Franciszek Piper reviews Fritjof Meyer, “Die Zahl der Opfer von Auschwitz”

As of 2024, it should be noted that one of the main «arguments» on which Fritjof Meyer relies, is in fact the faulty translation (not by himself though) from polish of a Rudolf Höss’s testimony read as stating that the crematoria would work only «8 to 10 hours a day», where the original Höss’s declaration does not mention «days» and in fact states «8 to 10 weeks». Meyer would not check a single primary source, though he justified his whole «new approach» by the mere existence of this «document». The great Holocaust Controversies team did check the primary source and showed the above point here… The whole dishonest and flawed Meyer’s article was built on a completely erroneous premise…

In May 2002, Fritjof Meyer, a journalist with the influential German newsmagazine Der Spiegel, published an article titled “Die Zahl der Opfer von Auschwitz. Neue Erkentnisse durch neue Archivfunde” (The Number of Victims of Auschwitz: New Findings in the Light of Newly-Discovered Documents) in the German scholarly journal Osteuropa. Meyer does not deny the existence of the gas chambers, but he lowers the number of people murdered in Auschwitz to approximately 510,000.

Franciszek Piper, Ph.D., director of the Historical Research Department at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, has written a critical review of Meyer’s article. One of the reasons for this step is the fact that Osteuropa is a prestigious journal that has been published for 52 years by the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Osteuropakunde e.V. The head of its board is Dr. Rita Süssmuth (former head of the German Bundestag), and the board also includes ten other eminent scholars.

In a July 24, 2002 letter to the Museum, Meyer wrote that the editors of Der Spiegel had rejected his article.

Franciszek Piper - Fritjof Meyer, “Die Zahl der Opfer von Auschwitz. Neue Erkentnisse durch neue Archivfunde,” Osteuropa, 52, Jg., 5/2002, pp. 631-641, (review article)

While the war was still on, it was already known that Auschwitz, a German concentration camp and a state institution, was one of the largest extermination sites in occupied Europe.

The Polish government, with its wartime seat in London, took the lead in spreading this information, on the basis of reports from the resistance movement in occupied Poland. First published in Polish government bulletins, the information was later carried by the press around the world.

The belief that the number of victims reached into the millions prevailed among Auschwitz prisoners, and even among some of the SS men who witnessed the things happened in the camp.¹ This is confirmed both by testimony from prisoners and SS men, and by notes drawn up during the war by the prisoners assigned to burning corpses (Sonderkommando).²

When the Soviet army entered the camp on January 27, 1945, they did not find any German documents there giving the number of victims, or any that could be used as a basis for calculating this number. Such documents (transport lists, notifications of the arrival of transports, reports about the outcome of selection) had been destroyed before liberation. For this reason, the Soviet commission investigating the crimes committed in Auschwitz Concentration Camp had to make estimates.

They used statements by former prisoners as a basis for establishing the length of time that the particular crematoria had functioned, and their daily capacity. Multiplying these two factors yielded a figure of 5,000,000. Estimating that at least 20% of the time had been taken up by interruptions for maintenance or repairs, the commission concluded that 4,000,000 had been burned, and therefore had perished, in the camp.³ That figure appeared in a communiqué that the Soviet commission published in Krasnaya Zvezda on May 8, 1945, and was reported by the press around the world. Former camp commandant Rudolf Höss corroborated this number in his testimony before the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg the following year. He stated that 3,000,000 had died in the camp, and this statistic was generally assumed to apply only to the period when he had been commandant, from 1940 to 1943.

Polish crime investigators and the Supreme National Tribunal in Poland, which tried the Auschwitz prisoners, also accepted the figure of 4,000,000. Established by the prosecutorial authorities rather than by researchers, this number gained acceptance by the public and became canonical knowledge on the subject of Auschwitz for many years, in Poland and elsewhere.

The absence of the most important of the statistical sources that the Germans kept in Auschwitz made it practically impossible for historians to research the issue of the number of victims. The reluctance to research this issue also resulted from a conviction of the impossibility of drawing up a full list of transports reflecting the total number of deportees, and above all of the people who were consumed by the gas chambers and crematoria with no registration or records. This view finds expression in some veterans’ groups to this day.

This does not mean that all researchers agreed on the figure of 4,000,000 in their publications. Jewish researchers in particular, who were fully aware that Jews made up the decided majority of the victims of Auschwitz, had significant reservations about this figure—above all because, when added to the number of Jews killed at other extermination sites, it more than doubled the overall loss of Jewish lives, set at 5,000,000 to 6,000,000. Since these researchers did not know, in turn, the number of persons from other ethnic groups deported to the camp they frequently refrained from attempting to establish the total number of victims, and limited themselves to Jewish losses.

Thus various figures for the number of Auschwitz victims appeared in the literature: at least 900,000 (Reitlinger), 1,000,000 Jews (Hilberg), 2,000,000 Jews (Gilbert), 2,500,000 Jews (Weiss) , 3,500,000 – 4,500,000 (Kogon).

In the early 1950s, Reitlinger, unlike other researchers, attempted to estimate the number of victims of Auschwitz on the basis of the incomplete information then available about the number of deportees to Auschwitz and other death camps from specific countries. None of the other researchers named above attempted a more detailed analysis or provided any justification for their estimates. It would seem that researchers generally repeated the numbers (from 1,000,000 to 3,000,000) to which Höss testified at various times in Germany and Poland in 1946 and 1947.

There are various opinions about the origins and purpose of the widely-circulated figure of 4,000,000 Auschwitz victims. Some regard this number as a product of wartime horror propaganda. They assume that the people who set and announced this figure were aware that it was inflated. The same would apply to those who later accepted and publicized it.

If we take into account the extent, or rather the lack, of original camp records on the number of both deportees and people who were murdered, along with the highly suggestive nature of eyewitness accounts speaking of “uncounted victims” or “millions of people who were murdered,” then we should accep. 4,000,000 as a figure that, according to the best knowledge of the members of both the Soviet and Polish commissions, and subsequently of the prosecution investigators and the authors of various publications, reflected the actual human losses in Auschwitz.

The Germans signed the capitulation on the day the Soviet commission issued its communiqué. There were therefore no reasons to treat the Nazi crimes as an instrument of wartime propaganda or an inducement to fight against the enemy. About one thing there can be no doubts: no one knew or could have known the true number of Auschwitz victims at the time, while the method that the Soviet commission used in arriving at its estimate still finds approval today, both among those who would maintain or even raise that estimate, and among those who would lower it.

Georges Wellers was the first researcher to make a detailed analysis of this issue. He compared findings on the human losses in specific countries whence people, mostly Jews, were deported to Auschwitz, with the findings in Danuta Czech’s Kalendarzu wydarzeń w obozie koncentracyjnym Oświęcim-Brzezinka (Auschwitz Kalendarz), based on the partially extant camp records, eyewitness accounts, and resistance movement material. As a result of his research, Wellers concluded that at least 1,600,000 people were deported to Auschwitz, of whom at least 1,500,000 died. Wellers published his findings in Le Monde Juif in late 1983.⁴

The Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Oświęcim investigated the issue in the 1970s as part of its established research schedule, without arriving at any results.

I reopened the research on this problem in the 1980s, as part of the work on the five-volume Auschwitz monograph. I knew full well that the findings of the prosecutors and judicial authorities on this question in the 1940s rested on inadequate documentation. Nor did they reflect the breakdown of the victims by ethnic origin. My findings turned out to be similar to those of Georges Wellers, as I announced in a paper read at a scholarly conference in Cracow-Mogilany on February 16-18, 1987. I then stated that “Wellers’s calculation methods and findings can generally be accepted without reservations, with the exception of the problematical assumptions in his estimates in regard to Polish Jews. The figure of 600,000 Polish Jews must be regarded as inflated.”⁵

After an overall analysis of the original sources and findings on deportation to Auschwitz, I concluded that a total of at least 1,300,000 people were deported there, and that 1,100,000 of them perished. Approximately 200,000 people were deported from Auschwitz to other camps as part of the redistribution of labor resources and the final liquidation of the camp.

One of the most distinguished Holocaust researchers, Raul Hilberg, published a separate work (Auschwitz and the Final Solution)⁶ on the number of Auschwitz victims. His findings reaffirmed both the figure of 1,000,000 Jewish Auschwitz victims that he had arrived at as long ago as 1961, as well as my own conclusions.

