Many Jewish survivors of the "death camps" say they
saw bodies being piled up in pits and burned. How much gasoline
would have to be used to perform this?
40. Many Jewish survivors of the "death camps" say they
saw bodies being piled up in pits and burned. How much gasoline would have
to be used to perform this?
The IHR says:
A great deal more than the Germans had access to, as there was a
substantial fuel shortage at that time.
Nizkor replies:
"Access"? The Auschwitz III camp, Monowitz, was an
industrial work camp where fuel was produced! The IHR even admits this
in their revised answer to
question 6.
How much better "access" could there possibly be?
Anyway, the question is misleading: a high-energy, refined fuel
like gasoline was not required. Cheap and relatively plentiful
imflammables like motor oil and methanol were used instead.
Höss
describes the open-air burning process at Treblinka (Bezwinska and Czech, KL Auschwitz Seen By The
SS, 1984, p. 133):
[After the gassing at Treblinka] the gas-chambers were opened up and
the bodies taken out, undressed and burnt on a framework made of railway
lines.
The fires were stoked with wood, the bodies being sprayed every now
and then with petrol refuse.
He also describes the process at his own camp, Auschwitz (Kogon et al.,
Nazi Mass Murder, 1993, pp. 168-169):
As late as the summer of 1942, the corpses were still carried to mass
graves. It was only toward the end of the summer that cremation began
to be used -- first by means of a wood pyre with about two thousand
corpses, and later in the ditches, with the corpses that had been buried
there earlier and then been exhumed. Used motor oil was poured over
them, and later methanol.
It was not a serious hardship for the Nazis to sacrifice a little
used motor oil.
The IHR changed the question from the blatant invention
"gasoline" in the original, to the merely-inaccurate
"fuel" in the revised version. It's still misleading. The
term "fuel" can refer to many things, but used motor oil is
not one of them.
[
Previous |
Index |
Next ]
Home ·
Site Map ·
What's New? ·
Search
Nizkor
© The Nizkor Project, 1991-2012
This site is intended for educational purposes to teach about the Holocaust and
to combat hatred.
Any statements or excerpts found on this site are for educational purposes only.
As part of these educational purposes, Nizkor may
include on this website materials, such as excerpts from the writings of racists and antisemites. Far from approving these writings, Nizkor condemns them and
provides them so that its readers can learn the nature and extent of hate and antisemitic discourse. Nizkor urges the readers of these pages to condemn racist
and hate speech in all of its forms and manifestations.