The Gas Chamber of Sherlock Holmes

An Attempt at a Literary Analysis of the Holocaust Gassing Claim

by Samuel Crowell (1/2)

"In Memoriam!"
Dec 22, 1997: Revised Jan 10, 1999

Analytical Table of Contents
1. -- Introduction
Original nature of the gassing claim in 1945-1946.-- Criticism of the claim since then.-- Current calls for censorship. -- The need for free speech and free expression in this domain. -- Methodology: Literary analysis, or a chronological and comparative method.

2. -- The First Reports
The first reports emanate from Polish Jewish underground newspapers in the winter and spring of 1942. -- Conveyed to England, widely publicized from the summer of 1942. -- The first BBC broadcasts. -- Concept of a feedback loop for developing and legitimizing rumors. -- Nature of rumors. Extermination in a bathhouse by: steam, electricity, a vacuum, a hammer, or poison gas. -- Evolution of the typical shower-gas-burning sequence. -- The Katyn Forest Massacre: a model of forensic investigation. -- Soviet response: gas vans in Krasnodar, massacre at Babi Yar. -- Possible origins of rumors: German secret weapons technology, German experiments with cyanide gas after discovery of Soviet plans to use it in 1941, analogy with Western execution techniques (electrocution, gas), and disinfection procedures.

3. -- German Disinfection Procedures
Western disinfection procedures developed in 19th Century to combat cholera, typhoid, dysentery, and typhus. -- German methods very systematic, constant exposure to cholera and typhus because of Eastern European immigrants fleeing persecution. -- Hamburg epidemic in 1892. -- Mary Antin's passage in 1893. -- American procedures, 1892, and the fear these evoked in Jewish community. -- German disinfection procedures in World War One in Turkey. -- In Poland. -- English procedures in Poland in 1919. -- American procedures in Poland. -- German technological developments in the 1920's and 1930's. -- The mechanics of disinfection: shaving, showering, and fumigating. Zyklon B. -- Double-doored Apparate for disinfection. -- Railway car gassing tunnels. -- Typical responses among Eastern Jews and others: non-comprehension, fear, anxiety, evasion, and destructive rumors of extermination.

4. -- The First Reports from Auschwitz and Majdanek
First claims of mass gassing at Auschwitz sandwiched around Soviet occupation of Majdanek camp. -- The first inaccurate Auschwitz memo, July, 1944. -- Soviet guided tour of Majdanek, August 1944, and Special Commission. Gassing motifs emerge. -- Double doored disinfection Apparate identified as gas chamber. -- Fascination with the peephole on the door: fundamental proof of the gassing claim. -- Peephole then figures in Auschwitz claim, in War Refugee Board Report, November, 1945. -- An apparent convergence of fact is perhaps merely a convergence of rumor.

5. -- The Eastern Camps, Polevoi's Report, and the Gerstein Statement
Soviet propagandists begin gathering gassing stories in August, 1944, these are published in Yiddish. -- Soviet Special Commissions in fall. -- Deposition of Leleko, February, 1945, summarizes these claims. Close linkage of Leleko deposition with descriptions for Majdanek, therefore probable derivation. -- Gerstein statement from April of 1945. -- Contains many fantastic elements, gassing elements in turn derivative of Leleko, Majdanek, and initial Pravda reports on Auschwitz. -- Gerstein illustrates absolute identity of Zyklon B with an extermination program in allied thinking. Gerstein's story widely publicized in France in July, 1945. -- His suicide follows.

6. -- The Canonical Holocaust
The gassing claim as we understand it today is double-rooted: first, in the photographs and newsreels of the dead at Belsen, who perished from typhoid, typhus, and tuberculosis, and second from the Soviet Special Commission on Auschwitz, which concluded four million dead with no direct documentary evidence. -- Analysis of the Soviet claim. -- Influence of Soviet report on allied interrogators. -- Influence of Soviet report on eyewitnesses: Bendel and Bimko. -- Influence of Soviet report on German confessions: Maximillian Grabner and others.

7. -- The Nuremberg Trials
The aim of the Nuremberg Trials to discredit National Socialism and German militarism: the future pacification of Germany. -- Evidence provided for incriminating value. -- No attempt at putting documents in context. Soviet Union oversees most of the gassing claim presentation. -- Soviet record in 1930's show trials indicates mass hysteria, conspiratorial thinking, forced confessions. -- Hysterical atmosphere at Nuremberg: Judges, who privately doubt, fail to maintain a rational atmosphere.

8. -- The Confessions of Rudolf Höß
Höß captured and interrogated by British after Soviets conclude gassing claim presentation. -- Höß' confessions clearly coerced. Analysis of April 5, 1946 affidavit. -- Content of that affidavit derives from Soviet presentation. -- Errors in that affidavit.

9. -- Interpreting Documents and the Postwar Literature
Quality of documents offered at Nuremberg. -- Documents offered as indicative of gassing actually indicate something else. -- The Wetzel-Lohse correspondence. -- The Diary of Dr. Kremer. -- Post-war literature emerging in this period: Olga Lengyel, Miklos Nyiszli. -- Clear influence of claims in Soviet report. -- Inaccuracy of details and unreliability of descriptions. The main conduit for cultural awareness of the gassing claim. -- The absence of evidence is considered the proof of the gassing claim: the conspiratorial nature of the gassing claim.

10. -- Retrofitting the Euthanasia Campaign
Euthanasia program begins 1939, evidence indicates lethal injections were used. -- German people began to rumor poison gas and death ray usage because the bodies were cremated, by 1940. -- Strong opposition of German people. -- In summer, 1946, narratives of euthanasia killings emerge, these use the same materials (Double-doored Apparate) and procedure for the now familiar shower-gas-burning sequence. -- Shower element does not fit the euthanasia procedure. -- Confusion of deceptions. -- Concept transference, compare World War One. -- Conclusion is that Euthanasia gassing narratives derived from extermination gassing narratives, but rumors of gas usage came first. -- Demonstrated German fear of poison gas and cremation.

11. -- The Fear of Cremation and Poison Gas
Cremation still relatively modern in the 1930's and 1940's. Resistance by many social elements, gives rise to bizarre ideas of concealing crimes and corpse recycling. -- National Socialism advocates cremation because of over-crowding and disease control. -- Cremation fears mirrored in many instances of Allied fear about German secret weapons, technological abilities -- Fear of poison gas and its disfiguring effects common in Interwar culture. -- Vicki Baum. -- Pabst's Kameradschaft. Poison gas and mass hysteria: Israel, 1991; Florida, 1971; D-Day, 1944; The "War of the Worlds" panic of 1938. -- Disfigured bodies, from fire or putrefaction, are conceived as victims of poison gas: Germany, Cassell bombing raid, 1943, concentration camps, 1945. -- Poison gas often conceived as air-borne: German civil defense.

12. -- German Civil Defense
German air raid shelters meant to serve also as anti-gas shelters. -- Therefore equipped with gastight doors. -- Air raid shelter doors also equipped with peepholes, to allow inspection without breaking the gastight seal. -- The doors at Majdanek are air raid shelter doors, the bathing facility meant to double as a decontamination center. -- The main fear is from disfiguring mustard gases, therefore Germans equipped laundries and public baths to serve as decontamination centers in the event of a gas attack. -- Bombing assault on Germany killed perhaps 3/4 million people, most perished from gas poisoning (CO) and were at least partially cremated by dry heat. -- But this event would be inverted into an accusation against the German people after the war.

13. -- Civil Defense in the Concentration Camps
Concentration camps important to war industry. -- Therefore require air raid and anti-gas protection, according to German guidelines. Review of evidence for air raid shelters and gas protection in the concentration camp system. -- Himmler Order of February 8, 1943, directly precedes flood of work orders for gastight fixtures at Auschwitz Birkenau.

14. -- Pressac's "Criminal Traces"
Material or documentary evidence in the present day rests almost entirely on the "criminal traces" of J. C. Pressac, developed by the Polish communists for their Auschwitz trials in 1946 and 1947. -- But this evidence, when viewed in the light of civil defense literature, does not indicate gas chambers, but rather gastight bomb shelters and delousing chambers. -- Since most of this evidence clearly argues for gastight bomb shelters, but was developed, and has been presented, as proof of gas chambers, it follows that there is no material or documentary evidence for gas chambers at all, and it follows further that there is a strong likelihood of a Polish and Soviet communist hoax in developing this particular evidence.

15. -- The Gas Chamber of Sherlock Holmes
Gassing narratives from World War Two reflected in literature prior to the war, including Sinclair Lewis (1936), and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1924). -- Analysis of the shower-gas-burning concept in its parts: disinfection procedures (Mayakovsky), poison gas usage (H.G. Wells, Sax Rohmer, E. R. Burroughs). -- Elements of the gassing claim directly pertinent to Jewish traditions: longstanding conceptions of "extermination" and its meanings, "six million", and the concept of a secret central conspiracy to destroy the Jewish people. -- The conclusion is that the cultural script for the shower-gas-burning sequence as well as the extermination-six million-central conspiracy concepts are all very old and deeply rooted.

16. -- Conclusions
There is no material or documentary evidence that unambiguously supports the gassing claim. -- The evidence put forward overwhelmingly refers to either disinfection or civil air defense, including gas protection. -- Furthermore, fictional accounts of gassing antedate the gassing claim by many years. -- The gassing claim as a mass delusion. -- As a rumor. -- As a legend. -- As a hoax. -- Analogy to UFO abductions. -- The gassing claim as a cultural construct. The need for nationalities to perceive their history as unique. -- The general nature of 20th Century history in Eastern Europe. -- The Jewish ordeal along the continuum of war, revolution, collectivization, dekulakization, and the German expulsions. -- The gassing claim created by, and reinforced by, delusional pressures of social and cultural change as well as by censorship.

FOOTNOTES TO BE FOUND AT THE END OF RELEVANT SECTIONS
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A COMMON BELIEF is that in World War Two the National Socialist government of Germany carried out a secret policy of mass exterminations, chiefly using extermination gas chambers. The policy is said to have been ordered by Adolf Hitler, and involved the gassing of millions of human beings, who subsequently were burned either in crematoria or in huge pits so that scarcely a trace of their bodies remained.
The claim of mass gas extermination has been questioned ever since the late 1940's, but only by a few people, and very much on the fringe of public discourse.2 In the early 1970's several new critics of the gas extermination claim emerged, and over the past two decades they have been joined by many others, so that now there are at least several dozen who have written on the subject.3 These researchers consider themselves heir to the tradition of those historians who sought in the 1920's to revise, and de-politicize, our understanding of the First World War, and so consider themselves historical revisionists. But the skepticism of these researchers towards mass gassing is usually accompanied by a desire to reevaluate the Holocaust in its entirety, and as a result they are more normally called "Holocaust revisionists" or "Holocaust deniers".4
The response of traditional historiography to the challenge of the revisionists has not been what one would expect. Normally, when someone challenges a historical orthodoxy, a minute analysis of the material and documentary record ensues, and the record is correspondingly revised. But nothing of the sort has happened here: instead, the arguments of the revisionists have been ignored and they have been reviled.5
In recent years, the expression of revisionist skepticism has been criminalized in several European countries, leading to heavy fines and prison terms, particularly in Germany and France.6 In Canada, two major trials have been held with the intention of silencing a gas chamber critic.7 Most recently the Prime Minister of Great Britain, during his candidacy, repeatedly promised to ban revisionist writings about the Holocaust.8
The further erosion of free speech on this matter must be considered intolerable to anyone who takes the intellectual life seriously. Therefore the purpose of this essay will be to deliberately review the gassing claim, with the object, not to prove that gassings did or did not take place, but rather to investigate whether there is a plausible basis for revisionist doubt. If we find that the traditional gassing narrative contains sufficient errors or lacunae to justify doubt, then we must allow doubt. On the other hand, if we find that the traditional gassing narrative has an irrefutable documentary or material base, then we must note this also. The result should be, in the first case, due recognition of revisionist contributions to the ongoing process of modern historiography, or, in the second case, a further marginalization of revisionist thinking, which should render their influence harmless and thus unobjectionable. But in any case we cannot continue the current situation where revisionists are dismissed as not serious even while many of them are punished with quite serious fines and prison terms.
The method we shall use is largely determined by the inherent problems of the subject, specifically the problems concerning text and source criticism. Even if charitably inclined, anyone with minimal historical training cannot fail to notice how traditional Holocaust scholars take a generally uncritical, selective, and anachronistic position with regards to their evidence. From a mass of materials that support, or seem to support, their position, they simply select heavily edited excerpts here and there.9 Rarely is an attempt made to explain the theoretical underpinnings of the selection or verification process for testimonies or affidavits. Rarer still are attempts to place the frequently ambiguous evidence in a wider documentary context. When the original sources contain errors or data inconsistent with the traditional interpretation, no attempt is made to explain the source or significance of these errors and inconsistencies.
Finally, traditional Holocaust scholars pay no attention to the chronological evolution or even the circumstances of gassing claims, even though it should be obvious that earlier statements, widely publicized, have a strong potential for influencing later permutations of a claim. This last is a particularly glaring omission, since the vast majority of Holocaust evidence is gleaned from testimonial or affidavit narratives. In short, the overall impression created by the traditional school's method is one of simply selecting data that supports what everyone already knows.
The revisionist approach has its own strengths and weaknesses. Its greatest strength has been its willingness to subject the standard evidentiary texts to rigorous criticism. But even here, there has been a tendency to confuse debunking with historical explanation. It is not enough to say that this or that affidavit contains several errors and is therefore suspect, nor, for that matter, is it enough to carry out forensic studies and show the extreme unlikelihood of specific gassing claims. There have been enormous contributions in this latter area in the past decade, and the researches of Faurisson, Berg, Rudolf and Mattogno have gone a long way to define the physical limits against which testimonies and affidavits must be tested.10 Nevertheless, to show with a fair degree of probability that the mass gassings were impossible is not the same thing as explaining why everyone believes they took place.
Therefore we begin at the beginning with the simple proposition that the gassing claims are either true or not true. If they are true, then the historian should be able to establish how the claims came to be known, and at what point the fugitive claims of wartime crossed the threshold of fact. On the other hand, if the claims are false it should be possible to explain how they emerged, how they were constituted, and why they were believed. In short, the problem requires a chronological method.
In general the tendency in most writings on the Holocaust has been to ignore the difference between rumor and fact: the traditional school considers all rumors fact, the revisionists consider all facts rumor.11 It is precisely at this juncture, then, that we seem to have a promising point of departure, since all parties, traditional or revisionist, agree that the gassing claims began as vague, anonymous, and unverifiable reports, that is, as rumors.
Fact is a reflection of empirical reality; but rumor expresses a reality all its own, however difficult it is to define, since the real world of rumor is simply that world of unspoken assumptions, associations, and projections that characterize a human culture at a specific moment of historic time. Attempts to describe the parameters and nature of that unspoken world, which in some ways is more real than the real world, at least in terms of determining our perception and our judgment, has been a main project among intellectual historians and literary critics at least since the early 1960's.
By way of a simple example: in 1976 a literary detective named Samuel Rosenberg wrote a book entitled Naked is the Best Disguise: The Death and Resurrection of Sherlock Holmes. Rosenberg closely analyzed the Holmes stories in order to argue that Conan Doyle was expressing in his work a great number of late Victorian concerns: Evolution, Nietzsche's theories, German secret societies and bellicose nationalism, the White Man's Burden, and so forth. While we can debate his success is mapping out Conan Doyle's specific intellectual concerns, his book did succeed in placing the stories firmly within a specific cultural context, thus helping to explain their content.
We want to pursue a similar path here, and hence propose a literary analysis in a chronological format. That is, while skeptical of the gassing claims, we are not setting as our primary objective to prove or disprove any specific gassing claim. Instead we will have a simple narration of the gassing claims, from the spring of 1942 through the end of the Nuremberg and Auschwitz Trials in 1947. The analysis shall be "literary" because it will focus on the themes, motifs, tropes, and story elements that comprise the gassing claims. To put it another way, the gassing claims will be laid out, viewed as narratives or as "texts", arranged in order, and analyzed separately and in combination.
Literary analyses usually involve several different steps. One is simply the breakdown of a text into its parts along with a discussion of these. In the present case this will involve the isolation and tracking of some of the gassing claim story elements. A second step involves a textual analysis, in which the text is arrayed with similar texts that may have influenced it or which may have been influenced by it. Precisely for this reason, judgment on the veracity of claims will be suspended, in favor of investigating whether a given narrative shows textual links with prior or later texts. A third approach places the text in a broader social and cultural context, in order to see how it relates to, or expresses, its culture. In the present case the emerging story elements will be placed in the context of known historical and cultural crosscurrents, most of which have been undervalued or ignored by traditional historians of this subject. By putting these materials in context, it will be possible to see the extent to which the gassing claim was, or was not, peculiar to its time.
After discussing the various story elements of the emerging gassing claim three facts should become clear. First, the mass gassing narratives have a strong family resemblance among them and even to texts that predated the supposed gas exterminations by 20 years or more. Second, the unique characteristics of the gassing process can be traced, in the broader context of European social and cultural history, to completely ordinary procedures, albeit procedures which were the source of significant social and cultural anxiety. Finally, it should become plain that there is no documentary or material evidence that unambiguously supports the mass gassing claim: those documents that are said to bear even remotely on the gassing claim are, in context, completely benign, and for the most part refer back to the anxiety-producing procedures just discussed. These conclusions will not prove that there were no mass gassings. They will, however, vindicate revisionist doubt.
It will of course be impossible to indefinitely withhold a final judgment on the source or character of the gassing claims. But we can take guidance from two cautionary remarks of Conan Doyle's Baker Street sage. "How often have I said to you that when you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?" said Sherlock Holmes to Dr. Watson in The Sign of Four. To be sure, the historian must always be willing to face uncomfortable truths. "I should have more faith," Holmes remarked in A Study in Scarlet, "I ought to know by this time that when a fact appears opposed to a long train of deductions it invariably proves to be capable of bearing some other interpretation." Indeed, it is precisely to the reasonable possibility of "some other interpretation" that all historical investigation must be dedicated.
Yet no one can authoritatively deny the existence of something that most everyone else accepts as true. Therefore categorical denials of mass gassing are not possible. One can, however, try to explain how the gassing claim could have arisen quite naturally given the characteristics and concerns of early 20th Century social and cultural life. It will be shown that the gassing claim, as a form of the more general extermination claim, comprises elements of specific concern to East European Jews since the early 19th Century. It will also be shown that the traditional extermination scenario, featuring a shower-gas-burning sequence, is rooted in profound European and American concerns over disease and disease prevention, the use of poison gas and other mysterious weapons of mass destruction, and finally anxiety and fear over the recent reappearance of cremation as a means of disposal of the dead.
In short, it will be possible to see that the generation of a delusion of mass gas extermination did not require a conspiracy, or a hoax, nor much conscious effort at all, but only a social and cultural climate that would facilitate the generation of such claims, at a time of war, hatred, and social anomie. We will see that such claims, facilitated here and there by a little helpful fraud, but above all by a simple willingness to believe the worst about one's enemies, would allow these rumors to be stated as fact and become themselves part of that social and cultural landscape of which we are only half-consciously aware.
A few caveats are probably in order. Many people still feel that to question the mass gassing claim, or for that matter, any other aspect of the Holocaust, is tantamount to dismissing the enormous suffering and loss of life experienced by the Jewish people in World War Two, and that it is even "wicked" to pose questions that may cause survivors any further suffering.12
As to the first point, it is only because of the emphases of recent historiography that the mass gassing claim has come to be so exclusively associated with the Jewish people and the Holocaust. In 1945, it was commonly claimed that ten million or more had been exterminated at the same half dozen camps where today three million Jews alone are said to have been gassed,13 the implication is clear that at the time it was believed that more non-Jews than Jews had in fact been exterminated with poison gas.14 Moreover, mass gassing has been reconstructed as having been applied first to insane and disabled non-Jewish Germans in the course of the Euthanasia campaign. Therefore, skepticism of the mass gassing claim intersects, but does not embrace, the totality of the Holocaust.
As to the second point: the argument that we must spare the feelings of survivors is essentially an appeal to compassion. For many years, we were swayed, and even troubled, by this argument, but we have seen in recent times that this compassion has been invoked to justify persecution and censorship. So now the value of compassion has been placed at odds to the free reason of the individual. But in fact all compassion, and all human action, can only flow from the reasoned choice of free human beings. We conclude, therefore, that the most positive end is served by insisting on the right of free people to speak their minds.

