About 2 hours.

About an hour and a half, although the larger bones require further processing afterwards.

Well, which is it, 1.5 or 2? More recently, the Holocaust-deniers have begun to rely on the testimony of Ivan Lagace, who apparently said at the Zündel trial and later in print that it takes six or eight hours per body.

The IHR has a lot of nerve complaining that survivors' testimonies contradict each other on technical details like cremation time -- it can't even get its own story straight!

The discrepancy between the IHR's estimates and the actual time (more like 30 minutes) is chiefly due to the fact that the IHR is confusing military-industrial crematoria with everyday civilian crematoria.

When they say "professional crematory operators," they mean people like Lagace, whose job is to cremate one corpse at a time, with a coffin, in an oven designed to incinerate even the largest bones into a fine ash for the next of kin to take home. This situation is obviously not comparable to the situation at Auschwitz-Birkenau during the Second World War.

For example, Lagace would never even consider mixing or "comingling" the ashes of one deceased person with those of another. Lagace and the IHR forget that two or three emaciated corpses could be inserted into each "muffle." This would, of course, never be done in a civilian, commercial establishment.

Also, the Auschwitz furnaces were designed to run continuously, using the heat energy produced by the burning of previous bodies to keep the oven hot for the next bodies. After they were fired with coke to their proper operating temperature at the beginning of the day, they required little or no extra fuel to operate. This was a technical achievement that is well-documented (see Gutman et al., <cite>Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp</cite>, 1994, pp. 185-187ff). Lagace claims that there must be a "cooling off" period between each body incinerated, which shows a profound ignorance on his part as to how the ovens worked. Lagace claims that continuous operation would have caused the Auschwitz ovens to break down, but again, he simply does not understand the difference between everyday civilian crematoria and military-industrial crematoria.

Also, typically, a commercial crematory operator will burn a corpse for an extended period to remove all traces of carbonized flesh, i.e., to whiten the bones. Even so, such processes only extend the total cremation time to between two and four hours, and not the six to eight hours that Lagace claimed. Lagace forgets that such cosmetic concerns were not of importance to the Nazis. But these errors and others are dealt with in the reply to question 45.

Those errors aside, there is still simply no question about the burning times of the ovens. In 1939, the firm of Topf and Sons was awarded a contract to build a Dachau furnace which had an estimated capacity of one corpse per hour per muffle (times two muffles). By increasing the air pressure, by July 1940 they had produced a furnace that could burn just under two corpses per hour per muffle (again, times two muffles). It required three hours of maintenance per day, a far cry from the twelve hours per day claimed by the IHR in question 45. (See Gutman et al., op. cit., pp. 185-186, 189-190.)

The crematoriums that were eventually installed at Auschwitz-Birkenau were massive. They were capable of disposing of several bodies per muffle in half an hour or so, and they could run for days at a time without maintenance. (There were difficulties eventually, however, and several of the ovens were out of service for months at a time.) Topf and Sons was awarded a patent in 1951, and the patent also states that a single muffle can cremate a corpse in half an hour.

Photographs of the furnaces in Krema II are available.

Zyklon-B, a hydrocyanic gas.

Amazingly, even this four-word answer contains two errors.

First, Zyklon-B is the carrier of the gas, not the gas itself. Zyklon-B is the trademarked name for a substance, usually wood chips or diatomaceous earth, which has been impregnated with both the liquid form of hydrogen cyanide, and an irritant.

Second, the gas in question is hydrogen cyanide (sometimes called prussic acid). "A hydrocyanic gas" is nonsensical, because there is only one gas which is hydrocyanic, and that is hydrogen cyanide gas.

Hydrocyanic gas from "Zyklon B," a commercial pesticide that was widely used throughout Europe.

The answer as revised is correct.
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28. For what purpose was, and is, this gas manufactured?

The IHR says:

For the extermination of the typhus-bearing louse. It is used to fumigate clothing and quarters. It is readily available today.

Nizkor replies:

That's right. But it was also used to kill people on a massive scale. HCN (hydrocyanic acid, the gas released by Zyklon- has a "side effect" which the SS found very useful: it kills human beings quite well.

In fact, the same concentration kills humans and other mammals much faster than it kills lice and bugs. The concentration used for delousing, 8-10 grams per cubic meter, kills humans very quickly, though it takes up to 32 hours to get rid of bugs and clothes moths. Even when a lower concentration is used, death comes swiftly.

