Auschwitz: Eyewitness Reports and Perpetrator Confessions of the Holocaust

History of Origins of this Book

In the beginning of April 1993 I got to know Gerhard Förster, a retired degreed engineer, originally from Silesia, but who had worked for decades in Switzerland, had acquired Swiss citizenship and had settled in Würenlos in the Canton of Aargau.[1] Förster was contemplating establishing a revisionist publishing house and to engage me as an author. My task would be to compile the first systematic collection of perpetrator confessions and eyewitness reports about the gassings of Jews in the National Socialist (NS) concentration camps as claimed by the representatives of orthodox historiography. For Förster I seemed to be the right man, because in my just-then-published revisionist debut work Der Holocaust auf dem Prüfstand (The Holocaust on the Test Bench, Graf 1993) I had already quoted a considerable amount of such confessions and witness testimonies. I was deeply taken with this proposal, especially as I had time to do such work – a week before, immediately after the publication of the just-mentioned book, I had lost my position as a teacher of French and Latin at the College-preparatory School in Therwil, in the Canton of Basel Land.

Basically, two possibilities existed regarding the possible structure of the planned study: I could present a cross section of perpetrator confessions and eyewitness reports about all six camps labeled in orthodox historiography as “extermination camps” or confine myself to one of these. After comprehensive deliberations with Förster as well as with Prof. Robert Faurisson who, together with me, had visited Förster in July 1993 in Würenlos and who’d made a range of useful suggestions for the forthcoming work, I decided to go with the second approach. Herewith the choice of camp was obvious – it could only be Auschwitz due to the following reasons:

• In the scholarly historiography of the Holocaust as well as in media propaganda, Auschwitz at that time played a dominant role.[2] In the public awareness it consequently had become the ultimate symbol of the “industrial extermination of the Jews by the NS regime.”
• There are far more perpetrator confessions and witness testimonies about Auschwitz than there are about all five of the other “extermination camps” combined.
• For Auschwitz, an exceptionally large number of documents by the SS camp administration still exists, enabling the historian to compare the claims of the witnesses to the documented facts of the conditions in the camp. Among the existing material is also a multitude of documents (building plans included) about the crematories in which homicidal gas chambers using the pesticide Zyklon B are said to have been installed and in which the corpses of the murdered people would have been incinerated subsequently. This gives the researcher the opportunity to verify whether the claimed mass gassings and mass incinerations were technically possible at all. Besides that, the crematories still exist, at least in a state of ruin, which also strongly simplifies the researcher’s task. About the “extermination camps” Chełmno, Belzec, Sobibór and Treblinka hardly any contemporary documents exist, and the camps themselves were torn down before the retreat of the Germans.

As the source material available to me was just too sparse, in September 1993 I visited the Italian independent scholar Carlo Mattogno, who lives near Rome, and who for over a decade has concerned himself with the persecution of Jews in the Third Reich and who had already published various papers on this subject. Mattogno had a large number of witness reports about Auschwitz at his disposal I could copy and use for my forthcoming work. Titled Auschwitz: Tätergeständnisse und Augenzeugen des Holocaust (Auschwitz: Perpetrator Confessions and Eyewitnesses of the Holocaust), my book was published in May 1994 in Würenlos by the publishing house established by Förstner called “Neue Visionen.” The centerpiece of my study consisted of the testimonies of perpetrators and witnesses as to the mass gassings in Auschwitz as posited by orthodox historiography; each witness report was followed by an analysis.

Now almost two and a half decades have gone by since the publication of the original German edition of that book. In the face of the undiminished relevance of the subject a new edition seemed highly desirable. To just reprint the edition of 1994 was not appropriate for several reasons. In the first place it contained quite a few mistakes and unfortunate wordings that needed to be corrected. More important, however, was that since 1994 revisionist research, particularly with regard to Auschwitz, had greatly advanced, in which above all the magisterial work of Carlo Mattogno must be praised. While revising my book, I’ve relied upon these new revisionist insights.

The structure of the new edition follows that of the old one. In the end, the number of the witness reports and perpetrator confessions dealt with here has not changed despite deletions, additions and certain agglomerations.[3] Slightly adjusted, however, was the title of the book: As the number of witness reports is substantially higher than the number of confessions, this new version of the book is called Auschwitz: Eyewitness Reports and Perpetrator Confessions of the Holocaust. Unlike the old version, the “eyewitness reports” and the “perpetrator confessions” are presented in separate chapters: The former form the second chapter, while the latter form the third chapter of the book. In the first chapter, the most important information about Auschwitz is given as background – a short history of the camp, the numbers of those deported to the camp, the proven and the claimed number of victims, the crematories and open-air incinerations, the claimed killing sites and the claimed murder weapon Zyklon B – in such a way that I can refer to that data in the subsequent chapters as needed. In the epilogue, a recapitulation is then drawn from what has been previously developed.

Two Necessary Clarifications of Terms

In order to avoid terminological misunderstandings from the outset, let the terms “Holocaust” and “gas chambers” be immediately defined:

The term “Holocaust” – that, since the airing on German TV at the beginning of 1979 of the American movie by the same name, has also permeated the German-speaking world – goes back to an ancient Greek word in an etymological sense meaning “complete burning” and originally meaning “burnt offering.” I denote this to be the alleged mass extermination of Jews in gas chambers as well as the subsequent incineration of the corpses in crematories or in open air. Not belonging to the term “Holocaust” are the persecutions and deportations of Jews during the Second World War – disputed by nobody – as well as the completely undisputed existence of concentration camps, in which a large number of Jewish and non-Jewish detainees died as a consequence of epidemics, malnutrition and deprivation, and to a lesser extent also of maltreatment or execution. The executions of Jews behind the eastern front, represented in orthodox historiography as part of the Holocaust in terms of systematic extermination of Jews, are not dealt with in this book.

“Gas chambers” I denote to solely be spaces for killing people by gas, though not the disinfestation or delousing chambers of which the existence and use in Auschwitz as well as in other concentration camps is undisputed, and in which clothing, blankets etc. were cleansed of vermin by means of gas. (In the German wartime documents these disinfestation chambers were occasionally denoted “gas chambers.”)

The Significance of Holocaust Witness Testimonies in Public Awareness

Anyone disclosing himself as revisionist in front of an open-minded but only superficially informed audience will practically always be confronted with the following three main objections:

The Photos

“But all of us have seen the images of heaps of corpses in the concentration camps. Are you going to tell me those are Photoshop creations?”

The Question about the Whereabouts of the Disappeared Jews

“Where did those millions of Jews go then, if they weren’t gassed?”

The Witness Testimonies

“But there were numerous witnesses that told about the mass gassings in Auschwitz and in other camps. Do you have the presumptuousness to state they all lied?”

Experience shows that for most of the defenders of the orthodox version of history and who are not familiar or only partially familiar with the facts, the third of these three arguments is the most important and decisive. In my experience, it is easier to convince an anti-revisionist interlocutor of the dubiousness of his position with regard to the first two points.

The case is easiest when it’s about the photos. Usually it suffices to point out that these photos are indeed real – except for some that do not carry much weight, however, and therefore can be ignored here – but they do not provide any proof of the alleged mass exterminations of Jews in “extermination camps.” They are from camps in west Germany, such as Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, Nordhausen and Dachau, and show the victims of epidemics, malnutrition, exhaustion and Allied air-raids. During the advance of the Red Army, the Germans had evacuated the eastern camps in order not to let potential soldiers and workers fall into the Soviet’s hands. In the western camps, where these transferred inmates were detained in overburdened facilities, an uncontrollable outbreak of epidemics occurred in the overcrowded barracks; frequently, neither medical supplies nor food could reach the camps anymore due to the destruction of the German infrastructure by the Allied air-raid campaign. As a result, for instance in Dachau, where a total of 12,445 detainees had died between the beginning of 1940 and the end of 1944, no less than 15,348 died in the first four months of 1945, hence more than during the entire preceding five years (Neuhäusler 1981).

These facts are not disputed by orthodox historiography, but that doesn’t stop the media from showing these photos as proof of the Holocaust and from falsely portraying the victims of typhus and malnutrition as having been murdered.

