Auschwitz Engineers in Moscow
Carlo Mattogno got impatient with me for not working on this book for years. He had it ready to go since 2014, as you can see from the date of Jürgen Graf’s Introduction to this book (which he wrote in December 2013). Alas, the topic was very narrowly focused, and other projects got preferred treatment for many years. However, with the path cleared by later 2023, and with some jostling by Carlo, we finally got it across the finish line on January 2024, with an almost ten-year delay. Shame on me.
The book expands our roster of studies dealing with witness accounts on the Holocaust. (Section Four of the Holocaust Handbooks). This one is a special, indeed unique group of witnesses: technicians said to have enabled the National-Socialist mass-murder machinery. Dr. Gerhard Peters, war-time CEO of DEGESCH (the patent owner of Zyklon B), and the managers of the company Tesch & Stabenow, a pest-control company that delivered Zyklon B and other pest-control chemicals and equipment to German wartime camps, are also in that group of witnesses. The British show trial staged against Bruno Tesch is dealt with in detail in Volume 50 of our series Holocaust Handbooks: The Neuengamme and Sachsenhausen Gas Chambers.
This new book, Volume 52 of the series, focuses on the cremation-furnace engineers of the company Topf & Sons, who the Soviets abducted to Moscow after the war. The conditions of incarceration in Moscow during those years have been described in detail by Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, who had the privilege of enjoying them at the same time as these four Topf engineers. These engineers had planned, designed and supervised the construction of cremation furnaces and ventilation equipment in various German wartime camps. If we follow Solzhenitsyn, sleep deprivation rather than physical violence is said to have been the Soviet preparation method of choice which, after being rigorously applied for several days in a row, gets every victim to become completely compliant and submissive, eagerly willing to say anything asked of them, if only they are left in peace and get to sleep.