In fact, HCN is used to kill people in gas chambers today, in the United States.

A rather technical paper on the nature and mechanism of cyanide is available.
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29. Why did they use this instead of a gas more suitable for mass extermination?

The IHR says:

If the Nazis had intended to use gas to exterminate people, far more efficient gases were available. Zyklon-B is very inefficient except when used as a fumigation agent.

Nizkor replies:

Lies. Zyklon-B was used partly because it is extremely efficient at killing people. True, there are other gases that are comparably efficient. However, Zyklon-B was unique in that it also had these two advantages:

• It was easy to pack, store and transport -- it could be ordered from an ordinary chemical company, and came in sealed tins.
• It was widely available, as it was used for delousing. In fact, probably over 90% of the Zyklon used at Auschwitz was used for delousing purposes. See e.g. Gutman, Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp, 1994, p. 215.

As noted in the answer to question 28, it is extremely efficient for mass murder. In fact, HCN, the gas released by Zyklon-B, is used today to execute condemned people in the United States.

In fairness, it should be pointed out that today's execution gas chambers generate HCN by chemical reaction, not by simply allowing it to evaporate, as was done with Zyklon-B. But there were no problems with the method the Nazis used; it worked quite well.

As the Nazis found out soon enough, the bottleneck in the extermination process was the incineration of the bodies, not the gassing itself. A thousand people could be killed in a matter of minutes, or an hour or two at most, counting the entire operation from arrival at the camp to the final ventilation of the gas chamber.

Yet to burn the bodies of those thousand people took quite a long while. Large, expensive furnaces were purchased, and many Reichsmarks were spent on maintaining them, but burning bodies still took at least ten times longer than actually killing people. The Nazis even reduced the size of the gas chambers after they realized that the bottleneck would always be the furnace capacity -- see Gutman et al., Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp, 1994, p. 224.)

So the arguments about difficulties with the gassing process, or efficiency of the gas, are just red herrings. See also the appropriate section of the Auschwitz FAQ.

Anyway, if there are supposedly so many gases that are "far more efficient," why doesn't the IHR just name some? Greg Raven was asked to do exactly this in on Usenet in 1994-95, but, after being asked many times, he was only able to state:

Carbon monoxide would be faster than Zyklon B, for example, as would any of numerous nerve gasses.

As has already been explained, the speed of the killing agent is not the bottleneck in the killing process, so saying which gas is "faster" misses the point. That aside, carbon monoxide is not in fact "faster" than HCN, which is one of the fastest-acting poisons there is. See the paper written on the subject for details.

In fact, the Nazis did try using carbon monoxide, in the Action Reinhard camp Treblinka, and also at Maidanek, where bottled CO and piping apparatus was found. But, as Höss explained in his memoirs, he found the existing methods inefficient and decided to switch to Zyklon-B instead.

"Nerve gasses" is not a specific enough claim to address.

The only other instance of a specific gas being named, that we have yet found, is a laughable demonstration of ignorance. In the so-called "Lüftl Report," Walter Lüftl writes:

Anyone familiar with the danger involved in handling hydrocyanic acid gas (which is explosive and extremely toxic) must wonder why the SS executioners didn't use carbon dioxide gas -- which is easier to handle and completely harmless to the executioner -- to kill the prisoners who were allegedly poisoned with Zyklon.

Any textbook on physiology confirms that in the event of anoxia (oxygen deprivation), disturbances of brain functioning appear after five seconds, followed by unconsciousness after 15 seconds, and brain death after five minutes. This is how animals are put to sleep, painlessly and surely. It also works with people.

This is sheer stupidity. Carbon dioxide simply asphyxiates its victims, drowning them in oxygenless air. Unconsciousness would take much longer than fifteen seconds. Death would not be painless, it would be about as painful as strangling or drowning. And carbon dioxide must be transported compressed in bottles, since "dry ice" cannot be sublimated quickly enough to kill anyone.

How many bottles of carbon dioxide would it take to completely replace the normal, oxygenated air in a gas chamber? How much would it cost to transport and refill these bottles? Wouldn't it be easier to use a small amount of a poison that must only achieve a few hundred parts per million to be deadly, instead of having to reach a concentration sufficient to displace the oxygen from the air?

