Henryk Tauber
[2000] Critique of Claims Made by Robert Jan Van Pelt by Germar Rudolf
For this he mainly relies on two 'witness' accounts:
- He quotes Henryk Tauber [van Pelt p. 294, 13]:
The roof of the gas chamber was supported by concrete pillars running down the middle of its length. On either side of these pillars there were four others, two on each side. The sides of these pillars, which went up through the roof, were of heavy wire mesh. Inside this grid, there was another finer mesh and inside that a third of very fine mesh. Inside this last mesh cage there was a removable can that was pulled out with a wire to recover the pellets from which the gas had evaporated.
Van Pelt describes Tauber as follows [p. 112]:
Tauber's testimony is, without doubt, the most important record of the extermination procedure taken immediately after the war. It is largely corroborated by the contemporary testimonies of Jankowski and Dragon, and by the later memoirs of Filip Müller.
And in his footnote 87 van Pelt adds [p. 138]:
It is highly unlikely that Filip Müller's memoirs was inspired and or shaped by Tauber's testimony.
Maybe he is right with that, but has he noted that Müller copied entire sentences form the testimony of Miklos Nyiszli?[14] So Müller's forgery certainly cannot corroborate anything. Henryk Tauber is nevertheless an important witness, as his good knowledge about many details of the crematoria indicates that he indeed was working inside them. However, some of his statements are obviously absurd and/or impossible, indicating that Tauber tended to exaggerate and invent certain stories [van Pelt p. 108, 15]:
During the incineration of such [not emaciated] corpses, we used the coke only to light the fire of the furnace initially, for fatty corpses burned of their own accord thanks to the combustion of the body fat. On occasion, when coke was in short supply, we would put some straw and wood in the ash bins under the muffles, and once the fat of the corpse began to burn the other corpses would catch light themselves. […] Generally speaking, we burned 4 or 5 corpses at a time in one muffle, but sometimes we charged a greater number of corpses. It was possible to charge up to 8 “Müselmanns.” Such big charges were incinerated without the knowledge of the head of the crematorium during air raid warnings in order to attract the attention of airmen by having a bigger fire emerging from the chimney.
In their vast thermodynamic study, Franco Deana and Carlo Mattogno have shown that it is impossible that corpses burn totally "of their own accord", that you could light corpses with a simple straw and wood fire, that a fat corpse can light and incinerate meager ones. Apart from that, the procedure described by Tauber is absurd: Lighting a fire "in the ash bins under[sic!] the muffles" to burn a corps on top of these ash bins is impossible. These "ash bins under the muffles" were meant to gather the ashes of the incinerated corpses. The gas flow of such a cremation is as follows:
fresh air from oven room ® coke gas generator (fire) ® muffle with corpse ® ash bin ® recuperator ® flue ® chimney
Provided, this air flow would be maintained, any fire lit in the ash bin would just heat up recuperator, flue, and chimney, but couldn't "light' any corpses on top of it. It is more likely, however, that a fire lit in the ash bin would turn around the flow direction of the gases, as hopt gases tend to flow upward:
chimney ® flue ® recuperator ® ash bin ® muffle with corpse ® gas generator ® oven room
That means that the hot exhaust gasses would pour into the oven room, which would have been quite disastrous.
Furthermore, Deana and Mattogno have shown that even if it were possible to fit two or even three corpses at one time in a muffle (one cannot get more than three in there due to the limited height of the doors), it wouldn't make any sense as the incineration process is drastically slowed down due to several thermodynamic effects (reduced surface/volume ratio, narrowed and thus accelerated hot air flowthrough leading to increased energy loss).[16] Tauber's assertion that the Sonderkommando put up to 8 corpses into a muffle is therefore a lie. Deana and Mattogno proved additionally that it is impossible to get flames coming out of any crematorium chimney, as they had to travel some 30 m through flue and chimney to reach the open. No flame can be that long, except in case of an explosion, which would have damaged or destroyed the crematorium. A few lines later, Tauber writes (italic numbers in brackets refer to pages in J.-C. Pressac) [van Pelt p. 109]:
Once the people were in the gas chamber, the door was closed and the air was pumped out. [489]
That is absurd and technically impossible. Elsewhere Tauber writes [van Pelt p. 109f.]:
Another time, the SS chased a prisoner who was not working fast enough into a pit near the crematorium that was full of boiling human fat. At that time, the corpses were incinerated in open air pits, from which the fat flowed in to a separate reservoir, dug in the ground. This fat was poured over the corpses to accelerate their combustion. This poor devil was pulled out of the fat still alive and then shot. [499]
It is true that flesh burned in fire releases fat. But since fat is highly inflammable, one cannot collect it. And fat does not boil, it decomposes and catches fire beyond a certain temperature (184°C/363°F[17]). Tauber is telling atrocity stories which cannot be true. Tauber continues [van Pelt p. 111]:
So, during the incineration of fat bodies, the fires were generally extinguished. When this type of body was charged into a hot furnace, fat immediately began to flow into the ash bin, where it caught fire and started the combustion of the body. [495]
I quote this nonsense only in order to show that Tauber knows very well that fat, once released, catches fire when it is being heated beyond a certain temperature… And later: [van Pelt p. 112]
It was realized that the pits burned the corpses better, so the crematoria closed down one after the other after the pits came into operation. [500]
Nothing could be more wrong. Would that be true, mankind would have never developed crematories. In fact, by storing and reflecting the heat that would otherwise be lost, the fireproof brick walls of the crematorium muffles are the components which save energy, allow higher temperatures and thus accelerate the incineration process. In an open air cremation, huge amounts of energy are being lost due to radiation an convection.
After having had a closer look into van Pelt's (and Pressac's) star witness' testimony, who can honestly believe Tauber's extermination stories?