The Holocaust Historiography Project

Sompolinski, Roman

Roman Sompolinski
Roman Sompolinski

Roman Sompolinski was a Polish Jew who was arrested in 1939 and, after staying at various camps, ended up in Auschwitz at the end of 1943, where he claims to have worked inside Crematorium II as a member of the Sonderkommando from December 1943 until February 1944. From Auschwitz he was transferred to Bergen-Belsen in December 1944. Here are some peculiar claims regarding Auschwitz from an affidavit he signed on 24 May 1945 for the Bergen-Belsen Trial:

  • Although all other Sonderkommando members were killed after six months, he escaped this fate because I contracted typhus and was removed to hospital. The orthodox narrative has it, though, that inmates becoming seriously ill were even more likely to be killed. Sompolinski was nursed back to health because the Germans cared, and they evidently did not see him as a dangerous carrier of secrets.
  • Before entering the gas chamber, the victims were given towels and soap. This 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.
  • Once the victims were inside the alleged gas chamber, an SS man in a control room underneath the bathroom turned on the gas. There was no room underneath any of the rooms claimed to have been homicidal gas chambers. Furthermore, the orthodox narrative has it that the gas was not turned on — this requires gas under pressure — but rather Zyklon B were pellets thrown through some opening into the chambers.
  • The victims’ screams were drowned by a brass band playing outside, and a radio inside. This is a unique claim requiring no further comment.
  • Death occurred within 3-5 minutes, which is impossibly fast for a room without forced evaporation and dissipation of the gas.
  • The bodies were put on a chute, so they dropped into a subterranean room adjacent to the crematorium ovens. However, in Crematorium II, the ground-floor furnace room was one level up from the underground morgue presumably misused as a homicidal gas chamber.
  • From the chute, eight bodies were transferred to a tipper trolley on rails, which was wheeled to the furnaces. This story is reminiscent of the War Refugee Board Report, but it is still untrue. In fact, in Crematorium II, corpses were brought upstairs by a rickety makeshift freight elevator.
  • Corpses burned to ashes within about three minutes. This is the world record in lying about the Auschwitz cremation capacity. The actual cremation time was one entire hour.

Had Sompolinski really worked inside this building for three months, he would have gotten the layout and equipment at least nearly right. But his description is completely made up, as is the rest of his tall extermination tale. (For more details, see Mattogno 2021, pp. 311-315.)