Bacon, Yehuda

Yehuda Bacon (or Bakon, born 28 July 1929) was deported to Auschwitz in December 1943 at age 14. He was evacuated from there on 18 January 1945 and ultimately liberated at the Mauthausen subcamp Gunskirchen on 5 May 1945. In spite of his young age, he was not selected for gassing upon arrival, but was admitted to the camp.

Bacon testified during the Eichmann Show Trial in Jerusalem on 7 June 1961 and also during the Frankfurt Auschwitz Show Trial on 30 October 1964. He claimed to have received privileged treatment at Auschwitz. He was allowed to wear long hair, he did not have to work initially, received better clothing and custom-made shoes, and he and his group of boys had a ping-pong table at their disposal.

In order to make it credible that he, as a 14-year old boy, could give a detailed description of the alleged gas chamber and its equipment, he claimed that, when it was cold outside, the nice SS allowed him and his group of boys to spend time in the gas chamber or the undressing room when not in use, as this room was allegedly heated. He also stated that he loitered around the courtyard of Crematorium III, climbed onto the roof of the gas chamber, lifted the lid of the Zyklon-B introduction shaft, and studied its appearance. The SS was even more accommodating by allegedly giving him a tour of the inside of the crematoria, including the furnace hall!

It goes without saying that no 14-year-old inmate would have been allowed to do any of this, and that he most certainly did not get an inspection tour of any building, let alone any of the crematoria.

Without supervision and guards, he could have left neither his camp sector, which was surrounded by a barbed-wire fence, nor enter any of the four crematorium yards, which were also surrounded by barbed wire. No one would have allowed him to hang out in that yard and investigate this (alleged) crime scene.

Bacon apparently made it up in order to explain how he could have known what the gas chamber looked like and how it was equipped. Hence, whatever he told about the appearance of this alleged room most certainly stems from what he read and heard elsewhere.

During his various statements, he described the alleged Zyklon-B introduction devices in various conflicting ways. They were pipes surrounded by four iron columns surrounded by strong wire, or simply pipes riddled with little holes. Ventilators were located below these pipes, which had holes in them for cleaning with water. He even saw these ventilators when the building was getting dismantled. However, the ventilators serving the basement rooms were installed in the building’s attic, not in the basement, and most certainly were not below some introduction columns.

His description of these alleged introduction devices is a hodgepodge of features found in the descriptions by Michał Kula, Henryk Tauber and Miklós Nyiszli. He combined this with false ventilator claims like those made up by Janda Weiss.

Bacon also insisted that he saw flames coming out of the crematoria’s chimneys reaching a height of four metres, although flame-spewing chimneys are technically impossible. He also asserted that inmates used the cremation ashes of their fellow inmates to sprinkle on the roads during winter, so that people could walk on the road and not slip — a handy use of your compatriot’s leftovers.

(For more details, see Mattogno 2019, pp. 111f., 428-431.)