The Chemistry of Auschwitz

Video Transcript:

In 1989, a graduate student in chemistry was surprised to learn that no one had ever studied the Auschwitz gas chambers from a chemical perspective. A year later, while preparing his PhD thesis in chemistry at the prestigious Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research in Stuttgart, Germany, he realized that this institute gave him access to all the resources he needed to look into this matter himself. Now, after more than two decades of continuous research and archival studies, this curious scholar, Gerimar Rudov, has published his findings in the form of a book and a video, both with the title, The Chemistry of Auschwitz. Let's see what he found out. On June 15th, 1994, David Lawson was scheduled to be killed in the execution gas chamber of the state prison of North Carolina. This is a view into this chamber. Lawson, however, refused to cooperate. Instead of breathing quickly and deeply, he repeatedly held his breath and took only short breaths in between. Again and again, he called out, I am human! For 10 straight minutes, he kept on struggling against his fate. Only 18 minutes after the beginning of the execution was he declared dead. It was the longest lasting gas chamber execution in the history of the United States. The witnesses to the execution were horrified, and the prison warden supervising the execution was so shaken that he resigned. Because of disasters like this, executions by gas chambers were eventually banned for being cruel and unusual. And this, despite the fact that executions with gas were considered swift, painless, and humane when they were first introduced in the United States in the 1920s. Here is a clip from a British documentary showing how it's supposed to work. This BBC One, and now 14 days in May, viewers are advised that this is a disturbing documentary about the death penalty in Mississippi. Filmed during the final days of one condemned man's fight to save his life, it includes a sequence of the gas chamber being tested with rabbits. 14 days in May. Actually, I only show a few sturds from this documentary, because the previous version of this documentary was taken down by BBC claiming that it violates their copyright. Well, the clips I showed lasted 57 seconds of a documentary lasting two hours and 20 minutes, so not even 0.7% of the entire BBC film. It clearly is a case of fair use, or the more so since the entire documentary is available online on YouTube at the address is given, and BBC has not taken down these full versions. So, BBC's intervention is a clear cut case of abusive copyright claims to sense of use inconvenient to them. If you want to watch the gasing scene, go to the YouTube movies listed. Anyway, this test gasing occurred in the gas chamber of the state prison in parchment, Mississippi, using two black rabbits. The poisonous cyanide powder was put into a bowl beneath the execution chair. Once the door was secured, sulfuric acid was put over the powder. As a result, hydrogen cyanide gas was released so violently that it rose up in a cloud of sulfuric acid mist. The bunnies died after not even a minute. If we look up expert literature, like Henderson and Haggard's Noxious gases, we find in them the claim that humans die very quickly within a minute or less when exposed to the hydrogen cyanide concentrations as they are used during executions in the United States. But that's apparently not true. US researchers Scott Christensen has written a study on the history of the US gas chamber. He found that during hundreds of executions over the past 90 years, it took an average some nine minutes to kill a human. So, what's wrong here? And who is right? Turns out reality is right and the scientists are wrong. In a 1976 study for the US Army on the toxicity of hydrogen cyanide gas per humans, a certain McNamara traced back what the experts quote in their books on toxicology. It turned out that directly or indirectly, they all refer to a German book of 1919 that reported the results of gasing tests made prior to World War I on, well, rabbits. The study also established that gasing experiments with dogs, monkeys and humans demonstrated that humans are much less susceptible than dogs. For example, in one case, a dog and a human volunteer were placed in a gas chamber and exposed to the same concentration of hydrogen cyanide. While the dogs stopped breathing after just one and a half minutes and was as soon dead, the man at that time did not even show any symptoms. In fact, the values found by this study closely resemble the values found by Christians and in his study. Instead of killing within a minute or less, the concentrations used in the US execution gas chambers would indeed not kill with certainty before some 10 minutes. One reason for this is also that death row inmates executed in the US using hydrogen cyanide gas chambers knew what they were facing. In fact, although they were told to breathe in deeply to shorten their suffering, some did the exact opposite in a desperate and futile attempt to survive the gas exposure as is explained in this documentary. This poor roofing fellow got caught on the top of the roof of the Catholic Church of St. Michael at Wintergri's Buck in Bavaria, Germany when the ballots started tolling frantically. This church is our next stop when our journey to the chemistry of Auschwitz. In 1972, major renovation work was carried out on this church. Among other things, the plaster on the inside was redone and a pest control company was called to kill the woodworms which had infested the churches would work. But replacing the plaster first and then fumigating the church with hydrogen cyanide in order to kill the bugs was a bad idea as the church's newsletter reports. In the church's chronology on the church's website, we find an entry for July 1972 referring to quote, fumigation of the entire church with Zeitlam against Woodworm infestation. Unquote, Zeitlam refers to Zeitlam B, the active ingredient in which is hydrogen cyanide. Further down we read that the fumigation led to blotchy discolorations of the plaster. Not much more information can be cleaned from that website, but a similar case that occurred four years later in a nudge church in Bavaria is more revealing. This concerns the Protestant church of the town of Wiesenfelt. Here too, the church's plaster was redone and a few weeks later the whole church was fumigated using Zeitlam B that is to say hydrogen cyanide in order to kill woodworms. A few months later, the entire plaster started developing blotchy blue stains as if someone had splatted blue ink everywhere onto the plaster. This time, however, the case was properly documented and the experts called to investigate took samples, analyzed them chemically and determined what the problem was. The case was published as an entry in volume four of the German series Bauschädenzumlong, that is collection of construction damages. Here are the first two pages of this article in German. The paper was also published in an English translation in this book on pages 557 to 559. From this article, we learned that the hydrogen cyanide had been absorbed by the fresh and moist plaster and that the small traces of rust contained in the plaster, which is a natural component of every cement and sand used to make it, had reacted with the hydrogen cyanide to slowly form a pigment called iron blue or Prussian blue. Being an integral part of the plaster, the only way to remove the blue stains was by completely knocking off the new plaster and redoing the entire job as the lead architect of the renovation project Konrad Fischer stated in an interview. Unfortunately, there aren't any color images of that case available. The only illustration shown in the documentation is this black and white image, which may have looked something like this in color, but there are other cases where the same reaction occurred. Cyclone B was used on a grand scale during World War II in Europe to combat lies which infested the clothes, bed linen and living quarters of soldiers, prisoners of war and concentration camp inmates. Lies transmits typhus, which