Holocaust Documents, Part 7: Aktion Reinhard and other camps
Written by Sir Aaron Richards
Mirrored from https://imgur.com/a/725A7
The following section will deal with Aktion Reinhard, specifically Treblinka, the Nazi camp with the second highest death toll after Auschwitz-Birkenau, and also briefly address Majdanek and Mauthausen later.
CONTENTS:
Why the transit camp theory is bunk
Sketch of Treblinka II extermination camp (produced during Franz Stangl's 1967 trial in Germany)
The horrors of the Treblinka II extermination camp, photo taken 1944 (note ground disturbances)
Some maps and models of Treblinka II
CG model of the new gas chamber building in Treblinka II
Photo of the excavator and old gas chamber building at Treblinka II
Dossiers of Aktion Reinhardt
Sonderaktion 1005
The Operation Reinhard oath
Kurt Gerstein's account
Holocaust deniers try to wholly discredit Kurt Gerstein's account
How about an anti-denier infographic about Treblinka this time?
Friedrich Paul Berg's obsession with diesel engine exhaust being harmless
"But German submarines used diesel engines and nobody was killed!"
Friedrich Paul Berg's obsession with cherry red corpses (CO poisoning)
Fritz Berg and his railway delousing chambers, producer gas vehicles and air-circulation chamber
Shipments of hair from Treblinka and Majdanek
W. Rutherford's sketch of the new gas chambers of Belzec
The Majdanek controversy
Mauthausen's homicidal gas chamber
Idiot defacing Mauthausen gas chamber
Doors at Mauthausen concentration camp's gas chamber
Layout of the homicidal Mauthausen gas chamber and its operation
Why the transit camp theory is bunk
No evidence exists that would exculpate the Aktion Reinhardt camps as harmless transit camps, even though it should be plentiful if resettlement to the Nazi-occupied Soviet territories via the AR camps had taken place.
There is no reason whatsoever why there should not be a lot of documentation about transportation from the AR "transit camps" to the East if such transportation had taken place, not only in related railway records and documentation pertaining to the organization and execution of the transports but also in the largely recovered files (ask Dr. Nick Terry) of the civilian and military administrations of the occupied eastern territories, who would have had to deal with these hundreds of thousands of resettled Jews.
And while it is understandable that the Nazis would destroy incriminating documents related to a mass murder operation, there is no reason whatsoever why they should have destroyed documentation about resettlement via transit camps to the occupied eastern territories.
On the contrary: not only would such documentation have been paraded as a means to counter wartime reports that the Nazis were massacring the Jews ("hey look here, we're not killing them but just deporting them to Russia"), but every official big and small who was involved in Aktion Reinhard(t) would have had a vital interest in preserving these documents in order to invoke them in his defense in case of being accused of war crimes.
After Stalingrad at the latest the hypothesis of Germany losing the war had to be taken into consideration, and as early as February 1943, following the Casablanca Conference announcement of "punishment and retribution in full" upon Nazi Germany's "guilty, barbaric leaders", officials involved in measures against the Jews had to count on being held to account as war criminals. Later in the same year, the Moscow Conference's "Statement on Atrocities" made it clear beyond doubt what the Allies' policy regarding prosecution of and punishment for Nazi atrocities was, and that "all officers and men and members of the Nazi party" (not just the top leaders) would be held accountable for crimes they had been involved in.
Under these conditions, the organizers and executors of Aktion Reinhard(t), from Himmler, Globocnik and Höfle down to the staff manning the supposed "transit camps", would have been suicidal masochists if they had destroyed documentation proving that they had been involved in mass deportation but not mass murder, documentation that was their life insurance. Yet no such documentation exists, and this alone should make "Revisionists" realize and admit how worthless all their theories and hypotheses are.
What revisionists sometimes cite, are records of several thousand Jews departing Warsaw and ending up in places like Minsk (1000), Smolensk (2000), and Brzesc and Malchowicze (4000). None of these records prove that the railway lines went through any of the AR camps, i.e. Treblinka, Belzec or Sobibor. Therefore, revisionists using this as proof the AR camps are transit camps are committing deliberate deception. Now why on earth haven't holocaust deniers been able to trace the route of at least over 1.3 million people to the occupied Soviet territories and have only been able to trace the route of a couple of thousand?
Here's just another example of how Carlo Mattogno and Jürgen Graf are caught with their pants down when they try to construct their house of cards known as "Resettlement to the East" by selectively using documentation as "evidence":
http://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot.co.at/2008/04/mattogno-and-graf-screwed-by-their-own.html
Sketch of Treblinka II extermination camp (produced during Franz Stangl's 1967 trial in Germany)
To get an idea of how the camp looked and worked:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1V0yiNYCpoA [video has been removed]
Franz Stangl was an Austrian-born SS commandant of the Sobibór and Treblinka extermination camps during the Operation Reinhard phase of the Holocaust.
Holocaust deniers like to remind us that it is not clear how many people deported ever actually graced the gates of the Reinhardt camps and how many ever left, let alone the names. But names are not required to establish that at the very least the 1,274,166 deportees mentioned in Höfle’s report to Heim of 11 January 1943 were delivered at the camps of Einsatz Reinhardt and that, except for a few dozen escapees, no one who entered these camps ever left them alive. The issue is simply that Aktion Reinhardt was not just a deportation and population movement. It was a deportation to places where the deportees were killed upon arrival. That’s what all evidence clearly shows, as there’s no evidence to the deportees having been taken anywhere further east – although there should be plenty of it if such had happened, as this involves over a million people.
We then have the testimony of Stangl:
"It must have been at the beginning of 1943. That’s when excavators were brought in. Using these excavators, the corpses were removed from the huge ditches which had been used until then [for burial]. The old corpses were burned on the roasters, along with the new bodies [of new arrivals to the camp]. During the transition to the new system, Wirth came to Treblinka. As I recall, Wirth spoke of a Standartenführer who had experience in burning corpses. Wirth told me that according to the Standartenführer’s experience, corpses could be burned on a roaster, and it would work marvelously. I know that in the beginning [in Treblinka] they used rails from the trolley to build the cremation grill. But it turned out that these rails were too weak and bent in the heat. They were replaced with real railroad rails."
Source of quote: Yitzhak Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka. The Operation Reinhard Death Camps, pages 173 and following.
Holocaust deniers often point us to the testimony of Eichmann during the Eichmann trial, where Eichmann claimed that submarine engines were the diesels that gassed the Jews, an "amazing whopper if there ever was one", as they like to add.
That was just a mistake Eichmann made about a technical detail he was not and didn’t have to be familiar with (holocaust deniers expect witnesses who were watching naked women and children heading into gas chambers and hearing their screams to have focused all their attention on how many cylinders the gassing engine had, for instance), and it doesn’t change the accuracy of his statements about the purpose of the camp he visited. If holocaust deniers could demonstrate that he didn’t know much about the deportations he was accused of having organized, that would be something different.
The horrors of the Treblinka II extermination camp, photo taken 1944 (note ground disturbances)
The 1944 aerial photo of Treblinka II after "clean-up". The new farmhouse and livestock building are visible to the lower left. The photograph is overlaid with already-dismantled structures (marked in red/orange). On the left are the SS and Hiwi ("Hilfswilliger" - foreign volunteer) guards living quarters (1) with barracks defined by the surrounding walkways. At the bottom (2) are the railway ramp and unloading platform (centre), marked with the red arrow. The "road to heaven" (Himmelsstrasse) is marked with a dashed line. The undressing barracks for men and women, surrounded by a solid fence with no view of the outside, are marked with two rectangles. The location of the new, big gas chambers (3) is marked with a cross. The burial pits, dug with a crawler excavator, are in light yellow.
Holocaust deniers have often asked historians to provide ONE demonstrable documented fact about DEATH in Treblinka (i.e. the numbers from e.g. the Hoefle Telegram they wont accept as they cling on to the theory that Treblinka was merely a transit camp with free showers and cloth delousing for Jews being sent "eastward", wherever that meant).
How about a complaint by the local Wehrmacht commandant of Ostrow about the unbearable stench of insufficiently buried Jewish corpses at Treblinka, recorded in the Wehrmacht war diary of the General Government, as evidence that there were so many corpses in Treblinka at the time of the complaint that they couldn't be sufficiently buried? There are also postwar eyewitness testimonies from Treblinka SS-men and the diary of a German soldier en route to the Eastern Front mentioning this nauseating stench of death, which could be smelled miles away. Would deniers accept those accounts as evidence that Treblinka was full of stinking Jewish corpses, so full that even the enormous grave pits (also described by witnesses and in a Polish crime site investigation report) couldn't keep the camp from stinking to high heaven?
And what about an April 1942 commentary by a high-ranking German official about the "Generalplan Ost", in which that official recommended about solving the Polish question in the same manner as the Jewish question, i.e. by liquidating the Poles like the Jews? Those are just a few examples of evidence from the German side pointing to mass murder.
Why don't you have a listen to how Franz Suchomel describes Treblinka, secretly recorded during the interview for the documentary film Shoah, directed by Claude Lanzmann?
Suchomel participated in the Action T4 euthanasia program, in the Einsatzgruppen actions, as well as Operation Reinhard: In August 1942, he was transferred to the Treblinka extermination camp with the rank of SS-Unterscharführer. There he was responsible for handling incoming transports of Jewish victims as well as the confiscation and collection of valuables. In October 1943 he served at the Sobibor extermination camp for a short time. After Operation Reinhard ended in November 1943, Suchomel was transferred along with the rest of Globocnik's staff to Operational Zone of the Adriatic Littoral in Trieste. Here he was a member of Sonderabteilung Einsatz R (English: "Special Action Unit R"), involved in extermination of Jews, confiscation of Jewish assets, and fighting partisan activity. As the end of the war approached, the "Special Unit" withdrew from northern Italy at the end of April 1945.
Twenty years after the end of the war, in the framework of first official investigations into war crimes at the Treblinka extermination camp, German authorities collected evidence of Suchomel's participation in the Holocaust. He was arrested on 11 July 1963. The Treblinka trials took place from 12 October 1964 until 3 September 1965 against ten defendants before the 3rd District Court of Düsseldorf. The charges consisted of the murder of at least 700,000 mainly Jewish people in the gas chambers, as well as deadly assault, shootings, and hangings of individual prisoners.
