Krema IV and V were of different design too. But that indeed seem to be addressed by Pressac, not that convincingly. Pressac argues that:
The throughput of Krematorium I, estimated at 340 per day, is a valid figure based on relatively long practice, but the figures for Krematorien II, III, IV and V are purely theoretical, especially those for IV and V which were calculated by extrapolation from the planned figures for Krematorien II and III.
Theoretical? Weren't Krema II and IV as per Pressac himself transfered in 31 March 31st, 1943, respectively March 22nd, 1943, while the 4756 document is dated June 28th, 1943? There were still no figures for those types of Kremas three months after being transfered?
http://www.nizkor.org/ftp.cgi/camps/auschwitz/images/k2-transfer-deed.jpg
http://www.nizkor.org/ftp.cgi/camps/auschwitz/images/k4-transfer-deed.jpg
Further, I find this:
Cracks in the chimney were already visible on April 3, and by mid-May the crematory was no longer operational. Because Birkenau’s crematories could not possibly have “processed” as many corpses as has been claimed, Meyer concludes that between December 1942 and March 1943 tens of thousands of corpses were cremated there in the open air.
http://vho.org/GB/Journals/JHR/21/3/Weber24.html
If true, this means that June 28th letter is even further unlikely.
Surprisingly somewhat. Didn't expect to be proven wrong in that respect. I've rarely seen anyone remark that the 340 figure is off on denier sites nor did I find this off figure addressed by others.
Also remaining is the issue of one cremation in 15 minutes (25 for Krema I assuming the 340 figure and 24 hour continuous operation) and calculating for continuous 24 hour operation which has no basis in reality. Pressac himself suggest 33 minutes, as we've seen before. Also remaining is that unadjusted, using the same performance for Krema I as the others, the figure would have been 4992, a figure too close to 5000?
It's interesting that in all of this you flat-out ignore how many bodies actually needed to be cremated in 1943 and 1944. Up to March 1943 victims at Birkenau were first buried then exhumed and cremated on open-air pyres. Around 250,000 bodies were burned that way by the spring of 1943. They had been killed in the Bunkers at Birkenau or died in Birkenau, they weren't going to be carted over to the main camp when the crematorium was out of action for much of the summer of 1942 and had such a small capacity.
Open-air pyres were reactivated twice, firstly in August 1943 when a large influx from Upper East Silesia arrived at the same time as there was only one operational crematoria due to breakdowns, and then in May 1944 for the summer when the Hungarian action and other large scale actions arrived, overwhelming the three crematoria that were operational at that time.
From March 1943 to May 1944, with the blip of August 1943 (dealt with by reactivating pyres), Auschwitz actually required far less cremation capacity than is spelled out in this letter: on average, less than 1,000 per day. This was not distributed absolutely evenly, but the average worked out at less than the stated 'official' capacity of Krema II. And by the autumn, they had two such crematoria working. Thus there are testimonies that the crematoria were used alternately; one crematoria would burn the bodies from an incoming transport while the other was either finishing off the cremation from an incoming transport or burning bodies of prisoners who died in the camp. If lots of transports arrived simultaneously then there were scheduling problems, but never to the point of causing the system to break down from September 1943 to May 1944.
In May 1944, very large numbers of transports arrived, so Kremas IV and V were reactivated, but Krema V went over to open air pyres as its ovens failed, and the old open air pyres were reactivated. This despite the fact that a smooth running of all four crematoria using the 'official' figures would have sufficed to cope with the 1944 influx. Thus whenever the numbers threatened to overload the crematoria, the camp turned to fallback methods.
Theoretically, over the 460 days from July 1 1943 to September 30 1944, using the 'official' figures in the letter of June 28, 1943, the camp could have cremated 2,031,360 bodies. The two large crematoria II and III could have cremated 1,324,800 bodies, while the two less advanced crematoria IV and V on the 'official' figures could have cremated 706,560 bodies. In practice crematoria IV and V were mothballed for much of that period so crematoria II and III did most of the work. Crematorium III was being repaired until September 1943, which cancels out against the fact that Crematorium IV was reactivated from May to October 1944 with working ovens.
In the same time-frame, July 1943 to September 1944, not more than 700,000 people died at Auschwitz. That's because more than 300,000 had died up to July 1943, and there were some 10s of 1000s of deaths in October 1944 and then far fewer after the suspension of gassing.
So we find that the cremation requirement was just over half the 'official' capacity of Kremas II and III. Yet we know that on two occasions, the crematoria were supplemented by open-air pyres; and that Krema IV also functioned for five months in that time-period (when its 'official' capacity would have cremated 117,504 bodies). There was evidently a lot of idle time when the crematoria were not being used to their maximum efficiency, and some time when requirements exceeded capacity, at which point other methods were used.
Indeed, the use of two sets of open-air pyres in the summer of 1944 render virtually all cremation capacity arguments moot, because the ultimate capacity of the pyres was massively greater than the capacity of the crematoria.
