Auschwitz

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

"Auschwitz" is perhaps my favorite of the history-related books Auschwitz written by Robert Jan Van Pelt, testified on behalf of Deborah Lipstadt in the libel suit brought against her by David Irving. This book competently coalesces into a history of German power in the East with a detailed seems at the death and labor camps of Auschwitz. Using the architectural reports left behind as well as statements of people who were there to sketch the story, the authors trace the expansion and changes of the Auschwitz camps from 1939 to the present day. The attentiveness camp at Oswieczim was initially proposed for political captives, and about 15,000 Germans, Czechoslovaks, Poles and Russians were there in "defensive imprisonment". The Birkenau labour camp, which lies 4 kms, from Oswieczim, and the farming work of the Harmense camps is both under the power of the governor of the Oswieczim camp. The huts in the camp are in three rows casing an area of 500 x 300 meters. Birkenau camp is shaped of three blocks and is also bordered by two rings of watch-towers.

Working situations at Birkenau and Oswieczim are unbelievable. Work is accepted on either in the camp or in the region. New buildings are put up in the camps and in the work-shops. Some persons also work in the management of the camps. Any person who does not bear out his work to the fulfillment of the supervisor is thrashed or trodden to death. For Jews the food is 300 grams of bread per head every evening, or 1 liter per head of turnip soup and a little coffee. Non-Jews receive rather more. Anyone who cannot work is sent to the "Krankenbau", the cabin for the sick. The German doctor separates sick persons into two groups: curable and dangerously ill. The dangerously ill are disposed of by a phenol injection in the area of the heart. Among non-Jews this is done only to those who are really seriously ill. Particularly brutal scenes took place when the sick were killed wholesale during the process of delousing when a typhus plagues broke out. Near the "Krankenbau" is the "hygiene institute" where sterilization and false insemination of the women are carried out, and blood tests are made for blood transfusion.

These implementations took place at the beginning in the jungle of Birkenwald by gas suffocation in a special building constructed for the reason. The crematorium contains a large hall, a gas chamber and a furnace. People are accumulated in the hall which holds 2,000 and gives the intuition of a swimming-bath. They have to undress and are given a piece of soap and a towel, as if they were going to the baths. Then they are packed into the gas chamber which is hermetically preserved. Several S.S. Men in gas-masks then pour into the gas chamber through three openings in the maximum a preparation of the toxic gas megacyklon, which is made in Hamburg. At the end of three minutes all the persons are dead. The dead bodies are then taken away in carts to the furnace to be burnt. The furnace has nine chambers, each of them with four openings. Each opening will take three bodies at once. They are entirely burnt after 1.5 hours. Thus each crematorium can burn 1,500 bodies daily. The crematoria can be documented from outside by their supercilious smokestack.

The residue had been killed by tough work, illness, particularly epidemics of typhus and malaria, ill treatment, and finally "assortment". Twice a week the camp doctor pointed to persons intended for selection. Those selected were all gassed. In a single block of Birkenau camp the standard number of deaths a week were as much as 2,000, 1,200 of these being a natural deaths and 800 "selection". At the beginning of 1943 the "political section" (camp Gestapo) at Oswieczim received 500,000 forms for release. The governor had them all made out in the names of persons who had already been gassed and wedged them in the records of the camp.

Auschwitz, or Auschwitz-Birkenau, is the well-known for all the Nazi death camps. Though Auschwitz was just one of six execution camps, it was also a labor attentiveness camp, extracting prisoners' "value" from them, in the form of forced labor, for weeks or months. As the hostages destabilized from disease, or the hunger foods, or overwork, they were selected to be taken to the gas chambers for a more "humane" death. In this, Auschwitz differed from most of the other camps, like Belzec or Treblinka.

