Flaws and Limitations in Chemistry of Auschwitz

[Nessie]

Presence of free-form cyanide is not a reliable marker of historical cyanide exposure

This is so stupid. To finally put this point to rest - Confused Jew acknowledges upthread that:

"HCN is highly volatile and water-soluble; it disperses and hydrolyzes rapidly

This is correct, and I'll be interested to see him weasel his way out of his own quote. To drive this point home, the boiling point of hydrogen cyanide is 25 degrees celsius and the freezing poiint is -15 degrees celsius. Upon boiling, the hydrogen cyanide will simply evaporate, dispersing into the atmosphere via diffusion.

Finding trace free associated cyanide in a location like this today and claiming it has been there since 1943 is the equivalent to seeing a cloud in the sky and saying the cloud has been there since 1943. Its simply moronic, childish, and displays reckless regard for anything approaching an honest conversation about the facts at play.

This is the entire point and reason of studying only the cyanide that has chemically bonded with the iron. It is locked-in, it is longterm stable, and it is a much much much better fingerprint into the past for us to investigate.

How much exposure to Zyklon B, does it take, for a wall to start staining Prussian Blue?

[Wahrheitssucher]

There's no point in giving him more temporary bans. He will never change. JewPT has already been banned twice for Ai plagiarism. And he was told he would get a permanent ban if he did it again. Then on his first day back we see he can't even go two posts without resorting to Ai.

An alternative explanation is that ‘confusedjew’ is not a person but is an Ai chatbot.

“An AI bot is a software application that uses artificial intelligence to perform automated tasks and respond to user input, often simulating human conversation.

Ai chatbots exist. E.g. virtual assistants like Siri and all those that provide customer support”.

He's clearly not serious and is apparently only here to defend his tribe and waste our time by spamming the board with low-effort slop. I feel I have to follow through here.

…every thread with him just goes around in pointless circles. He does zero research and his posts are not his own original thoughts. Consequently he doesn't understand what he posts and he doesn't remember what arguments he's already posted or what the responses were. It's impossible to have a worthwhile discussion with someone like this.

[HansHill]

Apologies getting to this late, and it seems I am still in time and Confused Jew hasn't been banned just yet. Some of the delay was caused by needing to actually verify if Confused Jew's quotes were real, given that he has been caught (in this thread nonetheless) fabricating and mis-attributing quotes, which is something I think we all take seriously. I credit the ever vigilant Wetzelrad for catching multiple of these fabrication.

Anyway onto the main course of this slop.

That is not "AI garbage". If you can't answer the question then fine, but banning me because you can't answer is lame.

This is directly from the Markiewicz report.

10 samples of plaster from the delousing chamber (Block No 3 at Auschwitz), 10 samples from gas chamber ruins and, in addition, 2 control samples from the buildings which, as living quarters, had not been in contact with hydrogen cyanide. Out of the 10 samples from the delousing chamber, seven contained cyanogen compounds at concentrations from 9 to 147 µg in conversion to potassium cyanide (which was used to construct the calibration curve) and 100 g of material. As far as the ruins are concerned, the presence of cyanide was demonstrated only in the sample from the ruins of Crematorium Chamber No II at Birkenau. Neither of the control samples contained cyanides.

If you can't explain why the controls expectedly showed no cyanide while the homicidal chamber did using the same exact method, you need to explain how it got contaminated. Otherwise, you are not doing serious scientific investigation and are just ignoring evidence because it disconfirms your theory.

Confused Jew's challenge here has been underlined by me, and I will answer it with his own quote from upthread, which was a correct quote:

....If results are near detection limits and possibly ambiguous, the only valid conclusion is “inconclusive data”, not “absence of residues.” Equivocal or low-signal measurements don’t demonstrate nonexistence — they just mean you can’t tell.

