Auschwitz Doctor Hans Münch Interviewed
During his lifetime, the former Auschwitz camp physiciaon Dr. Hans Münch was a prominent witness to the alleged mass exterminations said to have happened at Auschwitz during the war. He was always willing to testify in court, to give interviews to mass-media outlets, and to cooperate with organizations of former inmates. He eagerly confirmed all the cliches contained in the Auschwitz narrative popular amongst mainstream journalists and scholars alike. This interview gets to the bottom of what Dr. Münch really knew about Auschwitz, and what the sources of his “knowledge” were.
Dr. Hans Karl Wilhelm Münch (also sometimes cited as “Moench”) rarely appears in the literature. From September 1943 to January 1945, he was an employee of the Hygiene Institute of the Waffen SS, located in Rajsko near Auschwitz, but probably not as deputy director, as he claimed, especially since such an important position would hardly have been left to a university graduate, which included the management of such well-known world capacities as Prof. Jakubski (Poznan), Prof. Mannsfeld (Budapest), Prof. Klein (Strasbourg), Prof. Coblenz (Strasbourg), Prof. Levine (Paris), and Dr. Pollack (Prague), all of whom had worked at this Hygiene Institute.
Despite his rare appearance in the literature, Dr. Münch is an important figure in connection with the legal and journalistic consolidation of the orthodox narrative on the persecution of the Jews. Especially during the 1990s, Dr. Münch was increasingly invited by various TV stations in Germany for interviews about his alleged experiences at the concentration camps of Auschwitz and Auschwitz-Birkenau.
The statements of former SS men are usually given more weight than the statements of former inmates, because many people assume, at least subconsciously, that former inmates could dramatize past events out of vindictiveness or in order to gain material or political advantages. On the other hand, in the case of the perpetrators, one assumes – or some find it at least understandable – that they are trying to minimize their share of guilt or that of their colleagues. If, however, a former SS man openly admits that he or at least his former colleagues committed monstrous crimes, he is sometimes even held in high esteem in view of this insight and penitence. Former SS men are therefore much better suited as witnesses to impress the masses.
Dr. Münch is a particularly suitable candidate for such a witness. Due to his history – he successfully avoided any participation in the alleged extermination and found much praise and encouragement from former prisoners – he stands as a man of strong character, as a good SS man. Finally, his good relations with former inmates and to leading governmental (Zentrale Stelle) as well as non-governmental organizations involved in investigating and chronicling National-Socialist persecution (Auschwitz Committee/H. Langbein) have the advantage for him that he never had to fear finding himself in a German courtroom as a defendant for any offense. Accordingly, and in contrast to many others, one cannot so easily entertain the suspicion against him that, for some reasons of courtroom tactics, he parroted some official narrative in order to escape further prosecution or harsher punishments, for instance, on the initiative of powerful organizations of former inmates, which have always been able to organize fitting testimonies for every case (cf. E. Loftus, K. Ketcham, Witness for the Defense, St. Martin’s Press, New York 1991; Y. Sheftel, The Demjanjuk Affair, Victor Gollancz, London 1994; C. Jordan, as well as A. Neumaier, in G. Rudolf (ed.), Dissecting the Holocaust, 3rd ed., Castle Hill Publishers, Uckfield, 2019; R. Gerhard, Der Fall Weise, 2nd ed., Türmer, Berg am See, 1991).
As an academic with a PhD title, he also brings with him the necessary intellectual persuasiveness, which for many people comes from the sound of this academic title alone. All in all, Dr. Hans Münch is the ideal witness for the exterminationist persuasion.
For this reason, it was time to subject the key witness Dr. Münch to critical questioning. I deliberately refrained from revealing to Dr. Münch my own opinions on the matter under discussion, in order to make sure that he would behave in a natural and unconstrained manner. For the same reason, it did not seem appropriate to put the witness on the defensive by treating him too harshly, to which he would probably have reacted aggressively, which could have led to a premature termination of the interview and an eviction from his home, but not to a successful conclusion of the interview. After all, I was a guest at Münch’s home.
The following tactics resulted from this situation: Initially, I tried to extract as many details as possible from the witness. Any internal contradictions in these statements or those that contradicted facts established otherwise were not held against the witness at this stage. In the second part, it was elicited to what extent the witness had been exposed to memory-manipulating circumstances in the last decades: what he has read, with whom he has been in contact. Finally, in the last phase, Dr. Münch is confronted with some contradictions between his interview here and earlier statements. Furthermore, the most-important facts about the Auschwitz Camp are contrasted with his statements. The resulting massive self-doubt of the witness had to be the final point for this interview, since the geriatric witness might not have been able to cope healthwise with a harder confrontation about the contradictions between his testimony and documented realities. Therefore, a detailed analysis of this testimony was conducted only after the fact.
In the following, as an introduction to the person of Dr. Hans Münch, some passages referring to him are quoted from the literature. The comments in square brackets were added here; numbers in brackets refer to explanations following these quotations. For the compilation of these quotations, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to Mrs. Ingrid Weckert and Dr. Robert Faurisson. Last but not least, I would also like to thank Dr. Karl-Werner Augsberg, whose initiative created the idea for this interview.
Literature References about Dr. Hans Münch
Bernd Naumann, who observed the great Frankfurt Auschwitz trial for the German daily newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, wrote about him (Auschwitz. Bericht über die Strafsache gegen Mulka u.a. vor dem Schwurgericht Frankfurt, Fischer, Frankfurt/Main, 1968, p. 105):
“The bacteriologist and hygienist [Dr. Hans Münch], who now works as a general practitioner in Bavaria, was deferred from military services as indispensable during the first years of the war, then drafted into the Waffen SS and detached to the branch office of the Hygiene Institute of the Waffen-SS in Auschwitz. As he said, it was a question of character whether an SS doctor would allow himself to be ordered to take part in the mass murders.[1]
Münch stood before a Polish court in Krakow after the war [2nd Polish Auschwitz Trial, Nov. 25 to Dec. 22, 1947] along with forty other former SS members, including Auschwitz commandant Liebehenschel, who was sentenced to death, and [as the only defendant, Münch] was acquitted, because former camp prisoners testified good things about him.
‘You could react humanely in Auschwitz only in the first hours. Once you had been there for a while, it was impossible to react normally. According to the regulations, everyone there was dirty. He was trapped and had to participate.’[2]
In response to his refusal to cooperate in the murders at Auschwitz, the head of the Hygiene Institute replied that he could well understand that. His boss then sent a telex to the commandant of Auschwitz, and he (Münch) was thereupon assigned neither to participate in selections nor in gassings.”[3]
Hermann Langbein, an acquaintance of Dr. Hans Münch, writes about him in his book Menschen in Auschwitz, Ullstein, Frankfurt/Main 1980:
“In his book ‘Die unbesungenen Helden’ [The Unsung Heroes], Kurt R. Großmann quotes a richly embellished account by Heinz Kraschutzki about the SS doctor Dr. Moench, who had joined the SS only to save his Jewish wife. When he had to answer to a Krakow court, the whole hall is said to have cried out, ‘Release him!’ Dr. Münch’s wife (that is the correct name) was not Jewish. He had joined the SS because he hoped for better opportunities to work there as a hygienist. During the Krakow trial, he was the only one to be acquitted, because prisoners had testified in his favor. However, no one could report a dramatic outcry from everyone. […]
‘Many years later, when I [Langbein] asked the SS physician Dr. Hans Münch, who had been acquitted in Krakow and who had obviously held Mengele in high esteem,[4] why Mengele was capable of committing acts such as those described earlier, Münch replied: ‘Mengele was convinced that a struggle to the death was being waged between Germans and Jews, and that therefore the Germans must exterminate the Jews, whom he regarded as an intelligent and therefore all the more dangerous race.’’ (p. 385)
“The repeatedly quoted Dr. Hans Münch – born in 1911 – could do otherwise. He was, however, in a particularly favorable situation in Auschwitz, since the Hygiene Institute at which he was employed was directly subordinate to the chief hygienist in Oranienburg, Professor Joachim Mrugrowski. He once described how he used this to shirk being assigned to selections: ‘At first I did not directly refuse – that did not seem possible in the realm of such a bureaucratized pseudo-military affair as Auschwitz was – but I simply said: I can’t do it. Then I went to my immediate boss (Dr. Weber) and presented it to him the way someone would say it, and lamented to him all my distress. Of course, he understood, and he made sure that the next higher departments and bosses heard it from me in the same way. There, too, I found understanding.[3] And after I was able to prove that I was also fully occupied with a lot of other work, I had peace for the next half year and could keep myself free from selections. Later, when I was settled in Auschwitz, other loopholes and tricks were found to avoid such things.’
Marc Klein [a prisoner who worked in the Hygiene Institute] wrote of Münch: ‘He was relatively friendly to the prisoners, which was rare, though not unique.’ Dr. Vilo Jurkovic [also a former prisoner] said Münch was proof that Germans could behave humanely even in SS uniform. Münch was the only one of forty defendants acquitted during the great Krakow Auschwitz trial. In justifying this verdict, the court pointed out that he had been able to stay out of the murder machinery, and witnesses had confirmed that he had helped prisoners establish contact with their families, supplied them with medicines, once got two women released from the penal squad, and had incurred inconvenience because of his friendly attitude toward the prisoners.
But Münch, like his superior Weber, did not object to the following custom that had become established at the Hygiene Institute. Originally, beef was used there as a culture medium. One day, the gentlemen of this institute came up with the idea that they would rather eat the beef assigned for this purpose. As soon as shootings were carried out at the Black Wall, they had meat cut out of corpses that had not yet been completely emaciated, which was used to grow cultures, while the beef that continued to be requested went into the cooking pot.’[5]
After the war I [Langbein] asked Münch, who had settled down as a general practitioner in a small town in Bavaria, how he had come to join the SS at that time. He told me that he had chosen hygiene issues as his research subject, and had done research for the Nazi student body on the living conditions of the population in the Bavarian forest reserve. He received a prize for this work, and Dr. Weber, then already in the SS, became aware of him. Weber persuaded him to join the SS as well, since there he would find the most-favorable conditions for further work in his chosen specialty, while there were hardly any other employment opportunities.[6] Thus, Münch, who had not been brought up in the National-Socialist spirit, joined the SS; and when Weber was ordered to Auschwitz, he went there too.” (pp. 403-405)
In the transcript of the IG Farben trial held by the U.S. military authorities in Nuremberg after the end of the war (Case 6, U.S. versus Krauch, NMT, Vol. VIII, pp. 312-321, transcript pp. 14321-14345), Dr. Münch stated the following:
“In the spring of 1943, the Hygiene Institute in Auschwitz was established to control the epidemics rampant among the prisoners of Auschwitz, and to prevent these epidemics from spreading to the civilian population of the Upper Silesian Industrial Area. It was mainly a matter of typhoid and fever typhus.” (pp. 14324f.)
“In the summer of 1944, the entire Auschwitz complex consisted of 144,000 inmates.” (p. 14326)
“The crematoria and gas chambers were located one or one and a half kilometers southwest of the Birkenau Camp, camouflaged in a small forest. [7][…] One could not see the fires at all [when corpses were burned on large pyres], but one had to smell the stench, since the burning of such a huge number of corpses produced a terrible stench that was perceptible everywhere.[8]” (p. 14327)
“[…] in view of the chimneys of Auschwitz, which smoked continually,[9] every prisoner was reluctant to tell anyone anything.” (p. 14329)
“[On stench:] That was all that could be perceived [in Katowice and the vicinity of Auschwitz] of the gassings.[8]” (p. 14333)
“In my experience, it must be assumed that, although knowledge of the extermination at Auschwitz was general, it came about only by rumor.”[10] (p. 14336)
“Question: Mr. Witness, did you ever see a gassing of human beings?
Answer Münch: I have seen a gassing once.[11]” (p. 14338)
(Udo Walendy, Auschwitz im IG-Farben-Prozeß, Verlag für Volkstum und Zeitgeschichtsforschung, Vlotho 1981, p. 50.)
In a 1981 interview with a Swedish TV station,[12] Münch stated, in contrast to his other accounts, that he had been transferred to Auschwitz a year earlier, hence in the spring or summer of 1943. It is interesting that he confirmed the interviewer’s false statement that Birkenau was seven kilometers from Auschwitz (in fact, it is not even three kilometers), which indicates that this witness was easily influenced. Münch also reported unmistakable smoking chimneys and stench.[9]
Notes
[Subsequent note: The German weekly news magazine Der Spiegel published an interview with Hans Münch in its issue No. 40/1998. Münch evidently had become even more senile in the meantime. Despite many clichés repeated by Münch, it is a psychologically very revealing interview. See also a statement Münch made in 1995 and a revisionist analysis of the same at https://codoh.com/library/document/just-another-auschwitz-liar/].
| [1] | Dr. Münch is thus one of the most important witnesses for the fact that there was no duress (threat of punishment for refusal to obey orders), a defense position the defendants often sought when on trial. |
| [2] | This amounts to a virtual guilty verdict for all other SS men. |
| [3] | In the interview reproduced below, Dr. Münch gives a somewhat different account of the events that led to his exemption from the selections. According to this, he had personally gone to Berlin, which may be doubted in view of the effort involved at the time. |
| [4] | One could also interpret this appreciation to mean that Dr. Münch did not remember Dr. Mengele as that brutal “angel of death” so vividly portrayed by many inmates. |
| [5] | Dr. Münch’s account of these circumstances in the following interview is completely different. According to this, only human flesh from deceased prisoners was taken when beef was not available. Langbein is likely reproducing distorted inmate tales. |
| [6] | According to Dr. Münch’s statement in his interview, he made an effort to get this position, so he did not have to be persuaded. |
| [7] | With this statement, Dr. Münch stands alone among all witnesses. The alleged gassing facilities called “Bunker 1” and “Bunker 2” reported by other witnesses are said to have been located only a few tens or hundreds of meters north of the Birkenau Camp. Cf. the interview. |
| [8] | These technically impossible statements also appear in the following interview, where Münch states that the flames of the pyres could be seen, but that he could not remember any noticeable smell in the camp. |
| [9] | Since crematorium chimneys cannot possibly smoke continuously, this account must have sprung from Dr. Münch’s imagination. Cf. Münch’s analogous statements in the present interview and the accompanying criticism. |
| [10] | If the court had followed the logic of this statement, it would have had to acquit all defendants from the ranks of the Zyklon-B producers and dealers during the IG Farben trial with regard to the charge of “participation in mass murder by delivery of Zyklon B.” It did not follow this logic. In strange contrast to this stands a quotation without source from the German news magazine Focus, No. 38/1995, p. 125: “Concentration camp doctor Hans Münch: ‘Despite the constant admonition for secrecy,’ it had been ‘impossible not to know anything about it.’” Dr. Münch was not a concentration-camp doctor, but a hygienist at the Hygiene Institute of the Waffen-SS. |
| [11] | This interesting answer was not followed up by either the defense or the prosecution with a question aimed at investigating what exactly the defendant claimed to have seen. It was left at that. The only really important question, namely the reality of the gas chambers, was also left unanswered, even unasked. In the following interview, by the way, Dr. Münch contradicts several times in various contradictory versions this account of a single gassing event he allegedly experienced. |
| [12] | Stephane Bruchfeld, Förnekandet av Förintelsen. Nynazistisk historieförfalskning efter Auschwitz, Svenska Kommitten Mot Antisemitism, Stockholm 1995. Unfortunately, the present text from the Internet (Nizkor document pub/people/m/muench.hans swedish-television-interview Last-Modified: 1996/08/10) is a back-translation from English, which in turn is a translation from Swedish, which in turn is a translation of the German interview. Therefore, Münch’s statements are only outlined here. |
In a letter to his professional colleague Dr. Augsberg, Dr. Münch wrote:
“Dr. Hans Münch
Forgegenseestr. 27
87672 Rosshaupten28 Feb. 1995
Dear Mr. Augsberg!
Unfortunately, I am only able to reply to your letter of February 8 today. After my visit to the celebrations commemorating the 50th anniversary of the dissolution of the Auschwitz Camp and the TV reports accompanying this event, I have a lot of writing to do.
So, you are mainly concerned with the problem of the use of hydrogen cyanide (gassing of humans in very large chambers). The chambers 1 and 2 [at] Birkenau (finished 1943 to 1944) held up to 3000(!) densely packed people. Normally, they were occupied only with 1200 to 2000.[1] Also during the large transports from the Balkans and from Eastern Poland or Ukraine, and the so-called celebrities’ camp (e.g., Theresienstadt) still remaining in the Czech Republic.
The Leuchter Report, which I have read (translation of the original), claims that even after 30 years, HCN could still be detected in the plaster of the chambers, if gassings with Zyclon really happened. However, the chemical analyses were negative.
Unfortunately, I cannot comment on this due to a lack of sufficient chemical knowledge. I did not make any special effort to find out what science had to say about this, because I observed the process of gassing from the very beginning at least 6 times through the peepholes installed in the gates. First while ‘on duty,’ when, at the end of August 1944, I was ordered by the commandant and the garrison physician to be briefed on the selection procedure at the ramp. The camp doctors in office at that time (5-6) were overworked. During this night of forced instruction on how to handle selections and supervise gassing, which was part of the normal duty of the camp doctors, I had to experience the procedure of extermination of Jews unfit for work in all its details for a whole night. My refusal to do this ‘medical service’ was accepted by the head of the SS Hygiene Institute in Berlin (Prof. Mrugrowsky), and the ‘administrator’ of this office (an Oberscharführer (staff sergeant)), who was satisfied and pleased to prove that there was danger in exceeding firmly delimited competences, strengthened my back. Finally, a compromise was reached. A young full-time colleague (Dr. Delmot) was assigned to Auschwitz. He had to work half days as a camp doctor. After that, he could start his PhD thesis at the Hygiene Institute Auschwitz. In English captivity, he committed suicide (shot himself).[2]
A somewhat long preface to the fact that I cannot say more about the Zyclon problem than what I saw exactly. (There remains one reservation: I did not see the gassing of children. Without official selection, they were taken together with some mothers first to a barrack of the camp, and were later gassed separately)[3].
Zyclon was filled in tin cans. For the gas chambers, without the usual ‘warning substance.’ HCN, as far as I know, is gaseous at about 12°.[4] It was poured into the chambers, which were camouflaged with showers, through shafts that reached down to the floor.
With summer temperatures, gassing was not a problem, I was told. The gas lying on the floor quickly vaporized – I assume that it was adsorbed to a porous substrate. (Unfortunately, I do not know exactly, because I did not inform myself about the theory.[5])
At first, the chambers were filled normally without resistance. The victims were given soap and rags to feign cleaning. When the chambers were filled to 2/3, the guards standing at the gates inside the chamber and also the dressed prisoners of the Sonderkommando left the chamber, and the rest (those still outside) were pushed by force through the hermetically closing heavy gates. I do not want to describe the panic that arose soon after the closing. Normally, the lights were switched off. After a very short time (I estimate 1/2 minute, probably shorter), the initially very violent escape movements became slower, and the screaming, which could be perceived from the outside in a very muffled way, also became silent. In front of the gates, they began to remove the belongings of the victims, which had been carefully placed.
After about 20 minutes, the exhausters started to work. About 15 minutes later, the opposite gates[6] were opened, and the corpses, sometimes very dirty with excrements, after cleaning with a strong water jet, were taken away by the Sonderkommando of the crematorium inmates.
So much for Zyclon and what I saw during my instruction at the ramp. I saw the whole procedure of a selection and gassing only during this night at the end of August. Selections in the camp, meaning selections of Jews who were no longer fit for work due to illness and malnutrition, proceeded quite differently. They took place at irregular intervals in the camp infirmaries. They were endured with stoic composure by the apathetic patients, most of whom were suffering from famine edema. They were a part of the camp’s everyday life, and were accepted as inevitable without resistance in resignation, because that was just the way it was.
