Another False Holocaust Witness
Officially Sanctioned
Fraud at Dachau
By Mark Weber
Each year many thousands of tourists visit the site of the
notorious Dachau concentration camp in southern Germany, not far from
Munich. They see the crematory, the memorial shrines, and the museum.
And in recent years, as an almost daily fixture, they see Martin
Zaidenstadt. This elderly Jewish man lectures visitors to Dachau on
his experiences as a wartime prisoner there. He is particularly
passionate about the horrors of the camp's gas chamber where, he
explains, many prisoners were put to death with poison gas. He even
claims that this gas chamber served as a model for Auschwitz (New
York Times, Oct. 26, 1997). Zaidenstadt's listeners respond to his
heart-rending testimony with unquestioning sympathy. Many reach
generously into their wallets.
But now a new 50-minute documentary film, "Martin," and a new
book, The Last Survivor: In Search of Martin Zaidenstadt, written by
journalist Timothy W. Ryback and published by Pantheon, have
subjected that testimony to critical review. Ryback establishes that
the octogenarian Zaidenstadt was born in Jedwabne, Poland, but that
his story of Dachau internment is a fraud. He probably never visited
the camp until the 1990s, says Ryback, and his tales of gas chamber
killings are untrue.
Although supposedly authoritative evidence of gas chamber killings
at Dachau has been cited over the years - including "eyewitness"
testimony at the main Nuremberg trial of 1945-46 - today no reputable
historian credits such claims. It is widely acknowledged, even by the
well-known "Nazi hunter" Simon Wiesenthal, that no one was ever
"gassed" at the camp. (See, for example, "Wiesenthal Re-Confirms: `No
Extermination Camps on German Soil'," The Journal of Historical
Review, May-June 1993, pp. 9-12.)
In today's cultural climate, one is obliged to regard "Holocaust
survivors" such as Zaidenstadt with an almost reverential indulgence.
For example, the director of the state-run Dachau camp memorial,
Barbara Distel, seems unbothered by Zaidenstadt's deceit. Even though
she is a government official, she permits his mendacious panhandling.
(One can hardly imagine Distel tolerating anyone who spent hours
explaining to camp site visitors that American GIs who liberated the
camp on April 29, 1945, summarily killed 500 German prisoners there.
For more on this, see, J. Cobden, "The Dachau Gas Chamber Myth,"
March-April 1995 Journal, pp. 14-26.)
Also typical is the attitude of Howard Kaplan, a Jewish writer in
Los Angeles. In a recent article about Zaidenstadt published in an
influential Israeli magazine, he acknowledges that "a difficult
question arises from Martin's fabrications," but concludes on an
upbeat note: "But is exaggerating the horror really an affront to
truth? I'm not persuaded... What matters is that Martin has
ultimately found his way back to Judaism at the doors of the
crematorium." (H. Kaplan, "The Man by the Door," The Jerusalem
Report, April 10, 2000, pp. 46-47.)
A recent New York Times article about the new "Martin" film
acknowledges that Zaidenstadt's "assertion" of Dachau gassings is
"contrary to the official stories." But instead of forthrightly
identifying his "provocative contentions" as lies, the Times coyly
tells readers: "In the end we learn that Mr. Zaidenstadt's version of
things isn't entirely reliable, but isn't to be dismissed either...
The implicit message of `Martin' [is] that everyone has a
truth to deliver..." ("Holocaust Documentary Explores One Man's
Truth," April 3, 2000.)
No one seems concerned about the toll that such deceit takes on
the residents of the Bavarian town of Dachau, who must live in the
shadow of the camp's government-promoted infamy For example, to avoid
the stigma of having children born in the notorious city, many
expectant mothers go elsewhere to deliver their babies.
The Zaidenstadt story points up the socialintellectual corruption
that is an intrinsic by-product of what Rabbi Michael Goldberg (in
his 1995 book Why Should Jews Survive?) aptly calls "the Holocaust
cult." All the same, Zaidenstadt now joins a growing list of
demonstrably false "Holocaust survivor" eye-witnesses - a slate that
includes Jerzy Kosinski and bestselling author Binjamin Wilkomirski.
(See "Holocaust Survivor Memoir Exposed as Fraud," Sept.-Oct. 1998
Journal, pp. 15-16.)
- M.W
Reprinted from
The
Journal of Historical Review,
(March/April 2000)
The Journal of Historical Review:
P.O. Box 2739 , Newport Beach, CA 92659, USA. Subscription: $40 per
year (domestic).
