How Danuta Czech Invented 100,000 Gassing Victims

Previous Research

Already in 1994, the Spanish revisionist Enrique Aynat published a booklet that contains a critical article on the way Danuta Czech determined the fate of the Jews deported from France and Belgium to Auschwitz in 1942.[3] He pointed out that the only source Czech relied upon regarding arrivals at Auschwitz were handwritten lists of registration numbers assigned to the deportees which were clandestinely compiled by inmates and smuggled out of the camp in 1944. These lists contain the date of an arriving transport, the registration numbers assigned to male and female deportees, and in many but not all cases the location whence these transports had come. It is not known how reliable these lists are. After all, they were compiled by individuals naturally hostile to their captors. It is important to emphasize, however, that these lists do not contain any information about inmates arriving at the camp who were not registered, and if such deportees existed, what their fates were.

Extant documents from the German wartime authorities in France, Belgium and the Netherlands are more detailed about the persons deported to Auschwitz, since among them are lists containing not only the exact number of deportees sent to Auschwitz with every transport, but also the deportees’ names, among other things. Hence it is known that not every person deported on a certain train to Auschwitz was admitted to that camp on the train’s arrival (the journey usually took two days). The central question is: what happened to the persons put on a train at the point of origin who were not registered at the Auschwitz Camp? The (obligatory) mainstream hypothesis is that, by and large, these persons simply perished “in the gas chambers” at Auschwitz.

In his 1994 paper, Aynat put forward a number of arguments disputing that claim, among them German wartime documents indicating that Jews fit for labor where sent to Auschwitz for the purpose of labor deployment, whereas those unfit for work were meant to be deported not to Auschwitz but to the “Government General”, i.e., occupied Poland. Since during the war Germany had incorporated the area around Auschwitz into its province of Upper Silesia, in their eyes Auschwitz was a part of Germany, not of occupied Poland.

Aynat discusses in some detail the fact that, for the various resistance movements highly active inside and outside the camp, Auschwitz was virtually transparent, as information about what was going on inside the camp was frequently and easily reported to the various headquarters of the resistance. In other words: nothing could be kept a secret at Auschwitz. However, when analyzing the documents produced by the Polish government in exile regarding Auschwitz, it becomes clear that the sensational news of conveyor-belt mass murder in chemical slaughterhouses does not play a major role, and that the claims (not) made in these documents to a large degree undercut today’s mainstream narrative.[4] Aynat also discusses several wartime sources and documents pointing to the fact that Jews sent to Auschwitz were in some cases shipped further east.

A year after Aynat’s initial book on the topic was published, the Auschwitz Museum published a five-volume work on the so-called Death Books (Sterbebücher) of Auschwitz containing detailed information on almost 69,000 inmates incarcerated at Auschwitz – meaning officially registered there – who had died there. Aynat subsequently did the Herculean work of matching, one by one, the names listed on the deportation lists of transports originating in France with those listed in the Death Books in order to match them, so the fate of these deportees could be determined. His results show that many if not most of the French Jews deported to and registered at Auschwitz tragically died there, probably mainly due to the catastrophic typhus epidemic which raged in this camp starting in early 1942.[5]

The present paper will look in a more-detailed fashion into how Danuta Czech handled the sources she had at her disposal to come to the claims she made in her Chronicle about the number of Auschwitz deportees allegedly killed in gas chambers. I will focus here exclusively on deportees sent to the camp with major deportation transports organized by Germany’s Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA, Reich Security Main Office), the National-Socialist equivalent to the current U.S. Department of Homeland Security, so to speak. A considerable number of deportees from these transports are said to have been sent, without registration, straight from the railway ramp to the gas chambers. I will establish in this paper how Czech makes that determination based on the evidence adduced. I will not discuss the many claimed gassings of usually smaller batches of inmates which had been properly admitted to and registered in the camp but which are said to have met their gruesome end in the gas chambers later due to some more-or-less-arbitrary decision by the SS administration or some SS physician. The gassings resulting from these so-called “selections” among regular prisoners have been thoroughly discussed elsewhere by Carlo Mattogno, where he shows how the extant documentation in many cases clashes with claims of mass murder.[6]

The Data

The following table contains data about all the entries in Czech’s Chronicle referring to arrivals of deportation transports at Auschwitz which are mentioned either in extant documents by the German authorities responsible for these deportation trains, and/or in the clandestinely compiled list of registered arrivals mentioned earlier.[7] The meaning of each column is as follows:

Column 1: The train’s date of arrival at Auschwitz; also the respective entry in Czech’s Chronicle.

