Rosenblum, Joshuah

Joshuah Rosenblum, born in 1923, was a Polish Jew who was arrested in May 1941 and sent to the Sosnowice Transit Camp, and then to Wiesau. After working with about 300 Jews on a highway construction project about 125 km from Berlin, he was transferred to Klettendorf, near Breslau, from where he fled. Arrested by the German police in March 1944, he was interned in Auschwitz-Birkenau. After his liberation, he eventually immigrated to Israel.

Rosenblum made his first statement about Auschwitz in 1970 in Israel, hence it is probably infested with knowledge acquired later. In 1996, Rosenblum was moreover interviewed by German historian Barbara Siebert. Here are some pertinent points from Rosenblum’s statements:

• At the start of a mass gassing in Crematorium IV and V, an SS man poured Zyklon B from a can into the room through two small windows. Yet in reality, those small openings were equipped with iron bars whose gaps were smaller than the width of a Zyklon-B can, which therefore could not have been emptied out into the room through those windows.
• Because the SS made the victims suffer, the Sonderkommando Jews decided to prepare their fellow Jews for the killing themselves, to treat them nicely, and not to tell them anything about their impending fate. But this is absurd: are we to thank those Jewish commandos for being nice, or condemn them for aiding the killers?
• These crematoria each presumably could burn about 800 bodies in 24 hours, although their maximum theoretical daily capacity was only some 160 bodies.
• Four corpses were allegedly thrown into each muffle every 10 minutes, meaning 24 bodies per hour. That would amount to 3,840 bodies per 20-hour working day, not 800. However, each cremation muffle was designed only for one corpse each, and could cremate only one body per hour.
• Pits measuring 2 m deep, 10 m long and 5 m wide were dug, in which 2,000 bodies were allegedly burned within 2 to 3 hours. However, burning down a huge cremation pyre during open-air incineration takes at least a day. Furthermore, at a packing density of 6 bodies per running meter and a height of 20 cm per body layer, this pyre would have been (2,000÷10m÷6/m×0.2m=) 6.67 meter high. Add to this a minimum of a similar stacking height of fuel wood needed, and the height of the pyre reaches 13 meters and more. How exactly was that pyre built and prevented from toppling over? And how was groundwater prevented from accumulating in the pits?
• When burning corpses in pits, “in order to save gasoline – the corpses could also be doused with human fat, which flowed into a pit at a deeper spot. We poured the human fat with buckets onto the people who were supposed to burn faster.” Yet highly combustible fat burns on contact with fire or embers, hence could not flow anywhere. Also, gasoline was most certainly not use to burn corpses, as it was a scarce commodity during the war, and because it can char a body only superficially when poured onto it.
• From May 1944 until October 1944, the “fires burned incessantly – day and night.” Air photos show, however, that no large-scale fires were burning in or around Auschwitz-Birkenau during that time.
• Victims were shot lying down next to the blazing pit – with the executor inevitably getting burned to a crisp in the process.
• Rosenblum claimed that the shot at the pit’s edge often was not fatal, so the victims ran around inside the burning pit screaming, begging to get shot dead. But if they had to lie down to get shot, how did they end up inside the pit running around? However, if a victim had indeed gotten alive into the blazing inferno, the inhaled hot air and flames would have singed the lungs quickly, rendering any screaming and running around impossible.

(For more details, see Mattogno 2021d, pp. 222-227.)