Holocaust Documents, Part 2: Documents and arguments regarding the homicidal nature of the facilities in question
Written by Sir Aaron Richards
Mirrored from https://imgur.com/a/725A7
CONTENTS:
Auschwitz II Birkenau aerial photos taken on August 23rd, '44, August 25, '44
Guard towers
Gas chamber roof of Krema II compared between Aug 25th and May 31st photo
David Olere's sketch of Krema III matches with air photos of 1944 published 30 years later
A picture of Krematorium III, taken from the Bauleitung construction album
Women standing in front of the Krema III building
Birkenau photograph taken on 31st May, 1944
The Krematoria security screen
Images from the Auschwitz album
Kremas II and III (background) during construction, February 1943
Defending the image
If the zyklon-b inlets weren't clear enough, here they are once again
Another Birkenau aerial photograph, taken approx. 3 weeks later
Grisly details around Krematorium IV and V
Gas-tight window shutters
Kremas IV and V had ventilation
Krematorium VI was planned
Birkenau, December 21, 1944
Birkenau photograph taken 2 weeks before liberation
Topf & Sons ovens of Krematorium II and III Birkenau ovens
1943 Zentralbauleitung document regarding the crematory output (the "Janisch document")
A denier pic that tries to mess with your mind
1942 Kurt Prüfer document
Another popular anti-crematory capacity image circulated among holocaust deniers
Krematorium II
Victims entering Krematorium II
Ruins of Krematorium II's undressing room (Leichenkeller 2)
Ruins of Krematorium II's homicidal gas chamber (Leichenkeller 1), viewing East
Ruins of Krematorium II's homicidal gas chamber (Leichenkeller 1), viewing North-West
Auschwitz Krema building located in the Birkenau camp, scale model
Grisly details of the Krematorium II scale model
Auskleideraum
A day in the life of a Sonderkommando
Cremation
The elevators of Kremas II and III
So how realistic and achievable is multiple corpse cremation per Topf muffle?
Can crematory smokestacks belch smoke and fire?
Cremation time sheet from the Gusen camp (Mauthausen-Gusen complex)
An overview of the crematoria capacities in some Nazi camps
Engineer Fritz Sander's letter to Topf, dated September 14th, 1942
Auschwitz typists can't keep their lies straight
Documents and arguments regarding the homicidal nature of the facilities in question
Zyklon-B pellets containing HCN poison gas
The Prussian Blue argument made by holocaust deniers
The American gas chamber strawman
Blueprint of Krematorium II
Vertical cross section of Krema II's Gas chamber
March 6, 1943 Karl Bischoff Letter about heating a "morgue room"
More proof of warm air ventilation, April 13th, 1943
Gaskeller Document regarding Krematorium II and III's gas chamber ventilation system's capability
Bischoff's "Vergasungskeller" and "Be- und Entlüftungsanlage"
If Kremas II and III were air-raid shelters, and Usain Bolt was an SS-guard...
Time sheet / Daily report of an Auschwitz worker
Krematorium III inventory
Gas-tight doors for the Birkenau Crematoria buildings, March 31st 1943
Zyklon-B outgassing curve presented by holocaust deniers
Dr. Johann Paul Kremer's diary
The Sonderkommando photographs
Closeup of Sonderkommando photograph # 282: The undressing women
Closeup of Sonderkommando photograph # 280: taken during the 2nd half of August 1944
A closeup of Krema IV and V
Image comparison around the "White House"
The Auschwitz water table
Concluding Auschwitz II Birkenau
The infamous entrance to Auschwitz II Birkenau, also known as "Main Guard House"
Birkenau was the largest of the more than 40 camps and sub-camps that made up the Auschwitz complex. During its three years of operation, it had a range of functions. When construction began in October 1941, it was supposed to be a camp for 125 thousand prisoners of war. It opened in March 1942, and served as a center for the extermination of Jews.
The majority—probably about 90%—of the victims of Auschwitz Concentration Camp complex died in Birkenau. This means more than a million people. The majority, more than nine out of every ten, were Jews. A large proportion of the more than 70 thousand Poles who died or were killed in the Auschwitz complex perished in Birkenau. So did approximately 20 thousand Gypsies, in addition to Soviet POWs and prisoners of other nationalities.
In November 1944, with the Soviet Red Army approaching through Poland, Himmler ordered gassing operations to cease across the Reich. Crematoria II, III, and IV were dismantled, while Crematorium I was transformed into an air raid shelter. The Sonderkommando were ordered to remove other evidence of the killings, including the mass graves. The SS destroyed written records, and in the final weeks before the camp's liberation, blew up the krematoria.
Himmler ordered the evacuation of all camps in January 1945, charging camp commanders with "making sure that not a single prisoner from the concentration camps falls alive into the hands of the enemy."[1] On January 17, 58,000 Auschwitz detainees were evacuated under guard, largely on foot; thousands of them died in the subsequent death march west towards Wodzisław Śląski. Approximately 20,000 Auschwitz prisoners made it to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany, where they were liberated by the British in April 1945.[2]
Those too weak or sick to walk were left behind. When the 322nd Rifle Division of the Red Army arrived at the camp on January 27 they found around 7,500 prisoners and about 600 corpses had been left behind. Among the items found by the Soviet soldiers were 370,000 men's suits, 837,000 women's garments, and 7.7 tonnes (8.5 short tons) of human hair.[3]
Sources:
[1]: page 648, Friedlander, Saul (2009). The Years of Extermination. New York: HarperCollins. ISBN 978-0-06-198000-8.
[2]: p. 265, Rees, Laurence (2005). Auschwitz: A New History. New York: Public Affairs. ISBN 1-58648-303-X.
[3]: Steinbacher, Sybille (2005). Auschwitz: A History. Munich: Verlag C. H. Beck. ISBN 0-06-082581-2
Auschwitz II Birkenau aerial photos taken on August 23rd, '44, August 25, '44
This is the Birkenau camp in its entirety. Birkenau is where most of the mass murder in the Auschwitz complex took place. Next to four purpose-built Krema buildings (crematorium + morgue rooms used as undressing rooms and gas chambers), Birkenau also had two makeshift gas chambers, the "red house" and "white house", known as Bunkers I and II. North is to the top of the image. For an overview, see:
http://www.deathcamps.org/gas_chambers/gas_chambers_auschwitz .html
Note the huge plume of smoke. Some deniers claim this is a fake plume of smoke and show you a very similar looking image of the camp with NO smoke, however, beware their deception: The image they will show you was taken on August 25th 1944 (from a series titled 4185, 4186, 4187 and 4188), while this image was taken 2 days earlier, on August 23rd, 1944, one of several ones as well: this image (along with 2 others from this set) is labeled "3084" (the others are "3083" and "3085", respectively). 3085 shows the same plume of smoke, but the image is shifted a bit to the West and 3083 to the East, in accordance with the plane flying from East to West over the area. The photos can be viewed on the NCAP (National Collection of Aerial Photography) homepage, all you have to do is type Birkenau in the search function:
Since these three images (as well as the other four from Aug 25th) were taken within the span of a minute, a most excellent "video" of the entire camp's activity can be recreated by gifs that compare the zooms of the images, found at:
https://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot.co.at/2015/06/personal-movement-in-auschwitz-birkenau.html
From March 1, 1942 to November 22, 1943, Birkenau was under the command of the commandant of the whole Auschwitz complex, Rudolf Höss, followed by Fritz Hartjenstein, Josef Kramer and Richard Baer.
Several separate organizational units, also referred to as “camps,” along with the mass extermination facilities, came into being in Birkenau between 1942 and 1944. Each of these internal divisions of Birkenau was run by a camp director (Lagerführer), with a non-commissioned report officer (Rapportführer) and block supervisors (Blockführer) reporting to him.
The first of the camps to be founded inside Birkenau, in March 1942, was the men’s camp for prisoners of various nationalities. Until July 1943, it was located in sector BIb.
The women’s camp opened in August 1942. Located in sector BIa, it expanded to take in BIb in July 1943.
Seven new administrative units were opened in segment BII in 1943. The first, in February 1943, was the Gypsy Family Camp (sector BIIe). Throughout its existence, a total of 23 thousand Gypsies from Germany, Austria, the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, and the lands annexed to the Third Reich were sent there. The camp was liquidated on August 2, 1944, when the approximately 3 thousand Gypsies still there were killed in the gas chambers.
A men’s camp (sector BIId) was created in July 1943; the men from sector BIb were moved there.
That same month, a hospital camp for men of various nationalities opened in sector BIIf.
A quarantine camp for men prisoners of various nationalities opened in sector BIIa in August.
A family camp for Jews from Theresienstadt (sector BIIb) opened on September 8. About 18 thousand Jews from the ghetto in Terezin were placed there in 1943 and 1944. This was the second camp, after the Gypsy camp, where men stayed together with women and children.
Both these family camps were probably set up for propaganda purposes. In what was known as the Briefaktion (letter campaign), prisoners in the BIIb family camp were required to write censored correspondence with predetermined contents, in an effort to mislead public opinion and potential victims as to the purpose of the deportation of Jews.
A warehouse complex known as “Kanada” where baggage confiscated from the mass transports of Jews was stored and sorted, was conveniently located between Kremas II&III and IV&V.
This isn't the entire camp, in fact less than half of it. North is toward the bottom of the image. A rail transport of 33 cars is at the Birkenau railhead and debarkation point. Prisoners can be seen beside the train. The selection process is either underway or completed. One group of prisoners is being marched to Krematorium II. The gate of that facility is open and appears to be the destination of that ill-fated group.
On 20, 23 and 25 August 1944, the number of mass-murdered people from transports from Lodz was as low as as 1000 - 2,000 people per day and could have been handled by one or two Krema buildings.
You can see Krematorium II and III on the bottom right, each of them having an L-shaped undressing room and gas chamber below ground level, the latter having distinct smudges on the roof, indicating the presence of zyklon-b inlet holes (why else would there be smudges exactly on the two gas chamber roofs while the two undressing room roofs remain smooth?), which most deniers claim is a photo forgery based on their strawman argument that because these smudges are too big in diameter to be the actual holes in the roof, that the mainstream instead claims these are the zyklon vent/chimneys' shadows, and they don't align in the perfect angle with other shadows (e.g. that of the main crematorium chimney) nearby. Except "the mainstream" never makes such a claim. But we'll get to these in more detail later.
Guard towers
Some deniers have pointed out that it seems as though prisoners can simply keep on running toward the right and escape to freedom. But we already see the presence of at least one guard tower in close proximity. They'd have trouble running past that, not that there'd be much reason to flee, as they were deceived into thinking they were going to shower. The idea that there were no patrols beyond camp Birkenau's immediate borders (i.e. once you got past the barbed wire you were safe) is also a myth.
After undressing in an anteroom, the victims were herded into the gas chamber and killed by means of Zyklon-B pellets introduced into the chamber through the exterior vents. The bodies were then moved to the crematoria or external burning pits for disposal.
Gas chamber roof of Krema II compared between Aug 25th and May 31st photo
Some observers just looking at the May 31st photo (right; which I will show in its entirety in one of the posts to follow) might think the 4 spots on the gas chamber roof of Krema II that were so clearly visible in the August 25th photo (left) are wholly missing, while the "borders" of the gas chamber remain the same in both photos - except they aren't.
What appears to you as the upper (western) edge of the gas chamber roof in the May 31st photo, is actually some kind of dirt on the ground next to it, or part of the security/camouflage fence that is supposed to shield the courtyard of the crematorium from the rest of the camp. Similarly, what appears to you as the lower (eastern) edge of the gas chamber roof, is in actuality the discoloration running down the middle. I have emphasized this by drawing a red line to mark the actual borders of the gas chamber roof, while the blue box next to it aligns with the edge of the crematorium.
Therefore, we can conclude that the discoloration on the gas chamber roof (as opposed to no discoloration on the undressing room roof) is present in the May 31st photo just as it is on the Aug 25th photo.
Now then, what are these things? Deniers have pointed out that it is impossible for them to be the actual HOLES of the chimneys in the roof where zyklon-b was cast into the chamber, because in relation to the rest of the building they'd be more than 1.5 m in diameter. The deniers also dismiss the notion that these black spots are the SHADOWS of the zyklon-b inlet chimneys, as the direction of the shadows does not align with the direction of the shadow of the crematorium's smokestack. What historians, and smarter deniers like Mattogno therefore conclude, is that these spots mark some kind of discoloration on the gas chamber roof. Mattogno says it is bitumen underneath the roof surface showing, while historians say it could either be that, or compacted soil or grass. I personally would like to add that it could be shadows dependent on the position of the lids placed on the chimneys - the shape of these coverings and how they are positioned on the chimneys would influence the way the shadows cast look like. If the lids on the chimneys are bigger in diameter than the chimneys, they would jut out and it would be their shape influencing shadows, rather than the little chimneys/vents themselves.
In any case, one question remains that the deniers need to answer: Why do these spots exist on Krema II's gas chamber roof, while they DO NOT exist in any shape or form whatsoever on Krema II's undressing room roof? And why does this phenomenon also show up regarding Krematorium III? The answer is simple: because there is activity on the roof of the gas chambers, but none on the roof of the undressing room. Where there's activity, there's boots. Where there's boots, there's all sorts of dirt and footprints. Hence the long line of dirt leading away from the gas chamber roof, or the discoloration also running between the spots. Meanwhile, the roofs of the undressing rooms are as clean as the day they were built.
David Olere's sketch of Krema III matches with air photos of 1944 published 30 years later
A powerful corroboration is displayed between a drawing David Olere made in 1945 and the aerial photographs. Olere pictured the four gas openings as west-east alternating (starting west for the south-most opening seen at the top of the image, since north is to the bottom), which is exactly how aerial photographs (published more than 30 years later) show the pattern of the most pronounced spots on the roof.
The Italian holocaust denier and linguistics and philosophy major Carlo Mattogno says the spots are "black bitumen which was shielded from the atmosphere by a thin layer of cement which probably later crumbled in certain areas" and is utterly incapable of explaining how eye witnesses Olere (or Bacon or Tauber) were able to describe it, even sketch it in agreement with photographic evidence unknown to any of them at the time. In fact, Carlo (the flagship of "scholarly" holocaust denial, mind you) only hurts the revisionist cause by not jumping on the popular bandwagon allegation of the CIA having retrospectively added the shadows onto the photographs after consulting Olere's sketch.
One denier who however has held on to the "CIA manipulated the images" theory is John C. Ball. So confident was he in fact, that he posted a $100,000 challenge he would pay if 3 different experts (with his prior approval, of course) could agree that the photos were NOT altered in any way apart from the captioning. However, what's funny is that John C. Ball made it all but impossible to contact him regarding his $100,000 challenge, and in fact has now wholly disappeared from the holocaust denial scene.
Well before Ball's challenge was posted to his web page, Dr. Nevin Bryant, supervisor of cartographic and image processing applications at Caltech/NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, examined the photographs with digital enhancement techniques unavailable to the CIA photo publishers Brugioni and Poirier in 1979. Dr. Bryant's analysis proves that the photographs were not tampered with. (Van Pelt, The Case For Auschwitz, p. 354).
It gets better: US planes weren't the only ones who flew over the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex taking photos. Britain's commonwealth forces also involved SAAF Mosquito planes doing a fly-by, and the negatives from that sortie were stored for years in archives in Britain, and only discovered recently, 2011 I believe, and are now available to view in the NCAP archive in Edinburgh, and its website. Not only do the gas chamber roofs also show the same number of smudges as in the US photos made available to the public by Brugioni and Poirier in 1979, but the smudges are also in the same shape, the same angle.
So to keep the story of doctored photos going, one needs to set the date of retouching to earlier than 1979, then assume the agency that did the retouching had access to both the US and British negatives, then conclude that one set was to be published in the US, and the other set was to lay dormant in the archives of a different country, and then be published by that country 4 decades later, all to maintain this grand illusion of independent corroboration, all part of a several-decade spanning master plan that ensures the longevity of the holocaust story. Notice how am I fast approaching the realm of crazy.
Or, of course, you can maintain the story that the CIA did the retouching on their negatives prior to 1979, and the British used modern methods to replicate the CIA forgery before making their prints available to the public in 2011. Which leads us to the next leg of the story that deniers need to explain; how the manipulation was even done:
Just try to picture how absurd John C. Ball's CIA photo manipulation claim sounds - he theorizes that the negative was enlarged about 800%, marked, then reduced and reshot into a negative (how else can you draw microscopic markings onto a negative?). Yet first of all, the original negatives are not separate; they are still on a giant roll in the archives at Yad Vashem, connected with hundreds of other aerial photographs seamlessly. And secondly, if only the enlarged photo was marked while the original negative was not, then why don't deniers sneak in one of their many agents to look at the originals in the archives, and BOOM! if they don't find the holes in this alleged unaltered original, they'd have landed a major victory. The fact that none of them has accomplished this only lends credence to the conspiracy theory they must cling on to, that the negatives were altered, which, as pointed out earlier, is absurd, because drawing these marks onto such a tiny portion of a negative is impossible. The only way one could do it is, as mentioned earlier, enlarging the negative, editing the print, and reshooting it into a negative, and then destroying the original negatives, while seamlessly pasting (you can't) the reshot negatives back into the original microfilm rolls that contain all the other negatives of the series.
Because otherwise, my challenge is as follows: dear deniers, find the alleged unaltered original US negatives, or even the SAAF negatives, show them to the world and tear open holocaust defenders a new one. Until then: we win, you lose.
A picture of Krematorium III, taken from the Bauleitung construction album
A fun image to debunk any denier that spouts nonsense like "no wartime images of these buildings remain taken at ground level". Taken (according to Pressac) in June 1943, viewing north. Note the railway line running in front of the Krematorium. The Auschwitz crematoria were built by the company Huta Hoch- und Tiefbau. The entrance to the Krematorium's underground undressing room is to the extreme left of this image. The gas chamber with the zyklon vents on its roof would be in a 90° angle to the undressing room, and located behind the crematorium building.
A slightly higher res version of this image can be found here:
http://images.slideplayer.com/24/7482495/slides/slide_27.jpg
Women standing in front of the Krema III building
These make for some "fine" workers, don't they? I wonder what happened to them. Some may observe that the courtyard in front of Krematorium III is visible, rather than being shielded from view by a non see-through perimeter fence. However, the gas chamber is on the other side of the building, and therefore any SS activity on its roof would be wholly out of view of these people or anyone marching along the train track, who also would enter the underground undressing room further left of the building. And obviously there would be no need for activity on the gas chamber roof until everyone had entered the gas chamber, which is a while after they had entered the undressing room. Therefore the only necessary security screen would have to be located behind the building, and to the right, as that's where the rest of the camp was located. Anything else was merely additional precaution. But I will get to the fencing in a moment.
Birkenau photograph taken on 31st May, 1944
The arrows point to long lines of prisoners. On 31 May 1944, about 6,700 Hungarian Jews were killed in Auschwitz, and on 8 July 1944, the figure was about 8,800 people (according to Research Notes on The Hungarian Holocaust by Michael Honey here: http://www.zchor.org/hungaria). The 31 May aerial photograph shows open air cremation behind crematorium 5, which I will zoom in on later in the blog.
But it's not that these (rounded up) 7,000 to 9,000 victims had to be killed and incinerated simultaneously, even exactly at the time the site was targeted by aerial reconnaissance planes. The 31 May photograph was taken in the morning, between 9 - 10 a.m according to the sun's position. For all we know, the incineration of the victims from the previous day was already finished (apart from the open air cremation site still smoking behind crematorium 5) and new transports with victims did not arrive yet or new victims were not killed yet or were just killed (for 31 May 1944, numerous train cars can be observed at the Birkenau ramp indicating the more or less recent arrival of a transport; personnel movement is visible according to air photo experts including close to crematorium 4, see Zimmerman, Holocaust denial, Addendum and Shermer & Grobman, Denying History, p. 149).
Any likely incineration activity of an open air cremation site can be determined from the absence or presence of smoke, since open wood fires with a surface area of many m² can be assumed to generate substantial smoke most of the time, which should be visible even on aerial photographs taken from high altitude (see the 31 May, 8 July, 20 August and 23 August 1944 aerial photographs of the Birkenau compound).
