What was human hair used for at auschwitz

The hair, along with the combs and suitcases and shoes, is all that remains of them. No matter how painful it may be to look at, it is all part of the story that I believe has to be told. Smrek told me that the museum would not make a decision on the hair any time soon. He added that the hair was only one of his concerns. One was of Auschwitz I, the Stammlager , which consisted of twenty-eight brick barracks; the other was of Auschwitz II, also known as Birkenau.

We have twenty cubic metres of spoons, forks, and other metal articles. We are trying to preserve everything we can, but we can do only so much. The problem is that nothing lasts forever. Today, a half century after the Second World War, as time and nature conspire against the remaining physical evidence of the Holocaust, other equally corrosive forces are at work on that most crucial of all Holocaust legacies—human memory. Such an aggression is not to be tolerated. Despite their setbacks in courtrooms, however, the revisionists have made dramatic inroads into the public consciousness in recent years.

Last spring, a Roper poll published in the Boston Globe indicated that one out of three Americans believes it possible that the Holocaust never took place.

The wall fragments still revealed the presence of the poisonous gas, but the hair, after years of washing and treatment, had been leached of all cyanide residues. Revisionists, it must be stated, do not deny the presence of crematoriums in the camps, or the fact that millions of people may have died in the camps from exhaustion, hunger, or disease, or the fact that Zyklon B was used in gas chambers, to delouse clothing, but they adamantly reject the notion that human lives were deliberately, systematically destroyed.

And they challenge at every turn the veracity of eyewitness testimony, whether from Holocaust survivors, including inmates who manned the gas chambers and ovens, or from S. Revisionists claim that this testimony, including the dramatic memoirs of Rudolf Hess, is often biased or distorted or has been elicited under duress.

According to Mark Weber, who is the editor of the Journal for Historical Review , a prominent revisionist publication issued six times a year by the California-based Institute for Historical Review, the overturning of the conviction of John Demjanjuk in an Israeli courtroom this past summer further advances the revisionist claim. One should be skeptical about the testimony of Holocaust survivors.

This is exactly the point that revisionists have been making for over a decade. Further, in studying the original blueprints for the structures Faurisson could find no evidence that the crematoriums had been intended as extermination facilities. In his view, there was no hard evidence that the Holocaust had occurred, and he refused to accept that the worst crime in the history of mankind could have been perpetrated and not have left such evidence. Given the scale of the extermination process at Auschwitz, the material evidence—official documents, photographs, internal memos, and directives—is surprisingly scarce.

One reason is the extensive use of euphemism in official documents. Another lies in the evolution of the Auschwitz camps and the extermination facilities.

In June, , nine months after the occupation of Poland, the Germans established the Konzentrationslager Auschwitz in the brick buildings of a Polish military camp that dated back to the First World War. A former munitions depot on the edge of the camp was converted into a crematorium to incinerate the corpses of inmates who had been executed or had perished from disease, exhaustion, or abuse.

Poison gas is reported to have first been used in Auschwitz that September, when six hundred Soviet prisoners of war and two hundred and fifty sick prisoners were locked in basement rooms of Block XI and exposed to Zyklon B. Later that month, nine hundred Soviet soldiers were crammed into the morgue of the Auschwitz crematorium and gassed.

The whole transport exactly filled the mortuary to capacity. The doors were then sealed and the gas shaken down through the holes in the roof.

I do not know how long this killing took. For a little while a humming sound could be heard. But the doors held. They were opened several hours later, so that the place might be aired. It was then that I saw, for the first time, gassed bodies in the mass. Within the year, Birkenau came to dwarf the Stammlager in virtually every respect—in the squalor of its living conditions, in the capacity of its gas chambers, and, with its wire fences encompassing some four hundred and thirty acres of meadows, swamps, and woods, in its physical dimensions.

To service this massive complex, the Germans constructed a railway line that fed directly into the center of the camp. They also erected the four crematoriums, which had a total of forty-six ovens; the combined capacity of these ovens allowed for the incineration of thousands of bodies a day.

In November of , as the Germans prepared to abandon Auschwitz, they began dismantling and dynamiting three of the crematoriums at Birkenau. The fourth had been destroyed in October, during a short-lived inmate revolt. By the time the Soviet Army reached Auschwitz, nothing remained of the extermination facilities except heaps of broken bricks, slabs of concrete, pieces of twisted metal, and, of course, the endless piles of shoes, suitcases, flatware, and bales of human hair.

In the blueprints, construction documents, and work orders that trace the construction and subsequent use of these buildings, which are now housed in Auschwitz Museum archives, there is not a single explicit reference to the use of gas chambers or Zyklon B for homicidal purposes.

In the late nineteen-seventies, Pressac, having recently left the French military to pursue a career in pharmacy, decided to write a work of fiction depicting the world that would have resulted from a German victory in the Second World War. In collecting background information for his novel, Pressac travelled to Auschwitz to inform himself in detail about Nazi extermination techniques and was surprised at the lack of physical and documentary evidence.

After his initial visit, in , Pressac, who admits to having had revisionist leanings, spent the next eight years studying and analyzing the minute technical details of the Auschwitz crematoriums. His findings—rendered with cool detachment—have laid to rest the vaguest suggestion of the credibility of revisionist claims.