Less easy for a revisionist is it to answer the question about the whereabouts of the “disappeared” Jews in a short and convincing way. First of all, he will emphasize that, as a consequence of the National Socialist persecutions, indeed a very large number of Jews died, the traditional six-million number being far from any reality, though. In this context some revisionists might refer to Walter Sanning’s comprehensive demographic study The Dissolution published in 1983, but aside from the fact that this book has quite some weaknesses, making it a target of justified critique,[4] rarely will the interlocutor be willing to read a whole book full of dry statistics. Generally, a reference to the enormous Jewish migration from the former German-controlled areas that started immediately after the war is more convincing. A notion about its extent is for instance given by the following article, published November 24, 1978 on page 8 of the State–Times (Baton Rouge, Louisiana; somewhat shortened also in the San Francisco Chronicle, Nov. 25, 1978, p. 6):

“The Steinbergs once flourished in a small Jewish village in Poland. That was before Hitler’s death camps. Now more than 200 far-flung survivors and descendants are gathered here to share a special four-day celebration that began, appropriately, on Thanksgiving Day. Relatives came Thursday from Canada, France, England, Argentina, Colombia, Israel and from at least 13 cities across the United States. ‘It’s fabulous,’ said Iris Krasnow of Chicago, ‘There are five generations here – from 3 months old to 85. People are crying and having a wonderful time. It’s almost like a World War II refugee reunion.’ […] For Iris Krasnow’s mother Helene, who had emigrated from Poland to France and from there to the U.S., the reunion is a joyous event. ‘I cannot believe that so many survived the Holocaust.’”

On June 29, 1987, the Chicago Tribune reported on a gathering of the Jewish family Mintz. Harry Mintz originally believed that all of his family members had perished in the Holocaust. After he went on a search, he discovered around 150 living relatives spread over many countries. A large number of them participated in the mentioned family gathering.

Such reports impress a layman seriously interested in historical facts much more than hard-to-digest population statistics, and they are often able to shake his beliefs.

As a natural consequence of the history lessons taught in school as well as the relentless media propaganda against revisionism, we are all exposed to, the psychological barrier with regard to the witness testimonies is a lot stronger. If a revisionist points to evidently absurd eyewitness reports, for instance that of Moshe Peer, who claimed that in Bergen-Belsen (where according to the orthodox history no gas chamber existed) he survived no less than six gassings (Seidman 1993), or that of Morris Hubert, who testified that, each day in Buchenwald, the Nazis had put a Jew into a cage containing a bear and an eagle, after which the bear had eaten the Jew and the eagle had minced his bones (Goldman 1988), the anti-revisionist usually reacts disquietedly: Of course, he retorts, there will be swindlers among the witnesses; they are within every group of people, but that some witnesses would have told lies, does not at all mean, that all witnesses would be liars – and as is known, many thousands of those witnesses exist.

With their imputations, the anti-revisionist continues, the revisionists are insulting people who have suffered immensely, and are in a certain sense persecuting them for a second time. And anyway, it would have been impossible for so many witnesses to portray the same events independent of each other if these had not actually taken place. Those doubting the honesty of these witnesses apparently acts on the assumption that they all lied by order of a mysterious higher power. Yet this would be a classic example of a crude conspiracy theory.

These argumentative patterns can be seen for instance in the way the Swiss-Jewish historian Raphael Ben Nescher argues, who in his book Holocaust-Revisionismus: Ideologie oder Wissenschaft (in which he makes some no-less-than-sensational concessions to the revisionists, by the way; see my retort Graf 2013) writes (Ben Nescher 2010, p. 218):

“First, they [the revisionists] deny that the Nazis had a plan (conspiracy), to kill the Jews. From the historians they demand incontestable proof that such a plan existed. […] The revisionists think that on the one hand the Jews were capable of cajoling many thousands of witnesses, survivors, victims and perpetrators to give false testimonies and to have forged quite a few documents and images in order to produce an enormous tissue of lies and to fool the whole world; on the other hand, they [the Jew] are said to have been unable to forge a corresponding order by Hitler.”

This might sound quite convincing to the layman, but it has the small disadvantage that it rests on false premises and is therefore worthless. Let me discuss the following points:

The “Many Thousands of Witnesses, Survivors, Victims and Perpetrators”

No revisionist has ever claimed that the witnesses and survivors of the concentration camps, of which there were indeed many thousands, had lied throughout in all instances. It’s not about former concentration-camp detainees in general, however, but about those who claim to have attended homicidal gassings, and there weren’t “many thousands” of them, but quite a small number. As far as their testimonies pertain to Auschwitz, the most important of these witnesses are presented and quoted in this book.

The Imputation that “the Jews” Had Presumably Cajoled “Many Thousands” of Witnesses to Be Untruthful

To a certain extent, Ben Nescher puts up a straw man here because no serious revisionist has ever suggested such an off-the-wall thesis. In the present book, we will of course deal with the genesis of the gas-chamber story, which is much more complex.

The “Many Thousands” of Documents and Photos Revisionists Supposedly Classify as Forgeries

Manipulated photos do indeed exist in considerable numbers, as especially Udo Walendy has shown (Walendy 2003), but there are only a handful of documents pertaining to the Holocaust that were irrefutably revealed as forgeries by revisionists. One of these, among others, is the bizarre Franke-Gricksch Report about Auschwitz (cf. Section 3.4.), as well as three documents about the gas vans allegedly used by the Germans (for this, see Alvarez 2011). About some other documents, for instance the infamous Himmler Speech in Posen of October 4, 1943, revisionist researchers surmise that it is a falsified or at least manipulated document, but do not claim this explicitly, because they can bring up only circumstantial evidence, but no hard proof.

The Significance of Witness Testimonies in Orthodox Holocaust Literature

In his introduction to the first edition of this book, publisher Gerhard Förster wrote:

“The mark of Cain that the German people then [after the Second World War] had been branded with, a crime unique in history, has not disappeared to this day. The remembrance of it is kept visible daily by the media, and in the Federal Republic of Germany any doubt of the Holocaust is suppressed by laws that the defeated have imposed upon themselves. But what is the almost generally accepted thesis of the uniqueness of ‘Nazi crimes’ based on? In the first place on two court decisions, namely the one by the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg in 1945/1946, as well as the one of the Auschwitz Trial held in Frankfurt from 1963 to 1965. […] What do the judges rely on with their guilty verdicts? Well, in the Nuremberg case very predominantly, and with the trial at Frankfurt almost exclusively – on witness testimonies. By these, the million-fold genocide of the Jews stands or falls, and with that also the justification for the criminalization of a complete people continued undiminished a half a century after the end of the war.”

Förster’s wording, saying that the Nuremberg Tribunal “very predominantly” had relied on witness testimonies, could cause the erroneous impression that the Nuremberg prosecutors had indeed produced some sort of documentary proof for an annihilation of Jews in extermination camps, but this is not the case.

Image 4: Jan Crawford, “Piecing a Family Back together,” Chicago Tribune, 20. June 1987; http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1987-06-29/news/8702170556_1_reunion-holocaust-family

That the claims of homicidal gassings were explicitly based on witness testimonies (perpetrator confessions included), is revealed by an attentive reading of the edition of Raul Hilberg’s 1388-page canonical book The Destruction of the European Jews. For his portrayal of the anti-Jewish policy of the Third Reich as well as the deportations, Hilberg relied on an immense number of German documents, so a fundamental objection to his representation seems hardly possible in this regard. To the issue concerning the unfolding of mass killings in extermination camps, however, Hilberg devotes only 19 (!) pages (Hilberg 2003, pp. 1027-1046), and on these nineteen pages all of the source references about the extermination process refer to witness testimonies and perpetrator confessions as well as to verdicts at trials that in turn are totally based on witness testimonies and perpetrator confessions (cf. Graf 2015). In other words: Forty years after the end of the war, the orthodox Holocaust historians had still not been able to locate even one single wartime document about homicidal gassings in a single National-Socialist camp!

The Absence of Documentary Evidence of the Holocaust

In 1950, the French-Jewish historian Léon Poliakov published a book titled Bréviaire de La Haine (English: Harvest of Hate), which was the first attempt to present an overall view of the National-Socialist persecution of Jews. It contains the following truly astounding sentences (Poliakov 1971, p. 108):

“The archives of the Third Reich and the depositions and accounts of its leaders make possible a reconstruction, down to the last detail, of the origin and development of the plans for aggression, the military campaigns, and the whole array of procedures by which the Nazis intended to reshape the world to their liking. Only the campaign to exterminate the Jews, as regards its conception as well as many other essential aspects, remains shrouded in darkness. Inferences, psychological considerations, and third- or fourth-hand reports enable us to reconstruct its development with considerable accuracy. Certain details, however, must remain forever unknown. The three or four people chiefly involved in the actual drawing up of the plan for total extermination are dead and no documents have survived; perhaps none ever existed.”

With this, Poliakov implicitly conceded that the documents filed at the Nuremberg Trial as proof of the National-Socialist extermination of Jews were in reality not conclusive. This also pertained to the protocol of the Wannsee Conference of January 20, 1942[6] that for decades was presented as Holocaust proof positive, though it contained nothing about a policy of extermination of the Jews, let alone about extermination camps and gas chambers.

