In the previous blog of this series, I reproduced posts nos. 1 to 7 from the extinct RODOH forum’s thread "A message to Jonnie Hannover Hargis ...".
In this blog I reproduce posts # 8 to # 10 from that thread. These posts dealt with matters related to corpse cremation at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and extermination camp.
# 8
Oh, see here: our old friend Claudia Rothenbach, who very well knows that I'm banned from Hannover's Cesspit, shoots the bull there about one of my posts of June 2001.
Have you also gone chickenshit like Jonnie Hargis, Claudia?
Or would you care to bring your ramblings over to RODOH so we can discuss directly?
Anyway, let's have a look at what Claudia told the faithful Cesspit flock:
ClaudiaRoberto Mühlenkamp answered the assertions by Cat Scan with attempts like these:
Quote:
1. The crematoria at Auschwitz and Birkenau were not typical cremation ovens, but heavy-duty industrial ovens designed to run continuously, using the heat energy produced by the burning of previous bodies to keep the oven hot for the next bodies. After they were fired with coke to their proper operating temperature, they required little or no extra fuel to operate. A considerable but well-documented technical achievement. The cremation unit that one muffle was supposed to handle in a given time was a weight unit, which means that one or several persons adding up to that weight unit could be put into each muffle simultaneously without increasing the cremation time. Unlike in crematoria ovens used for civilian purposes, there was no need to wait for one body to have cremated completely. The practice actually was to put the next body or bodies in the muffle before the cremation process of the previous was complete.
Here are some comments:
RM: heavy-duty industrial ovens
No, they were not. Roberto sucks this out of his fingers. As Prüfer said: the dead bodies could be cremated one by one - perhaps a little bit overlapping.
Prüfer tried to lie to his Soviet interrogators at the start, but then he admitted that he had witnessed two or three bodies introduced into each muffle at the same time, his concern being that the cremation was still not going fast enough nevertheless. A statement by Sander during one of his interrogations and a letter Sander had written in 1942 confirm this. See my post # 7208 on this thread for the details.
Ah, and the heavy-duty industrial ovens thing I wrote in June 2001 was not sucked out of my fingers. This was the source of that and other statements commented by "Claudia":
Also, the Auschwitz furnaces were designed to run continuously, using the heat energy produced by the burning of previous bodies to keep the oven hot for the next bodies. After they were fired with coke to their proper operating temperature at the beginning of the day, they required little or no extra fuel to operate. This was a technical achievement that is well-documented (see Gutman et al., Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp, 1994, pp. 185-187ff). Lagace claims that there must be a "cooling off" period between each body incinerated, which shows a profound ignorance on his part as to how the ovens worked. Lagace claims that continuous operation would have caused the Auschwitz ovens to break down, but again, he simply does not understand the difference between everyday civilian crematoria and military-industrial crematoria.
Also, typically, a commercial crematory operator will burn a corpse for an extended period to remove all traces of carbonized flesh, i.e., to whiten the bones. Even so, such processes only extend the total cremation time to between two and four hours, and not the six to eight hours that Lagace claimed. Lagace forgets that such cosmetic concerns were not of importance to the Nazis. But these errors and others are dealt with in the reply to question 45.
Those errors aside, there is still simply no question about the burning times of the ovens. In 1939, the firm of Topf and Sons was awarded a contract to build a Dachau furnace which had an estimated capacity of one corpse per hour per muffle (times two muffles). By increasing the air pressure, by July 1940 they had produced a furnace that could burn just under two corpses per hour per muffle (again, times two muffles). It required three hours of maintenance per day, a far cry from the twelve hours per day claimed by the IHR in question 45. (See Gutman et al., op. cit., pp. 185-186, 189-190.)
The crematoriums that were eventually installed at Auschwitz-Birkenau were massive. They were capable of disposing of several bodies per muffle in half an hour or so, and they could run for days at a time without maintenance. (There were difficulties eventually, however, and several of the ovens were out of service for months at a time.) Topf and Sons was awarded a patent in 1951, and the patent also states that a single muffle can cremate a corpse in half an hour.
ClaudiaRM: designed to run continuously
No, they were not. As Mattogno proved they had to be cooled down after some hours and then cleaned to prevent damage. As Nieskly writes they were used only some hours per day.
Who said that continuously necessarily means 24 hours a day without interruption, Claudia?
It might also mean day after day for up to 20 hours a day without idle days in between.
And let's see if you can demonstrate that absence of cleaning, if the ovens ran 24 hours a day during a week or two, would necessarily lead to damage.
As to the stuff about the ovens having to be cooled down after some hours (!) and then cleaned to prevent damage, I submit that its simply horseshit, already considering Jährling's memo of 17.3.1943, which speaks of 12 hour daily (or daytime?) operation and of continuous operation (Dauerbetrieb).
Who is Nieskly, by the way, and what exactly does he write? Quote, please!
ClaudiaRM: using the heat energy produced by the burning of previous bodies
No, as Cat Scan described the head did not result from the burning of bodies but from the burning of carbon. The dead bodies did not even have contact to the flames.
Except where fat from the bodies dripped into the ash bin and caused a fire that directly burned the bodies, as described by Tauber. Whatever Cat Scan said, the fact is that the patent developed by Sander, in which the bodies themselves provided the essential combustion fuel once the oven had been completely heated, was stated to have been based on experience gained with the ovens operating at Auschwitz-Birkenau. This is from the transcript of day 9 at the Irving-Lipstadt trial, emphases are mine:< 6> Q. Are you saying that for the cremations on the second and
< 7> third day you would not have to put any coke into the
< 8> machine at all? It would just kind of carry on?
< 9> A. No. If you start incinerating on the second day you can
<10> still use that heat that had built up from the first day.
<11> If you then insert extra bodies in the oven that same day,
<12> after the first one, you only need very little extra fuel.
<13> Q. That is not what the document said. You said it needed
<14> none at all.
<15> A. Then it says only little, the first, second and third, and
<16> then, as you continue, then only very limited amount of
<17> fuel.
<18> Q. But of course they had more than just one furnace in
<19> Auschwitz. In each of these crematoria you are telling us
<20> they had five times three. So they did not have to fire
<21> them all up. They could just fire up one of them and keep
<22> it running?
