Pilecki, Witold

Witold Pilecki (13 May 1901 – 25 May 1948) was a lieutenant in the Polish Clandestine Army in German-occupied Poland. As such, he was arrested on 19 September 1940 and interned at Auschwitz under the name Tadeusz Serafiński. Pilecki organized a Polish resistance group in that camp. He claimed to have escaped from Auschwitz on 27 April 1943, after which he wrote a report summarizing his alleged knowledge. In it, we read the following pertinent claims:

• Pilecki listed all kinds of inmate numbers — admitted, shot, gassed, died of diseases, still present — which are highly inaccurate, if not to say freely invented.
• He claimed that up to August 1942, some 800,000 inmates had been gassed in Brzezinka [=Birkenau] at the Rajsko Camp, and that this number had climbed to over 1.5 million by March 1943. These numbers are preposterous even from an orthodox point of view. Moreover, for Pilecki, Birkenau was the gassing facility which was located at the Rajsko Camp; but in reality, Rajsko was a village to the southwest of Auschwitz that, even in the eyes of the orthodoxy, had nothing to do with exterminations.
• He claimed that even non-Jewish Czechs, Germans and others were gassed on arrival, which is preposterous nonsense even from an orthodox point of view.
• Pilecki asserted that inmates suffering from typhus, even those already recovering from it, were gassed in August 1942, even though the documents clearly show that the camp authorities tried everything to nurse typhus patients back to health.
• He claimed that, when mass graves had to be exhumed due to the risk of polluting the drinking water (which is correct), cranes were used for that purpose, which is an unprecedented and imaginary idea.

Pilecki claimed to have let himself get caught on purpose, so he would get inside the camp in order to collect information and transmit it to his outside contacts. Yet instead of conveying any accurate information, he merely repeated wild guesses and exaggerations, propaganda clichés and outright nonsense. He evidently knew

• nothing of the alleged gassings in the Main Camp’s crematorium;
• nothing about the gas chambers’ locations, features or modes of operation;
• nothing specific about the crematoria, other than mentioning the term;
• nothing about the two claimed gassing bunkers;
• nothing specific about the open-air incinerations, other than mentioning non-existing cranes.

Pilecki also retold the story of the alleged first gassing at Auschwitz, but got that wrong, too, as for him this took place in just one prison cell of the penal bunker (basement of Block 11, Main Camp). The largest cell in that basement has just over 12 square meters, in which several hundred Soviet PoW were allegedly pressed, which would have been physically impossible. Pilecki also asserted that a commission watched the gassing with gas masks. However, the orthodoxy’s tale insists that all cells or even the entire basement were used for that gassing, and that no one watched it.

(For more details, see Mattogno 2021, pp. 159-162.)