Deconstructing Danuta Czech

Danuta Czech’s Ausch­witz Chronicle, 1939-1945” is reputedly a work of fundamental importance for Holocaust historiography on Auschwitz. It received an official endorsement at the Frankfurt Ausch­witz Trial, where Czech testified as a witness for the prosecution on 19 February 1965 during the 138th session. In fact, during that trial, the first German edition of the Kalendarium, published in Poland in several numbers of the German-language journal Hefte von Ausch­witz (Czech, Danuta 1959-1962, 1964), constituted for the Frankfurt judges the historical framework into which they fitted the events narrated by the witnesses, and for the witnesses it was a sort of richly detailed panorama from which to draw inspiration for their own stories. Czech herself reports (1990, p. xiv; all subsequent page numbers from there, unless stated otherwise):

“The ‘Chronicle’ has been an important resource for collecting evidence against former members of the SS in Ausch­witz and other camps and continues to play this role. As its author, I gave expert testimony in the trial of Robert Mulka, who oversaw the gas chambers and the production of Zyklon B at Ausch­witz, and others, in the first Frankfurt Ausch­witz Trial, from December 20, 1963, to August 1965 in the Frankfurt District Court. I also served as an expert witness in the trial of the members of the Security Police (Sicherheitspolizei – Sipo) and the Gestapo of Bialystok in Bielefeld 1967-68 and in March 1988 in Siegen in the trial of the former Block Leader in the Gypsy camp in Birkenau, Ernst-August König.”

The Frankfurt Ausch­witz Trial, in turn, cemented in legal terms what is considered true about Ausch­witz, deviations from which in public statements of any kind can lead to criminal prosecution for “denial” in many countries.

Strangely, however, she did not use this monumental procedural legacy, to which she never referred in the later book edition of her chronicle.

To this day, orthodox scholars consider the Ausch­witz Chronicle to be a chronicle of real events, which took place on the dates indicated by Czech and in the ways she described. Indeed, both for its size (855 pages letter-size), and for its detail, but above all for its impressive body of references to a plethora of sources – although most of them are cryptic to almost all non-Polish scholars, including high-level historians – this opus is summa holocaustica in which the dogmatica Ausch­witziana is revealed, which should neither be verified nor discussed, but rather meekly accepted.

Such an attitude of sacred respect (in addition to the oft-noticed incompetence of non-Polish scholars) is what has hitherto prevented a critical analysis of this chronicle. It is widely known that all Holocaust works have been discussed and scrutinized, even those that have reached, in the eyes of the orthodoxy, the reputational apex of this field of historiography, such as Raul Hilberg’s monumental The Destruction of the European Jews (Hilberg 1985, 2003) – and this was basically inevitable. But no one has ever attempted to verify the sources of Czech’s Ausch­witz Chronicle, and not even one critical review is known that even hints at its shortcomings and inconsistencies. Yet these flaws exist, and they are numerous and serious, and they are the result of an intentional, duplicitous method, which is even-more-egregious.

It is true that Danuta Czech bases her chronicle on a series of original documents and on simplified transcriptions of German documents made by camp inmates, the main ones of which she diligently lists in her Introduction (pp. xif.): “admission lists,” “Camp Occupancy Register,” “card index” and “death register” of Soviet prisoners of war, “morgue register,” “Bunker register” of Block 11, “register of the Penal Company,” “registers of the Gypsy camp,” “orders from headquarters, the regiment, and the garrison,” “quarantine lists,” transport lists compiled by inmates (the so-called “Smoleń List”:[1] see her entry for 13 September 1944, p. 708) and others, but these concern only routine concentration-camp life and say nothing about alleged exterminations of Jews.

The historical foundation on which the Ausch­witz Chronicle was erected is in fact constituted from the two Polish post-war trials about alleged events at the Ausch­witz Camp: the Warsaw Trial from 11 to 29 March 1947 against former Camp Commandant Rudolf Höss (proces Rudolfa Hössa), and the Krakow Trial from 25 November to 16 December 1947 against forty former members of the Ausch­witz camp garrison (proces załogi Oświęcimia). During these trials, the extermination claims were substantiated exclusively on the basis of testimonies; the few documents alleged to support these claims remained in the background and remained almost completely unknown to historians. It was only in 1989 that Jean-Claude Pressac resurrected them, drawing from them an apparently coherent body of “criminal traces.” Precisely because the extermination claims had been legally “proven” by those two Polish trials, Danuta Czech assumes the alleged extermination as already demonstrated, so that in this regard she substantiates absolutely nothing with documents. She does not refer to a single document regarding any extermination installation nor any mass killing of deportees or camp inmates.

For the claimed establishment of the Birkenau gassing “bunkers,” she relies completely on Höss’s declarations, as she does for the rather-nebulous repurposing of the morgue of Crematorium I at the Ausch­witz Main Camp as a gassing facility.

Her demonstration of the existence of gas chambers inside the Birkenau Crematoria is pathetic. In this regard, Czech limits herself to imaginative hints which nowadays sound ridiculous, especially after Pressac’s 1989 work had appeared. Thus, in her entry for 23 January 1942, relating to Plan No. 932 of the new crematorium (the future Crematorium II), she states (p. 129):

“In the plan (Drawing 932) are two large underground rooms; after the building is completed, one is to serve as a disrobing room, the other as a gas chamber where people will be killed with Zyklon B gas.”

And in her entry for 15 August 1942, she writes regarding Plan No. 1678 of Crematorium IV/V (p. 218):

“Gas chambers are planned in each of these crematoriums.”

