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Source:Fritjof Meyer and the number of Auschwitz victims: a critical analysis
Journal of Genocide Research
Publisher: Carfax Publishing Company, part of the Taylor & Francis Group
Issue: Volume 6, Number 2 / June 2004
Pages: 249 - 266
URL: Linking Options
DOI: 10.1080/1462352042000225976
The International Auschwitz Controversy
By Germar Rudolf
It was not before 1989, 44 years after the liberation of the POW and concentration camp complex known as Auschwitz, that an international dispute started about the actual number of victims who had died in this camp complex. For 44 years, the Polish authorities and with them most of the world’s mass media had been claiming that some four million inmates had perished there, but in 1989 they suddenly changed their minds and reduced this figure drastically. As a consequence, the memorial plates on display in the camp Auschwitz-Birkenau were removed in 1990, which had propagated the four million figure in many languages. Following this dispute, an investigative commission was formed to come up with a more acceptable number of victims.[666] When this commission published its results in summer of 1990, they were widely distributed by the international media.[667] The most astounding admission came perhaps from a prominent Polish journalist, who stated that the old, exaggerated figure was an “anti-fascist lie.”[668] New memorial plates were installed in Auschwitz in 1995, claiming an alleged “final” victim count of 1.5 millions.
However, this “final” verdict did not end the controversy about the actual death toll of Auschwitz. In 1993 and 1994, the French pharmacist Jean-Claude Pressac, then promoted by the international media as the expert on technical questions surrounding Auschwitz, reduced this figure twice, first down to 800,000,[669] then down to 700,000.[670] The next reduction down to some 550,000 followed in May 2002 by Fritjof Meyer, a leading journalist of Germany’s biggest news magazine, the left-wing Der Spiegel. Meyer’s article appeared in the German geopolitical magazine Osteuropa, which is published by the German Society for Eastern Europe under the directorship of Prof. Rita Süssmuth, who was once the president of the German parliament. Meyer came to his conclusions by de-commissioning the Auschwitz crematoria as locations of mass murder, that is to say, by claiming that the alleged homicidal gas chambers in those crematoria buildings were never really used as such.
Since this periodical has a very small circulation, the article went largely unnoticed by the public at large. Only a few German mainstream media took notice of it, so for example Sven Felix Kellerhoff in the German daily newspaper Die Welt of August 28, 2002. Other than that, Meyer’s article had an echo only in small German right-wing publications.
The Polish Auschwitz Museum, however, reacted promptly to Meyer’s new and radical reduction of the Auschwitz death toll and de-commissioning of the crematoria. Dr. Franciszek Piper, chief historian of the museum, wrote a rebuttal to Meyer’s paper,[671] to which Meyer responded in turn.[672] A major German anti-fascist website posted links to these and related contributions by other authors on one of its web pages.[673]
Revisionists responded numerous times to Meyer’s article,[674] Piper’s rebuttal,[675] and Meyer’s response in self-defense,[676] demonstrating that both the semi-revisionist Meyer and the dogmatist Piper ignore documentary and physical evidence contradicting their thesis. In a perfect example of pseudo-scholarship, the entire discussion ensuing between established Holocaust scholars was subsequently conducted without a single reference to these revisionist responses, not to mention addressing the points of critique made.
This controversy about the number of Auschwitz victims finally reached international pseudo-academic dimensions, when Meyer’s paper was subjected to a detailed scrutiny by John C. Zimmerman – again under careful avoidance of mentioning revisionist contributions to the issue – in the prestigious English language magazine Journal of Genocide Research.[677] I will discuss this paper hereafter.
John C. Zimmerman is an assistant professor for accounting at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas. Defending the Holocaust Dogma is one of his spare time hobbies. In 2000, he published a “refutation” of Holocaust revisionism.[678] Many of Zimmerman’s essays have been posted on the Internet mainly by the so-called Holocaust History Project (holocaust-history.org). With the paper discussed here, Zimmerman has been accepted as a kind of official Auschwitz expert. This raises the question why the uncounted numbers of full-time Holocaust experts all over the world do not address the theses published by Fritjof Meyer. This even more so, as Carlo Mattogno has thoroughly documented the utter incompetence of Zimmerman in his contribution on this imposter in the present book.[679]
Right at the beginning of the paper at issue, Zimmerman states that he only bothers discussing Meyer’s hypothesis because Meyer’s victim number has the potential to get into the mainstream, where it could be quoted as an acceptable number by authors and historians not familiar with the demographics of Auschwitz (p. 249). And that has to be prevented, Zimmerman claims.
