Lequeux, Maurice

In early 1945, when impressions were still fresh of the alleged atrocities uncovered by the Soviets after they had occupied first the Majdanek Camp in August 1944 and then the Auschwitz Camp in January 1945, Paddy Costello, an official at the embassy of New Zealand in Moscow, was at Lublin and visited the Majdanek Camp. He was evidently invited by the Soviets to become a witness of the alleged German atrocities. In Lublin, this official met a certain Maurice Lequeux and Olga Lengyel, who both claimed to have been interned at Ausch­witz in 1944. A while later, on 4 May 1945, Costello wrote a report on both the Majdanek and the Auschwitz Camps. For the latter, he relied mostly on the tales told by Lequeux, which were allegedly confirmed by Mrs. Lengyel.

Since this report is from hearsay, it will not be analyzed here in detail, as inaccuracies and errors may be the New Zealand official’s fault. A similar report, this time allegedly directly from a certain “Lequeu” (without the ending ‘x’), was included in a 1946 French book edited by Eugéne Aroneanu, which contains many outrageous claims about Auschwitz. This French report was later translated to English, and received a document number during the U.S.-conducted Nuremberg Military Tribunals (NO-1960). This document claims that the author had been deported from Compiègne to Auschwitz, but the lists of all transports from Compiègne to Auschwitz, which have survived the war, do not contain a Lequeu or Lequeux. Both the New Zealand and the Lequeu report have distinct features making it likely that they stem from the same person, indeed, whoever that was.

Interestingly, the report by the New-Zealand official contains monthly victim numbers for the Auschwitz Camp for the months from May to July 1944, which are identical with those published by Olga Lengyel, totaling 1,314,000 murdered Jews. This is a prime example of the “convergence of evidence,” here identical but false claims by evidently not independent witnesses. The total death toll of the Auschwitz Camp according to Lequeux (as reported in that New Zealand report) was allegedly six million, rather than the still-exaggerated total of around one million, as currently claimed by the orthodoxy.

While the New Zealand official might have misunderstood certain things and reported others inaccurately, one would think that he did not invent the following preposterous claim allegedly uttered by Lequeux:

“Lequeux saw one parade of 2,000 women stark naked marching ‘to the gas’ with the German band at their head playing tangos and fox-trots.”

The report ends with the following remark:

“The above sounds like the invention of an insane mind. [Who could disagree? But…] I am convinced that Captain Lequeux was telling the truth [Which underscores once more that at war’s end almost the entire world was in an insane anti-German hysteria]. Captain Lequeux was anxious to return to Paris to deliver a full report on this subject.”

Turning to this “full report,” or rather its English translation (NO-1960), we can see from it that the author was familiar with some internal features of the Birkenau Crematoria II and III, but that his inclination to tell the truth was highly compromised. He claimed:

• Crematoria II and III had two gas chambers with a capacity of 1,500 to 1,600 victims each, and they were called “Bunker.” Although there were two large basement morgues in these facilities, the orthodoxy insists that one was used for undressing, not gassings. The term “Bunker,” is said to have referred to makeshift homicidal gassing facilities outside the Birkenau Camp, not to the basement morgues.
• Before the gassing commenced, some 90% of the victims had already suffocated due to the extreme packing density. This is a unique claim.
• A gassing lasted only 5 minutes, after which glass openings in the ceiling and the doors were opened. However, no glass opening in the ceiling existed, and any homicidal gassing using highly toxic gases would have required an extended ventilation time before any doors would have been opened.
• The dead victims kept standing upright on their feet. People dying slump down, no matter how tightly they are packed.
• The cremation of a batch of corpses – 36 in six furnaces (six bodies per muffle (?) in a muffle build for just one!) – took just 20 minutes. The Birkenau furnaces were designed to cremate a single body within one hour.
• Zyklon B was filled in through “a [=one] square, grated column of 30 cm on each side with a glass opening on the top,” instead of the four wire-mesh introduction columns with wooden or concrete lids currently claimed by the orthodoxy.
• Once the furnaces were heated up, the bodies burned all by themselves without the need of fuel. However, self-immolating bodies simply do not exist. The furnace type used inside Crematoria II and III needed at least some 20 kg of coke for a normal (unemaciated) corpse under ideal conditions. However, the inmate force-laborers did not operate the furnaces under ideal conditions, and at Auschwitz, most corpses were underweight or even emaciated, with little or no body fat to fuel any fire.
• The total daily cremation capacity of all crematoria was 10,400 on average, whereas the maximum theoretical (not practical average) capacity for a 20-hour workday (4 hours daily for letting the hearths burn out, clean and reheat them) was (46 muffles × 20 hours × one corpse per hour =) 920 bodies. Hence Lequeux exaggerated the theoretical maximum by more than a factor of ten.
• 12,000 to 14,000 bodies were burned daily on huge pyres, especially during the Hungarian transports from mid-May through July 1944. Air photos prove, however, that no large-scale pyres at all burned during that time.

As the New Zealand official correctly put it:

“The above sounds like the invention of an insane mind.”

(For more details, see Mattogno 2021, pp. 369-372, 382-385.)