Holocaust Controversies

Willi Lenz: The “Doctor” of the Kulmhof (Chełmno) Extermination Camp

2026-05-24T10:04:30.282+01:00

When Soviet troops reached the area around Chełmno nad Nerem in January 1945, the Nazi extermination camp Kulmhof had already been largely dismantled.¹ Nevertheless, contemporary documents and witness testimony preserve evidence about the men who operated the camp.

One name appears repeatedly in these sources: Willi Lenz, a Polizeimeister of the Schutzpolizei. At Kulmhof, he supervised Jewish forced laborers in the so-called forest camp, personally carried out shootings, and oversaw the disposal of the corpses.

Existing accounts of Kulmhof describe Lenz as an exceptionally brutal person (see endnote 1), but provide little information about his background and career. Drawing on contemporary civil records, police files, NSDAP membership documentation and postwar testimony, this article establishes his identity and reconstructs a life-spanning, though still fragmentary, biography of Willi Lenz.

Note on terminology

This article uses Kulmhof for the German extermination camp and Chełmno for the Polish village in which it was established. The village, officially known as Chełmno nad Nerem, lies in central Poland, between Poznań and Łódź. German names such as Posen, Litzmannstadt and Breslau (Polish Wrocław) are used where they reflect the administrative language of the sources.

Contents

Origins and Police Career, 1894–1941

It is July 16, 1894, a summer day in the small settlement of Smolarz Mill, deep in the forests of Obornik County north of Posen. Here, in a remote part of Prussia, Willi Lenz was born as the son of the mill owner Otto Lenz. Little is known about his childhood and youth; all that can be established with certainty is his origin in a rural milieu of the Prussian eastern provinces.²

After the outbreak of the First World War, Lenz joined the Silesian Dragoon Regiment "von Bredow" No. 4 in November 1914. His service in the 5th Squadron took him first to the Eastern Front and later to France. One detail stands out in retrospect: on November 18, 1914, his squadron passed through Chełmno, the place to which he would go more than two decades later under entirely different circumstances.

From March 1 to March 20, 1918, Lenz was treated in the Reserve Field Hospital 64 in Dizy-le-Gros (France). The diagnosis recorded was a contusion of the bone and soft tissue of the right elbow. During a later period of home leave, he contracted malaria and was admitted to Fortress Auxiliary Hospital VII in Posen on 26 September 1918.³

After the end of the war, Lenz's home district of Obornik fell to the Republic of Poland as a result of the Treaty of Versailles. He left his region of origin and made his way to neighboring Silesia.⁴

In Breslau, Lenz decided in 1920 to pursue a career with the Schutzpolizei.⁵ During a period of political and social tension after the war, police service offered an institutional environment shaped by order, discipline, and clear hierarchies. His private life also became more settled: in 1923 he married Ida, a nurse;⁶ in 1926 he became the father of a son.⁷It is yet not known whether they had any further children.

The Nazi seizure of power in 1933 changed the conditions of Lenz’s police career. In 1937, Lenz joined the NSDAP, a step that may have been been motivated by ideological conviction, career calculation, or a combination of both.⁸ In any case, Lenz rose within the Schutzpolizei: from Revier-Oberwachtmeister to Hauptwachtmeister, probably in 1937 or 1938.⁹

Document

NSDAP Gau card index entry for Willi Lenz. Source: Bundesarchiv, R 9361-IX KARTEI/2553197; also available as digitized microfilm at the U.S. National Archives, N0026, frame 596.

English Translation

Name:

Lenz, Willi

Occupation:

Polizei-Revier-Oberwachtmeister [Police Precinct Senior Constable]

Date of birth:

16 July 1894

Place of birth:

Smolarze

Membership no.:

424567

Admission:

1 May 1937

Admission requested on:

30 June 1937

Residence:

Breslau, Dragoner Street 13

Local Group:

Breslau

Gau monthly report:

Lower Silesia, month 10/41, sheet 10

Residence:

Posen, Andreas-Hofer Street 8

Local Group:

Posen

Gau:

Warthegau

The German invasion of Poland in September 1939 marked another turning point. With the incorporation of large parts of occupied Polish territory into the German Reich, the so-called Warthegau came into being- a territory in which National Socialist policies of occupation, Germanization, and extermination were implemented particularly early and radically. For Lenz, who had been born in the former Prussian east, the German occupation of the Warthegau may also have had a personal dimension: the return of German rule to a region connected to his own origins.

In July 1941, he was transferred from Breslau to Posen and promoted to Meister of the Schutzpolizei. On August 8, 1941, Lenz arrived in the capital of the Warthegau, where he was assigned as duty officer at the 4th police precinct.¹⁰

Arrival at Kulmhof

In November 1941, the command of the Schutzpolizei telephoned the 4th police precinct to request that Lenz appear the next day at the State Police headquarters in Posen. The Gestapo was looking for Schutzpolizei officers to provide a guard detachment for an SS special commando (SS-Sonderkommando).

The following day, Lenz reported to the State Police headquarters together with other Schutzpolizei officers who had been detached for the assignment. Kriminalkommissar and SS-Hauptsturmführer Herbert Lange required the men to sign a declaration committing them to strict secrecy about their deployment. A few days later, the group was taken by truck to Kulmhof, Polish Chełmno nad Nerem, south of Warthbrücken/Koło, and housed in buildings that had been confiscated by the SS-Sonderkommando.¹¹

On December 8, 1941, systematic mass killings of Jewish people by gas vans begun in Kulmhof.¹² Lenz soon occupied a key position in the forest camp. Command leader Lange entrusted him with the supervision of the Jewish labor detachment there. Lenz thus acquired considerable authority over the Jewish forced laborers and the police guards assigned to the forest camp. On occasion, he also delivered the speech to the Jewish victims in the mansion, where they were ordered to undress before being driven into the gas vans.¹³

Note on the Gas VANS

Gas vans were mobile killing vehicles used by the Einsatzgruppen and Sonderkommando Kulmhof to kill people with gasoline engine exhaust. At extermination camp Kulmhof, the victims were first taken by truck or forced to walk to the so-called mansion (Schloss, literally "castle") in the village of Chełmno, where they had to undress and surrender their belongings. They were then forced into the sealed cargo compartment of a truck and killed while the vehicle stood still with its engine idling. The gas van then transported the bodies to the forest camp, where they were unloaded and buried; later, the corpses were exhumed and burned. Also see the overview map here. For photographs of a gas van at the Einsatzgruppen see here and here.

"Doctor" in the Forest Camp

In the forest camp, Lenz decided who lived and who died; he was cynically called "Doctor." Who could not longer work during the day was sent to him with words like: "You have to go to the Doctor".¹⁴ At times, Lenz urged prisoners to flee, only to shoot them afterward under the pretext of an "escape attempt." At the end of the working day, he also separated out the sick and exhausted. At a whistle from him, the inner chain of guards closed into a ring around the Jewish prisoners. Those no longer able to work lay down on the ground and were killed with a shot to the back of the neck. In other cases, they were shot while standing or forced to lie down on top of the corpses already lying in the mass graves.¹⁵

People who still showed signs of life when the gas vans are emptied are also shot.¹⁶ SS-Scharführer Fritz Ismer testified that, after being assigned to Kulmhof in early January 1942, he observed "a Jewish worker going to Lenz with a small child and saying: ‘Meister, still alive.’ Lenz then took his pistol and shot the child".¹⁷

The Polizeimeister also shot Jewish psychiatric patients, physically weak Jews, and people brought in smaller transports directly to the forest camp without being sent through the gas vans. One witness later recalled hearing that Lenz had also shot Soviet prisoners of war in the mansion courtyard.¹⁸

Other Schutzpolizei officers - including Simon Haider, Johann Runge, Gustav Fiedler, Karl Heinl, and Johann Strohmeier - were also involved in shootings in the forest camp, but Lenz remained the principal perpetrator. For the members of the Gestapo, Lenz’s zeal provided a noticeable relief: they could avoid the notorious "stench in the forest" - an expression Lenz used for his workplace.¹⁹ Only SS-Untersturmführer Albert Plate and SS-Hauptsturmführer Hans Bothmann likewise participated regularly in the killings.²⁰

Lenz kept records of the number of shootings, since the daily strength reports of the labor detachment had to fit.²¹ In addition, he handed over valuables from the forest camp, including extracted gold teeth, to the administrative officer, SS-Hauptscharführer Fritz Ismer.²²

Lenz as Seen by His Contemporaries

What drove Lenz to devote himself to such a brutal task? The sources cannot fully explain his motives. They do, however, show how he behaved, how others perceived him, and how he sought to use commando service for advancement.

Although the conditions at Kulmhof brutalized many members of the Schutzpolizei, individual examples also show that, even under these circumstances, there was room for individual action, including limited gestures of compassion toward the victims.²³

In Lenz’s case, however, the statements converge into a different picture. The witness statements suggest that his behavior went far beyond mere obedience to orders, but rather an active, self-initiated participation in the extermination, marked by brutality and sadistic violence.²⁴ Armed with a club²⁵ and pistol, Lenz sometimes killed "for fun",²⁶ abused the Jewish prisoners²⁷ and threatened the policemen under his command.²⁸

Lenz lived together with the Polizeimeisters Simon Haider, Alois Häfele, and Kurt Möbius in the so-called German House.²⁹ It is precisely these immediate comrades who painted an especially dark picture of him. Häfele described Lenz as a "sadist" who knew "no inhibitions".³⁰ Möbius portrayed him as "completely insane," "racial-politically fanatical," "quarrelsome," with "cold eyes" - "someone with whom one can have absolutely no conversation".³¹ According to Möbius, Lenz participated in the extermination of the Jews in Kulmhof with an "obviously inwardly positive attitude".³²

According to the testimony of Bruno Israel, a Schutzpolizist from Litzmannstadt, Lenz once took from him photographs of Jewish acquaintances and tore them up - an act that indicates his hostility even toward private reminders of Jewish life.³³

All the more striking is the contrast with the perception of outsiders. To the chief forester and SS-Hauptsturmführer Heinrich May, who supplied the extermination site with firewood and with young trees for camouflage, Lenz appeared merely bieder - respectable, conventional, unremarkable – and looked like a "small, lowly little peasant". ³⁴

No known photograph of Willi Lenz has yet been found. A personal description mentioned him as approximately 165 centimeters tall, with thin blond hair, grey-blue eyes, and a slender build. ³⁵

His actions appear to have drawn criticism from the command leadership only when they disrupted the process or interfered with Gestapo interests. For example, he attracted negative attention when he immediately shot Jewish prisoners captured after escape attempts, instead of first handing them over to the Gestapo officers for interrogation. ³⁶

After Jewish prisoners managed to escape from Kulmhof under his supervision in January 1942, he had to justify himself before the SS and Police Court in Posen.³⁷

Expertise in Erasing Traces

In April 1943, the SS-Sonderkommando Kulmhof is dissolved. Instead of merely clearing out the mansion and leaving it to decay, SS-Standartenführer Blobel had it blown up and demolished.³⁸ Along with the walls, the last traces of the Jewish prisoners held there also disappeared - they are shot, presumably with Lenz’s involvement. The men of the commando were granted several weeks’ leave.³⁹

For Lenz, service with the SS-Sonderkommando ended on April 10, 1943.⁴⁰ Unlike the other members of the commando, who were transferred either to the Waffen-SS Division "Prinz Eugen" in the Balkans or to the SS Field Gendarmerie Training and Replacement Company at Weimar-Buchenwald, Lenz remained in the Warthegau and returned to the Schutzpolizei in Posen. His subsequent assignment to another top-secret special operation indicates that the authorities regarded his behavior and experience at Kulmhof as extremely useful.⁴¹

The Reich Security Main Office (RSHA), within the framework of the so-called Enterdungsaktion (exhumation operation) of Sonderkommando 1005, ordered the elimination of mass graves in the Warthegau.⁴² For the Hohensalza administrative district, a unit known as Wetterkommando - literally, "Weather Commando" - is formed from November 1, 1943, under SS-Hauptsturmführer Johann Legath.⁴³ A police detachment under Ernst Burmeister took over cordoning and guard duties. For the practical work of locating mass graves, exhuming bodies, and burning them, the commander of the Security Police in Posen, Karl-Heinz Stoßberg, assigned a man who already has relevant experience: Polizeimeister Willi Lenz.

Note on Sonderkommando 1005

The name of the operation directed by Paul Blobel to eliminate evidence of Nazi mass murder. Across the occupied and annexed eastern territories, mass graves were opened, corpses were burned, and the traces of killing sites were concealed. In 1942, the Kulmhof extermination camp served as an experimental site where Blobel tested methods for burning the bodies. See also Sonderkommando Kulmhof in German Documents: Body Disposal.

Alongside Lenz, the personnel used for the exhumation work included the Polish prisoners who had already worked with him in the forest camp. They had already been used during the early mass killings carried out by Sonderkommando Lange between 1939 and 1941. Now they had to help locate old mass graves. Lenz demonstrated to the SS commando how the exact position of the graves can be determined with an iron rod driven into the ground.⁴⁴

Within the commando, Lenz occupied a prominent position. The Gestapo members described the Polizeimeister as the "manager of the commando," with a "special position as cremation master" and an "outstanding position" at the burning site - as though he had brought a privilege with him from Posen.⁴⁵ Together with the Polish prisoners, Lenz directed the Jewish labor detachment in getting the bodies from the mass graves and burning them on pyres. ⁴⁶

This assignment, too, led to some conflicts with the command leadership. Lenz brutally abused Jewish prisoners and was reprimanded by Legath for it.⁴⁷ When he shot prisoners on his own authority, Legath supposedly complained to the commander of the Security Police in Posen. Stoßberg, however, is said to have kept the Polizeimeister under his protection. ⁴⁸

Lenz also appeared to view his work as a career opportunity. To Legath, he described it as his "greatest wish" to become a police officer, and hoped to achieve this goal through "special zeal in commando service".⁴⁹ It is a calculation that ultimately paid off: on August 7, 1944, he was sent to the 22nd three-month precinct officer candidate course at the police school in Pelplin.⁵⁰

Return to Kulmhof in 1944

Before this, however, Lenz returned to his former place of activity - the forest camp near Kulmhof. In March 1944, Hans Bothmann assembled a new Sonderkommando, which is deployed for the liquidation of the Litzmannstadt/Łódź Ghetto. Bothmann recruited the core personnel primarily from former members of the Sonderkommando in the SS Division "Prinz Eugen", who already held key positions during the first phase of the Sonderkommando. The Polizeimeister Willi Lenz and Alois Häfele also rejoined the commando.

The unit is supplemented by the NSKK driver Stefan Seidenglanz, the Gestapo members Walter Piller, Hermann Gielow, and Ernst Thiele, as well as by the police guard detachment of the Wetterkommando under Police Precinct Lieutenant Ernst Burmeister.

Lenz was again deployed in the forest camp, where he took charge of supervising the Jewish forced labor commando.⁵¹ He shots Jewish forced laborers who are no longer fit for work, so-called "letter writers" who had initially been exempted from gassing, as well as people who survived the gas vans. The deputy commando leader Walter Piller estimated that Lenz killed between 450 and 500 Jewish people.⁵² His zeal drove him again to acts of violence that went too far even for the notorious commando leader Bothmann when they disrupted operations.⁵³

On May 20, 1944, like all former members of Sonderkommando Kulmhof, Lenz war awarded the War Merit Cross, 2nd Class with Swords.⁵⁴

Death in the granary, January 1945

If Lenz completed the officer-candidate course in Pelplin, he presumably returned to Kulmhof in November 1944. There he was involved in the liquidation of the camp and in the removal of traces. When the Red Army advanced on Łódź in January 1945 during the Vistula - Oder Offensive, the Sonderkommando Kulmhof received the order to evacuate. At this point, 47 Jewish prisoners were still locked in the granary next to the ruins of the mansion, which was blown up in April 1943.⁵⁵ They were to be shot before the retreat.

During the night of 17 - 18 January 1945, Lenz enters the granary together with Reserve Sergeant Ernst Haase and ordered the prisoners to come out in groups of five. Outside, Lenz or Bothmann killed them with shots to the back of the head. Among the first victims was 14-year-old Szymon Srebrnik. ⁵⁶

When the fourth group of five prisoners had been led out and the door behind them was about to be locked again, Mordka Zurawski forced the door open and fled outside. In the chaos, the Jewish prisoners who remained in the granary managed to overpower and kill Lenz and Haase. Gestapo and Schutzpolizei members then opened fire on the granary with machine guns and set the building on fire.⁵⁷

Szymon Srebrnik survived despite a serious gunshot wound to the head. Mordka Żurawski managed to escape into the nearby forest.

The burned-out granary at Chełmno , 1945.

Source: AIPN GK 165/271, volume 2, p. 52

Epilogue

Much of what is known about Lenz’s actions comes from postwar testimony by survivors, bystanders, and former perpetrators. Such statements must be read critically, particularly where former members of the Sonderkommando may have sought to minimize their own responsibility or shift blame onto others. Nevertheless, the convergence of multiple accounts, together with the surviving documentary record, makes it possible to reconstruct Lenz’s role with considerable confidence.

Willi Lenz was not one of the architects of the genocide of the Jews in the Warthegau. Nor, however, was he merely a low-ranking guard who endured the brutal conditions of service at Kulmhof. The surviving sources portray him as a cruel, self-motivated perpetrator who played an active role in mass murder.

In this respect, Lenz can be cautiously compared with Otto Moll of Auschwitz-Birkenau. The extermination process depended on men like them willing to murder the most vulnerable, capable of forcing prisoners to perform horrific work, and experienced in the practical work of killing and disposing of bodies - men who, in the words of one of Lenz’s fellow policemen, were "without inhibitions".

Timeline: Willi Lenz, 1894–1945

1894	Born at Smolarz Mill in the Province of Posen.
1920	Entered the Schutzpolizei in Breslau.
1937	Joined the NSDAP.
1941	Transferred to Schutzpolizei Posen and assigned to Sonderkommando Kulmhof.
1941–1943	Served in the forest camp at Kulmhof.
1943–1944	Assigned to mass-grave exhumation and corpse-burning operations in the Warthegau.
1944	Returned to Kulmhof during the liquidation of the Łódź/Litzmannstadt Ghetto.
January 1945	Killed during the Jewish prisoners’ resistance in the granary.

Notes and References

Abbreviation of Archives:

AIPN - Archiwum Instytutu Pamięci Narodowej, Warsaw
BArch - Bundesarchiv, Germany
LA Berlin - Landesarchiv Berlin
LA NRW - Landesarchiv Nordrhein-Westfalen
LA SH - Landesarchiv Schleswig-Holstein
StA Hamburg - Staatsarchiv Hamburg
YVA - Yad Vashem Archives, Jerusalem

