Just curious: what do you make of the following?

Michael Shermer

P.S. I'm not Jewish and have no relatives that are.

Eyewitnesses to Mass Murder

In addition to photographic evidence, we have the confessions of guards such as SS-Unterscharf FChrer (Sergeant) Pery Broad, captured on May 6, 1945, by the British in their zone of occupation in Germany. Broad began work at Auschwitz in 1942 in the Political Section, and stayed there until the liberation of the camp in January, 1945. After his capture, he worked as an interpreter for the British and, in the process, wrote a memoir that was passed on to the British Intelligence Service in July, 1945. That December, he declared under oath that what he wrote was true. On September 29, 1947, the document was translated into English and presented at the Nuremberg Trials as evidence of the use of gas chambers as mechanisms of mass murder. Later that year Broad was released. In April, 1959, Broad was called to testify at a trial of captured Auschwitz SS members, and acknowledged the authorship of the memoir confirmed its validity, and retracted nothing.

The reason for this background to Broad's memoir is that deniers dismiss damning Nazi confessions as being coerced, or made up for bizarre psychological reasons (while simultaneously accepting those that support their position). Broad was never tortured, and he had absolutely nothing to gain and everything to lose by confessing. When given the opportunity to recant, which he certainly could have done in the later trial, he did not. Instead, he described in detail the gassing procedure, including the use of Zyklon-B, the early gassing experiments in Block 11 of Auschwitz, the temporary chambers set up at the two abandoned farms at Birkenau (Auschwitz II), which he correctly called by their jargon name of Bunkers I and II. He also recalled the construction of Crematoria II, III, IV, and V at Birkenau, accurately depicting (by comparison with blueprints) the design of the undressing room, gas chamber, and each crematorium. He then described the actual process of gassing in gruesome detail:

The disinfectors are at work with an iron rod and hammer they open a couple of harmless looking tin boxes, the directions read Cyclon [sic] Vermin Destroyer, Warning, Poisonous. The boxes are filled with small pellets which look like blue peas. As soon as the box is opened the contents are shaken out through an aperture in the roof. Then another box is emptied in the next aperture, and so on. After about two minutes the shrieks die down and change to a low moaning. Most of the men have already lost consciousness. After a further two minutes 85it is all over. Deadly quiet reigns. "The corpses are piled together, their mouths stretched open." It is difficult to heave the interlaced corpses out of the chamber as the gas is stiffening all their limbs.

Deniers point out that Broad's four minutes for the total process is at odds with the statements of others, such as the commandant Hoess, who said it was more like twenty minutes. Because of these minor discrepancies, deniers dismiss the account entirely. A dozen different accounts give a dozen different figures for time of death by gassing, so deniers figure that no one was gassed at all. Does this make sense? No. In The gassing process would take different lengths of time due to variations in conditions, including the temperature (hydrocyanic acid gas evaporation from the pellets depends on the air temperature), the number of people in the room, the size of the room, and the amount of Zyklon-B poured into the room; not to mention the psychological differences in time perception experienced by different observers. If the estimation of times were exactly the same, in fact, we would have to be suspicious that they were all taking their story from a single account. Such minor discrepancies are further evidence of the veracity of the story.

Deniers make a similar argument about the confession of SS-Obersturmbannf FChrer Rudolf Hoess, Commandant of Auschwitz from May 20, 1940, to November 11, 1943. Hoess made his statement on April 5, 1946, completely unaware of Pery Broad's memoir (and vice versa). Further, the Nuremberg Tribunal, when trying Hoess, was also unaware of the Broad document. This is important because even if deniers completely discount the Hoess testimony, which they do, they still have the problem of explaining why the two accounts coincide so well. Hoess, like Broad, talks about the temporary gassing experiments at Auschwitz I, the two "Bunkers" at Birkenau, the construction of the four large structures at Birkenau that included undressing rooms, gas chambers, and crematoria. Further, after Hoess was found guilty and sentenced to death, he wrote a 250-page autobiographical manuscript that corroborates both his previous testimony and Broad's statement. On the gassing procedure, for example, compare Höss's account with Broad's above:

Then, very quickly, the door was hermetically sealed, and a can of gas was immediately thrown onto the floor, through an opening connected to an air duct in the ceiling of the gas chamber, by the disinfectors, who were standing ready. This led to the immediate release of the gas. Through the peephole one could see that those who were near the air duct died immediately. It can be said that about a third died within a moment's notice. The others began to struggle, to scream, to choke. But very quickly the cries became death rattles, and, after a few minutes, all were on the ground. After a maximum of twenty minutes, nobody moved.

Broad and Hoess never saw each other before Höss's capture on March 11, 1946, (10 months after Broad). But even if one wanted to fantasize a secret meeting between the two before Broad was captured, why would they fabricate a story that would surely convict them? Finally, compare these two testimonies with that of the camp physician, Dr. Johann Paul Kremer (in Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, 1994, 162):

September 2, 1942. Was present for first time at a special action at 3 a.m. By comparison Dante's Inferno seems almost a comedy. Auschwitz is justly called an extermination camp!

September 5, 1942. At noon was present at a special action in the women's camp the most horrible of all horrors. Hschf. Thilo, military surgeon, was right when he said to me today that we are located here in the anus mundi [anus of the world].

