WW II American airman Paul Stralka shares details of his stay at Buchenwald for the Duluth News Tribune by recalling "long lines of prisoners being led to the gas chambers, which were usually disguised as showers." Unfortunately, Buchenwald is in Germany, and as we all know, "there were no extermination camps on German soil" (Simon Wiesenthal, Books and Bookmen, April, 1975).

4/13/83

      The Toronto Star recounts the story of Frank Walus, who was fingered by Simon Wiesenthal first as a Gestapo collaborator, then later as a member of the Gestapo. Twelve eyewitnesses swore Walus was a mass-murderer who had stomped a pregnant Jew to death. Forty eyewitnesses placed Walus at the concentration camp in Kielce, Poland, during the war. At the trial, however, it was established that Walus was never at the camp, never a member of the Gestapo, never a member of the SS, and that in fact all of Wiesenthal's charges against Walus were fabrications. This prompted the US Justice Department to drop all charges, issue an apology, and pay Walus $34,000 to help offset his legal fees.

      The West German weekly newspaper Deutsche National-Zeitung publishes a sketch made by Simon Wiesenthal (which first appeared in Wiesenthal's 1946 book, KZ Mauthausen) that supposedly shows three Mauthausen inmates who had been bound to posts and sadistically put to death by the Germans. Unfortunately for friends of the Holocaust myth (and Wiesenthal's almost non-existent credibility), the newspaper also reprints three photos from the July 11, 1945 Life magazine that record the firing-squad execution of three German soldiers during the Battle of the Bulge. The connection? Wiesenthal's sketch is shown to be nothing more than a poor rendition of the Life photos with a politically-correct caption. For those familiar with Wiesenthal's book, you will remember that he also cites a "confession" of camp Commandant Ziereis that 4 million inmates were gassed to death at Mauthausen, when it is well known that no more than 206,000 people were ever sent to Mauthausen and its satellite camps.