” to me. That is, the notion of conspiracy depends on point of view. We may say my definition of conspiracy is “confidential cooperation Butz doesn’t like”.

We can agree with Crowell, for the sake of discussion, that “conspiracy theory”, as distinct from “conspiracy”, is a claim, not supported by evidence sufficient for proof, of the existence of some conspiracy. The lack of proof, of course, is the basis for the ridicule that our media heap on the dissident conspiracy theorists. Where I part with Crowell is on the value of conspiracy theory. While some conspiracy theories are of course ridiculous, the possibility of hypothesizing conspiracies is vital to arriving at truth.

Here is an example. A police inspector, trying to solve a crime, conjectures that two or more characters may have collaborated in that crime. How does he investigate the conjecture? An important feature of his conjecture would be a hypothesis on specifically how the two or more suspects collaborated to commit the crime, because that hypothesis would guide him in seeking evidence that would, if it is found, confirm the conjecture. Without the hypothesis, the investigation would be unguided. That hypothesis, of course, is a “conspiracy theory”. The police inspector has two luxuries: official investigative power and that he need not reveal his hypothesis until he has the proof.

Public debate on matters of general concern does not allow that; there is normally no way to test the theory other than by throwing it out into the public arena. Should those who suspected a conspiracy involving President Nixon, before the Watergate tapes were released, have kept their mouths shut? I don’t think so.

I argued in my Hoax book that the “Holocaust”, in its canonical “gas chamber” form, has Auschwitz as its center and the document I called the “WRB Report” (since it was first published by Henry Morgenthau’s War Refugee Board), at its foundation. I made it clear in Hoax, Ch. III, that the War Refugee Board was a Jewish operation designed to help Jews, despite the neutrality of its name.

A preliminary version of the WRB Report had been reported by the NY Times on 3 July 1944 and on 26 Nov. 1944 the Times reported publication of the Report by the WRB, more than two months before the Soviets captured Auschwitz.

The WRB Report is also sometimes referred to, today, as the “Auschwitz Protocol”. In the book and elsewhere I noted the strong presence of truth in the document, e.g. the transport lists, which well approximate those later published by the Auschwitz Museum and which, as I said at the end of my Ch. III,  “is not the sort of information escapees would carry out”. As for the rest of the WRB Report, it closely approximates the present orthodox presentation of the gas chamber yarn, according to which gas chambers employing Zyklon were integrated into the crematoria. The knowledgeable, and I stress “knowledgeable”, authors therefore gave us a hoax.

What does Crowell say about the WRB Report? Very little, but it is important. He considers the document USSR-8 presented by the Soviet Union at the big Nuremberg trial (the IMT), as the foundation of the legend (pp. 58ff), noting the WRB Report was not presented (p 62). However Crowell also remarks that the Soviet report was influenced by the WRB Report, and also by a 2 Feb. 1945 report by the Soviet journalist Boris Polevoi (p. 48). He does not note that Polevoi was a Jew on his mother’s side. The Soviet report, having been written a year after the WRB Report by the Soviets who had captured the camp and many of its documents, of course contained more detail, but the Soviets were well instructed beforehand on what they were supposed to find there.

Actually, one page of the WRB Report was put in evidence in the IMT trial[iv]. Moreover, the Höss testimony, given originally, and under duress, to Jewish interrogators while in British captivity, had far more impact in the trial and in the press, and well into the postwar years, than either the Soviet report or the WRB Report.[v] Crowell notes (p. 77) that Höss’ statements “speak with great authority to most historians”.

The relative inattention to the WRB Report at the IMT could have been due to a number of things, e.g. an impossibility of producing the authors, or a decision to let the Soviet Union star in this matter, or simply because Auschwitz was on territory conquered by the Soviet Union.

It may be asked, why must the happenings at the IMT settle this? A hoax need not be something presented in a trial, but I think Crowell is right to focus in this way on the IMT; it provided the basis for all future presentations of the legend. Indeed trials have always been crucial in advancing or supporting the legend, a situation that alone should arouse suspicion in reflective historians. A recent example is the Irving-Lipstadt trial (2000).

