Nyiszli, Miklos

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 was then transferred to Birkenau to make use of his medical knowledge. This much is documented.

After the war, Nyiszli wrote a number of texts that claim to report in detail what he experienced while incarcerated at Auschwitz. This includes a declaration of July 1945; a book published in 1946; an affidavit written in Nuremberg in 1947 where he went in an – ultimately failed – attempt to be accepted as a witness during any of the Military Tribunals; and a fictitious, serialized text of 1948 claiming to be Nyiszli’s testimony when he took the stand at Nuremberg.

The contents of the last text mentioned will not be discussed here, as it is entirely fictitious. However, it is important to note that Nyiszli insisted that this is indeed a true and accurate protocol of his testimony in Nuremberg. This shows that Nyiszli had the criminal energy to make up an entire story about his appearance as a witness in Nuremberg, and then invent his testimony, including questions asked by prosecutors and his answers to them. But none of it ever happened. In other words: Nyiszli’s credibility as a witness is zero. Having said this, let’s look into the claims he made in his declaration and affidavit, and most importantly in his book, which also claims to describe exactly what he experienced.

Nyiszli’s criminal energy shows up again in his book, where he minutely describes a scene he claims to have witnessed after an alleged homicidal gassing in the basement Morgue #1 of Crematorium II at Birkenau, and the way he explains it. To begin with, Nyiszli wrongly assumed in his 1945 statement and in his book that Zyklon B is a product that, upon contact with air, released toxic chlorine gas. Since chlorine gas is roughly 2.5-times heavier than air and has a distinct yellowish color, upon release it tends to fill up a closed space visibly like water, from the bottom up.

With that assumption in mind, Nyiszli describes in his book in lavish detail how the victims in the gas chamber, evidently seeing the yellowish vapors crawling up on their feet and legs, tried to get away from the floor and to reach higher up toward the ceiling to avoid breathing in this gas as long as possible. In the process, they trampled onto each other and ended up climbing on top of each other, so that at the end of the gassing, the corpses were stacked in huge piles reaching toward the ceiling rather than lying scattered around the entire room.

The problem is that Zyklon B’s active ingredient is not chlorine but hydrogen cyanide, which is released by evaporation, no matter whether air is present or not. It is moreover slightly lighter than air and also invisible, so it would attack people seemingly from out of the blue. This proves irrefutably that Nyiszli did not know what Zyklon B was. Had he been the witness of many gassings with this product, he would have known. He moreover has never seen a gassing with Zyklon B, because the scene he describes would be utterly inconceivable with it.

In his book, Filip Müller (or rather his ghostwriter Helmut Freitag) copied almost every aspect of Nyiszli’s gassing scene, except Müller did not claim that Zyklon B was chlorine. With this act of plagiarism, Müller provided incontrovertible proof that he, too, had never seen a gassing with Zyklon B.

Another extraordinary fact is that Nyiszli and Charles S. Bendel, another Auschwitz inmate physician, both claimed independently from each other to have been the only Sonderkommando physician at the same location and during the same time span, and that they lived in the Birkenau crematoria for an identical period of their stay in that camp. Similarly, both claimed to be the only surviving Sonderkommando physician! But they were mutually unaware of each other’s existence, described incorrect places and made mutually contradictory factual assertions. However, while Nyiszli’s description is at least close to reality – which means that he did see the building or at least a blueprint of it – Bendel described a fantasy place that has no resemblance to reality.

Yet still, Nyiszli’s description of Crematorium II is filled with exaggerations, inaccuracies and invented rooms that never existed. For instance, he claimed that tens of thousands of inmates were employed to build the Birkenau crematoria, whereas documents demonstrate that on average some 70 inmates worked at each of the four crematoria’s constructions site at any given time. Morgue #1 of Crematorium II, the alleged homicidal gas chamber, as well as its furnace room, were both 30 m long, but Nyiszli claimed that they were 150 m long. The other morgue, almost 50 m long, he described as 200 m long. While there was one small freight elevator in that building, he turned this into four large elevators. Nyiszli also invented the following non-existing places:

• a changing room for the Sonderkommando members next to the gas chamber
• an entire carpentry shop
• a gigantic storeroom for clothing & toiletries
• an SS office
• lodgings for SS guards
• a kitchen

He moreover incorrectly described the cremation furnaces and the way they supposedly operated, adding a corpse-introduction device to his narrative that had existed only in the Auschwitz Main Camp’s crematorium, but by the time Nyiszli arrived at Auschwitz, this facility had been decommissioned for almost a year.

Nyiszli’s most extreme deviations from the orthodox narrative concern the alleged bunkers outside the Birkenau Camp. While mainstream historians insist that these were makeshift homicidal gassing facilities, Nyiszli insisted that people were not gassed there, but used it only as an undressing facility. They were then all shot standing at a cremation pit’s edge. Nyiszli never used the term “bunker.”

Nyiszli filled his narrative with the usual lies, exaggerations and camp rumors:

• Flames were shooting out of the crematoria chimneys (six times in his book!), although that was technically impossible.
• Three bodies were cremated at once in each muffle within 20 minutes – although these muffles were designed only for the cremation of one corpse at a time within one hour.
• He wrongly assigned to all crematoria the same capacity of 5,000 corpses per day, hence 20,000 per day together, when in fact their total theoretical maximum daily capacity was just under 1,000 bodies.
• 2,000 or even 3,000 people were gassed in the 210 m² “gas chamber” – an impossible packing density of 9.5 to 14.5 people per square meter.
• Zyklon B was thrown into “tinplate pipes” rather than the wire-mesh Zyklon-B introduction devices of the current orthodox version.
• The gas murder lasted only 2 to 5 minutes, which is impossibly fast for the slow-evaporating hydrogen cyanide, Zyklon B’s active ingredient, especially in a large room jammed with people and with no means of forced convection.
• Gigantic pyres burned day and night outside the Birkenau Camp, covering the area with thick smoke – while air photos of the area clearly show that no such thing ever happened.
• SS men stood lined up at the edge of the blazing pits, ready to shoot some 5,000 to 6,000 Jews daily, as they streamed naked out of the undressing hut – except that the SS men would have quickly gotten badly burned, and their ammunition would have been at risk of exploding.
• Auschwitz allegedly had a murder rate of at least 25,000 people per day, which comes to at least some 750,000 per month, hence a preposterous three million during the four months of extermination activity he claims to have experienced.
• Nyiszli’s entire story is centered around Auschwitz physician Josef Mengele. He mentioned him 124 times in his novel, whose original title translates to “I Was Dr. Mengele’s Forensic Pathologist in the Auschwitz Crematorium.” Therefore, with his mendacious story, Nyiszli created Josef Mengele’s diabolic postwar reputation, which was then copied by many later witnesses. (See the entry on Josef Mengele.)

Another key feature of Nyiszli’s testimonies is his claim that the members of the so-called Sonderkommando – the inmates allegedly in charge of pulling the corpses out of the gas chambers and burning them in furnaces or on pyres – were killed by the Germans every four months, and replaced with new inmates, in order to leave no witnesses of the crime behind. This claim has been repeated by many other self-proclaimed members of the Sonderkommando. However, if that were true, the world wouldn’t be awash in Holocaust survivors claiming to have been a member of such a Sonderkommando, and to have worked in it much longer than just four months, with no SS man ever attempting to murder them as “carriers of a terrible secret.” Hence, even mainstream historians acknowledge today that Nyiszli made this up.

Nyiszli’s narrative contains many more false claims. To cover them all would require writing a thick book, which is exactly where all the details about this masterful liar can be found: see Mattogno 2020a.