The Dallas Holocaust Museum
I used to see numerous signs advertising the new Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum as I drove around Dallas. The signs used the words Educate, Change, Teach, Hope, Inspire, Kindness, Learn, Respect, Encourage, Believe, Civility, Humanity, and Upstander to advertise the museum. The signs said the new museum opened on September 18, 2019.
A ninth-grade high school student I know recently visited the Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum with her English class on a school field trip. This article analyzes what she learned on her trip.
Museum’s Background
Founded in 1984, the Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum states that it is dedicated to teaching the history of the Holocaust and advancing human rights to combat prejudice, hatred, and indifference. Originally named the Holocaust Memorial Center, the museum was located on the ground floor of the Jewish Community Center in north Dallas. The Museum in 2005 relocated to a 6,000 square-foot rental facility in Dallas’ Historic West End to meet the growing demand for its services.
Now located in a modern 55,000 square-foot building, the Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum has dramatically larger facilities and expanded educational and cultural programming. The current Museum hosts almost 120,000 visitors each year, including many school children. It is the only Holocaust Museum serving the North Texas area. The Museum states that it has been built to galvanize the North Texas community to learn the lessons of the Holocaust and to combat hatred and prejudice.1
Analysis of Her Visit
My ninth-grade high school student saw films and pictures of dead and starving inmates in the German camps liberated by the Allies. She did not see any pictures of German homicidal gas chambers in the camps. She was deeply affected and emotionally disturbed by what she saw at the Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum.
Nothing has been more effective in establishing the reality of the Holocaust story in the minds of Americans than these terrible scenes encountered by troops at the German concentration camps. Today many state laws make viewing films of these awful scenes of the German camps mandatory for school children. Proponents of showing these graphic films to school children say that the trauma induced from watching these films is necessary to teach our children about the dangers of racism and anti-Semitism.
What school children and the public are not told is that most of the inmates in these camps died of natural causes. When American and British forces took control of the German concentration camps, they were followed by military personnel charged with documenting evidence of German war crimes. One of these was Dr. Charles P. Larson, a leading American forensic pathologist, who performed autopsies at Dachau and some of its sub-camps. At Dachau Dr. Larson performed about 25 autopsies a day for 10 days and superficially examined another 300 to 1,000 bodies. He autopsied only those bodies that appeared to be questionable. Dr. Larson stated regarding these autopsies at Dachau:
Many of them died from typhus. Dachau’s crematoriums couldn’t keep up with the burning of the bodies. They did not have enough oil to keep the incinerators going. I found that a number of the victims had also died from tuberculosis. All of them were malnourished. The medical facilities were most inadequate. There was no sanitation…
A rumor going around Dachau after we got there was that many of the prisoners were poisoned. I did a lot of toxicological analysis to determine the facts and removed organs from a cross-section of about 30 to 40 bodies and sent them into Paris to the Army’s First Medical laboratory for analysis, since I lacked the proper facilities in the field. The reports came back negative. I could not find where any of these people had been poisoned. The majority died of natural diseases of one kind or another.…2
Dr. Larson did report that some inmates had been shot in the German camps and that the living conditions in the camps were atrocious. The average daily caloric intake of the inmates was far short of requirements, thus accounting for the extreme emaciation of many of the inmates. However, since Dr. Larson’s autopsy reports were inconsistent with a program of extermination or genocide, they were not introduced into evidence at the Nuremberg trials.
Dr. John E. Gordon, M.D., Ph.D., a professor of preventive medicine and epidemiology at the Harvard University School of Public Health, was with U.S. forces at the end of World War II. Dr. Gordon determined that disease, and especially typhus, was the number one cause of death in the German camps. Dr. Gordon explained the causes for the outbreaks of disease and typhus as follows:
Germany in the spring months of April and May [1945] was an astounding sight, a mixture of humanity travelling this way and that, homeless, often hungry and carrying typhus with them…
Germany was in chaos. The destruction of whole cities and the path left by advancing armies produced a disruption of living conditions contributing to the spread of disease. Sanitation was low grade, public utilities were seriously disrupted, food supply and food distribution were poor, housing was inadequate and order and discipline were everywhere lacking. Still more important, a shifting of population was occurring such as few times have experienced.3
Dr. Russell Barton, an English physician who later became an American psychiatrist, entered Bergen-Belsen with British forces as a young medical student on May 2, 1945. Dr. Barton’s first impression of the camp was one of horror; some inmates were dead and piled up outside the huts, others were in various stages of dying, disease, and dehydration. Barton examined the camp’s well-equipped kitchens and found record books listing the food that had been cooked and distributed going back to 1942. Dr. Barton determined from his examination of the camp records that there had been no deliberate policy of starvation at Bergen-Belsen.
