THE RUDOLF REPORT

GERMAR RUDOLF · THE RUDOLF REPORTpossible. Hence, the new stairways did not have corpse chutes as theold stairway. Several other cost-reducing changes were made on crematoriumIII. 183 Defects in the quality of the cheap material used forcrematoria IV and V must have led to their early breakdown (see nextchapter).The original basement stairways with corpse chutes of crematoriaII and III had already been finished by then, although they could onlybe accessed with difficulty. That these stairs were built at all, indicatesan over-hasty transmission of the old plans for the main camp to thenew situation in Birkenau.The walls of the morgue consist of double brick masonry with alayer of tar in between for insulation. 183 The interior walls are plasteredwith a hard, cement-rich material, the ceiling and support pillars ofreinforced concrete show the marks of wooden planking and are thereforenot plastered. The roof, made of reinforced concrete, is isolated bya layer of tar, which is protected from environmental and mechanicaldamage by a rather thin layer of cement covering it. The layers of tarboth on top of the roof as well as between the two brick walls was indispensableas a water barrier due to the high ground water in theswampy region of Birkenau. Both morgues had several drains.5.4.1.2. The Obsessive Search for “Criminal Traces”Jean-Claude Pressac was the first researcher to dig through themountains of documentation at the Auschwitz Museum and laterthrough the documentation of the Zentralbauleitung stored in Moscow.He was also the first one to create the now-widely used term “criminaltrace”. Based on the total absence of documents proving the erectionof homicidal ‘gas chambers’, Pressac resorted to a semantic trick byattributing a criminal significance to harmless documents, which weresaid to constitute a clue that something was not quite right about thecrematoria at Auschwitz. Based on the progress in research, however,all these ‘criminal traces’ compiled by Pressac and others and accompaniedby sometimes fantastic cerebral acrobatics have collapsed. Themost notable of them are listed and briefly refuted in the following.183 J.-C. Pressac, op. cit. (note 67), p. 187, costs and survey of construction design of crematoriaII and III.94