Böck, Richard

Richard Böck (born 1906), SS Unterscharführer, served as a driver in the Auschwitz Camp’s motor pool. Böck was a good friend of former Auschwitz inmate Adolf Rögner, a convicted fraudster and perjurer whose long series of lies was instrumental in initiating the investigations that later ended in the infamous Frankfurt Auschwitz Show Trial. Böck was interrogated twice by the fact-finding branch of the Public Prosecutors at the Frankfurt District Court. His description of a homicidal gassing that he claimed to have personally witnessed is full of absurd, contradictory and technically impossible statements; as such, it has been a source of mockery by Holocaust skeptics. (For more details, see Rudolf 2003d; 2023, pp. 457-459.)

• During the first interrogation, he claimed that the gassing took place in the summer of 1943, while in his second interrogation he moved the event to the winter of 1942/43.
• Although it was strictly forbidden for him as an unauthorized person to be present at the alleged gassings or during an execution in a gravel pit (that he also claimed to have witnessed), he claimed that he simply drove to the gas chamber or accompanied SS men “a few meters behind” on their way to the execution.
• Ten minutes after the gas had been poured into the alleged gas chamber, the doors were opened. There was no ventilation, so the room would have been full of the colorless gas, but Böck saw “a bluish cloud floating over a gigantic pile of corpses,” and, “this blue vapor floated over the corpses, from which I assumed that it was a gas.” Since hydrogen-cyanide gas is colorless, this was nothing more than a product of his wild imagination, stemming from the (misleading) German name of hydrogen cyanide – Blausäure = blue acid.
• An unventilated room full of poison gas would have killed anyone trying to extract the corpses, and would also have endangered the lives of the SS men claimed to have supervised the process.
• Last but not least, Böck spread the well-worn lie that he “could see every day how the flames shot two meters high out of the [crematorium’s] chimney” located right next to his motor-pool office. “It also smelled intensively like burned flesh.” Yet the chimneys of cremation furnaces fired with coke, which burns almost flamelessly, cannot emit any flames, and a cremation furnace is not a barbecue grill but an incineration device operating at such high temperatures that the only scent would have been that of a normal coke-fueled fire.

In 1972, Böck was interviewed on behalf of the British Imperial War Museum. In that interview, he not only repeated the story of the blue haze hovering over the corpses, but he moreover insisted that, during their death struggle, the victims had piled themselves up in pyramids. Böck plagiarized this claim from Miklós Nyiszli, whose false tale had been serialized in a prominent German periodical in 1961. (See Rudolf 2024 and the entry on Miklós Nyiszli.)