Question:
Rabbi Pinchas Menachem Joskowicz, Poland’s chief rabbi, urged the Roman Catholic leaders to remove the 26-foot wooden cross near Auschwitz which was erected to commemorate a 1979 Holy Mass conducted there by Pope Paul II for the victims who died in the camp. The rabbi complains that the presence of the cross disturbs his prayers in the holy place where his family and nation died. I agree that the cross should not be there, and I urge all fellow-Catholics to contact their priests or write the Vatican and request the Holy Father in Rome to order the removal of the cross as soon as possible.
Why, Catholics and other Christians died at Auschwitz too. Are we to forget them? Fr. Maximilain Kolbe died in the starvation cell when he took the place of a prisoner chosen to be executed for an escaped prisoner. I guess we’re to assume that only jews died there and elsewhere? Pax Christi, Pat "Misere Mei, Deus" (http://members.aol.com/Padraic42/Franciscan/devotions.htm)
Response:
Remove the Cross from Auschwitz Rabbi Pinchas Menachem Joskowicz, Poland’s chief rabbi, urged the Roman Catholic leaders to remove the 26-foot wooden cross near Auschwitz which was erected to commemorate a 1979 Holy Mass conducted there by Pope Paul II for the victims who died in the camp. The rabbi complains that the presence of the cross disturbs his prayers in the holy place where his family and nation died. I agree that the cross should not be there, and I urge all fellow-Catholics to contact their priests or write the Vatican and request the Holy Father in Rome to order the removal of the cross as soon as possible. Auschwitz is, for the Jews, the paradigm of the Holocaust. When they speak or write of the Holocaust, Auschwitz is given an exalted position, and vivid descriptions by surviving Jews of atrocities against Jews are recounted. The prison population there was composed mostly of Jews, transported by train from Germany and the occupied territories in Eastern Europe. Russian liberators of the camp estimated that over four million innocent Jews were murdered there, far more than any other camp. Commemoration of the Holocaust has become a religious event, and Auschwitz is its symbol. Evidence of the atrocities in all the German camps in the form of survivor testimony, photographs, and confessions is abundant and well recorded. Some of the Auschwitz survivors are famous: Elie Weisel, the well known speaker and author, Simon Weisenthall, the famous Nazi hunter, and Otto Frank, the father of Anne Frank whose diary he published after the war. Their stories are among hundreds of others from survivors of Auschwitz and other camps describing unspeakable atrocities. Millions of innocent Jews are said to have been murdered in the camps by Germans using hydrogen cyanide gas, diesel exhaust gas, electricity, steam, fiery pits, skull-splitting devices, and guns, both in formal executions and casual target practice by German soldiers. Their hair was used to stuff mattresses, their skin used for lampshades, their fat used to make soap, their heads shrunk like those found among the tribes of South American, even the meat of their dead bodies was used for food. Their bodies were burned in specially constructed ovens, and their ashes used to make fertilizer, or scattered on icy sidewalks to prevent slipping, or thrown in rivers. Such eyewitness testimony made up the bulk of the evidence used by the tribunal at Nuremberg to sentence Nazi leaders to death. These stories, however, are being challenged. There is a growing number of skeptics who, after examining the available evidence, are beginning to question the accuracy of some of the survivors. Some of these challengers are unsavory and clearly motivated by less than noble sentiments; but some, like Arthur Butz, are college professors; some, like David Irving, Roger Gaurady, and Robert Faurisson, are tireless researchers and authors of books impressive in their detail; some, such as Arno Mayer and David Cole, are jews. These challengers point out hard-to-dispute facts that on their face are inconsistent with the testimony of many of the survivors. For example, they point to the absence of any written orders or detailed plans to murder Jews. After fifty years of searching through the thousands of documents captured from the Germans– over eleven tons of them–no researcher has yet found one official communication ordering anyone to destroy Jews in the concentration camps. They did, however, find an order from Himmler directing the camp commandants to take all necessary steps to reduce the number of prison deaths from diseases, especially typhus, that were sweeping the camps. They were also able to find an almost poignant communication from the commandant of the camp at Bergen-Belsen, begging for food and supplies for the prisoners who were dying by the hundreds from starvation and disease as the war came to a close and Germany’s transportation and supply system collapsed from continuous allied air attacks. But there were no written orders, plans, reports, training manuals, or other documents to support the stories of mass murder in any of the camps. The Auschwitz Death Books, records kept by the Germans of each death of camp prisoners including detailed information about the deceased and the causes of death, were recently released from the Soviet archives where they had been hidden from the world for