Multiple Corpse Cremation part 1: The October 1941 Planning Document

The October 1941 planning document for Krematorium II is the first document we’ll examine explicitly mentioning multiple corpse cremation and unfortunately for Mattogno it’s not looking good for his case for “sanity”.

The Auschwitz construction office recorded:

“Auxiliary operations: Due to the large occupancy (125,000 prisoners) a crematorium will be erected. It contains 5 muffle furnaces with 3 muffles each for 2 men, so that 60 men can be cremated in one hour.” (Bartosik, Martyniak & Setkiewicz, The Origins of the Birkenau Camp, Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, 2017, p. 170.)

Five furnaces. Three muffles each. Fifteen muffles total. Two bodies per muffle. Sixty bodies per hour. The arithmetic is unambiguous, and it appears in an official planning document without qualification or caveat.

This matters even more because the same system, running twenty-four hours, yields exactly 1,440 bodies per day the precise figure Bischoff recorded in his 1943 completion report for Krematorium II. The 1941 planning document and the 1943 report align perfectly because they describe the same designed system operating under the same parameters. Bischoff was not guessing; he was reporting a capacity established in the planning stage two years earlier.

Mattogno’s response is that the furnaces were fundamentally redesigned between October and November 1941. He bases this on a price discrepancy and a five-day gap between documents:

“The furnaces mentioned in this report were of a design different from the ones which were later built… We can gather this from p. 6 of the explanatory note where the cost estimate for the five triple-muffle furnaces is mentioned as being 60,000 RM (Document 212), whereas the Topf estimate for the five triple-muffle furnaces actually built in Crematorium II at Birkenau not only has a much lower price (51,237 RM, including the two coffin-loading devices and the three draft enhancers), but also shows a later date (4 November 1941). In addition, the operating instructions supplied by Topf to the Auschwitz Central Construction Office specify that the corpses be loaded ‘hintereinander’ (Document 227), i.e. successively. This means that the furnace was not designed for the simultaneous incineration of two corpses in one muffle.” (The Cremation Furnaces of Auschwitz, pp. 265–266.)

 

Three arguments in one paragraph. None of them holds up.

The document’s own title already explains the price discrepancy. It is explicitly labelled an “Explanatory Report on the Preliminary Draft for the Construction of the Prisoner-of-War Camp of the Waffen-SS, Auschwitz O/S.”

(https://www.auschwitz.org/en/stop-denial/efficiency-of-crematoria-furnaces/)

The five-day timeline makes a redesign even less plausible. A fundamental redesign of a technically complex furnace system communicated to the manufacturer, re-engineered, re-costed, and resubmitted would have left documentary correspondence. None has ever been produced.

The “hintereinander” (successively) argument fares no better and is particularly damaging because Mattogno’s own source undermines his claim. The relevant passage in the operating instructions reads:

“Once the cremation chamber (muffle) has been brought to a good red heat (approximately 800°C), the corpses can be introduced one after the other in the cremation chambers. 

Now the pulsed air blower situated to the side of the furnace should be switched on and run for about 20 minutes, ensuring that the two cremation chambers do not receive too much or too little fresh air.”(Pressac, Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers, p. 136.) 

This describes the sequence of loading, not a strict limit of one body per muffle. On a hyper-literal reading (the kind Mattogno applies when citing “hintereinander”), the blower is only activated after the corpses have already been introduced “one after the other,” and the instruction then immediately refers to regulating air for “the two cremation chambers.” This strongly implies at least two corpses per muffle had been loaded. While this may not have been the author’s primary intent, it directly undercuts Mattogno’s assertion that the instructions preclude multiple-body cremation. More importantly, these instructions were written for a double-muffle furnace, not the triple-muffle furnaces specified in the October 1941 document. An ambiguous instruction for a different furnace type cannot override an explicit “for 2 men” specification in a contemporaneous planning document. 