is a deadly disease. During World War II, hundreds of thousands of people died of it. This is a 1948 paper on that topic by Dr. John Gordon from Harvard University. I have read on the chart to improve its clarity. It shows the number of typhus cases in Germany as officially recorded and published by the German civilian authorities between 1939 and 1943 and, as encountered by US troops in their zone of occupation in the first half of 1945. No data is available for 1944. The numbers for the years 1939 through 1943 evidently do not include typhus cases in German labor or concentration camps, otherwise those numbers would be vastly higher. To prevent or stamp out typhus epidemics during World War II, killing lies was one of the most important challenges all worrying parties faced. The German's chief method of killing lies was Cyclone B deployed infumigation gas chambers. Such chambers were built in many locations, civilian as well as military in nature and of course in the vast German system of labor and concentration camps. Many, if not most of these fumigation chambers were destroyed after the war, but some survived. This here is the Cyclone B fumigation chamber at the former Stutturb concentration camp in Edansik, West Prussia, used to disenfest in made clothing. Note the blood you blew stains on the walls, outside as well as inside. This is a room of one building at the former made on a camp, which was also used for fumigating clothes. Again, it has blue stains in many places. The same is true for another structure in that camp also used for Cyclone B fumigations. This is a former Cyclone B fumigation facility at the former Auschwitz Birkenau camp. It exhibits the same kind of blue stains both on the outside walls and on the inside. That structure existed in two merosymmetrical units. This here is the other one, only a few yards away from the first. It too exhibits the Teltay blue discoloration of bricks, water and plaster on the inside as well as on the outside. We may assume that the plaster of the two churches fumigated with Cyclone B, which has just discussed, looked very similar to this. Now that we have arrived at Auschwitz, let's take a look around. This is a map of the Auschwitz region. In order to get an orientation as to where we are, here is an inset showing on the left a map of Europe. The small blue rectangle shows the area of Poland that is enlarged on the right hand inset. In it, I have surrounded with a red rectangle, the area which we see here in the larger map. Three areas on this map are of interest in the present context. First, the Auschwitz main camp, which was the original concentration camp opened in 1940. Most of its structures survived the war and served today as a museum. It also includes a crematorium with a homicidal gas chamber. We'll return to that later. Next, there is the huge Auschwitz Birkenau camp just a mile away, which was initially planned as a POW camp, but ended up as the destination for roughly one million Jews deported from various European countries. Most structures of that camp have been destroyed, either by the Germans prior to their retreat or afterwards by poets who use the building material as firewood or to reconstruct the homes. Finally, there is the industrial area of the German chemical trust eager farman industry to the east. The Auschwitz camp is considered the largest concentration camp of the Third Reich. At its peak in 1944, it had 48 sub-cams where inmates worked in armaments industries, workshops, farming, coal mines, and chemical factories. If you wish, it was Europe's largest slave labor enterprise ever. The most important factories from a strategic point of view were the Boonar Plans of the German Chemical Trust IG Farman Industry. Planning and construction started in 1941. These photos of this plant from the German Federal Archives are from 1943 and 1944. Some of these structures still exist to this day. You can see some photographic juxtapositions on the website given. Parallel to these industrial activities plans to increase the nearby slave labor population were also made. For that purpose, the initially small Auschwitz concentration camp was turned into a huge system of camps, which at one point was planned to accommodate some 200,000 inmates as a slave labor resource. The background of the chemical factories was the fact that Germany, in times of war, could easily be deprived of all major imports of food and raw materials by a British blockade. Already doing the First World War, Germany felt the devastating effect of being cut off from all imports, among them also rubber and petroleum, to name only the two most important raw materials for any industrialized nation. Ever since Germany's choke to become independent from natural, rubber, and mineral oil by exploiting its coal reserves and its chemical talents? In fact, already prior to the First World War, in 1909, the German Communist Fritz Kaufmann invented a process for producing artificial rubber. A process to convert nitrogen from the air into ammonia, an important first step in the production of any modern fertilizer or explosive, was first demonstrated by the German Communist Fritz Haarber also in 1909. He received the Nobel Prize for it in 1918. A process to turn coal into liquid hydrocarbons was first developed by the German Friedrich Bergeus, starting in 1910, with a patent issued in 1913. Hence, all the scientific pieces were in place when the First World War broke out, but turning them into an industrial-scale operation to make Germany independent from imports took a few decades. This stage was only achieved to a large degree during the later years of the Third Reich. The chemical industry near Auschwitz played a major role in this scheme. The importance of Auschwitz and Germany's economic plans can be derived from the summary written right after the war by some of America's greatest experts on German industry. Quote, Water and Germany was a chemical empire built on coal, air and water. 84.5% of her aviation fuel, 85% of her motor gasoline, or by the fraction of 1% of her rubber, 100% of the concentrated nitric acid, basic component of all military explosives, and 99% of her equally important methanol were synthesized from these three fundamental raw materials. The body of this industrial organism was the gas generating plants which turned coal into processed gases. Its arms were the many plants that used those gases and other materials drawn from the coal to produce synthetic fuels and lubricants, chemicals, rubber and explosive products. Apart from Auschwitz, Germany had only three other plants producing the basic chemicals from which the vast majority of all German supplies of rubber, fuel and lubricants were synthesized. Destroying these factors should therefore have been at the very top of all Allied bombing lists, although they were placed there only in 1944. Here is an Allied air photo of the Auschwitz plant taken on January 14, 1945, barely two weeks before the area was occupied by the Red Army. In this section enlargement, you can see many bomb craters caused by a number of Allied airweds on that factory which started in mid-1944. Some of them I have marked here red. Deportation of Jews to Auschwitz as slave laborers started in early 1942, but construction of the new camp Auschwitz-Birkenau had just begun. This here is a map showing the situation in May 1942. There actually wasn't much of a camp in existence yet. Only in late 1942 did the first inmate Chaua's and delousing facilities become operational in that camp. They already mentioned hygiene buildings, 5A and 5B with their Zeichelmbeer fumigation chambers. As a consequence, hygienic conditions at the camp were catastrophic and inmates started dying like flies right from the beginning. In the Nuta Chex mainstream standard work on the chronology of events at Auschwitz, we read on page 209 in the entry for May 10, 1942, that the Titus epidemic is spreading at the Auschwitz concentration camp and was even threatening the camps SS staff. One of the more prominent victims among them was the Auschwitz-Garrison physician Dr. Zeichelmbeer who died during that month