THE NAZI GAS CHAMBERS:
Rumours, Lies And Reality
– One Researcher’s View
Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen, Mr President, Honoured Guests,
First of all, thank you for inviting me to this seminal conference. My name is Alexander Baron, and I am probably something of an anomaly at a gathering of this nature. Although I have spent many thousands of hours over the last eighteen years or so researching in the British Library and other archives, I am not an academic in the proper sense of the word. Technically I am a journalist, but my efforts to earn a living by means of this dubious profession have been sporadic and largely unsuccessful.
I first heard of the supposedly so difficult subject of Holocaust Revisionism in the mid-seventies, but I didn’t begin to take any sort of interest in it until the early eighties when I began studying Revisionist literature in earnest. It took me no time at all to conclude that the entire Holocaust story from beginning to end was a gigantic concoction, pure Allied and Zionist propaganda, after all, wasn’t truth the first casualty of war? And wasn’t history written by the victors?
It took me several years more to realise that this was a somewhat naïve view, and that lies are propagated not just by the victors in any conflict. Although like Jewish power and Jewish mendacity generally, the Holocaust is and remains strictly off-limits to established and respectable scholars, quote unquote, and although explanations for anti-Semitism – real and imagined – are always rationalised in slavishly philo-Semitic terms, in the past few years a number of attempts have been made by courageous scholars, some of them Jewish, to make a more balanced assessment. One of these scholars is Professor Lindemann who in his book Esau’s Tears complained that many books on the Holocaust have been characterised by “disappointing intellectual standards and doubtful conclusions”. (1)
Commenting on a critically acclaimed book by another Jewish scholar, Daniel Goldhagen, he says that its thesis is far from original and that it represents the case for the prosecution but that “a major problem is that few serious historians would want to present a case for the defense” adding that “history should not...be written in the same way that cases are presented to a jury”. (2)
A major criticism of Holocaust Revisionism is that it seeks to present only the case for the defence, another Jewish scholar, Professor Mayer has written that Revisionists – to whom he refers as skeptics – are “outright negationists [who] mock the Jewish victims with their one-sided sympathetic understanding for the executioners” and that they are “ill-disguised anti-Semites and merchants of prejudice” whose “morally reprehensible posture disqualifies them from membership in the republic of free letters and scholarship”. (3)
This is probably the most complimentary remark that any mainstream scholar has ever made about the Revisionist Historians of the Holocaust; in addition to being denounced as anti-Semites, outright Nazis, bigots, racists, cranks, etc and ad nauseam, Revisionists have been subjected to intellectual, moral and most of all to legal persecution, and at times to naked force and tyranny. On the few occasions when our enemies have allowed us a platform and haven’t subjected us either to tyranny or to the silent treatment we have been subjected instead to ridicule, satire and gross misrepresentation. We have been compared with Flat Earthers and other denuded cranks, but since the early 1990s in particular, and to some extent before that, some of the enemies of intellectual freedom seeing that the writing was on the wall have found it necessary to confront, or to try to confront the evidence and arguments we have adduced. And almost exclusively these confrontations have been retractions, climbdowns, admissions that we have all been lied to, and each and every one of them has been made without the slightest good grace or good will.
Although to some extent Holocaust Revisionism can be said to have begun during the Holocaust itself, and although pamphlets and books on the subject have been published since the end of the Second World War, it would be true to say that the first thoroughly documented scientific study was The Hoax Of The Twentieth Century, by Professor Arthur Butz, which was first published in 1976.
In this book, the author makes an extremely important point which is often overlooked even today. At the beginning of Chapter II, he writes “When Germany collapsed in the spring of 1945 it was after a long Allied propaganda campaign which had repeatedly claimed that people, mainly Jews, were being systematically killed in German ‘camps’. When the British captured the camp at Bergen-Belsen in northern Germany they found a large number of unburied bodies lying around the camp.”
Film of Belsen – still photographs and video footage – was subsequently reproduced all over the world.
Professor Butz continues: “It is, I believe, Belsen which has always constituted the effective, mass propaganda ‘proof’ of exterminations, and even today you will find such scenes occasionally waved around as ‘proof’”. (4)
This is something of an understatement, the terrible scenes that were found at Belsen and other camps were used, certainly in Britain, in a decades long campaign to attack racists and those who opposed uncontrolled non-white immigration into the UK. At times the hysteria against racism and racists became fever pitched, although curiously many of the same people who raged against the Nazis in our midst had no compunction whatsoever in starting not one but three wars against Iraq thereby causing death, destruction and suffering to the Iraqi people on a scale that had not been seen in Britain even at the height of the Second World War.
Returning to Professor Butz, he is correct of course when he states that Belsen was used as a mass propaganda proof of the Holocaust – and of innate German wickedness – but he might have added that the scenes at Dachau were similarly used. He does in fact make this point, and later in his book he reproduces a photograph of a delousing chamber used at this camp which was captioned a gas chamber by the US Army. (5)
Above: A photograph of a delousing chamber in Dachau concentration camp, presented to the world as a homicidal gas chamber by the Daily Mail in its September 1945 publication Lest We Forget.
