Show on Art in Auschwitz Opens in
Berlin

The Judaicum Center in Berlin's New
Synagogue is set to open an exhibition of some 170 works by 44
concentration camp inmates entitled "Art in Auschwitz 1940-1945."

On Tuesday
evening, Chancellor Gerhard Schröder and the Polish Ambassador
Andrzej Byrt will be attending the opening of a show put together
by the State Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau in Oswiecim, which owns a
collection of some 1470
previously unseen still-lifes, landscapes, caricatures and
portraits culled from its collection of art created in the
Auschwitz extermination camp.

"Art in Auschwitz
1940-1945" marks the first time a show has foregrounded art
from concentration camps rather than featuring it within the
margins of a broader examination of German history -- the standard
approach towards Holocaust exhibitions over the last sixty
years.

A reminder of human brutality

Although few pieces in the
collection directly depict violence or cruelty, the
portraits selected convey a sense of human suffering and
endurance, serving both as an eloquent reminder of human
brutality and an affirmation of the creative urge, despite
imminent death. But they also work as autonomous, highly
expressive works of
art.

Critics have said that the only authentic response to the
Holocaust is silence. Similarly, these portraits of people devoid
of hope, sketches of starving crowds waiting to be deported,
desolate children and executions are images that no pencil, pen or
brush should ever have had to commit to paper or canvas. But these
pictures are testimonies to events -- reflections of a time and
place.

Supervised artistic activity

Much of the work exhibited was made by Polish artists. Before
Hitler began deporting millions of Jews to Auschwitz, the site had
been used as a concentration camp for Polish prisoners, many of
whom had belonged to the Polish resistance -- including numerous
artists.

Among them was Franciszek
Targosz, whose sketches so impressed Auschwitz
commandant Rudolf Höss that he approved Targosz's idea to
set up a camp museum.

Targosz was named head of the museum,
founded in October, 1941. It became a highly desirable work
assignment for prisoners, providing them with art supplies
and affording them the opportunity to make more private
images. Jewish artists, however, were never
admitted.

A way of forgetting

To the inmates, art offered an escape -- a way of
processing their experience, proof of their existence.

"I drew portraits in the camp as a way of finding a
short-lived happiness and first and foremost, as a way of
forgetting," wrote the artist Franciszek Jazwiecki in 1946.
"These pictures I drew in secret helped me forget, they drew
me into another world, the world of my art. I was aware that
drawing was punished with death and it was not that I was
brave, more that I simply ignored the risk, because I could
not resist creating my own world."

Although not represented in the new exhibition, another artist
who survived Auschwitz, Alfred Kantor, has said of his work:
"These (works) were crucial to my survival. Without this extra
nourishment, I could not have endured the months of hard labor."
His secret artistic activity had a crucial psychological purpose.
"My commitment to drawing came out of a deep instinct of
self-preservation and undoubtedly helped me to deny the
unimaginable horrors of that time. By taking on the role of an
'observer,' I could at least for a few moments detach myself from
what was going on in Auschwitz and was therefore better able to
hold together the threads of sanity."

"Art in Auschwitz 1940-1945" runs through Aug. 14 before
moving to the Felix Nussbaum Haus in Osnabrück Sept. 4 - Oct.
16

Auschwitz
art

Auschwitz
art show

The Museum
at Auschwitz, 1941-45
By Sybil Milton (full
acticle from this source (http://lastexpression.northwestern.edu/essays/Museumessay.001.pdf))

In
October 1941 Rudolf Höss, the camp commandant at Auschwitz allowed a museum to open in barrack 6 at
Auschwitz I. It moved to barrack 24 in March 1942,
where it occupied two rooms until Auschwitz was liberated in late January 1945. "The
goal of the museum was to collect, in small quantities, various rarities,
art works, valuable objects, coin and stamp
collections as well other rare objects located in the prisoners’ personal
possessions (such as documents, awards, banners, liturgical clothing, etc.).
About six prisoners were assigned to the museum. Two of them were assigned to
translate the Talmud into German, one repaired watches for the SS, the
remaining prisoners were mostly artists, graphic artists, or fine arts, and
created works of art that were considered the property of the
camp and were used as presents to visiting dignitaries from the
Reich."

