"Holocaust" authors claim that the Nazis were able to
cremate bodies in about 10 minutes. How long does it take to
incinerate one body according to professional crematory operators?
42. "Holocaust" authors claim that the Nazis were able
to cremate bodies in about 10 minutes. How long does it take to incinerate
one body according to professional crematory operators?
The IHR says (original):
About 2 hours.
The IHR says (revised):
About an hour and a half, although the larger bones require further
processing afterwards.
Nizkor replies:
Well, which is it, 1.5 or 2? More recently, the Holocaust-deniers
have begun to rely on the testimony of
Ivan Lagace,
who apparently said
at the Zündel trial
and later
in print
that it takes six or eight hours per body.
The IHR has a lot of nerve complaining that survivors' testimonies
contradict each other on technical details like cremation time -- it
can't even get its own story straight!
The discrepancy between the IHR's estimates and the actual time (more
like 30 minutes) is chiefly due to the fact that the IHR is confusing
military-industrial crematoria with everyday civilian crematoria.
When they say "professional crematory operators," they mean
people like Lagace, whose job is to cremate one corpse at a time, with a
coffin, in an oven designed to incinerate even the largest bones into a
fine ash for the next of kin to take home. This situation is obviously
not comparable to the situation at Auschwitz-Birkenau during the Second
World War.
For example, Lagace would never even consider mixing or
"comingling" the ashes of one deceased person with those of
another. Lagace and the IHR forget that two or three emaciated corpses
could be inserted into each "muffle." This would, of course,
never be done in a civilian, commercial establishment.
Also, the Auschwitz furnaces were designed to run continuously,
using the heat energy produced by the burning of previous bodies to
keep the oven hot for the next bodies. After they were fired with
coke to their proper operating temperature at the beginning of the
day, they required little or no extra fuel to operate. This was a
technical achievement that is well-documented (see Gutman et al.,
Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp, 1994, pp.
185-187ff). Lagace claims that there must be a "cooling
off" period between each body incinerated, which shows a profound
ignorance on his part as to how the ovens worked. Lagace claims that
continuous operation would have caused the Auschwitz ovens to break
down, but again, he simply does not understand the difference between
everyday civilian crematoria and military-industrial crematoria.
Also, typically, a commercial crematory operator will burn a corpse
for an extended period to remove all traces of carbonized flesh, i.e.,
to whiten the bones. Even so, such processes only extend the total
cremation time to between two and four hours, and not the six to eight
hours that Lagace claimed. Lagace forgets that such cosmetic concerns
were not of importance to the Nazis. But these errors and others are
dealt with in the reply to
question 45.
Those errors aside, there is still simply no question about the
burning times of the ovens. In 1939, the firm of Topf and Sons was
awarded a contract to build a Dachau furnace which had an estimated
capacity of one corpse per hour per muffle (times two muffles). By
increasing the air pressure, by July 1940 they had produced a furnace
that could burn just under two corpses per hour per muffle (again, times
two muffles). It required three hours of maintenance per day, a far cry
from the twelve hours per day claimed by the IHR in
question 45.
(See Gutman et al., op. cit., pp. 185-186, 189-190.)
The crematoriums that were eventually installed at Auschwitz-Birkenau
were massive. They were capable of disposing of several bodies per
muffle in half an hour or so, and they could run for days at a time
without maintenance. (There were difficulties eventually, however, and
several of the ovens were out of service for months at a time.) Topf
and Sons was awarded a patent in 1951, and the patent also states that a
single muffle can cremate a corpse in half an hour.
Photographs of the furnaces in Krema II are available.
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