When I was researching the Holocaust in the 1990s I found original photographs in the archive of the prestigious Imperial War Museum which bore the imprint of this lying propaganda. Two publications in particular spring to mind, one is a book which was produced in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. Lest We Forget was published in September 1945 by the Daily Mail newspaper. In this, photographs of the gassed at Dachau – quote unquote – and of the non-existent Dachau gas chamber are exhibited with the candid statement that they are to be used to re-educate the Germans.
Now in all fairness, there was a great deal of genuine confusion at this time about the nature of these gas chambers – real and imagined – and tabloid journalists have never been the most reliable source of information about any subject, least of all war, (6) but in spite of media misrepresentations, the truth about Dachau and Belsen did eventually come out, so there was no excuse in 1963 when the Board of Deputies of British Jews published a pamphlet called Letters To My Daughter in which the same tiresome lies were repeated.
Above: The Board of Deputies of British Jews published the pamphlet Letters To My Daughter in the full knowledge that the gas chamber exhibited here was merely a delousing chamber.
And there was absolutely no excuse a decade and a half later when the South African Board of Deputies used exactly the same miscaptioned photographs and outright lies in their successful campaign to make questioning the Holocaust a criminal offence in that country, which if you recall, was at that time ruled by a racist Apartheid régime.
Uncritical belief in the Holocaust in the West is an act of faith, of zealotry, even the most outrageous lies go unchallenged. My favourite piece of Holocaust nonsense is a story that appeared in the supposedly prestigious New York Times newspaper in 1988. According to Holocaust survivor Morris Hubert, a most remarkable menagerie existed in Buchenwald:
“In the camp there was a cage with a bear and an eagle,” he said. “Every day, they would throw a Jew in there. The bear would tear him apart and the eagle would pick at his bones.”
“But that’s unbelievable,” whispered a visitor.
“It is unbelievable,” said Mr. Hubert, “but it happened.” (7)
This story is prima facie ludicrous; that doesn’t mean it couldn’t have happened, of course, but as far as I know, it is a unique claim: there are no reports of the same acts of barbarism from any other source. Has anyone here heard of bears being kept in the Nazi concentration camps? And how would the Nazis or anyone keep an eagle in the same cage as a bear without the bear tearing it to pieces? Perhaps it was a special breed of bear, a man-eating koala trained to perform this particular task?
I don’t wish to sound uncharitable, or to mock the afflicted, but it would help if newspapers such as the New York Times didn’t insult my intelligence, and yours, by endorsing such nonsense.
When powerful Jewish organisations spread far less incredible but still wilful lies about the non-existent Dachau gas chambers, the silence is deafening, but when others attempt to expose such lies, they are denounced as liars, bigots, hatemongers and of course as anti-Semites. Indeed I am living proof of this. In 1995 and 1996 I published two editions of a pamphlet called Why Britain’s Police Aren’t Worth A Jewish Fingernail in which I exposed this particular version of the lie. The “Jewish fingernail” is a reference to the 1994 Hebron massacre; at the funeral of the murderer, a Zionist Rabbi made the terrible statement that one million Arabs are not worth a Jewish fingernail. I thought that was an appropriate title. And I mailed out a large number of this publication to police stations. And what did the police do? They arrested me on suspicion of “incitement to racial hatred”. The charge was eventually dropped (8) probably because of the embarrassment my accusers would have faced in the courtroom where the tables would have been turned on them. It is though ironic is it not that lies which besmirch the German people are considered perfectly acceptable while people who expose these lies are branded bigots?
No one summed up the religious fervour over the Holocaust better than your own charismatic President; speaking in December last year he pointed out that:
“If someone were to deny the existence of God... or prophets and religion, they would not bother him.
However, if someone were to deny the myth of the Jews’ massacre, all the Zionist mouthpieces and the governments subservient to the Zionists tear their larynxes and scream against the person as much as they can”.
We have seen similar religious fervour over the issue of ritual murder. In Britain in the last century, three people were prosecuted for claiming Jews practised ritual murder. Arnold Leese together with his printer Walter Whitehead was put in the dock in the 1930s, and the Dowager Lady Birdwood was so indicted, tried and convicted in the 1990s. (9) Yet in recent years there have been serious claims supported by serious evidence that certain Africans have murdered children for ritual purposes in England, the most notorious of which was the case of ‘Adam’ – this being the name given to the torso of a young unidentified African boy which was fished from the River Thames in September 2001.
Unless one accepts the dubious proposition that Jews are morally superior to Africans, one must at least concede the possibility of Jewish ritual murder, and discuss it in rational rather than hysterical terms, but nobody ever does, least of all our spineless and compliant academics. Just for the record I do not believe Jews are morally superior to Africans, and I know quite a lot of people who feel the same way. They are called Palestinians.
Returning to the Holocaust proper, the claims of mass extermination in homicidal gas chambers are extraordinary, and it is well attested that extraordinary claims demand extraordinary proof, yet when one lifts the veil of media hysteria, one finds such proof sorely lacking. In this connection I can do no better than again quote the distinguished Jewish academic Arno Mayer who writes that: “Sources for the study of the gas chambers are at once rare and unreliable.” (10)
Although he is of course a committed believer in the official version of the Holocaust, Professor Mayer’s book is an excellent work; he is clearly unhappy with many survivor testimonies, and does his level best to examine the subject critically. Although as he points out, testimonies about the Nazi gas chambers are rare, there are some eyewitness testimonies, the problem they all have is that where they are credible they do not support the Exterminationist position, and when they do support it, they are just not credible.