NOTES
1. Already the present essay in its research phase has given rise to two specialist articles, "Technique and Operation of German Anti-Gas Shelters: A Refutation of J. C. Pressac's 'Criminal Traces'" and"Defending Against the Allied Bombing Campaign: Air Raid Shelters and Gas Protection in Germany, 1939-1945, Parts 1 and 2". These articles correspond to sections 12 through 14. The present essay may stand on its own, but it is also in effect an outline for further extended treatments.
2. The first revisionists include the Frenchman, Paul Rassinier (d. 1967), active from 1948, a former inmate of Buchenwald (see his collected writings, Debunking the Genocide Myth, Institute of Historical Review (IHR), Newport Beach, CA: o. p.), and the Rumanian Jew, Josef Ginzburg (d. 1990), whose family was persecuted and deported during World War Two, writing under the pseudonym, J. G. Burg, from 1962. There is no easily available precis of revisionist historiography, Arthur R. Butz, The Hoax of the Twentieth Century, IHR, Newport News, CA:1983 contains some information, pp. 10-12; pp. 317-334.
3. Some descriptive matter is found in Butz, op. cit., loc. cit., and consult also cum grano salis Shermer, Why People Believe Weird Things, W. H. Freeman, NY:1997, pp. 173-252. After Rassinier and Burg, "Holocaust revisionism" essentially begins with Arthur R. Butz, whose book was first published in 1976 (1977 in the US): Robert Faurisson in France and Wilhelm Stäglich in Germany emerged almost simultaneously along with others. The end of the '70's witnessed the debut of the Journal of Historical Review [hereinafter JHR], the primary English-language organ of revisionist writings. The 1980's found important writings by James G. Martin, Friedrich Berg, and Mark Weber, they were joined in the 1990's by, among others, Carlo Mattogno and John Ball. The 1988 Zündel trial also witnessed the entrance of the British historian David Irving into the revisionist fold, although to this date his writings have not heavily engaged the topic of the Holocaust as such, but see his Goebbels (1996) and Nuremberg:The Last Battle (1996), both issued by Focal Point in London.
4. Shermer, Michael, op. cit., loc. cit., provides a definition of revisionist positions, or as he calls it, "Holocaust Denial": (1) intentional genocide on racial grounds; (2) "highly technical, well-organized" program, using gas chambers and crematoria, (3) between five and six million dead. Shermer is to be credited for not demonizing revisionists, although his treatment leaves much out. More to the point, we do not know of any other historical event where the facts are set as preconditions to the concept, furthermore, not all revisionists give equal weight to each of the three "conditions". In the present case, while we have doubts about the extent of (1) and (3), we do not consider them historiographically interesting. On the other hand, we are certain that (2), at least as stated, is false.
5. Typical are the descriptions of revisionists that one finds in Lipstadt, Deborah, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, Penguin Books (Plume), NY:1994, we note in particular the introduction where revisionist "deniers" are characterized as plague-spreading rats.
6. Revisionism is thus outlawed in Germany, France, Switzerland, and Israel.
7. Two trials were carried out against Ernst Zündel, in 1985 and 1988; Barbara Kulaszka prepared a digest of the transcripts of the second trial, printed as Did Six Million Really Die? and his available on the Zündel-site on the Internet [hereinafter, DSMRD].
8. Tony Blair's promises in news reports, 16 Oct 96, and 30 Jan 97.
9. This is evident, for example, in Raul Hilberg's Destruction of the European Jews, Quadrangle, Chicago:1968, which, on the subject of gas exterminations restricts itself to heavily edited testimonies of two Nazis, taken under vastly different circumstances, two ambiguous documents, and a number of postwar memoirs of former concentration camp inmates.
10. The forensic approach is largely the brainchild of Robert Faurisson who already in the 1970's sought to compare the arrangement of gassing facilities in Poland with known gas execution technology in the United States. In the late 1980's, while preparing for the second Zündel trial, an expert in US execution technology, Fred Leuchter, was commissioned to write a report on the gassing sites in Poland. The resulting Leuchter Report (1988) was a milestone in Holocaust forensics, although its main conclusion, that the crematoria at Birkenau could never have been used for gassing, has been hotly disputed. Leuchter's main scientific conclusions, that the crematoria bore unexpectedly low cyanide traces, considering their supposed use, have been reproduced in several studies by both sides, but the interpretation of these low to non-existent traces has been variously argued and appears inconclusive. The most thorough and rigorous study of forensic issues related to cyanide residues remains the Rudolf Report (Gutachten), but the German chemist Germar Rudolf, published in 1992 and subsequently revised. Rudolf, under the pseudonym Ernst Gauss has also edited the important collection of studies, Grundlagen zur Zeitgeschichte, Grabert Verlag, Tübingen:1994 [hereinafter Grundlagen], as well as the revisionist periodical, Viertelsjahrhefte für freie Geschichtforschung [hereinafter VffG], 1997-present.
11. As evidence of the first, we cite Walter Laqueur's The Terrible Secret: Suppression of the Truth About Hitler's 'Final Solution', Little, Brown & Co., Boston:1980, which repeats every bit of information coming from occupied Poland as proof of the extermination policy, even when he is constrained to admit that it is inaccurate.
12. Laqueur, Walter, Fascism: Past, Present, Future, Oxford UP, New York:1996, p. 141.
13. Soviet Special Commissions and contemporary reports had established death tolls as follows: Treblinka, 3-3.5 million, Auschwitz Birkenau, at least 4 million, Majdanek, 1.5 million, Sobibor, Chelmno, several hundreds of thousands, Belzec, 600,000. For a survey of death estimates as of 1946, including some even higher than the above, consult Aroneanu, Eugene, Inside the Concentration Camps, translated by Thomas Whissen, Praeger Publishers, Westport, CT: 1996, pp. 143-144.
14. Ibid., The implication may not be correct: according to one of Aroneanu's witnesses the Jewish component always comprised 90% of the total, whatever that might be, loc. cit. This seems illogical. It also seems illogical to attribute to the Nazis a policy of exterminating non-Jews if, in the interval of 50 years, it has been accepted that in fact something on the order of seven millions were not exterminated at these six camps.
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MOST HOLOCAUST RESEARCHERS begin their analysis of the gassing claims in the spring of 1942, so we shall follow that custom here.15 We are not concerned with recording every single enumeration of a gassing claim; we are concerned above all with recording characteristic changes in how the story is reported. Throughout 1942, 1943, and well into the summer of 1944, all claims of mass gassing must be considered as uncorroborated rumors: therefore, after briefly covering the evolution of the story we must pause and attempt to provide other possible explanations for these rumors that are not keyed to the assumption that they reflect reality. To that end, we will have to duly note a few other rumors pertaining to alleged German National Socialist activities that are generally conceded to be untrue today, that is, rumors that assumed a life of their own in the Second World War.
It should be pointed out here that in the spring of 1942 the National Socialist government of Germany began to systematically deport all Jewish persons in Europe to Poland, and, according to their claims, to points farther east. There is no denying that these deportations were cruel, or that they involved the unjust seizure of wealth and belongings, or that many Jews were done to death one way or another during this process. Virtually everyone, revisionist and non-revisionist, agrees about this aspect of the National Socialist persecution of the Jewish people.
There is also agreement that in the subsequent course of the war hundreds of thousands of Jews were dragooned into the German labor system, particularly into the armaments industry, working largely out of concentration camps, and several types of labor camps, and that the death rate in these camps was very high, particularly at the end of the war when disease control measures and provisioning completely broke down. The question is whether in the course of these concentrations in Poland and subsequent deportations farther east the German National Socialists were also carrying out a policy of deliberate extermination of Jewish people, specifically using poison gas.
The first claim of mass gassing pertaining to Jewish people that received wide circulation was contained in the so-called Bund Report that was smuggled to the Polish Government in exile, located in London, in the third week of May, 1942.16 The report contained two gassing rumors: first that a special automobile (a gas chamber) was being used to gas 90 persons at one time.17 Since the victims were supposed to have dug their graves before being gassed, it follows that this was more a gas chamber that could be moved from place to place than a gas van (normally conceived as a vehicle that would drive victims to a grave while they died from gas inhalation on the way).18 The second rumor pertains to actions in Warsaw: it is said that Jews were being experimented upon with poison gases.19
The Bund Report, in turn, appears to be a composite of at least two documents that had come from Warsaw during the spring of 1942. The first of these was an underground communication from the Jewish Labor Bund, in Warsaw, dated March 16, 1942, which described German activities in Western Poland as follows:
"In a number of villages the Jews were put to death by gas poisoning. They were herded in a horrible way into hermetically sealed trucks transformed into gas chambers, in groups of fifty, entire families, completely nude ...."20
and further alleged that "gas poisoning" was being carried out in Lodz.21 The second document that contributed to the Bund Report was a lead article in Der Veker, April 30, 1942, at a time of internecine struggle between Jewish resisters and collaborators in the Warsaw ghetto.22 That article is the source of most of the numerical totals in the Bund Report, but it is interesting that neither of these documents indicate 700,000 total dead.23 The April 30, 1942 Der Veker article also specifies Chelmno as the site of poison gassings, without giving details, but it is worth noting that from the March 16 communication there is an implied connection of bathing (the enforced nudity) and gassing, although, as we shall see, it will be some months before either element become dominant in the recitation of atrocities.
Two of the members of the Polish National Council in exile were Jewish: Zygielbojm and Szwarcbart, and they could be expected to be particularly interested in what was being alleged about their co-religionists several hundred miles away under German military occupation, and, in spreading these allegations as a means of getting support for their people.24 The Bund Report was thus extensively publicized in the media.
Already on June 24, 1942, the Bund Report was summarized on the BBC.25 The following day, the Daily Telegraph ran a major story on the Report, with two headlines of note: "Germans murder 700,000 in Poland," and "Traveling Gas Chambers".26 The following day, Zygielbojm delivered a broadcast over the BBC, summarizing the Bund Report, in Yiddish, and hence obviously directed to the Jewish population in Poland.27 Within a week, the BBC had made an arrangement with the Polish National Council giving the BBC priority in the reporting of all future atrocity stories.28
On July 1, 1942, the Polish Fortnightly Review published a report, based on the allegations made in the Bund Report, and now also mentioning specific camps: Sobibor, and Majdanek, near Lublin.29 It also made a reference to atrocities at Auschwitz, described as a labor camp, where about a thousand Soviet and Polish POW's were supposed to have been gassed the previous September, as well as to another camp nearby, called 'Paradisal' -- the name, so the report alleged, because "from it there is only one road, leading to Paradise."30 It further alleges that the crematoria in the Paradisal camp were five times larger than at Auschwitz, and that experiments with poison gas were conducted there.31 It should be emphasized that the remarks in the Polish Fortnightly Review concerning Auschwitz were not in the Bund Report; they appear to have come from earlier reports that were sent to London.32
Looking over these initial claims it is clear that the claim of gassing is but one of a number of extermination claims being made. It is furthermore true that the claims of gassing focus more on the allegation of experiments rather than a systematic extermination procedure. On the Auschwitz claims, there are some startling inaccuracies: Paradisal is clearly a reference to Birkenau, but Birkenau had no crematoria until the following spring, and the term Paradisal itself, as a road to paradise, is obviously the origin of the "Himmelfahrt" that will later figure so prominently in the folklore of Sobibor and Treblinka but which has no place in the history of Birkenau.33
The other thing that is important to note in this first rush of stories about gassings is that the BBC has already begun to play a major role in recycling these rumors back to their point of origin in Poland.34 These broadcasts in effect create a feedback loop that repeats and gives authority to Polish rumors, which are then re-injected back into Poland, where they may be expected to multiply and burgeon. There will be more to say of these broadcasts shortly, but the role of radio in disseminating and universalizing the rumors of mass gassing is something that deserves a very thorough accounting.
By July 16, 1942, the allegations of gassing were repeated in the News Review, here with the claim that the Germans were preparing "large gas stations" where the Polish Jewish population would be murdered.35 The report claims that Jews were to be given "no sleeping drugs"... "they were just trussed up and finished off."36 This report is getting us closer to the claim as we understand it today, but the reference to drugs and trussing up the victims suggests more a reference to gassing as a form of execution than for mass extermination: in other words, it appears that the author was attempting to compare the gassing procedure alleged in Poland with that used for executions in the United States.37
Later on that same summer, two rumors were passed on to Gerhart Riegner, the Geneva representative of the World Jewish Congress in Geneva.38 Both of these came from Germans, private citizens hostile to Nazism, and both claimed that the National Socialist government was preparing to use poison gas: the one claim would mutate into the formulation of "lighting the gas ovens"39 the other made a specific reference to the use of prussic acid, or cyanide gas (Blausäure).40 Both of these rumors are considered important because they stem from German sources and secondly because cyanide gas would later be considered to be a basic "murder weapon" in the extermination process.41 But it should be clear that rumors heard by even prominent Germans in the context of the established BBC gassing claim feedback loop are no more valid than any others. In this respect it is interesting to note that when two "eyewitnesses" from Poland were interviewed in Geneva at about the same time neither one said a word about gas exterminations, although they described many other hardships endured by Polish Jews. 42
A BBC broadcast on September 27th featured the exiled German author Thomas Mann, who repeated the gassing claim, saying that 16,000 French Jews had been gassed on a train after it had been "hermetically sealed" and that 11,000 Polish Jews had been put to death in the same way.43 It is known that such rumors were heard in Europe at the time.44 It follows that among the French and Dutch Jews being deported in the fall of 1942 there would be some who would be quite anxious about what awaited them in the concentration camps.
The next important development in the mass gassing claims comes again from Polish sources, and in particular the testimony of Jan Karski, a Polish intelligence operative who claimed to have been an eyewitness at Belzec, indeed, his report also mentions Sobibor and Treblinka.45 These various reports were compiled by the Geneva Zionists, and then publicized in London and New York at the same time.46 There were two apparently new elements to these materials. The first is the description of the loading of deported Jews into trucks covered with lime and chlorine -- this apparently the origin of the later claim of extermination with chlorine gas.47 The second was the description of extermination at Belzec -- the victims were told to strip, as if for a shower, were led into a room, and then electrocuted via a metal plate on the floor.48 The elaboration of these materials in the New York Times on November 26, 1942, would include allegations by Rabbi Stephen S. Wise that the Germans were also turning the bodies of dead Jews into "fats and soaps and lubricants" and that the Germans were now "injecting bubbles into their veins" because "prussic acid had been found to be too expensive."49
This particular cycle of extermination claims seems especially rich. Lime and chlorine were standard materials used to combat epidemics -- we will discuss this in more detail shortly. The extermination description at Belzec is noteworthy for two reasons: first, because it is apparently the first time that "showering" is explicitly described as an element in pre-extermination deception, although as we have seen the connection appears have preceded this statement,50 and second because the electrocution claim is no longer made today (although it must be said that it would later undergo significant elaboration.)51
The last element that is interesting is in regard to the soap claim, which has quietly been abandoned by all responsible researchers in recent decades.52 The claim of corpse utilization seems obviously related to a similar false claim made about the Germans in World War One, and indeed it was recognized as such in some quarters even in 1942.53 Another point is that there are two documents that indicate that the Germans were attempting to squelch such rumors in Slovakia and Lublin in July and October of 1942.54 Indeed, we know that "soap making" originally arose among ethnic Poles in 1942, who, along with the Jews, were being resettled on the right bank of the Bug River.55
The accumulation of extermination claims made in 1942 would lead the allied leaders to make a declaration on December 17, 1942, condemning German practices, without, on the other hand, specifying procedures.56
In April, 1943, an interesting memo of atrocities was drafted in London but was never issued. It claimed to describe extermination activities at Auschwitz- Birkenau. Three types of extermination were alleged in this anonymous document besides shooting. They were:
a. Gas Chambers, the victims were undressed and put into those chambers where they suffocated.
b. Electric Chambers, these chambers had metal walls, the victims were brought in and high tension electric current was introduced.
c. The so-called Hammerluft system. This is a hammer of air. These were special chambers where the hammer fell from the ceiling and by means of a special installation victims found death under air pressure.57
Needless to say neither method b. nor c. form part of the current extermination narrative. However these two story elements are good examples of how Holocaust claims are later elaborated and developed. The description of the electric chambers is almost certainly derived from the Karski report, and will surface again. The Hammerluft system appears even more interesting. The crux of this rumor appears to be the idea of a falling hammer: it is probably here that one has for the first time a claimed method of execution that will later emerge as a prime form of death at Mauthausen (where it was supposed to be the "Kugel Decree"), Buchenwald, and also Sachsenhausen, where in the form of what Carlos Porter sarcastically called the "pedal-driven brain-bashing machine" it was supposed to have been used to exterminate 840,000 Russian POWs.58 On the other hand, the element in the claim that touches on air pressure is probably the grandfather of the so-called "vacuum chambers" at Treblinka that would make a brief appearance in 1945.59
For all of the subsequent development of the Hammerluft claim, it seems odd how this rumor could have arisen in the first place, since there is no material or physical evidence to support it (indeed, there is no such evidence for any of the claims we have reviewed so far). We are tempted to think that someone took the term "Hammerluft", which might conceivably refer to a pneumatic hammer, and this led to some grisly speculation. On the other hand it is interesting to note that during the war the Germans attempted to develop a secret weapon that involved high pressure jets of gases that would penetrate the fuselage of low flying aircraft, and, as a military project, POW's and Jewish forced laborers were no doubt involved.60 Perhaps rumors of this project also mutated into this particular extermination claim.
The abovementioned memo, drafted April 18, 1943, was never issued, probably because the main atrocity story at the time was the massacre of the Polish officers in Katyn forest which had just been revealed by the Germans.61 The story is simply this. Over ten thousand Polish officers fell into Soviet hands in 1939 and were never heard from again. In February, 1943, shortly after the fall of the Sixth Army at Stalingrad, Germans stationed outside of Smolensk discovered mass graves of Polish officers. The Germans spent two months exhuming and analyzing the remains, accounting for 4,400 bodies in all. Several non-German forensic experts, including an independent Polish commission, were called in to investigate and carry out autopsies. The results in the subsequent German report, which was more than 300 pages in length, concluded that the officers had been systematically butchered in the spring of 1940. It was, in other words, an atrocity carried out by the Soviet Union.62
The Katyn episode is interesting for a few reasons. In the first place, confronted with well nigh irrefutable evidence of the criminality of their main ally, both Britain and the United States took the position that it was a German crime.63 Second, the German conduct of the exhumations and autopsies was thorough and meticulous: the international specialists, including the Poles, were allowed to conduct their researches with the minimum of interference.64 Third, the German forensic report is probably the most detailed analysis of any atrocity that ever occurred in the Second World War, nothing even remotely comparable has ever been produced for the many allegations of German atrocity.
In the midst of now typical gas chamber claims in May and June, and perhaps as a response to the Katyn accusation, the Soviets conducted a trial in Krasnodar in July of 1943, featuring German POW's who confessed to the gassing of people by use of "gas vans" or as the Russians called them, "Dushegubki" or "murder vans".65 It is worth mentioning here that no "gassing van" has ever been located.66 In August of 1943 a periodical entitled Polish Labor Fights! repeated extermination claims for Treblinka once more, now referring to rooms that are filled with people, sealed, and then filled with steam that kills the victims.67 Aside from the novel use of steam, later abandoned, one notes here again the use of the "showering" motif in the extermination process.
In late November, 1943, the Soviets, upon the liberation of Kiev, would allege that several tens of thousands had been shot at Babi Yar, a ravine outside of the city.68 The absence of forensic evidence was explained by claiming the Germans had somehow managed to dig up all of the remains a few weeks before retreating from the Red Army and burned all of the bodies without leaving a trace. What is at issue here is not the reality of shooting claims, per se, for there certainly is much evidence to corroborate the notion that the Germans and their East European auxiliaries massacred many people, including Jews, in the course of carrying out the Commissar Order to kill communists and communist sympathizers, as well as in the context of anti-partisan warfare.69 Rather, what is interesting about the Soviet claim is the assertion that all of the remains were completely destroyed. This is a very prominent feature of all atrocity claims made against the Germans in World War Two.
In December, 1943, the Soviets held another atrocity trial, this time in Kharkov, a city in the Eastern Ukraine that had changed hands several times during the war. Again, there were repetitions of the same gas van testimony given at the Krasnodar trial, and, on December 16, 1943, an interesting description of Auschwitz given by an SS officer, Heinisch:

