Recent (1996) press articles estimate the number of people to have survived imprisonment at Auschwitz to be 200,000. The real number is unknown, but many people were imprisoned at Auschwitz and its satellite camps for very short times and were then released after they had served their sentences. The real number, depending on the definition of 'survived', therefore may be higher.

After France was defeated by Germany in 1940, the Nazi leadership researched the practicality of resettling Europe's Jewry on the remote French colony of Madagascar. It was decided Germany did not have the resources to transport them there while the war was still being fought, so Madagascar was abandoned in favor of occupied Soviet territory in late 1941.

No. The torture victim will usually agree to do anything in order to get the pain or torture stopped. It is however, a good way to get the kind of confession that is desired by the torturers. The commission investigated nearly 140 former members of the Waffen SS who were involved as defendants in the Malmedy case. All except two of these men had had their testicles crushed while in the custody of the US military. There appears to be a wide range in how Nazis in Allied custody were treated.

There is very little in the report which can verified as accurate. The bulk of the information in the report is verifiably untrue or inaccurate by a wide margin. Though the report is supposed to be the first detailed account of the extermination of Jews at Auschwitz to reach the West, it is wrong in almost all of its details. Auschwitz camp commander Rudolf Hoess signed two confessions. The first confession was while a captive of the British.

Among the techniques used by the British to get Hoess to sign his confession included sleep deprivation, threats against his family, beatings, and forced consumption of alcohol.

The Müller document, published in 1980's, is purported to be an Austrian police memorandum from the postwar 1940's which lists Nazi concentration camps where gassing claims had been investigated and proved to be false. An Austrian, Emil Lauchout, claims the document to be genuine, but its provenance has never been established beyond question. It appears the gassing claims were never investigated, but simply accepted by the Allied governments as fact. No.

Because of the rapid acquisition of huge amounts of territory which had been depopulated by the retreating communists, the Nazi leadership saw this as an opportunity to expel the Jews. Germany now had control of an area into which to put them until the end of the war. Because of the war, an international boycott of German goods and limits on immigration in Palestine and other areas, Germany had difficulty getting the Jews to emigrate.

Some groups of Gypsies were put into Nazi concentration camps for several reasons. The German government considered them a security risk, but more importantly the Romany led a wandering lifestyle and did not occupy themselves in what the Nazis considered productive employment. Because they refused to abandon their traditional lifestyle, they were put to work in labor camps.

Testimony is the poorest form of evidence. The human mind is very malleable, and memory can be affected by a wide variety of factors. Very normal people can sincerely remember things that never happened. Add to this the interest of many of the witnesses in getting attention, influencing how they are themselves perceived by those around them, ameliorating their punishment, or exacting vengeance on their enemies. Testimony alone should be used only with extreme caution.

The WRB report is supposed to be based on the testimonies of three escaped prisoners from Auschwitz who claimed Jews were being gassed at Auschwitz on a large scale. It has now been largely forgotten, even though it is one of the founding sources for the Auschwitz legend. The reason it has been forgotten is that it is so obviously inaccurate in its descriptions of the gas chambers and the numbers of Jews being killed.

Kurt Gerstein was a low-ranking SS officer with a degree in mining engineering who served as a sanitation officer for the SS during the war. Near the end of the war, he deserted his assignment and surrendered to the French. While a captive of the French, he wrote several reports or confessions having to do with what he claimed to have witnessed with regard to the gassing of Jews at various Nazi concentration camps. He was found hanged in his cell soon thereafter.

German chemist, Germar Rudolf has analyzed samples of plaster taken from prisoner sleeping barracks and found that the amount of residue left behind from fumigation with Zyklon B is comparable with that found in the alleged gas chambers. Rudolf also concludes the gas chamber story is false. The Austrian engineer Walter Lueftl has also examined the allegations and came to the same conclusion; As did DuPont chemist William L. Lindsey when he examined the problem of the gas chambers.

It varies with the equipment used, but the cremation time for the equipment installed at Birkenau appears to have required an incineration time of about an hour per body. The entire cremation cycle took longer and each oven, or retort, could reduce three or four bodies per day under normal operating circumstances. Birkenau had a total of 46 ovens so the capacity would have been 184 bodies per day if all of the facilities were operating at once. This, however, was not the case.

The six million figure is not based on any body count, records, or census. The number came into use during the war in Zionist propaganda and appears to have symbolic numerological significance. When the digits in six million are summed they add up to six. Six million is six times ten raised to the sixth power. In numerology the number six is considered 'perfect'. Six is the number of days God used to create the earth in the story of creation in the book of Genesis.