For general studies on the Kulmhof/Chełmno extermination camp, see Patrick Montague, Chełmno and the Holocaust (2012); Shmuel Krakowski, Chełmno: A Small Village in Europe: The First Nazi Mass Extermination Camp (2009); Michael Alberti, Die Verfolgung und Vernichtung der Juden im Reichsgau Warthegau (2006); Peter Klein, Die Gettoverwaltung Litzmannstadt 1940–1944 (2009). See also Nick Terry, Covering Up Chelmno: Nazi Attempts to Obfuscate and Obliterate an Extermination Camp. 2018. Dapim: Studies on the Holocaust, 32(3), 188–205. 2 See also my blog series Sonderkommando Kulmhof in German Documents and source collection maintained by me at holocausthistory.site. ↩
LA Berlin; Östliche preußische Provinzen, Polen, Personenstandsregister 1874-1945; laufende Nummer: 7377; Urkunde Nummer: 375 ↩
BArch R 601/2351, p. 1–3, proposal list for the award of the Police Long Service Award (Polizei-Dienstauszeichnung); according to this document, military service from November 15, 1914, to March 30, 1919; BArch B 578/28359, p. 9, medical register of Reserve Field Hospital 64, Dizy-le-Gros; Seite 9, Krankenbuch des Reserve-Feldlazarett 64 Dizy le Gros; BArch B 578/36886, p. 9, medical register of Fortress Auxiliary Hospital VII, Posen; Wolfgang von Niebelschütz, Geschichte des Dragoner-Regiments von Bredow (1. Schlesisches) Nr. 4, 1929 ↩
Years later, his cavalry captain describes the mood within the troops - admittedly not without propagandistic intent - as one of bitter disappointment over the "loss of the Province of Posen" (Wolfgang von Niebelschütz, Geschichte des Dragoner-Regiments von Bredow (1. Schlesisches) Nr. 4, 1929, page 239). It is possible – though there is no concrete evidence - that he followed the call in Schlesien to join the Volunteer Squadron of Dragoon Regiment No. 4. This unit recruited "trained cavalrymen" willing to "protect their homeland, house and farm from predatory incursions by the Poles" and to spare their families a fate such as that attributed to the Germans in the Province of Posen. Good provisions, free accommodation, mobile pay, and a daily allowance are offered; at the same time, "discipline and order" were explicitly required (Groß Wartenberger Kreisblatt, February 1, 1919, no. 9, year 1919.). On September 30, 1919, this „border-defense formation" too was disbanded. ↩
BArch R 601/2351, p. 1–3, proposal list for the award of the Police Long Service Award (Polizei-Dienstauszeichnung), according to this document, Lenz entered police service on August 7, 1920. ↩
LA Berlin; Östliche preußische Provinzen, Polen, Personenstandsregister 1874-1945; laufende Nummer: 7377; Urkunde Nummer: 375 ↩
NSDAP-Gaukartei of Wolfgang Lenz, born December 10, 1926 in Breslau; available as a digitized microfilm at the U.S. National Archives, N0026, frame 774; ↩
NSDAP-Gaukartei BArch R 9361-IX KARTEI/2553197; available as a digitized microfilm at the U.S. National Archives, N0026, frame 596. ↩
Breslau address books, 1927–1932, 1935, 1937, and 1939. ↩
IPN GK 705-16, p. 15, Kommandotagesbefehl Nr. 70 des Kommandos der Schutzpolizei in Posen vom 16. Juli 1941; IPN GK 705-16, p. 30, Kommandotagesbefehl Nr. 78 des Kommandos der Schutzpolizei in Posen vom 12. August 1941 ↩
LA SH, Abt. 352.3, Nr. 16509, statement by Siegfried Süß, February 20, 1963. ↩
BArch R 601/2445, p. 63–64, proposal list for the War Merit Cross, 2nd Class with Swords ("[belonged] to SS-Sonderkommando Kulmhof: SS-Oberscharführer, criminal employee (K), Hering [from] December 8, 1941, to April 5, 1943, and SS-Oberscharführer, criminal employee (K), Laabs [from] December 8, 1941, to April 5, 1943"); Laabs and Hering were the two gas-van drivers at Kulmhof; AIPN GK 165/271, vol. 3, p. 13, statement by Adam Milewski, July 5, 1945 ("Transports began arriving in Chełmno from December 8, and from that date, the area was guarded."); AIPN GK 165/271, vol. 3, p. 102, statement by Zofja Potyralska, July 13, 1945 ("The Sonderkommando arrived in Chełmno at the end of November 1941, while the first transport of Jews arrived on December 8."); see also my blog post Review of Holocaust Handbooks Volume 23 - Carlo Mattogno, Chelmno (Part III - Systematic Analysis of One Example). ↩
BArch B 162/3245, Statement by Theodor Malzmüller, June 27, 1960 ("After Polizeimeister Lenz had delivered his speech to the Jews, he went with his Jewish labor detachment to the forest camp…"). ↩
LA SH, Abt. 352.3, Nr. 16507, statement by Fritz Ismer, July 5, 1961; BArch B 162/3246, statement by Fritz Ismer, November 9, 1960 ("It often happened that the Jews of the work detachments collapsed as a result of poor nutrition and hard labor. When they reported this to a police officer, he sent them to the ‘Doctor.’ ‘Doctor’ was the nickname of Polizeimeister Willi Lenz, who supervised all the excavations. He shot the Jews in question while they were standing, with a shot to the back of the neck."); LA SH, Abt. 352.3, Nr.16508.1, statement by Kurt Meier, June 30, 1960 ("He had the nickname Dr. Lenz."); LA SH, Abt. 352.3, Nr. 16509, statement by Franz Schalling, July 12, 1961 ("I still remember how, after my return from the hospital, one of the Jews of the commando told me that in the meantime many of our dear friends had had to remain in the forest. They had had to ‘go to Uncle Doctor.’ By this he meant that, because of their weakened condition, they had been shot by Polizeimeister Lenz in the forest camp."); LA SH, Abt. 352.3, Nr. 16509, statement by Franz Schalling, September 27, 1961 ("The selection of the Jewish mansion commando was carried out by the Poles. I myself heard them say in German to members of this commando: ‘You probably can’t go on anymore; tomorrow you’ll go to Uncle Doctor.’ The next day these people were then sent along to the forest, where they were shot by Lenz, who bore the nickname ‘Doctor.’"); AIPN GK 165/271, vol. 1, p. 51–53, statement by Andrzej Miszczak, June 14, 1945 ("nicknamed ‘Doctor’"). ↩
LA SH, Abt. 352.3, Nr.16490, statement by Josef Islinger, May 6, 1964 ("I know of Lenz that he also sometimes shot Jews during the course of the day."); LA SH, Abt. 352.3, Nr.16490, statement by Friedrich Maderholz, May 8, 1964 ("Regarding the shootings of Jews from the work commando who had become unable to work, I can say that these were regularly carried out at the end of duty. At a whistle, the guard chain closed in, and Lenz selected those unable to work. He, Plate, or Bothmann then shot them. Lenz also sometimes shot Jews during the day. I also remember Bothmann arbitrarily shooting Jews whenever he came to the forest camp."); LA SH, Abt. 352.3, Nr. 16492, statement by Gustav Fiedler, October 25, 1965 ("It is said to have been customary that, occasionally, at a whistle from Lenz, the inner guard ring would contract concentrically, and that Lenz would then personally carry out a so-called selection and shoot the Jews who could no longer work."); LA SH, Abt. 352.3, Nr.16490, statement by Josef Islinger, May 6, 1964 ("Regarding the Jewish work commando, I can state that it often happened that some of them were selected out and shot. As far as I remember, Lenz mainly took care of this. These selections and shootings were regularly carried out in the evening. I saw that, besides Lenz, Plate and Bothmann also shot."); Bundesarchiv B 162/3249, statement by Josef Islinger, February 26, 1962 ("Almost every day it happened that members of the Jewish work commando were shot in the forest camp in the evening before it was transported back to Kulmhof. These were always Jews who were no longer able or willing to work. Usually 5–6 people were killed. Sometimes, however, around 10 people were shot. These executions were mostly carried out by Police Meister Lenz. He ordered the Jews to lie down at the edge of the mass grave, face down. Then he took his pistol and shot each one in the back of the neck."); LA SH, Abt. 352.3, Nr. 15492, statement by Theodor Malzmüller, November 8, 1965 ("I saw with my own eyes that Jews from the work commando, after their chains had been removed, had to lie down on their stomachs and were killed by Lenz, Bothmann, or Plate with a shot to the back of the neck. This happened about 10 to 15 times, always in the evening. We were called together so that the ring closed and no one could run away."); LA SH, Abt. 352.3, Nr.16508.1, statement by Theodor Malzmüller, June 20, 1961 ("Whoever among them became sick and was no longer able to work had his foot chains removed and was shot by Bothmann, Plate, or Lenz in the area of the forest camp. This happened in such a way that they had to lie down and were then given a shot to the back of the neck with a pistol. I often saw all three of them do this. For the total number of shootings that I witnessed in this way, the figure of about 130 is not estimated too high."); LA SH, Abt. 352.3, Nr. 16492, statement by Gustav Fiedler, October 25, 1965 ("I was once present when a Jew came to Lenz and said: ‘Meister, shoot me, I can’t go on anymore’ or ‘I don’t want to go on anymore.’ At first Lenz did not want to, since the man could work well. Then he said: ‘Run,’ and shot the Jew."); LA SH, Abt. 352.3, Nr. 16509, statement by Jakob Wildermuth, January 17, 1962 ("It did happen once in a while that a victim was briefly sent away and was then shot when, for this purpose, he turned his back to the person killing him."); LA SH, Abt. 352.3, Nr.16510, statement by Martin Meier, October 11, 1961 ("I now remember that these three Jews had to lie face down in the mass grave on top of the corpses already lying there. Lenz then also climbed onto the corpses and gave the three Jews the shot to the back of the neck from above."); ↩
LA SH, Abt. 352.3, Nr.16490, statement by Josef Islinger, May 6, 1964 ("It may also have happened on occasion that bodies taken out of the gas van still showed signs of life. I once saw Lenz shoot such victims.") ↩
LA SH, Abt. 352.3, Nr. 15492, statement by Fritz Ismer, November 10, 1965. ↩
BArch B 162/3245, statement by Theodor Malzmüller, June 27, 1960 ("A transport consisting of four trucks carrying Jews … There may have been around 100 Jews on these trucks altogether. […] I could not see what took place there, but it was clear that the Jews were shot there. Afterwards, I heard from comrades — I can no longer say from whom — that the Jews had in fact been shot there by Bothmann, Plate, and Lenz. According to what was said, these Jews were mentally ill. […] I also saw with my own eyes that, over time, Bothmann, Plate, and Lenz shot approximately 130 Jews in the immediate vicinity. Of these, approximately 50 were shot by Bothmann, approximately 50 by Plate, and approximately 30 by Lenz. These were Jews who, over time, were brought to the forest camp in smaller transports of 5–10 people."); LA SH, Abt. 352.3, Nr.16508.1, statement by Kurt Meier, June 30, 1960 ("In one instance, he is said to have killed several Russian officers in the courtyard of the mansion with shots to the back of the neck. There were reportedly five or six Russian officers who had escaped from a prisoner-of-war camp. It was said of Lenz that he was a specialist in shots to the back of the neck."); LA SH, Abt. 352.3, Nr. 16507, statement of Alois Adler, January 23, 1962 ("With every arriving transport, there were probably 20–30 sick or infirm people who did not march to the mill but were taken by truck directly to Kulmhof. As I heard from accounts at the time, they were taken to the forest camp and shot there with a pistol by Polizeimeister Lenz. The people had to lie down on the ground and were shot in the back of the neck."); ↩
AIPN GK 165/271, vol. 2, p. 81, statement by Rudolf Kramp, July 1, 1945. ↩
LA SH, Abt. 352.3, Nr.16516, statement by Friedrich Hensen, June 22, 1960 ("Thus, on several occasions I saw Runge, Lenz, and Fiedler kill sick Jews with shots to the back of the neck. Each time, these people had to lie face down on the ground. Then Runge, Lenz, or Fiedler approached with a pistol and shot them in the back of the neck from above."); BArch B 162/3247, statement by Kurt Möbius, November 8, 1961 ("Haider and Lenz later told me that they, too, had shot Jews in the forest camp who were still alive."); LA SH, Abt. 352.3, Nr. 16508.1, statement by Walter Nonn, April 18, 1962 ("During my night duty in the forest camp, several Jewish prisoners were shot. The perpetrators were Polizeimeister Lenz and a certain Strohmeyer [sic]."); LA SH, Abt. 352.3, Nr. 16509, statement by Jakob Wildermuth, January 17, 1962 ("Such shootings were carried out by Bothmann, Plate, Lenz, and Runge."); LA SH, Abt. 352.3, Nr. 16489, statement by Gustav Fiedler, January 30, 1964 ("With regard to the policemen who, besides me, were active in the forest camp, I would like to add that Heider, whom I have already mentioned, was Lenz’s deputy, which has since come back to me."); Landesarchiv Nordrhein-Westfalen, Rep.206 Nr. 189, statement by Jakob Wildermuth, November 8, 1965 ("It is correct that, during my interrogation by the witness Kofner, I mentioned of my own accord that Heinl had also shot people."); BArch B 162/3247, statement by Kurt Möbius, November 8, 1961 ("That morning, I saw Oberscharführer Richter shoot with a pistol several people who had been in the gas vans but were still alive."); LA SH, Abt. 352.3, Nr. 16489, statement by Walter Bock, February 5, 1964 ("I can only remember that Lenz and Plate were said to have carried out such shootings."); LA SH, Abt. 352.3, Nr.16490, statement by Josef Islinger, May 6, 1964 ("I saw that, besides Lenz, Plate and Bothmann also shot people."); LA SH, Abt. 352.3, Nr. 16507, statement by Fritz Ismer, January 17, 1961 ("During my service in the forest camp, I saw Plate, Lenz, and Bothmann kill members of the Jewish labor detachments on several occasions with a pistol shot to the back of the neck when they were no longer able to work."); BArch B 162/3248, statement by Friedrich Maderholz, July 20, 1961 ("During my service as a guard inside the forest camp, I saw on several occasions that Lenz, Haider, Bothmann, and Plate killed members of the Jewish labor detachment there over the course of time with pistol shots to the back of the neck when they were no longer able to work. The killings were carried out mainly by Lenz, who was very brutal and ruthless."); LA SH, Abt. 352.3, Nr. 15492, statement by Karl Heinl, November 3, 1965 ("As I heard it, only Lenz, Bothmann, and Plate carried out shootings. Heider was not permitted to shoot."); LA SH, Abt. 352.3, Nr. 15492, statement by Gustav Laabs, November 3, 1965 ("Apart from Lenz, no one carried out shootings in the forest camp."); LA SH, Abt. 352.3, Nr. 16515, statement by Gustav Laabs, May 8, 1961 ("Several times, I saw Polizeimeister Lenz shoot people there in the back of the neck after they had first been forced to kneel or lie down. […] In addition to these several shootings by Lenz, I also once saw such a shooting carried out in the forest camp by Bothmann and a civilian unknown to me. The people had been made to lie down in a row beside one another on the ground. Bothmann and the civilian, both visibly drunk, stood with their feet between them and killed the people one after another with shots to the back of the neck. The civilian missed several times; Bothmann then laughed like a madman and fired again. This incident occurred in the summer of 1942."); LA SH, Abt. 352.3, Nr.16490, statement by Friedrich Maderholz, May 8, 1964 ("I also remember that Bothmann arbitrarily shot Jews whenever he came to the forest camp."). ↩
LA SH, Abt. 352.3, Nr.15492, statement by Josef Islinger, November 8, 1965 ("I believe Lenz kept records of it."); LA SH, Abt. 352.3, Nr.16514, statement by Gustav Fiedler, January 29, 1964 ("If it were true that I had carried out shootings, then one of the other police officers would surely also have heard me report the shooting to Lenz and explain to him what had happened to the missing Jewish forced laborers. Lenz kept a notebook in which he apparently recorded the number of Jewish forced laborers deployed."); LA SH, Abt. 352.3, Nr. 16507, statement by Fritz Ismer, January 17, 1961 ("As I myself saw, he [Häfele] also kept records of all the members of the Jewish labor detachments. Lenz also reported to him whenever some members of the Jewish labor detachment did not return from the forest camp because they had been liquidated. Häfele then crossed them out in his book."); LA SH, Abt. 352.3, Nr. 16507, statement by Fritz Ismer, July 5, 1961 ("When the Jewish labor detachment returned from the forest, Polizeimeister Lenz would in any case inform him of the changes, saying, for example: ‘eight out and five in.’ Häfele would then write something in his book."). ↩
LA NRW, Rep.206 Nr. 189, statement by Fritz Ismer [date?] ("Polizeimeister Lenz brought individual valuables and extracted gold teeth from the forest camp."). ↩
BArch B162/3248, statement by Walter Bock, June 20, 1961 ("Häfele came from Posen, but spoke with a Swabian dialect and was already an older officer. He had a very calm manner. I do not believe that he performed his duties at Kulmhof willingly. I often observed him slipping bread or cigarettes to the Jews of the labor detachment when no one was watching."). ↩
LA SH, Abt. 352.3, Nr.16516, statement by Theodor Malzmüller, April 21, 1964 ("Police Meister Lenz was the leader of the Waldkommando in the inner compound; he was very brutal."); AIPN GK 165/271, Band 1, S. 51-53, statement by Andrzej Miszczak, June 14, 1945 ("Lenz, nicknamed ‘Doctor,’ was the cruelest of all the Germans in Chełmno; that sadist had to kill at least one Jew a day with his own hands."); LA SH, Abt. 352.3, Nr. 15492, statement by Alois Häfele, November 3, 1965 ("Lenz was a sadist; he had no inhibitions."). ↩
LA SH, Abt. 352.3, Nr. 15492, statement by Theodor Malzmüller, November 8, 1965 ("I do not know whether he [Fiedler] carried a club. In any case, Lenz always had one with him."); LA SH, Abt. 352.3, Nr.16516, statement by Theodor Malzmüller, April 21, 1964 ("I can also say of Fiedler that, like Lenz, he carried a walking stick."); LA SH, Abt. 352.3, Nr. 16509, statement by Jakob Wildermuth, January 17, 1962 ("I do remember that, among others, Lenz and Haider carried sticks. I saw Lenz beat the Jewish workers."). ↩
Pawlicka-Nowak, Swiadectwa Zaglady, pp. 157–168, statement by Szymon Srebrnik, 1963 ("The deputy commandant of the camp, Lenz, was also particularly inventive in his cruelty. Among other things, he liked to shoot at bottles placed on the prisoners’ heads. Sometimes he hit the bottle; other times, he hit the human head.") ↩
LA SH, Abt. 352.3, Nr.16516, statement by Friedrich Hensen, February 6, 1964 ("Lenz also frequently beat the Jews and was particularly brutal toward them."); BArchB 162/3249, statement by Josef Islinger, February 26, 1962 ("Lenz and Runge constantly drove the members of the Jewish labor detachment to unload the gas vans. They insulted them with terms such as ‘pigs.’ It also happened that they beat the workers with sticks."); BArchB 162/3247, statement by Jakob Wildermuth, December 14, 1961 ("Lenz, Runge, and Heinl usually drove the members of the Jewish labor detachment in the forest camp to work by shouting at them and ordering them to work faster. They insulted them with terms such as ‘pigs,’ ‘lazy dogs,’ and the like. […] It also frequently happened that Lenz, Runge, and Heinl forced these Jews to work by beating them with wooden sticks."). ↩
LA SH, Abt. 352.3, Nr. 16489, statement by Gustav Fiedler, January 30, 1964 ("He was so harsh that he even kicked his own men in the backside."); LA SH, Abt. 352.3, Nr.15492, statement by Kurt Huth, November 12, 1965 ("Lenz approached me with his pistol. Hüfing said, ‘Let me handle this.’ He then beat me with a whip."); LA SH, Abt. 352.3, Nr.16489, statement by Kurt Huth, April 1, 1964 ("I remember Lenz as a completely ruthless, first-class sadist. He fired his pistol indiscriminately and frequently shot Jews from the labor detachment. He also threatened me personally with his pistol, so that I already thought he intended to shoot me. I had become nauseous from the stench there and from the sight of the horrific events inside the forest camp, and I must have collapsed and fallen asleep while on guard duty, whereupon Lenz caught me. He immediately reached for his pistol, and if First Lieutenant Hüfing had not arrived, he would certainly have shot me. Hüfing struck me several times across the back with a riding whip. After that, I was assigned only as an outer guard in the forest camp.") ↩
LA SH, Abt. 352.3, Nr. 15492, statement by Alois Häfele, November 3, 1965 ("I lived with Lenz, Möbius, and Heider in the German House.") ↩
LA SH, Abt. 352.3, Nr. 15492, statement by Alois Häfele, November 3, 1965 ("Lenz was a sadist; he had no inhibitions."). ↩
LA SH, Abt. 352.3, Nr. 15492, statement by Kurt Möbius, November 3, 1965 ("Lenz was completely insane; he was a bad comrade and intolerable. When he returned from the forest camp in the evening, it was absolutely impossible for us to have any conversation with him. We avoided him so that we would not have to listen to his rambling talk. In my opinion, he was fanatical in racial-political terms and boasted about his marksmanship and his work, which we found repugnant. He was extraordinarily quarrelsome and had such cold eyes."). ↩
BArchB 162/3248, statement by Kurt Möbius, November 23, 1961 ("The two Polizeimeister living with me, Lenz and Haider, evidently participated in what was taking place with an inwardly positive attitude …"). ↩
AIPN GK 165/271, volume 4, pp. 67–70; see also Chelmno Witnesses Speak, p. 194, statement by Bruno Israel, October 29, 1945 ("Once I found a photograph of a Jewish family I knew — the Smietana family — and wanted to take it. Lenz saw this and tore it into pieces."). ↩
LA SH, Abt. 352.3, Nr.16508.1, statement by Heinrich May, June 14, 1961 ("During my interrogation in Bonn, the name Lenz was brought back to my mind. He had struck me as a particularly respectable and unassuming [bieder] man, and I had wondered what he was doing in that gendarmerie commando."); LA NRW, Rep.206 Nr. 189, statement by Heinrich May [date?] ("Polizeimeister Lenz: ‘A small, lowly little peasant.’"). ↩
BArchB162/3258, statement by Hermann Gielow, May 15, 1945 ("Willi Lenz, Meister of the Schutzpolizei, approximately 48 years old, 165 cm tall, with thinning blond hair, grey-blue eyes, and a slender build; whereabouts unknown.") ↩
LA SH, Abt. 352.3, Nr.16508.1, statement by Theodor Malzmüller, June 20, 1961 ("I did not witness it myself, but afterwards I heard from comrades that, on one occasion, one of the Jews from the labor detachment was said to have attempted to escape. It was said that he had suddenly run into the forest but was then caught at the forest clearing. He was apparently shot immediately, namely by Polizeimeister Lenz. Lenz must then have tried to present the matter as though the man who had been shot had slipped past another police officer standing guard there as a result of that officer’s inattentiveness. This comrade disputed that account, however, and stated that, on the contrary, the man who was shot had run past Polizeimeister Lenz. Bothmann then came to the forest camp and severely reprimanded Lenz because he had shot the Jew immediately."). ↩
BArch B 162/3248, statement by Kurt Möbius, November 23, 1961 ("Incidentally, the two Polizeimeister Heyder [sic] and Lenz were later also questioned before the SS and Police Court after four Jews from the labor detachment had escaped while under their supervision during the journey to the forest camp, as I already described yesterday (fol. 11, para. 3). […] They had, however, seated themselves in the driver’s cab and were therefore partly responsible for the success of the escape attempt. Both of them had to go to Posen for questioning."). ↩
Andrej Angrick, »Aktion 1005« — Spurenbeseitigung von NS-Massenverbrechen 1942–1945, p. 293; AIPN GK 165/271, volume 1, pp. 51–53; see also Pawlicka-Nowak, Chelmno Witnesses Speak, pp. 139–144, statement by Andrzej Miszczak, June 14, 1945 ("On April 7, 1943, the palace was blown up in order to obliterate the traces of their crimes."); BArch B 162/3246, p. 158, statement by Walter Burmeister, January 25, 1961 ("Shortly before our departure, the Jews of the labor detachments were killed, although I did not participate in this, and the mansion was blown up."); BArch B 162/3248, p. 86, interrogation of Walter Burmeister, March 24, 1961 ("Bothmann, Bürstinger, and I, above all, remained until the end. Everything was then dismantled, and the mansion was blown up; that is to say, Standartenführer Blobel wanted to blow it up, but despite extensive preparations achieved only partial success. The forest camp was to remain fenced in, and the key was handed over to the forester. The cremation oven, which had appeared there at approximately the same time as Blobel, was demolished. Everything was levelled. I do not know whether planting had already been carried out there at that time. The last Jewish labor detachment also had to die; it was not present until the very end."); LA NRW, Rep.295 Nr. 251, statement by Alois Häfele, April 21, 1961 ("The mansion was blown up before the end, by an SS commando unknown to us. Bothmann killed the last Jewish labor detachment. That took place in the forest camp, but I was not present and had nothing to do with it.") ↩
BArchNS 19/2635, p. 9, letter from Rudolf Brandt to Hans Jüttner, March 29, 1943 ("A commando of 85 men under the command of SS-Hauptsturmführer Bothmann will complete its assignment during the course of this month. Afterwards, the men will go on leave, either for three or four weeks) ↩
IPN GK 705/23, p.11, Command Daily Order No. 39 of the Schutzpolizei Command in Posen, April 11, 1943 ↩
Allegedly, SS-Hauptsturmführer Johann Legath had already received, around this time, the assignment to exhume and destroy the mass graves in the Posen and Hohensalza districts of the Warthegau; see Staatsarchiv Hamburg, 213-12/007, pp. 3097–3105, statement by Johann Legath, April 2, 1962 ("Approximately three quarters of a year before the commando began its activities, Oberregierungsrat Stossberg informed me that I would soon be placed in charge of such a commando.") ↩
Andrej Angrick, »Aktion 1005« - Spurenbeseitigung von NS-Massenverbrechen 1942 – 1945, p. 1034 ff.; ↩
YVA O.53/12; see also Chelmno Witnesses Speak, pp. 169–193, statement by Walter Piller, May 15, 1945 ("After the closure of the Gestapo offices in Inowrodaw on November 1, 1943, due to the shortage of officers, I was transferred to a Gestapo post in Lodz. However, I did not begin my service until the middle of 1944, because before that I was assigned to Legath’s Wetterkommando, under the command of Kriminalkommissar and SS-Hauptsturmführer Hans Legath. […] 1. Legath, Hans — Kriminalkommissar and SS-Hauptsturmführer, […] 2. Michaelis, Erich — Kriminalsekretär and SS-Sturmscharführer, […] Legath’s deputy. 3. Schmerse, Wilhelm — Kriminalsekretär and SS-Sturmscharführer, […] 4. Thiele, Ernst — a driver and an SS-Hauptscharführer, […] 5. Gielow, Hermann — a driver and an SS-Hauptscharführer, […] 6. Kossek — I have forgotten his first name — SS-Mann."); StA Hamburg, 213-12/007, pp. 3097–3105, statement by Johann Legath, April 2, 1962 ("The following had been assigned to the commando from the Gestapo: Schmerse, Piller, and Michaelis. In addition, there was the driver Thiele."); StA Hamburg 213-12/0597/007, p. 3141, statement by Wilhelm Schmerse, April 6, 1962 ("When the Hohensalza State Police Office was dissolved in the autumn of 1943 and the Hohensalza branch office of the Commander of the Security Police in Posen was established, I was transferred to the State Police headquarters in Litzmannstadt. […] However, I never actually went to Litzmannstadt; instead, the head of the Hohensalza branch office, Hauptsturmführer Legath, in agreement with the responsible authorities, assigned me to a special commando. […] The leader of the special commando was Hauptsturmführer Legath. In addition to me, the following came from the Hohensalza office: Kriminalsekretär Piller, Kriminalsekretär Michaelis, and the driver Ernst Thiele."); BArchB 162/25944, p. 80, statement by Erich Michaelis, February 1, 1961 ("As I already stated during my earlier interrogation on October 13, 1960, I served with Legath’s commando, the so-called Wetterkommando, which was tasked with exhuming bodies. As I have already stated, this was during the period from November 1943 to May 1944.") ↩
StA Hamburg, 213-12/007, pp. 3097–3105, statement by Johann Legath, April 2, 1962 ("I conducted the search for the graves together with Polizeimeister Lenz; other officers were also involved in the search. […] Unless I am very much mistaken, Lenz was not always present. At the outset, he merely showed me how to determine whether bodies were buried in the ground by using an iron rod. In addition to Lenz, I had two police officers with me."); YVA O.53/12; see also Chelmno Witnesses Speak, pp. 169–193, statement by Walter Piller, May 15, 1945 ("Over the three and a half years from 1939 to 1943, the graves at the execution site had collapsed. This meant that they were visible to people. If there was any doubt, an iron rod was pushed into the ground, and the graves were identified in places where the earth gave way.") ↩
BArch B 162/25944, p. 80, statement by Erich Michaelis, February 1, 1961 ("Lenz was the manager of the commando."); StA Hamburg 213-12/0597/007, p. 3141, statement by Wilhelm Schmerse, April 6, 1962 ("Lenz held a special position as the master responsible for cremation. […] At the burning site, Lenz undoubtedly occupied a dominant position. He gave the impression that he had brought some special privilege with him from Posen.") ↩
BArch B 162/25944, S. 21-25, Aussage von Wilhelm Schmerse vom 27. Oktober 1960 („Zur Vernichtung der Leichen wurden von Pol.Mstr. Willi Lenz und anderen Polizeibeamten große Feuerstellen hergerichtet, in der Art, dass große Stapel Holz mit Leichen aufgeschichtet und in Brand gesetzt wurden."); BArchB 162/25944, S. 14 – 20, Aussage von Johann Legath vom 7. Oktober 1960 („Ich kann mich nunmehr erinnern, dass Polizeimeister Lenz meinem Kommando als Fachmann für die Ausgrabungen und Verbrennungen der Leichen zugeteilt war."); YVA O.53/12, siehe auch Chelmno Witnesses Speak, p. 169 – 193, Aussage von Walter Piller vom 15. Mai 1945 („As soon as the corpses had been exhumed, they were thoroughly cremated under Lenz's supervision. If necessary, the area around the pit was cleared off and covered with iron sheets. As soon as the fire was lit, dead bodies were thrown into the pit and burned.) ↩
YVA O.53/12, siehe auch Chelmno Witnesses Speak, p. 169 – 193, Aussage von Walter Piller vom 15. Mai 1945 ("Only Polizeimeister Lenz hit one Jew or another while they were burning the corpses; however, in such cases he was instantly reprimanded by commanding officer Legath.") ↩
BArchB 162/25944, pp. 21–25, statement by Wilhelm Schmerse, October 27, 1960 ("For the destruction of the bodies, large pyres were prepared by Polizeimeister Willi Lenz and other police officers, with large stacks of wood and corpses piled up and set on fire."); BArchB 162/25944, pp. 14–20, statement by Johann Legath, October 7, 1960 ("I can now recall that Polizeimeister Lenz was assigned to my commando as a specialist in the exhumation and burning of bodies."); YVA O.53/12; see also Chelmno Witnesses Speak, pp. 169–193, statement by Walter Piller, May 15, 1945 ("As soon as the corpses had been exhumed, they were thoroughly cremated under Lenz’s supervision. If necessary, the area around the pit was cleared and covered with iron sheets. As soon as the fire was lit, bodies were thrown into the pit and burned.") ↩
StA Hamburg 213-12/007, pp. 3106–3108, statement by Johann Legath, April 3, 1962 ("With regard to Lenz, I would also like to say that he gave the impression of being a very zealous officer who hoped to secure his promotion to officer rank through his exceptional zeal in carrying out the commando’s work. According to his own statements, becoming a police officer was his greatest wish. He also tried to encourage me to provide an appropriate assessment of his performance.") ↩
IPN GK 705/27, p. 23, Command Daily Order No. 50 of the Schutzpolizei Command in Posen, July 19, 1944 ↩
AIPN GK 165/271, volume 4, pp. 67–70, statement by Bruno Israel, October 29, 1945 ("The Jewish workers had shackles on their legs. They were divided into the Hauskommando and the Waldkommando. The former was supervised by Heffele [Häfele], while the latter was supervised by Lenz, with Runge as his deputy."); AIPN GK 165/271, volume 2, pp. 67–70, statement by Szymon Srebrnik, June 29, 1945 ("Runge operated one crematorium and Kreczmer [Kretschmar] the other. Lenz was their superior."); AIPN GK 165/271, volume 3, pp. 42–45; see also Chelmno Witnesses Speak, pp. 130–135, statement by Mordka Zurawski, July 31, 1945 ("The manager of the Waldkommando was Wachtmeister Lenz.") ↩
YVA O.53/12; see also Chelmno Witnesses Speak, pp. 169–193, statement by Walter Piller, May 15, 1945 ("Lenz [shot] an estimated 450–500 people."); AIPN GK 165/271, volume 3, pp. 42–45; see also Chelmno Witnesses Speak, pp. 130–135, statement by Mordka Zurawski, July 31, 1945 ("He shot one of the Jews because the man was getting onto the truck too slowly."); Chelmno Witnesses Speak, pp. 136–138, statement by Mordka Zurawski, January 30, 1950 ("Next, a special labor detachment made up of Jews entered the van and removed the corpses, while another detachment carried them to the furnace. If anyone was still alive, he or she was shot. A Gestapo officer stood next to each furnace; I remember clearly that Hanes [Hannes] stood next to one and Lentz [Lenz] next to the other, and they shot those who were still moving.") ↩
AIPN GK 165/271, volume 3, pp. 42–45; see also Chelmno Witnesses Speak, pp. 130–135, statement by Mordka Zurawski, July 31, 1945 ("Besides, Lenz beat Jews regardless of whether they worked well or badly. Once he beat me so severely that I lost consciousness; he then poured cold water over me to revive me."); AIPN GK 165/271, volume 2, pp. 67–70, statement by Szymon Srebrnik, June 29, 1945 ("The construction work lasted about two weeks. Jews building the furnaces were sometimes killed for entertainment. Lenz and the Sonderkommando commander, Commissioner Bothmann, displayed extreme cruelty. At times, of 30 workers sent to the woods, only 14 returned. The work groups were constantly replenished with new men brought from Łódź. Although each of eight transports brought 30 workers, even this was not enough, because so many of them were killed."); Pawlicka-Nowak, Swiadectwa Zaglady, pp. 157–168, statement by Szymon Srebrnik, June 1963 ("The deputy commandant of the camp, Lenz, was also particularly inventive in his cruelty. Among other things, he liked to shoot at bottles placed on the prisoners’ heads. Sometimes he hit the bottle; other times, he hit the human head."); YVA O.53/12; see also Chelmno Witnesses Speak, pp. 169–193, statement by Walter Piller, May 15, 1945 ("It was emphasized, however, that no brutal methods were to be used in the extermination process. Such conduct could result in severe punishment by the SS and Police Court. As far as I remember, Polizeimeister Lenz violated these orders on two occasions by beating Jews working in the forest with a stick, so that Bothmann had to intervene and reprimand him in both cases.") ↩
BArch ZK-L 484-555; according to this document, the War Merit Cross, 2nd Class with Swords, was proposed for Lenz by the Commander of the Order Police in Posen under file reference IIb-9573/43 (g) on December 3, 1943, and awarded to him on May 20, 1944 ↩
AIPN GK 165/271, volume 1, p. 51-53, Statement by Andrzej Miszczak, June 14, 1945 ("In the end there were 47 Jews in Chełmno; previously there were 80-90."); AIPN GK 165/271, volume 2, p. 67-70, statement by Szymon Srebrnik, June 29, 1945 ("In the granary there were still 87 Jewish workers. Those were tailors and shoemakers. They lived upstairs. The number of workers decreased and finally there were 47 of them left - 22 tailors and 25 courtyard workers."); ↩
AIPN GK 165/271, volume 2, pp. 67–70, statement by Szymon Srebrnik, June 29, 1945 ("When the Soviet Army was advancing rapidly, one night we were ordered to leave the granary in groups of five. I cannot remember the date. The area was lit by car headlights. I went outside in the first group of five. Lenz ordered us to lie down on the ground. He shot everyone in the back of the head. I lost consciousness and regained it when there was no one around."); statement by Bruno Israel ("On the night of January 16, 1945, we were woken up and ordered to pack our belongings. We were told about the advancing Russians. Lenz then led the Jews out of the granary in groups of five, and Bootmann [Bothmann] killed them with shots to the back of the head."); AIPN GK 165/271, volume 1, pp. 51–53, statement by Andrzej Miszczak, June 14, 1945 ("When the Soviet Army was advancing, the ‘liquidation’ of the last Jews began. They were led out in groups of five. They were ordered to lie on the ground and were shot in the back of the head."); Pawlicka-Nowak, Swiadectwa Zaglady, pp. 157–168, statement by Szymon Srebrnik, June 1963 ("It happened at night in mid-January 1945, when the door of our barracks was suddenly thrown open and Willi Lenz roared: ‘Five men out!’ I was among them, the youngest of all. I was wearing only my underwear and had no shoes. I remained calm, unlike a fellow prisoner, a doctor from Czechoslovakia, who went into shock and began dancing and singing. Bothmann was also outside. We were ordered to lie face down on the ground. Then the shots rang out. We were executed with the infamous Genickschuss — a shot to the back of the head."); Pawlicka-Nowak, Swiadectwa Zaglady, pp. 131–151, statement by Mordka Zurawski, February 17, 1945 ("It was the night between Wednesday, January 17, and Thursday, January 18. It was around 1 a.m. The doors of the camp opened, and we heard a voice: ‘Get up! Get dressed!’ At the same time, there was a loud roar in the yard. What kind of roar? The roar of a car engine, which, as it turned out, had brought Bothmann himself. This seemed deeply suspicious to us. We had terrible premonitions. Who entered first? The first to enter was Gestapo officer Meister Lenz. The first group of five went to their deaths. What kind of Meister? The master of the motor repair workshop. Upon entering, he called out the first group of five. He held a flashlight in one hand and a revolver in the other. We were chained. We could barely manage to dress ourselves. Some managed to put on some clothing, but most did not. Some were in shirts, without caps, barefoot. They led out the first five. A moment later, we heard five shots. We already knew what was happening."); AIPN GK 165/271, volume 3, pp. 42–45; see also Chelmno Witnesses Speak, pp. 130–135, statement by Mordka Zurawski, July 31, 1945 ("On the night of January 17, Lenz entered the granary and called out five people. After a while, we heard five shots.") ↩
AIPN GK 165/271, volume 2,p p. 67-70, volume 2, pp. 67–70, statement by Szymon Srebrnik, June 29, 1945 ("Later I learned that while killing the Jews, Lenz and Hase [Haase] also died (I saw their bodies). When the two went inside, the Jews hung one of them and shot the other one with his own weapon."); AIPN GK 165/271, volume 3, pp. 42–45; see also Chelmno Witnesses Speak, pp. 130–135, statement by Mordka Zurawski, July 31, 1945 ("We knew it signified our deaths, and that they would call us out in groups of five to kill us all. I knocked on the ceiling with a wooden board in order to alarm the tailors and shoemakers on the first floor. I decided to save my life. I stood by the door hidden under a blanket with a knife in hand. After the fourth group of five had been led out of the granary and the door was being locked, I charged the door with great force, probably making Lenz, who was locking it, fall over. I ran madly straight ahead stabbing my way through. I felt as if I were unconscious. As I later found out, in this act of madness one of the gendarmes lost his nose, and another, his ear. They were shooting at me and one bullet reached the muscle of my right thigh. One of the gendarmes hit my leg with the butt of a gun, but I kept on running. I got through the fence injuring my right arm to the bone and kept on running towards the woods. The Germans organized a chase. Lying in a ditch, I heard the gendarme Ruwinach [Ruwenach] and some other gendarmes warning the residents in nearby the houses about my escape...After the Soviet army marched in, I was in Chełmno and saw the corpses of Lenz and Haase. They had been killed by Jews during the execution."); AIPN GK 165/271, vol. 4, pp. 67-70, statement by Bruno Israel, October 29, 1945 ("Suddenly, Zurawski sprang from the granary, fought his way through the SS-men and escaped, running across my path about 6-7 meters away from me. In spite of Bootmann’s [Bothmann’s] order, I did not shoot. Bootmann, Kretschmer, gendarme Daniel, and others started chasing him. However, I did not know anything about Srebrnik’s escape.…I wish to point out that after Zurawski’s escape Lenz and gendarme Haase went inside the granary in order to force the Jews to go out. However, the Jews hanged Lenz and shot Haase. In such circumstances Bootmann ordered to fire incendiary bullets at the granary. The fire, which broke out, consumed all Jews inside. Shortly before the incident there were 45 Jewish workers in Chełmno."); AIPN GK 165/271, volume 1, pp. 51-53, statement by Andrzej Miszczak, June 14, 1945 ("This time the Jews rebelled. One of them, Mieczyslaw, known as Maks Zurawski, armed with a knife, forced his way passed the gendarmes and escaped from the gendarmes. The gendarmes could not find him. The Jewish tailors forced open the door leading downstairs. When two Germans (including Lenz) went inside, the Jews killed them. The Germans opened submachine-gun fire at the granary’s door, as well as at the interior. Simultaneously, they set fire to the granary."); BArch B 162/3246, p. 160, statement by Walter Burmeister, January 26, 1961 ("At the same time, I was told that the Jews of the labor detachment housed in the granary had pulled Wachtmeister Lenz into their quarters and killed him. Shortly afterwards, machine-gun fire was directed at the granary, which soon went up in flames.") ↩