What none of these three arguments solves is the question of why the numbers align so precisely. Mattogno does have an answer to this but the answer is tied directly to the Bischoff letter, and it is a poor one. His explanation is that whoever wrote the 1943 letter reproduced the 1941 figure, despite the furnace it described supposedly being an entirely different system, because, in his words: “the Leistung of the ovens had to correspond bureaucratically to that indicated in this document.”(Carlo Mattogno, “The Auschwitz Central Construction Headquarters Letter Dated 28 June 1943: An Alternative Interpretation.) He does not really explain why this correspondence was bureaucratically required, he simply asserts it. And as established above, his case for the 1941 document describing a different furnace does not survive examination, which leaves the assertion with nothing to rest on. It is also difficult to see why a junior official would knowingly report figures drawn from a furnace design that, on Mattogno’s own account, had nothing to do with the one actually built an act of bureaucratic fiction with no obvious motive behind it.

Mattogno’s way out is to argue that the real, corrected figures appeared in a revised version of the letter that has since been snatched by the Soviets (Cremation Furnaces p. 333). But his own reasoning elsewhere makes this difficult to accept. He argues that the figures in the surviving letter were so glaringly wrong that they could not have escaped the notice of Kammler’s technical staff: “Now since the Leistung indicated in the Bischoff letter is technically impossible, how can we believe that the engineers of Amt C/III, observing this false information, did not require an explanation from Bischoff? On his own, Bischoff would have answered, and based upon the question, a whole correspondence would have resulted of which there is not a trace.” (Ibid)

This is Mattogno stating, in his own words, that if the letter had genuinely reached the WVHA with these figures intact, the engineers there would have queried them, Bischoff would have had to respond, and that exchange would have left a documentary trail. He is right about that. Competent engineers reviewing a capacity figure roughly four times higher than what was achievable would not simply wave it through in silence. His own logic therefore requires one of two things to be true: either the surviving letter was never actually sent in this form, and a corrected version replaced it before reaching Kammler’s office, or the letter was sent as written and nobody objected because the figures were not, in fact, absurd to the people reading them.

Mattogno takes the first option. But notice what that choice demands. He needs not only a corrected letter that has never been found, but an entire silent process behind it: Bischoff catching the error, having the letter rewritten, and the flawed original somehow being the only version that survives into the historical record, while the corrected version supposedly sent in its place leaves no trace anywhere not in the Zentralbauleitung archive, not in Kammler’s office, not in any wartime or postwar collection of captured German records. The same absence of correspondence Mattogno uses to argue the figures must have been challenged is, by his own admission, equally absent for the correction he claims followed. If a query-and-response exchange would have left a trace, so would the production and circulation of a corrected replacement letter. Neither trace exists. Mattogno treats the missing query as proof something is wrong with the surviving letter, while treating the equally missing corrected letter as something the Soviets simply happened to remove.

One thing that should also be noted was pointed out to me by Sergey Romanov the Bischoff document reporting the figures is in fact a copy for the files, not the sent original (hence no signature), and the distribution list, common for such copies, was corrected meaning this is not some mistaken copy absent-mindedly left in the files, but an actual working document exactly this text was sent out to the people on the list, this is not a draft or anything like that. Which means as we can see none of Mattogno’s hypothesised correspondence occurred which must in fact mean that Kammler’s staff took no issue with the document.

The second option, the one Mattogno does not take, requires no missing documents at all. The letter was sent as written. The engineers of Amt C/III did not object, and left no correspondence querying it, because the figures matched what they already understood the furnaces had been designed to do the same two-body-per-muffle specification recorded in the 1941 planning document. No query was needed because nothing in the letter was unexpected.

Mattogno’s own argument about the absence of a correspondence trail, offered to prove the letter must have been corrected, is equally good evidence for the simpler explanation he refuses to consider. He cannot take that option, not because the evidence forbids it, but because it leaves him with nothing left to dispute.

So what can we understand using this document? We can very simply conclude that the figures are in fact correct and the Bischoff memo is in fact referring to multiple corpse cremation, which would debunk Mattogno’s theory that multiple corpse cremation would lead to no gain in time or fuel. 

In the next part we’ll examine multiple corpse cremation and an inconvenient document for Mattogno closer and see what the documents say about the practice and most importantly see if Mattogno’s response is worthwhile or worthless. 

