The Holocaust Historiography Project

Weiss, Janda

Janda Weiss was a 14-year-old teenager deported from the Theresienstadt Ghetto to Auschwitz in May 1944. After the war, he made a deposition which was printed in a U.S. compendium on the Buchenwald Camp. Here are some of Weiss’s peculiar statements:

  • On arrival, he saw horrible tongues of flame coming out of the crematorium chimney. However, the Birkenau coke-fired crematoria could not emit flames from their chimneys.
  • He claimed that it was well known that every transport was gassed after six months. The orthodoxy insists, however, that, starting in July 1942, individuals deemed unfit for labor were selected from each transport and killed instantly, the rest admitted to the camp.
  • Only the strongest men and women were sorted out, the rest gassed. And Janda Weiss, at age 14, claimed to have been among the strongest of this transport.
  • Paying tribute to the cliché, the ineluctable Dr. Mengele allegedly did the initial selection, and the one for the Sonderkommando assignments. However, on arrival, no inmate could have known the identity of any SS men.
  • He visited the barracks of the Sonderkommando members, where he found out about the horrors of the crematorium. However, the orthodoxy has it that this unit was isolated from the rest of the camp, hence could not be visited. Furthermore, considering that all camp sectors were surrounded by barbed wire fences, walking around visiting people was simply no option in general.
  • Old people were allegedly dumped from trucks into burning trenches while still alive. However, the heat of the blaze would have set the truck on fire if such a procedure had been tried.
  • He claimed to have later worked in the crematorium as a Sonderkommando member, so he must have had first-hand knowledge, but he claimed that the undressing room was in front of the gas chamber. That description fits for no claimed facility, though.
  • People were allegedly asked to put their shoes into the cubbyholes, meaning there were large shoe-storage shelves. This is a unique claim and flies in the face of the orthodox narrative.
  • Inside the gas chamber were three columns for the ventilators, through which the gas poured in. However, the ventilators were placed in the building’s attic, and the orthodoxy has it that there were four Zyklon-B introduction devices in the alleged homicidal gas chambers of Crematorium II and III.
  • Small children were thrown in[to the gas chamber] through a window. However, that basement room had no windows.
  • The lungs of the victims slowly burst. The poison allegedly used — hydrogen cyanide — has no such effect.
  • The killing lasted about three minutes. However, in a facility without means to accelerate the evaporation of the liquid poison from the carrier material (Zyklon B) and the dissipation into the large room, such short execution times are physically impossible.
  • The chamber was opened right after the killing was over. However, the presence of poison gas in this room would have required a lengthy ventilation time.
  • If the cremation furnaces could not keep up, surplus corpses were thrown into fire trenches. However, with such a blaze causing severe burns to anyone approaching it, it must be assumed that they used catapults to sling the corpses onto the blazing pyre from a safe distance. Furthermore, air photos prove that no such open-incineration trenches existed at that time.
  • Once it happened that a victim crawled out of a burning trench. Not likely.
  • Once Moll put a naked woman in the trench and shot her in the genitals. This is Holo-porn. Weiss evidently had some unsatisfied sexual issues.
  • On another occasion he [Moll] arranged twelve women who were lined up behind each other in a row, […]. Then he mercilessly shot through them all with a single bullet. Not possible.
  • He [Moll] hanged a man up by his hands and shot him until his arms were torn through; then he hanged him up by the feet and repeated the process. Possible only with a huge waste of ammunition, which can be ruled out.
  • Weiss also repeated a Chinese-whisper story, retold in variations by many, of a Jewess dancing naked in front of SS men, then taking one of their guns and shooting them. Again, this is yet more Holo-porn.

Whatever the motive of a 14-year-old teenager were to tell these outrageous lies, the problem really is not so much his lurid fantasy, but grownups who take that at face value and print it as evidence in a book.

(See Janda Weiss’s statement in Hackett 1995, pp. 349f.)