In 1989, a graduate student in chemistry was surprised to learn
that no one had ever studied the Auschwitz gas chambers from a chemical perspective.
A year later, while preparing his PhD thesis in chemistry
at the prestigious Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research in Stuttgart, Germany,
he realized that this institute gave him access to all the resources he needed
to look into this matter himself.
Now, after more than two decades of continued research and archival studies,
this curious scholar, Germar Rudolf,
has published his findings in the form of a book and a video,
both with the title “The Chemistry of Auschwitz.”
Let’s see what he found out.
On June 15, 1994, David Lawson
was scheduled to be killed
in the execution gas chamber
of the state prison of North Carolina.
This is a view into this chamber.
Lawson, however refused to cooperate.
Instead of breathing quickly and deeply,
he repeatedly held his breath
and took only short breaths in between.
Again and again he called out
“I am human!”
For ten straight minutes,
he kept on struggling against his fate.
Only eighteen minutes after the beginning
of the execution was he declared dead.
It was the longest-lasting gas-chamber execution
in the history of the United States.
The witnesses to the execution were horrified,
and the prison warden supervising the execution
was so shaken that he resigned.
Because of disasters like this,
executions by gas chamber were eventually banned
for being cruel and unusual.
And this despite the fact
that executions with gas were considered
swift, painless and humane
when they were first introduced
in the United States in the 1920s.
Here is a clip from a British documentary
showing how it’s supposed to work:
“This is BBC One.
And now, ‘Fourteen Days in May.’
Viewers are advised that this is a disturbing documentary
about the death penalty in Mississippi.
Filmed during the final days
of one condemned man’s fight to save his life,
it includes a sequence of the gas chamber
being tested with rabbits.
‘Fourteen Days in May.’”
This test gassing occurred in the gas chamber
of the state prison in Parchman, Mississippi,
using two black rabbits.
The poisonous cyanide powder was put into a bowl
beneath the execution chair.
Once the door was secured,
sulfuric acid was poured over the powder.
As a result, hydrogen-cyanide gas was released so violently
that it rose up in a cloud of sulfuric-acid mist.
The bunnies died after not even a minute.
If we look up expert literature,
like Henderson & Haggard’s “Noxious Gases,”
we find in them the claim
that humans die very quickly,
within a minute or less,
when exposed to the hydrogen-cyanide concentrations
as they are used during executions
in the United States.
But that’s apparently not true.
U.S. researcher Scott Christianson
has written a study on the history of the U.S. gas chambers.
He found that, during hundreds of executions over the past 90 years,
it took on average some 9 minutes to kill a human.
So what’s wrong here, and who is right?
Turns out, reality is right,
and the scientists are wrong.
In a 1976 study for the U.S. Army
on the toxicity of hydrogen-cyanide gas for humans,
a certain McNamara traced back
what the experts quote in their books on toxicology.
It turned out that directly or indirectly
they all refer to a German book of 1919
that reported the results of gassing test
made prior to World War One on… well, rabbits.
The study also established
that gassing experiments with dogs, monkeys and humans
demonstrated that humans are much less susceptible than dogs.
For example, in one case a dog and a human volunteer
were placed in a gas chamber
and exposed to the same concentration of hydrogen cyanide.
While the dog stopped breathing
after just one and a half minutes
and was assumed dead,
the man at that time
did not even show any symptoms.
In fact, the values found by this study
closely resemble the values
found by Christianson in his study.
Instead of killing within a minute and less,
the concentrations used in the U.S. execution gas chambers
would indeed not kill with certainty
before some ten minutes.
One reason for this is also
that death-row inmates executed in the U.S. using hydrogen cyanide gas chambers
knew what they were facing.
In fact, although they were told to breathe in deeply to shorten their suffering,
some did the exact opposite in a desperate and futile attempt
to survive the gas exposure, as is explained in this documentary.
This poor roofing fellow got caught
on the top of the roof
of the Catholic church of St. Michael
at Untergriesbach in Bavaria, Germany,
when the bells starting tolling frantically.
This church is our next stop
on our journey to the Chemistry of Auschwitz.
In 1972, major renovation work was carried out on this church.
Among other things,
the plaster on the inside was redone,
and a pest-control company was called
to kill the woodworms
which had infested the church’s woodwork.
But replacing the plaster first
and then fumigating the church with hydrogen cyanide
in order to kill the bugs
was a bad idea,
as the church’s newsletter reports.
In the church’s chronology
on the church’s website
we find an entry for July 1972
referring to – quote –
“fumigation of the entire church
with Zyklon against woodworm infestation” –
unquote.
Zyklon refers to Zyklon B,
the active ingredient in which is hydrogen cyanide.
Further down we read
that the fumigation led to blotchy discolorations of the plaster.
Not much more information can be gleaned from that website,
but a similar case that occurred four years later
in another church in Bavaria is more revealing.
This concerns the Protestant church of the town of Wiesenfeld.
Here, too, the church’s plaster was redone,
and a few weeks later
the whole church was fumigated using Zyklon B,
that is to say, hydrogen cyanide,
in order to kill woodworms.
A few months later,
the entire plaster started developing blotchy blue stains,
as if someone had splattered
blue ink everywhere onto the plaster.
This time, however, the case was properly documented,
and the experts called to investigate
took samples, analyzed them chemically,
and determined what the problem was.
The case was published as an entry in Volume 4
of the German series “Bauschäden-Sammlung”,
that is, “Collection of Construction Damages.”
Here are the first two pages of this article in German.
The paper was also published in an English translation
in this book on pages 557 to 559.
From this article, we learn
that the hydrogen cyanide had been absorbed
by the fresh and moist plaster,
and that the small traces of rust
contained in the plaster
– which is a natural component of every cement and sand used to make it –
had reacted with the hydrogen cyanide
to slowly form a pigment
called “Iron Blue” or “Prussian Blue”.
Being an integral part of the plaster,
the only way to remove the blue stains
was by completely knocking off the new plaster
and redoing the entire job,
as the lead architect of the renovation project
Konrad Fischer stated in an interview.
Unfortunately, there aren’t any color images
of that case available.
The only illustration shown in the documentation
is this black-and-white image,
which may have looked something like this in color,
but there are other cases
where the same reaction occurred.
Zyklon B was used on a grand scale
during World War II in Europe to combat lice
which infested the clothes, bed linen and living quarters
of soldiers, prisoners of war and concentration-camp inmates.
Lice transmit typhus,
which is a deadly disease.
During WWII, hundreds of thousands of people died of it.
This is a 1948 paper on that topic
by Dr. John Gordon from Harvard University.
I have redone the chart to improve its clarity.
It shows the number of typhus cases in Germany
as officially recorded and published
by the German civilian authorities
between 1939 and 1943,
and as encountered by U.S. troops
in their zone of occupation
in the first half of 1945.
No data is available for 1944.
The numbers for the years 1939 through 1943
evidently do not include typhus cases
in German labor or concentration camps.
Otherwise those numbers would be vastly higher.
To prevent or stamp out typhus epidemics during World War Two,
killing lice was one of the most important challenges
all warring parties faced.
The Germans’ chief method of killing lice
was Zyklon B, deployed in fumigation gas chambers.
Such chambers were built in many locations,
civilian as well as military in nature,
and of course in the vast German system
of labor and concentration camps.
Many if not most of these fumigation chambers
were destroyed after the war, but some survived.
This here is the Zyklon B fumigation chamber
at the former Stutthof Concentration Camp
near Danzig, West Prussia,
used to disinfest inmate clothing.
Note the blotchy blue stains on the walls,
outside as well as inside.
This is a room of one building
at the former Majdanek Camp
which was also used for fumigating clothes.
Again, it has blue stains in many places.
The same is true for another structure in that camp
also used for Zyklon-B fumigations.
This is a former Zyklon-B-fumigation facility
at the former Auschwitz-Birkenau Camp.
It exhibits the same kind of blue stains,
both on the outside walls and on the inside.
That structure existed in two mirror-symmetrical units.
This here is the other one,
only a few yards away from the first.
It, too, exhibits the tell-tale blue discoloration
of bricks, mortar and plaster
on the inside as well as on the outside.
We may assume that the plaster of two churches
fumigated with Zyklon B we just discussed
looked very similar to this.
Now that we’ve arrived at Auschwitz,
let’s take a look around.
This is a map of the Auschwitz region.
In order to get an orientation as to where we are,
here is an inset showing on the left a map of Europe.
The small blue rectangle shows the area of Poland
that is enlarged in the right-hand inset.
In it, I have surrounded with a red rectangle
the area which we see here in the large map.
Three areas on this map are of interest in the present context.
First, the Auschwitz Main Camp,
which was the original concentration camp opened in 1940.
Most of its structures survived the war
and serve today as a museum.
It also includes a crematorium with a homicidal gas chamber.
We’ll return to that later.
Next, there is the huge Auschwitz-Birkenau Camp just a mile away,
which was initially planned as a PoW camp,
but ended up as the destination
for roughly one million Jews
deported from various European countries.
Most structures of that camp have been destroyed,
either by the Germans prior to their retreat,
or afterwards by Poles
who used the building material as fire wood
or to reconstruct their homes.
Finally, there is the industrial area
of the German chemical trust I.G. Farbenindustrie to the east.
The Auschwitz Camp is considered the largest concentration camp of the Third Reich.
At its peak in 1944, it had 48 subcamps
where inmates worked in armaments industries,
workshops, farming, coal mines and chemical factories.
If you wish, it was Europe’s largest slave-labor enterprise ever.
The most-important factories,
from a strategic point of view,
were the Buna plants of the German chemical trust I.G. Farbenindustrie.
Planning and construction started in 1941.
These photos of this plant from the German Federal Archives
are from 1943 and 1944.
Some of these structures still exist to this day.
You can see some photographic juxtapositions on the website given.
Parallel to these industrial activities,
plans to increase the nearby slave-labor population were also made.
For that purpose, the initially small Auschwitz Concentration Camp
was turned into a huge system of camps,
which at one point was planned to accommodate
some 200,000 inmates as a slave-labor resource.
The background of the chemical factories
was the fact that Germany, in times of war,
could easily be deprived of all major imports
of food and raw materials by a British blockade.
