The Auschwitz Auschwitz Hoax Auschwitz-Birkenau The Auschwitz "Gas Chamber" Illusion By Nick Kollerstrom Published: 2008-05-24 http://codoh.com/library/document/684 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 camp commanders dated 20th January, 1943, reaffirmed that "every means must be used to lower the death rate." By September 1943 Auschwitz still had mortality peaking at 80/day, viewed as "catastrophic" by the SS administration. Thus, from authentic documents concerning the need to reduce fatalities at the Auschwitz camp, the world has moved to a belief in genocide, with not a single authentic, suppoting document[24]. The Auschwitz camp was set up as an industrial plant using the giant coalfields of Poland, and located at the confluence of rivers; it was essential to the war-effort – it would have made no sense to start exterminating its inmates. The Hamburg judge Wilhelm Staeglich had been positioned near Auschwitz during the war and had on various occasions dropped into the camps around there. The conditions seemed fairly tolerable, he recalled, and certainly nothing resembling an extermination program existed. In particular, he had discerned no fear of mistreatment amongst the inmates. He published a testimony to this effect in 1973, and in return for his shocking news a German inquisition forced him to resign his job, stripped him of his doctoral degree, and banned his book. He was then subjected to police raids. His book, translated into English, is an essential text.[25] German military radio messages were successfully decrypted at Bletchley Park using the "enigma" codebreaker. Concerning the labour camps, over the period Spring 1942-February 1943, the following information was obtained:[26] "The return from Auschwitz, the largest of the camps with 20,000 prisoners, mentioned illness as the main cause of death, but included references to shootings and hangings. There were no references in the decrypts to gassings." That seems clear enough – though no-one took any notice of it at Nuremberg. Bodies were disposed of by individual cremation, and the records for coke fuel consumption over the period February 1942 – October 1943 for the cremation ovens indicate that around five thousand bodies were then burnt. That accords with the number of registered, deceased inmates, viz those who had died from natural causes[27], who had to be cremated rather than buried because of the great typhoid epidemics. This suggests that no mass-incineration of bodies took place. Josef Kramer, a supervisor at the Auschwitz camp, gave a statement after the war which is recommended by Professor Butz as probably genuine: it had 350-500 deaths per week happening over May-November 1944, all from natural causes, a very high figure because sick prisoners were sent there, and the dead were all cremated. He believed the camp held up to 100,000 prisoners, mainly Poles and Prussians.[28] No Photos? Not only is there no trace of "Third Reich" documentation[29] for what is alleged, but no photographs exist showing anything resembling such a group-gassing procedure. Do you believe that Jews both male and female stripped then marched into the gas chambers, then were hauled out in piles? If so, are you willing to believe that neither the very-thorough Germans nor the clever Jews wanted or were able to get a single picture of this ultimate horror? Go to Google and search – you'll find rows of emaciated bodies, dead of typhus, will that do? I don't think so. US air-photographs taken in 1944 (released in 1978) when the "program" was supposed to be in full swing do not show any huge crematoria burning corpses nor queues entering the "gas chambers": "The few air photos of Auschwitz-Birkenau known to date from the period of December 1943 to February 1945 show no signs of fuel depots, smoke from chimneys or open fires, burning pits or pyres. The photos were altered: Zyklon B input hatches, groups of inmates, and walls around crematoria were retouched onto the photo negatives. […] To this day there is no air photo evidence to support the alleged mass murder of the Jews at any location in Europe occupied by the Germans during World War Two […] That the photos in western hands were altered in order to incriminate Germany, and were first published by the CIA, is also very significant indeed." [30] The Fabrication of Untruth Let's hear a couple of testimonies concerning the dreaded gas-chambers. An Austrian woman, Maria Van Herwaarden, testified about her camp experiences in a Toronto District Court in March 1988, as she had been interned in Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1942 for having sexual relations with a Polish forced laborer. On the train trip to the camp, a Gypsy woman told her and the others that they would all be gassed at Auschwitz. Upon arrival, Maria and the other women were ordered to undress and go into a large concrete room without windows to take a shower. The terrified women were sure that they were about to die. But then, instead of gas, water came out of the shower heads. Auschwitz was no vacation center, Maria confirmed, and she witnessed the death of many fellow inmates by disease, particularly typhus, and quite a few committed suicide. But she saw no evidence at all of mass killings, gassings, or of any extermination program.