The Holocaust Reviewed: Part Three

Auschwitz - Extermination or Labor camp

The Auschwitz camp, today found in Poland, is central to the Holocaust and the allegations surrounding the gassing of millions of Jews by Nazis during the Second World War. A review of this camp, and the allegations which surround it, is therefore particularly worthwhile.

The most common allegation made about Auschwitz was that Jews arrived by train and were taken immediately to gas chambers. Thereafter the bodies were burned in open pits or crematoria on site.

The Auschwitz camp - and specifically the Birkenau section where the gas chambers are alleged to have been situated - were supposedly destroyed by the Nazis towards the end of 1944, when the Soviet Army was advancing westward. Herein lies the first question: if the gas chambers were destroyed by the Nazis, then why are supposed gas chambers still on display today at Auschwitz, and shown to visitors?

AUSCHWITZ MUSEUM OFFICIALLY ADMITS GAS CHAMBER RECONSTRUCTION

The official website of the Auschwitz Museum has bowed down before Holocaust Revisionists and has now finally admitted officially that the gas chamber and crematorium 1, which is shown to visitors as evidence of the ‘mass extermination of the Jews,' was built after the war.

This dramatic admission can be found on the Auschwitz museum’s webpage at

http://www.auschwitz-muzeum.oswiecim.pl/html/eng/zwiedzanie/krematorium_1.html (cached copy of this page here)

where the following passage has now been inserted:

“After the war, the Museum carried out a partial reconstruction. The chimney and two incinerators were rebuilt using original components, as were and several of the openings in the gas chamber roof."

The fact that the Auschwitz "gas chamber" on show today is a reconstruction has been confirmed by the mainstream French magazine, L'Express, when its writer Eric Conan visited Auschwitz in January 1995. According to L'Express, the gas chamber shown to tourists was built in 1948, three years after the end of the war, by the Polish communists. The Auschwitz staff now admits this. As Conan wrote in L'Express "Tout y est faux"--Everything in it is fake." (Eric Conan: AUSCHWITZ: La mémoire du mal, L'Express, Paris, Paris, 19 janvier 1995).

Above: A frontal view of Crematorium 1, at Auschwitz 1 camp (there are actually two Auschwitz camps - Auschwitz 1 and Auschwitz-Birkenau). This photograph shows how the Auschwitz crematorium and gas chamber (underground) is presented to the modern visitor to Auschwitz.

Above: The "reconstructed" nature of Crematorium 1 at Auschwitz is obvious to even a causal observer: these photographs of the rear of the "reconstructed" Crematorium 1, showing the equally "reconstructed" chimney - which, as is evident, is not even connected to the building whose ovens it is supposed to have served. The chimney in fact is connected to nothing - a really poor fake.

Above: The ruins of Crematorium 2 in Auschwitz-Birkenau, as the Nazis left them when they evacuated the camp. This is how all the other Crematoria in the camp appear today - compare this to the "reconstructed" Crematorium 1 above, and the full extent of the "reconstruction" work becomes obvious - in fact, the gas chamber and crematorium shown to modern visitors to Auschwitz has been totally fabricated and built after the war. If modern day camp museum staff are pressed on this point, they do now admit it, although it was denied for years, despite obvious flaws in the Crematorium 1 chimney reconstruction, as illustrated above.

ORIGINAL Architect's PLANS SHOW NO GAS CHAMBERS

The original German architectural building plans for Auschwitz have survived, and are on display at the camp museum to this day. There are no gas chambers on these original plans - and given the specialist construction which would be required to build chambers capable of killing thousands of people at a time (as is claimed) it seems extremely unlikely that the plans in question would not have shown these structures.

It is claimed that the rooms marked as mortuaries (in German, "leichenkellers") on the building plans were used as gas chambers - a claim which is highly dubious, given the technical demands which an airtight chamber being used for mass gassings, would require.

Above: The original German architectural building plans for Crematorium 2 at the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp, on public display in the camp museum today. According to this original plan, there is no gas chamber. It is claimed that the underground structures, marked very clearly as mortuaries ("leichenkellers") were used as gas chambers - something which would technically be almost impossible, given the extremely high airtight specifications which are compulsory at gas chamber execution facilities which are used to kill people, as in the USA.

