← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · Oliver Cromwell
Thread ID: 4210 | Posts: 13 | Started: 2002-12-27
2002-12-27 14:44 | User Profile
Greetings. I mean this thread, or perhaps other threads as well, to be an introduction to war propaganda that is still being used by decetful people to further their political/social agendas.
I'd like to start with how many Jews were actually killed at Auschwitz.
Right after the war, two German businessmen were hung by a British Military Tribunal for selling a hydrocyanide based pesticide to Auschwitz. This was called Zyklon-B, and thousands of tons were produced every year before, during and after the war as a fumigant. It was claimed that Dr. Tesch, Zyklon's inventer, and Mr. Weinbacher, a company official, knowingly sent Zyklon to Auschwitz, and trained SS personel in it's use, including it's use homicidally.
The judge had Dr. Tesch hung after a former clerk claimed she saw a memo which was never produced, and a business enemy who was a leftist political activist claimed Tesch confided that he saw bad things at Auschwitz.
In Weinbacher's judgement, the judge said that while there was no proof either oral or written that Weinbacher knew Zyklon was being used to kill Jews, it was common knowledge that 4.5 million Jews were killed at Auschwitz with Zyklon therefore Weinbacher must have known. Now at a Military Tribunal, that is BIG EVIDENCE, so they had this guy with three children hung right away.
So, the numbers have gone from 4.5 million Jews killed in 1946 to 700,000 today, which is the basic consensus figure for those establishment historians interested in these things.
The problem is that there in simply no forensic evidence for large scale homicidal gas chambers at Auschwitz, therefore one relies on train schedules and cremation capacity (since there are no graves big enough to hold anywhere near 700,000 corpses.
The figures go like this:
X amount of Jews could fit into these trains from this district. Y amount of Jews could be cremated in these facilities in this amount of time.
Therefore, when a senior editor of Der Spiegel, Freitjof Meyer, found a document a few months ago saying that this particular "Krema" was not operational from this date to that date, we have to subtract this many Jews from the total. There was some moaning and groaning, but you'll find very few historians that will even defend the one million number, because there isn't a database or anything like that, just estimates based on hypothetical cremation rates, fuel consumptions, etc..
Replies welcome.
2002-12-27 14:59 | User Profile
Oliver,
I don`t believe in the "holocaust" gas chamber nonesense either. I am of the opinion that most of the Jews died in the final months of WW II due to starvation and an outbreak of typhus. What do you think the total number of deaths were and by what causes?
2002-12-27 15:31 | User Profile
I don't think the true total will ever been known. There were many killed by the Einsatzgruppen, the killing squads composed of both German and Eastern European auxilleries, many died in battle on the Soviet side, and there were large casualties in the camps from hungar, disease and murder.
One of the problems of the homicidal gas chambers is they vary so much from camp to camp, which is not military, and particularly not Germanic style.
It is currently believed that the methods used in the various camps were:
Auschwitz- Hydrogencyanide Treblinka - Diesel fumes from Russian T-34 tank engines Sobibor - Diesel fumes from a Russian submarine Chelmno - Diesel fumes from mobile vans Mauthausen- Underground death swimming pools
For a total of just over 2 million.
2002-12-27 15:42 | User Profile
In 1946 the Swiss Red Cross estimated between one-half million and one and one-half million Jews died in the holocaust. I've seen this report on the internet, but I can't dig it up at the moment. I consider it to be the most reliable, objective, and realistic report on record of the holocaust body count.
The Zionist claim that we white devils liquidated six-million of god's darlings is demographically and scientifically impossible.
-Z-
2002-12-27 16:10 | User Profile
Oliver, Zoroaster,
That`s roughly where I would put the figure based on my own readings from times past. When I consider how many people were killed in WW II, I think that Le Pen was correct when he referred to this as a "detail" of many that occurred in WW II.
They should get over it, but then again, there is too much profit in more ways than one to do that.
2002-12-27 16:24 | User Profile
I got interested in this subject years ago. When West Germany agreed to
compensate victims of the holocaust, survivors started coming out of the
woodwork. I asked the German Information Center for the number of surviving
Jews who made claims for restitution, or "Wiedergutmaching". They sent me
a pamphlet called FOCUS ON, dated May 1985. The number was 4,393,365.
This number represents a bare minimum, since the head of a household
survivor makes one claim, for his entire family. No record could be found for
the number of dependents that also survived.
The ADL put out an anthology called THE HOLOCAUST AND GENOCIDE for
the purpose of teaching holocaust to NJ HS students. A large table called
"Estimated Number of Jews Killed in the Final Solution". It gives the
"Estimated pre-final solution population", 1938 for each nation in Europe, and
next to it is another column called "Estimated Jewish Population Annihilated".
The difference of course is trhe number of survivors. In Eastern Europe and
the USSR, the survivors number 2,522,000. (East Germany did not offer
restitution to survivors in Eastern Europe, as W. Germany did.)
