I Con the World

Is Elie Wiesel an icon or an “I con?”

Venerated and billed as “the world’s most famous Holocaust survivor” and a Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, earning hundreds of thousands of dollars every year in speaking fees (at $25,000 a pop it might be closer to say a million), and holding a prestigious, but undemanding six-figure professorship in Humanities at Boston University, Elie Wiesel has never been asked to show any proof that he is what he says he is.

Everything written about Elie Wiesel that this writer can find skims over the details and dwells on the emotionality of holocaust, humanity and hate. Among the many unnerving quotations from Elie concerning the last h-word is this one, found preceding an essay in the Jewish Daily Forward of June 9th by Anita Epstein, titled “Why I Cannot Forgive Germany:” [1]

“I cannot and I do not want to forgive the killers of children; I ask God not to forgive.”

     - Elie Wiesel

Ms. Epstein is influenced (or inspired?) by Wiesel to hold onto hate by holding on to the holocaust legends, such as the one about “Germans” throwing babies off of balconies. Another famous statement made by Elie is:

“Every Jew, somewhere in his being, should set apart a zone of hate – healthy virile hate – for what the German personifies and for what persists in the German. To do otherwise would be a betrayal of the dead. ”

Elie Wiesel actually plays God. The world has been conned into seeing him as the next best thing to God, as someone who has risen above it all, as someone who is capable or has earned the right to pass judgment on the rest of humanity. What has earned him this right is clearly his suffering during the one year he was held in concentration camps and his “powerful prose” in describing it.

However, Elie’s actual presence in the Auschwitz “death camp” and the Buchenwald concentration camp during 1944-45 rests solely on the claims of the New York Times and his well-promoted books, the most famous being his first one, Night, published in 1955 in Buenos Aires. That’s an interesting story in itself, but here I will limit myself to a chronology of NYT features on Elie that coincide with his advancing fortunes.

On 6 May 1945, the New York Times published the now famous photograph of the “Crowded Bunks in the Prison Camp at Buchenwald” without identifying anyone in the picture. Further use of the picture follows.

* October 1983, it was published again in the high circulation Sunday NYT Magazine with this caption: “On April 11, 1945, American troops liberated the concentration camp’s survivors, including Elie, who later identified himself as the man circled in the photo.”[2] (Wiesel says he is the last one on top row in this cropped version of the picture).

Wiesel had never claimed to be in this picture before, and this face is not the face of a 16-year-old boy, nor does it resemble an existing portrait of Elie before he was deported. But, the article included the statement: “His name has been frequently mentioned as a possible recipient of a Nobel Prize, for either peace or literature.” So we suspect it was part of the campaign being waged to win him a Nobel Prize.

As David O’Connell has written in “Elie Wiesel and the Catholics,”[3] the NYT had manufactured history by declaring erroneously that Wiesel is seen in the picture, even though Wiesel had stated over the years that he was in the sick bay at Buchenwald on April 16, the day the photograph was taken.

* 14 October 1986. The Nobel award was announced.

* 2 November 1986. The NYT again republished a severely cropped version of the Buchenwald photo with the caption: “Elie Wiesel, the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize (at far right in the top bunk) in the Buchenwald concentration camp in April 1945, when the camp was liberated by American troops.” [4]

* 4 January 1987. The NYT erroneously claimed that Wiesel had been “freed from Auschwitz” during the war. [5]

* 18 January 1988. The NYT wrote on the occasion of his trip to Auschwitz: “Mr. Wiesel was a prisoner at Auschwitz and witnessed the killing there of his father and one of his sisters.” [6] But, according to Wiesel’s account (no records), his father died in Buchenwald [from illness - editor's remark]. However, the NYT knew that Auschwitz was a familiar Holocaust “keyword” to its readers, while Buchenwald was not.

More confusion:

* 3 June 1987, the Chicago Tribune published a photo of Wiesel, accompanied by two other men, standing in front of a blown-up version of the picture and pointing to himself in it. The caption read: “Nobel Prize winner Elie Wiesel points to a picture of himself, taken by a German at the Auschwitz death camp in 1945. The photograph is part of the Holocaust Memorial in Lyon, France.”[7]

* 21 April 1995, Wiesel told the German weekly Die Zeit that the picture had actually been taken the day after the liberation, that is, on April 12, 1945, not on April 11, as he had always implied. (It was actually taken on April 16). He also said: “On the day after the liberation the picture was taken in the Children’s Block at Buchenwald by an American soldier. It shows old men. But these old faces are the faces of men who, in truth, were 15 or 16 years of age like I was.” [8]

There is much more to the story of this photograph, but that must be sufficient for now.

Counter Claims

In March 2009, fellow Hungarian Jew Myklos (Nikolaus) Grüner’s accusation that Elie Wiesel is an imposter broke onto the Internet, mainly via an article [9] on Henry Makow’s website that he picked up from a Hungarian website.[10] Naturally, it didn’t get much coverage in the media, even though Grüner had documents from both Auschwitz and Buchenwald to back him up, including undisputed records that show him registered as a prisoner in both camps. Back in January 2003, Grüner had issued an “international press release to the world” from his home in Sweden:

“Elie Wiesel A-7713 has never existed, and the man claiming himself to be “Elie Wiesel” with the concentration camp number A-7713, knowing full well that this number belonged to someone else, is an imposter of the worst kind. For this statement, I, Nikolaus Grüner A-11104, have certified and written knowledge of.” [11]

In a press release of 2006, Grüner states: “I […] take full responsibility in revealing that the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize winner ‘ELIE WIESEL’ has been impersonating Lazar Wiesel A-7713 who was born 1913 in Marmaros, Hungary. Further more I also state that the archives in Auschwitz and Buchenwald are missing evidence to prove that ‘ELIE,’ known as A-7713, was ever registered as a prisoner in any German concentration camp at all.” [12]

The evidence Grüner presents is compelling, and can be found in an organized fashion in two articles written by Carlo Mattogno and posted at Inconvenient History Revisionist Blog [13] on 24 Feb and 26 March of this year. One small piece of this evidence is that Elie Wiesel was born on 30 September 1928, and another is that the ID number A-7713 was given out on 24 May, but Elie Wiesel says in his book Night that he wasn’t deported from Sighet (Marmaros) until after 28 May and possibly not until 3 June 1944.

