Viewer's Guide to "Auschwitz - The Surprising Hidden Truth" (Minutes 10 - 16)

Viewer's Guide to "Auschwitz - The Surprising Hidden Truth" 

Minutes 0 - 10

Minutes 10 - 16
Minutes 16 - 22

Minutes 22 - 38
Minutes 38 - end

 

Arrangement of the Undressing Room and the Gas Chamber

[10 min] Elongated rooms perpendicular is pretty stupid design. Any thinking person would have elongated rooms side by side...

Let's suppose for the moment that the elongated rooms perpendicular to each other is suboptimal design, and think about the consequences if this assumption holds.

As pointed out in the section "The Underground Gas Chamber" in the first part of this series, crematorium 2 was not planned as mass gassing site from the scratch. It was meant as an “ordinary” concentration camp crematorium (possibly with small scale killings to be carried out) and was only adapted later on at the end of the planning phase or already during its construction for mass gassings of people. The time window when the functional change or addition was decided is considered to be summer - winter 1942. The facility was mainly finished by February 1943. The late implementation of the gassing function would entirely explain if some design were not optimal for mass murder.

Furthermore, it is evident from numerous sources that the elongated, perpendicular underground chambers did not pose a problem for the gassing procedure. There was no difficulty in filling the homicidal gas chamber, there was a low risk of an uprising and it did not substantially slow down the extermination process. In other words, the design of the basement - even if we assume it was not optimal - was already sufficient. Enhancing the supposed suboptimal design would not have resulted in a much higher "throughput". The rate-determining step was the body disposal, which took way more time then the killing.

To be specific, improving the loading time of the gas chamber from say 2 hours to 1 hour did not translate into doubling the extermination rate since the incineration of the corpses lasted the entire day anyway. And since the start of the next extermination batch was usually determined by the arrival time of the following transport and not by the time the previous batch was finished, even this 1 hour gain would have been often irrelevant.

The premise is therefore a toothless tiger not providing any evidence against the reality of homicidal mass gassings in Auschwitz, but it is also not without its problems itself. First, it is important to recognize that the SS was focusing on two decisive points to control the situation: the entrance to the undressing room and the entrance to the gas chamber.

In this supposed enhanced design with the undressing room and gas chamber next to each other with multiple connections between them, also the number of required guards had to be multiplied or conversely with a fixed amount of guards, the actual design of elongated perpendicular rooms with only one entrance allowed to concentrate the guards on fewer decisive locations.

Risk of Revolt + Denierbuds's Own Concept

[10 min] ...this improved design has just 100 Jews going in an undressing room, since 2000 people is too ??? and hard to control, in particularly if there is a revolt.The undressed go into a shower room which in contrast to this is actually a convincing shower room where steel guillotine doors shut, in other words, doors that open towards the sky and shut towards the ground.

[11 min] The gas chamber fills with gas and afterwards steal guillotine doors open at a conveyor belt to a continuously operating oven. The bodies are all ready at short distance to the conveyor belt. The floor's ??? is slightly ??? conceptually a little bit like this. A gassing could happen every hour and a half and the strong point of this design is bodies are put into the oven steadily throughout the day and night. Because cremating the bodies is the hardest part of the process. It could do 13 gassings a day killing 13 hundred people. It is also small and easy duplicable.

The probability of a revolt among the victims with the actual designs of the extermination sites can be estimated from the available data. As a rough estimation derived from the Auschwitz death toll and an assumed average gas chamber loading of 1000 people, we may say that about 800 mass gassings of Jewish people were carried out in Auschwitz. Two serious cases of what one may classify as revolt by victims in the undressing room and gas chamber complex are known:

• On 23 October 1943, the SS man Schillinger was fatally wounded and as a consequence the victims were gunned down in the basement. The key moment leading to the uprising seemed to be an individual act of resistance by a Jewess seizing the gun of a SS guard probably coupled with misbehavior of the same, but not a collective, concerted revolt that degree of danger was scaling with the number of victims. There is no reason to believe that the fatal shooting would have been prevented by downsizing the crowd from say 1000 to 100 victims. Moreover, the incident shows that striking down a revolt of a mostly unarmed mass of people not familiar with the place was not posing a big problem.
  
  
• Sonderkommando researcher Andreas Killian mentions a mass escape of Hungarian Jews in June 1944 because of an improperly closed door (due to the lack of published and properly referenced evidence, the historical reality of the event is unclear, but will be accepted here for the sake of argument). The escape as such would not have been avoided by a reduced number of victims, but only by properly closing the door. There were apparently no causalities among the SS.