The sporadic efforts still undertaken to lower⁹ or raise¹⁰ the number of victims of Auschwitz on the basis of an analysis of the capacity of the apparatus of mass extermination, the time that it was in operation, or the degree to which it was utilized, must be regarded as erroneous in view of the lack of complete documentation. Similarly, attempts to minimize the number of victims by denying the existence of the gas chambers must also be rejected.

In technical terms, the gas chambers were utterly simple equipment: they functioned on the principle of a closed space into which poison gas could be introduced. Any sort of stationary or mobile structure could be used for this purpose. Showers or steam-baths were used in the euthanasia centers, specially constructed trucks in Chełmno (Kulmhof), barracks in Treblinka, and, for a time, two farmhouses in Brzezinka (Birkenau).

Minor modifications, consisting mostly of eliminating all openings, make it possible to turn any room into a gas chamber. Sophistic considerations presenting the process of killing people with poison gas, and more specifically Zyklon-B, as a complex technical undertaking requiring means beyond those at the disposal of the camp (as encountered mainly in the literature of the neo-Nazi deniers), are an attempt at manipulating simple facts, and basically amount to deliberate deception.

Another method for denying the mass murder committed in Auschwitz is employed by those who, while not denying the existence of the gas chambers, attempt to reduce the capacity for killing people in them to a minimum, as a result of various technical limitations (ventilation or security problems) or limiting their capacity (too little space). In their attempts to lower the capacity of the gas chambers, deniers gloss over the fact that each chamber could be used several times a day. Capacity was limited above all by the time required to lead people inside, poison them, and remove the corpses, rather than by the available space. Deniers introduce various analogies here with contemporary execution chambers, where completely different technical and security requirements, not to mention procedures, obtain.

The same applies to techniques for the cremation of the victims’ corpses. The known German records indicate that it would have been possible to cremate over 2,400,000 corpses¹¹ in the crematoria alone, without taking account of the pyres or the pits where corpses were burned, or, according to Sonderkommando members, over 4,000,000 corpses. The open-air pyres and pits where corpses were burned could be used whenever there were technical problems or excessive numbers of deportees arriving for extermination, and the capacity of the pyres and pits was practically unlimited.¹² It has even been observed more than once that these are the most effective and simplest methods. They were used successfully in the centers for the extermination of the Jews in Treblinka, Bełżec, Sobibór, and Chełmno, where the corpses of some 2,000,000 people were burned without the use of crematoria. The functioning of the open-air pyres and pits where corpses were burned in addition to the crematoria in Auschwitz Concentration Camp makes all discussion about the limited capacity for the cremation of corpses, and therefore any calculation of the number of victims on the basis of crematorium capacity, entirely irrelevant. What is more, as a result of the numbers of people deported for extermination, both the killing capacity of the Auschwitz Concentration Camp gas chambers and the cremation capacity in the camp were significantly greater than the need in this period. Only occasionally, during transport backlogs, was the apparatus of mass extermination incapable of consuming all victims on a running basis.

The underutilization of the Auschwitz extermination capacity resulted from Germany’s failure to meet its own expansionist goals, as a consequence of which it proved impossible to carry out the plans, as presented at the conference in Berlin-Wannsee, for the destruction of 11,000,000 European Jews in occupied, satellite, neutral, and dependent countries, as well as in those countries, such as England or the remaining European regions of the Soviet Union, that had not yet been conquered.

In his article “Die Zahl der Opfer von Auschwitz. Neue Erkentnisse durch neue Archivfunde” [The number of victims of Auschwitz Concentration Camp: New findings thanks to new archival discoveries], Fritjof Meyer attempts to prove that half a million people, as he writes in the introduction, or, as he writes in the concluding portion, probably 510,000 (probably including 365,000 in the gas chambers) perished in Auschwitz Concentration Camp.¹³ This is one more example of the use of these unreliable methods of arriving at estimates on the basis of the capacity of the crematoria and the length of time they were in operation.

Meyer writes at the beginning of his article that a “breakthrough in this area” has taken place thanks to Robert Jan van Pelt, a professor of architecture, who unearthed the most important sources on the number of victims of Auschwitz (an opinion van Pelt hardly shares). Meyer writes that "A crucial document, containing information on the subject of the capacity of the crematoria of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp, has been discovered. An account by camp commandant Höss on the length of time they were in operation has also come to light.”¹⁴

These documents, in combination with documents on deportations to the camp, have made it possible for him to establish beyond any doubt, as he puts it, the number of people killed in Auschwitz Concentration Camp, which could previously “only be estimated.” In the conclusion to his article, however, Meyer utterly contradicts this when he writes that the discussion of this issue has “not led to any results so far.”¹⁵ Meyer thus continues to regard the issue of the number of victims of Auschwitz as open.

Multiplying the daily capacities of the crematoria, as he defined them, by the number of days they were in operation, Meyer concluded that 313,866 corpses were cremated in the crematoria in Birkenau, 147,564 on the pyres (107,000 from September 1942 to March 1943 and 40,564 Hungarian Jews in October 1944), and 12,000 in the crematorium in the Main Camp, for a total of 473,000 corpses cremated in Auschwitz. According to Meyer, this figure, rounded up to half a million, is supposed to reflect the number of victims of the camp.

None of these statistics that Meyer uses for calculating the number of victims of Auschwitz, based on his own speculation, is justified by the source material.

All of Meyer’s figures on the time that the various crematoria were in operation and their capacity are based on Meyer’s speculation. He interprets his sources of information in such a way as to show the shortest possible operating time and the lowest possible capacity for the Auschwitz crematoria. At various points he asserts things completely different from what the sources say (as in the case of the Tauber testimony or Czech’s Kalendarz), he omits circumstances that are important to a given fact (as in Wetzler’s report), and he draws conclusions at variance with the logic of the facts (dressing up the reliability of Prüfer’s September 8, 1942 memo as based on practical experience in the use of the crematoria, which were not in existence at the time).

On more than one occasion, as shown above, Meyer refers in his notes to authors universally regarded as experts in Nazi genocide, such as Langbein or J. Van Pelt, who do not in fact advance any facts in support of Meyer’s theses, and whose views are utterly at odds with his.

Meyer’s second thesis is that not only is the number of people killed in Auschwitz half or less than the numbers found in the historical literature, but that the number of people deported to the camp is also lower.

According to Meyer, 915,000 people were deported to Auschwitz (Meyer does not mention this figure even once; it is the sum of the figure of 735,000 prisoners and POWs and 180,000 Hungarian Jews). This number is nearly 400,000 lower than the one set by F. Piper.

This difference results above all from Meyer’s lowering of the number of Hungarian Jews (by around 260,000) and Polish Jews (by around 125,000) deported to the camp.

According to Meyer, the number of Hungarian Jews “requires separate investigation” (“Das Schicksal der aus Ungarn Deportierten 1944 bedarf einer eigenen Untersuchungen ”). He therefore carries out such an investigation and concludes that not 438,000, but rather 180,000 Hungarian Jews were deported to Auschwitz Concentration Camp.

In making this claim, Meyer refers to Danuta Czech’s Kalendarz ! Among a great deal of information on various events in camp, the Kalendarz contains resistance movement records of the numbers of people registered in the camp under various camp numbers on a given day.

In those periods when individual transports were registered as they arrived in the camp, the entries are evidence of the arrival of a given transport on a given day. This procedure for registering transports made it possible for Czech to match the dates of the registration of given groups of people with the arrival of given transports.

During the time when the Jews of Hungary and Łódź were being exterminated, this practice changed completely because of the backup of transports⁴² and the arrival of several trains per day. Since it proved impossible to keep up with the registration of prisoners selected for labor, and since some of the prisoners were not registered at all, specific records of the registration of groups of prisoners cannot be matched either with the date of the arrival of the transport, nor with a specific transport. Similarly, the lack of annotations about the registration of some group of prisoners is not necessarily proof that no transports arrived in Auschwitz on a given day (for instance, May 16, 1944). Theoretically, a whole transport could be sent straight to the gas chambers, or persons could be selected and sent to the transit camp without being registered. Even women with children were sent to transit camp BIII (“Mexico”) without selection.

The fact of the registration of a certain number of people on a given day does not necessarily mean that those people arrived on that day. It could also have resulted from the fact that some of the people selected were located temporarily, without registration, in the so-called transit camps, whence they were either transferred to other camps, registered and held in Auschwitz or its sub-camps, or sent to the gas chambers. Sometimes, the registration of people held in the transit camps (BIIc, BIIe, BIII) was delayed by several days or even several weeks. On June 28, 1944, for instance, 1,000 Hungarian Jewish women were selected from the transit camp. Only then did they receive camp numbers. They could even have come from several or more than a dozen transports. Even a cursory reading of the entries in the Kalendarz makes it clear that the number of entries is not the same as the number of transports.