What Vladimir Davydov really said about the height of the Babyn Yar pyres.

2026-05-21T18:56:02.726+01:00

It has long been a staple argument of the deniers against one Babyn Yar witness Vladimir Davydov (one, but not the only, contrary to the incompetent nincompoops Carlo Mattogno and Jürgen Graf's claim) that he claimed the height of 10-12 m for the Babyn Yar pyres in 1943.

Mattogno and Graf wrote:

On November 9, 1944, Major Lavrenko, member of the Commission for the Investigation of German Crimes in Kiev, questioned the Jewish witness Vladimir K. Davidov. The latter stated that on August 18, 1943, he, along with 99 other prisoners, for the most part also Jewish, had been selected from the Siretzki concentration camp 5 km from Kiev. The 100 prisoners were taken to Babi Yar and there were forced to dig up the bodies of the Jews shot in 1941. According to him, 70,000 bodies had been in the mass graves of Babi Yar. The prisoners had exhumed these and burned them on 'ovens' afterwards, which consisted of granite blocks - procured from the Jewish cemetery of Kiev - with train rails laid upon them. On these a layer of wood was piled and on top of this the bodies, so that an enormous stack of bodies 10 to 12 m high resulted! In the beginning there was merely a single 'oven,' but then 75 of them (literally seventy-five) were built.

No other witness claimed something like this and Davydov himself stated in 1967 that the height was actually 4 m.

But what of his original claim? Well, now we have the original BY investigation files from 1943 and 1944.

In the original handwritten 09.11.1943 protocol we do indeed see "height":

But interestingly enough in the file a heavily edited typewritten version follows, in which the "10 to 12 m high" claim is struck out:

And just was was to be expected, the "height" in the 09.11.1943 protocol was nothing but a mistake. In the protocol from 20.11.1943 Davydov states:

"... as a result of this the stack was 10-12 m long and 4-5 m wide"

Conclusion: the claim in the 09.11.1943 protocol of the pyre height of 10 to 12 meters was a mere mistake, later corrected.

Otto Moll - Dear Gardener Next Door Or Psychopathological Mass Murderer?

2026-04-27T21:22:32.793+01:00

Otto Moll, born in 1915 in Mecklenburg, trained as a gardener before joining the SS-Wachverband V "Brandenburg" in 1935. His early life was marked by personal hardship: a serious car accident in 1937 left him with a skull fracture and blindness in one eye, and in 1940 his first wife and unborn child died from blood poisoning. By April 1938, he was working in the SS garden at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, and he soon became part of the expanding concentration camp system.

According to his own statement to US investigators from November 3, 1945, "from 1941 until January 1945, I likewise managed a gardening unit of the Economic and Administrative Main Office in the Auschwitz concentration camp".

Afterwards, Moll was stationed at the Kaufering II subcamp of the Dachau concentration camp. Moll stated that "no prisoner in my camp died from illness or malnutrition, and none were hanged or shot. There was not a single death in my camp ... no mistreatment of any prisoners by any guards occurred. No prisoner was beaten, kicked, or otherwise abused by the guards".

SS-Hauptscharführer Otto Moll - the dear gardener from next door?

Otto Moll (source)

At the CODOH Holocaust denial discussion forum, the poster Stubble writes that "Going over what there is, I can't rule out that he indeed just ran the garden (farm) detail and was hated for it, and thus framed up for something different".

The record tells a very different story.

To begin with, archival correspondence from the Fürstengrube mine administration (October 1943 – February 1944) mentions Moll as command leader of the Fürstengrube subcamp of Auschwitz III (Monowitz), which directly refutes his claim of merely managing "a gardening unit of the Economic and Administrative Main Office" (Nuremberg document NI-10412, images from Arolsen Archives/2963000).

In reality, Moll was deployed wherever the camp administration required him. He served as command leader of the penal company (1942), the Sonderkommando responsible for clearing mass graves in Birkenau (1942), the Fürstengrube subcamp (1943–44), the Gleiwitz subcamp (1944), the crematoria at Birkenau (1944) and the Gleiwitz subcamp again (1944).

Early witness accounts from 1945–1946 across Europe leave little doubt that Moll played a central role in the on-site operation of the extermination facilities.

Sonderkommando prisoner Szlama Dragon testified in February 1945 that Moll "directed the mass cremation of people arriving from various countries". Henryk Mandelbaum likewise identified him as head of the crematorium. Pery Broad, an SS man writing a report for the British , described Moll as one of the "greatest butchers of this past war". Rudolf Höß confirmed to US investigators that Moll was repeatedly used for executions and special tasks: "Whenever I wanted an extra good job done, I would send Moll."

Numerous other testimonies, including those from the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial, reinforce the same picture. Witnesses described Moll as an organizer of cremation operations, a supervisor of Sonderkommando units, and a figure directly involved in shootings. Further excerpts are reproduced at the end of this post.

The denier's "Holocaust Encylopedia" writes that Moll was "sentenced to death on 13 December 1945 after a show trial staged by the U.S. in Dachau" due to "unchallengeable claims" that Moll "had been in charge of an inmate unit deployed at the gassing bunkers".

However, Moll was not tried at Dachau for his activities in Auschwitz. The charges against him concerned the shooting of 26 prisoners during the evacuation march from Dachau toward Tyrol in April 1945 (examination of Wilhelm Metzler). When the witness Karl Stroh testified that Moll was known among the Jewish prisoners as "the hangman of Auschwitz", the court ruled that the "objection of the defense to the introduction of testimony attacking the character of one of the accused is sustained on the grounds that no evidence of good character or any evidence of bad character has been introduced to the court".

Yet again, the "Holocaust Encyclopedia" demonstrates that even the most basic facts are apparently too much to ask.

Few months after the Dachau trial sentenced Moll to death, US investigators became interested in his potential as witness. In his interrogations on April 15 and 16, 1946 and further in the joint interrogation with Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höß, Moll admitted into his various functions in the Auschwitz complex, including as head of crematoria in 1944 and clearing the mass graves in 1942, though still down-playing his role and atrocties and did not provide testimony incriminating other individuals.

Interestingly, the author Hans Schmid assumes that Moll's "psychologically pathological and abnormal" atrocities were partly caused "by his brain injury" and that "the symptoms of post-traumatic psychosis are strikingly evident in him: a general emotional blunting, a lack of compassion and consideration for others, disinhibition, and an uncontrolled increase in aggressive impulses." (Hans Schmid, Otto Moll - "der Henker von Auschwitz", Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft, 54, 2006).

Selected Testimonies On Otto Moll

Jewish Sonderkommando prisoner Szlama Dragon on 26 February 1945 to Soviet investigators:

"The selection of people for cremation was the responsibility of the SS fascist Mengele, a doctor, and SS [man] Mol [Moll], who directed the mass cremation of people arriving from various countries and of various nationalities, regardless of gender and age."

