The Deportation of Jews from the Lodz Ghetto to KL Auschwitz ... by Andrzej Strzelecki

The central gas chamber could hold 3,000 people. “Once they were undressed, they entered the central gas chamber through separate doors. The men and women went into the so-called shower area and got undressed separately, to avoid panic. We were put into quarantine separately, but we were housed together with another working party doing service in the crematorium and gas chamber. At that time, we never had any contact with the inmates from the big camp. “As I already said,I belonged to the working party responsible for unloading the ‘stiffs’ at the station. The propaganda story recounted by Boris Poljevoi, above, was picked up by a former Auschwitz inmate, a certain Lieberman, who stated as follows on 27 September 1945 : 4.Ĥ Gjermanskij “lagjer’ smjerti” v Pol’scje (German “Death Camp” in Poland).

No installation of this type ever existed at Auschwitz.ģ Kombinat smjerti v Osvjetzimje. Pravda, in the preceding months, had only dedicated a few lines to it, reporting, moreover, information received from London, according to which the Auschwitz “death factory” had three crematoria, “equipped with gas chambers””, with a capacity of 10,000 bodies per day! 4ġ The mass graves, real or imaginary, were located in the eastern area of the camp.Ģ Equivalent to the German word “ Schachtofen”, an enormous cylinder of refractory material employed for the production of gas from the gasification of coal. Until this time, Soviet propaganda had never paid much attention to Auschwitz. “They leveled the mounds of so-called “old” mass graves in the Eastern area 1, blew up and destroyed the traces of their electrical conveyor belt ( eljektrokonvjeijera ) where hundreds of inmates had been killed simultaneously by electrical current ( eljektriceskim tokom ), after which the bodies were placed on a conveyor belt moving slowly towards a pit furnace ( sciachtnuju pje ) 2, where the bodies were burnt completely” 3.

On 2 February, Pravda published an article by its correspondent, Boris Poljevoi, entitled, “The Death Complex at Auschwitz”, in which, among other things, we may read the following: The Soviet propaganda machine went to work immediately, echoing the most hare-brained stories circulating among the inmates – perhaps through excess of zeal. On 27 January 1945, the vanguard of the Soviet 100th Infantry Division forming part of the 60th Army of the I Ukrainian Front, reached the Auschwitz- Birkenau complex, now abandoned by the SS. Translated from the Italian by Carlos Porter Origins, development and decline of the “gas chamber” propaganda lie

The Deportation of Jews from the Lodz Ghetto to KL Auschwitz ... by Andrzej Strzelecki