Nazi gas chambers

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Sergey Romanov
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#166

Post by Sergey Romanov » 16 Jun 2004, 19:57

As for showers, van Pelt has this to say about them:

http://www.holocaust-history.org/irving ... eads.shtml
Re: C. Dummy Shower Heads (18-27)

Mr. Justice Gray included in his Judgment a reference to the eyewitness evidence of Yehuda Bacon.
7.51 Another was Yehuda Bacon, an Israeli artist, who at Auschwitz had been employed to take papers to the crematoria for burning. Consequently he had entered the crematoria and had seen the gas chamber. In the summer of 1945 he drew illustrations of Auschwitz which he produced in the course of his evidence. The drawings depicted the inside of gas chambers, including the dummy shower heads and the mesh columns used to insert the Zyklon-B into the gas chamber. He also described how the gas chambers were ventilated after the gassings. Bacon's evidence included a description of how the corpses were put on to a lift which raised them up to the incinerators. Van Pelt relied on the evidence of Bacon that, when it was cold the head of the Sonderkommando would let them warm up in the gas chambers and undressing rooms when they were not in use. He argues that this evidence refute Leuchter's contention that the temperature in the gas chambers was so low that there would have been condensed liquid hydrogen cyanide on the walls had it been used.

Ignoring the point of central importance in Bacon's description of the gas chamber - the wire mesh columns used to introduce Zyklon B into the gas chamber and the ventilation system used to extract the hydrogen cyanide after the gassing - Rudolf focussed on the (compared to the gas columns and ventilation system) relatively unimportant fake showers created to hoodwink the victims to introduce an argument that seeks to establish that the showers in morgue 1 of crematoria 2 and 3 were not dummies, but real. His aim, of course, is to show that the presence of real showers would indicate that the morgues had not been transformed into gas chambers.

Rudolf bases his argument on an unexecuted project, developed and abandoned in May 1943, to use the heat generated in the waste incinerator of crematorium 3, which was under construction at that time, to heat water that could be used for showers to be located in the "undressing room" of Crematorium 3. In order to understand this project, it is important to establish the historical context. Both in my book Auschwitz: 1270 to the Present (1996), and in the expert report I submitted for the original trial, I stressed that Auschwitz had a tangled, complex and confused history shaped by often contingent circumstances and evolving ambitions. I distinguished ten different and seemingly contrary functions during the almost 57 months of the camp's existence. Each of these functions has their own political, institutional and financial context. They often were at cross-purposes, at times parallel without interfering with one another, and at times these functions converged.

A function that became important in the Spring of 1943, just at the time that the four crematoria came into operation, was the use of the camp as a forced labour pool for various German factories built in the surrounding region. After the massive military losses in the summer of 1943, the German army had begun to draft every last German male and the armament industry pressed every available "free" person into its factories. Slaves were needed for other industrial work as well as in the coal mines, and the SS negotiated with numerous businesses to create and maintain in the Auschwitz area a system of 27 satellite camps located on industrial sites. In return for the forced labour of the inmates, the SS received an income which generated a profit of around two million RM per month.

Marginally interested in preserving their inmate investment, Birkenau was to become a service station for the outlying posts which were too small to maintain hospitals. One camp section under construction, BA III, was to host two quarantine camps, and two hospital camps. Thus in the Spring of 1943 the issue of hygiene had become important because the inmates who were considered fit for work had acquired a monetary value. This led to the construction of a new delousing/shower building that was to be known as the Central Sauna. The problem was that in the Spring of 1943 the need to improve the hygienic situation in Birkenau was urgent, while the Sauna was only to be completed in eight months time. The proposal to adapt one space in crematorium 3, the undressing room, for that purpose offered a quick temporary solution to the problem.

The proposal made sense, as it appeared in May 1943 that Auschwitz was about to be equipped with an overcapacity in killing installations. In our book, Dwork and I commented on this as follows:
The four new crematoria came into operation after the Holocaust itself had peaked. The Judeocide had begun in 1941, and the Germans killed some 1.1 million Jews that year. In 1942 they murdered another 2.7 million Jews, of whom approximately 200,000 died in Auschwitz. The year the crematoria of Auschwitz came into operation the number of victims dropped to 500,000, half of whom were killed in Auschwitz. All the Jews whom the Germans had been able to catch easily had been trapped. By the end of 1943 the Germans closed down the death camps built specifically to exterminate Jews: Kulmhof (150,000 Jews), Sobibor (200,000 Jews), Belzec (550,000 Jews), and Treblinka (750,000 Jews).

A more detailed analysis of deportations to Auschwitz shows that, indeed, the crematoria, planned and ordered shortly after the policy to kill all Jews had expanded to include all of Europe's Jews, only had become available when the number of transports arriving in Auschwitz began to dwindle. According to table D in Franciszek Piper's classic study Die Zahl der Opfer von Auschwitz (1993), the transports had gone down from a high of over 57,000 in January 1943 to 28,000 in April to a little over 16,000 in May. By the end of the year the average number of monthly arrivals was around 10,000, and in early 1944 it dropped even below that.

In the Spring of 1943 there was not only a significant downturn in the number of Jewish deportees arriving in Auschwitz, but also the mortality of registered prisoners in Auschwitz decreased dramatically. We have no figures for May. But in a letter to Himmler written on September 30, 1943, Oswald Pohl reported that in July 1943 the mortality in the men's camp in Auschwitz had reached a little under 3% (or 1,442 men) and in the women's camp a little over 5% (or 938 women). 16 The average mortality rate in Auschwitz was 3.7%. With that the mortality rate in Auschwitz was some 60% higher than the average mortality in the concentration camp system, which was 2.23 that month. While we can only speculate as to the proportion of the mortality in Auschwitz to that of the concentration camp system as a whole in May, we may for the sake of argument assume that it would have had more or less the same ratio. In May the mortality in the concentration camp system as a whole was 2.8%, thus it is possible that the Auschwitz figure would have been around 4.2%. In May 1943 the total inmate population of Auschwitz was 50,000. Hence it is likely that the monthly mortality was between 2,000 and 2,500. If we add to this figure some 12,000 Jews who would have been killed on arrival (75% of the 16,000 deportees), the total need for incineration capacity that month would have been around 15,000.

