Natzweiler

The Natzweiler Camp near the town of the same name, located in Alsace some 25 miles west-southwest of the city of Strasbourg, operated from May 1941 until September 1944. It is also sometimes referred to as the Struthof Camp. It was a concentration and forced-labor camp. Within the framework of the Holocaust, this camp entered the scene in 1942, when the macabre topic of a collection of human skeletons involving the anatomical institute at the University of Strasbourg was brought up. In the summer of 1943, preparations were made to transfer 115 inmates from Auschwitz to Natzweiler, presumably to have them killed and turned into skeletons for that collection.

The orthodox narrative has it that a room originally used as a refrigeration cubicle was rigged to serve as a homicidal gas chamber in order to “process” these 115 transferred inmates. There is documental and anecdotal evidence pointing to this room having served as a training gas chamber for soldiers to practice wearing a gas mask. Other evidence points to this room also having been used on a small scale to conduct experiments on inmates with antidotes to the war gas phosgene. The western Allies were stockpiling this war gas at that time in North Africa, evidently with the intention to carpet-bomb German cities with it, or so the Germans must have feared.

The assertion that this refrigeration room was indeed used as a homicidal gas chamber rests mainly on three affidavits and the trial testimony of Natzweiler’s former commandant Josef Kramer. Kramer later served for a brief period as commandant of the Birkenau Camp, and then at the end of the war as commandant of the Bergen-Belsen Camp. He was captured there by British occupational forces, who subsequently put him on trial. During that trial, Kramer initially denied any knowledge of homicidal gassings at Auschwitz or Natzweiler. It was only after prolonged torture by the British that Kramer broke down and started “confessing.” (See the entry on Josef Kramer for details.)

Kramer’s two longer, signed affidavits describing the alleged gassings contradict each other on various points:

• Either the gas chamber existed already when Kramer received the order from Berlin, or it did not.
• Either Kramer observed the killing process through the peephole, or he was content with only “listening.”
• Both affidavits give different numbers of inmates killed, different numbers of batches the victims were split into, how many and what kind of victims each batch contained, and also when they were allegedly killed.
• The gassing was carried out either by pouring some hydrogen-cyanide-generating “salts” into a pit inside the gas chamber, then pouring water on this which flowed from the outside through a funnel and a pipe. Or “salts” and water were mixed outside the chamber, then poured through the funnel to flow through the pipe into the chamber.
• After the act, either the gas-chamber door was opened and at the same time the fan turned on, or the door was opened only fifteen minutes after the fan had been switched on.

These contradictions aren’t even the crucial issue, though. The claimed method itself was technically impossible, as pouring water onto any cyanide salt could not have resulted in the swift release of lethal amounts of toxic gases under any circumstances. If some method had been found that quickly releases toxic fumes, then Kramer’s second gassing method – mixing water and salt on the outside – would have been suicidal, as the gasses would have hit his face right away. (He claimed to have worn no gas mask.)

The Natzweiler Camp had a Zyklon-B fumigation chamber, hence the camp authorities had access to Zyklon B and knew how to use it. Had there been an intention to kill with hydrogen cyanide, this insecticide would have been used. To accomplish this, staff trained and licensed to use Zyklon B would have been ordered to carry out the gassings. It is absurd to think that the camp commandant himself would have carried out all the steps of the gassings, as Kramer claimed.

At the end of the war, numerous corpses were recovered which were allegedly those of the inmates transferred from Auschwitz. A toxicological autopsy of these corpses by French toxicologist Dr. René Fabre revealed that they had not died of cyanide poisoning. Hence, if they were murdered for the sake of enriching some macabre skeleton collection, then this happened some other way.

Desperate to conjure up a homicidal gas chamber for “their” camp, in order to compete with their co-Allies’ propaganda success with their various gas-chamber claims, the French bungled it badly. Yet still, modern-day orthodox historians cling desperately to this delusion, for admitting that “confessions” were extracted with torture, and that lies were spread deliberately, could lead to a cascade collapse of other gas-chamber claims.

If, on the other hand, we took seriously Kramer’s ludicrous description of the Natzweiler homicidal gas chamber, then this would prove that, in mid-1943, the German concentration-camp commandants had no idea how to build and effectively operate them. This implies, of course, that there were no such operating facilities in existence at that time, whether at Auschwitz, Belzec, Birkenau, Majdanek, Sachsenhausen, Sobibór, Stutthof, Treblinka or elsewhere.

Either way, logic spells disaster for the orthodox propagandists.

(For more details, see Faurisson 1999, pp. 247-255; Mattogno 2016e, pp. 205-222.)