Under the date May 22, 1944, for instance, the Kalendarium contains the following entry: “2000 Jews selected from transports that arrived from Hungary were given numbers A-3103 to A-5102.”⁴³ Each of the entries referring to the Hungarian transports in the Kalendarz on a given day should be multiplied by four by anyone wishing to use these entries as a basis for calculating the number of incoming transports (a conference in Vienna decided that four transports per day should be dispatched), and not treated as evidence for the arrival of a single transport. Similarly, the entries in the Kalendarz that speak of the selection from a single transport (aus einem Transport) cannot be treated as evidence that only one transport arrived that day, and no more. This is plain to everyone who becomes familiar with the history of the camp at the period of the destruction of the Hungarian Jews, or who even takes the trouble to read the entries in the Kalendarz attentively. Yet Meyer, like Pressac, regards each of the 60 entries on the Hungarian Jews as referring to a single transport. After multiplying these entries by 3,000, he came up with a figure of 180,000 people. Arbitrarily and without any basis, Meyer rejects the figure of 141 transports, which is known to him from the literature, as based on “dubious documentation.”

Meyer completely ignores and remains silent on the existence of records from the German embassy in Budapest that submitted progress reports on the deportation of the Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz. The embassy sent these reports to the foreign ministry in Berlin on a regular basis, every few days. In one of the last telegrams on this subject, on July 11, 1944, ambassador Veesenmayer reported that 437,402 Jews had been deported from five concentration zones through July 9.⁴⁴ Without mentioning these documents by name, Meyer attempts to undercut their veracity by saying that they are based on “Hungarian police reports, surely exaggerated, that I do not wish to discuss further at this point.”⁴⁵ These and other documents and statistics are mentioned in Czech’s Kalendarz (the entry for July 11, 1944), as well as in my publication Die Zahl der Opfer von Auschwitz, which Meyer used, and which even contains a facsimile of that telegram.

In spite of what Meyer writes, the German and Hungarian documentation on the Hungarian Jews is among the most credible of sources. One of the newest works on this issue, by Szita Szabolcs (Utak a pokolbol. Magyar deportaltak az annektalt Ausztriaban 1944-1945), contains a list of 137 trains dispatched from Hungary via Kosice, and then through Slovakia to Auschwitz from May 14 to June 20, 1944. These trains carried 401,439 Jews to Auschwitz. The date, place of departure, and exact number of deportees are listed for every one of these transports.⁴⁶

One of the authors to whom Meyer refers frequently is J.C. Pressac, who was educated as a pharmacist and has written two books on the construction and functioning of the gas chambers and crematoria in Auschwitz Concentration Camp. Pressac’s accomplishment is to have proven beyond any doubt, through the analysis of German documentation, and especially blueprints, the existence of the gas chambers in Auschwitz Concentration Camp.

Unfortunately, a distrust of written documents, including many German ones, often lures Pressac into completely false surmises. Like Meyer, Pressac rejects the figure of 400,000 Hungarian Jews deported to Auschwitz on the basis of a conclusion that each of the 53 transports must have carried approximately 8,000 people. He correctly regards such a number as untenable. However, like Meyer, Pressac arrived at this figure by treating the number of entries in Czech’s Kalendarz about the registration of a group of prisoners who had arrived in the camp or been held in the transit camp as identical with the number of transports.

Pressac is convinced of the accuracy of the figure of 53 transports of Hungarian Jews (said to have been set by the Auschwitz Museum) by his own analysis of several aerial reconnaissance photographs taken over Birkenau by the Allies in 1944 (the observation of smoke from the crematoria and the pits where corpses were burned, and the number of trains and train cars). I shall pass over this without comment.

Among the 180,000 Hungarian Jews⁴⁷ transported to Auschwitz, according to Meyer,

Meyer claims to have calculated the figure of 40,564 Hungarian Jews on the basis of Czech’s Kalendarz. This is complete obfuscation and twisting of the facts. The fact that the Kalendarz contains no such information on Hungarian Jews under the month of October 1944 is easy to check. Meyer has invented this number in order to startle the reader; it coincides with information, said by Meyer to have originated with Colonel von Stauffenberg, about a supposed order by Kaltenbrunner for the extermination (Sonderbehandlung) of 40,000 to 42,000 Hungarian Jews. If Nazi dignitaries did indeed speak among themselves of this number, then they must have been lying about the true figure of 400,000.

Meyer alleges that his figure of 110,000 Hungarian Jews who were not registered but were transferred to other camps originates with Andrzej Strzelecki. This is another instance of manipulation. In the first place, Strzelecki’s figure of 110,000 people embraces all Jewish prisoners, and not only those from Hungary, as Meyer asserts. In the second place, Strzelecki’s phrase “passed through the camp” does not mean that they left the camp, but only that they were selected and thus found themselves in the camp, rather than being sent directly to the gas chambers. Some of them indeed left Auschwitz and were transferred to other camps, but the majority of them died or were murdered. The detailed findings, which Strzelecki presents in a table, leave no doubt as to this.

Meyer’s balance sheet indicates that, through September 1944, Hungarian Jews in general were not killed immediately upon arrival in the camp. In the light of the fact, this is patently absurd. Numerous entries in Czech’s Kalendarz (to which Meyer so willingly refers) refer to the registration of Hungarian Jews as prisoners in May, June, and July, and end with the statement that the remainder of the transport were killed in the gas chambers (for instance, under June 1, 1944: “Die übrigen Menschen werden in den Gaskammern getötet ”). Meyer passes this entry over in silence because it is not confirmed in the German camp records (which, in any case, are not extant). There are countless eyewitness accounts on this subject (thousands of prisoners in the Birkenau camp watched as thousands of people arrived, went through selection, and were led to the gas chambers). For Meyer, this has no significance. Yet it was precisely the destruction of the Hungarian Jews that, as shown by the records of the Auschwitz labor department, necessitated the expansion of the Sonderkommando from around 200 to almost 900 prisoners, who were assigned to burning corpses.

As to the Polish Jews, Meyer states that the figure of 300,000, as established by Piper, “is probably highly inflated.” Meyer cites Czech’s Kalendarz. He does not take into account the transports mentioned specifically by Martin Gilbert in his Atlas of the Holocaust. I take them into account, while Czech did not. It is worth adding, by the way, that the German historian Frank Golczewski arrived independently at the same figure for the number of Polish Jews deported to Auschwitz as I did.⁴⁸

Here is Meyer’s balance sheet: out of 915,000 prisoners and Soviet POWs in the Auschwitz camp. 401,500 survived. 335,000 deportees (225,000 registered prisoners and 110,000 unregistered Hungarian Jews) were transferred to other camps. 58,000 were evacuated, and 8,500 remained in the camp. The remainder, 513,500, perished.

This balance sheet is at odds with the facts, and not only because it lowers the overall number of deportees. The figure of 225,000 includes all of those who left Auschwitz between 1940 and 1945, either as a result of transfers of labor resources, as part of the final evacuation of prisoners (58,000), or as part of the transfer of unregistered Hungarian Jews (this is Meyer’s figure of 110,000, which is several times larger than it should be). By adding 58,000 and 110,000 to the figure of 225,000 transferees and evacuees, Meyer is simply counting the first two categories twice. For, in fact, some 220,000 to 230,000 persons survived Auschwitz, and not 401,500. It should be added that many of these people died later in other camps, especially during the period of the evacuation known as the Death March. They are, however, counted for statistical purposes among the victims of those other camps.

Meyer’s article contains numerous other data that require correction or comment:

Meyer defines Auschwitz Concentration Camp as a labor and death camp (Arbeits-und Vernichtungslager).

The official name was Konzentrationslager Auschwitz. It functioned as a place of extermination, mainly through indirect methods (starvation) in relation to non-Jews, and mainly through direct methods (gas chambers) in relation to Jews. As long as Auschwitz was in existence, labor played a secondary role. Auschwitz was never called a labor camp; nor was its nature ever that of a labor camp. Labor camps were in a completely different category. Referring to concentration camps as labor camps is a historical falsehood.

