By EMERSON VERMAAT

It was in October 1943 that a young Jewish woman named Franceska Mann grabbed the pistol of an SS-officer and shot him dead. This happened near one of the gas chambers of the Nazi death camp of Auschwitz. Not all Jews were willing to enter the gas chambers without resistance or protest. In October 1942, SS doctor Johann Paul Kremer witnessed the gassing of nearly 1600 Jews from Holland. But three Jewish women refused to enter the gas chamber begging for their lives, Kremer wrote in his diary. They were shot dead.

My new book "Auschwitz – Eindstation van de dood" ("Auschwitz – Final Destination of Death") was published in Holland in April this year. I wrote a paragraph on Franceska Mann who killed SS-officer Josef Schillinger as the SS tried to push a group of women into the one of the gas chambers of Auschwitz-Birkenau.

One of the Dutch Auschwitz survivors I spoke with was Ernst Verduin, a Dutch Jew from Amsterdam born in 1927. He was deported to Auschwitz in September 1943. Upon arrival in Auschwitz-Birkenau he was first "selected" for the gas chamber, but managed to leave the "gas chamber group" and join the group selected for slave labor. "An SS officer protested loudly, but I didn't care," Verduin told me at the end of February 2012. "I later learned that the SS wanted to avoid panic and that I wasn't the only one who switched from one group to another." "I already knew about the gas chambers of Auschwitz when I was still in the Nazi concentration camp of Vught in the Netherlands. An SS officer named Franz Ettlinger who was stationed at that camp told me about it. Ettlinger had previously been stationed at Auschwitz, so he knew exactly what was going on there."

Frans Goedhart, a courageous Dutch resistance leader, was also in Vught. He, too, received information about the gas chambers of Auschwitz – from another source, though. He managed to escape and published a lengthy article about "(Nazi) concentration camps – where the Nazis practice their ideas" in "Het Parool" on September 27, 1943. It was the very first article on this subject in Holland! Part of Goedharts remarkable article mentioned the gas chambers of Auschwitz. Het Parool was an illegal underground newspaper during the Nazi occupation of Holland and founded by Frans Goedhart himself. It had a circulation of about 40,000.

Auschwitz was indeed the "final destination of death." From all over Nazi occupied Europe trains with Jewish deportees arrived at Auschwitz. More than one million Jews were killed there. Upon arrival, most deportees were immediately "selected" for the gas chamber, the others were "selected" for slave labour. Many of those selected for slave labour died from starvation, exhaustion and disease. These "selections" were usually carried out by SS doctors such as Josef Mengele and Horst Thilo. Mengele also conducted so-called "medical experiments" on women, children and twins. Jenta-Jehudit Feig, a Jewish survivor, later said that she saw how Mengele had removed a still beating heart from a female body.

Anne Frank

Members of the Polish and Jewish underground reported about what happened in occupied Poland and Auschwitz. These reports also arrived in London where the Polish government-in-exile was located. These reports were not always taken seriously by the British and American governments. However, in 1942 and 1943 more and more British and American newspapers began to write about Nazi atrocities and the genocide of the Jews. The New York Times, for example, reported on August 27, 1943: "More than 3,000,000 killed in Hitler dominated lands." And the BBC Home News Bulletin accurately reported on July 9, 1942: "Jews are regularly killed by machine gun fire, hand grenades – and even poisoned by gas." Mass executions of Jews did indeed occur in the Baltic states (Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia) and the Nazi occupied parts of the Soviet Union. Jews had also been gassed in Auschwitz and in so-called gas vans.

It was in Nazi occupied Amsterdam that a teen-age girl named Anne Frank listened to this BBC broadcast. On October 9, 1942, she referred to the radio broadcast in her diary: "We assume that most of them (i.e. the Jews, V.) are murdered. The English radio speaks of their being gassed. This may be the quickest way to die."

In the summer of 1942, a German industrialist named Eduard Schulte informed a Jewish friend in Switzerland about the use of "prussic acid" (the poison gas Zyklon B) and a Nazi plan to kill all the Jews in occupied Europe. This information was passed on to the World Jewish Congress (WJC) as well as to the British and American governments, but both governments initially remained rather sceptical.

