Archive/File: camps/auschwitz Krema-I.001
(NOTE: Section 2.1 from auschwitz auschwitz.faq1)
 
2.1 Krema I - The Experimental Gas Chamber

   David Cole has produced a videotape which filmed the director of the
   Auschwitz State Museum admitting that the gas-chamber known as "Krema I"
   was constructed after the war ended, on the direct order of Stalin.
   Foner (Foner, Samuel P.  "Major Historical Fact Uncovered" SPOTLIGHT
   Vol.  XIX, Number 2, January 11, 1993) tells us:

      The videotape on which Piper makes his revelations was taken in
      mid-1992 by a young Jewish investigator, David Cole.  It has
      just been released, on January 1, 1993, although Cole announced
      his project at the 11th International Revisionist Conference at
      Irvine, California last October.

   The small gas chamber of Krema I was used for gassing for a short
   time, and then converted into an air-raid shelter; after the war, it
   was reconstructed to look as it did when it was used for gassing.
 
   Breitman offers the following as background information to the
   development of Zyklon B as a killing device, and (more specifically)
   to the early use to which Krema I was put:

      Auschwitz had been receiving trainloads of Soviet commissars and
      other POW's who were subject to liquidation.  Ho"ss's men had
      shot previous shipments of Russian prisoners, but on September 3
      Ho"ss's enterprising subordinate Hauptsturmfu"hrer Fritsch
      thought of an expedient new method based on the camp's own
      experience.  The buildings, many of them former Polish army
      barracks, were full of insects, and the camp administration had
      previously brough in the Hamburg pesticide firm of Tesch and
      Stabenow to get rid of them.  Two experts had fumigated
      particular buildings with a patented insecticide, Zyklon B, a
      crystalline form of hydrogen cyanide that turned gaseous when
      exposed to the air.  (Ho"ss, "Commandant of Auschwitz," 175.
      Interrogation of Ho"ss, 14 May 1946, NA RG 238, M-1019/R 28/63)
      On September 3 Fritsch decided to experiment.  First he crammed
      five or six hundred Russians and another 250 sick prisoners from
      the camp hospital into an underground detention cell.  Then the
      windows were covered with earth.  SS men wearing gas masks
      opened the Zyklon-B canisters to remove what looked like blue
      chalk pellets about the size of peas, creating a cloud of poison
      gas.  After they left, the doors were sealed.(Ho"ss, Commandant
      at Auschwitz, 173.  See also Yehuda Bauer, "Auschwitz," in
      Ja"ckel and Rohwere, eds., Der Mord an den Juden, 167-68) Ho"ss
      wrote later that death was instantaneous.  Perhaps that was what
      he was told.  But he was not present to witness the event; he
      was away on a business trip.  Other sources indicate that even
      the next day not everyone was dead, and the SS men had to
      release more insecticide.  Eventually all the prisoners died.
      When Ho"ss returned to Auschwitz, he heard about the successful
      experiment.  On Eichmann's next visit to Auschwitz, Ho"ss told
      him about the possibilities of Zyklon-B, and, according to
      Ho"ss, the two decided to use the pesiticide and the peasant
      farmstead for extermination.(Ho"ss, Commandant, 175.  From the
      History of KL Auschwitz, New York, 1982, I, 190)(Breitman, 203) 


[Auschwitz]                                                     [Page 4]
   SS-Unterscharfu"hrer Pery Broad described a gassing in Krema I while
   giving testimony (Museum, 176):

      "....  The `disinfectors' were at work.  One of them was
      SS-Unterscharfuehrer Teuer, decorated with the Cross of War
      Merit.  With a chisel and a hammer they opened a few
      innocuously looking tins which bore the inscription `Cyclon, to
      be used against vermin.  Attention, poison!  to be opened by
      trained personnel only!'.  The tins were filled to the brim
      with blue granules the size of peas.  Immediately after opening
      the tins, their contents was thrown into the holes which were
      then quickly covered.  Meanwhile Grabner gave a sign to the
      driver of a lorry, which had stopped close to the crematorium.
      The driver started the motor and its deafening noise was louder
      than the death cries of the hundreds of people inside, being
      gassed to death."

   Mu"llers eyewitness account of gassings in Krema I, in April, 1942, is
   recounted in Hilberg's "The Destruction of the European Jews,":

      The Auschwitz procedure evolved in stages.  In April 1942,
      Slovak Jews were gassed in Crematorium I, apparently with their
      clothes on.  Later, deportees from nearby Sosnowiec were told
      to undress in the yard.  The victims, faced by the peremptory
      order to remove their clothes, men in front of women and women
      in front of men, became apprehensive.  The SS men, shouting at
      them, then drove the naked men, women and children into the gas
      chamber. 

   In The Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, Jozef Buszko (Jagiellonian
   University, Krakow) writes: "The first, relatively small gas chamber was
   built in Auschwitz I.  Here the experimental gassing using Zyklon B gas
   first took place, on September 3, 1941.  The victims were 600 Soviet
   prisoners of war and 250 other prisoners.  After that experiment, the
   firm J.  A.  Topf and Sons received a contract to build much larger,
   permanent gas chambers connected with very large crematoria in
   Auschwitz-Birkenau, where the mass exterminations were mainly carried
   out.  Altogether four such installations -- II, III, IV, and V -- were
   built in Birkenau." (Encyclopedia, Vol. I, 113) 

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