Müller, Filip

Filip Müller (3 Jan. 1922 – 9 Nov. 2013) was a Slovakian Jew deported to Auschwitz in April 1942. His first deposition was published in 1946 in a Czech book. He next testified first at the 1947 Krakow show trial against former staff members of the Auschwitz Camp, then in October 1964 during the Frankfurt Auschwitz show trial. In 1979, a book was published in English and German listing him as an author, but it was basically written by his German ghostwriter Helmut Freitag. Finally, Müller agreed to be interviewed by French-Jewish activist Claude Lanzmann between 1978 and 1981 for his 9-hour documentary Shoah. Sections of it are featured in that movie.

There is a conspicuous difference between the two earlier and all later statements. While his narrative in the two earlier statements is focused almost exclusively (1946) or entirely (Krakow) on his alleged experiences at the old crematorium of the Auschwitz Main Camp, his later statements have their focus predominantly on his alleged activities with the Sonderkommando of Birkenau.

It is striking that Müller’s focus of claimed activities shifted with the focus of the audience he was addressing. The Krakow Trial had its focus on defendants who had been in charge of activities in the Main Camp, whereas during the Frankfurt trial, Müller was called to testify against Hans Stark, who had been active at the Birkenau Camp. Since most of the atrocities claimed for Auschwitz are said to have happened at Birkenau, this main attraction was also the focus of Müller’s statements both in his interview with Lanzmann and in his book.

Already during his statement in Frankfurt, he hinted at the fact that he had a collection of literature on this topic from which he drew some of this knowledge. A thorough analysis of his book reveals that he (or rather Freitag) plagiarized entire passages and episodes from other sources, mainly from Miklós Nyiszli’s narration that had been serialized by a German magazine in 1961. He reused blueprint drawings of the Birkenau Crematoria II and III from the Czech book where his initial statement had appeared, and used elements of the testimonies by Stanisław Jankowski and Rudolf Höss as well as claims published by Polish historian Danuta Czech in her German-language articles on the chronology of Auschwitz.

The most blatant plagiarism is his detailed description of a gassing scene in Crematorium II that was copied in almost all its details from Nyiszli’s narration, although he reworded them to make it difficult to track. One might think that maybe both witnesses simply viewed the same or very similar scenes. That explanation fails, however, because when Nyiszli wrote his story, he assumed and claimed wrongly that the poison gas used at Auschwitz was some type of chlorine, a gas much heavier than air which would have spread along the floor. Nyiszli describes, how the victims tried to get away from the floor, attempting to reach higher toward the ceiling to avoid breathing in this gas as long as possible. In the process, they trampled on and climbed on top of each other, ending up lying dead in huge piles reaching toward the ceiling. All this proves is that Nyiszli has never seen a gassing with Zyklon B, because its active ingredient hydrogen cyanide is slightly lighter than air and is also invisible (chlorine is yellowish), so no victim would have seen it, and there would have been no point for anyone to climb anywhere. Müller made the mistake of using different words to describe the same scene, thus demonstrating that he, too, had never seen the results of a gassing with Zyklon B (and neither did Freitag, evidently).

Müller’s various narrations contain many self-contradictions and contradictions to the claims made by other witnesses, which we will ignore here for brevity’s sake. They are moreover full of many improbable and impossible claims as well as slip-ups indicating that his source of information was not his original memory, such as:

