Paul Rea has another
go at the old Theresienstadt-Terezin Small Fortress story: Where Death Wears a Smile, screened on Channel 7 on 29 June 1985,
partly financed and endorsed by the “Hon” Christopher Skase and the
Sydney Jewish Community. From the credits listed on the video Paul Rea wrote
the script and was in charge of the historical research.
This Aussie Holocaust
docu drama won prizes in New York and, of course, in Germany.
Australian solider,
Alex McClelland, a POW and survivor of the Small Fortress at Terezin,
contends that this production was mainly based on the three totally
discredited affidavits given by one Jewish inmate at Terezin, Moritz
Mittelmann, and the eye-witness account of Australian POW, Walter Steilberg.
Mittelmann’s
affidavits were given to the Czech Regional Court authorities in Bratislava
on 2 November 1961, and again on 16 November 1974, and also to the German
War Crimes prosecutor at Dortmund on 2 June 1975. Herman Weissing, a senior
prosecutor of Nazi war crimes, replied to the Mittelmann accusations: “I
am quite certain that this incident did take place”. Weissing must have
known better because the 1978 Terezin document states that no allied
soldiers were executed or tortured and all 560 of them were released from
Terezin at the end of the war.
All three affidavits
contain material that is contradictory. Had Rea studied these documents in
some detail he should have been aware they contain contradictory
information. McClelland confirms
that these Affidavits cast doubt on whatever Mittelmann claims is the truth
because there were no other alleged witnesses to what he was reporting on.
Both Mittelmann’s
and Steilberg’s various affidavits, wherein they claim that German SS
guards killed forty Australian and New Zealand POWs at Terezin, is
not supported by the official documentation held at the Terezin camp museum.
In his affidavit to
the District Court, Adelaide, Australia, of 21 October 1992, Alexander
McClelland ripped the whole story apart. McClelland gave an interview to Fia
Cumming published in the Sun-Herald,
Sydney, 9 August 1998. In this article, ‘POW seeks truth in death
camps’, McClelland comments on the atrocity stories told in the video by
Walter Steilberg, and recently repeated by him to breakfast presenter Fran
Kelly on ABC Radio National on 30 August 2007 at which the ABC publication
of Rea’s book Voices from the
Fortress was announced.
In the 9 August 1998
newspaper article, we read the following:
“McClelland is also
sceptical about atrocities which Walter Steilberg claims in the film to have
witnessed, including barrels of human fat, headless bodies and
blood-splattered walls. “This is nonsense”, McClelland said. “Not one
other ex-POW from the small fortress recalls any such horrors”.
Steilberg also claimed
that a cart with dead bodies could be seen heading towards the cook
house. McClelland said, “Detailed maps of Terezin showed that
Steilberg could not have seen where the carts went. Steilberg claims to have
been fed lumps of meat, possibly human flesh, where other POWs were given
only bread. Steilberg, who lives on the NSW north coast, could not be
contacted by the Sun-Herald last
week.
McClelland reminds us
that this horror story sounds similar to the one of Donald Watt’s books, Stoker,
in which he claims that the gas chambers and furnaces worked twenty-four
hours a day, seven days a week, although he said they had to be cooled down
each night and fired up each morning. Watt claims he fed the Auschwitz fires
with huge fir tree logs and that bodies were pushed down a chute to the
furnaces and built up >in a sort-of log-jam at the entrance<. Watt
counted 5000 corpses a day, burned in each of the two crematories in
Auschwitz-Birkenau between May and the end of November 1944, equivalent to
one body every two minutes in each retort. But McClelland says Auschwitz was
surrounded by beech not fir trees, and photographs of the ovens, including
one in Stoker, show they had doors
less than half a metre wide.
It has also been
argued that the Auschwitz crematorium furnaces were fired by coke not wood.
Watt also claims that six to seven hundred Jewish women were kept in a cage
and had blood drawn from them each day with >>big syringes<<
until they died.
>>There are many
more examples of claims in Stoker
that are impossible for me and other concentration camp veterans to
believe,<< he said.
According, then, to
McClelland the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem investigated Donald
Watt’s claims as presented in his book Stoker,
and concluded that Watt had not spent any time at Auschwitz-Birkenau or at
any of the other Auschwitz camps.