Prosecutor: Tell the court about your talk with Somann.
Heinisch: Somann told me that death caused by gas poisoning was painless and more humane. He said that in the gas van death was very quick, but actually death came not in twelve seconds but much more slowly and was accompanied by great pain.
Somann told me about the camp in Auschwitz in Germany where the gassing of prisoners was carried out. The people were told that they were to be transferred elsewhere, and foreign workers were told that they would be repatriated and were sent under this pretext to bath-houses. Those who were to be executed first entered a place with a signboard with "Disinfection" on it and there they were undressed -- the men separately from the women and children. Then they were ordered to proceed to another place with a signboard "Bath." While the people were washing themselves special valves were opened to let in the gas which caused their death. Then the dead people were burned in special furnaces in which about 200 bodies could be burned simultaneously.70

Heinisch went on to say that Somann was the Chief of the Security Service in the Breslau area, which is the general area where Auschwitz is located, that gas executions took place only in camps on German soil, and further revealed that the decision to carry out executions "by means of gas poisoning" was made at a conference in the Summer of 1942 which Hitler, Himmler, and Kaltenbrunner attended.71
Heinisch's testimony is remarkable in several respects. First of all, we have by December, 1943, at a trial under Soviet auspices, a clear albeit erroneous narrative of the gassing claim at Auschwitz, in a form more or less similar to the standard narrative and in a publication that received wide distribution. It is also notable that Heinisch does not specify the ethnicity of the victims, but rather prefers to speak of foreign workers and their families: this at a time when large numbers of Ukrainians were being evacuated to the Reich for labor and were being subjected to the indignities of communal showers.72

The description of the gassing process provided by Heinisch is erroneous and therefore in attempting to account for it we could conceive of a link back to the unpublished narrative concerning Auschwitz in May or to other rumors that may have been circulating at the time. But it is important to note that the narrative contains details about bathing and disinfection that we have not encountered prior to this point. It is also important to reflect on how it would be possible for Heinisch, a district commissar at Melitopol in occupied Russia, and Somann, an SS chief in Breslau, to be informed of a process that the postwar trials have assured us were carried out in the greatest secrecy.73
In early 1944, in February, the Belzec electrocution story once more emerged.74 Finally, at the beginning of May, the New York Times repeated a story in which the Germans were planning to construct "special baths" which were in fact gas chambers, and in which the Hungarian Jews were to be exterminated.75 By this time, then, the gassing claim had become cemented its most typical form.
It should be emphasized at the end of this brief review of gassing and other extermination claims that to this point not a hint of what we would normally call evidence had been brought forward. Nevertheless we can see emerging over time a kind of model for extermination procedures, what we will call the shower-gas-burning sequence. The idea that victims would be led into a bathing facility of some kind, and then be executed (the method of execution focusing on gas more and more as time went by), and then burned so that no trace would remain was already a very common idea by the summer of 1944.
In fairness it should also be kept in mind that the shower-gas-burning concept still coexisted with other methods of extermination, including steam, vacuums, hammers of air, and electrocution, which have not been alleged in many years. We should expect therefore a heightened level of material and documentary proof in support of the gassing allegations as opposed to the others. We will find out the extent to which this is true in subsequent sections.
In reviewing these gassing claims we find that virtually all of them came from anonymous sources in Poland, and that all of them were publicized and propagated by Jewish agencies in Switzerland, London, and America.76 The conclusion that many revisionists have drawn is that these gassing claims were therefore developed by Jewish groups as part of a hoax.77 We would dissent from this interpretation: it is too great a leap to suggest that these Jewish agencies, in publicizing these claims, knew them to be false, or were publicizing them to some nefarious purpose. On the contrary, all of the internal evidence -- letters, diaries, stray conversations -- indicate that the Western Jews most responsible for the spread of these claims actually believed them.78 Whether these stories were then used to pursue political ends, and specifically Zionist ends, does not by itself discount the apparent sincerity of what these Jewish leaders were writing and saying at the time. To put the matter simply, they were in no position to know what was really going on: all they knew, or thought they knew, was that their co-religionists were undergoing a terrific ordeal of persecution, and needed help.
Having surveyed the claims, we must now attempt to interpret the nature of these various story elements. In other words, if these rumors are not a reflection of reality, then where did the rumors come from? It is clear that the use of gas was expressed in three ways before settling on the shower-gas scenario. One of these involved the idea of gas as a means of execution, in which the victims were not sedated, another involved the use of gas in experiments, which tied to the allegation of prussic acid use, and finally there was the variant that featured the "lighting of the gas ovens."79
The "gas oven" motif is clearly a garbled association between crematoria, almost all of which are gas operated, and the basic gassing claim. This perhaps innocent association, which corresponds to the known gas ovens that existed in many homes, tended to create an absolute linkage between gas chambers and crematoria: that is, wherever a crematorium was, there also was a gas chamber.
The "lack of sedation" motif, as already discussed, was probably an extension of the use of poison gas for execution purposes in the United States. The electrocution motif, prominent at about the same time, was a probable extension of the same idea, since electrocution was even more widely used for executions in America.80
Since the poison gas used for American executions was also cyanide, that could account for the rumors of cyanide gas usage. But there are other contexts in which cyanide gas could have emerged in official German documents or discussions during this period, and these usages could have led to garbled understanding which would account for the rumors as well, particularly those concerning experiments.
Soon after the invasion of Russia, the Wehrmacht obtained materials indicating that the Red Army had contingency plans for spraying German troops with cyanide gas from low-flying aircraft. As a result, in January, 1942, the Germans conducted experiments on farm animals using this gas, with generally fatal effect. This in turn led to the development of the FE 42 gas mask filter, which provided protection against cyanide gas. But the Germans, for reasons of security, attempted to keep these developments secret.81 So we have here at the beginning of 1942 secret experiments with prussic acid and the development of a device to protect against it, all of this before or roughly simultaneous with the emergence of rumors that the Germans were experimenting with this gas on human beings. A far more potent association in which prussic acid would emerge concerned the use of this material for delousing and disinfecting communities in Eastern Europe. Therefore we must make a detour to discuss these German delousing and disinfection procedures.

NOTES
15. Cf. Butz, Arthur R., op. cit.; Gilbert, Martin, Auschwitz and the Allies,Henry Holt & Co., NY:1982. Also useful to this section are: Gilbert's article, "What Was Known and When", in Gutman, Y. & Berenbaum, M., Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp, Indiana UP, Bloomington:1998; Martin, James J., The Man Who Invented 'Genocide', Institute for Historical Review, Newport Beach, CA: 1984; Dawidowicz, Lucy, ed. A Holocaust Reader,Behrman House, West Orange, NJ: 1976; and Laqueur, Walter, The Terrible Secret, Little, Brown, Boston:1980.
16. Gilbert, op. cit., p. 40. For reasons that will become more clear, it does not seem absolutely certain that the entirety of the Bund Report was composed in Warsaw. The entire text is reproduced in Dawidowicz, Reader, pp. 316-318. Priority claims for the first gassing story antedate this appearance: Robert Faurisson has referenced a report of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency Bulletin, from Stockholm, December 22, 1941, as follows: "More than 1,000 victims of spotted fever [i.e., typhus] in the densely crowded Warsaw ghetto have been put to death by gas [...], it is learned today from reliable sources," quoted in Grundlagen, p. 10n. However this account is no longer credited by the traditional narrative. Laqueur, Terrible, passim, cites many other reports from early 1942 that circulated in Poland in various underground newspapers, in letters, etc.
17. Gilbert, op. cit., pp.40-42
18. Cf. Ohlendorf's testimony in the Einsatzgruppen Trial, excerpted in Harris, Whitney R., Tyranny on Trial, Barnes & Noble, NY:1995 (orig. SMU Press, Dallas, TX: 1954), p. 352ff
19. Gilbert, op. cit., p. 43. This rumor is clearly indebted to the claim from December, see note above.
20. Dawidowicz, Reader, p. 215
21. op. cit., p. 216
22. op. cit., p. 294f for the complete text of the front page editorial. It is worthy of note than an analysis of the original text indicates that the atrocities are enumerated by way of justifying the recalcitrance of the Bund to the German occupation, and condemning the cooperation of the Jewish Councils. On these last, consult especially Trunk, Isaiah, Judenrat, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln: 1996 (originally published in 1972); and Ringelblum, Emanuel, Polish-Jewish Relations During the Second World War, Northwestern UP, Evanston, IL: 1992.
23. Ibid., the 700,000 figure appears to come from a 1916 article, see Laqueur, op. cit., p. , and Faurisson, cited below.
24. Gilbert, op. cit., p. 43, passim. The aim of the Bund Report, by the way, was not to elicit a Zionist quid pro quo, but rather to call for reprisals against Germans held by the Allies. This tends to support the idea that the gassing claims were generally believed by Polish Jews in exile.
25. Gilbert, op. cit., p. 44
26. Gilbert, op. cit., p. 43
27. Gilbert, op. cit., p. 44
28. Gilbert, op. cit., p. 46
29. Gilbert, op. cit., p. 44
30. Gilbert, op. cit., p. 45
31. Ibid.
32. The inference derives from the fact that Oswiecim (Auschwitz) is not mentioned in the Bund Report; however, it is mentioned in the underground appeal of 16 March, cf. Dawidowicz, Reader, pp. 215-216, however the details concerning Auschwitz in the 1 July article of the Fortnightly Review are not present in that earlier communication.
33. On Himmelfahrt, see Harris, op. cit., p. 334 for an example.
34. The inference derives from the fact of the Yiddish language broadcast, the BBC's claiming priority in announcing atrocity claims, and the fact, to be discussed later, that the BBC was widely listened to in occupied Europe. An analysis of BBC broadcasts is very much needed. More evidence of this feedback loop will be discussed further below, cf. Shermer, op. cit., p. 100f for an elucidation of the concept.
35. Gilbert, op. cit., p. 51
36. Ibid.
37. Perhaps the text was rewritten in London for the sake of an Anglo-American audience whose association with poison gas would more readily conjure up the idea of execution: poison cyanide gas had been used for executions in the United States since 1924, see Crowell, Samuel, "Technique an Operation of German Anti-Gas Shelters" at site referenced above, and is also available in German in Germar Rudolf's translation as "Technik und Arbeitsweise deutscher Gasschutzbunker im zweiten Weltkrieg" in VffG, I, 4, (XII, 1997), pp. 226-241, also incorporating some elements of "Defending Against the Allied Bombing Campaign."
38. Gilbert, op. cit., pp. 56-58
39. the "gas oven" formula is attributed to a Dr. Sommer, although it is not exactly clear if he composed the message that was eventually passed on to the West, Gilbert, op. cit., p. 56, 58n.
40. Gilbert, op. cit., loc. cit., repeated arguments that a single source existed for both messages, credit for identifying the "prussic acid" component as being derived from a Mr. Schulte belongs to Richard Breitman.
41. The current version holds that cca. one million people were exterminated with cyanide gas evolving from Zyklon B, a common pesticide, see further discussion below. The other two million gassed are said to have been killed with exhaust gases, specifically carbon monoxide from diesel engines.
42. Gilbert, op. cit., p. 64f
43. quoted by Stäglich, Wilhelm, Auschwitz: A Judge Looks at the Evidence, Institute for Historical Review, Newport Beach, CA: 1990, p. 112f (an English translation by Thomas Francis of Der Auschwitz Mythos, Grabert Verlag, Tübingen: 1979)
44. The inference is supported in Frank, Anne, Diary of a Young Girl (Definitive Edition), Bantam Books, NY:1997, p. 53, where for the entry of October 9, 1942 she describes hearing rumors of gassing over the "English radio", and see further discussion below.
45. Gilbert, op. cit., p. 93f
46. cf. Martin, op. cit., p. 40. In The New York Times the following day, that is, 26 November 1942. The details are clearly the same.
47. Gilbert, op. cit., p. 94
48. Ibid.
49. Martin, op. cit., p. 41
50. cf. the communication of 16 March 1942, discussed above, also Rothschild, Sylvia, ed.,Voices from the Holocaust, New American Library, NY:1981, where a Polish Jewish survivor recalled his fear of going to the bath house at Sachsenhausen already in 1942, p. 159, and habitual BBC listening by others, p. 129, 153. This testimony also indicates the very wide dispersion of the shower-gassing claim/rumor at this time, which inferentially supports the concept of the BBC feedback loop.
51. The nadir of this claim may be found in the Black Book of Polish Jewry, published in 1946, quoted by Porter, Carlos Whitlock, The Holocaust: Made in Russia, Historical Review Press, n. p.:1988, p. 381.
52. cf. Weber, Mark, "Jewish Soap" in JHR, vol.11, no 2. Also compare Hilberg, Raul, The Destruction of the European Jews, Quadrangle Books, Chicago:1968, pp. 331, 470. Rejection of the wartime soap-making rumor should be distinguished from the claim made at the International Military Tribunal (IMT) at Nuremberg by the Soviet Union that the Germans conducted soap-making experiments at Stutthof ca. 1944. This last claim is not explicitly rejected, but see Weber's article above. The reader is directed to the complete affidavit in support of the claim, reproduced in Porter, Holocaust, pp. 368-376, with the recommendation that they read it and decide for themselves.
53. Martin, op. cit., p. 46
54. Hilberg, op. cit., pp. 331, German propaganda division reports October, 1942, and NO-1660.
55. Hilberg, op. cit., p. 331
56. Martin, op. cit., p. 44
57. Gilbert, op. cit., p. 130
58. on "Kugel Decree" see Harris, op. cit., on the real meaning of the term, see Porter, Carlos Whitlock, Not Guilty at Nuremberg, Historical Review Press, Brighton, Sussex, UK:n. d., pp. 15-16, on the "pedal-driven brain-bashing machine" see Porter, Holocaust, p. 15, 378-380.
59. Porter, Holocaust, p. 408
60. cf. Hahn, Fritz, Waffen und Geheimwaffen des deutschen Heeres, 1933-1945, Bernard & Graefe Verlag, München:1992, "Windkanone", vol. 2, p. 136f
61. Paul, Allen, Katyn, Naval Institute Press, Annapolis: 1996; p. 210, the Germans broke the story April 13, 1943
62. Paul, op. cit., p. 254, the length of the Soviet report is given as 38 pages.
63. On allied response, see Paul, op. cit., p. 222, and especially pp. 301-315, Martin, op. cit., pp. 65-69
64. On German handling of Katyn, see Paul, op. cit., p. 208-210, 228-231, 270-273
65. Gilbert, op. cit., p. 149. The trial took place from July 14 to July 17, 1943. See The People's Verdict: A Full Report of the Proceedings at the Krasnodar and Kharkov German Atrocity Trials, Hutchinson & Co., London:1944. Dushegubki is the feminine substantive plural from the neuter noun Dushegubstvo, meaning murder, literally, destroying or crushing of the spirit (from the verb "to breathe"). The cognate derivation of suffocation is therefore innate.
66. Weckert, Ingrid, "Die Gaswagen -- Kritische Wurdigen der Beweislage" in Grundlagen, provides a detailed analysis of this claim. A review of the testimonies in The People's Verdict finds that the confessions of the German defendants and other witnesses on the gas vans are almost word for word identical, but these descriptions have never been correlated with any drawing or physical object. Other noteworthy themes developed, beginning at the Krasnodar Trial, include the claim that the Germans became obsessed with secrecy once they found out that the Soviets had obtained "gas van" documents (the most important of the PS-501 documents was developed by the Soviets, see Weckert, op. cit., loc. cit.), that Hitler personally ordered the suppression of "gas van" information in July, 1943, and that the bodies were burned to "wipe out the traces" of the crimes.
67. Butz, op. cit., p. 82
68. Butz, op. cit., p. 89, compare also the critique, "Babi Yar: Kritische Fragen und Anmerkungen" in Grundlagen, by Herbert Tiedemann
69. The question of the number of Jews shot by the Germans or their auxiliaries is hotly debated by revisionists, as is also the reasons for or rationale provided for these shootings. There seems little reason to disbelieve the extensive documentary records, which indicate a minimum of several hundreds of thousands of Jews slain. The next question pertains to the reason for these shootings: in some cases it appears tied to anti-partisan activity, in others, to retaliation or simply punitive measures, in others, to the ideological commitment of some Nazi commanders to the killing of all Jews. The traditionalist claim, supported by the judgment of the IMT and NMT, is that 2 million Jews men women and children, were shot, and that they were shot because of their Jewish identity alone. The actual totals one can derive from the existing documents -- assuming 100% reliability -- is about one million. Revisionists dispute the claim of shooting exterminations, largely, one thinks, because it is traditionally linked to the gassing claim, although it must be said that the evidence for the mass shootings is of a completely different order of magnitude and verisimilitude than the evidence for gassing. The shooting claims deserve an extended treatment on their own, one which places these actions in the context of the German tradition of reprisal shootings, from which the Jewish massacres, one way or the other, undoubtedly derived.
70. The People's Verdict, p. 90.
71. Ibid., p. 90, 91f
72. The Soviet prosecution at Nuremberg in the course of its presentation stressed elements of sexual shame and dishonor among Ukrainian deportees during this time-frame. xxxxx
73. It is also remarkable that Gilbert, in Auschwitz and the Allies, completely ignores Heinisch's testimony about Auschwitz, even though he references the Kharkov trial, references The People's Verdict, and sought to present in that book a complete narrative of how information about Auschwitz was acquired. It is also remarkable that Heinisch's narrative precedes the 1944 constructions of the Auschwitz narrative, discussed below. A review of other sources, primary and secondary, shows no references to Heinisch or Somann concerning Auschwitz.
74. Butz, op. cit., p. 146
75. Butz, op. cit., p. 147. This narrative, like the other Auschwitz narratives for 1944, appears to have come from the Weissmandel circle in Bratislava (cf. Dawidowicz, A Holocaust Reader, pp. 318-327) but given the testimony of Heinisch six months previous its derivative nature is easily argued.
76. Gilbert, op. cit., passim
77. e.g., Butz, op. cit., p. xxxxx Butz' meaning of the word "hoax" is rather more subtle than his use of the word implies, compare a later discussion in Hoax, p. xxxxx The other revisionist most closely associated with the Hoax concept is Robert Faurisson.
78. Gilbert, op. cit., p. 66, and esp. 67, 135, 136 [Ziegelboym's suicide], Morgenthau, Henry III, Mostly Morgenthaus, Ticknor & Fields, NY:1991, p. 366, [Henry Morgenthau Jr.'s comment]
79. Gilbert, op. cit., p. 56-58
80. Trombley, Stephen, The Execution Protocol, Anchor Books, NY: 1993, for further discussion of American execution techniques and their origins.
81. Gellermann, Günther W., Der Krieg, der nicht stattfand, Bernard & Graefe Verlag, München:1986, p. 186f
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