In fact, Friedrich Berg, dismisses carbon dioxide in another article published by the IHR, and available on CODOH's's web site:

Carbon dioxide is not really any more poisonous than ordinary water. Most toxicology handbooks do not even mention it. When mentioned at all, it is generally classified as a "non-toxic, simple asphyxiant."

So this is another internal contradiction.

The "Lüftl Report," is available on-line in a textfile on Nizkor, or as a web page at the IHR's web site. Search on the text "physiology"
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30. How long does it take to ventilate fully an area fumigated by Zyklon-B?

The IHR says:

Normally about 20 hours. The whole procedure is extremely involved and technical. Gas masks have to be used and only well-trained technicians are employed.

Nizkor replies:

No. The "20 hours" figure is irrelevant for a variety of reasons.

First of all, the figure is intended to apply to ordinary, unventilated, commercial- or home-use buildings. One should not reenter an ordinary building within that period of time, because there is little if any forced ventilation. Furthermore, ordinary items like carpets, drapes, furniture, and so on lengthen the time required to restore fresh air. The Nazi gas chambers, on the other hand, were empty concrete rooms, forcibly ventilated, so even five minutes was enough to recycle the air (see Gutman, Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp, 1994, p. 232). Some gas chambers did not have forced-ventilation systems; in those, the people who took the bodies out wore gas masks.

Also, there is a tremendous safety factor allowed for. Safety standards don't apply in wartime, and especially not when the aim is to kill a thousand people as quickly as possible. The Germans had plenty of experience with gas in general, and Zyklon in particular, since it was used so often in delousing.

Perhaps the Holocaust-deniers' next claim will be that the Germans never could have shot down any Allied planes, because it is impossible to fire a bomber's machine-gun while one is properly wearing a safety-belt according to FAA regulations.

Furthermore, the SS used Sonderkommando, prisoners used as forced labor, to remove the corpses from the gas chambers and cremate them. Needless to say, they didn't care much if the Sonderkommando would be hurt by the remaining gas. They were operating under a death sentence anyway -- the first thing each new Sonderkommando unit did was to burn the corpses of the previous unit.

If the "20 hours ventilation period" above was true, this would mean that the corpses of people executed using cyanide gas in US gas chambers would remain tied to the chair 20 hours after they were killed.

See also question 31, and the appropriate section of the Auschwitz FAQ.
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31. Auschwitz commandant Hoss said that his men would enter the gas chamber ten minutes after the Jews had died and remove them. How do you explain this?

The IHR says:

It can't be explained because had they done so they would have suffered the same fate as the previous occupants.

Nizkor replies:

It can be explained very easily, and it has been explained, many times, in works available in any good library. Or, anyone who takes a little time to think will come up with what the solution was.

The solution that the Nazis used, in the largest gas chambers, was to install ventilation systems that could completely recycle the air in under five minutes (see Gutman, Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp, 1994, p. 232). There were also wire-mesh devices to remove the Zyklon-B from the chambers, improving the efficiency of the ventilation process.

Other gas chambers did not have ventilation systems, and the first people to enter those gas chambers wore gas masks until the gas was diffused and made harmless.

It was important to ventilate the gas chambers quickly and get on with evacuating the bodies and cremating them -- this was what took a lot of time. The gassing itself only lasted a few minutes.

See also question 30.
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32. Hoss said in his confession that his men would smoke cigarettes as they pulled the dead Jews out of the gas chambers ten minutes after gassing. Isn't Zyklon-B explosive?

The IHR says:

Highly so. The Hoss confession is obviously false.

Nizkor replies:

Now this is really absolute nonsense.

The minimal concentration causing explosion is 56,000 parts per million. A concentration of 300 parts per million kills humans within a few minutes. As a reference, one can look at "The Merck Index" and the "CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics," or consult any manual dealing with toxicity and flammability of chemicals. There would have been no real danger of explosion even if there were a bonfire burning in the gas chamber while the execution was taking place.

In fact, the Nazis' own product literature on Zyklon-B, Nuremberg document NI-9912, points this out:

Danger of explosion: 75 grams of HCN in 1 cubic meter of air. Normal application approx. 8-10 grams per cubic meter, therefore not explosive.

(By the way, the 8-10 grams per cubic meter is the concentration needed for exterminating lice and other insects, not human beings. Mammals require a much lower concentration and much shorter exposure time.)

A transcription of the NI-9912 document is available on Bradley Smith's web site, incidentally, including the above quotation. So the "revisionists" obviously know it exists. They just choose to ignore it. Mr. Smith calls the document "inconvenient" -- that it may be...but to whom?

