• An inventory of equipment installed in Crematorium III called for the installation of one gas door and fourteen showers. These two items were absolutely incompatible one with the other. A gas-tight door could only be used for a gas chamber. Why would a room that functioned as a shower room need a gas-tight door?{9}
• Pressac, not content with this simple proof that this was not a shower room, calculated the area covered by a single shower head. He used the genuine shower installations in the reception building as a guideline. On the basis of this calculation, Crematorium III, which had a floor space of 210 square meters, should have had at least 115 shower heads, not fourteen.{10}
• On the inventory drawings, the water pipes are not connected to the showers themselves. Were these genuine showers the water pipes would have been connected.
• In certain gas chambers the wooden bases to which the shower heads were attached are still visible in the ruins of the building.{11} A functioning shower head would not have been connected to a wooden base.
• In a letter of January 29, 1943, SS Captain Bischoff, head of the Auschwitz Waffen-SS and Police Central Construction Management, wrote to an SS major general in Berlin regarding the progress of work on Crematorium II. In his letter he referred to Vergasungskeller (gassing cellar).{12} Butz and Faurisson tried to reinterpret the term Vergasung.{13} Butz’s explanation was that it meant gas generation. Faurisson argued that it meant carburetion and that Vergasungskeller designated the room in the basement “where the ‘gaseous’ mixture to fuel the crematorium furnace was prepared.”{14} There are fundamental problems with this explanation. Not only is there a significant amount of documentation which refers to gassing but, more importantly, the gas chambers were coke fired and did not use gas generation.{15}
• Pressac found a time sheet in which a civilian worker had written that a room in the western part of Crematorium IV was a “Gasskammer” (gas chamber). Faurisson, in need of proof that this was something other than what it said, suggested that these were “disinfection gas chambers.” How he reached this conclusion, especially when he had determined that Vergasungskeller meant “gas generation,” was left unexplained.{16}
• On February 13, 1943, an order was placed by the Waffen-SS and Police Central Construction Management for twelve gasdichten Türen (gas-tight doors) for Crematoria IV and V.{17}, [1] According to the files in the Auschwitz Museum the work on this order was completed on the 25th of February. On February 28, according to the daily time sheets submitted by the civilian contractors, the gastight shutters were fitted (Gasdichtefenster versetzten) and installed.{18} A time sheet of March 2, 1943, submitted by the same firm for work conducted on Crematorium IV, contained the following entry: “concrete floor in gas chamber.” The information on this work order and these two time sheets, when analyzed as a whole, indicate that on March 2, 1943, civilian employees of a German firm officially designated a room in Crematorium IV as a “gas chamber.”{19} It made absolute sense for them to do so because two days earlier they had installed “gastight shutters” in the same room.{20}
• A telegram of February 26, 1943, sent by an SS second lieutenant to one of the firms involved in the construction of the gas chambers, requested the immediate dispatch of “ten gas detectors.” The detectors were to be used to check the efficiency of the ventilation system in the gas chamber.{21}
• In a book containing the record of work carried out by the metal workshops for the construction and the maintenance of Birkenau Crematorium II, there is an order dated March 5, 1943, requesting the making of “one handle for a gas [tight] door.”{22}
• In a letter of March 6, 1943, a civilian employee working on the construction of Crematorium II referred to modifying the air extraction system of “Auskleidekeller [undressing cellar] II”. A normal morgue would have no use for such a facility.{23} During March 1943 there were at least four additional references to “Auskleidekeller.” It is telling that civilians who, according to the deniers, had been brought to Birkenau in January 1943 to work on “underground morgues” repeatedly referred not to morgues but to the ventilation of the “undressing cellars.”{24}
• In the same letter the employee asked about the possibility of preheating the areas that would be used as the gas chamber. But a morgue should not be preheated. It should be kept cool. However, if the room were to function as a gas chamber, then the warmer the temperature the faster the Zyklon-B pellets would vaporize.{25}
• A letter dated March 31, 1943, signed by SS Major Bischoff, contained a reference to an order of March 6, 1943, for a “gas [tight] door” for Crematorium II. It was to be fitted with a rubberized sealing strip and a peephole for inspection. Why would a morgue or a disinfection chamber need a peephole? It certainly was not necessary in order to watch cadavers or lice. There were also references in the Crematorium III work orders for gastight doors and for iron bars and fittings for gastight doors. The deniers, still clinging to their “morgue” theory, claimed that morgues needed gastight doors to prevent odors and infectious germs from spreading. They also claimed the doors were necessary because the morgues were disinfected with Zyklon-B. This is a charge that, as indicated above, contradicts basic science, since Zyklon-B is an insecticide and not a disinfectant. This argument still leaves them scrambling for an explanation of why fourteen shower heads, none of which were connected to a plumbing system, were necessary for a morgue.{26}
• The inventory of Crematorium II, prepared when the civil firm had completed the conversions on it, contained references to it being fitted with a Gastür and a Gasdichtetür (gastight door).
• A letter of March 31, 1943, regarding Crematorium III spoke of it having a Gastür, a gas door. Deniers are quick to argue that this could mean many things. But the inventory attached to the handover documents for the crematorium makes short shrift of this argument. The list states that it had a Gasdichtetür, a “gastight door.” One could possibly argue about the meaning of Gastür, but it is hard to squabble over a gastight door.{27}
The deniers also contended that Birkenau was designed to serve as a quarantine and hospital camp, not a death camp. They based their argument on architectural drawings of April 1943, which contained plans for a barracks for sick prisoners, a prisoners’ hospital, and a quarantine section. Why, they ask, would the Nazis build a health camp but a few hundred yards from gas chambers where people were being annihilated on a massive scale? All this, they assert, indicates that Birkenau was not built as a place of homicide and annihilation.{28}, [2] But there exists another official drawing of an overall plan of Birkenau, completed approximately a year later. It reveals that Birkenau was anything but a benign hosiptal unit. The first set of plans, completed in April 1943, described a camp that would house 16,600 prisoners. The drawings a year later show a camp that housed 60,000 prisoners and contained less than half of the planned barracks from the preceding year’s plans. The existing barracks housed four times as many people as indicated by the original drawings. Any suggestion of this being a place of healing is contradicted by these conditions.{29}
1
Because the dimensions of the “doors” were thirty by forty centimeters, Pressac hypothesizes that they were probably shutters rather than doors.
2
The traditional notation of who had actually done the drawing and who had signed off on it is chilling in both its ordinariness and extraordinariness. The drawing was completed by prisoner 63003 (whose name remains unknown) on March 23, 1944. We know that it was reviewed by a civilian worker named Techmann and approved the next day by SS Lieutenant Werner Jothan.