Ernst
Zündel Replies:Rebuttal # 37-38:
37 - 38 are treated together in this section
37. How did they die?
38. What is typhus?
Ernst
Zündel Replies:This topic, too, has been covered previously and will merely be reviewed
in synopsis. A comprehensive source is given in Typhus and the Jews by
Friedrich Paul Berg, Liberty Bell Publications, 1989. We recommend that
Nizkor not only read it but post it.
Here is a very brief excerpt, starting on page 4:
"A standard feature of the Holocaust story is the reliance upon photographs of thousands of dead bodies found in some of the German concentration camps at the end of World War 2. For people who are unfamiliar with the horrors of war, which includes most of us fortunately, those photographs are more than sufficient proof of a genocidal policy on the part of the German regime. . . The claims of the revisionists that the bodies were the result of catastrophic epidemics of typhus, typhoid, tuberculosis, dysentery, etc., are readily scoffed at as the foolish rantings of Nazi apologists . . .
Perhaps the best discussion of conditions at the end of World War 2 in Germany is by John E. Gordon, M.D., Ph.D., Professor of Preventive Medicine and Epidemiology at the Harvard University of Public Health. . . (T)he excepts which follow are not from someone who can be easily branded as another pro-German revisionist. The following passages by Gordon were published in 1948 by the American Association for the Advancement of Science:
"The whole area seethed with foreign peoples, conscript laborers moving this way and that and in all directions, hoping to reach their homes, in search of food, seeking shelter. Most of the typhus was within this group and they carried the disease with them. They moved along the highways and in country lanes - they moved mostly on foot, halted, then gathered in great camps of sometimes 15,000 or more, extemporized, of primitive sanitation, crowded, and with all too little sense of order and cleanliness.. . wearied with the war, undernourished, poorly clothed and long inured to sanitary underprivilege and low level hygiene, Add to this shifting population the hundreds of released political prisoners, often heavily infested with typhus . . rarely has a situation existed so conducive to the spread of typhus.
Typhus fever in a stable population is bad enough. It has demonstrated its potentialities in both war and peace. The Rhineland in those days of March, 1945 could scarcely be believed by those who saw it - it is beyond the appreciation of those who did not. It was Wild West, the hordes of Genghis Khan, the Klondike gold rush, and Napoleon's retreat all rolled up into one. Such was the typhus problem in the Rhineland . . ."
Revisionists have always maintained that Jews died by the same means
and causes as practically ALL civilians died during that horrible war -
by starvation, bombings, hardships due to destroyed housing and lack of
fuel, and rampant diseases caused by lack of medicine as a result of bombing
and overcrowding. An inordinate number of those who were in concentration
camps died from typhus. Typhus is spread by body lice. The Germans had
no DDT. Zyklon B was used instead to control the spread of disease. The
idea was, believe it or not, to SAVE lives.
According to Webster's Dictionary, typhus is an acute infectious disease
carried by lice. There are three types of louse that infest humans. There
is the head louse, the pubic louse (i.e. crabs), and the body louse. Typhus
is transmitted to humans through the body louse. It transmits more easily
where conditions are unsanitary and bodies are dirty.
That is the short answer. A longer answer can be found by reading up on
just how war played out so horribly at the end of 1945.
The reason it is important to be aware of typhus in relation to the Holocaust
story is that it played a devastating role in creating the scenes of human
devastation recorded by the Allied armies after they captured German labor-,
prison-, and concentration camps, particularly Dachau. It puts the Allied
war-propaganda newsreels of the concentration camps into their proper context.
This topic can only be properly understood and studied in depth if one
studies the official US Bombing Survey, conducted by the USA after Germany's
defeat.
This massive study details the numbers of hospitals, universities, laboratories,
vitamin-producing chemical factories, hospital and surgical supply companies
destroyed in Germany, leading to the widespread use of toilet paper as
a substitute for cotton gauze or bandages. With hygienic conditions at
such a low point, typhus via lice spread like wildfire. Typhus was nothing
new; it had long been a scourge in eastern Europe even during times of
peace. During times of war, however, it became a scourge beyond description.
Lice spread rapidly in unsanitary, overcrowded situations and were difficult
to control due to the vast movement of troops, due to dislocation of civilians,
destruction by war, streams of refugees etc. Let's take just one example,
Auschwitz.
During the Summer of 1942, a typhus epidemic broke out at the German concentration
and labor camp at Auschwitz. Auschwitz was equipped with extensive hospital
facilities, but the extent of the epidemic quickly outstripped the resources
available to combat it. Large sections of the camp were put into quarantine.
The staff of the camp implemented a complex set of procedures to control
the spread of lice and to stop the epidemic. At its peak, the typhus epidemic
at Auschwitz killed several hundred prisoners every day and forced the
SS, who operated the camp, to take drastic action, since they themselves
were in danger.
