What Happened to the Jews Who Were Deported to Auschwitz But Were Not Registered There?

Jürgen Graf

1. Introduction

According to the standard or official version of 20th century history, millions of European Jews were murdered in gas chambers at Auschwitz and other German wartime camps during the Second World War. This mass killing was supposedly carried out as part of a systematic policy by Third Reich Germany to exterminate Europe’s Jews.

In support of this view, orthodox “Holocaust” historians cite nothing beyond “eyewitness” testimonies – testimonies that contradict each other in every possible way, and are full of technical, natural-scientific, and logical impossibilities.[1]

Factual or documentary proof for a German policy to exterminate Europe’s Jews, or for the existence of homicidal gas chambers, simply does not exist. On the contrary, the huge amount of wartime German documents not only provides no proof for the existence of an extermination policy, they point to the contrary. To cite just one example: German wartime documents in the archives of the Auschwitz State Museum in Poland show that 15,706 wartime camp prisoners, nearly all of them Jewish, received medical care at the hospital of the Auschwitz III (Monowitz) camp between July 1942 and June 1944. Of these prisoners, 766 died in the hospital, while the rest of them were released.[2] This fact simply doesn’t square with an extermination policy.

The on-site forensic examinations carried out by revisionists show that the “eyewitness” accounts of mass murder, as well as the alleged disposition of the corpses, are impossible. These technical-scientific investigations also establish that the alleged “gas chamber” rooms or spaces were not constructed for homicidal purposes and, for structural-technical reasons, could not have been utilized as killing chambers. Moreover, the capacities of the crematories – insofar as they existed at a given camp – were woefully inadequate to cremate the vast number of corpses of the alleged victims.[3]

Those who defend the “Holocaust” story of Jewish extermination and mass killings in gas chambers have no coherent response to the results of revisionist research. In particular, they have no response to the forensic findings of the revisionist experts. Alone among the “exterminationists,” French researcher Jean-Claude Pressac has attempted to prove systematically that mass killings in gas chambers, as well as the cremation of the alleged number of bodies, was technically possible.[4] His arguments have been refuted in great detail by Robert Faurisson and Carlo Mattogno.[5] Anyone may compare for himself the arguments and evidence presented by each side on this issue. Such a comparison speaks for itself.

In discussions with opponents and skeptics, revisionists are invariably confronted with the question: “If they weren’t killed, what happened to the missing Jews?” This question deserves serious consideration. We revisionists should not be content merely to refute the official “Holocaust” story; we should also attempt to explain, as clearly as possible, what actually did occur. Naturally, this involves the question of the whereabouts of the missing Jews.

(Click on image to enlarge)

In this paper, I deal with the question of the fate of Jews who were deported to Auschwitz, but were not registered there. At the outset I want to say that no one is able to provide a complete answer to this question. If we possessed documents that clarified this issue, this paper would be unnecessary. As it happens, documents on this aspect of camp history are very spotty and incomplete. For the time being we are therefore obliged to deal, for the most part, with hypotheses, and to point to tasks that revisionists will likely confront in the future.

The first, or “destructive” phase of revisionist work – the refutation of the official “Holocaust” story – is largely behind us. It is now time to concentrate on the second, and more difficult, “constructive” phase, which is to provide a more complete picture of the actual fate of Europe’s Jews during the Second World War. Although authors such as Arthur Butz, Walter Sanning, Steffen Werner, Enrique Aynat and Jean-Marie Boisdefeu have already carried out some pioneering work, this second phase of revisionist research is still in its beginning.

2. An ‘Official’ Account of the Numbers of Jews Deported to Auschwitz

Shortly after the Red Army’s takeover of the Auschwitz camp in January 1945, the Soviets told the world that four million persons had died there.[6] Although this absurd figure was widely cited in the West, and was officially defended in Poland until 1990, few Western historians accepted it. Then, in 1993, the head of the historical research division of Poland’s Auschwitz State Museum, Franciszek Piper, presented new estimates of the numbers of Auschwitz victims, figures that represented a sharp reduction in the “official” figures.[7] Piper’s 1993 publication on the numbers of Auschwitz victims is the most carefully researched study on this issue presented so far by an “orthodox” historian. In contrast to historians such as Raul Hilberg, who don’t deem it necessary to provide evidence or sources for their numbers,[8] Piper explained in some detail how he arrived at his figures.

Piper wrote that altogether 1.3 million prisoners were brought to Auschwitz, of whom only 400,000 were registered. Among those deported to the camp were 1,095,000 Jews, of whom 205,000 were registered and 890,000 were unregistered. According to Piper, of 400,000 registered Jewish and non-Jewish inmates, 200,000 survived interment in the camp – that is, half of them. Similarly, he estimated, about half of the registered Jewish prisoners – that is, about 100,000 – survived Auschwitz internment. Because nearly all the unregistered Jews are supposed to have been killed in gas chambers, Piper concludes that “at least 1,100,000 persons were killed or died in the camp.”[9]

Holocaust researcher Jean-Claude Pressac has provided estimates of Auschwitz victims that are significantly lower than those of Piper. In the 1994 German-language edition of his second book Pressac estimates the total number of Auschwitz camp victims as between 631,000 and 711,000.[10] Interestingly, though, he was not permitted to cite these figures in an important semi-official anthology, Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp, a collection of two-dozen essays by Pressac and various “orthodox” Holocaust historians.[11] Considering these circumstances, one can conclude that Piper’s estimates reflect the current “official” historiography.