Column 2: Number of arriving inmates according to D. Czech. In some case, Czech either gives no number or indicates by the way she expresses herself that she does not know how many inmates were on that transport (“etwa” in the German edition; “approximately” in the English edition). In these cases, I entered three question marks for cases where Czech makes no assumptions, followed with a number in parentheses in cases where she speculates about the total number of deportees.

Column 3: point of origin; this derives either from the clandestine list of assigned registration numbers or from other extant wartime documentation. In some cases, this is based merely on temporal correlation with an event claimed elsewhere (Norway, Luxemburg). In that case, I have entered a question mark with Czech’s speculation given in parentheses.

Column 4: number of registered females according to the clandestinely compiled lists of registration numbers.

Column 5: number of registered males, as above.

Column 6: sum of previous two columns.

Column 7: percentage of deported inmates registered at Auschwitz.

Column 8: Number of deportees not registered at Auschwitz with unknown fate.

Column 9: fate of claimed unregistered deportees according to Czech.

Column 10: proof adduced by Czech to support here claim about the fate of unregistered deportees. In case the total number of deportees is unknown/uncertain but she makes a claim in this regard anyhow, her source for that number is given, if she has any.

Danuta Czech also lists a number of deportations for which no entries exist in the clandestinely compiled registration lists. They all come from either of two sources:

1. A book by the Polish author Natan E. Szternfinkiel (Zagłada Żydow Sosnowca, Centralna Żydowska Komisja Historyczna, Katowice 1946).
2. Martin Gilbert’s atlas on the Holocaust (Endlösung: Die Vertreibung und Vernichtung der Juden. Ein Atlas, Rowohlt, Reinbek 1982).

The first book is marked by anti-German propaganda and is devoid of any reference to any sources regarding its claims on deportation of Jews from Ilkenau and Sosnowiec (German Sosnowitz) to Auschwitz. The second is marked by the total absence of any source references. In other words: both books back up their claims with – nothing. Here are these claimed deportations backed up by nothing:

All deportees of these transports are said to have been killed in gas chambers, with only one exception: the entry of August 15, for which Czech gives a number of registered inmates which she must have derived from the registration lists. However, there is nothing in these documents confirming that the transport with which these 102 admitted deportees arrived consisted of 2,000 inmates, let alone that 1898 of them were killed. In fact, Szternfinkiel insists in all cases that the deportees were killed all and sundry, hence Czech’s correction here is a manipulation of the source.

Data Analysis

Idle Bunker 1

The mass murder of the Jews at Auschwitz using gas chambers is said to have started sometime in early 1942. For this purpose, the interior of an old farmhouse in the vicinity of the Birkenau Camp is said to have been converted into a set of homicidal gas chambers. Czech claims that this building was put into operation on March 20. The sources she quotes for this event (statements by R. Höss and P. Broad), however, do not confirm her date. In fact, the sources are not specific regarding the exact date and contradict each other to some degree.

A more important question is: who was killed in these gas chambers? If we look at the first table containing deportation transports for whose existence there is at least some documentary evidence, we realize that, until early July 1942, every single person deported to Auschwitz with those transport was properly registered and admitted to the camp. Czech even says so explicitly in a footnote to her entry of March 26, 1942 about the first transport arriving at Auschwitz (from Slovakia), explaining that only individuals fit for labor were sent. This proves that at least until early July 1942, deportees were sent to Auschwitz with the exclusive aim to deploy them as slave laborers. There was no policy of extermination in place.

