Most people are familiar with the “evil Nazi medical experiments” meme. What most people don’t know is that the bulk of these claims are only supported by witness testimony. Much of this testimony came from Miklos Nyiszli, a Jewish inmate of Auschwitz who claims to have been Dr. Mengele’s assistant.
In this article I will show that Nyiszli is an unreliable witness by examining claims made in his book, I Was Doctor Mengele’s Assistant. For sparing me from actually having to read the entire book, I thank Jürgen Graf’s Auschwitz: Eyewitness Reports and Perpetrator Confessions of the Holocaust (see pages 216-227).
The following is the first page from Nyiszli’s book. As you read the claims he made I want you to remember that he said that he would relay his account with “truth, objectivity” and “without any exaggeration or embellishment.” (As I was unable to find a text version of Nyiszli’s book, you will have to bear with these pixelated screen shots.)
This is the very first paragraph. Instead of being clinical and objective, the purple prose is piled on and piled thick. In the last sentence from the page above, Nyiszli claims he is a doctor, not a writer. This style of writing would suggest he is neither. It is clear that Nyiszli intended this book to appeal to emotion, not reason.
On page 35 Nyiszli describes the so-called undressing room in Krema 2 (where Holocaust fabulists claim a homicidal gas chamber was located) which is labeled as Leichenkeller 2 on the blueprint below—Leichenkeller is German for morgue cellar, by the way. He stated, “The transport entered a spacious, whitewashed, brightly lit chamber, about 200 metres long. There were columns running down the centre. Around the columns and beneath the walls on either side, benches. Above the benches, numbered coat hangers.” Now, it can be difficult to accurately gauge the size of a room by eye; however, the actual size of the room was 30 meters long. That big of difference is more than just an inaccurate guess—it is a strong indication that Nyiszli never stepped foot in, or had even seen the outside of, Krema 2.
On page 37 Nyiszli claims that it took a mere five minutes for the Zyklon B to kill everyone in the gas chamber:
There are two major issues with this claim. First, it does not match with other testimony. In fact, the amount of time it took for the alleged gassing victims to die is all over the place (see image below).
The second issue is that in order to achieve total death in five minutes some sixty-four cans of Zyklon B would be needed. This is much more than what Rudolf Höss has claimed and what mainstream scholars assume to be correct. In fact, one thousand gassings using this amount would be twice as much as what was ever delivered to the camp. (source, page 266. For more on this see pages 262-268 of Germar Rudolf’s book, Chemistry of Auschwitz.)
On page 65 Nyiszli makes a unique claim. According to him, a group of some five thousand Jews were made to undress in a hut, forced down a woodland path, and then shot in front of a pyre and cast into the flames. On the surface the whole thing is just as ridiculous as the alleged gas chamber procedure (which you can find here). Why bother shooting the Jews and wasting resources when it was “usually insufficient to kill the victim”? Most importantly, there is no evidence of large scale outdoor cremation (which you can read about here).
Given these easily falsifiable claims it is clear the Nyiszli is an unreliable witness. So why should we believe his claims about Nazi medical experiments? In the image below we can see his claims about medical experiments come from Auschwitz: A Doctor’s Eyewitness Account, which is a different title for I Was Doctor Mengele’s Assistant, the book we have been examining. The fact that anything he said was taken seriously is absurd.
But we’re not finished with Nyiszli. Continue to part two where I employ Carlo Mattogno’s definitive book on Nyiszli (see image below) to dissect more of his claims.
