I started thinking about this problem while reading a book by Julia Shaw called the Memory Illusion (2016). She tells experiments where people are led to remember that they saw a video where one of the hijacked planes in 9/11 crashes to the ground. They remembered seeing the video while there naturally is no video and according to one 9/11 conspiracy theory the plane was shot down by a missile, while according to another theory the plane landed on some secret airport and the passengers were killed.
Can there be something similar with the holocaust testimonies?
The answer is a definitively no, but if so, what else can explain them?
That problem requires some work. Some time ago I tried to check the state of the Franke-Gricksch report from the always reliable Wikipedia. I noticed that this topic was treated only in the German Wikipedia and started to wonder why the English Wikipedia does not have an article on it. After all, the Franke-Gricksch report used to be key evidence on gas chambers in Auschwitz.
There is a conspiracy theory claiming that some mysterious group of people would be controlling the content of Wikipedia on certain topics and using this remarkable on-line encyclopedia for propaganda purposes. These conspiracy theoreticians have even created their own Wiki called Metapedia, where you do find an article on the Franke-Gricksch report in English. I got kind of interested in the reason why the report is not covered by the English language Wikipedia.
There seems to be two Franke-Gricksch reports. One of them is the Franke-Gricksch resettlement report. The claim for the origin of this report is that an US army officer Eric M. Lipman typed a two page extract in 1945 from the report SS-officer Alfred Franke-Gricksche wrote in 1943 after having visited Auschwitch some time between 4.-16. May 1943. However, the first mention of this document is from 1977 and nobody knows where the original document could be. Except for Lipman, nobody has seen it.
I copied a few lines from the scanned copy of a German language version of this text from the web page of Carlos Whitlock Porter (https://www.cwporter.com/cfgrep.htm). The text has Lipman’s signature, it is supposed to be written by Lipman in 1945. After typing a header in English he copied two pages of the text of the German original by typing it. On these few lines Lipman made three typos: he wrote had instead of hat, the instead of der and here instead of hier . He corrected the last two typos by overtyping. The typos are in red.
I bit further is the sentence: “Hier kommt jeder, der noch irgendwie in den Arbeitsprozess eingebaut werden kann, kommt in ein besondered Lager”. The sentence has twice kommt. It might be possible that an American typing fast would make the three first errors, this error of retyping kommt is not a natural error in copying. These are just the first small problems.
There are much more serious problems as the article by Renk shows:
http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v11/v11p261_Renk.html.
Even main stream holocaust researchers now consider this document as probable forgery and maybe this is why there is no Wikipedia page in English for it. But usually Wikipedia has article also of forgeries and explains that they are forgeries.
The other Franke-Gricksch report describes a trip made by Alfred Franke-Gricksch to Poland from 4. May to 16. May 1943. This report can be found for instance from here:
https://forum.codoh.com/viewtopic.php?t=8872
and extracts of it are here
http://www.deathcamps.org/reinhard/frankegricksch.html.
This report is in the British National Archives http://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/C11345949
and there are British documents stating that the report is a translation made 1945 from a document in German language obtained in 1945 from SS Obergruppenführer Maximilian von Herff when the British took him as a war prisoner.
This report did not just appear from nowhere. It was kept in some secret British archive since the end of the war. It was released to the public in 2010. Documents related to finding of the report are mentioned here:
http://www.fpp.co.uk/Auschwitz/docs/controversies/Franke_Griksch/FG_Akte_precis_docs.html
If the English version of Wikipedia had an article of the Franke-Gricksch report, it would have to mention both reports, as does the German Wikipedia. The picture this second Franke-Gricksch report gives of Auschwitz and Operation Reinhard are in contradiction with the views of main stream historians and agree with the views of holocaust revisionists. This may be the reason there is no English language page of the Franke-Gricksch report in Wikipedia. If so, it does seem to suggest that the Wikipedia conspiracy is true. I will not investigate this strange conspiracy theory further, but let us continue to the holocaust and false memories. Especially we can investigate if the testimonies of gas chambers can be explained by false memories. As is known, there is a controversy of the existence of gas chambers and in many countries people are put to jail for denying them. I will not deny anything and will only explain what the issue is all about.
