Earlier I was reviewing the technical specifications of the Kula Columns in this article: https://phdn.org/archives/holocaust-his ... o-columns/
Something jumped out at me near the bottom of the article in a section labeled "A Similar Vent", appropriately above the section titled "Holocaust-Deniers." The article describes the image in this section as: "A rare photograph of a similar introduction vent from Majdanek, not Auschwitz" that has been preserved. The source for the photograph is cited as The Illustrated London News, October 14, 1944, p. 442.
Most notably, this image was published in a newspaper in October 1944, which was months before the liberation of Auschwitz on January 27, 1945. This made me wonder about the provenance of the entire "chimney used for the introduction of Zyklon B to gas inmates" claim, and whether Majdanek is the first case of this claim being officially made and published, again, even before the liberation of Auschwitz. Auschwitz is of course is today claimed to have had similar chimneys for the same purpose. This would be notable because, as I'm sure many here are aware, the claims that such chimneys were used for the introduction of Zyklon B to gas prisoners has recently been walked back, almost entirely, by the Majdanek museum.
Majdanek Gas Chamber Tour 2019
This video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0zV-2XNNhQ has been very helpful in understanding the contemporary, 2019 position of the Majdanek museum regarding which chambers were used for extermination and how. I'll also reference the map below, which I pulled from Mattogno's article on the Majdanek gas chambers:
http://vho.org/GB/Books/dth/fndMattogno.html
At 2:08 https://youtu.be/j0zV-2XNNhQ?t=128 we enter the room labelled IV in the map above. This room was, for decades, labeled by the Majdanek museum as an "experimental gas chamber" and was claimed to be the room most extensively used to gas inmates, by introducing Zyklon B through the chimneys in the ceiling. The chimneys in this room are real, and their existence is well documented. But due to the existence of the window in the wall, along with other problems with this room, the Majdanek museum now labels this room as a dressing room, and concedes that the chimneys were used to ventilate gas out of the room, not to introduce Zyklon pellets into the room as depicted in the 1944 image of the Soviet Army Man.
The revision of Chamber IV to "dressing room" means the entire claim that Zyklon B was dropped through ceilings at Majdanek at all is hanging by a thread, using only conclusions accepted by the Museum. You can see the room labelled in the map above as Chamber I in the tour video here at 3:19 https://youtu.be/j0zV-2XNNhQ?t=199. The text overlay demonstrates that the Majdanek museum still claims that Zyklon B was dropped into the hole in this ceiling, despite the doubt presented by Jean-Claude Pressac that this hole was ever used for that purpose, and despite Mattogno convincingly demonstrating they they were not.
The Zyklon Chimney dilemma
Therefore, if it's true that Majdanek is the first documented existence of official claims of chimneys on roofs used to dispense Zyklon B, claims which were again made even before the liberation of Auschwitz, and if chimneys were never used at Majdanek for the purpose that is depicted in the photograph of the Soviet Army Man, then only two possibilities remain:
1. The Soviet-Polish committee was wrong, or lied, about the use of such chimneys to introduce Zyklon B into gas chambers for the purpose of killing inmates, but, by sheer coincidence their false conclusions aligned with the true operation of the gas chambers in the yet-to-be-liberated Auschwitz.
OR
2. Majdanek was a prototype for the "homicidal gas chamber" claim that was then applied to Auschwitz after it had been invented and published at Majdanek in 1944.
There is much focus on the Zyklon chimneys in Auschwitz, but I believe more focus should be on Chamber I in Majdanek, which is the last vestige of the claim that Zyklon was used at all for mass murder at Majdanek. The idea that the Soviet man in this image is giving a false demonstration of the operation of a gas chamber at Majdanek in 1944, but accidentally demonstrating the exact true operation of the gas chambers in Auschwitz, which had not been liberated until 1945, is a conclusion that is hard to accept.
I could imagine a scenario where, say, Auschwitz was liberated first, the Soviets heard testimonies of the Zyklon chimneys, and had bias for what to look for and report on in investigating Majdanek of later. But the real sequence of events is that the investigation of Majdanek was completed months before the liberation of Auschwitz. It is harder to believe that the Soviets reached an incorrect conclusion about Zyklon chimneys in Majdanek but had accidentally predicted the way the gas chambers would be discovered to have actually worked in Auschwitz.
Lingering Questions
Does anybody know:
- Is the Soviet-Polish investigatory committee report the first documented accusations of chimneys being used to dispense Zyklon B for extermination? Where there any early documented accusations of this happening?
- Can anybody pinpoint where this photograph was taken in the camp? I am guessing it was taken near a chimney above Chamber IV but I can't be certain.
- Does anybody want to take a shot at arguing that the Soviet-Polish committee had mistakenly identified chimneys for the use of dispensing Zyklon B in Majdanek, but had coincidentally described the operation of the gas chambers in the yet-to-be-liberated Auschwitz?
- Is there another possibility I'm missing?