Some maps and models of Treblinka II
Maps were drawn after the war, on memory. Yet notice how they all have a similar layout, and make sense when taking a look at the aerial photo of the similarly shaped area. Treblinka II had two gas chamber buildings: an old, and a new. As Suchomel stated, the old one was not demolished after the new one went into operation, and instead served as a reserve in case even the newer, bigger gas chamber building became overburdened.
For a detailed list and description of all maps, see:
http://www.deathcamps.org/treblinka/maps.html
And for the other AR extermination camps:
http://www.deathcamps.org/belzec/maps.html
http://www.deathcamps.org/sobibor/maps.html
Unfortunately, no wartime photograph of the new Treblinka gas chamber building exists, though we have models.
CG model of the new gas chamber building in Treblinka II
From the undressing barracks, the Jews were led down a narrow, winding pathway referred to in the maps as "the tube" - surrounded by bushes, tree branches, and barbed wire. The SS men liked to call this pathway "the path to heaven" since it led to the gas chambers.
At the end of the pathway, the doomed prisoners would have seen a large building -- where they were told they would be deloused after having their hair shorn. But once the prisoners were packed in and the doors latched shut, engine exhaust was pumped in and was the agent of murder. The doors on the sides of the gas chamber building were then opened and the corpses taken to huge pits located nearby. Special workers called "dentists" were given the horrible task of removing gold teeth from the corpses.
Photo of the excavator and old gas chamber building at Treblinka II
This photo is important because to the left of the excavator it shows the old gas chamber building of the extermination camp.
Other, at first glance less interesting photos taken by Kurt Franz at Treblinka show the excavation process from a distance, but these are photographic evidence of Sonderaktion 1005, which I will address in a moment. It has also been possible to roughly pinpoint the position of Kurt Franz when he took these photographs, if you follow the link below:
If you are interested in how a mass grave of 50mx25mx10m can hold 100,000 corpses, see:
Dossiers of Aktion Reinhardt
The Aktion Reinhardt fellows had been involved with the mass killing of physically and/or mentally disabled people at the euthanasia installations during Aktion T4. The only “medical” expertise they brought along was their experience with and/or indifference to the murder of helpless human beings.
Let’s look at some of their curricula:
Christian Wirth
In October 1939 to Grafeneck euthanasia centre. Then in Brandenburg, Hadamar (chief of registry office) and Hartheim (head clerk and chief of police until Summer 1941). In mid-1940, Wirth was appointed as a kind of roving director or inspector of all euthanasia institutions throughout the Third Reich. At the Brandenburg euthanasia centre, he experimented in developing gas chambers for gassing the physically and mentally disabled.
Gottblieb Hering
Chief of the registry offices of Bernburg, Sonnenstein and Hadamar euthanasia centres. Also served at Hartheim. Member of the NSDAP, and SS since 1943.
Werner Dubois
In August 1939 to T4. Bus driver in Brandenburg and Grafeneck. "Burner" and bus driver in Bernburg (from early 1941 until mid 1941) and Hadamar. As "burner" he also transported corpses and urns.
Kurt Hubert Franz
End of 1939 summoned to the Führer's Chancellery and detailed for service as cook in the euthanasia institutes at Grafeneck, Hartheim, Sonnenstein and Brandenburg.
Erich Fuchs
In 1940 or summer 1941 drafted to T4. Worked as Dr Eberl's driver in the gassing centres Brandenburg and Bernburg, and was, as he expressed it himself, "an interested spectator" at the gassing of 50 mental patients. Was driver of a lorry, fetching food for the staff, for a short time.
Heinrich Gley
Came to T4 on 4 January 1940. At Grafeneck he transported victims. Served also at Sonnenstein.
Josef Oberhauser
In November 1939 to T4. At Bernburg as "burner" from autumn 1940 until autumn 1941. Also at Grafeneck, Brandenburg and Sonnenstein.
Karl Alfred Schluch
Duty bound to T4 on 13 June 1940. Served at Grafeneck and Hadamar.
Erich Unverhau
Duty bound to T4, where he worked as nurse from January 1940 - early 1942 at the Hadamar and Grafeneck euthanasia centres. There he escorted victims to the gas chambers, injected sedatives, ventilated the gas chambers and dealt with the disposal of the bodies and property.
Sonderaktion 1005
In March 1942, SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich placed SS-Standartenführer Paul Blobel in charge of Aktion 1005. However, its start was delayed after Heydrich was assassinated in June 1942 by Czechoslovakian SOE agents in Operation Anthropoid. It was after the end of June that SS-Gruppenführer Heinrich Müller, head of the Gestapo finally gave Blobel his orders.
The Sonderaktion 1005 (Special Action 1005), or Aktion 1005, or Enterdungsaktion (Exhumation Action) was overseen by selected squads from the Sicherheitsdienst (SD) and Ordnungspolizei and involved getting rid of the evidence of massacres committed by SS-Einsatzgruppen, Nazi death squads that had massacred millions of people including 1 . 3 million Jews according to Raul Hilberg, as well as Roma and local civilians in Eastern Europe. The operation, which was conducted in secrecy until 1944, used prisoners, Leichenkommandos (corpse units), to exhume mass graves and burn the bodies.
Blobel began his work experimenting at Chełmno (Kulmhof). Attempts to use incendiary bombs to destroy exhumed bodies were unsuccessful as the weapons set fire to nearby forests. The most effective way was eventually found to be giant pyres on iron grills. The method involved building alternating layers of corpses and firewood on railway tracks. Afterwards remaining bone fragments could be crushed by pounding with heavy dowels or in a grinding machine. The operation officially began at Sobibór. The Leichenkommando exhumed the bodies from mass graves around the camp and then burned them, after which the workers were executed. The process then moved to Bełżec in November 1942 where it lasted till March 1943.
The incineration at Treblinka began as soon as the political danger associated with the earlier burials was realized. In 1943, the 22,000 Polish victims of the Soviet Katyn massacre were discovered near Smolensk in Russia. Their remains were well preserved underground, attesting to the Soviet mass murder. By April 1943, the Nazis began to draw attention of the international community to this war crime. The Katyn Commission was formed to make detailed examinations in an effort to drive a wedge between the Allies (which did result between Poland and the Soviet Union). Meanwhile, the corpses that had been buried at Treblinka were dug up and cremated on Himmler's orders, who visited the camp in March 1943. The instructions to utilise rails as grates came from Scharführer Herbert Floss, the camp's cremation expert. The bodies were placed on cremation pyres that were up to 30 metres (98 ft) long, with rails laid across the pits on concrete blocks. They were splashed with petrol over wood, and burned in one massive blaze attended by roughly 300 prisoners who operated the pyres. The operation also returned to the scenes of earlier mass killings such as Babi Yar, Ponary, the Ninth Fort, and Bronna Góra.
And if you come across one of those particularly moronic holocaust deniers still barking to show him mass graves in Eastern Europe because "none exist", show him this:
http://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot.co.at/2009/03/photographic-documentation-of-nazi.html
The Germans did not build or use crematoriums in Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka. Cremation was done on makeshift grills/grates consisting of railroad tracks laid over one another, with combustible material placed underneath them to initially get the fire going. The exhumed victims were cremated at once with a mixture of straw and branches in between them, in batches of approximately 2000 corpses at a time, per grill, per day. This is attested to in Arad's "Belzec Sobibor and Treblinka".
The Germans had 212 days between the 1st of march and the Treblinka revolt on the 19th of October to accomplish one of the most grotesque tasks in human history. So doing the math:
2000 corpses x 212 days = 424,000 corpses burned.
Two grills could then burn 848,000 corpses and three grills could cremate 1,272,000 corpses.
"Gley stated that each grate could burn about 2,000 corpses within 24 hours, so the capacity of two grates would be 4,000, that of three grates 6,000 within 24 hours. Comparison with the Dresden pyres suggests that these figures are realistic, even conservative."
http://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot.com/2016/06/mattognos-cremation-encyclopedia-part-3_18.html?m=1
The picture above shows such a type of open air cremation method used during WW2, which involved stacking corpses on rails. The pic above is a real photograph taken showing the cremation employed in Dresden after allied air raids. Is it so hard for deniers to understand the extrapolation that the same method was used in the AR camps although no photo exists? If you still insist that cremation using this method is impossible or highly impractical (possibly because you watched a denierbud video where he tried to grill some meat on a beach) then you should read this if you have an afternoon to kill:
http://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot.co.at/2006/12/incinerating-corpses-on-grid-is-rather_18.html
Deniers have raised several other issues about outdoor cremation as well, from the amount of wood allegedly needed based on arbitrary standards they set "per corpse" using Hindu funeral pyres as an "efficient method" of cremation, to setting up strawmen like expecting to find millions of teeth in areas where close to a million people were murdered, buried, exhumed and cremated; the strawman being "cremation leaves behind intact teeth that should be found in the soil". All these issues have already been debunked:
Why Hindu funeral pyres are a bad counter-example:
https://www.hdot.org/debunking-denial/or15-hindu-funeral-pyres/
Why huge amounts of wood were NOT needed per body cremated:
https://www.hdot.org/debunking-denial/or18-not-enough-wood/
Why human bodies CAN burn on their own:
https://www.hdot.org/debunking-denial/or17-cremation-bodies/
The Operation Reinhard oath
Pic related is an important document (you can find the original in the state museum of Majdanek) from Aktion Reinhard(t) that (among other interesting observations to which I will get to in a moment) explains why there isn't much photographic documentation of the camps Treblinka, Sobibor and Belzec as compared to other camps including Auschwitz-Birkenau.
First, the translation:
========
July 18, 1942
Undertaking.
concerning the obligation of [name of person]......... as a person with special duties in the execution of tasks in the evacuation of Jews within the framework of "Einsatz Reinhard," [Operation Reinhard] under the SS Police Leader (SS- und Polizeifuehrer) in the District of Lublin.
