Silflay Hraka

New photos of the Holocaust keep turning up. Eric Muller has found some of his great uncle and aunt, who did not survive the Nazi camps.

Sixty-three years and eight days ago, on April 26, 1942, my great-uncle Leopold M?ller and his wife Irene were marched on a roundabout route from a Gestapo gathering point in a small park in W?rzburg through the city’s streets to a train depot. There they left their luggage on the platform and boarded a train to the East. To their deaths.

But photographs were apparently not enough. The Nazis also hired someone to make a movie of the event.

The photo above was taken 60 years ago, in April 1945, in the German town of Schwarzenfeld. It’s one of a series of Holocaust photos my dad discovered under a drawer in an Army Surplus filing cabinet. The bodies in the caskets are those of Jews, some of the over 6 million killed by the Nazis during the Holocaust. The people attending the funeral are Germans who had been ordered there by American officers.

The Americans discovered that many hundreds of helpless persons, including Allied prisoners-of-war and Polish Jewish slave laborers, had been shot in cold blood by Nazi SS troops, and their bodies thrown into a mass grave. The executions took place one day before the American forces captured the town. After making official record of the circumstances, U.S. Military Government officers ordered local German civilians to exhume the bodies and provide coffins and a civilized burial for the victims.

Aside from the soldiers, the only other American in the photo above is a priest, Friar Victor Koch, who appears in the far right hand side of the picture. He had been sent to Schwarzenfeld to found a monastery in 1932. His presence was the only thing that saved the town from destruction after American forces discovered the mass grave on its outskirts.

Sources indicate that Father Viktor argued with the American commander for no less than three hours. Eventually, he succeeded in convincing him that Schwarzenfeld?s citizens were innocent of this atrocity. He agreed to spare the town under one condition. He ordered Schwarzenfeld’s citizens to exhume corpses buried on the town’s outskirts, wash them, clothe them in donated garments, construct caskets, and give each victim a proper burial, all in 48 hours. If the townspeople failed to achieve this task, he intended to re-issue orders for Schwarzenfeld’s destruction. To complicate matters, wood and nails–the construction materials needed to construct caskets–were scarce. However, the people of Schwarzenfeld were resourceful. The children knew of a local barn where old horseshoes were in plentiful supply, and they quickly proceeded to gather as many as they could find. Later, the nails were hammered back into shape, and then used to construct the coffins. Every man, woman, and child in the town participated in this effort, and with Father Viktor’s help, they succeeded in completing this monumental task.

I recieved an email or two from relatives of Fr. Victor after the original post went up. Last I heard they were attempting to write up a news/magazine article on Fr. Victor and his history. My guess is that the story eventually turned into this website. There are a number of other photos of Fr. Victor and Schwarzenfeld, including some I hadn’t seen before dealing with the atrocity and subsequent re-burial.

Anne Frank would have turned 75 in June. New photos of her life have been published at the website devoted to her.

The foundation’s website — www.annefrank.org — features the only existing film footage of the young Jewish girl, taken in 1941 before her family went into hiding during the World War II occupation.

The site also includes photographs and testimony from family friends and neighbours — including from Miep Gies, the Dutch woman who helped the Frank family hide from the Nazis — published for the first time in digital form.

The video the film mentions can be seen here.

Eric Muller’s great uncle was a World War I veteran. A Jewish veteran, who lost the use of his arm while fighting for his country.

That country was Germany.

How his service was repaid.

How black would a man’s thoughts be, once he realized the country he’d crippled himself for was intent on murdering his family?

Chuck Simmon’s mirror site has been visited by a man who personally witnessed some of the scenes depicted in Unseen History.

Carolina Law professor Eric Muller comes from Nazi refugees on his father’s side. Recently, he’s been going through the pictures his family brought with them when they escaped. Most of them are innocuous, portraits of normal family life that reflect nothing of the lengthening shadows outside their home.

Most. Not all.

I was interviewed by a reporter from the Wilmington Star back in…….October, I think. A while ago, certainly. He’d heard of the Unseen History posts and wanted to do a story on them.

It’s just been published. (registration required. Use “laexaminer@laexaminer.com” as the member name, and “laexaminer” as the password)

CHAPEL HILL – The easiest way to move the cabinet was to take out all the drawers first.

They were pictures of the first evidence found by U.S. soldiers of the Holocaust.

Yes, that’s me, though I rarely ever look that serious. The wife couldn’t stop giggling when she saw it, which does wonder’s for a mans self-esteem, let me tell you.

Like the photo, the story is more or less accurate. My father’s not a doctor, for one thing, though he does emit a kind of a phd vibration. When he dicusses the Apocrypha, for instance. Mark’s not the first person to gift him with that honorific by a long shot.

Also, in most cases my servers do not page me before they break, though admittedly that would be greatly appreciated. Typically I’m paged after they malfunction, but before the user notices. I’m therefore almost positive that I didn’t say

“When they know they’re not going to work, they call my beeper,” he said. “And then we fix them.”