Already during the First World War,
Germany felt the devastating effect
of being cut off from all imports,
among them also rubber and petroleum,
to name only the two most important raw materials
for any industrialized nation.
Ever since, Germany strove to became independent
from natural rubber and mineral oil
by exploiting its coal reserves
and its chemical talents.
In fact, already prior to the First World War,
in 1909, the German Chemist Fritz Hofmann
invented a process for producing artificial rubber.
A process to convert nitrogen from the air into ammonia
– an important first step in the production
of any modern fertilizer or explosive –
was first demonstrated by the German chemist Fritz Haber, also in 1909.
He received the Nobel Prize for it in 1918.
A process to turn coal into liquid hydrocarbons
was first developed by the German Friedrich Bergius
starting in 1910, with a patent issued in 1913.
Hence, all the scientific pieces were in place
when the First World War broke out,
but turning them into an industrial-scale operation
to make Germany independent from imports
took a few decades.
This stage was only achieved to a large degree
during the later years of the Third Reich.
The chemical industry near Auschwitz
played a major role in this scheme.
The importance of Auschwitz in Germany’s economic plans
can be derived from the summary
written right after the war
by some of America’s greatest experts on German industry, quote:
Apart from Auschwitz,
Germany had only three other plants
producing the basic chemicals
from which the vast majority
of all German supplies
of rubber, fuel and lubricants were synthesized.
Destroying these factories should therefore have been
at the very top of all Allied bombing lists
– although they were placed there only in 1944.
Here is an Allied air photo of the Auschwitz plant
taken on January 14, 1945,
barely two weeks before the area was occupied by the Red Army.
In this section enlargement,
you can see many bomb craters
caused by a number of Allied air raids
on that factory, which started in mid-1944.
Some of them I have marked here red.
Deportation of Jews to Auschwitz as slave laborers
started in early 1942,
but construction of the new camp Auschwitz-Birkenau had just begun.
This here is a map showing the situation in May 1942.
There actually wasn’t much of a camp in existence yet.
Only in late 1942
did the first inmate showers and delousing facilities
become operational in that camp,
the already-mentioned hygiene Buildings 5a and 5b
with their Zyklon-B fumigation chambers.
As a consequence,
hygienic conditions at the camp were catastrophic,
and inmates started dying like flies
right from the beginning.
In Danuta Czech’s mainstream standard work
on the chronology of events at Auschwitz,
we read on page 209 in the entry for May 10, 1942
that the typhus epidemic is spreading
at the Auschwitz Concentration Camp,
and was even threatening the camp’s SS staff.
One of the more prominent victims among them
was the Auschwitz garrison physician Dr. Siegfried Schwela,
who died during that month of the disease.
The entry for May 25th states
that more typhus cases were reported on that day
in the camp infirmary.
By the summer of 1942,
possibly also because there was never
a proper garrison physician in charge during that time,
the typhus epidemic had gotten completely out of control.
Hundreds of inmates were dying every day.
On page 277 we read in the entry for August 17
that Dr. Kurt Uhlenbrock took over
the post of garrison physician on that day,
but a footnote explains that he, too,
succumbed to typhus a few weeks later
and remained in Auschwitz until October 2 of 1942
only because he was still recovering from that disease.
Uhlenbrock barely survived.
The sick Uhlenbrock was replaced on September 6th
by Dr. Eduard Wirths, who until then
had been garrison physician at the Dachau Camp.
Only after Dr. Wirths had assumed his position,
did things start to change.
Here is how the new garrison physician Dr. Wirths
described the situation at the Auschwitz Camp
when he arrived there – quote:
Wirths, here on the left, together with, among others,
camp commander Höss on the very right,
subsequently went to work to improve the conditions,
yet it took him a full year
to get the epidemic under control.
Among other things, he also saw to it
that the most modern delousing technique
was installed at Auschwitz:
a large microwave delousing device.
Here is an image of that device
as installed at Auschwitz in early 1944,
and this is a circuit layout.
These documents are stored in the archives
of the Siemens Company
who developed this device under the aegis of the German Army
in order to keep the clothing of German soldiers clean.
A shift of priorities occurred in 1943, however,
as a result of which the device was used
to save the lives of inmates at Auschwitz instead.
Here is a blueprint from the files
of the Auschwitz camp authorities
showing the building where the device was installed.
And this is a report by Dr. Wirths of August 1944
in which he enthusiastically praises
the exceptional performance of this device.
The Siemens Archives in Munich even have some film footage of the device
as it is being operated at Auschwitz,
but we were not allowed to make a copy of it.
Also in 1944, DDT made its first appearance in Auschwitz
under the German name “Lauseto.”
Nine metric tons were delivered in April 1944,
fifteen tons in August,
and two tons in October of that year.
Together with the highly effective and efficient microwave delousing facility,
Auschwitz therefore had hardly any need for Zyklon B in 1944,
at least when it came to disinfestations.
As a matter of fact, only a little more
than one metric ton of Zyklon B
was delivered to Auschwitz in 1944,
and the last delivery was made
in late May of that year.
Since the factory buildings of the producer of Zyklon B,
the Dessauer Zuckerwerke
– that is: Sugar Works of Dessau, in Saxony –
were damaged in summer 1944 by an Allied air raid,
Zyklon B deliveries pretty much dried up after that in general.
It is important to note
that the mass extermination of Hungarian Jews at Auschwitz
using Zyklon B
is said to have started in mid-May 1944,
that is to say, around the time
Zyklon-B deliveries came to an end.
These are images made by the SS
while these Jews were unloaded from trains at Auschwitz.
There aren’t any photos showing homicidal gassings, though.
There are, however, images showing inmates
who have just undergone the admission procedures to the camp,
which included showering and shaving
to prevent the spread of lice.
Having their hair shaved off
was certainly humiliating for these women,
but it also was a necessary, life-saving measure.
Plans for the two big Zyklon-B delousing facilities we saw earlier
were drawn up in the summer of 1942.
The original blueprints show
that the room used for fumigating clothes
was called “Gaskammer,” that is, “gas chamber.”
Most of these blueprints were drawn by inmates
employed at the Auschwitz Construction Office.
Interestingly, around the same time
the blueprints for these two buildings were drawn,
Polish resistance groups started reporting
the existence of two homicidal gas chambers at Auschwitz.
Some of the claimed features
of these alleged homicidal gas chambers
closely resemble features of these two fumigation facilities.
These fumigation rooms were not of the professional kind
that had been developed by the company distributing Zyklon B,
but of a rather more-basic,
if not to say primitive, design.
The rooms were huge,
had a lot of dead space in the gable area,
were not properly sealed along the roofline,
had no means of either heating the Zyklon B
or distributing its fumes in the chamber,
and their ventilation system was rather crude as well.
Here you see the two openings
where once ventilators were installed.
In fact, to operate this fumigation chamber,
someone wearing a gas mask had to enter the room
and spread out the Zyklon B pellets on the floor,
then retreat and lock the door firmly.
The doors to these disinfestation rooms
were of a makeshift kind as well,
since they were made by inmates
working in a local workshop.
They consisted of wooden boards
held together by iron bands,
as you can see in these illustrations.
The cracks between the boards were
– quote-unquote – “sealed” with felt strips,
which, by the way, lets hydrogen cyanide through
as if it were nothing.
These doors were moreover equipped with a peephole,
as was required by German law.
It stipulated that the person entering such a chamber
had to be observed by another person from the outside,
who needed to wear a gas mask as well
and had to have a first-aid kit at hand.
This way he could swiftly intervene
in case of an emergency,
for example caused by a leaking or improperly donned gas mask.
This kind of door is the only kind
that has ever been found in Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Here is one currently leaning against a wall
inside the former Zyklon-B-fumigation wing
of Building 5a that has a proper window.
It probably served as a door
to a hot-air disinfestation room, though.
This is a 1945 photo of another typical camp-made wooden door,
this one without window or peephole, though.
It was found near the ruins of Crematorium V,
and is today stored in the Old Crematorium at the Main Camp.
Somewhat more-sturdy steel doors were found
at the Auschwitz Camp in the old Crematorium building
which is said to have had a homicidal gas chamber.
However, these doors were ordered and installed
only during the conversion of this building
into an air-raid shelter for the SS in 1944.
At that point in time,
this crematorium had already been out of operation for a year.
This particular door was sealing
the air-raid shelter’s air lock to the outside.
This one, which is currently stored in the former furnace room,
might have been ordered to seal the opening
between the shelter and the former furnace room,
before it was decided to wall up that opening.
But even those doors are made of a wooden frame
and merely have a sheet-metal cover
to make them gastight.
There is no trace of any massive steel door
ever having been ordered or installed at Auschwitz
prior to mid-1944.
This is what they look like.
These are massive steel doors
as installed at the fumigation chambers at Dachau.
That one, and this one, sealed fumigation chambers at Majdanek,
and that’s the fumigation chamber at Stutthof.
And here are some excerpts
from construction drawings of such doors
as offered to the Auschwitz Camp in July 1942.
However, they were ordered only in June 1944,
and in November 1944, the vendor of these doors inquired
whether the camp still had an interest in their delivery.
This means that they were evidently never delivered.
Auschwitz simply never felt a need
to order massive steel doors…
This fact is not trivial.
After all, the orthodox Holocaust narrative has it
that hundreds of people were crammed
into the homicidal gas chambers.
Some witnesses even speak of a thousand,
two thousand, like Rudolf Höss,
or even three thousand people, like Charles Bendel.
Let’s ignore the fact
that it would have been physically impossible
to press many more than a thousand people
into the rooms referred to.
Here is a drawing of the largest of the rooms claimed,
densely packed with 1680 people
(120 rows of 14 each).
And such a packing density is only theoretically possible,
meaning that it requires the drill and discipline
of experience soldiers to line up in such a fashion.
Anyway, there can be no doubt
that panic would have broken out among those victims,
once they realized that they had been locked up
in a chemical slaughter house
and were about to be poisoned.
What a panicking crowd can do
can be seen from the Heysel Stadium disaster
that occurred in Belgium in May 1985.
Let’s watch this clip:
“Heysel Stadium, Brussels.
British soccer fans fly into a frenzy,
attacking rival Italian fans.
The Belgian police are caught off guard,
as innocent fans are pelted with bottles and rocks.
