The Holocaust Historiography Project

Bahir, Moshe

Moshe Bahir
Moshe Bahir

Moshe Bahir was an inmate of the Sobibór Camp. In his 1950 memoirs, he claimed that he had received secret notes in empty buckets brought back from the camp’s extermination sector that is said to have been cordoned off and invisible from the sector where Bahir worked and lived. These notes, allegedly written by inmates working at the gas chamber, described what was unfolding there. According to this, the gas was fed into the gas chambers through ordinary showers. After the murder, the floors opened, and the bodies were discharged into carts below, which brought them to mass graves. Bahir also claimed that, as of Himmler’s visit in February 1943, the first million victims had already been disposed of.

His claims are rejected as false by the orthodoxy, who insists that the gas was fed through pipes rather than showers. These chambers did not have collapsible floors with carts underneath either. The corpses were instead taken out of the chamber manually, sideways through a normal door. Furthermore, only about a quarter million victims are said to have died in the camp in total.

Here are some more peculiar contents of the secret notes that Bahir claims to have received from the inmates in the extermination sector:

  • One note told of a bloodstain which could not, by any means, be cleaned or scraped from the floor of the gas chamber. Finally, experts came and determined that the stain had been absorbed into the chamber’s floorboards after a group of pregnant women had been poisoned and one of them had given birth while the gas was streaming into the chamber. The poison gas had mingled with the mother’s blood and had created the indelible stain.
  • Another note said that, one day, the workers were ordered to replace a few floorboards because several fragments of ears, cheeks and hands had become embedded in them.

These are lurid fantasies, for sure, but they were certainly not part of the real world.

(See the entry on Sobibór for more details, as well as Graf/Kues/Mattogno 2020, pp. 32, 34, 72f., 82; Mattogno 2021e, pp. 85.)