The Liberation of the Camps: Facts vs. Lies
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By Theodore J. O'Keefe
Nothing has been more effective in establishing the authenticity of
the Holocaust story in the minds of Americans than the terrible scenes
US troops discovered when they entered German concentration camps at
the close of World War II.
At Dachau, Buchenwald, Dora, Mauthausen, and other work and detention
camps, horrified US infantrymen encountered heaps of dead and dying
inmates, emaciated and diseased. Survivors told them hair-raising
stories of torture and slaughter, and backed up their claims by
showing the GIs crematory ovens, alleged execution gas chambers,
supposed implements of torture, and even shrunken heads and
lampshades, gloves, and handbags purportedly made from skin flayed
from dead inmates.
US government authorities, mindful that many Americans who remembered
the atrocity stories fed them during World War I still doubted the
Allied propaganda directed against the Hitler regime, resolved to
“document” what the GIs had found in the camps. Prominent newsmen and politicians were flown in to see the harrowing evidence, while the US
Army Signal Corps filmed and photographed the scenes for posterity.
Famous journalist Edward R. Murrow reported, in tones of horror, but
no longer of disbelief, what he had been told and shown, and Dachau
and Buchenwald were branded on the hearts and minds of the American
populace as names of infamy unmatched in the sad and bloody history of
this planet.
For Americans, what was “discovered” at the camps — the dead and the
diseased, the terrible stories of the inmates, all the props of
torture and terror — became the basis not simply of a transitory
propaganda campaign but of the conviction that, yes, it was true: the
Germans did exterminate six million Jews, most of them in lethal gas
chambers.
What the GIs found was used, by way of films that were mandatory
viewing for the vanquished populace of Germany, to “re-educate” the
German people by destroying their national pride and their will to a
united, independent national state, imposing in their place
overwhelming feelings of collective guilt and political impotence. And
when the testimony, and the verdict, of the Nuremberg Tribunal
incorporated most, if not all, of the horror stories Americans were
told about Dachau, Buchenwald, and other places captured by the US
Army, the Holocaust could pass for one of the most documented, one of
the most authenticated, one of the most proven historical episodes in
the human record.
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]
Camp Survivors: Merely Victims?
US 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 US 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 US 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.” [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 published in an American magazine 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.” [13]
Additional corroboration of inmate brutality has been provided by
Ellis E. Spackman, who, as Chief of Counter-Intelligence Arrests and
Detentions for the US Seventh 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.” [14]
‘Gas Chambers’
In December 1944 US Army officers Colonel Paul Kirk and Lt. Colonel
Edward J. Gully inspected the German concentration camp at
Struthof-Natzweiler in Alsace. They submitted their findings to their superiors, who subsequently forwarded their report to the US War
Crimes Division. While, significantly, the full text of their report
has never been published, it has been revealed, by a historian
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 to claim it was
“allegedly used as a lethal gas chamber.” [15] (Emphasis added)
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 that accompanied official reports
of alleged gas chambers at Dachau. At first, a US Army photo depicting
a GI gazing 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. [16]
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 liberated by the Allies in western Germany. 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. (We are now told that “gassing” and “extermination” camps
were located exclusively in what is now Poland, in areas captured by
the Soviet Red Army and made off-limits to western investigators.)
Dr. Martin Broszat of the Munich-based Institute for Contemporary
History, which is funded by the German government, stated
categorically in a 1960 letter to the German weekly Die Zeit: “Neither
in Dachau nor in Bergen-Belsen nor in Buchenwald were Jews or other
prisoners gassed.” [17] Professional “Nazi hunter” Simon Wiesenthal
stated in 1975 and again in 1993 that “there were no extermination
camps on German soil.” [18]
Dachau “gas chamber” No. 2, which was once presented to a stunned and
grieving world as a weapon that 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.” [19]
The Propaganda Intensifies
More than 50 years after American troops entered Dachau, Buchenwald
and 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.