Two Jewish Auschwitz survivors were interviewed by me. One of them was Dr. Bloeme Evers-Emden. She was in the same deportation train as Anne Frank. They went to Auschwitz-Birkenau. In the so-called "women's camp" ("Frauenlager") Bloeme joined a group of other women who decided that they would help each other, come what may. Thanks to this group she and other women survived. She also witnessed terrible scenes: prisoners being beaten to death or desperate female prisoners throwing themselves on the electric, barbed wire. This was suicide and these poor women died instantly. "I decided not to follow their example, but to survive," Bloeme told me in July 2012. Bloeme also saw emaciated men, so-called "Musulmänner" or living skeletons who were barely able to walk. "When you see terrible things like that you stick closer and closer to your group of friends."

Verduin witnesses a visit by Haj Amin Al-Husseini to Auschwitz

Ernst Verduin was not in Birkenau but in Auschwitz-Monowitz, some five miles away from the main camp. But he first arrived in Auschwitz-Birkenau where the "selections" took place. "The worst thing I saw after my arrival was a group of prisoners who entered the gas chambers," Ernst Verduin told me. "These people were about to die. I later tried not to remember this terrible spectacle."

Auschwitz-Monowitz was a slave labour camp. The chances of survival there were only slightly better than in the main camp of Auschwitz and in Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Verduin claims he witnessed a visit to Monowitz by Haj Amin Al-Husseini, the Palestinian Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and a notorious Jew-hater:

"It was a very hot day in June or July 1944 when I was at work in Monowitz, also known as Auschwitz III. And then I suddenly noticed a group of people who looked like actors. They were wearing long robes and strange headgear. Occasionally, internees did perform a play in the camp. I wanted to find out myself and as I walked towards that group I was stopped by a high ranking SS officer whom I didn't know. He was from the main camp or from Birkenau. The officer asked me: ‘What do you want?' ‘I just wanted to know whether these people are actors or nor. Is there going to be a stage performance tonight?' ‘These people aren't actors,' the SS officer told me. ‘They are the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and his retinue.' I asked him then: ‘What is he doing here?' ‘He is paying a visit to the camp,' the SS officer said. ‘He lives in Berlin where he enjoys Hitler's personal protection. He is now paying a visit to Monowitz to see how the Jews are working themselves to death in factories. He is also in Auschwitz to see the gas chambers.'"

Verduin was told to resume his work immediately, otherwise he would be sent to the gas chambers, too.

Anti-Semitic Holocaust deniers and radical Muslims who, like Hitler, want to kill all the Jews

The final chapter of my book deals with anti-Semitic Holocaust deniers and Muslim radicals who believe that "the Holocaust is still to come upon the Jews." The arguments of the Holocaust deniers are refuted. For example, Holocaust deniers usually admit that Zyklon B was used in Auschwitz and Majdanek (another Nazi death camp in occupied Poland), but only to disinfect lice infested clothes. To refute this argument I mention and reprint authentic SS documents which clearly show that Zyklon B was used to kill people. One of these documents describe Zyklon B as "material (substances) for special treatment" ("Material für Sonderbeh.") – a Nazi code word for killing Jews. And why did the SS in Auschwitz order special gas chamber doors which had peepholes in them? The intention clearly was to watch through those peepholes in order to find out how quickly people, not lice or insects, would die.

I also show that the figure of six million Jewish victims of the Holocaust is fairly accurate.

Anti-Semitism is on the rise again, not only in today's Europe among Muslim immigrants and neo Nazis, but also in the Muslim world. Muslim suicide bombers are pyschopatic and fanatical little Hitlers bent on death and destruction, despicable worshippers of evil inspired by a satanic ideology. They don't go to their imagined "paradise," but straight to hell they go instead. All of them. The same applies to all those Islamo-Fascist hate preachers who inspired and still inspire the suicide bombers.