Features of Birkenau camp (Auschwitz II):

1. Rail siding and “selection” ramp 2. Crematory facility (Krema) II 3. Crematory facility (Krema) III 4. Crematory facility (Krema) IV 5. Crematory facility (Krema) V 6. “Disinfection and Disinfestation Facility,” also known as the “Central Sauna” 7. “Canada” section, where inmates' belongings were sorted and stored 8. Hospital or sick bay section 9. “Gypsy Camp” section 10. “Men's Camp” section 11. “Hungarian Camp” section 12. “Family camp” section 13. “Women's Camp” section 15. Entry gate for rail transport

Piper’s estimates of the numbers of registered inmates at Auschwitz (both Jewish and non-Jewish) are well-grounded. With regard to the number of the deceased among these inmates, however, revisionist researchers Carlo Mattogno and Franco Deana arrive at a lower figure. In 1994 they estimated the total number of registered prisoners – both Jews and non-Jews – who died at Auschwitz at 160,000 to 170,000.[12] (Mattogno, the leading revisionist specialist on Auschwitz, is currently working on a detailed study on the mortality rate at the camp in which he slightly reduces his 1994 figures.)[13]

With regard to the number of victims among the registered prisoners at Auschwitz, the leading “exterminationist” expert (Piper) and the most knowledgeable revisionist specialist (Mattogno) thus arrive at figures that, while they differ by 30,000 to 40,000, essentially agree on the order of magnitude. However, the situation is radically different regarding non-registered prisoners. Piper contends that in addition to 890,000 un-registered Jews at Auschwitz, there were also approximately 15,000 un-registered non-Jews at the camp.

For most of the European countries of origin, the contemporary wartime German documents show rather clearly just how many Jews were deported to Auschwitz. We know, for example, that more than 75,000 Jews were deported from France, of whom 69,000 were sent to Auschwitz.[14] Similarly reliable documentation shows just how many Jews were deported to Auschwitz from most of the European states of origin. For these countries, Piper’s figures can hardly be contested. Not so clear, however, are his estimates of the number of deportees from the two countries from where, by far, the largest number of Jews arrived – namely Hungary and Poland.

Telegrams sent to Berlin in 1944 by Germany’s special ambassador in Budapest, Edmund Veesenmayer,[15] put the number of deported Hungarian Jews at 437,000. In his classic revisionist work The Hoax of the Twentieth Century, Arthur Butz contends that at least some of the Veesenmayer dispatches are forgeries, and that the actual number of Jewish deportees from Hungary is much lower – only a fraction of what has been claimed.[16] I will go into this matter in more detail, but at this point I shall simply state that the Butz thesis, which I had endorsed in my book Der Holocaust Schwindel,[17] is probably not valid. I now accept the number of 437,000 deported Hungarian Jews as a working hypothesis.

Jean-Claude Pressac

Piper estimates the number of Polish Jews deported to Auschwitz at 300,000, a figure that is certainly too high. In support of this, he refers to the Kalendarium, an important, semi-official Polish work about Auschwitz compiled by Danuta Czech.[18] Piper puts the number of deportees from Poland at 225,000, and adds to this some 55,000 to 65,000 Jews deported from Lodz to Auschwitz who were overlooked by Czech. Piper therefore concludes that a total of 280,000 to 290,000 Polish Jews were deported to Auschwitz, a figure that he rounds off to 300,000. But in reality the Kalendarium figure of 225,000 must be reduced by at least some 43,000 because approximately 30,000 Jews arrived at Auschwitz from Polish labor camps, and are thus counted twice. Another 13,000 Polish Jews who were allegedly deported to Auschwitz in sealed cars and led to the gas chambers without selection only exist in the tales of “eyewitnesses”; they are, so to speak, “non-existing persons,” as George Orwell would put it. And finally, the number of Jews brought from Lodz to Auschwitz was not more than approximately 20,000.[19] For these reasons, the figure of 300,000 Polish Jews (allegedly ) transported to Auschwitz is greatly inflated, and must be reduced by around 100,000.

To summarize: According to Franciszek Piper, 1.1 million Jews were deported to Auschwitz – of whom 300,000 were Polish Jews. From this latter figure we subtract 100,000, while at the same time accepting his figures for all other countries, including Hungary (at least provisionally), and arrive, therefore, at about a million Jews deported to that largest of the German concentration camps. Of these, 200,000 were registered. According to Piper, half of them survived the camp, while Mattogno and Deana arrive at a higher percentage of survivors. Therefore, there remain some 800,000 Jews who arrived at Auschwitz but were not registered there (at least according to the camp records). According to official historiography, virtually all of these unregistered Jews were gassed in Auschwitz. According to the 1944 Veesenmayer telegrams from Budapest to Berlin, more than half of this 800,000, namely 410,000, arrived at Auschwitz from Hungary, of whom only 28,000 were registered in the camp.

