Sonderkommando Auschwitz I: Nine Eyewitness Testimonies Analyzed

To this day, the 1979 book Auschwitz Inferno: The Testimony of a Sonderkommando by former Auschwitz inmate and putative Sonderkommando member Filip Müller, who claims to have worked in the gas chambers of Auschwitz for three years, has a great influence both on the popular perception of Auschwitz and on historians probing or purporting to probe this camp's history. The late Raul Hilberg, for instance, one of the most-influential mainstream Holocaust scholars, called Müller "a remarkable, accurate, reliable person."The first half of the present book critically analyzes Müller's various post-war writings and testimonies, starting with a brief essay he wrote just after the war, then his testimony during the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial in 1964, the interviews he gave Claude Lanzmann for his epic 1985 documentary Shoah, and of course his 1979 book, which was to an unknown degree ghostwritten by one Helmut Freitag. A thorough analysis and comparison of these texts reveals that Müller's memory seems to have improved with the decades rather than faded. His later stories have him involved everywhere in Auschwitz where the mainstream narrative reported there was some dramatic action. But a closer look at what Müller (or Freitag) wrote reveals that they pilfered it from other writers, complete with historical mistakes and physical nonsense. One of Müller's main sources of such plagiarism was a book by Hungarian physician and proven impostor Miklós Nyiszli, but he also stole from the tales of the well-known false witnesses Kurt Gerstein and Rudolf Höss.The second part of the present book analyzes the accounts of eight more witnesses who claim to have been members of the Auschwitz Sonderkommando: Dov Paisikovic, Stanislaw Jankowski, Henryk Mandelbaum, Ludwik Nagraba, Joshuah…