The only half-way-serious attempt to documentarily prove the alleged killings of Jews in gas chambers is by the French researcher Jean-Claude Pressac. In 1989, he published an enormous opus titled Auschwitz: Operation and Technique of the Gas Chambers (Pressac 1989). It is of great value to any scientific analysis of the subject because it contains multiple previously unpublished documents about Auschwitz. Pressac honestly admitted that he had not discovered absolute proof of the deployment of homicidal gas chambers, but he submitted “39 criminal traces.” By this he meant “blunders” by the staff of the Auschwitz Camp’s Central Construction Office, who, despite the alleged strong prohibition to mention gassings, did leave a few remarks about them here and there in their documents anyway. Four years after that, a second, much-shorter Pressac book was published, Les Crématoires d’Auschwitz (Pressac 1993), which was translated into German a year later (Pressac 1994).

Although from a scientific point of view Pressac’s second book was a clear step backwards from his first, the Western media celebrated it in a concerted campaign as the definitive rebuttal of revisionism. In this book, the number of “criminal traces” shrank from 39 to less than 10; to compensate for this, Pressac presented a document found in a Moscow archive about “gas detectors” which he saw as definitive proof of the existence of homicidal gas chambers.[7]

Four revisionist authors – Robert Faurisson, Serge Thion, Germar Rudolf and Carlo Mattogno – have critically analyzed Pressac’s assertions (Faurisson 1991; Rudolf 2016b; Mattogno 2015). I don’t consider it necessary to summarize their line of argumentation here, but in order to illustrate the way Pressac argues, let one of his “criminal traces” be discussed here.

On March 31, 1943 Karl Bischoff of the Central Construction Office of Auschwitz mentioned an order for a “gastight door with peephole.” For the layman this is an extraordinarily convincing proof of homicidal gassings – for what, he will ask, did a delousing chamber need a peephole in the door? The answer comes from the “Instructions for the Operation of a Hydrogen-Cyanide Delousing Chamber” in Concentration Camp Mauthausen,[8] according to which a person who works in the chamber had to be continuously observed by a second person in order for the latter to be able to rapidly provide help in case of accidental poisoning. Ironically, Pressac himself reproduced photos of several delousing-chamber doors equipped with peepholes in his first book (Pressac 1989, pp. 425, 486, 500). Such “own goals” made some revisionists think Pressac could have been a revisionist double agent.

After the publication of his second book, Pressac criticized the orthodox portrayal of the Holocaust with growing sharpness. In a 1995 interview with the antirevisionist Valérie Igounet that was published five years later, he stated (Igounet 2000, p. 657):

“The current view of the world of the [National Socialist] camps, though triumphant, is doomed. What of it can be salvaged? Only little.”

In the face of such heresy, Pressac fell from grace. When he died in 2003 at the age of only 59, the mass media, a decade earlier having celebrated him as the conqueror of revisionism, reacted with frosty silence, and the only obituaries were written by revisionists (see Graf/Mattogno/​Rudolf).

Even among non-revisionist historians there were a few who were not misled by the triumphant crowing of the coordinated mass media after the publication of Pressac’s second book. On September 2 and 3, 1996, in the western Swiss newspaper Le Nouveau Quotidien, the anti-revisionist French historian and novelist Jacques Baynac published a two-part article on the subject of revisionism, in which he offered the following critical conclusion (Baynac 1996b):

“For the scientific historian, an assertion by a witness does not really represent history. It is an object of history. And an assertion of one witness does not weigh heavily; assertions by many witnesses do not weigh much more heavily, if they are not shored up with solid documentation. The postulate of scientific historiography, one could say without great exaggeration, reads: no paper/s, no facts proven […].

Either one gives up the primacy of the archives, and in this case one disqualifies history as a science in order to immediately reclassify it as fiction; or one retains the primacy of the archive, and in this case one must concede that the lack of traces brings with it the inability to prove directly the existence of homicidal gas chambers.”

In other words: 51 years after the end of the Second World War the “biggest crime in the history of mankind” still was not proven!

The complete absence of documentary proof for the existence of extermination camps and gas chambers gave orthodox historiography quite a headache from the start. As the prosecutors of the Third Reich could not possibly be content with only witness testimonies, they used a trick already at an early stage, characterized by Carlo Mattogno as follows (Mattogno 1991, pp. 64f.):

“The Nuremberg inquisitors created an absurd interpretation method which makes it possible to infer something from any document that it does not contain. The starting point of this method of interpretation is the – unfounded and arbitrary – axiom that, even in the most secret documents, the Nazi authorities had used a kind of code language, the keys of which the Nuremberg inquisitors naturally claimed to have discovered. Thus took place the systematic misinterpretation of intrinsically harmless documents in support of the extermination thesis.”

The best-known case of such arbitrary interpretation is the term “Final Solution of the Jewish Question”, denoted in unison by the court historians to be synonymous with “physical extermination”, in spite of the fact that the contemporary documents show that the “Final Solution” was of a territorial nature. Here is one example. On June 24, 1940, Head of the Security Service Reinhardt Heydrich wrote to Secretary of State Joachim Ribbentrop:[9]

“Since my office has taken over the task on 1 January 1939, more than 200,000 Jews have emigrated from the Reich’s territory so far. However, the entire problem – we are already dealing with some 3.25 million Jews in the area currently under German control – can no longer be solved by emigration. Hence, a territorial solution becomes necessary.” (My emphasis)

The Absence of Material Evidence for the Holocaust

Let us go back to Jacques Baynac for a moment. In his previously quoted newspaper article, he wrote that, if one wants to continue to classify history as a science, one has to admit “that the lack of traces brings with it the inability to prove directly the existence of homicidal gas chambers.” As his article shows, Baynac exclusively meant documentary proof when using the word “traces.” Obviously, he did not at all realize that a far-more-difficult problem exists with which orthodox Holocaust historiography has to wrestle – the absence of material evidence of the alleged million-fold killings of Jews in “death camps.”

While in a pinch one might imagine it would have been possible to issue only verbal orders to carry out murders, to consistently use code language in documents and, in case it were not possible to operate without incriminating documents, to swiftly dispose of these documents before the end of the war, the elimination of several millions of corpses would have been a titanic task. According to Raul Hilberg, 1.25 million people perished in Auschwitz – to limit ourselves to this camp – (“up to 1,000,000” Jews plus 250,000 non-Jews; Hilberg 2003, p. 1320). In 1993, Franciszek Piper, at that time the director of the Auschwitz Museum, postulated a number of victims of 1.1 million (Piper 1993/1996). As over a million corpses do not disappear by themselves, the mortal remains of those perished in the camp must have been incinerated.

In order to justify their claim of approaching matters scientifically, orthodox Holocaust historiography should have pursued already many decades ago the question as to whether or not the crematories of Auschwitz were at all capable of incinerating the claimed number of corpses in light of their capacity and available amounts of fuel, and to what extent the eyewitness reports about open-air incineration of corpses are plausible. Only revisionist researchers – who in the jargon of the Western societies are vilified as “right-wing extremist liars” – have undertaken these tasks.[10]

To the next point: At every common murder trial held in a country under the rule of law, traces of the crime are investigated. This means that, among other things, an expert report about the murder weapon is produced. When someone has been stabbed, for instance, and the police find a blood-stained knife in the vicinity of the crime scene, the forensic experts come into action and examine whether fingerprints are on the knife handle, whether the stab wounds of the victim match the blade of the knife, and if the blood on the knife is that of the victim. But in the case of the “biggest crime in human history”, the prosecutors of National-Socialist Germany as well as the orthodox historians always made do with witness testimonies. In the verdict of the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial, the court unreservedly conceded (Sagel-Grande et al. 1979, p. 434):

“The court lacked almost all possibilities of discovery available in a normal murder trial to create a true picture of the actual event at the time of the murder. It lacked the bodies of the victims, autopsy records, expert reports on the cause of death and the time of death; it lacked any trace of the murderers, murder weapons, etc. An examination of the eyewitness testimony was only possible in rare cases.”

Think about that! Regardless of the claims of the court, an “examination of the eyewitness testimony” would have been possible in many instances. But the judges weren’t interested in that as they were obliged to meet political expectations.

As bogus proof of the claimed mass extermination, the Auschwitz Museum presents trembling visitors with piles of shoes and other utensils allegedly belonging to murdered detainees. Yet a pile of shoes merely proves that at the spot in question, somebody has piled up shoes. With regard to Concentration Camp Majdanek, where over decades also piles of shoes had been presented as proof of the Holocaust, Polish historian Czesław Rajca wrote in 1992 (Rajca 1992, p. 192):

“It had been assumed that this [quantity of shoes] came from murdered detainees. We know from documents that have later come to light that there was, at Majdanek, a store which received shoes from other camps.”

The Problematic Nature of the Witness Testimonies

In the 1994 anthology Grundlagen zur Zeitgeschichte (English: Dissecting the Holocaust, Rudolf 2003b), a milestone in revisionist research, Germar Rudolf, using the pen name Manfred Köhler, wrote (Köhler 2003, p. 85):

“In academia as well as in the justice system of a state under the rule of law, there is a hierarchy of evidence reflecting the evidential value. In this hierarchy, material and documentary evidence is always superior to eyewitness testimony.”

