Russ Folsom wrote in part:
As for the incident at Dachau,
one rather astute friend of mine observed that by
raising the spectre of an Allied atrocity
having taken place at Dachau in the very last days
of the war, the 'revisionists' seek to ply the
popular imagination with the cynical distortion
that the only crime that ever happened at
this particular KZ was the 'massacre of German
soldiers' by their enemies, and thus rob the world
of the true legacy of enslavement, brutality, and
inhumanity which Dachau actually represents.
I used the example of GI's executing SS at
Dachau a few weeks ago to reinforce my view that we
were not morally clean ourselves. Some time soon
after this message I offered as proof that more
than one or two were killed a reference to a photo
at the USHMM archive on their website. Just now I
enlarged the photo and counted about forty bodies
against the wall. One GI has BAR, another an .30
cal. carbine, usually, but not always, carried by
officers.
In any case, I did not mean to assign moral
equality to this act. In fact, if I had been there,
I am fairly I would have participated in the
killings as well. I would have been wrong, but if I
were battle hardened, and had heard of the SS
massacre of prisoners at Malmedy (the GI's had
their hands tied behind their backs with wire), I
have little doubt I would have shot them as well,
the bastards.
And there is an additional troubling aspect to
this. I was fortunate enough to know Erick
Kulka, the co-author of
The Death Factory
(Birkenau). He told me that after liberation, I
think from Belsen, some prisoners had found a gun
and were going around killing SS. They told Kulka
to do so and he refused. He told me he didn't want
to be like the SS. Another time he mentioned that
his SS Sergeant in the locksmith shop at Birkenau
protrected his prisoners and was responsible for
saving their lives.
This raises some troubling questions regarding
assumptions of collective guilt. In any case
similar SS men, were, if nothing else guilty of
some type of complicity, though I don't think they
should have been killed.
And one point should be addressed to the
revisionists. Bear with a short story. On one of my
early visits to Birkenau I took along a man who I
had worked with when he was an inmate at the
federal prison at Marion IL. This is the prison
that replaced Alcatraz. This guy was very tough,
and he was very intelligent and sensitive. The
first sight of Birkenau can be very shocking. As
you approach, it is exactly 1km. wide. It really a
huge camp. Peter kept shaking his head. I asked him
what was going on. He said: They didn't have it
coming. By this he meant that the prisoners were
innocent. The SS at Dachau, or any other camp for
that matter, were not simply innocent. They had
volunteered for this duty, and were, if not
directly responsible for the murder, certainly
complicitous. This is not to discount the
possibility that some SS men at Dachau may have
been innocent, or perhaps it would be correct to
say not as guilty as some of their compatriots.
More items by Alan Jacobs: [
write to David Irving