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His Sisters Were Killed in Allied Air Raids, not at Auschwitz Courtesy of AHRS
by Harry de Quetteville
Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/2603431/Bergen-Belsen-survivor-learns-of-sisters-fate-64-years-on.html
Eugene Black found the archive revealed that his sisters had been killed instead in an Allied bombing attack on the factory where they had been forced to work near Buchenwald [Emma: Yep, and I am certain there were numerous others who shared this fate—perhaps tens-of-thousands or more. Air raids are really terrible. Non-combatants are the ‘vital point’ [target or ‘center of gravity’] of strategic air strikes. The point of the Allied raids was to avoid the German armed forces, which the Allies failed to defeat in face-to-face combat, and instead take the war to the German civilians in order to break the national morale. Some 800,000 German civilians died in the Allied air raids.]
Then he visited Germany's biggest wartime archive, where a major new effort has just begun to make its unparalleled records more widely available, and discovered they had been spared.
"When we arrived at Auschwitz I was immediately separated from my mother and two sisters," he said yesterday, from his home near Leeds. "Five minutes later I was separated from my father. I never saw any of them again." After accessing the files at Bad Arolsen in central Germany however, Mr Black, a Czech Jew deported to the Nazi's most notorious camp in May 1944, discovered that his sisters - like him - had been selected not for death but for slave labour teams.
"After 64 years believing they had perished in the gas chambers with my mother the documents came as such a shock," he said.
Mr Black endured a horrific 12-month ordeal that saw him transferred through a series of camps until he was eventually liberated by British troops at Bergen-Belsen. [Emma: How and why did he survive all of these transfers? Why wasn’t he ‘exterminated’? Why don’t any of these stories cause even one mainstream historian to question what really happened? Why does the crazy train keep on going? I really do fail to understand this.]
At Bad Arolsen he learned that his sisters had also avoided the gas chambers.
But to his horror, Mr Black, who anglicised his Czech name Jeno Schwarcz, found the archive revealed that they had been killed instead in an Allied bombing attack on the factory where they had been forced to work near Buchenwald.
"It's unbelievable. It still has to sink in," he said. "I've had to think things through again. But at least they died together and weren't gassed.
"It must have been a terrible death in the chambers," he added. [Emma: Had there been gas chambers, then yes, it would have been terrible.]
Mr Black's visit to Bad Arolsen two weeks ago came as the archive launched a new programme to digitise a wealth of documents from millions of 'displaced persons' - DPs - after the war.
Tales from concentration camp survivors, refugees, exiles, and even Nazis trying to secure anonymity by submerging themselves in the human flood, are testament to a shattered continent.
"This part of the archive has never been studied by historians," said spokeswoman Kathrin Flor. "It gives a fantastic portrait of Europe after the war: who was where, who survived the camps, where they were all going." Bad Arolsen has spent almost 150,000 pounds to acquire scanning equipment to digitise its post-war archive in more than 20 million images. The records being photographed include the 75,000 files of those 'DPs' who found their way to the UK after the end of the conflict.
Among the records being photographed is the CM1 - Care and Maintenance - card of Mr Black, then Eugene Schwarcz, made shortly before he emigrated to Britain in 1949 after working as a translator with the British army.
Above a boyish photograph it provides a grim record of his year-long odyssey as a 16 year-old through the network of camps built for genocide from Poland to the German border with France.
It shows how, after 10 days at Auschwitz he was selected for transfer to Buchenwald before being sent from there to Dora-Mittelbau camp in central Germany to work as a slave labourer on Hitler's "wonder weapon" programme of V-1 and V-2 rockets.
It was while clearing tunnels for 14 hours a day with little food that he caught pneumonia and was sent to the nearby Harzungen sub-camp, where he credits a German air force doctor with saving his life, by prescribing him light work duties. That crucial medical order is included in his Bad Arolsen file.
"The Germans were brilliant at keeping records," he said. "But I had no idea they went into such detail.” [Emma: Yes, the Bad Arolsen archives completely shatter the last vestige that there was ever a ‘plan’ to exterminate Jews in gas chambers. There are absolutely no records about the alleged ‘genocide’ and there never will be. There was never a plan to mass murder any ethnic group during WWII, except the Allied plan (the Morgenthau Plan) to mass murder and mass sterilize the German ethnic group. The Allied plan was documented.]
One file in the archive notes, for example, the number of lice found during an inspection of 667 prisoners in Block 6 of the Grossrosen camp, in today's Poland, on November 28th, 1944. Despite the imminent collapse of the Nazi war machine, camp guards meticulously counted 39 lice.
For Mr Black however, the efforts underway at Bad Arolsen are about more than just documenting the horrors of the war.
“It made such a big difference to me to see that what I have been living with is true. Because it's there in black and white. I can't explain what it meant to close at long last this terrible experience in my life. It's just unbelievable.” [Emma: Well, at least this Jew has piece of mind. But how many German survivors still do not? How many Germans were hanged for crimes like this one that never happened? How many Germans still feel guilty about Black’s relatives when in fact it was the Allies that murdered them?]
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