<23> A. But it seems that there were more bodies than one could
<24> take. We also have, of course, the patent application of
<25> Topf from late 1942, which actually operates on that whole
<26> principle.
. P-152
< 1> Q. It was not used, was it?
< 2> A. No, but it was based on the experience gained. As it very
< 3> literally says, it is based on the experience gained with
< 4> the multi-muffle ovens used in the East. The document --
< 5> I am happy to try to find it. I do not know where the
< 6> patent application is.
And this is from the transcript of day 11, emphases are again mine:<12> MR RAMPTON: The case sought to be made is that it explains how
<13> it was that they were able to incinerate as many corpses
<14> as they could, and also how they managed to use as little
<15> fuel a these were able to do.
<16> A. Yes, I was looking for that particular sentence, because
<17> I did not want to quote the sentence from memory.
<18> Q. I think you will find it in translation on pages 538, 539.
<19> A. This is what it says here at page 540, it says:
<20> "Pre-heating of such an oven should take at least two
<21> days. After this pre-heating the oven will not need any
<22> more fuel due to the heat produced by the corpses."
<23> Q. Read on, will you.
<24> A. "It will be able to maintain its necessary high
<25> temperature through self-heating".
<26> Q. Carry on.
. P-161
< 1> A. "But to allow it to main a constant temperature it would
< 2> have become necessary to introduce at the same time
< 3> so-called well fat and so-called emaciated corpses,
< 4> because one can only guarantee continuous high
< 5> temperatures through the emission of human fat. When only
< 6> emaciated corpses are incinerated, it will be necessary to
< 7> add heat continuously. The result of this will be that
< 8> insulation could be damaged because of the dust created
< 9> temperatures and one would expect shorter or longer break
<10> downs".
<11> Q. That document, Professor, is this right, is in its origin
<12> quite unrelated to what went on at Birkenhau?
<13> A. It is quite unrelated you say?
<14> Q. Unrelated.
<15> A. No, its origin is of the fall of 1942 and the ovens in
<16> crematoria 2 and 3 only came into operation in April
<17> 1943. However, the multi-muffle ovens were already used
<18> in crematorium No. 1 since August 1940. So the principle
<19> is the same in the ovens in crematorium 1. So clearly
<20> they are using the principle which has been the experience
<21> that has been gained in crematorium 1 in creating this <22> patent application.
<23> Q. I am grateful. There is no doubt about the authenticity
<24> of this, is there, as an original German document written
<25> by Topf for their patent agents?
<26> A. No, it is registered in whatever the patent ----
. P-162
< 1> Q. How well does that document what we see here on page 540,
< 2> I do not need you to look at them, how well from memory
< 3> does that chime with the descriptions given by the
< 4> eyewitnesses, including Hirst, of how this procedure was
< 5> carried out in practice?
< 6> A. What is very important in the descriptions of the
< 7> sonderkommandos is that they talk about, with a certain
< 8> kind of care, they would bring corpses of people of
< 9> different sizes into the muffles, exactly to -- no,
<10> I cannot say that because they do not actually give that
<11> explanation. But here actually is given an explanation, a
<12> thermodynamical explanation why that would have been done.
<13> Q. I think Tauber was quite specific about it, was he not,
<14> about using fat corpses?
<15> A. Yes.
<16> Q. Indeed on the trial run I think they were given fat
<17> corpses, says Tauber, in March 1943, were they not?
<18> A. I would like to see that thing.
<19> Q. We can look at it later.
<20> MR JUSTICE GRAY: What you quote in your report does not read
<21> like a patent application. Is it a quote from the patent
<22> application?
<23> A. We go to 808 ----
<24> Q. I think you are quoting another author, are you not?
<25> A. No, this is the comment. Sorry.
<26> MR RAMPTON: This is the interpretation.
. P-163
< 1> A. This is the comment written by a number of engineers
. < 2> MR JUSTICE GRAY: It probably does not affect the point.
< 3> MR RAMPTON: My Lord, one can see how they have dealt with it,
< 4> how Topf dealt with in the last paragraph of the quote on
< 5> page 539.
< 6> A. Yes, one of the important lines in that thing, of course,
< 7> is they are actually not incinerating any more, but they
< 8> are literally burning corpses.
< 9> MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes.
<10> MR RAMPTON: The passage from Tauber's evidence or testimony,
<11> call it what you like, is on page 535. At the top: "The
<12> corpses of wasted people with no fat burned rapidly in the
<13> side muffles and slowly in the centre one. Conversely,
<14> the corpses of people gassed directly on arrival not being
<15> wasted burnt better in the centre muffle. During the
<16> incineration of such corpses we used the coke only to
<17> light the fire of the furnace initially, for fatty corpses
<18> burn of their own accord thanks to the combustion of body
<19> fat". It is the same opposite on the previous page in
<20> relation to crematorium 1.
<21> He actually says in relation to crematorium 2
<22> and 3: "I know from the experienced gained by observing
<23> cremation in crematoria 2 and 3 that the bodies of fat
<24> people burned very much faster. The process of
<25> incineration is accelerated by the combustion of human fat
<26> which thus produces additional heat."
ClaudiaRM: After they were fired with coke to their proper operating temperature, they required little or no extra fuel to operate.
No, this is bullshit. Roberto did not even understand the working principle of the ovens.
Poor Claudia, reduced to playing the big fat technician again. Cut out the crap, ma'am.
ClaudiaIn these ovens the dead bodies were burned by the hot gas that was produced through burning coal. If you stop the fire there is no gas stream any more.
Yep, that's how you start an oven up. But once it has reached a certain temperature, it doesn’t need much additional fuel, according to patent applications quoted at the Irving-Lipstadt trial. And according to Topf's operating instructions, every incineration causes the temperature in the oven to rise. So give me no @#%$, Claudia.
Claudia
The old bakery ovens work with the principle Roberto describes. The ovens are heated by burning coal, they save the heat, the coal is taken out and the bread put in. But this is a different story.
Yeah, Im sure that, unlike bakery ovens and contrary to what is stated in patent applications, those cremation ovens froze stone cold as soon as the coke fuel had burned down, even if they had been running at 900 Celsius or more before. Who are you trying to bullshit, Claudia?
Claudia
RM: A considerable but well-documented technical achievement. No, just crap.
That certainly applies to what big fat technician Claudia has written so far.
