jumpy64 wrote:"Why are there so few Holocaust stories from non-Jews?"
Iwo Cyprian Pogonowski is named as having been in Sachsenhausen concentration camp as a non-Jewish victim of the Holocaust. He states there were gas chambers at that location and implies that they were used on non-Jewish victims.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sachsenhausen_concentration_camp
However the construction of a gas chamber and ovens by camp-commandant Anton Kaindl in March 1943[2] facilitated the means to kill larger numbers of prisoners.
Here crematoria facilities are described as "ovens", as per the usual dissimulation of the facts, but it is quite clear that Wiki states "a gas chamber" not "gas chambers" (plural).
This leads to 1 link:
jewishgen.org/forgottencamps/Camps/SachsenhausenEng.html
In March 1943, a gas chamber was added to the "Station Z". This gas chamber was used until the end of the war. The number of gassed victims is unknown because the transports for gassings were not registered in the entry registers of the camp.
On Pogonowski's own blog he has an essay called "The German dehumanizing routine".
bibula.com/icp/?p=165
Since all Jews were transported east in 1943, where most of them were murdered, there were no prisoners marked with the star of David among the thousands of inmates in Sachsenhausen at the time of the evacuation of the camp.
So, according to Iwo there were no Jews in the camp after 1943 and no-one immediately identifiable as Jewish among the inmates at the time of the evacuation of the camp in May 1945.
For the time period summer 1944 Iwo states TB sufferers were gassed, but provides no further details. He describes sending someone to be checked for TB in his place and that after the war he found that he had TB scars and:
therefore very likely I would have been selected for the gas chamber, which was in the adjacent (sic) to the camp industrial yard or the “Industriehof of the Sachsenhausen Koncentrations Lager."
He then writes "Word spread that the men listed were to be gassed".
Iwo then jumps a year, to Spring 1945 and the allied carpet bombing. He writes about American planes using phosphorous bombs which killed (according to his figures) 700 prisoners and injured 1000 others. He describes this as "a tragic case of 'friendly fire'".
Then he says:
Dead bodies of prisoners were loaded on trucks, and shipped directly to the crematorium. I was told that seriously injured prisoners were sent to the gas chambers and then to crematorium. SS-guards did not permit any rescue efforts on the part of the prisoners.
This part of his story about the seriously injured being gassed makes no sense. There was massive damage that had been caused by the allied bombing, with huge craters everywhere and barracks burned to the ground. Did the camp guards have the time and personnel to drag seriously injured prisoners to the gas chambers (plural)? Wouldn't it have made more sense to simply shoot them or leave them to die? Iwo, at no point describes seeing anyone or knowing of anyone who died in the gas chamber at Sachsenhausen and is only "told" that it is happening. There are only rumours and innuendo in his account.
The rest of his story is the usual "death march" story in direct opposition to his own use of the word "evacuated". There is also a preposterous "count" of 6000 people allegedly shot by SS guards along the evacuation road, although he doesn't state who counted all those corpses or why those self same guards didn't shoot the seriously injured after the carpet bombing and chose to gas them instead.
At the end of Iwo's account he repeats again that there were gas chambers (plural) at Saschenhausen.
About quarter million inmates passed through Sachsenhausen during the camp operation in 1936-1945; 130,000 inmates of 41 different nationalities died there. The camp was equipped with gas chambers.
So, here is an example of a non-Jewish account of a gas chamber where it is implied that it was used to kill people who weren't Jewish. He didn't see it being used, nor did he know of anyone who was killed via that device, or at least fails to name anyone. The mainstream view on the Holocaust is that
only Jews were gassed by the Nazis, but here is an account attempting to add non-Jews to that story.