The only way of supporting the claim that Jews were killed en masse at Auschwitz during the first half of 1942 is the use of dubious sources full of wild claims without any support in the extant documentation: Gilbert’s and Szternfinkiel’s wholly invented mass gassings as listed in the second table, plus a few gassing events among registered inmates whose reality is confirmed only by self-proclaimed “eyewitnesses” who testified during the Polish show trials against Rudolf Höss and members of the Auschwitz camp garrison.[8] Since each death of a registered inmate was recorded numerous times and in a number of ways by the various Auschwitz authorities, and because these documents do not reflect these mass murders, as Mattogno has aptly shown, it is quite safe to say that these events are based merely on witness fantasies and are simply untrue.

In other words, no gassing happened at Auschwitz before early July 1942. Hence, the so-called Bunker 1 would not have served any purpose. This jibes well with the results of Carlo Mattogno’s detailed research into the question of whether or not this “Bunker 1” existed in the first place: it did not. It, too, is a mere figment of the imagination.[9]

In early July, things are said to have changed drastically, though. Czech writes that on June 30, the second gas-chamber building – Bunker 2 – became operational. She supports her claim by again quoting Rudolf Höss’s post-war statements, which are of little value, however, due to the circumstances of coercion under which they were made and due to their internal inconsistencies and blatant contradictions to external, more-reliable sources.[10] Since Czech’s claims about Bunker 1 are obviously bogus, how can we take such lore seriously anymore? The fact of the matter is that, after July 1942, not all deportees sent toward Auschwitz were being taken into the camp anymore. So what happened in July 1942 that changed things?

There were actually at least two factors that changed the way the deportees were being processed.

Typhus

In her entry for April 6, 1941, Danuta Czech mentions that typhus was introduced to the Auschwitz Camp by inmates transferred from Lublin. However, she does not support her claim with any contemporaneous documents. Her next entry mentioning the dreaded disease is more than a year later, on May 10, 1942, where she remarks that the Auschwitz garrison physician Dr. Siegfried Schwela died of the disease. Hence, not only the inmates, but also the SS personnel were affected by the epidemic. Dr. Schwela’s successor, Dr. Kurt Uhlenbrok, got infected as well and, being unable to perform his duties, was relieved of the post only a month later, on June 9 (although Czech reports about this only in her entry for August 17). Thus, the pivotal post of garrison physician, responsible for the camp’s hygiene, was pretty much unoccupied until after the peak of the epidemic. The camp’s health and sanitary situation started to improve only after Dr. Eduard Wirths, previously posted as garrison physician of the Dachau Camp, showed up at Auschwitz on September 6 to take over Uhlenbrok’s position.[11]

If we look at the trend of the camp’s mortality in 1942 as reflected in the Death Books, see Figure 1, we clearly recognize the catastrophic rising tide peaking in August of 1942, with daily deaths reaching a maximum of almost 500 on certain days.[12] The disease was brought somewhat under control in late 1942, but flared up again in early 1943 and then once more, although less pronouncedly, during the winter of 1943/1944.

Considering the crucial role the Auschwitz camp system was supposed to play as a provider of slave labor for the region’s war-related industries, the Auschwitz camp authorities reacted rather sluggishly to this disaster, to put it mildly. As Czech reports, Commandant Höss imposed a partial camp lockdown (Lagersperre) only on July 10. A week later, Heinrich Himmler arrived for a two-days’ visit to inspect the SS’s undertakings in the area. During that visit, it would have been impossible to hide the disastrous situation from him.