British hooligans break through a fence.
In a panic, the Italians make a run for the exists,
but they suddenly have nowhere to go.
A concrete wall blocks their escape,
but it quickly collapses under their weight.
Hundreds are now trapped under a crushing mass of humanity.
Cries for help go unanswered.”
Note that the wall was pushed over
by the pressure exerted by the hundreds of fans
pushing against it.
The steel doors sealing U.S. execution gas chambers
look like an overkill in security,
for even if an inmate ever had a chance
of getting out of the execution seat he is strapped into,
any normal steel door would prevent him from getting out.
But here, it’s not just about keeping the inmate in,
but also about keeping all the witnesses
absolutely safe from any leakage.
At Auschwitz, leakage would not have been the major issue.
After all, all the leaky makeshift fumigation doors
did their job just fine.
For homicidal gas chambers
designed to contain hundreds of unfettered victims,
the challenge would have been
to let the door open to the outside,
and to secure it against a panicking crowd
violently pushing and kicking against it.
The door had to open to the outside,
because many if not most victims,
trying to escape through the door,
would collapse and die right in front of it,
making it impossible to open any door opening to the inside.
However, a door opening to the outside
is much more difficult to secure
against being opened by force.
Simple wooden doors held together by iron bands would never do.
The flimsy iron bands would give way within seconds,
and the wood would bend and splinter.
To illustrate that point,
I have used Photoshop
to make the latch on this gas tight door move.
This was the kind of latch
that was used on all the gas-tight doors at Auschwitz.
Imagine hundreds of people pushing against that latch.
How long would it last?
These doors worked for fumigation chambers,
but for homicidal gas chambers,
they absolutely are inconceivable.
Here is a scene from the 2011 movie “Auschwitz”
by Uwe Boll showing a gassing scene.
It shows a massive steel door,
as has to be expected,
even though the latch is a little flimsy.
The problem is that none of the claimed homicidal gas chambers at Auschwitz
was ever equipped with such doors.
The situation is even worse
when it comes to the room at the Auschwitz Museum
which is presented every year
to over a million visitors
as a homicidal gas chamber.
This is an original German blueprint of 1942.
It clearly shows not only that the room in question,
in its original layout,
which is labeled as an innocuous morgue,
had no door through which the claimed victims
could have accessed the morgue from the outside.
They actually had to enter into it
either by walking through the furnace room
where their already-murdered fellow inmates
were just being cremated – an absurd idea.
Or else they had to enter
walking through the dissecting room
were piles of corpses were awaiting autopsies
by the camp’s physicians
– a no less absurd scenario.
Worse still, the door connecting the morgue
– the alleged gas chamber –
to the furnace room was a swinging door,
as can be seen from blueprints of 1940,
here an enlargement of that door,
1942, also as an enlargement,
and even 1944,
when the building was converted to an air raid shelter,
although here the draftsman apparently
got the opening direction wrong.
This proves, however,
that through the entire history of that crematorium,
until that door was walled up in 1944,
this door was a swinging door.
The question is:
How do you make a swinging door gas tight?
And how do you secure it against a panicking crowd?
Look at this real-world swinging door in my home.
There is no way of looking it securely against a panicking crowd.
And look at these gaps.
By their very design,
swinging doors are not even able to prevent a draft.
It makes perfect sense to have such a door
in a place where people constantly haul
heavy loads from one room to another.
The door opens with a push in either direction,
and in closes by itself.
But such a door is utterly inconceivable
for a homicidal gas chamber.
And yet, there it is.
Today, there is no door at all between these two rooms.
That’s not a smart design for a homicidal gas chamber either,
but reinstating the original design
is apparently out of the question as well.
It goes without saying that the Auschwitz Museum
hides this ugly little secret
from its millions of visitors,
because otherwise the entire fraud
upon which this museum was built
would swiftly collapse.
On this chart,
today located right next to the building,
there is no trace of that swinging door.
Of course, there was another door to that morgue,
the wall opening of which is shown here on the museum’s chart.
We do not know what kind of door was built in here,
as that wall was removed by the museum after the war.
However, we can see already in this chart
that the wall that accommodated this door was rather thin.
In fact, original wartime blueprints give the exact measure of that wall’s thickness:
15 cm.
That is the thickness of the width of a regular brick
plus some plaster left and right of it.
What we can deduce from this
is that it would have been impossible to install in that wall
a heavy, panic-proof steel door,
because those need to be solidly anchored in cement or concrete,
as these construction drawings for solid gas-tight steel doors show
that were offered to the Auschwitz camp authorities.
There’s more to the story,
but before discussing this,
let’s go back to chemistry.
As mentioned before,
in the case of the Bavarian church in Wiesenfeld,
masonry samples were taken and analyzed
in order to find out
what had caused the blue stains.
Similar investigations were done in Auschwitz,
where a number of researchers took masonry samples
of the various fumigation chambers
and of rooms that are said to have used,
or rather misused,
at some point in time
to mass murder people with hydrogen cyanide
in the form of Zyklon B.
Before we can go into the details of these analyses, however,
we need to address a number of questions.
First, how likely is it to find any trace
of the blue chemical compounds involved in the first place?
After all, several decades have passed
since Zyklon B was used in those locations.
Next, what conditions are favorable to their formation?
And finally, are there any factors
that could interfere with the reliability of chemical analysis?
The first question concerns the stability
of the blue pigment we are analyzing.
Viewed on the surface of things,
it is plainly obvious that this pigment must be very stable,
because it can still be found to this day
in the walls of the various fumigation facilities,
even on the outside
where the walls have been exposed
to the influence of sunshine and rain
for many decades.
This fact is backed up by a long-term-stability test
which was performed in England
starting in the late 1950s.
During that test,
the blue pigment was simply precipitated on an aluminum sheet,
and that aluminum sheet was then exposed
to rain and shine for 21 years
on the rooftop of the factory building
of the High Duty Alloys Company in Slough,
which is a western suburb of London.
During the 1950s and 1960s,
at the peak of the age of coal,
acidic smog was a common occurrence
in and around London.
“[…] this choking, eye-watering smog.
Traffic in London was completely at a standstill on many occasions.
In fact, the fog was the worst on record for many a year.”
Hence, the color samples used in that test
were exposed to one of the most aggressive environments possible.
Yet still, the results published in this paper of 1981 were astounding.
They showed that this Prussian Blue pigment
was one of the most stable pigments
of all the pigments investigated,
similar only to iron ochre,
which is basically rust.
Almost all of the samples used
hardly lost any of their vibrancy.
Another strong indicator that the pigment in question
is extremely long-lasting
can be seen from the fate it suffered
in the soil of former coking plants and city gas works.
During the age of coal,
people used to heat their homes and cook with city gas,
which could be produced from coal
in a number of ways.
Let’s watch the following educational Australian footage from the 1950s,
which I have cut down
to what’s essential in the present context:
“the coal is fed from the hoppers
and falls into the retorts,
which are heated from the outside.
As the coal is heated, coal gas is given off. […]
Those dots show how the gas escapes
from the retorts through pipes.
What is left of the coal is called coke,
and is emptied from the bottom of the retorts
into steel trucks. […]
Other sections of the gas works
clean this gas
by removing tar, ammonia and other impurities,
to make it fit for our use."
One of these impurities is a small amount of hydrogen cyanide,
which gets washed out in the cleaning step mentioned next:
“and also this scrubbing plant
to remove still more impurities.”
Hydrogen cyanide was removed
by letting it react with a solution
of iron-two and iron-three hydroxide,
resulting in Prussian Blue.
Because Prussian Blue was considered innocuous,
many city-gas works and coking plants
simply dumped the pigment on the factory grounds.
As a result, the soil of thousands
of coking and city gas plants all over the world
contains high quantities of Prussian Blue to this day,
at times even giving the soil a bluish hue.
In the 1990s, when environmentalism became fashionable,
people started noticing the high quantities of cyanide
in the soil of former coking plants.
Ever since, a plethora of scientific papers has appeared
investigating how dangerous this cyanide contamination is,
if at all.
One scientist in particular built his career
on pushing the panic button about that,
the Dutchman Johannes Meeussen.
In a number of papers which he collected in a volume
he eventually submitted as his PhD thesis,
he theorized that Prussian Blue
from coke-gas scrubbers deposited in soil
would be highly unstable
and should dissolve within a short period of time,
giving off toxic levels of free cyanide
into the ground water.
But when he tested his theory
by taking soil samples and analyzing them,
the results did not support his theory,
which turned out to have been based
on the premise that Prussian Blue
is present in the soils
as a microscopic mixture of iron cyanide and iron hydroxide,
that is, rust – a so-called solid solution.
That may in fact be the case
with some of the Prussian Blue
dumped on the grounds of former gas works,
as this Prussian Blue formed quickly
using an excess of iron hydroxide.
But that is not at all
what we would be dealing with in our case.
The slow formation of the pigment in masonry
in the absence of noticeable amounts
of dissolved iron hydroxide
precludes the formation of mixed crystals
and supports the formation
of pure Prussian Blue crystals.
Further studies revealed that Prussian Blue as such
is in fact highly stable for many decades.
This chart shows in purplish blue
the range of stability of Prussian Blue
and, in a lighter blue, of Turnbull’s Blue,
which is almost identical to Prussian Blue.
The acidity of the environment is plotted along the x axis,
and the oxidative strength on the y axis.
Actual environmental conditions in masonry and soils
are located between pH 4 and pH 8.
In other words,
there is no way Prussian Blue could dissolve quickly
under the circumstances considered here.
The actual solubility of Prussian Blue
can be calculated by the upper limit of alkalinity
at which it is still stable.
According to this chart,
that limit is somewhere between pH 9 and pH 11,
depending on the oxidative strength of the environment.
With the known solubility of iron(III) hydroxide,
this yields a solubility product pKs for Prussian Blue
of somewhere between 165 and 200.
To cut a long story short:
If Prussian Blue forms in masonry
as a result of exposure to hydrogen cyanide,
the pigment formed is extremely stable.
In fact, it is similarly stable
as the main components of the wall itself,
since it is an integral part of it
and one of its most stable components to boot.
In particular, it is less soluble
than the iron hydroxide from which it formed.
