Szlama Dragon and Henryk Tauber

The subject of the gas chambers of Auschwitz, after a very troubled genesis and development, which in the years 1942-1944 saw the creation and propagation of the most-absurd stories by the various resistance groups inside the Auschwitz Camp, was revised by the Soviets in February-March 1945, and received its first official sanction of historical “truth” in their “Communiqué of the Extraordinary State Commission for the Investigation and Research of the Crimes of the German-Fascist Invaders and their Accomplices,” which was published by Pravda on May 7, 1945. Later accepted by the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal (IMT) as Document 008-USSR, it constituted the archetype of all subsequent historiography.[1] The story of the alleged extermination by gassing was based on the interrogations of two self-styled members of the Sonderkommando, Henryk Tauber and Szlama Dragon, whose statements were also summarized in this presentation:

“Two former prisoners who were interrogated as witnesses, SHYLOMA DRAGON (a resident of the small town of Zitovnin of Warsaw Province) and GENRICH TAUBER (from the town of Krzanow in Poland), who worked in a Sonderkommando operating the gas chambers and crematoria, testified as follows:” (IMT, Vol. 39, pp. 241-261, here p. 245)

Dragon had been interrogated on February 26, 1945, Tauber the next day. With regard to the alleged exterminations these two witnesses – and to a lesser degree also Henryk Mandelbaum and Stanisław Jankowski, whom I have dealt with (together with other witnesses of the Sonderkommando) in another study (Mattogno 2021a) – were the two most important witnesses at the trial held in Warsaw by the Polish authorities from 11 to 19 March 1947 against Rudolf Höss, the former commandant of the Auschwitz Camp. However, for unknown reasons, neither of them participated directly in the trial, nor did they appear at the subsequent trial against the Auschwitz camp garrison, which took place in Krakow from 25 November to 16 December 1947. Tauber’s testimony, which was attached to the records of the Höss Trial, was the protocol of a deposition he had given to the Polish investigating judge Jan Sehn during the interrogation of 24 May 1945. Dragon had been interviewed by the same judge even earlier, on 10-11 May 1945.

These two testimonies constituted the essential basis of the judicial reconstruction of the alleged extermination process carried out by the IMT, were also used by the emerging Polish historiography for its historical reconstruction: Tauber thus became the most-important guarantor of the claimed homicidal gassings in the Auschwitz crematoria, while Dragon assumed the same role for the imaginary “bunkers” of Birkenau.

After his extradition to Poland on 25 May 1946, Höss began to be extremely “cooperative” with the local authorities, reworking most of the ramblings he had previously uttered to the British and American investigators, and adapting them to the “historical” perspective of his new jail masters (see Mattogno 2020a for details). But while Höss’s testimony became accessible to Western historiography as early as 1958 (Broszat 1958; English: Höss 1959), Tauber’s was ignored for another three decades, until Jean-Claude Pressac rediscovered it in the proceedings of the Höss Trial and published it in 1989. In his ponderous work on Auschwitz, the French historian presented a complete English translation, accompanied by an accurate commentary (Pressac 1989, pp. 481-502). The translation, while not perfect, came from Pressac’s adaptation of two French translations made for him, one by Dorota Ryszka, the other by Adam Rutkowski (ibid., p. 481).

Dragon’s testimony became known in its entirety only in 1993, when it appeared in German translation in a book by the Auschwitz Museum’s chief historian Franciszek Piper (Piper 1993, pp. 203-225).

Also in 1993, Szlama Dragon, who then called himself Shlomo, and his brother Abraham were interviewed by Israeli historian Gideon Greif (Greif 2005, 122-180). Abraham claimed that he, too, had been assigned to the Sonderkommando of the “bunkers.” But with regard to Auschwitz, Szlama mentioned him only twice in passing in his Polish testimony (pp. 2, 13). Greif expressed his admiration for the prodigious memory of the two brothers, whom he interviewed 48 years after the claimed events (ibid., p. 124):

“Both brothers have amazing powers of recall.”

