[Continued]

Porter:

TRUE: Concentration camp inmates died of epidemic disease including scarlet fever, typhoid, dysentery, and typhus <353, 421, 445, 449>.

The whole truth: yes, and they also died of gassing, shooting, hanging, beating, phenol injections, etc. Porter continues:

TRUE: Auschwitz was a swamp, full of mud, snow, and ice (forgetting to tell us that the funeral pyres were in holes in the ground, according to Document USSR-8, a Soviet "War Crimes Report" which is our principal source of information).

The whole truth: there is far more information about Auschwitz than the Soviet "War Crimes Report." There is Höss's autobiography, the statements of Böck, SS Dr. Kremer's diary, the statement of Alter Fajnzylberg, and hundreds of other inmates and guards. It is doubtful that Auschwitz was full of snow and ice in the summer - which is when the pit burning (due to the failure of some the crematory ovens) took place in 1944 as massive numbers of Hungarian Jews arrived. This pit burning was photographed by the Resistance; these photographs may be seen on p. 422 of Pressac, J. C.: Auschwitz: Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers.³⁴

Porter:

TRUE: All concentration camps were industrial installations with huge factories <327, 413, 421>. All camps contained hospitals <439>.

The real text:

Oranienburg had begun as a concentration camp. From the offices of Section D, every aspect of prison life and death was regulated. Its chief, Richard Glücks, had responsibility as well, in consultation with [General Oswald] Pohl [head of the SS Main Economic and Administrative Office], for establishing the balance between laborers and candidates for the chambers, for the equation in which X represented slave labor and Y represented the more immediately condemned.³⁵

The whole truth (on concentration camps):

"Konzentrationslager" (concentration camp) is not to be confused with "Vernichtungslager" (exermination or annihilation camp). The latter term was applied to Treblinka, Belzec, and Sobibor, the camps whose only purpose was death. ... and on hospitals:

On principle, no one wanted to be put into the clinic. In Plaszow it had been a dangerous place where you were made to take Dr. Blancke's terminal benzine treatment. Even here in Brinnlitz, there was always a risk of sudden inspections, of the type that had already taken the boy children. According to the memos of Oranienburg, a labor-camp clinic should not have any patients with serious illnesses. It was not meant to be a mercy home. It was there to offer industrial first aid. ³⁶

Porter: TRUE: There was a children's camp at Auschwitz <520>. Inmate labour was required for industrial purposes <which is the whole point of both the book and film>.

The real text:

One day that summer Regina [Horowitz] saw the film of Auschwitz which the Russians had made and were showing free of charge to the Polish population. She saw the famous frames involving the camp children, who looked out from behind the wire or were escorted by nuns past the electrified fence of Auschwitz I. Being so small and engaging, Richard [her son] figured in most of the frames. [...] But after what he had seen of the scaffolds of Plasow and Auschwitz, she could never take him to a children's playground without his growing hysterical at the sight of the swing frames.³⁷

The whole truth (children's camp):

The inspector's orders, originating from Oranienburg, were that the Gröss-Rosen subcamps should be scoured for children to be used in Dr. Josef Mengele's medical experiments in Auschwitz. ³⁸

...and on inmate labor:

Schindler's contact had been correct in saying that the women had lost nearly all their industrial value. At inspections, young women like Mila Pfefferberg, Helen Hirsch, and her sister could not prevent the camps of dysentery from bowing and aging them. Mrs. Dresner had lost all appetite, even for the ersatz soup. Danka could not force the mean warmth of it down her mother's throat. It meant that she would soon become a Mussulman. The term was camp slang, based on people's memory of newsreels of famine in Muslim countries, for a prisoner who had crossed the borderline that separated the ravenous living from the good-as-dead.

Clara Sternberg, in her early forties, was isolated from the main Schindler group into what could be described as a Mussulman hut. Here, each morning, the dying women were lined up in front of the door and a selection was made. Sometimes it was Mengele leaning toward you. Of the 500 women in this new group of Clara Sternberg's, 100 might be detailed off on a given norning. On another, 50. You rouged yourself with Auschwitz clay; you kept a straight back if that could be managed. You choked where you stood rather than cough. ³⁹

Porter:

Obviously, if only the "unfit" were gassed <which is not true; if so, why build hospitals?>, there was no attempt to exterminate the Jewish people "as a whole".

The whole truth: hospitals help only slightly injured people as well, along with the guards. Slightly injured people are not unfit. See also the text above regarding the orders from Oranienburg. The fact that the Nazis found it convenient to extract slave labor from the Jews does not prove they were not eventually to die. Does the fact that prisons feed death row inmates prove that they will not be executed? Of course not.

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