The Franke-Gricksch resettlement report, the probable forgery, is one of the key documents that have been used to prove the existence of gas chambers in Auschwitz and Operation Reinhard camps. This is because, if authentic, it is an original Nazi document and not a eye witness testimony, which could be unreliable.
There are many Nazi documents indicating that Nazis were killing Jews in large numbers, such as the talk Himmler gave in Poznan 4/6 October 1943, the entries for February 14 and March 26, 1942, in Göbbel’s diary and the Operational Situation Report from the USSR No 128, November 3, 1941, but most of these describe the Eastern Front and they do not mention gas chambers. There is also plenty of reason to believe that doctors in concentration camps killed patients by injections – indeed, nobody questions that Nazis had an euthanasia program. It is also clear that camp guards hanged and shot prisoners. Therefore it is agreed by everybody that Nazis killed Jews on purpose. Only the role of gas chambers in these murders is questioned.
Existence of gas chambers is not doubted. Every camp had delousing chambers, which are called gas chambers in the plans of the buildings and probably were called by that name. Additionally, every army has gas chambers for testing and teaching the use of gas masks. What is disputed by revisionists is use of homicidal gas chambers where people were killed by poisonous gas.
Even here it is necessary to make a reservation. There was a chamber in Struthof-Natzweiler, which was used to test gas masks against battle gases. Some revisionists accept the claim that more than 80 Jews were murdered by gas in these tests as a control sample, while other revisionists insist that gas masks were tested on German personnel only. The controversy concerns the existence of homicidal gas chambers in Auschwitz and Operation Reinhardt camps for killing Jews in large numbers for genocidal purposes.
The Allied first heard about mass killings of Jews by gas from the reports of the Polish underground in November 1942. Polish officer Witold Pilecki, using the false name Tomasz Serafiński, let himself to be captured by Germans and be taken to Auschwitz in September 19, 1940. While in Auschwitz, he organized the underground Union of Military Organizations in Auschwitz and kept sending information from the camp to the Polish underground since October 1940.
Four Poles, Eugeniusz Bendera, Kazimierz Piechowski, Stanisław Gustaw Jaster and Józef Lempart escaped from Auschwitz on June 20, 1942, with one of Pilecki’s report. These reports were the basis of the document “The Mass Extermination of Jews in German Occupied Poland”, which the Polish underground presented to the Allies and the United Nations in 10. December 1942. Pilecki himself escaped from Auschwitz on the night of April 26/27, 1943. In 1945 he prepared a 100 page report called the Witold report.
Jerzy Tabeau from the Polish underground was in Auschwitz under the false name Jerzy Wesolowski. He escaped on 19 November 1943 with Roman Cieliczko. Tabeau wrote a report between December 1943 and January 1944. This report is known as Polish Major’s Report.
Poles were not working as Sonderkommandos on crematories and for that reason cannot be personal eye witnesses of gassings. The reports of the Polish underground are based on information heard from Jews in Auschwitz. For that reason these reports cannot be taken as primary sources. There are only two primary documents: reports or witness statements from Nazis and reports of witness statements from Jews, who either worked in Sonderkommando, were doctors, or who survived a gas chamber. Let us first look at the Nazi documents.
Nazis, who have admitted that there were homicidal gas chambers, can be divided into three groups. One group includes Nazis, who served in Auschwitz, admitted their guilt and told that there were gas chambers, and usually were executed soon afterwards. There is reason to believe that most or all of them were tortured or otherwise persuaded to confess gas chambers. This group includes Rudolf Höss, executed in 1947; Josef Kramer, hanged in 1945; Richard Bär, managed to hide until captured in 1960, died in 1963 before trial; Franz Hössler, executed in 1945; Otto Moll, executed in 1946; Dr Fritz Klein, executed in 1945; and Johann Schwarzhuber, executed in 1947. Schwarzhuber confessed that there was a homicidal gas chamber in Ravensbrück and did not mention of a gas chamber in Auschwitz. According to the present main stream history, there was no homicidal gas chamber in Ravensbrück.
