Smith's Report No. 62,
February/March 1999 Letters: PO
Box 439016 San Diego CA 92143: [email protected] The U.S.
Holocaust Memorial Museum Fakes a Photo to Rake in
Funds LOOKING
over a recent U S Holocaust Memorial Museum
fundraising mailer, CODOH researcher Richard
Widmann spotted a picture he thought he
recognized. Taken at some time after the American
liberation of Dachau, the picture (shown below)
shows healthy inmates cheerily waving beneath an
American flag run up a makeshift flagpole. There was just one problem, however: the
Museum's caption reads: Former Dachau prisoners celebrate the first
anniversary of their liberation by hoisting a
homemade American flag in thanks on April 30, 1946.
National Archives, Washington -- but Widmann
believed it dated from just days after Dachau's
capture. The photo has long been of interest to
revisionists, and has appeared in standard as well
as revisionist publications, including Joseph
Halow's Innocent at
Dachau (following page 156). Revisionist
have interpreted it and similar photos from Dachau
and other liberated camps that show the good health
and spirits of many of the inmates, as correctives
to attempts to depict wasted victims of typhus and
other epidemics as typical, indeed deliberate,
results of German policy. Widmann wondered whether he could have been
mistaken. And what could have been the USHMM's
purpose in misdating and miscaptioning the photo?
The mailer was a fundraiser, of course, to help
ensure, in the USHMM's words, that "every
generation to come will remember the Holocaust." Of
the dozen Holocaust photographs featured in the
mailer, the one of the inmates hoisting the
American overlaps with one of Jewish "Buchenwald
survivors" ranged under the Israeli flag. [...] When the USHMM remembers "the Holocaust," we may
be certain that as Norman Finkelstein has
characterized the word, "The 'Holocaust' is in
effect the Zionist account..." of what happened to
the Jews during the war. When the USHMM goes to
raise funds from voluntary contributors (rather
than the American taxpayers it derives a large part
of its funding from), it turns first to wealthy
Zionists. [...] The Dachau picture? The folks who put together
this carefully thought-out fundraiser needed a U.S.
flag, but a smaller one, to show that, yes.
Americans count too- but we all know who's top
dog. What about that date, however? Widmann, working
closely with Joseph Halow, who served as a court
reporter at the Dachau war crimes trials,
identified the photo as number 207745 through the
copy in Halow's personal collection. The original
is at the National Archives in Washington D.C., and
has a date stamp on the reverse. The staff at the National Archives confirmed
that the photo was indeed taken on April 30, 1945
and not 1946 as the museum claims. One wonders at
the Museum's temerity in imagining that the
everybody would be hoaxed by a fraud which presumed
that the "survivors" of Dachau would return one
year later, and dress up once more in their prison
garb, to boot. Even so, pictured a crowd of healthy inmates at
Dachau just after liberation runs counter to the
Museum's propaganda efforts. After all, the main
come-on to American gentiles visiting the USHMM is
the link between the American capture of the
camps--amid the tried-and-true scenes of horror-and
the Hitler order-gas chamber-extermination
Holocaust. So, keep the picture, fake the caption,
change the date-and the facts be damned! The USHMM admits that it is raising funds "to
change the way people think." Falsifying the
facts-even in ways as petty as falsely captioning
and falsely dating a relatively unimportant
photograph-is an unworthy way of transforming
people's thought. It is more compatible with
propaganda, "self-criticism," brainwashing, and
other totalitarian methods for controlling, as well
as changing, "the way people think," than it is
with the democratic values of free inquiry and
uncompromising pursuit of the truth. And if the
Museum doesn't scruple to provide a fake
interpretation of this picture, what wouldn't they
do to falsify evidence more central to the
Holocaust legend? |