The Holocaust deniers claim: “There is no surviving German document that orders the construction of homicidal gas chambers. The buildings the deniers’ opponents call gas chambers were built without any document specifying that purpose. The absence of an explicit order is the absence of the operation.”
The claim plays on the absence of a specific kind of document, then misuses the absence to deny the operation that the surviving documents do attest. The bureaucracy of the killing was deliberately designed to avoid putting the homicidal purpose in writing in plain language. Heinrich Himmler had given an explicit instruction in 1942 that the operation was not to be discussed in correspondence, and that euphemisms were to be used in the documents that did mention it. The euphemisms were standardised: Sonderbehandlung (special treatment), Sonderaktion (special action), Endlösung (final solution), Aussiedlung (resettlement), Evakuierung (evacuation). The construction documents accordingly describe the buildings in technical terms (gas-tight rooms, ventilation specifications, introduction columns, cremation muffles) without naming the human-killing purpose. The denier argument that the absence of an explicit order disproves the operation is therefore the argument that the SS’s deliberate document-control practice succeeded in preventing the post-war historians from finding the smoking-gun memo. It did not. The construction documents that survive, read in context, document the operation unambiguously.
What the construction documents do say
The Auschwitz Zentralbauleitung correspondence on the design of crematoria II and III, captured by the Soviets in January 1945, includes the following items, among many others. A letter from the Zentralbauleitung to Topf und Söhne dated 28 June 1943 requests “twelve gas-tight doors approximately 30 by 40 cm” with the specification of opening direction and lock type, for installation in crematoria IV and V. A construction site progress report dated 24 March 1943 by Walter Dejaco refers to the “Vergasungskeller” (gassing cellar) of crematorium II and notes its dimensions, internal heating system and the position of the wire-mesh introduction columns. The blueprint of the underground undressing room of crematorium II includes shower fittings on the ceiling that were dummies (no plumbing led to them); the gas-tight doors between the undressing room and the gas chamber; the introduction-column positions in the gas chamber roof. The architectural firm contracted to manufacture the gas-tight doors, Friedrich Tomaschek of Auschwitz town, billed for them in invoices that survive.
The Topf und Söhne correspondence with the SS construction office, in parallel, discusses the engineering of the introduction columns in detail. A letter from Topf engineer Kurt Prüfer to the SS dated 8 February 1943 refers to the “Drahtnetzeinschiebevorrichtung” (wire-mesh introduction device) for the Zyklon B in crematorium II. A subsequent letter discusses the increased ventilation requirements for the gas chamber on the grounds that the existing fan capacity is inadequate. The Topf accountant’s books record the bills for these specific items. None of this is in dispute among historians; the documents have been reproduced in full in the Pressac volume of 1989, in van Pelt’s expert evidence at the Irving v. Lipstadt trial, and in subsequent scholarship.
The Himmler instructions on euphemism
The deliberate avoidance of the explicit term in writing was Himmler’s own policy, recorded in his correspondence and in the testimony of Eichmann. The most notorious example is Himmler’s Posen speech of 4 October 1943 to senior SS officers, which exists in audio recording (the only surviving recording of Himmler discussing the operation in plain language). Himmler said: “I refer now to the evacuation of the Jews, the extermination of the Jewish people. This is one of those things which is easy to talk about. ‘The Jewish people will be exterminated’, says every Party member, ‘sure, it’s in our programme, eliminating the Jews, exterminating them, sure, we’ll do it.’ And then they all come, our eighty million good Germans, and each one has his decent Jew. Sure, the others are pigs, but this one is a first-class Jew. Of those who talk like this, none has watched, none has stood up to it. Most of you here will know what it means when 100 corpses lie next to each other, when 500 lie there or when 1,000 are lined up. To have stuck this out and, with the exception of human weaknesses, to have remained decent, that has hardened us.”