The Bischoff Memorandum

On 28 June 1943, SS-Untersturmführer Josef Janisch prepared a document for the signature of SS-Sturmbannführer Karl Bischoff this document was to be sent to SS-Brigadeführer Hans Kammler reporting the completed cremation capacity of all five Auschwitz crematoria:

“1.) Old Crematorium I  3×2 muffle furnaces 340 persons 

2.) New Krematorium II 5×3 muffle furnaces  1,440 persons 

3.) New Krematorium III 5×3 muffle furnaces 1,440 persons 

4.) New Krematorium IV 8 muffle furnaces 768 persons 

5.) New Krematorium V 8 muffle furnaces 768 persons 

Total for 24-hour operation: 4,756 persons.”

1943-06-28 Central Construction Office Report on Auschwitz’ Cremation Capacity: “Total for 24-hour Operation: 4,756 Persons

This was not Allied propaganda. It was an internal SS administrative document, written by the officer responsible for construction to his superior. It even contradicts the more inflated Soviet claims. For someone who repeatedly insists that German wartime documents represent the highest standard of evidence, this memo should carry considerable weight.

Mattogno’s position on this document has shifted over time. In his 1990 article in the Journal of Historical Review, he declared it forged or doctored:

“This capacity corresponds to the cremation of one corpse in one muffle in 15 minutes or of three corpses in 45 minutes. This however is technically impossible; this document as well has been forged or doctored.”

By 1999 Mattogno seems to have not yet made up his mind on the document, writing:

“It is therefore possible that the document is authentic.”

while also saying:

“The forger may also have been a prisoner employed in the offices of the Zentralbauleitung, who could have been able to carry out the forgery between the time of the escape of the SS and the arrival of the Soviets; this forger would have had the necessary knowledge to create a ‘Fälschung’, but considering the tendency of the prisoners to show hyperbolic exaggeration, in this case, the forgery would certainly contain a much higher Leistung.”

(The Auschwitz Central Construction Headquarters Letter  Dated 28 June 1943: An Alternative Interpretation)

By the time of The Cremation Furnaces of Auschwitz (2015), the outright forgery claim had quietly disappeared. Mattogno now treats the document as authentic, offering no explanation for his earlier reversal and no acknowledgement that he had previously made a serious accusation without evidence. Instead, he pivots to a new position:

“The most obvious conclusion we may draw from the remarks made above is that the author of this letter was completely unfamiliar with the technical question of the capacity of the cremation furnaces.” (p. 343)

Readers are now asked to believe that an SS construction officer recorded figures wildly detached from operational reality, reported them up the chain to Kammler, and that nobody corrected the mistake or at least that there is zero documentary evidence of any such correction.

To buttress this explanation, Mattogno again relies on his core claim that multiple-corpse cremation was technically impossible:

“Now, having ruled out — in terms of economy and duration — the efficient simultaneous cremation of multiple corpses in one muffle in the Auschwitz-Birkenau furnaces, we can state with certainty that such a capacity is technically impossible.” (p. 341)

That single conditional does enormous work. Mattogno’s entire reconstruction of Auschwitz cremation capacity rests on the assumption that multiple-corpse cremation was impossible. If that assumption is false and especially if multiple-corpse cremation was standard operational practice the Bischoff memo becomes entirely unremarkable.

As for how a supposedly incompetent official’s wildly inflated figures passed without objection from Kammler’s technically competent staff at Amt C/III, Mattogno gestures toward a lost “corrected” version of the letter that the Soviets supposedly removed from the archives. That claim, and what it would actually require to be true, will be examined in the next part of this series .

Missing Documents and the Wrong Suspect

Before reaching the single most important memorandum on cremation capacity at Auschwitz, there is a preliminary issue worth examining because it reveals a great deal about Mattogno’s overall method.

Mattogno has repeatedly claimed to have examined all 88,200 pages of the Auschwitz construction archives held in Moscow. He is very proud of this fact. Yet from those 88,200 pages, almost no documentation recording actual individual cremations survives. After denier critic John Zimmerman pointed out this rather obvious problem, Mattogno eventually produced what appears to be the only document related to an individual cremation in the entire archive: a 1940 test cremation entirely unrelated to the Birkenau crematoria under discussion.

This absence matters enormously, though not for the reason Mattogno would prefer.

We are dealing with one of the largest cremation facilities in Europe, operating continuously during the height of the war. Sparse day-to-day operational documentation is not a neutral historical fact. It is suspicious in itself, and the most immediate question it raises is why. Rudolf Höss, Henryk Tauber, Perry Broad, and others testified that records were systematically destroyed as the war ended. Mattogno, however, shifts attention away from the people with the clearest motive to destroy those records and instead attributes the gap to Soviet archival selection (discussed further in part 5). He acknowledges the documentary absence while attributing it to Soviet archival selection, despite presenting no direct evidence for such intervention.