In view of these realities, I have not engaged on principle in speculation about Holocaust numbers. It should be remembered that, among the transports of Jews, only those able to work were counted. Until the end of 1943, there were also the extermination facilities in the Government General (Treblinka, Sabibor!) There was no counting at all.[7]
In view of these facts, and taking into account the events in Somalia and probably also in Iraq, where there is extreme hunger, just because they cannot depose a small military junta. One must also consider that the numbers at Auschwitz were only possible because, contrary to prior chemical-physiological knowledge or experience, HCN cannot be used just for the destruction of lice. Only laymen could have come up with this idea. And they arise from the bitter experience of one who was there.
With kind regards and best wishes
Hans Münch”
Notes on Dr. Münch’s letter
| [1] | In the following interview, Dr. Münch admits that he has no knowledge of how many victims the alleged gas chambers could hold. |
| [2] | Thus, Dr. Münch’s reports remain unverifiable. Cf. the remarks by H. Langbein, Menschen in Auschwitz, op. cit., pp. 405f. |
| [3] | A legally and scientifically worthless statement from hearsay. |
| [4] | The boiling point of hydrogen cyanide is 25.7°C. |
| [5] | In the following interview, Dr. Münch says that he could not be taught anything new about Zyklon B as a hygienist. After all, he had trained disinfectors. |
| [6] | In the following interview, he also mentions opposite doors. |
| [7] | The camp was called Sobibór. He can have learned about this only from literature. |
The Interview
In the following table, the interview is reproduced in the left column, while the right column contains analytical comments. Germar Rudolf’s (R) conversation with Dr. Hans Münch (M) in his home at Forggenseestr. 27, D-87672 Roßhaupten, took place on June 15, 1995, from about 2:00 p.m. to 4:10 p.m. (F = wife of Dr. Hans Münch). It was recorded on a tape cassette. In the original German transcript, it was attempted to reproduce the exchange of words as far as possible without any alteration, i.e., with all colloquial nuances and slips of the tongue. Needless to say, this was impossible to maintain for this translation. Therefore, the text was streamlined to make it more readable and easier intelligible.
Despite the length of the interview, the publisher has decided to publish it without abridgements in a single issue of this journal, since a division of the interview would certainly not simplify its reading.
| The Interview | Comments on the Interview |
|---|---|
| [At the beginning, Dr. Hans Münch tells that he had a delegation from Israel visiting him in the morning, whom he had only recently seen off]. | |
| R: So, Dr. Münch. Let’s start over again. I found an article here in the Süddeutsche Zeitung where there was a preview about the TV programs on the fiftieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. Do you know if you appeared in any of these films?
M: I can’t tell you how many. So… R: Several? M: So here from Germans at least 4 or 5. About RTL and all the others, the official ones, the state ones too [unintelligible] and so on. The others cut scenes together, and so on. R: It says here – as far as I know, Mr. Augsberg told me in his letter, that was ZDF [2nd German State TV channel], “The Truth About Auschwitz,” moderated by Guido Knopp. Do you have any recollection of that? M: [shakes his head] R: You don’t know specifically? M: No, it’s not important either. R: Yes, it’s ultimately unimportant; you’re right. Yes, well, now I have first of all in the list of questions personal data: We already had the year of birth; you said, you were born in 1911. M: Yes. R: Place of birth, where were you…? M: Freiburg in Breisgau, and that doesn’t matter; that was just by chance. R: Were you a member of the NSDAP? M: From, wait a minute, the last point in time: 1937, that was the last point in time, and that was also the thing where I took my exams, and if you weren’t a member, then you could still take your exams, but you could hardly, you couldn’t get a job. R: So, membership was practically a prerequisite for a career? M: In general, right. R: And Waffen SS or SS? Did you become a member? M: I joined, I enlisted in the Waffen SS in 1943. R: 1943 only? M: 1943. R: And what was the…? |
|
| M: Because that was the only way to get out of the dilemma that I was in here in the country. I had to cure the population and had no clue about it, because I had only worked scientifically before, and so on. And, well, that’s how I got here, and then I met, I met once, I was assessed as indispensable, wasn’t I, and then this one morning, when I came to Munich again and I was doing courtesy visits, I met an acquaintance on the street, and I complained to him. He said: “That’s no problem, I’ll do it easily. I have a good connection to the Waffen SS, you can get in touch with them.” And then, three weeks later, it was a… He was an intimate of… what was his name? Jesus Christ! The one who made these pogroms in the Czech Republic. It doesn’t matter. Anyway, one of them… | Münch probably refers to the reprisals after the fatal assassination of Heydrich against the civilian population of the Czech village Lidice, where the assassins had taken shelter. |
| R: Heydrich?
M: Heydrich! They had gone to school together, and so on. Good. R: What kind of scientific work did you do? About what? M: As a student, I started studying a little bit, very late, but then I studied very intensively, and as a student, I had a scholarship for bacteriological research. Culture media, back then that was a, how do you say? So, it was all about procuring material that was important for the war, that was scarce for the war. Because I had also studied chemistry, that suited me quite well. So, I was right in the middle of it, and since then, I had only worked scientifically, and then I was dumped here in the Allgäu at the beginning of the war, and they said, “So now, cure the people,” and I didn’t have a clue. Wanted to get away. And then in 1943 arose as the only possibility, and at the same time, yes, I can also say, there is another one who we both knew, right? “He has a big bacteriological institute there, and he is looking for someone. He absolutely has to find someone, and he can’t find anyone. I can arrange it so that you go there.” I mean, it couldn’t be more convenient, and so I went there. R: Where did you end up, geographically? M: What? To Auschwitz. R: Directly to Auschwitz, in 1943 already? M: Pardon? No, in 1943. I first had to do training for eight weeks, and so on. I had no basic military training and nothing, right? Yes, and then I got there, I was in the middle of it, and had no clue. R: When was that exactly? M: That I started there, that was in January 1944. R: To Auschwitz, then? M: Yes. R: And what was “Auschwitz”? What does that mean? The town itself or any…? |
 Map of the Auschwitz region around the year 1943/1944. At the bottom of the picture, the settlement Rajsko near the Sola, where the Hygiene Institute of the Waffen-SS was located. (Click on image to open an enlarged version.) |
| M: The city itself is a provincial nest, isn’t it? So, enormous industries developed around there at that time, because they made synthetic gasoline, IG-Farben, right? And they needed workers, and so they made the concentration camp there. And then, this concentration camp became the extermination camp already in 1942, didn’t it? So, where they gassed. And that’s how it escalated.
R: And where were you specifically? M: At the Hygiene Institute of the Waffen-SS in Auschwitz, that is, at the concentration camp in Auschwitz. And why did they put a hygiene institute there? Because after the thing had existed for a year, this concentration camp, and the fence was made very tight, hygiene was written very small. So, many epidemics occurred there, typhus and typhoid fever, and whatever else you can imagine, and they are, yes, and the… typhus and… they were then all, and of course they then infected the civilian population. And the wife of a high-ranking SS leader got sick, and there was fire on the roof, and something had to be done. And that’s when the Hygiene Institute was called in. And that’s how it got there. Because in itself, that’s… R: Was that, was that in the extermination camp itself, where you were working, or was that…? M: Pardon? R: The hygiene institute? M: That was outside. R: That was outside. |
Since Dr. Münch was not yet there in 1942, this is a hearsay statement.
|
| M: Outside of the camp, but also with a fence around it. That was a unit of, so they pulled out very good scientists during the big transports. They were all very excellent people. And our lack of work was not due to that, right? And the equipment was also excellent, it was stolen from France. And that was optimal, that is, in terms of work, it would have been optimal. | Again, a hearsay statement. |
| R: How far was that, eh, that area away from the actual death camp?
M: One and a half, two kilometers. They marched in every morning. It was a detachment of 100 men. R: And what did you do there in your normal activity? Culture substrates…? M: Well, that was about getting hygiene into this pigsty, wasn’t it? And there, you did exactly what you do everywhere in such areas: you isolated the centers, and, of course, did examinations, so that we knew what was coming from where. It all absolutely depended on it, because the diseases progressed quite differently due to the malnutrition, and there one had… that was the prerequisite, that one…, if half the camp had died, it did not matter. There was a crematorium right from the start. And they were incinerated, right? So, that was not the problem, but the problem was how to prevent it from getting out into the civilian population, among the guards, into the industrial area, which was connected to it. This was always about, about 100,000 people; I mean just those who were in the camp. R: What I read once – that’s why I wrote it all down – in one of the books, is that in the Hygiene Institute meat from executed prisoners was used as a basis to grow bacteria. M: That’s a small, small, small episode, but it happened by chance, because normally, culture mediums are made from slaughterhouse waste, aren’t they? So, from meat, which is contaminated and so on. And that is all cooked and so on. And one day, there was actually nothing there. And then, they said, “Wait a minute, guys, there are all these corpses lying around. Why shouldn’t we use human flesh?” R: So, they didn’t kill people especially for that reason, but did…? M: No, no. There was enough lying around; there was enough there. R: How did you find out that it was human flesh? Did they talk about it openly, or did you hear about it by rumor? M: That was actually a bottleneck. We had everything, but there wasn’t enough bouillon. It’s called bouillon; it’s meat extract, right? And you have to have it there, and where do we get it, right? R: Did you take the corpses yourself and process them, or…? M: No, they sent someone there and said: “Come, now.” We called, and that was quite, nothing spectacular, wasn’t it? They said, “We need a few good chunks of meat, they’re lying around at your place,” right? Something like that. So that, you can’t, how do you say, that was there; it appeared as if that was a special thing, wasn’t it? That was a very small thing there, where nobody thought about it, right? R: Didn’t you somehow have any scruples at that time, when you went along with this? After all, somehow, this was human flesh… |
 Inscription in the undressing room of a hygiene barrack in Auschwitz-Birkenau: “One louse, your death.” An exhortation to the prisoners to cleanliness. Typhus, the main cause of death in Auschwitz, is transmitted by the louse. (Click on image to open an enlarged version.) |
| M: Excuse me, if you have seen that daily, so, as normal business, right? That some hundreds have died there, have starved, right? Or perished otherwise, and, I mean, at first, the crematoria were not built to destroy people, but in order to get rid, somehow, of all the dying inmates. You can’t bury all that.
R: Nowadays, with the consent of relatives, corpses, I may say, are also used for medical purposes, for the education of students and the like. M: That has always been the case, and… R: That is, you saw it in a similar way at that time? People died, and you don’t have meat, and to possibly help other people by doing epidemic research, then at least the meat was still to be used, or how did you think of it back then? M: About such small things one has at all… R: There one did not think at all more? |
At the peak of the epidemics in the summer/fall of 1942 and summer of 1943, well over 100 prisoners actually died daily, mainly as a result of typhus. However, Dr. Münch was not yet in the camp at that time. (Cf. J.-C. Pressac, Die Krematorien von Auschwitz: Die Technik des Massenmords, Piper, Munich, 1994).
While Dr. Münch speaks here of the use of the flesh of those prisoners who died a “natural” death, he later speaks of the use of the flesh of gassing victims (here). |
| M: …There one neither thought nor spoke at all, right? And the problem is that it was not even particularly well suited for it, the human flesh. And above all, not this flesh, which prior to this went through the chimney, through the crematoria, where they were poisoned with hydrogen cyanide. Do you understand?
R: So, they practically took the meat from those who were killed in the gas chambers, the meat from those…? |
It seems unlikely that meat contaminated with HCN would have been used for medical experiments, when uncontaminated meat was available in abundance due to the many victims of the epidemic. Its use was confirmed by Dr. Münch a little earlier (here) |
| M: Yes, of course. You could have gotten others, but you would have had to look for them first. But they were there, they were there every day, weren’t they? And we are speaking of huge quantities, right?
R: Before we continue, can you make a sketch of the camp from back then, from where the individual parts of the camp were, where they were? |
Here Dr. Münch contradicts himself and the facts he correctly described earlier (here): There was unfortunately never a shortage of naturally deceased persons in Birkenau. |
| M: No, that, oh, there are books. There are lots of them, in every book about Auschwitz you get, that’s, I can’t give you any more than this, do you understand? The camp plans are everywhere, so that’s no problem at all. It doesn’t matter at all. There were two large camps. One was Birkenau, where men and women were together, that was, in good times, there were up to a hundred thousand, if you can imagine that. And there was the Main Camp. There was a maximum of 20,000 to 25,000 in there.
R: Were you also in the Main Camp itself? M: Yes, of course, always, everywhere. Main Camp. I mean, we were jointly responsible for hygiene, and if somewhere, if we noticed things in the camp, there and there, then you had to go there, you had to see what you could do and how it was, what you could do about it. There were, these are dimensions that you can’t imagine: 100,000 people; quite a city, isn’t it? And all of them crowded, very, very crowded, right? R: So, you went continuously to the camp at Birkenau as well as to the Main Camp itself? M: Yes, of course, and that’s clear. Although that was not my problem. My problem was that I had been promised or that it had been agreed that I had nothing to do with this whole thing, but only had to lead this institute, right? And then, when the big mass transports came in the summer of 1944, there simply weren’t enough doctors for the selections. R: Yes, let’s perhaps put that back a bit. M: That was the problem. Everything else is… R: Do you have…, I want to keep a little bit of a chronology here; otherwise I’ll get mixed up; otherwise we’ll do things twice. M: Yes, yes. R: So. Main Camp, you have been there. Now, I would be interested in camp sketches. Very probably from the Main Camp, could you very probably… could you still draw a sketch of what was where, approximately? |
The first indication that Dr. Münch is very well read in Auschwitz literature; otherwise, he would not know that such plans can be found in every book. |
| M: Oh, there goes… that was…, when I took the…, there I….
R: Then you also take books? M: I mean, I can draw it for you, but, but there’s no point at all. Where you can get them from? R: Nah, I just want to know if you can remember it yourself. M: I was there again just now. I was there now for the fiftieth anniversary. R: That is to say, your memory stems more from your current visits and from the plans that you know from books? M: Yes, yes. When you go in and out of there every day, you can’t…, that stays with you, of course, right? That’s not a problem at all. It’s just hard for you to even imagine the dimensions. R: Yes, yes. M: That is the most difficult thing. R: Have you heard of shootings, executions in the Main Camp? M: Of course, but there, for that, there…, those are things, there it…, that was only a very small side issue. There, no one… Executions happened rarely, right? That is much too much effort. R: You didn’t experience anything like that? M: Shootings? R: Yes. |
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| M: I don’t think I’ve ever seen one, right? Because that was relatively rare. Look, if you kill more than 2,000 people in one night, then you can’t deal with shootings. Those are totally different dimensions. There you have that… That has been a factory. What do you think? I mean, these are… One has completely wrong ideas as to how it all went, right? The whole, the … Everything that was brought from the Balkans or from France or from Holland; they all arrived as families, right? And those… Everything that was children, that is, that was not fit for work, already because of their smallness, they were primarily gassed in the first place. There was no talk of that at all. Whether someone would be shot or something like that, that was… It was far too much effort.
R: Oh dear, yes. The gassings, where did they take place, the gassings? They were… M: They were in the crematoria. R: In the crematoria? M: Yes. They were, the crematoria. They were buildings; there was…. R: In which camp were they now, of which…? M: They were all only in Birkenau. R: Only in Birkenau? |
During the Second World War, the British were able to intercept and decrypt the radio transmissions of the SS from Auschwitz. According to these messages, there were not only many deaths from epidemics, but also isolated executions by hanging and shootings. However, nothing is mentioned of gassings in these radio messages. (F. H. Hinsley, British Intelligence in the Second World War, Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, London, 1989, p. 673).
Dr. Münch’s thesis that one would not have bothered with elaborate executions in view of the effectively running extermination machinery is interesting, since this conclusive argument would suggest, in view of the proven executions and hangings, that there was no effective mass extermination at Auschwitz. The death books of Auschwitz show that a considerable number of children and old people (“unfit for work”) were admitted to the camp, i.e., not gassed on arrival. (cf. Sonderstandesamt Arolsen (ed.), Die Sterbebücher von Auschwitz, Saur, Munich, 1995). |
| M: There was one in the Main Camp, how one had tried, that was before my time. How to do it at all, there was a test barracks where they did it. They were, the, eh…
R: So, you only know about gassings in the Main Camp from hearsay? You were there… M: In the Main Camp, it happened only a as a test, as tests. R: Only as tests? M: When the transports arrived, right?, and everyone was selected who was unable to work, that was the task of the doctors, and… R: Again, back to the Main Camp. The test gassings. You said that was before your time, the test in the Main Camp. M: Well before my time. R: When did you learn about it, about these tests? |
Confused statement from hearsay (Cf: C. Mattogno, Auschwitz: The First Gassing, 4th ed., Castle Hill Publishers, Dallastown, PA, 2022. |
| M: I only have that, I only know that from the so-called literature, that is, one knows that Gerstein did that, and that one had such and such difficulties and so on. That…
R: So, you have no knowledge about it yourself? |
Gerstein allegedly witnessed a gassing at the Belzec Camp, but never at Auschwitz (cf. Henri Roques, The “Confessions” of Kurt Gerstein, Institute for Historical Review, Costa Mesa, Calif., 1989; C. Mattogno, Rudolf Reder versus Kurt Gerstein: Two False Testimonies on the Bełżec Camp Analyzed, Castle Hill Publishers, Uckfield, 2021). |
| M: I have no knowledge of that at all.
R: You know the locations today in this Auschwitz Museum, I assume, very well? M: I beg your pardon? R: The way the Auschwitz Museum is built today, you know it very well, I suppose? M: Nothing has been built there at all, but the Main Camp is the Auschwitz Museum. R: Good, exactly. M: And from Birkenau, where the 100,000 were, there is only about six, eight barracks around and the so-called entrance gate, and nothing else. R: Main Camp, back. Today you can visit this gas chamber as such with the crematoria. Have you been in there? M: Can’t do anything anymore. As I said earlier, whether it is reconstructed according to the testing time, when they tried out the gas, or whether it has remained standing at all or not, right? That I don’t know. They set up a furnace so that we can see what a crematorium furnace looked like. And then they said, down there in those vaults, there they were gassed, right? But from the actual gas chambers and from all these crematoria, nothing is left. Everything was blown up. R: Not in the Main Camp either? M: There was nothing there, practically. R: In your time… M: …There were only these test facilities. R: So, in your time, there was nothing more? M: Well, because this Main Camp was kept as a museum, let’s say, wasn’t it? The other barracks would have all collapsed, they were all wooden barracks. R: Alright. Birkenau. We would probably have the same problem there now. In Birkenau, you said, were the crematoria, and there, in the crematoria, murder was committed. |
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| M: In the crematoria, it unfolded as follows: There were four crematoria, weren’t there? They all became bigger and bigger and bigger, because the transports became more.
