Water in the death/work camps?

I read something that said the nazi's floridated the water in the camps to numb resistance to their authority and agenda. True or false?

A quick look at Google finds lots of references, but they are invariably antifluoridation or conspiracy websites, and all quote the same unsourced material. Many also post claims that the Soviets did the same thing to their prisoners as well during WW2. Of course even if they did do this it does not mean it actually did what they thought it did. The Nazis and Stalin were fond of all sorts of odd ideas.

tim gueguen 101867

False. Fluoridation of drinking water supplies didn't even begin anywhere in the world until the 1950s. The idea that the Nazi regime would spend millions of Reichmarks and scarce natural resources improving the quality of water to concentration and death camps is ludicrous.

Why would they spend time and money to flurodate the water when they had the ultimate weapon against resistance - death? This is probably the result of some conspiracist with too much time on his hands.

[moderator's Note: The thread is starting to move away from a wwii disucssion to a discussion of floridation. Please have any followups contain wwii related material...rhm]

The practice of fluoridating drinking water for dental hygiene comes from the discovery of natural flourides in ground water in locations where dentists could not make a living. These locations were in the American West (West Texas? New Mexico? Arizona?), locales NOT noted for lack of 'resistance to authority and agenda.'

Auschwitz II, also known as Birkenau, had no running water at all for any of its up to 200,000 inmates. Auschwitz I and III had running water for base facilities and industrial buildings but none to inmate barracks. Belsen also had no running water to any inmate barracks, although the plumbing existed for it. There was plumbing at the 'show camp', Theresienstadt, but running water only for the period of the Red Cross inspection in 1944.

It seems from these partial researches that providing running water at concentration camps was not a priority for the Nazi regime. It seems microscopically unlikely that any such water was improved with fluoride.