SS Officer Karl von Eberstein on the conditions of the camps / Piles of bodies & Emaciated Corpses

[Lamprecht]

"How can anyone deny the Holocaust? Haven't you seen the piles of corpses, the emaciated prisoners - how can you call those pictures fake!?"

Anyone who debates the Holocaust with regular people will soon encounter this question. And then, if you do convince them that these piles of bodies were not gassed Jews, and the emaciated corpses were not deliberately starved, they may say:

"Well it doesn't matter. The nazis forced them into camps so it's their fault entirely. They could have just left them alone!"

That may be true, but that is not the "Holocaust" - which is defined as a deliberate policy of extermination. And to be fair, there were massive numbers of corpses all over Germany due to allied bombing campaigns.

According to leftist historian Norbert Frei (from Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 35 (1987) page 400):

The shock of these discoveries [of mountains of corpses] often led to false conclusions which turned out to be enduring
"Der Schock über die Entdeckungen führte nicht selten zu faktisch falschen Schlußfolgerungen, die sich zum Teil als recht zählebig erweisen sollten"

Here I will provide some relevant testimony by SS Officer von Eberstein, text and image format:

HERR PELCKMANN: At the wish of the Court I have reduced the number of witnesses to the absolute minimum of five witnesses. I will bring only such witnesses who, due to their high position in the organization, can give the Court comprehensive answers on organizational questions, that is, basic questions. Therefore, not-withstanding your high rank, I must ask you how much, according to your conviction, the mass of these many thousands of unknown members of the SS knew? I will reserve the affidavits, documents, and other proof for later.

VON EBERSTEIN: If I, in my position and in spite of the general view I had of things inside, the country, knew nothing, how could the men at , the front or the few who remained at home know about it? The horrible things that happened later on in the concentration camps and which came to light after the collapse and the capitulation I personally can only explain by the general state of things during those last months. People lost their heads; hundreds of thousands of people were put on the move; thousands of detainees were brought from the border territory and crowded into the few camps which were still available. In southern Germany, in Dachau, there was an uninterrupted stream of people coming in throughout the winter. There was a typhus epidemic which claimed many victims. I learned of that also by chance only because the Gauleiter and Reich Defense Commissioner asked for workers to clear up after air attacks, and from a call to the camp, commander I learned that these workers could not be supplied due to a typhus epidemic.

Later, I heard at a conference that this epidemic had claimed many victims. Moreover, in the last few weeks, railroad traffic was disconnected. The supply line was completely blocked, and there was already a good deal of hunger. Upon my remark that it should be possible to stop this epidemic the commander told me there were no more medical supplies, the pharmaceutical factories having been destroyed too. Only thus can I explain the terrible pictures, which we all know, which have been shown here. In any case, the mass of the men of the General SS and the German population could, not have known about all this as no one could look into the camps. The General SS, for which I am speaking here, and the Waffen-SS, too, could not have prevented it.

Nuremberg Trial Proceedings Volume 20. One Hundred and Ninety-Fifth Day. Monday; 5 August 1946. Volume XX, pp. 310-311
https://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/08-05-46.asp or https://archive.is/hdge#selection-437.1-445.493




Please see my post with various graphs on this page, as well as Sannhet's post on the Buchenwald death rates by month for some perspective here:
Re: The Known Death Totals at German Camps
viewtopic.php?t=10198

[Lamprecht]

A good discussion of the horrible conditions in Germany at the final moments of World War II is by John E. Gordon, M.D., Ph.D., Professor of Preventive Medicine and Epidemiology at the Harvard University School of Public Health. The following passage was published in 1948 by the American Association for the Advancement of Science:

Foreigners in the Rhineland ...

The whole area seethed with foreign people, conscripted 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 -- now a dozen Roumanians pulling a cart loaded with their remaining belongings; here a little band of Frenchmen working their way toward France, there some Netherlanders, or perhaps Belgians; and everywhere, the varied nationalities of the East -- Ukrainians, Poles, Czechs, Russians. 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 or cleanliness.

These were the people where typhus predominated, more than a half million of them in the Rhineland, 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 infected with typhus but happily far fewer in numbers; the German refugees, first moving ahead of our troops and then sifting back to their homes through the American lines. Rarely if ever 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 from Moscow all rolled up into one. Such was the typhus problem in the Rhineland.

The Epidemiologic Situation

The great assault of the Rhine River got under way on March 24, the British 21st Army Group and the U. S. Ninth Army to the north, the First and Third Armies in the center. and somewhat later the U. S. Seventh Army and the First French Army to the South. All found typhus fever; the British scarcely any, the Ninth some, the First and Third a great deal, while in the south the U. S. Seventh and the First French Armies again encountered relatively little.