In any case, would the gas be explosive ten minutes into the ventilation process, after enough of it had been swept away to render the room nontoxic? Not a chance. If the Sonderkommando were smoking cigarettes, they were obviously not wearing gas masks, so they would be dead anyway unless the concentration were far below 100 parts per million!

Why on earth does the IHR even bother to claim that explosion was a possibility? If there were anywhere near enough HCN to cause an explosion, any smoker would be long-dead from the poison anyway!

The facts are that the IHR has ignored basic reference works, failed to notice the Nazis' own dismissal of this point, and jettisoned common sense. This says a great deal about their level of scholarship.

And, for a brief digression...

It seems to say something about their honesty as well. Though they ignore NI-9912 here, where it is inconvient, they actually use it in other IHR publications! The so-called Lueftl Report, available from Greg Raven's web site, lifts figures from this document without a citation, when it says:

The evaporation of Zyklon B requires as many as 32 hours or as few as six hours, depending on whether the ambient temperature ranges from five to 30 degrees Celsius.

So they quote NI-9912 when it suits their purposes, and ignore it when it doesn't. That pretty much sums up Holocaust "revisionism."

And as long as we're on the topic, we might as well mention: that statement, even just in and of itself, is blatant academic dishonesty. NI-9912 does mention the figures of 6 to 32 hours, depending on temperature. However, those numbers are how long it takes the insects to die, and they have nothing to do with the evaporation time of Zyklon-B. Here is the original text of the captured Nazi document:

Time needed to take effect: 16 hours, unless there are special circumstances such a closed-in type of building, which requires less time. If the weather is warm it is possible to reduce this to a minimum of 6 hours. The period is to be extended to at least 32 hours if the temperature is below 5 degrees Centigrade.

The strength and time as above are to be applied in the case of: bugs, lice, fleas, etc., with eggs, larvae and chrysalises.

Again, the above is available on Bradley Smith's web site and is called "inconvenient" -- again, inconvenient to whom?
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Anything else????

No. A reward of $50,000 was offered for such proof, the money being held in trust by a bank, but no one came up with any credible evidence. Auschwitz, captured by the Soviets, was extensively modified after the war and a mortuary was reconstructed to look like a large "gas chamber." It is now a big tourist attraction for the Communist Polish government.

No. Auschwitz, captured by the Soviets, was modified after the war, and a room was reconstructed to look like a large "gas chamber." After America's leading expert on gas chamber construction and design, Fred Leuchter, examined this and other alleged Auschwitz gassing facilities, he stated that it was an "absurdity" to claim that they were, or could have been, used for executions.

Regarding the $50,000 reward offer: it was paid, to the last cent (actually $90,000), to Mel Mermelstein, an Auschwitz survivor who took the IHR to court. Here is the statement made by the judge:

The Honorable Thomas T. Johnson, on October 9, 1981, took judicial notice as follows:

Under Evidence Code Section 452(h), this court does take judicial notice of the fact that Jews were gassed to death at the Auschwitz Concentration Camp in Poland during the summer of 1944

and

It just simply is a fact that falls within the definition of Evidence Code Section 452(h). It is not reasonably subject to dispute. And it is capable of immediate and accurate determination by resort to sources of reasonably indisputable accuracy. It is simply a fact.

The IHR complains that they were not given a chance to dispute this fact, but then the American court system is not meant to be a place for people to try to prove crackpot theories. No "credible evidence" was produced because there was no call for it -- a courtroom is not the place to rehash the work of historians over the last half-century.

Besides, "credible evidence" means only what Holocaust-deniers want it to mean. Michael Shermer, in an open letter, has offered to take the IHR up on a similar offer, but only if they precisely define ahead of time what they will accept as evidence. He has received no reply. (In fact, to date, his letter has not even been printed.)

After this trial, both Mermelstein and the IHR sued each other for libel, but both decided not to go to court. The Holocaust deniers claim this is a "stunning victory" which "nullifies the result of the first trial." Nonsense: the two were unrelated, and the second trial would have had nothing to do with the gas chambers of Auschwitz.

As with most legal proceedings, the details get quite complicated. Great detail, including copies of several official documents, is available in the FTP archives.

Regarding Fred Leuchter's fraudulent "Report," a separate FAQ is available.