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. A surviving German directive confirms exactly this. On 15 March 1945, Gauleiter Sprenger ordered:

“All files, particularly the secret ones, are to be destroyed completely. The secret files about the installations and deterring work in the concentration camps must be destroyed at all costs. These files must under no circumstances fall into the hands of the enemy, since after all they were secret orders by the Fuhrer.” (D-728, Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression, Vol. 7, p. 175.)

That direct order demanding the destruction of concentration camp records answers the question plainly. 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.