Just as Haj Amin Al-Husseini did then, these hate clerics now frequently lash out against the Jews – all the Jews, that is, not just against those who are living in Israel. The influential Hamas cleric Yousif Al-Zahar refers to the Jews as "the brothers of apes and pigs." This is based on, inter alia, a quote from the Quran, namely Sura 5 verse 60: "Say: Shall I tell you who will receive a worse reward from God (Allah, V.)? Those whom God (Allah, V.) has cursed and with whom He has been angry, transforming them into apes and swine, and those who serve the devil."

The recently deposed former Egyptian president Mohammed Morsi, who belongs to the anti-Semitic Muslim Brotherhood, also once described the Jews as "descendents from apes and pigs." This was before he was elected president in June 2012.

Morsi was on very friendly terms with Hamas, a terrorist organization. Attacks by Muslim terrorist groups in the Sinai and by militant Muslims against Christians in the rest of Egypt increased drastically under Morsi's rule. Moreover, the autocratic Muslim Brotherhood president wanted to send Egyptian "jihadists" to Syria – something the army leadership was utterly opposed to. In the view of the army, there was no alternative but depose a man who wanted to turn Egypt into a kind of Muslim caliphate – just like Gaza. In Gaza, the influential sheikh Yunus Al-Astal, a Hamas "legislator" and imam, claims that "suffering by fire is the Jews' destiny in this world and the next." "Therefore, we are sure that the Holocaust is still to come upon the Jews."

In today's Europe, too, anti-Semitism is on the rise. Last June, I paid a visit to locations in Lithuania where during the Second War more than 130,000 Jews had been executed by the Nazis. One of those locations was the forest of Paneriai (Ponary), near the capital of Vilnius. My Lithuanian guide who could read Russian told me that somebody had painted the slogan "Hitler was right" on one of the monuments – in Russian, that is. This anti-Semitic slogan has been removed. An orthodox rabbi named Josef Antebi was recently beaten up in the heart of Amsterdam. This is only one of the many anti-Semitic incidents throughout Europe.

The nuclear threat from Iran

Muslim leaders in Iran advocate the destruction of Israel. While calling the twentieth century Holocaust "a myth," they say that "the zionist regime" (Israel) will soon be wiped off the face of the earth – another call for genocide comparable to the call Hitler made in January 1939 when the Nazi leader announced "the extermination of the Jewish race in Europe."

A collection of Iranian genocidal calls can be found in a well documented article written by Elihu D. Richter and Alex Barnea and published in the Summer 2009 issue of the Middle East Quaterly ("Tehran's Genocidal Incitement against Israel").

A very alarming article in the British weekly The Economist suggests that it may be already too late to stop Iran from having a nuclear bomb. "The idea that there will be plenty of time between Iran making the decision to build nuclear weapons and actually getting them is a comforting conceit that Western intelligence agencies have clung to." "As time goes on, the period that Iran needs to produce not one or two but several devices undetected shrinks…" "In the last quarter Iran converted 67% of its MEO (=Medium Enriched Uranium, V.) into oxide, but still increased the stockpile by 10 kg. Even though Iran is managing its MEU stockpile carefully to keep the negotiations going and preserve ambiguity, on any reckoning it is likely to be well over the time limit set by Israel before the end of this year."

"In December 2011 Mr. Jones (i.e. Greg Jones of RAND Corporation, V.) estimated that Iran could produce an implosion type device within two to six months, thanks to the help it is thought to have received from Vyacheslav Danilenko, a former Soviet nuclear weapons designer. North Korea is also believed to have given substantial technical help." "Neither Iran's elections, nor sanctions, nor military threats are likely to divert it (Iran) from the path it is on to getting nuclear weapons."

"The inconvenient truth is that while the talks seem destined to continue, Iran is close to what is known as ‘critical capability' – the point at which it could make a dash to produce enough weapons grade uranium for one or more bombs before the IAEA or Western intelligence agencies would even know it had done so." "The nuclear program is worth almost any sacrifice because it guarantees the regime's survival against external threats…"

Militant Islam is the most dangerous threat to peace, security and stability in the Middle East, Africa and Asia. Once the Iranian Islamo-Fascists have their nuclear bomb they will be able to wipe out Israel with several nuclear strikes only. It will be another Holocaust – or the nuclear "Armageddon" that some silly but dangerous Islamic Apocalypticists write about.

