THE SHOAH

PLEASE TAKE SOME TIME TO READ

Please note I'm no expert on the death camps as I was born in 1950 but as a child my family would talk of the horrors of Auschwitz and other death camps. Then in April 1961 there was much talk of Adolf Eichmann and his trial in Jerusalem. As a child I could never understand how anybody could do this to another human being no matter what race or religion.

We have now passed 75 years since the Russians liberated Auschwitz and Auschwitz-Birkenau which was quite by accident, even the Russians who had been fighting Nazi Germany and had suffered much hardship they could not believe what they were seeing as days before they had entered the Chełmno extermination camp that had been sanitised with no trace of what had been happening. Today you can visit Auschwitz and Auschwitz-Birkenau, Poland and view for yourself what remains of the death camps as I did in October 2019.

It's quite unbelievable that in Great Britain today one in six people believe it never happened and the Nazi at Auschwitz-Birkenau didn't kill some 1,500,000 (this is a minimum estimate) people by gas and then incinerate their bodies. Some believe the propaganda that Auschwitz was just a German summer camp for the troops with a large swimming pool along with brothel, only later was true from Jan 1945 in block 24 A

If you believe Auschwitz was a summer camp please take the trip to Poland and see the truth for yourself. There were many death camps in Poland for you to choose but Auschwitz-Birkenau holds the record of people murdered by the Nazi state. As I have said I could never understand how any human could inflict this industrial-scale slaughter upon another human.

In 1823 poet Heinrich Heine a German poet of Jewish origin infamously stated, “Where books are burned, in the end people will also be burned.” for the people of Nazi Germany it took just eight years. Heinrich Heine's books were amongst the many books that were burnt in 1933, German students who had joined the Nazi party and had organised the nationwide book burning fires. The seeds were set.

The Holocaust or Shoah (means “destruction” in Hebrew) generally used to describe the genocide of approximately seven million European Jews during World War II, as part of a program of deliberate extermination of the world's Jewish population, executed by the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nazi) regime led by Adolf Hitler. His autobiography and political manifesto Mein Kampf (My Struggle) lays out what was to become of the Jewish problem. The shocking thing was that everybody knew of his intentions on what he called the Jewish problem. In short Hitler had corrupted Charles Darwin's theory on natural selection to give the "perfect" German so some of the human race would need to be culled, Homosexuals, Gypsies, the disabled, the list was long but top of his list the Jews. The Polish race was to be used as slave labour and some of the selected children were given new German names and made ready to fight for the German Reich.

After coming to power in 1933, Adolf Hitler’s government passed laws that excluded Jews from society, then on 15th September 1935 the Nuremberg Laws were passed restricting the rights of people of the Jewish origin in Germany. If your Grandmother was Jewish you were deemed to be a Jew. The Jewish people were denied the right to hold public office or civil service positions; Jewish immigrants were denaturalised; Jews were denied employment by the press and radio; and were excluded from farming. Then in 1934 Jews were excluded from the stock exchanges and stock brokerage.

In Great Britain the Jewish population was in great fear of Hitler invading. Many of the upper classes of the day had strong anti-semite views such as one prominent MP Nancy Astor. It is on record that In the lead up to the Second World War, Lady Astor is said to have written to US Ambassador to Britain Joseph Kenendy Sr. saying that Hitler might be the solution to the world's problem of Jews. Even members of the Royal family the abdicated king Edward VIII is recorded of siding with Hitler on his final solution of the Jews. I only add this information so to understand why Hitler thought the world would thank him for sorting the perceived Jewish problem. The world had gone mad.

The first concentration camp in Germany is recorded as Dachau this was opened in March 1933 which could accommodate some 5,000 people. Some years later on 15th July 1937 a concentration camp is established at Buchenwald in Germany. Both these camps would later become well known as death camps.

Then on 17th August 1938 a law is passed stating that all Jews in Germany (except those with ‘typical’ Jewish first names) are required to take a new middle name by 1st January 1939 ‘Israel’ for men and ‘Sara’ for women. The names must be registered at the registry office and used on all official documents.