This is not so clear for the crematoria. The question is, if and to what extent did the crematoria in Auschwitz-Birkenau emit smoke. The "if" can be answered quite easily: SS ground photographs of crematorium 2 and 5 show black soot at the top of the chimney, which is a clear sign that there was emission of considerable smoke at some point before. Less straightforward is to quantify the extent and frequency of smoke.
In the most extreme case, the chimneys always spouted thick, heavy smoke generating clouds of several square meter projected surface area readily visible on aerial photographs even of poorer resolution. In this case - and only in this case - absence of visible smoke from crematoria chimneys on aerial photographs would be proof of inactivity of the cremation ovens. Holocaust deniers assume this - without saying - when they discount cremation activity based on the absence of visible smoke on aerial photographs. Carlo Mattogno is the prime example.
The Krematoria security screen
Holocaust deniers have often pointed out how close the Birkenau crematoria were to the rest of the camp harboring up to 100,000 people. They show us some aerial photo closeups and then make the claim that thousands upon thousands of people could have easily seen activity around the crematoria, and therefore it would have been impossible for the Nazis to conceal genocide, some even going so far as to say the Appellplatz near Krematorium III was, in fact, a football field where team Gypsy played team Jew, some 100 meters from Krema III. What the holocaust deniers of course don't tell you, is that the Birkenau crematoria possessed a security screen - basically a fence that consisted of thick foliage, and the exact opposite of the kind of see-through barbed wire fence that you might be familiar with from the movies, and which exists to this day.
The pic above shows the security screen, the likes of which are also seen in this video around Krematorium V:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KRT6oYUg494
The security screen was discussed in Hoess's memoirs, the testimony of Jerzy Bielski, and in the Nuremberg document 4463. This screen was erected to block any line of sight from the gas chambers to other parts of the camp, lest prisoners discover that people going in weren't coming out.
Documentary evidence of the security screen is existing on both aerial photographs (the thick border around the Krematoria as compared to the thin fence surrounding the camp perimeter) as well as ground photography regarding Krematorium II seen here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UP790K8DR50
John C. Ball hilariously failed to recognize the screen, and thought the CIA had used some kind of marker to create a thick border:
http://phdn.org/archives/holocaust-history.org/see-no-evil/screen_fence.jpg
http://phdn.org/archives/holocaust-history.org/see-no-evil/Barbedwire_air.jpg
More documentation exists, e.g. construction office member Werner Jothann writing: "The local Construction Office has submitted to us the allocation documents relating to camouflaging the crematoria. In the PoW camp, but only for the installation of wooden posts with shrubbery."
Wooden posts with shrubbery is indeed a good description of the image you see above.
Images from the Auschwitz album
On the left you see a trainload of arrivals with at least seven SS officers in the foreground and more at the very back; on the right you see an image where in the background, Krematorium II (with security screen even shielding its front courtyard) is visible behind the barbed wire fence, as well as one of the guard towers on the perimeter of the camp toward the extreme right.
The rest of the Auschwitz album can be viewed at:
http://www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/exhibitions/album_auschwitz/index.asp
or
http://www.yadvashem.org/yv/de/exhibitions/album_auschwitz/photo_1.asp
Kremas II and III (background) during construction, February 1943
If you look closely to the right of the locomotive (probably an Orenstein & Koppel locomotive, built around 1910, 30 Pferdestärke, type Bn2t, bearing the logo of the company Carl Brandt, Magdeburg), you can see a platform in front of Krema II. This is the roof of the gas chamber located underground along with the undressing room in an L shape beneath the ground level crematory building, and the zyklon-b inlet holes are visible on this photograph as well, this time at ground-level instead of the aerial photo before, and located right below the crematorium's windows.
Defending the image
Some holocaust deniers have attacked the above image, bringing the laws of perspective into the argument and saying the train tracks are too broad for the train and that the gas chamber does not intersect with the Krematorium where it is supposed to, according to the surviving blueprints. Well, let's extend those lines, shall we? The above picture demonstrates how everything checks out. All lines converge to the vanishing point. And in case the deniers haven't noticed, it is winter, and there is snow everywhere, therefore some of the gas chamber's roof is covered toward the left of the locomotive's smokestack with snow. Also note how broad the driver's cabin of the locomotive is - this corresponds to the breadth of the train track. I have to admit the image suffers from overexposure in several areas, making things harder to spot. But if you insist on a more professional analysis than the above, well, it has already been done by Mazal, Keren et al. in "The Ruins of the Gas Chambers: A Forensic Investigation of Crematoriums at Auschwitz I and Auschwitz-Birkenau" and can be found at:
http://hgs.oxfordjournals.org/content/18/1/68.abstract
Even Charles D. Provan agrees that Faurisson's "No holes, no holocaust" argument is moot at this point:
https://web.archive.org/web/20040402071014/http://revisingrevisionism.com/
If the zyklon-b inlets weren't clear enough, here they are once again
This collage suggests the location of the 4 inlet holes of Crematorium II (as seen in the aerial photo of August 25, 1944) in the ground level photo of early 1943. The two images to the top right consist of a (bottom) zoom in on Krema II's gas chamber roof as seen in the train photograph, and (top) the most plausible locations of the vents, superimposed on the zoom. The top left image is a flipped (both horizontally and vertically) zoom of the August 25, 1944 aerial photo, with red lines converging on the approximate geographical location from where the 1943 ground photo was taken. From this position, Krema II is in the foreground and Krema III in the background, just like in the ground level photo. Ever so slightly left of the red line 3rd from right, the line of sight is blocked by the locomotive smokestack, obscuring the 3rd zyklon inlet. The thickness of the smokestack also obscures parts of the 4th, though the leftmost part of it is still visible to the left of the smokestack if you observe closely. This is the basis used to superimpose the inlets behind the smokestack. Note that inlets 3 and 4 appear closer together than 1 and 2, but observing the laws of perspective this is the case the further away a row of equidistant objects lies from the observer. And even in the aerial photo you can see that the inlets 3 and 4 are closer together than inlets 1 and 2 or 2 and 3.
What can the deniers do at this point, given that we have both aerial and ground-level photographic proof of the zyklon-b inlets, except either keep yelling fake in an ever desperate manner, or say ventilation or some stuff like that without providing any more detail? What discredits the ventilation theory is that deniers themselves go to great lengths to disprove the existence of these vents in the ruins today (such as the deniers Robert "No holes, no holocaust!" Faurisson or Vincent Reynouard), which they wouldn't do if they tried to explain away their existence as mere ventilation in the first place.
And yet, a research team consisting of Harry Mazal, Daniel Keren and Jamie McCarthy investigated the collapsed roof of the gas chamber ruin of crematorium 2 in the late 90s and managed to identify three of the four zyklon-b inlets (see their paper, as mentioned earlier: "The Ruins of the Gas Chambers: A Forensic Investigation of Crematoriums at Auschwitz I and Auschwitz-Birkenau"), also available here:
Another Birkenau aerial photograph, taken approx. 3 weeks later
This time more of the camp is visible, including Krema IV and V (which is partially obscured by the trees around it). North is to the right of the image. In this image, the zyklon-b inlet holes of Krema III seem to be in the same position as the previous image, but 3 of the 4 inlets on the roof of Krema II's gas chamber are not visible except the shadow of the one closest to Krema II. However, the presence of white patches near the building suggests clouds or artifacting on the photo negative has obscured the remaining three. A large column of prisoners, probably over a thousand, is marching on the camp's main north-south road. Crematorium IV's gate is open; this may be the final destination of the newly arrived prisoners.
Gas-tight window shutters
Krematorium IV during and after its construction.
By June 1943, all four Birkenau Kremas were fully operational. Unlike in Kremas II and III whose gas chambers were located underground, at Bunker 1 and 2 and Kremas IV and V with their pitched roofs, the gas was introduced via windows in the walls that were closed with gas-tight shutters, whose delivery to the camp is proven via documentation and photos.
Contraptions like these were mounted on the exterior of Krematorium IV and V's gas chambers, as the Zyklon was introduced through the windows, rather than through the roof. A similar process was also the case in Bunkers 1 and 2, known as the red and white house:
Pressac p. 323, regarding Bunker 1 (the little red house): "The rooms of an ordinary farmhouse were turned into gas chambers by roughly sealing the windows, fitting gas tight doors and making small apertures filled with shutters in the wall alongside these doors at about head height. Through these the Zyklon B was introduced."
Note how the handle for closing the windows is on the OUTSIDE, a decidedly impractical arrangement for any room, unless one wanted to ensure that those inside could not open them. For more, see Jean-Claude Pressac's "Auschwitz Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers":
http://www.phdn.org/archives/holocaust-history.org/auschwitz/pressac/technique-and-operation/
These trees look oddly familiar with the ones that surround a group of naked women in one of the Sonderkommando photographs that will follow later. Hmm, I wonder whether they might have been heading to Krema V's gas chamber? Holocaust deniers have a particularly hard time wrapping their head around this one, trying to find all sorts of excuses as to why there should be a group of naked women disrobing in the middle of a damn forest.
Grisly details around Krematorium IV and V
This is a zoom of the aerial photo taken on May 31st, 1944 (north is to the right) showing cremation pits West of Krema V, several to the SE of Krema V, and some large trenches due North of Krema V some distance away. This last set of trenches were probably used for burying corpses from Bunker I. A plume of smoke can be seen emanating from the pit near Krema V.
According to Holocaust deniers, the aerial photographs supposedly refute that mass extermination was taking place at the Birkenau camp, because the extent of visible smoke would not correspond to large scale body disposal activity:
"1944 photos show no smoke coming from chimneys, and only little smoke from outdoor fires."
(Air Photo Evidence v.3, holocaust handbooks, p. 94)
However, let's keep in mind that (1) regarding outdoor fires, these deniers have apparently ignored the August 23rd 1944 photo that shows a gigantic smoke plume coming from the same area and (2) regarding chimney smoke, these are the same deniers who keep reminding us that crematory chimneys are not designed to emit thick, visible smoke in the first place. So on one hand they tell us that crematories aren't supposed to be belching smoke all the time (when they are trying to discredit eye-witness testimonies) but then they say the lack of smoke from crematory chimneys is proof no large scale body disposal activity in the crematoriums was going on. Contradictory, much? Make up your minds, deniers! Either bodies CAN be cremated in a crematorium without massive amounts of smoke escaping through the chimneys (in which case you make a point against the eye-witnesses, but not against the aerial photography), or they CANNOT (in which case you make a point against the aerial photography, but not against the eye-witnesses). Can't have it both ways, I'm afraid. And if you ask any crematory operator, he will tell you that under heavy strain smoke will escape 20th century crematory chimneys, which corroborates the eye-witness accounts.
The Birkenau crematoria came under heavy strain in 1944 during the Ungarnaktion, which is why outdoor cremations had to be done. We have ground-level Sonderkommando photographs proving this, taken right outside Krematorium V's damn doorway (!), that I will show later. So, the holocaust denier will once again make an observation: since these aerial photographs were taken in 1944, during the Ungarnaktion, i.e. the height of extermination activity, and since the crematories came under duress, WHERE IS THE SMOKE? Why is it only present in some of the photographs? And why is it coming from cremation pits near Krema V and not from any crematory chimney in said photographs?
Obviously when outdoor cremation becomes necessary, clearly something has happened that has rendered indoor cremation impossible during such days. Therefore, the crematories will either be under maintenance, or under manageable loads while the bulk of corpses is taken outside for cremation. Hence smoke OUTSIDE the Krematorium, rather than from its chimneys (which, in the case of Krema IV and V, are two smokestacks to the lower-left of the building roof - Krema IV's smokestacks are covered by the label "trenches", but you can see one of their shadows)
Also, a question I need to ask the denier in return is: can 1.1 million people be killed and cremated in Auschwitz without non-stop everyday cremation to breaking point? The answer is yes, as I have demonstrated in my crematory calculations elsewhere. We also need to remember that a year has 365 days and the amount of photography flybys over Birkenau number around a half dozen, of which several were taken too late, i.e. in December and January when the mass extermination was largely over. You can calculate what percentage of a year's activity these photographs managed to capture, not to mention that they also only captured 1 second of an entire day. Who knows what happened during other hours of that same day.
And finally, another proof that non-stop 24/7 mass extermination with smoke everywhere wasn't a thing is by looking at the Glaser List and realizing not many Jews were cremated on several of the days the aerial photographs were taken. I have addressed this regarding the June 26th photograph that shows the entire Auschwitz camp complex towards the beginning of this report.
Kremas IV and V had ventilation
It wasn't just Kremas II and III with the underground gas chambers that had ventilators (Entlüftungs-Anlagen) as well as ventilation ducts (Entlüftungskanäle). This document shows Kremas IV and V, with their ground-level gas chambers had these systems in place as well.
Krematorium VI was planned
The following document and blueprint detail plans for a sixth crematorium, one with even more effective ovens...scratch that...incinerators purpose-built allowing zero dignity regarding human cremation.
March 13, 1946: From the Interrogation of the Chief Engineer of the Berlin Firm Topf and Söhne, Fritz Sander:
"I decided to design and build a crematorium with a higher capacity. I completed this project for a new crematorium in November 1942—a crematorium for mass incineration—and I submitted this project to a State Patent Commission in Berlin. This crematorium was to be built on the conveyor belt principle, that is to say, the corpses would be brought to the incineration furnaces continuously. When the corpses were pushed into the furnaces, they would fall into a grate, then slide into the furnace to be incinerated. The corpses would serve at the same time as fuel for heating the furnaces. This patent could not then be approved by the Main Patent Office in Berlin because of its secrecy classification. The project file is registered in the Patent Office but the invention could not be patented in wartime." - Fritz Sander
Did you get that into your thick skull, Carlo Mattogno? (what is your job, again, Mr. "I never worked a day in my life?") Because Fritz Sander, the engineer, tells you corpses themselves can be used as fuel for heating the furnaces.
Birkenau, December 21, 1944
Most of the crematoria as well as parts of the camp and guard towers have been partially dismantled at this point, except for Krema IV which, after the Sonderkommando uprising on October 7th 1944, no longer exists. "The Grey Zone" is a film that covers and commemorates this heroic show of defiance.
The aforementioned dismantling is by the way also the reason why you won't find any Zyklon-B wire-mesh columns, shower-heads etc. in the partially collapsed ruins of Krema II's gas chamber today, even if you hop down one of the holes in the ceiling when no one is looking: the Crematoria didn't remain operational till the day they were blown up, but were dismantled during the weeks prior to this, with most of the equipment shipped back to Germany.
Birkenau photograph taken 2 weeks before liberation
Section III of Birkenau has been completely dismantled and evacuated, including the guard towers. The snow cover on the roofs of the Women's Camp indicates that it had been evacuated. Within Section II, it is easy to detect which of the barracks are probably still occupied as evidenced by the melting snow on the barrack block roofs. The camp has been partially evacuated.
The remaining Crematoria buildings would be blown up in the coming days.
Note that "Gas Chamber II" and "Gas Chamber III" are incorrectly labeled, as the labels point to the undressing rooms - the gas chambers were in a 90° angle to them, facing away from the main railway line.
Topf & Sons ovens of Krematorium II and III Birkenau ovens
This is a picture taken during the construction of Birkenau's Krema II and III buildings that had identical layout, each featuring 5 triple-muffle Topf & Sons ovens. The leftmost oven's third muffle is not in the frame, as altogether there were 15 crematory muffles in this building, and 37 others spread among the 10 other ovens in the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp complex.
This is a picture taken during the construction of Birkenau's Krema II and III buildings that had identical layout, each featuring 5 Topf & Sons triple-muffle ovens. The right-most one is not in the frame. You can find the photos as part of the 1943 Bauleitung album on Yad Vashem.
1943 Zentralbauleitung document regarding the crematory output (the "Janisch document")
This is the famous 1943 document from the Zentralbauleitung, which lists the daily crematory capacity of Auschwitz and Birkenau. Some have questioned whether this is a realistic, achievable number, a peak performance, an exaggeration/advertisement intended to impress the higher ups, or the usual denier last resort argument of it being a forgery.
Josef Janisch (born April 22, 1909 in Salzburg, † July 26, 1964 at the Tuxer Joch) was an Austrian engineer. He was a member of the management staff of the Central Construction (Zentralbauleitung) involved in the construction of the Auschwitz camp and its crematoria with gas chambers.
Josef Janisch was a member of the SS (no. 299 849) and reached the rank of SS-Hauptsturmführer (equivalent to Hauptmann). Janisch became head of Bauleitung 2, which was initially responsible for Birkenau as a labor and POW camp, but then also became responsible for its conversion to an extermination camp. 1943 onward, the task description for Bauleitung 2 was supplemented with the addition: "implementation of special treatment". [1]
On January 29, 1943, the head of the Zentralbauleitung in the Auschwitz concentration camp, Karl Bischoff, stressed in a letter the indispensability of his employee Janisch, in regard to the management of the "special construction" of Auschwitz-Birkenau due to him being "the only reliable technical specialist". [2] The term "special construction" was chosen as the code name for the extermination facilities. [3]
Dated June 28, 1943, the document above, a list of the "daily [cremation] performance of the various crematories", was attached to Janisch's message regarding the "construction of crematorium III" and thus of "all ordered crematoria" at Auschwitz-Birkenau. The message was sent to the SS-Wirtschafts- und Verwaltungshauptamt (SS-WVHA) in Berlin, intended for the head of the construction industry in the SS, the SS-group leader and Amtsgruppenchef of "Amt C" ("Bauwesen"), Hans Kammler.
Kurt Prüfer, senior engineer of Topf and Sons, the company that manufactured the crematoria ovens, gives a more conservative estimate in a telegram here: http://imgur.com/d09KvVO
Josef Janisch was a devout Nazi, while his brother, Franz Janisch, was the opposite. Franz Janisch's daughter, Line Wintersteller, still has memories of her uncle, and claims he once threatened to send her mother to Dachau for saying Jews are people, too.[4]
Sources:
[1]: Rainer Fröbe: "Bauen und Vernichten. Die Zentrale Bauleitung Auschwitz und die Endlösung" in: Christian Gerlach (Hrsg.): „Durchschnittstäter.“ Handeln und Motivation (= Beiträge zur Geschichte des Nationalsozialismus, Band 16). Assoziation – Schwarze Risse – Rote Straße, Berlin 2000, ISBN 3-922611-84-2, page 183.
[2]: Annegret Schüle: "Industrie und Holocaust. Topf & Söhne – Die Ofenbauer von Auschwitz." Herausgegeben von der Stiftung Gedenkstätten Buchenwald und Mittelbau-Dora. Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen 2010, ISBN 978-3-8353-0622-6, page 187.
[3]: Ibid, page 186
A denier pic that tries to mess with your mind
Krema III had 5 ovens with 3 muffles each, 15 muffles in total, as shown in the pictures earlier.
...so 1440 corpses cremated a day in 15 muffles is 1440 / 15 = 96 corpses cremated in every muffle per day.
One day has 24 hours, so 96 / 24 = 4 corpses per hour.
If you stuff 4 corpses into each muffle (2 adults + 2 children or infants) and it takes an entire hour for the contents to be somewhat reasonably cremated, to then be dropped to the ash collection channel below, so that the muffle is clear for the introduction of the next batch of bodies, the calculation checks out. But we're not done cremating the ones that were dropped just yet:
In the operating instructions of the Topf double-muffle oven, the following is written:
"As soon as the remains of the bodies have fallen from the chamotte grid to the ash collection channel below, they should be pulled forward towards the ash removal door, using the scraper. Here they can be left for a further twenty minutes to be fully consumed . . . In the meantime, further bodies can be introduced one after the other into the chambers." - J.C. Pressac, "Technique & Operation..." page 136
I like how it says "bodies". It's almost like it's plural. OH WAIT! It is plural.
As well from the Pelt report: "The procedure was to put the first body with the feet towards the muffle, back down and face up. Then a second body was placed on top, again face up, but head towards the muffle. . . "
The idea that only one body fits in a muffle can therefore be dismissed.
