The CODOH Revisionist Forum

In 1942 the Germans produced a long film on typhus titled Kampf dem Flickfieber!, now hosted on USHMM. On reel 2, starting from timestamp 00:49, it shows the operation of an Entseuchungszug, a disinfection train. After an on-camera demonstration, it also shows an animated diagram, which (collaged and cleaned up) looks like this:


Diagram labels include: We see in the footage that the persons being disinfected are German soldiers. They are made to disrobe, turn in their clothing, proceed through a haircut and shower, wait for one half hour in private cabins, and re-robe before disembarking. The procedure looks familiar -- that is, similar to other delousing procedures we will look at -- even though the shape of a train makes the path of travel unintuitive.

One individual whose hair is not shorn is given Cuprex to apply. Cuprex seems to be an American-made anti-lice insecticide lotion.

The operators wear an outer layer of protective clothing which covers everything but their faces.

I am unable to identify the disinfection device on the train, but it resembles a two-sided steam autoclave. The uniforms are put on hooks and hanged inside the chamber.

Built right next to the Birkenau train ramp, buildings 5a and 5b were designed expressly for delousing (as "Entlausungsbaracke"). They are mirror images of each other. Four blueprints of 5a can be found in Pressac's book, Auschwitz: Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers, starting from page 55. The most readable of these is this one:


From left to right, the labels follow the path of travel:
The gas chambers in both of these buildings have Iron Blue stains from Zyklon usage. Later work converted part of this space for "hot-air disinfection" using a Hochheim Company device. A third form of delousing was installed in the form of a "steam-disinfection device" from the Eugen Werner Company. See The Real Auschwitz Chronicle for details, especially p.214.

Photos of these buildings are plentiful in The Chemistry of Auschwitz. The clothing was presumably put on clothing racks of some fashion, though I can't find an image of what those looked like.

According to camp documents, some 22 "gas doors" or "gas-tight doors" were equipped to these buildings (Special Treatment in Auschwitz, pp.48-49). Also notable is that these doors were to be manufactured "exactly like the doors for special t. of the J.", no doubt referring to the doors of the Zentralsauna, which was the "Delousing facility for special treatment".

The Zentralsauna or Central Sauna stands between Crematoria III and IV. In documents it was referred to by formal names like "Disinfection and disinfestation facility" ("Desinfektions- und Entwesungsanlage") or "Delousing facility for special treatment" (see Special Treatment in Auschwitz, p.40).

Pressac discusses the Zentralsauna with numerous photos and plans in Auschwitz: Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers from pages 65 to 85. The most accurate floorplan is the one on page 72, but the Auschwitz Museum's equivalent plan is faithful enough and easier to read.



Prisoners to be treated would enter at the upper right (literally marked "Zugang" or "entrance" in the original), follow a U-shaped pathway, showering at the bottom while their clothes went to disinfection at the center of the building, and ultimately exit at the upper left ("Abgang"). Not to be overlooked are all the rooms that have direct equivalents in the crematoria, especially the doctor's room ("Artzt") and examination room ("Untersuchungs-Raum"). There was also a valuables room ("Wertsachen") noted on at least one draft plan and in the handover protocol (The Real Auschwitz Chronicle, p.387).

The Zentralsauna was equipped with "3 disinfestation ovens" installed by a Munich-based company called Goedecker (Les Crématoires d'Auschwitz, caption for document 24) and "4 disinfestation hot-air chambers" from Topf & Söhne. The Germans took some action shots of them while in operation:
https://lekcja.auschwitz.org/praca_en/i ... 2b3c92.jpg
https://www.historiography-project.com/ ... 083-01.jpg
https://assets.st-note.com/img/17741082 ... CGn4qV.png

According to Germar Rudolf, two of the Topf devices may have come from a project originally planned for Crematorium II (The Chemistry of Auschwitz, pp.121,122).

One oddity about the Zentralsauna is that it's singular, lacking an identical or split facility to keep men apart from women.

It is probably more than coincidence that at the same time the Zentralsauna was being planned and built in Birkenau (construction beginning on April 30, 1942), a very similar facility was in the works at Majdanek. A plan for an "Entlausungsanlage", drawn on March 30, 1942, accurately depicts what later became Barrack 42, the women's bathhouse, which is the place women supposedly passed through on their way to the "gas chamber" bunker stationed just behind it.



A major flaw in the "gas chamber" theory is that the plan shows the intended path of travel takes the prisoner delousees away from the bunker. This is proven by the room labels, which include the entrance ("Eingang"), undressing room ("Auskleideraum"), clothing drop-off ("Kleiderannahme"), etc. That is, the plan had delousees travel from north-to-south instead of from south-to-north (as the Soviets, the witnesses, and the Majdanek Museum all claimed, e.g. see this magazine they produced, page 17).

Barrack 42 has four small delousing chambers. I'm unable to find any information on how these worked. All the chambers have wooden doors in a style similar to Auschwitz's gas-tight doors.

Barrack 42 is the approximate mirror image of its neighbor Barrack 41, the men's bathhouse. The two notable differences in B41 are: the absence of those four delousing chambers, leaving more space for showers; and the conversion of the undressing room to perform clothing delousings. We know that in the undressing room Zyklon B was used because of the tell-tale Iron Blue stains on the walls and ceiling. However, these Zyklon gassings would be slow, probably requiring an overnight wait to air out, and this would inconveniently block off a large part of the building. For this reason, I say probably that delousing gassings were only conducted between transports, and incoming prisoners were issued fresh clothes which could easily be stored in the sizable dressing room. With those assumptions, B41 and B42 operated very similarly.

