ConfusedJew wrote: ↑Sun May 11, 2025 11:32 pmThe scrolls were buried during the war and were written by authors were not writing for attention or survival as the authors expected to die. They hoped the truth would be discovered later. That contemporaneity makes them especially reliable: there was no incentive to lie, and no chance for postwar embellishment.
I find it noteworthy that you, as a Jewish Holocaust believer, find these types of "testimonies" to be the most convincing. I bet if you'd ask a revisionist what he'd consider the strongest evidence in favor of the Holocaust, he'd say wartime German documents, not accusations by Jews.
To be honest, from a purely historiographical perspective, the significance of these scrolls is very limited and for that reason, orthodox historians have not utilized them a lot in their reconstruction of the Holocaust, relying instead on other famous Sonderkommando witnesses. But let's tackle them one by one. Much of the following comes from the textual analyses made by Rudolf and Mattogno, with some of my own opinions. To start off, the provenance of these "scrolls" is questionable at best (see earlier comments by Callafangers), and the contents of all of them hint of the fact that they were written at a time when the Holocaust story/rumor had already been firmly established in post-war Europe. What's odd, to say the least, is that they all appeal to future Holocaust literature, foreseeing an entire field of history dedicated to their experiences, and contain popular propaganda themes from Holocaust literature. And strictly speaking, there is no evidence any of these scrolls actually date from pre-liberation Auschwitz (1944). Notably, most of these scrolls were, inexplicably, "found" by seemingly random people at random dates, meaning they would have been able to freely stroll the former camp grounds and dig for objects, which heavily undermines the integrity of the crime scene and would have made it possible for anybody to plant and "find" anything they wished.
1. Chaim Herman.
This is the earliest scroll. It was allegedly found in February 1945 "in a pile of ash" at the railway siding right outside the crematoria by a French medical student. It was not until 1967 that the Auschwitz Museum received a photocopy of a typewritten transcription of the original manuscript. This scroll is interesting because it is the only early manuscript supposedly written by an identifiable inmate with a registration number - Chaim Herman, inmate 106113. The text is directed towards family members, but gives no details whatsoever about the supposed extermination method, instead appealing to future Holocaust literature. He mentions the dwindling numbers of the "Sonder Kommando" and their impending "liquidation", but what would his family members have garnered from any of this? What was the "Sonderkommando", and what was its task? What exactly was "Crematorium 2" and why did it have to be destroyed? Herman answers none of it, and instead invokes future Holocaust literature which would provide all of the answers. Herman mentions the demolition of Crematorium III on November 6, but in another scroll by an unknown author, the date is given as after November 25. Importantly, Herman's letter does not mention any details about mass murder or gassing, and instead presupposes that the reader is already aware of the term "Sonderkommando" and its tasks. Herman speaks of "proofs" but gives no details whatsoever that would allow a future person to figure out what was actually going on. Why not mention gasssings? Why not mention Zyklon B? Why not mention the fake morgues?
2. Salmen Gradowski.
This one was found by the Soviets in a tin can in March 1945. Just like the previous text it was "deciphered", edited and published by Ber Mark, who's history puts into question the provenance and reliability of the published text. The letter is dated September 6, 1944, and contains a number of details and claims that immediately reveal the actual source of the text to be the Soviet propaganda mill which occupied the camp at this time. For example, the author (there is no evidence a "Salmen Gradowski" ever existed nor is his registration number known) mentions "millions" had been killed, mirroring the notorious Soviet propaganda claim of 4 million dead. Despite supposedly dating from September 6, he mentions "tens of thousands of Jews" from the Czechoslovakian regions being exterminated there at that time, despite the first transport from Theresienstadt arriving only on September 26, according to Danuta Czech. Gradowski furthermore claims to have been deported to Auschwitz on a train that passed the Malkinia station right next to Treblinka on December 7, 1942, which is odd. Why not just have these Jews gassed in Treblinka instead of taking them all the way to Auschwitz? Gradowski makes one fleeting mention of "the gas chamber" (singular), and that's all we get in terms of details of his work in the Sonderkommando.
