Plan, to Exterminate the Jews

Any plan allegedly contrived aiming at the extermination of Europe’s Jews is necessarily linked to a Hitler order to initiate such an extermination. Since there is no trace of such an order (see the entry on the Hitler Order), it is unsurprising that no documental trace of any plan has ever been found either.

The Holocaust, in its orthodox version, is an event that is said to have lasted more than three years (from mid-1941 to late 1944), encompassed almost an entire continent, and caused at least six million claimed victims. How could it possibly be perceived that such a vast undertaking was implemented without any plan?

U.S.-Jewish political scientist and historian Raul Hilberg, who during his lifetime was considered the world’s leading orthodox Holocaust scholar, tried to explain how this vast project unfolded without an order, a plan or even without a budget (De Wan 1983):

“But what began in 1941 was a process of destruction [of the Jews] not planned in advance, not organized centrally by any agency. There was no blueprint and there was no budget for destructive measures. They [these measures] were taken step by step, one step at a time. Thus came about not so much a plan being carried out, but an incredible meeting of minds, a consensus mind reading by a far-flung [German] bureaucracy.”

Hence, Hilberg tried to explain this conundrum by resorting to telepathy. The absurdity here speaks for itself.

In lack of any wartime documents containing anything resembling a plan, interrogators, prosecutors and judges of various postwar judiciaries as well as historians have tried to explain the path along which the extermination of the Jews is said to have evolved. In doing so, they evidently neither followed an order, nor did they have a plan to present some coherent narrative as to how it supposedly transpired. As a result, their narrative is an incoherent, chaotic mess. The following outline of the orthodox attempts at explaining the evolution of the Holocaust is not based on wartime documents, physical traces or forensic findings, but exclusively and entirely on postwar anecdotes, hearsay, rumors and conjectures.

Regarding Auschwitz, the orthodoxy relies on postwar statements by former camp commandant Rudolf Höss. After prolonged torture, Höss “confessed” that he had received a verbal order from Himmler in June 1941. According to this, Hitler demanded the total extermination of all Jews, and Auschwitz was to be turned into an extermination machine to this effect. Thereafter, Adolf Eichmann was charged with finding a murder method, but he failed with this task. Luckily, Höss’s deputy Karl Fritzsch, spontaneously and without having been asked to do so, came up with the idea of using Zyklon B.

On 3 July 1941, the Auschwitz Camp’s construction office received two articles written by DEGESCH CEO Gerhard Peters, which described in detail sophisticated Zyklon-B circulation systems developed by the DEGESCH Company for fumigations. With a few alterations, this system could have been used for mass homicides. Yet instead of paying any attention to these articles, Fritzsch allegedly decided two months later, in early September, to simply dump Zyklon B into some basement rooms full of people, with no way of retrieving the Zyklon-B pellets, and with no ventilation system to clear the fumes afterwards. (See the entry on the first gassing at Auschwitz.)

The next steps in the Auschwitz gassing narrative were all unplanned improvisation as well: The first gassing at the old crematorium in the Auschwitz Main Camp a few weeks later was spontaneous and improvised: quickly hack holes through the roof of the crematorium’s morgue while the victims were already waiting, dump Zyklon B on their heads and forget it, while the ventilation system ordered for that building was never installed (see the section “Propaganda History,” subsection “Crematorium I” in the entry on the Auschwitz Main Camp).

The conversion of two old farmhouses outside the Birkenau Camp in the first half of 1942 into makeshift gassing facilities was also improvised: dump Zyklon B and forget it, with no ventilation system (see the entry on the bunkers of Birkenau).

Even the claimed late adaptations of the four new crematorium buildings at Birkenau in late 1942/early 1943, so they could serve homicidal purposes, were made with little or no forethought or planning (see Mattogno 2019). In fact, the alleged Zyklon-B introduction holes of Crematoria II and III are even said to have been hacked through the finished, thick reinforced concrete roofs with jack hammers as an afterthought (roofs with jack hammers see the entry on Zyklon-B introduction devices). Certainly, none of this was planned in advance – if it ever happened in the first place.

Parallel to this constant bungling, the camp’s headquarters started negotiations with a civilian company in July 1942 to build 19 DEGESCH circulation fumigation systems – to be installed in the camp’s reception building for disinfesting inmate clothes, not for homicide! There is neither any documental nor any anecdotal trace that anything similar to such a system was ever considered to be used for homicidal gassings. (On the Peters articles at Auschwitz and the plans to build 19 disinfestation chambers, see Mattogno 2019, pp. 115f.)

The situation is even more convoluted when it comes to the alleged gas vans. Here, the orthodox narrative relies on a post-war fable told by Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski about an execution of 100 partisans, which Himmler allegedly attended. Shocked by the cruelty of the procedure, Himmler supposedly ordered a method to be devised which would be easier for the stressed German executioners. Although von dem Bach incredibly claimed that the new method used afterwards was blowing up people with explosives, historians take this non-event as the initiation of developing the so-called gas vans.