During the night of 9th and 10th November 1938, a pogrom, organised by SS Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, (Kristallnacht the Night of Broken Glass) named because of the shattered glass that littered the streets after the destruction of Jewish-owned businesses, synagogues, and homes throughout Germany and annexed Austria. Records show that some 91 Jewish people are killed that night and thousands of Jewish men are taken to concentration camps within Germany. This was the start of the Shoah (Holocaust)

Following the invasion of Poland 1st September 1939 ghettos were set up to segregate Jews. Then on 23rd November 1939, all Jews in Poland are forced to wear an armband depicting a Star of David whenever they are in public, this was not the end, from the ghettos they were sent to one of the many concentration camps. One such camp Auschwitz was established by Germans in 1940, The site was a disused Polish army base in the suburbs of Oswiecim, a Polish city that had been swallowed up by the Third Reich. Its name was changed to the German name Auschwitz. The camp initially served as a detention centre for Polish and Russian political prisoners along with the Catholic priests and homosexuals. However, it evolved into a network of camps where Jewish people and other perceived enemies of the Nazi state were exterminated, often in gas chambers, or used as slave labor until they died of starvation.

The camp at Auschwitz block 11 was called by prisoners "the Block of Death". In the cellars there was the camp detention house with a closed yard where executions were conducted by firing squad. There were also posts in the yard where prisoners were hanged on their hands which were tied behind their backs so that their feet would not touch the ground. The punishment was usually inflicted for several hours, an hour at a time. The prisoner lost consciousness because of the intense pain. It was one of the camps many punishments. The lucky ones slept on the bare floor. Confinement in the dark cells lasted from several days to several weeks and they were then expected to do a full days work each day.

Record show that on the 23rd Sept 1941 block 11 started an experimental use of Zyklon B the trade name of a cyanide-based pesticide invented in Germany in the early 1920s by Bayer. The product became infamous for its use by Nazi Germany during the Holocaust. On the 1st March 1941 1.5mile to the west they started the construction of Auschwitz II in a town called Birkenau. It soon becomes the most brutal and overcrowded of the camps at Auschwitz. It is recorded that more than 44,000 camps and other detention sites were created. At the height of World War II, The Nazis were slaughtering as many as 15,000 Jews a day. The genocide was so severe that more than a million Jews were killed in just three months in 1942.

Far away from block 11 was block 24 A by the main gate which has been documented as one of the largest brothels. Gestapo monster Heinrich Himmler had ordered the brothels to be set up in camps across Nazi-occupied Europe. Non-Jewish women were lured into volunteering with promises of better living conditions for very light labour, lots volunteered. They didn't know the kind of work they was supposed to do. In a diabolical scheme aimed at encouraging some of the non Jewish inmates to work even harder they would get 15 minutes with an SS Guard looking on through a peephole. As many as 21 women prisoners worked in block 24 brothels known as Sonderbauten (special buildings)

On 8th January 1942, SS Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich sent invitations to be present at a conference which included SS Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann. The conference was set for the 20th January 1942 formalised the plans to the next step for "Adolf Hitler's Final Solution to the Jewish Question" the deportation and genocide of all Jewish people, estimated at 11 million would need to be removed and exterminated. For more information on the Wannsee Conference.

Many people were moved from all over Europe to a central point at Oswiecim. After many days traveling in a cattle trucks they would see the light of day, those that had survived the journey would then go through selection on the platform, a stone track. The strong were selected to work and were given a number tattooed on their arm while the sick, elderly, women and children were told they were going for a shower. They were packed in more than 2,000 in an area of 210 meter squared. The doors were locked and Zyklon B crystals was poured from the roof. Within one hour they were all dead. The bodies were removed and checked for gold teeth, jewellery and their hair was removed. They were then cremated and all personal records destroyed total time some two hours to the start of cremation at Auschwitz-Birkenau. They had entered a factory of death on a scale you just can't believe.

People today can't understand how so many would just calmly walk to their death. German officers learnt very quickly beating the people with sticks didn't work so they laughed and joked with the people and would ask things like "any craftsmen here?" to which they would get lots of replies, they would then inform those people to make sure when you leave the showers make sure you inform the guards of your trade.

