Schellekes, Maurice

Maurice Schellekes wrote a brief report in Israel in 1981, almost 40 years after his claimed experiences at Auschwitz, hence inevitably contaminated with elements picked up during those decades. He even mentioned that events at Auschwitz have been described “in so many papers and books” that they need not be repeated. His motivation to write something anyhow was his feeling that he had to defend himself against arguments proffered by Holocaust skeptics. He referred specifically to Thies Christophersen’s brochure The Auschwitz Lie. However, Schellekes’s text is so superficial and full of platitudes that it is worthless as a historical source. He insisted that he saw everything that was going on, but he described things as if he knew nothing specific about them.

He wrote that, from mid-August 1942, he was assigned to the Sonderkommando and had the ghastly task of burying thousands of corpses in mass graves, allegedly victims of mass gassings. However, at that time, the typhus epidemic at Auschwitz and Birkenau reached its peak, with many hundreds of victims daily, most of whom were initially buried in mass graves due to a lack of cremation capacity. The situation was so out of control that creating additional corpses by mass murder would have been logistically impossible in the late summer and fall of 1942, so this can safely be ruled out. Hence, what Schellekes describes is, if true, probably related to the burial of typhus victims. Burying hundreds and thousands of dead bodies was surely a horrific task, no matter how the victims had died. This much must be granted him.

After a month of this work, his Sonderkommando assignment ended – probably because from late September 1942, corpses were no longer buried, because they threatened to poison the drinking water. They were burned on pyres instead. Schellekes, however, didn’t know that context. He then underwent his next selection. As a carrier of the holiest of all of the Third Reich’s secret, we would expect him to have been killed, but instead he was allowed for the rest of his time in Auschwitz to be a normal inmate with normal work assignments at the Main Camp and in Birkenau, where he was able and allowed to spread his knowledge among hundreds and thousands of his co-inmates, obviously because his German captors knew that there was nothing secret or problematic about his knowledge.

Demonstrating typical Jewish chutzpah, Schelleckes ended his text by admonishing Holocaust skeptics: “How dare they!” But of course, the same could be said, with vastly greater force, of the hundreds of false and lying Holocaust witnesses.

(For more details, see Mattogno 2022e, pp. 176-179.)