Letters to David Irving on this Website

Frank Lowe Jr discusses, September 7, 2004, the interrogation of the Auschwitz commandant

Höss's testimony on the Gassings at Auschwitz.

APPARENTLY, in his April 1, 1946 Nuremberg testimony as to the first "gassings" at Auschwitz, former Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss gave the same essential testimony as Aumeier had earlier in August of 1945: November of 1942.

The prosecuting attorney continuely tried to bait Höss, by suggesting that November of 1941 was the original date of the first gassings, but Höss did not confirm any gassings in that year.

Secondly, he would not testify that the original Soviet prisoners of war were murdered, but said that they constructed Birkenau and remained there afterwards and their deaths were because of epidemics within the camp. (See Henry Mazal's site for Höss' testimony).

This testimony demonstrates that if their were any "homicidal" gassings, they were after the typhus epidemic had been raging at Auschwitz for four months and that they were essentially propylactic murders, to keep these victims of the epidemic from further infecting inmates within the camp.

This is essentially the same information we have about the "selection" process in the book by Jürgen Graf and Carlo Mattagno on Majdanek -- that the murders coincide with the "selection" of typhus victims who were deemed incurably ill with the disease.

They were shot for that reason, and not as part of any systematic extermination plan; since there were no crematoriums built in advance of the epidemic, there was no plan for mass murder before the epidemic. Little wonder both camps had epidemics at the same time, June and July of 1942.

Even their new book on the Stutthof Concentration Camp (outside Danzig) confirms that typhus was a problem there and that it hit the camp before Auschwitz in April 1942.

There was an epidemic at Stutthof in December 1944 that was worse in death rate than the so-called "exterminations" within the camp.

The reality is that all the major Polish camps, Chelmno, Belzec, Majdanek, Auschwitz, Treblinka, Janowska, and Stutthof had typhus epidemics at one time or another, or were fed by inmates from Polish city ghettos where typhus epidemics were already rampant in advance of the shipments; Chelmno from Lodz (December, 1941), Belzec from Lvov (August, 1942), and Treblinka from Warsaw (February, 1943).

The Treblinka epidemic was the worst and affected 95 percent of the inmates, with half of them dying, and it delayed the revolt within that camp until the summer of 1943. Apparently Christopher Browning's assertion in his new Holocaust book is right: "The typhus epidemic has spread past the ghettos".

Frank Lowe Jr

 

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Previous letters by Frank Lowe: [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9]

 

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