Voice of the White House

                Washington, D.C., October 31, 2006: “ I’m a little late this week because of what I just found out. It seems that a person, or persons, currently unknown, poured molasses into the oil system of several of the Presidential helicopters! It was discovered when a guard noticed traces of the molasses dripping on side of the craft and a through check disclosed that not one but two helicopters had been sabotaged. The molasses would have heated up inside and gummed up the moving parts, causing a crash.  Very few staffers are aware of this which, according to the Marine source who told me, must have happened within the past week. I asked several non-government mechanics I know (my car is always having engine trouble) about this and both told me that this is an old trick and guaranteed to freeze up the machinery. Add to this the discovery of a bullet impact mark on one of the heavily bullet-proof windows of the Oval Office. Nothing was noticed for several days and then a man tending the grounds saw it. No one knows when it happened but a week is about the closest anyone can come. They were trying to figure out where the shooter was located but apparently since only one surface was damaged, there was no way to figure this out. If the bullet had penetrated and hit the President or some more important object like a desk, figuring the trajectory would be relatively easy. A Secret Service man told me that Bush has had more serious death threats than any other President since Abraham Lincoln but there is a total blackout on such comments.  Obviously, new security measures have to be taken but I have no idea what they are. I do note that there are more anti-aircraft weapons on the White House roof than on the Battleship Iowa!”

Letters to the Editor

From:     Eric De la Freniere  <delafreniere_eric@yahoo.com>

Sent:

Sunday, October 29, 2006 4:49 PM

To: tbrnews@hotmail.com

Subject:

Fake Historical Book

Into That Darkness (Random House, 1983), Gitta Sereny

I was asked to do a college book review for this book and wanted to supply more specific information than the author provided. The book is woefully short of fact and very long on rambling mea culpas. I took a passage by Sereny and used it as a basis for my attempts at verifications:

“Franz Stangl, the son of a night-watchman, was born in Altmuenster, Austria, on 26th March, 1908. After working as a weaver,  Stangl joined the Austrian police in 1931 and soon afterwards the illegal Nazi Party.

After  the Anschluss,  Stangl was quickly promoted through the ranks.of the SS. In 1940 Stangl became superintendent of the Euthanasia Institute at Schloss Hartheim where mentally and physically handicapped people were sent to be killed.

In 1942 he was transferred to Poland where he worked under Odilo Globocnik. Stangl was commandant of extermination camps in Sobibor (March, 1942 - September, 1942) and Treblinka (September, 1942 - August, 1943). Always dressed in white riding clothes, Stangl gained a reputation an an efficient administrator and was described as the "best camp commander in Poland".

During the Second World War he stole vast sums of money from the inmates and deposited it in Schutzstaffel (SS) bank deposits. This included 145 kilograms of gold from rings and 4,000 carats of diamonds.”

Every bit of this information, dramatic though it might read, is a fiction. All of the personnel records of the German SS and their police are available both at the German government’s Berlin Document Center and through copies of their records at the U.S. National Archives. A close search of these tens of thousands of pages of official German records, easily accessible to the public,  discloses that there was no Fritz ( or Franz,) Stangl in either the SS or the German Police and that a roster of SS officials working for the KL or Concentration Camp system does not show any person with the name Fritz (or Franz)Stangl at Treblinka camp or any other camp. In point of  fact, the records show that no one under that name was a member of the SS, the Camp System, the German Police or the Nazi Party.

Also, extant records of the German banking system which did have bank accounts for the SS camps shows no record whatsoever of a Franz Stangl and no deposits of “145 kilograms of gold from rings and 4,000 carets of diamonds,” in his name or in the name of Treblinka camp..  In addition, the so-called ‘Leopold Files’ in Austrian State Archives which contains an enormous amount of material on the early Nazi party in Austria does not show anyone with that name either as being a member either of the Nazi party or the SS or Austrian police..

In short, Stangl was a fictional character, invented for the sake of an interview by Sereny and, most fortunate for her, published post mortem. (Stangl was purported to have died, having confessed his sins to Sereny, shortly before she began her book, later entitled “Into That Darkness”  This book, purported to be an introspective interview with a remorseful SS camp commandant who, according to Sereny, murdered over 900,000 Jewish inmates of Treblinka camp located in Poland.

Again, camp records, now in Russian archives and readily available to researchers, shows that there were only a total of 135,000 inmates in that camp from its inception in 1942 to close in April of 1943 and that the death tolls were approximately 13,500, in the main from typhus infections. It would be interesting to learn where Stangl found his “4,000 carets of diamonds. “ Most likely in the author’s fertile imagination!