The Holocaust Historiography Project

Jankowski, Stanisław

Stanisław Jankowski (23 Oct. 1911 – 20 Sept. 1987) — also known as Alter Fajnzylberg, Alter Feinsilber and Stanisław Kaskowiak — was a Polish Jew incarcerated at the Auschwitz Camp from March 1942 to January 1945. In April 1945, he testified in front of an investigator of a Polish commission, and he also testified during the 1947 trial against Rudolf Höss. In 1980 and then once more in 1985, he made two more depositions. His testimonies contain a large number of implausible or impossible claims, including:

  • He claimed that his train arrived at Auschwitz on March 27 at 10 am after a five-day journey, with many detainees having died en route; while documents show that the train arrived on March 30 at 5:33 am after not even three days, with all inmates alive, well, and properly registered at Auschwitz.
  • He claimed to have witnessed how the SS executed inmates using machine guns inside the morgue of the old crematorium. Machine guns would be utterly unsuitable and highly dangerous to the gunners inside a building due to possible ricochets.
  • According to his 1947 testimony, the only gassing inside the old crematorium known to him took place in November or December 1942. In 1985 he claimed that a gassing he witnessed concerned inmates who had exhumed and cremated corpses in Birkenau, which would place that event also in late 1942. However, the orthodoxy assumes that gassings in the old crematorium took place only between late 1941 and March 1942, when gassings were allegedly moved to Bunker 1 near the Birkenau Camp.
  • According to his brief 1980 statement, the morgue had a ventilator in the ceiling, but nothing else of note. In his 1985 statement, he mentioned two Zyklon-B gas-feed holes, but could not remember any ventilator. The orthodoxy, however, insists on four Zyklon-B introduction hatches.
  • He stated that three corpses were concurrently placed into a cremation muffle designed for just one corpse. Moreover, the small furnace door would not have allowed more than two corpses to be pushed into the muffle.
  • At the end of the shift, ten to twelve corpses were supposedly crammed together into each muffle to burn overnight, which is utterly impossible.
  • The cremation of a load of five corpses — which would not have fit into the muffle — allegedly took half an hour (6 minutes each), although the Auschwitz cremation furnaces needed one hour to cremate a single corpse. (See the entry on crematoria.)
  • When the furnaces were properly heated, the corpses burned by themselves for weeks on end. However, self-immolating bodies simply do not exist.
  • In outdoor burning pits, male corpses were stacked alternatingly with females, because the fatter women helped to burn the men; but this has utterly no scientific justification.
  • In those pits, drainage channels for human fat had been dug, although he thought that no fat was collected, as the corpses burned completely.
  • 1,500-2,000 people were crammed into the larger chamber of Crematoria IV and V, which, at a size of not quite 100 m², would mean an impossible packing density of 15 to 20 people per m².
  • Following the postwar cliché, Jankowski claimed that the ineluctable Mengele gave the order to pour Zyklon B into the gas chamber.
  • In the smaller gas chamber of Crematoria IV and V, the gas was poured in through the door — which is totally at odds with the orthodox account that insists that Zyklon pellets were poured in through hatches in the wall (even though these hatches had iron bars that would have prevented anyone from sticking a Zyklon can in them).
  • Although these gas chambers had no ventilation, the airing out of the room lasted a short time only, about 5 minutes, after which the inmates of the Sonderkommando started removing the corpses without wearing gas masks. This would have meant working in an almost undiluted, highly toxic atmosphere. Yet Jankowski claimed that this only caused lightheadedness.
  • He mentioned a large number of transports from various countries arriving after he was transferred to Birkenau in July 1943, yet the documented transports show that he is wrong about many of his claims, including the total number of inmates arriving at Auschwitz, and those allegedly gassed on arrival, which is not even confirmed by (unfounded) orthodox claims.
  • In April 1945, he claimed a few million as the total death toll for Auschwitz, parroting Soviet propaganda at the time. (The orthodoxy today insists on roughly one million.)

(For details, see Mattogno 2021d, pp. 160-179)