(Mattogno, Sonderkommando Auschwitz II, p. 52)

Jewish Sonderkommando prisoner Henryk Mandelbaum on February 27, 1945, towards Soviet investigators:

"The head of the crematorium was SS Oberscharführer Fass [Peter Voss] and later Hauptscharführer Moll Otto"

(Mattogno, Sonderkommando Auschwitz I, p. 180)

On 10 - 11 May 1945, Slzama Dragon testified to Polish investigators:

"On 9 December 1942, in the evening, Moll, Plage, Palitsch and Siwy as well as Arbeitseinsatz[führer] Mikus came to Block 14. Moll declared that he was going to make a selection of workers [p. 2/103] for a rubber factory. Each of us approached him, Moll asked him his profession, observed him carefully; if he was healthy and strong, he assigned him to this group who, according to his statements, were to go to work in the rubber factory. My brother and I declared that we wereailors by profession, and [we] were also assigned to this group established then by Moll and his comrades. On the morning of the next day, i.e., 10 December 1942, immediately after all of the Kommandos [komando] had left for work, Moll came to Block 14 and ordered: “Sonderkommando raus [outside].” From this we learned that we were part of a certain “Sonderkommando,” and not of the Kommando assigned to the rubber factory. We did not realize what that Sonderkommando was, because no one had explained it to us. On Moll’s orders, we presented ourselves in front of the block, where SS men surrounded us and led us out of the camp in two groups of 100 people. We were taken to a forest, where there was a masonry cottage [chałupa], covered by a thatched roof. The windows were bricked up. On the door leading into this house was fixed a sheet-metal plate with the inscription “Hochspannung – Lebensgefahr” [High Voltage – Danger of Death]. Two wooden shacks were located at a distance of about 30-40 meters from that little house. On the other side there were 4 pits, with dimensions of 30 meters long, 7 meters wide and 3 meters deep. The edges of these pits were sooty and burned. We were lined up in front of the house; Moll came over and told us that we would work there cremating old and lice-infested people; as for us, we would be fed; at night we would be taken back to the camp, and we would have to work, because otherwise those who did not want to work would be beaten and would be left to the [= mistreated with] sticks and dogs. The SS men who were escorting us actually had dogs. Then we were divided into various groups. I, along with 11 others, was assigned to the group that, as it turned out later, had to extract the corpses from that little house. All 12 of us were fitted with [gas] masks and led to the door of the cottage. Moll opened this door, and only then did we see that in this small house lay naked corpses of people of various ages and both genders. Moll ordered us to transport these corpses from inside the house to the courtyard in front of the door. We began to work in this manner, four of us carrying one corpse. This irritated Moll, [who] rolled up his sleeves and threw a corpse in front of the door into the courtyard. When we declared in spite of this lesson that we could
not manage to work like this, he divided us up into groups of two. As the corpses were lying in the courtyard, a dentist, assisted by an SS man, pulled out the [gold] teeth, a barber – supervised by an SS man – cut the hair, [p. 3/104] then another group loaded the corpses onto carts [na wózki /rollwa-
gen/[sic]. These carts were placed on narrow rails [a narrow-gauge track] that went all the way to the edge of the pits. These rails ran between two pits. Another group was engaged in preparing the pits to burn the corpses. At the bottom of the pits, they first placed large [pieces of] wood, then smaller and smaller wood [pieces] in a crisscross pattern, and finally dry branches. Another group picked up the corpses brought in on carts at the edge of the pits, and threw them into the pits. When all the corpses had been transported from the cottage to the pits, Moll sprayed these corpses with petroleum at the four corners of the pit, set fire to a rubber comb and threw it into an oil-soaked spot. The fire flared up and the corpses burned. While Moll lit [the pyre], we stood in front of the house and watched carefully. After all the corpses had been re-
moved from the house, we had to clean it thoroughly, wash the floor with water, then sprinkle it with sawdust and whitewash the walls.
[...]
When we moved the pillow away, it turned out that the child had its eyes open and gave the impression of being alive. We took this child along with the pillow to Moll, telling him that the child was alive. Moll snatched it from us [grabbing it] by the arm, took it to the edge of a pit, laid it on the ground, put his heel on its neck, and then threw it into the fire. I saw this whole scene with my own eyes and noticed that, at the moment when Moll put [the boot] on the child’s neck, the child moved its arms. The whole time, this child did not cry out; I cannot say whether it was breathing, because I did not examine it, however
[p. 6/107] it struck us that it looked different from the lifeless corpses.
[...]
When everyone was now in the undressing room, Moll stood on a bench and gave a speech to the people assembled. He told them that they would go to the camp, where the strong would be sent to work, the sick and the women would remain in the blocks. At the same time, he pointed to the buildings in Brzezinka and said that, before entering the camp, everyone had to bathe, because otherwise the camp authorities would not let them in. When everyone had undressed, they were pushed naked into the gas chamber. At first, there were 3 gas chambers, but later a fourth was installed. The first could hold 1,500, the second 800, the third 600, and the fourth 150 people. From the undressing room, people passed into the rooms through a narrow corridor. The rooms were marked “Zur Desinfektion” [To Disinfection]. When the room was full, the door was closed. This was done by the SS guards, very often Moll personally. Then, Mengele gave the
order to Scheinmetz, who, as in the bunkers, went to the Red-Cross vehicle, took out the gas [p. 7/108] can, opened it and poured its contents into the chamber through a small window in the side wall. This little window was quite high, so that he reached it [by climbing] up a [step] ladder. And here, too, as at the bunkers, he did it with a mask. After a while, Mengele announced that the people were no longer alive, saying: “Es ist schon fertig” [It is already done], and he left in the Red-Cross car together with Scheinmetz. Then Moll opened the door to the gas chamber, we put on our masks, and dragged the corpses from the individual chambers through a small corridor into the undressing room, and through the undressing room and the next small corridor to the furnaces."

(Mattogno, Sonderkommando Auschwitz II, p.61, 64-65)

Jewish Sonderkommando Henryk Tauber on 24 May 1945 to Polish investigators in Cracow:

"Finally, he had to climb the barbed wire, which was not electrified during the day. and when he was at the top, the head of the crematoriums, Moll, first name Otto Hauptscharführer / Master sergeant], killed him with a shot.

...

Hauptscharführer Moll was the most degenerate of the lot. Before my arrival at the camp, he was in charge of the work at the Bunkers, where [not far away] they incinerated the gassed victims in pits. Then he was transferred for a while to another section. In view of the preparation necessary for the “reception” of convoys from Hungary in 1944, he was put in charge of all the Krenntorien. It is he who organized the large-scale extermination of the people arriving in these convoys. Just before the arrival of the Hungarian transports, he ordered pits to be dug alongside Krematorium V and restarted the activity of Bunker 2, which had been lying idle, and its pits. In the yard of the Krematorium, there were notices on posts. with inscriptions telling the new arrivals from the transports that they were to go to the camp where work was waiting for them, but that first they had to take a bath and undergo disinfestation. For that, it was necessary for them to undress and put all their valuables in baskets specially placed for this purpose in the yard. Moll repeated the same thing in his speeches to the new arrivals. There were so many convoys that sometimes it happened that the gas chambers were incapable of containing all the new arrivals. The excess people were generally shot, one at a time. On several occasions, Moll threw people into the flaming pits alive. He also practised shooting people from a distance. He ill-treated and beat the Sonderkommando prisoners, treating them like animals. Those who were in his personal service told us that he used a piece of wire to fish out gold objects from the box containing the jewels taken from new arrivals, and took them off in a briefcase. Among the objects left by the people who came to be gassed, he took furs and different types of food, in particular fat. When he took food, he said smilingly to the SS around him that one had to take advantage before the lean years came. Under his direction, the Sonderkommando was strengthened and increased to about 1000 prisoners."

https://phdn.org/archives/holocaust-history.org/auschwitz/pressac/technique-and-operation/pressac0494.shtml etc.

Izrael Rozenborn on 24 May 1945 in Lodz:

"To save time, the Germans threw little children alive into these flaming pits. One of these killers was SS Hauptscharfuhrer Moll, a sadist, who seized little children by the hair and, with his pistol, shot the child."

http://polishjews.org/shoahtts/001.htm

Regina Plucer testfied on May 30, 1945 that up to the time crematorium 2 was dismantled "Obersturmfuhrer MOLL was in charge."

https://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot.com/2015/08/testimonies-of-prisoners-of-demolition.html

Tibor Wahl on June 26, 1945, to the "Budapest Commission for the Welfare of Deported Hungarian Jews":

"We marched on foot as far as Gleiwitz. Our leader was Scharführer Moll, who had previously been the head of the crematorium in Birkenau."

(DEGOB protocol 162)

The SS officer Wilhelm Boger mentioned in a report on Auschwitz written on July 5, 1945 in Ludwigsburg on the former "SS-Hscha. Moll" as leader of the "Sonderkommando" together with Voss and Muhsfeldt.

https://holocausthistory.site/1945-07-05-the-1945-report-of-ss-officer-boger-on-auschwitz/

The Auschwitz officer Pery Broad in a report July 13, 1945, to the British:

"In his duties at Birkenau, Hössler also had a very zealous assistant at his side, SS-Hauptscharführer Moll. Moll and Palitzsch must surely be counted among the greatest butchers of this past war. … One of the white farmhouses had also been put back into operation. It was designated Bunker 5, and Moll carried out his bloody work there."

Auschwitz prisoner Charles Bendel, on October 1, 1945, at the British Belsen trial, answered "Hauptscharführer Moll" on the question "under whose authority was the Sonderkommando?".

Rudolf Höß testified on April 3, 1946, that Palitsch "was also used like the other non-commissioned leaders in executions, as, for instance, Moll" and on April 4, "Whenever I wanted an extra good job done, I would send Moll" (National Archives, Record Group 238, Interrogations, Summaries of Interrogations, and Related Records, Hoess, Rudolf)

Rudolf Höß further testified on April 16, 1945:

"I know Moll from Sachsenhausen. During my activity in Sachsenhausen Moll was there as a gardener between the years 1938 and 1940. He was responsible for all the gardens of the camp. Moll was a difficult subordinate, because he had suffered a bad injury before when he still belonged to the guard troops and therefore he had been taken away from active service and he had been transferred to some less exacting duty. He frequently had arguments with his superiors. I myself was adjutant at the time and was responsible for all the work of the command staff. I usually got along well with him because I would make due allowances for his peculiarities. I did not use him much for duty as a subordinate leader which he was. I saw to it that he could fulfill his duties as a gardener absolutely independently and for this reason he somehow felt attached to me. When I was transferred to Auschwitz in 1940, Moll approached me at once to get transferred to Auschwitz too. I believe it was in 1941 that he arrived but I am no longer able to state the date exactly. When he came to Auschwitz I used him in the agriculture establishment and put him in charge of a work detail. He carried out the most difficult and exacting work, was very independent, but again always got into arguments with other superior officers.
...

A When the extermination action started in 1941, I took Moll as a subordinate leader for one of these farm buildings. He served there, however I cannot give you any particular details because he did not in any way become conspicuous. He was responsible for the supervision at this place over the prisoners that were employed there and including the guards who were responsible for the security of the prisoners.

This farm that I mentioned was the place where the prisoners were being gassed and Moll was responsible to see that they were taken into the houses, that everything was being done, and after they were gassed and the bodies removed, that the teeth were pulled and all those other details which I gave you the other day.

Q Then he was responsible for the gassing, the removal of bodies, the cremating, and all of that?

A Yes, he was responsible for that.

Q Was he also responsible for the disposal of the bodies gassed there? By cremation?

A That too, yes. Especially that particularly and before that I had used Moll to effect the burning of the corpses who were lying in mass graves out in the open. He carried out these duties with great independence and I did not have to worry at all about his work detail. Later, in 1942, when the crematorium was finished, Moll was put in charge by me of one-half of the entire extermination installations. Later, when larger intervals came about in extermination actions, Moll was put in charge of a labor camp on the outside. He was sent to Gleiwitz. Before that he was in charge of a labor camp attached to a coal mine, the name of which I am not able to recall. He built up a completely new labor camp on that side and only after that was he transferred to the German State Railroad repair shops in Gleiwitz to supervise the attached labor camp there. When more extensive actions were started again, Moll was recalled for them. In 1944 I recalled Moll from his labor camp and used him to supervise the entire extermination plant.
...
Q Did Moll have any particular animosity or prejudice against Jews or any other race or class of people?

A I never observed it and I cannot say whether that was so.

Q Do you think he killed all inmates regardless of their racial extraction or nationality with equal lack of feeling?

A Yes.
Q What do you know about Moll’s executions by machine gun or pistol?

A Yes, I know something about that. For instance, sometimes there were inmates who were paralyzed and it was difficult to get into the gas chambers, or who, for some other reason, could not be brought into the gas chambers, and he would kill them by a shot in the neck.
...

Q Did you ever hear him referred to as the "man of action" because of the efficiency with which he carried out these executions?

A His comrades always thought he was crazy and he was never rated as all there.
...
Gluecks's expression for him was "crazy dog".

(NARA, Record Group 238: National Archives Collection of World War II War Crimes Records
Series: Interrogations, Summaries of Interrogations, and Related Records File Unit Hoess, Rudolf)

Jewish Sonderkommando prisoner Filip Müller in 1946:

In the summer of 1944, our previous chief, the SS man Forst, was replaced by a new SS man, Moll, supposedly because he did not have sufficient organizational ability and energy. Moll handled everything reorganized everything and also set up pits for burning corpses. When there was a lot of work, he himself helped throw the bodies into them: he rolled up his sleeves and worked for two men. This fanatic and madman, who neither smoked nor drank, repeatedly declared that an order is an order, and that if the Führer ordered him to, he would burn even his own wife with his child. His only positive trait was his humanity toward people during shootings, and his favorite amusement was playing with the children of mothers awaiting death. He would approach a mother with a smile, kiss her child, give it a piece of chocolate, and then take the child away with the promise that he would bring it back. However, he threw them alive into the seething human fat. He did this several times a day and then said: ‘I have already done enough for the Reich!’"

(Kraus, Tovarna na smrt, p. 143- 145)

Manuscript found in 1952 on the grounds of the camp, attributed to Sonderkommando prisoner Lejb Langfus writes:

“Hauptscharführer Moll lined the people up in groups of four, one after another in a straight line, and with a series of shots he killed them all. If someone turned his head to the side, [Moll] threw him alive into the burning pit of the dead. If someone refused to go into the chamber, [Moll] seized him by the hands, twisted them, pushed him to the ground, and trampled him to death. As a rule, when a transport arrived, he would jump onto a bench, cross his hands over his chest, and give a short speech saying that they were to go to the bath and would then be assigned to various work details. If anyone expressed doubt about the truth of his words, [Moll] punished him with a severe beating and at the same time tried to create a wild, chaotic rush so that people would lose their sense of direction.”

(Inmitten des grauenvollen Verbrechens Handschriften von Mitgliedern des Sonderkommandos, p. 183)

Manuscript by Salmen Lewenthal found in 1968 on the grounds of the camps:

"When they had already been separated from the people and could no longer meet anyone […] in the camp only constantly […] to those coming for the first time into the little woods, where the bunkers were then located, the murderer Oberscharführer Moll, known throughout the world, [gave an address/speech?]."

(Inmitten des grauenvollen Verbrechens Handschriften von Mitgliedern des Sonderkommandos, p. 206)

On January 17, 1964, SS man Bruno Schlage testified at the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial

"At the crematorium there was a permanent detail under the command of Hauptscharführer Moll. He was directly subordinate to the camp commandant."

(Das Verfahren: 8. Verhandlungstag (17.01.1964). Der 1. Frankfurter Auschwitz-Prozeß, S. 4837)

On October 15, 1959, Karl Bracht testified:

"At that time, the leader of the penal company was SS-Hauptscharführer Moll. […] In the penal company, shootings and acts of physical violence resulting in death occurred daily. The shootings were carried out almost exclusively by Moll."

(Das Verfahren: 73. Verhandlungstag (03.08.1964). Der 1. Frankfurter Auschwitz-Prozeß, S. 14061 - 14063)

Filip Müller's examination at the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial on October 5, 1964:

"Hauptscharführer Moll [had only] one eye; he was a pronounced organizer of the burnings. He carried out the extermination with the same dedication as a director building a factory. And [he possessed] strict discipline. With the work details he did it like this: ‘I need 50 people.’ Not that the kapos would say ‘this one or that one goes,’ but he himself selected the prisoners, and I was often among those prisoners."

(Das Verfahren: 97. Verhandlungstag (05.10.1964). Der 1. Frankfurter Auschwitz-Prozeß, S. 20547)

SS man Bernhard Walter's examination at the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial on August 14, 1964:

"I had known Moll from earlier. Moll was known as a Jew-hater. At that time— I believe it was in 1936 in Oranienburg—he had an accident, a severe skull fracture, and he was also blind in one eye. He attributed this to an accident involving a Jew. And since then, he apparently developed an obsession about Jews. For that reason, I knew Moll. One day—we were supposed to play on the radio; he was then with the band—it was generally known that he was lying seriously injured in the hospital and that some kind of Jewish vehicle had run into him or something like that. In any case, that is how I knew Moll. And I can also remember seeing him out there in Birkenau, when I was there, striking prisoner columns with a stick, a regular walking cane."

(Das Verfahren: 77. Verhandlungstag (14.08.1964). Der 1. Frankfurter Auschwitz-Prozeß, S. 14811)

On April 22, 1959, SS officer Franz Hofmann testified to West-German investigators:

"I also remember the SS non-commissioned officer Moll, who was likewise active at the gas chambers. Moll was known for shooting a few prisoners at random upon the arrival of transports in order to establish authority and command respect."

(Das Verfahren: Vernehmungsprotokolle der Angeklagten. Der 1. Frankfurter Auschwitz-Prozeß, S. 3871)

Twenty years of HC blog

2026-03-23T21:47:00.005+00:00

Happy birthday to us: exactly twenty years ago, the Holocaust Controversies blog was kicked off with the first of over 1,500 posts. It's a strange anniversary given how much time has elapsed and how different the world now is.

Back then, the HC team met online at the original Real Open Debate on the Holocaust forum, an old-fashioned bulletin board, before any of today's social media platforms existed. While Holocaust 'revisionism' had been dealt a huge blow in 2000 with the defeat of David Irving's libel suit against Deborah Lipstadt in London, it seemed to be surging online, largely ignored by the mainstream media. Many of the HC team had been arguing with Holocaust deniers online for years. I myself stumbled across it when googling for materials on Auschwitz, and could scarcely avoid what seemed like a barrage of revisionist propaganda materials. Thus the decision to found the blog.

Twenty years on, the landscape is entirely different. Holocaust denial in 2026 presents an even more paradoxical picture: it has surged once again on various social media platforms, but in a largely headless form, part of a wider upsurge in antisemitism online in the past two to three years. And with that surge, HC's views have as well, passing six million since May 2010 in July 2025 and seven million in February 2026.

Organised revisionism, meanwhile, has come closer than ever to dying a death entirely. In 2009, Mark Weber, the director of the Institute for Historical Review, announced that he no longer saw a point in 'revisionist' activities; in those years also David Irving and David Cole, two of the bigger names from the early 1990s heyday, publicly rejected most of the key tenets of 'revisionism'. Nearly all of the promoters, publishers, authors and activists who stuck to hardcore negationism despite these declarations of apostasy then proceeded to drop like flies: Willis Carto, Bradley Smith, Ernst Zündel, Robert Faurisson, Serge Thion, Samuel Crowell, Fredrick Töben, and Jürgen Graf all passed away, alongside lesser figures who had made names for themselves without really publishing anything, such as Richard Williamson and Ursula Haverbeck. Many of the revisionists we've sparred with online at RODOH and elsewhere have likewise passed away: Fabian 'Sailor' Eschen, Wilfried 'neugierig' Heink, Charles Wing Krafft, Friedrich Paul Berg, and likely others - Carlos Porter's website went offline several years ago, being archived elsewhere, for example.

This near-death experience for organised revisionism hasn't silenced them entirely: Germar Rudolf has kept the lights on at CODOH, despite an attempted coup by Michael Santomauro in December 2023. Rudolf even recently organised 'the first revisionist conference in twenty years' at the start of February 2026. The catch being, there are now only a handful of living revisionists associated with the core enterprise who can contribute to the flagship 'Holocaust Handbooks' series. When HC blog started, this ran to twenty brochures; a further 34 have been published since 2006. Of those, three have recycled older books by now-dead or missing authors (Henri Roques, Walter Sanning, John Ball), two were revisions of earlier books also by now-dead authors (Pierre Marais and Jürgen Graf), and a whopping 22 of the new 34 titles were authored by our old friend Carlo Mattogno, now a venerable 75 years of age. With 21 titles from Mattogno just on Auschwitz across 54 volumes in the series, prolixity becomes self-refuting: who has the time to wade through that much verbiage? Why can't he sum up his arguments concisely?

Chances are, if you've come across HC in the past few years, it's because we've been linked to for our resources, especially Sergey Romanov's Rebutting the Twitter Denial round-up (337K views since May 2017), Roberto Mühlenkamp's Photographic documentation of Nazi crimes (151K views since 2009), and Hans Metzner's index of published evidence on Auschwitz (107K views since 2012). Or downloaded our 2011 white paper on Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka (26K views on archive.org many thousands more on academia.edu and on other online libraries). Numerous Substackers, Redditors, tweeters and others have pointed to HC's resources over the years - we thank everyone for making use of the work we've done.

Other anti-denial websites, especially Gilles Karmasyn's phdn.org, have provided similar resources, archiving the Holocaust History Project website (still a going concern when HC began in 2006) and many others.

The biggest change since 2006, however, has been in the possibilities of digitisation across archives and libraries. Consider this: in 2004, the archives in Washington, DC area, USHMM and the US National Archives at College Park, MD, were relying on microfilm reader-printers; by 2007 these had become reader-scanners. When HC began twenty years ago, digital cameras were only just becoming cheap enough to be used by researchers, so twenty-five years ago, one would take notes in pencil or on laptops. Archives had yet to invest in scanners to digitise their holdings; by the start of the 2010s that had started to change.

While HC blog has regularly posted transcriptions and scans of key sources, our own Hans Metzner has recently set up the Holocaust History Site to post scans, transcriptions *and* translations of key sources in especially German. Both sets of materials see use in classrooms. On HC blog, I have been maintaining a directory of open access sources since 2016, with 59.9K views since then - a resource which has been appreciated by researchers into WWII and the Holocaust with otherwise zero interest in Holocaust denial. Since 2020, with systematic digitisation at the Bundesarchiv, US National Archives and other European archives, from Switzerland to Poland and Ukraine, the volume of historical sources from the 1930s and 1940s has increased exponentially. The oldest and largest Holocaust archives - the Wiener Library, Ghetto Fighters' House, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and Yad Vashem - have been either early adopters of digitisation or have embraced it wholeheartedly when they took the plunge. This has supported yet more reference sites such as Yad Vashem's Untold Stories project, documenting over 1,200 localities within the borders of the wartime Soviet Union where Jews were murdered, with translated sources for all of them.

In 2006, HC blogged about the then brand new agreement to open up the archives of the International Tracing Service at Arolsen, Germany. The following summer in 2007, I watched as a procession of hard drives arrived at USHMM with the digital copies of the archive being shared around the world. By the end of the 2010s, much of the Arolsen Archives were made open access online.

