Nagraba, Ludwik

Ludwik Nagraba was a former Auschwitz inmate who testified during the Höss show trial on 22 March 1947. In September 1947, he made a deposition in preparation of the Krakow show trial against former members of the Auschwitz camp staff.

Nagraba claimed to have been admitted to the Auschwitz Camp on 15 February 1941, where he stayed until October 1944, when he was transferred to Buchenwald. At Auschwitz, he was deployed at various innocuous jobs until July 1942, when he contracted typhus. After the Germans had nursed him back to health with great efforts, he was assigned to work inside Crematorium III – which started up only in June 1943, hence 11 months after he had become sick. He worked there until the building was demolished in late 1944. Here are some peculiar claims Nagraba made with his two statements:

• Eight or nine people were put into one muffle at once – although the muffles were designed to cremate only one corpse at a time.
• 2,850,000 deportees were gassed, and Nagraba knew this because the transports were recorded, and the numbers conveyed from the “transport commandant” to the camp commandant, which he managed to somehow intercept. However, many more than that perished, because many victims allegedly went straight to their death without being counted. Perhaps the witness was aiming at the Soviet’s 4-million death-toll number.
• Even German soldiers arriving in uniforms were killed in the gas chambers (though shot, not gassed), plus “large number of civilians, professors, priests.” This is clearly absurd.
• He called the first Birkenau crematorium “the modern 2-furnace crematorium,” although that building had five furnaces.
• He claimed that there were 18 cremation pits for open-air incinerations, each burning 8,000-10,000 corpses per batch (every other day?), hence a total capacity of 144,000 to 180,000 corpses per batch, or roughly a million corpses within just two weeks (assuming one batch every other day).
• Once lit with some flammable substances, the corpses burned all by themselves. However, self-immolating bodies simply do not exist.
• German “Gasmeisters” – a term Nagraba invented – carried Zyklon-B cans around in their backpacks. That runs not only contrary to the orthodox narrative, which maintains that Zyklon-B cans were transported by a red-cross vehicle, but it was also against all safety rules.
• Nagraba claimed that he had to collect the emptied Zyklon-B cans and transport them back to the Main Camp in a cart. No SS man in his right mind overseeing a mass murder with Zyklon B would ever have allowed an inmate to get anywhere near containers that might still have toxic residues in them.
• He also claimed that Sonderkommando members of Crematorium IV were gassed in a disinfestation chamber at the inmate-property warehouse, whose corpses he claims to have removed and then cremated. The orthodoxy insists, however, that the SS did that dirty job themselves. Furthermore, no Sonderkommando member ever would have voluntarily set a foot into the fumigation chamber, if they had observed homicidal gassings for months on end.

(For details, see Mattogno 2021d, pp. 216-222.)