But twenty-one years earlier, on 2 March 1972 during the 26th Session of the Austrian trial against the architects Walter Dejaco and Fritz Ertl in Vienna, Szlama Dragon, after having confused Crematorium I with “Bunker 2” (!) the day before, was forced to confess (Pressac 1989, p. 172):

“I can’t remember today after 30 years…”

Therefore, in 1993, Szlama miraculously remembered perfectly what he could no longer remember in 1972! This is a specific reason for not considering these testimonies in detail, in addition to the general reason that very late testimonies (in this case dating back forty years after the alleged events) are necessarily influenced by too many external factors, which alter the genuine memories, if they exist in the first place.

Pressac ‘s assessment influenced all subsequent orthodox historiography, which hastened to dust off Tauber’s testimony. In 1995, Franciszek Piper, at that time director of the Auschwitz Museum’s historical department, reproduced it in the original language in the Museum’s five-volume history of the camp (Długoborski/Piper 1995, Vol. III, pp. 189-208), which was later translated into German and English (idem 1999, 2000).

Robert Jan van Pelt took it in 1999 as the historical-technical basis of the alleged homicidal gassings and cremations in his expert report on Auschwitz for the libel trial of British historian David Irving against US-American scholar of Jewish religion Deborah Lipstadt (11 January to 11 April 2000). This report, which is known as “The Pelt Report,” was later released as a book in a revised and expanded edition. When assessing Tauber’s testimony, van Pelt went far beyond the limits Pressac had set for himself, writing in that book in open contradiction to revisionist historians (van Pelt 2002, p. 193):

“All of Tauber’s testimony up to this point can be confirmed in the blueprints or by means of other documents in the archive of the Auschwitz Central Construction Office. Only the division of the gas chamber of Crematorium 2 into two spaces cannot be traced in the archives. Negationists use this to refute the validity of the whole of Tauber’s testimony.”

There is no need to point out that no revisionist researcher has ever dreamed of refuting the entire testimony in question on the basis of this detail alone. This is therefore a pathetic lie. Van Pelt continues (ibid., p. 205):

“Given [Enrique Aynat] Eknes’s difficulty in discrediting Tauber’s testimony, it is not surprising that negationists preferred to bury it in silence. Yet we do well to attach the highest evidentiary value to it, not only because of its internal consistency. Tauber’s statements were largely corroborated by the contemporary testimonies of Jankowski and Dragon and by the later memoirs of Filip Müller.” (Emphasis added)

And finally, here is how van Pelt summarizes his assessment of the testimony in question (ibid., p. 204):

“Tauber’s statement was extremely specific, it did not contain contradictions, and it did not contain improbable allegations. In fact, negationists have not been able to discredit him as a witness.” (Emphasis added)

Regarding Dragon, he wrote (ibid., p. 188):

“Dragon was precise and reliable when he talked about what he had witnessed in person, and none of the details he told were part of the Soviet report.” (Emphasis added)

The last part of this statement is clearly wrong, since the Soviets summarized “Shyloma Dragon’s” statements in the report in question (the Communiqué mentioned above).

These utterances of van Pelt perfectly characterize their author, who is completely devoid of any critical sense and hopelessly afflicted by a staggering credulity, as I have amply demonstrated in a separate study (Mattogno 2020). The fact that van Pelt, who posed as an “expert” on Auschwitz during the Irving vs. Lipstadt Trial, completely ignored the Soviet interrogations of Tauber and Dragon is undermining his credibility even more.

The present study constitutes the revisionist response to van Pelt ‘s claims. It is so little “negationistic” of truth and facts that it brings into the historiographical debate two important documents hitherto not only unpublished, but – because of their very content – actually completely unknown even to Auschwitz specialists: The first statements ever made by Tauber and Dragon.

Although Tauber and Dragon are universally considered by orthodox Holocaust historians to be witnesses of extraordinary importance, none of them, starting with Jean-Claude Pressac, Robert Jan van Pelt and Franciszek Piper, ever bothered to obtain their first testimonies, whose existence was known since 1945, since they were explicitly mentioned in the report of the Soviet Commission of Inquiry on Auschwitz, as I mentioned earlier. After the opening of the Soviet archives, the retrieval of these testimonies (and of others, such as Mandelbaum ‘s) was within the reach of any willing researcher and, in fact, Jürgen Graf and I found them in Moscow about 25 years ago without too much difficulty.[2] These testimonies are therefore presented here for the first time in a Western language.