Back to the newspaper
article: >>In April 1995 the chairman of the Vidal Sassoon Centre for
the Study of Antisemitism, Professor Yehuda Bauer, said claims that the Nazis had made soap from Jews’ fat were known to be
false and simply misuse people’s fears and obsessions.<<
Nonetheless,
Israel’s chief Rabbi, Israel Meir Lau, demanded that an auction house
return a bar of soap to its owner, >>so that it could be given a
proper burial<<.
McClelland said he was
concerned that escalating claims were being filed, and fuelling racial
hatred against the Germans.
>>The danger was
that if the exaggerated claims about the Holocaust were disproved,
later generations might become sceptical and reject even the horrible
truth,<< he said.
The author Gerald
Green wrote the book, Artists of
Terezin, in which he claimed people were dragged off to the gas chambers
in Terezin and the German’s sole intent was to murder their prisoners. But
in the same book he said there were no gas chambers at Terezin.
Finally, in this 9
August 1998 article, Paul Rea is quoted as saying that he himself did not
verify the claims made in the Mittelmann Affidavit but relied on it because
it had come from the Dortmund War Crimes Prosecutor’s office. He did not
go into the Terezin archives searching for documents when making this film.
Fia Cumming also notes that Rea quoted selectively >>from two of the
affidavits in a National Times
article in 1985, in which he
intermingled paragraphs from both statements to make one consistent account.<<
This makes sense in
regard to this Holocaust horror story because if Rea would have used the
official Terezin document, dated 19 September 1978, which refutes the claims
of Mittelmann and Steilberg, he would most probably not have received
funding from Channel 7 and the Australian Jewish community – and would
have had no story to tell nor story to sell.
It is to Alex
McClelland’s credit that he obtained an official statement from the
Terezin Museum about the claim that SS guards had killed 40 Australian and
New Zealand soldiers. Dated 19 September 1978 and signed by Vaclav Novak,
director of the Terezin Memorial Museum, it stated:
>>The prisoners
of war from Great Britain and its dependencies [Australia, New Zealand –
ed] came to the Small Fortress since Autumn 1944. … With comparison with other prisoners in the Small Fortress, their
position was much better. They were better dressed and received food stuffs
from parcels sent by the Red Cross. They did not go, in the most part, to
work. The only exception was in March 1945 when almost all prisoners of
the Small Fortress had to go and dig anti-tank ditches in the neighbourhood
of Terezin. This was only for a very short period of time.
They
were never tortured by the prison wardens nor anybody of them executed. They
remained here until beginning of April 1945. On the 4th of April
1945 a transport containing 560 prisoners of war was dispatched from Terezin.
This transport consisted not only of British prisoners of war but also of
other members of the allies, the most numerous group was that of the Soviet
prisoners of war.<<
Let me get back to the
book, Voices from the Fortress,
which Rea calls in his Foreword ‘Stories
from the Fortress’. In the photo section there is a notable mix-up with
Bob Slater appearing twice, once as himself and the other as Walter Wise,
the Australian soldier.
The book is the old
recycled Terezin horror story based on the proven false and refuted
affidavits and eye witness accounts of Walter Steilberg and Moritz
Mittelmann.
Boy, oh boy! When will
it ever end? From >Swindler’s List< to human flesh in Terezin and
giant injections in Auschwitz, soap made of Jewish fat, and lamp shades made
of human skin – there is no end to it. There are hundreds more made-up
Holocaust horror stories available on a daily basis.
A closer look at
Rea’s book is merely that – more of the same with some revision
regarding the Moritz Mittelman affidavit.
In this book Rea and
Steilberg accuse the Australian Department of Veteran Affairs of failing
former prisoners-of-war of their rights. The Department failed to contact
the Czech authorities regarding Australian and other Allies POWs who ended
up contrary to the Geneva Convention of War in German concentration camps
instead of POW camps. This accusation is correct, and the inaction of this
government department for many years is a scandal in itself.
However, the problem
is that Rea did exactly the same when he was in charge of research and
writing the film script for the TV production, When
Death Wears a Smile. One phone call to the Terezin archives would have
made it clear that not one of the Allied POWs in the Small Fortress was
tortured or killed, something that was well known to Rea, so according to
Alexander McClelland, who had given Rea the 1978 Terezin documents before
film production started.
