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Officially Sanctioned Fraud at Dachau

By Mark Weber – The Journal of Historical Review – March/April 2000

Each year many thousands of tourists visit the site of the notorious Dachau concentration camp in southern Germany, not far from Munich. They see the crematory, the memorial shrines, and the museum. And in recent years, as an almost daily fixture, they see Martin Zaidenstadt. This elderly Jewish man lectures visitors to Dachau on his experiences as a wartime prisoner there. He is particularly passionate about the horrors of the camp’s gas chamber where, he explains, many prisoners were put to death with poison gas. He even claims that this gas chamber served as a model for Auschwitz (New York Times, Oct. 26, 1997). Zaidenstadt’s listeners respond to his heart-rending testimony with unquestioning sympathy. Many reach generously into their wallets.

But now a new 50-minute documentary film, “Martin,” and a new book, The Last Survivor: In Search of Martin Zaidenstadt, written by journalist Timothy W. Ryback and published by Pantheon, have subjected that testimony to critical review. Ryback establishes that the octogenarian Zaidenstadt was born in Jedwabne, Poland, but that his story of Dachau internment is a fraud. He probably never visited the camp until the 1990s, says Ryback, and his tales of gas chamber killings are untrue.

Although supposedly authoritative evidence of gas chamber killings at Dachau has been cited over the years — including “eyewitness” testimony at the main Nuremberg trial of 1945-46 — today no reputable historian credits such claims. It is widely acknowledged, even by the well-known “Nazi hunter” Simon Wiesenthal, that no one was ever “gassed” at the camp. (See, for example, “Wiesenthal Re-Confirms: ‘No Extermination Camps on German Soil’,” The Journal of Historical Review, May-June 1993, pp. 9-12.)

In today’s cultural climate, one is obliged to regard “Holocaust survivors” such as Zaidenstadt with an almost reverential indulgence. For example, the director of the state-run Dachau camp memorial, Barbara Distel, seems unbothered by Zaidenstadt’s deceit. Even though she is a government official, she permits his mendacious pan-handling. (One can hardly imagine Distel tolerating anyone who spent hours explaining to camp site visitors that American GIs who liberated the camp on April 29, 1945, summarily killed 500 German prisoners there. For more on this, see, J. Cobden, “The Dachau Gas Chamber Myth,” March-April 1995 Journal, pp. 14-26.)

Also typical is the attitude of Howard Kaplan, a Jewish writer in Los Angeles. In a recent article about Zaidenstadt published in an influential Israeli magazine, he acknowledges that “a difficult question arises from Martin’s fabrications,” but concludes on an upbeat note: “But is exaggerating the horror really an affront to truth? I’m not persuaded… What matters is that Martin has ultimately found his way back to Judaism at the doors of the crematorium.” (H. Kaplan, “The Man by the Door,” The Jerusalem Report, April 10, 2000, pp. 46-47.)

A recent New York Times article about the new “Martin” film acknowledges that Zaidenstadt’s “assertion” of Dachau gassings is “contrary to the official stories.” But instead of forthrightly identifying his “provocative contentions” as lies, the Times coyly tells readers: “In the end we learn that Mr. Zaidenstadt’s version of things isn’t entirely reliable, but isn’t to be dismissed either… The implicit message of ‘Martin’ [is] that everyone has a truth to deliver…” (“Holocaust Documentary Explores One Man’s Truth,” April 3, 2000.)

No one seems concerned about the toll that such deceit takes on the residents of the Bavarian town of Dachau, who must live in the shadow of the camp’s government-promoted infamy. For example, to avoid the stigma of having children born in the notorious city, many expectant mothers go elsewhere to deliver their babies.

