[media-dakwah] Was Holocaust Survivor Viktor Frankl Gassed at Auschwitz?

Sun, 21 May 2006 18:54:49 -0700


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bismi-lLahi-rRahmani-rRahiem
In the Name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful


=== News Update ===

http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v20/v20n5p10_frankl.html



Was Holocaust Survivor Viktor Frankl Gassed at Auschwitz?

A recent article has revealed that Viktor Frankl, the famous psychiatrist
and emblematic Auschwitz survivor, greatly embroidered on his meager time
at Auschwitz. This news casts a shadow over the veracity of Frankl's famous
memoir, Man's Search for Meaning. Of even more interest, however, is a
question that arises when considering the Auschwitz State Museum's records
regarding Frankl's time at Birkenau: Was Viktor Frankl gassed at Auschwitz?

Few men who emerged from the camps can match the late Viktor Frankl for
acclaim. A psychiatrist from Vienna who died in 1997, Frankl gained
international renown for the theories of mental health he expounded through
his psychiatric school, logotherapy. Inextricably bound up with Frankl's
fame, teachings, and moral authority was his experience of the German
concentration camps, above all Auschwitz, as described in Man's Search for
Meaning (U.S., 1959) a worldwide bestseller that has been ranked as one of
the ten most influential books of the twentieth century by the Library of
Congress.

In his reminiscence, Frankl recounted his stay at Auschwitz as if it had
lasted an eternity. Now comes Timothy Pytell, adjunct professor of history
at the Cooper Union in New York City, to inform us that, based on his
research for an intellectual biography of Frankl, the celebrated survivor
spent at most three days at Auschwitz, while in transit from Theresienstadt
in Bohemia to a subcamp of Dachau in October 1944. As Pytell observes, a
reader of Man's Search for Meaning would "be stunned to discover that
Frankl spent only a few days in Auschwitz." In the book, Frankl devotes
some thirty pages to Auschwitz. Besides recording his experiences on
arrival (shaving, showering, delousing, etc.), Frankl makes observations
about the lot of inmates there that strongly imply that, at the very least,
he spent months, not days, at the camp. ("We had to wear the same shirts
for half a year, until they had lost all appearance of being shirts.") As
Pytell writes of Frankl's depiction of his stay at Auschwitz: "But if truth
be told, Frankl's rendition is contradictory and profoundly deceptive."

Pytell notes that Frankl was transferred from Theresienstadt on October 19,
1944, on a train that carried 1500 persons to Auschwitz, and that the
prisoner's log of the Dachau sub-camp Kaufering III records Frankl's
arrival on October 25, 1944. Indeed, Frankl himself told the American
evangelist Robert Schuller, in an interview published in Schuller's
magazine Possibilities (March-April 1991): "I was in Auschwitz only three
or four days ... I was sent to a barrack and we were all transported to a
camp in Bavaria." Thus the credibility of yet another star survivor has
been tested and found wanting. Like the testimony of Miklos Nyiszli, Filip
Müller, Rudolf Vrba, Mel Mermelstein, and a host of other eyewitness
oracles, Viktor Frankl's Auschwitz stories are now an embarrassment to the
Holocaust industry, rather than an indictment of the Germans.

There's more, however. While Pytell wasn't up to examining the implications
of Frankl's stay at Auschwitz for the reliability of the camp's official
history, records compiled by exterminationist researcher of Theresienstadt
H. G. Adler and by the Auschwitz State Museum make clear that if Frankl
arrived at Auschwitz on October 20, 1944, he must have left Theresienstadt
on a train with 1,500 passengers, designated "Es." The English-language
edition of the supposedly authoritative Auschwitz Chronicle, 1939-45
(editor Danuta Czech, London: I.B.Tauris, 1990), based on material from the
Auschwitz State Museum, reports of that train:

October 20
1,500 Jewish men, women, and children are sent in an RSHA transport from
the ghetto in Theresienstadt. After the selection, 169 women are admitted
to the transit camp and 173 men as prisoners to the camp. The men receive
Nos. B-13307-B-13479. The remaining 1,158 people are killed in the gas
chamber of Crematorium III.

Now, while Viktor Frankl reports at length in his chatty memoir about his
reception at Auschwitz (including the obligatory brush with Dr. Mengele),
he says not a word about being registered, assigned a number, tattooed with
that number, or transferred to the Auschwitz Stammlager, the permanent
camp). Thus one can conclude that he was not admitted as a prisoner to the
camp. And the Chronicle's entry speaks of no surviving, non-registered
persons from that shipment. Ergo, according to the Auschwitz Chronicle, and
the records on which it claims to be based, Viktor Frankl must have gassed
nearly fifty-three years before his widely announced death in September
1997. Who was it, then, who was sent out of Auschwitz a few days later, and
went on to write all those books?

As Robert Faurisson, Carlo Mattogno, Enrique Aynat Eknes, Jürgen Graf, and
other revisionist researchers have made plain, there is a way out of this
seeming quandary. The survival of Frankl, like the survival of sundry other
persons counted dead by the record keepers at the Auschwitz State Museum --
most notably French and Euro-politician Simone Veil -- was due, not to some
miraculous intervention, but to the sloppy and dishonest research of the
Auschwitz authorities. Despite recent revisions in the Chronicle that allow
for the survival of some non-registered inmates, the widely consulted
reference continues to consign, more or less automatically, arrivals not
officially assigned to the Auschwitz camp to the gas chambers.

No doubt if the Auschwitz records were open to a thorough revisionist
combing, we would learn of many more survivors who are counted, officially,
as gassed. Needless to say, such life-affirming findings are entirely
unwelcome to the Holocaust industrialists, whether at the Auschwitz State
Museum, or the Red Cross's international tracing center at Arolsen,
Germany, or at Yad Vashem in Israel. And -- who knows? -- stating that
Viktor Frankl wasn't gassed might earn one a fine, or a prison sentence, in
more than one "democracy."

===


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