Holocaust gas chambers were designed by the Topf und Söhne company…Who knew?

I’ve never been to Israel so I’ve never seen the Yad Vashem Holocaust museum there.  Today I learned from this website that there is a “scale model of a gas chamber” in the museum.

This quote is from the web site which mentions the scale model at Yad Vashem:

There we saw a scale model of a gas chamber, and we learned that a company called Topf und Söhne was hired to design and build four gas chambers and a crematorium. In case anyone in the future wanted to perpetrate another genocide, they patented the design. The facility was capable of murdering 4,756 people in 24 hours – they guaranteed it in writing.

Wow! Talk about German engineering!  The Topf und Söhne (Topf and son) company guaranteed an exact number of Jews that could be killed in 24 hours! And they patented their design! Now we know how the Germans were able to dispose of 400,000 Hungarian Jews in only 10 weeks at Auschwitz-Birkenau, as claimed by Holocaust historians.

But wait a minute! Topf und Söhne guaranteed in writing that 4,756 people could be MURDERED in 24 hours, but how long did it take to burn the bodies of 4,756 people?  How many bodies could fit on the elevator that brought the bodies up from the underground gas chambers in Krema II and Krema III to the ovens on the ground floor?  Where did they store the bodies while they were waiting to burn them?  Surely not outside the gas chamber buildings because that would have immediately tipped off the victims that they were not going into a shower room.  There was no corpse storage room in Krema II, nor in Krema III, because the only rooms in these crematoria were the gas chambers and undressing rooms.

Logo of Topf und Söhne on Dachau oven

The photo above shows the Topf logo on the one oven (with two retorts) in the Old Crematorium at Dachau. The logo is on the lower left hand side in the photo below.

Oven in the Old Crematorium at Dachau

The scale model of a gas chamber that is on display at Yad Vashem is probably the same model of one of the Auschwitz gas chambers that is on display at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC.

Scale model of Krema II gas chamber in US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC

There is nothing left of the oven room and the gas chamber in Krema II at Birkenau except the ruins, which are shown in the photo below.

2005 photo of the ruins of Krema II at Birkenau

I took the photo above in 2005; it matches a black and white photo taken by the Soviet liberators of Birkenau in February 1945.  The part of the building where the ovens were located was above ground while the gas chamber and the undressing room were five feet below ground.

The photo below shows the blueprint of Krema II, one of two identical buildings at Birkenau.

Original blueprint for Krema II (Crematorium No. 2)

On the original blueprint, which is shown above, the undressing room is on the right. To the left of the undressing room is the above ground oven room with the ovens designated by 5 small squares. Each oven had 3 openings for bodies. The gas chamber is perpendicular to the undressing room. On the blueprint, the gas chamber is labeled L-keller which is an abbreviation for Leichenkeller, which means corpse cellar in English. The undressing room was also called a Leichenkeller on the blueprint.

I am assuming that the scale model of a gas chamber at Yad Vashem is a model of one of the four gas chambers at Auschwitz II, aka Birkenau, but it could be a model of the reconstructed gas chamber at Auschwitz I, the main camp, which is shown in my 2005 photo below.

Gas chamber in Auschwitz main camp

The oven room is right next to the gas chamber in the Auschwitz main camp.  When the Jews entered the building, after being told that they would be taking a shower, the first thing they saw was a cremation oven.  The photo below shows the view from the door where the Jews entered the building.

View of a cremation oven from the entrance into the gas chamber building at Auschwitz main camp

There are a couple of strange things that I noticed about the gas chamber at the main Auschwitz camp.  The victims entered a door which had a view of one of the ovens.  How did they prevent the victims from going berserk when they saw the oven? Of course the inner door might have been closed so that the prisoners couldn’t see a cremation oven right in front of them.  If this is a Topf and Sohne design, I say that it is not a very good design.  What about the heat of the ovens that were only separated from the gas chamber by a brick wall?  Would this have caused an explosion if Zyklon-B was used?  Apparently not, since the gas chamber in the main camp did not blow up and it was later converted into a bomb shelter by the Germans.  The Soviet liberators converted the bomb shelter back to a gas chamber, but for over 50 years, visitors were told that the gas chamber was original.

I did not see a Topf und Söhne logo on the ovens in the main Auschwitz camp.  These ovens were reconstructed by the Soviets from parts allegedly found somewhere in the camp.

So what happened to the engineers at the Topf und Söhne company?  Under the “common design” theory of guilt, used by the Allies against the German “war criminals,” the Topf engineers were guilty of the murder of millions of people who were burned in the facilities which they designed.

According to Wikipedia, Kurt Prüfer was the original designer for the “incinerators” that were used by the Nazis to burn the bodies at Buchenwald, Belzec, Dachau, Mauthausen, Gusen and Auschwitz.

This quote is from Wikipedia:

In fact, Kurt Prüfer, the original designer of the ovens stated during his interrogation by Russian officials: “I have known since spring 1943 that innocent human beings were being liquidated in Auschwitz gas chambers and that their corpses were subsequently incinerated…”^[2] Furthermore, he goes on to note that he himself visited Auschwitz no less than five times, during the construction and operation of the incinerators, saying when asked “Five times. The first time [was] the beginning of 1943, to receive the orders of the SS Command, where the incinerators were to be built. The second time [was] in spring 1943 to inspect the building site. The third time was in autumn 1943 to inspect a fault in the construction of a chimney. The fourth time [was] at the beginning of 1944, to inspect the repaired chimney. The fifth time [was] September-October 1944 when I visited Auschwitz in connection with the intended relocation [from] Auschwitz’ of the retorts, since the battle front was getting nearer.

As for what happened to Kurt Prüfer after the war, this quote from Wikipedia tells us about his fate:

In the wake of the war, Kurt Prüfer was detained by the Americans for a few weeks before being released. At that time he was arrested by the Soviets, interrogated, and then sent to a Gulag where he would stay until his death in 1952. Ludwig Topf, the firm’s chief officer at the time of the war, committed suicide in 1945, leaving a suicide note full of excuses and claims of his own innocence. His brother, Ernst-Wolfgang fled to western Germany and was put on trial by the Americans. He managed to talk his way out of charges, maintaining that he did not know the intention for the incinerators; and placing all the blame on his brother Ludwig and Prüfer. He went on to found another incinerator company that survived until 1963 when it went bankrupt.

Original oven at the Mauthausen camp

There were two cremation ovens at Mauthausen, including one with two retorts (not shown here) that was installed only days before the camp was liberated. Strangely, the one oven shown in the photo above was able to handle the 100,000 or more bodies of prisoners claimed to have been killed at Mauthausen.

The Topf und Söhne “incinerators” were first used at Buchenwald to burn the bodies of prisoners who had died in a typhus epidemic in 1939.

The photo below shows the ovens at Buchenwald; in the background you can see the elevator which brought the bodies up from the morgue in the basement and in the center is the door into a very small room which has a toilet and a shower stall.

The oven room at Buchenwald

Topf und Söhne did not get a patent on the crematoria ovens that it had supplied to the Nazis until January 3, 1953, eight years after the end of World War II.  The patent (No. 861,731) was issued by the (West) German Patent Office to “J. A. Topf & Söhne, Wiesbaden.” The official patent document’s title is “Process and Apparatus for Incineration of Carcasses, Cadavers and Parts Thereof.”  Source: ELI M. ROSENBAUM  July 19, 1993 New York Times.