Claudia
RM: The cremation unit that one muffle was supposed to handle in a given time was a weight unit, which means that one or several persons adding up to that weight unit could be put into each muffle simultaneously without increasing the cremation time.
This is crap as well.
As described the dead bodies were cremated by streaming gas. So the most relevant point is the space to keep the gas streaming.
Does the gas stream inside the muffle, Claudia? Or does it stream around the muffle from outside? Have a look at Pressac’s Document 25.
Tauber described this circuit as follows:
As I have already said, there were five furnaces in Krematorium II, each with three muffles for cremating the corpses and heated by two coke-fired hearths. The fire flues of these hearths came out above the ash [collection] boxes of the two side muffles. Thus the flames went first round the two side muffles, then heated the center one, from where the combustion gases were led out below the furnace, between the two firing hearths. Thanks to this arrangement, the incineration process for the corpses in the side muffles differed from that of the center muffle.
Anything wrong with this description, oh big fat technician?
Claudia
If too many dead bodies
How many would too many be?
Claudiadisturb the stream
How so? See above.
Claudiathe cremation time is reduced.
Reduced? Wonderful! But I think you mean increased. Increased by how much, Claudia? If by a lesser factor than the number of bodies in relation to one body, multiple cremation would still be worth while.
ClaudiaRM: The practice actually was to put the next body or bodies in the muffle before the cremation process of the previous was complete.
Here again - Roberto suck out of his finger.
No, the practice of introducing one body before the incineration of the former one was complete I got from Topf's operating instructions. There is no reason why they should have proceeded differently when doing multiple cremations, and that they actually so did is also suggested by the fact that the men of the Sonderkommando were supposed to charge the muffles every half hour, as stated by Tauber.
ClaudiaThe truth is that the many lie-witnesses tell us they put 3 to 8 bodies into a muffle at one time.
The truth is that, like other Revisionist ramblers, Claudia calls eyewitnesses liars without having demonstrated that they lied. Please quote the exact statements you are referring to, Claudia. And then explain why exactly you consider them lies.
ClaudiaWhy does Roberto know that this means that they worked only overlapping?
Unlike Claudia, I can put two and two together, see above.
So what will it be, Claudia? Will you keep on mouthing about me on a forum from which you know I have been banned, like chickenshit Hargis?
Or will you continue the conversation with me over here?
# 9
So, how did Jonnie react?
Did he address any of the arguments presented in my posts # 7208 and # 7209?
No way, José. I doubt he could if he tried.
Instead he went on rambling, on the thread Roberto Muehlenkamp debunked on 3.5kg of coke cremations about what I wrote back in 2001 in my one post (the following one was retained by the moderator, as shown in my blog article Hannover" Hargis, the coward, threatens when he is safe) on the thread "Claimed cremation patent / 3.5 kg of coke" of the former CODOH discussion forum.
Let's look at what he tells his faithful flock:
HargisTin Foil Hat Roberto Muehlenkamp also makes a claim about an alleged patent (covered in http://forum.codoh.com/codoh/493.html ) which he claims proves the capability of the absurd acrobatic feats of the 1940s Auschwitz-Birkenau crematoriums.
I usually ignore Hargis' cowardly insults from behind an alias (Andrew may want to tell us what the legal implications of such anonymously uttered insults are under US federal law), but this one is funny. For the term tinfoil hatters (and not hats, as Hargis writes) is one of the designations applied to conspiracy theorists, also known as conspiraloons, loonspuds, fruitnjobs, etc. And who would be more a conspiracy theorist than Jonnie Hannover Hargis, who clings to the pious, unshakeable and utterly imbecile belief that the Nazis did not commit any mass murder of Jews during World War II and that the overwhelming evidence to the reality of systematic mass murder was fabricated by some supernaturally powerful conspiracy which, among other highly improbable if not impossible achievements, would have had to fool governments, administrative authorities, criminal justice authorities and historians all over the world over a period of more than six decades (unless, of course, Hargis believes that all these people and entities were/are accomplices to the conspiracy) and induce millions of Jewish non-victims living throughout the world into concealing their origin and/or their identity so it could be claimed that they had been murdered, all that without leaving a shred of evidence to it’s sinister activities behind?
We are faced here with a phenomenon that is often observed among Revisionist true believers: they tend to project their own fallacies onto their opponents.
Now to Hargis' "facts"
Hargis- the patent was for an incinerator not a oven, big difference, you build a fire, let it develop over a period of time (in this case, two days), and then start throwing material in it -- that is, right on the fire to burn
- the crematory ovens at Auschwitz were nothing like this incinerator
Given the conditions under which the crematory ovens at Auschwitz-Birkenau were operated, that's not quite correct, as pointed out in the excerpt from the transcript of day 11 at the Irving-Lipstadt trial, quoted in my previous post on this thread. Emphases in the following are mine:
<11> Q. That document, Professor, is this right, is in its origin
<12> quite unrelated to what went on at Birkenhau?
<13> A. It is quite unrelated you say?
<14> Q. Unrelated.
<15> A. No, its origin is of the fall of 1942 and the ovens in
<16> crematoria 2 and 3 only came into operation in April
<17> 1943. However, the multi-muffle ovens were already used
<18> in crematorium No. 1 since August 1940. So the principle
<19> is the same in the ovens in crematorium 1. So clearly
<20> they are using the principle which has been the experience
<21> that has been gained in crematorium 1 in creating this
<22> patent application. <23> Q. I am grateful. There is no doubt about the authenticity
<24> of this, is there, as an original German document written
<25> by Topf for their patent agents?
<26> A. No, it is registered in whatever the patent ----
. P-162
< 1> Q. How well does that document what we see here on page 540,
< 2> I do not need you to look at them, how well from memory
< 3> does that chime with the descriptions given by the
< 4> eyewitnesses, including Hirst, of how this procedure was
< 5> carried out in practice?
< 6> A. What is very important in the descriptions of the
< 7> sonderkommandos is that they talk about, with a certain
< 8> kind of care, they would bring corpses of people of
< 9> different sizes into the muffles, exactly to -- no,
<10> I cannot say that because they do not actually give that
<11> explanation. But here actually is given an explanation, a
<12> thermodynamical explanation why that would have been done.
<13> Q. I think Tauber was quite specific about it, was he not,
<14> about using fat corpses?