Endurance in Auschwitz tells of the horrendous and heartless conditions of life in the Auschwitz death camp as personally witnessed and experienced by the author, Primo Levi. Levi is an Italian Jew and chemist, who at the age of twenty-five, was in prison with an Italian resistance group and sent to the Nazi Auschwitz death camp in Poland in the end of 1943. For ten terrible months, Levi endured the cruel and inhuman death camp where men slaved away until it was time for them to die. Levi thoroughly presents the hopeless existence of the prisoners in Auschwitz. whose most basic human rights was exposed away, when in Chapter 2, he states, "Imagine now a man who is deprived of everyone he loves, and at the same time of his house, his habits, his clothes, in short, of everything he possesses: he will be a hollow man, reduced to suffering and needs, forgetful of dignity and restraint, for he who loses all often easily loses himself" (27). With Survival in Auschwitz, Primo Levi provides a bleak assessment of human survival in the dehumanized society of a Nazi death camp. Throughout the book, Levi supports the subject that the prisoners of the death camp are abridged to being no longer men, but instead animals that must endeavor to stay alive day by day or face certain death.

In Chapter 2, properly titled "On the Bottom", Levi discusses his experience of being procedure as a prisoner into Auschwitz and the realization that they will not be treated with any human regard. He and all the prisoners who disembark with him are exposed of everything they own and are shaved, sanitary, and tagged like they were livestock. Once the prisoners have been processed and they see what they have become, Levi describes the highest resentment of their treatment as "the destruction of a man" and all realize that "It is not possible to sink lower than this, no human condition is more miserable than this, nor could it conceivably be so" (26-27).

Nearly everyone has learned of Auschwitz, the German wartime concentration camp where many prisoners most of them Jewish were allegedly eradicated, especially in gas chambers. Auschwitz is extensively regarded as the most awful Nazi extermination center. The camp's terrible reputation cannot, however, be reconciled with the facts.

The Auschwitz Camps

The Auschwitz camp intricate was set up in 1940 in what is now south-central Poland. Large numbers of Jews were expelled there between 1942 and mid-1944. The main camp was known as Auschwitz, I. Birkenau, or Auschwitz II was evidently the main extermination center, and Monowitz, or Auschwitz III, was a huge industrial center where gasoline was produced from coal. 

Four Million Victims?

At the postwar Nuremberg Tribunal, the Allies charged that the Germans killed four million people at Auschwitz. This numeral, which was imaginary by the Soviets, was uncritically accepted for many years. It often appeared in major American newspapers and magazines.

Today no sound historian, not even those who generally accept the annihilation story, believes this figure. Israeli Holocaust historian Yehuda Bauer said in 1989 that it is time to finally acknowledge the familiar four million figures is a premeditated myth. More recently, Holocaust historian Jean-Claude Pressac has estimated that about 800,000 persons of whom 630,000 were Jewish -- perished at Auschwitz. While even such lower figures are incorrect, they show how the Auschwitz story has changed radically over the years.

The Höss "declaration"  

A key Holocaust document is the "declaration" of previous Auschwitz chief officer Rudolf Höss of April 5, 1946, which was submitted by the U.S. prosecution at the main Nuremberg trial.

Although it is still extensively cited as concrete proof for the Auschwitz extermination story, it is in fact, a fake statement that was obtaining by torture.

No Documentary Evidence  

Many thousands of secret German documents dealing with Auschwitz were confiscated after the war by the Allies. Not a single one refers to a policy or program of extermination. In fact, the extermination story cannot be reconciled with the documentary evidence.

Allied Propaganda  

The Auschwitz gassing story is based in large part on the rumor statements of former Jewish prisoners who did not personally see any proof of termination. Their attitude is comprehensible, because gossip about gassings at Auschwitz was widespread.  

Allied planes dropped large numbers of leaflets, written in Polish and German, on Auschwitz and the surrounding areas which claimed that people were being gassed in the camp.

Gassing Expert counters extinction Story

America's leading gas chamber specialist, Boston's engineer Fred A. Leuchter, cautiously examined the hypothetical "gas chambers" in Poland and concluded that the Auschwitz gassing story is ridiculous and technically unfeasible. 

The Auschwitz extinctions' story created as wartime misinformation. Now, more than 60 years after the end of the Second World War, it is time to take another. More purpose looks at this extremely politicized chapter of history. The Auschwitz fabled is the center of the Holocaust story. If hundreds of thousands of Jews were not methodically killed there, as alleged, one of the great myths of our time crumples.

Artificially maintaining the hatreds and obsessions of the past prevents genuine reconciliation and lasting peace. Revisionism promotes historical awareness and international understanding. That is why the works of the Institute for Historical Review are so important and justify our support.