The Holocaust Historiography Project

Lettich, André

André Lettich was a French Jew deported to Auschwitz on 20 July 1942. Between September 1942 and March 1943, he claims to have served as an inmate physician for members of the so-called Sonderkommando. In 1946, he wrote a memorandum, in which he claimed the following about the alleged exterminations at Auschwitz, among other things:

  • He was unaware of the term bunker allegedly used for the makeshift gassing facilities outside the Birkenau Camp, mentioned only one of the two which the orthodoxy claims existed, called it simply a cottage, and placed it two kilometers away from the camp, although both are said to have been only a few hundred meters away from the camp’s perimeter fences. Lettich also placed the related undressing hut a ludicrous 500 meters away from the cottage.
  • Inmates were handed towels and soap before entering the chamber, something that most certainly would never have happened, considering the mess it would have created and the effort necessary to retrieve and clean these items afterwards.
  • Showerheads not connected to pipes were at the cottage’s ceiling, which is a feature claimed, according to the current orthodox narrative, for the underground morgues A.K.A. gas chambers of Crematoria II and III, but not for the bunkers. (And also for early gas-chamber claims, according to which gas actually came out of those showerheads…)
  • In addition to a sky light for dumping in Zyklon B, the cottage had windows that were opened for ventilation, which runs contrary to the current orthodox narrative, according to which those facilities had only hatches with shutters in the wall to supply the poison.
  • Some elements Lettich plagiarized from the War Refugee Board Report, such as the claim that, after the gas-chamber doors had been closed, there was a waiting period to make sure the temperature in the chamber was high enough.
  • The (wrong) number of muffles in two of the crematoria was also lifted from the War Refugee Board Report, (nine, instead of 15), while Lettich claimed six muffles for each of the other two crematoria (instead of the correct number: eight).
  • He also repeated the myth spread by the War Refugee Board Report of a commission of German high officials coming to Auschwitz from Berlin in early 1943 on occasion of the first Birkenau crematorium’s inauguration, monitoring the first gassing there through little skylights which did not exist in these facilities, and neither does any trace of such an absurd commission.
  • Each muffle allegedly could accommodate six bodies at a time, which burned in fifty minutes, resulting in 180 bodies cremated in all crematoria within an hour. In fact, those muffles were designed only for one corpse, to burn within an hour, resulting in a maximum of 46 corpses per hour.
  • A fable he plagiarized probably from Miklós Nyiszli, is his claim that powerful blowers fanned the furnaces’ flames, when in fact these furnaces had only small blowers to duct combustion air through openings in the muffle vault (this cold air actually cooled the muffle and did not fan any flames).
  • Lettich repeated Miklós Nyiszli’s legend that the members of the Sonderkommando were killed every 3-4 months, yet the many survivors claiming to have been part of that unit prove otherwise. He even contradicts his own claim by stating that he had no difficulty getting transferred to the Gypsy Camp in March 1943.
  • To crown this insipid regurgitation of wartime atrocity propaganda, he claimed that the total death toll of the Auschwitz Camp was 4 or 5 million, without exaggeration, although he was in no position to know.

As is evident, even after almost three years in Auschwitz (although only six months as a Sonderkommando physician), Lettich evidently knew close to nothing of the crematoria’s internal structure and alleged gas chambers, and he copied lavishly from what he had heard and read elsewhere. Lettich himself called his testimony the most-precise — which is a laughable claim, in light of the facts.

(For details, see Mattogno 2016f, pp. 100-103; 2021, pp. 317-321.)