Until as recently as 2008, the Majdanek Museum claimed B41's undressing room (which it insists is a "dressing room") hosted a homicidal "gas chamber", but it has since dropped this claim (Source). It still claims B41 was the site of selections for gassing and for travel toward the "gas chamber" bunker.

B41's undressing room also has wooden doors made gas-tight plus two chimneys added for ventilation. The way the latter are described in documents, i.e. "Brick construction of two chimneys in the gas chamber", could be interpreted as criminal traces if a person was looking for any here (Concentration Camp Majdanek, p.133).

This building, the only one still standing between Fields I and II, is very poorly documented. From my best attempts at research, it was a crematorium equipped with two cremation ovens, but according to the Soviets and some witnesses, it was also used for homicidal gassings, delousing gassings, and/or laundry drying. The Majdanek Museum now rejects the story of homicidal gassings here (Source).

This facility is fundamentally different than others on this list because, as far as anyone knows, it didn't include showers and was not referred to in documents as a delousing facility. I include it here because it demonstrates the banality of having gas chambers in a crematoria.

Mauthausen's laundry block is adjacent to the main entrance and the prisoners' barracks. The basement floor of the laundry is nothing more than a giant shower room and a steam autoclave. A wall bisects the space around the autoclave, splitting it into a clean room and unclean room.

This location is best seen in tourist videos, like this one:



It hardly needs to be said, but the process here was: enter, drop off clothing near the autoclave, possibly get a haircut, shower, and put on clean clothing on the clean side. Exit was made through the same door they came in through.

This building had the elaborate title of "Laundry and Reception Building with Delousing Installation and Prisoner Bath" ("Wäscherei- und Aufnahmegebäude mit Entlausungsanlage und Häftlingsbad"). Here we see again that Zyklon delousing gas chambers are paired up with showers and other non-homicidal facilities.

Pressac covers this building from page 31 forward, again with many photos and plans. One particularly valuable photo shows the canopy-style roof built over the delousing cells, still under construction:


This design is reminiscient of the canopy roof built over Majdanek's "gas chamber" bunker. The exposure to open air would have been good for airing out clothing laden with HCN.

Something that differentiates this building is that it was intended to use Degesch-brand circulation devices. This would have made Zyklon gassings here much faster than those conducted in BW 5a and 5b and elsewhere. I will expand on this in the next section on Dachau.

Joe Splink wrote: ↑Sun Jun 14, 2026 12:16 am From van Pelt's book - 'Auschwitz: 1270 to the Present'

Van Pelt's rendering is helpful, in fact his book includes many high-quality plans, but he wrote overconfidently about things he didn't know. It turned out that the "nineteen Zyklon B delousing chambers" were never completed (see Germar Rudolf's Auschwitz: Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers, An Introduction and Update to Jean-Claude Pressac’s Magnum Opus, p.25).

In 1944, eight of the incomplete delousing cells were converted instead for the usage of breakthrough microwave technology. A report by the physician Eduard Wirths informs us (same volume, pp.18-20):

The shortwave delousing device Osten 3 was taken into operation at Auschwitz on June 30, 1944. After training the so-far unskilled employees, full operations of the device started on July 5, 1944. [...] The device’s average daily performance was 1441 sets of clothing and 449 blankets or comforters, which amounts to 46,122 sets of laundry and 14,368 blankets or comforters within 32 business days. [...] The delousing device operates very swiftly and reliably, as many test runs have shown [...]

A plan for this conversion is titled "Installation of Shortwave Delousing Systems" ("Einbau der Kurzwellen-Entlausungsanlagen") (p.21).

Also mentioned in Wirth's report is usage of the chemical DDT under the name "Lauseto".

Joe Splink wrote: ↑Sun Jun 14, 2026 12:16 am I believe this building is still there, but not on the tour.

Google Maps shows the outer shell of the building is basically intact, but extensively modified. According to Pressac the Museum gutted the gas chambers to use that space for storage.

Sometimes called "Barrack 'X'". This facility has on one end four small fumigation cells. In the immediate aftermath of the war, these cells were mistaken for homicidal gas chambers by U.S. reporters and the U.S. Army (Source, p.33).

In fact they were properly-designed Zyklon fumigation delousing chambers equipped with steel doors and with circulation devices built by the Degesch company, which was also the manufacturer of Zyklon. Here is a photo (from Mattogno) and drawing (reproduced in Rudolf's Auschwitz: Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers, An Introduction and Update to Jean-Claude Pressac’s Magnum Opus, p.22).


These devices opened and emptied the Zyklon B cans remotely, heated their contents for rapid release, circulated air to spread it evenly through the room, and ultimately extracted the gas and replaced it with fresh air. Documents say this process would take 70-75 minutes (The Real Case for Auschwitz, p.167). This is many times faster than fumigation with no device, which would usually require one to two days (Source).

The fumigation cells appear on the left side of this plan created by the Dachau Museum.



Since the Museum admits that no one was gassed here, one is left to speculate about what all these extra rooms were for. I say here that this facility may have been built for prisoner delousing with a path like this:

7.5) Entrance.
7) Undressing. Shaving if needed.
5) Shower.
4) Dry off. Inspection if needed.
3) Dressing.
2) Exit.

There is some slight circuitousness to the path this leaves for the clothing, and the clean and dirty sides may overlap somewhere, but this is no more awkward than any other facility I've looked at. It seems totally plausible.

Naysayers could argue that the shower was not fit for showering, but to the best of my understanding the pipes that run above the ceiling were in fact equipped to supply and heat water to the shower heads (see The Dachau Gas Chamber, p.49). The shower room may have been converted to a different purpose at some later date, but since the historians are unable to reach a rational consensus on this point I will not attempt to comment.

Even if you reject showers here, it is still a notable example of a crematorium and delousing chamber combo.