Because the six million number is not based on a census or survey or any other type of documentation, this question cannot be answered in an accounting 'balance sheet' type manner. However, a general explanation is possible. There are several circumstances one has to keep in mind when considering what happened to the Jews of Europe between 1939 and 1948. Before the outbreak of the war, the Jews of Europe were concentrated in the east.

Babi Yar is a ravine in Ukraine where thousands of Jews are said to have been shot by the Nazis and buried in a mass grave.

The gas chambers are supposed to be the end result of a long chain of events that evolved into a genocide program. They then constitute the physical application of Nazi policy toward the Jews. Whether the policy the exterminate the Jews was the intention from the start, or whether it evolved into it over time because of circumstance, the gas chambers are unambiguous signs the extermination program existed.

The reports left by Gerstein are full of exaggerations and absurdities, but because the source is an SS officer, they are frequently used by Holoscribes as source material in their writings. A reading of the entire text of these confessions can only make one wonder how anyone can seriously quote from them.

Receipts for shipments of coke to fuel the crematories for some of 1942 and ten months of 1943 are in the Auschwitz archives in Poland. They indicate an amount of fuel available to cremate corpses compatible with the registered deaths in the camp for that period. The death rate was about 100 per day and the amount of coke available for each cremation works out to a little more than 21 kilograms (46 lb.) of fuel per registered death.

Dr. Kremer's diary does not mention the gas chambers at all and only refers to the use of Zyklon B once in relation to the fumigation of a barracks infested with lice. Dr. Kremer discusses the epidemic of typhus raging through Auschwitz during the second half of 1942 and the quarantine the camp was under to get control of the spread of the disease.

The Jewish question was 'What was to be done with an ethnic minority with no homeland of its own which refuses to assimilate into the dominant German culture?'. It should be noted that this question was being raised by Jews as well as non-Jews. II[...] The primary responsibility for the administrative handling of the Final Solution of the Jewish Problem will rest with the Reich Leader SS and the Chief of the German Police [...] -regardless of geographic boundaries.[..

Many concentration camp inmates were imprisoned not simply for ethnic reasons. They were there because they were common criminals. Some of these people were not honest to begin with and used this opportunity to turn the tables on their former captors. It is a way to take revenge and to distract attention away from their own crimes. B. Many concentration camp inmates were there for political reasons-- particularly communists. They might lie for ideological reasons.

Eyewitness testimony, even when it is not politically motivated, is the lowest quality of evidence. Memory is a very malleable thing even under normal circumstances. In the highly charged atmosphere of the ideological conflict that destroyed a major part of Europe, the testimony of people who have good reason to hold a grudge should be highly suspect and examined carefully.

Holocaust literature often uses 'selection' as meaning a process in which prisoners were segregated into a group that would be put to work and a group that would be put to death. Of course, the process of sorting prisoners by sex and age before the delousing procedure was a standard and implied nothing sinister since the prisoners had to strip in order to take a shower.

Several German words with the 'Sonder' or 'special' prefix have been designated as code words in the Holocaust lexicon. 'Sonderbehandlung' can mean many different things in German depending on the context. In many documents in the Auschwitz files, the 'Sonder' prefix designated something that had to do with the hygienic regimen that was instituted in the camps after the epidemics of the summer of 1942.

The diary of SS doctor Joseph Kremer makes repeated references to his taking part in 'special actions' while he was assigned to duty at Auschwitz during the Fall of 1942. This was during the worst time of the typhus epidemic at that camp. While his diary does not make clear what he was doing during one of these special actions, it appears his duty was one of giving clinical (i.e. visual) examinations to groups of prisoners being transferred from other camps and sub-camps of Auschwitz (e.g.

Zyklon B was and still is a commercially made fumigant designed to rid man-made structures, such as buildings, ships, silos, etc. of destructive pests including moths, rodents, termites, and--most importantly during World War II--the typhus-bearing body louse. Many of the Nazi concentration camps suffered from typhus epidemics which killed hundreds of thousands of prisoners. Camp staff members also became sick and died from typhus.

From 1942 until the end of the War in 1945, the SS fought epidemics of typhus and other diseases in the concentration camps. One of the largest camps and the one hardest hit by the epidemic was Auschwitz and its satellite camps. An average of about one hundred prisoners out of population of around fifty thousand died there every day. The crematories were built as a sanitary measure to dispose of the bodies of the dead.

Because the fight between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany was a largely ideological one, and the Soviet Union was not a signatory of Geneva Convention agreements on the conduct of war, it was rightly assumed by Hitler that the Soviets would not fight by the rules. The Einsatzgruppen were police units assigned to the pacification of occupied territories in the east.