Packing Density, inside Gas Chamber

Principles

How many people can stand on a surface area of one square meter (some 10 square feet, or a square 3’3” on a side)? Assuming that there are children in the mix, a figure of ten people seems physically possible – barely. The skeptical reader is invited to lay down some masking tape on the floor: a single square, 3’3” on a side, and see how many people can stand in that square.

The situation changes dramatically, if we consider a large crowd of naked strangers, of both genders, uncooperative and scared, who are told to take a shower together, such that they must line up extremely densely – breasts against shoulder blades, bellies against buttocks, genitals against genitals, shoulders against shoulders. No one could believe this is for taking a shower, so they will simply not cooperate. Screaming at them and threatening violence, or even beating them or shooting them will not work but rather trigger a panic in that room with unforeseeable consequences.

Packing people tightly into a given space requires that they can understand instructions, that they are told what the goal is, that they are willing to cooperate, and that they all have the discipline to follow orders. None of it is a given in any of the orthodox scenarios. The Jews came from all over Europe, and many if not most may not have understood what they were told already due to the language barriers. But then, if they did understand it, they were told a lie, as the given goal was presumably to take a shower, which means exactly the opposite of lining up tightly together.

Auschwitz

Take the case of the underground Morgue #1 of Crematoria II and III at Auschwitz Birkenau, for which we have blueprints showing their size, and the most witness accounts ever made for any homicidal gas-chamber claim. The room was 7 meters wide and 30 meters long. If we assume the average person to be half a meter wide and a quarter meter deep (25 cm), then physically we could fill the room as shown in the graphic, when packing them chest to back, shoulder to shoulder.

This amounts to 14 persons in a row, with 120 rows in total, resulting in 1,680 people, or 8 persons per square meter. This can be considered the realistic physical maximum of what can be achieved. However, considering that the intended victims would not have been told anything, let alone why they had to line up that way, they therefore would not have cooperated in achieving such a packing density. Thus, we may assume that half of that density, hence 4 people per square meter, is already optimistic. It may therefore be stated that anyone claiming that more than 1,000 people (4.75 people per m²) were crammed into this room is exaggerating.

The following table shows the claims of several prominent Birkenau witnesses, regarding how many people were allegedly packed into Morgue #1 (the alleged “gas chamber”) of Crematoria II or III.

The conclusion is inescapable: Nearly all witnesses have exaggerated the number of people allegedly gassed in one batch, at times in an extreme way. It is a typical “conversion of evidence” on a lie. Exaggerating the claimed batch size of gassings clearly supports equally fantastic and exaggerated overall death-toll figures for Auschwitz.

Claimed packing density of victims in the underground Morgue #1 of Crematoria II and III at Auschwitz-Birkenau

Witness	4,000 (19/m²)	3,000 (14.3/m²)	2,500 (11.9/m²)	2,000 (9.5/m²)	1,500 (7.1/m²)	1000 (4.8/m²)	500 (2.4/m²)
Daniel Bennahmias		●
Pery Broad	●
Shaul Chasan			●
Stanisław Chybiński		2,800
Leon Cohen				●
Josef Erber		●
David Fliamenbaum				●
Chaim Frosch				●
Dario Gabai		●	●
Yaakov Gabai				●
Salmen Gradowski			●
Jeannette Kaufmann				●
Hermine Kranz		●
Michał Kula			●	●	●
Erich Kulka				●
Henryk Mandelbaum		●
Hans Münch		●
Marcel Nadsari		●
Miklos Nyiszli		●		●
Dov Paisikovic		●
Aaron Pilo		●
Regina Plucer						●
Fritz Putzker				●
Deszö Schwarz					●
Roman Sompolinski							●
Soviet Report 26/2		●	●	●
Henryk Tauber	●
Morris Venezia		●
Shlomo Venezia					1,800
Rudolf Vrba				●

The situation is not different for other gas-chamber claims, although there the situation is not as clear as the above example, because for most of them we lack material and documental evidence as to the size of the claimed gas chambers. However, some witnesses have made more-or-less-detailed statements both about how many people were gassed per chamber and per batch, and what the room’s size was. This is true for the two alleged makeshift facilities just outside the Auschwitz-Birkenau Camp commonly referred to as the “bunkers” of Auschwitz, and for some of the claimed gas chambers of the camps at Belzec and Treblinka. In these cases, when it comes to the size of the related claimed gas chambers, we depend on either what each witness has claimed, or what the orthodoxy has ordained to be “true.”

In some cases, witnesses have invented figures for the size of the chamber and the people packed into them. For example, Szlama Dragon gave exact sizes of the so-called bunkers of Auschwitz – albeit contradicting material evidence for Bunker 2 – as well as the number of people per batch killed in them, which results in impossible packing densities of 20 to 25 people per m². For one of the alleged bunkers of Auschwitz (probably Bunker 1), Arnošt Rosin claimed a packing density of 12 and 19 per m². For an unknown chamber at some facility in Auschwitz, Charles S. Bendel had 1,000 people in a room of barely 40 or 50 m² (again 20 to 25 people per m²), although no such room ever existed there. Stanisław Jankowski claimed that 1,500-2,000 people were crammed into the larger chamber of Crematoria IV and V. This room had roughly 100 m², which would have resulted in a packing density of 15 to 20 people per m².

Belzec

Kurt Gerstein claimed an even more impossible packing density of 28-32 persons per m² for the alleged gas chambers at the Belzec Camp.

Treblinka

As to the claimed Treblinka gas chambers, Abe Kon asserted that 600 people were pressed into an alleged room size of 6 m × 6 m, hence an impossible 16.7 people per m².

Jankiel Wiernik’s figure for the Treblinka Camp was 400 to 450 people on (5m×5m=) 25 m² per chamber in the old building, hence 18 to 20 people per m², and 1,000 to 1,200 people on (7m×7m=) 49 m² per chamber in the new building, hence 20 to 24.5 people per m².

Lucjan Puchała asserted that 700 victims went into each Treblinka chamber, but he gave no room size. If we take what the orthodoxy claims (32 m² per room for the new building with larger chambers), then this results in a density of 22 people per square meter (or 14 for Wiernik’s claimed 49 m²).

Aleksander Kudlik’s figure for the Treblinka Camp, given Wiernik’s claimed chamber size, was at least physically possible, although not much more realistic: 5,000 people in all ten chambers of some 49 m² each, hence only 10 people per m². If we take the orthodoxy’s claim of 32 m², however, this value increases to an impossible 15.6 people per m².

Elias Rosenberg stated that 400 were squeezed into the initial, smaller chambers, which measured 4 m × 4 m, hence 16 m², if we take the orthodoxy’s claims. That would have resulted in an impossible packing density of 25/m². For the new gas-chamber building, Rosenberg claimed a capacity of 12,000 people. According to orthodox claims, that building contained 10 chambers of 32 m² each. Hence, Rosenberg’s victim count would have resulting in an impossible (and record-breaking) packing density of 37.5 people per m².