of the disease. The entry for May 25 states that more Titus cases were reported on that day in the camp infirmary. By the summer of 1942, possibly also because there was never a proper garrison physician in charge during that time, the Titus epidemic had gotten completely out of control. Hundreds of inmates were dying every day. On page 277, we read in the entry for August 17 that Dr. Kurt Ullenbrock took over the post of garrison physician on that day, but a footnote explains that he too succumbed to Titus a few weeks later and remained in Auschwitz until October 2, 1942 only because he was still recovering from that disease. Ullenbrock barely survived. The sick Ullenbrock was replaced on September 6 by Dr. Edo Adverts who until then had been garrison physician at the Dachau camp. Only after Dr. Vietz had assumed his position, did things start to change. Here is how the new garrison physician Dr. Vietz described the situation at the Auschwitz camp when he arrived there. Quote, I discovered intolerable conditions for the prisoners. There was no running water, no proper toilets, no means of bathing, the barracks in which the prisoners were caughted were unheated, overcrowded and beds were missing. Lies literally swamped on the floors, close, bodies of the people. The walls were black with fleas. The people in an inconceivable condition wasted to their ribs, plagued with rum and the dead lying between the living and the dying. Every day hundreds of dead were caught at off, often after lying for days among the living. I was so spiritually demoralized that as soon saw suicide as the only way out. Vietz, here on the left, together with among others camp commander Huss on the very right, subsequently went to work to improve the conditions, yet it took him a full year to get the epidemic under control. Among other things he also saw to it that the most modern delousing technique was installed at Auschwitz, a large microwave delousing device. Here is an image of that device as installed at Auschwitz in early 1944 and this is a circuit layout. These documents are stored in the archives of the Siemens company who developed this device under the ages of the German army in order to keep the clothing of German soldiers clean. The shift of priorities occurred in 1943 however, as a result of which the device was used to save the lives of inmates at Auschwitz instead. Here is a blueprint from the fires of the Auschwitz camp authorities showing the building where the device was installed. And this is a report by Dr. Wildes of August 1944 in which he enthusiastically praises the exceptional performance of this device. The Siemens archives in Munich even have some firm footage of the device as it is being operated at Auschwitz, but we were not allowed to make a copy of it. Also in 1944, DT made its first appearance in Auschwitz under the German name Lausito. Nine metric tons were delivered in April 1944, 15 tons in August, and two tons in October of that year. Together with the highly effective and efficient microwave delousing facility, Auschwitz therefore had hardly any need for Cyclombi in 1944, at least when it came to disinfestations. As a matter of fact, only a little more than one metric ton of Cyclombi was delivered to Auschwitz in 1944, and the last delivery was made in late May of that year. Since the factory buildings of the producer of Cyclombi, the Desau-Azuka Werke, that is, sugarworks of Desau in Saxony, were damaged in summer 1944 by an Allied air raid, Cyclombi deliveries pretty much dried up after that in general. It is important to note that the mass extermination of Hungarian Jews at Auschwitz using Cyclombi is said to have started in mid-May 1944, that is to say, around the times Cyclombi deliveries came to an end. These are images made by the SS while these Jews were unloaded from trains at Auschwitz. There aren't any photos showing homicidal gassing, though. There are, however, images showing inmates who have just undergone the admission procedures to the camp, which included chowering and chaving to prevent the spread of lies. Having the hair-shaped arc was certainly humiliating for these women, but it also was a necessary life-saving measure. Plants for the two big Cyclombi delousing facilities we saw earlier were drawn up in the summer of 1942. The original blueprints show that the room used for fumigating clothes was called Gascommer, that is, Gas Chamber. Most of these blueprints were drawn by inmates employed at the Auschwitz construction office. Interestingly, around the same time, the blueprints for these two buildings were drawn, Polish resistance groups started reporting the existence of two homicidal gas chambers at Auschwitz. Some of the clean features of these alleged homicidal gas chambers closely resemble features of these two fumigation facilities. These fumigation rooms were not of the professional kind that had been developed by the company distributing Cyclombi, but of a rather more basic, if not to say, primitive design. The rooms were huge, had a lot of dead space in the gable area, were not properly sealed along the roof line, had no means of either heating the Cyclombi or distributing its fumes in the chamber, and the ventilation system was rather crude as well. Here you see the two openings where once ventilators were installed. In fact, to operate this fumigation chamber, someone wearing a gas mask had to enter the room and spread out the Cyclombi pellets on the floor, then retreat and lock the door firmly. The doors to these disinfestation rooms were of a makeshift kind as well, since they were made by inmates working in a local workshop. They consisted of wooden boards held together by iron bands, as you can see in these illustrations. The cracks between the boards were, quote unquote, sealed with felt strips, which, by the way, let's hydrogen sign that through as if it were nothing. These doors were more of a quip with a peephole, as was required by German law. It stipulated that the person entering such a chamber had to be observed by another person from the outside who needed to wear a gas mask as well and had to have a first aid kit at hand. This way, he could swiftly intervene in case of an emergency, for example, caused by a leaking or improperly done gas mask. This kind of door is the only kind that has ever been found in Auschwitz Birkenau. Here is one currently leaning against the wall inside the former Cyclombi fumigation wing of Building 5A that has a proper window. It probably served as a door to a hot air disinfestation room though. This is a 1945 photo of another typical camp made wooden door. This one without window or peephole though. It was found near the ruins of Crematorium 5 and is today stored in the old Crematorium at the main camp. Somewhat more sturdy steedles were found at the Auschwitz camp in the old Crematorium building, which is said to have had a homicidal gas chamber. However, these doors were ordered and stored only during the conversion of the building into an air-air shelter for the SS in 1944. At that point in time, this Crematorium had already been out of operation for a year. This particular door was sealing the air-air shelters airlock to the outside. This one, which is currently stored in the former furnace room, might have been ordered to seal the opening between the shelter and the former furnace room before it was decided to wallup that opening. But even those doors are made of a wooden frame and merely have a sheet metal cover to make them gas tight. There is no trace of any massive steel door ever having been ordered or installed at Auschwitz prior to mid 1944. This is what they look like. These are massive steel doors as installed at the fumigation chambers at Dachau. That one, and this one sealed fumigation chambers at Maidanik, and that's the fumigation chamber at Stuttau. And here are some excerpts from construction drawings of such doors as offered to the Auschwitz camp in July 1942. However, they were ordered only in June 1944 and in November 1944, the vendor of these doors inquired whether the camp still had an interest in their delivery. This means that they were