<15> A. Yes.
<16> Q. Indeed on the trial run I think they were given fat
<17> corpses, says Tauber, in March 1943, were they not?
<18> A. I would like to see that thing.
<19> Q. We can look at it later.
<20> MR JUSTICE GRAY: What you quote in your report does not read
<21> like a patent application. Is it a quote from the patent
<22> application?
<23> A. We go to 808 ----
<24> Q. I think you are quoting another author, are you not?
<25> A. No, this is the comment. Sorry.
<26> MR RAMPTON: This is the interpretation.
. P-163
< 1> A. This is the comment written by a number of engineers.
< 2> MR JUSTICE GRAY: It probably does not affect the point.
< 3> MR RAMPTON: My Lord, one can see how they have dealt with it,
< 4> how Topf dealt with in the last paragraph of the quote on
< 5> page 539.
< 6> A. Yes, one of the important lines in that thing, of course,
< 7> is they are actually not incinerating any more, but they
< 8> are literally burning corpses.
< 9> MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes.
<10> MR RAMPTON: The passage from Tauber's evidence or testimony,
<11> call it what you like, is on page 535. At the top: "The
<12> corpses of wasted people with no fat burned rapidly in the
<13> side muffles and slowly in the centre one. Conversely,
<14> the corpses of people gassed directly on arrival not being
<15> wasted burnt better in the centre muffle. During the
<16> incineration of such corpses we used the coke only to
<17> light the fire of the furnace initially, for fatty corpses
<18> burn of their own accord thanks to the combustion of body
<19> fat". It is the same opposite on the previous page in
<20> relation to crematorium 1.
<21> He actually says in relation to crematorium 2
<22> and 3: "I know from the experienced gained by observing
<23> cremation in crematoria 2 and 3 that the bodies of fat
<24> people burned very much faster. The process of
<25> incineration is accelerated by the combustion of human fat
<26> which thus produces additional heat."
Tauber was even more specific in describing the process:
At the beginning of the cremation process. the furnaces were heated only by their fireboxes and the charges burned slowly. Later on, as cremations succeeded one another, the furnaces burned thanks to the embers produced by the combustion of the corpses. So. during the incineration of fat bodies, the fires were generally extinguished. When this type of body was charged into a hot furnace, fat immediately began to flow into the ash bin, where it caught fire and started the combustion of the body. When musulmans were being cremated, it was necessary to constantly refuel the fireboxes.
So what was happening here when bodies with a sufficiently high fat content were burned was not exactly cremation any longer. It was incineration, in that the bodies were burned directly by the flames coming up from the ash bin into which the body fat had dripped. This procedure was not possible when emaciated bodies of so-called musulmans were burned, as Tauber points out. There it was necessary to constantly refuel the fireboxes.
Hargis- this incinerator was never built
- the patent for an incinerator, which was never built, was years after the war
Both is irrelevant. What matters is that the Birkenau ovens were operated in a manner similar to that envisioned by engineer Sander of Topf & Söhne in his patent. As pointed out by van Pelt during the Irving-Lipstadt trial, this patent was based on the experience gained with the operation of the cremation ovens at Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Hargis
- incinerators still require external fuel for burning
Nobody said otherwise. Both incinerators and cremation ovens need fuel, and a lot of it, in order to be brought to a sufficient level of heat. But once that level has been reached, the amount of additional fuel required is rather small. This was stated for a cremation oven in a 1939 patent quoted on day 9 of the Irving-Lipstadt trial, according to the transcript of that day's session. Emphases in the following quote are mine:<16> A. I am going to state a figure and it is from a patent.
<17> I am happy to show you the passage. The big issue in
<18> crematorium design is that you need to get the thing
<19> going, the oven going, and that takes a hell of a lot
<20> energy. So, if you incinerate one body, and this is a
<21> document which is prepared for Dachau in 1939, to cremate
<22> one body in Dachau was 175 kilos of coke, far exceeding
<23> the 30 kilos. However, it says that, by the time you have
<24> started this incinerator, after you have incinerated a
<25> number of bodies, and I will quote the thing, "If the cold
<26> room required 170 kilograms of coke to start up a new
. P-151
< 1> incineration, it needed only 100 kilo if it had been used
< 2> the day before. The second and third incineration on the
< 3> same would not require any extra fuel, thanks to the
< 4> compressed air". Those that followed would call for on
ly < 5> small amounts of extra energy.
< 6> Q. Are you saying that for the cremations on the second and
< 7> third day you would not have to put any coke into the
< 8> machine at all? It would just kind of carry on?
< 9> A. No. If you start incinerating on the second day you can
<10> still use that heat that had built up from the first day.
<11> If you then insert extra bodies in the oven that same day,
<12> after the first one, you only need very little extra fuel.
<13> Q. That is not what the document said. You said it needed
<14> none at all.
<15> A. Then it says only little, the first, second and third, and
<16> then, as you continue, then only very limited amount of
<17> fuel.
Hargis- a patent is not a certification that what it describes will work, the incinerator in question was never built and the claims by Muehlenkamp cannot be shown to actually work, he can show no verifiable example of this incinerator or any example of any cremation process that TODAY (2006) achieves what he ludicrously claims
Cut out the crap, Jonnie. It’s not for me to demonstrate that what becomes apparent from the evidence to mass cremations at Auschwitz-Birkenau was feasible. It is for you, the gibbering rambler who against all logic and common sense challenges that evidence because it goes against his articles of faith, to demonstrate that what is stated in contemporary technical documentation and/or described by eyewitnesses would not have been possible. And you seem very ill-equipped to shoulder that burden of proof.
