Müller was such a productive liar that this article is divided in 3 parts.
Part 1
by Carlo Mattogno
Müller’s First Statement
The Statement Published by Ota Kraus & Erich Kulka (1946)
In the following pages, I reproduce in full the first two statements by Müller in chronological order, and summarize the others, given their excessive length. In this way, I present an exhaustive picture of Müller’s testimony, providing all requisites for a sound historical evaluation of it.
One of the first general historical descriptions of the Auschwitz Camp, the 1946 book The Death Factory (Továrna na smrt), written by Ota Kraus and Erich Schön (Kulka), two former camp inmates, contains a statement by Müller on Auschwitz,[1] which I quote from the published English translation of the book, with an eye to the original text and the German translation. Original text missing in, or significantly different from, the published English translation is added here in brackets (Kraus/Kulka 1966, pp. 156-160; subsequently referred to as the Kraus-Kulka Statement):
“I came to Auschwitz I on April 20th, 1942, with the first Slovak convoy and at first I worked in the camp like all the other prisoners.
On May 24th, 1942, I was with a friend of mine. We were terribly thirsty and had somehow managed to get some water. For this we were punished by being sent to the crematorium to work at the gas chamber. When we arrived, we found some hundreds of corpses, fully dressed, and luggage lying about on the ground. We were filled with unspeakable horror as we saw what we were expected to do. Five prisoners were already working there. We had to carry the corpses to the furnaces.
The SS man in charge of us, a man of about twenty named Starck, struck me with a stick, remarking that I had only to finish my work and then I too would go into the furnace. Two Slovak doctors in their despair told Starck they would rather he shot them dead.
Having had no previous experience of stoking furnaces, we bungled things badly. Fire broke out at the crematorium, which made it impossible for the corpses to be burnt. The SS blamed us for sabotage, and four of our comrades were killed on this account.
When the fire was put out, Starck brought seven more prisoners. We loaded the remaining corpses onto three lorries, and then followed the most ghastly journey I have ever undertaken.
It was late at night and I sat in the last lorry on a heap of corpses. Behind us was a small car marked on the sides and roof with a large Red Cross; the headlights dazzled us and lit up our grim load. All the time we were guarded by SS men, armed with automatic rifles.
The lorries struck out across a field behind the camp and stopped at a marshy pit. Here we threw the corpses into the water in the pit. This work went on until three o’clock in the morning, after which we returned to the camp. They locked us in a dark cell in Block 11, the execution block, where we waited, dirty and stained with blood, without any food or water, until noon the following day.
When we were let out, we each got a loaf of bread.
Then they took us out to our pit on a fire engine; it was at Brzezinka, near the newly built concentration camp at Birkenau. We had to wait a long time while they drained the water from the pit. Not far from us we saw another group of prisoners digging some new pits. We discovered later that this was the Sonderkommando from Birkenau.[2]
Then it started! They drove us down into the pit where we stood up to our waists in the swamp. Our task was to place the corpses on one heap so as to make room for more. SS officers and men stood on the edge of the pit and amused themselves watching the disgusting work we had to do. They kept throwing stones at us to make us work faster. Finally, when we had sprinkled the corpses with chlorine and earth, they took us back to the camp where we were again put in the dark cell which we had occupied up to August, 1943. We worked at the crematorium from morn till night.
I experienced a great deal at the crematorium and I saw sights that the world ought never to have to hear about. It was not intended that I, an eye witness, should survive, nor did I myself suppose that I should ever be at liberty again. I do not want, nor would I be able to describe everything in detail. There is too much of it and it is so horrible that many would not believe it. And even today I cannot grasp all that I witnessed.
At Auschwitz crematorium I had to be present at the executions performed by SS Palitsch who carried out the sentences passed by the Camp Gestapo. He was a professional mass murderer. His victims, mostly political prisoners, were made to line up in fives against the wall, and Palitsch merely fired. …
June 17th, or 18th, 1942, was a beautiful sunny day. The camp was thoroughly tidied up at great speed. We noticed that the SS were all on edge. Evidently something was in the wind but we had no idea what it could be, except that we suspected that some V.I.P. was due to visit the camp.
At about half-past nine, a high-ranking SS officer in a white uniform appeared at the entrance to the crematorium enclosure, accompanied by two SS officers. It was Himmler himself. He made a careful inspection of everything. We were in the room containing the clothes of persons who had been executed when he came round. At the sight of these blood-stained garments, he turned to our SS chiefs in great surprise and asked why they were in this state. Dissatisfied with the answer he was given, he flew into a rage and thundered: ‘We need the clothing of these accursed dogs for our German people! It’s a waste to gas people in their clothes!’
After this the gas chambers were converted into mock bathrooms with water-pipes and taps, and the people had to undress before they went to their death [were gassed].