evidently never delivered. Auschwitz simply never failed to need to order massive steel doors. This fact is not trivial. After all, the orthodox Holocaust narrative has it that hundreds of people were crammed into the homicidal gas chambers. Some witnesses even speak of a thousand, two thousand, like Rura First, or even three thousand people, like Charles Bender. Let's ignore the fact that it would have been physically impossible to press many more than a thousand people into the rooms referred to. Here is a drawing of the largest of the rooms claimed, densely packed with 1,680 people, 120 rows of 14 each. In such a packing density is only theoretically possible, meaning that it requires the drill and discipline of experienced soldiers to line up in such a fashion. Anyway, there can be no doubt that panic would have broken out among those victims once they realized that they had been locked up in a chemical slaughterhouse and were about to be poisoned. What a panicking crowd can do can be seen from the Heisel Stadium disaster that occurred in Belgium in May 1985. Let's watch this clip. In a panic, the Italians make a run for the Exit, but they suddenly have nowhere to go. A concrete wall blocks their escape, but it can quickly collapse and then they're waiting. Hundreds are not trapped under a question van, the humanity. Pride for helpful unanswered. Note that the wall was pushed over by the pressure exerted by hundreds of fans pushing against it. The steel doors sealing US execution gas chambers looked like an overkill insecurity for even if an inmate ever had a chance of getting out of the execution seat he is trapped into, any normal steel door would prevent him from getting out. But here it's not just about keeping the inmate in, but also about keeping all the witnesses absolutely safe from any leakage. In Auschwitz, leakage would not have been the major issue. After all, all the leaky makeshift fumigation doors did their job just fine. For homicidal gas chambers, designed to contain hundreds of unfedded victims, the challenge would have been to let the door open to the outside and to secure it against a panicking crowd violently pushing and kicking against it. The door had to open to the outside because many, if not most victims, trying to escape through the door would collapse and die right in front of it, making it impossible to open any door opening to the inside. However, the door opening to the outside is much more difficult to secure against being opened by force. Simple wooden doors held together by iron bands would never do. The flimsy iron bands would give way within seconds and the wood would bend and splinter. To illustrate that point, I've used Photoshop to make the latch on this gas-tight door move. This was the kind of latch that was used on all gas-tight doors at Auschwitz. Imagine hundreds of people pushing against that latch. How long would it last? These doors worked for fumigation chambers, but for homicidal gas chambers, they are absolutely inconceivable. Here is a scene from the 2011 movie Auschwitz by Uwe-Bal showing a gas-sexy. It shows a massive steel door, as has to be expected, even though the latch is a little flimsy. The problem is that none of the claimed homicidal gas chambers at Auschwitz were ever equipped with such doors. The situation is even worse when it comes to the room at the Auschwitz Museum, which is presented every year to over a million visitors as a homicidal gas chamber. This is an original German blueprint of 1942. It clearly shows not only that the room in question in its original layout, which is labeled as an inocuous morgue, had no door through which the claimed victims could have accessed the morgue from the outside. They actually had to enter into it, either by walking through the furnace room, where they already murdered fellow inmates were just being cremated, and observed idea, or else they had to enter walking through the dissecting room where piles of corpses were waiting out of seas by the camp's physicians, and no less absurd scenario. We're still the door connecting the morgue, the alleged gas chamber, to the furnace room was a swinging door, as can be seen from blueprints of 1940, here an enlargement of that door. 1942 also has an enlargement, and even 1944 when the building was converted to an air-air shelter, although here the drastman apparently got the opening direction wrong. This proves, however, that through the entire history of that crematorium, until that door was walled up in 1944, this door was a swinging door. The question is, how do you make a swinging door gastight, and how do you secure it against the panicking crowd? Look at this real world swinging door in my home, there is no way of locking it securely against the panicking crowd, and look at these gaps. By their very design, swinging doors are not even able to prevent a draft, it makes perfect sense to have such a door in a place where people constantly haul heavy loads from one room to another. The door opens with a push in either direction, and it closes by itself, but such a door is utterly inconceivable for a homicidal gas chamber. And yet, there it is. Today there is no door at all between these two rooms. That's not a smart design for a homicidal gas chamber either, but reinstating the original design is apparently out of the question as well. It goes without saying that the Auschwitz Museum hides this ugly little secret from its millions of visitors, because otherwise the entire fraud upon which this museum was built, what's with it, collapsed. On this chart, today located right next to the building, there is no trace of that mean door. There's more to the story, but before discussing this, let's go back to chemistry. As mentioned before, in the case of the Bavarian Church in Reasonfeld, Maesterry samples were taken and analyzed in order to find out what had caused the blue stains. Similar investigations were done in Auschwitz, where a number of researchers took Maesterry samples of the various fumigation chambers and of rooms that are said to have been used, or rather misused, at some point in time to mass murder people with hydrogen cyanide and the form of cyclohn B. Before we can go into the details of these analysis, however, we need to address a number of questions. First, how likely is it to find any trace of the blue chemical compounds involved in the first place? After all, several decades have passed since Cyclohn B was used in those locations. Next, what conditions are favourable to their formation? And finally, are there any factors that could interfere with their reliability of chemical analysis? The first question concerns the stability of the blue pigment we are analysing. Viewed on the surface of things, it is plainly obvious that this pigment must be very stable because it can still be found to this day in the walls of the various fumigation facilities, even on the outside where the walls have been exposed to the influence of sunshine and rain for many decades. This fact is backed up by a long-term stability test which was performed in England starting in the late 1950s. During that test, the blue pigment was simply precipitated on an aluminum sheet and that aluminum sheet was then exposed to rain and shine for 21 years on the rooftop of the factory building of the Hyduty Alloys Company in Slao, which is the western suburb of London. During the 1950s and 1960s, at the peak of the age of coal, acidic smock was a common occurrence in and around London. Hence, the colour samples used in that test were exposed to one of the most aggressive environments possible. It still, the results published in this paper of 1981 were astounding. They showed that this Prussian blue pigment was one of the most stable pigments of all the pigments investigated, similar only to iron ochre, which is basically rust. Almost all of the samples used hardly lost any of their vibrancy. Another strong indicator that the pigment in question is extremely long lasting can be seen from the fate it suffered in the soil of former cooking plants and city gas works. During the age of coal, people used to heat their homes and