The WRB Report played a role in the Eichmann trial (1961). The names (Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler) later allegedly used by the two escapees were given there.[vi] Vrba was a cousin of Vera Atkins, who was to inspire the Miss Moneypenny character in the James Bond stories, but who was a British intelligence agent during the war, indeed one of Höss’ Jewish interrogators.[vii] Small world! Or perhaps we should say “All In the Family”. Vrba published his alleged memoirs in 1964 and testified at Ernst Zündel’s trial in Canada in 1985.[viii] It is the WRB Report that has had both a wartime and postwar life; the Soviet Union’s report has been forgotten. Interest in the WRB Report faded in the first three postwar decades but has risen in recent years. It is the foundation for what I called the Hoax and it is clear that it was created, and has been sustained, by the Jewish entity, especially in its Zionist manifestation, despite the many absurdities and contradictions in the accounts of Rudolf Vrba.

I have to add that I don’t know what individuals actually composed the WRB Report. What is clear is that it came from Jewish circles.

That brings us to my “main objection”: Crowell does not present the Jews as important actors in the genesis of the legend. Indeed they don’t do much more than get killed. There being no hoaxer identified in this book, it can be difficult to see a hoax.

Reconsider, as Crowell would have us, the Nuremberg trials. They were a Jewish festival, conducted under the auspices of the USA in the US zone of occupation in Germany. At the IMT, the Soviets, British and French were just guests in a US-staged show. President Franklin “Clear It With Sidney” Roosevelt[ix] was closely associated with the Jews. During the war he enlisted the support of the Jewish gangster Meyer Lansky via their mutual friend the Jew Walter Winchell, then the most influential columnist in the US.[x] Roosevelt’s secret emissary to the dictator-gangster Fulgencio Batista in Cuba was Lansky.[xi]

Roosevelt tasked his close Jewish associate Samuel Rosenman to lay the foundation of the “war crimes” trials, fighting off a British preference to just shoot the Nazi leaders unceremoniously, in favor of the show that was eventually staged in Nuremberg.[xii] What the Soviet Union did there, with its variation or embellishment of the basic materials of the WRB Report, was part of this Jewish festival. The star of the show was Rudolf Höss, acting out a script written for him by Jews. I said much about the Jewish involvement in the Nuremberg trials in my Hoax book, especially in Chs. I, III, V.

What is sorely missing in Crowell’s book is the Jew as actor or, in terms Crowell quotes, as exercising “deliberate agency” (p. 358) in creating and sustaining the hoax. This absence seems to be deliberate. In discussing the various statements made by or attributed to Höss (pp. 75-83), Crowell references (note 298 on p. 76) Robert Faurisson’s paper, cited above, on the interrogations of Höss while in British custody. I consider Faurisson’s paper the basic study of the Höss testimony problem, but Crowell remarks with obvious disapproval that Faurisson preferred “to stress the Jewish identity” of the interrogators. I say “obvious disapproval” because only the unusual reader alert to such footnotes could infer from Crowell’s section that Höss’ tormentors were Jews. From that I must infer that Crowell considers it irrelevant or at least unimportant that the Höss testimony was obtained under duress applied by Jews. Moreover to Crowell it seems (p. 81) Höss’ interrogators were “acting more or less in good faith”!

In summary both the Crowell book and the Mattogno volumes, and probably Mattogno’s earlier works, are indispensable additions to the revisionist library, but both must be read with care and reserve, as indeed all historical works should. I have had to criticize Crowell’s treatment of the genesis of the legend, because I think it very seriously flawed. That does not diminish my admiration for his analysis of the documents purporting to prove the existence of “gas chambers”. It’s the bad things the book reviewer has to give space to; the author gives space to the good things.

In concluding I want to express my great satisfaction with developments of the past 40 years, at the outset of which I wandered alone in the desert. We are not yet in the land of milk and honey, but we are in a land of plenty and these books prove it.

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 Dr. Claus G. Wagner Bartach

Introduction

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

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

The Holocaust

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Another Book of late Revenge?

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

The Office – Das Amt

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hans Mommsen speaks out

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gregor Schöllgen and Daniel Koerfer comments

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

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

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

Political Background

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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

Today, on 12 May 2011, John Demjanjuk was sentenced by a Munich court to 5 years in prison [1]  for assisting in the alleged murder of 28,060 Dutch Jews in the Sobibór “extermination” camp in eastern Poland in 1943 (the number of victims in the indictment was previously given as 27,900).