The first really serious condition appeared when Buchenwald concentration camp was occupied by the Third Army on April 12th. The British soon uncovered Belsen camp, with still more typhus and misery. Then followed in order Dachau, Flossenburg and finally Mauthausen, all with hundreds of cases of typhus fever and sometimes thousands.

These concentration camps with their political prisoners and their typhus fever would have been problem enough. Added to the situation were millions of conscript laborers suddenly released from employment and from camps that were many times typhus infested. They scattered throughout the country. Many were gathered in large improvised camps. They spread typhus widely ... Germany in the spring months of April and May was an astounding sight, a mixture of humanity travelling this way and that, homeless, often hungry and carrying typhus with them.

Special Epidemiological Problems

The outbreaks in concentration camps and prisons made up the great bulk of typhus infection encountered in Germany. Each presented an individual epidemiologic problem. That of Dachau is illustrative. 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 to escape the advancing United States troops.

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 4 tiers high with 2 and sometimes 3 men to a narrow shelf-like bed; the sick and the well; 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 ...

Available records failed to demonstrate how many of the 4,032 patients of the Dachau epidemic were actually ill with typhus at the time the camp came under American jurisdiction, how many developed the disease within the succeeding today incubation period,

... Even the appreciable figures cited fail to include all who contracted typhus fever in Dachau concentration camp. Freed from the sort of existence they had been living, it was no wonder that those strong enough should attempt to escape. Many did, and scattered widely through the nearby country, especially to the region south of Munich. Some were actually in the clinical stages of typhus fever and many were incubating the disease. They were later found with typhus fever in other areas.

The camp was promptly quarantined. Hospitals were moved in to augment the small prison hospital. Case finding teams initiated control work through survey of the surrounding area for former inmates developing typhus after leaving. The dusting of prisoners with DDT powder was started May 3, 1945, and completed May 8.

Summary and Conclusions

Conditions in Western Europe in many respects favored a much greater spread of typhus fever than actually occurred. 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 were 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.

Native Germans, dislodged from their homes and often moving long distances to escape the enemy, were finding their way back to their native lands. The roads, the countryside, were full of released German prisoners of war who lacked transportation and were their to their homes on foot ...

Two important factors served to limit the extent of the outbreak. The most significant was the time of the year that allied troops entered Germany. Had this been December instead of March, as would have happened except for disrupted military plans, the problem would have been much more serious. Von Rundstedt's Battle of the Bulge, although of serious import militarily, had the favorable aspect of postponing contact with typhus until the spring months.

Spring brought a lower potential of louse infestation, it permitted life outdoors instead of crowding within existing habitations, and the movement of displaced persons and refugees was facilitated, with consequent greater dispersal. Dispersal of course, had advantages and disadvantages. It tended to disseminate infection broadly-it limited concentrated outbreaks.

Early repatriation of all Russian nationals, both prisoners of war and conscripted labor, was undertaken in May and completed in June. A large part of available American transport was turned to this end, with the result that thousands of Russians were repatriated every day. They were the population groups with the heaviest incidence of typhus.

Under any interpretation of governing circumstances, much credit must be given to the efficiency of recently developed methods of typhus control. The value of delousing through dusting with DDT, and the usefulness of typhus vaccine were tried and tested on a scale greater than ever before and under conditions epidemiologically more conducive to extensive and continued spread of the disease. The results attained in the Naples epidemic were confirmed and extended.

No single factor contributed more to the satisfactory end of the outbreak than that never in the course of the epidemic were the fundamental supplies of DDT powder and vaccine lacking. Occasional difficulties arose in local distribution, but the supply system was such and the stock piles so great that they were promptly remedied.

The middle of July saw Western Europe return to a satisfactory situation of low grade typhus endemicity.

- John E. Gordon, Louse-borne Typhus Fever in the European Theater of Operations, U. S. Army, 1945," in Rickettsial Diseases of Man (Washington, DC: American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1948) pp. 21-7.

Reproduced here: https://archive.is/q22g9#selection-9.810748-9.810804

[Lamprecht]

Some good info here:

Evidence of disease/starvation for other Europeans?
viewtopic.php?t=8334

From a post by hermod:

At Dachau and Belsen the horrific emaciated prisoners were mainly the result of typhus and typhoid. But at Buchenwald they were mainly the result of starvation...a starvation induced by the Communist inmates administering the camp. At Buchenwald by 1943 the well-organized and disciplined Communist inmate organization had taken virtually total control of the camp's internal operation and the Communist inmates decided who was allowed to eat and who wasn't. This remarkable situation was confirmed in a detailed U.S. Army intelligence document of 24 April 1945 entitled Buchenwald: A Preliminary Report. This confidential analysis remained classified until 1972.