DISEASE HAS MOVED hand-in-hand with warfare and migrations throughout history, and has brought more than one army to its knees. Eastern Europe was a particularly dreaded location for such epidemics: the Allies in the Crimean War, and the Napoleonic Army in 1812 were decimated by diseases, above all typhus and cholera, but also typhoid and dysentery.82 For a long time the cause of these diseases was unknown, only towards the end of the 19th Century was it understood that cholera, typhoid, and dysentery were transmitted by microbes usually in contaminated water.83 The vector of typhus -- the body louse -- was not identified until shortly before World War One.84
This lack of understanding did not prevent Europeans from attempting to control these diseases, since the general understanding was that filth and poor hygiene had something to do with their transmission.85
Towards the end of the 19th Century Germany developed a number of procedures for the delousing and disinfection of people and their clothing. These involved showering, smearing the body with petroleum or other substances to kill bugs, and steaming or boiling belongings.86 The application of the these procedures soon came to a test in the 1880's.
Typhus was endemic in Eastern Europe, and cholera had swept through the region on several occasions in the 19th Century.87 The constant saturation, particularly with typhus, conferred a certain immunity on the inhabitants.88 Someone transplanted to these regions could easily catch these diseases.89 Someone leaving the area might carry them.90 The population of the area, comprising roughly the Western Russian Empire and the Eastern provinces of Austria Hungary, Jewish and gentile, were uniformly impoverished, hungry, and, by then current Western hygienic standards, filthy.91 It is no exaggeration to state that most of the people in this region were but one crop failure away from death.92
In 1881, after the assassination of Tsar Alexander II, anti-Semitic riots became characteristic in the region.93 That was the last straw for many Jews, who had borne impoverishment, hunger and filth as stoically as their gentile counterparts, in addition to government interference in their traditional way of life. As a result, many Jews chose to emigrate, and this led them in many cases through Germany.94 In Germany, they were subjected to the standard disinfection procedures, of which Mary Antin gave a much quoted account in her memoirs 95
In a great and lonely field, opposite a solitary house within a large yard, our train pulled up at last, and the conductor commanded the passengers to make haste and get out. [...] [The conductor] hurried us into the one large room that made up the house, and then into the yard. Here a great many men and women, dressed in white, received us, the women attending the women and girls of the passengers, and the men the others. This was another scene of bewildering confusion, parents losing their children, and little ones crying; baggage being thrown together in one corner of the yard, heedless of contents, which suffered in consequence; those white-clad Germans shouting commands, always accompanied with "Quick! Quick!" -- the confused passengers obeying all orders like meek children, only questioning now and then what was to be done with them. And no wonder if in some minds stories arose of people being captured by robbers, murderers, and the like. Here we had been taken to a lonely place where only that house was to be seen; our things were taken away, our friends separated from us; a man came to inspect us, as if to ascertain our full value; strange-looking people driving us about like dumb animals, helpless and unresisting; children we could not see crying in a way that suggested terrible things; ourselves driven into a little room where a great kettle was boiling on a little stove; our clothes taken off, our bodies rubbed with a slippery substance that could be any bad thing; a shower of warm water let down on us without warning; again driven together to another little room where we sit, wrapped in woolen blankets till large, coarse bags are brought in, their contents turned out, and we see only a cloud of steam, and hear a woman's voice to dress ourselves, -- "Quick! Quick!" -- or else we'll miss -- something we cannot hear. We are forced to pick out our clothes from among the others, with the steam blinding us; we choke, cough, entreat the women to give us time; they persist, "Quick! Quick! -- or you'll miss the train!" Oh, so we really won't be murdered! They are only making us ready for the continuing of our journey, cleaning us of all suspicions of dangerous illness. Thank God!
Mary Antin's bewilderment at disinfection and quarantine, arising from disorientation and novelty, is understandable, so too are the wild rumors that would come from incomprehension and anxiety. But it must be said that such measures were necessary: the year before Mary Antin made her passage in 1893, Hamburg had been hard hit by a cholera epidemic, and New York City had been hit with both a cholera and typhus epidemic.96
In the case of the New York epidemics we find many themes that would repeat themselves over subsequent decades. The immigrants, particularly Jews, feared the process of disinfection and quarantine, believing in some cases that their loved ones were being taken to a slaughterhouse.97 They distrusted the health authorities, and sought to hide instances of typhus, never realizing of course that such opposition and concealment merely spread the disease further.98 In addition, there were problems with the quarantine. By regulation, those dead of typhus had to be cremated, but this was a violation of Jewish law.99 The quarantine stations did not make provision for kosher food, and, as a result, several pious Jews starved themselves.100 The intereactions between the New York health authorities and the immigrant Jews could almost be characterized as culture shock, so deep the chasm of non-comprehension and non-accommodation that divided them.
The same pattern emerged in World War One, and not only among Jewish people. The Germans, in the context of reorganizing the Turkish army, spent a great deal of effort in controlling typhus and other diseases.101 The two main tools of this effort were the Dampfdesinfektionwagens (mobile steam disinfection trucks) and the Turkish baths, which were converted for disinfection purposes.102 The Germans used primarily sulfur gas, which required a generator (Vergaser) that would burn the sulfur and provide the gas.103 Already at the beginning of 1914 the Germans were using vergasen (gasify, gas) as a synonym for begasen (fumigate). 104
Cooperation among the local populations varied: the Turks did not understand why lice had to be killed, because Allah forbade it, the Greek Orthodox and Jewish subjects objected on religious grounds to the bathing and shaving that was part of the treatment.105
A severe typhus epidemic in Serbia in the winter of 1914-15 led to international intervention, including an American Relief Expedition that did much to control the disease in its early stages.106 In 1915-1916, as Bulgaria entered the war on the side of the Central Powers, she was given large chunks of Serbian territory and this in turn required heightened vigilance on the part of the disinfection squads.107 In this context a story appeared in the London Daily Telegraph in March, 1916, that alleged that 700,000 Serbians had been asphyxiated.108 Robert Faurisson has successfully shown that this rumor or atrocity claim was directly related to the application of disinfection measures in the region.109 Surely it is no coincidence that the first claim of mass exterminations in 1942, as we recall, also featured gassings, the Daily Telegraph, and 700,000 victims. The story also reminds us that a mobile steam disinfection truck could easily be converted in a frightened and ignorant mind into a traveling gas chamber.110
The reactions to disinfection procedures in Turkey and the Balkans were also apparent in Poland, whether the disease control was being administered by Germans, Americans, or the British.111 The Germans went to extensive lengths to control diseases, and particularly typhus throughout Poland.112 This involved carrot and stick methods: on the one hand, the Germans painstakingly wrote a brochure, that was published in the Yiddish language, trying to explain, with appropriate references to the Torah, the importance of personal hygiene, and the necessity of controlling lice.113 On the other hand, the Germans would sometimes be required to force the local inhabitants to bathe and shower at bayonet point.114 When the war was over, a terrible typhus epidemic swept through Poland and the Western Russian provinces.115 American and British specialists went to Poland with a view to controlling the disease. They also sought to delouse and disinfect the residents.116 But they too ran into resistance and non-compliance, particularly on the part of the Jewish population.117 One feature of the American treatment that would soon become typical was the use of bottled cyanide gas as a means of destroying vermin.118
In the 1920's the Germans developed media for using cyanide gas that would be safer than the use of bottles or the so-called barrel system.119 One substance developed, called Zyklon B, used clay-like pellets into which the gas was absorbed as liquid under pressure and then sealed in a can.120 When the can was opened, the pellets would be strewn and the gas would slowly develop.121 By the Second World War, through the addition of gypsum, Zyklon B had now achieved a stability such that three hours were required for the full evolution of the gas at room temperature,122 which was ideal for its purpose as an insecticide.
Also during this period the Germans developed fumigation chambers or Entwesungskammern.123 These were usually constructed out of steel, although brick and concrete could also be used.124 About 10 meters square, the rooms would be filled with clothes and then the Zyklon pellets would be strewn among them. Such chambers, or Apparate, typically had two doors: the dirty clothes would go in one door, the disinfected clothes would be taken out of the other door.125 The Germans also developed a complicated machinery whereby forced air at or near the boiling point of hydrogen cyanide would be blown through the pellets to speed up the evolution time.126 The same air circulation technology (Kreislauf) would be used in large railroad tunnels, which by means of the air circulation gas generating apparatus (Kreislaufvergasungsapparaturen) could fumigate an entire passenger train at one time.127
Although Zyklon B was widely used for disinfection, it is important to note that throughout the '30's and during the war many other gases and substances were employed to combat vermin.128 One gas which was widely substituted for Zyklon was "T-Gas" a mixture of ethylene oxide and carbon dioxide which came in steel tanks and would be piped into the disinfection chamber.129 Other gases included Tritox, Ventox, and Areginal.130
Delousing and disinfection procedures were also a major component of German municipal disinfection centers, temporary huts of the German Labor Service, and transit camps (Durchgangslagern) for POW's or deported populations. All three featured a division into a dirty and clean side (reine und unreine Seite), and all three featured undressing rooms, shower rooms, and standard size fumigation chambers with double doors.131 There were some variations of course. The municipal disinfection center at Darmstadt for example, was enlarged in World War Two to make room for the influx of laborers from the East, which we assume to have comprised Poles, Soviet POW's, and Jews.132 Its cellars were also adapted to air raid shelters.133 The standard huts (Unterkünfte) for the German labor service were equipped with a diesel room, since diesels were expected to provide electricity in the absence of a power net for these outlying structures: these structures were also meant to be temporary and were designed to be put up and taken down in a minimum of man hours.134
In World War Two, the Germans aggressively pursued the containment of disease using all of these methods. As the concentrations of Jews in the ghettos increased, epidemics would break out, and the Germans would attempt to get the local Jewish authorities to implement disinfection procedures.135 Sadly, concealment, non-compliance, and resistance were characteristic in many ghettos, on the other hand, the records indicate that the ghetto in Vilna (Vilnius) was able to successfully control epidemics throughout the war.136
The experience of the Wehrmacht in the field also suggests a successful effort at controlling epidemics, including the use of decontamination vehicles and mobile showering units, many of which were improvised by the men of the German Medical Corps (Sanitatsdienst).137
Of course, the most notorious example of the application of these procedures came in the concentration camps. Upon arrival, inmates were routinely stripped, searched for valuables, showered, and then given clothes that had been previously disinfected.138 In fact, the most common procedure involved disinfecting the clothing in one part of the "bath and disinfection complex" while the arrivals showered in another part. Kurt Vonnegut's description shows how even American prisoners of war entering German custody could become anxious and fearful at the strangeness of the ritual:
The naked Americans took their places under many showerheads along a white-tiled wall. There were no faucets they could control. They could only wait for whatever was coming. Their penises were shriveled and their balls were retracted. Reproduction was not the main business of the evening.
An unseen hand turned a master valve. Out of the showerheads gushed scalding rain. The rain was a blowtorch that did not warm. It jazzed and jangled Billy's skin without thawing the ice in the marrow of his long bones.
The Americans' clothes were meanwhile passing through poison gas. Body lice and bacteria and fleas were dying by the billions. So it goes.139
There seems little reason to doubt that the level of disorientation and fear had changed since the time of Mary Antin 50 years before, to say nothing of the humiliation: indeed, there are witness testimonies that support the idea of such continuity.140
In recounting these aspects of German disinfection procedures, as well as Jewish responses, which ranged from sullen non-compliance and avoidance to paranoid fear, one finds a remarkable similarity and a probable point of contact for virtually all of the gassing claims from 1942 into the summer of 1944.
Sobibor, for example, was described in German documents as a transit camp [Durchgangslager].141 Yet a transit camp would require facilities for showering arrivals and disinfecting their belongings before sending them further on their journey.142 And indeed we find in survivor testimonies that that is exactly what happened to them there.143 Yet at the same time, we have rumors reported in the West, and later we will have testimonies, that assure us that Sobibor was a camp where arrivals were simply exterminated via the familiar shower-gas-burning sequence.144 The same situation applies to Treblinka testimonies, for the Malkinia disinfection establishment was only a few kilometers away.145
For Majdanek the situation is even more remarkable. As we shall see later, the Bath and Disinfection Complex II would be earmarked as an extermination center by the Soviets: but in its construction it is virtually identical to the standard hut for delousing incoming members of the Labor Service and disinfecting their belongings.146
In summarizing the gassing rumors for the period 1942 through the spring of 1944 we encountered several references to prussic acid, showers and baths, and mobile gas chambers that led us into a discussion of German disinfection procedures. We have found that over six decades before World War Two the Germans had devised, for purposes of disease control, procedures that called for the use of mobile delousing and disinfection chambers, baths and disinfection complexes, and fumigation chambers that would utilize a common pesticide, Zyklon B, whose active ingredient was cyanide gas.
But above and beyond the German procedures we have found characteristic reactions to such diseases control measures, among many ignorant or traditional religious communities, and also among Jews, particularly those from the traditional and insulated East European communities.147 The reactions have ranged from avoidance and non-compliance, to anxiety, fear, and rumor-mongering of a particularly destructive sort. Finally, we note a haunting similarity between the delousing procedures known to have been applied and the rumors of mass gassing that were current at the time.
Therefore the most likely explanation for the evolution of the mass gas extermination legend, to this point in our analysis, is that the application of delousing measures on the populations of Eastern Europe, and particularly on the Jewish people who were being resettled to the East, or dragooned into the Labor Service, conjured up the typical rumors of extermination and slaughter as they had in the past. These rumors, in turn, were conveyed to Jewish parties in Western Europe and the United States, who appear to have all too readily believed them, the rumors in turn were propagated by the British in radio broadcasts back to Europe, including Yiddish language broadcasts, such that the rumors were already widely known, if not widely credited, throughout Europe by the end of 1942. We are now prepared to engage the next evolution of the mass gassing claim.

