AUSCHWITZ FAQ: Working draft
Ken Mcvay
your comments, and any additional questions/answers that need to be
addressed. The format will be changed prior to release, in the hope the
document can be made available via hypertext, but Part One (this one) should
be ready within a month. The Leuchter Report FAQ is beling prepared now, and
should also be published in a month or so.
When both documents have been published as FAQ's, we will begin our Sobibor
FAQ project, and solicit information and bibliographies.
I. Introduction & Editorial Notes
1. Krema I - documentation regarding its use for gassings
2. Krema II, III, IV, and V - documentation regarding their use for gassings
3. How many people died at Auschwitz?
. Registration Tattooing - Why did the Nazis tattoo people, when they
were going to kill them all anyway?
II. Information of value to those interested in research regarding
Auschwitz
I. Introduction & Editorial Notes
This document is the result of the combined effort of subscribers to
the Holocaust Research Distribution List. Without their contribution
of time and material, it would not exist.
The appearance of a quotation mark within a proper name indicates that
the previous letter should be read as an umlaut, although some quoted
material appends a trailing 'e' instead. (I.e. Hoess and Ho"ss reference
the same name.)
1: Krema I - documentation regarding its use for gassings
David Cole has produced a videotape which filmed the director of the
Auschwitz State Museum admits that the gas-chamber known as "Krema I"
was constructed after the war ended, on the direct order of Stalin.
Foner (Foner, Samuel P. "Major Historical Fact Uncovered" SPOTLIGHT
Vol. XIX, Number 2, January 11, 1993) tells us:
"The videotape on which Piper makes his revelations was taken in
mid-1992 by a young Jewish investigator, David Cole. It has just been
released, on January 1, 1993, although Cole announced his project at the
11th International Revisionist Conference at Irvine, California last
October."
The small gas chamber of Krema I was used for gassing for a short time,
and then converted into an air-raid shelter; after the war, it was
reconstructed to look as it did when it was used for gassing. This is
one of the testimonies about gassing in Krema I:
Testimony of SS-Unterscharfuehrer Pery Broad, describing gassing in
Krema I in Auschwitz ["KL Auschwitz as Seen by the SS", p. 176]
".... The `disinfectors' were at work. One of them was
SS-Unterscharfuehrer Teuer, decorated with the Cross of War Merit. With
a chisel and a hammer they opened a few innocuously looking tins which
bore the inscription `Cyclon, to be used against vermin. Attention,
poison! to be opened by trained personnel only!'. The tins were filled
to the brim with blue granules the size of peas. Immediately after
opening the tins, their contents was thrown into the holes which were
then quickly covered. Meanwhile Grabner gave a sign to the driver of a
lorry, which had stopped close to the crematorium. The driver started
the motor and its deafening noise was louder than the death cries of the
hundreds of people inside, being gassed to death."
Mu"llers eyewitness account of gassings in Krema I, in April, 1942, is
recounted in Hilberg's "The Destruction of the European Jews,":
The Auschwitz procedure evolved in stages. In April 1942, Slovak
Jews were gassed in Crematorium I, apparently with their clothes
on. Later, deportees from nearby Sosnowiec were told to undress
in the yard. The victims, faced by the peremptory order to
remove their clothes, men in front of women and women in front
of men, became apprehensive. The SS men, shouting at them, then
drove the naked men, women and children into the gas chamber.
In The Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, Jozef Buszko (Jagiellonian
University, Krakow) writes: "The first, relatively small gas chamber was
built in Auschwitz I. Here the experimental gassing using Zyklon B gas
first took place, on September 3, 1941. The victims were 600 Soviet
prisoners of war and 250 other prisoners. After that experiment, the
firm J. A. Topf and Sons received a contract to build much larger,
permanent gas chambers connected with very large crematoria in
Auschwitz-Birkenau, where the mass exterminations were mainly carried
out. Altogether four such installations -- II, III, IV, and V -- were
built in Birkenau." (Encyclopedia, 113)
2.Krema II, III, IV, and V - documentation regarding their use for gassings
Foner continues: "What Piper said, in effect - and on camera - was that
the explosive Leuchter Report was correct: No homicidal gassings took
place in the buildings designated `homicidal gas chambers' at
Auschwitz."
(As to the "Leuchter report", we refer you to the Leuchter Report FAQ,
coming soon to alt.revisionism).
