36: Denying History -- Witnesses and Confessors

Additional evidence regarding the use of gas chambers comes from the confessions of guards such as Unterscharfuehrer (Sergeant) Pery Broad, captured on May 6, 1945, by the British in their zone of occupation in Germany. Broad began work at Auschwitz in 1942 in the "Political Section" and stayed there until the liberation of the camp in January 1945. After his capture, he worked as an interpreter for the British and, in the process, wrote a memoir that was passed on to the British Intelligence Service in July 1945. That December, he declared under oath that what he wrote was true.

On September 29, 1947, the document was translated into English and presented at the Nuremberg trials as evidence of the use of gas chambers as mechanisms of mass murder. Later that year Broad was released. In April 1959 Broad was called to testify at a trial of captured Auschwitz SS members and acknowledged the authorship of the memoir, confirmed its validity, and retracted nothing.

Deniers try to dismiss any damning Nazi confession as being coerced or made up for bizarre psychological reasons, while simultaneously accepting statements by those who support their position. Broad was never tortured, and he had nothing to gain and everything to lose by confessing.

When given the opportunity to recant, which he certainly could have done in the 1959 trial, he did not. Instead, he described in detail the gassing procedure, including the use of Zyklon-B, the early gassing experiments in Block II of Auschwitz, the temporary chambers set up at the two abandoned farms at Birkenau (Auschwitz-Birkenau, or Auschwitz II), which he correctly called by their jargon name of "Bunkers I and II." He also recalled the construction of Crematoria II, III, IV, and V at Birkenau, accurately depicting (by comparison with blueprints) the design of the undressing rooms, gas chamber, and each crematorium. He then described the actual process of the gassing in gruesome detail:

"The disinfectors are at work . . . with an iron rod and hammer they open a couple of harmless looking tin boxes, the directions read Cyclon [sic] Vermin Destroyer, Warning, Poisonous. The boxes are filled with small pellets which look like blue peas. As soon as the box is opened the contents are shaken out through an aperture in the roof. Then another box is emptied in the next aperture, and so on. After about two minutes the shrieks die down and change to a low moaning. Most of the men have already lost consciousness. After a further two minutes . . . it is all over. Deadly quiet reigns. . . . The corpses are piled together, their mouths stretched open. . . . It is difficult to heave the interlaced corpses out of the chamber as the gas is stiffening all their limbs."

Deniers point out that Broad's four minutes for the total process is at odds with the statements of others, such as the commandant Hoess who said it was more like twenty minutes. Because of such minor discrepancies, deniers dismiss Broad's account entirely. A dozen different accounts give a dozen different figures for time of death by gassing, so deniers believe that no one was gassed at all. Does this make sense? No.

The time required for the gassing process would vary according to the room's temperature (hydrocyanic acid's evaporation from the pellets depends on the air temperature), the number of people there, the rooms size, and the amount of Zyklon-B poured into the apertures -- not to mention the psychological differences in time perception experienced by different observers. Indeed, if the estimation of time were all exactly the same, we would have to be suspicious that they were all taking their stories from a single account. Such minor discrepancies actually back up the veracity of Broad's statement.

Deniers make a similar argument about the confession of Hoess, commandant of Auschwitz from May 20, 1940, to November 11, 1943. Hoess made his statement on April 5, 1946, probably unaware of Pery Broad's memoir (and vice versa). Further, the Nuremberg tribunal, when trying Hoess, was also unaware of the Broad document. Even if deniers completely discount the Hoess testimony, which they do, they still have the problem of explaining why the two accounts coincide so well.

Hoess, like Broad, talks about the temporary gassing experiments at Auschwitz I, the two "Bunkers" at Birkenau, the construction of the four large structures at Birkenau that included undressing rooms, gas chambers, and crematoria. Moreover, after Hoess was found guilty and sentenced to death, he wrote a 250-page autobiographical manuscript that corroborates both his previous testimony and Broad's statement.

As far as we know, Broad and Hoess never saw each other before Hoess's capture on March 11, 1946 (ten months after Broad's). But even if we fantasize a secret meeting between the two before Broad was captured, why would they spend time fabricating a story that was likely to convict them? Besides, theirs are not the only accounts.

Compare, for example, this testimony from the Auschwitz camp physician, Dr. Johann Paul Kremer:

"September 2, 1942. Was present for first time at a special action at 3 a.m. By comparison Dante's Inferno seems almost a comedy. Auschwitz is justly called an extermination camp!

"September 5, 1942. At noon was present at a special action in the women's camp -- the most horrible of all horrors. Hschf. Thilo, military surgeon, was right when he said to me today that we are located here in the $$#@ mundi [$$#@ of the world]."

Deniers claim that Kremer says "special action," not gassing, but at the trial of the Auschwitz camp garrison in Krakow in December 1947, Kremer clarified exactly what he meant by "special action":

"By September 2, 1942, at 3 a.m. I had already been assigned to take part in the action of gassing people. These mass murders took place in small cottages situated outside the Birkenau camp in a wood. The cottages were called 'bunkers' in the SS-men's slang. All SS physicians on duty in the camp took turns to participate in the gassings, which were called Sonderaktion [special action]. My part as physician at the gassing consisted of remaining in readiness near the bunker. I was brought there by car. I sat in the front with the driver and an SS hospital orderly sat in the back of the car with oxygen apparatus to revive SS-men, employed in the gassing, in case any of them should succumb to the poisonous fumes.