The second group is composed of Nazi witnesses in the Frankfurt trial 1964 or later. Most of them were never tried as they only claim to have seen gassings. This group includes Richard Böck , died in 1973, was a driver who supplied goods and food, claimed to witness one gassing, was made a honory Auschwitz survivor, helped Jews, and was never tried; Karl Hölbinger , friend of Böck, a driver, took Böck to see the gassing, alive, and was never tried; Oskar Groening admitted in a BBC interview having been standing with another guard when he dumped Zyklon B to the gas chamber, and was never tried; Pery Broad, was a translator, claimed having seen an SS-man pour Zyklon B to a gas chamber, and spent 4 years in prison starting 1965; Dr Hans Münch, died in 2001, was acquitted in 1947 as the good man of Auschwitz, testified in the 1964 Frankfurt trial, but later made anti-gipsy comments, he denounced holocaust denial; Hans Stark, died in 1991, claimed having participated in early gassings and having poured Zyklon B on prisoners, was arrested 1959, sentenced as under aged for 10 years in 1965 and was released in 1968; and Franz Hofmann, testified in the 1964 trial, confessed having sent 40-50 children ages 6 to 12 to gas chambers when he already had a life sentence from two murders in Dachaus, died in the prison in 1973.
To the last group I have collected all others. They form five subgroups. The first are some uncertain cases, that is, I could not find verification that they admitted having seen gas chambers. These include Walter Dejaco, architect, died in 1978; Peter Weingärtner, SS guard, executed in 1945; and Dr Karl Kahr, doctor in camps Dachau and Mittelbau-Dora. These three do not seem to have witnessed gassings.
The next is a special case, Kurt Gerstein. He wrote a report in 1945 after being captured. Gerstein’s report describes gassings in Belzec and Treblinka but there are many exaggerations and it has been questioned if Gerstein did try to tell of killing of Jews in 1943 or is this only what he told after the war. He’s case should be investigated.
Four workers of Topf and Söhne gave testimonies to the Soviets: principal engineer Fritz Sander died after three years of interrogation, senior engineers Karl Schultze, Gustav Braun were released from gulag in 1955, while senior engineer Kurt Prüfer died in gulag in 1952. All four confessed to anything Soviets wanted. These testimonies are problematic. For instance, Kurt Prüfer testified knowing of homicidal gas chambers in Auschwitz, but his testimony is in contradiction with testimonies of other witnesses saying that the gas chamber was in the same floor as the crematory.
The fourth subgroup are Nazis, who did not personally witness gas chambers even if they admitted their existence: Otto Ohlendorf, hanged in 1951, was convicted for murders by the Einsatzgruppen and not involved in gas chambers (gas vans being a different charge); Baldur von Schirach, died in prison 1974, was charged of transfer of Viennese Jews to Auschwitz, so not eye witness to gas chambers; and Hans Frank, the chief jurist of the General Government, who claimed not having been aware of extermination camps in the General Government until early 1944.
The last in this group is SS-Doctor Professor Dr Johan Paul Kremer. He gave a testimony in 1947 where he says that he once took part in gassing of women. He withdrew his confession in 1957 when he was released from prison and allowed to return to West Germany, but in the trials of 1960 and 1964 he again testified having seen the gassing. Dr Kramer’s testimony is given after the war but there is a war time document, he kept a diary of his time in Auschwitz. The diary mentions Special Actions, but does not explain what they were and that they are related to gas chambers. The Diary does not mention gas chambers and the specific entries may relate to countermeasures to typhus and typhoid epidemics. The Diary entries do suggest that Jews were selected to be killed, but the killing method is not told.
