six reasons why the gas chamber story is a lie

1. The physical evidence -- the rooms themselves.

This has to be the starting point. If you could go to Auschwitz and find a room that was obviously a gas chamber, then there would be no such thing as revisionism. That would settle the matter once and for all. The problem is, when you go to Auschwitz and look at the room that is supposed to have been a gas chamber, you find a room that is obviously not a gas chamber. That's why revisionism is possible. That's why revisionism is necessary.

Please click here to see pictures of the gas chamber at Auschwitz.

The basic fact in the whole subject is that the room that is supposed to have been a gas chamber isn't a gas chamber.

If I were teaching Psychology 101, I would use this as a paradigm case of beliefs governing perceptions. Some people look at those pictures and see a gas chamber. Others look at the same pictures and see a morgue. This is like that experiment where everybody in the room says the red pencil is longer, and the experimental subject, whose eyes tell him the green pencil is longer, is afraid to contradict the group.

My eyes tell me that the green pencil is longer, and I'm going to say so, even if it's illegal to say it (especially if it's illegal to say it): the very idea that people were gassed in that room or any such room is absurd on its face.

2. The gap in the documentary record.

If there were documents covering the whole sequence of events, then there would be no such thing as revisionism. The problem is, the documents one would expect to find do not exist. We have documents relating to every aspect of the war, including every aspect of the Holocaust, except for the gassing of the Jews. It is not possible to gas six million people, or to do anything else involving millions of people, without leaving a paper trail. If the gassing happened, there would be thousands of documents to verify it, starting with the planning stages and continuing throughout the course of events. But no such paper trail exists.

3. The gap in the photographic record.

If there were photographs of the whole sequence of events, including photographs of piles of corpses in gas chambers, then there would be no such thing as revisionism. That would settle the matter immediately. The problem is that no such pictures exist. We have photographs of every aspect of World War II, including every aspect of the Holocaust, except for the gassing of the Jews. There are photographs of Jews getting off the train at Auschwitz, photographs of Jews in the camp, and photographs of bodies in mass graves, but there are no photographs of anyone being gassed.

To summarize the first three reasons: if we had the same kind of evidence for the gassing of the Jews that we have for real historical events (i.e. for events that actually happened), then everyone would acknowledge that there were gas chambers, and there would be no such thing as revisionism.

4. The testimony of witnesses doesn't prove that there were gas chambers.

There are three points that need to be made about witnesses.

a. The witnesses are not unanimous. Some witnesses didn't say anything about gas chambers.

For example, Jan Karski wrote a report in the fall of 1942 in which he stated that he visited the camp at Belzec to investigate rumors of extermination. He said the Jews were being killed by electrical shocks in a room with a metallic floor. In 1944, he published a book in which he said that the Jews were being loaded into wagons filled with quicklime and left to die outside the camp. Neither the article nor the book says anything about gas chambers. Now, of course, the official history of Belzec says nothing about electrical shocks or wagons filled with quicklime. We are supposed to believe that the Jews at Belzec were killed in gas chambers. But Jan Karski, who was there at the time (so he says), said nothing about gas chambers.

b. Witness testimony about gas chambers doesn't stand up under examination.

One of the witnesses who is quoted as an authoritative source is Dr. Miklos Nyiszli, the supposed author of Auschwitz, a Doctor's Eyewitness Account. There really was a Dr. Nyiszli. He was a Hungarian doctor. He was sent to Birkenau (not Auschwitz), where he worked in the pathology lab under the infamous Dr. Mengele. After the war, he testified at the Nuremburg trials. He died in 1949. The book was published in 1951. Throughout the book, the author says he was in Auschwitz. He says there were four crematoria at Auschwitz. In fact, there was one crematorium at Auschwitz, and four at Birkenau. Obviously anyone who was there would know that. Anyone who was there would know which camp was which. At the end (page 206), when they are evacuating in January of 1945, the author says

We left, filled with the feverish sensation of liberation. Direction: the Birkenau KZ, two kilometers from the crematoriums.

Dr. Nyiszli didn't leave Auschwitz and go in the direction of Birkenau. He was already in Birkenau. This is just the most glaring impossibility in a book full of impossibilities. This book was not written by Dr. Nyiszli. It couldn't have been written by anyone who was there. And yet this book is cited as one of the most authoritative witness statements.