I shall return to the question of the Hungarian Jews in the final part of this paper, but for now I turn to the fate of the non-registered Jews from other countries.

3. The Non-registered Jewish Prisoners from Countries Other than Hungary

It is well known that many wartime German documents speak of the “evacuation” (“Evakuierung”) or “expulsion” (“Abschiebung”) of the Jews. A good example is the August 21, 1942, memorandum by Martin Luther, a high-ranking official (Unterstaatssekretär) in the German Foreign Office (and who represented it at the January 1942 Wannsee Conference). Referring to a decision by Hitler two years earlier to remove the Jews from Europe, Luther wrote:[20]

The principle of the German Jewish Policy after the [National Socialist] assumption of power was to promote Jewish emigration by all means … The present war gives Germany the opportunity and also the duty to solve the Jewish question in Europe … The evacuation [Evakuierung] of the Jews from Germany began on the basis of the above-mentioned Führer directive [Führerweisung]. It was logical to include immediately the Jewish citizens of the countries that had also adopted anti-Jewish measures … The number of Jews deported [abgeschobenen] in this way to the East did not suffice to cover the labor needs there.

Historians who contend that “evacuation” and “relocation” are sinister camouflage terms for “extermination,” will have some difficulty explaining the remark in Luther’s memo that “the number of Jews deported in this way to the East did not suffice to cover the labor needs there.”

Even more problematic for Holocaust historians, perhaps, is the deportation of a considerable number of Jews from western European countries to the occupied Soviet territories (notably to the Baltic lands and Belarus). Deportations of German and Czech Jews to Riga (Latvia) and Minsk (Belarus) have been dealt with in detail by Raul Hilberg, who also emphasizes in his three-volume study the economic importance of Jewish prisoners working in those territories. He writes, for example, of “a widespread demand for Jewish workers,” and that in Riga German and Latvian Jews worked for the SS, the army, the navy, the air force, the railroad, and in commercial enterprises.[21]

Jews were being deported from Germany to Riga in December 1941. In that same month, according to orthodox historiography, the first so-called “extermination camp” was opened at Chelmno, and in March of 1942, a second “extermination camp” supposedly began operation at Belzec. Given that a camp does not appear overnight, the decision to build Chelmno and Belzec must have been made quite some time earlier. In Hilberg’s view, everything points to a decision having been made by Hitler before the end of the Summer of 1941 to annihilate the Jews, that is, at least two months before the deportation of German Jews to Riga and Minsk.[22] If so, why then were Jews who were supposedly destined for extermination deported from Germany to far-off Riga and Minsk rather than to the much closer “extermination camps” of Chelmno and Belzec? The argument that they were temporarily spared because they were needed as workers in the occupied Soviet territories simply does not hold up. As Hilberg reports, many of these German Jewish deportees were “cripples, war invalids, and people over 70 years of age”[23] who were utterly unsuited for employment. Such people would “logically” have been sent straight to the “extermination camps” (if such existed).

In October 1942 Switzerland’s main Jewish community weekly, the Israelitisches Wochenblatt für die Schweiz, reported:[24]

For some time there has been the tendency to dissolve the ghettos in Poland. That was the case with Lublin, and now Warsaw is to follow. It is not known to what extent this plan has already been carried out. The previous inhabitants of the ghettos are going off farther to the East into the occupied Russian territory. They were partially replaced by Jews from Germany … An eyewitness, who until recently was in Riga and was able to escape, reports that there are still 32,000 Jews in the Riga ghetto. Since the occupation, thousands of Jews died. The Jews must assemble in the morning for compulsory labor outside the city … Recently, in Riga, it has been noticed that transports of Jews from Belgium and other western European countries, which, however immediately go on further to unknown destinations.

The official “Holocaust” literature is silent about the transport of Polish Jews to the occupied Soviet territories. The Polish Jews evacuated from the ghettos are supposed to have been gassed in “extermination camps.” Nor is there any mention in the official literature of the deportation of Belgian Jews to Riga. According to the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, for example, “by far the greater part of the [Jewish] deportees [from Belgium] perished in Auschwitz; some small groups were also sent to Buchenwald, Ravensbrück and Bergen-Belsen.”[25] As we have seen, the Israelitisches Wochenblatt also mentions in October 1942 transports of Jews from other western European countries to Riga, from where they go to unknown destinations. According to the official historiography, however, there were six extermination camps in October 1942. If so, why would the deported Jews have been transported far to the east of the six “death centers” to the occupied Soviet territories? Defenders of the orthodox “Holocaust” story, who hold that the Belgian Jews would never have been allowed to reach the occupied Eastern territories, are simply unable to answer such elementary questions.