Although Czech, in her entry for July 17, has Himmler attend a mass gassing of 499 deportees from the Netherlands on that day, an inspection of Himmler’s diary shows that he never went to Birkenau at all. Since that camp was the hotbed of typhus and other infectious diseases – unsurprisingly, since at that time it was still under construction and lacked any proper sanitary facilities – it would have been highly dangerous for him to go there. That he in fact did not go there also results from the fact that Rudolf Höss’s claim of Himmler having attended the entire procedure – from unloading the transport train until the clearing of the victims’ bodies from the gas chambers[13] – cannot be true, because the train from the Netherlands arrived at Auschwitz already in the evening of July 16, and the newly admitted inmates showed up in the camp’s record already during the morning roll call of July 17. Himmler, however, arrived at Kattowitz Airport only at 3:15 pm on July 17, but did not get to the camp itself before late afternoon.[14] Considering that the primary source upon which the tale of Himmler’s attendance of a gassing rests is none other than Rudolf Höss’s postwar fairy tales, the entire episode can be dismissed safely as just another myth cooked up by Höss in an attempt to directly implicate Himmler in what supposedly transpired at Auschwitz under Höss’s command.

Interestingly, this mass gassing of deportees from an incoming transport is the only one of 1942 for which Czech provides a source to back it up – and what a source it is: the tortured Rudolf Höss facing the noose.

This transport of July 17 is also the very first one arriving at Auschwitz for which we know with some certainty that not all deportees who boarded the train were registered at Auschwitz, for we know how many were on that train (2000, 1551 of whom were registered). Although Czech claims that an unspecified (hence unknown) number of deportees from two earlier transports from Slovakia were gassed in “the bunker” (July 4 and 11), we have no record of how many deportees were on these trains. I’ll get back to this later.

Crematorium I

When the typhus epidemic struck in the spring of 1942, the only cremation facility operational at Auschwitz was the old crematorium with its three double-muffle furnaces. Each muffle could cremate a normal corpse on average within roughly an hour, meaning that, for a 20-hour workday, this facility could cremate a theoretical maximum of (6×20=) some 120 corpses.[15] In July 1942, the death rate exceeded 4,000, or 130 corpses per day on average. But already the load put on that facility in the months prior to July led to such massive strain that some of the refractory lining of the flues had to be replaced in mid-May 1942; a few weeks later, it was noticed that the chimney was deteriorating to such a degree that it was decided to tear it down entirely and rebuild it. That work was done between July 12 and August 8, 1942. During these almost four weeks, the crematorium was by necessity out of operation, meaning that, when the typhus epidemic approached its cataclysmic peak, Auschwitz had no cremation capacity at all.[16] After Crematorium I went back into operation in mid-August, the death rate was more than twice the number of theoretically possible cremations. What happened to all these corpses that could not be burned? Although the situation improved considerably in November and December, things got out of hand again in January 1943, with no additional cremation capacity ready to help out until mid-March of that year (when Crematorium II went operational briefly, was overloaded and was shut down again a few weeks later for major repairs…). At any rate, witnesses (among them Höss) state that these “excess corpses” were buried in mass graves but later exhumed and burned on pyres, because the corpses were lying in the groundwater threatening to poison the drinking-water supply of the entire region. Considering all the circumstances, this part of the witnesses’ story is most likely true.

In the context of the present study, we need not concern ourselves with the particulars of this situation. Fact is that, when Himmler visited Auschwitz on July 17 and 18, 1942, he saw his plans to turn this camp into a main hub of Germany’s exploitation of slave labor for the war effort seriously threatened. In fact, Himmler saw the camp at its worse, with the typhus epidemic raging out of control, with no garrison physician in charge, with few, if any sanitary installations, with no capacity to cremate the victims, with corpses piling up everywhere by the hundreds.

In this situation, it is claimed that at that very time the mass murder of thousands of deportees in gas chambers started, that in fact a new gassing facility (Bunker 2) went into operation. In view of the fact that the camp authorities had lost control of the epidemic and could not even handle the corpses resulting from the disease, how likely is it that they could have even thought of making this already uncontrollable situation even worse by adding thousands of additional corpses every month which they wouldn’t have been able to process in any way either?

Himmler’s reaction to the situation in Auschwitz is not known but may be inferred from the fact that his subordinate Richard Glücks demanded only five days later, on July 23, that Höss put the entire Auschwitz Camp on a total camp lockdown.[17] Thus, Auschwitz, at that time a death camp quite literally, had been quarantined.

