"It is easier to believe a lie one has heard a hundred times than a truth one has never heard before." -- Robert S. Lynd, American sociologist, The Passion of Labour (pg. 67)
Most of us have seen the naked, decaying corpses in photographs and film, piles of them everywhere being thrown or bulldozed into pits or laying in the open waiting to be disposed of. When these images are combined with the voice of the narrator in a documentary film, there seems to be no question as to how these people died; they were murdered in gas chambers or by other means at the hands of the brutal Nazis.
These images, burned into our minds after nearly 70 years of schooling, books, documentary and Hollywood films, along with the often present violin music, pose what may be the greatest barrier toward critical thinking one may face regarding the alleged holocaust of World War II. We all saw the bodies! How can anyone have the audacity to question the fact that the Nazis sent six million Jews to their deaths after witnessing these atrocities with our own eyes?
Here is what Dr. Russell Barton, who was one of the first British medics to arrive at Bergen-Belsen, has to say regarding the piles of bodies and general conditions in the camp:
Video: Ernst Zundel interviews Dr. Russell Barton
Almost all of the photographs and film of corpses we have seen share some common attributes; 1), the time frame in which they were captured, 2), many of the bodies are emaciated, 3), there is no unusual discoloring apparent in the fresher corpses and 4), most of the images are from the Dachau, Bergen-Belsen and Buchenwald camps.
While we are encouraged to believe that the piles of corpses were the result of mass gassings, the simple fact is that there were no homicidal gas chambers at Buchenwald or Bergen-Belsen, nor was there ever a functioning gas chamber at Dachau (actually there was no gas chamber at all, a fact which we will expand upon later). These facts are agreed upon by both reputable exterminationists and revisionists.
The photograph of the pile of bodies in image number 1 was captured by the allies after U.S. troops liberated the Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany on April 4th, 1945. The majority of the deaths in the camps occurred during the final months of the war, a period during which conditions deteriorated drastically due to the increased pressure and bombing of infrastructure caused by the allied forces. It is estimated that 500 people perished daily in Bergen-Belsen during the final months of the war while the camp was under the control of the Germans and this figure soared to approximately 1700 deaths per day after the camps were liberated and the inmates were in the care of the allies.
Typhus had reached epidemic proportions throughout occupied Europe but other diseases, including typhoid, dysentery and tuberculosis, were prolific as well. The problem of disease was greatly intensified in the camps due to severe overcrowding as the Germans were forced to consolidate prisoners in a smaller and smaller number of camps due to the allied advanced as Germany began to lose the war. Image number 4 is of a sign that was posted at Auschwitz which warned people about the danger posed by typhus, the deadly disease carried by lice for which the Germans had no cure.
Allied bombing had been taking place on a massive scale throughout occupied Europe, resulting in many thousands of civilian casualties. Piles of corpses were a common sight, as seen in the 3rd photograph which was captured after the brutal allied slaughter that took place in Dresden. Roads, bridges and railways which were vital for transporting food, medicine and other supplies to the camps and elsewhere were obliterated and therefore many thousands of the deaths in the camps can be indirectly attributed to the indiscriminate allied carpet bombing campaign. Image number 6 shows how the death toll in Buchenwald rose from about 200 per month to approximately 4000 per month during the bombing campaign. The deaths of many thousands more occurred while the camps were under allied control after their liberation.
Both hydrogen cyanide and carbon monoxide poisoning can cause distinct blue or bright red to pink patches on the skin as seen in image number 5. This discoloration would have be clearly visible on the fresher corpses had they been exposed to hydrogen cyanide or carbon monoxide gas. Even in gray-scale photographs, dark patches on the skin should be visible. An article from eMedicineHealth states:
The skin of a cyanide-poisoned person can sometimes be unusually pink or cherry-red because oxygen will stay in the blood and not get into the cells.
From an eNotes article titled Suicide Investigation:
Cyanide turns to lethal hydrogen cyanide gas on contact with the acid of the stomach. Hydrogen cyanide prevents the body's cells from using oxygen; this gives the blood a characteristic pink color that will be evident to the pathologist on autopsy. The victim's face is often a brick-red hue after cyanide poisoning.