We are particularly fortunate to have two such striking testimonies, both from Polish Jewesses, which were given at the main Belsen Trial in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. The Belsen Trial concerned atrocities – real and imagined – which were committed both at Belsen and at Auschwitz I. Many of those on trial, including Commandant Kramer, had worked at both camps. The papers relating to this trial are held by the Public Record Office – or the National Archives as we are now to call it – in the War Office or WO series, (the predecessor of the Ministry of Defence).
It is a stock charge by Revisionists that the trials held by the Allies after the Second World War were show trials; there is more than a grain of truth in this claim, but any honest person who reads the entire transcript of the main Belsen Trial – as I have – will conclude that show trial or not, the defence team did not simply go through the motions. The cross-examination of the accusers by the likes of Major Winwood – who defended Kramer – was vigorous, and all but destroyed the prosecution’s case. Sometimes though cross-examination is academic, because the testimony of a witness is patently false, or even patently ludicrous in the light of the known facts of a case.
The testimony of Holocaust survivor Sophia Litwinska falls into the ludicrous category in the light of the laws of physics, because she would have the court and the world believe not that she had simply witnessed the wicked SS administering the Zyklon to a group of ill-fated Jews, but that she herself had actually been gassed, and was for some inexplicable reason dragged out of the gas chamber by an SS man just as the darkness was about to overcome her.
Litwinska’s testimony on the seventh day of the trial, September 24, 1945, can be found in WO235/13; at page 169 of this document we find the following:
She was asked: “When you reached the crematorium what happened there?”
And replied: “We left the trucks and were led into a room which gave me the impression of a shower bath. There were towels hanging round and sprays, and even mirrors.”
She was then asked: “Were the doors closed?”
And replied: “I cannot say; I have never thought when I was there I shall leave and be here present in the court to speak about it.”
“What happened next?”
“There were tears; people were shouting at each other; people were hitting each other. There were healthy people; strong people; weak people; and sick people, and suddenly I saw fumes coming in through a window.”
“What do you mean when you say window?”
“On top, very small sort of window.”
“What effect did this have on you?”
“I had to cough very violently; tears were streaming out from my eyes, and I had a sort of feeling in my throat as if I would be asphyxiated.”
“What happened to other people around you?”
“I could not look even at the others because each of us was only concentrated on what happened to himself.”
“What was the next thing that you remember?”
“In that moment I heard my name called. I had not the strength to answer it, but I raised my arm. Then I felt somebody take me and throw me out from that room.”
Her rescuer was Franz Hoessler, who was in the dock at this trial. One might have thought this death defying act of remarkable courage would have earned him some sort of commendation at the very least. Instead, he was hanged.
According to Litwinska, she had been sent to the gas chamber by mistake and was rescued because she was married to a Gentile, although curiously her husband, a Polish officer, had been arrested because he had married a Jewess, and was already dead.
In the book INDUSTRIAL POISONS IN THE UNITED STATES, Harvard medic Alice Hamilton writes: “The indiscriminate use of this very dangerous gas by persons quite unfamiliar with it led to the accidental death in Cleveland of four persons who inhaled hydrocyanic gas with which a restaurant under their apartment was being fumigated.” (11)
Hamilton gives the lethal dosage as .25 parts per thousand for men stood at rest for two minutes, and .375 parts per thousand for a minute and a half without dizziness.
The lethal dose is a mere 60mg minimum or .8 to 1mg per kg of body weight. (12)
One might ask how the laws of physics changed between the publication of Professor Hamilton’s book in 1925 and the rescue of Litwinska less than twenty years later.
Can anyone give any credence whatsoever to the ludicrous claim that as a large group of people is being gassed to death, an SS man opens the door, dives in, and whisks one of them out? The military court which tried Franz Hoessler did, apparently.
Litwinska was sent off to be gassed in a fairly small group, but the conventional Holocaust wisdom is that these gassings were carried out on an industrial scale. The big question has to be how? How can hundreds of people at a time be duped or coerced into entering a gas chamber? On the pretext that they were to shower? And then the door is slammed, and the Zyklon administered through a hole in the roof, or through the wall. It doesn’t work like that, the laws of physics won’t permit it. One has only to look at the precautions that have to be taken when one individual is gassed with intent in a lethal execution chamber, as has happened to convicted murderers on numerous occasions in the United States.
How do the Exterminationists explain this away? The answer is they don’t; they simply brand us anti-Semitic for even daring to ask the question.
Curiously the question appears not to have been asked in any meaningful sense until the courageous Professor Faurisson published the results of his researches. I have to say I do not agree with everything the Professor has written, especially with regard to Anne Frank, but when it comes to the gas chambers, he is spot on.