This sentence is a travesty for several reasons, besides the obvious grotesquery of trying a 91-year-old man for a crime allegedly committed 68 years previously.
I will refrain from giving a detailed overview of the case, as this has already been done elsewhere.[2]

To begin with, the only piece of documentary evidence supporting the presence of Demjanjuk at Sobibór is an identification card (from the SS training camp at Trawniki) which authenticity has been questioned by several experts. A month ago a formerly classified 1985 FBI report surfaced which stated that the Trawniki card was “quite likely fabricated” by the Soviet Union.[3] This revelation, however, did not help Demjanjuk in the end. The only existing testimonial evidence consists of a few vague statements of dubious value from former Ukrainian auxiliaries made behind the iron curtain. Not one of the surviving Sobibór inmates has placed Demjanjuk at Sobibór.

The prosecution has been unable tie Demjanjuk personally to any specific crime of violence. Instead, his alleged crime consists of having been present as a low-ranked guard at camp which sole purpose, it is alleged, was the extermination of Jews. Any guard who found this activity objectionable, the prosecution’s argument goes, could have deserted his post. However, the mere presence as a guard at Sobibór, or any of the other “pure extermination camps”, has until now not been considered punishable. In fact, at the Sobibór trial in Hagen in 1966, five out of the eleven accused former German camp personnel were acquitted, despite their admitted presence in the camp. Four of the convicted were given sentences of between 3 and 4 years imprisonment. Needless to say all of these men were of higher rank than Demjanjuk.

There is further the fact that Demjanjuk spent several years in Israeli prison, including time on death row, innocently accused of having been the camp guard “Ivan the Terrible” of Treblinka. Demjanjuk has in fact been hunted, harassed, imprisoned and prosecuted continuously since 1975, when a pro-Soviet calumniator named Emil Hanusiak leveled the first accusations against him.

All of the above objections are dwarfed, however, by the following harsh facts:

1) There exists no documentary or material evidence whatsoever supporting the official claim that Sobibór served as a “pure extermination camp” where hundreds of thousands of Jews were gassed, buried and later burned on open-air pyres. The only documentary evidence mustered by prosecutors and holocaust historians consists of reports and transport lists confirming that large numbers of Jews were sent to the camp. Said documents have nothing to say about the fate of the Jewish deportees subsequent to their arrival in Sobibór. On the other hand a directive issued by Himmler on 5 July 1943, as well as a reply from Oswald Pohl on 15 July 1943 (Nuremberg document NO 482) speaks of “the Sobibor transit camp located in the Lublin district”. The camp was in fact located very near the former German-Soviet demarcation line, a most logical location for camp serving the transfer of Jews to the Occupied eastern territories.

2) In 2001 and 2008 two teams of archeologists, the first headed by the Polish professor Andrzej Kola, the second by the Israelis Isaac Gilead and Yoram Haimi and the Pole Wojciech Mazurek, went over the whole of Lager III, the “death camp proper of Sobibór – corresponding to an area of less than 4 hectares – using probe drillings as well as numerous excavations without finding any trace whatsoever of the camp’s alleged homicidal gas chambers. As it is radically impossible, given the limited area and time available, that these well-equipped teams of specialists would fail to locate any remain or trace, however slight, of the large concrete or brick building described by the self-styled eyewitnesses, only one conclusion is possible: the alleged homicidal gas chambers, never existed. On the other hand, Andrzej Kola discovered in Lager III a huge wooden barrack filled with remains of clothing and toilet articles, as well as a smaller building with a coke storage and remains of an oven – possibly one used for delousing with hot air or steam. According to the official version neither of these structures should have existed.[4] Together with the non-existence of the Sobibór gas chamber building their discovery greatly strengthens the revisionist case, namely that Sobibór (as well as Belzec and Treblinka) served as a transit camp where arriving Jewish deportees were showered and deloused before being sent on further east.

3) According to orthodox historiography not a single Dutch Jew was ever deported further east than Poland. However, on 16 April 1943 – at the very time when Demjanjuk supposedly aided in the extermination of Jews at Sobibór – the Vilna Jew Herman Kruk noted in his diary that “a rumor is circulating that there are about 19,000 Dutch Jews in Vievis”. Vievis is a small town between Vilna and Kovno, which during the years of German occupation was the location of a Jewish labor camp. On the same day Kruk wrote under the heading “More about the Dutch Jews” that he had “succeeded in getting a Jewish sign [evidently a cloth Star of David] and a copy of the order of the Reichskommissar for the Occupied Netherlands about Jewish property.” Two weeks later, on 30 April 1943, Kruk wrote in his diary that “carloads filled with goods from the Dutch Jews are in the Vilna railroad station”. Furniture taken from these trains had been brought to workshops in the Vilna ghetto, where documents written in Dutch were found by the workers.[5] Since there is no reason on earth to believe that Kruk, a prominent member of the Vilna ghetto community, made up this story, it must be taken as an important piece of evidence in support of the revisionist transit camp hypothesis. Large transports of “foreign” Jews to the Vilna area in the spring of 1943 is also mentioned in the diary of the Jewish partisan fighter Aba Gefen (entry for 16 May 1943),[6] as well as by a news notice published in the Polish underground newspaper Biuletyn Informacyjny on 6 May 1943.[7] There are also several testimonies confirming the presence of Dutch Jews in Minsk in 1942-43.[8]