There is also another Gradowski manuscript published in 1977. Here's the incredible story of how it was found:
“When, in March 1945, I returned ‘home’ to my birthplace Oswiecim (the Germans called it Auschwitz and built a death camp there), after having spent four years in concentrations camps, I found myself standing on the grave of millions. […] A month after the end of the war, I had the good fortune and privelege to find my wife who had been deported to a women’s camp in Lower Silesia where she was liberated. We decided right away to leave Oswiecim, the House of Sacrifice of millions, and together with a small group of friends we began to plan our immigration to Palestine. At this time, local inhabitants used to come to us in order to sell various items they brought – gold, and other valuables. Shortly before we departed from the town, a young man came to me with a tin can that he had dug up at the crematorium in Birkenau-Brzezinka. From the can, which was partly rotted and rusted, we extricated pages of a notebook with dense handwritings in Yiddish. I perused several pages of the introduction and saw immediately that I had an important document before me. Although I did not know who the author of the work was and also did not know its exact contents – I immediately felt obliged to buy the manuscript, paid the desired amount, and the document came into my possession. I have spent many months copying the pages, some of which I have been able to read without any trouble. A large portion, however, required considerable effort and a long time to separate pages stuck together and to decipher what was written. Some words had been erased or were completely illegible. I marked these places in the manuscript thus: (…missing…).
Despite the fact that the text of this manuscript is supposed to have been written clandestinely and haphazardly deposited in the earth surrounding Crematorium II, the text is extremely lengthy and lachrymose in tone, lacking any sort of detail on the actual crimes being committed, instead appealing to future Holocaust literature for details. It's written more like a 60's Holocaust novel than a witness account, absolutely dripping with moralism and atrocity propaganda. The text implies that enormous ditches were dug for shooting Jews from the edge of the ditch, which is not documented for Auschwitz. He uses the term "bunker" for the Crematoria gas chambers, not knowing this term was allegeldy used for the converted cottages outside of Birkenau (which he knows nothing about). A cremation allegedly took "a few minutes". He does not mention the number of Zyklon B holes. He claims 5000 Jews were cremated in "not much time" (it would have taken 8 days of continuous operation). The text also contains various ridiculous anecdotes of heroism and bravery in the face of the SS, which again is odd considering it was supposed to be a witness account buried to inform humanity of the crimes committed by the Germans. Here's one anecdote:
Behind them comes the mother, who stops suddenly, turns toward the officials, and begins to address them with unheard-of courage: [‘]Murderers, bandits, criminals without shame! Today, you’re going to kill us, innocent women and children. And then you’ll blame us, the unarmed and defenseless, for starting the war! It’s us, me, and my child, we started this war! Be careful, you robbers! You believe you can use our blood to cover up your failure at the front. But you’re going to lose this war. You know very well, how many serious defeats you suffer every day on the Eastern front. Think about it, you rascals! You can do anything you want, now, without worrying about it, but the day of vengeance will come! Great Russia will win, and will avenge us! We’ll tear you to pieces! Our brothers from all over the world will give you no peace, until they have revenged our innocent blood!
Here's another example:
“They continue to parade, row after row, of naked young women. And again, the marching suddenly stops. A splendid blonde young girl stops and she, too, turns towards the bandits: [‘]You horrendous criminals! You devour me with your greedy eyes, you ogle the nakedness of my seductive body. Of course, this is your moment. In civilian life you could never even have hoped for such a spectacle. You, shameless criminals, have found yourselves the perfect lair, here, to satisfy your perversion. But you will not enjoy this pleasure for very long. The game will soon be up for you, you will not succeed in exterminating all the Jews. You will pay for everything.[’] Suddenly she leaps forward and slaps Oberscharführer Vost, kapo, commanding officer of the crematoria, three times across the face. A rain of truncheon blows showers down upon her shoulders. She enters the bunker with her head broken, covered in blood.”
Once inside the gas chamber they start singing
"The Internationale", "the national anthem of the great Russian people", and - revealingly - the "Tikva", which was the anthem of the Zionist movement and of the State of Israel, strongly implying this entire text was written after the State of Israel had been formed. Indeed, Gradowski seems to concur: "This anthem reminds them that the ancient people of martyrdom, the people of Israel,
will survive and will rebuild their own country on earth within the near future"...
