The Holocaust Historiography Project

Aumeier, Hans

Hans Aumeier
Hans Aumeier

Hans Aumeier (20 Aug. 1906 – 24 Jan. 1948), SS Hauptsturmführer at the time, was transferred to Auschwitz on 16 February 1942, and was head of the Protective-Custody Camp at the Auschwitz Main Camp until 15 August 1943. From October 1943 onward, he was commandant of the Vaivara Concentration Camp in Estonia, and in February 1945 became commandant of Mysen Concentration Camp in Norway, where he was arrested by the British on 11 June 1945.

In his first interrogation by British prison guards, dated 29 June 1945, he spoke quite naively of the crematories at Auschwitz, insisted that he had no knowledge of gas chambers, and that during his time at Auschwitz no detainee was gassed. Unsatisfied with this testimony, the interrogators demanded exact data on homicidal gassings, with full details, including the number of victims per day, total numbers, and a confession of his own responsibility and that of the other perpetrators and persons responsible for giving the orders. Aumeier was never asked whether there were any gassings or whether he participated; rather, he was effectively ordered to provide the details and make a confession. The result of this subsequent confession by Aumeier was then commented upon by his British jailers in a Report on the interrogation of prisoner no. 211, Sturmbannführer Aumeier, Hans on 10 August 1945:

The interrogator is satisfied that the major part of the material of this report is in conformity with the truth as far as the facts are concerned, but the personal reactions of Aumeier and his way of thinking may change a bit when his fate gets worse.

Therefore, Aumeier was not interrogated to obtain true information, but rather to force him to confirm what the British already had decided was the truth. The reference to his fate getting worse is a not-too-subtle hint at systematic torture, which applied to nearly all Germans in British or American captivity.

Aumeier’s testimony on the alleged gas chambers of Auschwitz is full of untruths and is furthermore completely inconsistent with the chronology of events claimed by orthodox researchers. In order to say anything at all about the gassings, as demanded of him, he transposed all events by one year. Instead of fall/winter 1941 for the first experimental gassing of Soviet POWs, as the orthodoxy claims, Aumeier placed this event — with Jews as victims — in the fall/winter of 1942. Also, the initial mass gassings in dedicated facilities, usually alleged to have occurred in the Birkenau bunkers starting in March 1942, took place, according to him, in very early 1943. Since Aumeier came to Auschwitz only in early 1942, his claim to have first-hand knowledge of events that occurred earlier (according to orthodoxy) are necessarily invented and untrue. In other words, Aumeier made things up to please his tormentors, repeating what was given to him as a pre-established official truth. Aumeier was eventually extradited to Poland, where he was executed in early 1948.

(For more details, see Mattogno 2016f, pp. 138-141.)