One might have expected medical men to have taken an interest in the mechanics of this unique form of mass murder, but their curiosity appears never to have been aroused. I made a fairly detailed study of all the major English language medical journals published immediately after the Second World War; they contain scant mention of Nazi crimes – real and imagined – and none at all about mass gassings.
For those who remain skeptical about the Revisionist position, or indeed for those who are skeptical of the perceived wisdom, I propose a solution. In some countries, including Israel, a murderer who freely admits his crime is made to re-enact it. This was the case with the November 1995 assassination of Yitzhak Rabin by the Zionist fanatic Yigal Amir. (13)
As the Nazis freely admitted their crimes – so we are told – why should not a re-enactment of a mass gassing be ordered? Or a simulation? Nowadays computers can do wonderful things. There have been simulations of the Kennedy assassination which dispel the numerous ill-informed claims that Lee Harvey Oswald was not the assassin; why not a simulation of a couple of thousand Jews being marched into a gas chamber and exterminated with a lighter than air gas that was dropped from the ceiling while the SS stood around drinking coffee and smoking Woodbines? If my tone sounds facetious I apologise not; the scenario really is that ludicrous.
The other testimony of a survivor who survived an actual gassing was that of 28 year old Regina Bialek. I am quoting here from a slightly more accessible source, the official book on the Belsen Trial. In this book we find her deposition, which reads thus:
“On 25th December, 1943, I was sick with typhus and was picked out at a selection made by Doctors Mengele and Tauber along with about 350 other women. I was made to undress and taken by lorry to a gas chamber. There were seven gas chambers at Auschwitz. This particular one was underground and the lorry was able to run down the slope and straight into the chamber. Here we were tipped unceremoniously on the floor. The room was about 12 yards square and small lights on the wall dimly illuminated it. When the room was full a hissing sound was heard coming from the centre point on the floor and gas came into the room. After what seemed about ten minutes some of the victims began to bite their hands and foam at the mouth and blood issued from their ears, eyes and mouth, and their faces went blue. I suffered from all these symptoms, together with a tight feeling at the throat. I was half conscious when my number was called out by Dr. Mengele and I was led from the chamber. I attributed my escape to the fact that the daughter of a friend of mine who was an Aryan and a doctor at Auschwitz had seen me being transported to the chamber and had told her mother, who immediately appealed to Dr. Mengele. Apparently he realized that as a political prisoner I was of more value alive than dead, and I was released...I think that the time to kill a person in this particular gas chamber would be from 15 to 20 minutes.” (14)
Until his death in a drowning accident in Brazil in 1979, Dr Mengele achieved notoriety as one of the most notorious Nazi war criminals at large; known as the Angel of Death, he inspired a song and at least one smash box office film, The Boys From Brazil. Are we to believe Regina Bialek was saved from the gas chamber by the Angel of Death himself?
Should we dismiss this testimony just because it is ludicrous? It wouldn’t be half as ludicrous if these women were the victims of medical experiments rather than of attempted exterminations by Zyklon B. We know the Nazis conducted unethical medical experiments on what they regarded as the lower elements and expendables of society, just as the British conducted such experiments on our own servicemen in the 1950s. (15) It is possible that Litwinska and Bialek were guinea pigs rather than potential genocide victims; the alternative is that their stories were made up out of the whole cloth, certainly lies and perjury were rather commonplace at all the so-called war crimes trials; this fact was even recognised by the United Nations War Crimes Commission. In its 1947 report on the Belsen Trial, after paying lip service to the Nazi extermination programme: “at least 2,500,000 human beings (or as some say 4,000,000) were done to death by being poisoned in gas chambers [in Auschwitz]” (16) it pointed out that “From the evidence it appeared that the usual ground for inferring that people had been gassed was that they disappeared.” (17)
People disappear all the time, especially during war-time; that doesn’t mean they have been gassed. The report sheds some light on how the evidence for the trial – and by implication other such trials – was generated. We are told that affidavits were prepared from statements taken by other people, mainly by police officers, then turned into affidavits by Major Smallwood. And “the accused were never present or really present when these accounts were being made.” It is not clear what not being really present means, but it is obvious that these affidavits and witness statements enjoyed a considerable amount of creative licence. (18)
The rules of evidence at this – and related trials – were such that they allowed for the admission of documents and statements “appearing on the face of it to be authentic, provided the statement or document appears to the Court to be of assistance in proving or disproving the charge...” (19) Hearsay evidence was admitted both in affidavits and in the witness box. (20)
Now it is a fact that prosaic evidence given under oath can be a tissue of lies, and that by the same token the most scurrilous unsubstantiated rumours can be true; one has only to compare President Clinton’s categorical denial “I did not have sex with that woman” with the sordid case of Monica Lewinsky’s semen stained dress to realise this, but the admittance of hearsay evidence at a criminal trial makes a mockery of the process. Such evidence cannot be tested, and can only be prejudicial to the accused.
As well as generating ludicrous evidence of mass gassings, the Belsen Trial gave the world the claim of four million dead in Auschwitz. This claim is likewise based on hearsay.
Ada Bimko (Bimko that is, not Bimbo) was a Jewish doctor who was interned at Auschwitz for fifteen months before being transferred to Belsen.