Let us illustrate this statement by means of two hypothetical examples. First, we assume the police find the corpse of a murder victim, and two persons claim to have seen how Mr. K. shot the victim dead. Traces that indicate the presence of Mr. K at the crime scene are not found. When being questioned by the police, Mr. K. states that at the time of the crime he had been in a hotel 800 kilometers away from the crime scene. Investigation shows that his presence in that hotel was indeed registered and that six witnesses state having seen him there at the time of the crime.

In a country under the rule of law, and in view of these facts, Mr. K would not be charged. This is not because there are three times the number of witnesses for the defense than for the prosecution (this numeric aspect is secondary), but because the hotel register proves that he was not at the crime scene at the moment of the crime. The documentary proof (the hotel register) outweighs the witness proof (the testimonies of both claimed eyewitnesses). The fact that they gave false testimony could for instance be because they resented Mr. K. for some reason and therefore wanted him to be accused of a crime. Of course, it is also possible that the real perpetrator looked like Mr. K, and that the witnesses mixed up the two. In this case, the false testimony had no malicious intent, but was a simple mistake.

Second example. Historians discover an old document in which a city is described that until now has been completely unknown to historiography, and that is said to have been located at a particular site. Excavations are conducted but nothing is found. Because a complete city cannot disappear without a trace, the historians will conclude that the city in question never existed. That does not at all mean that the document in question has to be a forgery. It could be altogether genuine, but in this case reflects not a historical fact but a legend.

In the same way as the first example illustrates the superiority of documentary proof versus witness evidence, the second demonstrates the superiority of material evidence versus documentary proof. We could have any amount of precise ancient-Egyptian paintings of the pyramids – if these pyramids were located nowhere and not even remainders of them could be found, such documents would be of no evidentiary value.

Now that we have seen that witness testimony is the weakest of all proof, let us once more listen to Mr. Köhler (ibid., p. 86):

“While making no claims to completeness, the following lists a few criteria for determining credibility:

a) Emotional involvement. If witnesses are emotionally too involved in the cases under investigation, this may distort the testimony in one direction or the other, without this necessarily being a conscious process.
b) If it turns out that a witness is not overly concerned about truthfulness, this casts doubts upon his further credibility.
c) Testimony under coercion. The frankness of testimony may be limited if a witness is subjected to direct or indirect pressure that makes him deem it advisable to configure his testimony accordingly.
d) Third-party influence. A person’s memory is easy to manipulate. Events reported by acquaintances or in the media can easily become assimilated as ‘personal experience’. […]
e) Temporal distance from the events to be attested to. It is generally known that the reliability of eyewitness testimony diminishes greatly after only a few days […].”

Let us now apply each of Köhler’s five points to the actual case of the Holocaust eyewitnesses.

Emotional Involvement

In the case at hand, it was the war hysteria, the atrocity propaganda lasting for years and the ideological nature of the war that biased almost every human. In such conditions, objective information is interpreted in an extremely biased way.

All human beings dislike uncertainty and insecurity. Our brain is a supercomputer that continually infills lacking information by inter- and extrapolations. What we think to be a memory is in most cases based on very few concrete data points and on quite a bit of interpretation that consciously as well as unconsciously is affected by our expectations and feelings – hope, fear, anger, hate, love – (cf. Fraser 2012).

Out of fear of a poison-gas war, mixed with all kinds of fears and hysteria evoked by atrocity propaganda, shower rooms of detainees with nearby hydrogen-cyanide delousing chambers are imagined rapidly as homicidal gas chambers, and in many-a-brain, rumors soon become certainty.

One-sided suggestion – and that is what the world has been experiencing ever since the end of the war with regard to the Holocaust – while being under emotional stress is the main prerequisite for transforming our memory, as Elizabeth Loftus has repeatedly proven (Loftus 1994, 1997, 2013).

Woe to the contemporary witness who does not remember the way society expects! Social ostracism and societal exclusion, ruined career, physical attacks, material disadvantages and even prosecution are the possible consequences. On the other hand, for every witness who remembers the way he is expected to, approval or even fame and wealth await! There is no subject that exerts a higher social and emotional pressure on witnesses than the Holocaust.

Veracity

For the largest part the Auschwitz eyewitnesses were former Jewish detainees, most of whom had not been incarcerated due to actual or alleged crimes, but had been robbed of their belongings and deported solely on the grounds of their descent. They had been forced to perform heavy manual labor in torrid summer heat and bitter winter cold, had to witness how their fellow sufferers were snatched away in droves by epidemics or died from exhaustion, and possibly had to undergo grueling evacuations shortly before the end of the war. Under these conditions, it was almost inevitable that an enormous hate of the SS and by extension of the Germans in general arose within many of them. Those of them who were allowed to testify in court as witnesses for the prosecution after the war, now had the opportunity to avenge their oppressors by imputing to the SS defendants sitting in the dock, in addition to misdeeds they may really have committed, far worse actions in order to have them hanged or at least to get them behind bars. Others who were not a witness for the prosecution, but who piped up in books, newspaper articles or radio and television programs, generally did their best to incriminate the Germans as permanently as possible, even if by doing so the truth often fell by the wayside. This may have been morally objectionable, but it was humanly understandable.

(For fairness’s sake it must be pointed out that there were also Jewish detainees who testified in favor of former SS men at the trials, and asserted that they had behaved correctly and humanely. Such testimonies were unwelcome for political reasons, however, and therefore mostly ignored by the courts. Cf. Jordan, pp. 151f.)

A further possible motive for such witnesses was the craving for recognition, the desire to have their 15 minutes of fame. In his late work Sources of Holocaust Research, Raul Hilberg wrote (Hilberg 2001, p. 48; cf. Graf 2018, pp. 147-166):

“The abstainers [survivors refusing to testify] might have harmed other victims. They could have shied away from recalling instances of weakness, helplessness, or humiliation. Alternatively, they could have concluded that they did not have enough to say if they had not been in Auschwitz for some time, or if they had not jumped from a moving train, or if they had not joined a partisan unit in the woods.”

In plain language: There were plenty of motives not to tell the truth. Regrettably, however, Hilberg did not conclude from this that the witness testimonies in general needed to be approached with prudence. He willingly accepted any ever-so-foolish eyewitness report, if it supported his thesis (cf. Graf 2015 in general).

In 1975, a group of English cremation experts investigated the required minimal duration with regard to the incineration of the corpse of an adult in a muffle. On average, this is 63 minutes (Jones 1975). Let us now compare this empirically hardened figure to the testimony of the Slovak Jew and former Auschwitz detainee Dov Paisikovic, who as a member of the Sonderkommando claims to have taken part in the incineration of the corpses of gassed people in Crematory II of Auschwitz-Birkenau (Poliakov 1964, p. 162):

“Cremating a corpse lasts roughly four minutes.”

The cremation duration quoted by Poliakov is therefore approximately fifteen times less than the actual duration. This cannot be called an “error” or “exaggeration”; Paisikovic has lied through his teeth. The reason for this was of course to make credible the claim of an enormously large number of corpses of gassed people having been incinerated in a very short time. Such a flagrant lie disqualifies an eyewitness from the start. Even if Paisikovic’s other testimonies seemed plausible, he would not be a credible witness. His report about Auschwitz, however, contains numerous other absurdities in addition to the absurdity mentioned above (cf. Section 2.13.). For habitual liars, one false claim is not enough.

Testimony under Coercion

Especially during the early Holocaust trials, it was possible not only to exert pressure on the defendants but also on the witnesses so that they would express themselves the way the prosecution desired. (That many witnesses were very eager to confirm the exaggerations and falsehoods expected of them, is a different kettle of fish.)

On May 24, 1945, the Polish Jew and erstwhile Sonderkommando man Henryk Tauber stated during a questioning by the Polish judicial authorities that the number of Auschwitz victims amounts to four million.[11] Apart from the fact that Tauber, as a detainee, hardly had any access to the records and statistics of the camp administration, and therefore could not have known the total number of victims in Auschwitz, his figure is almost four times as high as the figure of 1.1 million currently mentioned in Poland (which, as we will see later, is still exaggerated by approximately a factor of seven).

A look at the historical context explains Tauber’s grotesque exaggeration. Two and a half weeks earlier, on May 7, 1945, Pravda had published a Soviet Committee report in Moscow saying that four million people had perished.[12] It’s therefore quite obvious that Tauber had been instructed before his questioning which figure he was required to mention.

Third-Party Influence

Various witnesses claim that three corpses were incinerated at the same time within 20 minutes in a single muffle of the crematories of Auschwitz. This claim can also be found in the notes of the first Auschwitz commandant, Rudolf Höss, made in 1946 while in Krakow Prison (cf. Section 3.1.).

