Filip Müller’s False Testimony, Part 1

1. Müller’s First Statement

1.1. The Statement Published by Ota Kraus & Erich Kulka (1946)

In the following pages, I reproduce in full the first two statements by Müller in chronological order, and summarize the others, given their excessive length. In this way, I present an exhaustive picture of Müller’s testimony, providing all requisites for a sound historical evaluation of it.

One of the first general historical descriptions of the Ausch­witz Camp, the 1946 book The Death Factory (Továrna na smrt), written by Ota Kraus and Erich Schön (Kulka), two former camp inmates, contains a statement by Müller on Ausch­witz,[1] which I quote from the published English translation of the book, with an eye to the original text and the German translation. Original text missing in, or significantly different from, the published English translation is added here in brackets (Kraus/Kulka 1966, pp. 156-160; subsequently referred to as the Kraus-Kulka Statement):

“I came to Ausch­witz I on April 20th, 1942, with the first Slovak convoy and at first I worked in the camp like all the other prisoners.

On May 24th, 1942, I was with a friend of mine. We were terribly thirsty and had somehow managed to get some water. For this we were punished by being sent to the crematorium to work at the gas chamber. When we arrived, we found some hundreds of corpses, fully dressed, and luggage lying about on the ground. We were filled with unspeakable horror as we saw what we were expected to do. Five prisoners were already working there. We had to carry the corpses to the furnaces.

The SS man in charge of us, a man of about twenty named Starck, struck me with a stick, remarking that I had only to finish my work and then I too would go into the furnace. Two Slovak doctors in their despair told Starck they would rather he shot them dead.

Having had no previous experience of stoking furnaces, we bungled things badly. Fire broke out at the crematorium, which made it impossible for the corpses to be burnt. The SS blamed us for sabotage, and four of our comrades were killed on this account.

When the fire was put out, Starck brought seven more prisoners. We loaded the remaining corpses onto three lorries, and then followed the most ghastly journey I have ever undertaken.

It was late at night and I sat in the last lorry on a heap of corpses. Behind us was a small car marked on the sides and roof with a large Red Cross; the headlights dazzled us and lit up our grim load. All the time we were guarded by SS men, armed with automatic rifles.

The lorries struck out across a field behind the camp and stopped at a marshy pit. Here we threw the corpses into the water in the pit. This work went on until three o’clock in the morning, after which we returned to the camp. They locked us in a dark cell in Block 11, the execution block, where we waited, dirty and stained with blood, without any food or water, until noon the following day.

When we were let out, we each got a loaf of bread.

Then they took us out to our pit on a fire engine; it was at Brzezinka, near the newly built concentration camp at Birkenau. We had to wait a long time while they drained the water from the pit. Not far from us we saw another group of prisoners digging some new pits. We discovered later that this was the Son­der­kom­man­do from Birkenau.[2]

Then it started! They drove us down into the pit where we stood up to our waists in the swamp. Our task was to place the corpses on one heap so as to make room for more. SS officers and men stood on the edge of the pit and amused themselves watching the disgusting work we had to do. They kept throwing stones at us to make us work faster. Finally, when we had sprinkled the corpses with chlorine and earth, they took us back to the camp where we were again put in the dark cell which we had occupied up to August, 1943. We worked at the crematorium from morn till night.

I experienced a great deal at the crematorium and I saw sights that the world ought never to have to hear about. It was not intended that I, an eye witness, should survive, nor did I myself suppose that I should ever be at liberty again. I do not want, nor would I be able to describe everything in detail. There is too much of it and it is so horrible that many would not believe it. And even today I cannot grasp all that I witnessed.

At Ausch­witz crematorium I had to be present at the executions performed by SS Palitsch who carried out the sentences passed by the Camp Gestapo. He was a professional mass murderer. His victims, mostly political prisoners, were made to line up in fives against the wall, and Palitsch merely fired. …

June 17th, or 18th, 1942, was a beautiful sunny day. The camp was thoroughly tidied up at great speed. We noticed that the SS were all on edge. Evidently something was in the wind but we had no idea what it could be, except that we suspected that some V.I.P. was due to visit the camp.

At about half-past nine, a high-ranking SS officer in a white uniform appeared at the entrance to the crematorium enclosure, accompanied by two SS officers. It was Himmler himself. He made a careful inspection of everything. We were in the room containing the clothes of persons who had been executed when he came round. At the sight of these blood-stained garments, he turned to our SS chiefs in great surprise and asked why they were in this state. Dissatisfied with the answer he was given, he flew into a rage and thundered: ‘We need the clothing of these accursed dogs for our German people! It’s a waste to gas people in their clothes!’

After this the gas chambers were converted into mock bathrooms with water-pipes and taps, and the people had to undress before they went to their death [were gassed].

In the summer of 1943, the furnaces and chimneys at the Ausch­witz crematorium caught fire. Nazi engineers renovated them, but three months later the same thing happened again. Meanwhile four crematoria had been started up at Birkenau, and it was to this camp that we were now transferred. We joined the Son­der­kom­man­do and lived in Block 13 in the men’s camp, BIId.

Part of the work at the Ausch­witz crematorium was the filling of urns. We put ash and dust from a great heap into urns, closed them with metal lids, and stamped them with the name of a victim, the date of his birth and death; the details were taken from lists supplied to us by the Political Department. The urns were packed in wooden crates, about 8 in. × 8 in. × 16 in., and addressed to the relatives who had to pay 2000 crowns per urn. It goes without saying that no urns were sent to the relatives of the Jews.

Many of these urns were sent to Bohemia and Moravia, but none of them contained the ashes of the person whose name was marked on top. When I was transferred from Ausch­witz I to Birkenau, there were about 4000 urns there already filled in advance.

At Birkenau life was a little freer. I found several fellow-countrymen in the camp. After evening roll-call I used to climb over the wall of our isolated block and visit my friends in the camp, more especially at the locksmiths’ workshop. I found that while they had been able to form a clear idea of the general extent and function of Birkenau, they did not know all the details that I was able to pass on to them. We were continually making plans to escape but never succeeded in bringing it off.

Work at the Birkenau crematoria was the same as at Ausch­witz, except that at Ausch­witz the crematorium was only a small affair whereas at Birkenau it was an enormous factory – four factories, in fact – turning out death on an assembly line.

I started work at Crematorium I.[3] I was proposed for the post of Kapo, since my prison number was lower than those of all the others working there [at the crematorium], which meant that I was the oldest prisoner. I did not accept this function, and by way of punishment was transferred to Crematorium IV. Here there was more work since the mechanical apparatus was not so efficient [as in Crematorium I] and burnt only about 1500 people every twenty-four hours.

Here I witnessed the ‘scientific’ experiments performed by SS doctors Fischer, Klein and Mengele. Between 100 and 150 men and women, aged from eighteen to thirty, were selected [from the transports] and shot – unlike the other prisoners who were gassed. A piece of flesh was then cut from their thighs and forwarded to the Bacteriological Institute at Rajsko [where bacteria were cultured]. One of the SS, who was acting as assistant to an SS doctor, told me all about it, remarking that horse meat would have done just as well but would have been a waste.

The youngest women also served as a source of blood which would be drained from their veins for several minutes until they collapsed, after which they would be thrown half-dead into the fire. The blood was poured from a pail into special bottles which were then hermetically sealed. I was told that it was urgently needed at the military hospitals.

In the summer of 1944 SS Forst [Voss], who up to then had been our chief, was replaced by SS Moll, apparently because of his lack of organizing ability and energy. Moll reorganized everything and ordered pits to be dug for the corpses. If there was a lot of work to do, he would even lend a hand himself in throwing the corpses into the pits, rolling up his sleeves and working at double speed. This fanatical madman, who neither smoked nor drank, often declared that an order was an order, and that if the Führer were to order him to burn his own wife and child he would not hesitate to do so.

Moll ‘s sole source of pleasure was human blood and shooting, and his favourite amusement was to play with children whose mothers were waiting for death. He would go up to the mother with a smile, kiss her child, give it a piece of chocolate, and then take the child away with the promise that he would be coming back. Then he would throw the child alive into sizzling human fat [that was draining in channels from the burning pyre]. At the end of the day, when he had done this several times, he would pronounce with satisfaction: ‘I’ve done enough for the Fatherland today!’, after which he would order his servant, a French prisoner, to bring him something to eat.

In his spare time he used to go fishing in the Vistula. Twice he took me with him to his private flat at Ausch­witz, to bring clothing for his wife and son. His son, aged about seven, asked when he would bring him some more pictures and storybooks. I had the impression the lad knew that the things his father brought him were from people killed at Birkenau.[4]

I saw nationals of almost all the nations of Europe die in the gas chambers. Those from the Czech Jewish family camp were the only ones to go to their death singing their national anthem. [French female inmates sang the Marseillaise while on trucks riding to the gas chambers.]

I am the oldest member of the Ausch­witz and Birkenau Son­der­kom­man­do and the only one to have been through everything [who survived everything]. I only escaped death as a result of a number of lucky chances; it was indeed a miracle.

What 1 went through seems incredible to me today, like some sort of evil dream. It was much more terrible than could ever be described.”

1.2. The Deposition at the Krakow Trial (1947)

On December 11, 1947, Müller testified as a witness for the prosecution during the sixteenth session of the trial against the Ausch­witz camp garrison (the Krakow Trial, November 25 to December 16, 1947). This testimony is still unpublished, hence deserves to be reported in full:[5]

“I was Inmate No. 29236 of the Ausch­witz Concentration Camp. I arrived at the Ausch­witz Concentration Camp in April 1942. In May 1942, I was assigned to Block 11, and in that block, I suffered terrible harassment. It consisted primarily of the fact that we could not get any water to drink at all. As a result of this, I was forced to go at 6 in the morning in search of the leftover tea that was in the courtyard of Block 11, so I had to ‘organize it,’ as they said in a certain way in the camp. When doing this, the Oberscharführer of Block 11 caught me, and led me to a special room. In the afternoon, Camp Commandant Aumeier arrived in that room, who of course asked me what I had done. Then he took me to another room and, after taking 6 other prisoners, he led us all to the gate of the Ausch­witz Camp. By order of Aumeier, the guards took us from the gate of the Ausch­witz Camp to the old crematorium of Ausch­witz. So, from May 1942 until January 18, 1945, I was present at the gassing [przy gazowaniu] in the crematorium. After we arrived at the crematorium, Aumeier handed us over to his subordinate Unterscharführer Stark, who led us with many blows to the gas chamber and opened it. In that chamber was the first gassed Slovakian transport. These inmates had been gassed in their clothes. Since we were being beaten without interruption and had no experience of running the crematorium facilities, we started a fire in the Ausch­witz crematorium. As a result, the gassed victims could not be cremated.

On Aumeier ‘s initiative, two trucks were taken that same evening, at midnight, and the rest of the corpses, about 800, were loaded onto the trucks, and brought to the vicinity of Birkenau. We reached Birkenau at about one in the morning, and were escorted by the Red Cross, which illuminated us from behind with a spotlight. In this car was the defendant Aumeier, as well as the head of the Political Department Grabner. While being violently beaten, we were forced to unload the corpses quickly into pits in which there was still water, so that the work lasted about two days. After that work, bloody, dirty, we were taken to Block 11 and locked up in Cell 13. We were led there by another Unterschar­führer who was on night duty, and all six of us were locked up. The following day, around two o’clock, after lunch, we were taken to the gate of the Ausch­witz Camp, and there we waited for the fire engine, painted green, in which were Aumeier and Grabner.

We got into the car, and went to the place where we had thrown the bodies the day before. First, we had to pile up the corpses in the mud in a heap, but since it couldn’t be done with precision, we were beaten good and proper. For all this work, the main initiative came from the head of the Political Department Grabner and from Aumeier. Then we doused the corpses with chlorine, and were again locked up in Block 11, Cell 13.

We stayed in Cell 13 of the Bunker for a year and a half, that is, until the Ausch­witz crematorium was liquidated. I met the defendants Aumeier and Grabner, that is, I saw them at least once a day, almost until the Ausch­witz crematorium was liquidated, so I would like to mention a couple of incidents about their behavior.

