From: mars1933@hotmail.com   
      
   by Theodore J. O'Keefe   
      
   Nothing has been more effective in establishing the authenticity of   
   the Holocaust story in the minds of Americans than the terrible scenes   
   US troops discovered when they entered German concentration camps at   
   the close of World War II.   
      
    At Dachau, Buchenwald, Dora, Mauthausen, and other work and detention   
   camps, horrified US infantrymen encountered heaps of dead and dying   
   inmates,  emaciated and diseased. Survivors told them hair-raising   
   stories of torture and  slaughter, and backed up their claims by   
   showing the GIs crematory ovens, alleged  execution gas chambers,   
   supposed implements of torture, and even shrunken  heads and   
   lampshades, gloves, and handbags purportedly made from skin flayed   
    from dead inmates.   
      
    US government authorities, mindful that many Americans who remembered   
   the  atrocity stories fed them during World War I still doubted the   
   Allied propaganda  directed against the Hitler regime, resolved to   
   "document" what the GIs had found  in the  camps. Prominent newsmen   
   and politicians were flown in to see the harrowing  evidence, while   
   the US Army Signal Corps filmed and photographed the scenes  for   
   posterity. Famous journalist Edward R. Murrow reported, in tones of   
   horror,  but no longer of disbelief, what he had been told and shown,   
   and Dachau and   
    Buchenwald were branded on the hearts and minds of the American   
   populace as  names of infamy unmatched in the sad and bloody history   
   of this planet.   
      
    For Americans, what was "discovered" at the camps -- the dead and the   
   diseased,  the terrible stories of the inmates, all the props of   
   torture and terror -- became the basis not simply of a transitory   
   propaganda campaign but of the conviction that, yes, it was true: the   
   Germans did exterminate six million Jews, most of them in lethal gas   
   chambers.   
      
   What the GIs found was used, by way of films that were mandatory   
   viewing for  the vanquished populace of Germany, to "re-educate" the   
   German people by  destroying their national pride and their will to a   
   united, independent national state,  imposing in their place   
   overwhelming feelings of collective guilt and political  impotence.   
   And when the testimony, and the verdict, of the Nuremberg Tribunal   
   incorporated most, if not all, of the horror stories Americans were   
   told about   
    Dachau, Buchenwald, and other places captured by the US Army, the   
   Holocaust  could pass for one of the most documented, one of the most   
   authenticated, one of  the most proven historical episodes in the   
   human record.   
      
    A Different Reality   
      
     But it is known today that, very soon after the liberation of the   
   camps, American   authorities were aware that the real story of the   
   camps was quite different from the   one in which they were coaching   
   military public information officers, government spokesmen,   
   politicians, journalists, and other mouthpieces.   
      
     When American and British forces overran western and central Germany   
   in the spring of 1945, they were followed by troops charged with   
   discovering and securing any evidence of German war crimes.   
      
     Among them was Dr. Charles Larson, one of America's leading forensic   
   pathologists, who was assigned to the US Army's Judge Advocate   
   General's Department. As part of a US War Crimes Investigation Team,   
   Dr. Larson performed autopsies at Dachau and some twenty other German   
   camps, examining  on some days more than 100 corpses. After his grim   
   work at Dachau, he was   
    questioned for three days by US Army prosecutors.   
      
   Dr. Larson's findings? In an 1980 newspaper interview he said: "What   
   we've heard is that six million Jews were exterminated. Part of that   
   is a hoax." And what part was the hoax? Dr. Larson, who told his   
   biographer that to his knowledge he "was the only forensic pathologist   
   on duty in the entire European Theater" of Allied military operations,   
   confirmed that "never was a case of poison gas uncovered."   
      
   Typhus, Not Poison Gas   
      
   If not by gassing, how did the unfortunate victims at Dachau,   
   Buchenwald and Bergen-Belsen perish? Were they tortured to death or   
   deliberately starved? The answers to these questions are known as   
   well.   
      
    As Dr. Larson and other Allied medical men discovered, the chief   
   cause of death at Dachau, Belsen and the other camps was disease,   
   above all typhus, an old and terrible scourge of mankind that until   
   recently flourished in places where populations were crowded together   
   in circumstances where public health measures were unknown or had   
   broken down. Such was the case in the overcrowded internment camps in   
   Germany at war's end, where, despite such measures as systematic   
   delousing, quarantine of the sick and cremation of the dead, the   
   virtual   
   collapse of Germany's food, transport, and public health systems led   
   to catastrophe.   
      
   Perhaps the most authoritative statement of the facts as to typhus and   
   mortality in the camps has been made by Dr. John E. Gordon, M.D.,   
   Ph.D., a professor of preventive medicine and epidemiology at the   
   Harvard University School of Public Health, who was with US forces in   
   Germany in 1945. Dr. Gordon reported in 1948 that "The outbreaks in   
   concentration camps and prisons made up the great bulk of typhus   
   infection encountered in Germany." Dr. Gordon summarized the  causes   
   for the outbreaks 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 the disease. Sanitation was low grade, public utilities were   
   seriously disrupted, food supply and food distribution was poor,   
   housing was inadequate and order and discipline were everywhere   
   lacking. Still more important, a shifting of populations was occurring   
   such as few countries and few times have experienced.   
      
   Dr. Gordon's findings are corroborated by Dr. Russell Barton, today a   
   psychiatrist of international repute, who entered Bergen-Belsen with   
   British forces as a young medical student in 1945. Barton, who   
   volunteered to care for the diseased survivors, testified under sworn   
   oath in a Toronto courtroom in 1985 that  "Thousands of prisoners who   
   died at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp during World War II   
   weren't deliberately starved to death but died from a rash of   
   diseases."   
      
   Dr. Barton further testified that on entering the camp he had credited   
   stories of deliberate starvation but decided such stories were untrue   
   after inspecting the well equipped kitchens and the meticulously   
   maintained ledgers, dating back to 1942, of food cooked and dispensed   
   each day.   
      
   Despite noisily publicized claims and widespread popular notions to   
   the contrary, no researcher has been able to document a German policy   
   of extermination through starvation in the German camps.   
      
    No 'Human Skin' Lampshades   
      
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)