Putzker, Fritz

Fritz Putzker was a Jew from Vienna who passed through several camps, among them Ausch­witz and Birkenau, where he arrived on 23 February 1943. He was deployed in this camp for nine months as a foreman in the workshops of the Lenz Corporation. Probably in 1945, he wrote a report, in which we read, among other things, that for some inscrutable reasons he managed to be present during homicidal gassings in all the crematorium types of Birkenau. Interjecting polemics into his account such as “Oh you blood hounds!”, he claimed the following, among other things:

• Between 5-6 million people were killed in Birkenau from 1942 until its final evacuation. And this does not even cover the camp’s entire history.
• The gas murder, allegedly carried out at 40 to 60 degrees Celsius(!), lasted 3 minutes, which is impossibly fast.
• In the two smaller crematoria, the murder lasted 6 to 8 minutes. This is still too short a time for a facility with no equipment to evaporate and dissipate the poison.
• An SS man “kept on jumping on the body of pregnant women until the birth literally protruded.”
• For Putzker, Bunker V was not a makeshift gassing facility just outside the Birkenau Camp (usually called Bunker 2), but merely a funeral pyre.

Putzker’s text is accompanied by two drawings of the two types of crematoria, which assign a maximum gas-chamber capacity of 2,000 victims to the larger of both facilities (which would result in a packing density of some 9.5 people/m², which is rather unrealistic). Neither of these drawings have the slightest resemblance with reality, highlighting the purely imaginary nature of his testimony. This is also confirmed by the cremation capacity he claims on those drawings: 3 to 4 bodies per muffle, and a total daily capacity per crematorium of 5,000 to 8,000 bodies, whereas the real theoretical maximum capacity stood at 300 bodies for the larger (II and III) and 160 bodies for the smaller crematoria (IV and V).

(For more details, see Mattogno 2021, pp. 363-366, 487f.)