By adding this number to the survivors in the West, a sum of the survivors is
6,915,365. How many Jews were there in the areas occupied by the Natzi's
before the war? The ADL lists 8,861,800. Subtracting, we get 1,946,435 as the
maximum number of Jews who died of all causes in occupied territory from
1938 to 1945.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Unfortunately, the literature that considers matters pertaining to the factual basis of the "Holocaust" myth is very technical and complicated. Nonetheless, if you have the courage and intellectual honesty and fortitude to consider the matter would urge you to see the following introductory material and take a couple of hours to carefully review the material. [url=http://www.codoh.com/info/infoihr/ihrleafdex.html]http://www.codoh.com/info/infoihr/ihrleafdex.html[/url] www.ety.com/tell/books/jgjewstats/jgstattoc.htm [url=http://codoh.com/gcgv/gcgvbrowning.html]http://codoh.com/gcgv/gcgvbrowning.html[/url] [url=http://codoh.com/gcgv/gc46-ORIGI.HTML]http://codoh.com/gcgv/gc46-ORIGI.HTML[/url] [url=http://www.zundelsite.org/101.html]http://www.zundelsite.org/101.html[/url] [url=http://www.zundelsite.org/english/debate/debatetoc.html]http://www.zundelsite.org/english/debate/d.../debatetoc.html[/url] [url=http://www.codoh.org/revisionist/review/tr09denyhist.html]http://www.codoh.org/revisionist/review/tr...09denyhist.html[/url] [url=http://netjunk.com/users/library/simon_w.htm]http://netjunk.com/users/library/simon_w.htm[/url]
If and when you need more serious technical material to satisfy and desire for truth you may have I would refer you to the following:
[url=http://codoh.com/rudolf/rudreport/rudreport.html]http://codoh.com/rudolf/rudreport/rudreport.html[/url] [url=http://codoh.com/gcgv/gcdiesel.html]http://codoh.com/gcgv/gcdiesel.html[/url] [url=http://www.zundelsite.org/english/leuchter/report1/index.html]http://www.zundelsite.org/english/leuchter...ort1/index.html[/url] [url=http://www.lebensraum.org/english/leuchter/report2/leucha.html]http://www.lebensraum.org/english/leuchter...rt2/leucha.html[/url] [url=http://codoh.com/gcgv/gc426v12.html]http://codoh.com/gcgv/gc426v12.html[/url] [url=http://codoh.com/gcgv/gcpatwill.html]http://codoh.com/gcgv/gcpatwill.html[/url] [url=http://codoh.com/gcgv/gcgvtyph.html]http://codoh.com/gcgv/gcgvtyph.html[/url] [url=http://codoh.com/gcgv/gcpprsac2.html]http://codoh.com/gcgv/gcpprsac2.html[/url] [url=http://codoh.com/gcgv/gcdelouse.html]http://codoh.com/gcgv/gcdelouse.html[/url]
Perhaps for a change you could consider holocausts that actually happened. If you are concerned at all with the fate of Europa consider the following: [url=http://codoh.com/atro/atrocity.html]http://codoh.com/atro/atrocity.html[/url] www.iolaos.com/scriptorium/english/archives/sginferno/sgi00.html [url=http://www.jrbooksonline.com/polish_atrocities.htm]http://www.jrbooksonline.com/polish_atrocities.htm[/url] [url=http://www.faem.com/edward/dresden.htm]http://www.faem.com/edward/dresden.htm[/url] [url=http://www.melvig.org/files/dresden.html]http://www.melvig.org/files/dresden.html[/url] [url=http://netjunk.com/users/library/cm_rev.htm]http://netjunk.com/users/library/cm_rev.htm[/url] [url=http://netjunk.com/users/library/bacque_1.htm]http://netjunk.com/users/library/bacque_1.htm[/url] [url=http://netjunk.com/users/library/ike.htm]http://netjunk.com/users/library/ike.htm[/url] [url=http://netjunk.com/users/library/vinnitsa.htm]http://netjunk.com/users/library/vinnitsa.htm[/url]
[url=http://www.jewwatch.com/jew-genocide-USSRchristians.html]http://www.jewwatch.com/jew-genocide-USSRc...christians.html[/url] [url=http://www.jewwatch.com/jew-genocide-USA.html]http://www.jewwatch.com/jew-genocide-USA.html[/url]
Rape as means of effecting a German genocide: [url=http://netjunk.com/users/library/massrape.htm]http://netjunk.com/users/library/massrape.htm[/url]
A once popular text calling for genocidal destruction of Germans: [url=http://www.ihr.org/books/kaufman/perish.html]http://www.ihr.org/books/kaufman/perish.html[/url]
2002-12-27 16:26 | User Profile
When I consider how many people were killed in WW II, I think that Le Pen was correct when he referred to this as a "detail" of many that occurred in WW II.
Actually, this was another media lie. Le Pen said that the "chambre de gas" (spelling is from memory) the gas chambers, or the 2 million figure, was a detail of history. I've checked with many sources, and to my knowledge, never said that the "holocaust" or the 5-6 million numbers was a detail of history.
Just another case of our mindless media barfing up the lies and exaggerations of their puppet masters.
Regards
2002-12-27 19:06 | User Profile
Originally posted by Sertorius@Dec 27 2002, 16:10 ** They should get over it, but then again, there is too much profit in more ways than one to do that. **
Which is why they won't.
But turn it around: If the Europeans ever decided to hold Judaism accountable for the Soviet Holocaust (which is a distinct possibility), getting over it quickly would be a bad idea for reasons of group cohesion.
The Holocaust is not only a shakedown, its aim seems in part a prop for Jewish solidarity. It works; more to the point, it can be turned around.
Thanks to Ed for the interesting links.