The
initiative to open this museum had come from the Polish prisoner Franciszek Targosz, who had been deported to Auschwitz in December 1940, and assigned prisoner
number 7626. In early 1941, Höss discovered Targosz sketching horses. Targosz knew that art not specifically ordered by the
camp

administration was a punishable offense.
To save himself, he suggested that Höss establish a museum in one of the camp
barracks. The museum, Targosz argued, would provide a place of culture
for Nazi officers stationed at Auschwitz. Such a museum would exhibit examples of
Nazi-approved art, including handicrafts and folk objects
"collected" from the prisoners. Höss saw the propaganda potential of such a
museum, since Nazi dignitaries visiting Auschwitz would be impressed by his cultural
achievement and he would also have a vehicle to show the supremacy of the
Aryan race. He consented to the plan and ordered Targosz early in 1941 to organize the museum. Thus,
Targosz managed both to save his own life and to
have some of his drawings exhibited. The museum at Auschwitz remained open in several locations until
the camp was liberated in 1945. Its exhibits included ceramics, glass, and
metalwork crafted by prisoners, as well as coins and antiques confiscated from
the deportees. It also displayed Nazi military regalia and documents, as well
as Jewish prayer books, shawls, and phylacteries. The other art shown there included landscapes, portraits
of Nazi officials, and illustrations of German legends.

Although the
museum was not an official labor kommando for prisoners at Auschwitz I, it became a place where Polish artists
incarcerated at Auschwitz could go after completing their official
assignments. There they produced what was ordered, as well as their own works
in their few free late evening hours and on Sundays.

The museum
provided a temporary sanctuary for these artists (including Mieczyslaw Koscielniak, Jan Baras-Komski, Wlodzimierz Siwierski, Waldemar Nowakowski, Bronislaw Czech, and many others). The museum had
materials available for officially commissioned works and thus also provided
supplies for secret sketches, portraits, and caricatures, that they created
for themselves. Thus, the Krakow sculptor Xawery

Dunikowski, prisoner number 774, was assigned to make
a model of the camp. The materials available to him officially were, in part,
filched for a series of clandestine portraits of sleeping fellow inmates.
Similarly, the graphic artist Mieczyslaw Koscielniak, prisoner 15261, produced officially
requested art showing the orchestra and hospital at
Auschwitz, and used materials pilfered from this
assignment for clandestine sketches of sickness, suffering, and despair.
Initially Koscielniak had been assigned to heavy demolition labor
in kommando number 2. There, he spontaneously risked
talking to an SS guard and offered to draw his portrait in five minutes.
Impressed by a portrait completed in such a short interval of time, the guard
arranged for Koscielniak to be reassigned to work at the SS Deutsche
Ausrüstungswerke, an armaments factory adjacent to Auschwitz I.

Koscielniak drew as a duty to the resistance movement,
attempting to smuggle more than 300 works outside the camp, although only a
relatively small number of these works are known to have survived.

It is clear
that portraits were commissioned by the Germans as gifts to superiors or to
their own families, and also for documentation of medical experiments. Thus,
Josef Mengele commissioned a Czech Jewish artist, Dinah
Gottliebova, to do portraits of Roma (Gypsy) prisoners
as illustrations for a book he hoped to publish about his medical experiments
in Auschwitz. Other prisoner artists, like Leo Haas,
Halina Olomucki, and Arnold Daghani also reported receiving orders to do
portraits of Nazi officers, often from photographs of relatives missing in
action. If the resulting work was acceptable, it often helped secure more
lenient work assignments or better rations. Obviously compulsory work produced
by inmate artists was meticulously executed and technically excellent, since
the interned artist?s fate depended on compliance with SS orders
and whims. Moreover, paper, ink, and watercolor available through official
work could be used
as materials for clandestine art.

A FACTUAL APPRAISAL
OF THE "HOLOCAUST" BY THE RED CROSS.
by NoEvidenceOfGenocide •
Friday January 28, 2005 at 07:09 AM

No Evidence Of Genocide

The Jews And The Concentration Camps:
A Factual Appraisal By The
Red Cross.

There is one survey of the Jewish question in Europe during World War Two and
the conditions of Germany's concentration camps which is almost unique in its
honesty and objectivity, the three-volume Report of the International Committee
of the Red Cross on its Activities during the Second World War, Geneva, 1948.

This comprehensive account from an entirely neutral source incorporated and
expanded the findings of two previous works: Documents sur l'activité du CICR en
faveur des civils détenus dans les camps de concentration en Allemagne 1939-1945
(Geneva, 1946), and Inter Arma Caritas: the Work of the ICRC during the Second
World War (Geneva, 1947). The team of authors, headed by Frédéric Siordet,
explained in the opening pages of the Report that their object, in the tradition
of the Red Cross, had been strict political neutrality, and herein lies its
great value.

The ICRC successfully applied the 1929 Geneva military convention in order to
gain access to civilian internees held in Central and Western Europe by the
Germany authorities. By contrast, the ICRC was unable to gain any access to the
Soviet Union, which had failed to ratify the Convention. The millions of
civilian and military internees held in the USSR, whose conditions were known to
be by far the worst, were completely cut off from any international contact or
supervision.

