37: Denying History -- Additional Evidence

In 1979 the CIA published a report titled The Holocaust Revisited: A Retrospective Analysis of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Extermination Complex. The two authors, Dino A. Brugioni and Robert G. Poirier, claimed that aerial photographs taken by the Allies prove extermination activities. On February 15, 1979, after the report was published, newspapers proclaimed:

"Photos of Auschwitz Extermination Unit Produced" (New York Times)

"'44 Photos Showed Auschwitz Camp" (Washington Post)

"'44 Photos Showing Auschwitz Camp Spur Questions on Failure to Bomb It." (Los Angelas Times)

"The World Knew -- Kept Silent" (Washington Post)

But according to one Holocaust denier, the aerial photographs, including the negatives, were tampered with, marked, altered, or faked by the CIA. The denier does not accuse Brugioni and Poirier of doctoring the photographs; rather, he argues that they were interpreting already altered photos, marked to show extermination activity.

As an example, he argues that a "zigzag" line was drawn on two photos by the CIA to make their report fit the Holocaust story (the photos show a large goup of people moving in a marching fashion into a registration building). However, on the original negative, the line is extremely small and would be impossible to draw on. The denier theorizes that the negative was enlarged about 800%, marked, then reduced and reshot into a negative. Yet the original negatives are not separate; they are still on a giant roll in the archives at Yad Vashem, connected with hundreds of other aerial photographs.

What do the photographs really tell us? Brugioni and Poirier's claim that their analysis of the photographs shows extermination activity is overstated. By themselves the photographs in their report do not show mass murder. But that does not mean they are useless. As corroboration for other forms of evidence, including eyewitness accounts, blueprints, extant ruins, and ground photographs, they have much to tell us. Enhanced with new digital techniques, the photographs reveal more detail that Brugioni and Poirier were able to see.

Brugioni and Poirier were using analog technology (just enlarging photographs from the negatives), but -- thanks to Dr. Nevin Bryant, supervisor of Cartographic Applications and Image Processing Applications at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California (operated by the California Institute of Technology) -- Shermer and Grobman were able to get the photographs in question analyzed by digital technology. The photographic negatives were converted to digital data in the computer, then enhanced with software programs used by NASA for aerial and satellite imaging.

The photographs of Auschwitz were shot in sequence as a plane flew over the camp (on a bombing run toward its intended target -- the I. G. Farben industrial works a few miles from the camp). The rolls of film are long, containing hundreds of large-format photographs, most of which are of farms and countryside and contain nothing significant to see. Photographs of the camp itself are few and far between, and for each of the five dates there exist one, two, or three photographs at most. Since there is more than one photograph of the camp, and each is taken a few seconds apart, stereoscopic viewing of two photographs shows movement of people and vehicles. Such viewing also provides greater depth perception of the size of the buildings.

The existing photographs were taken on only five days -- April 4, May 31, June 26, August 25, and September 13, 1944. Deniers claim that between April and October there is not one aerial photograph that shows extermination activity. First of all, there are photographs of people in long lines being marched toward Crematorium V, where the gassing would have taken place. But, as for direct evidence, what could we realistically expect to see? The undressing, gassing, and cremation -- by this time -- were all done inside the crematoria buildings. It was highly unlikely that an Allied plane would have flown over at the same time as smoke was coming out of chimneys or from an open-pit burning. Indeed, it would be an extraordinary coincidence if we had such a photograph.

The five dates, however, are easy to check for extermination activity. Danuta Czech's Auschwitz Chronicle: 1938-1945 gives a day-by-day description of all significant activities at the camp. It was compiled from the twenty-one volumes of documents from the trial of Rudolf Hoess, seven volumes of documents from the Krakow trial of forty members of the Auschwitz SS, transport registers, prisoner records, smuggled notes and letters from the resistance movement, survivor testimonies, and thousands of other Nazi documents recovered after the liberation.

On April 4, 11 prisoners from Katowice (in Silesia) received numbers 179576-179586; 53 female prisoners selected from an RSHA transport from Trieste and Istria received nos. 75460-76512; 32 prisoners sent in a group transport received nos. 179666-179697; and a small transport of deportees arrived from Trieste, 103 of whom were killed in the gas chambers, according the the Auschwitz Chronicle. Since the process would have taken less than an hour, it is, as noted, not surprising that the few seconds an Allied plane was flying over Auschwitz that day did not correspond with the time the victims would have been burned in the crematoria.