The '4756' document is not a forgery. You have not advanced any arguments to explain how it was forged or to prove that it was forged. Such arguments must come from outside the document itself. You have not refuted the point that the Soviets suppressed the document and did not use it in their May 1945 report, because they had estimated a far higher (and unrealistic) cremation capacity. Nor have you explained why the Soviets, who had demonstrable possession of the document, would write about it to themselves, in secret and internally to the NKVD, if it was a forgery. Forgeries get used. The Soviets didn't use it. They passed a copy to the Poles, who first presented it in evidence in 1947, even though the document contradicted the 4M figure claimed by the Poles at that time and subsequently.
Nothing in the provenance of this document suggests forgery.
There are no external signs of forgery, and the document is consistently formatted, and appears where it should in the archival file; and is backed up by a request from Hoess to be informed of the capacity of the crematoria.
Pressac's interpretation, that the document was a piece of internal propaganda to show off the shiny new toys, and gives inflated figures, is plausible. The numbers illuminate the mentality of the SS in the Zentralbauleitung and crematoria administration. As the document is demonstrably not a forgery, the numbers originate from the SS.
There is in fact no reason why the numbers should originate from anyone else but the SS. The Soviets and Poles had a demonstrable interest in raising the numbers to a far higher level than 4756 per day. Nobody else had possession of the document but them; the Soviets had the original and did nothing with it except discuss it in an internal secret memorandum.
The same paper trail of files also contains two documents regarding coke usage in Krema II, based on tests in March 1943. One of the documents miscalculates the numbers and had to be corrected by the second document. That in itself demonstrates that the SS were not actually fussing over the numbers quite as precisely as you think they ought to have.
The fact that there were tests in March 1943 of coke usage as well as witnessed tests of cremation speed (initially slower - the witnesses speak of a 45 minute cycle) in Krema II indicates that the SS tried to confirm cremation capacity for Krema II but then did not do this for Krema IV.
Pressac has pointed out that the 1440 figure is implicit in the original plan for Birkenau in October 1941, when the single new crematorium is meant to burn 60 bodies/hour. In the summer of 1942, Topf expected that Crematorium II would have a capacity of 800/day. Then they learned that the design was 1/3 more efficient. Meanwhile, the Zentralbauleitung at Auschwitz informed Stutthof that the Topf design could burn a body in half an hour. Another of several documents which indicate that the crematoria were intended to have a rapid tempo and high capacity.
Thus, the 1440 figure is
not necessarily based on the results of the tests in March 1943. However, we know that witnesses state that the expectation was that 2 bodies would be loaded per muffle every half an hour. This was the target tempo, and could be achieved (in fact exceeded).
When asked by higher authority to come up with figures, the Zentralbauleitung and crematoria administration fudged on Krema IV and derived the capacity mathematically, as Pressac has shown. They probably simply restated the target capacity for Krema II, ignoring whether the rate was precisely achievable or not. And they probably derived the 340 figure from consulting with the crematoria administration. The showpieces were the four new crematoria, they were the ones whose capacity had to be advertised to higher authority.
However, 1440 could easily be exceeded under certain conditions. As one of your co-religionists SnakeTongue so tediously informed us, 'bodies' is not a fixed unit of measurement. Bodies don't all come in the exact same proportions and with the exact same weight. We know, moreover, that the initial tests were done on relatively healthy bodies whereas 'Muselmaenner' were held to burn more slowly.
Each muffle in Crematorium II and III had a volume which was equal to the size of an incinerator from many decades previously that could accommodate 450kg of animal carcasses. There was in principle nothing to stop three bodies fitting in per muffle, if one uses the classic modern adult male with an average weight of 70kg. Yet the corpses of victims among new arrivals would be also disproportionately female, since more men than women were selected for labour. 1940s average weights would tend more towards just over 60kg for men and just over 50kg for women. Children would be much smaller. And there were many children to be burned.
In the autumn of 1943, Auschwitz received an entire transport of children from the Bialystok ghetto who had been shunted to Theresienstadt, kept briefly on ice in connection with a possible prisoner exchange, then shipped to Auschwitz when that fell through. 1,264 children aged between 6 and 12 were killed in a gas chamber and then cremated. There would have been little reason to load each muffle with only 1 or only 2 corpses of children in that age-range. You could easily fit 4-5 in one go.
That's why the documents proving multiple corpse cremation are so important. They confirm the witnesses, who universally report that multiple bodies were inserted per muffle.
The design of the crematoria was not such that the bodies were roasted over open coals, the heat and flame came from above, affecting the entire surface area of the stretcher. A single body cremation would thus waste large amounts of energy. Multiple body cremations lessened that waste of energy, and they also exploited the energy reserves in each corpse. Burning bodies together meant that the energy released from fat, muscle and bones could accelerate the cremation process.
Krema I was slower because it burned almost exclusively male prisoners many of whom had become emaciated as 'Muselmaenner'. Kremas II-III would be faster because they burned a mix of men, women and children killed on arrival, who had not yet become Muselmaenner.
So in practice, the peak capacity of Krema II was significantly higher than 1440/day. It just didn't need to be reached very often.