Foner omits mention of the larger gas chambers of Kremas II-V, in which
over a million people were murdered. Hilberg provides the following:
At Birkenau, illusion was the rule. It was not always simple or
possible, inasmuch as at least some of the deportees had
observed the sign "Auschwitz" as the train passed through the
railway yards, (Wiesel, 36) or had seen flames belching from the
chimneys, or had smelled the strange, sickening odor of the
crematoria. (Lengyel, 22) Most of them, however, like a group
from Salonika, were funneled through the undressing rooms, were
told to hang their clothes on hooks and remember the number, and
promised food after the shower and work after the food. The
unsuspecting Greek Jews, clutching soap and towels, rushed into
the gas chambers. (Mu"ller, 80-81) Nothing was allowed to
disturb this precarious synchronization. When a Jewish inmate
revealed to newly arrived people what was in store for them, he
was cremated alive. [Mu"ller, 80) Only in the case of victims
who were brought in from nearby ghettos in upper Silesia
(Sosnowiec and Bedzin) and who had had intimations of Auschwitz
was speed alone essential. These people were told to undress
quickly in their "own best interest." (Mu"ller, 69-71)
3: How many people died at Auschwitz?
Foner's Spotlight article makes the following assertions regarding the
number of people killed at the camp:
Like most Americans, since his youth Cole had been instructed in
the "irrefutable fact" that homicidal gassings had taken place
at Auschwitz. The number of those so executed - also declared
irrefutable - was 4.1 million.
Then came the Leuchter Report in 1988. This was followed by a
"re-evaluation" of the total deaths at Auschwitz (down to 1.1
million). As a budding historian - and a Jew - Cole was
intrigued.
Previous to 1992, anyone who publicly doubted the 4.1 million
"gassing" deaths at Auschwitz was labeled an anti-Semite,
neo-nazi skinhead (at the very least). Quietly, because of
revisionist findings, the official figure was lowered to 1.1
million. No mention of that missing 3 million.
Foner's assertions are simply not true, although it is correct to note
that the Polish government did claim that four million people were
exterminated at Auschwitz, historians (Feig, Reitlinger, Hilberg, et al)
have never supported that figure. Consider the estimates provided by
Buszko at the end of his article on Auschwitz, which appeared in the
Encyclopedia of the Holocaust:
Of the 405,000 registered prisoners, 65,000 survived
Of the 16,000 Soviet POW's, 96 survived
Various estimates suggest 1.6 million were murdered
Buszko's article, and the above estimates, appeared in the 1990 edition
of the Encyclopedia, which clearly puts the lie to Foner's comment that
"anyone who publicly doubted the 4.1 million ..." figure was "...labeled
an anti-Semite..." Buszko is not only a Jewish historian, but Polish as
well.
Feig also provides evidence of the false nature of Foner's comment when
she notes that `Ho"ss testified that the Tesch directors could not help
but know of the use for their product because they sold him enough to
annihilate two million people.' Feig's book was published in 1981.
According to Snyder, Adolf Eichmann reported to Himmler, in 1944, that
four million had been killed in the camps, and another million had been
shot or killed by mobile units. (Encyclopedia of the Third Reich.
1989) Eichmann's report, which referenced _all_ the camps (most of which
were in Poland), may have been the source of the Polish government's
figures. (Snyder is a Professor of History at the City College and the
City University of New York.)
The Leuchter Report, which Foner alludes to extensively in his Spotlight
article, has been thoroughly refuted. For detailed information about the
report, see the Leuchter FAQ, published regularly in this newsgroup, and
available upon request from list...@oneb.almanac.bc.ca. (Send the
command GET HOLOCAUST LEUCHTER.FAQ in order to obtain the file.)
[next entry will be numbered after the gas chamber issue
has been fully explored. knm]
Q: Why would the Nazis have tattooed the prisoners at Auschwitz, when
they were going to kill them all anyway?
Buszko (see above), writing in the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust,
explains why some prisoners were tattooed, while others were not:
Prisoners were registered and received numbers tattooed on their
left arm upon leaving the quarantine in Birkenau for forced
labor in Auschwitz or in one of the subcamps. The same
procedure applied to those prisoners who were directed straight
to Auschwitz I: 405,000 prisoners were registered in this way.
[Ed. Note: Buszko later notes that only 65,000 of those so
registered and tattooed survived. knm] Not included in any form
of registration were the vast majority of the Auschwitz victims,
those men and women who, upon arrival in Auschwitz II, were led
to the gas chambers and killed there immediately. Also not
included in the registration were those prisoners who were sent
to work in other concentration camps not belonging to the
Auschwitz system. ... Still another group of unregistered
prisoners were those who were designated for execution after a
short stay in the camp. That group consisted mainly of
hostages, Soviet army officers, and partisans." (Encyclopedia,
110-111)
Q: Where can I get more information about Auschwitz?