At that time most of the Kapos of the crematorium were Germans. One day, a Kapo had a bandaged hand. Unterscharführer Grabner went to him and asked him:

‘Fritz, why is your hand bandaged?,’ to which Fritz replied, ‘I have killed five Jews again.’ ‘Imbecile, you don’t use your hand for this, you have iron [żelazo] for this, if you kill five, you will have [another] ten [to kill], and if you kill ten, you will have [another] twenty.’

In the Ausch­witz Camp, I also saw that the tissue of executed non-Jewish inmates was used for various purposes. These people were often shot in the presence of Dr. Mengele and others, whose names I do not know, and in the presence of Aumeier and Grabner. Immediately afterwards, the flesh from their calves was placed in crates, so that on average 6–8 crates of flesh were taken in a week.

It sometimes happened that a German commission came with swastikas on their arms, and asked in the presence of Aumeier and Grabner if it was human flesh. Aumeier replied: ‘Horse meat could also be used, but what a pity [to waste] horse meat!’

Unterscharführer Grabner was also guilty of the fact that urns were shipped with completely false ashes of the victims, that is, 3,000 urns were filled with ordinary ash, which were then stored in the SS hospital in front of the crematorium, then, by direct order of the Political Department, they were shipped off.

I saw Aumeier and Grabner shooting Russian prisoners in Block 11, as well as Polish political prisoners. When it seemed to Aumeier and Grabner that this [the shooting] was proceeding too slowly, they hit them even before they died, and they said faster [prędzej].

When Polish political prisoners shouted ‘Long live free Poland,’ before dying, they separated them and shot them in the abdomen, so that they had an agonizing death lasting two or three hours.

Untersturmführer Grabner, as I have already said, was the main accomplice and promoter of the crematorium at Ausch­witz, not Birkenau.

There were cases where corpses with severed heads were brought from Kattowitz: these corpses were brought by the Kattowitz Security Police.

Grabner and Aumeier also participated in the selection of sick and weak people in the hospitals, and handed them over for execution. Untersturmführer Grabner participated in all the selections for the crematorium until 1943. All selections that took place in the crematorium were made in the presence of Grabner until 1943, and also in the presence of Aumeier. Hauptscharführer Palitzsch and Unterscharführer Stark usually did the shooting, and they always received detailed instructions from them during executions.”

1.3. Later Statements

Müller also testified as a witness for the prosecution during the Frankfurt Ausch­witz Trial (December 20, 1963 to August 20, 1965), where he was subjected to a very long interrogation during the 97th and 98th sessions (October 5 and 8, 1964).[6] It took place in German, a language that the witness, a native to the Slovak language, knew but had not mastered completely, which is why his answers are at times cumbersome and unclear, and often the interpreter Stegmann had to intervene to explain to the Court what he meant.

As mentioned earlier, Müller published his memoir Sonderbehandlung/​Ausch­witz Inferno in 1979, and between 1978 and 1981, he granted a long-winded interview to the French Jewish activist Claude Lanzmann, which was recorded and later included in Lanzmann’s documentary Shoah, which exists also in an abridged book version (Lanzmann 1985).

Overall, these later statements contain conspicuous discrepancies with respect to the two earlier ones, the most-important of which lies in the fact that in the early statements he focused his alleged experiences almost exclusively on the crematorium of the Ausch­witz Main Camp, but in his later statements, he predominantly reports on his alleged activities at the “Son­der­kom­man­do” of Birkenau.

In the 1946 testimony, the account relating to Birkenau is fleeting and vague, completely devoid of any reference to the alleged extermination process, and is practically reduced to a fatuous anecdote. At that time, little or nothing was known about the alleged gas chambers of Birkenau, and the two editors of Továrna na smrt were former Ausch­witz inmates and personal friends of Müller. Hence, it would have made no sense for him to hide from his friends the presumably most-relevant aspect of his experiences at the camp – meaning his alleged activities in the Birkenau crematoria. The fact that in this statement he spoke for the most part only about the Ausch­witz crematorium confirms, therefore, that in 1946 he knew nothing of the Birkenau crematoria. This issue is of fundamental importance for establishing the credibility of the witness. It will be examined more-thoroughly in Chapter 5.

During the Krakow Trial, Müller did not mention his alleged experiences at Birkenau at all. Although it is true that this trial’s focus was on the defendants Grabner and Aumeier, who were mainly implicated in the use of the alleged gas chamber inside the old crematorium of the Main Camp, it is also true that the witnesses for this trial were chosen on the basis of their ability to testify; nothing would have prevented Müller from testifying also on the crematoria of Birkenau, if he had had relevant information to report on this.

It should also be noted that Hans Stark, a former SS Untersturmführer in charge of inmate admissions at Ausch­witz-Birkenau, was a completely marginal figure in Müller’s two earlier statements, whereas his deposition during the Ausch­witz Trial is completely centered around Stark, thus transforming him into the main actor of the claimed homicidal gassings. The reason for this is easy to see: at the Ausch­witz Trial, Müller was called to testify especially against Stark. This is another example of Müller’s testimonial opportunism.

In practice, his entire “eyewitness account,” with all the value he attached to it, almost completely unfolded in the crematorium at the Main Camp:

“I experienced a great deal at the crematorium and I saw sights that the world ought never to have to hear about. It was not intended that I, an eye witness, should survive, nor did I myself suppose that I should ever be at liberty again.” (Kraus-Kulka Statement)

Therefore, if Müller subsequently spoke of his alleged experiences in the Birkenau crematoria, the relevant statements cannot be truthful and necessarily have to come from Holocaust literature. During the 98th session of the Frankfurt Trial, he candidly asserted (Fritz Bauer…, p. 20717):

“I have a certain amount of literature in my library, which contains a number of authentic pictures showing this concentration camp.”

He exploited this literature in an unscrupulous way, up to the most-brazen plagiarism, as I will document later. His main sources, which I will analyze in detail in Chapters 4 and 5, are in fact:

1. with regard to the Birkenau crematoria: Myklós Nyiszli ‘s 1946 book I was Doctor Dr. Mengele ‘s Anatomist at the Ausch­witz Crematorium (in its 1961 German serialized translation);
2. for various information and drawings of the Birkenau crematoria: Ota Kraus ‘s and Erich Schön ‘s Czech-language book The Death Factory (1946/​1957a).

In addition, he used Stanisław Jankowski ‘s deposition of April 16, 1945 for the Ausch­witz crematorium, Danuta Czech ‘s German-language articles “Kalendarium of Ausch­witz” (1961-1964) for the general history of the camp, and finally Rudolf Höss ‘s autobiographic writings, published in the German original in 1958 (Broszat), for various information.

Before retracing the literary provenance of Müller’s statements on Birkenau’s “Son­der­kom­man­do,” it is necessary to examine whether at least his narration relating to the crematorium at the Ausch­witz Main Camp is credible.

2. Müller’s “Experiences” at the Main Camp Crematorium

2.1. Arrival and Duration of Stay at the Crematorium

First of all, it is necessary to establish the time limits of Müller’s stay in the crematorium, starting from the day he arrived there. In the Kraus-Kulka Statement, he claimed that he was assigned there on May 24, 1942. In the Frankfurt Statement (97th session) he declared that he arrived in Ausch­witz on April 13, 1942 and was transferred to Birkenau the next day, where he remained for five to seven days. Later he said that he went to Birkenau on April 14 or 15, stayed there for three to four days and then was sent back to the Ausch­witz Main Camp. After a couple of days, he was assigned to the “Buna Kommando” for eight to ten days, but in early May, he was sent back to Ausch­witz, where he was assigned to the crematorium one Saturday.

Müller was quite sure it was a Saturday, because he explained that “the inmates always slept in on Saturdays, (there was an hour) or maybe more to sleep in.” (Fritz Bauer…, p. 20465)

It would therefore be the first Saturday of May 1942, which fell on May 2. This dating is in evident contrast with that of May 24, which was moreover a Sunday. Also in his book, Müller said that “It was a Sunday in May 1942” (Müller 1979b, p. 1), but he did not indicate the date. He remained at the Main Camp’s crematorium for about six weeks until the end of June 1942 (Fritz Bauer …, p. 20506):

“Witness Filip Müller: I was in the Ausch­witz crematorium until about the end of June or the beginning of August [sic], I can’t, I can’t [remember] that.

Presiding Judge (interrupts): Well, roughly how many weeks was it?

Witness Filip Müller: Six weeks.

Presiding Judge: Six weeks.

Witness Filip Müller: About six weeks.”

This presupposes an arrival date around mid-May. The maximum period of the witness’s stay in the crematorium therefore runs from the beginning of May to the end of June of 1942.

2.2. The Crematorium’s Layout

How was the crematorium laid out at the time? The witness does not provide a description. As for the cremation’s appearance, he limits himself to mentioning the three double-muffle furnaces and the round chimney (“a round red-brick chimney,” Müller 1979b, p. 11). However, the “Inventory plan of Building No. 47a, BW 11. Crematorium” (“Bestandsplan des Gebäudes Nr. 47a. BW 11. Kre­matorium”) of April 10, 1942 shows in the blueprint a square chimney (see Mattogno/Deana, Vol. II, Docs. 206, 206a, pp. 349f.).

Müller then accurately describes the device for introducing corpses into the muffles (the “corpse-introduction device” – Leicheneinführungs-Vorrichtung, although he calls it “cast-iron truck”) and the “turn-table” (Drehscheibe; Müller 1979b, p. 14), which was used to turn the devices from a pair of rails running across the furnace room to one of the perpendicular sets leading to each muffle opening. Müller explicitly states that the system lacked an essential device – the pair of rollers (Laufrollen) onto which the side rails of the corpse-introduction stretcher were placed and which served to center the stretcher when it was pushed in, and to prevent it from dropping down onto the refractory grate prematurely, which could damage it. Müller mentions later, when talking about Crematorium II in Birkenau, that its furnaces had such rollers as the only “important innovation” (Müller 1979b, p. 59). Fact is, however, that the furnaces at the Main Camp’s crematorium were also equipped with these rollers. He probably claimed they didn’t exist, because the two furnaces on display in this building today were badly rebuilt by the museum right after the war, leaving out the rollers in the process, while the corpse-introduction device was mounted correctly (Mattogno/Deana, Vol. I, pp. 261f.). This suggests that Müller’s description in his book is not exclusively based on his memory (if at all), but at least to some degree on post-war observations.

After preheating the furnace, the corpses were placed in the muffles – three at a time (Müller 1979b, p. 15). In this regard, the witness states (ibid., p. 16):

“The powers that be had allocated twenty minutes for the cremation of three corpses. It was Stark ‘s duty to see to it that this time was strictly adhered to.”

He then adds that 54 corpses could be cremated in the three double-muffle furnaces within one hour, hence three corpses every 20 minutes in each muffle (ibid., p. 17). These claims put Müller’s tale squarely into the realm of fantasy, because the cremation capacity of the Ausch­witz double-muffle furnaces was one corpse per hour and muffle, or six corpses per hour in the six muffles (Mattogno/Deana, Vol. I, pp. 251-265, 312-341). Therefore, Müller increased the actual furnace capacity by a factor of nine! I will return to this question in Chapter 6.

2.3. The Crematorium Fire and the Chimney’s Reconstruction

On the first day of the witness’s claimed activity at the crematorium, he was about to undress the corpses of the gassing victims, but then he was assigned to work on the actual cremations. In his first two statements, the related account is somewhat vague:

“Having had no previous experience of stoking furnaces, we bungled things badly. Fire broke out at the crematorium, which made it impossible for the corpses to be burnt.” (Kraus-Kulka Statement)

“Since we were being beaten without interruption and had no experience of running the crematorium facilities, we started a fire in the Ausch­witz crematorium. As a result, the gassed victims could not be cremated.” (Krakow Statement)

This was the prelude to his alleged dispatch to a mass grave in Birkenau, which I will deal with later. At the Frankfurt Trial (97th session), Müller tried to formulate a somewhat-more-credible story. Together with another inmate, Maurice Lulus, he was first charged with removing the slag from the two furnaces’ gas-generator grates (“die Öfen entschlacken”), then these furnaces were fired up by Stark and an inmate named Fischl, and their operation was then entrusted to the inmates Müller and Lulus (Fritz Bauer…, pp. 20475-78). Yet then, a fire broke out as follows (ibid., pp. 20478f.):

“And after that, after a few minutes, when the corpses were already burning, you had to turn on the fans – there were fans there too. And we couldn’t do that, we saw it for the first time.[7] And the fans, they were on too long, and that led to a fire in the crematorium.