In May 1943 three crematoria were operational in Birkenau: 2, 4 and 5. According to a German document they had a total incineration capacity of (1,440 + 768 + 768 = ) 2,976 corpses per day, or close to 90,000 corpses per month - that is six times the capacity actually needed to take care of the corpses of those who had died a "natural" death and those who had been murdered. Thus in May 1943 it appeared that crematorium 3, under construction at that moment, was to have little use, as the completed crematoria 2, 4 and 5 had more than enough capacity for whatever Jews could be expected.

An added factor is that in May 1943 it also had become clear that the Hungarians were not going to hand the Germans their more than 800,000 Jews. In April, during their meeting in Klessheim Castle, Horthy had refused Hitler's request to deport Hungary's Jews. A popular contemporary summary of that interview held that Horthy told Hitler, "They may be lousy Jews, but they are our lousy Jews." 17 As Goebbels' diary entry of May 8, 1943 reveals, the Germans realised they were not going to succeed. "Horthy himself . . . will continue to resist every effort to tackle the Jewish problem aggressively." 18 With little prospect to receive Hungarian transports, the massive overcapacity of crematoria had become almost an embarrassment, and hence it made absolute sense to find some alternative purpose for crematorium 3, which was to be completed a month later.

There is no evidence that the proposal to use the heat generated by the waste incinerator to warm water for 100 showers in the undressing room of crematorium 3 was ever realized. And, with the exception of a drawing that Topf sent on June 5 in response of a request made on May 14, there is no trace of the proposal which was initiated on May 12 after May 16. As Rudolf observes (p. 23), Bischoff writes in June 1943 the project had been dropped. In response to a question "are the exhaust gasses utilized?" on a questionnaire concerning the crematoria, Bischoff responded: "planned but not carried out."

Indeed, in June the Central Construction Office would have had second thoughts about giving crematorium 3 another purpose: on May 18 crematorium 4 was taken out of commission for repairs, and four days later, on May 22, crematorium 2 was shut down also. Obviously crematorium 3 was to be needed as a killing installation.

When crematorium 3 was completed and transferred to the camp on June 24, 1943, an inventory that was added as an appendix to the official transfer document notes, however, that morgue 1 of that building contained 14 showers. The question, now, is whether and if so how these 14 showers relate to the abandoned project to install 100 showers in morgue 2 - the undressing room. Can they be explained by reference to the plan of middle May? And if so, does their presence mean that morgue 1 of crematorium 3 was not used as a gas chamber?

Let us first look at the inventory of crematorium 3 in greater detail. The first thing that must be noted is that it is not a complete inventory: we know through comparison with other transfer documents (such as the transfer document of crematorium 2 of March 31, 1943) that the main document contained the major inventory, and the appendix only subsidiary items. The problem is that the page that mentions the major items did not survive. But the page that does survive gives nevertheless some important clues as to the use of morgue 1. It records that this room was equipped with a gasdichte tür, a gas-tight door. From a letter dated March 31, 1943, and signed by the Chief Architect of Auschwitz, Karl Bischoff, we know that this gas-tight door was similar to the gas-tight door of crematorium 2, that is a door "with a spy-hole made of double 8mm glass with a rubber seal and metal fitting." Bischoff stressed in his letter of March 31 that his order for that door was "very urgent." 19 Why would a shower room urgently need a gas-tight door, with a spy-hole of double 8 mm glass with a rubber seal and a metal fitting?

Let us now try to reconstruct the sequence of events that connects the letter of March 31 to the inventory of June 24. It seems that in March 1943 the Auschwitz SS tried to complete crematorium 3 with a sense of urgency as, at that time, there was still a belief that in the near future the more than 800,000 Hungarian Jews would be deported to Auschwitz - as many of them were, in the end, in the Spring and Summer of 1944. At that time, the Auschwitz SS intended crematorium 3 to be equipped, like its just completed twin crematorium 2, with an undressing room and a gas chamber equipped with a gas-tight door with a spy-hole. Then, in April 1943, Hitler was unable to convince Horthy to surrender the Hungarian Jews, and transports to Auschwitz began to decrease, while crematoria 4 and 5 were brought into operation, creating a massive killing and incineration capacity. At the same time Birkenau was assigned a new function to service the new satellite camps, and serious measures were contemplated to improve hygienic conditions so that the camp could fulfill its contractual obligations to the various civilian companies that were to use the labour of the inmates. Realizing that there was no need for crematorium 3 to serve as a killing station - crematoria 2, 4 and 5 had more than sufficient capacity at that time - it appears that the Auschwitz SS contemplated to use the basement of the not-yet completed crematorium 3 as a shower facility for the inmates. The Central Construction Office decided to install in the now obsolete undressing room 100 showers, to be supplied with hot water generated by the waste incinerator, and probably an unknown number of showers in the other basement room, which had been intended as a gas chamber, and which was therefore supplied with a gas-tight door. These showers were probably cold-water showers, not to use the water heated by the waste incinerator. The reason that the spaces originally designed as basement morgues and later planned to be an undressing room and a gas chamber invited such a transformation was the presence of six drains in the floor of the undressing room and four drains in the floor of the gas chamber.

Then, as May progressed, crematoria 2 and 4 broke down, and it became clear that crematorium 3 would be needed as a killing installation after all. The project to install the 100 hot-water showers in the undressing room was therefore abandoned, but it is possible that the gas chamber had already been equipped with 14 of the unknown number of cold-water showers, and as these could be useful in serving the needs of the Sonderkommandos living in the building, they were left in place, and therefore duly recorded when, in late June 1943, the crematorium was transferred to the camp. To complete the arrangement in the gas chamber, the 14 real showers were complemented with an unknown number of fake showers, not listed in the inventory, but mentioned in various testimonies given by eyewitnesses.