Hence, as long as the wall itself exists,
it must be expected to contain Prussian Blue in undiminished concentrations.
Therefore, taking samples and analyzing them for Prussian Blue makes sense,
even if undertaken many decades after the events
that led to the pigment’s formation.
Let’s now turn to the conditions
that are favorable for the formation of Prussian Blue.
First off, the formation of Prussian Blue
in masonry exposed to hydrogen cyanide
cannot be the rule,
because the fumigation of buildings with Zyklon B
and similar products based on hydrogen cyanide
has been a common practice
for more than half a century,
yet reports about walls turning patchy-blue,
such as the two churches I discussed earlier,
are rare exceptions.
The question is:
what do all the cases of wall discolorations known to us
have in common that sets them apart from the rest?
Well, fumigations of buildings for pest control
usually take place only in older buildings,
because newly erected buildings cannot be infested by pests.
Such an infestation usually takes years or even decades.
However, all the fumigation chambers of the Third Reich era
were specifically built to be used
right after they had been erected.
The same instant-exposure situation
was given in the case of the two churches,
whose plaster had been replaced
a few weeks prior to the fumigation.
The same, of course, would have been true
for the claimed homicidal gas chambers
inside the crematoria at Auschwitz-Birkenau,
which are said to have been built
for the specific purpose of being used
right after these facilities had been finished.
So, what factors are favorable
to the formation of Prussian Blue in masonry?
In this presentation,
I will focus only on the most important aspects
of the physics and chemistry
of hydrogen-cyanide interaction with masonry.
More details with many references to expert literature
can be found in my book.
Anyway, in order to find out
which factors support the formation of Prussian Blue in masonry,
we need to look into the various steps
leading to the formation of this pigment.
First, hydrogen cyanide needs to get absorbed
by the moisture contained in the wall.
Next, the hydrogen cyanide molecules must be split
to form cyanide ions,
because only these ions react with iron at a considerable rate.
Then, those cyanide ions must attach themselves
to the iron ions contained in rust.
That means that the cyanide ions
displace the oxygen and hydroxide ions that,
together with the iron, constitute rust.
After this, some of the iron must be reduced
from the trivalent to its bivalent form,
because Prussian Blue is a mixture of both,
but the rust contained in masonry contains almost exclusively trivalent iron.
Finally, all components must come together
so as to precipitate as the blue pigment in question.
The first step requires that the masonry contains lots of water.
At low temperatures and a high relative humidity of the ambient air,
such as one can find in unheated basements,
up to 10% of the masonry material can consist of water.
If the ambient air is warm and dry, however,
this value may sink down to just 1% or even less.
The influence of moisture in the wall
on the tendency to absorb hydrogen cyanide
was determined during a series of tests
conducted in Germany in the late 1920s.
In our context, a comparison between a moist lime sandstone
and one dried for half a year at 20°C, that is 68°F, is of interest.
Here you can see a factor of almost 10 between moist and dry material.
In fact, a high water content is conducive to all the reactions considered,
none of which can take place at a noticeable rate in the absence of water.
Hence cool and thus moist walls will be more inclined
to form Prussian Blue than warm and dry walls.
The second step depends on the acidity of the masonry’s capillary water.
Since hydrogen cyanide is a weak acid,
it forms cyanide ions to a noticeable degree only in an alkaline, or low-acidity environment.
Such an environment exists in fresh lime mortars and plasters for a few weeks,
and in cement mortars and concretes for many months, years or even decades,
depending on their exact composition and history.
It can be stated in general
that a masonry material remains alkaline for a longer period of time,
if it contains little lime and lots of cement.
Hence, fresh and thus still-alkaline lime plaster
supports this step of the formation of Prussian Blue for a number of weeks,
while mortar and concrete rich in cement support it for many months,
if not years or even decades.
The difference in absorption of hydrogen cyanide between fresh, hence alkaline mortar
and old, well-set, hence pH-neutral mortar
was also investigated in the previously mentioned study.
We derive from it that, compared to the old mortar,
the fresh, alkaline mortar absorbed at least 26 times as much hydrogen cyanide,
and that it released it much more-slowly,
widening the gap between the two types of mortar as time went by.
Aging lime plaster turns pH-neutral after several weeks,
at which point any cyanide not bound by iron
will be turned back into hydrogen cyanide by the wall’s moisture.
That hydrogen cyanide will slowly evaporate and vanish into thin air.
Cement mortar and concrete, however, stay alkaline for much longer periods of time.
Hence, these materials allow any cyanide that has accumulated in its capillary system
to continue reacting for a much longer time.
The third step is the slowest of all the reactions considered.
It therefore determines the rate of formation of long-lasting iron-cyanide components.
While the trivalent iron of rust becomes more readily available
for reactions with increasing acidity,
its reaction partner, the cyanide ion, has the opposite tendency.
Hence, while fresh and thus very alkaline plasters, mortars and concretes
can accumulate lots of cyanide,
it takes a long time for iron cyanide to form.
In the cases of the two churches mentioned earlier,
that process took many months up to a year.
Helpful to this slow process is the next step, the reduction of trivalent iron to bivalent iron.
This reduction requires that something else gets oxidized.
In our case, the oxidizing agent is an excess of cyanide itself,
which also needs an alkaline environment for this reaction.
The driving force behind this reaction is the energy released
when trivalent iron surrounded by cyanide turns into bivalent iron.
That reaction is so strong in an alkaline medium
that it is even capable of turning trivalent chromium into hexavalent chromium.
The energy difference Δ between the two types of iron cyanides
is some 64 kilo-Joule per mol.
Hence, even if only small amounts of iron(III) cyanide can form
in a moderately alkaline environment,
it gets withdrawn from the equilibrium
by turning into iron(II) cyanide in the presence of excess cyanide.
In the course of many days, weeks, months or even years,
this can amount to considerable quantities of iron(II) cyanide.
The last step, the precipitation of Prussian Blue,
can take place when the acidity sinks below the limit
where this pigment is stable compared to iron hydroxide, that is, rust.
As shown previously, that is somewhere between pH 9 and 11.
Since the masonry’s acidity sinks with time starting at the surface,
that’s where most of the Prussian Blue will show up initially.
If the wall is moist, that moisture evaporates at the surface,
leaving behind everything that travels along with the water but cannot evaporate.
That includes any soluble iron cyanides not yet precipitated as Prussian Blue.
Hence, this pigment tends to get accumulated on the surfaces, inside and outside.
The red arrow on this photo points to the spot
where I took a wall sample from the inside of Building 5a in Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Note that just a few millimeters beneath the surface,
the plaster is considerably less blue.
But even in deeper layers, the plaster still contains high concentrations of cyanide.
It’s just that on the very surface,
that pigment’s concentration is extremely high in certain places.
This accumulation process on a wall’s surface depends on a number of factors,
starting with the kind of material that makes up the wall at any particular spot,
the amount of water in its capillary system, and the water’s mobility.
Last but not least,
the heat conductivity of the underlying material also has an influence on this.
There are a few other factors to be considered.
For instance, it goes without saying that high contents of rust in the masonry
are also conducive to the formation of Prussian Blue,
but since most materials have an iron content between 1 to 5 percent anyway,
the difference between them is usually negligible.
Furthermore, any masonry material containing considerable amounts of cement
also has the advantage that its microscopic inner surface
is much larger than that of masonry consisting mainly of lime.
Here is a scanning-electron microscope image of lime mortar,
and here is one of cement mortar at the same magnification,
although the image is much smaller.
As you can see, the crystals in the cement mortar are much smaller.
Here is a series of three images showing what happens to cement and concrete
after water has been added to the cement powder.
The first image shows the state after 4 hours,
the second after 10 hours, and the last after 21 hours.
What you see growing here are needles of aluminosilicates,
something that happens only in cement mortars and concretes,
but never in lime mortar.
These crystals are responsible for the fact
that cement mortar is much firmer and longer-lasting than lime mortar.
Due to this micro-crystalline structure,
the inner surface of cement and concrete is much larger than that of lime mortar.
The actual value, measured with water vapor,
can be as high as 200 square meters per gram of material.
Lime mortar has only about 10% of that value.
The micro-crystalline structure of cement mortars and concretes means
that the solid/liquid interface is very large.
Since we are dealing here with a reaction of the mostly solid iron ions
with cyanide dissolved in the capillary water,
such a large surface is very conducive to this reaction.
It also means that more iron is exposed at the surface,
and that it is more inclined to react, energetically speaking.
The opposite is true for sintered materials, however,
which do not tend to form Prussian Blue,
because the sintering process drastically reduces the inner surface of such materials,
hence their propensity to react in any way.
Bricks are a case in point.
Only on the surface,
where the material has been eroded due to environmental influences,
is the rust contained in them able to react to a considerable degree.
Before we turn to the actual analysis,
we need to understand that analyzing a substance
for a certain chemical
isn’t always a straightforward process.
Many methods are sensitive not just for one chemical,
but for several,
so a certain reading might not necessarily indicate
how much of a certain chemical is in a sample,
because it may give a combined reading of several chemicals.
In the present case, Johannes Meeussen determined
with a series of experiments
the kind of chemicals that can give false positive readings.
The most common one among them is carbonate.
This is very important for our case,
because one of the main components
of masonry is calcium carbonate.
In fact, older lime plaster samples
may mainly consist of it.
If we extrapolate Meeussen’s data to carbonate contents
in the order of several hundred grams per kilogram sample material,
or several ten percent,
this means that such samples
can yield a reading of several milligrams of cyanide
even in the total absence of any cyanide.
In other words, the analytical methods used
to detect cyanide traces
become insensitive in the case of masonry material rich in carbonates,
and readings of up to a few milligrams of cyanide per kilogram of sample material
should be considered uncertain or unreliable.
Equipped with this knowledge,
let’s now have a look at the analytical results
of a number of researchers
who took samples at Auschwitz.
To make things easier to digest,
I do not give the results of individual samples in this table,
but only the ranges of results.
Furthermore, I have grouped the samples
by the type of location they came from,
and then by the individual
who took the samples and had them analyzed.
The first, white set of results
comes from samples taken from walls
which are said to have been part of homicidal gas chambers.
The second, blue set of results concerns samples
taken from walls of former fumigation chambers,
mainly of the two buildings at Birkenau shown before.