cook with city gas, which could be produced from coal in a number of ways. Let's watch the following educational Australian footage from the 1950s, which I have cut down towards essential in the present context. The coal is fed from the hoppers and pulled into the retorts, which are heated from the outside. As the coal is heated, coal gas is given off. Those dots show how the gas escapes from the retort through pipes. What is left of the coal is called coke and is emptied from the bottom of the retort into steel trucks. Other sections of the gas works clean this gas by removing tar, ammonia and other impurities to make it fit for our use. One of these impurities is a small amount of hydrogen cyanide, which gets washed out in the cleaning step mentioned next. And also this scrubbing plant to remove still more impurities. Hydrogen cyanide was removed by letting it react with a solution of iron two and iron three hydroxide, resulting in pressure and blue. Because pressure and blue was considered inocuous, many city gas works and cooking plants simply dumped the pigment on the factory grounds. As a result, the soil of thousands of cooking and city gas plants all over the world contains high quantities of pressure and blue to this day, at times even giving the soil a blue issue. In the 1990s, when environmentalism became fashionable, people started noticing the high quantities of cyanide in the soil of former cooking plants. Ever since, a plethora of scientific papers has appeared investigating how dangerous this cyanide contamination is, it at all. One scientist in particular built his career on pushing the panic button about that, the Dutchman Johannes Moisin. In a number of papers, which he collected in a volume, he eventually submitted as his PhD thesis, he theorized that Prussian blue from coca-scrabbers deposited in soil would be highly unstable and should dissolve within a short period of time, giving off toxic levels of free cyanide into the groundwater. But when he tested his theory by taking soil samples and analysing them, the results did not support his theory, which turned out to have been based on the premise that Prussian blue is present in the soils as a microscopic mixture of iron, cyanide and iron hydroxide that is rust, a so-called solid solution. That may in fact be the case with some of the Prussian blue dumped on the grounds of former gas works, as the Prussian blue formed quickly using an axis of iron hydroxide. But that is not at all what we would be dealing with in our case. The slow formation of the pigment in masonry in the absence of noticeable amounts of dissolved iron hydroxide precludes the formation of mixed crystals and supports the formation of pure Prussian blue crystals. Further studies revealed that Prussian blue as such is in fact highly stable for many decades. This chart shows in purplish blue the range of stability of Prussian blue and in lighter blue of Turnbull's blue, which is almost identical to Prussian blue. The acidity of the environment is plotted along the x-axis and the oxidative strength on the y-axis. Actually, environmental conditions in masonry and soils are located between pH 4 and pH 8. In other words, there is no way Prussian blue could dissolve quickly under the circumstances considered here. The actual solubility of Prussian blue can be calculated by the upper limit of alkalinity at which it is still stable. According to this chart, that limit is somewhere between pH 9 and pH 11, depending on the oxidative strength of the environment. With the known solubility of iron 3 hydroxide, this yields the solubility product PKS for Prussian blue of somewhere between 165 and 200. To cut a long story short, if Prussian blue forms in masonry as a result of exposure to hydrogen cyanide, the pigment formed is extremely stable. In fact, it is similarly stable as the main components of the wall itself since it is an integral part of it and one of its most stable components to move. In particular, it is less solubility than the iron hydroxide from which it formed. Hence, as long as the wall itself exists, it must be expected to contain Prussian blue in undiminished concentrations. Therefore, taking samples and analyzing them for Prussian blue makes sense even if undertaking many decades after the events that led to the pigments formation. Let's now turn to the conditions that are favorable for the formation of Prussian blue. First off, the formation of Prussian blue in masonry exposed to hydrogen cyanide cannot be the rule because the fumigation of buildings with the zyclombine and similar products based on hydrogen cyanide has been a common practice for more than half a century, yet reports about wall-sturning petri-blue, such as the two churches I discussed earlier, are rare exceptions. The question is, what do all the cases of wall discolorations known to us have in common that sets them apart from the rest? Well, fumigations of buildings for pest control usually take place only in older buildings because newly erected buildings cannot be infested by pests. Such an infestation usually takes years or even decades. However, all the fumigation chambers of the third-right era were specifically built to be used right after they had been erected. The same instant exposure situation was given in the case of the two churches whose plaster had been replaced a few weeks prior to the fumigation. The same, of course, would have been true for the claimed homicidal gas chambers inside the crematoria at Auschwitz-Birkenau, which are said to have been built for the specific purpose of being used right after these facilities had been finished. So, what factors are favorable to the formation of Prussian blue in masonry? In this presentation, I will focus only on the most important aspects of the physics and chemistry of hydrogen cyanide interaction with masonry. More details with many references to expert literature can be found in my book. Anyway, in order to find out which factors support the formation of Prussian blue in masonry, we need to look into the various steps leading to the formation of this pigment. First, hydrogen cyanide needs to get absorbed by the moisture contained in the wall. Next, the hydrogen cyanide molecules must be split to form cyanide ions because only these ions react with iron at a considerable rate. Then, those cyanide ions must attach themselves to the iron ions contained in rust. That means that the cyanide ions displace the oxygen and hydroxide ions that, together with the iron, constitute rust. After this, some of the iron must be reduced from the trivalent to its bivalent form because Prussian blue is a mixture of both. But the rust contained in masonry contains almost exclusively trivalent iron. Finally, all components must come together so as to precipitate as the blue pigment in question. The first step requires that the masonry contains lots of water. At low temperatures and a high relative humidity of the ambient air, such as one confined in unheated basements, up to 10% of the masonry material can consist of water. If the ambient air is warm and dry, however, this value may sink down to just 1% or even less. The influence of moisture in the wall on the tendency to absorb hydrogen cyanide was determined during a series of tests conducted in Germany in the late 1920s. In our context, a comparison between a moist lime sandstone and one dried for half a year at 20 degrees Celsius, that is 68 degrees Fahrenheit, is of interest. Here you can see a factor of almost 10 between moist and dry material. In fact, a high water content is conducive to all the reactions considered, none of which can take place at a noticeable rate in the absence of water. Hence, cool and thus moist walls will be more inclined to form prussian blue than warm and dry walls. The second step depends on the acidity of the masonry's capillary water. Since hydrogen cyanide is a weak acid, it forms cyanide ions to a noticeable degree only in an alkaline or low acidity environment. Such an environment exists in fresh lime waters and plasters for a few weeks and in cement waters and concretes for many months, years or even