The range of open access literature and published sources has likewise exploded, to the point where it's difficult to keep fully on top of what is and isn't on an open access library, or has been uploaded to a historian's academia.edu page. The first four volumes of USHMM's Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos are now fully open access both on JSTOR as well as a convenient subsite at Project Muse. All West and East German trial judgements - 63 volumes worth - have been open access at Justiz und NS-Verbrechen for over three years now. All sixteen volumes of the Persecution and Murder of European Jews series are open access in German, the English translations are following behind with only a short moving wall; the full published edition of the Goebbels diaries is likewise now open access. Hundreds of yizkor books, memorial books to destroyed Jewish communities in Eastern Europe, have been translated to English and can be found on JewishGen.

So, what to do with all of this material? This anniversary post goes up almost exactly eight months since we last made a new post on HC. While none of the regular HC bloggers have been scythed down in the way that revisionist authors have been in the past twenty years, it's nonetheless true that the core team has largely moved on. Roberto Mühlenkamp and Jonathan Harrison are both inactive; Hans Metzner is concentrating on the aforementioned Holocaust History Site, while Sergey Romanov is focused on his research on the Katyn and Vinnytsia Soviet killing sites and debunking of Russian Katyn deniers; you can read his work at the Katyn Files (and browser translators mean you don't need to know Russian to do so). Andrew Mathis is around, but less active. Our guest bloggers and white paper contributors - Jason Willis Myers, Joachim Neander, Statistical Mechanic - have likewise moved on or retired. I myself devote most of my time to teaching history at university level, on themes far broader than the Holocaust, having devised courses on comparative histories of violence, on the German occupation of Poland and the Soviet Union in WWII - thus concerned 50:50 with the fates of Jews and non-Jews, and now also contributing to a course on the Second World War as a global war.

Sustaining interest in 'debunking' is a long-term impossibility, and we have never monetised the blog or sought to profit from the work on display here. There just isn't as much 'activity' from Holocaust deniers as there is from pseudoarchaeologists, pseudohistorians and ancient aliens enthusiasts, which has kept a debunker/researcher like Jason Colavito busy for decades.

Passing the twenty year anniversary, at a time when Holocaust denial has surged in some parts of social media, despite the near-death of 'organised revisionism', does however make me resolved to revive HC. That could be posting more often about the new digital resources, or exploring older denial texts that remain inexplicably popular. Arthur Butz's The Hoax of the Twentieth Century is about to, or has just had, its fiftieth anniversary.

As the founder of HC blog, I'd also like to open up the possibility of recruiting new contributors, who might pick up the baton and who can respond to denial as it currently is, in its vague, diffuse form. Voicing denier sentiments might well be simply a form of vice signalling, or just another tool in the antisemitic repertoire and another way of attacking and trying to hurt Jews, 'libtards', and the other enemies of the terminally online contrarians. Perhaps pop over to Skeptics Society Forum, where Hans and I still post, and where other veterans of anti-denier arguments online still post, to introduce yourself if you might be interested in helping out.

In the meantime, a huge thank you once again to all our readers and everyone who's ever made use of the Holocaust Controversies blog.

German Footage of a Homicidal Gassing with Engine Exhaust. Part 7: Tactical Symbol & Homicidal Gas Van

2025-07-25T22:22:00.013+01:00

German Footage of a Homicidal Gassing with Engine Exhaust

Part 1: Provenance

Part 2: Location

Part 3: Responsibility (I)

Part 4: Responsibility (II)

Part 5: Responsibility (III)

Part 6: Forgery Allegation

Part 7: Tactical Symbol & Homicidal Gas Van

If there were still anyone in the world who harbored even the slightest doubt about the authenticity of the film footage showing the Nazi gas killing operation at the psychiatric hospital in Mogilev, those doubts should now be dispelled.

Mogilev gassing footage

Recall that the truck, whose exhaust pipe is connected to the building wall, bears a tactical symbol and a numerical designation on the rear side of the flatbed (see Figure 1). Until now, these markings could not be clearly identified - but that has changed.

Figure 1: Still of Mogilev gassing footage with tactical sign on the truck

As reported in another blog post, the only known photographic evidence of a Nazi gas van using engine exhaust for killing was recently published. In one of these photos, the gas van used by Sonderkommando 7a of Einsatzgruppe B is seen from behind with its doors closed. On the left rear door of the box body, a tactical symbol and the designation "VIIa" are clearly visible (see Figure 2).


Figure 2: Photograph of homicidal gas van of SK 7a (from: Cameron Munro, "Engineered for Mass Murder – The Nazi Gas Vans: 1939–1945")

Here is the crucial point: The exact same tactical symbol appears on the truck shown in the Mogilev gassing footage - just in that case, it is followed by "IX" (see Figure 2). The symbol was apparently used to mark vehicles of Einsatzgruppe B, while the number denoted the specific Einsatzkommando or Sonderkommando.

Figure 3: Comparison between rear of Mogilev gassing truck (left) and SK 7a gas van (right)

The truck used in Mogilev therefore belonged - at least temporarily - to Einsatzkommando 9 of Einsatzgruppe B. Since the license plate visible on the vehicle can be linked to Einsatzkommando 8, it may be that the truck originally served with Kommando 9 and was later transferred to Kommando 8.

The tactical symbol on the truck provide further evidence that it belonged to Einsatzgruppe B - and thus confirm that the footage is indeed authentic documentation of a gassing operation carried out by Einsatzgruppe B at the psychiatric institution in Mogilev.

First Published Photographs of Nazi Homicidal Gas Van with Engine Exhaust

2025-07-11T22:11:00.013+01:00

Cameron A. Munro has recently published "Engineered for Mass Murder – The Nazi Gas Vans: 1939–1945", a book in which he presents 15 photographs depicting a homicidal gas van built on a petrol-powered Diamond T chassis.

These photographs were taken in April 1942 by SS-Rottenführer August Vielkind of the Waffen-SS reserve, who was part of the advance detachment of Sonderkommando 7a of Einsatzgruppe B, marching from Klintsy via Gomel to Sychyovka. The images were used by prosecutors in Dortmund during investigations into members of Sonderkommando 7a. However, as Munro notes, it seems they "did not forward the photographs to West-German investigators of other units" and "the photographs then lay forgotten in the files of the Landesarchiv Nordrhein-Westfalen in Münster for many years".

It’s remarkable that such historically significant material can still be discovered after so many years. And fittingly - characteristic of authentic historical research - the deeper one digs, the more corroborating rather than contradicting evidence tends to emerge.

I highly recommend it to anyone interested in the history and mechanics of the Nazi homicidal gas vans.

Saurer Company or Why even Rudolf has shown the Diesel Issue is irrelevant on Gas Vans ("Rebuttal of "Holocaust Encyclopedia")

2025-05-24T21:45:00.028+01:00

For decades, Holocaust deniers have claimed that the Saurer gas vans had to have diesel engines, and since diesel exhaust has lower carbon monoxide, they conclude the vans couldn’t have been used for murder. The argument is irrelevant as the RSHA turned chassis with gasoline engines into gas vans. A detailed refutation of the "diesel issue" argument was published ten years ago and has never been answered in substance to my knowledge (see Rebuttal of Alvarez on Gas Vans: Why the Diesel Issue is Still Irrelevant). Denier Alvarez’s new edition (2023) of his book "The Gas Vans" continues to repeat it, without a single source, counter-argument, or whisper of a rebuttal to the refutations that already exist.

Germar Rudolf’s entry "Saurer Company" in CODOH's Holocaust Encyclopedia tries a fresh variation:

He notes that the RSHA motor pool acquired a number of Saurer 5-ton chassis in 1942 and the company Gaubschat in Berlin built a cargo box on each chassis - "for an unspecified purpose". The historical consensus (or as Rudolf like to call it "orthodoxy") holds that these were mobile gas chambers. Rudolf argues that because gasoline-engined trucks were supposedly "much easier" to obtain from other manufacturers, the RSHA’s Saurers “must have had diesel engines".

Here’s where the things get interesting.

Rudolf concedes for the first time what deniers once swore was impossible and what we have pointed out at this blog: that Saurer did, in fact, produce gasoline-engine trucks during the war - in the French factory in Suresnes near Paris

But just when you think he might finally stumble into truth, he goes back to form and claims - without evidence - that the French factory "phased out the last gasoline-engine trucks in 1941".

The Saurer branch in Suresnes produced 3.766 vehicles between 1940 and 1944 with "production focused primarily on five-tonners with gasoline engines, which accounted for no less than three-quarters of total production" ("Saurer. Vom Ostschweizer Kleinbetrieb zum internationalen Technologiekonzern", p. 198).

There is therefore no factual basis that the gasoline Saurer were phased out in 1941.

So Rudolf claims the RSHA would have found it "much easier" to buy gasoline trucks from other makers. That assumes knowledge he does not have. In reality, we have no clue which five-ton gasoline-powered chassis would have been easier for the Security Police to acquire - because answering that would require analysis and actual expertise in wartime logistics, procurement procedures, agencies, institutional hierarchies, and the personalities involved.

The reality of wartime vehicle procurement was far more complex than determining the production output of a manufacturer. For example, the Security Police in Berlin was equipped with a various makes of trucks confiscated from occupied France - hardly a sign that they had their pick of new vehicles rolling off the lines at major domestic plants (Bundesarchiv R 58/7658).

As Friedrich Pradel, the Security Police’s vehicle procurement officer, later testified on the gas vans, the Wehrmacht's motor pool office refused to allocate truck chassis to the RSHA. His superior, Walter Rauff was forced to source the first batch of vehicles through the motor pool department of the Security Service (SD) instead (interrogation of Pradel of 26 April 1966, NHStA NDS. 721 Hannover Acc. 97/99 Nr.10/32).

These initial gas vans weren't acquired through standard military supply channels; they were cobbled together through internal networks and Party stock. Only later did the Wehrmacht finally approve a second batch of trucks: gasoline-powered Saurer chassis from the Suresnes factory in occupied France. The fact that they were not offered domestic vehicles might be no accident. Perhaps the army preferred to keep German-built vehicles for its own operations and was content to pass the heavy, French-made gasoline trucks to the Security Police. Who knows.

On top of that, the argument is beside the point. Even if - for the sake of argument - there were some general preference or higher likelihood for using Saurer diesels or non-Saurer petrols for unspecified purposes, that probability drops straight to zero the moment we consider the documented use of the Saurer "special vehicles" as gas vans. Or in other words, it is more likely that the Security Police was purchasing gasoline-powered Saurer from the French factory than trying to kill people with Diesel engine exhaust. Rudolf's modified diesel argument is useless as a defense - it doesn't help the deniers case one bit.

So, on the positive side, Rudolf finally admits that Saurer was producing chassis with gasoline engines during the war years. That’s progress - a step in the right direction and a slap to the "Saurer-were-all-diesels" choir of revisionists.

Why Producer Gas Wasn’t Used (Rebuttal of "Holocaust Encyclopedia")

2025-04-19T13:03:00.012+01:00

Holocaust deniers often fixate on fringe technicalities or imagined inconsistencies to avoid confronting the overwhelming documentary, testimonial, and forensic evidence. One of their rhetorical questions goes something like this: "If gas chambers were real, why didn't the Nazis use producer gas?"

Well, challenge accepted.

What is Producer Gas?

Producer gas, also known as wood gas, is generated through the gasification of solid biomass - typically wood or charcoal - in a low-oxygen environment. The result is a mix of gases including carbon monoxide (CO), hydrogen (H₂), carbon dioxide (CO₂), methane (CH₄), and a large portion of nitrogen (N₂).

According to Imbert company - Germany's leading producer gas generator manufacturer during the war - the typical gas composition was as follows: [1]

47% nitrogen
23% carbon monoxide
18% hydrogen
10% carbon dioxide
2% methane

With its high level of carbon monoxide, producer gas is highly toxic to humans.

During World War II, wood gas generators were used in Germany as emergency substitutes for liquid fuels. Vehicles, particularly in the rear areas, were retrofitted with these bulky devices out of necessity, due to fuel shortages and rationing.

The "Revisionist" Argument

When Germany and her allies were cut off from foreign oil supplies by the Allied naval blockade during World War Two, producer-gas generators became an important technology for the Axis powers in Europe. These devices could be fired with wood, coal or coke, and could be tweaked to contain as much as 35% of CO.
[...]
Therefore, when the so-called “Final Solution” was reaching its peak in 1942 and 1943, Germany had tens of thousands of engineers and mechanics familiar with this lethal-gas technology, hundreds of thousands of drivers capable of operating these devices, and an equal number of these poison-gas devices present literally everywhere, with no limitation on fuel.

Yet no one has ever claimed that this technology was used to kill even one single person.

(Holocaust Encyclopedia. uncensored and unconstrained)

This line of argument has appeared in various iterations from Holocaust deniers like Friedrich Berg, Jürgen Graf, Santiago Alvarez, Thomas Dalton, and Nicholas Kollerstrom [2], and in discussions on the CODOH revisionist forum. This argument has become part of the canon of Holocaust denial.

The logic runs like this:

Producer gas was widely used in Germany and easily produced.
It was highly toxic with lethal levels of CO.
It required no strategic fuel.
Therefore, it would have been the most "logical" method for mass killing.
And since it wasn’t used, the narrative of homicidal gassings must be false.

Please note that this argument is often paired with the so-called "diesel issue" - the claim that diesel engines couldn’t produce enough carbon monoxide to kill efficiently. But this line of reasoning collapses immediately, because it’s based on a false premise: the Nazis didn’t use diesel engines for homicidal gassings - they used gasoline engines (see on this blog Why the "diesel issue" is irrelevant and Rebuttal of Alvarez on Gas Vans: Why the Diesel Issue is Still Irrelevant ).

Engine Exhaust Was Used. Here’s Why.

The Nazis went for carbon monoxide as "silent killer" as early as 1939, during the Aktion T4 euthanasia program. In that context, they used pure carbon monoxide delivered in steel cylinders. But scaling that method to the mass murder operations in the East wasn’t logistically viable - gas delivery was too limited, too centralized, and too slow for mobile killing operations.

The alternative was carbon monoxide from gasoline engines:

Gasoline engines are known to produce lethal levels of carbon monoxide (in fact, a well known method of suicide).

They were readily available, state-of-the-art technology, and could be literally operated by anyone with a driver’s license

There is no evidence that the Security Police operated any producer gas fuelled vehicles around late 1941 and early 1942. The Security Police did not need producer gas, when gas vans were deployed to the Einsatzgruppen and Chełmno extermination camp and stationary gas chambers began operating in places like Belzec. At that point in the war, the Third Reich had access to roughly 8 million tons of liquid fuel, and that level held steady through 1943. The fuel crisis only truly hit in 1944 after the Allied bombing of synthetic fuel plants and the loss of Romanian oil.

Moreover, the Security Police and its mobile Einsatzgruppen were fuel-privileged institutions. These weren’t rural officials driving along on wood gas - they were well-equipped, fully motorized units with dedicated fuel allocations or direct access to Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS supply networks.

The Gestapo offices alone had monthly allocations of 250,000 liters of gasoline (BArch R 58/856/91). Sonderkommando Kulmhof burned 15,000 liters just to run a few trucks deporting Jews between January and May 1942. The Einsatzgruppen had their own mobile fuel tankers.

There was no shortage that forced a switch to alternative fuels, no political directive pushing for it within the Security Police until as late as 1944, and no technical motivation. Thus, there was no incentive to use producer gas, when gasoline-powered engines worked just fine.

Producer Gas - And Why It Wasn’t Used

While workable in rear logistics or agricultural vehicles, producer gas was largely unsuitable for frontline or police operations. Converting vehicles to run on producer gas came with serious drawbacks, it meant "reduced performance, poorer efficiency, cumbersome handling, [and] higher maintenance". [3]

Startup time: Gasifiers had to be heated before they could produce usable gas.

Power loss: Vehicles retrofitted for wood gas suffered from reduced engine performance

Bulky: The gasifier units were heavy and took up valuable space, reducing capacity
Maintenance: Producer gas generators required frequent cleaning, careful operation, and constant monitoring

Explosion risk: The flames of the gasifier unit and combustible gas mix (high in CO and hydrogen) posed a danger - especially in enclosed spaces like gas chambers. Producer gas generators were forbidden near explosive mixtures.

These limitations made producer gas a more challenging choice for mass killing operations - for the gas vans and - though to a bit lesser extent - also for stationary use in extermination camps such as Treblinka, Belzec, and Sobibor during Operation Reinhard.

In fact, it is all but certain that had the Nazis actually used producer gas, Holocaust deniers would likely be arguing the exact opposite - that gasoline engines would have been more practical, more safe, and more believable all along. That game is all too familiar.

Best Method? Flex method

The Nazis employed a wide range of killing methods - starvation, beatings, shootings, lethal injections, carbon monoxide from gas cylinders, engine exhaust, and Zyklon B. These methods often coexisted. This diversity was not random; it reflected the fact that what was considered "best" varied across different killing sites and operational contexts.

What is perceived as the "best" method depends on many factors. There is no universal formula in state-sponsored mass murder, where decisions are made in real time under constrained conditions, with the tools and knowledge at hand.

The decision to use gasoline engine exhaust as a killing method was not the result of a prestigious expert panel or a broad expert consensus. It was a practical solution developed within a small inner circle of the Nazi police apparatus, specifically for use by the Security Police and the Einsatzgruppen. That’s why Auschwitz - administered separately by the SS Economic and Administrative Main Office (WVHA) - was not part of this initiative and developed its own Zyklon B route, just in case you were wondering.

Footnotes:

[1] Eckermann, Fahren mit Holz, p. 17.

[2] Friedrich Berg in: Germar Rudolf (ed.), Dissecting the Holocaust, 2019, p. 465 - 467: "The vast numbers of producer gas vehicles as well as the fervor with which the Germans developed new vehicles and uses for this gas technology, which is so evident throughout their wartime automotive literature, undermine the Holocaust story in general. If the Germans had ever intended to commit mass murder with carbon monoxide, they certainly would have had enough brains to employ this superb poison-gas technology long before using anything as idiotic as Diesel exhaust. [...] Another irony is the fact that the same producer-gas technology was actually used to gas rats and other vermin. According to the public-health literature from the Third Reich, producer-gas equipment from the firm of Nocht-Giemsa for killing rats was “very common.”And yet, no one thought of using this obvious, practical, effective, simple and cheap technology on humans – even Jews who had sometimes been compared to rats as in the film Der Ewige Jude (The Eternal Jew). [...] What argues most strongly against all such gas-van stories is that the use of any kind of liquid fuel in medium and heavy trucks had already been prohibited a year earlier by Speer on September 22, 1942; smaller vehicles were still exempt until a year later (see Chapter 9). Assuming that anyone would have broken the law for a few percent of CO from gasoline engine exhaust – or even only a fraction of a percent from Diesel engine exhaust – when the legally required fuel was far more lethal, is too ridiculous. It never happened! "

Nicholas Kollerstrom, 2014, Breaking the Spell, p. 63: "If you believe that Germany had a wish to exterminate a particular ethnic group – for no discernible reason – and if you wish to believe they did so by herding crowds into a large room that would not have looked at all like a washroom (i.e. it could not have had any windows, or they would be smashed, and would have needed large, metallic outward-opening doors that clanged shut, and could not have had drains in the floor) then, clearly, mass murder would have been simple and efficient using the readily-available producer gas, because it has one-third carbon monoxide by volume;"

Santiago Alvarez, The Gas Vans: "But not even gasoline engines would have been the choice of a potential mass murder, since Germany had an even cheaper, less complicated, and more efficient method readily at hand: wood gas or producer gas generators." (p. 101) "Hence, if the Germans had used the Saurer trucks mentioned in the Gaubschat exchange as gas vans – or any other truck – they would have been equipped with wood gas generators, and this very gas – before(!) entering the engine – would have been used to kill the inmates locked up on the cargo box." (p. 272)

Thomas Dalton, Debating the Holocaust, 2015, p. 116: "A second option, though, was much better: producer- or wood-gas generators. These devices burned wood or colce/coal in a small stove in order to create COgas, which was then used as fuel in the engine. Producer-gas generators were very efficient at producing high-concentration carbon monoxide—typically in the range of 18-35%. At these levels, anyone exposed to this gas would die very quickly. [... ] Though hazardous, such devices were well-known to the Germans, who mass-produced them; some 500,000 were in use throughout the Reich. And obviously a producer-gas homicidal chamberwould have been a potential fire hazard—given that high levels of CO are flammable—but the Germans would have had no problem engineering such a system, if they desired."

Jürgen Graf in: Carlo Mattogno & Jürgen Graf, Treblinka. Extermination Camp or Transit Camp?, 2016, p.123: "But that would have by no means been the ‘best’ source of CO available during World War II: due to a lack of gasoline, the German government passed laws that made it compulsory to equip all diesel-driven vehicles with producer gas generators, which generate a gas with up to 35% of CO from wood or coke. Hundreds of thousands of these truly poisonous generators operated in wartime Germany and in the occupied territories, and this technology was well-known to all major German politicians at that time, as Berg shows."

[3] Eckermann, Fahren mit Holz, p. 126.

How We Already Debunked Your Franke-Gricksch Report Denial Before You Even Hit 'Publish'

2024-12-18T09:31:00.013+00:00

There’s a relatively new holocaust denier blog called Holocaust Claims (https://www.holocaust.claims) churning out posts every other day in 2023. While the pace slowed considerably in 2024, the quality refused to improve.

There is piece titled The Franke–Gricksch Report from September 2023 which quotes fellow denier Jürgen Graf and tosses in another shaky point gleaned from some video clip. The arguments have been dismantled right here on this blog back in 2019:

- number of muffles in the crematorium, here and here and here.

- coke consumption and freshly burnt, here and here

- ventilation duration, here and here

- death time, here

- cremation capacity, here and here and here and here

- hiding jewelry, here and here

- special tracks in specially designated districts of the camp, here and here and here

It's also telling that, in 2023, a Holocaust denier still harps on Eric Lipman’s quick and dirty typed copy of the report as if the clean carbon copy we discovered and published in 2019 doesn’t exist.

Never Change a Winning Method: How the Nazis Planned to Gas a French General with Carbon Monoxide

2024-12-14T08:32:00.016+00:00

On October 28, 1944, the German General Fritz von Brodowski was shot in Allied captivity. Three months later, on 19 January 1945, the Nazis retaliated by shooting the French General Gustave Mesny in a staged escape attempt.

