Self-Immolating Bodies

After several cases were reported where the bodies of deceased individuals had slowly burned to a large degree, investigations into the phenomenon have revealed that, under highly unusual circumstances, large parts of a human body can indeed burn almost to ashes without any fuel. These cases are usually initiated by small fires such as candles setting aflame some fabric, usually cotton, which subsequently acts like a wick, slowly melting and burning subcutaneous fat deposits. The heat produced can be enough to slowly evaporate the body’s water, thus enabling also the remaining tissues made of fat and protein to burn. This phenomenon requires a body with sufficient fat content, meaning an overweight or obese person. This procedure takes many hours and burns only the trunk plus, in highly obese cases, also fat-rich parts of the extremities, but usually not the lower extremities (lower arms and legs, feet and hands) which have less fat content (Nickell/Fischer 1984; Nickell 1998).

It goes without saying that this is not a way to turn human bodies into ashes swiftly and completely. In particular, it would not have worked with the millions of Jews deported to German camps, most of whom had lived a life of deprivation to the point of starvation for months if not years. Overweight or even obese individuals were rare among them.

Nevertheless, there are many witnesses to the claimed National-Socialist mass murder of the Jews who insisted that the victims’ bodies were burned to ashes with little or no fuel, either in crematoria or on pyres. Experiences with large-scale outdoor combustions of culled livestock have shown, however, that cremation without fuel is a far-fetched illusion (see the entry for open-air incinerations). Furthermore, more than a century of scientific and historical data on millions of cremations in crematoria has equally shown that burning the human body in such devices requires considerable amounts of fuel – again with the exception of obese individuals.

Among the witnesses having made false claims about self-immolating human bodies are:

• Paul Blobel
• Leon Cohen
• Eliezer Eisenschmidt
• Leon Finkelsztein
• Yaakov Gabai
• Richard Glazar
• Stanisław Jankowski
• Stanisław Kon
• Olga Lengyel
• Maurice Lequeux
• Kurt Marcus
• Konrad Morgen
• Marcel Nadsari
• Ludwik Nagraba
• Dov Paisikovic
• Chil Rajchman
• Jean-François Steiner
• Franz Suchomel
• Franz Süss
• Jerzy Tabeau
• Henryk Tauber
• (Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier)
• Shlomo Venezia
• Szyja Warszawski
• Jankiel Wiernik

This “convergence of evidence” on the same lie proves the copy-cat and/or orchestrated nature of these witness testimonies.