Newly arrived Hungarian Jews at Auschwitz-Birkenau, almost certainly in late May or early June 1944. Here the able-bodied Jews have been separated into two columns by sex, with women and children on the left, and men and boys on the right. Several SS men are visible. In the foreground are a few unemployable Jewish women and children. Birkenau's main rail entry gate can been seen in the background, to the left. This photo, taken by a German photographer from the roof of a rail car, is from The Auschwitz Album (1981).

It is quite obvious that for many Jews from Belgium and other western European countries, Auschwitz served merely as a transit camp. The article from the Swiss Jewish weekly cited above is no isolated case. Two revisionist authors, the Spaniard Enrique Aynat and the Frenchman Jean-Marie Boisdefeu,[26] have found additional examples. Here are some of them:

• A Slovak Jew, Gisi Fleischman, reported in March of 1943 that in the region of Lublin (Poland), he encountered other Slovak Jews, as well as Belgian Jews.[27]
• In 1942 Jews from Belgium, Netherlands and France arrived by train in Lvov (Lviv), Ukraine, according to testimony of the eyewitness I. Hertz provided in 1946 by the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee of the USSR.[28]
• The French Communist underground newspaper Notre Voix reported in its April 1944 issue:[29]
  

  News that will please all the Jews of France was broadcast by Radio Moscow. Who among us has not had a brother, a sister, a spouse or a parent among those deported from Paris? And who will not rejoice when he hears that 8,000 Paris Jews have been rescued by the glorious Red Army! One of them reported on Radio Moscow how he was saved from death together with 8,000 other Paris Jews. They all found themselves in Ukraine at the time of the latest Soviet offensive, and the SS bandits wanted to shoot them before they left the country.

One might object, of course, that such reports are not German wartime documents, and consequently are not conclusive. All the same, they give additional support to the thesis that Auschwitz also functioned as a transit camp. Why should an underground Communist newspaper in France have published in April of 1944 a false news report about Jews being rescued by the Red Army in Ukraine? And why should the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee of the Soviet Union have spread false information about deportations of French and Belgian Jews to Ukraine? There is no valid reason to believe such reports are false.

In addition, some surviving German wartime documents also refer to the deportation of western European Jews to the occupied Soviet territories. On August 28, 1942, an SS conference on “the Jewish question” was held in Berlin, at which specific problems arising from the deportations were discussed. The official record of the conference included the following on deportations of stateless Jews from France:[30]

During the course of the discussion, SS Lt. Colonel [Obersturmbannführer] Eichmann made known that the current evacuation problem (deportation of the stateless Jews) should be concluded by the end of this calendar year. The end of June 1943 is anticipated as a deadline for the deportation of the remaining foreign Jews … Eichmann requested the immediate purchase of the barracks that had been ordered by the Commander of the Security Police in the Hague [Netherlands]. That camp is to be built in Russia. The transport of the barracks can be arranged so that three to five barracks can be taken along with each transport train.

The implication of this document is clear: Only a portion of the Jews who had been deported from France to Auschwitz remained in the camp. The remainder were transported further east, namely to the occupied Eastern territories (“Russia”), where a camp was to be built for them. The barracks for this camp were to be transported by train.

In his Mémorial de la Déportation des Juifs de France, Serge Klarsfeld mentions a May 1944 transport of 878 French Jews to Tallinn (Reval), Estonia, as well as to Kaunas, Lithuania. Among the deported, there were also children between 12 and 15, of whom most were definitely too young to work. So why were they sent to the Baltic lands?

This is not the only documentary evidence to show that Jews who were unable to work were not killed in Auschwitz, but instead were taken further to the East. A July 1942 SS memo on Jewish deportations reports:[31]

On July 20, 1942, SS Lt. Colonel Eichmann and SS First Lieutenant [Obersturmführer] Nowak of the Reich Security Main Office [RSHA] IV B4 [Jewish affairs section] telephoned. With SS Lt. Colonel Eichmann, the question of the relocation of children was discussed. He decided that as soon as transport into the [Polish] Generalgouvernement is once again possible, transports of children would roll. SS First Lieutenant Nowak assured that by late August or early September approximately six transports would be possible into the Generalgouvernement. They would contain all types of Jews (including those unable to work and the elderly).

This memorandum refers to the transport of Jewish children as well as unemployable and elderly Jews into the Generalgouvernement. Auschwitz was not in the Generalgouvernement, but rather in a portion of south-western Poland that had been annexed to Germany in 1939. Unemployable and elderly Jews were not gassed in Auschwitz, but rather were sent further eastward, undoubtedly to be billeted there in a ghetto. The objection that they were perhaps murdered in an eastern extermination camp would be preposterous because there is no reason to divert such people from the “gas chambers” of Auschwitz in order to murder them in the “gas chambers” of Treblinka.

