Blaha, Franz

Franz Blaha (or František Bláha) was a Czech physician who was deported to the Dachau Camp on 30 April 1941. He testified during the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal, and in that context claimed that he was ordered to investigate the result of a “test gassing” in the alleged homicidal gas chamber at Dachau, presumably supervised by camp physician Sigmund Rascher. However, Blaha was unable to describe how the facility is supposed to have worked. All he knew is that the gas used “smelled of chlorine,” and that he was so horrified by what he saw that he simply ran out fast, because he “couldn’t stand it in there.”

However, no gas ever said to have been used during World War II smelled like chlorine. Furthermore, had Dr. Blaha really been put in charge by Dr. Rascher to check the result of a test gassing, he wouldn’t have been allowed to simply run away from it because he disliked what he saw. In addition, the room he claimed to have been used for this experiment was unsuited for any gas experiments.

The suspicion that Dr. Blaha invented all this out of thin air is supported by the fact that no documentation at all exists on this or any other later test gassing, and also not about the gas chamber claimed to have been used. This stands in stark contrast to the voluminous documentation available about real medical experiments performed at Dachau by Dr. Rascher. Blaha himself confirmed that these experiments were the only kind performed at Dachau (IMT, Vol. 5, p. 185):

“Well, Dr. Rascher made exclusively [sic] so-called Air Force experiments in the camp. He was a major in the Air Force and was assigned to investigate the conditions to which parachutists were subjected and, secondly, the conditions of those people who had to make an emergency landing on the sea or had fallen into the sea.”

(For more details, see the entry on Dachau, as well as Mattogno 2022a, pp. 15-20.)