Polevoy, Boris

Pseudonym for Boris Nikolayevich Kampov

Boris Nikolaevich Polevoy (17 March 1908 – 12 July 1981) was a Soviet journalist writing primarily for Soviet Russia’s leading newspaper Pravda. His métier was similar to Ilya Ehrenburg’s: glorifying communism and the Soviet Union, and as Pravda’s official war correspondent during the war, exaggerating and inventing atrocity tales about the enemy and spreading them most effectively. (See Heddesheimer 2002 for more details.)

Polevoy was among the Soviet troops who entered the abandoned Auschwitz Camp on 27 January 1945. Here are some of the claims he made about that camp in his two first reports of 29 January and 2 February 1945 (for details, see Mattogno 2021, pp. 294f.):

• The eastern part of the camp had hundreds of mass graves containing several hundreds of bodies of murder victims each. In fact, the four mass graves that once contained probably between ten and twenty thousand typhus victims were located in the west of the camp.
• The camp had a crematorium almost 500 m long, equipped with shaft furnaces, in which corpses burned within 8 minutes. The actual crematoria buildings were some 50 m long, and they had normal-sized coke-fired cremation furnaces burning one corpse per muffle within an hour.
• Another building had metallic floors, in which victims were killed with high-voltage current. The floor opened, the corpses fell onto conveyor belts slowly moving to the shaft furnaces, where they were burned; the bones passed through rolling mills, and the resulting powder was used to fertilize the camp’s gardens. All this is pure mendacious fantasy.
• Special mobile devices existed for killing children. Not even the most dogmatic orthodox historian has ever come up with anything to support that claim.

Mainstream historian Robert Jan van Pelt stooped to justify Polevoy’s lies, while also acknowledging they belong to the category of myth (see Mattogno 2023b, pp. 80-82).