In 1945, I am convinced, the victorious Allies undertook measures to cull out German documents that were clearly at odds with Allied extermination claims, which is why documents such as those cited here are available only in sparse numbers. In all probability, this is the reason why almost no documents are available concerning the alleged extermination camps of Treblinka, Sobibor and Belzec. Almost certainly these three “Operation Reinhard” camps in the German-occupied Generalgouvernement territory were transit camps through which Jewish deportees – especially Polish Jews, but also a certain number of western European Jews – went on into the occupied Eastern territories.

According to official “Holocaust” historiography, Treblinka, Sobibor and Belzec functioned purely as extermination centers, in which all arriving Jews were immediately put to death (except for a handful of “working Jews” [Arbeitsjuden] who were temporarily spared). But there is no doubt that Treblinka, for example, functioned as a transit camp. This is corroborated by various eyewitness reports. For example, a Polish Jew named Samuel Zylbersztain reported some time after the end of the war that in 1943 he, together with some 500 other Jews, was transferred from Treblinka to Majdanek (Lublin).[32] But why were these 500 Jews deported to Majdanek? Certainly not to be gassed there. After all, he also survived this second “extermination camp.” Indeed, he later survived eight additional (regular) concentration camps. He is yet another living witness that the Germans did not exterminate the Jews.

In an interesting book published in Germany in 1990, Die zweite babylonische Gefangenschaft (“The Second Babylonian Captivity”), Steffen Werner provides evidence for German wartime deportations of Jews from various countries to Belarus (Belorussia).[33]

Finally, I want to raise the question of the fate of the Jews who were deported to the occupied Soviet territories. Undoubtedly the mortality was very high due to the general wartime deprivations, especially given that many of the deportees were old and physically unable to work. It seems possible to me that many of the surviving Polish Jews opted to stay in the Soviet Union at the end of the war because Poland had been devastated during the war and because anti-Semitic feelings were rampant there. On the other hand, I think it unlikely that many surviving Jews from western European countries would have voluntarily remained in the Soviet Union.

The Birkenau camp, from an enlarged portion of an Allied aerial reconnaissance photograph taken on May 31, 1944. On this day, according to the official “Kalendarium” (or “Auschwitz Chronicle”), thousands of newly arriving Hungarian Jews were killed here in gas chambers, supposedly located in crematory buildings (Kremas) II and III, visible at the upper left. However, as Jürgen Graf and others have pointed out, no trace of such mass killings can be found in this or any of the other aerial reconnaissance photos, fortuitously taken during what was supposedly the high point of alleged mass killings in the camp.

Werner and Boisdefeu speculate that those western European Jews deported to the occupied Soviet territories who survived the war were probably rounded up by the Soviets and deported to Siberian camps. At that time Stalin and the Soviet regime already supported the myth of the annihilation of the Jews in gas chambers, and a massive return of Jews to western Europe from the USSR would have discredited that story. However, this is only speculation, and Werner and Boisdefeu are unable to prove this thesis. Such unanswered questions can presumably be clarified only through documents held in archives in Russia and in other countries of the former Soviet Union. There are reasons to hope that a future nationalist government in Russia will one day make such documents public. I do not need to spell out the obvious dramatic and politically important consequences of such a step.

4. The Non-Registered Hungarian Jews

It is generally accepted that Hungarian Jewry suffered from three big deportation waves in 1944.

• Between May 15 and July 9, mass deportations from the provinces were carried out. As already mentioned, Germany’s special ambassador in Budapest, Edmund Veesenmayer, reported in telegrams to Berlin that altogether 437,000 Jews were deported to the Reich. This was about half of Hungary’s Jewish population at the time. (In 1944 the Hungarian state was geographically far larger than it is today, because in 1939 and 1940 it had annexed portions of Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and Romania, which it lost again in 1945.) Conscious of the worsening military situation, and responding to protests from Allied and neutral governments, the Hungarian head of state, Miklos Horthy, ordered the deportations stopped on July 9, 1944. As a result, the Jews in the capital of Budapest, who were next slated for deportation, were spared.
• In the second half of June, 20,000 Hungarian Jews were deported to the Strasshof camp, near Vienna. Most of them survived the war.[34]
• After the downfall of the Horthy government in October 1944, and the assumption of power by Ferenc Szalasi and his “fascist” Arrow Cross movement, thousands of Budapest Jews were force-marched to the border of the Reich to construct ramparts against Soviet tanks. A considerable number of them must have perished, but because these deaths are not so directly related to “the Holocaust,” I shall not deal further with that here. I will confine myself to dealing with the first and most massive deportation wave.

According to the original version of the “Holocaust” story, all of the Hungarian Jews deported between May and July 1944 were sent to Auschwitz and gassed upon arrival, except some 28,000 Jews who were registered there. In a scholarly article published in 1983, French-Jewish historian Georges Wellers calculated that 409,640 Hungarian Jews were killed at Auschwitz-Birkenau.[35] In fact, Wellers’ figure was a deliberate deception. Already in 1964, Polish historian Danuta Czech revealed, in the first edition of her Auschwitz Kalendarium, the existence of the so-called transit camp (Durchgangslager) in Auschwitz-Birkenau.[36] Under the date of July 14, 1944, she wrote:

The unregistered Jews (the so-called ‘transit Jews’) neither received camp numbers, nor were they tattooed with numbers. They were temporarily billeted in the camp BIIc, the evacuated gypsy camp BIIe or a camp called ‘Mexico’ by the prisoners. This latter one was the unfinished third sector of the camp that on the plans was designated as BIII (Bauabschnitt III). This is where the women were billeted.