To say the least, Rea
and producer Heinman, were both selective with their evidence here in order
to get their story together. Had they mentioned the 1978 documents regarding
Allied POWs in Terezin, the story would immediately have fallen apart and
there would have been no story to tell and to sell.
At page 195 of his
book Rea quotes Alexander McClelland:
>>McClelland
developed an infected leg but was still ordered to the anti-tank ditch where
he believes he was saved by one of the Waffen SS men who noticed his
condition and gave him a first aid kit. He recalls getting near a window in
the cell facing the yard and seeing a kapo dressed in black bringing two
prisoners in striped uniforms from the small cell opposite. [According to
McClelland’s book, these were not Allied POWs but concentration camp
prisoners – DB] The kapo stood the prisoners by the window of cell 44 and
went to work on them with a club until he had beaten them to death. … One
day the kapo in black opened the door and came into the cell. He found
McClelland, brandished his club and said: >Herr Doktor thinks you need
some medicine<. McClelland, unable to move away, did his best to protect
his head from the blows. …<<
This quotation appears
in both McClelland’s and Rea’s books. Let me augment the quote by adding
from McClelland’s book:
>>In a letter I
had in 1989 from Charles Croal, the New Zealand Airforce bloke I had swapped
identities with in 1942 (so he could escape), he mentioned the Jewish kapo
in Compound 4 of the Small Fortress who split his ear in two. He must have
been the same kapo as he was the same kapo that bashed me up, as he was the
only kapo that carried a heavy stick, of the two kapos in Compound
4.<<
Rea omits the fact
that McClelland described these kapos in his affidavit as being Jewish. I
wonder why Rea omitted that? Does Rea fear of being called an antisemite if
he pointed out that the kapos were mainly Jewish at Terezin? Kapos is the
abbreviation for concentration camp police – Konzentrationslagerpolizei.
Alexander McClelland,
who can claim credit of having published the important Terezin document, is
pushed by Rea into the anti-Zionist right-wing Holocaust denier corner in
order to make Steilberg more credible – which, in my opinion, he is not.
Rea also omitted to mention the two Affidavits that state Alexander
McClelland was a POW in the Small Fortress.
According to
McClelland, Rea knew about the two Affidavits, one from Herbert George
Moles, Bletchley, Milton, dated 21 August 1979, states:
>>Alexander
McClelland was in the same group of British POWs who left the Small Fortress
Terezin concentration camp in early May 1945. We were liberated by the
Americans.<<
The
other affidavit is from James Roy Daniels, London, dated 20 August 1979:
>>I was in the
same group of British POWs as McClelland an Australian. We left the Small
Fortress, Terezin in early May and were liberated by the American forces
three days later in a small village.<<
Interestingly, Rea
calls Mittelmann’s contradictory affidavits as >>unproven<<.
To that I respond: they are simply false because the official documents from
Terezin museum confirms that.
In order to make
Steilberg more credible, Rea attempts to neutralise McClelland’s Terezin
document. At p 248 Rea quotes
McClelland where McClelland condemns Mittelmann:
>>In his view
[McClelland] Mittelmann was wrong and because I [Rea] had conflated his
statement I had wilfully distorted and sensationalised his allegation about
the massacre of Australians. According to McClelland, this was intended to
fabricate a lie to >Australianise the Holocaust and promote Zionist
racial hatred<. He continued to write letters to politicians including
Prime Minister John Howard, denouncing, accusing and pleading. Ultimately,
he found himself in the far right of Australian politics.<<
This paragraph Rea
footnotes as 35, which reads: >>Adelaide Institute Report 20 May 2005
>Exposing Literary Frauds and documentaries about the Holocaust<.
<<
After all, his book Voices
from the Fortress, which he also calls Stories
from the Fortress is based mainly on Walter Steilberg’s Affidavits and
eyewitness accounts. Rea dedicated the book To
Walter Steilberg ‘… he was our mainstay, he was the backbone of us
all.’