Asked by the prosecutor Colonel Backhouse if any of the prisoners kept records in respect of the operation of the alleged gas chambers, she replied: “Yes...One of those who took part...a man called Grzecks, told me that others of those kommandos before having been gassed had complete records of all those transports which did arrive and then eventually were destroyed. This man Grzeck [sic] told me that others who took part in these kommandos, and in fact he himself, kept records and that the number of those Jews who were destroyed in this gas chamber would be about four million.” (21)
That is in one gas chamber, one room, not in the entire camp. If you imagine a football stadium, the largest football stadium you can think of, and imagine it filled again and again and again and again and again, many, many, many times, then think of all these people exterminated in one room, that should give you an idea of just how ludicrous are these claims.
I will return to the subject of gas chambers shortly when I will explain why I believe there were indeed some homicidal gassings, but I think we have established two things: i) that the stories about gassings are not as established as the Great Pyramid, if I may borrow an expression from Professor Butz, that many of them are based on wilful distortions and outright lies; and ii) mass gassings did not happen, they just could not have been carried out the way they were allegedly carried out. Gassing a thousand or even a hundred people in a gas chamber or any building and doing so without endangering the operators is a very different proposition from gassing one person under controlled conditions.
I want now though to examine a few documented facts which are totally at odds with the claims of a mass extermination programme. In particular I want to discuss the way prisoners of war were treated by the Nazis.
On one occasion while I was pottering about in the library of the Imperial War Museum I came across The Prisoner Of War, a magazine published during the Second World War by the Red Cross. Some of the articles therein make extraordinary reading; Allied servicemen in the Nazi camps staged boxing matches, some had the use of swimming pools, prisoners had access to a wide range of educational classes including modern languages, economics and gas fitting (ironically). And they even took examinations.
One article though struck me as absolutely astonishing; the September 1942 issue reported that one prisoner, Ronnie Wells, who was described as “the Bournemouth Speed Skating champion and stilt skater” had been allowed a very special privilege while interned in Poland the previous year. And I quote: “the German authorities allowed him to buy two pairs of skates and to go ten miles outside the camp to practise on a large lake”.
Above: The Red Cross frequently paints a different picture of the Nazis camps from that portrayed in the at times ludicrous survivor literature.
This shows an astonishing lack of security, British prisoners of war were in effect treated as men of honour – give us your word as an English gentleman that you won’t do anything dastardly, Tommy, like trying to escape – and all that, but if human beings really were being exterminated in those very camps, would British POWs, or indeed anyone, have been allowed out of them at all? I think not.
We find similar anomalies of security in the survivor literature. In her book Prisoners Of Fear, the Gentile doctor and former Auschwitz inmate Ella Lingens-Reiner reports matter of factly that prisoners went outside to the ponds on working parties some considerable distance from the camp, and that while they were breaking rocks or doing whatever concentration camp inmates do around ponds, their SS guards busied themselves with their fishing rods. (22)
But perhaps the most remarkable account of life in Auschwitz comes from a British soldier named Charles Coward. Coward’s story was related in a 1954 book The Password Is Courage, which went through no less than eight editions by 1988. (23) His story was even made into a tongue-in-cheek film starring Dirk Bogarde. Coward’s exploits earned him the sobriquet The Count Of Auschwitz; he was captured at Calais in 1940, and while lying badly wounded in a civilian hospital was awarded the Iron Cross by a German general in a bizarre mix up.
An amusing aside here, between pages 48 & 49 of the 1954 edition, 3rd Impression, is a photograph captioned “Manacled, a British prisoner receives a Red Cross parcel”. We can’t see the prisoner so have no idea if he is really British, however, the manacles on his wrist appear to be floating in mid-air. They certainly give the impression of having been superimposed.
During one of his myriad escape attempts, Coward and the other escapee with whom he was captured received a stern warning. They had been travelling on forged documents, posing as Bulgarian mine workers.
After protesting: “All prisoners of war have the right to try to escape,” his captor replied: “Say ‘sir’ when you address an officer. Prisoners may try to escape, however foolish that may be, but in disguising themselves as civilians and carrying forged identity papers, they make themselves liable to be shot as spies.”
Suffice it to say they were not shot but were sent to a castle at Ulm where they were said to have been badly beaten. Coward complained about his treatment to the Commandant, who promised to look into it saying “I apologise for the behaviour of the guard; in war-time we cannot always employ the best of men in the Wehrmacht.” You just can’t get the staff nowadays, can you?
When he and his fellow escapee were tried for trying to escape, Coward told the officer in charge that he would protest to the trustees of the Geneva Convention. He was thrown out and warned never to cross Herr Hauptmann’s path again!
His biographers tell us “...Coward’s position was unassailable. Try as they would, they could not stop a prisoner from getting in touch with Geneva...” (24) This is absolutely ridiculous. Two years later these same people who were quivering in their boots at the thought of some upstart British serviceman reporting them to the Red Cross were supposed to be exterminating every Jew in Europe. Surely Coward and his fellow escapee could have had an “accident” in custody, or been shot while trying to escape. Instead of being shot though, he was sent to a sugar factory in Czechoslovakia. And put in charge of it!
