Dachau

Documented History

The Dachau Camp enters the Holocaust stage in March 1942, when plans for a proper crematorium building were drawn up. The few documents that the conquering U.S. troops did not destroy show little unusual. However, on 9 August 1942, hence in the early stages of the planning and construction phase, Dachau camp physician Siegmund Rascher wrote a letter to SS chief Heinrich Himmler, in which he wrote that a facility equal to the one already existing at Linz is currently being built at Dachau. The reference to Linz probably pointed to Hartheim Castle near that Austrian city, which was one of the institutions where the Third Reich implemented its euthanasia program. Accordingly, Rascher mentions that invalids end up in certain chambers anyway, which is why he asked for permission to use these chambers in order to test Germany’s new war gasses. The latter probably referred to the nerve gasses Tabun and Sarin, which had been discovered in Germany in 1936 and 1938, respectively; Tabun had gone into mass production in Germany in 1942.

At the time that Rascher wrote this letter, four Zyklon-B disinfestation chambers using the DEGESCH circulation method were under construction at the far end of the new crematorium building in Dachau. It stands to reason that Rascher was thinking about using those chambers for war-gas experiments.

Siegmund Rascher is known for his involvement in several (pseudo-)medical experiments using concentration-camp inmates as human guinea pigs. The documentation on low-pressure and cold-water experiments is vast, and was amply employed during the so-called “Medical Case,” which was Case 1 of the U.S.-conducted Nuremberg Military Tribunals (NMT, Vol. I & part of Vol. II). However, there are no documents on experiments with toxic gases or the deployment of a gas chamber at Dachau. Therefore, it stands to reason that Rascher’s request was turned down, assuming that the document is genuine.

Propaganda History

When U.S. troops closed in on the oldest and one of the most well-known German concentration camps in late April of 1945, they brought along a film crew from their propaganda division, the psychological warfare department. They did not only find the usual heaps of corpses in the camp, the result of Germany’s catastrophic collapse at the end of the war, but they also found “the gas chamber.” This was duly filmed, and that footage put to “good” use in the U.S. propaganda documentary Nazi Concentration and Prisoner-of-War Camps, which was shown during the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal (IMT) on 29 November 1945 (Document 2430-PS; see IMT, Vol. 30, p. 470). The narrator in that movie says:

“Dachau – factory of horrors. […] Hanging in orderly rows were the clothes of prisoners who had been suffocated in the lethal gas chamber. They had been persuaded to remove their clothing under the pretext of taking a shower for which towels and soap were provided. This is the Brausebad – the showerbath. Inside the showerbath – the gas vents. On the ceiling – the dummy shower heads. In the engineer’s room – the intake and outlet pipes. Pushbuttons to control inflow and outtake of gas. A hand valve to regulate pressure. Cyanide powder was used to generate the lethal smoke. From the gas chamber, the bodies were removed to the crematory.”

Next, a commission of U.S. Senators and Representatives was quickly flown over to Munich to see with their own eyes not just the corpses, but the gas chamber itself. A U.S. investigation committee then wrote a report, which describes the ceiling of the gas chamber as being 3 meters high, although it is in fact only some 2.10 m high. It also asserts that the lethal gas was fed into the room through brass showerheads connected to two valves in the exterior wall. However, the room has only iron showerheads, and they are not connected to the large pipes in the rear of the room. Although factually wrong, this report was admitted in an edited version as Document 159-L during the IMT (IMT, Vol. 37, pp. 605-627; here p. 621).

Later reports by persons who tried to understand the design of this room and its purpose have concluded that this complex system of heat exchanger, pipes, valves, ducts, vents and a fan had one essential component missing: it had no means of adding or introducing any poison gas. It was an absurdly complicated and inefficient way of heating and ventilating this room. An internal expert report of the U.S. 3rd Army even called the room “a failure,” as a result of which “no experimental work ever took place in it.”

In support of the gas-chamber tale, one key witness testified during the U.S. Dachau show trial in late 1945 and also during the IMT in early 1946: Franz Blaha, who was the only witness to ever claim during a trial that a homicidal gassing happened at Dachau. However, his testimony is rather superficial and makes little sense, if any. (See the entry on Franz Blaha.) There were other witnesses whose claims about homicidal gassings at Dachau were recorded by U.S. investigators prior to their Dachau show trial, but in light of the internal U.S. expert report considering the gas chamber a “failure,” and probably also due to the evidently hysterical and contradictory nature of these wild accusations, the prosecution decided to drop the charges in this regard and ignore those witness statements.

Today, the room in question has two openings in its outside wall that each can be closed with an iron hopper. Therefore, the orthodoxy changed tack and has claimed ever since that these hoppers were allegedly used to insert Zyklon B, and let it slide through the holes onto the chamber floor. However, this would have enabled every inmate outside to watch this operation, and it would have made it impossible to retrieve the Zyklon-B pellets after the deed, thus needlessly extending the required ventilation time.

More importantly, such a primitive “dump and forget” solution stands in stark contrast to the four advanced DEGESCH circulation fumigation chambers installed at the other end of the same building, only a few meters away. (See the entry on fumigation gas chamber). The Dachau camp authorities therefore knew perfectly well how to perform Zyklon-B gassings efficiently, swiftly and safely. Had they wanted to do the same inside the “gas chamber,” they would have installed one of these devices in that room, allowing them to open a Zyklon-B can remotely, to develop its fumes swiftly, and to dissipate it rapidly throughout the room.

Death-Toll Propaganda

For re-education purposes, the U.S. occupational forces set up signs near the Dachau crematorium building to instruct the locals that at this camp some 238,000 had been cremated there. That number never found entry in serious historian’s narrative, though. Currently, a total death toll of some 28,000 to 32,000 is assumed, with almost half of them dying in the catastrophic last months of the war due to starvation and diseases.

Forensic Findings

The room in question has six large-size, fully functional floor drains with large sieve buckets underneath to catch hair and other items. One of the showerheads embedded into the ceiling has been removed. Underneath it, an object is visible that looks like a cut-open water pipe. If these showerheads are fake, then there is no other major water source in this room, other than one water pipe in the back wall. Hence, why are there six floor drains? Anyone seriously interested in resolving this riddle would open the ceiling and see what is behind it.

The outer brickwork and mortar around the two “Zyklon” openings in the outer wall show that these openings were not original but were added later, after the wall had been finished. This can also be seen on the inside, where the wall tiles around these openings were removed and “replaced” with plaster, merely made to look like tiles. If these openings were not present when the room was built in 1942/43, then there was no way of adding any poisonous substance. Therefore, this room was not planned as a gas chamber.

It stands to reason that the two openings were added at a time when this room was no longer used as a shower room, but rather as an additional morgue, toward the later part of the war. These openings may have served simply to facilitate ventilating the room, by serving as fresh-air inlets. Alternatively, they may have been deliberately installed in order to align with the popular image of a “gas chamber.”

Current Orthodox Narrative

The orthodoxy cannot make up their mind whether this room was ever used for any gassing, or whether it was used only once, or rarely, or on occasion. Also, the question of whether this room was planned to serve a larger purpose of a future anticipated mass-murder facility is unresolved. For if this highly complex facility served to mass-murder people, then there must have been a plan to use it as such.

The whole issue disappears, once it is understood that this facility never has been and never was meant to be a homicidal gas chamber. Hence, in this case as well, we are dealing only with pure deception.

(For more details on this topic, see Leuchter et al. 2017, pp. 149-159, 173-193; Mattogno 2022a; Rudolf 2023, pp. 78-88.)