3. Leib Langfus.
This scroll was supposedly found by a resident of the town of Auschwitz in the ruins of Crematorium III in April 1945, but wasn't handed over to the Auschwitz Museum until 1970! It was a massive 109 pages long, but pages 1-99 make no mention of the Holocaust or extermination but simply tells the story of the leadup to the deportation. This transport is said to have arrived on December 6, 1942, and sadly pages 100-105 containing the details of the work of the Sonderkommando, are allegedly "illegble". Only page 106 is intact:
As many people were crammed in [as possible]. It’s difficult to imagine that you could fit so many people in such a small [room]. Those who didn’t want to go in there, were shot for [resistance] or torn to pieces by dogs. Over the course of a few hours, they could have suffocated from lack of oxygen. The doors were then hermetically sealed, and then gas was thrown in through a small hatch [singular] in the ceiling.
The publishers of the Langfus texts inform the reader that the "bunker" mentioned by Langfus refers to the cottage outside of Birkenau, but it's clear from the actual text itself that Langfus could not have been solely referring to neither Bunker 1 nor Bunker 2, because he only uses the singular, and mentions only one small hatch
in the ceiling in this regard, so that one must assume he used it interchangeably for all gas chambers. Langfus, like many of the early propaganda witnesses, claimed the bodies came out "blue" from the gas chamber, which was a common propaganda trope based on the German word for hydrogen cyanide. He also claimed that the Germans set cremation pits ablaze and threw dead inmates into the already burning pits (an impossibility given the radiation of heat from the pits), another popular propaganda theme in the immediate post-war period.
4. "Unknown Author".
According to the aforementioned Ber Mark, the author is actually Leib Langfus, but the Auschwitz Museum disagrees with this. Mark claims the original manuscript is stored in the Jewish Historical Institute at Warsaw but they deny being in possession of the document. It was supposedly found in 1952 on the site of Crematorium III but the chain of custody is somewhat unclear. The text basically contains a number of minor anecdotes of transports of Jews being gassed while performing heroic acts of bravery and resistance, most of which don't appear in the Auschwitz Kalendarium or are otherwise incongruent with the known history of deportations to Auschwitz. Quoting Mattogno:
The anecdotes of the invectives and speeches by the victims, of which I have provided several examples already earlier, presuppose, among other things, the existence of an appropriately trained squad of inmate interpreters and stenographers in the “Sonderkommando” translating and recording these memorable sayings for posterity! The following anecdote, which is even more ridiculous, is situated “am Anfang des Jahres 1943” “at the beginning of 1943.” The “gas chamber” (“bunker” in the French text; Mark, p. 250) was packed full, and yet, incredibly, only “one Jewish boy remained outside”: what “gas chamber”? When? Where? It is useless to look for answers in this series of imaginary narrations. An Unterscharführer, obviously anonymous, massacred him with blows, leaving him wallowing in his own blood, but suddenly he arose and “all of a sudden the maltreated boy, who had been lying motionless, jumped to his feet and began to regard, quietly and silently, his cruel murderer with his childish gaze. The Untercharführer burst into loud, cynical laughter, took out his revolver and shot the boy”
Some of these stories mention invented SS soldiers with stereotypical German names like "Forst" or "Vost", but one story mentions (Otto?) Moll, who was a real member of the SS at Auschwitz.
One of the manuscripts also talk about Belzec, but the reliability of these stories can be glanced from the following detail:
Later, when the Germans have penetrated deeply into Russia, eight large barracks were built in the forest, in which they installed tables and benches; there, the Jews from Lublin, Lvov and other districts were crammed in together and electrocuted.
For those of us familiar with early Holocaust propaganda, electrocution was a very popular theme around 1944 to 1946, especially for the Reinhard camps but also for Auschwitz.
Mattogno summarizes it thusly:
Naturally, all this information was supplied by the usual eye-witnesses, who, we know neither how nor why, instead of being “electrocuted” at Bełżec, became members of the Sonderkommando of the crematoria at Birkenau! Ber Mark in fact assures us that these presumed events “are related according to the testimonies of different deportees transferred to Auschwitz and Birkenau after the crushing of the rebellion at Belzec”. The problem is that there was never any rebellion at Bełżec, and electrocution as a method of mass murder, although claimed for Bełżec by many early sources, is today summarily rejected as untrue.