From the book Forensic Pathology, Second Edition by Dominick DiMaio and Vincent J.M. DiMaio M.D.:
The gastric mucosa and blood will have a bright red color. Livor mortis is often bright pink. This coloration is caused by cyanide's inhibiton of the cytochrome oxidase system, which prevents utilization of circulating oxyhemoglobin. It is oxyhemoglobin that gives the bright pink color to the blood, not cyanohemoglobin, which is not formed in any significant quantity in life. If a strong solution of potassium or sodium cyanide was ingested, there may be some alkaline burns of the gastric mucosa. If there was some vomiting of the material, these burns might be seen in the skin adjacent to the mouth. If hydrogen cyanide is inhaled, the only changes at autopsy are a bright pink color to the blood and livor mortis.
Unknown to many is the fact that autopsies were conducted on a large number of corpses after the camps were liberated. It is very telling indeed that these autopsy reports were not entered as evidence during the Nuremberg tribunals. The Institute for Historical Review has the following to say regarding Dr. Charles Larson, a pathologist and member of the U.S. War Crimes Investigation Team, who preformed hundreds of autopsies on the corpses in the German concentration camps:
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]
Dr. John E. Gordon, M.D., Ph.D., professor of preventive medicine and epidemiology at the Harvard University School of Public Health, who was with U.S. forces in Germany in 1945, said:
Most deaths in the concentration camps were caused, not by starvation or maltreatment but by typhus.
In an article titled Disease killed Nazis' prisoners, MD says we read:
Thousands of prisoners who died at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp during WWII weren't deliberately starved to death but died from a rash of diseases, according to a psychiatrist who was there in 1945.
From the trial of Ernst Zündel, formally a political prisoner of Canada, the United States and Germany, Emil Lachout read the following evidence from a Circular Letter of the Military Police Service dated October 1, 1948:
Military Police Service Copy
Circular Letter No. 31/48 Vienna, 1 Oct. 1948 10th dispatch
1. The Allied Commissions of Inquiry have so far established that no people were killed by poison gas in the following concentration camps: Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, Dachau, Flossenbürg, Gross-Rosen, Mauthausen and its satellite camps, Natzweiler, Neuengamme, Niederhagen (Wewelsburg), Ravensbrück, Sachsenhausen, Stutthof, Theresienstadt.
In those cases, it has been possible to prove that confessions had been extracted by tortures and that testimonies were false.
This must be taken into account when conducting investigations and interrogations with respect to war crimes.
The result of this investigation should be brought to the cognizance of former concentration camp inmates who at the time of the hearings testified on the murder of people, especially Jews, with poison gas in those concentration camps. Should they insist on their statements, charges are to be brought against them for making false statements.
From a document titled The Rudolf Verdict As Pronounced By Mannheim District Court On 2 May 2007, we read:
# 6 What about those pictures of mountains of dead bodies in the concentration camps?
Here is a photograph of victims of the typhus epidemic in a mass grave on the concentration camp in Bergen-Belsen, taken by the British Army. It is typical of a large number of such photos often shown on TV Holocaust documentaries either without commentary or else with allegations that the dead are victims of the Holocaust. In fact, it is a photograph of victims of an epidemic which occurred at war's end. The cause of death is evident from the condition of the corpses. If they had been gassed they would not be emaciated and if they had died of starvation they would have swollen joints and stomachs. Any medical professional will see at first glance that these people died of typhus.
All photographs of heaps of corpses were taken in Western camps around the end of the war, such as Dachau, Bergen-Belsen, and Buchenwald, where historians now agree no mass murders took place. Significantly, there are no such photographs taken at the camps in which mass murder is alleged to have occurred (Auschwitz, Treblinka, Belzec, Sobibor, Chelmno, Majdanek.) These eastern camps were all in areas which came under Soviet control at war's end. It is very telling that the Soviets released no pictures of mass graves or heaps of corpses and allowed no journalists, medical professionals, or other experts to examine the camps. Since the end of the 1980s, Revisionists have been investigating these sites for evidence of mass murder, but the officials have obstructed their efforts by all possible means.
