Lethal Injections

The chemical phenol has been used in the past as a wound and instrument disinfectant in hospitals all over the world. It was also used to this end by the inmate infirmary of the Auschwitz Camp. The camp’s documentation contains several orders of phenol by employees of the infirmary (see Mattogno 2023, Part 1, pp. 140, 194, 249, 264, 282).

A book called Morgue Registry was kept at the morgue of the Auschwitz Main Camp. It contained the data of deceased inmates, whose corpses were stored in that morgue temporarily prior to burial or cremation. There is nothing suspicious about this document. However, inmates active for the camp’s underground resistance made a copy of this Morgue Registry. Behind some of its entries, they added the term “szpila” in their copy, which is a misspelled version of the Polish word “szpilka,” which means pin or awl (as in a sewing needle).

During the Frankfurt Auschwitz show trial, Danuta Czech, a Polish historian employed by the Auschwitz Museum to chronicle the history of the Auschwitz Camp, testified wrongly that these words can be found in the original of the document up to mid-December 1942. She furthermore claimed that these words referred to an injection syringe, although the Polish word for the needle of a syringe is “igła.”

Danuta Czech’s perjury served to lend credence to many mendacious testimonies by former Auschwitz inmates who had claimed that seriously sick inmates, who had been admitted to the camp’s infirmary but had little prospect of a speedy recovery, were picked out by camp doctors during so-called selections, and then murdered with an injection of phenol into the heart.

Danuta Czech further manipulated the record by claiming that even after mid-December 1942, when no “szpila” was added anymore by some inmate resister, killings by injections occurred. She based this claim on the simple fact that some inmates had died in Block 28, which was the inmate infirmary’s central ward and outpatient clinic. However, the word “szpila” added by the inmate resisters was added only to two entries of inmates who had died there, while 58 were added to the names of inmates who had died in other blocks. Hence, there is no meaning and pattern behind those entries of this non-word that doesn’t even mean syringe. Still, Czech decided that, from mid-December 1942 onward, any inmate who died at Block 28 was a victim of phenol injections.

However, the vast documentation about the healthcare at the Auschwitz Camp clearly shows that inmates, no matter how sick, were cared for with great effort, including complicated surgeries and long-term care for terminally ill patients. Furthermore, the camp’s frequent statistics of the deployment status also show that inmates unfit for work were not killed at all.

The primary victim of this grand lie was SS Oberscharführer Josef Klehr, a medical orderly at Auschwitz and later the head of the disinfestation unit. Klehr was framed for this invented crime by witnesses such as Withold Pilecki. However, a detailed analysis of his testimony reveals Pilecki as an untrustworthy liar.

(See also the entry on healthcare, as well as for more details Mattogno 2016a, esp. pp. 97-102; 2022b, esp. pp. 40-45.)