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Auschwitz Notebook

Doors and Portholes

DITLIEB FELDERER

As I illustrated with my slide presentation at the 1980 Revisionist Convention at Pomona College, Claremont, California, one of the most blatant examples of Holocaust forgery is in the access to the “gas chambers.”

Auschwitz I

At Auschwitz I there are no less than five doors or doorways giving access to the “gas chamber.” There are double doors (Le with a small lobby) at each end of the room, and one doorway off to the inside, which leads into the crematory area. However, this latter doorway has no door and shows no sign of ever having borne one. This alone would seem to rule out the possibility of the room being used to gas people. Either the people would have escaped through the (doorless) doorway, or the gas would have flowed out the same way and either gassed the crematory workers and/or exploded with the heat.

At the end facing the gallows (where Rudolf Höss met his end after “confessing” to all kinds of atrocities at Auschwitz) the outside door is rather strange. It is made of light masonite board and tin-plate, and the locking or barring mechanism is on the inside. This would seem to indicate that the gassees locked themselves in. The door is so flimsy that a child could knock a fist through it. The porthole in the door (whose glass was broken when we visited) gives a very fine view, not of the interior of the room, but of the lobby wall about one meter away from the door. In no way could this door be described as “hermetically-sealed.”

Likewise, the inner door of this lobby is incredibly flimsy. The doorhandle and lock look as if they came out of a Polish farmhouse. This door is made entirely of wood.

We guessed that these two doors had been added or altered after the war, and our discussions with the camp staff in 1979 confirmed this.

Standing inside the room, we can see another door at the far end. The doorposts are made of wood, and the door itself is made of wood and glass. The handle and lock are so weak that they keep falling apart. The door opens inwards, into the “gas chamber.” When we asked Mr. T. Szymanski, the (now retired) curator, how it was that the gassees did not just smash the window in this door and escape, he advised us that he had never investigated this door so he could not give us a definite answer!

The outside door at this far end is a definite fake. It is made of masonite, unlike the other three doors, it opens outwards, and has a round porthole. We know that this door has been altered three times by referring to various Auschwitz guide books over the years. The first door appeared in Oswiecim (10, p197) and seems to be the original 1946 door. There are nine horizontal wooden slats in this original door, and no porthole. The second door appears in We Have Not Forgotten (6, p88), which was published in 196 1. This door had an iron bar added to the upper part of the door, plus a square porthole.

Birkenau (Auschwitz II)

Confusion reigns here again. A model of Birkenau which is on display at Auschwitz a couple of miles away transposes many of the rooms. Un/dressing rooms become the gas chamber, and vice versa. Likewise, the book Oswiecim (10, p200) blatantly makes the transposition. Unfortunately, it is not possible to totally check these allegations forensically, since the Germans are supposed to have blown up the business part of all the Birkenau gas chambers shortly before the camp was evacuated in 1945. The four installations are numbered 2 through 5 (with 1 being the number given to the gas chamber/ crematorium at nearby Auschwitz proper). The entire building of Crematory 4 has disappeared except for the foundations. Crematory 5, its “mirror image” next to it, has also been damaged somewhat. Crematories 2 and 3 are partly destroyed, but there still remain a couple of buildings which I was able to explore inside. My report was published in the previous issue of THE JOURNAL OF HISTORICAL REVIEW.

An exhibit on display in front of Crematory 2 shows a plan of the alleged building, with a text in Polish, English, French and Russian (but not German). The English text reads:

CREMATORIUM II, ACTIWE [sic] SINCE
SPRING 1943, WITH GAS CHAMBER AND OVENS
TO BURN CORPSES IN. IN ORDER TO
CAMOUFLAGE THE CRIMES PERPETRATED
THERE THE TERRAIN OF THE CREMATORIUM
WAS SCREENED WITH POPLARS.

COMMENT:
1. UNDRESSING ROOM
2. GAS CHAMBER WHERE CIRCA 2000 PEOPLE WERE KILLED SIMULTANEOUSLY.
3. ELECTRIC LIFT FOR TRANSPORTING BODIES FROM GAS CHAMBER TO THE HALL WITH OVENS.
4. ROOM WHERE HAIR WAS CUT AND GOLD CAPPED TEETH EXTRACTED.
5. HALL WITH CREMATING OVENS.
6. OVEN IN WHICH PERSONAL DOCUMENTS OF THE KILLED WERE BURNED.

