In 1995, Ernst Lobethall gave his testimony as a survivor of “The Holocaust” to the Survivors of the Shoah Foundation for their video library, as thousands of others have done. In it, he had some words to say about a British soldier he met while interned at Auschwitz III (Monowitz) who had done him a favor.

Lobethall records that the soldier he called Ginger “gave me a letter and 10 packs of cigarettes, and a bar of chocolate from my sister. Ten packs of English cigarettes – it’s like being given Rockefeller Center.” He also said, “I had no heavy socks to put on my boots; for two packs of Players cigarettes, (pause) and that, later on, came, again, to save my life on the death marches that took place in 1945.” This clip from the video was shown on the BBC Online News Magazine on November 29, 2009.[1] The article says that

Mr Lobethall traded two packs of Players cigarettes in return for getting his shoes resoled. It helped save his life when thousands perished or were murdered on the notorious death marches out of the camps in winter in 1945.

Lobethall’s testimony was at some point taken under consideration by the Yad Vashem Memorial Museum’s “Commission for the Designation of the Righteous,” a rather pompously-named committee, headed since 2005 by Israel Supreme Court Justice Jacob Tuerkel, that examines candidates before bestowing upon them the equally grandiose title of “Righteous Among the Nations.”

Yad Vashem, Israel’s official institution for Holocaust research and propaganda, set up this commission in 1963 with the intent, according to their website, to “single out within the nations of perpetrators, collaborators and bystanders, persons who bucked the general trend and helped the persecuted Jews.” (my emphasis)

As I understand this, to Yad Vashem — the highest Holocaust authority for not only Israel’s Jews but all Jews — every country that had “perpetrators” and “bystanders” are included in “the nations.” Thus, only Israel, which did not exist at the time, is separate, or above, “the nations” (something I will get back to later).

According to the website, this “Commission for the Designation of the Righteous” is made up of volunteers, most of them holocaust survivors, each of whom are “expert in the history of the Holocaust in a certain region of Europe. They receive cases for evaluation and present their recommendations to the Commission to discuss.”[2] Then the final decision is made by the Chairman, always a Supreme Court Justice. The “righteous” are defined as non-Jews who risked their lives to save a Jew(s) during the Holocaust. Yad Vashem has now given over 22,000 people this title. They come mainly from the greater European area, but with several from beyond, such as from Chile, Japan, Vietnam and the USA.

Currently there are six who did their “righteous” duty at Auschwitz; Denis Avey will apparently be the seventh. Thus, we want to look into Mr. Avey’s conduct at the Auschwitz camp and how he saved the life of a Jew to find what the standards for this award really are.

Denis Avey came into the picture because Ernst Lobethall, a German Jew originally from Breslau, in his testimony referred to above, remembered a British soldier who had befriended him — whom he called “Ginger” due to his red hair. He said this soldier had managed to send a letter to Lobethall’s sister in England asking her to send him cigarettes and other items that he, Avey, would be able to get to her brother Ernst. He said she sent 10 packs of Player’s cigarettes, a bar of chocolate and a letter, which Mr. Avey smuggled to Lobethall.

Lobethall claimed in his Survivors of the Shoah interview that trading the cigarettes enabled him to have his boots resoled, which saved his life on the “death march” later on when Auschwitz was abandoned. A Times article says Lobethall purchased boots and also scraps of food, which helped him to survive the “death march.”

Apparently, Yad Vashem searched among the British POW’s, with the help of the BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) [3], and came upon Denis Avey. At this point, the details are unclear. Did the BBC approach Avey? Did Avey just spontaneously begin “telling his story” at this time? Nothing is said of this in any of the three UK news articles. It’s only said that Avey opened up and told his incredible story after 65 years of silence only last October, when he was also “reunited” with Lobethall’s sister Susanna Timms, 86, after she was traced to Solihull, West Midlands. The result is that Yad Vashem had another candidate for their “Righteous Among the Nations” award.

Here is what Yad Vashem says: “For obvious reasons this honour cannot be based on Avey’s word alone,” says Susan Weisberg, spokeswoman for Yad Vashem. “Each case must be substantiated by eyewitness testimonies and archival documents of the period.” (my emphasis) This process is now ongoing, so let’s look at the news articles about Denis Avey and see if there are eyewitnesses and archival documents.

The prestigious Times did their own tribute to Denis Avey in a Feb. 25, 2010 article [4], written by Jacob Wallis Simons. Some of the details change and one has to wonder whether it’s the writer Simons, the Times staff, or Avey himself who made the changes from the BBC version. It begins with a description of Avey as “a formidable figure, even at the age of 91. More than 6 ft. tall, with a severe short back and sides (?) and a piercing glare, he combines the pan-ache (sic) of Errol Flynn with the dignity of age.”

Denis Avey, who currently lives in Derbyshire with his wife of seventy-some years, looks relaxed, but says he has remained traumatized for 65 years. (The Mail Online)

Simons also tells us that Avey has a glass eye.

I ask him about it. He tells me that in 1944, he cursed an SS officer who was beating a Jew in the camp. He received a blow with a pistol butt and his eye was knocked in.

This is unlikely because the SS guards were under strict rules forbidding the beating of prisoners, let alone a British Prisoner of War who was under the authority of the Wehrmacht. The guard would have been severely punished, possibly even given a death sentence. Do Avey’s records say he was then hospitalized and had his eye removed? You can be sure there aren’t any such records.

Avey grew up on an Essex farm, describing himself as living a rough-and-tumble lifestyle. “I had a shock of red hair and a temperament to match.” In 1939 he volunteered for the Army — because he was too impatient to wait a week for the RAF (my emphasis). “I ended up in the 7th Armoured Division, the original Desert Rats,” he says. “We operated behind enemy lines in Egypt. In 1942 we were ambushed. I was wounded and taken prisoner by the Germans.”

For all his bravery, Avey told The Mail reporter, Andy Dolan, the reason he took so long to speak about his experience was because “I was so traumatised at my whole experience of the Auschwitz camps it took me 60 years to be able to recount the horrors I saw.”[5] We will see that Avey’s experience of the regular “Auschwitz camps” consisted of two nights supposedly spent in an Auschwitz barracks.

Avey at Auschwitz

The Times article continues:

Avey was a troublesome prisoner. In the summer of 1943 he was deported to Auschwitz, in Poland, and interned in a small PoW camp on the periphery of the IG Farben factory. The main Jewish camps were several miles to the west. “I’d lost my liberty, but none of my spirit,” he says. “I was still determined to give as good as I got.”

By “main Jewish camps,” Simons means Auschwitz (I) and Birkenau (Auschwitz II). The “main Jewish camp” by the IG Farben plant was named Monowitz (Auschwitz III). The British POW camp was near the construction site of the Farben Buna plant and several hundred meters west of the Monowitz workers’ camp. The first 200 British POWs arrived in September 1943. The barracks for the Monowitz camp were built in 1942 and all the prisoners who worked at the Farben industrial complex were moved into them. No Farben workers remained housed at Auschwitz or Birkenau after that.

Auschwitz Complex: Auschwitz I is the tiny orange rectangle in the center; Birkenau is on the left; Monowitz is the orange rectangle on the far right.

Avey says he “immediately” knew the situation at Monowitz:

“The Stripeys — that’s what we called the Jewish prisoners — were in a terrible state. Within months they were reduced to waifs and then they disappeared. The stench from the crematoria was appalling, civilians from as far away as Katowice were complaining. Everybody knew what was going on. Everybody knew.”

The POW camp was separate from the “Jewish camp” and administered by the Wehrmacht, not the SS, so how does he know what state they were in? The Poles from the area say they did not know what was going on. The part about the stench cannot be true; nowhere is it said there were crematoria in Monowitz, and it is at least 10 km from Birkenau where the crematoria were. The city of Katowice is approximately 50 km away, and is a highly industrialized area that could be considered to have “polluted” air. Same with the Buna synthetic rubber plant—some odors would probably have come from there.

Remarkably, for a “hothead,” Avey was able to think beyond the war.

I knew in my gut that these swine would eventually be held to account. Evidence would be vital. Of course, sneaking into the Jewish camp was a ludicrous idea. It was like breaking into Hell. But that’s the sort of chap I was. Reckless.

Simons tells us that

Avey’s audacious plan was made possible by Ernst Lobethall, a German Jew from Breslau, who worked alongside Avey at the Farben factory. Although fraternising was forbidden on pain of death, the two men became friends. “We spoke out of the corner of our mouths,” Avey says, “a difficult thing to do in German.”

Avey’s plan was made possible by Lobethall? How so? Lobethall says nothing about “Ginger” trading places with a Jewish prisoner in his testimony; he only spoke of getting cigarettes. It’s Avey who’s filled in all the rest. And did POW’s and Jewish prisoners “work together?” Sometimes, no doubt, but it’s rare to hear about it. If “fraternizing was forbidden on pain of death,” what would compel them to take the chance? And when did Avey learn to speak German, growing up on a farm in Essex and clearly disliking Germans, whom he called swine?

Lobethall revealed to Avey he had a sister living in England, so Avey says he

“wrote to my mother, who told Susana that Ernst was alive. She posted 200 cigarettes to me via the Red Cross. Miraculously, four months later, they arrived. The cigarettes were worth a king’s ransom. Ernst suddenly became rich.”

The problem here is that if Lobethall knows his sisters address in England, he could have written to her himself. She could have sent a package with cigarettes and chocolate directly to her brother and the Red Cross would have delivered it. Dennis Avey is superfluous in this instance. This is Giveaway No. 1 that the story is fake. The BBC article even tells us that Avey contacted his mother with a “coded letter.” Why? There was nothing he was saying that was against the rules, except that he was “fraternizing” with an inmate from the labor camp. Maybe careful wording is what he meant by “coding.”

Avey’s “meticulous plan” turns out to be this:

(He) found a Dutch Jew with a similar physique and persuaded him to exchange places for a day. Avey knew that they marched past each other at the same time every week. “The Nazis were rigid, you see,” he says. “To them orders were orders, to be carried out exactly. That was what allowed me to find a way round them.”

Once again, in spite of the Nazis’ rigidity, he manages to persuade a Jew to risk his life in order to get one night outside his own barracks. The BBC article said,

He arranged to swap for one night at a time with a Jewish inmate he had come to trust.

Who was this inmate? The BBC article doesn’t tell us. The article in the Daily Mail says the inmate was Lobethall:

The pair met while being used as slave labour at a nearby synthetic rubber factory. At the end of their shift one night, Mr Avey changed into Mr Lobethall’s stripy uniform, took his ID card and returned with the Jewish prisoners to Birkenau, also known as Auschwitz II.[6]

Apart from Lobethall never saying anything in his Survivors of the Shoah video testimony about trading places with Denis Avey, or going into the British POW camp, the prisoners did not carry ID cards. That’s what the tattoos were for, to keep track of them. Where did Andy Dolan get such an idea?

The Times continues:

Avey shaved his head and blackened his face. At the allocated time, he and the Dutch Jew sneaked into a disused shed. There they swapped uniforms and exchanged places. Avey affected a slouch and a cough, so that his English accent would be disguised should he be required to speak.

Try to imagine this, if you can. The POW’s and the Jewish prisoners are marching in different directions and pass each other. Time stops; everyone else goes into suspended animation while the two men leave the ranks and go into a shed nearby. They change into each other’s uniforms and return to take each other’s place in the ranks. Time resumes and so does the marching.

In addition to this, the British Prisoner of War has shaved his head, while the Jew with a shaved head is pretending to be a British Prisoner of War. And the rigid, order-bound SS guards don’t notice anything wrong. This is Giveaway No. 2.

Avey then tells Simons:

“I joined the Stripeys and marched into Monowitz, a predominantly Jewish camp. As we passed beneath the Arbeit Macht Frei sign, everyone stood up straight and tried to look as healthy as they could. There was an SS officer there, weeding out the weaklings for the gas. Overhead was a gallows, which had a corpse hanging from it, as a deterrent. An orchestra was playing Wagner to accompany our march. It was chilling.”

Avey is really warming up to his subject now. But he doesn’t know Monowitz from Auschwitz where the Arbeit Macht Frei sign is. Auschwitz had very few Jews in it; they were all at Birkenau and Monowitz. Giveaway No. 3.

The BBC article said:

He fully intended to get as far as Birkenau, where the gas chambers and crematoria were constantly in operation, belching acrid fumes. He only made it as far as Auschwitz III, (Monowitz) where he spent the night on two occasions.

So where was he? Since he doesn’t know, we can conclude he was never in these places. Especially when he describes it this way:

They were herded through the camp, carrying the bodies of those who had died that day. “I saw the Frauenhaus — the Germans’ brothel of Jewish girls—and the infirmary, which sent its patients to the gas after two weeks. I committed everything to memory. We were lined up in the Appellplatz for a roll call, which lasted almost two hours. Then we were given some rotten cabbage soup and went to sleep in lice-infested bunks, three to a bed.”

Here he is definitely describing Auschwitz I, 7 km from Monowitz where they worked. But he’s incorrect in everything he says. The brothel was called Die Puff, and didn’t have Jewish girls working in it, but Polish women from outside the camp. Jews could not use the brothel at all, following the Nuremberg laws of racial purity. The infirmaries would not care for patients for two weeks only to then send them to the gas chamber. The camp administration was constantly fighting lice in the barracks and on the inmates. That’s what the Zyklon B was for.

I wonder what happened in the British POW camp when the “Dutch Jew” brought his lice-infested body (according to Avey) into it and spent the night?! What about when Avey returned there after spending the night in a lice-infested bed? Here’s Avey’s description of the night:

The night was even worse than the daytime. “As it grew dark, the place was filled with howls and shrieks. Many people had lost their minds. It was a living hell. Everyone was clutching their wooden bowls under their heads, to stop them getting stolen.”

Only enamel covered metal bowls were used at all camps, so Avey reveals he’s making it up when he specifies wooden bowls. He also doesn’t tell us which barracks he stayed in. Giveaway No. 4.

Lobethall had bribed Avey’s bedfellows with cigarettes. “They gave me all the details,” he says, “the names of the SS, the gas chambers, the crematoria, everything. After that, they fell asleep. But I lay awake all night.”

Where is Lobethall? If Avey traded places with the Dutch Jew, can we assume he spent the night in Lobethall’s barracks? Again, I repeat that Lobethall didn’t mention anything about his friend Avey’s “prisoner exchange” in his testimony. If he “bribed Avey’s bedfellows with cigarettes,” he was a part of it. But why would suffering Jewish prisoners need to be bribed to talk about their sufferings? They wanted to get the information out to the rest of the world, as I understand it. And what good were the names of the SS to Avey; has he ever reported any crimes by guards whose names he got that have resulted in action taken? Also, the alleged gas chamber had not operated in Auschwitz I since 1942; now it was 1944. In spite of the shrieks and howls in this “living hell,” his bedfellows fell right to sleep. In the morning, after roll call and breakfast, they were marched back out of the camp.

“When we passed the shed again, I slipped in to meet the Dutch Jew,” he says. “That was hair raising. Although I trusted him, I couldn’t be sure that he’d turn up. And if an SS officer had looked in the wrong direction at the wrong time,
that would have been it.”

Amazing how the SS cooperated with his plan.

The changeover went smoothly, and Avey returned to the PoW camp. “The Dutch Jew perished, but I’m certain that this short reprieve prolonged his life by several weeks,” he says. “Whether that was a good thing, I don’t know.”

Returned to his camp with his shaved head? How many of his fellow POW’s knew what he was up to? And how convenient that the nameless Dutch Jew died, so there is no one, including relatives, alive today to corroborate Avey’s story… or not. In these far-out holocaust tales, the essential characters always die early, and are usually nameless. Giveaway No. 5.

Here would be a good place to show you what the British POW’s at their camp at Monowitz looked like. This is a picture of their soccer team, wearing matching team sport shirts, looking healthy, well-treated, and on friendly terms with their benign-looking Wehrmacht guards.

The Times article continues:

In 1945, as the Soviet Army closed in, the Nazis abandoned the camp and herded 60,000 prisoners in the direction of Germany, in what would become known as one of the Death Marches. Avey, who by then was suffering from tuberculosis, was among them. Around 15,000 prisoners died on the way. “The road was littered with corpses,” he says. “I saw a chance to escape and seized it.”

Giveaway No. 6. The POW’s didn’t go with the 60,000 regular prisoners. They didn’t leave until January 21, while the regular prisoners began their march on January 18. This is very important because it shows that Avey could not have been there if he didn’t know what kind of a march he was on. He’s saying things off the top of his head, depending on what he has read or heard. He knows about the “death march” of the 60,000 but not that the POW’s left later on a separate march.

He found his way to Allied lines and was transported back home. Two days before VE Day, he arrived at his parents’ Essex farm half-dead with exhaustion and sickness. They had not expected to see him again.

I think it’s certain the British or American Army would have hospitalized him right there if he had TB, not transported him “sick” and “half-dead” to his parents home, where he arrived on May 6. This arrival date to his parents in England may be documented, but Avey doesn’t say how long his March lasted or anything else about it. Again, this is typical of false stories. I would like to see the official military record for Mr. Avey!

Simons now reveals even he knows this story doesn’t make sense.

If Avey’s story still sounds implausible, there is no doubt about the help he gave to Lobethall. Last year the BBC screened a moving documentary, during which Avey learnt for the first time that his old friend had survived the war and died in New York in 2001. Before his death, Lobethall recorded a video testimony for Steven Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation, during which he emotionally recounts how his life was saved by Avey’s (actually Ginger’s – he never says he knew the soldier’s name) initiative and Susana’s cigarettes. This is the only moment that I see Avey’s steely façade falter.

In other words, if you can’t believe Avey, then at least believe Lobethall!

“I was hospitalised for two years after the war,” Avey continues. “In 1947, I went to the military authorities to submit my information about Auschwitz. Their eyes glazed over. I wasn’t taken seriously. I was shocked, especially after the risks I’d taken. I felt completely disillusioned, and traumatised as well. So from then on I bottled it up, and tried to piece my life back together.”

This may just be his way of explaining why he waited 65 years to speak of this—until Yad Vashem and the BBC came looking for a red-haired British POW.

Readjusting to normal life was hard. Avey became addicted to adrenalin, racing fast cars, travelling to Spain for the running of the bulls. He was plagued by nightmares and flashbacks. Even today he shows signs of trauma. He always carries an expensive gold watch, so that “if ever I find myself in a fix again, I’ve got something to fall back on”.

Two nights spent in an Auschwitz barracks (assuming that it really happened) would not create such Post Traumatic Stress in a tough, ready-for-anything Desert Rat, as he describes himself. This is Giveaway No. 7. Avey is clearly a man who has always had a myriad of psychological problems. His reckless nature leads him to take advantage of this opportunity for a claim to fame as a “Righteous Among the Nations.” But what does it say about Yad Vashem that they appear to be on the verge of accepting Avey’s preposterous account? Why is Yad Vashem so anxious to confer this designation upon as many Gentiles as possible?

How Yad Vashem gains from their “Righteous” program

Let’s look further into the meaning of this honor bestowed by Jews upon Gentiles. Yad Vashem says: Each case must be substantiated by eyewitness testimonies and archival documents of the period.

Signed and notarized testimonies by survivor and other witnesses of the rescue attempt. Testimonies should include all known personal data on rescuers and survivors, a detailed account of the rescue attempt (how the contact with the rescuer was made; the form of rescue; places and dates of rescue; what arrangements or agreements were made between rescuers and survivors; how did the danger to the rescuers manifest itself; any other details that may shed light on the nature of rescue.) [7]

Where are the testimonies for Avey and Lobethall? They come only from Avey, Lobethall and Lobethall’s sister, a rather ingrown group. There are no outside neutral parties. The BBC tells us that Avey briefly met Susana Lobethall in 1945, when he came home from the war, traumatized by what he’d witnessed and endured. They both thought Ernst was dead. But where are the witnesses to this meeting? Susana lost touch with Avey and thus never told him the good news when she found out Ernst was alive.

Is it because all Avey did was to smuggle cigarettes to Lobethall (according to Lobethall) that they needed to build up a grander picture of him as risking his life? Yad Vashem and the British news media go to great lengths always to keep the “horror” of Auschwitz alive in the public consciousness. Denis Avey serves this purpose for them, in spite of the unbelievability of his story. As we can see from the comments from readers to these three articles, they accept what he says without question.

As for Yad Vashem, they have an even more sinister purpose for their “Righteous Among the Nations” than just pushing holocaust horror stories. This program has created for Israel a moral high-ground for Jews, from whence they look down upon and reward Gentiles who have put their own lives in danger to save Jews. This is a subtle, or not so subtle statement that good Gentiles defend and protect Jews. Do they ever say it is the responsibility of Jews to protect Gentiles? Never — this is never brought up at all. Because in their Jewish universe, Gentiles can only be “perpetrators” or silent “bystanders,” while Jews are perpetual victims of Gentiles. No matter what kind of murderous behavior Jews exhibit, this never changes.

Elie Wiesel, that personification of everything that is wrong with the “holocaust industry,” speaking at the 2005 opening of the new Yad Vashem Museum in Jerusalem, made this statement:

The Holocaust was not man’s inhumanity to man. It was man’s inhumanity to the Jews.[8]

This sums up the ethnocentric view of world Judaism, of religious Judaism and Zionism both — it’s all about us, and we are working to make that the legal framework of this planet. Watch out, Gentiles!

It’s instructive to look at the situation of the Roman Catholic Church and the path to sainthood of one of their beloved Popes, Pius XII. Jewry is doing everything in its power to stop the canonization of Pius XII because, in their estimation, he didn’t do enough to “help the Jews” during their holocaust. Therefore, in their eyes he is not Righteous. Wrongly, they make it his responsibility, not their own, to look out for Jews. This is the message that’s being transferred to the rest of us by constant barrage of Jewish outrage and interference in Gentile affairs. While some of us can see through it, most cannot.

But what if the tables were turned and concerned Gentiles were to do everything in their power to stop the “Righteous Among the Nations” from being conferred on Denis Avey, on the basis that he is unworthy of it? He is certainly lying about his exploits back in the camps; what was his status there exactly? The Jews are demanding all documents relating to Pius XII during the war years be released to them; we should likewise demand to see Denis Avey’s military records, at the very least. We should make it our business, just as they make the Church’s sainthood process their business.

In closing, I’d like to quote from a recent article [9] by Steven Walt (co-author of The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy). “Challenging Orthodoxy Is a Form of ‘Asymmetric Conflict’: You Win By ‘Not Losing.’ As long as you remain part of the debate, you’re winning. Minds don’t change overnight, and it is difficult to know how well an intellectual campaign is going at any particular point in time—some days you might think you’re winning big, while other days the deck will appear to be stacked against you. But the real question is: are you still in the game?”

[1] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/8382457.stm
[2] http://www1.yadvashem.org/righteous_new/about_the_program.html
[3] Ibid: news.bbc.co.uk. “The BBC has now reunited the pair after tracing Susana, who is now Susana Timms and lives in the Midlands.”
[4] http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/the_way_we_live/article7039572.ece
[5] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1235566/How-British-PoW-swapped-uniforms-sneak-IN-Auschwitz-Jewish-pal-slip-out.html#ixzz0i0XQUEm7
[6] Ibid.
[7] http://www1.yadvashem.org/righteous_new/how_to_apply.html
[8] http://www.jweekly.com/article/full/57402/yad-vashem-ramping-up-effort-to-combat-holocaust-denial/
[9] http://walt.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2010/02/22/on_grabbing_the_third_rail

On 27 January 2010, the tenth “Holocaust Remembrance Day”, Elie Wiesel was invited into Montecitorio Hall, the seat of the Chamber of Deputies of the Italian Republic where he had the opportunity to give a brief speech. The president of the Chamber, Gianfranco Fini, introduced him as “the most authoritative living witness of the horrors of the Shoah among the survivors of the Nazi concentration camps”.[1] But is he really a witness?

Is Elie Wiesel an impostor?

On 3 March 2009, a Hungarian website published an article entitled Még mindig kísérti a haláltábor (The extermination camp is still tempting)[2] and outlining important revelations by Miklós Grüner, a former deportee to Auschwitz. The article was translated and appeared the following day under the title Auschwitz Survivor Claims Elie Wiesel is an Impostor[3]. The text reads as follows:

«In May 1944 , when Miklos Gruner was 15, he was deported from Hungary to Auschwitz-Birkenau with his mother and father as well as both a younger and an elder brother. He says that his mother and his younger brother were immediately gassed after their arrival in the camp. Then he, his elder brother and their father had an inmate number tattooed on their arms and were sent to perform hard work in a synthetic fuel factory linked to IG Farben where the father died six months later. After that, the elder brother was sent to Mauthausen and, as the young Miklos was then alone, two elder Jewish inmates who were also Hungarians and friends with his late father took him under their protection. These two protectors of the young Miklos were the Lazar and Abraham Wiesel brothers.

In the following months, Miklos Gruner and the Wiesel brothers became good friends. Lazar Wiesel was 31 years old in 1944. Miklos never forgot the number Lazar was tattooed with by the Nazis: A-7713. In January 1945, as the Russian army was coming, the inmates were transferred to Buchenwald. During the ten days this transfer took, partly by foot, partly by train, more than half of the inmates died and amongst them was Abraham, the elder brother of Lazar Wiesel. In April 8, 1945, the US army liberated Buchenwald. Miklos and Lazar were amongst the survivors of the camp. As Miklos had tuberculosis, he was sent in a Swiss clinic and therefore was separated from Lazar. After recovering, Miklos emigrated to Australia while his elder brother, who also survived the war, established himself in Sweden.

Years later, in 1986, Miklos was contacted by the Swedish journal Sydsvenska Dagbladet in Malmo and invited to meet “an old friend” named Elie Wiesel… As Miklos answered that he doesn`t know anyone with this name, he was told Elie Wiesel was the same person Miklos knew in the Nazi camps under the name Lazar Wiesel and with the inmate number A-7713… Miklos still remembered that number and he was therefore convinced at that point that he was going to meet his old friend Lazar and happily accepted the invitation to meet him at the Savoj Hotel in Stockholm on December 14, 1986. Miklos recalls:

“I was very happy at the idea of meeting Lazar but when I confronted the so-called ‘Elie Wiesel’, I was stunned to see a man I didn`t recognize at all, who didn`t even speak Hungarian or Yiddish and instead he was speaking English in a strong French accent. Therefore our meeting was over in about ten minutes. As a goodbye gift, the man gave me his book entitled ‘Night’ of which he claimed to be the author. I accepted the book I didn`t know at that time but told everyone there that this man was not the person he pretended to be!”

Miklos recalls that during this strange meeting, Elie Wiesel refused to show him the tattooed number on his arm, saying he didn`t want to exhibit his body. Miklos adds that Elie Wiesel showed his tattooed number afterward to an Israeli journalist who Miklos met and this journalist told Miklos that he didn`t have time to identify the number but… was certain it wasn`t a tattoo. Miklos says:

“After that meeting with Elie Wiesel, I spent twenty years of research and found out that the man calling himself Elie Wiesel has never been in a Nazi concentration camp since he was not included in any official list of detainees”.

Miklos also found out that the book Elie Wiesel gave him in 1986 as something he has written himself was in fact written in Hungarian in 1955 by Miklos’ old friend Lazar Wiesel and published in Paris under the title “Un di Velt hot Gesvigen”, meaning approximately “The World Kept Silent”. The book was then shortened and rewritten in French as well as in English in order to be published under the author`s name Elie Wiesel in 1958, under the french title “La Nuit” and the English title “Night”. Ten million copies of the book were sold in the world by Elie Wiesel who even received a Nobel Peace prize for it in 1986 while – says Miklos – the real author Lazar Wiesel was mysteriously missing…

“Elie Wiesel never wanted to meet me again”, says Miklos. “He became very successful; he takes 25 thousand dollars for a 45 minutes speech on the Holocaust. I have officially reported to the FBI in Los Angeles. I have also complained to governments and media, in the US and Sweden with no result.

I have received anonymous calls telling me I could be shot if I don`t shut up but I am not afraid of death any more. I have deposited the whole dossier in four different countries and, if I died suddenly, they would be made public. The world must know that Elie Wiesel is an impostor and I am going to tell it, I am going to publish the truth in a book called “Stolen Identity A7713”.”»

Miklós Grüner’s declarations have been repeated many times, but have not caused any major research effort. We will thus scrutinize them critically but soberly.

First of all, some biographical data on Elie Wiesel:

Born on 30 September 1928 at Sighet in Romania, the son of Shlomo and Sarah Frig, the daughter of Dodye Feig, deported to Birkenau on 16 May 1944.[4]

The most important point to be verified is the reliability of the accuser. What can be considered established on the subject of Miklós Grüner is the fact that he was at Buchenwald in May of 1945. In a “Concentration Camp Inmates Questionnaire” of the Military Government of Germany, we have an entry giving his name, and the date of his birth – 6 April 1928 – also conforms. The ID number is handwritten in the upper left hand corner: 120762.[5]

Document 1: Questionnaire concerning Miklós Grüner. Buchenwald, 6 May 1945. (Click on the picture to view it in full size).

However, the key person here is Lázár Wiesel. Fortunately, the file card concerning his stay at the Buchenwald camp also exists and allows us to verify Miklós Grüner’s assertions. This file card [6], has in its upper left hand corner the handwritten entry “Ung. Jude” (Hungarian Jew), in the center, “Ausch. A 7713”, i.e. “Auschwitz A-7713”, the former Auschwitz ID number, and, on the right, “Gef.-Nr.:123565”, (Detainee number 123565, the new Buchenwald ID number). This detainee was born on 4 September 1913 (Lázár Wiesel’s year of birth according to Miklós Grüner) at Maromarossziget and was the son of Szalamo Wiesel, who was at Buchenwald, and of Serena Wiesel née Feig, interned at KL Auschwitz. The stamp “26.1.45 KL. Auschwitz” indicates that Lázár Wiesel was registered at Buchenwald on 26 January 1945 coming from Auschwitz.

Document 2: Personal file card for Lázár Wiesel (KL Buchenwald). (Click on the picture to view it in full size).

Note: Maromarossziget [Máramarossziget in Hungarian], now Sighetu Marmaţiei (in Rumanian) is the same place which Elie Wiesel calls Sighet.[7]

The name “Szalamo” is the same as “Shlomo”, while “Serena” is phonetically close to “Sarah”.

The following table summarizes the results of the above verification:

Miklós Grüner is perfectly right: Elie Wiesel has taken on Lázár Wiesel’s identity.

Another accusation levelled by Grüner concerns the origin of Elie Wiesel’s book “La Nuit” (in English “Night“). In the Hungarian version of the article mentioned in note 2, it is said that the book was published in Hungarian in Paris in 1955 by his friend Lázár with the name of Eliezer and the title “A világ hallgat” (And the world remained silent). In the English version of the article, mentioned in note 3,
the title, instead, is in Yiddish and reads “Un di Velt hot Gesvigen” (And the world remained silent).

A search for the title in Hungarian gave no result, whereas the Yiddish book is, indeed, documented. It is registered in the Bibliography of Yiddish Books on the Catastrophe and Heroism [8], n. 549 a p. 81. The entry, in Yiddish, states: Eliezer Wiesel, Un di Welt hot geschwign (And the world remained silent). Buenos Aires, 1956. Central Association of Polish Jews in Argentina. Series Das poilische Jidntum, vol. 117, 252 pages. There is an English translation of this book, which corresponds to chapter VII of “La Nuit”. We will discuss it further along in this article.

Michael Wiesberg provides some noteworthy details on this subject:

«Wiesel has often mentioned the story of how this book came about. Naomi Seidmann has noted that Wiesel himself, in Alle Flüsse fließen ins Meer [All rivers run to the sea] has drawn attention to the fact that, in 1954, he gave the Argeninian publisher Mark Turkow the original manuscript of “La Nuit”, written in Yiddish. According to Wiesel, he never saw it again, but Turkow strongly denies this. This manuscript was published at Buenos Aires in 1955 under the title Und di Velt hat Geshveyn (And the world remained silent). Wiesel asserts to have written it in 1954 while on a cruise in Brazil. However, in an interview, he declared that it was only in May of 1955, after an encounter with François Mauriac [9], that he decided to break his silence. “And in that year [1955], in the tenth year, begins my story. It was then translated from Yiddish into French and I sent it to him. We were very, very good friends until his death”.

Naomi Seidmann, in her research on “La Nuit”, brought to light that there are considerable differences between the Yiddish and the French versions, with respect to the length, the tone, the argumentation and the topics treated in the book. She attributes these differences to the influence of Mauriac who can be described as a very particular person”»[10]

In this respect, hence, the least that can be said is that the origin of the book is quite uncertain and misty.

Is Elie Wiesel a false witness?

This having been stated, we have yet to establish whether Elie Wiesel is also a false witness on the subject of Auschwitz.

We will examine his “eye-witness account” as it is set out in his “masterpiece” (Fini), “La notte”.[11] As early as 1986 Robert Faurisson wrote an article entitled Un grand faux témoin: Élie Wiesel [12] (A prominent false witness: Elie Wiesel). More recently, Thomas Kues has written a further article entitled Una donnola travestita da agnello [13] (A weasel in sheep’s clothing). Both authors approach the subject in general terms; now the time has come for a more through analysis. We must stress that the overall tone of the account in question is that it tells a story rather than describing something factual; Elie Wiesel goes to great lengths to avoid any verifiable details and what he says about Birkenau, about Auschwitz, about Monowitz or about Buchenwald is so vague that his story might have taken place, just as easily, somewhere in Siberia or in Canada.

Quotes are from Elie Wiesel Night, His Record of Childhood in the Death Camps of Auschwitz and Buchenwald, Penguin Books edition (Translated from the French by Stella Rodway), New York 1981.

a) Deportation

Elie Wiesel does not specify the date of his deportation to Auschwitz. His narrative starts, though, with reference to a specific date: “On the Saturday before Pentecost [“Shavuòth” in the Italian edition], in the spring sunshine, people strolled, carefree and unheeding, through the swarming streets.” (p.22-23). In 1944, this festival fell on 28 May 1944 [14], a Sunday. The day in question was thus 27 May. The first transport of Jews left Sighet on the following day, hence, on 28 May. “Then, at last, at one o’clock in the afternoon, came the signal to leave” (p.27). Elie Wiesel then speaks of “Monday” (p. 29), the dawn (p.29), the day after tomorrow (p. 29) saying, at the end, “Saturday, the day of rest, was chosen for our expulsion” (p. 33) He then speaks about the traditional Friday evening meal and goes on to say: «The following morning, we marched to the station […]» (p. 33, which means that the trip to Auschwitz began on Saturday, 3 June 1944.

The duration of the trip is not given, but transports from Hungary usually took three or four days to reach Auschwitz-Birkenau. Elie Wiesel spent the night at Birkenau and was moved to Auschwitz the following day where he was given the number A-7713, which was tattooed on his arm (p. 54). Yet, according to him, “it was a beautiful April day” (p. 51).

This schedule is pure invention. If he did leave Sighet on 3 June 1944 he could not have arrived at Auschwitz in April. Moreover, the ID number A-7713 was given out on 24 May, the day on which 2,000 Hungarian Jews were assigned the numbers A-5729 through A-7728 [15]. According to Randolph L. Braham, a Jewish transport left Máramarossziget on 20 May 1944.[16] Allowing four days for the journey, this was the transport of Lázár Wiesel who was assigned the ID number A-7713 precisely on 24 May 1944. But apparently, Elie Wiesel was unaware of all these things.

b) Arrival at Birkenau

Elie Wiesel writes:

«But we had reached a station. Those who were next to the windows told us its name: ‘Auschwitz.’ No one had ever heard that name» (p.37).

«Toward eleven o’clock, the train began to move. We pressed against the windows.The convoy was moving slowly. A quarter of an hour later, it slowed down again. Through the windows we could see barbed wire; we realized that this must be the camp» (p. 39).

«And as the train stopped, we saw this time that flames were gushing out of a tall chimney into the black sky» (p. 39).

«In front of us flames. In the air that smell of burning flesh. It must have been about midnight. We had arrived – at Birkenau, reception centre for Auschwitz» (p. 39).

From the geographical point of view, this tale is nonsense. The spur towards Birkenau left the main track at a station, (the so-called “old ramp”) some 500 meters from the camp – as the crow flies – and then ran obliquely to the east of the camp fence. The spur was about 700 meters long.

There were four crematoria at Birkenau, named II, III, IV and V. The chimneys of the crematoria closest to the “old ramp” (II and III) were some 1,400 m away, in a straight line, and the other two (IV and V) about 1,800 meters. Over the last 400 m, the spur ran perpendicularly to the camp fence, which means that crematoria II and III could not be seen from the windows of the train, being situated straight ahead, as they were; the others were hidden behind at least 12 rows of barracks and had, moreover, two chimneys each.

As far as I know, no other witness ever spoke of having seen the chimneys of the crematoria from the deportation trains, and for good reason.

Document 3: Aerial photograph of the Birkenau camp, taken on 31 May 1944 (NA, 60PRS/462, D 1508, Exp. 3056). The circles mark the crematoria; (left to right) II, III, IV, V. The building in the shape of a “T”, marked “ZS” is the Central Sauna. “EG” is the entrance building (Eingangsgebäude). The arrow (at bottom) marks the railway spur. (Click on the picture to view it in full size).

Elie Wiesel’s arrival at the camp is described only vaguely in his account; he takes great care to skirt any detail that might be verifiable. Aside from the “chimney” which will be discussed later, he speaks only of “barbed wire” (p. 39), then, inside the camp, of a crossroads (p. 40), a “ditch” (p. 43), “another large ditch” (p. 43), a “barrack” (p. 45), and “another barrack” (p. 48).

There is no mention of all the things which attracted the attention of the real deportees, as is shown in the photographs of the so-called Auschwitz Album [17] (which were taken a few days after the arrival of Lázár Wiesel’s convoy: The entrance building (Eingangsgebäude) with its archway through which the trains entered the camp, the ramp (the so-called Judenrampe or Jewish ramp) with its three railway tracks inside the camp, the fences, the innumerable rows of barracks on either side, the long roads which split the camp lengthwise and crosswise, the drainage ditches, the watch-towers, the water basins for fire-fighting, or crematoria II and III at the far end of the ramp.

Document 4: Entrance building (Eingangsgebäude) of the Birkenau camp © Carlo Mattogno

Then the tale becomes a little more specific:

«A barrel of petrol at the entrance. Disinfection. Everyone was soaked in it. Then a hot shower. At high speed. As we came out from the water, we were driven outside. More running. Another barracks, the store. Very long tables. Mountains of prison clothes. On we ran. As we passed, trousers, tunic, shirt, and socks were thrown to us» (pp. 47-48).

This is pure invention: At the time, Birkenau had four disinfestation and disinfection installations (Entwesungs- und Desinfektionsanlagen). The main one was the so-called Zentralsauna (Entwesungsanlage, BW 32) in the shape of a T near the western fence of the camp with its three hot-air disinfestation chambers (Heissluftentwesungskammern), three steam autoclaves (Dampf-Desinfektionsapparate), shower hall complete with undressing room and dressing room, barbershop; there were two more such installations, designated as BW 5a and 5b, located in sectors BIb and BIa, similarly furnished with a shower hall, undressing room and dressing room, but one of them had a disinfestation gas chamber working with Zyklon B, the other one had two hot-air disinfestation chambers. Moreover, BIIa, the Gypsy camp, had 8 electrical disinfestation devices (elektrische Entlausungsapparate).[18] In the first three installations, with their undressing rooms (Auskleideraum) and dressing rooms (Ankleideraum) all stages of the operation took place indoors. The disinfection procedure did not make use of petrol. But of all these things, Elie Wiesel did not have a clue.

We should also mention, at this point, the little tale of the “good” detainee who went around among the new arrivals, telling them to make themselves older or younger than their real age, in order to avoid being “gassed”. Elie Wiesel, who was not yet 15, was told to say that he was 18, while his father, who was fifty, was advised to say “forty” (p. 41) This is a foolish story, because each transport was accompanied by a transport manifest which contained, i.e., the last name, first name and date of birth for each of the new arrivals which means that any such pious lie would be discovered immediately upon registration. It is also nonsense from the point of view of the holocaust historians, because, according to a publication of the Auschwitz Museum, all children below ge 14 were systematically gassed [19], whereas there was no age limit for adults. In the Auschwitz death registers (Sterbebücher) for 1943 we have 4,166 entries for persons between 51 and 90 years of age (no such registers are extant for 1944).[20]

c) “The” flaming chimney

Elie Wiesel had no idea of how many crematoria there were at Birkenau, what they were like and where they stood. Even though, at one point, he speaks of “six crematoria” (p. 78) he always talks about “the” chimney as if their had been only one, without identifying the crematorium. Actually, there were six chimneys at Birkenau: which one was spouting flames?

He dwells on a single strange phenomenon: «Do you see that chimney over there? See it? Do you see those flames? (Yes, we did see the flames.)» (My italics) (p.41). Now, at last, we know where the chimney was: “over there”!

The tale of the flaming chimneys was very popular in the 1950s, when Elie Wiesel wrote “Night” (1958). Nowadays, nobody treats the matter seriously, not even Robert Jan van Pelt who made an effort to prove that smoke came out of the chimneys of the crematoria… period.[21] Actually, there is no technical basis to this tale, as I have shown in a specific article.[22]

Document 5: A convoy of Hungarian Jews at the Birkenau camp – End of June, 1944. The arrows show crematoria II and III, without “flames” or smoke (from: L’Album d’Auschwitz, p. 51)

d) The “cremation pits”

We have here the most frightening part of his “eye-witness account”:

«Not far from us, flames were leaping up from a ditch, gigantic flames. A lorry drew up at the pit and delivered its load – little children. Babies! Yes, I saw it – saw it with my own eyes… those children in the flames. (Is it surprising that I could not sleep after that? Sleep had fled from my eyes.)

So this was where we were going. A little farther on was another and larger ditch for adults.

I pinched my face. Was I still alive? Was I awake? I could not believe it. How could it be possible for them to burn people, children, and for the world to keep silent? No, none of this could be true. It was a nightmare… Soon I should wake with a start, my heart pounding, and find myself back in the bedroom of my childhood, among my books…

My father’s voice drew me from my thoughts:

‘It’s a shame… a shame that you couldn’t have gone with your mother… I saw several boys of your age going with their mothers…’

His voice was terribly sad. I realized that he did not want to see what they were going to do to me. He did not want to see the burning of his only son.

My forehead was bathed in cold sweat. But I told him that I did not believe that they could burn people in our age, that humanity would never tolerate it…

‘Humanity? Humanity is not concerned with us. Today anything is allowed. Anything is possible, even these crematories…’

His voice was choking.

‘Father,’ I said, ‘if that is so, I don’t want to wait here. I’m going to run to the electric wire. That would be better than slow agony in the flames.’

He did not answer. He was weeping. His body was shaken convulsively. Around us, everyone was weeping. Someone began to recite the Kaddish, the prayer for the dead. I do not know if it has ever happened before, in the long history of the Jews, that people have ever recited the prayer for the dead for themselves.

‘Yitgadal veyitkadach shmé rabai… May His Name be blessed and magnified…’ Whispered my father.

For the first time, I felt revolt rise up in me. Why should I bless His name? The Eternal, Lord of the Universe, the All-Powerful and Terrible, was silent. What had I to thank Him for?

We continued our march. We were gradually drawing closer to the ditch, from which an infernal heat was rising. Still twenty steps to go. If I wanted to bring about my own death, this was the moment. Our line had now only fifteen paces to cover. I bit my lips so that my father would not hear my teeth chattering. Ten steps still. Eight. Seven. We marched slowly on, as though following a hearse at our own funeral. Four steps more. Three steps. There it was now, right in front of us, the pit and its flames. I gathered all that was left of my strength, so that I could break from the ranks and throw myself upon the barbed wire. In the depths of my heart, I bade farewell to my father, to the whole universe; and, in spite of myself, the words formed themselves and issued in a whisper from my lips: Yitgadal veyitkadach shmé rabai… May His Name be blessed and magnified… My heart was bursting. The moment had come. I was face to face with the Angel of Death…

No. Two steps from the pit we were ordered to turn to the left and made to go into a barracks» (pp. 43-45).

Where does all this take place? As usual, Elie Wiesel takes care not to furnish any kind of reference point as to the location. According to the holocaust historians, the “cremation pits” were located at two sites: one was outside of the camp, across from the Zentralsauna at the alleged “Bunker 2” [23] and another was in the northern yard of crematorium V. We must exclude the first site, because otherwise Elie Wiesel would have had to mention their leaving the camp and walking several hundred meters in open terrain.

What about the other site?

In the study Auschwitz: Open Air Incinerations [24], I have shown, on the basis of an analysis of all available aerial photographs of Birkenau, that the story of the “cremation pits”, as far as their number, their size or their purpose are concerned, is not borne out by the reality on the ground. The only documented site of any kind of cremation that may have existed at Birkenau was a space behind crematorium V, it covered an area of some 50 square meters – whereas, if we follow the holocaust propaganda, the alleged extermination of the Hungarian Jews is said to have required “cremation ditches” with an area of about 5,900 square meters altogether – as we can see from this photograph:

Document 6: Aerial photograph of Birkenau taken on 23 August 1944 – Northern yard of Crematorium V. The smoking site is very small, as can be seen from the size of crematorium V which was about 13 meters wide. (Click on the picture to view it in full size).

We must remember, moreover, that in order to reach this point it would have been necessary to pass crematoria IV and V which surely would not have escaped the eye of as acute an observer of chimneys as Elie Wiesel – there were four chimneys, after all. What is more, there were no barracks in the vicinity, there was only crematorium V. Finally, the nearest wire fence against which our witness wanted to throw himself (on the north side) ran along on the far side of a drainage ditch.

Wiesel’s tale is not only historically unfounded, it is also absurd, because if Wiesel had really come within two steps of a real “cremation pit” – which would have had to be run at a temperature of about 600 degC to be effective – he would have been killed by the intense heat.

The scene of the truck unloading children into a “cremation pit” is also one of the ludicrous propaganda arguments of the post-war era. It was illustrated by one of David Olère’s drawings in 1947 which was then to inspire a number of later “eye-witnesses”.[25]

Wiesel’s story thus turns out to be both false and absurd, but it is also a blatant subterfuge: if he and his father had really been “selected” for work, why were they taken anywhwere near the “cremation pit”? So that they would discover the “terrible secret” of Auschwitz and spread their story to other camps?

It is obvious that we have here nothing but a simple trick used by Wiesel to style himself as an “eye-witness” of a horrific but purely fictitious event.

e) The transfer to Auschwitz

After a night spent in a barrack of the Gypsy camp, Elie Wiesel was moved to the Auschwitz main camp. Here too, the description is exceedingly vague:

«The march had lasted half an hour. Looking around me, I noticed that the barbed wires were behind us. We had left the camp.

It was a beautiful April day. The fragrance of spring was in the air. The sun was setting in the west.

But we had been marching for only a few moments when we saw the barbed wire of another camp. An iron door with the inscription over it:

‘Work is liberty!’

Auschwitz» (pp. 51-52).

He does not even seem to have noticed passing through the archway of the Birkenau entrance building. Along the way, he notices nothing, neither the bridge across the railroad tracks, nor the long tree-lined road leading to the main camp. On the other hand, he immediately sees the inscription “Arbeit macht frei” (but does not render it in German), as could anyone who ever heard of Auschwitz.

Needless to say that he makes sure not to provide us with an even sketchy description of the new camp. On arrival, he was taken to Block 17 about which he does not tell the reader anything, for obvious reasons.

«In the afternoon we were made to line up. Three prisoners brought a table and some medical instruments. With the left sleeve rolled up, each person passed in front of the table. The three ‘veterans,’ with needles in their hands, engraved a number on our left arms. I became A-7713» (pp. 53-54).

Even this facet is false. I have already spoken of the fraudulent ID number. Here, Tadeusz Iwasko informs us that

«The new arrivals (Zugang) were taken to the bathhouses which, at Auschwitz I, were located in block no. 26».[26]

Elie Wiesel keeps quiet about all the preparatory operations prior to admission, which he is obviously unfamiliar with:

«Registration took place immediately after the bath and the consignment of the clothes; it involved the filling-out of a form (Häftlings-Personalbogen) giving personal data and the address of the nearest relatives. […]. The detainee was then assigned a serial number which would be used instead of his name throughout his stay at the camp. Registration ended with this number being tattooed on his lower left arm».[27]

He goes on to speak of the evening roll call:

«Tens of thousands of prisoners stood in rows while the SS checked their numbers» (p.54) (my italics)

The Auschwtz camp strength, however, was far lower. On 12 July 1944, the camp held about 14,400 detainees.[28]

f) The transfer to Monowitz

After having spent three weeks at Auschwitz (p. 55), Elie Wiesel was transferred to the Buna camp (p. 59), also called Auschwitz III, at Monowitz. Here, again, we have no verifiable particulars.[29] What little details he gives us are all fanciful. He starts out right away with a contradiction:

«Our convoy included a few children ten and twelve years old» (p. 58).

Perhaps these youngsters, too, had told the Germans that they were eighteen years of age, so that they would be spared the gas chambers?

Then «[…] we were installed in two tents» (p. 58), as if Monowitz did not have the 60 barracks which Primo Levi told us about:

«Our Lager is a square of about six hundred yards in length, surrounded by two fences of barbed wire, the inner one carrying a high tension current. It consists of sixty wooden huts, which are called Blocks, ten of which are in construction. In addition, there is the body of the kitchens, which are in brick; an experimental farm, run by a detachment of privileged Häftlinge; the huts with the showers and the latrines, one for each group of six or eight Blocks. Besides these, certain Blocks are reserved for specific purposes. First of all, a group of eight, at the extreme eastern end of the camp, forms the infirmary and clinic; then there is Block 24 which is the Krätzeblock, reserved for infectious skin diseases; Block 7 which no ordinary Häftling has ever entered, reserved for the “Prominenz”, that is,the aristocracy, the internees holding the highest posts; Block 47, reserved for the Reichsdeutsche (the Aryan Germans, ‘politicals’ or criminals); Block 49, for the Kapos alone; Block 12, half of which, for use of the Reichsdeutsche and the Kapos, serves as canteen, that is, a distribution centre for tobacco, insect powder and occasionally other articles; Block 37, which formed the Quartermaster’s office and the Office for Work; and finally, Block 29, which always has its windows closed as it is the Frauenblock, the camp brothel, served by Polish Häftling girls, and reserved for the Reichsdeutsche»[30]

When compared to this text, Elie Wiesel’s non-description can only be qualified as pathetic.

When he spoke at Montecitorio, Elie Wiesel boasted of having known Primo Levi:

«At a certain point, both of us were assigned to the same barrack, but he was not there during the death-march towards the [railroad] cars which took us to Buchenwald, he stayed in the hospital» (my italics)[31]

However, Primo Levi was assigned to Block 30 [32], then to Block 45 [33] and finally to Block 48.[34] Which Block was Wiesel’s? The answer is not as simple as that. Initially, Wiesel speaks of «the orchestra block»[35] which was, indeed, near the door of the camp (p. 60), then he mentions Block 36 a couple of times: «with all my might I began to run to block 36» (p. 84), «I ran to block 36» (p. 87) without telling us whether he eventually stayed there, finally he says clearly that he stayed in Block 57 (p. 96). In fact, Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi were never housed in the same barrack. A little white lie right in the middle of Montecitorio, right smack in the face of so many listeners!

The little tale of ripping out gold teeth from the mouths of living detainees (p. 63) and the ensuing closure of the dental station (Zahnstation) is unfounded. Gold teeth were removed from corpses and the Zahnstation, located in Block 15 and run by the SS, was never closed down.

Elie Wiesel then goes on to tell us about a detainee “selected” for death in the “gas chamber”:

«When the selection came, he was condemned in advance, offering his own neck to the executioner. All he asked of us was:

‘In three days I shall no longer be here…. Say the Kaddish for me.’

We promised him. In three days’ time, when we saw the smoke rising from the chimney, we would think of him. Ten of us would gather together and hold a special service. All his friends would say the Kaddish.

Then he went off toward the hospital, his step steadier, not looking back. An ambulance was waiting to take him to Birkenau» (pp. 88-89) (my italics)

Our “eye witness” had either forgotten that he was at Monowitz where there was no crematorium or had such a keen eye that he could see the smoke from “the chimney” (one of six, the choice is yours) at Birkenau, something that would be rather improbable in view of the fact that the two camps were 5 km apart as the crow flies and the town of Auschwitz stood between them.

Also, sending an ambulance to take a detainee to the gas chamber would really be an example of “Sonderbehandlung“, a very “special treatment”!

On the subject of “selections”, Elie Wiesel asserts that «the notorious Dr. Mengele» was present at one of them (p. 85); but Mengele was Lagerarzt of the Gypsy camp (BIIe) at Birkenau and certainly had other duties than to go to Monowitz and carry out “selections” there. Mengele, incidentally, is the only physician mentioned by Elie Wiesel, and is also the one who received him at Birkenau (p. 42); the name is very well known among those who never even came near Auschwitz.

Our eye-witness even mentions an occurrence that one can verify: an allied air-raid.

It took place «one Sunday» (p. 70), he remembers the day very well because he had decided «[…] to stay in bed late in the morning» (p. 70) «The raid lasted over an hour” (p. 72) and he comments: «To see the whole works (la fabbrica in the Italian edition, p. 62) go up in fire – what revenge!» (p. 72) (my italics).

In reality, the raid took place on 13 September 1944, which was a Wednesday, it lasted 13 minutes, from 11:17 through 11:30 (a.m.) and destroyed only part of the installations. Actually, at Monowitz there was not only one plant but quite a few.

We will not go into minor silly statements, such as the death sentence pronounced «in the name of Himmler […]» (p.74) and move on to his stay at the camp hospital (probably inspired by Primo Levi’s account). It took place «in mid-January» when his right foot swelled up because of chillblains and he had to be operated on. He had to move into the hospital and immediately noticed that «it was indeed true that the hospital was very small […]»(p. 90). Actually, it consisted of only nine Blocks, two for recovery (13 and 22), two for surgery (14 and 16), one for internal medicine and dentistry (15), two for internal medicine (17 and 19), one for out-patients and reception(18) and one for infectious diseases.[36]

g) The transfer to Buchenwald

We do not have to go into the motivations for Wiesel’s decision to leave with the Germans rather than wait for the Soviets to arrive, because, in its literary context, it is psychologically explained by the (unjustified) fear that all those remaining behind in the camp would be shot.

Leaving aside the evacuation march itself and the ride on the train, we will consider the details of the arrival at Buchenwald, keeping in mind only the duration of the whole trip: three days’ stay at Gleiwitz (p. 107), plus one day for the march from Monowitz, and «ten days, ten nights of travelling» (p. 111) for a total of at least 14 days. On arrival at Buchenwald we have the usual fogginess – no part of the camp can be identified in any way. Wiesel speaks of showers «On the third day after our arrival at Buchenwald» (p. 118) but avoids any kind of detail regarding the registration procedure. We have already seen that Miklós Grüner and Lázár Wiesel who really did go to Buchenwald were respectively assigned the ID numbers 120762 and 123565.

If Elie Wiesel had in any manner wanted to speak of the registration which he had to go through like everyone else, obviously, he would have had to say something about two ID numbers. Worse still, there is no record of a person by the name of Elie (or Eliezer) Wiesel in the Buchenwald files.

Let us take a look at the account of his arrival at Buchenwald to see whether it agrees with the documents.

He states that he went to have a shower «on the third day after our arrival at Buchenwald» (p. 118) and that this had occured on «January 28, 1945» (p.123), which means that he left Monowitz on 11 January and arrived at Buchenwald on 25 January. Actually, there were three convoys of deportees from the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex which went to Buchenwald [37] in January of 1945:

No convoy left on 11 January, no convoy took longer than 8 days to arrive. The one arriving on 26 January had both Lázár Wiesel and Miklós Grüner on board, as we can see from the ID numbers assigned to them – 120762 and 123565.

As has been mentioned above, the original Yiddish text from which Elie Wiesel took chapter VII of his book (the account of the journey from Gleiwitz to Buchenwald) has been translated into English by Moshe Spiegel under the title “The Death Train”[38]. The two texts are very similar, except that in the first book the number of detainees loaded into Elie Wiesel’s car is not 100 but 120.[39] Moreover, there is a mention here of the number of cars on the train: 25.[40] On the other hand, the number of detainees in Elie Wiesel’s car still alive on arrival at Buchenwald is the same for both: 12 (p. 101).[41] This means that, in this car, there was a mortality of 88 or 90%, respectively. But the entire convoy would have had a similar death rate:

«The journey lasted ten interminable days and nights. Each day claimed its toll of victims and each night paid its homage to the Angel of Death».[42]

On the day of the arrival at Buchenwald, there were 40 deaths.[43]

Thus, initially, there would have been (25 x 100 ~ 120 =) 2,500 ~ 3,000 detainees altogether on this train, with most of them dying on the way.

On the other hand, it is known from the train manifests, that the transport which reached Buchenwald on 26 January comprised, on departure, exactly 3,987 detainees [44]; if 3,927 of them were registered at Buchenwald on arrival there were 60 deaths, or a mortality of 1.5 percent, along the way.

Taking all these aspects into account, one can see that the description given by Elie Wiesel for the journey from Gleiwitz to Buchenwald cannot be true.

In short, Elie Wiesel was never interned at Birkenau, nor at Auschwtz, nor at Monowitz, nor at Buchenwald.

As far as Elie Wiesel’s father Shlomo is concerned, while his name [45] does appear in the Central Database of Shoah Victims’ Names [46] at Yad Vashem, this information was provided on 8 October 2004 by Elie Wiesel himself!

One last remark: It is asserted that Elie Wiesel’s presence at Buchenwald is borne out by the fact that he appears on a photograph showing a group of detainees at this camp:

«Photo by Harry Miller of slave laborers in the Buchenwald concentration camp after U.S. troops of the 80th Div. entered the camp. Taken on 16 April 1945. Miklos Grüner (Haft-Nr. 120762) is on the left at the bottom, while Elie Wiesel (Haft-Nr. 123565) is on the next row up, seventh along, nearest to the third pillar from the left».[47]

However, the interpretation that the face of the person shown on this photograph is Elie Wiesel’s is based solely on his own statement to the effect that he recognized himself. As to “his” ID number – 123565 – that number belonged to Lázár Wiesel!

Carlo Mattogno [48]

[1] See the shorthand minutes in:
http://www.camera.it/cartellecomuni/Leg16/files/pdf/opuscolo_giorno_della_memoria.pdf
[2] In: http://www.haon.hu/hirek/magyarorszag/cikk/meg-mindig-kiserti-a-halaltabor/cn/haon-news-FCUWeb-20090303-0604233755
[3] In http://www.henrymakow.com/translated_from_the_hungarian.html
[4] Elie Wiesel, section on “Early life”,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elie_Wiesel
[5] NARA, A 3355, RG 242.
[6] Idem.
[7] Sighetu Marmaţiei, in: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sighetu_Marma%C5%A3iei
[8] YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, New York, 1962.
[9] François Mauriac wrote a preface for Elie Wiesel’s book.
[10] Michael Wiesberg, Unversöhnlich – Elie Wiesel zum 80. In: Grundlagen, Sezession 25, August 2008, p. 25.
[11] Giuntina, Firenze, 1986.
[12] In: R. Faurisson, Écrits Révisionnistes (1974-1998), vol. II, De 1984 à 1989. Édition privée hors commerce, 1999, pp. 606-610. Online: http://www.vho.org/aaargh/fran/archFaur/1986-1990/RF861017.html (French); http://www.ihr.org/leaflets/wiesel.shtml (English).
[13] Elie Wiesel: la donnola travestiata da agnello, in:http://andreacarancini.blogspot.com/2010/01/elie-wiesel-la-donnola-travestita-da.html
[14] http://www.hebcal.com/hebcal/?year=1944&v=1&month=5&yt=G&nh=on&nx=on&i=off&vis=on&set=on&c=off&geo=zip&zip=&m=72&.cgifields=nx&.cgifields=nh&.s=Get+Calendar
[15] Liste der Judentransporte, Museum of Auschwitz-Birkenau, microfilm no. 727/27.
[16] R.L. Braham, A Magyar Holocaust. Gondolat Budapest-Blackburn International Inc., Wilmington, 1988, p. 514.
[17] L’Album d’Auschwitz, Éditions du Seuil, Paris 1983.
[18] These installations have been well described by Jean-Claude Pressac in: Auschwitz: Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers, The Beate Klarsfeld Foundation, New York 1989, pp. 53-85.
[19] Auschwitz. Il campo nazista della morte. Edizioni del Museo Statale di Auschwitz-Birkenau, 1997, p. 122.
[20] Thomas Grotum, Jan Parcer, “EDV-gestützte Auswertung der Sterbeeinträge”, in: Sterbebücher von Auschwitz, State Museum of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Ed. K.G. Saur, Munich, New Providence, London, Paris 1995, vol. 1, p. 248.
[21] R.J.van Pelt, The Case for Auschwitz. Evidence from the Irving Trial, Indiana University Press, Bloomington/Indianapolis 2002, p. 504.
[22] «Combustion Experiments with Flesh and Animal Fat on cremations in pits in the alleged extermination camps of the Third Reich», in: The Revisionist, Vol. 2, Number 1, February 2004, pp. 64-72.
[23] But no photograph shows the presence of smoke in this area.
[24] Theses & Dissertations Press, Chicago 2005.
[25] See also my study Le camere a gas di Auschwitz. Studio storico-tecnico sugli “indizi criminali” di Jean-Claude Pressac e sulla “convergenza di prove” di Robert Jan van Pelt, Effepi, Genoa 2009, p. 552.
[26] Auschwitz. Il campo nazista della morte, op. cit., p. 52.
[27] Idem, p. 54.
[28] D. Czech, Kalendarium der Ereignisse im Konzentrationslager Auschwitz-Birkenau 1939-1945, Rowohlt Verlag, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1989, p. 821.
[29] Except the mention of the barrack of the camp orchestra.
[30] Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz. The Nazi Assault on Humanity (re-titled edition of If This Is a Man), Collier, New York 1961, p. 27.
[31] http://www.camera.it/cartellecomuni/Leg16/files/pdf/opuscolo_giorno_della_memoria.pdf
[32] Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz, op.cit., p. 33.
[33] Idem, p. 51.
[34] Idem, p. 116.
[35] The Block for the orchestra was not counted with the other barracks of the camp, numbered 1 through 60.
[36] Irena Strzelecka, Piotr Setkiewicz, «Bau, Ausbau und Entwicklung des KL Auschwitz und seiner Nebenlager», in: W. Długobordki, F. Piper, Auschwitz 1940-1945. Studien zur Geschichte des Konzentrations- und Vernichtungslager Auschwitz, Verlag des Staatlichen Museums Auschwitz-Birkenau 1999, Bd. I, p. 128.
[37] Het Nederlandsche Roode Kruis, Auschwitz, Deel VI, ‘s-Gravenhage, 1952, p. 39.
[38] In: Jacob Glatstein, Israel Knox and Samuel Margoshes (Eds.), Anthology of Holocaust Literature, A Temple Book, Atheneum, New York 1968, pp. 3-10.
[39] Idem., p. 10.
[40] Idem., p. 9.
[41] Idem., p. 10.
[42] Idem., p. 5.
[43] Idem., p. 10.
[44] Andrzej Strzelecki, Endphase des KL Auschwitz, Verlag Staatliches Museum in Oświęcim-Brzezinka 1995, pp. 338-229. Reproduction of two pages of the original transport manifest.
[45] He is listed there as Shlomo Vizel, son of Eliezer and of Nisel, born at Sighet and died at Buchenwald on 27 January 1945. The year of his birth is not indicated.
[46] http://www.yadvashem.org/wps/portal/IY_HON_Welcome
[47] Elie Wiesel’s identity crisis, in:http://christopherhitchenswatch.blogspot.com/2009/03/elie-wiesels-identity-crisis.html
[48] The Italian original of this article, Elie Wiesel: «Il più autorevole testimone vivente» della Shoah?, dated 3 February 2010, is found online at: http://ita.vho.org/056_Elie_Wiesel.htm (This English translation contains some minor revisions made for it by the author).

Dr. Josef Mengele

The grandson of a Holocaust survivor has purchased the diary of Dr. Josef Mengele, which was put up for sale in the United States, a Connecticut-based auctioneer said Tuesday.

The buyer, an East Coast Jewish philanthropist who remained anonymous, paid an undisclosed sum for the 180-page journal, which he intends to donate to a Holocaust museum, said Bill Panagopulos of Alexander Autographs. [...]

Entries in the journal begin in June 1960 in South America, where Mengele found refuge after World War II. They include statements on the need to sterilize people with “deficient genes.”

Mengele, who was notorious for the brutal experiments he performed on camp inmates, outlined in the diary his impressions and thoughts on culture, religion, history and biology, developing the racial doctrine which served as the Nazi regime’s ideological basis.

Source: http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1147455.html

The real questions are, of course, what Mengele had to say about the alleged mass gassings at Auschwitz, and when his writings are to be made available to public scrutiny.

For more on the Mengele case, see the following review of Gerald Posner and John Ware’s 1986 book Mengele. The Complete Story:

http://www.codoh.com/review/revmengele.html

Dear Dr. Neander,

Thank you for your letter of February 3rd. First let me assure you that you are welcome to any assistance I can give you in keeping the facts about Irene Zisblatt and the entire “Auschwitz experience” in order. (See 2nd paragraph at:
http://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot.com/2010/02/response-to-c-yeager.html#_ftnref2)
As a self-described independent scholar who has moved to Poland from Germany (I gather) and lives in Cracow, close to the Auschwitz-Birkenau (A-B) Memorial Museum, you obviously have a desire to be, or believe that you are, an “expert” on A-B. Very good, since we certainly need real experts to help us deal with the many, many falsehoods and perversions promulgated about this place since at least 1941, but especially after 1945.

You and I have agreed that Mrs. Zisblatt (by the way, she is no more “Mrs.” Zisblatt than I am Mrs. Yeager, so I will just call her Zisblatt and you may call me Ms. Yeager) has written a fantasy with her book, The Fifth Diamond. Of course, that means you also agree that the account she gives of her Auschwitz experience in Steven Spielberg’s documentary film, The Last Days, is also fantasy (a very important and potent point). As you have previously stated, the main theme of her book and of her testimony in the film is her ingesting, defecating, retrieving and ingesting again, over and over during her year spent in camps and on what she terms a “death march,” four diamonds given her by her mother before they entered Birkenau. Thus you agree that Zisblatt is lying in a very bold way about her experience, although you prefer to call her a “confused old lady” with a “dysfunctional memory” who “deserves our pity.” Hmmm, I dare say Zisblatt probably prefers my description of her as liar to yours as object of pity.

But more on that later. I want to follow your comments in a chronological order, so I’ll speak first about Stehzelle. You “prove” the existence of such torture by referring to the Auschwitz archives, saying that out of 275 reports you counted 28 reports that speak of Stehzelle given as punishment. This you expect to be accepted at face value. Yet, the entire holocaust legend is based on false reports, forgeries and lying and/or coerced witnesses. Therefore, a holocaust skeptic such as I am does want to see some physical evidence or unquestionably genuine documentation, which you have not produced.

My reference to the Auschwitz Wikipedia page, where Stehzelle is discussed, was not meant as “gospel” but had a purpose. If the most popular, most-relied upon quick source of information on the Internet cannot give a single real source of documentation for such cells, but instead dissimulates, it just shows how confused the entire subject is. It may have skipped your notice, but Maximilian Kolbe was not in a standing cell at the end, but in a regular cell, yet his detention in this cell was used at Wikipedia as evidence of the existence of “standing cells.” Going to the A-B website, one finds no archival information such as you say you have, but only a panoramic photo of the same reconstruction that I showed a photo of in my critique of your original article. And the Auschwitz archives are not The Gospel either.

It is also possible that “standing cell” was not what was described by some witnesses, who do like to go overboard in their descriptions. Why, for instance, do we only have reconstructions today, as seen in the photo mentioned above taken in Block 11 at Auschwitz, with those ridiculous tiny doors that adults would find it extremely hard to get through (and how did they get sick or unconscious people out, not to speak of dead ones?), and that are NOT shown to regular tour-goers who are not taken into the basement? It is typical that there are a lot of words written and spoken about things like Stehzelle, but no desire to show anything real to the public. Why? Because when the more intelligent of the public can look things over for themselves, they begin to see the improbabilities and impossibilities of the story that’s been given out.

It’s also of note that “standing punishment” has been around for a long time—it was called Field Punishment No. 1 by the British Army in WWI (soldiers referred to it as “the crucifixion”); the French Legionnaires called it “the Silo.” By the 1920’s it was routine police torture in America. In the 1930’s, Stalin’s NKVD used forced standing to coerce confessions for show trials. South African and Brazilian police made prisoners stand on cans or bricks, which caused excruciating pain to the feet. In 1956 the CIA commissioned two experts to study the effects of enforced standing. They found that the ankles and feet swell to twice their normal size within 24 hours; large blisters develop, and it gets worse from there.[1] It follows that it’s unlikely those so punished could work after spending over one day in such a cell.

With such wide usage, it’s no wonder it became a favorite story at the German concentration camps. No, I do not automatically accept the story that Commandant Liebenhenschel had the standing cells allegedly erected by Commandant Hoess torn down. I do not consider myself a scholar, Dr. Neander, as you do. I am an intelligent person who likes to use a common sense approach (anathema to holocaust scholars!). I think it is very telling that all alleged standing cells were torn down prior to the camp liberation or immediately afterward, leaving us with no physical record. In the case of Dachau, it was the U.S. Army itself that tore them down without taking any photographs. This makes no sense, since they were eager to find all evidence of Nazi crimes and publicize them. An intelligent person has to conclude that the standing cells at Dachau, today represented by a diagrammatic exhibit, are just another false publicity story. Would you not conclude that yourself, Dr. Neander?

This is all there is as evidence of Stehzelle at Dachau. The sign says prisoners were kept in these cells for as much as 72 hours at a time (3 days!). A Dachau exhibit reports that a Soviet prisoner, Yuri Piskunov, was confined to one of these cells for 10 days (!) in October 1944, but with no mention of his crime. According to the CIA study I cited, he would not have survived, but Piskunov was still alive when this exhibit opened in 2000. (photo by litlnemo at flickr)

Stehzelle drawing

More evidence? Drawing from a “survivor” of the so-called “Standing Cells” shows how belief is generated from fantasy. From http://www.dachautour.com/

Moving on, you also make the comment that your original statement in your “Diamond Girl” article — “On the other hand, according to her story, Chana obviously did not have health problems with ingesting feces, as the Stehzelle episode shows. During the five days in this dungeon, the girls relieve themselves into the ankle-deep water in which they stand and drink the same water repeatedly (47), without becoming sick.” — was meant ironically, and I was unable to detect this. I doubt very much that I was the only reader who was unable to detect any irony in your wording and presentation of this idea. One would have to be a mind-reader to do so, and scholarly articles do not demand such mind-reading (well, Raul Hilberg does expect us to believe in mind-reading among the Nazi “final-solutionists,” which just shows that he is not a true scholar). Yet, even though you fault me for not picking up your ironies, you have misread or “mystified” several things that I wrote.

For instance, I was not “criticizing” you for not confronting the three main versions of Zisblatt’s story—her book, her Surviviors of the Shoah testimony, and the Spielberg film—and all the unacceptable discrepancies between them, in my first response to you: “Holocaust Scholar Finds ‘Fifth Diamond’ to Be a Work of Fiction.”[2] I only pointed that out so the reader would know there was an even bigger problem with Zisblatt’s integrity as a holocaust survivor than what you presented in your article. I accept your position that you wanted to keep your critique to a manageable length—that is certainly understandable—although the other reasons you give are less convincing. You say that the book cannot be altered anymore and is the product of thorough reflection as opposed to “the contingencies of an interview or a film scene shot live.” I have to object that the (Shoah) interview was taped, with opportunity to change and correct if desired; the film also must have given opportunity for several takes and was carefully prepared for. I don’t think there is any wiggle-room for claiming she was not able to say what she really meant to say. Therefore, we cannot divorce Zisblatt’s book from her Shoah testimony and especially from the film, The Last Days, and from all her public talks; they must be taken as a whole in the long run. I am not saying you are avoiding this; I don’t think, at this point, that you are.

Another instance: You are misrepresenting my words when you say that by “smoothing over” I meant you did not mention everything that was erroneous in Zisblatt’s narrative. That is not at all what I wrote. My words of “smoothed over” were clearly in regard to several of Zisblatt’s errors that you made light of or excused; thus they were in reference to what you DID say—not to what you did not say. An example is her incorrect timing for her arrival at Birkenau, putting herself there a full month before Jews from her area arrived there. She was very clear in Shoah testimony and book (written 10 years later) that all Jews in her town were deported by two days after Passover. This is not something that she would be confused about. Yet you call my criticism of survivors unable to assign correct dates to their memories an unreasonable expectation on my part. You then launch into a lecture of moral outrage at my “ignorance” of how impossible it was for concentration camp inmates to have any sense of time, and suggest I read “some good (non-revisionist) literature” about concentration camp life. This is typical holocaustian tactics of going on the offence rather than defend one’s position.

Do you suggest I read the most famous concentration camp literature of all — Night and other books by Elie Wiesel? How about Deborah Lipstadt’s works, or Danuta Czech? There are so many books to choose from, I wouldn’t know where to start. Perhaps you could direct me to the ones you most recommend.

Dr. Neander, do you deny that prisoners at A-B were able to subscribe to newspapers that were delivered to them in the camp? Do you deny that they received mail from family and friends, which certainly had dates on it? Do you deny there was a network of rumor and talk of all sorts, including an underground that managed to send radio messages to London? Let’s get real here. Even poor Zisblatt with her dysfunctional memory says they “somehow” knew when Jewish holidays came up and fasted for Yom Kippur for 24 hours, dumping their soup into the dirt, even though they were “starving.” How heroic! They were punished for that by the SS, she says, who deprived them of soup for the next five days. Contradictory to that, she also says she lost her faith in God and disassociated herself from her religious beliefs as soon as she found herself in the camp—survival became her only goal. How does that fit with choosing to fast when you’re starving?

So when you say that “for the average prisoner even the possession of paper and pencil — to take notes, to write a diary — was a ‘crime’ punishable by severe flogging, Stehzelle, or, if the SS man had a bad day, by killing on the spot” it is you that is showing ignorance, not I, by exaggerating beyond belief.

You continue in this vein when you still insist that “All the atrocities reported by Zisblatt did happen, somewhere, sometime” (tearing Jewish babies in half and throwing them in a river or into burning pits or banging their heads against trucks, or skinning prisoners with “smooth skin” to make lampshades, or putting anti-fertility chemicals into the soup?) and that “There can be no doubt that a multitude of criminal medical experiments” were performed on prisoners. (You also use the phrase “doubtless” many times, which any debater knows is a mark against you because it is used in place of proof or solid argument.) Now, I did not say that the medical experiments you refer to are absolutely untrue; I just know that it is necessary to doubt the simplistic, broad-brush claims you make about them.

Taking the camp doctors you mention one by one, let’s fact check your claims to be a scholar against what you’re now calling my “deep ignorance.”

1)  Dr. Sigmund Rascher, contrary to what you say, was never sentenced to death by an SS court; he was not even put on trial in an SS court or any other court. Rascher and his wife were arrested by the Munich police in April 1944 and put into a Munich jail for a crime that had nothing to do with his “experiments” at Dachau, but for Kindesunterschiebung, the kidnapping of two infants that they claimed Mrs. Rascher had given birth to. This was a very serious crime in Germany. They were also charged with financial irregularities and scientific fraud. Rascher was later moved to the Dachau prison bunker in preparation for being sent to the South Tyrol as part of a prisoner-exchange [3]; his wife to Ravensbruck. They were “executed” right before liberation under unclear circumstances that are too complicated to go into, but were not according to SS procedure. As a doctor, Rascher used Dachau for his investigations into the effects of high altitude on German pilots, commissioned by Himmler for the Luftwaffe. According to the post-war testimony of his assistant Walter Neff (who was also a prisoner), 180 to 200 prisoners, only one a Jew, were provided—the great majority of whom had already been condemned to death by German courts. Forty of them were Russian POWs who were also subject to death because they were Communist Commissars (the “Commissar Order”) and 10 were ‘volunteers.’ Again according to Neff, about 70 to 80 of these prisoners died.[4] Himmler is said to have told Dr. Rascher that the subjects who survived should be pardoned to life imprisonment.[5] If so, this is another indication that the prisoners turned over for this experiment were condemned to death already. It’s also noteworthy that three of the doctors who worked with Rascher on the Luftwaffe high altitude experiments were acquitted at the Nuremberg “Doctor’s Trial” in 1947.[6]

To put this in perspective, let me remark that the Nazi justification for these experiments was that this was done in an effort to save the lives of German pilots. Please remember that the “good” Americans claim their “experimental” atomic bombing of Japanese cities was justified because it saved American servicemen’s lives. These hundred thousand plus of Japanese citizens had not been condemned to death by a court for criminal activities, but they were condemned by the American President and Military Command in absentia! The moral seems to be: killing to save American lives can be justified, but not German lives—victor’s justice. Also, America confiscated the results of the experiments they found by Dr. Rascher and used them for the U.S. Air Force.[7] They also used the results of experiments at Buchenwald. Many of the doctors who did experiments in the camps were brought to America to continue their experiments.

2)  Dr. Waldemar Hoven was accused of being the commandant’s wife’s lover. According to the Buchenwald camp guidebook “Ilse (Koch) selected prisoners with tattooed skin to be killed by her lover, Dr. Waldemar Hoven, in order to make leather lamp shades to decorate her home.”[8] We know that is not true—it is one of the famous atrocity legends (lies)—so why believe anything in the Buchenwald guidebook, or Buchenwald archives either if they have them? (I was at Buchenwald and I could see how hard they try to make it seem like a much worse place than it was. They have something of an inferiority complex because they don’t have a gas chamber, poor things, so they’ve turned the crematorium into a shrine and invented the “killing room” in the basement below.) The prisoners didn’t like Ilse Koch and because there were so many complaints about them, both Hoven and Ilse Koch were tried by Dr. Konrad Morgen in his tough SS court. Ilse Koch was acquitted, but Hoven was convicted and sentenced to death for murder. He spent 18 months in prison at Buchenwald, but was then reprieved because of the critical wartime shortage of doctors. He remained practicing at Buchenwald. He was not sent to the Eastern front by Himmler, as you said.

Strangely, an official U.S. Army Report dated April 24, 1945 accused Dr. Hoven of being a communist ally who was charged with killing anti-communist prisoners in Buchenwald with lethal injections. He was prosecuted by the IMT at “The Doctor’s Trial” and executed in 1948. Who is to say of what he was really guilty?

3)  Dr. Carl Clauberg and Dr. Horst Schumann are accused by holocaust crazies without any evidence. In the few articles about them on the “world wide web,” there are no sources or exhibits to confirm the nonsense about Clauberg’s sterilization of women “experiments,” and the same goes for Schumann. Nothing on the USHMM or A-BMM sites except the same accusatory words. You speak of a thick paper trail, yet all that is found is one unverified letter to HH, that could very well be made up, and probably is because it sounds ridiculous. Dr. Clauberg was known to be a respected medical doctor in Germany.

So, Dr. Neander, do you repeat any holocaust rumors and character assassinations that come down the pike, with little concern for true scholastic rigor? And still you accuse me of ignorance of the “facts.” What actual facts have you presented? What is going on here is that holocaust “Exterminationists” can’t stand it that there were capable doctors, nurses, hospitals and infirmaries in all the main camps taking good care of the prisoners who were ill or injured, so they have to turn these doctors into “Frankensteins” who were only concerned with evil and crazy experiments. You are the one who should better inform yourself before making rash statements.

As for Zisblatt’s hateful attitude toward Germans, it speaks for itself throughout her book and testimonies. She also makes it clear that her hateful attitude is directed toward all Gentiles—there is not a decent one in any of her versions of her story. (Of course, to holocaust-obsessed people like Zisblatt, a “good Gentile” is only one who helps Jews; there is no other standard.) It is astounding that you defend this on the basis that a German woman would feel and write the same against the Soviet and Jewish-Allied “retribution” they experienced at the end and after the war. As you must know, German women who suffered horrendous experiences (some far worse than anything Zisblatt could have experienced) do not write books or make speeches about it in anywhere near the numbers that Jews do.[9[ Even this statement is overly generous—the ratio must be something like 1000 to 1. So yes, there is a great deal of resentment against “the Tribe”, not just from me, and it is well-deserved.

Thus, your efforts to continue to “smooth over” and “soften the blow” to Zisblatt are noticeable. You attempt to pass over to me the blame of wrongdoing by calling me “harsh and disparaging” in my attitude toward this woman who is involved in a “noble cause.” I do not agree with that, but still you are confusing things badly when you say I called her insane, mentally retarded, and a congenital liar. What I said, as you well know, was that she could not subjectively believe what she wrote was true (as you suggested) UNLESS she was insane, mentally retarded or a congenital liar, which I did not think she was. Therefore she must be seen as an egotist and a business woman marketing herself. Are those words too harsh, in your opinion, for what she had done and continues to do, Dr. Neander? Do you deny she is marketing herself and her fantasy story? Do you deny she is paid for many of her public appearances? Do you deny she loves the limelight and the attention? She began doing this in 1994 when she was 16 years younger than she is today, so you really can’t blame it on her old age. It would be distasteful to “market herself” as she is doing even if her story were true—that it is completely false makes it over-the-top disgusting.

And speaking of disgust … I wonder why you lower yourself to post your articles on a site with such low standards as “Holocaust Controversies?” Is that the only place that will accept them? Or are you one of the team? You appear to want to personally uphold good manners and proper forms, but the people you associate with there are anything but “proper.” They are name-callers and haters extraordinaire! Regular contributor Sergey Romanov seems overly reliant on four-letter words. Here are some he used to describe me after my article in response to yours was posted on Inconvenient History Blog: “neo-nazi scum,” idiotic paranoid,” “not very bright,” “dumb neo-nazi liar,”[10] and just yesterday a friend of theirs named Nathaniel called me an “ignorant fuck.” I would think you would not want to be associated with such language that reveals such immature behavior. I certainly don’t! Therefore, while I am willing to converse with you in the further exposure of Irene Zisblatt as the fraud that she is and in putting other myths about Auschwitz-Birkenau in their proper perspective, be informed that I will not reply to anything more that is posted at “Holocaust Controversies.” Good day to you, Sir.

[1] http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=20040514&slug=torture14

[2] http://www.revblog.codoh.com/2010/01/holocaust-scholar-finds-%e2%80%9cfifth-diamond%e2%80%9d-to-be-a-work-of-fiction

[3] In the last days of the war, the “prominent” prisoners from all the camps and prisons were sent to Dachau, from which they were then sent to the South Tyrol, allegedly as part of Himmler’s negotiations with Allies for a conditional surrender. Both Nerin E. Gun, a journalist and prisoner at Dachau, in his book The Day of the Americans, 1966, and veteran holocaust writer Gerald Reitlinger in his book The SS, Alibi of a Nation, 1922-1945, say that Dr. Rascher was on that trip. Reitlinger wrote “Captain Payne-Best met Sigmund Rascher during the southward evacuation of the Dachau political bunker at the beginning of May 1945.” However, Payne-Best was a British intelligence agent who was arrested in 1939, given special treatment in camp, and whose book The Venlo Incident must be taken with that in mind. Gun wrote that Dr. Rascher was shot in Innsbruck, after the VIP prisoners had been turned over to Captain Payne-Best.

[4] Paul Berben, Dachau 1933-1945: The Official History, London: The Norfolk Press, 1975. pp. 125-135

[5] George J. Annas, Michael A. Grodin, The Nazi doctors and the Nuremberg Code: human rights in human experimentation. Oxford University Press US. 1995. pp. 71–73.

[6] “Dr. Hans Wolfgang Romberg, [mentioned above], was put on trial at Nuremberg in the Doctors Trial which started on December 9, 1946 and ended on August 20, 1947. Dr. Romberg was acquitted, as were Dr. Siegfried Ruff and Dr. August Weltz who were also involved in the Luftwaffe experiments at Dachau.”
http://www.scrapbookpages.com/DachauScrapbook/experiments.html

[7] A. Scott Berg, Lindbergh, G.P.Putman, 1998

[8] http://www.scrapbookpages.com/Buchenwald/Atrocities.html

[9] Jewish survivors are encouraged to speak out, write books and even to embellish and fabricate (The Last Days “documentary” film is an example), and are rewarded (and given awards) for it, while the far more numerous German survivors have been discouraged to the point of ostracism if they should “complain” or “whine” about their sufferings. Once again, victor’s justice.

[10] http://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot.com/2010/01/yeager-vs-neander.html

Joachim Neander claims that he is able to give the name of two prisoners who were gassed at Auschwitz. He notes that the “Bunkerbuch” on 5 September 1941 has recorded the death of three detainees, Fritz Renner, Bruno Grosman and Roman Drost, of which the first two are Germans. Since «they all died the same day when the first mass gassing was carried out in the basement of Block 11 (date Sep 5, 1941, according to reports that, shortly after the event, reached the Polish Government-in-Exile in London)» this shows that they were gassed. He adds that «Carlo Mattogno does neither take into consideration the “Bunker” ledger nor the Rögner report nor the accounts of the Polish prisoners who were involved in the September 5, 1941, “action”».[1]

The French historian Jacques Baynac has written:

«For the scientific historian, the testimony is not really history, but an object of history. A testimony does not have much weight, and weighs still less if not confirmed by a genuine document. The postulate of historical science thus is, to put it bluntly: no document(s), no verified fact.»[2]

A testimony, if not supported by a document, is worthless from the historical point of view, regardless of the notion of “converging testimonies”, as is shown by the example of the “converging” testimonal evidence for the Auschwitz 4 million victim figure.

However, in this case, as I have demonstrated in my study Auschwitz: The First Gassing. Rumor and Reality (Theses & Dissertations Press, available online:http://vho.org/dl/ENG/atfg.pdf) the testimonies are not only not supported by any documents, but all are moreover contradictory on all essential points, namely:

• on the location of the first gassing,
• on the duration of the first gassing,
• on the date of the first gassing,
• on the hour of the first gassing,
• on the preparations for the first gassing,
• on the physician present at the first gassing,
• on the perpetrator of the first gassing,
• on the nature of the victims of the first gassing,
• on the number of the victims of the first gassing,
• on the persons who removed the corpses,
• on the beginning of the removal of the corpses,
• on the duration of the removal of the corpses,
• on the fate of the corpses removed,
• on the technique of the gassing,
• on the duration of the agony of the victims,
• on the number of Zyklon B cans used for the gassing.[3]

The interpretation made by Joachim Neander is completely unfounded for two reasons:

1) He arbitrarily chooses the date September 5, 1941 among the various contradictory dates given by the self-styled “eyewitnesses”:

• Michał Kula: 14-15 August 1941
• Zbigniew Baranowski: 15 August 1941
• Walter Petzold: 9 October 1941;

Others – Henry Storch: spring of 1941; Maximilian Grabner: beginning of 1941; Hans Aumeier: November or December 1942.

Among these datings he chooses the one mentioned in «reports that, shortly after the event, reached the Polish Government-in-Exile in London» and which were published in the Polish Forthnightly Review on 1 July 1942. But why should this date be more reliable than the others? Danuta Czech, in her Kalendarium, has explicitly stated 3 September 1941 as the starting date of the alleged gassings. Why is this date unreliable according to Joachim Neander? The answer to this is simple and brings us to the second reason.

2) It is true that these three prisoners were listed as dead in the “Bunkerbuch” on 5 September 1941, but it is also true that they were locked up there the same day. Now, according to Danuta Czech, the “first gassing” began on 3 September and ended the day after that with the death of all the victims; on 5 September there was thus no “gassing” but only an evacuation of the bodies. Neander knows the Kalendarium, since he drew from it (the entry for 6 September 1941) the information regarding the three prisoners confined in the Bunker.[4] In addition, his statement that «Carlo Mattogno does neither take into consideration the “Bunker” ledger» is false, since I have written on the matter:

«The “Bunkerbuch” does not provide us with any information regarding the alleged homicidal gassing of September 3-5, 1941. On September 5, three detainees are registered as having entered: Fritz Renner (ID 11179), Bruno Grosmann (ID 15083), and Roman Drost (ID 10992). They die on the same day (in the register of the Bunker, next to their names, there is the note “ver.”[storben] = deceased). On September 5, the civilian Ladisław Maślak, who had entered the Bunker on August 10, is also entered as having died. The cause of death is not indicated for these four detainees».[5]

In this context Adolf Rögner’s statement that

«in the prison, there were still 2 Germans, they were not released … The 1st Camp Physician had told them they would be released early if they agreed to participate in a short treatment».

has no value. It can not refer to the two German prisoners mentioned above, because they entered the Bunker of Block 11 on 5 September 1941 and died there the same day – what sense does it then make that «there were still 2 Germans, they were not released»? Moreover, in the brief quote made by Neander, Rögner does not indicate the names of the detainees nor the date. He therefore does not have any indication that it refers to Fritz Renner and Bruno Grosman in relation to 5 September 1941.

Equally untrue is the statement that I did not mention «the accounts of the Polish prisoners who were involved in the September 5, 1941, “action”». In this regard I have gathered, from all available sources, over forty such accounts, a number vastly superior to that given by Danuta Czech.[6]

In conclusion:

• there is no evidence that the Bunker of Block 11 in Auschwitz was ever used for a homicidal gassing;
• the dating 5 September 1941 for the alleged event is merely one of the conflicting dates provided by the witness accounts;

therefore the deaths of Fritz Renner and Bruno Grosman in the Bunker on September 5, 1941 does not prove anything and the two can not be considered as “gassed”.

Carlo Mattogno

[1] http://forum.codoh.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=5909

[2] J. Baynac, «Faute de documents probants sur les chambres à gaz, les historiens ésquivent le débat», in: Le Nouveau Quotidien, 3 September 1996, p. 14.

[3] Auschwitz: The First Gassing. Rumor and Reality, pp. 69-90.

[4] D. Czech, D. Czech, Kalendarium der Ereignisse im Konzentrationslager Auschwitz-Birkenau 1939-1945. Rowohlt Verlag, Reinbek bei Hamburg, 1989, p. 120.

[5] Idem, p. 106.

[6] Idem, pp. 31-68.
]]> http://www.revblog.codoh.com/2010/02/rebuttal-to-joachim-neander/feed/ 0 http://www.revblog.codoh.com/2010/02/the-fuhrerbefehl-according-to-the-wjc-in-1945-all-jews-must-die-but-not-before-going-through-suffering-and-agony/ http://www.revblog.codoh.com/2010/02/the-fuhrerbefehl-according-to-the-wjc-in-1945-all-jews-must-die-but-not-before-going-through-suffering-and-agony/#comments Mon, 01 Feb 2010 13:46:04 +0000 Thomas Kues http://www.revblog.codoh.com/?p=707 By Thomas Kues

In 1945, the World Jewish Congress prepared a report on the “Criminal Conspiracy” against the Jews perpetrated by the Third Reich for the authorities in charge of bringing about the International Military Tribunal. Of this report, the chapter “Charge Eight: Mass Annihilation, part II” is of special interest. The document, which is found among the records of the World Jewish Congress at the Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives, can be read online, courtesy of the Harry S. Truman Library & Museum website:

What did the World Jewish Congress want the “international justice” to believe about the supposed Nazi extermination conspiracy? In what way did they describe the origin and the implementation of it in form of the infamous “death camps? What were the sources behind the report?

On p. 109 we read:

“In March 1942, Heinrich Himmler paid a visit to Poland. During his stay in Poland he issued an order to the effect that 50% of all Polish Jews had to be exterminated by the end of that year. In July 1942 Himmler came to Poland again. According to the Polish underground sources, he declared at a Nazi meeting in Warsaw that:

1) Hitler had personally told him that the Jews had commenced the war and should, for that reason, be punished.

2) the Jews are the scum of the earth and must be converted to dust.

3) All Jews must die, but not before going through suffering and agony.

A special “Vernichtungskommission” was organized, with Commissar Fey as Chairman and a large office in Warsaw. This commission had to supervise the work of Jewish extermination in Poland; its members continuously visited different parts of the country and directed the mass slaughter of the Jewish population. Chairman Fey was directly responsible to Himmler.”

While the first of the three statements ascribed to Hitler is clearly based on speeches made by the Führer at the outbreak of the war, the other two statements are typical Greuelpropaganda fantasies casting Hitler as the Devil incarnate. It is all to easy to picture Adolf having a tantrum in front of a sycophantic Reichsführer-SS while giving the infamous, never-proven Führerbefehl (unaware that a member of the Polish resistance, posing as a Sachertorte-carrying waiter, is taking mental notes).

Also, if the supposed mass exterminations were part of a “conspiracy”, would it make much sense to have a “Vernichtungskommission” (Extermination Committee) housed in a “large office in Warsaw”? What happened to the alleged code language? And who was “Commissar Fey”? Is this an error for Robert Ley, the head of the Deutsche Arbeitsfront (DAF)? (No “Fey” appears on the “Preliminary List of War Criminals” drawn up by the WJC the same year – Ley does, though).

The biblical undertone of the report appears most clearly on p.111:

“The fleeing Germans [after Stalingrad] surpassed even themselves and reached such depths of cruelty and destructive fury that they beggar any description and any imagination. The Jews should never be able to enjoy the defeat of their worst enemies, or, as Hitler put it, the Jews should never celebrate another Purim (Jewish festival commemorating defeat of Haman’s plot) in his memory.”

As for the Hitler quote, what the Führer actually said in this speech (according to The New York Times January 31, 1944) was that, unless Germany was victorious, “Jewry could then celebrate the destruction of Europe by a second triumphant Purim”. Thus Hitler’s words were not a threat of physical extermination, but a warning about the consequences of a German defeat.

The “report” gets into high gear when it reaches the description of the “death factories”. Here follows the discription of the supposed mass killings at Belzec (pp. 115-116):

“The Jews were crammed into special chambers with metal bars on the floor and walls; then the chambers were filled with water and a powerful electric current sent through these bars. Besides, there was in Belzec a special building with several gas chambers, and the German scientists zealously experienced there on Jews with all kinds of poisoning gases they invented or improved. The children, if healthy, were used as involuntary blood donors for the German Army. Mostly these children were bled white to such a degree that they died shortly afterwards. Special factories produced in Belzec soap and shoes, out of Jewish fat; yet, this business was never really profitable, probably because of the Jews being in the third year of an acute starvation period and there was not much fat left on their bodies. [...]
   The weak point of Belzec was the way the bodies were disposed of… They, or their remains, were loaded on railway cars and transported to a spot where a group of Jews already prepared a grave, whereupon this whole group was instantly executed. After a few months of operating in high gear, all the fields along the railway were filled with mass graves. Lumps of gored blood and decomposed remains of human bodies were spread everywhere around the graves, and the stench became so intensive, that the peasants of nearby villages deserted their farms and land, and the whole population of Belsec left this sinister town.”

Here the WJC authors tries to include every ludicrous atrocity story spread about Belzec during the war: electrocution chambers, gas chambers (utlizing various unnamed poison gases), children emptied of their blood, human soap, trains of death (the story of Jan Karski sans quicklime killings)… The idea that shoes were also produced out of the victims seems to be a new addition. No wonder, by the way, that the Belzec soap & shoes business “was never really profitable” – how good would shoes made out of human fat be? Needless to say, there are no indications whatsoever that the town of Belzec was emptied of its population – but apparently the spies of the underground resistance did not bother to verify this claim, although the town was and is easily accessible by train or car.

Next Sobibór is briefly described (p. 116):

“In the death camp of Sobibur the process of killing was still more perfected. A special brick building was constructed there, and as soon as about 800 people passed into this building, the heavy doors were locked and an electric engine in an adjoining ving pumped poison gas into it. As a rule, in fifteen minutes all the people were dead; then the floor in the building slid apart automatically and the bodies fell into the basement, from where they were taken in special carts to woods and buried there.”

This description is almost certainly a summary of a testimony left on August 10, 1944 by the former Sobibór inmate Ber (Dov) Freiberg, which was later included in Vassili Grossman and Ilya Ehrenburg’s Black Book (Holocaust Library, New York 1981, p. 439). The bizarre claim of the collapsible gas chamber floor appears in a number of early Sobibór testimonies.

Regarding the third Aktion Reinhardt “death camp” the report concludes that

“Tremblinka [sic] had a much greater “productive capacity” than Belsec or Sobibur. It had first three gas chambers, then two were added, and it was able to cope with as many as 20,000 people a day.” (p. 117)

Here we run into a paradox apparent also in the Höss “confession”, namely that Auschwitz had a smaller “killing capacity” than Treblinka, despite the former being constructed as more “efficient” than the latter. On pp. 118-119 we read:

“In July 1942 Heinrich Himmler paid a visit to the camp and laid down plans how to make Oswiecim the largest death factory the Germans ever established. Four new large crematoriums, each connected with a gas-chamber, were built, able to cremate 500 people in an hour, 12,000 in a continuous work of 24 hours. And still, despite this amazing productivity, so many people were killed on some days in Oswiecim, that huge pyres of corpses had to be kindled there. Not less than 4,000,000 people perished in Oswiecim, not less than 1,800,000 of them were Jews.”

It is worth noting that the only victim figure of an “extermination camp” presented is that of Auschwitz.

Finally we note the following statement regarding Majdanek, found on p. 118:

“On November 3rd, 1943, Majdanek had a great day: 18,400 people were killed in this single day. In the official report sent on this day to Berlin, the camp authorities wrote: “The difference between the number of prisoners confined in the camp in the morning and in the evening, is the result of a special annihilation of 18,000 persons.”

This refers to the alleged so-called “Operation Harvest Festival” (Aktion Erntefest). As far as I have been able to determine, the quote from an “official report” concerning the “special annihilation” (no Tarnsprache used there!) is a complete fabrication either on part of the WJC or (perhaps more likely) Soviet propagandists.

The WJC report on the “Mass Annihilation” lack any reference to sources, but it is apparent that its authors have simply lifted their “information” from various Polish and Soviet “reports” on alleged German war crimes. Its primary value consists in the insight it provides into the dissemination of the “Holocaust” propaganda. It begs disbelief that a major international organization such as the WJC produced – at the end of the war – an unsourced “report” teeming with blatant absudities and internal contradictions, if in fact the alleged mass extermination really had taken place. It is even more astounding that WJC officials deemed this report worthy of being submitted to international judicial authorities. This in turn shows that the men behind the “Holocaust” propaganda often did not make the effort to produce authentic-sounding or even realistic descriptions of the alleged crime – such effort was not generally necessary, since the claims were not actually tried by the “International Military Tribunal”, but rather regarded as their own evidence, as far as they were found in some report submitted by the Soviet prosecution.

It is often stated that Rudolf Reder (who later took the name Roman Robak) was the only Jew to have survived the “pure extermination camp” at Belzec. This, however, is incorrect even from an exterminationist viewpoint, since according to orthodox historiography there were in all seven survivors: Reder, Chaim Hirszman, Sara Beer, Hirsz Birder, Mordechai Bracht, Samuel Velser and “Szpilke”. The last person appears only within Reader’s account. Although Reder claims to have met “Szpilke” in Lemberg after the war, and states that he later lived in Hungary, yet this mysterious witness to the last days of the camp has left no historical trace whatsoever. As for Sara Beer, Belzec expert Michael Tregenza informs us (“Belzec – Das vergessene Lager des Holocaust”, in I. Wojak, P. Hayes (eds.), “Arisierung” im Nationalsozialismus, Volksgemeinschaft, Raub und Gedächtnis, Campus Verlag, Frankfurt / New York 2000, p. 260) that she was transferred from the “death camp” to Trawniki together with 20-25 unnamed other Jewesses, and that she survived also Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen to be liberated by British troops in April 1945; she appears to have left no testimony on her stay in Belzec. Birder, Bracht and Velser are basically unknowns. Further, two women named Mina Astman and Malka Talenfeld are reported to have escaped after spending only some hours in the camp, and their brief impressions seems to have been recorded only second-hand (see Y. Arad,Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka.., p. 264). Only two of the survivors, Reder and Hirszman, left witness accounts. The former published the 74-page pamphlet Belzec in collaboration with Nella Rost in 1946, and also testified before a Polish investigative commission and in connection with the 1965 Munich Belzec trial. As for the latter, Carlo Mattogno informs us (Belzec in Propaganda, Testimonies, Archeological Research, and History, p. 51):

“On March 19, 1946, Chaim Hirszman appeared before the regional historical commission of Lublin, but he was murdered the same day after his interrogation had been adjourned. Therefore, we have only a very laconic testimony from his side (Zydowski Instytut Historiczny (Jewish Historical Institute), Warsaw, Report No. 1476). As far as its content is concerned, it is so irrelevant that it does not even appear in the extract of testimonies on Belzec presented by Marian Muszkat in the official report of the Polish government on the German crimes against Poland.”

Yet, despite its extreme brevity, it is obviously of a certain importance as the only witness account left by a former Belzec prisoner besides those of Reder’s. The fact that it has gone virtually unmentioned and unquoted by Holocaust historians is likely foremost due to the aforementioned brevity and obscurity, but it cannot be wholly excluded that it also has to do with its contents, i.e. Hirszman’s statements about the alleged mass killings at Belzec.
Yitzhak Arad informs us that Hirszman and two other, unnamed prisoners escaped from the train which was taking them from the liquidated Belzec camp to Sobibor in July 1943, supposedly to be killed there (Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka…, p. 265). The orthodox claim that the remaining Belzec inmates were taken to Sobibor to be executed there does not square well with the abovementioned fact that Sara Beer and other female detainees were sent to the Trawniki labor camp.
As for the ultimate fate of Hirszman, historian Martin Gilbert writes (The Holocaust. The Jewish Tragedy, Fontana Press, London 1987, p. 817) that:

“on March 9, one of only two survivors of the death camp at Belzec, Chaim Hirszman, gave evidence in Lublin of what he had witnessed in the death camp. He was asked to return on the following day to complete his evidence. But on his way home he was murdered, because he was a Jew.”

The Polish Historian Henryk Pajak states, however, that Hirszman was killed not because he was a Jew, but because he was an “active and dangerous functionary” of the new Communist regime (Konspiracja mlodziezy szkolnej 1945-1955, Lublin 1994, pp. 130-31, quoted in Tadeusz Piotrowski, Poland’s Holocaust, McFarland 1998, p. 341, note 306).

Chaim Hirszman’s testimony

According to his own testimony, Hirszman was deported from Zaklikow, which was in the District of Lublin, Janow county (Gilbert, The Holocaust, p. 304). Arad informs us that a transport of 2,000 Jewish deportees departed from Zaklikow on November 3, 1942 (Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka…, p. 383). Gilbert reproduces the apparently most relevant part of Hirszman’s testimony as follows:

“We were entrained and taken to Belzec. The train entered a small forest. Then, the entire crew of the train was changed. SS men from the death camp replaced the railroad employees. We were not aware of this at that time.
The train entered the camp. Other SS men took us off the train. They led us all together – women, men, children – to a barrack. We were told to undress before we go to the bath. I understood immediately what that meant. After undressing we were told to form two groups, one of men and the other of women with children. An SS man, with the strike of a horsewhip, sent the men to the right or to the left, to death – to work.
I was selected to death, I didn’t know it then. Anyway, I believed that both sides meant the same – death. But, when I jumped in the indicated direction, an SS man called me and said: ‘Du bist ein Militarmensch, dich konnen wir brauchen’ ['You have a military bearing, we could use you.']
We, who were selected for work, were told to dress.
I and some other men were appointed to take the people to the kiln. I was sent with the women. The Ukrainian Schmidt, an Ethnic German, was standing at the entrance to the gas-chamber and hitting with a knout [a knotted whip] every entering woman. Before the door was closed, he fired a few shots from his revolver and then the door closed automatically and forty minutes later we went in and carried the bodies out to a special ramp. We shaved the hair off the bodies, which were afterwards packed into sacks and taken away by Germans.
The children were thrown into the chamber simply on the women’s heads. In one of the ‘transports’ taken out of the gas chamber, I found the body of my wife and I had to shave her hair.
The bodies were not buried on the spot, the Germans waited until more bodies were gathered. So, that day we did not bury…” (Gilbert, The Holocaust, p. 304)

We note here first and foremost that Hirszman speaks of “gas chamber” in singularis. In many eyewitness accounts, “gas chamber” is confusingly taken to mean a building containing one or more gas chambers, but judging from Hirszman’s very brief description we are in fact dealing with only one chamber: children are thrown into “the chamber” and “the door” closes automatically once the victims are inside. According to orthodox historiography, the gas chamber building used at Belzec during this period of time consisted of six chambers arranged three and three on either side of a central corridor. There is no reason why the entrance door to the building, a opposed to the doors of the individual chambers, would be “closed automatically” before the gassing. It is also noteworthy that Hirszman for some inexplicable reason uses “kiln” as synonymous with “the gas chamber”, while at the same time he implies that the building was disguised as a bath.

The claim that the hair of the victims being shaved off after their death goes completely against all other available eyewitness testimony. We may compare here with Kurt Gerstein’s statement that the women had their hair cut off and stuffed inside potato sacks before entering the gas chambers (cf. H. Roques, he ‘Confessions’ of Kurt Gerstein, IHR, Costa Mesa 1989, p. 30) or Rudolf Reder’s claim to the same effect (cf. Rudolf Reder, “Belzec” in: Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry, volume 13 (2000), p. 274).

The assertion that at the day of Hirszman’s arrival “the bodies were not buried at the spot” but instead left lying on the ground and only buried once “more bodies were gathered” is spurious for two reasons. First, no other witness has attested to this procedure; rather most witnesses imply or state that the corpses were interred right after the gassing in the burial pit open for the moment, and then covered with a sand layer. Second, the archeological evidence furnished by Andrzej Kola contradicts it. Given a theoretical maximum of 8 corpses per cubic meter, the approximately 2,000 victims (if we are to trust Arad’s figure) would have occupied 250 cubic meters. Of the 33 grave pits identified by Kola at Belzec, 10 (in their present state) have a volume of 250 cubic meters or less. There is thus no reason to believe that the SS would wait for more corpses to accumulate before burying them. Besides, the idea of letting 2,000 corpses lie around in the open for a day or more seems odd. On the other hand, the procedure described by Rajchman might be realistic if the only victims from the transport were a small number of en route deaths.

The second-hand testimony of Pola Hirszman

The day after Chaim was shot, on March 20, 1946, Chaim’s wife Pola testified about what her husband had allegedly witnessed at Belzec. Her testimony is likewise kept in the archive of the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw. Gilbert writes that “Chaim Hirszman’s experiences at Belzec were also set down in 1946 by his second wife, Pola, to whom he often retold them after the war” (ibid., p. 305). Needless to say, second-hand accounts are more or less worthless as evidence, but we will anyway take a look at some of her statements.

Mrs. Hirszman’s testimony starts out with a typical atrocity story about a transport consisting of small children – babies to three year olds – being murdered in a most unseemly manner:

“The workers were told to dig one big hole into which the children were thrown and buried alive.” (ibid., p. 305)

There is not really much to comment on here. The same goes for the next story, about a prisoner being hanged for a failed escape attempt; on the scaffold, the condemned man prophesize the fall of Hitler and his Reich. We are also told that typhus was prevailing in the camp, and that Chaim also contracted the disease but avoided being “murdered on the spot” by concealing his condition from the Germans. Pola also relates a story that is found with variations also in the Treblinka and Sobibor lore, about an Aryan (in this case a Ukrainian woman) arriving by mistake at the camp who is then gassed with the Jews, despite showing the SS men proper identification. Next we learn about the camp that

“Once you crossed the gate to the camp, there was no chance to get out of there alive. Not even any Germans, except for the camp staff, had access to the camp.” (ibid., p. 305)

This claim is contradicted by several eyewitness statements. The former camp staff member Heinrich Gley declared in 1961 that a Jewish work detail had been carrying tasks far outside the camp and Polish witness Maria D. affirmed in October 1945 that some Jews in the camp “had the right to leave the camp perimeter” (Mattogno, Belzec…, p. 44). According to orthodox Belzec expert Michael Tregenza, four Polish villagers were employed in the camp proper, while, most astoundingly, other villagers were allowed inside the camp to take photographs (ibid., p. 43).
One of the stories related by Pola concerns Jews employed outside of the camp:

“Two Czechoslovak Jewesses were working in the camp office [which was located outside of the camp]. They, too, had never entered the camp. They even enjoyed a certain freedom of movement. They often went with the SS men to town to arrange different matters. One day they were told that they would visit the camp. The SS men showed them around the camp and in a certain moment they led the women to the gas-chamber and when they were inside, the door closed behind them. They finished with them in spite of the promise that they would live.” (Gilbert, The Holocaust, pp. 305-306)

This story clearly does not make much sense. On one hand, we are told that the two Jewesses had been promised that they would live, and thus they must have known that the Jews were being exterminated at Belzec – and working at the camp office, they could hardly have escaped figuring out the “true nature” of the camp (especially since this was supposedly well-known in the Belzec community from the start; cf. Mattogno, Belzec…, p. 43). But why then would the women walk gullibly into the “gas chamber”? Furthermore, we again note the singular of “door” being used in the description of the “gas chamber”.

When not carrying out a wholesale mass murder, burying small children alive or tricking Jewish secretaries into gas chambers, the SS men in the camp spent time relaxing with their victims:

“The Germans ordered the prisoners to set up a football team and on Sundays games were being played. Jews played with SS men, the same ones who tortured and murdered them. The SS men treated this as a matter of sport, and when they lost a game, they had no complaints.” (Gilbert, The Holocaust, p. 306).

On this point, at least, there is reason to believe that Pola is relating the truth. The SS man Werner Dubois mentioned during an interrogation in 1961: “It also happened that I organized a soccer match with 22 Jews on the sports ground” (quoted in Mattogno, Belzec…, p. 66). The soccer games are also confirmed by the Polish witness Tadeusz M., who further noted that the Germans had organized a string orchestra among the inmates (ibid., p. 44)

Conclusion

Chaim Hirszman’s Belzec testimony is indeed largely irrelevant due to its brevity and lack of detail, but is nonetheless illuminating. Within the space of only some paragraph our witness manages to include several statements contradicting the orthodox picture of the “death camp”. Further, the second-hand recollections of his wife do not exactly help his reliability. It is a shame that Hirszman did not survive to leave a more complete testimony, as it would undoubtedly have constituted another bullet in the foot of the Belzec story. However, the stuck splinter that is Hirszman’s Belzec statement should be enough to make the defenders of the pure Shoah faith cringe with embarassment.

“Sixty-five years ago, the world woke itself to the horrors of Auschwitz. Today, it is our duty to pay tribute to the 6 millions of Jews and all the other victims of the Holocaust.

We have a duty to remember the loss of life and the suffering caused by this unprecedented crime in history. This legacy must be passed to future generations as a memento. Miep Gies, one of the Dutch citizens who hid Anne Frank and her family from the Nazis and who preserved Anne Frank’s diary said that the past is never over.

Remembrance of the Shoah must strengthen our determination to fight, in today’s world, against the phenomena that several decades ago led the world into the abyss of the Holocaust. (…)

No form of antisemitism, regardless of where and whom it comes from, is acceptable. The commemoration of other crimes cannot be to the detriment of the remembrance of the Shoah. The conflict in the Middle East cannot be an excuse or justification for antisemitism. It is deplorable to read at the very wake of the commemoration of the Holocaust statements that deny the Shoah. It is unacceptable to deny or minimize the established history of the Nazi genocide against the Jews. The value of human life is universal: this is true for each and every human being, regardless of their race, religion, or nation.

At the end of this year, Member States will have to implement the long-awaited Framework Decision on racism and xenophobia. Sixty-five years after the extermination camps were liberated, we can be proud that EU law makes the denial of the Shoah a crime in all its Member States. The Commission is strongly committed to pay particular attention to the correct transposition and implementation of all the provisions of this Framework Decision across the Union.”

Thus, if Barrot and his cohorts have their way, critical scrutiny of the “Holocaust” claims, i.e. “Holocaust denial” will be illegalized come 2011 in all EU member states, not only the ones already equipped with such anti-heresy laws (among them Germany, Austria, France, Belgium and the Netherlands). The modern day inquisition of the Holy Shoah will enter a new stage. “The European Mind Stops…”

In 2005, historians Eric Johnson and Karl-Heinz Reuband published a volume entitled What We Knew: Terror, Mass Murder and Everyday Life in Nazi Germany (John Murray, London). The book contains a number of recent interviews with Germans as well as Jews of German nationality deported to ghettos and “death camps”. One of the latter is Ernst Levin, born in Breslau (Wroclaw) in 1925. In January 1943 he was deported to Auschwitz, where he worked in the Buna-Werke in Monowitz (Auschwitz III). The most interesting part of the Levin interview, however, does not concern Mr. Levin himself, but a friend of his in Breslau (pp. 74-75):

“Just about four weeks before I went on my transport, there was one transport before mine and a friend of mine named Helmut went on that transport. That transport wound up in Treblinka. In a place near Treblinka, there was also a contingent of Germans working, one of whom we had known. Helmut wrote a letter and gave it to this man and said: ‘Send it to my Ernst.’ I got this letter. I never knew who sent it or how they got it out. He told me in this letter that he was near Treblinka and ‘hier ist ein Lager, wo die Menschen chemisch behandelt werden.’ [here is a camp were the people are being treated with chemicals.] It is amazing that even at that time he wouldn’t say that they were gassed. Isn’t that amazing? I was thinking, ‘what the heck does he mean?’ I guess he eventually was gassed. He certainly didn’t survive.”

What is especially striking about the letter’s reported content is the wording “chemisch behandelt” (“chemically treated”). According to official historiography, the alleged mass killings at Treblinka were carried out using engine exhaust gas. Obviously no ordinary person would connect exhaust gas with chemicals. The early war-time and post-war claims about killings with steam and vacuum on the other hand are impossible to connect with the concept of “chemical treatment”. From Levin’s statement it is clear that his friend Helmut did not write that the deportees died from the “chemical treatment” (otherwise Levin would have easily drawn the conclusion that the phrase referred to mass killings using some chemical agent).

Since the reported message from the Breslau Jew Helmut is only fragmentary, it is as good as impossible to draw any conclusions from it. It is possible, though, that “chemisch behandelt” is a reference to a part of a delousing procedure. The Ostarbeiter Galina K., who worked in a transit camp near Hannover during the war, has testified that she and the other worker prisoners “smeared heads, armpits and genitalia [of the Ostarbeiter deportees] with a chemical solution” (Janet Anschutz, Irmtraud Heike, “Medizinische Versorgung von Zwangsarbeitern in Hannover: Forschung und Zeitzeugenberichte zum Gesundheitswesen”, in: Gunter Siedburger, Andreas Frewer, Zwangsarbeit und Gesundheitswesen im Zweiten Weltkrieg. Einsatz und Versorgung in Norddeutschland, Georg Olms Verlag, Hildesheim, Zürich, New York 2006, p. 52).

The statement that Helmut was sent to Treblinka, but then ended up “near Treblinka” can be taken to imply that he was transferred from the “death camp” to either the labor camp Treblinka I or to some labor detail in the Treblinka-Malkinia area. It should not be excluded though, that the letter could have been sent from Treblinka II. The phrase “near Treblinka” could possibly refer to the village of Treblinka, which was located some four kilometers to the north of the “death camp” Treblinka II, or to the railway station, which was located about 1 km to the north of it. The phrasing “hier ist ein Lager” (here is a camp), while not unequivocal, also fit this interpretation. What speaks against such an interpretation is the claim that Helmut gave the letter to a German working “near Treblinka”, a claim which, however, Levin appears to contradict himself (“I never knew who sent it or how they got it out”).

That at least some of the inmates in the Aktion Reinhardt “pure extermination camps” were able to send letters to the outside world has been revealed by Jules Schelvis. In his study Sobibor. A History of a Nazi Death Camp (Berg Publishing, Oxford 2007), Schelvis briefly mentions (p. 139) Walter Poppert, a German Jew who was deported from Westerbork (a collection camp in the Netherlands) together with his wife on May 8, 1943. At Sobibór, Poppert was foreman of the Waldkommando (wood-cutting detail) a fact which he mentioned himself in a postcard dating from August 1943 (p. 112, 141). Orthodox historians often maintain that the Dutch Jews who arrived at Sobibór had to write postcards which were sent to their relatives in the Netherlands as part of the overall “deception”. However, this is supposed to have happened at their arrival, before the vast majority of them supposedly were led to the gas chambers. Poppert’s postcard on the other hand was sent 3 months after his arrival to the camp. In other words: the SS allowed an inmate in a top secret “extermination camp” to communicate with the outside world!

By Carlo Mattogno (January 2010)

My work Le camere a gas di Auschwitz. Studio storico-tecnico sugli “indizi criminali” di Jean-Claude Pressac e sulla “convergenza di prove” di Robert Jan van Pelt (The Gas Chambers of Auschwitz. A Historical and Technical Study on the “Criminal Evidence” of Jean-Claude Pressac and the “convergence of evidence” of Robert Jan van Pelt, Effepi, Genoa 2009) has now been in print for several months and, as expected, it has been met with almost complete silence. Below I will speak of it briefly as a dignified celebration of the “Remembrance Day”. The work in question is not “negationist” but *affirmationist* because it refutes the interpretations proposed by the authors mentioned in its title while reconstructing, piece by piece, thanks to documents unknown to Pressac and van Pelt, the real context of events. It is therefore not a work of sterile or negative criticism, but a positive contribution to our knowledge of the camp.

First some technical information. The book consists of 715 pages, whereof 658 are text and the remaining 51 contains reproductions of documents. The critical apparatus consists of 2,510 notes with references to documents from 22 archives and a bibliography listing approximately 270 works, including over 80 on the subject of cremations. The appendices contain, among other things, a glossary of more than 400 German technical terms. The study is divided into five parts and 19 chapters. The table of contents below already provides a fairly accurate idea of the topics that are treated. I will therefore limit myself to making some brief comments.

Part One is devoted to the “criminal traces” of the alleged homicidal gas chambers at Auschwitz, as presented by Jean-Claude Pressac and later – in a publication bordering on plagiarism – by Robert Jan van Pelt. The original formulation of the “traces” goes back to the Polish investigative judge Jan Sehn, who listed nearly all of them after the war.
With “criminal traces” Pressac means the alleged “bavures” that appears in several German documents relating to the crematoria of Birkenau and for which, he said, it is impossible to give any explanation other than a homicidal one. But, as is documented in the seven chapters of this section, this claim depends solely on Pressac’s inability to correctly explain the documents in question.

In Chapter 1 are listed accurately all the “criminal traces” put forward by the two historians, divided according to which crematorium they relate to, as well as distributed chronologically, highlighting the often overlooked fact that they are concentrated to the period of the construction of the crematoria. The orthodox historians wants us to believe, that the alleged gas chambers at Birkenau operated for several months without leaving any trace behind. In particular, the alleged gas chamber of crematorium II is supposed to have been in operation for twenty months, exterminating a total of 500,000 Jews (according to van Pelt) without leaving a single “criminal trace”.

The chapter concludes with a discussion of the ventilation systems of Leichenkeller 1 (the semi-subterraneous basement rooms supposed to have served as a homicidal gas chamber) and 2 (the alleged changing rooms) of crematoria I and II. The original German documents show that, for the alleged Auschwitz gas chambers, the SS planned 9.5 air changes per hour, whereas the ventilation capacity for the “undressing rooms” was set at 11 air changes per hour.
Thus the “undressing rooms” were better ventilated than the “gas chambers”! There follows another tehnical discussion, likewise based on German documents, concerning an elevator with a capacity of 300 kg which was installed in Crematorium II as a temporary device, but remained in permanent use, contrary to the unfounded claim of van Pelt that it was replaced with another elevator having a capacity of 1,500 kg (but which in fact was mounted in crematorium III). In order to bring the alleged 500,000 corpses from the semi-basement to the furnace room on the ground floor, the elevator would have had to make 100,000 trips up and down. This would mean 231 transports a day, each lasting 6 minutes, without interruption, day and night on all of the approximately 430 days during which the crematorium actually was in operation, without ever a mishap occuring and without a moment’s rest!

Chapter 2 covers, one by one, the “criminal traces” pertaining to crematorium II – Vergasungskeller, Gaskeller, Gasdichtetür, Auskleideraum, Auskleidekeler, Sonderkeller, Drahtnetzeinschiebevorrichtung and Holzblenden, Gasprüfer and Anzeigegeräte für Blausäure-Reste, Warmluftzuführungsanlage, Holzgebläse and others – discussing them in detail and clarifying their real historical context, thus refuting the fallacious interpretations of Pressac and van Pelt. Chapter 3 examines the secondary “criminal traces” relating to the same crematorium, while Chapter covers the primary “traces” pertaining to crematorium III. Among other things I show here, basing my argument on documents unknown to Pressac and van Pelt, that the 14 showerheads mentioned in a document relating to Leichenkeller 1 of crematorium III were not “fake”, as apodictically proclaimed by them, but real ones. They were, in fact, part of a program of “Special measures for the improvement of hygiene facilities” launched at Birkenau in early May 1943, which also included the crematoria and of which, apparently, the two abovementioned authors know nothing. In their ignorance, they have turned an installation for the maintenance of hygiene among camp inmates into a “criminal trace” of mass extermination.

Chapter 5 deals with the “criminal traces” of crematoria IV and V. While Pressac admitted that there exists no evidence for the presence of homicidal gas chambers in these buildings, he nevertheless ventured four different hypotheses regarding their structure and functioning, one more inconclusive than the other. It is no wonder that he described the gassing technique supposed employed here as “irrational and ridiculous”. Even this judgement is all too kind, because the procedure described by Pressac, with Zyklon B being inserted through small windows, was technically impossible. These windows were, in fact, fitted with metal bars, making it impossible to introduce a can of Zyklon B from the outside. Moreover, we are supposed to believe that the Auschwitz SS designed the alleged homicidal gas chambers in Crematorium IV and V without a mechanical ventilation system, at the risk of contaminating the entire crematorium, and this after ordering, on 9 December 1940, ventilation installations for the dissection rooms and the mortuary of crematorium I, and after installing ventilation systems not only crematoria II and III, but also in the disinfestation gas chambers in Block 3 of the main camp as well as the disinfestation facilities BW 5a and 5b in Birkenau and the so-called Kanada I.

In Chapter 6 are analyzed the “criminal traces” of a general nature, i.e. those not pertaining to a specific crematorium, such as Normalgaskammer, a standard warm-air circulation disinfestation chamber constructed by Degesch. Incredibly Pressac argues that the term implies the existence of an “abnormal” or “homicidal” gas chamber (the opposite of a Normalgaskammer was in fact a behelfsmäßige Gaskammer, a temporary gas chamber, such as all the existing disinfestation gas chambers at Auschwitz and Birkenau). Here is also discussed the only “criminal trace” discovered by van Pelt, the “cremation with simultaneous Sonderbehandlung“, which historical context and meaning van Pelt both distort due to his lack of historical and technical knowledge.

Chapter 7 deals with the “criminal traces” artificially attributed to the so-called “Bunkers” at Birkenau, two farmhouses allegedly converted into homicidal gas chambers, which in reality never existed as such. The individual “traces” are examined in their historical context and restored to their true meaning, which has been systematically distorted by the two abovementioned authors.

Part Two consists of a scientific study of the crematoria of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Opening it, Chapter 8 presents an 86 pages long summary of my research on this topic, which is yet to be published in full. As can be seen from the table of contents below, it addresses all the key technical problems related to the structure and operation of the cremation facilities, their capacity and the duration of the cremation process. The data from the actual operation of these facilities are compared with testimonies relating to them, which all turn out to be grossly exaggerated or false, a result of such exaggerations being functional to the Soviet propaganda figure of four million gassed at Auschwitz: only by attributing hyperbolic capacities to the Birkenau crematoria could the Soviet propaganda be propped up. But why, when all witnesses have lied intentionally regarding the cremations, should we trust their claims about the supposed gassings? As explained in my description of Chapter 10, they have already destroyed their own credibility on this issue. Here is also examined the allegations of massive outdoor cremations being carried out in 1944, which are contradicted by American and British aerial photographs of Birkenau. In Chapter 9 are discussed in detail Pressac’s claims regarding cremation and the crematoria at Auschwitz. Here is shown that the French historian had no grasp of the related technical problems and that his speculations in this regard lack any foundation.

Part Three deals with the two most important testimonies left by former Auschwitz inmates and SS camp staff. Chapter 10 presents a critical analysis of the statements of Henryk Tauber, a witness considered by Pressac to be “95% historically reliable” and whose testimony by van Pelt is ascribed “the highest evidentiary value”. The latter has also arrogantly proclaimed that “negationists have not been able to discredit him as a witness” and therefore prefer “to bury it [=Tauber's testimony] in silence”. What has in fact been buried in silence are 47 pages of detailed criticism. In addition to the well-known deposition of Tauber before the investigative judge Jan Sehn on May 24, 1945, which I have analyzed in the original Polish, I introduce two more statements unknown to both Pressac and van Pelt: a deposition made by Tauber before a Soviet investigative commission on February 27 and 28, 1945, which I have examined in the original Russian, and a deposition in Polish made before the Jewish Historical Commission in Cracow in 1945. As can be seen from the table of contents, some thirty issues are dealt with in all. The conclusion reached by this critical analysis is that there is no need for the revisionists to discredit, since he has done this efficiently enough by himself with absurdities and mendacious assertions. And this is the witness par excellence!
Chapter 11 exposes the painful efforts of van Pelt to paint as credible the “confessions” of the former commandant of Auschwitz. He claims that “negationists have tried to find contradictions in Höss’s testimony” but that they “have not been successful in attacking Höss’s credibility, by pointing out contradictions”. However, van Pelt himself, in an earlier work, speaks explicitly of “internal inconsistencies in his statements”. In this chapter is highlighted the method of systematic distortion and complicit silence implemented by van Pelt to conceal these contradictions, which are so huge that they by themselves demolish the whole credibility of Höss’s statements.

Part Four is a careful examination of the historical and technical errors of van Pelt. Chapter 2 examines his statements regarding cremation and crematories, highlighting his astounding technical and historical ignorance on this subject. To this we must add his arrogance. He criticizes Fred Leuchter for his lack of “expert knowledge” on this issue even though he himself comes off as an illiterate (his knowledge in this regard is even smaller than that of Pressac), yet he has the gall to pontificate as were he a world-reknowned expert. Besides being absurd, his claims often border on the comical, as when he ascribes to a proposed yet never constructed crematorium furnace a cremation capacity of 7,200 corpses per day, despite the fact that this would require a furnace of rather unusual size, with a height of 100 meters and a width of 40 meters (the project in question was referring to an installation 6 meters high and 3 meters wide), or when he states that the cremation of a corpse requires 3.5 kg of coke (the average of the Birkenau crematoria was approximately 17 kg when the furnaces had reached operating temperature, which required an additional quantity of coke). The reader may enjoy a large assortment of nonsense courtesy of van Pelt. Here he flounders desperately and has to resort to painful sophistry to keep from sinking, but in the end, the only thing to remain afloat is his blatant ignorance.
Among other things, this chapter examines van Pelt’s fanciful claim that “by the time the crematoria were finished, Auschwitz had virtually no permanently dedicated morgue capacity”, in other words: the morgues of the crematoria were permanently employed as gas chambers and undressing rooms. This claim is confronted with a series of documents, unknown to van Pelt and ranging in time from 20 March 1943 to 25 May 1944, which show that the morgues of the crematoria were always available as such. The mortuaries and morgues remained in use.
Chapter 13 contains a detailed discussion of the alleged Zyklon B introduction holes in the roof of Leichenkeller 1 of crematorium II in Birkenau, which, through a detailed rebuttal of the two most important exterminationist studies on the subject, demonstrate that these openings never existed, so that the gassing technique described by the witnesses could never have worked.
Chapter 14 evauates the conjectures drawn by van Pelt relating to Zyklon B. By carefully selecting witnesses favorable to him (those who claim that it took about 30 minutes for the victims to die) and excluding inconvenient ones (such as those who refer to a time of about 3 minutes) he rules that the alleged homicidal gassings took place with concentrations of hydrogen cyanide “as low as 100 ppm [parts per million]“, corresponding to 0.12 g/m3. This is done mainly to “refute” the Leuchter Report. Unfortunately, the figures provided by Höss, van Pelt’s SS witness par excellence, results in a concentration 140 times higher! By an even more bizarre calculation, he reaches the conclusion that a good 1,660 of the 12,000 kg of Zyklon B delivered to the camp during 1943 were used for the alleged homicidal gassings. However, since the documents on the use of Zyklon B are very rare and, moreover, refer exclusively to disinfestation, this claim is completely unfounded and further contradict Pressac’s conjecture that only 2-3% of the total deliveries of Zyklon B was used for the alleged gassings (while van Pelt’s figure amounts to almost 14%). What we have here is proof of the fact that in the absence of documents, historians make arbitrary and unfounded speculations.
Chapter 15 concerns the number of Auschwitz victims. The various figures are examined chronologically, beginning with the 4 million of Soviet propaganda and the calculations found in the related “expert report” (which presuppose for the Birkenau crematoria an absurd capacity of 9,000 corpses per day, almost 10 times the theoretical capacity of the facilities – yet, as noted above, the “eyewitnesses” have readily conformed their statements to fit this figure) and ending with the official statistics of Franciszek Piper. Here is documented that Piper’s figure contains at least 180,600 fictitious deportees. The number of documented deaths amounts to approximately 135,000.

Part Five deals with one of the fundamental principles of van Pelt’s historical methodology: the “convergence of independent accounts”. This assumes that the first reports about Auschwitz were truthful, independent and convergent.
Chapter 16 examines the origins of the propaganda spread by the resistance movement in Auschwitz, and how its first absurd stories, which later fell into oblivion, with difficulty came to form the literary motif of the homicidal gas chambers, aided by contributions from the Soviets, Brits and the Poles.
Chapter 17 considers the “reconstruction of how knowledge of Auschwitz had emerged” proposed by van Pelt and demonstrates how this propaganda was spread. The key document here is a report, written in 1944 by two Jewish inmates who escaped from Birkenau, Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler, which is well known for its blatant lies relating to both the crematoria and to statistics; lies that Pressac and van Pelt have painfully attempted to explain and justify with sophistry and nonsense.
Van Pelt makes a similar attempt to salvage also Boris Polevoi’s article on Auschwitz from 2 February 1945, which contains clumsily invented claims about the alleged extermination process. Here is also examined the Polish reports and investigations (Roman Dawidowski, Jan Sehn), the major testimonies (Charles Sigismund Bendel, Miklos Nyiszli, Filip Müller) and the minor (Ada Bimko, Marie Claude Vaillant-Couturier, Severina Shmaglevskaya, Janda Weiss) as well as the statements from Germans who stood accused at the Belsen trial (Josef Kramer, Hans Aumeier, Fritz Klein and others) put forward by van Pelt in a most unseemly manner. One of the gems found in his exposition is the pathetic attempt to justify the ridiculous lies of Ada Bimko.
Chapter 18 demonstrates the inconsistency of van Pelt’s historiographical methodology and his imaginative but evidentially baseless historical reconstruction, from the “first gassing” in Block 11 of the Auschwitz main camp and the “gas chamber” of crematorium to the so-called “Bunkers” of Birkenau. Also discussed are the related testimonies put forward as evidence (Pery Broad, Hans Stark, Jerzy Tabeau, Szlama Dragon, David Olère, Johann Paul Kremer).
Chapter 19 refutes the legend of the “terrible secret” of Auschwitz, which only came to light in 1944 through the Vrba-Wetzler report. In fact one should rather speak of a “terrible propaganda” which was only gradually developed from said report and subsequently “historicized” by the Soviets, Brits and Poles. The camp was permanently exposed to prying eyes: the prisoners in the more than one hundred Kommandos in the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex, the Polish workers employed by companies in the camp (only in Birkenau twenty firms were present), and workers released from Birkenau after a few weeks of internment for breach of employment contracts (at least 335 between July 335 and December 1944). From all these sources came no “terrible truth”, but only the absurd reports examined in chapters 16 and 17. Moreover, relatives of SS men stationed in Auschwitz were able to visit them in the camp (at least 270 such visits are attested to). Many senior SS officers also visited Auschwitz. The documents show, however, that these people discussed everything but the alleged “gas chambers” and extermination – there are not even veiled references or insignificant “bavures”. These important aspects have been completely overlooked by van Pelt.
Finally, the chapter examines the pivot of van Pelt’s methodology, the “convergence of evidence” and in extension the alleged “convergence of independent accounts” and documentary sources (documents, photographs, archaeological finds). The result should be a “convergence” between testimonial and documentary sources, that is, a mutual confirmation: the documents would corroborate the testimonies and vice versa. In reality, the testimonies are neither true, independent nor even convergent, while the documents are systematically misrepresented by van Pelt, so that the “convergence” he presents is purely fictitious. His unjustly celebrated book The Case for Auschwitz is not a historical study, but a journalistic overview of misunderstood and misinterpreted historical sources.