2002-12-28 04:10 | User Profile
The Barnes Review [url=http://www.tbrnews.org/Archives/a050.htm]http://www.tbrnews.org/Archives/a050.htm[/url] The origins of the great myth of the Twentieth century
In the years following the end of the Second World War, a movement has developed in the international Jewish community concerning the number of their co- religionists who perished in the brutal hecatomb of that war. In 1948, an official French bureau dealing with war crimes stated that the minimum number of Jewish dead in the Auschwitz camp was 8 million.
The Soviet Auschwitz Commission stated in the same year that the total of Jewish dead in the camp was 5.5 million and their satellite Polish communist government stated that the official death toll of Jews, again in Auschwitz camp, was now firmly fixed at 4 million.
This figure, of 4 million Jewish dead in Auschwitz, was again firmly fixed by a September 30, 1989 article in the "Jerusalem Post."
There was another modification in the American-published Aufbau, a New York Jewish newspaper, of August 3, 1990 that further reduced the number of Auschwitz Jewish victims to 900,000.
On March 3, 1991, an article appeared in the New York Times which gave a radically reduced figure, based entirely on the complete, wartime official German concentration camp records.
These records, which had been captured at the headquarters of the camp system at Oranienbaum camp outside of Berlin in April of 1945 by the Soviet Army, were subsequently microfilmed by the then-Soviet archives in Moscow. Prior to glasnost, these records were only made available, according to Russian sources, to Jewish researchers and were forbidden to anyone else for reasons that will shortly become very obvious.
These records, the completeness and authenticity of which no one disputes, state that the total of all persons who died in the German prison camp system from its inception in 1935 to its collapse in late 1944 and early 1945 were 403,712.
These official records, though lengthy and very prolix, are in the process of being released for public consumption.
Every month, without fail, the commanders of each camp and each satellite camp, were required to send an accurate accounting of their respective inmates to the commander of the camps, SS General Richard Glücks at Oranienbaum camp.
From these records, it is extremely easy to ascertain the number of prisoners in each camp at a given date, their origins, sex and offenses. The death tolls in each camp were also incorporated into these monthly reports.
All camp inmates were issued numbers when they entered the camp and their names were entered in the camp ledgers. There was no exception to this rule as rations and clothing for the inmates were based entirely upon accurate figures.
All other camps aside, the figures for the extensive Auschwitz complex reflect the number of inmates who died, who they were and what they died from, be it execution or natural causes.
Also included in the monthly reports were the lists of inmates who had been received at the camp during the previous thirty day period as well as the inmates who were either released upon completion of sentence or transferred to another camp in the system.
Since those who speak of millions or at the least, hundreds of thousands, of Jews murdered during the war always refer to these deaths occurring at Auschwitz, it might prove instructive to set forth the official figures for that camp.
From its inception in mid-1941 to its closing in December, 1944, a total of 109,399 inmates incarcerated in Auschwitz died. Most of the prisoners in that camp were professional criminals, sex offenders, communists and others. The majority of the prisoners were Polish.
Of this figure, 103,429, died of typhus alone
The balance of 5,970 either died of natural causes, suicide or execution for such matters as theft, assault on other inmates or guards, escape or attempted escape.
Of the 109,399 dead, 60,509 were Jews and are so carried on the official death rosters.
The legend that Auschwitz was a murder camp where millions (or hundreds of thousands) of Jews were gassed and cremated is merely that; a legend that has been enhanced and embellished in furtherance of a chronic and on-going extensive fund- raising enterprise.
As an example of historical mendacity, let us consider the fate of the Hungarian Jews who were, at the strong request of the Hungarian government, evacuated from that country and sent to Auschwitz camp between May and October of 1944.
According to Lucy Dawidowicz in her 1975 book, The War Against the Jews, the number of Hungarian Jews transported to Auschwitz camp and murdered between May through October of 1944 was 450,000. A later work by Raul Hilberg entitled The Destruction of the European Jews published in 1985 gives the total of Hungarian Jews transported to Auschwitz and immediately gassed during the same period as 180,000.
The official German records, both of the Concentration Camp system and the German State Railways were as follows: May through October, 1944 May 8548 June 3981 July 6543 Aug 3881 Sept 163 Oct 1 Total number of Hungarian Jews sent to Auschwitz, May-October 1944: 23,134.
These figures are now compared with the same official records showing the number of Hungarian Jews transferred, obviously alive, from Auschwitz during the same period::
May 2963
June 5934
July 9630
Aug 1500
Sept 1300
Oct 200
Total number of Hungarian Jews transferred from Auschwitz between May and October, 1944: 21,527
The number of Hungarian Jews, therefore, remaining in Auschwitz after October, 1944 were 1,607.
The perpetually penitent German government, mostly under the aegis of the former Chancellor Helmuth Kohl, has paid out over 102,653 billion German marks to the Jewish community throughout the world and has given, officially, 3 billion marks to the State of Israel as ââ¬Åcompensationââ¬Â for Jewish persecutions.
Although a number of holocaust writers agree that the Russian originals of official German records are completely factual, their only counter-argument has been that there simply must be "secret lists" that, if ever found, would prove the immense numbers of dead that have become part and parcel of their perpetual and highly effective fund- raising campaign.
Of course no one has ever seen these lists but the convoluted argument runs that since everyone knows that six million Jews were murdered by the Germans, lists of these six million must exist. The fact that there are no such lists in existence and that no researcher of any point of view has been able to discover one page of such lists in no way discourages the creative writers and the equally creative media producers from using a figure that, according to one holocaust scholar is only "symbolic" in nature.
