Follow up visit to Majdanek
David | 27.02.2012 16:17
In 2007 I first visited Majdanek and saw how an entire fake history was being created. Earlier this year I visited again and saw how the fakery is still being extended.
But the new Holocaust-industry version of this site does not match the simple history, horrific though it is.
The site was windswept and deserted and bleak then and it has not changed much now -- except in details which do seem new.
It is now all very glitzy and glossy. Last time I was here, in March 2007, I did not remember seeing the well-built dogtooth pattern footpaths, or the plaques etched with descriptions and images into expensive stainless steel, posted near each item of interest. They are new. I was last here four years ago with Alan Heath, a good expert on these sites.
The first building encountered is the massive crematorium, with its tall single chimney dominating the whole area. Inside the gloomy wooden building, illuminated now only by dim 40 watt bulbs (of the new energy-efficient variety of course), stand the six iron crematory furnaces in their brick casing. The building occupies many rooms and is dark and gloomy.
Odd, the 1944 photos I have seen show these furnaces in the open, being inspected by Russian troops, not enclosed in a building at all. (In fact this whole building is a fake, put up in post-war years.)
I am put at once on the alert. Not sceptical, because to be even mildly sceptical in countries with "Holocaust-denial" laws is now a criminal offence. As we leave the building I notice a crew of plasterers and bricklayers busy constructing something else -- I could not see what, but judging by the stack of cement bags it appears to be quite big.
The creosoted wooden watchtowers arouse our curiosity too. They differ in design from the authentic watchtowers displayed on the wartime photos. More dummies, it seems -- meaning the towers, not the tourists who come from all over the world to tread these well-paved pathways now.
I would guess that several million dollars have been spent on this Majdanek complex since I last saw it. And I thought from the recent news items that the Reinhardt camps had run out of cash -- the Sobibor museum closing, etc. What's going on?
Graham G came here last year, after our last tour of the Nazi sites. Today I find myself repeatedly asking him, "Was this here last year? And this?" -- pointing to new exhibits, walkways, glass doors, turnstile barriers, and the like. In each case the answer is no, these are things that have been installed here in the last twelve months.
The biggest shocks are in the final building, Number 42, identified on the plans as the male showers, fumigation plant, and "gas chambers". I have to be careful here, because I am not a Holocaust denier.
I already drew attention in my March 2007 Radical's Diary to the dark blue-black stains on and right through various walls in the building -- clearly Prussian Blue, visible as cyanide compounds even without carrying out Fred-Leuchter type lab. tests. There was no reference to them in the few amateurish signs posted here four years ago.
Now there are expensive signs on glass panels in three languages, English, Polish and Hebrew, depicting these rooms -- not as gas chambers, but as fumigation chambers for clothing and the like. There is a new room with racks of brand new cans of Zyklon B cyanide-impregnated pellets, the deadly substance used for the disinfestation. Here (unlike the Soviet propaganda information fed to the Illustrated London News, August 1944, which is also on display on the site) it is made plain that the killing agent used for prisoners was not Zyklon B but "carbon-monoxide" fed into the gas chamber from cylinders in the next door room.
Ah, that explains it. I saw those two cylinders chained to the wall two years ago, but noticed at that time that the pipes going through the wall were not connected, and had quite freshly been cemented into place. The "gas chamber" room is now cordoned off, with a glass door preventing entry. All rather modern and cathedral-like. The room has a thin window half way along one wall, above shoulder height.
Hugo Haig-Thomas says rather blasphemously, "If I were a prisoner, I think I'd ask for the window seat."
What kind of gas chamber has a glass window in it, indeed?
True, there are steel gas-tight doors installed at either end of this chamber, as with the other fumigation chamber too. They are standard German Luftschutz-issue air-raid shelter doors, added to the building evidently as an afterthought, just as in Krema II at Auschwitz after our bomber squadrons began reaching into Poland. The doors are installed to open outwards, and to close flush onto their exterior gastight flange as in all air raid shelters, just as Neufert defined: Neufert is the standard SS building-code manual which was introduced as evidence at the Lipstadt trial.