The rhetorical convenience of this move is worth noting. When surviving German documents support Mattogno’s conclusions, they are reliable and authoritative. When they undermine his conclusions, Soviet tampering becomes plausible. When documents are missing, the implication is that Soviet archivists removed material favourable to the defence rather than that the SS destroyed incriminating records during the collapse of the Reich. Every possible evidentiary outcome is made to support the conclusion Mattogno already wanted to reach. That is not scepticism. It is special pleading: the standards of evidence change depending on which conclusion needs to be defended.

This pattern repeats constantly throughout his work.

Changelog: not directly relevant reference removed 18/6/2026

Carlo Mattogno, Auschwitz Cremation, and the Problem of Selective Scepticism

Holocaust denial tends to focus most of its attention on the gas chambers. That is the emotional centre of the debate and naturally where both sides spend most of their energy. But there is another issue sitting right beside it that denial literature cannot avoid: body disposal. More specifically, could Auschwitz-Birkenau cremate the number of bodies historians say it did?

This is where Carlo Mattogno enters the picture.

Among Holocaust deniers, Mattogno occupies an almost untouchable position. He is treated not as merely one writer among many but as the movement’s leading technical authority on Auschwitz. Germar Rudolf writes in Auschwitz Lies that anyone who wants to seriously challenge Holocaust denial “needs to focus on the many papers and monographs written by Carlo Mattogno,”  whose knowledge of the Holocaust: “may be second to none and that not only includes revisionists but possibly also all the orthodox historians worldwide.” (p.210)

That is a remarkable claim, and it creates a remarkable burden. If Mattogno really is the strongest researcher Holocaust denial can produce, then his work should withstand close scrutiny. His arguments should be internally consistent, methodologically sound, and capable of surviving direct comparison with the documentary record.

What one finds when reading Mattogno carefully is something quite different. His conclusion shift whenever the evidence becomes inconvenient. German wartime documents are treated as unimpeachable when they support his position and suddenly unreliable, manipulated, or misunderstood by everyone but him when they do not. Impossibilities slyly become possible if a document needs handwaving. Technical discussions routinely expand outward in every direction except the one that matters most: what the documents themselves actually say.

Mattogno has effectively made cremation his life’s work. Since the 1990s he has written thousands of pages on cremation capacity, fuel consumption, refractory wear, furnace throughput, and corpse disposal at Auschwitz. There is no question he has invested enormous time in the subject. But page count is not evidence, and technical vocabulary is not historical method.

Mattogno himself appears deeply aware of his page count. In The “Extermination Camps” of “Aktion Reinhardt” he writes: 

“In fact, I am the author ‘most damaging’ to their books about Auschwitz, which I exhaustively refuted in the more than 700 pages of my already quoted study Auschwitz: The Case for Sanity.” (2013 ed, p. 1496)

The emphasis on quantity over quality is revealing because it reflects the way Mattogno argues generally. The objective often appears to be less about establishing a point clearly than about surrounding the reader with technicality, calculations, diagrams, block quotations, and side discussions until the reader assumes there must be something persuasive hidden beneath the mass of detail. This approach works surprisingly well on audiences unfamiliar with the primary sources. A 700-page technical study creates an immediate impression of authority. Most readers are not going to check every citation, verify every quotation, or test whether the arguments actually follow from the evidence presented.

That is one reason Mattogno’s work deserves close scrutiny.

This series will not follow him into every secondary theatre of argument. It will not spend pages debating abstract combustion models or calculations detached from the documentary evidence. That terrain favours confusion over clarity and allows weak arguments to survive by burying them beneath technical detail. Instead, this article will focus on a much simpler question: what do the documents actually say? What did the people designing, operating, and discussing these crematoria say they were doing? And how does Mattogno respond when those documents contradict him? And what does this reveal about the methodology of denials greatest researcher on the topic he seems to consider most important? 

Once one strips away the technical clutter, a very consistent pattern emerges.

"Then the vehicle drives on for another 10 minutes, and by the time they reach the execution site, the occupants arrive already dead".

