Polish-Jewish Relations: 1,300 Keyword-Phrase-Indexed Book Reviews (by Jan Peczkis)

Eyewitness Auschwitz: Three Years in the Gas Chambers, by Filip Muller. 1979. Stein and Day Publishers, New York

Auschwitz Gas Chambers: Most Jews Had No Idea of the Unfolding German-Made Holocaust

The author was one of the few Sonderkommando in Auschwitz-Birkenau that observed the mass gassings, was forced to cremate those that were murdered, and yet who lived to tell about it. I focus on items of lasting interest.

JEWS DID NOT COLLABORATE WITH THE NAZIS OUT OF FEAR OF THEIR OWN LIVES

In the Foreword, prominent Holocaust scholar Yehuda Bauer summarizes and briefly analyzes Filip Muller’s work. Bauer concludes, “…some will emphasize the fact that most of the Jews going to the gas chambers had no inkling of what was happening to them…” (p. xii).

Let us focus on this. According to the oft-repeated standard exculpatory narrative, Jews collaborated with the Nazis out of a desperate attempt to save their own lives. This exculpation assumes, first of all, that most ghetto Jews realized that the Nazis were going to kill all the Jews. Clearly, this exculpation is false: Most ghetto Jews did not think that their lives were in danger, not even when they found themselves at the very doors of the gas chambers! Other reasons must be sought for Jewish-Nazi collaboration.

NO JEWISH EXCLUSIVISM: AUSCHWITZ WAS UNIVERSAL

Nowadays, we have Jews trying to monopolize Auschwitz, and we hear Jewish indignation at the fact that the Polish government at one time mentioned the many nationalities of the victims at Auschwitz. Ironically, former Jewish Sonderkommando Muller has a much better grasp of the situation at Auschwitz than do many of today’s Holocaust supremacists. He comments, “Auschwitz was a place where every European language was spoken; it was also a place where people died, not only from starvation, sickness and epidemics, but from being battered to death, killed by having phenol injected into their heart, or driven into the gas chamber.” (p. 2).

AUSCHWITZ GAS CHAMBERS: NO SPECIFIC JEWISH-ONLY WAY OF DYING AT THE HANDS OF THE NAZIS

Murder is murder, regardless of how it is achieved. Yet part of today’s mystification of the Holocaust, designed to elevate the Holocaust in the public imagination, involves the association of gas chambers and “industrial genocide” with the Holocaust. This is ironic for several reasons. First of all, most of the 6 million murdered Jews did not die in gas chambers or though “industrial genocide”. Furthermore, the Nazis first designed their system of gas chambers and crematoria for use on the handicapped, and only later did they co-opt these for use on Jews. For more on this, see:

https://www.jewsandpolesdatabase.org/2022/11/12/industrial-genocide-mythical-significance-not-invented-for-use-on-jews-mauthausen-gas-chambers-massive-austrian-overabundance-in-nazism-austrian-coverup-horwitz/

Finally, even in locations in which the Nazis systematically gassed Jews on a large scale (Birkenau), they did not consistently use mass gassing on Jews. Muller writes, “The killing of innocent victims in the gas chamber was not the only means of mass murder in the crematorium of Auschwitz. In the gas chamber of the crematorium–we used to call it the mortuary–they practiced another kind of execution, one that we had often witnessed at the black wall of Block 11. If a transport of less than 200 people arrived at the liquidation then, as a rule, they were killed not by gassing but by a bullet through the base of the skull.” (p. 44). Clearly, the Nazis were driven by pragmatism, and not by some kind of mystical sense of destiny in killing Jews.

SONDERKOMMANDOS WERE TRICKED BY THE GERMANS INTO BECOMING SONDERKOMMANDOS

Muller informs us, “To fill up empty spaces in the Sonderkommando the SS employed all manner of deceptions. A friend of mine was among the many prisoners taken in by their tricks. One day he was told that strong and healthy men were wanted for well-paid work in the Bata shoe factory 200 kilometers away. Eagerly and suspecting nothing he volunteered for this work. When a little later he was taken to the crematorium he realized that he had been tricked: but by then it was too late.” (p. 51).

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GERMANS OFTEN DIRECTLY FOUND FUGITIVE JEWS

According to the standard Holocaust narrative, promoted most recently by the likes of Jan Grabowski and Barbara Engelking, fugitive Jews were out of reach of the Germans and at the complete mercy of the Poles. The low survivorship of fugitive Jews in German-occupied Poland is automatically blamed on Polish denunciations by “Polish collaborators.

All this is far from the truth. Fugitive Jews were still very much “within reach” of the Germans, and the Germans were perfectly capable of finding fugitive Jews on their own. Muller describes such instances, “In the ghettos of Polish towns there were always individuals or small groups who tried to escape. Most of these attempts, undertaken long before the liquidations of the ghettos, came to a tragic end. Members of the Katowice Gestapo used police dogs to unearth the fugitives in their secret hiding-places, mostly in shelters hastily dug in wooded areas, and dragged them out of their burrows like rabbits. Afterwards they were taken to the crematorium at Birkenau where a bullet finished them off.” (p. 71).

JEWS THEMSELVES GAVE AWAY THE HIDING PLACES OF FUGITIVE JEWS

At various times, Jews betrayed other Jews in hiding, whether deliberately or inadvertently. Muller describes the latter case, “One day I was able to have a last conversation with a small group of Jewish families who had been caught. For four months, so they told me, they lived in dugouts near Sosnovits [Sosnowiec], leaving their hiding places only at night to get a breath of fresh air and also to provide themselves with the bare necessities of life. When their money ran out, their supplies dried up too. Hunger and thirst, cold and disease, took them to the brink of despair. In the end they were given away by the constant crying of their hungry and feverish children. SS patrols who were always prowling around with their dogs tracked them down. Without questioning or trial they were brought to Birkenau from where there was no return.” (p. 71).