R: So, they were extended? M: They always built a new one. R: Always a new one. M: Yes, built in the back. And… R: But how do you know that? Also from literature, or from your own experience, or…? M: I, that was… One was constantly broken, wasn’t it? Then it had to be repaired again. Then they built a new one right next to it, and so that was everyday life. And these gassings, these crematoria, where the furnaces were, that was in the immediate vicinity of these halls, or whatever you want to call it, where the gas was let in. R: Yes, to the details we will perhaps come to in a moment, to the irregular things. Your regular activities in Birkenau, what were they? If you were a hygienist… M: If anything, if there was something for which a hygienist was needed, I was, we were, we had to go, right? R: Yes, what was the specific activity? |
Crematoria IV and V, which were planned later, were considerably smaller than the previously planned Crematoria II and III (15 muffles each), each with eight muffles (incineration sites). Crematorium II was originally intended as a replacement for the old crematorium at the Main Camp. Only with the catastrophic conditions during the epidemic summer of 1942 was the number of planned crematoria increased to two, then to four, before even one of them had been completed, hence could have been overloaded or broken down. (Cf. in this regard and regarding other constructional conditions: C. Mattogno, F. Deana, The Cremation Furnaces of Auschwitz: A Technical and Historical Study, 2nd ed., Castle Hill Publishers, Uckfield, 2021; C. Mattogno, The Real Case for Auschwitz: Robert van Pelt’s Evidence from the Irving Trial Critically Reviewed, 3rd ed., Castle Hill Publishers, Uckfield, 2019). |
| M: Yes, when in some barracks there was a new suspicion that a new epidemic was breaking out, right? We as so-called expert had to… And the problem was that the camps themselves were not happy that someone was again meddling in their area, and so on. So that was, it is difficult to describe, there were these internal quarrels and so on …
R: Then you examined the people, didn’t you? |
What is a so-called expert? |
| M: No. Then we had to see where the [infection] center is, right? And the reason for it could be. Mostly, it was because someone somehow fell ill with a fever and had certain symptoms, and then every doctor… There was, usually a doctor in every barracks who was either directly active, or there was someone in there who then made sure that it was covered up as much as possible. And it was this cover-up that caused the epidemics to grow in the first place, wasn’t it?
R: Yes, were they SS doctors or were they prisoners? M: They were all prisoner doctors who were employed by the SS and were supervised, yes. R: Yes, and why did they cover it up? Surely, they must have had an interest in that…. M: Of course, of course, but how should they do that? Then they also had to give lethal injections to this, to that person, so anyway, they had to get rid of him, you know? The center, that wasn’t so easy, because everyone was registered, and every evening there was roll call, and if someone was missing, then all hell broke loose, right? So, these are all things that you can’t describe at all. You have to know the basic concepts, how it was done, and so on. You can talk about it for days. I mean, nothing like that ever existed until then. Whether it recently happened somewhere in Rwanda or somewhere else, we don’t know. R: Yes, now we come to the question of mass extermination. Were you ever required to make selections? M: Well, that was my problem. R: That was your problem? M: Normally not. R: Normally? M: Normally I hadn’t had anything to do with that at all. But in June/July of 1944, right? There were so many transports coming from the Balkans in particular and from everywhere. There were – right? What shall I call it? – so many arrivals that the doctors simply couldn’t keep up. Because they had a lot of other things to do. The SS doctors, right? They had to do the selections, they were simply overwhelmed, right? And then they thought, well, there’s another one in the Hygiene Institute, that’s also a doctor, he has to come here, too. R: What was your rank? What was your function? M: The lowest one has: Lieutenant, Untersturmführer, that’s all. R: So, you had the… M: But that was only so that I could be employed there. So, normally, I would have never had [that rank] after my [short] service time, right? R: And then you were obligated to do something like that? |
This cover-up of catastrophic conditions by the prisoner capos, which was particularly dangerous for the health of the prisoners, is described particularly well by the former concentration-camp inmate Paul Rassinier, Ulysses’s Lie, Castle Hill Publishers, Uckfield, Bargoed, 2022, where it is also described that this uncooperative behavior of the prisoners had nothing at all to do with their fear of being murdered in case of illness, but found its justification in the most-brutal hierarchy fights and rivalries among the prisoners, as they can be found in every prison even today.
The thousands of examination and care reports of thousands of sick prisoners admitted to the prisoners’ hospital, which are stored in the Auschwitz State Museum, also prove that sick inmates were not killed in Auschwitz, but that a great deal of effort was made to heal them. (As an example, cf. the fate of J. Freimark, in C. Jordan, “The German Justice System: A Case Study,” in Germar Rudolf (ed.), Dissecting the Holocaust: The Growing Critique of “Truth” and “Memory,” 3rd ed., Castle Hill Publishers, Uckfield, 2019, pp. 141-173; in general, see C. Mattogno, Healthcare in Auschwitz: Medical Care and Special Treatment of Registered Inmates, Castle Hill Publishers, Uckfield, 2016). Dr. Münch evades an answer. |
| M: …I was meant to be obligated to do that. But not anymore. At that time, I was not the first in charge. I was the second man, but the so-called first man, he was practically never there anyway. He was needed for completely different things. He was a hygienist at the mines, where the V2 [rockets] was made, right? There he had to… A lot was done with prisoners there. He had to set up the camps and so on. Yes, and then, so, I had practically not much to do at all. I had enough manpower, I just had to keep an eye on things, right? And then they said: He’s sitting over there doing nothing, and we… Why shouldn’t he also do selections? And then, I went to the central Hygiene Institute in Berlin the next day, when I was supposed to do a visit there, and I met the boss there, thank God, and told him: “Well, you could do… But I refuse, I won’t do it. I didn’t even come here under these conditions,” and so on. “I don’t want to. I came voluntarily. I don’t belong to the SS at all,” and so on. And then he said: “I understand everything. Be quiet. You are lucky. We have, thank God, a young man who has come from the officer’s academy, that is, from this school, who has had basic SS training since he was a child, right? We will send him,” and then: “We need you. Someone has to be in the institute. So, then you got lucky.” And so, I escaped this thing.
R: So, you were not assigned to do selections? M: What? R: You didn’t have to select? M: There was some back and forth, right? And then, it was settled. Then, of course, came the problem for me. Then the young man arrived. He didn’t have a clue either. He had never heard of gassings, despite his special SS training, and he had a father who was a big shot. And he said: “I won’t do it,” and called his father, and everything came back and forth and back and forth. And then, because his father was a much higher animal than the camp commandant, right? And all the others who had something to say there, they said, “Yes, well, now stay there and take a look at it first. You’ll see, it’s not so bad,” etc., right? That worked very well. Within 14 days at the latest, he said to himself: “Yes, well, I can see that these gassings are the best thing; otherwise, it would be much worse, when the people die of diseases and hunger, epidemics and everything else. Then, it’s better to kill them that way, if they can’t survive, right? So, you select and take those who can’t survive anyway. That was the morality, and that was how the whole thing was conceived. And then, he was there for 14 days. In the morning, he had to do normal camp duty as a doctor, right? And in the afternoon, he was at the Hygiene Institute; and there he was directly confronted with these things, wasn’t he? R: So, you had, in plain English, never made selections? M: Never. I am very often… Well, yes, once, where I, how do you say it? I was to be installed, right? I had to spend a whole night being told how to do it in detail, even though I already knew everything in detail, of course. But there was no getting around it. As a hygienist, I had to be everywhere, didn’t I? I saw that every day. R: Yes, what? Did you, on that night, the night you say you were instructed, did you also do the selection yourself, or did you just watch? M: I was standing next to it, so I let them show me what it was like. And, do you understand? That, well, it was all military, and military must be… R: What did they actually tell you there, what your task was? What does that mean: selections? What was done there, and where was it done? How? M: That was done… there is a big station, so to speak, a huge peron[?]. There were these about 30 to 50, up to 50 freight cars, right? Crammed with people. They all had to get out. Then, all the children were sorted out. Then, they were told that they were going to a special camp, right? And they gave them a few more women. And then, the men and women had to line up separately. If there were old people and those who were sick, they were supposed to report immediately. They were put in a pile right away. There was no selection. And then, the doctors who were on duty had to go to… That was different at different times; there was no direct rule. It depended on how big the transport was, when the next one was coming, and so on. They had to march past them, and then he said: “You go to the right, and you go to the left” and… R: Okay; what was the criterion? M: The criterion was, is, is he, after… If there was time, after a closer look, is he fit for work? Can he be deployed to work? Or is he only a burden? R: Alright; does one need the qualification of a doctor for that? M: No. But Hitler was… From Himmler it is known that he was, first of all, a school teacher, and secondly a perfectionist, so [unintelligible], and so, if there are selections anyway, then doctors have to do that, don’t you understand? R: I don’t understand that, but I take it that way. |
These remarks by Dr. Münch are likely to have deprived many a defendant in trials about National-Socialist violent crimes of the last possibility of an effective defense. Doctors or other SS members who were in any way involved in alleged extermination operations – even if only peripherally, for example, in the typing pool – have claimed during such trials that they acted under duress, or assumed that they were under duress. However, Dr. Münch’s testimony, which he probably gave before many courts, proves that there was no duress; that anyone who showed even a little reluctance could avoid aiding and abetting the alleged genocide.
However, what if the reason for the reported selections, which undoubtedly took place, was not a separation of inmates to go either to the “gas chamber” or to be admitted to the camp, but rather a decision to either be admitted to the camp or to be transferred to another camp? Such a question, however, is illegal to raise in many countries, as is evidenced by the fact that a book investigating precisely this question was confiscated, banned, and consigned to book burning in Germany in early 1995. For the English equivalent, see S. Werner, The Second Babylonian Captivity: The Fate of the Jews in Eastern Europe since 1941, Castle Hill Publishers, Uckfield, 2019. The author and publisher of the 1995 German edition could escape prosecution only because the statute of limitations for the prosecution of this alleged crime of presenting a novel historical thesis had expired (back then only 6 months). Dr. Münch’s statements about the young, unfortunate ensign, who had to take Münch’s job at the ramp, remain unverifiable, since this young man, according to Dr. Münch’s statements in the letter to Dr. Augsberg reproduced earlier, took his own life in British captivity after the war. He is not alone in this, as many SS men saw only death as a way out of the never-ending torture of the Allied victors. (Cf. G. Rudolf, “The Value of Testimony and Confessions on the Holocaust,” in: idem, Dissecting the Holocaust, op. cit., pp. 83-128, esp. pp. 88-94). |
| M: So that must be quite… a lot of people don’t understand. But that was the opinion. So, it has to be done absolutely perfectly. So that nobody says…
R: That means it was decided practically by glancing at a prisoner more or less immediately, left or right? M: That’s right. R: But that way one could not make a reasonable decision at all! |
Probably true.
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| M: No. Man, if… Selection already happened before that. So, for example, if there was a shortage of any specialists, then all those who had knowledge in, let’s say, agriculture or welding or something, or special things, even medical, if there was a demand for doctors, then they should report. And so, they already sorted out first of all those for whom there was a need. That was, you see, that only as an aside …
R: So, you were standing right next to it once, but you said that as a hygienist, you were often in the camp, and you saw it often? M: I saw it frequently. That is clear. R: Hence, from that your knowledge of how that went on in detail? M: The knowledge, so that’s not, that was… When you were already there, that was normal, everyday life. Everyday life was that. R: Now to the question of how such selections proceeded. Not from the way it was done, but regarding the atmosphere; how the SS people behaved. Were there Kapos present among the prisoners? Were there guard dogs? |
There was a selection before the selection. |
| M: So, there were a lot more personnel. Kapos were of course [there]. So, most of the work, what was real work, was done by prisoners. So that was done by proven… mostly by people who had been transferred from other concentration camps. In the concentration camps were also professional criminals and people who were in prison for other reasons, not for political reasons. Those were particularly suited to creating order there, so to speak. First of all, when they had their prisoner clothes on, right? They could talk much better with the people from the transport. First of all. And secondly, when they were… well.
R: Okay. Did that go off quietly? Did the prisoners who were newly unloaded…? M: You can’t say very much. There were transports where there were a few of them, where there were people who knew what was going on. And then it became critical, right? R: Yes, and then what was done? |
In accordance with the experience of P. Rassinier, op. cit. |
| M: I was… I can’t say in detail. It depended on things. The simplest method was to first divide the transport and – the area was big, wasn’t it? – and to bring them together in small groups and then to… And the whole thing was very well camouflaged anyway, wasn’t it? So, whoever was destined to be gassed had first to… In front of the building, everyone had to undress and put their shoes and stockings, and everything exactly in one spot, so that he would find them again when coming back.
R: Yes, perhaps we wait with this. We did not get there yet. Before we get to that, to the next point. Alright. Then we’re at this point: were you required to supervise gassings? M: Supervision of gas… That was really not the task. I only had to determine whether they were really dead, right? But that wasn’t a problem either. R: Alright, did you ever do that? M: None of the doctors did, because that, after five minutes was the maximum, wasn’t it? Was that all, right? Everything was dead. That was not the problem. But the problem was whether the hydrogen cyanide was all gone. R: No, I’m not concerned now with technical issues, but whether you as a person had ever done something like that. You said that you had only been instructed once for selections, but that you had not been deployed. M: So, I have the whole process from the beginning to the [end]; once, right? That was clear. R: So, you were… did you once, were you present at the gassings, for instructions? |
In fact, nothing was camouflaged at Auschwitz. Cf. G. Rudolf (ed.), Air-Photo Evidence: World-War-Two Photos of Alleged Mass-Murder Sites Analyzed, 6th ed., Castle Hill Publishers, Uckfield, 2020; Lili Meier, Serge Klarsfeld (eds.), The Auschwitz Album, Beatle Klarsfeld Foundation, New York, 1989. |
| M: Of course. And there I looked through. How it was going, and so on. I had done that before, too, because when you pass by there every day, not every day, but very often, and see how everything is going, then, of course, you look at it.
R: So basically, only as a spectator, because you were in the camp again and again as a hygienist. Then you experienced that? M: Yes, I experienced that. R: So, it’s not somehow that you were obligated? M: No, not professionally. So, that was just the one time, wasn’t it? R: So otherwise practically a kind of spectator? M: Yes. R: And how many times in total? M: What? R: That you saw something like that; that you were present at a gassing? |
Here he reports that he had already looked into a gas chamber before his instruction. Later, he says that this one time was enough for him (here, here) or that he definitely did not look into it again (here), but later, he claimed that he had looked into the gas chamber even more often after the instruction (here). Finally, at one point, he stated that he “saw nothing” (here). |
| M: I can’t say that. So. I, well, I came to Birkenau, so on average at least two or three times a week, you understand? Birkenau. And there it was; unavoidable; you couldn’t walk, and so on. You drove by car. You couldn’t get past the ramp. And when it was busy, you were just… then you were held up, first of all, and then….
R: No, I mean the gassing itself, which did not take place outside but in the chambers. You had to be purposeful… |
Psychological observation: Dr. Münch reports about his observations of what happened in the open air at the ramp, although he was asked about gassings that took place indoors. Either he equates the selections or other events at the ramp with gassings, or he avoids the subject. |
| M: That was already, that was completely enough for me that one night, wasn’t it? To see how that, how that went.
R: And you didn’t see that again after that? |
Here he reports that this one look into the gas chamber was enough for him (also here). Previously, he reported that he had already looked into the gas chamber earlier (here); later, he claimed that he had looked into the gas chamber even more often after the instruction (here). Finally, at one point, he stated that he “saw nothing” (here). |
| M: That much, which was then much more interesting, wasn’t it? Those were the problems. The crematoria didn’t work anymore, because they were all overloaded. And then you had to burn everything on big funeral pyres, right? The problem was, they also asked the hygienist, what can be done, that… There’s not enough fat burning. Then, the whole pyre doesn’t burn, and so on, you know? Such technical problems…
R: Yes, well, maybe we’ll get to that later. Now, first of all, so, you said, a gassing you practically saw this one time. M: Yes. R: And other times not? |
Psychological consideration: Dr. Münch evades the question, which may be uncomfortable to him, and reports about completely different things, here open-air incineration.
Dr. Münch’s report about the problems with pyre cremations are implausible: First, by the time Dr. Münch came to Birkenau (1944, not even half a year before the alleged end of the extermination), any problems connected with this would have been solved long ago, both from the exterminationist point of view of the beginning of the mass murders in late 1941/early 1942, as well as from the revisionist point of view in view of the thousands of epidemic deaths in the summer of 1942 with insufficient cremation capacity. Second, the fairy tale about the corpse fat which must have flown out of the corpses in sufficient quantities for open-air cremations to be successful, originates from innumerable testimonies, but they are untenable, since no fat flows out of bodies during open-air cremations. Moreover, the body fat, in view of the 60 to 70% water content of the human body, plays only a subordinate role during cremation. (Cf. A. Neumaier, “The Treblinka Holocaust,” and C. Mattogno, F. Deana, “The Cremation Furnaces of Auschwitz,” in G. Rudolf (ed.), Dissecting…, op. cit., pp. 404f., 495-498; C. Mattogno, “The Recovery of Human Fat in the Cremation Pits,” in: Inconvenient History, Vol. 6, No. 3, 2014.) |
| M: Well, I certainly didn’t look into it on purpose; that I most certainly did not do.
R: At the most outside somehow that you saw that something was going on inside a building? M: How they run in there, and so on. R: Yes, yes. Otherwise only from the outside. M: How they stand there and do and…. R: Well, and this one time that you saw it there, you say that was summer of 1944. Can you be more specific about that? M: No. That must have been at the end of June, beginning of July. R: Can you actually give names of people who experienced this themselves, and of whom you perhaps know that they would still be available today as witnesses? M: You mean doctors? R: Yes, SS people, colleagues from back then. |
Here, in accordance with his previous statement, he reports that this one look into the gas chamber was enough for him (here and here). Previously, he reported that he had already looked into the gas chamber earlier (here), and later, he claimed that he had looked into the gas chamber even more often after the instruction (here). Finally, at one point, he stated that he “saw nothing” (here). |
| M: No, there are none. So, whoever they caught, they have now… They are all gone, they are all gone, and the few who got away like that, like Mengele for example, they are no longer alive. | Thus, Dr. Münch’s statements about the persons involved remain unverifiable. |
| R: That is, you are practically the last of these? Can you say it like that? You don’t know anyone else?
M: I have always been the last. I don’t know anybody else either, do I? There were not more than seven doctors, always. That was the highest occupancy rate. R: Do you have contact perhaps to victims or to members of the Sonderkommando? Names you would know somehow? M: Nobody has contact to Sonderkommando. The few who survived, they are all in Israel, right? And they are all hardly approachable. And hardly anyone talks about it. And the few that have talked, they haven’t been able to say anything substantially different. R: You say you were instructed the one time. What – now I come back to it – what would have been your task there specifically? What was the task of the doctors? Why did they have to be there? M: Theoretically, it would have been how to select. We didn’t talk about that at all. First of all because it depended on things, depended on how big the capacities of crematoria were, right? So, how much can we gas at all, right? And secondly, how many are needed? That one must have that many in any case as fit for work. R: Yes, I don’t mean the selections, but the gassing itself. There you also once, you say, looked through the little hole. |
Psychological observation: Dr. Münch was again asked about his tasks during the gassing, but he came back to the selections (cf. here). Is he evading because he does not know what he is talking about? |
| M: I didn’t see anything! That…
R: Alright. Why did the doctors have to be there? Was that also just a crazy idea of Himmler? |
This is an astonishing, central statement: He saw nothing. However, this does not prevent him from claiming the opposite in other places: here, here, here, and here. |
| M: The doctors only had to be there because of the selections and to determine whether they were really all dead, right? – which no one ever did, because they were all dead.
R: So, it was actually also unnecessary? M: Was actually unnecessary, of course. But, as I said, it had to be perfect. Perfection was a tick of Himmler’s. There’s no other way to explain it. R: Now I have, because I have to confess, I have a map of Birkenau with me. You probably know it. I mean, you know your way around literature. Then you will probably know that too. Something like that. M: So, this is Birkenau. R: Exactly. M: And what do you want to know? R: Where you said you witnessed this gassing once. Which one was it at? Do you remember that? M: Which crematorium was that? R: Yes. M: It was this one here, K III was that. R: III was it? |
Psychological consideration: Dr. Münch reduces the activity of the doctors essentially to the selections, although he is supposed to report about gassings. Do all his memories revolve only around selections, and was the rest learned only after the fact? (Cf. here and here) |
| M: This, at the thingy [ramp]. But that night, that is where I saw everything, right? But that night, where I was really officially instructed, it was mainly a matter of… There were these free incineration sites, which were, how do you say? Where they were burned in pits, they were, they were important. And that they worked well; how to supply air, and so on. That was important at that time, and that’s where I, that’s where I saw the most.