decades, depending on the exact composition and history. It can be stated in general that a masonry material remains alkaline for a longer period of time if it contains little lime and lots of cement. Hence, fresh and thus still alkaline line plaster supports the step of the formation of prussian blue for a number of weeks, where mortar and concrete rich in cement support it for many months, if not years or even decades. The difference in absorption of hydrogen cyanide between fresh and alkaline mortar and old, well set, hence pH neutral mortar was also investigated in the previously mentioned study. We derived from it that, compared to the old mortar, the fresh alkaline mortar absorbed at least 26 times as much hydrogen cyanide and that it released it much more slowly widening the gap between the two types of mortar as time went by. Aging lime plaster turns pH neutral after several weeks, at which point any cyanide not bound by iron will be turned back into hydrogen cyanide by the wall's moisture. That hydrogen cyanide will slowly evaporate and vanish into thin air. Cement mortar and concrete however stay alkaline for much longer periods of time. Hence, these materials allow any cyanide that has accumulated in its capillary system to continue reacting for a much longer time. The third step is the slowest of all the reactions considered. It therefore determines the rate of formation of long lasting iron cyanide components. While the trivalent iron of rust becomes more readily available for reactions with increasing acidity, its reaction partner, the cyanide iron, has the opposite tendency. Hence, while fresh and thus very alkaline plaster mortars and concretes can accumulate lots of cyanide, it takes a long time for iron cyanide to form. In the cases of the two churches mentioned earlier, that process took many months up to a year. Helpful to this slow process is the next step, the reduction of trivalent iron to bivalent iron. This reduction requires that something else gets oxidized. In our case, the oxidizing agent is an excess of cyanide itself, which also needs an alkaline environment for this reaction. The driving force behind this reaction is the energy released when trivalent iron surrounded by cyanide turns into bivalent iron. That reaction is so strong in an alkaline medium that it is even capable of turning trivalent chromium into hexavalent chromium. The energy difference delta H between the two types of iron cyanides is some 64 kilojoules per mole. Hence, even if only small amounts of iron three cyanide can form in a moderately alkaline environment, it gets withdrawn from the equilibrium by turning into iron two cyanide in the presence of excess cyanide. And the course of many days, weeks, months or even years, this can amount to considerable quantities of iron two cyanide. The last step, the precipitation of Prussian blue, can take place when the acidity sinks below the limit where this pigment is stable compared to iron hydroxide that is rust. As shown previously, there is somewhere between pH 9 and 11. Since the mazenries acidity sinks with time starting at the surface, that's where most of the Prussian blue will show up initially. If the wall is moist, that moisture evaporates at the surface, leaving behind everything that travels along with the water but cannot evaporate. That includes any solubilary iron cyanide, not yet precipitated as Prussian blue. Hence, this pigment tends to get accumulated on the surfaces, inside and outside. The red arrow on this photo points to a spot where a tug-a-wall sample from the inside of building 5A in Outruth's volcano. Note that just a few millimeters beneath the surface, the plaster is considerably less blue. But even in deeper layers, the plaster still contains high concentrations of cyanide. It's just that on the very surface, that pigment's concentration is extremely high in certain places. This accumulation process on a wall's surface depends on a number of factors starting with a kind of material that makes up the wall at any particular spot, the amount of water in its capillary system, and the water's mobility. Last but not least, the heat conductivity of the underlying material also has an influence on this. There are a few other factors to be considered. For instance, it goes without saying that high contents of rust and the mazenry are also conducive to the formation of Prussian blue, but since most materials have an iron content between 1 to 5% anyway, the difference between them is usually negligible. Furthermore, any mazenry material containing considerable amounts of cement also has the advantage that its microscopic inner surface is much larger than that of mazenry consisting mainly of lime. Here is a scanning electron microscope image of lime water, and here is one of cement water at the same magnification, although the image is much smaller. As you can see, the crystals in the cement mortar are much smaller. Here is a series of three images showing what happens to cement and concrete after water has been added to the cement powder. The first image shows the state of the four hours, the second after ten hours, and the last after twenty-one hours. What you see growing here are needles of aluminum silicates, something that happens only in cement mortars and concretes, but never in lime water. These crystals are responsible for the fact that cement mortar is much firmer and longer lasting than lime water. Due to this microcrystalline structure, the inner surface of cement and concrete is much larger than that of lime water. The actual value, measured with water vapor, can be as high as 200 square meters per gram of material. Lime water has only about 10% of that value. The microcrystalline structure of cement mortars and concretes means that the solid liquid interface is very large. Since we are dealing here with a reaction of the mostly solid iron ions with cyanide dissolved in the capillary water, such a large surface is very conducive to this reaction. It also means that more iron is exposed at the surface and that it is more inclined to react energetically speaking. The opposite is true for scented materials however, which do not tend to form prussian blue because the centering process drastically reduces the inner surface of such materials hence the propensity to react in any way. Bricks are a case in point. Only on the surface, where the material has been eroded due to environmentally influences, is the rust contained in them able to react to a considerable degree. Before we turn to the actual analysis, we need to understand that analyzing a substance for a certain chemical isn't always a straightforward process. Many methods are sensitive not just for one chemical but for several, so a certain reading might not necessarily indicate how much of a certain chemical is in a sample because it may give a combined reading of several chemicals. In the present case, Uranus moistened determined with a series of experiments the kind of chemicals that can give false positive readings. The most common one among them is carbonate. This is very important for our case because one of the main components of masonry is calcium carbonate. In fact, odor lineplast samples may mainly consist of it. If we extrapolate moistened data to carbonate contents in the order of several hundred grams per kilogram sample material or several 10 percent, this means that such samples can yield a reading of several milligrams of cyanide, even in the total absence of any cyanide. In other words, the analytical methods used to detect cyanide traces become insensitive in the case of masonry material, rich in carbonates, and readings of up to a few milligrams of cyanide per kilogram of sample material should be considered uncertain or unreliable. Equipped with this knowledge, let's now overlook at the analytical results of a number of researchers who took samples at our shits. To make things easier to digest, I do not give the results of individual samples in this table, but only the ranges of the results. Furthermore, I have grouped the samples by the type of location they came from, and then by the individual who