This narrative attempt to correlate a few important pieces of evidence - such as the letter of March 31, the meeting between Hitler and Horthy in Klessheim, the documents concerning the installation of hot-water showers in mid May, the break-down of crematoria 2 and 4 later that same month, Bischoff's answers to the questions asked in the questionnaire in June, and the partial inventory attached to the transfer document of June 24 - may be a reasonable depiction of what actually occurred and, given the fragmentary state of the evidence, probably important facts are left out. But whatever it may or may not be, it shows that the presence of 14 showers in the inventory attached to the transfer document of does not mean that the room in which they were installed was not a gas chamber. It only suggests that the road to the completion of crematorium 3 as a killing installation was a twisted path.

In his attempt to use Bischoff's proposal to install 100 hot-water showers in the "undressing room" of crematorium 3 as evidence that this crematorium was not a killing installation, Rudolf did face the problem how to explain why this building would have been equipped with an "undressing room" to start with. Rudolf tries to answer that question by postulating that the decision to put those showers in this "undressing room" shows that the word "undressing room" is used "in the ordinary mortuary sense, and not in any special sense." This statement, which is a mere assertion without any explanation, does not make any sense whatsoever. I do not understand "the ordinary mortuary sense" of making a very large space into an "undressing room," and then filling it with showers. Does Rudolf suggest that it was customary in Germany to shower dead bodies en masse? Or does he have something else in mind? What is clear, however, is that Rudolf has not provided any evidence that showers and undressing rooms were common features in German morgues.

Which leaves, then, the question of the gas-tight door. If, indeed, the presence of an undressing room and showers show that the basement of crematorium 3 was used in "the ordinary mortuary sense," what would be the "ordinary mortuary sense" of the gas-tight door mentioned in that same inventory that listed the 14 showers? After giving so much attention to one item of the inventory - the 14 showers - he completely ignores that other item - the gas-tight door.

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Lucius Felix Silla
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#167

Post by Lucius Felix Silla » 17 Jun 2004, 15:59

Dear Mrs. tigersqn and David Thompson,

Mr. tigersqn ask:

Why would they call it a "gas-tight door" and not an "air-tight door"?

and David Thompson also ask:

How do you know that it's "a normal practice in wartime to provide certain buildings with gas-tight doors?"

Why would anyone want a gas-tight door in a working morgue?


I have already discuss the question of gas-tight doors in my post concerning the various commands of doors for Krema II and III. I have suggested that either for security and/or hygienic reasons (the two reasons can be also compatibles) is absolutely normal to employ special doors in buildings where the danger of explosion caused by bombing is much higher (for example the Luftschutz Führer Sofort Programm, that is, the Fuhrer's Emergency Air Raid Program, issued in November 1940 have general guidelines) and where people died due epidemics of typhus and other contagious diseases. I have also prevented the reader from a more appropriate technical discussion on the types of doors shown by Pressac. But see Your pertinent questions, let’s go more deep on these doors.


To my knowledge the gas tight doors of Birkenau, and more in general the normal doors, were constructed by Häftlingtischlerei of Birkenau and weren’t provided from firms specialized in design and construction of real, truly gas tight doors as, for example, the firm Ewald Berninghaus of Duisburg. The type of doors showed in Pressac opus’ as presumed doors employed in homicidal gas chambers (see Pressac, passim), as already suggested by others (cfr. HANS JÜRGEN NOWAK, WERNER RADEMACHER, SOME DETAILS OF THE CENTRAL CONSTRUCTION OFFICE OF AUSCHWITZ, pp.329 ss. in GERMAR RUDOLF (ED.), Dissecting the Holocaust. The Growing Critique of ‘Truth’ and ‘Memory’.
Translated by Victor Diodon Chicago (Illinois): Theses & Dissertations Press, August 2003 Second, corrected, paperback edition ISBN 0-9679856-2-5 ISSN 1529-7748), were surely provisional gastight doors (or maybe, more accurately, gas resistant doors) but, from a technical point of view hardly can be called truly gas-tight doors.

To sum up, and according to criteria given by contemporaneous technical literature on use of Zyklon B as agent against louses in delousing gas chambers (cfr. R. Scholle, “Schutzraumabschlüsse”, Baulicher Luftschutz issue 3, W. Ernst & Sohn, Berlin 1939. Franz Puntigam, H. Breymesser, E. Bernfus, Blausäuregaskammern zur Fleckfleberabwehr, Sonderveröffentlichung
des Reichsarbeitsblattes
, Berlin 1943.) the main criteria for gastight doors are:
1. Due to the highly penetrative property of HCN, absolute gas-tightness of all construction parts.
2. The door panel must fit against all parts of the door frame in a parallel and uniformly tight manner. This requires a rubber gasket. To this, people often object that there was no rubber in Germany during the war. This is true only to a degree; we had a substance that was in some respects even better than natural rubber, namely buna.
3. A 5-cm-high threshold was required.
4.The door hinges required a free axis so that the door panel could pass on the band side when being closed. Illustration 8 shows this important point. To allow the panel to be pressed tightly to the frame but also to let it pass freely, the end of the steel strap on the pin of the lagscrewed
block is not round and close-fitting in shape, but oval. This allows the panel to move. This is a necessary prerequisite for a gas-tight door, since if it cannot be pressed tightly to the frame it cannot be made gas-tight. This goes even more for felt than for buna hose gaskets.
5. As locking mechanisms, even steel doors, required at least 8 wedge locks, three on either side and one each at the top and bottom. The wedges made it possible to press the door panels uniformly to their frames. If this was necessary for steel doors, this goes all the
more for wooden doors
None of the doors pictured by Pressac met even these five criteria:
1. The doors were uniformly fastened with screws etc.
2. The doors had only two fixed points, and two bolts of limited adjustability.
3. Felt is not gas-tight.
4. The steel door straps had no adjustable axes.
5. The wooden door panels could warp.
(cfr. supra Nowak cit.)
( on this subject See also Carlo Mattogno in: "Auschwitz: Gasprüfer und Gasrestprobe" http://vho.org/VffG/2003/3/Mattogno380-385.html.)