NOTES
82. The preeminent revisionist work on the subjects discussed here are two articles by Friedrich Paul Berg, "Zyklon B and the German Delousing Chambers" and "Typhus and the Jews," both originally published in the JHR and now available on the CODOH website at: http://www.codoh.com/gcgv.html . The following texts on epidemic diseases and their role in history were found useful: Marks, Geoffrey and Beatty, William K., Epidemics, Scribners, NY: 1976; Cartwright, Frederick F., Disease and History, Barnes & Noble, NY: 1996; McNeil, William, Plagues and Peoples, Anchor Books, NY:1976; Rosenberg, Charles E., The Cholera Years, University of Chicago, Chicago:1962; Zinsser, Hans, Rats, Lice, and History, Black Dog & Leventhal, NY: 1963; Dixon, Bernard, Magnificent Microbes, Atheneum, NY:1979; Schimitschek, Erwin, & Werner, G. T., Malaria, Fleckfieber, Pest, S. Hirzel Verlag, Stuttgart:1985, Hobhouse, Henry, Forces of Change, Arcade, NY:1990.
83. Carwright, op. cit., inter alia, discusses the water-borne diseases in detail.
84. Schimitschek, op. cit., p. 90
85. To a large extent Rosenberg's book, op. cit., is expressly concerned with the development of prophylaxis without a clear comprehension of etiology, and see Evans, cited below.
86. enumerated in Encyclopedia Brittanica, [hereinafter, EB] 12th Edition (1922), Typhus, vol.
II, p. 825-827, and Evans, cited below.
87. consult Zinsser, op. cit.,, Marks op. cit., Hobhouse, op. cit., also Goodall, cited below.
88. Note important characterization of typhus quoted in Dixon, op. cit., p. 201f.
89. Ibid., Also Goodall, cited below.
90. This very important concept involves the manner in which recrudescent typhus, which can recur many years after infection, can lead to a mild case of fever. However, if the person so afflicted with "Brill-Zinsser Disease" lives in a louse-ridden community, infection can then be transmitted to the louse and then to the louse matrix of the community with epidemic and lethal effect. Compare the comments by Zinsser, op. cit., p. 235, 235-239, in which he sketches the outlines of two species of the louse-borne disease. For typhoid fever, it is well known that about 1% of victims (female only) can become permanent carriers of the microbe in their gall bladders, compare "Typhoid Mary."
91. Starkenstein, E., "Hygienische und sanitäre Verhältnisse Polens. Ein Beitrag zur Ostjudenfrage" in Archiv für Soziale Hygiene und Demographie, 1 & 2 Heft, 12.VI.1917, pp. 19-38, is characteristic; gentile populations had similar problems, consult EB, article on Typhus, loc. cit.
92. This is a truism of Russian history, due to the short growing and harvesting season, and other factors, such that grain yields rarely exceeded 3:1. Hobhouse, op. cit., discusses in greater detail.
93. These are the "pogroms" which will continue until the end of the Russian Civil War; the roots of these anti-Jewish actions seem variable; partly attributed to religious anti-Semitism (i.e., Blood Libel accusations), partly due to the "Russification" tendencies of the Empire, which affected all minorities, not just the Jewish people, partly due to economic competition with other ethnics (Greeks, Germans), partly due to the peculiar position the Eastern Jews occupied vis-a-vis the peasantry, which was newly emancipated and striving to adapt, as well as other social, economic, and demographic conditions, some of which are adumbrated by Hobhouse, op. cit. In short, the circumstances that could contribute to anti-Jewish violence at this time and in the examined period were quite complex, what they all seem to have in common is the tremendous and radical changes taking place in the Empire, which will become even more rapid subsequent to the Revolution of 1917. To anticipate a later note, we register here merely the tendency of many Jewish observers to regard these causes as united only by hatred of the Jewish people, we note as well as the tendency of Jewish historians to regard these outbreaks by and large as the product of official instigation.
94. Discussed in, inter alia, Howe, Irving, World of Our Fathers, Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, NY: 1976, pp. 29-38.
95. Antin, Mary, The Promised Land, Penguin, NY: 1997, p. 138f, the book was originally published in 1912, and was based in turn on From Plotzk to Boston, from the 1890's, which in turn was based on an epistle Mary wrote in Yiddish to an uncle in Russia shortly after her arrival in Boston in the spring of 1893. The text is given in truncated form in Howe, op. cit., Markel, cited below, and Jan Van Pelt and Deborah Dwork, Auschwitz: 1270 to Present, W. W. Norton & Company, New York: 1996..
96. On Hamburg, see Evans, Richard J., Tod in Hamburg, a magnificent social history of the Free City (in German translation from the English), Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg: 1996; for New York, see Markel, Howard, Quarantine!, Johns Hopkins UP, Baltimore and London: 1997.
97. Markel, op. cit., p. 52, 50
98. Markel, op. cit., p. 54, p. 44f. A case of typhus causes the rickettsia to course in the patient's bloodstream, where it can be communicated to lice and from the lice to others people. Hence, in a lice-ridden environment, and it must be stressed in 1892 that lice were not understood as the vector, refusal to comply with quarantine certainly would facilitate the spread of the disease.
99. Markel, op. cit., p. 63
100. Markel, op. cit., p. 65
101. Becker, Helmut, Äskulap zwischen Reichsadler und Halbmond, Helmut Becker, n. p., 1990, provides an extensive survey including many extracts from primary sources and memoirs.
102. Becker, op. cit., p. 3, and compare discussion of Badeanstalten to control typhus, p. 126, Use of petroleum, p. 191, discussion of Apparat, p. 361-362, etc.
103. Ibid.
104. cf. "Ihm lagen zugrunde die Erfahrungen, die ich bei der Typhus- und Ruhrbekämpfung in Nordchina und bei der Genickstarrebekämpfung in München gemacht hatte. Sie lautete kurz: Heraus aus den versuchten Häusern, in weit angelegte, gesund gelegene, womöglich weit entfernte, auf Bergen gelegene Lager, vorher aber energische Reinigung aller Personen, Desinfektion aller Kleidungs- und Wäschestücke, die neuen Lager nur mit völlig gereinigten und neu gekleideten Truppen betreten lassen. Einschränkung des Dienstes, aber doppelte Rationen. So geschah es auch. Die Desinfektionswagen führen vor die Kasernen, Truppenteil für Truppenteil wurde gebadet. Dann die neue Kleidung empfangen, und sofort nach dem Zeltlager abgerückt. In der Kaserne wurde dann die alte Kleidung, Wäsche, Bettzeug desinfiziert, die Zimmer mit Formaldehyd und gegen die Läuse mit schwefelige Säure vergast." quoted from Meyer's memoirs, Becker, op. cit., p. 38
105. Becker, op. cit.
106. EB, article Typhus, loc. cit.
107. Becker, op. cit., inferred from the description of heightened procedures in the European portion of Turkey during this period, pp. 368-388, note also discussion of railroad delousing tunnels, p. 374.
108. "Request for Additional Information on the Myth of 'Gassings' of Serbs in World War One", Robert Faurisson, JHR, vol. 11, no. 2
109. Ibid.
110. The use of such vehicles in World War Two is well attested, consult Crowell, "Technique and Operation of German Anti-Gas Shelters in World War Two" for references.
111. For German disinfection procedures in World War One, titles include: Blumberg, Dr., "Über behelfsmäßig herstellbare Anlagen zur Entlausung und Desinfektion im großen" in Öffentliche Gesundheitspflege, Heft 10, 1918, pp. 353-364; Wolf, Dr. "Das Desinfektionsverfahren mit Blausäure" in Öffentliche Gesundheitspflege, Heft 2, 1919, pp. 54-66; Wolf, Dr. "Das Desinfektionsverfahren mit Blausäure (Zusammenfassende Übersicht II)" in Öffentliche Gesundheitspflege, Heft 4, 1922, pp. 126-130; For British procedures, see Goodall, below, for Americans in the Typhus Relief Expedition of 1919, see Cornebise, Alfred E.,Typhus and Doughboys, University of Delaware Press, Newark, NJ:1982
112. e.g., Celarek, Dr., "Über die unter der Zivilbevölkerung Lublins im Jahre 1915/16 herrschende Fleckfieberepedemie und ihre Bekämpfung" in Öffentliche Gesundheitspflege, Heft 11, 1917, pp. 597-602; articles by Starkenstein above, and Frey, below.
113. Frey, Dr. "Die Bekämpfung der Fleckfieberepedemie in der Zivilbevölkerung des Generalgouvernements Warschau in den Jahren 1915/16", in Öffentliche Gesundheitspflege, Heft 1, 1917, pp. 12-30, [the Yiddish instruction appears on pp. 21-25, phonetically in German script, cf. Fig. 11, and the article contains many excellent photos; the following Heft contains the continuation of the article]
114. cited in Goodall, E. W., "Typhus Fever in Poland" in Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine,vol. 13, April 23, 1920
115. Goodall, loc. cit., Cornebise, op. cit., Zinsser, op. cit., and several others.
116. Goodall, loc. cit., Cornebise, op. cit.
117. Goodall, loc. cit., Cornebise, op. cit., passim!, but see p. 94, p. 96, [the complaint of the Jews is characterized by Cornebise as "anti-Semitic"] p. 122., however, Isaac Bashevis Singer's historical novel, The Family Moskat, (Fawcett Crest, NY:1950, p. 376) includes an instructive description of the situation at the time: "An epidemic of typhus threatened, and even cases of cholera had been reported; the authorities hastily assigned a barrack for the disinfection of the civilian population. Orthodox Jews were compelled to shave off their beards and earlocks, and girls had their heads shorn. Immediately there sprang up a group of "fixers," who, for a bribe, obtained forged disinfection certificates for those who would not submit to these indignities."
118. Cornebise, op. cit., p. 93, 96-97, 98-100, 115, note in particular the quoted message, "Am looking forward with anticipation to the gas-squad with HCN that you promise sometime.", p. 96f
119. Berg, Friedrich, "Zyklon B and the German Delousing Chambers"
120. Berg, op. cit.
121. We say "slowly" here, but originally the development of the gas was rather rapid, this caused problems with the shelf life of the can and frequently caused danger, insofar as the liquid would then be de-stabilized within the can even before opening. Germar Rudolf's researches have found that gypsum was added in the 1930's to protract the evaporation,
122. This is indicated by the article of R. Irmscher from 1942, which shows a 100% evaporation of the cyanide from the gypsum ("ERCO") composite pellets after three hours at 59 degrees Fahrenheit. For this and the preceding point consult the most recent version of the Rudolf Report, at: http://www.vho.org
123. Berg, "Zyklon B"
124. Berg, op. cit.
125. Berg, op. cit.
126. Berg, op. cit.
127. Berg, op. cit.
128. Handloser, Siegfried, ed. Wehrhygiene, Springer-Verlag, Berlin:1944, in the article by B. Schmidt, "Desinfektion, Sterilisation, Entwesung", lists several, including Zyklon, Ventox, Tritox, Cuprex, Formaldehyde.
129. Ibid., p. 193f
130. Kalthoff, u. a., Die Händler von Zyklon B, VSA, Hamburg:1999, provides extensive details of these other gases, as well as the history of disinfection materials particularly as these touch upon the activities of the Hamburg- based Tesch & Stabenow.
131. Kämper, "Die Umgestaltung und Vergrößerung der Desinfektionsanstalt der Stadt Dortmund" in Gesundheits-Ingenieur, 27.IX.41; Stangelmeyer, Josef, "Genormte, zerlegbare Rohrleitungsnetze für die gesundheitstechnischen Anlagen der ortsveränderlichen Unterkünfte des Reichsarbeitdienstes" in Gesundheits-Ingenieur, 25.VI.42; Konrich, Friedrich, "Über die Sanierungsanstalten der deutschen Kriegsgefangenenlager" in Gesundheits-Ingenieur, 19.VII.41; Puntigam, Franz, "Die Durchganglager der Arbeitseinsatzverwaltung als Einrichtungen der Gesundheitsversorge" in Gesundheits-Ingenieur, Heft 2, Jahrg. 1944, pp. 47-56; other references of relevance to World War Two include:(articles): Ruppert, Joseph, "Gesundheitsverhältnisse und Seuchenbekämpfung im Generalgouvernement", in Der praktische Desinfektor, June, 1941, pp. 61-74; Finger, Georg, "Grundsätzliches zur Läusebekämpfung mit Imprägnierungsmitteln" in Der deutsche Militarartz, June, 1944, pp. 295-297. Relevant titles include Haag, Friedrich Erhard, Lagerhygiene, J.F. Lehmanns Verlag, München-Berlin: 1943; Walbaum, Jost, Kampf den Seuchen! Deutscher Ärzte-Einsatz im Osten, Buchverlag "Deutscher Osten", Krakau:1941.
132. Kämper, loc. cit
133. Ibid.
134. Stangelmeyer, loc. cit.
135. Walbaum, op. cit., is one source for this, Trunk, Judenrat, describes the general reluctance to submit to these procedures, as do other Holocaust authors, including Browning, Christopher, The Path to Genocide, Cambridge UP, Cambridge, 1992, pp. 145-168.
136. Discussed in Trunk, Judenrat, p. 165, and the whole of chapter 7 is very valuable and apt here. Unfortunately, Trunk follows the tendency among Jewish historians which we will discuss later, whereby all misfortunes that occur are viewed as part of someone else's conspiratorial designs, thus the diseases that occurred in the ghettos are said to have been part of the Nazi's "diabolical plan." [p. 143]. The enormous expenditure that the Germans made for controlling diseases tends to make this interpretation unsupportable.
137. Buchner, Alex, Der Sanitätsdienst des Heeres, 1939-1945, Podzun-Pallas, Wölfersheim-Berstadt: 1995
138. Discussed in Rothschild, op.cit., also Trunk, Jewish Responses to Nazi Persecution, Stein & Day, NY: 1981, both passim.
139. Vonnegut, Kurt, Slaughterhouse Five, Dell, New York:1988, p. 84
140. Compare Rothschild, op. cit., p. 159, also Trunk, Responses, p. 162; Trunk has several more of these, in Yiddish testimonies most of which were given soon after the war.
141. Butz, op. cit., p. 212, Hilberg, op. cit., p. 619
142. Puntigam, "Durchganglager", loc. cit.
143. Novitch, Miriam, Sobibor: Martyrdom and Revolt, Holocaust Library, NY:1980
144. Ibid.
145. The standard work on Treblinka remains Steiner's novelistic treatment, essays by Andrew Allen and Mark Weber, and, in particular, the article by Arnulf Neumaier in Grundlagen, "Der Treblinka-Holocaust" actually discuss details, and put the workings of the camp in a wider context.
146. Consult and compare floor plan of Majdanek Bath and Disinfection complex, in Grundlagen, p. 276
147. Trunk, in Responses (see citation below) as well as Novitch, op. cit., contain testimonies whereby the Westerners (chiefly Dutch) arriving at Sobibor welcomed the showers, the implication, sometimes explicit, being that the Polish Jews knew better.
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IN THE SUMMER of 1944 the legend of mass gas extermination became solidified through a series of reports that were published by the Soviet government, and, at the end of the year, by a report issued by an agency of the United States government. At this point the gassing claims assumed authoritative status, so much so that by the end of the year the Germans would explicitly deny them. The issuance of official reports cannot be overstressed: a rumor of any kind repeated over an official medium, such as the radio, and particularly in print, gives enormous weight to the claim. Nevertheless, as we shall see, these claims were not accompanied by hard evidence.
The first document that is important is a communication that seems to have come from a Jewish circle in Slovakia at the beginning of July, 1944, which we will call the July Report. This report is noteworthy because it contains the first full series of allegations about the Auschwitz Birkenau camp. Gilbert reproduces the document in full.148 In the context of the gassing claim, the report contains some data that may be considered accurate, in the sense that they do not contradict the current version. Thus we have a garbled reference to the Zyklon B issued by Tesch and Stabenow, and we have a reference to a bathing establishment, and holes in the ceiling where the gas drops down.149 But there are other elements in the report that are clearly false, for example, the reference to the number of holes (three), the time required for execution (one minute), the rails that are said to have led to the cremation ovens, which are also incorrectly described and counted, and so on.150
While we can grant that different observers might incorrectly estimate the time of execution, or the number of victims, because of the shock of what they were observing, it is another matter entirely that an observer would lose track of his or her ability to count or perceive. Therefore, while we may be inclined to dismiss the differences in the time of gassing, or the number of victims, the errors of physical detail are much more serious, and strongly suggest that whoever described these processes was never anywhere near a gas chamber or a crematorium. Therefore it must be conceded that the witnesses who wrote the report were repeating rumor, and, even if the witnesses believed it, the existence of a rumor is certainly not proof of the facts which the rumor alleges. The only thing the July report really shows is that gassing rumors were current in Auschwitz at the time.
The actual elements of the July report combine old and new features. The communiqué represents the first time that Zyklon B was specifically described as the source of poison gas. On the other hand, as we have seen, rumors about cyanide usage sprang up in the summer of 1942 and were abandoned late that year from the propaganda. The showering motif appears, which had been a common feature ever since late 1942. It seems that the association of poison entering through the actual holes in the shower nozzle was an easy inference -- we note that already in the previous year, in discussing the steam exterminations at Treblinka, the steam was described as emerging from holes in the pipes. This conceptualization of the gas dropping down on the inmates may also account for the idea of overhead openings needed for introducing the gas: obviously, Zyklon could not pass through a shower-head and would require a larger opening.
Another explanation, and a possible clue to another motif, involves the dusting with chlorine and lime which frequently accompanied the deportations, which goes back to the Karski report. That description had already led to some descriptions of chlorine gassing.151 In the July Report, however, we have a situation in which the bathers are led into a room, allowed to stand for several minutes so that an optimum temperature is achieved, and then the gas in the form of powder is thrown on them. Of course the problem with this description is that it is false, Zyklon B does not act in this fashion.152
The next event in the evolution of the gassing legend is crucial, because it involves the first allied exposure to a German concentration camp. Majdanek was liberated at the end of July, 1944, during a massive Soviet offensive that destroyed Army Group Center.153 For a month, the Soviets did not allow any visitors, then, at the end of August, they gave Western journalists a brief tour.154 This tour, in turn, generated wide press reportage by the New York Times and the Christian Science Monitor, and was accompanied by an official report of the Soviet Special Commission on Majdanek.155
The gassing sequence at Majdanek is different from that described at Auschwitz in July or at any other camp to this point. Previous accounts had always stressed that the victims were disrobed and met their end in the shower or bath itself. But at Majdanek it was now alleged that the shower was a preliminary step to the gassing process, which occurred at the other end of the building.156 This is a major divergence and we must inquire why.
The reason appears to lie in the physical layout that presented itself to the Russians. Most of the gassings were supposed to have taken place in the building labeled "Bath and Disinfection Complex II." This is a long narrow building that featured a series of rooms, including a dressing room, a shower room, a drying room (Trockenraum -- that is a heated room for drying inmates after showering) and, at the far end, three small squarish rooms (approx. 4 x 4 meters, but one larger), two of which had outside attachments with boilers that piped air into the rooms (the third was connected to the Trockenraum).157 The showers in the building actually worked, therefore the gassings could not have happened there. The smaller rooms and the Trockenraum, brick faced on the outside and roofed with reinforced concrete, thus became the gas chambers.
There were other features present at the site. The Trockenraum (sometimes called Room "A") had two wooden openings carved into the concrete ceiling: the same room contained several wooden struts, apparently with some wire reinforcing.158 It was also equipped with wooden doors with three sets of bidirectional handles.159 The smaller rooms at the far end had heavy steel doors, gastight doors with peepholes, also with bidirectional handles.160 In addition, two of the rooms had still extant piping running along the wall, about 30 cm above the floor, that appeared to be connected to five steel tanks located outside of the rooms.161 At first glance the gastight doors and the ceiling openings seem to be peculiar additions for a bath and disinfection complex, but they do not necessarily support a gassing claim, beyond that the structure corresponds to typical bath and disinfection complexes.
The Soviet scenario that was presented to the world's press went like this: the people were told to strip, leave their clothes in one room, then pass into another room where they would shower.162 After the shower, they would be led into one of the "gas chambers" where the Zyklon B would be dropped down on them after a waiting period. The three boiler rooms, on the other hand, would generate carbon monoxide gas that would be piped into the rooms, or else hot air to heat the rooms, or finally carbon monoxide would be piped in through the tanks.163 Meanwhile, the Germans were supposed to watch the death throes of the victims through the peepholes.164
There are some problems with this scenario. Of four rooms designated as gas chambers, only one (Room "A") had openings in the ceiling for the Zyklon to be introduced, two of the other rooms had crudely cut holes in the reinforced concrete.165 One of the rooms had no ceiling opening at all. Three of the rooms had boilers attached outside (hence, perhaps, the origin of the "three gas chambers"), the fourth room had no opening of any kind except the door.166 Graf and Mattogno have noted that of the five tanks found, only two remain, and they are marked not CO, but CO2, that is, carbon dioxide, necessary for the generation of disinfection gases (T-Gas), but with no claimed extermination potential.167 These, along with the boilers, would suggest that the rooms were used over time with a variety of disinfestation substances, including Zyklon B, T-Gas, and hot air. The gastight doors with peepholes, on the other hand, with bi-directional handles could be opened from inside or outside.168 Finally, the idea that showering ahead of time would facilitate the evolution of Zyklon B is simply wrong.169 What we have here is a clear case of forcing the facts to fit the theory.
Furthermore, while we continue to maintain that most of the elements in the gassing story arose more or less spontaneously and were just as spontaneously believed, at Majdanek we are confronted with grim evidence of a deliberate Soviet hoax. This is because while Room "A" of the complex features two carefully crafted and well dressed openings of wood in the ceiling, someone had attempted to replicate the openings in Rooms "B" and "C" by clumsily hacking small, squarish holes through the reinforced concrete roof and not even bothering to remove the rebar.170 It is simply unbelievable that the workmanship that created the apertures in the ceiling of Room "A" created the hole in the roof in Room "B" and "C", and moreover the opening in Rooms "B" and "C" could never have been gas tight. To the extent that these latter openings are claimed as contemporaneous opening devised for introducing poison gas, to that extent we are looking at clear cut case of Soviet fraud.
The reverberations of the Majdanek Special Commission were extremely broad, many of the symbols of the Holocaust have their beginning here. Among these one may note the huge piles of clothes, shoes, and hair, which were taken as prima facie evidence of exterminations of a million and a half human beings, although we now know that these piles of belongings indicate no such thing, and the current evaluation holds that less than 100,000 perished at Majdanek.171 Other elements include the red-brick facing of the gas chambers, the flat concrete roofs, the piping above the floor, and similar elements. But the most notorious element of the Majdanek report were the gas tight doors with peepholes. The first place this would become apparent was in the War Relief Board report.
It is not known exactly how long and in what form the War Refugee Board (WRB) report circulated in the late summer and early fall of 1944.172 It is known that repetition of some of its claims called forth a German rejection of the allegation in October.173 Finally, on November 26, 1944, the WRB Report was issued, and was summarized in the world press.174 The contents of the report, with respect to the gassing claim we are investigating, for the most part recapitulated material from the July Report, however there is one reference to the peephole not present in that earlier report that strongly suggests the influence of the Majdanek Special Commission:
Prominent guests from Berlin were present at the inauguration of the first crematorium in March, 1943. The "program" consisted of the gassing and burning of 8,000 Cracow Jews. The guests, both officers and civilians, were extremely satisfied with the results and the special peephole fitted into the door of the gas chamber was in constant use. They were lavish in their praise of this newly erected installation.175
The WRB report contains what would be considered many errors by the standards of today's knowledge of the subject.176 Nevertheless it was for some months the most important document in propagandizing not only the shower-gas-burning sequence but also the alleged unique status of Auschwitz Birkenau as a slaughterhouse of vast proportions. But as we have seen, it contained enough errors that it could not be a reliable source for the mass gassings it alleged, and, in fact, it appears to have both influenced, and been influenced by, the Soviet Special Commission on Majdanek.177 In the panicked atmosphere of the time, no doubt the similarities of the reports would have caused more than one sincere individual to feel that they were slowly piercing a veil of truth; 50 years later, however, it seems less likely that that was the case.

