In the
Gerstein Statement made by SS-Obersturmführer (1LT)
Kurt Gerstein (1905-1945) in French captivity shortly after the end of the war, and before his suicide, he claimed that 25 million people had been gassed during the war. This is usually explained away by Hoaxsters that Gerstein was projecting into the future, such as if the Nazis had won the war.
Kurt Gerstein was an evangelical Lutheran who had briefly been arrested by the Nazi government for anti-regime political agitation before the war. Gerstein was a degreed mining engineer who had also studied tropical medicine in preparation to serve as a medical missionary in backward countries when the war got in the way of his personal plans.
The
Gerstein Statement is thoroughly taken apart in the book by Henri Roques, who was stripped of his doctorate in France for
The Confessions of Kurt Gerstein (1989).
During the war, the Waffen-SS recruited Gerstein as a hygiene expert and they were no doubt lucky to get him.
In the vaunted
Gerstein Statment, Gerstein pretended to be an anti-Nazi spy who tried to warn the Vatican and the world about the extermination of the Jews.
Gerstein claimed to have visited the concentration camps Belzec and Treblinka to inspect the mass-murder mills going on there ─ along with his boss, SS-Standartenführer (Col.) Dr. Wilhelm Pfannenstiel, a medical doctor and professor of hygiene at the University of Marburg. Pfannenstiel was incarcerated without charges at the end of the war by the Allied victors until 1950.
To the Allied Inqusition after the war, Prof. Pfannstiel denied ever having visited Treblinka with the late Gerstein at all, and he said that, contrary to Gerstein's claims, they never witnessed any homicidal gassing at Belzec ─ although he saw some blue bodies lying about who could have been gassed or something like that. However, both carbon monoxide and hydrogen cyanide turn bodies bright red, and not blue or "cyanotic," which both Gerstein and Prof. Dr. Pfannenstiel would have known, so this oft-cited claim from both is rather suspect.
Where the 25 million figure comes from in reality is the number of people who had been deloused and had their clothing fumigated with hydrogen cyanide gas since the beginning of the war.
This figure was published by Emil Wustinger in a German hygiene paper given in 1944 and cited by Columbia-educated mining engineer and Revisionist Friedrich Paul Berg in his seminal paper: "The German Delousing Chambers."
The Journal of Historical Review, Spring 1986 (Vol. 7, No. 1), pages 73-94.
https://ihr.org/journal/v07p-73_Berg.html
Mr. Berg writes:
At the end of this article I have added a translation of one of the many articles that can be found in the German wartime technical and medical literature discussing the proper use of Zyklon-B for the control of typhus through the extermination of its principal carrier, the body louse. (See appendix.) The article by Emil Wustinger is especially important because of the numbers it gives to show the extent to which the Zyklon-B delousing technology was actually used by the Germans to save people from the ravages of typhus. According to Wustinger, 25 million people had already had their clothing and personal belongings fumigated from the start of the war until the beginning of 1944. This number is, interestingly enough, the same as the one which appears in the Gerstein Statement as the number of people who had been “killed” in gas chambers. [Emphasis added.]