In reality, one simply must to observe the difference between the doors used in autoclaves (hot vapour) of Birkenau (see Pressac, Les Crématoires d’Auschwitz, CNRS, paris, 1993, doc.24, or also his book of 1989, passim) installed in Zentral Sauna of Birkenau or the doors for true homicidal gas chambers in Americans penitentiaries (for example S. Thion, Vérité historique ou vérité politique ? L'affaire Faurisson, la question des chambres à gaz. Paris, 1980, pp.303-306 http://vho.org/aaargh/fran/livres/vhvp_annexes.pdf or First Leuchter Rapport, http://www.zundelsite.org/english/leuch ... s_gas.html) to understand that these doors showed by Pressac cannot have been employed really as doors in presumed homicidal gas chambers.

Tomorrow I will answer to others question of Mr. David Thompson and Mr. xcalibur.

Best Regards

LFS
Last edited by Lucius Felix Silla on 17 Jun 2004, 18:58, edited 1 time in total.


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#168

Post by Lucius Felix Silla » 17 Jun 2004, 17:21

Sergey Romanov wrote:
If the presence of one gas tight door in a local provided by showers is really an absurdity that can only explicate through a criminal conclusion, then why did Auschwitz Zentralbauleitung on 13 November 1942 order "Herstellung von 2 Stck. [i.e. Stück, LFS] Gasdichte Türen 100/200 für die Sauna"(i.e. "2 100/200 gas-tight doors for the sauna") of the disinfestation installation BW 5a in Birkenau? (cfr. TCIDK, 502-1-328, p. 70)? And isn?t the only example.
Aha, here's another of Mattogno's errors.

This nonsense has been debunked long ago. I'm not sure why you should be taken seriously after repeating it.

Zimmerman, "Holocaust denial":
The document he cited is a work order in AA File 502-1-328. It states: "For: Delousing Barrack. The following work is to be done: The creation of two steel gas proof doors for the sauna." In other words, if we are to believe Mattogno's explanation of this document, gas tight doors were being used in the shower facilities of the sauna. Why would gas tight doors be needed in a shower facility unless prisoners were being gassed?
The sauna is a reference to delousing barracks BW 5a which contained legitimate prisoner shower facilities and rooms where clothing was deloused with Zyklon B. Any logical person reading this document would realize that the gas tight doors were for that portion of the sauna used to disinfest clothing, not for the shower facilities. If Mattogno's explanation of this document is to be believed, then he has demonstrated that prisoners were gassed in the shower facilities of the sauna because the work order specifically refers to the type of gas tight doors which were used in the clothing disinfestation facility!
Mattogno may have believed that because the word sauna was used the argument could be made that it referred to the shower portion. But in fact the building known as the Central Sauna - which began operation in December 1943 - had legitimate shower facilities and places where clothing was disinfested. Not even Mattogno has claimed that the prisoner shower facilities of the Central Sauna had gas tight doors.
Unfortunately for You and for Prof. Zimmerman, we have the necessary documentation to answer to this historical enormity - which proves only the absolute ignorance of Zimmerman on the matter - quoted and repeated by You.

The commands of the doors for the BW (i.e. Bauwerke) 5 founded in Moscow Archives show these dates:

command of 9.6.1942, for BW5b: 4 gasditche Doppeltüren m. 1,60x 2,00 (see TCDIK 502-1-328 p.173);

12.11.1942, for BW5a: 2 gasditche Türen für die Sauna m.1,00x 2,00 and 2 gasdichte Türen m. 1,20x2,18 (see TCDIK 502-1-328 p.70);

19.11.1942, for BW5a and BW5b: 8 gasditche Türen (see TCDIK 502-1-328 p.78);

5.10.1942 and 6.10.1942, for BW5a and BW5b: 6 gasdichte Türen (see TCDIK 502-1-328 pp.71-72) m. 1,00x 2,00;

That is, a total of 22 gasdichte Türen.

Now accordingly to drawing nr.1715 of 25.9.1942 concerning BW5a/b in the two facilities were these hygienic installations (see Pressac, cit. p.57):
- 1 Gaskammer
- 1 Sauna
-1 Entwesungskammer
-1 Disinfektion apparatus


These installations were effectively installed:

1- Kammer für Blausäurevergasung (please note the word vergasung) "Gas chamber for HCN"
1- Saunaalage
1- Heissluftapparat (hot vapor) of firm Hochheim
1 -Disinfektionapparat (apparat for disinfection) by firm Werner.
(see TCDIK 502-1-332 p.46a)

So according to drawings, various commands and installations presents, we can see where the gastight doors were distributed in every BW5:

2x Gaskammer
2x Schleuse (compensation room before tje disinfection chamber)
2x Sauna
1x Entwesungsapparat
2x Entwesungskammer
2x Disinfektion
------
11

And so a grand total of 22 gastight doors, a total of 4 for the two Sauna's!

With this - and we have another example for BW28 (Kanada I) but i don't want bory none - the pathetic hypothesis of Zimmerman is totally confuted.
But what expect from one Universitary Professor who don't known
german language and relies only on secondary literature?

Best Regards

LFS

PS In next posts i will return on Your back posts and also on van Pelt absurdities.

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#169

Post by Lucius Felix Silla » 18 Jun 2004, 16:46

Dear Mrs-xcalibur and Mr. David Thompson,
xcalibur wrote:"Every crematorium has a facility for washing corpses...."

