Archives of the Holocaust: Unlocking The Past
BAD AROLSEN, Germany — The 21-year-old Russian sat before a clerk of the U.S. Army Judge Advocate’s office, describing the furnaces at Auschwitz, the Nazi death camp where he had been a prisoner until a few weeks previously.
“I saw with my own eyes how thousands of Jews were gassed daily and thrown by the hundreds into pits where Jews were burning,” he said.
“I saw how little children were killed with sticks and thrown into the fire,” he continued. Blood flowed in gutters, and “Jews were thrown in and died there“; more were taken off trucks and cast alive into the flames.
[…]
In May, after years of pressure from the United States and survivors’ groups, the 11 countries overseeing the archive agreed to unseal the files for scholars as well as victims and their families. […]
The ITS has allowed Paul Shapiro, of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, to look at the files […].
“This is powerful stuff,” said Shapiro, leafing through the file containing the Russian’s statement and about 200 other testimonies […]
“If you sat here for a day and read these files, you’d get a picture of what it was really like in the camps, how people were treated. […]
[…]
The Nazis created a bureaucracy that meticulously recorded the arrest, movement, and death of each victim. Sometimes even the lice plucked from heads in concentration camps were counted. In the war’s final months, the bookkeeping collapsed, but the extermination continued.
[…]
Source:
Arthur Max
Associated Press
Posted on Sun, Nov. 19, 2006
www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/world/16052154.htm
© 2006 MercuryNews.com and wire service sources. All Rights Reserved. http://www.mercurynews.com
Webmaster note: This story provides yet more evidence — as if any were needed — that you can utter any calumny about Third Reich Germany. Not only will you get away with it, you’ll be fêted for your “revelations.” It’s also a nice touch that a sidelong reference to the German delousing program — designed to save lives — is subtly connected to the myth of mass extermination. Thank goodness a sober-sided representative from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum is on hand to let us know just how credible these claims are. Otherwise, they wouldn’t even pass the laugh test.