........ [Name] declares:
I have been thoroughly informed and instructed by SS Hauptstuermfuhrer Hoefle, as Commander of the main division of "Einsatz Reinhard" of the SS and Police Leader in the District of Lublin:
1. that I may not under any circumstances pass on any form of information, verbally or in writing, on the progress, procedure or incidents in the evacuation of Jews to any person outside the circle of the "Einsatz Reinhard" staff;
2. that the process of the evacuation of Jews is a subject that comes under "Secret Reich Document," in accordance with censorship regulation Verschl. V. a;
3. concerning the special regulations made by the SS and Police Leader in the District of Lublin in this case, with explicit reference to the fact that these regulations are "Orders concerning Duties," and/or "Orders and Prohibitions" in accordance with Para. 92b of R.St.G.B.;
4. that there is an absolute prohibition on photography in the camps of "Einsatz Reinhard";
5. concerning Para. 88 through 93 of R.St.G.B., of the formulation of April 24, 1934, and the Regulation on Bribery and Revealing of Secrets on the part of Persons who are not in Official Employ, of May 3, 1917, and February 12, 1920;
6. concerning the paragraphs of R.St.G.B. 139 (Duty to Lay Information) and 353c (Breach of the Official Secrets Act).
I am familiar with the above Regulations and Laws and am aware of the responsibilities imposed upon me by the task with which I have been entrusted. I promise to observe them to the best of my knowledge and conscience. I am aware that the obligation to maintain secrecy continues even after I have left the Service.
========
Note the several incriminating passages I have marked in the document. To begin with, if the "resettlement of Jews" really was a resettlement, then why, as I have already shown countless times, so many orders about keeping it top secret? Why can't it be freely spoken of?
Secondly, the ban on photography. If the "revisionist scholars" are correct and Belzec, Treblinka and Sobibor were transit camps, then photography of the transit process would have only shown rows of Jews disembarking from the cattle cars (nice and comfortable way to resettle people, btw...), getting a health inspection, perhaps their hair shorn, and so on before being sent to their final destination (excuse the pun). Given that we have plenty of photography of inmates with shorn hair in e.g. Auschwitz, why a need for secrecy here? What makes Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka so unique, so different?
Third, note how the order also says secrecy is to be kept even after the Aktion Reinhard personnel have left service, i.e. they can't go around telling their pals how they oversaw lots of Jews transiting their innocuous little camps.
And lastly, the fact that the AR camps had been completely dismantled by the Nazis before the Soviets even reached them is just more proof of their criminal nature. Why bother dismantling a lame old transit station? There are tons of old rail stations all over Europe that are in disuse. More nails in the coffin that AR camps were transit camps, rather than centers of mass extermination.
Of course, the few surviving wartime pictures we have from Treblinka come from Kurt Franz, who violated this oath, but the contents of his private album were apprehended when Franz was arrested (some of the photos had been torn out and their captions erased, see Manfred Blank, "Zum Beispiel: Die Ermordung der Juden im 'Generalgouvernement' Polen", in: Adalbert Rückerl, NS-Prozesse. Nach 25 Jahren Strafverfolgung: Möglichkeiten – Grenzen – Ergebnisse, 1971 Verlag C.F. Müller, Karlsruhe, pages 46/47)
Kurt Gerstein's account
One of the most horrifying testimonies from the horrors of the Holocaust was left by a conscience-stricken SS officer, Kurt Gerstein, who visited Belzec and Treblinka in August 1942 and witnessed (at Belzec) a mass gassing of Jewish men, women and children. Gerstein realized that as a witness, he was determined to expose what he knew to the world to stop the atrocities. After the war the basic facts of Gerstein’s report were verified by SS Obersturmbannführer Dr. W. Pfannenstiel before the Land-Court of Darmstadt in the Federal Republic of Germany, on June 6, 1950.
Kurt Gerstein graduated as a mining engineer in 1931. In 1942 he was appointed head of the Technical Disinfection Department of the SS, responsible for improving the efficiency of Zyklon B. In the late summer of 1942 he was sent on a mission to introduce Zyklon B gassing into the Nazi death camps in Poland in place of gas engines. Eventually he risked his life to inform the Allies. He described how the Jews were forced to undress, the piles of shoes were allegedly 25 meters high, the women’s hair was cut off, and how the naked Jews were driven between two barbed wire fences to the gas chambers. Kurt Gerstein desperately tried to alert the world about the atrocities:
“I see everything! The mothers, their babies at the breast, the little naked children, the men and women, naked. They enter into the death chamber, pushed by the leather whips of the SS. Pack well, that is what the captain ordered. Seven to eight hundred persons on twenty-five square meters. More than half are children…"
Men, women, children filed past in ghastly parade as a burly SS man promised in a loud voice that nothing terrible was going to happen to them. “All you have to do is breathe in deeply. That strengthens the lungs. Inhaling is a means of preventing infectious diseases. It’s a good method of disinfection.” To those who asked what their fate would be, the SS man gave more reassurance: the men would build roads and houses, the women would do housework or help in the kitchen.
When the doors closed, the diesel engine would not work but broke down while pumping its deadly carbon monoxide gas into the chamber. While mechanics worked to repair the diesel engine, the Jews had to await death, pressed body-to-body against one another. An SS officer, Wilhelm Pfannenstiel, looking through the glass peep hole in the door of the gas chamber, commented that the Jews were weeping “as they do in the synagogue.”
Finally after two hours, it stuttered to life. “Up till then people were alive in these chambers .. another 25 minutes went by. True, many were now dead. After 28 minutes, only a few were still alive. At last after 32 minutes, everyone was dead. Finally, all were dead like pillars of basalt, still erect, not having any place to fall”, Kurt Gerstein later wrote. The outside doors to the gas chamber were opened and the bodies taken out. “One could tell families even in death. They were still holding hands, stiffened in death so that it was difficult to tear them apart to clear the chamber for the next load”, Gerstein wrote.
Before the corpses of the Jews were tossed into large trenches, they were searched for valuables in the form of gold teeth or gems or gold hidden in the vagina or rectum. Gerstein was shown the processing of the dead: “With gold to the left – without gold to the right. Other dentists hammered out gold teeth, bridges and crowns. In the midst of them stood Captain Wirth. Hew as in his element, and showing me a large can full of teeth, he said: “See for yourself the weight of that gold! It’s only from yesterday and the day before. You can’t imagine what we find every day – dollars, diamonds, gold. You’ll see for yourself!”
Kurt Gerstein forced himself to watch the final process. The bodies were flung into trenches, each some hundred yards long, conveniently located near the gas chambers. He was told that the bodies would swell from gas after a few days, raising the mound as much as six to ten feet. Once the swelling subsided, the bodies would be piled on railway ties covered with diesel oil and burned to cinders.
Sources:
Holocaust deniers try to wholly discredit Kurt Gerstein's account
So Kurt Gerstein claimed that they (he and Pfannenstiel) witnessed a gassing of Jews at Belzec with a diesel engine and saw a pile of clothing looted from dead Jews that was fifteen stories high. Both claims, holocaust deniers point out, are absurd lies quoted as gospel without critical analysis by Holocaust historians, as well as packing some 28 people per square meter and making them wait 2 hours while repairing a diesel engine that then took 30 minutes to kill them. Of course, the trump card holocaust deniers deliver us to wholly discredit Gerstein's testimony is his claim of 25 million Jews. They go on to say he got the 25 million figure from a trade paper on fumigation, which he would have been aware of as an SS hygienic specialist. The 25 million figure refers to the number of persons during the war up to early 1944 who had their clothing and personal effects gassed by the commercial fumigant Zyklon-B. The paper was given at the Hydrocyanic Acid Conference of the Labor Committee for Room Disinfestation and Contagious Disease Prevention on January 27-28, 1944 by Emil Wüstinger, an engineer from Frankfurt am Main, and published in Gesundheits-lngenieur, Vol. 67 (1944) on pages 179-80.
Of course Gerstein’s 25 million figure is bullshit. Everybody has arrived at that conclusion, both deniers and historians, which is also why you wont find this figure as part of holocaust historiography. But this doesn’t exclude the possibility of there being many accurate elements in Gerstein’s account, which is what this article will be about: rehabilitating Gerstein's account despite the numerous exaggerations he made. Remember: the man was trying to get the message out that horrendous crimes against humanity were happening in the AR camps.
Gerstein’s claim about the height of the pile of shoes and clothes at Belzec and Treblinka may also be exaggerated, and his claim about a diesel engine being used, which he didn’t SEE but had HEARD about from Odilo Globocnik, not because it’s “absurd”, but because the evidence suggests that the engine used for gassing at Belzec was not a diesel but a gasoline engine. But none of that changes the fact that his description of the gassing of Jews from Lwow he witnessed at Belzec coincides and is fully corroborated with those of other eyewitnesses independent of and more objective than Gerstein, like Prof. Pfannenstiel and Karl Alfred Schluch. There is thus no reason to wholly dismiss Gerstein’s account. What holocaust deniers like to do in the case of Gerstein, is throw out the baby with the bath-water.
But we're not done. Holocaust deniers like to point out that in Leon Poliakov's book "Breviary of Hate" (1951), reference for the English translation is 'Harvest of Hate', 1955, pg. 195, he quadruples the square footage of the size of gas chamber that Gerstein actually claimed so that the numbers of victims Gerstein claimed would more reasonably fit into the specified space:
"SS men pushed the men into the chambers. 'Fill it up', Wirth ordered; 700-800 people in 93 [sic - Gerstein's original claim is 25] square meters. The doors closed."
All it tells us is that it doesn’t look good on Mr. Poliakov. But it doesn’t change the fact that, as demonstrated by an experiment conducted by former holocaust denier Charles Provan, described under http://holocaust.skeptik.net/documents/provan_gerstein.html, Gerstein’s figures are not implausible. Provan used a group made up of two adult males, one adult woman, 4 children and a doll representing an infant, which corresponds to how Gerstein described the age and sex composition of a transport to Belzec. The only difference between Gerstein’s description and the test group in Provan’s experiment is that the latter consisted of well-fed Americans whereas the deportees to Belzec were Jews worn out by years of malnourishment in ghettos. But see the pictures for yourself:
http://holocaust.skeptik.net/documents/provan_photos.htm
Charles Provan managed to provide photographic evidence including measurements, of how 8 people can fit in a space of roughly 0.3 square meters (21" x 21" = 441 sq. in. = 0.285 m²). A room packed this way will yield 26 people per square meter. Anyone who claims this to be an impossibility defying the laws of physics has been objectively proven wrong thanks to the efforts of the late Mr. Provan and his family.
