The Holocaust Historiography Project

Showers

Fake Showers

Many witnesses claimed that deportees slated for homicidal gassings were told by SS men or their helpers that, in order to be admitted to the camp, they needed to have their clothes laundered and disinfested, and they themselves had to take a shower. This, it is frequently claimed, was a deception, so the victims would remain calm, would willingly get undressed, and would more or less voluntarily enter the homicidal gas chamber. To make that deception credible, the victims are often said to have been handed towels and soap when walking into the shower room/gas chamber, and the alleged homicidal gas chambers were presumably fitted with items making them look like shower rooms — foremost with dummy showerheads that were not connected to anything, or that were actually connected to some poison-gas supply rather than water.

The issuance of towels and soap, however, most certainly would never have happened, considering the mess it would have created and the effort necessary to retrieve and clean these items afterwards. In addition, no one takes towels into a shower. (See the entry on Towels, Soap, Toothbrushes inside Gas Chambers.)

The Crematoria II and III at Auschwitz are a prime example for this. One of their underground morgues is said to have been misused as a homicidal gas chamber, and many witnesses claimed that they had in their ceiling (fake) showerheads meant to deceive the victims. Some even claimed that these showerheads were used to introduce the poison gas rather than water.

Real Showers

In order to prevent the introduction and spread of disease, any inmate admitted or transferred to a German wartime camp had to undergo a hygienic routine prescribed by camp orders. The inmates had to go into a hygienic building featuring disinfestation and often also laundry facilities, undressing and dressing rooms, and an inmate shower. There they had to undress, hand over their clothes, then go into a shower room — where soap was provided — and take a shower. After that, they went out the other side into a separate dressing room, where towels may have been provided, and where they were given disinfested and laundered inmate/prison clothes. In addition, most inmates were then placed into a quarantine section of the camp for several weeks, to make sure they did not carry any infectious diseases.

A very similar procedure was followed when inmates were transferred away from a camp. Before being transported, they again had to undergo this procedure and then remain isolated from the rest of the camp until their transport took them away. This was to ensure that the inmate did not introduce any infectious diseases to his new destination.

(On hygienic measures at Auschwitz, see Rudolf 2020, pp. 76-90, as well as the many entries about disinfestation and disinfection in Mattogno 2023, Part 1.)

Crematoria II and III at Auschwitz-Birkenau fit nicely into that scenario. There is a plethora of wartime documents showing that real inmate showers were installed in both basements of these facilities as a makeshift measure to increase the available showers in the camp while the large disinfestation and shower facility — called Zentralsauna — was being built. These basement showers were to use the heat permanently produced by the waste incinerator which was located in the chimney wing of both buildings. Therefore, the showers in these basements were not fake, but real, and inmates going in there really took showers of warm water. However, that may have happened only for a short period of time, because these showers were probably taken out of use toward the end of 1943, after the Zentralsauna had become operational. From that point onward, the inmate workers in these crematoria marveled about the reason why no-longer functioning showerheads were located in a room which, when they saw that place, was only used to store corpses (which is, after all, the primary function of a morgue).

(For more details on the real showers, see Mattogno 2019, pp. 134-142.)

False Gas-Shower Claims

Some witnesses have claimed that showerheads were actually used to feed poison gas into the claimed homicidal gas chambers. In cases where Zyklon B is said to have been used for the murder, this would have been technically very challenging, as this product — liquid hydrogen cyanide soaked on gypsum pellets — was not a gas under pressure, and therefore could not have been fed into a pipe as such. The orthodox narrative has it that murder with Zyklon B happened simply by Zyklon B’s gypsum pellets getting poured into the gas chamber through some opening — either on the floor or into some column. (See the entry on Zyklon-B introduction devices.)

In other cases, such as the use of bottled, pressurized gas (such as carbon monoxide) or gas from internal combustion engines, piping gas through showerheads would have been technically feasible, but is usually rejected by the orthodoxy as untrue. Simple pipes with a single opening in the wall per chamber are said to have been used.

Here is a list of some of the witnesses who have falsely claimed that the gas came out of showerheads:

Auschwitz
Other Camps

This convergence of evidence on the same lie proves the copy-cat or orchestrated nature of these witness testimonies.