Crapola. I'll show you 20 on the East Coast of the US tomororrow that don't.

And please explain why they would.
and Mr. David Thompson also ask:
"(2) You [LFS] said: Quote:
Evidently, because the scope of LK1 is to receive the bodies of inmates died for natural causes, only a portion of the LK1, a small section, was intended as a shower facility. Every crematorium has a room for washing corpses.

The attendants took the corpses into the shower to wash them?

One morgue has 14 shower-heads to wash corpses?"


Maybe US crematoria don't have facility to wash corpses, but surely, german crematoria and mortuaries in Auschwitz and Birkenau have.

See, for example, in the first drawing of Krematorium I in Auschwitz I dated 9 december 1940 (TCDIK 502-1-327) and ALL successives blueprints until 1944, one room (next to Leichenhalle: mortuary) is designed "WASCHRAUM": room to wash corpses.

Also in the first drawings of future Krematorium II and Krematorium III, the future LK3 was subdivided in three rooms: S. Raum=Sezierraum (room for dissecting corpses) A. Raum=Aufbahrungsraum (room for the exhibition of the corpses) W.Raum=Waschraum (room to wash corpses).
The numerous drawings are dated from 24.10.1941 to march 1942, when the transformation in homicidal instruments, according to Pressac, wasn't yet planned (see Pressac, Les Crématoires d’Auschwitz, CNRS, Paris, 1993, doc.9, 10,11, 13,14,15).

Is absolutely normal provides crematoria with instruments to wash corpses.


Best Regards

PS xcalibur: "crapola"? isn't "crapula"? np for mispelling one word, can happens: i have mispelled weight (height) and Mr. Sergey Romanov, rightly, have noted my error. But please don't kill me for this....

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Toivo
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#170

Post by Toivo » 18 Jun 2004, 18:04

Any expert could enlight me in matter of deathcamp crematoriums? I recently read about pretty new crematorium in our capitol which received modern furnace from USA, state of Florida - fully automatic, controlled with computer . It takes atleast hour and half to consume one body no matter what size.

I bring you a couple of exsamples which is why I could use a little help and explanation:
Crematorium I. operated [at Auschwitz] from August 15, 1940 until July 1943. According to calculations by the German authorities, 340 corpses could be burned every 24 hours after the installation of the three furnaces.
http://www.us-israel.org/jsource/Holocaust/augas.html
The scientifically planned crematoria should have been able to handle the total project, but they could not. The whole complex had forty-six retorts, each with the capacity for three to five persons. The burning in a retort lasted about half an hour. It took an hour a day to clean them out. Thus it was theoretically possible to cremate about 12,000 corpses in twenty four hours or 4,380,000 a year. But the well-constructed crematoria fell far behind at a number of camps, and especially at Auschwitz in 1944. In August the total cremation reached a peak one day of 24,000, but still a bottleneck occurred.
From the testimony of Filip Muller, an Auschwitz survivor, Connilyn Feig reports the following account in "Hitler's Death Camps"

So how many furnaces did Auschwitz have then, or crematoriums???

Sorry if I asked something obvious but I got little clue in matter of Holocaust but I'd like to know more.

Regards

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#171

Post by Lucius Felix Silla » 18 Jun 2004, 18:53

Quote:
The scientifically planned crematoria should have been able to handle the total project, but they could not. The whole complex had forty-six retorts, each with the capacity for three to five persons. The burning in a retort lasted about half an hour. It took an hour a day to clean them out. Thus it was theoretically possible to cremate about 12,000 corpses in twenty four hours or 4,380,000 a year. But the well-constructed crematoria fell far behind at a number of camps, and especially at Auschwitz in 1944. In August the total cremation reached a peak one day of 24,000, but still a bottleneck occurred.


From the testimony of Filip Muller, an Auschwitz survivor, Connilyn Feig reports the following account in "Hitler's Death Camps".


At Birkenau operated:
Krema II (put into operation 31.3.43)- 5 ovens three-chambers, for a total of 15 chambers or muffles
Krema III (25.6.1943)- 5 ovens three-chambers, for a total of 15 chambers or muffles
Krema IV (22.3.1943)- 4 ovens two-chambers, for a total of 8 chambers or muffles
Krema V (4.4.1943)- 4 ovens two-chambers, for a total of 8 chambers or muffles
Grand total: 46 muffles or chambers
All Krematoria show at various stages and times much problems, and weren't really fully operationals for the years 1943/44.

All dates given by Filip Müller (ex Sonderkommando) are of PUREST MITHOLOGY.

Best Regards

LFS

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Toivo
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#172

Post by Toivo » 18 Jun 2004, 19:00

Thank you for information.

Regards

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#173

Post by xcalibur » 19 Jun 2004, 16:26

Lucius Felix Silla wrote:Dear Mrs-xcalibur and Mr. David Thompson,
xcalibur wrote:"Every crematorium has a facility for washing corpses...."

Crapola. I'll show you 20 on the East Coast of the US tomororrow that don't.

And please explain why they would.
and Mr. David Thompson also ask:
"(2) You [LFS] said: Quote:
Evidently, because the scope of LK1 is to receive the bodies of inmates died for natural causes, only a portion of the LK1, a small section, was intended as a shower facility. Every crematorium has a room for washing corpses.

The attendants took the corpses into the shower to wash them?

One morgue has 14 shower-heads to wash corpses?"


Maybe US crematoria don't have facility to wash corpses, but surely, german crematoria and mortuaries in Auschwitz and Birkenau have.

See, for example, in the first drawing of Krematorium I in Auschwitz I dated 9 december 1940 (TCDIK 502-1-327) and ALL successives blueprints until 1944, one room (next to Leichenhalle: mortuary) is designed "WASCHRAUM": room to wash corpses.