Presiding Judge: A fire broke out.

Witness Filip Müller: Yes, a fire. Because the fans [ran longer] than they were allowed to, and that’s why there was a fire. And then we have to extinguish it with water.”

In his book, Müller embroidered this story further (Müller 1979b, p. 14).

“Stark ordered the fans to be switched on. A button was pressed and they began to rotate. But as soon as Stark had checked that the fire was drawing well they were switched off again.”

This statement, which refers to the furnace’s preheating phase, is nonsense, technically speaking. Each of the crematorium’s three double-muffle furnaces was equipped with an air-induction device (Druckluftanlage) with a blower (Druckluftgebläse) driven by a 1.5-HP three-phase electric motor and associated ducts (Druckluftleitung), which entered the rear of the furnace and passed through its masonry above the two muffles. The supercharged air was ultimately fed through four openings placed in the apex of the muffle ceiling. The blower’s purpose was therefore not to stoke the fire in the gas generator, but to feed combustion air (oxygen) into the muffle, which was especially important in the cases of cremations using wooden coffins (which was not the case in Ausch­witz). Therefore, if the blower had remained in operation for too long, it would only have cooled the refractory masonry of the muffles.[8]

How many furnaces were there? At the Ausch­witz Trial (97th session), Müller stated that there were three furnaces with two muffles each, only one of which was fired up, although the terms he used to describe it were incorrect and confusing (Fritz Bauer…, p. 20477):

“Presiding Judge: So the furnaces were already on fire?

Witness Filip Müller: Yes, on fire, but only two.

Presiding Judge: Only two. And how many furnaces were there?

Witness Filip Müller: Six. […] Squares, these were three squares [= cuboids, blocks = furnaces]. In each square [furnace] there were two furnaces [muffles]. So six together.”

In 1979, he wrote (Müller 1979b, p. 14):

“Now all six ovens [muffles] were working.”

Müller then relates that the crematorium staff “had forgotten to switch off one set of fans,” which is inaccurate, because each furnace with two muffles had only one blower, and here’s what the claimed consequences were (ibid., p. 18):

“They had fanned the flames to such an extent that because of the intense heat the fire-bricks in the chimney had become loose and fallen into the duct connecting the oven to the chimney. This meant that the flames no longer had a way out; fiery red tongues were licking out of the oven and in no time the cremation room was enveloped in a dense fog of sickly choking smoke.”

This statement makes no sense either. As explained earlier, the purpose of the blower was not to stoke the fire in the gas generator, but to feed cold combustion air into the muffle. Had the blower been left on too long, the result would have been exactly the opposite of the witness claimed: the two muffles of the furnace would have cooled down to the point where the fire in the gas generator would have gotten weaker as well due to lack of draft, further decreasing the muffles’ temperature!

The “Operating Instructions for the Topf Coke-Fired Double-Muffle Cremation Furnace” (“Betriebsvorschrift des koksbeheizten Topf-Doppel­muffel-Ein­äscherungsofen”) prescribed for the heat-generating (second) phase of the burning of a corpse:[9]

“This increase in temperature can be prevented by blowing in air.”

This fire – continues Müller – was put out only in the evening; the crematorium had become unoperational.[10]

During the Ausch­witz Trial, Müller provided further, no-less-fanciful explanations (Fritz Bauer…, pp. 20578):

“Presiding Judge: Then you moreover told us that a fire had broken out in this Crematorium I in Ausch­witz because you did not operate these ovens or the fans properly. What was actually burning there?

Witness Filip Müller: It didn’t burn like that. The fans tore out the bricks. And the fire came out.

Presiding Judge: Out of where, out of the ovens?

Witness Filip Müller: Torn out of the oven, yes. And then, with water, we had to

Presiding Judge (interrupts): extinguish.

Witness Filip Müller: But not a fire on the roof or something.”

This is another huge nonsense: the blowers operated at a very low pressure. By way of comparison, the three forced-draft devices originally planned for Birkenau Crematoria II & III operated with a pressure of 30 mm water column, with a 15-HP motor.[11] About the blowers for the double-muffle furnaces we only know that they had a much-lower flow rate, since they were driven by small, 1.5-HP motors.[12] But even 30 millimeters of water column equals just 0.3% of atmospheric pressure. How could such a small overpressure tear to pieces the furnace’s masonry (or that of the smoke ducts, if we follow his book’s narration)?

In his imaginative story, Müller adds more nonsense: from the alleged openings produced by the dislodged bricks, flames came out and caused the fire. This is the naïve conception of an ignoramus who thought that a cremation furnace acts like a barrel: if a hole were punched into it, the wine would flow out – or in this case the fire. If such nonsense were true, flames would have come out every time a muffle door was opened, and a fire would have started!

In reality, the gases in the muffles (cremation chambers) of a cremation furnaces always have a lower pressure than the outside air pressure due to the chimney’s draft, which increased with an increased temperature difference. It follows that a possible opening in the refractory masonry not only would not have caused flames to escape, but quite to the contrary, it would have caused large quantities of cold, outside air to rush into the furnace, cooling it down.

The witness confirmed to Lanzmann that there were “ventilators, which were used to heat up the fire,” which, as I have already explained, is false, and he added:

“So, we let them [the blowers] run for a longer time and suddenly, the firebricks caved in. And with that, the pipes of the Ausch­witz crematorium to the chimney were blocked.” (Lanzmann 2010, pp. 8f.)

Müller stated that the fire had been extinguished with water, which is more blatant nonsense. Even the most-inept stoker would have known that throwing water into a glowing furnace would irreparably damage its refractory masonry, and even more-so, it cannot be believed that the head of the crematory would have given such an order. Furthermore, although Müller and Lulus were said to have been directly responsible for the alleged fire, Stark did not kill them, but instead four other, uninvolved inmates (Kraus-Kulka Statement) or only three (Müller 1979b, p. 18), namely: “Neumann, Goldschmidt and Filip Weiss “ (Fritz Bau­er…, p. 20579).

Regarding the crematorium chimney, Müller initially had scanty and confused knowledge:

“In the summer of 1943, the furnaces and chimneys at the Ausch­witz crematorium caught fire. Nazi engineers renovated them, but three months later the same thing happened again.” (Kraus-Kulka Statement)

In his book, however, he linked this event to the alleged fire (Müller 1979b, p. 40):

“Prisoner bricklayers replaced the round chimney which had been destroyed during the crematorium blaze by a tall new square chimney.”

Then he adds (ibid., p. 47):

“The continuous operation of the crematorium and, most of all, the overloading of the ovens – an aspect not taken into account during their construction –led to the crumbling of the fire-bricks of the inner lining, so that there was a danger of the chimney collapsing. Therefore, in the summer of 1942 a new square chimney with a double lining of fire-bricks was added. However, operations in the crematorium continued without interruption while this work was carried out.

A team of about thirty was building the new chimney, the majority of them Jewish prisoners.”

Here Müller either attributes two different causes to the same event, or he speaks of the chimneys having been rebuilt twice, or he refers to two different chimneys. The first hypothesis involves an evident contradiction, the second is historically wrong, and the third architecturally false, as that crematorium had only one chimney. I briefly summarize the actual events, which I described at length in another study,[13] but I state right up front that neither the crematorium, nor the furnaces, nor the crematorium chimney ever were on fire.

Between 14 and 15 May 1942 a repair was made to the “Kaminunterkanal,” the smoke duct that connected the three furnaces to the chimney, with the replacement of 50 refractory bricks.

On May 30, 1942, SS Oberscharführer Josef Pollok, in his capacity as the Ausch­witz Camp’s building inspector, informed the head of the Ausch­witz Central Construction Office, SS Hauptsturmführer Karl Bischoff, that the chimney framing (Kamineinband) had come undone, and that cracks had opened up in the masonry, which was partly due to overheating of the chimney. On June 1, Bischoff consequently prohibited the use of the chimney, thus effectively shutting down the crematorium, and at the same time reported to SS Brigade­führer Hans Kammler, head of Office Group C of the WVHA about this. The next day, Kammler issued an order for the chimney’s immediate reconstruction. The new chimney was built by 688 inmates (and not by “about thirty”) between June 12 and August 8. The old chimney was demolished after July 6.

Müller’s claim that the crematorium remained in operation during these construction works is afactual, because it was necessary to build two new smoke ducts: one 12.20 m long, which connected Furnaces 1 and 2 to the new chimney, the other 7.37 m long for Furnace 3. In July, deliveries of coke to the crematorium fell drastically. After a delivery of five tons on the 18th, the next delivery was made only on August 10th,[14] so the crematorium was certainly inactive for about twenty days, from July 20 to August 9.

Müller claimed that he worked at the crematorium until it closed, so he should have known these facts well. Instead, he told simple confabulations clearly based on second-hand information.

Later in his book, Müller returns once more to this chimney event, writing (Müller 1979b, p. 49):

“The building works department[15] of the SS had expected that, once the new square chimney was built, operations would run smoothly and without a hitch. However, it turned out quite soon that this new chimney could not cope with the work-load: while it was in use, lining bricks kept coming loose, blocking the flue. It was no longer possible to ‘dispatch’ the transports of Jews which continued to arrive as before without constantly recurring technical trouble. Therefore, in the autumn of 1942 operations had to be restricted.” (My emphasis)

In reality, however, the crematorium was immediately put back into operation at full capacity before fully curing the new chimney’s mortar, which was subsequently damaged by the rapid evaporation of the water still contained in it, causing new cracks to form, as Bischoff wrote to the camp commandant on August 13, 1942 with reference to his conversation with SS Hauptsturmführer Robert Mulka the day before.[16]

The relevant documentation does not contain the slightest reference to the cremation of corpses of gassing victims. Hence, the correlation claimed by Müller between the new damage to the chimney and the alleged gassings is purely imaginary. The scenario he presented is also in direct contradiction to that presented by French orthodox historian Jean-Claude Pressac (Pressac 1993, pp. 35):

“Since each gassing necessitated the complete isolation of the crematorium area, which disrupted the camp’s activity, and because gassings were unfeasible when work was in progress, it was decided at the end of April [1942] to transfer this type of activity to Birkenau.” (Emphases added)

In other words, the current orthodox narrative has it that no gassing took place anymore inside the Main Camp’s crematorium when Müller started working there.

2.4. Mass Graves at Birkenau (1942)

As a result of the alleged crematorium fire, Müller claims that the corpses not yet cremated were brought to Birkenau on trucks, but he provides contradictory data on both the number of corpses and the number of trucks used. In his first statement he claimed that “We loaded the remaining corpses onto three lorries” (Kraus-Kulka Statement), but one year later, he declared:

“On Aumeier ‘s initiative, two trucks were taken that same evening, at midnight, and the rest of the corpses, about 800, were loaded onto the trucks, and brought to the vicinity of Birkenau.” (Krakow Statement)

During his testimony at the Frankfurt Trial, Müller stated (Fritz Bauer…, p. 20480):

“It may have been 400 or 500 corpses, because (some) were burned in the crematorium before the fire.”

In his book, Müller writes merely (Müller 1979b, p. 20):

“Shortly before midnight we had finished loading the fourth and last truck.”

Finally, in his interview with Lanzmann he stated:

“And later in the evening, a few trucks came and we loaded the rest, maybe 300 corpses onto the trucks.” (Lanzmann 2010, p. 9)

Hence, there were either 800, 400-500 or 300 corpses to be hauled with either two, three or four trucks. If we follow Müller, this trip, in which he participated as well, was done only once. If we take the numbers he volunteered while testifying during the Krakow Trial, then we are to believe that two trucks carried 800 corpses, hence 400 each. Even if we assume with Robert Jan van Pelt that the bodies weighed 60 kg on average (van Pelt, pp. 470, 472), each truck would have carried a load of 24 tons, but the camp documentation shows that the trucks in the camp’s motor pool could carry a maximum load of 5 tons (see Mattogno 2015a, p. 55).

The second time Müller returned to the pit “on a fire engine” (Kraus-Kulka Statement), with a “fire engine” (Krakow Statement), with a “fire-brigade car” (Feuerwehrauto; Fritz Bauer…, p. 20483), which are all similar terms, but in his book, he claims to have been riding in an ambulance (Müller 1979b, p. 24), which is quite a different thing.