Given the foreign policy implications, the German Foreign Office was involved in planning the killing and left behind a paper trail, see Kaltenbrunner’s Execution Proposal to Himmler: "Carbon Monoxide Introduced Via an Apparatus Operated From the Driver’s Seat". On December 30, 1944, RSHA chief Ernst Kaltenbrunner sent Himmler two murder options:

1) During the relocation of 5 individuals in 3 vehicles with Wehrmacht insignia, an escape scenario arises when the last vehicle breaks down, or

2) Carbon monoxide is introduced into the sealed rear compartment of the vehicle via an apparatus operated from the driver's seat. The device can be installed with the simplest means and removed immediately afterward. A suitable vehicle has now been obtained after significant difficulties.

The very next bright idea after shooting was gassing with carbon monoxide? It’s almost as if the Security Police had some prior experience with this method. Oh right - they had:

Before deniers start questioning why a suitable vehicle was needed despite the existence of gas vans, let’s set the record straight: First, by this stage of the war, the gas vans employed for mass gassings may have already been dismantled. Secondly, the plan was to gas the French General in a car befitting his rank, not in the cargo compartment of a truck.

Review of Holocaust Handbooks Volume 23 - Carlo Mattogno, Chełmno (Part IV - Testimony of Chełmno Escapee Szlama Winer)

2024-11-29T19:12:00.001+00:00

Part I - Method

Part II - Scholarly Avoidance

Part III - Systematic Analysis of One Example

Part IV - Testimony of Chełmno Escapee Szlama Winer

Szlama Winer escaped Chełmno extermination camp on January 19, 1942 and upon arriving in the Warsaw Ghetto, provided a detailed account of the atrocities committed there. His report is extensive, comprising approximately 15,450 words and 692 sentences in its English translation. Carlo Mattogno even mocks the "extraordinary wealth of detail" and a "truly prodigious memory". It's remarkable that detailed recollection is now considered as a flaw in eyewitness testimony.

Slzama Winer

One might think that such a detailed testimony would provide ample material for a thorough analysis. Yet, Mattogno, in his critique, chooses to come up with a mere handful of points - six, to be precise - in an attempt to discredit the entire account as "completely unreliable".

Timekeeping

Mattogno ponders, "We should first note that, as soon as they arrived at Chełmno, the “diggers,” including “Szlamek,” had to hand over “all money and valuables”, and therefore watches. How could he then always be so sure about the time?" (p.52)

Ah, yes, genius, because without a wristwatch, one must be utterly lost in time. Even as Jewish prisoner in Chelmno extermination camp, one could estimate time through various means.

It is plausible that a prisoner managed to conceal a watch during the initial confiscations. Prisoners tasked with sorting through the belongings of victims may have come across watches or clocks and discreetly kept them. Guards may have even provided a clock to help prisoners adhere to the camp's strict schedules. In other instances, prisoners could have been directly informed of the time by guards issuing orders.

The routines imposed by the guards would also allow prisoners to estimate the time based on these recurring activities. Guards themselves might have openly discussed the time, checked their own watches, or followed visible routines that signaled time changes. Winer might also have relied on natural indicators, such as the position of the sun, to approximate the time.

Gassing Procedures

Mattogno asserts "What is certain is that the description of the witness is in stark contrast to the orthodox version on two essential points. First, according to this orthodox version, the victims were loaded into the “gas vans” at Chełmno Castle and murdered on the way to the camp, whereas the testimony reviewed here claims that the assassination was carried out directly at the camp in a hermetically closed “gas van” and even in the absence of the driver." (p. 54)

The "stark contrast" Mattogno perceives is easily resolved when one considers that the gassing procedures at Chełmno could have evolved over time. According to Winer's account, during the earliest weeks of the camp’s activity, the process involved transporting victims from the so called "palace" directly to the nearby forest camp, where the gassing procedure was conducted.

However, after the events of December 1941 and January 1942 - possibly influenced by the escapes of Jewish prisoners - the Sonderkommando Kulmhof likely revised their methods. They may have recognized that transporting live victims increased the risk of resistance or escape or attention and so prioritized killing the victims at the palace grounds before transporting the corpses to the forest for burial.

Witnesses who testified after the war recalled the later and more frequent gassings conducted at the palace grounds, either because they arrived at the scene after January 1942 or because this phase of the operation lasted longer and left a stronger impression. Both accounts - gassing at the palace and gassing at the forest camp - are compatible when viewed in the context of an extermination process that adapted to practical challenges over time.

Exhaust Pipe Connection

Mattogno notes, "Second, according to the orthodox version it was necessary to connect the exhaust pipe of the engine with a special flexible pipe to the interior of the cargo box, an operation that was performed outside the vehicle." (p. 55)

First, it is essential to recognize that this detail comes from hearsay knowledge passed on to Winer by other prisoners. Judging Winer's reliability based on secondhand information seems a bit of a stretch Historical sources often include elements relayed by others, which does not detract from their core accuracy but rather reflects the fragmented way in which information was shared.

As for the specific claim about the exhaust pipe connection, it is entirely plausible that the Jewish prisoner who passed on this description to Winer overlooked the detail of the driver quickly bending over to attach the flexible exhaust tube to the cargo box. Such technical details might not have been consistently observed or described under the circumstances on-site.

This emphasizes why corroborating multiple sources from different perspectives and provenances is crucial in reconstructing historical events. Each source, report, testimony, artifact etc. provides a piece of information, and together they form a more complete picture of what occurred.

Overpressure

Mattogno claims, "in the history of the “gas vans,” if one thing is certain it is that the system of piping engine-exhaust gases into a hermetically sealed cargo box cannot work, because the pressure inside the sealed cargo box would either shut down the engine or burst the cargo box (see Alvarez 2011, Subsection 1.3.2.)." (p. 55)

While Winer stated that the doors were "hermetically sealed," let's not pretend he was providing an engineering blueprint. Based solely on his account, one cannot rule out the possibility of design features such as overpressure flaps or vents located elsewhere on the vehicle that could have allowed excess pressure to escape.

Now, there is no significant evidence that the two gas vans employed in Chelmno in January 1942 were equipped with any specific pressure relief mechanisms. Interestingly, one of the designs included a "drain opening with closure in the right front box bottom," a feature that could, in principle, also have functioned for pressure relief. Overpressure flaps were explicitly requested for planned modifications of Saurer gas vans scheduled for fabrication after September 1942.

However, most importantly Holocaust deniers like Mattogno and his comrade Alvarez have yet to grace us with any mechanical stress calculations or empirical evidence to back up their bursting van theory. How much exhaust gas was emitted into the cargo box per minute by the engine in question? What's the failure threshold of a steel-reinforced hardboard box of the dimensions used in the gas vans? What were the leakage currents, especially as the box became pressurized? Leaks around joints, seals, or imperfect closures would naturally allow some pressure to escape.

The argument that the system "could not have worked" hinges on assertions not supported by rigorous technical analysis.

Corpse Color

Mattogno argues, "So the alleged victims of “gas vans” murdering with carbon monoxide should normally have a “cherry-pink” color, but, as we have seen, according to the witness, they had a “natural skin tone.” Therefore, if the witness described a reality in this case, the corpses he witnessed had not died of poisoning by exhaust gas." (p. 57)

Not all victims of carbon monoxide poisoning exhibit the "cherry red" skin coloration. The appearance of carbon monoxide poisoning can vary based on numerous factors, including concentration levels, duration of exposure, oxygen deprivation, state of shock of being crammed into a gas van, environmental conditions, individual physiological differences, health, nutritional state. In cold temperatures, as noted by Winer, vasoconstriction can reduce peripheral blood flow and diminish skin discoloration. In cases of mass gassing, especially under the brutal conditions described, the physical symptoms visible to a layman may not align perfectly with textbook cases.

An update about diesel and gas vans at the Krasnodar trial

2024-11-26T07:22:00.005+00:00

In the article "Why the "diesel issue" is irrelevant" I pointed out:

"Deniers also like to point to the two 1943 Soviet gas vans trials in Krasnodar and Kharkov. It was claimed by the Soviets that the gas van engines were diesels. Nick checked out the published English translations of trial transcripts (The People's Verdict), and found only one place where a witness mentions specifically diesel engine (p. 17, interrogation of accused Tishchenko). Given the Soviet propensity for tampering with the published transcripts, one should check the unedited version to see if it mentions "diesel" in this place. Anyway, one swallow does not make a summer, and Tishchenko wasn't even a gas van driver. The rest of the mentions were prosecution's statements, etc. - not the relevant kind of evidence."

I have now gone through the pretrial interrogations of the Krasnodar trial, as well as its original transcript, and found interesting and useful information.

During the interrogation of 08.06.1943 Tischenko indeed mentions a diesel engine. But in the same breath he mentions the use of бензин - gasoline - for gassings:

"As the German translator [Ivan] SHERTERLAN told me, this vehicle had a carrying capacity of up to 15 tons and could hold up to 100 people. SHERTERLAN also confirmed to me that the vehicle was designed for killing people, explaining that during the engine's operation, part of the gasoline and oil was directed directly into the muffler, where it transformed under the influence of high temperatures into a vaporous state and, along with poisonous gases, was directed through pipes into the body."

Same statement was first made on 28.02.1943.

Clearly, he was not well-versed technically and his testimony could just as easily be used to support the gasoline gassings, given that all the technical details, even if later distorted, were given to Tishchenko by the translator.

During the trial Pushkaryov, who helped loading corpses into the gas vans, actually provided an interesting description of them, omitted in the published version:

"Once, I went to the garage to get gasoline for a lighter, and there was this vehicle. I examined it in detail.
It was a large 7-8 ton vehicle with a diesel engine, painted dark gray. Fake windows were made by hand. The planks were nailed in such a way that it could not be seen whether there were windows. The interior of the vehicle was lined with galvanized iron, and the iron sheets were soldered together.
The doors of the vehicle were hermetically sealed with the help of rubber gaskets. On the floor, there was a wooden grid. At the bottom of the vehicle, there was a hose connected to the exhaust pipe."

"Expert [Prozorovsky]: I have one. The expert commission requests to specify the dimensions of the "dushegubka": its length, width, and height of the body.
Defendant: I understand the question. Its length was 8 meters, its height was2-2.5 meters, and its width was 2 meters.
Expert: How many axles did this vehicle have?
Defendant: I know that it was six-wheeled.
Expert: How many horsepower did the engine have?
Defendant: I don’t know for sure. I know it had 12 cylinders, but I don’t know how many horsepower.
Expert: Was it the same vehicle you observed from the second-floor window, which was under repair?
Defendant: The same one.
Presiding Officer: How can you confirm this?
Defendant: By its external appearance, length, and size — it was the same.
Expert: In this vehicle, where were the openings located: along the edges or in the middle of the floor of the body?
Defendant: The openings were located in the center of the body, closer to the sides.
Expert: How many openings?
Defendant: I saw two openings, approximately 4 centimeters in size, round in diameter."

During the pretrial interrogation of 10.06.1943 some details were different:

"The vehicle was a 7-ton truck with a body painted in gray, featuring fake windows on the sides. According to my observations, the vehicle had a 6-8 cylinder engine."

"Here I saw that after the boarding of Soviet citizens into the vehicle was completed, the vehicle door closed and the engine was started. After idling with the engine running for 10-15 minutes, the vehicle drove out of the Gestapo yard, in which direction - I do not know. But in the same month, I saw this vehicle standing for repairs in garage No. 1 on Ordzhonikidze St. No. 52. The repairs were carried out by German and Russian drivers (I do not know their names).

When the vehicle was in the garage yard, I examined it in detail and can say the following:

The vehicle had a long body with double walls, with a double-leaf door at the back, covered with iron. Inside, the vehicle was lined with iron. There were no seats in the vehicle, on the floor was a wooden grate. Under the grate, there were holes that were connected by a hose to the engine."

No mention of diesel yet. Also no mention of diesel in the 17.06.1943 or 27.06.1843 interrogations, where the van is described again. Thus the possibility should not be excluded that Pushkaryov's trial testimony could be influenced by the prior testimony by Tishchenko.

Rechkalov was asked whether he had seen reddish or pinkish corpses and described the color of the corpses fresh out of the van as pale yellow and as if with bruises as well as claimed to have seen feces in the van (and said that maybe there was also urine). This indicates that at the time Rechkalov saw this, the people probably died of pure asphyxiation rather than CO poisoning. This was the problem described by Becker in his infamous letter. Interestingly, Becker notes that after the problem was fixed, "distorted faces and excretions, such as could be seen before, are no longer noticed."

In Rechkalov's apparently first written statement he describes the van thus:

"Mass suffocation of prisoners was carried out in the following manner: stripped people were herded into a large vehicle, which could hold 100-200 individuals. The interior was lined with iron, and the dense floor was covered with a wooden grating. The door was securely locked, and the vehicle's engine was started. A hose was connected to the exhaust pipe, through which the processed exhaust gases entered an opening in the vehicle's floor. The hot gas spread beneath the grating throughout the vehicle. In convulsions and due to lack of air, accompanied by heart-rending screams, within 10 minutes, everyone inside dies."

Diesel engine is mentioned during the 01.03.1943 interrogation:

"Once, I had the opportunity to be present during the execution of one group of prisoners; I briefly inspected it [dueshegubka] and can report the following:

The 'dushegubka' as it was called in the 'Sonderkommando,' was a 15-ton vehicle equipped with a powerful diesel engine. It had a sealed body of large size, capable of holding up to 100 people, which could be hermetically sealed. Inside the body, along the front and left sides, there was a Г-shaped pipe with multiple drilled holes. One end of this pipe was connected to the muffler of the engine and extended under the vehicle body."

During the 05.03.1943 interrogation Rechkalov clarified, that the details of the functioning of the gas van he learned not only from own observations, but also from the Sonderkommando's shoemaker (?), who described the technical part. And later he also said that Tishchenko told him a lot of technical details about the van after their arrest. His diesel claim is therefore not necessarily an eyewitness claim in the first place and can be an assumption, also influenced by Tishchenko.

An interesting description appears during the 10.06.1943 interrogation:

"The policemen accompanying the 'dushegubka', including myself, rode behind it on horseback. While the road was good, the vehicle overtook us, and at one point, we completely lost sight of it. Upon approaching the 'ZIP' area, the road became muddy and impassable, and the gas van got stuck there. Catching up to it, we helped to pull it out."

This corresponds to the description in Becker's letter, that the gas vans were almost unusable in bad weather.

Rechkalov provided more details when confronted with the witness Ivanova on 03.05.1943:

"When the 'dushegubka' was loaded and drove out of the Gestapo yard, we accompanied it on horseback to the anti-tank ditch, which is located behind the 'ZIP', and due to the heavy mud on the way, we often had to pull it out, hearing the groans of suffocating people.
Not reaching the anti-tank ditch, the vehicle stopped because it was impossible to go further due to the mud. From a nearby farm, they brought a cart, into which they transferred the suffocated people from the 'dushegubka' and thus delivered them the remaining 200 meters to the ditch, and there they were thrown.
I told IVANOVA about this case."

This was confirmed by the witness Pereligina on 18.06.1943:

"The residents of our state farm, including me, began to wonder what kind of vehicle it was and why it was driving to the anti-tank ditch.
For a long time we could not find out, but one day in rainy weather the vehicle got stuck in the mud near our state farm and could not get directly to the anti-tank ditch. Then the Germans began to drive up to the vehicle with a cart. When the cart drove up to the vehicle for the first time, I saw the doors open at the back of the vehicle and smoke or steam poured out. When the smoke or steam cleared, they began to take the bodies of people out of the vehicle, strip them naked and then put them on the cart.
I watched this whole scene together with my neighbor KOROLCHUK Gorpina. We both started counting how many corpses were taken out of the vehicle and saw that each time 10 corpses were put on the cart, but I don't remember how many times the cart drove up
Among the corpses that were placed on the carts were both large and small - obviously children.
Since then, whenever there was mud, the vehicle stopped in the same place and the corpses were transported to the anti-tank ditch on a cart. When the weather was dry, the vehicles drove directly to the anti-tank ditch and I did not see what was happening there."

There was some further testimony about that, including by the mentioned Korolchuk.

Witnesses who did not know much about the gas van could still confirm some important details, like Tuchkov's claim that the gas van, about which he did not want to go in depth, had fake windows, a common claim at that trial.

Kladov's trial description of the gas van is also worth translating:

Defendant: Peklo stood in the yard, so I went inside and looked at the vehicle. The vehicle was closed. I was with a rifle which was slung across.
President: From what distance were you observing it?
Defendant: I approached the vehicle itself and even probed the fake windows with the bayonet.
President: How bold of you.
Defendant: I slung the rifle and measured the width of the vehicle. It was two rifles wide. It does not look like a bus. A bus has a semi-oval shape, but this was a [unclear] vehicle. On the left side, it had some kind of corrugated pipes, then a cylinder, followed by expansions [?] about a quarter meter wide. At the back, it had a two-leaf door running with a bolt from top to bottom, which acted as a latch. There was also a hinge, it turned to the left.
President: It turns out you know all the details of this vehicle's structure.
Defendant: There was a red cross painted on the front of the glass.

(He uses the dialectal adjective "уборчатый" to refer to the vehicle and to the pipes. When the word refers to the pipes, it means corrugated, in this context - flexible; indeed, there is evidence of the use of such pipes in the gas vans. The meaning of calling a vehicle this word is not clear to me. Could be a transcription mistake or a wrong turn of phrase by the accused. On the whole it's not a very clear description - what are the "expansions" or "thickenings" etc.?)

During the pretrial interrogation of 27.06.1943:

"I did not see the internal structure of this vehicle, but I can describe its external appearance, as I repeatedly saw the 'dushegubka' in the Gestapo garage, which I had to guard.
It was a large vehicle, resembling a wagon, dark gray in color, with a closed body at the back, having a double-leaf door with a latch on a hanging lock.
The sides of the body had false windows, in the form of wooden slats placed next to each other.
I was convinced that the windows were false because, by pushing a bayonet between the slats, supposedly covering the windows, I felt that under the slats there was an iron lining of the body. At the front of the vehicle, on the windshield, there was a painted image of the Red Cross."

Some testimonies about the woman named Natalya Lapukh, whose suspected fate had been gassing, and whose corpse was then found by her friends and acquaintances in a mass grave - all crimson in color and without any wounds that could be the cause of death - are of some interest.

Nadezhda Makarova, who was forced to lead her psychiatric patients into the van testified on 10.06.1943:

"The inside of the vehicle was painted yellow, there were no benches, there were wooden grates on the floor, there were pipes on top, but their purpose is unknown to me. The vehicle had thick walls, 10-12 cm thick, and on both sides of the vehicle in the upper part of the body there were small windows, square of about 10 cm, covered with an iron grate on the outside of the vehicle, through which light did not penetrate into the vehicle."

Could those squares be overpressure openings covered with flaps, like those discussed in the Just memo?

I haven't found any other testimonies about diesel.

One more point though. The published Soviet description of the trial, both in Russian and in English, says:

In their report the Committee of Experts stated that the carbon monoxide could undoubtedly have had lethal effect if the waste gases from the Diesel engine penetrated the closed van.

However, the expert report never mentioned diesel. Neither was diesel mentioned when the expert testified in court. So the text in the book is an extrapolation.

The primary materials of the Krasnodar trial contain very interesting evidence. The evidence for diesel engines in gas vans, that appears in the trial materials, is extremely weak and cannot serve to disprove the fact that all engine-based gas vans ran on gasoline.

Debunking the World Almanac meme directly

2024-11-24T19:08:00.001+00:00

Our reader Jiří Fojtík has pointed out the most probable actual source of the World Almanac's figures for Jews, and that source is from 1937, thus allowing us to debunk the WA claim directly. Earlier we relied on the fact that the WA numbers were unsourced and thus useless. Boy, were we right.

The article has been updated accordingly.

Review of Holocaust Handbooks Volume 23 - Carlo Mattogno, Chelmno (Part III - Systematic Analysis of One Example)

2024-11-20T14:43:00.020+00:00

Part I - Method

Part II - Scholarly Avoidance

Part III - Systematic Analysis of One Example

There is consensus among researchers that the Chełmno extermination camp began operations in early December 1941.

Mattogno states that Krakowski claims the camp was inaugurated on 8 December 1941 without providing "any documentary evidence, not even a single testimony" (p.29, 2nd edition). While Krakowski does indeed fail to cite sources for this specific assertion, this shortcoming is unique to his work (see also Part II). Other scholars, including Montague, Klein, Alberti, and Pawlicka-Nowak, provide sources to confirm the camp’s start-up date.

Mattogno attempts to discredit this consensus by citing Andrzej Miszczak’s testimony from Blumental, Dokumenty i materiały tom I (1946) that the first transport arrived at the camp on 9 December 1941 and dismesses it as “a simple claim without any documentary confirmation.” This highlights the fundamental methodological flaw in Mattogno’s approach that was pointed out in the Part 1 of this review: his refusal to treat testimonies as historical sources unless confirmed by official Nazi documents.

Let us now move beyond theoretical critiques and examine how Mattogno’s flawed methodology impacts the specific question of Chełmno’s start-up operations.

Mattogno himself references the following testimony:

Andrzej Miszczak: "Only on December 9, 1941, the first trucks carrying Jews arrived from the direction of Kolo." (AIPN GK 165/271, volume 1, p. 51)

Several additional witnesses also testified shortly after the war to Polish investigators:

Jozef Czuprynski: "In 1941, on December 5, truck transports of Jews from Koło began arriving in Chełmno" (AIPN GK 165/271, tom 2, p. 19)
Leopold Fjalkowski : "In early December 1941, transports of Jews began arriving in Chełmno." (AIPN GK 165/271, tom 3, p. 61)
Adam Milewski: "Transports began arriving in Chełmno from December 8, and from that date, the area was guarded." (AIPN GK 165/271, volume 3, p. 13)
Czeslaw Potyralski: The first transport arrived during the night of December 7 to 8 (AIPN GK 165/271, volume 2, p. 95 - 96)
Zofja Potyralska "The Sonderkommando arrived in Chełmno at the end of November 1941, while the first transport of Jews arrived on December 8." (AIPN GK 165/271, volume 3, p. 102)

Further knowledge comes from contemporary reports written by Jewish communities in 1942:

Testimony of Lajwe Wołkowicz of 26 February 1942: "On Sunday, December 9, 1941, the Jews in Dąbie learned about the deportations from Koło. The Judenrat sent a messenger (a Christian) to Koło with a letter to find out if it was true. The messenger returned with written confirmation; in the letter, the Koło Judenrat wrote that already on December 7, thirty strong Jews had been captured on the street and sent to Chełmno. On Sabbath, December 8, 1941, the SA and gendarmerie began gathering Jews in the bet ha-midrash (according to a list)." (Ringelblum Archive Tom 9, Tereny wcielone do Rzeszy: Kraj Warty, p. 70 - 74)
Uszer Taube in 1942: "On Saturday, December 5, 1941, at 11 a.m., two SS men from Poznań arrived at the Landratsamt in Koło. Half an hour later, they caught 30 healthy Jewish men on the street and transported them by truck. At 2 p.m., the systematic deportation action began. [...] On Monday morning, December 7, trucks arrived, and each was loaded with 50 people. [...] Everyone knew they were being taken to Chełmno (a village between Koło and Dąbie, known as Kulmhof in German)." (AZIH Ring. I/394)

Finally, contemporary Nazi documents provide further insight into Chełmno’s operations:

Memo of Willy Just of 5 June 1942: "Since December 1941, ninety-seven thousand have been processed for example, using three vans, without any defects showing up in the vehicles. The explosion that we know took place at Kulmhof is to be considered an isolated case."
Civilians' trucks used to transport people to Chełmno were fueled by Sonderkommando Kulmhof starting on December 7, 1941. This is documented in the fuel consumption logs for trucks loaned by Sonderkommando Kulmhof from the Reichsstraßenbauamt Hohensalza, covering the period from December 7, 1941, to July 3, 1942, see Document 175 here.
Proposal for the Award of the War Merit Cross II Class with Swords by the Gestapo Headquarters in Posen, dated June 16, 1943: "In the SS-Sonderkommando Kulmhof served [...] SS-O’scharf. KAng. (K) Hering 8.12.1941 – 5.4.1943 and SS-O’scharf. KAng. (K) Laabs 8.12.1941 – 5.4.1943".

