Extermination through Labor – Myth or Reality?

When I received Carlo Mattogno’s Italian typescript for his next book in early 2024, which would end up becoming Volume 53, of our prestigious series Holocaust Handbooks, Labor Camp Auschwitz-Monowitz, I realized quickly that it contained sheer endless tables at its end, and in the middle, it consisted of seemingly interminable pages of quotations from what looked like innumerable witness accounts. I was not pleased. How am I going to pitch this to our customers? When I eventually got to translating it, it slowly dawned on me that I had in my hands, or rather on my hard drive, a rough gemstone that merely needed some polishing and TLC to make a fantastic contribution to our collection. Here are the reasons why:

The camps of National-Socialist Germany are said to have served mainly two purposes during the war: a) outright extermination and b) exploiting prisoners’ strength by working them to death. Revisionists have focused on the first topic since the first revisionist book was published by Paul Rassinier. But very little, if any, revisionist material has been published since Rassinier which addresses the second claim. Our new book changes this, finally.

Ever since Carlo Mattogno started critically examining the orthodox Holocaust narrative in the mid-1980s, he has put his main focus on documents. He refused to erect his historical narrative on the basis of witness accounts due to their legendary unreliability. He has proven in many monographs just how unreliable they are. (See in particular Volumes 35, 37, and 43-46 of the series Holocaust Handbooks for his unrelenting deconstruction of survivor testimonies on the claimed homicidal gas chambers.) In this sense, this new study marks a radical change in Mattogno’s attitude. While he still insists on basing his narrative mainly on authentic wartime documents, this new volume contains at times long quotations from 129 plus 14 witness accounts.

There is a reason why I did not add these two numbers together, because during the I.G. Farben Trial, the prosecution presented mainly 14 eyewitness testimonies to support their claim that the management of I.G. Farbenindustrie, in conjunction with the Auschwitz camp SS, implemented a wartime policy of “extermination through labor.” When that trial was launched, this claim had not yet been cast in historical stone as a dogma, so the defense managed to find plenty of witnesses who could and would testify for the defense: 129 of them, more than nine times as many as the prosecution had mustered to find. That number itself has some historical relevance, because in medieval Germany, when a person was accused of sorcery or witchcraft, a rule stated that for any witness for the prosecution, the defense had to present at least seven witnesses confirming the defendant’s innocence to allow for a possible acquittal. The Germans even have a term for it: Übersiebnung – oversevening.

This book is a stunning demonstration of what could have been, had witnesses against the gas chambers not faced an insurmountable dogmatic wall that rendered it outright dangerous for anyone to come out and say: “I was there, it didn’t happen.” Massive social ostracism for former inmates and possible prosecution for former SS members was the risk for “deniers” back then, not much different than today for us scholars. But even if a witness stated that he didn’t see it, but should have seen it, it never mattered. Such witnesses without knowledge have always been dismissed as irrelevant, because anyone who didn’t know about an event is simply not a witness, period. With that attitude of a pre-ordained truth of the reality of the gas chambers, any attempt at refuting them with witnesses was a futile effort from the start. Therefore, no serious attempt was ever made by any defense team.

It is different with the claim of “extermination through labor.” This is not a matter of whether or not a room was equipped to serve a certain purpose, and whether it was used as such. “Extermination through labor” presupposes that the entire camp regiment – accommodation, food, workload, medical care etc. – was so horrific by design that it led to the mass death of inmates. Here, nobody can claim that people who experienced the camp and labor regiment differently can be dismissed as having been at the wrong time at the wrong place. They were there, for months and years, and 129 of them described the opposite of what the prosecution at the I.G. Farben Trial tried to prove. The defense even submitted an expert report analyzing documents submitted by the prosecution, and demonstrating that they prove the exact opposite of what the prosecution claimed. These Herculean efforts did not stop this kangaroo court from sentencing the plant manager Dr. Dürrfeld to a prison term, but at least it left a rich documentation worth publishing. This furthermore indicates that the legal situation of defendants during those trails was in certain ways even worse than that for defendants during medieval witch trials: not even nine times as many exonerating witnesses made any difference. But at least Dr. Dürrfeld did not end up on the stake. He was merely sentenced to eight years imprisonment.

So far, mainstream historians have completely ignored this massive amount of exonerating evidence, as they usually do. It’s time that this evidence sees the light of day, and shows to the world, or at least to those willing to see, that even witness accounts support the revisionist cause, if only they were allowed to speak their mind without feeling threatened.

Oh, and the long tables in the appendix stick it to these mendacious court historians: here is all the data you either need to refute or swallow, if you want to be taken seriously by reasonable people in the future.

Carlo Mattogno, Labor Camp Auschwitz-Monowitz: Exposing the Myth of “Extermination through Labor,” Armreg Ltd, London, November 2024, 6”×9” paperback, 358 pages, index, bibliography, ISBN: 978-1-83640-031-8. Also available as an audio books and in eBook formats (epub + PDF).