Remarkable Holocaust Nonsense #19: The Pit of Boiling Human Fat

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 used 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:

‘Another time, the SS chased a prisoner who was not working fast enough into a pit near the crematorium that was full of boiling human fat. At that time, the corpses were incinerated in open air pits, from which the fat flowed into a separate reservoir, dug in the ground. This fat was poured over the corpses to accelerate their combustion. This poor devil was pulled out of the fat still alive and then shot.’ (1)

This is similar to another claim around the same time by an unnamed doctor who had imprisoned at Auschwitz who claimed in ‘The Manchester Guardian’ – now just ‘The Guardian’ – on 2nd October 1945 that:

‘At Berkenau, a sector of the main camp, there were, stated witness, four crematoriums, each equipped with two gas chambers. But their capacity became insufficient and an additional system was devised by digging large trenches, some 12 yards by six, in which the bodies were burned, and to expedite matters channels were cut at the bottom of the trenches to drain away the human fat.

It was part of his Kommando's work to prepare these pits each day by laying huge wood fires saturated with petrol, and by this system it was possible to dispose of one thousand bodies an hour as against one thousand a day in a crematorium.’ (2)

This is clearly very similar to Tauber’s claim – it could indeed even be Tauber’s claims transliterated and added to – with the critical differences that Tauber’s version has a ‘pit of boiling fat’ and the fat is used expedite the open air cremation operation – which is relatedly to Tauber’s false claim that fat people cremate faster because of the fat content of their bodies when in fact it is quite the opposite and renders cremation exceedingly dangerous even today – (3) while the ‘Doctor’ claims that the fat drainage trenches were not used to collect fat but rather drain it away to speed combustion which directly contradicts Tauber, while both of them were both self-proclaimed members of the jewish Sonderkommando (i.e., the famous Kapos) at Auschwitz.

Both Tauber’s and the ‘Doctor’s’ testimony occur at a very early junction in so far as in the promoting the theory of the ‘mass extermination of the jews’ by the Third Reich during the Second World War the proponents were forced to confront a very large problem with their claim which was simply: it is one thing for the Germans to killed six million jews but how on earth did they get rid of all those bodies since we can’t find them?

Early proponents of the theory realised – quite reasonably I might add - that their claims about the cremation capacity of Auschwitz and other sites like it simply didn’t stack up with the numbers of dead jews they claimed had been liquidated and since they didn’t have the bodies they must have gone somewhere.

Thus, they quite reasonably tried to come up with various different alternative ‘explanations’ about where the bodies had gone or how the Germans had achieved such hugely efficient mass cremations.

Both these reports are examples of the latter.

The interesting thing about it is that seems superficially plausible to anyone who doesn’t know very much about plumbing, sewerage and/or human cremation. After all you can burn large numbers of bodies in pits to be sure, but it doesn’t cause human fat to run out in large amounts especially if you are just using a bit of petrol and wood (plus human fat apparently) since human beings aren’t actually flammable and the heat produced wouldn’t be sufficient or sustained enough to produce actual cremation.

Further if you dug channels or slit trenches to drain away the ‘human fat’ then what you’d actually get are what are called ‘fatbergs’ in modern sewers because fat quickly cools, congeals and then solidifies (hence Tauber’s ‘pit of boiling human fat’ would simply become an overflowing pit of congealed cold fat fairly quickly). So, if you pour out large amounts of fat into open channels it will quickly cool and probably repeatedly block the channels inside of a day so you’d have to have people spending all day breaking it up, but that still doesn’t answer where on earth the ‘human fat’ was disposed of given there would have been hundreds of tonnes of it.

You see all this is why you are told not to pour hot fat used in or produced by cooking into the sewer system because it is extremely difficult to break up, builds up quickly and renders the sewer system useless unless frequent specialist maintenance is conducted.

Tauber’s testimony then provides a way out of the conundrum created by the ‘Doctor’s’ testimony by simply having the Germans pour the ‘boiling human fat’ over fresh jewish corpses they were supposedly about to subject to open air cremation in order to ‘speed it up’.

Weren’t the Germans just insidious and demonically evil?

The truth is fairly obvious in that none of this – as I’ve explained above – can be true since it simply isn’t practical - and often simply not physically possible - with Tauber -for example - mistaking how cookery works for how cremation works.

Further Tauber claims that the Germans literally pushed a jew in the ‘pit of boiling human fat’ when he says:

‘This poor devil was pulled out of the fat still alive and then shot.’ (4)

This clearly nonsense since you wouldn’t have a ‘pit of boiling human fat’ for a start, but also if you are going to kill someone then why would you throw them in a ‘pit of boiling human fat’ then shoot them when they tried to get out. Presumably causing them to fall back into said ‘pit of boiling human fat’ and promptly clog up that pit and any drainage channels to or from it.

After all you still need to cremate the body as you cannot boil a body away in fat!

Clearly then Tauber and the ‘Doctor’s’ testimony is utter nonsense because it is simply not practical or physically possible and they are making spurious horror story-esque claims about what the Germans did which are clearly post-war propagandistic nonsense.

References

(1) https://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic.php?t=82890 also https://www.historiography-project.org/1945/05/

(2) The Manchester Guardian, ‘Doctor describes routine of gas chambers’, 2nd October 1945 (https://www.theguardian.com/century/1940-1949/Story/0,,127738,00.html)

(3) See my article:

(4) https://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic.php?t=82890 also https://www.historiography-project.org/1945/05/