Dec 27, 2009
Nazi-Hunter Simon Wiesenthal
and his Trail of Holocaust Lies
[SOURCE]:
Guy Walters
The head Nazi-hunter’s trail of lies
Getting to the truth about the Holocaust is a bit troubling.
Simon Wiesenthal
Head Nazi-Hunter
Since the early 1960s, Simon Wiesenthal’s name has become synonymous with Nazi hunting.
His standing is that of a secular saint.
Nominated four times for the Nobel peace prize, the recipient of a British honorary knighthood, the US Presidential Medal of Freedom, the French Légion d’honneur and at least 53 other distinctions, he was often credited with some 1,100 Nazi “scalps”.
He is remembered, above all, for his efforts to track down Adolf Eichmann, one of the most notorious war criminals. -- In fact, he was not the one to get Eichmann.
Truth is that Simon Wiesenthal was better suited for fictional Hollywood story-telling.
Miracle #1 -- Saved by the Bell
Wiesenthal claimed he and a Jewish friend called Gross were arrested at 4pm on Sunday July 6, one of the few dates that remain constant in his ever-shifting life story. Whenever he is so specific, however, he is usually lying.
Frogmarched to prison, they were put in a line of some 40 other Jews in a courtyard. Ukrainian auxiliary police started shooting each man in the neck, working their way down the line towards Wiesenthal.
He was saved by a peal of church bells signifying evening mass.
Incredibly, the Ukrainians halted their execution to go to worship.
Miracle #2 -- Saved by being Soviet Spies
The survivors were led to the cells, where Wiesenthal claims he fell asleep.
He was woken by a Ukrainian friend in the auxiliary police who saved him and Gross by telling them to pretend they were Russian spies.
They were brutally questioned — Wiesenthal lost two teeth — but were freed after cleaning the commandant’s office.
Truth to Miracle #1 and #2 -- Lied about bribing
According to testimony Wiesenthal gave to American war crimes investigators after the war, he was actually arrested on July 13 and managed to escape “through a bribe”.
By subsequently placing his arrest on July 6, his story fitted the timing of the [Lvov] pogroms.
Miracle #3 -- Saved by the call of his name
By the end of the year Wiesenthal was in Janowska, a concentration camp outside Lvov. Given the task of painting Soviet railway engines with Nazi insignia, he made friends with Adolf Kohlrautz, the German senior inspector at the workshop, who was secretly anti-Nazi.
On April 20, 1943, Wiesenthal was apparently selected for a mass execution again.
The SS at Janowska picked him among some Jews to be shot in a grim celebration of Hitler’s 54th birthday.
They silently walked towards a huge sandpit, 6ft deep and 1,500ft long. A few dead bodies were visible in it. Forced to undress, they were herded in single file down a barbed-wire corridor known as the hose to be shot one by one at the edge of the pit.
A whistle interrupted the gunshots, followed by a shout of “Wiesenthal!”
An SS man called Koller ran forward and told Wiesenthal to follow him. “I staggered like a drunk,” Wiesenthal recalled. “Koller slapped my face twice and brought me back to earth. I was walking back through the hose, naked. Behind me, the sounds of shooting resumed but they were over long before I had reached the camp.”
Back at the workshop he found a beaming Kohlrautz, who had convinced the camp commander it was essential to keep Wiesenthal alive to paint a poster that would feature a swastika and the words “We Thank Our Führer”.
Miracle #4 -- Saved by the slip out the back door trick
On October 2, 1943, according to Wiesenthal, Kohlrautz warned him that the camp and its prisoners were shortly to be liquidated.
The German gave him and a friend passes to visit a stationery shop in town, accompanied by a Ukrainian guard.
They managed to escape out the back while the Ukrainian waited at the front.
Truth about Miracle #3 and #4 -- Lied about Kohlrautz
Yet again he had seemingly cheated death in a miraculous fashion. But we only have his word for it.
According to Wiesenthal,
- Kohlrautz was killed in the battle for Berlin in April 1945.
- He also told a biographer, however, that Kohlrautz was killed on the Russian front in 1944.
- And in an affidavit made in August 1954 about his wartime persecutions, he neglects to include the story at all.
- In both this document and in his testimony to the Americans in May 1945, he mentions Kohlrautz without saying the German saved his life.
Miracle #5 -- Saved by the smashed foot
Whatever the truth, by November 1944 Wiesenthal was in Gross-Rosen, a camp near Wroclaw.