The story of the mass grave is completely unlikely and contrary to any organizational logic: in the middle of the night, the corpses would have been transported to Birkenau and thrown into a pit that had filled with water due to the high groundwater level, only to return the next day in order to pump the water out of the pit with a fire-brigade vehicle, to recover the corpses and pile them up “to make room for more,” and finally to cover them “with chlorine and earth” (Kraus-Kulka Statement). These operations would also have been useless, because “ground-water had seeped through into the pit” (Müller 1979b, p. 21), and after pumping it out, the pit would have filled up again, submerging the corpses again. Only a lunatic would have given such orders.

2.5. “Gassings,” the “Gas Chambers” and Zyklon B

On the first day Müller was taken to the supposed gas chamber of the Main Camp’s crematorium – on May 2 or 24, 1942 – he found “the first gassed Slovakian transport” (Krakow Statement). However, Danuta Czech ‘s Ausch­witz Chronicle dates this alleged event to July 4, 1942, and the transport is not said to have been gassed in the crematorium, but in the Birkenau bunkers! (Czech 1990, pp. 191f.)

In his testimony during the Ausch­witz Trial, Müller added 100 Soviet prisoners of war to the presumed gassing victims (Fritz Bauer…, p. 20470), but even for Czech this is pure fantasy. He specified that the deportees “died on their feet” (“im Stehen starben”; ibid., p. 20472[17]) and, incredibly, not even the defense lawyers contested such nonsense.

Having joined the “Fischl-Kommando” made up of seven inmates, Müller’s task consisted initially in undressing the corpses, who evidently had not undressed before being gassed and had even brought their luggage into the gas chamber (as Müller saw “suitcases” and “packages” among the corpses; ibid., p. 20470). The senselessness of this claim, which is in striking contradiction to the orthodox narrative, becomes palpable in the witness’s explanations. On “June [června] 17th, or 18th, 1942” – as Müller recounts in the Kraus-Kulka Statement – Himmler presumably inspected the crematorium during his visit to Ausch­witz (which took place on July 17 and 18), and saw the clothes and linen of the gassing victims in the gas chamber:

“At the sight of these blood-stained garments, he turned to our SS chiefs in great surprise and asked why they were in this state. Dissatisfied with the answer he was given, he flew into a rage and thundered: ‘We need the clothing of these accursed dogs for our German people! It’s a waste to gas people in their clothes!’

After this the gas chambers were converted into mock bathrooms with water-pipes and taps, and the people had to undress before they went to their death [were gassed].”

Hence, according to this legend,[18] the practice of stripping the victims before gassing them would have been introduced no earlier than July 17, 1942!

It follows that, after ten months of alleged homicidal gassings,[19] the SS at Ausch­witz had still not figured out that it was easier to have the victims undress themselves before gassing them rather than to remove the clothes from corpses. According to witness Walter Petzold, this “fatal mistake” (“verhängnisvollen Fehler”) was committed by the SS only on the occasion of the mythical first homicidal gassing in the basement of Block 11 of the Main Camp ten months earlier.[20] One might expect that they had learned their lesson by the time Müller started working in the Main Camp’s crematorium.

When writing his book in 1978/79, Müller probably no longer remembered the previous nonsense and asserted that “Today this new procedure was to be tried out for the first time” in the crematorium courtyard, where “today” refers to the arrival of a transport of Polish Jews from the Sosnowice Ghetto (Müller 1979b, pp. 31f.). Müller gives no date, but a few pages later he adds that, after a rest of three days (ibid., p. 35), another transport with several hundred Polish Jews arrived who were all destined for extermination (ibid., pp. 35f.), and he specifies (ibid., p. 39):

“Afterwards this technique was used as a reliable method for the mass extermination of human beings without bloodshed, and it began to assume monstrous proportions. From the end of May 1942 one transport after another vanished in this way into the crematorium of Ausch­witz.”

Hence, Müller not only contradicts the orthodox Ausch­witz narrative, but also himself.

According to Müller, the cremation activity resumed several days after the alleged fire (ibid., p. 30), therefore in the first ten days of May (or in early June, if we use Müller’s other timeline), with the arrival of the transport of Jews from the Sosnowice Ghetto mentioned earlier (ibid., p. 32); on that occasion, 600 people were allegedly gassed in the crematorium’s morgue that is said to have been repurposed as a homicidal gas chamber (ibid., p. 33).

According to the Ausch­witz Chronicle, the first Jewish transport from Sosnowice arrived in Ausch­witz on May 12, and it was allegedly gassed entirely in “Bunker 1” at Birkenau (Czech 1990, p. 166), not at all in the crematorium. However, there is no document in this regard. Czech’s source is in fact a simple, somewhat-vague statement in a 1946 book:

“On May 12 [1942], the day of the first evacuation, the process of the systematic operation of total extermination of the Jews of Sosnowice began, which ended in January 1944.” (Szternfinkiel, p. 34)

How Czech deduced from this meager “information” that a Jewish transport actually departed from the Sosnowice Ghetto on that day, that it contained 1,500 Jews, that it arrived in Ausch­witz on that same day, and that all its claimed deportees were gassed without exception, and in “Bunker 1” to boot, remains a complete and utter mystery.

At this point, Müller runs into another contradiction. During the Frankfurt Trial, he stated that the members of the Birkenau “Son­der­kom­man­do” called the then SS Oberscharführer Wilhelm Boger, one of the defendants on trial, “Malech Hamuwes” – angel of death – because he brought the transport announcement:

“The ‘Son­der­kom­man­do’ said about Boger: ‘Malech Hamuwes is coming.’ That means: ‘Death is coming.’ In the crematorium, Boger was called: ‘Ma­lech Hamuwes is coming.’ That means in Yiddish: ‘Death is coming.’ When Boger comes, you don’t say: ‘It is Boger,’ but you say: ‘Malech Hamu­wes is coming.’” (Fritz Bauer…, pp. 20514f.)

During the interview with Lanzmann, however, this nickname appears in a completely different context. When the transport from Sosnowice arrived, consisting of 250-300 people (down from 600 in his book, although Czech insists there were 1,500 deportees), Müller heard the words of the deportees, such as “‘fachowitz’, which means ‘a skilled tradesman’. And then I could make out, ‘Malekenowis’ [Malech Hamuwes], that’s Yiddish for ‘the angel of death’” (Lanzmann 2010, p. 19).

During the Frankfurt Trial, Müller further stated that he had witnessed gassings “many, many times” (Fritz Bauer…, p. 20498), but he only pointed to the three mentioned above. For the rest, he limited himself to generic statements:

“Gassings happened all the time. Back then – I’m talking about May, June 1942 – people were gassed either before roll call or in the evening after roll call […]” (ibid.)

“Gassings occurred either in the evening after roll call or early before roll call, so that (at) eight o’clock, after eight o’clock, only the clothes (were there). About three times in a week people were gassed like that.” (ibid., p. 20499f.)

“It goes on like this for six weeks, as I see Stark doing this job. He must [have sent] at least – at least, I say – 10,000, 11,000 people into the gas.” (ibid., p. 20504)

“At least 10,000, 11,000 were gassed, at least from what I have seen with my eyes from one, two meters away.” (ibid., p. 20505)

To these 10,000 to 11,000 gassing victims must be added those alleged shot:

“In 1942, during the six weeks I was there, Stark shot people there, too. Those were the small transports of Jews that were picked up at the bunkers, which I have already mentioned. 80, 100, 120, 60 once, yes.” (ibid., p. 20537)

“Moreover, two are standing there who have worked with him in the gas chamber, the SS members. Yes, the Rottenführer from the Political Department and the Unterscharführer. Because one did not (gas) in the Ausch­witz crematorium, if 80 or 100 people arrive; they were not gassed in this gas chamber. Only more, 500, 600, 700 or 300, like that. And back then, when more than 60, 70, 80 or 100 people arrived, the Unterscharführer shot with him together.” (ibid., p. 20538)

In his book, Müller wrote (Müller 1979b, p. 44):

“If a transport of less than 200 people arrived for liquidation then, as a rule, they were killed not by gassing but by a bullet through the base of the skull.”

Regarding the shootings, Müller asserted that Stark and Unterscharführer Klaus had killed together “at least 2,000” people, and that the tasks were divided as follows between the two (Fritz Bauer…, p. 20587):

“Klaus only shot when (transports with) 80 or 100 (people) came. But often transports arrived with only 50 or 60 people. Then Stark shoots.”

The total number of murdered victims allegedly seen by Müller within six weeks therefore amounts to 12,000-13,000. The alleged 10,000-11,000 gassing victims should correspond to about 20 transports of 500-600 people each, but as noted earlier, the witness only mentions the first three. Where did the others come from?

Czech ‘s Chronicle directly contradicts these statements, because for the months of May and June 1942, it records various transports destined for gassing, but they are claimed to have been sent to the Birkenau “bunkers” for extermination, and only one of these claimed transports had such a small number of deportees. I list the transports claimed by Czech in the following table:

To top it off, all of these transports are completely invented, as I have demonstrated elsewhere (Mattogno 2016d, pp. 35f.).

As mentioned, the Main Camp’s crematorium was supposedly equipped with a “gas chamber,” yet during his testimony at the Ausch­witz Trial, Müller was rather evasive and even enigmatic, merely stating:

“The gas chamber was not as big as I will then describe the gas chambers at Birkenau. No window in it, just above, below a fan and light.” (Fritz Bauer…, p. 20493)

Speaking of the alleged victims, the witness specified:

“No, they weren’t shot. They were gassed. But when I got there the first time, I didn’t know. Afterwards we saw that there was a hall below. There was a large fan below that was turned on. Down there, there were still such green crystals. And there were no people a meter (away) from them.” (Fritz Bauer…, p. 20471)

Where was this fan located? Below what? No one at the hearing asked the witness these obvious questions. In the book, he talked about it again, but without making the matter any clearer either (Müller 1979b, p. 13):

“I noticed that there were some small greenish-blue crystals lying on the concrete floor at the back of the room. They were scattered beneath an opening in the ceiling. A large fan was installed up there, its blades humming as they revolved.”

The side view of the “Inventory Plan of Building No. 47a, BW 11. Crematorium” mentioned earlier shows a large curved tube above the roof of the morgue, the alleged gas chamber. As I explained in detail in another study, it could only contain an air-intake fan, because for extracting the air from that morgue, a separate duct was planned connecting the room to one of the smoke ducts in the adjacent furnace room, which sucked out air from the morgue due to the low pressure created in the smoke duct by the chimney’s draft, possibly enhanced by the forced-draft system installed next to the chimney (Mattogno 2016c, pp. 83-87).

In order to function, an air-extraction fan as suggested by Müller would have required a way of letting fresh air into the room, either by way of a similar ventilation fan, or by opening of one of the two (or both) of the morgue’s doors,[21] with the latter way risking contamination of the entire building with hydrogen-cyanide fumes.

The witness had never previously expressed himself clearly on the alleged introduction openings of the Zyklon B piercing the reinforced concrete roof of the crematorium. It was only in 1979 that he indicated their number, asserting that they were “six camouflaged openings” fitted with covers (Müller 1979b, p. 38). But this is notoriously in contrast to the official number of openings allegedly restored in the room by the Ausch­witz Museum: four (Mattogno 2016c, Doc. 23, p. 133).

The description of Zyklon B as “green crystals,” which in the book became “green-blue crystals” (Müller 1979b, p. 38) and even “purple grains” (only in the German edition, 1979a, p. 183; excised from the English translation, 1979b, p. 115), and in the interview with Lanzmann “blue-purple crystals” (2010, p. 7), was a fable already en vogue immediately after the war that the witness undoubtedly drew from Rudolf Höss ‘s “confessions,” for whom Zyklon B was precisely “a crystal-like substance,” “a crystallized Prussic acid” (Mattogno 2020b, pp. 44, 66). As for the color of Zyklon B’s inert carrier material, Müller makes another mistake. At the time, as it appears from the “Guidelines for the Use of Prussic Acid (Zyklon) for Destruction of Vermin (Disinfestation)” issued by the Health Authority of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia in Prague (NI-9912), among other sources, this carrier material was made of either “a granular red-brown material (‘Diagriess’)” of diatomaceous earth, “or small blue cubes (‘Erco’)” of gypsum. Hence, what could have been mistaken for “crystals” with some imagination, were actually either grains of diatomaceous earth, although it had a red-brown color, or of gypsum granules which were indeed bluish (neither green, green-blue, nor blue-violet), but it would have been absurd to call them “crystals.”