The third set of results relates to samples
taken from walls of buildings which belong to neither group.
First, we see that all samples taken from structures
that were not fumigation chambers
exhibit results which are close to
what must be considered the detection limit.
To demonstrate this,
I have actually retested two of the samples
using a different lab.
While the first one – the Institute Fresenius –
found traces in the samples,
the second lab did not.
This means basically
that the cyanide readings in samples
taken from claimed homicidal gas chambers
are comparable to those taken from any other location,
and that none of them contain any traces of cyanide
that can be detected with any degree of reliability,
if they exist at all.
The situation is different
when it comes to samples taken from former fumigation chambers.
Only three of the four individuals who took samples
agree on the range of cyanide contents.
All samples that these three samplers had taken
had readings of at least a gram of cyanide
per kilogram of sample material.
This means that at least 0.1% of the samples
consisted of cyanide,
something we would expect of a sample
taken from walls exhibiting a patchy blue discoloration
caused by Zyklon-B fumigations.
The third set of samples
taken from various Auschwitz fumigation chambers
and analyzed by Markiewicz and colleagues, however,
didn’t result in any significant cyanide readings at all.
The reason for that is simple:
Dr. Jan Markiewicz, here a portrait from the 1960s,
had been commissioned by the Polish State Museum at Auschwitz,
thus by the Polish government itself.
Markiewicz himself was an employee
of the Jan-Sehn-Institute for Forensic Research,
which is run by the Polish government’s department of justice.
Since denying the Auschwitz gas chambers
is a crime in Poland,
Markiewicz must have been under massive pressure
to somehow conclude that the cyanide readings
from the claimed homicidal gas chambers
resemble those of fumigation chambers.
To produce those results,
he chose an analytic method
which by design was unable
to detect any Prussian Blue
and similar long-term-stable iron cyanide compounds.
Here is his 1994 publication of his rigged results.
As a reason why he excluded all Prussian Blue from the analysis,
he stated that he did not understand
how Prussian Blue could possibly form
in masonry as a result of Zyklon B gassings.
Quote:
“It is hard to imagine
the chemical reactions and physicochemical processes
that could have led to the formation of Prussian Blue in that place.”
Unquote.
Referring to a paper by an Austrian chemist,
Markiewicz then stated, quote
“that the formation of Prussian blue
in bricks is simply improbable,”
and that the blue discoloration
could instead be the result of blue wall paint.
While such a hypothesis is certainly permissible,
ignoring arguments to the contrary certainly is not.
But that is exactly what Markiewicz and his colleagues subsequently did.
Here is what they quoted in their paper
in footnote 4 on the last page:
Ernst Gauss, which used to be a pen name of mine,
"Vorlesungen über Zeitgeschichte,"
which means "Lectures on Contemporary History,"
This book is the German predecessor of the currently available book
Lectures on the Holocaust.
Its first edition was published in early 1993.
In it, I explained with the same arguments as presented here,
and supported by the same sources of expert literature,
how Prussian Blue can form in masonry after exposure to hydrogen cyanide,
and which factors are favorable.
Although he quoted the book,
Markiewicz ignored those arguments completely.
That book also addressed specifically
the many deficiencies and fallacies
of the Austrian paper quoted by Markiewicz,
in particular the demonstrably false hypothesis
that the blue discoloration of the Auschwitz,
Stutthof and Majdanek fumigation walls
could be the results of blue wall paint.
Specifically, we read on page 292, quote:
There are actually many more arguments
clearly showing that the wall-paint hypothesis
is nothing more than a red herring
conjured up to conceal a fraud:
First, Iron Blue as such
is not even sold as wall paint at all,
since it lacks sufficiently high lime fastness.
It is offered only as a mixture with other blue pigments.
But there is no trace
of any other blue pigment on these walls.
Second, if this argument were correct,
it would be remarkable that the SS,
of all the rooms in the concentration camps of the Third Reich,
would apply blue paint only to their disinfestation chambers
where no one could admire it;
and, strangely, always with the same blue:
Auschwitz, Birkenau, Majdanek, Stutthof…
All other rooms were merely whitewashed at best.
Third, the disinfestation chambers themselves
already had a coat of lime paint.
Why would they cover this coat of lime paint
with another paint which, in addition,
is not even lime-fast?
They would therefore have had to wait
until the lime paint and plaster had set
before one could (re)paint the walls.
And then it would have been by no means certain
that the paint would not furthermore have become stained
as a result of chemical reactions.
Fourth, neither would a coat of paint on the inside of the room
explain the absence of blue discolorations on the interior walls
which were added to the disinfestation wing of Building 5a at a later time.
It is striking that only such walls have blue stains
which were exposed to hydrogen cyanide.
Fifth, the wall-paint argument is refuted by the fact
that none of the colored walls shows any pattern of brush marks
and also no identifiable coat of paint,
since wall paint consists not only of pigment,
but also of a considerable proportion of binding agents
to hold the pigment in place and other chemicals.
The blue pigment is, however, simply one component
of the lime paint, plaster and mortar.
Sixth, the wall-paint argument furthermore fails to explain
how the artistic skills of the painters
could have succeeded in imitating the brick structure
lying beneath the plaster.
Such a pattern, however, is fully consistent
with the accumulation of cyanides
and the formation of Prussian Blue
as a result of fumigations,
because that depends on the wall’s humidity and temperature,
which in turn depends on
whether there is mortar or brick behind the plaster.
Seventh, the wall-paint argument does not explain the only-pale-blue tint
of the interior south walls
of the original disinfestation wing of Building 5a.
This, too, can be explained by fumigation,
because that interior wall was warmer and dryer than the exterior walls,
hence less prone to form Prussian Blue.
Eighth, neither does this wall-paint argument
explain the high cyanide content
in the superficially white, iron-poor material
of the walls of the disinfestation wing of Building 5b
– unless one posits that these rooms
were painted with an “iron white,”
a wall paint that does not even exist.
Here, too, the fumigation hypothesis has no trouble explaining this.
Since the plaster in that building
does not adhere firmly to the underlying wall,
moisture cannot easily travel from the wall
through the plaster into that room.
Thus, accumulation processes on the plaster’s surface are impeded.
The Austrian paper quoted by Markiewicz and colleagues
in order to prop up their auxiliary wall-paint hypothesis
was published in this political pamphlet.
It was written by Josef Bailer
and stands out by not having a single reference
to any literature, chemical or otherwise,
regarding the formation and stability of Prussian Blue,
or any other cyanide chemistry, for that matter.
In his first footnote, he excuses that fact
by stating that his subsequent remarks – quote
“aren’t supposed to be a treatise
on the chemistry of hydrogen cyanide” – unquote.
How can any researcher
take such a paper seriously in the first place
that is devoid of any substantiated reasoning?
Well, Markiewicz didn’t back up any of his claims
with any references to chemical literature either,
as can be seen from his meagre footnotes.
So, I guess ignorant birds of the same feather flock together.
And yet, these two vacuous papers
serve as the linchpin for the orthodox musings
on the chemistry of Auschwitz.
Anyway, after Markiewicz and his colleagues
had picked an analytical method
that wouldn’t find anything anywhere,
no matter how hard they looked,
they found that the readings of samples
taken from fumigation chambers were similar
– that is to say, non-existing –
to those taken from claimed homicidal gas chambers.
Hence, they concluded that the history of both groups of samples
must also have been similar.
So, because we know that Zyklon-B gassings
took place on a grand scale
in the fumigation chambers,
they concluded that similar Zyklon-B gassings
must also have taken place
in the claimed homicidal gas chambers.
And Bingo!
The reality of homicidal gassings at Auschwitz had been confirmed!
Because the absence of any evidence
proves what needs to be demonstrated!
Good job!
So, how do you prove that a civilization exists on Mars?
Well, first you take a detection device
that cannot detect civilizations.
Then you use it to measure the civilization existing on earth.
Your device will show some value close to zero.
Next, you train your instrument on Mars.
Here, too, the instrument shows a value close to zero.
Hence, you conclude that a civilization
similar to ours must indeed exist on Mars,
for the values measured in both cases are similar!
Of course, if you care to look,
there would be a similar civilization “value”
for the Moon, for Mercury, Venus, Jupiter,
Saturn, Neptune, Uranus, and Pluto;
for the sun, for Alpha Centaury,
for the Andromeda Nebula,
and wherever you train your smart device.
Smart?
Really?
There are people who take the Polish frauds around Jan Markiewicz seriously.
Some don’t know better,
because they simply trust quote-unquote “renowned” researchers,
but others do know better,
such as the Jewish-American chemist Dr. Richard Green.
The psychology behind his persistent denial of reality
is worth its own documentary,
so I won’t dwell on it here.
It goes without saying that the lack
of any reproducible, reliable cyanide readings
in wall samples taken from claimed homicidal gas chambers
does not conclusively prove that no gassings took place there.
After all, most premises fumigated with Zyklon B
don’t exhibit such residues either,
as I mentioned before.
But then again, so do all buildings
that were never exposed to the gas.
What we need to do is look into all possible factors
that can influence the formation of Prussian Blue,
and then compare those with the two cases:
the fumigation chambers on the one hand,
and the claimed homicidal gas chambers on the other.
This is exactly what the next table does.
It compares three types of facilities:
First, the documented case of the church at Wiesenfeld
where the plaster turned patchy blue after just one fumigation.
Second, Morgue #1 each of Crematorium II and III at Birkenau.
These unheated underground basements
were built into the ground water,
from which they were insulated
by a layer of tar between two layers of bricks.
Their interior plaster is of a very hard consistency to this day,
indicating a high portion of cement.
The roof is made of concrete; so is the floor.
These rooms allegedly served as homicidal gas chambers.
When samples were taken there in the 1990s,
the roof and walls of Morgue #1 of Crematorium II
were still extant to a large degree,
and sections of the interior wall’s plaster
were relatively well protected from environmental influences.
Third, the disinfestation facilities 5a and 5b at Birkenau,
as shown here already a number of times.
While the exterior walls have been exposed to the elements
since these facilities were built in 1942,
their interior walls have always been sheltered from any weathering.
The plaster and mortar of these buildings is coarse and brittle,
indicating a high amount of sand and lime as their ingredients
and little, if any, cement.