So at the end of the day, the only things questionable about Kurt Gerstein's testimony, are his numbers: the height of the pile of shoes and clothes, perhaps the amount of people packed into a gas chamber (but remember - a woman carrying an infant and leading a small child by the hand, i.e. 3 people, occupies not much more space than she would by herself), and the time it took to kill them (in fact, as absurd as it may sound, the incident of the engine breaking down and the doomed waiting for their death can indeed be true, because when faced with doors that are secure enough, it doesn't matter if there are 10 people, a hundred, or a thousand in the room, their manpower doesn't add up to force it open, so once inside, they really cant do anything but scream and hurt each other as they await death, however long it takes because they don't have room to batter the door). And the reason why historians do not dismiss Gerstein's account is because the killing PROCESS is corroborated by other testimonies, such as that of Dr. Pfannenstiel, which you can find here:
http://www.nizkor.org/ftp.cgi/people/ftp.py?people//p/pfannenstiel.wilhelm/pfannen.001
http://www.nizkor.org/ftp.cgi/people/ftp.py?people//p/pfannenstiel.wilhelm/pfannen.002
and on p. 173 of Kogon/Langbein/Rückerl et al, "Nationalsozialitische Massentötungen durch Giftgas"
Final question to deniers in this regard: What would Kurt Gerstein gain by lying? What would his motivation be, in the first place? A one-man vendetta against the Nazi regime? A potential acquittal after his capture by allied forces for saying things they like to hear? Well, too bad he committed suicide in 1945. I think I know why:
How about an anti-denier infographic about Treblinka this time?
It's quite fun when you create an infographic "truth bomb" except this time it isnt one going against established history, but doing the exact opposite - blowing up some common denier canards about Treblinka in their own faces.
One of these, is that some Australian dudebro going by the name of Richard Krege mowed Treblinka (and apparently Belzec located 270km away, too, how sneaky!) with a GPR (Ground Penetrating Radar) some time in 1999 and found absolutely zero traces of disturbed soil beneath the ground's surface.
Long story: Denier Gerald Fredrick Töben from the "Adelaide Institute" (basically an Australian IHR) sponsored the Australian engineer Richard Krege and a, as is alleged, "team of scientists" to hire GPR equipment and travel to Poland in order to definitely disprove mass graves on the site at Treblinka II. Some photographs were released of the expedition showing Krege using the equipment which looked like a giant lawnmower. It was claimed that raw and unprocessed GPR data obtained from a survey of the Treblinka camp was absolute proof that there were no mass graves at Treblinka, and that the "soil was undisturbed".
Internet deniers whooped and yelled that there had been no Holocaust in Treblinka. The "Adelaide Institute" announced that they had mailed History University departments across the world with a report containing copies of the results of their findings. The report apparently also included a CD containing the data. However, no reports were ever received by any University department. All that really emerged in the way of a report were these statements by the "Institute" and a grainy scan that was released onto the Internet of the unprocessed GPR data purporting to be taken from the area of the mass graves and said to show no signs of expected disturbances.
When Holocaust Controversies team member Roberto Muehlenkamp sent a copy of the scan to a person who actually understood the workings of GPR, one Dr. Lawrence Conyers, he stated that the scan contradicted the Adelaide Institute's findings, that it was ambigious and he then stated that the scan could indeed be showing evidence of soil disturbance at Treblinka after all. This amusingly threw into question denier ability to comprehend or understand what they had done.
The "Krege report" as it became known did not prove to be the miracle weapon of Holocaust denial - it was never an actual report, and in December 2006 during the Iranian holocaust denial conference ("International Conference to Review the Global Vision of the Holocaust")that gained international notoriety and negative press coverage, Gerald Fredrick Töben attended, but did not use this great opportunity to discuss the now Krege report and present Krege's results to the world.
So yes, it's too bad Mr. Krege never published his report as a PDF (like the Leuchter or Rudolf report) so that people can read it and arrive at the same conclusion. Instead, what we have are the usual denier sites like IHR or Rense giving us a nice SUMMARY of Mr. Krege's Treblinka adventure, i.e. that he was there, did the scan, found nothing, and you better believe it, rather than making the report itself available for download. Sometimes, a small SCREENSHOT of his laptop with the GPR software is provided in the article, as well as photos of him dragging the GPR across a green lawn. Is this the height of post-Rudolf revisionist science?
Until Krege releases his findings as a detailed science report with documentation of when he was there, on which day(s) he did the scan in which direction, along which route, and the usual amount of graphs and documentation a science report entails, and in the SEVENTEEN YEARS since he has been there he has not released the report, we can treat Mr. Krege's bedtime story with the same amount of trust that holocaust deniers treat the story of any Jewish Auschwitz survivor with.
And finally, one fun observation of the constantly adapting, slimy eel that is holocaust denial is this: Krege's alleged findings (no disturbed soil in Treblinka) go AGAINST the currently accepted holocaust denier position about Treblinka, which is that it existed, but was a transit camp with the necessary buildings erected and dismantled upon the camp's closure. So if it existed, and there's nothing there anymore today, it means the buildings were dismantled, correct? And all of this leaves no soil traces for a GPR to pick up? So what is it, holocaust deniers? Did the Treblinka camp exist, or did it not? If it existed, why didnt Krege's GPR scan find ANY soil disturbance whatsoever? And if it didn't exist, you're back to square one of holocaust denial, which is fully doubting camps' existences altogether and making a fool out of yourself as a result. I thought you had crawled out of this position long ago? Too easy.
Friedrich Paul Berg's obsession with diesel engine exhaust being harmless
The source of the claim that diesel exhaust cannot kill humans, and therefore nobody in the AR camps was gassed, is one questionable "expert" going by the name of Friedrich Paul "Fritz" Berg, operating a site called nazigassings. His claim is that idling diesel engines produce fumes that are no more dangerous than e . g. cigarette smoke, and therefore incapable of killing people since they contain "lots" of oxygen.
There are plenty of studies showing diesel engines are capable of killing when their fumes are pumped into an enclosed room. "The Toxicity of Fumes from a diesel Engine Under Four Different Running Conditions", by Prattle et al., British Journal of Industrial Medicine, 1957, Vol 14, p. 47-55,
...proves that small mammals can be killed by a very weak engine with only 6 bhp. The vehicle engines employed in the Reinhardt camps on the other hand had several hundred bhp.
Furthermore, In earlier years, the study of carbon dioxide had revealed that additional carbon dioxide increases the speed of breathing. Because of this, several German studies had concluded that the presence of carbon dioxide directly affects the quantity of carbon monoxide absorbed by human beings.
[Archiv für Hygiene und Bakteriologie, Vol. 102, 1929, pgs. 254 - 262, "Zur Beurteilung der Giftigkeit kohlenoxydhaltiger Luft"(Evaluating the Toxicity of Air Containing Carbon Monoxide), by Dr. Walter Deckert.]
Hence we may conclude that Kurt Gerstein, one of the Belzec eye-witnesses, trained as a mining engineer, viewed the exhaust deaths of the Jews at Belzec as due to poisoning by carbon monoxide, more speedily absorbed due to faster breathing caused by increased carbon dioxide. This theory was known and current in Europe (especially in Germany) and the United States at the time.
[Carbon Monoxide: Its Hazards and the Mechanism of its Action, by W . F. von Oettingen, Principal Industrial Toxicologist, United States Public Health Service, by Direction of the Surgeon General, United States Government Printing Office, Washington, 1944, p. 160.]
See also the previously mentioned article, by Dr. Walter Deckert, which says, "With the same content of carbon monoxide, an air rich in carbon dioxide is more poisonous than air with the normal content of carbon dioxide, in proportion to the content of carbon dioxide. This is explained in a two-fold way: first through the increased breathing activity as a result of the stimulating effect of the carbon dioxide on the breathing, and secondly on p. 257, Deckert states that the carbon monoxide is more poisonous, the less oxygen there is.
Therefore, concluding from the Carbon MONOxide levels of diesel exhaust the lack of its toxicity is an exercise in mental gymnastics when the denier doing so is using the oxygen content as a red herring (to fool the layman) and ignoring the elephant in the room: the vastly increased levels of Carbon DIOxide (e.g. 12%) compared to what is found in normal air (0.04%).
I still have trouble grasping what would be the big deal about making diesel exhaust toxic enough by running the engine at a high rpm while restricting the engine's air intake, or why CO content would matter in a closed space crammed with people having little oxygen to start with, when that oxygen was displaced by the incoming exhaust and the CO2 content raised beyond survival levels. And finally, Fritz Berg and friends need to prove that the fuel used for the diesel engines in wartime Poland was of a quality good enough to not affect anyone breathing in its fumes. They haven't been able to. Rather, they show us modern commercials of a suicidal person not being able to kill himself in a diesel car, or some person breathing in diesel fumes in a controlled lab environment from a diesel engine adhering to modern safety and environmental regulations...talk about false equivalence.
But all of the above is mostly irrelevant as we can make a good case that the witnesses who talked about diesel were mistaken (not something that casual witnesses to mass murder who didn't possess a technical background should be crucified for) and the gassing engine used was an engine running on gasoline. We know that, because all witnesses who either handled the engine or were otherwise familiar with it, be it at BELZEC (Rudolf Reder and the Polish electrician Kasimierz Czerniak, who helped to establish the motor room in 1942; described a petrol motor of approximately 200 or more PS, from which exhaust fumes were led away over ground pipes. Confusion with a diesel engine is out of the question because diesel fuel is called olej napedowy in Polish), SOBIBOR (SS-men Erich Bauer, Erich Fuchs, and Franz Hödl), CHELMNO (Walter Burmeister and Walter Piller, polish mechanics mentioned by German historian Peter Witte, survivors Mordka Zurawski and Bruno Israel) or the mobile gas van operations (Zalman Levinbuck, SS-commander Friedrich Jeckeln) ALL spoke of a gasoline engine. From TREBLINKA there are NO eyewitness testimonies of people who either operated or were familiar with the engine, but even there at least two eyewitnesses (Ukrainian guard Ivan Shevchenko and surviving inmate Oskar Strawczynski) expressly mentioned a gasoline engine. So forget about the diesel mantra - it's irrelevant. Citing mainstream sources still speaking of diesel is not a valid counter-argument for two reasons: one, the above paragraph, and two, as I have already shown, even Diesel engines can kill.
