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Holocaust: Belief and Facts
by Walter Lüftl
Editor’s Foreword to The Lüftl Report: An Austrian Engineer’s Report on the ‘Gas Chambers’ of Auschwitz and Mauthausen
In March 1992, a prominent Austrian engineer made headlines when a report he had written about alleged German wartime gas chambers was made public. Walter Lüftl concluded in his controversial report, “Holocaust: Belief and Facts,” that the well-known stories of mass extermination of Jews in gas chambers at the wartime camps of Auschwitz and Mauthausen are impossible for technical reasons and because they are incompatible with observable laws of nature. Lüftl further characterized the often-repeated stories of Jews being gassed with diesel engine exhaust (at Treblinka, for example) as a sheer impossibility. (See the IHR Newsletter, April 1992, p. 6.)
Lüftl, 59, is a court-recognized expert engineer and heads a large engineering firm in Vienna. On the basis of a well-established reputation as a particularly precise and exact specialist, he was chosen to serve as president of the Austrian Engineers Chamber (Bundes-Ingenieurkammer), a professional association of 4,000 members.
In spite of his reputation, he was obliged to resign as president of the engineers’ association in the uproar that followed news reports about his iconoclastic report. A leading official of the governing People’s Party expressed fear that Lüftl’s report could harm Austria’s image abroad.
A few days later, Austrian police raided Lüftl’s residence, turning it inside out in a “Stasi”-like search for possibly “incriminating material” that might show that he had violated a recently enacted law that makes it a crime in Austria to deny the “National Socialist crimes against humanity.”
To insure that Lüftl is not brought into any further legal jeopardy, it should be stressed that his report is published here (for the first time in English) without the author’s authorization or cooperation. The text has been slightly edited, and the editor has added some clarifying words in brackets.
Lüftl’s report is further authoritative confirmation of the findings of American gas chamber expert Fred Leuchter, who testified about his on-site investigation of the supposed “gas chambers” of Auschwitz, Birkenau and Majdanek in the 1988 trial of German-Canadian publicist Ernst Zuendel.
Lüftl’s report also corroborates Leuchter’s findings from his 1989 investigation of the supposed extermination “gas chamber” at the Mauthausen camp. (This “Second Leuchter Report” was published in the Fall 1990 IHR Journal.) — The Editor
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Introductory statement by the author:
The following remarks are intended neither to threaten the democratic order that has prevailed in the Republic of Austria since 1945, nor to advocate or promote the reintroduction of National Socialism. These remarks are intended solely to correct one-sided presentations of historical events, and to do so taking into consideration the laws of nature and technical limits, which are of course beyond dispute both politically and historically.
These remarks are not intended to “quibble over the number of victims” or to “defame the victims.” Rather, they are intended to serve as a scientific clarification of the number of possible victims on basis of technical and organizational considerations. These remarks are also intended to encourage further investigation into the actual events and the search for truth.
Because “Holocaust literature” tends to be so one-sided, it is unfortunately not possible to provide a “balanced presentation” here. A critical examination of the limited area of the overall topic under discussion has shown that the accounts of “eyewitnesses” in particular have been immensely exaggerated and unbelievable; so much so that a balancing of the discussion appeared indispensable. The impossible does not become any “truer” when it is claimed by many people. In cases of contradiction between witness testimony and objective proof, the latter takes precedence in every modern constitutional state. In the case of the “Holocaust,” though, this has obviously been
otherwise.
Foreword
The author would like to anticipate the proposed introduction of Section 283a of the Criminal Code [of Austria], according to which “the offense . . . [has been] committed whenever a person denies the fact that millions of human beings, especially Jews, were systematically exterminated in a genocidal way in the concentration camps of the National Socialist regime.” Such a legal provision could have the effect of rendering the following remarks punishable, in spite of the fact that they are based on scientific considerations treated in a manner subject to experimental duplication.
What is the Holocaust?
In the view of those who believe — or cause others to believe — in the [Holocaust], mass gassings, especially of Jews, were carried out in the concentration camps of the Third Reich. Above all in Auschwitz (hence the term “Auschwitz Myth”), four million Jews were gassed. [The Nuremberg Tribunal "established" that four million people (Jews and non-Jews) had been killed (by all means) at Auschwitz.] Currently, though, unimpeachable sources are seeking to reduce this [sic] figure to 1.5 million. On mathematical grounds alone, the “symbolic figure of Six Million” should be reduced by 3.5 million. Of course, such a reduction does not lessen the [gravity of the] crime in any way, because even one victim is one too many.
