Posted on 04/17/2003 7:35:42 AM PDT by BunnySlippers
Bottled Note Found in German Concentration Camp After 60 Years
Berlin, April 17 (Bloomberg) -- A worker found a bottled message by two inmates of a German concentration camp almost 60 years after it was hidden in a wall.
The bottled note was sealed into a hollow space in a wall of the Sachsenhausen camp north of Berlin, the site's memorial center said. It was secured with a wire in the wall's cavity and broke when a builder tore down the wall as part of measures to build a visitor center.
``Homewards I want to go again,'' inmate Anton E. wrote in the message dated April 19, 1944, seven years after he was put into the camp. The Polish captive Tadeuzs Witkowski noted that he had been in Sachsenhausen since July 1940, the center said in a faxed statement. He also stated his identification number.
The Nazi regime in Germany used the camps to kill six million European Jews as well as numerous resistance fighters and members of political parties opposing Adolf Hitler's rule. The prisoners were murdered in gas chambers upon their arrival at 29 camps such as Ausschwitz, Dachau and Bergen-Belsen, or were worked and starved to death in more than 160 labor camps.
About 18 million people were imprisoned in such camps during the Nazi regime of which 11 million died, estimates show.
A Nazi court in 1934 convicted Anton E., a member of Germany's communist KPD party, to four years in prison for resisting the regime. He was transferred later to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp where he was liberated in 1945.
``My spirit is unbroken. It'll have to get better soon,'' wrote Anton E. who was born in 1902 in Frechen close to Cologne and died in the early 1980's. His note was passed on to his widow, the memorial center said.
Witkowksi was deported from his hometown of Rzeszow to Sachsenhausen in 1940 at the age of 20 because he had attended an illegal learning group after his high school was closed by German troops that had occupied Poland.
He joined Anton E.'s construction unit in the camp and together they built the wall that would separate the building to make room for a slaughterhouse.
Witkowksi was freed by U.S. troops close to the northern town of Schwerin in 1945 while on a so-called death march the Nazis had organized in an attempt to dissolve the concentration camps before the arrival of allied troops that were already approaching.
``Tadeuzs then went into the American zone and emigrated to the U.S. or Canada,'' the memorial center quoted Zdzislaw Jasko, a fellow prisoner of Anton E. and Witkowski, as saying.
The memorial center will exhibit the piece of paper with one message scribbled on the front and one on the back in the visitor center that will open at the end of the year.
-Friederike Truemper in the Berlin bureau
-0- (BN ) Apr/17/2003 13:25 GMT
So now, the "bone of contention" is extermination as opposed to gas chambers. Funny critter :).
Nothing new in terms of revisionist approach, however.
Also, I don't see how my quoting Lucy Davidowicz makes me a denier.
No. That you profess not to know about IHR, when you clearly have a knowledge of the denier talking points, know relevant material, and now show knowledge of David Irving who is intimately connected with IHR (to put it mildly) shows that you're not being honest. Learn to read.
When I was stationed in Germany, I visited Dachau and Flossenburg on several occasions. I saw the ovens, the mass graves. At Flossenburg, in the middle of the well-manicured grounds, was an area that was marked with a large sign: PRISONERS WERE SHOT HERE.
Splitting hairs in this topic is ridiculous.
BTW, Sam...these remarks were not meant for you, I'm merely adding to your post.
Makes me all the more curious.
But that's a problem with many people: as soon as it deals with the Jooos --- everything comes out. They killed Christ; they poisoned wells in EUrope; they kill Christian children to make Matzos; they made us fight in Iraq "their" war; they "invented" the Holocaust.
If you confront them, they usually respond: "If I disagree wioth Irael, it does not make me anti-Semitic; I am America-first." Yeh, right...
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