1 corpse a minute is just a stupid way of saying 1440 corpses / 24 hours / 60 minutes = 1 per minute.
1942 Kurt Prüfer document
This document, a telegram sent in 1942 by Kurt Prüfer, senior engineer from Topf & Sons, the company that manufactured the crematory ovens, gives lower numbers (the relevant areas have been highlighted by me) than the document of the Zentralbauleitung:
250 instead of 340 could be cremated per day in Krema I
800 instead of 1440 could be cremated in Krema II and III each (were being built)
800 instead of 768 in Krema IV and V each (were being built)
So the only concrete evidence (one can postulate has been gathered from experience) is that Krema I can realistically cremate 250 instead of 340 people a day, a realistic capacity of only 73% of what is advertised on the 1943 document seen here: http://imgur.com/jSj3fsf
However, bear in mind that this lower number might simply be because less people were being killed in 1942 than in 1943 when the genocide reached its peak, rather than a physical limitation of how much Krema I's ovens can cremate per day.
Still, for argument's sake, I am putting on my skeptic glasses here and very dumbly extrapolating this to the other Kremas (73% as much as advertised) shown on the Zentralbauleitung document. We can conclude the following:
Kremas II and III = 2102 corpses instead of 2880 corpses per day
Kremas IV and V= 1120 corpses instead of 1536 corpses per day
This means, if you include the figures for Krema I, a total of 3472 corpses instead of 4756 corpses per day across all crematoria could be incinerated.
However, even with these more conservative figures, it still means that in 365 days of 24h operation, close to 1.3 million corpses could be cremated even if the ovens were only 73% as effective as advertised in the 1943 Zentralbauleitung document.
And we know that each Auschwitz crematorium operated close to 2 years. So we can safely assume less than 4 corpses were being cremated per hour on a 24 hour basis, and rather view these as peak performances in short spikes throughout the camp's operation.
Verdict: the Holocaust happened and is very real.
You can read Kurt Prüfer's testimony in Erfurt here:
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/Prufer.html
Another popular anti-crematory capacity image circulated among holocaust deniers
Oftentimes, holocaust deniers list the time it takes for a modern civilian crematory to cremate a corpse as proof that the much older Auschwitz ovens couldn't have possibly worked faster because modern = automatically better.
On the left, they first build the straw man that 7-8 bodies means 7-8 adult corpses, and not any infants or children. And speaking of straw men, while their appeal to logic is true that an adult corpse already inside the muffle might block the insertion of the stretcher that would insert an additional corpse into the muffle, who is saying corpses were inserted one after the other into the muffle via the stretcher, rather than being piled on the stretcher and inserted in one go?
And regarding modern crematoria on the image's right, their point is also moot for several reasons, and I am not sure whether they are well aware of these and continue to present the argument anyway (in the hopes of fooling the layman) or are truly dim-witted. For starters, they fail to provide citation that modern crematories are PHYSICALLY INCAPABLE of incinerating bodies faster (e.g. if the crematory operators were held under gunpoint). None of the cremation times they cite are from crematory ovens that are operating under heavy duress. Also, they conveniently "forget" the part where corpses in these modern civilian crematories are usually cremated inside a wooden coffin. Not the expensive heavy ones used for burials mind you, but one nonetheless. This means that "an average human body" ends up being much heavier than your intuition tells you, since it is cremated with the coffin.
...and one at a time.
...and the ashes are treated as holy, not garbage that can be mixed with that of others, so cool-down and retrieval are part of the procedure.
...and temperature regulation, adhering to safety standards and so on are all added to the time.
A more detailed takedown of why the comparison to civilian crematories is deliberately deceitful is presented here:
If one insists on making comparisons to present-day facilities, then one should rather look at cadaver incinerators that are used for getting rid of animal corpses or Pathological Solid Waste Incinerators and scale them down to compare what one Auschwitz oven was capable of, because these give us a much better time approximation of the actual physiological process itself, i.e. the combustion of flesh to ash.
But even if it took 1 hour to cremate 1 corpse and the Auschwitz crematories only operated in a 16 hour cycle with 8 hours of cooldown and maintenance every single day, then Krema II for example could cremate 175,200 people in 2 years (5 ovens with 3 muffles each = 15 muffles. 15 corpses (1 in every muffle) times 16 hours, times 365 days, times two will get you the answer), as each of the Auschwitz crematories was operational for approximately 2 years.
Krema III has an identical layout, so another 175,200.
Krema IV and IV that each had an 8-muffle oven, could cremate 186,800 combined.
Krema I that had 3 ovens with 2 muffles each, could cremate 70,080 based on this calculation of mine.
= 607,280 people in 2 years if only 1 person was cremated per muffle, and it took an entire hour to cremate before the next corpse could be introduced, and the ovens only operated 16 hours per day.
Auschwitz's death toll also includes open air cremations.
The point is, with these restrictions imposed, we can still perfectly explain half of the death toll or higher if you include open air cremation. Now all you need in your calculation is 2 corpses per muffle (unlike this denier infographic is trying to fool you into believing, anyone who has been to one of the Nazi camps and seen the ovens can attest that at least 2 adult corpses can be shoved with the stretcher into a muffle, leaving room at the top for child corpses as well) and you will arrive at the current death toll of 1.1 million, while still accounting for 8 hours of each day when no cremations were taking place and not including any open-air cremations. So if you include weeks of non-stop 24 hour cremation cycles (and we have documentation that the Topf ovens are capable of this), as well as the open-air cremations (again, we have 2 Sonderkommando ground photos showing this as well as aerial photos), then we can achieve even higher numbers, or say that less than 2 corpses per muffle were cremated on average per hour, or account for the Sonderkommando uprising on October 7th 1944 that destroyed Krema IV.
=========================================
tl;dr: with 2 corpses per muffle per hour it is perfectly possible to achieve the number of cremations that reflect Auschwitz' death toll. No need to cremate 4 corpses in an hour (1 corpse in 15 minutes) or any other nonsense holocaust deniers try telling you the mainstream MUST cling on to, to be able to explain the numbers.
Krematorium II
Victims entering Krematorium II
Now that we have covered the basics regarding aerial and ground photography and crematoria capability, it is time to get into the heart of the ugly matter and reconstruct the genocide process. This image is part of a model on display at the Auschwitz museum and is a photo that did not fit into the frame of the image that will follow soon, which shows a scale model of Krema II. This image is basically an extension of the image that follows, toward its left. Krema II and III's undressing room and gas chamber were located below the surface, so the victims, under the pretense that they had to take mandatory showers before being admitted into the camp, were led to the undressing room below ground.
Ruins of Krematorium II's undressing room (Leichenkeller 2)
This is where the victims disrobed and placed their clothes on numbered hooks aligning the length of the walls along with benches on both sides, before heading to the gas chamber disguised as a shower room.
Ruins of Krematorium II's homicidal gas chamber (Leichenkeller 1), viewing East
Several hundred thousand people were murdered here. Understandably, this area of the camp has been the subject of great (revisionist) controversy, and was even part of the Irving-Lipstadt trial, because this is the place about which Robert Faurisson made his famous "no holes, no holocaust" statement. My untrained eyes can already see holes on the gas chamber roof, as well as what appears to be blue staining on the wall to the extreme right. There goes the height of revisionist 'scholarship'....
Ruins of Krematorium II's homicidal gas chamber (Leichenkeller 1), viewing North-West
Can you spot the two trap-doors some particularly smug denier adventurers have used to climb down into the collapsed gas chamber when nobody was looking?
Auschwitz Krema building located in the Birkenau camp, scale model
The homicidal gas chamber ("Vergasungskeller") and undressing room ("Auskleideraum") are located below ground level in an L shape. Those who did not pass the "Selektion" upon arrival by train (i.e. anyone deemed unfit for labor, predominantly the elderly, the sick, mothers with infants and children) were sent to the gas chambers, while the healthy and able-bodied were absorbed into the camp labor force, showered, shorn and tattooed. A stairway would lead those that didn't pass the Selektion below ground. A lift existed that would haul the bodies up to the ground floor for cremation after the gassing was done. Both of these procedures were done by the "Sonderkommando", Jewish prisoners doomed to partake in the genocide of their own people.
Hundreds, if not over a thousand people were gassed at once, with Nazi camp personnel pouring Zyklon-B pellets from cans into the four inlets you can see protruding atop the gas chamber - inlets that fed into four hollow pillars made out of reinforced mesh wire going all the way to the gas chamber's ground, as described by Michal Kula, and therefore sometimes referred to as "Kula columns". The Zyklon-B (German patent name insecticide) pellets release the poisonous gas hydrogen cyanide (HCN) that kills warm-blooded human beings in concentrations as low as 300ppm well within 20 minutes, while it takes several hours (at least!) of exposure at concentrations around 16,000ppm to kill cold-blooded lice, as this gas was also used for fumigation (delousing) of inmate clothing and bedding in separate delousing chambers ("Entwesungskammern") existing elsewhere in the camp. HCN only becomes volatile/explosive at much higher concentrations (56,000ppm)[1].
This modeled Krematorium (Krema II) is equipped with 5 triple-muffle ovens manufactured by a company called "Topf & Söhne", i.e. each oven has 3 muffles, and each muffle is capable of cremating more than two corpses at a time, especially if you consider that corpses of infants and children take up very little space. Cremation temperature was probably between 800°C-1100°C, it took less than an hour to cremate the contents put into a muffle; the ash would fall through a grating into an ash collector underneath the muffle. Thus it wasn't necessary to collect the ash from the muffle, i.e. having to cool it down or anything.
Just from a hypothetical continuous 16 hour work-shift with 3 corpses per muffle, per hour, this building alone was able to cremate 720 corpses a day, or 525,600 corpses in 2 years of operation, i.e. half of Auschwitz-Birkenau's death toll. And this was just one of several (I, II, III, IV, V) crematoria in operation in the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex. The total amount of people killed in Auschwitz-Birkenau is between 1.1 and 1.5 million souls, of which approx. 900,000 died by gassing, and the rest by other means such as summary execution, labor attrition, starvation, medical experimentation or other camp conditions, as well as those already arriving dead in the trains where they were packed like cattle.
A Sonderkommando revolt on October 7th, 1944 destroyed Krema IV (events portrayed in the 2001 film: "The Grey Zone") and the demolition of Krema IV's walls commenced in mid-October 1944. The dismantling of Kremas II and III began in early December of 1944. The demolition (with dynamite) of Kremas II and III took place on January 20th, 1945 and Krema V, which was operational until the end, was demolished on January 26th, 1945. So the Nazis dynamited the Krema buildings before retreating while leaving most of the rest of the camp intact; Auschwitz I "Stammlager" and Auschwitz II "Birkenau" were liberated on January 27th, 1945 by the Soviet Red Army (International Holocaust Remembrance Day). Today, Krema I in Auschwitz I is the only intact Krema building (reconstructed in 1947), all others are either ruins or razed to their foundations.
This video (taken from a PBS documentary called "NOVA: Holocaust on trial" about the Irving vs. Lipstadt trial) offers a 3D look of the interior of one of the Birkenau "Krema" buildings from minute 48:00 to 49:32 in the link provided:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCERa40KP64 [video no longer available]
Here is a far more visceral cinematic gassing clip at one of the Birkenau Kremas (warning: graphic!) taken from the 1988 miniseries about the Holocaust called "War And Remembrance" that makes the gas chamber layout (including the pillars etc. as demonstrated in the video earlier) accurate enough to the description provided by historians (watch 11:36 onward):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xgb7Kgjma-g [video no longer available]
Source:
Grisly details of the Krematorium II scale model
The details speak for themselves. If you are still asking for proof, see the compilation of evidence at:
http://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot.co.at/2014/11/rebuttal-of-mattogno-on-auschwitz-part.html
Auskleideraum
Illustration made by David Olere of the victims being told to undress and put their clothes on numbered hooks for later recollection before being herded into the "shower" that was the gas chamber. Yehuda Bacon spoke about them during the Eichmann trial:
http://www.nizkor.org/hweb/people/e/eichmann-adolf/transcripts/Sessions/Session-068-06.html
A day in the life of a Sonderkommando
Bodies being dragged from the gas chamber, before their cavities were searched for valuables and gold teeth fillings removed before being cremated. Ovens on the same floor as the gas chamber suggest this is David Olere's rendition of Krema IV or V. However, there is a slight inaccuracy in this sketch as Tauber recorded that the Sonderkommandos wore gas masks when removing the bodies to the corridor.
Note that a gas mask was not mandatory for survival, because the gas chambers in all four Birkenau Kremas possessed ventilation.
Cremation
Illustration of the many hours of cremation that followed after a gassing in Krema II and III.
Notice the dead infants in the sketch? Holocaust deniers always skirt around this fact when they present their absurd calculations about cremation time.
It takes, say, 20 minutes to kill e.g. 1500 people in e.g. the 2000 sq. ft. area of the Krematorium II gas chamber. Let's say it takes twice as long for the ventilation system to do the air exchanges necessary for the Sonderkommando to be able to enter the chamber and begin with the corpse extraction. Keep in mind that the pellets, if they haven't been retrieved from the bottom of the Kula columns yet, are still outgassing, but the colums (where the toxicity is still highest) are quite a ways away from the entrance of the gas chamber and the ventilation system is still working, therefore the SK can enter the chamber without dying like Faurisson and his buddies erroneously claim. Plus, once enough corpses have been hauled away from the chamber so that the SK can move further inside, they can, as testimony of e.g. Daniel Behannais describes, start hosing down the chamber to wash away the blood and emptied bowels of the unfortunates and, by doing so, the water also destroys the still outgassing zyklon pellets, this is a common chemical reaction (H20 and CO2) that neutralises the HCN bound in the clay-pellets. More about this later.
My point is, the SK still have 23 hours of the day left to cremate these 1500 people, and considering Krema II has 15 muffles, and assuming 4 people per muffle (2 adults, 2 infants, and believe me children made a good chunk of those gassed considering 99% of them were not accepted into the camp's work force) and again, for sake of argument assuming 1 hour per muffle to cremate enough so that the cremains can be dropped to the ash collector below so the next batch can be introduced, this gives us an efficiency of 15 * 4 * 24 = 1440 corpses which is, LO AND BEHOLD, EXACTLY THE FIGURE LISTED IN THE JANISCH DOCUMENT (http://imgur.com/jSj3fsf) that tallies up the crematory capacity of Birkenau. Of course, my above example would leave the SK with only 23 hours, therefore the output would be 1380 but it's a close figure nonetheless.
Clearly this was a theoretical number, and the actual performance of the crematorium was lower (the following document is another hint: http://imgur.com/d09KvVO), which is why we have the outdoor cremations going on when time constraints meant the SK did not have more than a day or two to cremate all those killed in the gas chamber (as well having to cremate the additional influx of corpses that kept coming from within the camp). But the actual capacity was not FAR lower as revisionist wisecrackers want to tell us, I am convinced definitely above 1k bodies per day as concerns Krema II and III each, but lower than the stated 1440. This still means a single crematorium could process most of its gassed in the span of 2 days, 3 at most. The other crematoriums (I, IV, V) had lower crematory capacities, but keep in mind their adjoining gas chambers were also smaller.
Now, what would happen with all the ash? They were dumped into nearby ponds (there's a memorial next to them in Birkenau today to remind us), rivers (Vistula, Sola), strewn across fields and even used as winter salt on the roads leading to the camp, as Yehuda Bakon testified during the Eichmann trial (see my article attached to i.imgur.com/KxRpFZ5).
Sonderkommando Shaul Chazan reports:
“Every few days or once a week, a few German trucks with prisoners came by and took the ashes to the river to wipe out all the evidence. They say that somebody once asked what they were dumping into the river, and the answer was fish food. At first, we didnt know what they'd do with the bones and they were disposed of in the crematorium compound. A deep pit was dug in the yard and the bones were dumped there until an order was given to remove all the bones from the pit in order to pulverize them. At that stage, we removed the bones from a deep pit in the compound of Crematorium II [III] and what remained of them was hauled away in a truck” (Gideon Greif, "We Wept Without Tears")
The elevators of Kremas II and III
Given that unlike Kremas I, IV and V, Kremas II and III had their gas chambers located below ground level, the buildings needed a way of hauling the corpses from the cellar to ground level, where the crematory ovens were located.
We know from documentation that Krematorium III was equipped with an elevator from the company Gustav Linse, installed by the company Heinrich Messing in early summer 1943, a few months after the building was finished and began homicidal operation.
In his holocaust denying book "Auschwitz: The Case for Sanity" (a nice piggybacking on holocaust scholar Robert Jan Van Pelt's "The Case for Auschwitz"), holocaust denier Carlo Mattogno argues that the flat-plate elevator "with a capacity of 300 kg" installed into crematorium 2 "is absolutely out of proportion when it comes to the gigantic figures of a mass extermination cited by van Pelt" (Mattogno, ATCFS, p. 54). It is noteworthy that the argument is not valid for crematorium 3, since there an elevator with 750 kg capacity (with optional upgrade to 1500 kg) was installed from the very beginning.
Mattogno explains that for an:
"average duration of five minutes for one complete operation (loading, upward journey, unloading, downward journey), the transportation of 2,000 bodies from the half-basement to the furnace hall...would have taken...some 33 hours"
First of all, 300 kg was not the available capacity, but the "minimum payload" ordered by the construction office. That's a difference. The metalworking shop may have constructed the platform with a higher maximum payload. We don't have the technical documentation of the device, so we don't know. And even if its maximum payload was 300 kg, if it was properly constructed with safety factor, its actual maximum load that could have been exploited by the Sonderkommando prisoners was higher. The cables were designed for higher loads anyway, else the construction office would not have ordered a minimum, but a maximum load. Furthermore, it cannot be excluded that the payload of the elevator wasn't upgraded at some point. In short, the actual operation capacity of the elevator is far from certain and well established from German documents.
Secondly, Mattogno does not explain why two strong Sonderkommando prisoners should have required at least 2 minutes for putting five corpses on the elevator's platform. This is 24s for one single corpse, which sounds patently absurd. All they had to do was to grab the legs or arms of the corpse, rotate by 180°, walk one or two steps and drop the corpse. This is done in few seconds. After un/loading these corpses on/off the elevator platform, they had time to get more bodies from the gas chamber if they were in the cellar, or haul the bodies into empty furnace muffles on ground level until the empty platform came back again.
Thirdly, Mattogno assumed that it took 60s for a round trip of the elevator without the loading time. Actually, he misunderstood the estimation from an "anonymous architect" cited by Van Pelt in The Case for Auschwitz, p. 469. This Revisionist assumed that it took 30 s for a modern elevator round trip of one person for one floor, including loading of the (living) person. Mattogno understood that these 30s referred only to a single upward trip. So he doubled it to arrive at 60s for the roundtrip. But this is doublecounting, since the 30 s is already the time for the round-trip according to the anonymous architect. By the way, Mattogno's 30s for the upward trip translates into an average elevator speed of something like 0.1 m/s. It takes a power of about 300 W to lift 300 kg (neglecting the weight of the platform) in 30 s at a height of 3m. Yet, the engine installed in crematorium 2 to operate the elevator had 10 HP or about 7000 W (proof that Krema II's lift had 10HP will br provided in a document later). If Mattogno's assumption of load and speed were true, this elevator had an awfully poor efficiency.
Thus, each of Mattogno's parameters assumed to estimate the time it took to transport 2000 bodies from the basement to the furnace is either unfounded or false. The loading capacity may have been higher than 300 kg, the elevator took likely less than 30s for the 2.6 m from the basement to the furnace hall and the time to un/load a corpse was certainly less than 24s. If we only correct Mattogno's loading time down to 12s (which seems still too long for something like lifting a corpse onto/off the elevator by two men, who may have been replaced once they got fatigued), the 2000 corpses were transported in less than 17 hours to the furnace hall, which is less than the actual bottleneck, the cremation, of these corpses took.