All the same, the question remains whether mass gassings took place at all, or could possibly have taken place.
Insofar as possible, the author has carefully examined many reports of “eyewitnesses,” as well as “confessions” of SS men. If one examines the “eyewitness” testimony, doubts still persist, even if one believes everything that appears in the Holocaust literature. These doubts become even greater when one studies the “confessions” of those who were later found guilty [of crimes].
The author does not “deny” anything. (In proper legal terminology, this should really mean “to dispute.”) He does not wish to minimize or glorify anything. To use a currently fashionable phrase, he wishes only to “inquire into” [the truth of] the “Auschwitz myth.”
The author wishes to focus on the critical core of the “Auschwitz myth”: the technical possibilities of industrial mass killing with Zyklon B.
Zyklon B is the cornerstone of the Auschwitz myth
If Zyklon B is unsuitable for use in “deliberate genocidal extermination,” then the entire Auschwitz extermination story ["Auschwitz-Mythos"] falls apart. A chain is only as strong as its weakest link.
The war of belief
Because the Auschwitz extermination story ["AuschwitzMythos"] has so far not been subjected to scientific analysis, the discussion has been dominated by belief. Even intelligent, well-educated people believe in the “atrocities confirmed by many eyewitnesses.” In doing so, they forget that in any modern constitutional state, forensic evidence and documentary proof carry more weight than witness testimony.
Witnesses may err; their memories may deceive; witnesses may exaggerate their own importance and repeat hearsay. Witnesses have also been known to lie. Even the “confessions” of allegedly guilty individuals (which may be extorted through torture or obtained through promises of lesser punishment) are worthless without the support of objective proof. Anyone who doubts this should check Solzhenitsyn. . . [In The Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn cites the case of the Bavarian Jupp Aschenbrenner, who "confessed" to serving in a German wartime murder commando. Only later, in a camp in 1954, was he able to prove that at the time of the alleged crimes, he was in Munich learning to be a welder.]
All the arguments against the Holocaust [story] will be meaningless if people are not willing to accept the truth. In the words of Schopenhauer:
Nothing is more galling
Than to fight with facts and arguments
Against an adversary
In the belief
That one is dealing with his understanding,
When in reality
One is dealing with the will,
Which obdurately closes its mind to the truth.
One must understand that reason
Applied against the will
Is like seed sown on bare rock
Like light arrows against armor,
Like the stormwind against a beam of light.
Nothing can be done for those who do not want to face the truth. But perhaps, after reading the following, some will be ready to want to comprehend.
The gas chambers
According to the Holocaust literature, the victims were “packed” into the gas chambers and then poisoned with hydrogen cyanide (Prussian Blue) vapors from Zyklon B. The bodies were burned in crematory ovens, and the ashes were strewn on hillsides or in water.
Organizational problems
Because certain organizational problems arise even in mass extermination — for example, varying killing capacities of the gas chambers or varying crematory capacities in disposing of the bodies — it should be obvious even at this point that events cannot have transpired as described in the Holocaust literature. We shall nevertheless limit our discussion to the essentials.
The handling of Zyklon B
What is Zyklon B? Zyklon B is a pest control agent, the active ingredient of which is Prussian Blue (hydrocyanic acid, HCN).
Hydrocyanic acid is a highly toxic, highly flammable liquid that vaporizes at 25.7 degrees Celsius. The vapors released upon evaporation are lighter than air (density: 0.95). The ignition point of hydrocyanic acid is 535 degrees Celsius, but the acid can be ignited at temperatures as low as -17.8 degrees Celsius. The explosion point in air at 20 degrees Celsius ranges from 5.4 to 46.6 percent by volume percent, or between 60 and 520 grams per cubic meter (m3).
Among other uses, gaseous hydrogen cyanide is used as a fumigant gas.
What is the effect of hydrogen cyanide gas on human beings?
* 10 ml/m3 is harmless over an eight-hour exposure;
* 90 ml/m3 is dangerous or fatal upon protracted exposure;
* 80-270 ml/m3 is rapidly fatal. Alcohol, even if consumed in only small quantities prior to exposure, dangerously enhances the effects of cyanide gas.