That didn’t last long though because he escaped again. Well, he walked out of the gate, anyway, and eventually, at the end of 1943 he was transferred to Auschwitz.
He was far from the only British POW in the camp, at Christmas the same year, several hundred of his fellow Brits were set to work digging trenches and the like at Monowitz, 3 miles from the main camp. They are said to have received heavy workers’ rations supplemented by Red Cross food.
Although this book is highly imaginative, it relates an incident which did undoubtedly happen, and which again is highly at odds with the alleged genocidal behaviour of the camp hierarchy. A guard shot dead a British POW for disobeying an order and “the German guards let no one near until a doctor had been summoned and pronounced the man dead.”
The Nazis were perhaps the most bureaucratic administration that ever existed anywhere at anytime, everything was done by the book and had to be approved from above. One man is shot dead, and they summon a doctor to ensure everything is in order.
Coward regarded this shooting as cold-blooded murder, he was so incensed that after reporting it indirectly to the British authorities – as one would do – he murdered a German spy in retaliation; there seem to have been no repercussions for this. (25)
Later when he needed to have his eyes tested he was permitted to go into nearby Berkenwald accompanied by a solitary guard. On the bus he was abused by a young German woman. His escort seized the woman by the wrist and gave her a lecture on good manners and the decent treatment of prisoners of war!
Even though he had the run of the place, Coward was not happy with his working conditions, and threatened to report IG Farben to the Red Cross. He complained about “the bad food here” and about “other things”, the other things being gassings to which came the response: “Gassings? Killings? You must be out of your mind. Don’t talk lightly of such things, Mr Coward. It might be dangerous for you to make such wild statements about the Government and this company.” (26)
Even worse, you might lose your beer ration!
Yes, one of the complaints the Auschwitz personnel department received from the Red Cross concerned the distribution of beer for the POWs. As the saying goes, you couldn’t make it up.
That being said, what follows next provides I think an interesting insight into how rumour mills work. After demanding an interview with the Farben administrators Coward found himself face to face with several Farben and S.S. officials.
Through an interpreter he asked: “Is it true that thousands of civilian prisoners are being gassed and cremated?”
There was silence for a moment, then a Farben official laughed. Immediately all at the table were chuckling good-naturedly. “Utter nonsense...A crematorium is necessary to serve such a large area as this, in which many prisoners fall sick and die. It is hygienic, you must understand.”
“What about the gassing of people who are alive?”
“Fairy tales. Where a great number of workers are gathered together, one must expect the wildest rumours.” (27)
In her aforementioned book, Ella-Lingens Reiner reports a similar encounter with officialdom. After her arrest she told her Gestapo interrogator that she had helped Jews to escape because they were being sent to Poland to be killed; he replied: “You are completely crazy! The people there are working in factories.” (28)
Another Gentile doctor, Alexander Dering, had obviously visited the same rumour mill; Dering was a Pole; he was arrested in July 1940 and was sent to Auschwitz the following month. He didn’t let on that he was a doctor because he was afraid he would be exterminated; German policy was said to be to murder all the intellectuals and professional classes. He worked as an orderly, but when the wicked Nazis found out that he was a doctor, instead of exterminating him they promoted him. Three years later he was in charge of the whole camp hospital. (29)
I don’t dispute that there were rumours of gassings, but I would like to compare these rumours with another rumour. One of the craziest so-called conspiracy theories about AIDS is that it was manufactured by the US Government at the Fort Detrick biological warfare center as part of a plot to rid the United States of African-Americans. There is at least one spurious memorandum in circulation to that effect; it has all the authenticity of The Protocols Of The Learned Elders Of Zion. At one time this nonsense was apparently taken seriously by many American blacks. In reality we all of us pay lip service to all manner of rumours and scurrilous gossip everyday of our lives. I doubt very much many denizens of Nazi Germany and its satellites took claims of mass gassings anymore seriously than did the average American Negro of the Fort Detrick AIDS nonsense.
Returning to Ella Lingens-Reiner’s book, as with all survivor literature, one must learn to distinguish between what the witness claims to have seen and what he – or in this case she – actually experienced. She reports that after her arrest she was interrogated “in a fairly civilised manner” because “the period of arbitrary, purposeless tortures for the sake of pleasure was past”. (30) In other words, she wasn’t tortured but assumes other people in the same position were. Because that’s how the wicked Nazis behave, isn’t it!?
There can be little doubt though that many people believed they had seen or even visited gas chambers. The passage of time has if anything reinforced this propaganda. When I first began reading Revisionist literature in the early 80s I was asked by a left wing workmate about the photographs we had seen of gas chambers; he was referring specifically to the Dachau gas chambers. When I told him these were in fact delousing chambers he shook his head and ridiculed me, yet that is precisely what they were, and we are told nowadays that their presentation to the world as homicidal gas chambers was a mistake. Some mistake!
It is no doubt true though that some people with overactive imaginations did contribute to this nonsense. One such person was Ada Bimko, whom we have already met. In her testimony at the Belsen Trial she was asked “Have you ever been into one of the gas chambers?”
She replied simply “Yes.”
