Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time (42 page)

I give this context for Broad's memoir because deniers dismiss damning Nazi confessions as either coerced or made up for bizarre psychological reasons (while accepting without hesitation confessions that support deniers' views). Broad was never tortured, and he had little to gain and everything to lose by confessing. When given the opportunity to recant, which he certainly could have 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, and the temporary chambers set up in the two abandoned farms at Birkenau (Auschwitz II), which he correctly called by their jargon name, "Bunkers I and II." He also recalled the construction of Kremas II, III, IV, and V at Birkenau, and accurately depicted (by comparison with blueprints) the design of the undressing room, gas chamber, and crematorium. Then Broad described the 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 rilled 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 ... it 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, (in Shapiro 1990, p. 76)

Deniers point out that Broad's total of four minutes for the process is at odds with the statements of others, such as Commandant Hoess, who claim it was more like twenty minutes. Because of such discrepancies, deniers dismiss the account entirely. A dozen different accounts give a dozen different figures for time of death by gassing, so deniers believe no one was gassed at all. Does this make sense? Of course not. Obviously, the gassing process would take different amounts of time due to variations in conditions, including the temperature (the rate of hydrocyanic acid gas evaporation from the pellets depends on 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 that each observer would perceive time differently. If the time estimates were exactly the same, in fact, we would have to be suspicious that they were all taking their stories from a single account. In this case, discrepancy tends to support the veracity of the evidence.

Compare Broad's testimony with that of the camp physician, Dr. Johann Paul Kremer:

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]. (1994, p. 162)

Deniers seize upon the fact that Kremer says "special action," not "gassing," but at the trial of the Auschwitz camp garrison in Krakau in December 1947, Kremer specified what he meant by "special action":

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. (1994, p. 162n)

The convergence of Broad's and Kremer's accounts—and there are plenty more—provides evidence that the Nazis used gas chambers and crematoria for mass extermination.

We have hundreds of accounts of survivors describing the unloading and separation process of Jews at Auschwitz, and we have photographs of the process. We also have eyewitness accounts of the Nazis burning bodies in open pits after gassing (the crematoria often broke down), and we have a photograph of such a burning, taken secretly by a Greek Jew named Alex (figure 22). Alter Fajnzylberg, a French Sonderkommando at Auschwitz, recalled how this photograph was obtained:

On the day on which the pictures were taken we allocated tasks. Some of us were to guard the person taking the pictures. At last the moment came. We all gathered at the western entrance leading from the outside to the gas chamber of Crematorium V: we could not see any SS men in the watch-tower overlooking the door from above the barbed wire, nor near the place where the pictures were to be taken. Alex, the Greek Jew, quickly took out his camera, pointed it toward a heap of burning bodies, and pressed the shutter. This is why the photograph shows prisoners from the Sonderkommando working at the heap. (Swiebocka 1993, pp. 42-43)

Deniers also focus on the lack of photographic proof of gas chamber and crematoria activity in aerial reconnaissance photographs taken of the camps by the Allies. In 1992, denier John Ball actually published an entire book documenting this lack of evidence. The book is a high-quality, slick publication printed on glossy paper in order to hold the detail of the aerial photographs. Ball spent tens of thousands of dollars on the book, did all the layout and typesetting, and even printed the book himself. The project cost him more than just his savings. His wife gave him an ultimatum: her or the Holocaust. He chose the latter. Ball's book is a response to a 1979 CIA report on the aerial photographs—
The Holocaust Revisited: A Retrospective Analysis of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Extermination Complex
—in which the two authors, Dino A. Brugioni and Robert G. Poirier, present aerial photographs taken by the Allies that they claim prove extermination activities. According to Ball, the photographs were tampered with, marked, altered, faked. By whom? By the CIA itself, in order to match the story as depicted in the television mini-series
Holocaust.

Thanks to Dr. Nevin Bryant, supervisor of cartographic applications and image processing applications at Caltech/NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, I was able to get the CIA photographs properly analyzed by people who know what they are looking at from the air. Nevin and I analyzed the photographs using digital enhancement techniques not available to the CIA in 1979. We were able to prove that the photographs had not been tampered with, and we indeed found evidence of extermination activity. The aerial photographs were shot in sequence as the plane flew over the camp (on a bombing run toward its ultimate target—the IG Farben Industrial works). Since the photographs of the camp were taken a few seconds apart, stereoscopic viewing of two consecutive photographs shows movement of people and vehicles and provides better depth perception. The aerial photograph in figure 23 shows the distinctive features of Krema II. Note the long shadow from the crematorium chimney and, on the roof of the adjacent gas chamber at right angles to the crematorium building, note the four staggered shadows. Ball claims these shadows were drawn in, but four small structures that match the shadows are visible on the roof of the gas chamber in figure 24, a picture taken by an SS photographer of the back of Krema II (if you look directly below the chimney of Krema II, you will see two sides of the rectangular underground gas chamber structure protruding a few feet above the ground).

This photographic evidence converges nicely with eyewitness accounts describing SS men pouring Zyklon-B pellets through openings in the roof of the gas chamber. The aerial photograph in figure 25 shows a group of prisoners being marched into Krema V for gassing. The gas chamber is at the end of the building, and the crematorium has double chimneys. From the camp's daily logs, it is clear that these are Hungarian Jews from an RSHA transport, some of whom were selected for work and the rest sent for extermination. (Additional photographs and detailed discussion appear in Shermer and Grobman 1997.)

For obvious reasons, there are no photographs recording an actual gassing, and the difficulty with photographic evidence is that any photograph of activity at a camp cannot by itself prove anything, even if it has not been tampered with. One photograph shows Nazis burning bodies at Auschwitz. So what, say deniers. Those are bodies of prisoners who died of natural causes, not of prisoners who were gassed. Several aerial photographs show the details of the Kremas at Birkenau and record prisoners being marched into them. So what, say deniers. The prisoners are going to work to clean up after bodies of people who died of natural causes were burned; or they are going for delousing. Again, it is context and convergence with other evidence that make such photographs telling—and the fact that none of the photographs records activities at variance with the accounts of life in the camps supports the Holocaust and the use of gas chambers and crematoria for mass murder.

How Many Jews Died?

The final major axis of Holocaust denial is the number of Jewish victims. Paul Rassinier concluded his
Debunking the Genocide Myth: A Study of the Nazi Concentration Camps and the Alleged Extermination of European Jewry
by claiming "a minimum of 4,419,908 Jews succeeded in leaving Europe between 1931 and 1945" (1978, p. x) and therefore far fewer than six million Jews died at the hands of the Nazis. Most Holocaust scholars, however, place the total number of Jewish victims between 5.1 and 6.3 million.