Nazis in Several German Cities Sentenced for Mass-murder of Jews
November 18, 1960
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The former commandant of the Gusen concentration camp was charged today with responsibility for the murder of 300 prisoners in the camp during the Second World War The Public Prosecutor’s Office said that the accused, Karl Chmielewski, now 57, had ordered prisoners unfit for work to be sprayed with cold water in the wintertime, until they froze or drowned. In the summer, prisoners who could not work were drowned in an open-air swimming pool.

Prisoners killed by drowning in the pool at Mauthausen?

Just when I thought that I had heard everything about the many cruel ways that the Jews were murdered during the Holocaust, someone e-mailed me about the so-called “bathing to death” that was introduced by SS-Haupsturmfuehrer Karl Chmielwesky at Mauthausen between the Summer of 1941 and January 1942.

This information comes from the Nizkor web site, from which I have quoted below:

Inmates who were sick or un-fit for work were selected, driven to the bathing facilities for prisoners and showered with cold water for half an hour or longer. The drains of the pools were closed or blocked with victims who were already collapsed so that the water level continued to rise. In most cases death was through acute circulatory collaps (sic) or through downing. Often the SS-men who stood around the pool accelerated this by pushing the victims under water. At least 242 inmates were killed this way.

Source: Cp. Gisela Ralitsch: “Das KL Mauthausen” in Studien zur Geschicte der Konzentrationslager, eds: Hans Rothfels und Theordor Eschenberg, Stutthgart: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, 1970, pp. 50 – 92, hier pp. 72f.

Testimony of Lexi Kowal

Born into a loving and cultured family of great musical talent, my grandmother Mara’s life changed forever at the mere age of eight.

Until this age, she had never experienced anti-semitism. In 1938, this quickly changed, as the Iron Guard began to organise a pogrom to wipe out the Jewish residents. They assembled in a sports arena, dress in black pants and royal blue shirts, donning a swastika on their left arm. Mara was hidden with her family in the basement of a synagogue, narrowly surviving the event.

In 1940 Mara’s family travelled to visit a family member in Kishinev. Shortly after arriving, the Soviet Union invaded the region, and Mara’s family were not permitted to return home. They were forced to live there until the German invasion in 1941. Her father was taken away to fight in the Russian army, never to be seen again. Mara, her mother and three siblings were transported, through nightmare journeys, to several work camps in the geographic invention of Transnistria, north of Romania. In the camps, Mara was forced to build a “swimming pool”, used to drown children inmates.

A decisive point in the history of the Heinrich camp occurred at the end of January 1945 when around 450 Jewish prisoners, whom the SS had evacuated in the face of the advancing Red Army from Tschenstochau (Czestochowa) via Buchenwald and the Dora camp, arrived at Rottleberode. Until this time, the camp prisoners were mostly non-Jewish Poles (in November 1944, they comprised around 45 percent of the camp inmates), Russians, French, Czechs, and Germans. Until January 1945, there were no Jewish prisoners in the camp. Most of the new Jewish prisoners were sent as forced labor to the caverns at the B-4 construction project near Stempeda. Here they were the victims of brutal mistreatment by SS, Kapos, and German civilian workers. Many Jews drowned in a pool at the entrance to the cavern.
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In 1984, former Kapo Ebender was tried before a Fulda court on the charge that he drowned Jewish prisoners from the work detachment B-4 in the Heinrich camp. He was acquitted for lack of evidence.

My Visit to Theresienstadt (Terezin)
By Jonathan Newmark, Cold Spring Harbor High School, New York

We were then led through a small, dark tunnel through a hill. Immediately on the other side was a ditch about the size of a swimming pool. The guide had told us that, in fact, it was a swimming pool. I was curious as to why there was a swimming pool in a concentration camp. The guide informed us that for their own enjoyment, S.S. Guard’s would throw two prisoners in the pool, each armed with a wooden club. The prisoner’s would have to fight to their death, like 20th century gladiators. If they did not fight, both of them would be executed. This part of the camp was the most chilling of all. It was hard to believe that a human being could be as cruel as to make one man take another’s life to save his own. If a man could not swim, he would drown to death in the pool.

derekp78 wrote:Lamprecht:

That quote is a joke. It is a meme based on the song "Bodies" by Drowning Pool. 4chan people started creating these a few years ago, attempting to trick Holocaust activists into quoting them.

According to Jewish Auschwitz survivor Marc Klein there was a swimming pool for inmates, he mentions it at least twice in his recollections of the camp. In an article entitled ‘Auschwitz I Stammlager’ he wrote: “The working hours were modified on Sundays and holidays, when most of the kommandos were at leisure. Roll call was at around noon; evenings were devoted to rest and to a choice of cultural and sporting activities. Football, basketball, and water-polo matches (in an open-air pool built within the perimeter by detainees) attracted crowds of onlookers. It should be noted that only the very fit and well-fed, exempt from the harsh jobs, could indulge in these games which drew the liveliest applause from the masses of other detainees” (De l’Université aux camps de concentration: Télmorgnages strasbourgeois, Paris, les Belles-lettres, 1947, p. 453).

Jewish detainee, Raphael Esrail, confirmed in a short testimony written in 1997 that he saw, in July 1944, dozens of his fellow prisoners busy at work on the said pool which, he pointed out, had “a diving board and an access ladder”. [1]
Inmates from Auschwitz and surrounding camps enjoyed swimming and sunbathing beside the pool on Saturday and Sunday afternoons. Although not as popular as sports like soccer, some competition was organized where inmates from different countries of origin, and different camps, raced in individual and relay events.’
One of those who took advantage of the Auschwitz swimming pool was the French Jewish swimmer Alfred Nakache.
Nakache was a member of France’s Olympic Swimming Team at the Berlin Olympics of 1936. A freestyle swimmer, his team finished fourth in the 4x200m relay finals, just missing a bronze medal. But, his aquatic career was interrupted and put on hold during the German occupation of France in World War II.
Nakache was arrested and deported with his wife and their two-year-old daughter to Auschwitz in January 1944. Alfred was sent to Auschwitz III to work in a rubber factory. Sadly his wife and daughter perished.
At Auschwitz, Nakache would often compete against an amateur swimmer, prisoner number 172345, Noah kliger.
Less than a year after his liberation from Auschwitz, Nakache was a member of the French 3 x 100m relay team that established a World record in August 1946 at Toulouse.
Nakache was also a member of France’s Olympic swimming team that competed in the London Olympics of 1948.

[1] Raphael Esrail, Une piscine à Auschwitz, in Après Auschwitz (Bulletin de l’Amicale des déportés d’Auschwitz), n° 264/octobre 1997, p. 10).

In the Ganov camp 200,000 peaceful citizens were exterminated. The most refined methods of cruelty were employed in this extermination, such as disembowelling and the freezing of human beings in tubs of water. Mass shootings took place to the accompaniment of the music of an orchestra recruited from the persons interned.

In the Crimea peaceful citizens were gathered on barges, taken out to sea and drowned, over 144,000 persons being exterminated in this manner.

Throughout the winter many prisoners were killed in the following manner: They would be buried up to their waist in the snow, and water poured over them, so that they formed statues of ice.