NOTES
148. Gilbert, op. cit., pp. 262-264, where it is described as a summary. The changes involved with this document, which will culminate in the War Refugee Board (WRB) Report, are detailed by Miroslav Karny, "The Vrba and Wetzler Report", in Gutman, Y. & Berenbaum, M., Anatomy, pp. 553-568.
149. Ibid., Although the July Report is described as a summary, it contains errors of detail (e.g., "Megacyclon") that are absent from the November WRB Report, as well as an important omission (i.e., the peephole at the inaugural gassing) that is included in the later report. Karny's article suggests that the report was revised throughout the year, it is difficult to check exactly how because he further notes that the original manuscript has not survived. (Karny, op. cit., loc. cit., p. 564n5.)
150. Ibid.
151. Martin, op. cit., p. 145
152. That is, Zyklon does not come in a powder, and the optimum temperature is not liable to be reached in a packed underground cellar. It should be noted that some cyanide products do come in powdered form, but these are not the substances alleged.
153. This was Operation Bagration, timed to coincide with the third anniversary of Barbarossa and the Western Allies, who continued to be pinned down in Normandy. An evaluation of precisely what the Soviets encountered during this advance, which surrounded huge amounts of territory, is crucial to settling claims of what occurred here during the war.
154. Martin, op. cit., loc. cit. The recent book of Jurgen Graf and Carlo Mattogno, KL Majdanek: Eine historische und technische Studie, Castle Hill, Hastings:1998 is a thorough and indispensable account of materials for this camp.
155. 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, Moscow:1944 This document, in the Hoover Library, Stanford, CA, placed on the Internet due to the efforts of Philip Traurig. cf. Also Graf & Mattogno, op. cit., p. 119f for a detailed analysis of Soviet and Polish claims. On contemporary press coverage, consult, e.g., W. H. Lawrence "Nazi Mass Killing Laid Bare in Camp", in Reporting World War II, Part Two: American Journalism, 1944-1946, Library of America, New York: 1995, pp. 267-273.
156. Communique, op. cit., pp. 13-17
157. Ibid.
158. noted by Aroneanu, op. cit., but not the text of the communique we are using here.
159. Graf & Mattogno, op. cit., p.
160. Communique, op. cit., loc. cit.
161. Graf & Mattogno, op. cit., p.
162. Communique, op. cit., loc. cit.
163. Communique, op. cit., loc. cit. The source of the CO and/or function of the boilers is not completely clear from the text, although bottles of CO are described; apparently this led to some confusion subsequently, thus the photograph #0326 on the USHMM Internet website, at http://www.ushmm.org describes the boilers as "furnaces" which generated "carbon monoxide".
164. loc. cit., consult photo of Majdanek "gas chamber" door.
165. Grundlagen, p. 278 provides four very interesting photos of features at Majdanek.
166. David Cole's "Forty Six Unanswered Questions About the Gas Chambers" is important not only for its discussion of Majdanek but also of Auschwitz Birkenau. On CODOHweb.
167. Graf & Mattogno, op. cit., p. , and see the discussion in Schmidt, in Handloser, op. cit.
168. see Crowell, Defending Against the allied Bombing Campaign, Part 2
169. That is, humidity and moisture inhibits the evolution of the gas.
170. compare Grundlagen, photos on p. 278
171. op. cit., loc. cit., p. 277, 129n
172. Gilbert, op. cit.
173. Gilbert, op. cit.
174. Gilbert, op. cit., for coverage in the NY Times, see Reporting World War II, John H. Crider, "U. S. Board Bares Atrocity Details Told by Witnesses at Polish Camps", pp. 553-559
175. Dawidowicz, Reader, p. 119
176. compare Gilbert, op. cit., loc. cit., or Dawidowicz, op. cit., loc. cit.
177. That the WRB report was combined from various rumors was corroborated at the first Zundel trial in 1985, during which Rudolf Vrba, under cross-examination, admitted that he repeated rumors, and was not an eyewitness to what he described, moreover "He defended 'errors in good faith' n his 1944 Auschwitz accounts, which he made two weeks after escaping, as due to 'great urgency' to warn Jews." "Book 'An Artistic Picture'", Dick Chapman, Toronto Sun, January 24, 1985
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ALREADY IN THE SUMMER of 1944, the Soviet propagandist Ilya Ehrenburg began acquiring testimonies from the Aktion Reinhardt Camps. Some of these were collected and published in Merder fun Folker in 1945.178 Looking over some of these testaments today, one finds that while gassing claims are repeated, they are not usually presented with much detail.179 We should keep in mind however that for these Aktion Reinhardt camps (Sobibor, Treblinka, and Belzec) the buildings had been dismantled and there were no physical traces of gas chambers.180 No orders, correspondence, or documents concerning gas chambers were presented at the time, nor has there been any such documentation since.181 Our knowledge of these three camps -- in which today it is said that close to two million were killed -- rested then, as now, solely on witness depositions and SS confessions.182 The only corroboration for the actions alleged at these camps are some mass graves, which by normal estimation of grave mass, contain perhaps a few tens of thousands of bodies altogether.183 This may indicate murders and mass executions of some type, but they do not indicate mass exterminations, let alone by poison gas.
At the end of January, Auschwitz was liberated, and the Red Army found about six thousand prisoners who were considered too ill by the Germans to march back to Germany.184 Photographs of the liberated inmates, that included several hundred children, indicate old age, even infirmity, but neither starvation nor epidemics.185 Obviously the fact that such inmates were alive tended to contradict the already reigning conception; later, an SS man would confess that Himmler had ordered all exterminations to cease the previous November, in fact, precisely on November 26, 1944, the day the WRB report was issued.186 Needless to say no documentary evidence in support of this confession has ever surfaced.187
At the same time, the Soviets made reference ot the liberated Auschwitz camp in their national propaganda organ, Pravda. After a brief reference on February 1, a full report, by correspondent Boris Polevoi, was published on Friday, February 2, 1945, less than a week after the camp had been liberated, and a full three months before the official Soviet report on Auschwitz.
Polevoi's indebtedness to the Majdanek reportage is explicit, but at the same time there are some differences:
Last year, when the Red Army revealed to the world the terrible and abominable secrets of Majdanek, the Germans in Auschwitz began to wipe out the traces of their crimes. They leveled the mounds of the so-called "old" graves in the Eastern part of the camp, tore up and destroyed the traces of the electric conveyor belt, on which hundreds of people were simultaneously electrocuted, their bodies falling onto the slow moving conveyor belt which carried them to the top of the blast furnace where they fell in, were completely burned, their bones converted to meal in the rolling mills, and then sent to the surrounding fields.
In retreat were taken the special transportable apparatuses for killing children. The stationary gas chambers in the eastern part of the camp were restructured, even little turrets and other architectural embellishments were added so that they would look like innocent garages.
There is one major surprise to this narrative: first, it is completely different from the report of the Soviet Special Commission on Auschwitz. That report, in turn, would show the influence of the War Refugee Board (WRB) Report of November 26, 1945. An obvious inference is that the Soviet Auschwitz narrative was revised subsequent to this report to make it harmonize with the various anonymous messages which comprised the WRB report. Nevertheless, Polevoi's report shows other influences and connections.
For example, the concept of the "factory of death" is today well-known in the Holocaust literature, but appears to have its beginnings here. That concept in turn seems clearly linked to Russian, Soviet, and Western symbolism rejecting the industrial factory system, compare the short stories of Anton Chekhov or various writings of Maxim Gorky, or further the angst of German Expressionism. Meanwhile, the concept of the Germans "wiping out the traces of their crimes" goes back, as we have seen, to the Katyn Forest revelations of 1943.
It hardly needs to be pointed out that the "electric conveyor belt" has no place in any subsequent Auschwitz narratives, this story element is probably linked to the reports concerning the large electric chambers at Belzec and elsewhere. The "special transportable apparatuses for killing children" are probably references to gas vans, their special utilization for that purpose first attested at the Krasnodar-Kharkov trials. The description of "stationary gas chambers" is apparently a reference to either the delousing stations BW 5/A and 5/B at Birkenau, or else Crematoria IV and V. The reference to the "gas chambers" as "garages" ("garazhi") was a characterization first made of the "gas chambers" at Majdanek.
What is most striking about this press report is not its derivative nature or that it is totally at variance with the version of Auschwitz that we have come to know, substituting the traditional atrocity record with another, completely imaginary one. Rather, that the first non-anonymous observer at the Auschwitz camp could be so far from the current narrative speaks not only to the inaccuracy of this initial report, but also to the artifice of subsequent ones.
Shortly after Polevoi's report was published, Soviet interrogators developed affidavits from Pavel Leleko, who had been a police guard at Treblinka.188 Coincidentally, Leleko's interrogations are supposed to have begun on the same day that the WRB Report was issued, three months before. On the following February 20 and 21, 1945, Leleko contributed two affidavits, and these rehearse the structure of the Treblinka mass gassing claim, and indeed, the gassing claim for all the Aktion Reinhard camps.189
The Leleko depositions contain the following details of the gassing process:
1. The victims were detrained, asked to turn in all valuables, were separated by sex, and stripped. Then the victims were walked to a separate area that housed the gas chambers.
2. The gas chambers had flowers growing alongside in boxes. Instead of a door the victims entered through a heavy hanging made from a rug.
3. A long passage moved through the length of the building, five rooms on each side (10 in all).
4. Four rooms on each side comprised gas chambers, 6 meters square in size, 2.5/3 meters high.
5. The center of the ceiling had a light fixture with no wiring and two showerheads whereby the gas was let into the chamber.
6. The walls, floor, and ceiling were of cement.
7. Each gas chamber had two doors, one opening to the outside whereby the bodies were removed.
8. 500 people per chamber (500 people in 36 square meters).
9. Eight rooms out of the 10 used for gas chambers, the other two contained "powerful German engines" that fed the gas into the chambers.
10. After being filled, the gas chambers were sealed "by hermetically closing doors."
11. Progress of the gassing was observed by looking through a "porthole" "near each door."
12. The gassing took 15 minutes.
13. About 20 meters distant was the old gas chamber building, which had only three gas chambers.
14. The bodies were disposed in a concrete incineration pit about 20 meters long and 1 meter deep.190
The interrogation of Leleko is valuable because it is one of the most detailed description of a gassing at one of the Aktion Reinhardt camps.191 All other confessions, to the extent that they describe the gassing process at all, show clear traces of harmony with Leleko's testimony.192
The problem is that Leleko's testimony offers nothing new. The entire shower-gas-burning sequence was already well known by this time, so Leleko's remarks are not revelatory and could have been derivative. More interesting are his comments on the unwired lightbulbs in each room, and the two showerheads through which the gas was supposed to have filled the chamber. Such details tends to confirm our surmise that the association of showers and gas would inevitably lead to the conception of the gas actually coming down through the nozzle: although this method does not seem that it would be particularly effective, given that carbon monoxide is lighter than air.
More serious is the fact that the description of the building sounds remarkably similar to the Bath and Disinfection Complex at Majdanek. Again, we have a long corridor. Again, medium sized rooms into which hundreds of people are forced in the nude. Again, the chambers are constructed with cement, or more likely reinforced concrete. Again, each chamber has two doors. Again, the doors are hermetically sealed, and again, the dying are observed through a porthole or peephole. Even the number of "gas chambers" of the old style (three) corresponds to the number alleged at Majdanek.
Finally there is the detail that is almost decisive in linking Leleko's account with Majdanek: the engines. As we recall, three rooms at the bathing complex were equipped with outside boilers that forced hot air into the rooms. This is entirely consistent with the idea of hot air delousing, disinfection with Zyklon or other cyanide products, or combinations of the two. But the Soviet Special Commission on Majdanek had suggested that these boiler rooms instead generated carbon monoxide gas that was led into the rooms in order to kill the people inside. (The Soviets also alleged that carbon monoxide was led into another room through a pipe.193) Leleko's description of powerful German engines that generated enough carbon monoxide to kill 500 people in 15 minutes seems clearly derivative of the Majdanek concept. Leleko's confession does not specify the type of engine; that would be left to Kurt Gerstein two months later, with even more problematic implications for the mass gassing claim.
Kurt Gerstein was a minor officer in the SS who was apparently involved in some anti-Nazi activities before and during the war.194 He was, however, an engineer, and was apparently involved in the use of cyanide gas for disinfection purposes.
He fled the approaching Red Army and surrendered to allied custody in late April, 1945, and on May 6 was turned over to the French authorities.195 During this period he wrote several versions of an affidavit or statement, which differ in small details, but which generally provide a picture of a gassing at Belzec concentration camp and a confirmation of gassing operations at the other Aktion Reinhardt camps.196
The Gerstein Statement, as the various drafts are known, is probably the most widely quoted document for those who claim that mass gassings took place.197 The problem is that it is almost never quoted in full, because the entire document contains a number of errors and improbabilities.198
The Gerstein Statement, concerning gassing, and a few other matters, may be summarized as follows:
1. Gerstein visits Belzec and Treblinka,
2. Belzec has a capacity 15,000 per day,
3. Sobibor (not seen), has a capacity of 20,000 per day,
4. Treblinka, a capacity of 25,000 per day.
5. Globocnik, who controls the camps, instructs Gerstein to disinfect clothes and also increase efficiency of the gas chambers which are using old diesel engines.
6. Globocnik informs Gerstein that Hitler and Himmler had been to the camp August 15, 1942: Gerstein records an utterly incredible conversation between Hitler and Globocnik.
7. At Belzec the next day, Gerstein describes the bathhouse,
8. with flowers growing outside,
9. and a sign "To the baths and inhalations"
10. The building is accessed by a small stairway,
11. there are three rooms on either side, 4 x 5 meters, 1.9 meters high, "like garages" (the wording in one version appears to describe two doors per chamber, viz. "on return")
12. A transport arrives and everyone is forced to strip and turn in valuables in sequence,
13. the hair is shorn, someone tells Gerstein, "to make of it something special for the submarines, linings, etc."
14. The people are crowded into the gas chambers, 700-800 in 25 square meters.
15. The diesel engine fails to work, Gerstein times the delay, two hours and 49 minutes on his stopwatch.
16. One can see that many are still alive through a little window and the electric light in the room.
17. After 32 minutes of the gassing all are dead.
18. The next day he goes to Treblinka, there are 8 gas chambers,
19. mounds of clothes and underwear 35-40 meters high. and
20. The numbers reported on the BBC are too low: 25 million have been gassed.
21. that on June 8, 1942, Gerstein had spread rumors that the cyanide he was picking up at Kollin, in Czechoslovakia was for killing people
22. that the cyanide in his transport consisted of bottles which he later poured out,
23. that another method of murder consisted of leading people up staircases and throwing them into blast furnaces.199
The material or documentary evidence for any of these claims is nil.200 It is not normally claimed that anyone was killed with bottled cyanide, when that claim is made, as for example, in postwar testimony by former SS, it is arbitrarily corrected by historians.201 It is established that Hitler and Himmler were never at these camps in August, 1942.202 The crowding elements and the piles of clothing are impossible exaggerations. Therefore we are not bound to analyze the document as fact but are rather entitled to move immediately to the question of the source of the statement's elements.
The diesel gas reference is probably connected either to Soviet revelations of gas vans, or else to Soviet discussions of Treblinka.203 Other tropes can be identified, for example, the description of the gas chambers as appearing "like garages" is almost certainly indebted to Werth's description of Majdanek the previous summer, or Polevoi's description of Auschwitz two months previous.204 It is interesting to note that if Gerstein really was involved in the spreading of rumors about cyanide use for human beings, then the timing of these rumors (June 8, 1942) would coincide with the rumor of cyanide use that reached Switzerland the following August.
Another element: The 25 million victims goes back to a usage manual on Zyklon.205 The heaps of piled clothes are a reference to Majdanek.206 Above all, the statement shows the influence of Leleko's February interrogations and probably other testimonies concerning Treblinka and Sobibor made at the same time or before. In particular, the use of the "blast furnace" motif shows the clear influence of Polevoi. But many other elements, including the number of rooms, the arrangement of the building, the engines, the peepholes, even the flowers in front of the building, also appear derivative.
The main problem with the Gerstein statement is that one does not pick and choose from a document. Many elements of Gerstein's statement are simply false, if we reject these, we must legitimately ask why we should give credence to the other elements.207 As it turns out the only part of the statement which is quoted, and considered unambiguously true, relates to its repetition of the now conventional shower-gas-burning concept. Yet this simply means that we are using a part of Gerstein to confirm what we already know.
The gravest structural difficulty with the Gerstein statement is that it insists on the use of diesel engines in the generation of carbon monoxide gas for the gas chambers. Since 1983, Friedrich Paul Berg, a professional engineer and former environmental expert, has demonstrated that this would be a most improbable method for mass exterminations: diesel engines emit virtually no carbon monoxide.208 These analyses, in turn, cast grave doubts on the alleged gassings at all of the Aktion Reinhardt camps, because, following Gerstein, diesel engines -- usually from Soviet tanks but sometimes from submarines -- are nowadays always alleged as the means of the gas production at these three camps.209
Another point with Gerstein's statement is not that it can be shown as derivative of contemporary Aktion Reinhardt testimonies, or that it contains many absurdities, or that its description of the supposed 600,000 mass murders at Belzec remains essentially uncorroborated. It is rather that Gerstein, a Zyklon technician, was attempting by his confession to deflect guilt away from himself, which in turn proves the extent to which Zyklon was perceived solely as a death dealing mass murder weapon at the time.210 In this regard he was unsuccessful: after his claims were widely publicized in the press in July, 1945, the French indicated their intention to try him as a war criminal, and Gerstein committed suicide.211