Given its dangerous nature, this carrier material was removed immediately from the disinfestation gas chambers as soon as the residual gas test (Gasrestprobe) was negative and allowed access to the room for specially trained personnel equipped with gas masks (see Mattogno 2004b). This would have applied also to any homicidal gassings. Müller, on the other hand, apparently performed his gas test with his sense of smell and taste, because he wrote in his book (Müller 1979a, p. 185):

“Because the gas was neither odor- nor tasteless. It smelled of burning dry alcohol and produced a sweet taste on the lips.”

In the English edition, this was condensed to this brief partial sentence (Müller 1979b, p. 116):

“[…] because the gas smelled of burning metaldehyde and had a sickly-sweet taste.”

So, he had inhaled it and tasted it without wearing a gas mask! This fable had already been uttered by Dragon:[22]

“After opening, it was very hot in the room, and there was gas; it was suffocating, and it was sweet and pleasant in the mouth.”

It is therefore clear that Müller has never seen any Zyklon B in any “gas chamber,” despite his assurances to the contrary.

2.6. “Gassings” in the Crematorium: Müller versus Höss, Jankowski, Piper and Pressac

During the Polish trial staged against Rudolf Höss in Warsaw (March 11-29, 1947), the former Ausch­witz commandant made two important statements about the alleged gassings in the crematorium of the Main Camp – in fact, there was only one such gassing according to him (Mattogno 2020b, pp. 214, 165):

“Women were never gassed in Crematorium I. Exclusively those Russian prisoners were gassed there.” (10th Hearing, March 21, 1947)

“After the first gassing in Block No. 11 – this was the prison building – the gassings were transferred to the old crematorium, in the so-called morgue. The gassing was done this way: holes were made through the concrete ceiling, and the gas – it was a crystalline mass – was poured through these holes into the room. I only remember one transport. 900 prisoners of war were gassed in this way. From then on, the gassing was carried out outside the camp, in Bunker 1.” (11th Hearing, March 22, 1947)

Therefore, 900 Russian prisoners of war were gassed in the crematorium, after which the gassings were carried out in the “bunkers” of Birkenau. In other words, no Jewish transport was ever gassed in the morgue of the old crematorium. It should be emphasized that Czech ‘s Ausch­witz Chronicle, and consequently the historiography of the Ausch­witz Museum, is based precisely on these statements by the former camp commandant.

Müller first mentioned Jankowski in the deposition at the Frankfurt Ausch­witz Trial (97th hearing), where he mistakenly referred to him as “Samuel.” The circumstances of the encounter are as follows: after the transport of the corpses to the mass grave at Birkenau, the crematorium Kommando was taken back to a cell of Block 11. On that occasion, the door was opened and three other inmates were put into that cell, including Jankowski, but Müller said nothing about his activity at the crematorium. As will be seen, the reason for this is easily understood. He merely reported that he had been transferred to Birkenau with Jankowski (98th hearing). In his book, Müller mentions Jankowski only three times in insignificant contexts.[23]

For his part, Jankowski, in the deposition of April 16, 1945, did not mention Müller at all, and in his 1985 report, hence after Müller’s book had appeared, he mentioned a “Müller from Slovakia” only briefly as one of the six Jews who had worked at the crematorium.[24]

It ought to be kept in mind that Müller claimed that in the crematorium there was a real “gas chamber” complete with a fan and Zyklon-B-introduc­tion openings at least since May 1942. Furthermore, he declared with reference to this “death factory” (Müller 1979b, p. 51):

“Tens of thousands of Jews from Upper Silesia, Slovakia, France, Holland, Yugoslavia and the ghettos of Theresienstadt, Ciechanow and Grodno had been put to death and cremated there […]”

According to Danuta Czech, however, these transports were all gassed in the Birkenau “bunkers”! Contradicting himself, Müller also wrote (ibid., p. 49):

“From the start this small ‘death workshop’, into whose gas chamber more than 700 people could be crammed, served to relieve the two extermination centres at Birkenau. Known as Bunker 1 and 2 these were two whitewashed farmhouses with thatched roofs, all that remained of the village of Brzezinka.”

The transports listed in the table of Subchapter 2.5. (see p. 195) are all those that are said to have arrived at Ausch­witz in the months of May and June 1942. If we assume that the transport from Ilkenau contained 1,500 people, just like the previous one from Sosnowice, then this means that for Müller basically all, or almost all, the transports arriving at Ausch­witz would have been gassed in the crematorium: about 12,800 people. Hence, it would have been the “bunkers” (to be precise only “Bunker 1”) that would have served “to relieve” the Main Camp’s crematorium!

Finally, in the book, which should represent the final and most-authorita­tive version of his contradictory statements, Müller claimed that he remained in the crematorium until July 1943, so he must have known everything that had happened there.

In 1947, Jankowski testified the following instead:[25]

“I declare that at the time, it was the end of 1942, there were still no gas chambers in Oświęcim [Ausch­witz]. The only gassing of that period known to me took place in November or December 1942. At that time, 390 people were gassed, only Jews of various nationalities, employed in the Son­der­kom­man­do of Birkenau. This gassing was then carried out in the Leichenhalle [morgue]. I heard from people employed in the crematorium that even before this gassing some gassings had been carried out in this same Leichenhalle and in other rooms of the crematorium [i różnych ubikacjach krematorium].”

In 1985, the witness stated:²⁴

“At the crematorium, the corpses of inmates who died in the camp were cremated, the corpses of those killed in the gas chamber [komora gazowa] – I remember the gassing of about 400 members of the Birkenau Son­der­kom­man­do who had been deployed in the open-air cremation of the corpses, and of some other gassing victims.”

Hence, 38 years later, the morgue had turned into a real “gas chamber,” a function that it did not have specifically before, since gassings had also taken place “in other rooms of the crematorium,” but of these “other gassing victims,” Jankowski could not say anything specific, so in this witness’s “know­ledge,” the gassing of the approximately 400 inmates of the “Son­der­kom­man­do” remained the only “real” one.

Regarding this “Son­der­kom­man­do,” Müller specified in the deposition at the Frankfurt Trial (98th hearing) that it was made up of Slovak Jews who were preparing to escape, but were betrayed by an inmate and that “this ‘Son­der­kom­man­do’ was gassed at the end of 1942 or at the beginning of 1943.” The event took place in Ausch­witz, and he learned about it in Birkenau: “I heard it in Birkenau […]. I heard it at the Birkenau camp” (Fritz Bauer…, pp. 20762f.).

In contradiction to this, Müller wrote in his book that he actually witnessed the alleged gassing (Müller 1979b, p. 50):

“In mid-December 1942 all who belonged to this Son­der­kom­man­do were gassed and cremated. On removing their bodies from the gas chamber we found on some of them scraps of paper with notes scribbled on them to the effect that their plan to escape had been betrayed by certain barrack orderlies.”

These are not the only contradictions between the two “eyewitnesses.” Regarding the crematorium’s “gas chamber,” Müller stated that it had “six camouflaged openings,” while Jankowski stated:[26]

“This large hall had no windows, it only had two valves in the ceiling and electric lighting, as well as an entrance door from the corridor and another leading to the furnaces. This hall was called Leichenhalle (corpse hall). It served as a morgue and at the same time for ‘slaughters’, that is, inmates were shot there.”

In his affidavit of October 3, 1980, the witness stated (Pressac 1989, p. 124; see Chapter 9):

“It is at Ausch­witz that I saw for the first time a gassing in the Leichenhalle. This room had no windows, but there were ventilators in the ceiling. The two thick wooden doors of the room, one in the side wall, the other in the end wall, had been made gas tight. The room was lit by electricity.”

Finally in 1985, he asserted:[27]

“The gas chamber inside was painted white, on the ceiling, to the best of my memory, there were two gas-feeding holes [były dwa otwory do wsypywania gazu]; there were no fake showers; I don’t remember a fan.”

Jankowski ‘s statements are therefore contradictory and in direct conflict with those of Müller, also regarding the absence of fake showers, which for Müller were installed after Himmler ‘s visit to Ausch­witz.

Another contradiction concerns the operation and cremation capacity of the furnaces. For Müller, three corpses could be cremated simultaneously in a muffle within 20 minutes; according to Jankowski, a muffle could hold up to twelve corpses, but only five were placed in them simultaneously, because this way they burned better.²⁶ Jankowski did not say how long the cremation of such a batch took, which is even more-absurd than the one described by his colleague.

In 1985, Jankowski asserted:²⁴

“In the crematorium, there were three furnaces, which each had two hearths. Three corpses were generally placed into each opening. Only at the end of the work [shift], 10-12 corpses were placed inside, which burned in our absence. The introduction of such a number of corpses was not easy, so the Kapos took care of it themselves. The corpses were crammed in by placing a special poker under their armpits. The cremation of a load of five corpses lasted about half an hour.”

The claim that five corpses placed in a single muffle could burn within half an hour is technical nonsense, and that 10-12 corpses could even be introduced into a single muffle is utter delusional nonsense.[28]

From what Jankowski said about the furnaces, it is also certain that he had a rather faulty idea of how they operated:[29]

“The corpses lay on the grates, under which coke was burning [pod którymi palił się koks].”

Rather than a cremation furnace, for him it was a barbecue grill!

When the officials of the Ausch­witz Museum had two of the three original furnaces rebuilt in the Main Camp’s former crematorium after the war, they were undoubtedly inspired by this nonsense, since – as I will explain immediately – they forgot to reconstruct the two coke-burning gas generators in the rear part of each furnace, so that the hearth grates, which were originally located at the bottom of the gas-generator well, were installed beneath the muffle grates instead!

In 1985, Jankowski himself hinted at this, but in a somewhat confused way:[30]

“The currently reconstructed furnaces differ a little from the ones we had to operate, that is, the coke was poured into them from above through a special opening that was at floor level.”

In fact, the most-striking difference of this reconstruction compared to the original furnace is that the entire wall structure of the two gas generators is missing, a block attached to the rear part of the furnace measuring 2.5 (length) × 0.6 (width) × 1.4 (height) meters, with the upper surface being inclined. The double-leaf gas-generator loading-shaft door (Generatorfüllschachtverschlüsse) mentioned by Jankowski were arranged on this inclined surface. The gas-generator structure was accessed through a service shaft (Schacht) 0.95 meters deeper than the surrounding floor of the furnace room, so the two doors were located 0.45 meters above floor level,[31] hence not quite “at floor level.”

Regarding the cremation capacity of these furnaces, it is also worth mentioning the relevant statements by Henryk Tauber:[32]

“In Crematorium I, there were three furnaces with two muffles each, as I mentioned earlier. Each muffle could cremate five human corpses. Therefore, 30 human corpses could be cremated simultaneously in this crematorium. During the time I worked in the service squad of this crematorium, the cremation of such a load lasted an hour and a half.”

It follows that the three double-muffle furnaces of this crematorium had, at the same time, the phenomenal capacity of three corpses per muffle within 20 minutes, five within half an hour, and again five, but in an hour and a half!

In this context, it is worth underlining that Müller’s story is also in total conflict with Jean-Claude Pressac ‘s historical reconstruction. With reference to the Main Camp’s crematorium, he wrote in fact (1993, p. 34):

“The SS could only conduct gassings there from January 1942 until the date in May when the assembly of the third furnace was resumed, that is to say during four months. It is currently estimated that very few homicidal gassings took place in this crematorium, but that they were amplified because they were so impressive for the direct or indirect witnesses.”

As noted earlier, Pressac said the gassings were transferred to Birkenau “at the end of April” of 1942, so they had ceased even before Müller was assigned to the crematorium!

The Frankfurt Court did not take Müller’s deposition at the Main Camp’s crematorium too seriously, on which it ruled:

“The account of the witness Müller about the gassing of Slovak Jews is not very clear. As far as the court knows, gassing no longer occurred in the small crematorium, but in the farmhouses that had been adapted for this purpose.” (Langbein, p. 884)

A diplomatic way of saying that the witness was a perjurious liar.