• In his book, he describes the furnaces at the Auschwitz Main Camp’s crematorium in the faulty, incomplete state, as they had been rebuilt by the Auschwitz Museum after the war.
• Three corpses were place in a muffle and cremated within 20 minutes – although the muffles were designed only for one corpse, and its cremation took an hour.
• He invented a physically impossible story of a “fire” caused by leaving air blowers on too long, claiming that they had fanned the flames too much, when in fact the fans of these furnaces fed cold air into the muffle, hence leaving them on too long would have cooled the furnace down, not led to a “fire.”
• He claimed that flames shot out of the smoke duct when it partly collapsed, yet the smoke duct works with a negative pressure due to the chimney’s draft, hence cracks in its masonry would have led to cold air getting sucked in rather than hot air (or even flames) being able to escape.
• He then claimed that the fire was extinguished by throwing water on it, which most certainly would not have been done, because pouring water on red-hot refractory bricks would have severely damaged most of them.
• He claimed that the chimney was rebuilt at one point (correct), but that cremations continued at the same time, which is incorrect and would have been physically impossible.
• He insisted that he worked in that facility from early May until June of 1942, and in this context described the results of an alleged homicidal gassing of Slovakian Jews in the old crematorium’s morgue in early May. However, the orthodox narrative has it that, with the first of the two Birkenau bunkers having become operational in March 1942, gassings at this crematorium were discontinued in April of 1942 at the latest, hence Müller cannot have experienced any gassing there. Moreover, the first transport of Slovakian Jews that allegedly resulted in some of them getting gassed (in the bunkers) arrived on July 4, hence after Müller had left the old crematorium. Yet still, he repeatedly claimed that gassings in the old crematorium and in his presence were very common, causing some 10,000 victims overall.
• The inmates of that invented gassing kept standing upright after they had died. While this is a common cliché, it is also physically impossible.
• Müller seriously claimed that these imaginary gassing victims not only had not undressed before getting gassed, but that they had even taken their luggage into the chamber!
• The chamber was equipped with six openings in the ceiling to introduce Zyklon B, while today’s orthodox narrative claims four, due to the Poles having built four such openings after the war, which are in place to this day.
• Müller could smell the poison gas in the gas chamber when entering it to clean it out – in other words, he did not wear a gas mask, in a room evidently full of toxic gas! (Hydrogen cyanide has only a faint smell, hence to notice it, it has to be present in considerable and dangerous amounts!)
• He claimed during the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial that he managed to get out of the Main Camp’s Sonderkommando by paying some other inmate “a lot of dollars” – not Reichsmarks, but US dollars! US dollars were a coveted currency in Eastern-Bloc countries during the Cold War – which is where Müller lived when he testified in Frankfurt – but they were virtually non-existent and mostly useless in Europe during the war.
• He claimed that sick inmates unable to work were killed, but when he got sick, he was taken to the Birkenau inmate hospital and treated to full recovery.
• After his transfer to Birkenau, whenever there was a dramatic event happening at any of the crematoria there, he happened to have been transferred precisely to that building. It is clear that he used that as a literary device to explain his omnipresence and omniscience.
• During an inmate uprising in October 1944, he claimed to have hidden inside the smoke duct of Crematorium IV, while the building was set on fire by inmates. He claimed to have entered the duct through a cast-iron cover. However, the ducts of this crematorium had no access ports (with or without covers) for anyone or anything to crawl into them.
• Müller claimed that the cremation furnaces were fed with seven times more coke than they were able to contain and burn.
• Out of the crematoria’s chimneys, “raging flames rushed into the open air” – which was technically impossible.
• For Müller, “once they had caught fire, the dead would continue to burn without any further coke being required.” The legend of self-immolating bodies is simply physically impossible.
• The ventilation of the gas chambers in Crematorium V took only “a few minutes.” This facility wasn’t even equipped with any ventilation system. Ventilation by draft through opened doors and wall openings would have taken many hours, if not days. But even if there had been a ventilation system, it still would have taken several hours, all the more so because the Zyklon-B pellets, allegedly dumped on the inmates’ heads, would have given off its deadly fumes for up to an hour or two, so even the strongest fans could not have expelled all the gas, until that time had passed.
• Inmates entered this unventilated room right away, without gas masks!
• Since mid-May 1944, huge pyres in five large pits behind Crematorium V and four more near the “bunker” were blazing every day, to burn thousands of murdered Hungarian Jews, yet air photos clearly show that no such thing ever happened. (Müller called the bunker “Bunker 5,” a term used only by Rudolf Höss in his published memoirs and by Dov Paisikovic in his various unpublished statements.)
• Two naked women and an SS man stood at the edge of a blazing pit, until the SS man shot the women. The scene is plagiarized from a drawing by David Olère, yet physically impossible, as the heat of the blazing pit would not have allowed anyone to step close to it without getting burned.
• While a cremation pit was already ablaze, additional corpses from the gas chamber were continually thrown in – which would have led to the throwers getting burned up themselves.
• Fat dripping from burning corpses flowed through channels in the pits’ bottom toward collecting pans, from which the “sizzling fat was scooped out with buckets on a long, curved rod and poured all over the pit, causing flames to leap up amid much crackling and hissing.” If the fat poured back caused a massive blaze, why didn’t it cause the same blaze and burn off when exiting the corpses? And how could the person, standing right next to the fire while scooping and pouring out the fat onto the fire, avoid getting burned himself?
• One SS man loved flinging babies into the boiling human fat at the bottom of the pits – except that no such pool of fat could have existed.
• The ineluctable Dr. Mengele was often present when inmates were shot whose thigh muscles were to be used “for various [medical] purposes.”
• Thigh and calve muscles from freshly executed inmates were cut out and placed in buckets. The muscles’ convulsion made the buckets jump about. However, not only do cut-out muscles from dead people not convulse. But even if they did, they could not make the buckets jump.
• Being suicidal, Müller tried to gas himself by joining a batch of Jews to be gassed. However, two naked, sexy young girls convinced him that he needs to live to tell the tale, so they pushed him out of the chamber while they died.

Filip Müller’s book has been one of the most influential to cement the public perception of the Auschwitz Camp. In this book, Müller uses the word “perverse lust” to describe the motive of the SS man allegedly tossing babies into boiling human fat. However, these words only describe the author himself (and his ghostwriter) in concocting this preposterous web of lies.

(For details, see Mattogno 2021d, pp. 13-131.)