Now, the careful reader will notice that while Rudolf produces his results in the range of mg/kg which is the equivalent of PPM (parts per million), Markiewicz produces his results in µg/kg which is the quivalent of PPB (parts per billion). Ironically enough, Confused Jew continues in a subsequent thread to explain why this is problematic (for him), yet uses this as a critique againsts Rudolf (!):

Here Rudolf tries to explain away the results from the Markiewicz study and doesn't do a very good job in my opinion.

...when considering that they determined the cyanide content using photometry, we need to keep in mind that Meeussen et al. had clearly established that major amounts of carbonate can consistently result in reproducible false positives (see Table 26 on p. 302). It is therefore not far-fetched to posit that the readings Markiewicz and his colleagues obtained from their masonry samples did not reflect their cyanide content but to a major degree or maybe even exclusively their carbonate content.

This is not Rudolf "explaining away" the results, but rather simply "explaining" the purpose of a detection limit. I'm sorry Confused Jew, but your opinion that this isn't a good job, is irrelevant here.

So to address the original challenge with finality: the controls and homicidal gas chamber both reflect readings at or below the detection limit, which renders them unreliable according to Confused Jew's own logic earlier in the thread. He himself calls it "inconclusive data"

But! It gets worse for Confused Jew. He opens this very thread by attacking Rudolf for lack of reproducability. He has so far ignored my multiple explanations that it is Rudolf, not Markiewicz, who sought to reproduce results at or below the threshold. Here is me explaining this to Confused Jew upthread:

I think you are getting confused here. What the lack of reproducibility means in this instance is that the Fresenius Institute detected anomalous low-levels of HcN below the detection limit. The correct thing to do, is to corroborate these results and see can a positive be found again. When repeated by the Institute in Stuttgart, these false positives were not found again. This means Rudolf is very likely to be right, in that they were false positives, as they were, as described, non-replicable.

Here Confused Jew gets fiesty and makes another challenge:

Since all of you here are chemistry experts, would you like to explain to me how this works exactly and also why there was a false positive in the homicidal chamber but not in the living quarter controls?

This has been asked and answered but I will address it yet again anyway. According to Confused Jew's own logic here:

5. Analytically, being near a detection limit means signal-to-noise is low — not that the signal is false. Standard lab practice would report such results as trace detected, repeat tests, or improve sensitivity — not declare that nothing meaningful exists. The book offers no replicate data, calibration curves, or blank controls to justify calling these values “near detection limit” in the first place.

Markiewicz did NOT do this. Read that again - Markiewicz did not follow what CJ describes as "standard lab practice". Markiewicz simply denotes that readings at or below the detection limits are positives (!!) and moves on. No repeat tests, as Confused Jew is calling for here, as would be standard. Why the double standard Confused Jew? Rudolf has met his obligation here with a repeat test in the Stuttgart Institute, Markiewicz didn't, and you attacked Rudolf for what Markiewicz failed to do?

I will post this now and await more replies, as Mr Stubble has noted upthread, Confused Jew has already not responded to my earlier series of replies and I think he has alot of "research" to do.

That is, if he survives a final ban.

[ConfusedJew]

Presence of free-form cyanide is not a reliable marker of historical cyanide exposure

This is so stupid. To finally put this point to rest - Confused Jew acknowledges upthread that:

"HCN is highly volatile and water-soluble; it disperses and hydrolyzes rapidly

This is correct, and I'll be interested to see him weasel his way out of his own quote. To drive this point home, the boiling point of hydrogen cyanide is 25 degrees celsius and the freezing poiint is -15 degrees celsius. Upon boiling, the hydrogen cyanide will simply evaporate, dispersing into the atmosphere via diffusion.

Finding trace free associated cyanide in a location like this today and claiming it has been there since 1943 is the equivalent to seeing a cloud in the sky and saying the cloud has been there since 1943. Its simply moronic, childish, and displays reckless regard for anything approaching an honest conversation about the facts at play.

This is the entire point and reason of studying only the cyanide that has chemically bonded with the iron. It is locked-in, it is longterm stable, and it is a much much much better fingerprint into the past for us to investigate.