In the absence of authentic photographs documenting mass murder, it frequently happens that photographs of those who died in the Western camps at war's end of malnutrition and typhus are presented as evidence of deliberate mass murder. To be sure, the hellish conditions in the Western camps at war's end convinced many Allied observers that mass murder had taken place, so that initial reports to that effect are understandable. In reality, these conditions resulted from a situation for which the German government was not solely responsible. Toward the end of the war, Himmler illogically ordered the evacuation of the eastern camps as the Red Army approached, which led to hopeless overcrowding in the western camps. By that time, Allied bombing had completely destroyed the German infrastructure, making it impossible to supply the camps with food, medicines, and sanitation supplies. Misunderstandings about the causes of the massive die-off continue to this day, especially among Americans. The respected leftist historian Norbert Frei has given the following reason for misinterpretation, (from Vi erteljahrshefte 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."
There is no denying that a government which imprisons people in camps is responsible for them and so the unjustly imprisoned were therefore victims of the Third Reich, even if they died "only" of disease. However, one should not overlook the fact that by the war's end, mountains of corpses had become commonplace throughout Germany. In German cities there were 600,000 victims of Allied terror bombings. Millions more died of starvation and disease, which continued rampant through 1949. In Eastern Germany and Czechoslovakia, three million Germans were murdered by Serbs, Czechs, Poles, and Russians in the course of history's bloodiest ethnic cleansing. In the POW camps of the western Allies, a million young German men died and millions more allowed to vegetate. Hundreds of thousands more were shipped to the labor camps of the Soviet Gulag never to be seen again. But the media show only one variety of corpse piles, those in the concentration camps. We should ask ourselves why this is so.
Should the dignity and respect that we owe the victims of atrocities, depend on their nationality?
From the book The Hoax of the Twentieth Century - The Case Against The Presumed Extermination Of European Jewry by Arthur R. Butz, we read about the allied destruction of infrastructure which was vital for transporting supplies to the camps:
The conditions in the camps had forced the German government, in March 1945, to take the final step in reversal of its earlier policy of absolute exclusion of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) from the concentration camps (existing conventions covered POWs, not concentration camp inmates). On March 29, 1945, SS General Kaltenbrunner authorized the ICRC to place one delegate in each camp for the purpose of distributing relief supplies, on the conditions that the delegate remained there until the end of the war. The ICRC organized road transport for relief supplies (use of the rail- ways was out of the question) [...]
And again, regarding the railways:
The German rail system was in utter chaos and conditions in April 1945 are difficult to imagine [...]
And here, regarding the cause of death:
The causes for the dead bodies which were found at the camp when it was captured were described in a 1948 publication of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. As the US Army advanced into Germany, it encountered the sorts of conditions which its medical services had anticipated and for which they had prepared counter-measures:
"Germany in the spring months of April and May was an astounding sight, a mixture of humanity traveling this way and that, homeless, often hungry and carrying typhus with them. [...] The more territory that was uncovered, the greater was the number of reported cases; for Western Germany in the areas of the American advance was rather uniformly seeded with typhus. To be sure, there were heavily involved communities and others lightly affected. There were great accumulations of cases in the concentration and prison camps, and in nearby small communities.
As estimated 35,000-40,000 prisoners were found in [Dachau], 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 further 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, bed-ridden 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."
It is not surprising that Dachau had experienced catastrophes very similar to those at Belsen. Since the beginning of 1945, there had been an estimated 15,000 prisoner deaths from typhus, mostly in the final two months.
In closing, there is not any creditable forensic evidence that gassings were conducted in any of the camps, including those that are alleged to have had homicidal gas chambers. I hope that the reader will begin to understand how propaganda and images are used by the media and governments alike to tell a largely falsified story that fits a particular agenda and how such a narrative, after being repeated over and over again, can permeate the public perception to the point where the truth is nothing but a distant shadow.