Raul Hilberg was a Jewish Austrian-born American political scientist and historian. According to Wikipedia he was widely considered to be the preeminent scholar on the Holocaust. In 1961 Hilberg released his book, The Destruction of the European Jews. He revised his work in 1985, and it appeared in a new three-volume edition. Today I will be focusing on his claim that in Auschwitz/Birkenau the Germans burned bodies of alleged gassing victims in massive outdoor pits. The following quote by Hillberg demonstrates how he felt victimized by Christians and Nazis. It is not unreasonable to believe that this feeling Hillberg had motivated his Holocaust research.
Carlo Mattogno authored a response to Hillberg’s book, Bungled: The Destruction of the European Jews, which I will enlist in analyzing these claims. In the following Hillberg admits that the crematoriums alone were not sufficient to burn all the alleged gassing victims which could be as much as 10,000 a day, and on some days even as much as 20,000. For this reason giant pits were dug, 8 or 9 of them, more than 40 yards in length. Lastly, Hilberg claims that human fat was collected and repurposed into fuel, a claim that I have previously shown as being nonsensical.
Mattogno examined the source of Hilberg’s claim along with other sources Hilberg used:
This conflicting witness testimony is only the tip of the Hilberg. Let us recall when his book was released, 1961. This was prior to the declassification of aerial photographs of Auschwitz/Birkenau, which happened in 1979. Here is an aerial photo of the camp I found on the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, or USHMM, webpage. As you can see there is no smoke from these alleged burn pits. Unfortunately the place where the pits would be is cut off.
Here is the full version of this photo I found in a tweet from Auschwitz Memorial.
To decipher where the pit would be we can use a map from USHMM.
According to Hilberg’s source, Filip Müller, there should be five pits in this area which is north of Crema V:
North of that is the Bunkers, or provisional gas chambers, were alleged to be. That is where the other four of nine pits were said to be found:
Here is a clearer view of Crema V from Air-Photo Evidence—World War Two Photos of Alleged Mass Murder Sites Analyzed:
And of Bunker 2:
As you can see there are no pits and there is no smoke. Despite this evidence against the existence of massive burn pits the claim is still upheld. Read part two where I address Holocaust Denial on Trial’s defense of the pits.