Fabian, Bela

Bela Fabian was a Hungarian politician deported to Auschwitz, where he was employed in the camp’s records office. He was evacuated to the West at war’s end and managed to escape, reaching American lines. In an interview given to a U.S. official, he testified that, based on his experience with camp records, up to June 1944, five million people had been gassed and burned at Auschwitz. He also claimed to have seen flames billowing from the crematorium chimneys, which was technically impossible. This witness also claimed that the Auschwitz crematoria burned 12,000 corpses daily on average, hence some 4,380,000 per year — a lie matching his lie about five million gassing victims. He furthermore spread the rumor that the Gypsies at Auschwitz were killed in August of 1944, a claim clearly refuted by documentary evidence (see the entry on Gypsies). His final imaginative contribution concerns a selection among inmates at the camp’s infirmary in late October 1944, leading to all seriously sick inmates being gassed and burned; this claim is unsupported by any document or any other witness story, and is refuted by rich documentation showing the life-saving healthcare that seriously ill inmates received at Auschwitz. (For more details, see Mattogno 2021, pp. 389f.)