“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.”
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 .
it's always abstract arithmetic that they resort to at the first opportunity, i'm not sure if he really believes that arithmetic can be used to prove an act of forgery
ReplyDeleteI find Mattogno especially likes to go to the abstract arithmetic because the available Auschwitz documentation is so detrimental to his case he’d just prefer it doesn’t exist
DeleteMore from that article about his view at the time:
ReplyDelete"Ingenieur M. Gerner, in the article referred to above, has tried to solve the problem by adducing an interpretation which in my judgment cannot be separated from the general formulation because it starts with the assumption that the 28 June 1943 letter is a "Fälschung" (fake), though eventually, as shall be explained shortly, it cannot be anything else but a Verfälschung" (a fraudently altering) of an original document."
Gerner was of course Rudolf. However, it seems to be a mistranslation. In the German version: "so werde ich hier aufzeigen, daß es sich bei diesem Dokument allerhöchstens um die (betrügerische) Verfälschung eines echten Dokuments handeln kann".
That is, it is *at most* a fraudulent altering of an authentic document, that is, for Mattogno at that time even that fakery hypothesis was merely a border possibility. He clearly leaned towards authenticity.
It should be mentioned that Mattogno provides a confirmation of authenticity: he found that the person who likely typed this document was Nestripke, who would have been dictated to by Janisch (while Irving claimed that no person named "Ne." was on the Auschwitz lists).
The most important element that is missing above, but maybe will be mentioned later, is that this document is a carbon copy for the files, not the sent original (hence no sig), and the distribution list, common for such copies, was corrected (meaning this is not some mistaken carbon 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.