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The Auschwitz "Gas Chamber" Illusion by Nicholas Kollerstrom Published: 2008-05-24 This essay will argue that well-designed cyanide gas chambers were indeed present at Auschwitz, and did work efficiently, but that they were operated for purposes of hygiene and disinfection, in order to save lives and not take them. Terrible mass mortality came about in the German labour-camps, especially towards the end of the war, but maybe we have to try a bit harder to understand what caused this. Amongst all the archival material for the German Third Reich, there has always been a notable lack of documentation to support the existence of an intentional mass-extermination program – of Jews, or anyone else. We have all heard stories about a Nazi program of exterminating Jews, but to what extent are there documents or any physical remains showing this? Has the traditional Holocaust story developed merely out of rumours, misunderstandings, and wartime propaganda? From stories pre-dating the Second World War to the Nuremberg Trials which gave official sanction to the notion, to subsequent trials, books and films, we have had it imprinted on our collective psyche. Europe needs, more than anything else, a truth and reconciliation forum to get to the bottom of these matters, and try to exorcise the demonic hate-images. Many European states have passed laws that prohibit citizens from expressing doubt – Germany, France, Austria, Poland, Portugal, Czech Republic, Romania, Belgium and Switzerland. Collectively, we need to work trough our despair, rage, and ideas of blame, to try and access the real historical record. Cyanide at Auschwitz Zyklon-B was used at Auschwitz, as an insecticide. It was vital in attempting to maintain hygiene that mattresses be deloused. Liquid hydrogen cyanide was adsorbed onto clay-type granules, designed to make the deadly gas as "safe" as it could be. If you go to Auschwitz today, you can't see any authentic gas chambers. You see stone huts, and experts have testified that they could not have been used to gas people, owing to problems in sealing them up (Zyklon-B released its cyanide gas rather slowly[1]). In 1988 the scientific team of Fred Leuchter (a US execution-expert "Mr Death" in gas-chamber technology) visited Poland, and concluded that the Auschwitz "gas chambers" could not possibly have functioned in the alleged manner – i.e., they were not gas chambers[2]. In the following years, others would confirm the accuracy of his seminal, "Leuchter Report" . The German chemist Germar Rudolf, who worked at the Max Plank institute for Solid State Physics, is now in jail, because he likewise measured the high levels of the cyanide in the walls of the de-lousing chambers. It happens that this gas bonds permanently with iron, and iron is present in all the cement etc of stone walls. Whereas, he found none in the walls of what were supposed to be the "gas chambers" which were mainly shower units. He thereby confirmed the work of Leuchter who likewise only found remains of the cyanide gas-insecticide in the de-lousing chambers.[3] After Rudolf's report was published in 1993, he lost his job and was prevented from completing his doctorate, then a few years later he was given a jail sentence. He is now in a high-security prison near Stuttgart, for the crime of not finding cyanide in the "gas chambers[4]," echoing Leuchter's cyanide residue investigations. [5] When a chemist is put in jail, for replicating the result of another – in Germany of all places, the nation which invented chemical procedure – then the farce cannot continue for much longer[6] (The gas chambers were conveniently located east of Germany behind the Iron Curtain to make them inaccessible to westerners, which helped the myth to flourish). The Leuchter results were almost too good to be true, with a three orders of magnitude difference between the cyanide levels in the delousing chamber walls (about one part per thousand) and those in the washing chambers (aka "gas chambers" ), around one part per million. They are not published in any peer-reviewed chemistry journal, for obvious reasons. The only way to hold a debate on this subject appears to be in a courtroom, while being prosecuted! It is hard to reach the calm condition necessary for replication of chemical measurements. Nonetheless people have replicated the fundamental result[7], and even folk with no interest in chemistry can appreciate the pretty blue colour on the outside of the de-lousing chamber (where the ferrocyanide has seeped right through the wall) and its complete absence around the so-called "gas chambers." Let's face it, the case is established: the cyanide poison was used where the German records state that it was used for delousing mattresses, clothing etc., whereas it was not used where the US and UK (at Nuremberg) alleged. Tourists, thirty million of them, have filed through "Krema 1" at Auschwitz, with its piteous piles of shoes, etc of the dead. This was reconstructed after the war in 1946[8], a fact revealed 1992 by Dr. Franciszek Piper, the Senior Curator and Director of Archives of the Auschwitz State Museum. The historic remains from the camp are such things as shower-unit huts, a swimming pool and a morgue. There was a camp orchestra, and quite a collection of pictures from the camp art-classes,[9]although these cannot be shown in Germany or Poland, on account of laws prohibiting the doubting of the Holocaust. Anne Frank of "Diary" fame came to the camp in 1944 with her father who was ill. He was put into the hospital there, and recovered, suggesting that he was decently looked after.