Let’s recap the situation. Andrzej Miszczak, a reliable witness who provided a detailed and corroborated account of the camp's operations as an outsider and bystander, places the start of Chełmno’s activities around December 9, 1941. While a single source is not definitive, Miszczak’s testimony provides a decent basis for understanding the camp’s timeline. Importantly, his account is not the sole piece of evidence on the matter.

Testimonies from other witnesses converge on a timeline, give or take a few days. Further corroboration comes from contemporary reports written by Jewish communities. Together, these sources of diverse provenance - eyewitness testimonies and Jewish reports - and their cumulative weight paints a robust picture of Chełmno’s start-up operations around December 8, 1941.

Yet, by Mattogno’s "method", such sources hold no value and are dismissed outright because they are not official Nazi documents. His approach demands a pretense of ignorance, even when the facts are well-supported.

The Nazi documents also date Chełmno's operations back to December 1941. These documents enhance illuminate some more facet of the narrative. However, they are not necessary to establish the basic facts. The absence of these documents would not plunge the timeline into darkness - it would simply leave the narrative less detailed.

The memo by Willy Just is known to Mattogno, yet he fails to connect the dots. Later, he dismisses the Just memo as a forgery - a claim that has been thoroughly rebutted here. This pattern of denial was already pointed out in the part I: demanding official Nazi documents as evidence but resorting to all manner of mental gymnastics when they contradict his preconceived conclusions.

Mattogno's restrictive methodology doesn’t just tie one hand behind his back - it blindfolds him and spins him in circles. By dismissing testimonies and contemporary reports, he's essentially trying to assemble a puzzle after tossing out half of the pieces. Such an approach does not contribute meaningful to historical reconstruction; rather, it obstructs the pursuit of historical truth. But perhaps that's precisely the goal - after all, Holocaust denial thrives on not knowing.

Review of Holocaust Handbooks Volume 23 - Carlo Mattogno, Chelmno (Part II - Scholarly Avoidance)

2024-11-17T11:14:00.010+00:00

Part I - Method

Part II - Scholarly Avoidance

Part III - Systematic Analysis of One Example

Mattogno’s Holocaust Handbooks Volume 23 on Chełmno was first published in 2009 (Italian) and in 2011 (English), with a "2nd revised edition" in 2017.

Key scholarly works on the extermination of Jews in the Reichsgau Warthegau include

Michael Alberti’s Die Verfolgung und Vernichtung der Juden im Reichsgau Warthegau (2006)
Shmuel Krakowski’s Das Todeslager Chelmno/Kulmhof: Der Beginn der 'Endlösung' (2007)
Peter Klein’s Die Gettoverwaltung Litzmannstadt 1940-1944 (2009)
Patrick Montague’s Chelmno and the Holocaust: The History of Hitler’s First Death Camp (2012).

Of these four major studies, Mattogno references only Krakowski's work, which is arguably the least comprehensive of the group, rather than engaging with the strongest and most recent scholarship. Furthermore, Mattogno appears unaware of Łucja Pawlicka-Nowak’s Chełmno Witnesses Speak (2004), a critical source collection. As a result, his work was already outdated at the time of its first publication and even more obsolete by the time of the revised edition.

This omission is not merely a matter of quantity, but it has a significant qualitative impact. Montague's research, for instance, offers more thoroughly sourced and detailed synthesis of Chełmno's history than Krakowski's book. Alberti and Klein, meanwhile, provide nuanced analyses of Nazi policies connected to Chełmno and leverage official Nazi documents effectively.

On pages 23 to 29, Mattogno touches Nazi policy with tons of full quotes - he seems to take the view that the extermination of Jews in the Warthegau would have required an overarching, pre-existing plan to kill all European Jews. Mattogno appears oblivious to the regional and situational policies and of escalation and shifts over time - and of decades of historical scholarship that examines the evolution and nuances of Nazi policy toward Jews.

In conclusion, Mattogno's approach to literature research and keeping his work up-to-date is nothing short of abysmal. His refusal to engage with the extensive body of scholarship on Chełmno / Nazi policy suggests he might have spent more time avoiding books than actually reading them.

Still Waiting: Where Did The Jews "Evacuated to The East" Go?

2024-11-13T21:42:00.008+00:00

It's been a while since I published Seriously Now, Where Did The Jews "Evacuated to The East" Go? - and honestly, I consider it the clinical precise knockout for any so-called "transit camp hypothesis". So here is the question to those who believe the Nazis did not seize the opportunity of a brutal war to make their wet dreams come true. If I were you, I’d be asking a very serious question about those 2.3 million Jews who were "evacuated to the East" according to the Korherr report. Where did they go?

Option A) They were shipped off to the swamps and forests of the Reichskommissariats Ostland and Ukraine. Just imagine - over 2 million "state enemies" casually relocated into hostile, partisan-infested territory, where German forces were chronically understaffed and barely holding control. What could possibly go wrong?

Or maybe...

Option B) Over 2 Million "dangerous elements" were cozily settled in the German army’s rear - right between unstable frontline, partisan warfare, hungry locals and overstretched supply lines. Doesn’t that just scream military brilliance?

By the way, the correct answer in the sample solution is "neither option is true." For further details, refer to the original post.

Review of Holocaust Handbooks Volume 23 - Carlo Mattogno, Chelmno (Part I - Method)

2024-11-11T13:01:00.021+00:00

Part I - Method

Part II - Scholarly Avoidance

Part III - Systematic Analysis of One Example

Nearly two-thirds of the Holocaust Handbooks - based on page volume and principal authorship - can be credited to a single figure. If this weren't bad enough, it's none other than Carlo Mattogno, a prime example in the "How Not To Do History" playbook. It's truly comforting to know that the bulk of revisionist historiography rests on him.

Take Holocaust Handbook no. 23 on the Chełmno (Kulmhof) extermination camp, for instance. It's one of Mattogno's worst contributions, though the competition is fierce. In this work, a lack of proper historical method combines with near-total avoidance of research of the subject and unfortunate timing.

Mattogno sums up his approach in a single statement, which begs to be quoted in its full beauty:

"As there are no documents which can be used as a basis of comparison, this means that for Chełmno the testimonies cannot constitute historical sources, so that there cannot even exist a genuine historiography for this camp."

(Mattogno, Chelmno, p.9)

There's more than half a million words of witness accounts, hundreds of wartime documents, photos, and archaeological studies on the camp. Among all events of mass violence in human history, the extermination camp Chełmno (Kulmhof) is relatively well documented. But why let overwhelming evidence get in the way?

And what does he mean by "genuine historiography" anyway? Historiography, by definition, means that historians have written about a topic, which - spoiler alert - has been the case for Chełmno. Scholars like Shmuel Krakowski, Patrick Montague, Janusz Gulczyński, Michael Alberti, Peter Klein and others have examined the history of this camp.

Now, we come to what is, in my opinion, one of the most absurd remarks ever made by a leading Holocaust denier. Mattogno claims "that for Chełmno the testimonies cannot constitute historical sources" and the related gem a page later that "these legal testimonies have no historiographic value".

A historical source is essentially any source of information about the past:

"…The concept of historical source covers all sources of historical cognition (whether direct or indirect), that is, all information (in the sense of information theory) about the human past, wherever such information can be found, together with the ways in which such information has been transmitted (information channels)."

(Topolski, Methodology of History, p.388).

But Mattogno, ever the innovator, pre-emptively tosses thousands of pages of testimonies right out the window - without even reading them. Any legitimate historian would welcome more evidence, would examine each piece carefully for insights into what truly happened; Mattogno does the opposite, brushes off the most abundant source material on Chelmno with the flick of a pen.

Mattogno tries to salvage his "historian" image by selectively nitpicking through a few witness statements. Of course, with his pre-conviction that testimonies "have no historiographic value," this whole exercise is pure spectacle and the result known beforehand.

He keeps piling on the nonsense - layer upon layer - and we're still in the same sentence. He asserts that "there are no documents which can be used as a basis of comparison". In Mattogno's world, if there's no "document" mirroring a testimony, then the testimony has "no historiographic value". It's a distortion of the historical method, which usually relies on corroboration, plausibility, and common sense, not an arbitrary demand for matching documents. By Mattogno's logic, we'd need a "supporting document" for every single testimony before we could take it seriously, which makes testimonies redundant to begin with. The reason for this bizarre twist is obvious: he needs a pretext to discard inconvenient evidence he'd prefer to ignore.

A "document" is not inherently superior to a "testimony". An official report from a biased individual can be riddled with falsehoods, while an honest observer's account can be remarkably precise. The true value of a source depends on the specific context and the questions asked, making source analysis anything but black and white.

Mattogno, however, dismisses the basics of the historical method. He disregards well-established techniques and practices of the discipline. If one chooses to abandon the field's established methods, the bare minimum expectation would be to provide a solid theoretical framework, justification, and scope for the new approach - that is, to start with a detailed discussion on methodology, rather than just doing things differently.

Mattogno does bring up one piece of literature for his grand theory: a 1987 article on gas vans by German historian Mathias Beer, who at the time was early in his career and not specializing in historical methodology.

Mattogno did not bother to consult modern textbooks on historical methodology and methods. Or read Beer properly in the first place. According to Mattogno, Beer supposedly supports the idea that testimonies "have no historiographic value". However, Beer actually says the opposite and argues that witness statements can establish "probable facts" even on their own. But when you're pioneering the anti-method, who needs accuracy?

Mattogno further distorts Beer's work by claiming that a source's "historiographic value" only exists with direct confirmation from "documents". In reality, Beer suggests that "whenever possible" testimonies should be linked to "critically validated documents" - not that this is a strict requirement. Beer actually argues that even a single document, like one confirming a witness's presence at a location, can strengthen the reliability of the testimony. This approach values a broad spectrum of corroboration, something Mattogno pointedly ignores

In Mattogno's version of history, only an official Nazi document - preferably stamped and signed in triplicate - counts as legitimate (unless it’s incriminating, in which case he dismisses it as a forgery or otherwise flawed). Historiography embraces a much broader concept of what constitutes a document, considering any written source as valuable. Or it utilizes varied classifications, such as distinguishing between intentional and unintentional sources or those consciously versus unconsciously transmitted:

"We have observed that one definition of document is any written language. [...] Documents sometimes are categorized in terms of (a) time of composition in relation to observation of the matter observed, or (b) the audience for which the document is intended, or (c) the intent of the composer."

Shafer, A guide to historical method, p. 47 & p. 51.

Mattogno exhibits an extreme bias in favor of the Nazis and implies that only Nazi documents can serve as proof of their atrocities. The argument is one of his most frequently used gems with some 400 counts throughout his Holocaust Handbooks ("no documents", "no documentary evidence", "not any docoument", "not the slightest document" etc.). If his approach were a serious historical method rather than a tactic of Holocaust denial, it would ease perpetrators' ability to evade responsibility by just arguing we did not document it or we destroyed all our documentation, so it did not happen.

Notably, Mattogno has never applied his method beyond the Holocaust. This fixation on perpetrators' documents, however, does not contribute meaningfully to historical study; it simply reduces the available sources and heavily biases the narrative in favor of perpetrators. The motive behind Mattogno's method is clear: to deny evidence of Nazi atrocities.

If Mattogno had engaged with Beer's work more thoroughly, he would have encountered Beer's subsequent research on the expulsion of Germans from the East. In 1998, Beer reviewed a study from the 1950s on this topic, offering insights into the historical project:

"For the first time, almost exclusively witness reports formed the basis for such an extensive research project. Based on the historical method, a multi-stage process for the source-critical review of witness reports was developed."

(Beer, Im Spannungsfeld von Politik und Zeitgeschichte. Das Großforschungsprojekt "Dokumentation der Vertreibung der Deutschen aus Ost-Mitteleuropa", p. 385)

It is worthwhile to examine the perspective and methodology developed over six decades ago on a topic researched "almost exclusively through witness reports". The German historian Martin Broszat’s paper, Massendokumentation als Methode zeitgeschichtlicher Forschung, elaborates on the method in detail.

Broszat observed that "only a small fraction of the official material is available to the German historian of contemporary history" and that "language regulations of a propagandistic or ideological kind, even within internal communications" had "devalued" official documents of the time. He noted that "official documents on this event are almost entirely missing" and that "diaries and letters are only available in relatively small numbers" so the "main reliance was on information later recalled from memory".

Broszat acknowledged that such reports "often refer to incidents and conditions which, in their singularity, cannot be easily classified as correct or incorrect". However, he emphasized that "almost all experience reports contain some statements that can be precisely verified" and that "the comparison of the various accounts with one another is of decisive importance".

In terms of "the comparative examination of testimonies", Broszat advised against a mechanical approach, emphasizing instead that "all individual circumstances must be taken into account". He argued for assessing the "greater or lesser probability of statements" by considering the relationship of witnesses to the events they reported: whether they played an active, responsible role or were passively involved, whether they observed the events directly or received information from third parties.

When specific details could be confirmed as either accurate or inaccurate, "an essential criterion for assessing other information" could be established. In cases where accuracy could not be definitively determined, credibility was assessed "based primarily on internal criteria - how an incident is presented, the gravity with which it's treated, the clarity and consistency of expression, and other factors".

Ultimately, Broszat concluded that "it has indeed proven possible to separate the reliable from the unreliable, the positive from the negative, and to arrive at a set of sources which, in its entirety, can justifiably be described as not only uncontestable but also as historically valuable."

Thus, six decades ago, German historians were able to establish historical facts on the expulsion of Germans from the East primarily from information subsequently given from memory. Yet Holocaust deniers like Mattogno still struggle to accept such evidence on Nazi atrocities today.

Mattogno claims that "there are no documents which can be used as a basis of comparison" for Kulmhof. But this is simply untrue. Numerous wartime Nazi documents detail the activities of the camp (see Sonderkommando Kulmhof – Documents and Sonderkommando Kulmhof in German Documents). Ironically, Mattogno himself includes photographs of correspondence related to Sonderkommando Kulmhof (documents 6 and 6a in his book).

In short, every bit of his central claim on method is completely, spectacularly false.

Lampshades and shrunken heads: an update

2024-10-05T20:54:00.000+01:00

Somebody has called our attention to some relatively new items at the website of the Buchenwald Memorial, namely, a dossier about the artefacts allegedly made from human bodies.

Some notable new information:

- a small lampshade, thought to have been a fake for decades (after a forensic test claimed it could not have been made from human skin) has been retested in 2023 and was proven to have been produced from human skin after all;

- a piece of the lampshade in Pister's office has been found and ordered to be tested, the results are pending (our previous conclusion was that it's unlikely to be human skin, but the test results can refute it, of course);

- some barely known shrunken head imitation has finally been shown to be a fake in 2023 (this has nothing to do with the original shrunken heads found in Buchenwald, of course);

- a pocket knife case alleged to have been made from human skin has been ordered to be tested, with results pending;

- three tattooed skin pieces were tested, with the expert concluding two of them were of human origin, the third probably not (possibly pig skin), albeit the Memorial disagrees with the latter conclusion since this piece is also documented to have come from the camp pathology department; and indeed, pigs don't have tattoos in the first place.

The article "Nazi shrunken heads, human skin lampshades, human soap, textiles from human hair? Sorting out the truth from the legends" has been updated accordingly.

Reality Check and Cutting Through 'Uncensored and Unconstrained' Nonsense in CODOH's "Holocaust Encyclopedia": Burmeister, Walter

2024-06-28T20:15:00.006+01:00

There is literally nothing that the denier's "Holocaust Encyclopedia" does not get wrong in the entry "Burmeister, Walter".

Starting with the identity:

"Walter Burmeister (14 Nov. 1894 – 23 Feb. 1980), SS Oberscharführer"

Walter Burmeister born 14 November 1894 was a school teacher / inspector and not member of the Nazi paramilitary forces. He had no involvement with Kulmhof / Chełmno extermination camp.

Denazification file of Walter Burmeister (born 14 November 1894),

LA-NRW Abteilung Rheinland, NW 1039-B/3939

The Walter Burmeister associated with Kulmhof was born on 2 May 1906. This mistaken identity has been plagiarized from a Wikipedia entry that erroneously combined the biographies of two Burmeisters. The notion that a school inspector would be drafted to drive a gas van should raise immediate red flags.

Furthermore, it is misleading to state that Burmeister "is said to have served as a driver of one of the gas vans at the Chełmno Camp", as Burmeister was not a dedicated driver of a gas van, but the "girl for everything" (jack of all trades), only stepping in to operate gas vans if the regular drivers were unavailable.

The claim that Burmeister was "interrogated by Investigating Judge Władysław Bednarz after the war in Poland" and that he "made up when put under pressure by his Polish investigators to come up with something" is absurd. Burmeister was never captured and interrogated by the Poles. It is also incorrect to assert "there is no trace of any Renault truck ever used as a gas van". Evidence (little, but there is) including Burmeister's testimony might indicate that Renault chassis were part of the gas van pool. See Rebuttal of Alvarez of Gas Vans: Misreading the Fine Print for further reading.

The argument that there is no trace of the "fanciful piping system" is also wrong. The pipe system in the gas vans, used to feed in the gasoline engine exhaust, is well-established and supported by numerous eyewitness accounts. For instance:

"We looked inside the gas van and noticed that under the wooden floor grid, there were thin pipes running through, which were perforated."

(interrogation of Walter Bock on May 16, 1961, LAS, Abt. 353.3, Nr. 16510)

It is anchronistic to say that "15 years later in Germany...Burmeister had learned enough about the orthodox narrative to adjust it to what was expected of him". In reality, the testimony where he supposedly "adjusted" to "what was expected of him" was provided before the testimony discussed previously. It is misleading to say he was "no longer claiming a Renault", as in the testimony he mentioned that the gas vans were "French vehicles".

Finally, Burmeister was not trialed for "for aiding in the murder of at least 130,000 people" but actually 145,000 (first period of Kulmhof extermination camp) + 7,100 (2nd period of Kulmhof extermination camp) people - thus 152,100 in total (Justiz und NS-Verbrechen, Lfd.Nr.594a LG Bonn 23.07.1965 JuNSV Bd.XXI S.227)

Lessons learnt:

1. Be cautios with Wikipedia

2. Hands off denier's "Holocaust Encyclopedia"

Rebuttal of Alvarez of Gas Vans: Misreading the Fine Print

2024-06-22T09:15:00.006+01:00

Rebuttal of Alvarez on Gas Vans

Part I: Why the Diesel Issue is Still Irrelevant (update 1, 2)
Part II: Producer Gas

Part III: The Ford Gas Wagon (update)
Part IV: The Becker Letter (update)
Part V: The Rauff Letter to the Criminal Technical Institute (update 1, 2, 3, cf. on Mattogno & here)

Part VI: The Turner Letter

Part VII: The Schäfer, Trühe & Rauff Telexes

Part VIII: The Einsatzgruppe B Activity & Situation Report (cf. on Mattogno)

Part IX: The Just Memo

Part X: The West-German Trials Against Members of Einsatzkommando 8

Part XI: Einsatzgruppe D in Simferopol

Part XII: Material Evidence

Part XIII: Misreading the Fine Print

Footnote Fun

For those who appreaciate deciphering these results of meticulous research, footnotes are an art form on its right. For others, like the Holocaust denier Santiago Alvarez, it's an opportunity to dig themselves deeper into misinformation. Case in point: he stumbled over the footnotes of the book Nazi Mass Murder by Kogon, Langbein, Rückerl (see Alvarez, The Gas Vans. A Critical Investigation, page 149).

Alvarez states that the former member of Sonderkommando Kulmhof Walter Burmeister was interrogated "after the war in Poland". However, here's the kicker: Burmeister was not interrogated by the Poles. He spent in British internement / near Flensburg after war:

"When I was wounded shortly before the end of the war (on May 2, 1945), I was admitted to a Flensburg hospital. As a former member of the SS – I was an Unterscharführer at the time – I was sent to the internment camp at Neuengamme. I was interned there for 2 1/2 years. After my release, I took up residence in the Flensburg district. For several years, I have been self-employed in Flensburg and own a plumbing and installation business here."

https://holocausthistory.site/testimony-of-burmeister-walter-on-kulmhof-extermination-camp/

This interrogation in question took place in West-Germany, not in the late 40s, but more than a full decade later, on 23 March 1961. This mistake now turns Alvarez' timeline into a muddled mess.

He claims that Burmeister was "merely parroting what the Poles put on his platter". Well, that's a bit awkward as Burmeister never dined with them in the first place. He then adds that "during an interrogation some 15 years later in Germany on January 24, 1961, Burmeister described the piping device differently" and concludes that "Burmeister’s knowledge had been 'streamlined" over the years". Except, this interrogation of January 24, 1961 took place before the one of March 23, 1961. So, if anything, we're observing a process of testimonies getting less "streamlined" over time.

According to Alvarez, Burmeister described the gas vans with such minutae that it could only mean he was coerced by the Poles. However, the details Burmeister provided actually align with German records - only exploited years after the Polish investigation. If Alvarez timeline were correct, Burmeister could not have been fed with the German records. It’s almost as if Burmeister was, you know, telling the truth.

The root-cause of the whole confusion is Alvarez careless reading of the footnotes. Burmeister's testimony of 23 March 1961 is cited in reference 7 of Kogon et al., Nazi mass murder. It refers to "vol. 6" of ZSL AZ 203 AR-Z 69/59. The Polish investigations are cited in footnote 6, which refers to "special vol. A" of ZSL AZ 203 AR-Z 69/59. For whatever reason, Alvarez presumed that footnote 7 also cites "special vol. A" without performing any proof-reading or plausibility check. If Burmeister had been interrogated by the Poles after the war, it is all but certain that this would have been mentioned in the judgement of his trial.

