But it is known today that, very soon after the liberation of the camps,
American authorities were aware that the real story of the camps was quite
different from the one in which they were coaching military public information
officers, government spokesmen, politicians, journalists, and other mouthpieces.
When American and British forces overran western and central Germany in
the spring of 1945, they were followed by troops charged with discovering
and securing any evidence of German war crimes. Among them was Dr. Charles
Larson, one of America's leading forensic pathologists, who was assigned
to the Judge Advocate General's Department. Dr. Larson performed autopsies
at Dachau and some twenty other German camps, examining on some days more
than 100 corpses. After his grim work at Dachau, he was questioned for
three days by U.S. Army prosecutors. (note 1)
Dr. Larson's findings? According to an interview he gave to an American
journalist in 1980, "What we've heard is that six million Jews were
exterminated. Part of that is a hoax." (note 2) And what part was
the hoax? Dr. Larson, who told his biographer that to his knowledge he
"was the only forensic pathologist on duty in the entire European
Theater," (note 3) informed Wichita Eagle reporter Jan Floerchinger
that "never was a case of poison gas uncovered." (note 4) Neither
Dr. Larson nor any other forensic specialist has ever been cited by any
Holocaust historian to substantiate a single case of death by poison gas,
whether Zyklon-B or any other variety.
If not by gassing, how did the unfortunate victims at Dachau, Buchenwald,
and Bergen-Belsen perish? Were they tortured to death? Deliberately starved?
The answers to these questions are known as well. As Dr. Larson and other
Allied medical men discovered, the chief cause of death at Dachau, Belsen,
and the other camps was disease, above all typhus, an old and terrible
scourge of mankind which until recently flourished in places where populations
were crowded together in circumstances where public health measures were
unknown or had broken down. Such was the case in the overcrowded internment
camps in Germany at war's end, where, despite such measures as systematic
delousing, quarantine of the sick, and cremation of the dead, the virtual
collapse of Germany's food, transport, and public health systems led to
catastrophe.
Perhaps the most authoritative statement of the facts as to typhus and
mortality in the camps has been made by Dr. John E. Gordon, M.D., Ph.D.,
a professor of preventive medicine and epidemiology at the Harvard University
School of Public Health, who was with U.S. forces in Germany in 1945. Dr.
Gordon reported in 1948 that "The outbreaks in concentration camps
and prisons made up the great bulk of typhus infection encountered in Germany."
Dr. Gordon summarized the causes for the outbreaks as follows:
Germany was in chaos. The destruction of whole cities and the path left by advancing armies produced a disruption of living conditions contributing to the spread of the disease. Sanitation was low grade, public utilities were seriously disrupted, food supply and food distribution was poor, housing was inadequate and order and discipline were everywhere lacking. Still more important, a shifting of populations was occurring such as few countries and few times have experienced. (note 5)
Dr. Gordon's findings are corroborated by Dr. Russell Barton, today a psychiatrist of international repute, who entered Bergen-Belsen with British forces as a young medical student in 1945. Barton, who volunteered to care for the diseased survivors, testified under sworn oath in a Toronto courtroom in 1985 that "Thousands of prisoners who died at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp during World War II weren't deliberately starved to death but died from a rash of diseases." (note 6) Dr. Barton further testified that on entering the camp he had credited stories of deliberate starvations but had decided such stories were untrue after inspecting the well-equipped kitchens and the meticulously maintained ledgers, dating back to 1942, of food cooked and dispensed each day. Despite noisily publicized claims and widespread popular notions to the contrary, no researcher has been able to document a German policy of extermination through starvation in the German camps.
What of the ghoulish stories of concentration camp inmates skinned for
their tattoos, flayed to make lampshades and handbags, or other artifacts?
What of the innumerable "torture racks," "meathooks,"
whipping posts, gallows, and other tools of torment and death that are
reported to have abounded at every German camp? These allegations, and
even more grotesque ones profferred by Soviet prosecutors, found their
way into the record at Nuremberg.
The lampshade and tattooed-skin charges were made against Ilse Koch, dubbed
by journalists the "Bitch of Buchenwald," who was reported to
have furnished her house with objects manufactured from the tanned hides
of luckless inmates. But General Lucius Clay, military governor of the
U.S. zone of occupied Germany, who reviewed her case in 1948, told his
superiors in Washington: "There is no convincing evidence that she
[Ilse Koch] selected inmates for extermination in order to secure tattooed
skins or that she possessed any articles made of human skin." (note
7) In an interview General Clay gave years later, he stated about the material
for the infamous lampshades: "Well, it turned out actually that is
was goat flesh. But at the trial it was still human flesh. It was almost
impossible for her to have gotten a fair trial." (note 8) Ilse Koch
hanged herself in a West German jail in 1967.