Dr. Barton made inquiries with inmates, including Jewish doctors, who told him that Bergen-Belsen had not been too bad until the autumn of 1944. Then, as the Russian armies were advancing, the inmates said they had been given the choice of remaining in the camps about to be overrun by the Soviets or being repatriated back to Germany. Many chose to return to Germany. As a result, from the autumn of 1944 to early 1945, some 53,000 people were moved into Bergen-Belsen, which had room for only 3,000 inmates. The overcrowding was extreme and the staff at the camp resented it. Josef Kramer, the commandant of Bergen-Belsen, and Dr. Fritz Klein, the medical doctor at the camp, didn’t know what to do with the huge influx of inmates. Dr. Barton concluded that the horrific conditions at Bergen-Belsen were attributable to overcrowding and the collapse of the German economy at the end of the war, rather than to an intentional program of extermination.4
Dr. Barton’s testimony is consistent with statements from Violette Fintz, a Jewish woman who had been deported to Auschwitz in mid-1944, then to Dachau, and finally to Bergen-Belsen in early 1945. Fintz compared conditions in the various camps:
Belsen was in the beginning bearable and we had bunks to sleep on, and a small ration of soup and bread. But as the camp got fuller, our group and many others were given a barracks to hold about seven hundred lying on the floor without blankets and without food or anything. It was a pitiful scene as the camp was attacked by lice and most of the people had typhus and cholera…Many people talk about Auschwitz—it was a horrible camp. But Belsen, no words can describe it…From my experience and suffering, Belsen was the worst.5
Bergen-Belsen is typical of the other German camps. The sharp increase in the number of deaths at the camps in 1945 was due to disease and overcrowding rather than to an extermination program. The woeful scenes on liberation of the camps were not typical of camp conditions throughout their existence. By the end of the war as many as two or three inmates were sleeping on a single plank, three tiers to a bunk, in packed wooden barracks. Ill-clothed and ill-fed, exposed to virulent epidemics, camp inmates were dying in horrifying numbers throughout the last months of the war.6
The fate of Anne Frank, who is known around the world for her famous diary, is typical of many Jews who died in German camps during the war. Anne and her father were first deported from the Netherlands to Auschwitz in September 1944. Anne’s father contracted typhus at Auschwitz and was sent to the camp hospital to recover. He was one of thousands of Jews who remained at Auschwitz when the Germans abandoned the camp in January 1945. He survived the war and died in Switzerland in 1980.
In the face of the advancing Soviet army, Anne Frank was evacuated to Bergen-Belsen, where she died of typhus in March 1945. While Anne Frank’s fate was tragic, her story is not consistent with a German plan of extermination against the Jews. Along with thousands of others at Bergen-Belsen, Anne died from a typhus epidemic and not from a German plan to commit genocide against European Jewry.
The Allies were no more effective in stopping deaths in the camps than the Germans had been. For example, there were some 55,000 to 60,000 inmates in Bergen-Belsen when the British took control of the camp. Despite the best efforts of the British, almost 14,000 inmates died at Bergen-Belsen in the months following the British takeover.7 Likewise, at Dachau, the death rate remained high in the month after the Americans liberated the camp.8 The high death rates in these camps were primarily caused by typhus and other diseases rather than by an extermination program on the part of the Allies.