Kremer’s case is described in Robert Faurisson’s article http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v02/v02p103_Faurisson.html.
At the end of this article Faurisson mentions that the entry of 1 March 1943 in Kremer’s diary says: “Went today to shoemaker Grevsmühl to be registered and saw there a leaflet sent him from Kattowitz by the Socialist Party of Germany. The leaflet informed that we had already liquidated 2 million Jews, by shooting or gassing.” What this entry says is that the socialists were at that time claiming that Nazis were shooting or gassing Jews. We already know that the Polish underground had announced that Nazis were killing Jews with gas. These claims must have been known in Auschwitz and other concentration camps.
In addition to the mentioned Nazi testimonies, there are the following reports: the Jäger report (1942) and Einsatzgruppen operational situation reports (1941-42) only discuss Einsatzgruppen, the Hölfe telegram (1943) tells that 1,274,166 Jews had been transferred to Operation Reinhard camps, but does not inform what happened to them, the Wannsee Conference memo (1942) says nothing of gas chambers, the Riegner telegram (1942) is not a primary source, the Katzmann report (1943) does not mention of gas chambers, the Special Prosecution Book – Poland (1937-39) has nothing on gas chambers.
The Korherr report (January 1943) tells that 1.274,166 Jews had been processed at the camps of General Government and 145,301 at the camps in Warthegau. The word processed was originally Special action. Korherr later explained that he asked what the word means and was told that it means resettlement in the Lublin area. As the number 1,274,166 is exactly the same as in the Hölfe telegram, the meaning of the word must be that these Jews were transported to the Operation Reinhardt camps. As this is so, the report does not tell anything of gassings in Auschwitz. It only confirms the Hölfe telegram and informs of a transport of 145,301 Jews from elsewhere – probably direct transfers to the East.
The Gerstein report (1945) mentions the gassing procedure in Belzec and Treblinka but it was written after the war. The Franke-Gricksch resettlement report is a probable forgery and the other Franke-Gricksch report does not mention gassings.
This leaves only one report, which briefly mentions gassings in Belzec: the Wilhelm Cornides report (1942). It is a diary of Cornides’ trip passing Belzec. The railroad policeman tells him that Jews are killed with gas, but this is not even a second hand eye witness report. There were rumors of Jews being killed with gas, so it is not surprising that the policeman thinks this is the case. If may have been the case, but this report is not a proof of it.
Let us continue to the prisoner eye witness reports. We have to discard witness statements where the person only heard of gassing. André Rogerie, French resistance, is one such witness. He heard of gassings from a French doctor in Auschwitz. Very many people, inmates, doctors and guards, must have heard that Nazis are gassing Jews as socialists and the Polish underground claimed so. We must focus only on eye witness reports.
One problem with the eye witness reports is that there are prisoner eye witness testimonies claiming that they saw gas chambers in camps where according to present main stream historians there were no homicidal gas chambers. This is the case with Ravensbrück. French resistance member (non-Jewish) Germaine Tillion was interned there. She wrote a book in 1973 where she claims that there was a gas chamber. It is also the case with Dachau. American soldiers wrote many letters, reports and articles where they stated having heard testimonies that the inmates were killed in a gas chamber. Main stream historians disagree. The same is true for Mauthausen. There are many confessions of Nazis that there was a gas chamber and also by inmates, for instance the testimony of Werner Reinsdorf. Moshe Peer tells how he as an 11-years old child was sent six times to the gas chamber in Bergen-Belsen. He survived every time but he watched others die. There are also testimonies of a gas chamber in Neuengamme concentration camp. Main stream historians disagree: none of these camps had homicidal gas chambers.
There are also reports of people, who survived gas chambers. Gena Turgel was sent to the gas chamber in Auschwitz in the December 1944 but from the showers came water, not gas. Hungarian Jews are assumed to have been gassed in summer 1944. November 25, 1944, Himmler orders destruction of gas chambers and crematoria. They were blown up January 20-26, 1945.