3. Müller’s “Experience” at the Birkenau “Son­der­kom­man­do”

3.1. Transfer to Birkenau, and Assignment to the “Son­der­kom­man­do”

In the two declarations of 1946 and 1947, as noted earlier, Müller limited the description of his experiences almost exclusively to the Main Camp’s crematorium. At that time, he knew only trivial anecdotes bandied about by the resistance about Birkenau. Only many years later did he elaborate on his “experience” at Birkenau, which became predominant since the Frankfurt Trial.

In 1946, he stated:

“Finally, when we had sprinkled the corpses with chlorine and earth, they took us back to the camp where we were again put in the dark cell which we had occupied up to August, 1943. We worked at the crematorium from morn till night” (Kraus-Kulka Statement),

which is to say that he remained in Ausch­witz until his actual transfer to Birkenau.

During the Frankfurt Trial, the witness gave a completely different version:

“Witness Filip Müller: There are inmates standing at the gates, a labor service, and they say: ‘Take the inmates to the camp!’ Yes, that was already at the end of my stay there. And he takes us to the camp. The labor service comes to me and says to me: ‘You, if you bring me a lot of dollars ‘– a lot, yes, he doesn’t say how many – ‘[I’ll get you out] of there.’ And I did it.

Presiding Judge: What did you bring him?

Witness Filip Müller: I brought him a large, such a package of American dollars, to the inmate.

Presiding Judge: Yes.

Witness Filip Müller: That was in the morning. When we got back, I give it to him, and he says to me, ‘Stay here.’ And where the kitchen was, there was a block on the other side, and he says to me, ‘Here, stay in the washroom.’ I stay there, he comes and he puts me up in Block 14. And I worked in Block 14. Later, I was transported to Buna, Monowitz.” (97th hearing, Oct. 5, 1964, Fritz Bauer…, pp. 20507f.)

These events sound blatantly unlikely and false. It must be remembered that Müller was assigned to the “Fischl-Kommando” of the crematorium, which had seven inmates and which later became the “crematorium working party” under the command of Kapo Mietek Morawa (Müller 1979b, pp. 39f.), which was controlled by Stark. How can one seriously believe that Müller could leave this Kommando so easily, especially since in the meantime he had become a “carrier of secrets”?[33]

Moreover, since the people allegedly gassed evidently were Jews from Polish ghettos, how can one seriously believe that their pockets were full of US dollars? While it is true that US dollars were a coveted currency in Eastern-Bloc countries during the Cold War – that’s where Müller lived when he testified in Frankfurt – US dollars were pretty much useless in Europe prior to and during the war.

After his transfer to Monowitz, which took place at the end of June 1942, Müller remained “in Monowitz until the spring of 1943” (Fritz Bauer…, pp. 20508f.”), that is, for at least 9-10 months; he recounted the subsequent events thus:

“And I get a big phlegmon. I couldn’t work [anymore], in the infirmary I was afraid [of] what was there. And once an Unterscharführer sees us. There were three more of us. One had, I think it was typhus. He had a fever. And we don’t work. So we are hiding. He sees us, [takes] us out, and the next evening we came to Birkenau together with 30 other inmates.” (Ibid., pp. 20509f.)

Although, as he pointed out, he was sent “from Buna to Birkenau as a ‘Muselmann’” (Fritz Bauer…, p. 20510), instead of being gassed for being a “Muselmann” (a term used for an emaciated inmate with no hope of recovery), he was hospitalized at the infirmary, was treated, then went through a convalescent block (Schonungsblock; ibid., p. 20511) and ended up in a Kom­mando of potato peelers (Kartoffelschälkommando), where he remained for approximately 3 months.

At the 97th and 98th hearings of the Frankfurt Trial, Müller stated that he was transferred to Birkenau in the early summer (Sommerbeginn) of 1943, joined the “Son­der­kom­man­do,” and was housed in Block 13 (ibid., pp. 20759-61). At first, he was assigned to Crematorium. I [= II], where he spent “about five or six weeks” , then was transferred to Crematorium IV [= V], which also happened in the summer of 1943 (ibid., pp. 20523f.). The Main Camp’s Crematorium Kommando (Fischl-Kommando) followed him “14 days or a month” later (ibid., p. 20760).

In his statement to Kraus-Kulka, Müller stated that the transfer was due to the fact that he had refused the appointment to Kapo (=foreman). This position had been offered to him because his “prison [=inmate registration] number was lower than those of all the others working” at the crematorium, therefore he had been an inmate for the longest time. Keep in mind, however, that Müller’s registration number was 29236, while that of his friend Jankowski was 27675, hence Jankowski had arrived at Ausch­witz earlier than Müller.

In his book, Müller took up the first version: he returned to Birkenau 15 months after he had first stayed there for a few days; the “Son­der­kom­man­do” of the Ausch­witz crematorium was transferred to Block 13 of Birkenau Sector BIId (Müller 1979b, p. 52), after about 14 months of isolation in Block 11 of the Main Camp (ibid., p. 53). In reality, at Birkenau he was sent directly to the “crematorium team” (ibid., p. 57). The 15 months mentioned above refer to July 1943, the month explicitly indicated by the witness as that of the closure of the old crematorium at the Main Camp, to be precise “mid-July 1943” (ibid., p. 51). This date (like many other data that I will point out in turn) is taken from Jankowski ‘s statement:[34]

“I, along with the entire commando of stokers, six Jews and two Poles in number, was transferred to Birkenau in July 1943 and assigned to Crematorium V.”

Müller therefore went to Birkenau with the entire Kommando of the crematorium, but in Frankfurt he had stated that this Kommando had arrived there “14 days or a month” later.

In further contradiction to this, he wrote that “a few days later” – after his arrival at Crematorium II – he was transferred together with the Kommando Lemke, of which he was a part, to Crematorium III (Müller 1979b, p. 65). This therefore evidently happened around mid-July 1943. A few pages later we find him a stoker in Crematorium V, without him saying when he was sent there. Here is the relevant passage (ibid., p. 68):

“For some weeks now I had been a stoker in crematorium 5. During this particular night we cremated corpses from a transport from France [German edition: “from Malines in France”; 1979a, p. 108].”

In the summer of 1943, only three transports were directed to Ausch­witz from the Malines Camp, which was located in Belgium, not in France. Transport No. XXI arrived there on August 2, while Nos. XXIIa and XXIIb both arrived there on September 22. From the first, 1,087 deportees were allegedly gassed, from the other two, 875 deportees.[35]

The next morning, Müller says, another 2,000 Jews arrived in the courtyard of Crematorium V (Müller 1979b, p. 69). This figure of 2,000 deportees is compatible only with the date of August 3, the day when several transports from the Będzin and Sosnowice ghettos are said to have arrived at Ausch­witz (according to Czech, four transports with altogether 9,000 deportees as well as a smaller one with 200 deportees from Berlin arrived on August 3; Czech 1990, p. 454).

But if Müller had started working at Crematorium II in mid-July, and a few days later had been sent to Crematorium III, only to have been working at Crematorium V already for a few weeks in early August, how could he then have seen, “toward the end of the summer of 1943” (hence probably September 1943) the establishment of a “workshop for melting gold” at Crematorium III, as he claims (Müller 1979b, p. 68)?

From Crematorium V, Müller was inexplicably sent back to Crematorium II:

“One evening at the end of October 1943, I moved out to Crematorium II with a squad of about 100 prisoners on the night shift.” (Müller 1979a, p. 129)

The English translation of Müller’s book omits to mention any crematorium, thus sanitizing Müller’s tale of this inconsistency:

“One evening towards the end of October I went on night duty as one of a team of 100 prisoners.” (1979b, p. 81)

The first documented data on the strength of the crematorium staff (Krematoriumspersonal) dates to January 15, 1944 and mentions 383 inmates for the four crematoria of Birkenau. It is therefore extremely unlikely that three months earlier Crematorium II alone had a night shift of 100 inmates, all the more-so since not even from an orthodox point of view there was any need for night-time activities due to a lack of gassings during these months.[36]

But Müller’s transmigratory vicissitudes do not end there. During the alleged gassing of the inmates of the Theresienstadt Family Camp on March 8, 1944, which involved 3,700 people and began in Crematorium II according to Müller (1979b, pp. 106f.), he was on the spot by a lucky coincidence and managed to witness it all (ibid., p. 107):

“Together with about thirty prisoners I was in the underground passage which linked the changing room to the gas chamber.”

Then when the second part of the victims was taken to Crematorium III, Müller saw the car of the “disinfecting operators” enter the courtyard of Crematorium III, meaning that the next batch of victims would be disposed of there (ibid., p. 116).

According to the orthodox version later sanctioned by Danuta Czech, the inmates of the Family Camp were indeed gassed in Crematoria II and III (Czech 1990, p. 595).

Müller’s transmigrations are therefore clearly a mere literary device invented by him in order to be credited as an “eyewitness” of all the most-important events in the fables of Ausch­witz. And in fact, at the beginning of May 1944 he was back at Crematorium V to participate in the excavation of the alleged cremation pits! (Müller 1979b, pp. 126f., 129-132)

3.2. The Selections of the “Son­der­kom­man­do”

If we credit the orthodox post-war narrative, the inmates of the “Son­der­kom­man­do” were dangerous “carriers of secrets” (Geheimnisträger) who had to be eliminated periodically, generally every three or four months.[37] By the early 1960s, this alleged procedure was considered an established fact. For this reason, this controversial dialogue took place at the Frankfurt trial (Fritz Bauer…, pp. 20572f.):

“Presiding Judge: Yes, it was always said that the members of the ‘Son­der­kom­man­do’ who had been there for three or four months, who knew so much and who had seen so much, were then always killed, so that they would stay there any longer.

Witness Filip Müller: No.

Presiding Judge: So we’ve been told so far.

Witness Filip Müller: [+[38] There] were selections, but you couldn’t say every two or three months.”

Considering the fact that Müller remained a member of the “Son­der­kom­man­do” until January 1945 according to his own narrative, he is evidently unable to explain his beyond-miraculous survival of at least seven selections – assuming that they occurred every four months until November 1944, when all homicidal-gassing activities are said to have been stopped (Müller 1979b, p. 161). Hence, he was forced to disavow the dogma of the periodic extermination of the “Son­der­kom­man­do,” thus leaving the judges baffled.

But the problem came back in another form. Müller wrote that, at the end of Birkenau’s alleged extermination activity, “all traces of the summer’s mass exterminations” were to be erased and that the number of the “Son­der­kom­man­do” inmates were reduced to 200 (ibid., p. 160). Of these, 100 were saved, which were divided as follows: 70 were part of the demolition team, the remaining 30, including Müller, worked until January 1945 in Crematorium V (ibid., p. 161). Therefore, the SS of Ausch­witz set out to cover up the traces of the alleged exterminations, but left 100 “eyewitnesses” of them alive! Müller could not ignore this irremediable contradiction, which all self-proclaimed witness veterans of the “Son­der­kom­man­do” run into. Not knowing how to handle it, however, he appealed to the SS’s mysterious ways of doing things (1979a, p. 271):

“Again and again I asked myself how it came about that we, the remaining carriers of secrets of the Son­der­kom­man­do, had not been shot before the evacuation. I couldn’t find a reasonable answer to this question.”

The English translations condensed this down considerably (1979b, p. 166):

“Again and again I asked myself why we, the last few remaining Son­der­kom­man­do prisoners, had not been shot before the evacuation.”

On the other hand, 5 “carriers of secrets” of the “Son­der­kom­man­do,” Müller’s colleagues – Waclaw Lipka, Mieczyslaw Morawa, Joseph Ilczuk, Wladyslaw Biskup and Jan Agrestowski – were transferred from Birkenau to Mauthausen on January 5, 1945, allegedly in order to be killed there,[39] which is an unfounded and utterly absurd claim, because it implies that these inmates were transferred from a death camp to a mere concentration camp a long distance away in order to be killed there!

But there is an even-more-striking contradiction that demands a reasonable explanation. In 1946, Müller had stated:

“I am the oldest member of the Ausch­witz and Birkenau Son­der­kom­man­do and the only one [jediný] to have been through everything [který všechno přežil: who survived everything]. I only escaped death as a result of a number of lucky chances; it was indeed a miracle.” (Kraus-Kulka Statement)

This claim of the immediate postwar period was typical and indicative both for these witnesses’ arrogance and vanity. For instance, Miklós Nyiszli claimed to have been the only surviving “Son­der­kom­man­do” physician, and so did Dr. Charles Sigismund Bendel (Mattogno 2020a, p. 332). Then there is the only survivor of the “Son­der­kom­man­do” allegedly gassed on December 5, 1942 – Arnošt Rosin – and at the same time the other only survivor of this gassing, a certain Spanik (Mattogno 2021, pp. 333).