For safe handling, hydrocyanic acid is absorbed in diatomite (following the admixture of an irritant for safety purposes), and is stored and transported in air-tight metal cans. The product is generally used within three months. Because the Zyklon B manufacturing facilities were totally destroyed in bombing attacks in early 1944, gassings with Zyklon B could not have taken place after the summer of 1944.
The trade weight of the cans was 100, 200, 500, 1000, and 1500 grams HCN content. The total weight of a can corresponds to approximately three times the HCN content.
Hydrocyanic acid vapors are not released immediately after the cans are opened. The evaporation of Zyklon B requires as many as 32 hours or as few as six hours, depending on whether the ambient temperature ranges from five to 30 degrees Celsius. The evaporation rate is not exactly proportional to time.
The gassing procedure according to the Holocaust literature
The victims were led to gas chambers, which were disguised as shower baths, and were deceived by being handed soap and a towel. But what for? Who takes a shower holding a towel in his hands? But let’s not detain ourselves with such trivia.
It is said, for example, that a hundred victims were packed into a chamber of 20 square meters, that is, five persons per square meter. (Witnesses sometimes even speak of as many as 25 victims per square meter.) At five persons per square meter, the victims wouldn’t even be able even to soap themselves, due to lack of space. So what would they need the soap for? Soap was a commodity in short supply, but was permitted to fall on the floor unused, and become unusable. But let’s move along.
The doors of the 2.5 meter-high chamber were hermetically sealed. An SS man wearing a gas mask threw Zyklon B, a mixture of hydrocyanic acid and irritant (added as a warning substance, since some people cannot smell hydrocyanic acid, the odor of which peculiarly resembles that of bitter almonds) absorbed in a carrier substance, from a can containing 200 grams of HCN in each case, from above. (This is the usual procedure described in the Holocaust literature. According to some sources, it was done differently only at Mauthausen.) The mixture fell to the floor, and the hydrocyanic acid began to escape. The gassing procedure normally lasted 15 to 20 minutes. (According to some sources, it lasted from five to as long as 30 minutes.)
Assuming that the floor temperature was 25 degrees Celsius (which is quite warm, since the gas chambers were mostly cold, damp cellars), let us also conservatively assume a gassing time of one half hour. After one half hour, there would have been at most 16 grams of HCN in the air of the chamber. The volume of air would be 44 cubic meters. (That is, 50 cubic meters, minus the volume of the victims, estimated at six cubic meters, assuming an estimated average body weight of 60 kilograms per person, which would mean a volume of 6 cubic meters for the victims.) The hydrocyanic acid content in the air of the chamber would thus have been 363.6 mg/m3. (That is, 16,000 mg/44 m3 = 363.6 mg/m3.) That certainly would have been enough to kill them. (That is, 270 ml/m3 x 1.23 = approximately 330 mg/m3.)
The one hundred victims would now therefore be dead, if we assume that the hydrocyanic acid did not condense on the cold ambient surfaces inside the room — perhaps the room was pre-heated to a comfortable temperature.
At this point, the “chief of the gassing operation” looked through a peephole in the door to see whether any of the victims showed signs of life. But just how he could have done that at Mauthausen, looking through a peephole 1.20 meters above the ground in a door that is only 1.68 m high, is a matter that merits further study.
How could he see anything when the victims were “packed together,” and therefore could not fall down even in the remotest corners of the room? Nevertheless, after a brief look, the SS executioners turned on the ventilators to air out the gas chamber. And here we hit the first snag. The ventilators must, of course, have been exhausters. For them to work (that is, to exchange the air in the chamber), the gas chambers would have to have been equipped with air intake channels and chimneys equipped with blowers. Nothing of the sort has ever been found in any [alleged homicidal] gas chamber!
Are the Nazis supposed to have caused all of this equipment to disappear without a trace in the confusion of defeat? Apart from that, some concentration camps were liberated intact by the Allies.
The ventilation lasted 30 minutes, and, finally, the door was opened (!) to determine whether the room was gas-free. “The gassing chiefs, wearing gas masks” carefully held up a strip of [chemically sensitized] paper inside [the chamber]. When the room was free of gas, the doors were opened and the blue [skin-colored] corpses were taken by prisoner members of the crematory work team to the morgue, or straight to the crematory. (However, any textbook on toxicology will confirm that the skin color of victims of hydrocyanic acid poisoning is red.) Then the gas chambers — heavily soiled with blood, excrement, and vomit — were cleaned.