As a new nuclear power, Iran will be able to impose its will on other nations in the Middle East. Time for diplomacy and additional sanctions is over now. Sanctions and diplomacy did not work in the case of North Korea either. Religious and ideological fanatics will push through their own agenda, whatever the cost.

It is imperative, therefore, that the United States gives its ally Israel the tools to bomb Iran's underground nuclear facilities before it is too late. As Sir Winston Churchill, the able British Prime Minister during the Second World War, begged U.S. president Franklin Delano Roosevelt on February 9, 1941: "Give us the tools and we will finish the job." "Put your confidence in us. Give us your faith and your blessing, and under Providence, all will be well." Unfortunately, though, the current U.S. president Barak Obama fails to act decisively where other presidents did not dare to hesitate. Obama's current priority lies, so it seems at least, with starting a dialogue with the ultra-conservative Taliban, dangerous terrorists and notorious drug dealers who are bent on reconquering Afghanistan once the Americans have left that God-forsaken country.

Emerson Vermaat is an investigative reporter in the Netherlands. He is author of a recent study on Auschwitz and the threat of "another Holocaust," Auschwitz – Eindstation van de dood (Auschwitz – Final Destination of Death), Aspekt Publishers, Soesterberg, Netherlands, April 2013. Website: www.emersonvermaat.com.

Sources:

Emerson Vermaat, Auschwitz Eindstation van de dood (Soesterberg, Ntherlands, 2013), pp. 46, 47 (Franceska Mann), p. 125 (Mengele), p. 131-138 (Bloeme Evers-Emden), pp. 145, 146 (Haj Amin Al-Husseini), pp. 159, 160 (BBC broadcast and Anne Frank) , pp. 199, 200, 284 (Frans Goedhart), p. 219 (Zyklon B), p. 224 (Hamas sheikh: "The Holocaust is still to come upon the Jews…"), pp. 281, 282 ("Material für Sonderbeh.", i.e. Zyklon B is used for killing Jews).

Frans Goedhart alias Pieter 't Hoen, Het Parool, September 27, 1943 ("Concentratiekampen: Waar de Nazi's hun idealen in praktijk brengen").

Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl (Mumbai, India: Wilco Publishing House, 2005), p. 40.

Nederlands Dagblad, June 26, 2013, p. 3 ("Rabbijn op straat mishandeld").

The Koran, translated by N.J. Dawood (London/New York: Penguin Books, 1993), p. 86 ("… transforming them into apes and swine…"). Sura 5 verse 60.

Elihu D. Richter and Alex Barnea, Tehran's Genocidal Incitement against Israel, Middle East Quarterly, Summer 2009, pp. 45-51.

The Economist (London), June 22, 2013, pp. 21-23 ("Can Iran be stopped?")

Jean-Pierre Filiu, l"Apocalypse dans l'Islam (Paris: Fayard, 2008); David Cook, Contemporary Muslim Apocalyptic Literature (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2005), pp. 76 , 77 (nuclear weapons in Armageddon): "Israel during the era of the Mahdi will seek its own destruction and dig its own grave." (Quote from M. Da'ud, 1995).

Winston S. Churchill, Never Give In! The Best of Winston Churchill's Speeches (London: Pimlico/Random House, 2004), pp. 262. ("Give us the tools, and we will finish the job!").

Ron Moreau, The Taliban's Life of Luxury. Is Afghanistan destined to be run by the drug mafia?, Newsweek (Europe), July 1, 2013, pp. 20-23; M.J. Gohel and Sajjan M. Gohel, The Flawed Dialogue With The Taliban, Asia-Pacific Foundation, June 24, 2013, pp. 1-10. "To all Afghans, that sounds like a bid for restoration of Taliban rule…"

©2013 Emerson Vermaat. All rights reserved.