Auschwitz Fakes in Images No. 2: The Auschwitz Camp Orchestra

The story about the "Auschwitz camp orchestra" have entered nearly legendary status. Most often, the public is told, the evil Nazis (either themselves, or they forced Jews to do so) played classical music while they were mass-murdering Jews in the "gas chambers" or some other such activity.

A good example of this sort of propaganda has emerged with the inevitable "survivor eye-witnesses" producing sketches "made from memory" or somehow "in secret at the time" of these orchestra performances.

A good example is below: this is a drawing supposed "made secretly in Birkenau" by "survivor" François Reisz. It purports to show the camp orchestra playing as work details returns to the camp; note they are carrying the dead on stretchers and handcarts, and the whole area is covered in smoke (presumably from those crematoria again. (Published in Projektgruppe Musik in Konzentrationslagern, ed., Musik in Konzentrationslagern, Freiburg i.Br., 1991, page 58).

Of the fiendishness of Nazis there is no end . . . below, a similar "made from memory" drawing, this time by "former prisoner" Mieczysław Koscielniak, in 1950. (published in M. Koscielniak: Bilder von Auschwitz, 2d ed., Frankfurt a. M., 1986.) Note once again the dead being carried into the camp....

So what was the reality of the Auschwitz Orchestra?

The truth is revealed in original photographs, on display at the camp museum to his day.

Here is the real Auschwitz camp orchestra, assembled for an open air concert in Auschwitz I. Note the crowds of prisoners standing round (not being "marched" or "carrying the dead" but quite relaxed, listening to some music., Note other prisoners on the left, standing at ease. . .

Photographs like this expose the "survivor" drawings as lies -- and of course the Holocaust storytellers cannot allow this to pass without comment.

Below is the same image, as displayed at the Auschwitz Museum. Note the caption: it actually claims that the orchestra was forced to "assemble here to play marches while the prisoners filed past. This was to help the prisoners keep in step and make it easier to count them as they went to and form work."

The picture shows no prisoners "marching past" or guards "counting them" -- instead if shows, as pointed out above, a relaxed group of prisoners (recognizable by their striped clothes) just standing around in no "line step" . . . this is an example of where the Holocaust storytellers will just make a claim, hoping that no-one will actually analyze their statements and see it for the hoax that it is.

It is, of course, also untrue that the camp orchestra was "forced" to assemble in one particular area only. Below, a picture taken in 1941, a Sunday afternoon (and not a "work" day, so, no "rows of prisoners "marching past") in which the details can be seen even more clearly:

And here, just to round the truth about the Auschwitz Camp Orchestra up, is a picture of the camp choir,  recruited from the workers at the IG Farben factory at Auschwitz--all well-fed prisoners, putting on a concert for the camp inmates:

Below: A stage performance at Auschwitz, dated by the German Federal Archive Service as "1941/1944.