Kula, Michał

Michał Kula was a Polish inmate incarcerated in Auschwitz, where he was deployed at the inmate metalworking shop, the communication hub of the Auschwitz resistance. Kula made three statements about his alleged experiences in Auschwitz, one in preparation of the Polish show trial against Rudolf Höss, one while taking the stand during that trial, and then again during the Polish show trial against former members of the Auschwitz camp staff. Here are several of Kula’s claims from those three depositions:

• There were two homicidal gas chambers in each Birkenau Crematorium II and III, a smaller and a larger one. Every other witness and, based on this, every orthodox scholar insists, however, that only one of the basement rooms of these buildings was used as such.
• 2,500 people were pushed into the larger chamber (later he reduced that to 2,000), and 1,500 into the smaller – resulting in a packing density of either (2,500/2,000/1,500 ÷ 210m² =) 12, 9.5 or 7 people per square meter, where only the last figure is realistic.
• People entered the gas chamber by being unloaded from a truck via a tipping mechanism, throwing them onto a concrete ski jump, on which the victims slid down straight into the gas chamber. A corpse chute in between two flights of stairs existed in these crematoria, connecting the ground floor to the basement, but trucks could not get access to the door leading into this staircase containing that chute, and if they had been able to drive up to it (across an extended lawn), tipping the truck’s load bed would have made the victims fall into the entry area at most, but not down the chute. Finally, the chute ended in a hallway, not the morgue that supposedly served as a gas chamber. (See the similar testimony by Sofia Litwinska.)
• There were fake showerheads in the “gas chamber,” when in fact documents show that these showerheads were real and operational.
• All members of the Son­der­kom­man­do were exterminated every three months at some gas chamber “in the vicinity of Gleiwitz.” The myth of a frequent killing of Son­der­kom­man­do members is refuted by the many (often merely self-proclaimed) survivors of this labor unit. No other inmate has ever claimed the existence, let alone use, of a gassing facility near Gleiwitz (today’s Gliwice), nor is there any documental or material trace for it.
• The gassing victims he once claimed to have seen looked greenish, when in fact the victims of hydrogen-cyanide poisoning look pinkish, not greenish.
• His metalworking team allegedly manufactured Zyklon-B introduction columns for the Crematoria II and III. However, in two separate depositions, he gave entirely different dimensions for them. The first description made them too large to fit into the claimed space, and the second version made them so small and narrow that they could not have functioned as he claimed. Finally, there is no material or documental trace of these columns. For example, had they been installed, they had to have been bolted to the concrete floors of these morgues, yet no traces of any such anchoring points can be found in the floors.
• The vast documentation of orders submitted to the metalworking shop has no trace of such columns ever being manufactured. As a reason for this, Kula claimed that orders prepared for the crematoria were not recorded due to their secrecy. Yet the extant documentation contains a plethora of orders for the crematoria which the metalworking shop received and properly fulfilled.
• Kula’s description of these Zyklon-B introduction columns contradicts that of other witnesses, some of whom claimed to have worked for a long time inside the “gas chamber,” seeing those columns for months on end, and even cleaning them out.

(For details, see the entry on Zyklon-B Introduction Devices, as well as Rudolf 2020, pp. 148-162, 229.)