Recommended Books
My ninth-grade student asked personnel at the Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum if they could recommend three books for her to read about the Holocaust. It was recommended that she read the following three books:
1. The Boy from Block 66 by Limor Regev
2. The Last Boy in Auschwitz by Moshe Bomberg
3. The Medic’s Wife by Edmund A. Kruszynski
The first two recommended books each involve the stories of young Jewish boys who survived the Holocaust, including their internment in Auschwitz-Birkenau. The third book is the story of how Allied medic Edmund Kruszynski found love in the most unexpected place: Buchenwald. These three books do not address any of the problems of the official Holocaust narrative.
Let’s examine some of the problems regarding the evidence of the Holocaust:
1) No German written order to execute large numbers of Jews has ever been found. When asked in 1983 how the extermination of European Jewry took place without a written order, Jewish Holocaust historian Raul Hilberg replied:
What began in 1941 was a process of destruction not planned in advance, not organized centrally by any agency. There was no blueprint and there was no budget for destructive measures. They were taken step by step, one step at a time. Thus, came about not so much a plan being carried out, but an incredible meeting of minds, a consensus–mind reading by a far-flung bureaucracy.9
On January 16, 1985, under cross-examination at the first Ernst Zündel trial in Toronto, Raul Hilberg confirmed that he said these words.10 Thus, Hilberg stated that the genocide of European Jewry was not carried out by a plan or order, but rather by an incredible mind reading among far-flung German bureaucrats;
2) There was nothing remotely resembling a genuine homicidal gas chamber in any of the German camps;11
3) Strong scientific evidence indicates that the alleged homicidal gas chambers at the German camps were never used to execute people;12
4) No pro-Holocaust witnesses have ever been able to withstand cross-examination in a legitimate court of law;13
5) The Allies tortured many German witnesses such as Rudolf Höss into making confessions. The Allies also murdered German defendant Richard Baer to prevent him from testifying that there were no homicidal gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau;14
6) Allied aerial photographs taken in May of 1944 do not show evidence of the mass murder of Hungarian Jews at Birkenau;15
7) Laws have been enacted in many countries making it a criminal offense to contest any aspect of the Holocaust story. The obvious question is: What kind of historical truth needs criminal sanctions to protect it? The Holocaust story would not need criminal sanctions to protect it if it was historically accurate.
8) No autopsies from Dr. Charles Larson or any other Allied medical doctor indicate that anyone was gassed in any of the German camps;16
9) There are too many Jewish survivors of the Holocaust. If close to 6 million Jews died in the Holocaust, you would not have so many Jewish survivors receiving reparations from the German government;17 and
10) There is no mention of homicidal gassings or the mass murder of Jews in any of the ultra-secret Enigma messages used by the Germans to send their top-secret communications. During 1942 and 1943, British intelligence intercepted daily coded messages from Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Dachau, and seven other camps. Every day the Germans recorded the numbers of dead and the cause of death of inmates at each camp. The transmissions from Auschwitz-Birkenau mentioned illness as the primary cause of death. There were no references to homicidal gassings as a cause of death in any of the decoded German messages.18
Conclusion
None of the films or exhibits in the Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum indicates that Germany had a program of genocide against Jews during World War II.
Revisionist historians agree that Germany persecuted Jews during World War II. National Socialist Germany saw Jews as being an influential force behind international communism, and therefore considered Jews to be a potential danger to the war effort. Consequently, Jews were sent to concentration camps, forced to live in ghettos, conscripted for labor, stripped of their rights, and suffered extreme hardships. Unfortunately, many Jews died in the German concentration camps during World War II.
However, Germany did not conduct a program of genocide against European Jewry during the war. The existence of homicidal gas chambers in the German concentration camps has been disproven with scientific evidence. Tons of German wartime documents were captured by the Allies, and none of them refers to a German program of extermination. Likewise, the British broke the ultra-secret Enigma code used by the Germans to transmit secret communications. During 1942 and 1943, British intelligence intercepted daily coded messages from Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Dachau, and seven other camps. None of these secret transmissions refers to homicidal gas chambers or a German program of genocide.
