Comparing Auschwitz to the Gulags

Source: ZGram, The Zundelsite, May 26, 2000

Comparing Auschwitz to the Gulags

Good Morning from the Zundelsite:

Since Revisionists are a bunch of strongly opinionated people of sometimes opposing beliefs, there is one oddling among us who went on record with this baby statement:

"Slaves in Auschwitz were not better off than slaves in Soviet camps."

Ingrid:

"Now here you are just plain wrong on your facts. WRONG. WRONG. WRONG. Think of Kolyma.

Oddling:

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"RIGHT, RIGHT, RIGHT, tovaritschka Rimlandova.

"Don't forget Auschwitz was a wartime camp for labor purposes, not really like Dachau where they sent the communists to in the pre-war years etc. What went on there -- and I don't mean any gas chambers or the pasting together of twins by their backsides -- was not unlike what went on at the Kolyma (and elsewhere): barbaric slave work in exchange for a miserable soup ration, all for a clearly visible purpose.

"Of course, war is an atrocious thing and nobody denies it. Same with typhus and the arctic climate. Neither Auschwitz nor the Kolyma were gratuitous. Neither were the A-bomb or Dresden exactly, by the way and contrary to mythology, but that's another story. But all of those camps were *clearly* criminal because people guilty of no crime couldn't leave even if they wanted to and they were being killed like insects. They didn't have the right to be uninterested in German war production or the colonization of the big North and the Far East to save the revolution, or whatever. As simple as that. 2 + 2 = 4. An innocent slave is an innocent slave, not a criminal.

"An excuse is always there; why, even Count Dracula has to stay alive, hasn't he? Doesn't mean eating people's necks and drinking their blood is more acceptable when we don't like the people being savaged in those odd ways. Even if it serves someone's purposes.

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Of course I couldn't let that rest. Therefore, I went for reinforcement. Here is what Mr. Zundel sent me, culled from an upcoming study:

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General:

The most important difference: The German camps were open to inspection by delegates from the Committee of the International Red Cross. The Soviet camps were not.

(For details, contact the CIRC at 9 Ave. de la paix, Geneva, Switzerland. For relatively little money - less than $50 - one can obtain reports prepared in war time about the conditions in German camps.)

Specific to Auschwitz:

Supposedly the most dreaded of German camps, Auschwitz was repeatedly visited by Red Cross inspection teams who were allowed to speak to prisoner representatives alone in order to hear first-hand of any mistreatment, chicanery, interruption of mail and parcel delivery, health concerns, food and ration matters etc.

No such visits took place - ever! - to Soviet Gulag camps.

Auschwitz, the supposed "death camp", had among other facilities:

* A camp hospital to which expert surgeons even from the famous Berlin "Charité" Surgical Clinic were dispatched to deal with difficult cases -

* Camp sick barracks, attended by camp inmate doctors and nurses to deal with the inmates' health problems - much like the now common walk-in clinics in modern US communities -

* A Camp diet kitchen, one of the largest service buildings in Auschwitz, with state-of-the-art cooking facilities. (This building had 12 chimneys and can be visited today...)

* The caloric content of the diet was carefully monitored by camp and Red Cross delegates. It only deteriorated in Auschwitz and other camps towards the end of the war when German railroads and the entire transport system collapsed under constant aerial attacks -

* Camp orchestras, with every conceivable instrument available -

* A Camp theater, where live plays could be performed by camp inmate actors -

* Camp sculpture classes conducted for interested, talented inmates by professional sculptors

* Camp art classes for inmates

* Camp lectures on every topic under the sun, from health, the arts, philosophy, science, economic issues etc.

* A Camp cinema - where every week different, mainly cultural and non-political films were shown -

* Camp religious facilities made available on a rotating basis to every denomination for religious services -

* A Camp library, where inmates could borrow books from thousands of volumes available -

* A Camp swimming pool for use by the inmates on Birkenallee, where there were walkways with comfortable benches for inmates to relax in the shade of the trees -

* Camp sports facilities, like soccer fields, handball areas and other exercise facilities -

* A Camp coupon incentive system, where through extra work inmates could obtain coupons redeemable for cake or ice cream in the Camp Cantina, which also had extra toiletries etc.

