The Gas Chambers Never Existed

This is the headline maximalist position of Holocaust denial. The position requires the listener to accept that the SS construction office at Auschwitz built four large purpose-designed buildings between 1942 and 1943 for some other purpose; that the Topf und Söhne firm of Erfurt designed and supplied gas-introduction columns and ventilation systems for some other purpose; that the SS specifically requisitioned cyanide fumigation product without the warning agent for some other purpose; that the Sonderkommando manuscripts buried at Birkenau were written by people who did not exist about events that did not occur; that Höss, Broad, Tauber, Müller, Venezia, Stark, Nyiszli and dozens of other witnesses were collectively lying or deceived; that the Polish, Soviet, German, Israeli and Anglo-American forensic and judicial commissions of 1945 to 2000 all reached the same wrong conclusion independently; and that the surviving physical buildings at Auschwitz, Birkenau, Majdanek, Sachsenhausen and Mauthausen were built for innocent purposes that the documents fail to mention. The position is the limit case of a denial that has run out of specific objections and reverted to a wholesale rejection of the historical record.

The contemporaneous documentary record

The denial that contemporaneous German documents mention the gas chambers is among the easiest to refute in detail. The relevant documents survive, were captured by the Allies in 1945, and have been in published form for decades. The Wannsee Conference Protocol of 20 January 1942 refers to the “appropriate treatment” (entsprechende Behandlung) of those Jews who would survive the labour-and-attrition phase of the planned operation. The Höfle Telegram of 11 January 1943, decoded by GCHQ at Bletchley Park (file HW 16/23, declassified 2000), reports the year-end 1942 totals for the four Operation Reinhard killing sites (Lublin/Majdanek, Bełżec, Sobibór, Treblinka), naming each site and giving precise numbers of arrivals (1,274,166 in total). The Korherr Report of March and April 1943, prepared by Richard Korherr, the SS chief statistician, for Himmler, lists the “evacuation” totals from the various national populations and notes that approximately 2.5 million Jews had by then “passed through” the camps.

Beyond these top-level documents, the construction of the gas chambers is documented at every operational level. The Auschwitz Zentralbauleitung files, captured by the Soviets and now in Moscow, contain hundreds of pages of correspondence, drawings, requisitions and bills relating to the gas chambers and crematoria specifically. The Topf und Söhne files, captured by the Soviets in Erfurt, contain the parallel commercial correspondence. The SS labour camp inspectorate files (WVHA, captured at the war’s end) contain the establishment-level correspondence about staffing, supply and operation. The Sicherheitsdienst (SD) reports from the Reichssicherheitshauptamt include numerous references. The denier claim that no contemporaneous documentary evidence exists requires not having looked at the documents.

The contemporaneous Allied intelligence record

The British and Americans had received intelligence about the gas chambers as the operation was underway. The decoded Höfle Telegram in January 1943 was the most precise such intelligence; the British did not at the time know what the totals referred to, but the document was filed and the decryption survived. The Polish underground, through Jan Karski, brought reports of the Operation Reinhard camps to London in late 1942 and early 1943. The Auschwitz Protocols of April 1944 (the Vrba-Wetzler Report), produced by two Slovak Jewish escapees from Birkenau, described the gas chamber operation in detail; the document reached Allied governments in mid-1944 and was used to argue for the Hungarian deportation halt in July 1944. The Vrba-Wetzler Report has been continuously available in the historical literature since 1944.

The Allied aerial reconnaissance photographs of Auschwitz-Birkenau from June, July, August and September 1944 show the gas chamber and crematorium complex from above, including, in the August 1944 image, a transport of Hungarian Jews being walked from the railway siding towards crematorium II. The photographs were taken by US Army Air Forces reconnaissance aircraft photographing the IG Farben Buna-Werke synthetic rubber plant adjacent to Auschwitz; the Auschwitz killing facility was incidentally captured on the same photographic plates. The photographs were filed at the time, rediscovered in the National Archives in the 1970s, and analysed in detail by Dino Brugioni and Robert Poirier of the CIA’s National Photographic Interpretation Center in 1979. They are in the public record.

