Newsgroups: alt.revisionism Subject: Holocaust Almanac: Schools for Murder From: Ken McVayFollowup-To: alt.revisionism Organization: The Nizkor Project, Canada Keywords: Babi Yar,Kiev,Hartheim,Mauthausen,Sonnenstein,Grafenegg Archive/File: places/germany/euthansia/program.04 Last-Modified: 2001/05/18 "The mass killings by shooting proved cumbersome and expensive. Too many people were needed to shoot 33,711 Jews on September 29 and 30, 1941, at Babi Yar near Kiev. Eventually, close to 100,000 corpses filled that ravine, mostly of Jews, but also of partisans and saboteurs. ... Mass graves were a risky business; there was always the possibility of incriminating evidence. Solutions were sought in other quarters. Euthanasia was the other avenue to mass killing. Much of these `mercy killings' took place at Castle Hartheim, ... conveniently close to Mauthausen. There were other euthanasia centers in Germany at Hadamar near Limburg, Sonnenstein in Saxony and Castle Grafenegg in Brandenburg. Wiesenthal calls these places `schools for murder.' <39> Thus were killed the German mentally retarded, insane, uncurably sick, crippled, deformed, invalids, the senile, all `useless eaters' with `lives not worthy of living' (lebensunwerte Leben). It was also a much simplified welfare system. These preparatory schools for murder offered the training course for the roughnecks who learned by killing thousands of Christian German and Austrian individual victims and, thus insensitized, graduated to the main task, which was to be the genocide of millions of Jews, and eventually of Gypsies, Poles, Russians, Czechs and other less worthy Slavs. The program was administered under Rudolf Hess and, after his departure, under Martin Borman. Medical supervision was under Werner Heyde, M.D., professor at the University of Wurzburg; 100,000 people were dispatched this way. They experimented with various gasses and injections; they photographed the effect, clocked the speed of death by a stopwatch, filmed it in slow motion and then dissected the brain -- all as an undergraduate course preparatory for genocide. [Ed. note: So much for the Holocaust-deniers' contention that not one person was ever gassed in Germany. knm] Thus were trained Captain Christian Wirth, chief of Hartheim, later in charge of the extermination camps at Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka, and Gustav Wagner who also commanded Sobibor; they in turn taught other cadres of executioners. <40> In 1941, as a test run, 285 Jews from Dachau were killed under this program at the mental institution of Bernburg. <41> This and the mobile gas units were the last preludes to the Final Solution. Then Adolf Eichmann took over and put the extermination process on the assembly line. The answer came with the invention of gas chambers. The first gassings took place in moving vans, as for instance in Chelmno (1941) and in the occupied parts of the USSR and Poland. By the spring of 1942, gas chambers were installed at several concentration camps in Poland: Belzec (March 1942), Sobibor (May 1942) and Treblinka (July 1942); Majdanek, a former prisoner-of-war camp near Lublin, was extended for Jews in 1941. <43> In occupied Poland and the Ukraine, traditional hotbeds of anti-Semitism, the Nazi henchmen found willing helpers among the local population. But even in Vichy France the militia picked up where xenophobia left off and pursued with uncalled-for energy anti-Jewish legislation. In Italy, Rumania, Bulgaria and even in Hungary until the German occupation in 1944, the authorities tried to contain German pressure to deport the Jews. Only in Denmark did the majority of the population, including the king, support the Jews, and the resistance managed to spirit most of them out to Sweden and safety. <43> By far the largest camp, eventually with five gas chambers and crematoria, was Auschwitz near Cracow. It first started in May 1940 as a concentration camp for Polish political prisoners. By October of the following year, Auschwitz II-Birkenau (Oswiecim-Brzezinka in Polish) was established for the purpose of the Final Solution. Each day thousands of men, women and children were gassed there upon arrival. Commandant Rudolf Hoess made competitive sport out of it, boasting that his new gas chambers could accommodate 2,000 people at one time, while Treblinka's could do away with only 200. (Still, Treblinka would not be outdone and turned `Jews into ashes at the rate of over 25,000 per day.') <44> The highest Auschwitz record allegedly was 34,000 Jews and others gassed within twenty-four hours during the `height of the season' in the summer of 1944, when 400,000 Hungarian Jews were annihilated. <45>" <39> Wiesenthal, Simon. The Murderers Among Us. pp. 310-12 <40> Ibid., p.318 <41> Infield, Glenn B. Skorzeny, Hitler's Commando. p. 229 <42> Gilbert, Martin. The Holocaust, Maps & Photographs. p.16 <43> Marrus, Michael R. and Paxton, Robert. O. Vichy France and the Jews. <44> Ferencz, Benjamin. Less Than Slaves: Jewish Forced Labor and the Quest for Compensation. pp. 19-20 <45> Hoess, Rudolf. Commandant of Auschwitz. Extracted from------------------------------------------------------------ "WOMEN IN THE RESISTANCE AND IN THE HOLOCAUST: THE VOICES OF EYEWITNESSES" Edited (and with introduction) by Vera Laska. Greenwood Press, Westport & London, 1983. LOC 82-12018, ISBN 0-313-23457-4 pp. 13-15 -------------------------------------------------------------------------- "In his cell that evening [Ed. note: after the screening of a concentration camp film at the Nuremberg trials. knm] [Hans] Fritzsche exclaimed: `No power in heaven or earth will erase this shame from my country -- not in generations -- not in centuries!' [Hans] Frank, similarly emotional, burst out: `To think we lived like kings and believed in that beast! Don't let anybody tell you they had no idea! Everybody sensed that there was something horribly wrong with this system, even if we didn't know all the details. They didn't want to know! It was too comfortable to live on the system, to support our families in royal style, and to belive that it was all right. May God have mercy on our souls!'" [Conot: Judgement at Nuremberg]
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