Newsgroups: alt.revisionism
Subject: Holocaust Almanac - Eyewitness Auschwitz: Mental Patients
Summary: Brief description of shootings of mental patients at Birkenau
         during the year 1943
Reply-To: kmcvay@oneb.almanac.bc.ca
Followup-To: alt.revisionism
Organization: The Old Frog's Almanac, Vancouver Island, CANADA
Keywords: Auschwitz,Birkenau

Archive/File: holocaust/poland/auschwitz muller.011
Last-modified: 1993/09/20
XRef: index auschwitz

   "Occasionally mentally ill persons were shot in the crematorium.  Many
   accepted death calmly because they did not understand what was
   happening.  In 1943 a few minor transports arrived from Poland,
   obviously patients from mental hospitals.  Conditions there must have
   been bad, for almost all were under-nourished and emaciated.  Their
   clothes were shabby and threadbare and most of them were crawling
   with lice.  When asked to undress, these people would react in
   different ways.  A few quite clearly did not understand what they
   were supposed to do; even when the request was repeated with menacing
   firmness they still stood there impassively.  It was only when SS men
   began to beat and shout at them that they grasped what was expected
   of them.  Many would stare at the SS dazed and frightened only to
   relapse into complete indifference.  Still others marched to and fro
   muttering incomprehensible monologues, oblivious of what was demanded
   of them.  But then, with them the SS men did not insist on their
   undressing.  As they were led to the wall of death they could see,
   Iying at their feet, their fellow sufferers who had just been shot.
   Only very few seemed affected by the sight, most just stood there
   staring vacantly.  But there were others who when asked to undress
   complied with alacrity, giggling and smirking.  For often there were
   females among them, and the thought of seeing naked women excited
   them intensely.


                              Work Cited

Mu"ller, Filip. Eyewitness Auschwitz: Three Years in the Gas Chambers.
New York: Stein and Day, 1979

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