Similarly, each time she reports about one of the Birkenau crematoria being turned over by the camp’s Central Construction Office to the camp administration, she states that the related building had one or several (homicidal) gas chamber(s),[2] although the related documents say nothing at all about gas chambers.

In the Ausch­witz Chronicle, the alleged extermination facilities are therefore not documented, but presupposed and proclaimed apodictically and dogmatically.

The source situation regarding the alleged extermination of human beings (Jews and Gypsies) is even worse. Here, Czech relies mostly on anecdotal sources or, worse still, on post-war memoirs or historical secondary literature. As for the memoirs, she cites those of unknown and irrelevant former inmates, such as Júlia Škodová, but incredibly omits the 1979 book by Filip Müller, whom Raul Hilberg had raised to the rank of a key witness already in 1985 by citing his book 17 times.

In a confounded and inextricable mixture of documents and testimonies, the editor of the Ausch­witz Chronicle misrepresents the few documents she cites.

From a methodical point of view, the most-serious deficiency is the fact that Czech casually elevates the probative value of testimonies onto the same level as that of contemporaneous documents, and then declares claims made by witnesses to be facts, or more-precisely, she transmogrifies witness statements into real events. Her use of testimonies is particularly fallacious, because it is based on extrapolations and interpolations from cherry-picked claims contained in individual statements, which she then presents as “events” in the related entries – without in the least caring about checking the reliability of the testimonies and the trustworthiness of the witnesses, in the process omitting absurdities, impossibilities and contradictions their statements contain.

This is already evident in her treatment of Höss’s statements,[3] which form the backbone of the Ausch­witz Chronicle regarding the extermination order Höss claims to have received from Himmler, and all the subsequent events – the “first gassing” with Zyklon B, the use of the morgue of the Main Camp’s crematorium for homicide purposes, and the establishment of the makeshift gassing facilities called “bunkers.” Czech distorts the chronology of the former Ausch­witz commandant, invents dates, and remains dead silent about the many anachronisms and contradictions in Höss’s tales. This fallacious procedure already begins with Höss’s alleged summoning to Berlin by the Reichs­führer SS, which the former camp commandant notoriously placed in June 1941, but Czech postponed it ex cathedra to 29 July.

At this point, the editor of the Ausch­witz Chronicle gets entangled in a series of contradictions with no way out. In his autobiographic notes, Höss refers explicitly to two conflicting orders by Himmler, the first for the total extermination of all Jews, the second for their only-partial extermination (Höss, p. 146):

“When the Reichsführer SS modified his original Extermination Order of 1941, by which all Jews without exception were to be destroyed, and ordered instead that those capable of work were to be separated from the rest and employed in the armaments industry, Ausch­witz became a Jewish camp. It was a collecting place for Jews, exceeding in scale anything previously known.”

In the course of his trial, he provided further clarifications in this regard:[4]

“As I said during the investigation, Himmler’s initial order was that in general all Jews sent to Ausch­witz by the R.S.H.A., by Eichmann’s office, were to be exterminated. Hence, that is what was decided regarding the first transports that came from Upper Silesia, and also, in part, with regard to transports from the General Government. This was also the case with the first transports that came from the German Reich. Then this order was changed in the sense that it was necessary to select those fit for work. Physicians were responsible for selecting people who were healthy, strong, and of a certain age [the young].”

Czech follows Höss with his claim that Himmler gave him the second order, but she inverts the content of the order – rather than sparing the lives of those able to work, as Höss had claimed, she says that the order presumably issued on 18 July 1942 did not state to spare the lives of deportees able to work, but “to kill the Jewish prisoners who are unfit for work” (entry for 18 July 1942; p. 199), yet she contradicts herself by affirming that the first selection with subsequent gassing of only the deportees unable to work had already taken place on 4 July (pp. 191f.), therefore against Himmler’s order then in force to kill all Jews!

The issue becomes more-entangled when Czech has to give a semblance of historical guise to the phantom gassings at the “bunkers” of Birkenau, because she is forced to invent a series of fictitious transports that had to undergird Himmler’s alleged first order – that of total extermination. Here are the transports, whose deportees were exterminated all and sundry according to Czech, yet they are totally invented from whole cloth:

Further contradiction arises here, however, because it is known that the first 18 real, documented transports of Jews that arrived at Ausch­witz from Slovakia, France, and from Lublin-Majdanek Camp between 26 March and 30 June 1942, brought 16,767 deportees who were all registered without exception, hence were not exterminated, as Czech herself documents, and as shown by the following table:

According to the lore picked up by Czech, all these deportees should have been exterminated without exception, given that at that time Himmler’s alleged order of total extermination was still in force, which is said to have been changed only on 18 July 1942, according to her.

In this context, it should be noted that, after the “revision” sanctioned by Karin Orth in 1999, no serious orthodox Holocaust scholar takes Höss’s or Czech’s timeline of the events seriously anymore, because they all move Höss’s alleged meeting with Himmler to June 1942, meaning that they postpone it by one year.

This completely upsets the chronology of fictional and contradictory events listed by Czech, however, but the orthodoxy maintains the claim that all she writes was real, and at best a few key dates are retouched, as did French historian Jean-Claude Pressac with the “first gassing” (which he moved from Czech’s dating at 3-5 September 1941 to sometime between 5 and 31 December 1941) and with the establishment of “Bunker 1” (which he moved to the end of May rather than Czech’s date of 20 March 1942; Pressac 1993, pp. 34, 39). Others have tried to switch around the claimed victims, as imaginatively proposed by Robert Jan van Pelt, who fancied that the victims of early 1942 were not Jews who had arrived with transports from Upper Silesia, but Jews unable to work from the Schmelt Organization.[5]

That the claimed events relating to the “bunkers” have no historical basis is confirmed by the fact that the Ausch­witz Chronicle mentions only their presumed institution (p. 186 and 239) but is subsequently completely disinterested in them: In all of 1942, they are mentioned only once ambiguously, on October 11, in relation to the diary of Dr. Johann Paul Kremer (see my comment about that entry). What happened to the two “bunkers”? They vanish without a trace from the pages of the Ausch­witz Chronicle, but the second of these two facilities, the so-called “Bunker 2,” suddenly reappears in the entry of 9 May 1944 (p. 622), where we read that it was “put back into operation,” while “Bunker 1” disappears definitively without any explanation.