The Zaidenstadt story points up the social-intellectual corruption that is an intrinsic by-product of what Rabbi Michael Goldberg (in his 1995 book Why Should Jews Survive?) aptly calls “the Holocaust cult.” All the same, Zaidenstadt now joins a growing list of demonstrably false “Holocaust survivor” eyewitnesses — a slate that includes Jerzy Kosinski and best-selling author Binjamin Wilkomirski. (See “Holocaust Survivor Memoir Exposed as Fraud,” Sept.-Oct. 1998 Journal, pp. 15-16.)

November 16, 2014 Posted by | Deception, Timeless or most popular | , | 4 Comments

Debunking the myth of Nazi mosquito-borne biological weapons

By Jean Pascal Zanders | The Trench | March 4, 2014

Starting at the end of January, several press items reported on an academic article published in the December edition of the quarterly magazine Endeavour. Based on documents from the Dachau concentration camp, Dr Klaus Reinhardt, a biologist at the University of Tübingen uncovered that Nazi scientists wanted to use mosquitos as insect vector for the delivery of malaria plasmodium protozoans. According to the article abstract:

In January 1942, Heinrich Himmler, head of the Schutzstaffel (SS) and police in Nazi Germany, ordered the creation of an entomological institute to study the physiology and control of insects that inflict harm to humans. Founded in the grounds of the concentration camp at Dachau, it has been the focus of previous research, notably into the question of whether it was involved in biological warfare research. This article examines research protocols by the appointed leader Eduard May, presented here for the first time, which confirm the existence of an offensive biological warfare research programme in Nazi Germany.

In 1999, while at SIPRI, I oversaw the publication of a volume in the Chemical & Biological Warfare Studies series edited by Erhard Geissler and John Ellis van Courtland Moon on Biological and Toxin Weapons: Research, Development and Use from the Middle Ages to 1945. Geissler, now a retired professor in molecular biology and genetics, wrote the chapter on Germany’s biological warfare programmes before and during World War 2. He basically debunked the myth that the SS was conducting a secret offensive biological warfare programme against Hitler’s explicit orders not to investigate such weapons.

Reinhardt claims to have recently uncovered fresh documents from Dachau and suggests that the earlier assessments of Germany’s offensive BW activities are wrong. Being familiar with Geissler’s investigations — particularly with the 900-page mastodont, emphatically entitled Biologische Waffen – nicht in Hitlers Arsenalen — and other historical research on the origins of offensive biological warfare programmes on the eve of and during World War 2, I was mildly sceptical of the new claims. While the possibility of finding new archival material always exists, contradicting a central conclusion of extensive historical research is quite a different matter. An article in National Geographic summarised Reinhardt’s findings, but also noted that they are controversial among researchers. His conclusions were therefore not as absolute as some press items were suggesting, I therefore assumed.

Yesterday, however, Erhard Geissler posted a blog commentary, calling the findings ‘disinformation’ :

Despite the thrilling headline Reinhardt in his article does not provide any new material regarding the dual-use activities performed in the Entomological Institute of the Waffen-SS beyond that what was already published. The low-scale experiments performed by Eduard May in September 1944 on the survival of food-deprived mosquitoes, can hardly assessed as confirmation of “the existence of an offensive biological warfare research programme in Nazi Germany”. Besides that, the main body of Reinhardts paper including its concluding paragraph does not pick up the alleged BW preparations but deals with the “enigmatic figure” of its director, Eduard May.

Geissler concludes:

Up to today there is no evidence of offensive biological warfare research in Germany after the unsuccessful attempts of German biosabotage in WWI. It is a pitty that the misleading heading of Reinhardt‘s article similar to other disinformation campaigns are favored by some media’s apparent craving for a breaking story that often supersedes thorough investigation.

This is pretty categorical debunking of research findings. To be continued?

Jean Pascal Zanders (Belgium) has worked on questions of chemical and biological weapon (CBW) armament and disarmament since 1986. He was CBW Project Leader at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), Director of the BioWeapons Prevention Project and Senior Research Fellow responsible for disarmament, arms control and non-proliferation questions at the European Union Institute for Security Studies.

March 4, 2014 Posted by | Deception | , , , , , | Leave a comment