The Holocaust Historiography Project

Laptos, Leo

Leo Laptos was an Auschwitz inmate, who worked at Birkenau as a pharmacist. After his transfer to the Dutch camp of Vught, he reported that at Auschwitz people were killed in gas chambers equipped with showerheads emitting gas rather than water. However, the product allegedly used at Auschwitz, Zyklon B, contains liquid hydrogen cyanide absorbed on gypsum pellets. The liquid poison evaporates slowly, and the developing gas is not under pressure, hence cannot be ducted through pipework. Laptos also claimed that, after the murder, the gas-chamber floors were allegedly tipped up, making the victims fall onto a conveyor belt, which transported them to the crematorium. No tipping-floor facility or conveyor-belt system ever existed at Auschwitz. (See Mattogno 2021, p. 295.)