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Srul Fajgielbaum was an inmate of the Sobibór Camp. In a deposition of 5 November 1945, he claimed to have been involved in building the (one) gas chamber at Sobibór. The room’s ceiling, floor and walls were allegedly lined with iron plates, and the execution was carried out with electricity “produced inside the chamber by…
Scientific research shows that even mildly manipulative interviewing techniques, repeated multiple times, succeed in implanting false memories into roughly one third of all average adults, making them firmly believe that they experienced events that never happened (Loftus 1994, 1997, 2003). It has also been demonstrated that the human memory is more easily manipulated when questioning…
Starting on 6 September 1943, Jews from the Theresienstadt Ghetto in what is today Czechia were deported in large numbers to the Auschwitz-Birkenau Camp and lodged there in the so-called Family Camp. More such transports arrived in December 1943 and May, September and October 1944. On 10 and 11 July 1944, some 7,000 Jews quartered…
Henrik Farkas was a Hungarian Jew deported to Auschwitz on 15 June 1944. After the war, he made a deposition which was published in a 1945 collection titled, “Data on the Martyrdom of Hungarian Jewry during the 1941-1945 War.” Farka’s chapter on the “gas chambers” was plagiarized from the 1944 report by Rudolf Vrba and…
farmhouses, makeshift gas chambers at Birkenau → Bunkers /
Leon Feldhendler was an inmate of the Sobibór Camp. In a 1946 book, he is quoted as having testified that, in the sector where he was employed, the living conditions for the Jews were agreeable: “The [Jewish] tradesmen were living very nicely, in their workshops, they had comfortable quarters.” He claimed that the gas chambers…
Hella Felenbaum-Weiss was an inmate of the Sobibór Camp. In a deposition probably recorded in 1946, she claimed that inmates were gassed using chlorine inside the train during transit on the way to Sobibór. This claim is rejected as false by the orthodoxy, who insists that inmates were gassed only after their arrival at the…
Leon Finkelsztein was a Polish Jew deported to the Treblinka Camp on 22 July 1942, who escaped during the uprising on 2 August 1943. On 28 December 1945 he was interrogated by Polish judge Łukaszkiewicz. Here are some pertinent claims from his deposition: Deportees were killed in the trains in transit with chlorine sprinkled in…
Horst Fischer (31 Dec. 1910 – 8 July 1966) was a wartime physician and SS Hauptsturmführer. From 6 November 1942 until 1944 he was deployed as camp physician at the labor camp Auschwitz-Monowitz and at the worksite of the nearby Buna branch of the German chemical giant I.G. Farbenindustrie. In September 1944, he became deputy…
David Fliamenbaum (born 1924) was incarcerated in Auschwitz-Birkenau, where he was encountered by Soviet troops upon their occupation of the area. During an interview conducted on 1 March 1945, he claimed to have witnessed various atrocities. Fliamenbaum claims to have been made an apprentice in a masons’ school with 600 other boys and young men….
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…
France’s role in the Holocaust was twofold. First, during the German occupation of northern France, the French government in southern France collaborated with the German authorities and agreed to have those Jews living in France deported to Auschwitz who either had no French citizenship or who had obtained it only recently. The deportation lists have…
Despite her status as perhaps the most famous Holocaust victim, the story of Anne Frank has little direct bearing on the larger Holocaust narrative. In one sense, she was just one more Jewish victim of the evil Nazis. And yet, there is so much controversy around her famous diary that it threatens to expose deeper…
Background Before the investigations for the great Frankfurt Auschwitz trial started, the German government was reluctant to evaluate the contents of eastern European archives. Offers by communist countries were conceived as attempts to destabilize West Germany with propaganda, potentially falsified evidence and manipulated witnesses. This resistance, however, collapsed under the lobbying of various pressure groups…
Kurt Franz (17 Jan. 1914 – 4 July 1998), SS Oberscharführer, was deployed as a guard at the Buchenwald Camp, and later as a cook at several institutions of the Third Reich’s euthanasia action. In April 1942 he was assigned as a guard at the Belzec Camp. In September 1942, he became deputy commandant of…
Ber (or Berisch) Freiberg was an inmate of the Sobibór Camp. In three depositions of 10 and 18 August 1944 and 27 July 1945, he claimed that executions at Sobibór happened in just one gas chamber. A gas, perhaps chlorine, was produced by an electric machine, from where the gas was piped into gas tanks…
Chaim Frosch, who claims to have been deported to Auschwitz on 30 April 1942, recorded a rather brief and terse undated account of his alleged experience in that camp, probably shortly after the war, which is now archived at the Yad Vashem Center in Jerusalem. He admitted having knowledge of extermination activities mainly – in…
When the link between infectious diseases, bacteria and bacteria-carrying pests (like insects or rodents) was discovered during the second half of the 19th Century, it quickly became apparent that this was a pivotal event in the history of human healthcare. Some of these pests were the vectors of major epidemic diseases, such as the body…
The term ‘furnace’ is commonly used for any industrial heating device used for the high-temperature processing or burning of material objects. The term ‘oven,’ in contrast, is commonly used for food-processing and -heating devices not intended to burn the food but rather to cook or heat it. Hence, a corpse cremation device is a furnace,…
Dario Gabai (or Gabbai, 2 Sept. 1922 – 25 March 2020) was a Greek Jew deported to Auschwitz in March 1944. Possibly incentivized by his brother’s interview with Israeli historian Gideon Greif a few years earlier (see the entry on Yaakov Gabai), Dario started giving his version of events in numerous media venues, soon after…
Yaakov Gabai (or Gabbai, aka Ya’akov, Jaacov, Jacob; born in Athens in 1912) wrote a brief text about his alleged experiences in Auschwitz in 1983, almost four decades after the events, when asked to do so by Erich Kulka. Some ten years later, he was interviewed by Israeli historian Gideon Greif. He arrived at Auschwitz…
Gyula Gál was a Hungarian physician who was deported to Auschwitz, where he stayed until the camp was conquered by the Soviets. Not quite two months later, he wrote a report about Auschwitz, which contains the following peculiar statements, among others: The camp’s total death toll was 5 million persons, 3½ million of them Jews,…
A gas chamber is an enclosed space or room to expose items to a chemically active gas in order to achieve certain effects. There are three main types of gas chambers: Training/testing gas chambers: used by military and civilian-defense agencies to test gas-protection equipment and to train personnel in their use. Disinfestation or fumigation gas…
A gas van is a large-capacity truck or van allegedly used to murder passengers in the rear cargo hold via engine exhaust gas. Soviet Gas Vans In the mid-1930s, Isai Davidovich Berg – a Russian Jew and head of the economic department of the NKVD for the Moscow region – had the idea of using…
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