If you read only one book about the Holocaust, that book should be Auschwitz, a Doctor's Eyewitness Account. Let them give you their best shot. Use your own judgment. Is this book an eyewitness account, or not?

c. Witnesses by themselves don't prove anything.

Suppose a hundred thousand witnesses claim that something happened. Does that mean it happened? There are probably a hundred thousand people who have "seen a UFO" at one time or another in the last fifty years. Does that mean there are flying saucers in the sky? There are hundreds of people who say they have not only seen UFOs, they have been in them. They have been abducted. They will tell you in vivid detail about their experience, and they have no obvious motive for lying. Does that mean it happened?

Go back and look again at the "gas chamber" - if someone says he saw people being gassed in that room, does that mean it happened?

5. The fact that standard reference books can't be trusted.

In the summer of 1995, when I was a novice in this subject, I went to a debate between Michael Shermer, editor of Skeptic magazine, and Mark Weber, a revisionist. It was supposed to be a debate, but actually it was what Michael Shermer calls a "meta-debate." Dr. Shermer tried to pretend that there was nothing to argue about. However at one point he did condescend to say something about the evidence. He said that if anyone really wants to look at the evidence for the gas chambers, the place to look is Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp, by Gutman and Berenbaum, especially the article by Pressac.

It probably never occurred to Dr. Shermer that anyone would actually read the book, but I did. I searched all over Los Angeles for this book, and finally found it at the UCLA bookstore. I read Pressac's article, including the footnotes. Many of his assertions about gassing are not documented at all. When Pressac does give footnotes, they can't be checked out. Most of them are of the form "Oswiecim, BW 1/19" or "Moscow/October Revolution, 7021-108-32, 46."

However, there is one exception. Pressac says, on page 234,

The first gassing in crematorium IV did not go well. An SS man, wearing a face mask, had to climb a little ladder to get to a "window," then open it with one hand and pour in the Zyklon B with the other. This acrobatic routine had to be repeated six times. When the gas-tight doors were opened to evacuate the gas, it was noticed that the natural aeration was ineffective; a door had to be cut immediately into the north corridor to get an air current flowing. [143]

The footnote for this paragraph is:

143. Auschwitz Album (New York, 1980), photo 112.

This can be checked out. The Auschwitz Album is out of print and hard to find, but at least one doesn't have to go to Poland or Russia. Eventually I found a copy in a library, and eagerly looked up photo 112. This photo has nothing to do with the paragraph quoted above. In fact, none of the photographs in the Auschwitz Album has anything to do with that paragraph.

In other words, the only footnote I was able to check turned out to be bogus.

As far as I know, the Auschwitz Album is not available online. (Since writing this I have discovered that part of it is available here.) I'm not going to scan photo 112 and post it here. This is left as an exercise for the reader. Do you care if the gas chamber story is true? How much do you care? Enough to go to the library and check out footnotes? What Michael Shermer is counting on is that almost no one will do this.

What I'm counting on is that a few people will. It only takes a few, in the beginning. At every university, I hope at least one student or professor will care enough about academic honesty to look up photo 112, and then will have enough courage to speak up. Make no mistake, it does take courage. Consider what happened to David Cole and other revisionists.

More information about Pressac and his footnotes can be found on the Dead Footnote page. I have added some new and somewhat ironic comments to this page in October of 2004. It's not as simple as I thought.

6. The fact that Hitler declared his intentions openly, and the Nazis committed atrocities openly.

Conventional historians account for the lack of photographs and documents by claiming that the Holocaust was so secret that no photographs were ever taken, and no incriminating documents were allowed to exist. This is supposed to have been true even when the Final Solution was in the planning stages, as far back as 1941.

Hitler talked about exterminating or annihilating the Jews on many occasions. For example, here is a sentence from Mein Kampf. (This is from page 338 of the Houghton-Mifflin hardback edition. Other references to extermination may be found on pages 169 and 679.) Hitler wrote,

The nationalization of our masses will succeed only when, aside from all the positive struggle for the soul of our people, their international poisoners are exterminated.

We are supposed to believe that Hitler announced to the world that the Jews would be annihilated, and at the same time went to great lengths to maintain the pretense that they were not being annihilated. The intention was declared openly, but the act itself was so secret that the Nazis never even discussed it among themselves. This is nonsense.