This is because the
original story as depicted in the video was based mainly on Mittelmann’s
false affidavits, which McClelland demolished
in his book: The Answer –
Justice. An Australian Prisoner of War and Witness in the Small Fortress
Terezin Concentration Camp in 1945, published in
1998 by HIP, PO Box 887, Toronto 2283, Australia, ISBN 0-906879-41-8.
Likewise with Walter
Steilberg who has a flowering fantasy, especially in regard to torture and
murder of Allied POWs in the Small Fortress of Terezin. The notorious meals
made of human flesh and fat gives the reader goose bumps. I wonder if
Steilberg read the book, Hanibal the
Canibal, who went into a Pizza Hut outlet, ordered a giant pizza with
everyone on it!
Steilberg’s human
flesh story is the Silence of the Lamb movie all over again, much like the Watt’s
Stoker story in Auschwitz-Birkenau
where the Germans hold six to seven hundred Jewish women in a giant cage.
From time to time the Dr Mengele boys came with giant syringes, stuck them
into the ladies through the bars, draining their blood out of their bodies
until they dropped dead. I’m surprised that Hollywood has not made
Holocaust films yet out of these >>true horror<< stories. After
all, the refuted lamp shades made of human skin and soap made from Jewish
fat were very successful and profitable, even until today. Doesn’t it also
reminds you of the chopped-off hands from Belgian’s children cut off by
German soldiers during World War One? I assume the Krauts had them for
lunch. During the 1920s the British government actually apologized to the
German government for having spread these horror war propaganda stories.
There is no business like Shoah business.
Another interesting
matter raised by Rea in the book is the 5 million Soviet POWs captured by
the German Army of whom two million died. He does not inform us of the cause
of their deaths. He quotes from another horror story where a German guard
used his German Shepherd dog to kill prisoners, slowly then have the dogs
eat all the flesh until only the bones were left. I wonder why the dogs
didn’t also eat the bones!
In order to bring
balance here, Rea should have mentioned what happened at the various Allied
POW camps holding German POWs, which had no shelter, for example the Rhein
Wiesen in Germany, where the Americans slowly starved to death about a
million German POWs. Canadian James Baque writes in detail about this
tragedy in his books Other Losses
and Crimes and Mercies.
How could this have
happened that the German POWs were treated like that? According to the
Geneva Convention of War they should have been treated like any POW, but
Eisenhower decided to remove this protection by declaring them
>non-combatants< and this removed such protection. The USA is still
doing the same, for example at the US Army base on Cuba, Guantanamo Bay
prison where the US military is still holding captured individuals
indefinitely without laying any charge.
According to my
knowledge Eisenhower was never charged by the International War Crimes
Tribunal at Nürnberg or any other tribunal for ordering this genocide of
these German POWs.
Rea’s book is in my
view a rushed, revised and recycled job. There are translation errors,
photographic stuff-ups, and the language is, to say the least,
unsophisticated, the story is sexed up, important documents like the Terezin
documents are not mentioned again, like in the earlier video production.
Some
politically correct critics will give Rea five stars. I give him six
lemmings* and rest my case, and add the following for your consideration:
*Lem-ing
(lemming) n. 1.
Any of various volelike rodents of the genus Lemmus
and related genera, of northern regions, such as the European species L. lemmus, noted for its mass migrations as a result of periodic
population increases. 2. A
person who wilfully follows a disastrous course of action; a
self-destructive person.
History
Lessons at the People’s University,
The
Guardian Weekly, 18 May 2007, By Tatum Anderson.
From German Stalags to
Malaysia, Douglas Gillam gave up a math degree to fight the Nazis. So when his
plane was shot down over enemy territory in 1943 he might have been surprised
had he known how soon he would be back at university.
While he was a POW in
Stallag IV, B, near Leipzig in eastern Germany, he began to receive textbooks
and exam papers sent from England.
>>I attempted to
sit a three-hour paper in the corner of a room with 350 other men in it, many
of whom were playing games. My hut commander was given the job of sitting next
to me to make sure that nobody gave me assistance.<<
A camp university
flourished as prisoners began to teach each other.