In no way does Van Pelt’s book, as Meyer claims, represent a breakthrough in reducing the number of victims of Auschwitz Concentration Camp to 500,000.

On the contrary, Van Pelt maintains (The Case, p. 350) that the new documents that he presents indicate that the burning capacity of the cremation apparatus can be put at 1,000,000 to 1,400,000 victims of the camp, thus falling within the limits of the estimated number of victims.

Meyer’s allegation that the morgues were adapted as gas chambers only in the spring of 1943 is unsupported by the source material.

The underground rooms in the crematoria were used as gas chambers from the moment the facilities went into operation. This function had been present in the earliest plans for these buildings, no later than January, 1942. Blueprints from that date for crematoria II and III feature not one, but two underground rooms, one of them twice the size of the other, with differing ventilation equipment. One room (the undressing room) had only exhaust ventilation. The other room had forced-air ventilation of double the power, even though this room (the gas chamber) was only half the size of the undressing room.

Meyer’s statement that the gas chambers in the crematorium buildings were not functioning in the second half of 1943, and that only two provisional chambers (bunkers) were then in use, is not supported by any primary sources. In fact, the sources say the opposite: that the provisional gas bunkers were taken out of operation, and the first of them demolished, after crematoria II-V went into service.

It must be pointed out that Meyer constantly confuses the concepts of the “white house” and the “red house,” and of “bunker no. 1” and “bunker no. 2.” As a reminder: bunker no. 1 was called the “red house” (since it was built of unplastered brick); bunker no. 2 was called the “white house” (since it was plastered in white). The foundations of bunker no. 2 (the white house) were identified in 1945. Bunker no. 1, the red house, was demolished in 1943, and no foundations remain. Reports in an Italian newspaper about the sensational discovery of the foundations of bunker no. 1 are completely erroneous.

Meyer writes that more than 400 people could be crowded into the first provisional gas chamber (bunker no. 1), and that the killing in the gas chamber was done predominantly in the evenings.

Meyer is repeating the figure of 300-400 given by Pressac, who does not back up this assertion with any sources. In his first book, Technique and the Operation of the Gas Chambers (New York 1989), Pressac said that the bunker had a capacity of 450 to 600 persons. He assumed eight to ten people per square meter and said that there were 50 sq. m. of floorspace. In fact, there were 90 sq. m.

One of the sources that Meyer cites is my third volume of Auschwitz 1940-1945: Central Issues in the History of the Camp. On the subject of the capacity of bunker no. 1, I write that “Bunker 1 held about 800 people and Bunker 2 about 1,200.” I also write that “In periods of less frequent transports, the bodies of people gassed at night or late in the evening remained in the bunkers under SS guards until morning” [emphasis added]. My mention of the number of people forced into the gas chamber is based on an eyewitness, the commandant of the camp, while Meyer gives no source. His assertion is an unrealistic supposition that diverges from the realities of the camp, the procedures used for killing people, and objective physical capacities.

As to physical capacities, it is worth remembering that the current construction regulations in the German Federal Republic for public transport (streetcars) envisions a density of eight adults, each weighing 65 kg., per one square meter.⁴⁹ If this density norm were applied to a 90 sq. m. gas chamber, it could hold 720 people. Bearing in mind that children were also involved, and that all were naked, Höss’s figure of 800 may be regarded as entirely realistic and in line with the facts.

Assuming the same proportion, we can calculate that the second provisional gas chamber, of 105 sq. m., could hold approximately 950. Höss mentions 1,200. In view of the fact that each group of victims included many children, this figure can be regarded as entirely realistic. Meyer speaks of “over 400” and “over 500” people, which is completely at odds with the figures given above. However, this is not Meyer’s most important error.

His fundamental error is that he treats the figure of 400 to 500, which refers to his estimate of the one-time capacity of the gas chambers, as reflecting their daily capacity. Each of these gas chambers could in fact be used many times in the course of the day, with its capacity limited only by the time required to force people inside, kill them, and remove their corpses. In this situation, divagations on the number of people who could in fact fit into the gas chamber at a time are irrelevant, and cannot have any significant impact on establishing the overall number of victims of Auschwitz.

The statement that Bunker no. 2 functioned from December 1942 to November 2, 1944 is untrue. This bunker functioned from mid-1942 until the spring of 1943 and between May, 1944, and the autumn of that same year.

Meyer cites testimony given in Norway on October 29, 1945 by former camp director Hans Aumeier, who states that the first gassing was carried out in the camp only in November, 1942, and that the RSHA (Reich Main Security Bureau) then ordered the killing of Jewish prisoners who were not fit for work in order to avoid the spread of an epidemic. Aumeier also maintains that experience in the use of the one provisional gas chamber showed that the gas chambers should be built as permanent parts of the new Birkenau crematoria.

Meyer presents this information without commentary even though it contradicts all the established facts, which are based not on a single deposition but on many sources.

The procedure of using gas to kill Auschwitz prisoners, and not only Jews, began on July 28, 1941, with the first transport of 575 prisoners, mostly Poles (Poles then made up the overwhelming majority of the prisoners) to the euthanasia center in Sonnenstein and its gas chambers.⁵⁰

The first experiments in the Auschwitz camp with killing by gas were carried out in August 1941, and mass killing by gas was applied beginning the following month, first against Soviet POWs and then in 1942 (no later than February) against whole transports of Jews.

The regular selection of sick prisoners in Birkenau was carried out, beginning in May 1942, on orders from the head physician in SS-WVHA Office DIII (Leitenderarzt), Dr. Lolling. The selected prisoners were taken to the gas chambers and killed. Similar selections had been carried out earlier in the Main Camp. On August 29, 1942, 746 sick and convalescing prisoners were selected there and killed in the Birkenau gas bunker. Meyer’s information about the gassing of sick prisoners for the first time in November 1942 is therefore inaccurate.

The November 1942 “experiments” could not, in any case, have had any influence on the decision that had been made much earlier to build fixed gas chambers in Birkenau.

Meyer states that no more than 350,000 people could have been killed in Bunker no. 2 over the course of two years. This figure represents a rounding-off of the figure of 365,000 that he obtains by multiplying 500 people gassed per day by 730 days.

This reasoning is utterly fallacious. In view of the fact that the gassing operation could be carried out at least several times per day, the potential capacity of the gas chambers was several times higher. After all, killing by gas (the scattering and evaporation of the Zyklon B) took only a few minutes. To make sure, this was extended to more than ten, or even to tens of minutes. A member of the Sonderkommando assigned to bunker no. 2 wrote that the prisoners assigned to dragging the corpses out of the chamber went to work as soon as the door was opened, which is why they were supplied with gas masks (F. Piper, Ilu ludzi zginęło w KL Auschwitz – deposition of Szlama Dragon, p. 198).

An April 27, 1943 decree by Glücks is known in the literature. It suspended the program for killing the sick, Action 14f13, in the concentration camps. It applied exclusively to concentration camp prisoners. Meyer states that the decree by Glücks resulted in the total suspension of the extermination of the Jews, and the closing of the extermination centers in Bełżec, Sobibór, and Treblinka.

This is untrue. It is expressly written in Glücks’s decree that it applies to concentration camp prisoners who were killed under Action 14f13. It did indeed lead to a fall in the death rate in Auschwitz, and initially applied even to registered Jewish prisoners. The decree originated with Himmler. It is hard to say whether it was Himmler’s intention to stop the selection and killing of registered Jewish prisoners, or whether this only resulted from a literal interpretation of the ruling. In any case, the selection and killing in the gas chambers of registered Jews resumed a short time later (the first extant document, dating from August 21, 1943, is a list of the names of 498 Jewish women selected and killed in the gas chamber, and was signed by female SS supervisor Maria Mandel).

The decree did not interrupt the deportation of Jewish transports to Auschwitz; nor did it stop the killing in the gas chambers of the majority of the people who arrived in those transports. Such transports were arriving at the time from Germany (Berlin), occupied Poland, and France.

Nor did Action 14f13 have anything to do with the functioning of the death camps in Treblinka, Sobibór, and Bełżec. These centers operated within the framework of Action Reinhard, the extermination of Jews in the General Government. This action basically ended in 1942, when its task, the murder of the majority of Jews in the area concerned, had been completed. Transports arrived at these death camps only occasionally in 1943: at Sobibór, one each in January, April, July, and September, and at Treblinka in January and August. The camp at Bełżec had already stopped operating in December 1942, and received no transports in 1943. The final liquidation of these camps, consisting mainly of burning the corpses that had been buried earlier and removing evidence of the crime, took place at Bełżec in July 1943 and at Treblinka and Sobibór in late November. Including these death camps under Action 14f13 must result from either total ignorance or the deliberate manipulation of the facts.