The horrific scenes encountered by U.S. and British troops when they entered German concentration camps at the end of World War II have been used to prove a German policy of extermination of the Jews. As gruesome as these scenes were, it was soon discovered that most of the deaths in the German camps were caused by disease and other natural causes. None of the autopsy reports shows that anyone died of poison gas. Also, contrary to publicized claims, no researcher has been able to document a German policy of extermination through starvation in the German camps. The virtual collapse of Germany’s food, transport, and public health systems and the extreme overcrowding in the German camps at the end of the war led to the catastrophe the Allied troops encountered when they entered the camps.
Endnotes
1 https://www.dhhrm.org/about/.
2 McCallum, John Dennis, Crime Doctor, Mercer Island, WA: The Writing Works, Inc., 1978, pp. 60-61.
3 Gordon, John E., “Louse-Borne Typhus Fever in the European Theater of Operations, U.S. Army, 1945,” in Moulton, Forest Ray, (ed.), Rickettsial Diseases of Man, Washington, D.C.: American Academy for the Advancement of Science, 1948, pp. 16-27. Quoted in Berg, Friedrich P., “Typhus and the Jews,” The Journal of Historical Review, Winter 1988-89, pp. 444-447, and in Butz, Robert, The Hoax of the Twentieth Century, Newport Beach, CA: Institute for Historical Review, 1993, pp. 46-47.
4 Kulaszka, Barbara, (ed.), Did Six Million Really Die: Report of Evidence in the Canadian “False News” Trial of Ernst Zündel, Toronto: Samisdat Publishers Ltd., 1992, pp. 175-176.
5 Gilbert, Martin, The Holocaust, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1986, pp. 722, 785f.
6 Halow, Joseph, Innocent at Dachau, Newport Beach, CA: Institute for Historical Review, 1992, p. 146.
7 “Holocaust,” Encyclopedia Judaica, New York and Jerusalem: Macmillan and Keter, 1971, Vol. 8, p. 859. See also Shephard, Ben, After Daybreak: The Liberation of Bergen-Belsen, 1945, New York: Schocken Books, 2005, pp. 4, 202.
8 Berben, Paul, Dachau: 1933-1945, The Official History, Comité International de Dachau, 1975, p. 281.
9 De Wan, George, “The Holocaust in Perspective,” Newsday: Long Island, NY, Feb. 23, 1983, Part II, p. 3.
10 See trial transcript, pp. 846-848. Also, Kulaszka, Barbara, (ed.), Did Six Million Really Die: Report of Evidence in the Canadian “False News” Trial of Ernst Zündel, Toronto: Samisdat Publishers Ltd., 1992, p. 24.
11 See the video David Cole Interviews Dr. Franciszek Piper, Director, Auschwitz State Museum. Newport Beach, CA: Institute for Historical Review, 1992.
12 Rudolf, Germar, The Chemistry of Auschwitz: The Technology and Toxicology of Zyklon B and the Gas Chambers. A Crime-Scene Investigation, Uckfield: Castle Hill Publishers, 2020 https://castlehill.shop/product/the-chemistry-of-auschwitz-the-technology-and-toxicology-of-zyklon-b-and-the-gas-chambers-a-crime-scene-investigation/.
13 Rudolf, Germar (ed.), The First Zündel Trial: The Court Transcript of the Canadian “False News” Trial of Ernst Zündel, 1985, Uckfield, UK: Castle Hill Publishers, 2020.
14 http://www.wearswar.com/2024/04/02/evidence-jews-controlled-allied-run-postwar-trials/.
15 Ball, John Clive, “Air Photo Evidence,” in Gauss, Ernst (ed.), Dissecting the Holocaust: The Growing Critique of Truth and Memory, Capshaw, AL: Thesis and Dissertations Press, 2000, p. 284.
16 McCallum, John Dennis, Crime Doctor, Mercer Island, WA: The Writing Works, Inc., 1978, pp. 60-61.
17 http://www.wearswar.com/2022/12/15/holocaust-reparations/.
18 Hinsley, Frank H., British Intelligence in the Second World War: Its Influence on Strategy and Operations, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984, Vol. 2, Appendix 5, “The German Police Cyphers,” p. 673.
Recent Comments