But the most persuasive evidence to me is registration cards and other official documents from the Auschwitz Museum archives that show Lazar Wiesel, born 4 September 1913 received number (and tattoo) A-7713 and his brother, Abraham, born 10 October 1900 was given A-7712.

A-7712 is the number Elie claims belonged to his father Shlomo, who was with him. There are no such records for Elie and his father. Nor for his two sisters who supposedly survived Auschwitz too.

The situation at Buchenwald is similar and the evidence against Elie Wiesel being a survivor of Auschwitz and Buchenwald at all continues to build to a veritable mountain, all of which will be graphically presented and archived at a website that is now under construction and soon to open.

Where’s the tattoo?

Our new website will carry the theme “Where’s the tattoo?” – an idea originally suggested by a poster on the CODOH forum. We present this to viewers as a world-wide challenge and to encourage investigation and demand for answers. We will ask for independent efforts by diverse groups to work with film, Youtube videos, petitions and letter-writing campaigns to Universities, especially Elie’s employer, Boston University.

We will challenge those in the “mighty mainstream media” to force attention on this issue. Everyone—you—can act as an individual entrepreneur, make use of the information we will provide, contribute information to I Con The World, coordinate with us. Our spotlight on Elie Wiesel and the issue of who he really is will be intense and unrelenting. We are not talking about speaking in riddles here, but of evidence that is in- your-face… or in-his-face. We urge your participation, we urge you to recruit others by bringing I Con The World to their attention, by encouraging others to contribute in whatever way they can.

Watch for us. Get ready to help.

[The Elie Wiesel Cons The World website is now up online at http://www.eliewieseltattoo.com - Editor's note]

[1] Jewish Daily Forward, 9 June 2010. http://forward.com/articles/128652/
[2] Samuel G. Freedman, “Bearing Witness: The Life and Work of Elie Wiesel,” NYT, 23 October 1983.
[3] “Elie Wiesel and the Catholics,” Culture Wars, November 2004.
[4] Martin Suskind, “A Voice from Bonn: History Cannot be Shrugged Off,” NYT, 2 November 1986.
[5] “A Survivor’s Prize,” NYT, 4 January 1987.
[6] “Wiesel and Walesa Visit Auschwitz,” NYT, 18 January 1988.
[7] “Elie Wiesel and the Catholics,” ibid.
[8] “1945 und Heute: Holocaust,” Die Zeit, 21 April 1995.
[9] http://www.henrymakow.com/translated_from_the_hungarian.html
[10] http://kuruc.info/r/6/36390/
[11] Nikolaus Grüner, Stolen Identity, Stockholm, 2005-2006.
[12] Grüner, ibid.
[13] Carlo Mattogno, ”Elie Wiesel: ‘The Most Authoritative Living Witness’ of The Shoah?” http://www.revblog.codoh.com/2010/02/elie-wiesel-the-most-authoritative-living-witness-of-the-shoah/; ”Elie Wiesel: New Documents” http://www.revblog.codoh.com/2010/03/elie-wiesel-new-documents/

In the recently published study Sobibór. Holocaust and Propaganda co-authored by Jürgen Graf, Carlo Mattogno and myself a subchapter (pp. 361-363) of our discussion on the fate of the allegedly gassed Jews is devoted to a number of quotes from war-year issues of the Swedish-Jewish periodical Judisk Krönika (Jewish Chronicle) which contradicts the established historiography on this most important issue. Jewish-American historian Steven Koblik, who has specialized on Sweden’s war-time relationship with Germany and the ”Holocaust” has the following to say about the journal in question:

“One center of activity was within the pro-Zionist groups. They had a journal, Judisk Krönika, founded in 1932, that publicly tried to change the official congregation policy and influence the larger Swedish community. The journal developed close contacts in Eastern Europe, especially Poland, and provided some of the best information on the extent of the Final Solution found in any Western publication. The journal also became a source of information for other non-Jewish publications.”

In my survey of the war-year issues of this journal – which is still the most important Jewish periodical in Sweden – I came across also a number of news notices relating to the activities of the Einsatzgruppen in the occupied Soviet territories, as well as Soviet evacuations of Jews to the Russian interior and Central Asia. I present them here in chronological order accompanied by a few brief comments.