Let me summarize once again, for the particularly dense:
1. Most eyewitnesses said nothing about the type of engine.
2. Those eyewitnesses who either operated the engine or were otherwise familiar with it, the people "in the know", spoke of a gasoline engine.
3. Some casual eyewitnesses, who neither operated the engine nor were otherwise familiar with it, mentioned a diesel engine (though there are also two casual Treblinka eyewitnesses, Oskar Strawczynski and Ivan Shevchenko, who mentioned a gasoline engine).
So the preponderance of testimony mentioning the type of engine, and especially of knowledgeable testimony, is clearly on gasoline and not diesel.
For more, see:
http://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot.co.at/2006/06/why-diesel-issue-is-irrelevant.html
"But German submarines used diesel engines and nobody was killed!"
Some of the slightly less brained deniers throw the old submarine gambit into their argument why diesel engines are harmless. The argument they make is Germany used diesel subs and it didn't kill the crew...
Of course, what they apparently haven't bothered researching is how diesel-electric submarines work. The diesel engines are only used while on the surface, the exhaust gases are released into the air. As well as providing power for the propellers, one or more engines is used to recharge the banks of batteries.
It's the batteries that are used for the submarine's propulsion while it is submerged. For obvious reasons, the diesel engines are not used.
Some submarines included a snorkel, which permitted the use of diesel engines when the submarine was at periscope depth.
Unlike nuclear submarines, diesel-electric submarines spent quite some time on the surface - and only submerged for short periods of time, to attack or avoid a specific threat. Batteries have limited power and hence, run out much sooner (36-48 hours depending upon the submarine type).
So there you have it. German diesel-electric submarine crew never ended up breathing the exhaust fumes of their sub's diesel engine, so the argument is moot.
Friedrich Paul Berg's obsession with cherry red corpses (CO poisoning)
Now that we've established gasoline engines (and therefore much higher CO content compared to diesel) were the most likely agent of death in the AR camps (though I personally don't completely rule out diesel engines myself, given that they are indeed lethal), the holocaust denier "Fritz" Berg chimes in with the other half of his theory in which he tries to discredit gasoline engines as well:
Berg's idea (based on some medical literature he selectively quotes that show a link between CO poisoning and this phenomenon in about 70% of observed cases) is that the bodies of people who died due to CO poisoning turn a bright cherry red color, and the fact that none of the eye-witness testimonies mentioned this unique phenomenon (except for Sonderkommando Henryk Tauber in Auschwitz, or Nazi chemist Leiding in Sachsenhausen, woops) is proof to him that the mass gassing by engine exhaust regarding the AR camps & gas vans has finally been exposed as a complete hoax.
Let us first begin with Henryk Tauber's testimony, shall we? (caps for emphasis)
"We found heaps of naked bodies, doubled up. They were PINKISH, and in places RED. Some were covered with greenish marks and saliva ran from their mouths. Others were bleeding from the nose. There was excrement on many of them. I remember that a great number had their eyes open and were hanging on to one another. The bodies were most crushed together round the door. By contrast, there were less around the wire mesh columns. The location of the bodies indicated that the people had tried to get away front the columns and get to the door. It was very hot in the gas chamber, and so suffocating, as to be unbearable. Later on, we became convinced many people died of suffocation, due to lack of air, just before the gassing."
source: Robert Jan Van Pelt, "The Case For Auschwitz: Evidence from the Irving Trial", page 197
Furthermore, regarding the gas vans tested at Sachsenhausen on Soviet POWs (see: "KL - A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps" by Nikolaus Wachsmann, professor of modern European history), the corpses were described as pink in the testimony of Nazi chemist Theodor Friedrich Leiding:
"One day, I was summoned to travel to Sachsenhausen ... and there was a van, which was equal or like that, which I had seen in the yard of the Reichskriminalpolizeiamt. The number of men, which entered into the van, may have been around/about 30 ... The corpses had, as we chemists found out/observed the typical pink outlook of men, who had died of a CO-poisoning."
source: http://www . nizkor . org/hweb/camps/chelmno/sonderdruck . html
And here Dr. Leiding testifies again:
“I was told that the people who had climbed into the truck were Russians who would otherwise have had to be shot. They were looking for a different way of killing them. We then went to another place, where we met the truck again. It was near the crematory oven. I can still remember that one could see through a peephole or a small window into the inside of the truck, which was lit up. One could see that the people were dead. The van was opened. Some bodies fell out; the others were unloaded by prisoners. Those of us who were chemists could ascertain that the bodies had that pinkish look which is typical of victims of carbon monoxide poisoning."
source: E. Kogon, H. Langbein, and A. Rueckerl, Eds. "Nazi Mass Murder: A Documentary History of the Use of Poison Gas" Yale University Press, 1993, p. 54
What can we already establish? Deniers are LIARS if they say there is no testimony of pinkish red corpses. Now to turn to the question how frequently this phenomenon occurred among the gassed dead. Strangely enough, I find myself quoting a denier site (chances are, the article wont be there for long):
http://www.vho.org/tr/2004/2/Provan159-164.html
Oh, I know why! It's because the author is our true skeptic, Charles D. Provan, reviled by deniers (because he was a born skeptic, managed to mingle with the denier scene, but then realized they are a bunch of tossers after all). The above article shows that CO poisoned victims have, in fact, a slightly higher chance of displaying cyanosis (bluishness) than reddishness. And neither of these ALWAYS show up.
Furthermore, the corpses do not necessarily turn cherry red, especially when the victims have a compromised ability to oxygenate, which is likely to have been the case with Jews from miserable Polish ghettos due to anemia and other conditions related to prolonged malnutrition, compared to the corpse of a healthy, perhaps overweight, dare I even say obese person you are looking at in the picture above.
"When the victim is anaemic the color may be faint or even absent because insufficient haemoglobin is present to display the colour."
source: Forensic Pathology, by Bernard Knight MD, MRCP, FRC(Path), Barrister, Oxford University Press, New York, 1991, p. 507.
Besides that, the victims didn't necessarily die of carbon monoxide poisoning. Suffocation as the incoming exhaust further reduced the already sparse amount of available oxygen by displacement from the non-airtight* gas chambers may well have killed a great many before carbon monoxide poisoning got to them. And don't forget how densely packed the victims were - if you have researched how many people have lost their lives due to being crushed in a panicking human crowd, I think you will realize how lethal an extremely dense crowd of people can be on its own. If you are so densely packed in a room that you can't fully expand your lungs to take a deep breath, well, you will asphyxiate before any CO or hydrogen cyanide even gets to you. See Henryk Tauber's aforementioned testimony for Auschwitz. For the AR camps, Dr. Pfannenstiel attributed the bluish tinge he observed on some of the victims' faces to suffocation, further underscoring the presence of cyanosis.
But here's the real shocker**: Deniers have been asked to show us medical literature that asserts that this cherry-red discoloration sets in either at the time of death or shortly thereafter, so that it would be obvious to those opening and emptying the gas chambers, and the deniers have failed spectacularly, including our expert Fritz Berg. Instead, they refer to the coloration that has set in on cadavers hours after death when lividity has formed and settled, which is completely IRRELEVANT to the case at hand in e.g. Treblinka, as by this time the corpse would either be in one of the mass graves (Mid 1942 - March 1943) or already burning on the pyre (March 1943 to late August 1943).
Now before some wise guy tries to remind me about the exhumed corpses, I'll ask him to go on a small medical literature errand and inform me how long this cherry-red coloring is visible on said corpse after it has set in. Days? Weeks? Months? Then we can talk about it still being relevant during the exhumation process that started March 1943 onward.
And finally, let me also know how many Aktion Reinhardt corpse cremators survived and got to deliver a testimony. Because they, of all people, would have had the best chance to observe any kind of repeatedly occurring skin discoloration on the bodies they routinely hauled into the cremation pyres over, and over, and over again. Not someone who observed corpses from a safe distance.
*it is extremely hard to place a chamber under a true (as in lab conforming) hermetic seal if it has corpse-removal doors that open the way they did in the gas chambers of Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka according to the sketches (http://i.imgur.com/JAPJImU.jpg). Holocaust deniers create red herrings when they bring in pressure arguments stating the engines would fail, or some of the crazier ones, that the chambers' structural integrity would falter and they'd blow up. So when witnesses spoke of "hermetic seal", how do you think they arrived at this conclusion? Were they scientists who inspected every nook and cranny of each of the gas chambers, or did they rather notice the gas chambers being windowless rooms, and/or their doors the victims went through having rubber and felt linings covering their crevices (as attested to by SS guards/witnesses at Treblinka/Sobibor camps in their trials and by finding the felt at Belzec during the archeology), and came to their conclusion based on such observations? This does not mean the gas has no other way to escape. But for the sake of continuing the point, let's just assume it didn't. This still does not mean the chamber would blow up or the motor would fail, because it is not hard to overcome gas compression with a reasonable size motor....witness all the people who seal up windows and kill themselves in their cars. Air, even at sea level, has a reasonably high degree of compression tolerability. Gases are pretty thin.....simple physics. Think about how much you can pump up a bicycle tire, or fill a scuba tank, or even a spray can with gas without any of these exploding. The holocaust denier argument of gas pressure buildup can therefore be completely dismissed in either scenario. Any and all arguments regarding a "true hermetic seal" being present or not are therefore completely meaningless in any court of law.
**credit to Nessie from RODOH
So let me recap: Fritz Berg makes the case that death by CO poisoning usually causes cherry-red corpses, citing some medical literature and points out how AR witnesses do not mention this. I have compiled evidence that his theory is nothing but a rape of the scientific method because:
- he assumes CO as the sole agent of murder when humans packed like sardines breathe in exhaust gas
- he deliberately neglects suffocation, cyanosis, and this being correctly observed by witnesses
- he uses a well-fed corpse that inhaled god knows how much CO to extrapolate his claim from
- he cannot prove that cherry-red coloring sets in immediately / very shortly after death so it can be noticed before burial / cremation
- he cannot prove that the coloring continues to show on the corpse months later even during putrefaction so that it could have been noticed during exhumation
Gee, perhaps all this is the reason why no scientist or doctor (and in extension holocaust historian) take Fritz Berg's cherry-red ramblings seriously. He tried to catch holocaust historians with their pants down, but it backfired on him instead.
http://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot.in/2007/10/bergs-big-lie.html
http://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot.in/2011/12/belzec-sobibor-treblinka-holocaust_6507.html
Fritz Berg and his railway delousing chambers, producer gas vehicles and air-circulation chamber
Another cornerstone of Berg's theory of how implausible the gassings conducted in the Birkenau and AR camp gas chambers are, is his notion that the Nazis could have just used one of the giant delousing chambers used to delouse railway wagons, like the one located in Budapest, Hungary or Sarajevo, Bosnia. Berg thinks that since the Jews were carted off the various ghettos in Europe by rail anyway, why not simply drive the trains into these gas chambers instead? Why take the Jews to some far away camp, have them disembark, kill them in separate, purpose-built gas chambers and send the trains back rather than killing them in these already existing chambers? A much more complicated procedure, according to Berg.