R: You said that you had been instructed in Crematorium III at that time. Can you remember the rooms there, can you perhaps draw a sketch of them? M: No, no, no, no. R: You can’t? |
Psychological observation: Again Dr. Münch evades the questions about the gassings and reports about something completely different: this time, the open-air incinerations. (Cf. here)
It is extremely doubtful that Dr. Münch was instructed by the Institute of Hygiene in issues of open-air cremation. For such an instruction, engineers – such as those from the Topf Company building cremation furnaces inside the camp – would have been consulted rather than bacteriologists. |
| M: No. You have to imagine that everything was camouflaged.
R: How camouflaged? M: That was, well, it was disguised as a barn or something like that; anyway, as a civilian, as some civilian thing, wasn’t it? The only thing that…, chimneys were there; big ones, right? They were important, and they were usually set off a bit from the actual buildings, too, so they didn’t stand out. |
The thesis of the camouflage he must have taken from the literature, which is wrong, at least in this point, cf. here.
The only correct thing in this description concerns large chimneys. Crematorium III did not remotely resemble a barn. Its chimney stood inside the building, albeit in an annex. (Cf. J.-C. Pressac, Auschwitz:…, op. cit.). |
| R: Could you see these buildings, the crematoria, from the ramp, that is, the prisoners, when they came into the camp, could they already see these buildings, the crematoria?
M: They were absolutely, absolutely harmless buildings, right? R: But you could see them? They were not camouflaged any further, except that … M: Not when they came in, but when they came in on the…, when they came in, here, for example, here is the station. Where does the thing come in? Here it comes in, and here is the so-called ramp, isn’t it? And there are unloaded, and there has been the selection. And of course, they saw very little of these crematoria. And if they did, and if anyone saw anything, then apart from the chimney, there was nothing conspicuous, nothing at all. But it was only that there were very large gates, right? And then they said, these are for disinfection. Everybody has to be disinfected. [Unintelligible] And there were also. R: What do you mean very large gates? Gates, in the buildings. There were gates in it? M: In the chambers, yes in the buildings, there were huge gates. R: Where the prisoners went in? M: That’s where you went in, wasn’t it? And … R: Yes, now we’re coming…, exactly. Now we’re at this point: the procedure, how that unfolded. You said earlier that the victims undressed before they were murdered. M: Yes. R: Where did they undress? |
In fact, Crematoria II and III could be admired in full beauty from the ramp.
These buildings had no large gates, only plain doors.
|
| M: On the ramp there.
R: On the ramp there? M: On the ramp. So, without then… in the immediate vicinity of the respective crematoria. R: In the open air? M: Yes. R: So here somewhere in the area? [By the ramp.] M: Yes. R: And then, what happened then? How did the victims behave? I mean, you know what I can imagine? In 1940, after all, it wasn’t like today, where the youth or many adults are used to free body culture, to saunas, to seeing each other, even the opposite sexes, naked, that people there just…. M: You must know, the people who came from the transports; they all came from camps. And they somehow knew how to do something; not to carry out some order immediately, right? That had heinous consequences. R: Yes, but when I think, for example, of the transports from Hungary…. M: Yes, they were all before… R: They were not in camps. They came, they all came directly from the train stations in Hungary directly to Auschwitz. |
This narrative is unique among all testimonies. No witness has ever reported that the victims undressed in public on the ramp. Evidently, this event never took place. Dr. Münch projects into his memory other testimonies of people undressing in the open. He must therefore have known and partially internalized these other statements. |
| M: But they were grouped together before. You can be assured. I wasn’t there, I don’t know. But you can be sure that, with the mentality that the Hungarians in particular developed towards the Jews, they were treated very, very, very brutally and badly. And if somebody just tried to do something not correct, not true, there was immediately not only beating, but rigorous punishments. So, there was no problem at all.
R: So, they were disciplined and obediently undressed, intimidated. M: Absolute disciplined. One had… Basically, well, they were all starved, weren’t they? One gave them first of all, that was very important, one gave them first of all, and dehydrated, and thirsty, right? They were first given a lot to drink. And good water, which they haven’t had since, during the whole transport, all of them. So, they were all always grateful that they were treated very humanely there, contrary to other customs, because they came from… Who knows where they came from. R: How were they treated there? That is, did the SS or the Kapos somehow take advantage of these undressing or already undressed prisoners? M: But what do you think? That was everyday life for them, and it was the most important thing for them that, for God’s sake, there should be no fuss. They were very polite. So, they were very special, were… How do you say it? R: Were they treated courteously? M: Treated courteously, weren’t they? Now finally, here comes where you’re doing well and, “Where did you come from,” if you’ve talked to them at all. And above all, they were constantly surrounded by prisoners who were employed to avoid any commotion, right? That everything was quite well, that has proven] best from experience. We knew exactly when a transport came from some country where you didn’t know the people had been treated, right? Then we were already worried. Oh, they came from Holland, so you knew we had to deal with the Dutch in that way. |
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| R: The things that the prisoners took off there, they sorted them neat and tidy?
M: They had to be neat and tidy right there, in order to give the impression that they were coming back, and that nothing should get mixed up, right? R: What was done with them afterwards? M: Already at the moment when the thing was closed, the truck arrived. It was all thrown onto a big truck, and sent to Canada. That’s what they called it. And there, the stuff was sorted and processed and, above all, searched for valuables, for everything, right? Everyone had tried to take something along, hadn’t they? R: Then the victims were naked in front of the gas chamber, or in front of this building, where they were inside … M: They went in there, didn’t they? R: How? So, you said these were big gates where they went through? M: Yes, and came in and…. R: Do you have any idea how big? |
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| M: That was, that was different in each one, the chamber. It was not very big, not bigger, a chamber not bigger like so, like this room here [5×6 m], right? But there were… It had capacity of up to, I think, two and a half thousand in one building. You can read that everywhere. It’s in every book.
R: So, as big as a barn door, or what? |
The alleged gas chamber in Crematoria II or III, which Dr. Münch claims to have seen (here), measured 7 m × 30 m, and could have held a maximum of about 1,000 people.
Here we have a clear indication that Dr. Münch, in describing the details of the alleged gas chamber, did not report from his own experience, but from the literature. |
| M: Barn doors were big, as big as that wall there [2.5×3 m], so 3 m they were.
R: The doors were that big? M: Yes, they were. |
The doors through which victims could have entered crematoria II/III were about normal size (1 m × 2 m) |
| R: So, they entered the chamber from the outside through a large door?
M: There they went in. And over there they went out again through the same big door. |
In Crematoria II and III, after entering the building, one was not immediately in the alleged gas chamber (Morgue 1). One had to go first into the basement, and there through other rooms. Moreover, the alleged gas chamber had only one door. |
| M: Exactly the same one, over there. There were then the crematoria.
R: All right. So, on the opposite side were the crematoria, you had said. M: Yes. R: What does crematoria mean? That is, this gas chamber itself was a separate building? And the crema…. |
The cremation furnaces were in the same building as the alleged gas chamber, but in Crematoria II and III, one floor above the basement level of the alleged gas chamber. |
| M: That’s quite different. Once they were even downstairs, and they were pulled up with freight [elevators?].
R: What was it like in the building where you say? M: It was right across the street. R: It was right across the street. That was Crema III? M: Yes R: Aha, that is, and the room, the gas chamber’s size, you say, was as big approximately as… like your living room? M: Were quite, were quite different. R: …were quite different. |
A reference to Crematoria II and III, where bodies were transported from the morgue (or supposed gas chamber) to the furnace room on the ground floor by freight elevators. |
| M: Well, you can’t say that at all. I really can’t say that in detail, because I didn’t look at it closely, right? I think the size and so on is interesting… That was interesting for those who had to clear the stuff away, who had to clear it away, right? And who had to say, well, the way it was.
R: How were the victims made to go voluntarily into such a gas chamber? |
Psychological consideration: Dr. Münch thinks that only the surviving prisoners of the Sonderkommando had to worry about such details, because they “had to say,” that is: had to say something about it in their testimonies. |
| M: Everybody who comes to the camp had to be disinfected. And there were, there comes, “You have to shower; you have to disinfect; here’s soap and a towel; and it all has to be in order.”
R: And then the … M: And then they went in there. R: With soap and a towel in the shower? M: And then there went also the SS people, and the Kapos above all; they went in with them, and so they said that they, the first ones who came in, lined up right over there, and that everything came in well ordered. R: You said, how many victims did such a gas chamber hold? M: That, each one, there’s no standard, right? R: From, to? |
On issuing soap and towel, see here. |
| M: Let’s say from 50 to…, I really can’t say. I really can’t say. You can’t estimate that at all if you don’t know. I mean, for me it wasn’t important. If there… If you don’t know, you can, if you… you can… 200 people; you’re amazed at how close the… When they’re close together, how small the pile is, right? | This ignorance contrasts with the certainty with which Dr. Münch, in his letter to Dr. Augsberg, wrote of a capacity of up to 3,000 people, a figure which can be found in many a witness report, but which would not have been technically feasible on the approximately 210 square meters of the largest alleged gas chamber available. |
| R: And the victims, how did they behave along the way? Quietly too? Or were they excited, scared, intimidated, or panicked?
M: I mean, excited, that was very rare that there was really excitement; very rare, because they were handled very much with kid gloves, and because that was really so perfectly camouflaged, as a washroom, so to speak, as a disinfection room, and that one therefore also quite accepted, gladly accepted that. R: The SS people, how did they behave? M: Pardon? R: The SS men, how did they behave or the Kapos? M: They kept to themselves, they kept absolutely to themselves, right? They stood around with their rifles, and the work was done only by the Kapos. R: And was there any resistance anywhere when they tried to close the doors, or was that also accepted? M: That was always a problem, right? That’s clear. Because when, all of a sudden, as many as possible were supposed to get in, and then, when it got tight, the prisoners who were inside, well, they slowly pushed their way out, right? And then, from the outside, with great force, the doors were closed, the bolts closed, [it was all] over. That was then made at once very rigorously. R: One question: The people, as you said, got soap and towels. M: Pardon? |
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| R: Those victims have been…
M: Not everyone, but it was just, as much as was possible, right? With such antics, it was camouflaged, right? R: I mean, from the SS’s point of view, it is alright to give a soap along for the shower for camouflage reasons, but if one gets close together, of course, taking a towel along is not… M: Yes, sure, sure. But just imagine, they are all afraid now; they have all been standing for a long time until everything was ready, right? They were happy that it finally went on, and so on. You can’t at all… with normal [conditions], that was … Above all, they were on the road for days. The people were really, above all, thirsty. They were glad that they had water first, weren’t they? They were glad that the seriously ill, or those who had already died in the cars, right? That they had first been separated. They were calmed down and given something, you understand? So that they would rest. Then they were sent to a crematorium just as they were, after the main thing was gone. R: By what means were they killed? M: Well, with hydrogen cyanide. R: With hydrogen cyanide. |
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| M: With hydrogen cyanide, without warning substance.
R: Did you, at the time when you were instructed, get safety instruction on this poison gas? M: Sure, I got that, I don’t know that, but about hydrogen cyanide, everybody was exactly informed, and…. R: Why, why? M: Tell hygienists something about hydrogen cyanide? Hydrogen cyanide is used to exterminate insects, right? So, there was…. R: Was that your job as well? M: We trained so-called disinfectors, didn’t we? So, there wasn’t a word said about that. R: And did you train the people who did the gassings, did you also train them…? M: They were fine, they were not endangered. R: Did you train them? They had to be trained, too. |
Due to the Allied bombing campaign, regular production of Zyklon B with warning agent was disrupted from 1943 onward, so that later a large part of the supplies did not contain any warning agent. |
| M: No, no, no. We only…, but that didn’t go into my area. But for the SS, so for the troops, right? With every troop there was a decontamination troop, right? And they were trained, of course. There were three schools there.
R: The agent, the hydrogen cyanide, how was that stored? Was it… M: In cans. R: In cans. |
The hygienist and SS man Dr. Münch, responsible for disease control in the camp, thus allegedly trained the disinfectors. If persons had also been trained for mass murder, it would of course also have been his task to train them. But he claims to have had nothing to do with this. |
| M: In cans. In cans together with silicic acid, right? Hence adsorbed. It falls down and, for example, I didn’t experience it, because it was all in the summer; it was warm, right? If it was cold in winter, then people were left in these chambers for a while until it got warm.
R: How do you know that? M: What? R: How do you know that? |
Since he was only present during the summer, this is a statement from hearsay. |
| M: Because that’s what they told us.
R: At that time, when you … M: Yeah, yeah, let’s say, “It can go fast. We can pour it right in. We don’t need to preheat,” so to speak. So one calculated. One made a safety coefficient of about 5 minutes, and in my time back then, so in the summer, within three minutes everything was absolutely over. R: The gas chamber that you were instructed in at that time, how was it equipped? I have to stick to my list to be able to grasp that as concretely as possible. The door of which you had just spoken, was quite large, 3 by 2 meters. |
Hearsay |
| M: Yes, and double and, and….
R: What kind of material was it? Was it wood, iron? M: Wood, over and over wood. What was in the middle, inside? I don’t know, I don’t know. R: Was it a single door, a double door, a swinging door, a sliding door, a trap door? |
The interviewer misinterprets this remark “double”, cf. below. |
| M: Well, those were, as far as I remember, they were all big barn doors, weren’t they? That were closed from over there and over there.
R: Alright, what does barn doors mean? Barn doors are sliding doors, aren’t they, not hinged? M: No, not sliding doors but…. R: On hinges? M: Hinged doors. |
There were no barn doors in any of the crematoria. It is possible that Dr. Münch internalized testimonies about Bunkers 1 and 2, which were allegedly used for gassings, and were located outside the actual camp. These buildings were also called “white” and “red farmhouse”. This mental connection with farmhouses may be the origin of his imagination that the supposed gas chambers in or near the crematoria had barn doors or were camouflaged like barns (cf. here). |
| R: So, it’s a double door that closes in the middle?
M: Yes, it’s on the inside. R: Which way did it open? To the inside, to the outside, or swinging? M: Outside, of course. R: To the outside. We had already clarified size, material too. Processing, do you know how thick it was, bracing, tightness? M: Who? R: The door. M: That, in any case, it was double-walled… R: Double-walled? |
The interviewer misinterprets the half-sentence spoken by Dr. Münch (here) as “double door”, although Dr. Münch’s comments on the material of the door (see below) indicate that he only meant “double-walled”. Dr. Münch, however, does not contradict, but readily adopts the thesis of the double door. This witness is therefore very easily influenced. |
| M: Double-walled. I know it because of the sound that was made then, right? When the panic broke out, you had to go very close to hear something. That was just very, very instructive. That was like a buzzing, a loud buzzing from a beehive, about. That much you heard outside.
R: And the same applies to the door that was on the opposite side? |
Such a double-walled door has never been reported before. Nor has any such door ever be found. |
| M: Yes, I don’t know that.
R: You don’t know that? M: Then over there was the Kommando. R: Yes, I mean now in terms of the size of the doors, so…. M: That one was exactly the same. R: Special equipment on the doors. You had said you had looked through somewhere, there was…. M: There was a small, little peephole. R: What do you mean small, 5 cm in diameter? M: Like a spy, a normal spy glass, right? There was, and that was brightly lit. R: And normal window glass, or…. M: Pardon? R: Spy glasses have such an optic that you…. M: Probably with such an optic, yes, so that… R: You don’t remember? |
A first indication that Dr. Münch does not know firsthand what happened at the other end of the supposed gas chamber. |
| M: I didn’t think about that kind of…
R: At what height was that? Did you have to bend down or…? |
“…informed”? Sometimes it would be good if the interviewer would let his interlocutor finish…. |
| M: No, quite normal height, I didn’t bother with that. So, I really can’t tell you anything about that. | The intense not knowing after 50 years doesn’t have to mean anything. |
| R: You don’t know?
M: [shaking his head]. R: Was there a protective grid in front of the spy glass? Do you know anything about that? M: At what? R: In front of the spy glass, a grille or anything? M: I don’t know…. Oh, you mean that they could break through that, or something? R: Yes. M: No, no, there was no danger of that. R: To the ventilation. M: You must know that, the moment the doors were closed, there was panic in there, wasn’t there? R: How were they actually locked? Were there… M: I don’t know. So that, I certainly didn’t think about that. But you can be assured that…. R: I just imagine when I have 1000 people inside, they panic and want to get out the door they came in. A thousand people have a tremendous amount of pressure. M: So, there was already experience enough there, how thick it must be, how that was. R: You said, in the summer, a maximum of three minutes, then it was all over. M: Yes, yes. R: In winter, up to five. M: It was said, so one has calculated. R: What happened then, after that? M: Yes, then first of all, after 15 minutes, I think, that long was the… One had to stand at attention, where it was not necessary. Then, the hydrogen cyanide was extracted with large exhausters, right? Yes, and then, the crematorium unit came from the other side, right? Opened the doors and pulled out the… That was the difficult, the… R: One thing at a time. Sorry if I’m interrupting you. To the ventilation first. I’ll get to the technical details first. M: It was an exhauster. That’s all I can say. R: You can’t say, so you don’t know if there was anything attached in the chamber? M: No, no, no. R: Nothing at all? How did the poison gas get in? M: Pardon? R: The poison gas. |
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| M: Through a shaft at the top.
R: Through a shaft. M: Through a shaft that went almost all the way down, and that’s where it was poured in, wasn’t it? And that sort of evaporated. R: And what do you mean, one shaft, several shafts? How many? M: That was, you’re asking me too much. R: You don’t know? M: Well, that didn’t interest anybody. Because for that, they were a well-rehearsed team. Everything was going on; nobody was interested in that. R: But you have seen the shafts? |
This was allegedly the case in the gas chamber in the old crematorium at the Main Camp as well as in Crematoria II and III (four shafts each). However, the shafts in the old crematorium were made only after the war by the Poles (cf. Eric Conan, “Auschwitz: La Mémoire du Mal”, L’Express, 19/25 January 1995), and in the ceiling of the alleged gas chamber of Crematorium II, which has been preserved to this day, those holes cannot be found. |
| M: Yes, of course, that was the man who poured it down up there, right?
R: With your quite normal… M: That was the… That was in ambulances that the so-called disinfectors arrived. R: Yes, and how big were these shafts? 10 cm, 50 cm in diameter, or were they square? M: No idea at all, I have with… Why should I inspect something like that? R: Nah, I mean, I’m only concerned with an estimate. You know, when you see, on a roof, for example, something…. M: It was all camouflaged anyway. R: From 100 meters, you can’t see a small shaft, or barely. |
“Up there” a man could have been only on the old crematorium at the Main Camp, because the roofs of the basement morgues of Crematoria II and III were approximately at ground level. The alleged gassings in the Main Camp, however, are said to have ceased in the summer of 1943 at the latest. So, Dr. Münch could not have seen any man “up there” pouring anything through shafts. |
| M: No, that was all camouflaged. After all, these were camouflaged buildings, where no human being could get the idea that something else was happening there, right? They were camouflaged buildings. It was mostly kind of, as an agricultural business, something like that, with a barn. | Camouflage: an untruthful protective claim to explain his not knowing (cf. here, here).