The former Zyklon-B-fumigation chambers
of these buildings were heated above-ground rooms.
While we have relatively reliable information about the fumigation cases,
some parameters of the claimed homicidal gassings
are by necessity speculative in nature,
as we have only highly unreliable
and at times wildly divergent witness statements to back them up.
I’ll get back to that in a few minutes.
In this table, I have listed seven features
of the masonry under consideration.
Four of them
– alkalinity, inner surface, moisture and number of gassings –
clearly favor the claimed homicidal gas chambers
over the disinfestation chambers
when it comes to the formation of Prussian Blue.
This is mainly due to the fact
that the underground morgues were unheated,
hence cool and moist locations,
and that their plaster, containing large quantities of cement,
was of a much higher quality,
evidently due to the constant high moisture it needed to withstand.
Hence, if we consider only the chemical and physical features,
the claimed homicidal gas chambers
would have had a considerably higher propensity
to form Prussian Blue than the fumigation chambers.
However, we need to somehow explain
a difference of up to a factor of one thousand
in favor of the fumigation chambers,
although so far, the opposite seems to be more likely.
But there are two more factors related to how the rooms were used,
which I have marked with three question marks in the gas chamber column.
The first concerns the amount of hydrogen cyanide
used per volume of air, called concentration,
and the second concerns the amount of time
during which the gas was contained in these rooms,
and thus could react with the masonry.
This is exactly the line of argument of scholars
defending the orthodox Holocaust narrative,
such as Richard Green, Josef Bailer and Jan Markiewicz.
They claim that, compared to fumigations,
only a fraction of the concentration of hydrogen cyanide was used,
and that killing humans took much less time than fumigating bugs.
With that, they are not entirely wrong.
But they are not entirely right, either.
First, in order to kill insects like fleas, lice and woodworms,
one also has to kill their larvae and eggs,
which, due to their slow metabolism,
react only slowly to poisonous substances in the air.
In contrast to that, humans, as warm-blooded animals,
always have a fast metabolism.
Orthodox scholars base their assumption
of swift Zyklon-B executions
on toxicological handbooks saying
that hydrogen cyanide kills humans swiftly
already at low concentrations.
As we have seen at the beginning of this presentation, however,
that assumption is based on experiments on rabbits
which cannot be transferred to humans,
who react much slower to gaseous hydrogen cyanide.
When it comes to the speed of the execution
and the amount of poison used to effect it,
what do witnesses claim about Auschwitz?
We have only one testimony
regarding the quantity of Zyklon B allegedly used during homicidal gassings.
It stems from Rudolf Höss,
the former Auschwitz camp commander.
However, he was severely tortured
during his initial interrogations,
and many of the claims he made in his various statements
are demonstrably false.
I won’t go into details about that here.
Hence, I must abstain
from using his coerced confessions as a source,
not least because they would be inadmissible
in any proper court of law.
There is an indirect way of determining
the amount of poison allegedly used, though.
It uses the claimed execution times
in order to calculate from them
the effective concentration needed
to achieve such times.
That requires, of course,
that we have reliable information about the execution times.
Fact is, however, that claims about that
vary between instantly and up to 20 minutes.
We can get out of that bad fix by acknowledging
that not all witnesses are created equal.
As a matter of fact,
many witnesses claiming knowledge
of how long a gassing lasted at Auschwitz
cannot possible have that knowledge.
It requires knowledge of when the gassing started
and when it was considered concluded.
When it comes to executions
in the underground morgues of Crematoria II and III,
whose activities were hidden from most,
the only individuals who could possible know all this
were the physicians who are said to have ordered and supervised the gassings.
I have found four former Auschwitz physicians
who made statements in this regard,
and they all agreed more or less
that it took only a few minutes,
not more than five anyway,
until all victims had succumbed.
Now, remember that in U.S. execution gas chambers,
it took up to ten minutes
to make the toughest executees succumb.
Employing Haber’s rule
that it takes twice the amount of poison
to kill in half the time,
this means that the effective concentration used at Auschwitz
must have been at least twice that used in U.S. execution gas chambers.
Their concentration is given
as roughly a third of one percent by volume,
which means that some two thirds of one percent by volume or more
would have been needed
to achieve the execution times claimed by these physicians.
Of course, it could be argued
that the victims going into the gas chamber did not know what awaited them,
in contrast to gas-chamber executees in the U.S.
Hence, they would not have kept their breath and would therefore have died faster.
But that argument is flawed,
because many deportees sent to German camps during the war
have testified to the fact that rumors about gassings were circulating everywhere,
and that many who entered a real shower room were convinced
that they were actually in an execution gas chamber.
"We knew we were going to the gas chamber, right?"
"But by some miracle, I don't know how it was then, water came down instead of the gas!"
Hence, it is quite likely that those who would have entered a hypothetical gas chamber
would have been just as suspicious, if not even more, as those entering a real shower.
After all, none of the deportees could possibly miss the fact
that they were entering into a large crematorium building rather than a sanitation facility,
as you can see in this model of Crematorium II at Birkenau on display at the Auschwitz Museum.
In addition, we are dealing with solid statistics here.
It is claimed that many hundreds, up to a thousand or even many more than that
were murdered by gas with every single batch.
A thousand people give you a rather reliable statistical representation
of pretty much every kind of human behavior you can expect:
a hyperventilating hysteric standing next to the source
who breathes in the poison so intensely that he dies within a minute or so,
but also the level-headed survivalist who gets away from the source,
tries to remain calm and holds his breath as long as he can.
At the end, the Nazis would have had to kill them all,
and therefore the latter type of victim is the one defining
how long it would have taken to kill all hypothetical victims.
Already now you can see that we are very close
to the concentrations usually used for fumigations,
which are usually around 1 to 2 percent by volume.
That takes one of the two reasons out
why we should expect less Prussian Blue
in homicidal gas chambers than in fumigation chambers.
And how about the time
during which the masonry was exposed to the poison?
Here we run into an even bigger problem.
Again, eyewitness statements clearly stating
how long it took
before the doors to the execution chamber were opened
are rare, and few of those who did testify
could possibly know it in the first place.
In addition, when it comes to executions with Zyklon B,
we face the problem that it does not behave at all
like the cyanide powder mixed with sulfuric acid
as it was used in U.S. execution gas chambers.
In those chambers,
the bulk of the poison gas develops instantly,
engulfing the victims within seconds.
Zyklon B, on the other hand,
was developed to release its poison only slowly,
both in order to allow personnel
spreading it out in the fumigated locations
to retreat safely,
and also in order to continuously release
more hydrogen cyanide for an hour or more.
This was meant to compensate
for losses occurring in fumigated places
through leakage, absorption in moisture,
and adsorption on fabrics, for instance.
This is a German paper that discussed
how fast hydrogen cyanide evaporates
from the carrier substance of Zyklon B.
It was published in 1942,
right at the height of Zyklon-B usage at Auschwitz.
The author, Richard Irmscher, was a researcher
involved in developing and improving Zyklon B.
Zyklon B was available on a number of different carrier substances,
but toward the beginning of the war,
it was pretty much down to wood-fiber discoids and gypsum.
While in the U.S. the discoids were primarily used,
the type usually used in German concentration camps
during the war was made of gypsum pellets.
In the year 1998, the Auschwitz Museum cooperated
in having some pellets analyzed
which they had taken from Zyklon B cans
left behind at Auschwitz by the German authorities.
A spectral analysis carried out on the pellets
confirmed that they consisted mainly of gypsum.
Here is a chart taken from Irmscher’s paper
showing how fast hydrogen cyanide evaporates
from the gypsum-type Zyklon B,
depending on the ambient temperature.
These values are valid only for cases
where the pellets are spread out thinly
and at low relative humidity.
The highest temperature given is 15°C,
which corresponds to 59°F.
In our case, where people
would have been packed tightly into the chamber,
the room temperature sooner or later
would have risen well beyond 15°C
even in an unheated basement room in winter,
and its relative humidity would have reached
100% rather quickly, probably already
before the start of the actual execution.
That complicates our considerations,
as does the fact
that it would not have been possible
to spread out the pellets as during a fumigation.
While a higher temperature accelerates the evaporation,
a high humidity leading to condensation
of moisture on the gypsum pellets
would have slowed down the evaporation to a crawl.
Hydrogen cyanide is so soluble in water that,
once the carrier material is moist,
it will give off its hydrogen cyanide
only reluctantly, even if warmed up.
At the end, the entire scenario we are trying to figure out
depends on how the Zyklon B is said to have been applied.
Here is a scenario invented by German moviemaker Uwe Boll
in his 2011 movie “Auschwitz.”
Was the Zyklon B dumped indiscriminately
into the execution chamber
through some openings, as some witnesses claimed,
in some columns, as shown here,
or was it lowered into the chamber
through some contraption
and retrieved after it was all over,
as some other witnesses have claimed?
And how reliable are these witnesses?
Plus, are their claims consistent
with documentary and physical evidence we have?
Moreover, are these claims technically feasible?
And can they have the claimed results?
Let’s start by asking us what a
quote-unquote “reasonable” person
hell-bent on mass-murdering people would have done.
The camp authorities of Auschwitz
in charge of building gas chambers
– be they for fumigation or for execution –
had been informed about the best way
of conducting such gassings:
They had been sent two articles
describing the Degesch circulation device
as discussed earlier.
We know that, because these articles were found
in the camp’s files currently stored in Moscow.
In this device, a can of Zyklon B is opened
by a large can-opening mechanism
operated from the outside
with a crank wheel like this,
or a simple crank.
Once opened,
the Zyklon-B pellets fall into a metal basket,
through which a fan blows warm air.
This fan gets its air
from the other end of the chamber,
resulting in the gases inside the chamber being circulated,
leading to a swift and even distribution of the poison gas.
By retracting the crank wheel at the end of the procedure,
the fan no longer circulates the air
but blows it out,
replacing it with fresh air from the outside.
Here is Degesch’s schematic drawing
as shown earlier explaining it in more detail.
Degesch offered that fumigation device,
called a “Normalgaskammer” or “standard gas chamber,”
to the Auschwitz authorities,
who initially planned to install a number of them.
That project was abandoned in 1943, however,
when the swift deployment
of the world’s first microwave device
to kill bugs was promised,
as mentioned before.
