Gulba, Franciszek

Franciszek Gulba was deported to Auschwitz on 11 February 1941. In November 1944, he was transferred to the Buchenwald Camp. Twenty-five years after the war, on 2 December 1970, he signed a lengthy affidavit in Polish at the Auschwitz Museum. Four years later, on 30 December 1974, he wrote a letter to the International Auschwitz Committee at Warsaw, where he made some more statements. Here are some of his pertinent claims:

• In August of 1942, he allegedly saw a steamroller ready to prepare an access road to a new gassing facility outside the camp’s perimeter, the so-called Bunker 2. However, no such heavy equipment has ever been claimed to have been used at Auschwitz for such gravel-road projects. (In his 1974 letter, the gravel road had mutated into a road with “solid pavement” – although no such road ever existed.)
• He claimed that he and the fellow inmates of his labor unit built the road by first putting down a layer of bricks, then a layer of gravel, topped with a layer of – sand!
• They also allegedly built a drainage ditch next to this road “with vertical brick walls to sustain it.” Gulba clearly knew nothing about road and drainage construction. He invented this entire scenario, so he had a “reason” to claim how he ended up witnessing a gassing.
• A large excavator was used to dig deep trenches, presumably to serve as mass graves. However, the orthodoxy insists that mass graves were dug manually by inmates.
• Spruce pine trees were planted to hide the mass graves. However, air photos of 1944 show that the mass graves had not been hidden, and that no stand of young fir trees existed anywhere.
• The gassing facility allegedly consisted of a corridor, from which entry doors into individual gas chambers opened to the left and right. The chambers’ exit door led directly to the mass graves. However, the orthodoxy insists that Bunker 2 had no corridor at all. Each door led directly into and out of one of several parallel gas chambers. The design described by Gulba is said to have existed in the latter-phase gas-chamber buildings at Belzec, Sobibór and Treblinka.
• Gulba claimed that the ceiling of the old farmhouse had been replaced with a massive concrete slab, but the straw roof had been kept in place nonetheless. This claim is unique among all witnesses. However, replacing the ceilings across the entire building with a concrete slab would have required removing the roof – and putting it back later. That’s not likely to have happened.
• The gas was thrown in through openings in the ceiling. However, the orthodoxy insists that Zyklon B was poured in through hatches in the side walls. Openings in the ceiling are claimed for the gas chambers posited to have existed inside Crematoria I through III.
• The gassing he claimed to have witnessed in August 1942 in Bunker 2 was, in his opinion, the first to have occurred in the Birkenau area. However, the orthodoxy insists that gassings in that area had occurred much earlier – since March 1942 in the so-called Bunker 1, some 500 meters to the north, and since early July 1942 in Bunker 2. Because Gulba had been in the camp since early 1941, and claimed to have been lodged in Birkenau since April 1942, earlier mass gassings nearby could not have evaded his attention.
• In 1970, he did not yet know the term “Bunker.” In 1974, however, after the International Auschwitz Committee had sent him an article on the “bunkers,” he named the facility he claimed to have seen “Bunker 2,” but insisted that he knew nothing about “the other farmhouse” (Bunker 1).

This is how cross-pollination, or rather cross-pollution, of witness memory works.

(For more details, see Mattogno 2016f, pp. 113-116.)