History Forum / General / General Topics / July 2008

Here's something more interesting about Majdanek, faigelah.

Majdanek death toll: 1.5 million
Nazi Mass Killing Laid Bare in Camp
Victims Put at 1,500,000 in Huge Death Factory of Gas Chambers and
Crematories
William H. Lawrence
The New York Times
August 30, 1944
Page 1
LUBLIN, Poland, Aug. 27 (Delayed) -- I have just seen the most terrible
place on the face of the earth -- the German concentration camp at Maidanek,
which was a veritable River Rouge for the production of death, in which it
is estimated by Soviet and Polish authorities that as many as 1,500,000
persons from nearly every country in Europe were killed in the last three
years.
I have been all through the camp, inspecting its hermetically sealed gas
chambers, in which the victims were asphyxiated, and five furnaces in which
the bodies were cremated and I have talked with German officers attached to
the camp, who admitted quite frankly that it was a highly systemized place
for annihilation, although they, of course, denied any personal
participation in the murders.
I have seen the skeletons of bodies the Germans did not have time to burn
before the Red Army swept into Lublin on July 23, and I have seen such
evidence as bone ash still in the furnaces and piled up beside them ready to
be taken to near-by fields, on which it was scattered as fertilizer for
cabbages.
Ten Mass Graves Opened
I have been to Krempitski, ten miles to the east, where I saw three of ten
opened mass graves and looked upon 368 partly decomposed bodies of men,
women and children who had been executed individually in a variety of cruel
and horrible means. In this forest alone, the authorities estimate, there
are more than 300,000 bodies.
It is impossible for this correspondent to state with any certainty how many
persons the Germans killed here. Many bodies unquestionably were burned and
not nearly all the graves in this vicinity had been opened by the time I
visited the scene.
But I have been in a wooden warehouse at the camp, approximately 150 feet
long, in which I walked across literally tens of thousands of shoes spread
across the floor like grain in a half-filled elevator. There I saw shoes of
children as young as 1 year old. There were shoes of young and old men or
women. Those I saw were all in bad shape -- since the Germans used this camp
not only to exterminate their victims, but also as a means of obtaining
clothing for the German people -- but some obviously had been quite
expensive. At least one pair had come from America, for it bore a stamp,
"Goodyear welt."
I have been through a warehouse in downtown Lublin in which I saw hundreds
of suitcases and literally tens of thousands of pieces of clothing and
personal effects of people who died here and I have had the opportunity of
questioning a German officer, Herman Vogel, 42, of Millheim, who admitted
that as head of the clothing barracks he had supervised the shipment of
eighteen freightcar loads of clothing to Germany during a two month period
and that he knew it came from the bodies of persons who had been killed at
Maidanek.
Evidence Found Convincing
This is a place that must be seen to be believed. I have been present at
numerous atrocity investigations in the Soviet Union, but never have I been
confronted with such complete evidence, clearly establishing every
allegation made by those investigating German crimes.
After inspection of Maidanek, I am now prepared to believe any story of
German atrocities, no matter how savage, cruel and depraved.
As one of a group of nearly thirty foreign correspondents brought to Poland
on the invitation of the Polish Committee of National Liberation, I also had
an opportunity to sit with the special mixed Soviet-Polish Atrocities
Investigation Commission, headed by Vice-chairman Andrey Witos of the Polish
Committee, and to question six witnesses, including three German officers --  
Vogel, Theodore Shoelen and Tanton Earness -- who will probably face trial
for their part in the administration of the death camp.
Responsible Germans Listed
For the correspondents, the commission's prosecutor, a Pole, summed up the
evidence taken. He said it had been decided that these Germans bore the main
responsibility for the crimes committed at Maidanek and in the Krempitski
Forest: General Globenik, Gestapo, and SS Chief of the Lublin district.
Governor Wendler of the Lublin district, described as a distant relative of
Heinrich Himmler. Former Governor Zoerner of the Lublin district. Lisske,
who had charge of all the concentration camps in the Lublin district.
General Weiss, who was in charge of the Maidanek camp. Company Commander
Anton Tumann, who at one time had charge of Maidanek. Mussfeld, who was in
charge of the crematorium. Klopmann, who was chief of the German political
department in the Lublin district.
It is impossible in the space here available to relate details of all the
evidence of crimes we saw and heard, but for the benefit of those who have
not had the opportunity to see with their own eyes, here is the story as it
came from the lips of a German who had been a prisoner in Maidanek and was
left behind by the retreating Germans. He is Hans Staub, a 31-year-old,
tall, husky man with close-cropped hair, who had been imprisoned for
engaging in black market meat operations in Germany.
Despite German orders that prisoners were to keep out of the crematorium
area, he managed to slip inside the brick fence one day and secrete himself
about the time a truck loaded with about a dozen persons drove up. Among
them was a Polish woman he estimated to have been 28 or 29 years old.