Under the date of August 22, 1944, Danuta Czech’s Kalendarium reports that on that day there were 30,000 unregistered Hungarian Jews in the Birkenau “transit camp.”[37] All this is irrefutable evidence that many Birkenau Jews were neither registered nor gassed, but instead were simply transferred elsewhere.

As to the number of victims among the Hungarian Jews deported to Auschwitz, the “orthodox” historians provide contradictory figures:

• According to the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, “most of the Hungarian Jews were gassed in Birkenau shortly after their arrival.” Prudently, however, no figure of these “gassed” Jews is given.[38]
• In his three-volume study, Raul Hilberg similarly contends that “the great majority” of the deportees from Hungary were “gassed” upon arrival at Auschwitz.[39] Further on in this same work, however, he contradicts himself, putting the total losses of Hungarian Jewry at “over 180,000,”[40] which implies that a clear majority of the deportees must have survived. But where and how? Hilberg mentions “several thousands” who were transferred elsewhere,[41] but provides no information about the fate of the other Hungarian Jews who survived.
• Jean-Claude Pressac fixes (arbitrarily, it seems) the number of Hungarian Jews who died in Auschwitz at 292,000.[42]

All these figures are fundamentally impossible because cremating such masses of corpses in the purported eight-week time period was technically not feasible. Not even in the Third Reich were the laws of nature suspended. During the period of the deportation of Hungarian Jews to Birkenau, May–July 1944, four crematory facilities with a total of 46 muffles were in operation there. As Carlo Mattogno has established, the theoretical maximum capacity of the Birkenau crematories was 1,248 corpses per day.[43] For the entire 55-day period when Hungarian Jews were arriving at the camp (May 15 through July 9, 1944), the maximum theoretical cremation capacity would therefore have been about 68,640 bodies. In reality, even this figure is excessive. Thanks to the many wartime German documents on crematories and cremation that survived the war, we know that the crematory ovens often broke down and had to be repaired. Finally one must take into account that in addition to the hypothetical number of murdered Hungarian Jews, the corpses of other (non-Hungarian) prisoners who died during this same period had to be cremated as well. Even if we accept Hilberg’s relatively low figure of 180,000 Hungarian Jews who died in Auschwitz-Birkenau, this is still about 111,0000 higher than the number of corpses that could have been cremated during this period.

Some “Holocaust” writers, apparently struck by such technical considerations, have greatly exaggerated Birkenau’s crematory capacities. Citing eyewitness testimonies, such as those of Filip Müller,[44] they claim that the corpses of many of the alleged gassing victims were incinerated in open-air cremation pits (in the courtyard of crematory [Krema] V, and near crematories II and III, and “Bunker 2”). Thanks to a fortunate coincidence, Birkenau was twice photographed from the air by Allied reconnaissance aircraft on May 31, 1944,[45] a day when 15,000 Hungarian Jews arrived at the camp. Moreover, we are authoritatively told, some 184,000 Jews had arrived there from Hungary during the previous 14 days – an average daily total of some 13,000. The aerial reconnaissance photographs show not the slightest trace of the alleged extermination action: No trace of pits, no lines of people in front of the crematories, no evidence of open-air burning in the areas mentioned by witnesses.

The German documents of this period clearly reveal the reasons for the mass deportation of Hungarian Jews to the Reich: Germany urgently needed labor for armaments and other war-related enterprises. On May 9, 1944, Heinrich Himmler reported in a letter to the chief of the SS Hauptamt as well as the head of the SS central economic administration office (WVHA) that 10,000 soldiers were to be assigned to guard the workers engaged in the Jäger (pursuit plane) construction program, because otherwise “the placing, the guarding and the efficient employment of approximately 200,000 Jews” was impossible.[46] A report two days later further explained:[47]

The Führer has ordered that for the guarding of the 200,000 Jews, the Reichsführer SS [Himmler] will dispatch 10,000 Waffen SS soldiers, with their officers and petty officers, who shall be detailed to the concentration camps of the Reich in order to employ them in the large constructions of the Organization Todt and other militarily important duties.

With regard to these 200,000 Jews, Himmler must have thinking of the Hungarian deportation action, which was about to begin, because at that time no other large-scale deportations of Jews was either underway or imminent.