In attempting to defend their eroding position, these writers have stated that enormous trains full of Jews were driven into the camp grounds at Auschwitz and the occupants quickly gassed and cremated with no records ever kept by the authorities.
If these writers are aware that it is impossible to prove a negative, they show no signs of following this logical dictum.
In a thoroughly mendacious attempt to prove the case of secret lists and mystery death trains, such writers as Danuta Czech have quite cheerfully produced highly embellished examples of a number of copies of official records left behind when the SS evacuated the camp in December of 1945.
What Czech has done is to take an official report on the number of prisoners arriving at Auschwitz on a certain date, claim that they were all Jews and that most of them were immediately gassed.
She has supplied hundreds of such examples, all of which have been deliberately altered and only one will suffice.
On August 23, 1943, Czech speaks of a "RSHA" (Gestapo) transport arriving at the camp with "2,000 Jews" on board.
These transports consisted of railroad trains utilizing small boxcars as prisoner transport.
Czech states that 441 men and 591 women were given inmate numbers (and lists them) while the remaining 1,000 Jews were "killed in the gas chambers."
The official record shows that at least part of this story is true. The transport and inmate admission records of that day show the origin of the train and the number of cars and prisoners involved.
It would have been totally impossible to fit an extra 1,000 human beings into the cars of that specific transport without first compacting them into very small parcels and if this were the case, there would have been no need to kill them later.
The official records for that date also indicate that the new arrivals came from the labor camp at Kolo and that only twenty one of them were Jews.
This 850 page book, written by a member of the Auschwitz Museum staff, is filled with such nonsense and studded with other entries that show, very clearly, the enormous death toll inflicted not by the SS but by typhus.
There is one incident of massacre, mainly of sick and elderly Jews, in Auschwitz that is entirely and sadly true.
Nearly 10,000 of these prisoners were machine gunned and beaten to death by the guards before the Soviet army arrived in early 1945.
Blood was said to be running out the doors in heavy streams by the Russian military who witnessed the scene.
Unfortunately for Czech and the legion of other creative writers, the guards were not members of the dread SS but locally-recruited Polish policemen who remained behind long after the Germans had evacuated the camp to the west.
One argument often heard on the part of the holocaust theory promoters is that of the 300,000 Jewish residents of the Polish capital of Warsaw, almost none have ever been accounted for after the German invasion in September of 1939.
These numbers have been repeatedly cited in at attempt to refute revisionist writers whom their counterparts scornfully refer to as "Holocaust Deniers."
In 1995, Arkady Vaksberg, a Russian Jew, attorney and co-founder of Moscow's "Literary Gazette" gave an account of these Polish Jews in his book, "Stalin Against the Jews" published by Doubleday.
Vaksberg goes into some detail about the fate of the Warsaw Jews. He states that these Jews attempted to flee into what they foolishly thought would be the safety of Stalin's Russia only to be shot down by Stalin's border guards or seized and put into the Soviet Gulags from which few ever returned.. Vaksberg speaks of "hundreds of thousands" of such individuals.
Far from being gassed or shot by the advancing Germans, they were either murdered at once by the Soviet border guards (acting on Stalin's specific orders) or murdered later in his death camps.
The official German records are augmented and complimented by the official British intelligence intercepts of radio reports sent from Auschwitz to Oranienbaum between early 1942 and February of 1943, a period in which many Jews were purported to be gassed.
In the official British intelligence reports, published in 1980 one can read,
"The returns from Auschwitz, the largest of the camps with 20,000 prisoners, mentioned illness as the main cause of death, but included references to shootings and hangings. There were no references in the decrypts to gassing."
One of the enduring Auschwitz fictive legends deals with the subject of enormous gas chambers and crematoriums which were constructed solely to murder and dispose of Jewish prisoners.
When typhus entered the camp in 1942, the death tolls rose rapidly and were the object of great concern to the leaders of the camp system. Auschwitz was a huge labor camp and many German firms had contracted with the SS for what was essentially slave labor for their factories constructed in the vicinity.
The loss of valuable workers was of such concern to Berlin that immediate antiseptic measures were instituted at all camps, given that many infected prisoners were transferred from one camp to another.
Typhus is spread in humans by the head louse and a great influx of lousy Soviet prisoners of war, after June of 1941, brought the disease with them.
All inmates entering the camp had to be stripped, issued clean camp clothing, have their heads shaven and be showered using medicated soap.
The clothing was put into small rooms and deloused by using Zyklon B, a cyanide preparation widely used in the German military for disinfecting. A through post-war check by forensic personnel of the areas now designated as the Auschwitz gas chambers indicates that cyanide gas was never used in these areas. The actual delousing areas were so small that even at best, they might have held twenty five humans at a time. This would mean that the gassing must have begun somewhere in the latter years of the nineteenth century and, in theory at least, still be in progress into the twenty first.
The genuine tragedy of the uprooting and deportation of Europe's Jews has been long overshadowed by the thoroughly fictional creations of latter day fund raisers who have scrambled up onto the bodies of their co-religionists solely for the purpose of political advantage and monetary gain.
So important has the mythic number of six millions of slaughtered Jews become to those who rely on it to bolster their fiscal demands, that its creators have applied tremendous social, political and economic pressure to maintain it.
