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Ludwik Nagraba was a former Auschwitz inmate who testified during the Höss show trial on 22 March 1947. In September 1947, he made a deposition in preparation of the Krakow show trial against former members of the Auschwitz camp staff. Nagraba claimed to have been admitted to the Auschwitz Camp on 15 February 1941, where…
During the International Military Tribunal (IMT) in Nuremberg, the Allied victors tried what they perceived as the 24 major German war criminals. However, already during the preparation of this tribunal, the victorious powers agreed that many more suspected war criminals needed to be prosecuted. But since it had proven very difficult to get all four…
Miklos Nyiszli (17 June 1901 – 5 May 1956) was deported to Auschwitz in the context of the wholesale deportation of Jews from what was Hungary back then. He arrived at Auschwitz on 29 May 1944. He spent two weeks at the Monowitz Camp, but due to the fact that he was a physician, he…
Josef Oberhauser (21 Jan. 1915 – 22 Nov. 1979) was an SS Untersturmführer at war’s end. From 1939 until August 1941, he was responsible at various locations for cremating the bodies of persons who had been killed during the so-called Euthanasia Program. From November 1941 until August 1942, Oberhauser served as the head of the…
The Pole Narcyz Tadeusz Obrycki was deported to Auschwitz on 13 May 1943. In December 1946, he signed an affidavit about his time there. In it, he described the structure of Crematoria II and III rather accurately. But there are some peculiarities of his testimony, for which he relied exclusively on camp rumors: The victims…
David Olère was deported to Auschwitz in March 1943 and was employed there by the SS to paint portraits for them. He claimed that he lived in the attic of Crematorium III. Although he prepared some rather accurate architectural drawings of this building, they also include invisible features, such as the smoke ducts. He could…
Principles How many people can stand on a surface area of one square meter (some 10 square feet, or a square 3’3” on a side)? Assuming that there are children in the mix, a figure of ten people seems physically possible – barely. The skeptical reader is invited to lay down some masking tape on…
Vassily Pankov was a Ukrainian auxiliary presumably deployed as a guard at the Sobibór Camp. After the war, he was arrested for this. In his interrogation of 18 October 1950 by Soviet authorities, he was made to describe even the Buchenwald Camp as an extermination camp. According to Pankov, the gassing facility at Sobibór consisted…
Alexander Pechersky (22 Feb. 1909 – 19 Jan. 1990), a Soviet-soldier of the Red Army, ended up in German captivity in 1941. After an extended stay at a labor camp in Minsk, he ended up at the Sobibór Camp in September of 1943, where he organized a successful prisoner uprising just three weeks later, on…
Moshe Peer was a French Jew who, at the age of 9, was arrested and, together with his family and many other Jews from France, deported to Auschwitz. While his mother perished there, he and the rest of his family were transferred to the Bergen-Belsen Camp toward the end of the war, where they all…
According to some sources, certain German wartime camps are said to have had facilities for the mass murder of inmates, such as homicidal gas chambers, but all historians without exception reject these claims as false, based either on false rumors, distorted hearsay, misunderstandings or outright black-propaganda lies. These camps, some of which have been completely…
Witold Pilecki (13 May 1901 – 25 May 1948) was a lieutenant in the Polish Clandestine Army in German-occupied Poland. As such, he was arrested on 19 September 1940 and interned at Auschwitz under the name Tadeusz Serafiński. Pilecki organized a Polish resistance group in that camp. He claimed to have escaped from Auschwitz on…
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…
Regina Plucer was a Polish Jewess who was interned at the Auschwitz Camp from August 1943 until January 1945. On 11 May 1945, hence not even four months after leaving Auschwitz, she signed an affidavit in preparation for the Bergen-Belsen show trial. She asserted in it, among other things, that she had been deployed in…
Michał Podchlebnik was a Polish Jew who, during his interrogation by Judge Bednarz on 9 June 1945, claimed to have been deported to the Chełmno Camp in late December 1941 or early January 1942, depending on which of his statements we believe, and escaped from there after just a few days. He is one of…
Salomon Podchlebnik was an inmate of the Sobibór Camp. In a concise deposition of 6 December 1945, he claimed that inmates at Sobibór were killed with an unspecified gas in one gas chamber, resulting in half a million victims. The orthodoxy insists, however, that there were several gas chambers, and that only half as many…
Oswald Pohl (30 June 1892 – 7 June 1951), SS Obergruppenführer, headed the SS offices that, in early 1942, were consolidated as the SS’s Economic and Administrative Main Office (Wirtschafts- und Verwaltungshauptamt). This office was directly subordinate to Heinrich Himmler as the Reichsführer SS. It handled all financial and administrative matters concerning the SS and…
Henryk Poswolski was a Polish Jew deported from the Warsaw Ghetto to the Treblinka Camp in January 1943, where he was employed as a bricklayer and stoker. However, he was not working at the camp’s extermination sector, which was physically and optically cordoned off from the rest of the camp. (What he was stoking, then,…
Introduction The term originates from the Latin word propagare, to propagate, and did not initially have any nefarious connotation. It simply meant the dissemination of information, with no implication that this information may be inaccurate or untrue. The shift in the term’s meaning is a result of spreading disinformation through mass media with the intention…
Lucjan Puchała was a Polish railway worker at Małkinia Station near Treblinka until June 1942, and then at the construction of the track from Treblinka Station to the sand pit near the Treblinka I Labor Camp. Necessarily from pure hearsay, he reported, among other things: There were 8 brick-and-cement gas chambers for 700 victims per…
Chil Rajchman (aka Henryk or Ye(c)hiel Reichman(n), 14 June 1914 – 7 May 2004) was a Polish Jew who was deported to the Treblinka Camp on 10 October 1942, from which he escaped after an inmate uprising on 2 August 1943. Still during the war, he presumably wrote down his experiences in Yiddish, which were…
Jerzy Rajgrodzki was deported to the Treblinka Camp on 12 September 1942, and escaped during the prisoner uprising on 2 August 1943. On an unspecified date, he wrote a lengthy report on his stay at the camp, which was published in 1958. He described the alleged Treblinka gas chambers, presumably operated with engine-exhaust gas, similar,…
Samuel Rajzman (1904 – 1979) was a Polish accountant who was deported from the Warsaw Ghetto to the Treblinka Camp in late September 1942 – or maybe in August of that year, according to his testimony at the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal (IMT, Vol. 8, p. 325). He managed to escape from that camp on…
Sigmund Rascher (12 Feb. 1909 – 26 April 1945), a Luftwaffe Major, was a physician who conducted often-lethal freezing and low-pressure experiments on concentration-camp inmates at the Dachau Camp. In 1944, he and his wife were arrested for kidnapping babies while falsely claiming them to be Mrs. Rascher’s natural-born children. For this, both were executed…
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