Yet one of Czech’s most-important witnesses on this issue, Szlama Dragon, explicitly stated:[6]

“Bunker No. 1 was dismantled completely as early as 1943. After the construction of Crematorium No. 2 at Brzezinka, the barracks near Bunker No. 2 were dismantled as well and the trenches filled in. The bunker itself, however, remained until the end and, after a long period of inactivity, was put back into operation for the gassing of the Hungarian Jews.”

If there was any logic to it, the “bunkers” would have ceased their activity in March 1943, when the new Crematoria IV and II were put into operation. Franciszek Piper also claims that much, albeit with a deliberately fuzzy dating:[7]

“In the spring of 1943, with the launching of new gas chambers and crematoria, the two bunkers were shut down.”

In addition to the total lack of reliable sources, Czech’s surprising caution in hiding the bunkers all but from the reader’s view depended on the difficulties that arise, from an orthodox perspective, with regard to pinpointing that exact installation where a particular gassing action is said to have taken place. Thus, she precisely locates only the claimed first gassing in the new crematoria – the one in Crematorium II of 13 March 1943 (see my related discussion of that entry). For all subsequent gassings, however, she no longer knows what to say, and the claimed concomitant activity of the “bunkers” for a few weeks or months would have further aggravated her embarrassment. For example, on 20 March 1943, 2,191 Greek Jews were allegedly murdered “in the gas chambers” (p. 356) – but where exactly? In Crematorium II? In Crematorium IV? In “Bunker 1”? In “Bunker 2”?

Czech sometimes puts together testimonies claiming distinctly different events, decreeing by her authority that they refer to the same event, the one she tries to prove. At other times she refers to contradictory testimonies, from which she draws similar elements while hiding their contradictions from her readers.

In Poland, the courtroom climate in 1947 was particularly heated, and the witnesses for the prosecution, almost all former prisoners of the Germans, were understandably resentful, if not vengeful, and ready for any declaration against the German defendants. They did not feel bound by the duty to declare the truth, or perhaps they considered the blatant absurdities they uttered to be real. The judges, for their part, adopted criteria of the “truth” that were extremely conducive for the purpose of these trials – convictions. This means that the witnesses basically had a blank check to tell anything they wanted; they could lie with impunity. Not a single witness is known – among the 206 who attended the Warsaw Trial and the 375 who attended the Krakow Trial – who was ever investigated for perjury or even simply reprimanded by the court or retracted by the prosecution.

The overwhelming majority of these witnesses, with regard to the fundamental question of the presumed selections with subsequent gassings, did nothing but regurgitate and embellish in various ways the propaganda tales that had been created and circulated during the war by the Ausch­witz resistance movement, which back then were known pretty much to all, as I have amply illustrated in another study (Mattogno 2021). The Polish courts therefore dogmatically assumed the truthfulness of all incriminating testimonies, and Danuta Czech followed that policy slavishly. But even if and when some of the witnesses’ claims appear plausible, they can in no way be regarded as a source for historiography, because they cannot be verified or falsified by superior evidence, such as documents and material traces.

The trial sources are indicated by Czech sometimes with the respective initials (Dpr.-Hd: documentation of the Höss Trial; Dpr.-ZO: documentation of the Trial of the Ausch­witz Camp Garrison), sometimes explicitly: “Höss Trial,” “Krakow Ausch­witz Trial,” sometimes volumes belonging to the second are cited in a list of volumes starting with those belonging to the first trial (as for example in her entry for 3 September 1941, p. 117).

Czech limits herself too often to mentioning the procedural volume and the page (which are on occasion wrong), without indicating the name of the witness she refers to – a practice which certainly does not serve to enable other scholars to check her sources, and it does not even seem accidental. In these cases, the reader of the Ausch­witz Chronicle does not even know whether her sources are testimonies (and then which ones) or documents (many volumes of both trial documentations contain documents, document reproductions and transcripts of various kinds).

Alongside this testimonial body, Czech adds the so-called “materials of the resistance movement,” a collection of items from the camp’s resistance movement with some transcripts of German documents and some purloined originals. The claims made in this material, however, are almost always unverifiable, often clearly exaggerated or outright false – a broad hodgepodge of crude atrocity propaganda.[8] Claiming to extract “historical events” from such a witches’ brew is an affront to historiography and common sense.

Czech even launches a methodical proclamation, as high-sounding as it is false:

“The available sources – original documents, resistance-movement documents, statements of former prisoners, and trial materials – were subjected to a strict source check and were compared with other appropriate documents.” (p. xii)

In reality, as I explained earlier, there is no trace of a “strict source check” in the Ausch­witz Chronicle, nor of a comparison between documents and testimonies: documents (distorted) and testimonies (extrapolated) are instead apodictically, faithfully assumed to be true, without the slightest critical scrutiny, sometimes even with artful omissions or intentional distortions.

Czech’s methodical contortionism comes to light especially in her treatment of the deportation of Hungarian Jews to Ausch­witz, the background of which I had outlined in a previous study (Mattogno 2007).