However, we had dinner at the Top of the Hill brewpub, and expense-tab beers have a way of contorting speech. At the best of times I tend to trip over my words, so I undoubtedly supplied Mark with a number of mangled quotes.

As well, there are occasions when the servers go in to warning states, which will send a page my way. For the most part though, the pager only goes off when things are already broken.

There were a couple of items I ran across while researching the Unseen History posts that I couldn’t fit in, like this movie, taken at Ohrdruf, of German civilians burying the victims of the camp.

I also ran across this excerpt, describing part of the liberation of Dachau, in Joshua M. Green’s Justice at Dachau.

Rainbow’s arrival from the east was followed by arrival from the northwest of the 45th Infantry Division, known as Thunderbird. Lt. Col. Felix Sparks, the division’s twenty-seven-year-old commander, had been given orders to detour from his push toward Munich and to proceed instead to a place call Dachau. No further explanation was given. Thunderbird, named for a Native American god of war and terror, boasted on real Native American, 1st. Lt. Jack Bushyhead, known by home in Tulsa, Oklahoma as Chief Glorious Eagle. In 1943 the division had taken part in the invasion of Sicily, then moved on to secure beachheads at Salerno and Anzio. Italian children danced with glee when Bushyhead confided to them that the entire division was made up of real Indians.

“Now I know what we’re fighting for,” said Bushyhead. “We can’t live in the same world with them. They’re nothing but animals. They must be destroyed.”

According so some accounts, Bushyhead kept his word. If so, he doesn’t appear very perturbed.

I should point out that, other than the above, most of the web sources for Bushyhead massacre story are either racist, proponents of some type of Holocaust Denial, or some combination of both.

The official account of the American actions at Dachau lists 17 Germans killed, with as many as 11 others killed in other locations on that day, with most seeing the action as understandable, if regrettable.

”General Patton was appointed military governor of Bavaria and had set up headquarters in Augsburg,” Sparks said in the Globe interview. ”I walked into his office and saluted and introduced myself. Patton said, ‘Didn’t you serve under me in Africa and Sicily? Well, you have a damn fine record.’ ” Sparks said that when he began to explain what happened in the coal yard, Patton instantly waved him off.

”I believe every man in the outfit who saw those boxcars prior to the entrance to Dachau felt, and was justified, in meting out death as a punishment to the Germans who were responsible.”

For those of you happening upon these pictures for the first time, an explanation of how they came to appear on this site can be found in the first post in this series.

A list of all the Unseen History posts can be seen here, and will eventually be mirrored here.

—————-

We end where we began, at the Ohrdruf work camp, where the American experience of the Holocaust began, with what was for an all to short time the only concrete evidence the West had of the vast Nazi death machine. Other proof came all too soon, in massive, overwhelming amounts. At the height of the Reich campaign against undesirables within and without its death camps numbered in the thousands

Click on picture for a larger version.
S & G 61331
#11310

THIS PHOTO SHOWS: Some of the prisoners who were mercilessly massacred by the Nazi SS men lie on the ground at the prison camp. Many of the men were naked and in the last stages of starvation when they were executed.
British Combine – Acme Photo F 15486 from Sport and General.

Click on picture for a larger version.

It takes a special sort of ignorance to look at pictures like the one above, to gaze upon the results of a campaign calculated, approved and directed by Germany’s highest leaders, a campaign willingly executed by the vast majority of its citizens and think; “The United States sure was horrible to the Native Americans.”

It’s hard to believe such wilfull ignorance exists when evidence that can allay it is literally available at the touch of a finger. Yet exist it does. Scan the comments on many of the posts in this series and there it will be, standing out from those around it like a corpse at a wedding.

As the eyewitnesses to the Holocaust grow fewer in number, the meme that conflates the American Indian’s experience in the nineteenth century with that of the Jew in the twentieth grows more pervasive. Not that comparisons with the Holocaust need be confined to that example alone, but the experience of the native American is greatly tempting to those of a certain mindset.

“Never Forget” means nothing to these people, because they don’t know what they’re never supposed to forget was in the first place. Their lack of historical knowledge allows them to peer into the past and see patterns that never existed, much as a child percieves monsters in the shadows of a night-darkened closet.

For those who promulgate the argument, the point is not to equate the native Americans of the 1870s with the Jews of the 1940s. Frankly, they couldn’t care less about either group. The equation they are interested in is not Native American = Jew, it’s United States = Nazi Germany.

It’s a deeply flawed idea on many levels, which is one reason its main appeal is limited to those ignorant of history, an argument so weak it can be refuted with one word.

Geronimo.

Geronimo, the Apache who died in a Florida prisoner of war camp in 1909, yet who fought for so long and so hard against the U.S. that his very name is a symbol of bravery. Geronimo, the 501st Parachute Infantry Regiment.

If one wishes to prove that Nazi Germany and America are equivalents, then one must first produce the Jewish Geronimo, reknowned throughout Nazi Germany for his bravery, the Jew whose fame is so everlasting that a German Army regiment has taken his name for its own.