Time for the Truth
It is time that the government and the professional historians reveal
the facts about Dachau, Buchenwald and the other camps. It is time
they let the American public know how the inmates died, and how they
didn’t die. It is time that the claims of mass murder by gassing are
clarified and investigated in the same manner as any other claims of
murder. 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 to end the scapegoating of other groups, including Germans,
eastern Europeans, the Roman Catholic hierarchy, and the wartime
leadership of America and Britain, 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 Republic have
the facts about the camps, facts they have 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 that
are deemed by those in positions of power to be significant in
determining America’s foreign and educational policy, as well as its
selection of past events to be memorialized in our civic life.
Today the alleged facts of the Holocaust are at issue all over the
civilized world. 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, make public 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.
Summary
The conclusions of the early US Army investigations as to the truth
about the wartime German concentration camps have since been
corroborated by all subsequent investigators and can be summarized:
The harrowing scenes of dead and dying inmates were not the result of
a German policy of “extermination,” but rather the result of epidemics
of typhus and other disease brought about largely by the effects of
Allied aerial attacks.
Stories of Nazi supercriminals and sadists who turned Jews and others
into handbags and lampshades for their private profit or amusement
were sick lies or diseased fantasies; indeed, the German authorities
punished corruption and cruelty on the part of camp commanders and
guards.
On the other hand, portrayals of the newly liberated inmates as saints
and martyrs of Hitlerism were quite often very far from the truth;
indeed, most of the brutalities inflicted on camp detainees were the
work of their fellow prisoners, in contravention of German policy and
German orders.
The alleged homicidal showers and gas chambers were used either for
bathing camp inmates or delousing their clothes; the claim that they
were used to murder Jews or other human beings is a contemptible
fabrication. Orthodox historians and professional “Nazi-hunters” have
quietly dropped claims that inmates were gassed at Dachau, Buchenwald
and other camps in Germany. They continue, however, to keep silent
regarding the lies about Dachau and Buchenwald, as well as to evade an
open discussion of the evidence for homicidal gassing at Auschwitz and
the other camps captured by the Soviets.
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.
12. Egon W. Fleck and Edward A. Tenenbaum, Buchenwald: A Preliminary
Report, US Army, 12th Army Group, April 24, 1945. National Archives,
RG 331, SHAEF, G-5, 17.11, Jacket 10, Box 151. Quoted in: M. Weber, “Buchenwald: Legend and Reality,” The Journal of Historical Review,
Winter 1986-87, pp. 408-409.
13. Donald B. Robinson, “Communist Atrocities at Buchenwald,” American
Mercury, October 1946, pp. 397-404.
14. San Bernardino Sun-Telegram, March 13, 1966. Quoted in: James J.
Martin, The Man Who Invented ‘Genocide’ (IHR, 1984), pp. 110-111.
15. “Concentration Camp at Natzwiller [sic],” RG 331, Records of
Allied Operations and Occupation, SHAEF/G-5/2717, Modern Military,
National Archives (Washington, DC). Quoted in: Robert H. Abzug, Inside
the Vicious Heart (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 9-10,
181 (n. 5).
16. John Cobden, Dachau: Reality and Myth (IHR, 1994), pp. 25-29. See
also: The Journal of Historical Review, May-June 1993, pp. 9-11; The
Journal of Historical Review, March- April 1995, p. 16.
17. “Keine Vergasung in Dachau,” Die Zeit (Hamburg), August 19, 1960.
Facsimile reprint, and English-language translation, in The Journal of Historical Review, May-June 1993, p. 12.
18. Letters in Books & Bookmen (London), April 1975, p. 5, and in The
Stars and Stripes (European edition), Jan. 24, 1993, p. 14.
Wiesenthal’s 1993 Stars and Stripes letter is reprinted in facsimile
in The Journal of Historical Review, May-June 1993, p. 10.
19. Memorial Site Concentration Camp Dachau. Leaflet published by the International Dachau-Committee (Dachau, Germany), no date.
About the Author
Theodore J. O’Keefe is the author of numerous published articles,
essays and reviews on historical and political subjects. For some
years he served as editor of the IHR’s Journal of Historical Review.
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