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AUSCHWITZ:
Technique
and Operation
of
the Gas Chambers © | |
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objects [Documents 40, 41 and 98]. In the film
"Chronicles of the Liberation of the camp, 1945",
already mentioned, the outside of a gas chamber using Zyklon-B in
the section of the camp known as “Kanada I” is shown, with its
characteristic gas-tight door with a peephole. There is a real
problem here, however, for this gas chamber was strictly for
disinfestation, not for homicidal purposes. The interior, several
photographs of which were taken at the Liberation and in the 50s and
60s, never seems to have been filmed, probably because it was not
fitted with false showers.
In the search for evidence
of the criminality of the Krematorien, the “Bauhof”, the camp's
building materials yard, turned out to be a very valuable source.
and was exploited to the full by the Examining Judge, Jan Sehn
[Document 99], in conjunction with the correspondence found
concerning the construction of the Krematorien.
Then, during
the 50s, the Krematorien became places of pilgrimage. A belvedere
was built on the collapsed roof of the furnace room of Krematorium
II, where the motors for the ventilation system were installed and
where some of the Sonderkommando men used to live [Document
100]. A first commemorative plaque was erected near the ruins of
Krematorium II, on private initiative [Documents 101 and
102]. A central monument, between Krematorium II and III and the
end of the ramp, was erected by the Polish authorities [Document
103]. It would appear that the central monument was later than
the commemorative plaque of Krematorium II, whose Hebrew
inscriptions were considered too “provocative” [!] at the time and
caused it to be removed. Finally in 1963-64, the present monument
was erected [Document 104 and 105], chosen from the works
presented in an international competition held by the Auschwitz
Museum and the Polish authorities. It is located on part of the land
belonging to the two Krematorien, set on very large stones arranged
irregularly and extending over a considerable area, thus preventing
any subsequent archeological research. Its artistic value is for the
individual to judge. The base of the monument is of nineteen stone
tablets, each bearing a text in a different language. The content of
these texts varying slightly from one to the other: for example,
here are the English, French and German versions: |
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FOUR MILLION
PEOPLE
SUFFERED
AND DIED HERE
AT THE HANDS
OF THE NAZI
MURDERERS
BETWEEN THE YEARS
1940 AND 1945
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ICI
DE 1940 A 1945
4 MILLIONS
D'HOMMES
DE FEMMES
ET D'ENFANTS
ON ETE
TORTURES
ET ASSASSINES
PAR LES GENOCIDES
HITLERIENS |
MÄRTYRER-
UND TODESORT VON
4 MILLIONEN OPFERN
ERMORDET
VON
NAZISTISCHEN
VÖLKERMÖRDERN
1940 – 1945
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The figure of 4 million victims is now recognized as “emotional”
and should really more in the order of 1 million. Despite this
incorrect figure, repeated in 19 different languages, the visitor
who stops and meditates before the Birkenau monument cannot but be
aware that he is there between two buildings designed as normal
crematoriums by a few dozen men, then criminally converted by these
men, and built and fitted out by a few hundred more, and in the end
so destructive that they killed and reduced to ashes about 750,000
people, the very great majority of whom were non-combatants whose
only crime against the regime that annihilated them was their
Judaism.
Before the second monument was built, much
digging and searching was done in the crematorium grounds and ruins.
The hunt was essentially for notes, photographs, and other objects
hidden in the heaps of ashes or buried by members of the
Sonderkommando. As of 1962, only six manuscripts had been found,
whose Hebrew texts were attributed to three authors: Zalmann
Gradowski, an “unknown author” [presumed to be Leib Langfus] and
Zalman Lewenthal, and also a letter written in French by Hermann
Chalm. All these writings were published by the Auschwitz Museum in
a special volume entitled "Amidst a nightmare of
crime", together with the deposition of Stanislav Jankowski
(whose real name was Alter Feinsilber) made on 16th April 1945 and
in fact placed at the front of this book. On 5th November 1970, an
inhabitant of Oswiecim, Wojciech Borowcyk, brought to the Auschwitz
Museum a set of five manuscripts found in the attic of his house
during a major tidy up. These Hebrew manuscripts, which had been
found by his elder brother, Gustaw Borowczky in April 1945, near the
ruins of Krematorium III, had never been handed over to an
interested body because the elder brother had left the town. They
thus lay undisturbed in the attic for twenty five years. This “new”
testimony, written by a Sonderkommando man whose first name was
Lejb, was translated by Dr Roman Pytel and published by the
Auschwitz Museum under the title "Ich will leben…" [I
want to live…]
The author knows of two other excavations
made during the 60s to investigate the gas chambers of Krematorien
II and III. The first dug a trench around the walls of Leichenkeller
1 of Krematorium II [Documents 106, 107, 108 and 109]. The
second, undertaken in August 1968, was at the northern end of
Leichenkeller 1 of Krematorium III and cleared away the soil to
expose the air extraction vents near the base of the walls
[Document 55]. This last excavation was not consolidated and
resulted in land slips that further damaged and jumbled the ruins of
this part of Krematorium III. |
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| COMMENTS AND
CONCLUSIONS |
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As we come to the end of this study, one observation is
certainly called for: most of the German documents used in it have
been available to historians for forty years, and yet no precise and
detailed history of Krematorien II and III was ever produced during
this time and it was not until 1988 that the present author
completed such a study, subject to the gaps and errors that may
become evident later, In the author's opinion, the reason why such a
task has never been undertaken before is to be found in the degree
of interest shown, in the main countries concerned about the
extermination of the Jews, in the study of the technical means by
which it was made possible.