He told Hella Pick, his biographer, that he was forced to work barefoot in the camp quarry and soon learnt that the team of 100 prisoners assigned to the work kommando shrank by one each day. After a few days he felt sure his turn was about to come.
“My executioner was behind me,” he recalled, “poised to smash my head with a rock.
I turned around and the man, surprised, dropped his stone.
It crushed my toe. I screamed.”
Miracle #6 -- Saved by the Red Cross inspection
Wiesenthal’s quick reactions and yell apparently saved his life because there was some form of inspection that day — he thought it may have been by the Red Cross — and so he was stretchered away to the first-aid station.
His toe was cut off without anaesthesia while two men held him still.
The following day, Wiesenthal said, he was in agony.
“The doctor came back and saw that I had a septic blister on the sole of my foot. So they cut it open and the gangrene spurted all over the room.”
Truth about Miracle #5 and #6 -- No Red Cross
Yet again, one of Wiesenthal’s “miracles” is open to doubt.
- First, the story appears in no other memoir or statement.
- Secondly, if the Red Cross really was inspecting Gross-Rosen that day, then the SS would have temporarily halted any executions. As it was, the Red Cross was not allowed access to concentration camps at that time.
- Thirdly, the medical consequences seem entirely implausible.
Miracle #7 -- Saved by a broomstick and a coat for a shoe
Soon afterwards, according to Wiesenthal’s account, he managed to walk 170 miles west to Chemnitz after Gross-Rosen was evacuated.
Walking on a gangrenous foot with a recently amputated toe would have been hellish.
Instead of a shoe, he had the sleeve of an old coat wrapped around his foot with some wire. For a walking stick he had a broomstick.
Of the 6,000 prisoners who marched out, only 4,800 arrived in Chemnitz.
With his infected foot, Wiesenthal was lucky to be among them.
Miracle #8 -- Saved by a cold shower after being frozen
From Chemnitz, the prisoners ended up at Mauthausen camp near Linz in Austria.
Wiesenthal arrived there on the frozen night of February 15, 1945.
In "The Murderers Among Us", he tells how he and a fellow prisoner, Prince Radziwill, linked arms to make the last four miles uphill to the camp.
The effort was too great and they collapsed in the snow.
An SS man fired a shot that landed between them. As the two men did not get up, they were left for dead in the sub-zero temperature.
When lorries arrived to collect those who had died on the march, the unconscious Wiesenthal and Radziwill were so frozen that they were thrown onto a pile of corpses.
At the crematorium, however, the prisoners unloading them realised they were alive.
They were given a cold shower to thaw out and Wiesenthal was taken to Block VI, the “death block” for the mortally ill.
Miracle #9 -- Saved by bread alone
In 1961, when Wiesenthal was interviewed for the Yad Vashem archive by the Israeli journalist Haim Maas about his war years, Wiesenthal mentioned that the infection from his foot had now turned blue-green and had spread right up to his knee.
He lay in the death block for three months until the end of the war. Too weak to get out of bed, he claimed he survived — incredibly — on 200 calories a day, along with the occasional piece of bread or sausage smuggled to him by a friendly Pole.
Miracle #10 -- Saved by a great immune system
Mauthausen was liberated on May 5, 1945.
Despite weighing just 100lb, Wiesenthal struggled outside to greet the American tanks. “I don’t know how I managed to get up and walk,” he recalled.
If he was able to walk, his severely infected leg must have been cured during the previous three months by either amputation or antibiotics.
We know the former did not take place, and the latter was emphatically not a common treatment for ailing Jews in Nazi concentration camps.
Once again, it appears as though a miracle had taken place.
Truth about Miracle #6 through #10 -- No hurt foot
The rapidity of Wiesenthal’s recovery is so astonishing that it is doubtful whether he was as ill as he claimed.
Just 20 days after the liberation, he wrote to the US camp commander asking whether he could be involved in assisting the US authorities investigating war crimes.
Lie #11 -- Not in 13 concentration camps
Claiming to have been in 13 concentration camps — he had in fact been in no more than six — Wiesenthal supplied a list of 91 names of those who he felt were responsible for “incalculable sufferings”.
Miracle #12 -- That Wiesenthal and family survived at all
The biggest miracle at all is that Wiesenthal is alive today, considering how many other Jews perished.
The question is at what point did Wiesenthal just make all this up?
Was Wiesenthal in any camps at all?
You can read further at The Problem.
You can read further at The Solution.
Article located at:
http://www.thechristiansolution.com/doc2009/303_Wiesenthal.html
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