Gas Chamber Lies: Dachau

I want to make a few preliminary comments on the “holocaust” based entirely on my own experience. Please remember that this is an informal personal blog which bounces where it will and makes no pretense of being the equivalent of a thoroughly researched book on any subject. If someone challenges me I will do the research necessary to respond, but until then I will enjoy presenting my views and experiences in a sometimes impressionistic way – staying ahead of the holocausters by always trying to be honest and accurate and never publishing any alleged fact which I think is questionable.

As a university instructor in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s I was blessed with full summer vacations with pay. Presumably that was not just to help make up for the low salaries but also to allow experiences which would broaden the academic mind, and so I dutifully traveled in Europe for two whole summers. The first trip was so few years after the end of the war in 1945 that I saw many bombed buildings and much rubble in German cities.

In Munich we happened to meet an American man and his German wife. They kindly showed us around, and we attended a musical and comedy show in a Munich theater – replete with Spatenbrau and Munich delicacies. The program was quite different from the heavily Jewish-influenced vaudeville-type stage shows in America. It was more along the lines of Garrison Keillor’s “Prairie Home Companion”: Country comedians, slap dancers, yodelers, bell ringers, singers, glockenspiel artists, Alpenhorn players . . .

Among the performing groups was a small, old-fashioned German band from the town of Dachau, about 20 kilometers from Munich. Our hostess whispered, “They’re very ashamed of what happened in their town.”

Of course I had heard of Dachau. It was the site of one of the “death camps” or "extermination camps" the public had been told were situated all over Germany, whose main business was the gassing of Jews. Its most distinctive, and undoubtedly most photographed feature, was the “Arbeit Macht Frei” (literally “Work Makes Free”) gate. The motto was accurate because Dachau was in fact a labor camp.

Taking a tour of the concentration camp at Dachau, we were led, along with many other visitors, into a huge shower room whose ceiling was covered with pipes and dozens of shower heads. I shuddered as we were told that crowds of Jews would be herded in for showers, the door would be locked, and then instead of water, poison gas would pour from the shower heads and asphyxiate all the prisoners, whose bodies would then be hauled out to the crematoria.

There was no doubt at all expressed in the guide’s lecture: We had seen a gas chamber, and Dachau was prominently listed for years a one of as number of concentration camps in Germany with a gas chamber kept busy exterminating Jews.

Well, it turns out that what we saw at Dachau was just what it looked like – a big shower room built for purposes of hygiene, not murder. Thoughtful inspection would have revealed, in fact, that the shower room could not have been used as a gas chamber, and bodies hauled from it, without killing people all over the neighborhood.

No one was ever gassed at Dachau.

It is an odd phenomenon that as the holocaust myth burgeoned after World War II into a full-fledged money-making industry and an argument for the Jewish colonization of Palestine, the number of concentration camps in Germany which were supposed to have had gas chambers shrank. At what point Dachau was removed from the “gas chamber” list I don’t know, but after awhile not ONE camp in Germany was seriously alleged to have used gas chambers to kill Jews.

The story told to me in the Dachau shower room was a bald faced lie. So were the stories about the other “gas chambers” in camps in Germany . “Simon Wiesenthal re-confirmed that "there were no extermination camps on German soil" during the Second World War.”

“What the ‘Nazi hunter’ now says contrasts sharply with what was authoritatively claimed in the decades following the Second World War. At the great Nuremberg Tribunal of 1945-1946, for example, Allied government officials presented apparently conclusive evidence to prove that camps ‘on German soil’ -- such as Dachau and Buchenwald -- were ‘extermination’ centers. Sir Hartley Shawcross, chief British prosecutor at the main Nuremberg trial, accordingly declared in his closing address on July 26, 1946, that ‘murder [was] conducted like some mass production industry in the gas chambers and the ovens’ of Buchenwald, Dachau, Oranienburg -- all 'on German soil' -- as well as at other German-run camps [such as Bergen-Belsen]. Abundant 'proof' that inmates were gassed at Dachau has been provided over the years, most notably at the main Nuremberg trial of 1945-1946. Former inmate Dr. Franz Blaha, for example, provided eyewitness testimony at Nuremberg about gas chamber killings there of 'many prisoners.'"

Nobody "made a mistake". The gas chamber stories were deliberately manufactured for propaganda purposes – in particular to make Germans look guilty (and falsely justify their executions) and to increase sympathy for the Jews.

There are excellent sources which expose concentration camp and gas chamber legends. For now I will end with just this thought:

If someone tells you a dozen lies about something, and then admits reluctantly and gradually that every lie was a lie, would you believe the liar if he clung to a last remaining similar story and said, “But this one really IS true?”