One Jewish German teenager had kept a diary of her life in hiding from the security police, her capture and transfer to Westerbork transit camp, then Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland September 1944. Anne and her sister, Margot and their mother, Edith, survived the initial intake into the camp and were kept at Birkenau as slave labourers for two months. On November 1st 1944 Anne and Margot took the final journey to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp locked into cattle wagon with about 70 to 100 other individuals, with hardly any food or water, for a two-day journey. Her official recorded death March 31st 1945 (exact dates of her deaths are unknown) new study puts Anne's death in February of 1945. Some misguided people wrote that the diary was a fake and had not been written by Ann Franks. Some people just don't like the truth and will do anything to bend the truth to suit their warped version of events. It is a recorded fact that over one million children under the age of sixteen died during the second World War, not because of the bombs, but because they did not fit in as Hitler’s image of the "perfect" German, even German children that were disabled were euthanised.

Towards the end of the war a lot of people including Anne Franks and her sister were evacuated to Germany, Bergen-Belsen concentration camp this was set up in 1943. It was not designed as a death-camp, but was still a place of unbelievable horrors and brutality to avoid evidence from the advancing Soviet army into Poland. The camp were for Jewish hostages held with the intention of exchanging them for German prisoners of war held overseas. The camp was later expanded to accommodate Jews from other concentration camps.

Allegedly in May 15th 1944 the world is still not aware of the atrocities that are taking place in Auschwitz and Auschwitz-Birkenau. A report is put together a collection of three eyewitness accounts from 1943–1944 about the mass murder that was taking place inside the concentration camp in German-occupied Poland. The 33 page report (Auschwitz Protocols) written around April 1944 and sent around the world asking for the camps and rail links to be bombed to reduce the then full scale deportation of Hungary's jews to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Nothing was done as it was felt it would be better to continue with the war effort and bombed the nearby The synthetic rubber factory at Monowitz which had Auschwitz III that supplied the labour for the rubber factory. Then on 27th January 1945 the Soviet army liberated Auschwitz and Auschwitz-Birkenau and frees the remaining 7,650 prisoners that have been left behind, many would still die from disease and malnutrition. The world then woke up and knows the truth.

On the 11th April 1945 American forces liberate approximately 21,000 prisoners from Buchenwald and its sub-camps. It is recorded that U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower said: "Get it all on record now – get the films – get the witnesses – because somewhere down the track of history some bastard will get up and say that this never happened." Sadly this is not true, just a twisted fact but he did get the Civilians of the town to help bury the dead and bare witness to what was going on.

Some of the photos below shows U.S. soldier surveying a German concentration camp which were taken by James Emison Chanslor, an Army Master Sergeant who served from 1942 until 1945. We know every arm of Germany's bureaucracy was involved in the logistics of the mass murder, turning the country into what one Holocaust scholar has called "a genocidal state. Most of the photos are from Auschwitz.

Source: Some Photos courtesy of Master Sergeant John Michael Chanslor who served in World War II from 1942 until 1945.

There are many versions of what General Dwight D Eisenhower said on visiting Ohrdruf concentration camp. The truth for the recorded is: "The things I saw beggar description. The visual evidence and the verbal testimony of the starvation, cruelty and bestiality were so overpowering I made the visit deliberately, in order to be in the position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations to propaganda" General Dwight D Eisenhower April 13th 1945.

On The 20th November 1945 the trials of 22 top-level Nazi war criminals begin at Nuremberg. The court is composed of judges from the four Allies. Twelve of the defendants are sentenced to death. The commandant of Auschwitz SS-Obersturmbannführer Rudolf Franz Ferdinand Höss went on trial before a Polish Supreme National Tribunal. He was sentenced to death by hanging which was carried out at Auschwitz 16 April 1947. During his imprisonment, at the request of the Polish authorities, he wrote his memoirs, released in English under the title Commandant of Auschwitz

For those amongst you who think it was only Jews that ended up in the death camps you would be so wrong. The German authorities of that day also targeted other groups because of their perceived "racial inferiority": Roma (Gypsies), the disabled, and some of the Slavic peoples (Poles, Russians, and others who were deemed sub human). Other groups were persecuted on political, ideological, and behavioural grounds, among them Communists, Socialists, Jehovah's Witnesses, and homosexuals. Children were not spared they also were sent to the death camps see photos above. The German authorities of that day were so efficient at killing, the children arriving at Auschwitz-Birkenau camp could be dead and piled high ready for cremation within two hours.

Today, more than ever, with the BNP, Iran, and other fools claim the Holocaust to be 'a myth,' a Zionist plot??? General Dwight Eisenhower was right. It is imperative we all make sure the world never forgets what one madman with a nation behind him can achieve against the human race. The children of today who will be the adults of tomorrow must know the truth so this can never happen to any race or religious group of people. Today in the United Kingdom the BNP is growing day by day, just think how the Holocaust came about in the first place!