took the samples and had them analyzed. The first white set of results comes from samples taken from walls, which are said to have been part of homicidal gas chambers. The second blue set of results concerns samples taken from walls of former fumigation chambers, mainly of the two buildings at Bergenau shown before. The third set of results relates to samples taken from walls of buildings which belong to neither group. First, we see that all samples taken from structures that were not fumigation chambers exhibit results, which are close to what must be considered the detection limit. To demonstrate this, I have actually retested two of the samples using a different lab. While the first one, the Institute for Zanios, found traces in the samples, the second lab did not. This means basically that the cyanide readings in samples taken from claimed homicidal gas chambers are comparable to those taken from any other location, and that none of them contain any traces of cyanide that can be detected with any degree of reliability if they exist at all. The situation is different when it comes to samples taken from former fumigation chambers. Only three of the four individuals who took samples agree on the range of cyanide contents. All samples that these three samples had taken had readings of at least a gram of cyanide per kilogram of sample material. This means that at least 0.1 percent of the samples consisted of cyanide, something we would expect of a sample taken from walls exhibiting a patchy blue discoloration caused by a zyklumbi fumigations. The third set of samples taken from various Auschwitz fumigation chambers and analysed by Machiewicz and colleagues, however, didn't result in any significant cyanide readings at all. The reason for that is simple. Dr. Jan Machiewicz, he or portrayed from the 1960s, had been commissioned by the Polish State Museum at Auschwitz, thus by the Polish government itself. Machiewicz himself was an employee of the Jansin Institute for Chorrenzic Research, which is run by the Polish government's Department of Justice. Since denying the Auschwitz gas chambers is a crime in Poland, Machiewicz must have been under massive pressure to somehow conclude that the cyanide readings from the claimed homicidal gas chambers resemble those of fumigation chambers. To produce those results, he chose an analytic method, which by design was unable to detect any Prussian blue and similar long term stable iron cyanide compounds. Here is his 1994 publication of his rigged results. As a reason why he excluded all Prussian blue from the analysis, he stated that he did not understand how Prussian blue could possibly form in masonry as a result of cyclumbi gasings. Quote, it is hard to imagine the chemical reactions and physical chemical processes that could have led to the formation of Prussian blue in that place. Unquote. Referring to a paper by an Austrian chemist, Machiewicz then stated, quote, that the formation of Prussian blue in bricks is simply improbable, and that the blue discoloration could instead be the result of blue wall paint. While such an hypothesis is certainly permissible, ignoring arguments to the contrary certainly is not. But that is exactly what Machiewicz and his colleagues subsequently did. Here is what they quoted in their paper in footnote 4 on the last page. Jan Schaus, which used to be a pen name of mine, Paul Eismüberzeitgeschichte, which means lectures on contemporary history. This book is the germ predecessor of the currently available book lectures on the Holocaust. Its first edition was published in early 1993. In it, I explained with the same arguments as presented here and supported by the same sources of expert literature how Prussian blue can form in masonry after exposure to hydrogen cyanide and which factors are favorable. Although he quoted the book, Machiewicz ignored those arguments completely. That book also addressed specifically the many deficiencies and fallacies of the Austrian paper quoted by Machiewicz, in particular the demonstrably false hypothesis that the blue discoloration of the Auschwitz, Stuttof and Mydannick fumigation was, could be the result of blue wall paint. Specifically, we read on page 292, quote, These cyanide readings can be found not only on the wall surface as would have to be expected in the case of wall paint but also deep inside the wall and on the outside of the masonry and also on the bricks. Furthermore, the blue discoloration resembles anything else but a typical coat of paint. In fact, the patchy pattern also proves that the Prussian blue originated from plumigation gassings. There are actually many more arguments clearly showing that the wall paint hypothesis is nothing more than a red herring conjured up to conceal a fraud. First, I am blue as such is not even sold as wall paint at all since it lacks sufficiently high line fastness. It is offered only as a mixture with other blue pigments but there is no trace of any other blue pigment on these walls. Second, if this argument were correct, it would be remarkable that the SS of all the rooms in the concentration camps of the third Reich would apply blue paint only to the disinfestation chambers where no one could admire it. And strangely, always with the same blue Auschwitz, Birkenau, Mydannick, Stuttof, all other rooms were merely whitewashed at best. Third, the disinfestation chambers themselves already had a coat of lime paint. Why would they cover this coat of lime paint with another paint which, in addition, is not even lime fast? They would therefore have had to wait until the lime paint and plaster had said before one could repaint the walls. And then it would have been by no means certain that the paint would not furthermore have become stained as a result of chemical reactions. Fourth, neither would a coat of paint on the inside of the room explain the absence of blue discolourations on the anterior walls which were added to the disinfestation wing of 358 at a later time. It is striking that only such walls have blue stains which were exposed to hydrogen cyanide. Fifth, the wall paint argument is refuted by the fact that none of the colored walls show any pattern of brush marks and also no identifiable coat of paint since wall paint consists not only of pigment but also of a considerable portion of binding agents to hold the pigment in place and other chemicals. The blue pigment is however simply one component of the lime paint plaster and mortar. Sixth, the wall paint argument furthermore fails to explain how the artistic skills of the painters could have succeeded in imitating the brick structure lying beneath the plaster. Such a pattern however is fully consistent with the accumulation of cyanides and the formation of prussian blue as a result of humigations because that depends on the wall's humidity and temperature which in turn depends on whether there is mortar or brick behind the plaster. Seventh, the wall paint argument does not explain the only pale blue tint of the interior south walls of the original disinfestation wing of building 5a. This too can be explained by humigation because that interior wall was warmer and drier than the exterior walls hence less prone to form prussian blue. Eighth, neither does this wall paint argument explain the high cyanide content in the superficially white iron poor material of the walls of the disinfestation wing of building 5b unless one posits that these rooms were painted with an iron white the wall paint that does not even exist. Here too the humigation hypothesis has no trouble explaining this. Since the plaster in that building does not adhere firmly to the underlying wall moisture cannot easily travel from the wall through the plaster into that room thus accumulation processes on the plaster surface are impeded. The Austrian paper quoted by Machiewicz and colleagues in order to prop up their auxiliary wall paint hypothesis was published in this political pamphlet. It was written by Joseph Biler and stands out by not having a single reference to any literature chemical or otherwise regarding the formation and stability of the prussian blue or any other