The Wehrmacht researcher Sergey Vershinin is currently publishing excerpts from the diary of Johannes Gutschmidt. Gutschmidt (1876-1961) was the commandant of various POW camps. Specifically the topic under the discussion was his time in Smolensk where he was the commandant of the Dulag-231.

In his diary Gutschmidt twice mentions a visit to the building of the Smolensk NKVD, or, more specifically, to the execution cellar where people used to be shot.

He attaches some valuable photos of the cellar. The second visit was on 07.04.1942:

7.4.42. Ganz früh rief mich Oberst Marschall an, ich sollte sofort das Nordlager auf Ausbaumöglichkeit erkunden. Ich fuhr mit Janusch um 8 ab und es zeigte sich, dass das Lager nicht zu gebrauchen ist. Der Oberst kam auch noch heraus und stimmte mir zu. Auf der Rückfahrt besichtigten wir die Hinrichtungszelle und die GPU Gefängniszellen, die jetzt von der Sicherungspolizei belegt sind. In jeder Zelle sassen 4 bis 6 Personen. Bei uns [handgeschrieben: i. e. bei der geheimen Feldpolizei] werden die Leute ebenfalls durch Pistolenschüsse ins Genick erschossen oder sie werden mit einem Gasauto heraus geschafft. Das hält vor der Stadt und schaltet die Auspuffgase so um, dass sie in das Innere des Wagens gelangen. Dann fährt der Wagen noch 10 Minuten weiter und an der Hinrichtungsstelle kommen die Insassen schon tot an und werden sofort in die Gruben geworfen. Nachmittags machte ich in der Hinrichtungszelle einige Aufnahmen mit Böhms Sonne.

7.4.42. Very early, Colonel Marschall called me; I was to immediately scout the North Camp for expansion possibilities. I left with Janusch at 8, and it turned out that the camp is of no use. The Colonel also came out later and agreed with me. On the return trip, we inspected the execution cell and the GPU prison cells, which are now occupied by the Security Police. In each cell 4 to 6 people used to sit. With us [handwritten: i. e. with the secret field police], people are likewise executed by pistol shots to the back of the neck, or they are transported away in a gas car (Gasauto). It stops outside the city and redirects the exhaust gases in such a way that they enter the interior of the vehicle. Then the vehicle drives on for another 10 minutes, and by the time they reach the execution site, the occupants arrive already dead and are immediately thrown into the pits. In the afternoon, I took some photos in the execution cell using a "Böhm's Sun".

The archival source provided by Vershinin is BArch MSG 2/10902, Bl. 209.

The question of the authenticity of the diary (i.e. whether the text is contemporaneous to the events it describes or whether it's a memoir in form of a diary) was analyzed by Christian Hartmann in this article. As he points out, retroactively faking 450 double-sided, detail-filled sheets for an incomprehesible purpose is simply implausible (there are also other arguments). What cannot be entirely excluded, however, is that the diary could have been retyped after 1945. The forensic testing of the materials showed them to have been available throughout the 1940s.This means that in theory some passages could have been deleted or added during the retyping.

That said, the purpose of adding a passage like this after the war eludes me. It would be incriminating, if anything. It also fits with the gas vans having arrived in Smolensk just a couple of months prior to this entry.

Tales of Junk Demography: How Sanning Invented 100,000 European Jews in Morocco

In Chapter Seven dealing with post-war Jewish migration, Sanning tries to convince his readers that part of the Oriental Jews who came to Israel during the first two decades after its declaration of independence were, in fact, European Jews. Among them, allegedly 100,000 out of 252,642 Moroccan olims.

To support his assertion, he cited the results of 1936 French Moroccan census, which found 161,000 Jews, then implied a natural increase of 1 percent per a year and stated Moroccan Jewish population was 50,000 in 1970. This would allow the native Moroccan Jewish community to give Israel only 150,000 new souls, by 100,000 less than actually arrived. The self-appointed revisionist demographer concluded the only explanation is the mass resettlement of 100,000 European Jews in Moroccan territory during the war or shortly after (Walter Sanning, The Dissolution of Eastern European Jewry, p. 164).

Note: In the case of France, Sanning assumed totally 170,000 North African Jewish newcomers, 110,000 from Algeria and 60,000 from Tunisia (ibid., p. 169).

