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Four witnesses claimed that, at the Janowska Camp near Lviv, a machine was used to grind down bones that were left over from open-air incinerations of corpses, which are said to have been extracted from mass graves of German murder victims. These witnesses are: Heinrich Chamaides, Moische Korn, David Manusevich and Leon Weliczker. Their claim…
Fire funerals were quite common in ancient times but were banned by the monotheistic religions. Only with increasing population densities, a lack of cemetery space, hygienic concerns, and decreasing influence of religions did cremations make a comeback in the late 1800s. They have been on the rise ever since; see the data prior to World…
Diesel-engine exhaust gases are claimed by numerous witnesses – including during the trial against John Demjanjuk in 1987 – to have been used to mass-murder Jews in the camps at Belzec, Sobibór and Treblinka, and in some of the so-called gas vans. However, diesel-engine exhaust gas is notoriously low in its most toxic component, carbon…
When the link between infectious diseases, bacteria and bacteria-carrying pests (like insects or rodents) was discovered during the second half of the 19th Century, it quickly became apparent that this was a pivotal event in the history of human healthcare. Some of these pests were the vectors of major epidemic diseases, such as the body…
The term ‘furnace’ is commonly used for any industrial heating device used for the high-temperature processing or burning of material objects. The term ‘oven,’ in contrast, is commonly used for food-processing and -heating devices not intended to burn the food but rather to cook or heat it. Hence, a corpse cremation device is a furnace,…
A gas chamber is an enclosed space or room to expose items to a chemically active gas in order to achieve certain effects. There are three main types of gas chambers: Training/testing gas chambers: used by military and civilian-defense agencies to test gas-protection equipment and to train personnel in their use. Disinfestation or fumigation gas…
A series of wartime documents from the Auschwitz Camp authorities mention terms such as ‘gastight door’ or ‘gastight window.’ Polish investigators right after the war, and subsequently many orthodox scholars, have claimed that this so-called “criminal trace” points at the existence of homicidal gas chambers at Auschwitz. However, a thorough analysis of these documents shows…
U.S. Execution Gas Chambers Between 1924 and 1999, the U.S. states of Arizona, California, Colorado, Maryland, Mississippi, Missouri, Nevada, New Mexico and North Carolina have employed hydrogen-cyanide gas in homicidal gas chambers in order to kill persons sentenced to death (capital punishment). For safety reasons of everyone involved – prison warden, technicians and witnesses –…
Several German wartime camps claimed to have been the site of mass murder, such as Auschwitz, Majdanek and Stutthof, had coke-fueled cremation furnaces which steadily burned the remains of inmates who had died for whatever reason. However, several other camps which supposedly were pure extermination camps, such as Belzec, Sobibór and Treblinka, had no cremation…
The 1936 Berlin Olympic Games were the first event in history which were transmitted live on TV. The powerful radio transmitters built for this had a frequency spectrum that was rather broad, so a minor amount of its energy was emitted in the frequency range now known as microwaves. When this transmitter was operated, it…
The early era of industrialization was an era of coal and coke. Steam machines were driven by coke and coal fires, homes were heated with them, food was cooked with them, and an entire industry evolved around producing coke from coal and using the by-product – “coal gas” or “city gas” – to provide heating,…
Saunas (steam baths) are a Finish invention to boost the human immune system by alternating exposure to high heat and humidity to let the sweat wash out skin impurities, with cold showers followed by dips into cold-water pools afterwards. This method spread to Germany during World War II, and from there to the entire world….
Fake Showers Many witnesses claimed that the victims of homicidal gassings were told by SS men or their helpers that, in order to be admitted to the camp, they needed to have their clothes laundered and disinfested, and they themselves had to take a shower. This, it is frequently claimed, was a deception, so the…
Attentive observers have noted items or facilities at the so-called death camps that seem entirely inappropriate, and which in fact suggest a much-more benign usage of those camps. The brothel at the Auschwitz Main Camp is one such item, and the “zoo” at Treblinka is another. Then we have the barber shop, dentist, and shoemaker…
Principles By “ventilating” an enclosed space, we refer here to replacing old, stale or contaminated air with fresh, uncontaminated air. In an ideal scenario of a cuboid space (room), fresh air would be pushed in along the entire surface area of one end of the room, and stale air would be taken out along the…
Shortly after plans were developed to set up a large PoW camp west of Auschwitz near the village of Brzezinka (Birkenau), these plans included a large facility containing inmate showers and disinfestation devices for inmate clothes. A map showing an early stage of the camp from late March 1942 shows an outline of this building…
Several German wartime camps are said to have had homicidal gas chambers in which Zyklon B was used for mass murder (see the entry on Zyklon B). For most of them, the way Zyklon B is said to have been introduced is uncontested. The situation is different for the claimed homicidal gas chambers at Auschwitz,…
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