Mr. Kainee Goes To Washington

Or, Now You See Him, Now You Don't

From time to time, Matt Giwer (a rather dull, run-of-the-mill Holocaust Denier) shows up on talk.origins, and sooner or later claims 'no physical evidence exists' of a gas chamber.

Now, he does this every few months or so, and since one of the reasons I got involved with talk.origins in the first place was because of people who lie about evidence (Creationists), I got interested in the other major sort of 'denier'.

So I chose the Dachau gas chamber as a simple counterexample. In a series of back-and-forth posts, over the years I've learned more about Dachau, and nowadays it's pretty easy to stomp Giwer's arguments into the mud where they came from. Threads exist for perusal on Google Groups --

Now, if you check back, what happens in these threads is Giwer trots out a consistent set of claims about Dachau, gets shown to be wrong (and basically ignorant of the layout or construction of the camp and Barrack X) and then after a short while runs away from the thread. Then, when he comes back, he acts like he's never heard of any possible errors in his claims, and makes them all over again. So it's sort of smarter to put this web page together to spare me from repeatedly having to dig up links to point them out to Giwer.

I labour under no illusions that he will ever correct his mistakes, he's shown himself incapable of *that*.

So on to the claims and evidence!

The Dachau Gas Chamber

In 1941, the camp authorities running KZL Dachau constructed a new crematorium building, called "Barracke X". This building contained, apart from the actual crematorium room with furnaces, additional rooms for clothing fumigation, a vehicle room, two morgues, and what is clearly a purpose-built gas chamber, disguised to look like a shower room ('Brausebad'). Barracke X was apparently completed in 1942.

Giwer's Claims

Giwer has claimed a number of things about both Barracke X as well as the gas chamber itself. I will try and list them as I find them in various posts made by him over the last several years.

The 'gas chamber was built for tourists'.
There are 'windows' in the gas chamber.
There are no facilities for handling cyanide present.
The 'brausebad' sign is a fake, and has been painted over.
The doors to the gas chamber are fakes.

"The gas chamber was built for tourists": Giwer has made a series of claims that the gas chamber room was somehow built post-war to show to tourists. See the news article: link

> 
> 	I gave the URL which showed you the one shown the tourists, which the 
> museum says was never used, was not the gas chamber(s) discovered in 
> 1945 upon camp liberation. Those at the time of liberation were 
> standard fumigation equipment with warning signs and such. There 
> aren't many inside photos of them but they do show the handling 
> equipment.

Now, Giwer's claim is that the 'gas chambers discovered in 1945' are not the same as the one now shown as such. My reply to Giwer points out he is mixing up two different sets of rooms:

The gas chambers discovered in 1945 exist in a building, called
Barracke X, that is actually off in one corner of Dachau, and was
not a normal part of the camp for prisoners to transit.  The building
contained a crematorium and morgue, as well as gas chambers.  It was
built in 1942 by incarcerated Polish priests.

In Barracke X, there are five (5) different gas chambers.  Four
were pretty obviously used to fumigate lice-infested clothing and
bedding - they are small, windowless rooms at one end of the 
Barracke, with gastight doors, and a heater/blower apparatus 
(by Degesch, makers of Zyklon) to speed up the release of hydrogen
cyanide gas from the Zyklon pellets.

The fifth room, which, as you say, is 'shown the tourists', is the
gas chamber proper.  It was present in the current layout at the 
camp liberation.  It is also a windowless room, with gastight doors,
with a dual-exhaust system in the ceiling (which vents to the outside).

Now, subsequent to this post back in 2004, I visited the camp and in particular went to Barracke X.

This photo shows a plan of the Barracke. On the left end of the building are a series of five disinfection rooms. Their doors are shown here and here, with a Quicktime movie I made which shows them all with commentary here.

In addition to the five disinfection rooms, there is another room inside the crematorium building proper that is also a gas chamber. (I was wrong about the total number of rooms, by the way, it is six, not five.)

Now, somehow, Giwer doesn't know that there are two different types of 'gas chamber' in Barracke X. His webpage (link ) posts photos that he claims show the 'BRAUSEBAD' door into the 'shower room' gas chamber is 'something built after the war'. Now, having visited the site, it's obvious the left hand photo on Giwer's page is the doors to the disinfection rooms on the end of the building. I can't tell if it's the exterior side, from the look of it, or the walkway/tunnel side (look at the map to see what I mean). So then the photo on the right hand side of Giwer's web page is clearly not that of the disinfection chambers - it's too tall, for one thing - you have to stoop a bit to walk into the disinfection chambers. Here is another website with a short writeup on the photo that confuses Giwer so much.

The 'Brausebad' door that Giwer claims is 'postwar' leads to the gas chamber room disguised as a shower. Here is a photograph taken on May 3rd, 1945 while a group of US Congressmen were visiting, inside the gas chamber.

Now, the camp was liberated on April 29th, 1945, and there are numerous accounts in the press describing the fake shower room by May 3rd (in Stars and Stripes) for example, and the phtograph of the Congressmen clearly shows the interior of the shower room to be pretty much identical in appearance to today.