• Vol. 10 Nr 9 (November 1941), p. 141: “50,000 Lithuanian Jews, who initially had been brought to the interior of Russia, have now been allocated to Mongolian farms. About 100,000 Jews from Ukraine have found a haven of escape in Birobidzhan.” The number of evacuated Lithuanian Jews given here is vastly higher than those presented by mainstream sources, who generally state that approximately 10,000 of these Jews escaped or were evacuated to the Soviet Union before the German invasion (cf. Jim G. Tobias, ”Die Massenexekutionsstätte Ponary bei Vilna 1941-1944” in: R. Margolis, J. G. Tobias (eds.) Die geheime Notizen des K. Sakowicz, Antogo, Nuremberg 2003, p. 14, note 12).
• Vol. 10 Nr 10 (December 1941) p. 156: “News of the most terrifying sort have reached us from the Ukraine. There are reports of thousands of killed Jews, among them 15,000 Galician Jews, who had been expulsed from Hungary. Also in Odessa thousands of Jews are said to have been executed as punishment for a time-bomb which exploded in the city hall and buried in its ruins 200 Romanian soldiers with their staff. Similar reports also come from Kiev and other Russian cities.” (The journal consequently used “Russian” to denote “Soviet”, thus the reason why Kiev in the Ukraine is called a “Russian city”).
• Vol. 11 Nr 1 (January-February 1942) p. 12: “In occupied Ukraine, the violent German anti-Jewish persecution has not been able to destroy the Ukrainian population’s good relationship with the Jews. As far as it is possible, the local government takes care that also the Jews are given normal rations of food. The destitution, however, is enormous, and a large part of the population does not have a roof over their heads, since the houses have been destroyed during the fighting. [...]. According to Deutsche Zeitung im Ostland [an official German newspaper published in Riga] the Russians evacuated 30,000 Jews from Lithuania, 24,000 Jews from Latvia and 1,000 Jews from Estonia at the beginning of the German-Russian war.” The figure of 30,000 evacuated Lithuanian Jews is three times that held by mainstream historiography (see above). It should be noted in passing that the number of Jews evacuated from Latvia by the Soviets is consistent with that found in the general report of the Einsatzgruppe A from 16 October 1941 to 31 January 1942 (23,479).
• Vol. 11 Nr 2 (March 1942) p. 27: “In Minsk, Berditschev, Schitomir and Mohilev there are no longer any Jews. Their houses have been confiscated to be used as winter quarters for German soldiers. All the Jews of Kharkov [Kharkiv] were brought to a concentration camp soon after the German conquered the city. The Jews in the occupied territories are being strongly decimated by epidemics and hunger.” In the Minsk ghetto there lived in fact tens of thousands of Jews at the time. It seems unlikely that the well-informed journal would be so grossly mistaken on this point. It is possible that what was meant was that there were no longer any Jews outside of the ghettos – the second sentence hints in this direction. As for the Jews of Kharkov, mainstream historiography claims that 15,000 of them were shot in the nearby ravine Drobitsky Yar on 15 December 1941.
• Vol. 11, Nr. 6 (July-August 1942), p. 91: “From Uzbekistan it is reported, that the Soviet government has prepared for the creation of permanent housing for the one million Jews which have been evacuated there. (…) After several months on the march, the evacuated Jewish colonists from Crimea have reached their destination, the Siberian territory of Krasnojarsk. [...]. Part of the Jewish farmers from the Ukraine have travelled to Saratov in the Volga district, where they have been given new soil. [...] In Taschkent, where thousands of Jews from Poland find themselves, there have been opened three offices for the registration of the refugees.”
• Vol. 11 Nr. 7 (September 1942), pp. 101-102: “The latest reports to the Polish government in London are concerned with this ['the horrible blood bath'] and according to them, 400,000 Poles, half of them Jews, have been massacred. A report which reached London even states the number of Jews exterminated in Poland alone to 700,000. This figure is so enormously high, that one find it hard to believe in. [...]. Berlin radio has explained, that the message about the killings of 700,000 Jews is not true. Only executions due to actions of sabotage have taken place.” While this quote does not concern the USSR, it is nevertheless worth mentioning here, as it shows that German authorities addressed and explicitly denied the mass killing allegations, while acknowledging executions of (Jewish) partisans (and possibly also reprisal shootings). On page 102 we find a list of a “horrible series of mass executions”: 9,000 Slonim Jews are claimed to have been killed at the beginning of November 1941; 50,000 Vilna Jews from November 1941 onward; another 60,000 Vilna Jews in May 1942; undated mass killings are listed for Lodz (35 000 victims), Lwow (30,000), Stanislawow (15,000), Pinsk (8,000) and Brzesc (6,000). Massacres are also claimed for Czyzew, Szlachecki, Hancewicze and Tarnopol, but neither dates nor victim figures are given. It is further stated that 25,000 Latvian Jews fell victims of pogroms (supposedly carried out by the local population, in contrast to mass shootings carried out by the Germans). As for the alleged Vilna massacre of May 1942, it was reported on by the New York Times on 16 June 1942 (p. 6):
  

  “Stockholm, Sweden, June 15 – Sixty thousand Jews of Vilna were put to death between May 7 and May 20 by the German-controlled Lithuanian police, according to reports brought here by a Pole, who said he was in Vilna until May 24. He arrived in Stockholm a few days ago with an account of escaping from the Nazis by way of Warsaw and Gdynia, where he hid himself aboard a ship bound for Sweden. The Polish refugee’s story of the Vilna massacre, of which he said he was an eye-witness, is impossible to confirm now.
  He said members of the special Lithuanian police, recruited from Germans in Lithuania and Lithuanian Quislingists, started persecuting Jews and Poles immediately after Berlin’s announcement of the so-called autonomous status of the Baltic States at the end of April.
  Until then 80,000 Vilna Jews were concentrated in two ghettoes, the old ghetto near the German quarter and a new one in the Bakshta quarter of the city. After the announcement of the new status all the Jews were sent to the Bakshta ghetto, the Pole stated.
  On May 7 the executions started, he said. The Jews, men, women and children, were taken from sundown to dawn in trucks to the suburb of Ponary, where they were mowed down by machine-gun fire. The executions continued every night until May 20, the Pole related, and during the day members of the Lithuanian police collected and sold the clothing of their victims.
  The Polish refugee said that about 20,000 Jews of ‘useful professions’ such as physicians and scientists and specialized workers, escaped execution and that the number of the victims was estimated in Vilna to be up to 60,000. No German military or Gestapo men were seen taking part in the executions, but neither did they interfere, he said.”