Hence, without giving any explanation, Müller transmogrified from the only survivor to one among one hundred only survivors!

In his book, Müller wrote that he had survived “one Son­der­kom­man­do selection after another” (Müller 1979b, p. 166) but previously stated that he had only experienced three selections (Fritz Bauer…, p. 20572):

“In the years 1943 to 45, there were selections in Birkenau. But I say there weren’t any in the main crematorium, in the main camp.”

“In 1942, when I was working in the Ausch­witz crematorium, there was absolutely no selection. […] In 1943 there was one selection.” (Ibid., p. 20573)

“In 1944 there were practically two selections.” (Ibid., p. 20657)

Regarding the first selection, Müller stated (ibid. pp. 20573f.):

“In 1943 there was one selection. That was at the end of the summer of 1943, when the selection was made, in the courtyard of Block 13. We were 30 prisoners as stokers. We worked in Crematorium IV. [= V…]

Then we came back and there was already a selection. Schwarzhuber was there. And the strong ones were taken; they were told: ‘You are going to Lublin.’ And those who were not strong were left there, so that … But afterwards, when the ‘Son­der­kom­man­do’ comes from Lublin, we see that they have boty, holínky.

Interpreter Stegmann: Shoes, boots.

Presiding Judge: From your people who went into the gas there.

Witness Filip Müller: We ask them; they say they were gassed there. That was one [the first]. The second time was again a selection.”

The Ausch­witz Museum’s story line has nothing about a selection among “Son­der­kom­man­do” members at the end of summer 1943. Müller, who here relied heavily on rumors, had the misfortune of speaking about it before Danuta Czech cast the narrative of this event into its final shape, which she did only in 1989, when she dated that event to February 24, 1944 (Czech 1989, p. 728/1990, p. 588). The previous German edition of her Kalendarium, which appeared in 1964, did not mention it at all (Czech 1964a, p. 80).

Picking up this legend, Franciszek Piper subsequently developed it as follows, also thanks to Müller’s imaginative tale: on February 24, 1944, all the members of the “Son­der­kom­man­do” were gathered in the courtyard of Block 13; the Lagerführer called out the registration numbers of a group of inmates, who were then transferred to the Majdanek Camp (Piper 2000, p. 185):

“They were killed shortly afterwards. […] Those who remained behind in Ausch­witz learned about the fate of their colleagues in April. Nineteen Soviet POWs arrived in Ausch­witz then; they had worked at the Majdanek crematorium and had witnessed the executions of the former Ausch­witz Son­der­kom­man­do members.”

From this it follows that these Ausch­witz inmates were killed in the Majdanek crematorium, but according to the Majdanek museum’s current narrative, there was no gas chamber in that building (Kranz, pp. 219-227; for Müller they were gassed). The only claimed gas chambers are said to have been located at the opposite end of the camp, in Building XII^A, but the orthodox narrative has it that they ceased their homicidal activity in early September 1943, and on September 21, the 23 detainees who had worked there were allegedly shot (ibid., p. 226). Piper ‘s claims are therefore as unsustainable as Müller’s.

Jankowski also told the story of the 200 inmates of the “Son­der­kom­man­do” who had been transferred to Majdanek, and also elaborated on a transport from this camp to Ausch­witz, to which Piper alluded:[40]

“At the beginning of 1944, a transport arrived at the Birkenau Camp from Majdanek containing 300 Polish Jewesses, 19 Soviet prisoners and a German inmate who had been Kapo in Majdanek. The men were placed in Block No. 13, in the Son­der­kom­man­do, being assigned to work in the crematorium. The 300 women, on the other hand, were kept for 3 days in the Sauna, that is, in the bathhouse, then they were taken to the crematorium, where during the night they were shot and cremated. I know of the shooting and cremation directly from my comrades from the Son­der­kom­man­do, who were on duty that night and were eyewitnesses to the execution, and then took part in the cremation of the corpses. The entire transport of Jews executed at the camp was obviously not recorded anywhere.”

His two colleagues, Dragon and Tauber, didn’t have much better information than he did either. Dragon declared:[41]

“Mostly Slovaks worked in the Son­der­kom­man­do that worked at the two bunkers before my assignment to the new Son­der­kom­man­do established in December 1942. As I stated earlier, the Son­der­kom­man­do to which I was assigned consisted of 200 inmates. Within a short period of time, it was increased to 400. Later, 200 inmates of this Son­der­kom­man­do were transferred to Lublin, from where 20 Russians arrived at the Son­der­kom­man­do. From these Russians, we learned that these 200 inmates transferred to Lublin had been shot there. In 1943, 200 Greeks were assigned to our Son­der­kom­man­do, and in 1944 500 Greeks.”

He didn’t make any specific statements about the dating of this claimed event. Tauber roughly dated the event, but asserted that 300, not 200, inmates were transferred:[42]

“At the beginning, when I was assigned to work in the Son­der­kom­man­do, it had about 400 inmates and maintained this force until January or February 1944. In one of these months a transport of about 300 inmates was sent to Lublin. […] After this transport was sent to Lublin, about 100 remained. From Lublin, 20 Russians and the German Kapo Karol were sent and assigned to our group.”

Also in this case it is worth highlighting the irreducible stupidity that witnesses (and orthodox Holocaust historians) are forced to attribute to the SS to support their legends: the 200 inmates in question were sent to die in the Majdanek crematorium so that their comrades of the Ausch­witz “Son­der­kom­man­do” would not know anything about it, and at the same time they transferred 19 or 20 Soviet PoWs to this “Son­der­kom­man­do” who “had worked at the Maj­danek crematorium and had witnessed the executions of the former Ausch­witz Son­der­kom­man­do members,” evidently informed as to all details of the alleged execution!

Danuta Czech states that the transport from Majdanek arrived at Ausch­witz on April 16, 1944, and contained 299 Jews with 2 infants and also 19 Russian PoWs who were assigned to the “Son­der­kom­man­do” (Czech 1990, p. 612).

Returning to Müller, being unable to plagiarize a story at least already sketched out, he was forced to improvise, and he did it badly. The related choppy, almost unintelligible dialogue during the Frankfurt Ausch­witz Trial shows that he did not know what to say and was inventing things on the fly; he got himself into trouble, claiming that there had been a selection among the “Son­der­kom­man­do” of Crematorium IV (= V), but it did not involve the 30 stokers who were part of the “Son­der­kom­man­do”. Hence the questions of the President Judge (Fritz Bauer…, pp. 20574-20576):

“Presiding Judge: Who were the prisoners in ‘Son­der­kom­man­do’ 13 who were not on duty in the crematorium? What kind of work did they have or what kind of task did they have?

Witness Filip Müller: They were room attendants who were not in the crematorium.

Presiding Judge: And yet [they] were in the ‘Son­der­kom­man­do’?

Witness Filip Müller: Yes.

Presiding Judge: Who therefore were always selected there, as you just said?

Witness Filip Müller: Yes.

Presiding Judge: They were all room attendants?

Witness Filip Müller: No, those were only inmates who worked in the ‘Son­der­kom­man­do’.

Presiding Judge: And what were they doing in the ‘Son­der­kom­man­do’?

Witness Filip Müller: Working.

Presiding Judge: Exactly the same thing you were doing?

Witness Filip Müller: They weren’t stokers, but something else.

Presiding Judge: But what were they?

Witness Filip Müller: They have the clothes …

Presiding Judge: You said earlier that there was not a division [of labor]; that one person did this, the other that, but everyone who was in the ‘Son­der­kom­man­do’ was also used for everything.

Witness Filip Müller: Yes, yes, yes. That’s the way it is.

Presiding Judge: And how come these people who were selected before you were already in your Block 13?

Witness Filip Müller: Well. We were there as stokers. But Gorges came many times and said: ‘The clothes you have to’…

Presiding Judge [interrupts]: Take away.

Witness Filip Müller: That happened, too, yes. It wasn’t always so. It was not divided [so] that [it was said]: ‘This one has [to do] this’ or ‘That one there has [to do] that’. But we always came into the camp after the roll call.”

With these awkward and confused statements, the witness tried painfully to get out of the embarrassing situation he found himself in: the “selection” had taken place (and thus saved face), but it had not concerned the actual members of the “Son­der­kom­man­do,” but rather elements somehow associated with it (and so he explained why Holocaust historiography knew nothing of that “selection”).

In his book, this “selection” disappears, or rather, it is transformed into that of February 24, 1944 mentioned earlier. In the related description that follows, Müller was inspired by the stories of Chaim Herman and Salmen Lewental which had appeared in a German edition in 1972:[43]

“In February 1944 there was a selection among members of the Son­der­kom­man­do. One evening during roll-call Lagerführer Schwarzhuber, Rapportführer Polotschek and another few SS men appeared in the yard of Block 13. From among the prisoners they selected about 200, telling them that they would be transferred to Lublin where strong men were needed for a special job. Most of them belonged to the group which, with Hössler in charge, had taken part in removing all traces of the mass graves near bunkers 1 and 2. Since work there had come to an end, they were now expendable.” (Müller 1979b, p. 90)

However, the motivation for the alleged selection is senseless from an orthodox point of view, given that, as Piper informs us,

“when the new gas chambers and crematoria entered operation in the spring of 1943, use of the two ‘bunkers’ ceased. Bunker 1 and the adjacent barracks were demolished and the burning pits filled in and levelled. The same was done with Bunker 2, except that the ‘bunker’ itself was not demolished.” (2000, p. 143)

Therefore, the elimination of these mass graves had taken place in early 1943, which means that the inmates who had worked there would have been “useless” ever since; but then why did the SS wait until February 1944 to carry out the “selection”?

It is clear that Müller had no knowledge of these alleged events and invented everything badly.

Shifting the claimed selection from 1943 to 1944 meant that, for this year, he found himself with three selections, while at the Ausch­witz trial he had spoken of only two for 1944.

The second selection of 1944 took place, according to the witness, “a few weeks before the revolt” of October 7, in the course of which “several hundreds” of prisoners were killed (Fritz Bauer…, pp. 20647, 20706).

In his book, he sets it “towards the end of September 1944” in Crematorium IV (Müller 1979b, p. 152).

Piper claims that the alleged selection was “at the end of September,” but his only source is Müller’s book! (Piper 2000, Note 563, p. 186) A wise decision, because Dragon and Tauber had made conflicting statements about it. For Dragon, the presumed selection took place after the revolt of October 7, 1944, for Tauber (who traced the revolt to September), before the revolt. Dragon:[44]

“In October 1944, 500 inmates were shot, in particular 400 in the courtyard of Crematorium No. IV and 100 in the camp sector near Crematorium No. II. This same month, Moll selected about 200 inmates from the Son­der­kom­man­do, who were taken to Ausch­witz and, as we were later informed by the inmates employed at Kanada, were gassed in the chamber that was used to fumigate the items in the Kanada warehouse.”

Tauber:[45]

“We set the date of the revolt to June 1944. I don’t remember the exact date. The revolt, however, did not happen, although everything was ready for its outbreak, and even people from whom we had hidden the preparation of the revolt participated in the secret action. This affair did us a lot of damage, and after it was discovered, it resulted in many victims. First our Kapo Kamiński was shot shortly after the deadline set for the revolt. Since then we were transferred to Crematorium IV to make any contact with the world impossible. About 200 inmates were selected and sent into the gas. They were gassed in the delousing [facility] of the ‘Kanada’ [camp warehouse section] in Ausch­witz, and cremated in Crematorium II. This cremation was carried out by the SS themselves who were assigned to the crematorium. The situation became more and more serious for us, and although we were monitored and examined with doubled vigilance, we decided to flee from the camp at any cost. After the preparations, there was a revolt in Crematorium IV in September 1944; it also involved Crematorium II.”

As Piper points out correctly, the series of labor-deployment reports of the Birkenau men’s camp records a decrease in strength of the “stokers Crematorium (I-IV)” from 874 inmates on September 7, 1944 to 662 of October 3,[46] but the reports in between have not been preserved, and it is not known when or why this decrease occurred. It is clear that neither Müller nor Piper can back up their claims with anything.