Conclusion:
The provisional elevator in crematorium 2 was very much capable of transporting 2000 corpses from the basement to the furnace hall in less than 20 hours. Carlo Mattogno's contrary conclusion is based on unfounded and false parameters determining the daily capacity of the elevator.
Most seriously, he assumed the Sonderkommando prisoners were working in slow motion. It's entirely possible that Mattogno - at his present age and shape, as the man is in his sixties - would need twenty-four seconds to move 30 kg (= 60 kg corpse lifted by two) by say one meter. But certainly not the strongest guys in their early 20s and 30s selected from a pool of hundreds of people to become a Sonderkommando.
The order for its Krema II's provisional elevator is to be found in the “Metal working” file, Annex 15 of Volume 11 of the Höss trial:
"Order No 61 of 15/2/43 — POW camp Krematorium II/III BW 30.
Subject: 1 goods lift with a minimum payload of 300 kg. including the fitting of suitable winches, cable and motor and the guide rail.
Order No 2563/:146:/ of 26/1/43 from the Bauleitung.
Order taken over from the former prisoners' metalworking shop.
Completed on 13/3/43."
It was subsequently replaced by a 1500 kg capacity Demag goods lift.
So how realistic and achievable is multiple corpse cremation per Topf muffle?
Very. Denier Carlo Mattogno has made the issue of cremation (together with that of the gas introduction openings of Krema II) to the central pillar of his rebuttal of mass extermination in Auschwitz - so much that it would “destroy his [Robert Jan Van Pelt’s] historical method in a radical way and completely refutes all the conclusions which are based upon it” (Auschwitz The Case For Sanity, p. 663). Since 1988, Mattogno has researched the cremation capacity and fuel consumption of the crematory ovens in Auschwitz. But he is nothing more than an elaborate liar 90% of holocaust deniers (and likewise common people on the other side of the argument) are too dumb to realize and therefore be in a position to refute.
The crematoria in Auschwitz were operating with a high throughput of corpses in order to cope with the corpses from the extermination of the European Jews. With the term “high-throughput”, I mean nominal cremation times of < 40 min per (adult) corpse per oven opening (muffle). This time is less than the physiochemical processes of the incineration take at typical operating conditions of an oven. Therefore, these cremations are characterized by multiple cremation techniques, i.e. the simultaneous presence of more than one (adult) corpse in the main incineration chamber (for single cremations, the time to cremate an adult corpse was about 1 hour, see also letter Topf to Mauthausen of 1 November 1940, reproduced in I Forni Crematori di Auschwitz, Documentazione, p. 404). Most of the witnesses, who have testified about the operation of the crematory ovens in Auschwitz, have mentioned multiple cremation techniques - aside numerous Sonderkommando prisoners, also the Topf engineers Kurt Prüfer and Fritz Sander and the SS men Rudolf Höß, Erich Muhsfeldt and Pery Broad.
According to Mattogno, the crematory ovens in Auschwitz “did not allow multiple cremations” and “even if multiple cremations had been possible in the ovens of Auschwitz-Birkenau, they would not have led to any gain in time or in fuel” (ATCFS, p. 285). However, several contemporary German sources provide evidence for high-throughput cremations intended/possible/carried out in crematory ovens in camps:
On 14 July 1941, the Topf engineer Paul Erdmann provided the construction office Mauthausen with a cremation rate of 33 to 40 min per corpse “without overloading” the two-muffle oven.
On 30 October 1941, the SS construction office Auschwitz noted that the planned crematorium 2 will have a cremation rate of 15 min per corpse.
On 10 July 1942, the SS construction office Auschwitz informed the SS construction office Stutthof on the three-muffle oven that “an incineration takes about ½ hour according to the Topf company”.
On 8 September 1942, the Topf engineer Kurt Prüfer noted nominal cremation rates of 30 min for the double-muffle oven, 22 min for the triple-muffle oven and 12 min for the 8-muffle oven (Schüle, Industrie und Holocaust, p. 442).
On 24 September 1942, the Topf engineer Fritz Sander wrote to the Topf management that the concentration camps “help themselves with a large number of ovens/muffles and by stuffing several corpses in the individual muffles”. (Schüle, Industrie und Holocaust, p. 443)
On 28 June 1943, a draft was prepared in the construction office Auschwitz according to which the cremation rate of the Topf two-muffle oven was 26 min per corpse and that of the three- and eight muffle oven 15 min per corpse (Schüle, Industrie und Holocaust, p. 460).
List of cremations from Theresienstadt between 3 October to 15 November 1943 according to which the cremation time was less than 35 min in 72% cases (Mattogno, ATCFS, p. 279).
On 4 February 1944, oven builder Hans Kori wrote to the Majdanek concentration camp that the cremation time of his ovens can be halved to 30 min per corpse by employing multiple cremations. It should be emphasized that these sources contradict Mattogno’s central hypothesizes that the cremation rate of the Topf two-, three- and eight-muffle ovens were not exceeding one corpse per 60 min, or that multiple cremations were not possible or at least not beneficial in crematory ovens.
Revisionists usually tend to discard post-war testimonial evidence in favor of incomplete, ambiguous and unclear contemporary German sources in order to deny German atrocities. In this case, however, even most of the relevant contemporary German documents are too problematic from a Revisionist point of view, since they corroborate significant parts of testimonial evidence and further suggest death rates for Auschwitz exceeding that of natural deaths and thus supporting unnatural deaths and mass murder in Auschwitz. Instead of taking these German documents as basis for a discussion of the cremation capacity of the crematoria in Auschwitz (as one would intuitively do), Mattogno brushes them away as unreliable .
The evidence for high-throughput incinerations in Auschwitz consists of numerous testimonial evidence supported by the cited documentary evidence and demographic evidence indicating the disappearance of over a million people in Auschwitz. Such multiple corroborating evidence can be considered as strong by any standard. If numerous people of different backgrounds report a certain incident at numerous occasions and under numerous conditions, if this is to a significant extent backed up by contemporary written sources from authorities and if it fully explains a demographic loss of over a million people otherwise unexplained, you clearly need some serious evidence that weighs way more.
And here is where Mattogno’s problems begin. A technical/physical/chemical argument brought forward by an autodidact on the field of cremation (supported by Franco Deana of whom nothing else is known other than the academic title dott. Ing.) never peer-reviewed by recognized experts can hardly be considered as powerful. Mattogno probably interprets the lack of expert response to his hypothesizes on the crematory ovens as confirmation of the same. However, it is actually the high improbability of his assertions compared to the solid evidence for mass extermination in Auschwitz and – most importantly – the extremely low impact and publicity of his work, why there is so little attention paid to him.
On the technique of introducing a fresh corpse into the muffle after the previous corpse has been dehydrated and enters the combustion phase (as he acknowledges it was done in the crematorium in Theresienstadt), he says that “such a procedure was impossible in the Topf crematorium ovens, both because they were coke-fired and because the dimensions of the muffle precluded it” (ATCFS, p.280). However, he provides no explanation of why it was not possible to have one corpse in combustion phase and one corpse in dehydration phase in the muffle if the oven is coke-fired instead of naphtha. Likewise, Mattogno does NOT demonstrate that the muffle was too small. It is guesswork, but that’s not enough to refute the solid evidence on cremation cycles as short as 20 to 30 min.
On the second multiple cremation technique, the introduction of several fresh corpses into the muffle at the same time, Mattogno argues that 1.) it was thermochemically not possible to dehydrate multiple corpses in the muffle, 2.) it was spatially not possible to cremate multiple corpses into the muffle and 3.) it did not decrease the cremation time anyway. For the thermochemical argument, Mattogno estimates the amount of energy required to evaporate the water contained in four corpses per muffle, which would be way less than the amount of energy supplied from the coke gasifier and would lead to a critical decrease of the muffle temperature. He discusses four corpses per muffle, because the figure was supplied by Sonderkommando Henryk Tauber. However, whether Tauber’s figure of 4-5 corpses per muffle is historically correct or exaggerated is not essential for the question of mass extermination in Auschwitz. As rule, one needs to address the minimum claim, where a narrative can still be supported, in order to refute the narrative. In other words, Mattogno should have discussed the heat balance with 2 instead of 4 corpses per muffle. But the argument is also fundamentally flawed. Mattogno has not taken into account a major contribution to the heat balance after fresh corpses are pushed into the openings according to testimonial evidence – the combustion of dehydrated corpses already inside the muffle.
On the second point, Mattogno claims that “if two or three bodies had been introduced into one muffle, the corpses would have blocked…the passage of the combustion products coming from the gasifiers” (p. 285). According to Mattogno, the muffles of the three-muffle ovens were 70 cm wide, and it is entirely unclear and not obvious at all why two corpses on top of each other or even two corpses with reversed head-feet direction next to each other would have blocked any openings located in the side of the muffles. Mattogno once again failed to demonstrate his assertion.
Mattogno’s last point (“multiple cremations...would not have led to any gain in time or in fuel”, p. 285) is an excellent case example of how not to perform a "rigorous scientific treatment of the matter" (ATCFS, p.229). Mattogno wants to test the hypothesis if multiple cremations as reported for the Auschwitz crematoria would have reduced the nominal cremation time or the required fuel and cites some information on slaughter house incinerators mentioned in Wilhelm Heepke’s “Die Kadaververnichtungsanstalten” (1905). However, the operation principle of the cadaver incinerators was significantly different to the one reported for the crematoria in Auschwitz. The data cited by Heepke refers to incinerators that were loaded once with cadavers with a mass equal to 7 – 9 corpses when scaled to the floor area of the Topf ovens (or > 9 corpses when scaled to the volume). In contrast to this, the Topf ovens were only loaded with a fraction of this number of corpses (2-4), but reloaded after a well-defined time (corresponding to the end of the dehydration of the previous load). The benefit of this well-defined reloading (but which required a higher man power) was saving of external fuel, since the combustion of the dehydrated corpses was efficiently exploited as a source of internal fuel. There is no evidence that this technique was carried out for the slaughter house incinerators. Hence, the data provided by Heepke cannot test for the impact of multiple cremations as performed in Auschwitz on the amount of required external fuel.
Keeping the size of the muffle and the ratio surface area to volume of the cadavers constant, one would assume that the cremation rate increases upon increasing the amount of mass while increasing the amount of energy until it saturates or even decreases because a) the necessary energy can longer be supplied, b) because the fresh air injection or exhaust gas removal becomes limiting or c) because the ratio of the available surface area to bulk drops below a critical value. In other words, there is no general answer to the question if multiple cremations increase the cremation rate, but it depends on the actual regime an oven is operating and if sufficient energy is supplied. At low loadings, the cremation rate will increase, at high loadings it will be saturated or decrease. The fact that numerous eyewitnesses have reported high throughput cremations being carried out in Auschwitz is sufficient evidence to assume that the Topf ovens in Auschwitz-Birkenau were still in a low loading regime with beneficial impact of increasing load on the cremation rate. The additional energy was obviously supplied by the combustion of the dehydrated corpses from the earlier batch.
It is up to Revisionists to demonstrate that the Topf ovens in Birkenau were already saturated with one adult corpse and that any increase of the number of corpses would have resulted in a proportional increase of the cremation time even if extra heat was supplied by the exothermic reaction of the previously dried corpses, if they disagree with this empirical knowledge from numerous eyewitnesses.
Mattogno also argues that the durability of the Birkenau ovens (and lack of documents on rebuilding the brickwork) allowed for only a maximum 92,000 cremations. The figure is based on the limit of 2,000 cremations per muffle provided in an article by Rudolf Jakobskötter from 1941 on electrical Topf ovens (ATCFS, p. 298). However, the argument does not take into account the higher loading per introduction as well as the reduced thermal stress on the refractories (compared to civilian use of crematory ovens), since they were subjected to less temperature changes during a) the cremation of fresh and dehydrated corpses at the same time in the muffle reducing the temperature peaks from the different phases of the cremation process and b) continuous operation. The latter was also pointed out by the Topf engineer Erdmann in the letter of 14 July 1941 to the concentration camp Mauthausen:
“It is doing no harm to carry out cremations day and night one after the another, if required. The fact is that the fireclay materials last longer if there is a uniform temperature in the oven all the time.”
In conclusion, it is clear that Mattogno has not performed well on this issue of the capacity of the crematory ovens in Auschwitz that he defined as of prime importance and that he studied for the last 3 decades. He can't explain the paper trail & the numerous sources on high throughput cremations, nor does he provide a scientific treatment of why high throughput cremations are impossible.
Can crematory smokestacks belch smoke and fire?
Short answer: Yes.
Holocaust deniers often circulate this sketch of David Olere in fits of laughter saying it is impossible to flames to shoot out of a crematory chimney, and that they also don't emit thick smoke either. They also attack Hollywood depictions of Auschwitz such as a scene from Schindler's List that show smoking crematory chimneys.
So on one side deniers use witness testimony of smoke and fire as proof that they're swindlers, as they go on to claim crematory chimneys do not emit either. And on the other side deniers use the lack of thick smoke and fire on aerial photography as proof there was no extermination going on because if there was, huge plumes of smoke should be visible. Notice the hypocrisy?
What we need to find out, is if 1940s Topf & Sons crematory chimneys were physically capable of emitting smoke and even fire.
Let's first address the fire issue. According to head of B&L Cremation Systems Inc., Dr. Steve Looker, older crematoria were quite capable of shooting out flames if overloaded, a phenomenon he called a "candle." His own product is designed to avoid this. Even so, he allowed that if he actively tried for it, there is a decent chance he could produce the effect as well. This contradicts the revisionist "expert claim" that flames cannot shoot out of crematorium chimneys.
Auschwitz survivor Arnold Friedman, prisoner number B14515's account of fourteen foot flames delivered as testimony at the first false news trial of Ernst Zundel, however, could be considered hyperbole (the height in numbers), were it not for another overlooked fact: an actual chimney fire caused by the build-up of highly combustible creosote due to the coke-fired nature of the Auschwitz crematory ovens.
As the smoke rises through the chimney it cools, causing water, carbon, and volatiles to condense on the interior surfaces of the chimney. The black oily residue that builds up is referred to as creosote. Over the course of a season creosote deposits can become several inches thick. Since creosote is highly combustible, a thick accumulation creates a fire hazard which then ignites—causing a chimney fire.
In order to properly maintain chimneys and heaters that burn wood or carbon-based fuels, the creosote buildup must be removed.
73% of heating fires and 25% of all residential fires in the United States are caused by failure to clean out creosote buildup. Since 1990, creosote buildup has caused 75% fewer fires. This is partly due to the use of efficient wood-burning stoves that fully combust the carbon from fuel, and partly due to the use of Class A flues, insulated double wall stainless steel pipe. Can't say the same about 1940s Topf crematory ovens.
Therefore, the flames observed could also have been the result of a normal chimney fire, caused by an ignition of the built-up creosote in the chimney. As stated, creosote is condensed particles of smoke that stick to the inner wall of the chimney. Creosote is highly combustible, and can result in a long, hot, destructive chimney fire. The documented problems that occurred with the Auschwitz chimneys - cracking, collapse of liners - suggest that there were chimney fires which resulted from poor maintenance.
Now, let's talk about smoke. If you look at the 1943 photograph of Krematorium IV shown earlier, you will see the tip of the smokestacks is covered in soot. Is that proof enough or do you need more? Also, keep in mind that smoke and open flame was also emanating from the outdoor cremation pits, and these were located near the Krematoria (e.g. V and its surroundings). I include the possibility of the witness seeing this activity and attributing it to the smokestack of Krema V. Given that this area was off-limits to the average prison inmate, i.e. they couldn't get close to judge where exactly the smoke and where the fire was coming from, it is no surprise that they attributed it to the crematorium itself. Regarding Arnold Friedman's statement about being able to guess the physical makeup and even nationality of the cremated by the color of the smoke (as quoted from a newspaper article in the 'Globe and Mail' Toronto, January 12, 1985), one has to keep in mind that factors like the amount of coal used, the amount of hours since the crematory had begun its current batch of incineration and any physiochemical differences when it comes to the incineration of emaciated musulmans and somewhat well-fed civilians, can explain observed variations in the shade of the emanating smoke.
These observations, if I may say so humbly, are a more realistic interpretation of the testimony than using blunt denier rhetoric (as e.g. expressed by codoh's resident troll Jonnie "Hannover" Hargis) calling Arnold Friedman a crank and a liar.
Cremation time sheet from the Gusen camp (Mauthausen-Gusen complex)
This is the report about crematorium activity in the Gusen camp. "Leichen" in the table's upper row means corpses (of all ages); the table lists the daily number of corpses cremated during autumn 1941.
What is particularly interesting about Mattogno's methodology is that he was quite willing to accept this timesheet as authoritative when he was trying to make arguments about the amount of coke that would be needed to incinerate the bodies of the gassed at Auschwitz by extrapolating this chart of Gusen to there. Now, however, that this timesheet shows that the Topf ovens were able to function in a very timely capacity (namely, that the SINGLE Topf double-muffle oven in Gusen is capable of cremating 806 corpses in 18 days, or an average of 45 corpses per day or 2 corpses an hour if we consider 24/7 non-stop cremation...which wasn't the case, and therefore a higher corpse incineration rate per hour since you have to account for the downtime but still reach the numbers listed), Mattogno claims that such numbers are "technically absurd." Classic example of denier cherry-picking.
We don't know how the Gusen workers decided to add coke to the ovens. At certain times they may have added more than was necessary. The idea that how much coke an average corpse required can be derived through a simple division is absurd. Also, there is only information that states how many wheelbarrows of coke were used, but no weight is attached to the individual barrows. Rather, the weight of each barrow-load is listed as a round figure of 60 kg. Certain barrow-loads of coke could have weighed less than others. Part of the theory that Mattogno is advancing is that each coke load weighed the same.
Case in point: On October 28, 1941, 18 barrows of coke were needed to cremate 30 corpses, while just a day earlier, 30 corpses could be cremated using only 17 barrows, or upto 60 kgs less coke.
In a similar fashion, on November 1st, 1941, 38 corpses could be cremated with 21 barrows of coke while on the following day 42 corpses could be cremated with the same amount of barrows, and on the day following that a further 2 barrows less were needed.
Source:
Austrian Bundesministerium für Inneres, document B/12/31, Archiv der Gedenkstätten, Konzentrationslager Mauthausen. Thanks to Daniel Keren.
http://www.phdn.org/archives/holocaust-history.org/auschwitz/response-to-mattogno/
An overview of the crematoria capacities in some Nazi camps
The way you should read this map is as follows: Each semi-circle represents one oven muffle. Each rectangle, wherein these muffles are contained, represents one oven. Each oven bears the name of the crematory company that manufactured it. The letter T stands for the manufacturer Topf & Söhne, while the letter K stands for the manufacturer Kori.
It is clear from the map that e.g. Auschwitz-Birkenau had 3 double-muffle ovens, 10 triple-muffle ovens and 2 eight-muffle ovens, all made by Topf & Sons.
To sum up the entire cremation debate in the simplest of terms, consider this:
If baking 1 pizza in 1 oven takes 1 hour and 1 kg of coke, then it is true that stuffing more pizzas in the oven will make it take longer than 1 hour. E.g. 4 pizzas in the oven take 3 hours to bake. So while the principle of more muffle content prolonging the baking process is correct, we are still looking at 4 pizzas in 3 hours, i.e. 1 pizza in 45 minutes. Even though 1 pizza was not done in 45 minutes, 4 pizzas were in 3 hours, which still averages 1 pizza = 45 minutes, and therefore a higher output in, say, a week than baking 1 pizza at a time.
The same can be applied to the coke required. More matter to bake equals more coke, but baking more at once averages to less coke per pizza. And that, is a very offensive, but in my opinion easy method to grasp the issue at hand. Because I have met my fair share of deniers who claim if 1 pizza takes 1 hour to bake and requires 1kg of coke, then 2 pizzas take 2 hours to bake and require 2 kgs of coke.