Also in the first drawings of future Krematorium II and Krematorium III, the future LK3 was subdivided in three rooms: S. Raum=Sezierraum (room for dissecting corpses) A. Raum=Aufbahrungsraum (room for the exhibition of the corpses) W.Raum=Waschraum (room to wash corpses).
The numerous drawings are dated from 24.10.1941 to march 1942, when the transformation in homicidal instruments, according to Pressac, wasn't yet planned (see Pressac, Les Crématoires d?Auschwitz, CNRS, Paris, 1993, doc.9, 10,11, 13,14,15).

Is absolutely normal provides crematoria with instruments to wash corpses.


Best Regards

PS xcalibur: "crapola"? isn't "crapula"? np for mispelling one word, can happens: i have mispelled weight (height) and Mr. Sergey Romanov, rightly, have noted my error. But please don't kill me for this....

1) That would be "Mr." xcalibur, "Dr." xcalibur, or simply, "xcalibur".

2) In the preparation of corpses for dissection one does not use showers to wash them.

3) "Crapola" is the proper spelling.

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#174

Post by mstein » 06 Jul 2004, 11:54

Toivo wrote:Any expert could enlight me in matter of deathcamp crematoriums? I recently read about pretty new crematorium in our capitol which received modern furnace from USA, state of Florida - fully automatic, controlled with computer . It takes at least hour and half to consume one body no matter what size.
As in so many things, you have to ask exactly the right question or you're going to get a misleading answer.

Since you mention Florida, it's very possible the crematory oven you mention was made by B&L Cremation Systems. A number of years ago I read an article about cremation that quoted its president, Mr. Steve Looker. I decided to call Mr. Looker and ask him about cremation times and a couple of other issues that always seem to arise in these discussions.

It turns out there are three different questions you could ask, and they have three different answers.

Question number one: If you had an epidemic situation, and you were trying to burn bodies as fast as possible for public health reasons, how soon could you put another body in, even if the previous body is not completely finished?

Question number two: How much time does it take until you've reduced a body as much as it's ever going to be reduced?

Question number three: How long does a normal funeral cremation take?

Mr. Looker's ovens are designed for normal funeral cremations, not public health body incineration. For this purpose, you must never mix two bodies together - the relatives will be very unhappy if they find out. So he wasn't quite sure on the first question off the top of his head. That kind of operation is completely foreign to anything a normal user of his product would ever do.

However, when evaluating the witness statements, you must remember that they were not doing normal funeral cremations. There was, unfortunately, no concern about returning the right ashes to the grieving family even if some of them had been left alive to go to a slave labor site. The Sonderkommando would have been loading in bodies as fast as they could be loaded, even if the previous body was not 100% reduced. The time between loadings is the time the witnesses would have reported. The Topf ovens were designed to allow a mostly-consumed body to fall to a lower chamber for a further 20 minutes of burning while a new body was introduced into the main chamber. See:

http://www.holocaust-history.org/~dkere ... sion.shtml

For question number two, the answer for Mr. Looker's product is approximately one hour for an adult body. (It would be the same for multiple small bodies adding up to that weight.) Now, you might object that if that is so, it's still impossible to put a new body in at the 20-minute mark while over half a body remains to be burned. While we did not discuss this point specifically, I don't see any reason to expect that the process must be linear. By "linear" I mean that after 10% of the time, 10% of the body is gone, after 50% of the time, 50% is gone, etc. Many physical processes are _not_ linear.

So why is the answer to the third question 90 minutes, if after an hour you've reduced the mass as much as it will go? Well, it turns out that even though the body has been reduced to the bare essentials in only an hour, it's not very pretty. The color, he told me, is brown/black at that point. The additional burning time makes the "cremains" more aesthetically presentable to the family by whitening them. A friend of mine has the ashes of a cat in a glass bottle on her shelf, and they are indeed more of a grey color. (I would not call them really white.)

One other thing that is often claimed as an impossibility: witness statements about flames shooting up the chimney. Cremation ovens don't do that, it is claimed. And that's true - for an oven under normal and correct operation. But Mr. Looker said that if overloaded, an oven can shoot flames; the phenomenon is called a "candle" in the business. Even though his oven is specifically designed to avoid this, he thought that if he really tried to generate a candle with his own product, he stood a fair chance of being able to do so. If they were loading bodies as fast as they possibly could, then it seems quite likely the ovens at Auschwitz did indeed become overloaded from time to time and could have shot flames.
So how many furnaces did Auschwitz have then, or crematoriums???
There were a total of five crematory buildings. Krema I was in the main camp; Kremas II-V were in Birkenau. Krema I had three double-muffle ovens. Krema II and III each had five three-muffle ovens. Kremas IV and V each had one eight-muffle oven.

- Mike Stein

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#175

Post by David Thompson » 06 Jul 2004, 13:40

Thank you, mstein, for a very informative post, and welcome to the forum!

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Lucius Felix Silla
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#176

Post by Lucius Felix Silla » 06 Jul 2004, 16:12

Dear Mr. mstein,

I think that on basis of the evidence given from german documents is reasonable to conclude that in the Auschwitz's Crematoria :

1) One hour is necessary to burn one corpse in one muffle for time.
At same time, the crematoria weren't operational 24hours for day, so the real (not theorical) number of corpses burnt in one day was significantly inferior to 1048 corpses in one day for all 52 muffles of Birkenau, probably in the range of the half and also minus.

2) That also if in theory possible, load more than one corpse at time don't change the duration of the cremation: two corpses at time, two hours.

3) If these presumed flames are really present during cremation, why in the aerial photographs taken in 1944 weren't visibles?

Best Regards

LFS

P.S.
Just a curiosity:You are the same Mike Stein cited by Jamie McCarthy in the essay "The Wolzek Paradox?"

