"It is not surprising that original Krema plans, do not indicate gas chambers."
This completely contradicts and rewrites the traditional narrative. The original story was that these were sophisticated "industrial" killing centers. "Conveyor belt" killings, etc. It also defies common sense to say that mass scale exterminations began in the summer of 1941 and the "final solution" was decided upon in late 1941 yet they were designing "normal" crematoria in Auschwitz in mid 1942.
Jews had Dejaco in their crosshairs years before this trial. Vrba actually mentions him by name in his 1963 memoir and Simon Wiesenthal was the one pushing to get him prosecuted. In Wiesenthal's mind, the crematorium architect must necessarily be complicit of mass murder because under the original narrative the design was inherently criminal from the beginning.
He was to watch the world's first conveyor belt killing, the inauguration of Commandant Hoess's brand new toy, his crematorium. It was truly a splendid affair, on hundred yards long and fifty wide, containing fifteen ovens which could burn three bodies each simultaneously in twenty minutes, a monument in concrete, indeed, to its builder, Herr Walter Dejaco.
Auschwitz survivors who, like myself, were the slave laborers who worked to build it, may be interested to learn, incidentally, that Herr Dejaco still practices his craft in Reutte, a town in the Austrian Tyrol. In 1963 he won warm praise from Bishop Rusk of Innesbruck for the fine new Presbytery he had built for Reutte's Parish Priest.
It was only decades later that Pressac and others attempted to change the story in light of additional documentation. Here is what Pressac explained in his 1995 interview with Igounet.
Concerning the history of the camp, it could be demonstrated that the Kremas had started off as normal sanitary facilities; then later changed into liquidation centers for “Jews unable to work”, that is women, children and the elderly. That doesn’t appear to change the fact of the slaughter of the Jews, but the crucial question was and always will be - for lack of a written document, one that would be an SS report saying so – when was the order given? According to Kommandant Hoess, it was in the summer of 1941. However, the criminal transformation of the Kremas was a job that began at the end of November of 1942. This one year difference can only be explained if Hoess was mistaken about the date. Affirming that Hoess accepted the liquidation order at the beginning of June of 1942 implies that all the books written for the past 50 years on this question, books that indicate that the decision to begin this massacre came in the summer of 1941, are inaccurate and need to be reexamined. Such were the first results of a simple study of the files of the SS-Bauleitung at Auschwitz and a study which would have to be carried out for a long time. As for the thesis of Faurisson, it was an execution. When I had started to consult the construction plans and files of the Kremas, many difficulties emerged. The writing of some plans was in a Gothic script that I could not read. I ended up breaking up the words letter by letter. I had to approach the construction files with nothing but my schoolboy German. I worked on researching key words: gaskammers/gas chambers, Gastur/gas door, Gasdichte Tur/gastight door, Ofen/oven, Einascherungsofen/incineration oven, Krematorie/crematory. As soon as I understood a word, I found I had to grasp the context in which it was employed. Often, I called Iwaszko in to help me decipher something so I could understand it. These files had not been studied by the Polish historians because, being handwritten, they were not easily readable. It was by the pen of a foreman of the civilian firm Reidel and Sons of Bielitz that I found the first two “criminal traces” concerning Krema IV.
What I indicate as being " criminal traces" arise from the difference between the normal installations of a normal crematory, one intended just to incinerate the dead and primarily including one or more mortuaries, along with an autopsy room which was legally mandated and a room for furnaces and coke storage; and those in an abnormal crematory which would have a homicidal gas chamber. This installation or this transformation required particular pieces of equipment which one finds mention of in the SS correspondence with the civilian firms or in their building site logs. A better definition would be “traces of criminal installations”. The search for such “traces” would not be possible if the Kremas had a criminal beginning, as the Polish historians believed for 40 years.
This idea that the crematoria started out as normal crematoria and were converted to have gas chambers during construction is an absolutely radical revision to the story. And it doesn't make sense given the general timeline for the supposed extermination program.