Harry Mazal quotes Stars and Stripes as saying, on May 3rd, 1945:
"The Dachau crematorium is a long low brick structure with a tall smokestack from which smoke poured day and night. The gas chamber is 20 feet square and has 18 nozzles across the ceiling that look like shower outlets..."

If Giwer would like to show this quote in error, he should do so.

Otherwise I'm not sure where Giwer's claim it was 'built after the war' comes from - unless he means somehow the US Army constructed the whole thing between April 29th and May 2nd 1945? The phot with the Congresscritters has a low-ceilinged, tiled chamber with recessed light fixtures. And that's the room today. (Caveat: the congressional report published some days later said the shower room/gas chamber had a ceiling '10 feet high', which is a puzzling error. Clearly the phto taken May 3rd doesn't show a 10 foot ceiling.)

So, from the press comment of the days after the camp liberation, and photos taken at the time, there's clearly evidence that the room was already in place when the camp was liberated, and that it was indeed labelled as a shower room (which it is also evident it isn't).

Giwer's webpage makes a series of misleading and/or untrue statements:

Door Hinges: Giwer seems to think the fact that the doors are hinged on different sides is somehow fatal, when all he's done is point out that two different doors, in different parts of the building, are not the same
Door warnings: Giwer notes the clear warnings shown on the door in the left photo (the disinfection chamber) and points out nobody would be fooled seeing this door into thinking it led into a 'shower'. He also claims (under the right hand photo) that 'the original could only trick a blind man'. Again, Giwer is confusing the two doors, since the left door (with warnings) leads to a disinfection chamber, not to the shower room. Hence his 'warning' argument is meaningless, apples and oranges.
Multiple doors: Giwer seems to claim that since there is an identical door next to the one the soldier is next to, the shower room is fake. Since the photos are obviously of different parts of the building, this claim by Giwer is again, specious, since there are still the same doors today on the disinfection chambers, in a row, as in the left hand photo. Giwer again tries to confuse the reader by claiming the doors are the same somehow.
US Army Confusion: Giwer claims the US army mistook the disinfection chambers for a gas chamber, and that therefore the shower room is fake. The problem here is that there are photographs and newspaper articles taken at the time the camp was captured (April 29, 1945) that describe (in varying detail) the fake shower room and point out it is a gas chamber. While I agree the left hand photo is mislabelled , Giwer uses a single photo to try to confuse the uninformed reader into thinking the 'Brausebad' room is fake because it isn't in the left hand photo. Again, anyone familiar with the building knows they are two different parts of the Barracke. Either Giwer doesn't know, he is too lazy to fix his page, or he is being deceptive. Since I've pointed it out to him repeatedly, he has no excuse for not knowing about his misleading and erroneous claims.

Cyanide Handling: Simply put, Giwer claims the shower room cannot be a gas chamber because there are no 'facilities' for handling HCN gas.

The problem with this is that a few meters away from the gas chamber are the fumigation chambers. Now, even Giwer knows that there Zyklon was used to fumigate clothes - he says so on his webpage. But the fumigation chambers are vented to the atmosphere. Since the fumigation of clothing uses a considerably *higher* concentration of cyanide to kill lice than is needed to kill humans, then obviously the Germans didn't have a problem with venting cyanide from the Barracke.

This is one of the more obvious false claims by Giwer, and probably the simplest to show as such.

Since there would have been no issues with disposing of the cyanide, the other issue Giwer has raised is that the gas chamber lacks the 'heater/blower' device present in the fumigation chambers. This isn't really an issue since Zyklon B has a relatively high vaopr pressure and readily gives off HCN gas even at low temperatures. Giwer has previously made claims (in 1996) that have been shown in error on this point.

Heaters are used in the fumigation chambers since a high concentration of cyanide is needed to kill lice (7000 to 15000 ppm) - *much* higher than that needed to kill humans (100 to 300ppm, depending on time of exposure) . The heater is thus used to more rapidly produce cyanide gas to shorten the fumigation cycle. Humans on the other hand die rapidly when exposed to much lower doses of cyanide gas and so a heater is not needed. See my USENET post here, where I explained to Giwer that you can use Zyklon B as a fumigant at much lower temperatures, since the lethal concentration of HCN when exposed for half an hour is only 185ppm, and the vapor pressure of HCN at 0 Celsius is 370ppm. When it gets cold, you just keep the victims in the gas chamber a while longer; a 370ppm concentration of HCN will kill the average person in 6-8 minutes (source: OSHA).

Fake Sign: another simple claim by Giwer is the 'BRAUSEBAD' sign has been repainted and is not original. Inspection of the sign shows that it has not been painted over (this is visible in clear photos, unlike the one on Giwer's page), and that there are a number of original painted signs in other buildings in the camp (I have seen a 'Nicht Rauchen' one in a photograph.) I asked the guide specifically if the sign had been repainted and they stated it was the original, and that was why it was faded. The other surfaces in the room had been painted, however. This photo shows how the sign has been carefully 'painted around'.