After the work done by the
Examining Judge, Jan Sehn. on the question, the Poles felt no need
to probe any further. After Jan Sehn’s death in 1957, nobody thought
to pursue or question his study of the Krematorien where the
homicidal gas chambers were located, because the facts were
considered to be obvious, as plain to see as the sun in the sky.
What is more, a certain anti-semitic past, which ought to be
forgotten in view of the vicissitudes suffered by the Poles since
1945, turned their historical research away from this field, where
the findings were known and accepted, towards work on Polish
resistance during the war for the survival of that country. In the
Federal republic of Germany, despite several trials where former SS
men claimed that they had scarcely participated in the “actions” at
all, or even that they had seen nothing at all, and where former
prisoners often invented things, an ostrich-like attitude and the
desire to forget were stronger than any interest in historical
research, the main aim being to avoid fanning the embers of a still
smoldering past. The case of the German democratic republic was
different, its political structure allowing it to squarely face and
denounce a past of which it considers the other Germany to be the
direct heir. In Austria. a trial such as that of the two
“Krematorium architects” ended up being dismissed for lack of
evidence, simply because the historical material provided by the
Poles and the Russians was not properly exploited, and because of an
unconscious refusal of self-criticism on the part of the population,
The Soviet Union, hampered by the variations and contradictions in
its political orthodoxy and trapped by memories of a guilty past
(Katyn, the Gulags) and by an equally guilty present, discredited
itself in the eyes of world opinion and gradually lost any rights on
the subject, even though it was the Soviet Army that liberated
Auschwitz-Birkenau and had seized documents from the archives the
quality and value of which still remain unknown. The Anglo-Saxon
world felt itself to be relatively little concerned (United Kingdom)
or too far away to really participate (United States, with notable
exceptions such as Raul Hilberg). The position of Israel would seem
to be close to that of Poland on the evidence of the mass gassings,
a position reinforced by the presence of numerous survivors of the
camps, and interest turned more towards a religious preservation of
the memory rather than a close study of the mechanics of the
extermination. There remains the case of France, where the Jewish
population was free to express itself fully. Unfortunately, the
appearance of the “iron curtain” made contacts and visits to the
places where the extermination had taken place very difficult, and
the historians having the capacity and the desire to study the
question generally preferred to take the easy way out and rely on
what was said and written by “prominent” witnesses (and by them
only), ignoring the testimony of ordinary deportees (those who had
suffered the most, but without glorifying themselves for it after
the war), and disregarding the German archives preserved “on the
other side” of the iron curtain.
The fact that the history of
the extermination rested essentially on eyewitness accounts gave
rise in the West to a debate cased on comparison and confrontation
of these testimonies, a critical attitude which led in the end
towards some people purely and simply denying the existence of
homicidal gas chambers. Testimony history and its revisionist
offspring being very closely linked, the one having generated the
other, it became absolutely essential to find a new historical
approach in order to escape from the closed circle of futile debate
and go further in search of the truth. A precise study based on
material evidence, such as the study of Krematorien II and III,
meets this requirement of getting out of the circle, but can by no
means be considered definitive, because like any human endeavor it
contains imperfections. It is intended above all to be the
beginning, open to criticism and improvement, of a detailed,
in-depth study of all the gas chambers, for homicidal or
disinfestation purposes, still existing in the Nazi concentration
camps. This study also demonstrates the complete bankruptcy of the
traditional history (and hence also of the methods and criticisms of
the revisionists), a history based for the most part on testimonies,
assembled according to the mood of the moment, truncated to fit an
arbitrary truth and sprinkled with a few German documents of uneven
value and without any connection with one another. This new
methodology is also a form of protection against the temptation to
seek media success, as in films or television programs which,
despite their success, disdain even the most elementary historical
approach and cut themselves off from basic realities. Finding a
hitherto unknown document that makes it possible to fill a gap
between two known facts and this improving our overall knowledge is
a thousand times more necessary and important than constantly
wasting kilometers of film on the same places, the same ruins and
the same monuments without ever bringing anything new. The money
invested in these films or television broadcasts would have been
better spent on genuine historical research in order to establish a
less fragile truth than that based on human memory, which is
fallible and changes over time.
Above and beyond the
methodological errors, the faults, deliberate or otherwise, the many
sophisms that were committed and triggered a violent nihilist
reaction, it is essential to recall the significance of
Krematorien II and III, as it was illustrated after the Liberation
by a Soviet artist who portrayed Krematorium II (working on the
basis of German drawings of the “930” series) in a deserted
landscape [Document 110] and as portrayed symbolically from
1945 by David Olère. After his return to France, with people
constantly coming to ask him “Have you any news of my mother, my
father, my brothers and sisters, my dear children, my grandparents,
my uncles and aunts, my friends and neighbors, please, where are
they?” David Olère, in a weak state and exasperated by all these
people who had still not understood, used to reply by thrusting ONE
SINGLE SKETCH [Document 111] under their noses. |
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| Completed on 4th February
1988 | |
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AUSCHWITZ:
Technique
and operation
of the gas chambers
Jean-Claude Pressac
© 1989, The
Beate Klarsfeld Foundation |
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