None of the above facts have been considered, or even mentioned in passing, during the trial in Munich. This should of course not surprise, as the blatant disregard of technical evidence has been common to all “extermination camp” trials.

To summarize:

- The murder weapon in the crime which Demjanjuk has now been sentenced for never existed
- There exists no documentary or material evidence supporting the claim that Sobibór functioned as a “pure extermination camp”; preserved documents in fact describe the camp as a “transit camp” (Duchgangslager)
- There is ample reason to believe that the 28,060 alleged victims were in fact sent on to the German-occupied territories of the Soviet Union and the Baltic states.

Needless to say such facts does not matter one bit to the enlightened judges and prosecutors of the “freest state in German history”. The defense, undoubtedly aware that any mention of said facts would run afoul of Germany’s laws against “Holocaust denial”, settled on the usual strategy: accepting the officially sanctioned version of events while insisting on the personal innocence of the defendant. In the end, this did not help, and it probable, even likely, that the outcome of trial was more or less settled from the start. At the time of Demjanjuk’s extradition to Germany in May 2009 German holocaust historian Norbert Frei stated: “The Germans owe it to the victims and the survivors, but also to themselves, to prosecute Demjanjuk.”[9] Demjanjuk had to be sentenced, because the Germans “owed this” to themselves. Or to put it more clearly: The trial was necessary to keep “alive” in the minds of the German people (and the western world in general) the phantom of the “Holocaust”.

Demjanjuk’s defense attorney, Ulrich Busch, has stated that an appeal will be filed against the verdict. As for now Demjanjuk has been released from prison, as the sentence is not yet legally binding (rechtskräftig). If after the appeal it is determined that he should serve time in jail (5 years minus the nearly 2 years already spent in custody) it will further be decided whether the 91-year-old is physically fit for imprisonment.[10]

[1] “Fünf Jahre Haft für John Demjanjuk”, Süddeutsche Zeitung, 12 May 2011; online: http://www.sueddeutsche.de/muenchen/urteil-am-landgericht-muenchen-fuenf-jahre-haft-fuer-john-demjanjuk-1.1096378
[2] Cf. Jürgen Graf, Thomas Kues, Carlo Mattogno, Sobibór: Holocaust Propaganda and Reality, TBR Books, Washington D.C. 2010, pp. 9-12, 375-390.
[3] “FBI thought Demjanjuk evidence faked”; Associated Press, 12 April 2011, online: http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5gzn9sjjViXpoagiQbtyuSx3oZdEg?docId=2ed960173598473c94630a9a5ebe2cbe
[4] Cf. J. Graf, T. Kues, C. Mattogno, Sobibór: Holocaust Propaganda and Reality, op.cit., pp. 149-167.
[5] Ibid, p. 366ff.
[6] Cf. Thomas Kues, “Evidence for the Presence of ‘Gassed’ Jews in the Occupied Eastern Territories, Part 2″, section 3.3.11; online: http://www.inconvenienthistory.com/archive/2010/volume_2/number_4/evidence_for_the_presence_of_gassed_jews_2.php
[7] Klaus-Peter Friedrich, Der nationalsozialistische Judenmord in polnischen Augen: Einstellungen in der polnischen Presse 1942-1946/47, dissertation presented to the University of Cologne in 2002, p. 126. Online: http://kups.ub.uni-koeln.de/volltexte/2003/952/
[8] T. Kues, “Evidence for the Presence of ‘Gassed’ Jews in the Occupied Eastern Territories, Part 2″, sections 3.3.17 and 3.5.
[9] Georg Bönisch, Jan Friedmann, Cordula Meyer, “Ein ganz gewöhnlicher Handlanger,” Der Spiegel, No. 26/2009, 22 June 2009 (www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-65794351.html).
[10] “John Demjanjuk kommt frei”, http://www.focus.de/politik/deutschland/ns-kriegsverbrecherprozess-john-demjanjuk-kommt-frei_aid_626638.html