Engineer Fritz Sander's letter to Topf, dated September 14th, 1942
When a denier asks you to provide evidence beyond mere testimony that crematory workers in Auschwitz stuffed more than one body at a time into a muffle, show him this. It is proof of multi-corpse incineration per muffle in Auschwitz I ("man hilft sich [...] mit einem Vollstopfen der einzelnen Muffel mit mehreren Leichen" translates to "one is trying to handle the situation by stuffing individual muffles with multiple corpses"). Now watch the denier move the goal posts to "well this doesn't prove it happened all the time and in the other crematoriums, let alone other camps as well". Welcome to debating holocaust deniers 101. So let's let the Sonderkommando speak, shall we?
Henryk Tauber described how the muffles were filled with multiple bodies:
"We burned the bodies of children with those of adults. First we put in two adults, then as many children as the muffle could contain. It was sometimes as many as five or six. We used this procedure so that the bodies of children would not be placed directly on the grid bars, which were relatively far apart. In this way we prevented the children from falling through into the ash bin. Women's bodies burned much better and more quickly than those of men. For this reason, when a charge was burning badly, we would introduce a woman's body to accelerate the combustion."[1]
Filip Müller, also a member of a Sonderkommando that cremated bodies, confirmed the process of multiple cremations in his memoirs. The bodies were:
"...sorted according to their combustibility: for the bodies of the well-nourished were to help burn the emaciated. Under the direction of the Kapos, the bearers began sorting the dead into four stacks. The largest consisted mainly of strong men, the next in size of women, then came children, and lastly a stack of dead Mussulmans, emaciated and nothing but skin and bones. This technique was called 'express work,' a designation thought up by the Kommandoführers and originating from experiments carried out in crematorium 5 in the autumn of 1943. The purpose of these experiments was to find a way of saving coke. [...] Thus the bodies of two Mussulmans were cremated together with those of two children or the bodies of two well-nourished men together with that of an emaciated woman, each load consisting of three, or sometimes, four bodies."[2]
Sources:
[1] Robert Jan van Pelt, "The Van Pelt Report" (“IV Attestations, 1945-46”).
[2] Filip Müller, "Eyewitness Auschwitz: Three Years in the Gas Chambers" (Ivan R. Dee, 1979), pp. 98, 99.
Also, see: https://www.hdot.org/debunking-denial/ab4-civilian-ovens-comparison/
Auschwitz typists can't keep their lies straight
The left document talks about permission being granted for a vehicle to bring "material for special treatment" from Dessau. Which is the town where there was the ironically named Zyklon-B manufacturing plant "Dessauer Zuckerraffinerie GmbH" (Dessau sugar refinery ltd.) for the company DEGESCH (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Schädlingsbekämpfung - German Society for Pest Control).
The right document, just 2 months later, talks about bringing material for "Jewish relocation"
Interestingly, Sonderbehandlung changes to Judenumsiedlung in just a span of 2 months...well, what is it? Is special treatment being administered or are Jews being relocated?
Documents and arguments regarding the homicidal nature of the facilities in question
Zyklon-B pellets containing HCN poison gas
The Zyklon-B that was the principal agent in the mass murder of human beings in Auschwitz, Majdanek and Mauthausen was manufactured by the German companies DEGESCH (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Schädlingsbekämpfung; "German Society for Pest Control") and Degussa.
Holocaust deniers often go on long 'appeal to reason' monologues stating why the Germans, despite being such a technologically advanced and efficient people, resorted to an insecticide to kill people rather than something more efficient. But what is more efficient? Bottles of pure CO that are expensive as hell? Shooting Jews on the spot? The latter was done to over a million people in many parts of Eastern Europe - as part of Einsatzgruppen and massacres like Babi Yar, Rumbula, Ponary and so on. But the Nazis are people too, and killing unarmed civilians at gunpoint over, and over again takes a psychological toll over time on anyone. Nazis were not immune to PTSD. Himmler's concern for the psychological well-being of his subordinates is recorded, many of whom were cracking up after shooting men, women and children day in day out. This is why a more industrial method of mass killing was devised based on experience drawn from the T4 Euthanasia program and experiments at Mogilev, where the killer doesn't have to look at the faces of people whose life he is going to take. And speaking of efficiency, what could have done the job "more simple and easier" - and more inconspicuous, than ordering some extra cans of a standard insecticide that had to be stockpiled at concentration camps anyway for disinfestations, dropped through some openings into basements packed with people? Nothing, if you ask me.
taken from: http://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/mmg/mmg.asp?id=1141&tid=249
So what is hydrogen cyanide?
At room temperature, hydrogen cyanide is a volatile, colorless-to-blue liquid (also called hydrocyanic acid). It rapidly becomes a gas that can produce death in minutes if breathed. Hydrogen cyanide is used in making fibers, plastics, dyes, pesticides, and other chemicals, and as a fumigant to kill rats. It is also used in electroplating metals and in developing photographic film.
What immediate health effects can be caused by exposure to hydrogen cyanide?
Breathing small amounts of hydrogen cyanide may cause headache, dizziness, weakness, nausea, and vomiting. Larger amounts may cause gasping, irregular heartbeats, seizures, fainting, and rapid death. Generally, the more serious the exposure, the more severe the symptoms. Similar symptoms may be produced when solutions of hydrogen cyanide are ingested or come in contact with the skin.
taken from: http://www.cyanidecode.org/cyanide-facts/environmental-health-effects
The LD50 for gaseous hydrogen cyanide is 100-300 parts per million. Inhalation of cyanide in this range results in death within 10-60 minutes, with death coming more quickly as the concentration increases. Inhalation of 2,000 parts per million hydrogen cyanide causes death within one minute. The LD50 for ingestion is 50-200 milligrams, or 1-3 milligrams per kilogram of body weight. For contact with unabraded skin, the LD50 is 100 milligrams per kilogram of body weight.
Although the time, dose and manner of exposure may differ, the biochemical action of cyanide is the same upon entering the body: Once in the bloodstream, cyanide forms a stable complex with a form of cytochrome oxidase, an enzyme that promotes the transfer of electrons in the mitochondria of cells during the synthesis of ATP. Without proper cytochrome oxidase function, cells cannot utilize the oxygen present in the bloodstream, resulting in cytotoxic hypoxia or cellular asphyxiation. The lack of available oxygen causes a shift from aerobic to anaerobic metabolism, leading to the accumulation of lactate in the blood. The combined effect of the hypoxia and lactate acidosis is depression of the central nervous system that can result in respiratory arrest and death. At higher lethal concentrations, cyanide poisoning also affects other organs and systems in the body, including the heart.
Description: Colorless gas or colorless or pale-blue liquid
Warning properties: Almond odor at >l ppm; inadequate warning for acute or chronic exposure
Molecular weight: 27.03 daltons
Boiling point (760 mm Hg): 78ºF (25.6ºC)
Freezing point: 8ºF (-13.4ºC)
Specific gravity (liquid): 0.69 (water = 1)
Vapor pressure: 630 mm Hg at 68ºF (20ºC)
Gas density: 0.94 (air = 1)
Water solubility: Flammable at temperatures >0ºF (-18ºC)
Flammability: flammable limits 3.9% to 21.8% at room temperature
Flammable range: 5.6% to 40% (concentration in air)
The Prussian Blue argument made by holocaust deniers
As if all this wasn't enough, Holocaust deniers still cling on to their belief that nobody was gassed in any gas chamber anywhere in the Nazi camps. So the argument they make to support their claim that nobody was gassed is, that in the camps that used Zyklon-B (HCN) to gas humans (Auschwitz-Birkenau, Majdanek, Mauthausen, Stutthof), a blue pigment has formed in the concrete walls of rooms that both deniers and historians agree were used for delousing. However, no such visible pigment is found on the walls of the actual homicidal gas chambers (e.g. Mauthausen, or Krema I in Auschwitz Stammlager, or the semi-collapsed interior of Krema II's gas chamber in Birkenau), something also proven in the findings of the Leuchter report, the Rudolf report (both are deniers who took samples illegally by chiseling directly into the concrete) and the report done by the reputable Krakow Institute for Forensics (KIFR), although trace amounts have been found in the walls of the homicidal gas chambers in all three reports - just "not enough" (according to denier standards) compared to the delousing chambers. The deniers' arguments are addressed and refuted in the picture above. Which leaves us with the question as to why iron-cyanide compounds were even found in these homicidal gas chambers if no homicidal gassing had occurred there at all, and these rooms were "just" morgues according to the deniers? The deniers have carefully constructed an alternate explanation, but one that is never consistent: according to some deniers, the morgues were really just morgues and the trace amounts come from the fumigated clothing of the corpses stored therein. Except in Birkenau, corpses were stored naked, and cremated naked. Other deniers instead claim the morgues, just like many other buildings in the camp complex, were routinely fumigated to prevent typhus from spreading. Really? You "routinely" fumigate morgues? Name me one morgue operator who agrees - especially considering Zyklon-B is an insecticide and NOT a bactericide, therefore it makes no sense to fumigate a morgue routinely used to store corpses (as deniers claim). Yet other deniers make the claim that these rooms marked as morgues on blueprints were *also* used for delousing clothing, but only occasionally and therefore the minuscule amount of residue. This lack of consistency among revisionists is a clear example of them grasping at straws. If you cannot even form a proper consensus amongst yourselves, how on earth will you achieve the feat of rewriting history?
So what is the real explanation, then? Why haven't "enough amounts" of Prussian Blue staining, so as to become visible, formed on the walls of the homicidal gas chambers? The answer is a combination of several factors, but let's first look at the following: Hydrocyanic acid is a very weak acid, and accordingly its salts dissolve easily in stronger acids. Even carbonic acid, which is formed as a reaction of carbon dioxide (higher levels of which will be in a room that was filled with people) with water (which I will get to in a second), will dissolve ferro-cyanide. Carbonic acid is CO2 + H2O = H2CO3. In Dr. Richard Greens essay "Leuchter, Rudolf, and the iron blues" he points out these rooms were washed. Which is also logical, because after a homicidal gassing and the clearing of corpses, the room will neither look nor smell fine enough to continue to pass for a harmless shower room, which is the deception required to get the next batch of victims into it. Evidence of hosing down gas chambers during cleanup from witnesses:
“The water tap was in the corridor and a rubber hose was run from it to wash the floor of the gas chamber...” (Henryk Tauber, p.484 Pressac, Auschwitz: Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers)
“The Sonderkommando squad, outfitted with large rubber boots, lined up around the hill of bodies and flooded it with powerful jets of water. This was necessary because the final act of those who die by drowning or by gas is an involuntary defecation....” (Miklos Nyszili, p-52, "Auschwitz")
"Once the gas chamber had been cleared, it must be hosed free of all traces of blood and excrement-but mainly blood-and then it must be whitewashed with a quickdrying paint. This step is crucial and it is done each time the gas chamber is emptied, for the dying have scratched and gouged the walls in their death throes. The walls are embedded with blood and bits of flesh, and none of the next transport must suspect that he is walking into anything other than a shower. This takes two or three hours.” (p.46, Holocaust Odyssey of Daniel Bennahmias, Sonderkommando)
So what have we established so far? We have established that the walls of the homicidal gas chambers were subjected to a different treatment (regularly washing down with water to get rid of stains, even repainting) compared to the walls of the delousing chambers where none of this was necessary.
Next, we need to look at the time factor within which a high concentration of HCN was present: A typical delousing cycle lasted for many HOURS while a typical homicidal gassing took approx. 20 minutes (followed by ventilation and several hours of clearing bodies during which HCN levels would have dropped considerably). So we're left with the fact that walls being exposed at best 20 minutes at a time to high concentrations of HCN before ventilation and subsequently washed, compared to walls being exposed to HCN for many hours (delousing) would obviously, over time, react differently. THIS is why you'll find visible cyanide residue on delousing chamber walls and none visible (yet trace amounts still existing as per samples taken) on the walls of the homicidal gas chambers. There is no equation known to chemists with which anyone can independently calculate that "X amount of cyanide residue should permanently form for Y hours of exposure to HCN gas". Therefore, holocaust deniers using the amount of cyanide residue present on brick walls as proof of how much HCN was ever present in this chamber, is not science at all.
Deniers have one more argument left: "Well, what about the small homicidal gas chambers at Stutthof or Majdanek? They display visible PB staining. If relatively few people were gassed here in comparison to Birkenau, why has so much PB formed? HUH?????" The answer, again, is simple: historiography points out to these chambers being dual-purpose ones: Homicidal gassings happened here, AS WELL AS delousing. This is the position holocaust historians hold. But holocaust historians do not ever claim the homicidal gas chambers at Birkenau or Mauthausen were also used for delousing. We move on with what Dr. Green has to say:
"Rudolf was unable to create Prussian blue with brick and cyanide in his own experiments. The presence of Prussian blue in at least some of the delousing chambers is interesting, but the current arguments presented by Rudolf continue to assume that HCN concentration is the sole variable that caused this, which is clearly not any kind of consensus among chemists worldwide. It needs to be established beyond doubt that Prussian blue would ALWAYS form beyond a certain concentration under specified conditions.
Concluding that the lack of Prussian blue in the homicide chambers means that cyanide gas was not used in them at lethal concentrations requires concrete proof that Prussian blue would have 100% had to have formed under operating conditions, including not just concentration, but also duration, temperature, humidity and pH. I do not see that enough has been done to establish this. In this matter, the burden of proof is on the "activist" to demonstrate this precondition." - Dr. Richard Green, in his essay
It is also not the cyanide which alone causes the pigmentation - it is the reaction with wall compounds which must be present in certain conditions. For instance, Rudolf did not find visible PB in the delousing chambers of Dachau. So once again, to summarize, Germar Rudolf and revisionist "scientists" need to prove to the world that:
1) It is Hydrogen Cyanide gas ALONE that forms Prussian Blue residue on concrete walls in the first place
2) Even low concentrations of HCN, e.g. 300ppm will, over 2 years, lead to its formation
3) Even low exposure times (< 1 hour) will, over 2 years, lead to its formation
4) Even at temperatures and humidities present in the homicidal gas chambers, PB will form over 2 years
5) Cleaning the walls will not prevent PB from forming. Or if it prevents the PB from forming, that cleaning the walls after the bodies had been cleared would be too late to prevent the PB from forming.
6) Relating to point 5), that enough HCN was still present in the room after the ventilation system had begun doing its job to still contribute to the PB formation process as the bodies were being cleared.
7) Their research meets the standards of the scientific method, i.e. is nicely protocoled, reproducible, and peer reviewed (I am sure they can think of ways to camouflage the intent of their paper so that third party chemists from e.g. developing nations can independently review their paper and judge the accuracy of the methods and conclusions without being informed of any underlying motives)
Until they can present these results - and being barred from Auschwitz is not an excuse because they can recreate these conditions in any lab or even a shed - their findings so far, are meaningless to science.
Therefore, I daresay case closed.
If you're still not satisfied about refuting Leuter and Rudolf, see:
http://phdn.org/archives/holocaust-history.org/auschwitz/chemistry/blue/
http://phdn.org/archives/holocaust-history.org/auschwitz/chemistry/not-the-science/index.shtml
http://www.nizkor.org/ftp.cgi/camps/auschwitz/cyanide/cyanide.002
http://www.nizkor.org/features/techniques-of-denial/blue.html
The American gas chamber strawman
"Revisionists" like Fred Leuchter or Robert Faurisson take great pains to emphasize again and again how many safety measures and protocols a homicidal gassing in an American gas chamber required, how "complicated" it was and so on and so forth and use this to make their case that therefore, homicidal gassings per se are nigh impossible to be done, let alone en masse, in a room of far simpler making.
Interestingly, these are the very same people who have no trouble believing in the existence of delousing chambers which also lacked the kind of doors American gas chambers had, and were often located in even closer vicinity to inmate barracks in the Nazi camps.
And for the record anyone who has studied the history of gas chambers in America will know that initially, before chambers like the above were built, people (and by people I mean sometimes up to 2, were successfully gassed in normal concrete rooms, some even with glass windows. E.g. see following image:
http://www.capitalpunishmentuk.org/nevada.jpg
Germar Rudolf is also one whose theory is based on the fact that American gas chambers delivered much higher concentrations of HCN to kill a death row inmate than is the required minimum lethal dosage, and because these inmates took several minutes to die despite breathing deeply and calmly (and therefore a similar amount of time as the gassing victims of Nazi camps), he comes to the conclusion that similar high levels of HCN would have to have been present in the gas chambers of e.g. Birkenau (rather than 300ppm) to kill everyone in such a short amount of time, to make his argument that higher levels of iron-cyanide compounds (prussian blue) should have therefore formed in the gas chamber walls.
But he fails to realize this: If the human lethal minimum is 300 ppm for a clinical result defined as immediate death or death in minutes, then the hugely increased ppm for penal gassing in US gas chambers cannot better the outcome. The man will die when the lethal minimum has arrested his breathing process.
Therefore the lethal minimum will achieve the same outcome as a much higher ppm saturation. The penal quantities are to ensure the victim's distress is minimised and that lethal minimum is inhaled as fast as possible.
The Nazis had no similar altruistic values, and you CANNOT dismiss the premise that if the lethal minimum achieved the similar knock-down times in Birkenau, then that is reasonable evidence that all that was required was the lethal minimum applied in the time necessary to do the job - not the penal overdose, used for moral and medical propriety.
In other words: if 8000ppm of HCN is present in a gas chamber rather than 300ppm, this doesnt mean the person inhaling it will die 26 times faster.
Because around 300 ppm is the minimum required HCN concentration in the air so that it comes straight into the victim's lungs and inhibits his ability to process air into oxygen at cellular level, and this takes his body 2 minutes, namely breathing shut-down and clinical death - is 270 ppm, according to literature (USEPA; Ambient Water Quality Criteria Doc: Cyanides p.C-7 (1980) EPA 440/5-80-037).
So if the fastest you can bring about death is 300 ppm because that's all you need to cause an immediate shut-down of the body's oxygen-related processes, then 5000 ppm, 8,000 ppm or 20,000 ppm will not do that job any faster because 300 does it in the minimum amount of time it takes that level of poison to cross the blood-air barrier and paralyse cellular respiration.
So this kind of reverse-engineering argument of "amount of HCN present in an American gas chamber + minutes it took for the inmate to die means less concentration results in a much longer killing process" is BASELESS UNSCIENTIFIC NONSENSE. Once again, the height of scientific holocaust revisionism debunked.
Blueprint of Krematorium II
Here is the (in big letters) labeled blueprint of Krematorium II, designed by Walter Dejaco and Fritz Karl Ertl, whose original survived the war and is available in the Auschwitz archives.
Holocaust deniers will be quick to point out that the rooms in question are labeled 'Leichenkeller' (morgues; literally corpse cellars) and not 'Gaskeller', but we'll get to those in a moment.
First, remember that all the forensic reports conducted found trace amounts of iron-cyanide compounds in the samples taken from the gas chambers. Why were even trace amounts there, if according to the deniers nobody was gassed? Holocaust deniers have an answer for that: the morgues were fumigated a couple of times, just like all other rooms in the Auschwitz complex were, including prisoner barracks, as a precautionary method to combat typhus.
The revisionist/denier explanation is that the gas chambers were morgues for typhus victims. "Where there's typhus and attempts to battle it, there should be traces of a well known insecticide, correct? Therefore trace amounts of cyanides were found in the concrete walls despite nobody being gassed here. Zyklon was used to kill lice which one would expect be found on the bodies and clothing of people who died of typhus. Zyklon fumigation may have been utilized in these rooms for exactly the same reasons it was utilized in many other parts of the camp."
But why would you disinfect corpses you are going to cremate anyway? Let that sink in for a while. Okay, so maybe the clothes are still useful. So, why not remove the clothes, and disinfect them in the already existing disinfection facilities? Why are morgues needed for this? Is it because you don't want the Sonderkommando handling the diseased bodies to get infected? Is that it? Why, it would be awfully considerate of the Nazis to expend additional Zyklon-B to prevent the Sonderkommando from getting infected, only to kill them later, given the short lifespan Sonderkommandos had in the first place. But even if the Nazis were so considerate, there's just two more problems: First off, disinfecting a morgue that will be infected the next moment when new typhus-ridden corpses will be brought in seems rather like a Sisyphean task. Secondly, HCN is not a bactericide, therefore useless on disinfecting anything dead - it is well known that lice flee the human body upon death. Furthermore, non-gas chamber related deaths in Birkenau yielded bodies that were transported naked to the crematoria - lice tend to cling to clothes most of all: not present by the time the body gets to the morgue. Sonderkommando were never spending time undressing corpses before hauling them into the furnaces, nor did they haul them into the furnaces clothed. Therefore, there is absolutely zero reason to fumigate a morgue for lice. HCN has no use in a morgue, period. So the argument that it is just as valuable to fumigate a morgue as it is to fumigate a barrack room doesn't hold. It's completely pointless.