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#177

Post by mstein » 07 Jul 2004, 03:25

Lucius Felix Silla wrote:Dear Mr. mstein,

I think that on basis of the evidence given from german documents is reasonable to conclude that in the Auschwitz's Crematoria :

1) One hour is necessary to burn one corpse in one muffle for time.
Well ... according to Mr. Looker, if you are not paying attention to funeral rules about producing nice white ashes from a single body, then you really should talk about time by weight, not by corpse. If this time you quote represents an average adult of, say, 80kg, then a 20kg child would be about 15 minutes.

At same time, the crematoria weren't operational 24hours for day, so the real (not theorical) number of corpses burnt in one day was significantly inferior to 1048 corpses in one day for all 52 muffles of Birkenau, probably in the range of the half and also minus.
Quite likely so, since on the witness accounts they had to burn in pits on the busy days.

2) That also if in theory possible, load more than one corpse at time don't change the duration of the cremation: two corpses at time, two hours.
Again, you really have to measure by weight, not by corpse in this mode of operation. If it's one hour per adult, then yes, it's two hours for two adults of the same size. If the corpses were smaller (women and children) then the time is less.
3) If these presumed flames are really present during cremation, why in the aerial photographs taken in 1944 weren't visibles?
You appear to have misunderstood me. I never intended to say that flames were visible 100% of the time, nor did any witness I know of. It's an occasional phenomenon, not a permanent one. Nevertheless some people have called witnesses liars for saying they saw flames at all, claiming that crematoria _never_ do that.
Just a curiosity:You are the same Mike Stein cited by Jamie McCarthy in the essay "The Wolzek Paradox?"
I certainly hope so - one of us is more than enough, I would think! :)

- Mike Stein

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#178

Post by Konrad » 07 Jul 2004, 06:59

mstein wrote: Question number one: If you had an epidemic situation, and you were trying to burn bodies as fast as possible for public health reasons, how soon could you put another body in, even if the previous body is not completely finished?
Open air cremation on a pyre may be the solution. At least that is what was done in Dresden and I believe in Hamburg after a devestating air raid with many civilians killed. See:
http://www.dsz-verlag.de/Artikel_04/NZ08/Dresden_1.jpg
The Topf ovens were designed to allow a mostly-consumed body to fall to a lower chamber for a further 20 minutes of burning while a new body was introduced into the main chamber. See:
http://www.holocaust-history.org/~dkere ... sion.shtml
Engineer Kurt Prüfer who designed, supervised the installation and witnessed comissioning of the cremation ovens in Birkenau testified during a crossexamination by SMERSH that it took 1 hour to cremate one human corpse.
Engineer Karl Schultze also confirmed this during his interrogation on March 4, 1946 by Captain Schatnowski and Major Moruschenko:

[…]This way I designed and constructed together with Prüfer also the crematoriums in the concentration camps Auschwitz in 1942/1943. I only erected the part of the crematorium which belonged to the ventilation.
Four crematoriums were built in this camp during the time in question. In two crematoriums were each five ovens, and in each oven three corpses could be loaded at a time [one in each of the three muffles], i.e. there were three openings (muffles) in one oven. Within one hour fifteen corpses could be burned in a crematorium with five ovens [and fifteen muffles].«

So why is the answer to the third question 90 minutes, if after an hour you've reduced the mass as much as it will go? Well, it turns out that even though the body has been reduced to the bare essentials in only an hour, it's not very pretty. The color, he told me, is brown/black at that point. The additional burning time makes the "cremains" more aesthetically presentable to the family by whitening them.
Interesting! Maybe Mr. Looker did not fully understand the chemistry of the cremation process? On January 5, 1953 did the firm Topf & Söhne apply for a patent (Patentschrift Nr. 861 731) for an oil fired cremation oven which through a clever arrangement of heat recuperators and preheated combustion air resulted in the complete cremation of all body parts. The attached patent drawings show the plans, longitudinal- and cross-sectionss of this oven, which consists of three cremation chambers. A fairly detailed description of the process is included with the patent:

[…]
Die im Fettkrper der menschlichen Leiche enthaltenen CH (Kohlewasserstoff) Verbindungen (Fette) weisen zum Teil eine sehr niedrige Zündtemperatur auf und verbrennen bei höchsten Temperaturen. Dagegen ist es bisher nicht gelungen, die im Eiweißkrper in Verbindung mit N (Stickstoff) enthaltenen CH-Verbindungen bei Fehlen von reinem Fettkörpern und damit reinen CH-Verbindungen exotherm zu verbrennen. Der Eiweißkörper setzt mit seinem relativ hohen N-Gehalt (etwa 25%) seiner Verbrennung heftigsten Widerstand entgegen. Seine Zündtemperatur liegt bei etwa 800° C.
Bei bisher erreichten Lufttemperaturen von 400 bis 500° C konnte somit die in Eiweißkörper enthaltene Stickstoffkomponente in ihrer die Verbrennung hemmenden Wirkung nicht aufgehoben wwerden.
Erfahrungsgemäß vermag erst die Einwirkung von Luft von 800 bis 900° C die Trennung des N von den CH-Verbindungen zu vollziehen, trotzdem es sich um eine chemische Verbindung von N + CH handelt, sondern nur um eine jener lockeren Verbindungen von N, wie sie dieser als sehr träge bekanntes Gas, vielfach eingeht. Daß bei der Ausschaltung des N auch eine gewisse Wämemenge verbraucht wird, ist anzunehmen. Jedoch wird aber niemals der große Wärmeverbrauch auftreten, der notwendig ist, um N aus einer festen chemischen Verbindung frei zu machen. Es werden auch bei der Verbrennung der CH-Verbindungen im Eiweißkörper nahezu die Wärmemenge frei, welche bei der Verbrennung von reinen CH-Verbindungen ihrer Zusammensetzung entsprechend entbunden werden.
Für eine menschliche Leiche von etwa 70 kg Gewicht, einem Gehalt von etwa 12 kg C, etwa 2 kg H2 und etwa 0.5 kg P, bei etwa 55.5 kg H2O + N errechnet sich ein Mindestheizwert von etwa 160,000 WE, wozu noch die Sargverbrennungswärme zu rechnen ist.[…]