There is also another brief, practically unknown testimony by Tauber, which he gave in 1945 to the Jewish Historical Commission of Krakow, the precise date of which is not indicated (Tauber 1945).

This study is devoted to an examination of the testimonies of Henryk Tauber and Szlama Dragon mentioned above. In Part One I, present the English translation; in Part Two, I present a critical historical-technical analysis of the testimonies in order to establish whether they really have a “very high probative value,” and how we are to assess the judgments expressed in this regard by Pressac and van Pelt.

Striving for completeness, I pick up what I already stated in my “Critical Analysis of Henryk Tauber’s Testimonies” published in another study (Mattogno 2019, pp. 331-375), and I will elaborate on this in more detail here.

There is also an Italian translation of Tauber’s testimony of 24 May 1945 (Saletti, pp. 59-82), which, besides being second-hand in nature, is also riddled with so many errors and inaccuracies as to be historiographi­cally unusable.

In the translations I have tried to maintain, as far as possible, the rough and repetitive style of the original texts, even if the resulting prose is anything but polished. This way the reader can get a more-precise idea of Tauber’s and Dragon’s way of expressing themselves than other translations, which are more elegant, but at the same time less adherent to the original.

I have added in the text, between square brackets, everything that serves to better clarify the meaning of certain terms, and the correct spelling where they are misspelled. In footnotes, I have provided necessary contextual explanations and the translations of the words or expressions mentioned in German.

With this book I add another study to my cycle of critical analysis of the “eyewitness accounts” of the self-styled members of the Sonderkommando that I have undertaken over the years and have collected mainly in the works listed below:

• “La verità sulle camere a gas”? Anatomia della “testimonianza unica” di Shlomo Venezia. Effepi, Genoa, 2017;[3]
• An Auschwitz Doctor’s Eyewitness Account: The Tall Tales of Dr. Mengele ‘s Assistant Analyzed. 2nd ed., Castle Hill Publishers, Uckfield, 2020;
• The Making of the Auschwitz Myth: Auschwitz in British Intercepts, Polish Underground Reports and Postwar Testimonies (1941-1947). 2nd ed., Castle Hill Publishers, Uckfield, 2021;
• Sonderkommando Auschwitz I: Nine Eyewitness Testimonies Analyzed. Castle Hill Publishers, Uckfield, 2021

In these works, I have critically examined five general categories of witnesses, which I enumerate in order of importance:

1) Self-proclaimed eyewitnesses of the Sonderkommando:

André Lettich, Shlomo Venezia, the authors of the clandestine manuscripts (“Author Unknown,” Chaim Herman, Salmen Gradowski, Leib Langfus, Salmen Lewental, Marcel Nadsari [Nadjari]), Szaja Gertner, Polish Anonymous Witness of 1945, Roman Sompolinski, Charles Sigismund Bendel, Milton (Meilech) Buki, Miklós Nyiszli, Polish Anonymous Witness of 1946, Arnošt (Ernst, Arnold) Rosin, Filip Müller, Dov Paisikovic, Stanisław Jankowski, Henryk Mandelbaum, Ludwik Nagraba, Joshuah Rosenblum, Aaron Pilo, David Fliamenbaum, and Samij Karolonsij.

2) Witnesses who worked in the crematoria without being part of the Sonderkommando:

Four Hungarian anonymous authors: Protocol No. 90 (23 June 1945); Protocol No. 151 (27 June 1945); Protocol No. 182 (30 June 1945); Protocol No. 2114 (26 August 1945), and Lieberman (1945).

3) Testimonies of detainees who allegedly escaped gassings:

Abraham Cykert (1945), Regina Bialek (1945), Sofia Litwinska (1945), Bruno Piazza (1956).

4) Casual witnesses to the gas chambers:

Ada Bimko (1945), Jeannette Kaufmann (1945), Regina Plucer (1945), Hermine Kranz (1945), Fritz Putzker (1945), Isaac Egon Ochshorn (1945), Anonymous French Jewish Witness (1946), Helena Bard-Nomberg (1946)

5) Witnesses who received information directly from members of the Sonderkommando:

Alfred Wetzler and Rudolf Vrba, Sofia Kaufmann Schafranov (1945), Marie Claude Vaillant-Couturier (1945), Marc Nahon (1945), Chaim Frosch (1945).

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Endnotes