The entry for May 31 includes 100 Jews selected from an RSHA transport who recived numbers; others were reported as "killed in the gas chambers." It also notes that 1,000 male Jews and 1,000 female Jews received numbers from another RSHA transport from Hungary. The rest were reported as "killed in the gas chambers." For this day we do not know how many Jews were killed in the gas chambers, what time they were killed, or if they were cremated that day or the next day.

It is reported that between May 16 and May 31 the SS acquired eighty-eight pounds of gold and white metal from false teeth, so it is possible that the bodies were not cremated until after this process was completed, which would have been after May 31 for those arriving that day. But in an enhanced portion of the aerial photographs from this date we can see a large group of people going toward Crematorium V. That fits with reports of prisoners being marched into the crematoria for gassing that day. These may be the Hungarian Jews from and RSHA transport, some of whom were selected for work, the rest for extermination. Deniers claim the gas chambers in these crematoria were simply morgues. But why would you march living prisoners into a morgue other than to kill them?

On June 26, no one was gassed, according to the Chronicle. Four prisoners received numbers, 778 prisoners were transferred from Auschwitz to Buchenwald; and the camp received four sieves for sifting through human ashes to find unburned human bones for incineration.

No one was gassed on August 25 or on September 13.

These photographs are a good example of how, in order to make proper interpretations, we must review the physical evidence in conjunction with written documents and eyewitness testimonies. Sometimes we can make logical inferences, but other times we cannot draw final conclusions. The historian, however, is willing to wait for further evidence. In contrast, deniers seem anxious to prove that because nothing appeared to happen on a particular day at one particular moment, then nothing happened at other times on other days as well -- an example of the fallacy of pseudo-historical thinking.

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Holocaust deniers assume that because historians have determined that Auschwitz ended up being an extermination camp, we should be able to show it was originally designed as an extermination camp. Since the layout, design and function of Auschwitz do not match what we might expect to find in a perfectly designed extermination camp, deniers then argue that it was not an extermination camp at all. In general, this argument is flawed because historical outcomes rarely match historical intentions. In particular, it is flawed because we can trace the changes that occurred at Auschwitz, and this can be done with the other extermination camps as well.

The architectural historian Robert Jan van Pelt, in a brilliant essay entitled "A Site in Search of a Mission," has demonstrated through chronology of blueprints and architectural designs of Auschwitz, that modern myths about the camp have erased the historical contingencies of its origin and development. In his essay, and even more poignantly in his 1996 book coauthored with Deborah Dwork, van Pelt unravels the contingencies that constructed the necessity that became the Auschwitz we know today. The problem is that we are trying to understand the early stages of Auschwitz by what now remains. The original intention of Auschwitz, however, was quite different:

"Auschwitz was not preordained to become the major site of the Holocaust. It acquired that role almost by accident, and even the fact that it became a site of mass murder at all was due more to the failure to achieve one goal than to the ambition to realize another."

The focus on the final stage of Auschwitz as a killing machine has prevented us from understanding its contingent history, as well as how anyone could assume the role of mass murderer. Dwork and van Pelt put Auschwitz and its operators in historical context, observing:

"This almost comfortable demonization [of a place of preordained mass murder] relegates the camp and the events that transpired there to the realm of myth, distancing us from all too concrete historical reality, suppressing the local, regional, and national context of the greatest catastrophe western civilization both permitted and endured, and obscuring the responsibility of the thousands of individuals who enacted this atrocity step by step. None of them was born to be a mass murderer, or an accomplice to mass murder. Each of them inched his way to iniquity."

Auschwitz (or Oswiecim), it seems, was to be a district capital, a center of mass industry, and a model city that would project the image of an ideal future city for the Thousand-Year Reich. Concentration camps were originally designed as instruments of terror to control resistance to the Nazi Party (Dachau is the classic case), but in time, as they evolved, they furnished labor for productive work, especially after 1939 and the start of the war. Before the war the free labor of the camps would have competed with German businesses and thus increased unemployment, which went against Nazi policy. When the war began, however, the camps took on two new functions: providing a source of labor and housing prisoners of war. And, as more and more of Germany's productive labor joined the armed services, these two functions blended into one, with prisoners providing the free labor.