On August 15, 1944, the Concentration Camp department of the SS central WVHA office reported that there were 524,286 inmates, and that an additional 612,000 prisoners were in the process of being added to the camp system. Of this latter group, 90,000 were Jews who were being brought in as part of the “Hungarian program (Jewish action).”[48]

In my opinion, these documents not only discredit the familiar claims of mass extermination in Birkenau – which was technically impossible anyhow – they also refute the thesis proposed by Arthur Butz in The Hoax of the Twentieth Century that the 1944 Veesenmayer telegrams are, at least for the most part, forgeries.[49] In support of his thesis, he presents several points, perhaps the most important of which is the Report of the International Committee of the Red Cross on its Activities During the Second World War.[50] This detailed 1948 document makes no mention at all of mass deportations of Jews from Hungary in the spring and summer of 1944, and, rather to the contrary, reports that it was only in October 1944 that “the full tide of the great tribulations of the Hungarian Jews” began. Given that the ICRC delegates in Budapest were at that time housed in the same building as the Hungarian Jewish Council, it is unthinkable that the International Red Cross representatives could have failed to know of any large-scale measures being taken against Hungary’s Jews.

Jürgen Graf studies a text during a break at the 13th IHR Conference.

I readily admit that I am at a loss to explain this mysterious ICRC report. But even among the Red Cross delegates there must have been incompetent persons, and it is to such a person that this report’s defects should most probably be attributed.

The German wartime documents clearly suggest that hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews were deported, and that, therefore, the Veesenmayer telegram figure is not an exaggeration. Let’s recall the figures: In May 1944, Himmler, referring to Hitler, spoke of 200,000 Jews who were to be employed in war-related work. On August 15, the ongoing integration of 90,000 Hungarian Jews into the camp system was reported, and a week later, 30,000 Jews from Hungary are reported to still be in the Birkenau “transit camp.”

Given that a high percentage of the deported Hungarian Jews were either unemployable or only marginally employable, these figures suggest that altogether several hundred thousand Hungarian Jews were deported. As already mentioned, the Veesenmayer telegrams put the figure at 437,000. A forgery meant to discredit the Germans and/or Hungarians would have made sense only if the actual number had been much lower. If, for example, 350,000 Hungarian Jews had been deported, the difference would not have been important enough to justify such a sophisticated and elaborate forgery.

Another strong argument for the validity of the Veesenmayer telegram figure is that it is almost exactly corroborated by the wartime transportation lists provided by Laszlo Ferenczy, the chief of the Hungarian police. Ferenczy put the total number of Hungarian Jewish deportees at 435,000. These Ferenczy documents were submitted as evidence in the Eichmann trial in 1961 in Jerusalem.[51] When Carlo Mattogno and I visited the Hungarian National Archives in March 1999, we were told that the transportation lists had disappeared from the cellar of some unidentified ministry. In a private conversation, one of Hungary’s leading “Holocaust” experts confirmed this information, and confided to us that the “disappearance” of these documents was due to “political intrigue.”

While one might suspect that these documents were hidden or destroyed because they show figures of deportees that are much lower than those that have been generally accepted. Although this possibility cannot be entirely excluded, it seems to me much more likely that the Ferenczy lists are embarrassing for the official historiography because they indicate the destination of the deportees. If the “missing” Ferenczy transport lists show that even a substantial minority of the deportees was not destined for Auschwitz, this would imply, of course, that the large-scale 1944 deportation of Hungarian Jews was not organized as part of any extermination program. (According to the official “Holocaust” story, Auschwitz was the only operational extermination camp between May and July 1944.)[52]

Important in this regard are the 1944 transport lists stored in the archive of the former Stutthof concentration camp. These records show that between June 29 and October 28, 1944, a total of 48,619 predominantly female Jewish prisoners arrived at the Stutthof camp (located east of Danzig/ Gdansk in present-day northern Poland). About half of these deportees – 25,043 – had arrived from two Baltic camps: Kaunas (Lithuania) and Riga (Latvia). These prisoners had been evacuated in the face the advancing Red Army. Almost as many – 23,566 – had arrived from Auschwitz.[53] For three of the large transports from Auschwitz (August 14, 16 and 28, 1944) we have more or less complete lists of the deportees, with names and nationalities. Over 99 percent of the deportees in the first two of these three transports were Jewish females from Hungary. How many of them had been registered in Auschwitz, and how many had been held in the Birkenau “transit camp” without being registered, remain unknown.

Remarkably, some of the Jewish women transferred to Stutthof from Kaunas and Riga were of Hungarian nationality. For example, more than 90 percent of the 793 Jewish women who made up the August 4 transport from Kaunas were originally from Hungary. A certain number of the 9,537 who arrived at Stutthof in the transports from Riga of August 9 and October 1 were likewise Hungarian Jewish women. It is quite possible that these Jewish females had first been sent to the Baltic region by way of Auschwitz, but it’s equally possible that they were sent to Lithuania and Latvia directly from Hungary. In the Baltic lands they were doubtless employed in work that was important for the war economy, possibly for the Todt Organization, until the advance of the Red Army forced the Germans to evacuate them to Stutthof. There such Jewish females were employed in the numerous sub-camps, predominantly in industrial work, but some also in agriculture.[54]