Müller’s third selection allegedly took place on an unspecified date, but in any case after the revolt of October 7. Müller spoke of it like this:

“In the year 1944, that was already towards autumn, back then the commando leader was already Scharführer Buch. At that time, Moll was already gone. It so happened that Buch made a selection. He selected and said: ‘There are 300 inmates here in Crematorium III, IV. Of these 300 inmates, 270 will go to a very good job. And they’ll have a great time, bread, drinks, everything.’” (Fritz Bauer…, pp. 20557f.)

In practice, according to his deposition at the Frankfurt Trial, only the 30 inmates housed in Crematorium V were saved, the other 270 were shot.

In further contradiction to himself, Müller reported in his book that, after the revolt of October 7, the “Son­der­kom­man­do” was reduced to 200 prisoners rather than 300 (Müller 1979b, p. 160). About 450 prisoners were killed in the “Son­der­kom­man­do” revolt (ibid.), which he cribbed from the first German edition of the Kalendarium of Ausch­witz, where Czech mentions precisely the decrease in force from 663 to 212 inmates (Czech 1964a, pp. 73, 75), so that the number of those allegedly killed was 451. The survivors were finally 100 inmates, the aforementioned 30 plus another 70, who were assigned to the demolition team (Müller 1979b, p. 161).

The origin of these two figures is revealing. Müller drew the first from Nyiszli, although Nyiszli had explicitly stated that the 30 inmates he mentioned were not part of the “Son­der­kom­man­do”; the second number Müller took from Kraus and Schön/Kulka, for whom 70 was the total number of surviving inmates of the “Son­der­kom­man­do”! (See Subchapter 3.4.)

According to the documents, the official name of the so-called “Son­der­kom­man­do” was the following, with the number of inmates assigned to it in subsequent columns (which remained practically unchanged from July to the beginning of September 1944; see Mattogno 2016a, pp. 83-92):

April-May 1944:

Since July 1944:

During meetings and for other bureaucratic needs, the respective units were called by these names, but Müller clearly knew nothing of them.

3.3. Müller’s Miraculous Survival

In Müller’s account of the “Son­der­kom­man­do” revolt of October 7, 1944, the only thing that stands out is how he survived the repercussions. Crematorium IV was set on fire, but he entered it anyway and took refuge in the building’s furnace room (Verbrennungsraum), which was ablaze:

“I was by now completely out of breath. The crematorium was still burning fiercely. The wooden doors were ablaze, several of the wooden beams were charred and dangling from the ceiling, and there was a fire raging in the coke store.” (1979b, p. 156)

And outside, a gun battle was raging.

“In a flash I remembered a place where I would be safe from bullets: inside the flue leading from the ovens to the chimney. I lifted one of the cast-iron covers, climbed down and closed the cover behind me. Inside the flue there was no room to stand upright; I stretched out trying to catch my breath. From outside I could still hear the rattle of machine-guns. When after a while the shooting seemed to die down I crawled towards the chimney because I was able to stand up there.” (Ibid.)

During the 97th hearing of the Frankfurt Trial, the witness stated (Fritz Bauer…, pp. 20564f.):

“There was a flap made of […] metal, a metal lid […] a duct. […] which connected the chimney with the furnace. […] A duct. And then get into the duct and stay there. I can already see the chimney up in front of me, and black water flows and – […] Hot water, boiling water flowed down. […] The fire brigade was already there. And all this pours on me, I’m already all [wet] from the water, and that’s where I stay. After a three-quarter hour or an hour I can already hear revolvers shooting. I heard how they were shooting outside because there was the chimney.”

In both stories Müller mentions only one “duct” and only one chimney, although he himself wrote earlier in the description of Crematorium V (which is mirror-symmetrical to Crematorium IV; Müller 1979b, p. 95):

“The raging flames rushed into the open air through two underground conduits which connected the ovens with the massive chimneys.”

But the fundamental problem is another: were the smoke ducts of the furnaces of Crematorium IV and V equipped with inspection shafts in the first place? To understand the significance of the documents and photographs I adduce, it is necessary to first know how this system was structured. I summarize the detailed description that I presented in my specific study on the crematory furnaces of Ausch­witz (Mattogno/Deana, Vol. I, pp. 283f.).

The Topf coke-fired 8-muffle furnace was made up of eight single-muffle furnaces as per Topf Drawing D58173 arranged in two groups of four furnaces; each group consisted of two pairs of furnaces opposing each other in such a way that they shared their rear walls and the central walls of the muffles in a manner already used in the Płaszów crematorium. The two furnace groups were connected to four gasifiers coupled in the same way and thus formed a single 8-muffle furnace, also called “Großraum-Einäscherungsofen,” literally “large-scale incineration furnace.”

The two ducts ran horizontally in opposite directions below the floor of the furnace hall and ended in a chimney that had a square cross-section of 0.8 m × 0.8 m and a height of 16.87 m. The chimneys had no draft enhancers.

That said, let’s look at the question of the presence of inspection manholes.

Document 1 in the Appendix shows my diagram of the 8-muffle furnace: the two smoke ducts are indicated by No. 7. In the plan of Crematorium IV/V No. 1678(r) of August 14, 1942, the smoke ducts are indicated with dashed lines. Document 2 shows the foundations of the two 4-muffle furnaces. The numbers I have placed on it indicate, as in the above scheme:

• 5: vertical smoke duct
• 6: masonry containing the smoke ducts
• 7: horizontal smoke duct
• Achtmuffel-Einäscherungsofen: 8-muffle cremation furnace
• Schornstein: Chimney.
• M1-M8: the eight muffles (the squares represent the muffle openings).

Each of the two smoke ducts, which had to be at least as wide as the chimneys (0.8 m), was about 1.5 meters long from the external wall of the furnace to the chimney. This was the space available on the floor of the furnace room where an inspection manhole might be placed. The smoke ducts obviously crossed the external wall of the chimney, so that, up to the chimney flue, they were about 1.8 meters long. Any inspection manhole placed between the furnace and the chimney, which should have measured 0.45 m × 0.50 m,[47] would have been no more than one meter away from the chimney flue.

The detailed cost estimates and parts list of the Topf 8-muffle furnace (dated November 16, 1942 and September 8, 1942, respectively) contain no references to any manhole covers.[48] All that remains is to examine are the ruins of Crematoria IV and V. It should be noted that there is practically nothing left of Crematorium IV, while in Crematorium V the remains of the anchor rods of the 8-muffle furnace and the chimneys are still clearly visible. The two crematoria were built on the basis of an identical plan, but in mirror images. Hence, what is true for Crematorium V also applies to Crematorium IV.

When I visited the Birkenau Camp in 1997, having Müller’s story in mind, I made a thorough inspection of the ruins of Crematorium V in search of the inspection manholes of the smoke ducts, with negative results: they do not exist. On that occasion I took several photographs, of which I present the most-significant in the Appendix:

In the space between the furnace and the west chimney on one side and the east chimney on the other, there should have been an inspection manhole similar to those seen in Photo 9, relating to Crematorium III, equipped with a metal lid like the one that in 2010 was curiously located on the remains of the reinforced concrete roof of Morgue #1 of Crematorium II (Photo 10). But there is no trace of this in the ruins, so Müller’s tale is just another lie –shameless, but not an original one, because it was invented in 1945 by Szlama Dragon. In relation to the “Son­der­kom­man­do” revolt, this witness had in fact declared:[49]

“I hid under a pile of wood, and Tauber in the chimney flues [w ciągach komina] of Crematorium No. V.”

Henryk Tauber, on the other hand, did not confirm this fabrication.

3.4. Legendary Anecdote

In the Kraus-Kulka Statement, Müller related some of the many fabrications circulating in the immediate postwar period (see Part 3 in Mattogno 2021):

“Here I witnessed the ‘scientific’ experiments performed by SS doctors Fischer, Klein and Mengele. Between 100 and 150 men and women, aged from eighteen to thirty, were selected [from the transports] and shot – unlike the other prisoners who were gassed. A piece of flesh was then cut from their thighs and forwarded to the Bacteriological Institute at Rajsko [where bacteria were cultivated]. One of the SS, who was acting as assistant to an SS doctor, told me all about it, remarking that horse meat would have done just as well but would have been a waste.”

“Here,” as he explicitly said, was referring to Crematorium IV (=V). The following year, however, during the Krakow Trial, he stated:

“In the Ausch­witz Camp, I also saw that the flesh of executed non-Jewish inmates was used for various purposes. These people were often shot in the presence of Dr. Mengele and others, whose names I do not know, and in the presence of Aumeier and Grabner. Immediately afterwards, the flesh from their calves was placed in crates, so that on average 6–8 crates of flesh were taken in a week.

It sometimes happened that a German commission came with swastikas on their arms, and asked in the presence of Aumeier and Grabner if it was human flesh. Aumeier replied: ‘Horse meat could also be used, but what a pity [to waste] horse meat!’”

From the context and the characters involved, it is clear that the scene was placed at the Main Camp’s crematorium.

Curiously, as if to take revenge for the plagiarism suffered, Jankowski in turn plagiarized the following imaginative story from Müller, embroidering it as follows (see Chapter 9):

“Every two weeks, SS doctors came to the undressing room and from the corpses cut off muscles, which were placed in clay pots with some disinfectant liquid. Muscles were cut from corpses, both of men and women, as long as they were shot and not gassed.”

Another fable related by Müller is this:

“The youngest women also served as a source of blood which would be drained from their veins for several minutes until they collapsed, after which they would be thrown half-dead into the fire. The blood was poured from a pail into special bottles which were then hermetically sealed. I was told that it was urgently needed at the military hospitals.” (Kraus-Kulka Statement)

To refute this nonsense, it suffices to give the floor to two former Ausch­witz inmates, the famous Primo Levi and the less-well-known Leonardo de Benedetti, a Jewish doctor who, in 1946, wrote a “Report on the Hygienic-Sanitary Organization of the Monowitz Concentration Camp for Jews (Ausch­witz, Upper Silesia),” in which, with reference to the camp hospital, we read among other things (Mattogno 2016, pp. 54-57, here p. 55):

“We shall cover such matters with the remark that even surgeries requiring a high surgical standard were performed, above all those involving penetration of the body wall such as gastroenteroanastomosis for duodenal ulcers, appendectomies, rib resectioning for emphysema, as well as orthopedic interventions for fractures and sprains. Where the overall condition of the patient did not assure that the trauma of the surgery could be withstood, the patient received a blood transfusion before initiating the procedure; transfusions were also performed to alleviate secondary anemia as well as severe hemorrhage from an ulcer or trauma sustained in an accident. For donors, recent arrivals to the camp were selected who were in good health; donation of blood was voluntary and was rewarded with 15 days’ stay in the hospital, during which time the donor receives a special diet, so that there was never any lack of volunteers for blood donation.”

There is also the pathetic rhetoric of the alleged victims who went to meet death with phenomenal pride and courage:

“I saw nationals of almost all the nations of Europe die in the gas chambers. Those from the Czech Jewish family camp were the only ones to go to their death singing their national anthem. [French female inmates sang the Marseillaise while on trucks riding to the gas chambers]” (Kraus-Kulka Statement)

The creators of this story forgot that the alleged victims were unaware of their impending fate, because the SS had set up a well-organized plot to deceive them – the pretense that they would take a shower and/or would be disinfested. It is therefore utterly unclear what would have motivated them to sing national anthems on the trucks.

In his book, Müller updated this fairy tale on the basis of the equally fabulous story by the “Unknown Author” which in the meantime he had been able to read in the pertinent book (Bezwińska/Czech 1972): Czechoslovakian Jews sang their national anthem and then “they sang ‘Hatikvah’, now the national anthem of the state of Israel” (Müller 1979b, p. 111).

Müller contributes to this anecdote by inventing a story – more pathetic than comical – to which he devotes almost four pages (ibid., pp. 111-114) that can be summed up in a few lines. He snuck into the gas chamber because he intended to die with the victims, but a group of girls intervened (ibid., p. 114):

“Before I could make an answer to her spirited speech, the girls took hold of me and dragged me protesting to the door of the gas chamber. There they gave me a last push which made me land bang in the middle of the group of SS men.”

If he really wanted to die, Müller could have thrown himself easily on the camp’s high-voltage fence: death would have been certain, without any last-minute savior.

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

Appendix

Documents

Photos

Endnotes