On pp. 250-255, Zimmerman tackles the following questions: How many prisoners were deported altogether toward Auschwitz railway station? How many of them were registered in the camp? And how many of those not registered were either transferred elsewhere or killed by gas? Revisionists and exterminationists argue only about the last question, about what happened to those inmates on whose fate we have no other evidence than general witness statements.
This lack of evidence is acknowledged by Zimmerman, who admits that in the years 1942-1944 numerous transports arrived in Auschwitz, bringing inmates that were never registered in the camp and for which there is “no information” about their fate. But in spite of this total lack of any information, Zimmerman claims that those prisoners were gassed. (p. 251)
“No information” means in plain English: no information also about their alleged fate of having been gassed.
That there are indeed cases where it can be shown that deportees sent to Auschwitz, but not registered there, were not killed by means of poisonous gas, is even admitted by Zimmerman. As an alternative to the claim of immediate extermination on arrival, he mentions that during 1944 thousands of Jews deported from Hungary and Poland were temporarily quartered in the transit section of the camp (Durchgangslager) before they were transferred to other camps. These inmates never received any registration numbers (p. 252). Of course, Zimmerman cannot come up with a single document indicating the mass murder of unregistered deportees, but he quotes a document which deals with the mass transfer of unregistered Jews to other camps. This is a memo written on May 29, 1944, by First Lieutenant Ferency, delegate of the Hungarian Ministry for the Interior for the deportation of Jews.[680] In it Ferency explains that 184,000 Jews had been deported the previous day and that the Security Police requested that the Jews get food for five days, because they were to be transferred by train to various labor camps after their selection at Auschwitz (p. 253).
Zimmerman argues that all those Jews not registered in Auschwitz and about whose fate we have no other evidence were gassed in Auschwitz.
It is necessary here to highlight Zimmerman’s perverted way of arguing:
Only a few decades ago, it was considered a “certainty” that every transport arriving at Auschwitz was subjected to a selection process, during which those unfit for labor were separated and killed “by gas.” That was especially true for the Jews deported from Hungary. During the past decades, however, it turned out that many assumed to have been exterminated had not been gassed after all, but were merely transferred to other camps. Zimmerman mentions a few cases himself. In their study about the Stutthof camp, Jürgen Graf and Carlo Mattogno have pointed out more such cases.[681]
In other words: inmates, about whose fate there was no information for many years, suddenly turned out to have been very much alive.
How is it then possible to claim, as Zimmerman does, that all those inmates died “in the gas,” about whose fate we still have no information today?
Zimmerman is correct when claiming that many German authorities were instructed toward the end of the war to destroy their archives (p. 256). But that is a measure taken by all countries who are threatened to be occupied by enemy forces. If each and every such destruction of secret archival material would prove a Holocaust, then we would have one Holocaust after the other everywhere in the world.
Fact is, however, that the Auschwitz authorities did nothing to hide or destroy any of the tens of thousands of documents of the Central Construction Office of Auschwitz, which would have, after all, contained the evidence of the mass murder claimed by Zimmerman. And the fact is that these documents not only contain no evidence for mass murder at all, but to the contrary: they refute such claims.
It remains a fact that the absence of evidence cannot serve as proof for a claim. But that is exactly what Zimmerman is doing. That flies in the face of scientific methods.
An analysis of Zimmerman’s chapter about the capacity of the crematoria in Auschwitz, starting at p. 255, quickly reveals how weak the basis is on which Zimmerman tries to erect his thesis. Comparable to the earlier works by Pressac, Zimmerman as well considers it unnecessary to consult technical expert literature or to perform his own technical calculations when trying to solve a technical problem. He relies completely upon witness testimonies and documents, which he picks selectively without any critical analysis. It is also indicative that Zimmerman does not mention the works of his arch enemy Carlo Mattogno with a single word in this paper. Until recently, attempts to refute Mattogno’s works was one of Zimmerman’s main objectives.[682] But when publishing in an allegedly scientific journal, he suddenly forgets the most important scientific principle: to mention and discuss contrary evidence and opinions. So much for Zimmerman’s scholarly standards.
In order to justify his artificially increased capacity of the crematoria in Auschwitz-Birkenau, Zimmerman applies five sleights of hand:
1. He declares that the furnaces at Birkenau had a performance as similar furnaces in other camps (Gusen camp, pp. 257f.). He ignores that the furnaces in Birkenau were inferior to those other furnaces, because they did not have forced draft blowers and had different muffle grills.[683]
2. He claims that the emaciated corpses of Auschwitz could be cremated faster (p. 258), ignoring that, first of all, the claimed gassing victims would not have been emaciated – that would have been true only for inmates incarcerated for an extended period of time and suffering and/or dying from either serious diseases (diarrhea, typhus) or malnutrition. Additionally, emaciated corpses with a low body fat content do not burn faster than corpses with an average content of body fat.