Vera Laska notes that there are over ten-thousand printed sources
relating to Auschwitz alone, and offers this guidance for those pursuing
Holocaust research:
Yad Vashem Martyrs' and Heroes' Memorial Authority in Jerusalem
is a depository of documents and memoirs on the Holocaust,
mostly in German, Hebrew and Yiddish. It also issues the Yad
Vashem Studies on the European Jewish Catastrophe and
Resistance.
The Centre de Documentation Juive Contemporaine in Paris and the
Wiener Library in London are major sources of information. The
Wiener Library's catalogue series published a bibliography,
Persecution and Resistance Under the Nazis (London: Valentine,
Mitchell, 1960). ...
In the United States the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research
(1048 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10028) houses several
collections of ghetto documents and related primary source
materials. It publishes the YIVO Annual of Jewish Social
Science. Since 1960, Yad Vashem and the YIVO Institute have
been engaged in preparing a multivolume bibliographical series
on the Holocaust; one of the volumes, Jacob Robinson, ed., The
Holocaust and After: Sources and Literature in English
(Jerusalem: Israel University Press, 1973) is most helpful.
The Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith (823 United Nations
Plaza, New York, N.Y. 10017) supplies teaching materials at
reasonable prices, for instance The Record - The Holocaust in
History, 1933-1945, published in cooperation with the National
Council for Social Studies in 1978.
The Library of Congress and the National Archives are rich
sources for researchers, containing among others the transcripts
of war crime trials. This in itself is an immense
documentation; for instance, the Nuremberg Doctors' Trial of
twenty-three defendents alone takes up 11,538 pages in nineteen
volumes. Indexes can be consulted about various concentration
camps. ...
In addition to the massive amount of information Laska notes, additional
bibliographic sources are available through the Holocaust bibliographic
files available on oneb.almanac.bc.ca and elsewhere. To obtain the most
recent revision of the Almanac's bibliography, send an email request to
kmc...@oneb.almanac.bc.ca and use the word BIBLIO as the subject of your
message.
Suggested reading related to Auschwitz, from the Encyclopedia of the
Holocaust:
Gilbert, M. Auschwitz and the Allies. New York, 1981
Gutman, Y., and A. Saf, eds. The Nazi Concentration Camps:
Structure and Aims; The Image of the Prisoner; The Jews in the
Camps. Proceedings of the Fourth Yad Vashem International
Historical Conference. Jerusalem, 1984
Ho"ss, R. Commandant of Auschwitz. London, 1959
Kielar, W. Anus Mundi: Fifteen Hundred Days in Auschwitz-
Birkenau. New York, 1980
Langbein, H. Auschwitz-Prozess: Eine Dokumentation. 2 Vols.
Vienna, 1965
Langbein, H. Menschen in Auschwitz. Vienna, 1972
Levi, P. Survival in Auschwitz: The Nazi Assault on Humanity. New
York, 1981
Lukowski, J. Bibliografia obozu koncentracyjnego Oswiecim-
Brzezinka. 5 vols. Warsaw, 1970
Mark, B. The Scrolls of Auschwitz. Tel Aviv, 1985
Works Cited
Feig, Konnilyn G. Hitler's Death Camps. LOC D810.J4 F36, 1981
Foner, Samuel P. "Major Historical Fact Uncovered" SPOTLIGHT
Vol. XIX, Number 2, January 11, 1993)
Gutman, Israel, ed. in Chief, et al. Encyclopedia of the
Holocaust. New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1990. ISBN 0-02-
896090-4 (set) (Referenced in this FAQ as "Encyclopedia")
Hilberg, Raul. The Destruction of the European Jews. Holmes & Meier,
1985. See 967-976.
Laska, Vera, ed. Women in the Resistance and in the Holocaust: The
Voices of Eyewitnesses. London: Greenwood Press, 1983. LOC 82-12018,
ISBN 0-313-23457-4
Lengyel, Olga. Five Chimneys. Chicago: Ziff-Davis, 1947, as cited in
Hilberg.
Mu"ller, Filip. "Eyewitness Auschwitz: Three Years in the Gas Chambers",
as cited by Hilberg.
Snyder, Dr. Louis L. Encyclopedia of the Third Reich. (New York: Paragon
House, 1989.)
Wiesel, Elie. Night. (New York, 1969), as cited in Hilberg.
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