The first, German edition of the Ausch­witz Chronicle listed 91 transports of Jews from Hungary between 2 May and 18 October 1944, from which a total of 29,159 deportees were registered.[9] As for the fate of non-registered deportees, Czech invariably ruled: “The others were gassed” (Czech 1964a, pp. 91ff.)

In his 1983 French “Attempt to Determine the Death Toll at the Ausch­witz Camp,” Georges Wellers tried to determine the number of deaths in Ausch­witz based on the first edition of the Ausch­witz Chronicle. In dealing with the case of Hungary, he stated that a total of 437,402 Jews had been deported to Ausch­witz in 87 trains, on average about 5,028 people per train. Subtracting from the total number of deportees the number of those registered – which he calculated at 27,758 – Wellers concluded that 409,640 Hungarian Jews had been gassed at Ausch­witz (Wellers 1983, pp. 147, 153).

In my critique of Wellers’s study mentioned earlier, I pointed out a glaring contradiction in the Ausch­witz “Kalendarium” concerning the Hungarian Jews: according to Justification of the Verdict #112 of the Eichmann Trial in Jerusalem (based on the report of Hungarian Lieutenant Colonel Laszlo Ferenczy of 9 July 1944[10]), from mid-May to 8 July 1944, 434,351 Jews were deported from Hungary in 147 trains (Poliakov, p. 199), but the Ausch­witz Chronicle recorded only 91 transports, 33 of which are said to have arrived after 11 July, the date of arrival of the last train that had departed from Hungary on 8 July.[11] The conclusion was inevitable: only the 58 transports recorded in the Ausch­witz Chronicle up to July 11 had arrived at Ausch­witz, but the remaining 33 trains presumably arriving after that date were fictitious (Mattogno 1987, pp. 18-20, 37, 39). Before accepting this conclusion, I submitted the problem to various historical institutes specialized in the study of the Holocaust: The Munich Institut für Zeitge­schichte (17 February 1986), The Ludwigsburg Zentrale Stelle der Landesjustizverwaltungen (21 February 1986), the Paris Centre de Documentation Juive Contemporaine (14 April 1986), the London Wiener Library (14 April 1986), the Jerusalem Yad Vashem (21 January 1987) and Ausch­witz Museum (21 January 1987) – and of course to Wellers himself (17 February 1986). No one was able to resolve this contradiction. On 15 April 1987, when my aforementioned study had already been published, the Ausch­witz Museum replied to my letter, stating the following:

1. A part of the Hungarian Jews who arrived at Ausch­witz had been sent without registration to the so-called Depot-Lager (custody camp) or Durchgangslager (transit camp), from where a certain proportion were subsequently registered and admitted to the camp. Therefore, the entries in the Ausch­witz Chronicle after 11 July 1944 do not refer to transports from Hungary, but to inmates from the transit camp.
2. The registrations of prisoners from Hungary were carried out cumulatively, i.e. one entry may refer to several transports that arrived on the same day.

This explanation was adopted two years later by Danuta Czech in the second German edition of the Ausch­witz Chronicle, where she states that a portion of the Hungarian Jews deported to Ausch­witz were housed in Sectors BIIe, BIIc, BIIb, and BIII of Birkenau, which are designated in the records as “Ausch­witz II Transit Camp” (p. 564). Records concerning Hungarian Jews are also often introduced with the phrase “from the RSHA transports from Hungary…” (ibid., pp. 628ff.), with which Czech makes it clear that the relevant record refers to multiple transports.

Czech was induced – perhaps by my questions – to explicitly state what she already knew, because in the first German edition of the Ausch­witz Chronicle, she had reported a message from the camp resistance about the numerical strength of the inmates which, among other things, spoke of “30000 Jewish inmates from Hungary who were not registered in the camp (transit camp)” (Czech 1964b, p. 60).

In her entry for 2 October 1944, she further wrote (ibid., p. 71):

“The number of Jewish female inmates in the ‘Jewish transit camp Mexico’ (Construction Sector III) was 17202 women and girls.”

In her entry for 4 October, she quoted a letter from the camp’s SS administration to the Central Construction Office, according to which Sector BII of the Birkenau Camp was being used “as a reception and transit camp” (ibid.; reproduced in Blumental, pp. 95f.).

Finally, in her introduction to the year 1944, Czech wrote (1964a, p. 71):

“In Birkenau, the construction of Camp BIIc was finished, and they were building on Construction Section III, called ‘Mexico’ by the inmates. Both camps were intended for Hungarian Jews,”

without explaining, however, that these were unregistered inmates. All of this is in open contrast to the claim that, with each transport of Hungarian Jews, the “remaining people are killed in the gas chambers,” a phrase she repeats monotonously over and over again. At the time, her point of view was historically nonsensical (ibid.):

“Höss carries out hasty preparations to enable the rapid mass extermination of some 500,000 Hungarian Jews.”

In the book edition of the Ausch­witz Chronicle, Czech omitted – and rightly so – the many nonsensical statements found in the “Materials of the Camp Resistance Movement” (in the Ausch­witz Chronicle: “Mat. RO” = Materiały Ruch Oporu), such as those found in the “Extraordinary Appendix to the Periodic Report of the Period from 5 to 25 May 1944,” where the arrival at Ausch­witz of 13 transports of Hungarian Jews per day is mentioned (see below, entry of 24 and 25 May 1944).

On this subject, she reports another resistance claim dated 15 July 1944 (Mat. RO., Vol. VII, p. 451; p. 666):

“Between May 16 and June 13 over 300,000 Hungarian Jews were delivered in 113 trains.”

