40. Many survivors of the "death camps" say they saw bodies being piled
up in pits and burned. How much gasoline would have to be used to perform
this?

Ernst Zündel Replies:
Rebuttal # 40:

Many Jewish survivors of the "death camps" say they saw bodies being piled up
in pits and burned. How much gasoline would have to be used to perform
this?

First thing that needs to be mentioned with this regard is that the
aerial photographs of Auschwitz made by the US Air Force in 1943 and '44 do not
reveal any signs of any pits, no mounds of earth that would have to be excavated
from those pits, nothing that might indicate mass homicidal activity, no smoke
from crematoria, no signs of bodies being burned in the open, no piles of coal - nothing! Those overflights were taking place at
random, at the time when the "extermination program" at Auschwitz was allegedly
in full swing.

Those aerial photographs were extensively studied by
researchers. German
historian Udo Walendy, who as a court-recognized expert was a witness at the
Zundel trial, devoted his entire "Historical Facts" magazine (#9, 1981) to the
subject.

Other expert witnesses at Zundel trials
were also giving their evidence on the subject. There is simply nothing on those
photographs to give the slightest amount of ammunition to the holocaust writers.

The major source for the stories about "cremation pits", as well as
other ones of the same "quality", seems to be a former Auschwitz inmate, Filip
Muller, but stories of burning bodies in pits can also be found in Auschwitz
commandants' Rudolf Hoess
"confessions" and "memoirs". The stories of burning in pits usually involve
Auschwitz-Birkenau camp, but some pit burning is also alleged at
Treblinka.

The type of fuel in case of Birkenau was supposed to have been
wood, not gasoline. At Treblinka rubbish was supposedly used, which is simply
preposterous, as the rubbish of a camp is not nearly the same as that of an
average American or Canadian household.

The camps sure did not have
plenty of fancy wrappings made of paper and plastic. They probably did not have
many cardboard boxes either. Every wartime scrap of material was saved and
recycled - even then! And in "paper-poor" wartime Germany, there certainly were
no newspapers with some hundred or even twice that many pages every day, no
magazines, no clothing to throw out. It is simply inconceivable that someone
would be suggesting that the camp garbage was just as combustible as our garbage
today!

As for the claims with regard to gasoline, everybody must have
seen corpses of Goebbels and Hitler. They were still far from the stage when the
body is reduced to ashes, even after a considerable amount of gasoline poured on
them. In his testimony Ivan Lagace said that he had seen the remains of victims
of crime, after the murderers had attempted to burn the corpse with gasoline in
an open area and set them on fire. They utterly failed in that.

Human
bodies are very difficult to burn, and in the open it is pretty much impossible.
Skin can be charred quite easily; limbs can also be burned; but it is extremely
difficult to cremate the torso.

The recent case in Britain involving "mad
cow" disease is a case in point. It was a real disaster of national proportions
- not just for the purely economic impact due to the loss of so much livestock,
but also for the expense associated with disposing of so many carcasses.

Somehow nobody suggested to pile those carcasses in the open and douse
them with gasoline!

And yet, according to the holocaust historiography,
those "evil nazis" in fuel-starved wartimes somehow were able to do essentially
the same with no apparent problem.

Gasoline was a very precious
commodity in Germany during the war, it is simply inconceivable that it would
have been wasted on cremations of bodies, especially for such inefficient
process as burning in the open - or worse yet, in pits! Here we do not even need
to mention the fact that there is no record of any large quantity gasoline
deliveries to Auschwitz.