The regimen implemented to fight the spread of typhus included the building
of extensive delousing facilities, particularly at the huge Auschwitz satellite
camp called Birkenau. In addition to the sauna building where incoming
prisoners were showered and had their heads shaved to remove nits (louse
eggs), fumigation chambers were built to delouse clothing and luggage with
either steam or a chemical fumigant called Zyklon-B. In addition to delousing
personal items, Zyklon-B was also used to systematically fumigate entire
buildings at the camp in a process that took several days to complete.
Even with these procedures in place, the constant flow of thousands of
prisoners and internee laborers through Auschwitz and its sub-camps, the
Germans had only limited success in controlling the spread of typhus. Testifying
to their inability to control the disease, the SS build four crematory
facilities at Birkenau during 1943 to dispose of the camp's dead, after
it was discovered that dead and conventionally buried typhus-infected cadavers
poisoned the ground water and spread the epidemic via the drinking water.
As Germany began to lose the war, prison camps were evacuated ahead of
the advancing Red Army and Allied Armies in the West in late 1944 up to
the end of the war in the spring of 1945. (They could have left them to
be "liberated" by the Reds, which would have solved one problem!
Ask Mr. Elie Wiesel why he decided to run with the "exterminators"
instead of waiting for the "liberators"!)
All of these concentration camp inmates were crammed into the remaining
German Altreich camps such as Dachau, Bergen-Belsen etc. These concentration
camps became extremely overcrowded with yet more typhus brought by the
new arrivals and causing yet more dead. Berg has described these conditions:
". . . the clock had been turned back - in some respects, as far back as the middle ages. By the winter and early spring of 1945, tens of millions of people were fleeing into an area so small that, even in the best of times, enough food could not be produced to sustain the normal population. Casualties were in the millions. All major cities were in ruins. The fact that Germans facing extinction in these circumstances neglected the health and nutrition of many of their most bitter enemies in concentration camps should not be at all surprising." (p. 10)
In addition, the German transport and production infrastructure was
severely damaged by Allied bombers and strafing fighters. The transport
of supplies became at first difficult and at the end impossible. It is
worth mentioning also that the Allies bombed the chemical factories producing
Zyklon B, which was one reason why more people died of typhus than might
otherwise have been the case. There is, in fact, correspondence from one
camp commander in the archives complaining that people died from a LACK
of Zyklon B. There were also shortages of railroad, cars, trucks, fuel,
food and medicine for all of Germany, including civilians and naturally
also the concentration camps, as that country was overrun by its enemies,
who were closing in on all sides.
One unavoidable result of Germany's desperate situation was the ever more
rapid spread of typhus and other diseases in the overcrowded and under-supplied
German prison camps. Fuel and capacity for the crematories ran out and
the dead began to accumulate in sheds, makeshift morgues, ultimately yards
etc.. Even more increased contagion was the result.
Add to that a passage from a recent best-selling pilot book, Yeager: An
Autobiography". The author described that his fighter group was
". . . assigned an area of fifty miles by fifty miles and ordered to strafe anything that moved . . . we weren't asked how we felt zapping people. It was a miserable, dirty mission, but we all took off on time and did it...We were ordered to commit an atrocity, pure and simple, but the brass who approved this action probably felt justified because wartime Germany wasn't easily divided between innocent civilians and its military machine. The farmer tilling his potato field might have been feeding German troops."
He might also have been feeding detainees at Dachau, including Anne Frank and her family! So what was the end result? The photographs you see in every news reel describing the horrors of the camp. They were horrors all right! Here is a graphic description:
"The Dachau camp, located in Bavaria about 5 kilometers north of Munich, was one of the largest and certainly one of the most notorious of the Nazi installations housing political prisoners. It was liberated by units of the U.S. Seventh Army on May 1, 1945.
An estimated 35,000 - 40,000 prisoners were found in the camp, living under conditions bad even for a German camp of this kind and worse than any other that came into American hands. Extreme filthiness, louse infestation and overcrowding prevailed throughout the camp buildings. Several car loads of human bodies were found packed in box cars in the railroad yards adjacent to the camp, the vestiges of a shipment of prisoners from camps farther north who were transferred to Dachau in the late days of the war. . .
The number of patients with typhus fever at the time the camp was first occupied will never be known. Days passed before a census of patients could be accomplished. Several hundreds were found in the prison hospital, but their number was small compared with the patients who continued to live with their comrades in the camp barracks, bedridden and unattended, lying in bunks four tiers high with two and sometimes three men to a narrow shelf-like bed . . . crowded beyond all description, reeking with filth and neglect - and everywhere the smell of death.
During the first few days little more could be done with the limited staff that was available than make the rounds of the barracks, pulling out the dead and the dying..."
That's where the pictures come from. As the Americans and the British
wrestled control of the concentration camps from the SS, they took films
of the chaotic and appalling conditions in these camps and circulated them
around the world as "evidence of Nazi barbarity" - in large part
to deflect public criticism of their own war crimes of genocidal bombing.
The implication to this day is that these piles of dead were victims of
gassings. Not infrequently it is stated that Anne Frank and her family
were gassed in the last days of the war.
Nothing could be farther from the truth. She, along with many others, died
of typhus