Most of the HCN did evaporate and disperse, but a tiny portion chemically bound itself to minerals and metals in the masonry before it escaped. That’s why trace residues could still be detected decades later.

After the gassing stopped and the space was ventilated, nearly all of that HCN escaped into the atmosphere and decomposed (within hours to days).

In any environment with moisture and reactive minerals, some molecules don’t just evaporate — they react.

Those cyanide ions (CN⁻) immediately bind to available metal cations — especially iron (Fe²⁺ or Fe³⁺) found in mortar, brick dust, or rust.

Once bound, they form stable metal–cyanide complexes such as ferrocyanide or ferricyanide.

Only a minute fraction — on the order of parts per million of the original gas — ever gets fixed this way. The rest truly does vanish. But those tiny bound amounts are enough for modern analytical chemistry to detect decades later.

[ConfusedJew]

Apologies getting to this late, and it seems I am still in time and Confused Jew hasn't been banned just yet. Some of the delay was caused by needing to actually verify if Confused Jew's quotes were real, given that he has been caught (in this thread nonetheless) fabricating and mis-attributing quotes, which is something I think we all take seriously. I credit the ever vigilant Wetzelrad for catching multiple of these fabrication.

There were no fabrications. I've fed the specific PDF into the LLM and told it not to reference any outside source and I am selecting the exact quote from the PDF. It just helps me dissect at 300 page document much more quickly.

[ConfusedJew]

This is not Rudolf "explaining away" the results, but rather simply "explaining" the purpose of a detection limit. I'm sorry Confused Jew, but your opinion that this isn't a good job, is irrelevant here.

So to address the original challenge with finality: the controls and homicidal gas chamber both reflect readings at or below the detection limit, which renders them unreliable according to Confused Jew's own logic earlier in the thread. He himself calls it "inconclusive data"

A detection limit is the smallest concentration of a substance that can be reliably detected by a given analytical method — meaning the instrument or test can distinguish it from background noise, but not necessarily measure it precisely.

In the Kraków forensic study (Markiewicz, Gubala, and Łabędź, Z Zagadnień Sądowych, 1990), the researchers reported a detection limit of about 3–4 micrograms (µg) of cyanide per kilogram (kg) of sample.

<3 µg/kg was below detection limit, meaning it was indistinguishable from background noise.

In Table 3, for Crematorium I, the cyanide ion concentrations range from 0 to 288 µg/kg, with several definite positive readings (28, 76, 80, 288).

The highest reading (288 µg/kg) is nearly 100 × higher than the limit of detection and squarely in the range of confirmed cyanide residue.

If 288 were the only non-zero number, it might suggest contamination or measurement noise — but it sits plausibly within a small cluster of real positives.

The Kraków team used a validated micro-diffusion colorimetric assay (pyridine-pyrazolone method) which repeated triplicate measurements for each sample, verification of positive results by re-analysis, and precision within about ±10–15 % for low-level samples.

That level of quality control makes random mis-readings (like a ten-fold error) very unlikely. A 288 µg/kg result could fluctuate by perhaps ±30 µg/kg, but not vanish entirely through re-testing.

[ConfusedJew]

....If results are near detection limits and possibly ambiguous, the only valid conclusion is “inconclusive data”, not “absence of residues.” Equivocal or low-signal measurements don’t demonstrate nonexistence — they just mean you can’t tell.

So to address the original challenge with finality: the controls and homicidal gas chamber both reflect readings at or below the detection limit, which renders them unreliable according to Confused Jew's own logic earlier in the thread. He himself calls it "inconclusive data"

This isn't true, the Markiewicz data showed samples above the detection limit. We can and probably should go deeper on that.

The results were not inconclusive.

If you look at Table 1, the controls show a reading of 0 across 8 different samples with 0 contamination or background noise. This sets a proper baseline.

