The Nizkor Project: Remembering the Holocaust (Shoah)

The Leuchter Report: Introduction & Editorial Notes


This document provides a counterpoint to assertions commonly made by those who deny that anyone was gassed at the Auschwitz-Birkenau and Treblinka death camps during World War II; who, in fact, deny that the gas chambers even existed. (At least a million people were ruthlessly exterminated at Auschwitz, and seven-hundred-thousand more at Treblinka - the worst of the Nazi extermination camps in terms of victims slaughtered.)

The most prestigious source in Germany regarding the crimes of the Nazis during WW2, the "Institute for Contemporary History" in Munich, sums up the facts in a recent publication. (For the full document, get pub/orgs/german/ifz/ifz.report)

Treblinka (district Warschau, general government) from the end of July 1942 on had three gas chambers and received at the start of September 1942 furthermore ten larger gas chambers. Up to the dissolution of the camp in November 1943 altogether 700,000 Jews were killed here by carbon monoxide.

Auschwitz-Birkenau (in the formerly Polish, in 1939 adjoined to the "Reich" upper eastern Silesian area, south eastern of Kattowitz): The extermination camp in Birkenau, established in the second half of 1941, was joined to the concentration camp Auschwitz, existing since May 1940. From January 1942 on in five gas chambers and from the end of June 1943 in four additional large gassing-rooms gassings with Zyklon B have been undertaken. Up until November 1944 more than one million Jews and at least 4000 gypsies have been murdered by gas.

(Get pub/camps/auschwitz /auschwitz.faq1, and ~/auschwitz.faq2)

(Note that these numbers include only people gassed - many were murdered using more "conventional" means)

This is by no means a replacement for serious research - just an expose of common frauds like the "Leuchter report", and a guide to scholarly sources.

This document was prepared by Danny Keren and Jamie McCarthy, and edited to its present form by Ken McVay. Comments, corrections, and additions are welcome.

Documents cited in this work which are available from our server are noted in the form (Get path/filename). The site ftp.nizkor.org accepts anonymous ftp logins.

The original plaintext version of this file is available via ftp.


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