  This alleged massacre of 60,000 Vilna Jews is clearly invented. No other known source claim a mass killing of even remotely this size during 1942, and moreover the figure of 60,000 victims is numerically impossible: In January 1942 there lived some 15,000 Jews in the Vilna ghetto, while according to a census carried out at the end of May the same year, the inhabitants of the Vilna ghetto numbered 14,545 (cf. J. Graf, C. Mattogno, Treblinka: Extermination Camp or Transit Camp?, Theses & Dissertations Press, Chicago 2004, p. 209, 212). The census moreover shows that among these 14,545 ghetto inhabitants, no fewer than 3,693 were children of 15 years of age or less, whereas there were 59 registered Jews aged 65 or older (ibid., p. 212). This clearly contradicts the claim that only ”Jews of ‘useful professions’” were spared. Moreover, one of the major testimonial sources for the alleged mass extermination of Jews at Ponary, the diary of Kazimierz Sakowicz, states that not a single Jew was shot at Ponary during May 1942, or for that matter in April or June (R. Margolis, J. G. Tobias (eds.) Die geheime Notizen des K. Sakowicz, op.cit., p. 69).
  The most bewildering aspect of the anonymous Polish witness testimony is the implication that there had been no (large-scale) massacres of Vilna Jews until May 1942, and that until April the same year there had existed two ghettos in the city, housing a total of 80,000 Jews. According to mainstream historiography, there existed two ghettos in Vilna, together housing some 60,000 Jews, until the end of October 1941, when the smaller of the two ghettos (“Ghetto No. 2″) was liquidated. By this time there reportedly remained only some 27,000 – 28,000 Jews in Vilna, which the Germans sought to reduce to 12,000. The Jews now had to get new work certificates and were moved to the now empty Ghetto No. 2. Those Jews who did not managed to receive new work certificates were sent to Ponary and allegedly killed there in three ‘actions’ in late October, early November and December 1941 (ibid., pp. 30-32). The anonymous Polish witness thus places the liquidation of the smaller ghetto in April 1942, when in fact it happened in October the year before! But how could anyone confuse something which happened more than half a year ago with something transpiring a mere few weeks ago?
  By listing the alleged mass murder of 50,000 Vilna Jews together with the alleged mass murder of 60,000 Jews from the same city in May 1942 – despite the two allegations being mutually contradictory – Judisk Krönika somehow wanted its readers to believe that there had lived at least 110,000 – possibly as many as 130,000 – Jews in the Vilna ghetto! Nonetheless, in its issue from May/June 1944 (vol. 13, No. 5, p. 68) the same journal reported that there still lived 20,000 Jews in the Vilna ghetto, but these were said to have been ”foreign Jews” – something which flies straight in the face of mainstream historiography, according to which not a single foreign Jew was ever deported to Vilna (cf. J. Graf, T. Kues, C. Mattogno, Sobibór. Holocaust Propaganda and Reality, TBR Books, Washington D.C. 2010, pp. 362-363).
  Here should also be noted that mainstream historiography holds it that there remained only some 40,000 Jews in Lithuania by the end of 1941 (ibid., p. 45). Several thousands of Lithuanian Jews were allegedly shot in early 1943, including 4,000 Jews from smaller ghettos in the vicinity of Vilna. In the autumn of 1943 most of the remaining Jews in the country were either sent to Poland to be killed in the “extermination camps” there or deported to labor camps in Latvia and Estonia (ibid., pp. 33-34). However, according to the memoirs of the Hungarian Jewess Reska Weiss, who was deported from Auschwitz to Riga in June 1944 and from there on to Lithuania via Daugavpils (Dünaburg), some 30,000 inmates, mainly Baltic Jews, were detained in a camp in the northern Lithuanian town of Panevezys (Ponevezh). After spending some time there, Weiss was transferred to the ghetto of Siauliai (Schaulen, in western Lithuania), where she was informed by a nurse working in the ghetto hospital that the ghetto’s population amounted to some 30,000 Jews (R. Weiss, Journey through hell, Valentine Mitchell, London 1961, p. 81, 95).