These doors are also equipped with standard gas-detector tubes. Moreover, all these gas-tight doors have their handles on the inside of the door. That's handy. I think I would have passed on the window seat, and moved to a seat near the exits instead. "Doors to manual, Herr Sturmführer!" Handles?
As for the gas cylinders in the little room next to the big room designated "gas chamber" by the new tourist-friendly Majdanek management -- well, to coin a contemporary phrase, Houston we have a Problem. The gas cylinders in the darkened room are clearly not carbon-monoxide, as stated on the expensive glass descriptive panels, but stamped "CO2," carbon-dioxide, which is not lethal . Oh, and they are still not connected to the room.
A troop of school-age female students plunges through the building, guided by a diminutive, stocky Polish woman. There are around sixty or eighty, and the whole area is full of squirming, bored, giggling, and otherwise completely uninterested females. The guide delivers a brief and impassionate account of the horrors which occurred in this "gas chamber". I suggest loudly that "scepticism" is called for, and she is stunned.
To a German-speaker, perhaps their teacher, I point out that the cylinders are actually marked carbon-dioxide, and that the "gas chamber" doors all have handles on the inside: it's hardly San Quentin or Sing-Sing.
Moreover the right hand chamber has the rear wall newly plastered over, but if you go outside the building you can see the identical exit-door which has thus been hidden.
She makes some retort, and unable to speak Polish I reply in Russian, which is much the same: Not possible. She gathers up her flock and sweeps out clucking indignantly. I notice that J has fled, appalled at this heresy.
It is not denialism, or negationism, of course: to suggest that a modicum of fakery and exaggeration has been done is not to deny the atrocities, merely to question their true scale and the methods used.
The Majdanek death figure from 1940 to 1944 has currently shrunk to 50,000 victims of all kinds, i.e. rather lower than one of the medium-size overnight RAF Bomber Command successes.
Come to that, we have another problem with those gas chambers in Majdanek. The ceilings are smooth, and bare of any openings. But the photo in the Illustrated London News, August 1944, on display in another building, shows a soldier pouring a big can of Zyklon B pellets into a chute through a hole in the roof above a gas chamber.
Yet another case of the collar not quite matching the cuffs: you don't have to be Horatio in CSI Miami to spot major forensic problems with the murder weapon that is being touted here.
The site was windswept and deserted and bleak then and it has not changed much now -- except in details which do seem new.
It is now all very glitzy and glossy. Last time I was here, in March 2007, I did not remember seeing the well-built dogtooth pattern footpaths, or the plaques etched with descriptions and images into expensive stainless steel, posted near each item of interest. They are new. I was last here four years ago with Alan Heath, a good expert on these sites.
The first building encountered is the massive crematorium, with its tall single chimney dominating the whole area. Inside the gloomy wooden building, illuminated now only by dim 40 watt bulbs (of the new energy-efficient variety of course), stand the six iron crematory furnaces in their brick casing. The building occupies many rooms and is dark and gloomy.
Odd, the 1944 photos I have seen show these furnaces in the open, being inspected by Russian troops, not enclosed in a building at all. (In fact this whole building is a fake, put up in post-war years.)
I am put at once on the alert. Not sceptical, because to be even mildly sceptical in countries with "Holocaust-denial" laws is now a criminal offence. As we leave the building I notice a crew of plasterers and bricklayers busy constructing something else -- I could not see what, but judging by the stack of cement bags it appears to be quite big.
The creosoted wooden watchtowers arouse our curiosity too. They differ in design from the authentic watchtowers displayed on the wartime photos. More dummies, it seems -- meaning the towers, not the tourists who come from all over the world to tread these well-paved pathways now.
I would guess that several million dollars have been spent on this Majdanek complex since I last saw it. And I thought from the recent news items that the Reinhardt camps had run out of cash -- the Sobibor museum closing, etc. What's going on?
Graham G came here last year, after our last tour of the Nazi sites. Today I find myself repeatedly asking him, "Was this here last year? And this?" -- pointing to new exhibits, walkways, glass doors, turnstile barriers, and the like. In each case the answer is no, these are things that have been installed here in the last twelve months.
The biggest shocks are in the final building, Number 42, identified on the plans as the male showers, fumigation plant, and "gas chambers". I have to be careful here, because I am not a Holocaust denier.