[31]A Jewish woman named Marika Frank arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau from Hungary in July 1944, when 25,000 Jews were supposedly gassed and cremated daily. She likewise testified after the war that she heard and saw nothing of "gas chambers" during the time she was interned there. She heard the gassing stories only later.[32] The Allied carpet-bombing destroyed the supply lines for the Camps, and so the death-toll mounted from famine and disease. Leaflets were dropped from the air, alleging that at Auschwitz a "final solution" /extermination of Jews policy was being conducted, using gas. [33] That was the genesis of the story, as those Allied-propaganda leaflets were believed. Greeted by the sight of rows of famished Jews who had died of e.g. typhoid, it was not hard to see its confirmation. "Far from it being common knowledge in Germany that people were being gassed […] the vast majority of Germans were horrified by the United Nations accusations and they protested that they had never heard of such acts until after the cessation of hostilities when they had begun listening to United Nations broadcasts." Since the British Broadcasting Corporation had been broadcasting these accusations regularly for many months before the end of the war, those Germans who had "common knowledge" of the gassing before the war's end most likely got this "knowledge" from the BBC![34] The gas-chamber legend was born in December 1941, when the German author Thomas Mann declared on the BBC that in German hospitals the severely wounded, the old and the feeble were culled with poison gas. This was the "first appearance of gas chambers in propaganda." [35] As to how the stories got going, here is a remark by Faurisson: "The Foreign Office saw the new rumors of the Second World War only as Jewish inventions, and many in American circles shared that conviction[36]. Edward Beneš, President of Czechoslovakia (in exile in London), announced in November 1942, after inquiry by his staff, that the Germans, contrary to what had been reported to him, were not exterminating the Jews. The American Jew, Felix Frankfurter, a Supreme Court judge, stated to Jan Karski on the subject: "I can' t believe you." In August of 1943, Cordell Hull, Secretary of State, warned the U.S. ambassador in Moscow by telegram that in planning a joint Allied statement on "the German crimes in Poland", it would be advisable to eliminate any mention of the gas chambers, since, as the British pointed out, there was "insufficient evidence" in the matter[37] The Hoax of Nuremberg A modern inquiry needs to start from the data-fabrication at Nuremberg by the US/UK, using systematic assassination and torture of witnesses. The Nuremberg trials started in 1946 with the image of six million dead as firmly established.[38]This did not emerge as a conclusion from the trials, but in its immensity it was presented to the tortured and/or beaten[39]Nazis as a fact, and would they confess their part in it? All the main defendants at Nuremberg insisted that prior to the trial they had not known of any mass murder of Jews: except that Rudolf Höss, the former Commandant of Auschwitz, signed on March 15, 1946, a document averring that he had overseen the slaughter of two and a half million Jews, and this was read out on 15th April at Nurnberg. That day signified the birth of Auschwitz's horror-myth. Two weeks earlier, Hoess had remarked: "Certainly, I signed a statement that I killed two and half million Jews. I could just as well have said it was five million Jews. There are certain methods by which any confession can be obtained, whether it is true or not."[40] Decades later, an account was published of how Hoess had been tortured for three days and nights without sleep by a British army team in order to extract that statement.[41]In a letter to his wife, Hoess apologised for his "confessions" and explains that they had been extracted from him under torture[42]. The victorious Allies could not have their "truth" come out at Nuremberg, without the assistance of torture. In 2001, Patricia Meehan discussed the network of secret "Direct Interrogation Centres" the British had set up in their occupational zone of Germany[43]- torture chambers, to prepare "evidence" for the upcoming trials. A Zionist influence was noted at the Nuremberg trials,[44]not least concerning the figure of six million.[45] Weighty books are in print as memorials to "the Holocaust," but, let's hear a sceptical view from Down Under:[46] "Yet in the case of the Holocaust, the dearth of material evidence for the existence of large-scale extermination programme is not perceived as signifi… truncated (20,524 more characters in archive)