It would be tedious to itemize and refute the thousands of bizarre claims
as to Nazi atrocities. That there were instances of German cruelty, however,
is clear from the testimony of Dr. Konrad Morgen, a legal investigator
attached to the Reich Criminal Police, whose statements on the witness
stand at Nuremberg have never been challenged by believers in the Jewish
Holocaust. Dr. Morgen informed the court that he had been given full authority
by Heinrich Himmler, commander of Hitler's SS and the dread Gestapo, to
enter any German concentration camp and investigate instances of cruelty
and corruption on the part of the camp staffs. According to Dr. Morgen's
sworn testimony at Nuremberg, he investigated 800 such cases, in which
over 200 convictions resulted. (note 9) Punishments included the death
penalty for the worst offenders, including Hermann Florstedt, commandant
of Lublin (Majdanek), and Karl Koch, Ilse's husband, commandant of Buchenwald.
In reality, while camp commandants in certain cases did inflict physical
punishment, such acts had to be approved by authorities in Berlin, and
it was required that a camp physician first certify the good health of
the prisoner to be disciplined, and then be on hand at the actual beating.
(note 10) After all, the camps were throughout most of the war important
centers of industrial activity. The good health and morale of the prisoners
was critical to the German war effort, as is evidenced by a 1942 order
issued by SS-Brigadefuehrer Richard Gluecks, chief of the office which
controlled the concentration camps, which held camp commanders "personally
responsible for exhausting every possibility to preserve the physical strength
of the detainees." (note 11)
U.S. Army investigators, working at Buchenwald and other camps, quickly
ascertained what was common knowledge among veteran inmates: that the worst
offenders, the cruelest denizens of the camps were not the guards but the
prisoners themselves. Common criminals of the same stripe as those who
populate U.S. prisons today committed many villainies, particularly when
they held positions of authority, and fanatical Communists, highly organized
to combat their many political enemies among the inmates, eliminated their
foes with Stalinist ruthlessness.
Two U.S. Army investigators at Buchenwald, Egon W. Fleck and Edward A.
Tenenbaum, carefully investigated circumstances in the camp before its
liberation. In a detailed report submitted to their superiors, they revealed,
in the words of Alfred Toombs, their commander, who wrote a preface to
the report, "how the prisoners themselves organized a deadly terror
within the Nazi terror." (note 12)
Fleck and Tenenbaum described the power exercised by criminals and Communists
as follows:
. . . The trusties, who in time became almost exclusively Communist Germans, had the power of life and death over all other inmates. They could sentence a man or a group to almost certain death . . . The Communist trusties were directly responsible for a large part of the brutalities at Buchenwald.
Colonel Donald B. Robinson, chief historian of the American military
government in Germany, summarized the Fleck-Tenenbaum report in an article
which appeared in The American Mercury shortly after the war. Colonel Robinson
wrote succinctly of the American investigators' findings: "It appeared
that the prisoners who agreed with the Communists ate; those who didn't
starved to death." (note 13)
Additional corroboration of inmate brutality has been provided by Ellis
E. Spackman, who, as Chief of Counter-Intelligence Arrests and Detentions
for the Seventh U.S. Army, was involved in the liberation of Dachau. Spackman,
later a professor of history at San Bernardino Valley College in California,
wrote in 1966 that at Dachau "the prisoners were the actual instruments
that inflicted the barbarities on their fellow prisoners." (note 14)
On December 9, 1944 Col. Paul Kirk and Lt. Col. Edward J. Gully inspected
the German concentration camp at Natzweiler in Alsace. They reported their
findings to their superiors at the headquarters of the U.S. 6th Army Group,
which subsequently forwarded Kirk and Gully's report to the War Crimes
Division. While, significantly, the full text of their report has never
been published, it has been revealed, by an author supportive of Holocaust
claims, that the two investigators were careful to characterize equipment
exhibited to them by French informants as a "so-called lethal gas
chamber," and claim it was "allegedly used as a lethal gas chamber".