[Nessie]

...Most of the HCN did evaporate and disperse, but a tiny portion chemically bound itself to minerals and metals in the masonry before it escaped. That’s why trace residues could still be detected decades later.

After the gassing stopped and the space was ventilated, nearly all of that HCN escaped into the atmosphere and decomposed (within hours to days).

...

The forced ventilation, described by Karl Schultze;

https://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic.php?t=61650

"The ventilation installation provided for a ten-times air exchange; it served to suck out the gas that had collected and pump in fresh air. The pipes of the ventilation, which I personally constructed for the gas chamber, were immured in the walls of the chamber."

Meant that there was limited exposure to the walls of the chambers, so there was little chance for any bonding in the walls. The gassing process, did not leave time to leave much residue.

[Archie]

Apologies getting to this late, and it seems I am still in time and Confused Jew hasn't been banned just yet. Some of the delay was caused by needing to actually verify if Confused Jew's quotes were real, given that he has been caught (in this thread nonetheless) fabricating and mis-attributing quotes, which is something I think we all take seriously. I credit the ever vigilant Wetzelrad for catching multiple of these fabrication.

There were no fabrications. I've fed the specific PDF into the LLM and told it not to reference any outside source and I am selecting the exact quote from the PDF. It just helps me dissect at 300 page document much more quickly.

"It just helps me dissect at 300 page document much more quickly."

Translation: "It helps me fake my way through debates without doing any of the reading."

You aren't "dissecting" anything. You are lazily copying hallucination-filled text from a chatbot and dishonestly presenting it as if you wrote it yourself.

[HansHill]

Confused Jew is living up to his name again.

I will gladly indulge the renewed challenges.

In the Kraków forensic study (Markiewicz, Gubala, and Łabędź, Z Zagadnień Sądowych, 1990), the researchers reported a detection limit of about 3–4 micrograms (µg) of cyanide per kilogram (kg) of sample.

Firstly, Confused Jew is mixing up the two Krakow studies. The 1990 study was the study that was leaked which affirmed Leuchter's results, and would agree with Rudolf's later results.

What CJ means to cite, is the 1994 study.

The detection limit cited by Markiewicz is indeed 3-4µg/kg, however baffingly and inexplicably, the paper cited by Markiewicz CLEARLY indicates a detection limit of 0.2 mg/L (200 μg/kg). This paper, as cited by Markiewicz is listed as:

- Estimation of Microquantities of Cyanide - Joseph. Epstein

Screenshot of relevant passage below:



https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/ac60004a018

This isn't true, the Markiewicz data showed samples above the detection limit. We can and probably should go deeper on that.
The results were not inconclusive.

You can start going deeper onto why 1) you are mis-citing the papers, 2) why Markiewicz mis-quoted his supposed detection limit by two orders of magnitude, and 3) by explaining how this impacts your results. Notice how we always say "at or below the detection limit".

Fellas?

[Archie]

...Most of the HCN did evaporate and disperse, but a tiny portion chemically bound itself to minerals and metals in the masonry before it escaped. That’s why trace residues could still be detected decades later.

After the gassing stopped and the space was ventilated, nearly all of that HCN escaped into the atmosphere and decomposed (within hours to days).

...

The forced ventilation, described by Karl Schultze;

https://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic.php?t=61650

"The ventilation installation provided for a ten-times air exchange; it served to suck out the gas that had collected and pump in fresh air. The pipes of the ventilation, which I personally constructed for the gas chamber, were immured in the walls of the chamber."

Meant that there was limited exposure to the walls of the chambers, so there was little chance for any bonding in the walls. The gassing process, did not leave time to leave much residue.

Debunked repeatedly.
viewtopic.php?t=162

Ten air exchanges per hour was standard for a morgue.

That air exchange number assumes perfect mixing of old and fresh air. You would never achieve that in a room full of bodies with the intake and outtake the way they had it.

[ConfusedJew]

"It just helps me dissect at 300 page document much more quickly."