Since the incineration of a single adult corpse in a muffle takes approximately an hour, the respective witnesses exaggerate the capacity of the crematories by a factor of nine. It can hardly be assumed that various witnesses conjured up the same impossibility independent of each other. A common source must therefore exist from which these fallacious statements originated. Such a source indeed exists in the form of the witness Szlama Dragon, who made the following statement before a Polish committee in May 1945 (cf. Section 2.11.):

“After we had dragged the bodies to the furnace, we put three of them on an iron stretcher, the first corpse headfirst, the second reversed, and the third again like the first one. We pushed the stretcher on rollers installed there into the furnace opening. In doing so, two prisoners pushed the stretcher from behind, while a third pulled them at the front. When the stretcher had been pushed into the furnace opening, it dipped downward, and the bodies fell onto the grate. Then we pulled out the stretcher again and closed the furnace opening. Then we filled another furnace. The cremation lasted 15 to 20 minutes. Then new bodies came into the furnaces.”

From this it follows that all witnesses who made the same fallacious claim got their “knowledge” either directly or indirectly – via third parties – from Szlama Dragon. The fact that Höss, who of course knew very well the real capacity of the crematories of Auschwitz, put the same nonsense on paper in Krakow Prison, can only be explained by his dungeon masters having dictated these data to him in order to give the fanciful tales about millions of gassed and incinerated Jews an appearance of credibility.

Temporal Distance from the Events to Be Attested to

Because the human capacity of remembering becomes increasingly weaker with the passage of time, as Manfred Köhler states, it follows that witness testimonies given immediately after the liberation of the Auschwitz Camp are the most important ones, because at that time the memory of the witnesses was still clear. The more time that went by between the portrayed events and the testimony of the witness, the less conclusive this testimony became – not only because human memory becomes increasingly unreliable as time passes, but also because with every year that goes by the danger grows that the memory of the witness in question gets influenced by books, newspaper articles or movies about the subject in question, and he then confuses these representations with his own experience. This means that witness testimonies about the Holocaust given decades after the end of the war are generally of no historical value. A historiography that relies upon such testimonies has lost all claims of being scholarly in nature. Likewise, a judiciary that sentences people on the basis of such testimonies, decades after the respective events, violates elementary principles of justice. The declarations of former detainees who several decades after the war testified during trials against former SS men are therefore already suspect from the start and bear little probative value.

* * *

When analyzing eyewitness reports, we will frequently examine the respective testimonies as to their internal as well as to their external plausibility. Here also, we can rely on Manfred Köhler, who lets the assessment of a witness testimony depend on “internal conclusiveness”, the “correctness of the historical context” as well as on consistency with “technical and natural scientific reality”, and defines these terms as follows (Köhler 2003, p. 86):

“a) Internal consistency. Testimony must be free of contradictions and in accordance with the rules of logic.
b) Correctness of historical context. Testimony must fit into the historical context established conclusively by higher forms of evidence (documents, material evidence).
c) Technical and scientific reality. Testimony must report such matters as can be reconciled with the laws of nature and with what was technically possible at the time in question.”

Let us illustrate this statement by means of two testimonies of Auschwitz witnesses. First with a report that, to express it with Köhler’s words, cannot “be reconciled with the laws of nature and with what was technically possible at the time in question.” Moshe Maurice Garbarz, who is seen as one of the witness of the alleged murder actions performed in two farmhouses located outside the Auschwitz-Birkenau Camp (the “Bunkers”), claimed that, in the vicinity of one of these houses, a unit of detainees had dug out a “swimming pool” (meaning: a mass grave) with a length of 50 to 60 m, a width of 20 to 30 m and a depth of 1.5 m in just one single night. In the face of the fact that this inmate unit in no way had any motorized excavators at its disposal, but merely shovels and mattocks, this is a radical technical impossibility (cf. Section 2.16.). Garbarz’s testimony is already completely incredible on the grounds of this physical impossibility; the conclusiveness of such an eyewitness report is equal to zero. This would be that way even if the rest of the report were consistent – which it is absolutely not, however. As already seen in the case of Dov Paisikovic, here as well it seems that, for a witness who expresses one blatantly obvious technical absurdity, one such absurdity doesn’t seem to ever be enough.

An incidental remark imposes itself here. Opponents of revisionism often accuse revisionist of worshipping the basic principle “falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus” (false in one thing, false in everything) and that they would exploit discrepancies in testimonies in order to discredit all witnesses in general. This allegation holds no water, though.

If a former concentration-camp inmate declares to have been transferred in October 1942 together with 1,000 other detainees from Camp A to Camp B although the documents show that the respective transfer happened in November 1942, no serious revisionist will doubt the entire testimony of this witness for just that reason. Such small errors can be easily explained by the imprecision of the human memory. However, if the documents clearly say that there was no transfer of detainees from Camp A to Camp B at all in the whole of 1942, then this heavily shakes the credibility of the witness in question, and his other testimonies need to be approached with due caution. Lastly, completely untrustworthy are witnesses such as Paisikovic or Garbarz, who advance radical technical or physical impossibilities, to be recognized as such on first sight. For these the motto “falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus” is valid without restriction.

As a second example consider a case of the lack of “correctness of historical context.” In his notes from Krakow Prison, Rudolf Höss wrote that the SS had prepared to receive and to eliminate two and a half million Bulgarian Jews in Auschwitz (Bezwińska/Czech 1984, p. 137). The number of Jews living in Bulgaria at that time was approximately 50,000; not one of them perished in Auschwitz (Benz 1991, p. 308). Höss could not have been mixing up Bulgaria with Romania or Hungary, because he mentions these two countries in the same context, and had increased the number of Jews living there also by large margins, although not to such extremes.

On its own, this obvious discrepancy would not yet have been sufficient reason to undermine the credibility of the contents of Höss’s extensive “autobiographical notes.” If these were consistent otherwise and in accordance with proven historical facts, one could shrug off the “two and a half million Bulgarian Jews” as an inexplicable anomaly. Fact is, however, that the “notes” abound with inconsistencies, as we will see when analyzing them.

Let us now deal with one more allegation that has been raised frequently against revisionists and their way of dealing with witness testimonies. The French-Jewish author Georges Wellers expressed it in 1979 as follows (Wellers 1979, cited by Reynouard 2012):

“[Paul] Rassinier [French historian and founder of revisionism] and his imitators use very simple and very practical working rules. The first is to classify all more or less inconvenient testimonies as unreliable under two pretenses. If the testimonies agree, they are declared worthless either because they are the result of collusion agreed upon by witnesses due to common interests, or because they were coerced by torture or promises. However, if the testimonies are contradictory, their originators are declared to be obvious liars.”

This is simply untrue. If two witness testimonies are congruent, this is far from being a reason for revisionists to declare these testimonies the result of collusion or – in the case of perpetrator confessions – of torture or promises of a lenient treatment. (This is true at least for serious revisionists; we need not bother with the dubious ones who inevitably also exist). Revisionists will do this only if the respective witness testimonies contain radical impossibilities visible on first sight, i.e. testimonies that contradict logic or the laws of nature, or are in glaring conflict with the historical context. One example of this is the already-mentioned eyewitness reports crediting the crematories with a capacity many times their actual capacity. If two witness testimonies are incongruent, revisionists will in no way sweepingly call their originators liars. If the contradictions are so slight that they can easily be explained by the unreliability of the human memory, then no serious problem exists. If the differences are insurmountable, however, then at least one of the witnesses either lied or made a serious mistake and by that he’s untrustworthy. Revisionists will only claim that both witnesses are untrustworthy if they have demonstrated that the testimonies of both witnesses contain evident impossibilities.

Here is an instructive example of this. With regard to the “first gassing in Auschwitz” claimed by orthodox historiography, the purpose of which allegedly was the testing of the suitability of Zyklon B for murdering people, the victims of which allegedly were Russian POWs, the witnesses contradict each other already regarding the date of the event. SS Second Lieutenant Henry Storch dated it to spring 1941, the former detainee Kula to August 1941, SS Second Lieutenant Maximilian Grabner to the beginning of 1942, SS Captain Hans Aumeier to November or December 1942 (for sources, see Mattogno 2016a). Current mainstream historiography, relying on Danuta Czech’s Auschwitz Chronicle, claims the first gassing took place from September 3 to September 5, 1941 (Czech 1990, pp. 85-87). If this is correct, then all witnesses who stated dates different from this one have either been mistaken (which in the case of Kula, who mentioned August 1941, could appear somewhat plausible, because September can easily be confused with August) or lied (how can somebody who in late summer had been witness of such a dramatic event that must have indelibly stayed in his memory, move this to the winter?).

Doubts about the reality of the claimed test gassing get stronger when one discovers that the witnesses glaringly contradict each other also with regard to two further fundamental questions – the duration of the killing process and the discoloration of the corpses after the gassing. According to the first Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss, the death struggle of the victims lasted only a few moments; according to witness Michał Kula, 15 hours or more. The corpses of the gassed people had become (for sources, see Mattogno 2016a):

• discolored greenish according to M. Kula;
• discolored blue respectively blueish according to former detainee Wolny and SS Sergeant Pery Broad;
• discolored violet-black according to former detainee Kielar;
• ghostly pale according to former detainee Zarembina.