(note 15)
Both the careful phraseology of the Natzweiler report, and its effective
suppression, stand in stark contrast to the credulity, the confusion, and
the blaring publicity which accompanied official reports of alleged gas
chambers at Dachau. At first, a U.S. Army photo depicting a GI gazing mournfully
at a steel door marked with a skull and crossbones and the German words
for: "Caution! Gas! Mortal danger! Don't open!" was identified
as showing the murder weapon. Later, however, it was evidently decided
that the apparatus in question was merely a standard delousing chamber
for clothing, and another alleged gas chamber, this one cunningly disguised
as a shower room, was exhibited to American congressmen and journalists
as the site where thousands breathed their last. While there exist numerous
reports in the press as to the operation of this second "gas chamber,"
no official report by trained Army investigators has yet surfaced to reconcile
such problems as the function of the shower heads: Were they "dummies,"
or did lethal cyanide gas stream through them? (Each theory has appreciable
support in journalistic and historiographical literature.)
As with Dachau, so with Buchenwald, Bergen-Belsen, and the other camps
captured by the Allies. There was no end of propaganda about "gas
chambers," "gas ovens," and the like, but so far not a single
detailed description of the murder weapon and its function, not a single
report of the kind that is mandatory for the successful prosecution of
any assault or murder case in America at that time and today, has come
to light.
Furthermore, a number of Holocaust authorities have now publicly decreed
that there were no gassings, no extermination camps in Germany after all!
All these things, we are told, were located in what is now Poland, in areas
captured by the Soviet Red Army and off-limits to Western investigators.
In 1960 Dr. Martin Broszat, who is now director of the Munich-based Institute
for Contemporary History, which is funded by the West German government
to support the Holocaust story, wrote a letter to the German weekly Die
Zeit in which he stated categorically: "Neither in Dachau nor in Bergen-Belsen
nor in Buchenwald were Jews or other prisoners gassed." (note 16)
Professional Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal wrote in 1975 that "there
were no extermination camps on German soil." (note 17) And Dachau
"gas chamber" No. 2, which was once presented to a stunned and
grieving world as a weapon which claimed hundreds of thousands of lives,
is now described in the brochure issued to tourists at the modern Dachau
"memorial site" in these words: "This gas chamber, camouflaged
as a shower room, was not used." (note 18)
More than forty years after American troops entered Dachau, Buchenwald, and the other German camps, and trained American investigators established the facts as to what had gone on in them, the government in Washington, the entertainment media in Hollywood, and the print media in New York continue to churn out millions of words and images annually on the horrors of the camps and the infamy of the Holocaust. Despite the fact that, with the exception of the defeated Confederacy, no enemy of America has ever so suffered so complete and devastating defeat as did Germany in 1945, the mass media and the politicians and bureaucrats behave as if Hitler, his troops, and his concentration camps continue to exist in an eternal present, and our opinion makers continue to distort, through ignorance or malice, the facts about the camps.
It is time that the government and the professional historians revealed
the facts about Dachau, Buchenwald, and the other camps. It is time that
they let the American public know how the inmates died, and how they didn't
die. It is time that the claims as to mass murder by gassing were clarified
and investigated in the same manner as any other claims of murder are dealt
with. It is time that the free ride certain groups have enjoyed as the
result of unchallenged Holocaust claims be terminated, just as it is time
that other groups, including Germans, eastern Europeans, the Roman Catholic
hierarchy, and the wartime leadership of America and Britain stop being
scapegoated, either for their alleged role in the Holocaust or their supposed
failure to stop it.
Above all, it is time that the citizens of this great democratic Republic
have the facts about the camps, facts which they possess a right to know,
a right that is fundamental to the exercise of their authority and their
will in the governance of their country. As citizens and as taxpayers,
Americans of all ethnic backgrounds, of all faiths, have a basic right
and an overriding interest in determining the facts of incidents which
are deemed by those in positions of power to be determinative in America's
foreign policy, in its educational policy, in its selection of past events
to be memorialized in our civic life. The alleged facts of the Holocaust
are today at issue all over the civilized world: in Germany, in France,
in Italy, in Britain, in the Low Countries and Scandinavia, in Japan, across
our border in Canada and in the United States of America itself. The truth
will be decided only by recourse to the facts, in the public forum: not
by concealing the facts, denying the truth, stonewalling reality. The truth
will out, and it is time the government of this country, and governments
and international bodies throughout the world, made public and patent the
evidence of what actually transpired in the German concentration camps
in the years 1933-1945, so that we may put paid to the lies, without fear
or favor, and carry out the work of reconciliation and renewal that is
and must be the granite foundation of mutual tolerance between peoples
and of a peace based on justice, rather than on guns, barbed wire, prisons,
and lies.
The conclusions of the early U.S. Army investigations as to the truth about the wartime German concentration camps have since been corroborated by all subsequent investigators and can be summarized: