Book Announcement

The Making of the Auschwitz Myth

Authored by Carlo Mattogno

The orthodox narrative of what transpired at the infamous Auschwitz Concentration/Labor Camp during the Second World War congealed into its current version in the environs of the Great Auschwitz Trial staged at Frankfurt, Germany, during the mid-1960s. But how exactly did we get there?

On the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the occupation of Auschwitz by the Red Army in January 1945, Carlo Mattogno wrote an article titled “Auschwitz: 60 Years of Propaganda,” which investigated the early history of claims made about Auschwitz. The present study greatly expands on this theme.

It starts out by analyzing radio messages sent by the SS from Auschwitz to their Berlin headquarters between early 1942 and early 1943. Many of these messages were intercepted and decrypted by the British, giving them a fairly accurate picture of what was going on at Auschwitz. Spoiler alert: the biggest drama unfolding there was a raging typhus epidemic.

Next, Mattogno juxtaposes to these SS messages the missives sent by the Polish underground to their government-in-exile in London, which painted a radically different image contradicting subsequently established facts and even at times themselves.

The largest section of this study analyzes the statements of more than fifty witnesses, most of them made during the war and in the immediate postwar period. The focus is on those passages in their statements that contain claims about mass murder by means of gas chambers. The bottom line of this review is that none of the early witnesses reviewed here fully confirms the current orthodox narrative. Instead, their stories are rife with propaganda absurdities and fantastic rumors.

The fourth section of this study analyzes the flawed early attempts by historians to write a consistent history of the Auschwitz Camp, while the last section demonstrates how modern historians twist the record in order to sustain the fiction that the orthodoxy’s fake version of the facts about Auschwitz is somehow “well-documented.”

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The present issue of Inconvenient History includes an excerpt from this book: its introduction as well as the very first chapter of the book’s first part on British radio intercepts.