Sanning's calculation is, of course, wrong.

Tales of Junk Demography: An Introduction

 Over 17 years ago Jonathan Harisson finished his series The Crazy World of Walter Sanning criticizing The Dissolution of Eastern European Jewry, the 1980s "revisionist" attempt of study of Jewish demography.

Sanning is still taken seriously by many Holocaust deniers. Deanna Spingola heavily refered to The Dissolution of Eastern European Jewry in The Ruling Elite: Death, Destruction, and Domination published in 2014. Don't forget about Ryan Faulk. Or X Nazi star Karl Radl.

Willi Lenz: The “Doctor” of the Kulmhof (Chełmno) Extermination Camp

When Soviet troops reached the area around Chełmno nad Nerem in January 1945, the Nazi extermination camp Kulmhof had already been largely dismantled.¹ Nevertheless, contemporary documents and witness testimony preserve evidence about the men who operated the camp.

One name appears repeatedly in these sources: Willi Lenz, a Polizeimeister of the Schutzpolizei. At Kulmhof, he supervised Jewish forced laborers in the so-called forest camp, personally carried out shootings, and oversaw the disposal of the corpses.

Studies of Kulmhof describe Lenz as an exceptionally brutal person (see endnote 1), but provide little information about his background and career. Using contemporary civil records, police files, NSDAP membership documentation and postwar testimony, this article establishes his identity and reconstructs a life-spanning, though still fragmentary, biography of Willi Lenz. 

What Vladimir Davydov really said about the height of the Babyn Yar pyres.

It has long been a staple argument of the deniers against one Babyn Yar witness Vladimir Davydov (one, but not the only, contrary to the incompetent nincompoops Carlo Mattogno and Jürgen Graf's claim) that he claimed the height of 10-12 m for the Babyn Yar pyres in 1943.

Mattogno and Graf wrote:

On November 9, 1944, Major Lavrenko, member of the Commission for the Investigation of German Crimes in Kiev, questioned the Jewish witness Vladimir K. Davidov. The latter stated that on August 18, 1943, he, along with 99 other prisoners, for the most part also Jewish, had been selected from the Siretzki concentration camp 5 km from Kiev. The 100 prisoners were taken to Babi Yar and there were forced to dig up the bodies of the Jews shot in 1941. According to him, 70,000 bodies had been in the mass graves of Babi Yar. The prisoners had exhumed these and burned them on 'ovens' afterwards, which consisted of granite blocks - procured from the Jewish cemetery of Kiev - with train rails laid upon them. On these a layer of wood was piled and on top of this the bodies, so that an enormous stack of bodies 10 to 12 m high resulted! In the beginning there was merely a single 'oven,' but then 75 of them (literally seventy-five) were built.

No other witness claimed something like this and Davydov himself stated in 1967 that the height was actually 4 m.

But what of his original claim? Well, now we have the original BY investigation files from 1943 and 1944.

Otto Moll - Dear Gardener Next Door Or Psychopathological Mass Murderer?

Otto Moll, born in 1915 in Mecklenburg, trained as a gardener before joining the SS-Wachverband V "Brandenburg" in 1935. His early life was marked by personal hardship: a serious car accident in 1937 left him with a skull fracture and blindness in one eye, and in 1940 his first wife and unborn child died from blood poisoning. By April 1938, he was working in the SS garden at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, and he soon became part of the expanding concentration camp system.

According to his own statement to US investigators from November 3, 1945, "from 1941 until January 1945, I likewise managed a gardening unit of the Economic and Administrative Main Office in the Auschwitz concentration camp". 

Afterwards, Moll was stationed at the Kaufering II subcamp of the Dachau concentration camp. Moll stated that "no prisoner in my camp died from illness or malnutrition, and none were hanged or shot. There was not a single death in my camp ... no mistreatment of any prisoners by any guards occurred. No prisoner was beaten, kicked, or otherwise abused by the guards".

SS-Hauptscharführer Otto Moll - the dear gardener from next door?   

 

Otto Moll (source)

At the CODOH Holocaust denial discussion forum, the poster Stubble writes that "Going over what there is, I can't rule out that he indeed just ran the garden (farm) detail and was hated for it, and thus framed up for something different". 

The record tells a very different story.