Meyer questions the contents of the document of June 28, 1943 on crematorium capacity. He cites Jean-Claude Pressac, who baselessly called the document “an internal SS propaganda lie.” Pressac’s work has great value because of the source material (blueprints, documents, and testimony) it presents. Yet his conclusions are often contradictory. Pressac generally attempts to minimize the number of victims, lower the capacity of the crematoria and gas chambers, and move back the time when certain decisions and actions were taken.⁵¹

For instance, Pressac states at one point that the June 28, 1943 document was “an internal SS propaganda lie.” Elsewhere, he holds that the data it contains are reliable, since the figures for the number of persons burned could reflect the fact that there were children as well as adults in the transports. Nevertheless, he turns around and denies the figure again by citing a different number of corpses that could be burned in the different crematoria. Pressac says that 250 corpses, not 340, could be burned per day in crematorium I; 1,000 rather than 1,440 in each of crematoria II and III; and 500 rather than 768 in crematoria IV and V.

While comparing crematorium capacities, he also writes that only crematoria II and III were in operation. He keeps contradicting himself. He writes on page 102 that only two crematoria, I (in the Main Camp) and V, were in use at the end of May, 1943 (he states earlier that crematorium V was never in operation - Krematorium V nicht benutzt). He goes on to state that “crematorium V was not used after September (1943), since crematorium II (repaired) and crematorium III sufficed for the ‘treatment’ of the daily Jewish transports” (Die Krematorien, pp. 102, 103). He also contradicts the claim that crematorium IV was inoperative the whole time when he writes that “Koch regularly repaired the crematorium IV furnaces and waited for the guarantee period to expire” (Koch reparierte regelmässig den Ofen des Krematoriums IV und wartete darauf, dass die Garantie abliefe, Die Krematorien, p. 100). Even Pressac’s findings indicate that crematorium IV was functional and in use at times, regardless of the fact that Auschwitz labor department records confirm the operation of all the crematoria.

Meyer holds that not more than 500,000 people died in Auschwitz Concentration Camp. 356,000 of them in the gas chambers, in part because “the anticipated mass of victims did not arrive in the next eleven months” (June 1943-April 1944) after the opening of the four crematoria and gas chambers in Birkenau.

The number of transports did indeed decrease in this period, for the majority of Jewish communities had already been liquidated, and those that still existed could not be brought under the mass extermination campaign for various reasons. There were political obstacles. Not all the countries originally slated for German occupation (such as England) had been conquered. Some countries (such as Italy) had slipped out of German control. Satellite regimes (as in Hungary) feared giving up their Jews in the face of the approaching, inevitable fascist defeat. Others (such as Bulgaria) opposed the extermination of their Jews. Aside from political considerations, the program for the mass extermination of the Jews, who made up the largest group of Auschwitz victim, were hindered by economic considerations, such as those that prevented the Nazis from liquidating the last large concentration of Polish Jews, in Łódź.

To back up his assertion about the slowing down of mass extermination, Meyer lists in a footnote the numbers of unregistered new arrivals killed in the gas chambers from June 1943 to April 1944, which he specifies as 80,924. He derives this information from Czech’s Kalendarz.

Meyer regards this as identical with the number of people killed and burned in the camp in this period. In fact, apart from Meyer’s 80,924 unregistered victims, 101,523 were registered in the camp (98,225 given numbers 123235-186590 in the men’s series and 57849-80567 in the women’s series, and 3,298 Gypsies given numbers 8229-9833 in the Gypsy men’ s series and 8890-10582 in the Gypsy women’s series). This means that the total number of people deported to the camp, exclusive of police and re-education prisoners, was approximately 182,500. Those who died included not only the people sent straight from the ramp to the gas chambers (Meyer’s 80,924), but also a significant fraction of those included in the numerical registration. These were prisoners who died of starvation or sickness, and also those selected for the gas chamber, given lethal phenol injections, or shot.

Meyer knows these figures from the Kalendarz, but chooses to ignore them. For instance, the Kalendarz states that 1,624 registered prisoners died in the women’s camp in June 1943 (Kalendarz, p. 535), 1,133 in July (Kalendarz, p. 560), 1,433 in August (Kalendarz, p. 592), 1,871 in September(Kalendarz, p. 617), 2,274 in October (Kalendarz, p. 642), 1,603 in November (Kalendarz, p. 666), and 8,931 in December (Kalendarz, p. 691); there is no corresponding data available for the men’s camp. The deaths of the registered prisoners, who were burned in the crematoria along with Meyer’s 80,924, are partially noted in the camp Death Books, where entries refer to the deaths of about 16,500 people in the second half of 1943, even though hardly any Jews are noted there (these entries correspond in part to Czech’s data).⁵²

Meyer ignores all these figures on prisoners who were killed or died, and then burned.

While the Kalendarz contains no such monthly figures for 1944, there are some figures, including people killed in the gas chambers in this period, which Meyer ignores. For instance, 2,661 registered women prisoners died in the camp from January 1-15, 1944; 3,791 Jews from camp BIIb (the family camp for Jews from Theresienstadt) were killed in the gas chambers on March 8, 1944.

Meyer states that, for unacceptable reasons, no research on Auschwitz was carried out until recently, thus allowing “unrestricted scope for propaganda.” Meyer makes it seem as if historical revisionists led the way, and even forced historians to undertake research on Auschwitz. The revisionists, whose “contribution” to stimulating research on Auschwitz is supposedly so great, confine themselves in fact to two issues: the number of victims, which they seek to reduce to the lowest possible minimum, and the gas chambers, the existence of which they attempt to call into question on the basis of the most “objective” sources, such as German blueprints, documents, and the laws of physics and chemistry. They have, in fact, succeeded in luring some researchers into this polemic that borders on absurdity. Seldom do the researchers’ arguments satisfy the revisionists. Meyer hardly regards the work of Zimmermann or Evans as refutations of the revisionist theses. Meyer does not even mention such earlier work as Wellers’s “The Existence of Gas Chambers” in The Holocaust and the Neo-Nazi Mythomania (New York, 1978, pp. 109-138) or Hitler’s Apologists: The Anti-Semitic Propaganda of the Holoaust “Revisionism” (New York, 1993). Nor does Meyer think—although he will not say why—that the issue of the number of Auschwitz victims should be regarded as closed.

Research on reconstructing the history of Auschwitz Concentration Camp, however, is more than the number of victims and the technical aspects of the way the gas chambers and crematoria functioned. It is a vast enterprise embracing hundreds of issues ranging from the fate of the victims, through legal, sociological, economic, political, and medical issues, to profiles of the criminal perpetrators. Seldom does any of this interest the revisionists. Incomplete though it may be, the reconstructed history of Auschwitz consists of hundreds of historical studies, source publications, memoirs by former prisoners, and other eyewitness accounts. The Auschwitz Museum did not need any inspiration from “revisionists” to embark upon multi-layered research into the history of the camp back in the mid-fifties. The first version of Czech’s Kalendarz, which Meyer frequently cites for the years 1940-1941, came out in 1958.

The first scholarly study of the number of Auschwitz victims, by Georges Wellers—whose work, and indeed whose name are totally absent from Meyer’s article —appeared in Paris in 1983. Nor was the figure of 4,000,000 Auschwitz victims, which arose in a specific situation and at a specific time, ever universally accepted as dogma “behind the Iron Curtain,” in Poland. As to the four million, it should suffice to mention that Czesław Madejczyk, one of the greatest authorities on recent history in Poland, wrote in his monumental 1970 Polityka III Rzeszy w okupowanej Polsce [The Policies of the Third Reich in Occupied Poland] that “many researchers question it as too high, both overall and in its component parts.”⁵³

As a member of the Auschwitz Museum research staff, I took up the issue of extermination, including the number of victims in Auschwitz Concentration Camp, in a paper I read at an international conference in Warsaw in 1983. In this paper, titled “Rola obozu koncentracyjnego w Oświęcimiu w realizacji hitlerowskiej polityki eksterminacji ludności żydowskiej” [The role of Auschwitz concentration camp in realizing the Nazi policy of exterminating the Jewish population], I surveyed the world literature on Auschwitz and the various estimates it contained of the number of victims, ranging from 1,000,000 to 4,000,000. I also announced, without any assumptions as to its outcome, an upcoming attempt to arrive at my own estimate. Although the Main Commission for the Investigation of Nazi Crimes in Poland then regarded the figure of 4,000,000 as inviolable; nevertheless, my article was published and thus made accessible to a wider circle of researchers.