Today, most of Auschwitz are almost perfectly preserved as a crime scene for more than a million murders. The wooden barracks of the Birkenau camp called Auschwitz II , which was built as an extension to the main Auschwitz camp, can be seen behind them. The timber was reused to rebuild Poland after the war. The brick chimney stacks remain a testament of the existence of the camp. More than 2,000 people a day visit the Auschwitz and Auschwitz-Birkenau camp in Poland on a tour around the death camp. Books and films can't show the size of this place until you are standing on the platform (a stone path) and you have a 360 deg view of the camp. The most shocking for me to hear that Auschwitz-Birkenau was overcrowded. You can only appreciate this by standing on the platform. To view more information please visit Auschwitz.org

When you talk to people they have a total figure of 6 million people were killed in the many camps controlled by the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nazi) Records show that between 1942 and 1945 five million ethnic minorities would also lose their lives plus the six million Jewish people. We know many more people lost their lives.

It was at Auschwitz that an ardent Nazi, Josef Mengele was appointed by Heinrich Himmler to be chief doctor at Auschwitz and Auschwitz-Birkenau, the supplementary extermination camp at Auschwitz, where he and his staff selected incoming Jews for labor or extermination and where he supervised medical experiments in block 21 on inmates to discover means of increasing fertility (to increase the German “race”). He also experimented on twins to see if he could break the code that made twins as this would also help to increase the German race. Mengele would experiment on one twin and when they died he would also kill the other twin to see what changes had been made. Mengele eluded capture in spite of extradition requests by the West German government and clandestine operations by the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad. He allegedly drowned in 1979 after suffering a stroke while swimming off one of São Paulo’s beaches, Brazil. He was buried under the false name Wolfgang Gerhard February 7th, 1979. I have always hoped that it was Mossad who caused his stroke. As long as there’s still a Nazi breathing in any corner of the world, Mossad should help them stop breathing.

Atrocities against Jews were not just fanatics in Germany. Northern France had its camps and atrocities. Records even show of Polish atrocities against Jewish population and other civilians during and after the war. One on the 10th July 1941, Polish villagers in Jedwabne, perhaps at the instigation of the Nazis, they rounded up some 340 Polish Jews, including women and children, who were then murdered. It's a matter of fact more than 300 of their Jewish neighbours were locked in a barn and burned alive, with German Orpo Police looking on.

The Jewish community in Jedwabne had been established in the 18th century. There were approximately 1,500 Jews out of a total population of 2,167 residing in Jedwabne in the 1930s.

In 2006 I spoke with an elderly German living in Letchworth. He had lived through the second world war and had served in the German army from 1943. to 1945 for reasons best known to himself after talking about other things. He said he had not been responsible for that madman's belief. But he felt he was responsible to make sure it never happened again in his lifetime. Sadly he has passed away so it falls to us all to prevent such things happening again to any race of people. I personally dislike Nigel Farage not because he has a German wife but he has a big thing about immigrants mostly Muslim coming to our shores and blaming them for problems within the UK! Now who does that sound like?

FREEDOM ISN'T FREE... SOMEONE HAD TO PAY FOR IT!

I visited Poland 14th October 2019 and took some time to look around the camps of Auschwitz and Auschwitz-Birkenau Click to see some photos of my trip. I thought I would well up and not cope with being at the places where such awful things took place, the death of so many people. If there was any place where the souls of people would be crying out this would be the place. I found I was more angry and filled with hate for Germans of yesterday against my mother's advice never hate for it was hate that caused a corporal in the German army to start this SHOAH that removed 6 million generations with their DNA from this earth.

David Baddiel Joke: Some time after the war a holocaust survivor dies and goes to Heaven and god asked him, Tell me did you tell jokes while in the death camps? Yes of course we told jokes. god asked him to tell a holocaust joke, so he did. god said that's not funny! The survivor said "Well I guess you had to be there"

To watch David Baddiel exploring the multi-faceted nature of Holocaust denial in an attempt to understand what motivates this dangerous phenomenon and why it is on the rise. Only available in the UK via BBC red button

Last edited on other Virgin webspace 13/08/2010 22:16:51 and again 10th March 2020