Gas Chamber Myths

Despite the fact that no writer today talks about gassing at Bergen-Belsen this existed in the past. Writers have pruned this from history also.

Some former inmates and a few historians have claimed that Jews were put to death in gas chambers at Bergen-Belsen. For example, an "authoritative" work published shortly after the end of the war, A History of World War II, informed readers: "In Belsen, [Commandant] Kramer kept an orchestra to play him Viennese music while he watched children torn from their mothers to be burned alive. Gas chambers disposed of thousands of persons daily."

Note here we have the playing of "Viennese" music. It is bad enough when the bad guys emit "demonic laughter" but to have their own "germanic" mood music sounds like Victorian horror movies.

That there could be anything more evil than this is difficult to imagine. Yet there never were any Nuremberg claims that there were any gas chambers at Bergen-Belsen. Belsen had exactly one crematory oven that was outdoors without even a covering structure.

However this writer informs witnesses of something that he clearly made up to fit the horror story mold.

In Jews, God and History, Jewish historian Max Dimont wrote of gassings at Bergen-Belsen. A semi-official work published in Poland in 1981 claimed that women and babies were "put to death in gas chambers" at Belsen.

And again pointing out Nuremberg made no claim to gas chambers. The story has been abandoned by all of today's writers.

In 1945 the Associated Press news agency reported:

In Lueneburg, Germany, a Jewish physician, testifying at the trial of 45 men and women for war crimes at the Belsen and Oswiecim [Auschwitz] concentration camps, said that 80,000 Jews, representing the entire ghetto of Lodz, Poland, had been gassed or burned to death in one night at the Belsen camp.

Five decades after the camp's liberation, British army Captain Robert Daniell recalled seeing "the gas chambers" there.

Years after the war, Robert Spitz, a Hungarian Jew, remembered taking a shower at Belsen in February 1945: "... It was delightful. What I didn't know then was that there were other showers in the same building where gas came out instead of water."

Another former inmate, Moshe Peer, recalled a miraculous escape from death as an eleven-year-old in the camp. In a 1993 interview with a Canadian newspaper, the French-born Peer claimed that he "was sent to the [Belsen] camp gas chamber at least six times." The newspaper account went on to relate: "Each time he survived, watching with horror as many of the women and children gassed with him collapsed and died. To this day, Peer doesn't know how he was able to survive." In an effort to explain the miracle, Peer mused: "Maybe children resist better, I don't know." (Although Peer claimed that "Bergen-Belsen was worse than Auschwitz," he acknowledged that he and his younger brother and sister, who were deported to the camp in 1944, all somehow survived internment there.)

Such gas chamber tales are entirely fanciful. As early as 1960, historian Martin Broszat had publicly repudiated the Belsen gassing story. These days no reputable scholar supports it.