"When the transport with people who were destined to be gassed arrived at the railway ramp, the SS officers selected from among the news arrivals persons fit to work, while the rest -- old people, all children, women with children in their arms and other persons not deemed fit to work -- were loaded onto lorries and driven to the gas chambers. There people were driven into the barrack huts where the victims undressed and then went naked to the gas chambers. Very often no incidents occurred, as the SS-men kept people quiet, maintaining that they were to bathe and be deloused. After driving all of them into the gas chamber the door was closed and an SS-man in a gas mask threw the contents of a Cyclon [sic] tin through an opening in the side wall. The shouting and screaming of the victims could be heard through that opening and it was clear that they were fighting for their lives. These shouts were heard for a very short while."

---

The convergence of the accounts from Broad, Hoess, and Kremer is additional proof that the Nazis used gas chambers and crematoria for mass extermination. And these are only the three most famous accounts. There are many others, such as the following extract from a sworn statement by Stefan Kirsz taken in Belzec on October 15, 1945 (where carbon monoxide was used instead of Zyklon-B). In 1942, Kirsz was a twenty-nine-year-old Belzec villager employed by the Polish State Railways as an assistant locomotive driver on the line between Rawa Ruska and Belzec. In other words, Kirsz was a witness with no particular agenda when describing what he saw:

"The transports which I drove rom Rawa Ruska to Belzec were divided into three parts in Belzec whereby each part (20 wagons) was rolled onto a siding on the area of the camp. As soon as the wagons came to a stop on the siding on the area of the camp they were emptied of Jews. Within 3-5 minutes the 20 wagons were completely emptied of people and luggage. I saw that besides the living people, corpses were also taken out. These people were ordered to place their luggage on one side and to completely undress themselves. Their clothes were laid on one side and their shoes on the other and then they went, undressed, one after the other, into a barrack which stood near the siding, from where they were pushed into the gas chambers [von wo sie in die Gaskammer geschoben wurden]. I was able to see this because I entered the camp area and pretended that I had to shovel coal nearer to the furnace door. The Germans allowed no one to see the camp area. Whenever I was in a locomotive near the extermination camp I tried to see something more, but I did not hear the screams of the Jews driven in."

The power of this eyewitness account speaks for itself, as does the following statement of Hans Stark, registrar of new arrivals at Auschwitz:

"As early as autumn 1941 gassings were carried out in a room in the small crematorium which had been prepared for this purpose. The room held about 200-250 people, had a higher-than-average ceiling, no windows and only a specially insulated door, with bolts like those of an airtight door. There were no pipes or the like which would lead the prisoners to believe that it was perhaps a shower room. In the ceiling there were two openings of about 35 cm in diameter at some distance from each other. The room had a flat roof which allowed daylight in through the openings. It was through these openings that Zyklon-B in granular form would be poured. . . .

"At another, later gassing -- also in the autumn of 1941 -- Grabner ordered me to pour Zyklon-B into the opening because only one medical orderly had shown up. During the gassing Zyklon-B had to be poured through both openings of the gas chamber at the same time. This gassing was also a transport of 200-250 Jews, once again men, women and children. As the Zyklon-B -- as already mentioned -- was in granular form, it trickled down over the people as it was being poured in. They then started to cry out terribly for they now knew what was happening to them. I did not look through the opening because it had to be closed as soon as the Zyklon-B had been poured in. After a few minutes, the gas chamber was opened. The dead lay higgledy-piggledy all over the place. It was a dreadful sight."

---

Rudolf Reder spent three months at Belzec before escaping in November 1942. The following is from a sworn affidavit by Reder about his experiences in the Lemberg ghetto in Poland from November 1941 to mid-August 1942 and the months in the Belzec extermination camp:

"On 17 August 1942, I was deported to the Belzec extermination camp. We were unloaded and had to strip naked. Specialists were asked to step forward. I reported as a mechanic. Only eight men were left behind; the rest were immediately gassed. There were about 4,500 people on the transport. All the prisoners were taken to a big barrack where the women had their heads shaved bald. Then they were driven into a narrow corridor; there was a door there with the inscription, "Bade und Inhalationsraume" [bath and inhalation room]. In front of the door hung a flowerpot with some flowers. As one opened the door there was another corridor; to the right were three doors, and to the left three doors, which led to six gas chambers. Each chamber could hold 750 people.

"The building was of concrete. I know from my own observation that the gassing took no more than 20 minutes. The gas was fed through pipes from an engine in a small hut. I operated a machine which dug the earth out of pits which served as graves for those gassed. I additionally had to drag corpses out of the gas chambers and drag them to the pits. I dragged the corpses in this way: I placed a belt around a wrist and a second worker did the same, and thus we carried the corpses to the pits. There were about 30 graves, each grave was 100 meters long, 25 meters wide and 15 meters deep. In my opinion, about 100,000 corpses could be buried. The corpses were stacked up to about 50 centimeters about the edge of the pit, because the corpses later settled."

Many more, and similar eyewitness accounts could be cited, but it should be clear by now how these add to the overwhelming convergence of evidence for mass gassings.