According to the English language media folder of the German Topf & Söhne exhibition, there were doubts at the time, voiced by none other than his colleague Kurt Prüfer, about whether engineer Sander's invention would actually function. On page 6 of the media folder, we read the following (emphasis is mine):
No form of command or fear of the SS moved the company and the participating employees to act as they did. The Topf & Sons business correspondence testifies to that fact, as does the circumstance that the experts designed gigantic ovens for mass incineration on their own initiative, before their customers ever expressed any such wishes. Surviving letters show that the management regarded its business relations with the SS as an equal partnership and by no means conceived of itself as a mere recipient of orders from above. The company notified the SS of overdue payments and did not shy away from conflict, whether the issue was responsibility for operational failures or the term of guarantee. It was personal ambition which motivated Fritz Sander and Kurt Prüfer to work on developing mass-scale furnaces. Sander, for his part, designed a four-storey "Continuous-Operation Corpse Incineration Oven for Mass Use" in which thousands of human beings could have been burned every day. Having been loaded in at the top, the corpses would slide down on slanted grates from one storey to the next, being first heated and then set on fire by the already burning corpses below. Following a heating period of two days at the most, the oven could thus be kept running without the further introduction of fuel. On Sander's request, the Topf brothers applied to have this facility patented. Prüfer questioned the operability of the construction, assuming that corpse parts would stick to the grates and clog the oven. And he offered an alternative, a "Ring Cremation Oven" based on tile production techniques. The construction of Prüfers design never actually commenced, although the SS undertook preparations for it in 1943. According to testimony by the former commander of Auschwitz Rudolf Hoess, the project was resumed in 1944, but again not carried to completion, now on account of the advancing battlefront.
So while there were doubts about whether Sanders invention would actually function in practice, Prüfer's system of multi-muffle ovens and multiple cremations seems to have worked well enough for the SS to seriously consider acquiring the Ring Cremation Oven he had developed as an alternative to Sander's solution. The only reason why this was not implemented was the proximity of the advancing battlefront in 1944. According to the notes of Auschwitz camp commandant Rudolf Höss made in the sequence of his pre-trial interrogations in Poland, the capacity of this Ring Cremation Oven was to exceed that of all existing installations together:
Eine später noch beabsichtigte, die im Bau befindlichen bei weitem übertreffende Anlage kam nicht mehr zur Durchführung, da im Herbst 1944 der RFSS die sofortige Einstellung der Juden-Vernichtung befahl.
My translation:
A further installation planned later on, which by far exceeded those under construction, was no longer executed because in the autumn of 1944 the RFSS [= Himmler - RM] ordered the immediate stop of the extermination of the Jews.
Last but not least:
Hargis- the dimensions of the Auschwitz crematory ovens would not allow for the multiple cremations as claimed
This you'll have to explain to me, Jonnie. According to Prüfer's statement at his interrogation by Soviet counterintelligence on 5 March 1946 (see Graf's translation from Russian to German, which, as mentioned in my post # 7208 on this thread, is not always correct), the openings of the muffles had the measurements 0.70 x 0.70 meters, and the muffles were two meters long. According to Tauber,
The dimensions of the door and the opening of the muffles were smaller than the inside of the muffle itself, which was 2 meters long, 80 cm wide and about 1 meter high.
So the area of the muffles inside was 0.8 x 1 = 0.8 square meters, and the volume was 0.8 x 2 = 1.6 cubic meters. Please tell us, Jonnie, how many bodies, especially of women and children, can fit into an area of 0.8 square meters and a volume of 1.6 cubic meters (I'm not saying that they were all introduced through the opening at the same time, of course, and neither did Tauber)? I'm told that 8 persons per square meter is a standard density in the Tokyo subway during rush-hour. So let's have your calculations, Jonnie.
Ah, and please explain why, if multiple cremations were not possible, Sander wrote the following to the management of Topf & Söhne on 14 September 1942 (from my post # 7208 on this thread):
The high demand of incineration ovens for concentration camps - which lately has shown especially in what concerns Auschwitz, and which according to Mr. Pruefer's report again led to an order of 7 three-muffle ovens - led me to examine the question whether the current oven system with muffle for the above-mentioned entities is the right thing. In my opinion things don't go fast enough in the muffle ovens to remove a huge number of corpses within a desirably short time. Thus one helps out with a multitude of ovens or muffles and stuffing full the individual muffle with several corpses[emphasis - RM], without thereby solving the basic source [of the problem], i.e. the deficiencies of the muffle system.
Just keep the bullshit coming, Jonnie. I’m loving it.
# 10
Meanwhile, I see that Mr. Bergmann has also started mouthing off about me, in his posts of Wed Oct 04, 2006 6:34 pm and Thu Oct 05, 2006 4:49 am (he seems to be having a sleepless night) on the thread Roberto Muehlenkamp debunked on 3.5kg of coke cremations.
The contentions in his latter post about Prüfer's statement towards SMERSH were already addressed in my post # 7208 on this thread.
As to van Pelts 3.5 kg of coke, the underlying calculations are based on the assumption that the coke consumption calculations in Jährling’s memorandum of 17.03.1943 were made having in mind the capacity figures mentioned in the Auschwitz construction offices' letter to the WVHA dated 28.06.1943. This is hardly a given, already because the former document was produced more than three months before the latter and at a time when none of the new Birkenau ovens had yet been commissioned.
But there is no room for doubt, considering i.a. the fact that this was common practice at Auschwitz-Birkenau in September 1942 already, that Jährling had multiple cremations in mind when he made his calculations. In my post # 5999 on this forum, the pertinent parts of which are quoted hereafter, I have demonstrated that the coke deliveries to Auschwitz-Birkenau documented for the period between March 15 and October 25, 1943 are compatible with the number of deportees that historical research established to have been gassed and cremated at the camp during that period, even without considering the evidence to open-air incinerations being used as well, mentioned in Nick Terry's blog article Open-Air Cremations in Auschwitz, August 1943.
One key part of the article by Mattogno & Deana under http://www.vho.org/GB/Books/dth/fndcrema.html#ftnref127 , so warmly recommended by Claudia, is the discussion of coke consumption according to Jährling's memorandum of 17 March 1943 and the possibility of saving time and fuel through multiple cremations. At the end of section 5.4 of that article, the following is stated:The reduction of coke consumption during 12 hours of activity by 1/3 from 4,200 to 2,800 kg means that during discontinuous cremations, (4,200 - 2,800 =) 1,400 kg of coke were necessary to reheat the five ovens,[130] whereas the remaining 2,800 kg were used for the actual cremations. This results in the following figures:
availability of coke per oven
availability of coke per muffle
coke consumption per muffle during continuous operation
triple-muffle oven
70 kg/h
23.3 kg/h
15.5 kg/h
eight-muffle oven
140 kg/h
17.5 kg/h
11.7 kg/h
These data are almost identical to those calculated above for normal corpses[131] and confirm the accuracy of our heat balance calculations for both the triple- and the eight-muffle ovens.