Yet another issue that speaks against delousing bodies (clothed or not) infected by typhus in the morgue where they were supposedly stored is because in actuality, the bodies never even entered it. No need for them to enter the morgue, because in Birkenau there were 4 crematoria with 46 muffles (2x [5x3] + 2x[1x8]). To understand where I am going with this, taking one of the revisionists' favorite documents, the number of *officially registered* 'natural' deaths in the entirety of 1943 was 36,000, i.e. less than 100 per day. More than one adult body could be cremated in one muffle, as is testified to, and as a simple measurement of the dimensions of the muffles indicate. Nor did these bodies arrive all at once, but were carted over from their various places of death in the camp to the crematoria by dedicated corpse-carrying commandos ("Leichenkommando"), whose existence is documented and witnessed. Ultimately this leaves us with no other interpretation than that the rooms marked in the surviving Krema blueprints as 'morgues' (Leichenkeller) were actually in use for other purposes, i.e. a place for people to get undressed (Auskleideraum) and a place to gas them (Vergasungskeller).
But we're not done. There are deniers who argue that the morgues were actually used occasionally as morgues, and occasionally as disinfection facilities, therefore being able to explain the cyanide traces for the gas chambers that showed up in the Leuchter, Rudolf and Krakow reports in that they came from deliberate processes (delousing of clothing) having taken place there, rather than routine building fumigation. First off, we have plenty of disinfection rooms known by everyone in the camp as such, both in Auschwitz I and in Birkenau (e.g. Zentralsauna). Their argument also includes the flow of bodies from the Leichenkommandos having to be diverted to the Leichenkeller, because they're gullible enough to believe denier nonsense about very slow cremation speeds (i.e. one corpse at a time, several hours per incineration based on the average times taken from modern civilian crematories following all procedures, ovens constantly breaking down or having to be cleaned and so on). But then they have caught themselves on the horns of a dilemma: If the cremation speeds were so slow that bodies had to be stored in the Leichenkeller temporarily, then the morgues would have been in use. Therefore, a delousing - underground in the case of Krema II and III - would have disrupted this for a minimum of 24 hours, since a lice-disinfestation takes that long. Can the deniers care to explain how not a single crematorium worker claims that these rooms were morgues? There isn't a single document spelling out that '100 bodies were stored here on Tuesday' - clearly there was no need for the Nazis to destroy such a mundane document among their meticulous records. So, all they've got is a dodgy coulda-woulda-shoulda that doesn't have any external evidence to back it up, documentary or testimony. Whereas the conventional explanation has more than 150 witnesses and a number of documents. Personally, I like corroboration. It's the bread and butter of historiography as well as court cases.
Verdict: Deniers insisting that the Leichenkeller remained morgues until the end of the war show their complete lack of familiarity with the documentation. Why don't we play a game with them? Let them explain why documentation exists where these facilities are instead labeled 'disrobing cellars' and 'gas cellars', to which I will get in a second. Deniers need to come up with a scenario that can explain all of these documents coherently in such a way that their gas chamber denial can stand up. Hint: if they say the word forgery, they lose.
Now that we have ruled out morgues and disinfestation in these chambers, what remains for the holocaust deniers? Air-raid shelters. Some holocaust deniers' claim is that the buildings were originally morgues built to deal with a typhus epidemic. These morgues were later converted to air-raid shelters when the epidemic was in abeyance and the threat of allied bombing had increased. At the time of conversion they were fitted with standard gas-proof bomb shelter doors.
While this was true about Krema I in Auschwitz I some time in 1944 onward, the "morgues" in Auschwitz II Birkenau were never converted to air-raid shelters, because the SS HQ was stationed in Auschwitz I, and the SS barracks of Birkenau were too far away to realistically save the personnel from an air raid. If holocaust deniers can bring forth any documentary or testimony proof about big air-raid shelters in Birkenau, by all means. Until then, this is another baseless wildcard they are simply throwing at holocaust historians while they are grasping at straws to be able to explain the presence of gas-tight doors and cyanide residue in a morgue.
Vertical cross section of Krema II's Gas chamber
While the former blueprint shows us a horizontal cross section of the entire Krema II, this blueprint shows us a vertical cross section of just "morgue" 1, aka Krema II's gas chamber that claimed several hundred thousand lives. Note the ventilation systems in place ("Entlüftung" and "Belüftung") that shuts up any denier claims about poison gas being difficult to ventilate out of an underground room.
I think both these blueprints should answer Robert Faurisson's famous (stupid) question/challenge: "Show me or draw me the murder weapon, the homicidal gas chamber".
You may notice that the aeration/de-aeration system was designed as is common for a morgue, with the fresh air coming in from the top, and the foul air exiting from the bottom. When the morgue was put to use as a homicidal gas chamber, the Nazis encountered two problems:
One, bodies lying haphazardly across the entire chamber after a gassing (unlike neatly stacked bodies in a morgue) had a chance to block the de-aeration near the floor, and two, HCN is lighter than air, and tends to accumulate near the ceiling, and therefore a system wired the other way would have worked more efficiently (i.e. poison air gets sucked out on top and fresh air is blown at floor level). However, note that the only permanent fixtures in this regard are the air canals - the pumps themselves could be remounted to reverse the system. What's more, even with the current system in place, the HCN could escape out of the same, porous wire-mesh columns/vents the Zyklon was introduced into the chamber in, once the laws of pressure equilibrium dictated by the introduction of the (heavier) clean air from the Belüftung would force the lighter HCN upward and out.
What we still need to clarify, is whether these gas chambers labeled "morgues" in the blueprints, especially those of Kremas II and III, since they were located underground, were heated or not.
Some defenders argue why would morgues need heating? Bodies are supposed to be stored cold. So the few letters we have remaining (which I will post below) requesting heating and ventilation for the morgue/gas chamber are proof that it couldn't have been a morgue.
However, some deniers have argued that if there were heaters in any of these rooms - even if these were just morgues and only used as such - it would have been to keep the temperature above freezing so the bodies wouldn't freeze together in winter while they were piled on top of each other. Not a pleasant thing to have to use an axe or something similar to separate the bodies whose liquids spilled out and froze because they need to be dragged out of the room and into the crematoria one floor above to then cremate them. At least this is the theory for Kremas II and III (because Kremas IV and V had the gas chamber/"morgue" on the same ground level as the crematory).
So both deniers and defenders agree that it would be convenient if the underground rooms of Kremas II and III were heated at least in the winter, for different reasons obviously. Why do defenders of the holocaust have to accept it as well? Because:
The Zyklon-B pellets dropped into the gas chamber via holes in the roof need approx. 26°C to begin proper evaporation/outgassing of HCN, and 300ppm concentration needs to be achieved to start killing people. Hundreds, if not over a thousand panicking people in the room might be able to produce enough body heat and hyperventilation to bring the ambient temperature to 26°C in an underground room (average body temperature 37 centigrade. I would like to see over a thousand denier dickheads crammed together naked in a 2000 sq ft room and I would drop some crystals myself just to test out their dumb theory), but I'm not sure they could achieve the temperature change within 5-10 minutes after entering, as gassings usually were over within 20 minutes according to eyewitness testimony, so I will stick with the idea of the chambers being heated. Besides, due to the proximity of the crematory right above, I am also of the conviction that heat would seep down via convection through the building material and ground. Believe it or not, sometimes even unheated cellars in winters can be, in fact, warmer than the freezing cold outside. And let's not forget that it is nonsense to say Zyklon-B pellets are completely harmless until 25.7°C is reached. Yes, that is how a typical denier argument goes: “Since, at 1atm, HCN only boils at around 26°C, if the air in the gas chamber was colder, the pellets would be harmless”. One doesn't have to possess extensive knowledge of physics and chemistry to see why this is nonsense: It's like saying that at 1atm, water can only evaporate at 100+°C.
Still, to answer whether these chambers were heated or not, holocaust historian Jan Van Pelt writes in page 115 of the Pelt Report:
"Cross-referencing this letter with blueprints of the basement of crematorium 2, Dawidowski concluded that the designation “Vergasungskeller” applied to morgue 1. He noted that the blueprints showed that the section of this morgue differed from that of morgue 2 in that the former was equipped with two built-in ventilation ducts on each side. Correspondence explained that these ventilation ducts were connected to a ventilator driven by 3.5 horsepower electric motor, and that the space was also equipped with a separate system for introducing warm air into it—an arrangement which made a lot of sense if the space was used as a Zyklon B gas chamber (because hydrogen cyanide, with a boiling point of around 27 Celsius, works much faster when used in a pre-heated space—an issue Dawidowski was to discuss at length later in his report). Both eyewitness testimonies, blueprints and correspondence corroborated each other."
Van Pelt goes on in page 116 of the Pelt report:
Dawidowski noted that the gas chambers were either pre-heated with portable stoves or, in the case of crematoria 2 and 3, by warm air generated by the ovens. And he presented the results of the laboratory analysis on the presence of HCN in the six zinc covers found in crematorium 2 and the bags of hair.
Taken from the Van Pelt report, page 296:
Essential for Leuchter’s argument was that the gas chambers had been operated on low temperature. “We know that the facilities in question were operated at low temperatures,” he testified in court. “We know that there would have been a considerable amount of condensation of liquid hydrogen cyanide on the walls, floor and ceiling of these facilities.” Leuchter was even prepared to testify that “these facilities were operated at zero degrees fahrenheit or near zero temperatures and perhaps below that.” It is not clear on the basis of what evidence Leuchter came to this conclusion. There is, in fact, ample evidence that the gas chambers were heated. One piece of anecdotal evidence was given by Yehuda Bakon during the Eichmann trial. In 1943 he had joined a group of youngsters who had to pull a cart, the so-called Rollwagenkommando:
Q. “Who gave you orders where the cart should go?”
A. “The Blockälteste (block elder) always went with us and he knew what we had to do. Our tasks were quite varied: Sometimes we had to collect papers, sometimes we had to transfer blankets, sometimes we had to go to the women’s camp to which other people did not have access. With the Rollwagenkommando we went through all the camps of Birkenau, A, B, C, D, E and F, as well as the crematorium.”
Q. “You went into the crematorium?” A. “Yes.” Q. “Did you see the crematorium from the inside?”
A. “Yes. We had to take wooden logs that were in the vicinity of the crematorium for the fire. Sometimes these had to be taken for regular heating in the camps. And when we finished our work and it was cold, the Kapo of the Sonderkommando took pity on us and said: “Well, children, outside it is cold, warm yourselves in the gas chambers! There is nobody there.”
Q. “And you went to warm yourselves inside the gas chambers?”
A. “Yes. Sometimes we went to warm ourselves in the Kleidungskammer, sometimes in the gas chambers. It sometimes happened that when we came to the crematorium, we were told: “You cannot enter now—there are people inside.” Sometimes, it was in crematorium 3, after they had been burned, we took the ashes, and in winter the ashes were to be used for the road.”
Q. “Did you use human ashes to spread on the roads?”
A. “Yes.”
Q. “For what purpose?”
A. “So that people could walk on the road and not slip.”
March 6, 1943 Karl Bischoff Letter about heating a "morgue room"
There are also German documents that attest to the fact that the gas chambers were heated. The most important is a letter the chief architect of Auschwitz, Karl Bischoff, sent to the crematorium oven builders Topf & Sons on March 6, 1943. In it, Bischoff discussed the heating of morgue 1 of crematorium 2:
"In accordance with your proposal, the department agrees that cellar 1 will be preheated with the air coming from the rooms with the 3 installations to generate the forced-draught. The supply and installation of the necessary ductwork and ventilators must follow as soon as possible. As you indicate in your letter, the work should begin this week."
While the letter says "keller 1" (cellar 1), rather than "Leichenkeller 1" (morgue 1), if you look at the header, you'll see the document is talking about Krematorium II and III, and the only cellars these buildings possessed, were said morgues, as the blueprints prove, therefore the document DOES suggest heating morgues.
Both Yehuda Bakon’s testimony and Karl Bischoff’s letter demolish Fred Leuchter’s argument that the gas chamber of crematorium 2, and by implication crematorium 3, was not heated.
Furthermore, do not forget the fact that heating can also be done at the source, i.e. a canister of Zyklon-B can be heated to induce evaporation: In Mauthausen, Zyklon wasn't dropped into the gas chamber as pellets but rather the prussic acid the pellets were soaked with was introduced into the chamber in gaseous form (HCN) via tubing:
"If a gassing was due to take place, … Roth gave orders to one of the prisoners of the crematorium work detail, who were his subordinates, usually to the witness Kanduth, to heat a brick in the crematory oven. Roth took the burning-hot brick in a shovel and placed it inside the apparatus for admitting the gas. The apparatus consisted of a metal chest with a removable cover, which could be hermetically sealed by means of wing screws and airtight packing. By giving off heat, the brick led to the quick release of the poison gas..."- Judgement, Hagen Mauthausen trial, 24 July 1970 (as quoted in:) - Kogon, Langbein and Rueckerl. Nazi Mass Murder: A Documentary History of the Use of Poison Gas. Yale University Press. 1993. pp. 179-9.
That being said, Jean-Claude Pressac, in bullet point 4 on page 432 of his most excellent "Auschwitz: Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers" book, postulates that the forced-draught installations (Saugzuganlagen) only saw limited use before technical problems (relying on the testimony of Sonderkommando Henryk Tauber) including a small fire forced the Nazis to abandon this method of increasing the temperature in the gas chamber obviously intended for more efficient evaporation of HCN.
Regardless, the fact remains that the Nazis considered heating a cellar which on all blueprints was marked as a morgue. This is cold, hard, wartime documentary evidence that the "morgues" saw use other than their intended purpose, namely the cold storage of corpses. Even top tier holocaust deniers such as Germar Rudolf and Carlo Mattogno are forced to agree with this and accept this document as genuine and fact, but they claim that points to the morgues seeing limited use as delousing chambers. Thing is, they have no testimony to back up their hypothesis that the cellars of Kremas II and III were ever used the way the already existing delousing chambers elsewhere in the camp, much closer to the inmate barracks, were.
More proof of warm air ventilation, April 13th, 1943
Italian holocaust denier Carlo Mattogno uses this document as proof one of the rooms in Krema II (he argues, the gas chamber, i.e. morgue 1), was in fact used as a delousing facility (which is a nice way of explaining the trace amounts of HCN residue found in the forensic tests and also a nice way of explaining gas-tight doors), because according to this document 2 Topf delousing ovens (Entwesungsöfen, as referenced in the document) were part of its inventory.
But did it cross his mind how little a grand total of 2 delousing ovens are capable of, and how odd and out of place they would look in a 2000 square foot room? It makes far more sense to me that if these ovens were ever installed in the building, they would be for the Sonderkommando who worked and lived on the ground floor (and slept in the attic) to clean their personal clothing. The Zentralsauna building was where the steam chambers used for delousing went, chances are these two ended up there as well.
And obviously of note, the delousing ovens (Entwesungsöfen) used HOT AIR... and NOT poison gas! The room was also labeled a Vergasungskeller which would make sense if the delousing ovens used poison gas, but they didn't. No German in his right mind would call steaming something as "vergasen". Hence, only the gullible will buy in to Mattogno's nonsense.
Interestingly, this document rather only holds more incriminating evidence of the Saugzuganlage, as well as speaks of an "Erweiterung", a modification (expansion), of the aeration and de-aeration system to use warm air (Warmluftzuführung).
Gaskeller Document regarding Krematorium II and III's gas chamber ventilation system's capability
Ventilation blower Nr. 450 for the gas cellar in Auschwitz is missing...
In February 1943 Auschwitz camp building authorities complained to Topf, the company that built the crematoria equipment, that they needed ventilation blowers 'most urgently'. Why the urgency, if this was an air-raid shelter, morgue, or delousing chamber?
There is no reputable evidence that affirms the deniers' claims.
Deniers hypothesise that the urgency was a result of official fears that the camp would be hit with a typhus epidemic, which would cause a tremendous spike in the death toll. Without the proper ventilation system, the crematoria would not be able to operate (but if you check the telegram, it clearly says, the ventilation blower is needed for the gas cellar, not the crematorium on ground level).
So if during a typhus epidemic the morgue was stacked with bodies, then it would only smell bad if the ventilation system wasn't working properly. A real urgency makes far more sense if one needs to get hydrogen cyanide out of an underground room so that corpse extraction from the chamber can commence properly, which is obviously what has to happen before the next batch of victims can be gassed.
Corpse cellar 1 (the gas chamber) was the only room in the basement which was ventilated by both aeration AND de-aeration blowers, which we saw in the cross-section blueprint earlier.
Carlo Mattogno makes the case that the number of air-exchanges this ventilation system was capable of, is lower than the number of air exchanges delousing facilities elsewhere display, and therefore comes to the stunning conclusion that this place could not have functioned as a homicidal gas chamber. This is the height of revisionist logic.
The ventilation capacity of corpse cellar 1 was considered sufficient for homicidal gassing by the SS. Keep in mind that at the time the SS was operating the Bunker extermination sites without any forced ventilation whatsoever, just by natural aeration. The > 9.5 air exchanges per hour were a technical improvement over the natural ventilation at the Bunker sites, which was speeding up the ventilation process significantly.
As you can see, the Belüftungsgebläse Nr. 450 is directly related to the homicidal gas chamber (cellar 1), has a capacity of 3.5 PS (Pferdestärke, horse power) or 2.6 kW.
It is proof that both crematoria II and III's underground gas chambers were equipped with ventilators.
Jean-Claude Pressac's "The Machinery of Mass Murder at Auschwitz" says:
"In mid-March [1942] , Bischoff received new calculations from Schultz. After reviewing the original numbers, he had decided that it was better to increase the total capacity of the ventilation system of the new crematorium, now to be built at Birkenau, from 32,600 cu m of air an hour to 45,000 an hour. The room most affected by this was the B. Keller, which was to receive a system capable of aerating and deaerating 8,000 instead of 4,800 cu m an hour, that is, a 66-percent increase. Bischoff accepted Schultze's new proposal on April 2. He asked Topf to bring the designation on the firm's blueprints into line with the ones drawn"
8000 ÷ 504 = 15.8 air exchanges per hour.
Deniers claim 4,800 ÷ 506 = 9.48 air exchanges per hour.
Dr. Richard Green said:
"John Zimmerman has recently researched, 502-1-327, a Topf bill dated May 27, 1943, which may refer to crematorium II (however, the first page in his copy is missing so he cannot yet be sure); it may indicate that the 4800 cu m/hour figure is correct."
We also see here how Krema II's lift had an output of 10PS and Krema III's elevator 15PS. This is about as far as some holocaust deniers' tales of "hand-drawn elevators" will ever get.
Bischoff's "Vergasungskeller" and "Be- und Entlüftungsanlage"
This document, presented at the Nuremburg trials under the number NO-4473 and reproduced in Pressac, Jean Claude, Auschwitz: Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers, The Beate Klarsfeld Foundation, New York, 1989, p. 432, is dated 29 January 1943, with SS Hauptsturmführer Bischoff, head of the Auschwitz Central Construction Management (Zentralbauleitung), writing to Dr. Ing. Kammler in Berlin regarding Krematorium II, and in this letter he refers to a Vergasungskeller (gassing cellar):
"The Crematorium II has been completed - save for some minor constructional work - by the use of all the forces available, in spite of unspeakable difficulties, the severe cold, and in 24 hour shifts. The fires were started in the ovens in the presence of Senior Engineer Prüfer, representative of the contractors of the firm of Topf and Sons, Erfurt, and they are working most satisfactorily. The formwork for the reinforced concrete ceiling of the Leichenkeller could not yet be removed on account of the frost. This is, however, unimportant, as the Vergasungskeller can be used for this purpose.
