The 'homicidal gas chamber' in Paris

[Stubble]

https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn1000177

Can you guys tell me everything you know about this piece of film? I want to know what brand the film was, what day the footage was shot, the relative humidity that day, the barometric pressure, who's hand operated the camera, who was on the crew, their detachment, who their superiors were, where the film was sent, how it ended up where it is currently held, and rather importantly who Lt Hodges was.

The way I understand it this was shot by psywar as part of the propaganda campaign, just like 'death mills', the Buchenwald table, Dachau, testimony from that OSS guy at Mauthausen etc.

If I'm wrong, I'd like to know.

[Wetzelrad]

For those unfamiliar, this footage was covered by revisionists in the video Probing the Holocaust at timestamp 25:50.

As to your questions, this is one of those cases where the Holocaust Controversies blog is perfectly adequate for filling in background information.
https://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot ... nt-of.html

As with any post on that website Romanov has loaded it with bluster and handwaving. By the end of it a thoughtful reader will notice Romanov's inability to explain the existence of this suspicious footage and room. Why were those four pipes hanging from the ceiling? Why was steam coming out of them? Who could possibly believe that those deliberate handprints on the wall are evidence of a crime? Why is a group of soldiers procedurally touching everything in the room? Why were they picking up empty coffins and spinning them around? What was the purpose of the film?

The obvious answer is that Allied forces meant for it to look like a kill room which is exactly how it was presented in the newspapers. That this footage was only used to a very limited extent does not disprove this, since as Romanov admits you would have to be dumb to believe this propaganda. That it was staged is too obvious. Neither is this disproven by the cement actually reportedly being asbestos, nor by the gassing device actually being perhaps a furnace or rather a "heat torture" device. Those are claims made in the press reports, but they continue to be unbelievable in that form, among many other claims like electrocution benches and flamethrowers.

So while USHMM's extant description of the room is wrong, Probing the Holocaust's argument against that description was correct, and the thesis that the room and footage were produced as atrocity propaganda remains in tact.

Possibly there is an argument to be made that this "gas chamber" should instead be called a "fire chamber" or "torture chamber" as it had been at the time, but this is hardly important since the biggest Holocaust museum still labels it as the former. Besides, Romanov helpfully provides multiple sources that do claim gassings happened there. Most notably, a soldier by the name of Roger Reant claimed to have seen Zyklon B there. The following excerpt comes evidently from his written testimony in 1944. Machine translated:

I was able, guided by the district chief warrant officer Oyarsabal, to see a gas chamber and a shooting mound built for killing, at the Guynemer barracks, Boulevard Victor, Place Balard – Gestapo Center 1940 to 1944 – Archives of the Air Ministry, 1944.

I saw with my own eyes the Ziklon B cartridges, the improbable handprints on the interior lining installed to hold back the screams of the dying. Fir coffins outside, execution poles riddled with holes at face height;

This gas chamber adjoined the covered building of the shooting range. It had a false chimney through which a Gestapo officer introduced the lethal gas cartridge. After the execution, fans vented the gases to the outside.

https://www.jp-petit.org/nouv_f/issy_ch ... _paris.htm

As for Hodges, he was quite important. He was in command of First Army when it liberated Paris.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Courtney_Hodges

However, Hodges was merely a subject on the film. See timestamp 6:32. The person listed as camera operator was "Laurence". I'm so far unable to determine who that was, plus it's not even certain he was behind the camera in the earlier footage. Even so, it could be useful to identify him or any of the other people involved in this story.

[Stubble]

So, you think Lt Hodges refers to Lt Gn Hodges then?

I don't think they would omit the general part, but more likely the lieutenant part.

I'll reread the HC Blog post. I didn't get the info I wanted out of it the first time around.

Edit:Ah, I see now, in the past I had believed the allies constructed this setup. They didn't. It is the extraction system for changing the air over for the shooting range. Smokeless powder was significantly less smokeless during ww2. Those vents are the supply side, not the discharge side. Without seeing the system in its entirety, I haven't ever put that together before. After reading the blog again, it clicked.