So the triple-muffle ovens of Birkenau crematoria II and III used 15.5 kg of coke per hour in continuous operation, according to Jährling's memo of 17 March 1943. This means that if more than one corpse per hour could be burned in those ovens, Mattogno's contentions regarding coke consumption and the incompatibility of coke deliveries in 1943 with the number of deportees known to have been gassed at Auschwitz-Birkenau in that year goes down the drain.
This, in turn, means that Mattogno must demonstrate that multiple burning of corpses in the Birkenau crematoria would either have been impossible or meant no savings of time and fuel.
The first he doesnt even try; for the second his key arguments are data relating to
A. the crematorium of the transit camp for Jewish deportees at Westerbork, Netherlands;
B. animal carcass incineration ovens produced by Kori, a competitor of Topf & Söhne.
Let us first look at the second set of data. Mattogno shows a table with figures relating to:
1: type of oven
2: maximum load of the oven
3: relative consumption of fossil carbon[157]
4: duration of combustion process
5: quantity of fossil carbon required to incinerate 1 kg of organic substance
6: time required to incinerate 1 kg of organic substance
7: quantity of organic substance incinerated in 1 min. (in kg)
The maximum loads range from 250 kg to 900 kg, the times from 5 hours for 250 kg to 13.5 hours for 900 kg. Two things become clearly apparent from this table:
1. Incineration time always increases by a proportion lower than the increase of the weight load to be burned;
2. The greater the increase in weight load, the greater the gap between the weight load increase factor and the incineration time increase factor.
This will be illustrated in the following tables:
Table 1
Kori Oven_Maximum load kg_Increase % load_Incineration time hours_Increase % incineration time
1a_250_0%_5.00_0%
1b_310_24%_6.00_20%
2a_370_19%_7.00_17%
2b_450_22%_8.00_14%
3a_540_20%_9.50_19%
3b_650_20%_10.50_11%
4a_750_15%_12.00_14%
4b_900_20%_13.50_13%
Table 2
Kori ovens compared_(a) Load increase factor_(b) Incineration time increase factor_Relation (b) ./. (a)
4b / 1a_3.60_2.70_0.75
4 b / 1b_2.90_2.25_0.78
4b / 2a_2.43_1.93_0.79
4 b / 2b_2.00_1.69_0.84
4 b / 3a_1.67_1.42_0.85
4b / 3b_1.38_1.29_0.93
4b / 4a_1.20_1.13_0.94
Both tables clearly show that incineration time never increases by the same factor as the weight load to be incinerated, and table 2 furthermore shows that the relation between incineration load increase and incineration time increase diminishes as the incineration load increases. Oven 4b has a maximum load 2.9 times higher than oven 1b, yet it doesn't take 2.9 times longer to incinerate this higher load, but only 2.25 times longer. Oven 4b has a maximum load 3.6 times higher than oven 1a, yet it doesn’t take 3.6 times longer to incinerate the higher load, but only 2.7 times longer. The relation between incineration time increase and incineration load increase in the last of these comparisons is 0.75, as it would be if the incineration time went up by a factor of 3 when the incineration load goes up by a factor of 4. The progression of this relationship suggests that if the increase factor of the incineration load were higher than 3.6, the relation between the incineration time increase factor and the incineration load increase factor would be even lower than 0.75, but as I have no corresponding data, I will in the following operate with a relation of 0.75 and assume that a fourfold increase of the incineration load leads to only a threefold increase of the incineration time. Applied to the Birkenau ovens, this would mean that if 4 dead bodies weighing 70 kg each were incinerated in a muffle instead of one, the incineration time would go up by a factor of 3, and not by a factor of 4 as would correspond to Mattogno's thesis.
Mattognos claim that the incineration time in a cremation oven will increase by exactly the same factor as the incineration load is based on ignoring the above-shown progression that can be read from his data about the Kori ovens and instead making an unjustified assumption on the basis of just two data from the Westerbork cremation ovens:
7.2.2. The Experiences of the Westerbork Crematorium
The experiences from the consecutive cremations in Westerbork confirm this conclusion. As indicated in chapter 6.3., the corpses of two adults were never cremated together in this crematorium. The only kind of simultaneous cremation was that of an adult corpse together with the corpse of a baby. As shown, this prolonged the average cremation time by 14% (from 50 to 57 minutes), which is at least equal to, if nor considerably more than, the percentage as the baby's weight compared to that of the adult (5-10 kg 70 kg = 7-14%). This indicates that the simultaneous cremation of two adults would have at least doubled the duration of the cremation.
There is an obvious reason why the cremation of a baby together with an adult in the Westerbork crematorium prolonged the average cremation time by a percentage at least equal to the proportion of the baby's weight compared to that of the adult, which Mattogno ignored. The adult, as Mattogno mentions in section 6.3 of his article, had an average age of 70 years, and the bodies of infants hold a higher proportion of water than the bodies of adults and a much higher proportion of water than the bodies of elderly people. Under http://www.seps.org/oracle/oracle.archive/Life_Science.Biochem/2001.06/000991410254.7589.html we read the following:[...]Several physiology texts place average young men at 60% water, and young women at 50% water, the difference due to relatively more fat in females. Thus, a 70 kg young man has about 42 kg (or 42 liters) or water. With age fat increases and muscle decreases, so that in old age the body may contain only 45% water. Infants, by contrast, average 73% or more.[my emphasis - RM][...]
The following two tables visualize these data:
Table 3
Item_Weight kg_Water kg
(a) Old man_70_32
(b) Infant 5kg_5_4
( c ) Sum (a) + (b)_75_35
(d) = relation (b) ./ (d)_7%_10%
Table 4
Item_Weight kg_Water kg
(a) Old man_70_32
(b) Infant 10 kg_10_7
( c ) Sum (a) + (b)_80_39
(d) = relation (b) ./ (d)_14%_23%
In Table 3 the infant has 7 % of the total weight of the cremation load but 10 % of the water. In Table 4 the infant has 14 % of the total weight of the cremation load but 23 % of the water. As a corpse's water content obviously has some influence on the time it takes for the oven to evaporate the water and hence on the cremation time, this shows that Mattogno's conclusion is wrong. In failing to take into account the difference between an infant's body and an elderly mans body, and in furthermore failing to observe the relation between incineration time increase and incineration load increase according to the data in his Kori table, Mattogno twice failed to take into account evidence contradicting his desired conclusion, a highly unscientific proceeding.