The speech is on tape because Himmler had it recorded. The recording is in the Bundesarchiv. The speech is the explicit acknowledgement, by the man directly responsible for the operation, of what the operation actually was. The deniers either ignore the recording (when claiming there is no documentary evidence of the killing as policy) or argue that the recording is a forgery (which has been rejected by every audio-forensic study, including the German Federal Criminal Police laboratory analysis of 1979). Either way, the recording is the closest thing to a written order that the deniers’ framing demands; the speech makes the policy explicit while conforming to the practice of not putting it in routine correspondence.
The Höss confession
The other category of “explicit order” the deniers will accept is the explicit testimony of the perpetrator. Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz, testified at Nuremberg on 15 April 1946 that Himmler had personally summoned him to Berlin in summer 1941, told him he had been chosen to organise the mass killing of European Jewry at Auschwitz, and given him verbal instructions to that effect. Höss had no surviving written order from Himmler; the order was given in a face-to-face meeting at Himmler’s office. Höss’s testimony was given before a tribunal that was about to send him back to Poland to be tried and hanged. He had no incentive to invent the meeting or to embellish the instructions. He repeated the account in his subsequent Polish trial and in his written memoir composed in Polish custody before his execution. The Höss account is the explicit verbal order that the deniers’ framing requires; it was given verbally because Himmler did not put it in writing, and Höss attested to it under oath.
Why the claim is harmful
The claim that no document orders the gas chambers is harmful because it weaponises an absence that the perpetrators themselves designed. The SS deliberately kept the killing out of routine correspondence; the surviving senior testimony confirms that this was deliberate; the construction documents describe the buildings in the technical terms the policy required; the Himmler recording exists. The denier argument is the argument that Himmler’s document-control policy worked: that he succeeded in keeping the explicit term off the routine paperwork. The further argument, that the absence of the explicit term means the operation did not occur, requires the listener to ignore the construction documents, the perpetrator testimony, the Posen recording, and the entire surrounding evidence. The absence of the smoking-gun memo is the success of the deception, not the absence of the killing.
What kind of document do they require? Why would the SS have produced such a document, given Himmler’s explicit instruction not to? What do the construction documents that do survive describe?
See also
Sources
- Heinrich Himmler, Posen speech to SS officers, 4 October 1943, audio recording in the Bundesarchiv, Koblenz; transcript at the Avalon Project, Yale Law School; and Nuremberg Document PS-1919
- Rudolf Höss, testimony at the International Military Tribunal, Nuremberg, 15 April 1946, in Trial of the Major War Criminals before the International Military Tribunal, vol. 11, Nuremberg, 1947
- Rudolf Höss, Kommandant in Auschwitz, edited by Martin Broszat, Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1958
- Zentralbauleitung der Waffen-SS und Polizei Auschwitz, correspondence and drawings on the gas chambers and crematoria, Russian State Military Archive, Moscow, fond 502, with the specific documents on the gas-tight doors, the Vergasungskeller, the introduction columns and the ventilation
- Topf und Söhne correspondence with the Auschwitz SS construction office, Thuringian Main State Archive, Weimar, with specific letters from Kurt Prüfer on the introduction device for crematorium II
- Friedrich Tomaschek (Auschwitz town), invoices for the gas-tight doors, in the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum collection
- Jean-Claude Pressac, Auschwitz: Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers, Beate Klarsfeld Foundation, 1989, with full reproduction of the relevant documents
- Robert Jan van Pelt, The Case for Auschwitz: Evidence from the Irving Trial, Indiana University Press, 2002, on the document trail and the question of the missing explicit order
- Mr Justice Charles Gray, judgment in David Irving v. Penguin Books and Deborah Lipstadt, Royal Courts of Justice, 11 April 2000, on the documentary evidence for the gas chambers
- Christopher R. Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939 to March 1942, University of Nebraska Press / Yad Vashem, 2004, on the bureaucratic record and the language of euphemism
- Peter Longerich, Heinrich Himmler: A Life, Oxford University Press, 2012, on Himmler’s document-control policy
- USHMM Holocaust Encyclopedia, “Implementing the ‘Final Solution'” and “The German Bureaucracy”, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org