Langfus, Leib

In November 1970, a resident of the city of Ausch­witz handed over a manuscript in Yiddish that he claimed to have found in a glass jar within the ruins of Crematorium III. Since that building was completely obliterated in late 1944 when the Germans blew it up, it is safe to say that a glass jar located inside of it would have been shattered to pieces. Hence, this glass jar was placed inside the ruins after the building had been dynamited.

The manuscript – with a total of 111 pages written in fountain pen – was first published in a German translation in 1996. It is attributed to a certain Leib Langfus. The first 99 pages contain a verbose account of the background to the deportation, and the deportation from the Polish town of Mława itself. The related transport is said to have arrived at Ausch­witz on 6 December 1942. Then, when it should get interesting, the text of the following pages (100-105) is suddenly “illegible.” Page 106 has the description of a claimed homicidal gassing of unknown victims at an unknown location on an undisclosed date, evidently based on the knowledge of someone who was there but somehow didn’t get killed in the gassing, but stood aside instead, so he could later write a superficial, meaningless account whose only distinctive features are all wrong:

• Gas was allegedly thrown into this one small room through just one small hatch in the ceiling. However, if we follow the orthodox narrative, in December 1942, the large morgue inside the old crematorium at the Main Camp was no longer used for homicidal gassings; the orthodoxy claims that it had four hatches in its ceiling; the so-called bunkers near the Birkenau Camp supposedly had several rooms each, not just one; they are said to have had hatches only in their side walls, not in the ceiling; and the new crematoria at Birkenau were all still under construction.
• Leib Langfus’s ghost writer could even see through walls, for he was able to observe the victims’ death struggle, who, rather than falling over dead, decided to arrange themselves neatly in piles of corpses stacked up to a meter high. (This points to a plagiarism of Miklós Nyiszli’s text, first published in 1946; see the entry on him.)
• Moreover, the ghost writer saw that some of the victims “turned quite blue under the influence of the gas,” while poisoning by hydrogen cyanide (the active ingredient in Zyklon B) turns victims pink, not blue.
• Since not all victims could fit into the gas chamber, some allegedly had to wait in a hut until the next day for their turn, although at that time there were allegedly two gassing bunkers in operation, each with several chambers, so plenty of capacity and no need to wait.
• Langfus uses the term “bunker” for this makeshift gassing facility outside the Birkenau Camp. However, that term has not been used by any wartime source or witness, and was invented only toward the end of the war, meaning that this text was probably written long after the Auschwitz Camp was occupied by the Soviets (see Mattogno 2016f).
• Langfus’s ghost writer has the victims thrown by some inmates onto a gigantic blazing pit fire – who would have gotten burned to a crisp themselves, had they dared approach it. Furthermore, Langfus talks only about one pit, when in fact there were many, if we were to believe other witnesses and the current orthodox narrative.
• Finally, the ghost writer claims that all that was left of the entire transport after this conflagration had died down was “a small pile of burnt bone” that was simply “thrown aside,” although burning, say, a thousand people would have left a veritable mountain of human and wood ashes, including many partially burned body parts and charcoaled wood pieces, probably some 10 cubic meters in all.

(For details, see Mattogno 2021, pp. 259-261; see also the entry on Salmen Lewental.)