Remarkable Holocaust Nonsense #31: Certifying Cause of Death without Investigation

One of the strangest things about the so-called Nuremberg Trials between 1945-1946 is how ludicrous much of the testimony is. One of the major witnesses was a medical doctor who had been imprisoned in Dachau concentration camp between 1941 and 1945 named Fritz Blaha; who is also a principal source officially testifying to the myth of the ‘shrunken heads’.

In his ‘witness testimony’ concerning Dachau; the following exchange occurred:

‘HERR BABEL: How then did you have an opportunity of observing such ill-treatment?

BLAHA: I performed many autopsies on people either shot or beaten to death at their work, and made of official reports on the cause of death.

HERR BABEL: You said they were shot. Did you see such incidents yourself?

BLAHA: No.

HERR BABEL: Then, how do you know that?

BLAHA: The bodies were brought to me from the place of work, and it was my duty to ascertain the cause of death; that the men had been beaten to death, for example, that the skull or ribs had been fractured, that the man had died of internal hemorrhage, or that he had been shot; I had to make an official report on the cause of death. Sometimes, but this was rare, when an investigation was conducted, I was called in as witness.

HERR BABEL: Thank you.’ (1)

What is interesting here is that Blaha – responding to German defence counsel Ludwig Babel – is basically stating that he ‘saw’ SS and German personnel at Dachau murdering inmates by shooting them and/or beating them to death.

Babel naturally challenges Blaha on how he knew this to which Babel then responds that he was ‘responsible for autopsies’ so he ‘knew’ how those who came to him had died.

This is patently ludicrous because while Blaha may or may not have been responsible for performing autopsies on dead concentration camp inmates; it does not follow he knew how and why they died. Sure, he could say that someone had been killed by blunt force trauma but Blaha would have had a next to impossible to distinguish between someone who had been beaten to death compared to someone who had say had rock land on them during forced labour causing internal haemorrhaging but not massive crush injuries.

Blaha would have us believe that – in essence – there were no industrial accidents at all during forced labour at Dachau and that all the deaths of this kind that occurred at Dachau did so from the savage beatings of inmates by SS and German personnel.

Similarly, we are forced to ask if an inmate had been shot: why would the camp authorities need an autopsy in the first place? Isn’t it somewhat self-evident?

Blaha would have us believe not but predictably Blaha was also actively prevented from being cross-questioned too closely by the judges (2) and his relative malice towards his former jailers may be explained by the fact that Blaha seems to have been a communist and a vicious individual in general. (3)

However, what he was – or was not – Blaha’s ‘testimony’ makes absolutely no sense whatsoever!

References

(1) Trial of the Major War Criminals Before the International Military Tribunal, 1947, Vol. 5, International Military Tribunal: Nuremberg, p. 199

(2) Carlos Porter, 1996, ‘Not Guilty at Nuremberg: The German Defense Case’, 1st Edition, Samisdat: Toronto, p. 16

(3) Ibid., p. 17