Meyer goes on to write that the revisionists tracked down the details, and “their discoveries could prove upsetting to such significant philosophers as Ernst Nolte or David Irving.”

It is difficult to see how the revisionists could upset Irving, whose main theses on Auschwitz accord fully with those of the revisionists.

Meyer asserts that Ernst Stäglich, among others, has “raised justifiable doubts as to several passages in Höss’s accounts.”

No historian has ever held, “discoveries” by Ernst Stäglich and other revisionists notwithstanding, that Höss’s testimony and writings are error-free and authentic. Like all eyewitness accounts, Höss’s must be evaluated in terms of reliability and compared with other sources.

Meyer regards as propaganda, in the same category as the long-outdated figure of 4,000,000 victims, such facts as the deportation to Auschwitz of over 400,000 Hungarian Jews, or mass killing with gas in the “crematorium cellars.” This should be seen as propagating and reinforcing par excellence the views of the historical revisionists, who select details taken out of context, under the pretext of “factual corrections,” and then use them to paint a caricature of the Auschwitz camp as a place where nothing out of the ordinary occurred.

Reconstructing the true image of the camp and that extraordinary human tragedy is a matter of utter indifference to them. This is the major point of difference between these historical revisionists and historical researchers, including those who add to or correct previous findings on the basis of new sources.

Meyer questions Czech’s estimates of the transports—in most cases, carrying 2,000 persons each—of Polish Jews deported to Auschwitz as too high. Yet many facts speak in favor of her estimate. The figure of 2,000 per transport occurs, among other places, in the partially extant schedules for trains to Auschwitz from various places in Poland where the Jews were concentrated.⁵⁴ Former commandant Höss also gave this figure on March 11, 1947, during the proceedings of the Supreme National Tribunal in Warsaw: “The Reich Railroad demanded that a single one of these trains should not carry more than 2,000 persons. Trains arrived carrying 2,200 or 2,500 persons. On the average, they carried 2,000 persons.”⁵⁵

Meyer cites Pressac, who questions this average. Here is Pressac’s reasoning: Czech states that 23,714 people unfit for labor arrived in the camp over a period of six days in early August 1943. This represents a daily average of around 4,000. The crematoria could not burn them, since crematorium II was under repair, and crematorium IV was not operating—Pressac does not say why. All he has to say is that in mid-May 1943, the crematorium IV furnace was unusable, and crematorium finally remained unused until the end⁵⁶. Here, he cites Höss’s statements. Yet, as shown above, Höss repeatedly said something different on other occasions. As shown above, both the German records and accounts by former prisoners undercut the assertion. According to Pressac’s arbitrary estimate, the capacity of the two remaining crematoria, III and V, was 1,500 per day (in fact, according to Bischoff’s June 28, 1943 letter, it was 2,208 [1440 + 768]; according to Sonderkommando prisoners, it was 4,000 [2,500 + 1,500]). On this basis, he concludes that the average transport carried 1,500 persons, and that the eyewitness accounts are inflated by 100%. According to Pressac, further evidence for lowering the number of Polish Jews deported to Auschwitz is Höss’s estimate that 30-35% were left alive and 65-70% killed.

Pressac states in conclusion that the number of Polish Jews deported to Auschwitz was approximately 150,000 (100 transports of 1,500 persons each).

Obviously, this kind of reasoning and drawing conclusions on the basis of “accepted” data cannot stand up to criticism. Pressac assumes that 30,000 people, of whom some 24,000 were unfit for labor, could have arrived at the camp in the sourse of seven (not six) days, because he holds that the capacity of the crematoria in operation at the time was 1,500 per day. On the other hand, he has no answer for the question of what happened to the 30,000 people who, according to the German records, were in fact sent to Auschwitz in connection with the liquidation of the ghettos in Będzin, Sosnowiec, and Dąbrowa Górnicza.

Meyer is, to an extent, aware of this problem, which is why he develops his concept of a smaller number of transports, and therefore a smaller number of Polish Jews deported to Auschwitz, using as evidence the notes written by Sonderkommando members and found after the war. Meyer states that Lejb Langfus’s manuscript contains the information that there were 975 people in his transport, and 450 of them were categorized as fit for labor. This is merely a counterfactual interpretation by Meyer. In describing the selection, Lejb Langfus says that the new arrivals were divided into three groups: men fit for labor, men unfit for labor, and women and children. Without exception, the women and children were sent to the gas chambers. Then the group of 525 men unfit for labor were sent there. The third group, the 450 men fit for labor, were taken on foot to the Birkenau camp. Czech estimates that 1,500 to 2,000 people may have been sentenced to death, while the whole transport numbered from 2,000 to 2,500 people.⁵⁷ Another Sonderkommando prisoner, Załmen Lewental, writes in the same publication that “It was December 10, 1942. Immediately after arrival, after selection . . . when only 500 people were chosen out of a transport numbering 2,300, and the rest went to the gas.”⁵⁸

Załmen Gradowski of the Sonderkommando also states that, whatever Meyer may suggest, the transports of Polish Jews were very numerous: “Here comes a group made up of over 200 people chosen from that great human mass that has just arrived […] There were thousands of them, and now only a tiny band was left.”⁵⁹ Meyer neither cites nor comments upon these well known facts.

A closer analysis of Meyer’s article leads to the conclusion that his whole method of explication and proof is based on undocumented hypotheses. First choosing fragments from among the testimony, documents, and literature, he then uses incorrect interpretation and falsification in his attempt to demonstrate the veracity of his a priori thesis that all previous findings about the number of victims of Auschwitz Concentration Camp are erroneous.

Nor can there be any assent to Meyer’s opinion that, although “the discussion of the number of Auschwitz victims has spread far and wide, it has not so far led to any results.”⁶⁰ Meyer identifies the reason for this as a ban, until 1989, on questioning the 4,000,000 figure in Eastern Europe. He fails to mention the important fact that such research was nevertheless carried out, even if it was not published until the 1990s. Meyer barely mentions my own work Die Zahl der Opfer von Auschwitz, which appeared in 1989.

Meyer also hushes up the fact that such research was carried out in Western Europe and the USA. It hardly seems an accident that he not only shies away from any polemics with the standard works on this problem that appeared in the west, by Georges Wellers and Raul Hilberg, but even avoids mentioning them.

The starting point for Meyer’s article is his claim that the figure of 4,000,000, as established by the Soviet commission investigating the Auschwitz crimes in 1945, was “the product of wartime propaganda.” His whole article is a claim that, on the basis of nothing more than Höss’s testimony and the memo by Topf und Söhne employee Prüfer, it can not only be estimated, but also calculated that half a million people died in Auschwitz.

In his conclusion, however, Meyer completely undercuts the credibility of the Höss testimony by quoting obvious errors and mistakes in matters that are not even related to the issue of the number of Auschwitz victims. Meyer also mentions, and emphasizes, that the figures on the number of victims that Höss produced while under interrogation by the British were forced out of him by beating, vodka, and sleep deprivation. Meyer omits to inform his readers, however, that Höss had every opportunity to correct his testimony before both the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg and in Poland, but never did so.

No researcher taking up the issue of the number of Auschwitz victims today would ever base his findings as to the number of people deported to Auschwitz from specific countries, or as to the overall number of people deported and killed, on the numbers provided by Höss. If the latter figures are cited at all, it is for the sake of comparison or as additional information.

These numbers are therefore a red herring that Meyer introduces in order to create the impression, for the benefit of readers unfamiliar with the subject, that all the sources are unreliable and dubious as to the numbers of victims. Meyer crowns this line of reasoning with his concluding statement that his research yields a presumed figure of 510,000 people murdered, 356,000 of whom were probably exterminated in the gas chambers.⁶¹

Can the view expressed in the last sentence of Meyer’s article, that his findings reinforce the warnings against the new barbarism, be regarded, in this context, as a goal that he has accomplished?

Meyer’s article is an attempt at depreciating the role of Auschwitz in the process of Nazi genocide, and at reducing the problem of extermination to the level of technology. Revisionist historians of all stripes have repeatedly attempted the very same thing. This is hardly an accident.