Deportation of Individuals Unfit for Labor

While initially the German authorities deported only such individuals to Auschwitz they deemed capable of working, this policy gradually changed in July 1942, first by expanding the age range upward, then by increasingly including individuals unfit for labor (primarily children), as Aynat has shown in his 1994 study. The mainstream narrative has it that these individuals were primarily those who were not registered on their arrival at the Auschwitz camp but were killed in gas chambers.

Cosel

In her entry for August 28, 1942, Czech writes that some 200 deportees fit for work were taken off the deportation train at Cosel in Upper Silesia (halfway between Gleiwitz and Oppeln, some 50 km northwest of Auschwitz) in order to be deployed as slave laborers in Upper Silesian industry. There is evidently no direct documentary support for this claim, but considering that Auschwitz had been put under a camp lockdown, and that sending even deportees fit for labor there seems rather unwise, it stands to reason that the German authorities tried to send as many deportees as possible to other places not threatened by typhus. We know of the Cosel case only indirectly because some of the deportees taken off there were later admitted to the Auschwitz Camp after all. Czech handles this situation by arbitrarily subtracting invented numbers of deportees from several trains coming from France, Belgium and the Netherlands:

Hence, in total Czech claims that, during 1942, some 4925 deportees were taken off the trains traveling through Cosel. This is pure conjecture. For all we know, the number of inmates taken off at Cosel could have been lower or higher, or could have included even all of the inmates that were not registered at Auschwitz.

Although the same could have happened to any train coming from the western Europe, Czech limits this procedure arbitrarily to only a select few of them, and without foundation denies it for the rest.

It may well be that the trains approaching Auschwitz made other stops elsewhere as well where deportees were also taken off in order to be employed in local enterprises – including trains coming from other countries such as Slovakia, Poland, Belarus (Grodno) etc. And it may well be that some deportees did not finish their journey when arriving at Auschwitz, but that they left again – without having been registered – on other trains or by other means of transportation to be sent either to labor-deployment sites around Auschwitz or farther to the East, or to some ghetto, for instance.

That this is closer to the truth than what Czech conjectures can be demonstrated with the transport of Dutch Jews arriving at Auschwitz on Oct. 18. Here is what Carlo Mattogno has found out about that particular transport:[18]

“According to Czech’s Auschwitz Chronicle, a Jewish transport from Holland arrived on October 18, 1942, with 1,710 deportees, of whom only 116 women were registered, and the remaining 1,594 persons are said to have been gassed. The ‘special operation’ mentioned by [Johann] Kremer allegedly refers to this claimed gassing.

According to a Dutch Red Cross report, the transport in question, comprising 1,710 persons, departed from Westerbork on October 16 and stopped first in Kosel, where 570 [sic!] persons were taken off. The rest continued on to the following camps:

‘St. Annaberg or Sakrau – Bobrek or Malapane – Blechhammer and further some to Bismarckhütte/Monowitz. A separate group into the Groß-Rosen zone.’

A list of the transports from Westerbork to the east – probably prepared by Louis de Jong – names as the destinations of the October 16, 1942, transport ‘Sakrau, Blechhammer, Kosel.’

For its false assertions regarding this transport, Czech’s Auschwitz Chronicle again cites the Kremer diary! Thus only a small percentage of the Jews deported from Holland on October 16, 1942, actually arrived in Auschwitz.”

So it wasn’t just Cosel where the trains stopped and deportees got off; they detrained at many stations.

While it is to some degree speculative to apply this pattern generously to all transports where we don’t know the fates of deportees not arriving at Auschwitz or at least not having been registered there, Czech’s procedure of picking a few transports and taking a few inmates off at Cosel is at least as speculative, and even more so her utterly unsupported claim that the difference between deportees boarding a train and those registered at Auschwitz (plus those taken off at Cosel) equals the number of deportees gassed on arrival.

One thing is for certain, however: Considering that Auschwitz had turned into a deathtrap due to the raging typhus epidemic, it would have made perfect sense for the German authorities to send as many deportees elsewhere rather than to let them perish at Auschwitz.

