The Holocaust Historiography Project

Dawidowski, Roman

Roman Dawidowski
Roman Dawidowski

Prof. Dr. Roman Dawidowski was a Polish engineer who was one of four experts constituting a mixed Polish-Soviet expert commission tasked with investigating the Auschwitz crematoria. This Stalinist mock commission applied absurd technical parameters in order to come to the preordained conclusion that these crematoria had the capacity to cremate four million human bodies within just one and a half years of their existence.

Dawidowski later also served as the right-hand man of Polish investigating judge Jan Sehn in preparing the upcoming two Stalinist show trials against former camp commandant Rudolf Höss on the one hand, and against several former lower-ranking camp officials on the other. While sifting through the vast documentation left behind at Auschwitz by the German camp authorities, Sehn and Dawidowski cherry-picked ambivalent documents that included terms such as gas, gastight, and gas chamber, or sonder and spezial (meaning separate or special), ripped them out of their documental and historical context, and mispresented them as circumstantial evidence allegedly proving that homicidal gas chambers existed at the former camp, and were actually used for mass murder.

Dawidowski and Sehn ignored and hid from the courts and the defense that the vast extant Auschwitz documentation actually proves the exact opposite of their narrative: terms such as gas chamber refer to disinfestation gas chambers meant to save inmate lives, not kill them. Furthermore, the camp authorities had gone to great length and enormous efforts and expenses in their desperate attempts at improving living conditions and thus survival chances for all inmates. (See the section Documented History of the entry on the Birkenau Camp and on healthcare for details.)

During the trial against Rudolf Höss, Dawidowski testified that the gas chambers at Auschwitz could exterminate 60,000 persons per day in total, hence 22 million per year or some 35 million during their entire existence. He pushed his testimony into the theater of the absurd when claiming that the Auschwitz crematoria could easily match this high productivity of corpses, as they had a capacity of 400,000,000 bodies! Yes: four hundred million!

Some so-called experts have made literally insane statements. Either they were grossly incompetent, or they should have been indicted for perjury. And the judges and prosecutors who played along were equally to blame.

(For more details, see Mattogno/Deana 2021, pp. 337-339; Mattogno 2019, pp. 453-455, 513-519; Mattogno 2020b, pp. 174f., 258.)