In the summer of 1943, the furnaces and chimneys at the Auschwitz crematorium caught fire. Nazi engineers renovated them, but three months later the same thing happened again. Meanwhile four crematoria had been started up at Birkenau, and it was to this camp that we were now transferred. We joined the Sonderkommando and lived in Block 13 in the men’s camp, BIId.
Filip Müller, during the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial
Part of the work at the Auschwitz crematorium was the filling of urns. We put ash and dust from a great heap into urns, closed them with metal lids, and stamped them with the name of a victim, the date of his birth and death; the details were taken from lists supplied to us by the Political Department. The urns were packed in wooden crates, about 8 in. × 8 in. × 16 in., and addressed to the relatives who had to pay 2000 crowns per urn. It goes without saying that no urns were sent to the relatives of the Jews.
Many of these urns were sent to Bohemia and Moravia, but none of them contained the ashes of the person whose name was marked on top. When I was transferred from Auschwitz I to Birkenau, there were about 4000 urns there already filled in advance.
At Birkenau life was a little freer. I found several fellow-countrymen in the camp. After evening roll-call I used to climb over the wall of our isolated block and visit my friends in the camp, more especially at the locksmiths’ workshop. I found that while they had been able to form a clear idea of the general extent and function of Birkenau, they did not know all the details that I was able to pass on to them. We were continually making plans to escape but never succeeded in bringing it off.
Work at the Birkenau crematoria was the same as at Auschwitz, except that at Auschwitz the crematorium was only a small affair whereas at Birkenau it was an enormous factory – four factories, in fact – turning out death on an assembly line.
I started work at Crematorium I.[3] I was proposed for the post of Kapo, since my prison number was lower than those of all the others working there [at the crematorium], which meant that I was the oldest prisoner. I did not accept this function, and by way of punishment was transferred to Crematorium IV. Here there was more work since the mechanical apparatus was not so efficient [as in Crematorium I] and burnt only about 1500 people every twenty-four hours.
Here I witnessed the ‘scientific’ experiments performed by SS doctors Fischer, Klein and Mengele. Between 100 and 150 men and women, aged from eighteen to thirty, were selected [from the transports] and shot – unlike the other prisoners who were gassed. A piece of flesh was then cut from their thighs and forwarded to the Bacteriological Institute at Rajsko [where bacteria were cultured]. One of the SS, who was acting as assistant to an SS doctor, told me all about it, remarking that horse meat would have done just as well but would have been a waste.
The youngest women also served as a source of blood which would be drained from their veins for several minutes until they collapsed, after which they would be thrown half-dead into the fire. The blood was poured from a pail into special bottles which were then hermetically sealed. I was told that it was urgently needed at the military hospitals.
In the summer of 1944 SS Forst [Voss], who up to then had been our chief, was replaced by SS Moll, apparently because of his lack of organizing ability and energy. Moll reorganized everything and ordered pits to be dug for the corpses. If there was a lot of work to do, he would even lend a hand himself in throwing the corpses into the pits, rolling up his sleeves and working at double speed. This fanatical madman, who neither smoked nor drank, often declared that an order was an order, and that if the Führer were to order him to burn his own wife and child he would not hesitate to do so.
Moll ‘s sole source of pleasure was human blood and shooting, and his favourite amusement was to play with children whose mothers were waiting for death. He would go up to the mother with a smile, kiss her child, give it a piece of chocolate, and then take the child away with the promise that he would be coming back. Then he would throw the child alive into sizzling human fat [that was draining in channels from the burning pyre]. At the end of the day, when he had done this several times, he would pronounce with satisfaction: ‘I’ve done enough for the Fatherland today!’, after which he would order his servant, a French prisoner, to bring him something to eat.
In his spare time he used to go fishing in the Vistula. Twice he took me with him to his private flat at Auschwitz, to bring clothing for his wife and son. His son, aged about seven, asked when he would bring him some more pictures and storybooks. I had the impression the lad knew that the things his father brought him were from people killed at Birkenau.[4]
I saw nationals of almost all the nations of Europe die in the gas chambers. Those from the Czech Jewish family camp were the only ones to go to their death singing their national anthem. [French female inmates sang the Marseillaise while on trucks riding to the gas chambers.]
I am the oldest member of the Auschwitz and Birkenau Sonderkommando and the only one to have been through everything [who survived everything]. I only escaped death as a result of a number of lucky chances; it was indeed a miracle.
What one went through seems incredible to me today, like some sort of evil dream. It was much more terrible than could ever be described.”