Although the United States has freedom of speech, no individual regardless of their probity or accuracy, is given any kind of public credence should they question this sum.
In point of fact, any such questioner runs the risk of being shrilly attacked in a complaisant print media as being either a practicing Nazi or a deluded lunatic.
In other countries, such as Canada, France, Spain and most especially, Germany, to bring this enormous figure into even the slightest question is to invite immediate legal retaliation.
To question or to deny the accuracy of this figure, as well as attendant questioning of a planned, state-ordered massacre of all the Jews of Europe by the government of the Third Reich , is to invite hysteric prosecution accompanied by a dismal and shrill chorus of wailings from the cadre of professional mourners into whose coffers their rewards flow.
During the Middle Ages, so-called alchemists expended a great deal of their time and the money of others attempting to turn lead into gold. Now, it appears that others have found a most successful, and highly profitable, way to turn blood into gold.
2002-12-28 11:11 | User Profile
On March 3, 1991, an article appeared in the New York Times which gave a radically reduced figure, based entirely on the complete, wartime official German concentration camp records.
While I have no doubt that the current 700,000 number is way too high, unfortunately the list Barns speaks of is hypothetical.
In other words, that article was just made up.
Having said that, I have no doubt such records, or parts of such records, are somewhere.
2002-12-28 16:16 | User Profile
More revisionist websites re Auschwitz: "No Holes,No Gas Chamber(s)",by Carlo Mattogno [url=http://vho.org/~granata/noholes.html]http://vho.org/~granata/noholes.html[/url] "Air Photo Evidence",by John Ball-This website gives a detailed analysis of Auschwitz photos and maps. [url=http://www.air-photo.com/english/]http://www.air-photo.com/english/[/url]
2002-12-28 19:51 | User Profile
I would think that if extermination was the goal, castration would have been the simple soultion over the long term. ̉̉̉
2002-12-29 05:59 | User Profile
Previously posted by Il Ragno:
Complete with sidebar commentary by Bill White.
[url=http://216.133.73.245/lsn/news.asp?FileNam...1103094913.html]http://216.133.73.245/lsn/news.asp?FileNam...1103094913.html[/url]
OstEuropa
Auschwitz, Poland -- [LSN: Originally, the (Jewish) Soviets said that 4 million Jews were killed at Auschwitz, and that certain buildings were originaly Nazi gas chambers. It was against the law to say that 1 million Jews were killed there, or saying that the 'gas chambers' were Soviet reproductions. You could be executed for saying those things. In the mid-1990s, the Polish government said that, well, no, 1 million Jews were killed there, and the 'gas chambers' were built by the Soviets as reproductions in 1948, and that if you said differently you could get a stiff jail sentence.
Now, official, mainstream German historians are saying that there were no gas chambers in Auschwitz, that any actual killings occurred outside of the camp, and that the number killed is much lower than 1 million. In reality, the claim that "six million" Jews died in the Holocaust was a fabrication created by the Soviet-Jewish propagandist Ilya Ehrenberg in 1944, before the wars' end and before the Soviets had occupied any of the territory that contained 'gas chambers'. It was a lie that the official Jewish establishment in the United States, which was heavily invested in and tied into Soviet communism, republished repeatedly in their journals, and later repeated and yelled and screamed at people until we were forced to believe it.
The truth is that the "Holocaust" was invented by the Soviets and used by US Jews to fatten their pockets with "Holocaust reparations", and was almost entirely a fabrication. There were anti-Jewish atrocities on the Eastern Front, but compared to the Jewish-Soviet atrocities on that front, what you have is a war of two sets of massive atrocities, and not a continent-wide act of anti-Jewish genocide.]
Issues of Contemporary History
The Number of Victims of Auschwitz
New Findings Through New Archival Discoveries
Fritjof Meyer
Fritjof Meyer (1932), Dipl. DHP, Dipl.-Politologe, Dipl.-Kameralist, Leitender Redakteur. Der Spiegel, Hamburg
In 1945, the Soviet investigative commission, a product of war propaganda, calculated four million victims of the National Socialist labour- and death camp, Auschwitz-Birkenau. Under pressure, Camp Commandant Hoess stated three million, then recanted. How many people actually fell victim to this singular act of mass murder could, up to now, only be guessed at. The first Holocaust historian, Gerald Reitlinger, estimated one million, but the latest research places the number at several hundred thousand less. Two new documents about the capacity of the crematoria now confirm the existing documentation concerning interments to the camp, thereby finally shifting the dimensions of this breach of civilization into the realm of the conceivable, and so only now becoming a convincing monument for future generations.
[Notes]
A KEY DOCUMENT providing information about the capacity of the crematoria at Auschwitz-Birkenau has now been discovered. At the same time, a statement by Camp Commandant [Rudolf] Hoess concerning their operating times has come to light. On the basis of this existing, but hitherto largely ignored documentation regarding those people delivered into this camp, it is now possible to compute more accurately how many people were murdered at Auschwitz. Let's say it up-front: half a million fell victim to the genocide.
Credit is due to Robert-Jan van Pelt, Professor of Architecture at the University of Waterloo in Canada, for this breakthrough. He came into prominence with his outstanding book "Auschwitz -- From 1270 to the Present", written in conjunction with Deborah Dwork.[1] Van Pelt appeared as an expert witness for the defence at the London lawsuit brought by David Irving againt Deborah Lipstadt, who had termed Irving an Auschwitz denier. Pelt has just published a very important book on the preparation of his expert report -- with extracts from the document -- and the proceedings themselves.