Kogon et al. Nazi Mass Murder, p. 262

Renault or Not Renault: That is the Question

Burmeister stated the gas vans were Renault trucks. According to Alvarez, "there is no documentary or anecdotal evidence that a Renault truck was ever used by the RSHA for anything". It's always puzzling how someone with limited knowledge of the RSHA can make such a definitive statement. In fact, there is substantial evidence that Renault trucks were used by the RSHA. For instance, during the early stages of Operation Barbarossa, numerous Renault trucks were acquired by the RSHA from army depots in France.

Transfer of trucks from Heeresfahrpark 511 to the RSHA motor pool, BArch 58/7658

There is also at least one testimony that one of the gas vans provided to the Einsatzgruppen in the occupied Soviet Union was based on a Renault chassis:

"The G-van was was a french make, according to my memory a Renault."

(interrogation of Gustav Lauster of 24 October 1967, BArch B 162/2266)

Now, the larger gas vans were built on Saurer chassis, while the smaller gas vans used Diamond T chassis and likely other makes. Regarding Kulmhof, the gas van driver Gustav Laabs stated the smaller gas vans were based on Dodge chassis and Walter Burmeister described them as French and Renault. Generally, Burmeister can be considered as the more reliable witness. Both were in excellent positions to know the make of the vehicles. It's possible that one of them was mistaken, or they may have been describing different gas vans from the two operational periods (1942 vs. 1944). Although this topic needs some further study, it is not central to the question of whether gas vans existed in the first place.

Reality Check and Cutting Through 'Uncensored and Unconstrained' Nonsense in CODOH's "Holocaust Encyclopedia": Auschwitz Death Books

2024-04-30T11:18:00.009+01:00

Let's look into the arguments presented in CODOH's Holocaust Encyclopedia - Auschwitz Death Books. We'll take on a couple of the key points:

More Christians than Jews died at Auschwitz according to the death books

The Auschwitz death books only represent a fraction of the camp’s reality. They are capturing a limited time-frame and especially excluding those directly sent to homicidal gas-chambers upon arrival. The majority of Jews were killed immediately upon arrival and they were thus not recorded in the camp books, as established by numerous perpetrator and surviver testimonies and contemporary documents.
Very young and very old people in the death books

The argument that the presence of young and old people contradicts the "orthodox narrative" of immediate gassing is misleading. Testimonies and historical records document that while the vast majority of deported people was immediately gassed, some groups were occasionally selected for labour or other purposes, including medical experiments, and could survive for varying period.
High death rates during typhus epidemics as proof of natural causes of death

While typhus and other diseases did cause high mortality rates, this argument overlooks the intentional harsh conditions created by the Nazis, such as starvation, forced labor, and inhumane living conditions, which exacerbated these outbreaks and increased mortality. The implication that the catastrophic conditions were purely incidental rather than a result of deliberate policies is historically inaccurate.

Further Reading:

The Kinna Report - German Document on the Killing of Unfit Jews in Auschwitz

Nazi Document on Mass Extermination of Jews in Auschwitz-Birkenau: The Franke-Gricksch Report

Open Letter to Nick Kollerstrom on the Auschwitz Death Books

Carlo Mattogno's Scholarly Death Certificate

Evidence on the systematic falsification of death causes in Auschwitz

Sonderkommando Lange shown on footage in 1939/1940?

2024-04-24T21:02:00.018+01:00

Recently, a documentary about the Nazi extermination camp Kulmhof was shared (Polish and English) on YouTube. In addition to current footage of the former Nazi extermination camp, the documentary also features contemporary photographs from a permanent exhibition. At minute 1:43, a German officer and three soldiers with a motorcycle sidecar can be seen in front of a building.

The English caption reads:

"Members of the Sonderkommando Lange in front of one of the buildings of the psychiatric hospital in Dziekanka in Gniezno, December 1939 - January 1940."

The photograph is thus a unique piece of contemporary history, depicting the mobile Sonderkommando Lange (i.e. before Kulmhof) during an operation.

If it shows what the caption suggests...

One may question why a killer commando that otherwise operated under high secrecy would openly appear like this from the beginning while being captured on camera.

Or why Lange would use a motorcycle with sidecar in the first place. It's not as though the Gestapo in annexed or occupied territory wasn't motorized with larger horsepower.

On the other hand, it could also be the Luftwaffe number plate of the motorcycle or the Luftwaffe officer's uniform, indicating that this is more likely a photo in the context of the Luftwaffe reserve hospital in Gnesen rather than the deportation of inmates of an asylum by the Secret State Police.

Last but not least, the scene doesn't align with what witnesses of the operation reported:

"The first transports of patients were picked up in the winter of 1939/40 by an SS command using ordinary trucks. At that time, the institution had approximately 1100 patients. It involved two or three trucks."

(interrogation of Bogdan Orlicki of 21 June 1971, BArch B162/17388, ca. p. 2073)

New Website holocausthistory.site Launched

2024-03-30T20:01:00.006+00:00

I'm thrilled to announce the launch of a new website aimed at serving as a platform to display evidence of Nazi atrocities. While still under construction, visitors can catch a glimpse of its future direction.

One of the advantages, albeit requiring additional time and effort, is its complete configurability and extensibility to accommodate any conceivable functionality that may emerge in the future.

There is is no strict topic limitation, however, the start will be made on Kulmhof / Chelmno extermination camp and gas vans in general, as I have some high quality material on these topics that will give the site some outstanding content.

This website serves as a complementary resource to HolocaustControversies, focusing on documenting historical evidence without engaging in discussions regarding Holocaust denial.

Feel free to have a look at https://holocausthistory.site/.

Carlo Mattogno and the Franke-Gricksch Report

2024-03-09T16:30:00.014+00:00

Carlo Mattogno is an Italian Holocaust denier and a revisionist historian who is known for promoting discredited and fringe views regarding the Holocaust.

Statement by ChatGPT 3.5 on the question "who is Carlo Mattogno". Given such precision like a skilled archer hitting the bullseye, what can potentially go wrong to let some AI chatbot assist to write a blog posting. Maybe it can help me to understand why Mattogno writes "in general, I only consider in my books what has been published in paper form" (Mattogno, Deliveries of Coke, Wood and Zyklon B to Auschwitz: Neither Proof Nor Trace for the Holocaust, p. 107).

Where I would have simply thought "well, maybe because you are afraid to face your critics", we get a more sophisticated analysis by the chatbot (one that only our own Nick Terry would consider inadequate and add minimum 10 - 15 more elaborated bullet points on the fly):

Mattogno's preference for critiques in paper form rather than internet articles or blogs could be influenced by several factors, although it's speculative to pinpoint his exact motivations. Some possible reasons might include:
Credibility Concerns: Mattogno may perceive printed materials as having more credibility than online content. Traditional publishing in reputable journals or books often involves peer review and editorial scrutiny, which could be seen as a more rigorous validation process compared to self-published internet articles or blogs.
Selective Engagement: Requiring critiques in a specific format may allow Mattogno to choose which criticisms to engage with. This could be a way of avoiding less formal or rigorously researched critiques that may be more common in online spaces.
Appeal to Authority: Insisting on critiques in print form might be an attempt to lend an air of legitimacy to his work by associating it with established academic practices. This could be an effort to position his views as scholarly and deserving of consideration.
Control of Narrative: Printed materials are typically less transient than online content. By limiting critiques to traditional publications, Mattogno might seek to control the narrative around his work, as print materials often have a more enduring presence and may be considered more carefully curated.

(Point 4. I don't understand even after translating into my native tongue German - and several times back and forth again hoping something gets added in translation.)

Mattogno's approach of "only considering in my books what has been published in paper form" led to an awkard situation. To most academics, especially those in the vast landscape of Holocaust history, he's seen as such a lackluster researcher that many refuse to dignify his work with a response. It's like setting up for a showdown, but no one bothers to show up. Some avoid it because they don't want to waste a bullet, while the other guy steers clear just because his choice of weapon is not met. Nobody? Well, not quite nobody! A small group of indomitable bloggers remains, standing at high noon armed with arguments as sharp as Gallic swords...or something.

Anyway, rules are made to be broken. In 2019, I published Nazi Document on Mass Extermination of Jews in Auschwitz-Birkenau: The Franke-Gricksch Report and Mattogno explains that "in this case I make an exception". An exception to a rule that does not make sense in the first place. Most of Holocaust denial activities take place online. Almost all of Holocaust denial debunking takes place online (unless David Irving goes on trial). If we publish all blog postings with books on demand, then they are suddenly qualified to get considered?

On the other hand, the rule reduces workload. Mattogno does not have to write another 50,000 pages which nobody except us will really read anyway. We do not have to produce a couple of postings. Win-Win. Personally, I think we should keep this working model.

But now that there is an exeption, I just have to reply. It's almost pathological. My apologies, but I cannot let Mattogno's unsubstantiated assertions go unchallenged.

1.Mental decline

How does this blog work? Since 2006 (I guess) postings on holocaustcontroversies have the same structure:

- Date

- Headline

- Main text

- Author

- Comments

If you're seeking information about the author of the post, you simply need to scroll past the main text. Mattogno is familiar with our blog, having read and cited it in the past; he is not a newcomer who would be encountering it for the first time while examining the Franke-Gricksch post.

However, despite his familiarity with the blog's structure, Mattogno asserts that Nazi Document on Mass Extermination of Jews in Auschwitz-Birkenau: The Franke-Gricksch Report was published "without attribution to any author" (p. 107). I already raised the question about his mental decline elsewhere.

2. Parroting

Rather than engaging with presented arguments, he reiterates points that have already been thoroughly addressed in the blog post. Might be a result of reading comprehension issues or cognitive challenges.

Examples:

Item 1. on p.109. Arrival of the Jews in "a special area of the camp" and alleged anachronism.

This matter has been extensively covered in Appendix C, titled "Special tracks in specially designated districts of the camp," and in Appendix D, which focuses on Brian Renk. Furthermore, a more detailed exploration is available in a separate post titled Vincent Reynouard And The Franke-Gricksch Report (Part 1) . To summarize, there is no anachronism in the report; Franke-Gricksch did not state that the special ramp for the Jews was in Birkenau.

Item 2.) on p. 109. Not using the term "crematorium". This is has been addressed in appendix C section ""biggish house" [größeres Haus]"...

"It is in accordance with his take-home message that the victims are tricked into their fate and do not suffer that he does call the crematorium what he presumed how an ignorant person and victim would see it, a biggish house."

...and in appendix D section on Carlo Mattogno:

[...]
But what it is clear is that the author of the report did not want to use the term and decided to describe the site as "biggish house". His possible motive? The report describes the mass extermination in the most positive way, for the victims as well as, implicitly, for the perpetrators. The reason for calling the crematorium a "biggish house" might have been to emphasise that the victims do not realise from the outside they are really led to their slaughterhouse.

Item 6 on p.113. "500000 Jews". Already addressed in the blog posting in section"The result to date of this “resettlement action”: 500,000 Jews.":

[...]
500,000 seems like an inflated figure disseminated by the Auschwitz SS at the time (possibly based on operation time, capacity, estimated transports, instead of actual records they were not allowed to keep). The Auschwitz SS Administration did not have to know about exact figures since they were responsible for the (registered) inmates, but not for those sent immediately to the gas chambers without registration in the camp's books.

Another point: the Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höß may have felt like boasting about the Auschwitz death toll to catch up with the reports on those of the Aktion Reinhardt camps Treblinka, Belzec, Sobibor.

In his post-war manuscript on the Final Solution of the Jewish Question, Höß provided more or less decent totals for the Jewish deportations to Auschwitz. According to him, he learnt the figures "from Eichmann or his staff" - quite possible only in 1944.

The death toll of 500,000 up to May 1943 is far too low for a post-war forgery with much higher figures floating around at the end and after the war. The Soviets claimed some 4 Million deaths for Auschwitz. The Auschwitz escapees Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler reported that 1.765 million Jews were gassed in Auschwitz between "April 1942 to April 1944".

3. Circular source firing squad

In reference to Item 3 on page 109, Mattogno cites Jewish Sonderkommando member Henryk Tauber as evidence against the existence of shower heads in Crematorium 2 in May 1943, leading to the conclusion, "how is it possible that the Pseudo-Franke-Gricksch 'saw' non-existing showers in the alleged gas chamber?" Yet, Tauber is simultaneously dismissed as a "blatantly false witness" and "deliberate impostor" by Mattogno (Mattogno, Sonderkommando Auschwitz II, p.149). It's randomly throwing in stuff that serves your agenda, without assessing whether the approach is methodically sound and rational.

Tauber mentioned that the shower heads were installed "in the fall of 1943." While Tauber is considered a strong eyewitness in general, if Franke-Gricksch described shower heads in the crematorium in May 1943, it stands as compelling evidence.

However, upon closer examination, Franke-Gricksch did not explicitly mention shower heads; rather, he described a "big basement room that resembles a shower room." Presuming Tauber's dating is reliable, this description aligns with what victims were told and the general appearance of the gas chamber. It suggests an innocent-looking room with a piping system and drainage, resembling a shower room. Franke-Gricksch might have been informed by his tour guide that shower heads were planned for future installation.

4. Theory without evidence

According to Mattogno, the crude post-war copy of the report by Eric M. Lipman of the U.S. Third Army is the "original" text, while the actual war-time carbon is a "retyped, cleaned-up, improved version". Mattogno spins a theory that explains nothing and is not backed by evidence. If anyone were to propose a theory of this nature supporting Nazi atrocities, Mattogno would likely promptly criticize and vent, highlighting the unsubstantiated nature of such conjecture.

5. "F" grade for linguistic analysis

It is supposed to be "striking" that Lipman changed the grammar of one sentence and "grammatically speaking, Lipmann‘s way of arranging the words in this sentence is wrong". However, from a grammatical perspective, the sentence is not incorrect (usage of a prepositional attribute).

Furthermore, there's no compelling reason why someone carelessly / in a hurry retyping a text, as Lipman did, should be expected to flawlessly maintain the word order in every single sentence. It should not happen when working with care and proof-reading, but this was not the case here.

6. No expert at work

The Italian denier has barely any more expertise then the rest of us, yet he boldly assumes the role of an authority on countless subjects, now extending his claims to typescripts. He contends that the similarities in the matching system and type features between the Franke-Gricksch report and the letter to Krüger might be attributed to an "entire series of certain typewriters of the time having some 'defective' types due to manufacturing imperfections." However, the point of obtaining an expert opinion for the blog post was to check for the possibility of coincidence or such systematic issues. While Mattogno is entitled to seek advice from a typescript expert, his own conjecture appears amateurish and fails to contribute meaningfully to the debate.

He further argues that "the verification criterion adopted by the bloggers is completely insufficient" because it does not establish "who used a certain typewriter to write a certain text." That's a no brainer, and it underscores precisely why the blog post did not solely focus on the typewriter question, as that would have been a relatively straightforward task. Instead, the post presented numerous arguments collectively establishing the authenticity of the document. Mattogno chose to overlook the majority of these arguments, rendering his rebuttal wholly inadequate.

7. Arrogance meets Ignorance

If arrogance is your trait, excel in something remarkable. If ignorance prevails, adopt humility. If you embody both, consider forming a tag team with Mattogno.

Mattogno crafts an image of himself as the crème de la crème, the cream of the crop, an elite figure at the pinnacle of Holocaust research. His viewpoint posits others, particularly "the bloggers," as inferior, lacking, mere losers.

This self-perception may have solidified in the 90s when Mattogno, alongside Graf, secured a significant coup by obtaining Auschwitz files from Moscow's special archives. Despite the fallacious nature of his arguments, the extensive use of unpublished contemporary documents somewhat justified his arrogance.

However, Mattogno failed to evolve and rapidly fell behind, failing to keep pace with historians and even "the bloggers." What persisted was not expertise but ignorance. Now coupled with the same arrogance.

"In their childish superficiality, the bloggers do not even ask themselves what was the reason for the journey of von Herff and Franke-Gricksch." (Mattogno, Deliveries of Coke, Wood and Zyklon B to Auschwitz, p.118)

Says he who has done no research on the SS Personnel Main Office other than referring to the "1943 Organisationsbuch of the NSDAP" and provides no analysis of the journey undertaken by von Herff and Franke-Gricksch,

"The bloggers" systematically studied numerous personnel and matter files of the SS Personnel Main Office and other sources. There is a whole section "context" in the main part of the posting trying to make sense out of the trip. While one can dispute the findings, the assertion that "the blogger" did "not even ask themselves what was the reason for the journey of von Herff and Franke-Gricksch" is just absurd. Mattogno, despite citing from the relevant section (p.116), appears incapable of recognizing that his purported deficiency has been addressed in the post.

8. See no evil

In his concluding remarks, Mattono references an excerpt from the extensive Franke-Gricksch report concerning the "special enterprise REINHARD. This branch has had the task of realising all mobile Jewish property in the Gouvernement Poland". With a sense of satisfaction, Mattogno asserts that "the real Franke-Gricksch knew nothing of a Sonderaktion “Reinhard” consisting of an extermination operation of Jews".

The "real Franke-Gricksch" knew apparently nothing of the whereabouts of the Jews unfit for work either. It's all about working camps and "all Jewish possions and mobile property". And the "scum" in Warsaw ghetto getting "liquidated". What about the much bigger task to deal with hundreds of thousands Jews unfit for work? He inspected the SS personnel involved in the operation, but does not report about the operation.

Yet drops genocidal statements like "either this generation of ours succeeds in clearing up the Jewish problem completely and it its last consequences or, if their liquidation is not completely achieved, the Jewish people will rise again after this wave of oppression" and "this problem has to be cleared up completely to free the world once and for all of this pestilence...".

Holocaust deniers will need to explain all of this, victory dancing on semantics of "Sonderaktion Reinhard" does little to address the underlying historical reality.

As I pointed out in blog article, the Franke-Gricksch report on the mass extermination of Jews in Auschwitz serves as a critical component, filling the void left by the lengthy report.

9. Flying attack donkey fallacy

According to Mattogno "the problem of the formal authenticity of the document is entirely secondary to that of its veracity". Not really, not in the context of a trip report by an SS officer.

If Franke-Gricksch wrote a detailed report on mass extermination of Jews in Auschwitz, then probably because there had been mass extermination of Jews in Auschwitz. It's really simple as that and precisely why Holocaust deniers try everything to make it appear not authentic. Because they know else they are done. Nobody wants to argue, yeah Franke-Gricksch wrote it, but he did not mean it. It's not a defendable position, everybody knows.

Except Mattogno. He developed the idea that German contemporary documents on Nazi atrocities can be authentic, but have no real meaning. On the Gasprüfer document he argued while it "seems formally authentic...the document in question has no value, no more than a military document that mentioned a flying attack donkey".

And Mattogno is supposed to be their best donkey in the barn.

Kaltenbrunner on Aktion 1005: "...to avoid that another group of persons gains insight into the operation of the Sonderkommando."

2024-03-08T19:49:00.006+00:00

On February 3, 1944, Eichmann's office dispatched a letter, signed by the head of the RSHA, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, to Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler. The letter requested a decision on how to handle the SS and police personnel responsible for the escape of Jewish prisoners from Sonderkommando 1005 at Fort Kauen.

Kaltenbrunner proposed "the matter should be concluded within our jurisdiction" instead of involving the SS and police court "to avoid another group of persons gaining insight into the operation of the Sonderkommando".

By the way, I have yet to come across any explanation from Holocaust deniers regarding the true nature of Aktion 1005. It remains a top-secret operation involving the clearance of mass graves containing evidence of Nazi atrocities.

If any deniers possess information on an alternative interpretation, I invite them to share their insights in the comments along with supporting evidence.

DOCUMENT

TRANSCRIPTION

An den

Reichsführer-SS

z.Z. Feldkommandostelle

Betrifft: Flucht jüdischer Arbeitskräfte aus Kauen

Abschließend berichte ich zu der Flucht der 64 jüdischen Arbeitskräfte aus dem Fort Kauen, daß bisher 37 Juden wieder ergriffen werden konnten.

Der Führer des Sonderkommmandos 1005 - SS-Obersturmführer Radif - und der Führer des eingesetzten Wachkommandos - Gendarmeriemeister Apelt - wurden nach dem Ausbruch wegen fahrlässigen Verhaltens in Haft genommen. Da die Ermittlungen inzwischen abgeschlossen sind, habe ich die Haft in Hausarrest umgewandelt.

Ich bitte um Entscheidung, ob

1./ noch eine SS- und polizeigerichtliche Untersuchung erfolgen soll oder

2./ die Angelegenheit in eigener Zuständigkeit abgeschlossen werden soll.

Ich schlage vor, die Angelegenheit, nachdem Radif und Apelt seit Ende 1943 einsitzen, und um zu vermeiden, daß ein weiterer Personenkreis Einblick in die Arbeitsweise des Sonderkommandos erhält, abzuschließen.

Bei SS-Obersturmführer Radif handelt es sich um einen alten erprobten Nationalsozialisten, der während der Kampfzeit in der Ostmark zu 19 Monaten Kerker verurteilt war.

Gendarmeriemeister Apelt hat bisher in anerkennswerter Weise seinen Dienst versehen und war stets bestrebt, die Arbeiten auf der Baustelle vorwärts zu treiben.

[Kaltenbrunner]

TRANSLATION

To the

Reichsführer-SS

Currently at the Field Command Post

Subject: Escape of Jewish laborers from Kovno

In conclusion, I report on the escape of the 64 Jewish laborers from Fort Kovno that so far, 37 Jews have been recaptured.

The leader of Sonderkommando 1005 - SS-Obersturmführer Radif - and the leader of the deployed guard detachment - Gendarmeriemeister Apelt - were taken into custody after the breakout for negligent behavior.

As the investigations have been completed, I have converted the custody into house arrest.

I request a decision on whether

1./ there should still be an SS and police judicial investigation or

2./ the matter should be concluded within our jurisdiction.

I suggest closing the matter, as Radif and Apelt have been in custody since the end of 1943, and to avoid another group of persons gaining insight into the operation of the Sonderkommando.

SS-Obersturmführer Radif is an old, proven National Socialist who was sentenced to 19 months in prison during the fighting in the Ostmark.

Gendarmeriemeister Apelt has hitherto commendably fulfilled his duties and has always been striving to advance the work at the construction site.

[Kaltenbrunner]

(BArch R 9361-III/840355, first page of the document already posted here Once More, With Feeling: Deniers And Aktion 1005, 10 Years Later )