So the Bergian theory of denial really boils down to "The Nazis did not do homicidal gassing using A because they could have done it using B which is according to my perception more effective" and can be therefore considered a kind of crude Occam's razor.
Berg also applies Occam's razor in his other theories, namely that the Nazis should've used producer gas to kill Jews (even though they were volatile and a fire hazard for the drivers). Undue handling of these could easily have led the killers to poison themselves or blow themselves up. Another consideration speaking against the use of producer gas was that producer gas vehicles were needed to carry supplies on the Eastern Front, and taking any such vehicle out of frontline service and replacing it with an engine-driven vehicle would not have been a good choice regarding fuel-saving. Killers do not necessarily use the best killing method. So if the evidence shows that engine exhaust was used, the evidence is not faulty just because a "revisionist" 20/20 hindsight wisecracker thinks that he would have used producer gas instead.
Same applies for Berg's other Occam's razor attempt, which is his bewilderment that a continuous "Kreislauf" air circulation system wasn't used in the homicidal gas chambers as was in the delousing chambers. What he doesn't understand, is that such a system isn't necessary to have HCN spread from its pellets into the surroundings especially when introduced in 4 separate locations simultaneously in a 2000 sq. ft. room with a low ceiling packed with panicking, hyperventilating people, many of whom died by getting crushed before a lethal dose of HCN even got to them.
To answer why the railway delousing chambers weren't used, I can't think of a more stupid arrangement than clogging up the few railway delousing facilities that existed (which still needed to delouse trains, surely) with train-loads of deported Jews who would release the contents of their bowels into otherwise usable clothing, and soil the wagon floors, creating a horrendous mess for clean-up on however many wagons on the train. Not to mention that a single railway fumigation tunnel could only process several cars at a time rather than an entire train-load, so the cars would have to be split into groups, and then those not being gassed, wait. If forced to dismount from the trains, strip naked, and re-board the train to prevent clothes soiling, I think the shower story would no longer be convincing to the victims anymore. Besides, how much of the HCN actually penetrated the interior of these train wagons during such a procedure? And regarding the idea of leaving the train outside and just marching the Jews into the empty facility as tall as a cathedral, then one might as well build a smaller gas chamber and not have to waste Zyklon, which is exactly why the Nazis did what they did in Belzec, Treblinka, Sobibor, Majdanek, Auschwitz, Birkenau, Mauthausen etc. Furthermore, as the names Budapest and Sarajevo suggest, these facilities were located close to hubs of civilization. I think Berg missed the secrecy of the holocaust. Else Nazis might as well have built the extermination camps right outside Berlin, Warsaw and Vienna, rather than in remote areas of Poland (on a sidenote, while it was located very close to Lublin, Majdanek exacted a relatively small death toll and Lublin had even fewer inhabitants back then than it does today - it was anything but a hub of civilization). And lastly, keep in mind that the pictured facilities were not located in countries under direct German administration.
Berg's argument also hilariously debunks 'transit camp' notions made by other deniers since one reason cited for his harebrained idea is that the Nazis wouldn't have to transport the deportees as far as eastern Poland; yet being sent so far eastward is central to the hypothesis of the other deniers who believe the deportees were sent hundreds if not a thousand km further east as Hitler "wanted them out of Europe". The Bergian theory of denial therefore is the exact opposite of "Judenevakuierung" to the East.
This is also the reason why Fritz Berg is called a lunatic by many of his prominent fellow deniers, since he believes homicidal gassing of large amounts of people using Zyklon-B is perfectly possible - it just wasn't done in the places he thinks it should have been done. In fact, Fritz Berg and Robert Faurisson hate each others' guts! Berg also strongly dislikes Leuchter, but this is what Berg has to say about Robert Faurisson:
"On technical subject matter, Robert Faurisson is hopeless! He is a kind of techno-retard locked into his fixed ideas about “impossibilities” [of mass gassings using Zyklon-B]. Unfortunately, so are many “revisionist” true-believers who seem to worship at his feet. Denial is their new religion. That may explain why holocaust revisionism is not far more successful than it is. No doubt, if I give the same test to "exterminationists"--the results will be better. No doubt, if I am clever enough and disguise my motives--most “exterminationists” will agree that the railroad delousing tunnels could have easily worked for mass murder. They will agree that those real gas chambers would, at the very least, have been vastly better than the alleged gas chambers for humans at Birkenau which they already believe in. Of course, since the Nazis really had such huge delousing gas chambers (on railroad tracks of all places), why didn't they use them? Why have such chambers never even been implicated?" - F.P. Berg
To summarize: Berg is a proponent of the "Zyklon-B gassing, using railway fumigation tunnels" hypothesis. He expresses his denial by raising the question as to why Nazis did not use these huge halls to gas Jews who were bring transported across Europe in rail cars in the first place, wagons that needed to be disinfected anyway. Faurisson disagrees with him as the literature professor doesn't believe in mass gassings involving Zyklon-B because he believes the corpses would be saturated with poison that clearing them out of the chamber would be impossible (though Berg argues this is very much possible due to the ventilation system in the hangar). Just another example of deniers unable to offer a united front against historians and instead squabbling amongst themselves, only exposing & ridiculing each others' theories.
Shipments of hair from Treblinka and Majdanek
Just some documentation to discredit the denier claim that Nazi industry had no use for hair, and therefore the "hair story" is as much an absurd fairy tale as the "soap or lampshade story". Also, see:
W. Rutherford's sketch of the new gas chambers of Belzec
In August 1942, Lorenz "Hacko" Hackenholt oversaw the construction and operation of newer and larger gas chambers at Belzec extermination camp, after initial gassings had been carried out in smaller chambers earlier in spring. Once the new gas chamber building with 6 chambers (3 on either side, divided by a corridor in the middle) came into operation, he put up a sign which said "Hackenholt Foundation" on the outside, with potted geraniums on either side of the entrance. I have also heard reports of the building bearing the slogan "Bade- und Inhalationsraum" (Bath & Inhalation room). Hackenholt also designed and operated gas chambers at the Treblinka and Sobibor extermination camps. Franz Suchomel mentions him in his testimony linked earlier.
The Majdanek controversy
Like Dachau, controversy exists among holocaust historians over the frequency of homicidal gassing at Majdanek concentration camp located in the ass end of Poland, near the nevertheless beautiful city of Lublin. It was one of the first Nazi camps to be liberated, on July 24th 1944, and early on the Soviets did indeed think of it as an extermination camp with a death toll numbering in the millions. This death toll, thanks to research by actual historians, was continuously lowered over the post-war decades to 78,000 today. As early as 1948 it had gone down to 360,000 (Zdzisław Łukaszkiewicz). None of this was the contribution of any holocaust denier.
Due to the poorer amount of surviving documentation compared to camps like Auschwitz, we really cannot be certain how people were murdered at Majdanek by which means, though we can speculate based on documentation (such as delivery shipments) and testimony that the agents of murder by gassing were Zyklon-B & CO, but the former obviously was also a delousing / fumigation agent.
This is why some controversy exists whether the several surviving gas chambers at Majdanek concentration camp museum today were once homicidal gas chambers or delousing chambers, or both. I haven't researched this subject well, I have not visited Majdanek, I have not had a chance to see the available documentation or listen to the testimonies, so my expertise here is very limited.
Oftentimes, the following image is presented by deniers as "the homicidal Majdanek gas chamber" and they tell us to note the window on the left or how there are door handles on the inside as well, and therefore the door "could be opened from the inside":
http://forum.axishistory.com/download/file.php?id=156306&sid=b515581e1e818ae5b8a442a7bc5fdc0f
Note that the doors are standard issue air raid shelter doors which came with handles on both sides. This does not mean it is impossible to lock them from the outside. The picture below shows how the door at the far end of the room actually opens outward, rather than inward as the holocaust deniers claim:
https://rachelonyearcourse.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/dsc_0001.jpg
As for the supposed window, you have been the victim of camera perspective:
The pic above shows one of the Majdanek gas chambers that has survived the war and can be visited today, in the "Bath and Disinfection I" building equipped with shower heads. Holocaust deniers, in their attempts to discredit homicidal gassing, keep talking about a "Majdanek gas chamber window" whose glass could be broken by the victims to somehow survive the homicidal gassing this way (how this would drastically lower the HCN concentration in the room and allow more than 2 or 3 people closest to the window to survive is, of course, not explained by the deniers). In any case, the pic above shows a panorama of the chamber. Do you see any window? I don't. What I see, are two doors and three holes in the wall in two of which there're actually lights mounted, one off, the other on. Also, note the piping running the length of the chamber and the vent in the corner.
This denier video below on youtube shows how the brightly lit door in the pic is the entrance to this chamber, and how outside (not visible in the picture due to the light) the door frame, there is the same type of sturdy metal gas chamber door that also opens OUTWARD:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YToi7Gejl3k [video unavailable]
And note how at 0:59 you can see how it can be LOCKED from the OUSTIDE, which I mentioned earlier.
The only controversial aspect here is the glass covering the door's observation hole from the inside. I suppose if someone knocked out the glass (good luck figuring that out in a panic) and stuck his nose on the hemispherical grid, he and maybe 1 other person could survive by breathing the air from the outside, as only the exertion from their lungs could draw outside air through the grid into the chamber. This would perhaps save 2 person's lives, bravo. That is, if they arent being clawed to death by panicking people in their death throes behind them.
