A Review of The Chemistry of Auschwitz

When I started my foray into Holocaust Denial 5-years ago, I began by stating that no event of any significance in the world takes place without generating a flutter of conspiracy speculations. As unpleasant and potentially dangerous a belief in one or more of these conspiracies can be, they do, for the most part, come from a natural human desire to find an explanation for what appears to be unexplainable. However some historical events are so well documented that a belief in certain conspiracies comes from a much darker place where people feel compelled to bend and warp reality to justify their dislike or even hatred towards a certain group of people – and there is no better example of this than those who distort or flat-out deny the facts of the holocaust. 

Over the years I have countered what I consider to be the strongest arguments made by Holocaust denialists with reactive ease, but have not yet refuted Germar Rudolf’s book, The Chemistry of Auschwitz, leading some online to believe that I am unable to do so and therefore, somehow, the Nazis did not systematically kill millions of people in their death camps. The truth however is that I simply don’t like being told what to do and rather childishly, have been watching with great joy as revisionists claim victory online. Now that things have died down a little, I have decided its time to tackle this rather bland and unconvincing book and bring an end to this project.

The Chemistry of Auschwitz is an excruciatingly difficult read due to the multiple revisions made by its author. These revisions in this revisionist book are marked by jarring tonal changes in writing styles indicating that Rudolf no longer believes in many of the arguments he made when the book was first published. However, rather than removing these arguments from the book in their entirety, Rudolf seems to have simply edited out his endorsement leaving them for the most part intact. Perhaps he was worried that his girthy magnum opus would be reduced to a mere pamphlet if he were to remove all the mistakes he would openly admit to, or maybe he simply wanted to dog-whistle to his intended audience. Regardless, these edits resulted in a confusing and spineless book which is an echo of its former self. For example in an early addition, Rudolf regurgitates an argument from a fellow revisionist and former roommate, Gerald Fredrick Töben, who stated that one of the doors found in Crematorium I was not gas tight and therefore the room where it was situated could not have functioned as a gas chamber. Rudolf states that “This door is neither of sturdy construction, nor is it air-tight (note the keyhole). It is partly glazed and opens inwards i.e., into the room, where corpses were allegedly piling up”. However soon after the publication Rudolf discovered that the flimsy wooden door was not the same door used when the building was retrofitted into a gas chamber. Not wanting to remove this easily debunked keystone of the revisionist movement, Rudolf frames the argument as if Leuchter is the one who made it when he visited the site in the 1980s. 

The book also suffers from an identity crisis as Rudolf struggles to pin down who his target audience actually is. There are sections written in a dry scientific manner, which I imagine the average revisionist would struggle with, punctuated by sections written in the style of a teenager’s MySpace page in the early 2000s. For example, why in a book that supposedly disproves the holocaust would its author think it was a good idea to randomly start talking about his birthday? It feels like it has been written by someone who lacks a filter and who believes it would be a crime not to publish every thought that tumbled through their head, giving the book a bloated feel. When combined with the revisions it becomes as I said, excruciatingly difficult to read. 

If you were to distil down Rudolf’s book, his reasoning and methods for disbelieving in the industrial mass murder of people the Nazis deemed undesirables is identical to that found the Leuchter report. Rudolf illegally obtained samples from Auschwitz and covertly had them tested for the presence of a specific family of hydrogen ferrocyanides, commonly known as Prussion blues. Unable to find their presence in the samples he stole, he concluded that no gassing took place. Like with Leuchter, Rudolf’s reasoning and conclusion are wrong because Prussian blues would not necessarily be formed in the conditions found in homicidal gas chambers. This is due to the fact that their synthesis is sensitive to concentration, temperature, the amount of carbon dioxide present (from humans exhaling), presence of water, and the presence of Fe (III) that is already complexed with cyanide. In order to prove his thesis, Rudolf needed to demonstrate that these compounds can form in the conditions found in the homicidal gas chambers – something which he was unable to do, rendering his conclusion bassless. Rudolf, like Leuchter also erroneously believes Prussian blues to be the major form of cyanide residue discounting all other compounds. 

