Fliamenbaum, David

David Fliamenbaum (born 1924) was incarcerated in Auschwitz-Birkenau, where he was encountered by Soviet troops upon their occupation of the area. During an interview conducted on 1 March 1945, he claimed to have witnessed various atrocities. Fliamenbaum claimed to have been made an apprentice in a masons’ school with 600 other boys and young men. Within a short period of time, two thirds of all apprentices were allegedly slain by the teacher. However, a detailed study of the rich extant documentation of that school proves Fliamenbaum’s story to be utterly fictitious (Jastrzębska 2008). Neither the claimed mass murder of its apprentices, nor the names of the people he accuses as the perpetrators, nor the deployment of these apprentices at various construction sites has anything to do with reality.

Fliamenbaum’s description of Crematorium II, which he claims to have helped construct, is superficial, and his description of the extermination process — from undressing through gassing to cremation of the victims — is filled with inaccuracies and false claims, making it clear that he cannot have this knowledge from personal experience. For example, he claimed that two bodies were inserted into each cremation muffle, which then burned to ashes within just 15 minutes. However, these furnaces could cremate only one body within an hour.

It is furthermore inconceivable that a teenage mason’s apprentice who may have been involved in laying bricks during the initial construction phase was allowed to be inside the building after its completion, so that he could witness the gassing of a batch of 2,000 Jews from beginning to end, as he claimed, including the issuance of towels and soap to the victims — a wasteful practice that most certainly would not have happened.

Although Fliamenbaum could not possibly have any knowledge about cremation capacities, the number of arriving deportation trains, or the number of deportees in each of them, he nevertheless made statements about it as if he were running the camp. His statements included absurdly exaggerated cremation capacities, and inflated numbers of Jews allegedly gassed during the months, for which he claimed to have intimate knowledge:

In June, July, August and September [1943], an average of 3 to 6 transports arrived per day. Each transport contained from 1,000 to 1,500 people, of whom no less than 85-90% went to the crematorium.

This would amount to between 360,000 and one million Jews killed during those four months alone. Meanwhile, orthodox Polish propaganda-historian Danuta Czech claims only some 52,000 gassing victims for that time period (Czech 1990; for details, see Mattogno 2021d, pp. 230-235).

Fliamenbaum is the typical case of a witness who, from his perspective as a simple working deportee who had little insight into what was unfolding around him, could not have known much at all, but could not resist the urge to claim to know everything, and that he partook in all relevant events that Polish and Soviet propaganda were claiming at that time.