The U.S. report explained:

The trusties had wide powers over their fellow inmates. At first they were drawn almost exclusively from the German criminals. This period lasted until 1942. But gradually the Communists began to gain control of this organization. They were the oldest residents, with records of 10-12 years in the concentration camps ... They clung together with remarkable tenacity, whereas the criminal elements were simply out for their own individual welfare and had little group cohesiveness. The Communists maintained excellent discipline and received a certain amount of direction from outside the camp. They had brains and technical qualifications for running the various industries established at the camp.
[...]
Besides the top positions in the trusty organization, there were a number of key Communist strongholds in the administration of the camp. One was the food supply organization, through which favored groups received reasonable rations while others were brought to the starvation level. A second was the hospital, staffed almost exclusively by Communists. Its facilities were largely devoted to caring for members of their party ... Another Communist stronghold was the Property Room ... Each German trusty obtained good clothing and numerous other valuables. The Communists of Buchenwald, after ten or twelve years in concentration carnps, are dressed like prosperous business men. Some affect leather jackets and little round caps of the German navy, apparently the uniform of revolution.
[...]
lnstead of a heap of corpses or a disorderly mob of starving, leaderless men, the Americans [who captured the camp] found a disciplined and efficient organization in Buchenwald. Credit is undoubtedly due to the self-appointed Camp Committee, an almost purely Communist group under the domination of the German political leaders.
[...]
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 committed at Buchenwald.

Buchenwald: A Preliminary Report, Egon W. Fleck and Edwartd At Tenenbaum, U.S. Army, 12th Army Group, 24 April 1945. National Archives, Record Group 331, SHAEF, G-5, 17.11, Jacket 10, Box 151 (8929tl63-8929/180)

http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v07/v07p405_Weber.html

Also:

CONFIDENTIAL 3. Besides the top positions in the trustee organization, there were a number of key Communist strongholds in the administration of the camp. One was the food supply organization, through which favored groups received reasonable rations while others were brought to the starvation level. A second was the hospital (REVIER), staffed almost exclusively by Communists. Its facilities were largely devoted to caring for members of their party. All scarce drugs (and many were scarce at BUCHENWALD) were reserved for Communist patients, and hospital food was available for members of the Party even if not absolutely necessary. Another Communist stronghold was the property room (EFFEKTENKAMMER).

Edward Tenenbaum Egon Fleck Preliminary Buchenwald Report
https://archive.org/details/EdwardTenen ... rt/page/n7



Russell Barton, an English medical student who had spent a month in Belsen after the camp’s liberation and had investigated the reasons for the camp’s disastrous conditions toward the end of the war:

German medical officers told me that it had been increasingly difficult to transport food to the camp for some months. Anything that moved on the autobahns was likely to be bombed...
I was surprised to find records, going back for two or three years, of large quantities of food cooked daily for distribution. I became convinced, contrary to popular opinion, that there had never been a policy of deliberate starvation. This was confirmed by the large numbers of well-fed inmates.... The major reasons for the state of Belsen were disease, gross overcrowding by central authority, lack of law and order within the huts, and inadequate supplies of food, water and drugs.

Russell Barton, “Belsen,” in: History of the Second World War, 109 (1975), pp. 3025-3029; cf. Barbara Kulaszka (ed.), Did Six Million Really Die?, Samisdat Publishers, Toronto 1992, pp. 175-180


Dr Charles Larson was an American forensic pathologist working for the US Army. After the war, Larson did thousands of autopsies at various camps. Larson’s biographer wrote the following:

“In one grave the bulldozers uncovered an estimated 2,000 bodies, many of which were subjected to autopsy examination by Major Larson. All of those autopsied had died of various conditions such as emaciation with starvation, tuberculosis, typhus or other infectious diseases.

For the next ten days, many nights with only an hour or two of restless sleep, Larson worked among the dead. He performed about 25 autopsies a day and superficially examined another 300 to 1,000 bodies. He autopsied only those bodies that appeared to have died questionably. ‘Many of them died of typhus,’ Dr. Larson told me recently.

At Dachau Larson’s work – the profile of the prisoner population that his autopsies projected – indicated that only a small percentage of the deaths were due to medical experimentation on humans. It indicated that most of the victims died from so-called ‘natural causes’ at the time; that is, of disease brought on by malnutrition and filth which are the handmaidens of war.”