Additional fundamental flaws have been pointed out by many others. Gilles Karmasyan pointed out that Rudolf based the quantities of hydrogen cyanide released on a single figure which he deceitfully used to base an evaporation rate curve from before concluding that the rate of release of the deadly gas is too slow to kill anyone in a few minutes. To come to his conclusion, he ignores the importance of temperature and the simple and dark fact that human body temperature is way above the boiling point of hydrogen cyanide. Others have taken issue with Rudolf’s baseless claim that no forensic analysis was conducted on facilities at Auschwitz-Birkenau after the camp’s liberation. In reality toxicological analysis was carried out as early as 1945 by the Krakow Forensic Institute. They collected samples from, among other places, the ruins of Krematorium II and discovered the presence of cyanide compounds. Traces of hydrogen cyanide were also found in metal objects found in the hair or victims, such as pins, clasps, and gold-plated glasses holders. Even Rudolf claims about the lack of holes in the roof of the gas chambers has been thoroughly debunked. 

If, like me, you are able to see through the scientific jargon, The Chemistry of Auschwitz is a carbon copy of the Leuchter report, only written by someone who is competent in their field. At their cores, both share the same fundamental flaw regarding the synthesis and analysis of cyanide based residues rendering them both invalid. This is further proof that the people who promoted this book to me either have not read it or they don’t understand what is actually being discussed. Regardless, the book was not the great challenge that I or the likes of the TDS postcast hoped it to be and I have found myself struggling to find things to talk about that have not already been discussed. 

When I previously brought attention to Rudolf’s lewd convictions it was not just because it is hilarious, but because it is a perfect example of how he and his fellow revisionists construct their arguments. They like to get bogged down in the minutiae whilst purposely ignoring the bigger picture. What I am basically saying is that cyanide-based residue is not the only evidence we have of homicidal gas chambers, and by allowing ourselves to get bogged down on the insignificant, we miss the bigger picture. We have warehouses of personal effects that once belonged to the victims, pictures from the camps when they were functional, and witness testimonies not only from people who survived the camps but from those who worked there. 

Oskar Gröning was a German SS Unterscharführer whose responsibilities included counting and sorting the money taken from prisoners at the Auschwitz concentration camp. After the war, he returned to Germany where he led a normal life, reluctant to talk about his time at the death camp for more than 40 years later until learning about Holocaust denial. He obtained a pamphlet by the Holocaust denier Thies Christophersen which he then mailed back to Christophersen having written his own commentary on it condemning Holocaust denial which included the following. 

“I saw everything. The gas chambers, the cremations, the selection process. One and a half million Jews were murdered in Auschwitz. I was there.” – Oskar Gröning

Gröning’s actions drew the attention of a neo-Nazi magazine and he was soon receiving anonymous calls from people trying to convince him what he saw with his own eyes was wrong.  

“People who tried to prove that what I had seen with my own eyes, what I had experienced in Auschwitz was a big, big mistake, a big hallucination on my part because it hadn’t happened” – Oskar Gröning

Following his interactions with Holocaust deniers, Gröning decided to speak openly about his experiences as an SS soldier working at the infamous death camp and publicly denounce those who maintain the events he witnessed never happened. 

“I would like you to believe me. I saw the gas chambers. I saw the crematoria. I saw the open fires. I would like you to believe that these atrocities happened, because I was there.” – Oskar Gröning

His self-incriminating statements exposed his life to public scrutiny; in particular his confession to stealing jewelry and money from gas chamber victims for his personal benefit. As Gröning did not physically kill anyone one himself he did not consider himself guilty of any crime, but felt immense guilt after hearing the screams. However after the legal precedent set in 2011 by the conviction of the former Sobibor extermination camp guard John Demjanjuk in 2015, Gröning was found guilty of being an accessory to the murder of at least 300,000 people. 

Gröning’s testimony is a drop in the ocean of evidence demonstrably proving the mass extermination of the people the Nazis considered to be untermensch. The evidence is in fact so robust and plentiful that those who don’t believe the holocaust happened are choosing to do so! There is no doubt in my mind that Rudolf intentionally set out to disprove the use of Zyklon-B when he traveled to Poland after being commissioned to do so by Hajo Hermann on behalf of Otto Ernst Remer. Unfortunately for Rudolf, scientific discoveries do not happen in a vacuum and if you purposely ignore the mountain of contradictory evidence to reach your distasteful conclusion as he did you are not doing science – you are attempting to excuse away your bigotry. 

When I published my first blog post on Holocaust denial 5-years ago, I had no idea how big of a project it would turn into. This was due in part to revisionists moving the goalposts at every opportunity, but now I feel it’s time to bring this project to a close. Nothing I ever publish will be good enough for them because, as I said they believe what they want to believe because this was never about historical accuracy or science.