Codoh Exposes Auschwitz Perjurer

False “eyewitness” Testimony Helped Hang Germans

This month CODOH drops a bombshell. We have discovered, and now reveal, that a celebrated “survivor,- a prominent Zionist, and a major figure in the founding and leadership of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum gave false testimony immediately after World War II testimony that helped convict and hang Germans in 1945.

The sworn word of this survivor-“eyewitness” on the Auschwitz “gas chambers'” and on the number of Jew s killed at Auschwitz is contradicted today not only by Holocaust revisionists, by exponents of Holocaust orthodoxy, including the research staff of the Museum, but by the established facts. By alerting the American public to this scandal CODOH intensifies its campaign against the USHMM, a campaign that began last month with the exposure of the Museum’s “Majdanek gas-chamber door” hoax.

Committed Zionist, Prominent Survivor, USHMM Founder

The false witness—and U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum founder—is Dr. Hadassah Bimko Rosensaft. She was interned at Auschwitz in mid-1943, then at Bergen-Belsen from December 1944 until its liberation by the British in April 1945. After that, she joined with Joseph Rosensaft, who became her husband, in leading the Jews of Bergen-Belsen, and later Jews throughout the entire British zone of occupation in Germany. The Central Jewish Committee, which Joseph headed (Hadassah served on the presidium), was instrumental in helping Jews emigrate-legally and illegally—to Palestine.

The Rosensafts went on to be leaders among Holocaust survivors, in particular under the auspices of the World Federation of the Bergen-Belsen Survivors, of which her husband long served as president, she as vice-president.

(When husband Joseph died in 1975, Elie Wiesel delivered the eulogy.) Their son Menahem founded and leads the International Network of Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, and has frequently figured in news stories and op-ed pieces with vicious attacks on Pat Buchanan and Kurt Waldheim, and as a would-be hunter of alleged Nazi war criminals, including Dr. Mengele (naturally).

According to The Holocaust Museum in Washington, a celebratory book on the Museum co-authored by former Museum director Jeshajahu Weinberg, Hadassah Rosensaft was a leader in enlisting the “unwavering support of the survivors for the Museum” in its founding stages. She served on the content committee that determined the type and quality of exhibits the Museum would display. Indeed, a study of the Museum’s creation. Preserving Memory: The Struggle to Create America's Holocaust Museum by Edward Linenthal, reports that Dr. Rosensaft opposed— considering her history, more probably out of a concern for piety than accuracy—the display of alleged human hair from Auschwitz as well as the casting of the “gas chamber” door from Majdanek that CODOH ally Samuel Crowell has identified as a commonly manufactured German air-raid shelter door. After the Museum’s opening, Hadassah Rosensaft continued to serve as a member of the U.S. Holocaust Museum Memorial Council.

False Witness

To us at CODOH, Dr. Hadassah Rosensaft would be ordinarily of little interest other than as a particularly dutiful and long-lived devotee of the Holocaust cult And of little interest she was, until a CODOH researcher (who prefers to remain anonymous), noticed her little-used middle name: Bimko. That distinctive name rang a bell, a quick search ensued, and—lo and behold!—Dr. Hadassah Rosensaft proved to be identical to none other than Dr. Ada Bimko, who gave important testimony, false testimony, deadly testimony during the first Belsen trial in autumn of 1945.

Revisionist researchers have long been familiar with Ada Bimko’s testimony. Carlo Mattogno, for example, devoted several pages to it in The Journal of Historical Review (in “Two False Testimonies from Auschwitz,” pp. 35-38, Volume 10, no. 1, Spring 1990). Until now, however, no revisionist to our knowledge has recognized that the false testimony of Ada Bimko was given by a witness who would one day become a major voice in deciding policy and, indeed, the very exhibits at America’s taxpayer-supported, official U.S. Holocaust museum—a museum whose director, Walter Reich, recently wrote, in an essay titled, without apparent irony. “No, We’re Not in the Entertainment Business,” the following words:

In all of its activities, the Holocaust Museum is fiercely devoted to historical authenticity. It takes immense pains to guard against errors or misrepresentations. This is a responsibility of all museums; it’s ours all the more so because Holocaust deniers, driven by antisemitic animus, are ready to pounce on any errors or distortions.” (Washington Post, August 31, 1997)

What sort of “historical authenticity,” then, did Dr. Ada Bimko (soon to become Hadassah Rosensaft) display under oath during the Trial of Josef Kramer and Forty-Four Others, more commonly known as the first Belsen trial at Lueneburg, Germany, September 17, 1945 to November 17, 1945?

In a written deposition entered into evidence, she stated: “I have examined the records of the numbers cremated and I say that the records show that about 4,000,000 persons were cremated at the camp [Auschwitz].” In her testimony from the witness stand, Ada Bimko swore that a member of the crematorium Sonderkommando told her that four million Jews had been cremated at Auschwitz. (This and the following testimony is derived from the Trial of Josef Kramer and Forty-Four Others, edited by Raymond Phillips, Hodge & Co., 1949.)