• Vol. 11 Nr 8 (October 1942). On p. 122 we are informed that 76,000 Jews were evacuated from Vitebsk at the beginning of Operation Barbarossa, while 24,000 stayed in the city. We are also told that 200 Jews were shot in Kujbysjev as a result of partisan activity, 600 Jews were machine-gunned in the same town the following week. The remaining 15,000 Jews of Kujbysjev were then supposedly massacred during the next following weeks. The Jews in Jelsk were supposedly put on a barge in the Pripjet river which was then made to capsize (!). 5,000 Jews are stated to have been shot in Kersh. A witness, a fisherman named Josef Weingarten, crawled out of the mass grave and escaped. On pp. 122-123 we learn that “The result of the Nazis inhuman actions against the Jews is that they – men and women alike – have joined the guerillas, since they prefer to die in combat rather than be butchered like animals.” That this would in turn result in more Jewish men – and women – being shot as partisans, as well as more Jews being targeted in reprisal shootings ordered due to the activity of the same – increasingly Jewish – partisan groups – goes without saying.
• Vol 11 Nr 9 (November 1942). On pp. 142-143 we find reported massacres on Jews in Belarus (Delchitzi: 1,000 victims; Velizh in the Vitebsk district: 1,400 victims; Vaulino near Pskov: 1,000 victims) and in Lithuania (Ponevezh district: 11,000 victims; Kovno (Kaunas) in 1941: 800 victims). It should be noted here that if we are to believe the so-called Jäger Report, a total of 23,175 Jews had been shot in Kovno up until 1 December 1941. None of the individual Kovno shootings allegedly listed by Jäger are in the vicinity of the figure 800. The nearest ones are 463 and 534. There is mentioned, however, for 18 August, among a total of 1,811 Jewish victims, a shooting of ”711 Intelligentia Jews from the ghetto as reprisal for an act of sabotage”. But if the journal was in fact referring to this particular group of killed Jews, how come that it was unaware of all the other shootings in Kovno?
• Vol. 12 Nr 1 (January-February 1943), p. 6: “It is estimated that at the beginning of 1942 approximately 250,000 Jews were serving [as Red army soldiers] in the Russian battle zone. With the later instituted mobilization of reserve forces the number is likely to reach up to 400,000 in the end.” That the latter estimate was reached, or even surmounted, is indicated by the fact approximately 200,000 Jews are stated to have fallen as soldiers in the Red Army (cf. W.N. Sanning, The Dissolution of Eastern European Jewry, IHR, Costa Mesa 1990, p. 108). War-time Soviet reports state that 600,000 Jews served in the Red Army (ibid., p. 111f).
• Vol. 12 Nr 4 (May 1943), p. 63: “Since October 1942 more than 10,000 Jews have been killed by German special troup units only in the Brest-Litovsk district. Thousands have been poisoned with gas in hermetically sealed barns and others have been shot in groups of 60 in the forests in the vicinity.” The claim that barns were turned into improvised gas chambers is, to my knowledge, not found elsewhere.
• Vol. 13 Nr 4 (April 1944), p. 53: “It is yet impossible to say, how many of the Jews living in western Russia and the Ukraine managed to escape when the Germans occupied those territories in 1941 and 1942, and how many of these refugees really managed to find a safe haven after surviving the horrors of war, the starvation and the epidemics. It has been calculated, that between 1,000,000 and 1,500,000 Jews were able to reach the Russian interior during this period of time. It is thus likely that, despite the German invasion troups’ massacres on the Jewish population there are about 4,000,000 Jews in Russia. [...]. In fact, more than half of Russian Jewry are at the present living in Ural and beyond this area.” It should be noted here that it is unclear whether evacuated Belarus and Baltic Jews are included in this figure. The 4 million figure is consistent with statements made later that year by a Soviet source, according to which the number of Jews in the world after the end of the war would amount to ”little over 12,000,000”, whereof one third would be ”citizens of the USSR” (see my article ”Soviet Mouthpiece Journal in Late 1944: Only Some 3 Million Jews Exterminated”, Smith’s Report, No. 173, pp. 10-11).
• Vol. 16 Nr 5 (May 1947), p. 94: “In the Ukraine there live once more one million Jews. They have returned from the eastern parts of Russia to their old homes. Kiev and Odessa once more have 125,000 Jews [each?]. In Moscow there live 250,000.” According to the Soviet census of 1959, there lived 154,000 Jews in Kiev, 102,200 in Odessa, and 239,246 in Moscow. The 1970 edition of the Encyclopedia Judaica estimated the Jewish populations of the same three cities to, respectively, 200,000, 180,000 and 500,000 (W.N. Sanning, The Dissolution of Eastern European Jewry, op.cit., p. 119).

In my study Special Treatment in Auschwitz. Origin and Meaning of a Term[1] I have written as follows:

«“Special Units” of the Crematoria
Danuta Czech explains the origin and meaning of the term “Sonderkommando” (special unit) as follows:
“The extermination camp created also one other group of people, those who were forced to work in the crematoria and gas chambers – the unfortunate people were assigned to the work of the special unit. The SS used code words if they spoke about the mass extermination of those ‘unworthy of life.’ It called the mass extermination as well as the transports leading
to selection ‘special treatment’ (often abbreviated as SB). Thus, also, the expression ‘special unit.’”
In other words, since criminal activity described by the code word ‘special treatment’ was allegedly being conducted in the crematoria, the staff employed there had of necessity to be a ‘special unit.’ Naturally it was the only work unit at Auschwitz that merited the prefix ‘special’ [sonder] – otherwise the word would have lost the criminal significance that it possessed according to official historiography.
Based on the documents, the reality is entirely different. First of all, the expression ‘special unit’ does not appear in a single document referring to the crematoria. In its ‘magnum opus’ the Auschwitz museum attempted to prove, on the basis of two documents, that this term was used for the crematoria personnel. The first document is a duty roster for July 18, 1944 [”Dienstplan für Dienstag”, dated 17 July], the second order no. 8/43 of April 20, 1943 from the Commandant’s Headquarters. But the first document merely mentions the term ‘special unit’ in connection with a gate control [Torkontrolle]»

Here a correction is necessary. The mention of the ”Sonderkommando” is not related to the ”Torkontrolle” written on the left (the document is written in two columns) but to four names listed on the right: ”Buch, Kelm, Schultz, Bickel”. Franciszek Piper considers them all to be “members of the SS directly employed in the gas chambers and crematoria”, but this assertion is based solely on the document in question.[2] He also states that Buch, Kelm and Schulz are mentioned as the members of the SS-Sonderkommando of the crematoria by the witnesses Alter Feinsilber (alias Jankowski) and Henryk Tauber,[3] but the first one speaks only of a ”Scharführer Buch” and a ”Kell”,[4] while the other mentions a ”Schultz” and a ”Köln”.[5] One Scharführer Buch, an Unterscharführer Kelm and an Unterscharführer appears (with their proper names) in an undated list of SS-men containing a column of written signatures under the heading ”receipt”, likely related to the payment of salaries. Their tasks are not specified.[6] The Heinz Schulz who according to Piper (whose source refers to a “Schultz”) was a Kommandoführer (commando leader) of the crematoria was identified at the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial as SS-Unterscharführer Arthur Heinz Schulz, who was the “ Kommandoführer im Arbeitskommando Zerlegbetriebe” (commando leader of the disassembly work commando).[7] Hermann Buch, who according to Piper also served as a Kommandoführer in the crematoria, served, according to the same book in which the Auschwitz historian makes this claim, as Lagerführer of BIIe (head of camp BIIe, the “Gypsy family camp), at the beginning of April 1944. In the eight lines of his biographical note there is no hint that he occupied the – in the context of the ”Holocaust” claims most important – position of a crematoria Kommandoführer.[8]

There exists a similar docuent, the ”Dienstplan für Donnerstag, den 10.05.1944” (Service schedule for Tuesday, 5 October 1944), dated 4 October, in which the term Sonderkommando appears but with only one name written next to it: ”Buch”. In the second column on the same line is written “Sola, Hütte” (Sola [river], works) and close to this ”Kelm”.[9]

Because, as explained below, the staff of the crematoria at the time was divided into 8 Kommandos, 2 for each crematorium (one day and one night shift), a total of 8 Kommandoführer were required daily. The first document mentions only 4 SS non-commissioned officers, while the second mentions only a single name, which means that the ”Sonderkommando” mentioned in them had nothing to do with the crematoria staff.