The Red Cross Report is of value in that it first clarifies the legitimate
circumstances under which Jews were detained in concentration camps, i.e. as
enemy aliens. In describing the two categories of civilian internees, the Report
distinguishes the second type as "Civilians deported on administrative grounds
(in German, "Schutzhäftlinge"), who were arrested for political or racial
motives because their presence was considered a danger to the State or the
occupation forces" (Vol. 111, p. 73). These persons, it continues, "were placed
on the same footing as persons arrested or imprisoned under common law for
security reasons." (P.74).

The Report admits that the Germans were at first reluctant to permit
supervision by the Red Cross of people detained on grounds relating to security,
but by the latter part of 1942, the ICRC obtained important concessions from
Germany. They were permitted to distribute food parcels to major concentration
camps in Germany from August 1942, and "from February 1943 onwards this
concession was extended to all other camps and prisons" (Vol. 111, p. 78). The
ICRC soon established contact with camp commandants and launched a food relief
programme which continued to function until the last months of 1945, letters of
thanks for which came pouring in from Jewish internees.

Red Cross Recipients Were Jews

The Report states that "As many as 9,000 parcels were packed daily. From the autumn of 1943 until May 1945, about
1,112,000 parcels with a total weight of 4,500 tons were sent off to the
concentration camps" (Vol. III, p. 80). In addition to food, these
contained clothing and pharmaceutical supplies. "Parcels were sent to Dachau,
Buchenwald, Sangerhausen, Sachsenhausen, Oranienburg, Flossenburg,
Landsberg-am-Lech, Flöha, Ravensbrück, Hamburg-Neuengamme, Mauthausen,
Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, to camps near Vienna and in Central
and Southern Germany. The principal recipients were Belgians, Dutch, French,
Greeks, Italians, Norwegians, Poles and stateless Jews" (Vol. III, p. 83).

In the course of the war, "The Committee was in a position to transfer and
distribute in the form of relief supplies over twenty million Swiss francs
collected by Jewish welfare organisations throughout the world, in particular by
the American Joint Distribution Committee of New York" (Vol. I, p. 644). This
latter organisation was permitted by the German Government to maintain offices
in Berlin until the American entry into the war. The ICRC complained that
obstruction of their vast relief operation for Jewish internees came not from
the Germans but from the tight Allied blockade of Europe. Most of their
purchases of relief food were made in Rumania, Hungary and Slovakia.

The ICRC had special praise for the liberal conditions which prevailed at
Theresienstadt up to the time of their last visits there in April 1945. This
camp, "where there were about 40,000 Jews deported from various countries was a
relatively privileged ghetto" (Vol. III, p. 75). According to the Report, "'The
Committee's delegates were able to visit the camp at Theresienstadt (Terezin)
which was used exclusively for Jews and was governed by special conditions. From
information gathered by the Committee, this camp had been started as an
experiment by certain leaders of the Reich ... These men wished to give the Jews
the means of setting up a communal life in a town under their own administration
and possessing almost complete autonomy. . . two delegates were able to visit
the camp on April 6th, 1945. They confirmed the favourable impression gained on
the first visit" (Vol. I, p . 642).

The ICRC also had praise for the regime of Ion Antonescu of Fascist Rumania
where the Committee was able to extend special relief to 183,000 Rumanian Jews
until the time of the Soviet occupation. The aid then ceased, and the ICRC
complained bitterly that it never succeeded "in sending anything whatsoever to
Russia" (Vol. II, p. 62). The same situation applied to many of the German camps
after their "liberation" by the Russians. The ICRC received a voluminous flow of
mail from Auschwitz until the period of the Soviet occupation, when many of the
internees were evacuated westward. But the efforts of the Red Cross to send
relief to internees remaining at Auschwitz under Soviet control were futile.
However, food parcels continued to be sent to former Auschwitz inmates
transferred west to such camps as Buchenwald and Oranienburg.

No Evidence Of Genocide

One of the most important aspects of the Red Cross Report is that it
clarifies the true cause of those deaths that undoubtedly occurred in the camps
toward the end of the war. Says the Report: "In the chaotic condition of Germany
after the invasion during the final months of the war, the camps received no
food supplies at all and starvation claimed an increasing number of victims.
Itself alarmed by this situation, the German Government at last informed the
ICRC on February 1st, 1945 ... In March 1945, discussions between the President
of the ICRC and General of the S.S. Kaltenbrunner gave even more decisive
results. Relief could henceforth be distributed by the ICRC, and one delegate
was authorised to stay in each camp ..." (Vol. III, p. 83).