When prompted, she expanded in the following terms
“In August 1944 [when she was working as a doctor at Auschwitz]...again a new crowd of those selected for the gas chamber had arrived, and as they were sick they came covered with a blanket. After two days we were told to fetch all those blankets from the gas chamber. I took the opportunity, as I always wanted to see with my own eyes this ill-famed gas chamber, and I went. I did go into this crematorium.” (31)
It is clear from the above passage that what the good doctor refers to as a “gas chamber” was in reality no such thing.
Another quite remarkable but little known testimony can be found in a book by another female Auschwitz survivor.
smoke over birkenau by Seweryna Szmaglewska was published in New York in 1947; in this book the author says that women would take a long, hot steam bath then a cold shower and then they were sprayed with “some evil-smelling liquid, with which they disinfect your head”. This was clearly a precaution against typhus, which was rampant in the concentration camp system. Then she goes on:
“It had been announced that while the women took their bath their clothes would be disinfected in the gas chamber and in a steam kettle. But actually it turned out that the men working in the gas chambers could not catch up with their work. So we wait naked, in the big, cold hall.”
Gas chambers, she says, but clearly she does not mean homicidal gas chambers.
“After an hour the first batch of gassed clothes is brought.”
Then a bit later she says that everything the women in the hospital own is stripped from them and sent to the gas chamber. She even gives a detailed description of the gassing of clothes and says that “Two rooms adjoin the gas chamber – one for the storage of coal and coke, the other for the disinfected clothes.” On pages 174-7 of her book the author gives a remarkable description of a delousing. Clothes appear to have been deloused with Zyklon B in the open air. The women were deloused a thousand at a time, quite naked. Nice work if you can get it.One thing which is striking about this book is that the inmates appear to have moved freely about the camp, and of course you will recall that some even went ice skating.There can be little doubt that the reports of mass gassings based on the flimsiest of evidence coupled with the myriad lies that have been and are continually parroted about the Holocaust to this day taint the subject more than any other event in history. Much of the evidence for the existence of an extermination programme was generated at trials which were likewise tainted. In an earlier era, legal tribunals made findings of fact to the effect that women had copulated with the Devil; in some ways those judgments were less tainted; confessions were not always extracted by torture, and denuded old women with no fear of death sometimes proved credible witnesses, more so than many of those tried by their vanquishers in the aftermath of the bloodiest war in history.
In the British courts, if a conviction is sufficiently tainted, it will be quashed by the Court of Appeal. Certainly if prosecution witnesses lie repeatedly under oath – as police officers often do – and if the forensic evidence is doubtful, non-existent, or even impossible, then the court will say enough, and the conviction will fail. It may be that the accused will never be completely exonerated, but he will to all intents and purposes be considered innocent, and may even be eligible for compensation.
The historian though is not a jury, or a judge, and he is certainly not a tribunal of appeal. Unlike a judge who may exclude evidence, which is considered tainted or prejudicial, the historian, the honest historian, must consider all the evidence.
There is an old apocryphal tale related many centuries ago by one of those clever Greek geezers named Aesop, I’m sure you’re all familiar with it, it’s known as the boy who cried wolf. Throughout the ages, men and women of all races have cried wolf, often innocently, but sometimes for self-aggrandisement, for some deeper motive, revenge perhaps, or even for the sheer hell of it. I think it is fair to say that the Jews have cried wolf more often than most, certainly since the establishment of the State of Israel. The wolf they claim to see is an anti-Semitic wolf; they imagine anti-Semitism everywhere and in everyone. Hillary Clinton, the most politically correct person in Arkansas has been smeared as anti-Semitic, as has George Bush Senior, the singer Shirley Bassey, and the son of Yehudi Menhuin.
It is the punishment of a liar that he will not be believed; when he has lied so long and so persistently and so gratuitously, when the lies trip off his tongue with such effortless guile, there comes a point when we, when the world, will say enough is enough, go away and take your lies with you. This is the case with the Holocaust, and I was just coming to this point, having endured decades of the same lies: having seen delousing chambers persistently misrepresented as gas chambers, having seen retouched, or outright faked photographs – of which there are many – having listened to the most ludicrous nonsense such as the story of the bear and the eagle at Buchenwald, and seeing otherwise cynical people like journalists, pundits and even powerful politicians lap up these lies without exercising the slightest critical faculty, I had just about had enough of the Holohoax. Then I took a deeper look at the case of Commandant Kramer, and I arrived at my current position regarding homicidal gas chambers.
Kramer was sentenced to death and hanged for crimes allegedly committed at Belsen and Auschwitz. He was defended at the Belsen Trial by the spirited Major Winwood, who by his own account met his client only two to three weeks before the start of the proceedings. Winwood’s papers – which nobody else in the world appears to have read – are held by the Imperial War Museum.
Amongst them is a short dissertation on the Belsen Trial called Over Their Shoulder. As soon as I read it, something Winwood said in this paper struck me as curious; after the indictment was drawn up against Kramer he expressed relief that he was not to be charged with crimes allegedly committed at the Natzweiller camp; this camp, also known as Struthof, is not to be confused with Stuthof. Kramer had worked at Struthof too, and after his arrest he had confessed freely and voluntarily to the murders of 87 Jews – 50 men and 37 women – who had been gassed for “medical purposes”.