The prisoners were guarded by tommy-gunners, who ordered them to alight from
the truck and undress. The woman refused and this enraged Mussfeld, who beat
her. She screamed and Mussfeld lost his temper, shouting, "I'll burn you
alive."
According to Staub, Mussfeld then directed two attendants to grab the woman
and bind her arms and legs. They then threw her on an iron stretcher, still
clothed, and pushed her body into the oven.
"I heard one loud scream, saw her hair flame and then she disappeared into
the furnace," Staub said.
According to several witnesses, the peak death production day for Maidanek
was November 3, 1943, when for some reason not made clear the Germans
executed a total of 18,000 to 20,000 prisoners by a variety of means,
including shooting, hanging and gassing.
Camp Covers 670 Acres
This is Maidanek as I saw it. It is situated about a mile and a half from
the middle of Lublin on the highroad between Chelm and Cracow. As one
approaches he gets a view of the concentration camp almost identical with
those pictured in American motion pictures. The first site is a
twelve-foot-high double barbed-wire fence, which was charged with
electricity.
Inside you see group after group of trim green buildings, not unlike the
barracks in an Army camp in the United States. There were more than 200 such
buildings. Outside the fence there were fourteen high machine-gun turrets
and at one edge were kennels for more than 200 especially trained, savage
man-tracking dogs used to pursue escaped prisoners. The whole camp covered
an area of 670 acres.
As we entered the camp the first place at which we stopped obviously was the
reception centre and it was near here that one entered the bath house. Here
Jews, Poles, Russians and in fact representatives of a total of twenty-two
nationalities entered and removed their clothing, after which they bathed at
seventy-two showers and disinfectants were applied.
Sometimes they went directly into the next room, which was hermetically
sealed with apertures in the roof down which the Germans threw opened cans
of "Zyklon B", a poison gas consisting of prussic acid crystals, which were
a light blue chalky substance. This produced death quickly. Other prisoners
were kept for long periods; the average, we were told, was about six weeks.
Near the shower house were two other death chambers fitted for either Zyklon
gas or carbon monoxide. One of them was seventeen meters square and there,
we were told, the Germans executed 100 to 110 persons at once. Around the
floor of the room ran a steel pipe with an opening for carbon monoxide to
escape at every twenty-five centimeters.
Victims' Death Watched
We were told the victims always received a bath in advance of execution
because the hot water opened the pores and generally improved the speed with
which the poison gas took effect. There were glass-covered openings in these
death chambers so the Germans could watch the effect on their victims and
determine when the time had come to remove their bodies. We saw opened and
unopened cans of Zyklon gas that bore German labels.
About a mile from the gas chambers was the huge crematorium. Built of brick,
it looked and was operated not unlike a small blast furnace for a steel
mill, operating with coal as fuel fanned by an electrically operated blower.
There were five openings on each side -- on one side the bodies were loaded
in and on the other ashes were removed and the fire built up. Each furnace
held five bodies at a time.
We were told it took fifteen minutes to fill each furnace and about ten to
twelve minutes for the bodies to burn. It was estimated that the battery of
furnaces had a capacity of 1,900 bodies a day.
Near the furnaces we saw a large number of partial and complete skeletons.
Behind a brick enclosure near by were more than a score of bodies of persons
who, we were told, had been killed by the Germans on the day the Red Army
captured Lublin, which they did not have time to burn before fleeing.
Not far from the furnaces were a large number of earthenware urns, which
investigating authorities said witnesses told them were used by the Germans
for ashes of some of their victims, which they sold to families for prices
ranging up to 2,500 marks.
We saw a concrete table near the furnace and asked its purpose. We were told
the Germans laid the bodies of victims there just before cremation and
knocked out gold teeth, which were salvaged. We were told that no bodies
were accepted for cremation unless the chest bore a stamp certifying that it
had been searched for gold teeth.
It is the purpose of the Polish Committee of National Liberation to keep the
main parts of Maidanek just as it now exists as an exhibition of German
brutality and cruelty for all posterity to see.
M. Witos struck the universal feeling of all who have seen the camp when he
expressed regret that the section of American and British public opinion
that favours a soft peace with the Germans will not have an opportunity in
advance of the peace conference to look at this plain evidence of the
brutality of the Germans practiced towards their victims.
Among the few Polish people whom we had an opportunity to talk there is a
widespread sentiment for stronger means of vengeance against the Germans,
and the belief that some of those directly responsible for Maidanek should
be executed in the terrible death camp they themselves erected.
________________________________________
Editor's note: Lawrence wrote this article just after he and a group of
newsmen visited the camp. It's possible he was among the first newsmen into
the camp. He states the death toll at Majdanek at the same 1.5 million
figure as The Black Book and other sources. Of course now, even
anti-revisionists have reduced the figures by almost 95 percent.
And what about all those Holocaust historians (such as Lucy Dawidowicz), who
have for years been whipping up on the United States for failing to bend
every effort to save the Jews, when everybody knew what was happening
because the stories were in the New York Times?