The post-war legal record

The existence of the gas chambers was not seriously contested at any of the post-war war crimes trials. At the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg (1945 to 1946), it was treated as a matter of established fact, supported by documentary evidence, by film of the camps after liberation, and by the testimony of perpetrators and survivors. At the subsequent Nuremberg trials (1946 to 1949), particularly the Pohl Trial of the SS economic administration and the IG Farben Trial, the gas chamber operation was again treated as established. At the Auschwitz Trial in Frankfurt (1963 to 1965), the most extensively documented post-war trial of camp personnel, the operation was reconstructed in forensic detail from witness and documentary evidence, with twenty-two defendants tried by a German court that had every institutional interest in scrutinising every claim sceptically. The court convicted seventeen of the defendants on the basis of their roles in an operation it found to have unambiguously occurred. None of the defence counsel in any of these trials seriously argued that the gas chambers had not existed.

Why the claim is harmful

This claim is harmful because it is the rhetorical position that no amount of evidence can answer. The evidence exists in every form (documentary, testimonial, forensic, photographic, archaeological, judicial), produced by every category of witness and investigator (German, Polish, Soviet, Israeli, American, British, Jewish, non-Jewish, contemporary, retrospective). The denial requires the listener to dismiss all of it together, on the implicit basis that an entire international historical, judicial and museum apparatus has been collectively wrong, or collectively dishonest, for eighty years. This is not a position one can be argued out of by additional evidence; it is a position designed to make additional evidence beside the point. Recognising it as such is the first step in seeing past it.

What contemporaneous document do they accept as authentic? What witness do they accept as credible? What surviving structure do they accept as genuine? When every answer is “none”, the claim has revealed its character.

See also

• The Wannsee Conference and the Final Solution
• IG Farben
• Jan Karski
• The Nuremberg Trials
• The Twelve Subsequent Nuremberg Trials

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Sources

• Wannsee Conference Protocol, 20 January 1942, surviving copy held at the House of the Wannsee Conference Memorial, Berlin; full text at the Avalon Project, Yale Law School
• Höfle Telegram, 11 January 1943, decoded by GCHQ Bletchley Park, file HW 16/23, The National Archives, Kew; published in Peter Witte and Stephen Tyas, “A New Document on the Deportation and Murder of Jews during ‘Einsatz Reinhardt’ 1942”, in Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 15:3, 2001
• Korherr Report, “Die Endlösung der europäischen Judenfrage”, March and April 1943, Nuremberg Document NO-5193
• Vrba-Wetzler Report (Auschwitz Protocols), April 1944, multiple published editions; full text in Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler, I Cannot Forgive, Bantam, 1964, and in the War Refugee Board, German Extermination Camps – Auschwitz and Birkenau, Washington, November 1944
• Allied aerial reconnaissance photographs of Auschwitz-Birkenau, June to September 1944, US National Archives, College Park, Record Group 373; analysis in Dino A. Brugioni and Robert G. Poirier, The Holocaust Revisited, Central Intelligence Agency, 1979
• Zentralbauleitung der Waffen-SS und Polizei Auschwitz, full construction archive for the gas chambers and crematoria, Russian State Military Archive, Moscow, fond 502
• Topf und Söhne files, Thuringian Main State Archive, Weimar
• International Military Tribunal, Trial of the Major War Criminals, full record, Nuremberg, 1947 to 1949
• Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial transcripts (1963 to 1965), Fritz Bauer Institut, Frankfurt; Hermann Langbein, Der Auschwitz-Prozess: Eine Dokumentation, two volumes, Europa Verlag, 1965
• Robert Jan van Pelt, The Case for Auschwitz: Evidence from the Irving Trial, Indiana University Press, 2002
• Mr Justice Charles Gray, judgment in David Irving v. Penguin Books and Deborah Lipstadt, Royal Courts of Justice, 11 April 2000
• Saul Friedländer, The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews 1939 to 1945, HarperCollins, 2007
• USHMM Holocaust Encyclopedia, “Killing Centres” and “Auschwitz”, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org