The overall statistical risk of a mass revolt was thus about 0.25% (2 on 800). Moreover, at the time the crematoria were planned and constructed (1942 - 1943), the SS had - as far as we know - experienced not a single mass revolt among the gassing victims.

Given the low risk of a revolt and its relatively easy abolition (using bats, guns, machine guns and due to the confinement of the people within the crematorium basement with only few exits and within barbed wire fencing), it stands to reason that the SS would not have gained much by downsizing the number of victims per gassing.

Denierbud's own concept of the killing site does not provide a significant benefit, but it is also actually introducing severe disadvantages for the SS. 

In his concept, the victims stay around in Auschwitz for the whole day and night, which would have required SS men dispatched for their guarding and supervision for the entire day. In contrast, as it was actually done, guarding of the victims was only necessary for the first few hours after their arrival until they were locked in the gas chamber. 

And even worse, in denierbud's concept valuable medical SS personal needed elsewhere is also bound to the killing site for the entire day. In contrast, as it was actually done, the presence of SS medical orderly and SS doctors was limited to something like 1 hour per 1000 - 2000 victims. By needlessly delaying the killing process, denierbud's flawed concept is to some extent actually thwarting a main intention behind the choice of mass gassings as killing technique, to minimize the involvement of German paramilitary forces in the murder.

Foreknowledge

[11 min] Woman 1: "And when we were in the train we were afraid, we never knew what will be our future."

Among Jews rumors of gas chambers abounded during the war as can be seen in this testimony.

[12 min] Woman 2: "I was standing naked before the doctor and looking very proud into his eyes and so that he is seeing how a proud Jewish women is go into die because most of us knew that in Auschwitz and from the taps there didn't come any water but the gas and from the taps came fine warm water afterwards we dressed up and returned to our train it was a very relieving experience after we were ready to die there"

She soberly accepted her fate but that couldn't have been every person's reaction who didn't believe the shower story. Some would have become hysterical and under proverbial yelling ??? in the crowded theater.

[...]

[13 min] Her testimony shows us that gassing rumors existed among Jews.

The degree of foreknowledge among 100,000s of people cannot be reliably decided based on a single account of a Hungarian Jewess given decades after the event (memory fading and memory manipulation is increasing with time).

The German historians Götz Aly and Christian Gerlach have published a comprehensive work on the fate of the Hungarian Jews and according to their study of the testimonies (mostly unpublished accounts given immediately after the war when the memory was still fresh), the Hungarian Jews deported to Auschwitz

"...did not grasp, where they were. They had heard that the Germans had persecuted the Jews for years and killed many of them, but a lot of this was hopefully rated as rumor. Auschwitz did not mean anything to many of them and the fewest knew about the gas chambers... most of the Hungarian Jews gave the impression of ignorance to prisoners who stayed already for a long time in the camp. Few guards were therefore necessary for the march to the crematoria."

~ Götz Aly and Christian Gerlach, Das letzte Kapitel, p. 289, my translation


Actually, if there had been extensive foreknowledge among the Hungarian Jews as denierbuds presumes that even the body abled Jews believed there will be gassed, and if this had triggered severe resistance among the people as denierbud also presumes, then the Hungarian authorities would have had enourmous trouble to get them on the train in the first place, or the Germans in Auschwitz the able bodied Jews in the real showers. Neither was the case.

Gas Chamber Loading

We thus expect some level of non-cooperation from them. On a football field the Auschwitz gas chamber would be this size, that little flashing white line being the door. To see how crowded it would be, we have this be a head and these are shoulders. We make one row of 14 people across 23 feet. And bring it up into the gas chamber. That would be how crowded the gas chamber would be.

Gabbai: "And after that, you know, when after 15, 20 minutes they open up the thing, the first thing I see, I saw the people I saw 15 minutes before alive, I saw the mothers with the children standing up, because the gas chamber will take maybe 500 people was used to make 2500 people everybody standing up, there was no room for anything else than standing up."

[14 min] This density implies no resistance at all, it implies total cooperation.

Gabbai: "From time to time, we were tell very few words that they are going to die."

It's hard to believe that 2000 people would go in there without resistance or outright rebellion. Because that's a little over 1 feet² per person which would make them skeptical of the shower story in particularly with no soap dispensers anywhere. 

High crowd densities are usually not achieved by total cooperation, since these are near or above what is the critical density, where the individuals are forced into physical contact, loose control over their movement and feel uncomfortable. It is not a state people spontaneously create and sustain on the basis of cooperation, but they are forced into it by pressure and confinement.