John D. McCallum, Crime Doctor, The Writing Works, Mercer Island, Wash., 1978, pp. 57-60, 69.

More on Charles Larson's Autopsies:

Autopsies
viewtopic.php?t=6513

[Lamprecht]

From July 1943 until the end of the war, SS Judge Georg Konrad Morgen investigated hundreds of cases of corruption and murder within the SS, resulting in about 200 trials. Five concentration camp commanders were arrested, and two of them were shot. After the war Morgen established became an attorney in Frankfurt. During the war, Morgen lived at Buchenwald for eight months.

His description of the camp:

The prisoners were healthy, normally fed, sun-tanned, working ... The installations of the camp were in good order, especially the hospital. The camp authorities, under the Commander Diester, aimed at providing the prisoners with an existence worthy of human beings. They had regular mail service. They had a large camp library, even books in foreign languages. They had variety shows, motion pictures, sporting contests and even had a brothel. Nearly all the other concentration camps were similar to Buchenwald.

(Source: IMT "blue series," Vol. 20, p. 490)


Morgen explained the reason for the horrible conditions in the camps in the final months of the war:

To a great extent the horrible conditions at times prevailing in some concentration camps did not arise from deliberate planning, but developed from circumstances which in my opinion must be called force majeure, that is to say, evils for which the local camp leaders were not responsible. I am thinking of the outbreak of epidemics. At irregular intervals many concentration camps were visited by typhoid fever, typhus, and other sicknesses caused especially by the arrival of prisoners from the concentration camps in the eastern areas. Although everything humanly possible was done to prevent these epidemics and to combat them, the death rates which resulted were extremely high. Another evil which may be considered as force majeure was the fluctuating numbers of new arrivals and the insufficient billets. Many camps were overcrowded. The prisoners arrived in a weakened condition because, due to air raids, the transports were under way longer than expected. Towards the end of the war, there was a general collapse of the transportation system. Supplies could not be carried out to the necessary extent; chemical and pharmaceutical factories had been systematically bombed, and all the necessary medicines were lacking. To top all, the evacuations from the East further burdened the camps and crowded them in an unbearable manner.

(IMT "blue series," Vol. 20, pp. 498-499)

[Lamprecht]

Commandant of Bergen-Belsen Josef Kramer describes the horrible situation in the camp in the final months of the war. He laments the lack of food deliveries due to the catastrophic war-time conditions and insists food be brought to the camp within days. He even complained that a train full of food was destroyed by allied planes, as well as the electric plant that pumped the water. He claimed to have tried to get medicine and food, but couldn't.

Kramer Reports a ‘Catastrophe’

In a March 1, 1945, letter to Gruppenführer (General) Richard Glücks, head of the SS camp administration agency, Commandant Kramer reported in detail on the catastrophic situation in the Bergen-Belsen, and pleaded for help:[15]

If I had sufficient sleeping accommodation at my disposal, then the accommodation of the detainees who have already arrived and of those still to come would appear more possible. In addition to this question a spotted fever and typhus epidemic has now begun, which increases in extent every day. The daily mortality rate, which was still in the region of 60–70 at the beginning of February, has in the meantime attained a daily average of 250–300 and will increase still further in view of the conditions which at present prevail.

Supply. When I took over the camp, winter supplies for 1500 internees had been indented for; some had been received, but the greater part had not been delivered. This failure was due not only to difficulties of transport, but also to the fact that practically nothing is available in this area and all must be brought from outside the area ...

For the last four days there has been no delivery [of food] from Hannover owing to interrupted communications, and I shall be compelled, if this state of affairs prevails till the end of the week, to fetch bread also by means of truck from Hannover. The trucks allotted to the local unit are in no way adequate for this work, and I am compelled to ask for at least three to four trucks and five to six trailers. When I once have here a means of towing then I can send out the trailers into the surrounding area ... The supply question must, without fail, be cleared up in the next few days. I ask you, Gruppenführer, for an allocation of transport ...

State of Health. The incidence of disease is very high here in proportion to the number of detainees. When you interviewed me on Dec. 1, 1944, at Oranienburg, you told me that Bergen-Belsen was to serve as a sick camp for all concentration camps in north Germany. The number of sick has greatly increased, particularly on account of the transports of detainees that have arrived from the East in recent times – these transports have sometimes spent eight or fourteen days in open trucks ...

The fight against spotted fever is made extremely difficult by the lack of means of disinfection. Due to constant use, the hot-air delousing machine is now in bad working order and sometimes fails for several days ...