[10] The "gas chambers" at Auschwitz had water pipes in their ceilings, indicating that they were designed as shower units. They generally lacked tight-seal doors, which would have been essential, even though these were easy to install – the Leuchter report cited the absence of such seals as one reason why the alleged "gas chambers" would never have functioned. "The Final Solution" An Export Program The "Final Solution" of Adolf Hitler retained a single meaning right through WW2, central to the program of "National socialism," and signified the deportation of Jews, generally eastwards to Poland and Russia[11]. This program did not change at any point, e.g. the Wannsee conference of 1942,[12]to signify deliberate extermination. If that practice ever happened, it was not a centrally-directed policy and did not involve gas chambers: many tons of documentation of "Third Reich" policies remains, and no-one has been able to find therein any hint of such a meaning of intentional genocide. The historical record fails to show any central decision to exterminate Jews by Nazi Germany. The Gestapo and Zionists were collaborating in the late 30s because they had in this respect similar aims.[13]But, a German Foreign Office circular bulletin of June 22, 1937 stated that: "In view of the anti-German agitation of international Jewry, Germany cannot agree that the formation of a Palestine Jewish state would help the peaceful development of the nations of the world" .[14]International Jewish organisations twice declared war on Germany, in 1933 then again in 1939[15]. As the "final solution" policy[16]was thwarted by the Allies, the camps became places of hard labour; then under the impact of Allied terror-bombing ravages of disease and famine took place. No Documents? At the Auschwitz trial held at Frankfurt in the mid-sixties, the court had to conclude that it lacked "almost all the means or evidence available in a normal murder trial" including "the bodies of the victim, autopsy reports, expert reports on the cause of death, evidence as to the criminals, murder weapons, etc."[17] Far from leading to doubt, this gave to the mythic gas chambers a metaphysical status, doubt of which was forbidden. ' No documents have survived, perhaps none ever existed,' concluded the Holocaust historian Léon Poliakov.[18] "In the case of the rush to impute to the Nazis a programme for the extermination of millions of people which has implausibly left no material traces, all the normal rules of historiography seem not only to have been suspended, but to have been violated over and over again. Historians routinely cite documents from secondary works like Raul Hilberg's The Destruction of the European Jews (1961) or from printed collections of documents, such as Robert Wolfe's Holocaust: The Documentary Evidence – but they never cite original documents.[19] The nearest we have to primary-source documents concerning what went on within the camps, comes from the bulky, three-volume International Red Cross Report published in 1948. This and especially Volume III describes the couple of thousand regular, routine inspection-visits that its doctors made through the war years to the Polish labour-camps. Their report never hints at any gas-chamber, nor any mass-cremations. While maintaining a politically neutral position[20], it confirms that mortality in the camps was to a large extent caused by the allied terror-bombing.[21]Likewise Winston Churchill's bulky, six-volume account of the War gives no allusion to the subject, especially volume Six, Triumph and Tragedy where one would expect to have some allusion if he believed it had happened.[22] The head of the SS camp administration office sent a directive dated Dec. 28, 1942, to Auschwitz and the other concentration camps. It sharply criticised the high death rate of inmates due to disease, and ordered that "camp physicians must use all means at their disposal to significantly reduce the death rate in the various camps." Furthermore, it ordered: "The camp doctors must supervise more often than in the past the nutrition of the prisoners and, in cooperation with the administration, submit improvement recommendations to the camp commandants ... The camp doctors are to see to it that the working conditions at the various labor places are improved as much as possible." The directive stressed that "the Reichsfuhrer SS [Heinrich Himmler] has ordered that the death rate absolutely must be reduced."[23]A further letter to all concentration … truncated (30,880 more characters in archive)