Henryk Tauber was a Holocaust survivor who had claimed to be an Sonderkommando (a Jewish inmate that allegedly helped the Germans kill other Jews) while in Auschwitz. His testimony to the the Commission for the Investigation of Nazi Crimes was given in Krakow on May 24, 1945. Jean-Claude Pressac, whom I have written about, has this to say about Tauber:
Let’s take a look at an example of Tauber’s ‘precise and detailed’ descriptions:
“During the incineration of such corpses, we used the coke only to light the fire of the furnace initially, for fatty corpses burned of their own accord thanks to the combustion of the body fat. On occasion, when coke was in short supply, we would put some straw and wool in the ash bins under the muffles, and once the fat of the corpse began to burn the other corpses would catch light themselves. There were no iron components inside the muffle. The bars were of chamotte [refractory material], for iron would have melted in the furnace, which reached 1000 to 1200°C. These chamotte bars were arranged crosswise. The dimensions of the door and the opening of the muffles were smaller than the inside of the muffle itself, which was 2 meters long, 80 cm wide and about 1 meter high. Generally speaking, we burned 4 or 5 corpses at a time in one muffe, but sometimes we charged a greater number of corpses. It was possible to charge up to 8 “musulmans”. Such big charges were incinerated without the knowledge of the head of the crematorium during air raid warnings in order to attract the attention of airmen by having a bigger fire emerging from the chimney.” (source)
There are several problems with the claims Tauber is making. Starting with the assertion that fatty corpses burn of their own accord thanks to the consumption of body fat. First, bodies are mostly water and this must heat up and turn to vapor before the tissue and bones can burn. They can never burn by themselves. Second, the muffles (individual ovens) were designed for one person, so bodies wouldn’t be lighting eachother on fire (there is more on this in the next paragraph).
Next, Tauber claims that 4, 5, or even more, bodies are shoved into one muffle (opening in the cremation oven) at a time. This would have been impossible as the openings are 27.5 inches high by 27.5 inches wide (page 177). Note how Tauber gives the exact size of the inside of the muffle but only says the door was smaller than that. It is safe to assume this claim of multiple bodies in a muffle designed for one body has been made in order to create a scenario in which over a million bodies could have been burned in the limited time of the crematoriums existence.
It is also important to note that Tauber states that ‘generally speaking’ they burned 4 to 5 bodies at a time and the statement below in the first image would have one thinking that most of the bodies he burned were all skin and bones. However, the official narrative is that most were killed upon arrival to Auschwitz and would have been a normal body weight (see second image).
A photograph of the (reconstructed) crematory ovens in Auschwitz for reference:
Lastly, Tauber tells an interesting story of how they would fill the muffles with extra bodies to make the flames that were coming out of the chimney even bigger as to attract the Allied airmen and perhaps be rescued. As I have demonstrated in a previous post flames would not been leaping out of the chimneys. While this imagery makes for a dramatic story, it does not make for an accurate one.
If you would like to learn more about Henryk Tauber and other witnesses testimony check out Auschwitz: Eyewitness Reports and Perpetrator Confessions of the Holocaust—30 Gas-Chamber Witnesses Scrutinized, by Jürgen Graf. This is one of the first Holocaust revisionist books I ever read and I found it insightful not only for its scrutiny of the witness testimony, but also for the ways in which evidence should be analyzed. For example we are given things to consider when dealing with witness testimony:
Henryk Tauber is but one Holocaust survivor whose testimony was used to created the narrative of the Holocaust. See this article for some more troublesome testimony.