It goes without saying
that it would have made perfect sense
for the Auschwitz authorities
to use similar principles
when outfitting a room for mass executions.
Keeping the device out of reach of the victims,
who could otherwise sabotage
or wreck it in their fits of panic,
and making sure that warm air
is blown through the gypsum pellets
to quickly evaporate and dissipate the fumes
seems like a no-brainer.
I could make detailed suggestions
on how to solve the challenges involved most intelligently
from an engineering point of view,
but I won’t do that here,
because we’re not in a competition
to reinvent the claimed Nazi gas chambers.
Now let’s look into what orthodox scholars claim
about how it was supposedly done.
We’ll go through one Auschwitz gas chamber after another.
First, there is Crematorium I,
the old crematorium in the Main Camp
shown to this day to millions of tourists every year.
It is equipped with four wooden shafts
built into four roughly hewn holes in the roof,
marked here with red arrows.
They are said to have been used
to simply pour the Zyklon-B pellets
on top and among the people inside.
Here is a view of these primitive holes
as seen from the inside.
It goes without saying
that it would have been impossible
to remove the Zyklon B after the execution.
Hence, it would not have been possible
to successfully ventilate the room
unless all hydrogen cyanide
had evaporated from the pellets.
But there is more to the story.
Here is what Franciszek Piper,
the Auschwitz Museum’s curator,
said about these holes
when interviewed by Jewish-American revisionist David Cole in 1992:
A little later, Cole asked:
“Were the holes in the ceiling put in in the same way that they were…”
But how does Piper know this?
After all, when this
– quote-unquote – “reconstruction” work
was performed in 1947, he was only six years old.
Asked whether there is any proof
other than Piper’s word
for the claim that there were traces
of old openings on the ceiling
before the new openings were opened in 1947,
the Auschwitz Museum responded
that they have no documentation at all in this matter.
All they have to prop up their claim
is only one testimony deposed in 1981,
hence 34 years after the fact,
by the former museum guard Adam Źłobnicki.
Here is his statement.
Interestingly, he remembered quote-unquote “exactly”
that the new shafts were made of bricks,
when in fact the museum used
primitive wooden boards to build these shafts.
So much for that.
But wait.
Why did the museum ask a former museum guard to testify about this?
If anyone had any knowledge about what was done back then,
it would be the museum authorities of that time,
and in particular the individuals who commissioned and supervised
the quote-unquote “reconstruction.”
Any construction worker or architect hired to do the work
would also seem to be a competent witness in this regard.
But why, of all possible people,
would a former museum guard have had any knowledge
about traces of old holes having been turned into new ones?
And why did the museum
secure his testimony only 34 years after the fact?
Why wasn’t the claimed crime scene photographed in detail,
in particular the only obviously incriminating trace of mass murder,
that is, traces of the old Zyklon B holes?
Shortly after the retreat of German forces from the Auschwitz area in early 1945,
the Polish authorities commissioned a lengthy expert report
on documentary and physical evidence found at Auschwitz,
compiled by the Polish investigative judge Jan Sehn,
here portrait of him,
and by professor of engineering Dr. Roman Dawidowski.
But nowhere in their report is anything mentioned about holes or traces thereof
in the ceiling of this building
– or of any other Auschwitz building implicated in mass murder, for that matter.
Embarrassed by this total lack of any evidence for their claims,
the Auschwitz museum authorities must have used this one former museum guard
as a fig leaf to cover up the fact that the Auschwitz emperor is naked.
But that’s still not the end of it.
Here is how these four holes are distributed across the ceiling
of what tourists encounter at Auschwitz today as – quote – “the gas chamber.”
As you can see, they are neatly arranged
to be crosswise at equal distances to opposite walls.
But there’s a glitch.
When the Auschwitz Museum quote-unquote “reconstructed” that building
by removing the separation walls added in 1944,
they removed one wall to many,
leaving behind a room that is considerable longer than the original morgue,
aka gas chamber.
If we put that original wall back in place,
and if we also remove the additional entry
with the air lock added in 1944,
the distribution looks like this.
Even though that is not an iron-clad proof
that the holes are post-war fakes,
this fact combined with the fact
that there is no evidence at all
for the existence of any holes
prior to this quote-unquote “reconstruction”
would suffice to convince any jury in a trial
that the Auschwitz Museum committed a fraud
and is thus guilty of the criminal charge
of tampering with the evidence
of a claimed crime scene.
At any rate, no sane person
would compromise a massive concrete roof
by hacking holes into it
in order to dump Zyklon B onto people inside.
There would have been far better and less destructive methods
of adding poison gas into that room.
That’s the end of that claim.
Let’s move on to next claimed gas chambers,
the so-called bunkers.
Two of them are said of have existed.
They allegedly were two old farm houses
converted to mass execution gas chambers.
There is no evidence whatsoever
that the first of these buildings ever existed as such.
For the second bunker, we have witness drawings,
like this one by David Olère.
Zyklon B is said to have been dumped
through openings in the wall, plain and simple.
See the red arrow.
I will not dwell on this here in more detail.
When it comes to non-anecdotal evidence for Bunker 2,
the Auschwitz museum presents us
with foundation walls visible to this day.
Although that may be impressive,
if we look at any of the witnesses
who testified about this claimed mass-slaughter facility,
their description of that building
has nothing to do whatsoever
with the size, shape and partitioning
of the actual building
as evidenced by its foundation walls.
Here is a typical drawing of Bunker 2
by the witness Slamy Dragon.
One of the most detailed description
of a gassing said to have occurred
in one of these buildings
was given by Richard Böck,
a former Auschwitz SS man.
Here is what he testified
about what he claimed to have witnessed – quote:
– unquote.
There are two obvious problems with this testimony,
and many more, if we were to go into the details,
but don’t worry, I won’t.
The first obvious problem is
that hydrogen cyanide fumes are colorless.
We find in quite a few testimonies
an association between the color blue
and hydrogen cyanide as such
or the skin color of victims of cyanide poisoning.
Associating hydrogen cyanide with the color blue
originates with the fact that German chemists
who discovered Prussian Blue some 250 years ago
correctly associated it with hydrogen cyanide.
For that reason, they gave hydrogen cyanide
the German name “Blausäure” – “blue acid,”
which refers to the fact
that this was the chemical that formed a blue pigment.
Nevertheless, it is itself without any color.
Next and more importantly, it would have been impossible
for the inmate commando to remove the bodies
from the chamber without wearing gas masks.
Here is a sequence of cartoons
by French cartoonist Konk
illustrating the problem.
Since the Zyklon B had been dumped
into that room only some ten minutes earlier,
it would have kept releasing
lots of hydrogen cyanide
for the better part of an hour or even more,
depending on the circumstances.
Since these facilities are said
to have had no ventilation system at all
– which in itself is a ludicrous claim –
entering that room
and performing hard labor in it without gas masks
would not have been possible for many, many hours.
And that’s the end of that set of gas chamber claims.
This is also true for the gassings
said to have been performed
in the claimed gas chambers
of the Crematoria IV and V at Birkenau,
which allegedly didn’t have any ventilation system either.
Anyone claiming that a room
without any ventilation system
was used for the mass slaughters of people
using poison gas should see a psychiatrist.
Having brought up Crematorium IV and V,
there is a twist to that story as well.
Here is the floorplan of Crematorium IV.
Crematorium V was arranged mirror-symmetrically to it.
The rooms marked red and with a number one
are said to have been used for mass slaughter
– without any ventilation. Yeah, sure.
Anyway, Zyklon B is said to have been thrown
through openings in the walls,
here highlighted in green,
some of which have a number two next to them.
On this photo of 1943, you can see these openings.
The problem is that,
after subtracting the wooden frame of the shutters,
these openings were only 20 cm wide and 30 cm high
and that they were equipped with iron grates.
This is shown by documents
found among the paperwork left behind
in the workshop where the inmates had made those grates.
One witness even describes them.
Now, here is the problem.
If you install an iron grate in that opening,
which itself measured only 20 by 30 centimeters,
then how can you stick a Zyklon B can in there
that had a diameter of some 15 centimeters
in order to pour out any Zyklon B?
The answer is: you can’t.
End of story.
Let’s turn to the two crematoria
where the main action is supposed to have taken place,
Crematoria II and III.
Most gas-chamber victims are said to have been killed there.
Taking samples from Crematorium II is most-promising
also because its claimed gas chamber is in a somewhat-preserved state.
Here are some images of the reinforced concrete roof
of Morgue number one of Crematorium II taken in 1998.
The building is said to have been blown up
in late 1944 or early 1945
by the Germans before they retreated from the area.
The roof of that morgue was lifted off the seven pillars
that supported it, and collapsed back down.
Some of the pillars punctured the roof,
while others still support it in places.
Orthodox historians claim
that there were four openings in each of the roofs
of these Morgues of Crematoria II and III
through which Zyklon B was poured
in order to kill those trapped inside.
I will not review here the various reasons for that claim,
but will go straight to the question
of whether there is any evidence for this claim
that is other than anecdotal in nature.
First, here as well the expert report
written by Dr. Sehn and Dr. Dawidowski right after the war
makes no reference at all to any such openings.
However, it is clear from an expert report
compiled by the Institute for Forensic Research
in Krakow in June 1945, here the first page of it,
that Dr. Sehn had sent to that institute material for analysis
which originated from the interior of Morgue #1 of Crematorium II.
Hence, Dr. Sehn must have somehow gained access to that room’s interior.
Since the only entrance to it had collapsed
and is filled with debris,
he can have gained that access only
by way of either entering through pre-existing holes,
if any existed,
or if not, by creating new ones.
The only two holes that can be seen
in that roof today are these two.
One of them had four reinforcement bars
still sticking out from it in the early 1990s.
They had been cut at one end and bent back.
While visiting the place in 1997,
Australian revisionist Dr. Fredrick Töben
tried to bend two of them back,
but they broke.
Here is a photo taken before that attempt,
and here one after the attempt.
Be that as it may,
the fact that these rebars were not removed
and were still present in the early 1990s
proves that this was not an original hole
but one added after the room had been dynamited.
This is also supported by the fact
that this crudely chopped-out hole
is in an area where the concrete slab
has not been damaged much.