In 1940, Himmler began to make plans for the future of Auschwitz. The industrial giant I. G. Farben would have a plant in Auschwitz, all Jews and Poles would be removed from the region, and Auschwitz itself would become "a paradigm of the settlement in the East." Within two months, a master architectural plan to reconstruct and enlarge the camp was completed: it included an SS garden city and a center for agricultural experimentation.

Plans changed on June 22, 1941, when Germany invaded the Soviet Union. Contingencies once again altered future necessities, and the crooked timber of Auschwitz took another twisted turn. With the initial success of the Wehrmacht and the Luftwaffe, Russian prisoners of war came pouring into Auschwitz, suddenly transforming the camp into an instrument of war. Conditions were brutal and thousands of Russians died monthly from disease and starvation. Barracks were hastily thrown up to house the POWs, and new crematoria had to be added to dispose of the bodies.

The model-city-turned-POW-camp was, de facto, rapidly on its way to becoming an extermination camp. After the Russian armies began to hold the line against the Germans and it became clear that Operation Barbarossa was going to become a protracted affair, Auschwitz was further expanded to house up to 100,000 prisoners, primarily for labor. Eventually, the supply of free Russian labor began to dry up. Himmler needed a replacement, and he found it in the Jews. The evolution of Auschwitz toward its final end as an extermination camp now took a dramatic leap.

At the Wansee conference in January 1942, plans for the Final Solution were coordinated. Six days later, Himmler sent the following telegram to the inspector of concentration camps, Richard Gluecks: "As no Russian prisoners of war can be expected in the near future, I am sending to the camps a large number of Jews who have emigrated from Germany. Will you therefore make preparation to receive within the next four weeks 100,000 Jews and up to 50,000 Jewesses in the concentration camps? The concentration camps will be faced with great economic tasks in the coming weeks."

Indeed they were. Three weeks later, the first transport of Jews arrived, whereupon the young and healthy were put to work and the old and infirm were gassed and cremated. When this procedure became cumbersome, given the confines of the camp's original design, it was moved three kilometers away, from Auschwitz I to Auschwitz II (Auschwitz-Birkenau), where new crematoria were constructed and the killing escalated as the war intensified.

Yet all the while, says van Pelt, "the extermination of the Jews was meant to be a transient phenomenon in the history of the camp." Plans were continued to convert the camp yet again after the war, but "that other future never materialized. Thus the name Auschwitz became synonymous with the Holocaust, and not with Himmler's model town."

As the war turned against Germany, the Nazis became even more determined to exterminate the Jews. Auschwitz, because of its use of Zyklon-B, became the most efficient of the six extermination camps.

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The death camps were just one instrument in the Final Solution. The Einsatzgruppen were mobile SS and police units used for special missions in the occupied territories, such as cleaning out towns and villages of Jews and other unwanted persons, and killing them after the occupation by the Germans. The method of murder is irrelevant to the moral consequences of how many were murdered. Murder is murder, whether it is done by gas or by gun. As Gitta Sereny put it:

"[F]or most of the world, including most Jews, the term "Final Solution" has mainly or entirely been identified with gas chambers in occupied Poland, or even more narrowly, those in Auschwitz. For almost half a century, the murder by shooting of between one and a half million and two million Jews in the occupied Soviet territories has somehow been treated differently. Grotesquely, more often than not, these murders by shooting have been neatly classified as "acts of war," an extraordinary misconstruction of history which plays straight into the hands of the so-called revisionists."

Well over one million, and possibly as many as two million, were murdered by mobile gassing vans or by non-gassing techniques. For example, during the winter of 1941-42, Einsatzgruppe A reported killing 2,000 Jews in Estonia, 70,000 in Latvia, 136,421 in Lithuania, and 41,000 in Belorussia. On November 14, 1941, Einsatzgruppe B reported an additional 45,467 shootings, and on July 31, 1942, the governor of Belorussia reported 65,000 Jews had been killed in the previous two months. Einsatzgruppe C estimated it had killed 95,000 by December 1941. Finally, on April 8, 1942, Einsatzgruppe D reported a total of 92,000 killed, for a grand total of 546,888 dead, or more than half a million in less than one year.

