Early Revisionism outside Occupied Germany

Just One among Ten Thousand Lies!

Olof Svendson

As is well known, the victorious powers brought numerous Germans to judgment, sentenced them, sent them to jails or handed them over to the executioners. The sentences were—we were told—handed down on the basis of unchallengeable documents and in the name of justice. The exact wording of the documents was kept secret; they were not disclosed to the public. The press brought only short excerpts, which were quite useless. So one wondered what kind of documents they were. But nothing could be learned, and it seemed as if they were to remain hidden for all time.

Finally, on July 16, 1953, a Mr. Michel Wächter announces in the Swedish newspaper DAGENS NYHETER the contents of such a document. In the article, which is titled “Testimony about the Gas Chambers”, the following can be read among other things:

“[…] an eyewitness account of some of the German extermination camps. Document PS-1553-RF-350 was already available at the Nuremberg trials against the main war criminals. It was admitted as evidence in the so-called Doctors’ Trial in January 1947 and played a role in the first German poison-gas trial in January 1949. It is now officially published for the first time in the second issue of the Vierteljahreshefte für Zeitgeschichte (Quarterly for Contemporary History) in 1953. It was treated there as a historical document, dissected and provided with explanatory notes. A careful, critical examination by the guarantor has indeed revealed its truthfulness beyond all doubt.”

To underline the “scientific reliability” of the document, it is written at the end of the article:

“The publication of this document after scientific verification, carried out with impeccable enlightening methods in order to be able to form an opinion on every detail, should help to prevent the world from sinking once again into the same barbarism”.

The document in question has been reviewed for credibility by the Swedish civil engineer Erhard Fliesberg. Let’s see for ourselves what he reports:

An honest and thinking reader, after a really careful study of the factually critical review that follows here, will find that the true barbarism is to be found in the authors of the documents, as well as in the ‘scientists’ who were able to unite it with their scientific honor and duty to confirm the content and credibility of the documents. The same applies to the judges and courts who claim to have spoken in the name of justice when they passed their sentence on the basis of such documents and testimonies. It is undeniable that hidden forces were in play.

Since the above-mentioned document contains statements brimming with absurd and fantastic impossibilities, it will suffice to demonstrate such complete irresponsibility by a critical examination of the most essential points of this authoritative testimony.I do not want to waste much attention and time on such trivialities as

1. if there were only one witness, who was also the author of the document, but who had the good taste to commit suicide immediately after his capture in 1945;
2. the processions into the gas chambers were led by a young girl who was of statuesque beauty;
3. the pure ridiculousness that the hair of the killed people was used as sealing material for submarines.

I just want to nail down the incontrovertible impossibilities:

It is stated twice in the document that 700 to 800 people, say 750, were driven into the gas chambers that had a floor area of 25 square meters = 2500 square decimeters that had a volume of 45 cubic meters, therefore a height of 1.8 meters or 18 decimeters.

If on average 750 people are crowded together in a space of 25 square meters = 2500 square decimeters, then each one has space of:

2500 ÷ 750 = 3.33 square decimeters

Just compare this with the size of the standard German DIN-format letter sheet of:

2.1 × 2.97 = 6.25 square decimeters

and one can visualize the space available for each person!

The only way to drive 750 people into a space of the above-mentioned dimensions and to carry out the gassing would be to use hydraulic presses to form the living beings into rectangular blocks with the same cross-section from bottom to top and with a corresponding change in length. And figuring a volume of 50 Liters with an average weight of 52 Kilograms each, the length of each rectangular solid would have to be:

50 ÷ 3.33 = 15 decimeters,

which would fit under the ceiling with 3 decimeters to spare. But one has to consider that such a human block becomes a liquid due to the powerful pressure would have been. But it need not be said that in this mushy liquid of former humans no human life can exist anymore. Notwithstanding this, it is claimed that the document has been subjected to ‘meticulous and scientific scrutiny’ and that we should be subject to such scrutiny. Well, I ask, what would happen if this ocean of people could still live and breathe? —

The aforementioned human fluid has a volume of:

750 × 50 L = 37,500 cubic decimeters

When the chambers are filled and closed, there remains in them:

45,000 – 37,500 = 7,500 L of air, containing 1,500 L of oxygen.

The average person consumes, however, 600 liters of oxygen in 24 hours, therefore:

750 × 600 ÷ 24 ÷ 60 = 312 L/min. of oxygen.

This would mean that the air trapped in the gas chambers would not sustain the lives of the people locked up in them for more than 5 minutes at most. After that the air would be so low in oxygen and so polluted that no human being could exist in it. The document claims, however, that the people locked up in these gas chambers had lived for more than 3 hours! This had even been closely monitored with a stopwatch, which the witness fortunately had with him, even though exhaust gas from a diesel engine had been used as a lethal agent for the last half hour.

Just as nonsensical as these brain-bending impossibilities is the entire content of the document, which has been only one among many similar ones and has the purpose of imprinting sadistic barbarism as a method of extermination devised by Germans on humanity and its conscience.

Editor’s Note: The July 1954 issue of Der Weg (Vol. 11, No. 7) was dedicated to “The Lie of the Six Million” (“Die Lüge von den sechs Millionen“). Its featured article of that title, written by a certain Guido Heimann from Salzburg, Austria, was published on pages 479-487. We translated it in a separate paper titled, well, “The Lie of the Six Million,” and have moved the PDF file of the original German article there as well.

Endnotes