Newsgroups: alt.revisionism Subject: "Death by Typhus?" Polish Jews murdered on death march. Followup-To: alt.revisionism Archive/File: holocaust/poland/lublin lublin.001 Last-Modified: 1995/01/09 Mark Weber, whose connections to the German neo-nazi political movement were firmly established by the Simon Wiesenthal Centre (Los Angeles) in the Spring of 1993, has this to say about Auschwitz: Astonishing as it may seem, more and more historians and engineers have been challenging the widely accepted Auschwitz story. These "revisionist" scholars do not dispute the fact that large numbers of Jews were deported to the camp, or that many died there, particularly of typhus and other diseases. But the compelling evidence they present shows that Auschwitz was not an extermination center and that the story of mass killings in "gas chambers" is a myth. (Raven, Auschwitz) Theodore O'Keefe, an editor with the Institute for Historical Review, echoed this "typhus excuse" in his article entitled "The Liberation of the Camps: Facts vs. Lies": 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? 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 which 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. (Raven, Liberation) In light of such assertions, which attempt to whitewash the deliberate murder of millions, it might be worthwhile to consider the following incident, which took place near Lublin, in Poland, in early 1940: "On January 14 a group of former soldiers in the Polish army, 880 Jews in all, were taken from the prisoner-of-war camp in Lublin and told that they were to be marched to the Soviet border where, as Jews born east of the new Nazi-Soviet demarcation line, they would be transferred to Soviet authority. The 880 prisoners were escorted on the march by SS men armed with rifles and machine guns. Just before the town of Lubartow, the SS men opened fire, and more than a hundred of the prisoners-of-war were killed. 'The invalids were the first to be shot at,' one of the [prisoners], Avraham Buchman, later recalled, 'because they were too weak to walk. There was one man who was shot in the lung.'<7> The [prisoners] thought seriously of rebelling; there were only thirteen guards, albeit armed. But, as Ringelblum [Archival note: Emanuel Ringelblum was a young historian who began recording Nazi actions against Jews in 1933. He was executed by the Nazis in 1944, after three days of savage beatings. His diaries survived. knm] later learned, the guards told them that if any tried to escape 'that would be a great catastrophe for all the Jews of Poland'. Some twenty prisoners-of-war did manage to escape. But the retaliation was immediate: three men were killed 'with one bullet', while the cruellest of the guards 'wantonly killed people walking along the road'.<8> That night the [prisoners] were locked in an abandoned stable, and in the local synagogue. One the following day, between Lubartow and Parczew, a second massacre took place: only 400 of the 880 reached the outskirts of Parczew alive. There, Arieh Helfgot, one of the survivors, later recalled, 'a delegation of Jews came out to meet us in order to conduct negotiations with our murderers. We were astonished at their courage, as they could quite easily have died together with us.' These local Jews gave the SS men money, in return for permission to provide the [prisoners] with food. That night the [prisoners] were again locked in the local synagogue. But during the night, with the help of the same local Jews who had come so bravely to intercede for them, forty of the prisoners managed to escape. The local Jews then found them civilian clothers, and hiding places. On the following morning the remaining 360 [prisoners] were again marched off, and once more subjected to bursts of machine-gun fire; less than two hundred survived, to be imprisoned in another prisoner-of-war camp, at Biala Podlaska. The transfer to Soviet territory never took place. At Biala Podlaska, refused medical attention, most of the survivors of the march died of typhus.<9>" (Gilbert, 110-111) When Mr. O'Keefe and Mr. Weber, therefore, speak casually (and callously, I might add) of "deaths from typhus," one would be well advised to consider the reality, as outlined above. One need not research the era a great deal to realize that the conditions which led directly to tens of thousands of deaths from disease and starvation were deliberately and systematically encouraged by the Nazi legions. Gilbert's Notes: <7> Testimony of Avraham Buchman: Eichmann Trial, 2 June 1961, session 63. <8> Ringelblum notes, 6 March 1940: Jacob Sloan (editor), Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto: the Journal of Emanuel Ringelblum, New York 1958, page 25. <9> Testimonies of Arieh Helfgot, Nachum Perelman and Joseph Grosfeld, Yad Vashem archive: Krakowski, 'The Fate of Jewish Prisoners of War in the 1939 Campaign,' Yad Vashem Studies, XII, Jerusalem 1977, pages 316-17. Work Cited Gilbert, Martin. The Holocaust: A History of the Jews of Europe during the Second World War. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1985 Raven, Greg. UseNet alt.revisionism. Subject: "Auschwitz Myths and Facts," December 18, 1994. Message-ID:-----------. UseNet alt.revisionism. Subject: "Liberation of the Camps: Facts vs. Lies," December 20, 1994. Message-ID:
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