Resistance

GERMAR RUDOLF, RESISTANCE IS OBLIGATORYanother camp close to Dachau at Landsberg-Kaufering, built after 1943with forced labor to make war goods. The fact that they were transferredto another labor camp by passenger train, not cattle cars, supportsthe revisionists’ contention that Auschwitz was not an exterminationcamp.Hilda Wiesel also describes the arrival of “3,000 men who came (toLandsberg); they were from Auschwitz and they were a work force thatcleaned up the Warsaw Ghetto. Initially, they were at Auschwitz, thenthey went to clean up the ghetto, and then, afterwards, they were sent toour camp.” 40 Does Elie omit such survivor testimony because it doesnot fit the extermination camp scenario he paints and reiterates over andover again? And why does he never mention that his older sisterclaimed that prisoners were also killed by Allied bombing and strafingas they marched along the roads prior to liberation?Hilda Wiesel also testified that in late 1944 and early 1945 the camp“became ridden with typhus. The men died at the rate of 30 per day.” 40Typhus and other diseases were the main cause of prisoner deaths in thelast year of the war, but this is virtually eliminated in the Holocaust narrativeof Elie Wiesel. Why are all his descriptions of death the result ofbrutality and sadism instead of disease, starvation, and other causes associatedwith war?Finally, if Wiesel spent the day in Dachau in the early 1950s he musthave noticed that the barracks were filled with impoverished Germanswho had no other place to live. Roughly 80 percent of Munich had beenleveled, and poor people lived in the former Dachau concentration campon a permanent basis until it was upgraded to a Museum in 1965. Extensiveand brutal ethnic cleansing of civilian Germans after the war iscompletely ignored by Wiesel.While Wiesel fails to emphasize the ravages by disease of all prisonersand others held in tight quarters (in the military or in ghettos), oftenin unsanitary conditions, he does describe the showers and mandatoryhygiene routine followed uniformly in the Third Reich. This emphasison (almost an obsession with) hygiene was distinct to the German prisoncamps as opposed to those run by the Soviets or the Japanese. Elietells us that prisoners took off their clothes, were given hot showers,and then clean clothes. He says, “These were the showers, a compulsory40Translation of an interview in French of Hilda Wiesel Kudler in Nice, France, on December 11,1995 (see note 31).23