Let it be noted that the current director of the Auschwitz State Museum—Franciszek Piper—in an article included in a book published in association with the USHHM (Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp, Yisrael Gutman and Michael Berenbaum, editors)—has reduced the Auschwitz death toll to no more than 1.5 million, a figure without basis. In that context we recall the very widespread and heavily labored efforts of exterminationists at the time the 4 million figure was disavowed, several years ago, to blame the exaggeration on the (non-Jewish) Poles. Now we observe the testimony of Dr. Bimko, who is Jewish (like her Sonderkommando acquaintance), telling the court in 1945(!) the already current 4 million story.

While on the witness stand. Dr. Bimko claimed to have, together with an SS NCO, visited a “gas chamber” equipped with showerheads, and, in a room above it, seen with her own eyes—rememher, she is an “eye”-witness— “two pipes which I was told contained the gas. There were also two huge metal containers containing gas.” Mattogno notes this as the “crowning absurdity of Bimko’s testimony,” one which shows that “In fine, Dr. Ada Bimko never set foot in any of the crematoriums at Birkenau and her eyewitness testimony” on this subject is completely fabricated… Bimko, not even aware that Zyklon B was contained in cans, speaks of… ‘huge metal containers containing gas,’ as if the gas in question were methane!”

Thigh-slappers though these claims are to revisionists who know today that no more than 1.3 million were ever sent to Auschwitz, and who are aware that in no Auschwitz “gas chamber” does the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum claim that cyanide gas was piped in from huge metal containers, Ada Bimko s testimony impressed the British prosecutors and judge at the Belsen trial. Chief prosecutor T.M. Backhouse stated, in his closing speech: “I particularly rely on the witness Dr. Bimko. She, in my submission, is a particularly reliable witness, a professional woman, who did magnificent work in Belsen, and, we are told, is still there at the hospital, and her evidence I would ask you to accept.”

Accept it the court did, even when Dr. Bimko-Rosensaft stumbled badly in her accusation against one Karl Francioh, a cook at Bergen-Belsen. She had sworn in two written depositions to have seen Francioh shoot a man dead. On the witness stand, however, she testified that the man Francioh shot dead was a woman. It would seem to us that a medical doctor who had done “magnificent work” in a concentration camp hospital would know right off the difference between a man and a woman—but we’re dealing here with a founder of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and therefore, as we all know, normal standards of human perception do not apply.

The cook, Kurt Francioh, was hanged on December 13, 1945. Ten other German defendants were convicted and executed thanks to the testimony of Hadassah Bimko Rosensaft and witnesses like her (though few had her fine professional training) at the first Belsen trial.

Walter’s Choice

Museum Director Walter Reich, with his fierce devotion to historical authenticity. and his immense pains to guard against errors or misrepresentations, has a choice, which we, tipping our hats to a ripe bit of Holocaust schlock (remember Sophie’s Choice?) hereby dub “Walter’s Choice.” The choice is this: Reich can either publicly disavow Dr. Hadassah Bimko Rosensaft’s false testimony on Auschwitz and Belsen, and admit to its terrible results—or else change the Museum’ s exhibits and “educational” propaganda to match Rosensaft's postwar lies.

That is, Dr. Reich can:

1) order museum staff to modify the model of the Auschwitz/Birkenau “gas chamber” on display at the Museum to fit Bimko-Rosensaft’s false testimony. For this staff, which has already given us the fake gas chamber door from Majdanek, it should be a snap. These professionals will simply install scale versions of the two 3-inch “gassing” pipes, a scale version of the “huge metal gas cylinders,” and a scale version of the room “above” the gas chambers she swore to have seen with her own eyes at Belsen. Once those three details are taken care of Dr. Reich’s staff can then restore the old four million dead figure for Auschwitz that the Soviet Commission of Inquiry and his colleague Dr. Bimko-Rosensaft have attested to, or—

2) he can publicly disavow Hadassah Bimko Rosensaft’s corrupt eyewitness testimony about Auschwitz and sever every connection the museum has with this deadly perjurer.

Which will it be? In the short run, of course, it likely won’t be either. Reich and the Museum, beholden to the “survivor community,” solicitous of the truth only insofar as the Museum’s falsehoods don’t anger any large or moneyed interest, will try to sweat this one out—just as they are going to try and sweat out CODOH’s exposure of their “gas chamber” door hoax.

Director Reich knows we’re out there: he’s said as much. By now he also knows that CODOH has blown the whistle on his “gas chamber” door. When the Bimko-Rosensaft story is brought to his attention, and it will be, we suspect that, for the first time, he will start to envy his predecessor Michael Berenbaum's escape from the Museum’s directorship to the employ of movie mogul Steven Spielberg. Yet there is a simple solution to all his worries about revisionists. It is to make historical truth the standard of his museum, and his own standard.