This is another example of taking something mundane and ascribing to it a sinister function.

[Booze]

Holocaust Controversies, the site linked to here, is claiming that there is no deception by the USHMM because the description on their webpage is the description provided by the archivist. The implication is that an individual bureaucrat incorrectly assumed that this film captured a gas chamber.

Is it supposed to be obvious to visitors of their website, that the description is not provided by the USHMM?
I'd like your comments.

Also did this film ever have a sound track?

[Booze]

I visited the link to the USHMM prior to the link to Holocaust Controversies.
I will admit that it did not cross my mind that this description is provided by the archivist only.

I do not see how any reasonable person can claim that there is no deception here.
Nothing prevents the museum from clarifying the matter in regard to this film.
I put this in the category of lying by omission.

[Wetzelrad]

Holocaust Controversies, the site linked to here, is claiming that there is no deception by the USHMM because the description on their webpage is the description provided by the archivist. The implication is that an individual bureaucrat incorrectly assumed that this film captured a gas chamber.

Is it supposed to be obvious to visitors of their website, that the description is not provided by the USHMM?

I think it's a valid hypothesis on Romanov's part. We don't know that the person who wrote the description was making assumptions with no basis, but since he made multiple errors it is possible. It's equally possible that this person was basing his description on information we don't have or that he had mal intent.

However, even if you accept Romanov's contention that this was merely the misinterpretation of an uninformed archivist, the fact that the film was included in a 2016 USHMM video (here) about gas chambers proves that they are actively deceiving people with this description.

This is also not the only deception of this kind. Another prominent example is this page:
Photo album page showing the crematoria and gas chambers in Buchenwald.
https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/pa1168299

Mind you, there was no gas chambers at Buchenwald, nor was there "meat hooks" or skin books or the rest of what is claimed. What the photo actually shows is the disinfection chambers at Dachau. But you'd never know that from the title or description.

Also did this film ever have a sound track?

I'm not aware of one, but this alternate footage from the same day has French narration.
https://www.ina.fr/ina-eclaire-actu/vid ... de-torture

[Wetzelrad]

So, you think Lt Hodges refers to Lt Gn Hodges then?

I don't think they would omit the general part, but more likely the lieutenant part.

Yes. The description accurately describes him and his part in the film: "Lt. Gen. Courtney Hodges in Belgium, September 15, 1944." Clearly this is who the title refers to in its third segment.

Ah, I see now, in the past I had believed the allies constructed this setup. They didn't. It is the extraction system for changing the air over for the shooting range. Smokeless powder was significantly less smokeless during ww2. Those vents are the supply side, not the discharge side. Without seeing the system in its entirety, I haven't ever put that together before. After reading the blog again, it clicked.

This is another example of taking something mundane and ascribing to it a sinister function.

Your idea makes some sense, but how sure are you? I have no expertise on matters of ventilation, but consider the following:
1) I believe the room has only one interior wall, the wall with the four doors. The pipes actually run away from this wall toward the exterior.
2) The four pipes align (roughly?) with the four interior doors. If they laid on this platform and shot through the doors, then maybe these pipes were meant to pull gunsmoke away.
3) Several sources claim there were furnaces here.
4) During this footage they filled the room with some kind of steam or smoke, not gunsmoke.
5) The steam does have the appearance of exiting the pipes, especially at 03:28, but never entering the pipes.
6) These four pipes are spaced just a couple meters apart, all collapsing to a single pipe. Couldn't that single pipe by itself perform the same job?

This is another example of taking something mundane and ascribing to it a sinister function.

I'm more inclined to believe the Allies tried to stage something here, but possibly you will convince me that they merely misascribed the mundane if you can make sense of the above.

What is also mundane is the shooting range which was obviously primarily a shooting range. Wooden posts are not an unusual thing to have in a shooting range. We can't say that four thousand people were tortured and executed here if only X number of bodies were found. Whatever X is in this case.

