I have before me a document prepared by the Institute for
Historical Review, Costa Mesa, California. It can be
purchased from that so-called historical institute at a price
of $2.00 for ten copies. This so-called document
professes to prove that the Holocaust never happened. It
asserts that there is no evidence to prove that any member
of the Jewish faith was ever persecuted or died at the
hands of the Nazi Government of Germany. Among other
things, it is claimed that gas chambers and crematoriums
were constructed after the war as tourist attractions. The
document contains a total of 66 questions and answers to
prove that the Holocaust never happened.
I beg to disagree with the authors of this totally sick and
false literature. I am in a good position to disagree. On the
morning of April 29th, 1945, I was a lieutenant colonel
commanding an infantry battalion of the United States 45th
Infantry Division, with the mission of breaching the
defenses of the city of Munich, Germany, in my assigned
combat sector. Shortly after I had launched an attack
against the outer defenses of Munich, I received an order
to immediately proceed to the Dachau Concentration
Camp. I knew nothing about the camp, nor had I ever
heard of it.
Our first experience with the camp came as a traumatic
shock. The first evidence of the horrors to come was a
string of forty railway cars on a railway spur leading into
the camp. Each car was filled with emaciated human
corpses, both men and women. A hasty search by the
stunned infantry soldiers revealed no signs of life among
the hundreds of still bodies, over 2,000 in all.
It was in this atmosphere of human depravity,
degradation and death that the soldiers of my battalion
then entered the camp itself. Almost all of the SS
command guarding the camp had fled before our arrival,
leaving behind about two hundred lower ranking members
of the command. There was some sporadic firing of
weapons. As we approached the confinement area, the
scene numbed my senses. Dante's Inferno seemed pale
compared to the real hell of Dachau. A row of small
cement structures near the prison entrance contained a
coal-fired crematorium, a gas chamber, and rooms piled
high with naked and emaciated corpses. As I turned to
look over the prison yard with un-believing eyes, I saw a
large number of dead inmates lying where they has fallen
in the last few hours or days before our arrival. Since all
of the bodies were in various stages of decomposition, the
stench of death was overpowering. The men of the 45th
Infantry Division were hardened combat veterans. We had
been in combat almost two years at that point. While we
were accustomed to death, we were not able to
comprehend the type of death that we encountered at
Dachau.
Many of the prisoners were still alive, but many were
dying as we arrived and continued to die at the rate of
over a hundred a day for about two weeks after our
arrival. There were over six hundred troops from the 45th
Infantry Division who were in Dachau on the day of
liberation, along with some troops from the 42nd Infantry
Division. During the month of April, 1945, several
hundred other slave labor and death camps were liberated
by American, British and Russian soldiers.
Most certainly, there were well over a hundred thousand
Allied soldiers who were eyewitnesses to the
unspeakable horrors of the Holocaust, along with a
considerable number of Holocaust survivors. To those
sick people in our society who say that it never happened,
I say: Tell us who were there that it never happened,
instead of trying to disseminate your bigotry and hatred by
total revision of the Holocaust history. Your efforts will
never prevail. This remarkable United States Holocaust
Memorial Museum in which we are all assembled today
will always stand as a living monument to remind us
forever that caring men and women must always actively
resist those forces of evil which practice intolerance,
bigotry, hatred and slavery.
Felix L. Sparks
Brigadier General, AUS (ret)