We do know from concrete evidence that confining a large number of people at densities of 10 people per m² specifically for mass murder is possible without difficulty, namely from the mass extermination in Auschwitz with its excessive body of evidence and from the mass killings with gas vans. The latter case can be established by strictly relying only on contemporary German documents without any eyewitness accounts whatsoever (not that this would be methodologically reasonable, but it is a damning argument for people frivolously discarding testimonial evidence as historical source). According to one of these documents in total 97,000 people were killed in the gas vans with an estimated average crowd density of 9 to 10 people per m².

Now, if denierbud does not understand how exactly this was possible, he is urged to think harder rather than suggesting it never happened at all (argument from personally incredulity [thanks to Nathan]). Here is some food for his thought:

The victims inside the Auschwitz gas chambers were usually physically and mentally exhausted from a long journey without much food and water, intimidated by a place and environment they did not know, physically the weakest of mankind (mostly children, women, elderly and sick), separated from the fit men and women that ought to protect and lead them, naked (which certainly added to a feeling of defenseless) and they were confronted with strong (Sonderkommando), lightly armed (Kapos) and heavily armed (SS) men.

Given these circumstances, it is no surprise that there was only very limited, if any at all, resistance among the victims, even in the case they had foreknowledge about what was going to happen. They were an easy target for the Germans at the extermination sites. People who looked like troublemakers and potential leaders for a revolt were taken out from the crowd and separately executed with a small calibre rifle.

The victims were told to receive food and water after the alleged shower, which provided a strong driving force for the hungry and thirsty people to enter the gas chamber. According to crowd psychology, leadership is an important issue for crowd behavior. Since the people were separated from their natural strong leaders like husbands, mothers, elderly brothers and sister, they were either helpless or understood the Jewish Sonderkommando, Kapos and SS as new leader for the moment  - who guided them straight into the gas chamber.

If neither the prospect of food and water, nor the authority of those in charge of the extermination, nor herd behavior just following what the others were doing did work, then violence was sufficient to make them entering the gas chamber. Once they were inside the gas chamber, there was no way of escape as the crowd was pushing them deep inside the basement. Even if an individual decided to revolt at this point, it was hopeless, just consider the forces exerted by a single person and by the crowd.

If there was a flight response from the crowd, it would rather push deeper into the gas chamber away from the door where the concrete danger (armed SS, Kapos, Sonderkommando) came from, hoping for an exit in the back, while those in the back had nowhere to go. Generally, flight behaviour is also inducing a higher crowd density on an intentional basis as people sharing the same fate tend to feel more safe close together when they are in a situation of danger.

Jewish "Accomplices" at the Extermination Sites

[14 min] Commentator: "The Nazis had largely increased the number of Jewish prisoners in the Sonderkommando, prisoners who were forced to work in the crematoria, to deal with the massive numbers the Nazis planned to murder. So much so that the crematorium and gas chamber like this was operated by around 100 Jews and just 4 Germans." 

[15 min] It's not believable that Jewish men would do that and not believable that the Germans would assign so few Germans.

1. Argument from personal incredulity.

2. There is whole bunch of possible explanations for why Jewish prisoners would not refuse in assisting in the extermination procedure of innocent Jewish people, the most important one being the instinct of self preservation, the idea that the more smooth the killing procedure means less suffering for the victims and emotional blunting.

Once the German SS men had established a reliable team of Kapos and foremen that could do most of the job inside the basement for them, it is clear they would dispatch as few as possible Germans for this unpleasant duty. However, it should be also kept in mind that they could quickly call for reinforcement from outside the crematorium yard in case of problems.

Kapos

[15 min] Interviewer: "Why were you doing this, who was overseeing all this who was there?

Gabbai: "Well, the Kapos of the crematorium."

A Kapo was a Jewish worker put in charge.

Only some of the Kapos were Jewish. Many Kapos, in particular head Kapos (Oberkapos) were German and Polish prisoners.

It should be noted that while Kapos may have assisted in getting the naked victims inside the gas chamber, the actual killing, i.e. what actually led to the victims death (the closing of the door and the pouring in of the poison gas), was done by German SS men. 

Some Repetition

[15 min] Gabbai: "We only had 1 or 2 guards there. Wasn't too many SS...outside the crematorium heavily ??? 3, 4 ??? about half a dozen well equipped SS just moving around but inside the crematorium were only a couple of SS 2 or 3 SS. The Kapos were doing the job."

[16 min] And in a layout like this, it's hard to believe that they could get people to move all the way to the back in particulary if you find out that it was Jewish workers running the operation.

1. Argument from personal incredulity.

2. Already addressed above.