years. Their contents show that no prisoners were murdered; they died of natural causes, mostly from typhus, which spread swiftly through the crowded camps despite efforts by the Germans to control it. From these long hidden records it has been suggested that fewer than 50,000 Jewish prisoners died at Auschwitz during its existence and none were murdered, either by gassing, electrocution, diesel exhaust, boiling, or burning. Allied war records also contain no confirmations of mass murder in the camps. Even though the allies had cracked the German code early in the war, they intercepted no messages passed between the Germans mentioning the murder of Jews. With a network of spies spread throughout crowded Europe and hundreds of people going in and out of the camps, no official reports were ever made during the war of mass murders at any camp, either in or outside of Germany. Members of the Red Cross, who visited the camps regularly and talked to the prisoners, reported no unusual observations. Air surveillance photographs of Auschwitz, taken periodically at the time when, according to some of the survivors, thousands were being murdered daily, show no signs of activity anywhere in the camp that raised suspicions that any killings were going on, much less millions of killings–there are no lines of prisoners, no carloads or piles of bodies, no mounds of coal to fire the crematoriums, no burial pits in the surrounding areas. Random autopsies of hundreds of bodies found at the camps by American pathologists disclosed no deaths by gassing; all had died of disease or starvation. To the people who question the accepted history, these mysterious gaps in evidence, considering the enormity of the Holocaust, are not easily explained; it is like trying to verify reports of a herd of elephants attacking a village where there are no elephant tracks, no trampled vegetation, and many of the villagers cannot remember seeing any elephants. The skeptics cite odd anomalies in the claims of some of the well known survivors. For example, it is generally accepted that the principal means of killing Jews at Auschwitz was gassing. Yet, Elie Weisel, in his book written shortly after the war, never described gassings; instead, he wrote of seeing Jews being burned alive–thus, the term "Holocaust," meaning ritual burning, became widespread to represent the genocide of Jews. Apparently, he was not impressed with the gassing stories that must have circulated among the inmates in the camps. It is also widely accepted that Jews who couldn’t work were immediately executed. But Otto Frank had become severely ill and was comfortably in a hospital at Auschwitz when the Russians arrived. At about the same time, Simon Wiesenthal received medical treatment for a foot disorder which prevented him from working. When given the opportunity to stay at the camp to be liberated by the approaching Russians, he chose to go with the Germans. That same opportunity was given to Anne Frank and her sister, and both chose to be transported to a camp in Germany where they died, not of gassing, but of typhus. Those investigating the Holocaust find such behavior hard to reconcile with the stories of German cruelty. The Holocaust doubters claim that stories of the gassing are scientifically untenable. Hundreds of thousands are supposed to have been killed by diesel engine exhaust piped into sealed chambers. But it is commonly known in technical circles, and certainly was known by the techically skilled Germans, that diesel exhaust is not lethal. When american scientists later tried to duplicate the conditions in a laboratory, they found it took more than three hours to kill a guinea pig using a diesel engine specially modified to emit as much carbon monoxide as possible. On the other hand, Zyklon B is too lethal. It is a pesticide for lice used throughout Germany and especially designed to release gas from pellets slowly, over of period of hours, so the gas can reach into creases and corners. The gas remains deadly for a long time–the manufacturer recommended a twenty-four hour ventilation period after use. Yet, according to the testimonies, people who entered the chambers to remove the bodies minutes after the gas was administered and with the pellets still present suffered no ill effects. So the arguments rage on, mostly jews against gentiles, and it is not a place for the timid. A Canadian, Ernst Zundel, a proud German active on the internet, saw his house firebombed; Faurisson was attacked by a group of enraged young Jews and beaten to near death; Gaurady was recently prosecuted as a criminal under a French law that makes it a crime to question the findings of the Nuremberg tribunal; David Irving has been banned from even entering certain countries. The battles can be emotional, irrational, and violent, and it is no place for the Catholic Church. That is why the cross at Auschwitz should be removed. Its presence places the Church in the midst of a controversy that will create enemies regardless of who prevails. Supporting the current version of the Holocaust has made no friends for the Church among the Jews, and it may have engendered resentment among the Christian Germans. The Evidence is already mounting that the Church may have inadvertently placed its imprimatur on a distorted history that for more than half a … read more »
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