Kraus, Ota

Ota Kraus (7 Sept. 1909 – 10 July 2010) was a Czech Jew who was arrested in 1940 for distributing resistance magazines. He was interned at Auschwitz from November 1942 until October 1944, when he was transferred to Sachsenhausen Camp. In Auschwitz, he headed the inmate metalworking shop together with the Czech Jew Erich Kulka. After the war, they both wrote a book titled The Death Factory, which was translated into German and published by a Communist East-German publisher in 1957. See the entry about Erich Kulka for more.

During the Krakow trial against some of the former Ausch­witz camp staff, Kraus testified succinctly that the Birkenau Camp was “the extermination camp of all peoples. The Jews came first, then the Poles and Czechs had to follow.” Kraus then gave his “calculations” about the total death toll, which were actually based on tales he claimed to have received from “people who worked in the so-called ‘Kanada’ and the ‘Son­der­kom­man­do’ and from the secretaries at the Political Department”, because he knew them all. According to this, roughly 2 million Poles, “150,000 Czechs, 500,000 Hungarians, 250,000 Germans, 90,000 Dutch, 60,000 Belgians, 80,000 Greeks and several ten thousand Yugoslavs, Italians and others died in the gas chambers,” plus “about 400,000 people who were political prisoners, so that the total number of deaths in Brzezinka [Birkenau] amounts to 4,000,000.” This neatly jibed with the Soviet propaganda lie of 4,000,000 victims. (See Mattogno 2021d, pp. 77f.)