And again, the fairy tale of an agricultural business, a reference to testimonies read or heard by Dr. Münch about the “farmhouses” (cf. here, here). |
| R: Yes well, a barn was not there here [Crema II/III] though. | How true. |
| M: And these others, of which I saw little, over there, they were also partly… All the gas chambers were underground, right? They weren’t in there at the top at all.
R: You mean here at Crema IV and V? M: Yes, yes. You had to walk down steps there. R: And that, how do you know that? Also only now retrospectively, or did you already see it then, or…? |
He confuses Crematoria IV and V with Crematoria II and III. |
| M: Well, in this [Crema IV/V] with them, I have not been there consciously, so I don’t know.
R: So, that you may possibly know only in retrospect. M: Where did I read that now literally? Whether I read that once? I read terribly little, because you just drive yourself crazy, right? But now, I really can’t tell you. R: Are you sure that you were in Crematorium III at that time, that is, at the ramp? M: Yes. R: You are sure about that? M: Yes. I can tell you that, if you want to pin me down, I can’t tell you anymore whether it was one [Crema II] or the other [Crema III]. R: Whether two or three, but one of these? |
His information about the interior of Crematoria II and III, which he falsely projected onto Crematoria IV and V, comes only from hearsay, from knowledge acquired later from trials and from literature. Thus, he can never have been present at a gassing in the crematoria at the ramp. |
| M: In these, during that night, when I was there, where I looked through the peephole and so on, the more important things were the open-air burnings, right? Because there were difficulties. | Psychological consideration: Again, Dr. Münch evades the request to give concrete facts about his gassing experiences, by diverting to open-air cremations (cf. here, here). |
| R: I would like, first of all, to record exactly the locality where you were at that time. Do you know what the surroundings were? Did these buildings have a forest around them, or were they standing free?
M: They had, eh, they were planted. They were planted, but they were still quite easy to see in, right? R: So, what does planted mean? Little trees, hedges, woods or bushes, thickets? |
Crematoria II and III stood completely free, without any surrounding vegetation. Crematorium IV was partially surrounded by trees, and crematorium V was almost completely surrounded by trees. |
| M: Was, there were… ha, yes, like so, just like everything was down there, right? That was exactly adapted to this terrain. That… One did not see that it was extra; one can say nothing special at all. So, striking was just always the thing still, there. Conspicuous was the, were the chimneys, which were nearby, right? They just didn’t fit.
R: They stood practically alone? In the… M: They were standing around there, yes. But they were… If someone asked what the chimney was for, well, you couldn’t explain it. R: There was practically the building, and the chimney stood separately, or how? M: That one was a bit separate. That one was a bit separate, yes. They were big; they were very striking. R: What do you mean by big, would you guess? M: So, already like for a small factory, right? R: Do you know anything about the way the poison gas was released, whether auxiliary measures were taken, or whether it was just dumped in? M: Yes, it was exactly calculated. So and so much, so and so much goes into the room. It was poured in, and these were empirical values that had been collected, and then it slowly evaporated. It released itself, so to speak. R: But that means fast enough that within three minutes the people were dead? M: Three minutes, it never took longer than that. R: As for the camouflage equipment, you said that everything was well camouflaged. The chambers themselves, did you notice anything, if they were camouflaged in any way …….? M: Showers were, showers were pretend. They were made relatively high up, fixed, so that they couldn’t be reached, and you could see that it was a shower. Next to it, there were… R: What does shower mean? Pipes and heads and knobs and fixtures? M: It was a fake shower. No, the pipes weren’t like that; no fixtures weren’t on it. R: But pipes and shower heads were? |
Again, the story of the separate chimneys (see here). In fact, all chimneys of the Birkenau crematoria were within the buildings, not separate. However, the chimney of the old crematorium at the Main Camp was located a few meters away from the building. When Dr. Münch arrived at Auschwitz in 1944, however, this chimney had long since been torn down, as the crematorium had been converted into an air-raid shelter. It was rebuilt in the same place by the Auschwitz Museum after the war. This again indicates that Dr. Münch passes off what he has read, heard or seen afterwards as his memory. |
| M: I don’t know. I can’t, I can’t say. I was never in such a chamber.
R: Yes, how do you know that? Also only from the… M: No, I know that. Of course, I read about it too, but, but, I was never in a chamber. R: Yes, when you looked into the peephole, there wasn’t enough time, was there? M: Then, of course, you looked at everything, just not whether there were showers in there, right? R: Lighting system. You mentioned it was very bright. M: Very, very bright light. Very bright. R: What do you mean by very bright? A normal room with lighting like that… |
Therefore, Dr. Münch’s recollections about “false shower heads” in the alleged gas chambers are also only hearsay. |
| M: No, no, no, brighter than a room. So, that was at least 300, two, three hundred bulbs, right? That were in there.
R: Yes, and what was the point of that? M: I don’t know. It was like that. It was probably a regulation of some kind. R: Yes, they were always on and…? |
Morgue #1 of Crematorium II and III were equipped with 16 wooden bases in their concrete ceiling to accommodate 16 sockets for 16 light bulbs, 8 on either side of the longitutidnal support beam. That amounts to roughly one bulb ever 3 meters (10 feet), in a windowless basement room. Hence, this room was not excessively brightly lit at all! (Cf. G. Rudolf. C. Mattogno, Auschwitz Lies, 4th ed., Castle Hill Publishers, Uckfield, 2017, pp. 391f.) |
| M: Pardon?
R: They were basically switched on? M: Yes, otherwise you shouldn’t have, you wouldn’t have seen anything, right? Should have, should have…. R: Okay, who should have to see what? Nobody has to see anything. M: It was supposed to be monitored to see if it was working, wasn’t it? R: I see. M: If a can upstairs didn’t work, or something, you had to… Anyway, it was very bright. R: Do you know anything about floor tiles or wall tiles, which could also be used for a shower? M: Nothing, nothing, nothing I can tell you. R: You don’t know. M: I’m not interested in floor tiles either. R: Windows, columns, stucco? M: Nothing columns, those were… Pardon? R: Stucco? M: Columns were in it; columns were in it, yes. R: Columns were inside. Can you say anything about the number, size and so on? And, and about windows? When you say… |
|
| M: They were definitely there, at least, somehow camouflaged to the outside in any case.
R: That means only painted? M: Pardon? R: Only painted? M: No, no. So, holes, those were already… But whether the inside was not really walled up, so that nothing could penetrate to the outside, that would have been normally reasonable. Do you understand? I don’t think it’s possible to make a direct connection to the outside. R: You say you only looked through this hole once. You were never in the gas chamber itself, but you saw it often from the outside. M: Yes, there they appeared absolutely as a civilian building…. R: With windows? |
Once more the camouflage fairy tale (cf. here, here, here). |
| M: With everything, with everything. How to camouflage something.
R: So, the windows looked quite normal? M: Surely, I didn’t notice anything. R: So, what do you imagine windows to be, 1 meter by 80 cm or something like that? |
Once more the camouflage fairy tale (cf. here, here, here, here). |
| M: No one was interested in that.
R: How did she SS close the door? We already had that in principle. How long did it take? We’ve had that too. Wait a minute. Oh, that’s right. How long did it take before the poison gas was added after the door was closed? You had already said that in summer you could do it immediately, and in winter you needed a little time, or what? M: No, so the regulation was that after, before 15, after 15 minutes, after 15 minutes the exhauster should run. |
Or maybe he doesn’t know what he’s talking about? |
| R: Nah, I mean, the SS closes the door. So, when does the poison gas come in? Immediately? When it’s closed?
M: When it’s warm, immediately. R: When it’s warm, immediately; and when it’s not warm? M: Then you let it warm up in there first. It got warm in there quickly, didn’t it? R: And then when they were dead, wait 15 minutes and then the exhausters…. M: No, then it was ventilated, and how long that is, I don’t know, but certainly half an hour, I can’t tell you. R: How did the victims behave during their death throes? You said you looked inside. Did you see there… M: Terrible, I can only say quite terrible. Quite awful. Quite awful, because everyone was clinging to one another, weren’t they? And, and… Everybody wanted to reach, when… I can… It was, it was horrible. So, it was… So, you must have had the impression – the people – that it came from below, right? That it came from below… although hydrogen cyanide is supposed to be completely odorless, right? R: No it isn’t. |
|
| M: Yes, I only know that from…
R: I have studied chemistry, and it depends. There are people who smell it, and some people who don’t. It has a very subtle smell, but it…. |
The hygienist who can’t be told anything new about hydrogen cyanide (here) and who trained the disinfectors (here) doesn’t know? |
| M: Well, so in any case, it smelled; certainly it smelled different there than….
R: It doesn’t smell unpleasant, unfortunately. It doesn’t warn you. Did you hear victims singing from time to time? I say that because I read it once, I ask that. M: What? R: Did one hear singing of the victims, that they sang? M: You can call that singing. So, if you, really, if you listened at the wall, you heard, I think, it’s more like humming. I heard that several times. R: What do you mean, you heard several times? From the outside then? |
The laws of nature were certainly not suspended in Auschwitz. |
| M: I tried several times [to guess] what kind of noise it is, right? You can also consider it singing, but I think it’s absolutely impossible, because they were all in mortal fear. Nobody sings anymore. But the screams, which were mixed up, produced an almost harmonious sound on the outside, right?
R: To my next question: What happened after the victims were dead? We’ve already answered that. 15 minutes of waiting, something like that, until then the…. M: Yes, until they opened the door, at least another half hour. R: Then another half hour. M: At least. Then the problem was that they were all entangled with each other, I don’t know, I didn’t see it either, but that’s what they were talking about, wasn’t it? How best to get them apart. R: The chamber was ventilated with these exhausters. How did you actually find out about it? Were you told about it, did you hear about it, did you witness it yourself, that the exhausters started up? How long were you there at that time, when you…? |
The first hint that Dr. Münch is a pervert who repeatedly and voluntarily seeks sensory impressions that dying, panic-stricken people produce. |
| M: There you ask me too much, where I know that from, so that… Of course, one said, that was a big problem. Do you bring the… how far do you endanger this prisoner unit, this crematorium unit? How do you do, how can you, how do you say, how far are they themselves endangered when they go in there and have to pull them out? How everything is tangled together, and so on. Some have pulled them out of there first with rake-like things, right? So that was a big problem. But I can’t say anything about it, because I only know that it was a problem with which the people there were busy.
R: Did you yourself experience how the bodies were pulled out after the doors were opened and how they were treated? |
The whole procedure is obviously known to Dr. Münch only from hearsay. |
| M: I didn’t. That was on the other side, wasn’t it? That was of no interest. That night, when it was about that, I was not interested in it in principle, and that night, when I was there, there were… All those who were involved in it were no longer concerned about the selection, but about this new method of burning in pits.
R: When you looked through the peephole, you didn’t wait for half an hour until the ventilation was finished and continued to look at what was happening, but left afterwards? |
Here Dr. Münch states that he never saw how the Sonderkommando worked. Later, he makes confirming (here, here) and contradicting statements (here) on this.
Psychological observation: Again Dr. Münch, who was asked about the gassing procedure, evades by bringing up selections (cf. here, here, here) and open-air burnings (here, here, here). |
| M: No, no, no. That didn’t interest then anymore. That one look, the first look through the peephole, right? That was absolutely enough to not be curious anymore.
R: Do you know where they took the bodies afterwards? M: To the furnaces, of course, they were as close as possible. That had to be as close as possible… R: But for the premises, can you give any information? |
Here he reports that this one look into the gas chamber was enough for him (cf. here). Earlier, he reported that he had already looked into the gas chamber earlier (here), and later, he stated that he had looked into the gas chamber even more often after the instruction (here). Finally, at one point he even stated that he “saw nothing” (here). |
| M: That was also different in each one. It was, in any case, everything was with rail carts. If they had a piece, if there was a bigger thing, there were rail carts, where you did that.
R: Were you ever in these crematorium rooms? M: No, no. I never went to see the crematoria. What was I supposed to do there? R: So, you have never been in the building where the furnaces were? M: Well, that there was always trouble, and that they were always overheated and didn’t work. And that was a problem. But I never visited them, didn’t… R: The building where the people were gassed, as you said, was directly adjacent or close to the building where the furnaces were. M: As close as possible, yes, yes. R: And this was then brought over by rail carts? M: Yes. R: Did they then go over another part through the open air or was that enclosed? |
According to some accounts, there were rail carts from one of the “farmhouses” used as gas chambers to open-air burning pits, but not between the gas chambers inside the Birkenau Camp itself, and certainly not connecting various rooms, all of which were in the same building. Obviously, Dr. Münch here again partly internalized what he heard afterwards, and passed it off as his own experience. (Cf. here, here, here) |
| M: No, no, that was already free, that went through the open. Only in these crematoria [pointing to Crema IV and V], everything was perfected. There it went with elevators, etc. Everything was very close together.
R: But where you looked, meaning either Crematorium II or Crematorium III, you had to go through the open air first? |
With regard to the elevator, Dr. Münch again confuses Crema IV/V with Crema II/III, and attributes completely wrong characteristics to Crema II/III (cf. here, here). Moreover, there was no need to go through the open air in any of the crematoria to get from the alleged gas chamber(s) to the furnace room. |
| M: That was, that was still manual operation.
R: And then it went into the furnaces. There, in [Cremas] 4 and 5, everything was perfected? |
There was no manual operation anywhere in the crematoria. |
| M: But I wasn’t in these [Crema IV and V] at all. I never saw them in operation.…
R: So, you know that only in hindsight? M: …Never seen them in operation, right. R: About [Cremas] 4 and 5, you know practically only from hearsay. |
But then, how could he know? |
| M: I can, I only know that from… I was probably there once, I don’t know. But there I’m… What is that supposed to be? A pond?
R: Yes. |
See the sketch of the Birkenau camp. |
| M: Can’t remember.
R: Can’t remember it? Good. It’s a detail now. I still want to catch up on my list, even though it might be a bit of a pain. Soap and towels must have been somewhere. What did you do with them? I mean, the corpses are pulled out, and then everyone has dropped their soap and towel. It must have been terribly dirty. And that was a mess. M: Of course, but that’s, that was just… There was an extra unit for that, right? That was this so-called crematorium unit. Those were the people who had to take care of the operation. R: Did you still experience how they cleaned the place? |
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| M: No, no. Imagine! If I wanted to have nothing to do with the thing as much as possible, and should… and thing… Should I then still take care of the soap, right?
R: Yes, I didn’t know what you knew, that’s why I simply tried to finish this completely. The remains of the gassing…. M: I can’t imagine, when I tell it like this, I can’t imagine how it was possible that practically everybody was given a piece, a towel and a soap. It could be, according to what I imagine, that only four or five men got a bar of soap. That would have been possible. But even that is illusory, because after half of them were in there, it was so tight that no one could have soaped themselves or anything. That was in order to have a… R: I just imagined it vividly, if you kill 2000 people in a small room with 2000 soaps and 2000 towels… M: No, no. R: …and then you have to disentangle them, because you can’t take 2000 new towels for every gassing episode, let’s say. M: No, no, no. That was just, I think… R: You have to clean it up. |
Here Dr. Münch states that he never saw how the Sonderkommando worked. Elsewhere he makes confirming (here, here) and contradicting statements (here) on this subject. |
| M: I imagine, I have it, I can’t see it either, that I have ever seen something like that, but because there was so much discussion about it, right? How to… One says yes, with soap and towel it works. It doesn’t work at all, does it? Because just like you say yourself, and others have said again, have had again another trick.
R: That is, you did not see yourself that the prisoners were handed these things before they went in? |
Now it turns out that the handing out of soap and towel to inmates about to be gassed, as reported by Dr. Münch (for camouflage reasons, cf. here), is also only hearsay. Did Dr. Münch ever see people being led from the ramp to the gas chambers after a selection? |
| M: Not consciously. After 50 years, they should still say that, whether one has seen that, whether one has read it or whether there was someone, do you understand? I only know that it was considered common practice. I have read very little. Just from the…
R: We are still at the other complex, which you have already mentioned several times and where you said the hygienists were involved. How were the bodies disposed of? The methods of disposal. Do you have any knowledge of this now? Yes, in general? |
Here we have the confession of one of the key witnesses to the Holocaust that he himself does not know what part of his tale is self-experienced, and what was learned afterwards. |
| M: Yes, that was the big problem, that the crematoria were very often broken, overheated, right? And that you either had to build a new crematorium, or, as I said, most recently, you had to burn them in the open, in open pits. On big, huge grates. And that was a problem, when they burned, it was good. Because that’s when the fat dripped off. And that somehow, and… But as I said, these are pure things that I know from theory, right?
R: Have you yourself experienced such burnings? |
In fact, a new crematorium was never built because another one had broken down due to overloading.
Dr. Münch’s statement about burning corpses on large grates is unique for Auschwitz (cf. here, here). His statement about fat dripping out of corpse and being used as fuel has already been criticized (here). It should be noted that he now also admits in this regard that he did not even experience all this himself: “these are pure things that I know from theory”…. |
| M: Of course, I have, I tell you, all night long, and later on, of course, they said that.
R: These open burns? You were there? |
…in order to relativize it again immediately afterwards. |
| M: I saw them more often, right, because they asked, “My Lord! Don’t you all know anything about how to make it better?”
R: Now back to the crematoria. You said that you yourself were not in the furnace rooms. M: Where? R: In the furnace rooms, where they were burned. M: No, no. R: Did one somehow see outside that the crematoria were in operation? Noticed in any way? M: That the chimneys smoked. R: They were smoking? |
Dr. Münch was certainly not asked such questions, because such questions could only arise at the beginning of the alleged extermination process, when Dr. Münch was not yet in Auschwitz (see here). If the problems of eliminating traces had still not been solved in the summer of 1944, the alleged extermination of Jews would have ended in a huge fiasco, and there would have been traces en masse. |
| M: Yes, smoked quite considerably.
R: Was there maybe, also flame development or no flame development? M: I have never seen that. R: But smoke you have seen? M: Supposedly, but I… I read that there were flames. I never saw any. R: Yes, and what was that smoke? Was that… |
Crematorium chimneys cannot smoke considerably. (cf. C. Mattogno, F. Deana, in G. Rudolf (ed.), Dissecting…, op. cit.) |
| M: It was actually different from other smoke. I never realized why it smelled so strange, right?
R: So only the smell was different? M: It was different, but I can’t tell you how. It wasn’t like an industrial smell. R: How did the smoke look, colorwise, from the density, thickness? Yes, you know, there is jet black, thick, fat smoke, there is gray smoke, there is white smoke…. M: If one is not interested in it. R: Yes, well. But you have been frequently in Birkenau, and they say that the things had day and night… |
Nor do crematorium chimneys emit odors, let alone strangely different ones. Therefore, this statement can only come from other equally false testimonies, not from his own memory. Further on he admits that the information about the smell does not come from his own experience. |
| M: In Birkenau, you saw little of it, because you were too close to it. You could see much better from our institute. A few, six, eight kilometers away.
R: Six, eight kilometers? M: I guess now. You could see it much better there. R: So not in Birkenau itself? |
This phenomenon, which cannot be explained physically at first, is probably due to the fact that Dr. Münch saw the chimneys of the IG-Farbenwerke AG in Monowitz from a distance, which, as chemical plants, will indeed have spread an unpleasant odor, but not any clouds of smoke from the crematoria. |
| M: You could also see it, but, and above all, it is said… everywhere, you could smell it. So, I cannot remember smelling it. So that I would have noticed it. | Now we are getting closer to the matter: He saw practically no smoke in the camp itself and smelled nothing. |
| R: Alright, well, that was the crematorium. Then open burnings, exactly. You said it was done in pits.