Strictly speaking, even this claim cannot be considered historically accurate, because by 15 June, 99 trains with about 311,000 deportees had arrived at Ausch­witz (Mattogno 2021, p. 192). This can be inferred from Braham’s book The Destruction of Hungarian Jewry, which is quoted several times by Czech (the first time in her entry for 2 May 1944, p. 618).

The aforementioned information from the resistance movement is also in contrast to another piece of documented information provided by the very editor of the Ausch­witz Chronicle in her entry for 13 June 1944 (p. 644), where she states with reference to Braham’s book (who relies on Nuremberg Document NG-5619 as reproduced by him) that on 7 July the deportation from Zones I and II of Hungary had ended, as a result of which 289,357 Jews had been deported in 92 trains with 45 freight cars each. This corresponds to an average of (289,357 ÷ 92 =) 3,145 persons per train. But 300,000 divided by 113 yields 2,655 people per train. To take the resistance message of 15 July 1944 seriously, if it is true that 289,357 Jews were transported in 92 trains until 7 July, the remaining (300,000 – 289,357 =) 10,643 were transported in (113 – 92 =) 21 transports, each of which carried only (10,643 ÷ 21 =) 507 persons!

Furthermore, in her entry for 3 July 1944 (p. 657), Czech summarizes a German intercept of a BBC message of 2 July in Spanish as follows:

“400,000 Jews have been deported from Hungary to Germany and killed in the gas chambers.”

She does not write a single word about the blatant falsity of this information. This shows Czech’s obvious lack of critical sense. But she makes a shrewd omission even in the aforementioned resistance message of 15 July 1944, which continues as follows:[12]

“Of the transports of Hungarian Jews, 80,000 were sent to the camp with a separate ‘A’ numbering [prefix], due to the overloading of the gas chambers and crematoria, while the rest had already been successfully disposed of. Naturally, the rest were doomed to suffer the same fate in due time. The Hitlerite hangmen were systematic.”

It is evident that Czech did not find this information credible, so she omitted it. Here the methodical problem I mentioned earlier comes into full view: since the messages contained in the “Materials of the Camp Resistance Movement” (and this applies equally to the parallel source “Files of the Delegation of the Polish Government in Exile”) contain both prima facie false and plausible claims, how can the plausible claims be considered correct without an external source to confirm them? Czech commits precisely this abuse as her normal procedure.

Her general methodical principle is even more aberrant, since she assumes as an unquestionable dogma that any unverifiable claim coming from members of the camp resistance movement or from trial witnesses and even from post-war memoirs, is true and constitutes indisputable proof of the reality of claimed events, and can therefore be adduced as a source for this, as long as it is not patently false and absurd.

In the Ausch­witz Chronicle, the alleged mass killings are divided into two major categories: those of deportees unfit for work selected on arrival and subsequently gassed, and those of prisoners already registered and admitted into the camp, who later became unfit for work or sick or were suspected of suffering from contagious diseases, hence were subsequently killed either with lethal injections or by gassing.

In the first case, Czech does not even pose the problem of proof or documentation of the alleged individual mass-killing operations: she assumes a priori as an indisputable fact that deportees unfit for work on arrival were gassed in every case. Hence the monotonous refrain, repeated hundreds of times, but never proven: “The remaining [number of] people are killed in the gas chambers.” Of course, except in rare cases (always based on testimonies), she is not even able to specify in which of the four crematoria or in which of the two “bunkers” the gassing presumably took place.

Regarding the second category, on the other hand, Czech refers to documents, sometimes directly (e.g. the labor-deployment list, the death register of the inmate infirmary of the Main Camp (Block 28) and of the morgue, lists of names of prisoners), but she consistently misrepresents their meaning, more-often indirectly than directly. This is especially the case regarding the very-long testimony of the former Viennese prisoner Otto Wolken, who together with Höss is one of the two key witnesses Czech relies on. Wolken was deported to Ausch­witz on 20 June 1943, and registered with Inmate Number 128828. On 2 October 1943, he was transferred to the quarantine camp (Birkenau Camp Sector BIIa), where he worked in the outpatient clinic (Ambulanz). Here he furtively transcribed various German documents and created some of his own (the best-known is the so-called “Quarantäne-Liste”). A part of this documentation, together with interrogations of the witness, statistics compiled by him and other materials, was collected in Volume 6 of the Höss Trial, which is all dedicated to him. Wolken is the source of at least 15 alleged exterminations reported by Czech.

When it comes to extermination claims, by far the most-important materials are the “Daily Reports” (“Tägliche Meldungen”) and the “Quarantä­ne-Liste.” Since they constitute the sources for many entries in the Ausch­witz Chronicle, it is worthwhile assessing their value right here.

The “Daily Reports” consist of two notebooks written by Wolken which contain daily changes in the occupancy of Camp Sector BIIa. The first runs from 16 September 1943 to 30 April 1944, the second from 1 May to 3 November 1944. These documents include the following headings: “date” (“Datum”), “census” (“Belegstärke,” later “Stand”), “outpatient treatment” (“Ambul. Behandlung”), “lice control” (“Läusekontrolle”), “admitted to the prisoners’ hospital” (“Überwiesen in H.K.B.,” then “nach H.K.B.”), “convalescence” (“Schonung”), “request to see a doctor” (“Arztvormeld.​[ung]”), “petechial fever check” (“Fleckfieberkontrolle”), “at the disinfestation” (“zur Entlausung”) as well as “note” (“Bemerkung”). From the third sheet (page 4 of the consecutive numbering), two more headings are inserted between “zur Entlausung” and “Bemerkung”: “deaths” (“Todesfälle”) and “new arrivals” (“Zugang”). From the seventh sheet (page 10) “zur Entlausung” is replaced by “zur Sauna” (“to the sauna”), “Todesfälle” disappears, and after “Zugang,” the rubric “departure” (“Abgang”) appears, later also the rubric “scabies” (“Skabies”).[13]