Sophia Litwinska stated that she and other 3000 Jewish women were taken to be gassed. She was called out by Hössler and taken for six weeks to a hospital. This apparently happened on Christmas time 1941. According to main stream historians the first mass gassing was September 3, 1941, when 600 Soviet prisoners and 250 ill inmates were killed, but gassings of inmates started January-February 1942. The first gas chamber, “the red house” in Birkenau was operational March 1942.
These eye witness statements show that inmates believed that they were going to be gassed already in the end of 1941 when gassings had maybe not yet started and still in December 1944, when there already was an order to destroy the gas chambers.
The actual eye witnesses of gassings are either Sonderkommandos or Jewish doctors. Strangely, Nazis left 110 Sonderkommandos alive.
The first eye witnesses were the authors of the Vrba–Wetzler report and the Rosin-Mordowicz report. Alfred Wetzler (alias Jozef Lánik), died in 1988, escaped from Auschwitz 7–11 April 1944 with Rudolf Vrba. Parts of the Vrba-Wetzler report were published in June 1944 when Hungarian Jews were sent to Auschwitz. First full translation in English appeared in November 1944. The Rosin-Mordowicz report is a seven-page report from Arnost Rosin and Czesław Mordowicz, also Slovak prisoners, who escaped from Auschwitz on 27 May 1944.
The second group of witnesses is made of those, who witnessed soon after the war. They include three Sonderkommandos in Auschwitz, Tauber and Dragan brothers. Henryk (Tauber) Fuchsbrunner, died in 2000, joined Sonderkommando 1943, took part in the 1944 crematoria uprising, was captured but not killed, escaped January 1945; Szlomo Dragan, died in 2001, escaped with Tauber; Abraham Dragon, brother of Szlomo, escaped with Tauber. Tauber was the only eye witness, who gave a precise description of the crematoria and gas chambers in 1945, but what is strange, he told that cremation of one body took 5-7 minutes. Tauber’s testimony may be in a contradiction with the testimony of another Sonderkommando, Alter Feinsilber. Feinsilber testified in 1945 and according to Metapedia Robert Faurisson has written that Feinstein’s testimony essentially says that Germans closed Jews in the coke-room so that no Jew could see the gassings. If so, how could Tauber see? Henryk Mandelbaum was also a Jewish Sonderkommando in Auschwitz. He testified in 1947 having carried the bodies of Jews killed by Zyklon B. He died in 2008. Michał Kula is then the witness who describes the metal net into which Zyklon B was placed. He worked in the metal workshop of the camp and testified in 1945.
The third group is composed of witnesses in the 1963-65 trials. All were Sonderkommandos in Auschwitz: Filip Müller, died in 2013, witnessed in Frankfurt in 1964, then wrote a book in 1979; Milton Buki, died in 1988, witnessed in Frankfurt in 1965, up to that time lived in Los Angeles as Kaufmann; Dov Paiskovic, experiences recorded in 1963, claimed that cremation of a body took 4 minutes.
The last group is the doctors. They include Miklos Nyiszli, Jewish doctor, housed with the 12th Sonderkommando in Crematorium II, died in 1956; Dr Charles Sigismund Bendel, witness in the Belsen trial in 1945 and the Tesh trial in 1946. Carlo Mattogno goes throught the problems with his testimony in https://codoh.com/library/document/2275/.
There is also the book Thirty-four months in the concentration camps (1946) by Dr André Abraham-David Lettich (1908-1985), Romanian Jew. He and Dr Lazar Moscovic were sent to Auschwitz July 20, 1942. Lettich describes gassings in Auschwitz. Ada Bimko was also a doctor in Auschwitz and described gassings. She tells that doctors selected ill inmates, separated them for four days without food or drink, and then gassed them. This sounds like a quarantine approach for an epidemic that cannot be cured with medicine.
Probably I missed some eye witnesses, but that is not important. These are a representative sample. There are certain known problems with many of these testimonies, but I take only one: these testimonies give a too short time for cremating a body and the corresponding capacity of the ovens is much too large. The main stream holocaust historian Pressac claims that the correct number is one fourth of the number 10,000 bodies in a day given by these testimonies.