The fact is, however, that victims of hydrogen-cyanide poisonings almost always show a red discoloration – and not one of the witnesses mentioned this color.

If we find out that in September 1941, the date named by orthodox historiography, there were no Soviet POWs at all detained in Auschwitz, and that the first ones only arrived in October of the same year (ibid.), one can in good conscience categorize the “first gassing” as an invention of atrocity propaganda, and assume that the witnesses on the “perpetrator side,” such as Storch, Aumeier and Grabner, have given their testimonies under duress. This offers a plausible explanation for the countless glaring inconsistencies among the witness testimonies – one truly cannot expect coerced “perpetrators” and self-appointed “eyewitnesses” to consistently reconstruct an event that never happened!

The Problematic Nature of Perpetrator Confessions

As the just-mentioned cases of the SS men Storch, Aumeier and Grabner, who were stationed in Auschwitz, show, demonstrable cases exist in which alleged “Holocaust perpetrators” reported fictitious atrocities. That they did not do this out of a masochistic desire for the gallows or prison, will be easy to comprehend – they did so under coercion. Here is a reference to the historical context.

Parallel to the Nuremberg Trial, the Americans and the British held a large number of trials against Germans during which again and again brutal torture was employed. As a US committee revealed later, the torturers had extorted confessions by floggings, pulling out of fingernails, knocking out teeth, squashing of testicles and other bestialities (van Roden 1949). Josef Kramer, former commandant of various concentration camps, as well as other SS people were tortured by the British to such an extent that they begged for a speedy death (Belgion 1949, pp. 80f., 90). In March 1946 the first Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss was tracked down by a British torture team, and after a three-day flogging orgy confessed that in Auschwitz, under his command until the end of November 1943, two and a half million Jews had been gassed and a further 500,000 had died of starvation and diseases (cf. Section 3.1.; as mentioned, the present orthodox historiography of the camp claims a little over a million victims.)

Not all German “Holocaust perpetrators” confessed under torture; there were also more-subtle methods. A classic example of the implementation of such is the case of the physician Dr. Johann Paul Kremer, who was stationed in Auschwitz from August 30 to November 18, 1942 and kept a diary, of which some sequences were interpreted as veiled references to gassing actions. A careful analysis of these lines shows, however, that he was describing the horrors of the typhus epidemic raging at that time in Auschwitz (cf. Section 3.3.).

In 1947 during the Krakow Trial against former members of the Auschwitz camp crew, Kremer was a defendant and confirmed that in the respective diary entries he had indeed reported homicidal gassings. Together with 21 other defendants, Kremer was sentenced to death, but later, as one of only two of the convicts, he was pardoned. In 1958, he was released to West Germany. There he was put on trial once more, and again he interpreted his diary in the desired way. He was sentenced to ten years of prison, but he did not have to serve them, as the term was considered served due to the prison time he had already spent in Poland.

All speaks in favor of the assumption that, with his interpretation of his diary, Kremer had bought his life in Krakow, and also in Germany he played the prosecutors’ tune in order not to receive a severe sentence as an “obdurate denier” and to have to spend his last years behind bars.

Very similar devices were applied in West Germany where of course there was no torturing. In order to comprehend why almost all of the SS men indicted as former staff of the “extermination camps” admitted to, or at least did not explicitly contest, the actions they were accused of at these trials, one has to consider the following:

For murder, that is, the killing of a human being out of lowly motives, West-German law demanded and still demands life imprisonment. If a defendant at a Holocaust trial were to show the court in a credible way that he merely had been following orders in order to avoid otherwise unavoidable heavy sanctions, he could hope not to be sentenced for murder but only for wrongful death or for manslaughter, or even merely for aiding such deeds, and hence be sentenced to only a limited time in prison. Because the courts refused to address the question as to whether or not the alleged mass murders in gas chambers in the respective camps had happened at all, but in every instance axiomatically assumed them to be facts and merely judged the individual guilt of the “perpetrators”, a defendant who contested these murders would have gotten into dire straits and risked being harshly punished as an “obdurate denier.” There never was a lack of witnesses who were eager to see him behind bars, possibly for a long time, preferably forever. As no former concentration-camp detainee was ever prosecuted for perjury, the witnesses could incriminate at will any defendants they didn’t like with trumped-up allegations. Whether the judges rated these witnesses to be credible was up to them (as long as they were not under political pressure to sentence at least the one or the other defendant for murder). But even a negative assessment of credibility never had any repercussions for the respective witness.

This desperate tactic, employed by practically all of the former SS members who stood trial, often paid off. At the Sobibór trial in Hagen (1965/​1966), for instance, five defendants who were all accused of complicity in murder in 15,000 to 79,000 cases, were sentenced strangely mildly compared to the weight of the allegations: to between four and eight years, and Erich Lachmann, accused of complicity in the murder of at least 150,000 people, was even acquitted (Graf/Kues/Mattogno 2016, pp. 182-188).

A particularly glaring example of the mechanisms of German trials against National Socialism was provided by the repulsive man-hunt against the nonagenarian former Auschwitz guard Jakob W., at that time 91 years of age, although the case was shelved in 2014 by the Stuttgart district attorney. “He wants to talk anyway”, gloated the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel in its edition of August 25, 2014, and quoted the unfortunate geriatric as follows (Bohr/Meyer/Wiegrefe, p. 37):

“From 1944 onward, the crematories couldn’t cope anymore. Right next to it was a water ditch, it was maybe three or four meters wide. It burned day and night in there, in the pit. Two men always had kind of loops in their hands; with them they then pulled them (the corpses – ed.) out of the gas chamber, removed the loops and threw them into the burning fire.”

So, the SS burned corpses in a water ditch. With high probability the decision of the Stuttgart district attorney to discontinue the trial against Jakob W. was the reward for having done his bit at shoring up the orthodox view of Auschwitz, and with that he had contributed to the traumatization of the Germans.

The False Witness Testimonies as Acknowledged by the Orthodoxy

Those not familiar with the revisionist literature about the Holocaust cannot possibly know that the currently accepted version, according to which the extermination of Jews was allegedly conducted in six death camps by means of toxic gas, had numerous competitors during the war and also in the time immediately after the war.

From the fall 1941 until the spring of 1944, the Polish resistance movement spread altogether 32 reports about Auschwitz, wherein the camp was portrayed as a place of mass murder, although Jews were only one of several victim categories. The pesticide Zyklon-B was never mentioned as a murder weapon, but all kinds of imaginative murder weapons such as “electric baths”, a “pneumatic hammer” and an imaginary gas called “Kreuzolit” (cf. Section 2.1.).

After the Red Army had captured Auschwitz on January 27, 1945, Soviet journalists visited the camp and interviewed several of the 4,299 detainees left behind by the SS due to these detainees being unfit to walk long distances.[13] On February 2, an article by the Jewish war correspondent Boris Polevoi was published in Pravda titled “The Death Combine in Auschwitz,” in which one could read astounding things (Polevoi 1945):

“When the Red Army unveiled the terrible and disgusting secrets of Majdanek to the world last year, the Germans began to erase the traces of their crimes in Auschwitz. They leveled the hill of the so-called ‘old’ tombs in the eastern part, blew up and destroyed the tracks of the electrical conveyor belt on which hundreds of inmates had been simultaneously electrocuted; the bodies were loaded onto a slow-moving conveyor belt, which led them to a shaft furnace where they were completely burned. […] The special mobile devices for killing children were taken to the hinterland. The stationary gas chambers in the eastern part of the camp had been converted. Turrets and architectural ornaments had been attached to them, making them look like innocent garages.”

With this article, the world heard of the “electrical conveyor belt on which hundreds of inmates had been simultaneously electrocuted,” the “slow-moving conveyor belt” that transported the corpses “to a shaft furnace” and the “special mobile devices for killing children” for the very first and very last time. These products of a deformed fantasy forthwith became a relic of history. Additionally, the present-day historiography claims that the gas chambers were not situated in the eastern part but in the western part of the Birkenau Camp that in itself was located west of the Main Camp. That they had been adorned with “turrets and architectural ornaments”, nobody other than Polevoi reported. Why did Comrade Polevoi serve up imaginary atrocities to his Pravda readers, while he had a week-long opportunity to get informed by the liberated detainees about the real atrocity of Auschwitz? And why did the SS, who according to the findings of our historians had previously gassed approximately a million Jews in Auschwitz, leave behind 4,299 mainly Jewish detainees as witnesses for the prosecution against themselves before departing? In view of a million murders, 4,299 more murders wouldn’t have mattered at all! – Orthodox Holocaust historians avoid such questions like the plague.