Here, the orthodox narrative splits. One strand claims that the murder method used at Germany’s euthanasia centers served as a model: bottled carbon-monoxide gas. Such a bottle was allegedly hitched to a trailer pulled by a tractor in order to kill people locked up in the trailer. The other strand claims that the murder method was accidentally discovered by Arthur Nebe, in 1941 head of Germany’s Criminal Police. When driving home drunk one night, he allegedly almost killed himself by leaving the car running in his garage – hence he realized that car exhaust gasses can kill. However, this “planned” method is based on nothing but a rumor (see the entry on Albert Widmann).

Next, Germany’s high-tech research lab at the nation’s top-notch Institute of Criminological Technology made some tests with truck exhaust gasses, but came up with no useful results (or so Albert Widmann claimed). Nevertheless, 30 trucks equipped with no-useful-results diesel engines were then ordered for the sake of exhaust-induced mass murder. All this, even though diesel exhaust is useless for such a purpose, which is the meaning of “no useful results.” And all this, while Germany was mass-producing producer-gas devices by the tens of thousands every month, which were widely known to have the perfect potential of serving as gas-mass-murder machines. But those were never used. Clearly, there was no methodical thinking behind any of this.

The matter gets even more muddled when turning to the “Aktion Reinhardt” camps: Belzec, Chełmno, Sobibór, Treblinka. All of them started operating long after Auschwitz had allegedly received its order to exterminate Jews, and had already “discovered” the best method during the “first gassing” in early September 1941: Zyklon B. Yet none of these other camps used the Auschwitz Camp’s “research and development achievements.” The boss of these four camps, Odilo Globocnik, did not ask Höss for any advice on how to plan this, and he did not plan and coordinate any efforts of “his” four camps to come up with an effective solution either. Rather, all these camps bungled about with their own method: Chełmno allegedly received two or three “gas vans” of mixed makes and models in late 1941; Belzec and Treblinka each presumably used exhaust gasses from a diesel engine incapable of gassing anyone, while Sobibór is said to have used exhaust gas from a gasoline engine. None of these camps’ commandants learned from Auschwitz, because in Höss’s anachronistic narrative, Treblinka was in operation (using engine exhaust gases) already long before June 1941. Therefore, Höss claimed to have learned from Treblinka not to use inefficient engine exhaust. But this is, of course, nonsense, as Treblinka became operational only in July 1942, more than a year after Höss supposedly received Himmler’s order.

The climax of unplanned bungling was reached in the summer of 1943, when a makeshift homicidal gas chamber is said to have been set up at the Natzweiler Camp. Its claimed killing method is extremely primitive and physically impossible. If these claims were to be taken at face value, all they prove is that, still this late into the war, no plan in the entire German realm can have existed to mass murder people in gas chambers.

This tangled web of inconsistent muddling is what today’s historians claim, after they have streamlined their narrative and have culled from it all the claims that tell an even more disparate tale. The original, comprehensive narrative of all these camps is in fact a jumbled mixture of the most bizarre murder methods allegedly used. (See the section “Changing Murder Methods” in the entry on homicidal gas chamber, as well as the entries for each camp mentioned here for more details.)

The situation is no different with the Einsatzgruppen, as is explained in detail in the section “Extermination Order” of the entry dedicated to these units. No trace exists of any plan ever contrived, or order ever issued to the Einsatzgruppen, to systematically exterminate the Jews in the Soviet Union. When mass executions happened, Alfred Rosenberg’s office, the formal German chief of all German-occupied Soviet territories, prohibited them, stating that no order or document exists implementing a policy of wanton annihilation. (See the entry on Alfred Rosenberg.) The one Einsatzgruppen commander who claimed otherwise after the war, Otto Ohlendorf, devised this lie as a (failed) defense strategy. (See the entry on Otto Ohlendorf.)

In sum: There was no plan to implement the “Final Solution” in terms of the physical extermination of the Jews, because no such solution was envisioned or implemented.

The best indicator for this is the radical revision of the historiography about the Majdanek Camp. After the camp’s occupation by the Soviets in July 1944, it was claimed that seven homicidal gas chambers existed there. They were allegedly used to assist in killing the camp’s initially claimed two million victims. By the year 2005, this propaganda image had been downsized in several steps. Currently, only two homicidal gas chambers are claimed, and the death toll is said to have been around 78,000 – less than 4% of the original claim.

The only plan visible in all this is the systematic, yet uncoordinated creation of atrocity tales, no matter how far-fetched. In view of documental and physical evidence, these tales had to be drastically downsized, lest orthodox historians lose any remaining credibility.