* A Camp Complaint Office, where inmates could register complaints or make suggestions. Camp Commander Hoess had a standing order that any inmate could approach him personally to register a complaint about other inmates such as "Kapos" and even guards.

* A system of strict discipline for guards and also for inmates, with severe punishment being handed out against those found guilty (for instance, a camp slapping an inmate)

* An Auschwitz "In-Camp Jail". (!) Since the camp was a large, open facility, transgressors could be arrested, tried and jailed right in Auschwitz. (This jail was opposite the gynecological facility.)

* An Auschwitz Maternity Ward - Over 3,000 live births were registered there, with not a single still-born baby while Auschwitz was in operation under German rule -

* Auschwitz crematoria - These structures were hastily built by inmate labor after the first typhus epidemic caused thousands of deaths. (Burial of epidemic victims had caused the ground water to be contaminated causing infections among the German staff. One victim was an early camp commandant's wife, along with Polish peasants on the outside.)

* Auschwitz pregnancies took place because of the open nature of the facility. Auschwitz marriages took place because worker inmates fell in love and married their inmate partners.

Does all this sound remotely like anything that Steven Spielberg would like us to believe?

Tomorrow, I will tell you more.

Ingrid

May 27, 2000, Good Morning from the Zundelsite:

Herewith I continue Part II of how Auschwitz was run by the "Nazis" - as per condensed notes from the Zundel-Haus collected for a project:

* "Auschwitz selection": That maligned institution on the ramp was not, as falsely claimed by anti-German propaganda, to separate incoming inmates into those who were to be "gassed" and those who were to live. The selection was for those who could work, those who were too weak or ill, and those who had to be quarantined because of contagious diseases.

* Hygienic facilities contained large shower rooms, where hot and cold water - not "gas"! - was coming out of the shower heads. Inmates were subjected to these showers for health and hygienic reasons.

* Auschwitz barbershop: People were shorn of their body hair because it was in hair where typhus-carrying lice hid and multiplied. This measure was to save the lives of the inmates, not to humiliate them before their fellow men.

(Ingrid's comment here: During my early childhood refugee years, both children and adults were shorn repeatedly for that very same reason. I remember it very clearly because I liked to rub my little playmates' pate for the sensuous feel on my fingertips..)

* Auschwitz clothing: This was standard concentration garb, striped pyjamas - the very same standard garb for US road gangs in the South until the 1950s. For outside work (construction etc) warm clothing included long overcoats were provided, as were woolen mittens, woolen scarves, and heavy duty ear muffs, to protect the ears of the inmates.

* Zyklon B: The dreaded "extermination gas" of Holocaust-Hollywood lore was used on a regular basis by skilled, specially trained, inmate-staffed commandos, to disinfect blankets, sheets, uniforms, mattresses, sleeping and eating barracks, and even the morgue rooms. Again this was a public health measure to ensure the health and safety of the inmates - at great expense and effort to the Germans, by the way! - and not to "gas" inmates, as has been falsely claimed for more than 60 years!

* Transport to and from Auschwitz: This was usually done by specially built "prisoner transport trains" - sometimes on freight cars now disdainfully classified as "cattle cars." Millions of German soldiers, and later non-criminal civilians, were transported to and from the front - long before there was an alleged "Nazi Genocide Plan." Germans by the millions were put into exactly such "cattle cars" - such as when almost 17 million Germans were kicked out of their ancestral homelands in the East - or while being shipped to Stalin's Gulag camps.

There are thousands of feet of film in the archives of the world showing the German concentration camp system, prisoner selection and transport system at work. There are tens of thousands of photographs of how individual aspects of that system worked. There are millions of individual, personal files resting under lock and key in Arolson (near Kassel) in Germany, administered by the same reluctant Red Cross - an organization that could solve the real numbers of Holocaust victims question within a number of months IF they were not so frightened of the horrendous political fall-out, were the true numbers of the victims established by the documentary evidence.