Below: Two details of the above architect's plans, which show the mortuaries ("leichenkellers") in question. It is now claimed that these mortuary rooms were in fact gas chambers, and one of the mortuary rooms in the "reconstructed" Crematorium 1 is presented as a real execution center.

Above left: A model on display at the modern Auschwitz museum illustrates how the rooms described as mortuaries on the architectural building plans, would supposedly have been used as gas chambers. The ridiculousness of the alleged murder facility being actually used as shown is revealed by other photographs from the present day gas chamber on display to visitors to Auschwitz, illustrated below.

Above right: A photograph of the alleged gas chamber at Auschwitz 1 which is shown to visitors today: note the non-airtight opening door to the right of the picture, and in the top left of the picture, note the perfectly ordinary single pane glass window. If this room had been used to mass gas thousands of people, it would have been smashed out in an instant by the victims, especially if they were, as the story goes, packed into such facilities thousands or hundreds at a time.

Above: These two pictures show the roof of the alleged gas chamber shown to modern visitors to Auschwitz: Left: Firstly, note how close the building is to surrounding facilities, in particular the hospital block and the nearby guard tower. Right: The small structures on the roof itself were allegedly the pipe openings into which the Zyklon-B gas pellets were thrown. The larger structures are air vents through which the gas would have been allegedly expelled once the victims were dead. The impossibility of having poisonous gas - so strong that it had just allegedly killed thousands of people in a few minutes - being expelled into the air right next to the camp hospital with its open windows - makes a complete mockery of the gassing allegations.

Above: A close-up view of the openings on the roof of the alleged gas chamber which is shown to modern visitors to Auschwitz. It is claimed that the Zyklon-B pellets - which react with air to give off gas would be thrown down these openings into hollow pipes in the alleged gas chamber below. There are, of course, no hollow pipes in the chamber below (see picture of the interior above). More importantly, the crude wooden lid, which is lifted open and closed by hand, as illustrated here, is not airtight and would certainly have resulted in leakage of the gas into the surrounding area above the chamber, killing both guards and people in the surrounding buildings as well. Simply put, it is impossible to mass gas people in such a facility without killing everyone in the surrounding area as well.

It is therefore worth noting that there is absolutely no technical physical evidence to support the claim that gas chambers, designed for the killing of people, existed at any German concentration camp. This is particularly so with regard to the oft claimed story of gas chambers disguised as showers.

DELOUSING CHAMBERS FOR CLOTHING USED ZYKLON-B IN ALL CAMPS

What did exist - at all the camps - were small delousing chambers - tiny air tight rooms - no larger than large cupboards - in which clothes were regularly deloused with the Zyklon-B chemical (which was - and still is to this day - sold under that brand name as an insecticide). These delousing chambers were used in all the Nazi camps - including those in Germany itself, with the result that Zyklon-B was distributed to all camps, in Poland and in Germany alike. All Nazi documentation relating to gas and gassing equipment refers specifically to this use of the poison gas, and nowhere is reference made to the killing people in the camps with this insecticide.

Above right: A real gas chamber at Dachau, outside Munich. Although it was claimed that this chamber was used to kill people, this allegation has long since been abandoned and it is accepted that this was a clothing delousing chamber, which used Zyklon-B insecticide. Delousing chambers existed at all the Nazi camps. Note the gas warning on the door. Above left: The delousing chamber at Mauthausen Camp, also used Zyklon-B to disinfect prisoner clothing. Despite it having long since been admitted that there were no homicidal gas chambers in Germany itself, modern day visitors to Mauthausen are still told that people were killed in this chamber - a blatant lie.

Surviving bills of lading for Zyklon-B, which are available for public inspection at the National Archives in the United States, show very clearly that Zyklon-B was shipped to all camps, and not just to the alleged gas chamber camps. The bills of lading in the US National Archives run from 16 February to 31 May 1944 and reveal that the cases of cyanide crystals (Zyklon) are numbered in sequence (Nos. 50,053 to 50,210), each shipment consisted of thirteen cases, totaling 195 kg; and identical shipments -- six each -- went to Auschwitz and Oranienburg concentration camps.

Oranienburg is situated in Germany itself, and not even the wildest Holocaust exaggeration has ever claimed that there was a homicidal gas chamber at Oranienburg camp. The existence of proof of shipping of Zyklon-B to be used as a delousing agent to Oranienburg, is conclusive evidence of the real purpose for which that chemical was actually used for in the camps.