However, the figures written down by Wolken do not account for the actual change in force, as they are not even internally consistent. For example, on 5 October 1943, Wolken records 7,280 inmates; 276 inmates are recorded in “Ambul. Behandlung,” 8 in “Überwiesen in H.K.B.,” 5 in “Schonung,” 10 in “Arztvormeld.” and “1-Bl.8” is written in the “Bemer­kung” column, probably a death that occurred in Block 8. As a loss of inmates, in addition to those recorded in the columns “Todesfälle” and “Ab­gang,” Wolken also considers those recorded under the headings “Überwiesen in H.K.B.” and “Schonung,” so that the census on the next day, 6 October, should be (7,280 – 8 – 5 – 1 =) 7,266, but instead he has 7,721 inmates, 441 more than on the previous day.[14]

In practice, it is impossible to reconstruct the daily census of the quarantine camp based on the variations mentioned by Wolken, so that the numbers are always inexplicable. But all of Wolken’s conjectures regarding selections leading to gassings are based precisely on these incomprehensible variations of inmate counts. They are moreover invalidated by the fact that he had a very limited view of the events unfolding in the Birkenau Camp, which was limited exclusively to the quarantine camp: for him, the “Abgang” of a substantial number of inmates always meant their gassing, without ever knowing anything explicit about it (not even in which crematorium it would take place), and without ever even considering the possibility that any or all of these inmates had been transferred to other sectors of the camp. He never says who the doctor was who carried out the alleged selections, and hardly ever indicates who the selected inmates were.[15]

The “Quarantäne-Liste” is a list of inmates admitted to Camp Sector BIIa in Birkenau from 24 October 1943 to 3 November 1944 compiled by O. Wolken, who claimed to have also listed the alleged gassings. However, this is only explicitly stated in the typewritten text of the list, which appended to the protocol of Wolken’s interrogation of 24 April 1945 by Polish investigating Judge Jan Sehn.[16] This list in fact contains the columns “date” (“Datum”), “category” (“Kategorie”), “transport from” (“Transport von”), “tattoo number” (“Tätowierte Nr.”), “number” (“Anzahl”) and “gassed” (“Vergast”).[17] It is telling that, in the “original” handwritten list compiled by O. Wolken prior to the interrogation,[18] the “gassed” column does not appear at all. Instead, on the first two pages covering 24 October to 2 December 1943, the figures of those alleged gassed are listed in the “Block” column, as well as the number of the block where the registered inmates were housed. On the second page, starting with the last five entries (26 February to 5 March), the figure of those alleged gassed are no longer listed in the “Block” column but in the adjacent “Stand” column. From the third page on, these two columns disappear, and the figures for those alleged gassed are so faded as to be illegible, indeed barely discernible. This concerns the period from 5 March to 3 November 1944. These figures can therefore only be derived from the typescript version of the “Quarantäne-Liste.”

Wolken does not explain on what basis he could ascertain

1. that a part of the deportees was indeed gassed;
2. the exact number of those alleged gassed;
3. the exact number of male deportees of each transport (which is obtained by adding the number of those registered and allegedly gassed).

Irena Strzelecka, a historian at the Ausch­witz Museum, states (1997, p. 80):

“He compiled this figure on the basis of information given to him by inmates from the respective transports or who were accommodated in the Quarantine Camp.”

For obvious reasons, no deportee could know the exact number of men in his own transport, but even if we were to assume that this was possible, he should likewise have known the number of women and thus the total number of deportees, but Wolken never mentions either one or the other.

That the number of male deportees in the transports reported by Wolken is simply a figment of his imagination is demonstrated by Czech herself in cases where Wolken’s data can be verified. I give the most-significant examples:

• O. Wolken: On 24 October 1943, 347 inmates were registered (157889-158235), and 1,116 were gassed; total number of men: 1,463.[19]
• Czech, entry for 21 October 1943 (p. 511):

“1,007 Jews from the Westerbork camp arrive with an RSHA transport from Holland. In the transport are 87 children, 407 men and 306 women under age 50, as well as 207 older people. Following the selection, 347 men, given Nos. 157889-158235, and 170 women, given Nos. 65493-65662, are admitted to the camp. The other 490 deportees are killed in the gas chambers.”

The number of men allegedly gassed according to Wolken (1,116) is therefore greater than the total number of deportees (1,007)!

• O. Wolken: on 18 November 1943, 243 prisoners were registered (163201-163443), and 778 were gassed; total number of men: 1,021.¹⁹
• Czech, entry for 17 November 1943 (p. 528):

“559 male and 589 female Jews transferred from Herzogenbusch are given Nos. 163201-163759 and 68090-68678.”

Therefore, this transport consisted of (559 + 589) 1,148 persons, all of whom were registered! Czech moreover neglects to inform her readers that in this transport there were 14 children up to 15 years old, 485 men and 526 women from 16 to 50 years old, and 124 persons over 50 years of age (of a total of 1,149 deportees).[20]

• O. Wolken: on 19 November 1943, 243 prisoners were registered (163800-164072), and 803 were gassed; total number of men: 1,078.¹⁹
• Czech, entry for 17 November 1943 (pp. 528f.):

“995 Jews arrive from Westerbork in an RSHA transport from Holland. In the transport are 166 children, 281 men and 291 women below the age of 50, and 257 old people. After the selection, 275 men and 189 women are admitted to the camp and receive Nos. 163798-164072 and 68724-68912. The remaining 531 people are killed in the gas chambers.”