Clearly, the German authorities were at pains to relieve the dire situation
as far as they were able. The Red Cross are quite explicit in stating that food
supplies ceased at this time due to the Allied bombing of German transportation,
and in the interests of interned Jews they had protested on March 15th, 1944
against "the barbarous aerial warfare of the Allies" (Inter Arma Caritas, p.
78). By October 2nd, 1944, the ICRC warned the German Foreign Office of the
impending collapse of the German transportation system, declaring that
starvation conditions for people throughout Germany were becoming inevitable.

In dealing with this comprehensive, three-volume Report, it is important to
stress that the delegates of the International Red Cross found no evidence
whatever at the camps in Axis occupied Europe of a deliberate policy to
exterminate the Jews. In all its 1,600 pages the Report does not even mention
such a thing as a gas chamber. It admits that Jews, like many other wartime
nationalities, suffered rigours and privations, but its complete silence on the
subject of planned extermination is ample refutation of the Six Million legend.
Like the Vatican representatives with whom they worked, the Red Cross found
itself unable to indulge in the irresponsible charges of genocide which had
become the order of the day. So far as the genuine mortality rate is concerned,
the Report points out that most of the Jewish doctors from the camps were being
used to combat typhus on the eastern front, so that they were unavailable when
the typhus epidemics of 1945 broke out in the camps (Vol. I, p. 204 ff) -
Incidentally, it is frequently claimed that mass executions were carried out in
gas chambers cunningly disguised as shower facilities. Again the Report makes
nonsense of this allegation. "Not only the washing places, but installations for
baths, showers and laundry were inspected by the delegates. They had often to
take action to have fixtures made less primitive, and to get them repaired or
enlarged" (Vol. III, p. 594).

Not All Were Interned

Volume III of the Red Cross Report, Chapter 3 (I. Jewish Civilian Population)
deals with the "aid given to the Jewish section of the free population," and
this chapter makes it quite plain that by no means all of the European Jews were
placed in internment camps, but remained, subject to certain restrictions, as
part of the free civilian population. This conflicts directly with the
"thoroughness" of the supposed "extermination programme", and with the claim in
the forged Höss memoirs that Eichmann was obsessed with seizing "every single
Jew he could lay his hands on."

In Slovakia, for example, where Eichmann's assistant Dieter Wisliceny was in
charge, the Report states that "A large proportion of the Jewish minority had
permission to stay in the country, and at certain periods Slovakia was looked
upon as a comparative haven of refuge for Jews, especially for those coming from
Poland. Those who remained in Slovakia seem to have been in comparative safety
until the end of August 1944, when a rising against the German forces took
place. While it is true that the law of May 15th, 1942 had brought about the
internment of several thousand Jews, these people were held in camps where the
conditions of food and lodging were tolerable, and where the internees were
allowed to do paid work on terms almost equal to those of the free labour
market" (Vol. I, p. 646).

Not only did large numbers of the
three million or so European Jews avoid internment altogether, but the
emigration of Jews continued throughout the war, generally by way of Hungary,
Rumania and Turkey. Ironically, post-war Jewish emigration from
German-occupied territories was also facilitated by the Reich, as in the case of
the Polish Jews who had escaped to France before its occupation. "The Jews from
Poland who, whilst in France, had obtained entrance permits to the United States
were held to be American citizens by the German occupying authorities, who
further agreed to recognize the validity of about three thousand passports
issued to Jews by the consulates of South American countries" (Vol. I, p. 645).

As future U.S. citizens, these Jews were held at the Vittel camp in southern
France for American aliens. The emigration of European Jews from Hungary in
particular proceeded during the war unhindered by the German authorities. "Until
March 1944," says the. Red Cross Report, "Jews who had the privilege of visas for
Palestine were free to leave Hungary" (Vol. I, p. 648). Even after the
replacement of the Horthy Government in 1944 (following its attempted
armistice with the Soviet Union) with a government more dependent on German
authority, the emigration of Jews continued.

The Committee secured the pledges of both Britain and the United States "to
give support by every means to the emigration of Jews from Hungary," and from
the U.S. Government the ICRC received a message stating that "The Government of
the United States ... now specifically repeats its assurance that arrangements
will be made by it for the care of all Jews who in the present circumstances are
allowed to leave" (Vol. I, p . 649).

Biedermann agreed
that in the nineteen instances that "Did Six Million Really Die?" quoted from
the Report of the International Committee of the Red Cross on its Activities
during the Second World War and Inter Arma Caritas (this includes the above
material), it did so accurately.

A quote from Charles Biedermann
(a delegate of the International Committee of the Red Cross and Director of the
Red Cross' International Tracing Service) under oath at the Zündel Trial
(February 9, 10, 11 and 12, 1988).

The above is chapter
nine from the book "Did Six Million Really Die?"

For the entire
book "Did Six Million Really Die?", click here.