Let us now address the camps Belzec, Sobibór and Treblinka in eastern Poland, that according to orthodox Holocaust literature were pure extermination camps. According to the currently prevailing version of history, mass murder of Jews was conducted there by means of engine-exhaust fumes, but during the war completely different stories were told about these camps. For Belzec, the killing method most frequently claimed was electric current. A certain Dr. Phil. Stefan Szende described the extermination process in Belzec this way (Szende 1945, pp. 160f.):

“The trains coming into Belzec loaded with Jews were driven into a tunnel in the underground premises of the execution building. […] When trainloads of naked Jews arrived, they were herded into a great hall capable of holding several thousand people. This hall had no windows and its flooring was of metal. Once the Jews were all inside, the floor of this hall sank like a lift into a great tank of water which lay below it until the Jews were up to their waists in water. Then a powerful electric current was sent into the metal flooring and within a few seconds all the Jews, thousands at a time, were dead.

The metal flooring then rose again and the water drained away. The corpses of the slaughtered Jews were now heaped all over the floor. A different current was then switched on and the metal flooring rapidly became red hot, so that the corpses were incinerated as in a crematorium and only ash was left.

The floor was then tipped up and the ashes slid out into prepared receptacles. The smoke of the process was carried away by great factory chimneys. That was the whole procedure. As soon as it was completed, it could start up again. New batches of Jews were constantly being driven into the tunnels. The individual trains brought between 3,000 and 5,000 Jews at a time, and there were days on which the Belzec line saw between twenty and thirty such trains arrive.

Modern technology triumphed in the Nazi system. The problem of how to exterminate millions of people was solved.”

According to another Belzec witness, the non-Jewish Pole Jan Karski, the Jews in this camp were corralled into railroad cars whose floors were covered with quicklime. This devoured the flesh off of the bones of the unfortunate while still alive (Karski 1944, pp. 339ff.).

About Sobibór: The Soviet-Jewish officer and Sobibór detainee Alexander Pechersky described the extermination of the Jews in that camp with reference to an anonymous witness as follows (Pechersky 1967, p. 20):

“At first glance, everything looks as a bath should look – faucets for hot and cold water, basins to wash in… As soon as the people enter, the doors are clamped shut. A thick dark substance comes spiralling out from vents in the ceiling. Horrible shrieks are heard, but they don’t last long.”

Two other Sobibór key witnesses, Leon Feldhendler and Zelda Metz, mentioned chlorine as the killing agent. According to Metz, the death chamber had a collapsible floor through which the corpses fell into a train wagon (Blumenthal 1946, pp. 199ff.).

Even more revealing is the Treblinka case. On November 15, 1942, the resistance movement of the Warsaw ghetto published a report about this camp according to which, within barely four months of its existence, two million Jews were said to have been asphyxiated by hot steam (Marczewska/​​Waźniewski 1968):

“At the entrance of death-house No.1 the chief himself stands, a whip in his hand; beating them in cold blood, he drives the women into the chambers. The floors of the chambers are slippery. The victims slip and fall, and they cannot get up for new numbers of forcibly driven victims fall upon them. The chief throws small children into the chambers over the heads of the women. When the execution chambers are filled the doors are hermetically closed and the slow suffocation of living people begins, brought about by the steam issuing from the numerous vents in the pipes.”

After the Red Army in August 1944 had conquered the area around Treblinka, a Soviet committee questioned former inmates of the camp. They concluded that three million people had been murdered in Treblinka by corralling them into chambers, then pumping out the air. In September 1944, the Soviet-Jewish author Vasili Grossman dignified Treblinka with a visit. To be on the safe side, since he did not know which one of the three killing methods mentioned by the witnesses (steam, pumping out of air, gas) would prevail, he described all three in his book Die Hölle von Treblinka (The Hell of Treblinka; Grossman 1946). At the Nuremberg Trial the Soviet prosecutors chose the steam-chamber version and published a bulletin which said that several hundred thousand people had been murdered by steam in Treblinka (PS-3311, IMT, Vol. 32, pp. 153-158).

The conversion to the present-day version of Belzec, Sobibór and Treblinka happened in 1946 by the Polish “Main Commission for the Investigation of German Crimes in Poland”, that was renamed later to “Main Commission for the Investigation of Hitlerite Crimes in Poland” out of consideration for Communist East Germany. The committee reduced the formerly peddled, all-too-incredible number of victims (600,000 instead of 1.8 to 3 million for Belzec; 250,000 instead of 1 to 2 million for Sobibór; 900,000 instead of 3 million for Treblinka). Because the idea that the Germans would have deployed a multitude of wildly divergent murder methods in their camps was also not very credible, all killing techniques described by the early witnesses were consigned to an Orwellian memory hole and replaced by engine-exhaust gas chambers (for this, see Mattogno/​Graf 2016; Mattogno 2016i; Graf/Kues/Mattogno 2016).

Let us lastly turn to the question of the gas chambers in the western camps. At the Nuremberg Trial the British chief prosecutor Sir Hartley Shawcross had the following recorded:[14]

“Murder conducted like some mass production industry in the gas chambers and the ovens of Auschwitz, Dachau, Treblinka, Buchenwald, Mauthausen, Maidanek, and Oranienburg.”

Hence, Shawcross did not distinguish, as current orthodox Holocaust historiography does, between “extermination camps” (Auschwitz, Treblinka, Majdanek) and ordinary “concentration camps” (Dachau, Buchenwald, Mauthausen, Oranienburg-Sachsenhausen), but regarded all these camps as part of a gigantic murder machine. Indeed, for each of these camps there were witnesses who declared the existence of homicidal gas chambers. At the Nuremberg Trial, the former Czech Dachau inmate Dr. Franz Blaha testified under oath:[15]

“The gas chamber was completed in 1944, and I was called by Dr. Rascher to examine the first victims. Of the eight or nine persons in the chamber there were three still alive, and the remainder appeared to be dead. Their eyes were red, and their faces were swollen. Many prisoners were later killed in this way.”

About the gas chamber in Buchenwald, an official document compiled by the French government stated (Weber 1986, p. 411):

“Everything had been provided for down to the smallest detail. In 1944, at Buchenwald, they had even lengthened a railway line so that the deportees might be led directly to the gas chamber. Certain [of the gas chambers] had a floor that tipped and immediately directed the bodies into the room with the crematory oven.”

There was also no lack of perpetrator testimonies. Franz Ziereis, commander of Mauthausen, who was wounded by two shots in the stomach during the liberation of the camp, confessed on his deathbed, while he was allowed helplessly to bleed to death, that in Hartheim Castle near Linz one to one-and-a-half million people had been gassed (Wiesenthal 1946, pp. 7f.):

“SS-Gruppenführer Glücks had given the order to declare weak inmates insane and to murder them in a large facility with gas. Some 1 to 1.5 million were murdered there. The place is called Hartheim and is located 10 km away from Linz toward Passau.”

Statements such as this are so embarrassing to orthodox Holocaust historians that they hush them up where possible. A critical reader could otherwise get the idea to ask why the Höss confession about the gassing of two and a half million Jews in Auschwitz should be more credible than the Ziereis confession about the gassing of one to one and-a-half million Jews in Hartheim Castle.

In August 1960 the then-employee and later head of the Munich Institute for Contemporary History, Martin Broszat, wrote in a letter to the editor of the weekly newspaper Die Zeit (Broszat 1960):

“Neither in Dachau nor in Bergen-Belsen nor in Buchenwald were Jews or other prisoners gassed. […] The mass extermination of the Jews by gassing began in 1941/1942 and took place exclusively at a select few locations equipped with the requisite technical facilities, above all in the occupied Polish territory (but nowhere in the Reich proper): in Auschwitz-Birkenau, in Sobibór on the Bug, in Treblinka, Chełmno, and Belzec.”

By “Reich proper,” the German State of its borders of 1937 is to be understood.

An analysis of these contorted statements results in the following:

As to three camps (Dachau, Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald), Broszat explicitly states that there never had been gassings at all. For the other concentration camps located in the Reich proper such as Sachsenhausen, Neuengamme or Ravensbrück, Broszat in fact rules out mass gassings (according to him these only took place in Auschwitz, Chełmno, Belzec, Sobibór and Treblinka; that he did not mention the sixth “extermination camp”, Majdanek, in his letter to the editor, could be due to a mere slip-up), but not gassings on a smaller scale. The same goes for the camps Natzweiler (Alsace) and Mauthausen (Austria) that were not located within the territory of the Reich proper.

The orthodox historians have never agreed on the existence of gas chambers in the western camps. While Raul Hilberg pragmatically decided to do without these small gas chambers and did not mention them in his definitive book The Destruction of the European Jews,[16] the 2011 anthology Neue Studien zu nationalsozialistischen Massentötungen durch Giftgas (New Studies on National Socialist Mass Killings with Poison Gas) tenaciously holds onto them, although they would not at all be needed to maintain the orthodox Holocaust narrative in view of the low numbers of victims claimed (in total a couple of thousand; Morsch/Perz 2011). Carlo Mattogno has responded in great detail to this anthology (Mattogno 2016h).