Some Honesty

I mentioned earlier that Czech claims that an unspecified number of deportees from two transports from Slovakia were gassed in “the bunker” (July 4 and 11). The only extant document for this transport is the clandestinely compiled list of registration numbers assigned to deportees on these transports (372 and 330, respectively). These lists tell us neither how many deportees were on these trains altogether nor what happened to those that were not registered, if any deportees were left unregistered in the first place. Czech repeats this same arbitrary procedure of simply claiming, without any proof or trace, that there was an unregistered rest subsequently gassed in each instance where the clandestine lists mention registration numbers assigned to deportees from Slovakia:

It would have been much more honest to state right away that we don’t know how many deportees were on these trains, hence that it is unknown how many deportees were gassed, if any at all. This is the procedure she applies to transports coming from Yugoslavia, of which we also have merely the range of registration numbers assigned. For the first three instances she doesn’t even mention any unregistered deportees, let alone their presumed fates, while her last entry for Yugoslavia states expressly that it is unknown how many perished in the gas chambers:

She always states, however, that the registered inmates were admitted into the camp “after a selection,” implying that some inmates might have been selected not to get registered. These entries are probably the only ones in her entire book which come close to being honest, together with a few exotic ones about which she evidently didn’t dare make gassing speculation for lack of any documentary evidence or even anecdotal hints by self-proclaimed witnesses (Aug. 27: 82 registered deportees from Luxemburg; Nov. 18: 30 registered deportees of unknown origin).[19]

There are many other cases of registration numbers assigned to inmates coming from eastern Europe where Czech is less prudent and simply speculates wildly as to the numbers of deportees contained in the respective deportation trains. I highlighted them in my first table by rendering the number of alleged unregistered deportees – Czech’s gassing victims – in bold. Here they are once more:

Note that in lack of any extant document regarding these transports there is no evidence regarding the number of deportees contained in them. Hence, Czech’s numbers (here in the second column) are arbitrary at best, and, perforce, so are the numbers of alleged unregistered deportees, all of whom Czech lists as gassing victims with the exact number, in spite of the fact that she starts out with a made-up estimate. It’s all hocus-pocus.

Małkinia

There are two particularly interesting deportation cases in the above table: those arriving at Auschwitz on December 10 and 12. They came from Małkinia, which was a camp near the infamous Treblinka camp. Here is the question: if the vast majority of Jews coming from Małkinia (Czech claims that 79% of them were gassed at Auschwitz) were really slated to perish in gas chambers, why did the German authorities in charge of shipping Jews around Europe not select them right in Małkinia and send those unfit for labor – or unworthy of living, whatever the case may be – around the corner to the claimed highly efficient gassing facilities at the Treblinka extermination camp? Maybe because there was no such thing as a Treblinka extermination camp?[20] Or maybe because no Jew deported from Małkinia to Auschwitz was killed at Auschwitz? You decide.

Conclusions

The number of Jews killed in the gas chambers of Auschwitz right after arriving at the camp, hence without any registration, amounted to 105,992 for the entire year of 1942, if we are to take Danuta Czech’s words as printed in her Auschwitz Chronicle at face value. However, she has literally nothing in terms of documentation to back up her claims. Where there is a difference proven by documents between the number of deportees who boarded a train and the number of those who were registered at Auschwitz, she always claims that all of them were killed in the gas chambers (except for those who she speculates left the train in Cosel), although there are plenty of other explanations possible for this numerical difference, be it that more deportees than she assumes detrained at Cosel, that there were other stations along the journey where deportees were taken off, or that for some of the deportees arriving at Auschwitz their journey simply hadn’t come to an end yet, meaning that they were deported farther east, either to other locations of labor deployment or to places of ghettoization.

Any serious scholar wishing to write history based only on verifiable data must conclude that, for the year 1942, there is not a shred of evidence for even one single deportee arriving at Auschwitz and being led straight to the gas chambers without prior registration and admission to the camp. This analysis confirms Mattogno’s conclusion that there never were any homicidal gassing “bunkers” at Auschwitz.[9] There simply was no need for them, as there is no evidence for any such gassings.

Notes