1.2. The Deposition at the Krakow Trial (1947)
On December 11, 1947, Müller testified as a witness for the prosecution during the sixteenth session of the trial against the Auschwitz camp garrison (the Krakow Trial, November 25 to December 16, 1947). This testimony is still unpublished, hence deserves to be reported in full:[5]
“I was Inmate No. 29236 of the Auschwitz Concentration Camp. I arrived at the Auschwitz Concentration Camp in April 1942. In May 1942, I was assigned to Block 11, and in that block, I suffered terrible harassment. It consisted primarily of the fact that we could not get any water to drink at all. As a result of this, I was forced to go at 6 in the morning in search of the leftover tea that was in the courtyard of Block 11, so I had to ‘organize it,’ as they said in a certain way in the camp. When doing this, the Oberscharführer of Block 11 caught me, and led me to a special room. In the afternoon, Camp Commandant Aumeier arrived in that room, who of course asked me what I had done. Then he took me to another room and, after taking 6 other prisoners, he led us all to the gate of the Auschwitz Camp. By order of Aumeier, the guards took us from the gate of the Auschwitz Camp to the old crematorium of Auschwitz. So, from May 1942 until January 18, 1945, I was present at the gassing [przy gazowaniu] in the crematorium. After we arrived at the crematorium, Aumeier handed us over to his subordinate Unterscharführer Stark, who led us with many blows to the gas chamber and opened it. In that chamber was the first gassed Slovakian transport. These inmates had been gassed in their clothes. Since we were being beaten without interruption and had no experience of running the crematorium facilities, we started a fire in the Auschwitz crematorium. As a result, the gassed victims could not be cremated.
On Aumeier ‘s initiative, two trucks were taken that same evening, at midnight, and the rest of the corpses, about 800, were loaded onto the trucks, and brought to the vicinity of Birkenau. We reached Birkenau at about one in the morning, and were escorted by the Red Cross, which illuminated us from behind with a spotlight. In this car was the defendant Aumeier, as well as the head of the Political Department Grabner. While being violently beaten, we were forced to unload the corpses quickly into pits in which there was still water, so that the work lasted about two days. After that work, bloody, dirty, we were taken to Block 11 and locked up in Cell 13. We were led there by another Unterscharführer who was on night duty, and all six of us were locked up. The following day, around two o’clock, after lunch, we were taken to the gate of the Auschwitz Camp, and there we waited for the fire engine, painted green, in which were Aumeier and Grabner.
We got into the car, and went to the place where we had thrown the bodies the day before. First, we had to pile up the corpses in the mud in a heap, but since it couldn’t be done with precision, we were beaten good and proper. For all this work, the main initiative came from the head of the Political Department Grabner and from Aumeier. Then we doused the corpses with chlorine, and were again locked up in Block 11, Cell 13.
We stayed in Cell 13 of the Bunker for a year and a half, that is, until the Auschwitz crematorium was liquidated. I met the defendants Aumeier and Grabner, that is, I saw them at least once a day, almost until the Auschwitz crematorium was liquidated, so I would like to mention a couple of incidents about their behavior.
At that time most of the Kapos of the crematorium were Germans. One day, a Kapo had a bandaged hand. Unterscharführer Grabner went to him and asked him:
‘Fritz, why is your hand bandaged?,’ to which Fritz replied, ‘I have killed five Jews again.’ ‘Imbecile, you don’t use your hand for this, you have iron [żelazo] for this, if you kill five, you will have [another] ten [to kill], and if you kill ten, you will have [another] twenty.’
In the Auschwitz Camp, I also saw that the tissue of executed non-Jewish inmates was used for various purposes. These people were often shot in the presence of Dr. Mengele and others, whose names I do not know, and in the presence of Aumeier and Grabner. Immediately afterwards, the flesh from their calves was placed in crates, so that on average 6–8 crates of flesh were taken in a week.
It sometimes happened that a German commission came with swastikas on their arms, and asked in the presence of Aumeier and Grabner if it was human flesh. Aumeier replied: ‘Horse meat could also be used, but what a pity [to waste] horse meat!’
Unterscharführer Grabner was also guilty of the fact that urns were shipped with completely false ashes of the victims, that is, 3,000 urns were filled with ordinary ash, which were then stored in the SS hospital in front of the crematorium, then, by direct order of the Political Department, they were shipped off.
I saw Aumeier and Grabner shooting Russian prisoners in Block 11, as well as Polish political prisoners. When it seemed to Aumeier and Grabner that this [the shooting] was proceeding too slowly, they hit them even before they died, and they said faster [prędzej].
When Polish political prisoners shouted ‘Long live free Poland,’ before dying, they separated them and shot them in the abdomen, so that they had an agonizing death lasting two or three hours.
Untersturmführer Grabner, as I have already said, was the main accomplice and promoter of the crematorium at Auschwitz, not Birkenau.
There were cases where corpses with severed heads were brought from Kattowitz: these corpses were brought by the Kattowitz Security Police.