«The second [document] speaks simply of the pursuit of two Jews “who were on the run from the special unit.” [von 2 Juden, die vom Sonderkommando flüchtig waren] Therefore, the assumption, based on the above two occurrences of the term, is that there was in Auschwitz a single ‘special unit,’ which consisted of the crematoria staff!
However, in the documents, which explicitly mention the crematorium staff, its designation is simply “staff of crematorium” [Krematoriumspersonal][10] or it is identified by numbers – “206-B boiler, Crematorium I and II, 207-B boiler, Crematorium II and IV”[”206-B Heizer Krematorium I. u.II. 207-B Heizer Krematorium III. U. IV”].[11]
In the second place, there were numerous ‘special units’ in Auschwitz, of which not a single one had anything whatsoever to do with the crematoria. I list those below, for which I have found documentary evidence:

• Installation by special unit Birkenau BW 20 POW camp [“Installation des Sonderkommando-Birkenau BW 20 KGL”]: unit of electricians serving in the power plant of Birkenau (BW 20).
• pest control special unit [“Sonderkommando-Schädlingsbekämpfung”] (made up of women).
• special unit Reinhardt [“Sonderkommando-Reinhardt”]: women’s unit assigned to the sorting of clothing.
• special unit Zeppelin [“Sonderkommando Zeppelin”]: outside unit based in Breslau.
• special unit I [“Sonderkommando 1”]: unit for the warehousing of the personal effects of the Jews deported to Auschwitz.
• special unit II [“Sonderkommando II”]: no information with regard to its function.
• construction depot special unit (S.K.) [“Bauhof-Sonderkommando (S.K.) ”]: unit employed in the store of the construction depot.
• Dwory special unit (S.K.) [“Dwory-Sonderkommando (S.K.)”]: unit working in Dwory – a village about 10 km east of the town of Auschwitz.
• Buna special unit (S.K.) [“Buna-Sonderkommando (S.K.)”]: unit working in Monowitz.
• clothing workshops special unit [“Bekleidungs-Werkstätte-Sonderkommando (Bekl.Werkst.S.K.)”]: unit in the workshops producing clothing.
• DAW special unit [“D.A.W.Sonderkommando (S.K.)”]: unit employed in the German Equipment Works [Deutsche Ausrüstungswerke].
• Sonderkommando, occupied at the “Sola-Hütte.”

One may comb the orthodox historical publications, beginning with those of the Auschwitz Museum, for even a scant reference to the above ‘special units’ – but, alas, in vain!»

Recently the Auschwitz Museum website (www.auschwitz.org.pl) published two documents which mentions the term ”Sonderkommando”, one of them with explicit reference to a ”Krematorium” (crematorium). Below I present the documents with transcriptions and translations.

DOCUMENT:

TRANSCRIPTION:

«[Column 1]
a) Geheime Staatspolizei Auschwitz
b) Stadtrevier Auschwitz
Pezola, Wachtm[eister] d[er] S[chutzpolizei] d.A. [?]
c) 7.9.44. 1915 Uhr Wilczek
[Column 2]
Fluchtmeldung.
Gegen 1400 Uhr ist heute aus dem K.L. Auschwitz II vom Sonderkommando (Krematorium) eine größere Anzahl Häftlinge ausgebrochen meist Juden. Die Flüchtigen wurden bereits zum Teil bei der sofort aufgenommenen Verfolgung erschossen. Die Suchaktion wird fortgesetzt.
Kennzeichen: geschoren, auf dem l[inken]. Unterarm eintätowierte No. Kleidung teils Civil mit roten Streifen. Weitere Fahndungsmaßnahmen u[nd]. Verständigung der untergeordneten Stellen bitte ich sofort durchzuführen.
Es sind nur noch 4 Häftlinge flüchtig.
[Column 3]
Verstärkte Streife zum [vom?] Bahnhofsgelände entsandt».

TRANSLATION:

«[Column 1]
a) Secret State Police [i.e. Gestapo] Auschwitz
b) Auschwitz city hospital
Pezola, marshal of the security police d.A.[?]
c) 7.9.44. 19.15 hours Wilczek
[Column 2]
Escape report.
Towards 14.00 hours today a larger number of detainees belonging to the Sonderkommando (crematory), mostly Jews, escaped from K.L. Auschwitz. Part of the escapees were shot during the pursuit, which was commenced immediately. The search operation continues.
Dinstinguishing marks: cropped hair, number tattooed on the l[eft]. lower arm. Clothes partly civilian with red stripes. I request that you urgently notify subordinate agencies and carry out further search measures.
4 prisoners are still on free foot.
[Column 3]
Send a reinforced patrol to the station area».

It is rather curious that such an important document was discovered (?) only after 65 years and then published without any supplementary information. I will return to this issue at the end of the article.

The second document is an officer’s service report (Führer v. Dienst) from 9-10 December 1942.[14]

I will translate here only its most important parts:

«At 12.25 hours it was reported that 6 detainees had escaped from Sonderkommando I. [...]. At 20.30 hours there was a call from Harmensee that 2 detainees had been captured there. [...]. It was the two Jewish detainees no. 36816 and 38313 who had escaped from Sonderkommando II early on 7.12.42.»
[«12.25 wurde gemeldet das [sic] beim Sonderkommande [sic] I 6 Häftlinge geflüchtet sind. [...]. 20.30 wurde v. Harmenze [sic] angerufen, das [sic] dort 2 Häfltinge aufgegriffen worden sind. [...]. Es waren die beiden Juden häflinge [sic] N 36816 + 38313 welche am 7.12.42 früh v. Sonderkom. II geflüchtet sind»].

