Holocaust survivor speaks out against critical race theory, communism: 'let them be children'
Fox News Digital interviewed a Holocaust survivor named Sami Steigmann who endured Nazi medical experimentation during World War II.
Warning: This article contains graphic descriptions of Nazi medical experiments.
EXCLUSIVE – A Holocaust survivor who endured Nazi medical experimentation during World War II spoke out against teaching critical race theory in K-12 schools in an interview with Fox News Digital.
"In this country, there is no education. There is indoctrination," Sami Steigmann, 82, said about CRT, a lens of viewing the world and society's systems through race in an oppressor versus oppressed narrative. The theory also claims that America is systemically racist, meaning the cards are rigged against people of color in every institution.
Sami Steigmann said that schools in the U.S. are not educating children, they're indoctrinating them. (Screenshot/YouTube)
Fox News Digital previously reported that the Anti-Defamation League included concepts from critical race theory within its K-12 lesson plans. Its glossary of terms suggested that America was systemically racist.
"Excuse me. Please do not use the word ‘systemic,’" Steigmann said. "That means that when you look at me, you are calling me racist. Systemic means everybody. Are there racists? Yes, there are. Is there racism in the country? Yes, there is in any country… However, when you use the word systemic, you are calling me a racist. And I don't like it."
Sami Steigmann, a Holocaust survivor who endured Nazi medical experimentation, speaks with Fox News Digital about critical race theory. (Fox News Digital)
"The ADL was a wonderful, wonderful organization. [But] under the new leadership, in my opinion – not everybody will agree with me – but they went too far," Steigmann said.
The ADL is currently led by a former Obama official, Jonathan Greenblatt.
"Obviously, Greenblatt is very controversial," Steigmann said. "I'm not in the habit of judging somebody, criticizing somebody. It's not my role, but I think that they have, from being a very strong advocate for the Jewish people, they have right now gone a little bit too far in wrong directions. That's my personal opinion."
"If it would be systemic racism, [Barack] Obama would have never become the president. He was elected twice. Are there racists? Yes. OK, deal with them… bring it to justice. Whatever you want to do."
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Steigmann, born on December 21, 1939, is a Holocaust survivor from Czernowitz. From 1941-1944, he was with his parents at Mogilev-Podolsky, a labor camp in the modern-day Ukraine.
He told Fox News Digital that he lives with excruciating pain on a day-to-day basis because of Nazi medical experimentation for which there is no cure.
Nazi death camp called Auschwitz, located in Poland; a place where historians estimate around 1.1 million people perished during the less than 5 years of its existence, according to the Museum. (AP Photo/Czarek Sokolowski, file)
Steigmann is one of thousands of people who were experimented on during the Third Reich. There are 7,000 documented cases of Jews, gays, Catholic priests, Poles, Roma, political prisoners and Soviet prisoners of war who were subjected to experimentation, according to the Holocaust Museum.
Steigmann's father once found him on the floor suffering immensely. It was then that his father "in shock" decided to tell him about what happened to him as a young child during World War II. Steigmann was injected with unknown substances by the Nazis.
"So for 31 years, I was in excruciating pain. And I still am. I mean, I will be for the rest of my life. But I did not know why, and even the doctors could not tell me," Steigmann said.
"The German government admitted that I was subjected to medical experiments," Steigmann said. The government provided him with 2,500 Deutsche Marks as restitution for his pain and suffering.
After Adolf Hitler became chancellor in 1933, funding and career advancement opportunities opened up to scientists and doctors willing to conduct research that would supposedly "prove" Nazi ideology and advance its extermination objectives.
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Some experiments the Nazis conducted on prisoners in concentration camps during the Holocaust era left people permanently incapable of having children. In many cases, this outcome was by design. Nazi doctors were involved in "develop[ing] methods for the biological destruction of people regarded by the Nazis as undesirable," the Auschwitz Museum said.
For example, a doctor at Auschwitz, SS-Sturmbannführer Horst Schumann, conducted sterilization experiments using Siemens x-ray machines on the sexual organs of Jewish men and women, according to the Auschwitz Museum.
"The x-rays left them with severe radiation burns… and lesions that resisted healing," the Museum said.
Photographs taken by a Nazi photographer of Hungarian Jews in 1944 after arrival at Auschwitz-Birkenau, a death camp located in Poland. The photographs pictured here include men, women and children walking to and waiting outside the Auschwitz gas chambers shortly after arrival. (API/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)
Another Nazi doctor at Auschwitz, Carl Clauberg, who was a gynecologist, "developed a method of non-surgical mass sterilization" for women using "a specially prepared chemical irritant," according to the Auschwitz Museum.
