A Different Reality
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 US Army's Judge Advocate General's Department. As part of a US War Crimes Investigation Team, 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 US Army prosecutors. [1]
Dr. Larson's findings? In an 1980 newspaper interview he said: "What we've heard is that six million Jews were exterminated. Part of that is a hoax." [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" of Allied military operations, [3] confirmed that "never was a case of poison gas uncovered." [4]
Typhus, Not Poison Gas
If not by gassing, how did the unfortunate victims at Dachau, Buchenwald and Bergen-Belsen perish? Were they tortured to death or 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 that 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 US 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: [5]
Germany in the spring months of April and May [1945] was an astounding sight, a mixture of humanity travelling this way and that, homeless, often hungry and carrying typhus with them ...
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.
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." [6]
Dr. Barton further testified that on entering the camp he had credited stories of deliberate starvation but 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.
No 'Human Skin' Lampshades
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 proffered 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 US 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." [7] In an interview General Clay gave years later, he stated about the material for the infamous lampshades: "Well, it turned out actually that it was goat flesh. But at the trial it was still human flesh. It was almost impossible for her to have gotten a fair trial." [8] Ilse Koch hanged herself in a 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 proponents of the Jewish Holocaust story. 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 camp personnel.
As he explained in sworn testimony at Nuremberg, Dr. Morgen investigated 800 such cases, resulting in more than 200 convictions. [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.
While German 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. [10] After all, throughout most of the war the camps were important centers of industrial activity. The good health and morale of the prisoners was critical to the German war effort, as is evidenced in a January 1943 order issued by SS General Richard Glücks, chief of the office that supervised the concentration camps. It held the camp commanders "personally responsible for exhausting every possibility to preserve the physical strength of the detainees." [11]
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Notes
1. John D. McCallum, Crime Doctor [a biography of Dr. Charles P. Larson] (Mercer, Wash.: The Writing Works, 1978), pp. 44-46, 59, 69; See also: J. Cobden, "The Dachau Gas Chamber Myth," The Journal of Historical Review, March-April 1995, pp. 17-18.
2. Jane Floerchinger, "Concentration Camp Conditions Killed Most Inmates, Doctor Says," The Wichita Eagle, April 1, 1980, p. 4C.
3. J. D. McCallum, Crime Doctor (1978), p. 46.
4. The Wichita Eagle, April 1, 1980, p. 4C.
5. John E. Gordon, "Louse-Borne Typhus Fever in the European Theater of Operations, U.S. Army, 1945," in Forest Ray Moulton, editor, Rickettsial Diseases of Man (Washington, DC: American Academy for the Advancement of Science, 1948), pp. 16-27. Quoted in: Friedrich P. Berg, "Typhus and the Jews," The Journal of Historical Review, Winter 1988-89, pp. 444-447, and in Arthur Butz, The Hoax of the Twentieth Century (IHR, 1993), pp. 46-47.
6. "Disease killed Nazis' prisoners, MD says," Toronto Star, Feb. 8, 1985, p. A2. On Barton's similar testimony in a 1988 Toronto trial, see: Barbara Kulaszka, ed., Did Six Million Really Die? (Toronto: Samisdat, 1992), pp. 175-180, and, Robert Lenski, The Holocaust on Trial (1990), pp. 157-160, and, M. Weber, "Bergen-Belsen Camp: The Suppressed Story," The Journal of Historical Review, May-June 1995, pp. 27, 30 (n. 30).
7. "Clay Explains Cut in Ilse Koch Term," The New York Times, Sept. 24, 1948, p. 3.
8. Interview with Lucius Clay, 1976, Official Proceeding of the George C. Marshall Research Foundation. Quoted in M. Weber, "Buchenwald: Legend and Reality," The Journal of Historical Review, Winter 1986-87 (Vol. 7, No. 4), pp. 406-407.
9. International Military Tribunal (IMT), Trial of the Major War Criminals Before the International Military Tribunal (Nuremberg: 1947-1949 ["blue series"]), Vol. 20, pp. 489, 438.
10. Eugen Kogon, The Theory and Practice of Hell (New York: Berkley Books [pb.], 1984), pp. 108-109. See also: "Punishment for Mistreating SS Camp Prisoners," The Journal of Historical Review, Jan.-Feb. 1995, p. 33.
11. Nuremberg document NO-1523. Published in Trials of War Criminals Before the Nuernberg Military Tribunal (NMT "green series"), Vol. 4, pp. 372-373.
The Liberation of the Camps: Facts vs. Lies
By Theodore J. O'Keefe
http://www.ihr.org/leaflets/libcamps.shtml