Irving lost the trial, and indeed deserved to, because Irving, a successful author with a proven talent for research had increasingly aligned himself with the warped views of his Nazi cohorts, and he persisted, even in court, to hold to the absurd position that there were no gas chambers for killing people at Auschwitz-Birkenau. The arguments he claimed for the lack of capacity of Leichenkeller 1 [Basement Morgue No.1] of crematoria I and II were unconvincing. Judge Charles Gray found that, "no objective, fair-minded historian would have serious cause to doubt that they were operated on a substantial scale to kill hundreds of thousands of Jews".
It was, in general, a rightful judgement. This is not the place to go into details such as that the existing documentation, namely documents concerning certain subsequent adaptations (e.g. induction openings and gas-detection devices), converting buildings not originally erected as such into "gas chambers", as well as the relevant eye-witness accounts, point rather more in the direction of trials being conducted in March/April 1943 for the utilisation of the Leichenkeller [basement morgue] for mass murder after completion of the crematoria in the early summer of 1943.
The trials evidently failed, because the ventilation was counter-productive[3] and the expected masses of victims did not arrive in the following eleven months.[4] The genocide that was actually committed evidently took place primarily in the two converted farm houses outside the camp; the foundations of the first, the "White House" or "Bunker I", have only recently been discovered.[5]
More than 400 people at a time were driven into two rooms of this gas chamber, with a combined area of 90 square metres. This occurred daily, mostly in the evening, for one year from the spring of 1942.[6] The "Red House", or "Bunker II", 105 square metres in size for a maximum of 500 victims[7], was probably in use from December 1942 until the cessation of murder by gassing on 2 November 1944.
The Schutzhaftlagerfuhrer [Internment Camp commander], SS-Sturmbannfuhrer Hans Aumeier testified on October 29, 1945.[8] In November 1942, in strict secrecy, 50-80 prisoners where killed with gas in the Leichenkammer of the crematorium in the main camp. The next day, under utmost secrecy, Hoess disclosed to him, and to the Camp-Gestapo-Chief Grabner, the Camp Commanding Officer [Lagerfuhrer] Hessler, the Forced Labour Commander [Arbeitseinsatzfuhrer] Schwan, and the camp physician, that he had received an order from Himmler via the RSHA "to gas" all the weak, ill or disabled Jewish prisoners to prevent any further spread of epidemics. Hoess reported that he had performed the first killings the previous night and had thereby determined that the improvised gas chamber did not at all conform to their requirements. Hence gas chambers in the new crematoria at Birkenau were to be built as permanent fixtures. The whole thing would be a top state secret. Indiscretions or careless gossip would be punished by death, as those present, as well as further drawn-in accomplices, had to confirm in writing.
On the basis of their capacity, 350,000 people could have been murdered in the "Red House" or "Bunker II"alone within two years. Irving, of course -- and correspondingly van Pelt -- argued only about the basement crematoria [Krema I and II], even though there was a dramatic reduction in the death rate at Auschwitz which coincided precisely with their implementation, which lasted for a year, on account in fact of a Himmler order which initiated the purported "14 f 13" euthanasia action which also shut down the gas murders in the death camps established along the 1939 German-Soviet line of Demarcation, Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka.
At their trial session in London on 25. January, 2000 [transcript], the plaintiff [Irving] opened the cross-examination by complimenting the expert [Van Pelt] for his book on the history of Auschwitz: "It is one of the few books that I have read from cover to cover and it was a book that I found very difficult to put down." Then the two tore into each other over the question of whether or not the openings for the induction of Zyklon-B subsequently punched through the roof of the morgue during its adaptation were still visible (they are, which van Pelt did not yet know).
The second decisive issue was the question of whether or not a key document was a forgery: the letter of Auschwitz SS-Chief Architect Bischoff dated June 28, 1943 to the Wirtschafts- und Verwaltungshauptamt (WVHA) in Berlin in which he reported the completion of all four crematoria in Birkenau, the two large Lremas I and II each with 15 muffle kilns (combustion chambers for a corpse) as well as the two smaller ones, the only above-surface III and IV in Birkenau, each with 8 muffle kilns.[10]. Bischoff hastened to confirm in this letter an, in practice, entirely unproven daily cremation capacity in I and II of 1440 persons each, and of 768 bodies each for crematoria III and IV over a 24 hour shift. totalling (including the old crematoria at the base camp at Auschwitz, which had however already ceased operation) 4,756 corpses daily.
Irving failed to muster the necessary arguments to reinforce the, in this case, absolutely justifiable doubts about the authenticity of the document; Van Pelt's objections were more serious although also not absolutely convincing. The French expert Jean-Claude Pressac already named the letter "an internal propaganda lie of the SS" seven years ago.[11]
Van Pelt, in his report on the trial, has now furnished to us two pieces of information of no less sensational character: These two sources, in connection with the already existing, but largely ignored material, allow us to calculate relatively precisely the total number of victims of Auschwitz. In his 570-page book Van Pelt has almost hidden these documents and barely interprets them, and he did not introduce them to the trial at all. They contradict his own his expert report, not that they substantiate Irving's case. Van Pelt starts by quoting a document which has to my knowledge not previously been cited in the literature -- which calls into question the Bischoff letter of June 28, 1943 as it cuts Bischoff's own figures by half.[12]
According to this, a letter from Kurt Prufer, the chief engineer at Auschwitz, dated September 8, 1943, was discovered in the archives of the crematorium company Topf & Soehne (now: Erfurter Malzerei und Speicherbau), folder 241. It was thus written nine weeks after Bischoff's letter and after the completion of the crematoria, and therefore incorporates the first operational results According to Prufer, each of the crematoria I and II incinerated 800 bodies daily, and each of the two smaller III and IV burned 400, in other words a total of 2,400.