In reviewing blueprints, work orders, and inventories, including plans for electrical wiring and plumbing, Pressac exposed glaring inconsistencies between form and function. In the case of the gas chamber in Crematorium II, in Birkenau, Pressac revealed that there were more than twenty showerheads entered in the inventory list for the room, but the construction plans did not indicate the presence of any water pipes, nor was there any indication of showerheads on the blueprints.

This has allowed me to create a complete chronology of the extermination process at Auschwitz and a complete history of the instruments of destruction—when they were built, what their capacity was, when they broke down or malfunctioned. In June, , Ronald S. Building in midtown Manhattan. Lauder Foundation, a philanthropic organization fuelled by the family fortune. Something had to be done.

Lauder got in touch with the objects-conservation department of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and requested the names of consultants who could provide practical advice about the preservation of Auschwitz. Tony Frantz, the head of the department, thought that the Met itself might be interested in taking on the project on a pro-bono basis.

In December of , he visited the site in the company of his colleague George Segan Wheeler, a specialist in stone preservation. After carefully reviewing both Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II, Frantz and Wheeler determined that forty-two million dollars would be required for the long-term preservation of the site.

Lauder suspected that most of the likely sources of private funding had been wrung dry in the eighties by related projects: the Holocaust Museum in Washington, which had raised a hundred and sixty-eight million dollars; the Holocaust Center in Los Angeles; and Holocaust memorials in New York and Boston.

Lauder decided to make an appeal to national governments instead. In the past two years, the Ronald S. The preservation committee has received written promises from France, Austria, and Russia, and is waiting to hear from Italy, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Ukraine, among other countries.

Israel has agreed to commit a hundred thousand dollars. A contribution from the United States is still pending. Lauder does not anticipate that he will achieve the forty-two-million-dollar goal, but he is confident that he will eventually raise at least thirty-five million dollars. According to Bohdan Rymaszewski, a consultant at the Ministry of Culture in Warsaw and a member of the International Auschwitz Council—an advisory body that was created in during the acrimonious dispute between Jews and Poles over the presence of Carmelite nuns in a building adjacent to the Stammlager —the Polish government will be thankful for anything that the preservation committee can raise.

The world owes him a great deal of thanks. Lauder, in turn, gives Ernest Michel and Kalman Sultanik, the co-chairs of the preservation committee, much of the credit for the success of the initiative. Michel and Sultanik, who had worked together organizing a gathering of ten thousand Holocaust survivors at Yad Vashem and the Western Wall in Jerusalem in , each helped to advance the Auschwitz project in the crucial initial stage of its fund-raising process.

Then Michel, a German Jew who also lives in New York, approached the German government and after eighteen months of negotiation secured its seventeen-million-dollar commitment for the project.

My father also served in the German military during the First World War. Young Ernest also felt the consequences of National Socialist rule. In order to give me something to do, my father had me learn calligraphy. Ernest Michel is a cheerful man with gray hair, a full face, and an easy, disarming manner. His office walls are covered with photographs of luminaries he has met in the course of his work for the U.

On the wall behind his desk is a yellow cloth Star of David in a small frame. Beside it, in a shadow box, is a leather belt that Michel wore in Auschwitz. And nearby is a large color photograph of Michel at Birkenau, taken in July, , when he returned to Auschwitz for the first time. My father knew that his children had no future in Germany.

He did everything he could to get us out. A few months later, he nearly succeeded in having his son sent to America when a family in Wilmington, Delaware, agreed to take Ernest into their care.

But United States consular officials in Stuttgart, explaining that quotas for German Jews had been filled, told him his number would come up in I could have left for America within a month. Instead, he was arrested. He was told to bring work clothes and one suitcase.

The next morning, they walked me to the train station. That was the last time I ever saw them. Michel spent the next four years in a series of labor camps in Germany, harvesting crops and chopping wood outside Berlin and cleaning the sewers in the town of Paderborn, a hundred miles from Hannover. One day in February, , the inmates learned that the Paderborn camp was to be closed the following day, and that its entire inmate population, both men and women, would be moved to camps in the East.

There they put us on cattle cars. After five days and five nights, we learned we were arriving in a place called Auschwitz. Michel said that the train arrived in Auschwitz during the night of March 3rd, and that the instant the cattle-car door was opened he knew that things were bad. Klieg lights were on. Trains were everywhere. It was madness. Museum staff say the album cover and binding most likely come from the skin of a murdered inmate at the Buchenwald concentration camp in Nazi Germany.

The camp became notorious for its human experiments, inmate executions and sadistic guards. Ilse Koch, the wife of camp commander Karl-Otto Koch, is said to have ordered male prisoners with tattoos to be murdered, and then used their skins for lampshades, book covers and table covers.

Buchenwald survivors said human skin was regularly used for everyday objects, including book bindings and wallets. They carried her out on a stretcher and I never saw her again. I was determined to survive in order to bear witness. The blanket is a unique item in our collection. Examination confirmed that it consists of a mix of mainly animal and human hairs.

In many concentration camps hair was routinely shorn from prisoners, usually on arrival. The Nazi war machine used hair to make fabrics and textile products for the car industry, army blankets, socks for U-boat crews and gasket materials.