3. He misinterprets a memo by Kurt Prüfer, the engineer responsible for constructing the Birkenau crematorium furnaces, stating that the Birkenau three-muffle furnaces had a performance 1/3 higher than those of double-muffle furnaces, as a reduction of cremation time by 1/3 (p. 258). Performance, however, is a physical term meaning energy per time and corpse. The time required for a cremation was not affected, but the energy, because the three-muffle furnaces had only two fire places heating three muffles, so that almost the same energy was required to heat three muffles with three corpses as was required to heat two muffles with two corpses.
4. He repeats the legend that usually three, if not up to eight corpses were cremated at once in a single muffle in Birkenau, relying in this regard on the lying witness[684] Henryk Tauber (pp. 258f.) As proof that such an overloading of the muffles was possible in Auschwitz, Zimmerman quotes newspaper articles of the 1980s and 1990s reporting about cases where civil crematories had illegally cremated many corpses at once in order to gain an advantage in time and thus in efficiency over competitors. Zimmerman should have investigated the features of these modern crematoria and should have compared those to the furnaces in Birkenau, which would probably have prevented his error. In comparison to the coke-fired furnaces of Birkenau, modern crematoria have almost gigantic muffles, because:
a) they have to accommodate quite large coffins at times – in Auschwitz corpses were cremated without coffins – and
b) almost all modern crematoria operate with gas burners embedded in the muffle walls, which work efficiently only when they have a minimum distance from the coffin.
Ill. 1: Oven doors of the type used in the Auschwitz crematoria. Rollers to guide stretcher marked with white ellipses.[685]
But even in such cases, the cremation of multiple corpses at once can succeed only if the fuel consumption is increased accordingly, which, as Zimmerman himself writes, led to a fire in one of the cases he quotes, because the overcrowded muffle led to an overheating of furnace and flues.
Documents as well as pictures of the furnaces in Auschwitz prove that they had been designed for single corpse cremations only. For example, the furnace doors were only 600 mm × 600 mm small (23.5 inches), the upper half of which was a rounded arch. The height of the furnace door was further restricted by rollers at the bottom, on which the stretcher was pushed into the muffle (see illustrations 1-3). Hence, the doors alone are clear proof for the fact that these muffles were built for single corpse cremation. But there are also thermotechnical reasons why multiple corpse cremations cannot work: Several corpses in one muffle would have blocked the gas conduits in the muffle walls, through which the combustion gases flowed. Furthermore, the gas generator could not produce the heat required for the initial phase of dehydration, so the furnaces would cool down drastically at the beginning. During the following phase of incineration, the burning corpses would produce too much heat, overheating the muffle.[686] As chief engineer Kurt Prüfer put it when two corpses were once inserted simultaneously:[687]
“The furnaces could not keep up with this load”
Ill. 2: Oven doors of Crematorium II in Birkenau.[688]
Ill. 3: Same doors – with humans around to compare sizes – at the crematorium in Buchenwald.[689]
5. Zimmerman doubts the times given by Meyer – who in turn relies on Mattogno’s statements – during which the crematoria were inoperable. He conjectures that repair orders for furnace doors do not necessarily mean that the affected furnaces had been shut down. This may or may not be the case.[690] Due to lack of more detailed information, we can currently only speculate about that. But the fact is that Mattogno has documented many cases where the crematoria were indeed inoperable – Zimmerman ignores them all – and in some cases, where Mattogno had only insufficient data, he has estimated cautiously. For long periods of time during the existence of the crematoria, we do not have any documents about their activities. But instead of following Zimmerman’s method: “the lack of evidence proves that the crematoria did not operate,” Mattogno assumed the worst case: Where there is no evidence, he assumes full operation of the furnaces.
In various occasions, Zimmerman proves that he does not know the documents. For instance, he calls the operators of the furnaces “Sonderkommando” (p. 254), even though they were never called that way.[691] He thinks that the construction of additional morgues through various camps proves that the morgues of the crematoria could no longer be used as morgues, hence, that they served as gas chambers (p. 255). The fact is that these additional morgues served only to temporarily store corpses – mainly overnight and in order to keep rats out – before they were transported to the morgues of the crematoria.[692] Finally, Zimmerman repeats Meyer’s mistake by misquoting a statement by former camp commander Rudolf Höss. In his statement, Höss did not claim that the crematoria could operate only eight to ten hours a day, as Meyer and Zimmerman claim (p. 260), but eight to ten weeks.[663]
Ill. 4: Delivery notice (cropped) from April 16, 1942, by the Topf firm for parts of the Auschwitz three-muffle cremation furnaces: “10 introduction doors 600/600 mm”
Zimmerman’s statements about the alleged open air incinerations in deep pits contain nothing new, perhaps apart from a reference to a more recently released British air photo of the Birkenau camp, where a small plume of smoke can be spotted rising from the back yard of Crematorium V. Zimmerman claims that this smoke rises from a mass grave (p. 261).
