Oberhauser, Josef

Josef Oberhauser (21 Jan. 1915 – 22 Nov. 1979) was an SS Untersturmführer at war’s end. From 1939 until August 1941, he was responsible at various locations for cremating the bodies of persons who had been killed during the so-called Euthanasia Program.

From November 1941 until August 1942, Oberhauser served as the head of the Belzec camp guards, and is said to have overseen the development of the camp, including the construction of its facilities. Toward the end of the war, Oberhauser and many others of the remaining SS staff were transferred to Trieste, Italy, to fight partisans.

In 1948, he was sentenced to 15 years imprisonment for his involvement in the Euthanasia Program, but got amnestied in 1956.

In 1963, he was put on trial in Germany during the Belzec Show Trial staged in Munich. Oberhauser refused to testify during the trial itself, but he had agreed to pre-trial interrogations. During those interviews, he added some new information never heard before from anyone else: According to him, the first set of gas chambers at Belzec consisted only of one small chamber used to determine technically how gassings could be carried out. This test chamber was allegedly used only for maybe 7-9 transports with only some 150 Jews each. However, the orthodoxy asserts that there were three chambers in the first gas-chamber building, not just one, and that they were used at maximum capacity for several months, resulting in mind-boggling victim counts.

Oberhauser moreover insisted that the first four transports were killed with bottled gas (presumably carbon monoxide) rather than engine exhaust gas. An engine is said to have been added only later. This is a strident deviation from the pre-ordained historical script, which insists that engine-exhaust gasses were used in all claimed Belzec gas chambers at all times.

With such a deviation, Oberhauser’s statements were useless to the court, so they were ignored. However, they are the most important ones of all the statements made during that trial, since they clearly indicate that Oberhauser was making up things on the fly, exactly because he evidently had no first-hand knowledge of gas-chamber mass murders at all. He evidently had not read or internalized the exact details of the dogma then already in place.

While the charges against all other defendants were dropped, with claims of acting under duress, Oberhauser’s case was the only one ending with a conviction. He was sentenced to a prison term of 4½ years for aiding in the murder of at least 300,150 Jews. That is eight minutes for every life taken. As a first-time offender with no risk of relapsing, and due to his excellent conduct in prison, Oberhauser was released after serving only half his time. Since his pre-trial detention was made to count, he walked out of prison only a short while after the trial had ended. Had he insisted that the orthodox narrative is all wrong, he might have risked a much longer prison term due to denial and lack of remorse.

(For more details, see Mattogno 2004a, pp. 62-69.)