Wolken’s number of men allegedly contained in this mixed-gender transport is therefore higher than the total number of deportees (995)!

• O. Wolken: on 23 November 1943, 241 Jews from the Drancy Camp were registered (164427-164667), and 782 were gassed; total number of men: 1,023.¹⁹
• Czech, entry of 23 November 1943 (p. 532):

“1,200 Jewish men, women, and children arrive from Drancy with the sixty-second RSHA transport from France. After the selection, 241 men and 45 women are admitted to the camp and receive Nos. 164427-164667 and 69036- 69080. The remaining 914 people are killed in the gas chambers.”

Czech could not seriously believe that this transport contained 1,023 men and only 177 women. In fact, as Serge Klarsfeld informs us, it contained 634 men, 556 women and 10 undetermined persons.[21] The maximum number of male deportees is therefore 644, but for Wolken they numbered 1,023! Czech was familiar with Klarsfeld’s work, since she mentions it in connection with the pre-selection of deportees at Cosel (entry of 28 August 1942, p. 228) and then twice more (20 September 1942, p. 242, and 11 November 1942, p. 267).

• O. Wolken: on 10 February 1944, 141 Jews from Westerbork were registered (173510-173650), and 587 were gassed; total number of men: 728.[22]
• Czech, entry for 10 February 1944 (p. 582):

“1,015 Jews from Westerbork camp arrive in an RSHA transport from Holland. 340 men, 454 women, and 221 children are in the transport. After the selection, 142 men and 73 women, given Nos. 173509-173650 and 75216- 75288, are admitted to the camp. The remaining 800 people are killed in the gas chambers.”

Even if the children had all been male, the total number would have been (340 + 221 =) 561, much lower than that indicated by O. Wolken (728).

From these few examples it is already clear how reliable and serious Czech’s claim of “strict source check” really is!

O. Wolken’s career as a witness had begun with his statement to the Soviets of 18 February 1945.[23] Among other things, he handed the investigators a sheet on which only a portion of the transports recorded in the “Quarantäne-Liste” are listed. This is a handwritten sheet which bears the heading “Male transports through Quarantine Camp BIIa” (“Männertransporte über Quaran­tänelager B.II.A”). The back of this sheet contains the last four entries of this list plus another list with the heading “Selections in Camp BIIa” (“Se­lektionen im Lager B.II.A”).

The transport list includes the columns: date (am), origin (aus), serial numbers (Nummer), number of inmates admitted to Camp BIIa (ins Lager) and the number of those allegedly annihilated (vernichtet).[24] In this list, the numbers of those alleged gassed almost always diverge from those of the “Quarantäne-Liste,” as can be seen in the following table, in which I summarize the data of the two lists:

As explained earlier, there is no dedicated column for those allegedly gassed in the “Quarantäne-Liste,” which is inexplicable if Wolken had planned on accounting for those allegedly gassed right from the start when compiling this list. The document was compiled by him clandestinely, so if he had wanted to indicate the number of alleged gassing victims back then, he might have created a dedicated column of “gassed” or “annihilated.” The fact, however, that the relevant figures are inserted wherever there was space available – first in the column “Block” (together with the Block Number), then in the column “Remarks” (“Anmerkungen”), which already contained other text entries – shows that these are later additions. This is confirmed by another fact already mentioned earlier: the digits of the alleged gassing victims, unlike all the others which are well written with a pen, are all written in pencil; they are faded and very-often illegible. Hence, these clearly are figures that were added later, probably in February 1945. In fact, the list “Male transports through Quarantine Camp BIIa” seems to be a first draft regarding the number of those allegedly gassed.

From these spurious sources, Czech draws a conspicuous number of alleged selections with subsequent gassings. In many other cases she transforms simple unconfirmable statements by Wolken, uttered only by him, into real events. Here she also forgets the principle “testis unus, testis nullus” – only one witness is no better than no witness at all.

Starting on 3 July 1942, Czech reports a long series of records concerning alleged killings of sick prisoners by phenol injections, purportedly attested by the “Morgue Register” (M), the “Occupancy Register” (O), the “Materials of the Camp Resistance Movement” (RO), or simply by nothing. Since all these instances are backed up with the same sources and follow the same method, it is not worthwhile to dwell on each one individually, so I summarize them in the following table and treat them, with a few exceptions, all together, setting forth the necessary general considerations on the notion of phenol injections:

As noted earlier, Czech testified at the Frankfurt Ausch­witz Trial as a witness for the prosecution during the 138th Session (19 February 1965). Attorney Gerhard Göllner, who was defending Josef Klehr, who was accused of being responsible or co-responsible for killing inmates with phenol injections in his capacity as Sanitätsdienstgrad (medical orderly), asked her about the sources of these alleged killings. The editor of the Ausch­witz Chronicle (during that trial, they were discussing the first German edition of this work) answered in Polish (Fritz Bauer…, p. 29519):

“Więc, do 15 grudnia w książce, tak zwanym Totenbuch, w książce [kostnicy], widniały przy selekcjach wpisy ‘szpila’.”

This translates to:

“So, until December 15, in the book, the so-called Totenbuch, in the [morgue] book, there were entries ‘szpila’ next to the selections.”

