Sonderkommando [splittat från En gasning med Zyklon-B, filmad och dokumenterad.]

Givetvis ger de order innan de ska göra sitt arbete, och det begriper väl du också?

"---Bis Ende Februar 1943 waren im Rahmen der Aktion Reinhardt 825 Waggons mit »alten Textilien« in die Lager Auschwitz und Lublin (Majdanek) gesandt worden, die man während der »Judenumsiedlung« konfisziert hatte.[79] Eben darin bestand die Aktion Reinhardt,[80] was sich auch folgender Mitteilung des SS-Gruppenführers Fritz Katzmann entnehmen läßt:[81]

»Gleichzeitig mit den Aussiedlungsaktionen wurde die Erfassung der jüdischen Vermögenswerte durchgeführt. Außerordentliche Werte konnten sichergestellt und dem Sonderstab „Reinhard" zur Verfügung gestellt werden.«

Noch im Mai 1944 gab es in Birkenau ein »Sonderkommando Reinhardt«, bei dem 287 weibliche Häftlinge arbeiteten.[82]---"

"---The "victims" died in two minutes; twenty minutes after the "gas chamber" was opened the men of the Sonderkommando went inside without gas masks - since Dr. Bendel says nothing of gas masks, either - and began to drag out the bodies:

This went on for two minutes and then there was complete silence. Five minutes later the doors were opened, but it was quite impossible to go in for another twenty minutes. Then the Special Kommandos started work.[41]

This is impossible. Crematoriums IV and V did not have ventilation systems. The "gas chambers" were aired out simply by opening the doors to create a draft.[42] Given the extreme toxicity of hydrocyanic acid, a room fumigated for disinfection must be aired for at least twenty hours.[43] Thus it is evident that the men of the Sonderkommando, entering, after only twenty minutes' aeration, "gas chambers" in which there lingered lethal concentrations of gas[44] would themselves have been gassed.

Consequently, it is still more impossible that the Sonderkommando could have begun evacuating the corpses five minutes after the death of the "victims," as Dr. Bendel anomalously asserts:

For two interminable minutes, one heard blows against the walls, cries which had nothing human in them any longer. And then nothing. My head spun, I thought I had lost my mind. Of what abominable crimes were these women, these infants guilty that they had to die in so cruel a manner?

Five minutes later the doors were opened. The heaped, contracted corpses tumbled out like a waterfall. A few were so intertwined that separating them required fantastic effort. Covered with blood, they appeared to have struggled desperately against death. One who has seen a gas chamber even only once can never forget it. The corpses, still warm, passed to the barber, who cut their hair, and the dentist, who pulled out their gold teeth.[45]---"

"---Crematoria IV and V

All that exists for these facilities[67] are a few documents and contradictory, partly unbelievable eyewitness statements.[68] According to Pressac, the two western, heated, unidentified rooms, as well as their anterooms, served as 'gas chambers'. There is no evidence for any ventilation facility for these rooms prior to May 1944. For this reason Pressac suggests that up to that date ventilation was achieved by means of natural draft. In crematorium IV, but not in crematorium V, a ventilation facility is said to have been installed in May 1944, when the extermination of the Hungarian Jews allegedly began.[69] Pressac shows a blueprint for this, but fails to cite a source for it. According to his blueprint, the ventilation shaft would have opened into an additional chimney of crematorium IV. However, such a chimney is not visible on the air photos of May, June and September 1944.[70] As well, and strangely enough, the rooms described as 'gas chambers', beside the coke fuel and the physician's rooms, lack any ventilation chimneys - unlike all the other rooms in the two crematoria. Pressac himself points out that the lack of ventilation of the chambers would have resulted in the gas spreading through the entire rest of the building, so that all work would have had to cease for many hours.[71] He adds further that due to the technical inadequacies, the gassings in these rooms must have been a ludicrous procedure resembling a circus act.[72]

Unfortunately one must deal with such witness stories and try to keep a straight face in the process.---"

"---The gassing technique imagined by Pressac is this:

Le premier gazage fut catastrophique. Un SS devait, masque sur le visage, monter sur une petite échelle pour accéder a une ‹fenêtre›, l’ouvrir d’une main et de l’autre verser le Zyklon B. Sa prestation tenait du numéro d’équilibriste et devait être répétee six fois. (p. 76, our italics)

[The first gassing was catastrophic. An SS man, mask on face, had to climb on a little ladder to access a ‘window’, open it with one hand, and with the other, pour the Zyklon B. This feat was like a balancing act, and had to be repeated six times.]

Pressac forgets to add that the SS juggler would also have had to plead affably with the victims not to push him backwards, or grab him, or pull him in, while holding himself with one hand on the ladder. He would have had to extend his other hand inside the window (perched at 1.70 meters above the pavement) to pour a can of Zyklon B into the gas chamber!

Pressac’s narration continues:

Lorsque les portes étanches furent ouvertes pour évacuer le gaz, on s’aperçut que l’aération naturelle etait inefficace et il fallut percer d’urgence une porte dans le couloir nord pour provoquer un courant d’air. (p. 76, our italics)

[When the air-tight doors were opened to evacuate the gas, it was perceived that the natural ventilation was ineffective and it was urgently necessary to open a door in the north corridor to induce an air current.]

The story of ventilation in Crematories IV and V is one of those tales which illustrates the silliness of Pressac’s argumentation. In his book Auschwitz: Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers, Pressac pretends to see this door "urgently" opened in the north wall of Crematory IV in a photograph [94] which shows only the south side of Crematories IV and Vnot in (on) Crematory IV, which appears clearly in the foreground, but rather in (on) Crematory V, which is in the background partially obscured by trees. The south wall of Crematory V is so indistinct that one can make out a door in connection to the corridor only with a great deal of determination, and examination of the original photograph [95] shows that Pressac has mistaken for a door, shade produced by trunks of trees delimited at the bottom by lighter ground.---"