The thought that struck me was why was Kramer so worried about the Struthof charge when he didn’t appear worried at all about the Belsen and Auschwitz charges? It’s a bit like Osama bin Laden being arrested in New York and telling his lawyer he’s afraid he’ll be deported as an illegal alien. And the answer I came up with, and I stress this is only my answer, is that Kramer’s confession to the Struthof murders was bona fide; charges had been put to him, and he had admitted them, whereas he had not participated in murder or brutalities at either Belsen or Auschwitz, at least no more than prison guards of that era normally did. In short, his conscience was clear, at least on the major charges against him.
A word now about the conditions the British, the Americans and the Russians found in these camps. It is all too easy for us today sitting in out centrally heated living rooms in front of our computer screens to look at these scenes and recoil in horror, but what we must remember is that not only were these conditions caused primarily by the chaotic situation in a Reich that was being battered on all sides, but that prisoners – be they Jews, politicals or simply common criminals – are always at the bottom of the food chain, and on top of that, that this was a different era.
Nowadays if a family or an individual doesn’t own a refrigerator, or a telephone, or a TV set, that family or person is considered poor. How many families had refrigerators in the 1940s? Television was all but unknown, and although telephones had been around since the previous century, people didn’t walk around with them in their pockets as they do today. Conditions for ordinary working people were spartan, at times harsh, conditions for prisoners were even more so. Kramer was in charge of these camps, so ultimately the responsibility fell on his shoulders, but the question we should ask ourselves is had we been in his position, would we have been any different? I suggest that if we had been in charge of these camps most of us would have ended up like him, in the dock, and then swinging on the end of a rope.
Now, Struthof, Kramer made his confession to Major Jadin on July 26, 1945; curiously, in a book edited by self-styled Nazi hunter Serge Klarsfeld, the arch anti-Revisionist Jean-Claude Pressac states uncaterogically that the way in which Kramer claimed the gassings were carried out “cannot be considered credible. He would have ended up gassing himself.”
Kramer described a chemically impossible reaction “Because of the absurdity of this modus operandi and his ignorance about the substances involved, some quite legitimate historical suspicion has weighed on the procedure and on the very existence of the gas chamber at Struthof.” (32)
The gassings were said to have been carried out on three days (in the evening) in August 1943. Kramer said he gassed a total of 80-85 individuals on 4 or 5 different occasions, ie in total.
It is ironic that the Klarsfelds of all people cannot see the absurdity of this claim. Small scale gassings were impossible – as described by Kramer – but mass gassings, question them at your peril. Indeed in Germany as I am sure you know it is a criminal offence even to suggest such gassings didn’t happen, not that they couldn’t have happened but simply that they didn’t happen.It is my considered opinion that whatever technical mistakes Kramer made in this statement, he did indeed participate in these – by comparison – small scale acts of mass murder at this particular camp. Clear as his conscience was on the major charges, he was still a mass murderer; okay, he was only a technician, he was only following orders, only doing his job, as the saying goes, but the orders he followed were clearly illegal. Jews were never outlaws in Nazi Germany, and whatever deprivations they suffered in the Hitler era, from his accession to power to September 1939 and later, it was always a criminal offence to murder Jews per se, and I am convinced that however many people Hitler murdered in his bombing campaign against Britain, a campaign that was murderous on both sides, however many British and other soldiers his troops killed on the battlefield, that neither he nor anyone at the top of the Nazi hierarchy ordered the extermination of Jews in gas chambers.
The gassings – ie the acts of murder – that were carried out in Struthof, and very likely were carried out on a small scale in other camps, were unsanctioned acts which were punishable under Nazi law.
We know that the British in particular had an extremely competent and incredibly devious black propaganda department, the Special Operations Executive, and that this department under the control of Sefton Delmer churned out atrocity propaganda by the bucketload. It is my belief that the extermination programme was a child of this British black propaganda, and that small scale acts of mass murder – if I may use that oxymoron – were magnified and distorted out of all proportion, until like many similarly successful propaganda campaigns, it took on a life of its own; the witchcraft hysteria of an earlier age is a good example of this.
In closing, I will say that it is important for Revisionists to face these facts; we must not fall into the trap of Nazi apologetics, and we must certainly not try to outdo the Zionist propaganda machine in guile and cunning; in the first instance, they are so much more devious, sly and cunning than us that we must be on a loser from the start. In the second instance, unless we learn from the mistakes of the past, we are doomed forever to repeat them. The foreign policies of the United States, of the United Kingdom, and of nearly all the Western powers towards the Middle East have been based on misunderstandings, wilful distortions and at times the most outrageous lies for at least the past half century. Only by facing and exposing the lies, and the real crimes of all the Western powers of those past eras, and of today, can we pave the way to a just and peaceful world. Nowhere is this more important than here, for the people of the Middle East, and most especially at this time for the people of Iran.
To Notes And References
THE NAZI GAS CHAMBERS: Synopsis Of Paper
THE NAZI GAS CHAMBERS: Edited Version
Over Their Shoulder
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