February 21, 1997

Good Morning from the Zundelsite:

* With "Schindler's List" still looming to be broadcast Sunday evening for three long hours on US Network TV, a good source that you might want to check as an antidote is John Ball's air evidence photos of Auschwitz. Ball's very attractively laid out website is at http://www.air-photo.com.

This website has doubled its hits since the Plaszow camp map and ground photos were included. Studying some of the physical evidence of the camps will give you ammunition when either discussing the subject of concentration camps with others, or responding to media hype with letters and articles.

The Plaszow map combined with the ground photos are particularly intriguing, as they show the impossibility of some of the movie's scenes, and the contrast between the movie's gaunt, ill-fed, abused inmates, with the healthy, bright, well-fed inmates in the ground photos.

* A second source to check is the "Campaign for Radical Truth in History" web page at http://www.hoffman-info.com

Mike Hoffman, who does some excellent work compiling factual information on the Holocaust, wrote recently:

"Schindler's List" will be accorded all the sacerdotal majesty of a religious liturgical spectacle, and broadcast without any irreverent commercial interruptions (thanks to the largess of the scions of Bolshevik tractor factory builder Henry Ford).

The one overwhelming factor in Spielberg's despicable hoax-flick is its corrosive anti-German racism.

Spielberg depicts every single member of the German military as a homicidal robot.

Can one imagine a film about the Israeli army raids on the Palestinian ghetto in Gaza, which depicted every single Jewish soldier as a homicidal robot?

Oy veh, such a blood libel! The weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth would be heard from here to outer space. Not only would such a film not win an Academy Award, the director would be hounded around the planet, boycotted, vilified, even beaten or killed.

You see, there's one standard of human rights that obtains for protecting The Angelic Chosen People and another standard when it comes to licensing the defamation of the Demonic German people."

* More and more people now ask: Were Germans that demonic? For the next few days, I will be running a series of ZGrams based on a translation from a Polish source, Professor Krzystiof Dunin-Wasowicz who was a German concentration camp inmate at Stutthof near Gdansk. In other words, this author writes from the perspective of the "enemy", and therefore his contribution is all the more significant.

Professor Dunin-Wasowicz became a full professor after the war at the Institute of History of the Polish Academy of Sciences, and his special field of study was Contemporary History, his main works being scholarly books on German concentration camps.

The title of the book from which I will be quoting in coming days is "Resistance in the Nazi Concentration Camps 1933-1945."

To set the scene, Professor Dunin-Wasowicz speaks of the structure of at least self-government inside the concentration camps.

". . . the camps had their own prisoners' council . . . the council consisted of the following:

The "Lagerälteste", i.e. the senior inmate, responsible for the whole camp; in certain camps there were several.

The camp senior was aided by the camp recorder or "Lagerschreiber", responsible for administrative functions.

The "Block Aelteste", or block senior, (was) responsible for order and discipline in the block, which was often divided into rooms (Stuben) with a room senior entrusted with similar functions.

Adminstrative functions were in the hands of the "Blockschreiber", i.e., the block recorder.

The "Kapo", who was in command of a work detail, was aided by several "Vorarbeiter". In certain details, for example in hospitals, there were also recorders entrusted with administrative functions."

We also read that detainees inside the German concentration camps were NOT, as you always told, primarily Jews arrested and mistreated horribly for racial, anti-semitic reasons. According to Professor Dunin-Wasowicz, inmates were divided into various groups, depending on the reason for detention:

"Political prisoners had to wear a red triangle, sown to their blouses on their chest with its apec pointing downwards; the criminal prisoners' triangle was green, and they were called "Berufsverbrecher" (habitual criminals).

Criminal prisoners who had already served their sentences in a prison or reformatory. . . wore a green triangle with apex pointing upwards.

A black triangle was worn by the "anti-socials" (i.e. prostitutes, pimps, tramps, etc.) Homosexuals, exclusively Germans, wore a pink triangle.

Members of the religious sect of . . . (Jehovah's Witnesses) were marked by a violet triangle; the latter were sent to concentration camps because of their opposition to war. . .

A blue triangle was worn by participants in the Spanish civil war . . .

Jews wore the Star of Zion. . .

Each triangle had inside it a letter denoting the prisoner's nationality, P for Pole, R for Russian, F for French etc. An empty triangle usually denoted a German. . .

After an escape prisoners who were caught were given a "Fluchtpunkt", i. e., a coloured circle to wear on their backs. Any inmate who was confined for a second time wore a red horizontal stripe under the triangle . . . "

So was life a "regimented picnic" inside these concentration camps? No. Of course not. The country was at war, and these were people seen and marked as harmful to the country. No one denies that fact. We have them too, you know. They sit in our prisons.

Life was, however, orderly and organized in German concentration camps - at least in the beginning. Much of it was amazingly humane, according to this author.

The next three ZGrams will be excerpts taken from this source on music, sports and the fine arts within these KZ-camps. Some of it will surprise you.

Ingrid

Thought for the Day:

"The Germans believed they were fighting a war to save civilization."

(From the Introduction to Houston Stewart Chamberlain's "Political Ideals", translated by Alexander Jacob)

Comments? E-Mail: irimland@cts.com

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