The Holocaust Historiography Project

Bily, Henry

Henry Bily was a former member of the crematorium stokers at Auschwitz, later falsely called the Sonderkommando. In 1991, his memoirs were published in a French periodical for former deportees (Bily 1991). However, in the next issue of that periodical, the editors retracted his contribution, as it had turned out that Bily had plagiarized the tall tales published by Hungarian Jew Miklos Nyiszli (Redaction 1991, cf. Faurisson 1992):

[Bily,] without any references, took whole passages from Dr. Miklos Nyiszli’s book Médecin à Auschwitz, especially chapters 7 and 28 […]. Unfortunately the errors made by Dr. Nyiszli were also copied: it concerns the detailed description of the activities of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Sonderkommando to which Henry Bily is said to have belonged. […] This analysis shows that the Henry Bily text cannot in any way be considered as an original personal eyewitness report.