Throughout the world, Auschwitz has become a symbol of genocide, and especially of the Holocaust. The crimes committed here are unprecedented in view of their scale and nature. The things that happened in Auschwitz are a source of moral anxiety and of misgivings about the spiritual condition of the human species. They call into question man’s aptitude for self-control and for avoiding moral relativism. The Nazi Germans found accomplices in crime among what would have seemed to be those social groups most remote from moral evil.

Auschwitz was an important element in the realization of gigantic plans for demographic changes in the European continent, involving the annihilation of some peoples and the subjugation of others. The Jews and the Gypsies were the first victims of these demographic purges; the persecution of them failed to arouse opposition in most segments of society, and even revealed numerous supporters.

Eleven million European Jews came under the Nazi extermination plans. The Nazis managed to murder between 5,000,000 and 6,000,000 of them by the end of the war. Some 20% of this toll died in Auschwitz. Five to six million were saved only because the Third Reich was defeated and liquidated.

From the beginning of the war, German leaders also discussed without shame or inhibition the murder, the extermination, of the Poles. They did more than discuss. Day by day throughout the war there were executions, expulsions, arrests, and deportation to the camps. As a result of the selective way that this extermination policy was carried out, deliberate actions by the Nazi terror and extermination apparatus led to the death of more than 1,500,000 of the approximately 2,000,000 who lost their lives during the Second World War.⁶²

Auschwitz must therefore be seen from the perspective of the long-range goals that it was intended to serve in the realization of carefully laid military, political, and demographic plans. Beginning in 1942, Auschwitz must be seen from the perspective of the decisions revealed at the Wannsee conference, on January 20, 1942—that is, the extermination of 11,000,000 European Jews (a number that includes the Jews of the United Kingdom, Spain, Sweden, and other countries that the Germans expected to occupy soon). It must, furthermore, be seen from the perspective of future plans for “cleansing” Europe’s Slavic East.

This is why the Nazis created the gigantic gas chambers and crematoria with an annual capacity that they forecast at 1,600,000 people, and why they built a barracks camp in Birkenau with a planned capacity of 200,000 people and a built-up area of 175 hectares. The fact that the power of this destructive apparatus and this barracks capacity were never utilized to the full is a result of the collapse of their war plans, and their inability to carry out their extermination operations on the scale they intended.

Annexes

Telegram of the German ambassador and plenipotentiary for Hungary E.Vessenmayer, dated 4 May 1944 regarding both the “Ghettoization” of Jews in Carpatho-Ruthenia and Transylvania and the schedule of deportations. Source: Randolf Braham, The Destruction of Hungarian Jewry, New York 1963, p. 153.

Railways timetable e.g. from Białystok to KL Auschwitz, in which was foreseen that in each train 2000 people would be transported. Source: Szita Szabolcs, Utak a pokolbol, Kecskemt 1991, p. 23.

Telegram of E.Veesenmayer from 11 July 1944, in which the Ministry of Foreign Affairs is being informed, that till 9 July 434 402 Jews from Hungary were deported. Source: Randolf Braham, The Destruction of Hungarian Jewry, New York 1963, p. 443.

List of Hungarian Jews transports, from 14 May till 20 July 1944, passing railway station in Košice on the way to Auschwitz. (First page) Source: Szita Szabolcs, Utak a pokolbol, Kecskemt 1991, p. 21.

List of Hungarian Jews transports, from 14 May till 20 July 1944, passing railway station in Košice on the way to Auschwitz. (Second page) Source: Szita Szabolcs, Utak a pokolbol, Kecskemt 1991, p. 22.

1. For details see Franciszek Piper, Ilu ludzi zginęło w KL Auschwitz. Liczba ofiar w świetle źródeł i badań 1945-1990 [How many people died in Auschwitz Concentration Camp? The number of victims in the light of sources and research, 1945-1990] (Oświęcim, 1992); German version: Die Zahl der Opfer von Auschwitz Aufgrund der Quellen und der Erträge der Forschung 1945-1990 (Oświęcim, 1993).

2. Wśród koszmarnej zbrodni. Notatki więźniów Sonderkommando (Amidst a Nightmare of Crime: Notes by Prisoners from the Sonderkommando), (Oświęcim, 1975); German version: Inmitten des grauenvollen Verbrechens. Handschriften von Mitgliedern des Sonderkommandos (Oświęcim, 1996).

3. For details on the estimates by the Soviet commission, see Piper, Ilu ludzi.

4. Georges Wellers, «Essai de détermination du nombre des morts au camp d’Auschwitz,» Le Monde Juif, 112 (1983), p. 153.

5. Franciszek Piper, «Stan badań nad historią KL Auschwitz. Archiwum Okręgowej Komisji Badania Zbrodni Hitlerowskich w Krakowie» [The state of research on the history of Auschwitz Concentration Camp: The Archive of the Regional Commission for the Investigation of Nazi Crimes in Cracow], conference materials, Cracow-Mogilany, February 16-18, 1987.

6. Raul Hilberg, «Auschwitz and the “Final Solution”», [in:] Y. Gutman and M. Berenbaum, eds., Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp (Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1994), pp. 81-92.

7. Igo Trochanowski, «Zadania Baubüro w KL Auschwitz» [The tasks of the Baubüro in Auschwitz Concentration Camp], Biuletyn Towarzystwa Opieki nad Oświęcimiem 18 (1993), pp. 61-73, presented at a research session at the Silesian University in Katowice.

8. Wellers, ibid.; Raul Hilberg, «Auschwitz and the “Final Solution”,» [in:] Gutman and Berenbaum, eds., Anatomy, pp. 81-92.; Piper, Ilu ludzi.

9. Jean C. Pressac, Die Krematorien von Auschwitz. Die Technik des Massenmordes (Munich and Zurich, 1995), p. 202 (631, 000 to 711,000 killed).

10. Trochanowski, a former Auschwitz prisoner, came up with a figure of 4,351,000 murdered in the camp by using this «intake» method, op. cit.; Jerzy Sawicki, Tomasz Szkul-Skjoedkrön and Władysław A. Terlecki, «Tam miała umrzeć Polska. Ilu ludzi zginęło w Konzentrationslager Auschwitz» [Poland was supposed to die there: How many people perished in Konzentrationslager Auschwitz?], Nasz Dziennik (Jan. 27, 2003).

11. 4,756 corpses x 547 days = 2,601,532.

12. Wspomnienia Rudolfa Hössa komendanta obozu oświęcimskiego [Memoirs of Rudolf Höss, commandant of Auschwitz] (Warszawa, 1965), p. 202.

13. F. Meyer, op. cit., p. 631- «Eine Halbe Milion fiel dem Genozid zum Opfer,», p. 641 - «…mutmasslich 510,000 Toten, davon wahrscheinlich 356,000 im Gas Ermordeten».

14. F. Meyer, op. cit., p. 631.

15. F. Meyer, op. cit., p. 639, «Die Diskussion um die Zahlen der Opfer von Auschwitz hat in den vergangenen Jahren weite Kreise gezogen und bislang zu keinem Resultat geführt».

16. Robert Jan Van Pelt does not say which authorities he is speaking of. The Case for Auschwitz (Bloomington and Indianapolis, 2002).

17. APMA-B (Archives of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum), microfilm 1034.

18. Van Pelt, op. cit., p. 350.

19. APMA-B Höss Trial, vol. 1. Testimony published in Zeszyty Oświęcimskie special issue (II) Rękopisy członków Sonderkommando, (1971), p. 48.

20. «On March 4, they assigned us to stoke the generators […] with the crematorium in continuous operation, two loads burned per hour […] Obercapo August … did not permit us to place more than three corpses in each retort […] in April 1943, that is, in the middle of the month, I was transferred to crematorium IV. then also in the first half of 1943, crematorium V went into operation and then at the end, crematorium III» Therefore, with two corpses burned at a time per retort, the daily capacity of the crematorium was 1,440 (15 retorts x 2 corpses x 48 burning cycles), and this figure rose to 2,160 if three corpses were burned at a time (15 retorts x 3 corpses x 48 cycles). APMA-B, Höss Trial, vol. 11.

21. Wspomnienia Hössa, s. 201.

22. Nor does Pressac undercut the credibility of this text, one copy of which is preserved in the Domburg [Dornburg] Archive, ND 4586. While acknowledging that these crematoria could not achieve this capacity for technical reasons, he states that this was SS boasting («an internal SS propaganda lie»). F. Meyer, op. cit., p. 634.