The actual burning time was one and a half hours[13] in one muffle kiln, which was designed for the dignified cremation of a corpse and for the purpose of exclusively extracting that corpse's ashes. During a hypothetical 24-hour operation, each muffle kiln could have incinerated 16 bodies, 240 in the 15 muffle kilns of a large crematorium. If Prufer quoted 800, he was probably assuming that, under concentration camp conditions, at least two corpses at a time could be fed into a muffle kiln simultaneously, and he was further rounding up the figures to at least 720 and 384 bodies respectively. In fact, one muffle kiln could hold up to three of the mostly extremely emaciated victims, in that case with a technologically-possible delay of 30 minutes each.
[14] Consequently, 720 corpses each could be cremated in I and II within 24 hours, together 1,440, and in III/IV, 384 (Prufer says: 400), together 768. Precisely these were the numbers quoted for each individual crematorium in the June 28, 1943 letter of SS-Bauleiter Bischoff; thus they were actually doubled. However, according to Prufer's report, 2,400 bodies could be cremated daily in all four crematoria combined, according to his previous calculation 2,208.
Of course, the crematoria were not in operation round the clock; in fact they broke down frequently. Crematorium I, started up on March 15, 1943, was already damaged after nine days. On July 18, its repairs were "approaching completion."[15] On April 3, 1944 the repair of 20 oven doors of the two large crematoria was ordered and not effected until October 17 [16] The chimney of crematorium III, operating from March 22 on, was already showing cracks on April 3, and it was unusable by mid-May.[17] As Camp commandant Rudolf Hoess reported after the war: "III failed entirely after a short time and was later not used at all. IV [put into operation on 4 April 1943, FM.] had to be repeatedly shut down because after four to six weeks the ovens or the chimney had burnt out"; from this arises for I an operation time of 509 days, 462 days for II, only 50 days for III and 309 days for IV,[18] therefore 971 days in 15 muffle kilns and 359 days in 8 muffle kilns.[19]
Van Pelt now delivers a second piece of surprising information with the publication of testimony by Hoess during cross-examination before the Krakow court 1947: "After eight or ten hours of operation, the crematoria were unfit for further use. It was impossible to keep them in continuous operation."[20] Averaging this statement, that is nine hours daily operation time, results in 18 incinerations per muffle kiln with three bodies each, consequently 270 in each I and II, together 540; in III/IV 144 each, together 288, thus totalling 828 per day.
The conclusion is simple: accordingly to the above, in Kremas I/II during the 971 days of operation, a total of 262,170 bodies could have been incinerated, and in III/IV during 359 days 51,696; a total of 313,866 dead incinerated in the crematoria of Birkenau. These still aren't all those who died at Auschwitz. According to Hoess, until the end of November, 1942, 107,000 corpses from the mass graves where burned on pyres.[21] Pressac challenges this number: he calculates 50,000.[22]
The problem, so far unexplained and not even recognised as such is where did the victims of the particularly excessive gassings in the winter of 1942/43 until the beginning of operation of the crematoria remain, as well as 57,000 of the 100,000 unregistered victims who arrived at Auschwitz from December 1942 until March 1943; we can properly assumed them to have been burned in the open air, and Hoess had included them in his testimony.
Therewith a total of around 433,000 corpses were incinerated at Auschwitz, not including the victims of the Hungary action (burned on pyres), but including the estimated 12,000 cremated in the old crematoria of the main camp.[23] This figure corresponds almost exactly with the sum resulting from the deliveries to the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp minus the transfers to other camps -- which is a profound confirmation.