In fact, no cracks are running through this hole.
Had that crude damage to the roof been there before the explosion,
cracks would have formed,
most likely starting at its corners.
Therefore, it is likely that we are dealing here
with a hole chiseled out after the explosion,
probably by Dr. Sehn’s team
in order to get access to the area beneath.
The other hole, here an image of that,
is of a similar primitive nature.
It, too, was not a pre-planned hole
cast while the roof’s concrete was poured,
but knocked out afterwards.
The lack of any trace of the claimed holes in that roof
has caused mainstream historians some difficulty to explain.
Jewish-Dutch cultural historian Dr. van Pelt
stated about this on page 295
of his 1999 expert report
submitted as evidence in the libel trial
of British historian David Irving
against American author Deborah Lipstadt
and her publisher, Penguin Books – quote:
– unquote.
British engineer Paul Barford,
who around the same time was assisting the Auschwitz Museum
in efforts to conserve and restore the camp,
wrote in an email to David Irving in May 2000 – quote:
– unquote.
Later, the orthodoxy tried to remedy
the damage done with such statements
by declaring some odd cracks in that collapsed roof
to be remnants of these holes.
I won’t waste our time here
exploring these transparent and desperate attempts
at salvaging the sunken battleship Auschwitz.
Others have done that expertly,
and it would lead us too far astray
from the topic of this presentation.
If, as some claim, Zyklon B was simply thrown
through some holes in the roof of those morgues,
similar to the claims for the old crematorium in the Main Camp,
then the problem arising here as well
would have been that it would have been impossible
to successfully ventilate this room
within a short period of time.
The Zyklon B releasing its poison gas
for at least another hour
would have prevented that.
Some witnesses claim
that certain devices were installed through those holes.
One witness in particular is frequently quoted in this context:
Michał Kula, a former Auschwitz inmate
who worked in the camp’s metalworking shop.
During three post-war depositions,
he made a number of statements about Auschwitz,
several of which are demonstrably false,
which casts a very unfavorable light
on this witness’s trustworthiness.
Of interest for our topic are two of these depositions
where he gave more or less detailed,
yet partially contradictory descriptions
about the devices allegedly built by his workshop.
The first description made prior to the show trial
against former camp commander Rudolf Höss
described a column consisting of three layers.
An inner, removable wire-mesh column,
20 cm wide and deep,
was surrounded by two more columns of a wider wire mesh.
The outer column was 3 meters high,
and 70 cm wide and deep.
The problem with that column is
that it was too big
even for the only two existing holes
in the roof of Crematorium II.
The biggest of them is barely 50 cm wide.
During the trial, Kula testified,
and while so doing,
changed the dimensions of the column.
Most importantly, its width had now shrunk to only 24 cm,
hence roughly a third of his initial description.
Interesting in this context is Kula’s description
of the inner column, which could be removed.
It is said to have consisted
of an inner layer of solid sheet metal,
and an outer layer of a fine wire-mesh screen
with openings of merely one millimeter.
The inner sheet-metal column was capped
with a pyramid-shaped lid.
Zyklon B is said to have been poured onto this pyramid.
The gypsum pellets subsequently fell
into the space between the inner sheet-metal column
and the outer wire-mesh screen.
This would maximize the pellets’ exposure
to the surrounding air and thus
accelerate the evaporation of hydrogen cyanide.
After the crime, the inner column could be removed,
thus making a swift ventilation of the room possible.
Hence, Kula’s columns are the orthodoxy’s magic bullet
to reduce the time during which this claimed gas chamber’s walls
would have been exposed to the lethal gas.
The problems with this are manifold:
First, as mentioned before, Kula obviously was a liar.
Next, there is no documentary or physical evidence
that these columns ever existed.
Furthermore, these columns would have to have been firmly anchored
in a panic-proof manner
in both the floor and ceiling of that room,
leaving indelible traces of the anchoring points.
Here is a drawing on how structures are being anchored in concrete
after the concrete has already been poured.
But there aren’t any traces of such anchoring points.
A large part of the floor of Morgue I of Crematorium III
was actually cleared of all rubble
during excavations carried out in August 1968.
French historian Jean-Claude Pressac
showed a photo of that excavation
in his 1989 book on page 234.
Not a trace of any anchoring points was found, though.
There aren’t any visible
in the ruins of Morgue one of Crematorium II today either.
Even orthodox historians agree
that Kula’s columns had to be firmly anchored
with massive bolts in the floor and ceiling
of the claimed gas chambers.
Here is a photo of a column
built following the directions
of the already-mentioned Jan van Pelt,
clearly showing the bolts
that would go into the floor and ceiling.
In addition, Kula claimed that the outer column’s wire mesh
consisted of wire three millimeters thick.
That column’s only purpose would have been
to protect the inner columns from the panicking crowds.
A meshwork made of wire merely three millimeters thick
wouldn’t have done the trick.
Van Pelt understood this well,
so when he constructed a model of Kula’s column
for an architectural exhibition,
he departed from some of Kula’s data,
most importantly by using solid 8-mm interwoven steel rods
for the outer column’s meshwork.
Moreover, Kula’s column wouldn’t even have worked.
In his second description of the device during the trial,
where he testified under oath and reduced the width of the contraption
to make it more realistic,
he claimed that the slit of the inner column
into which the Zyklon B is said to have been poured
was only 15 mm wide.
Here is an image showing the size
of the Zyklon-B’s gypsum pellets.
Try pouring such objects into a slit 15 mm wide.
You’ll quickly discover that they get stuck
in lumps, jamming the slit.
The flow of granular goods through narrow openings is actually an entire field of study,
as the blockage of such openings by jamming pellets are a common problem.
As a rule, the minimum opening is suggested to be
at least three times as wide as the largest flowing item,
but that is true only if the pellets flow along smooth surfaces.
In our case, one side is a wire-mesh screen, hence a very rough surface
where the gypsum pellets would get stuck very easily.
For such a problem, the minimum width of the opening
through which the granules could flow easily would be at least twice as wide.
Since the larger Zyklon-B pellets are roughly 10 mm wide,
this means that an opening allowing a smooth flow would have to be at least 60 mm wide,
not 15 mm as claimed by Kula.
In addition, if you use Zyklon B in a room
with 100% humidity, moisture will condense
on the gypsum pellets, making them stick together,
for moist gypsum has the habit of getting gooey.
Hence, even if you managed to get some of the pellets
to trickle down that slit,
getting it out after the deed would have been a mess.
Finally and most importantly,
Kula’s method of introducing the poison
into the chamber is incompatible
with the claimed speed of execution.
Remember, in U.S. gas chambers,
where the poison gas instantly engulfs the victim in high concentrations,
it takes up to 10 minutes to incapacitate all victims,
and even more before they are actually dead.
Zyklon B releases its gas only slowly,
and if used in a high-moisture environment
with no forced evaporation,
this process slows down to a crawl.
So, the question is, how can one swiftly obtain,
using moist Zyklon B,
poison-gas concentrations
even in the most remote corner of the gas chamber
which are at least twice as high
as were used in U.S. execution gas chambers?
Alas, there is no possible way.
To get anywhere close to this,
we would have to increase the amount of Zyklon B to extremes
in order to have a quick rise in concentrations
beyond what was used in U.S. execution chambers.
I have made some calculations
which resulted in some 60 kilograms of Zyklon B
which would have to be used
to achieve an execution time of five minutes,
which means some 15 kg
– or 15 cans –
for each column.
Since the volume of the slit-shaped space
of Kula’s column, second edition,
was some 25 liters,
and because the bulk density of the gypsum pellets
was well under a kilogram of hydrogen cyanide per liter,
Kula’s columns may not even have been able
to accommodate that amount,
even if it had been possible
to fill them densely and completely.
Pouring in those 15 cans into that column alone
would have taken so much time
that it would have foiled the plan to kill swiftly.
Even-faster execution times,
such as two of the four physicians have claimed,
are impossible to achieve.
No matter which way we look at it,
the claimed scenarios are impossible.
It is also absurd,
because no sane SS officer knowing advanced fumigation technologies
would have consented to having crude holes
knocked through a reinforced concrete roof,
irreparably damaging it in the process,
in order to install several inoperable columns into them
for a purpose which they could not serve.
The whole hypothesis is an insult to any thinking person.
First, there were no holes in the roof.
Second, there were no columns installed anywhere.
Third, even if there were, they wouldn’t have worked.
And finally, the room was equipped
with a ventilation system designed for a morgue,
see the exhaust channels in orange (number 1)
and the air intake channels in blue (number 2)
in this blue print.
After the decision was allegedly made in late 1942
to convert that morgue into a chemical slaughter room,
the ventilation system was not upgraded.
That, next to a smart design to get the poison into the chamber
and some sturdy doors to keep the victims inside,
are design changes that would have been necessary
for converting these rooms into mass-execution chambers.
None of it ever happened.
Hence, none of it ever happened.
Anyway, ventilating a room chock-full of Zyklon B
intermingled with a thousand corpses or more
would have taken many hours.
Which means that the average contact time
of hydrogen cyanide with the masonry
would not have been just a few minutes,
but more in the order of magnitude of an hour or two.
That may be up to a factor ten lower
than what can be expected for fumigations,
but it is barely enough to offset the other factors
favoring the homicidal gas chambers
with regard to the formation of Prussian Blue.
Hence, down goes the last crutch
on which the orthodox hypothesis rests.
So, considering all this,
we would have to expect to find
in those claimed homicidal gas chambers
amounts of Prussian Blue that are similar in order of magnitude
to the traces we find in fumigation chambers.
Yet we find basically no cyanide in those walls.
Look at these walls inside the ruins of that morgue.
No blue stains, no cyanides.
Just as we didn’t find any traces of panic-proof doors,
of devices or means to introduce and swiftly distribute the poison gas,
and of powerful ventilation systems
upgraded to swiftly dispose of huge amounts of poison gas.
Or as Jewish activist David Cole once wrote:
And that’s the end of the line.
For all the source material used in this video,
and if you want to learn even more about this topic,
read the author’s book on "The Chemistry of Auschwitz,"
available wherever books can be bought,
except for Amazon, because they banned the book in July 2017.
You can also download it as an eBook at no charge at
www.HolocaustHandbooks.com.
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