Rascher, Siegmund

Siegmund Rascher (12 Feb. 1909 – 26 April 1945), a Luftwaffe Major, was a physician who conducted often-lethal freezing and low-pressure experiments on concentration-camp inmates at the Dachau Camp. In 1944, he and his wife were arrested for kidnapping babies while falsely claiming them to be Mrs. Rascher’s natural-born children. For this, both were executed shortly before the end of the war without ever facing formal charges, let alone a trial.

Rascher’s relevance for the Holocaust is a 1942 letter he wrote to Himmler requesting to be allowed to test newly developed war gases in facilities at that time under construction inside the Dachau Camp. The orthodoxy claims that this is a smoking gun pointing at plans to build a homicidal gas chamber at the Dachau Camp. However, the only functional gas chambers in existence at Dachau are four Zyklon-B disinfestation chambers used for fumigating clothes.

Although there are plenty of documents proving Rascher’s freezing and low-pressure experiments, no documents on any gas experiments exist. Only one witness has ever claimed to have experienced an experimental gassing: the Czech physician and former Dachau inmate Franz Blaha. However, his credibility is questionable, as an analysis of his testimony reveals.

(For more details, see the entries on Dachau and Franz Blaha, as well as Mattogno 2022a, pp. 14-20.)