M: In pits, yes. Pits with a big, huge … R: How big, how deep, how long, how wide? M: About – I’m really having a hard time, though, I guess as big as this section here of the thing [points to his living room]. There were over there, over there and over there…. R: 5, 6 meters long and 3 meters wide or 4 meters? M: 3 meters wide or 4 meters wide, and a corridor, over there and over there, a corridor of something more like 50 cm, I guess, right? And then above that… R: How deep were they? M: Pardon? R: How deep were these pits? M: A meter and a half, something like that, I guess, no more, and over there, and over there…. R: The side walls, the side walls were sloping steeply? M: I don’t know that at all … R: But was that earth, or was that masonry? |
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| M: That was earth, there was nothing walled. And then there was a grate above it. And how that was supported in the middle, you ask me too much, above that, you have…
R: How high was the grate then? Was it level or deep? M: No, it was almost level, yes, practically, maybe a little deeper, but it was… R: So, underneath the grate, there was a space 1.50 m deep? M: I guess, yes. R: And what was the grate? Were they thick iron bars, rails like railroad tracks or…? M: I don’t know that. R: You can’t tell? M: It must have been such a huge apparatus, right? Whether it was, it certainly wasn’t made in one piece. It was probably screwed together, I suppose. As I said, there were corpses lying on it, right? And they were supposed to burn, and they didn’t burn. R: You talked about corridors, there were corridors. What were the corridors for? M: [They] Went all around, all around it was free. R: All around, it was free. M: All around. R: Oh, so the grate was 50 cm narrower on each side than the pit, so there was 50 cm of space there? M: Yes. R: And that’s where you put bodies on top…. M: What? R: Bodies on top of the grate? How high was that? Was that stacked? M: The pile was never higher than a meter and a half, from what I saw. R: But, were all corpses thick on top? |
Dr. Münch’s statement about burning corpses on large grates is unique for Auschwitz (cf. here, here). |
| M: Yes. That was too much, of course, said some, and too little, said others. And you have to have some air in the middle. You have to have a layer of air; and so the discussions went. Those were the problems, right? In fact, I saw that it mostly worked badly. | Tightly stacked piles of corpses one and a half meters high would never have burned on a funeral pyre. If the SS had tried this in 1944, the whole extermination of the Jews would have been a disaster. |
| R: How was that fueled? With what?
M: With gasoline. R: With gasoline? M: Or it could also be that it was diesel, that could also be. R: But with liquid fuel? M: So, with a liquid fuel. R: That was poured over it? |
Liquid fuel is suitable at most to light a fire, but never to burn corpses completely. This statement cannot be in accordance with the truth either. Dr. Münch must have taken it over from other false statements. |
| M: Yes. That was also what was really done that night, in detail, I can’t tell you. I just know what all was discussed.
R: Yes, well. You said that you had been involved in this more often, and that you had seen this more often. |
So here Dr. Münch admits that he doesn’t really know anything specific regarding open-air incinerations either, so he wasn’t instructed there in any detail. The previous evasive maneuvers concerning open-air burnings (here, here, here, here) were therefore really only attempts to evade the pressing questions for details about the gassings. |
| M: No, they wanted, one wanted me to – whether I could give some advice for some reason, right? I stayed out of it, of course, right?
R: So, you didn’t see it more often? M: Pardon? R: More often, you have not seen it? |
Dr. Münch was certainly not asked such questions, because such questions could only arise at the beginning of the alleged extermination process, when Dr. Münch was not yet in Auschwitz (cf. here, here). |
| M: I’ve seen it a few times. I really can’t say how many times. Simply because one was interested in it. Or if you were looking for someone, right? Then they said he was at the pyre, right? Then you had to go there, too.
R: That was called a pyre? M: Yes. R: Alright, you said earlier that the problem was whether the fat ran out or not. That is… |
A second hint that Dr. Münch is a pervert who repeatedly and voluntarily seeks sensory impressions that dying or dead people produce (cf. here). |
| M: Yes, if it ran too much, it wasn’t good; if it didn’t run at all, it wasn’t good either; so, you’re really asking me too much.
R: That means that the fat then also served as fuel? M: In a certain concentration, it burns obviously, and in others, it burns again less, right? R: Of these pits, were there several, or was that the only one? M: There were always several. R: How many do you estimate? |
Dr. Münch’s statement about fat dripping from corpse and used as fuel – taken over from other false testimonies – has already been criticized (here, here). |
| M: The only thing that really struck me was that there were still a lot of corpses lying around, even charred ones, and that was simply because it didn’t work. They said, you’ve thrown too much on it. You have to take it off again first, etc. And that was… There were all the burnt corpses lying around. But, as I said, that was just the beginning.
R: That was also summer 1944? M: Although then, the people from Majdanek had come, who had already practiced there for a while. They were brought in. They were transferred in order to introduce it there. R: Alright, where am I now? Oh, I see. With this open incineration, what do you know about smoke development, flame development, odor development? |
In 1944 they did not start with exterminations, but this is said to have been in its final stage (cf. here, here). The only possibility that these descriptions by Dr. Münch correspond to the truth is that in 1944 the SS actually had to improvise due to capacity bottlenecks of the crematoria by temporarily resorting to open-air cremations. But this would only be conceivable if this business was the exception, if there had been no planned, thoroughly industrialized mass extermination going on since 1942! |
| M: Stench, a lot of stench. It stank.
R: And smoke? What was it like? Like the crematorium? |
Before, when only the crematoria were mentioned, he could not remember any noticeable smell in the camp (here). |
| M: I don’t know that. Whether there was any smoke, I can’t, don’t remember. It was nighttime, too.
R: Did they only burn at night, or…? |
It certainly wasn’t always night, especially since Dr. Münch, as a bacteriologist, hardly had night shifts all the time. He doesn’t know anything. That’s his problem. |
| M: Well, I’ve seen them practically only at night. During the day, of course, I’ve been there before, but it was just smoldering. So, most of it was already over. It was then only a smoldering fire.
R: Do you know how long such a pyre burned? M: No idea. No idea. R: The fuels. You said liquid, gasoline or diesel. Do you know where that was stored? I mean, there must have been a lot of… |
It should be pointed out in passing that the air photos of Birkenau taken by Allied reconnaissance planes between May and September 1944 show no traces of incineration pits, fuel depots, earth excavations or smoking fireplaces, which means that Dr. Münch’s statements about the incineration pits can already be considered refuted. (Cf. G. Rudolf (ed.), Air-Photo Evidence, op. cit.). |
| M: No, none, none, not at all. | He has no idea… |
| R: If you could show on the sketch where that was approximately. Whether it was in the area [points to the built-up area of the Birkenau Camp] or even outside.
M: Yes, I’ve thought about that before, I’ve thought about that before. |
|
| R: Do you know that building? That’s the Zentralsauna, that’s….
M: Excuse me? R: Do you know the Zentralsauna? |
|
| M: No, no, I don’t know either, I don’t know. It must have been out here, out there in this area. Wait a minute, where is north and south?
R: North is there, that means we put it like this, then we have north on top, as it is normally. M: So, this is the entrance. It must have been here. |
The hygienist Dr. Hans Münch does not know the most important building of the camp hygiene in Birkenau. |
| R: So, west of Crematorium II.
M Yes, I think so. I don’t want to commit myself there. I really don’t want to commit myself there. R: Now we basically have the most important part behind us. What is the recorder doing? It is still winding down a little bit. Now we have basically other things, namely, as you have already said yourself, regarding some parts, you don’t know any more whether you have experienced them yourself, or whether you have read them, or heard them somewhere else. It is certainly sometimes difficult to tell these apart. Can you state what you have read about it in the literature? Whether, and if so, how much? M: I have only read from people I know myself. R: Aha! Who do you know personally? M: Well, at least from people where I know where they were, what their function was, or possibly whom I know myself. R: Can you name any specific names or books? M: The standard for this thing, where you can be absolutely sure that it is really most exactly, absolutely objectively, that is the thingema, that… Jesus Christ! Can’t think of the name! Viennese actor. He is an actor by profession [but] has not acted anymore. Was previously in the… God, again! R: Do you have books here that you might yourself…? M: He was here a lot. Of course, I have books, but I don’t know if I can find them there now… Wait. Ask me again later; maybe I’ll know. R: Was he interned himself as a prisoner? M: He was in… I already knew him well as a prisoner, right? He was the clerk at the garrison doctor, the top clerk of the garrison doctor, in the barracks, so to speak, in the center, in the absolute center. |
That is absolutely novel. Other witnesses report of pits at Crematoria IV/V or at the bunkers (“farmhouses”), but not of such pits west of Crematorium II. |
| R: Langbein. But Langbein was not… Have you read anything by Hermann Langbein?
M: That’s him! R: That’s him. Well, there we have him. Langbein, exactly. Yes, what have you read about him? M: I’ve been in contact with him since this morning at half past eight… R: Yes, what have you read about him? “People in Auschwitz” or “The Auschwitz Trial”? M: What I read was not so important. I read some things together with him from here, when I was back, that must have been in the middle of the 1940s, uh, the 1950s. We also gave lectures together in schools. So, I had very close contact with him for a long time, but of course I had already had contact with him in Auschwitz, right? R: I’ll give you a few names, if you remember that you have read something by them, you can interject. Raul Hilberg? M: Pardon? |
Hermann Langbein, former communist, chairman of the Auschwitz Committee. One of the most active, influential and successful Holocaust propagandists. It should not be surprising if this close acquaintance over decades has deformed Dr. Münch’s memories.
The intensity with which Dr. Münch engaged with Mr. Langbein makes it likely that he now sees the period from the perspective of the prisoners, or rather from what their propagandists made of it. (H. Langbein,… wir haben es getan. Selbstzeugnisse in Tagebüchern und Briefen, Europa-Verlag, Vienna 1964; Der Auschwitz-Prozeß, 2 vols, Europäische Verlagsanstalt, Stuttgart 1965; Menschen in Auschwitz, Europa-Verlag, Vienna 1972; H. G. Adler, H. Langbein, E. Lingens-Reiner, Auschwitz: Zeugnisse und Berichte, Europäische Verlagsanstalt, Frankfurt/Main 1979; E. Kogon, H. Langbein, A. Rückerl, Nationalsozialistische Massentötungen durch Giftgas, Fischer, Frankfurt/Main 1983). |
| R: Raul Hilberg.
M: Don’t know him. |
(R. Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 3 volumes, Quadrangle Books, Chicago 1961/Holmes & Meyer, New York 1985/Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 2003) |
| R: You don’t know him. Arno Mayer?
M: I don’t know him either, |
(A. J. Mayer, Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? Pantheon, New York 1988) |
| R: Gerald Fleming?
M: Fleming. Wait a minute, yes, that’s an Englishman. R: Yes. The first two were Americans. Hilberg… M: Fleming, I’m kind of aware of him, but I can’t place him either. |
(G. Fleming, Hitler and the Final Solution, University of California Press, Berkeley 1984) |
| R: Christopher Browning?
M: No. |
(C. Browning, Fateful Months. Essays on the Emergence of the Final Solution, Holmes & Meier, New York 1985) |
| R: Hanna Arendt?
M: Arendt, yes. I have her, too. I know her from Auschwitz. R: Have you also read something by her? Or? M: I don’t know, well, I… |
(H. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, Faber, London 1963) |
| R: Yehuda Bauer?
M: Who? R: Yehuda Bauer. M: No. |
(Y. Bauer, The Holocaust as Historical Experience, Holmes & Meier, New York 1981) |
| R: Not. Wolfgang Benz?
M: Who? Wolfgang? R: Wolfgang Benz, Professor Wolfgang Benz. “Dimension of Genocide,” and he has written other books. M: No, no, no. |
(W. Benz, Die Juden in Deutschland 1933-45, Beck, Munich 1988; Dimension des Völkermords, Oldenbourg, Munich 1991; Legenden, Lügen, Vorurteile, dtv, Munich 1992; B. Bailer-Galanda, W. Benz, W. Neugebauer (eds.), Wahrheit und Auschwitzlüge. Zur Bekämpfung revisionistischer Propaganda, Deuticke, Vienna 1995). |
| R: Not. Rückerl, Adalbert Rückerl?
M: Rückerl? R: He was the head of the Central Office for Nazi Crimes in Ludwigsburg. Wrote a lot about the trials. M: No. R: Not. |
(A. Rückerl, NS-Prozesse, C.F. Müller, Karlsruhe 21972; NS-Vernichtungslager im Spiegel deutscher Strafprozesse, 2nd ed., dtv, Munich 1978; NS-Verbrechen vor Gericht, 2nd ed., C.F. Müller, Heidelberg 1984; E. Kogon, H. Langbein, A. Rückerl, op. cit.). |
| M: But when he was in Lugsburg and so on… I was there more often. I probably got to know him when he was there.
R: Where? Luxembourg? What do you mean? M: Well, he prepared the trials, didn’t he? R: Ludwigsburg, you mean. Oh, I see, you were also in Ludwigsburg, and there you…? |
He was in Ludwigsburg at the Central Office of the State Justice Administrations…. |
| M: No, but I’ve always had a lot to do with them while the trials were going on, haven’t I? I’ve had a lot to do with them.
R: Alright, what does that mean, “had a lot to do with them”? Did they ask you for advice? |
…but again, he wasn’t there. In any case, Dr. Münch served the Central Office as an important witness for the conviction of alleged violent National-Socialist criminals (cf. the works of A. Rückerl, op. cit.). |
| M: They wanted me, they wanted me, of course, they didn’t have a clue themselves, right? | We wonder whether they had more of a “clue” afterwards… |
| R: Wolfgang Scheffler?
M: No. R: Eberhard Jäckel? M: Jäckel? R: Jäckel. M: No. |
(W. Scheffler, Judenverfolgung im Dritten Reich, Colloquium, Berlin 1964)
(E. Jäckel, J. Rohwer (eds.), Der Mord an den Juden im Zweiten Weltkrieg, Stuttgart 1985; E. Jäckel, P. Longerich, H. J. Schoeps (eds.), ibid.). |
| R: Eugen Kogon?
M: Yes, but I don’t know him personally. R: Not personally, but have you read anything by him? M: I have read Kogon. R: What does the Kogon mean? “Nazi mass killings with poison gas”? M: Pardon? R: “Nazi mass killings with poison gas” or “The SS State”? |
(E. Kogon, Der SS-Staat, Europäische Verlagsanstalt, Stuttgart 1959; E. Kogon, H. Langbein, A. Rückerl, op. cit.). |
| M: “The SS State”, yes. I was interested in it because, God, yes, because we had a lot to do with Buchenwald, that is, it also belonged to the Institute of Hygiene, so to speak. But he died soon. | On E. Kogon’s misrepresentations of the conditions in the Buchenwald Camp, his fellow prisoner at that time P. Rassinier (op. cit.) has presented an excellent analysis. Possibly, Dr. Münch unconsciously replaced his memories with such distorted prisoner reports about the concentration camps. |
| R: Yes, yes. Bernd Naumann?
M: No. R: Report on the Auschwitz Trial. Jean-Claude Pressac? M: Report on the Auschwitz Trial? R: Yes. M: I certainly didn’t read that, because I experienced it myself. |
(B. Naumann, Auschwitz. Bericht über die Strafsache Mulka und andere vor dem Schwurgericht Frankfurt, Athenäum, Frankfurt/Main 1968). |
| R: You experienced it yourself, yes. Jean-Claude Pressac?
M: No. R: Another question, you know that there are revisionists who deny or deny certain things. M: Yes, yes. R: Have you read anything by them? M: I have read less, but films that… they often wrote to me, yes, I have been insulted, and what have you. So, with them, I’ve already had quite a bit of… R: Alright. Did you correspond with them, or did you leave it alone? M: I tried to correspond with them, but, somehow… Like, who’s sitting up there in Denmark now? R: Christophersen? M: Pardon? R: Christophersen? |
(op. cit.) |
| M: Christopherson, yes, a very stupid fellow. He can’t have a clue at all, right? He has never seen Auschwitz closer than about 6 km as the crow flies, right? And acts like an expert, and what have you. Not a clue, not a clue about anything.
R: I’ll give you a few names now. If you’ve heard of them, just for the sake of completeness. Fred Leuchter? |
In view of the qualitatively catastrophic statements of Dr. Münch, which testify to his complete ignorance of the realities in Birkenau, one wonders who has “no clue” here. (Cf. T. Christophersen, Die Auschwitz-Lüge, Kritik Nr. 23, Mohrkirch 1973.). |
| M: Yes, yes. Leuchter, the Leuchter thing. They sent it to me from these, Jesus! There was such a nest in Austria. I don’t know what it’s called. So, they sent me the Leuchter thingy, and there’s not much you can do… There’s also been a mistake made by the German justice system. They say it’s been proven… He says it’s been proven that there was no gas in there at all, because that should still be in the plaster, and there’s nothing in there, and so on.
R: Right. And what is supposed to have been the mistake of the German justice system there? M: They, uh, so they then invalidated his arguments. So, it’s absolutely… It’s supposed to be absolutely proven that this is all nonsense, what he’s saying there. That the experimental designs are wrong and so on, and that’s never been properly published. R: So, they failed to disprove him, right? M: They just say, they just always say, the Leuchter… R: It is wrong, but they don’t prove it? M: …the Leuchter Report works, [but] it’s wrong; they don’t say why … R: Robert Faurisson? M: Who is that? |
(F.A. Leuchter, An Engineering Report on the alleged Execution Gas Chambers at Auschwitz, Birkenau and Majdanek, Poland, Samisdat, Toronto, 1988; now with three other reports in Fred A. Leuchter, Robert Faurisson, Germar Rudolf, The Leuchter Reports: Critical Edition, 5th ed., Castle Hill Publishers, Uckfield 2017). |
| R: Faurisson, French. Spelled F a u r i s s o n.
M: Ah, Faurisson, yes, that was a… Wait, I don’t know him personally. But he has crossed my path several times. Well, in detail, I know… I think that he just says the dimensions; that can’t be right at all; that can be recalculated; that much is not possible at all. R: Right. Do you know anything about numbers yourself? Or do you only know that from hearsay? M: Whoever still says that he knows something about numbers, he is impossible. |
(R. Faurisson, Mémoire en défense, La Vieille Taupe, Paris 1980; Réponse à Pierre Vidal-Naquet, ibid. 1982; S. Thion, Vérité historique ou vérité politique?, La Vielle Taupe, Paris 1980; Réponse à Jean-Claude Pressac, Revue d’Histoire Révisionniste, Colombes, 1994).
Possibly Dr. Münch confuses Robert Faurisson with Paul Rassiner. |
| R: Paul Rassinier?
M: No. |
(P. Rassinier, the German editions of his works accessible to Dr. Münch would have been: Die Lüge des Odysseus, K.-H. Priester, Wiesbaden 1959; Was nun, Odysseus?, K.-H. Priester, Wiesbaden 1960; Das Drama der Juden Europas, H. Pfeiffer, Hannover 1965; Was ist Wahrheit?, 8th ed., Druffel, Leoni 1982) |
| R: Josef Burg?
[Tape change.] R: He doesn’t record the first two meters, the first 20 centimeters. M: I don’t know anything about it. R: Josef G. Burg. Don’t know anything about him? M: No. |
(J. G. Burg, Schuld und Schicksal, Damm, Munich 1962; Sündenböcke, G. Fischer, Munich 1967; NS-Verbrechen – Prozesse des schlechten Gewissens, G. Fischer, Munich 1968; Zionazi-Zensur in der BRD, Ederer, Munich 1980, and others.) |
| R: Arthur Butz? Or “The Hoax of the Twentieth Century.”