As a specific example of an Einsatzgruppen killing action, a report from Lithuania was submitted to Reinhard Heydrich by Karl Jaeger, commander of Einsatzkommando 3 in Einsatzgruppe A, and regional head of the Special Security Force. The report is labeled "Secret Reich Business" and titled "Comprehensive Tabulation of Execution Carried out in the EK3 Area up to 1 December 1941." For just two of the days, November 25 and 29, rather than transport Jews to the Kovno ghetto, the commando unit took them to fort number 9 near the city and executed them, as the report notes:

25.11.41 Kauen-F. IX -- 1159 Juden, 2,934

1600 Judinnen, 175 J.-Kind.

(Umsiedler aus Berlin,

Muenchen u. Frankfurt a.

M.)

29.11.41 Kauen-F. IX -- 693 Juden, 2,000

1155 Judinnen, 152 J.-Kind.

(Umsiedler aus, Wein u.

Breslau)

Not everyone was shot. Some were gassed in special gas vans. In a letter to SS Captain Walter Rauff from the automotive organization of the security police, labeled "Top Secret!" and dated June 5, 1942, orders are given to make adjustments to the vans to make them more effective. Some of the points include:

"Since December 1941, ninety-seven thousand have been processed, using three vans, without any defects showing up in the vehicles. The explosion that we know took place at Chelmno is to be considered an isolated case. The cause can be attributed to improper operation. In order to avoid such incidents, special instructions have been addressed to the services concerned. Safety had been increased considerably as a result of these instructions."

There were a total of seven recommendations. Although the term "gassing" people is not used, "treating subjects" with "CO" -- which are used -- can only mean murder by gas.

In Anatomy of the SS State, Helmut Krausnick et al. show that when the Einsatzgruppen were created in May 1941, members were "told about the secret decree on shooting by word of mouth. According to the testimony of Otto Ohlendorf, who was in command of Einsatzgruppe D, the 'liquidation order' (as he called it) meant 'putting to death all racially and politically undesirable elements among the prisoners, where these might be thought to represent a threat to security."

Numerous eyewitness accounts from the Einsatzgruppen can be found in a remarkably graphic book entitled "The Good Old Days": The Holocaust as Seen by Its Perpetrators and Bystanders. Here, for example, is a statement by the teleprinter engineer Kiebach from Einsatzgruppe C:

"In Rovno I had to participate in the first shooting. . . . Each member of the firing-squad had to shoot one person. We were instructed to aim at the head from a distance of about ten meters. The order to fire was 'Ready to shoot, aim, fire!' The people who had been shot then fell into the grave. I myself was detailed to the firing-squad; however, I only managed to shoot about five times. I began to feel unwell, I felt as though I was in a dream. A private or lance-corporal from the Wehrmacht, I don't know which unit, took my carbine from me and went and took my place in the firing-squad."

In an emotional, personal letter to his wife, "My dear Soska," dated Sunday, September 27, 1942, SS Lieutenant Colonel Karl Kretschmer apologizes for not writing more but notes he is feeling ill and in "low spirits" because "I'd like to be with you all. What you see here makes you either brutal or sentimental." His "gloomy mood," he explains, is caused by "the sight of the dead (including women and children."

Which dead? Dead Jews: "As the war is in our opinion a Jewish war, the Jews are the first to feel it. Here in Russia, wherever the German soldier is, no Jew remains. You can imagine that at first I needed some time to get to grips with this."

In a subsequent letter, not dated, he explains to his wife that "there is no room for pity of any kind. You women and children back home could not expect any mercy or pity if the enemy got the upper hand. For that reason we are mopping up where necessary but otherwise the Russians are willing, simple and obedient. There are no Jews here anymore." Finally, on October 19, 1942, in another letter from Kretschmer, signed "you deserve my best wishes and all my love, Your Papa," he shows how easy it is to slip into the banality of evil:

"If it weren't for the stupid thoughts about what we are doing in this country, the Einsatz here would be wonderful, since it has put me in a position where I can support you all very well. Since, as I already wrote to you, I consider the last Einsatz to be justified and indeed approve of the consequences it had, the phrase: "stupid thoughts" is not strictly accurate. Rather it is a weakness not to be able to stand the sight of dead people; the best way of overcoming it is to do it more often. Then it becomes a habit."