The world got a glimpse of the true facts very briefly when Mikhail Gorbachev released the Death Registers of Auschwitz, which revealed and meticulously detailed why and how 74.000 inmates died - less than half of them bearing Jewish names!

The German policy was uniform and covered all German camps, with similar basic design, administration and facility regulations. Individual corruption and transgression of the rules by German officials, even camp commandants, were investigated by order of Heinrich Himmler. One of the best known judges was Konrad Morgan who explained to his American captors how the system worked.

Morgan personally investigated and brought to trial several German camp commanders who were found guilty - and who were executed by German firing squad while the inmates of their camps were assembled to watch, so they could see for themselves that behaviors such as corruption, theft from inmates' parcels or their belongings as well as brutality against inmates would not be tolerated by German authorities.

These findings are based on the sworn testimony of Thies Christophersen, Tijudar Rudolf, Maria van Herworden, Ditlieb Felderer etc. given in the two Zündel Trials, and by anecdotal evidence gathered from many other sources such as the Red Cross Reports, inmate recollections etc.

For more details, consult your premier Revisionist websites.

So much for German concentration camps. I doubt that American concentration camps - 666 (!) prisoners-of-war and concentration camps, by the way, according to Time and Life books - had anywhere near comparable facilities and services.

And as to Soviet camps?

Millions and millions of Soviet citizens (and later others) went into first Lenin's, then Stalin's, then the other Soviet dictators' extensive camp systems. There are enough fragments of documents and camp locations - from East Germany to Siberia - which give a glimpse as to what life was like in these Soviet camps, whatever their "supposed purpose." Solzhenitsyn of course comes to mind. To compare life in Soviet prisons or prison camps with those in Germany and to pronounce them as equally bad either reveals the author as a woefully ignorant person - or a callous, careless investigator of facts.

Even in the darkest hours of defeat and retreat, Hitler's Germany was a country with clearly defined policy and a rigidly adhered to chain of command, with personal responsibility up and down that command structure being imposed until the very end. By contrast, the Soviet system was one of wanton, mindless brutality, torture, violence and often instant death administered by armed, artificially agitated, revenge-thirsting, primitive mobs against a whole plethora of imagined "enemies" - from "capitalists", "reactionaries", "counter revolutionaries" and "kulaks" to "enemies of the State"! Everyone - anyone! anywhere! - could be snatched from a field, a street, a school, or a factory and end his life in the Gulags, never knowing what they were "guilty" of or how to put an end to torment. To compare that kind of situation to the system in place in Germany - as a war time reaction to sabotage, treason, security threats etc. - is dishonest, unfair, and unworthy of decent people.

The whole issue of alleged German fiendishness was and is being used by people of many nations with many a political and historical ax to grind - from the Jewish extortionists who have turned the Holocaust into an industry, to those in Eastern Europe who sit on German lands, stole German factories and mines and live in the houses of Germans they drove out at gun point, raped and robbed of everything they had built up and worked for generations.

All these murders, thieves, and torturers are now ever so busy accusing the Germans, so that a propaganda-blinded world does not ask uncomfortable questions - such as: "What happened to the ancient inhabitants of East Prussia, of Königsberg, Danzig, Stettin? What happened to the farmers of Silesia? The Sudetenland? Bohemia? What did you do to them? How did you acquire this land? Did you pay even one penny for it?"

Do not forget: The ancient lands of the Germans in these Eastern territories were colonized by German settlers long before America and Canada were discovered, much less settled.

To Americans and Canadians, Australians and New Zealanders, and to the Israelis - a word of warning and explanation:

The Lebanese just took back what's theirs - where they had settled for many generations - and look at how their tormentors just scrambled for their safety!

The Mexicans will want to get the Southwest and the Alamo back. Aztlan - the name for the plan.

The Indians of Canada are making land claims to most of Canada. The natives of America, Mexico, British Columbia, Tasmania or the Maories of New Zealand have every right to expel intruders from their lands with far more sound arguments than the Allies could muster at the conferences in Yalta and Potsdam in 1944-45.

A precedent was set. You owe them. It all started at Yalta and Potsdam!