FORENSIC INVESTIGATION OF "GAS CHAMBER" RUINS REVEALS NO EVIDENCE OF GASSINGS

Although the Crematorium 1 has now been accepted by all as having been built after the war, there are in the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp the remains of no less than four other crematoria, all of which are alleged to either have had gas chambers attached to them in an underground facility, or have had the capacity for such gas chambers.

As cyanide gas leaves very long lasting traces in walls and plaster, the obvious step for anyone wishing to conclusively prove the use of Zyklon-B as a mass killing agent in the ruins of the alleged gas chambers at Auschwitz, would be to take forensic samples from these sites and analyze them for traces of the poison gas.

Surprisingly, samples were never taken from these sites to try and prove that mass gassing took place- and it was up to the revisionist historians, who doubted the mass gassing story, to take the first samples and analyze them. These samples were taken by Fred Leuchter, an acknowledged American expert who designed and built many of the late 20th Century American judicial execution methods, and whose work is widely available on the Internet.

Above: A still image from a video made of American judicial execution expert, Fred Leuchter, taking samples inside the crematorium - and alleged gas chamber - in Auschwitz-Birkenau. Leuchter took samples of the walls and plaster from all sites in Auschwitz which were allegedly used as mass gas chambers, and after analysis, found that there were insufficient traces of cyanide in the samples to show that these buildings had been used as gas chambers.

In February 1988, Leuchter traveled to Auschwitz, Poland, and assessed the likelihood that the building remains there could have functioned as homicidal gas chambers. He took forty samples of the fabric of those structures, for forensic and chemical analysis by reputable American laboratories. These laboratories found no significant residues of hydrogen-cyanide compounds except in one structure, which was commonly agreed to have been the building in which the slave laborers' clothing was fumigated with Zyklon-B. Here there were massive quantities of the poison residue still impregnating the brickwork. (The Leuchter Report, by Fred Leuchter, Focal Point Publications, London, 1989).

It has since been alleged that Leuchter's samples were invalid because they were ground up with brick and plaster which had not been exposed to Zyklon-B. This allegation is without foundation, as the test results, undertaken by an independent laboratory in the USA which had not been told the samples' origin, found the differentiation in traces of cyanide gas to be constant from site to site. Thus, even if non-contaminated material had been mixed in with the original, the differences between the area where delousing had taken place and where alleged mass killings had taken place, were still identical, despite all the samples having been subjected to the same mixing process.

In other words, it is the difference between the samples themselves which is the revealing part of the Leuchter Report: the scale of differentiation remained constant, even in the sample from the clothing delousing chamber, where the use of Zyklon-B was never under dispute.

Independent Forensic Research Confirms Leuchter Report

The British historian, David Irving, is the world's best selling writer and researcher on World War Two, a title he holds despite losing a much publicized libel suit against a Jewish author who accused him of being a Holocaust denier. In March 1991, Irving announced that he had "improperly obtained" a copy of a Polish forensic laboratory report commissioned secretly in February 1990 by Franciszek Piper, the new non-Communist director of the Auschwitz museum and archives.

This independent Polish government investigation, which the Auschwitz museum authorities have yet to release, although it is dated 24 September 1990, shows that while there are substantial concentrations (between 9 and 147 micrograms per 100g) of cyanide residues in ten samples taken from the walls of the rooms and chambers where cyanide gas was used for disinfecting the slave-laborers' clothing, there are none whatever in ten samples taken from rooms identified in countless war crimes trials as the lethal gas chambers also using this Zyklon B (hydrogen cyanide) gas, apart from a " vanishingly small" trace in one column in Birkenau, compatible with routine disinfectant operations. Forensic tests on human hair samples were also negative.-(Focal Point Publications, http://www.fpp.co.uk/docs/ReadersLetters/Times210391.html).

Raul Hilberg has also testified in a Canadian court that "no scientific reports prove Jews were exterminated in Nazi gas chambers" (Scientific evidence of Holocaust missing, The Sault Star Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, January 18, 1985). Testifying in the trial of a holocaust revisionist activist, Hilberg added that " . . . German war documents contain no mention of killing Jews . . ." and "there are no autopsy reports indicating a single person died from exposure to poisonous gas in chambers. " (ibid).

