Selection at Auschwitz: Extermination Claims Refuted

Just after WWII the Dutch Red Cross published a series of studies concerning the deportation of Jews; this document is well known to specialists, but the public is generally ignorant of it. Volume III contains an interesting example of the reinterpretation of testimonies to make them conform to received dogma.[1] One testimony concerns the selection of a convoy of 1,703 Dutch Jews upon their arrival on October 11, 1942.

A survivor (unfortunately his name is not given) stated that a group of young women was “selected” for work (“geselecteerd”). Let’s remind ourselves that back in those days the selection was done in the civilian train station of Auschwitz, just between the camps of Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II (Birkenau). The eyewitness specified that he “saw this group vanish while running toward Auschwitz I”; the witness then stated that “the group of women accompanied by children and elders climbed into three big trucks with trailers and they were also sent in the Auschwitz I direction.” To summarize: our eyewitness stated that, first, selectees suitable and unsuitable for work left in the same direction (the first ones by foot, the second ones in trucks); and, second, that this direction was toward Auschwitz I.

For the Red Cross narrator (J. Looijenga, the Bureau J chief from the Service of Information), the obvious interpretation was the one the Holy Church of the Shoah teaches in its dogma: the group of people unable to work was immediately gassed.

However, according to the same dogma, the gas chambers were not located in Auschwitz I (where there was, according to historians, only limited experimental gassing, which ceased before this convoy arrived) but in Auschwitz-II Birkenau. Hence, the Bureau J chief concluded that this eyewitness had merely made a mistake and, as it was impossible to doubt that both groups obviously (“blijkbaar”) went in the same direction and so into the same camp, one should infer that the selected young women went instead toward Birkenau, the “death camp.” This hypothesis, said Looijenga, was corroborated by the fact that nobody ever heard from the women in this convoy again, whether they were old or young. The unavoidable conclusion (I dare not say logical) reached by this poor Looijenga was that the selection as described by the eyewitness wasn’t really a selection for work, but the “simple dispersal of a group” (“eenvoudig de afsplitsing van een groep”) that was doomed for the gas chamber (with some “possible individual exceptions” added Looijenga carefully.)

If need be, we seem to have a suitable explanation. Yet how can we explain that one of the sub-groups consisted only of young women suitable for work, while the other consisted of women with children or old women? Apparently satisfied with his reasoning, or perhaps tired from such logical contortions, Looijenga didn’t ask himself this question. Neither was he willing to question the strange fact that those morons in the SS also gassed women who were able to work – young and suitable women that the Reich greatly needed in its weapons factories.

Looijenga’s analysis, let us remind ourselves, dates from 1952, and since then progress has been made in Auschwitz historiography. For instance, we know today that 108 women of this convoy got a registration number (see the Kalendarium for the 11 Oct. 1942 entry). Looijenga was thus wrong on an essential point; hence we must admit that there is no reason to reinterpret the testimony of the survivor from this convoy.[2] This means that during the October 11, 1942, selection of 1,703 Dutch Jews from this convoy:

• The women assessed as suitable for work were led on foot in the direction of Auschwitz I.[3]
• And the unfit women (more accurately sick or old women, or women accompanied by children) were loaded in three big trucks with trailers, and their convoy did not head toward the Birkenau gas chambers but in the opposite direction; we may suppose this direction to be toward the eastern ghettos in the General Government of Poland.

No doubt these unfortunate women and children underwent arduous fates, but these fates are not the one that historian Gayssot (initiator of the French anti-revisionist law) and his disciples would have us to believe. This must be said because respect for the missing and their memory is better served by a true account of their real history.

Notes

A slightly different version from this article was published in Akribeia no. 5, October 1999, pp. 149f. Edited by Jean Plantin.