The firm of Topf and Sons was not, on account of the unavailability of rail transport, able to deliver the aeration and ventilation equipment on time, as had been requested by the Central Building Management. As soon as the aeration and ventilation equipment arrive, the installing will start so that the complete installation may be expected to be ready for use by 20 February 1943.
A report of the inspecting engineer of the firm of Topf and Sons, Erfurt, is enclosed."
The mainstream interpretation of this incriminating letter is clear: "Vergasungskeller" translates to "gassing cellar" ('vergasen' means 'to gas'), and Krema II indeed had underground rooms or cellars ("Keller"), one of which (LK2) was the undressing room, and the other, the gas chamber (LK1). The letter also speaks of the installation of ventilation systems, which have also been attested to Leichenkeller 1 in the blue print shown earlier. Now, why would the author of NO-4473 not refer to a Leichenkeller as a Leichenkeller? As another example, the engineers Jährling and Messing referred to LK2 of Crematoria II and III via the terms "Auskleideraum" and "Auskleidekeller" (undressing room or cellar), another slip that betrayed a criminal purpose. Jährling used this designation in a document of 6 March 1943, and then Messing used it in three documents later in March.
However, holocaust denier Arthur Butz offered an explanation in his 1976 book "The Hoax of the Twentieth Century", saying that the Vergasungskeller was a part of the crematorium building devoted to generating a combustible gas for the ovens. The American believed the meaning of the German word "Vergasung" is gas generation or carburetion, i . e. turning something into a gas, based on the noun "Vergaser" (carburettor). Thirteen years later, fellow holocaust denier Robert Faurisson realized that Arthur Butz's interpretation was wrong, and later in 1989, mainstream Auschwitz expert Jean-Claude Pressac (who interestingly started out as a holocaust denier and ended up realizing the holocaust was real) conclusively showed that it was wrong, based on the design of the solid coke-fired cremation ovens which did NOT need carburettors. In 1991, Faurisson offered a theory that the Vergasungskeller was instead a storage area for fumigation equipment.
The German word "vergasen" can not only mean to kill or do away with something via gas, but next to the aforementioned sublimate, i . e. turn a solid into gas (Vergaser), more importantly, also 'to fumigate' something. The instinct of a modern German speaker might suggest the latter should be called "begasen" instead, but as source I use the Standort und Kommandaturbefehle des KL Auschwitz, a book penned by 1940s Germans stationed in the camp itself. If you use ctrl+f and try finding the word 'vergasen', you will see it repeatedly mentioned in routine fumigation procedures of office buildings elsewhere in the camp. Something no native German speaker can deny:
Full text of Kommandanturbefehle 1940 45 Ohne If Z Bemerkungen 530 S
So at first glance, Faurisson is right: the "Vergasungskeller" document, by itself, cannot prove that one of the morgues of Krematorium II was being used for homicidal gassing. Instead, the word could also mean it was a cellar used for storing fumigation equipment. But wouldn't it make more sense to store these on the other side of the camp where the delousing chambers were? Why would the fumigators have to run all the way to the cellar of Krematorium II to get the fumigation equipment? This is where Carlo Mattogno chimes in, with his theory that in the spring of 1943 a typhus epidemic was ravaging Birkenau, and additional hygiene measures had to be undertaken. Except Mattogno's theory is that the cellars of Krema II and III were used as actual showers for the inmates until the Zentralsauna building was completed. Meanwhile, Arthur Butz's newest proposal is that the Vergasungskeller was a gas shelter, on account of the fact that Crematoria II and III, with their large concrete cellars, were obviously ideal for adaptation as air raid shelters. Indeed, when this problem is looked at from the point of view of defense against air raids it seems there was no better choice at Birkenau. But before we debunk the air raid shelter scenario, I hope you've noticed how there is no kind of consensus whatsoever among these 'revisionist scholars', as every chap has a different theory. One says a storage for carburettors related to the firing of the crematory ovens. Another says a place where fumigation equipment was stored. A third chimes in and says an actual disinfection facility with working showers. A fourth maintains they really were morgues all along, just as the blueprints say. And then we have the fifth guy saying it was an air-raid shelter. Everyone somehow magically KNOWS this was not a cellar for homicidal gassing, but cannot agree what it was instead. Hilarious. The air-raid shelter theory at first glance makes sense, given that we have gas-tight doors delivered to this place, given that the Leichenkeller are located underground, and given that Krema I over at Auschwitz I really did end up becoming an air-raid shelter, so why not these morgues at Birkenau as well?
Except for four small problems:
First, a cellar built as a shelter against poison gas attacks will be referred to as a "Gasschutzkeller".
Second, building a gas raid shelter in the cellar of Krema II and III would be very nice for the camp inmates, but I highly doubt the Nazis were considerate enough to take extra measures to protect the lives of the common camp inmates from poison gas attacks (the irony).
Third, this would have to also mean the rooms could no longer be used as morgues for the storage of the dead, because due to the unpredictable nature of an air raid, you would otherwise have the scenario of vital camp personnel finding themselves in a room that is filled with bloating carcasses. It would certainly not have been inviting to be locked up in a closed space with gas-tight doors for many hours with rotting corpses!
And fourth, and this is the most damning evidence against a gas-raid shelter, its location: It is comically situated at the exact opposite end of the SS-barracks. If the Nazi personnel stationed in Birkenau built this shelter for themselves, then (if you look at the aerial photos I provided earlier), they would have to jog for minutes from their barracks alongside the camp's outer perimeter, then through the main gate, then jog for another few minutes along the rail ramp where the Selektion was done, before they could finally reach Krematorium II and III at the other end. Arthur Butz and friends would have saved me the trouble if they had looked at the aerial photography before establishing their crackpot theories.
If Kremas II and III were air-raid shelters, and Usain Bolt was an SS-guard...
Just to illustrate how stupid the air-raid shelter concept is, this would be the route from the SS-Barracks to the underground cellars of Kremas II and III some holocaust deniers claim were air-raid shelters.
If the scale is correct, we're looking at some 2 kilometers they would have to traverse before they would reach the shelter. At best, such a configuration would only allow the guards in the immediate vicinity of Kremas II and III to save themselves. Needless to say, that would be some 4000 square feet of gas chambers wasted just to save the guard tower personnel nearby.
Time sheet / Daily report of an Auschwitz worker
Unfortunately I couldn't find a larger, clearer copy of this document on the web, so bear with me.
In the bottom half of the image, what's written is the following:
5 Fußboden Aufschüttung auffüllen, stampfen
und Fußboden betonieren im Gaskammer
(author's note: grammatically "in Gaskammer" is right)
which is are technical construction terms I can only roughly translate to:
finish the work on the flooring, tamp
and concrete the flooring in gas chamber
Alright, so we have a document about construction work being done in a gas chamber. What completes the incriminating nature of this document is if you look at the very top left, what does it say?
It says Einäscherungsanlage 4
which is Crematorium 4 or Krema IV.
What we can conclude from this document, is that Crematorium IV possessed a gas chamber. Let me stress that coke-fired ovens do not need a carburetor (Vergaser), so "carburetion room" as translation for Gaskammer is once again invalid. And deniers Mattogno et al. have already demonstrated what a piss-poor air raid shelter Kremas IV and V would make, due to their pitched roof and lack of underground rooms, so air-raid shelter is also not a valid translation for Gaskammer. And obviously a morgue is not a Gaskammer either, so unless blueprints, photographic or testimony proof can be obtained explaining an additional Gaskammer was tacked on to Krematorium IV apart from the "morgue", we can only conclude it IS the "morgue".
Therefore, this can only leave two explanations: the Kammer was used for delousing/fumigation, or homicidal gassing. The fact that we have a Crematorium without a morgue to store the corpses is already giving us clues as to the real purpose of this crematorium.
For more, see Pressac's 39 criminal traces:
Krematorium III inventory
The following document shows 44 lamps (Kugel-Lampen), 9 faucets/spigots (Zapfhähne), 14 shower heads (Brausen) and 1 gas tight door (Gasdichte Tür, in handwriting) delivered to Krematorium III.
At the top left, we see the building being inventoried, "Krematorium III," also known as "KGL 30a." Below that, the first room listed ("Raum 1") has been written in as "Leichenkeller 1," which literally means "morgue 1." This is the homicidal gassing chamber, and this is where the showers and door were installed.
The handwriting is hard to read; the III might look like a II, but this document is reproduced in Pressac, Jean Claude, Auschwitz: Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers, The Beate Klarsfeld Foundation, New York, 1989, p. 432. Its source is given as Auschwitz State Museum Archive reference BW 30/43, p. 24.
Wait a minute...showerheads? For a morgue???? For a carburetion room??? For an air-raid shelter??? For a delousing/fumigation chamber??
And if they were for genuine showers, why a gas-tight door???
Gas-tight doors for the Birkenau Crematoria buildings, March 31st 1943
This photo scan showing the order of 3 gas-tight doors for worksite 30b (Krematorium IV), and 30c (Krematorium V) is taken from Jean-Claude Pressac's "Auschwitz: Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers".
Note how:
"We remind you of an additional order from 6.3.43 for the shipment of a gas door 100/192 for morgue 1 of Krematorium III, which should of of the same make as the cellar door of the adjacent Krematorium II, [namely] with a spy-hole of double 8 millimeter glass and gas-tight seal. This order is particularly urgent.' Signed, SS Major Bischoff."
mentions the one gas-tight door for morgue 1 of Krematorium III we were talking about earlier, and how this is urgent, and also proves how by March 31st, 1943, Krematorium II was already equipped with a gas-tight door.
Zyklon-B outgassing curve presented by holocaust deniers
Another important issue remains, regarding the outgassing curve of the clay-type granules or pellets that release the HCN into the surroundings. Given that a HCN air concentration of 300ppm is lethal to humans, from an initial 0ppm, can 300ppm be achieved within 5-10 minutes so that everyone is dead within half an hour? The holocaust denier narrative expressed in the above image states, that at 15°C (curve 4) ambient temperature, the Zyklon-B pellets have outgassed 25% of their contained hydrogen cyanide after 15 minutes and upto 40% by 30 minutes. Deniers express disbelief that it's possible to kill people with only 25% of the Zyklon-B pellets' contained HCN having evaporated into the gas chamber.
Dr. Franciszek Piper, one of the Auschwitz-Birkenau museum's curators, said in his book that between 5 and 7 kilograms of Zyklon-B were typically used for a gassing of 1500 people. Germar Rudolf himself accepts that for a gassing execution time of 15 minutes, all you needed was 5.8kg of Zyklon-B (see the table in Germar Rudolf, "The Chemistry of Auschwitz", page 263). How much is 25% of, say, 6 kilograms of Zyklon-B? 6 / 4 = 1.5 kilograms of pellets' worth of absorbed HCN gas released into the chamber.
But before that, let's quickly do away with the denier claim about Zyklon-B pellets "continuing to outgass for HOURS", which the above graph clearly indicates. The gas chambers were washed down. Lots of water around, and HCN outgassing from the quite soluble clay pellets can be neutralized when sprayed with water. Very easy to do in Krema II and III, where all pellets would be contained inside the four Kula columns. A detailed source for procedures in the Birkenau gas chambers are the interviews in Gideon Greif, "We Wept Without Tears"; also Henryk Tauber's testimony in Pressac.
Now, to address the Zyklon-B outgassing curve and whether 300ppm can be achieved quickly (taken from http://www.nizkor.org/ftp.cgi/camps/auschwitz/cyanide/cyanide.001 and edited by yours truly):
Imagine a room with 210 square meters of floor space (approx 2200 sq feet). The walls are 2.4 meters high, so the building will have a total volume of 504 cubic meters minus the volume of the supporting concrete pillars as laid out in the blue prints, therefore yielding 480m^3. If there are 1000 litres in a cubic metre, there'll be 480000 litres here, or 4.8 X 10^5 liters.
The structure would be fitted with 4 vents on the ceiling for pouring in the Zyklon, surrounded by wire-mesh pillars called "Kula colums". These 4 Kula columns' total volume wouldn't be subtracted from the remaining volume since they are hollow and meshed. Exhaust fans would be used to clear the room once the homicidal gassing was completed, a ventilation system whose installation has been proven via documents. This gas chamber would be largely below ground, to help maintain a constant temperature using the earth as insulation (not all of the gas chambers at Auschwitz were below ground, in fact Kremas I, IV and V were above ground structures). Keeping the chambers below ground would also allow easy access to the roof. The perpetrators could pour gas in through the roof while wearing gas masks, Sonderkommando inmates then used, to remove the bodies and transport them to the crematoria once the gassing was complete and the room had been cleared of gas. In reality, a quite simple operation.
Also, imagine that there are four such buildings in the camp (representing Kremas II, III, IV, and V at Auschwitz), and that each has a crematorium to go with it. For the sake of simplicity, each gas chamber will carry out only one gassing per day, and the chambers will be forcibly ventilated for at least one hour. I am aware that Krema IV and V's gas chamber areas were smaller than those of II and III, but keep in mind I am not taking the areas of the remaining gas chambers of the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex into this equation, which would be Krema I as well as the red and white house.
For the specifics of the gassing, let's look at just one chamber. A building with 210 m^2 of floor space can easily and generously accommodate six people per square meter (my calculations based upon how many people I could fit in one square meter, it wasn't even a tight fit). As I said earlier, the empty volume of the room is 480m^3. A human person's volume (in litres) is closely related to his weight in kilograms. People from all walks of life were sent to the gas chambers, from infants and children to the elderly, with most of the prime, healthy and able-bodied already having been selected for the camp population, and therefore less likely to find themselves in the gas chamber. Considering this, I have come to the average gas chamber person's volume in litres to 40, which will take up 0.04 cubic meters. At six people per square meter, that's 1260 people in one room, which take up 50.4 m^3 of space. That leaves a free volume of 429.6 m^3 (430 m^3 from now on.)
To show (1) how much Zyklon it would take to reach the lethal 300 ppm level, and (2) how fast 1 kilo of Zyklon would have to evaporate to reach 300 ppm in ten minutes, we need to know how much volume one kg of air takes up. Ideal gas assumptions say that one mole (6.021 X 10^23 molecules) of gas occupy 22.4 liters at 25 deg Celsius. One mole of gas is 21% oxygen and 79% nitrogen (ignore the 1% of other gases and assume they're not there.) Multiply this times the molecular weight of the gases (grams per mole of gas, 28g for N2, 32g for O2) and the weight of one mole of gas is (0.21)*32 + (.79)*28 = 28.84 grams, or 0.02884 kg per 22.4 liters (the vol. of one mole of gas).
One kilogram of gas will therefore occupy 776 liters of volume.
How much Zyklon-B will be needed to reach a concentration of 300 ppm? 300 ppm HCN corresponds to 300 milligrams of HCN per kg of air. For 430 cubic meters of air, you need to do some manipulations:
430 m^3 = 4.3 X 10^5 liters * (1 kg air/ 776 liters) = 554.1 kilos of air.
(0.300 grams HCN/ kg air)*(554.1 kg air) = 166.23 grams HCN.
...less HCN than is contained in one can of Zyklon-B (200g). In reality, if only 160 grams of HCN are poured into such a room,they may have to wait some time before everyone is dead. But what if you pour in a whole kilogram of HCN?
The question now becomes, "If 1 kg of HCN (5x 200g cans) are poured into our gas chamber, how fast will the HCN have to evaporate to reach a lethal concentration in ten minutes?" For this example, I will assume a constant rate of evaporation on a per gram basis. The rate of evaporation will be:
166 grams HCN/10 minutes = 16.6 grams/minute (16.6 grams HCN/minute)/(1000 g HCN) X 100 = 1.66%
Only 1.66% of the HCN will have to evaporate per minute. Actually, the numbers would be slightly different as there will be less HCN each minute, so 1.66% won't be as much HCN after eight minutes as it was in the first. Taking this loss of material into account, even a constant 1.66% evaporation rate takes only 13 minutes. For a substance that is normally a gas at room temperature, an evaporation rate this slow seems quite probable. As HCN boils at 26 degrees Celsius, it is quite likely that the gas will evaporate much faster than 1.66% per minute.
Let us recap: 1kg of Zyklon-B emptied into the Krema II gas chamber, at a temperature of 25°C, and an evaporation rate of 1.66% per minute, will, after 13 minutes, have created a concentration of 300ppm throughout the chamber. And that's what it takes to kill humans. Official figures say 5-7 kgs were used instead, therefore within this time frame, an even higher concentration could be reached. Rudolf's curve at 15°C (ten degrees cooler) shows that by 15 minutes, 25% of the Zyklon will have outgassed into the room. I find this as conclusive evidence that a homicidal gassing with Zyklon-B as the killing agent could easily kill 1500 people, most of who weren't adults in their prime and exhausted from a long train ride to boot and panicking and hyperventilating to top it all off, at room temperature well within half an hour.
With only one gassing a day, plenty of time will be left for ventilating the gas chamber and moving the bodies to the crematoria for combustion. The next question is, given one gassing a day and four purpose-built gas chambers at Birkenau (not counting the red and white house, known as Bunkers I and II and Krema I at Auschwitz I), how many people can be killed in a time period of one and one half years (18 months)? I chose this time period since the four large extermination facilities at Auschwitz-Birkenau were in operation from mid 1943 until their destruction by the fleeing Nazis in November 1944. For the sake of argument, I'll say that's about 1.5 years (May 1943 to Nov. 1944).
If the gas chambers were in operation for 548 days (1.5 yrs), and, considering that a daily gassing in 4 gas chambers was not really the case for the camp's history during this time, if we therefore lowered the average number of people gassed daily in each of the four gas chambers to a mere 500, the total dead would be:
(500)*(4)*(548) = 1,096,000 dead from gassing alone. Today the Auschwitz museum says approximately 900,000 people died in Auschwitz-Birkenau by gassing.
Most estimates say that 1.1 to 1.5 million died in Auschwitz-Birkenau altogether, including deaths from starvation, torture, summary execution, sickness and medical experiments. Clearly then, based upon my largely hypothetical example, it was both possible and feasible to murder that many, even in a fairly short time scale of 584 days with just four working gas chambers and only 500 people per chamber on average. And we still have 3 gas chambers to spare. If we brought them into the equation, it would be even less people per chamber. Or we could increase the people per chamber to more realistic levels, but then only gas every other day.
The bottom line is, twist and turn it all you want, gassing 900,000 people in Auschwitz-Birkenau over a span of 2 years is clearly possible, with plenty of room to spare for more. Therefore, the more careful revisionists have also realized that gassing isn't the problem, and rather concentrate their efforts in trying to contest the possibility of cremating 1.1 million people in around 3 years.
Dr. Johann Paul Kremer's diary
On August 29, 1941, Johann Paul Kremer, a medical doctor who had joined the Wehrmacht on May 20, 1941, was ordered to Auschwitz to replace another surgeon. Kremer kept a diary of many of his daily activities throughout the war. After his arrival at Auschwitz, oftentimes within the same entry Kremer speaks without emotion of “actions” he observed and the food he ate, as if these two activities are on the same plane. The footnotes to the diary contain important corroborating or clarifying information and should be read along with the primary text.
Source:
“Diary of Johann Paul Kremer,” translated from the German by Krystyna Michalik, in KL Auschwitz Seen by the SS by Rudolf Hoss, Pery Broad, and Johann Paul Kremer. The Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, Oswiecim, 1995, pp. 161–165
Read the diary translated here:
http://www-tc.pbs.org/auschwitz/learning/guides/reading2.3.pdf
The image above shows one of the diary pages where Kremer mentions "special actions" involving women, Dutch Jews, calls Auschwitz the "anus mundi" (ass of the world, a popular German slang still used today is the phrase "Arsch der Welt" to describe a horrible place). He also compares such a special action performed at 3 a.m. with Dante's Inferno and says Auschwitz is rightly called a CAMP OF EXTERMINATION.