What is the evidence against such a procedure? Zyklon B!
Holocaust writers have overlooked the fact that, during the ventilation process, Zyklon B would still have retained 92 percent of its hydrocyanic acid content, and would thus continue merrily on its way, releasing hydrocyanic acid gas. At 25 degrees Celsius, it would continue to do so for fully 15 1/2 hours, and even longer yet at lower temperatures.
Of course, one could have sent work team members into the gas chamber wearing gas masks and protective clothing to remove the Zyklon B [carrier material], which would at that point still be only partially gas-free. But just how they could remove this [carrier material] from the midst of the tightly packed piles of corpses covered with excrement, vomit and blood, defies explanation.
The bodies could have been removed, and the gas chamber then cleaned, only by men wearing gas masks and protective clothing. But this would mean a huge pile of excrement, vomit, and similar material, thoroughly contaminated with 184 grams of hydrocyanic acid (which would still continue to evaporate, although slowly). But the remaining 184 grams of hydrocyanic acid would still be enough to kill approximately 3,000 persons (at 0.001 gram per kilogram, assuming an average body weight of 60 kg per person).
This is the flaw in the Holocaust literature!
How did they get rid of the remaining Zyklon B from the midst of the one hundred corpses, without lengthy ventilation periods, and without causing mass deaths outside the gas chamber?
The procedure described above might have worked at Mauthausen, if people were really gassed at intervals of weeks or months. If we are to believe Hans Marsalek, the Mauthausen “historian,” an interval of 17 months elapsed between the fourth and fifth gassings at Mauthausen (April 17, 1943, and September 25, 1944). But at Auschwitz, people are said to have been gassed [continuously] on an industrial basis.
In fact, Zyklon B is utterly unsuited for purposes of systematic mass murder. It can be used to fumigate, and it could be used to gas a group of persons occasionally. But for time considerations alone, quasi-industrial killing would simply be impossible.
Although the Prussic (hydrocyanic) acid contained in Zyklon B can, of course, kill quickly and certainly, the handling requirements for Zyklon B and the circumstances involved rule out any significant use for the mass killing of people. This eliminates Zyklon B as a direct instrument of the Holocaust. The “eyewitness accounts” in this regard are false. The witnesses could never have seen an actual gassing. The events described never took place.
There remains the possibility of Zyklon B being used as a carrier material for hydrocyanic acid in gas generators.
The description of the [gassing] procedure given during a trial before the German district court [Landesgericht] at Hagen suggests the existence of a gas generator of almost ingenious simplicity of design. (The evidence for gassing in the Mauthausen camp was provided by the document archives of the Austrian Resistance Center [DOeW].)
In this case, Zyklon B was not thrown in from above. (Even though this is what a commemorative plaque tells us, Marsalek reports differently.) Why this brilliant procedure was never used in other concentration camps remains a mystery. At Mauthausen, the gas generator consisted of a sheet metal box with a lid, in which a hot brick (that had been heated in the open fire of the crematorium) was laid. This means that the SS could have gassed people only when bodies were already being burned. Zyklon B was then strewn onto this hot brick. But because of the temperature, this would mean an explosively rapid vaporization of the gas, resulting in an explosion of the HCN itself.
This version of gas generation may clearly be relegated to the realm of fairy tales. But it was believed by the Hagen district court, just like the fairy tale of blue (actually, red) victims of hydrogen cyanide poisoning. [The red coloring is confirmed, for example, in: Allgemeine und spezielle Pharmakologie und Toxikologie (Dr. W. Forth, et al., eds.), Mannheim, 4th ed., p. 645.]
Nothing is known of any other gas generators.
Summary
An absolutely unbiased study of the problem must conclude that, by and large, the views of the so-called “Revisionists” — the so-called “deniers” — are far more in line with the laws of nature, logic, and technical realities than the accounts in the Holocaust literature (in which, moreover, scientifically verifiable data is generally lacking). When, as an exception, verifiable data is given in the Holocaust literature, a critical examination of such data leads to absurd results (25 persons per square meter, and so forth).
The decisive error in the Holocaust literature is the belief that the hydrocyanic acid contained in Zyklon B could be fully released in the alleged time span of 15-30 minutes required for the gassing, and that the carrier material would simultaneously and completely vaporize like a moth ball. The [fact of the] residue of Zyklon B makes the Auschwitz extermination story ["Auschwitz-Mythos"] obsolete.
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