Cohen, Leon

The Greek Jew Leon Cohen was deported to Auschwitz and was registered there on 11 April 1944, although he claimed to have arrived “in late November [1943]”. He claimed to have been assigned to the so-called Sonderkom­man­do, where he was deployed at what today is referred to as “Bunker 2.” He remained silent about his experiences until he was interviewed by Israeli historian Gideon Greif in early 1990. He also published a book about his experiences a few years later (Cohen 1996). His accounts are riddled with false and implausible claims:

• He incomprehensibly called the SS guards “policemen.”
• As has become fashionable among Auschwitz survivors, he claimed to have been selected by Dr. Mengele on arrival.
• Sex sells, so he claimed something that is commonly associated with Ilse Koch, the wife of the former camp commandant of the Buchenwald Camp:
  

  “At [Mengele’s] side, a very beautiful woman was leading two huge Alsatian dogs. This woman was reputed to be a nymphomaniac. She picked strong muscular men for one-night stands and when she had completely exhausted them, she killed them with her own hands and used their skin for lampshades or book bindings. I sometimes wonder, is this madness, could it really have happened? To make it worse, at the Nuremberg trials, which was a complete farce, she only received a prison sentence and even managed a quick release as she was pregnant. […] Or am I talking nonsense?”

  This proves that Cohen was lying, since his alleged personal experiences in fact came from somewhere else.

• He claimed to have carried gassing victims to pits 3 meters deep, although a pit this deep would have filled with water due to the high groundwater level in the area.
• He never mentioned the term “bunker” in connection with the gassing facility, and did not describe it either; instead, he called the cremation pits “bunkers,” yet did not indicate either their number or size (other than that they were 3 m deep).
• He claimed that children’s and women’s bodies were put at the bottom of the pyre, as if they were used to ignite the wood and men lying on top.
• He claimed that rail carts were used to transport corpses to the pits, although the orthodoxy insists that no such devices were used at Bunker 2 in 1944.
• He claimed that, while the pyre was ablaze, men with long poles stood on either side stoking the fire, although those men would have been severely burned.
• He claimed that, after the fire had died down, the pit had to be cleared of accumulated fat, although fat would have been the first thing to burn in a fire, and could never have accumulated in it.
• He claimed that, since the gas chambers didn’t work fast enough, people were also gassed in “cattle trucks” parked in the fields – a unique and freely invented claim.
• His description of the crematoria has little resemblance to reality. (He attributed a capacity of 2,000 victims per batch to all crematoria’s gas chambers, which would have resulted in an impossible packing density of 9.5 people per square meter for Morgue #1 of Crematoria II and III.)
• According to him, the gas made the victims turn “deep purple, nearly black,” although cyanide poisoning turns the skin pink.
• He claimed that a physically impossible number of two to five corpses were pushed into a cremation muffle designed for only one corpse.
• The cremation of these two to five corpses is said to have lasted half an hour, when in fact the cremation of just one corpse took roughly an hour.
• He repeated the myth that the fat of women’s bodies was used to burn the men’s bodies, hence that corpses burned by themselves, without the need for fuel. However, self-immolating bodies simply do not exist.

(For more, see Mattogno 2022e, pp. 74-92.)