The plan on this display often transposes the rooms in contradiction to the model over at Auschwitz I. There is no trace whatsoever of any furnaces, chimneys, sliding doors, screwlids, perforated sheetmetal columns, electric lifts, or any other Holocaust props. The original German construction plans are kept under lock and key, so there is no way of knowing for sure if these were ordinary crematoria, or whether they were air-raid shelters or potato storage bunkers. My guess is that they were indeed ordinary crematoria, and that they were dismantled and then partly demolished by the Soviet liberators.

The only one of these four structures which has walls still standing is Crematory 2. The Exterminationists allege that the victims would descend a few steps into the un/dressing room and then they would be gassed next door and burned. However, the “gas chamber” section does not have a door! The gassees would appear to have been spirited through brick and concrete walls. Such are the magickal possibilities in the Holocaust pantomime.

Majdanek

At the Majdanek “gas chamber” we find two sturdy metal doors, each resting on three hinges, fastened onto the metal frame. Both doors have a porthole. There is a bluish color around the door frame, which we shall discuss further below. By comparing pictures of this structure in 76, p48 and 88, p30 it is quite evident that the building has been altered. In both these pictures the roof above the doors is missing.

When we visited Majdanek (Lublin) we discovered that the bluish color around the doorposts had been artificially applied. We discovered this by examining the total area of blue coloration. We found that not only were the walls of the “gas chamber” colored blue, but so too were the legs of a modem signpost adjacent to the doorway. We took a scraping of this coloring for forensic examination in Sweden.

Stutthof

It is important to bear in mind that we cannot in the least depend on the present appearance of Stutthof’s “gas chamber.” It may be that the entire building has been erected post-war, but in any case we do have definite evidence of alteration at least. There are two main sources for this:

First we have the 1960 photo in the book We Have Not Forgotten (2, pp108-109). This is quite different from the 1969 picture of the same “gas chamber” in Stutthof Guide Informateur (72, p68). The brickwork is entirely different from one book to the other; and what is more, both are different again from the present day structure. Over the years, the doors have been made more and more heavy, in an effort to create some “gas chamber” window-dressing. There are no portholes.

Paradoxically, the Polish government’s book [12] tells us on page 70 that “Stutthof had no gas chambers.”

Dachau

Despite recurrent claims in the popular newspapers, not even the Exterminationists maintain that anyone was gassed at Dachau. The guru of Exterminationist adherents, Simon Wiesenthal, wrote to Books & Bookmen (April 1975) to state that there were no extermination camps on German soil. Martin Broszat, enigmatic head of the IHR’s look-alike in Munich, the Institute for Contemporary History, wrote to Die Zeit on 26 August 1960 to say the same thing.

The installations on display at Dachau today are quite obviously fumigation closets for clothing. A photo appears in both Butz’s definitive opus (109) and in Richard Harwood’s marvelously readable Nuremberg Trials (130). The inscription on the door about “Gassing Times…” and “Deadly Danger!” would seem to so obviously disprove the extermination function that one wonders at any of the American liberators ever being taken in — even taking into account the Americans' renowned lack of linguistic ability.

Needless to say, fumigation closets do not need peepholes or “screw-tight mushroom lids” on the roof, and the “liberated” West Germans have not shown the same “poetic license” that their Polish counterparts have, in adding little bits here and there to “help educate backward people” about the “gas chambers.”

Bibliography

2. Mazur, et al., 1939-1945 We Have Not Forgotten, Warsaw, 1960.
6. Mazur, et al., 1939-1945 We Have Not Forgotten, Warsaw, 1961, (abridged edition: 160pp).
10. Michalek, Oswiecim, Warsaw, 1977.
12. Datner, et al., Genocide 1939-1945, Warsaw, 1962.
72. Deregowski, Stutthof Guide Informateur, Stutthof, 1969.
76. Gryn, et al., Camp de Concentration de Majdanek, Lublin, 1966.
88. Marsalek, et al., Majdanek, Lublin, 1971.
109. Arthur Butz, The Hoax of the Twentieth Century, IHR, 1980.
130. Richard Harwood, Nuremberg & Other War Crimes Trials, IHR, 1978.