Lastly, let us bring to mind the memoirs of supposed National-Socialist victims which have been acknowledged to be forgeries in the meantime, but which were praised for years by a reverent media pack as shocking testimonies of the Holocaust. The one that attained particularly deplorable fame is the concoction Bruchstücke (Fragments) by the Swiss fraud Bruno Dössekker, who uses the tuneful pen name “Binjamin Wilkomirski.“ In his book, “Wilkomirski” claims he was born in 1939 in Riga to Jewish parents. After the Germans invaded Latvia in 1941, they presumably deported him to Majdanek and then to Auschwitz where he experienced hell on earth. After the war, he claims to have been adopted by a Swiss family (Wilkomirski 1995/1997).

Bruchstücke was translated into numerous languages and was celebrated world-wide as an especially stirring Holocaust testimonial. The author’s fame lasted only three years, though. In August 1998, the Zurich weekly newspaper Die Weltwoche published an article by the Jewish journalist Daniel Ganzfried, in which this execrable fraud was professionally disassembled (Ganzfried 1998). “Wilkomirski“ was born in 1941 in Switzerland out of wedlock; he got to know Majdanek and Auschwitz only long after the war as a tourist. This confidence trickster had to accept this humiliating unmasking probably because he is not a Jew and had given himself the role of a Jewish Holocaust survivor – from a Jewish point of view, an unforgiveable sacrilege.

A Recap to this Point

My examples to this point are not yet proof that the extermination of Jews in Auschwitz by means of toxic gas as claimed by orthodox historiography did not occur, but suffice to instill in a reader interested in the historical truth some healthy skepticism about a version of history that exclusively builds its theses on witness testimonies and perpetrator confessions.

We have seen that even current orthodox historiography acknowledges numerous testimonies to be false. We’ve analyzed the inducements that persuaded the “eyewitnesses” and “Holocaust perpetrators” to give false testimonies. Even more important, however, is the following:

If we believe orthodox Holocaust historians, then the Germans deported several million Jews from almost all of the countries controlled by them into death factories in order to kill them there through the use of toxic gas (in Auschwitz and Majdanek in stationary gas chambers using the pesticide Zyklon-B,[17] in Belzec, Sobibór and Treblinka in stationary gas chambers using engine-exhaust fumes, in Chełmno using gas vans). Such an operation inevitably required an enormous logistical effort that must have left traces. The fact that such traces do not exist is not only claimed by the revisionists; this was also honestly acknowledged by the anti-revisionist historian Jacques Baynac, 51 years after the end of the war, but especially: this was also roundly conceded by the judges during the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial of 1963-1965.

In finishing, let us do a small thought experiment. Let’s assume a revisionist historian denies that in August 1945 the U.S. dropped atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and that he brushes aside all testimonies to this as “Japanese atrocity propaganda.”

One can readily doubt that the media would give the thesis of this “historian” much attention; they might briefly mention it as a curiosity, as deranged scribblings of a fool, and then get on with their daily business. No nation, Japan included, would think of adopting a law against “Hiroshima- and Nagasaki-denial” as a response to the assertions of this peculiar historian, and to threaten deniers with years of imprisonment. There would be no need for such a law. In a debate, one could show the originator of this peculiar thesis heaps of documents about the planning and execution of the atom-bombings; most of all, however, the existing palpable proofs of their reality – the destroyed cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as well as the radiation, claiming fatalities decades after the deed. Nobody would think of refuting the denier with the testimonies of the bomber pilots or with eyewitness reports given by citizens of the two Japanese cities decades after the war. After all, if the historical situation is clear, and adequate documentary and material proof exists, there is no need for perpetrator confessions or eyewitness reports. But in order to prove the “million-fold, industrial” murders of Jews in Auschwitz and five other “extermination camps”, the representatives of the orthodox Holocaust historiography to this day depend on perpetrator confessions and eyewitness reports! And in order to silence these annoying Holocaust revisionists, these splendid historians hand the matter over to the courts, as Jacques Baynac expressed it strikingly in the first of his two 1996 articles (Baynac 1996a).

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Endnotes

[1]	About the person of Gerhard Förster, see Graf 1999.
[2]	Meanwhile this has considerably diminished. Today, because of reasons easy to understand, many representatives of orthodox Holocaust historiography seek to divert the focus to the “eastern extermination camps”, the “gas vans” or the mass executions behind the eastern front.
[3]	In the old version, the Vrba-Wetzler Report and Vrba’s book of 1964 had been treated in separate entries itemized, as were Höss’s confession and his notes from Krakow Prison. In the new version they are treated as one item in both cases. The statements made by Michał Kula are no longer presented as a stand-alone witness testimony, but are included in the section dealing with the testimonies by Henryk Tauber. The unproductive reports by Seweryna Szmaglewska, Milton Buki and André Lettich are omitted. New are the reports by the Polish resistance movement about Auschwitz 1941-1944 that are treated as one testimony, the testimonies by Kurt Prüfer and Karl Schultze while in Soviet detention, as well as the confessions by Hans Aumeier and Maximilian Grabner.
[4]	Sanning’s estimate of 300,000 Jewish victims in total is surely far off, because in the concentration and labor camps alone, about 350,000 Jews died. And with this, the other victim categories, for instance the Jews executed behind the eastern front by firing squad, haven’t even been taken into consideration yet. On this, see Graf 2017.
[5]	https://youtu.be/_pQJ42ONPDo; from 24:20; cf. International Military Tribunal (in the following IMT), Document PS-2430: Nazi Concentration and Prisoner-of-War Camps: A Documentary Motion Picture, IMT, Volume 30, pp. 357f.; shown at the trial November 29, 1945, IMT, Volume XXX, p. 470. The photo shown here is from the US National Archives, ID 531259.
[6]	Nuremberg Document NG-2586-G. On January 20, 1992 in the newspaper Canadian Jewish News the Israeli Holocaust historian Yehuda Bauer dismissed the claim that at the Wannsee Conference the extermination of the European Jews was decided, as a “silly story.”
[7]	On February 26, 1943, the Auschwitz Central Construction Office asked the Topf & Söhne Company per telegram to deliver ten “gas detectors.” Four days later, in their reply letter of March 2, 1943, the Topf Company wrote that already two weeks ago, in their search for “indicating devices for hydrogen-cyanide residue,” they had asked five companies for them, of which three had replied negatively and two had not answered yet. The expression “gas detector” is a short form of the technical term for “smoke gas detector”, with which the composition of exhaust gas of incineration plants is analyzed, not, however, the concentration of hydrogen cyanide. That jibes with the fact that the crematories in question altogether had ten smoke ducts (flues), but allegedly only two gas chambers, and that in the order telegram as well as in the reply letter by the Topf Company, the name, resp. the abbreviated signature, of Rudolf Jährling had been entered, who in Auschwitz was responsible for all furnace equipment, not, however, for the handling of toxic gasses. Additionally, the term “indicating devices for residue of hydrogen cyanide” is wrong. Correct would be “gas-residue-detection devices for Zyklon”, which are boxes containing certain chemical ingredients and indicator paper. The Central Construction Office would have ordered them from the Auschwitz garrison physician, who was responsible for purchasing Zyklon B and the relating equipment, instead of ordering them from the Topf Company, which did not produce or sell these devices. As the availability of such test kits was required by law when deploying Zyklon B for disinfestation, the garrison physician surely would have had them in stock. The whole correspondence is therefore nonsensical and is under suspicion of being a forgery. For this, see Mattogno 2015, pp. 93ff.
[8]	Öffentliches Denkmal und Museum Mauthausen, Vienna, Archive M9a/1.
[9]	Nuremberg Document NG-2586-G.
[10]	The only attempt by orthodox historians worth mentioning in this regard is an article from 2011 by the present curator of the Auschwitz Museum, Piotr Setkiewicz, about the “Supply of Materials to the Crematories and Gas Chambers in Auschwitz: Coke, Wood, Zyklon”, which is characterized by a lamentable superficiality, however (cf. Mattogno 2019a).
[11]	Records of the Höss Trial, Warsaw, Volume 11, p. 130.
[12]	“О чудовищных преступлениях германского правительства в Освенциме” (About the Horrendous Crimes of the German Government in Auschwitz), Prawda, May 7, 1945.
[13]	The number of 4,299 detainees left behind in Auschwitz originates from a Soviet document of March 9, 1945. National Archive of the Russian Federation, Moscow, 7021-108-10.
[14]	International Military Tribunal (subsequently IMT), Volume XIX, p. 434.
[15]	IMT, Volume V, pp. 172f.
[16]	Except for a gassing action in Natzweiler, which allegedly caused the death of 115 Jews (Hilberg 2003, p. 1013).
[17]	In Majdanek additionally with carbon monoxide from bottles; cf. Graf/Mattogno 2016b, pp. 117-153.