Anti-semitism: Myth and Hate from Antiquity to the Present

DENYING THE HOLOCAUST
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Broad, who was convicted at the Auschwitz trials held in Frankfurt am
Main from 1963 to 1965, testified that “Auschwitz was an extermination camp,
the largest such camp in history,” 46 and he described the mass murder in the
gas chambers that he witnessed: “As soon as the last person had entered, the
SS guards disappeared. ... Suddenly the door was closed; it had been gasproofed
with rubber and reinforced with iron fittings. Those inside heard the
heavy bolts being secured. A deadly, paralyzing terror gripped the victims.
They started to beat on the door, hammering it with their fists in helpless rage
and despair.” 47
Anna Pawelczynska, a Polish sociologist and a non-Jewish survivor of
Auschwitz, described the camp:
First place in this sequence of dying was assigned to prisoners of Jewish descent
... and the proof was their mass murder through the use of assemblyline
techniques ...
Selection was carried out by German doctors, who designated those capable
of work. ... Those considered incapable ... were delivered up to immediate
death. ... The camp staff ... perfect[ed] the technology for killing
as many people as quickly and as efficiently as possible. On top of this some of
the SS who took part in the mass murders carried out their duties by thinking
up individual little amusements which fulfilled a sadistic need. Documents
that have been preserved, especially documents of the Sonderkommando, made
up of forced prison labor and mostly of Jewish origin, describe in detail the
techniques of the gas chambers, the crematory ovens, and the obliteration of
the traces of industrialized genocide. 48
Auschwitz consisted of two main camps, Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II-
Birkenau; around them were constructed some fifty satellite camps, in which
inmates worked as slave laborers for the German armaments’ industry. The
working pace at the factory and the ill treatment by guards were so brutal, reported
a physician and inmate, that “while working many prisoners suddenly
stretched out flat, turned blue, gasped for breath, and died like beasts.” 49
Deniers insist that Auschwitz was no more than a large industrial center
producing for the German war effort. But if Auschwitz were simply an industrial
complex, why were babies and young children sent there? And how do we
account for their sudden disappearance? And what happened to those Jews
whose names appeared on the list of deportees from various ghettos and collection
centers, but not on the list of those registered as new arrivals at the
camp? The unregistered, of course, after being disgorged from the cattle
trains, did not survive the selection process. They were immediately gassed, as