It is true that smoke rises from a tiny area behind the Crematorium V, but it is of course impossible to recognize what kind of a fire caused the smoke. And apart from this, the photo mentioned by Zimmerman is lacking all the evidence that should be there, should the theory of mass extermination in huge pits be true, as Zimmerman and his friends claim: gigantic pits to the west and north of the camp; gigantic stacks of fuel; fires with smoke plumes covering huge areas; considering the high water table in this swampy area, large areas around those fires would have turned into a huge morass. Nothing remotely similar to this can be seen on this or comparable photos.[693]
At the end, Zimmerman tries to salvage the credibility of the statement extracted from Rudolf Höss by the British by means of torture. He does that by claiming that he made similar statements while in Polish custody. Zimmerman claims that Höss was treated nicely while awaiting his lynching party in a Polish prison, but he missed the following lines in Höss’ statement about his Polish captors:[694]“During the first weeks the incarceration was quite tolerable, but all at once they [the wardens] were exchanged. From their conduct and their talks, which I could not understand but interpret, I could gather that they wanted to finish me off. I always got the smallest piece of bread and only a small ladle of thin soup. […]
If the prosecutor had not intervened, they would have finished me off – not just physically, but first of all psychologically.”
Although he could cope with quite a lot, so he continued, the psychological torture he was exposed to by his wardens was too much for him.
Here we see the typical tactics “with a carrot and a stick,” which was mastered in particular by the Stalinist henchmen who held Höss captive: First an inmate is mistreated by the “evil” guys, and after that the “good” guys tell him that this will not happen again and that he will be just fine, if only he cooperates with their demands. As is known, Höss was treated so well by the Poles that shortly thereafter he was dangling from the gallows.
The exactitude and reliability of Höss’ statements and memoirs, as claimed by Zimmerman, can be deduced, i.a., from the following quotations:[682]“Maintaining the fire at the pits, pouring the collected fat [over the burning bodies …]. They ate and smoked while dragging corpses […]” (p. 126)
“The bodies were doused first with oil residues, and later with methanol. […] He also attempted to destroy the bodies with explosives, […]” (pp. 157ff.)
“Half an hour after the introduction of the gas, the door was opened and the ventilation installation was turned on. Removal of the bodies began immediately […]” (S. 166.)
I do not have to make any further comment about such nonsense.[695] So much about Zimmerman’s exactitude and reliability.
[...]
[666] Cf. for this “Commission try to defuse Auschwitz controversy,” The Canadian Jewish News, Oct. 3, 1990, p. 5.
[667] Daily press of July 18, 1990, e.g.: Krzysztof Leski, Ohad Gozani, “Poland reduces Auschwitz death toll estimate to 1 million,” London Daily Telegraph, July 18, 1990; UPI, “Poland lowers Auschwitz toll,” Toronto Sun, July 18, 1990. In Germany, it was the left-wing radical daily newspaper die tageszeitung which published the lowest new victim figure on July 18, 1990: 960.000.
[668] “‘Ich empfinde Verlegenheit.’ Der polnische Publizist Ernest Skalski über die neue Auschwitz-Diskussion in Warschau” (“I feel embarrassed.” the Polish author Ernest Skalski about the new Auschwitz discussion in Warsaw), Der Spiegel no. 30 (1990), p. 111.
[669] “Total of the deaths: 775,000 (but this figure can be attended with gaps. This is why the global figure of 800,000 victims should be retained currently,” Jean-Claude Pressac, Les Crématoires d’Auschwitz. La Machinerie du meurtre de masse, éditions du CNRS, 1993, p. 148.
[670] “Total of the deaths: 631,000-711,000; [...] the number of the victims is evaluated at 630,000 to 710,000”; German translation of the work referred to in the previous note: Die Krematorien von Auschwitz. Die Technik des Massenmordes, Munich, Piper, 1994, p. 202.