In reality, in the register in question, which is the Morgue Register, the annotation “szpila”[26] is nowhere to be found. It is only found in transcriptions of that document clandestinely prepared by members of the inmate resistance movement, such as the one reproduced by Czech herself with the following caption:[27]

“Material of the resistance movement. List of numbers of deceased inmates prepared by members of the resistance movement on the basis of the Morgue Register. The remark ‘szpila = needle’ near some numbers means that these inmates were killed as a result of a selection carried out on 13 August 1942 in the inmates’ infirmary by phenol injections directly into the heart.”

A more-readable copy of this transcription can be found in the appendix of the iconographic book Sterbebücher von Ausch­witz (Staatliches Museum…, p. 100, Document 31). It should be pointed out that in this list, under the date of 13 August 1942, there are 26 inmate numbers listed, 19 of which are from Block 20, none of which is marked with the annotation “szpila.” Under the date of 14 August, 60 inmate numbers are listed, all from Block 20, but next to them appears a long brace with the word “szpila.” It is therefore clear that Czech confused the dates, although to 14 August, she attributes 58 inmates killed by lethal injection (p. 216), so that the sequence: 13 August = 0 injections, 14 August = 60 injections, turned into: 13 August = 60 injections, 14 August = 58 injections.

In the 1960 edition of the “Kalendarium,” the term “szpila” (in German “Nadel”) occurs only in the above-mentioned document. In the 1989/1990 edition, no document bearing the annotation “szpila” is mentioned.

Another page of these Morgue Register transcripts was published in Volume IV of the Ausch­witz Museum’s major work on that camp (Świebocki 2000); it includes the entries of August 11 and 12.

The entry for 11 August contains 34 inmate numbers from Block 20 marked with the annotation “szpila”. The entry for 12 August contains 42 inmate numbers. This should therefore be the preceding page of the one mentioned above, which contains the data for 13 and 14 August. Inexplicably, however, Czech attributes 79 selections with subsequent phenol killings to 11 August (p. 214) and 50 to 12 August (p. 215).

Since the term “szpila” is only found in these clandestine transcripts and never appears in the Morgue Register, hence the original document, this manipulation of the original document by the resistance members proves nothing and has no historical value.

Returning to Czech’s deposition, immediately after the aforementioned perjury, she added (Fritz Bauer…, p. 29520):

“Po 15 grudnia, po 12 grudnia, tych adnotacji nie ma.”

“After December 15, after December 12, there are no such annotations.”

Yet in the Ausch­witz Chronicle, as shown in the summary table above, killings with lethal injections appear up to 30 March 1943. If Czech’s testimony is true, then what is the source of these alleged selections? In fact, the source is a simple methodical trick. Based on the unproven assumption that inmate killings with phenol injection into the heart were perpetrated in Block 28, every time (or almost every time) when a larger number of bodies coming from Block 28 was recorded in the Morgue Register after 15 December 1942, the editor of the Ausch­witz Chronicle considers them murdered based solely on that very fact!

In an article published in 1974, Czech wrote that, in the second half of 1942, 3,610 inmates suffering from typhus were selected at the Main Camp’s hospital in August, September, November and December: 1,143 were killed in the gas chambers, and the remaining 2,467 were murdered with phenol injections (Czech 1974, p. 18, Note 27). This is not very credible. At the time inmates quartered in the Main Camp who were suffering from typhus were hospitalized in Block 20, the inmate infirmary’s Department for Infectious Diseases. A logbook from Room No. 3 of this Block has been preserved and was analyzed by Stanisław Kłodziński in an article whose title translates as “Typhus at the Ausch­witz Camp.”[28] It shows that, during the period from 12 March to 30 November 1942, 4,167 typhus cases were registered. The number of registered deaths caused by typhus was 323. On 12 March, the number registered in this room was already 645, and rose to 717 on 30 March, to 867 on 30 April, and to 1,162 on 31 May; on 30 June, the number had reached 1,557; the final number, on 30 November, was 4,812 sick inmates (Kłodziński, pp. 51f.). According to Kłodziński, 90 patients were killed on 29 August 1942. In fact, from 30 August 1942 to 7 September 1942, Room No. 3 was closed for disinfestation,[29] and for this reason, the 90 patients previously lodged in that room were transferred elsewhere the day before, as a result of which the register for this room obviously recorded that on the following day the room was empty. On 8 September 1942, 62 patients arrived in Room 3, and on the next day, the occupancy increased to 93 patients, hence the 90 inmates who had been there on 29 September, plus three new admissions.

But even if we were to assume that these 90 sick inmates were indeed killed, this would represent just 1.9% of all the typhus patients recorded during 8½ months, which radically refutes Czech’s delusions. I will return to this matter when discussing Czech’s entry for 29 August 1942.

Another source which Czech abuses is the diary of Dr. Johann Paul Kremer, in which he famously speaks of his participation in 12 “special actions” (“Sonderaktionen”). I refer the interested reader to another study of mine for a general discussion of this issue (Mattogno 2016b, pp. 82-95).

This present study is subdivided into 172 instances where I analyze entries from the Ausch­witz Chronicle. Some of these analyze multiple entries of the Ausch­witz Chronicle, so that the number of Czech’s entries analyzed actually exceeds 200. These are mostly alleged events concerning the extermination of Jews and Gypsies, which form the backbone of the orthodox narrative about Ausch­witz still in vogue.

Regarding transportation, occupancy and mortality, which are also important aspects of the camp’s history, I point to the relevant documents from time to time. For a general exposition of these issues, I refer the reader to a study of mine specifically focusing on these issues (Mattogno 2019). [Editor’s remark: see the paper “Auschwitz Statistics: Registrations, Occupancy, Mortality, Transfers” in this issue.]

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Print and eBook versions of the complete book are available from Armreg at armreg.​co.uk.

Endnotes