APPENDIX
Twisting the Truth
Zyklon-B, the Gas Chambers, and the Diary of Anne Frank
Some may find that I have already accorded antisemitic slander parading as a scientific theory far too much space—that I have taken people like Butz, Faurisson, Leuchter, and their associates too seriously. Nonetheless, after a number of years of working in this field, I am aware of how these pseudoscientific attacks on history obfuscate and obscure the truth. Most people do not believe the deniers’ claims but are at a loss as to how to address their charges. Some, fearful that the deniers’ findings have a measure of legitimacy, respond by seeking alternative explanations.
Consequently I devote this section to three of the charges most frequently made by Holocaust deniers, citing a variety of documentary and technical proofs that demolish any semblance of credibility they might be accorded. I do so with some reluctance, lest it appear that I believe that serious consideration must be given these people’s claims. I do, however, believe that even a cursory perusal of the relevant sections of these documents will demonstrate the deceitful quality of the deniers’ claims. I hope it will also demonstrate, as much of this book is intended to do, that it is Goebbels’s theory of the “big lie” that the deniers are emulating.
Deniers, led by Faruisson, argue that Zyklon-B (prussic acid) was totally inappropriate for use as a homicidal agent. As proof they cite a document prepared for the war crimes trials summarizing the manufacturer’s instructions for the safe use of Zyklon-B as a fumigant.{1} The guidelines stipulated that a room in which prussic acid had been used to destroy vermin had to be ventilated for twenty hours before reentry. Deniers argue that this demolishes all the “testimonies” on the use of Zyklon-B to kill human beings, asking how bodies could have been removed from the gas chambers shortly after execution if the room could not be safely entered for twenty hours? Not surprisingly the deniers ignored significant and well-known facts that demonstrate the fallacy of their claims.
The instructions cited were for use in a room or a private home—not gas-tight areas such as those in the death camps—full of furniture, household goods, bedding, carpeting, and the like. They stipulated how windows were to be sealed, keyholes taped, and chimneys covered. After fumigation, gas would be trapped in all sorts of nooks and crannies. Consequently mattresses, pillows, upholstered furniture, and similar items had to be shaken or beaten for at least an hour in the open air. The homicidal gas chambers were of an entirely different nature. They were empty of any items except a small number of phony shower heads and dead bodies. The floors and ceilings were made of bare concrete. A powerful ventilation system especially designed for the gas chambers had been installed. In this open and unencumbered setting it served as an extremely efficient means of extracting the gas. Each of the crematoria was equipped with such a system, something the normal home or business area would never have.{2} Moreover, according to both former prisoners and SS personnel, the Sonderkommandos, the inmates who carried out the bodies, wore gas masks.{3}
This argument about the extreme toxicity of Zyklon-B is designed to foster the conclusion that the gas posed too great a danger to SS personnel to be safely used. However, Faurisson and Leuchter also assert that it was used in the delousing chambers on clothes. (It is unclear how they could have concluded that it could be safely used in the delousing chambers but was too toxic to be used in homicidal gas chambers.)
Leuchter found traces of cyanide in rooms that Auschwitz officials described as killing chambers but that deniers claim were morgues. In an attempt to explain why residues of the gas would have been found in a room that supposedly served as a morgue, Faurisson and Leuchter explained that the morgues were disinfected with Zyklon-B, hence the residue.{4} This thesis is illogicaclass="underline" Disinfection is carried out with a bactericide, not an insecticide, particularly one so powerful as Zyklon-B.
Moreover, there is an internal contradiction in the deniers’ own argument. They have asserted that Zyklon-B could be safely used under only the strictest of conditions and that twenty hours had to elapse before a facility in which it had been used could be entered. Yet they would have us believe that in order to clean a morgue, something that needed to be done on a regular basis, the SS would, instead of employing something as common and effective as bleach, choose this highly toxic substance that needed, according to the deniers’ own calculations, stringent arrangements for safe use.{5}
Pressac observed that Faurisson presented prussic acid as “dragon breathing fire, scarcely to be approached and with clawed feet clinging strongly to the ground even when dead.” The apocalyptic picture bore little relationship to actual practice. If hydrogen cyanide were as Faurisson would have us believe it was, the staff of Degesch, the German company that produced it, “would long have been unemployed.”{6}
Deniers, led by Faurisson, repeatedly call for “one proof… one single proof” of the existence of homicidal gas chambers.{7} They dismiss the reliability of all human testimony, whether it came from the SS, surviving inmates, or Sonderkommando members. They do so despite the fact that regarding the general details of gassings, the testimony of all the parties tends to corroborate each other.{8} Pressac’s monumental study of the gas chambers is, in essence, a response to this demand for documentary proof. Pressac’s sensitivity to Faurisson’s demand for documents may be rooted in the fact that he almost was lured into denial and it was his own archival investigation which proved to him that Faurisson was consciously ignoring unequivocal evidence of homicidal gas chambers. On a trip to Auschwitz shortly after he met Faurisson, he was shown a series of documents that constituted far more than “the one single proof” upon which deniers insisted. On subsequent visits he discovered additional documents, some of which were previously unpublished. Since the publication of his book in 1989, he has spent time in former Soviet archives and has uncovered additional documents that demonstrate the absolute falsehood of the deniers’ claims that there is no material or documentary proof of gas chambers.
The next few pages contain a brief summary of Pressac’s extensive findings. Those who have found the deniers’ claims about gas chambers the least bit troubling should have their doubts set aside. Those who have never been persuaded in the least by this assault on the truth will find the documents overwhelming proof of the degree to which the deniers distort history and lie about the evidence. These documents include work orders, supply requisitions, time sheets, engineering instructions, invoices, and completion reports. All clearly indicate that the gas chambers were to be used for nothing but homicidal gassings. The company contracted to design and install the execution chambers was Topf and Sons. Much of the documentation comes from reports they, their subcontractors, and civilian employees submitted to the SS. They generally made it appear as if they were building morgues. But they slipped up often enough to provide us with detailed documentation of the construction and installation of homicidal killing units.