NOTES
178. Novitch, op. cit., passim
179. Ibid.
180. The standard story is that the Germans dismantled them to hide the traces of their crimes, but under our theory the huts would have been dismantled after use.
181. All "documentation" pertaining to these camps subsequent to the immediate postwar period has consisted of testimonies, thus, Gitta Sereny's Into that Darkness, Henry Holt, NY:1974, contains what are said interviews with former commandant Franz Stangl in the early 1970's, but aside from being very scanty on detail, these interviews also offer no proof, simply corroboration of the standard claim.
182. Ibid.
183. Ball, John Clive, "Luftbild Beweise", in Grundlagen, German translation of "Air Photo Evidence" which is rehearsed on Ball's website, at
http://www.air-photo.com
184. noted in the Soviet Special Commission, USSR-8, discussed below.
185. Stäglich, op. cit., contains several such photos.
186. This is according to a postwar SS affidavit, but is not corroborated. Interestingly, Czech, noted below, references this for the 26th, but then references for the day before (November 25th) a scrap of paper of unknown origin which refers to the order to dismantle the crematoria. The juxtaposition would repay careful scrutiny.
187. The facts behind the "stop the gassing" order are reconstructed in "Himmlers Befehl, die Vergasung der Juden zu stoppen" in VffG, I:4 (XII:97), pp.258-259
188. Documents of the US government reproduced in Sheftel, Yoram, Defending Ivan the Terrible, Regnery, Washington, DC: 1996, p. 378. It should be noted that the Leleko interviews are the earliest recorded in this document, however it is also important to note that the Soviets had already issued their "special commission" that is, had established the facts, of Treblinka, two months before Leleko's interrogations began. See discussion of "Canonical Holocaust" below.
189. The two later Leleko depositions played a crucial role in reversing the conviction of Ivan Demjanjuk, hence, they have been widely distributed and widely cited. We reference the versions found on the Nizkor site, at
http://www.nizkor.org
190. Ibid.
191. xxxxx
192. Compare, for example, the descriptions established at the various Treblinka trials from 1950, and also the testimony of Franz Suchomel in Lanzmann's Shoah.
193. Communique, loc. cit.
194. Roques, Henri, The 'Confessions' of Kurt Gerstein, Institute for Historical Review, Newport Beach, CA: 1989 is the standard analysis of his depositions and his life, cf. P. 90.
195. Ibid., p. 122f. It is important to note here that Roques is strictly concerned with analyzing the statements of Kurt Gerstein, not with overturning any other particular aspect relative to the gassing claim or the Holocaust.
196. Ibid.
197. Ibid., cf. Dawidowicz, Reader, in whose anthology it constitutes the sole description of gassing, and the sole document not completely contemporaneous with what it describes.
198. Dawidowicz, loc. cit., for an example, Roques cites several others, op. cit., pp. 143-156.
199. Roques, op. cit., detailed tables describing the elements of the eight (sic!) diiferent versions are found between pages 117-118.
200. The only "corroboration" for Gerstein's testimony, at a camp where 600,000 murders are claimed, is the 1946 book of Rudolf Reder which describes the same lengthy diesel breakdown. That was precisely one of the elements mentioned in French news reports, July 4, 1945 (Roques, op. cit., pp. 108ff reproduces the story in France-Soir.) The "confession" of Pfannenstiehl came later, consult Roques, op. cit., pp. 299-309, esp. 302, for an interesting discussion of his interrogations by the postwar courts.
201. Furet, Francois, Unanswered Questions, Schocken Books, NY: 1989, Adam, Uwe Dietrich, "The Gas Chambers", 35n, p. 350, 72n, p. 352 pp. 134-154
202. Noakes, op. cit., cited below, like most of those who use Gerstein, annotates when he doesn't omit.
203. This seems clear, although Friedrich Berg believes that the diesel motif goes back to the gas vans of the Krasnodar trial of July, 1943, if not earlier in Soviet propaganda thinking.
204. Werth's account will be given at the beginning of Section 15, below.
205. Roques, op. cit., the document is known as NI-9912. A translation of this document into French was one of the early broadsides in Robert Faurisson's revisionist career.
206. cf. Communique
207. Rassinier summed this up beautifully in Debunking, q. v.
208. Berg's "The Diesel Myth" has existed in several different versions, consult the version in Grundlagen, or one of several articles which cover the same material on CODOHweb.
209. Eichmann, in his 1960-61 interrogations, referenced submarine engines as being the source of the carbon monoxide: this is almost certainly a garbling of Gerstein's assertion. It should be noted that the Germans collected hair from German women in both world wars, although the pupose was unclear. In World War One, a woman's hair was used to strengthen rubber driving belts.
210. ref. to effect of the Communique, and the WRB report.
211. Roques, op. cit.
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IF WE WERE TO PINPOINT the time when the gassing claim assumed its present shape, it would be in the three-week period from April 15 to May 6, 1945. During this period the Western Allies liberated a number of concentration camps, and at the end of this period the Soviets issued their Special Commission report on Auschwitz Birkenau.
On April 15, the British Army took over the Bergen Belsen complex, which at this point contained tens of thousands of prisoners.212 The images of Belsen, cultivated by British military photographers, left an indelible impression: stacks of nude, discolored and disfigured corpses, many in advanced stages of putrefaction, lined like cordwood outside of buildings. Overcrowded barracks full of dead and dying inmates. Large mass graves full of contorted and twisted bodies. The universal reaction was one of shock, horror and disbelief: a common remark was that words could not describe what the liberators had seen.213
Also in April, the United States Army liberated Dachau and Buchenwald.214 These camps too provided their own images: at Dachau, a group of open train cars containing the bodies of a few hundred dead prisoners, at Buchenwald, a handful of strips of human skin which had apparently been lifted from the corpses of tattooed inmates.215 The American reaction to such death and destruction transcended shock in at least one instance: an American officer, confronted with the bodies at Dachau, lined up several hundred German soldiers (mostly youths) who had ended up in the camp at its liberation and machine gunned them in cold blood.216
The allied soldiers, confronted with these scenes of horror, interpreted them in terms of what they knew. And what they knew after three years of unchecked propaganda was that the Germans had been engaged in the systematic murder of millions of human beings in the camps by means of the shower-gas-burning sequence. The presence of a shower, or a crematorium, or a delousing chamber became prima facie evidence of the well-known gas extermination claim.217 The nude, discolored, and disfigured bodies were no doubt victims who had been gassed just before the allied arrival.218 Again and again one finds the sentiment that the corpses were the proof of the totality of the accusation which had been made for years, and that the Germans had been stopped, as one American put it, "before they had time to get their act together."219
The problem is that these perceptions were wrong. What the Allies had found in the Western camps was simply the result of the "last major epidemic of typhus in world history."220 The epidemic had been precipitated by the complete breakdown of sanitation, transportation, and provisioning for the concentration camp system in the last weeks and months of the war.221 The bodies were discolored and disfigured by the process of putrefaction, they were nude because whenever a prisoner died the other prisoners would strip their clothing and burn the lice-infested garments.222 Although widely publicized descriptions and photographs of gas chambers were proffered at the time for the western camps, these turned out to be nothing but standard delousing chambers.223 In 1960, it was established that there were no gassings in the Western camps.224 But none of this penetrated the western consciousness of the time which could not see beyond the piles of dead bodies, and saw in them proof of German evil and Nazi Kultur.225 The imagery of the western camps, and above all Belsen, would remain for decades the proof of the Holocaust, and by extension, of the gas extermination claim.
Just before the end of the war, the Soviets issued a report which would authoritatively establish the nature of the extermination program. The Soviet Special Commission on Auschwitz., like most Soviet reports, was relatively brief, about 30 pages, and published in brochure format.226 Given the emphasis given to the gassing claim there is very little descriptive material contained in the report, only two documents are cited: one, a reference to the construction of crematoria, second, a document that refers to baths for special purposes for either Crematorium IV or V.227 We should note that this evidence is not only considered incriminating but sufficient proof of the crime: this shows the extent to which the shower-gas-burning sequence was fundamental to thinking at the time, any one of the elements was considered decisive for the others. The substance of the report, with respect to the gassing claim, can be summarized in the following extract:
1. Twelve crematory ovens with 46 retorts were available in four new crematoria. 2. Every retort could take three to five corpses. 3. The cremation procedure took approximately 20 to 30 minutes. 4. The baths for special purposes, that is, the gas chambers for the killing of human beings were located in the cellars of special buildings next to the crematoria. 5. There were also another two separate "baths", the bodies of people killed here were burnt in separate fires in the open. 6. Dogs helped to drive the men intended for death into the baths. 7. On the way, they were driven with blows from clubs and rifle butts. 8. The doors to the chambers were hermetically sealed, and the people in them were poisoned with Zyklon. 9. Death occurred within 3-5 minutes; 10. after 20-30 minutes, the bodies were removed and taken to the crematory ovens in the crematoria. 11. Before cremation, cremation dentists removed all gold teeth from the bodies. 12. The "production" of the "baths" and gas chambers by far exceeded the capacity of the crematory ovens; therefore the Germans used gigantic fires in the open to burn the bodies. 13. Ditches 4 - 6 m wide, 25 - 30 m long, and 2 m deep were dug for these fires. 14. Channels ran along the floor of the ditches and were used for air supply. 15. The bodies were brought to the fires by narrow-gauge railway, and placed in layers crossways in the ditches. 16. Oil was poured over them and that is how they were burnt.228
At the end of the report, the Soviets calculated the number of bodies that could be burned in each of the five crematorium, this totaled 279,000 per month, from which they concluded that the maximum capacity of the crematoria was over five million.229 Nevertheless, their conclusion stated that "the technical commission established that the German hangmen killed not less than 4,000,000 citizens of the USSR, Poland, France, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria, Holland, Belgium, and other countries during the period of the existence of Auschwitz camp.230
Hence was born the Auschwitz four million.
The Soviet Special Commission on Auschwitz is probably the most important document ever issued on the gas extermination claim. Indeed, it is somewhat shocking to see the extent to which the claim is traced back to this slim and insubstantial brochure. But at the time it established not only the fact of the gas extermination claim but also the implementation of that alleged policy at the largest of all of the concentration camps. On the other hand, the report offers no proof of the claims which it makes, only two documents in circumstantial support, an assertion of the number of victims based merely on arbitrary multiplication of cremation rates, and is buttressed only with large amounts of eyewitness testimony that fail to even come close to providing details of the gassing procedure.
The importance of the document immediately became apparent in the interrogations, confessions, and immediate postwar trials. The first of these was at Belsen in the fall of 1945.231 Although the purpose of the trial was ostensibly to try the SS personnel who had been captured at that camp, it turned out that many of the SS and many of the prisoners had been transferred to Belsen from Auschwitz in late 1944 and early 1945.232 As a result, the Belsen trial was also a trial about the reality of what happened at Auschwitz: indeed, the proceedings included the showing of a Soviet film on Auschwitz.233
The German defendants were almost all former Auschwitz guards. The Belsen commandant, Josef Kramer, had formerly served briefly as commandant at Birkenau. Hößler had been the head of the women's camp. Irma Grese had been a warder at Birkenau. All of them were accused of participating in selections for the gassing process and all of them eventually admitted their participation. The extent to which the Soviet commission colored their confessions can be readily seen.
On May 22, 1945, the day after Heinrich Himmler was taken into British custody, Josef Kramer gave a lengthy statement describing the conditions in all the camps where he served, including Belsen, Birkenau, and Natzweiler Struthof. He explicitly denied the existence of "a gas chamber" at Auschwitz.234 The next day, Himmler was dead, an apparent suicide.235 In a later interrogation, Kramer admitted to the existence of "a gas chamber" at Birkenau over which he had no jurisdiction.236 From the stand, he would declare that his initial denial was motivated by an oath of silence to which he was no longer bound by the death of Hitler and Himmler.237 Unfortunately we do not have the date of the second statement by Kramer, but it seems likely that the revelations of the Soviet Special Commission were instrumental in getting him to admit to the gassing claim. The idea that he would be silent about the gassing claim, if it was true, when the WRB report had made essentially the same charges as far back as November, 1944238, and when the Soviet Auschwitz Report had been issued two weeks earlier, is very difficult to believe. The idea of an oath to remain silent makes no sense with regard to Hitler, who had been dead for weeks, nor is it likely that Kramer would deny, while his superior Himmler was also in British custody, something his interrogators were surely expecting him to admit.239
The rest of the defendants at the Belsen Trial also endorsed the gassing claim, with varying degrees of vagueness -- Grese, for example, would claim that she heard of the gas chamber from the prisoners' grapevine -- and after being found guilty 11 of the 45 defendants were hanged.240
The Auschwitz Special Commission definitely set the tone not only for subsequent confessions but also for eyewitness testimonies: in early September, 1945, the former political officer at Auschwitz, Grabner, gave a confession in Vienna in which he said that 3 million had been exterminated at the camp by the time he left in December, 1943.241 This generally accords with the Soviet projections, in the sense that if 3 million had died by the end of 1943, that would project to another million or so by the time the camp was liberated in January, 1945. Even more precisely, at the Belsen Trial, two former Auschwitz prisoners, Dr. Bendel and Ada Bimko, also attested to the reality of the gas chambers, Bimko in particular supporting the four million figure in two places.242
The fact that the eyewitness testimonies and confessions in the postwar period correspond to the Soviet Special Commission could be taken as simple corroboration of the Soviet report, except that it has now been recognized that the Soviet report was wrong, in particular on its totally arbitrary calculation of four million victims (current estimates hold one million or less.243) That figure derived from the Soviet calculation of cremation capacities. It did not derive from testimony. On the other hand, we have several testimonies and confessions which support it. But since the figure is wrong, it follows that the testimonies and confessions which support the calculation were influenced by that report.
If a witness or a confessor makes statements that corroborate statements in an official and widely publicized report, that witness or confessor may be viewed as independently verifying the truth, although the absence of material or documentary support would still leave the matter in doubt. But when the witness or confessor corroborates statements and the statements are false, then one can presume that the witness and confessor statements were simply derivative of the reports. To put it another way, several testimonies may converge on a truth, but several testimonies cannot converge on a falsehood: in such a case one is dealing either with statements derived from a common erroneous source or a kind of mass hysteria determined by the authority of an erroneous source.
Such is the problem with all witness testimonies and confessions for the gas extermination claim, particularly for this initial period, but even more subsequently. The allegations of mass gassing had been widely disseminated since 1942, and had assumed official status by the fall of 1944. Under these circumstances it would have been impossible to obtain "blind" testimony or an untainted confession. Only statements that provided high levels of corroborative detail would be probative, yet that is precisely what was never offered. Eyewitness testimonies and confessions made the gravest errors whenever they strayed into details, for example, in Ada Bimko's odd notion that the cyanide gas was kept in large round tanks244, or Josef Kramer's assertion that a gassing at Natzweiler was carried out by pouring half a pint of salts into a pipe.245
The Auschwitz Special Commission derived its authority partly because the Soviet government issued it and partly because there were no other reports -- as in the case of Katyn -- to contradict it. Its authority was certainly not due to any exhaustive forensic, documentary, or material calculations. As a result it became the fundamental document for anyone who wished to know what had transpired there. Witnesses, preparing to testify, would consult it so that they could refresh their memories or to put their own experiences in a wider context. Most importantly, allied officials, confronted with former Auschwitz personnel, would have to consult the report in order to know how to distinguish truth from falsehood in the course of their prisoner interrogations.246
As soon as a witness or confessor made statements corroborating the Soviet Special Commission, then those statements themselves acquired the Soviet report's weight of authority because they matched its claims. Over time the proof of the mass gas exterminations at Auschwitz would not be traced in the popular mind back to the Soviet Auschwitz report itself, but rather to testimonies and confessions that were clearly produced under its influence. Thus a version of the gassing claim, what we would call the Canonical Holocaust, evolved almost entirely through oral testimonies that built upon the basis of a report which had no substance. Meanwhile, the damning newsreels of Belsen would be manipulated and juxtaposed from camp to camp according to the whim of the prevailing culture, and provide the unanswerable ground to the claim.247