M: No. R: “The Hoax of the Twentieth Century”? M: Pardon? R: That’s a book of his, that is…. |
(A. R. Butz, The Hoax of the Twentieth Century, 4th edition, Castle Hill Publishers, Uckfield 2015) |
| M: No, that’s not what I read at first.
|
This statement does not show Dr. Münch’s willingness to listen to other opinions. |
| R: Wilhelm Stäglich?
M: Stäglich? R: Stäglich. “The Auschwitz Myth”? M: No. |
(W. Stäglich, Auschwitz Myth: A Judge Looks at the Evidence, 3rd ed., Castle Hill Publishers, Uckfield 2015) |
| R: Germar Rudolf
M: No. |
(R. Kammerer, A. Solms (eds.), Das Rudolf-Gutachten, Cromwell, London 1993: English: The Chemistry of Auschwitz: The Technology and Toxicology of Zyklon B and the Gas Chambers – A Crime Scene Investigation, 2nd ed., Castle Hill Publishers, Uckfield 2020) |
| R: Ernst Gauss?
M: What? R: Ernst Gauss. M: Gauss? R: So not Carl Friedrich Gauss, the great mathematician, that’s something else. M: No. |
(Pen name of Germar Rudolf, in the 1990s used for the German editions of Dissecting… (op. cit.) and Lectures on the Holocaust, 4th ed., Castle Hill Publishers, Bargoed, 2023) |
| R: Jürgen Graf?
M: No. |
(J. Graf, Der Holocaust auf dem Prüfstand, Guideon Burg, Basel 1992; Der Holocaust-Schwindel, ibid.; Auschwitz. Tätergeständnisse und Augenzeugen des Holocaust, Neue Visionen, Würenlos 1994; Todesursache Zeitgeschichtsforschung, ibid., 1995) |
| R: Carlo Mattogno?
M: No. So that’s all, they belong to the deniers, right? R: That all goes under the term denial, revisionists, exactly. So, there we have that. Now, what I did once, I dug a little bit in the literature, and looked up what I could find about you. It’s nothing bad. M: Yes, yes, some of it is, everything is distorted. R: That may be; I also assume that. That’s why I would like to ask you about it. And now, I have to check whether one thing or the other already emerges from our interview. So, first of all, the Krakow Trial in 1947. You were indicted in Poland in 1947? M: Yes… R: That is correct. Can you briefly reconstruct what you were accused of, and what the result was? |
(By the mid-1990s, many Italian books had been published by Mattogno, none of which were likely to be known to Dr. Münch, plus several English-language articles, and the book Auschwitz: The End of a Legend, A Critique of J.-C. Pressac, Institute for Historical Review, Costa Mesa, 1994) |
| M: Yes, I was with the main defendants. 40 of them, from the most distinctive types. They got 40 of them together there: The most important camp commandants, the most important crematorium specialists, and the people who stood out. And I was mainly accused of having done something with human experiments, and on the basis of these human experiments, I was acquitted; that is, I demonstrably did these experiments in order to prevent those women from going to the gas who had previously been in Clauberg’s prison – Clauberg, who was…, who had done the sterilization experiments. They were taken to the Main Camp, and there was a woman there whom an acquaintance of mine was very fond of. And he asked me to do something so that they would not be incinerated as former test subjects, that is, so that they would come to Birkenau and go to the crematorium there. And then, I and a few other prisoners came up with the idea that they should be used for experiments, human experiments. Yes, and we got them over the hump.
R: But for gassing, were you also charged with that? M: No. R: No? M: Yes, it was mentioned that I was not there; that it is proven that I refused. But that was only exonerating material. But the main thing was that I was able to get these 20 or so women through with these experiments. R: Alright. We’ll leave Mengele out of it. We already had that. Right, you were also involved later in the IG Farben Trial. Where was that? |
Whether Dr. Münch’s acquittal during the Krakow Trial was really connected with the unverifiable story of his help for women who were allegedly threatened with extermination (the passages quoted earlier from the literature do not mention such stories) or whether Münch was simply a welcome pawn for the Stalinist Polish judiciary during this show trial in order to have the gassing stories attested to by former inmates confirmed by a defendant from the “perpetrator side,” and in order to deny the other defendants the excuse of having acted under duress (cf. here), has to remain open.
Dr. Münch’s acquittal possibly indicates that the other Auschwitz doctors could also have enjoyed an acquittal, had their selfless and life-threatening commitment in the fight against the catastrophic conditions in the disease-ravaged Birkenau Camp been judged fairly. Certainly, it would have been appropriate to hold people responsible for these catastrophic conditions, to which probably more than 100,000 people fell victim, but the doctors seem to have been the wrong address for this. |
| M: There is no trial where I was not present. That was in thingy, of course, probably in Frankfurt.
R: Frankfurt? IG Farben? It is reported that you said that the capacity of the furnaces was not sufficient, and therefore they started to burn corpses on big pyres, whose fire could not be seen. But the smell, the odor, had to be sensed. M: That’s what we were talking about… R: And indeed, as you supposedly also said, in Katowice one could sense the smell of the crematoria just as intensely as in Auschwitz. Now, you said before that the crematoria themselves, that you can’t remember that an odor was spread there. |
Dr. Münch is the prototype of a professional witness, always ready to help put other people behind bars for the rest of their lives, without thinking about whether they deserve it or not.
The IG Farben Trial took place in Nuremberg (cf. Case 6, US versus Krauch, NMT, Vol. VIII). |
| M: Of course, I said, in the, right next to the crematoria, you saw almost nothing. But from a distance, you could see the smoke, and of course you could smell it, right? It was a very specific smell.
R: And how do you explain that it was only from a distance? M: I don’t know. R: You don’t know? M: How should I know that? R: Alright. There, they allegedly also reported, at a gassing, that you saw it. You probably meant what you said here. You didn’t participate yourself, but that’s the one where you were instructed. M: I was instructed. R: “The smell of the burning of corpses, which could be perceived everywhere.” So that refers to the surroundings, but not to the camp itself? |
On this nonsense, see here. |
| M: Yes.
R: Again, to the IG Farben Trial. There you presumably testified – as I said, this is a literature report. Unfortunately, this is not the authentic source, the protocol of the IG Farben Trial – that the crematoria and gas chambers were located one or one and a half kilometers southwest of the Birkenau Camp, camouflaged by a small forest. Do you know if there was anything else there? Because… M: One and a half kilometers, certainly not. That was in the immediate vicinity of the camp. The Birkenau Camp was a kilometer and a half away from the Main Camp, or from the town. So that, that’s not true. R: So, you mean that was misrepresented? M: There is something misrepresented. Read it out again. One and a half kilometers? |
On this nonsense, see here. |
| R: “the former SS doctor Dr. Münch from the IG Farben Trial, according to which the crematoria and gas chambers were located one or one and a half kilometers southwest of the Birkenau Camp, camouflaged by a small forest.”
M: No, no. I couldn’t have said that at all. R: So not that there was anything else there somewhere outside the camp? M: No, no, there was nothing there at all. That was still in the camp area. R: Now, the question that I would still like to address to you, this is now about the correspondence that you had with Dr. Augsberg. Dr. Augsberg sent me copies of your letters. [Sorts papers] Let’s put that away. These are camp maps. We don’t need them now. That’s actually of less interest. You wrote in your letter of February 28 that you had observed the gassing process at least six times through this spy glass from the beginning. But now you said that you had seen it only once. M: Once I observed the process of gassing, so, so, that is wrong. Read it again. R: “I did not make any special effort to find out what science had to say about this,” that refers to Leuchter. M: Yes. R: “because I observed the process of gassing from the very beginning at least 6 times through the peepholes installed in the gates. First while ‘on duty,’ when, at the end of August 1944…,” so you told me…. M: August, that may be. R: …the end of June to the end of July. M: I don’t want to commit myself there. R: “when, at the end of August 1944, I was ordered by the commandant and the garrison physician to be briefed on the selection procedure at the ramp.” So just a briefing while on duty. And the other at least five times, in what context were they then? |
Located one to one and a half kilometers southwest of the Birkenau camp was the agricultural experimental station and poultry farm of the SS in the settlement of Harmense, but there was neither a forest nor any gas chambers or crematoria. According to other witness accounts, Bunkers 1 and 2 (the “farmhouses,” see here), which were supposedly used for homicidal gassings, were located a few hundred meters north and northwest of the Birkenau Camp, in a forest and a clearing, respectively. |
| M: When you, when you came down there, and somehow, maybe, maybe, I don’t know. I also looked in a few times, right? You understand?
R: So, you also sometimes went in there by yourself and looked inside? |
Dr. Münch is looking for an explanation for the contradiction between his letter to Dr. Augsberg and what has been said here. He admits that he does not know. Everything that follows is therefore to be seen as an attempt at an explanation put forward after the fact, in an attempt to save his destroyed credibility. |
| M: When I was down there, when I had something to do, then I usually looked for a colleague, right?, who was on duty there. On that occasion, I already know that I looked in a few times. That was because I was so terribly shocked the first time, and then I thought that, if you dream about it a lot, etc., the best way to get rid of it is to deal with it absolutely again. Do you understand?
R: I don’t know. I mean, I imagine the experience so terribly that I wouldn’t want to experience it a second time. It’s like a nightmare for me. I wouldn’t want to relive it every night. M: You haven’t experienced one yet, right? R: I’ve only experienced nightmares, thank God, and so far no reality. |
Here he reports that he looked into the chamber more often after the first time. Previously, he reported that he had already looked into the chamber before the first instruction (here), and elsewhere he stated that it was enough for him to have looked into the chamber once during the instruction (here, here), or that he definitely did not look into it again (here). Finally, at a later point, he even stated that he “did not see anything” (here).
The third hint that Dr. Münch is a pervert, who repeatedly and voluntarily seeks sensory impressions that dying, panicked people produce (cf. here, here). This is not to say at all that Dr. Münch is actually a pervert. However, since Dr. Münch’s alleged behavior at that time presupposes a certain abnormality, the suspicion arises that the quite normal Dr. Münch did not experience what he described, since he probably would never have acted that way. |
| M: You understand, I have experienced a lot, and I know, and every person knows this: if you experience a terrible situation several times, it is much easier to cope with it.
R: Maybe you get used to it. |
Certainly, one get used to some degree even to terrible things, but it is abnormal that one deliberately seeks out the terrible in order to get used to it, if one has the option to avoid the terrible things altogether. |
| M: The people who experienced the air raids in the cities, the first ones were terrible, and afterwards you got used to it. From that motive, I looked into it a few times. It sounds perverse, paradoxical too, but that’s the way it is.
R: I would like to quote now only briefly here. You’ve already given details about the technology; you’ve already discussed this with me: “shafts that reach down to the ground”. So, there were definitely shafts, several shafts, as you write here…. M: Where? R: In the gas chambers, where the poison was dumped in. In any case, you say here that it was poured “through shafts”. M: Shafts? Yes, from above. |
Dr. Münch’s thesis sounds truly perverse. What person who had experienced even one Allied air raid would have voluntarily taken on such experiences several times to get rid of his “nightmares”? Whoever had the option, left the endangered cities! |
| R: In any casem that there were several shafts. “Camouflaged with showers.” So, several shafts.
M: Yes. You always have to say that there were large and small chambers. In the small chambers, there was perhaps only one, right? R: The other five times, or at least five times, were they all these here [Crema II and III]? II or III? M: I can’t, I really can’t say. R: You had said you never actually saw these [Crema IV and V]. You can’t remember the pond. M: Nah, I never saw them in operation. R: [Krema] IV or V. [So, it was] II or III? M: It could only have been there. R: And with these four or five times that were after that? M: Because they were also right near the ramp where I had to work. G. And this action, which you then experienced four or five times afterwards as more of an outsider, but these were the same premises as described before? With these two doors, where the rail carts briefly going through the open air? M: Yes, yes. R: And the size of the chamber that was operated there, can you remember approximately? M: Well, that, no. R: “At first, the chambers were filled normally without resistance. The victims were given soap and rags,” that’s what you said, you only have that from hearsay; you didn’t experience it yourself. |
In his letter to Dr. Augsberg, he writes about showers, without mentioning that he has this knowledge only from hearsay (see here). |
| M: If you ask me exactly, I can’t tell you. | Cf. here. |
| R: “When the chambers were filled to 2/3, the guards standing at the gates inside the chamber and also the dressed prisoners of the Sonderkommando left the chamber, and the rest (those still outside) were pushed by force through the hermetically closing heavy gates. I do not want to describe the panic that arose.” It then reads, “Normally, the lights were switched off.” You said earlier, the light was on because it….
M: Yes, yes, yes, when I looked in, it was enormously bright. R: Now, you said you looked in five or six times; was there always a light on? M: Of course, otherwise you can’t see anything. R: Well, yes, but how do you know that the light was normally turned off? M: Why should you turn on a light if you don’t really need it, right? Well, I know that when I looked in, right?, I had to… there was always a guard standing around. Then I had to tell him to turn on the light. |
Here, he claimed that the light was always on, because of some “regulation.” |
| R: So, you deliberately asked him to turn on the light so you could look at it again?
M: So that I can see that. R: Hence, in practice, so that you could lose your fright? M: I didn’t want to… I knew the sound, right? Although that was also very, very… Although I also listened to it intentionally, but when I looked in, then I turned, then there had to be light. R: So, according to that, there was no light coming in from the outside. M: No, no, there was nothing. R: So there was no window. M: Absolutely dark. R: No window. M: Absolutely dark. |
The fourth hint that Dr. Münch is a pervert who repeatedly and voluntarily seeks sensory impressions that dying, panicked people produce (cf. here, here, here). |
| R: “After a very short time (I estimate 1/2 minute, probably shorter), the initially very violent escape movements became slower, and the screaming, which could be perceived from the outside in a very muffled way, also became silent. […] After about 20 minutes, the exhausters started to work. About 15 minutes later, the opposite gates were opened.” Alright, earlier you spoke of at least 30 minutes that the exhausters worked, now 15 minutes.
M: From the whole procedure, from the exhausters, right? So, the exhausters included, that was half an hour. That was the official one, you see? The exhausters were turned on, and after half an hour, you can open them. R: Right. Here, you are only talking about 15 minutes. M: Yes, it was 15 minutes [for] the exhausters, and then one has…, one waited somewhat. R: “After about 20 minutes, the exhausters started to work.” So, you waited 20 minutes after the throw-in. M: Yes. R: Then the exhausters started working, and about 15 minutes later the doors were opened. M: Yes. R: So, there were 15 minutes of exhauster time. |
Earlier he stated that he has no exact knowledge at all about the operation of the fans, cf. here. Now he tries to support the statements in his letter, which he cannot have known from his own experience, but since he does not know what he is talking about, he gets caught up in the contradictory nature of his arguments. |
| M: Then I have expressed myself wrongly. After the exhausters had stopped, one also always did [wait] again first, and for a completely different reason, because it was hoped that this clutching of one another, right?, that this would loosen.
R: From the medical point of view, is that possible? |
Dr. Münch diverts from the topic, because he doesn’t know his way around anymore. |
| M: No. I don’t know, but that, it was like that, it was the custom. I was like, why don’t you guys open up?
R: Now it says here: “and the corpses, sometimes very dirty with excrements, after cleaning with a strong water jet, were taken away by the Sonderkommando.” Did you experience that yourself? |
Here he is making an absurdity of his own remarks, which only served to distract him from the subject. |
| M: Of course, I saw that, right? But not during that one night; but that’s what you saw when you were down there otherwise, and kind of, I mean, when I was down there, mostly that I was looking for somebody. You know, if somebody wanted to meet me or something. That’s when they were hauling them; when I saw how they worked….
R: That means that you were on the other side, at the other door, where you could see… M: Of course, on the other side, from behind. R: Did you see how the prisoners, how the Sonderkommando worked, how the prisoners were brought out? |
Here, Dr. Münch states that he had indeed seen how the Sonderkommando worked. Earlier, he made statements to the contrary (here, here). It is therefore obvious that he only says this in order to support the statements in his letter, and not make himself look untrustworthy. |
| M: The problem was, and I also, I can’t even tell you how I saw that, why I saw that in the first place. I only know that it was not at all easy to separate these tangles.
R: But you do not remember concretely having seen that? Did you ever see how the Sonderkommando worked? How they were equipped? Which technique they used? M: Nothing, nothing at all. They were in normal prisoner clothing. You couldn’t tell them apart from other prisoners at all. They only had the possibility to change into wet cloths, which they mostly didn’t do, because in order to get some traces of hydrocyanic acid. R: So, nothing protective. M: Nothing. G Well, that was basically this topic. Yes, now to other things. M: Yes, what are you actually interested in? R: I’m interested in the following problem in particular, and that is that you have spoken here about either this [II] or that [III] crematorium. M: Yes. |
Here Dr. Münch gives us a hint that his stories are not based on his experience at all, but on hearsay. |
| R: Now I have here a ground plan drawing of this crematorium, namely of the basement. | The illustrations presented to Dr. Münch in the following were taken from Ernst Gauss, Vorlesungen über Zeitgeschichte, op. cit.; see the English equivalent, Lectures on the Holocaust, op. cit. |
| M: This is from [Crema IV or V].
R: No, this is from these [Crema II or III]. M: But they didn’t have a cellar! R: The [II and III] have basements, the [IV and V] have none, so that is exactly the other way around as you said. |
Dr. Münch again confuses the Crema IV/V with the Crema II/III (cf. here, here). |
| M: Or reversed, yes, then I saw these [Crema IV and V].
R: Then you saw these? M: Yes. R: Alright. So, then you were back here at Crematorium IV and Crematorium V, and the pond…. M: I can’t remember. R: You can’t remember that. And how the buildings were surrounded… |
A rescue attempt: he simply switches the location. |
| M: But I was now, now I was here again [Crema IV and V]. I know that for sure because they created the big grandstand. | Dr. Münch refers to the memorial at the end of the ramp between the ruins of Crematoria II and III. |
| R: No, that is here [between Crema II and III], it is here.
M: No. R: Yes, it is. M: The grandstand for the celebrations! R: That’s here [between Crema II and III]. The one back there [Crema V] is in the forest and in the thicket and in the bushes, and you can’t go there at all. And this one [Crema IV], there’s nothing left at all except very small foundation walls. M: There is nothing left; I already know that there is nothing left. R: But the grandstand is here, it’s here at the head of the ramp at the end of the tracks. The grandstand was built here. M: But listen, I, I was there a few weeks, a few months ago! R: Right. And here, the ruins of those [Crema II and III] are still standing. That is, this [Crema II] is somewhat better preserved, and that [Crema III] is in very bad shape. |
|
| M: Tell me, I’m not stupid. Oh, sorry, here is the entrance.
R: There is the entrance. M: There is the entrance. Then it’s true. R: There, you go practically straight towards it. M: Then I’ve got them, then I’ve got them mixed up in the first place. Do you understand? Then I, then I was… That’s not possible. R: If we try to reconstruct that. You said that the chamber was a room with two doors, let’s put it that way, and there were also corresponding doors opposite, something like that. And… M: So, these were definitely not the underground ones, that’s quite clear. R: Above ground, camouflaged from the outside, any windows…. M: Yes. R: …I’ll say, I’ll say, but you couldn’t…. |
This is one possible explanation, but, of course, not the only one, and not the most probable one. |
| M: I don’t know anymore.
R: And there was no light coming in, that is, it was dark when everything was closed up. M: Yes. |
Is it all just made up?!?
|
| R: So those were just make-believe windows. Alright. And then, here, rail tracks went to a separate building through the open air? And here … | Mock windows only exist in Münch’s imagination. |
| M: Well, I was never in that area. Never.