[671] Once at http://www.auschwitz.org.pl/html/eng/ak ... php?id=564 ; this and the following two online papers have been removed but are archived here: http://web.archive.org/web/201509050548 ... jof-meyer/
[672] http://web.archive.org/web/201509050548 ... iper.shtml.
[673] It used to be posted at http://www.idgr.de, but that site has been deleted; most papers were mirrored by another exterminationists website that also got wiped off the net, but it has been archived: http://web.archive.org/web/201509050548 ... jof-meyer/
[674] Germar Rudolf, “Cautious Mainstream revisionism,” The Revisionist 1(1) (2003), pp. 23-30; Carlo Mattogno, “Auschwitz. Fritjof Meyer’s New Revisions,” ibid., pp. 30-37.
[675] C. Mattogno, “On the Piper-Meyer-Controversy: Soviet Propaganda vs. Pseudo-revisionism,” The Revisionist 2(2) (2004), pp. 131-139.
[676] Jürgen Graf, “‘Just Call Me Meyer’ – A Farewell to ‘Obviousness’,” The Revisionist 2(2) (2004), pp. 127-130.
[677] John C. Zimmerman, “Fritjof Meyer and the number of Auschwitz victims: a critical analysis,” Journal of Genocide Research, 6(2) (2004), pp. 249-266. This paper was positively mentioned by Sven Felix Kellerhoff, “Interpretationen und Ideologie,” in the German daily Die Welt, Sept. 21, 2004 (http://web.archive.org/web/201509050548 ... ff-3.shtml).
[678] Holocaust Denial. Demographics, Testimonies, and Ideologies, University Press of America, Lanham, MD, 2000.
[679] “An Accountant Poses as Cremation Expert,” starting on p. 89.
[680] Lieutenant Colonel Ferency, Representative of the Hungarian Secretary of State for the deportation of Jews, IMT, Blue Series, Vol. 4, p. 367.
[681] Concentration Camp Stutthof and its Function in National Sozialistischen Jewish Politics, 3rd ed., Castle Hill Publishers, Uckfield 2016, pp. 97-111; see also Mattogno, Carlo, “Die Deportation ungarischer Juden von Mai bis Juli 1944. Eine provisorische Bilanz,” in: Vierteljahreshefte für freie Geschichtsforschung, vol. 5, no. 4, Dec. 2001, pp. 381-395.
[682] See Mattogno’s replies to this in this volume, “An Accountant Poses as Cremation Expert,” starting at p. 89. The original Internet papers are posted at http://www.vho.org/GB/c/CM/jcz.html ; http://www.vho.org/GB/c/CM/Risposta-new-eng.html.
[683] The gaps of the grills of the Birkenau furnaces were only 50 mm wide, so that corpses had to almost completely incinerate before their remainders fell through the grill into the post-combustion chamber, making room for the next load of corpses.
[684] See my analysis in Lectures on the Holocaust, 2nd ed., The Barnes Review, Washington, DC, , pp. 383-388; see also my contribution about J.-C. Pressac in this book, pp. 27f.; cf. C. Mattogno, The Real Case for Auschwitz, Castle Hill Publishers, Uckfield 2015, pp. 367-416.
[685] Taken from J.-C. Pressac, Auschwitz: Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers, Beate Klarsfeld Foundation, New York 1989, p. 259, section enlargement.
[686] For a more complete discussion see the works quoted in footnote 19.
[687] See C. Mattogno’s explanations in this book in his chapter “9. Multiple Cremations,” on p. 150 of the present book.
[688] APMO, Neg. Nr. 291, section.
[689] US Army Audio-Visual Agency, SC 263997, section.
[690] The lack of any smoke from the crematory chimneys in Allied and German air photos during spring and summer 1944 indicates indeed that those crematories were inoperable for extended periods during this time, which Zimmerman doubts; see C. Mattogno’s elaborations on this in Auschwitz: Open Air Incinerations, Theses & Dissertations Press, Chicago 2005.
[691] They are called “Heizer” (stoker); C. Mattogno, Special Treatment in Auschwitz, Theses & Dissertations Press, Chicago 2004, pp. 101ff.
[692] Cf. C. Mattogno, “The Morgues of the Crematoria at Birkenau in the Light of Documents,” TR 2(3) (2004), pp. 271-294.
[693] G. Rudolf, “England’s Keele University Spreads Holocaust Propaganda,” The Revisionist, 2(4) (2004), pp. 444f.
[694] R. Höss, in: M. Broszat (ed.), Kommandant in Auschwitz, Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Stuttgart 1958, p. 151.
[695] More about that in my expert report, The Rudolf Report, 2nd ed., The Barnes Review, Washington, DC, 2011, pp. 185-187.
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