Translation: "It helps me fake my way through debates without doing any of the reading."

You aren't "dissecting" anything. You are lazily copying hallucination-filled text from a chatbot and dishonestly presenting it as if you wrote it yourself.

I'm not faking anything.

Rudolf's writing is very dense and not at all concise so it's a tool that I use to get to the most important parts of his arguments.

While I am very strong in scientific and logical reasoning, I am not an expert in the specific discipline of chemistry so I need to research a lot of these things.

What I'm seeing now is that Rudolf is trying to disregard Markiewicz's results as a false positive but he is unable to effectively explain (1) how the samples were contaminated and (2) why the controls were not.

There were clearly results above the detection limit for traces of cyanide ions where you would expect to potentially find them and there were zero traces where you would expect that they wouldn't be found.

[Stubble]

Confused jew, the entire issue here is your dishonest plagiarism of AI and that is why the hammer is going to fall on you when these loose ends are tied up sufficiently.

Archie has very generously afforded you a chance to make your best case possible.

You are, in fact, simply regurgitating hallucination filled AI into the forum as you are want to do, hence your coming ban.

Kindly do please respond to Mr Hill's very simple questions so we can speed this up and get you on your merry way.

[ConfusedJew]

Confused Jew is living up to his name again.

I will gladly indulge the renewed challenges.

In the Kraków forensic study (Markiewicz, Gubala, and Łabędź, Z Zagadnień Sądowych, 1990), the researchers reported a detection limit of about 3–4 micrograms (µg) of cyanide per kilogram (kg) of sample.

Firstly, Confused Jew is mixing up the two Krakow studies. The 1990 study was the study that was leaked which affirmed Leuchter's results, and would agree with Rudolf's later results.

What CJ means to cite, is the 1994 study.

The detection limit cited by Markiewicz is indeed 3-4µg/kg, however baffingly and inexplicably, the paper cited by Markiewicz CLEARLY indicates a detection limit of 0.2 mg/L (200 μg/kg). This paper, as cited by Markiewicz is listed as:

- Estimation of Microquantities of Cyanide - Joseph. Epstein

Screenshot of relevant passage below:



https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/ac60004a018

This isn't true, the Markiewicz data showed samples above the detection limit. We can and probably should go deeper on that.
The results were not inconclusive.

You can start going deeper onto why 1) you are mis-citing the papers, 2) why Markiewicz mis-quoted his supposed detection limit by two orders of magnitude, and 3) by explaining how this impacts your results. Notice how we always say "at or below the detection limit".

Fellas?

The detection limit is the same in both studies. From the second study:

"Secondly, the detection limit is the same. From the more up to date Under present circumstances we established the lower limit of determinability of cyanide ions at a level of 3-4 ,µg CN- in 1 kg of the sample."

First of all, I don't think you used the relevant measurement in the Epstein study but I can't access the whole thing so it is hard to tell what you are talking about. Secondly, samples were as high 288 which significantly exceed your 200 limit anyway.

That figure has to pertain to the same measurement technique that Markiewicz used and under the same conditions. The screenshot that you posted does not even give the limit that you quoted.

[HansHill]

Confused jew, the entire issue here is....

I would add to this, that an arguably bigger issue is that he in uncritically posting arguments that are self-contradictory, and he is merely posting whatever he feels necessary to score X point in Y moment. See above where he argues that small amounts of cyanide bound with iron to become detectable ~50 years later?

I began an exercise of pulling together approximately 7-8 instances across old threads where he was arguiing that such reactions were not possible due to alkalinity / acidity / moisture / lack of moisture / wrong type of iron / not enough iron. Clearly he is simply arguiing whatever point he needs in the moment, to try score the point in that moment with reckless abandon for the overall picture of things. Very scummy.

Midway through that exercise however, I saw that he pivoted to a new argument about the detection limit mis-applied by Markiewicz and so i immediately lost all of those examples because who cares! Te detection limit was a juicier line of reasoning anyway.