Book Announcements

Sonderkommando Auschwitz I

Authored by Carlo Mattogno

To this day, the 1979 book Auschwitz Inferno: The Testimony of a Sonder­kommando by former Auschwitz inmate and putative Sonderkommando member Filip Müller, who claims to have worked in the gas chambers of Auschwitz for three years, has a great influence both on the popular perception of Auschwitz and on historians probing or purporting to probe this camp’s history. The late Raul Hilberg, for instance, one of the most-influential mainstream Holocaust scholars, called Müller “a remarkable, accurate, reliable person.”

The first half of the present book critically analyzes Müller’s various post-war writings and testimonies, starting with a brief essay he wrote just after the war, then his testimony during the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial in 1964, the interviews he gave Claude Lanzmann for his epic 1985 documentary Shoah, and of course his 1979 book, which was to an unknown degree ghostwritten by one Helmut Freitag. A thorough analysis and comparison of these texts reveals that Müller’s memory seems to have improved with the decades rather than faded. His later stories have him involved everywhere in Auschwitz where the mainstream narrative reported there was some dramatic action. But a closer look at what Müller (or Freitag) wrote reveals that they pilfered it from other writers, complete with historical mistakes and physical nonsense. One of Müller’s main sources of such plagiarism was a book by Hungarian physician and proven impostor Miklós Nyiszli, but he also stole from the tales of the well-known false witnesses Kurt Gerstein and Rudolf Höss.

The second part of the present book analyzes the accounts of eight more witnesses who claim to have been members of the Auschwitz Sonderkom­mando: Dov Paisikovic, Stanisław Jankowski, Henryk Mandelbaum, Ludwik Nagraba, Joshuah Rosenblum, Aaron Pilo, David Fliamenbaum and Samij Karolinskij. The first three among them made substantial depositions which are often cited in Holocaust literature on Auschwitz, whereas the other five are less-well-known. A common feature of all of their accounts is that they follow a narrative developed after the war by the Soviet propaganda units which occupied Auschwitz after the German retreat. Large parts of that narrative are today considered wrong or at least exaggerated even by mainstream scholars. So how come these witnesses told the same overarching ideological lies in impressive concert, while they diverged on many concrete specifics on which they should have agreed, if their tales concerned actual events or conditions they all experienced in the same places and times? Find the answers in this revealing study!

Deliveries of Coke, Wood and Zyklon B to Auschwitz

Authored by Carlo Mattogno

In order to prove that mass exterminations in gas chambers occurred at the infamous Auschwitz Camp, mainstream historians must rely almost exclusively on eyewitness accounts. They also adduce a few documents with ambiguous contents which they take out of their historical and documental context in order to impute a homicidal meaning to them which they don’t have.

After revisionist scholars pointed out this fact, and also established the highly dubious nature of these witness accounts in numerous studies, a researcher from the Polish Auschwitz Museum, Piotr Setkiewicz, tried a different approach to prove the raison d’être of his employer: In a lengthy paper, he points to documents about deliveries of firewood and coke as well as the pesticide Zyklon B to the Auschwitz Camp. The deliveries and consumption of wood and coke allegedly can be explained only by massive cremation figures compatible only with a large-scale killing program. But to come to this conclusion, ridiculously low average amounts of coke required for the cremation of a corpse in a cremation furnace have to be assumed, and even lower average amounts of wood for the burning of corpses on outdoor pyres. Neither of these amounts is even remotely physically possible. Furthermore, one has to ignore the fact that the wood and coke supplied to the camp also was used to heat hundreds of inmate housing units, in addition to camp administration buildings and SS accommodations, and also to fire the many kitchen stoves and the boiler units in various disinfestation and shower facilities.

The supplies of the pest-control agent Zyklon B presumably point to homicidal activities as well, if we are to believe Setkiewicz. But when considering the total amount of inmate barracks in frequent need of pest control, and the various disinfestation facilities constantly consuming this product to fight lice and fleas in garments and bedclothes, nothing is left for the claim that there is anything sinister about the quantities of Zyklon B the Auschwitz Camp received.

As the present study shows, if realistic amounts of coke and wood needed for recorded (non-homicidal) cremation purposes are assumed, and considering the camp’s need for pest-control agents to fight the various epidemics which ravaged the camp throughout ist history, the documented supplies of coke, wood and Zyklon B actually prove the opposite of what Setkiewicz claims: Not only is there neither trace nor proof for mass murder contained in them, but they actually prove that the mass-extermination and mass-cremation claims cannot be true.

Bungled: “The Destruction of the European Jews”

Authored by Carlo Mattogno

What is the best way to demonstrate that the orthodox narrative about the “extermination of the European Jews by the Nazis” during World War II is fundamentally wrong? We think the best way is to take what the orthodoxy thinks is “arguably the single most-important book about the Holocaust” (Prof. Gutman, Hebrew University, Jerusalem), written by the most-renowned mainstream expert on the topic, and show paragraph by paragraph, sentence by sentence, even word by word, that this specialist got most of it fundamentally wrong.

This mainstream expert is the late Prof. Dr. Raul Hilberg, and the book in our sights is his three-volume work The Destruction of the European Jews, which most consider the gold standard of mainstream Holocaust writings. When it comes to documenting the National-Socialist persecution of Jews, this work certainly does a formidable job. But when it comes to proving that the Nazis planned and carried out a policy of systematic mass annihilation, Hilberg’s opus magnum proves highly deficient.

The present study demonstrates that, when it comes to the Nazis’ alleged planning of the “Holocaust”, Hilberg systematically misrepresents what the documents say about it by ignoring crucial documents, by ripping documents out of their historical context and thus distorting their meaning, and even by outright lying about their contents.

When it comes to substantiating his claims about the actual implementation of the alleged mass murder, Hilberg resorts to even-more-devious methods: he ignores reams of documents and relies almost exclusively on witness testimony, but with a highly mendacious approach: He cherry-picks only those witnesses who fit his preconceived notion, then picks out only those parts of their testimony that support his assertions, while systematically hiding from his readers that all of these testimonies contradict each other on essential points, conflict with the documented historical record, and are riddled with absurdities, anachronisms as well as historical and technical impossibilities. Hilberg moreover states his “judgment” that, if just one witness makes any kind of claim that fits his agenda, it must be true, and if several witnesses make the same claim, it must be even more true. Using the same logic, witches ride on broomsticks through the air and have sex with the devil, because thousands of witnesses have said so.

Apart from these blatantly unscholarly methods, the most-shocking revelation of the present study is that Hilberg never bothered going ad fontes: He categorically refused to ever investigate any of the claimed crime locations, and never set foot into any archive at these locations, let alone try to study their contents.

Why did anyone ever take this imbecilic imposter seriously? Mainstream scholars do, perhaps because they all employ markedly similar methods.