I already drew attention in my March 2007 Radical's Diary to the dark blue-black stains on and right through various walls in the building -- clearly Prussian Blue, visible as cyanide compounds even without carrying out Fred-Leuchter type lab. tests. There was no reference to them in the few amateurish signs posted here four years ago.
Now there are expensive signs on glass panels in three languages, English, Polish and Hebrew, depicting these rooms -- not as gas chambers, but as fumigation chambers for clothing and the like. There is a new room with racks of brand new cans of Zyklon B cyanide-impregnated pellets, the deadly substance used for the disinfestation. Here (unlike the Soviet propaganda information fed to the Illustrated London News, August 1944, which is also on display on the site) it is made plain that the killing agent used for prisoners was not Zyklon B but "carbon-monoxide" fed into the gas chamber from cylinders in the next door room.
Ah, that explains it. I saw those two cylinders chained to the wall two years ago, but noticed at that time that the pipes going through the wall were not connected, and had quite freshly been cemented into place. The "gas chamber" room is now cordoned off, with a glass door preventing entry. All rather modern and cathedral-like. The room has a thin window half way along one wall, above shoulder height.
Hugo Haig-Thomas says rather blasphemously, "If I were a prisoner, I think I'd ask for the window seat."
What kind of gas chamber has a glass window in it, indeed?
True, there are steel gas-tight doors installed at either end of this chamber, as with the other fumigation chamber too. They are standard German Luftschutz-issue air-raid shelter doors, added to the building evidently as an afterthought, just as in Krema II at Auschwitz after our bomber squadrons began reaching into Poland. The doors are installed to open outwards, and to close flush onto their exterior gastight flange as in all air raid shelters, just as Neufert defined: Neufert is the standard SS building-code manual which was introduced as evidence at the Lipstadt trial.
These doors are also equipped with standard gas-detector tubes. Moreover, all these gas-tight doors have their handles on the inside of the door. That's handy. I think I would have passed on the window seat, and moved to a seat near the exits instead. "Doors to manual, Herr Sturmführer!" Handles?
As for the gas cylinders in the little room next to the big room designated "gas chamber" by the new tourist-friendly Majdanek management -- well, to coin a contemporary phrase, Houston we have a Problem. The gas cylinders in the darkened room are clearly not carbon-monoxide, as stated on the expensive glass descriptive panels, but stamped "CO2," carbon-dioxide, which is not lethal . Oh, and they are still not connected to the room.
A troop of school-age female students plunges through the building, guided by a diminutive, stocky Polish woman. There are around sixty or eighty, and the whole area is full of squirming, bored, giggling, and otherwise completely uninterested females. The guide delivers a brief and impassionate account of the horrors which occurred in this "gas chamber". I suggest loudly that "scepticism" is called for, and she is stunned.
To a German-speaker, perhaps their teacher, I point out that the cylinders are actually marked carbon-dioxide, and that the "gas chamber" doors all have handles on the inside: it's hardly San Quentin or Sing-Sing.
Moreover the right hand chamber has the rear wall newly plastered over, but if you go outside the building you can see the identical exit-door which has thus been hidden.
She makes some retort, and unable to speak Polish I reply in Russian, which is much the same: Not possible. She gathers up her flock and sweeps out clucking indignantly. I notice that J has fled, appalled at this heresy.
It is not denialism, or negationism, of course: to suggest that a modicum of fakery and exaggeration has been done is not to deny the atrocities, merely to question their true scale and the methods used.
The Majdanek death figure from 1940 to 1944 has currently shrunk to 50,000 victims of all kinds, i.e. rather lower than one of the medium-size overnight RAF Bomber Command successes.
Come to that, we have another problem with those gas chambers in Majdanek. The ceilings are smooth, and bare of any openings. But the photo in the Illustrated London News, August 1944, on display in another building, shows a soldier pouring a big can of Zyklon B pellets into a chute through a hole in the roof above a gas chamber.
Yet another case of the collar not quite matching the cuffs: you don't have to be Horatio in CSI Miami to spot major forensic problems with the murder weapon that is being touted here.
David