NOTES
212. Reilly, Jo, ed., Belsen in History and Memory, Frank Cass, London:1997; Gödecke, Monika, ed. Konzentrationslager Bergen-Belsen: Berichte und Dokumente, Vendenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen:1995
213. Reilly, op. cit., see especially the article by Paul Kemp, "The British Army and the Liberation of Bergen Belsen April 1945", pp. 134-148
214. Buchenwald was liberated a few days before Belsen, but the bulk of the camps, including the scenes at Dachau and Mauthausen, came towards the end of the month, see the discussion of the chronology in Hackett, David A., The Buchenwald Report, a translation of a contemporaneous US Intelligence Report, translated by Hackett with an introduction, Westview Press, Boulder, CO:1995
215. cf. Aroneanu, op. cit., p. 106
216. Irving, Nuremberg, provides a photograph of the American officer manning his machine gun
217. cf., Edward R. Murrow, "For Most of it I Have No Words", pp. 681-685, and Martha Gellhorn, "Dachau", pp. 724-730, in Reporting World War II, op. cit.
218. The inference is that such sentiments must have informed the decision to conduct autopsies at Natzweiler-Struthof and Dachau: no autopsy report from any camp has ever yielded a verdict of cyanide poisoning.
219. Aroneanu, op. cit., p. 129, quoting from American report on Buchenwald
220. Kamp article, loc. cit., in Reilly, op. cit., p. 147. Fritz Berg however has suggested that it was followed by a little-known but widespread epidemic in Poland. Indeed, this, like most events between the Bug and the Dniepr between 1944 and 1948, still requires enlightening scrutiny.
221. This is the standard revisionist view, consult Butz, op. cit., for Commandant Kramer's description, and Berg, "Typhus and the Jews", for material on infrastructure destruction. Nevertheless, traditional Holocaust writers sometimes view these deaths as intentional (see article by Lattek, in Reilly, op. cit.), in this regard it is interesting to note that during the epidemics that raged through Bergen Belsen in the spring of 1945, of 18,168 total dead between March 1 and April 6, only 183 were from the "Star Camp" especially set aside for Jewish prisoners, and only 321 from the three main subcamps specifically for Jewish prisoners (the balance were approx. 4 thousand in the Women's Camp and 11 thousand in the Prisoner Camp #2), table cited in Gödicke, pp. 164-165.
222. Testimony of Dr. Russell Barton, in Kulaszka, Barbara, ed. Did Six Million Really Die?, on the Zündel-site.
223. Aroneanu, op. cit., photo, before p. 138, reproduces perhaps the most famous of these photographic hoaxes or misunderstandings, a pensive GI standing before a delousing chamber, with the caption: "An American soldier contemplates the entrance to the control room from which cylinders of Zyklon B were released into the gas chamber."
224. Martin Broszat's letter was published in Die Zeit, 26 August 1960, cf. Butz, op. cit., p. 47
225. "Nazi Kultur" the sign put up by the British at Belsen, a photo of which in Reilly, ed. op. cit.
226. The entire text of this document, "The Soviet War Crimes Report on Auschwitz, Nuremberg Trial - 6 May 1945" referenced as USSR-8, translated by Carlos W. Porter maybe found at http://www.codoh.com/trials/triussr8.html
227. Ibid.
228. Ibid.
229. Ibid.
230. Ibid.
231. The main source for this trial is Philips, Raymond, ed., Trial of Josef Kramer and 44 Others, (The Belsen Trial), William Hodge and Co., London: 1949. Also known as volumr II of War Crimes Trials under the editorship of Sir David Maxwell-Fyfe. On Irma Grese, see Brown, Daniel Patrick, The Beautiful Beast, Golden West Historical Publications, Ventura: 1996.
232. Brown, op. cit.
233. Philips, op. cit.,.p. 653
234. Philips, op. cit., pp. 718-737, 738f. Gödecke gives two dates: 2 May, and 22 May. If the latter, the proximity with the death of Himmler is striking. If the former, the weight of the Soviet Special Commission, issued four days later, is increased.
235. Reitlinger, SS: Alibi of a Nation, Da Capo, NY: 1995
236. Philips, op. cit., loc. cit.
237. Ibid.
238. Preceded, as we have seen, by the Soviet Kharkov Trial of December, 1943.
239. Butz, op. cit., loc. cit., makes the same arguments about Kramer's confessions, and further on the quality of Kramer's confessions see Robert Faurisson, "Sur la pretendue 'chambre a gaz' homicide du Struthof, les trois confessions successives et contradictoires de Josef Kramer".
240. Gödicke, op. cit., pp.231-233 provides a list of the defendants for the three Belsen trials (55 defendants in all) and sentences. What is less well known is that a dozen of the defendants were kapos, that is, prisoners. It should be obvious then that prisoners had a strong incentive to maintain a low profile and an orthodox interpretation: one prisoner was apparently denounced and put on trial because he was in an SS uniform at liberation.
241. Grabner's confession cited in Klee, Ernst, u.a., Hrsg., "Schöne Zeiten", S. Fischer Verlag, p. 228
242. Philips, op. cit., p. 68, 740ff, in both direct testimony and sworn affidavit.
243. The general consensus from Reitlinger (1953) through Pressac (1993) that the overall death toll at Auschwitz was less than one million, although there have always been those who have claimed higher totals, e.g., Dawidowicz (1974), Yehuda Bauer (1982), etc.
244. Carlo Mattogno, "Two False Testimonies from Auschwitz", in Journal of Historical Review, Vol. 10, Number One, spring, 1990.
245. quoted in Shirer, Rise and Fall, p. 1141
246. It is understood that an interrogator will seek to elicit information; therefore he must have some kind of focus as to which information is valuable and truthful and which is not: the Canonical Holocaust provided this. Compare the comments in Ruthven, Malise, Torture: The Grand Conspiracy, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London: 1977, p. 275
247. Reilly, op. cit., in an article provides several references to ways in which the Belsen images were appropriated for other camps, thus, for Buchenwald for the film Judgment at Nuremberg; see also Grundlagen, p.223 for an example where a photo of a Belsen pit grave is transposed to Auschwitz.
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THE ORIGINS of the Nuremberg Trials lay in the desire of the Allies as far back as 1943 to take revenge on the Nazi leadership, and punish the German people.248 It is clear that part of the desire was to ensure that there would be no more wars with Germany: hence at this early date one frequently encounters statements of simply executing tens of thousands of the leadership cadre in Germany, or even sterilizing the total German population.249
A general aspect of this hostile attitude was one of paranoia, evinced in conspiracy thinking about the Germans or at least about their leadership. The roots of such paranoia could be variously explained. For one thing, wars always generate suspicions and anxieties that frequently go over the top: one thinks of the English Army, confused and disoriented by the German offensive of May, 1940, finding secret messages in the plowings of Belgian farmers.250 Another contributing factor is the death and destruction of the war: history provides many instances where terrible misfortunes have been attributed to the secret plotting of others. Jews, for example, were frequently scapegoats in times of plague and disease.251 In the context of war-hatred against Germans, such attributions were a natural extension: during the influenza pandemic of 1918-1919, an American official attributed this terrible outbreak to a German submarine which had brought the disease to America under the Kaiser's order.252
Still another contributing factor to such paranoia is the extent to which war hysteria attributes malevolent "fifth column" tendencies to specific minority groups. The internment by the Allies of the Japanese and other European nationals, the Soviet deportations of the Volga Germans and Crimean Tatars, as well as the German deportations of the Jews, all seem to have been influenced by this kind of thinking to at least some degree.
To a certain extent such conspiratorial thinking is probably a throwback to shamanistic thinking; the idea that misfortune has a direct cause that can be traced back to a specific malevolent agent: one thinks of the various witchhunts that have cropped up here and there in European history.253 As it applied to the Germans in the 20th Century, such conspiratorial thinking about German motives and German conduct clearly preceded World War Two: one thinks of the Reichstag fire and even more sinister theories traced back hundreds of years.254
In the context of the postwar period this simply meant that the Allies were not inclined to trust the German people and least of all their former leadership.255 The Allies were convinced, on the basis of the Canonical Holocaust, that the German people, or at least the SS, had engaged in the most barbaric crimes and they would not be dissuaded by denials.256 Down to the common soldier, one finds that whenever any German denied knowledge of "what was going on in the camps" the usual conclusion drawn was that he was simply lying.257 A final contributing element to this Allied paranoia involved the fact that they were essentially occupying with relatively small numbers a nation of 80 million people; history again shows that when such a small group attempts to impose its will on the majority, conspiracy thinking is a natural result.258
Simply put, a profound gulf existed between occupier and occupied. Allied paranoia created the certainty of German conspiracies, of which the mass gassing program was merely one. The Germans were not to be trusted to tell the Allies what had happened and why, they were merely expected to confirm what they were told. The source of the information for what had happened was, after all, available in reports that had been authoritatively issued by the Soviet and later Polish communist governments, as well as by confessions and affidavits that simply restated what everyone had known all along. In this atmosphere of assumed guilt and conspiracy, it was unfortunate that the presentation for the mass gassing and extermination claims at Nuremberg fell almost entirely to the Soviet Union, which already had long experience with conspiracies, paranoia, and show trials.
What transpired at Nuremberg cannot be fully grasped without some understanding of the psychology of Soviet judicial procedure under Stalin. In the 1930's, the Soviets conducted several trials, mostly involving prominent communists but also "saboteurs" who, it was said, were attempting to destroy the Soviet Union.259 It is generally granted that the accusations made in these trials were false, an extract from one confessor's affidavit, who was charged with sabotaging Soviet agriculture as part of a German plot, is very revealing:
The chief task assigned to me by the German intelligence service at that time was to arrange to spoil grain within the country. This involved delaying the construction of storehouses and elevators, so as to create a discrepancy between the growing size of the grain collections and the available storage space. In this way [the German agent] said, two things would be achieved: firstly, the grain itself would be spoiled; and secondly, the indignation of the peasants would be aroused, which was inevitable when they saw that grain was perishing. I was also asked to arrange for the wholesale contamination of storehouses by pests, especially by corn-beetle ... The German intelligence service made a special point of the organization of wrecking activities in the sphere of horsebreeding in order .. not to provide horses for the Red Army. As regards seed, we included in our program muddling up seed affairs, mixing up sorted seed and thus lowering the harvest yield in the country. As regards crop rotation, the idea was to plan the crop area incorrectly and thus place the collective farm peasants in such a position that they would be virtually unable to practice proper crop rotation and would be obliged to plough up meadows and pastures for crop growing. This would reduce the size of the harvests in the country and at the same time arouse the indignation of the peasants, who would be unable to understand why they were being forced to plough up meadows and pastures when the collective farms wanted to develop stock-breeding and required fodder for the purpose. As regards the machine tractor stations, the aim was to put tractors, harvester combines and agricultural machines out of commission, to muddle the financial affairs of the machine and tractor stations, and for this purpose to place at the machine and tractor stations useless people, people with bad records, and above all members of our Right organization. As regards stock-breeding, the aim was to kill off pedigree breed stock and to strive for a high cattle mortality ... to prevent the development of fodder resources and especially to infect cattle artificially with various kinds of bacteria in order to increase their mortality ... I instructed [the head of the veterinary department] and Boyarshinov, Chief of the Bacteriological Department, to artificially infect pigs with erysipelas in the Leningrad region and with plague in the Voronezh region and the Azov-Black Sea Territory. I chose these two bacteria because the pigs are inoculated not with dead microbes, but with live ones, only of a reduced virulence. It was therefore quite simple from the technical standpoint to organize artificial infection ... For this purpose three factories were selected at my suggestion ... In these factories serums were made with virulent bacteria and given special serial numbers. Boyarshinov was informed of these serial numbers and he transmitted them to the chiefs of the veterinary departments in the localities who could be relied on in this matter, and they in turn transmitted them to veterinary surgeons who had anti-Soviet feelings and who in case of a heavy cattle mortality would not raise a big fuss.260
The detached reader notes first of all the tremendous scope of the secret conspiracy alleged as well as the fact that every conceivable shortcoming of Soviet agriculture is being attributed to it. A natural conclusion is that the Soviet government had orchestrated a tremendous hoax. But that is probably too radical an interpretation. It is hard to believe that any rational government, intent above all on simply suppressing its enemies,261 would devise such a lunatic indictment. Rather it suggests that, probably with some rational and deliberate coaxing from above, the concept of sabotage took on a life of its own in the minds of the security apparatus, the interrogators, and probably even among many of the defendants as well. In other words, we are looking at an instance of mass hysteria in which Soviet society had been taken over by rumors of secret "wreckers" whose secret agenda was so skillfully masked that no hard evidence existed, and whose works comprised all of the misfortunes of the process of collectivization and de-kulakization. To say that it was wholly deliberate is to go against the weight of analysis from history: as Malise Ruthven pointedly notes, histories of the witchcraft mania never suggest that the inquisitors were perpetrating a fraud.262
A similar hysterical atmosphere of endlessly ramifying atrocity appears to have prevailed at Nuremberg. The Americans had found half a dozen strips of human flesh at Buchenwald ornamented with tattoos.263 At Nuremberg, this freak discovery became a veritable cottage industry in the concentration camps: according to Dr. Blaha, the Germans made riding breeches, gloves, and ladies' handbags from human flesh at Dachau,264 while the witness Balachowsky assured the court in his testimony that it was used to bind books.265 The Soviets then produced samples of what they claimed was tanned human skin along with a few exhibits that were purportedly human soap.266 It need hardly be said that none of these claims have ever been verified; the Soviet samples have disappeared.267
The prosecution's case at the Trial consisted mostly of reading into the record miscellaneous atrocity claims from affiants who never appeared to testify.268 (The defense was allowed half a day to summarize 300,000 affidavits in rebuttal.)269 With regards to the gas extermination claim, an important document was an affidavit from Höttl, who subsequently evaded prosecution, which explained that secret orders from Himmler had established the extermination program, and that four million had been killed at Auschwitz, six million Jews in all.270 Later testimony by Wisliceny repeated Höttl's claim, and put the blame for the events on the missing and presumed dead Adolf Eichmann.271 No documents, then or now, have ever been advanced that point to the planning, budgeting, or ordering of a gas extermination program.
The Soviet presentation, covering most of February, 1946, was considered excessive by some: after presenting an affidavit that a German commandant had taken Jewish children, thrown them in the air, and then shot them for the entertainment of his small daughter, Justice Parker of the United States would be heard to privately comment: "They have gone too far!"272 When Mesdames Vaillant Couturier and Shmegelovskaya presented fantastic testimonies of the mass gassings at Auschwitz, Justice Biddle of the United States would note privately "I doubt this"273 and Justice Birkett of the United Kingdom would express private misgivings.274 But it points to the hysterical atmosphere of the time that neither they, nor anyone else, had the courage to publicly dissent and inject some rationality into the proceedings.275
In the summer of 1946, Soviet hubris finally overreached itself when they submitted a 56 page octavo pamphlet that claimed that the Germans had murdered 11,000 Polish officers and had buried them in the Katyn Forest in order to discredit the Soviet Union: under the rules of the Court, the mere submission of such a report would normally be enough to establish it as "fact of common knowledge."276 The depressing thing about the Soviet Katyn report is that it is in fact longer and more substantial than either the Majdanek or Auschwitz reports.277 It is also completely false, since it has been reasonably well known since 1952 and was admitted by the Soviet Union in 1989 that Katyn was a Soviet atrocity.278 The Germans, who finally had evidence to contradict a Soviet claim, tested the assumption, and finally, after some conflict, were able to present their own witnesses to the affair.279 The court made no mention of Katyn in its final judgment, making it very clear that at this trial justice and morality had to defer to political expediency.280
At the end of the Soviet prosecution case, the defense phase of the trial began. About a week after that, Winston Churchill, borrowing a phrase from Joseph Goebbels, spoke of an Iron Curtain descending over the continent of Europe.281 Almost simultaneously, a week long trial was held in the Hamburg Curio House against the principals of the firm Tesch and Stabenow, which sold Zyklon B to the Auschwitz camp. That trial, which yielded two death sentences, brought to the fore a number of witnesses -- Bendel, Broad, and Bimko -- whose narratives had already been before the public eye. Just days after the conclusion of that trial, and not far away, the British Field Police seized the former commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Höß.

NOTES
248. This is widely attested, see especially Morgenthau, op. cit. Tusa, Ann and John, The Nuremberg Trial, Atheneum, NY:1983, pp. 21-28, Irving, Nuremberg, discusses the matter extensively in chapter 2, "Lynch Law".
249. The widespread fascination with castrating Germans elicited comments from none other than President Roosevelt himself; see Morgenthau, op. cit., Butz, op. cit., cites Clifton Fadiman and Ernest Hemingway, Irving traces the concept back to a book written by an embittered American Jew, in Goebbels, p. 369, 372-373
250. Deighton, Len, Blood, Tears and Folly, Harper, NY:1994, pp.194-195
251. Cohn, Norman, Warrant for Genocide, Serif, London:1996, a study on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, recapitulates much of this material, and also shows the composite roots of that document. Unfortunately, Cohn takes an uncritical and erroneous view of statements derived from the Gerstein statement, cf. p. 236. The reader will have perhaps already noted that the concept of the National Socialist mass gas extermination program is an inversion of the Protocols concept which many, including many National Socialists, held about Jewish people. Therefore, in this sense, Cohn's choice of quotes is apt: the Gerstein Statement is the mirror image of the Protocols. Further, the reader would note that the wide-spread popularity of the Protocols concept (which nowadays embraces most conspiracy theories) is fundamentally a mythic reaction to certain aspects of modernity; in other words, just like our subject.
252. Collins, Richard, The Plague of the Spanish Lady, Atheneum, NY: 1974, p. 83.
253. Cohn, Norman, The Pursuit of the Millenium, also Ruthven, op. cit., Both authors (indeed, most modern authors) trace the witch hunts to social and hence ideological stress.
254. The Reichstag Fire is a classic instance of paranoia striking in both directions; the National Socialists were convinced that the communists had set the blaze, most everyone outside of Germany was convinced of German guilt. Fritz Tobias' study eventually showed that van der Lubbe set the fire by himself; thus the Law of Parsimony eventually gets rid of conspiracy theories, see Tobias, Fritz, The Reichstag Fire, Secker and Warburg, London:1962. Because Hitler benefited from the fire, in the sense that it facilitated the Enabling Acts, it was long considered another Nazi plot, cf. Shirer, Rise and Fall. xxxxx
255. One theme that is not pursued here but certainly deserves fuller treatment involves the allied desire to pacify Germany; this meant not only the demilitarizing of the nation by also the discrediting of its military and political elite. Lucius Clay, in his memoirs, Decision in Germany, discussed with frankness the result of the Nuremberg Trials: the National Socialist party was thoroughly discredited. [Doubleday, NY:1950, pp. 250-252] At the same time, Clay noted that the attempt to discredit the military leadership was less successful. [Ibid.] Therefore the reader should understand that one of the reasons that the atrocity charges (including the gassing claim) were pursued with such abandon, and were allowed to be pursued, and have been allowed to propagate unchecked, is because very quickly they became narrowed in function to the simple discrediting of National Socialism. However, just because these charges have been allowed to stand because they discredit National Socialism, it does not follow that to question these charges is the same thing as an endorsement of National Socialism.
256. The interrogation of Dr. Pfannenstiehl, who Gerstein mentioned in his statement, is characteristic. See Roques, op. cit., pp. 299-308
257. cf. Life Magazine, May 8, 1945, provides some examples, but this is a very common sentiment expressed in GI memoirs and the press.
258. This is the central thesis of Ruthven's book, op. cit., interestingly the notion is recapitulated by the conspiracy of Hitler's resurrection, cf. Life, issue cited above, cf., New Yorker, article cited below, as well as the generalized paranoia about "Werewolves" and the "Alpine Redoubt."
259. Tucker, Richard, The Great Terror, is the standard reference, but see also Ruthven, op. cit., pp. 218-278.
260. quoted in Ruthven, op. cit., pp. 245-246
261. Ibid.
262. Ruthven, op. cit., p. 265
263. Butz, op. cit., p. 238, provides a photograph of the Buchenwald exhibition that the German people were forced to view, again, as proof of the moral bankruptcy of the National Socialist regime. The photograph featured various anatomical exhibits, two shrunken heads, and half a dozen strips of human skin, most with tattoos, one of almost the complete frontal torso. Over on the far right of the photo one can see a lampshade on a stand, this was also claimed to have been made of human skin although basic visual inspection indicates that it is of a different order of material than the others. This lampshade appears to have been made of goatskin, and is the root of all of the rest of the "human skin" stories. Cf. Aroneanu, op. cit., p. 106, quoting Supreme AEF report on Buchenwald. As far as is known, neither that lampshade nor any of the other materials discussed in the text has ever been positively identified, many, not even seen; it is doubtful that such materials would be unavailable for testing even today if they had ever existed, since it is known that the United States government retains human skulls gathered by Americans soldiers and sailors in the South Pacific, Iserson, Kenneth, Death to Dust, Tucson, AZ, 1995.
264. cited in Porter, Holocaust, the reader is reminded that Porter's text simply involves captioned pages from the trial record that have been photographed and presented in legible format whole, i.e., his book does not comprise interpretation of these affidavits and testimony, other than, of course, in his selections.
265. cited in Porter, Holocaust
266. Ibid.
267. Ibid.
268. Taylor, Telford, Anatomy of the Nuremberg Trials, Back Bay, NY: 1992, p. 315
269. cited in Porter, op. cit.
270. discussed in Irving, Nuremberg
271. Irving, Nuremberg, and see also Harris, Tyranny
272. Tusas, op. cit., p. 198
273. Irving, in both Goering and Nuremberg, makes references that are keyed to Biddle's private papers, the first gives the impression that it was Shmegelovskaya who was doubted, the second, Vaillant-Couturier. Perhaps Biddle doubted both.
274. quoted in Taylor, op. cit., p.315
275. This ties directly to the judges and lawyers at Nuremberg, and the community of historians, who have failed to oppose censorship today. It is of course one thing for historians to avoid investigating contentious matters. That is not praiseworthy but it is understandable; although we should keep in mind that tenure was not designed to cover minor personal peccadilloes but rather to protect scholars when pursuing difficult questions. It must be said that Dr. Butz, regardless of the merits of his book or his arguments, is the only American academician to have used tenure for the purpose for which it was designed. On the silence of historians in the face of censorship, that is another affair. On the other hand, we are bound to record the statements of professors emeritus Raul Hilberg and Gordon Craig, who have both publicly denounced both censorship and taboo on this subject.
276. Taylor, op. cit., p. 313, reference to Article 21 of the London Charter.
277. The Majdanek report comes in at 26 pages, the Auschwitz report would be estimated at about 35, the brochure of Katyn introduced in evidence was 56 pages long.
278. Paul, op. cit.
279. Harris, Tyranny, summarizes the German counter, as well as the 1952 Congressional Hearings.
280. No mention in judgment, cf. Taylor, op. cit., Generally speaking it seems odd that historians continue to use Nuremberg testimony, especially unattested Soviet-generated testimony, as proof of German atrocities. The Soviet Katyn testimony, that described how the Germans dug up the bodies of the 11,000 Polish officers, transported them to Katyn, went through their pockets and planted papers, then reburied them, and then dug them up again, as part of a plot to discredit the Soviet Union, is just as detailed, cogent, and realistic as that provided by the Soviet Union for the extermination camps.
281. Churchill's speech, 6 March 1946, Fulton, Missouri, first stated by Goebbels, [date], Irving, Goebbels, p. xxxxx

Second Part
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END Sections 1 thru 7. Copyright 1997, Samuel Crowell. This document has been first displayed on Internet by the CODOH, Committee for Open debate on the Holocaust, Bradley R. Smith Director, PO Box 439016, San Diego, CA 92143, USA, to whom we are grateful.
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ARTICLE 19. <Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.>The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on December 10, 1948, in Paris.

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