Historians, critics, journalists, polemicists, storytellers, holocaustianist bloggers, defenders “truth and memory” and all the faithful of the Auschwitz faith – they can not with impunity continue to repeat the arguments of Pressac and van Pelt without having to deal with this work, which refutes those arguments totally and radically, and in turn, they themselves deserve respect only if they meet the challenge presented by this work in a no less total and radical way.

Table of Contents:

PREFACE

PART ONE

THE “CRIMINAL TRACES” CONCERNING THE HOMICIDAL GAS CHAMBERS
A historical and critical discussion of Jean-Claude Pressac’s and Robert Jan van Pelt’s theses

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER 1 – THE “CRIMINAL TRACES”

1.1. Historical background
1.2. The archive of the Auschwitz Zentralbauleitung
1.3. Methodological Premise
1.4. The “39″ criminal traces
1.4.1. Traces for crematorium II
1.4.2. Traces for crematorium III
1.4.3. Traces for crematoria IV and V
1.4.4. Further traces (crematoria II and III)
1.4.5. Other traces
1.5. Preliminary considerations
1.6. Chronological sequence of the “traces” and its significance
1.6.1. Items concerning crematorium II
1.6.2. Items concerning crematorium III
1.6.3. Items concerning crematoruia IV and V
1.7. Fundamental contradictions
1.8. The ventilation system of Leichenkeller 1 and 2 in crematoria II and III
1.9. The freight elevators of crematoria II and III
1.9.1. The history of the freight elevators of crematoria II and III
1.9.2. The freight elevators in the Irving-Lipstadt trial

CHAPTER 2 – THE “CRIMINAL TRACES” FOR CREMATORIUM II

2.1. “Vergasungskeller”
2.1.1. The importance of the indication
2.1.2. The historical context
2.1.3. The significance of the document
2.1.4. The function of the “Vergasungskeller”
2.1.5. Objections and replies
2.1.6. Van Pelt’s comments and objections
2.2. “Gasdichte Tür“, “Gastür”
2.3. “Auskleideraum“, “Auskleidekeller” and the barrack in front of crematorium II
2.3.1. “Auskleideraum” and “Auskleidekeller”
2.3.2. Origin and function of the “Auskleideraum” of crematorium II at Birkenau
2.3.3. The barrack in front of crematorium II
2.3.4. Van Pelt and the “Auskleidekeller”
2.4. “Sonderkeller”
2.5. “Drahtnetzeinschiebevorrichtung” and “Holzblenden”
2.5.1. The discovery of the indications
2.5.2. Significance of the terms and localization of the devices
2.5.3. Michal Kula’s testimony
2.5.4. What the “Drahtnetzeinschiebevorrichtung” were not
2.5.5. Van Pelt’s comments
2.6. “Gasprüfer” and “Anzeigegeräte für Blausäure-Reste”
2.6.1. Pressac’s interpretation
2.6.2. The destination of the “Gasprüfer”
2.6.3. The historical context
2.6.4. The bureaucratic context
2.6.5. The problems not solved by Jean-Claude Pressac
2.6.6. What were the “Gasprüfer“?
2.6.7. Prüfer and the “Gasprüfer”
2.7. “Warmluftzuführungsanlage”
2.7.1. Statement of the problem
2.7.2. Pressac’s explanation
2.7.3. Van Pelt’s explanation
2.8. “Holzgebläse”
2.9. The elimination of the slides for the corpses
2.9.1. Plan 2003 of December 19, 1942 and its significance
2.9.2. Concealing the slide

CHAPTER 3 – THE SECONDARY “CRIMINAL TRACES” RELATED TO CREMATORIUM II

3.1. Origin and definition of the secondary “criminal traces”
3.2. General aspects
3.3. The drainage system of the crematorium
3.4. The opening up of an access to Leichenkeller 2
3.5. The opening direction of the door of Leichenkeller 1
3.6. Substitution of a double door by a single-leaf (gas-tight) door in Leichenkeller 1
3.7. Elimination of the faucets in Leichenkeller 1
3.8. The elimination of Leichenkeller 3

CHAPTER 4 – THE “CRIMINAL TRACES” FOR CREMATORIUM III: “GASDICHTETÜR” AND “BRAUSEN”

4.1. Pressac’s interpretation
4.2. The historical context
4.3. The wooden plates of the alleged “dummy showers”
4.4. The “Gasdichtetür”

CHAPTER 5 – THE “CRIMINAL TRACES” RELATIVE TO CREMATORIA IV AND V

5.1. Presentation of the indications
5.2. The evolution of crematoria IV and V: the original plan
5.3. Development of crematoria IV and V: the first operating concept
5.4. Development of crematoria IV and V: the second operating concept
5.5. Development of crematoria IV and V: the third operating concept
5.6. The gassing technique
5.7. The introduction of Zyklon B
5.8. Van Pelt and the “12 St. gasdichte Türen”
5.9. The natural ventilation
5.10. The mechanical ventilation
5.11. Analysis of plan 2006 of January 11, 1943

CHAPTER 6 – THE “CRIMINAL TRACES” OF A GENERAL NATURE

6.1. “Normalgaskammer”
6.2. Why did the SS not use Degesch-Kreislauf gas chambers for homicidal purposes?
6.3. “Verbrennung” and “Sonderbehandlung”
6.3.1 The document
6.3.2. The “historical context” according to van Pelt
6.3.3. Van Pelt’s errors
6.3.4. The true historical context
6.3.5. The real meaning of the document

CHAPTER 7 – THE ALLEGED “CRIMINAL TRACES” FOR THE “BUNKERS” OF BIRKENAU

7.1. Some remarks concerning the title
7.2. “Sonderbehandlung”
7.2.1. Pressac’s thesis
7.2.2. Bischoff’s explanatory reports
7.2.3. The four barracks “für Sonderbehandlung” and the Birkenau “Bunkers”
7.2.4. “Sonderbehandlung” and “Entwesungsanlage”
7.3. The “Badeanstalten für Sonderaktionen”
7.3.1. Pressac’s explanations
7.3.2. A project not implemented
7.3.3. “Badeanstalten” and crematorium ovens
7.3.4. Van Pelt’s explanation
7.4. “Sperrgebiet”
7.5. The “Materialen für Sonderbehandlung” (materials for special treatment)
7.6. “Materialen für Judenumsiedlung” and the “Franke-Griksch Report”
7.6.1. “Materialen für Judenumsiedlung”
7.6.2. The Franke-Griksch ”report” and Pressac’s comments
7.6.3. Critical analysis of Pressac’s comments

PART TWO

THE CREMATORIUM OVENS OF AUSCHWITZ-BIRKENAU
Design, operation technical features and historiographical implications

CHAPTER 8 – THE FIRST SCIENTIFIC TREATMENT OF THE CREMATIONS AT AUSCHWITZ

8.1. Introduction
8.2. Structure of the work
8.3. The modern cremation
8.3.1. Crematorium furnace technology up to the end of the First World War
8.3.2. Technical developments of the German crematorium ovens in the 1930s
8.3.3. Legislation and statistical data concerning cremation in Germany
8.3.4. The firm J.A. Topf & Söhne of Erfurt
8.3.5. Design and operation of a crematorium oven with a coke-fed gasifier in the 1930s
8.3.6. Chimney draft and hearth loading
8.3.7. Consumption of coke in a crematorium oven with gasifier
8.3.8. The duration of the cremation process in ovens with coke-fed gasifiers
8.4. The Topf crematorium ovens at Auschwitz-Birkenau
8.4.1. The Topf crematorium ovens for the concentration camps
8.4.2. The crematorium oven with 2 muffles (Doppelmuffel-Einäscherungsofen) heated by coke
8.4.3. The crematorium oven with 3 muffles (Dreimuffel-Einäscherungsofen) heated by coke
8.4.4. The crematorium oven with 8 muffles heated by coke
8.4.5. Operation and control of the Topf crematorium ovens at Auschwitz-Birkenau
8.4.6. The crematoria ovens made by the firms H. Kori of Berlin and Ignis-Hüttenbau of Teplitz
8.5. Coke consumption of the Topf ovens at Auschwitz-Birkenau
8.5.1. Heat balance of the double-muffle Topf oven at the Gusen crematorium
8.5.2. Heat balance for the Topf double-muffle oven at Auschwitz
8.5.3. Heat balance for Topf triple-muffle and 8-muffle ovens
8.5.4. Remarks on the consumption of ovens with 3 and 8 muffles
8.6. The duration of the cremation process in the Topf ovens at Auschwitz-Birkenau
8.6.1. The documents
8.6.2. Kessler’s cremation experiments
8.6.3. The list of cremations at the Westerbork crematorium
8.6.4. The list of cremations at the Gusen crematorium
8.6.5. The list of cremations in the naphtha-fired Ignis-Hüttenbau ovens of the Terezín crematorium
8.6.6. Conclusions
8.7. The cremation capacity of the crematorium ovens at Auschwitz-Birkenau
8.7.1. The continued operation of the ovens
8.7.2. The simultaneous cremation of several bodies in one muffle
8.7.3. The Soviet expertises with the Kori crematorium ovens at Lublin-Majdanek, Sachsenhausen and Stutthof
8.7.4. The cremation capacity of the crematorium ovens at Auschwitz-Birkenau
8.7.5. The growth of the cremation installations at Birkenau
8.8. Historiographical implications
8.8.1. The activity of the Birkenau crematorium ovens
8.8.2. The durability of the refractory brickwork of crematorium ovens
8.8.3. The number of cremations in 1943: what the SS reckoned on.
8.8.4. The number of cremations in 1943: coke consumption
8.8.5. The open-air cremations of 1944
8.8.6. Van Pelt’s eloquent silence
8.8.7. The witnesses

CHAPTER 9 – PRESSAC AND THE CREMATION OVENS OF AUSCHWITZ-BIRKENAU

9.1. Pressac’s Technical Incompetence
9.2. Cremation capacity
9.2.1. Crematorium I
9.2.2. The Birkenau crematoria
9.3. The loading of a muffle
9.4. Coke consumption
9.5. The ratio of muffles / detainees
9.6. Pressac’s New Interpretations
9.6.1. Pressac’s arguments concerning cremations and the crematorium ovens
9.6.2. Discussion of the arguments
9.6.3. Pressac’s conjectures and conclusions on the subject of the crematorium ovens
9.6.4. Pressac’s technical drawings
9.7. The Novellette of the Ovens of Crematorium I
9.7.1. The first crematorium oven
9.7.2. The second crematorium oven
9.7.3. The “first gassing” and the deterioration of the second crematorium oven
9.7.4. The third crematorium oven
9.8. Ventilation of the Morgue in Crematorium I
9.9. The 8-Muffle Ovens
9.10. The Projects of Mass Cremations at Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1943

PART THREE

THE WITNESSES HENRYK TAUBER AND RUDOLF HÖSS

CHAPTER 10 – CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF HENRYK TAUBER’S TESTIMONIES

10.1. Introduction
10.2. CREMATORIUM OVENS AND CREMATIONS
10.2.1. Dimensions of the muffle
10.2.2. Temperature of the muffle
10.2.3. Loading system of the muffle
10.2.4. Loading the corpses: David Olère’s drawing
10.2.5. Loading the muffles and duration of the cremation
10.2.6. Opening the muffle doors
10.2.7. The combustibility of the corpses
10.2.8. The “auto-combustion” of the corpses
10.2.9. The embers of the corpses
10.2.10. The flaming chimneys
10.2.11. The test cremations
10.2.12. The “fire-proof” sack
10.2.13. The “cremation trenches”
10.2.14 The “cremation trenches” and the aerial photographs of Birkenau
10.2.15 The ground-water table in the Birkenau area
10.3. The gassings
10.3.1. The first homicidal gassing in crematorium II
10.3.2. The undressing barrack
10.3.3. The later gassings in crematorium II
10.3.4. The door of the alleged gas chamber
10.3.5. The Zyklon B introduction devices
10.3.6. The “fake” showers
10.3.7. The split-up of the alleged gas chamber of crematorium II
10.3.8. The gassing procedure in crematoria IV and V
10.4. Strength and events in connection with the “Sonderkommando”
10.4.1. The strength of the “Sonderkommando” in March-April of 1943
10.4.2. The “Sonderkommando” of the “Bunkers”
10.4.3. The alleged gassing of 200 detainees of the “Sonderkommando”
10.4.4. The alleged transfer to Lublin-Majdanek
10.4.5. The revolt of the “Sonderkommando”
10.4.6. The mystery of the survival of the 90 members of the “Sonderkommando”
10.5. The black propaganda concerning the atrocities committed by the SS
10.5.1. People burned alive
10.6. Conclusions

CHAPTER 11 – CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF THE TESTIMONIES OF RUDOLF HÖSS

11.1. The “non-existent” contradictions in Höss’ declarations
11.2. Errors, incongruencies and deceptive measures of van Pelt
11.3. The tortures applied to Höss

PART FOUR

VAN PELT’S TECHNICAL AND HISTORICAL MISTAKES

CHAPTER 12 – VAN PELT’S “EXPERT KNOWLEDGE” AND THE CREMATORIUM OVENS OF AUSCHWITZ-BIRKENAU

12.1. Van Pelt’s competence regarding cremations
12.2. The cremation capacity of the Birkenau crematoria
12.2.1. The Zentralbauleitung letter of June 28, 1943
12.2.2. The project of the Fritz Sander oven
12.3. Kurt Prüfer’s note of September 8, 1942
12.4. Coke consumption for one cremation
12.5. The number of corpses cremated with the coke delivered to the
crematoria
12.6. The multiple cremations
12.7. Crematoria and morgues
12.8. The “excessive” capacity of the crematorium ovens

CHAPTER 13 – THE ALLEGED OPENINGS FOR THE INTRODUCTION OF ZYKLON B IN THE ROOF OF LEICHENKELLER 1 OF THE BIRKENAU CREMATORIA II AND III

13.1. Van Pelt’s conjectures
13.2. The report by Daniel Keren, Jamie McCarthy and Harry W. Mazal
13.2.1. Critical analysis of Keren, McCarthy and Mazal’s “discoveries”
13.3. “Converging” testimonies
13.3.1. Yehuda Bakon
13.3.2. David Olère
13.3.3. The aerial photographs of August 25, 1944
13.3.4. The “train photograph”

CHAPTER 14 ZYKLON B

14.1. The concentration of HCN in the alleged homicidal gas chambers
14.2. The deliveries of Zyklon B to Auschwitz
14.3. The number of the potentially gassed victims

CHAPTER 15 – THE NUMBER OF VICTIMS

15.1.The Soviet Commission of Investigation
15.2. Nachman Blumental and others
15.3. The revisions by G. Wellers and F. Piper
15.4. F. Piper’s statistics
15.4.1. The number of deported Jews
15.4.2. The number of registered, unregistered and allegedly gassed persons
15.4.3. The number of deaths among the registered detainees
15.4.4. Conclusions
15.5. Significance and value of J.-C. Pressac’s and F. Meyer’s revisions
15.6. The propaganda figure of 4 million and the reliability of the witnesses

PART FIVE

THE ORIGIN OF THE “CONVERGENCE OF INDEPENDENT ACCOUNTS”

CHAPTER 16 – THE PROPAGANDA OF THE SECRET RESISTANCE MOVEMENT AT AUSCHWITZ

16.1. The forgotten propaganda stories
16.2. The story of the industrial exploitation of human corpses
16.3. The birth of the propaganda story of the gas chambers
16.4. The propaganda takes shape: Soviet, British and Polish contributions

CHAPTER 17 – THE GENESIS OF THE “KNOWLEDGE” OF THE AUSCHWITZ GAS CHAMBERS

17.1. The “War Refugee Board Report”
17.2. The justifications of a historical falsification
17.2.1. Van Pelt’s justifications
17.2.2. Pressac’s justifications
17.3. The origin of the report and of the drawing of crematoria II and III
17.4. The Soviets and the Lublin-Majdanek camp: general proof of propaganda
17.4.1 The “gas chambers”
17.4.2. The pile of shoes
17.4.3. The crematorium ovens
17.5. Boris Polevoi’s article of February 2, 1945
17.6. The Polish assessments and investigations
17.6.1. Roman Dawidowski
17.6.2. Jan Sehn
17.7. The witnesses Charles Sigismund Bendel, Miklos Nyiszli and Filip Müller
17.7.1. Charles Sigismund Bendel
17.7.2. Miklos Nyiszli
17.7.3. The witnesses Bendel and Nyiszli according to Pressac
17.7.4. Filip Müller
17.8. The lesser witnesses
17.8.1. Ada Bimko
17.8.2. Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier and Severina Shmaglevskaya
17.8.3. Janda Weiss

CHAPTER 18 – ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT OF THE STORY OF THE ALLEGED GAS CHAMBERS AT AUSCHWITZ

18.1. Van Pelt’s historiographical deficiencies
18.2. The alleged “first homicidal gassing”
18.3. The alleged homicidal gassings in crematorium I
18.3.1. Historical and documental unfoundedness
18.3.2. Pery Broad
18.3.3. Hans Stark
18.3.4. The novelized account of the first cremation in crematorium I
18.4. The Birkenau “Bunkers”
18.4.1. Total lack of proof
18.4.2. Van Pelt’s first interpretation
18.4.3. Van Pelt’s second interpretation
18.4.4. Van Pelt’s final interpretation
18.4.5. The alleged homicidal activity of the “Bunkers”
18.4.6. The witnesses
18.4.6.1. Jerzy Tabeau
18.4.6.2. Szlama Dragon
18.4.6.3. David Olère
18.4.6.4. The “convergence of evidence” concerning the “Bunkers”
18.4.6.5. Johann Paul Kremer

CHAPTER 19 – VAN PELT’S METHODOLOGY

19.1. The legend of the “terrible secret” of Auschwitz
19.2. Visits to Auschwitz by high-ranking SS officers
19.3. The illusion of the “convergence of independent accounts” and of the “convergence of evidence”

CONCLUSION

APPENDIX

Glossary
1) Structure of SS-Wirtschafts-Verwaltungshauptamt (1942)
2) Departments (Abteilungen) and structure of KL Auschwitz
3) Explanatory note on the position of the Auschwitz Zentralbauleitung within the structure of the camp
4) Sectors (Sachgebiete) of Zentralbauleitung at Auschwitz in January of 1943
5) Bauleitungen attached to Auschwitz Zentralbauleitung in January of 1943
6) Organization of J.A.Topf & Söhne Co., Erfurt, at the end of the 1930s

DOCUMENTS

ABBREVIATIONS OF ARCHIVES

GENERAL BIBLIOGRAPHY

BIBLIOGRAPHY ON CREMATION

INDEX OF NAMES