According to Danuta Czech's "Kalendarium"[24] 735,000 people -- not including the transports from Hungary[25] which she did not include -- where brought to this criminal location. 15,000 were Soviet prisoners of war[26], of the remaining 720,000, 346,000, according to Czech, were registered, and thus recorded, while 374,000 were not registered. Czech concluded that these unregistered died in the gas chamber, a supposition for which however there exists no documentary evidence;[27] there were refugees without registration numbers also living in the camp.[28] Since the total of the registered amounted to 405,000[29], of the 374,000, who were initially interned without registration numbers, 59,000 must have been subsequently registered, so that 315,000 without registration numbers remained. 225,000 of the 720,000 were transferred to other camps[30] -- Czech only notes one tenth of these. 58,000 were evacuated upon liberation of the camp and 8,500 left behind,[31] so that 428,500 remained, a number which, including the prisoners of war, is consistent with the 433,000 dead from the partially estimated crematorium capacity: they were murdered.[32]
If we accept that all 315,000 non-registered were killed by gas as "unproductive" (the numbers killed by other means should be added to those registered in the camp who were selected for death by gassing), it proves that the two farmhouses converted to gas chambers sufficed for the purpose. Only for the transports from Hungary in the early summer of 1944 did other death facilities have to be called in, perhaps the shut-down crematorium III or the gas vans that had already been deployed in Soviet territory by the Einsatzgruppen and in the Wartheland death centre, Chelmo by the Gauleiter Greiser with Himmler's, and surely also Hitler's, authorisation.[33]
The fate of those deported from Hungary in 1944 deserves it's own examination. If we rely on Danuta Czech's information alone, 60 trains arrived at Birkenau from mid-May until the beginning of July.[34] Each transport comprised 3,000 people, so that accordingly 180,000 would have arrived, of which, according to Czech, 29,210 received a registration number. 110,000 were transferred to other camps,[35] 40,564 people, just in the month of October 1944 alone, were killed by gas, according to Czech.[36]
These considerations lead to the conclusion that half a million people were murdered at Auschwitz, of which about 356,000 were gassed.[37]
In recent years, the discussion concerning the number of victims of Auschwitz has gone around in ever wider circles and has so far not led to any result. Thus WÃÆáclaw Dlugoborski, research curator of the APMO explains the deathroll in September 1998 in these words in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung:
Shortly after the end of the war it was fixed at four million by a soviet investigation commission, without inquiry. Even though doubts about the accuracy of the estimate existed from the very beginning, it became dogma. Until 1989, a ban was enforced in eastern Europe on challenging the number of four million killed; employees at the Auschwitz memorial site who doubted the accuracy of the estimate were threatened with disciplinary proceedings. [38]
On February 19, 1946, in Nuremberg, the soviet prosecutor Smirnov restated the four million count.[39] Shortly thereafter, on March 11, 1946, Hoess, who had been previously convicted of murder by the state court in 1924, was arrested. He was accused of responsibility for the death of around two million people. [40] After three days of sleep deprivation,[41], torture, and being beaten after every reply, naked and forcibly intoxicated with alcohol,[42] the first interrogation took place in the face of "overwhelming evidence". Hoess himself related: "Even though I signed them, I do not know what is written in the proceedings. However, alcohol and whips were too much for me, too."[43] At 2:30 AM he put with visible difficulty his signature to these sentences:
At Auschwitz according to my own estimate approx. [cca] 3,000,000 people died. As an estimate I assume that [das. sic] 2,500,000 of these were gassed.[44] If the conclusions reached in this study are correct, his statement should more realistically have read: In Auschwitz far more than 300,000 people were gassed and altogether 500,000 died. If two zeroes and a figure 2 are added, his converse testimony in the interrogation would have approached the Soviet numbers.
Under interrogation on April 1-2, 1946, Hoess first stated 1.1 million killed, then again 2.5 million.[45] Threatened with extradition to Poland and execution [46], Hoess stuck with the figure of three million victims, in front of the Nuremberg Military Tribunal, of which 2.5 million "gassed and burned",[47] but he corrected this via the American prison psychologist[48] and thereafter in his Krakow transcripts ("had the prosecution not intervened, they would have finished me off"[49]) as "much too high" to a figure of 1.13 million delivered to him "for extermination" in addition to "the smaller actions",[50] therewith almost 900,000 closer to the conclusions of this study, although still, in detail -- exactly conforming to his original interrogation record --, hugely inflated. He stated approximately 110,000 victims for France -- in total 75,721 were interned. According to Hoess, 95,000 came from the Netherlands, but it was 60,026,[51] he counted around 90,000 for Slovakia, even though only 26,661 Slovakian Jews were placed at Auschwitz,[52] for Greece 65,000 for 53,789 actually deported.[53] Hoess claimed 20,000 for Belgium[54] supposedly 40,000 from Hungary, 250,000 from Poland (300,000 according to Piper[5]) and 100,000 from Germany -- without Hoess' or his Polish interrogator Jan Sehn's inclusion of Upper Selesia, but with Theresienstadt (together 69,000 according to Piper).
The unreliability of Hoess' figures of "millions" is so profound that Martin Broszat simply omitted them when he published The Hoess Papers.[56] The missing passages read:
"Romania was designated as the next country. From there, Eichmann was expecting approximately 4 million Jews, according to the indications of his commissaries."[57] More than one zero too many: according to the "Encyclopaedia of the Holocaust"[58] and the minutes of the Wannsee Conference of January 20, 1942, in 1940 there were only 342,000 Jews living in Romania.
Hoess further: "At the same time, or meanwhile, Bulgaria, with an estimated 2 million Jews was to follow." This number is exaggerated by about fifty-fold: according to the minutes of the Wannsee Conference, there were only 63,403 Jews in Bulgaria in 1943.
By 1953, Gerald Reitlinger had already estimated the number of victims at Auschwitz at one million in total, of which up to 750,000 were murdered by gas, of them 550,000 to 600,000 were killed on arrival.[60] According to Piper, 1,110,000 people died in the camp, of which 202,000 registered and 880,000 unregistered, among them 95,000 registered and 865,000 unregistered Jews.[61] Admittedly, at 300,000 Piper's figure for those interned from Poland is probably grossly exaggerated. The number of survivors from Hungary is also unclear from his writing.
Citing the most recent research Pressac writes of 631,000 to 711,000 dead in total, of which 470,000 to 550,000 non-registered Jews were murdered by gas. [62] With presumably 510,000 dead, of which probably 356,000 murdered by gas, this study arrives at conclusions which are not all that different.[63] This result does not diminish the scale of the barbarism, rather it verifies it -- a hardened warning against any new violation of civilization.