It should be borne in mind that although there is no direct physical evidence to support the charge that six million Jews were gassed in the camps, this does not mean that the camps themselves did not exist, nor that Jews were rounded up and deported, nor that many died through illness, starvation or conventional judicial executions.

Auschwitz's real purpose - a massive labor camp

If there is no physical evidence of gas chambers having been operational at Auschwitz, the question can be rightly asked then what was the purpose of the camp in the first place. The answer to this is startlingly obvious if the site is visited with an unbiased eye: the Auschwitz area was one of the industrial concentration areas for the Third Reich, housing factories from almost all major industries which supported the Reich's war effort.

The Buna rubber factory was in Auschwitz, as were an IG-Farben factory, amongst dozens of others, manufacturing everything from clothing through to medical supplies. Jews - and others - were sent to Auschwitz to work as forced labor - in terms of the Wannsee plan.

Above: The true reason for the existence of the Auschwitz camp is revealed in these little shown pictures of the industrial complex which surrounded the camp - most of it within full view of the interior of the camp itself. Left: The Monowitz industrial complex, where most of Auschwitz's inmates were put to work in a variety of heavy industries, ranging from rubber manufacture, medical supplies, armaments and, as illustrated in the picture right, clothing. This photograph shows the tailor's workshop at Auschwitz 1, where prisoners would make up clothing for use by the German army.

USE OF INMATES AS LABOR EXPLAINS TATTOOING

The use of inmates at Auschwitz as labor also explains why the Nazis would have found it necessary to tattoo identification numbers on prisoners' arms - for if it was their intention to gas all Jews sent to Auschwitz, it would have made no sense to go through the trouble and expense of identifying and tattooing them first.

As the Soviet army advanced westward, the Nazis closed down the Auschwitz camp and forced all able bodied inmates to evacuate westward with them - once again contradicting the mass murder theory. If the Nazis had indeed wanted to kill all the inmates of Auschwitz, there would have been no logical reason to take Jews with them back into the Reich. The obvious intention in evacuating all able bodied inmates was to keep using them as labor at other locations, once again underlining the real purpose of the Auschwitz complex.

PHOTOGRAPHS OF AUSCHWITZ INMATES BELIE MASS GASSING ALLEGATIONS

The evacuation of all able bodied inmates from Auschwitz by the Nazis meant that only the elderly, children or sick remained behind in that camp when it was overrun by the advancing Soviet army. Herein lies another interesting but suppressed fact: as the pictures below show, the inmates of Auschwitz, as photographed shortly after the camp was overrun in January 1945, were the sickest and most disabled of all the prisoners - yet they actually do not look that sick or undernourished at all.

Above: inmates at Auschwitz, too infirm or sick to be evacuated by the Nazis, photographed in Auschwitz in January 1945. Note that they are warmly dressed, reasonably fed and do not resemble the emaciated corpses which are almost universally portrayed as evidence of Nazi extermination programs. The fact that so many women, children and infirm were still in the camp, and had not been "gassed", is yet another factor against the veracity of the "mass gassing" allegation - for if the story were true, those too sick to work, or too young, were "gassed upon arrival." That this did not happen, is proved by the fact that there were so many children and infirm in the camp.

These prisoners compare dramatically with the inmates found in camps in Germany itself, such as Bergen Belsen, where the lice borne disease typhus, had wreaked havoc, causing masses of prisoners there to die as dehydrated, emaciated skeleton figures. It remains thus one of the ironies of the Holocaust story, that the skin and bone body photographs which are used as 'evidence' of the Nazi's "genocide", do not originate in the so-called "extermination" camps, but from the camps in Germany proper, where no-one alleges that gas chambers existed.

Part Four: Treblinka: A Forensic Examination

Part Five: Faked Holocaust Memoirs - Simon Wiesenthal

Part Six: The Theater of Lies - the John Demjanjuk Case

Part Seven: Germans of Jewish Descent who served Hitler

Part Eight: The Holocaust as Viewed by a Jewish Scholar

or

Part One: How Many Jews were killed?

Part Two: The Wanssee Conference Reviewed

or back to Chapter 64, part four: "The Final Solution - Nazi Policy Towards Jews"