"Revisionists" have tried to downplay these diary entries. When they're not trying to label the diary a forgery, they go on to say that Sonderaktion could mean anything. But why then does Kremer compare it with Dante's Inferno? The best bet deniers have at this point is to use this document as evidence of widespread outbreaks of disease, and label the Sonderaktion as the mass incineration of corpses, potentially outdoors.
However, Kremer was one of the defendants at the trial of the Auschwitz camp garrison. The trial took place before the Supreme National Trubunal in Cracow in the period from November 24 to December 22, 1947. It was then that he offered detailed information on the meaning of some of the entries in his diary. In the official record of the interrogation of August 18, 1947, in Cracow, Kremer stated as follows:
“By September 2, 1942, at 3 a.m. I had already been assigned to take part in the action of gassing people. These mass murders took place in small cottages situated outside the Birkenau camp in a wood. The cottages were called Bunker in the SS-men’s slang. All SS physicians on duty in the camp took turns to participate in the gassings, which were called Sonderaktion [special action]. My part as physician at the gassing consisted in remaining in readiness near the bunker. I was brought there by car. I sat in front with the driver and an SS hospital orderly [SDG] sat in the back of the car with oxygen apparatus to revive SS-men, employed in the gassing, in case any of them should succumb to the poisonous fumes. When the transport with people who were destined to be gassed arrived at the railway ramp, the SS officers selected from among the new arrivals persons fit to work, while the rest—old people, all children, women with children in their arms and other persons not deemed fit to work— were loaded onto lorries and driven to the gas chambers. I used to follow behind the transport till we reached the bunker. There people were driven into the barrack huts where the victims undressed and then went naked to the gas chambers. Very often no incidents occurred, as the SS-men kept people quiet, maintaining that they were to bathe and be deloused. After driving all of them into the gas chamber the door was closed and an SS-man in a gas mask threw the contents of a Cyclon tin through an opening in the side wall. The shouting and screaming of the victims could be heard through that opening and it was clear that they were fighting for their lives [Lebenskampf]. These shouts were heard for a very short while. I should say for some minutes, but I am unable to give the exact length of time.”
A selection took place on September 5th, 1942 in the women’s camp at Birkenau, resulting in the killing in gas chambers of about 800 women prisoners. In the formal record of the interrogation of July 18, 1947 (Cracow) Kremer explains this entry as follows:
“The gassing of emaciated women from the women’s camp was particularly unpleasant. Such individuals were generally called Muselmänner [Moslems]. I remember taking part in the gassing of such women in daylight. I am unable to state how numerous that group was. When I came to the bunker they sat clothed on the grounds. As the clothes were in fact worn out camp clothes, they were not let into the undressing barracks but undressed in the open. I could deduce from the behaviour of these women that they realized what was awaiting them. They begged the SS-men to be allowed to live, they wept, but all of them were driven into the gas chamber and gassed. Being an anatomist I had seen many horrors, had dealt with corpses, but what I then saw was not to be compared with anything ever seen before. It was under the influence of these impressions that I noted in my diary, under the date of September 5, 1942: ‘The most horrible of all horrors. Hauptsturmfuhrer Thilo was right when he said to me today that we were located here in the anus mundi.’ I used this expression because I could not imagine anything more sickening and more horrible.”
Prisoners in a state of acute starvation were called Muselmänner in camp slang. A Muselmann was like a walking skeleton. The bones were barely covered with skin, the eyes had a faraway look. Apathy and somnolence were typical symptoms of starvation disease. Complete psychological exhaustion went together with general physical emaciation. These Muselmänner are what deniers like to label "typhus victims", when they're not busy peddling the "it was Allied bombing that destroyed supply lines and caused starvation in the camps" tale. Too bad for them the diary entries are from 1942.
The Sonderkommando photographs
photograph # 282: The undressing women
photograph # 280: taken during the 2nd half of August 1944
The Sonderkommando photographs are perhaps the most interesting of all photos taken in Auschwitz, taken secretly in August 1944 by Alberto "Alex" Errera, a Greek inmate in Auschwitz II-Birkenau, and smuggled out of the camp by September 4, 1944 along with the following note:
"Urgent. Send two iron reels of film as soon as possible. It is possible to take pictures. We send you photographs from Birkenau - people who have been gassed. The photograph shows a heap of bodies piled outdoors. Bodies were burned outdoors when the crematorium could not keep pace with the number of bodies to be burned. In the foreground are bodies ready to be thrown on the heap. Another photograph shows one of the places in the forest where people were told to undress, allegedly for a bath, but in fact before being driven to the gas chambers. Send a reel as soon as possible. Send the enclosed photographs to Tell" (a member of the Cracow underground)
The photographer was a member of the Sonderkommando, inmates forced to work in and around the gas chambers. He took two shots from inside Krematorium V, and two outside, shooting from the hip, unable to aim the camera with any precision. The Polish resistance smuggled the film out of the camp.
The photographs were numbered 280–283 by the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum. Nos. 280 and 281 show the cremation of corpses in a fire pit, shot through the black frame of the Krema's doorway or window. No. 283 (not shown in the collage) is an image of trees, the result of the photographer aiming too high.
Deniers have so far only been able to address the "actual origin" of ONE of these Sonderkommando photographs (I wonder why they never took pains to address the others?), which they have labeled "Ohio train wreck, 1912", although they have not been able to come up with independent pictures of this alleged train disaster that look similar enough in terms of people and location to be able to prove any kind of forgery having taken place (i . e. the addition of the corpses and the fence). Instead, what they managed to do was edit out some of the corpses in that SK photograph, point out an odd body shape, and call it a day. The "Ohio trainwreck" holocaust denier theory has been thoroughly DEBUNKED here:
http://hungarianskeptics.blogspot.co.at/2012/12/a-charge-of-forgery-supported-by.html
The final three photos added to the SK photographs in the above collage only proves how the location where these SK photographs were taken checks out with the location in Birkenau today. The surroundings are forested (the tree line may have grown a bit in the past 7 decades), the image aligns with the fence still standing today, and what's more, such an outdoor cremation would also explain the smoke plume in some of the aerial photographs, how conveniently located near Crematorium V!
Closeup of Sonderkommando photograph # 282: The undressing women
No. 282, shows a group of people undressing, with three naked women in the foreground just before they entered the gas chamber. They are standing in the forested area between Krematorium IV and V, and to the extreme right of the uncropped image (as shown in the collage earlier) you can see a chimney.
From left to right, the first foreground woman seems to be looking straight ahead, the one next to her has her eyes downcast and the woman to the right of the image seems to have noticed the cameraman and is looking eerily, directly toward him. There's also another woman slightly to the left of the first foreground woman - this woman is a bit further back, and also seems to be walking in the same direction the other three are headed.
Carlo Mattogno thinks what's happening in the background isn't a bunch of people undressing and/or stacking/sorting their clothes and other belongings on what seem to be luggage stacked on top of one another, but rather water tubs, and claims they're having some kind of a pool party splashing water around instead. He goes on to say that the woman and man to the right are both holding what appear to be water pails/jugs, reinforcing a bath scene hypothesis. However, if you look closely you will see that the right woman's arm would be waay too long to be holding a water pail - her "arm" in fact is severed - and therefore the "water pail" is actually an image artifact. It is harder to dismiss the "water pail" in the hand of the man to the extreme right of the image. However, the 2nd image makes his right arm a bit clearer and it suggests he is holding nothing, and the white splotch is in fact part of the image background. So Mattogno, the flagship of analysis-based holocaust denial is wrong (yet again!):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTuVK27_bhY [video removed for violating YouTube's policy on hate speech]
For a more detailed refutation of Carlo Mattogno's claims on the image, see:
http://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot.co.at/2013/05/the-photograph-of-crematorium-site.html
Not only this, but Carlo Mattogno bases the image to the right as the original, and goes to make the claim that the women are too young to be sent to the gas chambers. The image on the left is in fact the original. The image on the right, is a retouched version. I do not know who retouched the image and why, but the fact that retouched versions of other SK photographs also exist leads me to believe retouching attempts have been made to enhance clarity.
However in this case, the retouching actually tried to alter key aspects of the scene itself:
The clearest evidence (bear in mind that I am talking about "our" left and "our" right, not "their" left and "their" right) of photo fakery in the right image is the fact that the foreground woman on the left seems to have gotten a new, young face (while her face is indistinguishable in the original). Furthermore, her body seems to have been smoothed out.
The left woman in the background seems to have her body shadow removed to enhance her nakedness and also gotten a clearer face.
And right of the 2nd foreground woman's shoulder there seems to be a new, dark patch added in the background.
Finally, the biggest whopper comes in form of the complete body lift the 3rd foreground woman to the image's right received: While she (or he with long hair) looks like a hag sporting a rack befitting their age in the original, in the retouched photo it is definitely a "she" now, and also possessing the body of someone in their 20s or 30s, including B-cup breasts. This is no longer retouching for sake of better clarity - clearly someone made a serious attempt to make the foreground people look young and feminine. In any case, this is NOT the original photo, as my image comparison above demonstrates. Carlo Mattogno once again displays his intellectual dishonestly by basing his "research" off this image.
Closeup of Sonderkommando photograph # 280: taken during the 2nd half of August 1944
As mentioned earlier, this Sonderkommando photo is showing heavy smoke, naked corpses and prisoners dragging corpses towards the bonfire in the backyard of Krema V in Birkenau. Smoke is emanating from the ground but the actual pyre is not visible, suggesting it is actually located in a pit - a detail which corroborates numerous eyewitness accounts on corpse cremation in trenches in Birkenau.
Revisionists mention the marshy land around Auschwitz, and claim Birkenau had a high water table, but this would only be a problem during spring thaw and snow melt, not all year round. The photo above for example was taken during the peak of summer 1944, and any central European can attest to how hot summers can get, contrary to popular (non-European) belief about "cool European summers". During my visit to Poland and spending only 5 days outside touring Krakow and surroundings in early September 2016, I actually got a sun tan on my face!
Germar Rudolf has argued that the fenceposts look nothing like the fenceposts in Auschwitz today, as these have curved tops. A closeup of SK 280 clearly shows that the fenceposts have the curved tops as well. While SK 281 does not, even a fool will realize that the image is slightly shaky, and therefore one of the first details to blur would be the curvature of the fencepost. But if you look closely at SK 281, you can still see the curvature of 2 of the 4 fenceposts' top parts (from left to right).
Now then, three other things revisionists have pointed out is first of, the arm length of the man in the centre of the image, saying that his left arm is too long, or that his right arm has two elbows. If I stand up and slightly tilt my body to the left, my hand can indeed drop down to around knee height. And the man's right arm does not have two elbows - it's just a shadow created by his shirt sleeve.
The second thing they point out, is that these men aren't dressed in the "striped pyjamas" of your typical concentration camp inmates. Well, do we even know what the Sonderkommando dressed like? Do we even know if they did NOT wear hats? Keep in mind these people worked near the gas chambers, where the victims had disrobed prior to entering. The SK clearly had access to heaps of civilian clothes, whether they were allowed or not, and the Kanada section of the camp was between Krema II, III and IV, V.
And finally, the last thing revisionists point us to, is the "spaghetti person" near the legs of the SK in the middle. To them, it looks like a woman sporting an afro and kneeling with two impossibly curved arms of differing thickness raised above her head and sporting a very thin neck. To me, it appears the "afro" belongs to the corpse on the left, and the arms, neck and torso of the spaghetti person isnt even part of the same person. For instance, the right arm might be a detail of a corpse further back. All I can say is, it is very, very hard to make out more than just a handful of distinct corpses in this corpse mess even in this detailed zoom of # 280. I think the same effect starts to apply here as what applies when different people look at a cloud formation in the sky: different people see different shapes.
A closeup of Krema IV and V
Credit goes to Hans from Holocaust Controversies.
Note the smoke rising in real time near Krema V and people moving toward the buildings. The plume is rising from cremation pits just northwest of Krema V, precisely where eyewitness accounts claim bodies were burned. [1][2][3]
Sources:
[1] Mueller, Filip. Eyewitness Auschwitz. New York : Stein and Day, 1979. pp 136-139
[2] Hoess, Rudolph. Quoted in Nazism: A History in Documents and Eyewitness Accounts, 1919-1945. ed. by J. Noakes and G. Pridham. New York: Shocken Books, 1988. p. 1181
[3] Broad, Pery Quoted in Nazism: A History in Documents and Eyewitness Accounts, 1919-1945. p 1183.
Image comparison around the "White House"
We can observe a discoloration in the burial pits around Bunker II "the white house", hinting at activity in this area in the time between. This is comparing the Aug 23rd and Aug 25th 1944 photographs.
The Auschwitz water table
photograph of the excavation work on the Zentralsauna building taken in May 1943
After Prussian Blue, the holes on the gas chamber roof, cremation time and coke consumption, another central pillar of "revisionist science" that is supposed to debunk mass extermination in Auschwitz-Birkenau is the region's "high water table". Revisionist science basically says, the water table was too high to make cremation pits possible, therefore no mass body disposal (beyond crematory capability) could have occurred as the diggers would have struck water and you cannot incinerate corpses if they are wet, and if no mass body disposal could have occurred, they'd either still be around for us to find, or that many people were never killed in the first place. Revisionist scientists also repeat this for the AR camps.
Revisionist scientists, in their infinite wisdom, are unable to explain if the water table was so high that it made even digging a mere cremation ditch impossible, how then was it possible to build some eight thousand square feet of underground cellars for Krematoria II and III? Revisionist scientists also conveniently do not point out to their gullible readers trying to debunk the holocaust from the comfort of their own home, that if they actually took the trip to Poland and visited Auschwitz-Birkenau, they would notice the remains of many drainage ditches that criss-cross the entire Birkenau camp to this day, visible to over a million tourists that visit the camp each year, dug by the slave labor force's manpower available to the SS in Birkenau.
Of these many ditches honeycombing the camp, e . g. drainage excavation ditches E, F and H of Bauabschnitt (Building Segment) III were almost entirely finished by September 1943.[1]
Furthermore, a sharp fall in the ground water table in the area around Auschwitz was noted in February 1944. This is from a letter from the head of the Central Building Administration Jothann "to the Regierungspräsidenten - Division IIIQ - Kattowtiz" dated 10 February 1944, which begins as follows: "As a result of the catastrophic fall in the ground water level in the area around Auschwitz, the wells sunk to supply the concentration camp and related operations are no longer sufficient."[2]
The "area around Auschwitz" refers to the Stammlager and Birkenau, in the immediate vicinity of the Sola and Vistula rivers.
So during the period in which Auschwitz was active, the SS had the area drained; as can be seen today, the drainage, which has not been maintained since 1945, has deteriorated and the water level has risen.
How do we know the SS had equipment necessary to drain the water table? Because we have surviving documents from the Continentale Wasserwerks Gesellschaft relating to drainage work carried out at Birkenau between February 6 - August 7, 1943, including lists of pumping hours worked at Birkenau.[3]
The fact that pic related, a photograph of the excavation work on the Zentralsauna building taken in May 1943, shows a pit more than 4.3 meters deep, completely dry on the bottom, is proof that a "high water table" at Auschwitz-Birkenau did not pose an insurmountable problem for the camp administration. Also, in this picture are clearly visible the homicidal gas chambers of Krematoria IV and V, including the gas-tight window shutters mounted on the exterior. It is in the area in the image's background (around Krematorium V) where we have air photo evidence of incineration pits / cremation ditches dug.
Furthermore, keep the weather in mind, and the fact that the cremation ditches were not used all the time, but only when there were not enough furnaces to cremate the victims or during the extermination of the Hungarian Jews in 1944, when so many people were murdered daily that the furnaces could not handle the amount of corpses.
There is documentary evidence that the water table around Auschwitz-Birkenau did not remain at a constant level, but fluctuated a lot during the camp's operation. The incineration trenches are known to have been active in October-November 1942 and the summer of 1944, which do not coincide with the period the snow melts and the water level rises.
Revisionist allegations about the water table at Sobibor extermination camp have been debunked here:
http://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot.co.at/2006/10/but-wait-ugly-voices-fans-will-say.html
Sources:
[1]: Bauantrag zum Ausbau des Kriegsgefangenelagers der Waffen-SS in Auschwitz O/S. Errichtung von 25 Stck. Effektenbaracken. RGVA, 502-1-230, p.7.
[2]: http://web.archive.org/web/20130721122315/http://www.vho.org/tr/2003/1/Image1006.gif
[3]: Continentale Wasserwerks Ges., Tagelohn- (Neben-) Arbeiten
Concluding Auschwitz II Birkenau
Pic unrelated, as it shows naked Jewish women, some of whom are holding infants, waiting in a line before their execution by collaborating Ukrainian auxiliary police, most likely October 14, 1942. These Jews were collected by the German Gendarmerie and Ukrainian Schutzmannschaft during the liquidation of the Mizocz ghetto, which held roughly 1,700 Jews. On the eve of the ghetto's liquidation (13 October 1942), some of the inhabitants rose up against the Germans and were defeated after a short battle. The remaining members of the community were transported from the ghetto to this ravine in the Sdolbunov Gebietskommissariat, south of Rovno, where they were executed. Information regarding this action, including the photos, were acquired from a man named Hille, who was the Bezirks-Oberwachtmeister of the Gendarmerie at the time. Hille gave several of the photos to the company lawyer of a textile firm in Kunert, Czechoslovakia, where he worked as a doorman after the war. The Czech government confiscated the photos from the lawyer in 1946 and they subsequently became public. That the photos indeed show the shooting of Jews in connection with the liquidation of the ghetto was also confirmed by a statement of Gendarmerie-Gebietsfuehrer Josef Paur in 1961.
source: https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/pa1065461
Let's recap what things I have addressed, shall we?
I have given a brief history of Birkenau
I have explained the Selektion process and made it clear why Auschwitz survivors exist in the first place
I have provided ground and high resolution aerial photographs of the Kremas, roof "holes" and the camp
I have addressed the lack of crematory chimney smoke question
I have addressed the "crematoria / gas chambers could be seen by anyone in the camp" question
I have addressed the "victims could just flee past the Krema buildings" question
I have provided photographic evidence of the vents/chimneys through which zyklon-b was poured in
I have provided crematory capacity documentation
I have shown documentary evidence of lifts installed in Krematoriums II and III
I have addressed the nonsensical crematory capacity claims made by Mattogno
I have shown documentary evidence of multiple corpse cremation per muffle
I have addressed the gas chamber Prussian Blue staining claims made by Leuchter and Rudolf
I have shown via testimonial evidence and appeal to logic that the gas chambers were routinely washed
I have addressed the nonsense regarding the HCN LD1 for humans and LD100 for lice argument
I have addressed how pointless it is to bring in American gas chambers into the argument, and how much higher HCN concentrations won't kill people much faster
I have addressed Faurisson's challenge to show or draw him a gas chamber by providing blueprints.
I have addressed the issue with getting poison gas out of an underground room
I have addressed how ridiculous the concept of fumigating a morgue is
I have addressed how ridiculous the concept of a double duty morgue / delousing chamber is
I have shown documentary evidence of the "morgues" being heated
I have addressed the underground gas chambers of Krema II and III possessing a ventilation system
I have addressed the Vergasungskeller document and ruled out carburetion chambers & air-raid shelters
I have shown documentary evidence of gas-tight doors and shower-heads installed in the Krematoria
I have shown documentary evidence that Krematorium IV had a gas chamber
I have addressed the Zyklon-B outgassing curve and whether 300ppm can be achieved within 10 minutes
I have addressed the "Zyklon-B pellets continue to outgass for hours!" argument
I have addressed the evidence of corpse cremation near Krematorium V using ground photographs (SK)
I have addressed the evidence of cremation pits near Krematorium V using aerial photography
I have addressed the Birkenau water table
As to coke consumption, please see:
AUSCHWITZ: Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers, page 224
What I have not addressed, is the reduction of the 4 million death toll, which I have moved to the next section that debunks other common generic claims made about the holocaust & "the Jews" by deniers.