Auschwitz: Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers (1989)

Jean-Claude Pressac: Auschwitz – Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers

Although Pressac was at one time a revisionist, and associated with the denier Robert Faurisson, he saw the light after undertaking an in-depth examination of almost everything to do with Auschwitz. He tells the story of his conversion in a postface beginning at page 537 of his book.

Pressac's analysis is at once exhaustive and convincing. It is based on primary documents and testimonies, original architectural plans, photographs, drawings, worksheets, and schematics. A particularly powerful analysis is found in Chapter 8 of Part Two, entitled "One proof ... one single proof". Thirty nine criminal traces, beginning at page 429. Pressac's book is a definitive proof of the use of poison gas to murder Jews at Auschwitz and it is based on primary sources from the Nazis. There is no doubt.

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Postface by the author

His position with respect to the extermination of the Jews at Birkenau and the personal experiences that led him to undertake this study

I am not a Jew and I was at one time a “revisionist”. After reading this book, some will no doubt think that I still am one. This is quite possible and I bear them no grudge. The distinction between these two fiercely opposed schools, the “exterminationists” and the “revisionists”, becomes meaningless once a certain threshold of knowledge about the former Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp has been reached. I have passed this point of no return.

Any normal human being, visiting the Auschwitz camp for the first time, feels a deep emotional shock. The weight of history allows of no other response. An ordinary but motivated tourist, I nearly did away with myself one evening in October 1979 in the main camp, the Stammlager, overwhelmed by the evidence and by despair. I have often wondered how I would have been able to perform this act of self-destruction. Since that lugubrious evening, I have spent a total of almost three months, spread over ten visits between 1979 and 1984, studying the German archives in the Auschwitz State Museum, examining the ruins of Birkenau, trying to understand and put into place the pieces of this gigantic and incredible puzzle.

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Holocaust deniers have seized on the opportunities created by the Nazi decision to destroy the crematoria in Auschwitz-Birkenau at the end of World War II. They argue that homicidal gas chambers were not employed to murder Jews and other minorities in the camp. Although some of Pressac’s work is now outdated and has been supplanted by more modern texts it is, and will remain, an important documentary source of information.

564 pages

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A short summary of the evidence listed in the chapter "One Proof – Just One Proof" and of the flawed attempts by deniers to explain this evidence away:

The Gas Chambers: “One Proof – Just One Proof”

Deniers, led by Faurisson, repeatedly call for “one proof . . . one single proof” of the existence of homicidal gas chambers. They dismiss the reliability of all human testimony, whether it came from the SS, surviving inmates, or Sonderkommando members. They do so despite the fact that regarding the general details of gassings, the testimony of all the parties tends to corroborate each other. Pressac’s monumental study of the gas chambers is, in essence, a response to this demand for documentary proof. Pressac’s sensitivity to Faurisson’s demand for documents may be rooted in the fact that he almost was lured into denial and it was his own archival investigation which proved to him that Faurisson was consciously ignoring unequivocal evidence of homicidal gas chambers. On a trip to Auschwitz shortly after he met Faurisson, he was shown a series of documents that constituted far more than “the one single proof” upon which deniers insisted. On subsequent visits he discovered additional documents, some of which were previously unpublished. Since the publication of his book in 1989, he has spent time in former Soviet archives and has uncovered additional documents that demonstrate the absolute falsehood of the deniers’ claims that there is no material or documentary proof of gas chambers.

The next few pages contain a brief summary of Pressac’s extensive findings. Those who have found the deniers’ claims about gas chambers the least bit troubling should have their doubts set aside. Those who have never been persuaded in the least by this assault on the truth will find the documents overwhelming proof of the degree to which the deniers distort history and lie about the evidence. These documents include work orders, supply requisitions, time sheets, engineering instructions, invoices, and completion reports. All clearly indicate that the gas chambers were to be used for nothing but homicidal gassings. The company contracted to design and install the execution chambers was Topf and Sons. Much of the documentation comes from reports they, their subcontractors, and civilian employees submitted to the SS. They generally made it appear as if they were building morgues. But they slipped up often enough to provide us with detailed documentation of the construction and installation of homicidal killing units.

• An inventory of equipment installed in Crematorium III called for the installation of one gas door and fourteen showers. These two items were absolutely incompatible one with the other. A gas-tight door could only be used for a gas chamber. Why would a room that functioned as a shower room need a gas-tight door?

• Pressac, not content with this simple proof that this was not a shower room, calculated the area covered by a single shower head. He used the genuine shower installations in the reception building as a guideline. On the basis of this calculation, Crematorium III, which had a floor space of 210 square meters, should have had at least 115 shower heads, not fourteen.

• On the inventory drawings, the water pipes are not connected to the showers themselves. Were these genuine showers the water pipes would have been connected.

• In certain gas chambers the wooden bases to which the shower heads were attached are still visible in the ruins of the building. A functioning shower head would not have been connected to a wooden base.

• In a letter of January 29, 1943, SS Captain Bischoff, head of the Auschwitz Waffen-SS and Police Central Construction Management, wrote to an SS major general in Berlin regarding the progress of work on Crematorium II. In his letter he referred to Vergasungskeller (gassing cellar). Butz and Faurisson tried to reinterpret the term Vergasung. Butz’s explanation was that it meant gas generation. Faurisson argued that it meant carburetion and that Vergasungskeller designated the room in the basement “where the ‘gaseous’ mixture to fuel the crematorium furnace was prepared.” There are fundamental problems with this explanation. Not only is there a significant amount of documentation which refers to gassing but, more importantly, the cremation furnaces were coke fired and did not use gas generation.