Gillam became one of more than 30 lecturers, holding math lessons twice
a week. Other subjects ranged from ecumenical Greek to car repairs. Professor
Stephen Guest, whose father Frank, gave lectures to fellow prisoners at Stalag
IV, B says:
>>Even
the Germans used to attend the lectures on economics and psychology.<<
Guest followed in his
father’s footsteps, teaching distant learning courses.
This curious state of
affairs was facilitated by the 1929 Geneva Convention. While Europe was ripped
apart by war, the Germans allowed the University of London, the Red Cross
Society and the Order of St John of Jerusalem to deliver exam papers to 17,600
POWs. Almost 11 thousand exams were taken at 88 camps between 1940-45.
The University of
London collected exam papers from institutions across the UK and dispatched
them from Oxford University’s New Bodleian Library in Red Cross parcels.
They were sent to the camps in Germany and Italy by a circuitous route through
Allied Europe. Completed papers returned to Oxford along the same route.
This is one remarkable
chapter in the history of the University of London’s Distance Learning
Department, the External Program, which celebrates its 150th
Anniversary next year.
**************
David
Brockschmidt’s final comment:
Here you go, dear
reader, Shakespeare for lunch instead of human flesh, Keynes for dinner
instead of lampshades made from human skin, John Stuart Mill for breakfast
instead of blood transfusions from Auschwitz-Birkenau and real soap in the
shower. These were the real Hogan Heroes.
I
shall claim here that historical revisionism will grind historical lies into
the ground and expose the individuals and groups who pull the strings behind
the scene in order to cover up their own war crimes and genocides in order
to secure their financial, social and political status. No memory hole is
deep enough for the liars and deniers to hide historical truth from the
public forever. The arms of Revisionists are very long and we will get to
the bottom of it. Remember what the assassinated US President, Abraham
Lincoln said: >>You can lie to some people for some time; you can lie
to all people for a long time, but you cannot lie to all people
forever.<<
***
Home
from Nazi Hell to be called a liar,
The
Australian, Aug.30, 2007
By
Lauren Wilson
When Walter Steilberg
returned to Australian after being liberated from Terezin, a Nazi
concentration camp in the former Czechoslovakia, the Australian government
told him he had never been there. It was only 40 years later, in 1987, that
Canberra officially recognized the horrors experienced by Mr Steilberg.
Yesterday he helped
launch a historical account of the crusade for recognition, Voices
from the Fortress, by journalist Paul Rea. The book chronicles the
illegal detainment of Australian and New Zealand servicemen in the Nazi
concentration camp known as the Small Fortress of Terezin.
The book is dedicated
to Mr Steilberg, who Rea describes as >>an inspirational man<<
Mr Steilberg escaped
from eight POW camps across Europe, some comparatively comfortable because
he believed part of a soldier’s job was to try to make his way back to the
front line.
>>I often think
now, what the bloody hell was I doing, but it was duty<<, Mr Steilberg
said.
As punishment for
escaping, Mr Steilberg was sent to Terezin in 1944, where he shared a cell
with six British and New Zealand soldiers. Nothing could prepare him for the
horrors of Terezin, a site he described as being designed to >>liquidate as many prisoners as possible<<.
The atrocities Mr
Steilberg witnessed left him with enduring scars. He describes still being
able to >>smell the dead bodies<< when he travelled back to
Terezin with Rea in 1984.
When the camp was
liberated in 1945 after Adolf Hitler’s suicide, Mr Steilberg returned to
Australia.
But because the Army
had no documentation of his detainment in a Nazi concentration camp, it
denied it happened.
The government’s
refusal to recognise the illegal detainment of Mr Steilberg was a cruel
insult to the serviceman and a product of bureaucratic laziness on the part
of the Australian Army, according to Rea.
It also prevented him
from approaching West Germany for rightful war crimes compensation. While Mr
Steilberg eventually received $10,000 compensation from the Australian
government following its official recognition of Terezin in 1987, he said
>>It was too late<<.
Today Mr Steilberg is
grateful that Rea pursued his story. He is also relieved his experience is
now on the public record.
And his wife, Doris,
who has stood by him throughout the writing of the book, said:
>>He’s better and more at ease with himself these days<<.
Allied
POWs in 1944
Bob
Slater, foreground, white shirt; Wal Steilberg top row, third from right; Stan
Roper foreground, left.