5. Salmen Lewental.
There are two manuscripts supposedly written by Lewental, one found in 1961 and another in 1962. The most significant of these manuscripts is largely illegible but one page mentions a transport from Malkinia, passing by Treblinka with Jews unfit for work, and arriving in Auschwitz. It's difficult to understand why they weren't just gassed in Treblinka. He also mentions gassings and burnings in the supposed "bunkers" outside Birkenau, but those passages don't appear in Ber Mark's edition, which raises serious doubts about the "deciphering" of the manuscripts by Seweryn Zalmen Gostyński. As with all of these stories, none of the details add up with the modern-day version of the Holocaust. For Lewental, there was a single large room for gassing, with "boarded up windows", and only one small gas opening, whereas the orthodox story tells us the windows were bricked up, with many rooms inside, and with several gas windows. On top of that, he mentions the impossibly fast gassing time of "a few minutes". All we can glance from these texts is that many contradictory rumors were circulating in the camp regarding gassings. Lewental also mentions that he arrived on December 12, 1942, but was only assigned to the Sonderkommando on January 25, 1943, after a short stint at the Monowitz camp. Considering this, it's odd that he would be able to recount the gassing of 1,800 Jews in the "bunkers" on December 12, the same day he arrived. He also confuses dates and events and even the gas chambers themselves, forcing Ber Mark to concede that Lewental made numerous "mistakes".
More likely, Lewental and his inmate buddies just rehashed various propaganda themes circulating in the camp at that time. It is a well-known fact that the term "bunker" for the gassing cottages outside Birkenau was never used by any contemporary witnesses until after early 1945. Textual analysis of witness testimony and underground propaganda reports from the resistance movement demonstrates that the term "bunker" mostly referred to either the old crematorium in the Auschwitz Main Camp, to the basement in Block 11 or to the arrest cells therein, or to the machine-gun nests around Birkenau.
For Gradowski and the unknown author, the term "bunker" is used for the the gas chambers in Crematoria II and III. But Langfus and Lewental used it for both, without explaining the difference and why a peasant cottage would be referred to as a "bunker". The most famous "bunker" witness ever, Szlama Dragon, the witness upon which most of the "bunker" mythology rests, arrived on the same transport as Langfus and both of them were allegedly picked out for the Sonderkommando, but Dragon famously never used the term "bunker" in his February 26, 1945 interrogation, only referring to mere "gas chambers". So the fact that Langfus used this term is extremely significant for the dating of the document. The term was completely unknown to everybody until at least March 1945, meaning the Langfus and Lewental scrolls can safely be assumed to date from after this date. Possible explanations mentioned by Mattogno is either that the scrolls were back-dated and not actually written pre-liberation, or that the "decipherers" took significant liberties in their transcriptions.
6. Marcel Nadsari.
This scroll was found in 1980 during excavation work and was written in Greek. The author was deported to Auschwitz on April 11, 1944. Interestingly, Nadsari survived the war and published his own memoires about Auschwitz just a few years later, but, oddly, he never testified during any post-war trial as a former member of the Sonderkommando and died in 1971. As with all supposed Sonderkommando witnesses, none of his claims add up. He assumes a packing density in the gas chamber of 14 people per square meter, he mixes and matches details from Crematorium II and III, he mentions the ridiculous story of the fake Red Cross truck with Zyklon B, emptying the gas chamber after only 30 minutes (no ventilation), cremating corpses without fuel (he expressly mentions that no fuel was needed "because of all the fat"), that a corpse only generated 640 grams of ashes (in reality around 3.5 kg for a 70 kg corpse), exaggerated death tolls, etc. All that being said, Nadsari's text is suspiciously streamlined and conspicuously the original Greek manuscript has never been made public. What little can be found online, according to detailed analysis by Mattogno, indicates that significant liberties were taken with the transcription of the document and its translation from Greek (see HH#41, p 287 and on).