Grabner and Aumeier also participated in the selection of sick and weak people in the hospitals, and handed them over for execution. Untersturmführer Grabner participated in all the selections for the crematorium until 1943. All selections that took place in the crematorium were made in the presence of Grabner until 1943, and also in the presence of Aumeier. Hauptscharführer Palitzsch and Unterscharführer Stark usually did the shooting, and they always received detailed instructions from them during executions.”
1.3. Later Statements
Müller also testified as a witness for the prosecution during the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial (December 20, 1963 to August 20, 1965), where he was subjected to a very long interrogation during the 97th and 98th sessions (October 5 and 8, 1964).[6] It took place in German, a language that the witness, a native to the Slovak language, knew but had not mastered completely, which is why his answers are at times cumbersome and unclear, and often the interpreter Stegmann had to intervene to explain to the Court what he meant.
As mentioned earlier, Müller published his memoir Sonderbehandlung/Auschwitz Inferno in 1979, and between 1978 and 1981, he granted a long-winded interview to the French Jewish activist Claude Lanzmann, which was recorded and later included in Lanzmann’s documentary Shoah, which exists also in an abridged book version (Lanzmann 1985).
Overall, these later statements contain conspicuous discrepancies with respect to the two earlier ones, the most-important of which lies in the fact that in the early statements he focused his alleged experiences almost exclusively on the crematorium of the Auschwitz Main Camp, but in his later statements, he predominantly reports on his alleged activities at the “Sonderkommando” of Birkenau.
In the 1946 testimony, the account relating to Birkenau is fleeting and vague, completely devoid of any reference to the alleged extermination process, and is practically reduced to a fatuous anecdote. At that time, little or nothing was known about the alleged gas chambers of Birkenau, and the two editors of Továrna na smrt were former Auschwitz inmates and personal friends of Müller. Hence, it would have made no sense for him to hide from his friends the presumably most-relevant aspect of his experiences at the camp – meaning his alleged activities in the Birkenau crematoria. The fact that in this statement he spoke for the most part only about the Auschwitz crematorium confirms, therefore, that in 1946 he knew nothing of the Birkenau crematoria. This issue is of fundamental importance for establishing the credibility of the witness.
During the Krakow Trial, Müller did not mention his alleged experiences at Birkenau at all. Although it is true that this trial’s focus was on the defendants Grabner and Aumeier, who were mainly implicated in the use of the alleged gas chamber inside the old crematorium of the Main Camp, it is also true that the witnesses for this trial were chosen on the basis of their ability to testify; nothing would have prevented Müller from testifying also on the crematoria of Birkenau, if he had had relevant information to report on this.
It should also be noted that Hans Stark, a former SS Untersturmführer in charge of inmate admissions at Auschwitz-Birkenau, was a completely marginal figure in Müller’s two earlier statements, whereas his deposition during the Auschwitz Trial is completely centered around Stark, thus transforming him into the main actor of the claimed homicidal gassings. The reason for this is easy to see: at the Auschwitz Trial, Müller was called to testify especially against Stark. This is another example of Müller’s testimonial opportunism.
In practice, his entire “eyewitness account,” with all the value he attached to it, almost completely unfolded in the crematorium at the Main Camp:
“I experienced a great deal at the crematorium and I saw sights that the world ought never to have to hear about. It was not intended that I, an eye witness, should survive, nor did I myself suppose that I should ever be at liberty again.” (Kraus-Kulka Statement)
Therefore, if Müller subsequently spoke of his alleged experiences in the Birkenau crematoria, the relevant statements cannot be truthful and necessarily have to come from Holocaust literature. During the 98th session of the Frankfurt Trial, he candidly asserted (Fritz Bauer…, p. 20717):
“I have a certain amount of literature in my library, which contains a number of authentic pictures showing this concentration camp.”
He exploited this literature in an unscrupulous way, up to the most-brazen plagiarism, as I will document later. His main sources are in fact:
- Myklós Nyiszli ‘s 1946 book I was Doctor Dr. Mengele ‘s Anatomist at the Auschwitz Crematorium (in its 1961 German serialized translation);
- Ota Kraus ‘s and Erich Schön ‘s Czech-language book The Death Factory (1946/1957a).
- Stanisław Jankowski ‘s deposition of April 16, 1945 for the Auschwitz crematorium, Danuta Czech ‘s German-language articles “Kalendarium of Auschwitz” (1961-1964) for the general history of the camp
- Rudolf Höss ‘s autobiographic writings, published in the German original in 1958 (Broszat), for various information.
Before retracing the literary provenance of Müller’s statements on Birkenau’s “Sonderkommando,” it is necessary to examine whether at least his narration relating to the crematorium at the Auschwitz Main Camp is credible.
Part 2 Part 3
Comments