Danuta Czech, in her Auschwitz ”Kalendarium” summarizes the document in question as follows under the entry for 9 December 1942:

«At 12.25 the officer on duty received a notification that six detainees had escaped from the Sonderkommando».[15]

She then informs us that «the two prisoners, with the numbers 36816 and 38313», had escaped «from Sonderkommando II». In the entry for 10 December she adds:

«The two Jewish prisoners Ladislaus Knopp (No. 36816) and Samuel Culea (No. 38313) who had escaped from Sonderkommando II on 7 December are confined in the Bunker of Block 11 and released the same day into the camp.
Two Jewish inmates, who fled the day before from the Sonderkommando, are captured and imprisoned in the Bunker of Block 11. These are Bar Borenstein (No 74858), born 10 February 1920, and Nojech Borenstein (No 74859), born 25 March 1925 in Szreńsk. [...]. Both are probably executed in the presence of the Sonderkommando in order to terrorize the other prisoners».

In a footnote Czech explains with regards to Bar Borenstein and Nojech Borenstein:

«Next to the names of the both detainees, near the annotation “released” is written the letter “Ü”».[16]

It is not clear from what the author of the ”Kalendarium” draws her conclusion that these two prisoners were executed, as “Ü” is doubtlessly an abbreviation of “überstellt”, transferred. In fact, the numbers of these two inmates are not listed as dead among the entries of the Leichenhallenbuch (the registry of deaths from the morgue in Block 28 of the main camp) from 9 December 1942 or the following days.[17] But the most important aspect of the above summaries by Czech is the fact that she has omitted the number of the Sonderkommando from which the six prisoners had escaped: ”I”. The reason for this is easy to understand. Under the date of 3 December 1942 Czech writes:

«The approximately 300 prisoners of the Sonderkommando used for the exhumation and cremation of 107,000 corpses buried in mass graves are driven by the SS from Birkenau to the Auschwitz main camp. There they are taken to the crematorium and killed with gas. Thus the witnesses to the cremation of the corpses are eliminated».[18]

In the entry for 6 December 1942 she notes:

«A new Sonderkommando is formed, which includes several dozen detainees selected from camp BIb. It probably bears the name Sonderkommando II. Among its members are Meilech (Milton) Buki (Nr. 80312) and Szlama Dragon (Nr. 80359) [...]. At the trial of Rudolf Hoess he [Szlama Dragon] deposed as a witness for the prosecution, stating that the group of Jewish prisoners were assigned to the Sonderkommando on 9 December and the following day were employed in the cremation of corpses. From the camp documents it appears that the Sonderkommando [II] aready existed, because on 7 and 9 December prisoners employed in it attempted escape».[19]

The mention of «camp documents» clearly refer to the officer’s service report from 9 December 1942.

To recapitulate, the Sonderkommando allegedly massacred on 3 December 1942 was replaced by a “Sonderkommando II” on 6 December, which means that the former unit was the ”Sonderkommando I”. D. Czech claims that the detainees who escaped on 7 and 9 December were all from ” Sonderkommando II”, but the officer’s service report explicitly states that the six detainees in question were employed in Sonderkommando I”. By omitting the number “I” from her entry for 9 December and falsely asserting in the entry for 6 December that all the prisoners who had escaped belonged to “Sonderkommando II , Czech sought to to hide the fact that on December 9, 1942 there existed a “Sonderkommando I” as well as a “Sonderkommando II”, something which upsets her flawed reconstruction of events. It is all too obvious that, if the two Sonderkommandos existed at the same time, the first one could not have been exterminated on 3 December, and the second one could not have taken its place days later.

Elsewhere I have explained that the Sonderkommando I and II had nothing to do with the crematoria, but were working at sorting the booty of ”Aktion Reinhard” in Auschwitz.[20]

The imposture of Czech sought to confirm the thesis that at Auschwitz there existed one single, unique Sonderkommando employed in the crematoria. It had to be the only one because, as explained above, its name was to recall its supposed involvement in the alleged Sonderbehandlung. It is evident that the author of the ”Kalendarium” had to resort to this imposture because at that time there existed no documents which could establish a relationship between the Sonderkommando and the crematoria.

Now, the “escape report” mentioned above tells us of a Sonderkommando belonging to the “crematory”, but this was just one of many Sonderkommandos that existed in Auschwitz. This is confirmed by the document itself, since it specifies within brackets that the Sonderkommando was that of the “crematory”, thus implying precisely that there were other Sonderkommandos. Furthermore, the fact that the escapees from this Sonderkommando were “mostly Jews” contradicts the exterminationist axiom that all, or virtually all, of the members of the crematoria Sonderkommando were Jews.

This document is important also in another aspect, which perhaps explains the fact that it was “forgotten” for so many years. The only mass escape of Auschwitz crematoria staff mentioned by Holocaust historiography is supposed to have taken place in connection with the alleged “revolt of the Sonderkommando” of 7 October 1944. The only date to appear in the document in question is, however, 7 September 1944. The document, moreover, speaks of an escape, not of a revolt, which, among other things, is claimed to have led to deaths among the SS personnel – but in our ”escape report” there is no mention of any such deaths.

The one single document that is cited in confirmation of the alleged revolt, Standortbefehl (garrison order) No. 26/44 of 12 October 1944, states:

True to their oath to the Führer, there fell before the enemy in their line of duty, on Saturday 7.10.44 [«In Ausübung ihres Dienstes fielen vor dem Feind getreu ihrem Eid auf den Führer am Sonnabend, dem [sic] 7.10.44»]

This is followed by the names of three SS-Unterscharführer: Rudolf Erler, Willi Freese and Josef Purke.[21] It does not mention, however, under which circumstances these three non-commissioned officers died.