A catastrophe is taking place for which no one wishes to assume responsibility ... Gruppenführer, I can assure you that from this end everything will be done to overcome the present crisis ...

I am now asking you for your assistance as it lies in your power. In addition to the above-mentioned points I need here, before everything, accommodation facilities, beds, blankets, eating utensils – all for about 20,000 internees ... I implore your help in overcoming this situation.

Under such terrible conditions, Kramer did everything in his power to reduce suffering and prevent death among the inmates, even appealing to the hard-pressed German army. “I don’t know what else to do,” he told high-ranking army officers. “I have reached the limit. Masses of people are dying. The drinking water supply has broken down. A trainload of food was destroyed by low-flying [Allied] war planes. Something must be done immediately.”[16]

Working together with both Commandant Kramer and chief inmate representative Kuestermeier, Colonel Hanns Schmidt responded by arranging for the local volunteer fire department to provide water. He also saw to it that food supplies were brought to the camp from abandoned rail cars. Schmidt later recalled that Kramer “did not at all impress one as a criminal type. He acted like an upright and rather honorable man. Neither did he strike me as someone with a guilty conscience. He worked with great dedication to improve conditions in the camp. For example, he rounded up horse drawn vehicles to bring food to the camp from rail cars that had been shot up.”[17]

“I was swamped,” Kramer later explained to incredulous British military interrogators:[18]

The camp was not really inefficient before you [British and American forces] crossed the Rhine. There was running water, regular meals of a kind – I had to accept what food I was given for the camp and distribute it the best way I could. But then they suddenly began to send me trainloads of new prisoners from all over Germany. It was impossible to cope with them. I appealed for more staff, more food. I was told that this was impossible. I had to carry on with what I had.

Then as a last straw the Allies bombed the electric plant that pumped our water. Loads of food were unable to reach the camp because of the Allied fighters. Then things really got out of hand. During the last six weeks I have been helpless. I did not even have sufficient staff to bury the dead, let alone segregate the sick ... I tried to get medicines and food for the prisoners and I failed. I was swamped. I may have been hated, but I was doing my duty.

Kramer’s clear conscience is also suggested by the fact that he made no effort to save his life by fleeing, but instead calmly awaited the approaching British forces, naively confident of decent treatment. “When Belsen Camp was eventually taken over by the Allies,” he later stated, “I was quite satisfied that I had done all I possibly could under the circumstances to remedy the conditions in the camp.”[19]
...
[15] R. Phillips, ed., Trial of Josef Kramer and Forty-Four Others, pp. 163–166.
[16] Signed report by retired Colonel (Oberst a.D.) Hanns Schmidt to Kurt Mehner and Lt. Colonel Bechtold, Braunschweig, March 3, 1981. Photocopy in author’s possession.
[17] Signed report by Hanns Schmidt to Kurt Mehner and Lt. Colonel Bechtold, March 3, 1981. Photocopy in author’s possession.
[18] Essay by Alan Moorehead, “Belsen,” in: Cyril Connolly, ed., The Golden Horizon (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1953), pp. 109–110.
[19] Josef Kramer statement (1945) in: R. Phillips, ed., Trial of Josef Kramer and Forty-Four Others, p. 737. Also quoted in: A. Butz, Hoax, p. 275; Essay by Alan Moorehead, “Belsen,” in: Cyril Connolly, ed., The Golden Horizon, pp. 109–110; Dr. Russell Barton, “Belsen,” History of the Second World War (Editor: Barrie Pitt, Copyright BPC publications, 1966), Part 109, 1975, p. 3025.

From:
Bergen-Belsen Camp: The suppressed story
https://codoh.com/library/document/2592/

[Hektor]

Commandant of Bergen-Belsen Josef Kramer describes the horrible situation in the camp in the final months of the war. He laments the lack of food deliveries due to the catastrophic war-time conditions and insists food be brought to the camp within days. He even complained that a train full of food was destroyed by allied planes, as well as the electric plant that pumped the water. He claimed to have tried to get medicine and food, but couldn't.....

As with any previous Axis testimony (at least when it's vindicating) , this will be dismissed as "self-serving". That it is actually the testimony confirming Allied propaganda, which is self-serving... the dim-witted believers barely realise. It's kind of the same with the scamdemic. What counts is the testimony from "front-line doctors" (at least as long as they confirm virus, pandemic and how evil "COVID" is) as well as COVID-victims and COVID-survivor.... Shock and Awe was on me, when I realised how much this all resembles the Holocaust Industry and it's narratives.