The advantage of this type of cremation oven is that no further grinding of the bones is required after the completion of the cremation process and also the fuel consumption can be reduced to a minimum.
But Mr. Looker said that if overloaded, an oven can shoot flames; the phenomenon is called a "candle" in the business. Even though his oven is specifically designed to avoid this, he thought that if he really tried to generate a candle with his own product, he stood a fair chance of being able to do so. If they were loading bodies as fast as they possibly could, then it seems quite likely the ovens at Auschwitz did indeed become overloaded from time to time and could have shot flames.
Not flames or even smoke seems to be coming out from the crematorium stacks in Birkernau on 3.Aug.1944. http://www.fpp.co.uk/Auschwitz/images/A ... 230844.jpg

Konrad

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#179

Post by Earldor » 07 Jul 2004, 11:14

Konrad wrote:Open air cremation on a pyre may be the solution. At least that is what was done in Dresden and I believe in Hamburg after a devestating air raid with many civilians killed. See:
http://www.dsz-verlag.de/Artikel_04/NZ08/Dresden_1.jpg
And lo and behold, Dejaco went to Chelmno in September 1942 and when he returned wrote a memo entitled "Sonderanlage". Pretty soon afterwards open-pit burning was started beside Bunker 1 and 2, so not simply for victims of epidemics, "and after the war Dejaco admitted that he had drawn diagrams of an open-pit crematorium and emulated Chelmno's technique at Auschwitz."

Michael Thad Allen: The Devil is in the Details, Holocaust and Genocide Studies V16 N2 Fall 2002, p.198

Notes: Walter Dejaco, 4 Mar. 1962, "interrogation," Österreichisches Bezirksgericht Reutte, HS 58/62. Pressac, Die Krematorien, p. 11. Rudolf Kauer, a prisoner/engineer who worked with Dejaco, also discusses the Ringofen in statements made after the war: "In correspondence with the firm Topf, one referred to these pits as 'great ring cremation ovens,' 'open burning chambers' or 'open burning installations.' It was to be a deep oven that unified both advantages: the giant absorbtion capacity of the pit and the economy of the technically rational cremation ovens equipped with furnaces." Here too, the SS not only borrowed but sought to improve and innovate. Kauer to Geschworrenengericht bein Oberlandsgericht, Wien, 21/2/72, Signature V526/1-155, DöW microfilm roll 1108.

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#180

Post by Lucius Felix Silla » 07 Jul 2004, 15:18

Earldor wrote:
Konrad wrote:Open air cremation on a pyre may be the solution. At least that is what was done in Dresden and I believe in Hamburg after a devestating air raid with many civilians killed. See:
http://www.dsz-verlag.de/Artikel_04/NZ08/Dresden_1.jpg
And lo and behold, Dejaco went to Chelmno in September 1942 and when he returned wrote a memo entitled "Sonderanlage". Pretty soon afterwards open-pit burning was started beside Bunker 1 and 2, so not simply for victims of epidemics, "and after the war Dejaco admitted that he had drawn diagrams of an open-pit crematorium and emulated Chelmno's technique at Auschwitz."

Michael Thad Allen: The Devil is in the Details, Holocaust and Genocide Studies V16 N2 Fall 2002, p.198

Notes: Walter Dejaco, 4 Mar. 1962, "interrogation," Österreichisches Bezirksgericht Reutte, HS 58/62. Pressac, Die Krematorien, p. 11. Rudolf Kauer, a prisoner/engineer who worked with Dejaco, also discusses the Ringofen in statements made after the war: "In correspondence with the firm Topf, one referred to these pits as 'great ring cremation ovens,' 'open burning chambers' or 'open burning installations.' It was to be a deep oven that unified both advantages: the giant absorbtion capacity of the pit and the economy of the technically rational cremation ovens equipped with furnaces." Here too, the SS not only borrowed but sought to improve and innovate. Kauer to Geschworrenengericht bein Oberlandsgericht, Wien, 21/2/72, Signature V526/1-155, DöW microfilm roll 1108.

Dear Mr. Earldor,

Dejaco went to Chelmno on september 1942?

Pure fantasy.
Dejaco went on date 16th Septembre 1942 to Lizmannstadt (i.e. Lodz, cfr. Pressac, Les crematoires d'Auschwitz,1993, Paris, p.67) where was one the most important Jewish ghetto's of Poland.

There he could have seen how the local german autorithy have resolved the problems of the cremations of corpses died for various diseases and for this reason infected. The summer 1942 was the most catastrophic period for Auschwitz: on month of August only, some 4,000 inmates died for natural reasons due to the typhus epidemy and others diseases.

We must remember that at this time was operational only Krematorium I, but this implant have showed so much problems that he was practically out of service.

So on September 1942, SS-Untersturmführer Walter Dejaco, who together with his colleague Hössler had accompanied Camp Commandant Rudolf Höss to Litzmannstadt (Lodz), drew up a “travel report” in which he mentioned that the purpose of the trip had been the “visual inspection of the special facility, and discussions with SS-Standartenführer Blobel about the implementation of such a facility.”
This special facility was almost certainly a means for incinerating bodies in the open air. Dejaco also reported that the construction materials ordered from the Ostdeutsche Baustoffwerke in Posen via “special order by Staf. Blobel” had to be delivered to Auschwitz immediately; and that the firm of Schriever & Co. in Hannover had to supply a “ball grinder for substances”. This was most likely a device for grinding up the residue left after incineration.

That these special facilities were intended in order to burn the corpses of people killed in those mythical Bunkers 1 and 2 is only a speculative assertion based upon eyewitnesses statements (eyewitnesses which according to Pressac were all killed by Germans in order to conceal the proofs of the mass graves near Bunker 1 and 2!).

Best Regards

LFS

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