Auschwitz Engineers in Moscow

After the end of World War Two, the Soviets arrested four leading engineers of the engineering company J.A. Topf & Sons. Among other things, they had planned and supervised the construction of the Auschwitz cremation furnaces and the ventilation systems of the rooms said to have served as homicidal gas chambers. Between 1946 and 1948, Soviet officials conducted numerous interrogations with them.

The protocols of these interrogations were discovered in a Russian archive in 1993. Several mainstream scholars have since pointed out that the Topf engineers confessed during their interrogations to have willingly assisted in the construction of homicidal gas chambers, and in building the cremation furnaces to dispose of the bodies of those murdered. However, these scholars blatantly ignore the fact that, with their cruel incarceration and interrogation methods, Soviet interrogators always managed to extract any desired confession from any defendant. This is reflected here by the fact that the Topf engineers had adopted the Soviet's anti-fascist polemical terms, and often simply repeated in the affirmative the loaded questions they had been asked.

This work analyzes these interrogations by putting them into the context of the vast documentation on the Auschwitz crematoria and related facilities. It shows that every single "confession" of the Topf engineers contradicts both established facts and even the orthodox narrative: For example, their description of the alleged "gas chambers" and how they supposedly operated is completely wrong. They claimed mass gassings of Greek Jews for the summer of 1942, although the first Greek Jews arrived at Auschwitz only in March 1943. They insisted that, due to a lack of corpses, they could test the Birkenau furnaces in early 1943 only after waiting several days for the victims of a mass gassing. However, during that time, hundreds of inmates died every day of a raging typhus epidemic, so there was no shortage of bodies to cremate, hence no need to wait. Furthermore, allegedly because the existing crematoria proved to be insufficient, one of the engineers claimed to have invented, in the summer of 1942, a mass-cremation device for industrial-style mass murder. However, that invention was made at the peak of the catastrophic typhus epidemic in Auschwitz, many months before the Birkenau crematoria were built, and the patent application for the device clearly speaks of the sanitary disposal of the victims of infectious diseases, not mass murder.

Interestingly, when it comes to things the Topf engineers were intimately familiar with, they told the truth: they described the properties and performance of their cremation devices accurately, independently confirming that they could cremated only roughly one body per hour and muffle, and that attempts at cremating multiple bodies at once did not have any advantageous result. This pulls the rug out from underneath the orthodox narrative.

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