To this document is added the fact that, according to the series of reports on the Arbeitseinsatz (work deployment) of the men’s camp in Birkenau, the crematoria staff – called ”Heizer Krematorium I-IV” (firemen crematoria I-IV) and divided into one Kommando per crematorium, with each of those in turn broken down into two shifts, day an night: 57B, 58B, 59B, 60B – consisted of 663 prisoners on 8 October 1944, while on the following day it counted only 212.[22] But the decrease of 451 inmates does not necessarily indicate that they were killed during a revolt. On the other hand, if this alleged revolt had actually occurred on October 7, the decrease in the strength of the Sonderkommando would have been recorded on the following day, not on the 9th. Moreover, according to the sources referred to in footnote 22, from 10 October on, the staff of crematorium IV vanishes from the Arbeitseinsatz reports. The staff of crematorium I, II and V continues to be divided into two shifts, day and night, 33 prisoners each, practically until October 31.[23] The decrease could thus also have been caused by a reduction of the crematoria staff for administrative reasons. With regard to crematorium IV, no known document clarifies its fate.

On 7 September 1944 the crematoria staff consisted of 870 detainees,[24] while on 2 October it was down to 661.[25] If this decrease of 209 prisoners was not the result of the escape of September 7 (with which it is compatible, considering that the Arbeitseinsatz report for this day relates to changes in the work force which had taken place the day before, while the subsequent reports have not been preserved) it could also have been due to administrative reasons.

In conclusion: The fact that such an enormously important event as the alleged ”revolt of the Sonderkommando” is not explicitly mentioned in any German document, starting with those of the Litzmannstadt Gestapo, which in connection with any escape from Auschwitz as a rule always sent out a telegram to all affected offices,[26] is the most disturbing aspect of this story for Holocaust historiography.

Carlo Mattogno
8 March 2010

[1] Theses & Dissertations Press, Chicago 2004, p. 101.
[2] F. Piper, «Vernichtung», in: W. Długoborski, F. Piper (eds.), Auschwitz 1940-1945. Studien zur Geschichte des Konzentrations- und Vernichtungslagers Auschwitz, Verlag des Staatliches Museums Auschwitz-Birkenau, Oświęcim 1999, vol. III, p. 261.
[3] Idem, pp. 261-263.
[4] Inmitten des grauenvollen Verbrechens. Handschriften von Mitgliedern des Sonderkommandos, Verlag des Staatlichen Auschwitz-Birkenau Museums, 1996, p. 45.
[5] The Höss Trial, vol. 11, p. 142.
[6] GARF, 7021-108-54, pp. 97 and 98.
[7] Der Auschwitz Prozeß, edited by the Fritz Bauer Institut (Frankfurt am Main) and the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, Digitale Bibliothek, Verlag der Directmedia Publishing GmbH, Berlin 2005, p. 33519, 46036 and 46043.
[8] Aleksander Lasik, «Die Organisationsstruktur des KL Auschwitz», in: W. Długoborski, F. Piper (eds.), Auschwitz 1940-1945. Studien zur Geschichte des Konzentrations- und Vernichtungslagers Auschwitz, op. cit., vol. I, p. 239.
[9] GARF, 7021-108-59, p. 3.
[10] APMO, Übersicht über Anzahl und Einsatz der Häftlinge des Konzentrationslager, 31 January 1944. APMO, D-f/402, n. inv. 167217, p. 34.
[11] E.g. in Arbeitseinsatz für den 15. Mai 1943, APMO, D-AuII-3a/1a, p. 333a.
[12] In the list compiled by Otto Wolken. AGK, NTN, 149, pp. 139-140.
[13] Idem, p. 149.
[14] This document is dated ”9/10.42”. This should not be read as 9 October, but instead as 9-10 December (the month omitted here is indicated later in the report), the two days being when the officer in question performed his service (in all likelihood, judging from the times mentioned, which range from the 9th of December to the 10th).
[15] D. Czech, Kalendarium der Ereignisse im Konzentrationslager Auschwitz-Birkenau 1939-1945, Rowohlt Verlag, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1989, p. 355.
[16] Idem.
[17] AGK, Leichenhallenbuch, Collection “OB”, 385, pp. 42-43 and following pages.
[18] D. Czech, Kalendarium der Ereignisse im Konzentrationslager Auschwitz-Birkenau 1939-1945, op. cit., p. 349.
[19] Idem, pp. 352-353.
[20] “Azione Reinhard” e “Azione 1005”, Effepi, Genoa 2008, pp. 24-31.
[21] Standort- und Kommandanturbefehle des Konzentrationslager Auschwitz 1940-1945, K.G. Saur, Munich 2000, p. 499.
[22] GARF, 7021-108-99, p. 164 and 168.
[23] Idem, pp. 166-167.
[24] APMO, D AuII/3a/49, p. 88.
[25] Idem, p. 93. The intermediate reports have not been preserved.
[26] E.g. the telegram concerning the escape on 7 April 1944 of Walter Rosenberg (alias Rudolf Vrba) and Alfred Wetzler, who later became known as the authors of the ”Auschwitz Protocols”, APMO, JZ-8 / 6 Łódź / 4, p. 65.

Abbreviations:

AGK: Archiwum Głównej Komisji Badania Zbrodni Przeciwko Narodowi Polskiemu – Instytutu Pamieci Narodowej (Archive of the Chief Commission for the Investigation of Crimes against the Polish People – National Memorial Institute), Warsaw
APMO: Archiwum Państwowego Muzeum w Oświęcimiu (Archive of the State Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum)
GARF: Gosudarstvenni Archiv Rossiskoi Federatsii (State Archive of the Russian Federation), Moscow
RGVA: Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennii Vojennii Archiv (State Russian War Archive), Moscow.