What could be the reason for this error?
It cannot be false memories like in the examples of the book of Julia Shaw, nor can it be a mistake. It is intentional and the number is indeed wrong. There had to be a reason why the witnesses gave a wrong figure.
I do not doubt that there were selections of ill inmates and they were killed if they did not improve in a few days. I see no particular reason to doubt that one of the killing methods may have been gas. Some were shot and some got lethal injections. But the Sonderkommandos gave a wrong number and this wrong figure must have served some purpose. It led to the calculation that 4 millions, or today 1-1.5 million, Jews were killed in Auschwitz.
I have problems with this number since it does not fit to the number of Jews in Western Poland and West. According to my calculation, there were only about 3 million Jews in Nazi hands in these parts (=the sum of Polish Jews in the part taken by Germany 1939 and Western Jews taken to camps) and assuming that about 1.48 million were transferred to the Operation Reinhard camps, a number which agrees with the Korherr report and the Hölfe telegram, and the deaths in other camps than extermination camps were correct, there could die only 300,000 Jews in Auschwitz, very possibly less. Indeed, according to the first Polish calculations after the war, the death toll in Auschwitz was 300,000, composed of people from all nationalities, not only Jews.
Can it be illegal to speculate that the number of deaths in Auschwitz was less than 1-1.5 million? If so, how was it legal to lower the number from 4 million to 1-1.5 million?
I think that the purpose of giving the wrong figure was originally to hide the fact that about 1.5 million Jews were transferred to the East. And maybe also people were surprised that about 1 million Jews had died in the Western part (there were 410,000 camp survivors and some 80,000 Polish Jewish survivors who avoided camps). It seems like very much for a transfer operation of 3 million, but typically about one fourth to one third are killed in concentration camps from all causes, without genocidal intention. Death rates for many German POW camps were also very high in the Eastern front. They are larger in bigger camps due to epidemics.
There was no reason to hide the number of transferred Jews in case all of them were killed in the Operation Reinhard camps, but my calculations indicate that a certain number survived these camps and were transferred to what was the Soviet Union after the war.
The number is not very large and it comes from subtracting the pre-war Jewish population count from the post-war count and combining it with the division of Jews to West and East. I do not think subtracting numbers can be illegal in Europe.
The Soviets claimed that in Auschwitz died 4 million – a number known to be false. They did not want it to be known that many Jews had died in the Soviet Union and that some Jews had been transferred to the Soviet Union. Why they did not want it to be known is another question and I will skip it here. Anyway, this seems to be one answer to the question in the title of this post.
But are false memories part of the explanation? The reason why the capacity of crematoria is stated as much larger than it can possibly be, must be to hide the transfer of Jews to the East, but it is not at all necessary that all eye witnesses had such goal. In Julia Shaw’s there is a chapter of media’s influence and discussed the concept of memory borrowing. Just one spreader of disinformation may have, by discussing with other eye witnesses, modified the memories of the others. So, they all thought they remembered having seen gas chambers and that bodies burn to ashes in just 5 minutes.
The Nazi archive at Bad Arolsen was opened some five years ago. There are no documents confirming gassings. That must mean something. There are scientific studies showing traces of Zyklon B in the leichenkeller or Crema II, but that may mean that the morgue was occasionally gassed for killing lice. The evidence of gas chambers must be carefully considered and its implications to the witness testimonies evaluated.
Just to make it clear, I do not claim anything. You can consider the eye witness testimonies, those are the ones I found. You can also consider if these testimonies are strong enough to invalidate the commonly held belief that addition and subtraction of numbers is a correctly defined mathematical operation and if correctly done it gives correct results, and check the numbers that I have used in my two first posts on Holocaust, which are the best numbers I could find and from Jewish or other accepted sources. I say nothing, I leave it to you to conclude anything.