Deniers claim that Kremer says 'special action,' not gassing, but at the trial of the Auschwitz camp garrison in Krakow in December, 1947, Kremer clarified exactly what he meant by 'special action' (162):

By September 2, 1942, at 3 a.m. I had already been assigned to take part in the action of gassing people. These mass murders took place in small cottages situated outside the Birkenau camp in a wood. The cottages were called 'bunkers' in the SS-men's slang. All SS physicians on duty in the camp took turns to participate in the gassings, which were called Sonderaktion [special action]. My part as physician at the gassing consisted in remaining in readiness near the bunker. I was brought there by car. I sat in front with the driver and an SS hospital orderly sat in the back of the car with oxygen apparatus to revive SS-men, employed in the gassing, in case any of them should succumb to the poisonous fumes. When the transport with people who were destined to be gassed arrived at the railway ramp, the SS officers selected from among the new arrivals persons fit to work, while the rest "old people, all children, women with children in their arms and other persons not deemed fit to work" were loaded onto lorries and driven to the gas chambers. There people were driven into the barrack huts where the victims undressed and then went naked to the gas chambers. Very often no incidents occurred, as the SS-men kept people quiet, maintaining that they were to bathe and be deloused. After driving all of them into the gas chamber the door was closed and an SS-man in a gas mask threw the contents of a Cyclon [sic] tin through an opening in the side wall. The shouting and screaming of the victims could be heard through that opening and it was clear that they were fighting for their lives. These shouts were heard for a very short while.

The convergence of accounts between Broad, Hoess, and Kremer is additional proof that the Nazis used gas chambers and crematoria for mass extermination. And these are only the three most famous. There are many others, such as the following extract from a sworn statement by Stefan Kirsz taken in Belzec on October 15, 1945 (where carbon monoxide was used instead of Zyklon-B). In 1942, Kirsz was a twenty-nine-year-old Belzec villager employed by the Polish State Railways as an assistant locomotive driver on the line between Rawa Ruska and Belzec. In other words, Kirsz was a witness with no particular ax to grind as he describes what he saw (Zentrale Stelle, 1148):

The transports which I drove from Rawa Ruska to Belzec were divided into three parts in Belzec whereby each part (20 wagons) was rolled onto a siding on the area of the camp. As soon as the wagons came to a stop on the siding on the area of the camp they were emptied of Jews. Within 3-5 minutes the 20 wagons were completely emptied of people and luggage. I saw that besides the living people, corpses were also taken out. These people were ordered to place their luggage on one side and to completely undress themselves. Their clothes were laid on one side and their shoes on the other and then they went, undressed, one after the other, into a barrack which stood near the siding, from where they were pushed into the gas chambers [von wo sie in die Gaskammer geschoben wurden]. I was able to see this because I entered the camp area and pretended that I had to shovel coal nearer to the furnace door. The Germans allowed no one to see the camp area. Whenever I was in a locomotive near the extermination camp I tried to see something more, but I did not hear the screams of the Jews driven in.

The power of this eyewitness account speaks for itself, as does this statement of Hans Stark, registrar of new arrivals at Auschwitz (Klee, et al., 1988, 254-255):

As early as autumn 1941 gassings were carried out in a room in the small crematorium which had been prepared for this purpose. The room held about 200-250 people, had a higher-than-average ceiling, no windows and only a specially insulated door, with bolts like those of an airtight door. There were no pipes or the like which would lead the prisoners to believe that it was perhaps a shower room. In the ceiling there were two openings of about 35 cm in diameter at some distance from each other. The room had a flat roof which allowed daylight in through the openings. It was through these openings that Zyklon-B in granular form would be poured.

At another, later gassing "also in autumn 1941" Grabner ordered me to pour Zyklon-B into the opening because only one medical orderly had shown up. During a gassing Zyklon-B had to be poured through both openings of the gas chamber room at the same time. This gassing was also a transport of 200-250 Jews, once again men, women and children. As the Zyklon-B 'as already mentioned' was in granular form, it trickled down over the people as it was being poured in. They then started to cry out terribly for they now knew what was happening to them. I did not look through the opening because it had to be closed as soon as the Zyklon-B had been poured in. After a few minutes there was silence. After some time had passed, it may have been ten to fifteen minutes, the gas chamber was opened. The dead lay higgledy-piggledy all over the place. It was a dreadful sight.

Historian Michael Tregenza has provided us with translations of primary documents for a book he is writing on Rudolf Reder, who spent three months in Belzec before escaping in November, 1942. The sworn affidavit from Reder, about his experiences in the Lemberg Ghetto in Poland from November, 1941, to August 16, 1942, and in the Belzec extermination camp from August 17, 1942, to November, 1942, are revealing. Here is just one especially gruesome account of a gassing and mass burial soon after his arrival (Tregenza, 1996b ):

On 17 August 1942, I was deported to the Belzec extermination camp. We were unloaded and had to strip naked. Specialists were asked to step forward. I reported as a mechanic. Only eight men were left behind; the rest were immediately gassed. There were about 4,500 people on the transport. All the prisoners were taken to a big barrack where the women had their heads shaved bald. Then they were driven into a narrow corridor; there was a door there with the inscription, 'Bade und Inhalationsr E4ume.' [Bath and Inhalation Room.] In front of the door hung a flowerpot with some flowers. As one opened the door there was another corridor; to the right were three doors, and to the left three doors, which led into six gas chambers. Each chamber could hold 750 people. The building was of concrete. I know from my own observation that the gassing took no more than 20 minutes. The gas was fed through pipes from an engine in a small hut. I operated a machine which dug the earth out of pits which served as graves for those gassed. I additionally had to drag the corpses out of the gas chambers and drag them to the pits. I dragged the corpses in this way: I placed a belt around a wrist and a second worker did the same, and thus we carried the corpses to the pits. There were about 30 graves, each grave was 100 meters long, 25 meters wide and 15 meters deep. I n my opinion, about 100,000 corpses could be buried. The corpses were stacked up to about 50 centimeters above the edge of the pit, because the corpses later settled.