Larson, Charles

Charles P. Larson was a U.S. forensic pathologist, among other things working for the U.S. Army’s Judge Advocate General during and after World War II. After the war, Larson was put in charge of determining the reasons for the mass deaths occurring in German wartime camps. Larson performed autopsies on hundreds of victims in some twenty former concentration camps. He concluded that they had died from famine and disease, largely typhus, and that there was no evidence for any systematic, mass cyanide gassing (McCallum 1979).

In 1980, he stated during a newspaper interview which bore the telling title “Concentration Camp Conditions Killed Most Inmates, Doctor Says,” (Floerchinger 1980; reprinted in Kollerstrom 2023, p. 47):

“What we’ve heard is that six million Jews were exterminated. Part of that is a hoax. […There] never was a case of poison gas uncovered.”