cyanide chemistry for that matter. In his first put note he excuses that fact by stating that his subsequent remarks quote aren't supposed to be a treatise on the chemistry of hydrogen cyanide. Unquote, how can any researcher take such a paper seriously in the first place that is devoid of any substantiated reasoning? Well, Machiewicz didn't back up any of his claim with any references to chemical literature either as can be seen from his mere footnotes. So, I guess ignorant birds of the same feather flock together. And yet, these two vacuous papers serve as the linchpin for the orthodox musings on the chemistry of Auschwitz. Anyway, after Machiewicz and his colleagues had picked an analytical method that wouldn't find anything anywhere, no matter how hard they looked, they found that the readings of samples taken from fumigation chambers were similar, that is to say nonexisting, to those taken from claimed homicidal gas chambers. Hence, they concluded that the history of both groups of samples must also have been similar. So, because we know that Zyklum B-gastings took place on a grand scale in the fumigation chambers, they concluded that similar Zyklum B-gastings must also have taken place in the claimed homicidal gas chambers. And, Bingo, the reality of homicidal gasings at Auschwitz had been confirmed. Because the absence of any evidence proves what needs to be demonstrated. Good job! So, how do you prove that a civilization exists on Mars? Well, first you take a detection device that cannot detect civilizations. Then you use it to measure the civilization existing on Earth. Your device will show some value close to zero. Next, you train your instrument on Mars. Here too, the instrument shows a value close to zero. Hence, you conclude that a civilization similar to ours must indeed exist on Mars for the values measured in both cases are similar. Of course, if you can't look, there would be a similar civilization value for the Moon, for Mercury, Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, Uranus, and Pluto for the Sun, for Alpha Centauri, for the Andromen annibula, and whatever you train your smart device. Smart? Really? There are people who take the Polish frauds around Jan Markiewicz seriously. Some don't know better because they simply trust quote unquote renowned researchers. But others do know better, such as the Jewish American chemist Dr. Richard Green. The psychology behind his persistent denial of reality is worth its own documentary, so I won't dwell on it here. It goes without saying that the lack of any reproducible, reliable cyanide readings in wall samples taken from claimed homicidal gas chambers does not conclusively prove that no gassings took place there. After all, most premises fumigated with zyklombe don't exhibit such residues either, as I mentioned before. But then again, so do all buildings that were never exposed to the gas. What we need to do is look into all possible factors that can influence the formation of Prussian blue and then compare those with the two cases, the fumigation chambers on the one hand and the claimed homicidal gas chambers on the other. This is exactly what the next table does. It compares three types of facilities. First, the documented case of the church at Beeson Ferd or the plaster turned patchy blue after just one fumigation. Second, more number one, each of Crematorium 2 and 3 at Bergenau. These unheated underground basements were built into the ground water from which they were insulated by a layer of tar between two layers of bricks. The interior plaster is of a very hard consistency to this day, indicating a high portion of cement. The roof is made of concrete, so is the floor. These rooms allegedly served as homicidal gas chambers. When samples were taken there in the 1990s, the roof and walls of Morgan number one of Crematorium 2 were still extent to a large degree and sections of the interior walls plaster were relatively well protected from environmental influences. Third, the disinfestation facilities 5A and 5B at Bergenau as shown here already a number of times. While the exterior walls have been exposed to the elements since these facilities were built in 1942, the interior walls have always been sheltered from any weathering. The plaster and mortar of these buildings is coarse and brittle, indicating a high amount of sand and lime as they ingredients and little if any cement. The former Ziklumbi fumigation chambers of these buildings were heated above ground rooms. While we have relatively reliable information about the fumigation cases, some parameters of the claimed homicidal gasings are by necessities vacuative in nature as we have only highly unreliable and at times widely diversioned witness statements to back them up. I get back to that in a few minutes. In this table I have listed seven creatures of the mausenary under consideration. Four of them are a calamity in a surface, moisture and number of gassings clearly favor the claimed homicidal gas chambers over the disinfestation chambers when it comes to the formation of Prussian Blue. This is mainly due to the fact that the underground morges were unheated, hence cool and moist locations and that their plaster containing large quantities of cement was over much higher quality evidently due to the constant high moisture it needed to withstand. Hence if we consider only the chemical and physical features, the claimed homicidal gas chambers would have had a considerably higher propensity to form Prussian Blue than the fumigation chambers. However, we need to somehow explain a difference of up to a factor of 1000 in favor of the fumigation chambers, although so far the opposite seems to be more likely. But there are two more factors related to how the rooms were used, which I have marked with three question marks in the gas chamber column. The first concerns the amount of hydrogen cyanide used per volume of air called concentration, and the second concerns the amount of time during which the gas was contained in these rooms and thus could react with the mausenary. This is exactly the line of argument of scholars defending the orthodox Holocaust narrative such as Richard Green, Joseph Byler and Jan Machiewicz. They claim that, compared to fumigations, only a fraction of the concentration of hydrogen cyanide was used and that killing humans took much less time than fumigating bugs. With that they are not entirely wrong, but they are not entirely right either. First, in order to kill insects like fleas, lice and woodworms, one also has to kill their larvae and eggs, which due to their slow metabolism, react only slowly to poisonous substances in the air. In contrast to that, humans, as warm blooded animals, always have a fast metabolism. Authoric scholars base their assumption of swift zyclin B executions on toxicological handbooks, saying that hydrogen cyanide kills humans swiftly already at low concentrations. As we have seen at the beginning of this presentation however, that assumption is based on experiments on rabbits which cannot be transferred to humans who react much slower to gaseous hydrogen cyanide. When it comes to the speed of the execution and the amount of poison used to affect it, what do it misses claim about Auschwitz? We have only one testimony regarding the quantity of zyclin B elegantly used during homicidal casings. It stems from Rudra Purs, the former Auschwitz camp commander. However, he was severely tortured during his initial interrogations and many of the claims he made in his various statements are demonstrably false. I won't go into details about that here, hence I must abstain from using his quarers, confessions as a source, not least because they will be inadmissibly any proper court of law. There is an indirect way of determining the amount of poison elegantly used though. It uses the claimed execution times in order to calculate from them the effect of concentration needed to achieve such times. That requires of course that we have reliable information about the execution times. Factors however, that claims about that vary between instantly and up to 20 minutes. We can get out of that ba