R: Never. But the buildings were separated, and the rail tracks went through the open air. And then it went somewhere in the direction of the crematorium. That’s roughly how you described it. And now, these are the buildings that are directly on the ramp. You said that the prisoners undressed at the ramp and then entered through these gates. But that cannot be true here, because these are buildings with basements, and that was in the basement. |
To support his letter to Dr. Augsberg, he reported earlier that he had seen the Sonderkommandos working on the other side of his imaginary gas chamber (here). Now again he did not. Earlier, Dr. Münch also stated that he had never been there where, in his opinion, the Sonderkommando worked (here, here). So, this statement of his will probably be true: He knows all this only from hearsay. |
| M: There is something wrong. I can’t be mistaken like that. They were standing at the ramp, in the immediate vicinity of the station, of the terminus.
R: I must now look to see whether I can find a plan of… |
So one can deceive oneself and be deceived! |
| M: Hold on. Here, here, here. Stop, I’m in the wrong place. Here is the gate. Excuse me, here they were standing, here were the selections.
R: Yes, well, the selections, this is here. As far as I know, this has been expanded, and from here on, the area was double-tracked. M: I don’t know that. R: This was built in 1944, I think, when you arrived. It was completed in July, double-tracked, and then the trains drove up to here, so that even two trains could drive up at a time. On occasion, they also needed trains to supply the camp. M: I don’t know that. R: The ramp itself, the part that is filled up, is actually here. So, in principle, it should already… M: [mumbles unintelligibly]. |
No doubt there were selections at the ramp. |
| R: Please pay attention. It could also be that it was here in this area [Crematorium IV or V]. However, then the problem arises – I have here a floor plan of this building [Crema IV/V]. There, everything is also in one building, with the chimneys, so the chimneys do not stand apart.
M: Yes. R: It’s all in one building, there’s nothing driving over open ground, and there’s no big double swinging doors in the premises, from which you can… M: But there were definitely swinging doors like that. R: Swinging doors, double swinging doors opposite, you have here, but that’s the furnace room; that’s where the furnaces were in. M: Yeah, I wasn’t in there. R: These are…; so this is what they [Crema IV and V] looked like from the outside. Do you have any recollection of that? Two chimneys, actually. M: I can’t remember that. R: You can’t remember that? M: I can’t remember that exactly. |
Dr. Münch mentioned chimneys separately standing, cf. here, here.
Ernst Gauss, op. cit. p. 120:
|
| R: Wait a minute, I can take a look. I have, I think, in here… There is only one air photo of the crematoria, these here [II and III]. This is now an aerial view; they looked like this. But you have to imagine, you’re looking at it like a bird. This is a small annex; the chimney is rising up from there. About 15 meters high. And then a large building and these basement rooms; they rise only marginally above the ground; you can’t see them at all. These are earth fillings; they are not noticeable, and they are drawn in very thinly here.
M: There were the thingies in there, you say? R: The gas chambers are supposed to have been in here, and the prisoners are supposed to have undressed here underground, that is, not in the open. They came – well, the tracks went this way. I have them now… they are not shown here. The [prisoners] then went down here into this room, which is this one [floor plan of Morgue #2, Crematorium II], where they are supposed to have undressed underground in the basement, that is, not in the open. M: And that was here. |
Ernst Gauss, op. cit., pp. 104f. |
| R: That was there [Crema II/III], this, respectively, exactly. This is II, this is III; this one is mirror-inverted, so this way around. It looks like here in this orientation. Here you see, these are actually the basement rooms, which I only – which are here only dashed.
M: Then, then I was, then I was here. [Crema IV/V] R: Well, but there, it’s somehow not right either. Here, you have two chimneys that are inside the building. The buildings are all connected; no double swing doors. |
Ernst Gauss, op. cit., p. 102. |
| M: I don’t remember the chimneys at all, how they were arranged, that…
R: Yes, you said earlier that the chimneys were separate from the buildings. M: Yes, that was my impression, yes. R: But they are in the middle of it. M: Well, so there… |
Here we have the confirmation that the stories about chimneys separately standing also come from hearsay (cf. here, here). |
| R: Here it is said, in this building wing here, gassings supposedly occurred. That is here now, unfortunately turned sideways, down here: this part, in these premises, where they… they don’t exactly agree.
M: And that should have been here all under the earth? R: That was not underground here, no. That is now this [Crema IV/V] here, which would be possible as an alternative. These [Crema II/III] are underground. M: So underground I didn’t see anything at all. R: And back there, we now have this possibility, there were small windows in there from the outside, but they also went through and lit up the inside, which means it wouldn’t have been dark in there. We only have single doors here, no double swing doors. The building is contiguous, which means it didn’t have any rail track… |
Ernst Gauss, op. cit., p. 120. |
| M: I can’t mix it up like that! But that’s… there’s no such thing. Those were the huge swinging doors, that the… That was always the problem, how to close them, so that there are really many inside, right? That wasn’t… | Could you imagine this? |
| R: And here [Crema IV/V], as I said, there were no shafts from above. These were here [Crema II/III].
M: Yes. |
Better stated: They should have existed there. In fact, they never existed either; cf. here. |
| R: There were supposed to have been four shafts here [Crema II/III]. And you can see that here on the aerial photographs. You can easily see it there. These are the aerial photographs, one, two, three, four spots, and here as well. Here it is schematically again. These are supposed to be the shafts. Now, this is enlarged, this is.… | Ernst Gauss, op. cit., p. 104f.
|
| M: These are the shafts.
R: There have been shafts in the ceiling, but underground. They were basement rooms. |
Better stated: They should have existed there. In fact, they never existed either; cf. here. |
| M: That’s not possible. I have seen when they, here I mean, here, here, here directly near the ramp. I mean, I even remember a ladder, that they went up there with ladders and threw it down.
R: That is reported here, about these crematoria [IV/V], but not through the ceiling, but these windows, they were a little more than two meters high, so that you couldn’t get to them. M: But on, on a ladder. I know for sure that the… That was the… I know that for sure. R: Yes, especially since it was at ground level here, at these [Crema II/III], it couldn’t have been at all. M: Yes, then it is, then it is… [points to Crema IV/V]. R: But it didn’t go through the ceiling, but through the window. |
This scenario was effectively impossible near the ramp. |
| M: I can’t say that. That’s just the way it is, as soon as you read something, you go crazy, right? Do you understand? You get, you get a lot of things mixed up, right?
R: Yes, yes, everything is mixed up now. That’s the problem we have. That’s 50 years. 50 years of reading, listening…. M: That’s all right. |
Now he even questions his claim about the way in which the poison was poured into the chambers. This may also be based on mere hearsay. |
| R: I mean, you met with Mr. Langbein, with the gentlemen from the…
M: Yes, well, you don’t talk about these things there. R: You don’t talk about them? M: No, never. You don’t talk about it there. You talk… about things that you have experienced yourself, nobody talks about that. R: Now we have another problem. The witnesses say, as you also said, that there were shafts in the ceilings, and the stuff was dumped in. On the aerial photographs, there are spots, but you know that the ruins of these buildings are still standing. |
It seems that never in the last fifty years has even one journalist, scientist or jurist subjected the statements of the key witness Dr. Münch to a critical examination. This is a shameful, but unfortunately common practice with Holocaust witnesses: They are almost only asked the type of questions that encourage them to report their atrocity experiences or imaginings. There is no critical questioning. |
| M: No, there are none left.
R: The ruins are standing! M: Yes, yes. R: Not the buildings, the ruins. Like this. Did you ever actually go into the ruins? M: No. R: Have you looked around? M: Nah. R: You never did? M: Nope, nope. R: Interesting is, for example, this room here. This is supposed to have been the gas chamber. And the ceiling of this gas chamber is still preserved today. It was blown up, it was lifted… M: Lifted, yes. R: …was lifted up, and slumped back. M: I can remember, yes. R: It slumped back, and today it’s still partly lying on the… M: Yes, you can still see that. R: …on the pillars. M: Yes. R: There you can walk on it, and you can look for these holes, these insertion holes. They must be there, if there were gassings, as witnessed and as you can also see here [on the aerial photograph]…. M: And that was here [Crema II/III]? |
|
| R: That was there. And the problem now is that these holes in the ruins cannot be found today.
M: Yes. R: Look, what you can see here on this aerial photograph is this chimney casting a shadow. M: Yes. R: The shadow has a certain angle, and then every shadow on this picture would have to have this angle, because the sun has only one direction. M: Yes. |
“No holes, no ‘Holocaust’” (Robert Faurisson). Cf. G. Rudolf, The Chemistry…, op. cit., pp. 132-148; G. Rudolf, C. Mattogno, Auschwitz Lies. Legends, Lies, and Prejudices on the Holocaust, 4th ed., Castle Hill Publishers, Uckfield, 2017, pp. 291-408. |
| R: These here are also supposed to be shadows, according to reports, namely from these shafts, from these insertion shafts. Do you understand? But they have a different direction.
M: Yes, I’m not sure about that. I’m completely stumped, right? So, I can’t get any idea at all. R: You can’t imagine it? These are problems I am dealing with. |
These spots are either something completely different than insertion shafts, or the pictures were manipulated by the CIA. Cf. G. Rudolf (ed.), Air-Photo…, op. cit., pp. 60-67; Rudolf, The Chemistry…, op. cit., pp. 132-148. |
| M: But I can still see… absolutely today, how he stands on the ladder and throws the stuff in there.
R: So, on the ladder, not, in… Alright, now: Through a shaft into the basement? Through the ceiling? Through a window? Through a hatch? How was it? |
He may see it in his mind, but how did this image get there? Through his own experience at that time? And if so: What did he experience: gassings of people, or delousing of objects? Or are these images from films, which he misinterprets as his own experience? Or witness testimonies in court? Or stories told by his acquaintances? Or do they come from reading books? Or from the files of the Central Office? |
| M: I really can’t tell you. With the best will in the world, I can’t say. But I would actually have to, no, so that…, I don’t know. [Looks at the book from which the plans were presented to him.] Gauss, Gauss….
Fifty years is a long time, of course. What is this? [Points to a floor plan of Crema I in the Main Camp] |
And again, he challenges his own statements about the way in which the poison was poured into the chambers. So, this may also be based on mere hearsay.
The ravages of time explain the deterioration of memory, but not the replacement of what he experienced by things he could not have experienced. |
| R: That is, that is the crematorium in the Main Camp, the floor plan, the original floor plan.
M: Ah, yes, that’s, that practically has at all… So, I know the Stalag [Stammlager = Main Camp] very well. That didn’t exist. That has now been reconstructed. |
Ernst Gauss, op. cit., p. 92. |
| R: Yeah, that’s an original plan, the reconstruction, that’s, that’s on what page? Wait a minute [flips through the book]. There, that’s how it looks today.
M: Yes. R: That’s a new reconstruction. And this is how it looked in 1942, I think. M: I wasn’t even there then. R: These are original plans from the archives of the Auschwitz Museum. M: Yes, yes. |
Ernst Gauss, op. cit. p. 96. |
| R: When you were there, it must have been an air-raid shelter. Do you know anything about it? Because this is the plan from 1944, from your time, 1944.
M: We had our own bunker. R: Where was it? M: At the Hygiene Institute. R: What was the name of that? Was that… |
Ernst Gauss, op. cit., p. 93. |
| M: Raisko. There’s hardly anything left to see of it, it’s all built up and rebuilt. I didn’t know my way around there at all. I was practically there for a whole year. | For once a correct answer! |
| R: Alright. For example, I have certain problems with your descriptions of the open-air burnings, and I would like to tell you why. I have studied testimonies about Auschwitz, about Treblinka and similar camps. And about Auschwitz, it is generally reported that pits were made, and that the corpses were burned in the pits on wood or also by means of gasoline, not on grates. But there are stories from Treblinka about the grates that you described. | For these statements, compare here, here. Obviously, Dr. Münch has read literature not only about Auschwitz, but also about other camps. The statements about the grates allegedly used for burning corpses and about the dripping fat necessary for incineration are very reminiscent of statements about Treblinka (cf. A. Neumaier, in G. Rudolf (ed.), Dissecting, op. cit.), but not from those about Auschwitz (cf. J. Graf, Auschwitz: Eyewitness Reports and Perpetrator Confessions of the
Holocaust: 30 Gas-Chamber Witnesses Scrutinized; Castle Hill Publishers, Uckfield, 2019; C. Mattogno, The Making of the Auschwitz Myth, 2nd ed., Castle Hill Publishers, Uckfield, 2021; idem, Sonderkommando Auschwitz, 3 vols., ibid., 2021, 2022. |
| M: Yes, they were brought from Treblinka or Majdanek, I don’t know. They were brought specially, because it had not worked in Auschwitz at first.
R: Without the grates? M: Yes. R: When you came there, the grates were just brought? |
It is not exactly likely that iron grates were brought from Treblinka to Auschwitz. They would have been rebuilt in Auschwitz according to existing plans. |
| M: That’s when the grates were being tested.
R: I see. Because I haven’t come across that anywhere in the literature so far, such a statement that grates were also used in Auschwitz. M: Yes, they were extra, they were brought here, you know? R: Were you there? M: Pardon? R: Did you see how they were transported? |
Only in 1944, more than two years after the beginning of the alleged extermination, and shortly before its end? Hardly! (Cf. here, here, here.) |
| M: No, no, of course not, but it went, I say yes, this thing where I was to be introduced there, it went, there was, the whole selection was no longer important at all. The only thing that was important was that people were burning.
R: How long did that actually go on in your experience with this extermination? I mean, you have, you also said, in July, August maybe something like that, that was the first time you saw, you were instructed. How long did that go on? M: On the whole, how long did it go on? R: Yes. M: Well, at the beginning of September, I think there was almost nothing left. There was already… R: So, you basically experienced that for one or two months? M: Yes. I can’t say today whether I was there in June or in July. I mean, I had already seen the big, the furnaces running, always running. [Interrupted by his wife with concern for the husband’s health.] M: Yes, wait, I’m coming, I’m coming, I’m coming. R: It won’t be long now. We are near the end. F: You’re already pale. If something will happen to you. You can’t stay like this all the time…. M: Yes, I’m overly tired, you’re right. |
What was actually important during this alleged instruction, if anything? The gassings were not (cf. here to here, here, here); the selections were not, as he reports here, although he had previously announced otherwise (here, here, here). So only the open-air burnings, which allegedly still didn’t work in 1944? But these problems he wants to know only from the theory, without knowing what really happened there! (here, here, here) |
| R: Alright, well. We’re going to call it a day. We’re done too, so far. What else did I want? For a good conclusion, have you ever heard of the Franke-Gricksch Report?
M: What is it? Franke-Gritsch? R: Franke-Gricksch Report. M: Nah. R: You describe the gas chamber, as you said, as a room where the two doors were opposite. M: Yes. R: And this is now a report by an SS officer who was at Auschwitz in Nineteen Hundred and, uh, now I don’t remember when, ‘43/’44, and sent a report to Berlin, and describes these rooms as you did, that… On one side they went in, and on the other side, they were taken out. M: Yes. R: That’s why, and that, eh, it occurred to me that you might know that one. M Nah, first time I heard anything about it. |
Cf. B.A. Renk, The Journal of Historical Review, 11(3) (1991) pp. 261-279. |
| R: Because these premises: this cannot be seen in the plans, but there is the possibility that outside the camp area there were other premises. Therefore: Your statement that there were gas chambers outside, one and a half kilometers outside, there were the gas chambers, but outside the actual camp area somewhere camouflaged in the forest… | Here, Dr. Münch is cajoled into considering the option of gassings in the so-called “farmhouses” (bunkers) just outside the camp’s perimeter, as testified by other witnesses (cf. here, here, here), since Münch’s descriptions get closest to these claims. |
| M: I can’t put it together like that now. It was that night where I particularly noticed that, right?
R: But in your opinion, it was near the ramp? M: What I remember, yes. R: Well, Dr. Münch, let’s leave it at that. |
He does not pick up on this. He doesn’t trust his own memory anymore. |
| M: But something is going wrong, I can’t put it together, I can’t put it together. | This summarizes the value of Dr. Münch’s testimony quite well. |
Concluding Remarks
After switching off the tape recorder, Dr. Münch stated that no one had ever asked him such details, that he had never been questioned in such detail. In view of the devastating result of this interview, I am quite prepared to believe this, although at least Dr. Robert Faurisson conducted a similar interview with him several years ago (personal information, Dr. Faurisson).
And in view of the many similarly confused statements of other witnesses, I am inclined to assume that practically no one from the media, among orthodox scholars or the judiciary has ever critically questioned any of these witnesses. Apparently, these witnesses are only ever asked certain key questions that encourage them to report their memories and impressions. Where these memories and impressions come from, whether they are free of internal contradictions and can be brought into line with the facts, nobody seems to be interested in.
Dr. Münch’s statements are bursting with internal contradictions, e.g., concerning the origin of the meat used for experiments; whether he ever glimpsed into the gas chamber, and if so, then how often; about the alleged size of the gas chamber; the operation of the ventilation system, or the lamps inside the gas chamber; his knowledge about the activities of the Sonderkommando…
His statements are in decisive parts contrary to material realities, for instance concerning the premises he described, which in fact did not exist; his false theory that the gas chambers or crematoria were camouflaged; the technically impossible descriptions about open-air incinerations, which are refuted by air photos; his reports about the smoke and smell of the crematoria….
He admitted that he never experienced certain things himself, although he claimed otherwise elsewhere or even here, such as the gas chambers disguised as showers; the handing out of soap and towels to the victims; the perception of smoke and stench in the Birkenau Camp; the events in the basements of Crematoria II and III, which were unknown to him; the events in Crematoria IV and V, which were also unknown to him; the working methods of the Sonderkommandos; the internal equipment of the gas chambers; the way in which Zyklon B was introduced….
Other observations suggest as well that he adapts his statements to the respective interview situation, for example, his absurd theses that he voluntarily visited the horror again and again in order to get used to it, or because it interested him; his sometimes absurd and contradictory evasive maneuvers to other alleged processes when he was asked for concrete answers…
It was also astonishing that Dr. Münch, who claims to have trained the disinfectors at Auschwitz as a hygienist, seems to know neither the properties of Zyklon B nor the largest and most important hygiene facility of the camp, the Zentralsauna.
Finally, it must be stated that Dr. Hans Münch’s testimony is completely worthless, since it is obviously composed of a hodgepodge of the most diverse, incongruous statements of quite different “witnesses.” After 50 years of intensive exposure to all possible impressions by the judiciary, the media and acquaintances, this has to be expected, as experts generally admit (see G. Rudolf, op. cit.).
The judicial authorities and the media must be reproached for having failed to subject Dr. Münch to detailed and critical questioning at an early stage, when his memory was still more efficient and less distorted. Whatever Dr. Münch may have actually experienced and known, it has been irrevocably lost. Unfortunately, the situation is probably the same for all other witnesses to the Holocaust.
After Rudolf Vrba and Arnold Friedmann (cf. R. Faurisson, in G. Rudolf (ed.), Dissecting…, op. cit., pp. 134f.), Dr. Münch is, to my knowledge, only the third witness to the “Holocaust” whose proper critical questioning has been made public. In all three cases, it has turned out that the testimonies have no legal and scientific value.
To this day, there is not a single scientifically credible witness to the existence of homicidal gas chambers in the concentration camps of the Third Reich.
Bibliographic information about this document: Inconvenient History, Vol. 15, No. 2, 2023; first published as "Auschwitz-Kronzeuge Dr. Hans Münch im Gespräch" in Vierteljahreshefte für freie Geschichtsforschung, Vol. 1, No. 3, 1997, pp. 139-190
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