Piece by piece, such document fragments provide an overall view of the important May–July 1944 period. Although many gaps still remain, a coherent and logical picture is emerging. Approximately 437,000 Jews were deported from Hungary. The was done, first of all, because at that time Germany desperately needed labor. (Virtually every able-bodied German man had been called to military service.) Furthermore, security considerations almost certainly played a role. At that time, an invasion of Hungary by the Red Army had become a real possibility, and Hungary’s large Jewish population naturally (and understandably) would have sided with the Soviets. Auschwitz was the first destination for most, and perhaps nearly all, of the Jews deported from Hungary. Some 28,000 of these Jewish deportees were registered in Auschwitz, but the rest either remained in the Birkenau “transit camp” for some time or were soon distributed to various labor camps or labor units. In March 1999 in Budapest, Carlo Mattogno and I met in person with one of these wartime deportees. He told us that he had spent only a few days in Auschwitz before being sent to the Silesian labor camp of Gross-Rosen.

In the 1994 German edition of his second book, Jean-Claude Pressac writes:[55] “By the end of the war, according to the Encyclopaedia Judaica, Hungarian Jewish males and females were found in 386 concentration and labor camps, as well as in labor units, where they had survived a real martyrdom. They were seen everywhere, from a few hundred in the labor units to tens of thousands in the ‘big’ camps.”

We see no reason to doubt the veracity of this statement. One of the most crucial unsolved problems is the question of where the unemployable Hungarian Jews were billeted. Birkenau simply could not accommodate all of them. We are not aware of documents about a camp situated outside Auschwitz where these people were housed. If such documents existed, they were most likely destroyed or hidden by the victors, as they were radically incompatible with the legend of the end of Hungarian Jews in Birkenau’s gas chambers.

The fact that among the deported Hungarian Jews there was a certain number of children is due, most probably, to the German policy of not separating families. (Of course, it would have been better for these children if they had not been deported at all, but that’s another matter.) The Jewish children were by no means murdered as “useless eaters,” as the official “Holocaust” history contends. Proof of this are the documents Mattogno and I found during our third research visit to Russian archives. I am referring in particular to a 217-page report written in early 1945, shortly after the Soviet liberation of Auschwitz. It was written, in German, under the auspices of the Soviets by four former camp inmates, the Jewish physicians Lebovits, Weil, Reich and Bloch. It contains more than a thousand names of Auschwitz prisoners, nearly all of them Jews, with information about each one’s age and date of imprisonment. These prisoners had been in the Auschwitz hospital on January 27, 1945, when the Red Army took control of the camp. Among those patients are 97 boys and 83 girls in ages ranging from a few months to 15 years.[56] One was a three-year-old Hungarian Jewish boy, J. J. Malek, and another was an eleven-year-old Hungarian Jewish girl, R. M. Salomon.[57] The former had arrived at Auschwitz in May 1944, the latter in July of the same year. According to the official “Holocaust” story, these two Jewish children would never have lived to see the year 1945; they would have been gassed immediately upon arrival.

Under the present circumstances, it is of course not possible to determine the number of victims among the deported Hungarian Jews, but it was probably on the order of several tens of thousands. It is a well-known fact that countless prisoners succumbed to diseases in the chaotic final months of the war. At any rate, Jews were not exactly an endangered species in postwar Hungary. They almost completely dominated the Communist Party and the dreaded secret police during the first years of the brutal Soviet-imposed regime headed by the Jew Matyas Rakosi.[58] For a time in the early 1950s, there was only one non-Jew in the Central Committee of the ruling Hungarian Communist Party. (According to a popular joke of the time, he had been given this position to ensure that someone in the Central Committee would be able to sign death sentences on the Sabbath.)

5. Conclusion

With their historical and technical arguments, the revisionists have demolished the “Holocaust” extermination and gas chamber legends. But their task is far from complete. Thus far, they have only partly succeeded in demonstrating what really did happen to Europe’s Jews during the Second World War.

Many revisionists regard Walter Sanning’s 1993 book, The Dissolution of Eastern European Jewry,[59] as the definitive answer to this question. And while Sanning has indeed produced an admirable work that no serious researcher can afford to ignore, what I said about Butz’s The Hoax of the Twentieth Century may equally apply to Sanning’s demographic study: Even an outstanding work can contain errors. Sanning’s book suffers from two flaws: The author does not take into account the “Korherr Report,”[60] the most important German wartime document about Europe’s Jewish population, and he puts too much faith in Soviet sources. For example, he relies heavily on David Bergelson, head of the wartime Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, who said that more than 80 percent of the Soviet Jews were evacuated prior to the arrival of the advancing German forces, and therefore never came under German control. Sanning does not consider the possibility that Bergelson exaggerated the number of evacuated Soviet Jews to enhance the image of the Soviet regime as the “Savior of the Jews from Fascism.” The declarations of a Soviet propagandist should be regarded with skepticism.

Decisive progress in the investigation of the fate of Europe’s Jews during the Second World War, including reliable estimates of Jewish wartime losses, can be expected only after historians gain access to previously unknown documents from archives in eastern Europe and the former USSR. When I say “historians” I naturally mean the revisionists, because our opponents will not tackle this task.

Notes