A fourfold increase of the cremation load in the Birkenau ovens, which can be assumed to have led to a threefold increase of the cremation time according to the data discussed above, did not necessarily mean an only fourfold increase in the number of bodies. It could result from inserting into a muffle the bodies of four adult men with an average weight of 70 kg each (which would be a rather rare case), or it could (rather frequently) result from inserting into a muffle the bodies of a much higher number of adult men, women and infants, as exemplified in the table hereafter:
Table 5
Item_Weight kg
Corpse # 1: adult male_70
Corpse # 2: woman_50
Corpes # 3 child_10
Corpse # 4 child_10
Corpes # 5 woman_50
Corpse # 6 child_10
Corpse # 7 child_10
Corpse # 8 woman_50
Corpse # 9 child_10
Corpse # 10 child_10
Total weight_280
The total weight of 280 kg is four times the weight of an adult man of 70 kg, corresponding to 3 times the incineration time according to my above conclusions. Yet the number of bodies incinerated has increased not by a factor of 4, but by a factor of 10. So if one adult man weighing 70 kg could be incinerated in a muffle of the Birkenau ovens within an hour, a group of ten people roughly representing the population of the Birkenau gas chambers, which consisted largely if not mostly of children and women with children deemed unsuitable for working, could be incinerated within 3 hours, distributed into two or three incineration batches. 10 bodies within three hours gives an average of 3.33 bodies per hour. If we divide the coke amount per muffle of crematoria II and III calculated by Mattogno on the basis of Jährling's memorandum (15.5 kg) by this average, we get an average coke consumption of 4.65 kg per incinerated body. This is lower than the average of 5.20 kg of coke per body incinerated that results from dividing the 607 tons = 607,000 kg of coke delivered at Auschwitz-Birkenau between March 15 and October 25, 1943 by the 116,800 people gassed in the Birkenau crematoria in that period according to Danuta Czech's Calendarium (see section 10.2 of Mattogno's article).
An additional time saving factor that has not yet been taken into account in the above may have resulted from the practice, in accordance with the operating instructions for the Topf three-muffle ovens, of introducing the next load into the muffle before the previous load had been fully consumed by the fire, after the falling of the corpse parts from the incineration grid into the ash bin freed space in the muffle for the next load. Mattogno tried to exclude this by claiming, on the basis of cremation experiments made by R. Kessler in 1927, that the time for the remains of an incineration load dropping through the grating into the ash chamber was necessarily longer than 55 minutes, 55 minutes being the time that the main combustion process had taken in Kessler's experiments (see section 6.2 of Mattognos article). However, Mattognos argumentation in this sense is somewhat less than convincing, for the only indication he can offer that the body was still in the muffle after 55 minutes in Kessler's experiments is the increase of the muffle temperature to almost 900 C (1652 F). That this need not have been so is shown by the statement in the operating instructions for the Topf three-muffle ovens (see under http://www.mazal.org/Pressac/Pressac0222.htm ), according to which the temperature in the oven rises after each incineration. Incineration in the sense of the operating instructions obviously includes the after-burning of the remains after they have dropped through the grating, for only after that the ash is placed into the ash container and put aside for cooling. If, as the reference in the Topf operating instructions to the rising of the temperature after each incineration suggests, we assume that the point of highest temperature in Kessler's experiments coincides with the end of the after-burning process according to the Topf operating instructions, then the 20 minutes of after-burning mentioned in these instructions must be considered as included in the 55 minutes of Kessler's main combustion process, which means that the time until the remains dropped through the grating was only 35 minutes.
This time, 35 minutes, is in line with the deposition of Henryk Tauber presented in Pressac’s Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers, see under http://www.mazal.org/Pressac/Pressac0489.htm :
[...][Later on,] in continuous operation, we could burn two charges per hour. According to the regulations. we were supposed to charge the muffles every half hour.[my emphasis RM][...]
It is also in line with the statement of a participant in a 1975 conference of the British Cremation Society, omitted by Mattogno but quoted in John Zimmermans article Body Disposal at Auschwitz under http://www.holocaust-history.org/auschwitz/body-disposal/ , according to which most of the burning in a cremation muffle occurs within the first half hour and not much is left of the body after that time:
After about half an hour, whether the furnace has gotten up to a temperature of 1100C or whether it is 900C, there is a rapid fall away, and I think the investigations should be concerned with the last twenty minutes or so of the cremation cycle. At that time you have in the cremator a very small quantity of body material...roughly the size of a rugby football, about twenty minutes from the end of the cremation, and this is the thing which is most difficult to remove.
Emphases in the above quote are mine.
It seems plausible to assume that this factor, of each load being introduced roughly half an hour after the previous one, while that was still completing its combustion process, added to the multiplying factor resulting from the specific composition of the population gassed and burned in the Birkenau gas chambers (largely if not mostly women and children), and to the discrepancy between load increase and incineration time increase discussed above, in making it possible to incinerate as many as 4 corpses of the representative population of the Birkenau gas chambers per muffle and hour in Birkenau crematoria II and III. This is the average that becomes apparent from the figures in the letter sent on June 28, 1943 by SS-Sturmbannführer Bischoff, the Chief of the Auschwitz Central Construction Office, to SS-Brigadeführer Kammler, the Chief of the Economic-Administrative Main Office Amtsgruppe C. (see section 6.1 of Mattognos article). It also seems to have been planned by the Auschwitz Central Construction Office as early as 30 October 1941, according to Pressac (See under http://www.mazal.org/Pressac/Pressac0244.htm : The fact is that Krematorium II (and hence also III) was planned as early as 30th October 1941 to incinerate 60 corpses per hour.. In Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers, Pressac proclaimed the figures stated in the document of 28 June 1943 to be unrealistic; in his later book about the Crematoria of Auschwitz, he revised his position stating that, although mendacious and propagandistic, these figures were valid due to the multiplying factor resulting from the fact that e.g. a woman weighing 50 kg and two infants weighing 10 kg each make up the same cremation load as an average adult male weighing 70 kg). The latter makes it seem plausible that Jährling had a throughput of this order in mind when making the calculations for his memorandum of 17 March 1943, as do two documents that will be discussed in more detail hereafter.
