Jerzy Bielski and the Auschwitz Gas Chambers

In the context of the controversy over the arrest of Australian citizen Dr. Fredrick Töben in Germany, which I have reported elsewhere, the 5 May 1999 Sydney Morning Herald published an article by Sydney, Australia resident George Ryba. The gist of Ryba's article was as follows. He was a Polish political prisoner at Auschwitz for 3-1/2 years. As an electrician he worked in the gas chambers and the crematoria, on occasion being obliged to repair wiring in gas chambers that had been ripped off by gassed victims whose bodies were “still convulsive” while he worked there. “Dozens of (his) Jewish friends in the camp died by gassing.” These events were described by him when he testified against Ernst Kaltenbrunner (head of the security functions of the SS, including the Gestapo and SD) and Oswald Pohl (concentration camps chief). He wrote that his “testimony withstood long and forceful cross-examination by dozens of the best German lawyers defending the Nazi elite.” Nevertheless, he is opposed to the arrest of Töben.

There are many observations that can be made about Ryba's remarks and this will not be the last of this matter. I was particularly provoked by Ryba's claim that there had been meaningful cross-examination of his gassing claims. Such has not been my experience in studying this subject. Thus on 13 September I wrote the following letter to the Sydney Morning Herald, for publication:

The newspaper, to this date, has not published my letter.

I should remark on how such testimonies are studied. After the main Nuremberg trial of Göring, Kaltenbrunner et. al. the U.S. held 12 more trials at Nuremberg of high ranking Germans. “Case 4” among them was the “Concentration Camps Case”, whose principal defendant was Oswald Pohl.

The transcripts of these trials are not easily available but there exists a 15 volume set entitled Trials of War Criminals Before the Nuernberg Military Tribunals, published by the U.S. Government Printing Office in 1950, consisting mainly of excerpts of testimonies and documents.

It is perilous to draw conclusions from excerpts, so I had to take the time and effort to obtain the complete transcript of the Ryba/Bielski testimony. However the Bielski testimony that I quoted in my letter is to be found in vol. 5 of the published set (p. 662).

Here I will only add some remarks on Bielski's claim that “we could always speak with the people who were going to be gassed”. The scenario suggested is impossible to believe. If workers such as Bielski were able to speak to victims awaiting gassing, then surely there would have been occasions when they would have learned what awaited them in the “gas chambers”. Yet there is no record that a riot of an arriving transport ever took place at Auschwitz.

There were a few points during the Bielski testimony when it seemed that the defense lawyers might be starting to pursue the question of the reality of the events being claimed, but their lines of questioning quickly turned to identification of defendants. Pohl's lawyer was Dr. Alfred Seidl, who had earlier represented Hans Frank in the main Nuremberg trial, and also Rudolf Hess in that trial's later stages. The Bielski testimony that I quoted in my letter came during cross examination by Seidl, who had cited the earlier testimony of Auschwitz camp commandant Rudolf Höss, to the effect that the claimed exterminations were carried out in the greatest secrecy. Here is a larger excerpt of Bielski's reply:

Such provocative claims should elicit certain obvious questions. Did he tell these Jews what was supposedly going to happen to them? Did anybody else? Were there any riots? If he “could see everything”, would he describe the gassing procedure in all details? Did the victims disrobe in the gas chamber or in another room? Did he see the corpses of any people he had spoken to shortly before? Does he remember the names of any of these people? How long did the cremation process take? In the cremation process, were more than one corpse introduced into a muffle at one time? How many muffles were there?

Seidl asked no such questions. Rather, here is his reaction to the above testimony: “That is enough. What kind of uniform did the defendant Oswald Pohl wear at the time?”

In the published testimony excerpts cited above, only the phrase “That is enough” is reproduced from that.

Reading the transcripts of such trials is a venture in incredibility.

On the question of who was right, Höss or Bielski, on the question of secrecy in the reception of transports, I side with Bielski. In my book Hoax of the Twentieth Century I discussed the coerced Höss “confession” at length. I believe that SS personnel, inmates assigned to jobs that required their relative freedom to move about the camp, and civilian workers, were able to talk freely with people on incoming transports. Those people were in no imminent danger. If they had been, then Auschwitz would not have been, during the war, The Terrible Secret in Walter Laqueur's phrase.

31 October 1999.