Failing that, the Jewish Cochise, “incomparable as a leader and a strategist,” would also be acceptable.

Or the Jewish Crazy Horse, whose image has been slowly carved into a mountain over the last 55 years by a World War II veteran and his descendants.

Or Sitting Bull, whom thousands of Americans paid to see and cheered for as part of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show And Exhibition.

It’s not like there aren’t examples to pick from. Jews fought back against the Nazi regime in the Warsaw Ghetto, at Bialystok, at Sobibor, Treblinka and a hundred other locations, known and unknown.

Yet there are none. America took those whom it oppressed and made them heroes. Germany…….well, we know what Germany did.

None of this is meant to denigrate or whitewash the suffering of the North American Indians, 6000 to 7000 of whom died as a result of actions directly sponsored by the British and American states. Millions more died as a result of disease, especially in the years before the English arrived on the continent, or due to the slow, worldwide grind of culture against culture, a grind that continues to this day. The American Indians died, over hundreds of years, like the Gauls, the Maratha, and the Nubians before them. People have died throughout history because of where they were, because someone else wanted the land they lived on. Others surrendered, and survived.

The victims of the Holocaust died because of who they were. They died regardless of whether they fought or surrendered. 6 million died in 7 years.

The numbers alone make comparisons between the Holocaust and the American Indian experience ludicrous. 7000 deaths over 400 years, versus 6 million in 7.

If that is not enough, there is a final bit of evidence, one that speaks directly to the nature of the respective governments overseeing the fate of the Jew and that of the American Indian.

In 1944, the German bureaucrat in charge of Jewish Affairs, an intimate of Hitler, was Adolf Eichmann.

In 1870, the American bureaucrat in charge of Indian Affairs, an intimate of President Grant, was Ely S. Parker, a Seneca Indian.

—————————-

Barring another overlooked Army Surplus cabinet, this is the last post in the Unseen History. Thanks for stopping by to read them.

Postscript: Some final thoughts on the Unseen History posts are here.

For those of you happening upon these pictures for the first time, an explanation of how they came to appear on this site can be found in the first post in this series.

—————-

These are the last of the pictures but one. They don’t really fit in with the rest, as they were first taken by the Germans, then captured by the Allies at a later date. Still, the civilians in both pictures are likely camp workers. They’re just at work, alive, rather than dead in a ditch or smoldering barracks.

Both deal with another Nazi crime, the looting of Europe’s art. By some estimates up to 20% of all the art treasures in the world during the Nazi era ended up in Germany, and thousands of pieces remain there.

Notes: I’ve tried to identify the three paintings in this picture via the Lost Art Internet Database, a site set up in the year 2000 by the German government, ostensibly to aid those trying to track down art stolen by the Nazis. It’s slow, requires a login to view any of the art reports, and, once a person jumps through all the required hoops to register with the site, presents the user with this message

Your access will be established on workdays within 24 hours after registration.

So much for the vaunted German efficiency. Or is it that, after 60 some years,the Germans have grown attached to their ill-gotten loot and don’t really care for the idea of returning it to the Juden?

Thanks to the United States, it’s easy to find a list of the people who collaborated with the Nazi’s in looting the art collections of Europe. Thanks to the Germans, getting a simple list of the stolen objects is practically impossible.

Things are somewhat different for looted assets in the Netherlands.

If I had to guess, I’d say the landscape was a Salvator Rosa. From what little detail there is the painting appears to be his style, and there are a number of his works listed in the database. I’m stumped by the two portraits, however.

Each photograph, like the ones taken at the atrocity scenes, has a description of the scene glued to the back, though one much different in style. Here’s the caption for the photograph above.

If there ever was a German description, it’s long gone. I’ve no idea what the three letter acronym at the end stands for. The typist’s initials, possibly?

If the two photographs are at all related, then the scene above took place in Yugoslavia, as the caption for the one below places it there.

Caption on rear:
NAZI LOOT

The Yugoslav State Treasure in Cloister Ostorg – valuable articles are carried out into the courtyard preparatory to being transported to Germany.
PBS

The country referred to is not the country created after World War II, but rather the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, which puts the date of the picture somewhere around 1941.

Another oddity – there was once a third photo in this series. By the time we ran across the file containing them it was long gone, but the caption had been left behind.

“NAZI LOOT -
Hitler’s Gestapo men are submitting to him treasured pieces of art filched from the overrun countries of Europe. Goering looks on with pleasure.”

I always wondered what that photo looked like, but never really expected to know. But, thanks to the magic of the Internet, I’ve got a pretty good idea.

photo via this site, translated here.

The gif is so small that it’s hard to tell for sure, but that certainly appears to be a look of pleasure on Goering’s face, and that’s definitely Hitler. If anyone knows the location of a bigger version, drop us a line.

For those of you happening upon these pictures for the first time, an explanation of how they came to appear on this site, as well as more information on the Ohrdruf work camp can be found in the first post in this series.

The last post in this series can be seen here. A list of all the Unseen History posts can be seen here.