23. «…ein Brief des zum Bau in Auschwitz eingesetzten Oberingenieurs Kurt Prüfer aufgefunden, der mit dem 8. September 1942 datiert ist, also neun Wochen nach Bischoffs Schreiben und nach Fertigstellung der Krematorien, mithin aufgrund der ersten Betriebsergebnisse.» F. Meyer, op. cit., p. 634.

24. The testimony by Sonderkommando member Henryk Tauber contains an exact description of the course of these tests. The date for the beginning of the tests is confirmed by extant camp administration correspondence in connection with the transfer of capo August Bruck from the Buchenwald crematorium.

25. Summarizing the letter, Van Pelt speaks about «daily incineration capacity,» which Mayer interprets as meaning capacity per 24 hours of operation.

26. APMA-B. Aktenvermerk, 13.3.1943 (Schätzung des Koksverbrauches für Krematorium II KGL nach Angaben der Fa. Topf u. Söhne) Erbauer der öfen vom 11.3.1943.

27. APMA-B, Microfilm 425.

28. Biuletyn Głównej Komisji Badania Zbrodni Hitlerowskich w Polsce, XIII (1960), p.160.

29. Wspomnienia Rudolfa Hössa, p. 202.

30. F. Meyer, op. cit., p. 635.

31. Wspomnienia Rudolfa Hössa, p. 202.

32. F. Piper, Zatrudnienie, p. 393, facsimile of the document.

33. APMA-B, Microfilm 442.

34. J.C. Pressac, Techique and Operation…, p. 489: «According to the regulations, we were supposed to charge the muffles every half hour (…) In principle he did not let us put more than three corpses in one muffle.»

35. Franciszek Piper, Die Zahl der Opfer, p. 211. Testimony of Szlama Dragon.

36. Wspomnienia Rudolfa Hössa, p. 209 (essay on «the final solution of the Jewish question»).

37. Zeszyty Oświęcimskie, special issue IV (1992), p. 169.

38. David Olere, An artist in Auschwitz. Out of the Depths (Jerusalem, 1997), p. 63.

39. Czesław Ostańkowicz, «Isolierstation- Blok numer ostatni» [Isolierstation - The Final Block], Zeszyty Oświęcimskie, 8 (1964), pp. 113-114. Rudolf Höss, on the other hand, writes that all the prisoners who died in Birkenau were buried or burned on the spot; he says that those who were murdered or died there were buried in mass graves and, beginning in September 1942, burned in the open air.

40. Jean Claude Pressac, Auschwitz: Technique and operation of the gas chambers (New York, 1989), pp. 132, 133. Filip Müller, Eyewitness Auschwitz. Three Years in the Gas Chambers (New York, 1979), p. 39. On the role of crematorium I in the camp extermination apparatus, see also Georges Wellers, «The Existence of the Gas Chambers» in The Holocaust and The Neo-Nazi Mythomania (New York, 1978), p. 110.

41. Lists of arrivals, see Piper, Ilu ludzi.

42. The conference held in Vienna on May 4-6, 1944 decided that there would be four trains per day, each carrying 3,000 people. See Randolf Braham, The Destruction of Hungarian Jewry (New York, 1963), p. 373.

43. Czech, Kalendarium, p. 780. «Die Nummern A-3103 bis A-5102 erhalten 2000 Juden, die aus den Transporten des RSHA aus Ungarn selektiert worden sind.»

44. «In nur acht Wochen ab Mitte Mai 1944 wurden etwa 430 000 Juden nach Auschwitz-Birkenau deportiert, die Meisten von ihnen sofort im Gas ermordet». (Only from mid Mai 1944 about 430,000 Hungarian Jews were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau, and the most of them were killed immediately in Gas). Christian Gerlach, Götz Aly, Das letzte Kapitel. Der Mord an den ungarischen Juden. Stuttgart München 2002, s. 10. Braham, op. cit., p. 443. A facsimile of the document can be found in another book with which Meyer was familiar: Piper, Die Zahl der Opfer, p. 123.

45. F. Meyer, op. cit., note 35.

46. Szita Szabolcs, Utak a pokolbol. Magyar deportaltak az annektalt Ausztriaban 1944-1945 (Kecskemet, 1991), p. 21-22.

47. Pressac, whom Meyer accuses of arbitrarily inflating the number of Hungarian Jews deported to Auschwitz (240,000), commits a similar error. Pressac negates historical documents when calculating that between 160,000 and 240,000 Hungarian Jews were deported to Auschwitz. The figure of 160,000 comes from multiplying 53 (on the basis of Czech’s note on the registration of groups of Hungarian Jews, which Pressac mistakes for the number of transports) by 3,000 people per transport. The higher figure comes from the proportion of those selected for labor to those selected for extermination, 1:2, assumed by Pressac; Pressac sets the number selected at 80,000 on the basis of various hypothetical assumptions, which leaves him with a grand total of 240,000 arrivals. Pressac, Die Krematorien, p. 201.

48. Frank Golczewski, «Polen,» (in): Wolfgang Benz, ed., Dimension der Völkermords. Die Zahl der jüdischen Opfer des Nationalsozialismus (Munich, 1991).

49. Bundesgesetzblatt, Teil I, 16 October 1965, Verordnung über den Bau und Betrieb der Strassenbahnen (Strassenbahn-Bau-und Betriebsordnung - BOStrab) vom 31 August 1965, Sammlung des Bundesrechts, Bundesgesetzbl. 9234-2. («Als Steheplatzfläche sind 0,125 m2 /Person anzunehmen»).

50. Jochen August, «Das Konzentrationslager Auschwitz und die “Euthanasie-Anstalt Pirna-Sonnenstei”», [in] Sonnenstein: Beiträge zur Geschichte des Sonnensteins und der Sächsischen Schweitz, Heft 3/2001 p. 51-94.

51. Review by Franciszek Piper of: «Jean-Claude Pressac, Les crématoires d’Auschwitz. La maschinerie du meurtre de masse (Paris, 1993),» Zeszyty Oświęcimskie 21 (1995), p. 309-329.

52. Sterbebücher von Auschwitz. Fragmente / Death Books from Auschwitz. Remnants / Księgi Zgonów z Auschwitz. Fragmenty. Vol. 1-3. Munich/New Providence/London/Paris, 1995.

53. Czesław Madajczyk, Polityka III Rzeszy w okupowanej Polsce [The Policies of the Third Reich in Occupioed Poland] (Warsaw, 1970), vol. 2, p. 294.

54. Raul Hilberg, Sonderzüge nach Auschwitz (Frankfurt am Main, 1987).

55. Biuletyn Głównej Komisji Badania Zbrodni Hitlerowskich w Polsce, XIII (1960), pp. 159-160.

56. J.C. Pressac, Die Krematorien…, p. 98 «Mitte Mai war der Ofen außer Betrieb und das Krematorium IV wurde endgültig nicht mehr benutzt».

57. Zeszyty Oświęcimskie 14 (1972), p. 57; Czech, Kalendarz wydarzeń, s. 294.

58. Wśród koszmarnej zbrodni, p. 132.

59. Ibid., p. 92.

60. «Die Diskussion um die Zahlen der Opfer von Auschwitz hat in den vergangenen Jahren weite Kreise gezogen und bislang zu keinem Resultat geführt» F. Meyer, op. cit., p. 639.

61. «…das Resultat dieser Studie mit mutmaßlich 510 000 Toten, davon wahrscheinlich 356 000 im Gas Ermordeten», F. Meyer, op. cit., p. 641.

62. The two million Polish losses during the Second World War also include losses inflicted by official Soviet persecution from 1939-1941, and crimes by local nationalists including Lithuanians and Ukrainians, for which the co-responsibility often attaches to the German state that incited or accepted these crimes, or at least tolerated them. The figure also includes losses suffered in or as a result of combat. Czesław Łuczak, «Szanse i trudności bilansu demograficznego Polski w latach 1939-1945» [Chances for and difficulties in a demographical balance-sheet for Poland, 1939-1945], Najnowsze Dzieje Polski, 2 (1994), pp. 9-14.

[ Auschwitz | un dictionnaire du génocide | Génocide & 2ème GM | Toutes les rubriques ]

Annexes

How Many People Died in Auschwitz?

A review of Fritjof Meyer's “Die Zahl der Opfer von Auschwitz”

Franciszek Piper

© Państwowe Muzeum Auschwitz-Birkenau w Oświęcimiu 5/11/2003