Flossenbürg

Stephen Pinter, the U.S. chief investigator preparing the prosecution against former staff members of the Flossenbürg Camp after the war, came to the conclusion that no homicidal gas chamber ever existed at that camp. Today, all historians agree with that conclusion. That didn’t stop former inmates from making gas-chamber claims, though, as it was fashionable for “witnesses” during the first few decades after the war to claim gas chambers for every camp. One such person was Arnold Friedman, who, in his 1972 book Death Was Our Destiny, wrote that the SS tried to gas him at Flossenbürg, but that he managed to survive by breathing through the door’s keyhole – as if homicidal gas-chamber doors are locked with simple keys… (See the entry on Arnold Friedman for an excerpt.)

For the longest time, even the Yad Vashem Archives had a photograph of the Flossenbürg inmate shower room, mendaciously and maliciously mislabeled as follows:

“Flossenbürg, Germany, Gas chambers, which were called showers.”

It used to have Archival Signature 4029, Album No. FA256/40 (retrieved online in 2019), but it seems to have been removed since. Had this photo been taken from a different angle, showing the many windows in this real, once-working shower room (see the illustrations), no skeptical mind would have ever believed it.