The handprint wall also looks mundane. Those indents where adults and children pressed their hand flat against the wall could easily have been something they did for fun. This is why we see repeat handprints horizontally.

handprints.jpg (59.95 KiB) Viewed 177 times

Digging your hands in would not leave clear handprints. It's particularly hard to imagine someone who was being tortured deciding to jump several feet in the air to impress one of their palms in the wall. All of it is also inconsistent with press reports which claimed for example that the walls were heated to "white-hot". No one would push their hands against something that's burning them.

Gestapo torture chamber in Paris reported to have electrified benches and white-hot asbestos walls, atrocity propaganda.jpg (131.71 KiB) Viewed 177 times

[Stubble]

Yea, I'm going to have to dive deeper into this.

You've got me beat on familiarity.

I'll try to figure out who was holding the camera, their detachment etc and see if I can track down any communications or memoranda.

Any advice on points of contact or how to request documents would be greatly appreciated, I'm assuming the archives are subject to foia.

[Wetzelrad]

Well, I really don't mean to claim special expertise at all. The above represents my best understanding from viewing and reviewing these materials.

I see now that there is a Wikipedia page for this location. It claims 143 victims with no citations and no mention of the propaganda history.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balard_shooting_range

That page is actually a poor translation of the French version of the page as it existed in 2008. Here is a link to the current version.
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stand_de_tir_de_Balard

In the version of the story given there, the furnaces were not used to torture but to cremate bodies. Surprisingly it also sustains the hot wall torture claim. "It is assumed that electric cables crossed the wall and supplied resistors heating the wall to very high temperatures." I will leave this French material for someone else to investigate.

(For the benefit of people searching in the future, this thread is about the Balard shooting range at Issy-les-Moulineaux.)

I think I've got an ID. I checked personnel records for anyone with surname Laurence in the Signal Corps and found just one: Niilo B. Laurence. That name appears in a film produced specifically to feature Army cameramen.
https://www.britishpathe.com/asset/93496/

Here's Laurence.

laurence.jpg (63.81 KiB) Viewed 159 times

I'm not sure what you'll get out of this. It remains possible that Laurence filmed the later part of the tape (coded B 794) where his name appears but not the earlier two sections (B 759 and B 760) where it doesn't.

But more relevant, the cameraman is just one of many people there that day. Three different films were made that day, I think from three different cameras, and they show a large number of people in and outside the building. Not all Americans. Whatever fakery was done, I have to assume that it was done prior to filming and most or all of these people were uninvolved.

[counterskype]

It's pretty sad this is such a faux free speech board. Otherwise Hunt would just tell you Pinky, Philip Drell's partner shot some footage there. Drell shot the gas shower of doom at Dachau.

[Stubble]

Dude, you rock. Thank you for that man, much appreciated.

(For the record, I wanted the name to time him to his unit and see if they were involved with the oss or 'psyke war'.)

You can say what you like, but, you are certainly significantly more on the ball here than I am, and it shows. I commend you Sir.

[Hektor]

...
The handprint wall also looks mundane. Those indents where adults and children pressed their hand flat against the wall could easily have been something they did for fun. This is why we see repeat handprints horizontally.


handprints.jpg


Digging your hands in would not leave clear handprints. It's particularly hard to imagine someone who was being tortured deciding to jump several feet in the air to impress one of their palms in the wall. All of it is also inconsistent with press reports which claimed for example that the walls were heated to "white-hot". No one would push their hands against something that's burning them.
...

Possibly it was produced simply for the purpose of propaganda. But viewing hanprints in concrete mortar as 'evidence for homicidal gas chamber' is ridiculous.

In Auschwitz 1 Krema the story was that scratches on the wall were "fingernail scratches of gassing victims". I think the Auschwitz museum now distances themselves from this, since too obvious nonsense doesn't do them too much favor.