Remarkable Holocaust Nonsense #18: Fat People Burn Faster
In our next instalment of ‘Remarkable Holocaust Nonsense’ we have the testimony of Henry Tauber (aka Henryk Tauber) at Auschwitz on 24th May 1945 before Jan Sehn - the examining judge of Krakow and member of the Central Commission for the Investigation of Hitlerite Crimes in Poland – and a key ‘eyewitness testimony’ that is often cited as ‘evidence’ for Auschwitz being a death camp because Tauber was a member of the Auschwitz jewish Sonderkommando (i.e., he was a Kapo) who helped cremate the bodies of dead jews.
Tauber claimed that:
‘I know from the experience gained by observing cremation in Krematorien II and III that the bodies of fat people burn very much faster. The process of incineration is accelerated by the combustion of human fat which thus produces additional heat.’ (1)
This is obviously made-up nonsense derived from Tauber’s knowledge of cooking where you do indeed use fat to help cook meat a certain way but also to give it flavour, which Tauber uses in his testimony on the (false) assumption that cremation works the same way.
However, in human cremation – what Tauber was involved with rather than cooking humans for eating – the opposite is true in that someone who is larger (fat or otherwise) takes longer to successfully cremate simply because there is more tissue to combust which naturally takes longer.
As one funeral website puts it:
‘It generally takes about three hours to conduct a standard cremation, but a body with excessive fatty tissue can take much longer to cremate. This poses safety issues for the cremation equipment, as it must be able to handle the intensity of the heat over a longer period.’ (2)
Said ‘safety issue’ is when (very) obese people if not cremated correctly can actually cause - what is essentially - a grease fire – (3) rather like that can happen with a mishandled or malfunctioning deep fat fryer – which is possibly what Tauber is referring to, but it doesn’t lessen the time it takes to cremate a larger body. In actuality it lengthens it because the operators of the cremation oven have to put out said grease fire which – then as now – does (and would) require specialist equipment.
Since we have no record of any out-of-control (grease) fires at the crematoria of Auschwitz and jews of the time are unlikely to have been morbidly obese with maybe a few exceptions this would also make sense, but the fact that Tauber – who we know was part of the Auschwitz jewish Sonderkommando – essentially claims something physically impossible occurs tells us that Tauber was lying to Sehn probably to get rewarded and lessen his own ‘guilt’ as a ‘jewish helper’ at Auschwitz.
It is however a great piece of ‘Holocaust Nonsense’!
References
(1) https://phdn.org/archives/www.mazal.org/archive/documents/Tauber/Tauber02.htm
(2) https://www.us-funerals.com/can-an-obese-person-be-cremated/
(3) https://www.miamiherald.com/article147078929.html