Mattogno makes much of statements made by Topf engineers Schultze and Prüfer during their interrogation by the Soviet counter-espionage service Smersh in March 1946 (see section 6.6 of Mattognos article), according to which the three-muffle ovens of Birkenau could incinerate one body per muffle per hour. However, there are at least two documents besides the above-mentioned Bischoff letter warranting the assumption that these statements were deliberately false and meant to play down the incineration capacity of the ovens and thus the participation of the suspects in the mass murder at Birkenau.
One is a file note dated 8 September 1942, written by Kurt Prüfer and shown under http://www.holocaust-history.org/auschwitz/topf/ , in which Prüfer takes note of a conversation with an Obersturmführer Krone whom he told, among other things, that the five three-muffle ovens under construction at that time had a daily capacity of 800. Assuming that a day meant 24 hours, this would correspond to an average of 2.22 bodies per hour per muffle. It is unlikely that this statement was mere commercial propaganda, as Mattogno may want to claim, for Prüfer was talking about a product that had already been ordered by the customer and would have been one lousy salesman if he had stated a capacity higher than he considered feasible, thus reducing his customer's motivations for further orders (why order more when what you have is sufficient to do the job?) and exposing his company to warranty claims for his products lacking a stated characteristic.
The other document is a letter by engineer Fritz Sander to the management of Topf & Söhne dated 14.09.1942, the first page of which is shown on the website of a German exhibition about the company Topf & Söhne under http://www.topfundsoehne.de/.
TranscriptionAn J.A. Topf & Söhne
Abteilung Geschäftsleitung
Unser Zeichen: D/Sa/hes. Erfurt, den 14.9.1942
In Sachen: Einäscherungs-öfen für Konzentrationslager
Betrifft: Neukonstruktion.
Der starke Bedarf an Einäscherungs-Öfen für Konzentrationslager, der in letzter Zeit besonders deutlich für Auschwitz in Erscheinung getreten ist, und der laut Bericht des Herrn Prüfer wieder zu einer Bestellung aus 7 Stck Dreimuffell-Öfen führte veranlasste mich zu einer Prüfung der Frage, ob das bisherige Ofensystem mit Muffel für obengenannte Stellen das richtige ist. Meiner Ansicht nach geht in den Muffel-Öfen die Einäscherung nicht schnell genug vor sich, um eine grosse Anzahl von Leichen in wünschenswert kurzer Zeit zu beseitigen. Man hilft sich also mit einer Vielzahl von Öfen bzw. Muffeln und mit einem Vollstopfen der einzelnen Muffel mit mehreren Leichen, ohne aber damit die Grundursache, nämlich die Mängel des Muffelsystems, zu beheben.
Diese Mängel der Muffel-Öfen, die auch durch Zusammensetzung zu Vielmuffel-Öfen (Drei- bzw. Acht-Muffelöfen) und durch das gleichzeitige Belegen der einzelnen Muffeln mit mehreren Leichen nicht aufgehoben werden, sind m.E. folgende:
1.) Ununterbrochener Betrieb
Jede Muffel muss in bestimmten Zeiträumen neu gefüllt, gereinigt, dann wieder gefüllt und wieder gereinigt werden, und so setzt sich das Spiel während der Dauer des Ofenbetriebs fort. Zu jedem Spiel muss jedesmal die vordere Einführtür geöffnet und die Leichen müssen von vorn durch diese Tür in die Muffel eingeschoben werden. Während der Dauer dieser Handlung zieht kalte Luft in die Öfen ein, kühlt die Muffel ab, was die Haltbarkeit dieser herabsetzt, und verursacht ausserdem Wärmeverluste, die jedesmal durch erhöhten Brennstoff-Aufwand ersetzt werden mssen.
2.) Schwierigkeiten der Einführung.
Es ist jedenfalls eine harte und unangenehme Arbeit, die Leichen in der Längs-
b.w.
Translation:
To J.A. Topf & Söhne
Section Management
Our reference: D/Sa/hes. Erfurt, 14.9.1942
Subject: Incineration Ovens for Concentration Camps
Issue: New Construction.
The high demand of incineration ovens for concentration camps which lately has shown especially in what concerns Auschwitz, and which according to Mr. Prüfer's report again led to an order of 7 three-muffle ovens, led me to examine the question whether the current oven sytem with muffle for the above-mentioned entities is the right thing. In my opinion things don't go fast enough in the muffle ovens to remove a huge number of corpses within a desirably short time. Thus one helps out with a multitude of ovens or muffles and by stuffing full the individual muffle with several corpses, without thereby solving the basic source [of the problem], i.e. the deficiencies of the muffle system.
These deficiencies of the muffle ovens, which can neither be removed by putting them together to multi-muffle ovens (three- or eight-muffle ovens) and by the simultaneous filling of the individual muffle with several corpses, are the following, in my opinion:
1.) Uninterrupted Operation
Each muffle must at certain intervals be newly filled, cleaned, then filled again and then cleaned again, and this game goes on throughout the duration of the oven's operation. For each game the front introduction door must be opened and the corpses must be introduced from the front into the muffle through this door. While this action lasts cold air enters the ovens, cools the muffle, which reduces its durability, and furthermore causes heat losses which must be replaced by increased fuel usage every time.
2.) Difficulties of introduction.
It is at any rate a hard and unpleasant job to introduce the corpses in the length-
please turn page
What this document shows is that, at the time it was written, filling a cremation oven's individual muffle with corpses was standard procedure in cremation at Auschwitz, and that this was done as a means to speed up incineration in order to remove a huge number of corpses within a desirably short time. It goes without saying that this procedure would not have been adopted or soon have been abandoned if, as Mattogno claims, it had brought no savings in terms of time and/or fuel consumption.
Thus it can be concluded that:
Mattogno's assumptions and conclusions about incineration time and fuel consumption at the Birkenau crematoria are wrong;
It was possible to incinerate 3 to 4 dead bodies from among the representative population of the Birkenau gas chambers per hour and muffle in the Birkenau crematoria;
The fuel consumption for these incinerations can be assumed to have been in line with the documented coke deliveries at Auschwitz-Birkenau between between March 15 and October 25, 1943.
With this I conclude my discussion of what I consider one of the key parts of Mattognos article about the crematoria of Auschwitz-Birkenau.
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