"These procedures were carried out in a brutal way. Complications were frequent," the Museum said. "Multiple organ failure and death frequently followed."
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A survivor at another camp, Natzweiler-Struthof, testified about living with the consequences of the Nazi experimentation.
"It is very emotional, psychologically speaking, to go to details… I could never have any children. As I recall they – the Nazi doctors – experimented… with different instruments and cuts," she said.
"That was agonizing pain. They gave me all sorts of medicine that made me nauseous. The pain was excruciating and it made me so sick. My female parts are not working. Unfortunately it left me childless," her testimony, documented by the Claims Conference, said.
One of the most infamous Nazi doctors was the highly educated SS-Hauptsturmführer Josef Mengele, M.D., Ph.D.
Dr. Mengele, who worked at Auschwitz during World War II, had a fascination with twins, and conducted gruesome experiments – such as the removal of organs without anesthesia, submerging victims in hot water and injecting people with drugs and chemicals.
The U.S. Department of Justice completed an investigation into Mengele's wartime activities in 1985. The report said his crimes can be "accurately described as a catalog of horror." It added that what was "perhaps most shocking" was the "sheer pleasure" Mengele took in his inhumane experiments on children and adult prisoners in Auschwitz.
"Mengele is accused of murder on a colossal scale… In a grotesque perversion of the physician's role, Auschwitz's so-called ‘Angel of Death’ employed his knowledge of the workings of life in order to destroy it," the DOJ report said.
Eva Mozes Kor, a Holocaust survivor who endured experimentation from Mengele, said, "When I looked into his eyes, I could see nothing but evil… People say that the eyes are the center of the soul, and in Mengele's case, that was correct."
"I often say that we, the Mengele Twins, are the children without a childhood because when we look back at our wonder years, we remember the chimneys, the smell of burned flash, the shots, the blood taking, the endless tests in Mengele's labs, the rats, lice, and dead bodies that were everywhere," Kor said.
Kor, who passed away in 2019, famously and uniquely declared that she forgave Dr. Mengele.
"I discovered that I had the power to forgive. That no one could give me that power, and no one could take it away," Kor said.
As for collective forgiveness, another Holocaust survivor, Elie Weisel, notably said, "Forgiveness is God's, not mine."
A 1985 report by the Department of Justice on Nazi doctor Joseph Mengele, M.D Ph.D, said he was "synonymous with the evil of Auschwitz, the site on which more people were murdered than any other in recorded human history." (Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)
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Mengele escaped to South America after the war; it was believed that he died in 1979 of a stroke, according to the Holocaust Museum.
"[H]is name became synonymous with the evil of Auschwitz, the site on which more people were murdered than any other in recorded human history," the DOJ report said.
Today, Steigmann maintains a bright smile on his face. He has been flooded with messages on his website thanking him for sharing a positive perspective on life and his philosophy on overcoming adversity.
"I am not what happened to me, I am what I choose to be," Steigmann has famously said.
If you meet him on the street, Steigmann will likely give you his business card and tell you, "I am a motivational speaker." His speeches to young people and others quiet the chronic pain as he speaks about the importance of tolerance, loving and cherishing life every day and defending Israel from vilification.
A German and Israeli air force jets fly over the Fuerstenfeldbruck airbase where a rescue plot to save Israeli athletes failed. Eleven coaches and athletes were tortured and killed by a Palestinian terror organization called "Black September" during the 1972 Munich Olympic Games. (Sven Hoppe/dpa via AP)
"I decided because I had a very high tolerance, I have decided to learn to live with the pain and not use painkillers… I learned to live with it. And how shall I say? It's like part of me. So I try not to pay attention to it. When I give presentations… – being so concentrated on what I want to say… the pain is still there, but it's in the background. And I learned not to pay attention."
His advice to the young people includes, "Never give up, never lose hope and enjoy the life you’ve been given."
"Never be a perpetrator (anyone that hurts another, intentionally and repeatedly, is a perpetrator). But most importantly, never ever be a bystander. The greatest tragedy in human history, the Holocaust and all genocides, happened because the world stood by and did nothing."
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He adds that the most important thing to guide the next generation in a positive direction is through proper education.
"So my belief is that there is a virus that is much more dangerous than COVID-19… And this is the virus of bigotry, anti-Semitic hatred [and] racist ideology. The only way we can… combat it is only through education," he said.
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