On page 679 he said this:

If at the beginning of the War and during the War twelve or fifteen thousand of these Hebrew corrupters of the people had been held under poison gas, as happened to hundreds of thousands of our very best German workers in the field, the sacrifice of millions at the front would not have been in vain. On the contrary: twelve thousand scoundrels eliminated in time might have saved the lives of millions of Germans, valuable for the future.

At that point the "secret" was already out. Having broached the idea of gassing the Jews in Mein Kampf, it would make no sense for Hitler to pretend it wasn't happening, if he actually did it. But there is no other reference to gassing in anything else he ever said or wrote. We have voluminous records of everything Hitler, Himmler, and the other Nazis said in public, and much of what they said in private, and there is no mention of gassing anywhere, even on occasions when they were talking about getting rid of the Jews.

We have a transcript of a speech (the Poznan speech) in which Himmler addressed a private meeting of the senior officers of the SS. Even if he didn't want to mention gassing publicly, he would feel free to speak plainly at a private meeting of the SS. (He would have to speak plainly at some point. They would have to discuss it among themselves. You can't do anything without saying what you are doing.) But he said nothing about gassing, even though he was talking about sending the Jews to concentration camps. He did not say "I am now referring to the gassing of the Jews, to the Ausrottung of the Jewish people." On the contrary. What Himmler said was,

I am now referring to the evacuation of the Jews, to the Ausrottung of the Jewish people.

In another private meeting (in 1941), Hans Frank mentioned the idea of killing the Jews with poison gas, only to dismiss it:

We cannot shoot these 3.5 million Jews, nor can we poison them, yet we will have to take measures which will somehow lead to the goal of annihilation...

Even at the Wannsee conference, nothing was said about gassing.

In 1941, the Nazis were winning the war. War crimes trials were the last thing on anybody's mind. (In fact there was no such concept until 1945. War crimes trials had not been a standard part of wars in the past.) The Nazis had no reason to create an illusion for posterity. They thought they were going to be posterity. They thought they would never answer to anybody for what they did. And yet we are supposed to believe that even in 1941 they were looking ahead to a postwar era in which it would be necessary to cover up their actions.

The Nazis were not shy about killing people. They committed atrocities openly. They flaunted it. We have pictures of Nazi soldiers shooting Jews in cold blood and laughing about it. These pictures were not taken surreptitiously by someone else, they were taken by the Nazis themselves. But we are supposed to believe that the gas chambers were so secret that no photographs were ever taken.

We are also supposed to believe that it would be possible to cover up an action involving six million people.

The gassing scenario is supposed to have gone like this: a trainload of Jews arrives at Auschwitz. They are separated into two groups, those who are fit for labor and those who are not. The latter group is taken to the crematorium right then. First they go to the undressing room, where they take off their clothes. Then they are led into another room, which is supposed be a shower room, or a delousing room. When they are in that room, they are locked in and gassed. A few minutes later the guards go in and drag the bodies out and take them to the ovens to be cremated.

If six million Jews were gassed, this scenario must have been repeated thousands of times. Do the math. This must have happened at least twelve thousand times, at several different camps, over a period of several years. This macabre scene is something a photographer would give his right arm for, especially since naked women were involved. But supposedly it was forbidden to take photos, so no photos were ever taken. This is nonsense. Prison guards are a law unto themselves. You can't stop them from taking pictures. Ask Lynndie England - and her many fans and imitators who think it's all a big joke. Gallows humor existed in 1943 just as much as it does in 2004.

If the gassing scenario happened at all, let alone thousands of times, there would be photographs. But there are none.

There are no photographs of anyone being gassed because nobody was gassed.

Summing up

Arthur Butz is one of the great pioneers in this subject. He made the essential point that this has to be a simple thing.

If you are considering the question whether there is an elephant in your basement, you don't have to go down there and look around with a magnifying glass. You don't have to construct a long, involved argument to settle the question. If the elephant is there, he is obviously there, and if he is not there, he is obviously not there.

Likewise, the question of whether six million Jews were gassed cannot be an obscure question. It has to be obvious, one way or the other. That's why I began my argument with the physical evidence, the rooms themselves. Once you see that the room isn't a gas chamber, everything else falls into place. Of course there is no documentation of gas chambers. How could there be? Of course there are no photographs of anyone being gassed. How could there be? It's not a gas chamber!

-- Joseph Conrad

http://www.geniebusters.org/915/04g_gas.html