CLAIM: On page 94 Watt claims he counted the bodies and estimated that from May to the end of November 1944; two crematoria EACH disposed of 5000 corpses a day, seven days a week.
FACT: As Watt several times confirms that the ovens worked 6am to 6pm (page 102) and were shut down at night, to dispose of 5000 bodies a day would require a rate of 417.5 an hour. Each crematorium had 15 retorts, which means just under 28 bodies burnt each hour in EACH retort, or one every two minutes. This is completely incompatible with the data provided by the crematorium manufacturer.
CLAIM: On page 98 Watt claims that 600 or 700 Jewish women were placed in cages and the SS removed their blood with 'big syringes' each day, until they were too sick to give any more. "When that happened they were taken to the gas chambers and a fresh lot of women put into the cages.'
FACT: Watt himself admits that he never saw this ghoulish activity taking place, but 'heard about it from other prisoners'. He also saw 'the corpses, with their arms and bodies covered in puncture marks'. Anyone who has given blood knows that to get blood requires tapping into an artery. Bodies 'covered in puncture marks' are a ghoulish, sick fantasy.
CLAIM: Watt asserts on page 112 that all the horrors he described 'happened constantly, several times a day, each day and every day. I know, because…I was there and I saw it."
FACT: Watt unwittingly implies that there is no evidence to support his wild claims. On page 171, he asserts that the Germans "destroyed anything they could find that would have been the least bit incriminating". Yet he expects us to believe that he, the stoker For five months, was not thrown headfirst into the furnace as part of their clean-up.
There are many more examples of claims in 'Stoker' that are impossible for myself and other concentration camp veterans to believe. Most of Watt's claims range from absurd to ridiculous, yet they have been accepted as 'revelations' about the Holocaust. They include the claim that German guards habitually cut off the penises of Jewish prisoners, that prisoners were regularly thrown into furnaces alive.
APPENDIX III
PRESS STATEMENT
BY ALEXANDER McLELLAND, March 1997
Former Prisoner of War, Teresienstadt (Terezin) Concentration Camp, 1945.
History means telling the truth. But attempts to "Australianise" the Holocaust are leading further from the truth and more into the realms of promotion of racial hatred - against the Germans and those who assisted them.
The Australian-made documentary film "Where Death Wears a Smile (The Smiling Face of Auschwitz)" won the award for best political documentary at the New York Television and Film Festival in 1985. But the evidence of the murder of 40 Australian POW's in Terezin (also known as Teresienstadt) Camp in 1945 by Waffen SS troops, was completely false.
The crux of the documentary was an affadavit which the film-makers claimed was held at the War Crimes Archives in Dortmund, Germany. They claimed the affadavit was signed by "a Czechoslovakian Jew" who was the sole witness to the slaughter of the Australians in the small forest near the camp.
But when I went to Dortmund to see this affadavit I discovered that there was no such thing. On the contrary there were three separate affadavits signed by a Morris Mittelman, which were mutually contradictory. The filmmakers had taken excerpts from each of the affadavits to 'prove' their story, ignoring the remainder which proved it to be false.
Another example is the book "Stoker" written by Australian Donald Watts (with assistance from journalist Dorian Wild) and published in 1995. The book was given prominent coverage in major Australian newspapers but my research indicates that, although the book was sponsered by John Saunders AO, the benefactor of the Sydney Jewish Museum, there was NO coverage of "Stoker" in the Australian Jewish News. Could this be because the AJN recognised it for a fraud and would not support it?
It is interesting that on 23 March and 7 April 1995, just before "Stoker" was published on April 15, the AJN featured a photograph of a scale model of Crematorium 2 at Auschwitz-Birkenau on display at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, USA. The scale model shows that Donald Watts' ghoulish descriptions of mass disposal of bodies are myths.
I have spent the past 25 years researching the facts of the Holocaust in war archives throughout Europe and I am astonished that the blatant lies in "Stoker" have not been refuted. Watts for example claims that he was a stoker of the fires for the crematorium, using logs of fir trees cut down near the camp. Technical information on the crematorium shows beyond doubt that they were COKE fired, not wood fired. There are numerous other obvious errors in 'Stoker'. Watt insists he pushed huge logs into the ovens, but the photographs of the crematorium ovens - including one in "Stoker" itself - show that the furnace stoking doors were small, less than half a metre across.
Watt asserts that bodies were pushed down a chute to the crematorium furnaces. He claims one person had a long pole with a steel plate on the end with which he shoved bodies in, 'as they built up, in a sort of log-jam at the entrance'. The photographs show that in fact the bodies were placed into the furnaces one by one. German records show that it took 1 to 2 hours to burn a single body. Then the ovens had to be cooled between each cremation for 2 hours.
Watt claims wagons of bodies were "pushed at regular intervals from the gas chamber to the furnace". But Watt admits on page 104 that the gas chambers at Birkenau were underground. The bodies were put in a purpose-built elevator and lifted, one at a time. They were then put onto trolleys and placed on rollers which slid them into the crematorium retorts - each of which held one body at a time.
On page 98 Watt claims that 600 or 700 Jewish women were placed in cages and the SS removed their blood with "big syringes" each day, until they were too sick to give any more. "When that happened they were taken to the gas chambers and a fresh lot of women put into the cages."
Watt himself admits that he never saw this activity taking place, but "heard about it from other prisoners". He also saw "the corpses, with their arms and bodies covered in puncture marks". Anyone who has given blood knows that to get blood requires tapping into an artery. Bodies "covered in puncture marks" are a sick fantasy.
Last July 19 the AJN carried an article by Bernard Freedman about my research. Mr Freedman quoted Major-General Digger James of the RSL as stating he had never heard of myself nor the Small Fortress Association, representing ex-prisoners of war at Terezin, of which I am a secretary. I saw Digger James on February 13 and showed him the article; he was annoyed and said, "I never said that. These people never approached me."
It is time that the Jewish community of Australia purged its ranks of the people promoting racial hatred, at the expense of the truth. Failure to do so could cause a severe backlash against the Jewish people if they are shown to be complicit in falsifying history, especially to innocent school children.
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