Then, we have this chamber, complete with induction holes in the ceiling:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2X8zX_56p8 [video unavailable]
Like the larger anteroom with the shower heads (all within the barrack called "Bad & Desinfektion I") this room also has a window which lets in natural light from the exterior, but it is too high up on the wall - the inmates would have to literally be jumping if they wanted to break its glass, and this of course is assuming the window looked exactly like this during the war and didn't have any kind of external coverings like the ones on Krematorium IV and V in Auschwitz. Note how at 0:35 the guy filming does not show you the height of the window properly, but you can see it in this video:
The video in the link directly above, beginning around 5:16, also shows two more windowless chambers, apart from the one earlier which the museum says stored clothing (now empty Zyklon-B cans). This next one also has a metal gas chamber door that opens outward. The latter of these two chambers is the one presented earlier in the denier video and pic of this post.
There is also the aforementioned shower room, that has windows on a lower level. This shower room has been used by cinematographers as footage to explain the concept of fake shower-heads in homicidal gas chambers (as was the case in e . g. Birkenau). I am not aware of them saying in their documentary that this room in Majdanek was where homicidal gassings took place, so deniers build a strawman when they accuse the cinematographer of dishonesty by using footage from Majdanek.
Today, you can see a row of ovens (Kori company) with a total of at least 5 muffles in the camp's crematorium.
I will admit I know very little about this camp, its history and its layout as I have not visited or studied it. What I do know from the pictures, is that there are blue stains, the gas chambers have reinforced iron doors, and historians, not deniers, have placed the death toll on a comparatively very low level. If anything, this is more proof to me that nobody is trying to perpetuate any kind of hoax.
The only museum flaws you will find here are some wording on the signs that has been revised, that not all of the chambers are accessible to the public (including Bad & Desinfektion II), that the Bad & Desinfektion I has been extended, and bottles of CO2 are on display to commemorate CO gassing, because no original canisters the CO was bottled in survived, and canisters labeled CO are pretty hard to find, given that there is no industrial use for pure CO. Wow. Majdanek museum exposed. Good job, deniers, I guess it really is game over now...
In fact, if you read head of Majdanek museum Thomas Kranz's, „Mass Killings by Means of Toxic Gases in the Majdanek Concentration Camp“, you would know that he mentions all these things. No secrets kept. Now then, on what basis do we claim homicidal gas chambers existed in Majdanek? While the death toll based on estimates of crematory capacity and frequency of open air incineration turned out to be erroneous, the "Communique of the Polish-Soviet extraordinary Commission for investigating the crimes committed by the Germans in the Majdanek extermination camp in Lublin", foreign languages publishing house Moscow, 1944, provides detail:
The Committee of Technical and Chemical Experts under the Chairmanship of Kelles-Krause, Engineer-Architect of the City of Lublin, and consisting of Engineer Major Telaner, Docent; Grigoriev, B.M.E.; and Pelkis, B.M.E., found that the chambers erected within the precincts of the camp were mainly utilized for the purpose of the wholesale extermination of people. There were six such chambers in all. Some of them were adapted to the purpose of putting people to death by means of carbon monoxide; the others were adapted to the purpose of putting people to death with Zyklon.
Within the precincts of the camp were found five hundred and thirty-five canisters containing Zyklon B, and several containers with carbon monoxide. The chemical analysis revealed the following:
"The contents of the canisters were tested for the presence of prussic acid by the reaction of the formation of Prussian blue with the aid of benzidino-acinate indicator paper and picric sodium. Samples were taken from eighteen canisters and forty-eight-separate reactions were produced. All the tests gave positive results showing the presence of prussic acid with the aforesaid reagents. Samples of the gas taken from the containers were tested for carbon monoxide with the aid of reactions to iodinc pentoxide and palladious chloride indicator paper. In all, sixteen tests were made with iodine pentoxide and ten were made with palladious chloride indicator paper. All the tests made with the aforesaid reagents gave positive reactions to carbon monoxide."
On the basis of a precise calculation of a technical examination of the gas chambers, a chemical analysis of the carbon monoxide and the substance known as "Zyklon" the Committee of Experts also found the following:
"The technical and sanitary-chemical inspection of the gas chambers at the Majdanek Concentration Camp wholly confirmed the fact that all these chambers, particularly I, II, III and IV, were intended and utilized for the purpose of the wholesale and systematic extermination of people by poisoning with the aid of poisonous gases such as: prussic acid (the substance known as 'Zyklon'), and carbon monoxide."
By utilizing all tbe chambers adapted for the purpose of poisoning simultaneously, it was possible to put to death one thousund nine hundred and fourteen persons at a time. It has been established that in these gas chambers were put to death all the prisoners who were exhausted by starvation and enfeebled by exhausting labour and the severity of the camp regime, all those unfit for physical work, all those who fell sick with typhus, and all others whom the Germans deemed it necessary to put to death.
The witness Stanislawski informed the Commission of the following:
"In March 1943, three hundred Poles were put to death in the gas chamber. On June 20, 1943, three hundred and fifty persons were stripped naked in field No. 1 and taken to the bathhouse. From there they were taken into the gas chamber, where they were asphyxiated. On October 14, 1943, two hundred and seventy persons were put to death in this way."
The witness Zelent quoted the case of the asphyxiation by means of gas of eighty-seven Poles on March 15, 1944.
Another witness, Jan Wolski, a Pole, formerly a prisoner at the camp, testified to the wholesale asphyxiation of people with gas.
"In October 1942," he stated, "a large number of women and children were brought to the camp. The healthy ones were picked out for work, while the feeble ones, the sick and the children were asphyxiated in the gas chambers. In March l943, another two hundred and fifty women and children were exterminated in the same chamber, and several days later another three hundred persons of different nationalities were exterminated in this same way. On May 16, or 17, 1943, one hundred and fifty-eight children of ages ranging from two to ten were brought to the camp in motor trucks. These children were put to death in the gas chanber. In June 1943, the camp administration collected all the sick prisoners of war and civilian prisoners to the number of about six hundred and put them all to death the gas chamber."
Evidence concerning the wholesale asphyxiation of people by means of gases was given at the meeting of the Commission by German SS men who had served in the camp.
Rottenfuhrer SS Hensche stated that on September 15, 1942, three hundred and fifty persons including women and children, were put to death in the gas chambers.
Oberscharfuehrer SS Terner informed the Commission of the case which occurred on October 16, 1943, of the asphyxiation in gas chambers of five hundred persons, including many women and children.
The selection of people to be put to death by asphyxiation was systematically made by the German camp doctors Max Blanke and Heinrich Rindfleisch.
The aforesaid Ternes stated:
"In the evening of October 21, 1943, camp doctor Untersturmfuehrer SS Rindfleisch told me that that day three hundred children of ages ranging from three to ten were asphyxiated in the gas chamber with the substance 'Zyklon'."
The corpses were systematically removed from the gas chamber to be incinerated in the crematorium, or on bonfires. The corpses were transported on special lorries hauled by tractors. This is testified to by numerous eyewitnesses.
German prisoner of war, Rottensfuehrer SS Theodor Schollen, who served in the camp, stated:
"I often saw this machine with trailers going to and fro between the gas chambers and the crematorium. It came from the gas chamber loaded with corpses and went back empty."
The Polish-Soviet Extraordinary Commission has established that in addition to the gas chambers, the Germans in Lublin utilized gas vans for the purpose of putting people to death.
The witnesses-Stetdiener, an ex-soldier of the Polish army, and Atrokhov, a Soviet prisoner of war, gave a detailed description of the machine in which the Germans asphyxiated their victims with the aid of the exhaust gas from the engine. The discovery within the precincts of the camp of a number of corpses bearing the characteristic symptoms of poisoning by carbon monoxide confirms the fact that the Germans utilized carbon monoxide for the purpose of putting prisoners to death.
The aforementioned Committee of Medical Experts expressed the opinion that:
"The extermination of prisoners in the concentration camp was accomplished by different methods. In the initial period of the camp's existence the Hitlerites mainly resorted to wholesale shooting. Later, they also resorted to the wholesale poisoning of people in specially built gas chambers by means of powerful poisonous substances such as prussic acid (the substance known as 'Zyklon') and carbon monoxide."
Thus, the evidence of numerous eyewitnesses, the findings of the Committee of Medical Experts and the Committee of Technical and Chemical Experts prove that for nearly three years the Germans in the Majdanek Camp Systematically carried out the wholesale asphyxiation with the aid of gases of people, including aged people, women and children.
In the initial period of the existence of the Majdanek Camp the Germans buried the bodies of all those they shot and tortured. Later, and particularly in 1943 and 1944, they burnt the bodies, exhuming them from the pits in which the victims had been previously buried.
Already in the beginning of 1942 two furnaces for burning corpses were erected within the precincts of the camp. Owing to the extremely large number of corpses that had to be dealt with, the Germans, in 1942, began to erect a large new crematorium with five incinerators. This crematorium was completed in the autumn of 1943. The furnaces were in continuous operation.
The Committee established that for a long time, particularly during the past two years, the Germans, in addition to burning corpses in special furnaces, widely resorted to the practice of burning corpses on bonfires within the precincts of the camp as well as in the Krembecki-Woods. The witnesses Hospodarek and Matyasek, inhabitants of the village of Dziesiata (near the Majdanek Camp) and the village of Krembec, stated that they had seen gigantic bonfires in the camp and in the Krembecki Woods on which the bodies of the people who had been shot and tortured by the Germans were burnt.
Photographic evidence of open air cremation here:
http://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/pa13594
The Germans resorted to the grinding up of small bones in a special "mill." A detailed description of this mill was given by the witness Stetdiener, whom the Germans compelled to work this mill.
Lieutenant General Hilmar Moser, of the German army, ex-Military Commandant of Lublin, stated the following:
"I have no reasons for hushing or covering up the heinous crimes committed by Hitler, and I regard it as my duty to tell the whole truth about the so-called "Extermination Camp" the Hitlerites established along the Cholm Road, near Lublin. In the winter of 1943-44 a large number of the prisoners-among whom, to my great indignation, were women and children-were exterminated there. The number of killed was round about one hundred thousand. Part of the unfortunate people were shot and part put to death by means of gas. Last spring an incalculable number of corpses were exhumed and burned in furnaces specially built for the purpose, evidently with the object of wiping out the traces of the crimes committed by Hitler's orders."
