Bennahmias, Daniel

Daniel Bennahmias (1923 – 22 Oct. 1994) was a Greek Jew deported to Auschwitz, where he arrived on 11 April 1944. After the war, he remained absolutely silent about his wartime experiences. Only toward the end of his life did he grant interviews to a writer who then wrote his alleged Auschwitz experience down as a third-person narration, published only a year prior to Bennahmias’s death. The unreliability of an account of hearsay events some 50 years earlier is evident from the various false claims made:

• 3,000 people were killed in one batch in Morgue #1, the alleged gas chamber of Crematorium II, hence more than 14 people per square meter in this room of 210 m², which is an impossible packing density.
• After the gassing, the chamber was allegedly packed with corpses from “floor to ceiling,” which means that people had been lying in layers on the floor and had reached, layer by layer, up to the ceiling! Assuming that three corpses fit onto a floor area of two square meters and that one layer was on average 25 cm high, and given the dimension of Morgue #1 of Crematorium II at Birkenau of (30 m × 7 m =) 210 m² × 2.4 m height, this results in (630 corpses per layer × 8 layers =) some 5,040 people, to reach a stacking height of just 2 meters. These 5,000 people would have had to walk into and stand in that room, which implies an utterly impossible packing density of 24 people on each square meter.
• When the door was opened, an SS man leaning against the chamber door, instead of wearing a gas mask, smoked a cigarette, which would have meant certain death.
• Bennahmias spreads the crudest black-propaganda anecdotes invented by the Ausch­witz resistance movement, for instance, the claim that SS men randomly shot babies or tossed them onto the heads of the people crammed into the gas chamber awaiting their execution.
• He seriously claims that, after gassings, only one inmate was put in charge to shave the victims’ hair, and another inmate to find and extract gold teeth. This process is supposed to have lasted eight hours for a batch of two to three thousand gassing victims. Under these conditions, those two inmates had between 10 and 14 seconds to “process” each victim.
• He states that the victims gouged the concrete walls of the gas chamber and left “bits of flesh” and blood all over it, requiring it to be washed and repainted after each gassing. It is impossible to gouge concrete with bare fingers, and there is also no way to have “bits of flesh” sticking to a wall. Furthermore, the walls of these rooms were never painted, and they are still covered with bare cement plaster to this day.
• Bennahmias (or rather his ghostwriter Rebecca Camhi Fromer) plagiarized claims from other sources, for example by taking events and numbers from Martin Gilbert’s book Ausch­witz and the Allies.
• In spite of the members of the Sonderkommando allegedly being killed off repeatedly to annihilate these “carriers of secrets,” Bennahmias miraculously survived this culling process over and over again, like so many others of his colleagues.
• Bennahmias never mentions anything of relevance regarding the cremation furnaces, as if he had no knowledge about them at all.

An in-depth analysis of Bennahmias’s account reveals many more untrue, impossible, and implausible statements (Mattogno 2022e, pp. 93-100).