• Pressac found a time sheet in which a civilian worker had written that a room in the western part of Crematorium IV was a “Gaskammer” (gas chamber). Faurisson, in need of proof that this was something other than what it said, suggested that these were “disinfection gas chambers.” How he reached this conclusion, especially when he had determined that Vergasungskeller meant “gas generation,” was left unexplained.

• On February 13, 1943, an order was placed by the Waffen-SS and Police Central Construction Management for twelve gasdichten Türen (gas-tight doors) for Crematoria IV and V. * According to the files in the Auschwitz Museum the work on this order was completed on the 25th of February. On February 28, according to the daily time sheets submitted by the civilian contractors, the gastight shutters were fitted (Gasdichtefenster versetzten) and installed. A time sheet of March 2, 1943, submitted by the same firm for work conducted on Crematorium IV, contained the following entry: “concrete floor in gas chamber.” The information on this work order and these two time sheets, when analyzed as a whole, indicate that on March 2, 1943, civilian employees of a German firm officially designated a room in Crematorium IV as a “gas chamber.” It made absolute sense for them to do so because two days earlier they had installed “gastight shutters” in the same room.

* Because the dimensions of the “doors” were thirty by forty centimeters, Pressac hypothesizes that they were probably shutters rather than doors

• A telegram of February 26, 1943, sent by an SS second lieutenant to one of the firms involved in the construction of the gas chambers, requested the immediate dispatch of “ten gas detectors.” The detectors were to be used to check the efficiency of the ventilation system in the gas chamber.

• In a book containing the record of work carried out by the metal workshops for the construction and the maintenance of Birkenau Crematorium II, there is an order dated March 5, 1943, requesting the making of “one handle for a gas[tight] door.”

• In a letter of March 6, 1943, a civilian employee working on the construction of Crematorium II referred to modifying the air extraction system of “Auskleidekeller [undressing cellar] II”. A normal morgue would have no use for such a facility. During March 1943 there were at least four additional references to “Auskleidekeller.” It is telling that civilians who, according to the deniers, had been brought to Birkenau in January 1943 to work on “underground morgues” repeatedly referred not to morgues but to the ventilation of the “undressing cellars.”

• In the same letter the employee asked about the possibility of preheating the areas that would be used as the gas chamber. But a morgue should not be preheated. It should be kept cool. However, if the room were to function as a gas chamber, then the warmer the temperature the faster the Zyklon-B pellets would vaporize.

• A letter dated March 31, 1943, signed by SS Major Bischoff, contained a reference to an order of March 6, 1943, for a “gas [tight] door” for Crematorium II. It was to be fitted with a rubberized sealing strip and a peephole for inspection. Why would a morgue or a disinfection chamber need a peephole? It certainly was not necessary in order to watch cadavers or lice. There were also references in the Crematorium III work orders for gastight doors and for iron bars and fittings for gastight doors. The deniers, still clinging to their “morgue” theory, claimed that morgues needed gastight doors to prevent odors and infectious germs from spreading. They also claimed the doors were necessary because the morgues were disinfected with Zyklon-B. This is a charge that, as indicated above, contradicts basic science, since Zyklon-B is an insecticide and not a disinfectant. This argument still leaves them scrambling for an explanation of why fourteen shower heads, none of which were connected to a plumbing system, were necessary for a morgue.

• The inventory of Crematorium II, prepared when the civil firm had completed the conversions on it, contained references to it being fitted with a Gastür and a Gasdichtetür (gastight door).

• A letter of March 31, 1943, regarding Crematorium III spoke of it having a Gastür, a gas door. Deniers are quick to argue that this could mean many things. But the inventory attached to the handover documents for the crematorium makes short shrift of this argument. The list states that it had a Gasdichtetür, a “gastight door.” One could possibly argue about the meaning of Gastür, but it is hard to squabble over a gastight door.

The deniers also contended that Birkenau was designed to serve as a quarantine and hospital camp, not a death camp. They based their argument on architectural drawings of April 1943, which contained plans for a barracks for sick prisoners, a prisoners hospital, and a quarantine section. Why, they ask, would the Nazis build a health camp but a few hundred yards from gas chambers where people were being annihilated on a massive scale? All this, they assert, indicates that Birkenau was not built as a place of homicide and annihilation. ** But there exists another official drawing of an overall plan of Birkenau, completed approximately a year later. It reveals that Birkenau was anything but a benign hospital unit. The first set of plans, completed in April 1943, described a camp that would house 16,600 prisoners. The drawings a year later show a camp that housed 60,000 prisoners and contained less than half of the planned barracks from the preceding year’s plans. The existing barracks housed four times as many people as indicated by the original drawings. Any suggestion of this being a place of healing is contradicted by these conditions.

** The traditional notation of who had actually done the drawing and who had signed off on it is chilling in both its ordinariness and extraordinariness. The drawing was completed by prisoner 63003 (whose name remains unknown) on March 23, 1944. We know that it was reviewed by a civilian worker named Techmann and approved the next day by SS Lieutenant Werner Jothan.

These references to gas chambers and this plan of the camp constitute the kind of proof the deniers claim to be seeking. There is, of course, a myriad of additional documentation regarding deportations, murders, supplies of Zyklon-B, and other aspects of the Final Solution. I mention them not as proof of the Nazi annihilation of the Jews but as proof of the degree to which the deniers distort and deceive.

Deborah Lipstadt: „Denying the Holocaust – The growing assault on truth and memory”, pp. 225-229