As a result of a thorough investigation of numerous affidavits by medical experts and material proof, the aforesaid Committee of Medical Experts under the chairmanship of Professor Szyling-Syngalewicz, Professor of Medical Jurisprudence at the Lublin Catholic Univcrsity, found that:
"During the whole period of four years that the Lublin Majdanek Camp was in existence, a deliberate and consistent system operated for the premeditated, wholesale extermination of people, both prisoners in the camp as well as people especially brought there for the purpose of extermination."
Just as a general observation, historians usually avoid reasoning backwards from assumptions based on the present. The perils of the approach are obvious - it might lead someone to conclude that the battle of Gettysburg was a hoax because the present terrain features of the land don't correspond with the 1863 descriptions, so the 1863 descriptions must be bogus. In a similar fashion, trying to deduce from the current Majdanek camp museum's state to the past is erroneous, and the opposite approach is the historically correct one, i . e. how was the camp built, how did it evolve during the war, and how did it end up in the state it is today.
If you're still not satisfied, there's a huge thread over at the forums of the Skeptic Society where various denier claims raised about Majdanek (made popular by Eric Hunt's youtube video) are examined and refuted in detail. It has some 1000 posts & counting, so keep in mind it'll take days to go through:
Mauthausen's homicidal gas chamber
It goes without saying that both the sign and the commemorative plaques are post-war. Around 3,000[1] people were murdered by homicidal gassing at Mauthausen, located some 20km away from Linz, Austria. As shown earlier via documentation, at least one gas van also operated around the camp. Mauthausen concentration camp was part of a larger camp complex called Mauthausen-Gusen, and had sub-camps further away such as Ebensee. Other gassing facilities nearby included Schloss Hartheim some 6km away, where during Aktion T4 those deemed "lebensunwertes Leben"[2][3] (life not worth living) were euthanized. In total the camp complex cost the lives of 100,000 people.
This gas chamber was completed by 1942, and could kill about 100 prisoners at a time.[4] Contrary to Himmler's orders issued in fall 1944, homicidal gassing continued well into 1945 in this camp, in fact even peaked toward the final years. Lagerkommandant Franz Ziereis' testimony confirms this:
"A gassing facility was built in Camp Mauthausen by order of the former garrison doctor, Dr. Krebsbach, camouflaged as a bathroom. The gassing plant in Mauthausen was really built by order of SS Obergruppenfuehrer Gluecks, since he was of the opinion that it was more humane to gas the prisoners than to shoot them." -Franz Ziereis, in the interrogation protocol and sworn affidavit from prisoner clerk Hans Marszalek, with the interrogation conducted in the presence of Commander of the 11th Armored Division (American Armored Division) Colonel Richard R. Seibel. See Nuremberg document 3870-PS.
Also, in a diary he kept, Drahomir Barta, a Czech internee, wrote an entry on 13 July 1944 about Kapo Franz Suslak having told him about seeing over 150 Czech women and girls huddled in front of the gas chamber before being killed in October 1942 (Wingeate, Spaniards in the Holocaust: Mauthausen, the horror on the Danube, pp 74, 335). On 3 May 1945 a report given by two escaped inmates to the ICRC and describing a botched gassing on 23 April in the camp was forwarded to SHAEF (Hundschmied, Mills & Witzany Durda, St. Georgen Gusen Mauthausen: Concentration Camp Mauthausen Reconsidered, pp 213-214). A US Army report of 12 May 1945 (US 11th Armored Division, Periodic Report no. 133) (Wingeate, pp 161, 377) included a description of a gassing given by a witness from the camp.
A plaque dedicated to the memory of Ludwig Haider, a train operator (Lokführer) also commemorates this, who was gassed in April 1945. Revisionist scholars have pointed out there must be something phony about these plaques, as these names cannot be found at the Yad Vashem database. Taking their statement at face value (i . e. that they have gone there and combed through the records), I still wouldn't be surprised as these individuals needn't have to have been Jews. Roma (gypsies), Communists, homosexuals, prisoners of war, dissidents, saboteurs, spies and all other sorts of political prisoners were also murdered by (among other methods also) homicidal gassing in the Nazi camps. If these esteemed revisionist scholars had bothered to do more research, e . g. you know, something as simple as a google search, they would have found out there's a street in nearby Linz named after this very Ludwig Haider [5], who, additional details reveal, was born on the 9th of August 1885 in Straßwalchen, and was a Socialist, which is the reason why the Communist Party of Austria (KPÖ) [6] who either were or knew dear friends of his, and who found his records, set up the memorial for him in the gas chamber in 2001 [7].
Perhaps the only legitimate complaint the deniers can make regarding this gas chamber is that its showerheads that had been put up until not too long ago, have been removed as of 2016, possibly because they are part of a temporary exhibit on display in a different museum. I have already addressed the lack of prussian blue staining earlier in this blog. Especially expecting its formation in a chamber that "only" claimed the lives of some 3000 souls is several magnitudes more asinine that the debate we had about it earlier in Auschwitz - in any case, Leuchter did find trace amounts. A floor drain and tiled walls make washing the chamber easy, and in the chamber's corner you can see ventilation on the ceiling.
Another interesting read concerning Mauthausen is the Taylor Report, attributed to Lieutenant Jack Taylor. During WW2, the American intelligence service, the "Office of Strategic Service" operated behind German lines and tried to hinder German defenses by means of targeted espionage and sabotage campaigns. Jack H. Taylor was one of many OSS agents who were recruited during the war. Arrested by the Gestapo and deported to Mauthausen in 1945, Taylor describes in his report to the OSS not only the character of the mission, but also the murderous and inhuman conditions in the concentration camp. The TAYLOR REPORT is an important source of espionage and the Holocaust during the Second World War, which has found its way into post-war judiciary.[8]
Sources:
[1]: Bertram Perz, Florian Freund: Tötungen durch Giftgas im Konzentrationslager Mauthausen. In: Günther Morsch, Bertrand Perz: Neue Studien zu nationalsozialistischen Massentötungen durch Giftgas. Berlin 2011, ISBN 978-3-940938-99-2, S. 256.
[2]: "Die Freigabe der Vernichtung Lebensunwerten Lebens" Karl Binding, Alfred Hoche
[3]: "The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide", Dr. Robert Jay Lifton
[4]: Robert Abzug (1987): "Inside the Vicious Heart" pp. 106–110, Michael Shermer; Alex Grobman (2002) "Denying History: Who Says the Holocaust Never Happened and Why Do They Say It?" pp. 168–175.
[5]: http://ooe.kpoe.at/article.php/20060405102750978
Idiot defacing Mauthausen gas chamber
Here you have the pleasure of watching America's foremost gas chamber expert Fred Leuchter damaging another national monument after Auschwitz.
Doors at Mauthausen concentration camp's gas chamber
Friendly reminder that both doors of the homicidal gas chamber at Mauthausen open OUTWARD, both have PEEPHOLES, and locking handles on the OUTSIDE. Let that sink in.
David Cole once pointed out the outer handles can be turned today by grabbing the knob inside and turning it with your palm. He truly was the most talented revisionist kid in the 90s. Looking up the word 'rust' in an encyclopedia and how it messes up a door's locking mechanism after half a century might have been helpful.
Given that esteemed revisionist scholars keep insisting the Mauthausen gas chamber was but a mere shower room, I kindly ask them why this supposed shower room was equipped with two reinforced gas tight doors, and why both these doors had peep holes unless of course the Nazis were some kind of perverts.
Well they were, but of the sadistic, murderous sort.
Then we have David Irving, who maintains the Mauthausen gas chamber was in fact an air-raid shelter. But kindly note the stupidity of mounting air-raid shelter doors deep inside the main building, where this chamber is located, and were this chamber to be used as such, rather than as the building's main doors leading directly outside.
Layout of the homicidal Mauthausen gas chamber and its operation
The chronicler of camp Mauthausen's history, Hans Maršálek, describes the gas chamber as follows: "In the main camp [Mauthausen], set up in August 1938 east of Linz, work on a gas chamber was started in the autumn of 1941. It was in the cellar of the bunker that served as a prison, near which the crematoria were also located. It was a windowless room [...] and the two doors could be hermetically sealed. [...] From a neighboring room, called the 'gas cell' the gas was directed into the room through an enameled pipe which had a slot in it about a meter long on the side nearest the wall (in other words, on the side invisible from the room). The remains of this gassing facility can be seen to this day."[1]
He continues: "This room, 3.7m long and 3.5 wide, partially covered with tiles, was disguised as if it was a shower, with 16 shower-heads. Central heating and lights were on a wall, above the tiles; in a corner of the ceiling was an electric ventilator and a glazed pipe about a meter long. In a part of the wall that was not visible, this tube had a large half-centimeter split in it, around 80cm long, and was connected with the gas storage point in the adjacent cell. The switches for the lights, water and the ventilation were all outside the gas chamber. A brick that had already been heated up was placed above a shovel, and carefully laid down at the bottom of the container. An SS man, wearing a gas-mask, placed the Zyklon-B on the brick, and the container would immediately be sealed and hermetically closed via two lateral screws. The warmth given off by the brick caused the rapid release of the gas."[2]
So 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..."[3]
The Ventilation took about an hour, and a Gas detector would alert the operators that the room was clear of the gas. Ventilation was controlled by a "Elektror" brand power engine with an output of 1.5 hp / 1.1 kW.
Jean-Claude Pressac also mentions Mauthausen's gas chamber: "There was a 13.3 m² gas chamber at Mauthausen, operated by preheating the chamber before introducing Zyklon-B, which thus expanded as it vaporized. While 3455 victims were killed here according to the tribunals, [...] [Ref: “Les chambers à gaz. Secret d'Etat”, Les Editions de Minuit, Paris, 1984]"[4]
Even Fred Leuchter's chemical tests verified the chamber's use (though he says otherwise) finding 32mg/kg of cyanide residue.
credit goes to Skepticforum member "Denying-History" (he has made many other great contributions to expose holocaust denial on that forum, you should also check out his youtube channel)
Sources:
[1] Eugen Kogon, Hermann Langbein and Adalbuert Rueckerle, Nazi Mass Murder: A Documentary History of the Use of Poison Gas, Yale University Press (1993), pp. 177
[2] Les chambres à gaz secret d’État p. 223
[3] 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.
[4] Jean-Claude Pressac, Auschwitz: Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers, page 470